Strictly speaking, Neil Innes' songs weren't parodies in the same sense Weird Al's songs are. They belong more in the realm of "style parodies" where you parody an artist's style but not their actual work. Examples from Al's catalog are "Mr. Popeil" (B-52s), "Dog Eat Dog" (Talking Heads) and "Dare To Be Stupid" (Devo). Without having seen the lawsuit (but having seen The Rutles), I would say on some of the songs Innes got a bit closer to the original material than he should have.
MAD Magazine won a lawsuit in the 60s where the right to publish parody lyrics to songs without permission from the copyright holder was established. I don't have the title of the suit, but it was discussed in Frank Jacobs' book, "The Mad World Of William M. Gaines." I don't know how that suit relates to the music, however, since MAD never published the music -- only the words and the instructions, "Sung to the tune of:".
Actually we have two copies, one on my wife's Windows machine with all the expansions and one on my Linux box that's just the base game ported by Loki. She'll play either one depending on which machine is currently not being used, but I think she likes the Windows version better because it has the sprites and other creatures she likes. I will admit to not having personally played the Windows version yet -- if she's not playing it at any given point the odds are good that my wife, son or daughter is.:)
I can't remember what the creatures that look like sprites with butterfly wings are called. She just calls them "butterfly girls," and the water elementals are "water girls." As for the effect of combining different town creatures on morale, I don't know what it does for the armies, but I know she gets cranky when she doesn't get to put the stuff she likes into her armies.:)
In addition to everything else you did, you made a four-year-old happy. My granddaughter discovered your port of Heroes of Might and Magic III on my computer and promptly learned how to move the characters around. She now begs to play "the horsie game" when she comes over on weekends.
Of course she has no concept of the strategy or even of the point of the game, but she likes creating armies full of sprites, water elementals and unicorns.
Well, I for one bought their games. About a half dozen of them in all -- even Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, even though pysol is much, much better.
However as I saw it there were two big problems:
1. I'm not a fan of first-person shooters so I didn't buy any of them. I would have loved to seen more games like Railroad Tycoon II and Alpha Centauri.
2. I bought several of the games at a local Electronics Buotique, where they were selling for $5-10 a pop. I like a bargain as much as anyone else but the low price told me that either Loki wasn't charging enough for the games (doubtful), or EB wasn't selling the games and was closing them out. No matter how good Loki was, I don't think they were ever going to make it without retailer support.
What's the best way to determine whether there's a random number or nonsense string at the end? I can see sending a string of characters through ispell, but numbers would seem to be another matter.
I have pretty good success with looking for nine or more continuous spaces, by the way.
I did, just to see what happened, and found out that instead of my previous 24.x.x.x address, I now had a 12.x.x.x address, and everything worked quite well, and the nameservers are responding as expected. Now that I know my new address, which has nothing to do with my old address, I could probably use it as a static address. I've already let Public DNS know of my new IP address; hopefully I won't have to change it anytime soon.
Before that I was able to ping some machines but not others, just as you described, from my location here in Seattle.
Unfortunately I don't know if there's any way to determine your new address without using DHCP. I doubt it, since indications from AT&T are that they aren't supporting static addresses.
This only works if you can ping servers by number, of course, which I can't on AT&T's Seattle network. Right now I'm snoozing along on dialup. Someone wake me up when we're connected again.
Currently DNS is unresponsive on the AT&T/@home network in the Seattle area. I can ping my gateway, and I can ping the name server from a shell account in Texas, but there appears to be no path between the gateway and the name server.
AT&T customer service is unresponsive as well. I can't get to either their phone line or help.broadband.att.com, but given the circumstances that's pretty much to be expected, I suppose.
The last time I was in a Disney Store I noticed that they sell gift cards, accepted only at Disney Stores, that you can load with any amount up to $500. (These are similar to the ones most major chains sell these days, from B. Dalton to Target.) I forgot to ask whether they were accepted at the parks, but it wouldn't surprise me, since in some ways Disneyland is the world's biggest Disney Store.
It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to adapt the cards to the technology. In fact it would make some things easier -- include a card on the back of each Annual Pass, for instance, and the passholder would automatically get their 10% discount on park purchases, plus they'd be more likely to store money on the card (which of course could only be used to buy stuff from Disney).
