Ok, the movie sucked more than any other movie has sucked before it. But it forces us to reexamine how we define "a sucky movie". It allows us to set aside bias and gives us a firm and constant measure of "suckiness".
For instance, many people were disappointed by "Star Wars Part I: The Phantom Menace". I even had people say it sucked. But then there were the people who liked it, my self included. And some who loved it (not myself). We can all finally agree though, the suckiness factor in Star Wars Part I was not equal to that of BattleField Earth.
In fact, it allows us to determine a point of origin on a scale. With BattleField Earth being the suckiest movie that ever did suck, let's define a function "goodness" where goodness(battlefield_earth) = be. We can define the goodness of a movie, m, to be goodness(m). The amount that m didn't suck is goodness(m) - be. (Mathematicians, just have fun with it... I don't want proofs in my mailbox etc...)... define suck_factor(m) to be goodness(m) / be which is the measure of just how many time better m is than be since be*suck_factor(m) = goodness(m). suck_factor(be) = 1.:-)
With this in mind, I say we create a new rating system with the suckiness of Battlefield Earth in mind. The new measure will be "The BE Factor" which is just an alias for suck_factor(m) for any m.
The suckiness of Battlefield Earth also gave us new vocabulary words. For instance, when an otherwise excellent actor decides to act in a sucky movie like BE, we can say "Oh man, they pulled a Travolta." (just like John Travolta). When a friend is being stupid, call them "rat-brain" or "man-animal". guacamole will now make us think of the slop the "man-animals" were served. When your friend becomes angry at you for calling them a "rat-brain" warn them not to go "psychlo" on you. Or better yet, when a company is determined to be a monopolistic entity or uses slave labor in various 3rd world nations, you can say that the corporation has turned to "psychlonomics". And finally platform shoes will now be known as "Psychlo boots". =) =)
Good point... many times it's not the algorithm that's the problem, it's how people go about the exchanging of keys, storing the keys, etc, that compromise a system.
Could we consider the internet a test of just how much we truly value freedom of speech and the open discussion of opinions without the urge to attack and suppress them? It kind of gives one pause to wonder, if we as a society truly value the free exchange of ideas... or are they just feel good words? This particular issue doesn't have to do with copyrights, intellectual property, patents, illegal acts... a person put out some opinions... I don't know the nature... I don't care... he was attacked and for that... his ISP kicked him. So it seems to me the same old pattern... "I don't agree with you, so I'll just shut you up instead of discussing with you."
Heh, again, more security problems because of Microsoft's vbs engine. As I'm sure most people here realized, this worm will only affect windows machines. And windows machines run by people who aren't careful enough to check the script before they run it.
But to be fair, it's basically the same old story from the old days when trojans, virii, and worms were distributed in.COM and.EXE files (for those of us who used DOS =) hell, there were even a couple.BAT trojans (not very effective but still)... you could download all you wanted and not a thing would happen until you ran them. Then again, that's what scan was for... =)
You could have the same story with *nix though. What's to stop someone from writing a program that wipes out a user's directory? Or a sneaky bit of code in a program claiming to need access to root? I suppose the reason it doesn't happen as much in *nix land is because the users are generally more competent than people accustomed to simple point and click on M$ stuff; and incompetent people generally don't get root. =)
I guess the point is, all it takes is someone dumb enough to run a script or program etc without checking it out. If you're not practicing safe computing, you'll get an STD (Stupidly Transmitted Disease).
Not debating their rights to own their music and do with it as they see fit. Legally, Metallica is in the right. I do not think they are right to argue napster doesn't have a right to exist; especially when they have admitted to being neophytes when it comes to networking technology. I don't think napster is completely in the right either.
I was simply trying to make a contrast between metallica and offspring. Not argue whether metallica's right to protect their copyrights... that argument is pretty obvious.
Offspring is apparently gonna offer a song off their website soon. They seem to want their music to get into fans hands, even if not through "proper" means. I personally find it ironic that Metallica, which had previously promoted spreading of their music via bootlegs is so up in arms over napster... it seems to be the perfect medium for getting their music more widespread.
