I was in Kyoto on 47Mbit ADSL, and I could download at about 16Mbit/s (2 megabytes/sec). Which I only ever got if I was downloading a lot of torrents or a linux ISO from a good Japanese mirror.
A friend of mine (also in Kyoto) is on 100Mbit fiber, and I think for her the bottleneck is finding places which actually provide content at that speed.
I'd figure it was the same for any of the larger cities, so the better question is where in Japan are you?
You're looking at this backwards. The artist isn't the one not living up to their contract, Sony is.
The artist gives Sony the right to distribute their music with the understanding that Sony will do as much as it can to ensure their music will be distributed to those who want it (anything less would result in less money for the artist and Sony). By limiting online access to their own service the artists are missing out on a huge amount of downloads and revenue.
The issue isn't the artist saying I want more money or different terms, the issue is the artist saying you are supposed to be selling my music. A hell of a lot more music is being sold via iTunes than through your site (resulting in more money for everyone), so get with the program and sell my music.
You could just spend the money on your kid then and cut the school out of it. Your kid would probably be better for it as well.
By donating to one school, the kids in that school will benefit. In the rich areas the kids in the school would probably benefit a lot. Including the ones who's parents didn't donate anything. Why should these children get these benefits when children in other schools won't?
I guess it comes down to your motivation for donating in the first place. If you want to improve your child's education, hire them a private tutor, enroll them in extra-curricular courses they enjoy, work less and spend more time with them. Any of these ways will be a much wiser use of the money.
If you want to help the schools provide education, then understand that their mandate is to provide education for all (that is why they are PUBLIC schools, private schools who will gladly accept all your money exist as well you know). If they feel that directed donations undermines this goal then they won't allow them. This isn't true for all school districs (as I know my mother donates a lot of her time to a neighbourhood school, one that none of her children attended), but may be true for yours.
<snarky comment>If you want to donate so that all your neighbours know you donated I'm sure you can buy a plaque saying "I donated $30,000 to the school board this year, how about you?" and hang it on your front door.</snarky comment>
Again, I'm presenting the argument of some school boards. I can see some of the reasons for and against it. Personally, I think if there were mechanisms in place for students to attend ANY school in the district (not just the closest one) and some sort of luxury tax on donations where something like 50% is used for the purpose it was donated for and 50% used as the board sees fit then there would be very little for either side to argue about. But hey, I'm posting on Slashdot so obviously my opinion isn't worth very much.
"death gratuity" sounds too much like "gratuitous death", as in your son died fighting in a pointless war, so of course it had to go.
Mind you, that fallen doesn't sound too good, after all, all good soldiers go to heaven right? No doubt this will be fixed in a later piece of legislation.
It's to make sure that all the schools are about equal. Otherwise the school in the rich neighbourhood would get tons of donations from parents who have the cash sitting around while the school in the poor neighbourhood would get nothing. The school district has to be fair across the entire district, and they have decided that donations like that would make the situation unfair because the donations to the rich neighbourhood school would in effect make the funding per student to be higher than the poor neighbourhood school. It's a bit socialist, but then again so are most teachers so it makes sense.
I have no idea how much time you've spent on the Wordpress support forums but Podz (and many others) do a great job of helping people who do have support problems. Be it by giving them the appropriate link to look at, clarifying some concepts, or going to the person's site and figuring out some site-specific solutions. I think I've seen discussions where he's (with permission) actually gone into someone's server and fixed stuff up himself.
The point of this is that Podz and other mods like him do a lot of work providing timely support, and probably feel that if this thread took hold on the forum they'd be spending a lot of time talking about matt's actions instead of providing support.
Plus, for everyone using Wordpress 1.5, there is even a link to this issue (the Wordpress.org hosting Hot Nacho content issue) in the dashboard (which is how I found out about it).
Does no one else have a problem with how misleading the submission title is?
