The iPhone has a glass screen, bud. I assume you're not walking around with a pocket full of diamonds...
Dude. The question isn't "where next?"
on
iTMS Launches in Japan
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...the question is, when will the studios open up their gi-normous back catalogs for digital download? Decades of out-of-press, cool-ass music which could be a source of free revenue for the labels are languishing in magnetic-tape form in what I hope are climate-controlled vault conditions.
I think keeping old music on ice is the same as saying you don't want money.
And I hereby acknowledge that this post is only pretending to be shocked at the long-term, and evidently continuing idiocy of music labels.
Bought a dirt-cheap account on Ebay on Saturday; the seller sent the link to my Hotmail account, and it never appeared in the inbox or the trash.
Had him send it to my main email address after reading this article, and the link worked fine. Needless to say, I'll be ditching Hotmail within 24 hours. This makes me incredibly angry.
Yep. Would'a been funny in, say, 1999, back when Romero still worked @ Ion Storm. Warren Spector, however, has a whole different reputation in the game industry. Next up: Macarena jokes, and all your base are belong to us!
...where Springfield institutes Prohibition, and Homer becomes a bootlegger, making alcohol in his basement and smuggling it in bowling balls. At the end, Mayor Quimby repeals prohibition, and asks Homer how long it will take him to flood the town with alcohol.
"I'm not in that business anymore," Homer says.
Fat Tony, the gangster character, leans into the frame and whispers, "Four minutes."
Which is about how long Charlie Pride will have to wait before pristine digital copies of his tracks are available throughout the Gnutella network.
I think that the degree of hyperfocus on compliance with the apalling DMCA, along with the resulting development of new protection schemes, is very likely to (eventually) produce a substantial legislative lashback. Sooner or later, somebody in office is going to recall the existence of provisions for fair use, dust them off, and hold them up for the MPAA and the RIAA; this will very likely emerge from consumer anger with emerging technologies.
The point is, this comically Orwellian crackdown on the replication/distribution of copyrighted works (even in legally permissible ways, in many circumstances) may actually prove to be valuable in the long run, as infuriating as it is at the moment. These kinds of circumstances remind people that they do have rights. Historically, individual rights tend to prevail (in the Western hemisphere, at any rate), and these rights reassert themselves when attacked.
Damn. And I just finished a science fiction novel about a bionically-enhanced genetic researcher from Manila who uses his prototype Geckoboots to sneak into the offices of a Saskatchewan media streaming company.
Battlefield Earth can, without any reservations whatsoever, be called a motion picture. Everyone involved, from the screenwriter to the technical crews and actors, set out to make a motion picture, and that's exactly what they did. Here are just a few things they accomplished:
1)Battlefield Earth is distributed as a series of individual frames on long, translucent strips of celluloid which, with an arrangement of lenses and shutters, can be projected in rapid sequence on a large screen. Through a characteristic of human visual perception called "persistence of vision," this creates an illusion of motion.
2) Thanks to a blend of audio and visual technologies, Battlefield Earth synchronizes recorded sound with projected images, enabling a real sensory one-two punch!
3)Battlefield Earth employs a visual language involving a series of individual shots which are edited in a particular sequence to create a narrative.
4)Battlefield Earth was filmed with a variety of equipment which, with proper maintenance, can actually be reused for future motion picture productions! Such equipment includes cameras, microphones, editing stations, clappers, and large men with tool belts.
Yes, this project was shepherded through its various stages of production and assembled finally into a completed film. This is undeniable. I say to you, Battlefield Earth: MOTION PICTURE!
Historically, the First Amendment to the Constitution has always been the most lightly enforced. In 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which stated that it was a crime to say anything "false, scandalous, or malicious" against the U.S. Government.
The act was enforced; a number of Americans were actually incarcerated for speaking against the Government and individual politicians. Now, this seems blatantly unconstitutional, a direct violation of the First Amendment, and if such an obvious measure were passed today, there would be an uproar. (Thank god for the ACLU, is all I'm saying.)
On paper, the Sedition Act did not exercise prior restraint; the government then, as now, could not prevent seditious speech in advance. However, they could do whatever they wanted afterward. If people were aware that they could be punished for such speech, they would probably choose not to exercise that constitutional right. Thus, according to Howard Zinn and his excellent A People's History of the United States, you have a defacto condition of prior restraint, and a weakly enforced First Amendment.
