You sure could have fooled me. I still see VHS movies come out new for $25--and that's not even mentioning the practice of "pricing for rental"--selling VHS tapes at $60-100 or more for the rental market for a couple of months before dropping their price for consumers. DVDs haven't been priced for rental so far, though some of the studios are making noises about it.
It's all in what you're willing to pay, I suppose. For me, $20 for a movie I really like is a worthwhile investment. --
The problem with boycotting is that you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
So the MPAA doesn't get money from the principled nerds who don't like their policies. Oh, boo-hoo. They've lost maybe 1/10 of 1% of their revenue. If that. Ohhhh, yeah, they're sure feeling the pain from that! That's showing them! I'm just positive they're going to collapse any day now.
And meanwhile you don't get the fun of hacking ways around their DRM, or the fun of watching these high-quality movies.
Get real. You're never going to affect the MPAA by boycotting unless you get a substantial number of other people to boycott, too. And from the way the public has dashed headlong into adoption of DVD, making it one of the fastest-adopted new technologies ever, that's clearly just not going to happen. Even if every single Slashdot reader joined you, it would not be enough for the MPAA to even notice. It would be lost amid all those people who simply haven't decided to upgrade from VHS yet.
If you're going to boycott, at least be honest about why you're doing it. It's not to hurt the MPAA, or help the EFF. It's not to convince them to drop the asinine region system. It's so you can congratulate yourself for being more righteous than all the other folks who don't.
I hope you enjoy your self-righteousness as much as the rest of us enjoy our movies. In the mean time, I think I'll go watch my Ultimate Edition DVD of The Mummy. Have fun! --
I have a Sony DDU-220E DVD-ROM drive, a Netstream 2000 card, and Remote Selector (registered). Region-selectable all the waaaay, baby!
The irony is that I have yet to get any foreign DVDs that I would need region selectability to play. All the (unbelievably cheap--and yet legit!) Hong Kong DVDs I order from HiViZone so I can see Jackie Chan unMiramangled, in the original Cantonese . . . are region-free already! (God bless the sensibility of Hong Kong DVD vendors!) --
The Stage 2 beta of Neocron will be starting in a couple weeks or so, and two hundred people will be shipped CDs of the beta software. Neocron had originally intended to let everyone download its client software for free, but had to nix that option after its publisher objected, and after the size of the client file grew to about 550 megabytes, which they thought was too much to ask anyone to download. There's been a good bit of argument on the Neocron fora about whether the CDs will be shipped from Europe or North America when they are ready.
This does raise a bit of a question about what will happen when Neocron expands its beta to several thousand people, though. Hmmmm. --
And who says emulators should be free? Other than you?
They have costs involved in coding them. They have costs involved in pressing them to that oddball format of disc that Dreamcast uses. They have monster costs involved in standing up to Sony in a protracted series of legal battles and defending the rights of all emulators, free and bought alike, to even exist. (Do you think someone making those "free" emulators you love would be able to stand up to a major corporation's cease and desist orders?)
To recoup those costs, they have to make money. That's a simple fact of life of the capitalist society in which we live.
If you don't like it, hell, write your own PSX-to-Dreamcast emulator. It's legal--since Bleem did the footwork. (IANAL, yadda yadda) --
That is to say, after losing in court three times, Sony has been pressuring retailers not to stock Bleemcast--and that could drive Bleem right out of business. This is something Slashdot people need to know--it affects your freedom to play the games you want how you want.
The above link includes contact information for most major retailers. Happy Slashdot-effecting. --
Well, actually Bond and Blofeld never met even once in that movie. Blofeld (Max Von Sydow) had about two scenes in the entire show, and then was never seen again. It probably would have been a much better film if he had been the main villain.
The people developing this system had better be careful, though . . . it might be that Kevin McClory (the fellow with the Thunderball remake rights) could sue them for patent infringement.;) --
Re:Unless bathroom tiles can get pregnant...
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Duct Tape
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· Score: 2
What about bathroom tiles on the back of a Jupiter-going spaceship with three anuses and three mouths and cool shades and stuff? --
Re:Why Not Build Your Own Atomic Bomb!!
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Duct Tape
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· Score: 2
There's a very interesting novel on a very similar theme to this. Dad's Nuke, by Marc Laidlaw--a satire on suburbia describing a neighborhood arms race.
