I know that was meant as a joke, but skipping sites like Slashdot or Kuro5hin, which tend to maintain their own archives quite well, wouldn't necessarily be such a bad idea. Perhaps the sites most worth saving wouldn't be the Slashdot stories themselves, but the sites linked to by them. The slashdot effect tends to make people want to take their content off-line, which means that the most interesting content lasts the shortest. Archiving the contents of those sites ought to be the top priority.
Seriously, don't you think that's why I asked instead of declaring they shouldn't use it? Any reason you didn't just answer my question instead of weakly attempting to insult my intelligence?
Considering the sarcastic tone of your comment, is it at all surprising that someone would take it as the declaration that you insist it isn't? When you say things like "uh, wouldn't <insert possible catastrophe> happen?" it's really the same as saying, "it would take a moron to not see that <said catastrophe> would happen."
When someone takes offense at a comment you make, intended or not, the proper response is to apologize, not to get defensive and insult the offended.
There's already a product on the market that meets your desires, but it's not cheap. This site sells them, and has a fair amount of innovation beyond the simple hardcoding of Dvorak.
They're expensive because of the very low demand for such products. Convince a few thousand other people that they need one, and maybe the price will come down to one we can afford.
While in a lot of cases, PHBs request features that are entirely unnecessary, there are certainly a large number of cases where the features are absolutely necessary, and none of the existing packages can handle them.
For a while, I worked at an employment company which has one of the best payroll programs anywhere. It's written in-house in obscure languages (I honestly don't know what it is, but it's one of those COBOL-era mainframe languages) and it does everything they need. However, the business' needs have changed significantly over the last 20 years and so has the program. Every time the program required a new feature, it was hacked right onto it. At this point, the code base has become so huge and unwieldy as to be nearly unmaintainable.
A couple years ago, they decided to go with a new program. The only problem was that their program had stuff in it that none of the commercial applications could replicate. So they had to go and have a company write it for them. The only problem was that there were so many of these necessary but obscure features that nobody would do it. Now a lot of these features may seem superfluous, and perhaps even a lot of the people in the company don't understand them, but I assure you they're absolutely necessary. A new program has to be able to do everything the old one did, otherwise the company has to redo their entire operations. Telling a customer that they can't have five paychecks delivered to different accounts because the new program can't handle it just doesn't cut it.
Two years later, the company still doesn't have a new program, partly because one company answered the call and ran with the money (never do business with these people), but also just because nobody was willing to implement the kinds of features necessary to handle employment from state to state. They need a contracter like you who can implement all those crazy features and not think twice, and it's become very hard to find.
Both are perfectly valid romanizations of the word. It depends on whether you're using Hepburn-style or gunreishiki, or perhaps some other accepted standard that's emerged through common use.
since there is no way to know which ones are broken
Yes there is. As the old saying goes, look for the union label. If the CD has the Philips "Compact Disc" logo, it'll work in your computer. Nowadays, it's sometimes hard to find the label on a real CD, but I figure if I'm gonna spend $15-20 on something, it's worth the extra five minutes necessary to examine the packaging.
The CD logo is a fraction of the size, and far more meaningful than the Microsoft "certificate of authenticity."
That's why more and more sophisticated heuristics are researched. If it were all about brute force, then people like you and me could code up a chess-playing program capable of going toe-to-toe with Deep Blue in a day or two. But they can't. There's a reason why nobody in my AI class could make their Checkers program beat Chinook at the highest difficulty setting, despite Chinook being only a fraction of its computing power in actual tournaments.
Making an underpowered machine perform as well as a more powerful machine is perhaps the definition of finesse.
Or if we need to make it a real game then how about soccer?
And it's being done, with the Robocup league. According to This site, the goal is to have a fully bipedal team of autonomous robots go head-to-head against the winners of the year's World Cup by 2050.
This isn't their user preferences. It's their *default* user preferences. The idea is that you set the defaults to something that will generally make people Happy, be they sysadmins or workstation users. If they don't like something, they can change it. By creating a good set of defaults, you reduce the amount of tinkering the end user will have to do.
