I hate to say it, but you're completely wrong. Copyright licenses are emphatically not contracts. They do not require consent or consideration and are completely unilateral. (You still can't grant people the right to do something that is otherwise illegal, e.g. I can't grant you the right to make a copy of my novel and then stipulate that if you make a copy, you must find the President and beat him with it.)
Let's say I write a novel. Under U.S. law I automatically have copyright on it. If you buy a copy of my novel, you then have the usual rights afforded by copyright law. You can read it, tear it up, throw it away, paint it blue, sell it to someone, etc. I can't revoke any of those rights, but I can grant you additional ones, and I can do so on a case-by-case basis. If I felt like it, I could grant you the right to make three copies and share them with your friends. You could not refuse this right (although you could simply choose not to exercise it), I don't need anyone's permission to grant it to you (or to stipulate that if you take advantage of that right, you must do something else as well). And I also don't need to give you anything in exchange. But I could also stipulate that if you make more than three copies, then your right to share those copies is revoked.
As long as the stipulations don't require you to do anything illegal, they're perfectly valid. I don't have any obligations if I grant you this right; I can grant or revoke the right at will. That is a power reserved to me by copyright law.
The GPL is not a contract. It says nothing about using the work; all it says is that if you redistribute copies of the work, you must provide the source code. Without the GPL (i.e. under default copyright law), you wouldn't have any right to distribute the work at all. The GPL says, "You can distribute the work, but only if you adhere to these rules" (all of which are legal). Remember, on its own, copyright only affects your ability to copy and distribute copies (modified, derivative, or otherwise) of a work. It has nothing to do with what else you can do with the work once you have it in your legal possession.
Exactly. Copyright infringment isn't less wrong because it's not stealing.
It's less wrong because it's less harmful than stealing. Of course, the exact magnitude of harm in copyright infringment cases is nearly impossible to determine, whereas the exact magnitude of harm in theft cases is extremely easy to determine. So there's that problem, too, with trying to claim that "copyright infringment is stealing!"
You keep talking about licenses and contracts as if they're the same thing. They are most definitely not. A contract involves both parties agreeing to certain obligations that they must fulfill. A license is a one-way concept; if I own copyright on something, I can give you a license to do certain things with it, without incurring any obligations in return.
Let's say I write a book. I sell copies of that book at Borders, just like everyone else. But you, Just Some Guy, I call up and say, "I hereby grant you and you alone a license to make and distribute photocopies of my book." You haven't signed anything, and neither have I, yet your legal rights have just changed. You don't have to agree to it; in fact you don't get any say as to whether you agree to it. I can license or de-license you at will (according to the rules of law, anyway; I legally can't revoke your fair use rights, for example, or prevent you from selling the copy you bought to someone else). That's the difference between a license and a contract.
Now, as to whether or not buying a movie ticket actually licenses you to do something, I don't know. Actually it seems like the ticket would be more like a contract: you give us money, and we have to let you enter our premises and watch specifically the movie at the showtime shown on the ticket. At that point the contract ends and we can make you leave the premises. If we throw you out without cause as specified in the contract (a copy of which is probably available from the management), then we've violated the contract and you can sue us.
One issue is that the punishment does not in any way come even close to fitting the crime. A year in jail for bringing a camcorder into a movie theater? You'd get less for beating the shit out of the usher.
Copyright violation should be handled in civil law, not criminal. Patent and trademark infringment are both handled civilly, not criminally; why should copyright be treated differently?
Because as it stands, you will spend more time in jail for bringing a camcorder into a movie theater than you would for physically assaulting an usher. Plus, the MPAA keeps trying to get legislation to cripple home electronic equipment in an incredibly futile attempt to do something about piracy.
The first thing tells everyone that a giant company's financial interests are more important than the physical safety of an individual. The second thing tells those of us who DON'T pirate movies that we have to suffer because the MPAA doesn't have a clue how to deal with the problem sanely. Crippling my computer is NOT going to prevent people from downloading movies in any way. Cap Codes prevent me from enjoying a movie I *paid* to see. *That's* what pisses me off.