An interview in Rolling Stone quotes them as saying some very interesting things. My personal favorite being:
While Metallica have filed suit, citing the loss of revenue due to the online swapping, Holland disputes the idea. "From what I can tell it's not taking any money from people," he says. "I think it's expanding bands' fan bases. For us, when our last record was relatively new, about a year ago, we were the most downloaded band on the Internet . . . and geez, it certainly didn't hurt our record sales. We were doing great at that time. We were in the top ten for like six months or something," Holland says. "Somebody told me 'N Sync's record was available on Napster like three weeks before it came out, and obviously it didn't hurt their sales either. So I think it's good. It's the spirit of music; it's the spirit of rock & roll. More people coming to the party. Not less."
Well, I learned logo on old Apples in elementary school. ("learned", as in, I could draw a few shapes with a turtle), and I guess that planted the seed, but what really got me going was learning basic to write a breakout clone as a freshman in highschool... then it just kinda took off and whatever I could get my hands on and chomp into as a programmer keyed me in. I mean, classic geek... why do it? Cuz, it's cool... and I can! =)
I'm no legal expert, but I thought trademarks applied to identifying symbols, etc... unless this company is claiming that the scent of freshly cut grass causes people to think of them. Sort of like microsoft trying to trademark "windows".:-) I would think that a patent on the process of creating the scent would be much more appropriate... but then again, I'm not a lawyer and don't speak the language.
In the article, they said the study looked specifically at stores around universities, and further divided this set between universities that had banned napster, and those that hadn't.
Besides the obvious argument that they didn't count online record sales, which I suspect university students, being one myself, are more apt to do. There is another point that they didn't hit:
They said that there was an overall 4% drop in sales at stores near universities. They also said at universities where napster had been banned, there was a 7% drop in record sales... but whether or not this is due to napster is still out in the open. The study will be better validated if, in the next two years, record sales at universities rise more than a few points. (Ie, they need to show that when you have napster at a university, sales at stores go down, and when you don't have napster at a university, sales go up)
And, as a side note, if the labels want record sales in general (store bought and online) to go up, they could offer singles at reasonable prices.
I suspect this study was a little rigged too, but that's just my gut speaking. The story generally did a good job of covering most angles.
Sorry, should've been more specific. It wasn't that the US used tanks to kill people... it was that the united states used an excess of force. I was trying to draw a parallel between the actions of both countries. The US and China both actively try to suppress dissent... only in the United States, it seems to be more at the behest of big business rather than an oppressive government and less violent.
Really, this is the same country that little over ten years ago rolled tanks into Tiananmen square. And for my friends who were living in Beijing at the time, the suppression of the event was such that most had not seen the video and pictures most Americans have seen for the past decade. Ofcourse, seeing the actual tanks roll right not more than 10 from the front door has got to scare the shit out of anyone.
While I agree that China has made significant progress in the past 10 years, we still have to remember we are dealing with a country whose government is ideologically opposed to the United States.
On the plus side, China is going about with their reform in a very positive way. Unlike Russia, China is slowly moving towards a more capitalistic society... but sometimes I wonder if it's at the expense of it's citizens.
Ofcourse, if you look at recent events in the US in regards to the WTO meetings and the way the protestors were handled... perhaps we're not much different than China... and maybe we deserve eachother.
On an interesting note, it appears the the FBI considers TAIWAN a priority in counter-intelligence activities, and a hostile intelligence threat to the United States. Reno calls Taiwan an intelligence threat
A variant of this thing would be cool in a cyber-coffee house... only problem is that if someone decides to hack it you could have hot coffee down your pants. =)
On a more serious side, they talk about this thing being the product of a labor crunch... so what happens when there isn't a labor crunch and people are clamoring to find jobs? Are they going to have to sit in line behind a HAL9000 who is also going for the position?
Another one bites the dust =)
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
As the subject goes... they did a good and fair job. I thought the internet decision was a little dicey just given my experience with macintoshes and networking in general. IMHO, I don't think you get much better (or faster) net apps than with Linux/Unix. But ofcourse, that's just a preferences.
