Sorry, James Randi doesn't call people "fucking morons". I've heard his call people "stupid", but not "fucking morons". And when he does so, he gives a reason why. You have not addressed the issue -- I mentioned his constant quoting of "Nobel prize-winner Steven Weinberg" who said "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." The problem is, any anthropologist or psychologist would disagree with the quote, and Weinberg is a subatomic physicist, not a psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, behaviourologist, theologian or philosopher. The "Nobel-prizewinner" tag is an appeal to authority -- but Weinberg is no more of an authority on the subject than I am. Furthermore, the Milgram experiment is absolute proof that it is authority that is the problem. The problems of religious authority are no different from Milgram's white coats.
If you can address that logically and coherently, please go ahead. If you can't, then please refrain from calling me names.
Not to mention that "phasing" in sci-fi has always been based on the naive interpretation of what "gaps" in matter mean. The idea that you could slip something through the gap between a nucleus and its orbital electrons is utterly risible. The forces in there are immense. On one level, it's like claiming you can slip a spaceship through the gap between stars and without having to worry about the gravity of the star... on a deeper level, you're claiming that charged particles can pass each other without blowing the electrons off atoms or potentially fusing the nuclei under the combined pressure of orbitals.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that anything that lives by the sword dies by the sword, and the term "phasing" started life by semi-scientific musings so can be roundly dismissed as not possible. The problem is that other "undemonstrated abilities" start with claimed demonstrations, which is why Randi analyses them by observation rather than merely by theory.
I've always been a fan since I saw the series James Randi: Psychic Investigator in the early nineties. Given the fad that was going round at the time for the paranormal, it was very reassuring for me as an adolescent to see the cases so completely deconstructed with logic.
What worries me, though, is to see the James Randi foundation aligning itself with the likes of Richard Dawkins.
A great part of the magician's art is the use of language for misdirection. Does Richard Dawkins's sophistry not bring him into the same class as the other charlatans the JR foundation seeks to uncloak?
I'm thinking in terms of appeal to authority (eg quoting high-energy physicist Steven Weinberg as a Nobel prize winner, sidestepping the fact that he is no authority whatsoever on human behaviour), preference for "assumed" language over "asserted" language, essentially taking his conclusion as a starting point etc.
Can you ever justify defending rationality with an irrational argument?
[Disclosure: I am not religious, although I was brought up in a Catholic household. I "lost my faith", as they say, several years ago, and hold no bad feeling towards people who chose to identify themselves as religious.]
I started it with "exactly", because I was backing you up. Lots of people do this. I won't change my practices simply because one poster wants me to. If there was still a "foe" option in Slashdot, I would mark you to remind me not to reply to you in the future, but there isn't, so I can't.
I've noticed a big change of political tactics, especially regarding gun control in the wake of our recent mass killings. There are a few new memes being bantered about in the media. "Weapons of war" is my new favorite. They used to call them 'assault weapons', but I can only guess the idea that any weapon is an assault weapon if it's used in an assault confounded some people. It ignores that any number of useful and common implements in this society have existed as weapons of war at one time or another.
After all, once upon a time, a lowly musket ignited by flint on steel was at the cutting edge of infantry warfare technology. Secondly, it construes a mental image, especially to the uninitiated, that differentiates a scary looking rifle from a less scary looking hunting rifle, even if the hunting rifle is arguably more lethal in many ways.
Wow - now there's an interesting argument. "A hunting rifle may possibly (but may possibly not) be more lethal than an assault rifle in various unspecified ways". One way: increased accuracy. Because a hunting rifle is fundamentally "one shot". Stalk, aim, shoot, animal dead. An assault rifle is designed for repeated use against moving targets. Hunting rifles aren't much good for a massacre, and assault rifles aren't much good for anything but an all-out assault..
My point was about the "GP" - the "Grandparent Post", or the one you were replying to. Mr Hanky was criticising the grammar of the original article, but he made the mistake of talking about "sentences" when he meant "clauses". When he talked about the first and second sentences, he meant the first and second clauses, because the first sentence was split into two clauses separated by a comma. The "third sentence" was the "third clause", i.e. the second sentence.
And there's even a bit in the Bible about the poor woman who gave pennies at the temple who was mocked by a rich man giving a larger sum, but proportionally less. Which is frequently read out in churches, alongside "when you give alms, do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. And most collection boxes are designed to hide the amount the donor gives. Even non-religious charity boxes are often designed with privacy in mind due to this (church) tradition. (Just so you know, I no longer believe in God or attend church. I just think it's not worth the bother criticising with incomplete information.)
