To add to that, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with movies that use Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to build a dramatic trailer. I only know of one movie (Excalibur) that's actually used the music in the movie, but I've seen several that used it in trailers.
The Omen also used it.
The reason movies seldom use their own soundtracks in promotions is because the trailers are often made while the film is still in post-production. That's also why you sometimes don't see scenes from the trailer in the movie... it was filmed, but taken out of the final cut after the trailer was made.
There are three reasons why the Carmina Burana is used so often:
1) The movement that they use, "O Fortuna", is short. It's the perfect length for a commercial.
2) It is dramatic and kind of frantic-sounding. The Carmina Burana are a collection of old European pagan songs, mostly about springtime, sex, and drinking, and are set to an 20th Centry post-romanticism score.
3) Carl Orff is dead. There are no copyright license issues to worry about.
The public domain angle really saved some cash in Excalibur, because they used Wagner music (mainly from "The Ring" and "Tristan and Isolde") for most of the movie, and the Carmina Burana for one scene. Recycling opera music is really cool if done right, and much cheaper than hiring John Williams.
A lot of times when people think they are seeing "flicker", what they are actually seeing is the result of the frames not lining up correctly, or snapping back into place while being projected. I seem to remember reading about a firm in California that found a way to modify existing projectors to avoid this, making images easier on the eyes, and edges much more well-defined.
Anyone happen to remember the name of this design?
I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.
Of course, you are playing to the strength of digital projection when all you are showing is digitally-generated cartoons.
The notorious film critic (and technophile) Roger Ebert has been tracking this for some time. When it comes to photographic images on a massive screen, film still beats the pants off current digital offerings... and better film processes been pattented that will even leave emerging digital formats in the dust, using retrofits of current projectors instead of forcing theaters to sink huge bucks into state-of-the-art digital gear.
Walter Hill, director of the cult classic film "The Warriors" has filed a lawsuit against Offspring, a neo-punk band, for their late-90's radio hit "Come Out and Play", claiming theft of IP.
... the vast majority of people who grow up in heavily fundamentalist families remain fundamentalist; did they 'choose' that?
Actually, I've always found that the biggest zealots, of any cause, are the converts.
Most people I know that grew up in strict fundamentalist homes are nice people who live quiet lives, don't give a rat's ass about what you think of them, and don't really behave like the stereotype you might imagine when you hear the word "fundamentalist".
It's always the former heroin addict who would have died if not for his conversion that carries a big cross around, writes bible verses on his shirt, and shouts at people on school campuses for not having conservative haircuts. Or they go on TV and pretend they can heal people. Or they form "concerned parent" groups that try to stop you from listening to "evil" music.
As with any cultural minority, the only ones you ever notice are the ones you are least likely to like.
Yes, Slashdot is losing its edge and readers. We are only reading to document the downfall of a former news heavyweight.
Well, no. They are not "losing readers" - If anything they are becoming more popular. I read it because it's still a pretty darn good discussion forum most of the time, sticks to topics that geeks are interested in, and highlights a lot of interesting stories out on the web that I might not have seen otherwise.
They are not in a "downfall", but these momentary lapses of quality control do not reflect well on them.
They are not a "former news heavyweight", because they never were a news heavyweight.
It's called the right to feely associate, and it's the same right that allows an all-women college to keep me out because I'm a guy, or for the NAACP to not allow me on their board of directors, because I am not the right "race".
The idea is that you can deal with whoever you want, and choose not to deal with whoever you want.
People like to cite the "whites only" businesses in the south back in the 60's as an example of why free association is a bad idea... except many of those restaurant owners would have loved to have served black customers and collect their money... but they were not allowed to because of government restrictions on who they could serve. If we had simply lifted the restrictions and let the market decide, the businesses who chose not to serve certain people would simply find that they could not compete with those who did.
Imagine if such a restriction was legal today. Would anybody dare try to run a "whites only" restaurant in Atlanta? Not only would you miss out on all the black customers who would eat at the restaurant across the street, but a most whites would refuse to ever set foot in there as well. Kind of tough to run a business when red-neck bigots (a tiny minority of the Atlanta population) are your only clients.
(By the way, newspapers refuse to run ads all the time. The Saint Paul Pioneer Press was recently criticized for accepting ads from strip clubs, and so they changed their policy to not accept them. Censorship is commonplace./. even lets you censor out Jon Katz articles, if you want to. The First Amendment is only meant to protect us from government censorship. That why it say "Congress shall make no law..." instead of "businesses shall set no policy...")
All pro-choice means is that such folks believe a woman has choice...
