There was a manga version of Spiderman produced for Japan a few years ago. I saw some imported copies in a comic book shop at the time, and it was plainly an official adaptation and not a doujinshi fanfic or anything like that. They seem to have been translated and released on the US market in a limited way, but I never saw any of those on the shelves.
According to the usual account of the discovery of coffee, the first major users were Ethiopian monks, who thought highly of it precisely because it would keep them awake for their lengthy services.
God obviously made this version of the plant rare for a reason. So let's not get needlessly heretical here or anything.
I know this sounds like a troll, but just think about it for two minutes.
I did.
The advantages of railguns have little to do with their effectiveness. As far as I can tell, they're not remarkably more effective than the guns mounted on naval warships now -- you know, the ones that fire explosive shells. The damage done by a railgun projectile is from the kinetic energy alone. That translates to much safer handling aboard ship. It's most certainly not a WMD, a weapon designed to massacre whole populations. Neither are any of the beam weapons mentioned -- pretty much by definition: beam weapons can only be trained on a single target at a time. And probably not people; that would be a huge waste of energy.
Consider this from the article:
"The military likes having the option that does not cause collateral damage. That lets us engage units that are close to friendly forces and where we don't have to kill, but can simply make the enemy go away," McGinnis said.
So what's this? You favor the weapons in the current arsenal, where it's extremely difficult to avoid collateral damage and huge losses of life? And you disparage new weapons that allows the Navy to achieve its objectives while avoiding these things as much as possible?
I don't disagree with you that artists ought to be rewarded highly for great work--it's just that the rewards should be mostly from fame and just knowing that their work got so much attention and made such an impact.
Again, crap. You can't eat fame. You would deny anyone the opportunity to make a living from their art, and force artists to live on some kind of dole. Note that this leaves others, primarily distributors such as publishers or film studios or record companies, to make all the profits. They get a heathy enough share of the profit as it is -- which to a degree is only fair since they're shouldering the majority of the financial risk -- but you want to give them all of it. Unless you're advocating some kind of tightly controlled economic sector of artistic work where the government essentially regulates prices and distribution. That's absurd; there's no need for that at all. Creative work needs freedom to flourish. A heavily regulated market doesn't provide that. And who's to judge what's valid art and what isn't, and therefore who gets to be on the dole? Right now the market answers that question in a very meaningful way.
And guess what: Artists do "go back to mining coal" when sales drop off, if they haven't made enough in the meantime to live on! Take someone like Greg Kihn. He was a one-hit wonder back in the '80s with "My Love's in Jeopardy" and lived the high life for a few years. He blasted through all the profits from that a long time ago, and is now working as a DJ at a local radio station in San Jose. You're describing the current system exactly. What seems to bother you is that the people currently profiting off older work are those you don't approve of. Tough.
Some people like Greg Kihn, George Lucas, or Piers Anthony might only be capable of producing a small number of quality artistic work. Sometimes they can coast on the notoriety they get from it, like Anthony from the early Xanth books or Lucas from "American Graffiti" and "Star Wars", or, like Kihn, sometimes not. Forcing all artists to create for free won't change that. To imagine it will is to live in a fantasy world.
You seem to be saying that because someone starts out at the bottom of his profession out of necessity, he ought to stay there. That's a load of crap. You do good work, you ought to at least have the opportunity to be rewarded commensurately.
You seem to be saying that because some very good novels didn't earn their authors a decent living, then no author ought to be entitled to a living from his writing. That's a load of crap. You obviously have no idea how much work goes into creating good fiction. Doing it well requires an author's full-time attention. If they were forced to do it part time, there would be less of it and it wouldn't be as good.
And if your last point was valid, the best fiction these days would be coming from the fanfic community. Sure, I bet it is. Or is it more likely -- a load of crap?
When selling your work is your bread-and-butter, then HELL YES you care about making the cash! Just like most programmers and engineers care about getting paid for their work every so often. The main reason professional writers like it when people want to read their work is because it means more money for them. Sheesh, what is it with you people who want creative people to starve just so that you can enjoy their work for free?
I know, Harlan's a long way from starving, he's an asshole, the "piracy" here probably took not one cent from his pocket because none of these people were going to run out and buy his books anyway (or they already had and just wanted an e-version) and he doesn't understand USENET in the slightest which made him go after the wrong party here. But there's nothing "warped" about wanting to get paid FOR WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING!
