Final Fantasy VII is still for my money the best RPG ever made
As someone with a save that has two Master Materias in each of the three types (Summon, Magic, and Command), I agree with you. Moving even further offtopic, anyone else think that Square should consider redoing FFVII in a full 3-D environment for PS2 or PC or something? I know I'd get it...
Anyone want to try and start a fan-movement to do so?:)
(Oh, and to try and pretend to be on-topic, when's NetHack going to be ported to Mozilla?:P)
"We heard about this yesterday. Just like every other benchmark in the history of benchmarks it came out in favor of the company sponsoring it. Today people have started posting coherent arguments about why the benchmark is unfair, which is about as newsworthy as the sun rising in the morning, but we want you to stop submitting it already!"
At least, that was my take:)
(And based on several other stories that were basically "we didn't think it was newsworthy, but at least 500 of you did, so here it is!" Followed by it again next week, and then again in a month...)
Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet).
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
She was talking about the Google toolbar, and not searching Google. It appears that the current Mozilla Google toolbar does not contain the useful "highlight and jump to first occurance" feature that the IE Google toolbar contains (the little highlighters with words next to them on the right).
Personally, I find that I can't live without my mouse-gestures, so I wind up using Mozilla as may daily browser now; plus when I tried the Google toolbar I didn't find it to be that useful.
As an endnote, I tried installing the Googlebar on my copy of Mozilla 1.2 beta, and it didn't work. Although it appears that in the process of uninstalling it I screwed something up, so I'm going to get to reinstall Mozilla anyway (yay...).
Huge hit for me, unfortunately. I noticed that you could do that too, but after the first map or so things began to get rather unplayable. And, unfortunately, you still need the CD for the map editor... I'm looking for ways around that as well.
On another note, Warcraft III has all of a sudden copy-protected me from using my original CD. Thanks Blizzard.
Okay, who on Earth thinks that they should "backup audio cds"?
I do.
Really. I own two collector's editions of some very obscure music and I'd much rather play the backups than the original disks. So I make exact backups of them and then safely put the originals away.
I don't give them away to friends, I don't share them online through a P2P service, I don't do anything like that. I make a copy for the car and that's that. I want to keep the originals nice and safe; I use a copy for the car and Ogg for the computer.
When I buy a video game that requires me to use the CD, I try and use a copy as well, since I'd much rather risk accidently destroying a copy of my Warcraft III Collector's Edition (yeah, I know, Vivendi=Evil - quiet) then the original disk itself.
If I can figure out how to make a copy of UT2003 I'd do it to so I can let the original disks sit out of harms way (especially with the stupid "must have CD in the drive" shenanigans that often have disks out on top of the case during the burn of another disk or the install of something else - the joys of being a software developer under Windows - *sigh*).
Copy prohibition is only annoying for the legitimate purchases of content. The developers for UT2003 understood that and have admitted it in interviews. It's too bad that the publishing houses haven't figured that out yet and that I'm forced to have the stupid CD in my computer just so UT2003 can be convinced that even with a valid CD key I'm not some evil pirate.
When I buy music, I want to make an Ogg on my computer and a copy for my car. I then leave the disk safely away for potential future re-ripping and encoding to Ogg2 or the next great codec.
When my Dad buys a CD, he uses Roxio Easy-CD Creator to encode it to MP3 and then makes mixes of them for his car. My mother also encodes every CD she wants for easy access (although I don't know exactly what program she uses).
But notice that in these cases, we all legitamitely have the CD! I bought my copy of UT2003 and would be much obliged if Atari would trust me enough to use the game without the CD in the drive.
I have yet to see any of these restrictions doing anything to harm pirates. It just harms the honest consumer. I still buy CDs (a full four this year - and I haven't illegally downloaded anything else - and of those four, only two were through RIAA members) and support the companies that make games I like to play. But I still see the tracks available online, and know people who make copies of "copy protected" CDs simply to prove it's possible. And I'll bet all the real pirates of content and still happily selling their illegal $2 CDs out on the black market, laughing at means that only serve to force the honest user to either spend more money on additional CDs or give up functionality they've come to expect from their computers.
