Slashdot Mirror

Don't forget bigotry from them, such as suggesting kids being thrown into wood chippers because they DARED to wear a red hat.
Story film producer Jack Morrissey did just that.

During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.

"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can't.

"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

(source)

On Facebook: “So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” (April 2018)

This guy is another dinosaur that his constituents keep putting in because they have no idea how to vote for anyone else and doing so would require thought or energy which are scarce resources for the average American. At least this guy has the decency to retire! Just a few months ago, McCain was incapacitated and refused to step down unless the governor agreed to appoint his wife to take his place.

Putting the CON in Congress! :)

Sorry forgot the second link
Verge Co-Founder Calls Ben Shapiro The Jew Who Helps Other Jews Onto the Train

In one of the most progressive industries

Sure, for old, white and male values of 'progressive'.

in one of the most progressive countries in the world

You're number 20 on this list and the number of first world countries you're ahead of isn't that high.

That you believe what you typed is one of the problem with systematic biases. They are hard to identify and confronting when they are.

Here's a study that takes a stab at 'why'. It's a small sample, but among other factors female directors who have been successful on short films find it harder to attract funding or investment in feature films.

Here's a list of successful female directors talking about the problems they have experienced based solely on gender.

I've found those from a quick google search and memory of some similar articles. You raise mechanics, but a similar search shows females interested in being a mechanic facing even more overt cultural pressure to not. You imply that maybe women don't want to be directors, but a trivial search shows considerable evidence that counters this.

Culture is self re-inforcing. Biases are hard to identify. There's a massive difference in gender among feature film directors. There's a marked difference in the usual path of successful directors (from short films and documentaries, to longer, feature films) based on gender. Small wonder that this means that less females choose a path where an equal amount of work does not result in an equal outcome, or have to have a backup plan for when they can't pick up funding or have to spend another decade getting 'experience' that their male colleagues don't seem to need.

Here's a report that looks at female directors and compares their careers to male directors. One of the differences they report is that directors will often start with short films before moving on to longer or feature films. The initial disparity in numbers between male and female directors at the short film level then becomes even more stark. Female directors report difficulty in finding or attracting funding (not the only problem, sample size is small and selective). We're not talking about a situation where women don't want to become directors of feature films. They do. They can't. Your mechanic analogy is off the mark.

The problem with cultures is that they tend to be self-reinforcing. Women, knowing that their chance of being able to make a career beyond short film will make less of an effort in a direction that's unlikely to yield results. When putting together people to work on or with, people are likely to ask for people that they have worked with before and who they know they can work with, again.

It's complicated and complex, as many social structures are. Identifying biases are difficult and confronting. The numbers, alone, are a sign that there is _likely_ to be some kind of systematic bias or biases. Holding your hands over your ears and demanding proof before you'll act is childish. Let's investigate. There's smoke; maybe there's a fire. Maybe we'll find that it's just weird, but women really don't want to direct, but here's a list of qualified female directors talking about some of the different ways that they've experienced barriers to their careers based solely on gender.

curb the enshrined right of freedom of speech of NFL players protesting.

This is bullshit. There is no such right. The 1st Amendment protects them from government prosecution — one can not be jailed for making a statement. It does not protect them — nor anyone else — from the disgust of their fellow citizens. Private employers may fire assholes — indeed, just the other day y'all were celebrating firings of the folks (accused of) taking parts in KKK marches...

Consistency much?

Unlike football players or other private employees, government employees can not be fired for their political convictions. Because 1st Amendment...

The self-appointed "Internet Activists" can suck my tail...

100k over two years does not seem to be a huge FB buy? "divisive political topics" could be rewritten as Facebook click bait.
Or what am I missing?

To put that number in perspective, Buzzfeed has shown to have spent as much as ten times that amount per month on Facebook ads alone.

In other words, Buzzfeed probably spent 240 times as much money trying to influence the election than accounts that might be tied with Russia did.

Doesn't sound so much like an effective, dastardly, sneaky Russian plot to ruin America now does it?

http://www.thewrap.com/11-time...

Still waiting for one RT criticism of Putin.