If the law says X, and a company uses X to their advantage, it's hard to fault them... unless the law is unjust, stupid, ineffective, or otherwise bad. Nobody with half a clue thinks that the movie industry should just give up and let everyone pirate their movies. But copyright should be handled in the civil court system, not the criminal system. The fact that the MPAA is in the legal right doesn't excuse the parts of their behavior that are doing everyone harm and nobody good (hell, they're hurting themselves by acting like this!).
Oh, and good work lumping all Slashdotters into a single mold by pretending we all like to claim that "the MPAA needs to find a 'new business model'" as if that were the answer to the problem. That's a real, real valid way to argue.
I'm just gonna assume that you always look both ways before you stomp on the gas, since accelerating quickly into the intersection makes it more likely that you'll get hit by some asshole who's running the red in the other direction. The reason I assume this is because you haven't been killed in a car accident yet. If my assumption is wrong, then, well, you probably will be killed in a car accident any day now.:)
Quite a lot of places allow diagonal pedestrian crossing, and for very good reason. The places that do it typically have very high pedestrian traffic volumes, and it's better for both vehicle and pedestrian throughput (and safety) to have distinct vehicle and pedestrian walk cycles. Pasadena, here in southern California, has numerous diagonal crosswalks in the Old Town area (which is an extremely popular entertainment/dining area). Beverly Hills has several of them in its downtown, due to the relatively large amount of pedestrian traffic.
And here's a general idea: Next time you feel yourself getting really INDIGNANT and ANGRY about something you don't UNDERSTAND, you might want to stop and think about it, or maybe look into it, before posting a BLITHERING SCREED that makes you look like an ignorant nitwit.:)
Where would the average (e.g.) American have learned to fear the sound of a Huey? A Pavlovian response is a learned response; I don't think most people associate the sound of a helicopter with imminent death.
Miscellaneous errata: Inauguration Day is January 20th. So if someone else besides Bush (e.g. Kerry) wins the presidential election in November, he'd be sworn in as president on January 20th, not in February. Just FYI.
Greer's idea brings to mind an SF novel I read recently, "Remnant Population" by Elizabeth Moon. In this book an alien species shows up, and in this species mothers do not raise their own children -- a "nest-mother" does. Nest-mothers are older females who have already had children. For various psychosocial reasons, they're better equipped to raise a child than a new mother is. (Additionally, the whole social structure is more tribal than, say, American culture.) It's an interesting read.
But by the time we don't have a moon, we'll have a giant space station up there that will take its place.
Oh, probably by the time we're capable of building a space station 3,476 km in diameter, we'll probably be able to harness enough energy to simply force the moon to stay in its orbit.:)
Actually, by then, we'll probably have enough energy to fix Earth's axial tilt and eliminate seasons altogether! I can't wait! *spends next thousand years waiting*
it gives a degree of protection from disasters of the sort that killed off the dinosaurs.
is not one of them. Think about the two situations where Earth is hit by an asteroid that wipes out all life. In one situation, we have (say) a moon colony. In another, we don't.
In either situation, I'm still dead. So what do I care if we have a moonbase or not? When I'm dead, it won't matter to me whether the rest of humanity survives.
Now, it might be a valid reason if, by having a moon colony, the survivors of an asteroid strike (which may include me) are better off because the colonists can come back and help us somehow, whereas if we didn't have them we'd be screwed or worse off. But I don't think that's been demonstrated.
In truth, articles like this are intended to troll for humorless retards like you, so that those of us who know what laughter sounds like can mark you as Foes and mod you down to -1, so that we never have to see your piffle.
Yes, I know, it seems like an awful lot of work just to filter out the clueless, but then we're geeks: we LIKE elaborate schemes that piss other people off!
One big reason is that most classic SF does not translate especially well to film. The main thrust of SF is using futuristic settings to illuminate modern social issues -- or to explore what might happen to a society if a certain technology is developed, or we find out we're not alone in the universe, etc.
