Dunno about other humans, but for me it would be mostly about the "without a plane around me" part, when I have to travel long distance. Airlines suck, frankly.
I remember the last time I was in an aircraft, with some leg space that was too small even for a 5 ft tall woman who was with us, listening to a screaming kid, and peering down into some airliner joke food that was at most good for a goat, I remembered the famous Da Vinci quote, "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return." I thought, you can tell the fucker never tasted _this_ kind of flight:p
If a jetpack could get me from here to there without that hassle, I'm all for it.
Heck, I'd even fork over the money for a zeppelin flight, if they can have some more humane accommodations.
It doesn't matter. The "problem" starts not when you agree with their choices and ideology, but basically when they stop being a faceless mass of rampaging monsters.
Basically empathy is enough. It's the main problem, even. That's why everyone historically went to great extremes to dehumanize their enemies. Because as long as you feel empathy, it also feels wrong to go kill a few. We're hard-wired that way. (See, mirror neurons.) But when they become something that's hardly even human, and certainly not like us, suddenly bombing a few villages starts to sound actually ok.
You don't even have to _like_ someone for empathy to kick in. E.g., I remember all the guys wincing instinctively when I showed them a pic of some football player getting a mighty kick in the crotch. None of them knew or had any reason to like that player. Recognizing him as a human is enough to get those mirror neurons firing.
Plus, if you had the plebs actually comprehend the opponents' motives, that would in itself be a problem. Because then they'd also know that the bullshit propaganda about their motives is a lie. It's harder to motivate someone to bomb country X if they know that the motives of X are something like "they just want their land back" or "they're pissed off at our continuous heavy-handed bullying them around" than when you can sell them some bullshit like "they hate us for our freedoms".
The contracts don't work that way, but even if I'm to get philosophical, then I'm still not sure what your point is.
1. Essentially what you describe is equivalent with offering them a temporary license for up to a year instead of going to court now. Another year of using a trademark of one of the biggest franchises, that's a pretty substantial in my book. If that's nothing in your view, hell, I wish Lucas would offer me a nothing like that.
2. Essentially the ones who offered nothing in that contract was Jedi Mind. They offered to eventually stop something they had no right to do in the first place, and which Lucas could demand to stop immediately without giving them anything in return.
Essentially it seems to me like you expect some kind of "I'll stop cutting your tyres in exchange for..." or "I'll stop dropping bags of flaming shit at your door in exchange for...", because that's really equivalent to what Jedi Mind's side of the contract was. They just agreed to stop doing something not just wrong, but basically illegal. And that you'd expect something of value after that "in exchange for" in those. Doesn't it sound like a protection racket in that form?
My point was that when juggernaut legal departments drag you into court it's often the case that what the law actually says isn't going to matter one iota, but that everything will depend on what it will take to stop them from grinding you down into submission.
And that matters... why? I'd see a point in that if there was indeed a frivolous exercise in who has the most money. But when that juggernaut legal department is actually in the right, and applying the law as it was intended all along, and the little guy opposing them is in the wrong and had acted in bad faith, then why does it matter that they're a juggernaut legal department? If you're right, you're right, and that's that. Being right and rich doesn't make one less right.
Exactly what is the fear factor here? That, god forbid, someone might do that "grinding into submission" to defend a legal right as they had it, and were using as intended?
I agree with your post but FYI - he did not invent 'jedi'. He transliterated the Japanese 'jidaigeki' - a genre of films like Hidden fortress on which Star Wars is based.
Nevertheless, my point stands that the word as it is spelled by Lucas is not a common word that you can just use without intending to piggyback on Lucas's mind-share. If he sued a company called "Jidaigeki Mind", I'd concede the point, but "Jedi Mind" is another thing.
How did they alter anything? I'm pretty sure the same basic trademark law was in effect all the way back to Episode 4.
And it's no different from any other trademark. Just as you don't just use Apple's trademarks to sell, say, "iPod tyres" (pun on the iPod wheel, see?), or Nintendo's to sell a "Wii exercise machine" (that actually doesn't connect to a Wii), or Kraft Foods' trademark to sell something like "Cadbury chocolate flavoured condoms", or IBM's to sell something like "PowerPC dildo deluxe", you don't get to use Lucas's trademark to sell your gimmick input controller either. It's that simple.
And Lucas even invented the word. It's not as if I trademarked Pencil and started suing pencil makers. There is pretty much no way to accidentally name your product Jedi, you know, totally without trying to piggyback on Lucas's mindshare.
Honestly, it looks to me like textbook application of trademark law, as it was intended to work all along. You know, since the Trade Mark Registration Act of 1875 in the UK. Unless you want to tell me that Lucas invented a time machine to alter _that_ one, I seriously don't see how they altered any situation.
Yes, well, various ideas of things that can suck your soul out are a whole other dish. (You have to look no further than modern western world for a few people who think that cats will suck the breath out of a baby.) But you have to put it in context of what I was answering to. Basically that Vampires are X, Y, and Z, and the guy from Twilight isn't a vampire because he sparkles. It was already basically a proclamation that only essentially the archetype from Dracula counts as a real vampire. Honestly, the half ghost, half air elemental Edimmu wouldn't have fit that any better. Or conversely if we include anything that could get some kind of energy out of you as Vampires, then basically the GGPs objection that the Twilight guy is a faerie because "Fairies are youthful, amoral (note the difference), sparkly, supernatural beings who turn children away from their families and gain strength from human emotions." becomes moot as then Faeries become a kind of Vampire:p
Actually, here's a fun bit: after WW2 Japan apparently decided they renounce war and they'll never again have an Army.