Maybe its different in America, but in Canada an officer from the fire department can come into your house and make sure that there are no fire hazards with no warning. And you have to let them in. This is OK because when they come in they aren't looking for anything other than fire violations and won't pass the information on. Similarly I'd imagine the license man can come in but he can ONLY count TVs. Apparently they have them here in Japan as well, but they haven't knocked on my door yet.
You're kidding right? This thing has been out for a month. Before it came out there was a lot of hype but from the people I know who've seen it the movie wasn't very good.
It seems that the whole Slashdot crowd (or at least those that read the book) love it. Which is fine, but perhaps there are more people like myself who didn't find the book to be all that.
I read the book because it was being discussed on Plastic and I needed a book to read (I always need a book to read). Being a fairly big comic book geek helped as well.
That being said, I didn't find the book very good at all. Maybe it was because I was reading it in the middle of a David Foster Wallace binge (now there's an author), but the characters didn't seem interesting enough. Sure Joseph was cool, but he was too out there, too remote. Sammy's homosexuality also seemed forced. I have no objection to including a gay character, but it could have been handled better (like Apollo and The Midnighter's were in The Authority), it just seemed to cliched.
For a book that dealt with a lot of emotional issues and relationships I found the book to be flat.
After watching Gladiator win the Best Picture Oscar this year, not to mention Julia Roberts' Best Actress, it's fairly obvious that Oscar winners are not best in class.
That being said, Oliver! was a great film, and for that year probably did deserve all of it's Oscars, although Romeo and Juliet was a great film too.
And as for complaining about the horrible Slashdot editing, this is their personal playground and they'll do whatever they want in it. You could always go to k5, a site that seems to be filled with disgruntelled slashdotters.
It makes lots of sense to bunch FreeBSD with free UNIX-like OSes. Why?
a)it is free (as in beer) like the others
b)it is UNIX-like.
If it is UNIX then it is most definitely UNIX-like. In fact it is perfectly UNIX-like.
The reason that your slashdot is red is because this is a BSD article. BSD articles have a red colour scheme. Just be glad it wasn't the horrid scheme used for the your rights online ones. ugh.
As for the article itself, to the home user market there is no difference between BSD and Linux, Linux is just the catch-all term for free Unix-like OS. In that sense it does make sense for FreeBSD to be included.
The problem with the CNN poll is the very question it asked. A better one would be "Do you support congress dictating which sites can and can not be accessed through a library computer terminal". The results might be slightly different then.
Plus CNN polls are notorious for having groups with agendas getting people to vote for their choice. Explain how Jesus/Muhammad/(Insert long dead religious figure here) can be voted into the top 100 people of the last century.
Part of creating anything is the step of submitting it to whoever is going to publish it. It is very common for them to want to make changes to the work, and usually the suggestion for things to be changed gets pushed back to the creator(s). When this happened to the South Park people for Bigger, Longer and Uncut, they took the objectionable part out and replaced it with something even more objectionable. And then the movie was released with the rating they wanted.
It seems that in Kubricks case, more than a little had to do with the fact that the man was not around to either make the changes or tell Warner Bros to keep it intact or put directed by Alan Smithee on it.
Corporate censorship goes on all the time, it's called editing and is a vital part of the creative process. Corporations are only in it for the money, if there were money in making NC-17 films perhaps they wouldn't have required Kubrick to make an R film, more importantly they may have respected the vision of a man who wasn't alive to argue for his final cut.
Besides, in the gaming industry as it stands now, Carmack has way more influence that Kubrick. After all the guy did help found Id.
So explain who's policy it is of not showing NC-17 films? The governments, or the companies that run the cinemas. Because if it's the latter there isn't much you can do about it. Up here (in Canada) we don't have an NC-17 rating, just rated R (MUST be 18 or over to see, no exceptions). But still Eyes Wide Shut was in pretty much every cineplex.
