The Two Towers film did not improve upon the book. Faramir is spinning in his grave.
Uh... you are aware, right, that Lord of the Rings is not actually a history? Just to be clear: fictional character, never existed, not in grave. Okay?
Soviet Russia refers to the old USSR, the great bastion of communism in the world prior to it's collapse *gags* 10ish years ago
Let's not forget an important date in world history. The USSR ceased to exist as a political entity on Christmas Day, 1991.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
However, in a civilized country, only a court can decide whether or not a specific event was against the law or not.
Not exactly. In order to be valid, a law has to be specific. The law says which acts are prohibited. The purpose of a criminal trial is to determine facts: whether an event transpired as the prosecution alleges, or as the defense alleges.
For example, let's say somebody ends up dead. Depending on the circumstances, the person responsible for the killing may or may not be a criminal. If the killer acted in self-defense, for example, then no crime was committed. For the different classes of criminal homicide, the law defines various criteria. If the killer did this, then the crime is first-degree murder. If the killer did that, then the crime is first-degree manslaughter. If the killer did the other thing, then the crime is criminally negligent homicide. And so on.
The purpose of the trial will be to ascertain the facts of the case. The prosecution will say (for example) that the defendant killed the victim because he was sleeping with the defendant's wife. The defense will say that he defendant killed the victim in self defense because the defendant thought the victim was an intruder. (Or maybe they'll say that the defendant didn't do it at all. Whatever.)
The jury, in the case of a jury trial, is responsible for deciding the facts. Did the defendant kill the victim or not? If so, did he intend to kill the victim? If so, did he plan the crime in advance? And so on.
So the courts do not decide if a specific event was against the law; the law decides that in advance. The courts merely decide what happened, and apply the law accordingly.
The AUP are something that Verio has written and that Verio can choose to enforce or not.
Then what's the point of having an AUP? You can't choose whether or not to enforce a policy; that's arbitrary and unfair to your customers. You have to enforce a policy uniformly. Thing.net was violating Verio's AUP. Dow informed Verio of that, and so Verio had to pull the plug. Not because of the DMCA. Because of their own policy.
Trying to make this about the DMCA is really stretching it. The complaint cited the DMCA, which simply says that ISP's can be liable in copyright infringement instances if they receive notice of an infringement and do not act on it. But the complaint also cited the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Lanham Act. This isn't a DMCA case any more than it's a Lanham Act case.
The important point is that Thing.net was violating Verio's AUP. Verio had no choice at all, and they did the right thing.
Ever since it went digital back in the late 80's, it has. (See SMPTE 259M.) Almost all SDTV is either shot on digital videotape or telecined to digital videotape, at which point it's represented as an array of pixels. For analog TV, the digital signal is converted to an analog signal at the transmitter. For digital TV, the SMPTE 259M or 292M (SD or HD) signal goes straight into an MPEG encoder, and the encoded bitstream goes to the transmitter. Either way, TV is pixel-based now.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
Well on that basis...
Huh? You didn't just jump to that conclusion, dude. You called a cab, drove to the airport, stood in line for an hour, bought a ticket, and flew halfway around the world to that conclusion.
The idea of a right is that it is something outside the scope of that which the government or a law can interfere with.
The idea of a right is that it is something everybody agrees is outside the scope of what the government can interfere with.
Let me make this more clear. Let's say I were to make the statement that I believe I have a right to a free lunch one day per week. I'm being deliberately silly to make my point: I have a right to one free lunch per week.
The only reasonable response to that assertion is, "No, you don't." Just because I say I have a right doesn't mean that I do have that right. If everybody disagrees with me, then I have neither the right to a free lunch, nor the free lunch itself.
The right to bear arms is another great example. There are two reasons that we Americans have that right. One, because it's written down in our founding document. And two, because we all agree that we have it. It's not an inherent right; it's arbitrary.
Free speech is exactly the same. It's not a natural right. A person can be deprived of the right to speak freely with great ease. But we Americans all agree that a person should have the right to speak freely, and we act accordingly, so for all practical purposes we do have that right.
It makes me laugh when I hear 'Americans' say that non-citizens in this country shouldn't or don't have rights. The fact is when they state this they accept the notion that their rights are privileges granted by government. They are most emphatically not.