Ah, but the choice we are talking about here is the choice to destroy (at the very least) unique human potential. I don't want to get into a flame-war over this, because I actually have a lot of sympathy with your line of thought, but the semantic game of useing "pro-something-nice-sounding" for your side and "anti-" or the same for your opposition is silly.
As far as I am concerned, those who favor the legal choice of women to abort their unborn children with few or no restrictions are not "pro-choice" or "anti-life", but pro-abortion , because they believe the practice of unrestricted legal abortion should remain as it is.
Likewise, those on the other side of the fence are not "pro-life" or "anti-choice", but anti-abortion , because they believe laws should be put in place to ban (or drastically reduce) the number of abortions that are legal to perform.
The one thing I really hate about this debate as it rages in America is that neither side is willing to listen to each other, even for a moment. To the anti-abortionists, it seems obvious that their opponents don't give a damn about the sanctity of human life, and are unconcerned about the fact that the vast majority of abortions are cases of frivolous last-minute birth control by women who have multiple abortions instead of taking wise precautions. To the pro-abortionists, it seems equally obvious, that their opponents are screaming religious fanatics who want women to stay barefoot & pregnant, don't want anyone to have sex for pleasure, and don't give a damn about indiviual liberty or women dying in back-alley abortions or killing themselves with coat hangers.
So the discussion becomes pointless. Two groups, thinking they are arguing about the same issue, but are really just trying to shout each other down in order to frame the debate.
Allow me to summarize the opinion of most of the rest of us:
1) Abortions are bad, and should not happen very often. Even those of us who do not consider it killing recognize that such a wide-spread practice cheapens human life, which most of us believe should be valued.
2) Banning all abortions would be draconian and evil, because it would threaten the liberty, and in some cases the lives, of many women.
3) Some restrictions might be acceptable, as long as the law acknowledges that sometimes this horrible choice is justifiable, and in those situations the decision should be made by individuals (specifically, the pregnant woman in question), not by the government.
4) The unborn may (or may not) fit our definition of a "person", but just like you might have to shoot somebody who breaks into your house, or a general might have to bomb a bridge that has innocent people on it. The sad reality is that sometimes people are killed, and that does not always make it murder.
I'm sure the extremists on both sides consider me horribly misguided for holding opinions like this, but it is my sincere belief that, if democracy works at all, we will eventually arrive as a middle ground along these lines, and those shouting from the left and right can only slow us down.
I hope I didn't ruffle too many feathers, though. I really think we need more calm surrounding the issue.
(I appologize, to all who are not interested, for following such an off-topic thread. Moderate as you see fit.)
So, a nameless individual submitted a story he heard about somewhere, and of course/. posts it because it's guaranteed to boost viewership and therefore ad revenue.
At least when emmett posted the thing about LinuxCare layoffs he had the decency to make some kind of effort to verify the story. Shouldn't every/. editor at least try and do the same? (And please, don't tell me they're too busy; if they're too busy to verify sources then I demand the word "news" be removed from their tagline.)
I think the AC is right... so much so, that I don't mind burning a little karma to let his post be seen with my +1 bonus attatched to it (until I'm modded down), so there it is, in its entirety once again.
The editors at/. actually get paid. Not Kevin Garnet money, or even Craig Kilborn money, but they get a salary to sift through e-mail and post the interesting stuff as news, which is not a bad gig if you ask me. Come on,/., you can do better than this for what you are making. I've seen you do better. Shape up, eh?
You are absolutley correct that it is not illegal for you, or any other ISP to behave this way.
It is also not illegal for consumers to blacklist, flame, and boycott any company that treats its customers so poorly. If you were my ISP, and I heard about you doing something like this, you would lose my business, and I would persuade others to avoid you.
The Wrath of Geeks was not quite enough to shut down AOL back in their days of shady billing practices, but it came close for a while there. I also know of a few mom-n-pop ISP's that were once popular geek havens, but went belly-up specifically because they angered the geek set with the way they did business.
Even if you are one of the bigger local players, the margins are small enough that you really can't afford to chase customers away... especially the tech-heads who advise all their friends and family on which ISP to subscribe to.
I'm with you guys on this. A second-hand account by an anonymous coward with no details about who did it, who it happened to, when it happened, or anything. That's just stupid. If somebody really was upset about an ISP over-reacting, why not name them and sick all the/. trolls on them?
"Urban legend" is a good choice of words. This sounds exactly like the sort of story that new Internet users spam their friends with because some joke list circulated it to them, and they thought that it was important that Everybody They Know be aware of it.
Maybe not where you live, but where I live (Iowa) it's a crime to...
