That's actually a good idea; What I don't understand is why the record companies aren't doing this - posting their MP3's as 64bitrate samples. This would be a way to tell the anti copyright protection crowd to shut up - they could actively encourage trading, and their precious perfect digital copies would still be under control. I think that the VAST OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of people copying music (the n*stink and Brittney fans) probably dont' care about bitrate or quality - they're just as content to tape the song off of FM radio anyway (and listen to it over and over 10 zillion times, because the radio didn't play it enough).
But isn't there a fundamental difference in today's technology and so-called "fair use?" If a reviewer quotes part of a book, only a small portion of that book is duplicated and make freely available. If a home viewer tapes a show on a VCR, the most he can do is run a few copies off for friends. But with digital content and the Internet, a home computer user can share a perfect copy of any content with potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort. Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to copyright holders? How do you propose we stem illegal distribution of copyrighted material, other than mandating that copy-thwarting be built into any device that can read the original work?
But isn't there a fundamental difference in today's technology and homicide? If a murderer stabs one person with a knife, or runs wild through a shopping mall with a pistol, the most he can do is kill off a few people. But with nuclear weapons, a crazed killer can easily murder potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort. Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to human lives? How do you propose we stem illegal destruction of human lives, other than mandating that nuclear weapons be kept out of the hands of average citizens? Counterpoint: We already have laws on murder, so why should we encumber certain types of weapons with new laws?
The real question is; will they unload the totally messed up PVR hardware E* currently offers (7100/7200/501, etc) and offer their combined service through DirectTivos? I sure would like to have a PVR that doesn't crash 3 times a week and lose recordings, or spuriously fails to record.
(I can't say this enough, the Dish Network 7100/7200 player is about the worst peice of crap device I've ever seen. I'm sure glad EchoStar doesn't make air traffic control hardware)
Ah, if only you guys at D* would carry UPN and WB in my market (hint - BVS and Enterprise - DUH!) I would dump my buggy, crashy, unreliable peice of crap DishPlayer for a DirecTivo in about 3 nanoseconds.
Yeah, but I bet you don't get all the crashes and missed recordings that I get with my wonderful Microsoft-produced DishPlayer. Not to mention ad built into every screen continually chiding you to sign up for WebTV. Oh yeah.
I honestly would like to see news broadcasts FROM other countries - so people can stop accusing me of being a biased brainwashed American.
I'm actually very interested in seeing Al Jazeera these days. Not that Al Jazeera isn't biased as hell too - but I think that it would do wonders for objectivity among ALL news sources. CNN would probably self-destruct.
Are you kidding me? Music videos used to be promotional materials used for selling records to record store chain owners.
Something sick and evil happened in the early 80's where videos themselves became valued content, and the basis for their own cable channel. The viewers are watching commercials, intersperced with more commercials - 24 hours a day - and the fuckers at MTV couldn't leave that absurd business model alone, and for some reason felt it necessary to toss in some game shows and other crap.
They had people endlessly watching commercials, and they changed it. I'll never understand.
So it didn't have anything to do with huge energy conglomerates (like Enron, wait, no not actually *like* Enron, it was ACTUALLY Enron) fixing spot-prices of natural gas on the commodities market so they could take advantage of an artificially generated spike to rake in huge profits, while driving the (public) power distribution side of the business into bankruptcy?
I guess we'll see how the ongoing lawsuits pan out, but from what I've read in the press, the whole rolling-blackout deal had nothing at all to do with the state of semi-deregulation, and everything to do with plain old securities fraud.
I'm a Christian, and on Sunday night, I had several guests over for dinner. For my family, it was Easter. One couple was Jewish (so for them, it was Passover-ish), another Agnostic, and another Wiccan (who celebrated Ishtar). Nobody got bent out of shape. I suppose the presence of a Muslim would have been a problem though, because we went through about 6 bottles of wine.
First, I'm American, not Canadian. I love Canada. I like Canadian TV stars, I watch shows produced in Canada, I love Canadian sports (curling, not that hockey crap) and I drink Canadian beer when I get the chance. I wish you guys made cars.
