``Napster is at the forefront of using some extremely advanced rights management and security technologies in a
file-sharing environment,'' Napster's interim CEO Hank Barry said in a statement.
That's giving the customer what they want, for sure:)
Like it or not, MP3 is the standard, and people aren't going to change away from it unless another format allows greater benefits for the end user (better quality/compression ratio) or the other format is aggressively pushed by Microsoft (not that WMA isn't necessarily better than MP3, but I hardly expect Microsoft to let it succeed or fail on its own merits).
Nothing in file sharing is really going to change unless media companies really go after MP3 traders for their actions, which won't happen because of the massive potential backlash. You can destroy the Napster of the month for years, but all that will happen is people will trade underground the way they did before Napster made it so easy.
On the plus side, torpedoing easy-to-use file sharing programs is going to boost overall computer literacy, as people learn to track down their MP3s on Usenet and FTP sites and/or apply DeCSS-style cracks to the wide variety of "secure" music formats. If you think of the 'net as an ecosystem, the destruction of one of the larger trees in the forest is just causing explosive adaptation among Internet users. If the RIAA had been careful, they could have preserved Napster long enough to channel most of its users into more profitable channels. As it is, they've destroyed the biggest centralized point for MP3 trading, and they'll never have another chance to influence so many music traders at once again.
This was already announced here the other day, by the way.
If I were Adobe, and if I didn't have bigger fish to fry as far as bad PR this week, I'd take out after that law office with my big legal stick that I normally reserve for hackers that point out security flaws in my products. These renegade lawyers have smeared Adobe's name through the mud with the open source community, doing what would have been irrepararable harm had not Adobe already drawn a bead on its other foot, and now want to charge them for it. Unbelievable.
[Q] What do you call 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
You can also do this in Netscape by clicking on the Netscape Search button, selecting a search engine and clicking "always use this search engine". Then you can just type "? search terms" in the URL box to fire off a Google (or whatever) search.
The shortcuts to various search forms are a neat idea, though. I ended up just sticking the appropriate search boxes on my startup page, but your setup sounds pretty good too.
That's assuming that the problem really was in the custom app and not in NT or MSSQL, but I assume any bugs where MSSQL
quietly "disappears" certain information would be common knowledge by now...
Guess I won't be taking any more crap from Microsoft defenders the next time I assume that Microsoft can't cut it - the one time I trust Microsoft not to have screwed things up, they go and let me down.
Yep, that last laugh is pretty satisfying, at least until my major city disappears in a ball of nuclear fire:)
OK, maybe it would be more realistic for me to say that Sealand may be sovereign today, but I'm not sure that its sovereignty can be sustained indefinitely.
Most countries are safe from U.S. military threats to their sovereignty, but then again the U.S. has been known to be pretty controlling in economic and cultural ways instead. In a certain sense there aren't too many truly sovereign countries in the world today, since most countries lack the ability to survive without depending on the goodwill of other nations (if not militarily, at least for economic or political reasons). The U.S., newly embarked on a four-year mission to strain the good will of the other nations of the world, seems determined to test this sovereignty principle to the utmost, though:)
Even better - it's probably illegal for you to distribute tools that help work around this problem. Although from the description, it sounds like the method of protection is to distort the actual CD audio and depend on the CD player to interpolate; to work around this you would have to write code to do similar interpolation, which might be non-trivial.
OTOH, interpolating the music that's missing isn't as clearly illegal under the DMCA as distributing a program to crack DeCSS - you could argue that interpolating music tracks in this way is a reasonable thing that anyone would want to do with their CD so that they could play it at their computer.
I am puzzled to why any site would want to host in a country with questionable bandwidth,
No argument there.
bad reputation (it's
been billed as a future haven for copyright piracy becasue of the "lack" of laws)
It depends on whether you view that as a bad thing or not, though - if you don't believe in "copyright piracy", Sealand probably sounds like the only sane country in the world. That's not my position, but I could see how someone could feel that way.
and proximity to a defginite
sovereign entity (Great Britain). Since they are within 12 miles of their shores, Great Britain can easily come
forward and claim what is rightfully theirs.
