If you, like fax machine makers, were using the right software it would be true.
As Slashdotters, let's put our money where our mouth is and write this great software.
We would formulate a fantastic user interface design,structure a robust and error proof algorythm, and produce an elegant, well-documented piece of code.
And transport it to all popular operating systems and important business languages.
I heard on NPR that this project cost $70 million US dollars. Nothing at that cost with such little chance of success or return-on-investment would be a privately funded project.
There is undoubtably lots of government funds and focused government sponsored research put into this 'privately funded project'.
Sometimes we just have to refuse to believe ridiculous things that we read in the media. Things like 'a privately funded' $70 million project to put a toy on another planet. I have not doubt that a little digging would uncover large amounts of backgound public funding for this stupid stunt.
However we must place it in its proper perspective given the other priorities of public funds. And as far as I can see, EVERYTHING is more important now than space exploration.
Mars hasn't changed in a billion years. It isn't going to change in the next two or three hundred years. But we should wait that long before throwing money at it because we have far more important things to deal with here on the home world.
For instance, - the population of the world will double in the next thirty to fifty years. These people will need jobs, food, shelter, and political freedom to create the economic climate necessary to create jobs, food, and shelter.
-Weapons of mass destruction continue to be developed. Genocidial political ideologies continue to be spread on official government media in the areas of the world where population growth is the least controlled. In the same vein, omnicidal technology (things that can kill every human being on earth if inplemented) is beginning to be developed without any global control or even agreement on its restriction.
-Warnings of global environmental breakdowns and massive climate and weather pattern change in the next century are coming from scientists who know what they are talking about.
There are a lot of fools out there who will argue that the massive challenges facing us here on earth is the best reason to put more resources into getting a few humans off the Earth. But the level of technology in this millenium will not be able to support life off Earth without support from the Earth. A home planet devistated by political forces in the second half of the 21st century that should have been addresses at the beginning of the 21st century will doom any space colonies established too soon.
Space geeks need to be encouraged to take a really long view (500 years to 1500 years) to achieve their vision of colonies of humans on the Moon and other planets.
Science fiction television writers should realize that the technologies like that seen in Star Trek:Voyager and Enterprise aren't going to be around in two or three hundred years. Two or three thousand years is more like it.
I recommend Arthur C Clarke's book "3001" for a vision of the world in a thousand years from the perspective of a man revived from 2001.
Limiting access to a shitty little scratched up disc that only cost the companies $0.05 to make for $17 a pop is rape, plain and simple..
I must take issue with the above statement.
Rape, "plain and simple", is the brutal act of forcing unwanted sex on another person using violence and the threat of murder and disfigurement.
Monopolistic business practices that allow massive disadvantages to the buyer of luxury goods is not rape. Calling it rape is a poor choice of metaphor.
Speaking on behalf of the women of Slashdot, I implore you to consider a less offensive choice of expression. I also suggest that you avoid using the term 'rape' as a metaphor in your everyday conversation, as this could seriously decrease your chances of winning the affections of the young ladies who are listening to your opinions.
So how do they advertise this service? Do they run commercials with a bunch rowdy drunken guys in a tavern pumping their fists in the air yelling "We love our Cox!".
Or do they the sultry female Aryan with the major league yaboos purring... "Cox on Demand. It's what every girl wants..."?
I've gone from seeing maybe fifty feature films a year (in the mid-to-late 1990's) in theatres to seeing maybe three features in theatres this year.
There have been two main causes of this shift:
1) the ever-increasing admission price for the theatre that is much greater than the inflation rate.
2) the explosion in availablity of DVDs. They have great sound, sharp images, multiple languages and subtitles, and production commentary.
Two forces - one pulling me out of the theatres and the other drawing me into watching movies on my computer.
Ten years ago you could go see double features of second-run Hollywood films (an average of two to three months after their original theatrical first-run release) for $2 to $3 dollars. First run matinees were $3. Five years ago all second-run double features stopped effectively doubling the admission price instantly when the inflation rate was only 2% a year. First-run matinee admission rose a dollar a year in quarterly increments every year since 1997 in the monopoly Regal Cinema chain. (which owns roughly 80% of the movie theatres in the USA).
About 2001 DVDs start appearing in the Blockbuster and supermarket rental outlets. These were basically the 'junk' titles released to DVD after playing first-run and not even going to second-run theatres. In 2002, classic Hollywood and European art films start appearing in large numbers in the local public libraries, available for free checkout for a few days to a week. DVD stand-alone players (that play MP3 CD-R and CD-RWs) along with DVD-ROM drives for PCs appear for less than $60 at Fry's and PriceWatch.com.
In 2003, local suburban public libraries in Portland Oregon have nearly every title available on DVD that was previously only on video cassette along with hundreds of 'new' features that were in first-run theatres the previous year. Many were donated from the local Hollywood Video world-corporate headquarters (located nearby) or the local Blockbuster Video (to clear surplus product from their limited shelf space). Other titles were donated to the local library by ordinary people who had purchased a DVD at retail and had already seen it a few times.
The result is that thousands of people who used to go to the movies a few years ago are now just staying home and watching DVDs from the public library or supermarket rental outlet. This shift is beginning to influence the type of films that are produced for the theatres: fewer mid-budget films directed at mature audiences (mature meaning over 25 years old) and more comic-book megabudget productions for the date-night younger audience that are increasingly the only people who still go to theatres.
Personally, I don't see how downloaded versions of feature films are going to make any difference to anyone. The film files are too large and too low-resolution (thinking of DivX) to be widely traded on the net. The wide availablity of DVD titles and their low prices (plus small physical size) make downloading movies absurd for the vast majority of people.
The people who are seriously interested in seeing a particular movie (to the point of actually spending hours to download it) are in all likelihood going to pay to see it in a nice theatrical setting anyway; with bright large crisp film images and blasting surround-sound.