Wonder Woman has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What studio is going to complain about that?

http://www.thewrap.com/wonder-woman-has-a-higher-rotten-tomatoes-score-than-any-other-dc-or-marvel-movie-so-far/

Yes, but what was bizarre about this case was the timeline. One day, the FCC chairman was interviewed saying it's a free country. The very next day the FCC chairman basically announced that "if we hear complaints, we'll investigate" on Fox. By this point the story had blown up on the internet for a few days. SURPRISE! -- The next day he announces that they've heard complaints, so they'll investigate! Well sure, you basically told them on TV to complain the day before.

There was a 2 and 3? Non sense. Why not sequels of Starship Troopers while you are at it!

If ever there was a movie needing re-imaging ... Starship Troopers. I take that back, moving closer to the book (power suits) is not quite re-imagining is it?

I assume you mean this reboot of Starship Troopers...

The project is not a remake or a reboot of director Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 sci-fi movie, studio insiders said. Instead, the filmmakers are going back to the source material — a novel by Robert Heinlein. Nobody who worked on the 1997 film will be involved in the new project.

Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who wrote the upcoming “Baywatch” comedy starring Zach Efron and Dwayne Johnson, will pen the screenplay.
“Fast & Furious” producer Neal H. Moritz is producing along with Toby Jaffe (both worked on the original “Total Recall”).

I dunno, the jury is out on that one...

And that's important?

It is for the media that gave Trump $2B+ in free advertising during the election.

I think what's important is the reality, not the spin.

Tell the media.

The important bit from the article is that we get 100,000 more jobs.

Are these good paying middle class jobs that Trump promised to bring back to America? I doubt it.

I think you're focusing on the wrong goals.

Tell the media.

And additionally, you're imagining a fantasy situation just so you can complain how bad that fantasy situation is.

Tell the media.

But hey, fantasy simulation seems like it'll be the next big thing in VR.

I'll pass. I'm sure someone will get a kick out of Trump's Golden Showers VR.

http://www.thewrap.com/social-media-jokes-trump-golden-showers/

Knock yourself out.

Tell the media.

I think Charlie Brookers Black Mirror got it depicted right as to the effect these unsocial networks will have on the real world: See episode one Nosedive ..

There are other risks with AirBNB and similar services. Adam Conover did a fairly good "Adam Ruins Everything" presentation at http://www.thewrap.com/adam-ru...

Adam Conover has been doing fine, satirical work discrediting a lot of commonly held beliefs such as the effectiveness of private prisons the usefulness of summer vacation, hygiene, weddings, and many others. It's the sort of information Slashdot readers may have picked up in pieces, but presented in clear individual sketches that even children can understand.

Why is Trump taking pro-media stance?

Trump just read the riot act to the media elite.

On a larger scale, one for the first thing Trump plans to do is to kill US involvement in the TPP, which is pretty much a creation of the media companies...

In many ways, all along Trump has shown he is very much against the media industry. So if any one action appears to be FOR the media industry, it means you need to look a lot more closely.

In fact if you look you'll find that "Network Neutrality" was pushed for by the media industry, very happy to have a corporate backed government take full control over the wilds of the internet. Trump appointing people against network neutrality is continuing in the same vein of being very much against, not for, the media.

Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.

People seem to think that voting has some sort of meaning, and not a placebo to calm and comfort the masses.

Consider that Bernie raised $60 million to Clinton's $20 million, so the DNC quickly moved $60 million from down-ballot elections directly into the Clinton campaign. The popular vote by percentage was almost exactly proportional to the amount each candidate spent, so if the DNC hadn't done that, Bernie would have won.

Then consider that if you swap Hillary's superdelegates with Bernies, Bernie would have won. A candidate can have upwards of 30% more votes, and the superdelegates will still outweigh the popular vote.

Let's not forget that Clinton and Bernie were in a dead heat in several Iowa counties, and delegates were assigned by coin toss, of which Hillary won all 6.

A recent Wikileaks leak shows that, well... here's the relevant quote:

Why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate, governors and big city mayors, eliminating the DNC members who are not State chairs or vice-Chairs. (Frankly, DNC members don’t really represent constituencies anyway. I should know. I served on the DNC first as Executive Director and then as an elected member for 10 years.)

