I agree with you, that in the context of the origial, it was very good. Blade sees his vampire part in a slightly different light, because of that vampire chick who had the hot ass. Character development.
There was a bit of discontinuity between the original and the sequel, but that's easy to dismiss with a bit of suspension of disbelief. Blade's partner shot himself but Blade didn't see. Or did a vampire sneak out of the shadows, take the gun away, and just shoot it in the air? The area WAS crawling with vampires after all.
Blade suddenly being rich... he DID kick the ass of some seriously rich vampires in the previous movie. We can only assume that his scrounging really paid off. Not a far-off assumption, all things considered.
Jeez... if the producers obviously ignored several aspects of a film, there must have been a reason for that. They weren't important. Many good artists ignore or deliberatly avoid certain aspects of their art, in order to emphasise or put work into other areas. Obviously, the director doesn't want you to judge him on this point.
The strong points of the movie are:
Special effetcts. (They kick ass.) This takes art and skill. Fight scenes and vampires were really well done.
Ambience: This movie creates a feel like no other movie. That in itself is an achievement. I didn't like any of the batman movies, but I so thouroughly enjoyed the architecture and art in the movie. The interior design and the dark eye candy of the movie was extremely well done, on par with Lord of the Rings, but in a dark, evil, industrial sort of way. The attention to detail, like the cool weapons, outfits and sets was out of this world.
The plot: It all depends what you are expecting... It's fast paced, it's fun, it's full of twists and turns, and a few overturned cliches. The plot went on like a fast-paced RPG session where everyone is just having a great time and not nit-picking every scene. For this reason, I liked it. Good entertainment. Definately not shakespeare or a technically accurate vampire documetary, but then again, I didn't expect it to be. Apparently the reviewer expected these things... so of course he didn't really like it. Compared to movies like "Ghosts of Mars", this action movie's plot kicked total ass. It's an action movie.
Police are bad, but they're necessary in small doses, because criminals are bad too. Much like chemotherapy is bad for you, but so is cancer.
Imagine now, your "walking police databases" on every second street corner, watching everyone. Keeping tabs on everyone. Comparing notes. Making files and dossiers on whomever they chose. It worked for the USSR for 80 years. The old method works great for China. Police state works good for Cuba.
Now imagine if they had this tool. The word Freedom would be a fart in the wind.
So explain to me why this tool would be good to have in a free democratic country? Explain to me how this would *ONLY* be used to catch criminals and terrorists. I want to know.
It seems that technology does this a lot these days. You take a perfectly normal, legal activity. Apply technology to enhance it. Suddenly, you get something big and scary, that a lot of people become frightened of. Here are some examples.
1) Copying tapes and sharing them with your friends: More or less legal, under fair use rules. Add technology to the mix, and you have something that could (potentially) ruin an entire industry. (Artists would have to resort to actually performing to earn money! IMHO is a good thing.)
2) A few cops around the city, looking out for bad guys: This is good. And legal. Add technology to the mix, suddenly you have cheap videocameras on every street corner and public place, hooked up to a central database server. You can't fart without a computer cataloging it and adding it to your file. This seems legal, but is very frightening.
There are other examples I'm sure, but I'm still too sleepy to think of them.
To understand why privacy is critical to democracy, think of this analogy. The right to the secret ballot. If you had no right to privacy in the voting booth, people in power will know how you vote, and could then use their power to push you around. Now imagine, that instead of knowing how you voted, powerful people just can call up everything about you, your likes and dislikes, where you go, who you talk to, and your deep personal opinions. All at the push of a button.
In my opinion, this is just as harmful to democracy as losing the secret ballot. Imagine how easy it would be for Chinese officials to round up people with opposing political views if they had all this future technology.
With technology in the mix, nobody, nowhere, will have the power to change a bad government system unless we act now to ensure it.
Must not be a very strong law, considering the amount of public video cameras in the UK. Oh wait, they're for your "protection". Just wait till they have face recognition installed... then the government will know your movements everywhere the moment you step out of your house.
Unless you're posting from China, or maybe soon the USA, then you probably live in a democracy. That means your rights will be whatever you, the people define them as. You really want privacy? You want to define privacy? Then get it encoded in your laws ASAP.
I think the real question isn't if we have the right or not... We can theoretically have any right we vote for, if we want it bad enough. The question that we must answer is exactly how should we define law-enforced privacy? Face-recognition software is bad in public places? They say it's public, so we have no right to privacy. Well, imagine, for a moment, instead of a camera in a public place, you saw a uniformed police officer standing on the sidewalk, or in the cafe, walking around tables, visibly and openly taking a photograph of everyone, or perhaps holding a camcorder.