But the way this is done in great SF books usually either involves people talking a lot, or people thinking a lot, or with other mechanisms that don't translate all that well to a visual medium. Watching Ben Reich's gradual descent into insanity in "The Demolished Man" is not going to be an easy thing to show on-screen, not to mention the rapid-fire, overlapping conversations that the espers have. Can you imagine adapting "A Deepness in the Sky," where ARRR, THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD one of the big reveals is that the aliens are a race of spider-people? That would never work on film, because the instant you see them, you'd say, "Hey, they're spider people," whereas in the book, it's slowly revealed over many chapters. Or how those minuscule floating computer device thingies allow superior tactical knowledge over your enemies. Or using metric time (kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc.) which would just confuse the average viewer.
If you've ever read Greg Egan's novel "Diaspora," which is a great piece of SF, imagine trying to adapt Yatima's birth to the screen: showing a protosiliconic intelligence being born, learning basic logical concepts... these are not things that would work well on-screen. Those of us who are already familiar with the concepts, terminology, and mindset necessary to understand things like that might enjoy it, but we are a very small segment of the moviegoing market. The studios generally don't risk money on something which they know in advance, no matter how good it is, isn't going to make any money.
Yes, there certainly are some pieces of classic SF that are translatable to the screen, but they are few and far between. Most SF only really works in text form, because the ideas it presents are abstract and not readily realizable in concrete (visual) form.
Yeah, maybe everyone else who's never seen a movie before. This is one of the oldest cliches in the book. And there'd be great difficulty keeping this fact secret, considering that the actress playing Samus -- the main character -- would have top billing. People would assume going in that Samus was a woman. (Assuming the trailers didn't give it away, which they probably would.)
There's much better reasons than "a movie needs it's [sic] signature fuck toy" why having Samus in the suit for the whole movie wouldn't work:
- Nobody would identify with the character, as Samus would just be (essentially) a personality-free robot. Not acceptable for a film protagonist.
- Nobody would want to play that character. You wouldn't even need a real actress for it, you just get a stuntperson to play the whole thing, and have the actress only show up for the reveal at the end -- and as far as an actor's concerned, a cameo is not a real role. She wouldn't get to actually do any *acting*. And obscuring the actor's face for the entire movie prevents them from using their greatest asset. (Which was one problem with the Matrix films -- many of the actors had their eyes obscured for large parts of the film. Granted, it didn't matter for Keanu, since he can't act anyway, but everyone else suffered for it.)
Yeah, the Terminator was scary, but he wasn't the protagonist in the first film -- and in the second film, they humanized him by letting him learn how to act human. In T2 he didn't have "a massively distorted and completely inhuman voice". Arnie in T2 is a great character because he he's humanized.
Also note that the whole "Unidentifiable badass turns out to be a woman" is an *incredibly* old cliche. It was old when Metroid did it -- the reason we geeks thought it was so cool was because video game protagonists were almost never women. It wasn't an old cliche in the world of video games. But in a movie, the reveal would have much less power, and would very likely not affect the story much. Oh, so she's a woman. Big whoop. Maybe if Aliens had never been made (or any other movie with a badass heroine), it might work, but as it stands, it won't. (Nevermind that keeping that fact secret would be nigh impossible -- Samus is the main character, meaning the actress playing her would have top billing. Everyone would know going in that Samus was a woman.)
With regards to your sig, here are some polite corrections to your spelling and grammar:)
... I actually read the article.
The investigation team seems to be after some very extreme stuff.
Anyhow I find it curious that they mentioned something like near-european like tolerance of pornography. What's that supposed to mean?
Yes, believe it or not, you can see naked women on billboards advertising skin lotion. You can see naked women (and/or men) on magazines. Open them up and you see: Guess what? Naked women and/or men. Just that. No extreme posing, no sick and somewhat unaesthetic pussy tearing or any of that kind of stuff.
As prudish as a large portion of US citizens may be, the most extreme (and sick) porn I've ever seen comes from the US. I strongly suspect there's a link there somewhere.
