The One Ring.net are reporting that Jackson gets 10M + 5% of gross.
Ho. Lee. Shit.
(If you're doing the math at home, that comes to $53 million for Fellowship alone. And that doesn't even count the bragging rights. "Nyaah, nyaah, I made The Lord of the Rings and you didn't, nyaah, nyaah." Not bad for five years' work.)
You are missing the point, the whole point is to seperate the content from presentation.
No offense intended, but I think it is you who is missing the point. The average person doesn't think in XML. The average person thinks in formatted text. When I'm writing, I don't think "<ital>foo</ital>," I think "foo." Being able to see foo on the screen, but get "<ital>foo</ital>" in the output is a big win.
I'd go as far as to say that it's entirely impossible to have such a Docbook editor, since you have pretty much no say in the presentation when you write it.
Oh, sure you can. The editor doesn't need to display it the exact same way the end-user will display it; it just needs to display it in a way that makes the user feel comfortable. On your machine, chapter titles are 24 point serif type; on mine, they're 18 point italic sans-serif type. I don't care that yours are different from mine; I only care that mine look the way I expect them to.
havent you noticed Dubya's war on Iraq is about what Iraq might do
Sound defense policy is always based on capability, not intention. You can't read the enemy's mind, so you have to act on what he could do if so inclined. Any student-- even an armchair student-- of military history can tell you this.
If it reaches a point where the possibility that an enemy might act becomes sufficiently real, and the danger posed by that enemy's capabilities become sufficiently great, then the only reasonable course of action is to respond with military force. To do anything less is to... well, is to be Poland circa 1939.
If, on the other hand, you feel okay about the thought of another Pearl Harbor-- one involving nuclear or chemical weapons-- then carry on.
It's meaningful because the heart of the argument is the duration of copyrights. Person X says the duration is too long; person Y says it's too short. If the duration is completely picked out of thin air, and yet neither person X nor person Y has a decent argument to back up their opinion, who's right?
The law is necessarily chock full of arbitrary bright lines, which is perfectly reasonable so long as they aren't grossly misplaced...
Okay. I propose to you that the term of life + 70 years is not grossly misplaced. If you think it is, you're going to have to tell me why if you want me to believe you. So far all I've heard is, "That's too long!" To which I respond, "No, it's not! Neener, neener!" And we get nowhere.
it's absurd that you can sign up to die for your country but not buy a beer
Why? How are these two things related? Do you think soldiers should be drunk when they go into battle? The two things are, in fact, completely unconnected to one another.
When the minimum purchase age was reduced from 21 to 18 in the 1970's, alcohol-related fatalities in that age group rose 11% nationwide, and as much as 35% in some states. A Michigan study found that DWI arrests among 18-20 year olds increased an amazing 141% when their MLPA was lowered.
On the other hand, however, since the MLPA was raised in 1986 back to 21 nationwide, the rate of alcohol-related fatalities among 18-20 year olds has decreased by 63%. An estimated 17,000 lives were saved between 1975 and 1996 by the increased MLPA. That's somewhat larger than an infantry division, if you're thinking in military terms.
On the other topic, a person of 18 years is, on average, physically, intellectually, and emotionally capable of being trained by the military, and serving in the armed forces. If we should ever again find ourselves in a situation sufficiently grave to warrant conscription-- God forbid-- I will support a draft age of 18. If I have sons or daughters of that age, they can come along and fight with me.
I just hope that we never find ourselves in that situation again.
That's total ticket sales. Half that money goes to the theaters.
As I understand it, the numbers reported as "box office grosses" are studio grosses, not theater grosses. The figures come from the total amount of money paid to the distributor on a given day, weekend, or (in this case) interval.
I won't swear that this is true, but I understand it to be so. If I'm wrong, then oops.
Also, I'd be stunned if Jackson, or anybody else, was getting gross points. Points on the net, sure, but gross points?
(That said, I have been stunned before, so it's not impossible.)
Somebody wasted a mod point. This is not interesting. There is not copy protection on the extended DVD set, apart from Macrovision and CSS that's on virtually every DVD.
I copied discs one and two to my girlfriend's iBook so she could watch them on the plane on the way to her uncle's house. No problems. Works fine. Just like every other DVD.
(Had to clean off nearly 20 GB to make the damn things fit, though. Hope she doesn't need MS Office until she gets back.)
I'm not entirely sure this is relevant, but it's an interesting tidbit nonetheless.
The best reports are that New Line spent about half a billion dollars making and promoting The Lord of the Rings, all three films, and that includes money budgeted but not yet spent on promotion and advertising for the last movie. Of that half a billion, about $300 million went into making the movies themselves. The $500 million figure includes all the cost of making, distributing, promoting, and showing the movies; basically, the studio's total costs.
According to boxofficemojo.com, The Fellowship of the Ring has made about $860 million worldwide for New Line since its release last year. That's only gross revenue to the studio generated by movie theaters; it doesn't include DVD sales or any other sources of revenue.*
The punchline: if nobody in the world buys a ticket for the next two movies, New Line still will have made about a 72% profit on the Lord of the Rings. They could put The Two Towers and The Return of the King on a shelf, finished but unreleased, and still have made a fortune.
* Historically, the ratio of worldwide box office receipts to worldwide revenues from all media is about 1:1.5. In other words, for every dollar of box office gross, a movie can be expected to generate about $1.50 in video sales, rentals, TV rights, book and toy tie-ins, and so on.
So are you implying there are gnome themes that *don't* suck?
Absolutely not, I apologize for giving you that impression. When I said the phrase "dreadful KDE theme" was redundant, I was really only referring to the "dreadful theme" part.
UI themes suck. Period. All of them. I think we'd get more appealing results if we just hand every man, woman, and child in the world a canvas and a set of finger-paints and tell them to go at it.
The idea is good but, the interface has some problems. Drag the files that you want to burn into the CD-R's folder, see files in the folder, forget to hit burn to CD (it just puts fake links in the folder as place holders and waits for you to hit burn to CD to actually do anything).
Since I've never used XP, I can't comment directly, but on the Mac the Finder's CD burning feature works pretty much the same way. You drag the files to the CD, and then either tell it to burn, or simply eject the disc. When you eject, it asks you if you want to burn the contents, or just forget the whole thing. So you can't really forget to burn the disc.
Doesn't XP do something like that? Seems fairly obvious to me.
I have stopped counting the times that I've had to reboot my Jaguar workstation in the school's art lab after it failed to handle some bizarre error in Classic environment. It just gets worse with every release
I really, seriously don't mean any offense by this, but... what the fuck is wrong with you, dude?
I've been using Jaguar every day since before it was actually released; I bought a new G4 back in August, and it came with 10.2 on it about ten days before the retail boxes hit the shelves. I have never had to reboot my machine for any reason than an OS update. I shut it down once to move it to another room, and then one reboot for each of the updates since (most recently yesterday's security update). And that's all.
I'm pushing a pretty wide range of apps, too, including Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark (although less and less lately because it's my only OS 9 application, and InDesign is better), and sometimes Maya for doing weekly menus and signage for the restaurant. I push my machine pretty hard, and I never have the kinds of problems you're talking about.
I don't know what your deal is, but I think it's important for people to know that your experience is definitely not typical.
No, you're not. Since my company went under a few months ago I haven't touched a Windows machine, but at the time I was using Windows 2000 exclusively. I just didn't have a good reason to upgrade. All that stuff that Microsoft touted for XP-- media, burning, wireless-- I get on my Macs, and in a form that's a hell of a lot easier to use.
From my chair, Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Microsoft's operating system development, and we've been heading downhill ever since. Not because XP sucks, but just because it adds much stuff I don't need and no stuff I do.
