How about a parked-site blacklist? It could be implemented by a Firefox plugin, or an app that modifies the hosts file for users of other browsers. I can imagine it wouldn't be hard to convince even the least IT literate user that this is a Good Thing.
Opera's gripe may superficially appear to be the coupling of current web content with Internet Explorer, but really their complaint is the coupling of the web with computers. I mean, come on! Who wants to fork out for a PC just to browse the web and send emails? But right now, that's what you've got to do, because the threads of the web aren't as closely tied if you're not on Windows..
While webpages are written for a non-compliant PC-based browser, instead of to the agreed standards, the internet is trapped on PCs. If the web wasn't for the huge number of IE-only pages, your average PVR would probably now have an ethernet socket and a copy of Opera installed for use on your shiny new HD TV, and more people would be browsing on their mobiles.
I'm a bit confused as to why you cried "bollocks" to my post. I did, after all, state that the prevailing view, and the view of the church, was that the world was round. I'm presuming it's the "nor anybody else" in the following that is your objection:
Neither the church, nor anybody else said the world is flat.
Not true. A few crazy zealots state that the world was flat, based on an over-literal reading of a few bible passages. The mainstream believed differently, of course.
Just like today:
a fringe group of "Christians" on the north-western corner of the world believe that evolution is heresy, but the main established Christian sects in the rest of the world are perfectly happy with common descent and all that.
a minority of Muslim's think that blowing up a London bus full of innocent people will get them a virgin-filled boudoir in the afterlife, while the establishment condemns bombing as a sin.
First you say By the nature of the problem, shaping traffic patterns can involve local actions that look non-optimal but have a positive effect on the overall system., then you'll move onto shaping behaviour patterns and finally shaping thought patterns. And that's commie talk.
Unless you're doing it for an advertising agency, that is.
HAL.
The church never said it was flat!
on
Can Time Slow Down?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Two monks did, though. Very convenient that they did, because it gave a man with an axe to grind (whether it was against religion in general or the Vatican in particular) a way to discredit the Catholic Church.
Read Late Birth of a Flat Earth, one of the essays in Stephen Jay Gould's book Dinosaur in a Haystack. I'll not spoil the story for you by quoting any more than this: the supposed Dark and Medieval consensus for a flat
earth - is entirely mythological.
(One thing missing from the article. No seafaring nation could ever have believed that the world was flat. Ships fall below the horizon. Distant lands fall below the horizon. Any sailor afraid of "falling off" would be... well... a farmer.(
In most jurisdictions these rights would include transferring cd's to mp3's for personal use.
Yes, quite right. That's the RIAA's whole point. By putting it in a Kazaa shared folder, the file has intentionally been made available for public use. The law protects files created for personal use, and the plaintiff can demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the file was not created for personal use. ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury. If you look at the monitor you will see that the user has to specifically chose the option 'Share these files'. Thus it is clear that the defendant knew that these files were not for his personal use, and would be available to millions of users, from California to China, from Washington to Woolloomoolloo, from Texas to Timbuktu.")
Equally important many of the sources are not primary and often no good.
Yeah, but at least we can check secondary sources. Primary sources are usually subscription only! Yes, the students will have access to the references (either in the library or via Athens, Blackwells, etc) but do the site admins...?
Herein lies WP's core dilemma: do we prefer verifiable information from unreliable secondary sources or reliable information from unverifiable primary sources?
...and because they've already given away the rights to their two (very useful) articles under the GPDL, they're powerless to do anything. (Just try to retract one of your articles. Go on.)
If or when the users find out that the site has been corrupted. But Jimbelzebub won't let that happen any time soon. Hence why only a few of us have left.
You can't sue in a US court and ask that they follow Tunisian law -- nobody in that court, including the judge, is trained in it!
