In fact, the movie Taxi Driver has taken on an almost surreal additional undertone in the years since its release because of scenes in the cinema where pornographic movies are playing, particularly when Travis takes Betsy to one. The whole setup--people calmly watching a sex film in an almost deserted theatre--is so bizarre that it gives the impression of these scenes being some hallucination in Travis' mind, similar to the "Are you talking to me" scene. This colours all kinds of scenes such as the one with the husband declaring that he will kill his adulterating wife; do they actually happen or is it all in his mind?
Then you find out these places actually existed and now the movie is even more confusing.
Well sure, if you consider a lifelong punitive impediment for a misdemeanour's offence to be sensible.
Once again, absolutist monochrome thinking coupled with technical advances triumphs over commons sense and indeed justice. Laws like this read like they were drafted by teenagers. No I apologise; that was an insult to honest teenagers everywhere.
There has been quite an outcry from various humanitarian organizations who think the documents were not redacted well enough to hide the identities of civilians who may now become targets of reprisals.
There has been a bought and paid readings of a prewritten script as part of a coordinated effort to progressively demonise, discredit and finally destroy Wikileaks. The PR divisions of most organisations, charities included, can simply be viewed as part of the modern media sector. And as part of that sector, their primary purpose is to echo the opinions and worldview of their benefactors.
No-one cared about these civilian risks when the documents were first released; the Pentagon was still reeling from the shock of encountering actual investigative journalism. The scriptwriters were called in, but it took them a week or two to come up with hooks. The civilian risks has so far been the most successful way to paint the leaks in a negative light. The mainstream media, literally incapable of digesting the data load it was faced with, has swallowed this propaganda far more easily, and found it more palatable than doing the job they claim to do--showing truth to power.
The powers said that the war in Afganistan was going well; that the US and the UK were winning. The Wikileaks expose proves that they were lying. The war was going terribly all along. See what that is there? That's journalism; not paid propaganda. Wikileaks did the people of the US and the UK a enormous service, virtually unparalleled in history. And instead of their thanks, Julian Assange is going to be drawn and quartered.
The Western free press is dead; Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. It is not possible to expose hard truths or challenge those in power in any modern Western state(or at least the Anglo-Saxon ones). Those who try will be destroyed, discredited or simply ignored. This is made possible by the modern media, which has become a propaganda complex of terrifying size, power, and influence.
The definitive proof of all this will be the fate of Assange, which is now playing out before our very eyes. He is going to be torn apart by the monstrous media; A feral pack--on leashes. He is finished. No idealistic journalists, no cadre of bloggers, no editorials, no law, no person, no country can save him now.
And if you try anything similar, they'll get you too.
I avoid them like the plague now for the easy "accidental felonies" available when someone posts child porn as a joke, which will then put the illegal material in your browser cache, history, and in the server logs downloading it.
Those sort of comments get posted to Slashdot by trolls every now and again.
What we have here is the ultimate form of guilt by association. To merely gaze upon/hear about/read anything that could be construed as child porn is now a prosecutable offence. So much for the rule of law.
...and sadly, the games really don't focus on doing what is right -- simply to incite violence upon others.
I'm calling you on this statement. Nigh ever second video game revolves around the player saving the world, people, countries, etc. And I don't mean this in a Machiavellian sense. Often the narrative of the game makes it very clear who the wrongful party is and it's generally not the player. Video games in general take their morals from comic books, World War 2 films, and Revisionist Westerns--violence included.
In fact, you have to go far and wide to find a video game where the player plays a truly amoral character. Even the ultra-violent rage-quest of God of War at times portrays the lead Kratos in a tragic light and paints his foes as petty and undeserving. And if you're referring to multiplayer games, particularly online ones, even these generally provide some fig leaf of a story and setting which gives some motivation and/or rationalization for what is going on.
Again I don't mean to say that the story of setting necessarily justify the typical madness that is goes on in video games; but to state that games focus only on inflicting violence is a gross misrepresentation. If you want to see a running scale of violence in video games, play in order; Ico, MGS3:Subsistence, and God of War 3. These will give you some understanding of the gamut of violence in the medium, and the focus on it within individual games.
by which I clearly meant that the balance of copyright law in 1984 was not tipped completely in favor of the consumer, but that it merely seems like it was compared to the fucked up situation we find ourselves in now.