By now someone will probably want to intervene, "wait, you dumbass, what about the Japanese Self-Defense Forces?" Yeah, that's actually the fun part. Those evolved as an departments of the police, rather than as an army.
So, yeah, don't mess with the Japanese police. It's the only police force with aircraft carriers, submarines, tanks, and fighter-bomber planes:p
If a horde of zombies decides to mess with the Japanese police, they might have a nasty surprise:p
Some of the Eastern European myths (that Stoker was drew inspiration from) include such things as the Zburator, which basically means "the flying one" or "the one who flies". Oh, and he was into underage unmarried girls, like the Twilight guy too. I'm not aware of any particular consensus of how those flew, so I'd imagine angelic wings wouldn't be out of the question.
Or undead which could take pretty much every imaginable shape. The owl for example gave the name of Strigoi, though aparently they could shape-shift into everything else, from wolf to puppy or kitten. Or magical guys which could transform into dragons.
Rainows? You're aiming low. The Scholomance is an actual myth that's mentioned right in Dracula, and apparently Dracula himself graduated it. It was a mythical school where the Devil himself taught magic, including weather magic. As in: including how to summon the most devastating storms known to man. Rainbows? Heh. Those probably got rainbows as their junior year assignment.
Oh, and they got a dragon as an epic mount too. How pimp is that?:p
But anyway, technically Dracula had graduated that magic college, so rainbows probably wouldn't be out of the question as it is.
More seriously, I still don't see the problem I was answering to. The OP was pretending there's some clearly defined Vampire myth, and some clearly defined Faerie myth, and you could say that some movie was clearly one or clearly the other.
And all I'm saying is that it's just not so. The Vampire mythology as we have it, is a very modern invention, and not something any given population ever believed in. They're just whatever some novelist wanted them to be.
Whether it's Dracula or Twilight, it's drawing from the same pool of eastern european superstition anyway. If anything, Twilight is probably actually closer (though not identical) to something that people actually believed in, albeit that would be an incubus rather than undead.
Sure, some authors were more talented than others, and some chose better stuff, some chose crap. Isn't that the case in all genres? But that's IMHO more of a question of just that: talent and brains of the author. Rather than just being a matter of conforming to some exact definition of which beastie does what.
Actually, while humanity had a ton of imagination when it comes to fearing death, nothing even came close to the modern idea of vampire.
What Europe believed in is better described as "revenants", or what we nowadays think of as "zombies." They weren't supposed to be some clever and scheming count, but mindless bloated corpses of some peasants.
Oh, and generally they'd transmit disease generally by just being there not by bit. Remember it was an era where even an educated medicus knew that diseases are transmitted by smells (no, really, the miasma theory of disease) and everyone else knew that corpses cause disease. A corpse walking around was a health hazard by itself.
And just to drive the "zombie" aspect home, most of these were supposed to be literally brain dead. E.g., the ones from an outbreak in Venice could be prevented from biting anything ever again by just shoving a brick in the corpse's mouth. Your average Dracula or White Wolf kinda vampire would be sentient enough to basically go "oh, i have a brick in my mouth" and spit it out. Heck, even the dumbest animal would. But the version those people believed in would be forever thwarted by that brick because they weren't even able to figure that out.
Other forms of thwarting an undead included the equivalent of the frat prank of tying someone's shoelaces together, except it was more like tying the ends a piece of string to the big toe on each foot. Yep, that would thwart them.
Even when myths gave them a couple of neurons still working, then they'd be riddled with a crippling OCD, so they'd irresistably stop and count the grains in a pile of rice or whatever.
Basically they're not quite the smart and scheming baron kind, nor the kind who'd blend in and maintain a Masquerade. They were mindless rotting corpses.
The modern idea of a Vampire was pretty much used invented by Polidori in "The Vampyre", sort of reused in "Carmilla" (where it got some sexual part added too), but only really became mass known via "Dracula". It's really not about any single "ancient" myth, but a mix of several of those. Including a lot of the witchcraft beliefs, incubus beliefs, and various assorted other bits and ends. And yes, some stuff taken from fairies too.
Basically what Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker did there was already inventing a new kind of vampire and romanticizing it to appeal to their target audience. That was it, really. And each of them felt free to add a few personal touches and mix some even more unrelated mythical monsters to the definition of a Vampire, to make it even more mass-appeal. Which is basically why you've heard of Dracula over and over again, but most people never even heard of Carmilla or The Vampyre.
Complaining that someone else did the same thing is a bit silly. Yes, Twilight included some stuff from an unrelated mythical beastie. What, unlike Stoker, Anne Rice, White Wolf and everyone else... who added bits from unrelated mythical beasties too?
Oh, drug policy is the proverbial low hanging fruit there. I only mentioned IT and CS because we're on Slashdot, but, yeah, if we're doing a top of domains where it happens the most, I'll have to admit that drug-related politics would be way up there.
Basically. Though you need to put some number or hyperbole comparison on it, and make it a short and catchy sound bite for best results.
Sort of how like in the article it wasn't just "cats sometimes have more kittens" or "cats kill a lot of birds" that got to be circulated into near impossible to debunk, but catchier stuff with numbers, like "an unspayed cat can produce 42,000 cats in 5 years" or "a cat can kill a billion birds". Sounds more scientific that way. It practically implies that you have a scientific study somewhere that backs it up to within one significant digit.
