The courts also tended to use the word "Substantial" a lot. The betamax ruling mentioned "Substantial non-infringing uses", i.e. time shifting. Maybe if 20% of the traffic on the P2P services was non-infringing, that would count as substantial, but 0.02% doesn't?
You could add that they filter a lot of shlock before the consumer has to wade through it, but even that's a mixed blessing, as they often filter based on how photogenic the performer is rather than on musical grounds.
If you look at a reasonable spread, like 10 years, or even just the time the current set of judges on the 9th district have all sat together, or the time since GWB took office, the 9th is far from first place on % overturned, and not even in 1st place on total numbers.
You can take an odd sample, i.e. for the three weeks in early april 2001, and the 9th may be in first place for that time. That's where this claim started, when some conservative talk-radio hosts mentioned that for the last few weeks, the 9th was being overturned a lot, and it's become exaggerated repeatedly since then, chiefly by other conservatives. It's not even clear that the original claim was either right or researched at all.
How did this get modded informative?
The 9th's rulings stand up much better than average. They are in about 3rd place, possibly 4th, out of all the circuit courts. Considering that an exceptional amount of the 9th's rulings are in new areas, particularly technology, having the supremes agree 75 to 80% of the time for the last 10 years is a very good record.
The district court that covers Arkansas and some nearby states, on the other hand, has been overturned more than half the time, and on rulings that are in obvious disagreement with old, well established law. Given this contrast, I think I'll claim that Rush Limbaugh is a better pro soccer player than Pele, and see if I get modded +17.
It's one of those fundamental laws of math type things that a system based on the natural logarithm "e" will have the lowest error rate per calculation, all other things being equal. SInce no one can implement a 2.71... based logic system, 3 is closer to it than 2, and so the theoretical tech talent scouts would say it "has potential".
Every serious effort to develop higher than tri-valued logic starts from recognizing that the error rate will always go up, not just for a decimal system such as you describe, but for any number greater than 3, but there is some benefit from the design that will make some of those other things not equal, and so drive it back down.
Unless the designer can explain how those other design advantages will more than overcome the error rate increase, the machine will never be a practical working computer. Quite a few of these designs get proposed or supported by people who can't explain that point.
This points up one of the things I've never understood. Conventional wisdom is that it's cheaper to reward employees with stock options than cash, or cash equivalents like private use of a company car, for that matter. There seem to be a lot of counter-examples to this "wisdom", but not a lot of businesses paying attention to those counter examples.
Is this something MBA's are taught that doesn't fit the real world? Or is there some government regulation that makes paying off your employees in stock options take 1/10th the paperwork of of any other method? Or what?
Re:Quantity has a quality all its own.
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Let's remember that Stalin's philosophy led to a lot of draws and Pyrric victories. You can call the battle of Stalingrad a win for the USSR, but many would rather call it a bloody mess.
If that analogy holds:
infected windows boxes === 15 year old new Soviet Army Draftees, face down in the bloody snow. Open BSD === German Tanks (on fire) melting the bloody snow to bloody slush.
I am not a lawyer (Damn, but I'm writing that a lot lately). You're showing a very good grasp of this overall (IMHO), but there's one point you made that needs to be stressed. ".. it seems he was even authorized to do so". If some employee acted on behalf of SCO without authorization, it could make a claim for punitive damages impossible (for example), but not necessarily impact the base claim. (A lot of times, this results in a "reasonable man" test - If that guy at the loading dock just "sold" you the company car, is it reasonable for you to have assumed he really had the authority?)
If that person was authorized, it has a lot more impact. Employees can be shown to be authorized by such things as job titles (comptroller, sales representitive and the like, including most management titles) and decriptions found in employee evaluations, ads for hiring to that job, and by other factors such as company printed business cards that have both the person's name and the corporate logo. (If I was a lawyer, maybe I could remember about 10 other such things from an article I saw over a year ago, but I'm not and I can't).
One of the good things here, is that if Mr. X was authorized, there are inevitably public documents that will clearly show it, and they are usually easy to research. (Like finding an ad SCO ran in a trade journal before hiring that person for that job). The law on who is an authorized agent of a company is well established and doesn't rest on any speculative areas like IP law does. This is a point a judge can probably research and deal with in a few minutes if it is raised.
Cockles are a kind of small shellfish, as in the old English folk song that goes "Crying "Cockles and Mussels, alive, alive Oh!""