So: how about all those people out there tempted to make Usenet postings about their boss, or their classmates, whoever, who are now aware of the liklihood of legal repercussions of this action? Do we not have such a defacto exercise of prior restraint in this situation? Oh, well. I'm sure this kid's classmates had their feelings hurt, terribly, and in the current political climate, hurt feelings are an exception to freedom of speech.
Heh. Okay. I hereby vow never again to post without finishing the article first. The environmental tax is definitely a cool idea, especially coupled with elimination of income tax.
The problem is that such a fundamental change in the US tax structure is difficult for politicians to address. Conservatives would obviously risk the alienation of their core constituency (I mean it's the environment and taxes. For a conservative, putting these two in the same sentence would be the equivalent of sticking her head in the oven.) Liberals, in the current centrist political climate, would also be wary of suggesting such a change.
However, in time, I think that particular change is inevitable. In the 1970s, we were well aware that chlorofluorocarbons were deteriorating the ozone layer, but they weren't phased out until the 1990's. It just takes time. The cover of this month's issue of Discover magazine is about the strong possibility that global warming is now causing extreme weather fluctuation. A growing awareness of the problem will lead to political change. It doesn't happen immediately. It's a cool idea, but it will never happen without public debate.
Well, um, the thing is this... through the nineties, energy companies across the US have reported lower operating costs as a result of implementing cleaner technology in power plants. It is possible to create more efficient technology with lower environmental impact.
But I think the best way to make the environment cleaner is to place a financial premium on clean technology. This could be done by analyzing the environmental cost of certain kinds of pollutants, and taxing companies at a commensurate rate -- less waste, lower e-tax. This creates revenue which could be applied to State or Federal environmental efforts and a disincentive for corporate America to s##t where they eat.
Seems like digital bureaucracy is just as cumbersome as the paper kind. Whenever I read stories like this, the theme from Brazil starts playing in my head.
Microsoft is a HUGE company; I guess accreted layers of bureaucracy are an inevitable side effect of doing business on such a large scale. Or maybe just a side effect of clinging tenaciously to a closed-source proprietary business model.
Someday, if I ever own a megalithic corporation, I'm gonna automate all bureaucratic functions, so they're completely invisible to the user. And also I'm gonna drive a cool car.
Re:Dated Science Fiction
on
Orbitsville
·
· Score: 1
Another interesting characteristic of the "future technology" envisioned during the 1920s was the Victorian-influenced design aesthetic. The non-futuristic, workaday tech in the 20's featured modest artistic fluorishes, "curlicues of design" which Gibson writes about in the Gernsback Continuum.
The futurists of the 20s assumed, as all generations do, that the prevailing contemporary aesthetic would continue forever. A current example would be, oh, let's say, the redesigned Robot in the Lost in Space film, which looked like the product of the Dodge Viper design team. Which, sure, cool and everything, but the aesthetics of future generations will be either A) Something we can't imagine right now, or B) a new iteration of the aesthetics of generations past, seeing as how these things tend to be cyclical -- i.e., cars are all curvy and everything right now, which was the mode in the 40s and 50s. So here's my prediction: angular cars within 10 years. Take it to the bank; it's gold, baby.
In an Afterword for the 10th anniversary edition of Neuromancer, William Gibson talks about one of "the secret adult pleasures of science fiction." Specifically, learning to enjoy the dated aspects of an old science fiction novel, rather than discounting the whole work.
When the Magyar version of Neuromancer was published, he wrote an afterword to Hungarian readers, assuring them that the Soviet presence in Neuromancer was in no way a prediction of some resurgence of a communist government, but rather that Gibson could not, at the time he wrote the novel, imagine a future without the Soviet Union. "This stuff ages fast," he wrote.
Neuromancer does invoke the eighties, strongly. In its presentation of corporate hegemony vs. cowboy outlaws, there is a delineation between the squares and the hipsters which, in the nineties, became increasingly blurred. Nowadays, you can find corporate lawyers who wear little rimless glasses and dress like James Dean, the Gap having made bohemian as easy as Garanimals. Starbuck's represents a late commodification of an older European cultural node, and (wherever you stand on the issue) an anarchic little piece of code called Napster may lead to an IPO.