A phrasal verb is a verb that consists of more than one word. The line between a verb-adverb pair and a phrasal verb is blurry, but some examples may help. "To ask out," in the sense of to proposition for a date, is a phrasal verb. In this case, "out" is not an adverb describing the verb "to ask," but rather an integral part of the verb phrase. Another good example is "to have to do with," as in, "This sentence has to do with phrasal verbs." If you examine each part of the phrasal verb-- "has," "to do," "with"-- it makes no sense at all. But taken as a single verb, it carries meaning.
An inverted phrasal verb is one in which the word order is reversed. If the phrasal verb is "to play down," the inverted form is "to down-play."
A portmanteau is a word that is composed of two or more separate words smooshed together. "Down-play" is a hyphenated word; "downplay" is a portmanteau.
So if you start with a phrasal verb-- "to play down"-- invert the order-- "to down-play"-- and remove the hyphen, you end up with an inverted portmanteau phrasal verb: "to downplay." Same idea for "to downmoderate." Of course, "downmod," and its counterpart "upmod," carry the same meaning and are easier to type.
There's no test in existance which will detect that you smoked some dirt weed when you were 15, or will find those bong hits you did in college.
A background check will. You have to allow a moderately thorough background check when applying for a Secret clearance, and a brutally comprehensive one for any level above that. At the end of it, they'll be able to tell you where you get your drugs, what kind you buy, how much you pay for it, and what your preferred snack food is during those little "private moments."
This is A Good Thing. As a taxpayer-- boy, am I ever-- I would not be happy to know that the people entrusted with our national security secrets are going home and burning one after work every night.
"And now, here's a guy who's a real po-theed. Oh, sorry, that's 'pot head.'"
Many of these memoirs were vanity publications with print runs of 200 or so and are expensive and rare now.
Are you suggesting that putting those works in the public domain will solve the scarcity problem? I disagree. If there's no measurable market demand for the works now-- if there were, the copyright owners could easily be persuaded to publish another run-- then there will continue to be no measurable demand after the works hit the public domain.
Furthermore, I would imagine that the holders of the copyrights on these works-- presumably the children of the passed veterans you mentioned-- would be quite amenable to licensing the works for a trivial fee, or even opening them up to the public domain completely, if they were simply asked. My father-- rest his soul-- was just barely too young for World War I, but he served in World War II. He left no memoirs, but if he had, I would be the copyright holder on them. Anyone who asked me for them would be welcome to a copy for nothing more than the cost of reproducing them. I'm quite certain that many, or even most, people would feel the same way on this subject.
Furthermore, if even one library, somewhere in the country, has a copy of the book you're looking for, you can get your hands on it. Behold the wonder of the inter-library loan program.
Your example is an okay one, but it doesn't seem like anybody has really been harmed by copyrights here.
Okay, so I'm being a grammar nazi, but since when did the term "down-modding" enter the lexicon?
About forty-five seconds after "downgrade," "downlink," "download," "downplay," and "downsize." Late 20th century. Blink and you might miss it.
If you wanna get all technical, Herr Grammarian, "downmod" is an inverted portmanteau phrasal verb. It's constructed in the same fashion as the "back" verbs: backbite, backfire, backscatter, backslide, backstroke.
There are a few "up" verbs as well: upbraid, upchuck (heh), update, upend, upgrade, upheave, uphold, upholster (just kidding), uplift, uplink, upload, upraise, uprise (usually in the gerund form "uprising"), uproot, upset, and upstage.
I feel pretty okay about my use of "down-modding." So good, in fact, that next time I think I'll drop the hyphen.;-)
Map-makers were signing NDA's of secrecy so as to make money from their work. Copyright was created as a means to allow making works available while still being protected.
Read up on your history, friend. Copyright, when first codified in law, had nothing at all to do with maps. It was for the prevention of book piracy by printers in England who had taken to the habit of reprinting books without the permission of their authors.
Here, for your enrichment, is the relevant text of the introduction to the 1710 Statute of Anne.
An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted, and be it Enacted by the Queens most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament Assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten, the Author of any Book or Books already Printed, who hath not Transferred to any other the Copy or Copies of such Book or Books, Share or Shares thereof, or the Bookseller or Booksellers, Printer or Printers, or other Person or Persons, who hath or have Purchased or Acquired the Copy or Copies of any Book or Books, in order to Print or Reprint the same, shall have the sole Right and Liberty of Printing such Book and Books for the Term of One and twenty Years, to Commence from the said Tenth Day of April, and no longer;
The law then goes on to talk about penalties for violating the copyright (the pirates have to turn over all sheets to be destroyed, and pay a fine of one penny per sheet produced, which was quite a steep fine 300 years ago).
Notice the most important bit: "For Preventing therefore such Practices ['Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors'] for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books." The law says that piracy was a serious problem, and that the purpose of the law was to prevent it and to encourage people to write useful books. Says nothing at all about the public domain, friend. The purpose of copyright is now what it always has been: to grant authors a monopoly to encourage them, with the promise of financial reward, to create new works.
Film preservation is easy when stored as digital content.
Don't be ridiculous. The storage and preservation of digital content is even more difficult-- or, at best, exactly the same as-- the preservation of film. Film reels have to be stored in temperature-controlled warehouses, possibly enclosed in an inert atmosphere. Digital copies of film, apart from being poor copies of the originals, must be stored on computers; those computers must also be stored in temperature-controlled warehouses, but to make things worse, they consume electricity and require a high degree of active maintenance. If you instead commit the film to data tape or a similar offline storage medium, you're back where you started from: storing films in temperature controlled warehouses, possibly in inert environments.
Who's going to pay for that? What's more, who's going to pay to convert the now-public-domain films into digital copies in the first place? There's no reason for the former copyright owner to do so. Do you expect the government to do it? Money is tight enough as it is; an expensive program like that won't go over well when we're running a deficit already.
No, people were not inspired by a film just as much before and after it entered the public domain - because fewer people had access to the content. Now, everyone has free access to the content, and anyone can be inspired by it.
Bullshit. Public domain does not guarantee free access. I've used this example before; The Birth of a Nation has been in the public domain for some time. A copy of it will cost you $40. You can get copies of last year's new releases, which are still protected by copyright, for considerably less than that. Your theory that putting works into the public domain increases public access to them is demonstrably false.
The longer it takes something to enter the public domain, the more incentive it gives to creating works, but the less valuable these works are to society (Since people have limited freedom in regard to those works). The shorter it takes something to enter the public domain, the less incentive there is to create it, but the more valuable creations are to society (the information is free to inspire everyone, and anyone can pass it on to anyone to learn from).
Oops. You just tripped yourself up on your own logic. You're saying that shorter terms of copyright provide less incentive to authors to create works, even though those works are more valuable to society. So if copyright terms are shortened, some authors will choose not to produce works, and the loss to society will be greater, because those works, had they been produced, would have been more valuable than had copyright terms been longer.
That's okay, though, because your argument is basically fucked up. A work does not have greater value to society if it's in the public domain; the value to society is the same whether the author holds a copyright or not, because access to the work is the same whether it's copyrighted or not (see above). If copyright terms are shortened, authors will have less incentive to write; you've admitted this yourself. Therefore the world will lose out on works that would have been created had copyright terms been longer.
Shortening copyright terms, by this line of reasoning, would be a tragedy.
For example, a teacher can copy meterial from the public domain to all of his students freely, to teach them about music, or novel writing, or such.
A teacher can copy material from copyrighted works, too. That's spelled out in Title 17, section 107: "...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." Emphasis mine. If a teacher does not want to provide copies for classroom use, or if it's not practical to do so, we have this wonderful thing called a library system. Students' access to teaching materials is not restricted by copyright in any way.
