Yes, you can own something and still have laws regarding how you use it. In the case of books, the physical book is yours, but you are not legally allowed to reproduce it because of copywrite laws.
To extend the analogy - if I buy a game, it can be illegal to copy it, but I should be allowed to play it, 'cause I paid for it and its mine.
Its the medium, I agree - which is why I said that it will take an extremely talented director to overcome those limitations. Watchmen without subtlety is like taking a shower with a raincoat on. LOTR is still a good movie after you suck the subtlety out.
Doom 3 multiplayer: oldschool DM, nuttin' else HL2 multiplayer: CS. Bleah. Halo 2 multiplayer: The best Co-Op mode I've ever seen, plus the tried and true mix&match CTF/whatever with vehicles.
I would have to say that LOTR is an easier project than Watchmen, given the time and budget to do LOTR properly (which Jackson had). The problem is that Hollywood can't do subtlety. This is quite obvious in Jackson's changes to LOTR - he took all the subtlety out. Gandalf's battles aren't about inspiring fire in the hearts of his compatriots anymore, they're about fireballs and mind control. The confusing reinforcements of the novel are replaced with the inexplicable but cool Big Elven Army (that was the only change I really despised). Honestly, I couldn't care less about Arwen's expanded role - most of that stuff was Tolkien canon taken from the Silmarillion anyways, so its not like Jackson pulled it from his ass.
Anyhow, the point is that LOTR isn't very subtle. Its high fantasy - its about epic battles and heroic characters and a beautiful, detailed setting. All a director needed to do it right was a huge budget, willingness to do it in a superlong form (trilogy of long films), and solid, generic talent. The fact is that Hollywood is so barren of those gifts that we didn't expect to see that kind of product. LOTR has most of the elements of a popcorn war movie - Hollywood can do those. Jackson made it right by keeping much of the story, rather than fucking around with it like directors are quick to do. This is why we like Jackson - not just that he's a very talented director, but that he kept the fucking around to a minimum.
Watchmen is a whole other matter. This isn't a case of "Hollywood won't adapt it right because Hollywood likes to shit on our dreams" like LOTR. A Watchmen would be really, really _hard_ to do. This book is full of very twisted subtleties and undercurrents. If you just did a slavish reproduction of the comic like the first two Harry Potter films or the Dune miniseries - which is the best we can hope for - it would be a failure, because you'd miss many of the underlying themes and meanings of the comic. Terry Gilliam admitted this himself.
LOTR needs a good action director who cares about the source material to be done properly. Watchmen needs more than that - Watchmen demands genius.
While Keaton wasn't the best Batman, and the director took some liberties with details, I consider the first two Batman films captured the Batman concept quite well - especially the second movie, which made sure the audience had that twinge of sympathy for the villains. Plus, the second movie had the best casting ever - Walken and DeVito were wonderful, and Michelle is the greatest Catwoman of any time.
Really, I thought they were very good. As for Dune, I actually preferred the Lynch movie. Why? Because even though the miniseries followed the plot of the novel, I couldn't help but feel like it missed most of the underlying themes, ending up just a literalist "what happened" rendition with really, really ugly effects and costuming. At least the Lynch movie was artistically gorgeous, even if it perverted Herbert's novel.
Haven't read Maus, but I don't find that Gaiman's writing can hold a candle to Watchmen... and Cerebrus is mainly popular for its epic scale and its controversy, not its quality.
Oh I agree that all of those are excellent comics - but I think even Moore himself considers Watchmen to be his best work. As for Gaiman, while I enjoy his work a lot, it's fun teenaged-angst stuff. Its like "what if Piers Anthony wasn't a sexist infantile asshole". Wonderful comics, cool ideas, and excellent mood - but I haven't seen anything with the kind of depth that Moore can create.
Honestly, if you put Gaiman into the list, you may as well add things like Dark Horse's original Aliens Vs. Predator graphic novel, or Dark Knight Returns - an excellent book, a fun read, very well done.... but I wouldn't call it shakespeare.
