That's because the money isn't to be made from the movie; it's to be made from the merchandise. When the Blade Runner (pr/s)equels come out, they'll be able to pull out all the old Blade Runner merchandise and resell it to all the collectors and lovers of nostalgia. A movie with no potential for sequels is almost certainly going to have less or no potential for related merchandise.
It's one thing for Hollywood movies to be more mainstream and cater to the lowest common denominator. I could almost deal with that; this is business, not art. But coming to realize that it really is all about the merchandise has sucked what little joy was left in my life.
That link to pprune.org was truly educational. You tend to have this idealized image of "professional" fields like police, doctors, lawyers... air traffic controllers. Reading this forum thread showed how things operate not one bit differently than anywhere else. Workers blaming management for pushing through a project without being fully informed. "Old-timers" lamenting the fall of the old system and its need for personal experience and its replacement with a more automated system that requires new users to be less trained. Bitterness about the new young pups coming in with their business degress and flow charts and company cars instead of being able to work the machine with their own two hands. Training given on a pending-obsolete version of the software just to keep project dates. And I'm only page 2 of 12!
It's nice to be reminded that humans are humans everywhere.
If only I was given the time to dink around on the dev server for a few days to find out why some obscure problem was resolved by rebooting the server. And that assumes your dev environment is equivalent to prod enough to repro the issue in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I'd seriously like to be able to do that. I understand the value of spending two days of my time to avoid wasting three days of my future time. But very few for-profit organizations are going to want their employees finding root cause to prevent something that might happen in the future, when they have projects they want completed yesterday.
Two examples are given: decrypting encoded Internet traffice and decrypting encoded credit cards. If this problem is solvable by conventional computer, I see two major side-effects. First, it would mean we would have to be a lot more worried about the safety of our private information. since cracking current encryption would be a matter of short time. Second, it could mean a significant reduction in the funding and research for "unconventional" computer, the most prominent example being quantum computers.
Assuming your 89-year-old grandfather isn't a tech junkie, what this means to him is his credit card might not be as safe as it used to be. And even if he doesn't do online banking, I'd be willing to bet his bank trades his money with other banks using encrypted electronic transfers.
I trust Google with my email more than I trust myself. Google has an incentive to keep the data as reliably as possible, so it can sell the mining rights to advertisers. The frequency I go back to an old email to refer to something? Probably once a year to find my account name/password for some odd-ball service that doesn't allow me to use my usual account name/password.
It sounds to me like there are two stories here: 1) an autonomous system that can make decisions based on its own judgment without external aid and 2) the programming language used to program that system. Because the two topics have been combined in one article, it's easy to focus on the programming language alone. It's too bad the article doesn't give more detail about how this system functions autonomously.
Of course, if the real story is that this system only functions by following a script and that scripting language happens to be human readable, and it's being presented as a thinking system just because it parses an English-like language, I'd say it's being highly misrepresented.
This should say, "Supermassive black holes are now thought to be between 2 and 10 times less massive than previously thought..." Scientists would do everyone a favor if they dropped the formula "we used to think, but now we know". Appearing to have certainty about the newest scientific model gives the impression they are little different from the religious believer.
I could have dismissed this as the reporting being at fault, but the abstract ends with "Knowing the rotational velocities, we can derive the central black-hole masses more accurately; they are two to ten times smaller than has been estimated previously."
So you can move faster than the speed of light just by expanding space? That means all I have to do to make a FTL drive is figure out how to make it expand space!
The author is positing that the closed model you are so impressed with needs to change if they want to survive Android.
They don't need to survive Android. While I'm not Apple fan, I can appreciate what Jobs has done for the company. Yes, eventually Android will surpass iOS--and by then it will be too late. Jobs will have already created the next must-have shiny new gadget (look at the iPad) for other companies to catch up to.
I don't believe it's Jobs' ego that will bite Apple--it's his absence. That's been proven to be the case once before. Hopefully, Apple will have learned from that example and is doing everything they can to avoid it (perhaps developing cloning technology?). As an Apple stockholder, I'm genuinely fearful that Jobs' failing health and eventual absence will leave Apple devostated and unable to fully recover.
Jobs' ego will not allow this and they'll most likely end up in the same realm as Microsoft -- financially great but viewed as a 'has been' and opportunist by the community.
There's nothing more flattering than having made so much money that people are scared of what you might do with all that power. It should be a company's biggest celebration the first time they get sued. It says you finally have something work taking.
