It depends on which story SCO is telling that day. Most of the time they'd probably say that your analogy doesn't apply. Their big point is that IBM signed a contract promising to keep developments based on SysV in confidence. Thus, while the code may be entirely IBM's, IBM still didn't have the right to release it. Unless you had access to Microsoft's code and had signed an agreement saying that your driver code would be kept in confidence, the same legal situation wouldn't apply. The whole argument, of course, is directly contradicted by a side letter between AT&T and IBM that declared that IBM did have complete rights to any code they wrote that didn't actually contain AT&T code.
That's the reason for the argument that SCO will make on some other occasions. That argument is that IBM's code is somehow based on confidential methods and ideas present in the SysV codebase and that IBM is forbidden from releasing code that reveals those methods and ideas. This theory also seems to be contradicted by the facts. There's an agreement between IBM and Novel (Ammendment X) that allows IBM developers to refer to SysV code and documentation (though still not engage in literal copying) starting 5 years after the agreement was reached. Since the agreement dates to 1995, IBM has had the right to do that ever since 2000- which is before most of the code in question was released.
No. It's pretty clear that in this case the unscrupulous business guys thought that they could make a lot of money by suing IBM and brought in the unscrupulous lawyers to press their case. See my sig for details. It's not clear whether SCO leadership ever thought that they really had a case or if they were just planning on using the lawsuit as part of a stock pumping scam. Either way it seems fairly clear that they have engaged in stock pumping whether that was the original intent of just a fallback plan.
One big improvement in 2.6 will be with handling of CD and CD-RW drives. CD audio extraction will be able to use DMA, which should speed it up a lot. Also, CD writing will be possible using the regular IDE driver, so it won't be necessary to use SCSI emulation anymore.
For a really comprehensive description of the changes with 2.6, you might want to look at The Wonderful World of Linux 2.6, which goes into much more detail than anyone on/. is likely to be able to.
The idea behind Fedora is that it will be more cutting edge than Redhat used to be. Before they were always pulled in two directions. Linux geeks wanted all the latest toys, but the high-value Enterprise customers wanted a stable system. That's why they split off a separate RHEL branch; it was supposed to be stable and more thoroughly tested for Enterprise customers. Now that they have a more stable Enterprise branch, they're free to be more experimental in their regular branch, which is what's now being called Fedora. They're hoping that it will be more up to date than the old Redhat distro was.
I have used "normal" SLRs for over 10 years now, and the cost of film and development never stopped me of taking pictures. Mainly because the development of the negative is dirt cheap, I never went out and got EVERY single picture I took printed.
Instead I got the negatives, a light tabel and a maginifiying glass to decide which one I truly wanted prints off.
That's great if you're serious enough to develop your own photos, but most people aren't even close to that serious. Of course you could reasonably argue that SLRs are targeted at people who are serious enough to develop and print their own photos, or that if you're going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on cameras and lenses that the small extra cost of film shouldn't dissuade you from taking lots of pictures. The problem is that most people aren't ready to step in at that level. They need to get into the art of photography at a level that's easy enough for a beginner, and film and developing costs frequently are an impediment for somebody with a much cheaper point-and-shoot camera.
Although the bad thing about this camera is that it eats batteries like candy (I'd say the flash is the problem).
It probably depends on both the camera and the batteries. If you're used to the lifespan of batteries in film cameras then you're bound to feel limited by digitals. The flash probably isn't the problem (I think that's your film camera thinking showing through) but the process of compressing the pictures. Even with no flash, my camera can't take more than about 200 photos on a set of batteries, and it's frequently less than that. It's definitely worthwhile to invest in enough rechargables to keep you shooting all day. And definitely avoid NiCd's; get either NiMH (if your camera uses regular batteries) or lithium cells (if your camera uses those). A good charger is a necessity, too. I figure that with most digitals you'll wind up spending at least half of the cost of the camera on ancillary supplies like memory cards, batteries, etc.
The nice thing about traditional photography is that the body isn't really what is so expensive but the lenses, in Digital Photography you still need the good lenses but the body is a lot more expensive.
I think that this is why digital SLRs are primarily marketed at people who have already invested heavily in film photography. If you've plunked down several thousand dollars for lenses, spending an extra $900 on a Rebel Digital or $1500 on a D10 (or whatever the digital bodies for other manufacturers' lenses cost) looks quite a bit more reasonable.