In short - yes, I consider The Watchmen to be the Best Comic Series Ever. Period.
greatest is subjective... and if you don't agree that Watchmen is one of the greatest, then you're a stupid subject.
There are generally agreed to be a handful of comics of any literarry import in the comic world, beyond the pop stuff. The Watchmen stands on top of them all.
This is a book that Rhodes Scholars use to teach english students about the Cold War.
Good call - he suits the role. Its still gonna suck. I'm still in pain from LXG.
The fact is that I don't think its possible to really do that book properly in movie form. I've got a copy with dog-eared pages, and I just don't see how it could work without the juxtaposed images and character narration - that's the best part of the comic medium.
If the ISP wants to redirect anything, they should redirect it to themselves, to a nice plaintext page explaining the situation with links to _both_ websites. It would be a much more fair solution.
First thing Google should do: take any of these whiners out of the index and see how it helps their business. Oh? You're complaining? Well, it seems that you think that Google can list whatever they want, instead of what their robots find. Google was just making _extra sure_ that nobody would stumble onto your precious copywrited content by taking you out of the index... and make linking to and from you cause negative Googleranking.
Why bother with USB? It already has a mechanism to hotsync - the wireless. More likely it would be the other way around - a USB device for your desktop that communicates with your DS (not using the 802.11b because home users don't want to deal worrying about ports and servers). The DS broadcasts its name on hotsync, and you configure your desktop with the name as well.
Cube. Quake 1. Lots of FPS games are great for hop-in-and-play, except for the new ones, where your load and download times will suck up half of your quick break. But frequently I'll have a 10 minute break and just pop open Cube, join a server, frag for 9 minutes, then politely bow out. If you play FPS games, Cube is dead simple - no complex tricks, obscure pickups, or confusing levels.
If you're not into FPS games, there are numerous online Popcap games. If you like that sort of thing:P
Actually, my understanding was it was the terrified cowards who were afraid of breeders because of the weapons-grade plutonium concerns.
Of course, it doesn't matter here in Canada, as we use Candu reactors. No refining necessary so you don't have to worry about refinery accidents (like that mess in Japan) but they use deuterium as a medium and generate plutonium as waste.
I'm a linux noob, and never having worked with using external RPMs (I've always used ones that came with the distros) I've never been in dependancy hell either. My understanding of the problem is this: 1) Over-specific dependencies not liking package version 1.x of the project even though version 1.y does the job just fine, thankyou, and it might be a pain to run both package 1.x and 1.y on the same system. 2) The simple usability failure that they don't automatically fetch the dependancy packages for you or even tell you where to look. 3) confusion about how to update all packages.
1) I realise that Lisp's simplicity of syntax is the core source of its power. It is a feature I often pine for in the overcomplex and inconsistent languages like C++, Python, and Perl. But still, people spend decades of their lives thinking in infix, and frankly I've heard old-guard Lisp coders bitch about the pain of doing computation without infix - to my mind, that meanst that infix-conversion macros are either underdeveloped or unkown. Computers do computing very often, and the prefix computation is one of those thign that I have seen turn off many people curious about Lisp. It happens.
I just wish that one could optionally use {} brackets or something, purely as a commenting syntax or something.
The fact is that
foo = 5
is much more legible than
(let bar 5)
Lisp is just far too orthogonal to the languages that humans grow up with. Yes, its very very powerful - I know the beauty of metaprogramming (I do strange strange things in Python and hate the the cruftiness of the language in that field). No language will ever gain any real popularity without being at least reasonably human-readable. Coders are very fickle, visual people. Even C still uses familiar mathematical infix notation. Notice that C++'s most powerful feature that actually makes it not a pathetic joke of an OOP language, templates, are by-and-larged shunned by many programmers just because using as brackets is "ugly".
Yep. Lisp - because assembler was too easy to understand.
I'll admit that the consistency of syntax is wonderful, but that's no excuse for a) not having any built-in facility for BEDMAS-calculation. Some sort of standard macro for that is sorely lacking, and if its there, then the tutorial writers have to stop ignoring it - its absense is one of the language's biggest failings. b) totally obtuse keywords. Yes, you learn what car and cdr mean pretty fast, but they're only the beggining of Lisp's obfuscated acronyms. c) blocks-as-lists is a nifty feature, but some visual way to distinguish them on screen would be really, really nice.