In your heart, some of the valves somewhat resemble shells and flutter opeen and closed with each beat, hence the derivation. Why it is a good thing to warm those valves is less certain.
Now someone will probably come back with a completely different derivation.
Groklaw is quite possibly biased towards the idea that the legal system will actually create justice if given all the facts - some lawyers actually believe that sort of thing, even in this cynical world. So if they have a bias against SCO, they just might also have a bias towards examining all the facts, or a bias towards reserving final judgements until the court has finished its work.
Rather than having to trust them to be able to resist all emotional influences, why not judge whether their past record says they have done the right thing despite emotional influences, or not.
"Montana State Univ's Architecture course requires students to read Atlas Shrugged."
Why on Earth? Ayn Rand wrote a novel about architecture, but it wasn't shrugged, it was "The Fountainhead". That might even make sense. Still Atlas Shrugged is only about as long as the latest Harry Potter. If you can't squeeze that in sometime in those 5 years, you're going to have lots of other problems with the courseload.
Let's assume for the moment that the local cops and DA are very good people, honest, forthright and all that. Do they understand the difference between correlation and causation? Do they know that statistically billion to one odds means the thing has happened to 7 people? Somewhere out there, there's a guy who has un-alibied absences on his record that exactly match with a string of unsolved robberies, and he ISN"T the robber.
Any talk of corporations in general tends to be oversimplistic. However, there are some corporations that are sure keeping a lot of data on people. How many times have you encountered a form that asks a lot of questions you would consider irrelevant? I just filled out a form for car insurance that asked not just for my daughter's college and GPA, but what her major was. I actually called their local agent to ask if that made any difference in price. No - they just want that anyway.
You know, when someone is pointing a gun at you, arguing about whether it makes sense or not is peripheral. Either they have a reason, whether you understand it or not, or they are simply crazy. Either way, they're still pointing a gun at you.
When some corporation is gathering lots of information that could even concevably help someone remove your liberties, either they have a reason, whether you understand it or not, or they are simply crazy. Waiting until it makes sense to you is itself not sensible, because if they are crazy, you don't need to do business with them, and if they do have some kind of malicious intent, waiting until they explain it to you is going to be a mighty long wait. The only time waiting for an explanation might make sense is if you are 100% confident in advance that you are going to like what you hear.
The law doesn't hold you responsible if you make it easy for someone to steal your car. The law does let your insurance company hold you partly responsible, even to stopping carrying you or refusing to pay out on resulting claims. As far as your insurance company is concerned, you ARE aiding and abetting.
The law also doesn't bar agents of a federal agency from informing your insuror if they come across an unlocked car in the course of their legal activities, any more than a private citizen is barred from doing so.
If the FCC wants to force people to close relays, they have more than enough power to make anyone who doesn't cooperate wish they had gone ahead and picked a comparativley painless method of suicide, such as fire ants and honey. For example, they could list all the real owners of such relays with the court system, leaving them open to a lawsuit from any businesses wanting to recoup some of their losses from dealing with spam passing through that relay. Those businesses would only have to prove "knowingly aiding and abetting" if they sought triple, punitive damages, not simple damages. Leaving that relay open for long enough after notification and simple neglegence can be bumped up to criminal just for that time, although that time is probably at least 90 days in most jurisdictions.
Then there's the usual FCC hearings for liscencing. Wanna bet that none of those wide open servers out there are owned by any subsidiary of a broadcast communications corporation? Those, at least could catch all sorts of hell from the feds, all done perfectly legally.
(I am not a lawyer) - Monopoly law can be rather ambiguous, particularly as there's not a sharp line with an alarm, as you put it. Still there is more to this than just perceptions changing. Some actions don't work for a company climbing in the market. If they are tried then, there's no law against them, because they are just stupid then, and hurt the company instead of help. Companies that use them aren't continuing the same methods that made them successful, as they have to adopt new sharp practices. You can't adopt a strategy of eat everything that moves until you are a grown up shark.
One example of this is demanding hardware vendors not sell hardware equipped with an alternative OS. Microsoft didn't use that trick to become successful, because it only became workable after Microsoft was already highly successful. It's things like that that created the Sherman antitrust laws in the first place.
