I doubt even the space shuttle would protect you from anything as small as a bolt hitting it. A number of years ago a single paint fleck hit the windshield of the Shuttle and took out a large pit in the glass. Something even as large as a bolt would be catastropic. There's a lot of space junk up their, but most of it is trackable and can be steered away from in plenty of time.
With something inflatable, thin walls might be an advantage for small untrackable space-junk. It'd likely pass right through the whole structure and impart little energy to it (doing little damage). There'd be holes of course, but with the proper material that wouldn't rip the holes would be small and repairable.
While we may be looking into the past, a variable speed of light would mean we don't know how far into the past.
While what you're saying is technically true, the errors introduced by the variance of a few parts in a million of the speed of light is WAY smaller than the uncertainty of the distance that a quasar is from us (a few parts in a hundred I'd guess). In other words we already don't know exactly how far into the past we're looking to a MUCH larger degree than this potential variability of C.
What about books for the blind and dyslexic? Wouldn't that be "format shifting" (in effect), if you included the original book along with the new copy?
What about it? You can't take someone elses book, put it in braille, and sell it to someone else unless you own the copyright, or get permission from the copyright owner. Right, but isn't this akin to hiring someone to personally make a backup copy for you?
This is where I don't follow you. So you're saying that it would be illegal to buy a book, cross out some of the words, and then sell the book?
Probbably not, since you're not actually making a copy of the book. But that's not what we're talking about here. It would most definately be illegal to buy a book, scan or type the entire contents of the book into a computer, edit out what you didn't like, and re-sell your newly printed copy of the book. If you want to make an analogy you have to include every critical aspect. Sure, sure. And yet, I can buy a physical object such as a book from someone, cut out some pages and turn it into a book safe, and then resell that. Its technically a heavily edited book at that point. But -- and this happened with the original DVDs too -- every time I sell a copy of the booksafe, I have to buy another copy of the book. Thus the copyright owner gets their cut, each and every time.
As I've said above, your analogy breaks down because they aren't altering the original physical DVD, they're making a copy of it.
I don't know if either of your scenarios would be legal, but I don't think it really matters since both are extremely impractical.
The more practical approach, and the one that's already being done is using a specially created DVD player that takes in a "edits" file and skips over certain sections of the movie, or bleeps out certain words. I can't imagine that this would break any copyright law since nothing is being copied whatsoever, and the source material on the original DVD isn't being changed. It's essentially like an automated fast-forward or skip, and I can't imagine anyone trying to argue that the end-viewer controlling how they watch the movie is breaking copyright. The content producers wouldn't really care either since they don't have to do any promotion or marketing of "cleaned up" content.
Where do you draw the line between modifying an existing item, and creating a new one?
Removing content from a movie isn't creating a new work. There certainly are gray areas, but this case is in no way in a gray area. If you can't see that there's really no point in arguing any further. Yes, but they weren't MASS distributing the content
I guess I don't know what you mean by MASS distributing, or what that has to do with violating copyright law. They were certainly distributing enough of these derivative works to catch the ire of a lawsuit. Technically reselling even one copy of a work you've modified is violating copyright law, though you'd never get sued for it because it's not worth the money to pay the lawyers. It doesn't matter if you bought a copy or not, you can't sell derivative works without permission of the copyright holder. So how is this any different than taking anything else, changing it, and reselling it?
In this case it's different because they're changing a copyrighted work in a way that it's a derivative work. It's in no way analogous to buying plaster, and changing it into a sculpture, or paint and turning it into a painting. Copyright law is very clear on this, and in this case I actually think it's a good thing. You shouldn't be able to profit off someone elses work unless the copyright owner agrees to it.
Well then, lets see what the movie companies think when the people that buy the clean version of the movie quit buying the movies all together and they start to lose revenue. Its a person's choice to watch a movie or not if it offends them and if they can't watch a clean version of it, well then they just won't watch it. Will this be a lot of revenue. I don't know, but but I bet it will make a small dent.
Maybe it will, but it has to be a larger dent than the cost it would take to edit a new version, ship it, promote it, etc. Plus, if they do this they might create an expectation that this will happen with all movies and be widely available How much will that drain from existing sales? There's only so much room on store shelves, which could translate into lost sales of other movies if consumers expect a clean version of every major release. This could ultimately mean less profit to the studios because the different versions of the movie are competing with itself.