In Neuromancer, corporate is corporate; dressed-up and buttoned-down, conservative as hell. It even resides in its own separate world, compartmentalized from the retrofitted subcultural outlaw bohemia of Chiba city. Gibson also cites the fact that people in the novel jump into bed at the drop of a hat, and he had to backpedal in subsequent books, with the explosion of AIDS.
The whole point being that if you accept a novel for its dated aspects, you get a snapshot of the era in which it was written. If the novel is really good, the effect is almost impressionist: suggestive, peripheral detail accumulating into a kind of broader meta-landscape which the author may not even have intended.
Thief: The Dark Project blew me out of my chair. Eight minutes into the first level, I was yelling at my wife to come look at this thing. Nobody else has ever made such a detailed immersive environment, and I've NEVER encountered a better sound system in a videogame. Thief II lived up to all of my expectations, and I blasted through in about a week. I can't believe the company's gone, and I'm surprised about how upset I am by this.
I thought they reached their technological pinnacle years ago, when they invented a user interface based on graphical icons and a pointing device. Good to see they're still on the cutting edge.
The Inverted Pyramid: So, in the early 19th Century, when reporters were transmitting newspaper stories across the country via telegraph, there was a concern that the lines might go down during transmission, and that part of the story would be lost. The inverted pyramid writing style, in which the most important, general elements of a story come immediately after the lead, followed by consecutively more specific details, ensured that a newspaper could still print a story if the telegraph lines went down halfway through... apparently, newspapers are still really worried about those telegraph lines, 'cause this archaic style is still employed. There are WAY more interesting writing styles they could use these days, but newpapers are tenaciously clinging to an outdated mode that technology rendered irrelevant before I was born.
I'm thinking maybe you don't wanna joke about taking credit for the denial o' service attacks while the FBI is on the case... they might be treating jokes about ddos the way airports treat jokes about luggage bombs...
Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone has a glass screen, bud. I assume you're not walking around with a pocket full of diamonds...
...the question is, when will the studios open up their gi-normous back catalogs for digital download? Decades of out-of-press, cool-ass music which could be a source of free revenue for the labels are languishing in magnetic-tape form in what I hope are climate-controlled vault conditions.
I think keeping old music on ice is the same as saying you don't want money.
And I hereby acknowledge that this post is only pretending to be shocked at the long-term, and evidently continuing idiocy of music labels.
Elementary Rules of Usage
1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.
Follow this rule whatever the final consonant. Thus write,
Charles's friend
Burns's poems
the witch's brew
The Elements of Style, Third Edition
by William Strunk, jr. and E.B. White
THIS IS FROM PAGE 1 OF THE FIRST CHAPTER.
Bought a dirt-cheap account on Ebay on Saturday; the seller sent the link to my Hotmail account, and it never appeared in the inbox or the trash.
Had him send it to my main email address after reading this article, and the link worked fine. Needless to say, I'll be ditching Hotmail within 24 hours. This makes me incredibly angry.
Yep. Would'a been funny in, say, 1999, back when Romero still worked @ Ion Storm. Warren Spector, however, has a whole different reputation in the game industry. Next up: Macarena jokes, and all your base are belong to us!
anatomize-1. dissect in order to analyze; "anatomize the bodies of the victims of this strange disease"
...so, your problem is what, exactly?
2. analyze down to the smallest detail; "This writer anatomized the depth of human behavior"
(www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn)
was by Erik Wolpaw at Old Man Murry. Click here.
Although I hadn't actually read the paper at the time, I posted my first rebuttal to the ADTI press release here.
Now, having skimmed portions of the real deal, let me just say: merde de taureau!
this retort.
...where Springfield institutes Prohibition, and Homer becomes a bootlegger, making alcohol in his basement and smuggling it in bowling balls. At the end, Mayor Quimby repeals prohibition, and asks Homer how long it will take him to flood the town with alcohol.
"I'm not in that business anymore," Homer says.
Fat Tony, the gangster character, leans into the frame and whispers, "Four minutes."
Which is about how long Charlie Pride will have to wait before pristine digital copies of his tracks are available throughout the Gnutella network.
I think that the degree of hyperfocus on compliance with the apalling DMCA, along with the resulting development of new protection schemes, is very likely to (eventually) produce a substantial legislative lashback. Sooner or later, somebody in office is going to recall the existence of provisions for fair use, dust them off, and hold them up for the MPAA and the RIAA; this will very likely emerge from consumer anger with emerging technologies.