Oh boy... now I can get even more unsolicited email for porn sites. It's only a matter of time before someone uses this to send even more horrifying content... Activist Propaganda! At least I get some amount of amusement out of porn. =)
So, does this mean that we might get the opportunity to see if Warner Brothers was lying to us about Marvin the Martian? Perhaps we'll get a glimpse of Duck Dodgers too. =)
Oh good... more car accidents at the hands of unattentive cell phone users.... imagine explaining to an officer that you careened into the back of a truck while listening to "Born to be wild" from the net... assuming you survived. =)
Seriously, though, I kinda like having some things seperate...
heh, that's funny, because I've had not one single crash using linux, aside from when I recompiled the kernel... but that's to be expected, and the situation was easily fixed. When I run windows, I expect to crash.
"slashdot is a criminal organization" Wait... didn't the court just rule Micro$oft violated anti-trust laws, there-by making them a criminal organization? "...All MS is asking is for you guys to respect their copyrights. Is that so hard?"
But what is in contention here is whether or not microsoft actually owns the copyright.
Here's how I view it... imagine you have a software that you've been working on... you allow other people to help you. All this is in good faith and open... suddenly, one of the people who was helping announces that they have taken your code as a basis, slapped a few minor additions... kept it pretty much the same otherwise and claims that they own it... doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine that it smells really fishy and odious.
"...Without them, many great products would never have been created such as the car, light bulb, telephone..."
heh... copyright law didn't invent the car, light bulb, or telephone. And those things aren't even covered under copyright law... they would fall under patent law. And I'm not a really good historian when it comes to the inventors, but I doubt Ford, Edison, or Bell came about their inventions through the sleazy, underhanded, and legal cartwheels that microsoft used to purpotedly "copyright" their Kerberos Protocol. I'm pretty sure that those guys actually put some elbow grease into their inventions; not lawyers.
"Windows 98 is a great product. Anyone who says otherwise is a pro-Linux zelot or a fool."
At one point, I would've said that 98 was a step up from 95 (but not a "great" product)... turns out I was wrong. I don't want to even enumerate the problems 98 gave me after a while. The only people who can possibly say it's a "great product" are those with the intellect of a retarded gnat. Which precludes them from using linux. Learning linux wasn't easy, but damn, it's nice not to crash every 2 hours... and when I do, I can fix the problem.
7. Why wouldn't prospective purchasers of Windows 2000 need to know the contents of Microsoft's Kerberos specification in order to make informed judgments regarding interoperability in connection with their purchasing decisions?
Micro$oft has never been straightforward with the compatability of it's OS. If I'd known about half of the incompatibilities in Win2000 before I upgraded (to cure myself of Win98's instability), I would've just gone all Linux.
It really is the same old story...with companies, micro$oft simply bought them out... usually, they bought them legally... but they can't buy something open source... so they're trying to steal it and then bully anyone else who dares to use it without their permission... in effect, trying to continue their monopolistic policies where there isn't a single corporate entity to attack.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, many people were disappointed by "Star Wars Part I: The Phantom Menace". I even had people say it sucked. But then there were the people who liked it, my self included. And some who loved it (not myself). We can all finally agree though, the suckiness factor in Star Wars Part I was not equal to that of BattleField Earth.
In fact, it allows us to determine a point of origin on a scale. With BattleField Earth being the suckiest movie that ever did suck, let's define a function "goodness" where goodness(battlefield_earth) = be. We can define the goodness of a movie, m, to be goodness(m). The amount that m didn't suck is goodness(m) - be. (Mathematicians, just have fun with it... I don't want proofs in my mailbox etc...)... define suck_factor(m) to be goodness(m) / be which is the measure of just how many time better m is than be since be*suck_factor(m) = goodness(m). suck_factor(be) = 1. :-)
With this in mind, I say we create a new rating system with the suckiness of Battlefield Earth in mind. The new measure will be "The BE Factor" which is just an alias for suck_factor(m) for any m.
