jythie speculated:

I suspect you're right.

That doesn't alter the fact that it's important to the future of the human race that the issue be addressed.

newcastlejon remonstrated:

Yes it is. One I read the year it was published.

But pigiron was trying to be funny. (I think he succeeded, btw.) That makes his post a QUIP. From Goggle's search page for the term:

MightyMartian sneered:

There ARE current international treaties banning ownership of an extraterrestrial body. They're foolish and outdated, and they need to be amended. Bigelow is attempting to persuade the US government to begin negotiating that process.

I think Bigelow is a swine - but he's right about what it will take to give private capital the incentive to invest the blood and treasure necessary to colonize and exploit extraterrestrial resources. We're getting ever closer to the day when companies like SpaceX will be capable of creating conglomerates that possess the technology and financial resources to do exactly that - but they won't commit them until they see the possibility of getting sufficient return on their investment to make the risk worth taking.

I'm all for government funding - NASA, the ESA, and so on - for space exploration efforts. But we can't COLONIZE the Moon without first modifying the existing Moon Treaty. Nor can we conduct commercial operations (such as ice mining) without amending it, because that 50-year-old treaty prohibits them.

Anybody - including people you despise - can have a good idea. Ideas should be considered on their own merits, rather than being dismissed out of hand, simply because you dislike their source.

pigiron quipped:

And Bob Bigelow is a slumlord.

I've lived in one of his bigger "residence hotels". It was a hellhole. Cop cars day and night, shootings and stabbings, bloodstains on the carpet.

I understand Bob Hsieh, co-founder of Zappos, has bought up a big chunk of Fremont Street, and is steadily redeveloping it into a pretty decent area - but, five years ago, downtown Vegas was a complete slum. And Bigelow helped create that slum.

BTW - I think he's probably right about private property rights being the key to giving private capital the incentive needed to invest in colonizing and economically exploiting Luna. That, however, does not change who he is.

Sesostris III noted:

And Apple Computer was forced to negotiate a settlement with Apple Corps Ltd in every suit the Beatles' company filed. (They were all related to iTunes, which is all about music - and the Beatles worldwide trademark was established in 1968, so Apple Computers' conflicting mark had no legal leg to stand on.)

Trademarks are, for the most part, geographically limited, and apply fairly narrowly to the product or service to which the mark applies. Thus the Saturn automobile company, the Sega Saturn console, and Saturn Internet Services ALL had trademarks on the name Saturn. None of them conflicted with each other, because each represented a different category of product (cars vs. game consoles) or service (an ISP). Very few trademarks are global. Apple Computer is, and so is Apple Corps Ltd. The conflict arose when Apple Computer decided to get into the music business - and ran into a trademark the Beatles had established more than thirty years earlier. So Steve Jobs changed the service's name to iTunes, paid Apple Corps an undisclosed (but clearly substantial) amount of money, and signed a quitclaim agreement to make it all go away. Once that happened, negotiations began between Apple Corps and Apple Computer to make the Beatles' music available on iTunes - which it now is.

In other news, Shuttleworth over-fucking-reached in a major way. The EFF has set him straight. Let's hope he stays that way.

Unless, y'know, he's gay.

krs440 stated:

The aside was directed at the peanut gallery - not at you. (Your user number indicated that you ought to be familiar with the /. habit of responding to postings without having first read the article to which they refer. It's practically an article of faith around here. The notion that the gallery would bother to read a link posted within a comment is still less likely. Your research citation made it pretty clear that you're the exception that proves the rule.),/p>

Again, they're not the same quote. "I love it!" and "I'm lovin' it! (tm McDonalds) are not the same statement. They may well MEAN the same thing, but they are not the same quote.

I'm not a particular partisan of Mr. Mellon. If you can find an earlier citation for his exact statement, I'll happily acknowledge it. I'm equally sanguine about accepting that the "ain't" variant came first. My concern is with /.'s fortune file being RIFE with shit like this. Mis-attribution and non-attribution are equally bad things. The editors take a lot of heat for maladroit editing, but nobody (except me, and now thee) seems to have noticed that the fortune cookie database is as full of crap as the articles - and then some. It bothers me more than somewhat, and I thought it was overdue that someone pointed it out.

As it happens, that someone turned out to be yours truly.

krs440 noted:

If you read the reference I cited (pause for derisive laughter from the peanut gallery), you'll note that IT draws a distinction between the two formulations. Like Friedman with the more formal phraseology, Robert A. Heinlein is frequently credited with "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." In fact, he DID come up with the acronym TANSTAAFL (in his 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), which is now widely used, but, as you point out, he certainly didn't coin the parent observation.

So, yes, proper attribution can be obscure. But I still say that's NO excuse for obvious mis-attribution, and no excuse whatsoever for leaving out attribution of living authors' _bon mots_ altogether - especially when the source of those IS indisputable.

Slushdot's fortune cookies need a thorough overhaul.

Just as a for-instance, I keep seeing "There's no such thing as a free lunch" attributed to Milton Friedman. Phrase finder attributes the original statement to journalist Paul Mellon, in a January, 1942 editorial response to a speech by then-vice-President Henry Wallace. It notes that the phrase is associated with Friedman only because he appropriated it as the title of his 1975 book - but he would have been in grade school when Mellon's editorial was first published.