I believe the story is that Sealand was claimed before the limit was 12 miles. As an existing country, they weren't annexed when Great Britain increased their territorial waters, any more than England would be annexed if France increased its territorial waters to 200 Km. Although if they're entirely surrounded by British waters and airspace, Her Majesty could starve them out with little impunity to make a point:)
The real test of soveriegnty remains the ultimate one: force. If someone else can control your piece of land, you're not a sovereign nation. In that regard Sealand may be sovereign in name but it really isn't in fact.
The orbit thing was just off the top of my head. I imagine you could use microwave transmission to do it. Of course, then your microwave receivers have to be out in the desert somewhere, so why not just put the fusion plant there in the first place...
In the worst case, it already is safer, though - a catastrophic failure might destroy the neighborhood, but there shouldn't be any lingering radiation to harm future generations. Whereas Chernobyl will probably be making reindeer sick for hundreds of years (or until we find a perfect and everlasting containment system). So use the best safety devices (because these plants are expensive to replace) but also build them out in the desert somewhere, or in orbit.
I don't know about anyone else here but I'm all for having a system that can pick off a few nukes sent up by a
rouge terrorist organization.
Really? Even when the money could be better spent to provide worldwide nuclear security through enhanced nonproliferation agreements and tracking down "lost" Russian nuclear material? Picking off a few missiles is nice, but above a certain price point there are better alternatives.
And what about blue terrorists, or the purple ones?
How, exactly, do you track a suitcase nuke back to its country of origin after it's been denotated?
It would seem to me that you would need either:
a) for someone to claim responsibility (real dumb); or
b) to know it was coming
Or even better - what if it's a terrorist group? If the IRA or the PLO claims responsibility, you can't just nuke Northern Ireland or Israel/Palestine. Terrorists like that have effectively a huge amount of civilian hostages against MAD.
All the "Star Wars" money would be a lot more effectively spent on nonproliferation activities to stop the problem at the source, IMHO.
Actually, my fantasy world is mostly created in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Japan:) I just wish every single sitcom on TV wasn't set in LA, NYC, or DC - there are other interesting parts of the country, you know.
I'm not sure how much NYC is really an engine of the economy - the actual things that people buy are mostly made elsewhere. NYC just has all the real leeches - advertising agencies, fashion designers, stock market players, and millionaires. Other than the short-term dislocation caused by not having the stock market to obsess over and the Statue of Liberty to replace, I think the rest of the country would do just fine.
P.S. - I loved you guys in Mad Magazine. You should get your own movie, you know? If those kids from South Park can do it, so can you!
Also, every time a work is lent, a small royalty is generated.
Are you sure about that? Maybe I'm just uninformed, but I've never heard of such a thing before. My Mom's a librarian - I'll have to run that by her. You would think that under the right of first sale, after the library has bought the book they can do anything with it (well, except distributing unauthorized copies of course) without paying anything back to the publisher. I would think it would be like the used CD market, except that you get the CDs for free in exchange for returning them after a while.
OK, maybe "confusing" was the wrong word there. I don't think that familiarity with the series of games is necessarily a requirement (or even that it should be - I agree with your reasoning there), but an appreciation for the same type of storytelling that occurs in the games is. As others have mentioned, it's anime-style in that few things are directly spelled out, the focus is on the people even though at first glance there may appear to be high technology at the forefront (Evas or mechs in other anime), and more attention goes into the atmosphere than into the plot of the piece.
Sure, it's going to be confusing if you were expecting the Starship Troopers or even Alien style of sci-fi. But Katz is pretending to be a real movie reviewer - he should already be familiar with the genres of the visual arts and know what kind of criticism is appropriate for each. I don't think you should sit down and review Final Fantasy on the same terms as the latest action-adventure sci-fi blockbuster, any more than you would complain that E.T. never destroyed Tokyo with his atomic breath, or that Sgt. Ripley never zoomed around those aliens in "bullet time".
I didn't think it was flamebait, if anything that comment was ROTFL. Especially the part about how the evil magician usually turns out to be a long-lost relative. I still think it's a fun ride, though.