Who's losing money? Where is the evidence that film downloading off the web is really an issue that is affecting the bottom line of anyone? This whole thing seems to be a hysterical over-reaction to a problem that doesn't really even exist.
Hollywood's real problem is their inability to control production budgets coupled with a box-office audience that is no longer growing. If present trends continue, then within five years most major big-budget films will not return their production costs through box-office receipts. When that happens, Hollywood will be forced to go back to making $10-$20 million dollar movies and, frankly, they've forgotten how to make profitable movies in this price range.
Let's take a minute and clarify the most important unspoken point here::: We are not the ones who are responsible for the brutal and horrible terrorist acts. Harrassing us and our equipment isn't going to reduce anyone's chances from being victimized by these psychos.
An more effective approach to reducing terrorism would be to make it understood to the people who are causing these events that their underlining political agenda will not be considered if they coordinate and execute these actions. Not in a broad sense, but very specific quid-pro-quo (Latin phrase meaning one precise action traded for another). For instance if the Palestinians (or one of their "non-aligned" splinter groups) cause a terrorist incident to occur, then ALL State Dept negotiations, discussions, trade talks, diplomatic meetings, UN resolutions,ect. will be suspended for a year. They would be completely ignored by the international organizations upon which they depend to legitimize their political goals.
If bozos living in caves manage to get together the resources to mount massive terrorist attacks upon the civilized world (and who believes that bozos in caves are the ones actually doing this?), then the AID shipments and relief work will be suspended for a year. Soldiers will actually shoot the doctors who refuse to comply. Bank accounts will be seized: trade embargos actually enforced.
When people complain that their children are hurt and starving, we should very quickly and loudly point out that this is only happening because they gave money and shelter to a group that blew up a passenger airliner. It will continue for X months and then end. If it happens again, then the food, material, and trade embargo will go into effect again for X months. Sure, it makes us look like heartless assholes in their eyes, but we're not the ones dancing in the streets and handing out sweets to strangers when some piece of shit walks into a day-care center with ten pounds of Centex strapped around his waist.
Terrorism continues to happen because the people who are supposed to be stopping it are more serious about harrassing ordinary people who have nothing to do with it than they are at convincing the perpetrators (and their supporters) that the guaranteed consequences from these horrible acts would not be worth it to their cause.
Perhaps we should pause for just one second in our technological discussions of permanent storage of data and ask the more important question of WHY it is necessary to store data permanently.
Permanent data storage means inability to correct the mistakes that are part of the storage record. With the epidemic of identity theft currently out of control, and the lack of standards concerning who collects data, what type of data, and its ultimate use, it is foolish and dangerous to permanently store what is often wrong and low quality data.
Nor should we forget that ultimately all data is collected for political or commercial reasons, and in the West, these are often the same things. Permanent data storage is one of the foundations of permanent institutional political structures, which is just another name for fascism.
Ever had a computer glitch destroy your credit? Are you a one of the millions of John Smith, Jin Kim, Jean Martin, Abdul Mohammad, or other people who share a common name with tens of thousands of other people? Suppose you're Juan Lopez and some twit in the Migra transposed a couple of numbers on immigration form twenty years ago and now every time you cross the US border some fuckwit demands to stick something up your ass for 'National Security'.
And nobody or no amount of money can ever change it because the records are permanently and unalterably stored in a nuclear bomb proof mountain somewhere?
I believe that we should start trying to make Linux CDs available for checkout at the local public library.
No enough people have the broadband or fast enough download capabilities to handle file sets that above a few megabytes.
Having the inexpensive CD-R sets available for checkout at the local public library would go a long way to solving the distribution problem of the general public.
Plus the local Linux group could keep the circulating distributions current and the latest patches available.
I think that there was a discussion about this on Slashdot recently, but I don't recall.
consider yourself a provincial backwoods hick on a global cosmopolitan website
Everybody on Slashdot is a "provincial backwoods hick on a global cosmopolitan website". That's what makes it so much fun to read.
And by the point of view of the global cosmopolitan community in general, everybody in the computer/technical/engineering professions are provincial backwoods hicks.
I was really impressed with the last Star Wars movie (Attack of the Clones , I think). Having watched Star Trek on television for years and having gotten used to 'rubber mask' aliens, the CGI generated artifical characters were really impressive. There is a real difference between a 100 million dollar movie and a 100 thousand dollar TV episode.
I was also stunned by the amount that Attack of the Clones simply lifted whole CGI sections from other films. The multi-level flying car highways section that took up the first 25 minutes was 'cloned' directly from 'The Fifth Element'(1997) and, to a lesser extent, from 'Back to the Future II'. Did the smashing machines sequence in AOTC come before or after the same overlong sequence in 'Minority Report'? Or was it done first in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1932)?
Much of the rest of the film seemed to be lifted from earlier Star Wars pictures and just run through a CGI washing-machine. There were even some points where the audience was actually laughing 'at' the movie in a sort of collective acknowledgement of its stupidity. Mostly when the Princess What's Her Name kept getting tossed out of speeding land cruisers and then just jumping up and trotting away.
In an interview, the producer of AofTheC blamed the DVD explosion for reducing the possibility of the remaining half dozen Star Wars movies from getting made. But that's silly, it's the series itself that has run out of ideas.
Another example of invisible F/X is the island in the Tom Hanks/Robert Zemetkis film "Castaway". Nearly all of the outdoor scenes were shot in Southern California with the tropical backgrounds added by CGI.
American Cinematographer magazine is a good source for background info on movie technology. That's where I read about 'Castaway'.
The writer above has lots of good ideas for reforming the American DMCA law, but it goes against the current American political climate for any positive changes to take place.
The trend of the Americans to start using their vast police and military internal forces to enforce the whims of corporate copyright laws will multiply the effect of the parallel trend of outsourcing their technological corporate infrastructure to the third world. They are inducing a massive shift of their technological industry to the third world, without any thought given to the long-term consequences of such a strategy.
By the time that they realize how much these two trends are reinforcing each, their positive-feedback loop of technological suicide will be too far advanced to retard or reverse.
