I know I should be posting something serious and insightful, but I've just been reading the "Shatner's Birthday"/. thread, and misread the judge's name for a second.
Well for the last N years, many of Shatner's characters have been deliberate parodies of Shatner, and he's commented on how Shatner the character seems to have taken on a life of his own that Shatner the actor is perfectly happy to play.
Also in Miss Congeniality, where he and Candice Bergen ran the beauty pagent empire (and he played the same character in the sequel.)
I found Third Rock From The Sun to be pretty much unwatchable, so I didn't see his character in that more than briefly.
And then there's Denny Crane! on Boston Legal, where in addition to Candice Bergen and James Spader, he was joined by Rene Auberjonois (Odo), and occasionally Jeri Ryan (7 of 9) and a wide range of well-known character actors in one or more episodes.
BTW, that episode is in my standard rant about the TSA making up rules on a whim and claiming they've always been the rule. I've been flying since the days that Shatner could carry a gun on the plane and shoot aliens with it.
I thought John Lithgow did a good job in the later movie version, though I'm not sure whether I preferred the bad CGI alien in that version or the el-cheapo guy in a shag rug suit from the TV episode.
While obviously this doesn't apply to Bach, there are good reasons for copyright to last past the author's death (though that doesn't mean that the current "75 years after Disney Corporation dies" is justified. Helen Hooven Santmyer's novel And Ladies of the Club was published when she was 86, and became a best-seller. But if copyright ended at death, a publisher probably wouldn't have taken the risk of publishing a book from somebody who might die a couple of years later (and in fact did), so she wouldn't have made any money from writing it. She probably would have written it anyway, and maybe even gotten the Ohio State University Press to publish it (they sold only a few hundred copies, mostly to public libraries), but it wouldn't have gotten a commercial publisher a couple of years later, which was what got it widespread distribution.
It was humor. Surely you know that the standard classical theme music for evil masterminds is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor - it goes along with the evil laugh. (There are newer pieces that are appropriate for the villain to perform with a background chorus, such as this wonderful piece by Seanan McGuire, but the Tocatta's the gold standard for soliloquies.)
More seriously, though, I do have some friends who have depression issues that I haven't introduced to Pink Floyd, even though Dark Side of the Moon is a really important album for a generation of us, because it's wayyy too fsking depressing, though it also means they have to miss the appallingly wrong things that were done to it by the Austin Lounge Lizards who performed Brain Damage as a fast bouncy bluegrass piece.
They're trying to raise $15K here at Kickstarter, plus whatever they can get from CD sales. They're not going to make a lot of money, compared to the amount of work they're going to need to do, but they're making some money.
And they're going to make the Goldberg Variations a lot more accessible to the public, making it easier for kids (and adults) to learn that level of music skills. Maybe that just brings the world more art, but by putting Free editable versions of the scores out there, it gives people more ability to see what's going on inside the music and build their own variations of the Goldberg Variations. And while there's not much market for playing classical music at bars and nightclubs, there is a market for playing jazz, and there's a huge amount of overlap between jazz and classical.
One of the best computer programming courses I took in college was mainly focused on learning how to program in teams. Officially it was about doing computer simulations, but we were working in groups of 4-5 so we could learn how to do that, and we were pretty much free to divide the labor however we wanted, but we did have to learn some basic human communication skills in the process. For bright nerds with egos, which was most of the class, this was a tough course:-)
I'm not much of a gamer, and tend to think of the originality as more about story and characterization than visuals. So Nethack, for instance, grew into a highly original game, even though the graphical aspects were quite simplified.
It doesn't give you a monopoly - some other music publishing house can just as well do their own version of the same pieces. But it certainly does give you a copyrightable product, because you've put actual creative work into it, not just typesetting. And even if you hadn't done significant creative work, just taken some late-1800s sheet music on which the copyright had expired, but re-typeset it yourself, that's protected enough that somebody can't buy one copy of your sheet music and Xerox off a hundred copies for their high school choir, though they could have done that with the late-1800s version.
Typesetting music used to take actual work - it's still non-trivial with computers, and there are competing notations and formatting programs out there. A program that's good for guitar tab may not be able to do orchestral scores and vice versa, and classical music in particular tends to have all kinds of random notations on it about tempo and voicing that not all of the programs can express cleanly. So there's still value added.