Where do they come from, then? The rights you're referring to, where do they come from? Are they inherent? As I said, a person can be deprived of his rights very easily, so it's fair to say that they're not inherent. Are they granted by God? Well, some people think so, but not everyone agrees on that point, and even if everyone did it would be impossible to prove it. So it all boils down to the same thing: people only enjoy rights because other people agree that they should.
unless, of course, you're running Linux and then you also have to have...
I think my point up there was that people who run Linux on their desktop computers are just looking for trouble, and shouldn't be surprised when they find it.
Both you and that AC over there need to take notice of the fact that TV has never, ever used square pixels. Plain old ordinary SDTV uses a 704x486 raster in a 4:3 aspect ratio. How? Easy: the pixels aren't even close to square.
The 480p format, which is also 704x486, can even be displayed as a 1.78:1 image; Fox broadcasts this format.
And btw mplayer can play these if you have compiled it right and have the proper codecs.
On the other hand, QuickTime Player plays these without having to be compiled, and it comes with all the proper codecs.;-)
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
That said, it doesn't really matter how much i know about incorporating to decide that a law stating corporations have rights is an invalid law.
Actually, I disagree. I would say that an in-depth understanding of corporate law is vital to making an informed judgment about whether the law is appropriate or not.
Human beings have rights. Thats it.
Oh, boy. Refer to this post to read my response to this.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
That describes every society. Therefore, every society is a free society, including the former USSR, China, and Iran. Because there too you're allowed to do what you want without violating the law.
You've never visited those places, huh? In some countries you can be arrested and imprisoned for absolutely no reason at all. You can be arrested and imprisoned because somebody thinks you should be. You can be arrested and imprisoned for personally offending a bureaucrat. What you are free to do has absolutely nothing to do with the law.
What I said most certainly does not describe every society. In fact, you should consider yourself outstandingly lucky to live-- as a presume that you do-- in a country where everybody generally accepts the authority of the law, but also respects the strict limits placed on the law by the system of government.
Read the philosophy of Jefferson, Locke and Keyes, since this is the philosophy that our nation is founded on. Its pretty clear what a right is.
Philosophy is nothing but opinions, statements describing how one person thinks things oughta be. In the USA, certain fundamental assumptions are universally accepted. We call these "rights." Don't be confused, though, into thinking that what we call "rights" are in any way related to the natural world. They're purely a human invention, and an arbitrary one at that.
When some says "i have the right to do whatever i want to my body", it means exactly that. That person is free to do anything to his or her body, and any law to the contrary is invalid.
Ah, a libertarian. Well, friend, I hate to be the one to tell you that most of the human race does not agree with the statement in question. Since it's not universally accepted, it can't be a "right" of the first type. And the statement is not enacted as a law in any jurisdiction, so it also isn't a "right" of the second type. So it must be a "right" of the third type. In other words, when you say, "I have a right to this thing," what you really mean is, "I wish everybody would agree that I have a right to this thing, or at least that Congress would pass a law protecting this thing." Your statement of opinion therefore has no impact whatsoever, unfortunately, on whether a law abridging your "right" is a valid or just one.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
Actually, it is.
So let me get this straight. You don't know enough about corporate law to recognize it when you hear it, and yet you understand all the pros and cons of incorporation, and have a good enough grasp on the whole issue to say, "The law is wrong?"
Nothing personal, friend, but I suspect that you might be biting off a bit more than you can chew on this one.
a tiny home-computer maker with about 5% of the market hardly constitutes the "most influential computer company in the world".
Remember the fruity-colored iMacs? How soon after they were released did you start seeing all sorts of products made out of brightly colored translucent plastic? Apple-- specifically Jonathan Ive and his group-- influence far more than the computer market.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
And here I was thinking that it's the job of the courts to decide what's lawful and what not.
Man, you need to do some remedial reading on how the US government works. The legislature decides what is and what is not lawful. They have, for example, decided that trademark infringement is against the law. The court, at the first level anyway, is only concerned with the facts of a case. The court will decide if what a person does is (again, for example) trademark infringement. The court will not express an opinion as to whether or not trademark infringement is against the law.