Very often I find that an "artsie" film that I want (such as Ratcatcher, or Malena) to watch only plays in 1 cinema in Toronto (which is really bad considering the size of the city) and even then for a very short time, if I miss it then I'll have to hope that a distributor picks it up for video distribution. But has the movie been censored? No, there just wasn't a large enough market for it to be playing on as many screens as Erin Brokovich. It's not censorship, it's just one of the things you've got to deal with if your tastes fall outside those of the Moral Majority.
The bland tastes of middle america are a much harsher form of censorship than either the MPAA or Loews. It's due to their tastes that you hear the same songs on every station, and that survivor gets millions of viewers every episode. A sad result is that so many deserving programs die an unwatched death (well not so many, tv is pretty low quality in general).
And really, comparing the artistry of Kubrick with Carmack? Writing nice graphics code in C is an impressive feat, not an artistic vision. And most definitely not one of Kubricks calibre.
Controlling the media inputs of your children is a part of good parenting. Would you take a 6 year old child to see a hard core porn film with you? I hope not. What a rating system like this would do is allow the parents to see what objectionable content a child might encounter in a game so that they will be better prepared to deal with it - even if their method of dealing is to not buy the game.
Besides the typical "government interference is evil" line that is always played on slashdot, i have yet to see someone give a good reason why such a rating system is a bad thing. At worst the system becomes meaningless a la explicit lyric warnings on cds, but it's worth a try.
I'm making the assumption that you are a straight male (aka typical slashdot user). But have you ever considered going to the other side? By that I mean looking for another male.
Think about it, you want a geek mate and females who like Anime, 72 hour LAN parties and debating about the relative merits of software licenses are pretty hard to come by. But if you look for a male all of a sudden the odds are in your favour. Look at Slashdot, something like 300,000 users, the vast majority of which are geek males.
Now I know what you're thinking, "I'm not gay, and even if I were, that still leaves the matter of finding another gay male in a fairly homophobic society (geek society, not society at large)?" Well as other posters have suggested don't go looking for a mate, just a friend, and as it's a well documented fact that six beers is all it takes to become homosexual you never know what could happen.
Basically Black and White is a God game. You are a God and your power is based on the amount of people who believe in you. What you do with your power is entirely up to you. You can be Good, Evil, or any combination in between.
You also get to raise an animal to become your servant. The way you treat the animal and what you teach it will determine how it grows. Oh, and after you pick the animal that you want it grows to be Godzilla size, so it's a bit more than your average animal.
The best thing to do is go to one of the fansites, the one that i visit is liongames.com. The game has been really hyped up, but from the screenshots and previews i've read it seems to live up to it, guess we'll all find out in a couple of weeks.
I always thought that since slashdot didn't edit or remove posts it fell under the common carrier category - that is it wouldn't be held liable for content posted as it exercises no control over them.
Also I'm fairly sure that I've seen DeCSS code a couple of times (then again most code looks the same to me).
Perhaps the setting of a legal defence fund, or even a paypal account would help Slashdot fight this battle, and the others that will inevitably follow.
I'd make a comment about Americans and their silly laws, but its probably just a matter of time before DMCA-type laws spread elsewhere.
I started to read Critical Path (back in the summer when i actually had large enough blocks of free time to make it worthwhile), and while I admire the mans optimism and willingness to actually DO SOMETHING, I found his belief in technology to be a bit unfounded, although his motor company example (forgot which one of the Big Three it was) was pretty nice.
Even with his own wonderful dymaxion products (house, car, washroom, etc), they may have been technologically superior, but did why didn't they catch on then? Any explanation that includes the phrase "powers that be" demonstrates exactly where Bucky was wrong in his thinking.
Technological innovations are good, but to get them to be widely adopted you have to work the system, and once you are in a position to actually make some change, the system starts to look good to you so why change it? That's not to say that you shouldn't try to improve the world, but rather that you should realize that most people who are on top like the status quo - it's what got them to their power in the first place.
