This is true, but you still have to get to them, and use them. I "imagine" a big ass probe could find a nice asteroid field and employ the use of a solar smelter, but imagine the time involved in smeltering 1000kg probes to seed the galaxy. This is not 1000 year project.
There are a whole host of things to complain about*, but the bottom line is he violated copyright law in order to make a profit. Just because the RIAA does things wrong doesn't make it right for this guy to commit copyright infringement. He decided to ignore the rules of copyright, so he has to deal with the consequences. If he was too dumb to know there might be consequences, sucks to be him.
I'm not sure I agree with you. From what I understand, this guy makes mix tapes which is the norm for the hip hop scene. Further, this guy profits from other people's work, and credits them for their work. This in turn promotes and increases sales.
The real question is, do these artists object to being included on hip-hop mix tapes? If so then yes legaly they have every right to object and seek remedies under the law. But, I suspect that this person was encouraged to create these hip-hop mix tapes for the express purpose of promoting other people's work. For example, I have every reason to believe that mix tapes I got off the neighborhood dj, while technicaly pirated, were offered with the firm belief that the artists and copyright holders would agree promoting music served their interests.
It's rather like Weird Al, except he's protected under the law as his works are parities, and in most cases he gets permission to spoof other people's work. It's more like the anime piracy scene, where in most cases piracy of unlicensed series and movies is not discouaged for it serves to promote works that otherwise would be unmarketable in other regions. But at least in the case of anime, the copyright holders "ask" people to stop.
I can see where someone can easily be confused, something that was tolerated and encouraged in the past suddenly being considered a violation.
You can't explore a galaxy with a handful of probes. 72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
Not impressed by this guy's argument.
Firstly, regardless of how many probes you have, how they communicate information back is still limited by the speed of light, at least a civilization of our present technology level. The radius of the milky way is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 light years. Assuming you start from galactic center, and travel at 1/10 LS, we are talking 600,000 years for two probes to reach each end, and another 60,000 for them to communicate back. IF someone is on one of the spiral arms, this figure doubles.
Secondly something voyager sized is about 1000kg if I recall correctly, somewhere between 500kg and 1000. Do do something as you reccomend it, with self replication, we are talking the mass of several planets. Not to speak of fuel requirements, and the issue of not knowing exactly where one can get raw materials. Probally somewhere near the galactic unhabitable zone.
The guy's argument is perfectly valid, the galaxy is big, getting from point a to point b is slow. The biggest issue is speed.
Win2k prepresented the first time I ever bothered to go out of my way to upgrade, and liked it.
There was NOT a single reason to go windowsXP for me except some adobe products demanded "XP ONLY", and this was the ONLY reason I upgraded to XP.
I heard things about vista from people like my massage therapist, who like it because it plays music. I've been happy with winamp under windows for... forever. But needless to say she is saving up for a powerful enough PC to run Vista, which to me is nutty, but hey if ease of use is worth dollars, great.
Trek at least put a few years between it's TV series and motion picture release, maybe that was the key to Trek's theater success versus everyone else's failures. Even the Trek TNG films just seemed like long episodes to me.
Trek TOS only had three seasons before it was cancled, and remained in syndication. And actually there was a plan to have another trek series, StarTrek Mach 2 or some such, but star wars sort of encouraged NBC to not release another sci-fi series. The movie (The motion sickness) was based on the mach/phase II scripts. But regardless Trek is very much the Little Engine That Could... cancled, movied, and reserialed several times. To be honest, while I was disapointed that Enterprise was cancled, I think I've had my fill of trek.
Stargate on the otherhand, 10 straight seasons. That's up there with Happy Days, Jag, Friends, almost as many as M.A.S.H. It doesn't need any armchair quarterbacking, it's already successful. Even if the two movies fail, and Atlantis gets cancled, It's still worthy of a Smithsonian exhibit.
Does this mean that all of those Sensormatic tags, all of those cameras, and so on are "futile?" Not hardly. You wouldn't make such a ridiculous statement because you know that retail anti-theft mechanisms are meant to be a deterrent. Nobody -- least of which the retail industry -- expects these measures to prevent 100% of retail theft.
Your analogy is flawed as others have pointed out. Shrinkage prevention systems can be disabled, by the store or by your self after you buy the item. For example, I mail ordered DVDs. Inside is an inventory control tag. I can remove this in the unlikely event I need to carry my purchaced DVDs into an area that has such a system in place.