It wasn't tipped in the consumers favour at all. I'd argue that the case itself effectively reduced fair use in the US by refusing to rule on whether home video recording in and of itself was legal or not.
The entire point of your post was that the 1984 ruling represented a high point of sorts from which we have declined. My point is that there has never been a high point in copyright law as far as citizens are concerned, only a long decline since the concept was first introduced. The case wasn't a high point, and while it was a higher point that where we are now, I wouldn't really call it a high point by itself.
My point isn't that the case wasn't that clear cut. My point was that regardless of the outcome, the case was never meant to protect or enhance the rights of ordinary people; it was only meant to affect the rights of corporations and content producers. It's not possible to properly understand copyright laws or law cases by assuming that they are concerned with the rights of the general public. In fact, the case never decided on the legality of home recording, merely skirting around the issue by saying that it could be legal in certain circumstances. It only decided on the rights or corporations to enable such activities to take place.
When I look at the current state of IP law, the one thing that always strikes me is how far we've fallen since the Sony vs. Universal case in 1984.
If you think a ruling in a case between two major multinational corporations in any way represented a high point in fair use doctrine, you'd want to start thinking again. IP law has always been and will always be structured and modified, for and at the behest of corporations only. No other group has ever or will ever have its interests considered. Read up on the history of copyright and discover that it has always been a publishers law, and all amendments to it have been in the explicit interests of such groups.
Get with the times. The modern scales go like this:
AAA+: Must invest AAA: Good investment AA: Getting dodgey A: Risky Bet BBB: These guys couldn't even bri^H^H^Hpay us to give them a higher rating. BB: Get out now B: Just kidding, you can't actually get one this low.
Another good scale is the modern video game rank system (Which makes more sense given how bastardized the original system has become)
D: You sucked at this C: You tried, you passed. B: You actually put some effort in A: You were really good at this S: You aced this section.
At least the S rank does away with bastardizations like A+++, A* or AAA+, etc. In effect the S rank is the sane answer to what these ridiculous higher granulations have done to the original grading system. At least S has a definite meaning. Unfortunately, things like SS and SSS rank again crept in.
And outdated, misleading and a probably always untrue concept. The media has never been a check on the powers of government except in the rarest of instances. If you examine history, you will find that the media has always been the most powerful enabler of government corruption, abuses and injustices. The Afghan and Iraq wars are the perfect example of this. Ordinary people didn't want the war; experts knew there were no weapons; everyone knew it was all about oil. And yet the media--TV, radio and print--drummed and drummed and drummed and drummed up that war.
I can remember the mass protests against the war, apparent the biggest mass protest in human history. What did the media do? They toed the government line. They toed the government line because, in a very fundamental way, the media are a part of the government.
The function of the first estate, the clergy, was to be close to the people and to preach acceptance of state doctrine to them. To be sure they quarreled with the king and the nobility from time to time but overall their function was to keep the people in line. In the modern age, region has lost much of its political power, but politics abhors a power vacuum, and their old function of moulding public opinion and philosophy had to be filled.
And it has been filled. The pundit has replaced the priest, the news desk the alter, and the editorial the sermon. The form is different but the function is the same: to tell the people what to think, about themselves and the world. And it has been a hugely successful transition. A cursory glance at all the important issues of the day shows time and again that the best interests and indeed the very will of the people are essentially meaningless factors when issues are decided; trivialities to be talked away before driving home the scripted message.
The ultimate proof of the obsolescence of the media was this leak, effectively by a lone site on the internet. Tens of thousands of so called journalists across the globe and not one of them even bothered to obtain such files, let alone publish them. The only purpose of their profession is to act as paid shills to those in power, not air dirty laundry. Those days are long gone, if they ever really existed at all. This trove of files will never be properly investigated or scrutinized by such people, and the only real analysis and exposition will be done on private blogs or the occasional book.
In short, if the person was under the age of thirteen / twelve (depending on the particular law being violated), you have no defense of "I thought he/she was old enough" (yeah... right).
Unless you're in Ireland, where this is actually a defense as criminal law assumes criminal intent. But it only works if you're a nice young man, not a dirty old codger, as confirmed by the Irish supreme court. I'm not making this up; google the "Mr. A Case".
