The ancient Greeks and Romans themselves referred to "ancient" times which were only two or three centuries before their own, in some cases. It's all relative.
Though I do agree, 1000 years old isn't far from modern, especially in the Scandinavian world.
You've got this the wrong way round. It would indeed be a civil liberties matter if the law prohibited people from exercising control over what comes onto their property and what does not. If you're for civil liberties, you should be on the amusement park's side here. Control over who and what comes onto your private property is a pretty important set of rights.
Courthouses I believe prohibit camera phones (i.e. practically all cell phones), and the only time I'd ever go there is if I can't get out of jury duty.
For reference, I believe there are other circumstances that can in principle make presence in a courthouse obligatory.
Ye gods, thank you for reminding me of that. I'd completely forgotten about it. I've become used to using xpdf for Windows for extracting images, but it just plain slipped my mind that it could extract text as well -- and well-formatted, to boot (much better than Acrobat can). Thank you! That's now a permanent addition to my Windows context menus (as are the other xpdf components). Sumatra PDF is looking a lot better:-)
"Also look at your own example: books. How scarce is Homer's Iliad? "
Very there is only one. How many books of the same quality exist?
And yes Homer got paid for it. And paid very well.
IgnoramusMaximus has already replied to the rest of your post thoroughly, but as I am one of perhaps two (at most) Homeric scholars hanging out on/., I feel obligated to address this part again.
IgnoramusMaximus is absolutely correct to point out that there are thousands of variants. S/he is also correct to point out that above all else the Homeric epics were the products of a traditional storytelling/poetic genre (as attested by dozens of other examples of the same genre from the same time period or up to a couple of centuries later).
So I confirm that this does indeed mean that every bard who ever had a part in shaping the Iliad was most certainly a plagiarist and a pirate of the worst kind, by your standards.
On the other point you raise, however, that Homer got paid very well, you are altogether wrong. Some late performers got paid well if they did well in Homer-performing competitions (yes, seriously) -- that is to say, it was precisely the plagiarists who got the cash. But as for the people responsible for shaping the Iliad, there is absolutely no way of knowing how much compensation, if any, they got. Bear in mind that (a) money hadn't been invented at the time and (b) depictions of bards in Homer's own poetry give the strong impression of a hand-to-mouth kind of lifestyle -- a bard who continued to be in an aristocrat's favour would continue to be fed; but forget about becoming landed gentry.
So basically, yeah, the Iliad is actually a potent example of the kind of thing that can be created when there is no attempt to regulate the expression of ideas.
I take it back. There is a deal-killer: can't copy-and-paste into a text file or save in any format other than PDF. For me, at least, that's not a luxury, but a pretty fundamental necessity. Thanks for the pointer anyway; I may go back to it one day if I hear that it gets fixed.
That appears to be a very nice piece of software, if it's honest (I don't have the skills to check the source code for hostile activity; where I am right now I don't have a sufficiently sensitive firewall to check for any nasty tricks it might be trying to pull; and I can't trust anything in the Wikipedia article on it, as it looks very much like a corporate advertisement).
It's certainly a hell of a lot faster at rendering complex pages than Foxit, which was the one thing keeping me on Acrobat.
My only gripe (so far) is that you have to fuck around with referrer headers to download it in the first place.
1. When conferences are being organized, avoid US sites right there in the planning stage. (This is already happening in my field.)
To some extent in my field too, though I have the problem that the only significant international conferences in my field take place in the US and the UK. Other countries have only minor seminars. The UK is almost as much a no-go zone as the US (though the UK started becoming a no-go zone earlier). Well, maybe the days of the Ginormous International Conference are coming to an end.
Nero did play an instrument, a cithra I believe it is called, and did consider himself to be quite a musician. (Oddly I don't recall any mention of his skill level in my studies,
That's because no one knows. No matter how good or how bad he was, he would still be awarded every prize there was.
Titicus (spelling?), the historian,
Tacitus, Annals 15.38-44. Accounts are also given by Cassius Dio book 62, and Suetonius' Life of Nero.