I've considered getting a Digital SLR, but I don't think that it's really for me yet. I'm pretty happy with my digital point and shoot camera, and I don't think that I'm particularly close to using it to its full capability. OTOH, there are times when I'm a bit annoyed with its limitations and wonder if a better camera might be worthwhile. I'm not sure if I would be better served by a Digital SLR or a newer point-and-shoot, though.
Re:Digital Photography Review
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Digital 35mm SLRs?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But I've been wondering, lately, whether a nice camera like a digital SLR might allow me to take better pictures, which might in turn inspire me to take more pictures.
The thing that really makes you want to take more pictures is not so much the quality as the cost of seeing the results. With a film camera, I was always worried about the cost of film and developing, and that made me think before taking a picture. The result was that I never brought my camera with me to take casual photos, and when I did bring it I hardly took any pictures anyway. With a digital it's really easy to take tons of pictures because I know that processing them is as easy (and cheap) as downloading them to my computer. That means that my thought process has moved from "should I take this picture" to "why shouldn't I take this picture". The result is that I take a lot more pictures, and some of them actually turn out well.
I reject Godwin's law, because Nazi's, Hitler, and Sept. 11 were real events, and comparisons are sometimes valid.
Note, though, that the formal statement of Godwin's law doesn't say that the people who bring up Hitler are automatic losers. That's an element that was added later, and obviously doesn't apply in all cases. If you're in soc.history.wwii, for instance, then bringing up Hitler is obviously apropos and doesn't mean that you've lost. But if you're in rec.crafts.quilting and start making comparisons to Hitler the chances are very good that you're bringing him up because you've lost the argument on its merits.
By "natural" I mean that it can be found in real life.
Sure, but my point is that if the voice actress uses something close to her natural voice when speaking then it is, by definition a natural voice even if it's not what you expect her to sound like. My impression, though, is that using funny voices is a standard part of anime comedy. You can tell this because the same actress will use a different sounding voice for the same role depending on how serious the scene is. I find that Kotono Mitsuishi is particularly obvious in doing this- her normal character voice is very different from her voice when she goes on an insane punning spree, for instance- but they all do it to one extent or another. Nor is this particularly limited to Anime. Nobody thinks that voice actors should be restricted to natural voices in American cartoons, especially comedic ones; just try listening to Mel Blanc sometime.
So why is it ok for the FSF to protect their copyrights and not ok for the RIAA and MPAA?
Two reasons. One is that the FSF is much more generous about what they allow people to do without argument. The GPL is very, very friendly to people who want to use software licensed under it; you can do pretty much whatever you want so long as you pass on the source code and let others do the same. If the RIAA and MPAA were pursuing people who had violated terms that genrous they'd get a lot more sympathy. As it is, they're not just trying to punish people who have violated their copyright, but they're actively trying to take away fair use rights- i.e. restrict the little freedom that's left under copyright.
The other issue is how the two groups go about it. The FSF starts out by approaching violators privately and nicely, giving them an opportunity to correct their mistakes and continue without any punishment. They believe in negotiating first and suing as a last resort. (In fact, the FSF says that they've never actually gone so far as to sue somebody for a GPL violation.) In contrast the MPAA and RIAA have taken an attitude of attacking first and seeing if the alleged violator has actually done something wrong second. Again, they'd get more sympathy if they hadn't repeatedly threatened people for things that turned out to be completely innocent, like having legitimate files on their computers with names that bore only slight resemblance to names of copyrighted material.
It's really the same problem that Akira had - the anime movie came out in the middle of the manga story, and the manga story is so huge that they had to modify it for a feature length film, and the story suffers a great deal because of it.
If you really want an example of a manga that was gutted in order to make the movie, the obvious example is what Madhouse (and CLAMP) did to X. It's so thoroughly butchered that it's not really even the same story anymore. It's a beautifully animated movie, but so much was ripped out to squeeze it under 100 minutes that there's nothing left but a bunch of images and fights.
...that Shinji (Neon Genesis Evangelion) was err, voiced by a woman?
Why yes, I did know that; he was voiced by "the other" Megumi, who's also done roles such as Sailor Uranus, Yukito Tsukishiro, and Princess Emeraude. (And yes, I did know those other roles without looking them up.)
That said, I think that Spike Spencer absolutely nailed Shinji in the dub. I didn't like him as Mackie Stingray, I positively detested him as Akito Tenkawa, and I generally preferred the original Japanese to the dub in Evangelion. But I have to give the man his props. He played Shinji with the exact right degree of annoying self-pity and convinced me that dubs don't actually have to be horrible.