I think you're forgetting just how fragmented the US was when the Constitution was signed. The original Federal government under the Articles of Confederation was extremely weak and accomplished very little. (The US has tried very hard to forget the Articles of Confederation. You won't learn the name of the real first President of the US in elementary school, or even high school. It wasn't George Washington, who was actually the 11th President. Reagan was really the 50th, not the 40th.) It's probably fair to compare the current EU situation with the original condition of the US, and look at where the EU's development might run in parallel.
Our present Constitution was controversial enough when it was adopted over fears the Federal government was too strong. It wasn't, at least not at the time. The fundamental political unit wasn't seen as the Federation, but the State, and this accounts for some of the now seeming anomalies in our system such as the Electoral College and the uniform representation in the Senate. (And that latter can't be changed; it's the one Constitutional amendment that's unconstitutional.) The history of the US since then has been a gradual slide towards greater and greater centralization, often in spite of the actual powers granted to the Federal government. There were brief periods of national emergency where this process was greatly accelerated, such as the Civil War, the Depression and WWII, and arguably, the present "War on Terror".
It's taken the US over 200 years to arrive at its present degree of centralization. It overcame a certain amount of animosity among the States analogous to Eurpoean nationalism, and against the tide of an ingrained American distrust of powerful government. If anything, the Eurpoean attitude towards government will hasten centralization rather than retard it.
An interesting medical commentary once suggested that the role of government in societal bodies is akin to the role of parasites in biological organisms.
So what is the role of parasites in biological organisms? Are there any that aren't harmful -- in which case this is indeed a value judgement? If you'd said "symbiote" I'd have understood better, with a comparison to e. coli or something like that. But what good does a tapeworm or a virus do for the host?
Interesting that there was a small quake there while all these quakes have been occuring on the West Coast.
Actually, you'd be hard-pressed to find a time when earthquakes weren't occurring on the West Coast. Any New Madrid quake is going to coincide with California low-level seismic activity. It's pretty routine around here.
Re:Yep, any day now. By which I mean next 100000 d
on
Is This The Big One?
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· Score: 1
1. Land doesn't float on water. It's denser than water. It *does* float on magma, but that fact alone doesn't account for land above sea level. Even the ocean floor floats on magma.
2. The California plate is moving north, the San Andreas being a strike-slip fault rather than a nascent rift valley. Its evenutal fate is to move to Alaska rather than head out into the Pacific.
3. And what qualified you to make earthquake predictions anyway? You don't seem to know much about the geology around here.
For registering a copyright it's still a requirement to submit copies to the LoC. For published works, this must be "two copies of the best edition." Parent was talking about books not tray liners. It's safe to assume that the copyright was indeed registered for published books.
And if McD's wants to register the copyright on its tray liners, it does too have to submit a copy. At least according to the Copyright Office.
The myth that the pages are all crumbling is obscene,
It's no myth, even if one grants that it doesn't happen as often as some claim. Sixty years ago long-lasting quality paper was no more used for run-of-the-mill publications than it is now.
When I was a kid back in the '70s I found in my grandparents' basement a book called "Stratosphere Jim and his Flying Fortress." I don't recall the exact date on it, but from the context of the story it preceded WWII. (The "bad guys" were obviously Nazis, but the author carefully avoided calling them that, or even identifying them clearly with Germany.) It was a kind of low-tech science fiction novel and entertaining enough in its way, so I took it home. The pages were brown and could not tolerate any new creases, and at the slightest mishandling the pages would start to flake away at the corners. At that time the book could not have been more than 40 years old.
I wish I knew where it was, as it's clearly one of the orphaned works this article's about. If anyone else here has ever heard of it, I'd be very surprised.
It's the difference between writing a new Star Trek novel and photocopying one.
You just try writing and selling a new Star Trek novel without Paramount's permission and see what happens.
I contend that the impulse behind fanfic doujinshi and scanlation is exactly the same: a grass-roots hunger for more of the material that's actually available from the strictly legal sources. If anyone's scanlating a work that's otherwise available in English, it's certainly not hurting sales much is it?