I skimmed the brief, and the DMCA claim seemed to boil down to this:
Plaintiff makes a garage door opener that is keyed to Plaintiff's remote. Defendent creates garage remote capable of being keyed to many different garage door openers, including Plaintiff's. Purpose of garage doors is to secure property inside garage. Therefore Plaintiff's device is an anti-piracy (as in nautical theft) device, which is "circumvented" by an "unauthorized" (third-party) key (remote control).
This seems analagous to a lock company suing a locksmith for duplicating keys (assuming these keys don't say "do not duplicate" on them), since the company made the locks and keys to go with them, making the existence of a key not made by the lock company a circumvention device.
I wonder how long before we see such a suit filed?
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I couldn't let your plastic gears comment go unnoticed. You shouldn't complain about your VCR having cheap plastic gears -- that's the entire reason you can afford that VCR.
In the old days, VCRs had all-metal gears and rollers. They lasted forever, sure, but even the lowest-grade VCRs cost several times more than the S-VHS deck that I bought two years ago. We talk about things coming down in price, and when asked why, we usually just assume it's improvements in the manufacturing process. Well, this is what optimizing means. Among other things, you substitute inexpensive parts for the expensive ones. The result is a lower price point, and unless you would like to spend $1500 for your next VCR, you'd best accept it.
It could be that Fox didn't have permission to use the Japanese language track. Either that, or they just didn't have it on hand.
Even if it were subtitled, you'd likely see the exact same subtitles as on the R2. That's because the R2 subs are based off the Fox script, and if Buena Vista Japan isn't going to change a script that they didn't even write, there's no way the people who did write it are going to change it.
The red tint is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as severe as, say, disabling the blue gun on your monitor, but if you look at the whites, like on Sen's shirt, they're not quite white. More of a pink, really. You only notice it if you have a properly calibrated TV, or if you compare the preview side-by-side with the movie.
Since many of my friends are AV freaks, they generally make sure that their equipment is calibrated correctly, so things like this definitely show.
All this talk about embedded advertising seems to be assuming one thing: that users of ad-skipping features on ReplayTV and potentially Tivo don't actually watch ads. Why is this? The ad-skipping function is a thirty-second jump command, which is generally equivalent to *one* thirty-second spot, or at most two fifteen-second spots. So the feature doesn't block out every single ad; it only blocks out an ad that you've decided you don't want to see. So the content providers' argument hinges on the belief that people don't want to watch ads. There's a pretty obvious solution to this, but first a few preliminaries.
First of all, did anyone notice that AdCritic is back up? What does AdCritic represent? It provides the ability for a viewer to watch commercials that he or she wants to see. The key phrase is "wants to see." By the content providers' logic, there is no such thing. But history has proven otherwise.
Anyone remember medicine shows? Of course not, there's nobody that old here. But we all remember reading about them in school -- giant entertainment extravaganzas put on for the most part by confidence swindlers and snake-oil salesmen. Now who knows whether anybody believed the medicines would actually work as advertised, but the point is that people would watch these advertisements, fully aware of what they were, purely for the entertainment value. People bought the vials of stuff anyway, knowing full well that it probably wouldn't work.
The medicine show isn't dead; you can see it in the John West Salmon ad with the Taekwondo bear, or in the original "Think Different" ad, or heck, in the ads Tivo ran at launch. People didn't care that these were commercials; the fact is, they were *good*. And people *watched* them, and perhaps bought their product despite other wisdom.
The solution here is to stop making ads that people want to skip, and replace them with ads that people will rewind through and watch again. Is it that hard? Well, yeah, it is. But if the old model doesn't want to die (and no amount of litigation is going to prevent that), it's a solution that they'll all have to try to adopt sooner or later.
Within the next year and a half, what percentage of computer users and gamers do you expect to own DVD burners? Of these people, how many are willing to spend the money and effort necessary to obtain media for these devices just to play pirated video games? The few people I know of who own DVD burners use them for backing up large amounts of data, not for copying DVDs. The DVD piracy war will hardly even scratch the current generation of game systems. It probably won't even come into being until the X-Box 2, Playstation 3 and the Nintendo SmallerMoreColorfulExpensiveThing are already out.
