3. Have integrity. Don't violate copyright. Don't copy software illegally. Don't copy music illegally. Don't copy anything illegally. This is the least popular thing I have to say, but it is IMPORTANT. Every copy is bullet in the other side's arsenal. Evey copy is an argument for them to push legislation that takes away our freedoms. We must not be hypocrites if we want to have the moral ground to expose their hypocrisy.
Amen to that! I never get all those hundreds of thousands of people who see no problem at all in illegally copying CD's, illegally downloading MP3's and movies, etc.
Of course, years of working with computers and solving problems logically contribute to a mindset with a need for analysis... which probably means most of Slashdot thinks more like I do, right?
I don't think so. I'm a programmer and have worked with computers and solved problems logically for years, but I agree with the original poster. I think a lot of people have a tendency to read way too much into movies, books, paintings, etc., and should try to enjoy them on a much lower level.
I think I'm supported by the fact that most artists, when talking about their own work, say that critics read too much into it and they've mostly made it to satisfy their own creative urges. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien said that the primary motivation for the story of The Lord of the Rings was the "desire of a storyteller to tell a good story" (or something along those lines) and I've heard / read other artists in other fields say similar things. If that's all the artist intended, then who are we to decide that that's not good enough and that there should be more to it?
I have a suspicion that this desire to analyse artworks and look for a deeper meaning in them is partly snobism. People want to show off, show how clever they are for finding the hidden meaning.
Of course, I'm not saying that no art has deeper meaning; there are obviously thousands of books, paintings, movies, songs, etc. made with the express intent of the artist to make a point. But that leaves millions that were made "just to be funny" or "just to be good art". In other words, for a random work of art the chance that there was no deeper meaning intended with it is much larger than that there was, and people who say that there is no deeper meaning are most probably right...
More to the point, I believe The Matrix belongs to the latter category. The Wachowski brothers wanted to make a cool movie with a good (consistent and interesting) story and fantastic special effects in the style of their favourite comics. No deeper meaning than that. In my opinion, by far the most art was made purely for entertainment and should be enjoyed as such...
Here in Europe we have "teletext", which is a set of pages broadcast by most stations with all kinds of content, including program schedules, in color and rudimentary graphics with hypertext-like links between the pages. A sort of world wide web avant la lettre. All modern TVs over here have built-in support for viewing and navigating these pages.
It also has the latest news, traffic info, the weather forecast, entertainment info, subtitles, you name it. I've always wondered why this has never been introduced in the States, I think it would have been very succesful. We've had it for a long time (at least fifteen years, probably longer).
> First of all: it does have queries. The difference is that you write them in (for instance) Java. And that's not "good enough for now", that's several orders of magnitude more powerful than SQL.
In the same sense that assembly code is more powerful than Java. I'll take relational algebra (which, admittedly, is crappily implemented in SQL) over procedural Java any day, unless I have very particular needs.
Well yes, but why would you write "procedural Java"? Proper Java is easier to write than SQL.
> transactions (for instance object synchronization in Java,
I hope I don't have to tell you that serialization is in a whole different ballpark from transactions.
In other words, "it doesn't have queries". What real project doesn't (eventually) need queries? And even if writing your queries "by hand" in Java is good enough for now, what real project doesn't eventually need indices, transactions, or other features of a real database system?
Your post betrays a misunderstanding of the issues:
First of all: it does have queries. The difference is that you write them in (for instance) Java. And that's not "good enough for now", that's several orders of magnitude more powerful than SQL.
Secondly: it does have all the "features of a real database system" you mention, such as indices (for instance the various hashtables and sorted tree implementations in the Java Collections API) and transactions (for instance object synchronization in Java, can you tell I'm a Java developer?;-)).
It's all there, and more flexible and powerful than SQL, you just need to learn to think out of the box...
Take them to the moon and show them the lander in person, and they say it was planted.
But it was planted! How could NASA have gotten it there other than by going to the moon? Taking the crackpots to the moon and showing them the lander ought to satisfy them, although it would probably be a bit more expensive than writing a book about it...
Why does Frodo need to go and try and surrender himself to the ringwraith? Why did we need to see Sam doing his running, diving, savior thing?
I have a suspicion that this may be because the Cirith Ungol sequence may not be in the third movie (or may be much shorter), and PJ needed a place to stick the scene in the tower where Frodo almost attacks Sam and the scene on the path where Frodo almost surrenders to the ringwraith on the road below when they see the army coming out of Minas Morgul. It would explain a few other changes as well...
Also, I think the whole Theoden / Saruman excorcism thing was added because the scene you're talking about won't be in the movie. That would explain that and a few other changes and makes me a bit less uncomfortable about it...
