Actually, wasn't that one of the original Tivo ads? They show Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott about to apply a dollop of white goo to the "affected area," cutting away to the message, "Tivo, watch what you want, skip the rest."
All in all, Tivo had some of the best ads I've seen in a long time.
Some good points here, and your anecdotal evidence does seem pretty conclusive that piracy is where all the sales are going in this regard...
But I'm not convinced that on-line file sharing is the main vehicle of piracy. To point, have you actually tried assembling a complete album entirely from P2P applications?
First, you have to get a listing of all the tracks, and then you have to search for each track individually. Then you hope that they're all listed at the time you're on, which more likely than not they aren't. And then you try and find enough sources to download them, which could take hours or days (one source isn't enough, since they all tend to cut out after a minute or two).
Eventually, you've got your album assembled, but each file has different naming conventions, and they're not normalized; you might have to turn up your computer's volume on one song only to have the next song blasted at you. So you have to run normalization software yourself on all your files, which I guess is only a minor inconvenience. Now, this is all assuming that you actually downloaded the right file, which may not be a safe assumption given the number of mislabeled files out there.
By the time you're done creating your bootleg album, you've spent enough hours of solid attention to your computer that you might as well have just bought the album from Amazon (that's probably where you got your track listing from anyway). For your time, it may actually be cheaper, as you might have done something productive in that time.
Real piracy comes in much more convenient forms: campus network shares and friends with burners. SMB shares over 100-baseT are a godsend to the young pirate on a budget. Back when I was a student, I got gigs upon gigs of anime and mp3s over the campus network, and almost never ran KaZaA or Gnutella. And nowadays, most of my song discoveries are at friends' houses. Like this album? Here, I'll burn a CD for you. Even better, trade your entire collection with 7 or 8 other people at a LAN party. Remember, only one person has to buy the CD and rip it, and it's part of the "people" network.
All these methods are way easier to use than the big P2P networks, and they're exceedingly difficult to police. The only way a musician can hope to make money through distribution is to offer an option that is easy and cheap enough that the guilt factor (not insignificant) will be enough to convince people to either buy them or not share them.
Imagine the following scenario: A:Hey, mind if I leech that album off you? B:Sure, it's on \\pir8mus1k\shared\ A:Hey, thanks. I could pay $15 for this, but why?
And then another scenario: A:Neat album, can you make me a copy? B:Dude, it's like 6 bucks. Just download it from their site and quit lagging out my connection. A:Alright, fine...
I've heard both of these conversations under different circumstances.
I keep hearing claims that the GPL is paramount to open-source software development. Why is this?
Will open-source developers stop writing software if they're not forced to release all their derivative code? Have any significant contributions to the free software community been made entirely as part of a requirement of the GPL?
Now I'm all for the GPL's rule; I think that it's only fair that if you take from the community, you have to give back. Although I like the sound of this, I'm not convinced that it actually results in any positive change.
It may seem unfair if a company like OpenTV (or potentially Microsoft) uses GPL code without contributing back, but does GNU/Linux suffer from it? What happens if it turns out that the GPL doesn't hold up in court and every company starts using GPL code without doing their due diligence? Will all the projects on SourceForge just fold up and die?
While I can understand the open source developers feeling exploited, I don't think it would be the end of free software as we know it.
Hey, guns don't kill people -- they just accelerate chunks of metal to very high speeds. If you happen to be standing in the way, it's your own damn fault!
Any video or audio that is decodeable on a PC can be hijacked from that same PC
You sure about that? Because that seems to be exactly what Safedisc does. Somehow a key is pressed onto the CD in the mastering process, and although that key can be verified by the software, it can't actually be burned onto another CD by a standard CD burner.
I don't know how it works, and it seems like it ought to be impossible, but the proof is on every CD that EA has pressed in the last year or so. For more information, visit their web site.
I hate to burst the bubble of all those who had visions of running their home systems inside one of these, but according to Boxmaster's site, the cardboard case uses the Mini-ITX form factor.
While this might not be a problem for some, I don't know how many of us are willing to buy one of the few Mini-ITX motherboards on the market just to use this case.
Also, regarding the humanoid cases, it looks to me as if they can't be opened. Maybe I'm just not looking carefully enough, or maybe these are just meant for your BSD router or something...