To sum up: the legislature decides what the laws are, and the court decides whether a law has been broken based on the facts of the case. Okay?
Verio did not have much of a choice in this matter.
Of course not. What these guys were doing was clearly against Verio's AUP. Verio should not have had any choice in the matter. If they had, it would have made the whole AUP meaningless.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
You state that it's libel because they quote someone as saying something that they did not actually say, even though the words they are putting in his mouth are true. However, I go over to "The Onion" and take a look at the articles there, and right away I come across a story about Bill Clinton which quotes him saying a number of silly things that he clearly never said.
You've got to consider the intent. Letterman makes up stuff for his monologue every night, but he doesn't intent to inflict harm with it. These guys obviously intended to defame the character of Dow Chemical (such as it is) and to inflict harm on them. You have to take that into consideration.
Basically, what these guys did was not parody. What they did was intended to cause harm, so it was defamation.
I saw these huge HDTV's at the store being showcased...
For reasons that escape me, most retailers don't actually show HD programs on their HD floor models. If you go to someplace like a Best Buy and compare the SD sets to the HD sets, you'll be very much unimpressed... because they're running the same DVD-quality demo loop on both sets.
The best way to see HD is to find a high-end retailer that caters to people with too much money and do your browsing there, or to find a friend with an HDTV and park yourself on his couch during prime time, or on a weekend when CBS is showing an SEC game.
How can they get away with blabbing about great picture, then trying to sell their product on distorting said picture?
Yeah. Horizontal stretch (or vertical squeeze, if you're stuck with a 4:3 set) is only useful for DVD's and watching Fox Digital. You should never, ever use it just to "fill the screen."
Screw "720p." I'll take one of these and get my HDTV fix in 1280x1024.
Bwah-ha-ha-ha! Dude, 720p and 1280x1024 are equivalent resolutions! Programs recorded in 720p have a resolution of 1280x720 (1.778:1 aspect ratio), at 60 frames per second progressive-scanned. Once you fit that picture inside a 4:3 aspect ratio screen, you end up with a 1280x1024 raster size running at 60 Hz.
Of course, the box you linked to will actually down-sample 1080i broadcasts to 720p for display on a computer monitor. But hey, what's a little resolution between friends?
Why can't these home theater techie-wannabes just learn how pixel resolutions work?
Why can't these computer geeks learn how video signaling works? You want a cheat sheet? Here are the common ATSC formats expressed as raster sizes just for you.
Because DirecTV is so difficult to receive and often so expensive to have installed...
I think you have a problem with your brain being missing.
Anybody in North America can get DirecTV, as long as you can see the southern sky. And retailers like Good Guys and Circuit City give away the equipment when you sign a 12-month contract. I got my receiver (a cheap SD-only model from RCA), my dish, and the installation for free.
Go find yourself a sports bar with an HDTV setup, or a friend with an HDTV. Watch the SuperBowl on ABC in stunning 720p. Come back and ask the question again.
I bought my HDTV in June, and I can't imagine being happier with it. Everybody who sees it says, "I want one." The only obstacle right now is price, and it's not a big obstacle. If you're in the market for a 19" TV for the kid's room, HD is not for you. But if you can afford a $1,500-$2,500 for a nice living room TV, HD is an option. And the prices just keep dropping.
Even if I never buy anything, I like looking at the latest whiz-bang wild-ass thing Apple's done, because even when they miss, it's at least because they're trying something new.
And when they hit, you're going to see the same basic ideas in cheap Chinese-made PC hardware four to six months later.
All you trolls (you know who you are) can bitch all you want about Apple, but even you have to admit that they are far and away the most influential computer company in the world.
They're not here to make their customers happy, they're here to make money.
Actually, because Apple sells a relatively expensive niche product against the prevailing direction of the market, the only way for them to continue to make money is by making their customers happy.
Slashdot Mirror
The Two Towers film did not improve upon the book. Faramir is spinning in his grave.
Uh... you are aware, right, that Lord of the Rings is not actually a history? Just to be clear: fictional character, never existed, not in grave. Okay?