In another generation or two, America will be the new Argentina. Or even worse off considering that they created so much global hatred toward themselves in their schitzo period (1980-2010; when their mounting arrogance and delusional-self congratuation inversely paralleled their financial global decline) that the rest of the world will have no interest in revitalizing them.
In 2004 the smart young Americans are beginning to question the alternatives to being so closely tied to this declining empire, even if they rarely publicly acknowledge their doubts. Which is probably just as well, given the jingoistic politcal climate there.
An excellent overview of this trend is found in the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg. They missed the revolution that technology is creating in corporate copyright, but they foresaw everything else.
This is an American expression from the past racist days, yes, but the previous writer used it in reference to a false sense of wealth engendered by current American automobile marketing practices.
The origin of the expression is the still-continuing practice of offering deals to undereducated working-class minorities that seem spectacular at first but turn out to be financial disasters later. At the time that these expressions were used in the USA, the better-educated white majority was expected to be aware enough not make such mistakes. Using these 'Jim Crow' expressions in the current politically-correct environment serves to give the writer the ability to extraordinaryly accentuate a point at the cost of being labeled a 'backward racist' by his audience.
For example, in the case referred to by the writer, a car company will make a giant bloated Sport Utility Vehicle from an old truck design for $15,000. Then they will market it people with misleading television satuation ads for $30,000 - $35,000. People are offered $4000 cash back immediately and no interest payments for a year.
What happens is that people buy these things to get the cash now and the low payments for a year. Then they find that the vehicle depreciates at a much faster rate than the payment schedule for the vehicle.
In a few years they have a giant gas-guzzler that is worth $18,000 in trade but for which they still owe $26,000. When it starts to break down, they get stuck with huge repair bills. If they go to trade it in, they find they must pay the difference between the cost and the current worth with a loan with very-high interest rates.
I believe that this is what the writer means by "n****r rich".
Americans are a bit too quick to dump their colorful but nasty expressions, and a bit too slow to dump the underlining racist attitudes that created them. But they are nowhere near a racist as they were only a generation ago.
Let's pit Gollum, Terminator, The Hulk, Peter Pan and all those undead pirates against eachother in a nicely computer-generated arena. The winner claims the Oscar.
That's the spirit! Modern comic-book movies are so dumb and dull because they have to be in order to not offend anyone, anywhere, in any way. Every possible ticket must be sold to recoup the cost of these gigantic turkeys.
One of the most memorable aspects of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" was seeing all the cartoon characters interelating in the same story and scenes for the first time.
CGI should be used to create surrealistic masterpieces that leave people stunned. CGI needs to be orders of magnitudes cheaper so that individual genius can create works that will still amaze audiences in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
Take, for instance, Dali's "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans" painting (Google it). After seventy years it still stuns the imagination.
CGI is the medium of our era. But, future viewers will note that there were no artists at the time worthy of the medium, so no great works of art resulted.
In most movies, CGI is as stupid as tail-fins on an SUV.
CGI is just expensive eye-candy that does little more than add up the cost of film and drive the theatre admission prices sky-high.
Even if one film has great CGI and is a bit hit, it does little more than cause a rash of high budget copy-cats that are never as good and serve to re-enforce the already too-high admission prices.
I would rather have twenty well-written well-acted non-CGI films costing $5 million each (and costing $3 - $5 each for admission) than one bloated $100 million CGI comic-book turkey.
Do the math, Hollwood, you would be getting twenty admissions at $3 instead of one admission for $10. Plus there would be more work available for the technicians and set designers that you 'claim' to care about in those idiotic commercials that we have to watch before movies.
Hollywood is at the same point that the dot-com industry was in 1998: obsessed with own image of self-importance and convinced that it can do no wrong. Or, rather, Hollywood is the US car industry in the 1970's before the Japanese wiped them out with better, cheaper, and more reliable products.
Will Hollywood go crying to the feds for a big bailout like Chrysler when a New Wave of beautiful exciting foreign films wipes out their slate of $150 million comic-book turkeys in the coming years? (like in the early 1960's when the French New Wave films wiped the floor with gas-bags like 'Cleopatra'?)
Besides, the best source material for CGI never gets filmed. None of Harry Turtledove's alterative history novels have ever been optioned. Nor have any of the best books by Whitley Strieber, like "Lilith's Dream" or "Nature's End".
I have found Microsoft Word to be the most frustrating program that I have ever used (with the possible exception of a Commodore 64 C compiler).
Whenever I have to do something semi-serious in Word now, I always take a few minutes to get calm and detached from the anger that I know is going to come.
It helped greatly to study repeatedly (on my own time and money) several thick manuals on the subject and the 'Word Annoyances' O'Reilly book.
You just have to tell yourself "What you want to do, It can be done. Or, it's not important. Kittens, little children and blue skies are important; MS Word is not."
But then I find graphics images that I carefully pasted in a certain place moving around by themselves to other locations. Strange characters and lines appearing with no way to find out what they are and, more importantly, how to get rid of them. A Help function that doesn't help and makes you feel stupid.
And a boss (a German boss) who gives you a bad performance review because you haven't mastered this piece of absurd software. I've mastered a dozen compliers, assemblers, CAD , PCB and PLD design applications, but not the only program that the boss has ever had to learn. So, bad review.
I used to deal with the frustration of working with Microsoft Word by making a detailed list of what was wrong and possible ways that it could be improved. But I realised that it was pointless. No one would ever read it. Nothing would ever get any better. Nobody cares....
Now I spend a hour in the Daisy Kingdom after any major bout with using Microsoft Word. Calm, refocused, kittens, little children, the important things in the real world...
For what it's worth... first comes anger, then despair, then resignation, then acceptance of bullshit as the natural order of things.
I can suggest a slightly different path after steps two or three in the list above.
