Zixar

I got a little tired of the preachy nature of the flick, although I enjoyed it overall. You need to re-watch the first one after you see this one to see how a bunch of seemingly throw-away lines in the original tie in closely to the second. Example: You see the Architect's Video Wall in the first one. When Neo is first interrogated by Agent Smith, the surveillance camera display is the video wall. The extras really do tie in to the series. If you didn't see Final Flight of the Osiris at the beginning of Dreamcatcher, or haven't played around with the Enter The Matrix video game, you're missing some interesting parts of the back story. They aren't 100% vital, but they're worth perusing. The bit at the end of the sequel is problematic, though. It wouldn't surprise me now if they wimped out the ending by making the whole thing a dream--especially given the recurrent dream motif--Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus, Niobe, etc., etc. If Neo can now affect things in the Real World, that's pushing disbelief just a bit too far. Oh, did anyone else sit through the 12+ minutes of credits to see the trailer for the third movie? :)--> The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Morey: If you want some amazing mando strings, you have to try the Thomastik-Infeld flatwounds. They're imported from Austria, and rather steep in price ($21 per set or so) but they are FANTASTIC. They come in three different weights, light, medium, and heavy. They last a lot longer than ordinary roundwound strings, they stay in tune forever, it seems, and they're MUCH easier on the fingers. My calluses have nearly disappeared, and I can play a lot longer with them. I doubt I'll ever use any other strings now. They're hand-wound with some sort of tiny special nickel-alloy metal ribbons, which probably accounts for the expense. Some of the guys at MandolinCafe have said they've had a set last over a year in normal use! Thomastik-Infeld also makes violin and guitar strings, too. Elderly Instruments sells them online, among others. Well worth it. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Geez, Jonny, if you can play the guitar, your left hand can't be all THAT retarded! :D--> Zixette just got her hammered dulcimer this weekend--talk about weird string arrangements! I guess it will make sense in time, though. The worst thing was that I had to tune it for her. I thought tuning an autoharp with 36 strings was tough--her new HD has FIFTY. Took me about an hour to finish. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Does your ISP give you any free web space? If so, you can post them to your personal area on your ISP and link to them that way. Or, if the pics are small, you can make them attachments to your posts, but they have to be 50KB or smaller, if memory serves. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

wyteduv: I'd like to learn the bagpipes, but I think that would strain my wife's tolerance to her limit...and kill 4 of my 5 cats. (Buster's a tough ol' bird--he can take anything Papa plays...) :D--> The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Ex10: If you want a fun, easy instrument, get yourself a StrumStick. It's tuned like a mountain dulcimer, only a fifth higher and upside down like a skinny guitar. You only have to fret the bottom string, the other two strings are complementary drones. (You can fret them too, for chords, once you get good at it.) Also, like a dulcimer, the frets for notes out of the key have been removed, so the only notes you can play are part of the major key's scale. (Think of a piano with only white keys...) The result is that you can bang away on it all day and not worry too much about hitting a "clinker". They're widely available online and at music stores for about $120. They're great for kids learning music, too. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

EWB: Yep, there's just something unique about Irish folk music. I just bought The Chieftains latest CD, The Nashville Sessions. Interesting how elements of Irish music can be found in the folk roots of American country music. I don't know why I'm drawn to the less popular instruments. I started with an autoharp, then a bowed psaltery, mountain dulcimer, mandolin, tinwhistle, and I'm thinking about trying the fiddle, since the tuning is so close to the mandolin. We'll see. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Trefor: You might try the Irish tinwhistle. They're each tuned to a single key (diatonic) although you can usually play in two keys by changing the fingering on one note. The typical tinwhistle is in the key of D, but you can also play in G by changing the fingering on the C# to a C. It's also cheap--less than US$10. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Ooh, theremin! Cool! The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

My latest foray into the musical arena is the mandolin, which is much easier to play than I thought it would be. I know several folks play guitar, and I might even try that one day, although it seems tuned a bit strangely. I guess the mandolin would seem tuned strangely if I had started with guitar instead... What instruments do you play? Which ones do you wish you could play? The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Oh, by the way, TWI is allowed by statute to seek $150,000 punitive damages for each of those two copyrighted works you published, Mikey. Hope you either have 300 grand lying around somewhere, or aren't really that fond of your house... Toodles! The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

WordWolf: Storyteller? Ick. :D--> But if you must, I'd suggest "Cultmaker: The Violating". :D--> The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Of course, you could just get the StreamRipper plugin for the Winamp MP3 player and record the MP3s off of ShoutCast.com's Internet broadcasts, just like taping off of radio... ;)--> The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

