The whole point is you are an outlier. Politics is all about mobilizing an uninformed yet passionate base. The more ignorant and irrational the better.
And nowhere near enough reasonable people to make a dent.
The two party system is the ultimate stasis point. There is always someone to demonize, and always someone on your side. You can hate a person and live their party due to normal turnover. The ultimate straw man to draw attacks without real harm.
And the few reasonable and intelligent people are irrelevant.
For a first time office, that is impossible. The president has different responsibilities from a legislator. That makes their responses different. New information, New advisors, and the candidate ceases to exist.
So it really only works for reelection, and then the evil you know may be better than the one you don't.
There is an entire field called Risk Communication to find ways of explaining this to people. RC consultants are needed again and again to explain, in all facets of life, how to determine risk without using fear and bad data.
Logic does not help. Data does not help. You need to get an entire country to a risk seminar and understand what their brain is doing to them first. While factual, this is actually the worst way to convert people's beliefs.
Don't be surprised when you, and everyone else preaching the same message, fail to make progress.
I leave plastic out, it becomes brittle and breaks. Are you suggesting it is more durable than it is when exposed to ultraviolet?
Or did you focus is a single word and use it to post a knee jerk response that, while it may be true, is unrelated?
And, outside of laws, some companies do sell a green message, and provide products intended to degrade more quickly. Are those not within the scope of discussions?
The sort of encryption needed was illegal to export from the USA during most of that time. And USA was driving or pushing adoption of the internet, the web, the browser, email, AOL keywords...
Business made a concerted effort to make putting credit card info into a website look secure. But no one ever questioned if putting their mails to friends and relatives required the same protection.
No demand meant early providers of paid services and clients did not put effort into encryption. Then people grew up in that world, and it seems normal.
Now, encrypted mail is reported with news of terrosts and pedo rings and drug cartels, so it is not just "not normal" - it is "abnormal" to encrypt.
Assuming your question wasn't rhetoric, I hope that helps.
I resent your characterization of unfairness - if not for that I might have not posted what I prepared. Which is why I post this here. The remainder of the "you" references are aimed at the author of the article (that's what you see if people here would read and critically think about the page that appears after clicking). Apologies for slashdot's pasting being retarded.
"This article in Wired advances the idea that humans are losing the copyright battle against machines because the fair use laws are tilted against them. The writer wanted to include photos in his book, but the licensing fees were too high. The aggregators, though, like Google, are building their own content by scraping all of the photos they can find. If anyone complains, they just say, 'Fill out a DMCA form.' Can humans compete against the machines? Should humans be able to use the DMCA to avoid copyright fees too? Should web sites be able to shrug and say, 'Hey, we just scraped it?'"
Because many of those people â" and websites â" are notoriously loose with reusing images, and they like to hide behind the blithe view that itâ(TM)s all âoefair use.â
Fair use is fairly clearly laid out, and things like lolcats or other image macros can be considered parody. There is an article in Ars Technica which reproduces the image to illustrate what is the subject of the lawsuit. The lawsuit was ridiculous because the plaintiff had followed proper DMCA takedown, the site complied, then the plaintiff registered the copyright formally and sued Buzzfeed for the infringement of other sites that had subsequently used the photo. In other words the lead-off of this paragraph points to a baseless suit.
This example also shoots the argument in the head. BuzzFeed might as well be a web site with a single editor, author, owner, creator, and janitor. DMCA takedown would have been just as effective, unless the janitor AKA DMCA contact was out that day.
Was BuzzFeed a machine that included the image? Or was the article written by a human? The answer is that this is an exceptional case, and it makes no difference, because the plaintiff wrote the lawsuit and filed it with no legal advice. I can be sued for farting in the state of Wisconsin, despite never having set foot there. The case will likely be thrown out as soon as I submit my response to being served, which is "I was never there, and plaintiff will have to prove that I was, so good luck with that"
Some algorithm assembled the photos and itâ(TM)s enjoying a nice little loophole.
Okay, support that statement.
If I included photos, I needed to share my royalties with the photographers or risk a punitive copyright lawsuit. As a creative worker, I understood sharing with the photographers. And the pictures would really add depth to the book.
You're writing a book? That will be published and people will maybe pay money for? DMCA offers no protection for that. Is that your point, that DMCA offers safe harbor for individuals OR machines, but not for book authors?
one friend told me flat out that if he wanted the pictures, he would just go to Google. And he was right: All the photos were there.
Oh, the book is online, and your book isn't.
The automated machines have me and the photographers beat. Aggregators â" whether listmakers, search engines, online curation boards, content farms, and other sites â" can scrape them from the web and claim that posting these images is fair use
Nope, not even correct. BuzzFeed claims its use is transformative, but that doesn't mean they can scrape them and call them fair use. They have a DMCA waiver, and a baseless lawsuit to defend. How much in legal fees will it cost them? More than your royalty fees of $10
Is it possible that a port to a Windows phone environment is easier than rewriting it in java aka dalvik? That maybe it is a barely funded trial balloon?
The typical Microsoft approach at play is getting in late and screwing up the first version. Two options now - double down and fix it, or claim lack of interest and abandon the project.
This is not about making office a selling point yet, offering a crippled version for Android. That will make office a non starter, and any other suite wins. Clearly not how Microsoft wants to play it. Late to the game, but they have made up ground when they decided it was worth spending to win.
Please do get it straight. Why do you build the straw man if copyright violation, and attack that, when the obvious block and replacement is at the end of your rant?
With the inserted advertising of a few years ago, it is much more likely that providers would avoid that trap.
Popup, the magic word that produces an irrational knee jerk response. When can we go back to pointing out shitty journalism instead of being baited by it?