I recently caught a new episode on TLC (the Discovery Channel - er - subchannel - that actually shows SC/JYW) using Lisa Rogers as the host.
So yeah, us - er, USers - get to see her also. Although to be honest, I turned the show off because it looked to be fairly boring, since basically it was another "make a car" episode.
The ":)" was meant to imply the question was in jest. It is called an "emoticon" and is intended to denote sarcasm which would normally be made obvious by the tone of voice and delivery of the line, but cannot be due to the fact that this is a post composed of text.
Therefore, the question then becomes: can Capt. DrukenBum read?
My theory is that if anyone types the above in, they'll just see:
>
Thanks to my unclosed single-quote courtesy of "oh, I don't know" in my URL. So, see, you shouldn't accidently type that it because you'll then have to know to type in the closing ' or hit CTRL-D to "end" the file, otherwise Bash will keep on taking in your input until you finally hit a closing ' or just give up in frustration, possibly causing unwanted results...
We learned how to create a giant distributed network and how to divide large amounts of computationally intensive work to potentially hostile clients in such a fashion so as to ensure that blocks of work were actually completed, allowing newer distributed networks that actually attempted to solve better problems.
Distributed.net was interesting because of the method, not because of the actual solution. Yes, we knew it would be possible. But this really shows that it is indeed possible to create a working implementation, and that people very well might be willing to give away CPU cycles to a common goal. Yeah, breaking RC5 may not have been that interesting or useful, but demonstrating and creating a functional distributed network definately is.
I want you to explain if you disagree with the following and if so, why.
My understanding of this is that you were involved with the illegal distribution of copyrighted works, depriving the potential owners of money for the works (possibly - the reality may be "probably not," but...). You then received 33 months of jail time (or just under 3 years) which seems to me to be rather fair.
Based on the Operation Buccaneer information, you received counts of felony (criminal copyright infringement, probably), and conspiracy (to commit criminal copyright infringement, probably). (Both probablies are guesses based on the document.) This seems to be in line with what one would expect for charges against a ring of people whose sole goal is to steal massive quantities of software and redistribute them to as many people as want them at no charge. (The fact that there was no charge probably reduces the sentence to a degree, but the fact that it required specialized skills and involved a large collective of people acting together to commit criminal copyright infringement probably both outweigh that.)
So... why should I feel sorry for you? You got what you deserved. You stole from people and gave copies to as many people as you could. Based on the MIT press release, you illegal utilized systems you were supposed to be administrating for the purposes of illegally distributing software. As far as I can see, you got exactly what you deserved.
So - prove me wrong. Demonstrate that my understanding is flawed or that I am misunderstanding the crime. Demonstrate that it should not be a crime. Or - accept my view. Explain if you feel sorry for your actions and believe that you did indeed commit the crimes. Or come up with another response that does not fall directly between agree and disagree.
What a lot of people seem to miss is that Slashdot stories are actually delayed anywhere from four hours to up to a month (in extreme cases) before being posted. The editors are allowed to say "have this story appear at a certain time" when they accept them - they do this to space out the time stories appear, so that when an editor goes through the submitted story queue, they can accept a story and have it appear at a staggered point later in time.
Which creates an interesting side story about when Hemo talked for my college's local ACM chapter. He was scheduled to start at 6pm, and at around 6:01 according to Slashdot, he "posted" a story. Obviously, editors can tell stories to appear at a later time!
Actually, that really isn't secret. It's a well documented feature of Slashcode. Another feature is to accept a story but not post it at any time (I think). This would easily allow CmdrTaco (synonym for "Slashdot editor") to send off an e-mail altering the site owner to a potential overflow of hits. If after one day there's no response, then just post the story - it's a free Internet, and if you don't want the hits, there are ways of ensuring you don't get them.
But I'm really sick and tired of interesting content being permenantly removed off the web because it was posted to Slashdot and those hosting the content could not afford to keep it online. Implementing a caching feature and then asking the sites being hit if they wish to cache the content seems not only like a good solution, but also the polite and courteous thing to do.
But I've posted this before... I suppose the next thing to do is to actually code up a caching module and send it in as a patch to Slashcode. Maybe then things would change.
