He was a great author, among the Greats, and it's not to be taken lightly. Middle Earth is a complete realm from creation to the present. For all intents and purposes, this place actually existed. The details he put into this are astonishing.
There is still one reason not to take it as seriously as you would take real history: Real history is internally consistent, and Middle Earth's history is not (or at least, it does not have to be, and it seems unlikely that there are no contradictions anywhere within its telling). Yes, there are contradictions in our known history, but aside from positing violations of the laws of physics, we assume that we have inaccurate information, not that some author made an error which we have to ignore.
We want to learn from history, to avoid making the same mistakes; learning from fictional histories is harder, because you won't necessarily have to worry about making mistakes that might not be able to happen in real life. This is not to diminish Tolkien's literary achievements, of course; I've read and loved LOTR just as many others have. But though LOTR is often more interesting than real history, I don't think LOTR could or should take the place of real history. Yes, it's not to be taken lightly, if you want a complete view of western civilization, but it must be remembered what place in that civilization it holds.
Assuming it is true that "the most vocal whiners have been people who have read the books," it's silly to assume that reading the books will turn you into a vocal whiner (or will turn you into anything)... unless you're a whiny, nitpicking asshole by nature, in which case I'd agree with you. Stay away from the long, complicated words and stick with the nice pretty images instead.:)
In a journey, you largely know where you are going and the route you will take. It's a matter of enjoying, not "knowing," the route that matters.
You may know a general idea behind the story (crime thriller: cop solves mystery; romantic comedy: at-odds couple finally falls in love; etc.), but the surprises along the way can turn a well-known idea into a wonderful story (LA Confidential; When Harry Met Sally). I personally prefer to know as little as possible about a story before I experience it (be it a movie, book, whatever). Just because you don't care about whether you know the entire story doesn't mean that other people don't or shouldn't care. I didn't know dick about Hamlet the first time I saw it, and I'm glad -- if I'd known they were all going to die in the end, it would have taken all the shock out of it. Do I think everyone should feel this way? Of course not; that's your thing.:)
Anyway, the entire point of this thread was that he was making readers aware what level of spoiler info there was in the linked material. If you don't care about spoilers, then you don't have to heed the warning, but don't go insulting those who like surprises in their entertainment.
Most likely it's just a business matter between the companies involved. Mann Theatres owns the Chinese, and the Mann Village theater in Westwood (just off-campus from UCLA), and TTT will be showing there. Maybe they figured that Nemesis would be a big enough draw to justify having it at the Chinese this week, since their other big-ticket theater (the Village) would have TTT. (They were wrong; Nemesis did poorly this weekend, but if you could predict that in advance, you'd be smarter than every other person who ever worked in the entertainment industry...)
So it did poorly; why not dump it for TTT? Alas, the contracts between theaters and studios usually require that first-run movies show for two to four weeks minimum, and that commitment is usually made several weeks, if not months, in advance. Nemesis opened on Friday; there's no way it could be bumped for TTT by the following Wednesday, no matter how poorly it did.
Granted, it would be a great experience to see it there, but I personally prefer the Village. (The sound is louder, for one thing.:))
Re:Does this seem bass-ackward to anyone else?
on
Googling For Dates?
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· Score: 2
I do so love easy targets.
The difference between the Federal Government tracking personal information about someone, and an individual doing the same thing, is that the individual doesn't have an army of law enforcement types at his back who will, if the someone has suspicious information linked to them, make that person's life a living hell. If I want to find out something about someone, and it's something I don't like, the worst thing that will happen is, I will avoid them. The government is (theoretically) a manifestation of the will of the people; it is not supposed to be doing things which lie outside that mandate.
Re:This doesn't sound like a very good simulator
on
Old Age Simulator
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· Score: 2
Not to mention this guy. [jacklalanne.com]
Well, we know he's authentically old. If any young person looked at that website, their eyes would start bleeding.