Soviet Russia refers to the old USSR, the great bastion of communism in the world prior to it's collapse *gags* 10ish years ago
Let's not forget an important date in world history. The USSR ceased to exist as a political entity on Christmas Day, 1991.
However, in a civilized country, only a court can decide whether or not a specific event was against the law or not.
Not exactly. In order to be valid, a law has to be specific. The law says which acts are prohibited. The purpose of a criminal trial is to determine facts: whether an event transpired as the prosecution alleges, or as the defense alleges.
For example, let's say somebody ends up dead. Depending on the circumstances, the person responsible for the killing may or may not be a criminal. If the killer acted in self-defense, for example, then no crime was committed. For the different classes of criminal homicide, the law defines various criteria. If the killer did this, then the crime is first-degree murder. If the killer did that, then the crime is first-degree manslaughter. If the killer did the other thing, then the crime is criminally negligent homicide. And so on.
The purpose of the trial will be to ascertain the facts of the case. The prosecution will say (for example) that the defendant killed the victim because he was sleeping with the defendant's wife. The defense will say that he defendant killed the victim in self defense because the defendant thought the victim was an intruder. (Or maybe they'll say that the defendant didn't do it at all. Whatever.)
The jury, in the case of a jury trial, is responsible for deciding the facts. Did the defendant kill the victim or not? If so, did he intend to kill the victim? If so, did he plan the crime in advance? And so on.
So the courts do not decide if a specific event was against the law; the law decides that in advance. The courts merely decide what happened, and apply the law accordingly.
The AUP are something that Verio has written and that Verio can choose to enforce or not.
Then what's the point of having an AUP? You can't choose whether or not to enforce a policy; that's arbitrary and unfair to your customers. You have to enforce a policy uniformly. Thing.net was violating Verio's AUP. Dow informed Verio of that, and so Verio had to pull the plug. Not because of the DMCA. Because of their own policy.
Trying to make this about the DMCA is really stretching it. The complaint cited the DMCA, which simply says that ISP's can be liable in copyright infringement instances if they receive notice of an infringement and do not act on it. But the complaint also cited the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Lanham Act. This isn't a DMCA case any more than it's a Lanham Act case.
The important point is that Thing.net was violating Verio's AUP. Verio had no choice at all, and they did the right thing.
Actually, SDTV doesn't use pixels at all.
Ever since it went digital back in the late 80's, it has. (See SMPTE 259M.) Almost all SDTV is either shot on digital videotape or telecined to digital videotape, at which point it's represented as an array of pixels. For analog TV, the digital signal is converted to an analog signal at the transmitter. For digital TV, the SMPTE 259M or 292M (SD or HD) signal goes straight into an MPEG encoder, and the encoded bitstream goes to the transmitter. Either way, TV is pixel-based now.
Well on that basis...
Huh? You didn't just jump to that conclusion, dude. You called a cab, drove to the airport, stood in line for an hour, bought a ticket, and flew halfway around the world to that conclusion.
The idea of a right is that it is something outside the scope of that which the government or a law can interfere with.
The idea of a right is that it is something everybody agrees is outside the scope of what the government can interfere with.
Let me make this more clear. Let's say I were to make the statement that I believe I have a right to a free lunch one day per week. I'm being deliberately silly to make my point: I have a right to one free lunch per week.
The only reasonable response to that assertion is, "No, you don't." Just because I say I have a right doesn't mean that I do have that right. If everybody disagrees with me, then I have neither the right to a free lunch, nor the free lunch itself.
The right to bear arms is another great example. There are two reasons that we Americans have that right. One, because it's written down in our founding document. And two, because we all agree that we have it. It's not an inherent right; it's arbitrary.
Free speech is exactly the same. It's not a natural right. A person can be deprived of the right to speak freely with great ease. But we Americans all agree that a person should have the right to speak freely, and we act accordingly, so for all practical purposes we do have that right.
It makes me laugh when I hear 'Americans' say that non-citizens in this country shouldn't or don't have rights. The fact is when they state this they accept the notion that their rights are privileges granted by government. They are most emphatically not.