Have you ever seen an artist make a collage? You know, cut up portions of photographs, text, whatever and incorporate them into a new creation (assuming that they purchased them in the first place, that is)? Well, this ruling takes a big step towards forbidding that in the future.
Exactly how is taking a movie and editing out a few minutes of it while keeping the rest anything like a collage? A collage uses multiple sources and bears little resemblence to any single one of the works used in the collage. If you want a valid analogy, look no further than the music sampling world. Fair use means you can take short parts of the song without violating copyright. It doesn't mean huge portions that resemble the original work. There were multiple lawsuits over this in the 80s/90s. See Negativeland being sued by U2 for an example of a derivative work. Negativland lost (settled out of court) and copies of the album were destroyed. The song was largely similar to the original U2 song. On the other side there's all kinds of music that has samples in it that are small enough to not be a deriviate work, so no one ever bothers suing. There's a gray area in-between, and that's where you'd see court rulings that would effect what's fair use and what's a derivative work. This lawsuit is nowhere near that gray area.
What's happening here is nothing at all like a collage. It's quite obvious it's a derivative work, and distributing it therefore violates copyright law.
After all, if he's allowed to forbid you from editing it (after purchasing a copy), isn't he also allowed to forbid you from "editing out the sound"
Why are there so many people that make this out to be a limit on what you can edit and view yourself in the privacy of your own home? These companies were DISTRIBUTING this content. That has nothing to do with making your own version of Star Wars and taking out the sound.
These companies aren't "claiming it's the same movie".
Oh, so if they edited the movie "Fight Club", it wouldn't say "Fight Club" on it somewhere? Are you saying the movie doesn't have the names of the directors, actors, writers that produced the movie in the credits? If they had done that this lawsuit would never have gotten anywhere near as far as it did. You can't take Huck Finn, take out the parts you don't like and republish it as Blueberry Finn. That's clearly a derivative work. The issue isn't that the people buying the movie are confused and don't know it's edited, the issue is that the people editing the movie are creating a derivative work, but claiming that it's not.
Or is it simply a case of "censoring is ok, as long as the studio does it?
Legally OK?, yes. The studio owns the copyright, so they're the only ones who should be authorized to release a different version of the movie. You shouldn't be able to take someone elses copyrighted work, edit it, then re-release it as still being a product of the original studio or director (or of yourself for that matter). That's really the only salient point to this whole discussion.
From a practical standpoint, there also is a difference between the director producing a TV version, and Utah-company producing a video rental version. Directors know the movie is eventually going to be released on TV, so they create alternate dialogue, shoot less gory scenes, etc. Ultimately it's the directors, producers, actors, and writers names on the movie. Utah-company taking that work and editing it, then claiming it's the same movie is simply wrong. It'd be like taking Huckleberry Finn, editing out all the bad words in it, and re-publishing it as still a work of Mark Twain. (Oh.. but you buy a real copy of Huck-Finn for each copy you sell to satisfy the money guys).
If this were to be legal, then what's to stop anyone from taking the christian Veggie Tales series, change the dialogue to be satanic, then re-releasing the whole thing as still Veggie Tales? I don't know that these companies added in dialogue, but I don't really see any difference between that and removing dialogue or entire scenes.
The internet just gives the conspiracy nuts more power. Before the internet they only got to spew conspiracy nonsense to their friends (who probbably stopped listening years ago). But now with the internet all they have to do is post a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours and have 5 people believe them and start talking about the same thing. Most of the general populace has little to no critical thinking skills and will start to wonder if they hear the same dumb thing from 5 people.
This explains why the 9/11 conspiracy gets the amount of circulation that it does, despite the fact that it's about as valid as the nuts who think the holocaust never happened.
The article keeps talking about the icon being on his home computer. This implies to me that it's an icon that's used to launch a program, and only exists on his computer. But then there's mention of it being an icon for an IM program, which I assume means it appears next to his name when he posts messages (or something to that effect).
Which one is it? If it's the former, I don't see what the big deal is as it's like writing that in your personal notbook which you never take outside. If it's the latter, then obviously that's a problem.
I actually thought they were the same company, but apparently they just work very closely together, to the point that the US Justice Department sued them over common ownership affecting competition.
A proper engineering job would have taken six months, max, and they could have kept working on the science.
You can figure out how long it would take to engineer a device you've just heard of all of 20 minutes ago from a short, non-technical article posted on slashdot?