As many posters have pointed out already, VOD is not the ready for prime time, mainly because we don't trust the administrators of such a system to actually keep what we want. Basically, Video on Demand is an oxymoron. The current systems for VOD only have a few dozen (or maybe even a few hundred, to be optimistic) movies to watch at any given time, which severely limit their usefulness.
But let's look to the future. According to another poster, the Internet Movie Database lists some 268,836 films, of varying lengths, rarity, popularity and actual existence. An average movie is 2 hours, which can take as much as 1.5 gigabytes of space to actually look (and sound) good. 268,836 times 1.5 gigabytes is 403,254 gigabytes, or about 394 terabytes. Suppose we want the movies to have twice the resolution as what the average Kazaa user is used to, and we have about 788 terabytes of space. We still haven't broken the pedabyte level, and we've already archived every documented film in human history (including some that haven't even been made).
So assuming storage space keeps increasing, and bandwidth increases to the point that everyone can watch a movie at the same time without the networks clogging, and the political situation changes so that there actually is a public domain, or maybe somebody finally figures out a way that people can enjoy movies for free while still having the creators get paid, it is quite possible to have a VOD system that is actually useful to everyone.
It probably won't happen for a hundred or so years, but I can imagine a future where nobody keeps their own recordings, simply because they trust a benevolent entity to keep them in a no-questions-asked manner. Of course, I don't think people ought to trust a central organization like this, but I could imagine if it had a reputation like the Library of Congress, people probably would. When that time comes, that's when VOD will be viable, and we won't think of it as VOD. We'll just call it "watching movies."
Most people use their PVRs to record stuff or to pause commercials. So, you ignore the commercial pausing stuff, and a VCR fits the bill.
You really miss the point of TiVo. "Record stuff," that's like saying that my personal mp3 player is only marginally more useful than my great grandfather's gramaphone, because all they do is play recordings. Sure, all a TiVo does is record things, but it records things so incredibly well that you don't really even think of it as "recording" things.
TiVo means never having to turn on the TV and find that there's nothing on. As long as there's something worth watching on TV, even if it comes on at 2 am on the Korean Christian channel, it'll show up on your program list. Hear about some new show from a friend or co-worker? Just plug in the name and in about a week's time, it's there. No fumbling with schedules required. To get the kind of experience most TiVo owners enjoy, you'd need a personal robot switching tapes back and forth, and a ten-foot high octuple-layered stack of video tapes.
If you haven't used TiVo before, you're probably not convinced, but if you ever go to somebody's house that has TiVo, and try watching TV, it's a totally different experience. And no, I am not on their payroll. In fact, I don't even own a TiVo. But my mom and brother both have them, and when I'm visiting, I actually watch TV, whereas when I'm in my own house, I generally don't.
Well, I don't know about the Philips models, but the Sony TiVo certainly doesn't use standard phillips head screws. It uses Torx. Of course, it is probably possible, as you say, to replace them with real screws.
#1 is impossible with current digital cable system
on
Rabid TiVo Fanaticism
·
· Score: 1
It is possible to make a DVR that will not require a separate box to handle digital cable. However, such functionality would not allow you to watch multiple channels at once, no matter how well engineered it was. The reason lies in the fundamental differences between analog and digital cable.
In analog cable, every single channel is sent simultaneously, so all your TV has to be able to do to play two shows at once is interpret two parts of the signal. With enough processing power and a blazingly fast RAID array, your DVR could theoretically record every single show being aired on analog cable, simply because it's all being blasted at it. There is no request system with analog cable, which is partly why you can't do video on demand.
With digital cable, however, delivery is entirely request-based. When you change channels, your cable box sends a request back to the cable provider, who in turn starts streaming content from the requested channel. That's why digital cable systems can have hundreds or theoretically millions of channels, while on analog cable, you get a maximum of 120 or so. On analog, the company has to blast them all at you, which means there's a theoretical limit to how much you can send before you get frame drop. With digital, there's only one channel being sent out at a time, at maximum quality, regardless of how many channels are being offered.
Now it's actually possible to implement a cable system that supports picture-in-picture or recording multiple shows. Since there's plenty of bandwidth to go around (enough to send 120 or so shows at once), the cable company could just send you, say, the last nine channels that you requested, and leave the selection up to the DVR or cable box. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, none of the networks have implemented it this way.