The addition of the elves to Helm's Deep I didn't like at all. That's quite a fundamental change to the story. Men and Elves hadn't fought together for thousands of years, why this sudden, unexplained and unnecessary change of heart, when the Ents would have done just fine and would have taken just as much screen time? I thought it was quite an unnecessary and arrogant change on PJ's part, and the same goes for the whole warg attack thing, and the changes to Faramir's character.
But all in all these are very minor quibbles when compared to all the other aspects of the movie. I still thought it was the best movie I've seen in my lifetime (together with Fellowship) and it still captured the spirit of the book well enough...
Here in the Netherlands (and pretty the much the rest of Europe) one can directly transfer money from their account to some other person's account with the same or any other bank. You can give the order by mailing a transfer order or over the Internet, modem or telephone. It's free and it takes from one day (when it's the same bank, sometimes it's even instantaneous) to at most a few days. Once transferred the money is yours and there's nothing the sender can do about it anymore.
It's been as easy and cheap like this here for as long as I can remember. What's the deal in the US that transferring money is so difficult?
We initially planned to have a Gtk backend, but turns out that Windows.Forms sadly exposes bits from the Win32 API that would be very hard to emulate (or at least terribly painful to debug).
<Sigh>... Now why doesn't that surprise me in the least. This is probably intentional and an indicator of the way Microsoft will try to restrict the so-called platform independance of.NET to its own implementations and operating systems...
Got a nicely petty response from them as well when I canceled.
What did they say?
The EFF are the folks that want to fight to allow folks to spam like their was no tomorrow.
Really?! How do you get there from here? Their position appears to be very reasonable; all they are saying is that current (proposed) solutions are either inadequate or too restrictive, and I agree with them.
Could it be that you have some kind of personal problem with the EFF?
A while ago here in the Netherlands you could get stereo throwaway cameras, the pictures of which would be put on those corrugated transparent plastic cards that produce a 3D effect without needing 3D glasses. They must still be around somewhere...
In the Netherlands (and pretty much everywhere else besides the US), local calls are not free. So people like me (who have no access to broadband Internet connections) still essentially pay for every downloaded byte (since every downloaded byte requires me to keep the line open longer).
In other words, I am actually paying for those fucking banner ads to be downloaded to my machine. That's totally unacceptable and I think I'm perfectly in my right to do everything I can to avoid having to download them, including using a browser which blocks popups and running a proxy which redirects requests to known ad servers to a 1-pixel transparant GIF on the proxy.
All this is apart from the fact that I hate advertising in general and intrusive advertising such as commercial breaks, popup ads, slide-over ads, etc. specifically. When I want to know about a product, I'll go looking for information then. Don't bother me with it until then...
This is actually a good thing. Let's say you are trying to protect your house. Do you want the law to state that you must have an impenetrable fortress and if someone breaks in, tough luck?? Not having the strongest protection scheme should make a break-in (or cracking) any less illegal or wrong. If you think it should, next time someone breaks in to you house you should be saying "Well, I had it coming; I should have barred my windows and doors."
That's the wrong analogy. Illegally copying copyrighted materials is already against the law, just like illegally entering a house is. The DMCA would be comparable to a law that says "you cannot make, own or use (even for legal purposes) any object that could be used to break into a house." That would be plainly ridiculous and unacceptable, and it goes to show how low the political and judicial systems of the US have sunk for actually allowing such a ridiculous law to be purchased...
...the technical capability to burn a limited number of personal copies and the flexibility to import recordings to portable devices...
An MP3 file is not encrypted and hasn't got any kind of copy control mechanism built-in, nor is it possible to add something like that to the format since it's just an MPEG audio stream with no header or stream descriptors or anything.
That means that there's no way EMI could prevent you from burning, uploading to any portable player or copying the tracks you download from them.
Ergo, the format is probaly going to be WMA, which does have that kind of controls built-in. But that means that it's going to be more of the same:
You still won't be able to burn the tracks when and where you want to.
You won't be able to upload them to any portable device that doesn't support secure WMA (such as my empeg, a car MP3 player).
You'll probably have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft Windows Media Player to download and play the tracks.
You won't be able to play the tracks under any other OS such as Linux.
You'll have to be online to play the tracks at least sometimes, so your license can be renewed. Internet access costs money where I live.
Etc...
In other words, the same old fair-use restricting crap that we're used to from the industry. There's nothing revolutionary or new about this...
QoS means nothing of the things described. It's just a field in the IP header indicating which 'quality of service' is desired, which a router may or may not ignore.
You cannot use a sniffer to "determine whether someone is watching your MAC address" and noone can "see if you're using a sniffer", at least not from a remote system.
