Though copyright as it is has issues, this seems very off, as characters are the work, moreso than the settings and even plot - as only one of those three items tends to be unique. I've written books and stories, and the best answer I can give to you is this:
Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.
As in people doing these diets years before soylent, not years on said diet. My grammar might not've been clear enough.
EDIT: Specifically I'm thinking of the hundreds (if not thousands by now) of people on T-Nation/Testosterone Nation who've done the 1-month Velocity diet, which is (or was, I haven't been there in years, but that particular diet has been around for at least 5 years+), a protein shake diet with very little solid food. There are years of people doing it for a month and relating their experiences, highlights and downfalls, and I'm sure there are several more experiences in that world that would provide better data points. However, it has the issue of being mostly anecdotal evidence.
I'm not a real fan of chewing food, but having done a similar diet before I prefer it. Turns out that even though me and food don't always get along, after 3 weeks on a liquid diet the cravings for real food for me come back. There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent, this data exists but has been largely ignored since it's from a different kind of community. Anyways - 30 days isn't enough, many items take longer to produce issues. Vitamin C comes to mind, it's destroyed by sunlight, copper (copper is good for destroying a few biological agents it seems, birth-control and Vitamin C, oh it's uses - but we need it as well so it'll be there in soylent in trace amounts), and age, but so little is needed to avoid scurvy, and it takes about 3 months from your last consumption of it to produce adverse results, that it wouldn't be an issue... in the short run.
To address your comment about animals: I saw animals that are littered with disease standing above the product. Standing, breathing without masks, talking without masks(which means trace amounts of spit), in standard clothes that've probably been exposed to much. The rat was far less disturbing than seeing the people who were handling the product.
Contrary to the blood-work, there is a issue that presented itself after 30 days. Not a nutrient deficiency, but a chewing one: he mentioned he started chewing gum due to his jaw aching. As far as I know chewing is supposed to help keep the jaw healthy (an expert/dentist has been sorely lacking from these soylent discussions, I imagine they'd have much to say about chewing, jaw, and tooth issues that crop up), and as someone who hasn't done a great job of that in life... I certainly wouldn't want to mess with jaw health anymore.
My Mother has SAD, suffered for years with it in various parts of CA (too much gloom during winter, even though the days were long and sunny spring-autumns), but now lives in a northern mid-west state. We discovered that SAD doesn't affect her as much there for a couple reasons we can only guess at. The sun was out more often even on bone-chilling days, and the snow on the ground reflecting the light was far, far better for her than the gloomy rainy winter days of CA.
It was a nice surprise that a colder/Winter state was better for her particular SAD. Seems very counter-intuitive at first, but sometimes an individual's needs aren't so clear. And I just gotta reiterate... the snow reflecting more light into a home, combined with it adding the whole ambiance of a Winter look (rather than the sight of gloom or leafless plants in a more temperate state during winter) seems to have a real beneficial effect. Of course, individual results will vary, this only works for one particular case, but it's still of interest how SAD works and affects each person.
I once worked for a company that did pre-employment background checks. Before I left the CEO was talking about the next big thing in weeding out undesirables from the workforce: a system that would keep track of every time someone was placed behind bars/arrested, adding that to a database, and notifying potential/present employers that person A either working for them or applying to work for them had been arrested, either at one time or now.
Not charged with a crime, not falsely arrested, just simply placed behind bars. I left before really delving into the legality of it, but it apparently was.
Remember, the bill of rights only applies to the government. A private company doesn't have to care about WHY you were placed in a jail cell or whether you actually are a criminal, just that you were detained by the police at one time.
If every protester who'd been arrested (I'm thinking Occupy from a while ago) was now in a database that prevented them from ever getting a job again even though they've never committed a "real" crime, then being legal sure doesn't seem fine at all.
I should also mention that I've worked for a few companies handling private information about people. The lack of security in the private area is astounding. I'm honestly surprised that massive SSN and other personal info don't leak out of private companies more often, most of the time it's not difficult to walk out with a million DOB/Name/Current Address/SSN/Duplicatable Signature on thumb drive, there's no internal tracking and no encryption most of the time. The private sector is the last place surveillance should be happening, it's really frightening to think what could happen should they mess up.
I was overly broad with that, excuse me. It's much more complicated, but generally you can't exclude someone based on a criminal record alone as you rightly point out, and that's not accounting for other circumstances. So yes, financial will matter (of course, any financial crime means that license will be revoked and that record will be accessible as well), but unrelated crimes are different.