Hah. UT for me was solid as a rock under Win2k and flakey as all hell under Linux. Because it had a truely Unreal memory leak in the Linux version, causing it to - eventually - crash and burn, but not after causing my box to swap like mad.
My other favorite "dumb UT" moment was after trying to start a Linux UT server and failing because of a segfault, I found (eventually) that UT was trying to load "core" before the actual "Core" library file ("Core.ut"?). Needless to say, it really couldn't get any usable code off of it's own core dump, which could cause it to - core dump. Of course.
Bottom line: Crappy software is crappy software. None of this was Linux's fault. UT leaked memory like a sieve on my machine, becoming unplayable after 40 minutes on my 640MB(!) machine. Just because the underlying OS is far less likely to be strange doesn't mean the software you're running can't run amuck.
Haven't tried this, but my SB Live! has a recording device listed as "What You Hear" who's level seems to correspond quite accurately with the mixed sound output...
I'll bet that by setting the recording "device" to that device, you can record digital copies of any sound you play on your non-DRM PC. Once DRM comes into play, bets are off.
Massachusetts does too (state - er, commonwealth - where I'm from) - I guess. According to the League of Women Voters's article on Voting in Massachusetts an unenrolled individual can vote in any of the state parties' primaries. (In Massachusetts, that means Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, and Green.)
So, yeah, I can vote in any primary I choose. In a presidential election, voting in a primary automatically enrolls you in the party you voted for, but in state primaries, it does not. So I can vote for any party here. Which means I gotta figure out who I'm gonna vote for...
(And for some reason, our primaries are on September 17th, a week after the date you left. Meaning I can sit scared in my cellar on the 10th - ha.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that article seems to have nothing to do with this story.
From the article and linked press release, it seems that this story involves a contract dispute between Adobe and both ITC and Agfa Monotype. It does not involve a utility to change the embedding bits. It involves Adobe believing that they have the contractual right to embed ITC and Agfa Monotype fonts in their documents, while ITC and Agfa Monotype disagreeing.
In fact, the DMCA argument seems to be related to (and I'm guessing here) Adobe ignoring the bits (an "effective access control", huh?) and embedding the fonts even though the fonts say that the software should not do embed them. It does not seem to be going after a "circumvention utility" which allows a user to commit an illegal act.
*Sigh.* There seems to be no "good guy" in any of this...
primary elections are Tues. Sept. 10. Vote, people, VOTE!
But I expect that day to be completely taken up with Pre-September 11th mourning and rememberance. I fully expect to spend that day, the day following it, and the day following that huddled in my basement, quitely sobbing.
Or maybe not.
Actually, maybe this would be a great time for the geeks to vote - everyone else will be too busy staring at CNN!
On a serious note, this'll be the first primary I can vote on - it's the first one since the town actually received my application to register to vote! Last time, it got lost in the mail, and not having registered to vote before (fancy that), I didn't find out until I showed up to the polls and my name wasn't there... it's too bad that I have no idea who the canidates are and don't belong to a party (although I guess that means I can vote in any primary).
I'll just choose the Cowboy Neal option. What's that about "real life"?
I did a replace on all his... uh, interesting... variants of spellings of common words. The resulting document is actually very well composed, is (as far as I can tell) grammatically sound, and fairly intelligently argued. All in all, with correct spelling, the article is a good piece.
Unfortunately, the incorrect spelling distracted me and made it next to impossible to read the original. For an article where Prince is (presumably) attempting to reach a wider audience than "Prince Fans" it would be quite nice if the used proper spelling. He got "then" and "than" right, he got "its" and "it's" correct. If he can use proper grammar, I'm sure he can use proper spelling. It'll make him appear far more intelligent and lend additional weight to his argument.
You managed to lose quotes and apostrophes. This is my editted version (think I got everything) complete with original emphasis and strong sections and original links, as well as using plain old ASCII for quotes and other characters:
A Nation of Thieves?
