The way to become a Word 'Power User' is to do OCR scanning with it. Use Optical Character Recognition software that puts the results in a Word file and try to get the results to look correct. Advanced masters can attempt this with magazine articles and gurus might even test themselves with a Wired magazine article.
The big problem that I have with Word is determining what exactly is causing the scanned OCR text to look the way that it does.
And pictures? What a nightmare! Watch them hop all over the place. I once almost got fired from a job because I couldn't get the pictures to stop reformatting the text placement. The boss (the German boss) thought I was a total loser because I couldn't master such a simple program even though I worked in AutoCAD, OrCAD, PCB layout software packages, and C compiliers, no of which he could do.
I finally found the O'Reilly Word Annoyances and discovered how to get the pictures to stay locked in place and have the text place itself around the pictures.
Word has two good features: the spell checker and the ability to write VBA programs to manipulate text within Word. However since there is no complete, detailed, and coherent explanation of the Word object structure, actually using VBA to do something useful remains an elusive dream.
I once heard that in spoken Arabic the 'k' sound at the beginning of the English words 'cat' and 'kitten' are different letters and are considered different sounds. To differenciate these letters, Arabic transliterated into English uses 'k' for one and 'q' with no 'u' for the other.
About ten years ago I worked in Silicon Valley for a company that had an affiliate in the UK. I got assigned to back up all the hard disks once a week. One day I suggested to my boss that we make an extra back-up and send it to our English affiliate. My reasoning was that with all the:
1) Earthquakes - There was a 7.2 a few years before centered a few miles away. I remember steel tables bouncing several feet in the air off a concrete floor in the warehouse. There was a 7.4 a few months eariler in L.A. and a 7.3 south of Eureka to the north. Serious scare-the-shit-out-of-you earthquakes are not uncommon in California. The 8.4 quake of 1906 destroyed the entire city of San Francisco in only five minutes.
2) Fires - East Oakland had burned the previous summer and Malibu the summer before. People jsut love to build giant wooden houses ten feet apart and then plant trees with flammable oil in the bark all around them. One schmuck tosses a cigarette butt out the window and half the city is gone two hours later. Typical California.
3) Insurrections - In April 1993, Los Angeles erupted in a giant race riot. White cops beat a black guy with sticks on television after he drove 160 Kilometers-per-hour through many neighborhoods. The trial was moved to the most conservative city in the entire state and they were found not guilty. So the blacks burned down the Korean neighborhoods to protest the police presence in their neighborhoods (which have the highest crime rates in the country). Typical California.
4) Tsumamais - As a result of one of those earthquakes happening offshore, the beach rolls back really really far. Then it comes back up to the highest water mark on the beach, and keeps coming up and up and up. Over the beach, the parking lot, the streets, the stores, the houses, the buildings, the trees, the factory, the warehouses...
5) Incompetent back up technician accidently erasing the invaluable company data. - Uh, we won't spend much time on this one. But it's not all that uncommon. Especially when the backups are done on unpaid overtime.
When I explained all this to them as a good reason to have reasonably current set of backups out of the building, out of the city, and even out of the country, they looked at me as if I were stark raving crazy!
If one wants to get really technical about it... Every country borders every other country because the embassy of a country is actual territory of that country inside another country's capital.
But I will concede that Americans are dumber than other people around the world who have the same lifestyle and level of income. Peasants are stupid and superstitious, wherever they live and regardless of whether they're driving SUVs and 4x4s. America just has more rich dumb peasants than any other country (" We's numba one! ").
Although having lived in the USA for a long time, I'm not convinced that the Americans are really as dumb as everyone else claims that they are. Many people who claim that they couldn't find the Pacific ocean on a map still have memorized thousands of sport statistics.
How about the hit song from 1979 called "My Sharona" by the Knack? This was a huge hit in Japan where the title sounds like "Mai Shiro Onna" (every white woman). The fact that this band could appear, have one huge hit with exciting and intricate musicianship then completely disappear leads me to think that the song was actually by an unknown Japanese band. The Knack band was probably just several white L.A. male models, pretending to be a band, like those guys who won a Grammy in the late 1980s. The whole affair was probably just buried when it got too embarrassing.
Cultural sensitivity is all well and good, but I still believe that Microsoft should have just told India to change the country's borders to match the already manufactured software.
Or, Microsoft should have offered two versions. One with a fully-corrected version at full list price. The other version with the coloring mistake that caused... so...much...grief... at 1/3 the cost of the corrected version, along with a simple sticker on the box containing an apology at what was only a simple oversight (and with full warrantee and extended support). Let the customers decide what is more important; a simple coloring mistake with enormous discount in price or national pride at any price.
Then Microsoft should have taken the sales figures to the Indian government and suggested that they change the country's borders to match the software because that is what the people want.
The absurd end of all this 'no possible offence to anyone anywhere' - type of trademarking is an endless number of bland nonsense words as trademarks. For example, the little purple moron who sold his name to a record company and then found that he had to change his own name to some weird symbol if he wanted to perform new material that the record company thought was too different from his older hits to be released. Granted this particular individual is too weird and narcissistic to feel any embarrassment at the stupid things that he does, but this kind of thing could happen to anyone who isn't paying attention to the difference between what is real and what is absurd.
That point is that Hollywood really isn't profitable anymore. Movies are made by studios that are mostly owned by very large shell corporations who see movies as primarily an advertising medium for the products made by the other companies of the conglamerate. Movies don't make much money anymore. Some individual titles do, but on the whole, the production costs and promotion costs of films is rising faster that the box office. Every year sees bigger and bigger box office returns, but the overall profit margin is stagnant and the core audience that goes to films is shrinking slightly each year. This is unusual considering the movies are primarily oriented towards young people and the number of young people (especially outside the USA, Japan, and Europe) is growing quite a bit every year.
If movies budgets could be brought under control, and if it could be proven that movies actually increase consumption of the other products of the conglomerate that owns the studio, then it is possible that movie admissions might be given away in the future as a loss-leader to encourage consumption.