With the PS2, it may be different, simply because the console actually can play CDs, which can be burned fairly easily, but with the X-Box and Gamecube, it's highly impractical, even with a mod chip, to pirate games. Gamecube mods, which consist of a switch and a couple of wires, are about region coding. The X-Box mods are all about running unlicensed software, like Linux and MPlayer.
The way Lik-Sang is being attacked is not about piracy, but about control. Microsoft doesn't want to lose $250 per console (I've heard it takes ten game sales to recoup the loss from a sold X-Box), and Nintendo doesn't want people to break their market segmentation. Whether you believe these companies should lose money this way is irrelevant; do you really think we ought to be left holding the bag for their flawed business models? I want my X-Theater-Box, and if Microsoft really thinks it's a good idea to sell a $550 console for $250, then they need a reality check.
Alright, so what happens when you "donate" to one of these projects? You give money, and if enough other people think it's worth their money, you get the software. Doesn't this mean that unless you're willing to finance the project in whole, there's no guarantee that you'll ever see the software? While I can see a good number of people supporting ransomed software out of good will, I can't see it working as a real business model, as people generally want some reassurance that they'll receive that for which they've paid.
I've been a big anime fan since '95, and I'm just floored by how much commercial anime is out there, and by how quickly new series are licensed. For example, Chobits was licensed before the first season even finished in Japan..Hack//Sign had similar timing.
New anime companies are springing up out of the woodwork these days. I remember when you bought your tapes from AnimEigo, Manga Video, ADVision, Viz, Pioneer, and U.S. Manga Corps. There were a couple of smaller companies out there who existed largely to publish one or two shows, but that was about it. Now there are some 15 or so companies all buying up anime as fast as they can negotiate deals, and all hoping to get serious money off a single consumer-base.
It's not going to happen. Anime fandom has grown exponentially in the last two years, but I can't see it being anywhere near big enough to support all the companies out there. A lot of them are going to crash and burn, because their little money-making ventures didn't pan out. Anime as it currently stands is a fad. Sure, to us, its devoted followers, it represents pretty drawings, real plots, and disproportionately good musical scores. But to the people who are generating the most money for these companies, it's just a fad.
Cartoon Network seems to have noticed that you can't just slap the word "anime" on something and expect people to watch it, and I have a feeling that when all the things that were licensed at Anime Expo this year hit the streets, we're going to see similar behavior from the DVD distributors.
The anime market in America is going to crash in a big way in the next year or so, and honestly, I'm not going to miss it. I'd miss it if I had some faith that the two-dozen or so companies translating anime and manga (the 15 quoted was just for anime) actually cared about the quality of their work. I'd care if I could actually afford to buy even a tenth of what is put out commercially. If 80% of these companies went out of business tomorrow, I probably wouldn't notice. The hard-core fans would just go back to their fansubs, and that would be that.
Ten years later, we'll all have nostalgia for those funky Japanese cartoons we all used to watch. The real anime boom won't come until all cultural barriers are broken down, and we can watch Japanese, Chinese, French and Israeli TV just as easily as we watch Fox and NBC. By then there will be nothing strange about it.
Case in point: Sailor Moon. Not originally the kids show it is here
Sorry, Sailor Moon was as much a kids' show in Japan when I went there in '94 as it was when they aired it here. The major changes that were made for US release were cultural. Of course, a couple years down the line, when they realized that a bulk of their consumer base was perverted young men, they started throwing in the hot lesbian action. Before that, though, it was a kids' show. It even aired in the after-school timeslot.
Perhaps you were thinking of Card Captor Sakura, which was brought out here as "Card Captors," and was chopped up for the Saturday morning kiddy timeslot like Sailor Moon. The only difference being that Sakura was aired at around midnight in Japan, and actually was geared towards perverted college students like me from the get-go.
Of course, I'd still show it to kids anytime. I think that if you choose not to read too far into some of the peripheral characters, it's quite safe.
One of our major complaints about movie theaters is that they keep on squashing more theaters into a limited space, onto smaller and smaller screens. Now that we have inexpensive DVDs that take advantage of our expensive home theater hardware, we no longer need the theaters "just to see the movie." So the theater experience is more than just a bad joke, but actually a necessary consideration for people running theaters as a business.
