It amazes me that no one has brought this up yet, but
Hollywood would love to totally end the market
for rental movies. Yes, they currently make due with
the situation by having a rather heavy investment
in the big players such as Blockbuster, but they'd
still rather have aven a tenth of those rentals as
sales instead.
Now, if each disc required biometrically identifying
the person playing it, and would only play for one
(or even a half-dozen) people, how would this affect
Blockbuster?
A clever few figured it would be a cheap way
to get the copies -- buy one of these legit, and
then rip it/copy it.
Actually, these failed for one very simple
reason: price. They cost more than a rental
(and a lot more than NetFlix, assuming
you maximize your turnover rate) but provided
basically the same level of service to the
customer.
However, you do accidentally raise a REALLY
good point - Legality.
"Time-shifting" remains as one of our few
well-established fair-use rights. If you
"bought" one of these discs, and ripped it
(and kept the unplayable original, of course)
under the pretense of time-shifting it, how
would the courts view that? You have made use
of a repeatedly-upheld-in-court right, to get
around the entire reason you would (otherwise)
buy a time-sensitive disc in the first place.
Curious.
Well, no doubt the courts would side with
Hollywood on this one. In the case of time
shifting, all the legal precedents involve
companies-against-companies. A mere living,
breathing human has no chance in court against
a soulless legal-fictional entity, after all.
BBC will use this trial to iron out any
outstanding rights issues
So remember, kids, even if you come up with a
totally trivial means of defeating their DRM,
don't release it until AFTER they
have irreversably committed to this!
You must be out of touch. A heavily modded
computer can easily use 600 watts.
But they don't need to (and in fact, often
don't - That 600W power supply might only ever
draw 200W, in many situations.
For example, I recently upgraded my main machine
to an Athlon 64 3000 (Winchester core). Measured
at-the-plug (which even takes PS losses into
consideration), it consumes a whopping 64W idle
(how auspicious for an Athlon 64, eh?), or
just under 100W with absolutely everything
going (burning a DVD, CPU pegged, and playing a
modern FPS fullscreen). Combined with a flat
panel peaking at 19W, and my average still
doesn't equal the draw of a single P4 Prescott
core in isolation. And, in six months, I can
do a drop-in replacement with a dual-core
Athlon 64, with almost no increase in power
consumption. On the Intel side, though a lot
more pricey and with a bit less horsepower,
the Pentium M has a power consumption profile
that even puts the 90nm Athlon 64s to shame.
And that, I believe, sums up the intent of the
parent article nicely... I have a machine that,
for almost any use, really kicks some serious
butt, without making the lights dim. Could I
go for a dual-core P4, with dual SLI 6800
cards? Sure. Do I need an IDLE draw
of over 400W, in exchange for a few more FPS?
I think not.
Oh, and as a nice side effect of not drawing
all that much power, I only need two fans
in the case, a 900RPM 120mm in the power
supply, and a 1500RPM 90mm on the CPU.
It makes almost no noise, and I've never
seen the CPU go above 50C.
Owner of a dot-com, seven servers, and
you're the only person with the technical
skills? I'd say your options are: * Never
leave town. * Delegate some responsibilities
to someone else.
I'd agree with you, but for an entirely
different reason than he "should" for his
own good...
This strikes me as a simple matter of
practicality. I personally enjoy hiking.
I hike places where I can't get a cell
signal. In such places, even if I could
get a signal, what good would it do me? With
up to six hours to get back to town, would
knowing my servers just cooked really do me
any good if I didn't have someone "back at the
ranch" to fix the problem for me in the first
place?
Someone either needs near-perfect uptime, or
they don't. If "ASAP" means five minutes or
less, the job requires a body, not a pager. If
it means the company's sole tech can afford a
few hours to get back to civilization, then
skip the pager and have fun while out, rather
than spending the whole time worrying about
getting a page.
The whole point of the GPL is that users
can make modify the code.
And in this case, you can modify the
code. It just doesn't do anything
without their proprietary codebase.
Simple hypothetical scenario - They wrote a
totally closed program that transfers data
from a hardware device (in this case, some
form of PVR card) to a file.
They then made almost trivial modifications
to GPL'd software to let it use those files,
effectively giving them a "real" PVR suite
for just the R&D cost of a single, nnearly
trivial poll-and-dump program without
violating the GPL.
Going a bit further, they could even have
encrypted those files, giving the GPL'd code
the ability to decrypt such data,
given the key. And then kept the key as
part of the proprietary portion (if you use
GPG, do you have an obligation to release your
key to anyone that might want to read your
email?).
Now, does this violate the spirit of the
GPL? Most of us would agree that yes, it most
certainly does. You could argue (and DN
certainly would, unless they want to
take the "screw you, we pulled it off, go cry
in your Cheerios" approach) that they did obey
the spirit of the GPL, in that you and I and
everyone else has every right to use and modify
the GPL part of their effort to work with any
already-existing data. Of course, we have no
way to get or produce those files or the key to
decrypt them, but hey, our problem, right?
This particular issue will keep coming up, and no
clear answer exists to solve it. Even if, somehow,
we could force them to release every last bit of
code to their software, that doesn't change the fact
that you'd still need their firmware. And if we could
even stretch the GPL to force release of that, we'd
still need their hardware. And if they had to release
specs detailed enough to build your own? Well, do
you have the ability to produce 10-layer boards?
And, getting a bit more fantastic but still in the spirit
of the topic, even if you do have that ability to
make your own 10-layer boards (hey, on Slashdot, it would
surprise me greatly if someone here couldn't
perform any given currently-possible technological feat),
what if the use of technology-X required something that
only its creators can possibly have? "We have found a sample
of element-217, the only such sample known in existance,
under our corporate HQ while adding a new corporate swimming
pool. It works wonderfully for controlling fusion on any
scale, from battery-sized to power-plant-sized. Here,
you can have every last bit of information about our
designs, but gee, too bad we have the only sample
of element-217."
And here's a solid figure: the Canadian
Ontario Hydro company asks about 28 million
dollars (Canadian) a kilogram. Hang on, I'll
get my wallet.
Just how much of it do you want??? At $28
million per kilogram, that comes out to only
$28 per milligram. At STP, a milligram of
tritium takes up just under 7.5cm3. For
comparison, a single AA battery has a volume
of around 6.5cm3.
So, although these things wouldn't come cheap,
we'd only really have a cost in the hundreds
of dollars here for something that would fit
in a laptop - ie, comparable to a Li-ion laptop
battery.
The single biggest problem here comes from trying to
explain to people that the evil nukular batteries
can't hurt them because they only use beta decay.
Except that the fans are still on, which
supposedly moves the oil around.