Of course not -- that's not what I'm saying. You sue in Tunisia, Tunisia rules the other party in breach of contract and declares the contract void. The US court doesn't need to know Tunisian law, it needs to look at whether the plaintiff's IP is being used by the defendant (it is) and whether there is any other contract, whether implied or explicit, outside of the GPL. (The Terms of Use on Sourceforge may be important here, for example.) The problem with that is that the plaintiff can come back saying that the GPL specifies that you may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License which means that a successful defense on the grounds that Sourceforge specifies US jurisdiction would leave them open to being in breach of the GPL anyway.
Breaks for that country, you mean. To draw a parallel, if Tunisia considers quoting your post in my reply a violation of copyright, you might be able to get a judgement against me there -- but that judgement doesn't make a whit of difference while I'm living and doing business somewhere fair use applies.
I'm sorry, that's not a valid comparison. When I joined up, I agreed to the following (from the Ts&Cs)
The Terms and the relationship between each user and SourceForge shall be governed by the laws of the State of California without regard to its conflict of law provisions and each party shall submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of the courts located within the county of Santa Clara, California.
So wherever I am, wherever I go, it's Santa Clara's laws that apply. However, the various GPLs make no claim on a geographical jurisdiction. The default position is normally that any of the signatories may initiate legal action in their home jurisdiction. Now, should a Tunisia developer object when his code gets shifted to GPL3 and gets a court judgement in Tunisia, it is not just a problem in Tunisia, because in the absence of any noted jurisdiction the contract can be assumed to have been "signed" under Tunisian law!
I suspect the FSF have previously considered this problem but chose to ignore it. What's the alternative? Write US law into the "international" GPL? Unthinkable! Us "foreign" developers wouldn't have stood for that!
I'm sorry, but I fail to believe that the "any future version" clause means anything legally. I'm pretty confident that it wouldn't hold up in the UK, as it inequitably allows one single party to change the contract arbitrarily.
Now, this may seem a bit of a straw man, but stick with me. Assuming the clausing is legally valid, Richard Stallman could rewrite the various GPL licenses as follows:
1. This license grants Richard Stallman exclusive, sublicensable rights to the work. Anyone seeking to use this work should obtain a valid license from Mr R. Stallman.
Does that seem absurd to you? It does to me. No court would accept my signature on a contract if I had signed it before the contract had been drafted (eg: contract signed 1st Jan 2001, contract mentions CAN SPAM act, judge knows I hadn't read the contract) and the same must go for code. Now, while I'm willing to accept that US law may allow for such an abberration, the FSF's licenses do not specify US jurisdiction, so any contributer could bring a copyright violation claim in their own contry. Thus, if there is one country in the world that doesn't see this change as valid, the whole system breaks.
Which actually means there's no such thing as a legal Linux distro. Interesting....
Why are you so sure that an accidental, small in scope and promptly corrected copyright violation will not be handled in a similar manner?
Because you cannot accidentally download and use someone else's source code, whereas you might accidentally create a company name or logo that is similar or identical to one of your competitors'. Asus did acidentally fail to upload the modified source code to their site, as has been pointed out innumerable times on this thread, they did not break the license because they made it available in a reasonable time after receiving a request to do so. Had they not done, only then would they have been in breach of the license, and hence copyright.
Asus's accident did not break any copyright. No harm, no foul.
Releasing code on a forum that made such a condition would constitute licensing, just like publishing it in a book called Code You Can Use would.
It doesn't make that much difference how the license comes into being, as long as the author explicitly agrees to it. (It is possible to argue "implicit consent" in certain circumstances, but IANAL and it's a pretty complex area of law.)
The reason you're safe is not that you're small fry -- the GPL says that if you distribute derivative programs or systems, these have to be under the same license. Personal use is not distribution.
Many web companies are thought to have been taking advantage of this for years. It is claimed that many of the web services we receive are based on in-house improvements of open source code. As their in-house version is never distributed, there is no requirement to distribute the source code (which would help their competitors.