You're thinking way too small there - no matter how snobby you get about your audiophileness, your equipment can't really reproduce a pipe organ or good seats at an orchestra performance. And you can't begin to reproduce taiko, because your speakers simply can't move enough air - it takes rock&roll band concert hardware, not audiophile hardware.
But for classical music, the quality of your sound system isn't the critical issue - it's the performers. I had a housemate in college who had a medium-quality stereo system (by pre-CDROM definitions of medium quality, which meant much better than mine but not as good as some people around), and he'd found that it was good enough that he could hear what the orchestra was playing well enough that he should spend his money on records from better orchestras with better conductors. If you're listening to Beethoven, you should go for the Berlin Philharmonic with Furtwangler conducting, even though it's pre-war recordings, or maybe the New York Philharmonic with Toscanini or Bernstein. You certainly don't want the 101 Strings El-Cheapo Classical Music Collection.
For Bach's Goldberg Variations, there's Glenn Gould, and then there's, well, probably nobody else, but there are lots of people who can play them and interpret them interestingly. For other Bach pieces, you'll find huge differences between a random good orchestra and Walter Carlos's Switched-On Bach, or between those and later Wendy Carlos work, or even between the orchestra and somebody playing a pipe organ, which was after all the 17th century's version of the Moog synthesizer.
I think what he's saying is that the medieval Catholic Church's practice of extorting money so your mom would get out of Purgatory was the main heresy that the Protestants were rebelling against, not saying that all Protestants are like the televangelists who want you to donate money. And while Luther's 95 Theses also argued against 94 other things the Church was doing wrong in those days, that certainly was one of the more egregious problems.
On the other hand, once Luther's Reformation happened, there were lots of other causes having to do with power and money that got involved. Some of them were things like whether the Church could tell King Henry he can't have a divorce just because there's this other chick he liked (though they don't seemed to have minded him beheading the second one when he dumped her for the third, so it's not like there isn't plenty of blame to go around.)
This one annoyed me when it started to become popular. Maybe we should just blame South Park for it, but it seems to be a juvenile thing about making yourself feel more secure about your masculinity and sexual orientation by using the alternative as an insult and as a tool for social pressure. Is it because boys that age are still scared of girls, and need extra social pressure to go out and interact with them to avoid being thought of as gay, and they'd rather be harassed as being gay, when they're know they're not, than for being immature, when they know they are?
The problem is that this speech isn't intended to cause damage to human beings. It's intended to help them overcome a problem that the organization considers to be seriously bad for them. That's much different from, say, encouraging gay-bashing, even though both of them start from the belief that being gay is bad.
Whether you agree with that or not is a separate question, but if you think they're wrong, they're not in the "Hate Speech" or "Falsely Shouting Fire In A Theater" category - they're in the "Preaching the Wrong Religion" category or maybe the "Quack Medical Advice" category.
Why is it an app? Probably because apps are trendy, and can be sold for small amounts of money, and they get to call themselves cool for having written one, and they can tell the people who donate to them about the exciting work they're doing so please give more money. Also, it's portable, so if you need hourly reminding not to be gay or something, it's there in your pocket to remind you instead of being back on your PC at home. It's not like there aren't lots of other apps that have no need to be on a phone instead of a website.
As far as your point about not being supportive of the organization, as the anti-anti-abortion bumper sticker says, if you don't like it, don't ban it, just don't get one. In practice, I don't think they're going to get a lot of customers, and if it makes money it's going to be from their donor channel, not their actual sales.
The reason Apple should allow them to sell it is "app neutrality" - do you want them deciding what the public should be seeing on their phones, as long as it's not causing technical problems with the phone? Maybe you do - I'd really object if they were selling a KKK literature package app. But I've found it really annoying that the people who are attacking Apple for having not censored it yet seem to be doing so without knowing anything about the app except the organization that's selling it.
I started seeing articles attacking this app last week, and what really frustrates me about them is that they say that Apple ought to ban the app because it's EVIL, and then go talking about how evil the organization that publishes it is, but never say anything about the app itself. It looked very much like they hadn't actually seen it, and criticizing it for being evil without seeing it first is really inappropriate.
I'm sure that once they take a look at it, it will either be as evil as they're claiming or else somewhat lamer than that, but they really shouldn't be attacking it before they've seen it, just because they're prejudiced against people who are prejudiced against them.