I met an american once who noticed the same. He said like 'Yeah, here in germany you keep turning your head for those magazines laid out right next to the newspaper and you're all mixed why no one's irritated. But when you look inside it's cuddly innocent naked girls, much softer porn than what you see in the american editions.' Right on.
I'd say it may be time for you across the pond to lighten up a little, no? Ok, so some people say the US may be founded by all the crazy religious fanatics that got chucked out of europe a few centuries ago, but aren't things changing for the better over there? Or are they getting worse?
Now, to answer your actual questions:
What's that supposed to mean?
It's "common knowledge" in the U.S. that most European countries are much more liberal in terms of pornography. What exactly that entails, of course, is unknown to most Americans -- we simply figure that it's just like it is here, only more so. I wasn't aware until I read your post that run-of-the-mill porn in Germany was generally softer than what we have here in the U.S., though. Interesting. (I would like to visit Germany some time, and not just for the porn;))
I strongly suspect there's a link there somewhere.
One commonly-cited event is how when Denmark became the first European country to legalize pornography back in the 60s, the incidence of sex crimes dropped drastically. Japan, which has an enormous array of options for those seeking pornography (including some exceedingly bizarre stuff -- not extreme, just bizarre), has one of the lowest rates of sex crimes of any industrialized nation.
The point is that giving people a harmless outlet (pornography) is a healthy thing, as opposed to forcing them to repress everything until they decide to go out and start raping people.
I'd say it may be time for you across the pond to lighten up a little, no?
Not all of us think that Ashcroft's approach to pornography is reasonable. I'm an American citizen, born and raised, and I'm firmly of the opinion that consenting adults should be allowed, sexually, to do whatever they want with each other -- including recording their sex acts and selling copies to other consenting adults. (Minus a few random corner cases.)
Ok, so some people say the US may be founded by all the crazy religious fanatics that got chucked out of europe a few centuries ago,
Which is responsible for both our historically strong work ethic, as well as our incredible puritanical streak...
but aren't things changing for the better over there? Or are they getting whorse?
I don't really have any statistics, but it seems to me that it's getting more polarized. That is, more people are coming to believe that things like pornography are just fine, but the people who think it's evil are holding that opinion more and more strongly.
Like a lot of things, however, people generally only switch from one side to the other. The number of people who start out thinking pornography is okay, but then decide it's evil, is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people who start out sexually repressed but then find out that pornography can be a healthy outlet for emotions that might otherwise turn violent.
Maybe it seemed magical and enchanting for a little while.
Now think about what it would have been like after a month with no electrical power. No electrical power means no clean water, no refrigeration, no steady lighting, no movies, no television, no stereos, no calling 911 for medical emergencies, no electronic communications... think long-term, and then wonder whether modern technology has improved our quality of life.
Copyright infringement and larceny are so vastly different in their natures and effects that using the same term ("stealing") to refer to both does nothing but cloud the issue. It is in the interest of clarity that I wish people would stop calling copyright infringement "stealing." Maybe that's how people use it, and I'm trying to get them to stop.
(Generic postscript to insulting ACs: Fuck off, you goat-blowing pile of horse crap.)
Maybe it's a trick. Netflix could be making noises about getting into a market that they know is pointless to enter, causing other companies to waste time and energy trying to beat Netflix to market, when Netflix has no actual plans to go there. Mwa ha ha ha! And so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say it, but you're completely wrong. Copyright licenses are emphatically not contracts. They do not require consent or consideration and are completely unilateral. (You still can't grant people the right to do something that is otherwise illegal, e.g. I can't grant you the right to make a copy of my novel and then stipulate that if you make a copy, you must find the President and beat him with it.)
Let's say I write a novel. Under U.S. law I automatically have copyright on it. If you buy a copy of my novel, you then have the usual rights afforded by copyright law. You can read it, tear it up, throw it away, paint it blue, sell it to someone, etc. I can't revoke any of those rights, but I can grant you additional ones, and I can do so on a case-by-case basis. If I felt like it, I could grant you the right to make three copies and share them with your friends. You could not refuse this right (although you could simply choose not to exercise it), I don't need anyone's permission to grant it to you (or to stipulate that if you take advantage of that right, you must do something else as well). And I also don't need to give you anything in exchange. But I could also stipulate that if you make more than three copies, then your right to share those copies is revoked.