Right now, Disney and Pixar just had a falling out. Would Disney's last round of contract negotiations entail monopoly? It's an automatic no, because those actions hurt Disney instead of benefited them. Pixar felt free to say no. One of the reasons Microsoft was in violation was that Gateway, Dell, and others didn't feel free to say no.
This seems to be the kind of situation that makes it hard for many people to see the purpose of (or justice of) anti-monopoly laws. Microsoft was using its monopoly tactics against other software firms, and some software firms were in a position where it was suicidal to refuse Microsoft's settlments (such as the small software houses that made compression tools), but proving that monopoly existed took identifying third partys who didn't dare say no.
The FBI got into computers very early, purchasing some big iron mainframes in the 60's that became the base system for 20 years or so. When they upgraded in the 80s, delays and fears about them having enormous databases on average citizens left them with a system several congressmen criticized as obsolete before it was installed.
The FBI also tends to recruit two sharply separated types, cops and accountants. Cop types come from other law enforcement agencies, and include some agents with law degrees that have done previous work in DA's offices and such. Accountant types focus on econoomic crimes of the sort that can be uncovered by good audits, which are not the most glamorous part of the FBI's role. Guess who tends to get promoted faster.
So, the FBI has some people who are extremely knowledgable about computers, but often mostly about older UNIX or VAX types. They have some departments that are pretty knowledgable in a more general computing context, but these tend to be the ones that are acountant heavy, and particularly the ones that have accountants promoted to middle management. The FBI has tried to assemble units that are focused on investigating computer crime from some of these departments, but the results so far have been mixed at best. Your friend is probably dealing with a department that is mostly cop mentalities, and isn't expected to focus chiefly on the economic and computer aspects of the crimes they investigate - lord help you both if it isn't.
Great logic there - let the kid watch Barney or she'll grow up to be a felon. Your reply is to a poster who admits his kid sees some things he doesn't think are really good, but who has at least shown some concern, and tried to steer his child away from some of the things he thinks are negative influences. Sounds like a pretty good parent to me.
Hey world, I'm a parent. I didn't always manage to keep my kid from being exposed to commercial crap when she was growing up, though I tried. Please feel free to critcize every decision I made retroactively.
The biggest thing wrong with Disney IS the thing that's wrong with Barney. Both treat latch-key kids like their programs can be substituted for having a parent waiting when the kid gets home from pre-school and the kid will somehow miraculously grow up OK. Even if Disney or Barney was great literature in easy to comprehend, kid friendly form, that just doesn't work.
Granted - does that make my analogy wrong? It concevably could if all criminal acts began with the use of physical force and involved absolutely nothing else.
If there are other kinds of wrong doing, for example involving lieing rather than force, then it can be no more wrong to say that governments are merely the reperesentitives of some persons than it is to say the same thing about corporations. Are you saying that when a group of people work for a government, and lie to you, that is a government commiting a wrong, but when a group of people work for a corporation and lie to you, that is nothing but individuals committing the wrong?
Sounds like you favor perpetual copyright. I don't blame you for that, but, have you considered some of these points.
The way the constitution says it, coyright is a quid pro quo. You create a work. You get rights for a time. Eventually, it enters the public domain. Quid - The public pays you by protecting your work for a time, and pro Quo - the public gets your work eventually. Right now, your quid has been lengthened from 14 years with 14 renewal to Life + 70. The public's pro Quo hasn't been strengthened to amtch.
For example, it's going to cost the public more to settle copyright disputes when some of them involve contracts written 125 years ago, where sometimes a dozen corporations have passed on assets during bankrupcy and such to muddy the waters. You or your heirs got all that extra time under the extensions, but you're not required to do anything extra, not even attach a codicil to your will that helps keep track of your copyrights so that those court cases will be easier to resolve. (In fact, even though life + 70 implies that ALL individual copyrights will be passed on to heirs, no one is required to actually make a will).
Poeple have looked at what written works make during a timeframe, and on average, current copyright law seems to reward an author whith 99.75% of what they would make over absolutely unlimited copyright. (That arguement was made to the U.S. supreme court in Eldred vrs. Reno, for those wanting to check a source). No one has found any fault with that math, so I'd suggest it fits your case, and is probably reasonably accurate for music and such as well as print. So, whatever unlimited copyright duration costs the public, that total cost at this point has to be weighed against not what it profits the creator, but 0.25% of that benefit. If the US went back to a 28 year copyright, the amount drops to about 85%, and I can see the society needing to make some efforts to protect an author's rights to what would average 15% of his or her total income, but when we're talking about a remaining quarter of one percent, how much effort is realistic?
