It was Wilson Mizner (1876-1933). He was an American screenwriter who co-wrote, among other things, the script to Hard to Handle (1933) starring James Cagney.
There's your answer - and it only took ten seconds' plagiarism with Google.:)
Would be interested to know where you heard that. The way Stelios tells it, in his piece in the Guardian, it sounds like the distributors don't want to sign the normal contract either. To quote:
The single stumbling block remains the stubbornness of the major distributors. I'm spending a lot of time trying to sort this out. They say they don't believe in my pricing policy - they think it will encourage the same audiences to see films at a cheaper price, as opposed to luring a whole new audience who have been frightened off by the escalating costs of cinemagoing . . . I've promised them that I will remove the risk to their revenue by paying them a lump sum, somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds, to screen their releases; that way they get paid even if I turn out to be incompetent. But they're not budging; they believe that when their $200m blockbuster can be seen for 20p, it cheapens the product.
Of course, he is a PR man writing for public consumption, so we can't take this as gospel. While he strongly IMPLIES that he offered to sign the standard contract - and that the fixed-price contract is purely a concession to the distributors - he doesn't say so outright. Perhaps a more skilled researcher than I could find out what's really going on.
True, but we should also be able to move beyond tribal politics and recognise that we can support someone on one issue, and oppose them on another.
Absolutely. I think many Labour MPs have come to this conclusion lately.
Besides, if Stelios wins this - and I personally very much hope he will - then other cinemas will have to start competing on price. Then the anti-Stelios crowd can have the pleasure of choosing not to spend money with him and STILL getting into the cinema more cheaply.
However, I have to say I don't think the legal position is encouraging. Last August the High Court upheld a European Court of Justice ruling that Tesco (a British supermarket chain) could not sell discounted Levi's jeans without the manufacturer's consent. It's not a perfect analogue to this case: Tesco were buying the jeans very cheaply from countries outside of the EU, rather than paying the full price that Levi's would charge a UK retailer. Stelios doesn't seem to be trying to do anything like that - he just wants the distributors to provide him with films on the terms they would offer to any other cinema.
But still the principle - that the producers of a product or brand can control how and where it is presented - is very close.
Obviously it's easy to create an immense PDF if you put your mind to it: render the entire thing as a 4800 dpi bitmap, for example. But it's also surprisingly easy to create excessively large PDFs accidentally: embed a few fonts, use a couple of layers, make the thing editable in Illustrator, and watch the megabytes add up!
I would argue that the usage of "infer" to mean "imply" should be documented in the dictionary - because it is occasionally seen - but I would nevertheless beg you not to encourage its wider adoption. The entry itself does go on to say:
Usage Note: Infer is sometimes confused with imply, but the distinction is a useful one.
Of course, modern English is the product of millions of confusions and corruptions, and I'm sure we would all agree that this seems to have done it no great harm. But that's not a very strong argument for embracing every change in usage that comes along - particularly when, as in this case, the effect would be to obscure a currently clear and useful distinction between two words.
To "improve one's use of language" is always going to be a moving target; but I for one would applaud you for taking the more purist route on this one.:-)
To be fair, the big difference between this and the "traditional" rental model is that this way, although you can recycle the disc if you want, you won't be charged any more if you simply bin it. Since they're selling to Americans, they've probably guessed that 99% of people will take the path of minimum effort. Offering a recycling service allows them to keep the moral high ground, whilst having to do very little extra work.
I don't understand why anybody would do that. Maybe a handsome bribe?
Well, kind of. Speaking as a contract web designer, my employers almost never care about minority web browsers. They're happy for me to make a site that works with browsers other than IE, but they won't pay any extra for it. So the bribe is that I can do the job more quickly and simply for the same money if I only test my pages in IE.
If at least they knew how to spell!
Give them a break - they are in Luxembourg! And anyway, they do make an offer I've never seen before:
"if this seems unbearable to you, we will of course send you our files and scripts in order to allow you to set up a version of our site running under linux/netscape/opera/etc."
So what? This system works within the standard. Who cares whether or not the designers foresaw it?
It drives network traffic as well up to the sky.
Hardly. If you're on Earthlink and decide to opt-in for this, it simply means that everybody you know has to send you one extra email once. Earthlink's traffic may be a bit higher for the first few days, but once people get their whitelists in order it'll drop back to where it is now - and below, because there'll be less spam floating around.