Eventually the consumers will decide what is best, and everything will naturally work out in a way that is best for business, and gives consumers what they want.
Theology is the study of how quite intelligent people can make incisive and compelling logical arguments, but still never settle anything except the logical inconsistencies of their opponents position.
The other parties seem totally infested by moralism and corruption.
It's more than just the politicians. Actions like these require substantial cooperation from the civil service. I often wonder just how wide and how deep the desire for censorship runs in Australia.
Could any Australian slashdotter provide the wider subtext which is altogether absent in these stories? What is the driving element of society that is pushing for this censorship and how much support do they have among most Australians? Is this part of a historical trend or a new development? How deeply are the Australian political, state, and legal systems affected by it?--Not to mention the corporations. Why does Australia seem to be pursuing these laws so zealously?
Child pornography was the chief motivator but like with so many other noble beginnings, it spawned into an ugly beast
If you think that the child pornography hysteria that fuelled these actions was noble, I don't see what you consider so ugly about these inevitable conclusions. Rotten causes leads to rotten effects.
I usually rip my DVDs to ~1.2GiB Xvid avi files at native res using mencoder (not reencoding the audio), and have been doing this for many years. Does anyone know what combination of muxer and audio/video codecs is preferred nowadays?
Speaking for myself, I use XviD for video, raw ac3 or perhaps ogg for audio and mux everything together in an mkv file for best results.
The big question I've faced is whether to use h264 or not for video. After considering this for a long time, I finally came to the conclusion that for personal videos on your own hard drive, XviD is probably a better option. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, when it comes to personal videos I tend to encode at a high bitrate (>1200 kbits/s). I can spare the hard drive space for this and the codec usually does very well. Indeed at such high bitrates, while h264 probably still does a better job, it's own inherent artefact (usually in the form of a slight "blur", can allow subjective argument about which codec is doing a better job. Basically, at bitrates like these, you're far more into subjective than objective territory.
The second reason is probably more important. One of the huge disadvantages of h264 is its encode times. A 90 minute DVD movie can take up to five hours to encode, whereas the equivalent XviD may take less than one. Given that you may only watch this film three or four times over the rest of your life, you have to question why the encoding process should be longer than the films expected use time.
Clearly, this logic runs entirely contrary to those that someone encoding for web distribution would have. But since h264 has largely been developed for mass/web distribution anyway, I don't think this is surprising. If this VP8 codec performs well and speedily at higher bitrates, I might change my current setup; but for now, I would recommend sticking to XviD for home DVD->Hard Drive encoding.
And what would most PC gamers do without their mouse "crutch"?
This isn't about PC and console gamers. It's about control schemes and how they are implemented in a game. Try this test with a platformer, third person shooter or fighting game of any kind and the results will turn on their heads. In particular try the test with any purely 2D game or a game which requires simultaneous movement, camera control and button input.
How would you play a game like say, Infamous using a keyboard and mouse? What would the optimal mappings be? How was Red Faction: Guerilla played? Lost Planet? Go all the way back; what should the mappings for Super Mario be? Now try them using an emulator. (By the way, how do people play flight sims on the PC?)
I begin to understand why companies like Bethesda make their PC RPGs in first person. It's hard to certain kinds of games in certain control schemes.
His case makes sense to me (as would be the case if a Brittan, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, whoever wanted a US citizen for a similar premise, I'd say 'send him/her over...'
You may say that, but no American government will ever seriously consider extraditing one of their own citizens. In a similar fashion, they will not tolerate their own citizens being convicted of libel abroad, while simultaniously expecting that their own libel cases will carry weight in those same countries. And thanks to US control of DNS---on the internet at least---they certainly do.
The US does not have, and never had a legal system. It has at best a system of order. This isn't terribly surprising considering that most law enforcement and legal officers in the US are elected rather than appointed. Law in the US was always essentially made up by civilians at a local level, primarily to keep whatever order was deemed neccessary at the time, with little or no thought given to justice, legal theory or common sense. The ultimate manifestation of the US system of law is California, where laws via constitutional amendments are enacted by public fiat.
Outside of laws regulating commerce---in which Americans excel like no other race---there has never been any real tradition of the rule of law in the US. Once they fall foul of authorities, US citizens are at the mercy of the laws and procedures they themselves have decided on. The US "legal system" is simply the emotive and vindictive will of the people made manifest, and no justice can realistically be expected from it.