So thank you for contributing actual information to this discussion - you're the first person I've seen who's done so:-)
I'm a vegetarian, and I can't agree with them. Humans are naturally omnivores, and we've been cooking meat over fire for several hundred thousand years (rather long than I'd have expected), and, well, cooked meat is tasty. I don't eat it because of the ethical issues with killing animals for food, but that doesn't make them stop tasting good.
Now, they might be able to cure you of disliking vegetables, if they've got any cooking skills, but that's really a separate problem.
If the customer shows up once, and buys a $50 dinner for $25, of which the restaurant gets $15 and Groupon gets $10, and never comes back, maybe they lose. (Their direct costs are the cost of materials, plus the marginal costs of labor for the cooks and waiters, and maybe they don't make any extra to contribute to rent or fixed costs, but as long as they don't alienate customers with bad service from overworked staff, they're not actually losing marginal cost.)
On the other hand, if half the customers who show up for the coupon deal start coming back later, without coupons, then they're getting actual profits from the deal.
Groupon sounds like something that might make more sense for a retail product, where it doesn't matter if lots of people show up at once, than for a restaurant that has a capacity limit. On the other hand, if the deal is for Tuesday nights during the rainy season, and Groupon tells you how many customers took the deal so you know how many extra cooks and waiters to schedule, you could win.
My reaction to Groupon has been "It's like a coupon, only much harder to use!"
I don't know what fraction of the coupon value Groupon gets to keep. If it's 100%, $1.5B on $25B, that would be 6%, not a bad deal these days. But if they're only getting 10%, and spend half of it on advertising, that's 0.3% of a $25B valuation, or 1.25% of a $6B valuation, so that says that Google would have to be expecting significant growth to make their bid worthwhile, and the VCs must be hoping the IPO-buying public are real suckers.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. I've heard about it - it's in some place called the Blue Room.
The website isn't something.google.com, and it wants you to set Javascript. Is it a trap? (The worms..... the spice....)
I know I should be posting something serious and insightful, but I've just been reading the "Shatner's Birthday" /. thread, and misread the judge's name for a second.
Well for the last N years, many of Shatner's characters have been deliberate parodies of Shatner, and he's commented on how Shatner the character seems to have taken on a life of his own that Shatner the actor is perfectly happy to play.
Also in Miss Congeniality, where he and Candice Bergen ran the beauty pagent empire (and he played the same character in the sequel.)
I found Third Rock From The Sun to be pretty much unwatchable, so I didn't see his character in that more than briefly.
And then there's Denny Crane! on Boston Legal, where in addition to Candice Bergen and James Spader, he was joined by Rene Auberjonois (Odo), and occasionally Jeri Ryan (7 of 9) and a wide range of well-known character actors in one or more episodes.
Unlike "Talk... Like.. a PIRATE .. day", THIS one's... NOT OFFICIAL!
BTW, that episode is in my standard rant about the TSA making up rules on a whim and claiming they've always been the rule. I've been flying since the days that Shatner could carry a gun on the plane and shoot aliens with it.
I thought John Lithgow did a good job in the later movie version, though I'm not sure whether I preferred the bad CGI alien in that version or the el-cheapo guy in a shag rug suit from the TV episode.
Ahh, that's just the mad cow talking....
I really enjoyed that show - Shatner was playing a serious character, and also playing a caricature of Shatner, and was doing just fine at both.
While obviously this doesn't apply to Bach, there are good reasons for copyright to last past the author's death (though that doesn't mean that the current "75 years after Disney Corporation dies" is justified. Helen Hooven Santmyer's novel And Ladies of the Club was published when she was 86, and became a best-seller. But if copyright ended at death, a publisher probably wouldn't have taken the risk of publishing a book from somebody who might die a couple of years later (and in fact did), so she wouldn't have made any money from writing it. She probably would have written it anyway, and maybe even gotten the Ohio State University Press to publish it (they sold only a few hundred copies, mostly to public libraries), but it wouldn't have gotten a commercial publisher a couple of years later, which was what got it widespread distribution.
It was humor. Surely you know that the standard classical theme music for evil masterminds is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor - it goes along with the evil laugh. (There are newer pieces that are appropriate for the villain to perform with a background chorus, such as this wonderful piece by Seanan McGuire, but the Tocatta's the gold standard for soliloquies.)