As good as Disney is at extracting money from patrons, this seems like a natural for them.
if you can find it, is "A Stress Analysis Of A Strapless Evening Gown," edited by Robert A. Baker. It consisted primarily of articles from the Journal of Irreproducible Results and The Worm-Runners Digest, along with verse including some excerpts from "The Space Child's Mother Goose" (including "Three Jolly Sailors") and a poem about the neutrino from John Updike. Subjects of the essays, as I remember, include the title (interesting reading for a ten-year-old male back in the sixties), linguistic reform, logic, psychoanalyzing various of the rockets used in the early space program, and simulating the behavior of a randomly-designed computer by immersing a caged cat into a tank of water ("it exhibited an initial period of apparently random activity, but eventually settled into a quiescent state").
It's out of print but your local library may still have a copy, or you can track it down from a used bookseller.
Let's say you claimed to be Steve Wozniak. There are questions I could ask you -- about the design of the Apple II, about the members of the Homebrew Computer Club, about the Bay Area of the mid-70s -- that in and of themselves would not establish whether or not you really were The Woz, but could rule you out. For instance, if I created a ficticious member of the HCC and started asking you about him, if you went on about this guy's eccentricities you would obviously be a poser.
Answer enough of these questions and you might not establish yourself to be Woz, but if you don't rule yourself out and show consistency both with your story and with the world as we know it, you COULD be Woz.
In this particular story there is another, unique dimension to it -- the chess play. If you study the styles of the past masters enough, you might be able to look at a game and get a good idea of which players might have played it. For instance, it's been many years but I believe Fischer was partial to the Sicilian Defense. If Short's opponent used the Sicilian, and in particular lines that Fischer was known to favor, that would be yet another indication that he was indeed playing Bobby Fischer.
The only credible alternative explanation I can come up with at the moment is that Short was playing a grandmaster-level player intimately familiar with Fischer's style -- someone perhaps like Larry Evans, who helped Fischer analyze positions during breaks in play. Few people would be able to pull something like that off, though.
"Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man. Take away a million dollars from a rich man, he will make another million dollars. "
What a nasty unpleasant and largely untrue saying that is.
And what an unthinking reaction that is. One only has to look at the large number of lottery winners who end up deeply in debt after the money is gone, and the large number of entrepreneurs who bounce back after losing everything, to know that the saying is, in fact, quite true. Whether it's unpleasant and nasty might depend on whether you're a poor man who thinks getting a million dollars is going to make him rich. --
If war hits Slashdot should just continue to function normally. Sometimes in war it's convenient to spread mis- and dis-information to the enemy, something Slashdot has proven itself good at.
That, and get Jon Katz to write a few essays to bore the enemy into submission. --
Well, given a choice between reading about a hotshot young kid who invented, and then proved, a theorem on his own that was interesting enough to put him up there with the Big Boys of Math(tm), or yet another high school student with an assault rifle and a terminally bad attitude, which would you prefer? --
I have bought boxed copies of distributions for two main reasons:
1. To get printed copies of the manuals.
2. Because I realize that these companies are providing a valuable service, and the service is more likely to continue if I throw a few bucks their way.
I've also bought the cheap-o versions from Linux Central for updates and for distros I want to try out but don't want to tie up the money in yet, and the like. Besides, if I'm buying versions to give away to friends it's easier for me to buy them as Linux Central CDs than it is to burn my own. And, finally, this throws a few bucks Linux Central's way in return for them providing a useful service.
(Other outfits like Cheapbytes and Linux Mall provide similar services, by the way. Linux Central just happens to be the one I use.) --
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking, Neil Innes' songs weren't parodies in the same sense Weird Al's songs are. They belong more in the realm of "style parodies" where you parody an artist's style but not their actual work. Examples from Al's catalog are "Mr. Popeil" (B-52s), "Dog Eat Dog" (Talking Heads) and "Dare To Be Stupid" (Devo). Without having seen the lawsuit (but having seen The Rutles), I would say on some of the songs Innes got a bit closer to the original material than he should have.
