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True, I haven't seen a decent FF tribute in a long time.

Okay, finally someone who posts something intelligent. I haven't seen the ad until now, but I knew that it couldn't have just been a stick figure. I expected it would have been basketball or football or something, but anyway, I can see how Zhu could see some similarities, but you nailed it right on the head, the similarities are not close enough to justify a lawsuit.

The average percent of the population it requires to overthrow a government is 2%. Before you scoff that, imagine a solid 5000000 people (2% of 250 million) actively trying to bring the government down. I think if the government was acting that oppresively, it wouldn't be hard to scrounge up at least that many nationwide.

At 7/17/04 10:03 AM, antiklaus wrote:

:And worse still, the suicide gene is known to be carryable via regular pollination. This means that if we are not careful, every breed of food producing plant could become 'infected' with the gene through pollination, eradicating the long term ability of plants to be grown from their 'fruit' seeds.

Genes aren't viruses that can "infect" other living organisms. And of course it is carried through pollination, that's how it becomes a suicide plant. All that means is that any seeds created from the genes will create suicide plants as well, or simply infertile seeds. This isn't Spiderman, you can't just transfer genes from one organism to another passively. To do that requires gene splicing and manipulation, which doesn't occur in nature.

I find it strange (okay, not really strange) that there are several people with men kissing, but none with a man and a woman kissing. Honestly, I think having either is disgusting, as that is a fundamentally private act between two people and showcasing it is pretty sick.

Boy, what is this, idiot hour? I'll say it for the third and last time. Zhu isn't trying to sue Nike for a tick figure, he's trying to sue the style they used. NOBODY would be stupid enough to pay court expenses trying to prove that they own the stick figure, and I mean nobody.

At 7/16/04 09:36 PM, Lucifur666 wrote:

:Just look at france. THe french nation should have gotten a medal. Instead we got freedom fries and liberty toast.

For what? Being against the war because they were getting oil under the table from Iraq in exchange for weapons? I really don't think that deserves a medal, but I don't know, maybe you're for that sort of thing.

The fact is, we're in Iraq, and nobody can dispute that. Whether we should have gone there or not is almost completely irrelevant. Everyone is crying to get the US out, but what would happen if we DID pull out now? The entire area would be in chaos, the whole system of government there would be thrown into anarchy, only to have another charismatic dictator like Saddam rise up to "unite the people." Was I for going into Iraq? To some extent, yes. I think the timing was a little bit off, we should have done it after he gassed a bunch of Kurds, or direly after the Persian Gulf War. However, I also agree that timing plays a big factor on the world stage and that going into Iraq at this point was not a wise move. I also know, that my opinions on the matter are unimportant. I am absolutely for finishing out what we started. We would cause a much larger problem if we pulled out before things completely settle down over there. Oh, and a lot of innocent people died just like a lot of Muslims are terrorists. Both are relative terms. The fact is, compared to other wars, collateral damage was extremely low, but you wouldn't know that because every innocent person with a scratch was put on the air so it made it appear as if there was an enormous number of innocent people injured. I think it is appalling that innocent people were killed, but in war, that is to be expected, because war is an awful thing. I also don't believe that all of the people they showed were necessarily wounded by the US, they could have been injured by the Iraqis as well, and, judging from the past Iraqi treatment of their own citizens, is highly possible, which is not to say people weren't hurt by accidental US fire. Additionally, this war is one of the shortest wars we've ever had, and had one of, if not the lowest, numbers of US casualities. If people are going to be mad about the Iraq war, it's best that they're mad for the right reasons, not because the TV screen tells them to be.