The original argument was about whether people saw value in free things, not whether all television was free in every country. You're right that nothing is "free" in terms of cost, but we all know that, and it's also irrelevant to the discussion.
I don't think I want to go into the other ones, but do you really think public education is for free ? Do you think internet websites are for free ?
They're free in the same way software is free, that is "I didn't pay anything for it". That's what we're talking about here, so that's the operative definition of free. If you're trying to argue the "there's no such thing as free lunch" point, I think that makes a good speech to grade school kids but everyone else knows that, thanks. And yes, today's people - most of them - are just too lazy to learn, they don't want to hear about anything that needs any bit of effort to achieve.
It's got nothing to do with being lazy, it's about efficiency. Face it, software is just a tool and once you know how to do something efficiently with one tool it sucks to have to re-learn how to do it all over again. That's not laziness, it's time management. In my world, intelligence is closely related to this kind of adaptivity, the will and ability to learn and to be open towards new ways of doing things.
In your world you'd spend $5000 on re-tooling a carpenter to use a free hammer instead of a $5 hammer that has the same level of productivity. The only thing you'd achieve would be having 4995 less dollars in your pocket at the end of the day. Businesses (and really everyone) cares about costs, be it time spent learning some new tool, or money. Maybe you think learning a new interface is fun, but the rest of us don't.
OSS needs to demonstrate that the benefits are worth the costs. That's really no different than any other competitor. There's many benefits to OSS, but for the most part the "free as in beer" part isn't really important.
Especially, if that individual has been raised in such a capitalistic driven society; they literally can not conclude the possibility anyone could produce a valuable product for free without monetary or material compensation. It's out of their grasp, it does not compute
There's this thing that became quite popular more than 50 years ago, and it was given away free! No price whatsoever. It was called television, and a lot of people saw value in it. It had so much value that many people use this service far too much. About 50 years before that the scientists invented something we now radio. It was also, and continues to be free, and many people seem to love it and see value in it. Something like 400 years ago there was a thing called Public Education that was offered for free. People seem to continue to see value in it despite its free status even today! More recently we've invented internet websites, which are largely free.
People readily accept products that are free as having value, and have for literally hundreds of years. The problem that open source faces isn't that the software has no cost, it's simply that the current software is in an entrenched position. For the majority of people, the costs really isn't about the actual software itself. That's fairly trivial. The costs come in learning how to use new software, OS, etc. For a business that means retraining employees, or re-writing software. For individuals that means wasting your time re-learning to do something you already know how to do.
It's important to have alternative hypotheses...Until the theoreticians have done their homework and provided a reasonable and plausible alternative hypothesis, perhaps we shouldn't be investing millions of dollars (euros) in these kinds of experiments.
Huh? I simply don't understand this idea at all. Historically science hasn't come up with alternate explanations before they do an experiment with an expected result. Michelson-Morley fully expected to confirm the existence of the aether wind, and had no alternative hypotheses to explain its abscence. People came up with explanations after (like the aether was blocked by walls, it was dragged by the earth, etc). They were all bunk of course. But the abscence of an alternative theory doesn't mean they shouldn't have done the experiment. In their case it ultimately meant (after more and more experiments) that there was no aether, and they had to abandon the whole she-bang. It took until Einstein and special relativity to find the correct theory to explain the results of Michelson-Morley. Why does the abscence of an alternate theory mean you shouldn't do the experiment?
Except in the case of language being popular is being right. Language isn't a set of rules set down in books. It's a fluid, moving, changing thing defined by the people who use it. Anyone who's studied linguistics or history should know this intuitively.
It really is saying something that the best thing we've got has survived 30 years of scrutiny.
Well, it's pretty easy to survive 30 years of scrutiny when ST hasn't come up with one single testable prediction not accounted for by other theories. If you don't make any testable predictions it's pretty hard to knock it off the chopping block. From what I've read, ST isn't even a full theory, but merely a framework for other theories. When you've got 10^500 possible theories it makes it a bit harder to knock them all down. when you've got something good, simply abandoning it to try and find something else that better fits your equipment isn't a good idea.
Why not? The energies ST is testable at are far far far above anything we can even conceive of, much less build. ST seems to be based on the great white hope that someone will come up with testable predictions.
Why is it there's so many people that seem to miss this central point about what sciene is? Science isn't just an explanation or a story. Science makes predictions.
