Main Entry: racism
Pronunciation: 'rA-"si-z&m also -"shi-
Function: noun
Date: 1936
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
- racist/-sist also -shist/ noun or adjective
I believe the word you're looking for is "nationalism" (easy mistake, political correctness rarely is):
Main Entry: nationalism
Pronunciation: 'nash-n&-"li-z&m, 'na-sh&-n&l-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1844
: loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially : a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups
Remember the first cablecar in San Francisco? When they found they'd be riding at the shocking speed of 8 MPH, they believed they'd be unable to breath!
When the first automobiles came out, some had similar fears... At the turn of the century, most believed that things were advancing too quickly, and that people were going insane from the stress of the rapid changes...
And of course, less than one year ago, there was all the hype regarding the Y2K bug... There was supposed to be a second coming of Christ as well, but neither happened...
Suffice it to say, the public is remarkably stupid regarding anything they don't completely understand...
As a formerly poor(and considered by some as STILL poor) person, let me sum it up in one smallish paragraph:
Remember the old days when your employers said "I'm not paying you to think!"... Relish the fact that those days are fading fast...
And contrary to popular belief, there's plenty of computer experts (or at least operators who know how to use the equipment) who are poor, some of which were/are homeless... In the real world, there's still ample employment unskilled/skilled labor... For a lot of the tech positions however, it doesn't matter if you've used computers for x number of years, can edit your own registry tweaks manually, or can build a PC from scratch, if you have no certification, forget about that high end position working for the high tech businesses...
In my own case, due to the same conditions, I'm starting a business of my own, to attempt to sell the hardware, AND make sure my customers are well informed (to ensure that the consumer understands their investment)... No more of this $600 (with net provider purchase)Celery based 700 Mhz boxen wasted on web browsing nonsense...;)
Power isn't inherited, nor is it thrust upon anyone, it can only be embraced...
Thog notice weird people moving into cave next door. They have no brow. They stand up straight. Now weird people build spear using rock knife built by Thog. They kill many deer, and move up to prettier cave, with big rock walls for painting. Now they take little rock knife and attach it to stick, and shoot it with bow. Silly weird people! Don't you know bow is music maker? Silly weird people starve next winter.
Boy is Thog face red. Weird people kill even more deer! And nobody trade Thog naked woman statue or beads or meat anymore for stone knife. Me think something bad, Thog think weird people make new law of land, to make Thog starve in winter, cold and dead! Thog do big cave painting showing how bad weird people are because Thog starve. Thog stone knife good enough to kill deer, why nobody buy stone knife?
Weird people teach Thog new word, called compe- somthing. Thog not know what compe-somthing mean, but me not like it. Thog still use rock knife, rock knife good enough for me. Why weird people not use rock knife like everyone else use to? Now everyone use funny bow and stick thing, or spear, and only buy stone knife for cutting food, not as much as before, and Thog hungry!
Thog cold in winter again, Thog still not understand red hot thing weird people use to stay warm, but it scare Thog. Thog stay away from red hot thing, it make cave and Thog stink. Bad too, Thog see weird people playing with shiny clinky stone, and making it into knife. Thog scared of weird people now.
But seriously, this is just another example of why the French should be blocked from the rest of the net... Their recent trends towards isolationism and the real world's trend towards globalization of the internet just goes to prove this...
Did you know, for example, that they've adopted a "Speak Francaise or Die" policy in their society? English for example, is illegal (despite the fact that English, linguistically, is based almost 1/4 in French), and any American cultural reference is on it's way to becoming verboten there (once again, gee, even some of American culture is directly derived from French, British, Asian, African, German, and lots of other countries' influences, hence the "melting pot" concept)...
So I say hey, if the French really want to become isolationist in their ideals, then we should encourage it, and block them from the rest of the world... Considering how they treat computer geeks there, I see little reason why anyone outside of their country would care to patronize their mode of thinking...
Well, I for one was forced to killfile MSN mail a short while back, since I slipped up once and forgot to nospam my e-mail addy... Anyway, either through that, or Convergence:Technology's mistake of letting their e-mail database get on the net, someone harvested my addy, and promptly started spamming me from an AOL source through MSN...