If you wish to distribute something incorporating GPL/LGPL/[insert-name-of-license-here] code without adopting the license, you have to contact all named contributors in the version history for their permission (it is, after all, their work).
For evaluation we focus on two classes of typists. The first
will be English language authors. For this corpus we will use
the complete works of Shakespeare[27] from Project Gutenberg
[23].
Forsooth! I have sampled of thy research and verily did I find thy conclusions most useful to my plight. 'Tis now true that I can express my pose with heretofore unimagineable prolificity.
Hast though more learning that though mayst enlighten vs* further? I should, sir, be forever indebted to thy humble seruice.*
HAL.
Prior to the modern period (Shakespeare spoke/wrote Middle English, not Modern English), the letter v was simply a variant form of u, vsed when the the sentence was begun with "v" or "u". It neuer appeared inside a word. Even as a corpus of Middle English, your corpus was inualid, as the Gutenberg version was "corrected"/"reuersioned" by some editor, vnthinking of the fact that Middle English is a different language from modern English.
Looks like one presses ctrl+shift (or equivalent) then some key indicating which accent you want, which induces a modal change. The next character typed acquires the selected accent.
Actually it would be nice to have this on standard US keyboards also; it would make it easier to type the occasional email in French or whatever.
In fact, if you're running Windows then you've already got several keyboard mappings installed following the same pattern, even though you don't use them.
If you look at the website, "inventive step" appears to have been the replacing of the normal keys next to the shift keys with a second shift. They call this "4 shift-keys". I'm assuming they mean four modifier keys. Is it possible to patent using a number of modifier keys? Heck, doesn't MS's keyboard layout tool already let you do that anyway? (It's not installed on this computer and I don't have admin rights -- I'll check at home tonight.) I bet their "software component" was written in MSKLC. Oh, I so hope it is... that must surely constitute prior art in itself....>/p>
and you can find this kind of narrative structure pretty much everywhere you look.
Even in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte (Magical Flute) opera (1791)
Which is why I said modern western narrative. If we want to compare Star Wars with historical European narratives, then we really need to talk about Count Dooku and the Trade Federation in episode 2. When Dooku and the ambassadors claimed to be working against Sidious, and Obi-Wan defeated them, we were looking at the potential for a Greek Tragedy, the hero bringing about the good-guys' downfall. Imagine if Dooku had been telling the truth. Imagine if we had seen Obi-Wan capture the plans for the Death Star and place them directly in the hands of the Emperor. That would have been
But no... we got "good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and heroes don't make mistakes". Very dull. Very 21st century.
The original Star Wars leaned very heavily on Eastern narrative traditions (drawing particularly on Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa.
The Eastern narrative commonly relies on two classes of hero: one who is pure of heart and destined for great things and one who initially joins the quest out of self-interest, but finds himself affected by the actions and idealism of his companions. The first type cannot succeed without the strength of the second, and the second cannot succeed without the first showing them the path to enlightenment.
This archetype can be traced back at least as far as Journey to the West (circa 1590, the source for the TV series Monkey) in which the pure hearted monk Tripitaka (Xuánzàng) is aided by three characters, all of whom have fallen out of favour with the gods and seek redemption.
Luke is pure archetype number 1. Han Solo was archetype 2, an unreconstructed rogue even to the point of casually shooting Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina. When he flew back at the Death Star scene, he redeemed himself. Even so, in ESB he was still not fully converted, planning to head off just before the imperial attack started. His buddy Lando Calrisian stepped in to bolster the "soul in need of redemption" role, and by the end of the film, both Lando and Han were fully redeemed. Who did that leave for ROTJ? Yup, the big one: Darth Vader, whose hatred, bitterness and resentment was purged by love.
Now, when Lucas redid the original trilogy, he took away that first defining moment in Han's character, that cold-blooded, unflinching murder that showed us just how much of heartless, self-driven piece of scum he was. This was when Lucas started moving back into modern Western narrative. In the West, bad guys don't get reformed -- they get "what's coming to them!"