The main reason someone gets rejected from criminal reasons, in my experience, is having an old record that's been cleared or expunged, and then answering "No" when the employment application asks a specific wording of "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" - The answer would be yes, and a criminal check would reflect something had happened, but that the record has been expunged due to enough time passing for that particular crime. It sounds convoluted, and it is. Not sure it really should, but I only worked in the industry. Whether or not the industry followed the letter of the law is much, much different.
I used to work for a pre-employment background screening agencies. It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background. Unfortunately, it's not illegal (federally, with the EEOC, each state may have their own differences) to discriminate by personality test.
This is definitely something I saw prevalent in the hiring world: if it isn't outright illegal, use it to prevent someone from being hired. In many cases we had clients that'd tiptoe the line and ask if certain reasons would be valid for rejecting a person, and some HR managers were upset when they learned it was against the law to disallow someone who had admitted their criminal history from being hired. So they found another reason.
There is still a massive amount of hiring discrimination. It's just not the "official" reason anymore since that'd be illegal. That job was soulbreaking.
What this reiterated was mostly what I've been telling other self-publishers: marketing marketing marketing. Here's a book that gets good reviews and is supposedly (since I haven't read it) written well, yet only sells 1500 copies. Of course, 1500 copies in a very very short while is triple what most books sell in their lifetime, but it's still a very small number when it's by an author whose sold millions and has at times been credited with getting America's youth reading again - even if it was only for a while.
If J.K. Rowling can't sell more than a couple thousand copies of a new book based on it's quality alone, what makes you think you're going to sell any more by going the traditional publisher route under an also-unknown name.
It all comes down to marketing your book. You'll have to do your own marketing with traditional publishing as well, except now you also are in a contract. If your book does badly, your advance will make up for it. If it does well, then you're limited by paying back the advance prior to royalties, and you lose a touch of control.
Anyways, it gives me faith in our self-publishing business and our answers to clients who wonder why they haven't sold 3,000 copies yet. Although our last one is over 10k sales, mostly because they had been marketing the book months in advance of even writing it, and it was the written form of the advice they had been giving for years and building a platform with.
That's what we can learn from this. Build a platform based on you, market the book before it's even been written, build anticipation, and then market even more. I've really enjoyed this "revelation" about J.K., even if I'm not a reader. True, it does have a slightly sour taste due to it being a somewhat PR move, but then again... even Issac Asimov was Paul French when he wanted to write something my 8-year old sister would (and has!) read.
Exactly, pros do it all the time. Eventually it becomes cool. I never buy into the hype about it looking bad for a few reasons:
I wear glasses. Years ago people thought all glasses looked silly. And they were, with giant thick lenses. Now people buy non-RX glasses to look cool, even.
I saw an animated sci-fi show from around 10 years ago (Denno Coil, Japanese anime) where in order to see the AR/VR world, you wore glasses. Every single kid wore glasses. You had to in order to see the VR/AR. Once something is common, the look factor doesn't matter.
I think we're just seeing people being disappointed that Reality is still decades/centuries/possibly impossible behind Fiction, and Fiction is only pulling further away as Reality gets better computers to render Fiction with.
It's quite logical to practice one of the most important human communication skills at every opportunity possible. Practice makes perfect, and will hone the skill for use in situations where it will lead to direct benefits. If something isn't practiced, it can backfire when employed incorrectly.
It also very much feels like it'd go against the point of being empathetic if the only time it's employed is in beneficial situations.
It's also in very bad taste. Even if things were being brought on purposefully... it just feels wrong to have authorities sort-of bragging about catching law violators.
It feels immature. Law enforcement is supposed to be serious. This kind of thing should only really be a number in a report, not a picture with a comment trying to be funny. It should be objective, neither heavy-handed or lackadaisical.
Ditto. Ditto. For emphasis. Thank you for liking FF7. It's been a fad for the past 5-10 years for people to say "I don't know why everybody likes it, it wasn't that great." They are not correct.
The only game I've played through more times is Ocarina of Time - I rarely replay games, especially very long ones. Especially more than twice. FF7 has been the only exception.
I didn't have a psx, couldn't afford it back then, but I had a PC and got the PC version shortly after it had come out. It was my first FF game.
Stories like to have heroes, give them flaws, mess with them, and then miraculously help them win. The monomyth/hero's journey being the framework.
I don't know if any FF messed with their main character as much as Cloud. Well, they were on a streak after FF6 (Female protagonist who was definitely different from not just other games, but even her fellow party members... man they had good writing) The guy was messed up. Very bad things happened to him. Many times. People died, and not just for shock value.