Always the same idiotic message "Accept Credit Cards! Ask Me How! 568s" subject line... Invalid return addresses and whatnot, so apparently someone is using one of the general spammer toys used to regularly spam newsgroups...;P
I wrote on the subject several weeks back, asking whether or not anyone had considered performing an anti MPAA prank on the widest possible scale, but little to no responses had been recieved, and even less action... The original idea follows:
(1) Find a white pages phonebook for a relatively small town (ie: Population 5000-10,000), and the relevent zip codes for that area... If possible, pick a backwaters town which is lucky to have phone service, let alone net access...
(2) Go to any of the dozens of free webhosting sites out there, and build a couple of hundred websites which simply contain the DeCSS code, and register said sites under the names and addresses found in the aforementioned phone books... Then submit these sites to every search engine available...
(3) Watch the news... Within a few weeks, there'll be a report about a little podunk town's populace all recieving C&D letters from the MPAA, getting up in arms due to the fact that more than half don't even own PC's... With luck, some may even open up lawsuits of their own against the MPAA for whatever reasons...
You see, the point of this whole prank is to put the DeCSS in the REAL public spotlight... You know that other than the sparse handful of newspaper reports (well buried in sections nobody ever really reads), there was virtually NO coverage of this whatsoever? That's why the public has to be drawn into this, because the public per se is largely ignorant of how their rights are being stripped away, and how the MPAA and other major media moguls view them (and us)...
Lets face it folks, the biggest thing standing in the way of nerds and geeks has always been the same thing: The overwhelming lack of intelligence within the status quo... The public is made up of the same folks who voted in the idiots who pen CDA after CDA, they're the same folks that beat us up in school, they're the same folks that made fun of us for simply being interested in things they had no understanding of, the same ones who cut budgets for scientific development in liew of finding a way to build a bigger SUV, or a new football field... They MUST be made to learn, for they are our biggest threat, nay, the biggest threat to the world, as long as their ignorance remains poised to hobble any hopes of advancement of knowledge...
Frankly, yeah, the world is headed to hell in a handbasket, but who would be better to hold that handbasket in it's descent? Us or them?
Carl Sagan was a stoner, Carl Sagan was a nerd, and for all intents and purposes, Carl Sagan was the singular man who provided a reason to not fight a nuclear war, and thusly, the first man to truly rationalize disarmament...
Engineers
IT Managers and ISP's (server end)
Students (maybe)
Hardcore Users (gamers and OC tweakers)
In essense, a relative minority in comparison to the consumer market...
All in all, what has driven Intel and AMD up to this point, was inexpensive components that appealed to the needs of the general public... And truthfully, for the majority that does mainly web browsing and perhaps DVD/gaming, a 500 Mhz CPU will do quite adequately...
Especially currently, since the majority is still justifying to themselves just why they bought that $2,000 Pentium 133 based Compaq 4 years ago, and is unlikely to jump on the upgrade bandwagon even moreso...
Maybe in 2-3 years, when Microsoft releases another next gen Windows product, that requires a minimum of 800 Mhz CPU, 256 megs DDR, and an obscene (ie: 1 gig or higher) install footprint, then we may see the justification for faster CPU's...
Then again, I had a friend hand down his engineering sample of a PIII 733 to me a month back, and I still can't figure out what to do with all that power... I'm a graphic artist, so it's neet to see Photoshop do somewhat faster than a slug on my old K6-2 300, and emulate UltraHLE Mario64 @30 FPS for gaming...
But honestly, I cannot see much more viability for Joe Consumer...
Exactly my point... SCSI *is* a more expensive option (with higher benefits, true bus mastering, less resource hogging, etc)... The consumer version that Panasonic unveiled was ATAPI, and hence, less expensive...
As for CD-R drives, they started out as SCSI only devices... I have one sitting and collecting dust for want of a Centronics DB-50 to Mini-DB-50 cable, an old Pinnacle RCD 5020i POS... Dated 1994...
Hmmmm, as I recall, most CD-ROM drives were in SCSI only form as well, only because they started use primarily in Mac/Amiga applications... And additionally, they were prohibitively expensive as well...
Ohyeah, great plans if the last 2000 years are any indication... And a 2nd coming? Nah, he's just breathing hard... But seriously, he'll never come back, because you'll do exactly what the Romans did to him... His words will probably be 2000 years out of date from the 6 or 7 bibles (now in their 10,000,000th editing!) claiming to be the "true" bible, and you guys will either throw him out, or nail him to a cross...