I'm not even remotely confused about the difference between patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Patents last for about 20 years, and require full publication of the method, process, or device patented. You do not lose your patent if you do not defend every incursion against it; you can be as selective as you like. Patents must, in theory, be novel in order to be granted -- things that were already done or created in the past cannot be patented. (Of course, we all know how well the USPTO actually handles this, which is to say, ass-fucking poorly.)
Trademarks cover names, logos, images (i.e. "marks") and must be defended continuously, or you risk losing the right to the mark. Names like "Microsoft", "IBM", "Windows", "Apple", "Slim Jims", "The Club", and so on are all trademarked. "Aspirin" and "Escalator" are words that were formerly trademarked, but are no longer ("Aspirin" was voluntarily surrendered by Bayer around World War I, and I believe Escalator fell into the public domain due to lack of adequate litigation by its original holder). Trademarks last forever as long as you protect them.
Copyright grants, more or less, the right to the creation and distribution of copies of a work. You don't lose your copyright if you don't litigate every violation, and copyright has a (theoretically) fixed duration (although our lovely Congress is doing its best to kowtow to entertainment interests and keeps extending copyright durations for no good reason). Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. The work generally has to be fixed in a tangible medium, and publication is emphatically not required.
I misstated myself in the previous post. I didn't mean to say that unpublished works are uncopyrightable; I meant that unpublished works are unlitigatible. If you write a novel, but never show it to anyone, and then I write a novel that is nearly identical and publish it, you can't sue me for infringement, because you can't prove that I infringed. Hence, there's no problem for me. The same situation applies with Microsoft: If MS-similar code shows up in the Linux kernel (and I would be amazed if there were not already many segments that were quite similar, merely by chance, or duplication of function), there's similarly no problem, since unless MS can prove that the kernel dev saw their code (which shouldn't theoretically be possible, due to NDAs and its generally unpublished nature), they couldn't prove that infringement took place. Since nobody smart enough to work on the Linux kernel would be dumb enough to look at MS code anyway, there's no real chance of a problem.
Sorry for misstating things, but I'd watch your hyperbole in the future, you coward.
Well, there's two separate issues here. MS cannot own the copyright on its source code, because it's never been published -- copyright more or less requires publication (of course, they could publish it, all well and copyrighted, and then hope that someone screws up and uses it). However, the Windows source code probably does constitute trade secrets -- if we ever came to a situation where code in the Linux kernel was identical to some code in Windows, then there would be a few possibilities.
1. A Linux kernel dev had seen Windows source, and copied it. If this really happened, it should be easy for MS to prove -- via watermarked code, trace back to whoever leaked it, and sue them. Whether you could go after the developer depends on whether you could prove that he knew he was copying trade secrets. Presumably this would never happen, since anyone smart enough to be able to work on the kernel (or even approve code for inclusion) would also be smart enough to never want or need to copy MS code.
2. MS looked at the Linux kernel source, then modified some of its code to be identical, and then claims that it was copied. This would be nearly impossible to prove.
Just musing, really, but I don't think there's a serious issue here, at least not on first glance.
I find it hard to believe that someone would honestly not report his own brother for murder, but blanches at typing the word "shit" in a public forum. I think you need to reassess your own moral code, pal. (Man, I'm saying that a lot today.)
There's a saying, though I'm not sure of its source:
"Logic gives us what we need. Magic gives us what we want."
From that, I think, stems the fundamental conflict of religion. We can use all our scientific knowledge, logic, and reasoning to discover everything there is to know about the universe... but the questions that science can't answer ("Where did the universe come from?") or are irrelevant to science ("What is the meaning of life?") we badly want answers to. Reality isn't forthcoming... so we make them up, so that we can feel better. We want to feel safe and secure, and religion lets us do that. Some of us, apparently, are either able to feel safe and secure without religion, or are emotionally stable enough to handle the lack of security.
For my part, I don't know where the universe came from (and I don't care, as it wouldn't affect anything about my life), and "What is the meaning of life?" is a non sequitur.
There are few things I know within the core of my being. The idea that cloning etc. is somehow inherently wrong just isn't one of them. For me to believe it is wrong would require some evidence to that effect, or at least a valid argument against it. I'm sorry, but appeals to emotion just don't cut it.