Copyrights have been prolonged again and again since, and they are now Author's life + 150 years, which is an absurd amount of time, obviously contradicting the "For Limited Times" phrase in the constitution.
Actually, the author's life plus 150 years (Where'd you get that figure? The law calls for life + 70 years.) is a limited time, and is therefore completely acceptable under the Constitution. There's nothing absurd about it at all. It's just different from what you think it should be.
If you think life + 70 years (or life + 150 years, or any other figure) is inappropriate, then please tell me why another figure is more appropriate. You advocate 14+14; why? You'd better have something more convincing than "because that's the way they did it in the 18th century," too, because it was arbitrary then and it's arbitrary now. So what's your reasoning?
The copyright law was presented in the constitution of the united states after independent discussion and thought, and as a solution to their own intellectual output problems (secrecy and NDA's of the times).
Yeah, yeah. Licensing Act of 1662, Statue of Anne, and all that. What's your point? The fact is that the idea of intellectual property is not a new one; it is, in fact, a very old one. Arguing that IP is a new idea, and therefore not worthy of respect, is rather silly.
The idea is that Copyright is for limited times and only in this case is it promoting science and useful arts - because only works in the public domain are promoting science and useful arts.
But as I've already demonstrated, this assertion is false. Works that are protected under copyright still serve to promote science and the useful arts.
It's pretty clear at this point that you're misinterpreting the Constitution. If the government lacked the power to grant copyrights, then all works would automatically be in the public domain. By your reasoning, this would be the best possible scenario, because all works would immediately start promoting science and the useful arts.
Only that's not the way it goes. Copyrights-- limited monopolies-- are issued in order to give authors incentives to create new works. That's how science and the useful arts are promoted. Dropping works into the public domain only helps one group of people: the publishers who print copies of public domain works without having to pay the authors a penny.
Copyrights are on expressions of ideas, not on ways to do things.
Exactly! Which is why leaving works under copyright does not diminish the ability of other authors to be inspired by them. Anybody who reads them can be inspired by the ideas in authors' copyrighted works. The only thing that's protected is the expression of those ideas.
I've never before heard of this specific content, but now that I've googled to find what that content is all about - its enterance into the public domain may help artists be inspired and learn from these works, obviously.
(For those of you just joining us, we're talking about Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.)
Artists have been inspired by, and learned from, Steamboat Willie for decades. The fact that the cartoon was not in the public domain made no difference in all those years. So your argument that only works in the public domain benefit society is clearly a crock of poo.
While we're on the subject of film, I submit to you now that leaving Steamboat Willie under copyright will do more to serve society and posterity than releasing it to the public domain. How, you ask? Preservation.
Steamboat Willie is a film. Film must be preserved, lest it decay. It must be stored in a climate-controlled place, and, depending on the nature of the stock, possibly in an inert gas environment. This is not inexpensive; whole companies-- FotoKem being one-- exist solely to store motion picture film. (Well, okay, not solely. FotoKem was founded as a film storage company, but they've since expanded quite a bit.) These companies do not do this for free; they charge the owners of the films a lot of money for the service. Why does Disney continue to pay for the storage and preservation of Steamboat Willie? Because it has value to them. What would happen if that value were to vanish overnight? You can be sure that Steamboat Willie would end up on the top shelf of a broom closet somewhere. In a few decades, it would literally crumble to dust, lost forever.
Keeping Steamboat Willie under copyright gives Disney an incentive to store and preserve their work. Removing that incentive would result in a net loss to society.
How ya like them apples?
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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It doesn't much matter to me whether rights exist a priori or whether they're something we made up and enforced.
Of course it does. If they were a priori, you would have a case for trying to convince me to believe in them. As it is, since they're just assertions, it's easy for me-- and most of the rest of the world-- to just ignore them.
By the same token you can say that we just "made up right" I can say we made up the "fact" that 1 + 1 = 2.
Read Russell and Whitehead. They derived 1 + 1 = 2 from first principles. Took 'em hundreds of pages, too. If you can derive your claims from first principles, I will listen intently. Since you're just pulling them out of thin air, however, I'm not that interested in hearing them.
Btw, have you looked at the Republican or Democratic platform? Each of those platforms includes their own equally absurd non-sense.
Example?
Its interesting, though, I somehow doubt you'd be content if you were arrested for a consentual sexual activity that took place in your bedroom between you and your wife/girlfriend.
My FUD alarm is going off. Please provide one example of that happening anywhere in the United States in the past 226 years. Just one will do.
Some sex acts are illegal. Most sex acts aren't. If the majority of the citizens of a community wants a given act to be illegal, they are free to make it so. They are not restricted by some mythical "right to sexual freedom" that a Libertarian pulled out of his ear.
Quite frankly, most people are much closer to a moderate libertarian pov than a Democratic or Republican pov.
I disagree strongly with this statement. You might characterize yourself as a Libertarian while rejecting most of the tenets of the platform, and then jump to the conclusion that most people are really closet Libertarians. That's bogus reasoning. The Libertarian point of view includes a lot of whacked-out, loony shit that most Americans find absurd. Saying that most people wish they didn't have to pay taxes doesn't mean most people are Libertarians.
Back to the Republican party, they want to condemn people dying of painful terminal illnesses to live them out, rather than allowing them to end their lifes in peace and dignity. Democrats have decided that rats and mice should be alotted the same "rights" as human beings. The list of bullshit goes on and on. Each party has plenty of these idiocies.
I really wish you would provide better examples than these. It's only fair; mine came right out of the Libertarian party platform document.
To address your assisted suicide rhetoric directly, what the Republican party values is the sanctity of human life. Human life, in and of itself, has value, and it is in the best interest of society to preserve and protect that fact. For decades-- essentially since the widespread adoption of morphine and other narcotics for pain management-- doctors have been quietly helping patients in the end-stages of terminal illness end their own lives. My uncle suffered from a debilitating terminal disease for years before ultimately making his decision. The official cause of his death was heart failure secondary to myelofibrosis. The actual cause was a fatal dose of morphine administered in the hospital by his family physician. What the Republican party opposes is the public flaunting of what has historically been a private decision between doctor, patient, and family. With so-called physicians like Kevorkian constructing Rube Goldberg contraptions and conducting television interviews, I can't blame them one bit.
The reference to mice and rats and the Democratic Party is completely lost on me. What are you talking about here?
Well, I'll respond to that by saying that the government does not exist to protect us from our own stupidity, or the consequences of our own actions.
The purpose of government is to protect its citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic. That includes overt threats, like the Hitlers and Tojos of the world, as well as other threats, like polluted water, unsafe roads, and dangerous chemicals. Your life is safer now than it would be in a Libertarian world. This is a good and just thing.
All too often, the Libertarian point of view comes across as being shamelessly elitist. "Take all the warning labels off of everything," they say, "and let the problem of stupid people sort itself out." That's not the sort of world in which I wish to live.
Hard and fast rules never apply. Some people are more capable of making responsible decisions about drinking when they're 16 than others are when they're 50.
That's true, but the exception is not sufficient to invalidate the rule. Most people, at 16, are not prepared to make good decisions about their use of, for instance, alcohol. Most people, at 50, are. The break-even point is 21. The law must be specific, even though that means it cannot always be fair in every case. Better to be right most of the time, than to be wrong in a way that jeopardizes someone's safety or health.
If you are old enough to be drafted and sent off to die, or trialed for murder and given the death sentence, then society has obviously forced upon you the full responsibilities of an adult -- so you should get the full priviledges too, which includes drinking.