We must ask how safe would we feel in this situation.
There would be far less criminals on the streets. But remember, never piss off the watchers....
One of the most important parts of punishing a person or corporation that has broken the law, is to ask "will they do it again, and how do we stop them?". Testimony in court that M$ has not stopped the practice that has been determined as illegal is VERY important and relevant.
It's like saying "the convicted rapist has raped someone else while out on bail." I don't know about your country, but that kind of testimony in sentencing would be very relavant in sentencing in my country.
Here in Canada, it is possible lock someone up and throw away the key, if they're deemed dangerous offenders who will likely re-offend. I sure wish there was something like that for corporations.
Extaordinary claims requre extraordinary evidence.... Electrogravitics has none, to date. Still, a fun place to play with theoretical physics equations.
If I knew everything about you, there's no end to the stuff I could do to fuck you up. No end. And nobody would ever have to know who did it, why, or even know if it happened at all. I guess you trust that nobody would ever want to do this to you, for any reason. Not even... to get your money!?
I suppose you're a troll, or someone who actually trusts your governments, and all the other governments in the world to treat their citizens properly.
Why hide it at all? Why not mount another filesystem that uses this space exclusively? Imagine mounting a filesystem, whose total size is equal to all the cluster waste on your hard drive? Then treat it identical to any other drive. When you're finished copying your stuff to it, unmount it. Or better yet, write a driver that syncs your normal cluster space with your wasted cluster space, so as to prevent data loss in some way... Surely there is a use for this! It would be a great place to toss all unused cookies or other cruft that I wouldn't otherwise want to take up space... A temporary drive of sorts? What do you hackers think, would it be hard to write a filesystem that uses this?
Each unique web page served to me? Or each slashdot story I click on, and all threads then suddenly are included in this page? If every time I hit "refresh" the counter goes down again, I'm going to be in sent to the poorhouse!
BROADBAND pocket HD would be cool...
on
iWarez
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· Score: 2
Definition of warez heaven: Imagine the iPOD with broad band wireless. Then walk into a CompUSA store... *sigh*
NOT THEFT but something else
on
iWarez
·
· Score: 1
I don't think that this could be considered stealing, legally, because CompUSA was not deprived of anything. What would this crime be, if there is even a law for this? DMCA? Mischief? I think he'd be charged the same as a remote hacker would, methinks...
I fear that the world will have to suffer a few digital dictatorships before things will swing the other way. Much like we suffered through a few communist regimes before it became a largely discredited practice. It's sad that the British will be leading this next wave into oblivion, with the United States closely behind.
It's hard to break out of a regular totalitarian dictatorship... with the convenience of computers to gather data, I wonder how long it will be to escape the computer-enhanced ones.
And you think that you have issues with Big Brother now... wait till you see what the English have in store for you... Pretty soon in England you won't even be able to take a sh!t without having it logged in a GPS-enabled toilet and uploaded to a mainframe database to be added to your profile.
Careful what you ask for... The brits are the worst for privacy issues.
I think it's just you BioWare folk. When I see a troop of you congregating at the local Taco Time, and I'm trying to listen in (hopefully to catch some insider info on new games coming out!), I can't understand a damn thing you say! I can definately say it's easy to pick you guys out of a crowd. It might just be all the long-haired geekspeak, but I don't think so...
The guy put up a sign on his property. The legal dispute was regarding a municipal signage bylaw. Though there are implications that spill onto the net, this seems to be an entirely meatspace event. Perhaps the poster merely wanted to highlight that in the USA the decision would have went the other way? I'm confused... If somoene from Quebec who knows more about this can explain how this is a "news for nerds" story, and not a story consumerdot.org story?
Perhaps only a geek would post a sign on his property when he was mad at a company??? Ok, this is definately "news for nerds"...
"The laws for computer EULA's are much more vague"
They're not laws. They're contracts! Some contracts cannot be enforcable, because it's illegal to deny a consumer certain rights (such as fair-use backups.) Lets hope this is the case.
Suppose Microsoft hires a legal firm to do some small yet non-trivial task... In searching for lawyers, the prosecution against Microsoft would then not choose that law firm, for conflict of interest reasons... (They worked for Microsoft in the past, why should you trust them to be hard on MS.)