The suckiness of Battlefield Earth also gave us new vocabulary words. For instance, when an otherwise excellent actor decides to act in a sucky movie like BE, we can say "Oh man, they pulled a Travolta." (just like John Travolta). When a friend is being stupid, call them "rat-brain" or "man-animal". guacamole will now make us think of the slop the "man-animals" were served. When your friend becomes angry at you for calling them a "rat-brain" warn them not to go "psychlo" on you. Or better yet, when a company is determined to be a monopolistic entity or uses slave labor in various 3rd world nations, you can say that the corporation has turned to "psychlonomics". And finally platform shoes will now be known as "Psychlo boots". =) =)
I'm out.
Good point... many times it's not the algorithm that's the problem, it's how people go about the exchanging of keys, storing the keys, etc, that compromise a system.
Porn SPAM, it's fun to watch for those who like a raunchy taste...
make-money-fast SPAM, it might be just old SPAM because it looks a little green,
corporate SPAM, but it's too rich for my blood...
wow... I've even been getting Diploma SPAM, although it's a bit watered down from the real thing...
hopefully I won't see any Lawsuit SPAM, which looks brown and smells worse than a skunk; it leaves a funny taste in my mouth. :-)
Point to ponder.
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer
Could we consider the internet a test of just how much we truly value freedom of speech and the open discussion of opinions without the urge to attack and suppress them? It kind of gives one pause to wonder, if we as a society truly value the free exchange of ideas... or are they just feel good words? This particular issue doesn't have to do with copyrights, intellectual property, patents, illegal acts... a person put out some opinions... I don't know the nature... I don't care... he was attacked and for that... his ISP kicked him. So it seems to me the same old pattern... "I don't agree with you, so I'll just shut you up instead of discussing with you."
But to be fair, it's basically the same old story from the old days when trojans, virii, and worms were distributed in .COM and .EXE files (for those of us who used DOS =) hell, there were even a couple .BAT trojans (not very effective but still)... you could download all you wanted and not a thing would happen until you ran them. Then again, that's what scan was for... =)
You could have the same story with *nix though. What's to stop someone from writing a program that wipes out a user's directory? Or a sneaky bit of code in a program claiming to need access to root? I suppose the reason it doesn't happen as much in *nix land is because the users are generally more competent than people accustomed to simple point and click on M$ stuff; and incompetent people generally don't get root. =)
I guess the point is, all it takes is someone dumb enough to run a script or program etc without checking it out. If you're not practicing safe computing, you'll get an STD (Stupidly Transmitted Disease).
I was simply trying to make a contrast between metallica and offspring. Not argue whether metallica's right to protect their copyrights... that argument is pretty obvious.
An interview in Rolling Stone quotes them as saying some very interesting things. My personal favorite being:
Well, I learned logo on old Apples in elementary school. ("learned", as in, I could draw a few shapes with a turtle), and I guess that planted the seed, but what really got me going was learning basic to write a breakout clone as a freshman in highschool... then it just kinda took off and whatever I could get my hands on and chomp into as a programmer keyed me in. I mean, classic geek... why do it? Cuz, it's cool... and I can! =)
I'm no legal expert, but I thought trademarks applied to identifying symbols, etc... unless this company is claiming that the scent of freshly cut grass causes people to think of them. Sort of like microsoft trying to trademark "windows". :-) I would think that a patent on the process of creating the scent would be much more appropriate... but then again, I'm not a lawyer and don't speak the language.
In the article, they said the study looked specifically at stores around universities, and further divided this set between universities that had banned napster, and those that hadn't.
Besides the obvious argument that they didn't count online record sales, which I suspect university students, being one myself, are more apt to do. There is another point that they didn't hit:
They said that there was an overall 4% drop in sales at stores near universities. They also said at universities where napster had been banned, there was a 7% drop in record sales... but whether or not this is due to napster is still out in the open. The study will be better validated if, in the next two years, record sales at universities rise more than a few points. (Ie, they need to show that when you have napster at a university, sales at stores go down, and when you don't have napster at a university, sales go up)
And, as a side note, if the labels want record sales in general (store bought and online) to go up, they could offer singles at reasonable prices.
I suspect this study was a little rigged too, but that's just my gut speaking. The story generally did a good job of covering most angles.
China is also on the list.
I guess the difference is that the judge is the person who said something.