By the time he finally wrote the first three episodes, any aspirations to Eastern narrative was gone and he we had good people who were good, evil people who were evil and one good guy who was stupid and let the bad guys win. No-one was redeemed, and we made do with western "punishment": Maul, Dooku and Grievous were all cut to pieces before death.
The majority of posts seem to focus on the fact that Kiss make loads of money from merchandising and loads of money from touring and say "so Simmons is wrong". Look, the guy is the exception to the rule. Most musicians are bland and uninteresting and all the better for it. Kiss, like many of their contemporaries, made themselves into entertainers, not just musicians. Many rappers and high-camp pop acts follow this model, with extravagant stage "experiences", but it just wouldnt work for, say, Damien Rice.
Now I never got much training in this sort of thing, but as I understand it the recommended sitting position places the majority of your weight on your feet, not your seat. All good computer chairs are designed with the assumption that you do this. You cannot do stepping exercises in a computer chair, because putting your weight on your feet as you step would lift you out of your seat and/or push your chair back.
Also, the stepping-machine was always sold on a public misconception of exercise: hard work = good exercise. Stair-climbing wears you out quickly not because you use a lot of energy, but because it exercises such a small number of muscles. It's bad exercise, because it doesn't provide a balanced workout.
The best exercise I know of is still swimming. It exercises almost every single muscle in the body simultaneously. Because the work is spread out, you can keep going for much longer and burn far more calories than by doing anything else. You climb out of the pool feeling tired, but not dead like you would after a brief spell at the gym.
They translated it from Hebrew to English (not Dutch) -- hence the availability of quotes in English.
The Reg also initially made the mistake of trusting their source unquestioningly and didn't think to check whether Babelfish actually had a Hebrew option (I'm surprised how few of you checked!), but to their credit, they've updated. Check it out... there's a new culprit in the frame, but I won't name names for fear of libel suits if it's not true.
Slashdot Mirror
Domain name farming should be killed.
How about a parked-site blacklist? It could be implemented by a Firefox plugin, or an app that modifies the hosts file for users of other browsers. I can imagine it wouldn't be hard to convince even the least IT literate user that this is a Good Thing.
HAL.
...on the head?
Opera's gripe may superficially appear to be the coupling of current web content with Internet Explorer, but really their complaint is the coupling of the web with computers. I mean, come on! Who wants to fork out for a PC just to browse the web and send emails? But right now, that's what you've got to do, because the threads of the web aren't as closely tied if you're not on Windows..
While webpages are written for a non-compliant PC-based browser, instead of to the agreed standards, the internet is trapped on PCs. If the web wasn't for the huge number of IE-only pages, your average PVR would probably now have an ethernet socket and a copy of Opera installed for use on your shiny new HD TV, and more people would be browsing on their mobiles.
HAL.
I'm a bit confused as to why you cried "bollocks" to my post. I did, after all, state that the prevailing view, and the view of the church, was that the world was round. I'm presuming it's the "nor anybody else" in the following that is your objection:
Neither the church, nor anybody else said the world is flat.
Not true. A few crazy zealots state that the world was flat, based on an over-literal reading of a few bible passages. The mainstream believed differently, of course.
Just like today:
HAL.
'Cos you sound like a red, boy.
First you say By the nature of the problem, shaping traffic patterns can involve local actions that look non-optimal but have a positive effect on the overall system., then you'll move onto shaping behaviour patterns and finally shaping thought patterns. And that's commie talk.
Unless you're doing it for an advertising agency, that is.
HAL.
Two monks did, though. Very convenient that they did, because it gave a man with an axe to grind (whether it was against religion in general or the Vatican in particular) a way to discredit the Catholic Church.
Read Late Birth of a Flat Earth, one of the essays in Stephen Jay Gould's book Dinosaur in a Haystack. I'll not spoil the story for you by quoting any more than this: the supposed Dark and Medieval consensus for a flat earth - is entirely mythological.