But the proof in in the pudding. It's up to the publishers to tolerate this, or not. RTFA. Or are you challenging the reporter's facts here?
The difference is that Japanese publishers have a long history of tolerating, or even encouraging, this kind of activity. Doujinshi, for example, is unauthorized manga fan-fiction: entire comic books produced by fans using proprietary characters and openly published and sold. A great many manga artists got their start by drawing doujinshi, and the publishers have come to view it as something like a farm system for incubating new talent. A healthy doujinshi community surrounding a title is also seen as a sign of that title's popularity, not as a potential threat. This is true even when the doujinshi place the characters into situations or relationship that were certainly not contemplated -- and if asked, would probably not be sanctioned -- by the original artist or publisher.
Scanlation is nothing more than a foreign manifestation of this same impulse, and the copyright owners have just as much reason to tolerate it.
You're totally unqualified to assess a profession in which you have zero experience.
If a company sells you software that consistently fails to perform as advertised or documented, you're perfectly well able to assess that company as selling poor-quality software even though you're not a programmer.
If you go to a vegetable stand where the produce for sale is smaller than average, tasteless or rotten you can assess that produce as not worth your money even though you're not a farmer.
If you pick your car up from the mechanic and the part he just replaced falls off during the drive home, you can assess that mechanic's work as substandard even though you're not a mechanic yourself.
And if journalists consistently publish as "facts" statements which I know to be false, I am perfectly well-able to assess the work of those journalists as shoddy. So get off your damn high horse. There's nothing abstruse or holy about journalism that renders it immune to simple evaluations of truth or falsehood.
Oh, and that small-town reporter I mentioned before? His name is Neal Ross. I didn't mention his award winning investigative series on abuses at a center for the developmentally disabled. I do so now only to prove to you that he's bona fide. His journalistic education? None whatsoever. His experience before joining the paper? He played a 19th-century London reporter at a Dickens Christmas Faire in San Francisco.
Re:journalists
on
Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Journalists, despite your bleak and uneducated assessment, are people obsessed with the facts regardless of what the drooling, feebly tutored folk-minds believe based on their faiths and fantasies.
Bull. Shit.
Facts are the last things journalists care about. They care about deadlines. They care about making their editors happy. They care about their paychecks. As long as those three things are satisfactory, the facts can be included in the story -- if they feel like it.
Every single time I've seen or read journalistic coverage of an event I was actually present for, and every single time I've seen or read journalistic coverage on a subject on which I have some expertise, the get at least several important facts wrong. Every single time, without exception.
A co-worker of mine noticed the same thing, and had an opportunity to find out about it. He was at a civic fundraising dinner and happened to be seated next to a reporter for the local paper. (The San Jose Mercury News, a Knight-Ridder organ.) He waited until she'd tied a few on, on the theory of in vino veritas, before asking why what I described above seemed to hold. She told him flat-out that their first priority was getting the story out, and that getting the story right was simply not important.
On the other hand, and in the interests of balanced coverage: A good friend of mine had been a reporter for a local paper in Sonoma, and that was not at all the same. For one thing it was a weekly, so deadlines were nowhere near as tight. For another, his personal ethics and those of his editor absolutely forbade publishing a story with incorrect facts. The result was that he became so well-respected that the town council named a day after him when he left the paper to enter Rabbinical studies.
Sadly, small-town newspapers are a dying breed. Blogs cannot take their place as ethical news sources, but they certainly can as checks on big media. Clearly, some kind of check is badly needed.
We didn't used to write code in all-caps because we loved the caps-lock key. We used to write code in all-caps because we were using keypunch or Teletypes that had no lower case.
We've got those. Trouble is they're only really effective while someone's logged on. If no one's using the toilet you can't have the DoorLock firewall running without preventing authorized users' speedy access, and that causes even more disturbing system failures.
*Having to mop up the bathroom because your toilet experienced a "buffer overflow" yet again?
I had to deal with this not long ago. I just thought it was bad plumbing, but now I know it's those damn 133t 5kR1p7 k1dd13 h4x0rs again! If only American Standard didn't make such an insecure product! Anyone, absolutely anyone in the house, can just go into the bathroom and leave any kind of shit they want in my toilet and there's not a single security feature to stop them!
And does AS ever release security patches? Noooooo!