Sorry, should've been more specific. It wasn't that the US used tanks to kill people... it was that the united states used an excess of force. I was trying to draw a parallel between the actions of both countries. The US and China both actively try to suppress dissent... only in the United States, it seems to be more at the behest of big business rather than an oppressive government and less violent.
While I agree that China has made significant progress in the past 10 years, we still have to remember we are dealing with a country whose government is ideologically opposed to the United States.
On the plus side, China is going about with their reform in a very positive way. Unlike Russia, China is slowly moving towards a more capitalistic society... but sometimes I wonder if it's at the expense of it's citizens.
Ofcourse, if you look at recent events in the US in regards to the WTO meetings and the way the protestors were handled... perhaps we're not much different than China... and maybe we deserve eachother.
On an interesting note, it appears the the FBI considers TAIWAN a priority in counter-intelligence activities, and a hostile intelligence threat to the United States. Reno calls Taiwan an intelligence threat
A variant of this thing would be cool in a cyber-coffee house... only problem is that if someone decides to hack it you could have hot coffee down your pants. =)
On a more serious side, they talk about this thing being the product of a labor crunch... so what happens when there isn't a labor crunch and people are clamoring to find jobs? Are they going to have to sit in line behind a HAL9000 who is also going for the position?
AtheOS' website has been /.ed
As the subject goes... they did a good and fair job. I thought the internet decision was a little dicey just given my experience with macintoshes and networking in general. IMHO, I don't think you get much better (or faster) net apps than with Linux/Unix. But ofcourse, that's just a preferences.
Oh boy... now I can get even more unsolicited email for porn sites. It's only a matter of time before someone uses this to send even more horrifying content... Activist Propaganda! At least I get some amount of amusement out of porn. =)
So, does this mean that we might get the opportunity to see if Warner Brothers was lying to us about Marvin the Martian? Perhaps we'll get a glimpse of Duck Dodgers too. =)
I think the USA is pissed more because the playing field is about to shift, and they didn't have any part in it. :-)
Oh good... more car accidents at the hands of unattentive cell phone users.... imagine explaining to an officer that you careened into the back of a truck while listening to "Born to be wild" from the net... assuming you survived. =)
Seriously, though, I kinda like having some things seperate...
heh, that's funny, because I've had not one single crash using linux, aside from when I recompiled the kernel... but that's to be expected, and the situation was easily fixed. When I run windows, I expect to crash.
But what is in contention here is whether or not microsoft actually owns the copyright.
Here's how I view it... imagine you have a software that you've been working on... you allow other people to help you. All this is in good faith and open... suddenly, one of the people who was helping announces that they have taken your code as a basis, slapped a few minor additions... kept it pretty much the same otherwise and claims that they own it... doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine that it smells really fishy and odious.
"...Without them, many great products would never have been created such as the car, light bulb, telephone..."
heh... copyright law didn't invent the car, light bulb, or telephone. And those things aren't even covered under copyright law... they would fall under patent law. And I'm not a really good historian when it comes to the inventors, but I doubt Ford, Edison, or Bell came about their inventions through the sleazy, underhanded, and legal cartwheels that microsoft used to purpotedly "copyright" their Kerberos Protocol. I'm pretty sure that those guys actually put some elbow grease into their inventions; not lawyers.
"Windows 98 is a great product. Anyone who says otherwise is a pro-Linux zelot or a fool."
At one point, I would've said that 98 was a step up from 95 (but not a "great" product)... turns out I was wrong. I don't want to even enumerate the problems 98 gave me after a while. The only people who can possibly say it's a "great product" are those with the intellect of a retarded gnat. Which precludes them from using linux. Learning linux wasn't easy, but damn, it's nice not to crash every 2 hours... and when I do, I can fix the problem.
Micro$oft has never been straightforward with the compatability of it's OS. If I'd known about half of the incompatibilities in Win2000 before I upgraded (to cure myself of Win98's instability), I would've just gone all Linux.
It really is the same old story...with companies, micro$oft simply bought them out... usually, they bought them legally... but they can't buy something open source... so they're trying to steal it and then bully anyone else who dares to use it without their permission... in effect, trying to continue their monopolistic policies where there isn't a single corporate entity to attack.