Interestingly, Marc Laidlaw would later become a writer for another project with a nuclear theme--a little first-person shooter by the name of Half-Life. (As a little in-joke, some of his books can be seen in one of the lockers in the locker room in the early part of the game.) --
I'm not terribly sanguine about Neocron's prospects to escape unchanged in this environment. Hailing from Europe (land of the unpixellated naked Sims), it has a bit more lax attitude about nudity, and features visibly naked strippers in the city's red-light district. (You can see them in the mpeg movie available from neocron.com's downloads page.) --
Is there any "allowed" system at software stores? Is a 12 year old kid actualy forbidden to buy an MA game title w/out his parents? I'd definately encourage that sort of enforcement of the ratings system simply because it puts more control in the hands of the parrents.
At K-Mart, where I work, there is indeed such a system in effect now. Our cash register prompts us to enter a DOB for someone buying a violent video game, or a CD with explicit lyrics, in the same way it prompts for DOB on tobacco, alcohol, knife, or ammunition purchases. And we're expected to enforce that, and so I do. There's not a law or anything (yet), though, so if someone doesn't have his ID, I'll probably just go ahead and sell it to him.
(Of course, our registers sometimes ask us to card for the damnedest things, just because of the department-based way in which the system is set up. Cigarette lighters, books of matches, wheel ramps, tire wrenches--once I had a 16-year-old kid trying to buy cans of fix-a-flat, and the register told me not to let him! Had to get a manager's authorization to let it go through.) --
Something interesting I learned in marketing class is that coupons also serve to show a manufacturer just how many people are reading a particular magazine or otherwise paying attention to a particular source. They're not just a way to entice consumers into trying a product--they're trying to see how many people who do buy a product saw their ad.
Oddly enough, the folks at Tritin Films--makers of some of the best-known Quake machinima on 'net--are going to fully-rendered animation for their new Quake: The Movie title--importing the models from the game into 3D Studio Max, "biping" them to add skeletons for more articulated movement, and creating a whole movie with them. And the trailer looks awesome. --
Hate to burst your bubble, but it's not likely Jar-Jar is going to die. He exemplifies the same Campbellian archetype as Luke Skywalker from the first movie--the fool on a journey. When you think about that, it becomes likely that he will survive and mature through all three movies, and might even help facilitate delivering the young Luke Skywalker to his aunt and uncle on Tatooine. --
Examples of the Japanese infatuation with English can be found at engrish.com. Be certain you're not drinking anything that could go down the wrong pipe, and that those within earshot are not bothered by hysterical laughter, before reading. --
I've gone to Europe a couple of times and noticed that instead of voice dubs they do this:subtilting the movie, but who would want to look at the bottom of a screen the whole movie?
Oh, I dunno, the people who made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a megablockbuster? The animé fans who insist on subtitling on their videos and DVDs (enough so to start a letter-writing campaign that forced Disney to change their minds and include the original audio and subtitles on their Princess Mononoke DVD)? The Hong Kong action movie fans sick of hearing Jackie Chan in an Australian accent?
You could have voice translators, but then, that'd ruin the movie's sound and make the experience less entertaining.
Actually, some parts of Europe (Italy, in particular, if I remember right) do have major native-language dubbing set-ups. Some of the voice-actors, in fact, are big stars in their own right and get major salaries, and if they go on strike, they're not just replaced. (For that matter, when Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are redubbed for the German language markets, Arnold has to be done by a different actor. Even though he speaks native German, the Germans don't like his accent!) --
First off--most Western-made animated movies are not "dubbed" into their original language in the same sense that foreign films are (with actors trying to match voice to foreign lip movements).
Western-produced animated movies usually have the voices recorded first, long before any of the animation is ever done. (Disney's Atlantis, for instance, features a character voiced by the late Jim Varney, who died a whole year before the film's release date.) This gives the animators a baseline to work from, and also lets them sync lip movements in the animation precisely to the pre-recorded voices. How much trouble they take to get it exact depends on the budget of the animation; Disney movies obviously feature much better lipsync than Saturday morning cartoons.
(However, in most anime, the animation is done first, with a few mouth openings and closings done when a character would be talking, and they don't worry as much about lipsync. So most anime is "dubbed" into its original language.)
Unlike anime or regular animated films, lipsync in computer-animated films can be exact and precise enough that you could literally read the characters' lips, just as you might a live actor. Mainframe's Beast Wars and Reboot and others featured this sort of lipsync, done by feeding the pre-recorded audio tracks through a phonic recognition program that provides the mapping for the lip movements, if I recall correctly. (You might call it lipreading in reverse--"reading voice"--since it is getting the lip movements from the words, instead of the other way around.) One of the Mainframe folks once posted in the Transformers newsgroups that they were looking into ways to use that technology to aid the deaf, in fact.