Actually, he is right about the way it is in a lot of states. Next time you drive up to Minnesota, stop by the used record & CD store on 64th and Portland in South Minneapolis. You will see an endless array of products "for tobacco use only", including a pipe that is shaped like a pistol (you put your mouth over the barrel to smoke it).
Several times when I was in there buying records, I saw dumb stoners who vocalized their intention to smoke illegal stuff with them. They are always astonished that they actually got kicked out over a minor slip of the tongue. It can be pretty entertaining watching the arguments that follow.
One piece of advice that nobody seems to be giving you is this.
Take a fist full of twenties out of your wallet, and hire a lawer to sit down and consult with you on the issue. Find out exactly what your rights are, how much the dispute is likely to cost, and whether you want to bother going to bat over something as trivial as a clan name.
Then at least you will know about the situation, and Knowing Is Half The Battle (tm).
It is a name commonly associated with too-perfect-looking, bubble-headded blonde dingbats, (thanks to Mattel's, success). The term "barbie-doll" is part of the national zeitgeist, and humorous references of this sort are very common. If Mattel had not made such an idiosyncratic toy, it might not have become a shorthand term for shallow femininity.
(Barbie is designed to be obsessed with fashion, sunbathing, and other pursuits that feminists hate seeing little girls socialized to. There has never been a "Hacker Barbie" or a "CPA Barbie" or a "Firefighting Barbie"... but there have been dozens of iterations of Barbie as a fashion model. Among the phrases programmed into the first Talking Barbie were "Math is hard!" and "Let's go shopping!", which led to a very funny episode of the Simpsons.
That reminds me of a joke... Have you heard of the new Divorce Barbie doll? She's the same as the regular barbie, except she has all of Ken's stuff.
I can see several reasons why making 3 identical Baby Bills would not be quite as effective as breaking them up by departments:
1) If you broke it up into three companies with the same product, a winner would emerge within a year or two, and we would be back where we started.
2) The point of the break-up is not to get rid of the OS monopoly. It is to enforce anti-trust law that ensures that the monopoly is not abused or leveraged in a way that hurts consumers. Having a 90% share of a market does not, in and of itself, stifle competition. Making sure that nobody else can make money by competing with you by leveraging your dominance is another matter. MICROS~1 "broke" DR DOS by making sure their products would spit out unwarrented error messages when not running on MS DOS. They "enhanced" Java with windows-only tools to break the cross-platform advantage that Java offered. When it looked like the browser window was likely to replace the OS destop environment in some future systems, they chopped off the only profitable browser company at the knees, by making sure that all Windows customers would already have a free, pre-installed browser that was about as good; then they built web-design tools that would build content that failed on competing browsers, and took steps to make sure that they got used. They tried to strong-arm Apple and other companies into staying out of some of their newer markets (like streaming video and media).... All of these actions are reprehensible, but common in the industry, but the other industry players do not have the strength of a monopoly to back them up. If your kid brother punches you in the nose its annoying - if an 800 gorilla does it, you are down for the count.
3) We already have too many versions of Windows as it is. 95, 95, NT4, 2k, and CE don't play very well together, considering they all come from the same vendor. Can you imagine is we had two other baby-bill, each with their own "product line" of operating systems?
4) Even die-hard microsofties agree that DOS-based technologies are inferior to most modern OS's, which is why Bill has been trying for almost seven years to migrate the DOS world to NT, and even NT admins are sometimes forced to rely on a DOS shell for some stuff. If we had a multi-vendor DOS-based standard out there, would the world ever rid itself of DOS batch files?
5) I think a very sensible solution for a consumer OS would be to port the Windows API's and GUI to a *n?x environment. (If you got an honest answer out of Balmer or Gates, they would probably tell you that they would love to do something like that, but current anti-trust restrictions forced them to sell of Xenix and stay out of the UNIX arena for now). A mini-MS that does OS tech only would have the flexibility to advance such a project, and could do so without violating any federal restrictions.
6) If MS-Office is no longer part of the company, the practice of witholding pre-beta OS tools from the rest of the world to give the Office team a head start would end. For the first time in almost a decade, there would be real competition in the office suite business again, which could eventually lead to a lot of Good Things (i.e., non-proprietary document standards, XML-compliant web integration, etc.)
Gotta say I agree on both points. Doom looked like pixelated crap and played sluggishly. Marathon and Duke3D were a bit better, and were far more creative.
When Quake came along, it changed everything. No previous FPS ever seemed worthy of my prolonged attention, but Quake got its hooks in me. The true-3D engine made point-and-click fragging a reality. I became a deathmatch addict, and lost whole nights of sleep launching rockets and nails at complete strangers.