There's a line between being able to say what you want and being stupid. Of course if you walk into a Harlem bar and start spouting off black jokes you're going to get murdered, plain and simple. That doesn't mean you aren't allowed to say racist jokes, just don't be an idiot about it. And you can't be sued simply for insulting someone, you CAN be sued for slander, which is having a reckless disregard for the truth while trying to damage someone's reputation. However, it is hard to prove whether or not there is a "reckless" disregard for the truth and whether or not your intent was to damage a person's reputation. It's even harder to prosecute when talking about public officials and people in the public sphere, like celebrities. You can say anything you want about them. Heck, I can say that Kerry is obsessed with strangling whores or that Bush beats children with lead pipes in the Oval Office and nobody could touch me. It's called the Thick Skin Doctrine, meaning that anyone who enters the public realm must be able to have a "thick skin" to take all the crap and lies people are going to say about them, and they can't do anything back, because 1) it is extremely difficult to prove that there was the intent to damage someone's reputation and 2) if people were constantly living in fear of getting sued by public figures, there would be not way to criticize, them, which is really what a Democracy is based on. Thus, I think it is ridiculous when people say damned stupid things like "Bush is starting a police state," or "the American government is taking away all our free speech," because, when it comes right down to it, you can say whatever the hell you want about public figures, hell, you can make a magazine and print up the most ridiculous stories you want.

Yeah, I just said that anyone who thinks he is trying to sue over people using stick figures probably has no understanding of what the whole situation is about, copyright law in general even.

You can copyright a style of drawing, it just has to be different enough to be recognized as a style. I've studied up on copyright law (to cover my own butt if I ever need to) and you can't copyright a stick figure, of course, but that's not what Zhu is suing about. Of course, people who think that, oh, someone having spilled coffee on themselves was what the lawsuit was about for example, would immediately err on the side of believing any lawsuit is litigious. However if the style used by the Nike commercials is similar enough to Xiao Xiao, then Zhu might have grounds to sue. Is it likely that Zhu will have any such standing? Probably not, I don't think anything that Nike would be likely to use in an advertisement would bear a close enough resemblance. And suing isn't about the money a lot of times in artistic copyright disputes, it's about defending a person's artistic expression. The money involved can sometimes be exorbanant, but it is mostly a punishment to the defendant and compensation for the plaintiff. I mean heck, if somebody ran an advertisement with something of mine on it, I would want just compensation for having thought of the idea. That's not "selling out."

In all honesty, it is really the Israeli's and Palestinian's fight. This has been going on for literally millenia and will not stop since the hatred has its roots in Biblical times. I believe that Israel is best looking out for its interests by building a wall as a means od protecting itself, even if it is in disputed territory, ESPECIALLY in disputed territory. From the Israeli's standpoint, they don't want the tanks marching to their front door.

And you also have to take into account that ever since the creation of Israel, in fact, a mere year after Britain turned the land over and set up Israel and Palestine, the War of Independance broke out, since then, there has been the Suez War which started about a year later, then there was the Six-Day war which was about 11 years later, followed up by the War of Attrition a mere 3 weeks later, and 6 years later the October War started up (Yom Kippur War/ Ramadan War), and then to be followed by the Lebanon War.

In each of these wars, Israel was pitted against mulitple enemies on numerous fronts. And while I am not in any way saying that Israel was not to blame in any of these conflicts, the wars were never directly started by Israel, and you wonder why they want to build a wall? Hell, if it was ME over there, I'd build myself box with a ton of gun emplacements and electrify the whole damned thing.

Of course both sides are really responding to attacks by the other, but who started it? It doesn't really even matter now, the hatred is so deeply rooted. American support for Israel doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme of things, the truth is, they'll still be killing each other.

To respond to previous criticisms of the Arab tactics ( I really can't believe I'm posting this ): suicide bombers is pretty much all they can muster against Israel's military muscle. If 6 countries attacking Israel at once can't break through, then I don't think a band of rebels weilding 40 year old guns is going to do much either. So they make due with what they can, and if that means sacrificing themselves to fight for something they believe in. I don't agree with that at all, but things are vastly different over there, and I don't have to contemplate living in fear of the next Israeli helicopter gunship raid. Nor do I have to deal with young boys and girls running into the restaurant I'm eating at with a Semtex jacket and Primacord trim. I really think any opinions any of us would have about how they think and act over there would be horribly skewed and misshappen. It's a different world out there.