The real danger to the conglomerates that own the studios is that the MPAA will actually be successful in driving people out of the habit of consuming entertainment products, regardless of how much that they are actually paying or not paying for the opportunity to do so. If the MPAA convinces enough people that they will go to prison for watching downloaded movies, then the conglomerate loses the ability to use movies as a product-placement advertising medium. And new effective advertising mediums are getting increasing difficult to come by.
Eventually the conglomerates that own the movie studios will tell the MPAA to back off. The MPAA is a dinosaur anyway from the era when movie studios were still individual businesses that depended on box office receipts for their existence.
Want to support a band/artist? Go see them in concert OR send money to them directly...and I mean directly TO them...not to the management/record company. Will people send off a check to Chili-Peppers? Don't know, stranger things have happened.
No. Don't give them money.
Take the money that you were going to give them and instead use it to buy inexpensive musical instruments like the ones used on your favorite recordings. Learn to play your favorite songs, melodies, and riffs. Teach anyone who asks you how you played a song. Ask anyone that you hear playing a cool piece of music how to play it. Learn to play as good as your favorite artists. Try changing the lyrics, melodies, and lead guitar riffs of the songs that everyone knows.
Avoid expensive vintage name-brand instruments than be stolen by thieves, junkies, RIAA lawyers, or other shit-people. Learn to build your own instruments very cheaply. Bring your instruments to parties and jam. Use super cheap tiny amps or boomboxes as amps. Learn the simple electronics to get distortion, delays, and flanger effects. Get guitar effects programs for your PC where you plug your instrument into the sound card line-in and the line-out into a stereo or boombox amp. Learn from anyone and everyone and teach anyone and everyone what you know.
A good way to learn how to specific songs and lead guitar breaks is downloading MIDI files of the songs. They sound stupid when played through the 'synth' on the PC sound card, but they will teach you the song's chord structure when studied with a MIDI music notation program. Did I forget to mention learning to read music? Public schools have cut out music education so it's up to you to learn on your own this most-important subject. Forget algebra, master music instead...it's more important.
It's not going to be easy to shed the RIAA from our souls, but it will be fun.
So essentially, irate radio is a really good idea, needs a lot of work on the interface etc, preferably a Winamp plugin or something, and needs our support!
Non-Clear Channel or non-RIAA radio will never happen in the USA under the corporate dominated present system.
I suggest making a CD-R template of your favorite new non-RIAA music. Then make several copies of the CD-R for about twenty cents each. Keep a few in your briefcase or backpack and when you meet someone who agrees that the RIAA is out of control, just hand one to them as an inexpensive but well-appreciated gift. You might want to put OGG or MP3 software like Winamp on this CDR also.
Corporate media is frozen and stagnant. Ordinary people and slashdotters have to create their own alternatives now.
"He went ballistic. It was an incredible insult to Islam." He asked for the game to be withdrawn but it was issued against his advice in the United States in the belief that it would not be noticed.
Moslems are simply too sensitive. They go fucking nuts over things that seem world-shatteringly important to them but don't mean anything to anyone else. As a consequence, Moslems have a world-wide reputation of being trigger-happy and prone to violence over trival and imaginary slights.
C'mon, guys, this is bad for Islam. Next time you feel gravely insulted by someone from outside the Islamic world who knows almost nothing about your religion or culture, take a deep breath, say a quick prayer, and give a reasonable, detailed and calm explanation as to why you feel the situation is inappropriate. Don't just whip out your sword or suicide bombers.
Deal with reality. In the modern technological world, religion isn't all that important and Islam is one of least important religions of them all. If you'all didn't have so much oil, no one would give a fuck about you or your religion. That's the truth.
For example,take the Palestinians (please!). Here's a 'country' of only five million people or so who have been on the evening news every fucking night for the past thirty years. What do they make that the world desperately needs? Why are they so fucking important? You could take all the Palestinians and put them in Los Angeles and it would be six months before anyone realized that they weren't Mexicans. You could put all the Palestinians in some place like Kinshasa, Lagos, Mumbai, or Sao Paulo and a few weeks later they would just be gone as if they never existed. Even if they got their independence they would still be a dirt poor country with no ability to feed their own people or provide jobs. They're just a welfare country that lives on handouts from rich northern European countries. With hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue a year, what have the Gulf OPEC states ever done for Palestine? Nothing.
anyway, running out of time and gotta go. Please write and tell me how insensitive I am. I love it.
A little device that could carry my 'sensitive items' in a little hop over the customs inspection station at night could be quite useful in some situations. It would fly for a few hundred feet and give off a little short-distance radio signal to allow it to be found after landing.
I toy with the idea of filling an inflatable life raft with high-pressure hydrogen. It would float in the air at night and be dark against the sky. A light propeller (fueled by the hydrogen in the 'air raft' would push it and an air foil system would guide it under the direction of on-board GPS.
It would carry a few pounds of sensitive goods through the rugged mountain passes between British Columbia and Washington State in a controlled drift about 10 feet above the treetops. A 32 bit microcontroller would have its route mapped out and would work with the GPS to a landing zone of about one square mile where it and its cargo could be retrieved by a person in a all-terrain 4-wheel-drive.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message.
I haven't had a chance to see any recent French or European films for the past ten years because the film distribution system forces them to have box office admission prices above my entertainment budget. I had hoped that the DVD revolution would allow all the great new French films to get distributed here at much less cost, but that doesn't look like it will happen. An unintended consequence of having DVD regions to restrict simultanous global distibution of Hollywood product is that region blocking on DVDs has made low-cost distribution of foreign films to North America impossible. Plus saturating the multiplex theatres with Hollywood blockbusters has destroyed the distribution and audience for small atmospheric French films outside of a few large cities.
Gaumont and the other major distributors seem to be completely clueless as to how to use DVDs to tap into the North American market for French films that has been dormant since the late 1970s. They should get together with the mail-order DVD distributors like NetFlix to introduce a whole new generation to the parallel universe that is French and European film.
The movie industry has had phenomenal growth in the past few years. They just keep getting bigger and bigger.