He rushed down, helped to fight the fires, gave shelter, and provided food at either a discounted or free rate. I'm not entirely sure if it was free or discounted and I lack the initiative to look this stuff up.
Not everyone is as lazy. Tacitus continues after the passage you refer to (15.39), "These acts, though popular, produced no effect, since a rumour had gone forth everywhere that, at the very time when the city was in flames, the emperor appeared on a private stage and sang the Sack of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity." The same story is given by Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who appear to have used different evidence for their accounts, making it all but certain that the story is pretty accurate.
What did happen is that Nero used this fire to persecute the Christians but that was after the fire when the people were looking for someone to blame.
Based on the evidence of Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius, there is a possibility, albeit slim, that he was entirely accurate in this allocation of blame.
maybe if they placed modern graphics rendering on top of the old 2D control system, i would take a look Sounds like you're looking for jDoom -- unless I've misunderstood, that is.
Personally I'd recommend against nominating them. The Igs are
intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interest in science. -- source
I don't think I'd like to see them used to reward incompetence, or research based on contrived testing conditions and thereby leading to a foregone conclusion, which is what this is.
And a lexicon is not a copy of the books, or even a re-telling. It's a reference tool for information about the fictional world created by the books. Hardly the same thing.
A lexicon's relationship to its source material is more explicit than the situation Card describes, but it hardly looks like re-printing Rowling's books verbatim, does it?
I hope you don't hold the view that any encyclopaedia that presents information that comes ultimately from copyrighted sources ought to be considered guilty of infringement. Because most published information comes from copyrighted sources. Wikipedia articles about factual events often cite newspaper articles; newspapers articles are copyright-laden. Do they all get consigned to copyright hell too? It's the same identical situation here.
The author of the article wrote that typically in analysis of the purpose and character of use, the derivative work involves some extension or transformation. There isn't likely to be much in a lexicon or encyclopedia, so this should cut in favour of Rowling. The author did point out that an analysis of mistakes and plot inconsistencies would involve substantial extension and so could well have a valid defense
I presume the Tolkien estate will be suing soon over the Complete Guide to Middle-Earth.
But it's more general than that. From a legal point of view I don't know what the situation is, but from a research point of view (I'm an academic) an encyclopaedia of a fictional universe is not in any way substantively different from a more discursive type of academic book. (The fact that the folks publishing this encyclopaedia aren't academics is irrelevant.)
I have a nagging worry that this case will make it difficult to write any books about literature that is still under copyright -- which is a pretty big chunk of literature. Shakespearean scholars may be safe, sure. But I fear for people who work on, say, García Marquez, or C.S. Lewis, or Stephen King. I know someone who has some links with academics who specialise in children's literature; I think I should ask what those folks are thinking about this case, and whether they're worried.
I don't give two hoots about J.K. Rowling, but the more general principle of authors (or their estates) suing over people doing research on their books is a Very Bad Thing. We've got three possible outcomes here, as far as I can see:
(1) Rowling loses her case and loses it bad;
(2) Rowling wins, and the courts decide to draw an arbitrary, valueless distinction between encyclopaedias and discursive writing, prohibiting the one and permitting the other; this strikes me as untenable in the long term, as it simply doesn't make sense;
(3) Rowling wins, and henceforth only authors that have been dead for nearly a century will be legitimate topics for literary criticism.
Seems to me that only one of these outcomes makes sense.
I sit corrected! I teach ancient literature so I should have known that. Also I certainly wasn't replying in the spirit of your comment.:-) Humblest apologies for the inconwenience.
Slashdot Mirror
The ancient Greeks and Romans themselves referred to "ancient" times which were only two or three centuries before their own, in some cases. It's all relative.
Though I do agree, 1000 years old isn't far from modern, especially in the Scandinavian world.
Given that the full gamut involves only twelve notes (two non-overlapping hexachords plus the intervening "ti"), 15 people is in fact overkill.
You've got this the wrong way round. It would indeed be a civil liberties matter if the law prohibited people from exercising control over what comes onto their property and what does not. If you're for civil liberties, you should be on the amusement park's side here. Control over who and what comes onto your private property is a pretty important set of rights.
For reference, I believe there are other circumstances that can in principle make presence in a courthouse obligatory.