So if we “give” Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve “won” something from the Party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy.”

On the Republican side, several candidates signed a pledge to support the candidate whoever it should be, and we know how that turned out. "Except when they call my wife a bad name" is an exception, apparently.

And of course many Republicans don't support Trump, and the RNC cut off funding to his campaign and redirected funds to down-ballot elections.

Which prompted the recent tweet: "Shouldn't the goal of the party be to elect the candidate we voted for?"

People think that voting means something, but it doesn't. Not when the party can withhold support and sabotage their campaigns.

(The stock answer is that "The $x party is a private club, they can make whatever rules they want." Why do we even *bother* with primaries?)

If we can gather anything from the CIA black camps in Poland, it's that unless you're Roman Polansky (or probably any actual Polish citizen), the Polish are perfectly ready to sell you out.

Agh shit, I posted the link wrong, here it is. : http://www.thewrap.com/wp-cont...

Obligatory

Unlike the typical Democratic BS. Both Sec. Clinton and Sen. Sanders said that the FBI was right, but so was Apple. http://www.thewrap.com/clinton...

Archive link for those who prefer not to support the reprehensible Gawker: https://archive.is/PP7q2

IMHO Gawker is an absolutely vile clickbait machine that portrays itself as a progressive voice while selling outrage.
It undermines what I consider valid, socially responsible goals by trivialising most of them, generating needless conflict by labelling "bad" people and maintaining a ludicrous left-wing good, right-wing evil narrative. It produces propaganda and hatred for cash.

Nick Denton - the CEO of Gawker - has admitted that the company has a severe empathy problem and tried to relaunch it:
http://www.thewrap.com/nick-de...
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/2...

The problem with journalism is not that one needs an audience, the problem with journalism is that factual reporting is no longer the main goal. Truth is secondary to page-views. Nolan suggests that people are the problem because they won't pay for factual material, http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ demonstrates that one can successfully run a publication that focuses on the pursuit and publication of truth (with a healthy injection of humour).

TFA is an attempt to blame absolutely shitty "journalism" on the audience, what in fact is happening is that those of us who do care about quality journalism recognise Gawker for what it is and don't give it ad-revenue or page-impressions.

Really? What militant group was formed in response to Trump's rhetoric?

http://www.thewrap.com/donald-...

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/1...

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/22/...

If Donald Trump starts killing people while on stage, and is not arrested, then you have a point.

It looks like his supporters are right on the verge...

https://www.thewrap.com/donald...

Bruce Jenner is more famous for cutting his dick off than for being the Wheaties man.

Like I told me wife, if you are going to be transgender, shouldn't you at least look like this (Janet Mock):

http://www.thewrap.com/trans-a...

and not this?:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

The late great Benny Hill said it best in regards to Bruce:

"Everyone has the right to be ugly, but s/he abuses the privilege."

Two years ago they cut off my service for being behind on my bill, Friday before the Super Bowl.

I walked into their office on Monday with a check and my converter box. It's great not having to pay $90/month for a service I rarely watched.

But, their CEO is still making out well without my business, about 500 times what an average person makes.

Net Neutrality is a routing rule that has been with the Internet since the beginning. You don't "overturn" it with an act of congress.

No. But the courts overturned it which is why the FCC went back and came up with a different approach to prevent predatory practices.

How the Internet is designed is a job for engineers and no one else.

That's a nice sentiment but it's terribly naive. When content producers buy out the service providers, they make their engineers do all kinds of stuff to the design of the network to jack up profits and otherwise abuse their monopoly power. This is why the FCC ruled that the service providers must act like common carriers.

Really? Have you SEEN western animation lately?

Japan has.

The remarkable 16-week run atop the box-office that ''Frozen'' has enjoyed in Japan has ended, and it took Angelina Jolieâs ''Maleficent'' to do it.
''Frozen'' is the highest-grossing Disney film ever in Japan, and ranks behind only ''Titanic'' as the biggest box-office hit ever in that country.