Whether they are futile or not I can not say. I lack any research saying the cost of these systems justifies the lack of theft. But I can say I accept the fact that stores do have the right to employ beeper system to help prevent shoplifting, and use of such a system does not prevent me from shopping at a given store. They don't restrict the way I use a product, nor its function, well, unless we are talking floppies being sent over the demagnetizing but that's not an issue anymore.
But, given the fact that we have Blu-ray, HD-DVD, DigitalVHS, as well as a few systems of encoding HD on DVD, copy protection that can not be circumvented may prevent my use of a legit purchaced product in the unlikely event that one standard is supported over another. The inability to use my existing equipment for playback does make me NOT BUY THE SHIT. It was the same issue with superCD/DVD audio. I needed some assurance that if one system went the way of the beta I could copy one to the other, or play on my PC until such time as I invest in a new DVD player which will do these standards.
The fact we have an HD-DVD torrent available makes me more likely to buy a HD-DVD than Blu-Ray presently.
A quick look says that newegg has 500 gig drives for $144. If each movie is 20 gigs, then you'd need 4 of those drives to store each movie, which comes out to 576 dollars.
You mean, you'd need four of those drives to store all 100 movies, which is $576 vs. the $2,000 to buy all 100 movies, rather than needing for 500 gig drives to store each 20 gig movie.
Assuming 100 movies, one could invest in in a drive as you sugest, at $144/500GB drive, this works out to be 28.8c/GB. This is a good deal. This "will" cover about 25 movies each, or assuming 100 movies $5.76/movie. You gotta add the cost of an external HD case, but this is trivial.
Or, you could go D-VHS. I aproximate about $10.00/tape @ 50GB each according to froogle, or 20cent/tape. They seem to go for more in stores, like $25/tape or 50c/gb. As low as $5 to $13 per movie. Gotta add the cost of the recorder, which can be tricky, but certainly $500 to $1000 for something as useful as an oldstyle VCR but with the benifit of a firewire connection.
Or, better yet, you can get a 15 pack of DVD-R9s for $30ish, or about 24/cents/gig. Granted you'll need two or three DVD-R9s, but odds are you have the hardware to do this. $4 to $6/movie
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This being said... I'm going to hold off on investing in any of this crap until such time as the media war is over.
If you can do that, why not just stick with the DVD and upgrade the players to play MPEG4? Why are we creating new media when we could easily store an HD movie on a dual layer DVD?
Well, you have a choice really. For the time being i'm all for Mpeg4-HD on DVD9. The media is standard, the codec can be supported on at least a moderate laptop. There are issues with artifacts when compressing HD down to that level, but it is at least for the most part higher quality than current DVD, not to speak of VHS (ick). If I was going to bother, i'd look into using two DVD-9s to record HD.
Another alternative is D-VHS, which if i'm not mistaken is $10 per 50Gig tape, or 20c per gig. This is more bulky than quad pack. More bulky than 2-6 DVD9s, but given D-VHS is sub $700 you have to admit it's an attractive solution. For remote viewing i'd rather drag a laptop.
However, the best alternative, really the best alternative is to just wait, wait for BluRay/HD-DVD to fight it out, wait until the recorders are $300 or less, and go with it.
As someone who absolutely refuses to pirate software unless I have no choice, I'd be prepared to pay a few ££ extra to stay legal.
I wonder if keeping an extra copy of windows would make use of the propriority.dlls needed for mplayer WMV support would be considered legit and not piracy.
I'm not so much anti-piracy but pro working shit. For example turboprint. If I ever needed to print to my canons under linux, this is something i'd consider paying for.
If anyone has been most successful at this, its George Lucas, how many of us own more than one version of the first Star Wars trilogy?
Ummmm.... I'm happy to say I own NO starwars media nor accessories. Technicaly "I" may have bought the comic back in '79 but I was so young I don't remember if "I" bought it, or my brother. But needless to say if I did buy it I no longer have it. I may have recievd a "tonton" action figure but that again would be long since lost.
1. I thought it was foolish to buy starwars action figures in the 70s as all my friends had them already, and most were destroyed with firecrackers. 2. I never "bought" any star wars film, though I liked starwars I saw it enough in the theater, and on cable to keep me perfectly happy.