Don't try getting into a theological debate here, boyo, you're way out of your league... Go back to your book burning, cross burning, abortion clinic bombing, or whatever it is you do...
Hrmmmmm... Welp, lets see now... Can anyone tell me what the price on the average CD-R drive was, less than 5 years ago? Better yet, 10?
These $750-$1250 devices were (comparatively) slow, the media was costing in the range of approximately 10-20 times what they cost currently... And public interest in said drives was fleeting, and short of the occasional ubernerd, most folks were stating that CD-R was a fad that was economically unviable... And this was as little as 5 years ago...
Additionally, the drives were SCSI only, which boosted the price as well (Lets drag Adaptec into court for their unfair monopolistic practices while we're at it! Yeah!)... AFAIK, the current DVD-RAM's are also SCSI devices only...
ATAPI, on the other hand, reduces the pricing significantly, due to the overall compatability of the IDE bus (which until UDMA 33, was abhorantly slow, but with UDMA/ATA 66 and ATA 100 standards, expect that to help as well...)
Understand too, that the lower the cost of the hardware and media, the faster the public will embrace said hardware... These two things are interdependant... How many here who remember the old pricings, would have plunked down $1,000 for a 2x CD-R, and the $10 per disk the media was running for? Anyone?
Or maybe hentai (with hair so green it throws off the percentage), or perhaps nude body painting fetish picts... Since the software can easily be fooled with just a palette shift, eventually everything with a color value will be blocked... And grayscale is straight out...
I hear that, I'm no big fan of Cue:Cat, but had to endure tons of pointless news regarding that too...
Next on SlashDot: It's a hole in the wall, that your computer cannot live without! Lets discuss opensourcing the power companies and the evils of voltage monopolies!!! (followed by 5,000 postings and trolls about "Electricity is gay!" and "Fuck that, gimme a steam powered Celeron OC'd to 1.5Ghz!"...)
One, the tentacle rape material in some anime is basically due to the same restriction on genitalia... Erect penis? Bad! Sex crazed tentacles? Good!
Secondly, the primary reason why a lot of the female characters look young in Japanese animation/manga is simple: They know their fans are anywhere from 16 (cultural note: out of the remainder of the world, the US is the only country that has a serious hangup with kids being interested in, let alone knowing about sex) to 25...
And basically thirdly, the Japanese don't have any hangups about adults being interested in cartoons *or* comics... A great deal of anime that never even makes it to the US is produced for adults, and don't even have a hint of nudity to it... Then there's Junk Boy *shudder*...
Cute duality about Americans, however... If you don't admit to liking nudity, you're a prude... If you do, you're a pervert... I love this country...
The first one to publically produce manga and anime with the big eye style was Osamu Tezuka, who was indeed a big Disney fan (and known as the Japanese Walt Disney about 30 years before Miyazaki claimed the title)...
Believe it or not, we Americans are responsible for the whole trend against pubic hair, censorship, AND tentacles... When Douglas Macarthur was stationed in occupied Japan, he caught heat from his wife when she recieved complaints, from the enlisted men's wives... They were bringing in all kinds of erotic netsukes (for those who dunno, they're little carved sculptures made of ivory)... Many of which were quite graphic... Soooo as a result of good ol' American prudishness, we put a stipulation into the revised Japanese constitution, making graphic sex, and showing of the genitals (which they interpreted as being primarily pubic hair) illegal... This is why the majority of women you see in manga and hentai art online are either shaved or censored...
And the additional reason why they use teenagers as a theme is pretty much a cultural parallel to the US... Most of the models that Americans drool over are often over 5 years younger than their viewers... How many guys here, drool over Brittany Spears for example, even though she's young enough to be their daughter?
Even fashions worship the young... When was the last time you saw a woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan or what have you, who was older than 30? Or even 20? Playboy magazine perhaps is one of the few exceptions (and we won't go near the Japanese obsession with bunny girls)...
Technically by some/.'ers standards, I bet any 30+ y.o. guys who read magazines with women under 25 are considered as pedos too...