Where do they come from, then? The rights you're referring to, where do they come from? Are they inherent? As I said, a person can be deprived of his rights very easily, so it's fair to say that they're not inherent. Are they granted by God? Well, some people think so, but not everyone agrees on that point, and even if everyone did it would be impossible to prove it. So it all boils down to the same thing: people only enjoy rights because other people agree that they should.
unless, of course, you're running Linux and then you also have to have...
I think my point up there was that people who run Linux on their desktop computers are just looking for trouble, and shouldn't be surprised when they find it.
Both you and that AC over there need to take notice of the fact that TV has never, ever used square pixels. Plain old ordinary SDTV uses a 704x486 raster in a 4:3 aspect ratio. How? Easy: the pixels aren't even close to square.
The 480p format, which is also 704x486, can even be displayed as a 1.78:1 image; Fox broadcasts this format.
Me? I want to know where they came up with the name "B'fusalek". :-)
Isn't it obvious? It's an anagram of "sake flub." The writers were having a story meeting at a Japanese restaurant and... well, the rest is history.
Sorry, guys, I mean no offense to anybody, but I had to quit watching when the blue dude said, "Commodore Jennings is on line one." ::shudder::
And btw mplayer can play these if you have compiled it right and have the proper codecs.
;-)
On the other hand, QuickTime Player plays these without having to be compiled, and it comes with all the proper codecs.
That said, it doesn't really matter how much i know about incorporating to decide that a law stating corporations have rights is an invalid law.
Actually, I disagree. I would say that an in-depth understanding of corporate law is vital to making an informed judgment about whether the law is appropriate or not.
Human beings have rights. Thats it.
Oh, boy. Refer to this post to read my response to this.
That describes every society. Therefore, every society is a free society, including the former USSR, China, and Iran. Because there too you're allowed to do what you want without violating the law.
You've never visited those places, huh? In some countries you can be arrested and imprisoned for absolutely no reason at all. You can be arrested and imprisoned because somebody thinks you should be. You can be arrested and imprisoned for personally offending a bureaucrat. What you are free to do has absolutely nothing to do with the law.
What I said most certainly does not describe every society. In fact, you should consider yourself outstandingly lucky to live-- as a presume that you do-- in a country where everybody generally accepts the authority of the law, but also respects the strict limits placed on the law by the system of government.
Read the philosophy of Jefferson, Locke and Keyes, since this is the philosophy that our nation is founded on. Its pretty clear what a right is.
Philosophy is nothing but opinions, statements describing how one person thinks things oughta be. In the USA, certain fundamental assumptions are universally accepted. We call these "rights." Don't be confused, though, into thinking that what we call "rights" are in any way related to the natural world. They're purely a human invention, and an arbitrary one at that.
When some says "i have the right to do whatever i want to my body", it means exactly that. That person is free to do anything to his or her body, and any law to the contrary is invalid.
Ah, a libertarian. Well, friend, I hate to be the one to tell you that most of the human race does not agree with the statement in question. Since it's not universally accepted, it can't be a "right" of the first type. And the statement is not enacted as a law in any jurisdiction, so it also isn't a "right" of the second type. So it must be a "right" of the third type. In other words, when you say, "I have a right to this thing," what you really mean is, "I wish everybody would agree that I have a right to this thing, or at least that Congress would pass a law protecting this thing." Your statement of opinion therefore has no impact whatsoever, unfortunately, on whether a law abridging your "right" is a valid or just one.
Actually, it is.
So let me get this straight. You don't know enough about corporate law to recognize it when you hear it, and yet you understand all the pros and cons of incorporation, and have a good enough grasp on the whole issue to say, "The law is wrong?"
Nothing personal, friend, but I suspect that you might be biting off a bit more than you can chew on this one.
a tiny home-computer maker with about 5% of the market hardly constitutes the "most influential computer company in the world".
Remember the fruity-colored iMacs? How soon after they were released did you start seeing all sorts of products made out of brightly colored translucent plastic? Apple-- specifically Jonathan Ive and his group-- influence far more than the computer market.
And here I was thinking that it's the job of the courts to decide what's lawful and what not.
Man, you need to do some remedial reading on how the US government works. The legislature decides what is and what is not lawful. They have, for example, decided that trademark infringement is against the law. The court, at the first level anyway, is only concerned with the facts of a case. The court will decide if what a person does is (again, for example) trademark infringement. The court will not express an opinion as to whether or not trademark infringement is against the law.