Actually, that part would worry me the
most about this design, leaving the fans on.
The ordinary sort of brushless DC fans used for
cooling PCs respond very poorly to
stalling... As in, they usually cook themselves,
and unless you get lucky, they often take other
parts out with them (such as the power supply,
or whatever part they should otherwise have
kept cool).
Now, in air, they can spin away happily until
their bearings wear out, with no significant
resistance (of the physical, not electrical
kind) until they get going rather fast (at
least a few hundred RPMs, even for 120mm
fans).
In oil, though, even a very, very thin one,
the fan has to fight a lot more physical
resistance to spinning. Enough that I would
worry about them behaving comparable to a
stall (ie, cooking themselves rather than
moving).
Can any EEs or MEs comment on this in a more
informed manner than my mere speculation?
While it would be difficult to check every source for
every story, not checking them leads less-than-scrupulous
journalists into temptation. Why not have a publication
select a number of sources at random and check them?
Why shouldn't they check every single
source? You, or I, or Joe the Town Drunk can
surf the web and regurgitate news stories in
a blog. This can prove useful as a sort of
"first exposure" to learn something just
breaking, but while sometimes you get the
Beeb, sometimes you get Pravda.
The very JOB of a journalist, and their
editors, consists of finding information,
compiling it into a coherent whole, then
finding independant verification, and only
after all that, publishing the writeup.
Anything less, and you have an "in-print
blogger" rather than a "journalist". In
that whole process, the independant verification
(or first-hand verification when "independant"
has no meaning, such as "Fred said X in a private
interview") matter more than any other step,
because it turns hearsay into news.
until prices drop to under $500 for a
useable commercial HDTV, it will never hit
full introduction, no matter how much the
media industry tries to change it.
Perhaps you haven't kept up on the legal
landscape, but next year, broadcast analogue
TV goes dark in the US.
Not to say you won't see downsampling
receiver boxes to let people keep using
their ancient 20" NTSC TVs despite the
lack of native content, but at least
programming- and quality-wise, NTSC has
about a year to live... Even if Congress
gives it an extention (entirely too likely,
at this point), I give it less than five
years at the outside.
And I, for one, look forward to that.
Especially now that the courts have
struck down the broadcast flag. I have to
admit, I kinda dreaded the combination (though
had faith that easy circumventions would exist),
but now? Bring on the 700 channels of HDTV!
And I don't even watch much TV. But why
not embrace improvement? Even for the hour-per-week
I waste on the flickering box, I might as well not
get a headache from trying to watch a 50+ year old
technology cope with the modern world.
I'd still say its a bit high to be
considered the "low cost necessary to
bring HDTV to the masses."
For 40"???
I upgraded my TV last year, to a 540p-capable
model (DAMN I wish I'd waited another year),
for just about a grand... at 32" widescreen.
Absolutely beautiful for progressive DVDs,
but still, now I regret not having a 720p
(though, at least 1080i doesn't require
scaling...)
$400 for a 40" TV does not suck, at
all.
However, I consider this important for a totally
different reason...
This doesn't sound like an LCD. It sounds like
a CRT with each pixel having its own electron
gun, in an eighth of an inch thick. Think about
that for a minute, and then just try to
stop drooling. The thought certainly impresses
me, and I only watch about an hour of
TV per week.
Near-infinite brightness, perfect contrast
(even "real" CRTs can't do that),
pixel-addressable (ie, infinite sharpness?),
lightweight and low depth, presumeably low
power consumption
display costing less than either a comparable
CRT or LCD having all the shortcomings
of either of those technologies as they exist
today.
Perhaps I read more into this than I should,
but if it delivers half of that, time
to invest in their stock...
I don't want to buy dry ice. Isn't there
a good way to make it at home?
Yup, really amazingly simple.
Just take your anhydrous CO2 tank, connect it
to a dry ice mold (almost like a rigid fine-meshed
cheesecloth box, you could probably hack one
together if you don't already have one), and let
'er rip until the mold fills.
You can even still use the waste CO2 (a lot)
for something else, with a careful setup - Just
make sure the pressure drop occurs in the
mold rather than at some point down-stream.
Don't be coy Roy. Just admit you have a
pr0n collection.
Actually, on that topic, I would have
to say that organizing one's... "image" collection
takes quite a lot more thought than music.
With music, a dozen posters have already
suggested trivial variants of what most of
us already do - "music_root/artist_name/
album_name/song_title", possibly throwing a
release year in there somewhere, possibly an
a-to-z layout above the artists' names,
and with a few ways to deal with hard-to-describe
material such as soundtracks, collaborations,
and the like (incidentally, symbolic links work
wonderfully for soundtracks and collaborations,
but make it a tad harder to easily back-up one's
collection).
But with images, how do other Slashdotters organize
them? By... um... "model" name? By photographer?
By release date? By set name? And speaking of
sets, how do you know when you have a complete
set? And the order within the set - Most online
sources of images rename them to something more-or-less
meaningless, so how do people figure out order (beyond
the obvious sequential information, such as... uh...
"events" in the pictures that have distinct temporal
dependancies on other pictures?
Music doesn't take much effort to categorize. How do
people deal with material that doesn't neatly
fit into a simply directory structure?
That being said, evolution is as much a theory
as creationism, and some may say it evolution
relies on faith just as much (if not more) than
creationism.
No.
First of all, the strength of a theory
depends entirely on its predictive
power, not just its descriptive ability.
You can fit all the known facts about
anything to an arbitrarily complex
description, and have that description 100%
accurate for all known data. Only by
predicting never-before-seen data points can
a "theory" have any validity whatsoever.
One aspect of evolution predicts that, if I
take a culture of a bacteria killed off by
a particular antibiotic, and grow it in the
presence of that same antibiotic, after a
few generations the entire culture will have
immunity to that antibiotic. We did this in
my freshman college micro class, and what do
you know, it works! Do you know of any
testable predictions of creationism?
Really read up on evolution. There are huge
missing factors and gaps in logic. Darwin
knew this.
Unlike creationism, evolution doesn't depend
on a supreme source of authority for its
accuracy. You could prove Darwin as a raving
lunatic who liked to bugger goats, and it
would not affect the theory of evolution
one whit.
As for those "gaps"... Evolution, as a theory,
has a few missing data points. Not
gaps in logic, gaps in the fossil record.
BIG difference. And as for those
problematic gaps in the fossil record, people
tend to overstate them to an extreme. We only
really lack a very few examples that
would make some aspects of evolution more
solid, such as the "missing link" - Guess what?
as important as we humans consider ourselves,
the absence of one particular stopping point in
our ancestry has very little bearing on
evolution as a whole.
