In the game, they're shooting at *you*! And *you* have the ability to save your character's ass by shooting back.
In a movie, you're living more vicariously through the characters, and you don't have any control over their actions. Except maybe screaming at the screen "They're right behind you!"
Furthermore, they point out that DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright.
That's not much of a problem. As Disney has so carefully demonstrated, that will never, ever happen for any copyrighted work that has been published since 1928. The real problem however:
Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent
This will happen a lot sooner than the copyright will expire. Like in maybe 10 or 20 years. And not just that the software might not support old DRM formats (remember, they'll be producing new ones every 6 months because hackers will always find a way around them), but what about the hardware? Will it work in 15 years? Will someone be there to make replacement parts in 15 years? DRM is all about tying one electronic copy to one device at a time, whether it's a PDA-style book reader or a PC. But the whole point of electronic formats is reproducability so that you can prevent data loss (among other things).
The Disneys and Sonys of the world don't give a rat's ass about whether a historian can understand our culture (and by extension, their own) in a hundred or six hundred years. They care only whether or not they can make money this year.
There are many primates that subsist almost exclusively on fruit that has substantial amounts of sugar. They live for 20 years and their teeth are fine.
#1: They only live for 20 years.
#2: There's a difference between fructose, cane sugar, and refined sugar. Kind of like there's a difference between coffee, coca leaves, and cocaine.
It's really not as complex as you'd like to think. Refined sugar is a plant-eater's crack cocaine, and we love to put it in everything.
Some books, well, you really have to wonder if they're actually intended to be non-fiction in the first place. Biographies - especially unauthorized ones - are sometimes pretty unbelievable. And sometimes you just have to wonder what the hell the editors (yes, plural) were thinking. At some point in time, you'd expect that common sense would kick in and they'd say "Oh come on, that can't be right..."
But no. Time after time, you see all manner of media go through at least three levels of possible sanity checking and bullshit filter, and still somehow the real stinkers get through.
If you're not about to blow up a federal building (or blow up your garage with a badly-planned meth lab), then the Justice Department really doesn't give a shit about what you are doing at home, or what genre of dirty pictures you are doing it with.
Or how much pot you smoke every oh, 8 months or so, or what movies you pirate, or what songs you download. Just so long as you're not some pinko liberal pacifist journalist that's in the way.
That kind of "little thing" is how you make free speech go away. You just have journalists jailed for the sort of petty crimes that everyone is guilty of, at just the right time. Or in perpetuity, one or the other.
So while *I* may be of no interest to the DoJ, who is?
No, he's saying "Hey, it doesn't matter, because these movies made a profit due to their low budget". *That* is why people continue to fund his movies, and he continues to make them.
Here's the problem...the phrase "Americans that the government is suspicious of", can (and is) defined differently every day. Such vagueness virtually invites a police state.
Oh no, it's *much* worse than that. This is the stuff police states are *made* of. It doesn't invite a police state, it *creates* one. Yesterday it was terrorists. Today it's pornographers. Tomorrow it's you. That is, if they aren't already surveilling you because of the pornography, which they probably are.
And once it's you, then they'll be listening carefully to make sure you don't say anything anti-American, or better yet, something against the government. Because really, there's a *big* difference between being an enemy of the people, and an enemy of the government. Expose a corrupt government for what it is on the 6 o'clock news, and you're an enemy of the government but a hero to the people and the press.
Actually, I'm currently looking for work, and my boss knows it. My boss also knows that he can't pay me any better, and that any move I make for the sake of my career is a good thing.
Honesty is often a good policy in this regard. Don't be so passive-aggressive as to suddenly start dressing for interviews and disappearing for bullshit reasons. One thing that bosses *hate* is people lying to them about the reasons they're not there.
No, but you are agreeing that at some point in time, there were fish that decided to become amphibious, which at some point in time, grew into lizards, which at some point in time, grew into mammals and birds, which at some point in time eventually grew into apes and then humans.
At one point in time of course, we also were convinced that human beings were created entirely separately from animals, and could not be classified as animals. Now, scientists test new drugs on rats because their physiology is mostly similar to ours.
Don't leave your newspaper on the subway to share with others. The copyright nazis will beat the crap out of you in the middle of the street if you do.
some of the most "artful" old painter [...] did not paint for the fun of painting, but because they needed the money.
No, it's more like they *sold* their art because they needed the money. They made the art because they loved doing it. You can never get good enough to be called an artist if you don't like doing it in the first place.