To sum up: the legislature decides what the laws are, and the court decides whether a law has been broken based on the facts of the case. Okay?
Verio did not have much of a choice in this matter.
Of course not. What these guys were doing was clearly against Verio's AUP. Verio should not have had any choice in the matter. If they had, it would have made the whole AUP meaningless.
You state that it's libel because they quote someone as saying something that they did not actually say, even though the words they are putting in his mouth are true. However, I go over to "The Onion" and take a look at the articles there, and right away I come across a story about Bill Clinton which quotes him saying a number of silly things that he clearly never said.
You've got to consider the intent. Letterman makes up stuff for his monologue every night, but he doesn't intent to inflict harm with it. These guys obviously intended to defame the character of Dow Chemical (such as it is) and to inflict harm on them. You have to take that into consideration.
Basically, what these guys did was not parody. What they did was intended to cause harm, so it was defamation.
I saw these huge HDTV's at the store being showcased...
For reasons that escape me, most retailers don't actually show HD programs on their HD floor models. If you go to someplace like a Best Buy and compare the SD sets to the HD sets, you'll be very much unimpressed... because they're running the same DVD-quality demo loop on both sets.
The best way to see HD is to find a high-end retailer that caters to people with too much money and do your browsing there, or to find a friend with an HDTV and park yourself on his couch during prime time, or on a weekend when CBS is showing an SEC game.
How can they get away with blabbing about great picture, then trying to sell their product on distorting said picture?
Yeah. Horizontal stretch (or vertical squeeze, if you're stuck with a 4:3 set) is only useful for DVD's and watching Fox Digital. You should never, ever use it just to "fill the screen."
D) "former dot-com success story, recently humbled"
Bwah-ha-ha-ha! Dude, 720p and 1280x1024 are equivalent resolutions! Programs recorded in 720p have a resolution of 1280x720 (1.778:1 aspect ratio), at 60 frames per second progressive-scanned. Once you fit that picture inside a 4:3 aspect ratio screen, you end up with a 1280x1024 raster size running at 60 Hz.
Of course, the box you linked to will actually down-sample 1080i broadcasts to 720p for display on a computer monitor. But hey, what's a little resolution between friends?
Why can't these home theater techie-wannabes just learn how pixel resolutions work?
Why can't these computer geeks learn how video signaling works? You want a cheat sheet? Here are the common ATSC formats expressed as raster sizes just for you.
Greenhouse-gas-absorbing trees are my problem, as it is for millions who wish they could get NFL Sunday Ticket.
Dude, my dish points straight through a stand of oak trees. You appear to be full of crap.
Because DirecTV is so difficult to receive and often so expensive to have installed...
I think you have a problem with your brain being missing.
Anybody in North America can get DirecTV, as long as you can see the southern sky. And retailers like Good Guys and Circuit City give away the equipment when you sign a 12-month contract. I got my receiver (a cheap SD-only model from RCA), my dish, and the installation for free.
Go find yourself a sports bar with an HDTV setup, or a friend with an HDTV. Watch the SuperBowl on ABC in stunning 720p. Come back and ask the question again.
I bought my HDTV in June, and I can't imagine being happier with it. Everybody who sees it says, "I want one." The only obstacle right now is price, and it's not a big obstacle. If you're in the market for a 19" TV for the kid's room, HD is not for you. But if you can afford a $1,500-$2,500 for a nice living room TV, HD is an option. And the prices just keep dropping.
I stand corrected. Oops.
Even if I never buy anything, I like looking at the latest whiz-bang wild-ass thing Apple's done, because even when they miss, it's at least because they're trying something new.
And when they hit, you're going to see the same basic ideas in cheap Chinese-made PC hardware four to six months later.
All you trolls (you know who you are) can bitch all you want about Apple, but even you have to admit that they are far and away the most influential computer company in the world.
They're not here to make their customers happy, they're here to make money.
Actually, because Apple sells a relatively expensive niche product against the prevailing direction of the market, the only way for them to continue to make money is by making their customers happy.
The two kinda go hand-in-hand, you see.