As long as the stipulations don't require you to do anything illegal, they're perfectly valid. I don't have any obligations if I grant you this right; I can grant or revoke the right at will. That is a power reserved to me by copyright law.
The GPL is not a contract. It says nothing about using the work; all it says is that if you redistribute copies of the work, you must provide the source code. Without the GPL (i.e. under default copyright law), you wouldn't have any right to distribute the work at all. The GPL says, "You can distribute the work, but only if you adhere to these rules" (all of which are legal). Remember, on its own, copyright only affects your ability to copy and distribute copies (modified, derivative, or otherwise) of a work. It has nothing to do with what else you can do with the work once you have it in your legal possession.
Exactly. Copyright infringment isn't less wrong because it's not stealing.
It's less wrong because it's less harmful than stealing. Of course, the exact magnitude of harm in copyright infringment cases is nearly impossible to determine, whereas the exact magnitude of harm in theft cases is extremely easy to determine. So there's that problem, too, with trying to claim that "copyright infringment is stealing!"
You keep talking about licenses and contracts as if they're the same thing. They are most definitely not. A contract involves both parties agreeing to certain obligations that they must fulfill. A license is a one-way concept; if I own copyright on something, I can give you a license to do certain things with it, without incurring any obligations in return.
Let's say I write a book. I sell copies of that book at Borders, just like everyone else. But you, Just Some Guy, I call up and say, "I hereby grant you and you alone a license to make and distribute photocopies of my book." You haven't signed anything, and neither have I, yet your legal rights have just changed. You don't have to agree to it; in fact you don't get any say as to whether you agree to it. I can license or de-license you at will (according to the rules of law, anyway; I legally can't revoke your fair use rights, for example, or prevent you from selling the copy you bought to someone else). That's the difference between a license and a contract.
Now, as to whether or not buying a movie ticket actually licenses you to do something, I don't know. Actually it seems like the ticket would be more like a contract: you give us money, and we have to let you enter our premises and watch specifically the movie at the showtime shown on the ticket. At that point the contract ends and we can make you leave the premises. If we throw you out without cause as specified in the contract (a copy of which is probably available from the management), then we've violated the contract and you can sue us.
One issue is that the punishment does not in any way come even close to fitting the crime. A year in jail for bringing a camcorder into a movie theater? You'd get less for beating the shit out of the usher.
Copyright violation should be handled in civil law, not criminal. Patent and trademark infringment are both handled civilly, not criminally; why should copyright be treated differently?
Because as it stands, you will spend more time in jail for bringing a camcorder into a movie theater than you would for physically assaulting an usher. Plus, the MPAA keeps trying to get legislation to cripple home electronic equipment in an incredibly futile attempt to do something about piracy.
The first thing tells everyone that a giant company's financial interests are more important than the physical safety of an individual. The second thing tells those of us who DON'T pirate movies that we have to suffer because the MPAA doesn't have a clue how to deal with the problem sanely. Crippling my computer is NOT going to prevent people from downloading movies in any way. Cap Codes prevent me from enjoying a movie I *paid* to see. *That's* what pisses me off.
If the law says X, and a company uses X to their advantage, it's hard to fault them... unless the law is unjust, stupid, ineffective, or otherwise bad. Nobody with half a clue thinks that the movie industry should just give up and let everyone pirate their movies. But copyright should be handled in the civil court system, not the criminal system. The fact that the MPAA is in the legal right doesn't excuse the parts of their behavior that are doing everyone harm and nobody good (hell, they're hurting themselves by acting like this!).
Oh, and good work lumping all Slashdotters into a single mold by pretending we all like to claim that "the MPAA needs to find a 'new business model'" as if that were the answer to the problem. That's a real, real valid way to argue.
Well, given the forum, here's some ideas:
/. humor. :)
- Beowulf
- Soviet Russia
- Natalie
- Dupe (if you find two adjacent rocks that are extremely similar)
- Profit
- Overlord
I think that covers the bulk of common
I know you meant it as a joke, but, what about Google? They seem to have a pretty good sense of humor.
