Will,
I think there are two disconnects going on in this conversation:
Firstly, I think there's a bit of an epistemological disconnect here. You seem to be thinking of "copyright" as a sort of moral principle of ownership by the author.
Your interlocutors, on the other hand, see copyright as having no existence or meaning outside of the specific laws and regulations covering intellectual properties. For them, your question boils down to "could I sue and win?" (In this view, all questions about copyright basically boil down to this question and the related one of "If someone sues me, would I win?")
Of course, this is an epistemological argument that's been going on at least since Aristotle got kicked out of Plato's Academy. I come down with the Aristotelians here, but that's just my own personal bias.
Secondly, I think there's some conflation of the destruction of meaning as opposed to the alteration of meaning.
I think we all agree that a mod is well within their rights to make alterations that do not change the meaning. (Would changing the font the comments are displayed in violate copyright? clearly not.)
We also agree that the mod has a right to destroy meaning, on the principle that they can allow or disallow anything they want on the site they own. This even extends to selective destruction. For example, if I wrote a two-paragraph comment where the first paragraph was thoughtful and germane to the discussion and the second was a spittle-flecked rant about how George Soros and the Nazi financiers were plotting to destroy the world economy, then I think we can all agree that the mods would be well within their rights to delete the second paragraph and leave the first.
And we all agree that intentional alteration of meaning is a no-no. Changing "Barack Obama is not a Muslim" to "Barack Obama is ... a muslim" would be bad, possibly violating my copyright, and potentially running afoul of slander or libel laws if the alteration were public enough and vile enough, since it's placing words in my mouth.
But which of these is disemvowelling?
I just don't see much alteration of meaning in disemvowelling.
To the extent that the comment is still legible, there has been no alteration of meaning. To the extent parts of the comment become unreadable, there is destruction of meaning. The only alteration of meaning occurs when the disemvowelling produces ambiguity that can't be resolved by context. And even there, either there's a big alteration, in which case it should be clear to a careful reader which original meaning was intended, or there's a small alteration, ion which case, who cares? Especially given the fact that no alteration of meaning is intentional on the mod's part, I think the mod is well in the clear.
Xopher @786:
I don't think calling him Doogie Howser is such a slur as all that. For one thing, the series was far from universally panned. Harris even got a Golden Globe nomination for it. My (admittedly fuzzy) recollection is that the premise was hopelessly precious, but the acting and writing were at least workmanlike. And they even managed to stand out in what was otherwise a relatively fallow time for network television.
And secondly, as ethan points out, he seems to have a good sense of humor about it. It rather takes the sting out of a slur when the actual target seems more amused than offended.
As for how much of it has to do with his homosexuality, I don't think that people necessarily think of him as gay, given the pointed heterosexuality of his most visible roles. He's rightly a hero to the gay community for the nonchalance with which he came out, but I don't think his sexuality, one way or another, is deeply impressed in the public mind. I think it has more to do with general fascination with child stars and in particular Neil Patrick Harris' taking of roles that go directly against the grain of his "Doogie Howser" image.
Clifton @ 787
I, for one, certainly wasn't ascribing malice, although the idea of an evil cabal of NPR reporters bent upon destroying Neil Patrick Harris' career has a certain campy appeal. (Maybe that could be the subject of Mr. Whedon's next foray into the online musical genre.)
I just think there are a half a dozen interesting ways to approach this story, and I'm disappointed in whatever editor wrote the headline for choosing one which was the most tabloidy and at the same time made little sense to those already familiar with career of one of the principals.
It struck me a little like saying "NEWSFLASH! In addition to her singing career, Madonna has aspirations to be a film actress!"
Xopher @ 780
In addition to touring with Rent, he was in the concert version of Sweeney Todd with George Hearn and Patti Lupone.
On Broadway he did a turn at Studio 54 as the MC in Cabaret and then returned as the Balladeer in the 2004 revival of Assassins. (Which was where I caught him, and he was amazing.)
So it's not like this was some hidden talent that no one knew about. He's been performing musicals with some of the best in the business and holding his own for 8 years now.