Get a DVD-ROM or DVD writer for your PC. The DVD-ROMs are about $27 on Pricewatch.com. Download from the web the program 'DVDdecrypter'. With each new DVD run DVDdecrypter and copy the VOB files of the movie to your hard drive. Now you can use PowerDVD (or the movie-viewing program that comes with the DVD-ROM) to watch the movie without all the FBI warnings, moronic previews, commercials, and other dimwit distractions.
The trade-off is that you are watching on your PC monitor instead of big-screen TV and DVDdecoder doesn't handle subtitles (or, more precisely, I can't figure out how to get any existing subtitle function in the program to work).
There are ways and programs available to get your movie from the DVD to your TV without the irritating corporate bullshit. Unfortunately the people who know how to do this don't have the ability to explain it clearly to those who are not so finely focused on this complex technical speciality.
But we do have DVDdecrypter, so give thanks for small graces.
The social effect of the hyper-sonic passenger aircraft was written about by Whitley Streibler in his book "Nature's End" in 1986.
In it he describes aircraft that can get you from L.A. to India in three hours but punch holes in the local ozone layer when they leave the atmosphere. These holes cause unfiltered sunlight to shine through tiny portals onto the earth.
In his book he describes whole blocks of children playing outside getting severely sunburned to the point of third-degree burns requiring hospitalization when one of these TAV (trans-atmospheric vehicle) windows passes over a schoolyard with kids playing at recess (an American term for the period when young children in school are allowed outside to run around).
He describes hundreds of mothers demonstrating at airports in the 2020's with pictures of their burned children begging people not to use hypersonic air travel because their pleas and lawsuits against hypersonic aircraft are ignored by the authorities.
An example of the unintended consequences that often arise when the full environmental effects of disruptive technology are not taken into account by corporate engineers. This is what science fiction is best at.
I recently pulled a Roland MT-32 that I paid way too much money for back in the early 1990's out of the closet and played for a while.
What a disappointment. The instruments are mediocre and very noisy. The MIDI implementation is unnecessarily difficult and poorly documented. The editor programs still available are awkward to use and impossible to alter (no source code anywhere for MT-32 editors).
The unit has no backup battery inside. All modifications to any sounds are lost at power-down. The internal firmware writes the mediocre internal voices over whatever is in RAM so just adding a battery to the RAM's VCC won't save your work.
The internal synthesizer is just a square wave and a sawtooth with a gritty filter, amplitude envelope, and pitch tweeker (fire engine siren generator). So-so reverb and precussion patches. That's the whole thing.
Of all the synthesizers to select to emulate, this would be my last pick. Fifteen years ago, when it was released, it might have been impressive. But not now.
In fact, of all the synth tone modules from that period, the MT-32 sells for the least amount of money on Ebay. Someone is always trying to unload one for $40-$50 US.
The only thing cheaper is the Yamaha FB-01. In my opinion, the FB-01 is a 'better' synth because you can at least get some really metallic industial sounds out of it, along with fair orchestral instruments. For a $50 Ebay synth, get a Yamaha TX-81Z. It's the same price as a Roland MT-32, but far more fun and flexable to play with.
Here is Portland the opinion of the political sages of radio station KBOO is that George Bush made a secret deal with the Chinese premier on his recent visit that:
The USA will not defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion of that country.
and, in return,
China will not defend North Korea in the event of an American invasion of that country.
In the 1970's there were things called 'Midnight Movies'; showings of unusual films at 12am. They were actually quite popular then, but now it's hard to believe that anyone would want to see a movie at midnight.
The 1970's were also an era of a certain type of movie that can only be called an 'anti-date' movie. These films were all but guaranteed to make you feel so weird and repulsive after seeing them that you ran the risk of associating the shock induced by the movie with the person whom you went to the theatre with. Often you wouldn't know this was going to feel this way until the film was almost complete.
Movies in the 1995-2003 era are more-or-less engineered to induce precise emotions in the audience. There are few real surprises either good or bad. Everybody knows fairly well in advance how they are going to feel after the movie's over and they're leaving the theatre. You may not know what is exactly actually going to happen in the movie, but you have a fairly good idea how it's going to make you feel. Compared to the rollar-coaster risk that you took with 1970's movies, this is not really a bad thing.
Some examples of the 'anti-date' midnight movies of the 1970's are:
Clockwork Orange (1971 Stanley Kubrick)
Seven Beauties (1975 Lina Wertmuller)
El Topo (1969 Alexjandro Jordokoski)
Taxi Driver (1976 Martin Scorsese)
Chinatown (1974 Roman Polanski)
The list can go on and on. I'm amazed now that there was any romance at all in the 1970's. The fact that childern were still born to people who went to lots of movies is a testament to the human spirit.
There are a number of applications which I run,and I'm not just talking about games, which will not run under Win NT or 2000 at all.
I agree with that. I have a topographical map program that I often use that won't run at all on any system except Win98. Plus many of the CD-ROMs still on the shelves of the local library won't run on any system newer than Win98.
Plus Win98 is the last MS offering that allows a user to directly access input/output ports. I still have a few ten year old ISA PC cards that interface electronics to PCs. The control programs for these cards directly access I/O as they were written in DOS in most cases. Without Win98, they are useless.
The concept that millions of people are just going to throw away the equipment that they have bought five to ten years ago because of an arbitrary decision of one company in the support chain is simply corporate arrogance.
If Microsoft is no longer going to support an operating system that is still used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, then they should release the source code for this operating system.
The point to focus on is not that one name is almost the same as some other corporate name, it's that one person in Finland or Sweden or Shitholistan thinks that they can change the behavior of millions of people. Then they believe that they have the authority to enforce this because they have some form of legal position in their own country.
This is like some fundamentalist judge in Iran ordering the entire alchool industry in the world to shut down because it is forbidden by the Koran, and actually being taken seriously in areas outside the range of his private army.
Slashdot Mirror
If you, like fax machine makers, were using the right software it would be true.
As Slashdotters, let's put our money where our mouth is and write this great software.