More seriously, though, I do have some friends who have depression issues that I haven't introduced to Pink Floyd, even though Dark Side of the Moon is a really important album for a generation of us, because it's wayyy too fsking depressing, though it also means they have to miss the appallingly wrong things that were done to it by the Austin Lounge Lizards who performed Brain Damage as a fast bouncy bluegrass piece.
They're trying to raise $15K here at Kickstarter, plus whatever they can get from CD sales. They're not going to make a lot of money, compared to the amount of work they're going to need to do, but they're making some money.
And they're going to make the Goldberg Variations a lot more accessible to the public, making it easier for kids (and adults) to learn that level of music skills. Maybe that just brings the world more art, but by putting Free editable versions of the scores out there, it gives people more ability to see what's going on inside the music and build their own variations of the Goldberg Variations. And while there's not much market for playing classical music at bars and nightclubs, there is a market for playing jazz, and there's a huge amount of overlap between jazz and classical.
That was a great comment - thanks!
One of the best computer programming courses I took in college was mainly focused on learning how to program in teams. Officially it was about doing computer simulations, but we were working in groups of 4-5 so we could learn how to do that, and we were pretty much free to divide the labor however we wanted, but we did have to learn some basic human communication skills in the process. For bright nerds with egos, which was most of the class, this was a tough course :-)
I'm not much of a gamer, and tend to think of the originality as more about story and characterization than visuals. So Nethack, for instance, grew into a highly original game, even though the graphical aspects were quite simplified.
It doesn't give you a monopoly - some other music publishing house can just as well do their own version of the same pieces. But it certainly does give you a copyrightable product, because you've put actual creative work into it, not just typesetting. And even if you hadn't done significant creative work, just taken some late-1800s sheet music on which the copyright had expired, but re-typeset it yourself, that's protected enough that somebody can't buy one copy of your sheet music and Xerox off a hundred copies for their high school choir, though they could have done that with the late-1800s version.
Typesetting music used to take actual work - it's still non-trivial with computers, and there are competing notations and formatting programs out there. A program that's good for guitar tab may not be able to do orchestral scores and vice versa, and classical music in particular tends to have all kinds of random notations on it about tempo and voicing that not all of the programs can express cleanly. So there's still value added.
You're thinking way too small there - no matter how snobby you get about your audiophileness, your equipment can't really reproduce a pipe organ or good seats at an orchestra performance. And you can't begin to reproduce taiko, because your speakers simply can't move enough air - it takes rock&roll band concert hardware, not audiophile hardware.
But for classical music, the quality of your sound system isn't the critical issue - it's the performers. I had a housemate in college who had a medium-quality stereo system (by pre-CDROM definitions of medium quality, which meant much better than mine but not as good as some people around), and he'd found that it was good enough that he could hear what the orchestra was playing well enough that he should spend his money on records from better orchestras with better conductors. If you're listening to Beethoven, you should go for the Berlin Philharmonic with Furtwangler conducting, even though it's pre-war recordings, or maybe the New York Philharmonic with Toscanini or Bernstein. You certainly don't want the 101 Strings El-Cheapo Classical Music Collection.
For Bach's Goldberg Variations, there's Glenn Gould, and then there's, well, probably nobody else, but there are lots of people who can play them and interpret them interestingly. For other Bach pieces, you'll find huge differences between a random good orchestra and Walter Carlos's Switched-On Bach, or between those and later Wendy Carlos work, or even between the orchestra and somebody playing a pipe organ, which was after all the 17th century's version of the Moog synthesizer.
I think what he's saying is that the medieval Catholic Church's practice of extorting money so your mom would get out of Purgatory was the main heresy that the Protestants were rebelling against, not saying that all Protestants are like the televangelists who want you to donate money. And while Luther's 95 Theses also argued against 94 other things the Church was doing wrong in those days, that certainly was one of the more egregious problems.
On the other hand, once Luther's Reformation happened, there were lots of other causes having to do with power and money that got involved. Some of them were things like whether the Church could tell King Henry he can't have a divorce just because there's this other chick he liked (though they don't seemed to have minded him beheading the second one when he dumped her for the third, so it's not like there isn't plenty of blame to go around.)
It's been done. Put your mail in those green boxes marked W.A.S.T.E...