When I was in Canada last, I saw the AOL commercial. It was EXACTLY the same as the US version, except that the scenes where it showed people chatting were about Canadian topics: "I drove to Nova Scotia last night" "really? how long did it take" "did you see the hockey game last night"? But when you look at the US version of the commercial it was like: "I drove to Indiana last night" "did you catch the football game?"
Plug n play cultural references. I can just see the commercial for Afghanistan On Line - "I drove to Spin-Boldak last night" "did you catch the Buzkashi game yesterday?"
You see - the alternative; NOT "localizing" media, is perceived as arrogant, cultural imperialism. Localizing it, is basically using stereotypes, and is really even MORE arrogant.
At my software company, we localize our software. But I realize that it's done at huge expense and at a pace that's really not compatible with the pace of software product development. I can totally understand why suppliers of media don't often "localize" their content. In fact, in many cases, it's probably impossible to totally localize something. Look at how Japan does it with Anime. There are some movies where you can translate the words to English - literally, but it still does not make sense. Then there's cultural in-jokes, street signs, etc. You can only do so much. So where do you draw the line between something that's offensive and something that's not?
Well, in my neck of the woods - lots of people you might meet on the street would not be offended to see a movie scene where a guy is going down on another guy, who's been surgically modified to have breasts. That's San Francisco. But there are people in Saudi Arabia who would be mortally offended by sitting through a movie where a woman shows her face in public and doesn't get stoned by a mob.
You simply can not culturally sanitize stuff like that. Hell, a mere 100 miles South East of San Francisco, you could show a movie that portrays a woman taking her children away from her husband, and moving in with another woman, and both of them working and supporting themselves, and one of them running for public office, or maybe being a Lutheran minister, and residents of Stockton, CA would get steamed. In the same language. "Oh lordy! Those Hollywood heathen are trying to corrupt my moral values again!"
The other alternative is to limit the markets to which you attempt to sell the media. Essentially just a different form of censorship than localization.
Or just sell it, and say, "Fuck em if they can't take a joke". Which is what's perceived as arrogant - and the end result is: a billion Muslims feeling like the infidel Americans are out to wipe them out. Hell, we already hate everyone who's not white. . .
I don't know about you, but I lost a buttload of money in the stock market on that day. A lot of others did as well. Yes, the market was heading in a generally southbound direction, but look at the charts. 9/11 was a BAD day. Not to trivialize the deaths - but in my most cynical mind frame, this struck a sound blow to the heart of America.
Re:The sad truth: foreigners gobble up US culture
on
Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 2
which Islam? The Sunnis or the Shiites? If both, how will we keep them from killing eachother long enough. IMO they're worse than the Catholics vs. Protestants. Well, maybe more like Catholics vs. Protestants back in the 16th-17th century. They hardly bomb eachother much anymore. Okay, well, the random abortion clinic here and there. . .
Yeah, the Christians have all their shit together alright. Let's have the Muslims get their shit together like THAT. That's what I wanna see.
Re:Good to see misinformation is alive and well.
on
Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 2
Do you want to see a massive slaughter of innocents the likes that has never before been seen? One that will make Hitler's Holocaust look like summer camp? I guarantee you that if the US withdrew support for Israel, the dozen or so Arab nations surrounding Israel would resume the war THEY STARTED in 1967, and kill every last fucking jew they find. Not one of these countries recognizes Israel as a legitimate country with a right to exist. Then they will travel throughout the region and destroy every last shred of evidence of any historical link jews have to the region (they've already done that on the temple mount - regardless of how you might feel about possible remains of Solomon's temple - or what the religious implications might be, a crucial archeological site has been occupied and is being systematically erased, by religious zealots who don't want to admit that they once lived side by side in that region with jews, peacefully.)
I'm not saying that all arabs hate jews or want Israel destroyed. But the radicals do. And it's not the moderates who have the power in most of these nations.
Ah! So that recording of Nixon and Billy Graham; that paranoid shit about the jews controlling the media is TRUE?! Holy crap! I'm shocked that the jews brainwashed ME into believing that we need to keep giving them aid. I'm shocked that 30 years of Washington policy makers from both parties were also brainwashed by the jewish-controlled media. Just shocked.