Now... if you were to say the Robotech series, Macross, or the 2006 re-dub of macross... These are things I would have bought. Various Doctor Who serials I bought. Series or movies I couldn't rent or borrow I bought. The new macross dub is an example of re-buying something enough work went into to justify the expence. StarWars on the other hand, I caught the re-mastered edition in the theater, when it hit the $1.00 cinema.
This being said, I wouldn't knock anyone who bought anything from the Lucus franchise, most of the crap spewed out from there has been a very good investement.
Because THAT worked wonders for release timing, content control and market restrictions, didn't it.*
*Though having a decent TV that can handle PAL and NTSC helps, in the UK they're 6 bob a throw i can tell ye!
Getting multisync TVs to be the norm would be nice, but I was under the impression that DVD players can be had for a low price which will output in pal or NTSC, or multi if you happened to have a TV which handled both. Not being in Europe, I was under the impression that pal VCRS were made to handle NTSC by slowing down from 30 FPS to 25, as opposed to the more complex system of telesync.
We Canadians take "American" to mean a citizen of the USA; not of Canada, Mexico, Brazil or Argentina.
Where a citizen of Mexico may refer to both US and Canadian citizens as being "North Americans". It's a little more polite than assuming an english speaker is from the US, but a little strange in the fact that we are all part of North America.
I would like it if we all accept the fact that we share a Continent, but there is a language difference.
Now his next step has to be to find an edible ink. An inkjet just flash-boils ink. It has to be possible to do the same to fruit juice, colored water, beer (though the dissolve gas might be tricky), or even just plain water. You just need to clean the cartridge and get a refill kit.
A nice hack that he could sell to bars would be a water-based sprayer to draw the bar's logo/name on the beer foam.
Two points.
1) Some if not most inkjets are thermal based. This would include Canon and HP's consumer models. Others are micro piezo based, which would include Epson and many brothers. You can spot the brothers easily enough, when the head costs 3 times that of just the printer, you know it's micro-piezo. If you want flexable medium, go micro-piezo... such printheads can handle things from water based ink, oil based, non-water solvent based, and even liquid wax. But if you want cheap and disposable, thermal is the way to go.
There was another company, but I think they were bought out by media street and no longer sell the frosting sheets nor edable ink.
But as far as this project goes, it's rather spiffy. It would be cooler to incoperate a stepper motor attached to rollers that would permit clear printing on flat surfaces.
Except that the 16" spacing is really rather arbitary, it could have been 12 or 18 or 24. 16 is a safe number, and provides reasonably sound engineering when building a wall from 1.5" x 3.5" pieces of lumber. If we were to convert new construction en-masse, there's no guarantee that the American construction industry would settle on a centimeter spacing which would allow that thing to be hung directly on studs, is there?
1. I'm not sure the world standard of stud spacing. I would guess 30cm, 40cm, 60cm 2. I'm not sure why we converted to 16 inches, rather than 24 inches. 16 inches does seem to provide adquate stablity for a light duty wall, and OK fire prevention. 3. Stanards could very well be arbitary, but even if they are it's important to have one standard, so shit works in the way it's expected to.
Seriously -- why bother? What real, practical value is there in forcing the general public to use one arbitrary (to them) set of measurements versus another arbitrary set of measurements?
There are some nice import scrolling waterfall picture frams available at some shops. They are said to be hung on walls with hooks, but the hook handles are not 16 inches apart, the standard here for studs, and it's big and heavy enough that trying to put hooks directly into drywall results in total failure.
Also, metric wasn't designed to be arbitary, it was intended to be 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to equator. Had the earth been a perfect sphere, a fact not known to Delambre or Mechain the astronomers charged with defining this distance, odds are they would have gotten it right. But the point remains, basing a system of length on a huge distance, makes conversion between small distances, like how far away the local chemist is, to how far it is from San Francisco to Hong Kong easy. Basing a unit of measurement on a real world fixed value makes was a good idea.
If I say a baseball player stole second base, and some Slashdot troll says "no he didn't, running from first base to second base isn't illegal under local larceny statutes", you'd pop in to defend him, wouldn't you?
To *steal a base* is taking a base owned by another team, and keeping it for your team. It's a silly term, but accurate given that standing on the base is in possession of it.
The following are trademarks or service marks of Major League Baseball entities and may be used only with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. or the relevant Major League Baseball entity: Major League, Major League Baseball.
Speaking of standardized spots for peripherals, is it just me, or when ATX forced everybody to switch to PS2 mice and a different IRQ, did they just not work as well?