Each project (movie) is now an individual $50 to $200 million ?corporation?. A movie is a corporation that is its own product. And it?s a corporation that delivers about 2/3rds of its possible profitable return within a month after it is introduced to the public. The stream of profit that comes from all the secondary sources (post-theatrical release, i.e. DVD & video rentals, TV broadcast, airplanes, hotels, ect...) are usually only 1/3 of what the theatre release generates and often quite less. Plus movies are beginning to have less time to recoup their investment since the average summer film loses 40% of its audience after its first weekend of release. And 40% each subsequent weekend.
Nobody would get into the movie business for the money today if they had any other reasonable choice. For the fame, the glamour, the sex, the excitement, yes, of course, but for the money alone as a business, never. Currently the global media companies (all five of them) are falling over themselves trying to unload their record/music divisions off onto each other. Nobody wants them. A couple of giant flops like Gigli and a run of minor flops like The Alamo and one or two of the major studios will go bankrupt. The product (the movies) are selling like crazy in the total, but each individual movie is a total gamble. The high and rising out-of-control costs of production and marketing new blockbusters has made the entire movie business just marginally profitable regardless of how much heat, light, and excitement gets generated over any individual product film.
The situation will most likely get worse each passing year. Higher total revenues, shrinking core audiences, massive gambles on each individual product, shrinking total profits.
Home internet distribution really isn?t going to help Hollywood out of this situation because internet distribution puts medium budget specialty films on the same level as raging blockbusters. People will continue to go to the theatre for the blockbusters and download the specialty films. Since audience attention spans and free time for media consumption is limited, downloaded specialized and targeted films will only cut into the audience?s funds that currently go to blockbusters.
This is just the news that Hollywood doesn?t need and that is why they are wary of home internet film distribution.
I believe that he was meant to be an Episcopalian minister. To paraphrase Florence King's book WASP, Where is Thy Sting?, the 'piscop' high church is as close to Catholic as you can get and still be Protestant.
But even that wouldn't make sense, because there probably wouldn't be an Episcopalian church in a small MidWestern American town. Lutheran, Methodist, or Baptist, of course, but Episcopalian? Probably not unless the town was large enough that it could many levels of socio-economic classes.
Shyamalan's movies are more mood pieces than narratives anyway. For example the scene in Signs where the children are sitting on the couch with the tin foil hats on. Mr. Shyamalan has a real gift for creating moods. He should consider moving to France and revitalizing the French film industry. No seriously. They can't afford the huge Hollywood budgets and have never recovered from the death of Francois Truffaut. He could become a great director like Erich Rohmer there instead of being forced to make stupid films due to Hollywood mass-appeal requirements.
Seriously.
I saw Clockwork Orange when it was released in 1971 and was nearly traumatized. I've seen it two or three times since then.
I can't recommend it. To me it seems the perfect example of an immoral film. A film that makes you a worse person for having viewed it. The only other film that I find in this category is Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. This film is immoral because each time it plays on TV or theatrical rerelease people always end up being murdered by someone acting out scenes from the film in real life. Oliver Stone knew this would happen but still used his abilities and influence to have the film made and released. An absolute immoral act although not illegal. A true asshole and pervert. I never go see any of his movies anymore.
I saw Cruel Intentions and it was an exact remake of Dangerous Liasons and Valmont. All based on the 18th-century French novel. I don't recall any references to 'licking the alphabet' in Cruel Intentions. The late comedian Sam Kinison has a recorded routine about 'licking the alphabet'. Perhaps this is from where the idea is referenced.
Does this include catagories like the winner of the 1956 Indonesian winner of the Berlin film festival that was a 4 hour movie about life in a jungle village?
Or just modern Hollywood?
The worst modern Hollywood has got to be the Charlie's Angels flix.
Could someone put these women in a Serbian rape camp for a few weeks? Maybe they'll stop making such stupid slutty and trashy movies. Barrymore and Diaz are truly hopeless, Liu almost.
Watching all the cars being smashed in Terminator III was no fun when I didn't have the money to fix my own car. Why does anyone find this shit entertaining?
God, so MANY bad movies with excellent production values!
This is an excellent advance in the use of PCs as appliances.
Compare a PC to a TV. To use the TV, you just turn your eyes towards the screen and click the remote. Within a few seconds, it's on and you're lulled into its endless mediocre entertainment and corporate propaganda dimension.
PCs with internet access are much more interesting. But you have to be at your PC desk, assuming a posture of office environment productivity. Then turn on the PC and wait, and wait, for the 'boot' process. Yes, twenty, thirty seconds go by, you're still waiting. Screen after screen of garbage text goes by. It's like bringing the Defence Department on-line. Compare the PC to a Commodore 64 (an 8-bit first-generation home-computer from the mid-1980s). With that machine, you flipped the on/off switch, and the computer was on within seconds, ready to do a rather limited number of things, but with no waiting. (You did wait to load files from the floppy drive - about 3 minutes to load 25K bytes).
So after minutes, your PC is finally UP! and ready to go. Click on the telephone access, wait another minute or so before the internet connection is 'established'. Wait...and...wait. Oh yes, you can buy 24 telephone internet connection service, but it is very expensive. Especially compared to a television as an entertainment medium.
Still waiting? System crashed and needed 're-booting' yet? Is there one little weird-ass little program that has tripled your power-on boot time for no good reason and you can't figure out what program it is?
Are your ears hurting yet from all the white noise from all the powerful machinery creating the 'new information age' next to the desk?
Anyway, the whole point is that PCs have a long way to go from this 'Data Control, IBM, Science Is Mankind's Brother' 1960's mainframe mentality before they can be as advanced as a television set or a clock radio as a home appliance/entertainment device.
But making them quiet is a big and welcome step in that direction. A single step in a thousand mile journey.
Now how about starting to work on an OFF switch? You know, push the button and the machine goes off? Now? Within one second? Goes from using amps of power to microamps? Is it really that hard to do, guys? You'all put a man on the moon.. how about an instant OFF switch on the PC?