MAD Magazine won a lawsuit in the 60s where the right to publish parody lyrics to songs without permission from the copyright holder was established. I don't have the title of the suit, but it was discussed in Frank Jacobs' book, "The Mad World Of William M. Gaines." I don't know how that suit relates to the music, however, since MAD never published the music -- only the words and the instructions, "Sung to the tune of:".
Actually we have two copies, one on my wife's Windows machine with all the expansions and one on my Linux box that's just the base game ported by Loki. She'll play either one depending on which machine is currently not being used, but I think she likes the Windows version better because it has the sprites and other creatures she likes. I will admit to not having personally played the Windows version yet -- if she's not playing it at any given point the odds are good that my wife, son or daughter is. :)
Reminds me of the theater owner in Seoul who thought "The Sound Of Music" ran too long, so he shortened it by cutting all the songs. :)
"Television is called a 'medium' because when it's well done, it's rare." -- Ernie Kovacs (famous television personality)
Also attributed to Fred Allen (famous anti-television personality)
I can't remember what the creatures that look like sprites with butterfly wings are called. She just calls them "butterfly girls," and the water elementals are "water girls." As for the effect of combining different town creatures on morale, I don't know what it does for the armies, but I know she gets cranky when she doesn't get to put the stuff she likes into her armies. :)
In addition to everything else you did, you made a four-year-old happy. My granddaughter discovered your port of Heroes of Might and Magic III on my computer and promptly learned how to move the characters around. She now begs to play "the horsie game" when she comes over on weekends.
Of course she has no concept of the strategy or even of the point of the game, but she likes creating armies full of sprites, water elementals and unicorns.
You could always do worse than pleasing a child.
Well, I for one bought their games. About a half dozen of them in all -- even Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, even though pysol is much, much better.
However as I saw it there were two big problems:
1. I'm not a fan of first-person shooters so I didn't buy any of them. I would have loved to seen more games like Railroad Tycoon II and Alpha Centauri.
2. I bought several of the games at a local Electronics Buotique, where they were selling for $5-10 a pop. I like a bargain as much as anyone else but the low price told me that either Loki wasn't charging enough for the games (doubtful), or EB wasn't selling the games and was closing them out. No matter how good Loki was, I don't think they were ever going to make it without retailer support.
What's the best way to determine whether there's a random number or nonsense string at the end? I can see sending a string of characters through ispell, but numbers would seem to be another matter.
I have pretty good success with looking for nine or more continuous spaces, by the way.
I did, just to see what happened, and found out that instead of my previous 24.x.x.x address, I now had a 12.x.x.x address, and everything worked quite well, and the nameservers are responding as expected. Now that I know my new address, which has nothing to do with my old address, I could probably use it as a static address. I've already let Public DNS know of my new IP address; hopefully I won't have to change it anytime soon.
Before that I was able to ping some machines but not others, just as you described, from my location here in Seattle.
Unfortunately I don't know if there's any way to determine your new address without using DHCP. I doubt it, since indications from AT&T are that they aren't supporting static addresses.
This only works if you can ping servers by number, of course, which I can't on AT&T's Seattle network. Right now I'm snoozing along on dialup. Someone wake me up when we're connected again.
Currently DNS is unresponsive on the AT&T/@home network in the Seattle area. I can ping my gateway, and I can ping the name server from a shell account in Texas, but there appears to be no path between the gateway and the name server.
AT&T customer service is unresponsive as well. I can't get to either their phone line or help.broadband.att.com, but given the circumstances that's pretty much to be expected, I suppose.
Does that mean my @home connection is a zombie process?
The last time I was in a Disney Store I noticed that they sell gift cards, accepted only at Disney Stores, that you can load with any amount up to $500. (These are similar to the ones most major chains sell these days, from B. Dalton to Target.) I forgot to ask whether they were accepted at the parks, but it wouldn't surprise me, since in some ways Disneyland is the world's biggest Disney Store.
It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to adapt the cards to the technology. In fact it would make some things easier -- include a card on the back of each Annual Pass, for instance, and the passholder would automatically get their 10% discount on park purchases, plus they'd be more likely to store money on the card (which of course could only be used to buy stuff from Disney).
As good as Disney is at extracting money from patrons, this seems like a natural for them.