We have, quite literally,
evidence (either historical or laboratory
reproduceable) of every major step in the
development of life on this planet, from
the creation of organic molecules from the
ingredients of young Earth's atmosphere (the
classic Miller-Urey experiment)), to the
formation of cell walls via self-organizing
lipid membranes produced by the action of
the tides, to the gradual accumulation of
functional components inside a cell (via
endosymbiosis, of which Lynn Margulis has
written extensively), to the formation of simple
multicellular colonies (sea sponge has only
slightly more organization than a simple colony),
to the formation of differentiated tissues
such as organs (jellyfish), to the adaptation
of entire species to radically new environments
(fish -> amphibians -> reptiles -> mammals),
and sometimes back, ie, whales).
What do we lack in that? A few specific examples
in various lineages (including the human "missing
link"), the specific mechanism by which DNA arose.
A tricky problem with chromosome counts (which,
incidentally, the recent birth of a "zonkey"
all but cinches). And that about covers the "gaps"
in evolution, aside from very minor points
of contention, the resolution of which would not
affect the overall validity of the theory one bit.
It bothers me that people seriouslly do not
understand how complete of a theory we have
in evolution. These people read a book,
translated from the original language, patched
together and "remixed" several times over the
centuries, and not allowed to the general
public for much of its history, kept "safe" by
those who stood to gain the most by manipulating
its contents - And people call that a complete,
inviolable, sacred work. Then they look at
the modern world, see the current political
layout of the UK, and read hundreds of basically
agreeing third-party accounts of the history
thereof - but because the Bayeux tapestry
has a few worm-holes in it, they refuse to
believe the battle of Hastings ever occured.
Then it follows that we should all do a
half-assed job at everything, so that extra
people can be hired.
Depriving someone of a job by doing the work for
free does not equate to deliberately
underperforming at one's own job, for the simple
reason that if I underperform at my own job, I
will not have that job for long. A volunteer,
OTOH, practically cannot underperform
to a job-losing degree, short of deliberate
sabotage.
it enters the economy, and people's incomes,
somewhere.
Puh-lease! No, it doesn't - It enters a CRO's
annual bonus, and, having more than he can
realistically spend in the first place, ends
up as nothing more than another number in an
account.
Reaganomics failed. Trickle-down, doesn't.
The rich collect money, and the poor get
poorer, until they revolt. It has happened,
it happens as we speak, and it will keep
happening, unavoidably.
No, it's volunteerism. It would be communism
if you forced others to use GPL'd code. But they
don't have to.
Actually, the GPL does count as a form
of communism: "a system in which goods are owned
in common and are available to all as needed".
The problem here involves the typical American
perception of communism - It does not mean
"bad" or "evil" or "Stalinist". It just means
that no one "owns" the product of that work,
and no one can monopolize its use.
In some cases, communism works very, very well.
For material goods, it tends to fail due to
greed. As a system of government, it fails
quite spectacularly (again, mostly due to human
greed). But for intangibles, in which
category falls software, music, movies, thoughts,
algorithms, and all the topics we so often
argue about here on Slashdot under the broad
category of "IP" - communism works amazingly
well. Everyone can contribute, and everyone can
share the results equally. In fact, it takes
quite extreme laws and enforcement effort to
avoid IP naturally falling into a
more-or-less communistic state of existence.
As an aside, I find it almost scary that people would
defend against an accusation of communism by
calling something volunteerism. In a perfect world,
with no one going hungry or unsheltered or lacking
basic medical treatment, volunteerism seems like a
good, noble philosophy. In the real world,
operating under a basically capitalistic economy,
volunteerism actively does no less evil than
put people out of a job. For every hour someone works
for no pay, they have deprived someone of the possibility
of working that same hour for the purpose of feeding,
clothing, and sheltering themselves. In a very real
way, someone who don't need that hour's pay
(or they wouldn't have worked it for free) has managed
to take it away from someone who does.
As the one exception to this, court-ordered community
service seems reasonable, in that it allows a person to
"pay" the community back for their crimes by spending time
rather than dollars. For someone without extensive
financial resources, this means a fine that doesn't
unduely burden them. For someone with money to burn,
it causes them to spend something more valuable to them
than a mere monetary fine. A win/win situation both ways.
God gave mankind the gift of free will so that they
could use that free will to obey him
Can you seriously say that with a straight face?
"Gee, having these angels grovel and worship me gets a tad
tiring... Sure, they'd give their left nut for me (if
I hadn't made them androgynous), but they don't really
have any choice".
"Okay, hmm, you there, and you - I've given you the
ability to say no to me. Now you can choose to
act like obsessed fans."
"WHAAAATTTT?? You DON'T want to fawn all over
me for eternity? Well, screw you, then! I'll just take
my trees and go home!"
Okay... Moral of the story? God acts like a selfish,
egotistical little brat who had to create an entirely
new way to stroke his ego?
Not the most flattering interpretation. In fact, the
entire ante- (and meso- ) diluvian portion of the bible
of the Jews/Christians just has so many flaws,
unless we consider it nothing more than an allegory for
the dawn of consciousness in a particular pack of humans
living in the fertile crescent, and who eventually had to
migrate away during a particularly nasty annual flooding
of the same.
As an aside / full-disclosure, I do believe in a Creator,
but suspect that humans have the whole thing so completely
screwed up as to make "religion" and "fiction" effectively
interchangeable.
Although your line of reasoning works fairly well, you
don't need to go nearly that in-depth with the
explanation... The entire paradox reduces to a simple
contradiction - rock and not-rock (or move and not-move,
if you prefer).
Since anything follows from a contradiction, a simple and 100%
correct answer exists to the question - "Yes". You could qualify
that with "but It could move the rock anyway", but don't really
need to.
Of course, since anything follows from a contradiction, you
could also correctly answer "Purple flaming ducks chew on power
tools", but then you'd need to spend FAR longer than you
probably would like, trying to explain the answer to someone
who presumeably has a rather poor grasp of formal logic in
the first place, with a side trip into the aesthetic appeal
of dabbling with surrealism vs nonsense.
I have spend years following the job
markets and developer surveys, as I am
expected to give professional advice based
on facts, not opinion.
Then you should have no problem answering
the question, and proving a source for
your claim.
Please, relieve me of my ignorance and post a
(credible) link, a journal cite, or even an
online poll with more than a few hundred votes.
By what statistical measure do you determine
that most of the huge numbers of Java developers
are not doing it by choice?
Why, by no lesser evidence than that provided
by someone who "have spend years following the
job markets and developer surveys", your own
expert testimony, of course! Combined with a recent
slashdot poll from earlier this year,
with 46800 votes (statistically very
significant, if it had occurred under more
rigorous conditions)... Since you have "proven by
assertion" your claim that most coders use
Java, while a (more-or-less) statistically significant
ratio of coders prefer not to, it follows that they
must use Java against their will.