Spam is vandalism of a public space
on
Spam's U.S. Roots
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Spam is more like a nuisance crime than a disease. Diseases are natural occurrences, unpleasant yes but a biological function. Spam is a deliberate attempt to pollute a public space for private gain.
In a sense it's the fault of the original e-mail/internet designers. By creating a nearly free and unlimited communications channel for themselves, they never anticipated that the channel would be hijacked by advertisers who are claiming the internet for their own private personal gain (as a open medium through which they can sell nearly unlimited access to advertising agencies).
By hijacking it is. Spammers are stealing a public resource.
A situation like this occured about 80 years ago when radio was becoming popular as a medium. Advertisers set up stations and broadcast ads and chatter over each other's frequencies. Eventually in the early 1930's, the US Federal Communications Commission (and similar agencies in other countries) was formed and clamped down harshly on unregulated broadcasting. That solved the problem of overlapping stations but eventually led to the situation that we have today of stagnant and insipid radio.
Spamming is also like grafitti, which is a nuisance crime of a person painting a private message in a public space that is too low in value to be protected against defacing by a full-time guard. The public space gets trashed by messages considered ugly to all except the miscreant. Other countries punish this activity harshly and they don't have defaced public spaces.
Spam will continue until the techno community creates enforceable guidelines to deal with this problem, and then actually enforces them. This could be banning sending messages beyond a certain number or actually selling licenses to spammers to allowing them them to send X million e-mails per month. The only actual realistic solution to spam is to stop allowing unlimited private use of a public communications medium.
Don't rely on governments to address this problem. Spam will be solved by the open source community coming up with a definition of spam, justification of restriction, and effective cessation of spamming activities when the spammers refuse to follow published guidelines enacted by the open source community. In fact, it's likely that the spammers will use the police against the open-source community's spam-limiting activities.
In other words, spam will lighten when the open-source community uses their technology and skills to shut the spammers down, regardless of whether or not the spammers have legal authority to flood the internet with millions of unwanted messages.
Spam is in the same class of social irritants as grafitti. (il mio Italiano no esta bonno).
It is someone hijacking a lightly guarded public place for their own benefit. The physical area that gets defaced by grafitti is too low in value to hire a full-time guard to prevent its defacement. The shitperson can deface the area quickly with paint and not get caught, providing a free advertising medium for himself and his (always a male) message.
Public law enforcement officers say that the faster an area that has been defaced by grafitti is cleared of the defacement, the less likely it is to be re-vandalized. I'm not sure if this applies to spam as well. However I do believe that spam in the same social catagory as grafitti.
Spammers, like grafitti vandals, are assholes. To accept as legitimate advertisers is only to ask to deluged with endless amounts of worthless spam. The legal arguments that are used against vandals should be refined and tested in court against spammers.
And, yes, grafitti vandals are assholes too. They aren't artists. They have the ability to create art but they don't. They foul public places. People who claim that grafitti vandals are artists are assholes too. So are the people who defend spammers as 'new media' advertisers.
As a chinese American I've heard enough crap from idiots who just take the crap that the media spinners have to say, take it to heart, and are convinced that China is the big bad communist government and how Mao is gonna end up jumping out of his lil glass box and take over the world.
We European-Americans have learned to take what the Other-Americans say seriously. The Taiwan situation seems serious. Everybody would be happy to have the status-quo continue, everybody that is except the people who put Mao in the glass box. The only real question is how many Americans (Chinese,Euro, and Other) are going to die when the Maoists invade Taiwan.
...I'm sure the US would be antsy if Rhode Island decided to secede because of an oppressive government.
I'm from Rhode Island. They have an oppressive government. The rest of the country has been trying to convince them to secede for many years now. We're sick of all their BS: they embarass us. Most of us would be happy to see them go their own way. They can join the EU for all we care. Good Riddance to Rhode Island. Rhode Island is America's Gaza. Pweeuu!
Okay lets weigh up the options. 1. File correct police report, don't get $1500, chances of police finding your laptop... none. 2. File a slightly incorrect police report, get $1500, by some random stroke of luck the police do find your laptop. Chances police believe that the thief is lying and just cut the lock with some bolt cutters.
option 3)
Your laptop gets stolen in Mexico or some other of the 130 countries where police don't get paid well. You hack the cable and report to the police that the laptop was stolen.
The police KNOW you cut the cable because they were the ones who stole your laptop by picking the lock in the first place. They trot out some local loser junkie and claim that he was the thief and the laptop has already been passed up to some unknown higher buyer of stolen property. They claim that the 'thief' told them that he picked the lock and you lied to get the insurance money. They claim that you and the 'thief' are working together to defraud the insurance company. They threaten to arrest YOU unless you can settle this with an ad-hoc receiptless payment to them, now, of hundreds of dollars, senor, muchas gracias.
plus, being solid state, it won't develop mechanical problems. It'll take up substantially less space and consume less power.
You're most likely right about the issue of mechanical problems. However I'm not sure about the power issues. Hard disks use lots of power only when they are starting to spin. At idle or full speed they use little power.
Dynamic RAM memory, on the other hand, has to be constantly refreshed which means it has power running to it at all times to scan addresses. There has to be uninterrupted power to drive the RAM bank, the DRAM controller, the hot-plug interface to the PC, and the regulated power supply for the unit. This might be a significant percentage of the power that would be used in total by a low-energy magnetic storage device like a hard disk.
It's also time to start considering the possibility that Taiwan will possibly be invaded and occupied by the Communists from the mainland at some point within the next five years. This will, if it happens, disrupt manufacturing design and shipping for years to come.
If I were an American politician, I would suggest to the US State department that the USA would only guarantee to provide an efficient co-defense of Taiwan if Taiwan relocates a significant number of IC fabs and design centers to the USA employing primarily American workers. This is the way that the world works. They would surely understand. They wouldn't like it, but they would comply.
Slashdot Mirror
The way to become a Word 'Power User' is to do OCR scanning with it. Use Optical Character Recognition software that puts the results in a Word file and try to get the results to look correct. Advanced masters can attempt this with magazine articles and gurus might even test themselves with a Wired magazine article.