I already have a Google OS on my phone, and a Google Mail account specifically tied to just that phone. I'd rather trust Google (and the NSA) than give info to yet another third party (and the NSA).
I see no downside to trusting Google in this situation, and more downside to trusting a third party.
I thought I was alone in this until a few weeks ago I found a site called xkcdsucks, and it appears I'm not alone in thinking this.
I'm going to blow your mind right now. I mean seriously mind-fuck material. Want to know how to earn a bazillion dollars? I'll tell you. It takes work, and it won't happen overnight, but it is like printing your own money, only legally.
Take one idea that seems to have a fan base. One single thing that a large group of people agree is a good thing. Any group of people, any object of affection.
Make a web site dedicated to pointing out all of the flaws, inconsistencies, errors, fails, and general pointlessness of that thing. You don't even have to agree with yourself. Just hate something - vehemently and consistently, except for a few occasions when you pay a back-handed compliment.
And the magical part - allow comments.
People who don't agree will post raging apoplectic fits on how wrong you are. Your fans will post raging apoplectic fits on how wrong your haters are. Non-participants will hit your page daily just to see their "avatars" fight, regardless of their chosen side. Through all of this, you will get PAGE VIEWS which turn into ad revenue. You will have eyeballs, and dollars.
Cafe Press will have "Joining Yet Again is retarded" coffee mugs, and "Joining Yet Again is the new Christ" napkin holders, under your control and out of your control. You will be the messiah and the anti-christ, and rich beyond your wildest dreams.
And you don't have to be honest once.
Here's another tip that will blow your already blown mind. Other people have figured this out already.
And finally, since I'm basically retirement planning for you now, doing it on Slashdot earns dollars for Dice, not for you. How did you earn two replies today? You are a spectacular idiot - a shining example of how not to think, and how not to post. The rarest of the rare, a genuine failure pile. And I stopped to help you be less failtastic, or at least encourage you to be failtastic somewhere else, like in a closet with no internet connection.
That's not even remotely the question. Writing is a red herring - it is just a qualifier to the assertion that civilizations appear to have a limited shelf life. Maybe the current global civilization will exceed that, but one out of the many that have existed, is optimistic.
Every civilization [with written records] has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more.
While everyone else hates on your for your personal taste, I merely want to point out how you failed to parse grammar.
God dammit, you retarded sack of monkey shit. If there was any possibility of bin Laden being other than dead, it would destabilize the entire US of A to the point of people actually revolting.
The amount of outrage people felt for him was enough to give up civil liberties continuously for a decade, and feel good about it. If, 20 years from now, bin Laden poked his head out from under a rock and gave an interview, or said a word, or farted, the American people would riot in the streets. The coverage of his killing (alleged, for your sake) was so complete and his death was so final that any variation from the truth would be more outrageous than failure to capture him.
There is only one thing at this time that would unite the American people to overthrow the government, and that is bin Laden being alive. Nothing threatens the life of a soccer mom - financial crises, food chain shortages, coastal real estate being lost - nothing that she would give up the SUV and life of relative luxury, other than bin Laden being alive.
Take every violation of the constitution, put it in one place, and soccer mom says "if it helps keep the terrorists away, I'm all for it." Do you know what the opposite of that is? Literally the one thing that is the complete antithesis to every justification anyone anywhere has put forth for anything done since 2001?
Keeping the terrorists not only the opposite of "away", but alive. Lying about having killed him, and having him turn up somewhere on a video with a newspaper dated today. The SINGLE thing that could turn America into a rioting cesspool of VERY angry people, and you think that somehow the government thought it would be a good idea to lie about THAT?
If he turned up somewhere, it would defeat every justification, every court decision, every individual's belief that the government is doing things for the people. Not just that they lied - that happens all the time and no one bats an eye. But they lied about the number one terrorist in the world - the one person who can scare every average person just by appearing on TV - being killed. Not by some random ass clown in a desert, but by America's most elite using America's latest technology. A fucking stealth-coptor dropped out of the sky and put an end to America's long national nightmare.
And you think not just a few people but every person on record so far would be stupid enough to lie about it? I am all for caution, and have repeatedly posted such. But this is completely, unforgivably ignorant to even mention.
I can go with you on the long thought train to thermite and faked moon landings and the grassy knoll and whatever other lunacy you want to repeat. But this is simply knee-jerk contrarianism.
"What if it were true"? What if 9/11 was an inside job? Patriot act. What if there was more than a lone gunman? Plenty. What if the moon was faked? We beat Russia. What if everything Snowden leaked was true? Assumptions confirmed.
What if bin Laden were alive? What purpose would that serve? A political boost for Obama, to give him an easy ride to a second term? We can eliminate every Republican ever, and every closeted racist as beneficiaries. Who has anything at all to gain? No one has ever justified anything by saying "It helped us get bin Laden". No secret court, spy program, political organization has ever seen benefit. There is nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Americans had forgotten about him nearly completely, and if he disappeared into the sunset few would have noticed other than Bush haters who liked to point out the shift from "number one priority" to "not a priority".
Do you still think it is even a possibility that this did not happen?
You know the answer to that, and that answer is why you post meaningless rhetoric from the safety of your basement. Set up an ISP, get backbone access through a peering agreement, figure out how to isolate TLA activity, and go do it. Have your door kicked in, your pets killed, and be thrown in jail for massive breaches of wire tapping and whatever other laws they can find to overwhelm your legal team. And rot in jail for forever.
You would be a martyr for the cause, if you believe in it, but you might just affect public sentiment enough to make a small dent. Everything Snowden released so far? Much more sympathy for that guy than you using the tricks of your enemy to defeat them.