Not really. That's a compelling argument on its face, but in advocating it you make the mistake of assuming that responsibilities and privileges are awarded out at the same time, for the same reasons. They're not. The fact that you're old enough to be drafted, for example, does not entitle you to run for President. You can't do that until you're 35.
It is estimated that more than 1,000 lives were saved in 1987 due to the raising the year before of the minimum purchase age to 21. There has been a more than 60% decline in drinking-related fatalities among young people in the past 20 years. Conversely, the lowering of the minimum purchase age for beer during the 70's from 21 down to 18 resulted in an 11% increase in alcohol related fatalities across the entire continental US, while in some states the figures were as high as 35%. These figures alone justify the difference in age between franchise and legal alcohol consumption.
Security through obscurity is a poor model for national security.
No, it's not. It is, in fact, the only model for national security that actually works. In a previous job, I was required, as a civilian contractor, to get a Secret clearance from the DoD. (I was working on flight simulators for a defense company and for SGI; I've written about this here on Slashdot many times before.) I know some things that you don't. I know-- well, used to know; I've since forgotten-- the fuel tank capacity of the F-22. I know the approximate effective range of the AIM-120 missile. I know some fascinating things about the F-16 that you probably could never guess. All of these things that I know-- which aren't especially interesting to most people-- give us a demonstrable strategic advantage on the battlefield. That advantage saves lives. This fact alone is enough to justify the national security system of classifications. The thought of abolishing it, frankly, makes my skin crawl.
Current laws allow the govenrment to develop deadly bioweapons without facing any consequences, due to secrecy.
You betcha. And those deadly bioweapons-- if we had them-- would protect us from our enemies, keeping us safe. This goes back to that "protect the citizens from all threats" thing. If you think you live in under a oppressive regime now, just wait until an occupying force moves in and takes over, all because we made information about our military arsenals public.
May not be good, but its what the 2nd Amendment means. The right to bear arms. It doesn't put any restriction on what kind of arms or why.
Since you're so keen on "rights," you should be familiar with the concept that your "right" to bear arms (which in this case simply means a legal guarantee extended by the government, not any inherent privilege) ends at the point where the potential threat that you pose becomes unacceptable to the government or to your neighbors. The current opinion is that fully automatic weapons are too dangerous to be owned by civilians. This is an appropriate position; remember the havoc caused by those bank robbers in L.A. back in 1997? The law admittedly didn't prevent that situation, but it has served to make it the exception rather than the rule.
If you don't like what that means, then you should pass an Amendment to modify it (which is what I propose doing), not twist its words to meet your goals.
No amendment is necessary. The 2nd amendment does not make any mention of unlimited rights. Just as limitations on the freedom of speech are legal under the 1st amendment, limitations on the freedom to own firearms are legal under the 2nd amendment.
The law should mean what it says, in plain English, so anyone who passed 9th grade English could understand it. I.e., anyone who is to be held to the law ought to be able to read it and understand it by virtue of high-school English.
That's a nice sentiment, but it's neither realistic nor true. Our system of justice mandates that all accused persons are entitled to legal counsel for the specific purpose of helping them understand the laws under which they are accused. It is not necessary that the law be written in baby-talk, and such a requirement would place an undue burden on the lawmakers and justices of our country.
We live in a nation where ignorance of the law does not excuse violation of it, yet the entire penal code is hundreds of thousands of pages long, and ordinary citizens are incapable of reading and understanding the law properly.
We also live in a country where legal advice is available to everyone at a reasonable cost, and for free to accused persons. This is not bullshit; rather it is the model on which all modern judicial systems are based.
Its very simple: most people believe the draft is un-American and unconstitutional.
You need to do some research. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has nothing to do with conscription. (Which is entirely legal, by the way. Article I, section 8.) The Uniform Code of Military Justice is the foundation for a judicial system contained wholly within and applying only to the United States armed forces, including members, reservists, cadets and trainees, and prisoners of war. It's part of US law (Title 10, chapter 47, if you're interested). Because the requirements of and circumstances surrounding military justice are so different from those of civilian justice, Congress established a system of justice separate from the civilian system. The code makes it illegal, for example, for anyone subject to it to disobey a superior officer, or to be drunk while on duty, or to perform acts of misconduct while being held as a prisoner of war. These laws obviously don't apply to the civilian population, so in 1950 they were standardized into their own system of justice.
The UCMJ offers all of the same constitutional guarantees that apply to civilians: representation and counsel, avoidance of self-incrimination, protection from illegal search and seizure, and so on. The UCMJ has a system of appeals that leads all the way up to the Supreme Court. In other words, while military personnel are subject to more and stricter laws than civilians, and partake of a different form of judicial proceedings, they are just as protected by the Constitution as anyone else.
A call for the repeal of the UCMJ can have no basis in law whatsoever.
This also prevents the government from wasting our tax dollars prosecuting harmless activities like prostitution, drug use, or deviant consentual sex.
I've already covered this. I want the government to prosecute these things, because I do not accept that they are harmless. Most of America agrees with me, not with you. Your opinion on this matter, and most others, therefore, will not be translated into policy.
Try to name a single creative work that developed in a vacuum-- even Tolkien borrowed ideas from the past, just his past was more like 500+ years ago.
You can't copyright an idea, like a premise or a basic plot. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. For example, I could write a story about a little girl who gets swept away to a fantasy-land and who has to find her way home with the help of some loyal but flawed companions. That's not a new idea, but it's not infringing, either. But as soon as I put a Tin Man in there, or a Cowardly Lion, or an Emerald City, or a dog named Toto, that infringes on Baum's copyright.
Having works under copyright does not prevent authors from using those works as sources of inspiration, or even out-and-out stealing their ideas. Ringworld is under copyright, but Bungie was still able to make "Halo."
What copyright does prevent is the unauthorized use of another writer's entire story in detail, his characters, his original settings, or his exact words. You can't write a sequel to The Godfather without permission from the Puzo estate. You can't write Frodo/Sam slash fanfic without permission from the Tolkien estate*. But you can create new, original works inspired by works that are still protected by copyright.
If Shakespeare were alive today, for example, he couldn't sue Disney over the plot of The Lion King. The story is clearly inspired by Hamlet, using some of the same basic story ideas, but it would not infringe because it's just not close enough. The strange case of Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, however, is a different story. In that case, the plaintiff presented no fewer than seventeen distinct points of similarity between the film and a story proposal sent to Disney in 1980 by a director named Alter. The jury found that Disney stole Alter's movie idea, and awarded Alter $300,000.
(Yeah, Tezuka probably would have had a case against Disney. But it's not a sure thing. It depends on whether the similarities are trivial or substantive, and since I haven't seen Kimba, I can't comment.)
All I'm trying to point out here is that the idea of works passing into the public domain isn't really as all-important as many people make it out to be. You claimed that a work has to be in the public domain before it can serve as the inspiration for new works. That's clearly false. Another poster-- I forget who; was it you?-- suggested that works that are out of copyright can be had for free or nearly for free. I put the lie to that idea by pointing out that a videotape copy of The Birth of a Nation, a movie made in 1915 and long since in the public domain, costs an astounding $39.95, more than many firls that were just released.
I'm not saying that copyright should be absolute and permanent, necessarily; I'm just trying to keep copyright's opponents honest.
(I still haven't heard an argument for why we should limit copyrights to a particular and specific duration. Is any period of time ultimately going to just be arbitrary?)
Slashdot Mirror
The One Ring.net are reporting that Jackson gets 10M + 5% of gross.
Ho. Lee. Shit.
(If you're doing the math at home, that comes to $53 million for Fellowship alone. And that doesn't even count the bragging rights. "Nyaah, nyaah, I made The Lord of the Rings and you didn't, nyaah, nyaah." Not bad for five years' work.)