And guess what? You know all those people who plan on re-making Lisp to fix these problems? Every one I've heard from keeps saying things like "I like car and cdr, I'm keeping those". Way to ignore your customers - Lisp die-hards will stick to Lisp, and new users won't touch that unintelligable mess.
imho, natural language programming languages are awful because they add a tiny bit of verbal legibility in exchange for a) losing nice obvious visual cues like { and } and b) missing something painfully obvious:
We learn math pretty friggin' soon after learning to spell. And at that point, you never write "one plus one equals two" ever again, if you ever did.
The fact is that comptur language has a closer relationship mentally to math than to english. So why not use mathematical language? Its even better, as its not tied to a single human language (who wants to translate "plus" into Swahili?)
IMHO, modern commercial languages do suck for not learning from their more academic peers (Java, I'm looking in your direction - inner classes rock, but they're no excuse for all the missing stuff).
But for "englishoid" languages, I learned VB first and then Java, and I have to say the first thing I loved about Java was the unambiguous { and } blocking.
I'm all for using natural english in the parts of programming where it belongs - like flow control, function calls, class definitions, etc. But having unambigous "this is a block" characters helps mental consistency, and using mathematical syntax helps people understand the more mathematical concepts (although the C = as assignment thing is an abomination -:= pwns it).
Depends. They don't seem to go after leeches. But if his folder is shared, look out.
Shouldn't his wife be talking him out of this? I mean, they're obviously well-off (read the set-up), it would really suck for that all to be sued into oblivion, and they have kids to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can own something and still have laws regarding how you use it. In the case of books, the physical book is yours, but you are not legally allowed to reproduce it because of copywrite laws.
To extend the analogy - if I buy a game, it can be illegal to copy it, but I should be allowed to play it, 'cause I paid for it and its mine.
Well, if we're gonna talk mods, then UT2k4 already won. Too bad it doesn't have any players. I thought we were discussing out-of-the-box gameplay.
Its the medium, I agree - which is why I said that it will take an extremely talented director to overcome those limitations. Watchmen without subtlety is like taking a shower with a raincoat on. LOTR is still a good movie after you suck the subtlety out.
Yes, but H2 wins for multiplayer.
Doom 3 multiplayer: oldschool DM, nuttin' else
HL2 multiplayer: CS. Bleah.
Halo 2 multiplayer: The best Co-Op mode I've ever seen, plus the tried and true mix&match CTF/whatever with vehicles.
No contest - and I don't even have an X-Box.
epIII. I sense great disappointment in you.
I would have to say that LOTR is an easier project than Watchmen, given the time and budget to do LOTR properly (which Jackson had). The problem is that Hollywood can't do subtlety. This is quite obvious in Jackson's changes to LOTR - he took all the subtlety out. Gandalf's battles aren't about inspiring fire in the hearts of his compatriots anymore, they're about fireballs and mind control. The confusing reinforcements of the novel are replaced with the inexplicable but cool Big Elven Army (that was the only change I really despised). Honestly, I couldn't care less about Arwen's expanded role - most of that stuff was Tolkien canon taken from the Silmarillion anyways, so its not like Jackson pulled it from his ass.
Anyhow, the point is that LOTR isn't very subtle. Its high fantasy - its about epic battles and heroic characters and a beautiful, detailed setting. All a director needed to do it right was a huge budget, willingness to do it in a superlong form (trilogy of long films), and solid, generic talent. The fact is that Hollywood is so barren of those gifts that we didn't expect to see that kind of product. LOTR has most of the elements of a popcorn war movie - Hollywood can do those. Jackson made it right by keeping much of the story, rather than fucking around with it like directors are quick to do. This is why we like Jackson - not just that he's a very talented director, but that he kept the fucking around to a minimum.