The move to a different IRQ was a very good idea. Many people were annoyed with the fact under dos and windows 3.1 one could not nessicarly use the mouse and the internal modem at the same time. This could be resolved by setting your com3/com4 modem to a non-standard IRQ, or swapping the serial mouse port, but we are talking averge joe user. IIRC AOL's software hated using anything but IRQ 3/4. Even if you could follow directions and use a screwdriver, this was a hassle.
I never had an issue my self, like every good geek I did external modems, and extra serial ports.
I could go on about how IRQ 5 was this wonderful spot which was the default for soundcards, scsi cards, lpt2:, and whole others bunches of wonderful stuff, so much wonderful stuff people didn't understand why shit didn't work right.
Just one example: I'm the usual nerd fulfiling most cliches, somewhat fluent in english and of course I dig - like every nerd - current TV shows (Battlestar Galactica etc.)
There's no legal possibilty to obtain those shows legally here. Of course I could wait until they dub it and release it here but this usually takes up one year. Of course with crappy dubbing and no chance of getting the english voice track due to increased cost in licensing - even on pay-tv. Or wait even longer for the DVD release
Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-fansubs. They tend to be for the most part top quality for material which otherwise would go unlicensed in many markets. I like anime, and hate many english dubs, esp one which digitaly edit to make it more kid friendly (OnePiece). But at least with Anime, they mostly tend to ignore piracy in regions where their work isn't licensed understanding that the pirates create a market.
But I believe it's the current stance of the MPAA for you to WAIT, wait for them to release material for your market. This could take months, years, or it might never happen. There is nothing stopping you from getting a DVD shipped out of the country, and it's like like region free players are rare outside the US. And from my understanding there are nice handy dandy plugins so you can download subtitles in your language provided someone took the time to write them. This I don't believe violates any copyright law provided you bought the disc, and translations are copyright by the people who did the translation.
But I agree, the studios don't think in terms of global market. They are unwilling to go a "global" release.
Now my big complaint is HD. It's not an excuse to pirate, but I can see where one would be annoyed with the lack of standardization for commercial broadcasts/media. But this does not apply to film, unless you find some benifit to a HDTV camcorder in a theater.
I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Because the product would be recalled due to absence of a warning label saying "warning: this product has no warning labels".
I also haven't seen a car built in the past 5 years that comes with a cigarette lighter, or ashtray for that matter. These days, they're extras that you have to ask (and pay) for. The place where the ashtray normally goes now has a sticker on it that says "not an ashtray".
2007 toyota Highlander Hybrid 4x2 standard features (MSRP $32,490 "* Cigarette Lighter With Ashtray "
I've never bought a new car, got plenty of milage out of used cars my self, so I'll have to double check because no one wants you to smoke in a new car. And the first thing to go if there was a cigarette/cigar lighter would be the lighter to charge the cell phone, well unless ou have something like the highlander or other SUV/VAN where the ashtray has it's own lighter and seperate accessory plugs.
In fact, the only place i've seen the ashtray with a label on it "not an ashtray" are on rental cars. I've not noticed such a thing on an average passanger vehicel. But I can't imagine a car without an ashtray, where else would you put your coins or factory ciggerette lighter if equiped?
Come to think about it, ATMs must be nigh on impossible to use too.
Inserting the card and entering a PIN sounds doable blind - but then you're presented with screens to navigate via soft keys (and it's different between ATMs). No chance.
Not exactly true. With the exception of small ATMs at mini-marts which I have not looked at in great detail as I always hunt for my bank or "a" bank atm, they have brail instructions. I've also noted a headphone jack on some machines. I've not tried it "but" I imagine if one is blind, one would talk to their bank, and get a walkthrough as to how to use it. I would also imagine that other blind users would need help finding other cash machines, and if worse came to worse they could dial the phone number of their cell and get instructions, but if I was blind, I would stick to my own bank or use a debit machine.
Now... the funny thing is retrofitting ATM machines designed for the drivethrough, and slapping brail on them, ignoring the pedestrian to car accidents at these locations with sited people. I'm not talking spiffy new ATMs, i'm talking old green screens with burn in getting slapped on brail labels. When I asked the teller about the subject she said, "Oh, that's for blind people driving cars".
IANAL, but this is great advice to follow. You can always do well in court going pro say. You should be able to prove mens ray without a problem. It's obviously a prema fashuh case once you supena their motis operondeye. Your lingwa franka may be free music coupons in sitoo of money if you don't argue it right, but that's kwid pro kwo in an ex partay decision. You should have some stare deseesis on your side, but still, good luck.