Next thing you know, they'll be controlling the internet too!
Re:Good to see misinformation is alive and well.
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
Now, if we could only explain this to the people in the middle east who hate us. The ones to whom we're losing the propaganda war.
What I'd like to know is if they have a way out: of being trapped by Microsoft solutions.
How the hell am I supposed to view 15 years of legacy MS Office documents and email data if I were to switch to Unix? I'm fucked. I wish I'd realized this when we settled on Microsoft.
Re:Good to see misinformation is alive and well.
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
I would have to agree that pretty much anything on this list of attrocities (let's call a spade a spade here) is pretty much justified in that nearly every one was as you said; Cold-war-related.
Stopping the expansion of communism was a very important task. Yes, it was very dirty - but go and check your list and see where we failed. Pol Pot. Had we gotten in and installed a puppet government in there, would we have averted the catastrophe that followed with Pol Pot? Or would it have been worse, and would we be villified for causing the worse mess. It looks like either way, with the original poster's logic, the US is the bad guy. Because we in some way affected the course of events. We didn't play isolationist - so when something good happened as a result, some eggs still got broken, and the US was the bad guy. Or when something didn't go right, the US is still the bad guy. We just can't win.
Well, I'll tell you what - these areas where the US intervened stopped the global spread of communism. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't humane. But in the end, I think billions were likely saved. If you look at the WORST mass murderers in history, they were the communists (not to smear communism as an ideal - just the people who were claiming to be communists; Pol Pot, Stalin, etc). Imagine if the US had done nothing. Those of us still living today would be under a global communist rule with no hope at all of a counterrevolution. Only it wouldn't be communism. It would be a harsh dictatorship labelled communism.
And during the brief (and ill-fated) resistance prior to the rise of the global communist state, we would likely have permenantely damaged the environment with a nuclear exchange.
The US keeps taking it in the shorts because if it's relationship with Israel, and we keep giving them money, and putting a great deal of effort into preserving their miserable existance as a state.
Yet, when the US is asked for aid for starving people in poor countries, we refuse. (we're far behind many European countries in that regard)
Even when you brush aside the institutionalized lies and propaganda of the Arab leaders over the past 30 years, the US's support of Israel still looks pretty ugly. And it's not something that was made up. It's the truth.
I'm fashioning some bits of my SCA armor from this stuff. Very light, very excellent impact distribution, dimensional stability, and it's easy to work with. It heat-forms at about 330 degrees F.
However, I'd be careful with this type of modification, because the one thing Polycarbonate and Lexan (the GE brand-name for the stuff) are is sensitive to chemical solvents. So the wrong paint thinner, or contact with cyanoacrylates causes crazing, and what was once flexible and tough will shatter like safety glass when exposed.
. . . . Mohammed (Linus) came along and united them under the the flag of Islam (Linux), after which they created an empire that covered the half of the known world, and creating one of the most advanced civilizations of its time (My computer once most mainstream games are available on linux)
To make that really work, Linus would have to have been computer illiterate. Or maybe you weren't talking about Linux, maybe you were talking about GNU?
What the fuck to the MPAA and RIAA member companies think they're going to do when all computers are encumbered with this new copy-protection technology?
Lucas wants to go 100% digital, from the lens to the screen. Disney wants to eliminate celluloid from the animation process, most animated features are done largely on computer. Tell me that all the digital toys the music industry has to play with could be dispensed with in the production of the latest BoyBand video?
So - you're going to take all your creative professionals, encumber the fuck out of their equipment, you'll be increasing your OWN production costs by an order of magnitude - and more since you wont be able to use cheap commodity hardware anymore, because economy of scale will not apply to things that mainstream consumers aren't going to buy zillions of. And who's going to support your encumbered technology? Certainly not the $10/hr MCSE who learned NT and Linux on his homebrew Athalon running pirated software playing pirated MP3s.
Eisner says he's tired of being finessed by the technology industry? I think he's too full of himself. Don't bite the hand that feeds you Mickey.