We would formulate a fantastic user interface design,structure a robust and error proof algorythm, and produce an elegant, well-documented piece of code.
And transport it to all popular operating systems and important business languages.
...but Beagle 2 is a privately funded UK project.
I heard on NPR that this project cost $70 million US dollars. Nothing at that cost with such little chance of success or return-on-investment would be a privately funded project.
There is undoubtably lots of government funds and focused government sponsored research put into this 'privately funded project'.
Sometimes we just have to refuse to believe ridiculous things that we read in the media. Things like 'a privately funded' $70 million project to put a toy on another planet. I have not doubt that a little digging would uncover large amounts of backgound public funding for this stupid stunt.
Thank you,
I support space exploration 100%...
However we must place it in its proper perspective given the other priorities of public funds. And as far as I can see, EVERYTHING is more important now than space exploration.
Mars hasn't changed in a billion years. It isn't going to change in the next two or three hundred years. But we should wait that long before throwing money at it because we have far more important things to deal with here on the home world.
For instance,
- the population of the world will double in the next thirty to fifty years. These people will need jobs, food, shelter, and political freedom to create the economic climate necessary to create jobs, food, and shelter.
-Weapons of mass destruction continue to be developed. Genocidial political ideologies continue to be spread on official government media in the areas of the world where population growth is the least controlled. In the same vein, omnicidal technology (things that can kill every human being on earth if inplemented) is beginning to be developed without any global control or even agreement on its restriction.
-Warnings of global environmental breakdowns and massive climate and weather pattern change in the next century are coming from scientists who know what they are talking about.
There are a lot of fools out there who will argue that the massive challenges facing us here on earth is the best reason to put more resources into getting a few humans off the Earth. But the level of technology in this millenium will not be able to support life off Earth without support from the Earth. A home planet devistated by political forces in the second half of the 21st century that should have been addresses at the beginning of the 21st century will doom any space colonies established too soon.
Space geeks need to be encouraged to take a really long view (500 years to 1500 years) to achieve their vision of colonies of humans on the Moon and other planets.
Science fiction television writers should realize that the technologies like that seen in Star Trek:Voyager and Enterprise aren't going to be around in two or three hundred years. Two or three thousand years is more like it.
I recommend Arthur C Clarke's book "3001" for a vision of the world in a thousand years from the perspective of a man revived from 2001.
Thank you,
Limiting access to a shitty little scratched up disc that only cost the companies $0.05 to make for $17 a pop is rape, plain and simple..
I must take issue with the above statement.
Rape, "plain and simple", is the brutal act of forcing unwanted sex on another person using violence and the threat of murder and disfigurement.
Monopolistic business practices that allow massive disadvantages to the buyer of luxury goods is not rape. Calling it rape is a poor choice of metaphor.
Speaking on behalf of the women of Slashdot, I implore you to consider a less offensive choice of expression. I also suggest that you avoid using the term 'rape' as a metaphor in your everyday conversation, as this could seriously decrease your chances of winning the affections of the young ladies who are listening to your opinions.
Thank you,
Simonetta
"Cox on Demand"
... "Cox on Demand. It's what every girl wants..."?
So how do they advertise this service? Do they run commercials with a bunch rowdy drunken guys in a tavern pumping their fists in the air yelling "We love our Cox!".
Or do they the sultry female Aryan with the major league yaboos purring
I've gone from seeing maybe fifty feature films a year (in the mid-to-late 1990's) in theatres to seeing maybe three features in theatres this year.
There have been two main causes of this shift:
1) the ever-increasing admission price for the theatre that is much greater than the inflation rate.
2) the explosion in availablity of DVDs. They have great sound, sharp images, multiple languages and subtitles, and production commentary.
Two forces - one pulling me out of the theatres and the other drawing me into watching movies on my computer.
Ten years ago you could go see double features of second-run Hollywood films (an average of two to three months after their original theatrical first-run release) for $2 to $3 dollars. First run matinees were $3. Five years ago all second-run double features stopped effectively doubling the admission price instantly when the inflation rate was only 2% a year. First-run matinee admission rose a dollar a year in quarterly increments every year since 1997 in the monopoly Regal Cinema chain. (which owns roughly 80% of the movie theatres in the USA).
About 2001 DVDs start appearing in the Blockbuster and supermarket rental outlets. These were basically the 'junk' titles released to DVD after playing first-run and not even going to second-run theatres. In 2002, classic Hollywood and European art films start appearing in large
numbers in the local public libraries, available for free checkout for a few days to a week. DVD stand-alone players (that play MP3 CD-R and CD-RWs) along with DVD-ROM drives for PCs appear for less than $60 at Fry's and PriceWatch.com.
In 2003, local suburban public libraries in Portland Oregon have nearly every title available on DVD that was previously only on video cassette along with hundreds of 'new' features that were in first-run theatres the previous year. Many were donated from the local Hollywood Video world-corporate headquarters (located nearby) or the local Blockbuster Video (to clear surplus
product from their limited shelf space). Other titles were donated to the local library by ordinary people who had purchased a DVD at retail and had already seen it a few times.
The result is that thousands of people who used to go to the movies a few years ago are now just staying home and watching DVDs from the public library or supermarket rental outlet. This shift is beginning to influence the type of films that are produced for the theatres: fewer mid-budget films directed at mature audiences (mature meaning over 25 years old) and more comic-book megabudget productions for the date-night younger audience that are increasingly the only people who still go to theatres.
Personally, I don't see how downloaded versions of feature films are going to make any difference to anyone. The film files are too large and too
low-resolution (thinking of DivX) to be widely traded on the net. The wide availablity of DVD titles and their low prices (plus small physical size) make downloading movies absurd for the vast majority of people.
The people who are seriously interested in seeing a particular movie (to the point of actually spending hours to download it) are in all likelihood going to pay to see it in a nice theatrical setting anyway; with bright large crisp film images and blasting surround-sound.