So, taking a closer look at that poll... Well,
lookey-here... C and C++ add up to 38%, while
Java (including C# and VB - Considering the
popularity of VB, at least, it looks like some
Slashdot editor wanted to give Java at least a
chance to make a fair showing) only earning
a sad 17% (the same as plain ol' vanilla C all
by its lonesome). Even humble Perl scores 18%,
higher than Java + VB + C#.
But as I mentioned, Slashdot polls don't exactly
have the best of experimental methodologies, so no
doubt you have a much better source, ready
at your fingertips to fire off to me at a moment's
notice...
But, unlike in C or C++ those bugs are
actually trapped and you get traceable
exception reports.
Well, I can certainly see the justification
for that - Actually using a debugger takes
skill and an understanding of the
underlying architecture.
So, I recently found myself forced to do quite
a bit of work in C#.NET, and just this past
week, got a stack trace talking about a
System.Drawing.Bitmap object (unused anywhere
in my code) when trying to set a TextBox
control's ".Text" property. Unfortunately,
having no concept of how a computer actually
performs those instructions I give it, I've
never heard of a "null pointer" (pointers?
oh, how crude! Everyone knows that
pointers cause bugs, so languages like Java
and the.NET family don't have them), so I
didn't immediate realize that I had somehow
tried to work on a nonexistant TextBox, and
just can't understand why simply setting a
text field would cause such an anomalous error.
Good thing we have high quality compilers
(sorry, "interpreters") that give us meaningful
errors when they don't know how to proceed
in this wonderful modern world, eh?
Changing the problem domain simply changes how
people approach the problem. The "essence" of
the code remains the same - Adding additional
layers of abstraction makes it easier to grasp
at a high level, but much harder to know
exactly what occurs at the actual hardware level.
So, if you add 1+1 and depend on it equalling 3,
your program will fail no matter how clever
of a language you use. But a sufficiently
"clever" program may hide the fact that you
expected 1+1 to equal 3, not unlike in
my example above - I didn't "set" anything
to zero, nor does "zero" have a meaning
(within the language) as a value for
a TextBox to directly have. But the error
resulted from exactly that - At the
lowest level, a memory location, and later, a
CPU register, that the iterpreter had called
"textbox1", had a value of zero. All in a
language without explicit pointers (not
talking about "unsafe" mode) and nice detailed
stack traces.
Which is nothing compared to the disasters
that have resulted from the use of C and C++
over 20 years.
Don't blame the hammer when the homeowner insists
you finish the job in half the time and under
budget, then the house falls down a few years
later.
And if you believe the same (via different
mechanisms) won't happen under Java, or Fortress,
or any supposedly "safe" language - I have a
bridge to sell you. Buffer overruns occur because
of sloppy coding - In 90% of cases I've personally
had to deal with, simply using snprintf() rather
than sprintf() (or some comparable pair of "dumb"
and "length specified" functions) would solve the
problem. Do you really think that similar
oversights won't affect Java in some way?
I think you need to take a look at the
real world, where Java is the most widely
used language.
Your source for that factoid? I communicate
with quite a lot of real-world programmers,
and although I wouldn't discount the number
doing Java (mostly not by their choice), when
it comes to getting actual work done, almost
everyone chooses C or C++.
People don't pay me because I do something
easy and safe. They pay me because I do something
that most people cannot do, no matter
how much time they may dedicate to it.
Progressively easier and safer languages will
bring "toy" coding closer to the mainstream (though
never quite to the mainstream, since coding
takes some real thought, and people dislike having
to think). But forcing people who can actually
code to use castrated languages just wastes
time and resources. You want a cute webpage, use
a safe language; You want an OS, use C. You want
MS Paint, use a safe language; you want The
GIMP, use C.
Computers "speak" machine language. Assembly
gives a near 1:1 translation of that, but takes
too much work to maintain (and I'll admit that
even as someone who likes asm and doesn't
hesitate to use it sparingly when platform
independance doesn't matter). As long as our
computers have a CPU even remotely like what
we currently have available, C provides a near
perfect balance of closeness to the CPU (with
some care, you can translate most C to ML
almost directly) with human readability and
structural ease of maintenance.
I'm sure a large number of Fortran developers
would be very interested, even if you aren't.
You want Windows' Calculator, use a safe language.
You want high performance code that runs natively
on just about any supercomputer, use HPF (Fortran).
"Interest", perhaps. But if Fortress provides its
"ease" and "safety" the same way Java supposedly
did the same for C++, it will have marketing droids
as its only fans.
there are a generation or two, or three,
of people who do not read books. these people
go to movies. should the story be inaccessible
to them?
Put simply - Yes. Fuck 'em. If they won't take
the time to pick up a book and read the story,
why should they have access to it?
And I don't mean this as a troll... The biggest
complaint I see in this thread involves how
poorly DA's British, intellectual, subtle style
of humor, translates to the big screen. This
very consistently happens with productions of
decent literature (as opposed to productions of
hacks who basically write screenplays in novel
form), because the two mediums do NOT
have totally equivalent expressive power.
translating one form of literary culture into
another form, is usually a good way to spread
that culture. don't you agree?
No, I do not.
Movies convey information as though the viewer
exists as a disembodied viewer floating through
the story, observing the events that unfold.
Great for action, great for "physical" comedy,
great for slasher flicks and some forms of
more physical horror, great for porn. Okay
for drama, barely passable for "psychological"
thrillers (only by making offensively frequent
use of information the viewer should not
fairly have, such as showing scenes of the
unidentifiable bad guy torturing the little
girl, when the other 99% of the movie has the
observer follow Detective BadAss).
Books, OTOH, make use of the reader's
imagination. They let you inside the heads of
the charaters without the need for annoying
voiceovers - For that matter, a book could get
away with not having a single spoken word
(referring only to fiction here, of course,
since nonfiction would make this a moot
point).
your self, having read the book, can't possibly
think of why there is any reason whatsoever to
contribute to another cultural form.
Hello? Come back down here, friend, you've
floated a bit too far out there.
This doesn't involve cultural anthropology, it
involves two mediums that most people in the
modern Western world have basically equal access
to (or if not, they do not by choice).
Both mediums have their uses. But both do
not work for every story.