So in order for you to think something is wrong, you have to have evidence or a valid argument to that effect... but you also "know within the core of [your] being" that some things are inherently wrong. Presumably, you know these things without evidence or valid arguments.
I would suggest that you reevaluate your personal moral code -- it doesn't sound like it's particularly consistent at the moment. Some things, you just know are wrong; others, you need evidence for. I suspect emotions drive the evidence-free beliefs. Don't feel bad; all humans do this, although some of us try to avoid it.:)
What makes childbirth a defining moment between being a human being and not a human being? If that's not the moment at which to protect a human against death, then when does it happen? Is it in the 3rd trimester? Is it at two years old? Is it when they pass some formal IQ test?
In the most practical sense, it's the point which a majority of voters agree on -- to put it another way, the point at which it becomes socially acceptable to enough of the population that they can effectively impose their will upon the rest. Any particular biological criterion between conception and birth would be arbitrary, since there's a continuous path of development. I doubt you'd ever get more than a trivial number of people who agree that an already-born human can be freely aborted; and since a baby about to be born is so close, temporally speaking, to a baby that has just been born, that's probably too close for comfort.
Look, just because the Inuit live in a relatively primitive society doesn't mean you have to denigrate them. I mean, come on, have you ever even tried seal blubber soup?
Wait... did you mean Intuit? Oh, well, that's different then.
So instead of wasting your time coming up with vampire population ecology models, you're reading about it on Slashdot. This is something to gloat about?:)
Insofar as this is a real discussion;) In the Jossverse, there have been only a tiny number of vampires that have committed suicide. Not a single one of them has ever "recovered conscience," although two vampires (Spike and Angel) have ended up with souls, so they have, in a manner of speaking, recovered their consciences -- but not through introspection, or anything, merely ("merely") through magical intervention.
As far as suicide goes... only Darla (when she gave birth to Connor) and the vampire in the first episode of Angel season 3 (who had a magical operation to remove his heart, making him unkillable for 24 hours before he self-destructed) have ever really "committed suicide". There might be others but I don't think they would have a significant impact on the population.
Okay, I nearly had a heart attack when I read this:
Freedom -- from Microsoft --
A split second passed where I thought that, somehow, Microsoft had either trademarked "Freedom", released a program named "Freedom" ("Microsoft Freedom"... perhaps an oxymoron like "Microsoft Works"?), or acquired the intellectual property rights to the entire concept of freedom. Man, I need to read less/.
Radio is a form of advertising -- when you hear songs playing on the radio, what you're hearing is an advertisement for the album (or single) the song is on, and is also an advertisement for the band's tours ("Listen to this great music! Isn't it great? Now come buy our album and watch our performances!"). (It's not necessarily paid advertising, of course, although as I understand it, quite a lot of radio airtime is indirectly paid for by the labels.) A taxi driver plays music while driving around fares? That's free advertising, kids! The passenger is listening to your music, which (if the music does its job) will cause him to go buy it. And you want to CHARGE for the privilege of advertising to people? What the fuck is wrong with these chimps?
Re:Especially when you see the adds :)
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2
For someone whose posting history indicates extreme bitterness toward/., you sure do spend a lot of time posting here. Just thought I'd point that out.
Slashdot Mirror
We want to learn from history, to avoid making the same mistakes; learning from fictional histories is harder, because you won't necessarily have to worry about making mistakes that might not be able to happen in real life. This is not to diminish Tolkien's literary achievements, of course; I've read and loved LOTR just as many others have. But though LOTR is often more interesting than real history, I don't think LOTR could or should take the place of real history. Yes, it's not to be taken lightly, if you want a complete view of western civilization, but it must be remembered what place in that civilization it holds.