Who's losing money? Where is the evidence that film downloading off the web is really an issue that is affecting the bottom line of anyone? This whole thing seems to be a hysterical over-reaction to a problem that doesn't really even exist.
Hollywood's real problem is their inability to control production budgets coupled with a box-office audience that is no longer growing. If present trends continue, then within five years most major big-budget films will not return their production costs through box-office receipts. When that happens, Hollywood will be forced to go back to making $10-$20 million dollar movies and, frankly, they've forgotten how to make profitable movies in this price range.
Let's take a minute and clarify the most important unspoken point here::: We are not the ones who are responsible for the brutal and horrible terrorist acts. Harrassing us and our equipment isn't going to reduce anyone's chances from being victimized by these psychos.
An more effective approach to reducing terrorism would be to make it understood to the people who are causing these events that their underlining political agenda will not be considered if they coordinate and execute these actions. Not in a broad sense, but very specific quid-pro-quo (Latin phrase meaning one precise action traded for another). For instance if the Palestinians (or one of their "non-aligned" splinter groups) cause a terrorist incident to occur, then ALL State Dept negotiations, discussions, trade talks, diplomatic meetings, UN resolutions,ect. will be suspended for a year. They would be completely ignored by the international organizations upon which they depend to legitimize their political goals.
If bozos living in caves manage to get together the resources to mount massive terrorist attacks upon the civilized world (and who believes that bozos in caves are the ones actually doing this?), then the AID shipments and relief work will be suspended for a year. Soldiers will actually shoot the doctors who refuse to comply.
Bank accounts will be seized: trade embargos actually enforced.
When people complain that their children are hurt and starving, we should very quickly and loudly point out that this is only happening because they gave money and shelter to a group that blew up a passenger airliner. It will continue for X months and then end. If it happens again, then the food, material, and trade embargo will go into effect again for X months. Sure, it makes us look like heartless assholes in their eyes, but we're not the ones dancing in the streets and handing out sweets to strangers when some piece of shit walks into a day-care center with ten pounds of Centex strapped around his waist.
Terrorism continues to happen because the people who are supposed to be stopping it are more serious about harrassing ordinary people who have nothing to do with it than they are at convincing the perpetrators (and their supporters) that the guaranteed consequences from these horrible acts would not be worth it to their cause.
Perhaps we should pause for just one second in our technological discussions of permanent storage of data and ask the more important question of WHY it is necessary to store data permanently.
Permanent data storage means inability to correct the mistakes that are part of the storage record. With the epidemic of identity theft currently out of control, and the lack of standards concerning who collects data, what type of data, and its ultimate use, it is foolish and dangerous to permanently store what is often wrong and low quality data.
Nor should we forget that ultimately all data is collected for political or commercial reasons, and in the West, these are often the same things. Permanent data storage is one of the foundations of permanent institutional political structures, which is just another name for fascism.
Ever had a computer glitch destroy your credit? Are you a one of the millions of John Smith, Jin Kim, Jean Martin, Abdul Mohammad, or other people who share a common name with tens of thousands of other people? Suppose you're Juan Lopez and some twit in the Migra transposed a couple of numbers on immigration form twenty years ago and now every time you cross the US border some fuckwit demands to stick something up your ass for 'National Security'.
And nobody or no amount of money can ever change it because the records are permanently and unalterably stored in a nuclear bomb proof mountain somewhere?
I believe that we should start trying to make Linux CDs available for checkout at the local public library.
No enough people have the broadband or fast enough download capabilities to handle file sets that above a few megabytes.
Having the inexpensive CD-R sets available for checkout at the local public library would go a long way to solving the distribution problem of the general public.
Plus the local Linux group could keep the circulating distributions current and the latest patches available.
I think that there was a discussion about this on Slashdot recently, but I don't recall.
consider yourself a provincial backwoods hick on a global cosmopolitan website
Everybody on Slashdot is a "provincial backwoods hick on a global cosmopolitan website". That's what makes it so much fun to read.
And by the point of view of the global cosmopolitan community in general, everybody in the computer/technical/engineering professions are provincial backwoods hicks.
I was really impressed with the last Star Wars movie (Attack of the Clones , I think). Having watched Star Trek on television for years and having gotten used to 'rubber mask' aliens, the CGI generated artifical characters were really impressive. There is a real difference between a 100 million dollar movie and a 100 thousand dollar TV episode.
I was also stunned by the amount that Attack of the Clones simply lifted whole CGI sections from other films. The multi-level flying car highways section that took up the first 25 minutes was 'cloned' directly from 'The Fifth Element'(1997) and, to a lesser extent, from 'Back to the Future II'. Did the smashing machines sequence in AOTC come before or after the same overlong sequence in 'Minority Report'? Or was it done first in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1932)?
Much of the rest of the film seemed to be lifted from earlier Star Wars pictures and just run through a CGI washing-machine. There were even some points where the audience was actually laughing 'at' the movie in a sort of collective acknowledgement of its stupidity. Mostly when the Princess What's Her Name kept getting tossed out of speeding land cruisers and then just jumping up and trotting away.
In an interview, the producer of AofTheC blamed the DVD explosion for reducing the possibility of the remaining half dozen Star Wars movies from getting made. But that's silly, it's the series itself that has run out of ideas.
Another example of invisible F/X is the island in the Tom Hanks/Robert Zemetkis film "Castaway". Nearly all of the outdoor scenes were shot in Southern California with the tropical backgrounds added by CGI.
American Cinematographer magazine is a good source for background info on movie technology. That's where I read about 'Castaway'.
The writer above has lots of good ideas for reforming the American DMCA law, but it goes against the current American political climate for any positive changes to take place.
The trend of the Americans to start using their vast police and military internal forces to enforce the whims of corporate copyright laws will multiply the effect of the parallel trend of outsourcing their technological corporate infrastructure to the third world. They are inducing a massive shift of their technological industry to the third world, without any thought given to the long-term consequences of such a strategy.