The state has no sales tax, so they've decided to use more innovative ways of financing the government.
(Note to the humor impaired: This is a joke. Please laugh. Thank you.)
if you can find it, is "A Stress Analysis Of A Strapless Evening Gown," edited by Robert A. Baker. It consisted primarily of articles from the Journal of Irreproducible Results and The Worm-Runners Digest, along with verse including some excerpts from "The Space Child's Mother Goose" (including "Three Jolly Sailors") and a poem about the neutrino from John Updike. Subjects of the essays, as I remember, include the title (interesting reading for a ten-year-old male back in the sixties), linguistic reform, logic, psychoanalyzing various of the rockets used in the early space program, and simulating the behavior of a randomly-designed computer by immersing a caged cat into a tank of water ("it exhibited an initial period of apparently random activity, but eventually settled into a quiescent state").
It's out of print but your local library may still have a copy, or you can track it down from a used bookseller.
I'm doing web development . . . she thinks I'm still a Crip.
Whoever wrote this program, please step forward. You're a genius. The program has passed the Turing test with flying colors.
Let's say you claimed to be Steve Wozniak. There are questions I could ask you -- about the design of the Apple II, about the members of the Homebrew Computer Club, about the Bay Area of the mid-70s -- that in and of themselves would not establish whether or not you really were The Woz, but could rule you out. For instance, if I created a ficticious member of the HCC and started asking you about him, if you went on about this guy's eccentricities you would obviously be a poser.
Answer enough of these questions and you might not establish yourself to be Woz, but if you don't rule yourself out and show consistency both with your story and with the world as we know it, you COULD be Woz.
In this particular story there is another, unique dimension to it -- the chess play. If you study the styles of the past masters enough, you might be able to look at a game and get a good idea of which players might have played it. For instance, it's been many years but I believe Fischer was partial to the Sicilian Defense. If Short's opponent used the Sicilian, and in particular lines that Fischer was known to favor, that would be yet another indication that he was indeed playing Bobby Fischer.
The only credible alternative explanation I can come up with at the moment is that Short was playing a grandmaster-level player intimately familiar with Fischer's style -- someone perhaps like Larry Evans, who helped Fischer analyze positions during breaks in play. Few people would be able to pull something like that off, though.
They forgot to apologize for the biggest time wasting unintended consequence of all -- Slashdot.
--
"Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man. Take away a million dollars from a rich man, he will make another million dollars. "
What a nasty unpleasant and largely untrue saying that is.
And what an unthinking reaction that is. One only has to look at the large number of lottery winners who end up deeply in debt after the money is gone, and the large number of entrepreneurs who bounce back after losing everything, to know that the saying is, in fact, quite true. Whether it's unpleasant and nasty might depend on whether you're a poor man who thinks getting a million dollars is going to make him rich.
--
I can't believe how many people fell for this April Fool's joke.
So. You're new here, are you?
--
If war hits Slashdot should just continue to function normally. Sometimes in war it's convenient to spread mis- and dis-information to the enemy, something Slashdot has proven itself good at.
That, and get Jon Katz to write a few essays to bore the enemy into submission.
--
Well, given a choice between reading about a hotshot young kid who invented, and then proved, a theorem on his own that was interesting enough to put him up there with the Big Boys of Math(tm), or yet another high school student with an assault rifle and a terminally bad attitude, which would you prefer?
--
and send it to random friends all over the country, none of whom use encryption.
They have no idea what's in it, but more importantly, neither does the NSA!
--
Well, me for one.
I have bought boxed copies of distributions for two main reasons:
1. To get printed copies of the manuals.
2. Because I realize that these companies are providing a valuable service, and the service is more likely to continue if I throw a few bucks their way.
I've also bought the cheap-o versions from Linux Central for updates and for distros I want to try out but don't want to tie up the money in yet, and the like. Besides, if I'm buying versions to give away to friends it's easier for me to buy them as Linux Central CDs than it is to burn my own. And, finally, this throws a few bucks Linux Central's way in return for them providing a useful service.
(Other outfits like Cheapbytes and Linux Mall provide similar services, by the way. Linux Central just happens to be the one I use.)
--