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I doubt even the space shuttle would protect you from anything as small as a bolt hitting it. A number of years ago a single paint fleck hit the windshield of the Shuttle and took out a large pit in the glass. Something even as large as a bolt would be catastropic. There's a lot of space junk up their, but most of it is trackable and can be steered away from in plenty of time.
With something inflatable, thin walls might be an advantage for small untrackable space-junk. It'd likely pass right through the whole structure and impart little energy to it (doing little damage). There'd be holes of course, but with the proper material that wouldn't rip the holes would be small and repairable.
While we may be looking into the past, a variable speed of light would mean we don't know how far into the past.
While what you're saying is technically true, the errors introduced by the variance of a few parts in a million of the speed of light is WAY smaller than the uncertainty of the distance that a quasar is from us (a few parts in a hundred I'd guess). In other words we already don't know exactly how far into the past we're looking to a MUCH larger degree than this potential variability of C.
What about books for the blind and dyslexic? Wouldn't that be "format shifting" (in effect), if you included the original book along with the new copy?
What about it? You can't take someone elses book, put it in braille, and sell it to someone else unless you own the copyright, or get permission from the copyright owner.
Right, but isn't this akin to hiring someone to personally make a backup copy for you?
Except that isn't what's happening here.
This is where I don't follow you. So you're saying that it would be illegal to buy a book, cross out some of the words, and then sell the book?
Probbably not, since you're not actually making a copy of the book. But that's not what we're talking about here. It would most definately be illegal to buy a book, scan or type the entire contents of the book into a computer, edit out what you didn't like, and re-sell your newly printed copy of the book. If you want to make an analogy you have to include every critical aspect.
Sure, sure. And yet, I can buy a physical object such as a book from someone, cut out some pages and turn it into a book safe, and then resell that. Its technically a heavily edited book at that point. But -- and this happened with the original DVDs too -- every time I sell a copy of the booksafe, I have to buy another copy of the book. Thus the copyright owner gets their cut, each and every time.
As I've said above, your analogy breaks down because they aren't altering the original physical DVD, they're making a copy of it.
I don't know if either of your scenarios would be legal, but I don't think it really matters since both are extremely impractical.
The more practical approach, and the one that's already being done is using a specially created DVD player that takes in a "edits" file and skips over certain sections of the movie, or bleeps out certain words. I can't imagine that this would break any copyright law since nothing is being copied whatsoever, and the source material on the original DVD isn't being changed. It's essentially like an automated fast-forward or skip, and I can't imagine anyone trying to argue that the end-viewer controlling how they watch the movie is breaking copyright. The content producers wouldn't really care either since they don't have to do any promotion or marketing of "cleaned up" content.
Where do you draw the line between modifying an existing item, and creating a new one?
Removing content from a movie isn't creating a new work. There certainly are gray areas, but this case is in no way in a gray area. If you can't see that there's really no point in arguing any further.
Yes, but they weren't MASS distributing the content
I guess I don't know what you mean by MASS distributing, or what that has to do with violating copyright law. They were certainly distributing enough of these derivative works to catch the ire of a lawsuit. Technically reselling even one copy of a work you've modified is violating copyright law, though you'd never get sued for it because it's not worth the money to pay the lawyers. It doesn't matter if you bought a copy or not, you can't sell derivative works without permission of the copyright holder.
So how is this any different than taking anything else, changing it, and reselling it?
In this case it's different because they're changing a copyrighted work in a way that it's a derivative work. It's in no way analogous to buying plaster, and changing it into a sculpture, or paint and turning it into a painting. Copyright law is very clear on this, and in this case I actually think it's a good thing. You shouldn't be able to profit off someone elses work unless the copyright owner agrees to it.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I read the article, and I was confused to see these important points weren't summarized at all.
Well then, lets see what the movie companies think when the people that buy the clean version of the movie quit buying the movies all together and they start to lose revenue. Its a person's choice to watch a movie or not if it offends them and if they can't watch a clean version of it, well then they just won't watch it. Will this be a lot of revenue. I don't know, but but I bet it will make a small dent.
Maybe it will, but it has to be a larger dent than the cost it would take to edit a new version, ship it, promote it, etc. Plus, if they do this they might create an expectation that this will happen with all movies and be widely available How much will that drain from existing sales? There's only so much room on store shelves, which could translate into lost sales of other movies if consumers expect a clean version of every major release. This could ultimately mean less profit to the studios because the different versions of the movie are competing with itself.
