I'm scared of the chinese buses, which are probably the best deal all around. Except when they are asshats.

I've taken them to Boston, DC, and Connecticut. They've been late about half the time, but I never felt unsafe.

I've taken them to Boston, DC, and Connecticut.

Toting a clandestine canine!

I'm sorry, Kat. I hate it when life's acting all lifey on you.

Timelies. It's morning here, and Danah Boyd reminds me why I love reading her blog.

Also, I'm having a good music morning, with a lot of good emails and lack of work productivity. Probably just balance the extremely emotionally painful meeting I'll have tonight, with the current board of a non-profit Buffy organization I was involved with and helped to established between 2004-2007, and now, because they can't fucking function, they think about closing it.

I really don't want to think about it now. I'm going to return and enjoy my morning, as long as it will last.

Toting a clandestine canine!

shhhhhh

Aww fuck.

Cops kill cougar on North Side

Couldn't they have tranqued it? Anyway, the cougar was in Chicago, 2.4 miles from my apartment....

So. Tired.

Cops kill cougar on North Side

See, when I first read this, I immediately thought, "Just because a 60-year-old-woman was hitting on a 25-year-old is no reason to kill her!'

I've taken Amtrak up and down the East coast (well, between DC and NYC) at least four or five times a year for the past five years, and only once been more than half an hour late.

Wow. I'd say you've been very lucky in that case, as my trains seem to routinely run about an hour late. (Hence my preference for driving - even if I wind up stuck on the Beltway for an hour, if I'm driving I at least feel some sense of control over the situation.)

So it depends on what exactly is in the book, but it does seem like if she wins, it could dramatically change what is considered fair use.

The case is interesting to me personally because I have a friend who's just published the first of three HP trivia quiz books she's written (IIRC the second and third are coming out this summer), and if the case goes badly for the Lexicon people, she (among many many others) could be next.

Couldn't they have tranqued it? Anyway, the cougar was in Chicago, 2.4 miles from my apartment....

Or, you know, set it up on a squash court with Nutty so at least it has the fighting chance a cheetah would.

JKR first has to establish that the Lexicon is "substantially similar" to the HP books -- this may be difficult for her to do unless everything is a direct quotation from those book. Only then does the court consider whether or not the material used comes under the fair use doctrine.

Although I haven't read the briefs in the case, only the news accounts, she seems to be saying that no one can publish a derivative work without her permission -- and that's simply not true. Fair Use allows someone to create a new work based on her work, and even to quote directly from it when doing so.