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere -- while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right -- that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders -- i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction -- but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total -- and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies -- and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence -- i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break through" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread -- as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter -- for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 -- and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money -- enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little -- if any -- power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens -- and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world -- a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-2-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will -- but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law -- all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-2-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further -- but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist -- regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep through the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever -- i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available -- and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing -- consciously or not -- their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
For example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases -- as it is threatening to do -- the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply be, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us -- and it all depends on you.
[Ed: original used "2" for both "to" and "too" -- grammatical errors in that department are my fault. Only changes should be related to spelling, formatting and links preserved. Various Unicode characters translated to ASCII for the benifit of Slashdot. "Peer-2-peer" is kept as original.]
No, if you're going to post on Slashdot, that needs to be:
I wonder
weather youre Germans any better then there English.
There, that's fit to be printed in the Boston Globe! I mean, "Their, thats fit to printed in the Boston Globe!"
>;)
(Apparently, the editting in the Boston Globe has been going downhill, allowing things like "His wife and him were..." - it's all been downhill since the Boston Globe was bought by the New York Times. >;))
Re:I wonder what slashdot's percentages are....
on
Netscape 7.0 is Out
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· Score: 2
I know I'm posting this way too late for people to notice, but if you do change the user-agent, change it to something like the following:
Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; compatible; Mozilla 5.0; Gecko 2002053012; en-US)
The scripts I use to check browsers actually check for the presence of "Gecko" in the user-agent - if they see "Gecko", they register a "Mozilla based browser" if they can't otherwise determine the user-agent. That way browsers like Galeon get registered as being Mozilla derivatives for the purposes of site design.
Likewise, if they see "Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; compatible; Opera 5.0)" they'll register that as a hit for Opera. So just leave Gecko in there, and you can probably fool most scripts into accepting the browser as being IE while still registering to a human or to more intelligent scripts the presence of a Mozilla-based browser.
Have you ever considered the posibility of what is known as a "typo?"
Of course, the reality is that I'm mildly dyslexic, and swap letters in words occasionally. I try and catch them, but given that I am mildly dyslexic, I frequently "correct" the spelling while reading them.
Re:Stop nit-picking and just enjoy the damn film
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It should have been the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
I think that the writer changed that on purpose in order to blur the line between good and evil. In the movie, Magneto was not evil: he simply believed in the superiority of mutants over normal people and wanted to ensure their continued surivial in the face of growing anti-mutant concern.
So instead of being good vs evil, what we actually had was mutant who believes that mutants and mankind must coexist vs mutant who believes that mankind must be crushed in order to allow mutants to survive vs humanity which is just scared about the new mutants.
All in all, a lot of the "corniness" that can exist in comic books ("Would you prefer yellow spandex?") doesn't really work on the big screen, so a lot of the more comic-book type elements were altered and made more mature. So the Brotherhood of Mutants was made not so much evil as it was a "terrorist" (from the normal's point of view) organization securing the future of mutantkind.
Likewise, Rouge and Iceman are teenagers because the movie focused on the creation of what would become the X-Men. So the "elder" characters were already there (Jean Grey, Professor X, Cyclops), while the "younger" characters were still growing up in preparation to become X-Men. Don't think of the movies as The Amazing X-Men on the big screen, think of it as the a new universe based on the Marvel universe. Then all the nitpicky stuff can just be ignored. (Likewise, I think the Spiderman movie was supposed to take place in the same Movie-verse that X-Men does.)
Slashdot Mirror
As someone with a save that has two Master Materias in each of the three types (Summon, Magic, and Command), I agree with you. Moving even further offtopic, anyone else think that Square should consider redoing FFVII in a full 3-D environment for PS2 or PC or something? I know I'd get it...
Anyone want to try and start a fan-movement to do so? :)
(Oh, and to try and pretend to be on-topic, when's NetHack going to be ported to Mozilla? :P)
"We heard about this yesterday. Just like every other benchmark in the history of benchmarks it came out in favor of the company sponsoring it. Today people have started posting coherent arguments about why the benchmark is unfair, which is about as newsworthy as the sun rising in the morning, but we want you to stop submitting it already!"
At least, that was my take :)
(And based on several other stories that were basically "we didn't think it was newsworthy, but at least 500 of you did, so here it is!" Followed by it again next week, and then again in a month...)