Right you are. I think I got momentarily confused by the reference to a British guy shooting them. I was too busy trying to picture Val Kilmer with lousy teeth. Now you've got me wondering if this is another 'stuffed animals in the US in "defiance" of British rights' case - Winnie the Poo. I wonder if the British ever asked for 'their' lions back? People should see these, if only to understand that endangered species or no, some of that lion hunting looked like a vital necessity at the time.
Admit it. If Neo had rip-foo'ed the Architect's liver out through his nostrils right after the word "assiduous" you would have forgiven the rest of the film. If he'd followed with 50,000 monitors flying off the walls and imploding the archetect's dead, mangled body, you might have even voted Keanu a special Oscar for best "Woah!"
"Of course Moby Dick has a plot; it even has several. Most superficially; Ahab, maimed in body and spiritually scarred, seeks to find in the vast expanse of ocean the great beast that took his leg and his pride and kill it."
Erm... Hollywood calls that plot: Boy meets whale, boy loses whale, boy gets whale (whale gets boy?).
That's "The Ghost and the Darkness". The original pair of what you call "crazy zombie lions" are stuffed and exibited in a museum in Britain still. They really did kill all those people, at least according to the guys that finally bagged them. (Yes, here's another film based on a true story).
Mostly self educated. Mensa member at 14, started drinking at 15, dropped out of school at 17, acid at 18, heroin at 20, crack for the last 6 years or so, died duller than a bag of hammers.
By the time I made her acquantance, she was far from bright anymore, but when she had to sober up, she could still be superficially clever. (more on the "quote Eddie Izzard" level than thinking of something witty herself). Trouble was, she apparently put all remaining brain cells into getting more drugs. I never had to deal with her on a really personal level myself, but she made about 5 people's lives living hells with suicide threats, teary, drunken 2 am phone calls, threats to start hooking again is someone didn't help her get drugs (and it would "be all their fault", naturally), and crap like that.
On the bright side, her kid has three scholarships already guarenteed as a high school junior, and seems to have missed the self hatred part pretty well.
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The courts also tended to use the word "Substantial" a lot. The betamax ruling mentioned "Substantial non-infringing uses", i.e. time shifting. Maybe if 20% of the traffic on the P2P services was non-infringing, that would count as substantial, but 0.02% doesn't?
You could add that they filter a lot of shlock before the consumer has to wade through it, but even that's a mixed blessing, as they often filter based on how photogenic the performer is rather than on musical grounds.
If you look at a reasonable spread, like 10 years, or even just the time the current set of judges on the 9th district have all sat together, or the time since GWB took office, the 9th is far from first place on % overturned, and not even in 1st place on total numbers.
You can take an odd sample, i.e. for the three weeks in early april 2001, and the 9th may be in first place for that time. That's where this claim started, when some conservative talk-radio hosts mentioned that for the last few weeks, the 9th was being overturned a lot, and it's become exaggerated repeatedly since then, chiefly by other conservatives. It's not even clear that the original claim was either right or researched at all.
How did this get modded informative?
The 9th's rulings stand up much better than average. They are in about 3rd place, possibly 4th, out of all the circuit courts. Considering that an exceptional amount of the 9th's rulings are in new areas, particularly technology, having the supremes agree 75 to 80% of the time for the last 10 years is a very good record.
The district court that covers Arkansas and some nearby states, on the other hand, has been overturned more than half the time, and on rulings that are in obvious disagreement with old, well established law. Given this contrast, I think I'll claim that Rush Limbaugh is a better pro soccer player than Pele, and see if I get modded +17.
It's one of those fundamental laws of math type things that a system based on the natural logarithm "e" will have the lowest error rate per calculation, all other things being equal. SInce no one can implement a 2.71... based logic system, 3 is closer to it than 2, and so the theoretical tech talent scouts would say it "has potential".
Every serious effort to develop higher than tri-valued logic starts from recognizing that the error rate will always go up, not just for a decimal system such as you describe, but for any number greater than 3, but there is some benefit from the design that will make some of those other things not equal, and so drive it back down.
Unless the designer can explain how those other design advantages will more than overcome the error rate increase, the machine will never be a practical working computer. Quite a few of these designs get proposed or supported by people who can't explain that point.