By the time that they realize how much these two trends are reinforcing each, their positive-feedback loop of technological suicide will be too far advanced to retard or reverse.
In another generation or two, America will be the new Argentina. Or even worse off considering that they created so much global hatred toward themselves in their schitzo period (1980-2010; when their mounting arrogance and delusional-self congratuation inversely paralleled their financial global decline) that the rest of the world will have no interest in revitalizing them.
In 2004 the smart young Americans are beginning to question the alternatives to being so closely tied to this declining empire, even if they rarely publicly acknowledge their doubts. Which is probably just as well, given the jingoistic politcal climate there.
An excellent overview of this trend is found in the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg. They missed the revolution that technology is creating in corporate copyright, but they foresaw everything else.
What does "nigger rich" mean? Are you a racist?
This is an American expression from the past racist days, yes, but the previous writer used it in reference to a false sense of wealth engendered by current American automobile marketing practices.
The origin of the expression is the still-continuing practice of offering deals to undereducated working-class minorities that seem spectacular at first but turn out to be financial disasters later. At the time that these expressions were used in the USA, the better-educated white majority was expected to be aware enough not make such mistakes. Using these 'Jim Crow' expressions in the current politically-correct environment serves to give the writer the ability to extraordinaryly accentuate a point at the cost of being labeled a 'backward racist' by his audience.
For example, in the case referred to by the writer, a car company will make a giant bloated Sport Utility Vehicle from an old truck design for $15,000. Then they will market it people with misleading television satuation ads for $30,000 - $35,000. People are offered $4000 cash back immediately and no interest payments for a year.
What happens is that people buy these things to get the cash now and the low payments for a year. Then they find that the vehicle depreciates at a much faster rate than the payment schedule for the vehicle.
In a few years they have a giant gas-guzzler that is worth $18,000 in trade but for which they still owe $26,000. When it starts to break down, they get stuck with huge repair bills. If they go to trade it in, they find they must pay the difference between the cost and the current worth with a loan with very-high interest rates.
I believe that this is what the writer means by "n****r rich".
Americans are a bit too quick to dump their colorful but nasty expressions, and a bit too slow to dump the underlining racist attitudes that created them. But they are nowhere near a racist as they were only a generation ago.
Let's pit Gollum, Terminator, The Hulk, Peter Pan and all those undead pirates against eachother in a nicely computer-generated arena.
The winner claims the Oscar.
That's the spirit! Modern comic-book movies are so dumb and dull because they have to be in order to not offend anyone, anywhere, in any way. Every possible ticket must be sold to recoup the cost of these gigantic turkeys.
One of the most memorable aspects of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" was seeing all the cartoon characters interelating in the same story and scenes for the first time.
CGI should be used to create surrealistic masterpieces that leave people stunned. CGI needs to be orders of magnitudes cheaper so that individual genius can create works that will still amaze audiences in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
Take, for instance, Dali's "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans" painting (Google it). After seventy years it still stuns the imagination.
CGI is the medium of our era. But, future viewers will note that there were no artists at the time worthy of the medium, so no great works of art resulted.
In most movies, CGI is as stupid as tail-fins on an SUV.
CGI is just expensive eye-candy that does little more than add up the cost of film and drive the theatre admission prices sky-high.
Even if one film has great CGI and is a bit hit, it does little more than cause a rash of high budget copy-cats that are never as good and serve to re-enforce the already too-high admission prices.
I would rather have twenty well-written well-acted non-CGI films costing $5 million each (and costing $3 - $5 each for admission) than one bloated $100 million CGI comic-book turkey.
Do the math, Hollwood, you would be getting twenty admissions at $3 instead of one admission for $10. Plus there would be more work available for the technicians and set designers that you 'claim' to care about in those idiotic commercials that we have to watch before movies.
Hollywood is at the same point that the dot-com industry was in 1998: obsessed with own image of self-importance and convinced that it can do no wrong. Or, rather, Hollywood is the US car industry in the 1970's before the Japanese wiped them out with better, cheaper, and more reliable products.
Will Hollywood go crying to the feds for a big bailout like Chrysler when a New Wave of beautiful exciting foreign films wipes out their slate of $150 million comic-book turkeys in the coming years? (like in the early 1960's when the French New Wave films wiped the floor with gas-bags like 'Cleopatra'?)
Besides, the best source material for CGI never gets filmed. None of Harry Turtledove's alterative history novels have ever been optioned.
Nor have any of the best books by Whitley Strieber, like "Lilith's Dream" or "Nature's End".
It seems that you have also 'stoped' using the spell checker.
I have found Microsoft Word to be the most frustrating program that I have ever used (with the possible exception of a Commodore 64 C compiler).
Whenever I have to do something semi-serious in Word now, I always take a few minutes to get calm and detached from the anger that I know is going to come.
It helped greatly to study repeatedly (on my own time and money) several thick manuals on the subject and the 'Word Annoyances' O'Reilly book.
You just have to tell yourself "What you want to do, It can be done. Or, it's not important. Kittens, little children and blue skies are important; MS Word is not."
But then I find graphics images that I carefully pasted in a certain place moving around by themselves to other locations. Strange characters and lines appearing with no way to find out what they are and, more importantly, how to get rid of them. A Help function that doesn't help and makes you feel stupid.
And a boss (a German boss) who gives you a bad performance review because you haven't mastered this piece of absurd software. I've mastered a dozen compliers, assemblers, CAD , PCB and PLD design applications, but not the only program that the boss has ever had to learn. So, bad review.
I used to deal with the frustration of working with Microsoft Word by making a detailed list of what was wrong and possible ways that it could be improved. But I realised that it was pointless. No one would ever read it. Nothing would ever get any better. Nobody cares....
Now I spend a hour in the Daisy Kingdom after any major bout with using Microsoft Word. Calm, refocused, kittens, little children, the important things in the real world...
You're pissed off! I don't blame you. It
For what it's worth... first comes anger, then despair, then resignation, then acceptance of bullshit as the natural order of things.