Or sorta like how "87.2% of statistics are made up on the spot" is catchier than "some statistics are made up one the spot."
And try calling it a "study" not a website poll. Sounds more scientific.
For phone users, try "study shows iPhone users are 3.27 times likelier to have sex than Android users" or "study shows on the average iPhone user has more sex than Ron Jeremy" and you have practically a winner.
Or of course you can try to go for something that (A) preys on worse fears, and (B) doesn't sound as frivolous. E.g., "study shows iPhone users are 3.19 times likelier to get hired in management jobs."
Though IMHO it is a bit more than that. It's not just that people will believe some BS or another. It's that one piece of BS can get so circulated around, that it becomes basically common knowledge. It becomes something that "everyone knows". Even people who wouldn't just believe it the first time, start falling for it when they hear it from 10 different sources as common knowledge.
Plus, as they say in TFA, eventually it even gets picked by some newspaper, or repeated by some politician trying to support some bill, and it kinda becomes official.
Even basically "[citation needed]" doesn't help there, because some piece of BS (with statistics or not) that's been bouncing around for 30 years, can be a bitch to track to the actual source. Publication A cites official report B (see the politicians using them above,) which in turn has a footnote pointing at newspaper article C, which points to out-of-print book D, which even if you find a copy and read it, in turn points out to some study that's behind a paywall, and if you got even there, you find out it's really a meta-study quoting the numbers published in yet another article E.
Most people will give up somewhere along that chain, and assume it's actually a valid and proven claim. Some right at the first step, because, hey, it does point to a source.
And sometimes even if you make it all the way to the root source, you'll have trouble convincing anyone that that common knowledge is false. I mean, hey, what are you, some conspiracy theorist? Everyone knows X is true. Plus, supposedly some scientist said that (though usually he actually didn't, and some PR department or journalist mis-represented him), and who are you to question scientists??? You can even see that kind of idiot on Slashdot. There are several people around who seem to thrive on posting basically "who are you to question TEH SCIENTISTS???"
And even if you got past that, you often find that
A) they have the same gross misunderstanding of statistics as the journalists who mis-represented it in the first place, so good luck getting them to see why it doesn't actually say that, or
B) you need to first teach them what an equivocation or amphibology fallacy is, before they're even equipped to understand why the study doesn't actually say what they think it says
C) you'd need to first teach them a lot about the psychology and pitfalls of polling, i.e., that basically you can produce vastly different results from the same people and to essentially the same question, by just exploiting the tendency of people to say "yes" more than "no", or pick the answer which sounds more agreeable, or just pick the first one more in multi-choice polls. Serious polling companies know and compensate for that, but a PR agency can deliberately exploit that to skew the results.
Etc.
And again, try to do that without sounding like a CT-er inventing reasons not to trust those guys, and without falling into "tl;dr" range either. Good luck with that.
Basically at some point some falsehoods have taken off so well, that you don't even have to be a gullible moron to just take them for granted.
Actually, if you actually read the article to the end, they do say it applies to just about any kind of statistics. E.g., an example they use is a statistics which supposedly said that men prefer dating secretaries than female managers -- and you can see how that helped fuel that prejudice that women who pursue a that kind of career won't get laid, and probably are cold hearted bitches who don't have time for love anyway -- but then when someone actually got to the bottom of it, the poll didn't actually ask that.
Or you can take the myth that a woman who's not married by 35 is even less likely to marry than to be killed by a terrorist. Not only it turns out it was BS unsubstantiated hyperbole, but the perpetrators actually eventually apologized for it. Hey, better a few decades later than never, right? To get an idea how bogus that was, not only didn't the calculated numbers add up to "less likely than being killed by a terrorist" (they even admitted they made that up for sensationalism sake), but it was based on the critically flawed assumption that a woman would _only_ marry older men. But it's been echoed all over the place and taken for a fact.
And what they say is that basically not only some numbers pulled out of some PR bullshitter's ass get taken for gospel, but basically they become nearly impossible to debunk. You'd have to spend the equivalent of several episodes to debunk one sound bite that takes just 5 seconds to mindlessly repeat all around. And even then, you won't get as much exposure as the mass of idiots repeating the falsehood because they heard it somewhere, and even to a lot of those who hear you debunking it, you'll just sound like some conspiracy-theorist for attacking what they know for a fact.
And I think that shouldn't be dismissed as just some idle lolcat joke. Especially in IT and CS, we see the same phenomenon every day. There are a ton of "X is better than Y" or "A is 10% more scalable than B" pseudo-facts thrown around, that everyone just repeats and nobody questions them.
Especially almost nobody in management who heard it in some IT-for-managers ragazine _and_ from the nice salesman using it to sell his snake oil. So it must be true, right?
1. Not really. It just means it's going to favour those with a common/uncommon name (depending on whether it means the googler gets bored after twenty pages of other people called "John Smith" and nothing juicy, or if the first "John Smith" that pops up is a child rapist), or who are basically luckier.
Remember that even if everyone did do the same thing in the same amount, not everyone will be as prominently represented. You could be the college asshole and still slip through the cracks because nobody posted about it, or you could be the girl who gets rejected because someone took your photo while you were waiting for a taxi on a street corner and captioned it "Prostitution In New York." Or the guy who was just sleeping on the sofa at the party because you had already pulled an all nighter for an exam and were tired, and some asshole took a photo and captioned it "lol, John Doe drunk himself stupid".