If a TV series could afford to do that, do you really think that Square's 9-digit-budget blockbuster movie, touted as being the most hyperrealistic computer animation ever won't bother? --
You won't have to imagine when the DVD comes out. I've heard they're doing an English dub for the rental market and inclusion on the disc.
There was another computer-animated show with lipsynch that was redubbed for Japan, by the way. Mainframe's Transformers: Beast Wars had excellent lipsynch, but they didn't bother rerendering or anything when they redubbed for Japan. They just dubbed. (And for that matter, they even changed the gender of one of the characters, because female toys don't sell well in Japan!) --
[We fade in on the Crypto Cave, where our heroes Hellman and his faithful sidekick Diffie are relaxing after a strenuous workout. Suddenly, an alarm sounds!]
Diffie: Holey encryption algorithms, Hellman! It's the Encrypted Signal!
Hellman: Indeed. The RIAA must be up to its old tricks. Quickly, Diffie--to the German Crypto Mobile!
Diffie: Atomic random key generators to power . . . one-time pad to speed . .. --
FYI, it's because I have a Karma of over 25 so anything I post automatically gets a +1 rating right from the start (unless I check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box, as I did for this post, since it's not on the article topic). That post wasn't moderated at all, or there would have been a reason given after the number. --
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Bits, there is going to be a The Five Doctors special edition DVD, cleaned up, remastered, and chock full of bonus material.
--
You sure could have fooled me. I still see VHS movies come out new for $25--and that's not even mentioning the practice of "pricing for rental"--selling VHS tapes at $60-100 or more for the rental market for a couple of months before dropping their price for consumers. DVDs haven't been priced for rental so far, though some of the studios are making noises about it.
It's all in what you're willing to pay, I suppose. For me, $20 for a movie I really like is a worthwhile investment.
--
So the MPAA doesn't get money from the principled nerds who don't like their policies. Oh, boo-hoo. They've lost maybe 1/10 of 1% of their revenue. If that. Ohhhh, yeah, they're sure feeling the pain from that! That's showing them! I'm just positive they're going to collapse any day now.
And meanwhile you don't get the fun of hacking ways around their DRM, or the fun of watching these high-quality movies.
Get real. You're never going to affect the MPAA by boycotting unless you get a substantial number of other people to boycott, too. And from the way the public has dashed headlong into adoption of DVD, making it one of the fastest-adopted new technologies ever, that's clearly just not going to happen. Even if every single Slashdot reader joined you, it would not be enough for the MPAA to even notice. It would be lost amid all those people who simply haven't decided to upgrade from VHS yet.
If you're going to boycott, at least be honest about why you're doing it. It's not to hurt the MPAA, or help the EFF. It's not to convince them to drop the asinine region system. It's so you can congratulate yourself for being more righteous than all the other folks who don't.
I hope you enjoy your self-righteousness as much as the rest of us enjoy our movies. In the mean time, I think I'll go watch my Ultimate Edition DVD of The Mummy. Have fun!
--
The irony is that I have yet to get any foreign DVDs that I would need region selectability to play. All the (unbelievably cheap--and yet legit!) Hong Kong DVDs I order from HiViZone so I can see Jackie Chan unMiramangled, in the original Cantonese . . . are region-free already! (God bless the sensibility of Hong Kong DVD vendors!)
--
This does raise a bit of a question about what will happen when Neocron expands its beta to several thousand people, though. Hmmmm.
--
Plastic gets readers from Wired News , too.
--
They have costs involved in coding them. They have costs involved in pressing them to that oddball format of disc that Dreamcast uses. They have monster costs involved in standing up to Sony in a protracted series of legal battles and defending the rights of all emulators, free and bought alike, to even exist. (Do you think someone making those "free" emulators you love would be able to stand up to a major corporation's cease and desist orders?)
To recoup those costs, they have to make money. That's a simple fact of life of the capitalist society in which we live.
If you don't like it, hell, write your own PSX-to-Dreamcast emulator. It's legal--since Bleem did the footwork. (IANAL, yadda yadda)
--
That is to say, after losing in court three times, Sony has been pressuring retailers not to stock Bleemcast--and that could drive Bleem right out of business. This is something Slashdot people need to know--it affects your freedom to play the games you want how you want.
The above link includes contact information for most major retailers. Happy Slashdot-effecting.
--
It's not like you can't get realplayer clients for Linux, though. Sure, they're not the very latest, but they still play.