Watchmen is a whole other matter. This isn't a case of "Hollywood won't adapt it right because Hollywood likes to shit on our dreams" like LOTR. A Watchmen would be really, really _hard_ to do. This book is full of very twisted subtleties and undercurrents. If you just did a slavish reproduction of the comic like the first two Harry Potter films or the Dune miniseries - which is the best we can hope for - it would be a failure, because you'd miss many of the underlying themes and meanings of the comic. Terry Gilliam admitted this himself.
LOTR needs a good action director who cares about the source material to be done properly. Watchmen needs more than that - Watchmen demands genius.
While Keaton wasn't the best Batman, and the director took some liberties with details, I consider the first two Batman films captured the Batman concept quite well - especially the second movie, which made sure the audience had that twinge of sympathy for the villains. Plus, the second movie had the best casting ever - Walken and DeVito were wonderful, and Michelle is the greatest Catwoman of any time.
Really, I thought they were very good. As for Dune, I actually preferred the Lynch movie. Why? Because even though the miniseries followed the plot of the novel, I couldn't help but feel like it missed most of the underlying themes, ending up just a literalist "what happened" rendition with really, really ugly effects and costuming. At least the Lynch movie was artistically gorgeous, even if it perverted Herbert's novel.
Haven't read Maus, but I don't find that Gaiman's writing can hold a candle to Watchmen... and Cerebrus is mainly popular for its epic scale and its controversy, not its quality.
Oh I agree that all of those are excellent comics - but I think even Moore himself considers Watchmen to be his best work. As for Gaiman, while I enjoy his work a lot, it's fun teenaged-angst stuff. Its like "what if Piers Anthony wasn't a sexist infantile asshole". Wonderful comics, cool ideas, and excellent mood - but I haven't seen anything with the kind of depth that Moore can create.
Honestly, if you put Gaiman into the list, you may as well add things like Dark Horse's original Aliens Vs. Predator graphic novel, or Dark Knight Returns - an excellent book, a fun read, very well done.... but I wouldn't call it shakespeare.
In short - yes, I consider The Watchmen to be the Best Comic Series Ever. Period.
greatest is subjective... and if you don't agree that Watchmen is one of the greatest, then you're a stupid subject.
There are generally agreed to be a handful of comics of any literarry import in the comic world, beyond the pop stuff. The Watchmen stands on top of them all.
This is a book that Rhodes Scholars use to teach english students about the Cold War.
Good call - he suits the role. Its still gonna suck. I'm still in pain from LXG.
The fact is that I don't think its possible to really do that book properly in movie form. I've got a copy with dog-eared pages, and I just don't see how it could work without the juxtaposed images and character narration - that's the best part of the comic medium.
If the ISP wants to redirect anything, they should redirect it to themselves, to a nice plaintext page explaining the situation with links to _both_ websites. It would be a much more fair solution.
First thing Google should do: take any of these whiners out of the index and see how it helps their business. Oh? You're complaining? Well, it seems that you think that Google can list whatever they want, instead of what their robots find. Google was just making _extra sure_ that nobody would stumble onto your precious copywrited content by taking you out of the index... and make linking to and from you cause negative Googleranking.
Why bother with USB? It already has a mechanism to hotsync - the wireless. More likely it would be the other way around - a USB device for your desktop that communicates with your DS (not using the 802.11b because home users don't want to deal worrying about ports and servers). The DS broadcasts its name on hotsync, and you configure your desktop with the name as well.
Cube. Quake 1. Lots of FPS games are great for hop-in-and-play, except for the new ones, where your load and download times will suck up half of your quick break. But frequently I'll have a 10 minute break and just pop open Cube, join a server, frag for 9 minutes, then politely bow out. If you play FPS games, Cube is dead simple - no complex tricks, obscure pickups, or confusing levels.
:P
If you're not into FPS games, there are numerous online Popcap games. If you like that sort of thing
Wrong way around. My point was the main disincentive for breeder reactors was not present in Canada, as Candus already produce Pu.
Actually, my understanding was it was the terrified cowards who were afraid of breeders because of the weapons-grade plutonium concerns.
Of course, it doesn't matter here in Canada, as we use Candu reactors. No refining necessary so you don't have to worry about refinery accidents (like that mess in Japan) but they use deuterium as a medium and generate plutonium as waste.