I've got mens rea? How can this be possible? We both use condoms.
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Raw materials? The galaxy is full of them.
This is true, but you still have to get to them, and use them. I "imagine" a big ass probe could find a nice asteroid field and employ the use of a solar smelter, but imagine the time involved in smeltering 1000kg probes to seed the galaxy. This is not 1000 year project.
There are a whole host of things to complain about*, but the bottom line is he violated copyright law in order to make a profit. Just because the RIAA does things wrong doesn't make it right for this guy to commit copyright infringement. He decided to ignore the rules of copyright, so he has to deal with the consequences. If he was too dumb to know there might be consequences, sucks to be him.
I'm not sure I agree with you. From what I understand, this guy makes mix tapes which is the norm for the hip hop scene. Further, this guy profits from other people's work, and credits them for their work. This in turn promotes and increases sales.
The real question is, do these artists object to being included on hip-hop mix tapes? If so then yes legaly they have every right to object and seek remedies under the law. But, I suspect that this person was encouraged to create these hip-hop mix tapes for the express purpose of promoting other people's work. For example, I have every reason to believe that mix tapes I got off the neighborhood dj, while technicaly pirated, were offered with the firm belief that the artists and copyright holders would agree promoting music served their interests.
It's rather like Weird Al, except he's protected under the law as his works are parities, and in most cases he gets permission to spoof other people's work. It's more like the anime piracy scene, where in most cases piracy of unlicensed series and movies is not discouaged for it serves to promote works that otherwise would be unmarketable in other regions. But at least in the case of anime, the copyright holders "ask" people to stop.
I can see where someone can easily be confused, something that was tolerated and encouraged in the past suddenly being considered a violation.
You can't explore a galaxy with a handful of probes. 72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
h tmlf
Not impressed by this guy's argument.
Firstly, regardless of how many probes you have, how they communicate information back is still limited by the speed of light, at least a civilization of our present technology level. The radius of the milky way is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 light years. Assuming you start from galactic center, and travel at 1/10 LS, we are talking 600,000 years for two probes to reach each end, and another 60,000 for them to communicate back. IF someone is on one of the spiral arms, this figure doubles.
Secondly something voyager sized is about 1000kg if I recall correctly, somewhere between 500kg and 1000. Do do something as you reccomend it, with self replication, we are talking the mass of several planets. Not to speak of fuel requirements, and the issue of not knowing exactly where one can get raw materials. Probally somewhere near the galactic unhabitable zone.
The guy's argument is perfectly valid, the galaxy is big, getting from point a to point b is slow. The biggest issue is speed.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/images/f23.gi
Win2k prepresented the first time I ever bothered to go out of my way to upgrade, and liked it.
There was NOT a single reason to go windowsXP for me except some adobe products demanded "XP ONLY", and this was the ONLY reason I upgraded to XP.
I heard things about vista from people like my massage therapist, who like it because it plays music. I've been happy with winamp under windows for... forever. But needless to say she is saving up for a powerful enough PC to run Vista, which to me is nutty, but hey if ease of use is worth dollars, great.
Trek at least put a few years between it's TV series and motion picture release, maybe that was the key to Trek's theater success versus everyone else's failures. Even the Trek TNG films just seemed like long episodes to me.
Trek TOS only had three seasons before it was cancled, and remained in syndication. And actually there was a plan to have another trek series, StarTrek Mach 2 or some such, but star wars sort of encouraged NBC to not release another sci-fi series. The movie (The motion sickness) was based on the mach/phase II scripts. But regardless Trek is very much the Little Engine That Could... cancled, movied, and reserialed several times. To be honest, while I was disapointed that Enterprise was cancled, I think I've had my fill of trek.
Stargate on the otherhand, 10 straight seasons. That's up there with Happy Days, Jag, Friends, almost as many as M.A.S.H. It doesn't need any armchair quarterbacking, it's already successful. Even if the two movies fail, and Atlantis gets cancled, It's still worthy of a Smithsonian exhibit.
Does this mean that all of those Sensormatic tags, all of those cameras, and so on are "futile?" Not hardly. You wouldn't make such a ridiculous statement because you know that retail anti-theft mechanisms are meant to be a deterrent. Nobody -- least of which the retail industry -- expects these measures to prevent 100% of retail theft.