Those people don't actually have a history of everyone's life, and the full context for everything. They're just taking a tiny random sample, and out of context at that, so basically it becomes more of a matter of luck. They'll still find someone who seems clean by sheer random luck and using a sieve with holes the size of a bus, basically, even if technically he didn't really pass their theoretical threshold.
And for most jobs there's actually such a surplus of potential candidates, that basically even randomly dropping 9 applications in 10 is ok. It just doesn't have to be something that stinks of discrimination, because you can get sued. But otherwise you can even use tarot or numerology, and some companies actually _do_. Yep, if the numeric values for the letters in your name don't sum up to the same digit as the company name, your application is dropped unread.
Replacing it with basically dropping 9 out of 10 based on googling them, isn't going to put them out of business. They just replaced one random test with another.
2. Actually, a lot won't as much have to do with setting any threshold as with covert discrimination. It's nigh impossible to prove that they googled harder for dirt on, say, the black female applicant than for the white guy, and "but we found she got drunk at a party 20 years ago! we don't want that kind of people in our school!" already sounds like a justified reason instead of plain old discrimination.
In other words, just because there is a threshold, it doesn't mean that it has to be the same for everyone. Setting a threshold which, if applied literally, means you'd find no employees, also can mean that you have just set a reason to reject everyone you don't like. You just have to be a little more lax with applying it those you do.
Remember: discrimination is already invariably rationalized as really just having an objective reason to hire X instead of Y. And for the most part people don't even think "I'll reject all the chicks because programming isn't for broads" or "I'm not hiring any black accountant 'cause niggers are dumb". Even the most overtly bigotted people I know, still like to delude themselves that they're really just objective and, say, they'd gladly hire anyone who fits their standards. They just end up somehow applying that standard stricter to some people than to others.
The same will basically be applied here. You just need to dig harder for some people than for others.
Yeah, I can see the getting even with office supplies. "They may have demanded 100 hour weeks, treated me like dirt, and spat me out on the street the second I started showing the slightest signs of burnout, but I got a pen with their logo and 100 sheets of A4 paper! Take that, corporate oppressors! They're probably already regretting the day they decided to fire me!"
Ah, yes, lobotomies. Gives me a shiver just thinking of that. But, yes, you're right, a ton of children did get lobotomized so they'd stay out of their parents' way.
Actually, it doesn't say that the one cooked with cow shit isn't defiled. That it's a partial dispensation that God gives Ezekiel, would of course indicate it's less offensive to some degree, but it never actually says that now it's kosher. Heck, if you understand their purity laws, there was no way for that mixed-grain bread to be kosher even if cooked in a microwave oven. (And yes, I know it didn't exist yet.) One way or the other that thing was _still_ defiled, and still meant to be a sort of an offensive "look at the kind of crap you'll eat when conquered by gentiles" horror story. It was just less so than with human shit.
Nevertheless, the result of the whole thing is called "defiled bread" on the same page. That's what results out of the recipe the Lord gave. It explicitly says so. You can go and invent your own ways to cook it without defiling it, but that was not the purpose of that exercise in the first place.
Well, I never said that at any point _all_ parents were irresponsible. Even the current headline, that 1 million children are mis-diagnosed, well, at the scale of the USA that would be about 1%, at any rate less than 2%. It's not like right now society is all falling apart and everyone is doing X, whatever X may be.
_Some_ people are irresponsible parents. But in ages past _some_ other people were irresponsible parents too. That's all I'm saying.
Except it wasn't that clear even to other bible translators and scholars. E.g., the Douay-Rheims Bible translates the same verse as, "And thou shalt eat it as barley bread baked under the ashes: and thou shalt cover it, in their sight, with the dung that cometh out of a man." Note the method of baking those barley cakes, and why using it even as fuel still isn't any better.
It's also not the first time that the threat of eating shit is used in the OT, and likely was a reason why Ezekiel mentions that. E.g., in Isaiah 36:12 that is used as an explicit threat in another siege of Jerusalem: "But Rabshakeh said, "Has my master sent me only to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, doomed to eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?"" That Ezekiel would essentially repeat a threat they already had in a previous siege, is actually not very hard to swallow.
Well, the fact still remains that the lord himself is calling it "defiled bread", one way or another. You could argue exactly what is used how, but still the result of that recipe is explicitly called "defiled bread". That's still quite far from what they think they're eating there, i.e., some wholesome nutrition recipe from the Lord himself.
Plus, hey, it's still got a lot more shock value than a quote from the lolcat bible, which is really what I was saying there:p
Actually, in ye olde days, parents used to just sedate them. Just read some ads from the late 19'th century or early 20'th century. They were selling some unholy mixtures of opium, morphine, heroin, chloroform, and in some cases alcohol as a way to keep your kids out of the way. And you didn't even need a prescription for that either.
And in the poorer countries they just used poppy tea, pretty much for the opium again.
Honestly, it's not something new. Don't let nostalgia paint a false image for you, there actually never was an age where parents and school just dealt with it responsibly. If there even was some wonder drug that let one turn off the kids -- either as in "asleep" or as in "drooling unfocused in a corner" -- there always were a bunch of parents who wanted that.