Hmm... this is almost what is happening in The Authority (comic book series) right now.
The article in question has very little to do with e-books, the searchable books that you can read on PDAs and other electronic gadgets. What it is about is e-paper (all this e-stuff is really e-lame). E-paper looks and feels like paper BUT you can download text to it (and presumably upload text from it. So now when you buy an e-book, instead of putting it on your palm pilot you can download it to your paper and read it off that.
This is a totally cool application, giving you access to your library in a format that you already love, dead tree. It won't quite lead to the paperless office that everyone used to talk about, but should cause a nice reduction. Instead of throwing away a newspaper/magazine, you could just download the next issue, OR re-read an older one.
What we're looking at here is an ancestor of the Diamond Age smart paper that was so cool. I'm just waiting for the version that can tri-fold itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in Kyoto on 47Mbit ADSL, and I could download at about 16Mbit/s (2 megabytes/sec). Which I only ever got if I was downloading a lot of torrents or a linux ISO from a good Japanese mirror.
A friend of mine (also in Kyoto) is on 100Mbit fiber, and I think for her the bottleneck is finding places which actually provide content at that speed.
I'd figure it was the same for any of the larger cities, so the better question is where in Japan are you?
You're looking at this backwards. The artist isn't the one not living up to their contract, Sony is.
The artist gives Sony the right to distribute their music with the understanding that Sony will do as much as it can to ensure their music will be distributed to those who want it (anything less would result in less money for the artist and Sony). By limiting online access to their own service the artists are missing out on a huge amount of downloads and revenue.
The issue isn't the artist saying I want more money or different terms, the issue is the artist saying you are supposed to be selling my music. A hell of a lot more music is being sold via iTunes than through your site (resulting in more money for everyone), so get with the program and sell my music.
You could just spend the money on your kid then and cut the school out of it. Your kid would probably be better for it as well.
By donating to one school, the kids in that school will benefit. In the rich areas the kids in the school would probably benefit a lot. Including the ones who's parents didn't donate anything. Why should these children get these benefits when children in other schools won't?
I guess it comes down to your motivation for donating in the first place. If you want to improve your child's education, hire them a private tutor, enroll them in extra-curricular courses they enjoy, work less and spend more time with them. Any of these ways will be a much wiser use of the money.
If you want to help the schools provide education, then understand that their mandate is to provide education for all (that is why they are PUBLIC schools, private schools who will gladly accept all your money exist as well you know). If they feel that directed donations undermines this goal then they won't allow them. This isn't true for all school districs (as I know my mother donates a lot of her time to a neighbourhood school, one that none of her children attended), but may be true for yours.
<snarky comment>If you want to donate so that all your neighbours know you donated I'm sure you can buy a plaque saying "I donated $30,000 to the school board this year, how about you?" and hang it on your front door.</snarky comment>
Again, I'm presenting the argument of some school boards. I can see some of the reasons for and against it. Personally, I think if there were mechanisms in place for students to attend ANY school in the district (not just the closest one) and some sort of luxury tax on donations where something like 50% is used for the purpose it was donated for and 50% used as the board sees fit then there would be very little for either side to argue about. But hey, I'm posting on Slashdot so obviously my opinion isn't worth very much.
"death gratuity" sounds too much like "gratuitous death", as in your son died fighting in a pointless war, so of course it had to go.
Mind you, that fallen doesn't sound too good, after all, all good soldiers go to heaven right? No doubt this will be fixed in a later piece of legislation.
It's to make sure that all the schools are about equal. Otherwise the school in the rich neighbourhood would get tons of donations from parents who have the cash sitting around while the school in the poor neighbourhood would get nothing.
The school district has to be fair across the entire district, and they have decided that donations like that would make the situation unfair because the donations to the rich neighbourhood school would in effect make the funding per student to be higher than the poor neighbourhood school.
It's a bit socialist, but then again so are most teachers so it makes sense.