This points up one of the things I've never understood. Conventional wisdom is that it's cheaper to reward employees with stock options than cash, or cash equivalents like private use of a company car, for that matter. There seem to be a lot of counter-examples to this "wisdom", but not a lot of businesses paying attention to those counter examples.
Is this something MBA's are taught that doesn't fit the real world? Or is there some government regulation that makes paying off your employees in stock options take 1/10th the paperwork of of any other method? Or what?
Let's remember that Stalin's philosophy led to a lot of draws and Pyrric victories. You can call the battle of Stalingrad a win for the USSR, but many would rather call it a bloody mess.
If that analogy holds:
infected windows boxes === 15 year old new Soviet Army Draftees, face down in the bloody snow.
Open BSD === German Tanks (on fire) melting the bloody snow to bloody slush.
I am not a lawyer (Damn, but I'm writing that a lot lately).
You're showing a very good grasp of this overall (IMHO), but there's one point you made that needs to be stressed. ".. it seems he was even authorized to do so". If some employee acted on behalf of SCO without authorization, it could make a claim for punitive damages impossible (for example), but not necessarily impact the base claim. (A lot of times, this results in a "reasonable man" test - If that guy at the loading dock just "sold" you the company car, is it reasonable for you to have assumed he really had the authority?)
If that person was authorized, it has a lot more impact. Employees can be shown to be authorized by such things as job titles (comptroller, sales representitive and the like, including most management titles) and decriptions found in employee evaluations, ads for hiring to that job, and by other factors such as company printed business cards that have both the person's name and the corporate logo. (If I was a lawyer, maybe I could remember about 10 other such things from an article I saw over a year ago, but I'm not and I can't).
One of the good things here, is that if Mr. X was authorized, there are inevitably public documents that will clearly show it, and they are usually easy to research. (Like finding an ad SCO ran in a trade journal before hiring that person for that job). The law on who is an authorized agent of a company is well established and doesn't rest on any speculative areas like IP law does. This is a point a judge can probably research and deal with in a few minutes if it is raised.
Cockles are a kind of small shellfish, as in the old English folk song that goes "Crying "Cockles and Mussels, alive, alive Oh!""
In your heart, some of the valves somewhat resemble shells and flutter opeen and closed with each beat, hence the derivation. Why it is a good thing to warm those valves is less certain.
Now someone will probably come back with a completely different derivation.
Groklaw is quite possibly biased towards the idea that the legal system will actually create justice if given all the facts - some lawyers actually believe that sort of thing, even in this cynical world. So if they have a bias against SCO, they just might also have a bias towards examining all the facts, or a bias towards reserving final judgements until the court has finished its work.
Rather than having to trust them to be able to resist all emotional influences, why not judge whether their past record says they have done the right thing despite emotional influences, or not.
"Montana State Univ's Architecture course requires students to read Atlas Shrugged."
Why on Earth? Ayn Rand wrote a novel about architecture, but it wasn't shrugged, it was "The Fountainhead". That might even make sense.
Still Atlas Shrugged is only about as long as the latest Harry Potter. If you can't squeeze that in sometime in those 5 years, you're going to have lots of other problems with the courseload.
Let's assume for the moment that the local cops and DA are very good people, honest, forthright and all that.
Do they understand the difference between correlation and causation?
Do they know that statistically billion to one odds means the thing has happened to 7 people?
Somewhere out there, there's a guy who has un-alibied absences on his record that exactly match with a string of unsolved robberies, and he ISN"T the robber.
Any talk of corporations in general tends to be oversimplistic. However, there are some corporations that are sure keeping a lot of data on people. How many times have you encountered a form that asks a lot of questions you would consider irrelevant? I just filled out a form for car insurance that asked not just for my daughter's college and GPA, but what her major was. I actually called their local agent to ask if that made any difference in price. No - they just want that anyway.
You know, when someone is pointing a gun at you, arguing about whether it makes sense or not is peripheral. Either they have a reason, whether you understand it or not, or they are simply crazy. Either way, they're still pointing a gun at you.
When some corporation is gathering lots of information that could even concevably help someone remove your liberties, either they have a reason, whether you understand it or not, or they are simply crazy. Waiting until it makes sense to you is itself not sensible, because if they are crazy, you don't need to do business with them, and if they do have some kind of malicious intent, waiting until they explain it to you is going to be a mighty long wait. The only time waiting for an explanation might make sense is if you are 100% confident in advance that you are going to like what you hear.