The point is, this comically Orwellian crackdown on the replication/distribution of copyrighted works (even in legally permissible ways, in many circumstances) may actually prove to be valuable in the long run, as infuriating as it is at the moment. These kinds of circumstances remind people that they do have rights. Historically, individual rights tend to prevail (in the Western hemisphere, at any rate), and these rights reassert themselves when attacked.
So. Um. That's all I've got...
Damn. And I just finished a science fiction novel about a bionically-enhanced genetic researcher from Manila who uses his prototype Geckoboots to sneak into the offices of a Saskatchewan media streaming company.
Battlefield Earth can, without any reservations whatsoever, be called a motion picture. Everyone involved, from the screenwriter to the technical crews and actors, set out to make a motion picture, and that's exactly what they did. Here are just a few things they accomplished:
1) Battlefield Earth is distributed as a series of individual frames on long, translucent strips of celluloid which, with an arrangement of lenses and shutters, can be projected in rapid sequence on a large screen. Through a characteristic of human visual perception called "persistence of vision," this creates an illusion of motion.
2) Thanks to a blend of audio and visual technologies, Battlefield Earth synchronizes recorded sound with projected images, enabling a real sensory one-two punch!
3) Battlefield Earth employs a visual language involving a series of individual shots which are edited in a particular sequence to create a narrative.
4) Battlefield Earth was filmed with a variety of equipment which, with proper maintenance, can actually be reused for future motion picture productions! Such equipment includes cameras, microphones, editing stations, clappers, and large men with tool belts.
Yes, this project was shepherded through its various stages of production and assembled finally into a completed film. This is undeniable. I say to you, Battlefield Earth: MOTION PICTURE!
Historically, the First Amendment to the Constitution has always been the most lightly enforced. In 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which stated that it was a crime to say anything "false, scandalous, or malicious" against the U.S. Government.
The act was enforced; a number of Americans were actually incarcerated for speaking against the Government and individual politicians. Now, this seems blatantly unconstitutional, a direct violation of the First Amendment, and if such an obvious measure were passed today, there would be an uproar. (Thank god for the ACLU, is all I'm saying.)On paper, the Sedition Act did not exercise prior restraint; the government then, as now, could not prevent seditious speech in advance. However, they could do whatever they wanted afterward. If people were aware that they could be punished for such speech, they would probably choose not to exercise that constitutional right. Thus, according to Howard Zinn and his excellent A People's History of the United States, you have a defacto condition of prior restraint, and a weakly enforced First Amendment.
So: how about all those people out there tempted to make Usenet postings about their boss, or their classmates, whoever, who are now aware of the liklihood of legal repercussions of this action? Do we not have such a defacto exercise of prior restraint in this situation? Oh, well. I'm sure this kid's classmates had their feelings hurt, terribly, and in the current political climate, hurt feelings are an exception to freedom of speech.
Heh. Okay. I hereby vow never again to post without finishing the article first. The environmental tax is definitely a cool idea, especially coupled with elimination of income tax.
The problem is that such a fundamental change in the US tax structure is difficult for politicians to address. Conservatives would obviously risk the alienation of their core constituency (I mean it's the environment and taxes. For a conservative, putting these two in the same sentence would be the equivalent of sticking her head in the oven.) Liberals, in the current centrist political climate, would also be wary of suggesting such a change.
However, in time, I think that particular change is inevitable. In the 1970s, we were well aware that chlorofluorocarbons were deteriorating the ozone layer, but they weren't phased out until the 1990's. It just takes time. The cover of this month's issue of Discover magazine is about the strong possibility that global warming is now causing extreme weather fluctuation. A growing awareness of the problem will lead to political change. It doesn't happen immediately. It's a cool idea, but it will never happen without public debate.
Well, um, the thing is this... through the nineties, energy companies across the US have reported lower operating costs as a result of implementing cleaner technology in power plants. It is possible to create more efficient technology with lower environmental impact.
But I think the best way to make the environment cleaner is to place a financial premium on clean technology. This could be done by analyzing the environmental cost of certain kinds of pollutants, and taxing companies at a commensurate rate -- less waste, lower e-tax. This creates revenue which could be applied to State or Federal environmental efforts and a disincentive for corporate America to s##t where they eat.