While $500,000 is ridiculous for compensation from a free service, I do feel he has one valid point: if Facebook has disabled his account for any reason, they should provide it to him and give him some avenue to correct the situation. Even though it's a free service, with over 500 million active users, it's a pretty ubiquitous and universal service. It might not be wise to come to depend on it, but it's certainly understandable how someone would. If Google seemingly arbitrarily disabled your Gmail account (insert free but depended on email service here) would you be as dismissive?
I was about to cancel the comment I was going to make here (as I actually thought it through and realized I was wrong before posting:)) but I'm writing a different comment now to ask this: Why are Preview, Quote Parent, Options, in pretty stylized buttons while Cancel is a classic link? Is that a mistake or a design decision?
I am kind of used to Slashdot headlines that exaggerate the original article, but how do you go from a company has made some software that might be useful to social networks *like* Facebook to Facebook is going to get images with expiration dates?
I'm perfectly willing to accept I could be mistaken. What are the red herrings and straw men and bunch of irrelavent things? If his definition of open web standard is wrong and H.264 is not an open standard according to the W3C's definition, then how is GIF different from H.264 in this regard? I thought his argument--that just as the img tag allows for an unspecified number of formats to be supported and just as the W3C allows the industry to choose what gets supported, so it is with the video tag--to be perfectly fair.
Regarding Flash being a plugin, that seems to me like a fairly pedantic (or at best, technical) distinction, but I'm willing to concede a distinction between a company supporting a plugin because it's an industry standard while being against a supposedly closed codec as part of a native tag.
Two reasons. First, I made a concerted effort to give Bing a try mostly as an interesting experiment. Second, I've tried to leave it as default when it's the default (e.g. at work) also mostly as an interesting experiment. 90% of the time, I truly don't notice the difference. Like switching from XP to Win7, I just automatically adjust.
A single person's subjective analysis of 20 search terms is a small sample indeed! I will say, Bing has come a long way in producing search results I feel are useful, but I still find myself frequently forgetting Bing is the default search, coming up with bizarrely useless results, switching to Google, and saying to myself, ah yes, these are the results I was expecting.
Perhaps I've just learned to produce search results in Google that meet my needs and haven't developed that skill in Bing. A more thorough, less subjective analysis comparing the two search engines would be very interesting. Sadly, I think this writer's personal conclusion is just going to spark a nerd-war over Google vs. Microsoft filled with subjective opinion (like mine) and little empircal evidence.
Ok, now that I've actually taken the time to read Peter's article, I do have a few opinions of my own to express. First, as I expected, his article was articulate, informative, and interesting. It may not be for everyone (especially those who don't like reading over 1000 words at a time), but I'm likely his target audience and it appealed to me. It may not be 100% correct or agreeable, but it's far from FUD (and apparently, not four pages?).
As to the actual article: regarding "it's a about (cost) freedom", I don't think it's solely about cost freedom. I think it's also about legal freedom and intellectual property freedom. I do see Peter's point about the hypocracy of supporting Flash, but setting that aside, legal and intellectual freedom are still valid conditions to put on a standard video codec.
Cost freedom is also a valid condition though. The $6.5 million entry barrier (for over 100,000 users) may be pocket change for Google, but sets a bad precedent for new browser development. If Google is saying H.264 should not be supported by any of the browsers, I would take issue with that. But if they are saying, even though we could support H.264, we want to establish a world where you can't expect H.264, I think that is entirely the right thing.
On the other hand, I don't believe Google is sincere here (as evidenced by their support for Flash). Rather, I believe Google is attempting to manipulate popular opinion. Microsoft has turned things around with IE9. Apple has gained market popularity with iPhone and iPad. Google sees the threat. They would like you to see Microsoft and Apple appear as the ethical bad guys as they are less able to point out technical flaws than in the past.
Personally, I think this speaks to the increasing impossibility of setting standards by anything other than adoption rates and financial power bases. The strong are in a position to get stronger. The rule of the technocracy is over and the rule of the plutocracy is well under way. The history of the HTML5 spec shows this clearly, in my opinion.
I have to say, I thought this was especially absurd. I don't know if the poster truly thinks Peter Bright isn't smart or if he just couldn't resist such a big target. I'm sure it would be fair to accuse Peter of being opinionated or appearing arrogant, but Peter's articles are one of the few I regularly look forward to on Ars Technica. They are almost always well-written and informative so this seems especially immature.
It seems to me, in a country where law is based on precedent and more money buying better lawyers, a winning strategy would be to sue the least wealthy of the offenders, who don't have the financial resources to defend themselves, and then sue bigger and bigger offenders, using your now established precedent to help win.
When you go to sleep (or are knocked out, or drugged, or in a coma, etc) your consciousness ends. When you wake up, your consciousness resumes. You do not freak out about that. You remember your consciousness from before, that it was in the body from before. We believe we have a soul that is immutable from our consciousness because we have had no other experience and cannot comprehend what it would be like.