Yes, but remember that "belief system" is a very broad thing, and Scientology is a great example of the blurred boundary between religion and pseudoscience. It lures people in with seemingly scientific methods to establish trust and authority, then once authority is achieved, it can push in the "belief" stuff, because (to oversimplify) you'll trust anyone in a white coat.
The worrying thing is that very few genuine scientists can avoid the pseudoscience trap and having established their authority, they'll either impose wilder and less supported claims, or they'll stop accepting any counter-evidence to their theories because they don't accept others' authority ("I won the Nobel prize, and you want me to believe a PhD thesis disproves my genius?!?!?")
In the end, we all have belief systems, and Scientology is just a very extreme (and dangerous) example of a simple human failing.
Interesting... do you remember how long ago this was? Any attempt to overturn precedent would have to be built on the Berne Convention, so if it was before the end of copyright registration, it might be arguable....
OK so that's me replying to myself twice in a row -- bad form, I know.
But after the last post I remembered stuff I'd read about the development of the record industry in the states. Basically, in the old days there wasn't really any such thing as a "cover", because hardly anyone wrote their own stuff, and everyone was recording exactly the same thing anyway. But "derivative works" were recognised as separate works in law, and record labels started working that to their advantage. They would get their artists to change one or two notes and words and claim it was a new "derivative work". This didn't get them any more money at this stage, because they were still bound by the licensing agreement they recorded under.
The goal, rather, was to become the canonical "standard" that the public wanted to hear. Say your song came with the line "baby baby ooo-ah" and you changed it to "baby baby ooo-ee" -- no-one else could record the "ooo-ee" version without your permission. Now the cost to the recording artist doesn't change, so there was no incentive to people coming after to go to the "original" when then slightly modified version was available for the same amount of money and was likely to get more sales. However, suddenly the original author gets half of what he got before, all for two words and two notes that don't really constitute an artistic change to the song.
So they changed the law to kill the practice, by requiring you to get specific permission before creating a substantially different version: a derivative work.
A well-intentioned law, then, but nothing comes without consequences.
In reality, Coulton's license to cover the song is invalid: he clearly changed the song drastically, so it is a derivative work -- that whole tune is hardly an incidental change. But there's no way Mix-A-Lot is going to legally challenge him on it, because he's just gained a truckload of cash by licensing out Coulton's tune -- far more than he'd get for suing Coulton for breaking the conditions of his license.
So the system's broken, because it's allowing people to create these derivative works against the law. Perhaps Coulton should be suing the Harry Fox agency for selling him the wrong license...?
Glee's fanbase is probably very much sympathetic to the plight of these small artists and thus news of being asses like this will alienate the young, liberal audience that a show like this appeals to.
Glee's mainstream pop and appeals to mainstream pop fans. I'm now tempted to go and browse Glee fan forums and see what the reactions are like there. Gleeforum.com won't let me use their search system without an account. Nice.
Funny how a show about naturally talented underdogs and everyone-should-be-proud-of-themselves processes their voices through every digital device known to man, even in the "acoustic" numbers, to the point where they're even more pop-perfect that the leading pop singers. The show was always one big ball of hypocrisy.
No, the Acidjazzed Evening case was not won in court -- it was settled out of court for an undisclosed some. So it tells us that Coulton would probably win in court, but the lawyers won't let it get that far. Fox will back down if he stands up. He probably won't get as much as he should, but he'll be a heck of a lot better off after it.
All of these people being stolen from would be content with so little as an off-screen credit through some blog post or something.
Don't be so naive. If you give a credit you're admitting that they other party has rights, and if they raise any legal case you get slammed for acting in "bad faith". If you don't acknowledge the rights holder, you can claim it was a genuine mistake and use a "good faith" defence, reducing potential damages. "Bad faith" may result in punitive damages, "good faith" may avoid that.
Which is why it's so stupid when YouTube uploaders put copyright notices for materials without copyright clearance -- they've just killed any "good faith" defence.
The basis is typically messed up US copyright laws (as I learned today from reading this thread and articles on the topic). In most jurisdictions, any cover gets protection on the "arrangement", but apparently you have to pay an extra license fee in the US for "derived works" copyrights. As several commenters have noted, this looks suspiciously like "registration", which the Berne Convention specifically bans -- the US recently (and belatedly) stopped requiring registration of works in order to (finally) come into line with its treaty obligations under the Convention.