I'm sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Have you even read a EULA lately? Sure, I know it's easy to click past it as quickly as you can when it pops up in the installer. But try it sometime. You'll find that the vast majority of them contain language that distances the vendor as much as legally possible from anything like accountability.
Note that this is not the same as "support... resources... guidance." Anyone can provide that. Lots of folks make livings doing this for MS products, many of them without even official certification. It would be absurd to say that Bob, the techie that lives down the street, is in any sense "accountable" for, say, Clippy. No, the only ones who can be accountable in any real sense is MS itself, and it refuses to be so held.
It was already pointed out that seeds probably survived even if the parent plants didn't. Have a look at an area where there's been a forest fire to see how this works.
Many species survived, yes. It's impossible for use to determine how many individuals survived though, and I see no claims here one way or another.
The impact did metamorph rocks in the area, but worldwide there was nowhere near enough heat. It takes far more heat than a large forest fire, or even a broiler, to cause that kind of change in rocks. You normally need lots of pressure too.
As far as "reacting the atmosphere," that's part of the theory as first suggested several years ago. This isn't a new theory, but a study bringing out more evidence for it.
A brief heat pulse wouldn't raise the water temperature much, but even a rise of a few degrees might cause a number of more sensitive species to die off. Which may well be what happened.
I don't know about the birds, but this is hardly a fatal objection. Small animals can find many hiding places unavailable to larger ones. I don't think we need be too surprised if a number of smaller dinosaur species survived.
There were no polar ice caps during the Mesozoic.
I'd be shocked to discover that space.com's servers were ever overloaded by/. If you don't want to read the article, then say so. (If you're referring to the original paper, you can only get the abstract without a paid subscription anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
There was a manga version of Spiderman produced for Japan a few years ago. I saw some imported copies in a comic book shop at the time, and it was plainly an official adaptation and not a doujinshi fanfic or anything like that. They seem to have been translated and released on the US market in a limited way, but I never saw any of those on the shelves.
Ah! That's how they got Windows XP! I was wondering about that...
God obviously made this version of the plant rare for a reason. So let's not get needlessly heretical here or anything.
All the hippies I know drink their coffee heavily caffeinated. And I live in Santa Cruz County in California, so that's saying something.
Here ya are! Go nuts!
I did.
The advantages of railguns have little to do with their effectiveness. As far as I can tell, they're not remarkably more effective than the guns mounted on naval warships now -- you know, the ones that fire explosive shells. The damage done by a railgun projectile is from the kinetic energy alone. That translates to much safer handling aboard ship. It's most certainly not a WMD, a weapon designed to massacre whole populations. Neither are any of the beam weapons mentioned -- pretty much by definition: beam weapons can only be trained on a single target at a time. And probably not people; that would be a huge waste of energy.
Consider this from the article:
So what's this? You favor the weapons in the current arsenal, where it's extremely difficult to avoid collateral damage and huge losses of life? And you disparage new weapons that allows the Navy to achieve its objectives while avoiding these things as much as possible?So yes, you're a troll.
Again, crap. You can't eat fame. You would deny anyone the opportunity to make a living from their art, and force artists to live on some kind of dole. Note that this leaves others, primarily distributors such as publishers or film studios or record companies, to make all the profits. They get a heathy enough share of the profit as it is -- which to a degree is only fair since they're shouldering the majority of the financial risk -- but you want to give them all of it. Unless you're advocating some kind of tightly controlled economic sector of artistic work where the government essentially regulates prices and distribution. That's absurd; there's no need for that at all. Creative work needs freedom to flourish. A heavily regulated market doesn't provide that. And who's to judge what's valid art and what isn't, and therefore who gets to be on the dole? Right now the market answers that question in a very meaningful way.
And guess what: Artists do "go back to mining coal" when sales drop off, if they haven't made enough in the meantime to live on! Take someone like Greg Kihn. He was a one-hit wonder back in the '80s with "My Love's in Jeopardy" and lived the high life for a few years. He blasted through all the profits from that a long time ago, and is now working as a DJ at a local radio station in San Jose. You're describing the current system exactly. What seems to bother you is that the people currently profiting off older work are those you don't approve of. Tough.