No, I'm not saying it's a _good_ thing. Just that it's not a new one.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno about other humans, but for me it would be mostly about the "without a plane around me" part, when I have to travel long distance. Airlines suck, frankly.
I remember the last time I was in an aircraft, with some leg space that was too small even for a 5 ft tall woman who was with us, listening to a screaming kid, and peering down into some airliner joke food that was at most good for a goat, I remembered the famous Da Vinci quote, "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return." I thought, you can tell the fucker never tasted _this_ kind of flight :p
If a jetpack could get me from here to there without that hassle, I'm all for it.
Heck, I'd even fork over the money for a zeppelin flight, if they can have some more humane accommodations.
"Avoid strong drink. It can cause you to shoot at tax collectors...and miss!"
-- Robert A. Heinlein
It doesn't matter. The "problem" starts not when you agree with their choices and ideology, but basically when they stop being a faceless mass of rampaging monsters.
Basically empathy is enough. It's the main problem, even. That's why everyone historically went to great extremes to dehumanize their enemies. Because as long as you feel empathy, it also feels wrong to go kill a few. We're hard-wired that way. (See, mirror neurons.) But when they become something that's hardly even human, and certainly not like us, suddenly bombing a few villages starts to sound actually ok.
You don't even have to _like_ someone for empathy to kick in. E.g., I remember all the guys wincing instinctively when I showed them a pic of some football player getting a mighty kick in the crotch. None of them knew or had any reason to like that player. Recognizing him as a human is enough to get those mirror neurons firing.
Plus, if you had the plebs actually comprehend the opponents' motives, that would in itself be a problem. Because then they'd also know that the bullshit propaganda about their motives is a lie. It's harder to motivate someone to bomb country X if they know that the motives of X are something like "they just want their land back" or "they're pissed off at our continuous heavy-handed bullying them around" than when you can sell them some bullshit like "they hate us for our freedoms".
The contracts don't work that way, but even if I'm to get philosophical, then I'm still not sure what your point is.
1. Essentially what you describe is equivalent with offering them a temporary license for up to a year instead of going to court now. Another year of using a trademark of one of the biggest franchises, that's a pretty substantial in my book. If that's nothing in your view, hell, I wish Lucas would offer me a nothing like that.
2. Essentially the ones who offered nothing in that contract was Jedi Mind. They offered to eventually stop something they had no right to do in the first place, and which Lucas could demand to stop immediately without giving them anything in return.
Essentially it seems to me like you expect some kind of "I'll stop cutting your tyres in exchange for..." or "I'll stop dropping bags of flaming shit at your door in exchange for...", because that's really equivalent to what Jedi Mind's side of the contract was. They just agreed to stop doing something not just wrong, but basically illegal. And that you'd expect something of value after that "in exchange for" in those. Doesn't it sound like a protection racket in that form?
And that matters... why? I'd see a point in that if there was indeed a frivolous exercise in who has the most money. But when that juggernaut legal department is actually in the right, and applying the law as it was intended all along, and the little guy opposing them is in the wrong and had acted in bad faith, then why does it matter that they're a juggernaut legal department? If you're right, you're right, and that's that. Being right and rich doesn't make one less right.
Exactly what is the fear factor here? That, god forbid, someone might do that "grinding into submission" to defend a legal right as they had it, and were using as intended?
Nevertheless, my point stands that the word as it is spelled by Lucas is not a common word that you can just use without intending to piggyback on Lucas's mind-share. If he sued a company called "Jidaigeki Mind", I'd concede the point, but "Jedi Mind" is another thing.
How did they alter anything? I'm pretty sure the same basic trademark law was in effect all the way back to Episode 4.
And it's no different from any other trademark. Just as you don't just use Apple's trademarks to sell, say, "iPod tyres" (pun on the iPod wheel, see?), or Nintendo's to sell a "Wii exercise machine" (that actually doesn't connect to a Wii), or Kraft Foods' trademark to sell something like "Cadbury chocolate flavoured condoms", or IBM's to sell something like "PowerPC dildo deluxe", you don't get to use Lucas's trademark to sell your gimmick input controller either. It's that simple.
And Lucas even invented the word. It's not as if I trademarked Pencil and started suing pencil makers. There is pretty much no way to accidentally name your product Jedi, you know, totally without trying to piggyback on Lucas's mindshare.
Honestly, it looks to me like textbook application of trademark law, as it was intended to work all along. You know, since the Trade Mark Registration Act of 1875 in the UK. Unless you want to tell me that Lucas invented a time machine to alter _that_ one, I seriously don't see how they altered any situation.
Yes, well, various ideas of things that can suck your soul out are a whole other dish. (You have to look no further than modern western world for a few people who think that cats will suck the breath out of a baby.) But you have to put it in context of what I was answering to. Basically that Vampires are X, Y, and Z, and the guy from Twilight isn't a vampire because he sparkles. It was already basically a proclamation that only essentially the archetype from Dracula counts as a real vampire. Honestly, the half ghost, half air elemental Edimmu wouldn't have fit that any better. Or conversely if we include anything that could get some kind of energy out of you as Vampires, then basically the GGPs objection that the Twilight guy is a faerie because "Fairies are youthful, amoral (note the difference), sparkly, supernatural beings who turn children away from their families and gain strength from human emotions." becomes moot as then Faeries become a kind of Vampire :p
Actually, here's a fun bit: after WW2 Japan apparently decided they renounce war and they'll never again have an Army.