Your analogy is flawed as others have pointed out. Shrinkage prevention systems can be disabled, by the store or by your self after you buy the item. For example, I mail ordered DVDs. Inside is an inventory control tag. I can remove this in the unlikely event I need to carry my purchaced DVDs into an area that has such a system in place.
Whether they are futile or not I can not say. I lack any research saying the cost of these systems justifies the lack of theft. But I can say I accept the fact that stores do have the right to employ beeper system to help prevent shoplifting, and use of such a system does not prevent me from shopping at a given store. They don't restrict the way I use a product, nor its function, well, unless we are talking floppies being sent over the demagnetizing but that's not an issue anymore.
But, given the fact that we have Blu-ray, HD-DVD, DigitalVHS, as well as a few systems of encoding HD on DVD, copy protection that can not be circumvented may prevent my use of a legit purchaced product in the unlikely event that one standard is supported over another. The inability to use my existing equipment for playback does make me NOT BUY THE SHIT. It was the same issue with superCD/DVD audio. I needed some assurance that if one system went the way of the beta I could copy one to the other, or play on my PC until such time as I invest in a new DVD player which will do these standards.
The fact we have an HD-DVD torrent available makes me more likely to buy a HD-DVD than Blu-Ray presently.
On the other hand, if you drive to the store and back, you can probably have that HD-DVD in about an hour.
Add another $400 for the HDDVD player, with no assurance that it won't go the way of the 8-track or Beta.
If you can do that, why not just stick with the DVD and upgrade the players to play MPEG4? Why are we creating new media when we could easily store an HD movie on a dual layer DVD?
Well, you have a choice really. For the time being i'm all for Mpeg4-HD on DVD9. The media is standard, the codec can be supported on at least a moderate laptop. There are issues with artifacts when compressing HD down to that level, but it is at least for the most part higher quality than current DVD, not to speak of VHS (ick). If I was going to bother, i'd look into using two DVD-9s to record HD.
Another alternative is D-VHS, which if i'm not mistaken is $10 per 50Gig tape, or 20c per gig. This is more bulky than quad pack. More bulky than 2-6 DVD9s, but given D-VHS is sub $700 you have to admit it's an attractive solution. For remote viewing i'd rather drag a laptop.
However, the best alternative, really the best alternative is to just wait, wait for BluRay/HD-DVD to fight it out, wait until the recorders are $300 or less, and go with it.
As someone who absolutely refuses to pirate software unless I have no choice, I'd be prepared to pay a few ££ extra to stay legal.
.dlls needed for mplayer WMV support would be considered legit and not piracy.
I wonder if keeping an extra copy of windows would make use of the propriority
I'm not so much anti-piracy but pro working shit. For example turboprint. If I ever needed to print to my canons under linux, this is something i'd consider paying for.
If anyone has been most successful at this, its George Lucas, how many of us own more than one version of the first Star Wars trilogy?
Ummmm.... I'm happy to say I own NO starwars media nor accessories. Technicaly "I" may have bought the comic back in '79 but I was so young I don't remember if "I" bought it, or my brother. But needless to say if I did buy it I no longer have it. I may have recievd a "tonton" action figure but that again would be long since lost.
1. I thought it was foolish to buy starwars action figures in the 70s as all my friends had them already, and most were destroyed with firecrackers.
2. I never "bought" any star wars film, though I liked starwars I saw it enough in the theater, and on cable to keep me perfectly happy.
Now... if you were to say the Robotech series, Macross, or the 2006 re-dub of macross... These are things I would have bought. Various Doctor Who serials I bought. Series or movies I couldn't rent or borrow I bought. The new macross dub is an example of re-buying something enough work went into to justify the expence. StarWars on the other hand, I caught the re-mastered edition in the theater, when it hit the $1.00 cinema.
This being said, I wouldn't knock anyone who bought anything from the Lucus franchise, most of the crap spewed out from there has been a very good investement.
Because THAT worked wonders for release timing, content control and market restrictions, didn't it.*
*Though having a decent TV that can handle PAL and NTSC helps, in the UK they're 6 bob a throw i can tell ye!
Getting multisync TVs to be the norm would be nice, but I was under the impression that DVD players can be had for a low price which will output in pal or NTSC, or multi if you happened to have a TV which handled both. Not being in Europe, I was under the impression that pal VCRS were made to handle NTSC by slowing down from 30 FPS to 25, as opposed to the more complex system of telesync.