Perhaps that would make them the second-most important chip maker on the planet then?
I have no idea how much time you've spent on the Wordpress support forums but Podz (and many others) do a great job of helping people who do have support problems. Be it by giving them the appropriate link to look at, clarifying some concepts, or going to the person's site and figuring out some site-specific solutions. I think I've seen discussions where he's (with permission) actually gone into someone's server and fixed stuff up himself.
The point of this is that Podz and other mods like him do a lot of work providing timely support, and probably feel that if this thread took hold on the forum they'd be spending a lot of time talking about matt's actions instead of providing support.
Plus, for everyone using Wordpress 1.5, there is even a link to this issue (the Wordpress.org hosting Hot Nacho content issue) in the dashboard (which is how I found out about it).
Does no one else have a problem with how misleading the submission title is?
Maybe its different in America, but in Canada an officer from the fire department can come into your house and make sure that there are no fire hazards with no warning. And you have to let them in. This is OK because when they come in they aren't looking for anything other than fire violations and won't pass the information on. Similarly I'd imagine the license man can come in but he can ONLY count TVs. Apparently they have them here in Japan as well, but they haven't knocked on my door yet.
You're kidding right? This thing has been out for a month. Before it came out there was a lot of hype but from the people I know who've seen it the movie wasn't very good.
5 ?nn20041124b1.htm
But it did do well in the box office:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl
It seems that the whole Slashdot crowd (or at least those that read the book) love it. Which is fine, but perhaps there are more people like myself who didn't find the book to be all that.
I read the book because it was being discussed on Plastic and I needed a book to read (I always need a book to read). Being a fairly big comic book geek helped as well.
That being said, I didn't find the book very good at all. Maybe it was because I was reading it in the middle of a David Foster Wallace binge (now there's an author), but the characters didn't seem interesting enough. Sure Joseph was cool, but he was too out there, too remote. Sammy's homosexuality also seemed forced. I have no objection to including a gay character, but it could have been handled better (like Apollo and The Midnighter's were in The Authority), it just seemed to cliched.
For a book that dealt with a lot of emotional issues and relationships I found the book to be flat.
But that could just be me.
So Australia will have a huge african wilderness park and a 1km high concrete windmill?
I guess calling the place Oz was a nice bit of foresight.
That being said, Oliver! was a great film, and for that year probably did deserve all of it's Oscars, although Romeo and Juliet was a great film too.
And as for complaining about the horrible Slashdot editing, this is their personal playground and they'll do whatever they want in it. You could always go to k5, a site that seems to be filled with disgruntelled slashdotters.
I know that sometimes articles fade in and out of our collective consciousness but it was just posted on Wednesday and nothing new has happened since.
Although I guess anything would be better than talking about how the Leafs managed to lose to the Habs tonight. Disgraceful that was.
It makes lots of sense to bunch FreeBSD with free UNIX-like OSes. Why?
a)it is free (as in beer) like the others
b)it is UNIX-like.
If it is UNIX then it is most definitely UNIX-like. In fact it is perfectly UNIX-like.
As for the article itself, to the home user market there is no difference between BSD and Linux, Linux is just the catch-all term for free Unix-like OS. In that sense it does make sense for FreeBSD to be included.
Plus CNN polls are notorious for having groups with agendas getting people to vote for their choice. Explain how Jesus/Muhammad/(Insert long dead religious figure here) can be voted into the top 100 people of the last century.
It seems that in Kubricks case, more than a little had to do with the fact that the man was not around to either make the changes or tell Warner Bros to keep it intact or put directed by Alan Smithee on it.
Corporate censorship goes on all the time, it's called editing and is a vital part of the creative process. Corporations are only in it for the money, if there were money in making NC-17 films perhaps they wouldn't have required Kubrick to make an R film, more importantly they may have respected the vision of a man who wasn't alive to argue for his final cut.