Assuming it is true that "the most vocal whiners have been people who have read the books," it's silly to assume that reading the books will turn you into a vocal whiner (or will turn you into anything)... unless you're a whiny, nitpicking asshole by nature, in which case I'd agree with you. Stay away from the long, complicated words and stick with the nice pretty images instead. :)
Anyway, the entire point of this thread was that he was making readers aware what level of spoiler info there was in the linked material. If you don't care about spoilers, then you don't have to heed the warning, but don't go insulting those who like surprises in their entertainment.
Most likely it's just a business matter between the companies involved. Mann Theatres owns the Chinese, and the Mann Village theater in Westwood (just off-campus from UCLA), and TTT will be showing there. Maybe they figured that Nemesis would be a big enough draw to justify having it at the Chinese this week, since their other big-ticket theater (the Village) would have TTT. (They were wrong; Nemesis did poorly this weekend, but if you could predict that in advance, you'd be smarter than every other person who ever worked in the entertainment industry...)
:))
So it did poorly; why not dump it for TTT? Alas, the contracts between theaters and studios usually require that first-run movies show for two to four weeks minimum, and that commitment is usually made several weeks, if not months, in advance. Nemesis opened on Friday; there's no way it could be bumped for TTT by the following Wednesday, no matter how poorly it did.
Granted, it would be a great experience to see it there, but I personally prefer the Village. (The sound is louder, for one thing.
I do so love easy targets.
The difference between the Federal Government tracking personal information about someone, and an individual doing the same thing, is that the individual doesn't have an army of law enforcement types at his back who will, if the someone has suspicious information linked to them, make that person's life a living hell. If I want to find out something about someone, and it's something I don't like, the worst thing that will happen is, I will avoid them. The government is (theoretically) a manifestation of the will of the people; it is not supposed to be doing things which lie outside that mandate.
I'm not even remotely confused about the difference between patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Patents last for about 20 years, and require full publication of the method, process, or device patented. You do not lose your patent if you do not defend every incursion against it; you can be as selective as you like. Patents must, in theory, be novel in order to be granted -- things that were already done or created in the past cannot be patented. (Of course, we all know how well the USPTO actually handles this, which is to say, ass-fucking poorly.)
Trademarks cover names, logos, images (i.e. "marks") and must be defended continuously, or you risk losing the right to the mark. Names like "Microsoft", "IBM", "Windows", "Apple", "Slim Jims", "The Club", and so on are all trademarked. "Aspirin" and "Escalator" are words that were formerly trademarked, but are no longer ("Aspirin" was voluntarily surrendered by Bayer around World War I, and I believe Escalator fell into the public domain due to lack of adequate litigation by its original holder). Trademarks last forever as long as you protect them.
Copyright grants, more or less, the right to the creation and distribution of copies of a work. You don't lose your copyright if you don't litigate every violation, and copyright has a (theoretically) fixed duration (although our lovely Congress is doing its best to kowtow to entertainment interests and keeps extending copyright durations for no good reason). Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. The work generally has to be fixed in a tangible medium, and publication is emphatically not required.
I misstated myself in the previous post. I didn't mean to say that unpublished works are uncopyrightable; I meant that unpublished works are unlitigatible. If you write a novel, but never show it to anyone, and then I write a novel that is nearly identical and publish it, you can't sue me for infringement, because you can't prove that I infringed. Hence, there's no problem for me. The same situation applies with Microsoft: If MS-similar code shows up in the Linux kernel (and I would be amazed if there were not already many segments that were quite similar, merely by chance, or duplication of function), there's similarly no problem, since unless MS can prove that the kernel dev saw their code (which shouldn't theoretically be possible, due to NDAs and its generally unpublished nature), they couldn't prove that infringement took place. Since nobody smart enough to work on the Linux kernel would be dumb enough to look at MS code anyway, there's no real chance of a problem.
Sorry for misstating things, but I'd watch your hyperbole in the future, you coward.
Well, there's two separate issues here. MS cannot own the copyright on its source code, because it's never been published -- copyright more or less requires publication (of course, they could publish it, all well and copyrighted, and then hope that someone screws up and uses it). However, the Windows source code probably does constitute trade secrets -- if we ever came to a situation where code in the Linux kernel was identical to some code in Windows, then there would be a few possibilities.