I believe you're confusing the software's intended use with its primary use. BitTorrent is a program to assist in the distribution of large files, period. It just so happens that the most highly demanded large files on the internet are also illegal. BitTorrent doesn't really even directly facilitate piracy in the way that Napster did; you can't search it. It depends on people to provide the end user with trackers, and the indexing of these trackers is entirely separate from the BitTorrent program itself.
Each site that indexes BitTorrent trackers essentially becomes a mini-Napster. If you want to shut down the piracy of a given file, all you need to do is send a C&D letter to the person hosting the tracker, and no new people will be able to download it without someone sticking their neck out to repost the tracker on a different site. This is much like the old days, when we searched the web for our mp3 files, and waded through porn banners the old fashioned way. The only difference is that it doesn't cost humongous amounts of bandwidth to the person hosting the tracker.
People see BitTorrent and how it's used, and assume that it's just the next generation of piracy software. But it's more than that; it's the future of all online distribution. While it makes illegal uses easy, it makes the legitimate uses even easier. Even if it isn't right now, BitTorrent really should be the preferred distribution medium for just about any time-sensitive content. Imagine downloading the newest Redhat or Debian distro through it. All of a sudden the bandwidth bills for sites like redhat.com aren't quite so exhorbitant.
The only downside to BT that I've observed is that there's a sharp falloff between when a file is new and the downloads fast, and when it's old and completely inaccessible. It lies on a file's popularity to provide the extra bandwidth, and as I've noticed in the anime fansubbing community, you generally can't download a file over BT more than a week or two after it's released. This makes it ideal for time-sensitive stuff like news feeds or weekly netcasts, but completely useless for archival.
Anyway, to claim that BT is contributory infringement is practically to toe Senator Hollings' line. It's the amazingly useful technology that would be banned because it doesn't have piracy checks.
Umm, how long ago did you move away? As the other poster said, it's a Tower Records. Before that, it was an empty building for about a year and a half.
I don't have evidence to back this up, but I have a nagging suspicion that the H1-Bs were displaced at roughly the same rate the rest of us were. The struggling job market has leveled the playing field somewhat, in that most of us are willing to work for lower wages, as long as it'll pay the rent. Since that's really the complaint that we had against H1-B workers, doesn't that make us all just as appetizing to a greedy employer?
I could be mistaken here, and if there are statistics showing that the layoff rate for H1-Bs is significantly lower than it is for US residents, I'd like to see them. But making such claims without solid evidence puts us on a slippery slope towards racism.
Your analysis sounds good on the surface, but there are a few major issues where the metaphor breaks down. First of all, if Yubaba symbolizes the Japanese image of the West, then why does she run a bathhouse? Bathhouses don't exist at all in the West, and although I can't say for sure that there are no westernized bathhouses in Japan, the ones I've been to were not westernized at all.
And if Yubaba's domain is so westernized, then why does it resemble an old Chinese market, and furthermore, why isn't Daddy's Credit Card any good?
I'd say that that the social structure of Yubaba's bathhouse is more like that in the late Tokugawa period, everything all sectioned off with clearly defined roles for everyone. Even that's a real stretch, though.
So where does Kaonashi (No-face) fit into your analysis? If the West has already invaded, then why does another invader cause so much harm?
Personally, I think Spirited Away is more about finding your courage, and learning to hold on to your principles in an unfair society that wants to take away everything that's dear to you, even your own name. There's nothing distinctly Japanese about this struggle, although I have a feeling that young Japanese people have it much worse than Americans do, socially.
According to an interview with Miyazaki, the idea for Spirited Away came when some young girls were visiting with him, and reading some girls' manga. He read some of it when they weren't looking, and was horrified at what he saw: stories about sedate girls all waiting for their princes, or consumeristic nonsense. He wanted to do something to show Japan's younger generation what it means to be a human being, and this movie was the result.
In this light, I think Spirited Away had a much less political goal than you ascribed to it, though an equally lofty one.
I remember when that happened. I was a senior in high school and had just showed that movie to my film teacher a few weeks before. Such a sad coincidence that we'd both discovered him so shortly before his passing...