This is just like the arcades that are dropping like flies. The ones working on the old business model, i.e. getting a whole bunch of machines together in a room and putting a sign out front, are all going out of business, whereas game centers that focus on the "arcade experience," by providing games in nice layouts with good food and ambience. I mean, why go to the Tilt at your local mall when you could go to Illusionz?
The same is true for movie theaters. Nobody really feels compelled to see a movie at a megaplex, except maybe as an easy first date. But there's no way in hell that I'm not lining up to see Lord of the Rings at the Cinerama. A balcony, a gargantuan screen with digital projection, and an acoustically engineered layout all make any HT buff's claims of superiority seem ridiculous. The same goes for the drafthouse theaters described in many of the threads here.
The theater experience is real, it's just that it's not available in most places, and that's why people aren't turning out like the industry wants them to.
Light gun games worked by quickly flashing the bounding boxes on the screen different colors when the trigger was pulled, so that the gun could easily decide whether the player "hit" (pointed the gun at the right color) or "missed" (pointed the gun at the wrong color). Since I don't think the light gun can support all that many colors, it would be impossible for it to tell which icon the user shot at.
Now the Namco GunCon on the other hand, would be perfect for such an interface.
Re:Lets see $10,000/1million= :(
on
RC5-64 Success
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· Score: 1
Somehow it doesn't seem right to charge a man $70 a month for a *gaming* DSL provider, when he isn't going to be doing gaming or any other ping-dependent activity. My cable modem costs about half that, and it works fine for pretty much anything he'd be using it for.
I'll have to cast my vote in for Opera. It has all those things you mentioned, plus what is, IMO, a nicer interface. Not objectively superior, but definitely worth considering, and $20 ($10 if you're a student) isn't that high a price tag. Just my personal preference...
Okay, my example was probably bad because of the whole "already illegal" thing. But consider the following situation:
You buy a laserdisc or DVD from Japan, that doesn't have any subtitles on it. You find a script on the internet and download it, but you can't subtitle it yourself because you lack equipment. So you get your friend, who has an Amiga and a genlock, to master a new copy for you.
This may be a somewhat far-fetched situation, but it's also one where anyone you ask would say that you ought to be able to do it; the copyright holder has received payment, and that should be the end of the story. But if the courts rule in favor of the Directors' Guild, then that makes this perfectly legitimate-sounding arrangement illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that was meant as a joke, but skipping sites like Slashdot or Kuro5hin, which tend to maintain their own archives quite well, wouldn't necessarily be such a bad idea. Perhaps the sites most worth saving wouldn't be the Slashdot stories themselves, but the sites linked to by them. The slashdot effect tends to make people want to take their content off-line, which means that the most interesting content lasts the shortest. Archiving the contents of those sites ought to be the top priority.
Seriously, don't you think that's why I asked instead of declaring they shouldn't use it? Any reason you didn't just answer my question instead of weakly attempting to insult my intelligence?
Considering the sarcastic tone of your comment, is it at all surprising that someone would take it as the declaration that you insist it isn't? When you say things like "uh, wouldn't <insert possible catastrophe> happen?" it's really the same as saying, "it would take a moron to not see that <said catastrophe> would happen."
When someone takes offense at a comment you make, intended or not, the proper response is to apologize, not to get defensive and insult the offended.
There's already a product on the market that meets your desires, but it's not cheap. This site sells them, and has a fair amount of innovation beyond the simple hardcoding of Dvorak.
They're expensive because of the very low demand for such products. Convince a few thousand other people that they need one, and maybe the price will come down to one we can afford.
While in a lot of cases, PHBs request features that are entirely unnecessary, there are certainly a large number of cases where the features are absolutely necessary, and none of the existing packages can handle them.
For a while, I worked at an employment company which has one of the best payroll programs anywhere. It's written in-house in obscure languages (I honestly don't know what it is, but it's one of those COBOL-era mainframe languages) and it does everything they need. However, the business' needs have changed significantly over the last 20 years and so has the program. Every time the program required a new feature, it was hacked right onto it. At this point, the code base has become so huge and unwieldy as to be nearly unmaintainable.