Personally, I find that I can't live without my mouse-gestures, so I wind up using Mozilla as may daily browser now; plus when I tried the Google toolbar I didn't find it to be that useful.
As an endnote, I tried installing the Googlebar on my copy of Mozilla 1.2 beta, and it didn't work. Although it appears that in the process of uninstalling it I screwed something up, so I'm going to get to reinstall Mozilla anyway (yay...).
On another note, Warcraft III has all of a sudden copy-protected me from using my original CD. Thanks Blizzard.
I do.
Really. I own two collector's editions of some very obscure music and I'd much rather play the backups than the original disks. So I make exact backups of them and then safely put the originals away.
I don't give them away to friends, I don't share them online through a P2P service, I don't do anything like that. I make a copy for the car and that's that. I want to keep the originals nice and safe; I use a copy for the car and Ogg for the computer.
When I buy a video game that requires me to use the CD, I try and use a copy as well, since I'd much rather risk accidently destroying a copy of my Warcraft III Collector's Edition (yeah, I know, Vivendi=Evil - quiet) then the original disk itself.
If I can figure out how to make a copy of UT2003 I'd do it to so I can let the original disks sit out of harms way (especially with the stupid "must have CD in the drive" shenanigans that often have disks out on top of the case during the burn of another disk or the install of something else - the joys of being a software developer under Windows - *sigh*).
Copy prohibition is only annoying for the legitimate purchases of content. The developers for UT2003 understood that and have admitted it in interviews. It's too bad that the publishing houses haven't figured that out yet and that I'm forced to have the stupid CD in my computer just so UT2003 can be convinced that even with a valid CD key I'm not some evil pirate.
When I buy music, I want to make an Ogg on my computer and a copy for my car. I then leave the disk safely away for potential future re-ripping and encoding to Ogg2 or the next great codec.
When my Dad buys a CD, he uses Roxio Easy-CD Creator to encode it to MP3 and then makes mixes of them for his car. My mother also encodes every CD she wants for easy access (although I don't know exactly what program she uses).
But notice that in these cases, we all legitamitely have the CD! I bought my copy of UT2003 and would be much obliged if Atari would trust me enough to use the game without the CD in the drive.
I have yet to see any of these restrictions doing anything to harm pirates. It just harms the honest consumer. I still buy CDs (a full four this year - and I haven't illegally downloaded anything else - and of those four, only two were through RIAA members) and support the companies that make games I like to play. But I still see the tracks available online, and know people who make copies of "copy protected" CDs simply to prove it's possible. And I'll bet all the real pirates of content and still happily selling their illegal $2 CDs out on the black market, laughing at means that only serve to force the honest user to either spend more money on additional CDs or give up functionality they've come to expect from their computers.
It annoys me.
So yeah, us - er, USers - get to see her also. Although to be honest, I turned the show off because it looked to be fairly boring, since basically it was another "make a car" episode.
Therefore, the question then becomes: can Capt. DrukenBum read?
Are you single?
And if so, are you going to find a friend to pretend to be with for the purposes of responding to people in this forum?
Or do you welcome advances from people you've never met who have nothing better to do than to post to a web forum?
>
Thanks to my unclosed single-quote courtesy of "oh, I don't know" in my URL. So, see, you shouldn't accidently type that it because you'll then have to know to type in the closing ' or hit CTRL-D to "end" the file, otherwise Bash will keep on taking in your input until you finally hit a closing ' or just give up in frustration, possibly causing unwanted results...
until false; do lynx -source http://oh, I don't know/ > /dev/null ; sleep $(( RANDOM / 1024 + 1 )); done
and then accidently hit enter in a Bash shell...
We learned how to create a giant distributed network and how to divide large amounts of computationally intensive work to potentially hostile clients in such a fashion so as to ensure that blocks of work were actually completed, allowing newer distributed networks that actually attempted to solve better problems.
Distributed.net was interesting because of the method, not because of the actual solution. Yes, we knew it would be possible. But this really shows that it is indeed possible to create a working implementation, and that people very well might be willing to give away CPU cycles to a common goal. Yeah, breaking RC5 may not have been that interesting or useful, but demonstrating and creating a functional distributed network definately is.