I may get flamed for this, since we all hate what a jerk Lucas has been lately, but I gotta point out that the best FPS story-lines I've seen are the ones from LucasArts.
Outlaws is a 2.5D shooter, but the gameplay makes you feel like you really are John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, walking through the center of town with your spencer rifle and six-shooter. The "reload" requirement adds a lot to getting the pacing of the action just right. Install the 3D patch, and everything looks just like the animated cut scenes.:)
Jedi Knight had pathetic multiplay, but the solo game was far better than anything ID has ever come up with.
(It's actually both bigger and heavier than the Powerbook G3, unlike the Vaio, which is tiny.)
Airport != Wireless Internet.
(Airport is a LAN connector, not a wireless modem. Yes, you can connect the base to an ISP by a variety of means, but that's not what the rumor sites were talking about. They were hyping the notion that Apple was going to integrate mobile phone tech into the new books so you could dial out wirelessly from anywhere.)
I suppose if Apple started bundling Intellimouses with the next generation of Macs, you would call the current mouse rumor "dead on" as well.
Re:Preaching to the American Choir
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
You didn't hear about the movie version of Breakfast of Champions because it went strait to video. It starred Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte and should be avoided at all costs.
It shares the same flaw as "Fear in Loathing in Los Vegas", in that the director thought a funny book could be made even funnier by over-explaining all the jokes and using special effects and graphics to cram every subtle concept down the viewer's throat.
If you are in the video store and in the mood for Kurt Vonnegut's stories, rent "Mother Night" instead.
If you already saw Mother Night, go with "Harrison Bergeron".
If you already saw both of them, you can turn to the weak adaptation of "Slaughterhouse Five" as a last resort.
If you have seen all three, give up and rent something else, or go home and read Cat's Cradle.
Most Vonnegut fans will probably fail to hear my warning (as I failed to listen to the critics) and waste an hour and a half on this silly movie. If so, make a game of watching for Vonnegut's cameo appearance, or for references to his other works.
Two years ago, rumor sites like Apple Insider claimed that Apple was about to release a sub-notebook along the lines of Sony's Vaio, but with wireless Internet.
Last year, they said the next iMac would ship with a built-in 17" monitor, and feature "business" colors like Mahogany and Oak. They even had "photos" of the new design.
Now it's a buttonless mouse. News flash: it ain't gonna happen. The DP4 of OS X is obviously designed for a 1-button mouse. The round, 1-button USB mouse is cheap to make and part of their branding identity.
Rumor sites make this crap up to get more web hits and sell ads.
Check out Ebert's Sun-Times review of Ghost In The Shell. In this review, as well as some of his other essays, he touches on an interesting trend in dramatic anime (and Japanese pop culture in general): Female beauty is often used as a metaphorical symbol for power and independance. This is why the real heavy-hitters in Mononoke are women, as is the hero of GITS.
As for the cute, big-eyed ding-bats of comedic anime, I totally agree with you... although I can't help but notice that a lot of American women find those characters to be funny, while I can seldom stand to even watch them.
Re:Preaching to the American Choir
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
To me, a heavy handed plot is justified if it manages to attack with any success the common American culture or convince a few Americans to reconsider their lifestyle...
1) Honest film criticism requires that one evaluates a film on its own merits, not on whether the message stokes your ego. For example, "Breakfast of Champions" was based on a wonderful novel about the importance of accepting life as it comes to you, but the movie was crap. On the other hand, "Potempkin" was made to push mindless commie propaganda, but it was a triumphant moment in film history when audiences first saw the stairway scene.
2) "Heavy handed" attacks almost never persuade anybody. The way to win people over is by convincing them with logic in a friendly tone, not by calling them evil. The Rush Limbaugh show might be very entertaining to some hard-core Republicans, but I doubt he has turned many liberals into conservatives. Tirades only score points with people who already agree with you.
And for Ghod's sake, stay AWAY from the cute anime...
I'm with you on that.
Unfortunately, cute & annoying is to anime as wisecracking sidekick characters are to Disney animation... almost unavoidable. Their audience expects it.
Even in a lot of the "serious" anime you can often count on seeing giggling school girls, angry & short old men, a dumb fat guy, a vaguely caucasian military leader (usually a navy commander with a white mustache and a pipe), and many other tired conventions.
As if the "cute" factor wasn't enough, anime has its own set of formulae to bail out bad writers:
People stand still and shout at each other before every fight. Everybody has a standing vertical leap at least equal to their height. Pilots suffer physical pain along with their crafts when in combat. The climax of the film will be interrupted by a full page of monologue by a character that tells us The Meaning Of It All (GITS comes to mind as an example of this one)... and the list goes on.