I can suggest a slightly different path after steps two or three in the list above.
Get a DVD-ROM or DVD writer for your PC. The DVD-ROMs are about $27 on Pricewatch.com. Download from the web the program 'DVDdecrypter'. With each new DVD run DVDdecrypter and copy the VOB files of the movie to your hard drive. Now you can use PowerDVD (or the movie-viewing program that comes with the DVD-ROM) to watch the movie without all the FBI warnings, moronic previews, commercials, and other dimwit distractions.
The trade-off is that you are watching on your PC monitor instead of big-screen TV and DVDdecoder doesn't handle subtitles (or, more precisely, I can't figure out how to get any existing subtitle function in the program to work).
There are ways and programs available to get your movie from the DVD to your TV without the irritating corporate bullshit. Unfortunately the people who know how to do this don't have the ability to explain it clearly to those who are not so finely focused on this complex technical speciality.
But we do have DVDdecrypter, so give thanks for small graces.
Thank you,
The social effect of the hyper-sonic passenger aircraft was written about by Whitley Streibler in his book "Nature's End" in 1986.
In it he describes aircraft that can get you from L.A. to India in three hours but punch holes in the local ozone layer when they leave the atmosphere. These holes cause unfiltered sunlight to shine through tiny portals onto the earth.
In his book he describes whole blocks of children playing outside getting severely sunburned to the point of third-degree burns requiring hospitalization when one of these TAV (trans-atmospheric vehicle) windows passes over a schoolyard with kids playing at recess (an American term for the period when young children in school are allowed outside to run around).
He describes hundreds of mothers demonstrating at airports in the 2020's with pictures of their burned children begging people not to use hypersonic air travel because their pleas and lawsuits against hypersonic aircraft are ignored by the authorities.
An example of the unintended consequences that often arise when the full environmental effects of disruptive technology are not taken into account by corporate engineers. This is what science fiction is best at.
I recently pulled a Roland MT-32 that I paid way too much money for back in the early 1990's out of the closet and played for a while.
What a disappointment. The instruments are mediocre and very noisy. The MIDI implementation is unnecessarily difficult and poorly documented. The editor programs still available are awkward to use and impossible to alter (no source code anywhere for MT-32 editors).
The unit has no backup battery inside. All modifications to any sounds are lost at power-down. The internal firmware writes the mediocre internal voices over whatever is in RAM so just adding a battery to the RAM's VCC won't save your work.
The internal synthesizer is just a square wave and a sawtooth with a gritty filter, amplitude envelope, and pitch tweeker (fire engine siren generator). So-so reverb and precussion patches. That's the whole thing.
Of all the synthesizers to select to emulate, this would be my last pick. Fifteen years ago, when it was released, it might have been impressive. But not now.
In fact, of all the synth tone modules from that period, the MT-32 sells for the least amount of money on Ebay. Someone is always trying to unload one for $40-$50 US.
The only thing cheaper is the Yamaha FB-01. In my opinion, the FB-01 is a 'better' synth because you can at least get some really metallic industial sounds out of it, along with fair orchestral instruments. For a $50 Ebay synth, get a Yamaha TX-81Z. It's the same price as a Roland MT-32, but far more fun and flexable to play with.
Here is Portland the opinion of the political sages of radio station KBOO is that George Bush made a secret deal with the Chinese premier on his recent visit that:
The USA will not defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion of that country.
and, in return,
China will not defend North Korea in the event of an American invasion of that country.
In the 1970's there were things called 'Midnight Movies'; showings of unusual films at 12am. They were actually quite popular then, but now it's hard to believe that anyone would want to see a movie at midnight.
The 1970's were also an era of a certain type of movie that can only be called an 'anti-date' movie. These films were all but guaranteed to make you feel so weird and repulsive after seeing them that you ran the risk of associating the shock induced by the movie with the person whom you went to the theatre with. Often you wouldn't know this was going to feel this way until the film was almost complete.
Movies in the 1995-2003 era are more-or-less engineered to induce precise emotions in the audience. There are few real surprises either good or bad. Everybody knows fairly well in advance how they are going to feel after the movie's over and they're leaving the theatre. You may not know what is exactly actually going to happen in the movie, but you have a fairly good idea how it's going to make you feel. Compared to the rollar-coaster risk that you took with 1970's movies, this is not really a bad thing.
Some examples of the 'anti-date' midnight movies of the 1970's are:
Clockwork Orange (1971 Stanley Kubrick)
Seven Beauties (1975 Lina Wertmuller)
El Topo (1969 Alexjandro Jordokoski)
Taxi Driver (1976 Martin Scorsese)
Chinatown (1974 Roman Polanski)
The list can go on and on. I'm amazed now that there was any romance at all in the 1970's. The fact that childern were still born to people who went to lots of movies is a testament to the human spirit.
There are a number of applications which I run,and I'm not just talking about games, which will not run under Win NT or 2000 at all.
I agree with that. I have a topographical map program that I often use that won't run at all on any system except Win98. Plus many of the CD-ROMs still on the shelves of the local library won't run on any system newer than Win98.
Plus Win98 is the last MS offering that allows a user to directly access input/output ports. I still have a few ten year old ISA PC cards that interface electronics to PCs. The control programs for these cards directly access I/O as they were written in DOS in most cases. Without Win98, they are useless.
The concept that millions of people are just going to throw away the equipment that they have bought five to ten years ago because of an arbitrary decision of one company in the support chain is simply corporate arrogance.
If Microsoft is no longer going to support an operating system that is still used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, then they should release the source code for this operating system.
The point to focus on is not that one name is almost the same as some other corporate name, it's that one person in Finland or Sweden or Shitholistan thinks that they can change the behavior of millions of people. Then they believe that they have the authority to enforce this because they have some form of legal position in their own country.
This is like some fundamentalist judge in Iran ordering the entire alchool industry in the world to shut down because it is forbidden by the Koran, and actually being taken seriously in areas outside the range of his private army.