We might be going back in the direction of the latter two.
I doubt it. If recent events in the business world have proven anything it's that modern companies exist to maximise the remuneration of management. Shareholders, stakeholders, customers and the existence of the company itself all come in second to making sure the executive officers get vast salaries, bonuses and exit packages.
Hmmmmm? I would think that progress happens when the reasonable man finds better ways of adapting himself to the world. I suppose you could look at it either way though. Again, a witty phrase proves nothing,
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the movie Taxi Driver has taken on an almost surreal additional undertone in the years since its release because of scenes in the cinema where pornographic movies are playing, particularly when Travis takes Betsy to one. The whole setup--people calmly watching a sex film in an almost deserted theatre--is so bizarre that it gives the impression of these scenes being some hallucination in Travis' mind, similar to the "Are you talking to me" scene. This colours all kinds of scenes such as the one with the husband declaring that he will kill his adulterating wife; do they actually happen or is it all in his mind?
Then you find out these places actually existed and now the movie is even more confusing.
Well sure, if you consider a lifelong punitive impediment for a misdemeanour's offence to be sensible.
Once again, absolutist monochrome thinking coupled with technical advances triumphs over commons sense and indeed justice. Laws like this read like they were drafted by teenagers. No I apologise; that was an insult to honest teenagers everywhere.
English? Consistent?
I was/am/will be
You were/are/will be
He/She was/is/will be
They were/are/will be
We were/are/will be
There has been a bought and paid readings of a prewritten script as part of a coordinated effort to progressively demonise, discredit and finally destroy Wikileaks. The PR divisions of most organisations, charities included, can simply be viewed as part of the modern media sector. And as part of that sector, their primary purpose is to echo the opinions and worldview of their benefactors.
No-one cared about these civilian risks when the documents were first released; the Pentagon was still reeling from the shock of encountering actual investigative journalism. The scriptwriters were called in, but it took them a week or two to come up with hooks. The civilian risks has so far been the most successful way to paint the leaks in a negative light. The mainstream media, literally incapable of digesting the data load it was faced with, has swallowed this propaganda far more easily, and found it more palatable than doing the job they claim to do--showing truth to power.
The powers said that the war in Afganistan was going well; that the US and the UK were winning. The Wikileaks expose proves that they were lying. The war was going terribly all along. See what that is there? That's journalism; not paid propaganda. Wikileaks did the people of the US and the UK a enormous service, virtually unparalleled in history. And instead of their thanks, Julian Assange is going to be drawn and quartered.
The Western free press is dead; Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. It is not possible to expose hard truths or challenge those in power in any modern Western state(or at least the Anglo-Saxon ones). Those who try will be destroyed, discredited or simply ignored. This is made possible by the modern media, which has become a propaganda complex of terrifying size, power, and influence.
The definitive proof of all this will be the fate of Assange, which is now playing out before our very eyes. He is going to be torn apart by the monstrous media; A feral pack--on leashes. He is finished. No idealistic journalists, no cadre of bloggers, no editorials, no law, no person, no country can save him now.
And if you try anything similar, they'll get you too.
Whichever ones an Intellectual Property lawyer can convince an Intellectual Property judge(formerly IP lawyer) apply.
Those sort of comments get posted to Slashdot by trolls every now and again.
What we have here is the ultimate form of guilt by association. To merely gaze upon/hear about/read anything that could be construed as child porn is now a prosecutable offence. So much for the rule of law.
I'm calling you on this statement. Nigh ever second video game revolves around the player saving the world, people, countries, etc. And I don't mean this in a Machiavellian sense. Often the narrative of the game makes it very clear who the wrongful party is and it's generally not the player. Video games in general take their morals from comic books, World War 2 films, and Revisionist Westerns--violence included.
In fact, you have to go far and wide to find a video game where the player plays a truly amoral character. Even the ultra-violent rage-quest of God of War at times portrays the lead Kratos in a tragic light and paints his foes as petty and undeserving. And if you're referring to multiplayer games, particularly online ones, even these generally provide some fig leaf of a story and setting which gives some motivation and/or rationalization for what is going on.