Leonard Cohen for instance, made poetry because that's what he loved. He made music so that he could pay the bills. And even then, that may not have been such a wise decision, since most any musician will tell you that it's going to be a long time before that pays the bills.
MSN Hotmail says it stops more than 95 percent of the spam that enters its system from reaching in-boxes. Yahoo says it's just as effective.
No, I think that 95% of email that enters its system is filtered out. There's literally no way for them to really know whether or not 95% of the actual spam is getting stopped. Too few people report spam, and too many respond to it.
And my Yahoo account gets so much spam it's not funny. About 75% of the email I get at that address is spam, and the rest are mailing lists I actually asked for. My Yahoo account is just the account I use when I need to submit an e-mail address to a dubious website, mind you, but my proper account doesn't get all that much real e-mail anyway.
As for spam protection for the sites I manage personally (about 300 virtual domains, and 5000 users), none of the measures I take have anything to do with anything Microsoft has ever done. We use (in order of effectiveness) Spamcop's SBL, simscan (which uses spamassassin), a fake secondary SMTP server (it just rejects e-mail unless there's an outage on the primary), and finally SPF - which doesn't technically help our own users. About 90% of the mail we get gets refused. I can't call that "solved" by any definition of the term, since we're still spending vast resources to get even that far.
The warriors are us, geeks and techies who know the real solution.
Heh. We might *pretend* to be the warriors on the front lines, but we all know that the real solution is to get out there and start breaking fingers. Imagine what would happen if one night, all 200 spammers on the ROKSO list suddenly couldn't spam anymore? It would be like the night of the long knives for sure, but the entire world would cheer us on.
it really blows my mind how some very bright people seem to be Internet morons.
Not me. But then, I spent 10 years doing tech support for ISPs. The base problem is this: spammers are at their root, scammers. And what scammers do, is they prey on hope with "miracle solutions". The mark doesn't have to be stupid, or gullible necessarily, but they do have to have low self esteem and be praying for a solution to their perceived problem.
Re:Ok, what happens to Renderman now?
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 2, Informative
They're already here.. Didn't you hear about "Antz", the knock-off of "A Bug's Life"?
No, that's different. That's a *competing* film, since it was made and released at about the same time. In much the same way that "Armageddon" was made at the same time as "Deep Impact". There's lots of movies that get made this way, and they're not knockoffs because that would imply that the first (better) movie was made first, made lots of money, and got academy awards well before the knockoff was made.
The article glosses over a few important details, such as the fact that it's highly unlikely it will be able to produce more energy than it consumes. Thus while it might be able to use seawater to produce 300 times the energy per volume of gasoline, it probably takes about 3,000 times as much energy to extract the deuterium and generate that energy (the bit about getting the core temperature up to 300 million degrees is telling).
Especially if they're only spending $37 million US. I'd expect research and development costs to be at least 1000 times that. Of course, the article is too light on details to even begin to understand what the hell they're talking about.
This sounds like a question from a non-geek, asked in an uninteresting way, the answer to which is obvious, and one which really should be in the "Ask Google" bin, not the "Ask Slashdot" bin. If you were to ask this question on usenet or irc in a technical newsgroup or channel, it wouldn't even be answered at best, and at worst you would get flamed and told to go play in #ircnewbies instead.
Some days I wonder why I even read Slashdot. Half the time it's not news, and it's not for nerds.
I think it was the Canadian government that did a study of the benefits of internet access to small towns.
They basically found that it helps people find jobs in the cities faster, thus accelerating the exodus from the rural areas.
So yeah, I guess it helps small towns - by reducing the unemployment rate and breaking the cycle of despair and addiction that plagues so many of the people that live there.
It could mean the end of modern civilization and the death of billions
No, it might mean the death of a few million that are at the top of the food chain, but the fact of the matter is, the teeming masses are already better set up to deal with a world that doesn't have the technology we have today. They're the ones who are already living without electricity or running water.
Slashdot Mirror
In the game, they're shooting at *you*! And *you* have the ability to save your character's ass by shooting back.
In a movie, you're living more vicariously through the characters, and you don't have any control over their actions. Except maybe screaming at the screen "They're right behind you!"
Furthermore, they point out that DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright.