Look at the experiments that have "reprogrammed" people to believe they like something they didn't before by creating memories of experiences where they liked it. They cannot remember not liking it.Or schizophrenics or people with split/multiple personalities. Our brains are not the infallable machine devices that we like to think they are; they are squishy, malleable things. Consciousness is not a black and white state; it only appears to be because that is the typical way of experiencing our mind.
What makes us conscious? The belief that we're conscious. If you cloned your mind and put it in another body you would have two minds that both believed they were you. But why should we have trouble with that? We don't believe twins are one person. Their actions distinguish them. The two entities that shared one mind at one time would diverge and quickly become two distinguishable entities.
If you had substituted the name Sarah Palin for George W. Bush in the above, it would have been just as valid an observation, yet he was elected President. While I have no love for Palin, I think the idea that what she says will affect her electibility, like you said, shows a lack of understanding of the populous that would be electing her.
They abided by the law of the land of the time, and there was no obvious moral conflict with abiding by those laws. We can certainly change the laws for people in the future, but if we want them to uphold those laws, we will have to make sure we honor past agreements.
Is that the same argument you'd make for downloading music you haven't paid for? If you don't argue that it's acceptable to download music you haven't paid for, then great. I personally agree with you. But I think part of the argument many make is that there are times when the law cannot be easily changed by the populous (e.g. because there a few with more power to affect law-making than the whole democratic body) and in these cases, breaking the law is justified. If you would argue that downloading unpaid for music is acceptable (for whatever justifiable reason), then I don't see how you could make the argument above in this case.
I actually listened to a woman-on-the-street interviewee on the radio last night say, when asked about the invasion to privacy that the scanners are, that anything was worth the extra security. She would be willing to give up any and every right to be assured that she was safe. She didn't question that she was actually more secure, she just accepted that she was because she was told that she was. I can just see the argument, "well if a few Jews [insert foreigners of your choice here] have to be killed to ensure my safety, then that's what it takes."
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the money isn't to be made from the movie; it's to be made from the merchandise. When the Blade Runner (pr/s)equels come out, they'll be able to pull out all the old Blade Runner merchandise and resell it to all the collectors and lovers of nostalgia. A movie with no potential for sequels is almost certainly going to have less or no potential for related merchandise.
It's one thing for Hollywood movies to be more mainstream and cater to the lowest common denominator. I could almost deal with that; this is business, not art. But coming to realize that it really is all about the merchandise has sucked what little joy was left in my life.
That link to pprune.org was truly educational. You tend to have this idealized image of "professional" fields like police, doctors, lawyers... air traffic controllers. Reading this forum thread showed how things operate not one bit differently than anywhere else. Workers blaming management for pushing through a project without being fully informed. "Old-timers" lamenting the fall of the old system and its need for personal experience and its replacement with a more automated system that requires new users to be less trained. Bitterness about the new young pups coming in with their business degress and flow charts and company cars instead of being able to work the machine with their own two hands. Training given on a pending-obsolete version of the software just to keep project dates. And I'm only page 2 of 12!
It's nice to be reminded that humans are humans everywhere.
If only I was given the time to dink around on the dev server for a few days to find out why some obscure problem was resolved by rebooting the server. And that assumes your dev environment is equivalent to prod enough to repro the issue in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I'd seriously like to be able to do that. I understand the value of spending two days of my time to avoid wasting three days of my future time. But very few for-profit organizations are going to want their employees finding root cause to prevent something that might happen in the future, when they have projects they want completed yesterday.
Two examples are given: decrypting encoded Internet traffice and decrypting encoded credit cards. If this problem is solvable by conventional computer, I see two major side-effects. First, it would mean we would have to be a lot more worried about the safety of our private information. since cracking current encryption would be a matter of short time. Second, it could mean a significant reduction in the funding and research for "unconventional" computer, the most prominent example being quantum computers.
Assuming your 89-year-old grandfather isn't a tech junkie, what this means to him is his credit card might not be as safe as it used to be. And even if he doesn't do online banking, I'd be willing to bet his bank trades his money with other banks using encrypted electronic transfers.
I trust Google with my email more than I trust myself. Google has an incentive to keep the data as reliably as possible, so it can sell the mining rights to advertisers. The frequency I go back to an old email to refer to something? Probably once a year to find my account name/password for some odd-ball service that doesn't allow me to use my usual account name/password.
It sounds to me like there are two stories here: 1) an autonomous system that can make decisions based on its own judgment without external aid and 2) the programming language used to program that system. Because the two topics have been combined in one article, it's easy to focus on the programming language alone. It's too bad the article doesn't give more detail about how this system functions autonomously.
