That is all

You know what? I think you're right.

I was about to launch into this counter story, "Well, one of our high school teachers actually had her coffee spiked with ecstasy and wigged out" etc etc. Then it occurred to me that this didn't actually happen on our watch.

It was some apocryphal account of events that had happened "a few years ago"... looking back, it has the same hazy mythical quality as the one about the goat that those "sometime in the late 70's" seniors actually got on the roof, and the one about the mechanical whiz kid who actually took apart our principal's car and rebuilt it in the courtyard.

Like for real. Really happened, dude, my older brother knew the guy.

So this is how Tristram falls...

"You can't ban Tor! People might switch to something we can't intercept!"

This! Well, very close. AC gets this concept, but for the uninitiated:

You can copyright Batman the comic book drawing; you can copyright photos, images, scripts, etc. from Batman the movie; and you can copyright the *specific* character of Batman/Bruce Wayne, whose billionaire parents were shot in front of him on the streets of Gotham, who had a father-figure butler named Alfred, etc etc. You can trademark the logo on the Batsuit, and possibly even the whole suit if it's distinctive enough.

BUT you cannot copyright stock characters or concepts like "rich vigilante dons black suit and cape to fight crime" or "dapper British spy beds femmes fatales and saves the world." And you cannot copyright costumes (clothing is functional in the US, unless it's so completely unwearable that its only function could be as art). Which is a great reason to put trademarkable things like a logo and unique-looking suit on a character you want to protect.

Let's apply these to this case. What makes a Power Ranger a Power Ranger?

The Visuals:
--"Space-looking" spandex jumpsuits suits? Costumes are not copyrightable, possibly trademarkable.
--There are five different colors and white diamonds on their chests? Concepts are not copyrightable. A distinctive 5-color logo incorporating the rangers or some visual element like white diamonds could be trademarked, although the actual logos are all a variation on "lightning-y" words.

The Name:
--"Power Rangers" and "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" are certainly protectable (and protected) under trademark. They are too short and functional to be protected under copyright.

The Characters:
--Desire to fight various space assholes who want to wreak nonspecific space evil? Sounds pretty generic...
--Five teenagers fighting together? And they sometimes combine into one big ass robot? That's not even unique amongst futuristic crime-fighting robo-tweens in children's television, let alone all of fiction.
--They.... are one dimensional do-gooders who are so devoid of individual characteristics as to be interchangeable and known entirely by suit color, race, and gender? Now you're getting it! These "characters" are stock at best, meaning they are not protectable under copyright. The individual kids that donned the suits apparently had some half-assed backstories, but a) these too are stock and b) I don't believe the director referenced anything of the sort.

Mea culpa, I should know better than to rely on Slashdot for my facts--in this case, that 1oz of hard liquor is a "drink." I should've consulted an authoritative source like urbandictionary, which tells me one drink is actually equal to casual sex.

Could I still try to argue that my 1 glass was closer than 8? Well, yeah, but a) that would be pretty obtuse, and b) drinking any positive integer number of 8oz glasses of vodka is inadvisable in any case.

A single 8oz glass of vodka is pretty close to 10 standard drinks. How can you be so obtuse?

I have already secured the domain name "nodeerzone.com" so that state and federal highway officials can start putting in for stretches of highway they don't want deer to cross over. They will pay $20K/km to add highway sections to a public list. The deer will know not to cross these sections because of signs ($500 apiece) that say:

--NO-- DEER CROSSING!

I mean it, deer, you better not fucking cross here

Oblig Bash.

No, all three of you missed the point.

"Facebook engineers" are "game changing" the game by "rejecting" the "paradigm" that is "popular" (they're closing Facebook), instead embracing a "yet to be proven" "new approach" where your "pipe dreams" "look and feel like s__t " (unclear, they probably mean 'shat', which is short for William Shattner, who will buy the empty husk of Facebook and fold it into the Priceline Syndicate).

Focusing on a "groundbreaking" new business model, they'll be "approaching natives" (aboriginal peoples) with "samples and tutorials" that will give them "huge success internally" (Levitra and a lesson on handjobs). This new approach will definitely get the natives "stirred up", but will ultimately cause them to "React" poorly (an erection lasting more than four hours).

See how easy that was?

GD, you're a regular and thoughtful poster, so I don't think you're intentionally trolling. But if SCOTUS upheld slave ownership back in the 1800's, that's because the Constitution specifically contemplated and provided for slave ownership. It took a constitutional amendment (13th) to abolish slavery.

That doesn't mean SCOTUS is always (or even usually) right when it comes to protecting civil liberties. But that was just a Supremely bad example. :: ducks ::

Oh it was whore! That was really bothering me. I mean, w***e? I was wracking my brain and the best I got was "waste" or... "weene"?

I need my iPad. For me, it is excelling in a critical role that neither phones nor laptops can fill. As a performing musician, I post the iPad up on my mic stand, and the access to music and lyrics triples (or more) the range of songs I can play. Granted, my use case isn't the most common. But there are actually tons of musical performers, and IME they're increasingly turning to tablets to replace sheet music and chord charts.

...was obliged to use a concise term of action instead of the oddly constructed term of obligation "has been obliged."

Iran canceled its space program; Ansari fled to the US. That wasn't so hard!

I, on the other hand, have erstwhile been obliged to undertake in grammatical pedantry.

The Invisible Hand does give the best HJs...