However, I do hope (the article didn't say) they've come up with a smart solution to the problem of spammers putting real (but stolen) addresses as their From: address. Otherwise people unlucky enough to have their addresses stolen may indeed find their network traffic increases, thanks to a million challenges from Earthlink.
First off, ripping my 300 or so cds at high quality VBR would go a decent way to filling that. I'm betting I could definitely fill a healthy chunk of the 60gigs, and it'd be nice to have room to grow, eh?
Just to add my personal experience; obviously not all albums are the same length, and the thing about VBR is that you can't predict precisely how much space a given track will take up. But I do all my encoding with lame --r3mix, and I find that, on average, most rips seem to come out at about 1.3Mb per minute.
So, assuming your mileage doesn't vary (doubtful), and all your CDs contain 74 minutes of music (very doubtful), you can expect each one of your CDs to take up just under 100Mb. Or, to put it another way, your collection of 300 CDs would roughly half-fill that 60Gb unit.
Which prompts me to muse that if the extra storage is really cheap, you may as well go for it; but unless you're planning to double the size of your music collection within the lifetime of this player, you won't need the space for music. Personally, I only rip tracks I reckon I'll want to listen to repeatedly, and from my own collection of around 300 CDs I've still only managed to half-fill my 20Gb iPod.
It's not worth if for so many reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of good creative software on MS Windows.
What creative software do you really need that isn't available for Windows?? There are Windows versions of InDesign, Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Sonar, Cubase... I mean, I really can't think of any creative task where software availability would be a decisive factor in choosing a platform.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love to be running OS X, and I was seriously thinking of buying a Mac less than a month ago. But when it came down to it, I realised that for literally less than half the price of a 1GHz G4, I could get a new Athlon XP 2400+ system with 512Mb of DDR RAM and an 80Gb ATA-100 hard disk. However great the Mac is conceptually, it just can't compete with that sort of power at that sort of price.
I genuinely do want Apple to succeed; but not enough to pay an extra £650 for a new computer. So I really hope the 970 doesn't just mean their top-end computers will be twice as fast: I hope it means their mid-range computers will be half the price.
> "IBM" is not an abbreviation. If it's not an acronym, then there's no word in English for what it is.
"The test of a true acronym is often assumed to be that it should be pronounceable as a word within the normal word patterns of English. By such a reckoning, BBC is not an acronym, but an abbreviation; whereas Nato (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization), being pronounceable like Cato, is an acronym.... The limitations of the term being not widely known to the public, acronym is also often applied to abbreviations that are familiar but are not pronounceable as words. Thus EC (European Community), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). Such terms are also called initialisms." - The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd edn., ed. R.W. Burchfield (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1998) p. 17-18
a monolithic, faceless, compassionless, inhuman organism of one mind bent on consuming all to its purpose. But kind of like Communism, when you need a figurhead, you know you're in trouble.
Then again, look how well the GOP's doing these days!
Now the fighting is all but over and the barest beginnings of restoring basic services and installing an interim government is underway: writing copyright law has to be right up there with instituting banking, public works, security forces and the like, eh?
Well, presumably Ms. Rosen wasn't going to be helping out with any of those things; so I guess the argument is that she may as well get started on what she CAN do.
Personally, though, I don't see what the hell Iraqi IP law has to do with her or anyone in America. Let the Iraqis write their own damn laws - they're the ones who are going to have to live under them.
Of course it is possible that the account name was stolen or sold; I get a lot of MSN messenger spam on the new XP Machine, mostly from blockmessenger.com
I have to say, it's a bit of a mystery to me why, when an ISP receives an email from a relay that's never successfully relayed to it before, it doesn't hold the mail, and try to send a test message to itself through that relay. If the mail gets through, the relay is obviously open, and the ISP should refuse the mail, saying "could not deliver this message because it was sent via an open relay - please close the relay and resend." This wouldn't end spam, but it would cut off one route whereby spam gets to your inbox.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG - a Slashdot chick who knows the phrase "esprit d'escalier" AND - from her journal - "zeugma." I think I'm in love.
it's one of those odd nouns that has no singular form.
You mean it's one of those odd nounim that has no singular form.
It was Wilson Mizner (1876-1933). He was an American screenwriter who co-wrote, among other things, the script to Hard to Handle (1933) starring James Cagney.
:)
There's your answer - and it only took ten seconds' plagiarism with Google.