Slashdot Mirror
That's actually a good idea;
What I don't understand is why the record companies aren't doing this - posting their MP3's as 64bitrate samples. This would be a way to tell the anti copyright protection crowd to shut up - they could actively encourage trading, and their precious perfect digital copies would still be under control. I think that the VAST OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of people copying music (the n*stink and Brittney fans) probably dont' care about bitrate or quality - they're just as content to tape the song off of FM radio anyway (and listen to it over and over 10 zillion times, because the radio didn't play it enough).
But isn't there a fundamental difference in today's technology and so-called "fair use?" If a reviewer quotes part of a book, only a small portion of that book is duplicated and make freely available. If a home viewer tapes a show on a VCR, the most he can do is run a few copies off for friends. But with digital content and the Internet, a home computer user can share a perfect copy of any content with potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort. Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to copyright holders? How do you propose we stem illegal distribution of copyrighted material, other than mandating that copy-thwarting be built into any device that can read the original work?
But isn't there a fundamental difference in today's technology and homicide? If a murderer stabs one person with a knife, or runs wild through a shopping mall with a pistol, the most he can do is kill off a few people. But with nuclear weapons, a crazed killer can easily murder potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort. Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to human lives? How do you propose we stem illegal destruction of human lives, other than mandating that nuclear weapons be kept out of the hands of average citizens?
Counterpoint:
We already have laws on murder, so why should we encumber certain types of weapons with new laws?
I'll be too busy asking him why he won't fix my piece of shit Dish Player.
The real question is;
will they unload the totally messed up PVR hardware E* currently offers (7100/7200/501, etc) and offer their combined service through DirectTivos? I sure would like to have a PVR that doesn't crash 3 times a week and lose recordings, or spuriously fails to record.
(I can't say this enough, the Dish Network 7100/7200 player is about the worst peice of crap device I've ever seen. I'm sure glad EchoStar doesn't make air traffic control hardware)
Ah, if only you guys at D* would carry UPN and WB in my market (hint - BVS and Enterprise - DUH!) I would dump my buggy, crashy, unreliable peice of crap DishPlayer for a DirecTivo in about 3 nanoseconds.
And I really hope the merger does not go through.
Yeah, but I bet you don't get all the crashes and missed recordings that I get with my wonderful Microsoft-produced DishPlayer. Not to mention ad built into every screen continually chiding you to sign up for WebTV. Oh yeah.
I honestly would like to see news broadcasts FROM other countries - so people can stop accusing me of being a biased brainwashed American.
I'm actually very interested in seeing Al Jazeera these days. Not that Al Jazeera isn't biased as hell too - but I think that it would do wonders for objectivity among ALL news sources. CNN would probably self-destruct.
I would have the courts ban home shopping networks long before I'd think of banning the local networks.
Are you kidding me? Music videos used to be promotional materials used for selling records to record store chain owners.
Something sick and evil happened in the early 80's where videos themselves became valued content, and the basis for their own cable channel. The viewers are watching commercials, intersperced with more commercials - 24 hours a day - and the fuckers at MTV couldn't leave that absurd business model alone, and for some reason felt it necessary to toss in some game shows and other crap.
They had people endlessly watching commercials, and they changed it. I'll never understand.
So it didn't have anything to do with huge energy conglomerates (like Enron, wait, no not actually *like* Enron, it was ACTUALLY Enron) fixing spot-prices of natural gas on the commodities market so they could take advantage of an artificially generated spike to rake in huge profits, while driving the (public) power distribution side of the business into bankruptcy?
I guess we'll see how the ongoing lawsuits pan out, but from what I've read in the press, the whole rolling-blackout deal had nothing at all to do with the state of semi-deregulation, and everything to do with plain old securities fraud.
I'm a Christian, and on Sunday night, I had several guests over for dinner. For my family, it was Easter. One couple was Jewish (so for them, it was Passover-ish), another Agnostic, and another Wiccan (who celebrated Ishtar). Nobody got bent out of shape.
I suppose the presence of a Muslim would have been a problem though, because we went through about 6 bottles of wine.
First, I'm American, not Canadian. I love Canada. I like Canadian TV stars, I watch shows produced in Canada, I love Canadian sports (curling, not that hockey crap) and I drink Canadian beer when I get the chance.