(One thing missing from the article. No seafaring nation could ever have believed that the world was flat. Ships fall below the horizon. Distant lands fall below the horizon. Any sailor afraid of "falling off" would be ... well ... a farmer.(
HAL.
In most jurisdictions these rights would include transferring cd's to mp3's for personal use.
Yes, quite right. That's the RIAA's whole point. By putting it in a Kazaa shared folder, the file has intentionally been made available for public use. The law protects files created for personal use, and the plaintiff can demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the file was not created for personal use. ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury. If you look at the monitor you will see that the user has to specifically chose the option 'Share these files'. Thus it is clear that the defendant knew that these files were not for his personal use, and would be available to millions of users, from California to China, from Washington to Woolloomoolloo, from Texas to Timbuktu.")
HAL.
Equally important many of the sources are not primary and often no good.
Yeah, but at least we can check secondary sources. Primary sources are usually subscription only! Yes, the students will have access to the references (either in the library or via Athens, Blackwells, etc) but do the site admins...?
Herein lies WP's core dilemma: do we prefer verifiable information from unreliable secondary sources or reliable information from unverifiable primary sources?
HAL.
...and because they've already given away the rights to their two (very useful) articles under the GPDL, they're powerless to do anything. (Just try to retract one of your articles. Go on.)
HAL.
If or when the users find out that the site has been corrupted. But Jimbelzebub won't let that happen any time soon. Hence why only a few of us have left.
HAL.
1: It's not what they say that matters, it's how they're seen. And plenty of people see them as a definitive source of information.
2: It's not what they say that matters, it's what they do. They say they're neutral, but some pigs are more neutral than others....
Hal.
In the photo (in TFA) there's bad posture and trailing cables. How this got past health and safety I'll never know.
HAL.
You can't sue in a US court and ask that they follow Tunisian law -- nobody in that court, including the judge, is trained in it!
Of course not -- that's not what I'm saying. You sue in Tunisia, Tunisia rules the other party in breach of contract and declares the contract void. The US court doesn't need to know Tunisian law, it needs to look at whether the plaintiff's IP is being used by the defendant (it is) and whether there is any other contract, whether implied or explicit, outside of the GPL. (The Terms of Use on Sourceforge may be important here, for example.) The problem with that is that the plaintiff can come back saying that the GPL specifies that you may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License which means that a successful defense on the grounds that Sourceforge specifies US jurisdiction would leave them open to being in breach of the GPL anyway.
I'm sorry, but the GPL is chronically flawed.
HAL.
Breaks for that country, you mean. To draw a parallel, if Tunisia considers quoting your post in my reply a violation of copyright, you might be able to get a judgement against me there -- but that judgement doesn't make a whit of difference while I'm living and doing business somewhere fair use applies.
I'm sorry, that's not a valid comparison. When I joined up, I agreed to the following (from the Ts&Cs)
So wherever I am, wherever I go, it's Santa Clara's laws that apply. However, the various GPLs make no claim on a geographical jurisdiction. The default position is normally that any of the signatories may initiate legal action in their home jurisdiction. Now, should a Tunisia developer object when his code gets shifted to GPL3 and gets a court judgement in Tunisia, it is not just a problem in Tunisia, because in the absence of any noted jurisdiction the contract can be assumed to have been "signed" under Tunisian law!I suspect the FSF have previously considered this problem but chose to ignore it. What's the alternative? Write US law into the "international" GPL? Unthinkable! Us "foreign" developers wouldn't have stood for that!
HAL.
I'm sorry, but I fail to believe that the "any future version" clause means anything legally. I'm pretty confident that it wouldn't hold up in the UK, as it inequitably allows one single party to change the contract arbitrarily.