You are missing the point, the whole point is to seperate the content from presentation.
No offense intended, but I think it is you who is missing the point. The average person doesn't think in XML. The average person thinks in formatted text. When I'm writing, I don't think "<ital>foo</ital>," I think "foo." Being able to see foo on the screen, but get "<ital>foo</ital>" in the output is a big win.
I'd go as far as to say that it's entirely impossible to have such a Docbook editor, since you have pretty much no say in the presentation when you write it.
Oh, sure you can. The editor doesn't need to display it the exact same way the end-user will display it; it just needs to display it in a way that makes the user feel comfortable. On your machine, chapter titles are 24 point serif type; on mine, they're 18 point italic sans-serif type. I don't care that yours are different from mine; I only care that mine look the way I expect them to.
havent you noticed Dubya's war on Iraq is about what Iraq might do
Sound defense policy is always based on capability, not intention. You can't read the enemy's mind, so you have to act on what he could do if so inclined. Any student-- even an armchair student-- of military history can tell you this.
If it reaches a point where the possibility that an enemy might act becomes sufficiently real, and the danger posed by that enemy's capabilities become sufficiently great, then the only reasonable course of action is to respond with military force. To do anything less is to... well, is to be Poland circa 1939.
If, on the other hand, you feel okay about the thought of another Pearl Harbor-- one involving nuclear or chemical weapons-- then carry on.
You keep saying this as if it were meaningful.
It's meaningful because the heart of the argument is the duration of copyrights. Person X says the duration is too long; person Y says it's too short. If the duration is completely picked out of thin air, and yet neither person X nor person Y has a decent argument to back up their opinion, who's right?
The law is necessarily chock full of arbitrary bright lines, which is perfectly reasonable so long as they aren't grossly misplaced...
Okay. I propose to you that the term of life + 70 years is not grossly misplaced. If you think it is, you're going to have to tell me why if you want me to believe you. So far all I've heard is, "That's too long!" To which I respond, "No, it's not! Neener, neener!" And we get nowhere.
it's absurd that you can sign up to die for your country but not buy a beer
Why? How are these two things related? Do you think soldiers should be drunk when they go into battle? The two things are, in fact, completely unconnected to one another.
When the minimum purchase age was reduced from 21 to 18 in the 1970's, alcohol-related fatalities in that age group rose 11% nationwide, and as much as 35% in some states. A Michigan study found that DWI arrests among 18-20 year olds increased an amazing 141% when their MLPA was lowered.
On the other hand, however, since the MLPA was raised in 1986 back to 21 nationwide, the rate of alcohol-related fatalities among 18-20 year olds has decreased by 63%. An estimated 17,000 lives were saved between 1975 and 1996 by the increased MLPA. That's somewhat larger than an infantry division, if you're thinking in military terms.
On the other topic, a person of 18 years is, on average, physically, intellectually, and emotionally capable of being trained by the military, and serving in the armed forces. If we should ever again find ourselves in a situation sufficiently grave to warrant conscription-- God forbid-- I will support a draft age of 18. If I have sons or daughters of that age, they can come along and fight with me.
I just hope that we never find ourselves in that situation again.
That's total ticket sales. Half that money goes to the theaters.
As I understand it, the numbers reported as "box office grosses" are studio grosses, not theater grosses. The figures come from the total amount of money paid to the distributor on a given day, weekend, or (in this case) interval.
I won't swear that this is true, but I understand it to be so. If I'm wrong, then oops.
Also, I'd be stunned if Jackson, or anybody else, was getting gross points. Points on the net, sure, but gross points?
(That said, I have been stunned before, so it's not impossible.)
It's about the freedom, stupid.
Freedom to take without permission. I love it. Only in America.
Somebody wasted a mod point. This is not interesting. There is not copy protection on the extended DVD set, apart from Macrovision and CSS that's on virtually every DVD.
I copied discs one and two to my girlfriend's iBook so she could watch them on the plane on the way to her uncle's house. No problems. Works fine. Just like every other DVD.
(Had to clean off nearly 20 GB to make the damn things fit, though. Hope she doesn't need MS Office until she gets back.)
I'm not entirely sure this is relevant, but it's an interesting tidbit nonetheless.
The best reports are that New Line spent about half a billion dollars making and promoting The Lord of the Rings, all three films, and that includes money budgeted but not yet spent on promotion and advertising for the last movie. Of that half a billion, about $300 million went into making the movies themselves. The $500 million figure includes all the cost of making, distributing, promoting, and showing the movies; basically, the studio's total costs.
According to boxofficemojo.com, The Fellowship of the Ring has made about $860 million worldwide for New Line since its release last year. That's only gross revenue to the studio generated by movie theaters; it doesn't include DVD sales or any other sources of revenue.*
The punchline: if nobody in the world buys a ticket for the next two movies, New Line still will have made about a 72% profit on the Lord of the Rings. They could put The Two Towers and The Return of the King on a shelf, finished but unreleased, and still have made a fortune.
* Historically, the ratio of worldwide box office receipts to worldwide revenues from all media is about 1:1.5. In other words, for every dollar of box office gross, a movie can be expected to generate about $1.50 in video sales, rentals, TV rights, book and toy tie-ins, and so on.
So are you implying there are gnome themes that *don't* suck?
Absolutely not, I apologize for giving you that impression. When I said the phrase "dreadful KDE theme" was redundant, I was really only referring to the "dreadful theme" part.
UI themes suck. Period. All of them. I think we'd get more appealing results if we just hand every man, woman, and child in the world a canvas and a set of finger-paints and tell them to go at it.
The idea is good but, the interface has some problems. Drag the files that you want to burn into the CD-R's folder, see files in the folder, forget to hit burn to CD (it just puts fake links in the folder as place holders and waits for you to hit burn to CD to actually do anything).
Since I've never used XP, I can't comment directly, but on the Mac the Finder's CD burning feature works pretty much the same way. You drag the files to the CD, and then either tell it to burn, or simply eject the disc. When you eject, it asks you if you want to burn the contents, or just forget the whole thing. So you can't really forget to burn the disc.
Doesn't XP do something like that? Seems fairly obvious to me.
It looks like a dreadful KDE theme.
Talk about being redundant...
I have stopped counting the times that I've had to reboot my Jaguar workstation in the school's art lab after it failed to handle some bizarre error in Classic environment. It just gets worse with every release
I really, seriously don't mean any offense by this, but... what the fuck is wrong with you, dude?
I've been using Jaguar every day since before it was actually released; I bought a new G4 back in August, and it came with 10.2 on it about ten days before the retail boxes hit the shelves. I have never had to reboot my machine for any reason than an OS update. I shut it down once to move it to another room, and then one reboot for each of the updates since (most recently yesterday's security update). And that's all.
I'm pushing a pretty wide range of apps, too, including Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark (although less and less lately because it's my only OS 9 application, and InDesign is better), and sometimes Maya for doing weekly menus and signage for the restaurant. I push my machine pretty hard, and I never have the kinds of problems you're talking about.
I don't know what your deal is, but I think it's important for people to know that your experience is definitely not typical.
No, you're not. Since my company went under a few months ago I haven't touched a Windows machine, but at the time I was using Windows 2000 exclusively. I just didn't have a good reason to upgrade. All that stuff that Microsoft touted for XP-- media, burning, wireless-- I get on my Macs, and in a form that's a hell of a lot easier to use.
From my chair, Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Microsoft's operating system development, and we've been heading downhill ever since. Not because XP sucks, but just because it adds much stuff I don't need and no stuff I do.