I find the following a useful thing to add to my userContent.css.
a[href$=".pdf"]::after{
content: url("
data:image/gif;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wBDAAkGBwgHBgkIBwgKCg
kLDRYPDQwMDRsUFRAWIB0iIiAdHx8kKDQsJCYxJx8fLT0tMTU3Ojo6Iys/RD84QzQ5Ojf/2w
BDAQoKCg0MDRoPDxo3JR8lNzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nz
c3Nzc3Nzc3Nzc3Nzf/wAARCAAMAAwDASIAAhEBAxEB/8QAFgABAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABg
MF/8QAIxAAAgIBBAICAwAAAAAAAAAAAQMCBBEABQYhEkETMTJSof/EABQBAQAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAP/xAAcEQADAAEFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAgMABBExobH/2gAMAwEAAhEDEQA/AEF/jN
+uqcbdmpceuK0mzYE5MkSfy7z+381K7Ut8eKalHc7aRNQa2Kp4gWHIkYjHQPjnWxy3dHVOQs
rhamJ+GLDCYODI9d4I9etDt93CT7S5fAqGFgeMDMD7Pry0azVeMamopQbMegPM/9k%3D");
padding-left: 1px;
vertical-align: bottom;
}
... and similar things for javascript links and target="_blank"/"_new" links. I find it makes web browsing enormously less infuriating.
Ye gods, thank you for reminding me of that. I'd completely forgotten about it. I've become used to using xpdf for Windows for extracting images, but it just plain slipped my mind that it could extract text as well -- and well-formatted, to boot (much better than Acrobat can). Thank you! That's now a permanent addition to my Windows context menus (as are the other xpdf components). Sumatra PDF is looking a lot better :-)
Kevin Rudd would correctly ignore your letter because it's not his job to represent you. Your local MP is the best option.
IgnoramusMaximus has already replied to the rest of your post thoroughly, but as I am one of perhaps two (at most) Homeric scholars hanging out on /., I feel obligated to address this part again.
IgnoramusMaximus is absolutely correct to point out that there are thousands of variants. S/he is also correct to point out that above all else the Homeric epics were the products of a traditional storytelling/poetic genre (as attested by dozens of other examples of the same genre from the same time period or up to a couple of centuries later).
So I confirm that this does indeed mean that every bard who ever had a part in shaping the Iliad was most certainly a plagiarist and a pirate of the worst kind, by your standards.
On the other point you raise, however, that Homer got paid very well, you are altogether wrong. Some late performers got paid well if they did well in Homer-performing competitions (yes, seriously) -- that is to say, it was precisely the plagiarists who got the cash. But as for the people responsible for shaping the Iliad, there is absolutely no way of knowing how much compensation, if any, they got. Bear in mind that (a) money hadn't been invented at the time and (b) depictions of bards in Homer's own poetry give the strong impression of a hand-to-mouth kind of lifestyle -- a bard who continued to be in an aristocrat's favour would continue to be fed; but forget about becoming landed gentry.
So basically, yeah, the Iliad is actually a potent example of the kind of thing that can be created when there is no attempt to regulate the expression of ideas.
Give it 2600 years or so, then I'm sure Homer will be willing to discuss the matter with G. Luc.
Yes, but it wasn't a partner search engine. They were using their online store to leverage their own search engine, a9.com.
Maybe it's time you found out that javascript (what you mentioned) and Java (what TFA mentions) don't actually have anything to do with each other.
I take it back. There is a deal-killer: can't copy-and-paste into a text file or save in any format other than PDF. For me, at least, that's not a luxury, but a pretty fundamental necessity. Thanks for the pointer anyway; I may go back to it one day if I hear that it gets fixed.
That appears to be a very nice piece of software, if it's honest (I don't have the skills to check the source code for hostile activity; where I am right now I don't have a sufficiently sensitive firewall to check for any nasty tricks it might be trying to pull; and I can't trust anything in the Wikipedia article on it, as it looks very much like a corporate advertisement).
It's certainly a hell of a lot faster at rendering complex pages than Foxit, which was the one thing keeping me on Acrobat.