Nah... Perhaps if they got around to releasing a box set with more than one episode... Deny it all you want, but you're still paying over $10 for 30 minutes of footage...
We really don't have it better than the Japanese at all... It depends on the exchange rate from yen to dollar every time, on top of which, you pay a premium for the import tariffs... And the producers'site (Pioneer LLC) wants $24.95 US for the US version...
Your statement is erroneous twicefold, however, for one thing: The Japanese run most of their TV anime for free (whereas to see the good stuff, uncensored, WE have to pay extra for it), and have tape trading just as they do in the US...
BTW... WHY do you think that there's retailers in the US selling the disks for $11-$12? Because even they aren't stupid enough to think anyone in the US would pay $20+ for a DVD movie only 30 minutes long... Welcome to the world of economics...
Technically KTEH is ***THE*** geek's network...
They run uncut Red Dwarf, Lathe of Heaven, Dr. Who, pretty much everything you can't get on other networks...
And they run sci-fi marathons for their fundraisers too (and are consequentially one of the best at it)... They know their market demographic: Sci-fi nerds and geeks, who love shows that leave most mundanes scratching their heads... Ie: The majority of coders working out of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in general...
Probably also why Baycon does as well as it does every year...;)
Hmmmm, okay, lets see now... I'm a professional cartoonist for a living, and have studied animation covering the span of about 100 years (yup, it's been around THAT long)...
Up until the advent of the electric babysitter (read: Television), cartoons in general were aimed at all audiences... Period... During WWII, cartoons were used both in propaganda and to sell war bonds... From the earliest part of the 20th century, up until the 50's when television became widespread, cartoons were aimed more often at kids, because even in those days, the kids had considerable nagging power for the adults...
As it goes, many cartoons that most people watched as kids (well, provided you were a kid in the 70's) were directed towards adults... The Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle, were two such examples... How many 5 y.o.'s do you know who would get the "Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayam" joke from R&B?
However, in the last 30 years, the popular media has been tightening their focus on the kids a bit more, since they've discovered the all encompassing world of tie ins and toy marketing... So essentially, cartoons became "Just for kids"... As for Cartoon Network, at least they're pushing that envelope a little bit... Better than most regular networks do...
And everyone who thinks that only kids should enjoy cartoons, well guess what?
Who do you think animates those cartoons? And why do you think they do it? Pay is one thing, but it takes a hell of a lot of love for the craft for someone to sit down and draw hundreds (if they're using limited animation), to hundreds of thousands of cels...
And I know the next response "Oh, nobody does animation except slave labor and computers"... No matter how much CGI goes into animating effects and compositing the elements together, it hasn't quite changed the level of complexity to the art form... It simply reduced the number of steps to create a finished product... And there's also a great deal of people who still prefer the old fashioned techniques of animation...
For those who want to see some real anime without censorship (and have Realplayer or Windows Media Player;P), here's a few links:
http://www.sputnik7.com/anime/ --- (They have Devil Man! Badly dubbed but still kewl!)
Well, this is certainly a quandry, I saw the previews, and they rock... Remember when everyone was acting like Titan AE was hot shit (until they actually saw it)? Well, this is the same thing, except you'll still think it's hot shit after seeing it... There's just one teensy problem: If you want to see it unedited, you have to pay $20 a pop for a DVD with just *one* 30 minute episode... At that price, the producers actually justify piracy themselves...
So for myself, I downloaded it from my friendly neighborhood usenet acct, at alt.binaries.multimedia.anime... Damnned spectacular work, and considering this came out *before* Phantom Menace, and Titan AE to boot, the CGI gives both asses a decent bitch slappin'...
Of course, the few here who've seen it could post... But so far it looks like every response for the most part has nothing to do with anime proper... Some even calling unedited Tenchi pr0n? Erm, nahhhh... Titty shots make it into PG-13 and R rated films, and those come a far cry from pr0n...
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From Webster's Collegiate dictionary:
/-sist also -shist/ noun or adjective
Main Entry: racism
Pronunciation: 'rA-"si-z&m also -"shi-
Function: noun
Date: 1936
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
- racist
I believe the word you're looking for is "nationalism" (easy mistake, political correctness rarely is):
Main Entry: nationalism
Pronunciation: 'nash-n&-"li-z&m, 'na-sh&-n&l-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1844
: loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially : a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups
Does the Cyber-Jabberwocky's fangs go snicker snack?