Of course, if the real story is that this system only functions by following a script and that scripting language happens to be human readable, and it's being presented as a thinking system just because it parses an English-like language, I'd say it's being highly misrepresented.
This should say, "Supermassive black holes are now thought to be between 2 and 10 times less massive than previously thought..." Scientists would do everyone a favor if they dropped the formula "we used to think, but now we know". Appearing to have certainty about the newest scientific model gives the impression they are little different from the religious believer.
I could have dismissed this as the reporting being at fault, but the abstract ends with "Knowing the rotational velocities, we can derive the central black-hole masses more accurately; they are two to ten times smaller than has been estimated previously."
So you can move faster than the speed of light just by expanding space? That means all I have to do to make a FTL drive is figure out how to make it expand space!
The author is positing that the closed model you are so impressed with needs to change if they want to survive Android.
They don't need to survive Android. While I'm not Apple fan, I can appreciate what Jobs has done for the company. Yes, eventually Android will surpass iOS--and by then it will be too late. Jobs will have already created the next must-have shiny new gadget (look at the iPad) for other companies to catch up to.
I don't believe it's Jobs' ego that will bite Apple--it's his absence. That's been proven to be the case once before. Hopefully, Apple will have learned from that example and is doing everything they can to avoid it (perhaps developing cloning technology?). As an Apple stockholder, I'm genuinely fearful that Jobs' failing health and eventual absence will leave Apple devostated and unable to fully recover.
Jobs' ego will not allow this and they'll most likely end up in the same realm as Microsoft -- financially great but viewed as a 'has been' and opportunist by the community.
There's nothing more flattering than having made so much money that people are scared of what you might do with all that power. It should be a company's biggest celebration the first time they get sued. It says you finally have something work taking.
While $500,000 is ridiculous for compensation from a free service, I do feel he has one valid point: if Facebook has disabled his account for any reason, they should provide it to him and give him some avenue to correct the situation. Even though it's a free service, with over 500 million active users, it's a pretty ubiquitous and universal service. It might not be wise to come to depend on it, but it's certainly understandable how someone would. If Google seemingly arbitrarily disabled your Gmail account (insert free but depended on email service here) would you be as dismissive?
A search on google for those as terms (indirectly) produced this page on PS3 Security as a result. These are values that configure PS3 encryption.
erk is Encryption Round Key. riv is Reset Initalization Vector. pub is the Public Key. R, n, K parameters required for signing. Da is the Private Key.
I was about to cancel the comment I was going to make here (as I actually thought it through and realized I was wrong before posting :)) but I'm writing a different comment now to ask this: Why are Preview, Quote Parent, Options, in pretty stylized buttons while Cancel is a classic link? Is that a mistake or a design decision?
I am kind of used to Slashdot headlines that exaggerate the original article, but how do you go from a company has made some software that might be useful to social networks *like* Facebook to Facebook is going to get images with expiration dates?
I'm perfectly willing to accept I could be mistaken. What are the red herrings and straw men and bunch of irrelavent things? If his definition of open web standard is wrong and H.264 is not an open standard according to the W3C's definition, then how is GIF different from H.264 in this regard? I thought his argument--that just as the img tag allows for an unspecified number of formats to be supported and just as the W3C allows the industry to choose what gets supported, so it is with the video tag--to be perfectly fair.
Regarding Flash being a plugin, that seems to me like a fairly pedantic (or at best, technical) distinction, but I'm willing to concede a distinction between a company supporting a plugin because it's an industry standard while being against a supposedly closed codec as part of a native tag.
Two reasons. First, I made a concerted effort to give Bing a try mostly as an interesting experiment. Second, I've tried to leave it as default when it's the default (e.g. at work) also mostly as an interesting experiment. 90% of the time, I truly don't notice the difference. Like switching from XP to Win7, I just automatically adjust.
A single person's subjective analysis of 20 search terms is a small sample indeed! I will say, Bing has come a long way in producing search results I feel are useful, but I still find myself frequently forgetting Bing is the default search, coming up with bizarrely useless results, switching to Google, and saying to myself, ah yes, these are the results I was expecting.
Perhaps I've just learned to produce search results in Google that meet my needs and haven't developed that skill in Bing. A more thorough, less subjective analysis comparing the two search engines would be very interesting. Sadly, I think this writer's personal conclusion is just going to spark a nerd-war over Google vs. Microsoft filled with subjective opinion (like mine) and little empircal evidence.
