I posted a reply in one of the Paragon City Hall forums (where I'm a moderator) that I praticularly liked. It's a subject that comes up a lot on original materials. Thought I'd post it here for archiving purposes.

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I want to open by saying that I’m not a copyright lawyer. Most of my experience with trademark and copyright materials as it relates to the internet has come from having been a partner in a small internet publishing company through the late 90’s. Ok onto my dubious reply….

Well there are really two issues at work here:

1. Who 'owns' the intellectual property in question.
2. What kind of damage is incurred by use of another’s intellectual property, and how can you enforce such a thing.

Number 1 is usually pretty clear if adhere to trademark and copyright notifications. To begin establishing a copyright on something all you really need to do is put a copyright notice on the page where it appears. This needs to be done EVERY time you print or quote the material yourself. Failing to do so opens the legal question of weather you've now declared it public domain. It's much the same with Trademark, where you need to use the (TM) or (R) symbols EVERY time you use that trademark or it opens you to a legal challenge.

It can get even more difficult for the original owners of quoted or often used materials. I know you can also open yourself to a legal challenge on trademark and copyright if you are aware of someone else using your material without also using the proper copyright or trademark notices. This also can imply that you accept a public domain claim to the material. That's why ... (Read More)

Woot! They've just released a new reel of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the ring, with 4 minutes of footage of the next film, The Two Towers added onto the end. I'm such a geek but I'm really looking forward to it. I've been wanting to see LOTR again (this will be the 5th time I think), but have been waiting for the footage to come out.

In other news, I'm STILL sick with this cold and so is Courtney though both of us are on the up swing. A big factor for me is that I can't get any damn sleep at night because of the generic coughing by both Courtney and I, as well as my cats midnight meowing for attention. All the lack of sleep and sickness has me REALLY off my game this week.

In my stupor I've been continuing to play the game Freedom Force and have to say I'm finding the game a whole lot of fun. I had all these intentions of coming up with my own characters in it, but the ones that come with the game are so damn interesting I haven't felt the need to recruit someone original.

Man, I haven't had such a bad cold in quiet some time. I started running a bad fever Monday night, and it continued through yesterday. It broke last night, but I'm on the completely exhausted stage and it's a bit hard to concentrate. Makes it worse because Courtney had her version of it descend into her chest and we can bearly get any sleep with her coughing all through the night. So lack of sleep keeps both our immune systems down, and when you're already sick that is bad. I'm going to try Nyquil for the first time in my life tonight. Hope it's as good as they say, as little sleep as I've gotten, Courtney has had it worse and I really need to see if I can get her a good night sleep. I think that will help her feel much better.

I played the newly released game Freedom Force yesterday when I wasn't laying down. The game is a whole lot of fun, just the kind of thing I was looking for out of it. I even got online and played a bit online, although the options for multiplayer are rather limited.

Courtney has been sick all week and it took a turn for the much worse this weekend. She really had a battle with coughing and all that. My poor honey. I just hope she gets better soon. Unfortunatly I think I'm getting what she had. If I'm lucky though I'll be able to keep it from descending into my chest. I can deal with a head cold but my lungs are so damn big, coughing is a trial. I can't complain too much though. I went all winter without getting terribly sick and I didn't get the flu this year either so I feel lucky.

Looking forward to the Oscars this Sunday night. Trying to get together a little viewing party and make some spinach lasagne which is my specialty. I will be a completely Geek and pick Lord of the Rings to sweep it's catagories in my fantasy world, but I'd be surprised to see it win anything because American media has no taste. :)

Hey there. Obviously I haven't updated much this week. I've been rather busy with a fan web site for the game City of Heroes I've spoken about before. I was made a moderator on the Paragon City Hall forums. I also had them publish the first in a series of interviews with COH community builders, which you can check out here if you are interested. It's nice because I really feel like I'm contributing to the community which is a lot of fun. I've had a few ideas for additional content that may be interesting but I don't want to get caught in the trap of just blabbing away.

F. Scott Fitzerald said ""You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say." So I want to make sure the things I'm suggesting are worth the time for the community.