Perhaps, but let me ask you, for how long have you lived in Japan to judge (I haven't)?
Neither have I, but I can listen to the actresses interviews and compare their normal speaking voices to the ones they use in their roles. So I can say that, for instance, Aya Hisakawa uses something pretty close to her natural voice for most of her roles, while Megumi Hayashibara and Kotono Mitsuishi vary a bit more- fairly normal voices for their more serious roles but going more over the top when getting into heavy commedy. Try comparing Mitsuishi as Mireille Bouquet and Excel, for instance, and you know that it's just not possible for both of those to be her natural voice.
There is nothing about preferring subbing that makes one snobbish, nor is someone "normal" because they don't have the patience to watch something in its original format as the creator intended for it to be viewed.
Heck, it's not necessarily even an issue of artistic purity. I find that the original Japanese voice acting is usually higher quality than the dubs. I'm not sure exactly why, but I suspect that the way that the dubbing takes place has something to do with it. As I understand it, most American dubs have the cast come in and record their parts separately and then mix the whole thing together, while the Japanese actually have the whole cast together in the booth as a group. It's not at all clear to me why the dubbers do things that way, since that's not the way they do the voices when doing a cartoon that's originally in English.
There's also a clear advantage if you actually understand some Japanese. There are some shades of meaning that are very difficult to convey properly into English compactly that you can catch if you hear the Japanese. An example of this that I remember seeing recently is from RahXephon. When Ayato leaves Terra HQ to go back to Tokyo Jupiter, he tells Haruka "Ittekimasu". This is translated as "goodbye", but it's specifically the way of saying goodbye that you say when you're planning on coming back afterward. That's something that I would have missed had I been listening to the dub (or I'll admit if I had been watching the sub but hadn't been paying enough attention on other occasions to catch that particular distinction).
I have enjoyed dubs, like Cowboy Bebop, but in terms of pure numbers, the vast majority of anime fans prefer subtitles.
I don't think that the numbers support you on this point. The (admittedly unscientific) surveys that I've seen on Anime websites suggest that dubs have a substantial following. I'm not sure if it's a majority, but it's at least a large minority. It's enough that every Anime has a dub track unless there's some specific contractual or historical reason not to- and that's despite the fact that dubbing is clearly a lot more expensive than subtitling.
There have been some subtitled releases, albeit not Miyazaki's. In the past couple of years I've seen Millenium Actress, Metropolis, and Patlabor: WXIII all in subs. I also caught the Cowboy Bebop movie subbed, although that was a one-time screening at American Cinematheque rather than the regular theatrical release. So there are some distributors who think that it's worthwhile releasing in Japanese.
You didn't hear their dub track for Castly in the Sky, then. They left the Japanese language track alone, but felt the need to spice things up in the English version. The most glaring example is when Pazu starts playing the trumpet in the morning. In the Japanese track, it's just a nice trumpet solo as though he's playing a song to wake up the neighborhood. In the English dub, Disney decided that wasn't good enough and turned the whole thing into an orchestral piece, albeit with a strong trumpet line. It's not a huge change, but it shows that Disney really does think that they know better than Miyazaki.
Thus, a worm that is written as a stealthy time-bomb will be extremely destructive. If I were the bug, I would make a few random copies of myself to prevent extermination (much like the problem T-Cells have with the AIDS virus).
That's not exactly why the immune system has problems with AIDS. Part of it is that the virus actually invades the immune system itself, so the very part of you that's trying to protect you is itself prevented from working properly. ISTR that some viruses already try a similar approach by shutting down virus-check software.
Only a checksum of every single file on the system could completely wipe me out. Once I do that, I would lay dormant for a period of time, using the client to transmit myself to other computers. After my period of dormancy, I would then do something like wipe out the networks, install a phony NIC device driver, try to flash the bios, whatever.
The problem with this approach is that the worm would have to be completely stealthy in order to have maximum effect. If the virus-check companies figured out about it, they'd likely be able to decompile the thing and create a specialized countermeasure. This is one place where the analogy between biological and computer invaders breaks down. The natural immune system has a limited repertoire of possible responses and can only adapt to a novel threat on an evolutionary timescale, while our computers' "immune systems" can actually be intelligently designed to combat a specific threat.