That's far from the only sin of mis-attribution (or, much worse, non-attribution) in the fortune database. I'm CONSTANTLY seeing quotes from Bill Griffith's fabulous Zippy the Pinhead strips (mostly Zippy's own non-sequiturs) show up without attribution to either Griffith (their actual author) or Zippy (his mouthpiece). The same is true of many great Steven Wright lines - and there have to be plenty of others whose authors I don't recognize.

Full disclosure: I'm a writer. Proper attribution is important to me. I'm known for the extent to which I research my work - which makes proper attribution all the more important from my perspective.

canadian_right confessed:

Oh, for criminy's sake! A "satire of fascism and chavinism" that "conveyed the spirit of the book"? Give to me a break.

The two things are ENTIRELY mutually exclusive. You can convey the spirit of Heinlein's final juvenile novel, or you can make a "satire of fascism and chauvinism", but you cannot do both. In fact, I'm reminded of Heinlein's own observation that, "A man may choose to follow the path of faith, or the path of reason. He cannot do both."

Starship Troopers, the novel, is a straightforward exposition of the process by which callow teenagers are transformed into trained soldiers. There's no trace of sexism in it, and no hint of fascism, either. (That Heinlein sets the story in a society in which an individual must serve the public for a period - remarks he made in response to interviews published over the years made it clear that he did not envision military service as the only option - before being granted the sovereign franchise does NOT amount to "fascism".) The movie, by contrast, discards every trace of what makes the book effective as a coming-of-age tale, replaces Heinlein's social model with a truly fascist one, and makes the military's leadership a clown college (Space marines using carbines against the Bugs? Really?), to boot. It has NOTHING to do with the book, besides sharing a title.

You, sir, are a ninnyhammer.

Jeremiah Cornelius explained:

No, what YOU don't understand it that the Kochs have taken a hit in the past two weeks' free fall on Wall Street. They therefore have sent forth the word that the Tea Party needs to cut it the fuck out.

And the Tea Party is ignoring them.

Thus my "Victor Frankenstein" comment.

I'm telling you that YOUR picture of the current state of Washington and the Repugnican Party is oversimplified. YOU live in California. *I* live in rural Ohio, in the heart of Tea Party country. I'm personally acquainted with far too many of these nit-wits. And they are NOT part of the "everybody in Washington works for the plutocrats" equation.

Jeremiah Cornelius sneered:

Reductionist running dog.

Jeremiah Cornelius snorted:

Oh, horseshit.

The "drama and theatrics" of which you so dismissively speak is ALL on the Tea Party side. The House clowns behind this public tantrum ARE the agents of plutocrats - but they are unwitting ones, blinded to the control of their puppetmasters by their ideology and prideful ignorance. That's an argyle horse, because all their non-TP peers understand EXACTLY who has purchased them.

The Tea Party currently controls the Republican Party - and, because of gerrymandering and the fact that most Democrats only vote once every four years, that is unlikely to change any time soon. It is unlikely to change, because mainstream Republican voters don't turn out in significant numbers for primary elections. Instead, they're happy to cast their vote for a Republican slate in the general election, and go away satisfied that they've done their duty to party and (only incidentally) country. So it's the "base" - the evangelicals that Ronald Reagan's campaign strategy so empowered - the NRA lifers, and the slack-jawed Fox News addicts that turn out for the primaries. Those are the identical constituencies of the Tea Party, and they'll uncritically accept and vote in accordance with any propaganda effort that gets them sufficiently riled up over abortion, gun rights, taxes, and "socialism" (all while happily depositing their Social Security checks, and leaning as heavily on their Medicare coverage as they do on their walkers and canes).

Cue the Koch brothers - the oil billionaires who have (thanks to the Roberts Court's decisions that money and speech are somehow equivalent, that "corporations are people" for purposes of political speech, and that unlimited secret spending on political campaigns - as long as it pretends to be "educational" and "issue-based" - is a bastion of fr-r-ee-dom!) essentially bankrolled the entire Tea Party monster from its inception, as a proxy for their personal business interests.

Only now the monster has escaped their control - as Victor Frankenstein could have told them it inevitably would. And it's far too late to chain it back up in the basement, because the Tea Party is now a self-sustaining reaction.

THAT's the difference. Washington's establishment pols are self-aware. The Tea Party is not. It's all id - and the Republican superego has left the building, so its ego, the career Republican establishment, has been left to fend for itself. The result is that the career Republican pols are falling all over themselves to embrace all things Tea, in perfectly-justified panic over being "primaried" (a nonce verb that owes its very existence to the Tea Party) out of their comfy jobs as shills for whoever pays them to be.

It's the triumph of arrogant ignorance over calculated self-interest - and that is Not A Good Thing for the country. Or you and me, for that matter, because the Tea Party is the very definition of a faith-based movement. And I'm not talking about their Christian evangelism, here. I'm talking about their blind hatred of "socialism" - despite their personal dependence on it - of taxes - even though our tax rates are still near historic lows (and FAR lower than during the Eisenhower administration, which is a Golden Era in the Tea Party credo) - and of all things Obama - regardless of the fact that our 44th president is an enthusiastic centrist, and ardent supporter of the status quo.

Your sneering dismissal of all pols as corrupt representatives of corporate plutocracy represents a faux-sophisticate's rhetorical overreach: they're NOT all the same. The Tea Partiers are DANGEROUS, precisely because they're NOT subject to the "business-as-usual" corruption of Washington politics. They're True Believers - and not in the good, Marvel-comics way, but in the terrible Spanish-Inquisition-and-Crusades way.