Seems like digital bureaucracy is just as cumbersome as the paper kind. Whenever I read stories like this, the theme from Brazil starts playing in my head.
Microsoft is a HUGE company; I guess accreted layers of bureaucracy are an inevitable side effect of doing business on such a large scale. Or maybe just a side effect of clinging tenaciously to a closed-source proprietary business model.
Someday, if I ever own a megalithic corporation, I'm gonna automate all bureaucratic functions, so they're completely invisible to the user. And also I'm gonna drive a cool car.
Another interesting characteristic of the "future technology" envisioned during the 1920s was the Victorian-influenced design aesthetic. The non-futuristic, workaday tech in the 20's featured modest artistic fluorishes, "curlicues of design" which Gibson writes about in the Gernsback Continuum.
The futurists of the 20s assumed, as all generations do, that the prevailing contemporary aesthetic would continue forever. A current example would be, oh, let's say, the redesigned Robot in the Lost in Space film, which looked like the product of the Dodge Viper design team. Which, sure, cool and everything, but the aesthetics of future generations will be either A) Something we can't imagine right now, or B) a new iteration of the aesthetics of generations past, seeing as how these things tend to be cyclical -- i.e., cars are all curvy and everything right now, which was the mode in the 40s and 50s. So here's my prediction: angular cars within 10 years. Take it to the bank; it's gold, baby.In an Afterword for the 10th anniversary edition of Neuromancer, William Gibson talks about one of "the secret adult pleasures of science fiction." Specifically, learning to enjoy the dated aspects of an old science fiction novel, rather than discounting the whole work.
When the Magyar version of Neuromancer was published, he wrote an afterword to Hungarian readers, assuring them that the Soviet presence in Neuromancer was in no way a prediction of some resurgence of a communist government, but rather that Gibson could not, at the time he wrote the novel, imagine a future without the Soviet Union. "This stuff ages fast," he wrote.
Neuromancer does invoke the eighties, strongly. In its presentation of corporate hegemony vs. cowboy outlaws, there is a delineation between the squares and the hipsters which, in the nineties, became increasingly blurred. Nowadays, you can find corporate lawyers who wear little rimless glasses and dress like James Dean, the Gap having made bohemian as easy as Garanimals. Starbuck's represents a late commodification of an older European cultural node, and (wherever you stand on the issue) an anarchic little piece of code called Napster may lead to an IPO.
In Neuromancer, corporate is corporate; dressed-up and buttoned-down, conservative as hell. It even resides in its own separate world, compartmentalized from the retrofitted subcultural outlaw bohemia of Chiba city. Gibson also cites the fact that people in the novel jump into bed at the drop of a hat, and he had to backpedal in subsequent books, with the explosion of AIDS.
The whole point being that if you accept a novel for its dated aspects, you get a snapshot of the era in which it was written. If the novel is really good, the effect is almost impressionist: suggestive, peripheral detail accumulating into a kind of broader meta-landscape which the author may not even have intended.
Thief: The Dark Project blew me out of my chair. Eight minutes into the first level, I was yelling at my wife to come look at this thing. Nobody else has ever made such a detailed immersive environment, and I've NEVER encountered a better sound system in a videogame. Thief II lived up to all of my expectations, and I blasted through in about a week. I can't believe the company's gone, and I'm surprised about how upset I am by this.
Well, some of us are better with the command line than others. Maybe "we" don't need GUIs, but I'm afraid that "I" do.
I thought they reached their technological pinnacle years ago, when they invented a user interface based on graphical icons and a pointing device. Good to see they're still on the cutting edge.
The Inverted Pyramid: So, in the early 19th Century, when reporters were transmitting newspaper stories across the country via telegraph, there was a concern that the lines might go down during transmission, and that part of the story would be lost. The inverted pyramid writing style, in which the most important, general elements of a story come immediately after the lead, followed by consecutively more specific details, ensured that a newspaper could still print a story if the telegraph lines went down halfway through... apparently, newspapers are still really worried about those telegraph lines, 'cause this archaic style is still employed. There are WAY more interesting writing styles they could use these days, but newpapers are tenaciously clinging to an outdated mode that technology rendered irrelevant before I was born.
I'm thinking maybe you don't wanna joke about taking credit for the denial o' service attacks while the FBI is on the case... they might be treating jokes about ddos the way airports treat jokes about luggage bombs...