A couple years ago, they decided to go with a new program. The only problem was that their program had stuff in it that none of the commercial applications could replicate. So they had to go and have a company write it for them. The only problem was that there were so many of these necessary but obscure features that nobody would do it. Now a lot of these features may seem superfluous, and perhaps even a lot of the people in the company don't understand them, but I assure you they're absolutely necessary. A new program has to be able to do everything the old one did, otherwise the company has to redo their entire operations. Telling a customer that they can't have five paychecks delivered to different accounts because the new program can't handle it just doesn't cut it.
Two years later, the company still doesn't have a new program, partly because one company answered the call and ran with the money (never do business with these people), but also just because nobody was willing to implement the kinds of features necessary to handle employment from state to state. They need a contracter like you who can implement all those crazy features and not think twice, and it's become very hard to find.
Both are perfectly valid romanizations of the word. It depends on whether you're using Hepburn-style or gunreishiki, or perhaps some other accepted standard that's emerged through common use.
since there is no way to know which ones are broken
Yes there is. As the old saying goes, look for the union label. If the CD has the Philips "Compact Disc" logo, it'll work in your computer. Nowadays, it's sometimes hard to find the label on a real CD, but I figure if I'm gonna spend $15-20 on something, it's worth the extra five minutes necessary to examine the packaging.
The CD logo is a fraction of the size, and far more meaningful than the Microsoft "certificate of authenticity."
That's why more and more sophisticated heuristics are researched. If it were all about brute force, then people like you and me could code up a chess-playing program capable of going toe-to-toe with Deep Blue in a day or two. But they can't. There's a reason why nobody in my AI class could make their Checkers program beat Chinook at the highest difficulty setting, despite Chinook being only a fraction of its computing power in actual tournaments.
Making an underpowered machine perform as well as a more powerful machine is perhaps the definition of finesse.
And it's being done, with the Robocup league. According to This site, the goal is to have a fully bipedal team of autonomous robots go head-to-head against the winners of the year's World Cup by 2050.
This isn't their user preferences. It's their *default* user preferences. The idea is that you set the defaults to something that will generally make people Happy, be they sysadmins or workstation users. If they don't like something, they can change it. By creating a good set of defaults, you reduce the amount of tinkering the end user will have to do.
I skimmed the brief, and the DMCA claim seemed to boil down to this:
Plaintiff makes a garage door opener that is keyed to Plaintiff's remote. Defendent creates garage remote capable of being keyed to many different garage door openers, including Plaintiff's. Purpose of garage doors is to secure property inside garage. Therefore Plaintiff's device is an anti-piracy (as in nautical theft) device, which is "circumvented" by an "unauthorized" (third-party) key (remote control).
This seems analagous to a lock company suing a locksmith for duplicating keys (assuming these keys don't say "do not duplicate" on them), since the company made the locks and keys to go with them, making the existence of a key not made by the lock company a circumvention device.
I wonder how long before we see such a suit filed?
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I couldn't let your plastic gears comment go unnoticed. You shouldn't complain about your VCR having cheap plastic gears -- that's the entire reason you can afford that VCR.
In the old days, VCRs had all-metal gears and rollers. They lasted forever, sure, but even the lowest-grade VCRs cost several times more than the S-VHS deck that I bought two years ago. We talk about things coming down in price, and when asked why, we usually just assume it's improvements in the manufacturing process. Well, this is what optimizing means. Among other things, you substitute inexpensive parts for the expensive ones. The result is a lower price point, and unless you would like to spend $1500 for your next VCR, you'd best accept it.
It could be that Fox didn't have permission to use the Japanese language track. Either that, or they just didn't have it on hand.
Even if it were subtitled, you'd likely see the exact same subtitles as on the R2. That's because the R2 subs are based off the Fox script, and if Buena Vista Japan isn't going to change a script that they didn't even write, there's no way the people who did write it are going to change it.
The red tint is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as severe as, say, disabling the blue gun on your monitor, but if you look at the whites, like on Sen's shirt, they're not quite white. More of a pink, really. You only notice it if you have a properly calibrated TV, or if you compare the preview side-by-side with the movie.
Since many of my friends are AV freaks, they generally make sure that their equipment is calibrated correctly, so things like this definitely show.
Sorry to troll, but the subject says it all. What functional purpose could this product possibly serve?