In this case, the moving-pictures-with-sound
format doesn't work well to fully express the
story. I would even say that about the original
BBC episodes - Not bad, but not nearly as
stop-reading-so-I-can-stop-laughing-and-catch-my-b reath
funny as the book.
next time you see a 9 year old, ask them if they
know the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
And after going to see this movie, they might "know" the
right answer, but they won't "get" why so many of us
"geeks who read" find that answer hilarious. That 9YO will
roll his or her eyes, and say "what-EVER" in that dismissive
tone that only 5-15YOs seem able to master.
This has nothing to do with elitism, or with some
noble idea of "making culture accessible". It involves
placing something in the wrong context. The crocodile
doesn't live in trees, the monkey doesn't live in the
desert, and the cat doesn't live in a swamp. "format
C:\" doesn't work in Linux. And HHG doesn't work on
film.
Slashdot Mirror
How do they imagine this would work for rentals?
They don't.
It amazes me that no one has brought this up yet, but Hollywood would love to totally end the market for rental movies. Yes, they currently make due with the situation by having a rather heavy investment in the big players such as Blockbuster, but they'd still rather have aven a tenth of those rentals as sales instead.
Now, if each disc required biometrically identifying the person playing it, and would only play for one (or even a half-dozen) people, how would this affect Blockbuster?
A clever few figured it would be a cheap way to get the copies -- buy one of these legit, and then rip it/copy it.
Actually, these failed for one very simple reason: price. They cost more than a rental (and a lot more than NetFlix, assuming you maximize your turnover rate) but provided basically the same level of service to the customer.
However, you do accidentally raise a REALLY good point - Legality.
"Time-shifting" remains as one of our few well-established fair-use rights. If you "bought" one of these discs, and ripped it (and kept the unplayable original, of course) under the pretense of time-shifting it, how would the courts view that? You have made use of a repeatedly-upheld-in-court right, to get around the entire reason you would (otherwise) buy a time-sensitive disc in the first place.
Curious.
Well, no doubt the courts would side with Hollywood on this one. In the case of time shifting, all the legal precedents involve companies-against-companies. A mere living, breathing human has no chance in court against a soulless legal-fictional entity, after all.
BBC will use this trial to iron out any outstanding rights issues
So remember, kids, even if you come up with a totally trivial means of defeating their DRM, don't release it until AFTER they have irreversably committed to this!
You must be out of touch. A heavily modded computer can easily use 600 watts.
But they don't need to (and in fact, often don't - That 600W power supply might only ever draw 200W, in many situations.
For example, I recently upgraded my main machine to an Athlon 64 3000 (Winchester core). Measured at-the-plug (which even takes PS losses into consideration), it consumes a whopping 64W idle (how auspicious for an Athlon 64, eh?), or just under 100W with absolutely everything going (burning a DVD, CPU pegged, and playing a modern FPS fullscreen). Combined with a flat panel peaking at 19W, and my average still doesn't equal the draw of a single P4 Prescott core in isolation. And, in six months, I can do a drop-in replacement with a dual-core Athlon 64, with almost no increase in power consumption. On the Intel side, though a lot more pricey and with a bit less horsepower, the Pentium M has a power consumption profile that even puts the 90nm Athlon 64s to shame.
And that, I believe, sums up the intent of the parent article nicely... I have a machine that, for almost any use, really kicks some serious butt, without making the lights dim. Could I go for a dual-core P4, with dual SLI 6800 cards? Sure. Do I need an IDLE draw of over 400W, in exchange for a few more FPS? I think not.
Oh, and as a nice side effect of not drawing all that much power, I only need two fans in the case, a 900RPM 120mm in the power supply, and a 1500RPM 90mm on the CPU. It makes almost no noise, and I've never seen the CPU go above 50C.
Owner of a dot-com, seven servers, and you're the only person with the technical skills? I'd say your options are: * Never leave town. * Delegate some responsibilities to someone else.
I'd agree with you, but for an entirely different reason than he "should" for his own good...
This strikes me as a simple matter of practicality. I personally enjoy hiking. I hike places where I can't get a cell signal. In such places, even if I could get a signal, what good would it do me? With up to six hours to get back to town, would knowing my servers just cooked really do me any good if I didn't have someone "back at the ranch" to fix the problem for me in the first place?
Someone either needs near-perfect uptime, or they don't. If "ASAP" means five minutes or less, the job requires a body, not a pager. If it means the company's sole tech can afford a few hours to get back to civilization, then skip the pager and have fun while out, rather than spending the whole time worrying about getting a page.
The whole point of the GPL is that users can make modify the code.
And in this case, you can modify the code. It just doesn't do anything without their proprietary codebase.
Simple hypothetical scenario - They wrote a totally closed program that transfers data from a hardware device (in this case, some form of PVR card) to a file.
They then made almost trivial modifications to GPL'd software to let it use those files, effectively giving them a "real" PVR suite for just the R&D cost of a single, nnearly trivial poll-and-dump program without violating the GPL.
Going a bit further, they could even have encrypted those files, giving the GPL'd code the ability to decrypt such data, given the key. And then kept the key as part of the proprietary portion (if you use GPG, do you have an obligation to release your key to anyone that might want to read your email?).
Now, does this violate the spirit of the GPL? Most of us would agree that yes, it most certainly does. You could argue (and DN certainly would, unless they want to take the "screw you, we pulled it off, go cry in your Cheerios" approach) that they did obey the spirit of the GPL, in that you and I and everyone else has every right to use and modify the GPL part of their effort to work with any already-existing data. Of course, we have no way to get or produce those files or the key to decrypt them, but hey, our problem, right?
This particular issue will keep coming up, and no clear answer exists to solve it. Even if, somehow, we could force them to release every last bit of code to their software, that doesn't change the fact that you'd still need their firmware. And if we could even stretch the GPL to force release of that, we'd still need their hardware. And if they had to release specs detailed enough to build your own? Well, do you have the ability to produce 10-layer boards? And, getting a bit more fantastic but still in the spirit of the topic, even if you do have that ability to make your own 10-layer boards (hey, on Slashdot, it would surprise me greatly if someone here couldn't perform any given currently-possible technological feat), what if the use of technology-X required something that only its creators can possibly have? "We have found a sample of element-217, the only such sample known in existance, under our corporate HQ while adding a new corporate swimming pool. It works wonderfully for controlling fusion on any scale, from battery-sized to power-plant-sized. Here, you can have every last bit of information about our designs, but gee, too bad we have the only sample of element-217."
And here's a solid figure: the Canadian Ontario Hydro company asks about 28 million dollars (Canadian) a kilogram. Hang on, I'll get my wallet.
Just how much of it do you want??? At $28 million per kilogram, that comes out to only $28 per milligram. At STP, a milligram of tritium takes up just under 7.5cm3. For comparison, a single AA battery has a volume of around 6.5cm3.