Again I don't mean to say that the story of setting necessarily justify the typical madness that is goes on in video games; but to state that games focus only on inflicting violence is a gross misrepresentation. If you want to see a running scale of violence in video games, play in order; Ico, MGS3:Subsistence, and God of War 3. These will give you some understanding of the gamut of violence in the medium, and the focus on it within individual games.
It wasn't tipped in the consumers favour at all. I'd argue that the case itself effectively reduced fair use in the US by refusing to rule on whether home video recording in and of itself was legal or not.
The entire point of your post was that the 1984 ruling represented a high point of sorts from which we have declined. My point is that there has never been a high point in copyright law as far as citizens are concerned, only a long decline since the concept was first introduced. The case wasn't a high point, and while it was a higher point that where we are now, I wouldn't really call it a high point by itself.
My point isn't that the case wasn't that clear cut. My point was that regardless of the outcome, the case was never meant to protect or enhance the rights of ordinary people; it was only meant to affect the rights of corporations and content producers. It's not possible to properly understand copyright laws or law cases by assuming that they are concerned with the rights of the general public. In fact, the case never decided on the legality of home recording, merely skirting around the issue by saying that it could be legal in certain circumstances. It only decided on the rights or corporations to enable such activities to take place.
If you think a ruling in a case between two major multinational corporations in any way represented a high point in fair use doctrine, you'd want to start thinking again. IP law has always been and will always be structured and modified, for and at the behest of corporations only. No other group has ever or will ever have its interests considered. Read up on the history of copyright and discover that it has always been a publishers law, and all amendments to it have been in the explicit interests of such groups.
Get with the times. The modern scales go like this:
AAA+: Must invest
AAA: Good investment
AA: Getting dodgey
A: Risky Bet
BBB: These guys couldn't even bri^H^H^Hpay us to give them a higher rating.
BB: Get out now
B: Just kidding, you can't actually get one this low.
Another good scale is the modern video game rank system (Which makes more sense given how bastardized the original system has become)
D: You sucked at this
C: You tried, you passed.
B: You actually put some effort in
A: You were really good at this
S: You aced this section.
At least the S rank does away with bastardizations like A+++, A* or AAA+, etc. In effect the S rank is the sane answer to what these ridiculous higher granulations have done to the original grading system. At least S has a definite meaning. Unfortunately, things like SS and SSS rank again crept in.
And outdated, misleading and a probably always untrue concept. The media has never been a check on the powers of government except in the rarest of instances. If you examine history, you will find that the media has always been the most powerful enabler of government corruption, abuses and injustices. The Afghan and Iraq wars are the perfect example of this. Ordinary people didn't want the war; experts knew there were no weapons; everyone knew it was all about oil. And yet the media--TV, radio and print--drummed and drummed and drummed and drummed up that war.
I can remember the mass protests against the war, apparent the biggest mass protest in human history. What did the media do? They toed the government line. They toed the government line because, in a very fundamental way, the media are a part of the government.
The function of the first estate, the clergy, was to be close to the people and to preach acceptance of state doctrine to them. To be sure they quarreled with the king and the nobility from time to time but overall their function was to keep the people in line. In the modern age, region has lost much of its political power, but politics abhors a power vacuum, and their old function of moulding public opinion and philosophy had to be filled.
And it has been filled. The pundit has replaced the priest, the news desk the alter, and the editorial the sermon. The form is different but the function is the same: to tell the people what to think, about themselves and the world. And it has been a hugely successful transition. A cursory glance at all the important issues of the day shows time and again that the best interests and indeed the very will of the people are essentially meaningless factors when issues are decided; trivialities to be talked away before driving home the scripted message.
The ultimate proof of the obsolescence of the media was this leak, effectively by a lone site on the internet. Tens of thousands of so called journalists across the globe and not one of them even bothered to obtain such files, let alone publish them. The only purpose of their profession is to act as paid shills to those in power, not air dirty laundry. Those days are long gone, if they ever really existed at all. This trove of files will never be properly investigated or scrutinized by such people, and the only real analysis and exposition will be done on private blogs or the occasional book.
Unless you're in Ireland, where this is actually a defense as criminal law assumes criminal intent. But it only works if you're a nice young man, not a dirty old codger, as confirmed by the Irish supreme court. I'm not making this up; google the "Mr. A Case".
Lol.