Some people like Greg Kihn, George Lucas, or Piers Anthony might only be capable of producing a small number of quality artistic work. Sometimes they can coast on the notoriety they get from it, like Anthony from the early Xanth books or Lucas from "American Graffiti" and "Star Wars", or, like Kihn, sometimes not. Forcing all artists to create for free won't change that. To imagine it will is to live in a fantasy world.
You seem to be saying that because some very good novels didn't earn their authors a decent living, then no author ought to be entitled to a living from his writing. That's a load of crap. You obviously have no idea how much work goes into creating good fiction. Doing it well requires an author's full-time attention. If they were forced to do it part time, there would be less of it and it wouldn't be as good.
And if your last point was valid, the best fiction these days would be coming from the fanfic community. Sure, I bet it is. Or is it more likely -- a load of crap?
I know, Harlan's a long way from starving, he's an asshole, the "piracy" here probably took not one cent from his pocket because none of these people were going to run out and buy his books anyway (or they already had and just wanted an e-version) and he doesn't understand USENET in the slightest which made him go after the wrong party here. But there's nothing "warped" about wanting to get paid FOR WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING!
Our present Constitution was controversial enough when it was adopted over fears the Federal government was too strong. It wasn't, at least not at the time. The fundamental political unit wasn't seen as the Federation, but the State, and this accounts for some of the now seeming anomalies in our system such as the Electoral College and the uniform representation in the Senate. (And that latter can't be changed; it's the one Constitutional amendment that's unconstitutional.) The history of the US since then has been a gradual slide towards greater and greater centralization, often in spite of the actual powers granted to the Federal government. There were brief periods of national emergency where this process was greatly accelerated, such as the Civil War, the Depression and WWII, and arguably, the present "War on Terror".
It's taken the US over 200 years to arrive at its present degree of centralization. It overcame a certain amount of animosity among the States analogous to Eurpoean nationalism, and against the tide of an ingrained American distrust of powerful government. If anything, the Eurpoean attitude towards government will hasten centralization rather than retard it.
So what is the role of parasites in biological organisms? Are there any that aren't harmful -- in which case this is indeed a value judgement? If you'd said "symbiote" I'd have understood better, with a comparison to e. coli or something like that. But what good does a tapeworm or a virus do for the host?
Actually, you'd be hard-pressed to find a time when earthquakes weren't occurring on the West Coast. Any New Madrid quake is going to coincide with California low-level seismic activity. It's pretty routine around here.
2. The California plate is moving north, the San Andreas being a strike-slip fault rather than a nascent rift valley. Its evenutal fate is to move to Alaska rather than head out into the Pacific.
3. And what qualified you to make earthquake predictions anyway? You don't seem to know much about the geology around here.
And if McD's wants to register the copyright on its tray liners, it does too have to submit a copy. At least according to the Copyright Office.
It's no myth, even if one grants that it doesn't happen as often as some claim. Sixty years ago long-lasting quality paper was no more used for run-of-the-mill publications than it is now.
When I was a kid back in the '70s I found in my grandparents' basement a book called "Stratosphere Jim and his Flying Fortress." I don't recall the exact date on it, but from the context of the story it preceded WWII. (The "bad guys" were obviously Nazis, but the author carefully avoided calling them that, or even identifying them clearly with Germany.) It was a kind of low-tech science fiction novel and entertaining enough in its way, so I took it home. The pages were brown and could not tolerate any new creases, and at the slightest mishandling the pages would start to flake away at the corners. At that time the book could not have been more than 40 years old.
I wish I knew where it was, as it's clearly one of the orphaned works this article's about. If anyone else here has ever heard of it, I'd be very surprised.
You just try writing and selling a new Star Trek novel without Paramount's permission and see what happens.
I contend that the impulse behind fanfic doujinshi and scanlation is exactly the same: a grass-roots hunger for more of the material that's actually available from the strictly legal sources. If anyone's scanlating a work that's otherwise available in English, it's certainly not hurting sales much is it?
But the proof in in the pudding. It's up to the publishers to tolerate this, or not. RTFA. Or are you challenging the reporter's facts here?
Scanlation is nothing more than a foreign manifestation of this same impulse, and the copyright owners have just as much reason to tolerate it.
If a company sells you software that consistently fails to perform as advertised or documented, you're perfectly well able to assess that company as selling poor-quality software even though you're not a programmer.