So, although these things wouldn't come cheap, we'd only really have a cost in the hundreds of dollars here for something that would fit in a laptop - ie, comparable to a Li-ion laptop battery.
The single biggest problem here comes from trying to explain to people that the evil nukular batteries can't hurt them because they only use beta decay.
Except that the fans are still on, which supposedly moves the oil around.
Actually, that part would worry me the most about this design, leaving the fans on.
The ordinary sort of brushless DC fans used for cooling PCs respond very poorly to stalling... As in, they usually cook themselves, and unless you get lucky, they often take other parts out with them (such as the power supply, or whatever part they should otherwise have kept cool).
Now, in air, they can spin away happily until their bearings wear out, with no significant resistance (of the physical, not electrical kind) until they get going rather fast (at least a few hundred RPMs, even for 120mm fans).
In oil, though, even a very, very thin one, the fan has to fight a lot more physical resistance to spinning. Enough that I would worry about them behaving comparable to a stall (ie, cooking themselves rather than moving).
Can any EEs or MEs comment on this in a more informed manner than my mere speculation?
While it would be difficult to check every source for every story, not checking them leads less-than-scrupulous journalists into temptation. Why not have a publication select a number of sources at random and check them?
Why shouldn't they check every single source? You, or I, or Joe the Town Drunk can surf the web and regurgitate news stories in a blog. This can prove useful as a sort of "first exposure" to learn something just breaking, but while sometimes you get the Beeb, sometimes you get Pravda.
The very JOB of a journalist, and their editors, consists of finding information, compiling it into a coherent whole, then finding independant verification, and only after all that, publishing the writeup. Anything less, and you have an "in-print blogger" rather than a "journalist". In that whole process, the independant verification (or first-hand verification when "independant" has no meaning, such as "Fred said X in a private interview") matter more than any other step, because it turns hearsay into news.
until prices drop to under $500 for a useable commercial HDTV, it will never hit full introduction, no matter how much the media industry tries to change it.
Perhaps you haven't kept up on the legal landscape, but next year, broadcast analogue TV goes dark in the US.
Not to say you won't see downsampling receiver boxes to let people keep using their ancient 20" NTSC TVs despite the lack of native content, but at least programming- and quality-wise, NTSC has about a year to live... Even if Congress gives it an extention (entirely too likely, at this point), I give it less than five years at the outside.
And I, for one, look forward to that. Especially now that the courts have struck down the broadcast flag. I have to admit, I kinda dreaded the combination (though had faith that easy circumventions would exist), but now? Bring on the 700 channels of HDTV!
And I don't even watch much TV. But why not embrace improvement? Even for the hour-per-week I waste on the flickering box, I might as well not get a headache from trying to watch a 50+ year old technology cope with the modern world.
I'd still say its a bit high to be considered the "low cost necessary to bring HDTV to the masses."
For 40"???
I upgraded my TV last year, to a 540p-capable model (DAMN I wish I'd waited another year), for just about a grand... at 32" widescreen. Absolutely beautiful for progressive DVDs, but still, now I regret not having a 720p (though, at least 1080i doesn't require scaling...)
$400 for a 40" TV does not suck, at all.
However, I consider this important for a totally different reason...
This doesn't sound like an LCD. It sounds like a CRT with each pixel having its own electron gun, in an eighth of an inch thick. Think about that for a minute, and then just try to stop drooling. The thought certainly impresses me, and I only watch about an hour of TV per week.
Near-infinite brightness, perfect contrast (even "real" CRTs can't do that), pixel-addressable (ie, infinite sharpness?), lightweight and low depth, presumeably low power consumption display costing less than either a comparable CRT or LCD having all the shortcomings of either of those technologies as they exist today.
Perhaps I read more into this than I should, but if it delivers half of that, time to invest in their stock...
I don't want to buy dry ice. Isn't there a good way to make it at home?
Yup, really amazingly simple.
Just take your anhydrous CO2 tank, connect it to a dry ice mold (almost like a rigid fine-meshed cheesecloth box, you could probably hack one together if you don't already have one), and let 'er rip until the mold fills.
You can even still use the waste CO2 (a lot) for something else, with a careful setup - Just make sure the pressure drop occurs in the mold rather than at some point down-stream.
Don't be coy Roy. Just admit you have a pr0n collection.
Actually, on that topic, I would have to say that organizing one's... "image" collection takes quite a lot more thought than music.
With music, a dozen posters have already suggested trivial variants of what most of us already do - "music_root/artist_name/ album_name/song_title", possibly throwing a release year in there somewhere, possibly an a-to-z layout above the artists' names, and with a few ways to deal with hard-to-describe material such as soundtracks, collaborations, and the like (incidentally, symbolic links work wonderfully for soundtracks and collaborations, but make it a tad harder to easily back-up one's collection).
But with images, how do other Slashdotters organize them? By... um... "model" name? By photographer? By release date? By set name? And speaking of sets, how do you know when you have a complete set? And the order within the set - Most online sources of images rename them to something more-or-less meaningless, so how do people figure out order (beyond the obvious sequential information, such as... uh... "events" in the pictures that have distinct temporal dependancies on other pictures?
Music doesn't take much effort to categorize. How do people deal with material that doesn't neatly fit into a simply directory structure?
This is all about freedom and safety and other comfortable words.
You forgot "for the kids".
Can't forget the children - They make such great little pawns in just about any game of Politics.
That being said, evolution is as much a theory as creationism, and some may say it evolution relies on faith just as much (if not more) than creationism.
No.
First of all, the strength of a theory depends entirely on its predictive power, not just its descriptive ability. You can fit all the known facts about anything to an arbitrarily complex description, and have that description 100% accurate for all known data. Only by predicting never-before-seen data points can a "theory" have any validity whatsoever.
One aspect of evolution predicts that, if I take a culture of a bacteria killed off by a particular antibiotic, and grow it in the presence of that same antibiotic, after a few generations the entire culture will have immunity to that antibiotic. We did this in my freshman college micro class, and what do you know, it works! Do you know of any testable predictions of creationism?
Really read up on evolution. There are huge missing factors and gaps in logic. Darwin knew this.
Unlike creationism, evolution doesn't depend on a supreme source of authority for its accuracy. You could prove Darwin as a raving lunatic who liked to bugger goats, and it would not affect the theory of evolution one whit.
As for those "gaps"... Evolution, as a theory, has a few missing data points. Not gaps in logic, gaps in the fossil record. BIG difference. And as for those problematic gaps in the fossil record, people tend to overstate them to an extreme. We only really lack a very few examples that would make some aspects of evolution more solid, such as the "missing link" - Guess what? as important as we humans consider ourselves, the absence of one particular stopping point in our ancestry has very little bearing on evolution as a whole.