Now that you have thought about it some, I'm sure you will agree that you either posted meaningless rhetoric, or a poorly considered action plan. You will go to jail and effect no change whatsoever. If that is your plan, do continue. Otherwise actually think about what you are typing, and fix it before you hit submit.
The largest third party got 1 percent of the last vote. How are you going to magically get the other 32 percent needed to make any difference at all? Especially when twice as many people voted libertarian as are registered libertarian. At one percent, the vote is already straining the bounds of membership.
Do a membership drive, get all third parties behind one candidate, get more than one percent of the vote committed, and maybe the smart people will vote that way.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to keep people like Palin and Romney out of office. Not because they are Republicans, but because they are dangerous to the country. Obama won 53 to 46 percent of the popular vote - unbelievably close for a team consisting of a once war veteran turned party traitor, and a vapid twat. And a black man and a doofus won by just barely 10 percent of the votes. Which was far from certain at the time.
Come back to the big boy table when you have something to show for yourself - we're fighting real battles here.
I have a rare condition, Crohn's disease, which required emergency removal of most of my colon. I therefore have little room for normal bowel evacuation storage - it sometimes presents with an unpleasant urgency.
As it was, I found myself in the Australian outback (Kiwiville, though I doubt the Aussies would claim it), and having urges that I ignored as long as possible.
Upon returning to the mainland, as soon as I saw some brush, I announced my intention to "acquaint myself with the local herbiculture". Those among my party took my meaning - and those otherwise not did not. That was my intent of course.
I shat on a bush, to make a long story short. And my options as far as bathroom tissue were concerned included:
1) A very large, and ivy-looking, leaf 2) A very large, and lethal-looking, spider 3) My pants. While not an option, I should mention that these were not an option. American pants or British pants, they were not an option. I would like to appear in public as if I had not shat myself. 4) A baby koala, who seemed to notice my excrement the way I would that of a neutron, which is to say nearly not at all.
I must confess at this point, that there now lies in Australia, a, if you will, "sanitary napkin", whose fur should be cleansed, if not thoroughly exchanged.
Moses on a giant boat, we need to get a handle on this. We have to delete four years worth of memories. Plus however long it takes you to figure out how to delete memories. Plus however long it takes to figure out who leaked this. Get fecking started, you ass-bastards!
Oh, and the deleting of memories and independent learning need not coincide. So get something on my desk yesterday. Other than your ass gasses. We know how to create a false memory now - can we create the memory that you never invented something that you invented?
Why would monopoles have anything to do with " Valentine's Day, no less"?
Is it because 7 people were killed by what would have been a law abiding organization without prohibition? Or because we don't know if St. Valentine is a single person or multiple people?
Or because Valentinus who served a single religion - Christianity - died on the eponymous holiday?
Or because of the mythological attribution to a single person, despite not having a single person to attribute this to, or to that person's alleged habit of marrying Christian couples despite a ban on doing so?
If the last of these, and slashdotters are typically basement dwelling asexuals, then how should I interpret this, exactly? Because I do not understand what in Moses' holy boat fundamental particles have to do with humanity in any fashion.
Men are matter, women are anti-matter, and that's as deep as I get. If the woman measure in anti-mass what the man measures in mass, plus a bit, she dictates the course of the relationship. Otherwise it is the man. Similarly if there is a homosexual relationship with one having more matter than anti-matter, the dominant gender takes the course. Beyond that this makes no sense to me.
Unpaired poles are obviously deviants screwing anyone and anything that comes across them, no pun intended. Or did I misunderstand the relevance? Maybe pun was intended, did I still miss the relevance? Poles need not be paired - they should be left to their own free will. I rather respect the Poles, as a matter of fact. What am I missing?
Oh, sensationalism, shitty editorialisation, adverts, and overall shiteness. Sorry.
I have the solution to all crime. If an authorized person would shoot every American in the head, including me, there would be no crime. Does that make it a good plan? Or a legal plan?
Reductio ad absurdum is usually a very terrible idea. But we aren't dealing with the best and the brightest here, and sometimes beating people over the head to prove a point is the only way.
E.g. the male identifying mods all have small penis'.
Penises. They have small penises.
I am obviously a grammar Nazi, with a large penis - not a mod with a small penis. Or giant clitoris, for that matter.
Also, no one cares what you read - you're probably looking for the typos, logical fallacies, incomprehensible summaries, sensationalism, broken links, incomplete headlines, and overall mediocrity in order to make your average self feel above average.
Oh wait, that's me. Based on your browsing history, you're kind of a freak.
You're confusing the hardware technology with the software technology. No punch cards - we want computers that fit in your pocket. Those are the current technologies.
This was a very shitty "essay", and by that I mean loosely related thoughts vomited onto a single page. But the fundamental idea is sound, assuming there was one.
When we were resource-constrained, people were *very* inventive (not innovative) with what they made for programmers to use. They attacked a problem with zest, gusto, and some other foreign words.
The language of MatLab, for example, does very complicated math on large data sets. That's still current, right? But not widespread. APL was very arcane, but had some of the same ideas, long ago.
With C#, we have some very powerful language to do a lot of things in a few lines of code that otherwise would have taken a much longer for() loop in most other languages.
We are getting there, to the place where languages have the features we want to have. But there is still a pile of forgotten stuff that has not made it in to the latest stable tech.
If we had the new hardware, and the old ideas, code would be find-fuckingly awesome. But no, you want to go back to when things looked good but shat turtles. So have a go at your turbo button, which looks good, but doesn't really help. Underneath, we want a better algorithm and a way to access that in a language, hardware be damned.