774:
Am I the only one who finds that headline a little bizarre? I'm sure as a broadway buff I've followed Neil Patrick Harris' turns on the stage a little more closely than most, but it seems odd that some online movie "proves" that he can sing in a way that several runs in acclaimed Broadway musicals doesn't.
Oh, dear, of course.
An excellent performance, incidentally. The thought crossed my mind, but it seemed so earnest and yet so wrong-headed at the same time. It just made me want to spring into action because there was Someone Wrong On The Internet!
Brenda @ 64
Wow, I'm sort of shocked to see someone on this site express the sentiment that genre fiction, defined broadly, is reactionary hysteria. Not that there's anything wrong with the position, I'm just sort of gobsmacked to see it expressed here. Sort of like seeing a post on slashdot arguing that we should all get rid of our computers and go back to living a simpler life.
And I think it's clear that the best scifi/fantasy is every bit as good as "non-genre" fiction. (I say "the best of" because Sturgeon's Law, as always, obtains.)
To draw a parallel with the science you find so uninteresting, there's only so much you can learn about anything, whether it's a fundamental particle or the nature of the human condition, from passive observation. You can only observe things in a test tube for so long before you have to start smashing them together at relativistic velocities to learn more.
That's what Sci Fi excels at. It's not about portraying humanity exactly as it is, it's about asking "How would things be different if we changed this?" And a good work, like a good experiment, chooses its changes in such a way that the result illuminates us in ways which no ordinary scenario could.
Guthrie:
"Thanks everyone. I do actually have Richard Rhodes book "The making of the atomic bomb", but couldn't find anything useful in it about my question."
I'm actually in the middle of reading that book and, remembering that incident, I did some sleuthing in the index.
The story is told in chapter 13, pages 418-9 in my edition. It took place in July of '43, when Oppenheimer et al were first considering the possibility of thermonuclear weapons. Edward Teller, who had first proposed the idea pointed out that deuterium wasn't the only nucleus that could fuse, and that theoretically a nuclear device might ignite the nitrogen in the air or the hydrogen in the oceans the way that a fire spreads through fuel.
Shortly afterwards, though, calculations by Hans Bethe and Arthur Compton showed that this could only happen at temperatures two orders of magnitude greater than those generated by even thermonuclear devices.
Wait, Teresa, so Clinton is under the table and sick as a dog . . . This gives me an idea for a new way of choosing the President.
Election by drinking games!
In a sign of how deeply discredited Nader is on the left, I actually work for an organization that was founded in response to Nader's call for student activism in the 70's. Even those members of the organization that are old enough to have been around when Nader was considered an inspirational enough figure to start a national movement roll their eyes when his name comes up these days.
He's become the crazy uncle of the left. The one who worked hard and did a fine job of raising the cousins, but is now a little senile and makes inappropriate suggestions once he's got a few drinks in him.
Of course in your family, Uncle Ralph rarely is able do much more than embarrass you, in politics, the consequences have been tragic.
It's also worth noting that he's not running as a Green this time. Not even the Greens will have him these days, and they are seriously regretting letting him become the public face of the party.
But Jim, that would violate executive privilege. And then presidential appointees might be dissuaded from advocating immoral, un-american and/or illegal policies. And if they do argue for such policies they might be discovered and prosecuted, or at least shunned by all right-thinking people.
And what a horrible result that would be.
Neil @ 132:
"As is my take that Clinton and Obama are both what we used to call 'moderate Republicans'"
This sort of attitude flabbergasts me. What liberal utopia are you harkening back to? Sure, there are a handful of positions where I could wish that Clinton and Obama were more liberal, but I live in Boston and work for a frickin' environmental group. You don't get much more liberal than me without joining the Communist Party or the ELF.
Yes, there was a time when there were Republicans that were more liberal than Clinton and Obama. But keep in mind that was also a time when a significant number of Democrats were pro-segregation southerners. The issue of race in the mid-twentieth century completely scrambled the ideological spectrum. (The older members of my organization can still remember a time when it was much easier to get Republicans to support good environmental policies than Democrats, for example.)