Have you ever seen an artist make a collage? You know, cut up portions of photographs, text, whatever and incorporate them into a new creation (assuming that they purchased them in the first place, that is)? Well, this ruling takes a big step towards forbidding that in the future.
Exactly how is taking a movie and editing out a few minutes of it while keeping the rest anything like a collage? A collage uses multiple sources and bears little resemblence to any single one of the works used in the collage. If you want a valid analogy, look no further than the music sampling world. Fair use means you can take short parts of the song without violating copyright. It doesn't mean huge portions that resemble the original work. There were multiple lawsuits over this in the 80s/90s. See Negativeland being sued by U2 for an example of a derivative work. Negativland lost (settled out of court) and copies of the album were destroyed. The song was largely similar to the original U2 song. On the other side there's all kinds of music that has samples in it that are small enough to not be a deriviate work, so no one ever bothers suing. There's a gray area in-between, and that's where you'd see court rulings that would effect what's fair use and what's a derivative work. This lawsuit is nowhere near that gray area.
What's happening here is nothing at all like a collage. It's quite obvious it's a derivative work, and distributing it therefore violates copyright law.
After all, if he's allowed to forbid you from editing it (after purchasing a copy), isn't he also allowed to forbid you from "editing out the sound"
Why are there so many people that make this out to be a limit on what you can edit and view yourself in the privacy of your own home? These companies were DISTRIBUTING this content. That has nothing to do with making your own version of Star Wars and taking out the sound.
These companies aren't "claiming it's the same movie".
Oh, so if they edited the movie "Fight Club", it wouldn't say "Fight Club" on it somewhere? Are you saying the movie doesn't have the names of the directors, actors, writers that produced the movie in the credits? If they had done that this lawsuit would never have gotten anywhere near as far as it did. You can't take Huck Finn, take out the parts you don't like and republish it as Blueberry Finn. That's clearly a derivative work. The issue isn't that the people buying the movie are confused and don't know it's edited, the issue is that the people editing the movie are creating a derivative work, but claiming that it's not.
Or is it simply a case of "censoring is ok, as long as the studio does it?
Legally OK?, yes. The studio owns the copyright, so they're the only ones who should be authorized to release a different version of the movie. You shouldn't be able to take someone elses copyrighted work, edit it, then re-release it as still being a product of the original studio or director (or of yourself for that matter). That's really the only salient point to this whole discussion.
From a practical standpoint, there also is a difference between the director producing a TV version, and Utah-company producing a video rental version. Directors know the movie is eventually going to be released on TV, so they create alternate dialogue, shoot less gory scenes, etc. Ultimately it's the directors, producers, actors, and writers names on the movie. Utah-company taking that work and editing it, then claiming it's the same movie is simply wrong. It'd be like taking Huckleberry Finn, editing out all the bad words in it, and re-publishing it as still a work of Mark Twain. (Oh.. but you buy a real copy of Huck-Finn for each copy you sell to satisfy the money guys).
If this were to be legal, then what's to stop anyone from taking the christian Veggie Tales series, change the dialogue to be satanic, then re-releasing the whole thing as still Veggie Tales? I don't know that these companies added in dialogue, but I don't really see any difference between that and removing dialogue or entire scenes.
The internet just gives the conspiracy nuts more power. Before the internet they only got to spew conspiracy nonsense to their friends (who probbably stopped listening years ago). But now with the internet all they have to do is post a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours and have 5 people believe them and start talking about the same thing. Most of the general populace has little to no critical thinking skills and will start to wonder if they hear the same dumb thing from 5 people.
This explains why the 9/11 conspiracy gets the amount of circulation that it does, despite the fact that it's about as valid as the nuts who think the holocaust never happened.
Just plain stupid it is. Thanks for clearing that up.
Did you actually READ what I wrote, or are you just plain dumb?
The article keeps talking about the icon being on his home computer. This implies to me that it's an icon that's used to launch a program, and only exists on his computer. But then there's mention of it being an icon for an IM program, which I assume means it appears next to his name when he posts messages (or something to that effect).
Which one is it? If it's the former, I don't see what the big deal is as it's like writing that in your personal notbook which you never take outside. If it's the latter, then obviously that's a problem.
I actually thought they were the same company, but apparently they just work very closely together, to the point that the US Justice Department sued them over common ownership affecting competition.
A proper engineering job would have taken six months, max, and they could have kept working on the science.
You can figure out how long it would take to engineer a device you've just heard of all of 20 minutes ago from a short, non-technical article posted on slashdot?