Of course, true anime fans love this stuff the way James Bond fans like seeing car chases that end with fruit-cart collisions. It all comes down to taste.
Disregarding plot weaknesses, the first time I saw the Fifth Element, I was really stunned at how much I felt as if I had just watched a live-action Anime movie.
That movie was based on the ideas of the French comic-book artist Mobius. When I watched it in the theaters, I was not aware of this, but recognized the style right away. His comics are known for "style over substance"; visually stunning with very simple themes and silly sci-fi conventions (like the floating window-to-window lunch counter, the alien singer, etc.)
If you liked that movie (and it sounds like you liked it a little more than me), check out the Silver Surfer comic Mobius did for Marvel Comics, or his "airtight garage" anthology. You should be able to track them down at any comic store (and be gouged for them).
It sells wonderfully, even if its only a collection of bsides with a few new songs.
The MP3 Album ("Long Tall Weekend") is some of their best stuff. Every geek should get his hands on it, for the song "Older" alone if nothing else.
I hear they have a second offering (an "EP" this time) also for sale.
Plus the dial-a-song, the website (tmbg.com), the fan site (tmbg.org), and the mailing list... As if all that isn't cool enough, they have their own Internet radio station at WiredPlanet.com, which will let you listen to a continuous random selection of TMBG and Mono Puff music. Alas, the streaming client is MICROS~1 only, for now.
Slashdot Mirror
The Omen also used it.
The reason movies seldom use their own soundtracks in promotions is because the trailers are often made while the film is still in post-production. That's also why you sometimes don't see scenes from the trailer in the movie... it was filmed, but taken out of the final cut after the trailer was made.
There are three reasons why the Carmina Burana is used so often:
1) The movement that they use, "O Fortuna", is short. It's the perfect length for a commercial.
2) It is dramatic and kind of frantic-sounding. The Carmina Burana are a collection of old European pagan songs, mostly about springtime, sex, and drinking, and are set to an 20th Centry post-romanticism score.
3) Carl Orff is dead. There are no copyright license issues to worry about.
The public domain angle really saved some cash in Excalibur, because they used Wagner music (mainly from "The Ring" and "Tristan and Isolde") for most of the movie, and the Carmina Burana for one scene. Recycling opera music is really cool if done right, and much cheaper than hiring John Williams.
Anyone happen to remember the name of this design?
Of course, you are playing to the strength of digital projection when all you are showing is digitally-generated cartoons.
The notorious film critic (and technophile) Roger Ebert has been tracking this for some time. When it comes to photographic images on a massive screen, film still beats the pants off current digital offerings... and better film processes been pattented that will even leave emerging digital formats in the dust, using retrofits of current projectors instead of forcing theaters to sink huge bucks into state-of-the-art digital gear.
Actually, I've always found that the biggest zealots, of any cause, are the converts.
Most people I know that grew up in strict fundamentalist homes are nice people who live quiet lives, don't give a rat's ass about what you think of them, and don't really behave like the stereotype you might imagine when you hear the word "fundamentalist".
It's always the former heroin addict who would have died if not for his conversion that carries a big cross around, writes bible verses on his shirt, and shouts at people on school campuses for not having conservative haircuts. Or they go on TV and pretend they can heal people. Or they form "concerned parent" groups that try to stop you from listening to "evil" music.
As with any cultural minority, the only ones you ever notice are the ones you are least likely to like.
Well, no. They are not "losing readers" - If anything they are becoming more popular. I read it because it's still a pretty darn good discussion forum most of the time, sticks to topics that geeks are interested in, and highlights a lot of interesting stories out on the web that I might not have seen otherwise.
They are not in a "downfall", but these momentary lapses of quality control do not reflect well on them.
They are not a "former news heavyweight", because they never were a news heavyweight.
The idea is that you can deal with whoever you want, and choose not to deal with whoever you want.
People like to cite the "whites only" businesses in the south back in the 60's as an example of why free association is a bad idea... except many of those restaurant owners would have loved to have served black customers and collect their money... but they were not allowed to because of government restrictions on who they could serve. If we had simply lifted the restrictions and let the market decide, the businesses who chose not to serve certain people would simply find that they could not compete with those who did.
Imagine if such a restriction was legal today. Would anybody dare try to run a "whites only" restaurant in Atlanta? Not only would you miss out on all the black customers who would eat at the restaurant across the street, but a most whites would refuse to ever set foot in there as well. Kind of tough to run a business when red-neck bigots (a tiny minority of the Atlanta population) are your only clients.