1. A Linux kernel dev had seen Windows source, and copied it. If this really happened, it should be easy for MS to prove -- via watermarked code, trace back to whoever leaked it, and sue them. Whether you could go after the developer depends on whether you could prove that he knew he was copying trade secrets. Presumably this would never happen, since anyone smart enough to be able to work on the kernel (or even approve code for inclusion) would also be smart enough to never want or need to copy MS code.
2. MS looked at the Linux kernel source, then modified some of its code to be identical, and then claims that it was copied. This would be nearly impossible to prove.
Just musing, really, but I don't think there's a serious issue here, at least not on first glance.
Sequel, eh? I wonder if Gail Cooke gives it a 5-star review.
I heard it's not as creative as the original.
I find it hard to believe that someone would honestly not report his own brother for murder, but blanches at typing the word "shit" in a public forum. I think you need to reassess your own moral code, pal. (Man, I'm saying that a lot today.)
There's a saying, though I'm not sure of its source:
"Logic gives us what we need. Magic gives us what we want."
From that, I think, stems the fundamental conflict of religion. We can use all our scientific knowledge, logic, and reasoning to discover everything there is to know about the universe... but the questions that science can't answer ("Where did the universe come from?") or are irrelevant to science ("What is the meaning of life?") we badly want answers to. Reality isn't forthcoming... so we make them up, so that we can feel better. We want to feel safe and secure, and religion lets us do that. Some of us, apparently, are either able to feel safe and secure without religion, or are emotionally stable enough to handle the lack of security.
For my part, I don't know where the universe came from (and I don't care, as it wouldn't affect anything about my life), and "What is the meaning of life?" is a non sequitur.
I would suggest that you reevaluate your personal moral code -- it doesn't sound like it's particularly consistent at the moment. Some things, you just know are wrong; others, you need evidence for. I suspect emotions drive the evidence-free beliefs. Don't feel bad; all humans do this, although some of us try to avoid it. :)
I've never even tried to get a first post before, and here I go doing it by accident. Hooray...?
Look, just because the Inuit live in a relatively primitive society doesn't mean you have to denigrate them. I mean, come on, have you ever even tried seal blubber soup?
Wait... did you mean Intuit? Oh, well, that's different then.
So instead of wasting your time coming up with vampire population ecology models, you're reading about it on Slashdot. This is something to gloat about? :)
Insofar as this is a real discussion ;) In the Jossverse, there have been only a tiny number of vampires that have committed suicide. Not a single one of them has ever "recovered conscience," although two vampires (Spike and Angel) have ended up with souls, so they have, in a manner of speaking, recovered their consciences -- but not through introspection, or anything, merely ("merely") through magical intervention.
As far as suicide goes... only Darla (when she gave birth to Connor) and the vampire in the first episode of Angel season 3 (who had a magical operation to remove his heart, making him unkillable for 24 hours before he self-destructed) have ever really "committed suicide". There might be others but I don't think they would have a significant impact on the population.
Radio is a form of advertising -- when you hear songs playing on the radio, what you're hearing is an advertisement for the album (or single) the song is on, and is also an advertisement for the band's tours ("Listen to this great music! Isn't it great? Now come buy our album and watch our performances!"). (It's not necessarily paid advertising, of course, although as I understand it, quite a lot of radio airtime is indirectly paid for by the labels.) A taxi driver plays music while driving around fares? That's free advertising, kids! The passenger is listening to your music, which (if the music does its job) will cause him to go buy it. And you want to CHARGE for the privilege of advertising to people? What the fuck is wrong with these chimps?
For someone whose posting history indicates extreme bitterness toward /., you sure do spend a lot of time posting here. Just thought I'd point that out.
Hey! Your post is a dupe, too! :)
The day after Thanksgiving is not the busiest shopping day of the year. The fact that you put that phrase in quotes indicate that you might know that already, but others reading it might not. :)
Oh no! Do you people have any idea what this will lead to?!