--
The people developing this system had better be careful, though . . . it might be that Kevin McClory (the fellow with the Thunderball remake rights) could sue them for patent infringement. ;)
--
What about bathroom tiles on the back of a Jupiter-going spaceship with three anuses and three mouths and cool shades and stuff?
--
Interestingly, Marc Laidlaw would later become a writer for another project with a nuclear theme--a little first-person shooter by the name of Half-Life. (As a little in-joke, some of his books can be seen in one of the lockers in the locker room in the early part of the game.)
--
Says it all, doesn't it?
--
I'm not terribly sanguine about Neocron's prospects to escape unchanged in this environment. Hailing from Europe (land of the unpixellated naked Sims), it has a bit more lax attitude about nudity, and features visibly naked strippers in the city's red-light district. (You can see them in the mpeg movie available from neocron.com's downloads page.)
--
(Of course, our registers sometimes ask us to card for the damnedest things, just because of the department-based way in which the system is set up. Cigarette lighters, books of matches, wheel ramps, tire wrenches--once I had a 16-year-old kid trying to buy cans of fix-a-flat, and the register told me not to let him! Had to get a manager's authorization to let it go through.)
--
For that matter, it's not even just for corporate vehicles anymore, either. And, for folks who want logos on their own cars, they don't even have to be advertising, either.
--
Pretty slick, in my opinion.
--
Oddly enough, the folks at Tritin Films--makers of some of the best-known Quake machinima on 'net--are going to fully-rendered animation for their new Quake: The Movie title--importing the models from the game into 3D Studio Max, "biping" them to add skeletons for more articulated movement, and creating a whole movie with them. And the trailer looks awesome.
--
Hate to burst your bubble, but it's not likely Jar-Jar is going to die. He exemplifies the same Campbellian archetype as Luke Skywalker from the first movie--the fool on a journey. When you think about that, it becomes likely that he will survive and mature through all three movies, and might even help facilitate delivering the young Luke Skywalker to his aunt and uncle on Tatooine.
--
Examples of the Japanese infatuation with English can be found at engrish.com. Be certain you're not drinking anything that could go down the wrong pipe, and that those within earshot are not bothered by hysterical laughter, before reading.
--
--
Western-produced animated movies usually have the voices recorded first, long before any of the animation is ever done. (Disney's Atlantis, for instance, features a character voiced by the late Jim Varney, who died a whole year before the film's release date.) This gives the animators a baseline to work from, and also lets them sync lip movements in the animation precisely to the pre-recorded voices. How much trouble they take to get it exact depends on the budget of the animation; Disney movies obviously feature much better lipsync than Saturday morning cartoons.
(However, in most anime, the animation is done first, with a few mouth openings and closings done when a character would be talking, and they don't worry as much about lipsync. So most anime is "dubbed" into its original language.)
Unlike anime or regular animated films, lipsync in computer-animated films can be exact and precise enough that you could literally read the characters' lips, just as you might a live actor. Mainframe's Beast Wars and Reboot and others featured this sort of lipsync, done by feeding the pre-recorded audio tracks through a phonic recognition program that provides the mapping for the lip movements, if I recall correctly. (You might call it lipreading in reverse--"reading voice"--since it is getting the lip movements from the words, instead of the other way around.) One of the Mainframe folks once posted in the Transformers newsgroups that they were looking into ways to use that technology to aid the deaf, in fact.
If a TV series could afford to do that, do you really think that Square's 9-digit-budget blockbuster movie, touted as being the most hyperrealistic computer animation ever won't bother?
--
You won't have to imagine when the DVD comes out. I've heard they're doing an English dub for the rental market and inclusion on the disc. There was another computer-animated show with lipsynch that was redubbed for Japan, by the way. Mainframe's Transformers: Beast Wars had excellent lipsynch, but they didn't bother rerendering or anything when they redubbed for Japan. They just dubbed. (And for that matter, they even changed the gender of one of the characters, because female toys don't sell well in Japan!)
--
Diffie: Holey encryption algorithms, Hellman! It's the Encrypted Signal!
Hellman: Indeed. The RIAA must be up to its old tricks. Quickly, Diffie--to the German Crypto Mobile!
Diffie: Atomic random key generators to power . . . one-time pad to speed . . .
--
FYI, it's because I have a Karma of over 25 so anything I post automatically gets a +1 rating right from the start (unless I check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box, as I did for this post, since it's not on the article topic). That post wasn't moderated at all, or there would have been a reason given after the number.
--