I've done that and it continues to ask me if I want to install SP2... something I refuse to do until they make it not break my wifi card.
How are they working that out? After all, a distaste for RPMs and an adoption of LSB seems to be pretty mutually exclusive.
I'm a linux noob, and never having worked with using external RPMs (I've always used ones that came with the distros) I've never been in dependancy hell either. My understanding of the problem is this:
1) Over-specific dependencies not liking package version 1.x of the project even though version 1.y does the job just fine, thankyou, and it might be a pain to run both package 1.x and 1.y on the same system.
2) The simple usability failure that they don't automatically fetch the dependancy packages for you or even tell you where to look.
3) confusion about how to update all packages.
Deb won't. LSB is RPM based.
1) I realise that Lisp's simplicity of syntax is the core source of its power. It is a feature I often pine for in the overcomplex and inconsistent languages like C++, Python, and Perl. But still, people spend decades of their lives thinking in infix, and frankly I've heard old-guard Lisp coders bitch about the pain of doing computation without infix - to my mind, that meanst that infix-conversion macros are either underdeveloped or unkown. Computers do computing very often, and the prefix computation is one of those thign that I have seen turn off many people curious about Lisp. It happens.
I just wish that one could optionally use {} brackets or something, purely as a commenting syntax or something.
The fact is that
foo = 5
is much more legible than
(let bar 5)
Lisp is just far too orthogonal to the languages that humans grow up with. Yes, its very very powerful - I know the beauty of metaprogramming (I do strange strange things in Python and hate the the cruftiness of the language in that field). No language will ever gain any real popularity without being at least reasonably human-readable. Coders are very fickle, visual people. Even C still uses familiar mathematical infix notation. Notice that C++'s most powerful feature that actually makes it not a pathetic joke of an OOP language, templates, are by-and-larged shunned by many programmers just because using as brackets is "ugly".
Lisp is uglier.
Yep. Lisp - because assembler was too easy to understand.
I'll admit that the consistency of syntax is wonderful, but that's no excuse for
a) not having any built-in facility for BEDMAS-calculation. Some sort of standard macro for that is sorely lacking, and if its there, then the tutorial writers have to stop ignoring it - its absense is one of the language's biggest failings.
b) totally obtuse keywords. Yes, you learn what car and cdr mean pretty fast, but they're only the beggining of Lisp's obfuscated acronyms.
c) blocks-as-lists is a nifty feature, but some visual way to distinguish them on screen would be really, really nice.
And guess what? You know all those people who plan on re-making Lisp to fix these problems? Every one I've heard from keeps saying things like "I like car and cdr, I'm keeping those". Way to ignore your customers - Lisp die-hards will stick to Lisp, and new users won't touch that unintelligable mess.
imho, natural language programming languages are awful because they add a tiny bit of verbal legibility in exchange for a) losing nice obvious visual cues like { and } and b) missing something painfully obvious:
:= pwns it).
We learn math pretty friggin' soon after learning to spell. And at that point, you never write "one plus one equals two" ever again, if you ever did.
The fact is that comptur language has a closer relationship mentally to math than to english. So why not use mathematical language? Its even better, as its not tied to a single human language (who wants to translate "plus" into Swahili?)
IMHO, modern commercial languages do suck for not learning from their more academic peers (Java, I'm looking in your direction - inner classes rock, but they're no excuse for all the missing stuff).
But for "englishoid" languages, I learned VB first and then Java, and I have to say the first thing I loved about Java was the unambiguous { and } blocking.
I'm all for using natural english in the parts of programming where it belongs - like flow control, function calls, class definitions, etc. But having unambigous "this is a block" characters helps mental consistency, and using mathematical syntax helps people understand the more mathematical concepts (although the C = as assignment thing is an abomination -
Depends. They don't seem to go after leeches. But if his folder is shared, look out.
Shouldn't his wife be talking him out of this? I mean, they're obviously well-off (read the set-up), it would really suck for that all to be sued into oblivion, and they have kids to mind.