Of course, your first question leads to an interesting legal quandary, because you've missed one critical case: covers performed without a license. Yes, these are illegal in and of themselves, but what happens to the rights? I mean, when you acquire a license to record without the "derivate works" rights, you can argue that there's a "quid pro quo" there, because I'm effectively getting a discounted royalty rate which I pay for by giving the original artist copyright over my arrangement. But if I haven't got a license at all, there is no contract between me and the composer, so surely my rights prevail....?
No wait, I'm wrong. Bloody US laws... apparently he has no rights to his arrangement, just to his recording. But as other commenters have noted, this is another case of the US disregarding its treaty obligations under the Berne Convention. I would love to see someone challenging that and getting the US in line with the civilised world, but there's little chance of that happening here....
Not only did you not RTFA, you also have no idea about the song. You probably know it by the first line: I... like... big... butts and-I can not lie...
The original was a rap -- it had no tune whatsoever. Jonathan Coulton wrote an entirely new tune for it, which didn't even follow the rythym of the original. It's his tune.
That much should be enough. The fact that they also ripped off his instrumental track is just the icing on the cake.
What you're looking at here is the potential sinking of Microsoft's current OS convergence strategy.
MS are pushing Metro on the desktop so that you'll find the Windows phone OS friendly and familiar. Furthermore, they want people to write Metro apps that work on your phone and desktop so that you'll want to have the same OS on both. They hope that this strategy will drag the entrenched iOS and Android users back to the Windows camp. But once this hits a stable version, people will be able to import all their Android apps onto the desktop, but not onto a Windows phone.
Desktop/phone convergence without the need for Windows phone -- it's Redmond's nightmare.
I might make a feature suggestion (although they're probably already thinking about it): a phone app manager. Remember when the iPod couldn't hold your entire music collection, and you ran iTunes to move stuff on and off? Now imagine all the Android apps you've ever bought running natively on your desktop, and when you're heading away for the weekend, you open the app manager and say which apps you want on the device, it sideloads them, and away you go. That would be very handy indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... a limited liability company that doesn't limit your liability? Isn't that slightly completely oxymoronic?
If you can address that logically and coherently, please go ahead. If you can't, then please refrain from calling me names.
At African trade shows, speaking to African journalists. Next question.
Not to mention that "phasing" in sci-fi has always been based on the naive interpretation of what "gaps" in matter mean. The idea that you could slip something through the gap between a nucleus and its orbital electrons is utterly risible. The forces in there are immense. On one level, it's like claiming you can slip a spaceship through the gap between stars and without having to worry about the gravity of the star... on a deeper level, you're claiming that charged particles can pass each other without blowing the electrons off atoms or potentially fusing the nuclei under the combined pressure of orbitals.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that anything that lives by the sword dies by the sword, and the term "phasing" started life by semi-scientific musings so can be roundly dismissed as not possible. The problem is that other "undemonstrated abilities" start with claimed demonstrations, which is why Randi analyses them by observation rather than merely by theory.
"Not tricks, Michael, illusions. A trick is something a whore does for money"
Not knowing the quote, and given the structure of the sentence, I can't help but read that in KITT voice....
I've always been a fan since I saw the series James Randi: Psychic Investigator in the early nineties. Given the fad that was going round at the time for the paranormal, it was very reassuring for me as an adolescent to see the cases so completely deconstructed with logic.
What worries me, though, is to see the James Randi foundation aligning itself with the likes of Richard Dawkins.
A great part of the magician's art is the use of language for misdirection. Does Richard Dawkins's sophistry not bring him into the same class as the other charlatans the JR foundation seeks to uncloak?
I'm thinking in terms of appeal to authority (eg quoting high-energy physicist Steven Weinberg as a Nobel prize winner, sidestepping the fact that he is no authority whatsoever on human behaviour), preference for "assumed" language over "asserted" language, essentially taking his conclusion as a starting point etc.
Can you ever justify defending rationality with an irrational argument?
[Disclosure: I am not religious, although I was brought up in a Catholic household. I "lost my faith", as they say, several years ago, and hold no bad feeling towards people who chose to identify themselves as religious.]
I started it with "exactly", because I was backing you up. Lots of people do this. I won't change my practices simply because one poster wants me to. If there was still a "foe" option in Slashdot, I would mark you to remind me not to reply to you in the future, but there isn't, so I can't.