For maximum destructive effect, you'd probably be better off using something like a Warhol Worm- an invader that can spread to most available hosts in 15 minutes. That's enough faster than the possible response of anti-worm software makers that there wouldn't be a reasonable chance of creating a countermeasure in time. The SQL Slammer worm was the closest thing yet to a Warhol Worm, though its unique source of speed probably precludes a seriously damaging payload. Still, a worm that could spread worldwide in a few hours and then did as much as possible to damage its host could wreak some significant havoc without a reasonable chance of stopping it.
If the worm flashed the BIOS, wouldn't that tend to destroy its hosts and thus slow down the infection? This is one more place where knowing biology can be helpful in understanding computer diseases. Diseases that are promptly fatal tend to be self-limiting because they kill off their hosts before they have much time to spread. Most successful diseases are either not uniformly fatal or at least take long enough to kill that their host has plenty of time to infect others. This is why many types of malware with destructive payloads will have a built-in delay before blowing up; otherwise they'd kill themselves before managing to infect enough computers to cause real havoc.
They're not claiming that XFS, JFS, RCU, etc. are their property. They're claiming that those things are contractually protected, i.e. that the developers promised not to reveal them. That's a technical point, but if you look at all of SCO's press releases and public statements, they never actually say that they own those things. They say that they're protected by SCO's IP rights, which include patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and contract rights. I happen to think that their argument is nonsense, since the side agreements pretty clearly spell out the right of licensees to recycle code that they developed themselves, but at least SCO is not completely out to lunch on the issue.
That in no way restricts the ability of SCO to revoke a license which has already been invalidated by IBM or SGI violating its terms.
In the IBM license, for instance, this is explicitly spelled out. Right after the bit about the license being irrevocable, perpetual, and fully paid up, it says:
Notwithstanding the above, the irrevocable nature of the above rights will in no way be construed to limit Novell's or SCO's rights to enjoin or otherwise prohibit IBM from violating any and all of Novell's or SCO's rights under this Ammendment X, the Related Agreements, or under general patent, copyright, or trademark law.
It seems pretty clear from that sentence that SCO does have the right to revoke IBM's license for cause. Of course the best evidence is that they have failed to follow the terms under which such revocation would take place- in particular by failing to spell out IBM's alleged breach- but they have the right to do so.
SCO did not give them that time. They didn't spell out exactly what the breach was, much less what specific remedies would allow SGI to cure it. The contract requires SCO to specify those things before they can take action. That's the purpose of the waiting period- to give the licensee time to cure his breach and avoid losing his license. The clock can't start until SCO does its part, and by failing to detail the alleged wrongdoing on SGI's (or IBM's) part they've failed to abide by their side of the contract.
I'm not saying that IBM or SGI has violated the terms of their UNIX licenses; but if they have, that "fully paid up and irrevokable" language is irrelevant in this case.
That's not necessarily true. Somebody pointed out that this is one area where the driver's license analogy is fairly apt. Not all violations against ones driver's license result in revocation as a penalty. Most don't, in fact. Instead they're punishable by something less, like a fine. Similarly, revocation is not SCO's only option in this case. They might be compensated by a financial penalty, and injunction against a violating company transfering any more code to open source, or something like that. Imposing some lesser penalty would be reasonable particularly if, as SGI claims, the violation is trivial. SGI has admitted that they are in technical violation of the license, having released a couple of hundred lines of SVR4 code. Revoking their license over such a trivial breach would be grossly disproportionate.
You know, you might try actually reading the article, rather than just spouting off. I realize that this is novel behavior for a slashdotter, but it can actually help. The government is not, in fact, planning on censoring the web sites or making them directly illegal. They are saying that it's not OK to give money to the sites, which actually makes sense- that money will go into the hands of people who will use it to commit murder and other terrorist acts. Since that would classify as aiding and abetting under any reasonable standard of the law, forbidding people to give them money is perfectly reasonable.
I keep waiting for that to happen - the author of some piece of OSS suing SCO for licence infringement.
It's happened. There's this company you might have heard of called International Business Machines that has sued SCO for copyright infringement on their code in the Linux Kernel. They even registered the copyright, so SCO is liable for statutory damages. Interestingly, it looks as though it's no longer possible to download the kernel source from the SCO website, which suggests that their lawyers are worried. (I was going to suggest that people download the sources in order to drive up SCO's liability, but it looks as though they thought of that, too.)