Would be interested to know where you heard that. The way Stelios tells it, in his piece in the Guardian, it sounds like the distributors don't want to sign the normal contract either. To quote:
The single stumbling block remains the stubbornness of the major distributors. I'm spending a lot of time trying to sort this out. They say they don't believe in my pricing policy - they think it will encourage the same audiences to see films at a cheaper price, as opposed to luring a whole new audience who have been frightened off by the escalating costs of cinemagoing . . . I've promised them that I will remove the risk to their revenue by paying them a lump sum, somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds, to screen their releases; that way they get paid even if I turn out to be incompetent. But they're not budging; they believe that when their $200m blockbuster can be seen for 20p, it cheapens the product.
Of course, he is a PR man writing for public consumption, so we can't take this as gospel. While he strongly IMPLIES that he offered to sign the standard contract - and that the fixed-price contract is purely a concession to the distributors - he doesn't say so outright. Perhaps a more skilled researcher than I could find out what's really going on.
True, but we should also be able to move beyond tribal politics and recognise that we can support someone on one issue, and oppose them on another.
Absolutely. I think many Labour MPs have come to this conclusion lately.
Besides, if Stelios wins this - and I personally very much hope he will - then other cinemas will have to start competing on price. Then the anti-Stelios crowd can have the pleasure of choosing not to spend money with him and STILL getting into the cinema more cheaply.
However, I have to say I don't think the legal position is encouraging. Last August the High Court upheld a European Court of Justice ruling that Tesco (a British supermarket chain) could not sell discounted Levi's jeans without the manufacturer's consent. It's not a perfect analogue to this case: Tesco were buying the jeans very cheaply from countries outside of the EU, rather than paying the full price that Levi's would charge a UK retailer. Stelios doesn't seem to be trying to do anything like that - he just wants the distributors to provide him with films on the terms they would offer to any other cinema.
But still the principle - that the producers of a product or brand can control how and where it is presented - is very close.
Seconded.
I'm going to encode mine using CSS
:)
So it won't be displayed correctly in IE, you mean?
Obviously it's easy to create an immense PDF if you put your mind to it: render the entire thing as a 4800 dpi bitmap, for example. But it's also surprisingly easy to create excessively large PDFs accidentally: embed a few fonts, use a couple of layers, make the thing editable in Illustrator, and watch the megabytes add up!
I would argue that the usage of "infer" to mean "imply" should be documented in the dictionary - because it is occasionally seen - but I would nevertheless beg you not to encourage its wider adoption. The entry itself does go on to say:
:-)
Usage Note: Infer is sometimes confused with imply, but the distinction is a useful one.
Of course, modern English is the product of millions of confusions and corruptions, and I'm sure we would all agree that this seems to have done it no great harm. But that's not a very strong argument for embracing every change in usage that comes along - particularly when, as in this case, the effect would be to obscure a currently clear and useful distinction between two words.
To "improve one's use of language" is always going to be a moving target; but I for one would applaud you for taking the more purist route on this one.
The aroma of each be-atch, more like.
To be fair, the big difference between this and the "traditional" rental model is that this way, although you can recycle the disc if you want, you won't be charged any more if you simply bin it. Since they're selling to Americans, they've probably guessed that 99% of people will take the path of minimum effort. Offering a recycling service allows them to keep the moral high ground, whilst having to do very little extra work.
Hey Kids! Want to take over thousands of people's machines? Hack Geocities and install your own 3733t "eYe r0K uR w0RlD" binary at this URL!
Or distribute your own worm that adds an entry to the user's 'hosts' file, redirecting this address to your own site.
I believe you're thinking of Lord Falconer? Anyway, the Millennium Dome was fine so far as it went. The problem was that we paid a billion pounds for it, then the government gave it away. And we all know which grinning idiot we can thank for that.
I don't understand why anybody would do that. Maybe a handsome bribe?
Well, kind of. Speaking as a contract web designer, my employers almost never care about minority web browsers. They're happy for me to make a site that works with browsers other than IE, but they won't pay any extra for it. So the bribe is that I can do the job more quickly and simply for the same money if I only test my pages in IE.
If at least they knew how to spell!
Give them a break - they are in Luxembourg! And anyway, they do make an offer I've never seen before:
"if this seems unbearable to you, we will of course send you our files and scripts in order to allow you to set up a version of our site running under linux/netscape/opera/etc."
Interesting to note that the top 2% of the population includes people who chose names like "Motherfucking Shit."
"How about intercourse, pa?"
Are you from Alabama?
Yeah, well this is Piers Morgan we're talking about. The Mirror is not widely revered in the UK.