The big problem that I have with Word is determining what exactly is causing the scanned OCR text to look the way that it does.
And pictures? What a nightmare! Watch them hop all over the place. I once almost got fired from a job because I couldn't get the pictures to stop reformatting the text placement. The boss (the German boss) thought I was a total loser because I couldn't master such a simple program even though I worked in AutoCAD, OrCAD, PCB layout software packages, and C compiliers, no of which he could do.
I finally found the O'Reilly Word Annoyances and discovered how to get the pictures to stay locked in place and have the text place itself around the pictures.
Word has two good features: the spell checker and the ability to write VBA programs to manipulate text within Word. However since there is no complete, detailed, and coherent explanation of the Word object structure, actually using VBA to do something useful remains an elusive dream.
I once heard that in spoken Arabic the 'k' sound at the beginning of the English words 'cat' and 'kitten' are different letters and are considered different sounds. To differenciate these letters, Arabic transliterated into English uses 'k' for one and 'q' with no 'u' for the other.
About ten years ago I worked in Silicon Valley for a company that had an affiliate in the UK.
I got assigned to back up all the hard disks once a week. One day I suggested to my boss that we make an extra back-up and send it to our English affiliate. My reasoning was that with all the:
1) Earthquakes - There was a 7.2 a few years before centered a few miles away. I remember steel tables bouncing several feet in the air off a concrete floor in the warehouse. There was a 7.4 a few months eariler in L.A. and a 7.3 south of Eureka to the north. Serious scare-the-shit-out-of-you earthquakes are not uncommon in California. The 8.4 quake of 1906 destroyed the entire city of San Francisco in only five minutes.
2) Fires - East Oakland had burned the previous summer and Malibu the summer before. People jsut love to build giant wooden houses ten feet apart and then plant trees with flammable oil in the bark all around them. One schmuck tosses a cigarette butt out the window and half the city is gone two hours later. Typical California.
3) Insurrections - In April 1993, Los Angeles erupted in a giant race riot. White cops beat a black guy with sticks on television after he drove 160 Kilometers-per-hour through many neighborhoods. The trial was moved to the most conservative city in the entire state and they were found not guilty. So the blacks burned down the Korean neighborhoods to protest the police presence in their neighborhoods (which have the highest crime rates in the country). Typical California.
4) Tsumamais - As a result of one of those earthquakes happening offshore, the beach rolls back really really far. Then it comes back up to the highest water mark on the beach, and keeps coming up and up and up. Over the beach, the parking lot, the streets, the stores, the houses, the buildings, the trees, the factory, the warehouses...
5) Incompetent back up technician accidently erasing the invaluable company data. - Uh, we won't spend much time on this one. But it's not all that uncommon. Especially when the backups are done on unpaid overtime.
When I explained all this to them as a good reason to have reasonably current set of backups out of the building, out of the city, and even out of the country, they looked at me as if I were stark raving crazy!
Also, I think Canada should be called "Canadia." Isn't that a cooler sounding name?
I think Canada should be called 'Canabus'. That's an even cooler name.
Does 'Quatar' refer to rain Qatar or electric Qatar?
If one wants to get really technical about it... Every country borders every other country because the embassy of a country is actual territory of that country inside another country's capital.
But I will concede that Americans are dumber than other people around the world who have the same lifestyle and level of income. Peasants are stupid and superstitious, wherever they live and regardless of whether they're driving SUVs and 4x4s. America just has more rich dumb peasants than any other country (" We's numba one! ").
Although having lived in the USA for a long time, I'm not convinced that the Americans are really as dumb as everyone else claims that they are. Many people who claim that they couldn't find the Pacific ocean on a map still have memorized thousands of sport statistics.
Actually Exxon was called 'Esso'.
How about the hit song from 1979 called "My Sharona" by the Knack? This was a huge hit in Japan where the title sounds like "Mai Shiro Onna" (every white woman). The fact that this band could appear, have one huge hit with exciting and intricate musicianship then completely disappear leads me to think that the song was actually by an unknown Japanese band. The Knack band was probably just several white L.A. male models, pretending to be a band, like those guys who won a Grammy in the late 1980s. The whole affair was probably just buried when it got too embarrassing.
Cultural sensitivity is all well and good, but I still believe that Microsoft should have just told India to change the country's borders to match the already manufactured software.
... so...much...grief... at 1/3 the cost of the corrected version, along with a simple sticker on the box containing an apology at what was only a simple oversight (and with full warrantee and extended support). Let the customers decide what is more important; a simple coloring mistake with enormous discount in price or national pride at any price.
Or, Microsoft should have offered two versions. One with a fully-corrected version at full list price. The other version with the coloring mistake that caused
Then Microsoft should have taken the sales figures to the Indian government and suggested that they change the country's borders to match the software because that is what the people want.
The absurd end of all this 'no possible offence to anyone anywhere' - type of trademarking is an endless number of bland nonsense words as trademarks. For example, the little purple moron who sold his name to a record company and then found that he had to change his own name to some weird symbol if he wanted to perform new material that the record company thought was too different from his older hits to be released. Granted this particular individual is too weird and narcissistic to feel any embarrassment at the stupid things that he does, but this kind of thing could happen to anyone who isn't paying attention to the difference between what is real and what is absurd.
Well put, but you're missing one point...
That point is that Hollywood really isn't profitable anymore. Movies are made by studios that are mostly owned by very large shell corporations who see movies as primarily an advertising medium for the products made by the other companies of the conglamerate. Movies don't make much money anymore. Some individual titles do, but on the whole, the production costs and promotion costs of films is rising faster that the box office. Every year sees bigger and bigger box office returns, but the overall profit margin is stagnant and the core audience that goes to films is shrinking slightly each year. This is unusual considering the movies are primarily oriented towards young people and the number of young people (especially outside the USA, Japan, and Europe) is growing quite a bit every year.
If movies budgets could be brought under control, and if it could be proven that movies actually increase consumption of the other products of the conglomerate that owns the studio, then it is possible that movie admissions might be given away in the future as a loss-leader to encourage consumption.