Remember the first cablecar in San Francisco? When they found they'd be riding at the shocking speed of 8 MPH, they believed they'd be unable to breath!
When the first automobiles came out, some had similar fears... At the turn of the century, most believed that things were advancing too quickly, and that people were going insane from the stress of the rapid changes...
And of course, less than one year ago, there was all the hype regarding the Y2K bug... There was supposed to be a second coming of Christ as well, but neither happened...
Suffice it to say, the public is remarkably stupid regarding anything they don't completely understand...
As a formerly poor(and considered by some as STILL poor) person, let me sum it up in one smallish paragraph:
Remember the old days when your employers said "I'm not paying you to think!"... Relish the fact that those days are fading fast...
And contrary to popular belief, there's plenty of computer experts (or at least operators who know how to use the equipment) who are poor, some of which were/are homeless... In the real world, there's still ample employment unskilled/skilled labor... For a lot of the tech positions however, it doesn't matter if you've used computers for x number of years, can edit your own registry tweaks manually, or can build a PC from scratch, if you have no certification, forget about that high end position working for the high tech businesses...
In my own case, due to the same conditions, I'm starting a business of my own, to attempt to sell the hardware, AND make sure my customers are well informed (to ensure that the consumer understands their investment)... No more of this $600 (with net provider purchase)Celery based 700 Mhz boxen wasted on web browsing nonsense...;)
Power isn't inherited, nor is it thrust upon anyone, it can only be embraced...
Me Thog. Thog build rock knives.
Thog notice weird people moving into cave next door. They have no brow. They stand up straight. Now weird people build spear using rock knife built by Thog. They kill many deer, and move up to prettier cave, with big rock walls for painting. Now they take little rock knife and attach it to stick, and shoot it with bow. Silly weird people! Don't you know bow is music maker? Silly weird people starve next winter.
Boy is Thog face red. Weird people kill even more deer! And nobody trade Thog naked woman statue or beads or meat anymore for stone knife. Me think something bad, Thog think weird people make new law of land, to make Thog starve in winter, cold and dead! Thog do big cave painting showing how bad weird people are because Thog starve. Thog stone knife good enough to kill deer, why nobody buy stone knife?
Weird people teach Thog new word, called compe- somthing. Thog not know what compe-somthing mean, but me not like it. Thog still use rock knife, rock knife good enough for me. Why weird people not use rock knife like everyone else use to? Now everyone use funny bow and stick thing, or spear, and only buy stone knife for cutting food, not as much as before, and Thog hungry!
Thog cold in winter again, Thog still not understand red hot thing weird people use to stay warm, but it scare Thog. Thog stay away from red hot thing, it make cave and Thog stink. Bad too, Thog see weird people playing with shiny clinky stone, and making it into knife. Thog scared of weird people now.
Thog think, there go neighborhood...
Swastikas are for Krauts!
But seriously, this is just another example of why the French should be blocked from the rest of the net... Their recent trends towards isolationism and the real world's trend towards globalization of the internet just goes to prove this...
Did you know, for example, that they've adopted a "Speak Francaise or Die" policy in their society? English for example, is illegal (despite the fact that English, linguistically, is based almost 1/4 in French), and any American cultural reference is on it's way to becoming verboten there (once again, gee, even some of American culture is directly derived from French, British, Asian, African, German, and lots of other countries' influences, hence the "melting pot" concept)...
So I say hey, if the French really want to become isolationist in their ideals, then we should encourage it, and block them from the rest of the world... Considering how they treat computer geeks there, I see little reason why anyone outside of their country would care to patronize their mode of thinking...
Well, I for one was forced to killfile MSN mail a short while back, since I slipped up once and forgot to nospam my e-mail addy... Anyway, either through that, or Convergence:Technology's mistake of letting their e-mail database get on the net, someone harvested my addy, and promptly started spamming me from an AOL source through MSN...
Always the same idiotic message "Accept Credit Cards! Ask Me How! 568s" subject line... Invalid return addresses and whatnot, so apparently someone is using one of the general spammer toys used to regularly spam newsgroups...;P
I wrote on the subject several weeks back, asking whether or not anyone had considered performing an anti MPAA prank on the widest possible scale, but little to no responses had been recieved, and even less action... The original idea follows:
(1) Find a white pages phonebook for a relatively small town (ie: Population 5000-10,000), and the relevent zip codes for that area... If possible, pick a backwaters town which is lucky to have phone service, let alone net access...