We Canadians take "American" to mean a citizen of the USA; not of Canada, Mexico, Brazil or Argentina.
Where a citizen of Mexico may refer to both US and Canadian citizens as being "North Americans". It's a little more polite than assuming an english speaker is from the US, but a little strange in the fact that we are all part of North America.
I would like it if we all accept the fact that we share a Continent, but there is a language difference.
Come on, wasting beer????
Now his next step has to be to find an edible ink. An inkjet just flash-boils ink. It has to be possible to do the same to fruit juice, colored water, beer (though the dissolve gas might be tricky), or even just plain water. You just need to clean the cartridge and get a refill kit.
A nice hack that he could sell to bars would be a water-based sprayer to draw the bar's logo/name on the beer foam.
Two points.
1) Some if not most inkjets are thermal based. This would include Canon and HP's consumer models. Others are micro piezo based, which would include Epson and many brothers. You can spot the brothers easily enough, when the head costs 3 times that of just the printer, you know it's micro-piezo. If you want flexable medium, go micro-piezo... such printheads can handle things from water based ink, oil based, non-water solvent based, and even liquid wax. But if you want cheap and disposable, thermal is the way to go.
2) Edible ink has been around for a while for inkjets
http://www.kopykake.com/pc_edible_ink.html
There was another company, but I think they were bought out by media street and no longer sell the frosting sheets nor edable ink.
But as far as this project goes, it's rather spiffy. It would be cooler to incoperate a stepper motor attached to rollers that would permit clear printing on flat surfaces.
Now is a good time to read and print...
6 48
d C1951_64kb.mp4
The good news about nuclear destruction
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51
What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent!
http://www.ki4u.com/guide.htm
Don't forget to duck and cover.... this keeps you safe from a nuclear blast.
http://www.archive.org/stream/DuckandC1951/Duckan
Except that the 16" spacing is really rather arbitary, it could have been 12 or 18 or 24. 16 is a safe number, and provides reasonably sound engineering when building a wall from 1.5" x 3.5" pieces of lumber. If we were to convert new construction en-masse, there's no guarantee that the American construction industry would settle on a centimeter spacing which would allow that thing to be hung directly on studs, is there?
1. I'm not sure the world standard of stud spacing. I would guess 30cm, 40cm, 60cm
2. I'm not sure why we converted to 16 inches, rather than 24 inches. 16 inches does seem to provide adquate stablity for a light duty wall, and OK fire prevention.
3. Stanards could very well be arbitary, but even if they are it's important to have one standard, so shit works in the way it's expected to.
Seriously -- why bother? What real, practical value is there in forcing the general public to use one arbitrary (to them) set of measurements versus another arbitrary set of measurements?
There are some nice import scrolling waterfall picture frams available at some shops. They are said to be hung on walls with hooks, but the hook handles are not 16 inches apart, the standard here for studs, and it's big and heavy enough that trying to put hooks directly into drywall results in total failure.
Also, metric wasn't designed to be arbitary, it was intended to be 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to equator. Had the earth been a perfect sphere, a fact not known to Delambre or Mechain the astronomers charged with defining this distance, odds are they would have gotten it right. But the point remains, basing a system of length on a huge distance, makes conversion between small distances, like how far away the local chemist is, to how far it is from San Francisco to Hong Kong easy. Basing a unit of measurement on a real world fixed value makes was a good idea.
If I say a baseball player stole second base, and some Slashdot troll says "no he didn't, running from first base to second base isn't illegal under local larceny statutes", you'd pop in to defend him, wouldn't you?
To *steal a base* is taking a base owned by another team, and keeping it for your team. It's a silly term, but accurate given that standing on the base is in possession of it.
The following are trademarks or service marks of Major League Baseball entities and may be used only with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. or the relevant Major League Baseball entity: Major League, Major League Baseball.
Speaking of standardized spots for peripherals, is it just me, or when ATX forced everybody to switch to PS2 mice and a different IRQ, did they just not work as well?
The move to a different IRQ was a very good idea. Many people were annoyed with the fact under dos and windows 3.1 one could not nessicarly use the mouse and the internal modem at the same time. This could be resolved by setting your com3/com4 modem to a non-standard IRQ, or swapping the serial mouse port, but we are talking averge joe user. IIRC AOL's software hated using anything but IRQ 3/4. Even if you could follow directions and use a screwdriver, this was a hassle.