Write a domain-specific solution in C and be happy - or write a language that implements parallelism, data access, matrix calculations, and other 5-dollar ideas, so that a programmer does not have to waste time on solved problems.
Here's what I did for you. I listened to Confused Matthew's criticism. Then I watched 2001 again. And this is what I wrote (below the dashes). This is just about what actually happens in the movie, no interpretation or analysis or meaning. The short version is - there is a LOT happening, and it happens with the imagery and not with what people traditionally expect - dialog. The set is basically another character that does a lot of the talking that normally would break the feel of realism. If you object to realism, then just stop replying and go away because that's the fundamental point of the movie, if you strip away the details and analysis.
My conclusion first so you don't get bored: , about "changing the form" as Spielberg said Kubrick was doing, in the Afterword review, Matthew said that Kubrick "changed the form so much that it isn't recognizable any more." And here is the clincher - recognizable to the countless fans of the movie, but not to Matthew and not to you. And if you are going to quote someone to support your point, you can't present it as support, then select one of those statements and object to it. He says near the end that video has to have writing, and lists viewer feedback about the meaning of the movie. And apparently anyone can put pictures with music, and it doesn't qualify as a film. I did not know that. And if someone follows some simple formulae to create something like the political commercial, it is just as good as 2001. Listen to that part of the review again and see if it really passes the smell test. It is nonsensical and full of false equivalences. And Fantasia is a silent movie, while 2001 is not.
Gattaca has a lot of dialog - there is a lot going on. I didn't see The Man From Earth. The classics of course had most everything happen in dialog - all the explanations and history and circumstance. There was no atmosphere or scene, for the most part, other than an appropriate stage so the actors don't have to say "What a nice Doctor's office you have, Doctor". The classic movies are plays with better sets.
Gattaca is much more classically styled in this way, which makes it endurable by Confused Matthew. 2001 is certainly not standard Hollywood fare - but Gattaca is very much so, which is why apparently it qualifies as a film and 2001 does not. Gattaca is therefore probably the worst example you both could have used. It's a play, set in the future. If either of you had mentioned one of the Italian verismo films I might have just accepted and moved on. It had a blockbuster cast, $36 million budget. And it's a thriller.
Now for what I prepared dashes here - lameness accounted.
Confused Matthew is genuinely confused. He is doing a review that starts out claiming to be objective, but then the profanity and exasperation starts immediately. There is no hint of an attempt to understand the film, and he asserts "nothing is happening" when there is clearly something going on.
I'll start with the end of the review: The last 3 minutes of the last review are based on completely refusing to see that anything happened at all in the movie beyond Hal. Clarke said that anyone understanding the movie *completely* missed the point, and it wanted to raise more questions than it answered. But he concluded as if Clarke said that anyone *partly* understanding missed the point (a box full of scrabble letters is a masterpiece). And if it was supposed to raise questions, wouldn't Matthew have some actual questions? Unless he actually missed the point of the movie completely. Most people would at least ask "What the hell is that space baby?" instead of saying "Same as a turkey sandwich". This paragraph is why you should not listen to anything Confused Matthew said, at all.
The opening serves to set the stage for the rest of the movie. In a relatively short timespan, it shows two groups of apes in disagreement, one inventing tools to hunt, and then one group using those tools to kill members of the other group
POSITIVE reviews of 2001 and shows how they are almost word for word identical to NEGATIVE reviews of other movies...
what would be considered a negative in any other film, dragging scenes, no real narrative, bland characters, scenes continuing well past any need for them to, is somehow a positive when it comes to 2001. No film before or since that I know of has been given such a huge get out of jail free card and the fact that it is so beloved to this day really baffles the hell out of me
It baffles you because, as Gilliam says, you don't get it. And you won't get it after reading this. But you should be less baffled. Audiences didn't immediately get it either - it started slowly.
The movies accused of having bland characters and no narrative were either trying and not managing to, or didn't have anything else to fall back on. Hence the negative reviews. And I think you are underestimating the "nothing" where things are happening. Consider for a moment a "movie" told in snapshots - kodak pictures, or slideshows, Maybe background music, but no dialog. I remember maybe Google+ having an ad where a dude gets added to a "friends" circle, and they end up married - just in very simple acts like clicking and dragging. Used correctly, these methods can be very powerful.
For popular audiences (the rabble), the 20 minutes of "nothing" at the beginning set it apart from anything they ever experienced - and the stillness and quiet and loneliness of space is really conveyed by the atmosphere of the whole movie - not just a few scenes here and there. The bulky space suits and slow motion are embodied by the film. The lack of flashy personalities matches what we would expect for scientists on a boring flight. Calm, reasonable, rational, and almost sterile.
For more astute observers, a lot of detail and information are conveyed when there is seemingly nothing else happening. Especially when you look at personal interpretations such as this analysis - so many people have strong feelings about their interpretation, when it is based on information they got not from the film (or it would be indisputable) but from their interaction with the film.
You don't get it because you didn't interact with the film - you just watched it. And that's not your fault, or a deficiency on your part - I have watched other movies the same way and don't "get" them, which is why I understand where you are coming from.
In fact, the shear number of treatises on meaning in the movie shows how much information was conveyed without having much dialog. The plot was able to be furthered without dialog to explain what was happening. The characters did not have to evolve and be rich and multi-dimensional, because it is the atmosphere, and specifically HAL, that evolves. The characters do evolve, but it is a quiet, internal change that is either implied or understood. We know that Dave is scared of being killed by HAL - but he is not going to be the stereotypical whimpering woman or big bad ass - no "Imma bust all up in your memory crystals" sound bite, because HAL controls everything and already killed Frank on the mere mention of a possibility of disconnecting Hal.