They "hid themselves behind IP address 255.255.255.254"?! How does that work?
I could go on... This is either a fake or from a clueless script kiddie.
1) Were the two (yes, there were two not one) cars removed from the background of the farmyard scene?
There was only one car. If you look closely you'll see that the other 'car' is smoke coming from a chimney in the distance. The one car has already been removed on the regular DVD.
I may have been exaggerating the point a little for your education, so I'll refer you to this web page that I googled to in less than 30 seconds instead which has a photo showing it: Photo of leonids meteor shower [cox.net]
I was trying to make the point that from the description in the article, the objects that were seen didn't appear to be moving in the way you describe.
Observe that the meteorites in your picture appear to be moving away from the same point, and are only visible for a short stretch. From the articles, the objects that were seen were apparently going all the way across the sky from the east to the west, and all the way from the west to the east the following night. In other words they were going from one part of the sky to another (different parts each night) and not coming from the same point in the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
3. Have integrity. Don't violate copyright. Don't copy software illegally. Don't copy music illegally. Don't copy anything illegally. This is the least popular thing I have to say, but it is IMPORTANT. Every copy is bullet in the other side's arsenal. Evey copy is an argument for them to push legislation that takes away our freedoms. We must not be hypocrites if we want to have the moral ground to expose their hypocrisy.
Amen to that! I never get all those hundreds of thousands of people who see no problem at all in illegally copying CD's, illegally downloading MP3's and movies, etc.
Of course, years of working with computers and solving problems logically contribute to a mindset with a need for analysis... which probably means most of Slashdot thinks more like I do, right?
I don't think so. I'm a programmer and have worked with computers and solved problems logically for years, but I agree with the original poster. I think a lot of people have a tendency to read way too much into movies, books, paintings, etc., and should try to enjoy them on a much lower level.
I think I'm supported by the fact that most artists, when talking about their own work, say that critics read too much into it and they've mostly made it to satisfy their own creative urges. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien said that the primary motivation for the story of The Lord of the Rings was the "desire of a storyteller to tell a good story" (or something along those lines) and I've heard / read other artists in other fields say similar things. If that's all the artist intended, then who are we to decide that that's not good enough and that there should be more to it?
I have a suspicion that this desire to analyse artworks and look for a deeper meaning in them is partly snobism. People want to show off, show how clever they are for finding the hidden meaning.
Of course, I'm not saying that no art has deeper meaning; there are obviously thousands of books, paintings, movies, songs, etc. made with the express intent of the artist to make a point. But that leaves millions that were made "just to be funny" or "just to be good art". In other words, for a random work of art the chance that there was no deeper meaning intended with it is much larger than that there was, and people who say that there is no deeper meaning are most probably right...
More to the point, I believe The Matrix belongs to the latter category. The Wachowski brothers wanted to make a cool movie with a good (consistent and interesting) story and fantastic special effects in the style of their favourite comics. No deeper meaning than that. In my opinion, by far the most art was made purely for entertainment and should be enjoyed as such...
America is not the only country that has dollars you know...
Here in Europe we have "teletext", which is a set of pages broadcast by most stations with all kinds of content, including program schedules, in color and rudimentary graphics with hypertext-like links between the pages. A sort of world wide web avant la lettre. All modern TVs over here have built-in support for viewing and navigating these pages.
It also has the latest news, traffic info, the weather forecast, entertainment info, subtitles, you name it. I've always wondered why this has never been introduced in the States, I think it would have been very succesful. We've had it for a long time (at least fifteen years, probably longer).
He said "open", not "open source".
I don't know of any that have the same features:
* Triband
* Large backlit color screen
* Touchscreen / handwriting recognition
* PDA functionality
* HTML / cHTML / WML / etc. browser with frames and Javascript
* Bluetooth
* GPRS
* Memory expansion slot
* J2ME
* MP3 player
* Etc, etc...
..Men in Black II, which is included with the phone. It's a pretty cool (for a phone) real-time 3D (although not textured) shoot-em-up.
In the same sense that assembly code is more powerful than Java. I'll take relational algebra (which, admittedly, is crappily implemented in SQL) over procedural Java any day, unless I have very particular needs.
Well yes, but why would you write "procedural Java"? Proper Java is easier to write than SQL.
> transactions (for instance object synchronization in Java,
I hope I don't have to tell you that serialization is in a whole different ballpark from transactions.
I said synchronization, not serialization.
Your post betrays a misunderstanding of the issues:
First of all: it does have queries. The difference is that you write them in (for instance) Java. And that's not "good enough for now", that's several orders of magnitude more powerful than SQL.