My only gripe (so far) is that you have to fuck around with referrer headers to download it in the first place.
To some extent in my field too, though I have the problem that the only significant international conferences in my field take place in the US and the UK. Other countries have only minor seminars. The UK is almost as much a no-go zone as the US (though the UK started becoming a no-go zone earlier). Well, maybe the days of the Ginormous International Conference are coming to an end.
If you take that approach, remember to say bye-bye to your laptop before going through customs. You most certainly will never see it again.
Don't knock it, it's still better than Atmos. (Well, less lethal, anyway.)
I've since found out that there's a Classic Doom mod for Doom 3 as well -- I haven't been able to compare them though. :-)
That's because no one knows. No matter how good or how bad he was, he would still be awarded every prize there was.
Titicus (spelling?), the historian,Tacitus, Annals 15.38-44. Accounts are also given by Cassius Dio book 62, and Suetonius' Life of Nero.
He rushed down, helped to fight the fires, gave shelter, and provided food at either a discounted or free rate. I'm not entirely sure if it was free or discounted and I lack the initiative to look this stuff up.Not everyone is as lazy. Tacitus continues after the passage you refer to (15.39), "These acts, though popular, produced no effect, since a rumour had gone forth everywhere that, at the very time when the city was in flames, the emperor appeared on a private stage and sang the Sack of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity." The same story is given by Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who appear to have used different evidence for their accounts, making it all but certain that the story is pretty accurate.
What did happen is that Nero used this fire to persecute the Christians but that was after the fire when the people were looking for someone to blame.Based on the evidence of Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius, there is a possibility, albeit slim, that he was entirely accurate in this allocation of blame.
Personally I'd recommend against nominating them. The Igs are
intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interest in science. -- sourceI don't think I'd like to see them used to reward incompetence, or research based on contrived testing conditions and thereby leading to a foregone conclusion, which is what this is.
You mis-spelt "two".
And a lexicon is not a copy of the books, or even a re-telling. It's a reference tool for information about the fictional world created by the books. Hardly the same thing.
A lexicon's relationship to its source material is more explicit than the situation Card describes, but it hardly looks like re-printing Rowling's books verbatim, does it?
I hope you don't hold the view that any encyclopaedia that presents information that comes ultimately from copyrighted sources ought to be considered guilty of infringement. Because most published information comes from copyrighted sources. Wikipedia articles about factual events often cite newspaper articles; newspapers articles are copyright-laden. Do they all get consigned to copyright hell too? It's the same identical situation here.
I presume the Tolkien estate will be suing soon over the Complete Guide to Middle-Earth.
But it's more general than that. From a legal point of view I don't know what the situation is, but from a research point of view (I'm an academic) an encyclopaedia of a fictional universe is not in any way substantively different from a more discursive type of academic book. (The fact that the folks publishing this encyclopaedia aren't academics is irrelevant.)
I have a nagging worry that this case will make it difficult to write any books about literature that is still under copyright -- which is a pretty big chunk of literature. Shakespearean scholars may be safe, sure. But I fear for people who work on, say, García Marquez, or C.S. Lewis, or Stephen King. I know someone who has some links with academics who specialise in children's literature; I think I should ask what those folks are thinking about this case, and whether they're worried.
I don't give two hoots about J.K. Rowling, but the more general principle of authors (or their estates) suing over people doing research on their books is a Very Bad Thing. We've got three possible outcomes here, as far as I can see:
(1) Rowling loses her case and loses it bad;
(2) Rowling wins, and the courts decide to draw an arbitrary, valueless distinction between encyclopaedias and discursive writing, prohibiting the one and permitting the other; this strikes me as untenable in the long term, as it simply doesn't make sense;
(3) Rowling wins, and henceforth only authors that have been dead for nearly a century will be legitimate topics for literary criticism.
Seems to me that only one of these outcomes makes sense.
I sit corrected! I teach ancient literature so I should have known that. Also I certainly wasn't replying in the spirit of your comment. :-) Humblest apologies for the inconwenience.
Yes... excellent. Smithers! Summon the undead Greek poets!
Roman. Mantuan.