(By the way, newspapers refuse to run ads all the time. The Saint Paul Pioneer Press was recently criticized for accepting ads from strip clubs, and so they changed their policy to not accept them. Censorship is commonplace. /. even lets you censor out Jon Katz articles, if you want to. The First Amendment is only meant to protect us from government censorship. That why it say "Congress shall make no law..." instead of "businesses shall set no policy...")
Ah, but the choice we are talking about here is the choice to destroy (at the very least) unique human potential. I don't want to get into a flame-war over this, because I actually have a lot of sympathy with your line of thought, but the semantic game of useing "pro-something-nice-sounding" for your side and "anti-" or the same for your opposition is silly.
As far as I am concerned, those who favor the legal choice of women to abort their unborn children with few or no restrictions are not "pro-choice" or "anti-life", but pro-abortion , because they believe the practice of unrestricted legal abortion should remain as it is.
Likewise, those on the other side of the fence are not "pro-life" or "anti-choice", but anti-abortion , because they believe laws should be put in place to ban (or drastically reduce) the number of abortions that are legal to perform.
The one thing I really hate about this debate as it rages in America is that neither side is willing to listen to each other, even for a moment. To the anti-abortionists, it seems obvious that their opponents don't give a damn about the sanctity of human life, and are unconcerned about the fact that the vast majority of abortions are cases of frivolous last-minute birth control by women who have multiple abortions instead of taking wise precautions. To the pro-abortionists, it seems equally obvious, that their opponents are screaming religious fanatics who want women to stay barefoot & pregnant, don't want anyone to have sex for pleasure, and don't give a damn about indiviual liberty or women dying in back-alley abortions or killing themselves with coat hangers.
So the discussion becomes pointless. Two groups, thinking they are arguing about the same issue, but are really just trying to shout each other down in order to frame the debate.
Allow me to summarize the opinion of most of the rest of us:
1) Abortions are bad, and should not happen very often. Even those of us who do not consider it killing recognize that such a wide-spread practice cheapens human life, which most of us believe should be valued.
2) Banning all abortions would be draconian and evil, because it would threaten the liberty, and in some cases the lives, of many women.
3) Some restrictions might be acceptable, as long as the law acknowledges that sometimes this horrible choice is justifiable, and in those situations the decision should be made by individuals (specifically, the pregnant woman in question), not by the government.
4) The unborn may (or may not) fit our definition of a "person", but just like you might have to shoot somebody who breaks into your house, or a general might have to bomb a bridge that has innocent people on it. The sad reality is that sometimes people are killed, and that does not always make it murder.
I'm sure the extremists on both sides consider me horribly misguided for holding opinions like this, but it is my sincere belief that, if democracy works at all, we will eventually arrive as a middle ground along these lines, and those shouting from the left and right can only slow us down.
I hope I didn't ruffle too many feathers, though. I really think we need more calm surrounding the issue.
(I appologize, to all who are not interested, for following such an off-topic thread. Moderate as you see fit.)
At least when emmett posted the thing about LinuxCare layoffs he had the decency to make some kind of effort to verify the story. Shouldn't every /. editor at least try and do the same? (And please, don't tell me they're too busy; if they're too busy to verify sources then I demand the word "news" be removed from their tagline.)
I think the AC is right... so much so, that I don't mind burning a little karma to let his post be seen with my +1 bonus attatched to it (until I'm modded down), so there it is, in its entirety once again.
The editors at /. actually get paid. Not Kevin Garnet money, or even Craig Kilborn money, but they get a salary to sift through e-mail and post the interesting stuff as news, which is not a bad gig if you ask me. Come on, /., you can do better than this for what you are making. I've seen you do better. Shape up, eh?
It is also not illegal for consumers to blacklist, flame, and boycott any company that treats its customers so poorly. If you were my ISP, and I heard about you doing something like this, you would lose my business, and I would persuade others to avoid you.
The Wrath of Geeks was not quite enough to shut down AOL back in their days of shady billing practices, but it came close for a while there. I also know of a few mom-n-pop ISP's that were once popular geek havens, but went belly-up specifically because they angered the geek set with the way they did business.
Even if you are one of the bigger local players, the margins are small enough that you really can't afford to chase customers away... especially the tech-heads who advise all their friends and family on which ISP to subscribe to.
"Urban legend" is a good choice of words. This sounds exactly like the sort of story that new Internet users spam their friends with because some joke list circulated it to them, and they thought that it was important that Everybody They Know be aware of it.
Actually, he is right about the way it is in a lot of states. Next time you drive up to Minnesota, stop by the used record & CD store on 64th and Portland in South Minneapolis. You will see an endless array of products "for tobacco use only", including a pipe that is shaped like a pistol (you put your mouth over the barrel to smoke it).