Er, what?
eMail was not designed for such a challenge
So what? This system works within the standard. Who cares whether or not the designers foresaw it?
It drives network traffic as well up to the sky.
Hardly. If you're on Earthlink and decide to opt-in for this, it simply means that everybody you know has to send you one extra email once. Earthlink's traffic may be a bit higher for the first few days, but once people get their whitelists in order it'll drop back to where it is now - and below, because there'll be less spam floating around.
However, I do hope (the article didn't say) they've come up with a smart solution to the problem of spammers putting real (but stolen) addresses as their From: address. Otherwise people unlucky enough to have their addresses stolen may indeed find their network traffic increases, thanks to a million challenges from Earthlink.
First off, ripping my 300 or so cds at high quality VBR would go a decent way to filling that. I'm betting I could definitely fill a healthy chunk of the 60gigs, and it'd be nice to have room to grow, eh?
Just to add my personal experience; obviously not all albums are the same length, and the thing about VBR is that you can't predict precisely how much space a given track will take up. But I do all my encoding with lame --r3mix, and I find that, on average, most rips seem to come out at about 1.3Mb per minute.
So, assuming your mileage doesn't vary (doubtful), and all your CDs contain 74 minutes of music (very doubtful), you can expect each one of your CDs to take up just under 100Mb. Or, to put it another way, your collection of 300 CDs would roughly half-fill that 60Gb unit.
Which prompts me to muse that if the extra storage is really cheap, you may as well go for it; but unless you're planning to double the size of your music collection within the lifetime of this player, you won't need the space for music. Personally, I only rip tracks I reckon I'll want to listen to repeatedly, and from my own collection of around 300 CDs I've still only managed to half-fill my 20Gb iPod.
It's not worth if for so many reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of good creative software on MS Windows.
What creative software do you really need that isn't available for Windows?? There are Windows versions of InDesign, Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Sonar, Cubase... I mean, I really can't think of any creative task where software availability would be a decisive factor in choosing a platform.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love to be running OS X, and I was seriously thinking of buying a Mac less than a month ago. But when it came down to it, I realised that for literally less than half the price of a 1GHz G4, I could get a new Athlon XP 2400+ system with 512Mb of DDR RAM and an 80Gb ATA-100 hard disk. However great the Mac is conceptually, it just can't compete with that sort of power at that sort of price.
I genuinely do want Apple to succeed; but not enough to pay an extra £650 for a new computer. So I really hope the 970 doesn't just mean their top-end computers will be twice as fast: I hope it means their mid-range computers will be half the price.
> "IBM" is not an abbreviation. If it's not an acronym, then there's no word in English for what it is.
"The test of a true acronym is often assumed to be that it should be pronounceable as a word within the normal word patterns of English. By such a reckoning, BBC is not an acronym, but an abbreviation; whereas Nato (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization), being pronounceable like Cato, is an acronym.... The limitations of the term being not widely known to the public, acronym is also often applied to abbreviations that are familiar but are not pronounceable as words. Thus EC (European Community), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). Such terms are also called initialisms." - The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd edn., ed. R.W. Burchfield (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1998) p. 17-18
a monolithic, faceless, compassionless, inhuman organism of one mind bent on consuming all to its purpose. But kind of like Communism, when you need a figurhead, you know you're in trouble.
Then again, look how well the GOP's doing these days!
Now the fighting is all but over and the barest beginnings of restoring basic services and installing an interim government is underway: writing copyright law has to be right up there with instituting banking, public works, security forces and the like, eh?
Well, presumably Ms. Rosen wasn't going to be helping out with any of those things; so I guess the argument is that she may as well get started on what she CAN do.
Personally, though, I don't see what the hell Iraqi IP law has to do with her or anyone in America. Let the Iraqis write their own damn laws - they're the ones who are going to have to live under them.
Of course it is possible that the account name was stolen or sold; I get a lot of MSN messenger spam on the new XP Machine, mostly from blockmessenger.com
Dude, you do know you can just disable the messenger service, right?
e.g. blocking all mail from open relays
I have to say, it's a bit of a mystery to me why, when an ISP receives an email from a relay that's never successfully relayed to it before, it doesn't hold the mail, and try to send a test message to itself through that relay. If the mail gets through, the relay is obviously open, and the ISP should refuse the mail, saying "could not deliver this message because it was sent via an open relay - please close the relay and resend." This wouldn't end spam, but it would cut off one route whereby spam gets to your inbox.