(2) Go to any of the dozens of free webhosting sites out there, and build a couple of hundred websites which simply contain the DeCSS code, and register said sites under the names and addresses found in the aforementioned phone books... Then submit these sites to every search engine available...
(3) Watch the news... Within a few weeks, there'll be a report about a little podunk town's populace all recieving C&D letters from the MPAA, getting up in arms due to the fact that more than half don't even own PC's... With luck, some may even open up lawsuits of their own against the MPAA for whatever reasons...
You see, the point of this whole prank is to put the DeCSS in the REAL public spotlight... You know that other than the sparse handful of newspaper reports (well buried in sections nobody ever really reads), there was virtually NO coverage of this whatsoever? That's why the public has to be drawn into this, because the public per se is largely ignorant of how their rights are being stripped away, and how the MPAA and other major media moguls view them (and us)...
Lets face it folks, the biggest thing standing in the way of nerds and geeks has always been the same thing: The overwhelming lack of intelligence within the status quo... The public is made up of the same folks who voted in the idiots who pen CDA after CDA, they're the same folks that beat us up in school, they're the same folks that made fun of us for simply being interested in things they had no understanding of, the same ones who cut budgets for scientific development in liew of finding a way to build a bigger SUV, or a new football field... They MUST be made to learn, for they are our biggest threat, nay, the biggest threat to the world, as long as their ignorance remains poised to hobble any hopes of advancement of knowledge...
Frankly, yeah, the world is headed to hell in a handbasket, but who would be better to hold that handbasket in it's descent? Us or them?
Carl Sagan was a stoner, Carl Sagan was a nerd, and for all intents and purposes, Carl Sagan was the singular man who provided a reason to not fight a nuclear war, and thusly, the first man to truly rationalize disarmament...
So why can't we do similar?
Who needs it a P4, let alone anything over 1Ghz?
Engineers
IT Managers and ISP's (server end)
Students (maybe)
Hardcore Users (gamers and OC tweakers)
In essense, a relative minority in comparison to the consumer market...
All in all, what has driven Intel and AMD up to this point, was inexpensive components that appealed to the needs of the general public... And truthfully, for the majority that does mainly web browsing and perhaps DVD/gaming, a 500 Mhz CPU will do quite adequately...
Especially currently, since the majority is still justifying to themselves just why they bought that $2,000 Pentium 133 based Compaq 4 years ago, and is unlikely to jump on the upgrade bandwagon even moreso...
Maybe in 2-3 years, when Microsoft releases another next gen Windows product, that requires a minimum of 800 Mhz CPU, 256 megs DDR, and an obscene (ie: 1 gig or higher) install footprint, then we may see the justification for faster CPU's...
Then again, I had a friend hand down his engineering sample of a PIII 733 to me a month back, and I still can't figure out what to do with all that power... I'm a graphic artist, so it's neet to see Photoshop do somewhat faster than a slug on my old K6-2 300, and emulate UltraHLE Mario64 @30 FPS for gaming...
But honestly, I cannot see much more viability for Joe Consumer...
Exactly my point... SCSI *is* a more expensive option (with higher benefits, true bus mastering, less resource hogging, etc)... The consumer version that Panasonic unveiled was ATAPI, and hence, less expensive...
As for CD-R drives, they started out as SCSI only devices... I have one sitting and collecting dust for want of a Centronics DB-50 to Mini-DB-50 cable, an old Pinnacle RCD 5020i POS... Dated 1994...
Hmmmm, as I recall, most CD-ROM drives were in SCSI only form as well, only because they started use primarily in Mac/Amiga applications... And additionally, they were prohibitively expensive as well...
Ohyeah, great plans if the last 2000 years are any indication... And a 2nd coming? Nah, he's just breathing hard... But seriously, he'll never come back, because you'll do exactly what the Romans did to him... His words will probably be 2000 years out of date from the 6 or 7 bibles (now in their 10,000,000th editing!) claiming to be the "true" bible, and you guys will either throw him out, or nail him to a cross...