(If this makes entirely no sense, you need to read Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49". It still won't make sense, but it'll be a lot funnier.)
Not by half :-)
This one annoyed me when it started to become popular. Maybe we should just blame South Park for it, but it seems to be a juvenile thing about making yourself feel more secure about your masculinity and sexual orientation by using the alternative as an insult and as a tool for social pressure. Is it because boys that age are still scared of girls, and need extra social pressure to go out and interact with them to avoid being thought of as gay, and they'd rather be harassed as being gay, when they're know they're not, than for being immature, when they know they are?
The problem is that this speech isn't intended to cause damage to human beings. It's intended to help them overcome a problem that the organization considers to be seriously bad for them. That's much different from, say, encouraging gay-bashing, even though both of them start from the belief that being gay is bad.
Whether you agree with that or not is a separate question, but if you think they're wrong, they're not in the "Hate Speech" or "Falsely Shouting Fire In A Theater" category - they're in the "Preaching the Wrong Religion" category or maybe the "Quack Medical Advice" category.
Why is it an app? Probably because apps are trendy, and can be sold for small amounts of money, and they get to call themselves cool for having written one, and they can tell the people who donate to them about the exciting work they're doing so please give more money. Also, it's portable, so if you need hourly reminding not to be gay or something, it's there in your pocket to remind you instead of being back on your PC at home. It's not like there aren't lots of other apps that have no need to be on a phone instead of a website.
As far as your point about not being supportive of the organization, as the anti-anti-abortion bumper sticker says, if you don't like it, don't ban it, just don't get one. In practice, I don't think they're going to get a lot of customers, and if it makes money it's going to be from their donor channel, not their actual sales.
The reason Apple should allow them to sell it is "app neutrality" - do you want them deciding what the public should be seeing on their phones, as long as it's not causing technical problems with the phone? Maybe you do - I'd really object if they were selling a KKK literature package app. But I've found it really annoying that the people who are attacking Apple for having not censored it yet seem to be doing so without knowing anything about the app except the organization that's selling it.
I started seeing articles attacking this app last week, and what really frustrates me about them is that they say that Apple ought to ban the app because it's EVIL, and then go talking about how evil the organization that publishes it is, but never say anything about the app itself. It looked very much like they hadn't actually seen it, and criticizing it for being evil without seeing it first is really inappropriate.
I'm sure that once they take a look at it, it will either be as evil as they're claiming or else somewhat lamer than that, but they really shouldn't be attacking it before they've seen it, just because they're prejudiced against people who are prejudiced against them.
So thank you for contributing actual information to this discussion - you're the first person I've seen who's done so :-)
I'm a vegetarian, and I can't agree with them. Humans are naturally omnivores, and we've been cooking meat over fire for several hundred thousand years (rather long than I'd have expected), and, well, cooked meat is tasty. I don't eat it because of the ethical issues with killing animals for food, but that doesn't make them stop tasting good.
Now, they might be able to cure you of disliking vegetables, if they've got any cooking skills, but that's really a separate problem.
If the customer shows up once, and buys a $50 dinner for $25, of which the restaurant gets $15 and Groupon gets $10, and never comes back, maybe they lose. (Their direct costs are the cost of materials, plus the marginal costs of labor for the cooks and waiters, and maybe they don't make any extra to contribute to rent or fixed costs, but as long as they don't alienate customers with bad service from overworked staff, they're not actually losing marginal cost.)
On the other hand, if half the customers who show up for the coupon deal start coming back later, without coupons, then they're getting actual profits from the deal.
Groupon sounds like something that might make more sense for a retail product, where it doesn't matter if lots of people show up at once, than for a restaurant that has a capacity limit. On the other hand, if the deal is for Tuesday nights during the rainy season, and Groupon tells you how many customers took the deal so you know how many extra cooks and waiters to schedule, you could win.
My reaction to Groupon has been "It's like a coupon, only much harder to use!"
I don't know what fraction of the coupon value Groupon gets to keep. If it's 100%, $1.5B on $25B, that would be 6%, not a bad deal these days. But if they're only getting 10%, and spend half of it on advertising, that's 0.3% of a $25B valuation, or 1.25% of a $6B valuation, so that says that Google would have to be expecting significant growth to make their bid worthwhile, and the VCs must be hoping the IPO-buying public are real suckers.