As long as all the law firms (not necessarily each individual lawyer) are are on the payroll for something small, that's considered a conflict of interest, so they won't be considered. $40,000,000 suddenly will go a long way if you want every law firm in New York to give you a review on an EULA and suggest grammatical changes, or other such trivia.
Chechens are freedom fighters, who have more justification to fight thier opressors than George Washington ever did. Russia, the "Evil Empire" still opresses countries who are weak, like Chechnya. But now Russia is the USA's friend, so can do no wrong.
Amazing how things change. If this was 15 years ago, any US Offical would have said that Russian occupation of Chechnya was illegal, and the Chechens had all the right to fight. I wouldn't be surprised some of the US millitary help for Afghanistan against the USSR made it's way to Chechnya.
Once again the USA turns its back on people fighting for freedom, because of it's own interest.
I'm of Ukrainian descent, and travel to Ukraine frequently. The customs officers I've met were nice and friendly, to the point of letting me off of minor infractions as a kindness. The police are stern, but vaguely fair... a $20 bribe is usually enough to get you anywhere you want to go. There are bad apples everywhere, and there is less law and order in Ukraine. But, to it's credit, I feel FAR more safe on the streets of Ukraine's major cities at night, than I felt in Chicago, or Detroit.
To answer your question... Nobody, unless they're paid. However, the existence of the law now allows any mafia who control the police to extort more money from the people burning illegal CD's. In Ukraine, the police and the government are a tool of organized crime.
By your reasoning... Russia never subjugated Ukrainians by force. They merely witheld food, which by law, was property of the state anyways.
Denying a country 50% of it's GDP is "force" in my books. We have to stop thinking of "us vs them" nationalism, and understand on the international scale, we are all somewhat responsible for the welfare of each other. I think the USA should have done the opposite, and refused to enforce international IP law in Ukraine until it's economy recovers enough so that the average Ukrainian can afford a $15USD Britney Spears CD.
But, that would take vision and leadership, and would pay off beter in the long run anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Was a sequel to BLADE.
I agree with you, that in the context of the origial, it was very good. Blade sees his vampire part in a slightly different light, because of that vampire chick who had the hot ass. Character development.
There was a bit of discontinuity between the original and the sequel, but that's easy to dismiss with a bit of suspension of disbelief. Blade's partner shot himself but Blade didn't see. Or did a vampire sneak out of the shadows, take the gun away, and just shoot it in the air? The area WAS crawling with vampires after all.
Blade suddenly being rich... he DID kick the ass of some seriously rich vampires in the previous movie. We can only assume that his scrounging really paid off. Not a far-off assumption, all things considered.
Jeez... if the producers obviously ignored several aspects of a film, there must have been a reason for that. They weren't important. Many good artists ignore or deliberatly avoid certain aspects of their art, in order to emphasise or put work into other areas. Obviously, the director doesn't want you to judge him on this point.
The strong points of the movie are:
Special effetcts. (They kick ass.) This takes art and skill. Fight scenes and vampires were really well done.
Ambience: This movie creates a feel like no other movie. That in itself is an achievement. I didn't like any of the batman movies, but I so thouroughly enjoyed the architecture and art in the movie. The interior design and the dark eye candy of the movie was extremely well done, on par with Lord of the Rings, but in a dark, evil,
industrial sort of way. The attention to detail, like the cool weapons, outfits and sets was out of this world.
The plot: It all depends what you are expecting... It's fast paced, it's fun, it's full of twists and turns, and a few overturned cliches. The plot went on like a fast-paced RPG session where everyone is just having a great time and not nit-picking every scene. For this reason, I liked it. Good entertainment. Definately not shakespeare or a technically accurate vampire documetary, but then again, I didn't expect it to be. Apparently the reviewer expected these things... so of course he didn't really like it. Compared to movies like "Ghosts of Mars", this action movie's plot kicked total ass. It's an action movie.
So yea... I loved the movie, and this was why.
Bork!
Why?
Police are bad, but they're necessary in small doses, because criminals are bad too. Much like chemotherapy is bad for you, but so is cancer.
Imagine now, your "walking police databases" on every second street corner, watching everyone. Keeping tabs on everyone. Comparing notes. Making files and dossiers on whomever they chose. It worked for the USSR for 80 years. The old method works great for China. Police state works good for Cuba.
Now imagine if they had this tool. The word Freedom would be a fart in the wind.
So explain to me why this tool would be good to have in a free democratic country? Explain to me how this would *ONLY* be used to catch criminals and terrorists. I want to know.