That kind of quiet drama is so rare, and often poorly done, that it generates the kind of negative reviews you mentioned. In fact, there are a number of Italian films I specifically remember for having almost nothing at all happening of any substance, but they were extremely well done, and highly affecting. The much ridiculed bag from American Beauty - I recognized it as a very rushed (and therefore uncomfortable) attempt to capture this style of movie making. It had the opposite effect from what was intended, for most people, precisely because this sort of thing is rare in American cinema, and it was crammed in to a movie that did not have the slow pace required. And the dialog was clunky too, which didn't help.
The remake of Solaris, which is the slowest movie I can think of recently, had dra
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point is you are an outlier. Politics is all about mobilizing an uninformed yet passionate base. The more ignorant and irrational the better.
And nowhere near enough reasonable people to make a dent.
The two party system is the ultimate stasis point. There is always someone to demonize, and always someone on your side. You can hate a person and live their party due to normal turnover. The ultimate straw man to draw attacks without real harm.
And the few reasonable and intelligent people are irrelevant.
For a first time office, that is impossible. The president has different responsibilities from a legislator. That makes their responses different. New information, New advisors, and the candidate ceases to exist.
So it really only works for reelection, and then the evil you know may be better than the one you don't.
There is an entire field called Risk Communication to find ways of explaining this to people. RC consultants are needed again and again to explain, in all facets of life, how to determine risk without using fear and bad data.
Logic does not help. Data does not help. You need to get an entire country to a risk seminar and understand what their brain is doing to them first. While factual, this is actually the worst way to convert people's beliefs.
Don't be surprised when you, and everyone else preaching the same message, fail to make progress.
I leave plastic out, it becomes brittle and breaks. Are you suggesting it is more durable than it is when exposed to ultraviolet?
Or did you focus is a single word and use it to post a knee jerk response that, while it may be true, is unrelated?
And, outside of laws, some companies do sell a green message, and provide products intended to degrade more quickly. Are those not within the scope of discussions?
The sort of encryption needed was illegal to export from the USA during most of that time. And USA was driving or pushing adoption of the internet, the web, the browser, email, AOL keywords...
Business made a concerted effort to make putting credit card info into a website look secure. But no one ever questioned if putting their mails to friends and relatives required the same protection.
No demand meant early providers of paid services and clients did not put effort into encryption. Then people grew up in that world, and it seems normal.
Now, encrypted mail is reported with news of terrosts and pedo rings and drug cartels, so it is not just "not normal" - it is "abnormal" to encrypt.
Assuming your question wasn't rhetoric, I hope that helps.
The latter, and Lessig explains it well. http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp
"Sure, but can it substitute feet for meters?"
No, It's a copier, not rocket science.
I resent your characterization of unfairness - if not for that I might have not posted what I prepared. Which is why I post this here. The remainder of the "you" references are aimed at the author of the article (that's what you see if people here would read and critically think about the page that appears after clicking). Apologies for slashdot's pasting being retarded.
Fair use is fairly clearly laid out, and things like lolcats or other image macros can be considered parody. There is an article in Ars Technica which reproduces the image to illustrate what is the subject of the lawsuit. The lawsuit was ridiculous because the plaintiff had followed proper DMCA takedown, the site complied, then the plaintiff registered the copyright formally and sued Buzzfeed for the infringement of other sites that had subsequently used the photo. In other words the lead-off of this paragraph points to a baseless suit.
This example also shoots the argument in the head. BuzzFeed might as well be a web site with a single editor, author, owner, creator, and janitor. DMCA takedown would have been just as effective, unless the janitor AKA DMCA contact was out that day.
Was BuzzFeed a machine that included the image? Or was the article written by a human? The answer is that this is an exceptional case, and it makes no difference, because the plaintiff wrote the lawsuit and filed it with no legal advice. I can be sued for farting in the state of Wisconsin, despite never having set foot there. The case will likely be thrown out as soon as I submit my response to being served, which is "I was never there, and plaintiff will have to prove that I was, so good luck with that"
Okay, support that statement.
You're writing a book? That will be published and people will maybe pay money for? DMCA offers no protection for that. Is that your point, that DMCA offers safe harbor for individuals OR machines, but not for book authors?
Oh, the book is online, and your book isn't.
Nope, not even correct. BuzzFeed claims its use is transformative, but that doesn't mean they can scrape them and call them fair use. They have a DMCA waiver, and a baseless lawsuit to defend. How much in legal fees will it cost them? More than your royalty fees of $10
Is it possible that a port to a Windows phone environment is easier than rewriting it in java aka dalvik? That maybe it is a barely funded trial balloon?
The typical Microsoft approach at play is getting in late and screwing up the first version. Two options now - double down and fix it, or claim lack of interest and abandon the project.
This is not about making office a selling point yet, offering a crippled version for Android. That will make office a non starter, and any other suite wins. Clearly not how Microsoft wants to play it. Late to the game, but they have made up ground when they decided it was worth spending to win.
Please do get it straight. Why do you build the straw man if copyright violation, and attack that, when the obvious block and replacement is at the end of your rant?
With the inserted advertising of a few years ago, it is much more likely that providers would avoid that trap.
Popup, the magic word that produces an irrational knee jerk response. When can we go back to pointing out shitty journalism instead of being baited by it?
I already have a Google OS on my phone, and a Google Mail account specifically tied to just that phone. I'd rather trust Google (and the NSA) than give info to yet another third party (and the NSA).
I see no downside to trusting Google in this situation, and more downside to trusting a third party.
I'm going to blow your mind right now. I mean seriously mind-fuck material. Want to know how to earn a bazillion dollars? I'll tell you. It takes work, and it won't happen overnight, but it is like printing your own money, only legally.