It's a tricky subject. On one hand, John is right, in that nothing tangible gets stolen. However, Steve is right too, in that each downloaded song is generally a song that now the artist will receive no compensation for. Fact: It's legal to tape a song off a CD you own. Fact: It's legal to tape a song off of the radio. Fact: It's illegal to sell either tape. Before, the music biz had a built-in remedy--generation loss. If you've ever photocopied a photocopy, you'll see generation loss. Since the copies aren't perfect, repeated copying degrades the source material with noise or fidelity loss. Yes, you could tape off of a copied tape, but do this 3 or 4 times and the copies from each successive generation become practically useless. Photocopiers did not destroy the book trade. Cassette recorders did not destroy the music trade. VCRs did not destroy the film trade. So why the fuss? CDs aren't subject to generation loss. If you copy the data off of one, byte by byte, and put it on another, it is indistinguishable from the original. With computers, a person can borrow a friend's CD and make a perfect duplicate. A copy off that duplicate will still be identical to the original, and so on. The built-in safeguard for CDs used to be the sheer size of the data involved. The text of a 400-page book is about 1 megabyte. A single CD stores an album in 660 megabytes. The average song would take up 30-60 megabytes, a huge file to transfer over a modem. A few years back, however, some sound geniuses came up with a way to compress those 60MB song files into 3-5MB each. It's now known as MP3, and it's based on psychoacoustics--throwing away the bits of data representing sounds being masked by louder sounds, sort of. It's taking advantage of quirks in human hearing to get away with this. Since the MP3 encoder actually throws data away, it's called lossy compression. Is that good enough to consider MP3s equivalent to lossy photocopies or cassette tapes? Well, only in the case of multiple CD->MP3->CD->MP3 copying and extracting. When you copy an MP3 back into the standard CD format, the program has to expand it back from 3-5MB to 30-60MB. Without the original data though, the burner can only make educated guesses (which are still pretty good) on how to fill in the missing data. Down-generations of MP3s recorded this way start to take on a metallic distortion, but it takes more generations to degrade the recording substantially than cassette generations do. I don't know if I've made the situation any clearer, but that's more or less what's going on. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Jerry: I think Rafael already declared that interpretational and not actual, higher up on this page. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Newsflash, dumbass. Those books were not published to this site, nor do I have any other evidence that they have been published anywhere else on the internet. If they are in the hands of private collectors, it's their choice to make them public and accept the consequences. The face value of those works is only about $150, below the $1000 threshold of the copyright law. However, you chose to publish, not merely copy, publish, copyrighted material without holding the legal right to do so, on a public site. This isn't a case of two individuals swapping files, this is a public distribution of copyrighted material. The fair use defense does not apply since you published substantially the entire works in question, not just excerpts. If you had done that with some of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology works, you'd have already been served with the lawsuit. As I said before, though, you haven't just screwed yourself, you've screwed Pawtucket, too, unless one of you deletes those posts. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Ooh! Love that cute little red skirt, Dot... ;)--> The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

John: It depends. If he publishes them for download on a Napster-type service, then the record companies could say the combined value of 3,000 MP3 songs (typically costing $0.99 per legal download from pay-MP3 sites) exceeds the $1,000 limit on aggregate value and it is a Federal offense at that point. Plus, there's a 180-day window for the aggregation, too. If he published fewer, over a six month period, they all count together. Check out the Ubiquitous Mike thread for the sections in the US Code. Merely owning them is another matter. Unless the copyright holders can prove he furnished the copies to others, their main cause of action is against whoever copied it in the first place, or distributed it down the chain to him. I'm not a lawyer, so don't quote me on that, but it's sort of like moonshine--you can make all you want, but it's illegal to sell it, give it away, or transport it unless you pay the appropriate taxes on every gallon. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

There's also another $2,500 or so worth of infringement on the first page of the "Lost Teaching" thread... (11 pages, 6000+views) The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

No, dumbass, you aren't. You are continuing to push your perverted interpretation of VPW's works, regardless of what it might do to the site, its admin, or its patrons. You're only trying to wrap your odious nonsense in religious trappings so it might appear halfway-legitimate. You've crossed the line so far back you're approaching it again from the other side of the globe. Take your self-righteous spewage elsewhere. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

No, dumbass, lawyers live for minutiae like that. It's what pays for their BMWs. While I personally don't give the tiniest of damns if you spend the next three years in prison, you've also made Pawtucket an accessory by posting material on his website for which TWI still holds the legal copyrights. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Under USC Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 506(a)(2), distributing 1 or more copies of 1 or more copyrighted works with a total aggregate value of $1,000 or more, even if no money changed hands, is classified as criminal distribution, and is subject to a penalty under USC Title 18 Part I, Chapter 113, Section 2319© of up to 3 years in prison, 6 if it's a second or subsequent offense. As of this posting, this thread has a reported 6,592 views. Since the copyrighted work appeared on 2 of the current 13 pages of replies, that means that on average, Mike has distributed 1,014 copies of this work. If memory serves, the average cost for a legal copy of a TWI teaching tape was $4.00, giving an aggregate value of this infringement of $4,056.00. Call the Feds. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Goey: Mike has asked me to explain the following to you: He is what is known in research circles as a dumbass. I'll spare you the empirical formula and stoichiometric data, but simply put, his particular taxonomic sub-species is Dumbass craniorecta invertalis, more commonly known in the vernacular as the Western ....headed Dumbass. The primary distinguishing characteristics of D. craniorecta are: 1) Mental disjunction with reality. 2) Solipsistic egocentrism. 3) Occasional bouts of paranoid mania. 4) Social retardation. D. craniorecta can frequently be confused with D. ignoramus except that D. ignoramus may be successfully expunged with the proper application of anti-idiocy agents. D. craniorecta is incurably pernicious. D. craniorecta can sometimes be found cohabiting with D. anofossalus ambigua who, luckily, can be found 50% of the time in a hole in the ground instead of searching their other known habitat. Separating the two requires maceration and light centrifuge. D. craniorecta, being very dense, will sink to the bottom of any culture medium. I hope this helps, Goey. God bless! Dr Zixar The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

Under the fair use clause of the US Copyright code, portions of a copyrighted work may be replicated if properly accredited. Publishing an entire copyrighted work, though, is a violation of Federal law. Anybody got the number for the WayGB? They might as well make themselves useful, for once. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."

"If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for my kids!" -- A clueless Texas legislator, during a debate on whether to make Spanish an official language of the state. The fool hath said in his heart, "PFAL is the Word of God..."