We have, quite literally, evidence (either historical or laboratory reproduceable) of every major step in the development of life on this planet, from the creation of organic molecules from the ingredients of young Earth's atmosphere (the classic Miller-Urey experiment)), to the formation of cell walls via self-organizing lipid membranes produced by the action of the tides, to the gradual accumulation of functional components inside a cell (via endosymbiosis, of which Lynn Margulis has written extensively), to the formation of simple multicellular colonies (sea sponge has only slightly more organization than a simple colony), to the formation of differentiated tissues such as organs (jellyfish), to the adaptation of entire species to radically new environments (fish -> amphibians -> reptiles -> mammals), and sometimes back, ie, whales).
What do we lack in that? A few specific examples in various lineages (including the human "missing link"), the specific mechanism by which DNA arose. A tricky problem with chromosome counts (which, incidentally, the recent birth of a "zonkey" all but cinches). And that about covers the "gaps" in evolution, aside from very minor points of contention, the resolution of which would not affect the overall validity of the theory one bit.
It bothers me that people seriouslly do not understand how complete of a theory we have in evolution. These people read a book, translated from the original language, patched together and "remixed" several times over the centuries, and not allowed to the general public for much of its history, kept "safe" by those who stood to gain the most by manipulating its contents - And people call that a complete, inviolable, sacred work. Then they look at the modern world, see the current political layout of the UK, and read hundreds of basically agreeing third-party accounts of the history thereof - but because the Bayeux tapestry has a few worm-holes in it, they refuse to believe the battle of Hastings ever occured.
Then it follows that we should all do a half-assed job at everything, so that extra people can be hired.
Depriving someone of a job by doing the work for free does not equate to deliberately underperforming at one's own job, for the simple reason that if I underperform at my own job, I will not have that job for long. A volunteer, OTOH, practically cannot underperform to a job-losing degree, short of deliberate sabotage.
it enters the economy, and people's incomes, somewhere.
Puh-lease! No, it doesn't - It enters a CRO's annual bonus, and, having more than he can realistically spend in the first place, ends up as nothing more than another number in an account.
Reaganomics failed. Trickle-down, doesn't. The rich collect money, and the poor get poorer, until they revolt. It has happened, it happens as we speak, and it will keep happening, unavoidably.
Athlon64 PC $1,095.00
And... You can upgrade the video card!
No, it's volunteerism. It would be communism if you forced others to use GPL'd code. But they don't have to.
Actually, the GPL does count as a form of communism: "a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed".
The problem here involves the typical American perception of communism - It does not mean "bad" or "evil" or "Stalinist". It just means that no one "owns" the product of that work, and no one can monopolize its use.
In some cases, communism works very, very well. For material goods, it tends to fail due to greed. As a system of government, it fails quite spectacularly (again, mostly due to human greed). But for intangibles, in which category falls software, music, movies, thoughts, algorithms, and all the topics we so often argue about here on Slashdot under the broad category of "IP" - communism works amazingly well. Everyone can contribute, and everyone can share the results equally. In fact, it takes quite extreme laws and enforcement effort to avoid IP naturally falling into a more-or-less communistic state of existence.
As an aside, I find it almost scary that people would defend against an accusation of communism by calling something volunteerism. In a perfect world, with no one going hungry or unsheltered or lacking basic medical treatment, volunteerism seems like a good, noble philosophy. In the real world, operating under a basically capitalistic economy, volunteerism actively does no less evil than put people out of a job. For every hour someone works for no pay, they have deprived someone of the possibility of working that same hour for the purpose of feeding, clothing, and sheltering themselves. In a very real way, someone who don't need that hour's pay (or they wouldn't have worked it for free) has managed to take it away from someone who does.
As the one exception to this, court-ordered community service seems reasonable, in that it allows a person to "pay" the community back for their crimes by spending time rather than dollars. For someone without extensive financial resources, this means a fine that doesn't unduely burden them. For someone with money to burn, it causes them to spend something more valuable to them than a mere monetary fine. A win/win situation both ways.
God gave mankind the gift of free will so that they could use that free will to obey him
Can you seriously say that with a straight face?
"Gee, having these angels grovel and worship me gets a tad tiring... Sure, they'd give their left nut for me (if I hadn't made them androgynous), but they don't really have any choice".
"Okay, hmm, you there, and you - I've given you the ability to say no to me. Now you can choose to act like obsessed fans."
"WHAAAATTTT?? You DON'T want to fawn all over me for eternity? Well, screw you, then! I'll just take my trees and go home!"
Okay... Moral of the story? God acts like a selfish, egotistical little brat who had to create an entirely new way to stroke his ego?
Not the most flattering interpretation. In fact, the entire ante- (and meso- ) diluvian portion of the bible of the Jews/Christians just has so many flaws, unless we consider it nothing more than an allegory for the dawn of consciousness in a particular pack of humans living in the fertile crescent, and who eventually had to migrate away during a particularly nasty annual flooding of the same.
As an aside / full-disclosure, I do believe in a Creator, but suspect that humans have the whole thing so completely screwed up as to make "religion" and "fiction" effectively interchangeable.
Imagine, if you will, a large rock.
Although your line of reasoning works fairly well, you don't need to go nearly that in-depth with the explanation... The entire paradox reduces to a simple contradiction - rock and not-rock (or move and not-move, if you prefer).
Since anything follows from a contradiction, a simple and 100% correct answer exists to the question - "Yes". You could qualify that with "but It could move the rock anyway", but don't really need to.
Of course, since anything follows from a contradiction, you could also correctly answer "Purple flaming ducks chew on power tools", but then you'd need to spend FAR longer than you probably would like, trying to explain the answer to someone who presumeably has a rather poor grasp of formal logic in the first place, with a side trip into the aesthetic appeal of dabbling with surrealism vs nonsense.
I have spend years following the job markets and developer surveys, as I am expected to give professional advice based on facts, not opinion.
.NET family don't have them), so I
didn't immediate realize that I had somehow
tried to work on a nonexistant TextBox, and
just can't understand why simply setting a
text field would cause such an anomalous error.
Good thing we have high quality compilers
(sorry, "interpreters") that give us meaningful
errors when they don't know how to proceed
in this wonderful modern world, eh?
Then you should have no problem answering the question, and proving a source for your claim.
Please, relieve me of my ignorance and post a (credible) link, a journal cite, or even an online poll with more than a few hundred votes.
By what statistical measure do you determine that most of the huge numbers of Java developers are not doing it by choice?