I wish you guys made cars.
When I was in Canada last, I saw the AOL commercial. It was EXACTLY the same as the US version, except that the scenes where it showed people chatting were about Canadian topics: "I drove to Nova Scotia last night" "really? how long did it take" "did you see the hockey game last night"?
But when you look at the US version of the commercial it was like: "I drove to Indiana last night" "did you catch the football game?"
Plug n play cultural references. I can just see the commercial for Afghanistan On Line - "I drove to Spin-Boldak last night" "did you catch the Buzkashi game yesterday?"
You see - the alternative; NOT "localizing" media, is perceived as arrogant, cultural imperialism. Localizing it, is basically using stereotypes, and is really even MORE arrogant.
At my software company, we localize our software. But I realize that it's done at huge expense and at a pace that's really not compatible with the pace of software product development. I can totally understand why suppliers of media don't often "localize" their content. In fact, in many cases, it's probably impossible to totally localize something. Look at how Japan does it with Anime. There are some movies where you can translate the words to English - literally, but it still does not make sense. Then there's cultural in-jokes, street signs, etc. You can only do so much. So where do you draw the line between something that's offensive and something that's not?
Well, in my neck of the woods - lots of people you might meet on the street would not be offended to see a movie scene where a guy is going down on another guy, who's been surgically modified to have breasts. That's San Francisco. But there are people in Saudi Arabia who would be mortally offended by sitting through a movie where a woman shows her face in public and doesn't get stoned by a mob.
You simply can not culturally sanitize stuff like that. Hell, a mere 100 miles South East of San Francisco, you could show a movie that portrays a woman taking her children away from her husband, and moving in with another woman, and both of them working and supporting themselves, and one of them running for public office, or maybe being a Lutheran minister, and residents of Stockton, CA would get steamed. In the same language. "Oh lordy! Those Hollywood heathen are trying to corrupt my moral values again!"
The other alternative is to limit the markets to which you attempt to sell the media. Essentially just a different form of censorship than localization.
Or just sell it, and say, "Fuck em if they can't take a joke". Which is what's perceived as arrogant - and the end result is: a billion Muslims feeling like the infidel Americans are out to wipe them out. Hell, we already hate everyone who's not white. . .
I don't know about you, but I lost a buttload of money in the stock market on that day. A lot of others did as well. Yes, the market was heading in a generally southbound direction, but look at the charts. 9/11 was a BAD day. Not to trivialize the deaths - but in my most cynical mind frame, this struck a sound blow to the heart of America.
which Islam? The Sunnis or the Shiites? If both, how will we keep them from killing eachother long enough. IMO they're worse than the Catholics vs. Protestants. Well, maybe more like Catholics vs. Protestants back in the 16th-17th century. They hardly bomb eachother much anymore. Okay, well, the random abortion clinic here and there. . .
Yeah, the Christians have all their shit together alright. Let's have the Muslims get their shit together like THAT. That's what I wanna see.
Do you want to see a massive slaughter of innocents the likes that has never before been seen? One that will make Hitler's Holocaust look like summer camp? I guarantee you that if the US withdrew support for Israel, the dozen or so Arab nations surrounding Israel would resume the war THEY STARTED in 1967, and kill every last fucking jew they find. Not one of these countries recognizes Israel as a legitimate country with a right to exist.
Then they will travel throughout the region and destroy every last shred of evidence of any historical link jews have to the region (they've already done that on the temple mount - regardless of how you might feel about possible remains of Solomon's temple - or what the religious implications might be, a crucial archeological site has been occupied and is being systematically erased, by religious zealots who don't want to admit that they once lived side by side in that region with jews, peacefully.)
I'm not saying that all arabs hate jews or want Israel destroyed. But the radicals do. And it's not the moderates who have the power in most of these nations.
Ah! So that recording of Nixon and Billy Graham; that paranoid shit about the jews controlling the media is TRUE?! Holy crap! I'm shocked that the jews brainwashed ME into believing that we need to keep giving them aid. I'm shocked that 30 years of Washington policy makers from both parties were also brainwashed by the jewish-controlled media. Just shocked.