By now someone will probably want to intervene, "wait, you dumbass, what about the Japanese Self-Defense Forces?" Yeah, that's actually the fun part. Those evolved as an departments of the police, rather than as an army.
So, yeah, don't mess with the Japanese police. It's the only police force with aircraft carriers, submarines, tanks, and fighter-bomber planes :p
If a horde of zombies decides to mess with the Japanese police, they might have a nasty surprise :p
Been done before, actually.
Some of the Eastern European myths (that Stoker was drew inspiration from) include such things as the Zburator, which basically means "the flying one" or "the one who flies". Oh, and he was into underage unmarried girls, like the Twilight guy too. I'm not aware of any particular consensus of how those flew, so I'd imagine angelic wings wouldn't be out of the question.
Or undead which could take pretty much every imaginable shape. The owl for example gave the name of Strigoi, though aparently they could shape-shift into everything else, from wolf to puppy or kitten. Or magical guys which could transform into dragons.
Rainows? You're aiming low. The Scholomance is an actual myth that's mentioned right in Dracula, and apparently Dracula himself graduated it. It was a mythical school where the Devil himself taught magic, including weather magic. As in: including how to summon the most devastating storms known to man. Rainbows? Heh. Those probably got rainbows as their junior year assignment.
Oh, and they got a dragon as an epic mount too. How pimp is that? :p
But anyway, technically Dracula had graduated that magic college, so rainbows probably wouldn't be out of the question as it is.
More seriously, I still don't see the problem I was answering to. The OP was pretending there's some clearly defined Vampire myth, and some clearly defined Faerie myth, and you could say that some movie was clearly one or clearly the other.
And all I'm saying is that it's just not so. The Vampire mythology as we have it, is a very modern invention, and not something any given population ever believed in. They're just whatever some novelist wanted them to be.
Whether it's Dracula or Twilight, it's drawing from the same pool of eastern european superstition anyway. If anything, Twilight is probably actually closer (though not identical) to something that people actually believed in, albeit that would be an incubus rather than undead.
Sure, some authors were more talented than others, and some chose better stuff, some chose crap. Isn't that the case in all genres? But that's IMHO more of a question of just that: talent and brains of the author. Rather than just being a matter of conforming to some exact definition of which beastie does what.
Actually, while humanity had a ton of imagination when it comes to fearing death, nothing even came close to the modern idea of vampire.
What Europe believed in is better described as "revenants", or what we nowadays think of as "zombies." They weren't supposed to be some clever and scheming count, but mindless bloated corpses of some peasants.
Oh, and generally they'd transmit disease generally by just being there not by bit. Remember it was an era where even an educated medicus knew that diseases are transmitted by smells (no, really, the miasma theory of disease) and everyone else knew that corpses cause disease. A corpse walking around was a health hazard by itself.
And just to drive the "zombie" aspect home, most of these were supposed to be literally brain dead. E.g., the ones from an outbreak in Venice could be prevented from biting anything ever again by just shoving a brick in the corpse's mouth. Your average Dracula or White Wolf kinda vampire would be sentient enough to basically go "oh, i have a brick in my mouth" and spit it out. Heck, even the dumbest animal would. But the version those people believed in would be forever thwarted by that brick because they weren't even able to figure that out.
Other forms of thwarting an undead included the equivalent of the frat prank of tying someone's shoelaces together, except it was more like tying the ends a piece of string to the big toe on each foot. Yep, that would thwart them.
Even when myths gave them a couple of neurons still working, then they'd be riddled with a crippling OCD, so they'd irresistably stop and count the grains in a pile of rice or whatever.
Basically they're not quite the smart and scheming baron kind, nor the kind who'd blend in and maintain a Masquerade. They were mindless rotting corpses.
The modern idea of a Vampire was pretty much used invented by Polidori in "The Vampyre", sort of reused in "Carmilla" (where it got some sexual part added too), but only really became mass known via "Dracula". It's really not about any single "ancient" myth, but a mix of several of those. Including a lot of the witchcraft beliefs, incubus beliefs, and various assorted other bits and ends. And yes, some stuff taken from fairies too.
Basically what Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker did there was already inventing a new kind of vampire and romanticizing it to appeal to their target audience. That was it, really. And each of them felt free to add a few personal touches and mix some even more unrelated mythical monsters to the definition of a Vampire, to make it even more mass-appeal. Which is basically why you've heard of Dracula over and over again, but most people never even heard of Carmilla or The Vampyre.
Complaining that someone else did the same thing is a bit silly. Yes, Twilight included some stuff from an unrelated mythical beastie. What, unlike Stoker, Anne Rice, White Wolf and everyone else... who added bits from unrelated mythical beasties too?
Oh, drug policy is the proverbial low hanging fruit there. I only mentioned IT and CS because we're on Slashdot, but, yeah, if we're doing a top of domains where it happens the most, I'll have to admit that drug-related politics would be way up there.
Basically. Though you need to put some number or hyperbole comparison on it, and make it a short and catchy sound bite for best results.
Sort of how like in the article it wasn't just "cats sometimes have more kittens" or "cats kill a lot of birds" that got to be circulated into near impossible to debunk, but catchier stuff with numbers, like "an unspayed cat can produce 42,000 cats in 5 years" or "a cat can kill a billion birds". Sounds more scientific that way. It practically implies that you have a scientific study somewhere that backs it up to within one significant digit.