Importantly, though, that doesn't have any bearing on any other software under the GPL. The fact that SCO has violated the license on Linux does not prevent them from distributing any other GPLed software. Otherwise they probably would have been sued by several other Free Software developers. ISTR that the SAMBA team is particularly pissed at them and would love a legitimate excuse for preventing them from including SAMBA in their Unix line.
I noticed all my domain checking scripts stopped returning NXDOMAINS, and had to be hacked real quick to look for the magic site finder ip, and then before that wonderful Bind patch, had to worry that they would change the magic ip thus breaking my scripts again.
Couldn't you determine their magic site-IP dynamically? It seems to me that you could just look up an invalid address and then compare the result to what you got when looking up your questionable one. Looking up example.com should work, for instance. Even if Verisign deliberately broke things by making a distinction between reserved names line example and other errors, you could pretty much guarantee that your chosen domain was invalid by using a string of 30 random alphanumeric characters. Not, of course, that this justifies stupidity like sitefinder.
It's not just that spoofing of the From: lines wouldn't work anymore. Many of the recent viruses actually set up their own mail servers so that they can mail to everyone under the sun. This scheme would make those rogue servers ineffective, since the mail would be rejected as not coming from a legitimate source; a random desktop system doesn't count as legitimate. If the virus instead infected a mail program on the system and tried piping the mail through the legitimate mail server, the mail server admins could spot it fairly easily. This could really help in the battle against email worms.
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It depends on which story SCO is telling that day. Most of the time they'd probably say that your analogy doesn't apply. Their big point is that IBM signed a contract promising to keep developments based on SysV in confidence. Thus, while the code may be entirely IBM's, IBM still didn't have the right to release it. Unless you had access to Microsoft's code and had signed an agreement saying that your driver code would be kept in confidence, the same legal situation wouldn't apply. The whole argument, of course, is directly contradicted by a side letter between AT&T and IBM that declared that IBM did have complete rights to any code they wrote that didn't actually contain AT&T code.
That's the reason for the argument that SCO will make on some other occasions. That argument is that IBM's code is somehow based on confidential methods and ideas present in the SysV codebase and that IBM is forbidden from releasing code that reveals those methods and ideas. This theory also seems to be contradicted by the facts. There's an agreement between IBM and Novel (Ammendment X) that allows IBM developers to refer to SysV code and documentation (though still not engage in literal copying) starting 5 years after the agreement was reached. Since the agreement dates to 1995, IBM has had the right to do that ever since 2000- which is before most of the code in question was released.
No. It's pretty clear that in this case the unscrupulous business guys thought that they could make a lot of money by suing IBM and brought in the unscrupulous lawyers to press their case. See my sig for details. It's not clear whether SCO leadership ever thought that they really had a case or if they were just planning on using the lawsuit as part of a stock pumping scam. Either way it seems fairly clear that they have engaged in stock pumping whether that was the original intent of just a fallback plan.
One big improvement in 2.6 will be with handling of CD and CD-RW drives. CD audio extraction will be able to use DMA, which should speed it up a lot. Also, CD writing will be possible using the regular IDE driver, so it won't be necessary to use SCSI emulation anymore.
For a really comprehensive description of the changes with 2.6, you might want to look at The Wonderful World of Linux 2.6, which goes into much more detail than anyone on /. is likely to be able to.
The idea behind Fedora is that it will be more cutting edge than Redhat used to be. Before they were always pulled in two directions. Linux geeks wanted all the latest toys, but the high-value Enterprise customers wanted a stable system. That's why they split off a separate RHEL branch; it was supposed to be stable and more thoroughly tested for Enterprise customers. Now that they have a more stable Enterprise branch, they're free to be more experimental in their regular branch, which is what's now being called Fedora. They're hoping that it will be more up to date than the old Redhat distro was.
That's great if you're serious enough to develop your own photos, but most people aren't even close to that serious. Of course you could reasonably argue that SLRs are targeted at people who are serious enough to develop and print their own photos, or that if you're going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on cameras and lenses that the small extra cost of film shouldn't dissuade you from taking lots of pictures. The problem is that most people aren't ready to step in at that level. They need to get into the art of photography at a level that's easy enough for a beginner, and film and developing costs frequently are an impediment for somebody with a much cheaper point-and-shoot camera.