Take one idea that seems to have a fan base. One single thing that a large group of people agree is a good thing. Any group of people, any object of affection.
Make a web site dedicated to pointing out all of the flaws, inconsistencies, errors, fails, and general pointlessness of that thing. You don't even have to agree with yourself. Just hate something - vehemently and consistently, except for a few occasions when you pay a back-handed compliment.
And the magical part - allow comments.
People who don't agree will post raging apoplectic fits on how wrong you are. Your fans will post raging apoplectic fits on how wrong your haters are. Non-participants will hit your page daily just to see their "avatars" fight, regardless of their chosen side. Through all of this, you will get PAGE VIEWS which turn into ad revenue. You will have eyeballs, and dollars.
Cafe Press will have "Joining Yet Again is retarded" coffee mugs, and "Joining Yet Again is the new Christ" napkin holders, under your control and out of your control. You will be the messiah and the anti-christ, and rich beyond your wildest dreams.
And you don't have to be honest once.
Here's another tip that will blow your already blown mind. Other people have figured this out already.
And finally, since I'm basically retirement planning for you now, doing it on Slashdot earns dollars for Dice, not for you. How did you earn two replies today? You are a spectacular idiot - a shining example of how not to think, and how not to post. The rarest of the rare, a genuine failure pile. And I stopped to help you be less failtastic, or at least encourage you to be failtastic somewhere else, like in a closet with no internet connection.
That's not even remotely the question. Writing is a red herring - it is just a qualifier to the assertion that civilizations appear to have a limited shelf life. Maybe the current global civilization will exceed that, but one out of the many that have existed, is optimistic.
Every civilization [with written records] has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more .
While everyone else hates on your for your personal taste, I merely want to point out how you failed to parse grammar.
God dammit, you retarded sack of monkey shit. If there was any possibility of bin Laden being other than dead, it would destabilize the entire US of A to the point of people actually revolting.
The amount of outrage people felt for him was enough to give up civil liberties continuously for a decade, and feel good about it. If, 20 years from now, bin Laden poked his head out from under a rock and gave an interview, or said a word, or farted, the American people would riot in the streets. The coverage of his killing (alleged, for your sake) was so complete and his death was so final that any variation from the truth would be more outrageous than failure to capture him.
There is only one thing at this time that would unite the American people to overthrow the government, and that is bin Laden being alive. Nothing threatens the life of a soccer mom - financial crises, food chain shortages, coastal real estate being lost - nothing that she would give up the SUV and life of relative luxury, other than bin Laden being alive.
Take every violation of the constitution, put it in one place, and soccer mom says "if it helps keep the terrorists away, I'm all for it." Do you know what the opposite of that is? Literally the one thing that is the complete antithesis to every justification anyone anywhere has put forth for anything done since 2001?
Keeping the terrorists not only the opposite of "away", but alive. Lying about having killed him, and having him turn up somewhere on a video with a newspaper dated today. The SINGLE thing that could turn America into a rioting cesspool of VERY angry people, and you think that somehow the government thought it would be a good idea to lie about THAT?
If he turned up somewhere, it would defeat every justification, every court decision, every individual's belief that the government is doing things for the people. Not just that they lied - that happens all the time and no one bats an eye. But they lied about the number one terrorist in the world - the one person who can scare every average person just by appearing on TV - being killed. Not by some random ass clown in a desert, but by America's most elite using America's latest technology. A fucking stealth-coptor dropped out of the sky and put an end to America's long national nightmare.
And you think not just a few people but every person on record so far would be stupid enough to lie about it? I am all for caution, and have repeatedly posted such. But this is completely, unforgivably ignorant to even mention.
I can go with you on the long thought train to thermite and faked moon landings and the grassy knoll and whatever other lunacy you want to repeat. But this is simply knee-jerk contrarianism.
"What if it were true"? What if 9/11 was an inside job? Patriot act. What if there was more than a lone gunman? Plenty. What if the moon was faked? We beat Russia. What if everything Snowden leaked was true? Assumptions confirmed.
What if bin Laden were alive? What purpose would that serve? A political boost for Obama, to give him an easy ride to a second term? We can eliminate every Republican ever, and every closeted racist as beneficiaries. Who has anything at all to gain? No one has ever justified anything by saying "It helped us get bin Laden". No secret court, spy program, political organization has ever seen benefit. There is nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Americans had forgotten about him nearly completely, and if he disappeared into the sunset few would have noticed other than Bush haters who liked to point out the shift from "number one priority" to "not a priority".
Do you still think it is even a possibility that this did not happen?
You know the answer to that, and that answer is why you post meaningless rhetoric from the safety of your basement. Set up an ISP, get backbone access through a peering agreement, figure out how to isolate TLA activity, and go do it. Have your door kicked in, your pets killed, and be thrown in jail for massive breaches of wire tapping and whatever other laws they can find to overwhelm your legal team. And rot in jail for forever.
You would be a martyr for the cause, if you believe in it, but you might just affect public sentiment enough to make a small dent. Everything Snowden released so far? Much more sympathy for that guy than you using the tricks of your enemy to defeat them.
Now that you have thought about it some, I'm sure you will agree that you either posted meaningless rhetoric, or a poorly considered action plan. You will go to jail and effect no change whatsoever. If that is your plan, do continue. Otherwise actually think about what you are typing, and fix it before you hit submit.
No?
The largest third party got 1 percent of the last vote. How are you going to magically get the other 32 percent needed to make any difference at all? Especially when twice as many people voted libertarian as are registered libertarian. At one percent, the vote is already straining the bounds of membership.