I never had an issue my self, like every good geek I did external modems, and extra serial ports.
I could go on about how IRQ 5 was this wonderful spot which was the default for soundcards, scsi cards, lpt2:, and whole others bunches of wonderful stuff, so much wonderful stuff people didn't understand why shit didn't work right.
Just one example: I'm the usual nerd fulfiling most cliches, somewhat fluent in english and of course I dig - like every nerd - current TV shows (Battlestar Galactica etc.)
There's no legal possibilty to obtain those shows legally here. Of course I could wait until they dub it and release it here but this usually takes up one year. Of course with crappy dubbing and no chance of getting the english voice track due to increased cost in licensing - even on pay-tv. Or wait even longer for the DVD release
Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-fansubs. They tend to be for the most part top quality for material which otherwise would go unlicensed in many markets. I like anime, and hate many english dubs, esp one which digitaly edit to make it more kid friendly (OnePiece). But at least with Anime, they mostly tend to ignore piracy in regions where their work isn't licensed understanding that the pirates create a market.
But I believe it's the current stance of the MPAA for you to WAIT, wait for them to release material for your market. This could take months, years, or it might never happen. There is nothing stopping you from getting a DVD shipped out of the country, and it's like like region free players are rare outside the US. And from my understanding there are nice handy dandy plugins so you can download subtitles in your language provided someone took the time to write them. This I don't believe violates any copyright law provided you bought the disc, and translations are copyright by the people who did the translation.
But I agree, the studios don't think in terms of global market. They are unwilling to go a "global" release.
Now my big complaint is HD. It's not an excuse to pirate, but I can see where one would be annoyed with the lack of standardization for commercial broadcasts/media. But this does not apply to film, unless you find some benifit to a HDTV camcorder in a theater.
I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Because the product would be recalled due to absence of a warning label saying "warning: this product has no warning labels".
I also haven't seen a car built in the past 5 years that comes with a cigarette lighter, or ashtray for that matter. These days, they're extras that you have to ask (and pay) for. The place where the ashtray normally goes now has a sticker on it that says "not an ashtray".
x 2-features/?p=mech
http://autos.yahoo.com/toyota_highlander_hybrid_4
2007 toyota Highlander Hybrid 4x2 standard features (MSRP $32,490
"* Cigarette Lighter With Ashtray "
I've never bought a new car, got plenty of milage out of used cars my self, so I'll have to double check because no one wants you to smoke in a new car. And the first thing to go if there was a cigarette/cigar lighter would be the lighter to charge the cell phone, well unless ou have something like the highlander or other SUV/VAN where the ashtray has it's own lighter and seperate accessory plugs.
In fact, the only place i've seen the ashtray with a label on it "not an ashtray" are on rental cars. I've not noticed such a thing on an average passanger vehicel. But I can't imagine a car without an ashtray, where else would you put your coins or factory ciggerette lighter if equiped?
"My PID is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my parent process, prepare to vi. "
modded down in three, two...
Come to think about it, ATMs must be nigh on impossible to use too.
Inserting the card and entering a PIN sounds doable blind - but then you're presented with screens to navigate via soft keys (and it's different between ATMs). No chance.
Not exactly true. With the exception of small ATMs at mini-marts which I have not looked at in great detail as I always hunt for my bank or "a" bank atm, they have brail instructions. I've also noted a headphone jack on some machines. I've not tried it "but" I imagine if one is blind, one would talk to their bank, and get a walkthrough as to how to use it. I would also imagine that other blind users would need help finding other cash machines, and if worse came to worse they could dial the phone number of their cell and get instructions, but if I was blind, I would stick to my own bank or use a debit machine.
Now... the funny thing is retrofitting ATM machines designed for the drivethrough, and slapping brail on them, ignoring the pedestrian to car accidents at these locations with sited people. I'm not talking spiffy new ATMs, i'm talking old green screens with burn in getting slapped on brail labels. When I asked the teller about the subject she said, "Oh, that's for blind people driving cars".
IANAL, but this is great advice to follow. You can always do well in court going pro say. You should be able to prove mens ray without a problem. It's obviously a prema fashuh case once you supena their motis operondeye. Your lingwa franka may be free music coupons in sitoo of money if you don't argue it right, but that's kwid pro kwo in an ex partay decision. You should have some stare deseesis on your side, but still, good luck.
I've got mens rea? How can this be possible? We both use condoms.