It seems that technology does this a lot these days. You take a perfectly normal, legal activity. Apply technology to enhance it. Suddenly, you get something big and scary, that a lot of people become frightened of. Here are some examples.
1) Copying tapes and sharing them with your friends: More or less legal, under fair use rules. Add technology to the mix, and you have something that could (potentially) ruin an entire industry. (Artists would have to resort to actually performing to earn money! IMHO is a good thing.)
2) A few cops around the city, looking out for bad guys: This is good. And legal. Add technology to the mix, suddenly you have cheap videocameras on every street corner and public place, hooked up to a central database server. You can't fart without a computer cataloging it and adding it to your file. This seems legal, but is very frightening.
There are other examples I'm sure, but I'm still too sleepy to think of them.
To understand why privacy is critical to democracy, think of this analogy. The right to the secret ballot. If you had no right to privacy in the voting booth, people in power will know how you vote, and could then use their power to push you around. Now imagine, that instead of knowing how you voted, powerful people just can call up everything about you, your likes and dislikes, where you go, who you talk to, and your deep personal opinions. All at the push of a button.
In my opinion, this is just as harmful to democracy as losing the secret ballot. Imagine how easy it would be for Chinese officials to round up people with opposing political views if they had all this future technology.
With technology in the mix, nobody, nowhere, will have the power to change a bad government system unless we act now to ensure it.
Must not be a very strong law, considering the amount of public video cameras in the UK. Oh wait, they're for your "protection". Just wait till they have face recognition installed... then the government will know your movements everywhere the moment you step out of your house.
"Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy?"
Unless you're posting from China, or maybe soon the USA, then you probably live in a democracy. That means your rights will be whatever you, the people define them as. You really want privacy? You want to define privacy? Then get it encoded in your laws ASAP.
I think the real question isn't if we have the right or not... We can theoretically have any right we vote for, if we want it bad enough. The question that we must answer is exactly how should we define law-enforced privacy? Face-recognition software is bad in public places? They say it's public, so we have no right to privacy. Well, imagine, for a moment, instead of a camera in a public place, you saw a uniformed police officer standing on the sidewalk, or in the cafe, walking around tables, visibly and openly taking a photograph of everyone, or perhaps holding a camcorder.
We must ask how safe would we feel in this situation.
There would be far less criminals on the streets. But remember, never piss off the watchers....
Nothing here to see, move along.
One of the most important parts of punishing a person or corporation that has broken the law, is to ask "will they do it again, and how do we stop them?". Testimony in court that M$ has not stopped the practice that has been determined as illegal is VERY important and relevant.
It's like saying "the convicted rapist has raped someone else while out on bail." I don't know about your country, but that kind of testimony in sentencing would be very relavant in sentencing in my country.
Here in Canada, it is possible lock someone up and throw away the key, if they're deemed dangerous offenders who will likely re-offend. I sure wish there was something like that for corporations.
BORK!
Extaordinary claims requre extraordinary evidence.... Electrogravitics has none, to date. Still, a fun place to play with theoretical physics equations.
If I knew everything about you, there's no end to the stuff I could do to fuck you up. No end. And nobody would ever have to know who did it, why, or even know if it happened at all. I guess you trust that nobody would ever want to do this to you, for any reason. Not even... to get your money!?
I suppose you're a troll, or someone who actually trusts your governments, and all the other governments in the world to treat their citizens properly.
I suppose you trust corporations implicitly too.
Why hide it at all? Why not mount another filesystem that uses this space exclusively? Imagine mounting a filesystem, whose total size is equal to all the cluster waste on your hard drive? Then treat it identical to any other drive. When you're finished copying your stuff to it, unmount it. Or better yet, write a driver that syncs your normal cluster space with your wasted cluster space, so as to prevent data loss in some way... Surely there is a use for this! It would be a great place to toss all unused cookies or other cruft that I wouldn't otherwise want to take up space... A temporary drive of sorts? What do you hackers think, would it be hard to write a filesystem that uses this?
Each unique web page served to me? Or each slashdot story I click on, and all threads then suddenly are included in this page? If every time I hit "refresh" the counter goes down again, I'm going to be in sent to the poorhouse!
Definition of warez heaven: Imagine the iPOD with broad band wireless. Then walk into a CompUSA store... *sigh*
I don't think that this could be considered stealing, legally, because CompUSA was not deprived of anything. What would this crime be, if there is even a law for this? DMCA? Mischief? I think he'd be charged the same as a remote hacker would, methinks...