'Maleficent" Ends Incredible Box-Office Reign of 'Frozen' in Japan

PlayStation 4 ''Frozen'' Limited Edition PS 4 ''Frozen'' case mod. Available in Japan only.

> [Please see the bottom of p. 224 and top of p. 225 to understand why no one should give a rat's ass at the recent firing of New York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson.]

Seems like Greenwald disagrees with you.

"I think of all the executive editors of the New York Times, at least in recent history, or I'll say in the last 10 years since I've been paying extremely close attention to how the New York Times functions, Jill Abramson was probably the best advocate for an adversarial relationship between the government and the media,"

News Corp will sell anything they think they can sell. They'll sell science on Fox Broadcasting and paranoia on Fox News. The various properties don't have to get along, so long as they're profitable. Witness this jab at Fox News by The Simpsons, which also appears on Fox Broadcasting:

http://www.thewrap.com/sites/d...

...one has to consider what a broadcast entity dependent upon advertising revenues will do if those ads no longer generate cash.

That is certainly the argument Fox used. What they conveniently left out is that Fox collects retransmission fees from Dish.

In fact, Dish was at one time forced to drop Fox programming because, according to Dish :-

FOX is demanding a new contract with an unprecedented rate increase of more than 50 percent.

In addition, the broadcast networks including Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC have demanded that its affiliates hand over a percentage of the money they receive from local cable operators that retransmit their signals.

Broadcasters used to be content with the money they took in from advertisers, which supported "free" over-the-air television. But in recent years as broadcasters have lost viewers to cable and advertisers are shifting to the Internet, stations have been seeking new sources of revenue by demanding payment from cable and satellite companies for the right to retransmit their programming.

News Corp.'s Fox is not the only network seeking a slice of its affiliates' retransmission fees. CBS, ABC and NBC are also negotiating for a percentage. However, there is a consensus that Fox is being the most aggressive of the networks. None of the Big Three has yet threatened to drop its local affiliate if it doesn't get the money.

While the corporate skirmishing is waged far above the heads of TV viewers, it is likely to have a real-world effect on households that pay for cable or satellite service — about 90% of all TV-watching homes in the country — in the form of higher monthly rates as local providers look to make up the difference.

Basically, its all about the money. The broadcasting networks have already been paid by retransmission fees and are double dipping into advertising fees.

sadly, robots fighting robots does seem inevitable at this point, although humans are still likely to be participating.

"Sadly?" It's already in production:
James Cameron and Mark Burnett Team for Discovery's 'Robogeddon'

http://www.thewrap.com/tv/article/mark-burnett-alaska-series-others-announced-discovery-36832

They have this guy, too:
Chris Dodd, Ex-Senator, Named MPAA Chairman
at $1.3 million/year.

Stretching the truth to pass SOPA:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/04100017081/chris-dodd-resorting-to-outright-lying-desperate-attempt-to-get-sopa-passed.shtml

More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/24/christopher-dodd-as-mpaa-chairman-can-he-save-hollywood.html

You're assuming that there's an unlimited number of film projects to invest in, so that you can choose to invest in six District 9s rather than one Iron Man 2. But that's not really true at the major-studio level; the supply of people who can bring a studio-quality movie in on time and (mostly) on budget is extremely limited. So even the largest studios only get to place a small number of bets each year. (Paramount, for instance, released only 13 pictures in 2010.) So it makes sense economically to try to make each of those bets count as much as possible.

bingo. this will never happen, nobody wants TV to be equal to internet, and the demand is nonexistent. It's not too different than 3d tv, which has also been underwhelming.

No one who consistently watches their shows think Stewart or Colbert provide actual news.

[Citation Needed]

Ooops

Funny that it happened with this movie, when the producers of this movie ripped off the real-life story from this guy:
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/hurt-locker-sued-over-stolen-identity-14850

He was never credited or compensated. How hypocritical can the movie studios get?

Yeah, and the NY Times said 500 million. A number they made up, and it seems they did their math wrong anyway.

It seems pretty well accepted that actual cost of making the movie was about 230-250 million, which is cheaper than several other blockbusters of the last few years.

The people who actually paid for it (and ought to know) appear to think they only spent 237 milliion on it.