Or sorta like how "87.2% of statistics are made up on the spot" is catchier than "some statistics are made up one the spot."
And try calling it a "study" not a website poll. Sounds more scientific.
For phone users, try "study shows iPhone users are 3.27 times likelier to have sex than Android users" or "study shows on the average iPhone user has more sex than Ron Jeremy" and you have practically a winner.
Or of course you can try to go for something that (A) preys on worse fears, and (B) doesn't sound as frivolous. E.g., "study shows iPhone users are 3.19 times likelier to get hired in management jobs."
In a nutshell, yes.
Though IMHO it is a bit more than that. It's not just that people will believe some BS or another. It's that one piece of BS can get so circulated around, that it becomes basically common knowledge. It becomes something that "everyone knows". Even people who wouldn't just believe it the first time, start falling for it when they hear it from 10 different sources as common knowledge.
Plus, as they say in TFA, eventually it even gets picked by some newspaper, or repeated by some politician trying to support some bill, and it kinda becomes official.
Even basically "[citation needed]" doesn't help there, because some piece of BS (with statistics or not) that's been bouncing around for 30 years, can be a bitch to track to the actual source. Publication A cites official report B (see the politicians using them above,) which in turn has a footnote pointing at newspaper article C, which points to out-of-print book D, which even if you find a copy and read it, in turn points out to some study that's behind a paywall, and if you got even there, you find out it's really a meta-study quoting the numbers published in yet another article E.
Most people will give up somewhere along that chain, and assume it's actually a valid and proven claim. Some right at the first step, because, hey, it does point to a source.
And sometimes even if you make it all the way to the root source, you'll have trouble convincing anyone that that common knowledge is false. I mean, hey, what are you, some conspiracy theorist? Everyone knows X is true. Plus, supposedly some scientist said that (though usually he actually didn't, and some PR department or journalist mis-represented him), and who are you to question scientists??? You can even see that kind of idiot on Slashdot. There are several people around who seem to thrive on posting basically "who are you to question TEH SCIENTISTS???"
And even if you got past that, you often find that
A) they have the same gross misunderstanding of statistics as the journalists who mis-represented it in the first place, so good luck getting them to see why it doesn't actually say that, or
B) you need to first teach them what an equivocation or amphibology fallacy is, before they're even equipped to understand why the study doesn't actually say what they think it says
C) you'd need to first teach them a lot about the psychology and pitfalls of polling, i.e., that basically you can produce vastly different results from the same people and to essentially the same question, by just exploiting the tendency of people to say "yes" more than "no", or pick the answer which sounds more agreeable, or just pick the first one more in multi-choice polls. Serious polling companies know and compensate for that, but a PR agency can deliberately exploit that to skew the results.
Etc.
And again, try to do that without sounding like a CT-er inventing reasons not to trust those guys, and without falling into "tl;dr" range either. Good luck with that.
Basically at some point some falsehoods have taken off so well, that you don't even have to be a gullible moron to just take them for granted.
Actually, if you actually read the article to the end, they do say it applies to just about any kind of statistics. E.g., an example they use is a statistics which supposedly said that men prefer dating secretaries than female managers -- and you can see how that helped fuel that prejudice that women who pursue a that kind of career won't get laid, and probably are cold hearted bitches who don't have time for love anyway -- but then when someone actually got to the bottom of it, the poll didn't actually ask that.
Or you can take the myth that a woman who's not married by 35 is even less likely to marry than to be killed by a terrorist. Not only it turns out it was BS unsubstantiated hyperbole, but the perpetrators actually eventually apologized for it. Hey, better a few decades later than never, right? To get an idea how bogus that was, not only didn't the calculated numbers add up to "less likely than being killed by a terrorist" (they even admitted they made that up for sensationalism sake), but it was based on the critically flawed assumption that a woman would _only_ marry older men. But it's been echoed all over the place and taken for a fact.
And what they say is that basically not only some numbers pulled out of some PR bullshitter's ass get taken for gospel, but basically they become nearly impossible to debunk. You'd have to spend the equivalent of several episodes to debunk one sound bite that takes just 5 seconds to mindlessly repeat all around. And even then, you won't get as much exposure as the mass of idiots repeating the falsehood because they heard it somewhere, and even to a lot of those who hear you debunking it, you'll just sound like some conspiracy-theorist for attacking what they know for a fact.
And I think that shouldn't be dismissed as just some idle lolcat joke. Especially in IT and CS, we see the same phenomenon every day. There are a ton of "X is better than Y" or "A is 10% more scalable than B" pseudo-facts thrown around, that everyone just repeats and nobody questions them.
Especially almost nobody in management who heard it in some IT-for-managers ragazine _and_ from the nice salesman using it to sell his snake oil. So it must be true, right?
1. Not really. It just means it's going to favour those with a common/uncommon name (depending on whether it means the googler gets bored after twenty pages of other people called "John Smith" and nothing juicy, or if the first "John Smith" that pops up is a child rapist), or who are basically luckier.
Remember that even if everyone did do the same thing in the same amount, not everyone will be as prominently represented. You could be the college asshole and still slip through the cracks because nobody posted about it, or you could be the girl who gets rejected because someone took your photo while you were waiting for a taxi on a street corner and captioned it "Prostitution In New York." Or the guy who was just sleeping on the sofa at the party because you had already pulled an all nighter for an exam and were tired, and some asshole took a photo and captioned it "lol, John Doe drunk himself stupid".