Do a membership drive, get all third parties behind one candidate, get more than one percent of the vote committed, and maybe the smart people will vote that way.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to keep people like Palin and Romney out of office. Not because they are Republicans, but because they are dangerous to the country. Obama won 53 to 46 percent of the popular vote - unbelievably close for a team consisting of a once war veteran turned party traitor, and a vapid twat. And a black man and a doofus won by just barely 10 percent of the votes. Which was far from certain at the time.
Come back to the big boy table when you have something to show for yourself - we're fighting real battles here.
I have a rare condition, Crohn's disease, which required emergency removal of most of my colon. I therefore have little room for normal bowel evacuation storage - it sometimes presents with an unpleasant urgency.
As it was, I found myself in the Australian outback (Kiwiville, though I doubt the Aussies would claim it), and having urges that I ignored as long as possible.
Upon returning to the mainland, as soon as I saw some brush, I announced my intention to "acquaint myself with the local herbiculture". Those among my party took my meaning - and those otherwise not did not. That was my intent of course.
I shat on a bush, to make a long story short. And my options as far as bathroom tissue were concerned included:
1) A very large, and ivy-looking, leaf
2) A very large, and lethal-looking, spider
3) My pants. While not an option, I should mention that these were not an option. American pants or British pants, they were not an option. I would like to appear in public as if I had not shat myself.
4) A baby koala, who seemed to notice my excrement the way I would that of a neutron, which is to say nearly not at all.
I must confess at this point, that there now lies in Australia, a, if you will, "sanitary napkin", whose fur should be cleansed, if not thoroughly exchanged.
I hate to be a karma whore, but your employer was the one monitoring, and raising red flags.
Sucks to be all you knee-jerk reactionaries who don't bother to read, or follow up on news.
I lied. I enjoy karma whoring when my cautionary nature is right.
Jesus fucked a monkey!
Moses on a giant boat, we need to get a handle on this. We have to delete four years worth of memories. Plus however long it takes you to figure out how to delete memories. Plus however long it takes to figure out who leaked this. Get fecking started, you ass-bastards!
Oh, and the deleting of memories and independent learning need not coincide. So get something on my desk yesterday. Other than your ass gasses. We know how to create a false memory now - can we create the memory that you never invented something that you invented?
Why would monopoles have anything to do with " Valentine's Day, no less"?
Is it because 7 people were killed by what would have been a law abiding organization without prohibition? Or because we don't know if St. Valentine is a single person or multiple people?
Or because Valentinus who served a single religion - Christianity - died on the eponymous holiday?
Or because of the mythological attribution to a single person, despite not having a single person to attribute this to, or to that person's alleged habit of marrying Christian couples despite a ban on doing so?
If the last of these, and slashdotters are typically basement dwelling asexuals, then how should I interpret this, exactly? Because I do not understand what in Moses' holy boat fundamental particles have to do with humanity in any fashion.
Men are matter, women are anti-matter, and that's as deep as I get. If the woman measure in anti-mass what the man measures in mass, plus a bit, she dictates the course of the relationship. Otherwise it is the man. Similarly if there is a homosexual relationship with one having more matter than anti-matter, the dominant gender takes the course. Beyond that this makes no sense to me.
Unpaired poles are obviously deviants screwing anyone and anything that comes across them, no pun intended. Or did I misunderstand the relevance? Maybe pun was intended, did I still miss the relevance? Poles need not be paired - they should be left to their own free will. I rather respect the Poles, as a matter of fact. What am I missing?
Oh, sensationalism, shitty editorialisation, adverts, and overall shiteness. Sorry.
I have the solution to all crime. If an authorized person would shoot every American in the head, including me, there would be no crime. Does that make it a good plan? Or a legal plan?
Reductio ad absurdum is usually a very terrible idea. But we aren't dealing with the best and the brightest here, and sometimes beating people over the head to prove a point is the only way.
Penises. They have small penises.
I am obviously a grammar Nazi, with a large penis - not a mod with a small penis. Or giant clitoris, for that matter.
Also, no one cares what you read - you're probably looking for the typos, logical fallacies, incomprehensible summaries, sensationalism, broken links, incomplete headlines, and overall mediocrity in order to make your average self feel above average.
Oh wait, that's me. Based on your browsing history, you're kind of a freak.
You're confusing the hardware technology with the software technology. No punch cards - we want computers that fit in your pocket. Those are the current technologies.
This was a very shitty "essay", and by that I mean loosely related thoughts vomited onto a single page. But the fundamental idea is sound, assuming there was one.
When we were resource-constrained, people were *very* inventive (not innovative) with what they made for programmers to use. They attacked a problem with zest, gusto, and some other foreign words.
The language of MatLab, for example, does very complicated math on large data sets. That's still current, right? But not widespread. APL was very arcane, but had some of the same ideas, long ago.
With C#, we have some very powerful language to do a lot of things in a few lines of code that otherwise would have taken a much longer for() loop in most other languages.
We are getting there, to the place where languages have the features we want to have. But there is still a pile of forgotten stuff that has not made it in to the latest stable tech.
If we had the new hardware, and the old ideas, code would be find-fuckingly awesome. But no, you want to go back to when things looked good but shat turtles. So have a go at your turbo button, which looks good, but doesn't really help. Underneath, we want a better algorithm and a way to access that in a language, hardware be damned.
Write a domain-specific solution in C and be happy - or write a language that implements parallelism, data access, matrix calculations, and other 5-dollar ideas, so that a programmer does not have to waste time on solved problems.