That's not much of a problem. As Disney has so carefully demonstrated, that will never, ever happen for any copyrighted work that has been published since 1928. The real problem however:
Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent
This will happen a lot sooner than the copyright will expire. Like in maybe 10 or 20 years. And not just that the software might not support old DRM formats (remember, they'll be producing new ones every 6 months because hackers will always find a way around them), but what about the hardware? Will it work in 15 years? Will someone be there to make replacement parts in 15 years? DRM is all about tying one electronic copy to one device at a time, whether it's a PDA-style book reader or a PC. But the whole point of electronic formats is reproducability so that you can prevent data loss (among other things).
The Disneys and Sonys of the world don't give a rat's ass about whether a historian can understand our culture (and by extension, their own) in a hundred or six hundred years. They care only whether or not they can make money this year.
There are many primates that subsist almost exclusively on fruit that has substantial amounts of sugar. They live for 20 years and their teeth are fine.
#1: They only live for 20 years.
#2: There's a difference between fructose, cane sugar, and refined sugar. Kind of like there's a difference between coffee, coca leaves, and cocaine.
It's really not as complex as you'd like to think. Refined sugar is a plant-eater's crack cocaine, and we love to put it in everything.
Some books, well, you really have to wonder if they're actually intended to be non-fiction in the first place. Biographies - especially unauthorized ones - are sometimes pretty unbelievable. And sometimes you just have to wonder what the hell the editors (yes, plural) were thinking. At some point in time, you'd expect that common sense would kick in and they'd say "Oh come on, that can't be right..."
But no. Time after time, you see all manner of media go through at least three levels of possible sanity checking and bullshit filter, and still somehow the real stinkers get through.
If you're not about to blow up a federal building (or blow up your garage with a badly-planned meth lab), then the Justice Department really doesn't give a shit about what you are doing at home, or what genre of dirty pictures you are doing it with.
Or how much pot you smoke every oh, 8 months or so, or what movies you pirate, or what songs you download. Just so long as you're not some pinko liberal pacifist journalist that's in the way.
That kind of "little thing" is how you make free speech go away. You just have journalists jailed for the sort of petty crimes that everyone is guilty of, at just the right time. Or in perpetuity, one or the other.
So while *I* may be of no interest to the DoJ, who is?
They're making a movie version of Postal? What's next, Carmageddon? Galaga? Doom? Oh wait...
No, he's saying "Hey, it doesn't matter, because these movies made a profit due to their low budget". *That* is why people continue to fund his movies, and he continues to make them.
Here's the problem...the phrase "Americans that the government is suspicious of", can (and is) defined differently every day. Such vagueness virtually invites a police state.
Oh no, it's *much* worse than that. This is the stuff police states are *made* of. It doesn't invite a police state, it *creates* one. Yesterday it was terrorists. Today it's pornographers. Tomorrow it's you. That is, if they aren't already surveilling you because of the pornography, which they probably are.
And once it's you, then they'll be listening carefully to make sure you don't say anything anti-American, or better yet, something against the government. Because really, there's a *big* difference between being an enemy of the people, and an enemy of the government. Expose a corrupt government for what it is on the 6 o'clock news, and you're an enemy of the government but a hero to the people and the press.
Actually, I'm currently looking for work, and my boss knows it. My boss also knows that he can't pay me any better, and that any move I make for the sake of my career is a good thing.
Honesty is often a good policy in this regard. Don't be so passive-aggressive as to suddenly start dressing for interviews and disappearing for bullshit reasons. One thing that bosses *hate* is people lying to them about the reasons they're not there.
No, but you are agreeing that at some point in time, there were fish that decided to become amphibious, which at some point in time, grew into lizards, which at some point in time, grew into mammals and birds, which at some point in time eventually grew into apes and then humans.
At one point in time of course, we also were convinced that human beings were created entirely separately from animals, and could not be classified as animals. Now, scientists test new drugs on rats because their physiology is mostly similar to ours.
You mean that country in Europe
You mean that island separate from Europe?
Don't leave your newspaper on the subway to share with others. The copyright nazis will beat the crap out of you in the middle of the street if you do.
Oh, that's easy. The grandparents are not allowed to pick up their grandchildren from school. Only the parents.
For very small values of "spam". Or maybe very small values of "solved". I'm not sure which yet.
some of the most "artful" old painter [...] did not paint for the fun of painting, but because they needed the money.
No, it's more like they *sold* their art because they needed the money. They made the art because they loved doing it. You can never get good enough to be called an artist if you don't like doing it in the first place.