Your post has given me a very scary though: a movie of Stranger in a Strange Land. I don't know whether to embrace the idea of such a mind-bending book becoming a movie, or cringe in fear at the travesty that would likely ensue. If Final Fantasy was too mind-bending for most people, Michael Valentine Smith is going to be way over the top:)
Dr. Aki Ross, played here by
some code with too much lip balm, is more like Enya, a new age scientist whose
weapons are dreams and wiggly spirits rather than guns and bombs.
There
isn't a single decent battle scene, for God's sake, blasphemy in a movie that
purports to herald the ascent of the computer game over the traditional film.
I have played the game(s), and a lot of the point was deciphering what the "real" plot was. In the beginning it often did seem to be a simple "the mad Queen must be stopped", but always there were multiple layers of truth and reality that had to be peeled away to reveal the true motivation of the game. And there was lots of questing for things along the way too. I think you're reviewing the wrong movie if you didn't expect it to be somewhat confusing to the newbie viewer, full of seemingly contradictory versions of reality, and ultimately solved by heroes that rely more on their innate abilities and their relationships to each other than on any amount of military hardware. Winning a war through pure shoot-em-up style mayhem has never been the plot of a FF game - it's like the difference between a "foreign" (non-US) movie with actual plot, characterization, and open endings, and the usual U.S. fare of "Legally Blonde", "Tomb Raider", and "Pearl Harbor". Maybe you should have just reviewed The Matrix or Tomb Raider again, Jon, and given this one a miss.
I can't comment on your other points, since I haven't seen the movie yet (maybe this weekend?), but it wouldn't surprise me that the voicing and the expressions aren't perfect. After all, this is the first time something like this has been tried. It's still a huge advance over the animation of the humans in Toy Story or even Shrek, though - maybe your negative comments are because the animation was close enough to looking real that the remaining slight failings were especially jarring?
Oh yeah and one more thing:
(Why is it always in a ruined Manhattan? The tall
buildings?)
I can answer that - I'd destroy New York City in a heartbeat, and I'm not even a malevolent alien race:)
My thoughts exactly - sounds like it's time for OpenMAPS.org or something like that. It's nice that MAPS is still going to allow cheap access for end-users that aren't ISPs or large organizations, but in the end they're still doing the same copyright land grab that CDDB/Gracenote are so famous for. Apparently it's the coming thing in user-submitted databases: once you reach critical mass, do something to tick everybody off, and see how fast you can race back down to zero users!
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ROTFL! Can I use that as my sig? Genius!
That's giving the customer what they want, for sure :)
Like it or not, MP3 is the standard, and people aren't going to change away from it unless another format allows greater benefits for the end user (better quality/compression ratio) or the other format is aggressively pushed by Microsoft (not that WMA isn't necessarily better than MP3, but I hardly expect Microsoft to let it succeed or fail on its own merits).
Nothing in file sharing is really going to change unless media companies really go after MP3 traders for their actions, which won't happen because of the massive potential backlash. You can destroy the Napster of the month for years, but all that will happen is people will trade underground the way they did before Napster made it so easy.
On the plus side, torpedoing easy-to-use file sharing programs is going to boost overall computer literacy, as people learn to track down their MP3s on Usenet and FTP sites and/or apply DeCSS-style cracks to the wide variety of "secure" music formats. If you think of the 'net as an ecosystem, the destruction of one of the larger trees in the forest is just causing explosive adaptation among Internet users. If the RIAA had been careful, they could have preserved Napster long enough to channel most of its users into more profitable channels. As it is, they've destroyed the biggest centralized point for MP3 trading, and they'll never have another chance to influence so many music traders at once again.
This was already announced here the other day, by the way.
If I were Adobe, and if I didn't have bigger fish to fry as far as bad PR this week, I'd take out after that law office with my big legal stick that I normally reserve for hackers that point out security flaws in my products. These renegade lawyers have smeared Adobe's name through the mud with the open source community, doing what would have been irrepararable harm had not Adobe already drawn a bead on its other foot, and now want to charge them for it. Unbelievable.
[Q] What do you call 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
[A] A good start.
You can generate PDFs with the GIMP? And they're more secure than the Adobe version?