A phrasal verb is a verb that consists of more than one word. The line between a verb-adverb pair and a phrasal verb is blurry, but some examples may help. "To ask out," in the sense of to proposition for a date, is a phrasal verb. In this case, "out" is not an adverb describing the verb "to ask," but rather an integral part of the verb phrase. Another good example is "to have to do with," as in, "This sentence has to do with phrasal verbs." If you examine each part of the phrasal verb-- "has," "to do," "with"-- it makes no sense at all. But taken as a single verb, it carries meaning.
An inverted phrasal verb is one in which the word order is reversed. If the phrasal verb is "to play down," the inverted form is "to down-play."
A portmanteau is a word that is composed of two or more separate words smooshed together. "Down-play" is a hyphenated word; "downplay" is a portmanteau.
So if you start with a phrasal verb-- "to play down"-- invert the order-- "to down-play"-- and remove the hyphen, you end up with an inverted portmanteau phrasal verb: "to downplay." Same idea for "to downmoderate." Of course, "downmod," and its counterpart "upmod," carry the same meaning and are easier to type.
There's no test in existance which will detect that you smoked some dirt weed when you were 15, or will find those bong hits you did in college.
A background check will. You have to allow a moderately thorough background check when applying for a Secret clearance, and a brutally comprehensive one for any level above that. At the end of it, they'll be able to tell you where you get your drugs, what kind you buy, how much you pay for it, and what your preferred snack food is during those little "private moments."
This is A Good Thing. As a taxpayer-- boy, am I ever-- I would not be happy to know that the people entrusted with our national security secrets are going home and burning one after work every night.
"And now, here's a guy who's a real po-theed. Oh, sorry, that's 'pot head.'"
How many women do you know with "No, I won't fix your computer" tee shirts? I'm just going with the odds, dude.
ekrout is my new best friend.
Try going shirtless for a while!
Eww! Man-teats! Eww!
Many of these memoirs were vanity publications with print runs of 200 or so and are expensive and rare now.
Are you suggesting that putting those works in the public domain will solve the scarcity problem? I disagree. If there's no measurable market demand for the works now-- if there were, the copyright owners could easily be persuaded to publish another run-- then there will continue to be no measurable demand after the works hit the public domain.
Furthermore, I would imagine that the holders of the copyrights on these works-- presumably the children of the passed veterans you mentioned-- would be quite amenable to licensing the works for a trivial fee, or even opening them up to the public domain completely, if they were simply asked. My father-- rest his soul-- was just barely too young for World War I, but he served in World War II. He left no memoirs, but if he had, I would be the copyright holder on them. Anyone who asked me for them would be welcome to a copy for nothing more than the cost of reproducing them. I'm quite certain that many, or even most, people would feel the same way on this subject.
Furthermore, if even one library, somewhere in the country, has a copy of the book you're looking for, you can get your hands on it. Behold the wonder of the inter-library loan program.
Your example is an okay one, but it doesn't seem like anybody has really been harmed by copyrights here.
Okay, so I'm being a grammar nazi, but since when did the term "down-modding" enter the lexicon?
;-)
About forty-five seconds after "downgrade," "downlink," "download," "downplay," and "downsize." Late 20th century. Blink and you might miss it.
If you wanna get all technical, Herr Grammarian, "downmod" is an inverted portmanteau phrasal verb. It's constructed in the same fashion as the "back" verbs: backbite, backfire, backscatter, backslide, backstroke.
There are a few "up" verbs as well: upbraid, upchuck (heh), update, upend, upgrade, upheave, uphold, upholster (just kidding), uplift, uplink, upload, upraise, uprise (usually in the gerund form "uprising"), uproot, upset, and upstage.
I feel pretty okay about my use of "down-modding." So good, in fact, that next time I think I'll drop the hyphen.
Map-makers were signing NDA's of secrecy so as to make money from their work. Copyright was created as a means to allow making works available while still being protected.
Read up on your history, friend. Copyright, when first codified in law, had nothing at all to do with maps. It was for the prevention of book piracy by printers in England who had taken to the habit of reprinting books without the permission of their authors.
Here, for your enrichment, is the relevant text of the introduction to the 1710 Statute of Anne.
An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted, and be it Enacted by the Queens most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament Assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten, the Author of any Book or Books already Printed, who hath not Transferred to any other the Copy or Copies of such Book or Books, Share or Shares thereof, or the Bookseller or Booksellers, Printer or Printers, or other Person or Persons, who hath or have Purchased or Acquired the Copy or Copies of any Book or Books, in order to Print or Reprint the same, shall have the sole Right and Liberty of Printing such Book and Books for the Term of One and twenty Years, to Commence from the said Tenth Day of April, and no longer;
The law then goes on to talk about penalties for violating the copyright (the pirates have to turn over all sheets to be destroyed, and pay a fine of one penny per sheet produced, which was quite a steep fine 300 years ago).
Notice the most important bit: "For Preventing therefore such Practices ['Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors'] for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books." The law says that piracy was a serious problem, and that the purpose of the law was to prevent it and to encourage people to write useful books. Says nothing at all about the public domain, friend. The purpose of copyright is now what it always has been: to grant authors a monopoly to encourage them, with the promise of financial reward, to create new works.
Film preservation is easy when stored as digital content.
Don't be ridiculous. The storage and preservation of digital content is even more difficult-- or, at best, exactly the same as-- the preservation of film. Film reels have to be stored in temperature-controlled warehouses, possibly enclosed in an inert atmosphere. Digital copies of film, apart from being poor copies of the originals, must be stored on computers; those computers must also be stored in temperature-controlled warehouses, but to make things worse, they consume electricity and require a high degree of active maintenance. If you instead commit the film to data tape or a similar offline storage medium, you're back where you started from: storing films in temperature controlled warehouses, possibly in inert environments.
Who's going to pay for that? What's more, who's going to pay to convert the now-public-domain films into digital copies in the first place? There's no reason for the former copyright owner to do so. Do you expect the government to do it? Money is tight enough as it is; an expensive program like that won't go over well when we're running a deficit already.
No, people were not inspired by a film just as much before and after it entered the public domain - because fewer people had access to the content. Now, everyone has free access to the content, and anyone can be inspired by it.
Bullshit. Public domain does not guarantee free access. I've used this example before; The Birth of a Nation has been in the public domain for some time. A copy of it will cost you $40. You can get copies of last year's new releases, which are still protected by copyright, for considerably less than that. Your theory that putting works into the public domain increases public access to them is demonstrably false.
The longer it takes something to enter the public domain, the more incentive it gives to creating works, but the less valuable these works are to society (Since people have limited freedom in regard to those works). The shorter it takes something to enter the public domain, the less incentive there is to create it, but the more valuable creations are to society (the information is free to inspire everyone, and anyone can pass it on to anyone to learn from).
Oops. You just tripped yourself up on your own logic. You're saying that shorter terms of copyright provide less incentive to authors to create works, even though those works are more valuable to society. So if copyright terms are shortened, some authors will choose not to produce works, and the loss to society will be greater, because those works, had they been produced, would have been more valuable than had copyright terms been longer.
That's okay, though, because your argument is basically fucked up. A work does not have greater value to society if it's in the public domain; the value to society is the same whether the author holds a copyright or not, because access to the work is the same whether it's copyrighted or not (see above). If copyright terms are shortened, authors will have less incentive to write; you've admitted this yourself. Therefore the world will lose out on works that would have been created had copyright terms been longer.
Shortening copyright terms, by this line of reasoning, would be a tragedy.
For example, a teacher can copy meterial from the public domain to all of his students freely, to teach them about music, or novel writing, or such.