The fact is that we're looking at two presidential candidates who support cap and trade systems for CO2 emissions, universal (though not single-payer) health care, withdrawal from Iraq (though not as fast as some would like), etc. etc.
These ideas might be slightly right of center among my or your friends, or even by comparison to politicians in other developed countries, but they're significantly left of the center of American politics today. To say that they're just "moderate Republicans" is meaningless if you mean it in a historical sense (the ideological spectrum has completely reorganized itself several times in the last 50 years) and manifestly false if you compare them to the modern republican party.
Around the issue of energy, Obama makes me a little nervous. He seems to some of the wrong instincts when it comes to new energy solutions. (Clean coal, coal to liquid, etc.) That said, he's certainly been willing to listen to those who've objected to his missteps.
Bruce @5:
I couldn't agree more, and I'm proud to work for one of the organizations that will be doing that watchdogging, no matter who the nominee is. What's exciting, though is the possibility of a President who, instead of being jawboned into not opposing progressive change, could be convinced to become a champion for it. I think Obama is more likely to be that person than any of the other candidates. (With the possible exception of dear, departed John Edwards.)
Of course, I'm also biased. I went to the University of Chicago. Obama was my state senator. I'm still kicking myself for not running out and registering to vote when some of my friends were telling me that this really awesome Law School prof was a long-shot, anti-machine candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
As someone with a funny last name and someone who was bullied mercilessly in school, I can't say that I think the two had all that much to do with each other.
And as for misspellings and mispronunciation, you'd be shocked how many people can't handle a simple name like "Wand". I get Ward all the time, and quite often get people who think my name is Wan, and expect me to be Asian. But my favorite are the telemarketers who try to rhyme Wand with land.
So welcome to the little Miss Doctorow, whatever her name may be.
(And am I the only one who immediately thought, with apologies to Messrs G&S:
"Hail Poesy,thou heav'n-born maid!
Thou gildest e'en the sci-fi trade!
Hail flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail! All hail! Divine emolient!")
A horrible teleporter accident scatters the family of a wealthy space-merchant all across the galaxy. The merchant searches for his lost family in vain. Unbeknownst to him, the teleporter accident not only scattered his family, it duplicated his son Folous and his robot servant DRM10. Both boys have grown up separately without any knowledge of each other, but hilarious hijinks ensue when the father, both DRMs, Folous and Anti-Folous find themselves unwittingly reunited at a starport in the Effy System.
#20: I saw that letter and it took my breath away. I actually write letters like this as part of my job, and we would never do something half as brazen. What kills me is that this is clearly a prospecting appeal (i.e. a letter sent to people who haven't given before). The sternest we can muster is "I'm concerned that I haven't heard from you about renewing your membership" and that's to people who've already given money to us.
I also have to compare it to a similar appeal I got from the Democrats a couple years ago. The Democratic appeal claimed that I had been identified as a local leader and they wanted to survey me to help guide the future of the party. I'm sure that the survey was used for little more than helping them decide what issues they talked about when they hit me up in the future, but at least the Democrats made the pretense of trying to make me feel involved and wanted. The Republican appeal seems purely aimed at scaring people that they'll be kicked out of the party and become unable to vote if they don't send any money.
I'd be curious to see the return numbers on that letter. I'm guessing the return rate will be pretty good, but the average contribution will be low. After all, I always try to give a little more than the minimum asked for when I'm supporting a charity or a group who's work I care about, but I've never decided to chip in a few extra bucks on a registration fee or on any sort of club dues.
IANABIINDIPOOTV (I am not a book industry insider, nor do I play one on TV) but this seems an awful lot like someone taking over a hardware store and saying "Lots of stores sell nails, competition is high, profit margins are low, let's stop selling nails and replace it with something we can make more money on."
Of course then word gets around that Joe's hardware store doesn't carry nails and all the contractors and DIYers who are their best customers stay away in droves.