My understanding of this is that you were involved with the illegal distribution of copyrighted works, depriving the potential owners of money for the works (possibly - the reality may be "probably not," but...). You then received 33 months of jail time (or just under 3 years) which seems to me to be rather fair.
Based on the Operation Buccaneer information, you received counts of felony (criminal copyright infringement, probably), and conspiracy (to commit criminal copyright infringement, probably). (Both probablies are guesses based on the document.) This seems to be in line with what one would expect for charges against a ring of people whose sole goal is to steal massive quantities of software and redistribute them to as many people as want them at no charge. (The fact that there was no charge probably reduces the sentence to a degree, but the fact that it required specialized skills and involved a large collective of people acting together to commit criminal copyright infringement probably both outweigh that.)
So... why should I feel sorry for you? You got what you deserved. You stole from people and gave copies to as many people as you could. Based on the MIT press release, you illegal utilized systems you were supposed to be administrating for the purposes of illegally distributing software. As far as I can see, you got exactly what you deserved.
So - prove me wrong. Demonstrate that my understanding is flawed or that I am misunderstanding the crime. Demonstrate that it should not be a crime. Or - accept my view. Explain if you feel sorry for your actions and believe that you did indeed commit the crimes. Or come up with another response that does not fall directly between agree and disagree.
Which creates an interesting side story about when Hemo talked for my college's local ACM chapter. He was scheduled to start at 6pm, and at around 6:01 according to Slashdot, he "posted" a story. Obviously, editors can tell stories to appear at a later time!
Actually, that really isn't secret. It's a well documented feature of Slashcode. Another feature is to accept a story but not post it at any time (I think). This would easily allow CmdrTaco (synonym for "Slashdot editor") to send off an e-mail altering the site owner to a potential overflow of hits. If after one day there's no response, then just post the story - it's a free Internet, and if you don't want the hits, there are ways of ensuring you don't get them.
But I'm really sick and tired of interesting content being permenantly removed off the web because it was posted to Slashdot and those hosting the content could not afford to keep it online. Implementing a caching feature and then asking the sites being hit if they wish to cache the content seems not only like a good solution, but also the polite and courteous thing to do.
But I've posted this before... I suppose the next thing to do is to actually code up a caching module and send it in as a patch to Slashcode. Maybe then things would change.
My other favorite "dumb UT" moment was after trying to start a Linux UT server and failing because of a segfault, I found (eventually) that UT was trying to load "core" before the actual "Core" library file ("Core.ut"?). Needless to say, it really couldn't get any usable code off of it's own core dump, which could cause it to - core dump. Of course.
Bottom line: Crappy software is crappy software. None of this was Linux's fault. UT leaked memory like a sieve on my machine, becoming unplayable after 40 minutes on my 640MB(!) machine. Just because the underlying OS is far less likely to be strange doesn't mean the software you're running can't run amuck.
I'll bet that by setting the recording "device" to that device, you can record digital copies of any sound you play on your non-DRM PC. Once DRM comes into play, bets are off.
So, yeah, I can vote in any primary I choose. In a presidential election, voting in a primary automatically enrolls you in the party you voted for, but in state primaries, it does not. So I can vote for any party here. Which means I gotta figure out who I'm gonna vote for...
(And for some reason, our primaries are on September 17th, a week after the date you left. Meaning I can sit scared in my cellar on the 10th - ha.)
From the article and linked press release, it seems that this story involves a contract dispute between Adobe and both ITC and Agfa Monotype. It does not involve a utility to change the embedding bits. It involves Adobe believing that they have the contractual right to embed ITC and Agfa Monotype fonts in their documents, while ITC and Agfa Monotype disagreeing.
In fact, the DMCA argument seems to be related to (and I'm guessing here) Adobe ignoring the bits (an "effective access control", huh?) and embedding the fonts even though the fonts say that the software should not do embed them. It does not seem to be going after a "circumvention utility" which allows a user to commit an illegal act.
*Sigh.* There seems to be no "good guy" in any of this...