A teacher can copy material from copyrighted works, too. That's spelled out in Title 17, section 107: "...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." Emphasis mine. If a teacher does not want to provide copies for classroom use, or if it's not practical to do so, we have this wonderful thing called a library system. Students' access to teaching materials is not restricted by copyright in any way.
Copyrights have been prolonged again and again since, and they are now Author's life + 150 years, which is an absurd amount of time, obviously contradicting the "For Limited Times" phrase in the constitution.
Actually, the author's life plus 150 years (Where'd you get that figure? The law calls for life + 70 years.) is a limited time, and is therefore completely acceptable under the Constitution. There's nothing absurd about it at all. It's just different from what you think it should be.
If you think life + 70 years (or life + 150 years, or any other figure) is inappropriate, then please tell me why another figure is more appropriate. You advocate 14+14; why? You'd better have something more convincing than "because that's the way they did it in the 18th century," too, because it was arbitrary then and it's arbitrary now. So what's your reasoning?
AmigaOS4 screenshots
Jeebus. Those screen shots are even uglier than the ones on Red Hat's site.
The copyright law was presented in the constitution of the united states after independent discussion and thought, and as a solution to their own intellectual output problems (secrecy and NDA's of the times).
Yeah, yeah. Licensing Act of 1662, Statue of Anne, and all that. What's your point? The fact is that the idea of intellectual property is not a new one; it is, in fact, a very old one. Arguing that IP is a new idea, and therefore not worthy of respect, is rather silly.
The idea is that Copyright is for limited times and only in this case is it promoting science and useful arts - because only works in the public domain are promoting science and useful arts.
But as I've already demonstrated, this assertion is false. Works that are protected under copyright still serve to promote science and the useful arts.
It's pretty clear at this point that you're misinterpreting the Constitution. If the government lacked the power to grant copyrights, then all works would automatically be in the public domain. By your reasoning, this would be the best possible scenario, because all works would immediately start promoting science and the useful arts.
Only that's not the way it goes. Copyrights-- limited monopolies-- are issued in order to give authors incentives to create new works. That's how science and the useful arts are promoted. Dropping works into the public domain only helps one group of people: the publishers who print copies of public domain works without having to pay the authors a penny.
Copyrights are on expressions of ideas, not on ways to do things.
Exactly! Which is why leaving works under copyright does not diminish the ability of other authors to be inspired by them. Anybody who reads them can be inspired by the ideas in authors' copyrighted works. The only thing that's protected is the expression of those ideas.
I've never before heard of this specific content, but now that I've googled to find what that content is all about - its enterance into the public domain may help artists be inspired and learn from these works, obviously.
(For those of you just joining us, we're talking about Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.)
Artists have been inspired by, and learned from, Steamboat Willie for decades. The fact that the cartoon was not in the public domain made no difference in all those years. So your argument that only works in the public domain benefit society is clearly a crock of poo.
While we're on the subject of film, I submit to you now that leaving Steamboat Willie under copyright will do more to serve society and posterity than releasing it to the public domain. How, you ask? Preservation.
Steamboat Willie is a film. Film must be preserved, lest it decay. It must be stored in a climate-controlled place, and, depending on the nature of the stock, possibly in an inert gas environment. This is not inexpensive; whole companies-- FotoKem being one-- exist solely to store motion picture film. (Well, okay, not solely. FotoKem was founded as a film storage company, but they've since expanded quite a bit.) These companies do not do this for free; they charge the owners of the films a lot of money for the service. Why does Disney continue to pay for the storage and preservation of Steamboat Willie? Because it has value to them. What would happen if that value were to vanish overnight? You can be sure that Steamboat Willie would end up on the top shelf of a broom closet somewhere. In a few decades, it would literally crumble to dust, lost forever.
Keeping Steamboat Willie under copyright gives Disney an incentive to store and preserve their work. Removing that incentive would result in a net loss to society.
How ya like them apples?
It doesn't much matter to me whether rights exist a priori or whether they're something we made up and enforced.
Of course it does. If they were a priori, you would have a case for trying to convince me to believe in them. As it is, since they're just assertions, it's easy for me-- and most of the rest of the world-- to just ignore them.
By the same token you can say that we just "made up right" I can say we made up the "fact" that 1 + 1 = 2.
Read Russell and Whitehead. They derived 1 + 1 = 2 from first principles. Took 'em hundreds of pages, too. If you can derive your claims from first principles, I will listen intently. Since you're just pulling them out of thin air, however, I'm not that interested in hearing them.
Btw, have you looked at the Republican or Democratic platform? Each of those platforms includes their own equally absurd non-sense.
Example?
Its interesting, though, I somehow doubt you'd be content if you were arrested for a consentual sexual activity that took place in your bedroom between you and your wife/girlfriend.
My FUD alarm is going off. Please provide one example of that happening anywhere in the United States in the past 226 years. Just one will do.
Some sex acts are illegal. Most sex acts aren't. If the majority of the citizens of a community wants a given act to be illegal, they are free to make it so. They are not restricted by some mythical "right to sexual freedom" that a Libertarian pulled out of his ear.
Quite frankly, most people are much closer to a moderate libertarian pov than a Democratic or Republican pov.
I disagree strongly with this statement. You might characterize yourself as a Libertarian while rejecting most of the tenets of the platform, and then jump to the conclusion that most people are really closet Libertarians. That's bogus reasoning. The Libertarian point of view includes a lot of whacked-out, loony shit that most Americans find absurd. Saying that most people wish they didn't have to pay taxes doesn't mean most people are Libertarians.
Back to the Republican party, they want to condemn people dying of painful terminal illnesses to live them out, rather than allowing them to end their lifes in peace and dignity. Democrats have decided that rats and mice should be alotted the same "rights" as human beings. The list of bullshit goes on and on. Each party has plenty of these idiocies.
I really wish you would provide better examples than these. It's only fair; mine came right out of the Libertarian party platform document.
To address your assisted suicide rhetoric directly, what the Republican party values is the sanctity of human life. Human life, in and of itself, has value, and it is in the best interest of society to preserve and protect that fact. For decades-- essentially since the widespread adoption of morphine and other narcotics for pain management-- doctors have been quietly helping patients in the end-stages of terminal illness end their own lives. My uncle suffered from a debilitating terminal disease for years before ultimately making his decision. The official cause of his death was heart failure secondary to myelofibrosis. The actual cause was a fatal dose of morphine administered in the hospital by his family physician. What the Republican party opposes is the public flaunting of what has historically been a private decision between doctor, patient, and family. With so-called physicians like Kevorkian constructing Rube Goldberg contraptions and conducting television interviews, I can't blame them one bit.
The reference to mice and rats and the Democratic Party is completely lost on me. What are you talking about here?
Well, I'll respond to that by saying that the government does not exist to protect us from our own stupidity, or the consequences of our own actions.
The purpose of government is to protect its citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic. That includes overt threats, like the Hitlers and Tojos of the world, as well as other threats, like polluted water, unsafe roads, and dangerous chemicals. Your life is safer now than it would be in a Libertarian world. This is a good and just thing.
All too often, the Libertarian point of view comes across as being shamelessly elitist. "Take all the warning labels off of everything," they say, "and let the problem of stupid people sort itself out." That's not the sort of world in which I wish to live.
Hard and fast rules never apply. Some people are more capable of making responsible decisions about drinking when they're 16 than others are when they're 50.
That's true, but the exception is not sufficient to invalidate the rule. Most people, at 16, are not prepared to make good decisions about their use of, for instance, alcohol. Most people, at 50, are. The break-even point is 21. The law must be specific, even though that means it cannot always be fair in every case. Better to be right most of the time, than to be wrong in a way that jeopardizes someone's safety or health.