Besides, in the gaming industry as it stands now, Carmack has way more influence that Kubrick. After all the guy did help found Id.
Very often I find that an "artsie" film that I want (such as Ratcatcher, or Malena) to watch only plays in 1 cinema in Toronto (which is really bad considering the size of the city) and even then for a very short time, if I miss it then I'll have to hope that a distributor picks it up for video distribution. But has the movie been censored? No, there just wasn't a large enough market for it to be playing on as many screens as Erin Brokovich. It's not censorship, it's just one of the things you've got to deal with if your tastes fall outside those of the Moral Majority.
The bland tastes of middle america are a much harsher form of censorship than either the MPAA or Loews. It's due to their tastes that you hear the same songs on every station, and that survivor gets millions of viewers every episode. A sad result is that so many deserving programs die an unwatched death (well not so many, tv is pretty low quality in general).
And really, comparing the artistry of Kubrick with Carmack? Writing nice graphics code in C is an impressive feat, not an artistic vision. And most definitely not one of Kubricks calibre.
Besides the typical "government interference is evil" line that is always played on slashdot, i have yet to see someone give a good reason why such a rating system is a bad thing. At worst the system becomes meaningless a la explicit lyric warnings on cds, but it's worth a try.
Think about it, you want a geek mate and females who like Anime, 72 hour LAN parties and debating about the relative merits of software licenses are pretty hard to come by. But if you look for a male all of a sudden the odds are in your favour. Look at Slashdot, something like 300,000 users, the vast majority of which are geek males.
Now I know what you're thinking, "I'm not gay, and even if I were, that still leaves the matter of finding another gay male in a fairly homophobic society (geek society, not society at large)?" Well as other posters have suggested don't go looking for a mate, just a friend, and as it's a well documented fact that six beers is all it takes to become homosexual you never know what could happen.
Plus you'd find Will & Grace so much funnier.
You also get to raise an animal to become your servant. The way you treat the animal and what you teach it will determine how it grows. Oh, and after you pick the animal that you want it grows to be Godzilla size, so it's a bit more than your average animal.
The best thing to do is go to one of the fansites, the one that i visit is liongames.com. The game has been really hyped up, but from the screenshots and previews i've read it seems to live up to it, guess we'll all find out in a couple of weeks.
Also I'm fairly sure that I've seen DeCSS code a couple of times (then again most code looks the same to me).
Perhaps the setting of a legal defence fund, or even a paypal account would help Slashdot fight this battle, and the others that will inevitably follow.
I'd make a comment about Americans and their silly laws, but its probably just a matter of time before DMCA-type laws spread elsewhere.
Even with his own wonderful dymaxion products (house, car, washroom, etc), they may have been technologically superior, but did why didn't they catch on then? Any explanation that includes the phrase "powers that be" demonstrates exactly where Bucky was wrong in his thinking.
Technological innovations are good, but to get them to be widely adopted you have to work the system, and once you are in a position to actually make some change, the system starts to look good to you so why change it? That's not to say that you shouldn't try to improve the world, but rather that you should realize that most people who are on top like the status quo - it's what got them to their power in the first place.
Hmm... this is almost what is happening in The Authority (comic book series) right now.
This is a totally cool application, giving you access to your library in a format that you already love, dead tree. It won't quite lead to the paperless office that everyone used to talk about, but should cause a nice reduction. Instead of throwing away a newspaper/magazine, you could just download the next issue, OR re-read an older one.
What we're looking at here is an ancestor of the Diamond Age smart paper that was so cool. I'm just waiting for the version that can tri-fold itself.
Here's a link for you: www.speed-uwaterloo.sympatico.ca That being said, i miss the @Home access i have at home, more reliable and it had a decent upstream (uploading at 18k/s gets annoying) although HSE is way better for playing FIFA2001. Customer service seems decent for both of them as well, but thats partly because my @Home access was in a good neighbourhood.