The real danger to the conglomerates that own the studios is that the MPAA will actually be successful in driving people out of the habit of consuming entertainment products, regardless of how much that they are actually paying or not paying for the opportunity to do so. If the MPAA convinces enough people that they will go to prison for watching downloaded movies, then the conglomerate loses the ability to use movies as a product-placement advertising medium. And new effective advertising mediums are getting increasing difficult to come by.
Eventually the conglomerates that own the movie studios will tell the MPAA to back off. The MPAA is a dinosaur anyway from the era when movie studios were still individual businesses that depended on box office receipts for their existence.
Want to support a band/artist? Go see them in concert OR send money to them directly...and I mean directly TO them...not to the management/record company. Will people send off a check to Chili-Peppers? Don't know, stranger things have happened.
No. Don't give them money.
Take the money that you were going to give them and instead use it to buy inexpensive musical instruments like the ones used on your favorite recordings. Learn to play your favorite songs, melodies, and riffs. Teach anyone who asks you how you played a song. Ask anyone that you hear playing a cool piece of music how to play it.
Learn to play as good as your favorite artists. Try changing the lyrics, melodies, and lead guitar riffs of the songs that everyone knows.
Avoid expensive vintage name-brand instruments than be stolen by thieves, junkies, RIAA lawyers, or other shit-people. Learn to build your own instruments very cheaply. Bring your instruments to parties and jam. Use super cheap tiny amps or boomboxes as amps. Learn the simple electronics to get distortion, delays, and flanger effects. Get guitar effects programs for your PC where you plug your instrument into the sound card line-in and the line-out into a stereo or boombox amp. Learn from anyone and everyone and teach anyone and everyone what you know.
A good way to learn how to specific songs and lead guitar breaks is downloading MIDI files of the songs. They sound stupid when played through the 'synth' on the PC sound card, but they will teach you the song's chord structure when studied with a MIDI music notation program. Did I forget to mention learning to read music? Public schools have cut out music education so it's up to you to learn on your own this most-important subject. Forget algebra, master music instead...it's more important.
It's not going to be easy to shed the RIAA from our souls, but it will be fun.
So essentially, irate radio is a really good idea, needs a lot of work on the interface etc, preferably a Winamp plugin or something, and needs our support!
Non-Clear Channel or non-RIAA radio will never happen in the USA under the corporate dominated present system.
I suggest making a CD-R template of your favorite new non-RIAA music. Then make several copies of the CD-R for about twenty cents each. Keep a few in your briefcase or backpack and when you meet someone who agrees that the RIAA is out of control, just hand one to them as an inexpensive but well-appreciated gift. You might want to put OGG or MP3 software like Winamp on this CDR also.
Corporate media is frozen and stagnant. Ordinary people and slashdotters have to create their own alternatives now.
"He went ballistic. It was an incredible insult to Islam." He asked for the game to be withdrawn but it was issued against his advice in the United States in the belief that it would not be noticed.
Moslems are simply too sensitive. They go fucking nuts over things that seem world-shatteringly important to them but don't mean anything to anyone else. As a consequence, Moslems have a world-wide reputation of being trigger-happy and prone to violence over trival and imaginary slights.
C'mon, guys, this is bad for Islam. Next time you feel gravely insulted by someone from outside the Islamic world who knows almost nothing about your religion or culture, take a deep breath, say a quick prayer, and give a reasonable, detailed and calm explanation as to why you feel the situation is inappropriate. Don't just whip out your sword or suicide bombers.
Deal with reality. In the modern technological world, religion isn't all that important and Islam is one of least important religions of them all. If you'all didn't have so much oil, no one would give a fuck about you or your religion. That's the truth.
For example,take the Palestinians (please!). Here's a 'country' of only five million people or so who have been on the evening news every fucking night for the past thirty years. What do they make that the world desperately needs? Why are they so fucking important? You could take all the Palestinians and put them in Los Angeles and it would be six months before anyone realized that they weren't Mexicans. You could put all the Palestinians in some place like Kinshasa, Lagos, Mumbai, or Sao Paulo and a few weeks later they would just be gone as if they never existed.
Even if they got their independence they would still be a dirt poor country with no ability to feed their own people or provide jobs. They're just a welfare country that lives on handouts from rich northern European countries. With hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue a year, what have the Gulf OPEC states ever done for Palestine? Nothing.
anyway, running out of time and gotta go. Please write and tell me how insensitive I am. I love it.
A little device that could carry my 'sensitive items' in a little hop over the customs inspection station at night could be quite useful in some situations. It would fly for a few hundred feet and give off a little short-distance radio signal to allow it to be found after landing.
I toy with the idea of filling an inflatable life raft with high-pressure hydrogen. It would float in the air at night and be dark against the sky. A light propeller (fueled by the hydrogen in the 'air raft' would push it and an air foil system would guide it under the direction of on-board GPS.
It would carry a few pounds of sensitive goods through the rugged mountain passes between British Columbia and Washington State in a controlled drift about 10 feet above the treetops.
A 32 bit microcontroller would have its route mapped out and would work with the GPS to a landing zone of about one square mile where it and its cargo could be retrieved by a person in a all-terrain 4-wheel-drive.
ah, fantasy...
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message.
I haven't had a chance to see any recent French or European films for the past ten years because the film distribution system forces them to have box office admission prices above my entertainment budget. I had hoped that the DVD revolution would allow all the great new French films to get distributed here at much less cost, but that doesn't look like it will happen. An unintended consequence of having DVD regions to restrict simultanous global distibution of Hollywood product is that region blocking on DVDs has made low-cost distribution of foreign films to North America impossible. Plus saturating the multiplex theatres with Hollywood blockbusters has destroyed the distribution and audience for small atmospheric French films outside of a few large cities.
Gaumont and the other major distributors seem to be completely clueless as to how to use DVDs to tap into the North American market for French films that has been dormant since the late 1970s. They should get together with the mail-order DVD distributors like NetFlix to introduce a whole new generation to the parallel universe that is French and European film.