Happy day in general. I took some time on my day off yesterday to improve the database that produces the COH FAQ. As I mentioned before this is total geek stuff and it makes me completely happy. I think I've realized my talent in technology when I was pondering why I'm so happy about having done this. My talent isn't that I'm particularly smarter than anyone else. Nobody at MIT is going to look at what I've done and say 'wow, I never thought of that'. My talent lies in actually getting something done. The IT world is FULL of folks who talk crap about how simple something WOULD be to do, or how easily they COULD get something done. My gift is that I sit my ass down and actually do it. The FAQ is a good example of this. The info's been out there waiting to be compiled and when I brought the topic up awhile ago people gave the 'yea, of course. That would be so easy.' Answer. Of course in over a year nobody HAS done it, they've just talked shit about doing it. Well me? I DID IT, and it's up and very well received. The site it's on gets over 6 million hits a month, the site my DAOC maps are on gets over 9 million hits a month (I did the 4 Broken Shield Albion Dungeon Maps), the site I edit the Albion Quest Database for gets over 8 million hits a month. I do stuff people use and that just makes me feel good.

Woo Hooo! Day off today that means getting up late (even for me) and running around my place butt nekkid!

-"It's enough to make you want to burn your eyes out with hot pokers."

-"It's no use! You can't burn out your minds eye!"

Just wanted to put in an update. Not much really going on right now. Been a quiet mind week. I think because my mind has been so stressed over Enron, the new war, the old war, the dismantling of democracy by our president and congrees, and why Zander left Anya at the alter that my brain has kind of shut down.

I've still been plugging away at the City of Heroes web FAQ. Mostly just making changes to the page output from the database I set up. Answering forum posts as well. I was talking with Courtney that I just enjoy feeling like I am adding something to the community I'm involved with. (Maybe that is why I was ok in the Army).

I'm also very much looking forward to the game Freedom Force which has finnally gone gold and should be out around March 26th. I am mostly looking forward to it because I think it would be a fun thing to goof around with my friend in multiplayer. I hope my friends find it to be fun and we can all have a lot of fun with it. I had high hopes that Dark Age of Camelot would be a game that I could play with real life friends, but for many reasons that game didn't work out to be what most of us hoped it would be.

I'm excited about getting started on an important certification. A friend of mine and I are going to form a study group for our Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA). Getting a cert will make me feel much more secure in my ability to stay working in technology I think and the tests involves the work I do on a day to day basis so it ... (Read More)

Damn I'm in a good mood this afternoon. The weather is beautify, I got out a little earlier today, and now I'm in my office at home. I love this office. I always wanted my own kind of fun space and the lighting is great, I'm surrounded by plants and my computer set up is pretty good. I stopped by Best Buy and got a portable CD player since I'm now cleared for walking (back surgery drama) and I also picked up a new James Taylor CD. It's a compilation of liver performances of his and he is freaking awesome live! Christ, when I think about artists like him I can barely listen to the steaming pile of turd that is most modern music.
I think I'm in a good mood too because I'm starting to take a bit of time off of work finally. I'm taking the Tuesday and Thursday of the next two weeks off. I'm just about maxed in vacation time at work so I'm going to try to start taking 2 three day weekends a month. This way I bleed off my 2 days a month and if I switch jobs this year I wont be wasting much vacation time. Eventually I'd like to get it down to having two weeks built up. (I've got about 5 weeks)

I've been participating in a lot of web forums of late and find a lot of the behavior there amusing. I think I am going to try to put together a 'FLAME' index that can be processed by a script. Basically it would just count the occurrence of various often used flaming terms and add points for a calculated total flame index. Things like:

USE OF WORD OR PHRASE (Flame Points)
- "Dude" (5 points. +5 if all caps, +5 if post begins with the word)
- "obviously" (5 points per use of word)
- "Nazi" (50 points, +20 if it occurs in the last sentence.)
- "fail to realize" (1 point)
- "loser/idiot/ass" (20 points)
- "screw you" (30 points)
- "sucks" (5 points)
- "you suck" (15 points)

You get the picture.

First. Go read this article!
http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=humannews&StoryID=674819

Second. Write your congressman and senator, telling that it absolutely necessary that we begin constructing as many nuclear weapons as possible. This way we can wipe the earth of our species and our kind because we've obviously reached the point where we CANNOT be allowed to breed anymore since we are now producing people like this. Please God, let the cockroaches evolved to be more intelligent than us! We've had our chance.

ACK! My frustrations know no bounds. I've been a slacker for some considerable time and kept my Kansas Driver's license. I finally decided to get a GA one and go down to DMV yesterday. After Getting cleared through to the waiting room and given a number I wait 2 hours for them to reach the number 6. I am number 30. Demons of frustration and stress begin jabbing me with the pitchforks and whispering plots of bell towers and small arms fire. I come up with what I think is a better plan. I leave, and go back today, arriving 2 hours before the DMV opens. I wait. I get in. The exact same lady sees me but tells me today that magically I need a letter from the state of Kansas to clear my license there so I can get one here. Clear of what? I've no idea because I've never even gotten so much as a traffic ticket. Apparently this is something they have to do with all out of state drivers, that for some reason they didn't feel they needed to do the day before. I wander the parking lot and realize all the building in the area are 1 story and provide no clear field of fire. Begrudgingly I leave and will return when I've jumped through another bureaucratic flaming hoop.