Leonard Cohen for instance, made poetry because that's what he loved. He made music so that he could pay the bills. And even then, that may not have been such a wise decision, since most any musician will tell you that it's going to be a long time before that pays the bills.
If catering to the lowest common denominator is sufficient to disqualify a creation as art, then most of hollywood's productions are not art either.
Yes, that's true. *Most* of Hollywood's productions are not art. Would you call "Armageddon" art? What about "Rambo III?" How about "Freddy vs Jason?"
Every once in a while, they do produce art. But most of the time, no.
They keep them all locked up in a showcase,
Yes, Mister Wizard, that's because they're small, expensive, and can be easily put in your coat before you walk out of the store.
But I guess that that little bit never really occurred to you.
From the article:
MSN Hotmail says it stops more than 95 percent of the spam that enters its system from reaching in-boxes. Yahoo says it's just as effective.
No, I think that 95% of email that enters its system is filtered out. There's literally no way for them to really know whether or not 95% of the actual spam is getting stopped. Too few people report spam, and too many respond to it.
And my Yahoo account gets so much spam it's not funny. About 75% of the email I get at that address is spam, and the rest are mailing lists I actually asked for. My Yahoo account is just the account I use when I need to submit an e-mail address to a dubious website, mind you, but my proper account doesn't get all that much real e-mail anyway.
As for spam protection for the sites I manage personally (about 300 virtual domains, and 5000 users), none of the measures I take have anything to do with anything Microsoft has ever done. We use (in order of effectiveness) Spamcop's SBL, simscan (which uses spamassassin), a fake secondary SMTP server (it just rejects e-mail unless there's an outage on the primary), and finally SPF - which doesn't technically help our own users. About 90% of the mail we get gets refused. I can't call that "solved" by any definition of the term, since we're still spending vast resources to get even that far.
And you thought it was a joke
Apparently we do, because you're moderated +3 funny.
The warriors are us, geeks and techies who know the real solution.
Heh. We might *pretend* to be the warriors on the front lines, but we all know that the real solution is to get out there and start breaking fingers. Imagine what would happen if one night, all 200 spammers on the ROKSO list suddenly couldn't spam anymore? It would be like the night of the long knives for sure, but the entire world would cheer us on.
it really blows my mind how some very bright people seem to be Internet morons.
Not me. But then, I spent 10 years doing tech support for ISPs. The base problem is this: spammers are at their root, scammers. And what scammers do, is they prey on hope with "miracle solutions". The mark doesn't have to be stupid, or gullible necessarily, but they do have to have low self esteem and be praying for a solution to their perceived problem.
They're already here.. Didn't you hear about "Antz", the knock-off of "A Bug's Life"?
No, that's different. That's a *competing* film, since it was made and released at about the same time. In much the same way that "Armageddon" was made at the same time as "Deep Impact". There's lots of movies that get made this way, and they're not knockoffs because that would imply that the first (better) movie was made first, made lots of money, and got academy awards well before the knockoff was made.
The article glosses over a few important details, such as the fact that it's highly unlikely it will be able to produce more energy than it consumes. Thus while it might be able to use seawater to produce 300 times the energy per volume of gasoline, it probably takes about 3,000 times as much energy to extract the deuterium and generate that energy (the bit about getting the core temperature up to 300 million degrees is telling).
Especially if they're only spending $37 million US. I'd expect research and development costs to be at least 1000 times that. Of course, the article is too light on details to even begin to understand what the hell they're talking about.
This sounds like a question from a non-geek, asked in an uninteresting way, the answer to which is obvious, and one which really should be in the "Ask Google" bin, not the "Ask Slashdot" bin. If you were to ask this question on usenet or irc in a technical newsgroup or channel, it wouldn't even be answered at best, and at worst you would get flamed and told to go play in #ircnewbies instead.
Some days I wonder why I even read Slashdot. Half the time it's not news, and it's not for nerds.
I think it was the Canadian government that did a study of the benefits of internet access to small towns.
They basically found that it helps people find jobs in the cities faster, thus accelerating the exodus from the rural areas.
So yeah, I guess it helps small towns - by reducing the unemployment rate and breaking the cycle of despair and addiction that plagues so many of the people that live there.
It could mean the end of modern civilization and the death of billions
No, it might mean the death of a few million that are at the top of the food chain, but the fact of the matter is, the teeming masses are already better set up to deal with a world that doesn't have the technology we have today. They're the ones who are already living without electricity or running water.