All this talk about embedded advertising seems to be assuming one thing: that users of ad-skipping features on ReplayTV and potentially Tivo don't actually watch ads. Why is this? The ad-skipping function is a thirty-second jump command, which is generally equivalent to *one* thirty-second spot, or at most two fifteen-second spots. So the feature doesn't block out every single ad; it only blocks out an ad that you've decided you don't want to see. So the content providers' argument hinges on the belief that people don't want to watch ads. There's a pretty obvious solution to this, but first a few preliminaries.
First of all, did anyone notice that AdCritic is back up? What does AdCritic represent? It provides the ability for a viewer to watch commercials that he or she wants to see. The key phrase is "wants to see." By the content providers' logic, there is no such thing. But history has proven otherwise.
Anyone remember medicine shows? Of course not, there's nobody that old here. But we all remember reading about them in school -- giant entertainment extravaganzas put on for the most part by confidence swindlers and snake-oil salesmen. Now who knows whether anybody believed the medicines would actually work as advertised, but the point is that people would watch these advertisements, fully aware of what they were, purely for the entertainment value. People bought the vials of stuff anyway, knowing full well that it probably wouldn't work.
The medicine show isn't dead; you can see it in the John West Salmon ad with the Taekwondo bear, or in the original "Think Different" ad, or heck, in the ads Tivo ran at launch. People didn't care that these were commercials; the fact is, they were *good*. And people *watched* them, and perhaps bought their product despite other wisdom.
The solution here is to stop making ads that people want to skip, and replace them with ads that people will rewind through and watch again. Is it that hard? Well, yeah, it is. But if the old model doesn't want to die (and no amount of litigation is going to prevent that), it's a solution that they'll all have to try to adopt sooner or later.
Within the next year and a half, what percentage of computer users and gamers do you expect to own DVD burners? Of these people, how many are willing to spend the money and effort necessary to obtain media for these devices just to play pirated video games? The few people I know of who own DVD burners use them for backing up large amounts of data, not for copying DVDs. The DVD piracy war will hardly even scratch the current generation of game systems. It probably won't even come into being until the X-Box 2, Playstation 3 and the Nintendo SmallerMoreColorfulExpensiveThing are already out.
With the PS2, it may be different, simply because the console actually can play CDs, which can be burned fairly easily, but with the X-Box and Gamecube, it's highly impractical, even with a mod chip, to pirate games. Gamecube mods, which consist of a switch and a couple of wires, are about region coding. The X-Box mods are all about running unlicensed software, like Linux and MPlayer.
The way Lik-Sang is being attacked is not about piracy, but about control. Microsoft doesn't want to lose $250 per console (I've heard it takes ten game sales to recoup the loss from a sold X-Box), and Nintendo doesn't want people to break their market segmentation. Whether you believe these companies should lose money this way is irrelevant; do you really think we ought to be left holding the bag for their flawed business models? I want my X-Theater-Box, and if Microsoft really thinks it's a good idea to sell a $550 console for $250, then they need a reality check.
Alright, so what happens when you "donate" to one of these projects? You give money, and if enough other people think it's worth their money, you get the software. Doesn't this mean that unless you're willing to finance the project in whole, there's no guarantee that you'll ever see the software? While I can see a good number of people supporting ransomed software out of good will, I can't see it working as a real business model, as people generally want some reassurance that they'll receive that for which they've paid.
I've been a big anime fan since '95, and I'm just floored by how much commercial anime is out there, and by how quickly new series are licensed. For example, Chobits was licensed before the first season even finished in Japan. .Hack//Sign had similar timing.
New anime companies are springing up out of the woodwork these days. I remember when you bought your tapes from AnimEigo, Manga Video, ADVision, Viz, Pioneer, and U.S. Manga Corps. There were a couple of smaller companies out there who existed largely to publish one or two shows, but that was about it. Now there are some 15 or so companies all buying up anime as fast as they can negotiate deals, and all hoping to get serious money off a single consumer-base.
It's not going to happen. Anime fandom has grown exponentially in the last two years, but I can't see it being anywhere near big enough to support all the companies out there. A lot of them are going to crash and burn, because their little money-making ventures didn't pan out. Anime as it currently stands is a fad. Sure, to us, its devoted followers, it represents pretty drawings, real plots, and disproportionately good musical scores. But to the people who are generating the most money for these companies, it's just a fad.