Ok, now that I've actually taken the time to read Peter's article, I do have a few opinions of my own to express. First, as I expected, his article was articulate, informative, and interesting. It may not be for everyone (especially those who don't like reading over 1000 words at a time), but I'm likely his target audience and it appealed to me. It may not be 100% correct or agreeable, but it's far from FUD (and apparently, not four pages?).
As to the actual article: regarding "it's a about (cost) freedom", I don't think it's solely about cost freedom. I think it's also about legal freedom and intellectual property freedom. I do see Peter's point about the hypocracy of supporting Flash, but setting that aside, legal and intellectual freedom are still valid conditions to put on a standard video codec.
Cost freedom is also a valid condition though. The $6.5 million entry barrier (for over 100,000 users) may be pocket change for Google, but sets a bad precedent for new browser development. If Google is saying H.264 should not be supported by any of the browsers, I would take issue with that. But if they are saying, even though we could support H.264, we want to establish a world where you can't expect H.264, I think that is entirely the right thing.
On the other hand, I don't believe Google is sincere here (as evidenced by their support for Flash). Rather, I believe Google is attempting to manipulate popular opinion. Microsoft has turned things around with IE9. Apple has gained market popularity with iPhone and iPad. Google sees the threat. They would like you to see Microsoft and Apple appear as the ethical bad guys as they are less able to point out technical flaws than in the past.
Personally, I think this speaks to the increasing impossibility of setting standards by anything other than adoption rates and financial power bases. The strong are in a position to get stronger. The rule of the technocracy is over and the rule of the plutocracy is well under way. The history of the HTML5 spec shows this clearly, in my opinion.
I have to say, I thought this was especially absurd. I don't know if the poster truly thinks Peter Bright isn't smart or if he just couldn't resist such a big target. I'm sure it would be fair to accuse Peter of being opinionated or appearing arrogant, but Peter's articles are one of the few I regularly look forward to on Ars Technica. They are almost always well-written and informative so this seems especially immature.
I think it would be, "Houston, we have an opportunity."
how exactly do you think this will somehow magically be cheaper than printing in 2D on plain paper with standard ink?
Have you seen how much printer ink costs? It's more valuable than gold! Everything is cheaper than printer ink!
It seems to me, in a country where law is based on precedent and more money buying better lawyers, a winning strategy would be to sue the least wealthy of the offenders, who don't have the financial resources to defend themselves, and then sue bigger and bigger offenders, using your now established precedent to help win.
When you go to sleep (or are knocked out, or drugged, or in a coma, etc) your consciousness ends. When you wake up, your consciousness resumes. You do not freak out about that. You remember your consciousness from before, that it was in the body from before. We believe we have a soul that is immutable from our consciousness because we have had no other experience and cannot comprehend what it would be like.
Look at the experiments that have "reprogrammed" people to believe they like something they didn't before by creating memories of experiences where they liked it. They cannot remember not liking it.Or schizophrenics or people with split/multiple personalities. Our brains are not the infallable machine devices that we like to think they are; they are squishy, malleable things. Consciousness is not a black and white state; it only appears to be because that is the typical way of experiencing our mind.
What makes us conscious? The belief that we're conscious. If you cloned your mind and put it in another body you would have two minds that both believed they were you. But why should we have trouble with that? We don't believe twins are one person. Their actions distinguish them. The two entities that shared one mind at one time would diverge and quickly become two distinguishable entities.
If you had substituted the name Sarah Palin for George W. Bush in the above, it would have been just as valid an observation, yet he was elected President. While I have no love for Palin, I think the idea that what she says will affect her electibility, like you said, shows a lack of understanding of the populous that would be electing her.
They abided by the law of the land of the time, and there was no obvious moral conflict with abiding by those laws. We can certainly change the laws for people in the future, but if we want them to uphold those laws, we will have to make sure we honor past agreements.
Is that the same argument you'd make for downloading music you haven't paid for? If you don't argue that it's acceptable to download music you haven't paid for, then great. I personally agree with you. But I think part of the argument many make is that there are times when the law cannot be easily changed by the populous (e.g. because there a few with more power to affect law-making than the whole democratic body) and in these cases, breaking the law is justified. If you would argue that downloading unpaid for music is acceptable (for whatever justifiable reason), then I don't see how you could make the argument above in this case.
I actually listened to a woman-on-the-street interviewee on the radio last night say, when asked about the invasion to privacy that the scanners are, that anything was worth the extra security. She would be willing to give up any and every right to be assured that she was safe. She didn't question that she was actually more secure, she just accepted that she was because she was told that she was. I can just see the argument, "well if a few Jews [insert foreigners of your choice here] have to be killed to ensure my safety, then that's what it takes."