Several times when I was in there buying records, I saw dumb stoners who vocalized their intention to smoke illegal stuff with them. They are always astonished that they actually got kicked out over a minor slip of the tongue. It can be pretty entertaining watching the arguments that follow.
Take a fist full of twenties out of your wallet, and hire a lawer to sit down and consult with you on the issue. Find out exactly what your rights are, how much the dispute is likely to cost, and whether you want to bother going to bat over something as trivial as a clan name.
Then at least you will know about the situation, and Knowing Is Half The Battle (tm).
(Barbie is designed to be obsessed with fashion, sunbathing, and other pursuits that feminists hate seeing little girls socialized to. There has never been a "Hacker Barbie" or a "CPA Barbie" or a "Firefighting Barbie"... but there have been dozens of iterations of Barbie as a fashion model. Among the phrases programmed into the first Talking Barbie were "Math is hard!" and "Let's go shopping!", which led to a very funny episode of the Simpsons.
That reminds me of a joke... Have you heard of the new Divorce Barbie doll? She's the same as the regular barbie, except she has all of Ken's stuff.
1) If you broke it up into three companies with the same product, a winner would emerge within a year or two, and we would be back where we started.
2) The point of the break-up is not to get rid of the OS monopoly. It is to enforce anti-trust law that ensures that the monopoly is not abused or leveraged in a way that hurts consumers. Having a 90% share of a market does not, in and of itself, stifle competition. Making sure that nobody else can make money by competing with you by leveraging your dominance is another matter. MICROS~1 "broke" DR DOS by making sure their products would spit out unwarrented error messages when not running on MS DOS. They "enhanced" Java with windows-only tools to break the cross-platform advantage that Java offered. When it looked like the browser window was likely to replace the OS destop environment in some future systems, they chopped off the only profitable browser company at the knees, by making sure that all Windows customers would already have a free, pre-installed browser that was about as good; then they built web-design tools that would build content that failed on competing browsers, and took steps to make sure that they got used. They tried to strong-arm Apple and other companies into staying out of some of their newer markets (like streaming video and media).... All of these actions are reprehensible, but common in the industry, but the other industry players do not have the strength of a monopoly to back them up. If your kid brother punches you in the nose its annoying - if an 800 gorilla does it, you are down for the count.
3) We already have too many versions of Windows as it is. 95, 95, NT4, 2k, and CE don't play very well together, considering they all come from the same vendor. Can you imagine is we had two other baby-bill, each with their own "product line" of operating systems?
4) Even die-hard microsofties agree that DOS-based technologies are inferior to most modern OS's, which is why Bill has been trying for almost seven years to migrate the DOS world to NT, and even NT admins are sometimes forced to rely on a DOS shell for some stuff. If we had a multi-vendor DOS-based standard out there, would the world ever rid itself of DOS batch files?
5) I think a very sensible solution for a consumer OS would be to port the Windows API's and GUI to a *n?x environment. (If you got an honest answer out of Balmer or Gates, they would probably tell you that they would love to do something like that, but current anti-trust restrictions forced them to sell of Xenix and stay out of the UNIX arena for now). A mini-MS that does OS tech only would have the flexibility to advance such a project, and could do so without violating any federal restrictions.
6) If MS-Office is no longer part of the company, the practice of witholding pre-beta OS tools from the rest of the world to give the Office team a head start would end. For the first time in almost a decade, there would be real competition in the office suite business again, which could eventually lead to a lot of Good Things (i.e., non-proprietary document standards, XML-compliant web integration, etc.)
Like the kid on The Simpsons said: Gotta nuke sumpin'
When Quake came along, it changed everything. No previous FPS ever seemed worthy of my prolonged attention, but Quake got its hooks in me. The true-3D engine made point-and-click fragging a reality. I became a deathmatch addict, and lost whole nights of sleep launching rockets and nails at complete strangers.
I may get flamed for this, since we all hate what a jerk Lucas has been lately, but I gotta point out that the best FPS story-lines I've seen are the ones from LucasArts.
Outlaws is a 2.5D shooter, but the gameplay makes you feel like you really are John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, walking through the center of town with your spencer rifle and six-shooter. The "reload" requirement adds a lot to getting the pacing of the action just right. Install the 3D patch, and everything looks just like the animated cut scenes. :)
Jedi Knight had pathetic multiplay, but the solo game was far better than anything ID has ever come up with.
(It's actually both bigger and heavier than the Powerbook G3, unlike the Vaio, which is tiny.)
Airport != Wireless Internet.