It probably depends on both the camera and the batteries. If you're used to the lifespan of batteries in film cameras then you're bound to feel limited by digitals. The flash probably isn't the problem (I think that's your film camera thinking showing through) but the process of compressing the pictures. Even with no flash, my camera can't take more than about 200 photos on a set of batteries, and it's frequently less than that. It's definitely worthwhile to invest in enough rechargables to keep you shooting all day. And definitely avoid NiCd's; get either NiMH (if your camera uses regular batteries) or lithium cells (if your camera uses those). A good charger is a necessity, too. I figure that with most digitals you'll wind up spending at least half of the cost of the camera on ancillary supplies like memory cards, batteries, etc.
I think that this is why digital SLRs are primarily marketed at people who have already invested heavily in film photography. If you've plunked down several thousand dollars for lenses, spending an extra $900 on a Rebel Digital or $1500 on a D10 (or whatever the digital bodies for other manufacturers' lenses cost) looks quite a bit more reasonable.
I've considered getting a Digital SLR, but I don't think that it's really for me yet. I'm pretty happy with my digital point and shoot camera, and I don't think that I'm particularly close to using it to its full capability. OTOH, there are times when I'm a bit annoyed with its limitations and wonder if a better camera might be worthwhile. I'm not sure if I would be better served by a Digital SLR or a newer point-and-shoot, though.
The thing that really makes you want to take more pictures is not so much the quality as the cost of seeing the results. With a film camera, I was always worried about the cost of film and developing, and that made me think before taking a picture. The result was that I never brought my camera with me to take casual photos, and when I did bring it I hardly took any pictures anyway. With a digital it's really easy to take tons of pictures because I know that processing them is as easy (and cheap) as downloading them to my computer. That means that my thought process has moved from "should I take this picture" to "why shouldn't I take this picture". The result is that I take a lot more pictures, and some of them actually turn out well.
Note, though, that the formal statement of Godwin's law doesn't say that the people who bring up Hitler are automatic losers. That's an element that was added later, and obviously doesn't apply in all cases. If you're in soc.history.wwii, for instance, then bringing up Hitler is obviously apropos and doesn't mean that you've lost. But if you're in rec.crafts.quilting and start making comparisons to Hitler the chances are very good that you're bringing him up because you've lost the argument on its merits.
Sure, but my point is that if the voice actress uses something close to her natural voice when speaking then it is, by definition a natural voice even if it's not what you expect her to sound like. My impression, though, is that using funny voices is a standard part of anime comedy. You can tell this because the same actress will use a different sounding voice for the same role depending on how serious the scene is. I find that Kotono Mitsuishi is particularly obvious in doing this- her normal character voice is very different from her voice when she goes on an insane punning spree, for instance- but they all do it to one extent or another. Nor is this particularly limited to Anime. Nobody thinks that voice actors should be restricted to natural voices in American cartoons, especially comedic ones; just try listening to Mel Blanc sometime.
Two reasons. One is that the FSF is much more generous about what they allow people to do without argument. The GPL is very, very friendly to people who want to use software licensed under it; you can do pretty much whatever you want so long as you pass on the source code and let others do the same. If the RIAA and MPAA were pursuing people who had violated terms that genrous they'd get a lot more sympathy. As it is, they're not just trying to punish people who have violated their copyright, but they're actively trying to take away fair use rights- i.e. restrict the little freedom that's left under copyright.
The other issue is how the two groups go about it. The FSF starts out by approaching violators privately and nicely, giving them an opportunity to correct their mistakes and continue without any punishment. They believe in negotiating first and suing as a last resort. (In fact, the FSF says that they've never actually gone so far as to sue somebody for a GPL violation.) In contrast the MPAA and RIAA have taken an attitude of attacking first and seeing if the alleged violator has actually done something wrong second. Again, they'd get more sympathy if they hadn't repeatedly threatened people for things that turned out to be completely innocent, like having legitimate files on their computers with names that bore only slight resemblance to names of copyrighted material.
If you really want an example of a manga that was gutted in order to make the movie, the obvious example is what Madhouse (and CLAMP) did to X. It's so thoroughly butchered that it's not really even the same story anymore. It's a beautifully animated movie, but so much was ripped out to squeeze it under 100 minutes that there's nothing left but a bunch of images and fights.
Why yes, I did know that; he was voiced by "the other" Megumi, who's also done roles such as Sailor Uranus, Yukito Tsukishiro, and Princess Emeraude. (And yes, I did know those other roles without looking them up.)