I fear that the world will have to suffer a few digital dictatorships before things will swing the other way. Much like we suffered through a few communist regimes before it became a largely discredited practice. It's sad that the British will be leading this next wave into oblivion, with the United States closely behind.
It's hard to break out of a regular totalitarian dictatorship... with the convenience of computers to gather data, I wonder how long it will be to escape the computer-enhanced ones.
Bork!
And you think that you have issues with Big Brother now... wait till you see what the English have in store for you... Pretty soon in England you won't even be able to take a sh!t without having it logged in a GPS-enabled toilet and uploaded to a mainframe database to be added to your profile.
Careful what you ask for... The brits are the worst for privacy issues.
"Like living in the armpit of Canada"
Sorry my friend, you are mistaken. Armpits are generally warm places... It can't be Edmonton.
Bork?
I think it's just you BioWare folk. When I see a troop of you congregating at the local Taco Time, and I'm trying to listen in (hopefully to catch some insider info on new games coming out!), I can't understand a damn thing you say! I can definately say it's easy to pick you guys out of a crowd. It might just be all the long-haired geekspeak, but I don't think so...
E
Old Strathcona... Canada's new Silicon Valley
The guy put up a sign on his property. The legal dispute was regarding a municipal signage bylaw. Though there are implications that spill onto the net, this seems to be an entirely meatspace event. Perhaps the poster merely wanted to highlight that in the USA the decision would have went the other way? I'm confused... If somoene from Quebec who knows more about this can explain how this is a "news for nerds" story, and not a story consumerdot.org story?
Perhaps only a geek would post a sign on his property when he was mad at a company??? Ok, this is definately "news for nerds"...
BORK?
"The laws for computer EULA's are much more vague"
They're not laws. They're contracts! Some contracts cannot be enforcable, because it's illegal to deny a consumer certain rights (such as fair-use backups.) Lets hope this is the case.
BORK
Suppose Microsoft hires a legal firm to do some small yet non-trivial task... In searching for lawyers, the prosecution against Microsoft would then not choose that law firm, for conflict of interest reasons... (They worked for Microsoft in the past, why should you trust them to be hard on MS.)
As long as all the law firms (not necessarily each individual lawyer) are are on the payroll for something small, that's considered a conflict of interest, so they won't be considered. $40,000,000 suddenly will go a long way if you want every law firm in New York to give you a review on an EULA and suggest grammatical changes, or other such trivia.
Scary.
Chechens are freedom fighters, who have more justification to fight thier opressors than George Washington ever did. Russia, the "Evil Empire" still opresses countries who are weak, like Chechnya. But now Russia is the USA's friend, so can do no wrong.
Amazing how things change. If this was 15 years ago, any US Offical would have said that Russian occupation of Chechnya was illegal, and the Chechens had all the right to fight. I wouldn't be surprised some of the US millitary help for Afghanistan against the USSR made it's way to Chechnya.
Once again the USA turns its back on people fighting for freedom, because of it's own interest.
Sick.
"Interesting to note that you took my post as an argument".
:-)
Too many nuts here are serious about things like that... Re-reading it, I can see it now. My apologies.
E
I'm of Ukrainian descent, and travel to Ukraine frequently. The customs officers I've met were nice and friendly, to the point of letting me off of minor infractions as a kindness. The police are stern, but vaguely fair... a $20 bribe is usually enough to get you anywhere you want to go. There are bad apples everywhere, and there is less law and order in Ukraine. But, to it's credit, I feel FAR more safe on the streets of Ukraine's major cities at night, than I felt in Chicago, or Detroit.
To answer your question... Nobody, unless they're paid. However, the existence of the law now allows any mafia who control the police to extort more money from the people burning illegal CD's. In Ukraine, the police and the government are a tool of organized crime.
"Forced" is not too strong a word.
By your reasoning... Russia never subjugated Ukrainians by force. They merely witheld food, which by law, was property of the state anyways.
Denying a country 50% of it's GDP is "force" in my books. We have to stop thinking of "us vs them" nationalism, and understand on the international scale, we are all somewhat responsible for the welfare of each other. I think the USA should have done the opposite, and refused to enforce international IP law in Ukraine until it's economy recovers enough so that the average Ukrainian can afford a $15USD Britney Spears CD.
But, that would take vision and leadership, and would pay off beter in the long run anyways.
So what gives?