If you are old enough to be drafted and sent off to die, or trialed for murder and given the death sentence, then society has obviously forced upon you the full responsibilities of an adult -- so you should get the full priviledges too, which includes drinking.
Not really. That's a compelling argument on its face, but in advocating it you make the mistake of assuming that responsibilities and privileges are awarded out at the same time, for the same reasons. They're not. The fact that you're old enough to be drafted, for example, does not entitle you to run for President. You can't do that until you're 35.
It is estimated that more than 1,000 lives were saved in 1987 due to the raising the year before of the minimum purchase age to 21. There has been a more than 60% decline in drinking-related fatalities among young people in the past 20 years. Conversely, the lowering of the minimum purchase age for beer during the 70's from 21 down to 18 resulted in an 11% increase in alcohol related fatalities across the entire continental US, while in some states the figures were as high as 35%. These figures alone justify the difference in age between franchise and legal alcohol consumption.
Security through obscurity is a poor model for national security.
No, it's not. It is, in fact, the only model for national security that actually works. In a previous job, I was required, as a civilian contractor, to get a Secret clearance from the DoD. (I was working on flight simulators for a defense company and for SGI; I've written about this here on Slashdot many times before.) I know some things that you don't. I know-- well, used to know; I've since forgotten-- the fuel tank capacity of the F-22. I know the approximate effective range of the AIM-120 missile. I know some fascinating things about the F-16 that you probably could never guess. All of these things that I know-- which aren't especially interesting to most people-- give us a demonstrable strategic advantage on the battlefield. That advantage saves lives. This fact alone is enough to justify the national security system of classifications. The thought of abolishing it, frankly, makes my skin crawl.
Current laws allow the govenrment to develop deadly bioweapons without facing any consequences, due to secrecy.
You betcha. And those deadly bioweapons-- if we had them-- would protect us from our enemies, keeping us safe. This goes back to that "protect the citizens from all threats" thing. If you think you live in under a oppressive regime now, just wait until an occupying force moves in and takes over, all because we made information about our military arsenals public.
May not be good, but its what the 2nd Amendment means. The right to bear arms. It doesn't put any restriction on what kind of arms or why.
Since you're so keen on "rights," you should be familiar with the concept that your "right" to bear arms (which in this case simply means a legal guarantee extended by the government, not any inherent privilege) ends at the point where the potential threat that you pose becomes unacceptable to the government or to your neighbors. The current opinion is that fully automatic weapons are too dangerous to be owned by civilians. This is an appropriate position; remember the havoc caused by those bank robbers in L.A. back in 1997? The law admittedly didn't prevent that situation, but it has served to make it the exception rather than the rule.
If you don't like what that means, then you should pass an Amendment to modify it (which is what I propose doing), not twist its words to meet your goals.
No amendment is necessary. The 2nd amendment does not make any mention of unlimited rights. Just as limitations on the freedom of speech are legal under the 1st amendment, limitations on the freedom to own firearms are legal under the 2nd amendment.
The law should mean what it says, in plain English, so anyone who passed 9th grade English could understand it. I.e., anyone who is to be held to the law ought to be able to read it and understand it by virtue of high-school English.
That's a nice sentiment, but it's neither realistic nor true. Our system of justice mandates that all accused persons are entitled to legal counsel for the specific purpose of helping them understand the laws under which they are accused. It is not necessary that the law be written in baby-talk, and such a requirement would place an undue burden on the lawmakers and justices of our country.
We live in a nation where ignorance of the law does not excuse violation of it, yet the entire penal code is hundreds of thousands of pages long, and ordinary citizens are incapable of reading and understanding the law properly.
We also live in a country where legal advice is available to everyone at a reasonable cost, and for free to accused persons. This is not bullshit; rather it is the model on which all modern judicial systems are based.
Its very simple: most people believe the draft is un-American and unconstitutional.
You need to do some research. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has nothing to do with conscription. (Which is entirely legal, by the way. Article I, section 8.) The Uniform Code of Military Justice is the foundation for a judicial system contained wholly within and applying only to the United States armed forces, including members, reservists, cadets and trainees, and prisoners of war. It's part of US law (Title 10, chapter 47, if you're interested). Because the requirements of and circumstances surrounding military justice are so different from those of civilian justice, Congress established a system of justice separate from the civilian system. The code makes it illegal, for example, for anyone subject to it to disobey a superior officer, or to be drunk while on duty, or to perform acts of misconduct while being held as a prisoner of war. These laws obviously don't apply to the civilian population, so in 1950 they were standardized into their own system of justice.
The UCMJ offers all of the same constitutional guarantees that apply to civilians: representation and counsel, avoidance of self-incrimination, protection from illegal search and seizure, and so on. The UCMJ has a system of appeals that leads all the way up to the Supreme Court. In other words, while military personnel are subject to more and stricter laws than civilians, and partake of a different form of judicial proceedings, they are just as protected by the Constitution as anyone else.
A call for the repeal of the UCMJ can have no basis in law whatsoever.
This also prevents the government from wasting our tax dollars prosecuting harmless activities like prostitution, drug use, or deviant consentual sex.
I've already covered this. I want the government to prosecute these things, because I do not accept that they are harmless. Most of America agrees with me, not with you. Your opinion on this matter, and most others, therefore, will not be translated into policy.
Try to name a single creative work that developed in a vacuum-- even Tolkien borrowed ideas from the past, just his past was more like 500+ years ago.
You can't copyright an idea, like a premise or a basic plot. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. For example, I could write a story about a little girl who gets swept away to a fantasy-land and who has to find her way home with the help of some loyal but flawed companions. That's not a new idea, but it's not infringing, either. But as soon as I put a Tin Man in there, or a Cowardly Lion, or an Emerald City, or a dog named Toto, that infringes on Baum's copyright.
Having works under copyright does not prevent authors from using those works as sources of inspiration, or even out-and-out stealing their ideas. Ringworld is under copyright, but Bungie was still able to make "Halo."
What copyright does prevent is the unauthorized use of another writer's entire story in detail, his characters, his original settings, or his exact words. You can't write a sequel to The Godfather without permission from the Puzo estate. You can't write Frodo/Sam slash fanfic without permission from the Tolkien estate*. But you can create new, original works inspired by works that are still protected by copyright.
If Shakespeare were alive today, for example, he couldn't sue Disney over the plot of The Lion King. The story is clearly inspired by Hamlet, using some of the same basic story ideas, but it would not infringe because it's just not close enough. The strange case of Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, however, is a different story. In that case, the plaintiff presented no fewer than seventeen distinct points of similarity between the film and a story proposal sent to Disney in 1980 by a director named Alter. The jury found that Disney stole Alter's movie idea, and awarded Alter $300,000.
(Yeah, Tezuka probably would have had a case against Disney. But it's not a sure thing. It depends on whether the similarities are trivial or substantive, and since I haven't seen Kimba, I can't comment.)
All I'm trying to point out here is that the idea of works passing into the public domain isn't really as all-important as many people make it out to be. You claimed that a work has to be in the public domain before it can serve as the inspiration for new works. That's clearly false. Another poster-- I forget who; was it you?-- suggested that works that are out of copyright can be had for free or nearly for free. I put the lie to that idea by pointing out that a videotape copy of The Birth of a Nation, a movie made in 1915 and long since in the public domain, costs an astounding $39.95, more than many firls that were just released.
I'm not saying that copyright should be absolute and permanent, necessarily; I'm just trying to keep copyright's opponents honest.
(I still haven't heard an argument for why we should limit copyrights to a particular and specific duration. Is any period of time ultimately going to just be arbitrary?)
* This, of course, is a very good thing.