If you go to a vegetable stand where the produce for sale is smaller than average, tasteless or rotten you can assess that produce as not worth your money even though you're not a farmer.
If you pick your car up from the mechanic and the part he just replaced falls off during the drive home, you can assess that mechanic's work as substandard even though you're not a mechanic yourself.
And if journalists consistently publish as "facts" statements which I know to be false, I am perfectly well-able to assess the work of those journalists as shoddy. So get off your damn high horse. There's nothing abstruse or holy about journalism that renders it immune to simple evaluations of truth or falsehood.
Oh, and that small-town reporter I mentioned before? His name is Neal Ross. I didn't mention his award winning investigative series on abuses at a center for the developmentally disabled. I do so now only to prove to you that he's bona fide. His journalistic education? None whatsoever. His experience before joining the paper? He played a 19th-century London reporter at a Dickens Christmas Faire in San Francisco.
Bull. Shit.
Facts are the last things journalists care about. They care about deadlines. They care about making their editors happy. They care about their paychecks. As long as those three things are satisfactory, the facts can be included in the story -- if they feel like it.
Every single time I've seen or read journalistic coverage of an event I was actually present for, and every single time I've seen or read journalistic coverage on a subject on which I have some expertise, the get at least several important facts wrong. Every single time, without exception.
A co-worker of mine noticed the same thing, and had an opportunity to find out about it. He was at a civic fundraising dinner and happened to be seated next to a reporter for the local paper. (The San Jose Mercury News, a Knight-Ridder organ.) He waited until she'd tied a few on, on the theory of in vino veritas, before asking why what I described above seemed to hold. She told him flat-out that their first priority was getting the story out, and that getting the story right was simply not important.
On the other hand, and in the interests of balanced coverage: A good friend of mine had been a reporter for a local paper in Sonoma, and that was not at all the same. For one thing it was a weekly, so deadlines were nowhere near as tight. For another, his personal ethics and those of his editor absolutely forbade publishing a story with incorrect facts. The result was that he became so well-respected that the town council named a day after him when he left the paper to enter Rabbinical studies.
Sadly, small-town newspapers are a dying breed. Blogs cannot take their place as ethical news sources, but they certainly can as checks on big media. Clearly, some kind of check is badly needed.
Kids these days....
We've got those. Trouble is they're only really effective while someone's logged on. If no one's using the toilet you can't have the DoorLock firewall running without preventing authorized users' speedy access, and that causes even more disturbing system failures.
I had to deal with this not long ago. I just thought it was bad plumbing, but now I know it's those damn 133t 5kR1p7 k1dd13 h4x0rs again! If only American Standard didn't make such an insecure product! Anyone, absolutely anyone in the house, can just go into the bathroom and leave any kind of shit they want in my toilet and there's not a single security feature to stop them!
And does AS ever release security patches? Noooooo!
Note that this is not the same as "support... resources... guidance." Anyone can provide that. Lots of folks make livings doing this for MS products, many of them without even official certification. It would be absurd to say that Bob, the techie that lives down the street, is in any sense "accountable" for, say, Clippy. No, the only ones who can be accountable in any real sense is MS itself, and it refuses to be so held.
How is this any better than Linux?
Then read the abstract at least. It's free.
It was already pointed out that seeds probably survived even if the parent plants didn't. Have a look at an area where there's been a forest fire to see how this works.
Many species survived, yes. It's impossible for use to determine how many individuals survived though, and I see no claims here one way or another.
The impact did metamorph rocks in the area, but worldwide there was nowhere near enough heat. It takes far more heat than a large forest fire, or even a broiler, to cause that kind of change in rocks. You normally need lots of pressure too.
As far as "reacting the atmosphere," that's part of the theory as first suggested several years ago. This isn't a new theory, but a study bringing out more evidence for it.
I don't know about the birds, but this is hardly a fatal objection. Small animals can find many hiding places unavailable to larger ones. I don't think we need be too surprised if a number of smaller dinosaur species survived.
There were no polar ice caps during the Mesozoic.
I'd be shocked to discover that space.com's servers were ever overloaded by /. If you don't want to read the article, then say so. (If you're referring to the original paper, you can only get the abstract without a paid subscription anyway.)