But I expect that day to be completely taken up with Pre-September 11th mourning and rememberance. I fully expect to spend that day, the day following it, and the day following that huddled in my basement, quitely sobbing.
Or maybe not.
Actually, maybe this would be a great time for the geeks to vote - everyone else will be too busy staring at CNN!
On a serious note, this'll be the first primary I can vote on - it's the first one since the town actually received my application to register to vote! Last time, it got lost in the mail, and not having registered to vote before (fancy that), I didn't find out until I showed up to the polls and my name wasn't there... it's too bad that I have no idea who the canidates are and don't belong to a party (although I guess that means I can vote in any primary).
I'll just choose the Cowboy Neal option. What's that about "real life"?
Unfortunately, the incorrect spelling distracted me and made it next to impossible to read the original. For an article where Prince is (presumably) attempting to reach a wider audience than "Prince Fans" it would be quite nice if the used proper spelling. He got "then" and "than" right, he got "its" and "it's" correct. If he can use proper grammar, I'm sure he can use proper spelling. It'll make him appear far more intelligent and lend additional weight to his argument.
A Nation of Thieves?
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere -- while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right -- that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders -- i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction -- but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total -- and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies -- and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence -- i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break through" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread -- as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter -- for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 -- and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money -- enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little -- if any -- power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens -- and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world -- a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-2-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will -- but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law -- all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-2-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further -- but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist -- regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep through the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever -- i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available -- and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing -- consciously or not -- their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
For example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases -- as it is threatening to do -- the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply be, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us -- and it all depends on you.
[Ed: original used "2" for both "to" and "too" -- grammatical errors in that department are my fault. Only changes should be related to spelling, formatting and links preserved. Various Unicode characters translated to ASCII for the benifit of Slashdot. "Peer-2-peer" is kept as original.]
>;)
(Apparently, the editting in the Boston Globe has been going downhill, allowing things like "His wife and him were..." - it's all been downhill since the Boston Globe was bought by the New York Times. >;))
Especially because you're not far off...
(And read the disclaimers about accuracy I have in the entry. It's not really accurate, and is almost a year old.)
Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; compatible; Mozilla 5.0; Gecko 2002053012; en-US)
The scripts I use to check browsers actually check for the presence of "Gecko" in the user-agent - if they see "Gecko", they register a "Mozilla based browser" if they can't otherwise determine the user-agent. That way browsers like Galeon get registered as being Mozilla derivatives for the purposes of site design.
Likewise, if they see "Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; compatible; Opera 5.0)" they'll register that as a hit for Opera. So just leave Gecko in there, and you can probably fool most scripts into accepting the browser as being IE while still registering to a human or to more intelligent scripts the presence of a Mozilla-based browser.
Of course, the reality is that I'm mildly dyslexic, and swap letters in words occasionally. I try and catch them, but given that I am mildly dyslexic, I frequently "correct" the spelling while reading them.
I think that the writer changed that on purpose in order to blur the line between good and evil. In the movie, Magneto was not evil: he simply believed in the superiority of mutants over normal people and wanted to ensure their continued surivial in the face of growing anti-mutant concern.
So instead of being good vs evil, what we actually had was mutant who believes that mutants and mankind must coexist vs mutant who believes that mankind must be crushed in order to allow mutants to survive vs humanity which is just scared about the new mutants.
All in all, a lot of the "corniness" that can exist in comic books ("Would you prefer yellow spandex?") doesn't really work on the big screen, so a lot of the more comic-book type elements were altered and made more mature. So the Brotherhood of Mutants was made not so much evil as it was a "terrorist" (from the normal's point of view) organization securing the future of mutantkind.
Likewise, Rouge and Iceman are teenagers because the movie focused on the creation of what would become the X-Men. So the "elder" characters were already there (Jean Grey, Professor X, Cyclops), while the "younger" characters were still growing up in preparation to become X-Men. Don't think of the movies as The Amazing X-Men on the big screen, think of it as the a new universe based on the Marvel universe. Then all the nitpicky stuff can just be ignored. (Likewise, I think the Spiderman movie was supposed to take place in the same Movie-verse that X-Men does.)
So, yeah, just enjoy the damn film! :)