Here's what I did for you. I listened to Confused Matthew's criticism. Then I watched 2001 again. And this is what I wrote (below the dashes). This is just about what actually happens in the movie, no interpretation or analysis or meaning. The short version is - there is a LOT happening, and it happens with the imagery and not with what people traditionally expect - dialog. The set is basically another character that does a lot of the talking that normally would break the feel of realism. If you object to realism, then just stop replying and go away because that's the fundamental point of the movie, if you strip away the details and analysis.
My conclusion first so you don't get bored: , about "changing the form" as Spielberg said Kubrick was doing, in the Afterword review, Matthew said that Kubrick "changed the form so much that it isn't recognizable any more." And here is the clincher - recognizable to the countless fans of the movie, but not to Matthew and not to you. And if you are going to quote someone to support your point, you can't present it as support, then select one of those statements and object to it. He says near the end that video has to have writing, and lists viewer feedback about the meaning of the movie. And apparently anyone can put pictures with music, and it doesn't qualify as a film. I did not know that. And if someone follows some simple formulae to create something like the political commercial, it is just as good as 2001. Listen to that part of the review again and see if it really passes the smell test. It is nonsensical and full of false equivalences. And Fantasia is a silent movie, while 2001 is not.
Gattaca has a lot of dialog - there is a lot going on. I didn't see The Man From Earth. The classics of course had most everything happen in dialog - all the explanations and history and circumstance. There was no atmosphere or scene, for the most part, other than an appropriate stage so the actors don't have to say "What a nice Doctor's office you have, Doctor". The classic movies are plays with better sets.
Gattaca is much more classically styled in this way, which makes it endurable by Confused Matthew. 2001 is certainly not standard Hollywood fare - but Gattaca is very much so, which is why apparently it qualifies as a film and 2001 does not. Gattaca is therefore probably the worst example you both could have used. It's a play, set in the future. If either of you had mentioned one of the Italian verismo films I might have just accepted and moved on. It had a blockbuster cast, $36 million budget. And it's a thriller.
Now for what I prepared
dashes here - lameness accounted.
Confused Matthew is genuinely confused. He is doing a review that starts out claiming to be objective, but then the profanity and exasperation starts immediately. There is no hint of an attempt to understand the film, and he asserts "nothing is happening" when there is clearly something going on.
I'll start with the end of the review: The last 3 minutes of the last review are based on completely refusing to see that anything happened at all in the movie beyond Hal. Clarke said that anyone understanding the movie *completely* missed the point, and it wanted to raise more questions than it answered. But he concluded as if Clarke said that anyone *partly* understanding missed the point (a box full of scrabble letters is a masterpiece). And if it was supposed to raise questions, wouldn't Matthew have some actual questions? Unless he actually missed the point of the movie completely. Most people would at least ask "What the hell is that space baby?" instead of saying "Same as a turkey sandwich". This paragraph is why you should not listen to anything Confused Matthew said, at all.
The opening serves to set the stage for the rest of the movie. In a relatively short timespan, it shows two groups of apes in disagreement, one inventing tools to hunt, and then one group using those tools to kill members of the other group
It baffles you because, as Gilliam says, you don't get it. And you won't get it after reading this. But you should be less baffled. Audiences didn't immediately get it either - it started slowly.
The movies accused of having bland characters and no narrative were either trying and not managing to, or didn't have anything else to fall back on. Hence the negative reviews. And I think you are underestimating the "nothing" where things are happening. Consider for a moment a "movie" told in snapshots - kodak pictures, or slideshows, Maybe background music, but no dialog. I remember maybe Google+ having an ad where a dude gets added to a "friends" circle, and they end up married - just in very simple acts like clicking and dragging. Used correctly, these methods can be very powerful.
For popular audiences (the rabble), the 20 minutes of "nothing" at the beginning set it apart from anything they ever experienced - and the stillness and quiet and loneliness of space is really conveyed by the atmosphere of the whole movie - not just a few scenes here and there. The bulky space suits and slow motion are embodied by the film. The lack of flashy personalities matches what we would expect for scientists on a boring flight. Calm, reasonable, rational, and almost sterile.
For more astute observers, a lot of detail and information are conveyed when there is seemingly nothing else happening. Especially when you look at personal interpretations such as this analysis - so many people have strong feelings about their interpretation, when it is based on information they got not from the film (or it would be indisputable) but from their interaction with the film.
You don't get it because you didn't interact with the film - you just watched it. And that's not your fault, or a deficiency on your part - I have watched other movies the same way and don't "get" them, which is why I understand where you are coming from.
In fact, the shear number of treatises on meaning in the movie shows how much information was conveyed without having much dialog. The plot was able to be furthered without dialog to explain what was happening. The characters did not have to evolve and be rich and multi-dimensional, because it is the atmosphere, and specifically HAL, that evolves. The characters do evolve, but it is a quiet, internal change that is either implied or understood. We know that Dave is scared of being killed by HAL - but he is not going to be the stereotypical whimpering woman or big bad ass - no "Imma bust all up in your memory crystals" sound bite, because HAL controls everything and already killed Frank on the mere mention of a possibility of disconnecting Hal.
That kind of quiet drama is so rare, and often poorly done, that it generates the kind of negative reviews you mentioned. In fact, there are a number of Italian films I specifically remember for having almost nothing at all happening of any substance, but they were extremely well done, and highly affecting. The much ridiculed bag from American Beauty - I recognized it as a very rushed (and therefore uncomfortable) attempt to capture this style of movie making. It had the opposite effect from what was intended, for most people, precisely because this sort of thing is rare in American cinema, and it was crammed in to a movie that did not have the slow pace required. And the dialog was clunky too, which didn't help.
The remake of Solaris, which is the slowest movie I can think of recently, had dra