(Airport is a LAN connector, not a wireless modem. Yes, you can connect the base to an ISP by a variety of means, but that's not what the rumor sites were talking about. They were hyping the notion that Apple was going to integrate mobile phone tech into the new books so you could dial out wirelessly from anywhere.)
I suppose if Apple started bundling Intellimouses with the next generation of Macs, you would call the current mouse rumor "dead on" as well.
It shares the same flaw as "Fear in Loathing in Los Vegas", in that the director thought a funny book could be made even funnier by over-explaining all the jokes and using special effects and graphics to cram every subtle concept down the viewer's throat.
If you are in the video store and in the mood for Kurt Vonnegut's stories, rent "Mother Night" instead.
If you already saw Mother Night, go with "Harrison Bergeron".
If you already saw both of them, you can turn to the weak adaptation of "Slaughterhouse Five" as a last resort.
If you have seen all three, give up and rent something else, or go home and read Cat's Cradle.
Most Vonnegut fans will probably fail to hear my warning (as I failed to listen to the critics) and waste an hour and a half on this silly movie. If so, make a game of watching for Vonnegut's cameo appearance, or for references to his other works.
Last year, they said the next iMac would ship with a built-in 17" monitor, and feature "business" colors like Mahogany and Oak. They even had "photos" of the new design.
Now it's a buttonless mouse. News flash: it ain't gonna happen. The DP4 of OS X is obviously designed for a 1-button mouse. The round, 1-button USB mouse is cheap to make and part of their branding identity.
Rumor sites make this crap up to get more web hits and sell ads.
You have been trolled, /., big-time.
Check out Ebert's Sun-Times review of Ghost In The Shell. In this review, as well as some of his other essays, he touches on an interesting trend in dramatic anime (and Japanese pop culture in general): Female beauty is often used as a metaphorical symbol for power and independance. This is why the real heavy-hitters in Mononoke are women, as is the hero of GITS.
As for the cute, big-eyed ding-bats of comedic anime, I totally agree with you... although I can't help but notice that a lot of American women find those characters to be funny, while I can seldom stand to even watch them.
1) Honest film criticism requires that one evaluates a film on its own merits, not on whether the message stokes your ego. For example, "Breakfast of Champions" was based on a wonderful novel about the importance of accepting life as it comes to you, but the movie was crap. On the other hand, "Potempkin" was made to push mindless commie propaganda, but it was a triumphant moment in film history when audiences first saw the stairway scene.
2) "Heavy handed" attacks almost never persuade anybody. The way to win people over is by convincing them with logic in a friendly tone, not by calling them evil. The Rush Limbaugh show might be very entertaining to some hard-core Republicans, but I doubt he has turned many liberals into conservatives. Tirades only score points with people who already agree with you.
I'm with you on that.
Unfortunately, cute & annoying is to anime as wisecracking sidekick characters are to Disney animation... almost unavoidable. Their audience expects it.
Even in a lot of the "serious" anime you can often count on seeing giggling school girls, angry & short old men, a dumb fat guy, a vaguely caucasian military leader (usually a navy commander with a white mustache and a pipe), and many other tired conventions.
As if the "cute" factor wasn't enough, anime has its own set of formulae to bail out bad writers:
People stand still and shout at each other before every fight. Everybody has a standing vertical leap at least equal to their height. Pilots suffer physical pain along with their crafts when in combat. The climax of the film will be interrupted by a full page of monologue by a character that tells us The Meaning Of It All (GITS comes to mind as an example of this one)... and the list goes on.
Of course, true anime fans love this stuff the way James Bond fans like seeing car chases that end with fruit-cart collisions. It all comes down to taste.
That movie was based on the ideas of the French comic-book artist Mobius. When I watched it in the theaters, I was not aware of this, but recognized the style right away. His comics are known for "style over substance"; visually stunning with very simple themes and silly sci-fi conventions (like the floating window-to-window lunch counter, the alien singer, etc.)
If you liked that movie (and it sounds like you liked it a little more than me), check out the Silver Surfer comic Mobius did for Marvel Comics, or his "airtight garage" anthology. You should be able to track them down at any comic store (and be gouged for them).
The MP3 Album ("Long Tall Weekend") is some of their best stuff. Every geek should get his hands on it, for the song "Older" alone if nothing else.
I hear they have a second offering (an "EP" this time) also for sale.
Plus the dial-a-song, the website (tmbg.com), the fan site (tmbg.org), and the mailing list... As if all that isn't cool enough, they have their own Internet radio station at WiredPlanet.com, which will let you listen to a continuous random selection of TMBG and Mono Puff music. Alas, the streaming client is MICROS~1 only, for now.