That said, I think that Spike Spencer absolutely nailed Shinji in the dub. I didn't like him as Mackie Stingray, I positively detested him as Akito Tenkawa, and I generally preferred the original Japanese to the dub in Evangelion. But I have to give the man his props. He played Shinji with the exact right degree of annoying self-pity and convinced me that dubs don't actually have to be horrible.
Neither have I, but I can listen to the actresses interviews and compare their normal speaking voices to the ones they use in their roles. So I can say that, for instance, Aya Hisakawa uses something pretty close to her natural voice for most of her roles, while Megumi Hayashibara and Kotono Mitsuishi vary a bit more- fairly normal voices for their more serious roles but going more over the top when getting into heavy commedy. Try comparing Mitsuishi as Mireille Bouquet and Excel, for instance, and you know that it's just not possible for both of those to be her natural voice.
Heck, it's not necessarily even an issue of artistic purity. I find that the original Japanese voice acting is usually higher quality than the dubs. I'm not sure exactly why, but I suspect that the way that the dubbing takes place has something to do with it. As I understand it, most American dubs have the cast come in and record their parts separately and then mix the whole thing together, while the Japanese actually have the whole cast together in the booth as a group. It's not at all clear to me why the dubbers do things that way, since that's not the way they do the voices when doing a cartoon that's originally in English.
There's also a clear advantage if you actually understand some Japanese. There are some shades of meaning that are very difficult to convey properly into English compactly that you can catch if you hear the Japanese. An example of this that I remember seeing recently is from RahXephon. When Ayato leaves Terra HQ to go back to Tokyo Jupiter, he tells Haruka "Ittekimasu". This is translated as "goodbye", but it's specifically the way of saying goodbye that you say when you're planning on coming back afterward. That's something that I would have missed had I been listening to the dub (or I'll admit if I had been watching the sub but hadn't been paying enough attention on other occasions to catch that particular distinction).
I don't think that the numbers support you on this point. The (admittedly unscientific) surveys that I've seen on Anime websites suggest that dubs have a substantial following. I'm not sure if it's a majority, but it's at least a large minority. It's enough that every Anime has a dub track unless there's some specific contractual or historical reason not to- and that's despite the fact that dubbing is clearly a lot more expensive than subtitling.
There have been some subtitled releases, albeit not Miyazaki's. In the past couple of years I've seen Millenium Actress, Metropolis, and Patlabor: WXIII all in subs. I also caught the Cowboy Bebop movie subbed, although that was a one-time screening at American Cinematheque rather than the regular theatrical release. So there are some distributors who think that it's worthwhile releasing in Japanese.
You didn't hear their dub track for Castly in the Sky, then. They left the Japanese language track alone, but felt the need to spice things up in the English version. The most glaring example is when Pazu starts playing the trumpet in the morning. In the Japanese track, it's just a nice trumpet solo as though he's playing a song to wake up the neighborhood. In the English dub, Disney decided that wasn't good enough and turned the whole thing into an orchestral piece, albeit with a strong trumpet line. It's not a huge change, but it shows that Disney really does think that they know better than Miyazaki.
That's not exactly why the immune system has problems with AIDS. Part of it is that the virus actually invades the immune system itself, so the very part of you that's trying to protect you is itself prevented from working properly. ISTR that some viruses already try a similar approach by shutting down virus-check software.
The problem with this approach is that the worm would have to be completely stealthy in order to have maximum effect. If the virus-check companies figured out about it, they'd likely be able to decompile the thing and create a specialized countermeasure. This is one place where the analogy between biological and computer invaders breaks down. The natural immune system has a limited repertoire of possible responses and can only adapt to a novel threat on an evolutionary timescale, while our computers' "immune systems" can actually be intelligently designed to combat a specific threat.
For maximum destructive effect, you'd probably be better off using something like a Warhol Worm- an invader that can spread to most available hosts in 15 minutes. That's enough faster than the possible response of anti-worm software makers that there wouldn't be a reasonable chance of creating a countermeasure in time. The SQL Slammer worm was the closest thing yet to a Warhol Worm, though its unique source of speed probably precludes a seriously damaging payload. Still, a worm that could spread worldwide in a few hours and then did as much as possible to damage its host could wreak some significant havoc without a reasonable chance of stopping it.