I'm just gonna assume that you always look both ways before you stomp on the gas, since accelerating quickly into the intersection makes it more likely that you'll get hit by some asshole who's running the red in the other direction. The reason I assume this is because you haven't been killed in a car accident yet. If my assumption is wrong, then, well, you probably will be killed in a car accident any day now. :)
Quite a lot of places allow diagonal pedestrian crossing, and for very good reason. The places that do it typically have very high pedestrian traffic volumes, and it's better for both vehicle and pedestrian throughput (and safety) to have distinct vehicle and pedestrian walk cycles. Pasadena, here in southern California, has numerous diagonal crosswalks in the Old Town area (which is an extremely popular entertainment/dining area). Beverly Hills has several of them in its downtown, due to the relatively large amount of pedestrian traffic.
:)
And here's a general idea: Next time you feel yourself getting really INDIGNANT and ANGRY about something you don't UNDERSTAND, you might want to stop and think about it, or maybe look into it, before posting a BLITHERING SCREED that makes you look like an ignorant nitwit.
Where would the average (e.g.) American have learned to fear the sound of a Huey? A Pavlovian response is a learned response; I don't think most people associate the sound of a helicopter with imminent death.
Miscellaneous errata: Inauguration Day is January 20th. So if someone else besides Bush (e.g. Kerry) wins the presidential election in November, he'd be sworn in as president on January 20th, not in February. Just FYI.
Greer's idea brings to mind an SF novel I read recently, "Remnant Population" by Elizabeth Moon. In this book an alien species shows up, and in this species mothers do not raise their own children -- a "nest-mother" does. Nest-mothers are older females who have already had children. For various psychosocial reasons, they're better equipped to raise a child than a new mother is. (Additionally, the whole social structure is more tribal than, say, American culture.) It's an interesting read.
Actually, by then, we'll probably have enough energy to fix Earth's axial tilt and eliminate seasons altogether! I can't wait! *spends next thousand years waiting*
Right, because there's just no way that it's different sets of people who say those two things.
What fucktard modded that insightful?
Unless, of course, the base was located at one of the poles, such that it was always in sunlight (or darkness, depending on where they position it).
In either situation, I'm still dead. So what do I care if we have a moonbase or not? When I'm dead, it won't matter to me whether the rest of humanity survives.
Now, it might be a valid reason if, by having a moon colony, the survivors of an asteroid strike (which may include me) are better off because the colonists can come back and help us somehow, whereas if we didn't have them we'd be screwed or worse off. But I don't think that's been demonstrated.
In truth, articles like this are intended to troll for humorless retards like you, so that those of us who know what laughter sounds like can mark you as Foes and mod you down to -1, so that we never have to see your piffle.
Yes, I know, it seems like an awful lot of work just to filter out the clueless, but then we're geeks: we LIKE elaborate schemes that piss other people off!
One big reason is that most classic SF does not translate especially well to film. The main thrust of SF is using futuristic settings to illuminate modern social issues -- or to explore what might happen to a society if a certain technology is developed, or we find out we're not alone in the universe, etc.
But the way this is done in great SF books usually either involves people talking a lot, or people thinking a lot, or with other mechanisms that don't translate all that well to a visual medium. Watching Ben Reich's gradual descent into insanity in "The Demolished Man" is not going to be an easy thing to show on-screen, not to mention the rapid-fire, overlapping conversations that the espers have. Can you imagine adapting "A Deepness in the Sky," where ARRR, THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD one of the big reveals is that the aliens are a race of spider-people? That would never work on film, because the instant you see them, you'd say, "Hey, they're spider people," whereas in the book, it's slowly revealed over many chapters. Or how those minuscule floating computer device thingies allow superior tactical knowledge over your enemies. Or using metric time (kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc.) which would just confuse the average viewer.