Theology is the study of how quite intelligent people can make incisive and compelling logical arguments, but still never settle anything except the logical inconsistencies of their opponents position.
The Internet: where the more you offer people, the pickier they get.
It's more than just the politicians. Actions like these require substantial cooperation from the civil service. I often wonder just how wide and how deep the desire for censorship runs in Australia.
Could any Australian slashdotter provide the wider subtext which is altogether absent in these stories? What is the driving element of society that is pushing for this censorship and how much support do they have among most Australians? Is this part of a historical trend or a new development? How deeply are the Australian political, state, and legal systems affected by it?--Not to mention the corporations. Why does Australia seem to be pursuing these laws so zealously?
If you think that the child pornography hysteria that fuelled these actions was noble, I don't see what you consider so ugly about these inevitable conclusions. Rotten causes leads to rotten effects.
Speaking for myself, I use XviD for video, raw ac3 or perhaps ogg for audio and mux everything together in an mkv file for best results.
The big question I've faced is whether to use h264 or not for video. After considering this for a long time, I finally came to the conclusion that for personal videos on your own hard drive, XviD is probably a better option. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, when it comes to personal videos I tend to encode at a high bitrate (>1200 kbits/s). I can spare the hard drive space for this and the codec usually does very well. Indeed at such high bitrates, while h264 probably still does a better job, it's own inherent artefact (usually in the form of a slight "blur", can allow subjective argument about which codec is doing a better job. Basically, at bitrates like these, you're far more into subjective than objective territory.
The second reason is probably more important. One of the huge disadvantages of h264 is its encode times. A 90 minute DVD movie can take up to five hours to encode, whereas the equivalent XviD may take less than one. Given that you may only watch this film three or four times over the rest of your life, you have to question why the encoding process should be longer than the films expected use time.
Clearly, this logic runs entirely contrary to those that someone encoding for web distribution would have. But since h264 has largely been developed for mass/web distribution anyway, I don't think this is surprising. If this VP8 codec performs well and speedily at higher bitrates, I might change my current setup; but for now, I would recommend sticking to XviD for home DVD->Hard Drive encoding.
Off you go then and finish Super Mario World with a keyboard. We'll wait.
And what would most PC gamers do without their mouse "crutch"?
This isn't about PC and console gamers. It's about control schemes and how they are implemented in a game. Try this test with a platformer, third person shooter or fighting game of any kind and the results will turn on their heads. In particular try the test with any purely 2D game or a game which requires simultaneous movement, camera control and button input.
How would you play a game like say, Infamous using a keyboard and mouse? What would the optimal mappings be? How was Red Faction: Guerilla played? Lost Planet? Go all the way back; what should the mappings for Super Mario be? Now try them using an emulator. (By the way, how do people play flight sims on the PC?)
I begin to understand why companies like Bethesda make their PC RPGs in first person. It's hard to certain kinds of games in certain control schemes.
You may say that, but no American government will ever seriously consider extraditing one of their own citizens. In a similar fashion, they will not tolerate their own citizens being convicted of libel abroad, while simultaniously expecting that their own libel cases will carry weight in those same countries. And thanks to US control of DNS---on the internet at least---they certainly do.
The US does not have, and never had a legal system. It has at best a system of order. This isn't terribly surprising considering that most law enforcement and legal officers in the US are elected rather than appointed. Law in the US was always essentially made up by civilians at a local level, primarily to keep whatever order was deemed neccessary at the time, with little or no thought given to justice, legal theory or common sense. The ultimate manifestation of the US system of law is California, where laws via constitutional amendments are enacted by public fiat.
Outside of laws regulating commerce---in which Americans excel like no other race---there has never been any real tradition of the rule of law in the US. Once they fall foul of authorities, US citizens are at the mercy of the laws and procedures they themselves have decided on. The US "legal system" is simply the emotive and vindictive will of the people made manifest, and no justice can realistically be expected from it.
I doubt it. If recent events in the business world have proven anything it's that modern companies exist to maximise the remuneration of management. Shareholders, stakeholders, customers and the existence of the company itself all come in second to making sure the executive officers get vast salaries, bonuses and exit packages.
Hmmmmm? I would think that progress happens when the reasonable man finds better ways of adapting himself to the world. I suppose you could look at it either way though. Again, a witty phrase proves nothing,