I've noticed a big change of political tactics, especially regarding gun control in the wake of our recent mass killings. There are a few new memes being bantered about in the media. "Weapons of war" is my new favorite. They used to call them 'assault weapons', but I can only guess the idea that any weapon is an assault weapon if it's used in an assault confounded some people. It ignores that any number of useful and common implements in this society have existed as weapons of war at one time or another.
After all, once upon a time, a lowly musket ignited by flint on steel was at the cutting edge of infantry warfare technology. Secondly, it construes a mental image, especially to the uninitiated, that differentiates a scary looking rifle from a less scary looking hunting rifle, even if the hunting rifle is arguably more lethal in many ways.
Wow - now there's an interesting argument. "A hunting rifle may possibly (but may possibly not) be more lethal than an assault rifle in various unspecified ways". One way: increased accuracy. Because a hunting rifle is fundamentally "one shot". Stalk, aim, shoot, animal dead. An assault rifle is designed for repeated use against moving targets. Hunting rifles aren't much good for a massacre, and assault rifles aren't much good for anything but an all-out assault..
My point was about the "GP" - the "Grandparent Post", or the one you were replying to. Mr Hanky was criticising the grammar of the original article, but he made the mistake of talking about "sentences" when he meant "clauses". When he talked about the first and second sentences, he meant the first and second clauses, because the first sentence was split into two clauses separated by a comma. The "third sentence" was the "third clause", i.e. the second sentence.
And there's even a bit in the Bible about the poor woman who gave pennies at the temple who was mocked by a rich man giving a larger sum, but proportionally less. Which is frequently read out in churches, alongside "when you give alms, do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. And most collection boxes are designed to hide the amount the donor gives. Even non-religious charity boxes are often designed with privacy in mind due to this (church) tradition. (Just so you know, I no longer believe in God or attend church. I just think it's not worth the bother criticising with incomplete information.)
Yes, but remember that "belief system" is a very broad thing, and Scientology is a great example of the blurred boundary between religion and pseudoscience. It lures people in with seemingly scientific methods to establish trust and authority, then once authority is achieved, it can push in the "belief" stuff, because (to oversimplify) you'll trust anyone in a white coat.
The worrying thing is that very few genuine scientists can avoid the pseudoscience trap and having established their authority, they'll either impose wilder and less supported claims, or they'll stop accepting any counter-evidence to their theories because they don't accept others' authority ("I won the Nobel prize, and you want me to believe a PhD thesis disproves my genius?!?!?")
In the end, we all have belief systems, and Scientology is just a very extreme (and dangerous) example of a simple human failing.
I am sorry, where is the 3rd sentence in the content quoted? I am seeing only 2 sentences here. Also, the 2nd sentence is not after the comma.
Exactly. What's that rule about comments criticising grammar always having chronic errors themselves...? The GP needs to learn what a "clause" is....
Interesting... do you remember how long ago this was? Any attempt to overturn precedent would have to be built on the Berne Convention, so if it was before the end of copyright registration, it might be arguable....
OK so that's me replying to myself twice in a row -- bad form, I know.
But after the last post I remembered stuff I'd read about the development of the record industry in the states. Basically, in the old days there wasn't really any such thing as a "cover", because hardly anyone wrote their own stuff, and everyone was recording exactly the same thing anyway. But "derivative works" were recognised as separate works in law, and record labels started working that to their advantage. They would get their artists to change one or two notes and words and claim it was a new "derivative work". This didn't get them any more money at this stage, because they were still bound by the licensing agreement they recorded under.
The goal, rather, was to become the canonical "standard" that the public wanted to hear. Say your song came with the line "baby baby ooo-ah" and you changed it to "baby baby ooo-ee" -- no-one else could record the "ooo-ee" version without your permission. Now the cost to the recording artist doesn't change, so there was no incentive to people coming after to go to the "original" when then slightly modified version was available for the same amount of money and was likely to get more sales. However, suddenly the original author gets half of what he got before, all for two words and two notes that don't really constitute an artistic change to the song.
So they changed the law to kill the practice, by requiring you to get specific permission before creating a substantially different version: a derivative work.
A well-intentioned law, then, but nothing comes without consequences.
In reality, Coulton's license to cover the song is invalid: he clearly changed the song drastically, so it is a derivative work -- that whole tune is hardly an incidental change. But there's no way Mix-A-Lot is going to legally challenge him on it, because he's just gained a truckload of cash by licensing out Coulton's tune -- far more than he'd get for suing Coulton for breaking the conditions of his license.