Those people don't actually have a history of everyone's life, and the full context for everything. They're just taking a tiny random sample, and out of context at that, so basically it becomes more of a matter of luck. They'll still find someone who seems clean by sheer random luck and using a sieve with holes the size of a bus, basically, even if technically he didn't really pass their theoretical threshold.
And for most jobs there's actually such a surplus of potential candidates, that basically even randomly dropping 9 applications in 10 is ok. It just doesn't have to be something that stinks of discrimination, because you can get sued. But otherwise you can even use tarot or numerology, and some companies actually _do_. Yep, if the numeric values for the letters in your name don't sum up to the same digit as the company name, your application is dropped unread.
Replacing it with basically dropping 9 out of 10 based on googling them, isn't going to put them out of business. They just replaced one random test with another.
2. Actually, a lot won't as much have to do with setting any threshold as with covert discrimination. It's nigh impossible to prove that they googled harder for dirt on, say, the black female applicant than for the white guy, and "but we found she got drunk at a party 20 years ago! we don't want that kind of people in our school!" already sounds like a justified reason instead of plain old discrimination.
In other words, just because there is a threshold, it doesn't mean that it has to be the same for everyone. Setting a threshold which, if applied literally, means you'd find no employees, also can mean that you have just set a reason to reject everyone you don't like. You just have to be a little more lax with applying it those you do.
Remember: discrimination is already invariably rationalized as really just having an objective reason to hire X instead of Y. And for the most part people don't even think "I'll reject all the chicks because programming isn't for broads" or "I'm not hiring any black accountant 'cause niggers are dumb". Even the most overtly bigotted people I know, still like to delude themselves that they're really just objective and, say, they'd gladly hire anyone who fits their standards. They just end up somehow applying that standard stricter to some people than to others.
The same will basically be applied here. You just need to dig harder for some people than for others.
Yeah, I can see the getting even with office supplies. "They may have demanded 100 hour weeks, treated me like dirt, and spat me out on the street the second I started showing the slightest signs of burnout, but I got a pen with their logo and 100 sheets of A4 paper! Take that, corporate oppressors! They're probably already regretting the day they decided to fire me!"
Ah, yes, lobotomies. Gives me a shiver just thinking of that. But, yes, you're right, a ton of children did get lobotomized so they'd stay out of their parents' way.
Actually, it doesn't say that the one cooked with cow shit isn't defiled. That it's a partial dispensation that God gives Ezekiel, would of course indicate it's less offensive to some degree, but it never actually says that now it's kosher. Heck, if you understand their purity laws, there was no way for that mixed-grain bread to be kosher even if cooked in a microwave oven. (And yes, I know it didn't exist yet.) One way or the other that thing was _still_ defiled, and still meant to be a sort of an offensive "look at the kind of crap you'll eat when conquered by gentiles" horror story. It was just less so than with human shit.
Nevertheless, the result of the whole thing is called "defiled bread" on the same page. That's what results out of the recipe the Lord gave. It explicitly says so. You can go and invent your own ways to cook it without defiling it, but that was not the purpose of that exercise in the first place.
Well, I never said that at any point _all_ parents were irresponsible. Even the current headline, that 1 million children are mis-diagnosed, well, at the scale of the USA that would be about 1%, at any rate less than 2%. It's not like right now society is all falling apart and everyone is doing X, whatever X may be.
_Some_ people are irresponsible parents. But in ages past _some_ other people were irresponsible parents too. That's all I'm saying.
Except it wasn't that clear even to other bible translators and scholars. E.g., the Douay-Rheims Bible translates the same verse as, "And thou shalt eat it as barley bread baked under the ashes: and thou shalt cover it, in their sight, with the dung that cometh out of a man." Note the method of baking those barley cakes, and why using it even as fuel still isn't any better.
It's also not the first time that the threat of eating shit is used in the OT, and likely was a reason why Ezekiel mentions that. E.g., in Isaiah 36:12 that is used as an explicit threat in another siege of Jerusalem: "But Rabshakeh said, "Has my master sent me only to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, doomed to eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?"" That Ezekiel would essentially repeat a threat they already had in a previous siege, is actually not very hard to swallow.
Didn't a bunch of fundie churches proclaim the KJV to be the one true version? Makes it more fun than the newer ones which toned it down like that.
Well, the fact still remains that the lord himself is calling it "defiled bread", one way or another. You could argue exactly what is used how, but still the result of that recipe is explicitly called "defiled bread". That's still quite far from what they think they're eating there, i.e., some wholesome nutrition recipe from the Lord himself.
Plus, hey, it's still got a lot more shock value than a quote from the lolcat bible, which is really what I was saying there :p
Actually, in ye olde days, parents used to just sedate them. Just read some ads from the late 19'th century or early 20'th century. They were selling some unholy mixtures of opium, morphine, heroin, chloroform, and in some cases alcohol as a way to keep your kids out of the way. And you didn't even need a prescription for that either.
And in the poorer countries they just used poppy tea, pretty much for the opium again.
Honestly, it's not something new. Don't let nostalgia paint a false image for you, there actually never was an age where parents and school just dealt with it responsibly. If there even was some wonder drug that let one turn off the kids -- either as in "asleep" or as in "drooling unfocused in a corner" -- there always were a bunch of parents who wanted that.
No, I'm not saying it's a _good_ thing. Just that it's not a new one.