If you've ever read Greg Egan's novel "Diaspora," which is a great piece of SF, imagine trying to adapt Yatima's birth to the screen: showing a protosiliconic intelligence being born, learning basic logical concepts... these are not things that would work well on-screen. Those of us who are already familiar with the concepts, terminology, and mindset necessary to understand things like that might enjoy it, but we are a very small segment of the moviegoing market. The studios generally don't risk money on something which they know in advance, no matter how good it is, isn't going to make any money.
Yes, there certainly are some pieces of classic SF that are translatable to the screen, but they are few and far between. Most SF only really works in text form, because the ideas it presents are abstract and not readily realizable in concrete (visual) form.
There's much better reasons than "a movie needs it's [sic] signature fuck toy" why having Samus in the suit for the whole movie wouldn't work:
- Nobody would identify with the character, as Samus would just be (essentially) a personality-free robot. Not acceptable for a film protagonist.
- Nobody would want to play that character. You wouldn't even need a real actress for it, you just get a stuntperson to play the whole thing, and have the actress only show up for the reveal at the end -- and as far as an actor's concerned, a cameo is not a real role. She wouldn't get to actually do any *acting*. And obscuring the actor's face for the entire movie prevents them from using their greatest asset. (Which was one problem with the Matrix films -- many of the actors had their eyes obscured for large parts of the film. Granted, it didn't matter for Keanu, since he can't act anyway, but everyone else suffered for it.)
Yeah, the Terminator was scary, but he wasn't the protagonist in the first film -- and in the second film, they humanized him by letting him learn how to act human. In T2 he didn't have "a massively distorted and completely inhuman voice". Arnie in T2 is a great character because he he's humanized.
Also note that the whole "Unidentifiable badass turns out to be a woman" is an *incredibly* old cliche. It was old when Metroid did it -- the reason we geeks thought it was so cool was because video game protagonists were almost never women. It wasn't an old cliche in the world of video games. But in a movie, the reveal would have much less power, and would very likely not affect the story much. Oh, so she's a woman. Big whoop. Maybe if Aliens had never been made (or any other movie with a badass heroine), it might work, but as it stands, it won't. (Nevermind that keeping that fact secret would be nigh impossible -- Samus is the main character, meaning the actress playing her would have top billing. Everyone would know going in that Samus was a woman.)
The point is that giving people a harmless outlet (pornography) is a healthy thing, as opposed to forcing them to repress everything until they decide to go out and start raping people.
Not all of us think that Ashcroft's approach to pornography is reasonable. I'm an American citizen, born and raised, and I'm firmly of the opinion that consenting adults should be allowed, sexually, to do whatever they want with each other -- including recording their sex acts and selling copies to other consenting adults. (Minus a few random corner cases.) Which is responsible for both our historically strong work ethic, as well as our incredible puritanical streak... I don't really have any statistics, but it seems to me that it's getting more polarized. That is, more people are coming to believe that things like pornography are just fine, but the people who think it's evil are holding that opinion more and more strongly.Like a lot of things, however, people generally only switch from one side to the other. The number of people who start out thinking pornography is okay, but then decide it's evil, is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people who start out sexually repressed but then find out that pornography can be a healthy outlet for emotions that might otherwise turn violent.
Maybe it seemed magical and enchanting for a little while.
Now think about what it would have been like after a month with no electrical power. No electrical power means no clean water, no refrigeration, no steady lighting, no movies, no television, no stereos, no calling 911 for medical emergencies, no electronic communications... think long-term, and then wonder whether modern technology has improved our quality of life.
Copyright infringement and larceny are so vastly different in their natures and effects that using the same term ("stealing") to refer to both does nothing but cloud the issue. It is in the interest of clarity that I wish people would stop calling copyright infringement "stealing." Maybe that's how people use it, and I'm trying to get them to stop.
(Generic postscript to insulting ACs: Fuck off, you goat-blowing pile of horse crap.)
Maybe it's a trick. Netflix could be making noises about getting into a market that they know is pointless to enter, causing other companies to waste time and energy trying to beat Netflix to market, when Netflix has no actual plans to go there. Mwa ha ha ha! And so forth.