Some of it has been overhyped, and so the backlash against overhype has caused too many people to rate it lower than it deserves. Others expect too great of things and are disappointed when FF7 doesn't floor them - after all, they are told the title is one of the best RPGs of all time. It is, but it's impossible to look at it nowadays without already having an expectation in mind.
Back then, when we were still young and living off RPGs after school, some fantastic games were made. Some, like FF7 and Xenogears and Chrono Trigger were life-altering. These are the reasons why I want to work as a creator. They are the reasons why I love good entertainment and good writing.
They established the tropes. They get a pass on having the tropes used against them. Man, I always feel like writing a treatise when FF7 crops up. I loved the game, but I was never a full-on fanatic of it. It just deserves some love for it's age.
That echoes what I've discovered in my decades of gaming as well. Across mmos, MP fps', anything with MP, you start seeing patterns. A friend and I are even thinking about writing a book based on our experiences with people online, specifically the larger MMO communitys.
This kid's joking manner isn't even close to a percent of what vile stuff goes on every day, and his was even written in a satirical manner. He just happened to do it in the wrong environment. It's becoming that the wrong environment to say anything in is anywhere online, especially in text form.
I've seen simple misunderstanding's due to the lack of tone and context in text lead people to virtually "murder" each other in a violent rage. Some have even been eerily reminiscent of some real-life news stories, with the only actual difference being a virtual rather than real person. It may sound ridiculous to compare the two since people generally behave differently when behind a slight wall of anonymity, but it was an almost identical circumstance and conversation leading to an explosive impulse leading to one person's death.
The only difference was that in the game, the person respawned. Text is a terrible form of basing any kind of judgement of another person on. It's wrought with problems. This is part of why when we've had to make judicial decisions about people's problems onine (as Guild Leaders) we've always communicated by voice. Text has always caused issues. The legal system taking action over it is a perfectly USA response, it fits with everything I know of my fellow Americans when they (I should say we) misunderstand something.
Recently the places I've lived have all had calorie counts on menus. It's very helpful. That way, when presented with a choice between a 400 calorie meal for $10 and a 1200 calorie meal for $10, I know which one will give me more calorie for my buck.
Yes, some of us use it to get more calories, not less. It's just far too helpful to know exactly how many calories you're getting. It's not just for people dieting or wanting to eat less.
Sometimes when trying to make a point or advertise a product the simplest things are missed. In this ad "Try IE" is missing. The ad itself claims "progress" and "not as bad anymore"... but there's no call to action. I could make a fallible argument that the ad itself says IE is worse than all the other browsers - because it never says you should use IE... just that IE isn't so terrible.
It'd be a bad argument, but that's why I really don't like this ad - it's a (mostly) negative ad and emphasizes a negative point (how bad IE is perceived), which is not how you change people's thoughts. This video has many repetitions of IE SUCKS in it. If I were advertising a product, no matter what people thought of it, I wouldn't be flashing "my product sucks" all over the place for the majority of the commercial in order to make the last 5 seconds try and turn that on it's head.
You change preformed thoughts by repeating "my product is now great" over and over, not "my product isn't terrible anymore!"
It takes a significant amount of effort to do this all personally, this is very commendable. I self-publish and work for a company that helps others self-publish by editing/designing and converting their work, and it's always something very involved.
It's not as simple as just clicking convert either. Tables render differently in Epub and kindle, TOC creation can be a veritable mess and table rendering in Epub and Kindle conversions look different if done wrong.
Mobi conversion tools may or may not fix issues that'd appear if the official Kindle KDP tool is used, meaning a converted Mobi may end up looking entirely different than the same file once uploaded to Amazon.
Graphs... I don't even want to think about dealing with those and Kindle, congratulations on doing all of this yourself without screaming. My first couple book conversions were learning experiences, and they were mostly plain text (chapter fiction books) without varying fonts and diagrams.
So, if I had to sum up what I've learned into one idea that'd make the entire process easier, it'd be this:
Write plain text or rich text. Don't format when writing. Do write as non-fancy as possible in your master text. Then when you have to add stuff to it later, you don't discover little surprises that throw everything off.
For example: Don't indent. Kindle auto-indents when converted if indentation hasn't been defined in the style. (The official Kindle will, and only currently, who knows if it'll change in the future, and a Mobi generator generally doesn't.) So using TAB indents throughout a book instead of MS Word's feature will cause a massive headache just when you think you're done.