The law doesn't hold you responsible if you make it easy for someone to steal your car. The law does let your insurance company hold you partly responsible, even to stopping carrying you or refusing to pay out on resulting claims. As far as your insurance company is concerned, you ARE aiding and abetting.
The law also doesn't bar agents of a federal agency from informing your insuror if they come across an unlocked car in the course of their legal activities, any more than a private citizen is barred from doing so.
If the FCC wants to force people to close relays, they have more than enough power to make anyone who doesn't cooperate wish they had gone ahead and picked a comparativley painless method of suicide, such as fire ants and honey. For example, they could list all the real owners of such relays with the court system, leaving them open to a lawsuit from any businesses wanting to recoup some of their losses from dealing with spam passing through that relay. Those businesses would only have to prove "knowingly aiding and abetting" if they sought triple, punitive damages, not simple damages. Leaving that relay open for long enough after notification and simple neglegence can be bumped up to criminal just for that time, although that time is probably at least 90 days in most jurisdictions.
Then there's the usual FCC hearings for liscencing. Wanna bet that none of those wide open servers out there are owned by any subsidiary of a broadcast communications corporation? Those, at least could catch all sorts of hell from the feds, all done perfectly legally.
(I am not a lawyer) - Monopoly law can be rather ambiguous, particularly as there's not a sharp line with an alarm, as you put it. Still there is more to this than just perceptions changing. Some actions don't work for a company climbing in the market. If they are tried then, there's no law against them, because they are just stupid then, and hurt the company instead of help. Companies that use them aren't continuing the same methods that made them successful, as they have to adopt new sharp practices. You can't adopt a strategy of eat everything that moves until you are a grown up shark.
One example of this is demanding hardware vendors not sell hardware equipped with an alternative OS. Microsoft didn't use that trick to become successful, because it only became workable after Microsoft was already highly successful. It's things like that that created the Sherman antitrust laws in the first place.
Right now, Disney and Pixar just had a falling out. Would Disney's last round of contract negotiations entail monopoly? It's an automatic no, because those actions hurt Disney instead of benefited them. Pixar felt free to say no. One of the reasons Microsoft was in violation was that Gateway, Dell, and others didn't feel free to say no.
This seems to be the kind of situation that makes it hard for many people to see the purpose of (or justice of) anti-monopoly laws. Microsoft was using its monopoly tactics against other software firms, and some software firms were in a position where it was suicidal to refuse Microsoft's settlments (such as the small software houses that made compression tools), but proving that monopoly existed took identifying third partys who didn't dare say no.
The FBI got into computers very early, purchasing some big iron mainframes in the 60's that became the base system for 20 years or so. When they upgraded in the 80s, delays and fears about them having enormous databases on average citizens left them with a system several congressmen criticized as obsolete before it was installed.
The FBI also tends to recruit two sharply separated types, cops and accountants. Cop types come from other law enforcement agencies, and include some agents with law degrees that have done previous work in DA's offices and such. Accountant types focus on econoomic crimes of the sort that can be uncovered by good audits, which are not the most glamorous part of the FBI's role. Guess who tends to get promoted faster.
So, the FBI has some people who are extremely knowledgable about computers, but often mostly about older UNIX or VAX types. They have some departments that are pretty knowledgable in a more general computing context, but these tend to be the ones that are acountant heavy, and particularly the ones that have accountants promoted to middle management. The FBI has tried to assemble units that are focused on investigating computer crime from some of these departments, but the results so far have been mixed at best. Your friend is probably dealing with a department that is mostly cop mentalities, and isn't expected to focus chiefly on the economic and computer aspects of the crimes they investigate - lord help you both if it isn't.
Great logic there - let the kid watch Barney or she'll grow up to be a felon. Your reply is to a poster who admits his kid sees some things he doesn't think are really good, but who has at least shown some concern, and tried to steer his child away from some of the things he thinks are negative influences. Sounds like a pretty good parent to me.
Hey world, I'm a parent. I didn't always manage to keep my kid from being exposed to commercial crap when she was growing up, though I tried. Please feel free to critcize every decision I made retroactively.
The biggest thing wrong with Disney IS the thing that's wrong with Barney. Both treat latch-key kids like their programs can be substituted for having a parent waiting when the kid gets home from pre-school and the kid will somehow miraculously grow up OK. Even if Disney or Barney was great literature in easy to comprehend, kid friendly form, that just doesn't work.