Now, this may seem a bit of a straw man, but stick with me. Assuming the clausing is legally valid, Richard Stallman could rewrite the various GPL licenses as follows:
Does that seem absurd to you? It does to me. No court would accept my signature on a contract if I had signed it before the contract had been drafted (eg: contract signed 1st Jan 2001, contract mentions CAN SPAM act, judge knows I hadn't read the contract) and the same must go for code. Now, while I'm willing to accept that US law may allow for such an abberration, the FSF's licenses do not specify US jurisdiction, so any contributer could bring a copyright violation claim in their own contry. Thus, if there is one country in the world that doesn't see this change as valid, the whole system breaks.
Which actually means there's no such thing as a legal Linux distro. Interesting....
HAL.
Why are you so sure that an accidental, small in scope and promptly corrected copyright violation will not be handled in a similar manner?
Because you cannot accidentally download and use someone else's source code, whereas you might accidentally create a company name or logo that is similar or identical to one of your competitors'. Asus did acidentally fail to upload the modified source code to their site, as has been pointed out innumerable times on this thread, they did not break the license because they made it available in a reasonable time after receiving a request to do so. Had they not done, only then would they have been in breach of the license, and hence copyright.
Asus's accident did not break any copyright. No harm, no foul.
HAL.
No, he's saying that patents and trademarks are different items and covered by different laws.
Compare theft and assault. Both are equally illegal, but the crimes are different so the laws -- hence also the punishments -- are different.
HAL.
Releasing code on a forum that made such a condition would constitute licensing, just like publishing it in a book called Code You Can Use would.
It doesn't make that much difference how the license comes into being, as long as the author explicitly agrees to it. (It is possible to argue "implicit consent" in certain circumstances, but IANAL and it's a pretty complex area of law.)
HAL.
The reason you're safe is not that you're small fry -- the GPL says that if you distribute derivative programs or systems, these have to be under the same license. Personal use is not distribution.
Many web companies are thought to have been taking advantage of this for years. It is claimed that many of the web services we receive are based on in-house improvements of open source code. As their in-house version is never distributed, there is no requirement to distribute the source code (which would help their competitors.
If you wish to distribute something incorporating GPL/LGPL/[insert-name-of-license-here] code without adopting the license, you have to contact all named contributors in the version history for their permission (it is, after all, their work).
HAL.
From your research paper:
Forsooth! I have sampled of thy research and verily did I find thy conclusions most useful to my plight. 'Tis now true that I can express my pose with heretofore unimagineable prolificity.
Hast though more learning that though mayst enlighten vs* further? I should, sir, be forever indebted to thy humble seruice.*
HAL.
Prior to the modern period (Shakespeare spoke/wrote Middle English, not Modern English), the letter v was simply a variant form of u, vsed when the the sentence was begun with "v" or "u". It neuer appeared inside a word. Even as a corpus of Middle English, your corpus was inualid, as the Gutenberg version was "corrected"/"reuersioned" by some editor, vnthinking of the fact that Middle English is a different language from modern English.
Looks like one presses ctrl+shift (or equivalent) then some key indicating which accent you want, which induces a modal change. The next character typed acquires the selected accent. Actually it would be nice to have this on standard US keyboards also; it would make it easier to type the occasional email in French or whatever.
You already do. Check out the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (for Windows 2000, XP/2003 and Vista).
In fact, if you're running Windows then you've already got several keyboard mappings installed following the same pattern, even though you don't use them.
If you look at the website, "inventive step" appears to have been the replacing of the normal keys next to the shift keys with a second shift. They call this "4 shift-keys". I'm assuming they mean four modifier keys. Is it possible to patent using a number of modifier keys? Heck, doesn't MS's keyboard layout tool already let you do that anyway? (It's not installed on this computer and I don't have admin rights -- I'll check at home tonight.) I bet their "software component" was written in MSKLC. Oh, I so hope it is... that must surely constitute prior art in itself....>/p>
HAL.
and you can find this kind of narrative structure pretty much everywhere you look. Even in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte (Magical Flute) opera (1791)
Which is why I said modern western narrative. If we want to compare Star Wars with historical European narratives, then we really need to talk about Count Dooku and the Trade Federation in episode 2. When Dooku and the ambassadors claimed to be working against Sidious, and Obi-Wan defeated them, we were looking at the potential for a Greek Tragedy, the hero bringing about the good-guys' downfall. Imagine if Dooku had been telling the truth. Imagine if we had seen Obi-Wan capture the plans for the Death Star and place them directly in the hands of the Emperor. That would have been
But no... we got "good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and heroes don't make mistakes". Very dull. Very 21st century.