Next thing you know, they'll be controlling the internet too!
Now, if we could only explain this to the people in the middle east who hate us. The ones to whom we're losing the propaganda war.
What I'd like to know is if they have a way out:
of being trapped by Microsoft solutions.
How the hell am I supposed to view 15 years of legacy MS Office documents and email data if I were to switch to Unix? I'm fucked. I wish I'd realized this when we settled on Microsoft.
I would have to agree that pretty much anything on this list of attrocities (let's call a spade a spade here) is pretty much justified in that nearly every one was as you said; Cold-war-related.
Stopping the expansion of communism was a very important task. Yes, it was very dirty - but go and check your list and see where we failed. Pol Pot. Had we gotten in and installed a puppet government in there, would we have averted the catastrophe that followed with Pol Pot? Or would it have been worse, and would we be villified for causing the worse mess. It looks like either way, with the original poster's logic, the US is the bad guy. Because we in some way affected the course of events. We didn't play isolationist - so when something good happened as a result, some eggs still got broken, and the US was the bad guy. Or when something didn't go right, the US is still the bad guy. We just can't win.
Well, I'll tell you what - these areas where the US intervened stopped the global spread of communism. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't humane. But in the end, I think billions were likely saved. If you look at the WORST mass murderers in history, they were the communists (not to smear communism as an ideal - just the people who were claiming to be communists; Pol Pot, Stalin, etc). Imagine if the US had done nothing. Those of us still living today would be under a global communist rule with no hope at all of a counterrevolution. Only it wouldn't be communism. It would be a harsh dictatorship labelled communism.
And during the brief (and ill-fated) resistance prior to the rise of the global communist state, we would likely have permenantely damaged the environment with a nuclear exchange.
So, I wonder why the US gives Israel so much aid?
The US keeps taking it in the shorts because if it's relationship with Israel, and we keep giving them money, and putting a great deal of effort into preserving their miserable existance as a state.
Yet, when the US is asked for aid for starving people in poor countries, we refuse. (we're far behind many European countries in that regard)
Even when you brush aside the institutionalized lies and propaganda of the Arab leaders over the past 30 years, the US's support of Israel still looks pretty ugly. And it's not something that was made up. It's the truth.
Also used in cockpit canopies for fighter jets.
I'm fashioning some bits of my SCA armor from this stuff. Very light, very excellent impact distribution, dimensional stability, and it's easy to work with. It heat-forms at about 330 degrees F.
However, I'd be careful with this type of modification, because the one thing Polycarbonate and Lexan (the GE brand-name for the stuff) are is sensitive to chemical solvents. So the wrong paint thinner, or contact with cyanoacrylates causes crazing, and what was once flexible and tough will shatter like safety glass when exposed.
I woke up, and turned on the news and I saw that the Queen Mum had died. I thought CNN had gone all slashdotty on me for 4/1.
. . . . Mohammed (Linus) came along and united them under the the flag of Islam (Linux), after which they created an empire that covered the half of the known world, and creating one of the most advanced civilizations of its time (My computer once most mainstream games are available on linux)
To make that really work, Linus would have to have been computer illiterate. Or maybe you weren't talking about Linux, maybe you were talking about GNU?
What the fuck to the MPAA and RIAA member companies think they're going to do when all computers are encumbered with this new copy-protection technology?
Lucas wants to go 100% digital, from the lens to the screen.
Disney wants to eliminate celluloid from the animation process, most animated features are done largely on computer.
Tell me that all the digital toys the music industry has to play with could be dispensed with in the production of the latest BoyBand video?
So - you're going to take all your creative professionals, encumber the fuck out of their equipment, you'll be increasing your OWN production costs by an order of magnitude - and more since you wont be able to use cheap commodity hardware anymore, because economy of scale will not apply to things that mainstream consumers aren't going to buy zillions of. And who's going to support your encumbered technology? Certainly not the $10/hr MCSE who learned NT and Linux on his homebrew Athalon running pirated software playing pirated MP3s.
Eisner says he's tired of being finessed by the technology industry? I think he's too full of himself. Don't bite the hand that feeds you Mickey.
that's like asking: "Does whiskey count as beer?"