Cartoon Network seems to have noticed that you can't just slap the word "anime" on something and expect people to watch it, and I have a feeling that when all the things that were licensed at Anime Expo this year hit the streets, we're going to see similar behavior from the DVD distributors.
The anime market in America is going to crash in a big way in the next year or so, and honestly, I'm not going to miss it. I'd miss it if I had some faith that the two-dozen or so companies translating anime and manga (the 15 quoted was just for anime) actually cared about the quality of their work. I'd care if I could actually afford to buy even a tenth of what is put out commercially. If 80% of these companies went out of business tomorrow, I probably wouldn't notice. The hard-core fans would just go back to their fansubs, and that would be that.
Ten years later, we'll all have nostalgia for those funky Japanese cartoons we all used to watch. The real anime boom won't come until all cultural barriers are broken down, and we can watch Japanese, Chinese, French and Israeli TV just as easily as we watch Fox and NBC. By then there will be nothing strange about it.
Case in point: Sailor Moon. Not originally the kids show it is here
Sorry, Sailor Moon was as much a kids' show in Japan when I went there in '94 as it was when they aired it here. The major changes that were made for US release were cultural. Of course, a couple years down the line, when they realized that a bulk of their consumer base was perverted young men, they started throwing in the hot lesbian action. Before that, though, it was a kids' show. It even aired in the after-school timeslot.
Perhaps you were thinking of Card Captor Sakura, which was brought out here as "Card Captors," and was chopped up for the Saturday morning kiddy timeslot like Sailor Moon. The only difference being that Sakura was aired at around midnight in Japan, and actually was geared towards perverted college students like me from the get-go.
Of course, I'd still show it to kids anytime. I think that if you choose not to read too far into some of the peripheral characters, it's quite safe.
This is just like the arcades that are dropping like flies. The ones working on the old business model, i.e. getting a whole bunch of machines together in a room and putting a sign out front, are all going out of business, whereas game centers that focus on the "arcade experience," by providing games in nice layouts with good food and ambience. I mean, why go to the Tilt at your local mall when you could go to Illusionz?
The same is true for movie theaters. Nobody really feels compelled to see a movie at a megaplex, except maybe as an easy first date. But there's no way in hell that I'm not lining up to see Lord of the Rings at the Cinerama. A balcony, a gargantuan screen with digital projection, and an acoustically engineered layout all make any HT buff's claims of superiority seem ridiculous. The same goes for the drafthouse theaters described in many of the threads here.
The theater experience is real, it's just that it's not available in most places, and that's why people aren't turning out like the industry wants them to.
Light gun games worked by quickly flashing the bounding boxes on the screen different colors when the trigger was pulled, so that the gun could easily decide whether the player "hit" (pointed the gun at the right color) or "missed" (pointed the gun at the wrong color). Since I don't think the light gun can support all that many colors, it would be impossible for it to tell which icon the user shot at.
Now the Namco GunCon on the other hand, would be perfect for such an interface.
Why, if I had a penny for each time I...
Oh.
Somehow it doesn't seem right to charge a man $70 a month for a *gaming* DSL provider, when he isn't going to be doing gaming or any other ping-dependent activity. My cable modem costs about half that, and it works fine for pretty much anything he'd be using it for.
I'll have to cast my vote in for Opera. It has all those things you mentioned, plus what is, IMO, a nicer interface. Not objectively superior, but definitely worth considering, and $20 ($10 if you're a student) isn't that high a price tag. Just my personal preference...
Okay, my example was probably bad because of the whole "already illegal" thing. But consider the following situation:
You buy a laserdisc or DVD from Japan, that doesn't have any subtitles on it. You find a script on the internet and download it, but you can't subtitle it yourself because you lack equipment. So you get your friend, who has an Amiga and a genlock, to master a new copy for you.
This may be a somewhat far-fetched situation, but it's also one where anyone you ask would say that you ought to be able to do it; the copyright holder has received payment, and that should be the end of the story. But if the courts rule in favor of the Directors' Guild, then that makes this perfectly legitimate-sounding arrangement illegal.