So the system's broken, because it's allowing people to create these derivative works against the law. Perhaps Coulton should be suing the Harry Fox agency for selling him the wrong license...?
Glee's fanbase is probably very much sympathetic to the plight of these small artists and thus news of being asses like this will alienate the young, liberal audience that a show like this appeals to.
Glee's mainstream pop and appeals to mainstream pop fans. I'm now tempted to go and browse Glee fan forums and see what the reactions are like there. Gleeforum.com won't let me use their search system without an account. Nice.
Funny how a show about naturally talented underdogs and everyone-should-be-proud-of-themselves processes their voices through every digital device known to man, even in the "acoustic" numbers, to the point where they're even more pop-perfect that the leading pop singers. The show was always one big ball of hypocrisy.
No, the Acidjazzed Evening case was not won in court -- it was settled out of court for an undisclosed some. So it tells us that Coulton would probably win in court, but the lawyers won't let it get that far. Fox will back down if he stands up. He probably won't get as much as he should, but he'll be a heck of a lot better off after it.
All of these people being stolen from would be content with so little as an off-screen credit through some blog post or something.
Don't be so naive. If you give a credit you're admitting that they other party has rights, and if they raise any legal case you get slammed for acting in "bad faith". If you don't acknowledge the rights holder, you can claim it was a genuine mistake and use a "good faith" defence, reducing potential damages. "Bad faith" may result in punitive damages, "good faith" may avoid that.
Which is why it's so stupid when YouTube uploaders put copyright notices for materials without copyright clearance -- they've just killed any "good faith" defence.
UNLESS they stole his recording.
They did.
In which case, they are is serious monkey poo...
I don't remember any poo mentioned in Code Monkey...
The basis is typically messed up US copyright laws (as I learned today from reading this thread and articles on the topic). In most jurisdictions, any cover gets protection on the "arrangement", but apparently you have to pay an extra license fee in the US for "derived works" copyrights. As several commenters have noted, this looks suspiciously like "registration", which the Berne Convention specifically bans -- the US recently (and belatedly) stopped requiring registration of works in order to (finally) come into line with its treaty obligations under the Convention.
Of course, your first question leads to an interesting legal quandary, because you've missed one critical case: covers performed without a license. Yes, these are illegal in and of themselves, but what happens to the rights? I mean, when you acquire a license to record without the "derivate works" rights, you can argue that there's a "quid pro quo" there, because I'm effectively getting a discounted royalty rate which I pay for by giving the original artist copyright over my arrangement. But if I haven't got a license at all, there is no contract between me and the composer, so surely my rights prevail....?
No wait, I'm wrong. Bloody US laws... apparently he has no rights to his arrangement, just to his recording. But as other commenters have noted, this is another case of the US disregarding its treaty obligations under the Berne Convention. I would love to see someone challenging that and getting the US in line with the civilised world, but there's little chance of that happening here....
Not only did you not RTFA, you also have no idea about the song. You probably know it by the first line: I... like... big... butts and-I can not lie...
The original was a rap -- it had no tune whatsoever. Jonathan Coulton wrote an entirely new tune for it, which didn't even follow the rythym of the original. It's his tune.
That much should be enough. The fact that they also ripped off his instrumental track is just the icing on the cake.
However, I think they'd want to settle very, very quickly.
He definitely wrote it, but I still believe it was sung by a woman....
What you're looking at here is the potential sinking of Microsoft's current OS convergence strategy.
MS are pushing Metro on the desktop so that you'll find the Windows phone OS friendly and familiar. Furthermore, they want people to write Metro apps that work on your phone and desktop so that you'll want to have the same OS on both. They hope that this strategy will drag the entrenched iOS and Android users back to the Windows camp. But once this hits a stable version, people will be able to import all their Android apps onto the desktop, but not onto a Windows phone.
Desktop/phone convergence without the need for Windows phone -- it's Redmond's nightmare.
I might make a feature suggestion (although they're probably already thinking about it): a phone app manager. Remember when the iPod couldn't hold your entire music collection, and you ran iTunes to move stuff on and off? Now imagine all the Android apps you've ever bought running natively on your desktop, and when you're heading away for the weekend, you open the app manager and say which apps you want on the device, it sideloads them, and away you go. That would be very handy indeed.