The original argument was about whether people saw value in free things, not whether all television was free in every country. You're right that nothing is "free" in terms of cost, but we all know that, and it's also irrelevant to the discussion.
I don't think I want to go into the other ones, but do you really think public education is for free ? Do you think internet websites are for free ?
They're free in the same way software is free, that is "I didn't pay anything for it". That's what we're talking about here, so that's the operative definition of free. If you're trying to argue the "there's no such thing as free lunch" point, I think that makes a good speech to grade school kids but everyone else knows that, thanks.
And yes, today's people - most of them - are just too lazy to learn, they don't want to hear about anything that needs any bit of effort to achieve.
It's got nothing to do with being lazy, it's about efficiency. Face it, software is just a tool and once you know how to do something efficiently with one tool it sucks to have to re-learn how to do it all over again. That's not laziness, it's time management.
In my world, intelligence is closely related to this kind of adaptivity, the will and ability to learn and to be open towards new ways of doing things.
In your world you'd spend $5000 on re-tooling a carpenter to use a free hammer instead of a $5 hammer that has the same level of productivity. The only thing you'd achieve would be having 4995 less dollars in your pocket at the end of the day. Businesses (and really everyone) cares about costs, be it time spent learning some new tool, or money. Maybe you think learning a new interface is fun, but the rest of us don't.
OSS needs to demonstrate that the benefits are worth the costs. That's really no different than any other competitor. There's many benefits to OSS, but for the most part the "free as in beer" part isn't really important.
Especially, if that individual has been raised in such a capitalistic driven society; they literally can not conclude the possibility anyone could produce a valuable product for free without monetary or material compensation. It's out of their grasp, it does not compute
There's this thing that became quite popular more than 50 years ago, and it was given away free! No price whatsoever. It was called television, and a lot of people saw value in it. It had so much value that many people use this service far too much. About 50 years before that the scientists invented something we now radio. It was also, and continues to be free, and many people seem to love it and see value in it. Something like 400 years ago there was a thing called Public Education that was offered for free. People seem to continue to see value in it despite its free status even today! More recently we've invented internet websites, which are largely free.
People readily accept products that are free as having value, and have for literally hundreds of years. The problem that open source faces isn't that the software has no cost, it's simply that the current software is in an entrenched position. For the majority of people, the costs really isn't about the actual software itself. That's fairly trivial. The costs come in learning how to use new software, OS, etc. For a business that means retraining employees, or re-writing software. For individuals that means wasting your time re-learning to do something you already know how to do.
It's important to have alternative hypotheses...Until the theoreticians have done their homework and provided a reasonable and plausible alternative hypothesis, perhaps we shouldn't be investing millions of dollars (euros) in these kinds of experiments.
Huh? I simply don't understand this idea at all. Historically science hasn't come up with alternate explanations before they do an experiment with an expected result. Michelson-Morley fully expected to confirm the existence of the aether wind, and had no alternative hypotheses to explain its abscence. People came up with explanations after (like the aether was blocked by walls, it was dragged by the earth, etc). They were all bunk of course. But the abscence of an alternative theory doesn't mean they shouldn't have done the experiment. In their case it ultimately meant (after more and more experiments) that there was no aether, and they had to abandon the whole she-bang. It took until Einstein and special relativity to find the correct theory to explain the results of Michelson-Morley. Why does the abscence of an alternate theory mean you shouldn't do the experiment?
Except in the case of language being popular is being right. Language isn't a set of rules set down in books. It's a fluid, moving, changing thing defined by the people who use it. Anyone who's studied linguistics or history should know this intuitively.
It really is saying something that the best thing we've got has survived 30 years of scrutiny.
Well, it's pretty easy to survive 30 years of scrutiny when ST hasn't come up with one single testable prediction not accounted for by other theories. If you don't make any testable predictions it's pretty hard to knock it off the chopping block. From what I've read, ST isn't even a full theory, but merely a framework for other theories. When you've got 10^500 possible theories it makes it a bit harder to knock them all down.
when you've got something good, simply abandoning it to try and find something else that better fits your equipment isn't a good idea.
Why not? The energies ST is testable at are far far far above anything we can even conceive of, much less build. ST seems to be based on the great white hope that someone will come up with testable predictions.
Why is it there's so many people that seem to miss this central point about what sciene is? Science isn't just an explanation or a story. Science makes predictions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_th e_United_States_Constitution