I think I may have mentioned before my interest in the game City of Heroes. I decided to make a little FAQ database to publish a static web site from the information presented for the game. It was a fun little thing to do and you'd be surprised how many little function thingies you can put into something when you generate it out of a DB. My inner geek was thrilled to have implemented the ability in the DB to change the order any topic can appear in as well as the order a question under a topic can appear in. Automatic features are also present for listing the date of last update and weather a question is new or not. Nothing complicated really just satisfied my nerd bone. The output is informative but uncomplicated.

http://streamweaver.home.mindspring.com/COH/faqtopics.html

I had a rather interesting experience today. My neighbor 'Dr. Eddie' asked me to give him some help picking out a used car to buy. He's only been in GA for about 10 months and is from India, and never bought a car in America. You could see how nervous he was and how very concerned he was that he wasn't going to get ripped off. Those seem like common concerns to everyone I think, but he took the concern to a new level I think. Not because of any silliness on his part I think, but more because he must be used to a different set of expectations and traditions when buying a car in India. What seemed the most difficult thing for him to wrap his brain around was the idea of a 'no haggle' price. (We went to a Saturn dealership) Having lived in and visited several other countries before I know how prevalent and expected haggling can be in other cultures. To be it's always been a hassle and an annoyance, especially when being worked over by some slick store owner overseas. To him the opposite seemed almost a sin, and I think one of the reasons he needed me to come along with him was that he almost needed to actually see it happen with a witness to accept the truth of the 'no-haggle' phenom!

Anyway, I feel pretty happy that we were able to find a good car at a very good price. Even past his concerns he seemed happy to have found the car we did, and he's in the process of getting the paperwork form his bank to close the deal on Monday.

'Dr. Eddie' (that's all I know him by) and his family are really nice ... (Read More)

Find out which Buffy villian you are most like!
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I thought I’d make one more neural dump before parking the brain for the night.

I’m feeling especially frustrated about commercialism and marketing right now and resentful that I see no way out of that cycle, at least as long as I live in America. Probably because the college brand name bowls, the Enron travesty, and the constant talk of recession I feel more than ever that the only worth we seem to have in society is what kind of consumer potential we represent.

On a daily basis we hear from the government how the markets aren’t dong as well as they did X number of years ago, and for them to rebound we need to get out and be a good little consumer. What surprises me most about this is that more people aren’t disgusted or insulted by this kind or rhetoric. I know it’s a more complicated situation than this, but right now I feel like this is the same as the President saying “You people aren’t making my rich friends enough money, so get out there and spend!” What’s more insulting is that our economy seems to actually be taking a nose dive because of it. This means one thing to me, and that this country lives too much for the wealthy and affluent.

In the face of this kind of culture how can anyone feel that their net worth is anything more than their net worth. I feel like little more than an agent to transfer funds between one big corporation to another. That I wouldn’t be paid at all if it weren’t for the fact that the bloated money bucket I work for didn’t want to make sure one of it’s other bloated money ... (Read More)

Just got done watching another episode of Politically Incorrect on ABC, which was moderately interesting. Basically the conversation centered around the use of the ‘N’ word in popular culture. The pretense of the discussion was that the ‘N’ word began as a very hateful and damaging thing to say but in recent times it’s been cooped by some elements on the culture and can be a term of endearment in the black community in particular contexts. The dialog about the merits of this point was good but that wasn’t want caught my mind.

What did spark my thoughts was a situation that occurred at the beginning of the discussion and something I think that exemplifies the terrible time some of us have in trying to resolve racial issues in this country. Basically Bill Mauhr asserted that people in the black community use the ‘N’ word with each other and don’t mean it in a negative way. The immediate response from a black female panel member was “No we don’t” with the most adamant of tones. The entire panel stopped for a second and tried to clarify that this person indeed was asserting that the ‘N’ word wasn’t used at all in the hip-hop community or between some African Americans, she of course continued adamantly to deny that it was. The end result is the other two black panel members had to refute that and say that yes some people in the black community did use the word in a positive way with one another. (Sorry for the extended set up but stay with me)

I guess what my mind locked onto in this is one reason I think many non-blacks find it so unnerving to try to discuss racial issues. I think many (most) of ... (Read More)