Granted - does that make my analogy wrong? It concevably could if all criminal acts began with the use of physical force and involved absolutely nothing else.
If there are other kinds of wrong doing, for example involving lieing rather than force, then it can be no more wrong to say that governments are merely the reperesentitives of some persons than it is to say the same thing about corporations. Are you saying that when a group of people work for a government, and lie to you, that is a government commiting a wrong, but when a group of people work for a corporation and lie to you, that is nothing but individuals committing the wrong?
As somebody besides Shakespeare said, "It's that 90% of lawyers that give the other 10% a bad name."
Sounds like you favor perpetual copyright. I don't blame you for that, but, have you considered some of these points.
The way the constitution says it, coyright is a quid pro quo. You create a work. You get rights for a time. Eventually, it enters the public domain. Quid - The public pays you by protecting your work for a time, and pro Quo - the public gets your work eventually. Right now, your quid has been lengthened from 14 years with 14 renewal to Life + 70. The public's pro Quo hasn't been strengthened to amtch.
For example, it's going to cost the public more to settle copyright disputes when some of them involve contracts written 125 years ago, where sometimes a dozen corporations have passed on assets during bankrupcy and such to muddy the waters. You or your heirs got all that extra time under the extensions, but you're not required to do anything extra, not even attach a codicil to your will that helps keep track of your copyrights so that those court cases will be easier to resolve. (In fact, even though life + 70 implies that ALL individual copyrights will be passed on to heirs, no one is required to actually make a will).
Poeple have looked at what written works make during a timeframe, and on average, current copyright law seems to reward an author whith 99.75% of what they would make over absolutely unlimited copyright. (That arguement was made to the U.S. supreme court in Eldred vrs. Reno, for those wanting to check a source). No one has found any fault with that math, so I'd suggest it fits your case, and is probably reasonably accurate for music and such as well as print. So, whatever unlimited copyright duration costs the public, that total cost at this point has to be weighed against not what it profits the creator, but 0.25% of that benefit. If the US went back to a 28 year copyright, the amount drops to about 85%, and I can see the society needing to make some efforts to protect an author's rights to what would average 15% of his or her total income, but when we're talking about a remaining quarter of one percent, how much effort is realistic?
Right you are. I think I got momentarily confused by the reference to a British guy shooting them. I was too busy trying to picture Val Kilmer with lousy teeth. Now you've got me wondering if this is another 'stuffed animals in the US in "defiance" of British rights' case - Winnie the Poo. I wonder if the British ever asked for 'their' lions back? People should see these, if only to understand that endangered species or no, some of that lion hunting looked like a vital necessity at the time.
Admit it. If Neo had rip-foo'ed the Architect's liver out through his nostrils right after the word "assiduous" you would have forgiven the rest of the film. If he'd followed with 50,000 monitors flying off the walls and imploding the archetect's dead, mangled body, you might have even voted Keanu a special Oscar for best "Woah!"
"Of course Moby Dick has a plot; it even has several. Most superficially; Ahab, maimed in body and spiritually scarred, seeks to find in the vast expanse of ocean the great beast that took his leg and his pride and kill it."
Erm... Hollywood calls that plot: Boy meets whale, boy loses whale, boy gets whale (whale gets boy?).
That's "The Ghost and the Darkness". The original pair of what you call "crazy zombie lions" are stuffed and exibited in a museum in Britain still. They really did kill all those people, at least according to the guys that finally bagged them. (Yes, here's another film based on a true story).
Mostly self educated. Mensa member at 14, started drinking at 15, dropped out of school at 17, acid at 18, heroin at 20, crack for the last 6 years or so, died duller than a bag of hammers.
By the time I made her acquantance, she was far from bright anymore, but when she had to sober up, she could still be superficially clever. (more on the "quote Eddie Izzard" level than thinking of something witty herself). Trouble was, she apparently put all remaining brain cells into getting more drugs. I never had to deal with her on a really personal level myself, but she made about 5 people's lives living hells with suicide threats, teary, drunken 2 am phone calls, threats to start hooking again is someone didn't help her get drugs (and it would "be all their fault", naturally), and crap like that.
On the bright side, her kid has three scholarships already guarenteed as a high school junior, and seems to have missed the self hatred part pretty well.