I took a short robotics class through the University of Washington's EE department a while ago, and we used Linux for everything. The reason was that the software used to program the boards was written for *NIX, not Windows. The boards we were using were developed by MIT, as are a whole lot of good things in the field of robotics right now. Although Windows ports exist for the software, do you *really* want to try using a relatively untested version, considering that the MIT hackers are running on Unix?
Unix in the robotics lab is nearly as entrenched as Windows is in the office, and pretty much for the same reasons. The compatibility argument works both ways.
Spooky. Same hard drive (the IBM Deathstar, right?), same age of information, same circumstances surrounding deleting the old information (and asking myself why in hell I did that), same devastation. Losing a hard drive without proper backup (or finding out that your backup tapes didn't work, etc) is roughly equivalent to having your house burn down in this day and age. I lost all my (albeit crappy) papers from high school, a good percentage of my college coursework, every hard-to-find mp3 file I'd collected since 1996.
A similar thing happened to my friend's wife, a Psych. PhD at UW. The hard drive inside her Dell laptop died suddenly. But unlike my story, she'd been backing her stuff up nightly on the school's fileservers. Her hard drive failure meant a two-week inconvenience, whereas mine has resulted in six months of wondering what that phone number was again, how that great song went, and just what did happen in episode 37 of Hikaru no Go.
So the CS major (me) forgot to backup and got burned, while the doctor of psychology backed up and lost nothing. If only they taught us common sense in those CSE courses...
DVD-Rs don't cost shitloads anymore. They're still kind of expensive, but not that expensive. You can get a decent one for a couple hundred bucks off mwave or newegg.
An interesting quote from the article
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future.
When did this happen? Industry executives actually acknowledging the obvious? Now where'd those pigs go...
I'm actually not surprised that the users flocked to the KDE boxes. KDE just looks nice and new from a cosmetic standpoint, and in your atmosphere, with everything set up via desktop icons, there's no real barrier to entry. I mean, Windows is just fine and all, but if there's no learning curve, I think people would like to try something new for a change.
I just wonder how long it was before people started saying, "hey, the internet explorer starts up faster on this Konqueror machine than on that IBM over there."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, wasn't that one of the original Tivo ads? They show Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott about to apply a dollop of white goo to the "affected area," cutting away to the message, "Tivo, watch what you want, skip the rest."
All in all, Tivo had some of the best ads I've seen in a long time.
Some good points here, and your anecdotal evidence does seem pretty conclusive that piracy is where all the sales are going in this regard...
But I'm not convinced that on-line file sharing is the main vehicle of piracy. To point, have you actually tried assembling a complete album entirely from P2P applications?
First, you have to get a listing of all the tracks, and then you have to search for each track individually. Then you hope that they're all listed at the time you're on, which more likely than not they aren't. And then you try and find enough sources to download them, which could take hours or days (one source isn't enough, since they all tend to cut out after a minute or two).
Eventually, you've got your album assembled, but each file has different naming conventions, and they're not normalized; you might have to turn up your computer's volume on one song only to have the next song blasted at you. So you have to run normalization software yourself on all your files, which I guess is only a minor inconvenience. Now, this is all assuming that you actually downloaded the right file, which may not be a safe assumption given the number of mislabeled files out there.
By the time you're done creating your bootleg album, you've spent enough hours of solid attention to your computer that you might as well have just bought the album from Amazon (that's probably where you got your track listing from anyway). For your time, it may actually be cheaper, as you might have done something productive in that time.
Real piracy comes in much more convenient forms: campus network shares and friends with burners. SMB shares over 100-baseT are a godsend to the young pirate on a budget. Back when I was a student, I got gigs upon gigs of anime and mp3s over the campus network, and almost never ran KaZaA or Gnutella. And nowadays, most of my song discoveries are at friends' houses. Like this album? Here, I'll burn a CD for you. Even better, trade your entire collection with 7 or 8 other people at a LAN party. Remember, only one person has to buy the CD and rip it, and it's part of the "people" network.
All these methods are way easier to use than the big P2P networks, and they're exceedingly difficult to police. The only way a musician can hope to make money through distribution is to offer an option that is easy and cheap enough that the guilt factor (not insignificant) will be enough to convince people to either buy them or not share them.
Imagine the following scenario:
A:Hey, mind if I leech that album off you?