The movie industry has had phenomenal growth in the past few years. They just keep getting bigger and bigger.
Each project (movie) is now an individual $50 to $200 million ?corporation?. A movie is a corporation that is its own product. And it?s a corporation that delivers about 2/3rds of its possible profitable return within a month after it is introduced to the public.
The stream of profit that comes from all the secondary sources (post-theatrical release, i.e. DVD & video rentals, TV broadcast, airplanes, hotels, ect...) are usually only 1/3 of what the theatre release generates and often quite less. Plus movies are beginning to have less time to recoup their investment since the average summer film loses 40% of its audience after its first weekend of release. And 40% each subsequent weekend.
Nobody would get into the movie business for the money today if they had any other reasonable choice. For the fame, the glamour, the sex, the excitement, yes, of course, but for the money alone as a business, never. Currently the global media companies (all five of them) are falling over themselves trying to unload their record/music divisions off onto each other. Nobody wants them. A couple of giant flops like Gigli and a run of minor flops like The Alamo and one or two of the major studios will go bankrupt.
The product (the movies) are selling like crazy in the total, but each individual movie is a total gamble. The high and rising out-of-control costs of production and marketing new blockbusters has made the entire movie business just marginally profitable regardless of how much heat, light, and excitement gets generated over any individual product film.
The situation will most likely get worse each passing year. Higher total revenues, shrinking core audiences, massive gambles on each individual product, shrinking total profits.
Home internet distribution really isn?t going to help Hollywood out of this situation because internet distribution puts medium budget specialty films on the same level as raging blockbusters. People will continue to go to the theatre for the blockbusters and download the specialty films. Since audience attention spans and free time for media consumption is limited, downloaded specialized and targeted films will only cut into the audience?s funds that currently go to blockbusters.
This is just the news that Hollywood doesn?t need and that is why they are wary of home internet film distribution.
I believe that he was meant to be an Episcopalian minister. To paraphrase Florence King's book WASP, Where is Thy Sting?, the 'piscop' high church is as close to Catholic as you can get and still be Protestant.
But even that wouldn't make sense, because there probably wouldn't be an Episcopalian church in a small MidWestern American town. Lutheran, Methodist, or Baptist, of course, but Episcopalian? Probably not unless the town was large enough that it could many levels of socio-economic classes.
Shyamalan's movies are more mood pieces than narratives anyway. For example the scene in Signs where the children are sitting on the couch with the tin foil hats on. Mr. Shyamalan has a real gift for creating moods. He should consider moving to France and revitalizing the French film industry. No seriously. They can't afford the huge Hollywood budgets and have never recovered from the death of Francois Truffaut. He could become a great director like Erich Rohmer there instead of being forced to make stupid films due to Hollywood mass-appeal requirements.
Seriously.
I saw Clockwork Orange when it was released in 1971 and was nearly traumatized. I've seen it two or three times since then.
I can't recommend it. To me it seems the perfect example of an immoral film. A film that makes you a worse person for having viewed it. The only other film that I find in this category is Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. This film is immoral because each time it plays on TV or theatrical rerelease people always end up being murdered by someone acting out scenes from the film in real life. Oliver Stone knew this would happen but still used his abilities and influence to have the film made and released. An absolute immoral act although not illegal. A true asshole and pervert. I never go see any of his movies anymore.
I saw Cruel Intentions and it was an exact remake of Dangerous Liasons and Valmont. All based on the 18th-century French novel. I don't recall any references to 'licking the alphabet' in Cruel Intentions. The late comedian Sam Kinison has a recorded routine about 'licking the alphabet'. Perhaps this is from where the idea is referenced.
Does this include catagories like the winner of the 1956 Indonesian winner of the Berlin film festival that was a 4 hour movie about life in a jungle village?
Or just modern Hollywood?
The worst modern Hollywood has got to be the Charlie's Angels flix.
Could someone put these women in a Serbian rape camp for a few weeks? Maybe they'll stop making such stupid slutty and trashy movies. Barrymore and Diaz are truly hopeless, Liu almost.
Watching all the cars being smashed in Terminator III was no fun when I didn't have the money to fix my own car. Why does anyone find this shit entertaining?
God, so MANY bad movies with excellent production values!
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if there is something like this in the BIOS.
This is an excellent advance in the use of PCs as appliances.
Compare a PC to a TV. To use the TV, you just turn your eyes towards the screen and click the remote. Within a few seconds, it's on and you're lulled into its endless mediocre entertainment and corporate propaganda dimension.
PCs with internet access are much more interesting. But you have to be at your PC desk, assuming a posture of office environment productivity. Then turn on the PC and wait, and wait, for the 'boot' process. Yes, twenty, thirty seconds go by, you're still waiting. Screen after screen of garbage text goes by. It's like bringing the Defence Department on-line. Compare the PC to a Commodore 64 (an 8-bit first-generation home-computer from the mid-1980s). With that machine, you flipped the on/off switch, and the computer was on within seconds, ready to do a rather limited number of things, but with no waiting. (You did wait to load files from the floppy drive - about 3 minutes to load 25K bytes).
So after minutes, your PC is finally UP! and ready to go. Click on the telephone access, wait another minute or so before the internet connection is 'established'. Wait...and...wait.
Oh yes, you can buy 24 telephone internet connection service, but it is very expensive. Especially compared to a television as an entertainment medium.
Still waiting? System crashed and needed 're-booting' yet? Is there one little weird-ass little program that has tripled your power-on boot time for no good reason and you can't figure out what program it is?
Are your ears hurting yet from all the white noise from all the powerful machinery creating the 'new information age' next to the desk?
Anyway, the whole point is that PCs have a long way to go from this 'Data Control, IBM, Science Is Mankind's Brother' 1960's mainframe mentality before they can be as advanced as a television set or a clock radio as a home appliance/entertainment device.
But making them quiet is a big and welcome step in that direction. A single step in a thousand mile journey.