Nobody was responsible for the DMAC, it's the DMCA.
Hi Zico, long time no see. Been on vacation?
You can also do this in Netscape by clicking on the Netscape Search button, selecting a search engine and clicking "always use this search engine". Then you can just type "? search terms" in the URL box to fire off a Google (or whatever) search.
The shortcuts to various search forms are a neat idea, though. I ended up just sticking the appropriate search boxes on my startup page, but your setup sounds pretty good too.
I said here, and I quote:
Guess I won't be taking any more crap from Microsoft defenders the next time I assume that Microsoft can't cut it - the one time I trust Microsoft not to have screwed things up, they go and let me down.
Yep, that last laugh is pretty satisfying, at least until my major city disappears in a ball of nuclear fire :)
Very interesting. What's the deal on this in the States?
OK, maybe it would be more realistic for me to say that Sealand may be sovereign today, but I'm not sure that its sovereignty can be sustained indefinitely.
Most countries are safe from U.S. military threats to their sovereignty, but then again the U.S. has been known to be pretty controlling in economic and cultural ways instead. In a certain sense there aren't too many truly sovereign countries in the world today, since most countries lack the ability to survive without depending on the goodwill of other nations (if not militarily, at least for economic or political reasons). The U.S., newly embarked on a four-year mission to strain the good will of the other nations of the world, seems determined to test this sovereignty principle to the utmost, though :)
Even better - it's probably illegal for you to distribute tools that help work around this problem. Although from the description, it sounds like the method of protection is to distort the actual CD audio and depend on the CD player to interpolate; to work around this you would have to write code to do similar interpolation, which might be non-trivial.
OTOH, interpolating the music that's missing isn't as clearly illegal under the DMCA as distributing a program to crack DeCSS - you could argue that interpolating music tracks in this way is a reasonable thing that anyone would want to do with their CD so that they could play it at their computer.
As always, IANAL.
No argument there.
It depends on whether you view that as a bad thing or not, though - if you don't believe in "copyright piracy", Sealand probably sounds like the only sane country in the world. That's not my position, but I could see how someone could feel that way.
I believe the story is that Sealand was claimed before the limit was 12 miles. As an existing country, they weren't annexed when Great Britain increased their territorial waters, any more than England would be annexed if France increased its territorial waters to 200 Km. Although if they're entirely surrounded by British waters and airspace, Her Majesty could starve them out with little impunity to make a point :)
The real test of soveriegnty remains the ultimate one: force. If someone else can control your piece of land, you're not a sovereign nation. In that regard Sealand may be sovereign in name but it really isn't in fact.
The orbit thing was just off the top of my head. I imagine you could use microwave transmission to do it. Of course, then your microwave receivers have to be out in the desert somewhere, so why not just put the fusion plant there in the first place...
In the worst case, it already is safer, though - a catastrophic failure might destroy the neighborhood, but there shouldn't be any lingering radiation to harm future generations. Whereas Chernobyl will probably be making reindeer sick for hundreds of years (or until we find a perfect and everlasting containment system). So use the best safety devices (because these plants are expensive to replace) but also build them out in the desert somewhere, or in orbit.
Really? Even when the money could be better spent to provide worldwide nuclear security through enhanced nonproliferation agreements and tracking down "lost" Russian nuclear material? Picking off a few missiles is nice, but above a certain price point there are better alternatives.
And what about blue terrorists, or the purple ones?
Or even better - what if it's a terrorist group? If the IRA or the PLO claims responsibility, you can't just nuke Northern Ireland or Israel/Palestine. Terrorists like that have effectively a huge amount of civilian hostages against MAD.
All the "Star Wars" money would be a lot more effectively spent on nonproliferation activities to stop the problem at the source, IMHO.
Actually, my fantasy world is mostly created in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Japan :) I just wish every single sitcom on TV wasn't set in LA, NYC, or DC - there are other interesting parts of the country, you know.
I'm not sure how much NYC is really an engine of the economy - the actual things that people buy are mostly made elsewhere. NYC just has all the real leeches - advertising agencies, fashion designers, stock market players, and millionaires. Other than the short-term dislocation caused by not having the stock market to obsess over and the Statue of Liberty to replace, I think the rest of the country would do just fine.