B:Sure, it's on \\pir8mus1k\shared\
A:Hey, thanks. I could pay $15 for this, but why?
And then another scenario:
A:Neat album, can you make me a copy?
B:Dude, it's like 6 bucks. Just download it from their site and quit lagging out my connection.
A:Alright, fine...
I've heard both of these conversations under different circumstances.
I did *NOT* need that image. Thank you while I stab my eyes out.
I keep hearing claims that the GPL is paramount to open-source software development. Why is this?
Will open-source developers stop writing software if they're not forced to release all their derivative code? Have any significant contributions to the free software community been made entirely as part of a requirement of the GPL?
Now I'm all for the GPL's rule; I think that it's only fair that if you take from the community, you have to give back. Although I like the sound of this, I'm not convinced that it actually results in any positive change.
It may seem unfair if a company like OpenTV (or potentially Microsoft) uses GPL code without contributing back, but does GNU/Linux suffer from it? What happens if it turns out that the GPL doesn't hold up in court and every company starts using GPL code without doing their due diligence? Will all the projects on SourceForge just fold up and die?
While I can understand the open source developers feeling exploited, I don't think it would be the end of free software as we know it.
Hey, guns don't kill people -- they just accelerate chunks of metal to very high speeds. If you happen to be standing in the way, it's your own damn fault!
Any video or audio that is decodeable on a PC can be hijacked from that same PC
You sure about that? Because that seems to be exactly what Safedisc does. Somehow a key is pressed onto the CD in the mastering process, and although that key can be verified by the software, it can't actually be burned onto another CD by a standard CD burner.
I don't know how it works, and it seems like it ought to be impossible, but the proof is on every CD that EA has pressed in the last year or so. For more information, visit their web site.
I hate to burst the bubble of all those who had visions of running their home systems inside one of these, but according to Boxmaster's site, the cardboard case uses the Mini-ITX form factor.
While this might not be a problem for some, I don't know how many of us are willing to buy one of the few Mini-ITX motherboards on the market just to use this case.
Also, regarding the humanoid cases, it looks to me as if they can't be opened. Maybe I'm just not looking carefully enough, or maybe these are just meant for your BSD router or something...
As many posters have pointed out already, VOD is not the ready for prime time, mainly because we don't trust the administrators of such a system to actually keep what we want. Basically, Video on Demand is an oxymoron. The current systems for VOD only have a few dozen (or maybe even a few hundred, to be optimistic) movies to watch at any given time, which severely limit their usefulness.
But let's look to the future. According to another poster, the Internet Movie Database lists some 268,836 films, of varying lengths, rarity, popularity and actual existence. An average movie is 2 hours, which can take as much as 1.5 gigabytes of space to actually look (and sound) good. 268,836 times 1.5 gigabytes is 403,254 gigabytes, or about 394 terabytes. Suppose we want the movies to have twice the resolution as what the average Kazaa user is used to, and we have about 788 terabytes of space. We still haven't broken the pedabyte level, and we've already archived every documented film in human history (including some that haven't even been made).
So assuming storage space keeps increasing, and bandwidth increases to the point that everyone can watch a movie at the same time without the networks clogging, and the political situation changes so that there actually is a public domain, or maybe somebody finally figures out a way that people can enjoy movies for free while still having the creators get paid, it is quite possible to have a VOD system that is actually useful to everyone.
It probably won't happen for a hundred or so years, but I can imagine a future where nobody keeps their own recordings, simply because they trust a benevolent entity to keep them in a no-questions-asked manner. Of course, I don't think people ought to trust a central organization like this, but I could imagine if it had a reputation like the Library of Congress, people probably would. When that time comes, that's when VOD will be viable, and we won't think of it as VOD. We'll just call it "watching movies."
Most people use their PVRs to record stuff or to pause commercials. So, you ignore the commercial pausing stuff, and a VCR fits the bill.
You really miss the point of TiVo. "Record stuff," that's like saying that my personal mp3 player is only marginally more useful than my great grandfather's gramaphone, because all they do is play recordings. Sure, all a TiVo does is record things, but it records things so incredibly well that you don't really even think of it as "recording" things.