Secondly: it does have all the "features of a real database system" you mention, such as indices (for instance the various hashtables and sorted tree implementations in the Java Collections API) and transactions (for instance object synchronization in Java, can you tell I'm a Java developer? ;-)).
It's all there, and more flexible and powerful than SQL, you just need to learn to think out of the box...
Take them to the moon and show them the lander in person, and they say it was planted.
But it was planted! How could NASA have gotten it there other than by going to the moon? Taking the crackpots to the moon and showing them the lander ought to satisfy them, although it would probably be a bit more expensive than writing a book about it...
Why does Frodo need to go and try and surrender himself to the ringwraith? Why did we need to see Sam doing his running, diving, savior thing?
I have a suspicion that this may be because the Cirith Ungol sequence may not be in the third movie (or may be much shorter), and PJ needed a place to stick the scene in the tower where Frodo almost attacks Sam and the scene on the path where Frodo almost surrenders to the ringwraith on the road below when they see the army coming out of Minas Morgul. It would explain a few other changes as well...
...that's straight from the book.
Also, I think the whole Theoden / Saruman excorcism thing was added because the scene you're talking about won't be in the movie. That would explain that and a few other changes and makes me a bit less uncomfortable about it...
The addition of the elves to Helm's Deep I didn't like at all. That's quite a fundamental change to the story. Men and Elves hadn't fought together for thousands of years, why this sudden, unexplained and unnecessary change of heart, when the Ents would have done just fine and would have taken just as much screen time? I thought it was quite an unnecessary and arrogant change on PJ's part, and the same goes for the whole warg attack thing, and the changes to Faramir's character.
But all in all these are very minor quibbles when compared to all the other aspects of the movie. I still thought it was the best movie I've seen in my lifetime (together with Fellowship) and it still captured the spirit of the book well enough...
It's been as easy and cheap like this here for as long as I can remember. What's the deal in the US that transferring money is so difficult?
<Sigh>... Now why doesn't that surprise me in the least. This is probably intentional and an indicator of the way Microsoft will try to restrict the so-called platform independance of .NET to its own implementations and operating systems...
What did they say?
The EFF are the folks that want to fight to allow folks to spam like their was no tomorrow.
Really?! How do you get there from here? Their position appears to be very reasonable; all they are saying is that current (proposed) solutions are either inadequate or too restrictive, and I agree with them.
Could it be that you have some kind of personal problem with the EFF?
...so why complain?
A while ago here in the Netherlands you could get stereo throwaway cameras, the pictures of which would be put on those corrugated transparent plastic cards that produce a 3D effect without needing 3D glasses. They must still be around somewhere...
In other words, I am actually paying for those fucking banner ads to be downloaded to my machine. That's totally unacceptable and I think I'm perfectly in my right to do everything I can to avoid having to download them, including using a browser which blocks popups and running a proxy which redirects requests to known ad servers to a 1-pixel transparant GIF on the proxy.
All this is apart from the fact that I hate advertising in general and intrusive advertising such as commercial breaks, popup ads, slide-over ads, etc. specifically. When I want to know about a product, I'll go looking for information then. Don't bother me with it until then...
That's the wrong analogy. Illegally copying copyrighted materials is already against the law, just like illegally entering a house is. The DMCA would be comparable to a law that says "you cannot make, own or use (even for legal purposes) any object that could be used to break into a house." That would be plainly ridiculous and unacceptable, and it goes to show how low the political and judicial systems of the US have sunk for actually allowing such a ridiculous law to be purchased...
An MP3 file is not encrypted and hasn't got any kind of copy control mechanism built-in, nor is it possible to add something like that to the format since it's just an MPEG audio stream with no header or stream descriptors or anything.
That means that there's no way EMI could prevent you from burning, uploading to any portable player or copying the tracks you download from them.
Ergo, the format is probaly going to be WMA, which does have that kind of controls built-in. But that means that it's going to be more of the same:
In other words, the same old fair-use restricting crap that we're used to from the industry. There's nothing revolutionary or new about this...
...small but important distinction...
Pounds actually... The UK hasn't joined the monetary union (yet)...
There was only one car. If you look closely you'll see that the other 'car' is smoke coming from a chimney in the distance. The one car has already been removed on the regular DVD.
Photo of leonids meteor shower [cox.net]
I was trying to make the point that from the description in the article, the objects that were seen didn't appear to be moving in the way you describe.
Observe that the meteorites in your picture appear to be moving away from the same point, and are only visible for a short stretch. From the articles, the objects that were seen were apparently going all the way across the sky from the east to the west, and all the way from the west to the east the following night. In other words they were going from one part of the sky to another (different parts each night) and not coming from the same point in the sky.