Don't try getting into a theological debate here, boyo, you're way out of your league... Go back to your book burning, cross burning, abortion clinic bombing, or whatever it is you do...
Hrmmmmm... Welp, lets see now... Can anyone tell me what the price on the average CD-R drive was, less than 5 years ago? Better yet, 10?
These $750-$1250 devices were (comparatively) slow, the media was costing in the range of approximately 10-20 times what they cost currently... And public interest in said drives was fleeting, and short of the occasional ubernerd, most folks were stating that CD-R was a fad that was economically unviable... And this was as little as 5 years ago...
Additionally, the drives were SCSI only, which boosted the price as well (Lets drag Adaptec into court for their unfair monopolistic practices while we're at it! Yeah!)... AFAIK, the current DVD-RAM's are also SCSI devices only...
ATAPI, on the other hand, reduces the pricing significantly, due to the overall compatability of the IDE bus (which until UDMA 33, was abhorantly slow, but with UDMA/ATA 66 and ATA 100 standards, expect that to help as well...)
Understand too, that the lower the cost of the hardware and media, the faster the public will embrace said hardware... These two things are interdependant... How many here who remember the old pricings, would have plunked down $1,000 for a 2x CD-R, and the $10 per disk the media was running for? Anyone?
Next on the horizon, Smurf pr0n!!!
Or maybe hentai (with hair so green it throws off the percentage), or perhaps nude body painting fetish picts... Since the software can easily be fooled with just a palette shift, eventually everything with a color value will be blocked... And grayscale is straight out...
I'd be happier if someone creates censorware that blocks us from J.H. Christ's lunatic legions...
I hear that, I'm no big fan of Cue:Cat, but had to endure tons of pointless news regarding that too...
Next on SlashDot: It's a hole in the wall, that your computer cannot live without! Lets discuss opensourcing the power companies and the evils of voltage monopolies!!! (followed by 5,000 postings and trolls about "Electricity is gay!" and "Fuck that, gimme a steam powered Celeron OC'd to 1.5Ghz!"...)
Whoops, missed two details:
One, the tentacle rape material in some anime is basically due to the same restriction on genitalia... Erect penis? Bad! Sex crazed tentacles? Good!
Secondly, the primary reason why a lot of the female characters look young in Japanese animation/manga is simple: They know their fans are anywhere from 16 (cultural note: out of the remainder of the world, the US is the only country that has a serious hangup with kids being interested in, let alone knowing about sex) to 25...
And basically thirdly, the Japanese don't have any hangups about adults being interested in cartoons *or* comics... A great deal of anime that never even makes it to the US is produced for adults, and don't even have a hint of nudity to it... Then there's Junk Boy *shudder*...
Cute duality about Americans, however... If you don't admit to liking nudity, you're a prude... If you do, you're a pervert... I love this country...
Aren't you a little OLD for trolling?
The first one to publically produce manga and anime with the big eye style was Osamu Tezuka, who was indeed a big Disney fan (and known as the Japanese Walt Disney about 30 years before Miyazaki claimed the title)...
/.'ers standards, I bet any 30+ y.o. guys who read magazines with women under 25 are considered as pedos too...
Believe it or not, we Americans are responsible for the whole trend against pubic hair, censorship, AND tentacles... When Douglas Macarthur was stationed in occupied Japan, he caught heat from his wife when she recieved complaints, from the enlisted men's wives... They were bringing in all kinds of erotic netsukes (for those who dunno, they're little carved sculptures made of ivory)... Many of which were quite graphic... Soooo as a result of good ol' American prudishness, we put a stipulation into the revised Japanese constitution, making graphic sex, and showing of the genitals (which they interpreted as being primarily pubic hair) illegal... This is why the majority of women you see in manga and hentai art online are either shaved or censored...
And the additional reason why they use teenagers as a theme is pretty much a cultural parallel to the US... Most of the models that Americans drool over are often over 5 years younger than their viewers... How many guys here, drool over Brittany Spears for example, even though she's young enough to be their daughter?
Even fashions worship the young... When was the last time you saw a woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan or what have you, who was older than 30? Or even 20? Playboy magazine perhaps is one of the few exceptions (and we won't go near the Japanese obsession with bunny girls)...