TiVo means never having to turn on the TV and find that there's nothing on. As long as there's something worth watching on TV, even if it comes on at 2 am on the Korean Christian channel, it'll show up on your program list. Hear about some new show from a friend or co-worker? Just plug in the name and in about a week's time, it's there. No fumbling with schedules required. To get the kind of experience most TiVo owners enjoy, you'd need a personal robot switching tapes back and forth, and a ten-foot high octuple-layered stack of video tapes.
If you haven't used TiVo before, you're probably not convinced, but if you ever go to somebody's house that has TiVo, and try watching TV, it's a totally different experience. And no, I am not on their payroll. In fact, I don't even own a TiVo. But my mom and brother both have them, and when I'm visiting, I actually watch TV, whereas when I'm in my own house, I generally don't.
Well, I don't know about the Philips models, but the Sony TiVo certainly doesn't use standard phillips head screws. It uses Torx. Of course, it is probably possible, as you say, to replace them with real screws.
It is possible to make a DVR that will not require a separate box to handle digital cable. However, such functionality would not allow you to watch multiple channels at once, no matter how well engineered it was. The reason lies in the fundamental differences between analog and digital cable.
In analog cable, every single channel is sent simultaneously, so all your TV has to be able to do to play two shows at once is interpret two parts of the signal. With enough processing power and a blazingly fast RAID array, your DVR could theoretically record every single show being aired on analog cable, simply because it's all being blasted at it. There is no request system with analog cable, which is partly why you can't do video on demand.
With digital cable, however, delivery is entirely request-based. When you change channels, your cable box sends a request back to the cable provider, who in turn starts streaming content from the requested channel. That's why digital cable systems can have hundreds or theoretically millions of channels, while on analog cable, you get a maximum of 120 or so. On analog, the company has to blast them all at you, which means there's a theoretical limit to how much you can send before you get frame drop. With digital, there's only one channel being sent out at a time, at maximum quality, regardless of how many channels are being offered.
Now it's actually possible to implement a cable system that supports picture-in-picture or recording multiple shows. Since there's plenty of bandwidth to go around (enough to send 120 or so shows at once), the cable company could just send you, say, the last nine channels that you requested, and leave the selection up to the DVR or cable box. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, none of the networks have implemented it this way.
I believe you're confusing the software's intended use with its primary use. BitTorrent is a program to assist in the distribution of large files, period. It just so happens that the most highly demanded large files on the internet are also illegal. BitTorrent doesn't really even directly facilitate piracy in the way that Napster did; you can't search it. It depends on people to provide the end user with trackers, and the indexing of these trackers is entirely separate from the BitTorrent program itself.
Each site that indexes BitTorrent trackers essentially becomes a mini-Napster. If you want to shut down the piracy of a given file, all you need to do is send a C&D letter to the person hosting the tracker, and no new people will be able to download it without someone sticking their neck out to repost the tracker on a different site. This is much like the old days, when we searched the web for our mp3 files, and waded through porn banners the old fashioned way. The only difference is that it doesn't cost humongous amounts of bandwidth to the person hosting the tracker.
People see BitTorrent and how it's used, and assume that it's just the next generation of piracy software. But it's more than that; it's the future of all online distribution. While it makes illegal uses easy, it makes the legitimate uses even easier. Even if it isn't right now, BitTorrent really should be the preferred distribution medium for just about any time-sensitive content. Imagine downloading the newest Redhat or Debian distro through it. All of a sudden the bandwidth bills for sites like redhat.com aren't quite so exhorbitant.
The only downside to BT that I've observed is that there's a sharp falloff between when a file is new and the downloads fast, and when it's old and completely inaccessible. It lies on a file's popularity to provide the extra bandwidth, and as I've noticed in the anime fansubbing community, you generally can't download a file over BT more than a week or two after it's released. This makes it ideal for time-sensitive stuff like news feeds or weekly netcasts, but completely useless for archival.
Anyway, to claim that BT is contributory infringement is practically to toe Senator Hollings' line. It's the amazingly useful technology that would be banned because it doesn't have piracy checks.
Umm, how long ago did you move away? As the other poster said, it's a Tower Records. Before that, it was an empty building for about a year and a half.
I don't have evidence to back this up, but I have a nagging suspicion that the H1-Bs were displaced at roughly the same rate the rest of us were. The struggling job market has leveled the playing field somewhat, in that most of us are willing to work for lower wages, as long as it'll pay the rent. Since that's really the complaint that we had against H1-B workers, doesn't that make us all just as appetizing to a greedy employer?