I can't help but link this up with the sidelight on Nardelli taking over at Chrysler, not to mention a thread some years ago about how President Bush is typical of Harvard Business School grads from his era. These people really believe that a knowledge of finance is the most important thing to running any business, and actually knowing anything about the business in question is only going to distract you from focusing on what's really important (i.e. the next quarterly earnings report).
I think the place where the system really broke down was not in the initial banning request (people are jerks on the internet) or even the initial banning (overworked admins sometimes make mistaken snap judgments, even [or especially] when they're about to leave for vacation). The turn that made this incident into a farce was the automatic banning in response to a reasoned objection to the initial banning.
I think this turns on a basic piece of how humans process information. When faced with a barrage of information people look for easy ways to sort out what's relevant and what's not. If you're a wikipedia admin you can't do that on the basis of expertise (credentials are easy to make up) so instead obscure wikipedia policies become the credentialing system. If you can quote chapter and verse from the policies, then you've at least spent some time on the site and presumably have its best interests at heart, if not you're at best a hopeless newbie and at worst a drive-by vandal.
And once this tendency starts it becomes self-reinforcing, since the people who rise to the top tend to attract others to emulate them and drive away those who disagree. Before you know it you have a group of policy lawyers who serve as gatekeepers and venerate the policies above all else. People need a way to judge the accuracy of incoming information against known standards. It's a case where a perfectly reasonable heuristic (absent other information, the editor who displays knowledge of wikipedia is probably more reliable on a given topic than the one who doesn't) turns into a pernicious social dynamic (knowing the policies word for word is more important than direct, first-hand knowledge of a subject)
Doesn't mean wikipedia isn't a worthwhile project and a wonderful tool, but there are a few of these pernicious social dynamics that don't seem to be adequately addressed.
To steal a phrase from Clinton, "It's the immigration, stupid."
It's not that the right-wing crazies are becoming any less crazy, it's that Bush finally did something to piss them off. I think it's hard to overestimate the extent to which the right-wing crazies were scandalized by the slightest suggestion that Bush might support granting any sort of legal status to illegal immigrants. These people's biggest fear is that the brown people (whether they're Muslim or Hispanic) are going to come over here and out-breed us, turning America into a third-world country, murdering us in our beds and polluting our precious bodily fluids.
This also explains the discrepancy with his approval ratings on the war on terror, it's just that their fear of brown people over there in the middle east is trumped by their fear of the brown people right on our borders.
Pshaw, I say.
Sure, wisdom tooth removal can be nasty and leave you in serious pain for a week or so, but I've had the joyful experience of walking into a dentist's office (actually it was an oral surgeon) and having him tell me that I could look forward to years of agony.
See, I don't have any wisdom teeth. I also don't have three other adult teeth, and a fourth is only half the size of the space it's meant to fill.
This resulted in many years of orthodontia in middle school and early high school, and a retainer which I wore 20+ hours per day, mainly to maintain the gap on the upper right where we intended to put an implant once we were sure I'd stopped growing. Now I didn't wear this retainer out of any inherent virtue. Mostly I wore it because if I left it out for more than a couple hours at a time, it hurt like the dickens to put it back in. I could actually feel my teeth move in my jaw as I wedged the little fake tooth attached to the retainer back into its appointed space.
So junior year of college rolled around, and we were pretty well convinced I'd stopped growing some time around Sophomore year of high school, so I went in for a consultation with an oral surgeon on putting in an implant. I was promptly informed that while my retainer had done an admirable job of keeping the teeth apart, it had been remiss in dealing with the roots. See the implant is basically a screw placed into your jaw, with a fake tooth attached to the top. This screw is about 3 mm wide. The space between my roots was about 2.5 mm wide.
So as a junior in college, I got to get braces again.
Long story short, after 18 months of braces, two oral surgeries, one small bone graft, one false tooth shattered in my mouth, several weeks with a bare steel peg sticking out of my gums, one custom-built implant and about a millimeter sanded off of my bottom teeth to keep the implant from screwing up my bite I now have a full set of teeth.
Except for the two baby teeth on the bottom that are bonded to their neighbors and will rot out some day...
And the gap over on the top left...
...sigh...
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| 2008 | 14 |
| 2007 | 6 |
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