HAL.
The original Star Wars leaned very heavily on Eastern narrative traditions (drawing particularly on Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa.
The Eastern narrative commonly relies on two classes of hero: one who is pure of heart and destined for great things and one who initially joins the quest out of self-interest, but finds himself affected by the actions and idealism of his companions. The first type cannot succeed without the strength of the second, and the second cannot succeed without the first showing them the path to enlightenment.
This archetype can be traced back at least as far as Journey to the West (circa 1590, the source for the TV series Monkey) in which the pure hearted monk Tripitaka (Xuánzàng) is aided by three characters, all of whom have fallen out of favour with the gods and seek redemption.
Luke is pure archetype number 1. Han Solo was archetype 2, an unreconstructed rogue even to the point of casually shooting Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina. When he flew back at the Death Star scene, he redeemed himself. Even so, in ESB he was still not fully converted, planning to head off just before the imperial attack started. His buddy Lando Calrisian stepped in to bolster the "soul in need of redemption" role, and by the end of the film, both Lando and Han were fully redeemed. Who did that leave for ROTJ? Yup, the big one: Darth Vader, whose hatred, bitterness and resentment was purged by love.
Now, when Lucas redid the original trilogy, he took away that first defining moment in Han's character, that cold-blooded, unflinching murder that showed us just how much of heartless, self-driven piece of scum he was. This was when Lucas started moving back into modern Western narrative. In the West, bad guys don't get reformed -- they get "what's coming to them!"
By the time he finally wrote the first three episodes, any aspirations to Eastern narrative was gone and he we had good people who were good, evil people who were evil and one good guy who was stupid and let the bad guys win. No-one was redeemed, and we made do with western "punishment": Maul, Dooku and Grievous were all cut to pieces before death.
Oh, if only the story had stayed eastern....
HAL.
The majority of posts seem to focus on the fact that Kiss make loads of money from merchandising and loads of money from touring and say "so Simmons is wrong". Look, the guy is the exception to the rule. Most musicians are bland and uninteresting and all the better for it. Kiss, like many of their contemporaries, made themselves into entertainers, not just musicians. Many rappers and high-camp pop acts follow this model, with extravagant stage "experiences", but it just wouldnt work for, say, Damien Rice.
Now I never got much training in this sort of thing, but as I understand it the recommended sitting position places the majority of your weight on your feet, not your seat. All good computer chairs are designed with the assumption that you do this. You cannot do stepping exercises in a computer chair, because putting your weight on your feet as you step would lift you out of your seat and/or push your chair back.
Also, the stepping-machine was always sold on a public misconception of exercise: hard work = good exercise. Stair-climbing wears you out quickly not because you use a lot of energy, but because it exercises such a small number of muscles. It's bad exercise, because it doesn't provide a balanced workout.
The best exercise I know of is still swimming. It exercises almost every single muscle in the body simultaneously. Because the work is spread out, you can keep going for much longer and burn far more calories than by doing anything else. You climb out of the pool feeling tired, but not dead like you would after a brief spell at the gym.
HAL.
They translated it from Hebrew to English (not Dutch) -- hence the availability of quotes in English.
The Reg also initially made the mistake of trusting their source unquestioningly and didn't think to check whether Babelfish actually had a Hebrew option (I'm surprised how few of you checked!), but to their credit, they've updated. Check it out... there's a new culprit in the frame, but I won't name names for fear of libel suits if it's not true.
HAL.