P.S. - I loved you guys in Mad Magazine. You should get your own movie, you know? If those kids from South Park can do it, so can you!
I was imagining it to the tune of the railroad number from The Music Man. Definitely worthy of a musical, IMHO.
Are you sure about that? Maybe I'm just uninformed, but I've never heard of such a thing before. My Mom's a librarian - I'll have to run that by her. You would think that under the right of first sale, after the library has bought the book they can do anything with it (well, except distributing unauthorized copies of course) without paying anything back to the publisher. I would think it would be like the used CD market, except that you get the CDs for free in exchange for returning them after a while.
OK, maybe "confusing" was the wrong word there. I don't think that familiarity with the series of games is necessarily a requirement (or even that it should be - I agree with your reasoning there), but an appreciation for the same type of storytelling that occurs in the games is. As others have mentioned, it's anime-style in that few things are directly spelled out, the focus is on the people even though at first glance there may appear to be high technology at the forefront (Evas or mechs in other anime), and more attention goes into the atmosphere than into the plot of the piece.
Sure, it's going to be confusing if you were expecting the Starship Troopers or even Alien style of sci-fi. But Katz is pretending to be a real movie reviewer - he should already be familiar with the genres of the visual arts and know what kind of criticism is appropriate for each. I don't think you should sit down and review Final Fantasy on the same terms as the latest action-adventure sci-fi blockbuster, any more than you would complain that E.T. never destroyed Tokyo with his atomic breath, or that Sgt. Ripley never zoomed around those aliens in "bullet time".
Simple answer: They encoded the MP3 samples with the new version of Windows that only creates MP3s at 56k. No wonder WMA sounded better :)
I didn't think it was flamebait, if anything that comment was ROTFL. Especially the part about how the evil magician usually turns out to be a long-lost relative. I still think it's a fun ride, though.
Your post has given me a very scary though: a movie of Stranger in a Strange Land. I don't know whether to embrace the idea of such a mind-bending book becoming a movie, or cringe in fear at the travesty that would likely ensue. If Final Fantasy was too mind-bending for most people, Michael Valentine Smith is going to be way over the top :)
Hmmm, perhaps it's time for a retread. Is this better?
...and it shows when you say things like:
I have played the game(s), and a lot of the point was deciphering what the "real" plot was. In the beginning it often did seem to be a simple "the mad Queen must be stopped", but always there were multiple layers of truth and reality that had to be peeled away to reveal the true motivation of the game. And there was lots of questing for things along the way too. I think you're reviewing the wrong movie if you didn't expect it to be somewhat confusing to the newbie viewer, full of seemingly contradictory versions of reality, and ultimately solved by heroes that rely more on their innate abilities and their relationships to each other than on any amount of military hardware. Winning a war through pure shoot-em-up style mayhem has never been the plot of a FF game - it's like the difference between a "foreign" (non-US) movie with actual plot, characterization, and open endings, and the usual U.S. fare of "Legally Blonde", "Tomb Raider", and "Pearl Harbor". Maybe you should have just reviewed The Matrix or Tomb Raider again, Jon, and given this one a miss.
I can't comment on your other points, since I haven't seen the movie yet (maybe this weekend?), but it wouldn't surprise me that the voicing and the expressions aren't perfect. After all, this is the first time something like this has been tried. It's still a huge advance over the animation of the humans in Toy Story or even Shrek, though - maybe your negative comments are because the animation was close enough to looking real that the remaining slight failings were especially jarring?
Oh yeah and one more thing:
I can answer that - I'd destroy New York City in a heartbeat, and I'm not even a malevolent alien race :)
My thoughts exactly - sounds like it's time for OpenMAPS.org or something like that. It's nice that MAPS is still going to allow cheap access for end-users that aren't ISPs or large organizations, but in the end they're still doing the same copyright land grab that CDDB/Gracenote are so famous for. Apparently it's the coming thing in user-submitted databases: once you reach critical mass, do something to tick everybody off, and see how fast you can race back down to zero users!