Since I work on Windows, the tools can be rather simple. Create a document in MS word. Save as a web page (filtered) - to remove some of the junk word creates in html. Edit the html to remove a couple other quirks, set tags for chapters, remove unicode that Kindle won't recognize (some are, some aren't), save, convert, and check what you missed. The less special your document has to look, the easier it'll be.
Again, congratulations, welcome to the world of self-publishing. It can give a nightmare of a headache, but once it's done, the joy of knowing you created something on your own is magical.
No, what it means is that Sgt. Nelson knows how to work with bombs. It doesn't make him a subject matter expert on terrorism or art. Just bombs. And as charged, yes, the subject of the article did have materials needed to make bombs minus the explosives.
Everyone who has a timer/watch/cellphone does, which is the point of why this is so ridiculous. If you arrest everyone who has all the materials necessary to make a bomb minus the explosives, everyone would be arrested.
I like the idea, really, in terms of goals, presentation, and spirit. Unfortunately the second thing my mind goes to with this is the practical stuff: What are the limits and licenses?
The licensing is required, but the limits on it make me wonder about how much use I'd get out of it. I see links to the license on the FAQ: https://creativemarket.com/license - but there's only one type of license offered. It's very artist-friendly, I'll admit, but... that's the only license. The FAQ says that if that's a deal-breaker, to use the contact form. But there's more about that license that's, well, confusing.
It seems about what you'd expect (by which I mean good for a seller, and not as much as I'd hope for as a buyer, but buying IP is always going to be hard to balance, so it's understandable/expected), though there's one that worries me: "All other items may only be used in a single commercial project." This is referencing items that aren't add-ons.
Does this mean, for example, a purchased WP theme could only be used on one client's site, ever? That's how I'm reading this plus the other terms.
And those packs of between 25 and 500 or so icons, can they only be used in a single client application? It looks like some are add-ons to Photoshop, while others are apparently a non-program specific package, doesn't that mean they have to be used differently per this license since one set of icons is an add-on, the other isn't? I know it's called "SimpleLicense", but licenses are never simple.
And then there's another licensing aspect. The true ownership of the items. The FAQ says that each item won't be checked when uploaded to the market, so the developer can update listings as they please, and to use a contact form for copyright issues.
I'd hope that'd be enough, but I already see one person who looks like they are probably infringing copyright, from what this lay person can see: https://creativemarket.com/Adrien/activity - does this individual has licenses from Braun for his UI product and individual licenses with each car manufacturer listed for the car designs that allows him to create products based off those and resell them with a restrictive license?
A place to report copyright violations in excess of just a contact form is going to be required, sooner or later. But a check to begin with to make sure someone isn't offering an item that already exists... I can see how that'd be an impediment. The texture packs make me wonder for both site and seller, as I wouldn't want to be the person that has to make sure one particular version of the texture "crumpled paper" isn't the same as the other 1000 versions of it.
That all said, it does feel like something that has great potential to succeed. I do some design work, and even with all I noticed, I'd still be tempted to use this site for selling sets of graphics.
Even if it was ethically okay, it's more likely to get you rejected for the job than hired, regardless of the lie. Why? HR isn't doing the checking. I did background checks for years at a major company. Our clients were both big and miniscule - you'd be surprised at how many very small business would be able to afford a reasonably priced non-subscription background screening service. If the degree was off by some years, the client wouldn't hire the person because they lied on their resume. It doesn't matter what the lie is, just that they lied, end of story.
Don't lie on resumes. It's not HR that'll be catching them. It'll be a company that's been instructed to just report back to the client with whether things were true or not. And we caught a lot of both innocent mistakes (off by 1 year or so), as well as outright fabrications.
There's no trying to explain that stuff to HR when you're simply sent a rejection letter by a third-party.
Also, some of our clients were required by the government to account for where they've been for the past 5 or 10 years, and requiring paperwork proving where they were (even if unemployed) for any gaps in those employment. People were embarrassed to admit when they were unemployed and so left it unexplained... again costing them a job. Yes the paperwork explained to them beforehand they had to explain it.
And yes, we'd catch the "small stuff" - calling up a training school to verify someone had gone, and then double-checking government databases to verify the school itself was legitimate, running names and credit checks... and telling people "we don't want to hear your explanation for why your resume is inconsistent. Send us paperwork proving it, and then we'll find out on our own if that paperwork is valid" is all a liar would hear.
I do have to admit catching people in innocent mistakes was heartbreaking, and I'm glad I got out before they started offering the social network checking services. But to say someone's so experienced with lying they think they won't get caught... just means they haven't applied with a company that has a good service provider in the background.
Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.