Why, by no lesser evidence than that provided by someone who "have spend years following the job markets and developer surveys", your own expert testimony, of course! Combined with a recent slashdot poll from earlier this year, with 46800 votes (statistically very significant, if it had occurred under more rigorous conditions)... Since you have "proven by assertion" your claim that most coders use Java, while a (more-or-less) statistically significant ratio of coders prefer not to, it follows that they must use Java against their will.
So, taking a closer look at that poll... Well, lookey-here... C and C++ add up to 38%, while Java (including C# and VB - Considering the popularity of VB, at least, it looks like some Slashdot editor wanted to give Java at least a chance to make a fair showing) only earning a sad 17% (the same as plain ol' vanilla C all by its lonesome). Even humble Perl scores 18%, higher than Java + VB + C#.
But as I mentioned, Slashdot polls don't exactly have the best of experimental methodologies, so no doubt you have a much better source, ready at your fingertips to fire off to me at a moment's notice...
But, unlike in C or C++ those bugs are actually trapped and you get traceable exception reports.
Well, I can certainly see the justification for that - Actually using a debugger takes skill and an understanding of the underlying architecture.
So, I recently found myself forced to do quite a bit of work in C#.NET, and just this past week, got a stack trace talking about a System.Drawing.Bitmap object (unused anywhere in my code) when trying to set a TextBox control's ".Text" property. Unfortunately, having no concept of how a computer actually performs those instructions I give it, I've never heard of a "null pointer" (pointers? oh, how crude! Everyone knows that pointers cause bugs, so languages like Java and the
Changing the problem domain simply changes how people approach the problem. The "essence" of the code remains the same - Adding additional layers of abstraction makes it easier to grasp at a high level, but much harder to know exactly what occurs at the actual hardware level. So, if you add 1+1 and depend on it equalling 3, your program will fail no matter how clever of a language you use. But a sufficiently "clever" program may hide the fact that you expected 1+1 to equal 3, not unlike in my example above - I didn't "set" anything to zero, nor does "zero" have a meaning (within the language) as a value for a TextBox to directly have. But the error resulted from exactly that - At the lowest level, a memory location, and later, a CPU register, that the iterpreter had called "textbox1", had a value of zero. All in a language without explicit pointers (not talking about "unsafe" mode) and nice detailed stack traces.
Which is nothing compared to the disasters that have resulted from the use of C and C++ over 20 years.
Don't blame the hammer when the homeowner insists you finish the job in half the time and under budget, then the house falls down a few years later.
And if you believe the same (via different mechanisms) won't happen under Java, or Fortress, or any supposedly "safe" language - I have a bridge to sell you. Buffer overruns occur because of sloppy coding - In 90% of cases I've personally had to deal with, simply using snprintf() rather than sprintf() (or some comparable pair of "dumb" and "length specified" functions) would solve the problem. Do you really think that similar oversights won't affect Java in some way?
I think you need to take a look at the real world, where Java is the most widely used language.
Your source for that factoid? I communicate with quite a lot of real-world programmers, and although I wouldn't discount the number doing Java (mostly not by their choice), when it comes to getting actual work done, almost everyone chooses C or C++.
and their lack of memory management and safety
People don't pay me because I do something easy and safe. They pay me because I do something that most people cannot do, no matter how much time they may dedicate to it.
Progressively easier and safer languages will bring "toy" coding closer to the mainstream (though never quite to the mainstream, since coding takes some real thought, and people dislike having to think). But forcing people who can actually code to use castrated languages just wastes time and resources. You want a cute webpage, use a safe language; You want an OS, use C. You want MS Paint, use a safe language; you want The GIMP, use C.
Computers "speak" machine language. Assembly gives a near 1:1 translation of that, but takes too much work to maintain (and I'll admit that even as someone who likes asm and doesn't hesitate to use it sparingly when platform independance doesn't matter). As long as our computers have a CPU even remotely like what we currently have available, C provides a near perfect balance of closeness to the CPU (with some care, you can translate most C to ML almost directly) with human readability and structural ease of maintenance.
I'm sure a large number of Fortran developers would be very interested, even if you aren't.
You want Windows' Calculator, use a safe language. You want high performance code that runs natively on just about any supercomputer, use HPF (Fortran). "Interest", perhaps. But if Fortress provides its "ease" and "safety" the same way Java supposedly did the same for C++, it will have marketing droids as its only fans.
You really do come off as an elitist prick:
And you come off as an AC.
I win.
there are a generation or two, or three, of people who do not read books. these people go to movies. should the story be inaccessible to them?
b reath
funny as the book.
Put simply - Yes. Fuck 'em. If they won't take the time to pick up a book and read the story, why should they have access to it?
And I don't mean this as a troll... The biggest complaint I see in this thread involves how poorly DA's British, intellectual, subtle style of humor, translates to the big screen. This very consistently happens with productions of decent literature (as opposed to productions of hacks who basically write screenplays in novel form), because the two mediums do NOT have totally equivalent expressive power.
translating one form of literary culture into another form, is usually a good way to spread that culture. don't you agree?
No, I do not.
Movies convey information as though the viewer exists as a disembodied viewer floating through the story, observing the events that unfold. Great for action, great for "physical" comedy, great for slasher flicks and some forms of more physical horror, great for porn. Okay for drama, barely passable for "psychological" thrillers (only by making offensively frequent use of information the viewer should not fairly have, such as showing scenes of the unidentifiable bad guy torturing the little girl, when the other 99% of the movie has the observer follow Detective BadAss).
Books, OTOH, make use of the reader's imagination. They let you inside the heads of the charaters without the need for annoying voiceovers - For that matter, a book could get away with not having a single spoken word (referring only to fiction here, of course, since nonfiction would make this a moot point).
your self, having read the book, can't possibly think of why there is any reason whatsoever to contribute to another cultural form.
Hello? Come back down here, friend, you've floated a bit too far out there.
This doesn't involve cultural anthropology, it involves two mediums that most people in the modern Western world have basically equal access to (or if not, they do not by choice). Both mediums have their uses. But both do not work for every story.
In this case, the moving-pictures-with-sound format doesn't work well to fully express the story. I would even say that about the original BBC episodes - Not bad, but not nearly as stop-reading-so-I-can-stop-laughing-and-catch-my-
next time you see a 9 year old, ask them if they know the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
And after going to see this movie, they might "know" the right answer, but they won't "get" why so many of us "geeks who read" find that answer hilarious. That 9YO will roll his or her eyes, and say "what-EVER" in that dismissive tone that only 5-15YOs seem able to master.
This has nothing to do with elitism, or with some noble idea of "making culture accessible". It involves placing something in the wrong context. The crocodile doesn't live in trees, the monkey doesn't live in the desert, and the cat doesn't live in a swamp. "format C:\" doesn't work in Linux. And HHG doesn't work on film.