If the worm flashed the BIOS, wouldn't that tend to destroy its hosts and thus slow down the infection? This is one more place where knowing biology can be helpful in understanding computer diseases. Diseases that are promptly fatal tend to be self-limiting because they kill off their hosts before they have much time to spread. Most successful diseases are either not uniformly fatal or at least take long enough to kill that their host has plenty of time to infect others. This is why many types of malware with destructive payloads will have a built-in delay before blowing up; otherwise they'd kill themselves before managing to infect enough computers to cause real havoc.
Of course G5 users can do exactly the same thing. You do realize that Linux is available for processors other than x86, don't you?
They're not claiming that XFS, JFS, RCU, etc. are their property. They're claiming that those things are contractually protected, i.e. that the developers promised not to reveal them. That's a technical point, but if you look at all of SCO's press releases and public statements, they never actually say that they own those things. They say that they're protected by SCO's IP rights, which include patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and contract rights. I happen to think that their argument is nonsense, since the side agreements pretty clearly spell out the right of licensees to recycle code that they developed themselves, but at least SCO is not completely out to lunch on the issue.
In the IBM license, for instance, this is explicitly spelled out. Right after the bit about the license being irrevocable, perpetual, and fully paid up, it says:
It seems pretty clear from that sentence that SCO does have the right to revoke IBM's license for cause. Of course the best evidence is that they have failed to follow the terms under which such revocation would take place- in particular by failing to spell out IBM's alleged breach- but they have the right to do so.
SCO did not give them that time. They didn't spell out exactly what the breach was, much less what specific remedies would allow SGI to cure it. The contract requires SCO to specify those things before they can take action. That's the purpose of the waiting period- to give the licensee time to cure his breach and avoid losing his license. The clock can't start until SCO does its part, and by failing to detail the alleged wrongdoing on SGI's (or IBM's) part they've failed to abide by their side of the contract.
That's not necessarily true. Somebody pointed out that this is one area where the driver's license analogy is fairly apt. Not all violations against ones driver's license result in revocation as a penalty. Most don't, in fact. Instead they're punishable by something less, like a fine. Similarly, revocation is not SCO's only option in this case. They might be compensated by a financial penalty, and injunction against a violating company transfering any more code to open source, or something like that. Imposing some lesser penalty would be reasonable particularly if, as SGI claims, the violation is trivial. SGI has admitted that they are in technical violation of the license, having released a couple of hundred lines of SVR4 code. Revoking their license over such a trivial breach would be grossly disproportionate.
You know, you might try actually reading the article, rather than just spouting off. I realize that this is novel behavior for a slashdotter, but it can actually help. The government is not, in fact, planning on censoring the web sites or making them directly illegal. They are saying that it's not OK to give money to the sites, which actually makes sense- that money will go into the hands of people who will use it to commit murder and other terrorist acts. Since that would classify as aiding and abetting under any reasonable standard of the law, forbidding people to give them money is perfectly reasonable.
It's happened. There's this company you might have heard of called International Business Machines that has sued SCO for copyright infringement on their code in the Linux Kernel. They even registered the copyright, so SCO is liable for statutory damages. Interestingly, it looks as though it's no longer possible to download the kernel source from the SCO website, which suggests that their lawyers are worried. (I was going to suggest that people download the sources in order to drive up SCO's liability, but it looks as though they thought of that, too.)
Importantly, though, that doesn't have any bearing on any other software under the GPL. The fact that SCO has violated the license on Linux does not prevent them from distributing any other GPLed software. Otherwise they probably would have been sued by several other Free Software developers. ISTR that the SAMBA team is particularly pissed at them and would love a legitimate excuse for preventing them from including SAMBA in their Unix line.
Couldn't you determine their magic site-IP dynamically? It seems to me that you could just look up an invalid address and then compare the result to what you got when looking up your questionable one. Looking up example.com should work, for instance. Even if Verisign deliberately broke things by making a distinction between reserved names line example and other errors, you could pretty much guarantee that your chosen domain was invalid by using a string of 30 random alphanumeric characters. Not, of course, that this justifies stupidity like sitefinder.
It's not just that spoofing of the From: lines wouldn't work anymore. Many of the recent viruses actually set up their own mail servers so that they can mail to everyone under the sun. This scheme would make those rogue servers ineffective, since the mail would be rejected as not coming from a legitimate source; a random desktop system doesn't count as legitimate. If the virus instead infected a mail program on the system and tried piping the mail through the legitimate mail server, the mail server admins could spot it fairly easily. This could really help in the battle against email worms.