I could be mistaken here, and if there are statistics showing that the layoff rate for H1-Bs is significantly lower than it is for US residents, I'd like to see them. But making such claims without solid evidence puts us on a slippery slope towards racism.
Miyazaki hasn't been a Marxist since the '80s. Maybe even earlier.
Your analysis sounds good on the surface, but there are a few major issues where the metaphor breaks down. First of all, if Yubaba symbolizes the Japanese image of the West, then why does she run a bathhouse? Bathhouses don't exist at all in the West, and although I can't say for sure that there are no westernized bathhouses in Japan, the ones I've been to were not westernized at all.
And if Yubaba's domain is so westernized, then why does it resemble an old Chinese market, and furthermore, why isn't Daddy's Credit Card any good?
I'd say that that the social structure of Yubaba's bathhouse is more like that in the late Tokugawa period, everything all sectioned off with clearly defined roles for everyone. Even that's a real stretch, though.
So where does Kaonashi (No-face) fit into your analysis? If the West has already invaded, then why does another invader cause so much harm?
Personally, I think Spirited Away is more about finding your courage, and learning to hold on to your principles in an unfair society that wants to take away everything that's dear to you, even your own name. There's nothing distinctly Japanese about this struggle, although I have a feeling that young Japanese people have it much worse than Americans do, socially.
According to an interview with Miyazaki, the idea for Spirited Away came when some young girls were visiting with him, and reading some girls' manga. He read some of it when they weren't looking, and was horrified at what he saw: stories about sedate girls all waiting for their princes, or consumeristic nonsense. He wanted to do something to show Japan's younger generation what it means to be a human being, and this movie was the result.
In this light, I think Spirited Away had a much less political goal than you ascribed to it, though an equally lofty one.
...just so you know that yes, they really are trying to eliminate free speech.
I remember when that happened. I was a senior in high school and had just showed that movie to my film teacher a few weeks before. Such a sad coincidence that we'd both discovered him so shortly before his passing...
I took a short robotics class through the University of Washington's EE department a while ago, and we used Linux for everything. The reason was that the software used to program the boards was written for *NIX, not Windows. The boards we were using were developed by MIT, as are a whole lot of good things in the field of robotics right now. Although Windows ports exist for the software, do you *really* want to try using a relatively untested version, considering that the MIT hackers are running on Unix?
Unix in the robotics lab is nearly as entrenched as Windows is in the office, and pretty much for the same reasons. The compatibility argument works both ways.
Spooky. Same hard drive (the IBM Deathstar, right?), same age of information, same circumstances surrounding deleting the old information (and asking myself why in hell I did that), same devastation. Losing a hard drive without proper backup (or finding out that your backup tapes didn't work, etc) is roughly equivalent to having your house burn down in this day and age. I lost all my (albeit crappy) papers from high school, a good percentage of my college coursework, every hard-to-find mp3 file I'd collected since 1996.
A similar thing happened to my friend's wife, a Psych. PhD at UW. The hard drive inside her Dell laptop died suddenly. But unlike my story, she'd been backing her stuff up nightly on the school's fileservers. Her hard drive failure meant a two-week inconvenience, whereas mine has resulted in six months of wondering what that phone number was again, how that great song went, and just what did happen in episode 37 of Hikaru no Go.
So the CS major (me) forgot to backup and got burned, while the doctor of psychology backed up and lost nothing. If only they taught us common sense in those CSE courses...
DVD-Rs don't cost shitloads anymore. They're still kind of expensive, but not that expensive. You can get a decent one for a couple hundred bucks off mwave or newegg.
Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future.
When did this happen? Industry executives actually acknowledging the obvious? Now where'd those pigs go...
93% of all statistics are made up.
I'm actually not surprised that the users flocked to the KDE boxes. KDE just looks nice and new from a cosmetic standpoint, and in your atmosphere, with everything set up via desktop icons, there's no real barrier to entry. I mean, Windows is just fine and all, but if there's no learning curve, I think people would like to try something new for a change.
I just wonder how long it was before people started saying, "hey, the internet explorer starts up faster on this Konqueror machine than on that IBM over there."
From what?
The terrible secret of space?