Technically by some
Nah... Perhaps if they got around to releasing a box set with more than one episode... Deny it all you want, but you're still paying over $10 for 30 minutes of footage...
We really don't have it better than the Japanese at all... It depends on the exchange rate from yen to dollar every time, on top of which, you pay a premium for the import tariffs... And the producers'site (Pioneer LLC) wants $24.95 US for the US version...
Your statement is erroneous twicefold, however, for one thing: The Japanese run most of their TV anime for free (whereas to see the good stuff, uncensored, WE have to pay extra for it), and have tape trading just as they do in the US...
BTW... WHY do you think that there's retailers in the US selling the disks for $11-$12? Because even they aren't stupid enough to think anyone in the US would pay $20+ for a DVD movie only 30 minutes long... Welcome to the world of economics...
I'm speaking *specifically* about the Blue Sub #6 series... Look it up, ONE episode per DVD, @$20 a pop...
Helps to read the article's wording to know the details...;)
Technically KTEH is ***THE*** geek's network... They run uncut Red Dwarf, Lathe of Heaven, Dr. Who, pretty much everything you can't get on other networks... And they run sci-fi marathons for their fundraisers too (and are consequentially one of the best at it)... They know their market demographic: Sci-fi nerds and geeks, who love shows that leave most mundanes scratching their heads... Ie: The majority of coders working out of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in general... Probably also why Baycon does as well as it does every year...;)
Nah... That's AOL...
Hmmmm, okay, lets see now... I'm a professional cartoonist for a living, and have studied animation covering the span of about 100 years (yup, it's been around THAT long)...
Up until the advent of the electric babysitter (read: Television), cartoons in general were aimed at all audiences... Period... During WWII, cartoons were used both in propaganda and to sell war bonds... From the earliest part of the 20th century, up until the 50's when television became widespread, cartoons were aimed more often at kids, because even in those days, the kids had considerable nagging power for the adults...
As it goes, many cartoons that most people watched as kids (well, provided you were a kid in the 70's) were directed towards adults... The Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle, were two such examples... How many 5 y.o.'s do you know who would get the "Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayam" joke from R&B?
However, in the last 30 years, the popular media has been tightening their focus on the kids a bit more, since they've discovered the all encompassing world of tie ins and toy marketing... So essentially, cartoons became "Just for kids"... As for Cartoon Network, at least they're pushing that envelope a little bit... Better than most regular networks do...
And everyone who thinks that only kids should enjoy cartoons, well guess what?
Who do you think animates those cartoons? And why do you think they do it? Pay is one thing, but it takes a hell of a lot of love for the craft for someone to sit down and draw hundreds (if they're using limited animation), to hundreds of thousands of cels...
And I know the next response "Oh, nobody does animation except slave labor and computers"... No matter how much CGI goes into animating effects and compositing the elements together, it hasn't quite changed the level of complexity to the art form... It simply reduced the number of steps to create a finished product... And there's also a great deal of people who still prefer the old fashioned techniques of animation...
For those who want to see some real anime without censorship (and have Realplayer or Windows Media Player;P), here's a few links:
http://www.sputnik7.com/anime/ --- (They have Devil Man! Badly dubbed but still kewl!)
http://www.lunaarts.com/anime/
Well, lessee, I couldn't find many images but this comes close (w/review and screenshots): http://www.ex.org/4.6/20-anime_bluesubmarine.html
Well, this is certainly a quandry, I saw the previews, and they rock... Remember when everyone was acting like Titan AE was hot shit (until they actually saw it)? Well, this is the same thing, except you'll still think it's hot shit after seeing it... There's just one teensy problem: If you want to see it unedited, you have to pay $20 a pop for a DVD with just *one* 30 minute episode... At that price, the producers actually justify piracy themselves...
So for myself, I downloaded it from my friendly neighborhood usenet acct, at alt.binaries.multimedia.anime... Damnned spectacular work, and considering this came out *before* Phantom Menace, and Titan AE to boot, the CGI gives both asses a decent bitch slappin'...
Of course, the few here who've seen it could post... But so far it looks like every response for the most part has nothing to do with anime proper... Some even calling unedited Tenchi pr0n? Erm, nahhhh... Titty shots make it into PG-13 and R rated films, and those come a far cry from pr0n...