And personally, it strikes me as odd how all the left wingers tend to bash Isreal and try maintain a "neutral stance" on the whole issue. It seems that a lot of people are doing that with tolerance nowadays as well, go figure.

At 7/16/04 12:52 PM, Jirekianu wrote:

There are more and more holidays, and technology allows for us to have to do less of the work that we did before...

And yet we still work more in a week than every European country. In fact, Americans use next to no vacation days at all. In fact, there are some companies, such as IBM, that REQUIRES employees to use up vacation times. And certain think tanks offer incentives to employees that use up all their vacation days. Why? Because the average American is a workaholic, and companies realize that a workaholic is more likely to have a burnout, which is thusly bad for the company as a whole. The stereotypical "Lazy American" is a load of crap. As for the pure industrial potential of China and India: it is indeed absolutely tremendous. However, not only will they have to deal with the tens, if not hundreds of millions of their lower classes, they also have to develop at least mediocre infrastructure to tap into the enormous economic might they could possess. As far as China goes, Communism doesn't really make things better. If China is to become a true economic superpower, then they will have to embrace capitalism. China is already someone capitalist, making them more socialist than communist, and that capitalist sector is their leading cash source. The reaquisition of Hong Kong also will have an influence on China's inevitable turn to capitalism. As many people well know, Hong Kong is extremely capitalist, and while it was a British Territory, it displayed one of the most pure forms of capitalism in the world. When it was reaquired by China, the first thing that any good communist country would do would be to send them all to reeducation facilities like they did in the 50's. How strange then that China actually allows them to almost govern themselves and even use their own set of currency ( as verified by a friend of mine who goes to UT with me who was raised in Hong Kong ). I guess the whole point of that was to verify that if things progress as they are, China is looking at become quite a power, if it isn't royally screwed by their "one baby per family" law, which is causing them to systematically kill off all of their little baby girls. And with fewer women, their population rates will severely plummet, limiting their available workforce. India on the other hand is still going strong in the baby making department. I think India will become a much more formidable power a lot sooner than China, simply because America is outsourcing so much of its labor there. It's as if we're handing the key to superpower-dom directly to India on a silicon platter. Not that that's a bad thing exactly, I guess we'll just see how things turn out.

The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal was a pretty horrendous sight. It's hard to see how the blame goes all the way up to Rumsfield, but that's just the way it works I guess. On a little bit of a tangent: I don't support what happened in the least, but I find it a little less than concerting that I don't see people whining and crying about how American prisoners are treated. A little hipocritical and sad, if you ask me. Back on topic, I would have to agree that as unpopular as Rumsfield is, it seems that Bush would have little recourse than to drop him, other than the fact that combat operations in Iraq, while relagated to a mostly defensive stance, are still going on. It's kind of a difficult situation to be in, on one hand, in order to stay afloat in Washington, you have to play to people's preferences, however there is a great responsibility to finish what we've started in Iraq, which, I think, did tremendous good by removing Hussein from power, even if that leaves one heck of a gap to fill. I guess we can only hope that the balance of power over there settles down some more while the US Armed Forces are still there to prevent another charismatic dictator like Hussein was.

Also, the idea of the draft being reinstated is absurd, the US Armed Forces and our allies are more than equipped to deal with any crises on the horizon and their metaphorical grandmothers. Not only so, it was the Democrats who were talking about the draft in order to create less support for Republicans. The fact that you think it was the Republicans seems to support that.

I have noticed that. There's a little bit too much animation after the final gang member. Just like in the... whichever level the flmaethrower guy is. I remember him coming like a full minute after dealing with the 2 initial people. Third level was definately the hardest, without a doubt.