Now how about starting to work on an OFF switch? You know, push the button and the machine goes off? Now? Within one second? Goes from using amps of power to microamps? Is it really that hard to do, guys? You'all put a man on the moon.. how about an instant OFF switch on the PC?
Spam is more like a nuisance crime than a disease. Diseases are natural occurrences, unpleasant yes but a biological function. Spam is a deliberate attempt to pollute a public space for private gain.
In a sense it's the fault of the original e-mail/internet designers. By creating a nearly free and unlimited communications channel for themselves, they never anticipated that the channel would be hijacked by advertisers who are claiming the internet for their own private personal gain (as a open medium through which they can sell nearly unlimited access to advertising agencies).
By hijacking it is. Spammers are stealing a public resource.
A situation like this occured about 80 years ago when radio was becoming popular as a medium. Advertisers set up stations and broadcast ads and chatter over each other's frequencies. Eventually in the early 1930's, the US Federal Communications Commission (and similar agencies in other countries) was formed and clamped down harshly on unregulated broadcasting. That solved the problem of overlapping stations but eventually led to the situation that we have today of stagnant and insipid radio.
Spamming is also like grafitti, which is a nuisance crime of a person painting a private message in a public space that is too low in value to be protected against defacing by a full-time guard. The public space gets trashed by messages considered ugly to all except the miscreant. Other countries punish this activity harshly and they don't have defaced public spaces.
Spam will continue until the techno community creates enforceable guidelines to deal with this problem, and then actually enforces them. This could be banning sending messages beyond a certain number or actually selling licenses to spammers to allowing them them to send X million e-mails per month. The only actual realistic solution to spam is to stop allowing unlimited private use of a public communications medium.
Don't rely on governments to address this problem. Spam will be solved by the open source community coming up with a definition of spam, justification of restriction, and effective cessation of spamming activities when the spammers refuse to follow published guidelines enacted by the open source community. In fact, it's likely that the spammers will use the police against the open-source community's spam-limiting activities.
In other words, spam will lighten when the open-source community uses their technology and skills to shut the spammers down, regardless of whether or not the spammers have legal authority to flood the internet with millions of unwanted messages.
Let's not forget the anamorphic skull in Holbein's painting "The Ambassadors" from 500 years ago.
Spam is in the same class of social irritants as grafitti. (il mio Italiano no esta bonno).
It is someone hijacking a lightly guarded public place for their own benefit. The physical area that gets defaced by grafitti is too low in value to hire a full-time guard to prevent its defacement. The shitperson can deface the area quickly with paint and not get caught, providing a free advertising medium for himself and his (always a male) message.
Public law enforcement officers say that the faster an area that has been defaced by grafitti is cleared of the defacement, the less likely it is to be re-vandalized. I'm not sure if this applies to spam as well. However I do believe that spam in the same social catagory as grafitti.
Spammers, like grafitti vandals, are assholes. To accept as legitimate advertisers is only to ask to deluged with endless amounts of worthless spam. The legal arguments that are used against vandals should be refined and tested in court against spammers.
And, yes, grafitti vandals are assholes too. They aren't artists. They have the ability to create art but they don't. They foul public places. People who claim that grafitti vandals are artists are assholes too. So are the people who defend spammers as 'new media' advertisers.
As a chinese American I've heard enough crap from idiots who just take the crap that the media spinners have to say, take it to heart, and are convinced that China is the big bad communist government and how Mao is gonna end up jumping out of his lil glass box and take over the world.
...I'm sure the US would be antsy if Rhode Island decided to secede because of an oppressive government.
We European-Americans have learned to take what the Other-Americans say seriously. The Taiwan situation seems serious. Everybody would be happy to have the status-quo continue, everybody that is except the people who put Mao in the glass box. The only real question is how many Americans (Chinese,Euro, and Other) are going to die when the Maoists invade Taiwan.
I'm from Rhode Island. They have an oppressive government. The rest of the country has been trying to convince them to secede for many years now. We're sick of all their BS: they embarass us. Most of us would be happy to see them go their own way. They can join the EU for all we care. Good Riddance to Rhode Island. Rhode Island is America's Gaza. Pweeuu!
Okay lets weigh up the options.
1. File correct police report, don't get $1500, chances of police finding your laptop... none.
2. File a slightly incorrect police report, get $1500, by some random stroke of luck the police do find your laptop. Chances police believe that the thief is lying and just cut the lock with some bolt cutters.
option 3)
Your laptop gets stolen in Mexico or some other of the 130 countries where police don't get paid well. You hack the cable and report to the police that the laptop was stolen.
The police KNOW you cut the cable because they were the ones who stole your laptop by picking the lock in the first place. They trot out some local loser junkie and claim that he was the thief and the laptop has already been passed up to some unknown higher buyer of stolen property. They claim that the 'thief' told them that he picked the lock and you lied to get the insurance money. They claim that you and the 'thief' are working together to defraud the insurance company. They threaten to arrest YOU unless you can settle this with an ad-hoc receiptless payment to them, now, of hundreds of dollars, senor, muchas gracias.
Welcome to the world.
plus, being solid state, it won't develop mechanical problems. It'll take up substantially less space and consume less power.
You're most likely right about the issue of mechanical problems. However I'm not sure about the power issues. Hard disks use lots of power only when they are starting to spin. At idle or full speed they use little power.
Dynamic RAM memory, on the other hand, has to be constantly refreshed which means it has power running to it at all times to scan addresses. There has to be uninterrupted power to drive the RAM bank, the DRAM controller, the hot-plug interface to the PC, and the regulated power supply for the unit. This might be a significant percentage of the power that would be used in total by a low-energy magnetic storage device like a hard disk.
It's also time to start considering the possibility that Taiwan will possibly be invaded and occupied by the Communists from the mainland at some point within the next five years. This will, if it happens, disrupt manufacturing design and shipping for years to come.
If I were an American politician, I would suggest to the US State department that the USA would only guarantee to provide an efficient co-defense of Taiwan if Taiwan relocates a significant number of IC fabs and design centers to the USA employing primarily American workers. This is the way that the world works. They would surely understand. They wouldn't like it, but they would comply.