Once you start changing a movie for nudity, where does it stop? Gone With the Wind where Rhett stays? Soylent Green where it's lettuce? Bambi where his parents show up again at the end of a movie?
Once Upon a Time in the West where Cheyenne doesn't die?
"Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor."
Now, Mr Studio Boss, about that print of The Magnificent Ambersons. And about the twenty years of releasing only mutilated prints of Once Upon A Time in the West. Let's pop over to London and see if we can find a print of The Wicker Man unmutilated other than in Roger Cormann's desk, if we can get permission to dig up the Westway.
I still don't like it being done at all and believe that if someone's offended, then don't watch, and if the kiddies aren't old enough to see it uneditted, wait until their older. But it's going to happen.
In the past, Mr Bowdler and his like (hence Bowdlerised) saw no problem with producing versions of Shakespeare to suit the mores of the time. Shakespeare was acknowledged as a good thing for children, you see, but there's all that violence (so repressed were the times that they didn't even spot the raging sexual content, but that's another story). There were Hamlets, Lears and Macbeths with happy endings: God Alone knows how, and I'm not sufficiently exercised to research it. A Lear in which children all respect their fathers? A Macbeth with no violence? The mind positively boggles.
Such things may be fascinating cultural artifacts. But they're not remotely what Shakespeare wrote, and had he been alive, he would have had every right to be deeply pissed off.
UK editions often have some variation on this rubric:
Except in the United States, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
That's a Penguin from 1997. A 1998 Collins doesn't have the `Except in the United States' clause. It's in a 1977 reprint of a 1965 Collins, too. It's not in a 1954 UK edition I have to hand. It seems to be becoming less common, although a 2005 book I've turned up does have it.
Of course, both the vodka and the shaking are transgressive for an upper-class man of the fifties. They both go to show that Bond is a bit of a cad. A martini of the period would be gin and vermouth, stirred. Paradoxically, even for the fifties, 4 parts spirit to one part vermouth isn't very `dry', and is proportions that one would associate with the pre-war era. But martini drinking in the UK isn't terribly well documents (Churchill famously just wanted the vermouth bottle waved at the glass from accross the room, but there's not a lot else) and the UK didn't have the motivation of using vermouth to drown the bad taste of and/or stretch out the cost of the bootleg gin.
How is it a triumph? A thirty year old technology, which has flown dozens of times before, with a tolerable but not stellar reliability and safety record, does have its launch scrubbed? Christ, are Americans that desperate for something to cheer? Remember, by Apollo 13 the moon missions didn't justify postponing the soap operas, and 18--20's cancellation hardly caused national outcry. What makes you think ``Shuttle takes off again, no-one killed'' is a bug story, on July 4th or any other time?
Lets say I make an icon of "kill Bush" and gun pointed at his head and make it an icon for my IM.
Which circulates around your social circle and their social circle and so on unto the nth degree for three weeks? You get a visit from those nice men from the US Treasury and you end up in jail.
Now lets say I make similar icon of "kill my boss".
You lose your job. Even here in the employment protection socialist world of Europe, you lose your job. Instantly. And then you get to explain to the nice men with peaked caps what you were doing.
Why 'teacher' relationship calls for an exception? Being an idiot is my right protected by constitution.
Persumably, by extension, you'd have no difficulty with teachers circulating a list of pupils they want to see killed?
why did the school have to impart such a grand, and rather debasing, punishment?
Pour encourager les autres. And it worked, didn't it? Everyone in the school now knows what happens if you mail death threats to the Whitehouse. ``My friend had learned his lesson just fine from the response from the feds'' is dubious: someone smart enough to learn that particular lesson wouldn't have been so stupid in the first place. That the US Secret Service react to all threats to the president is hardly a news story, is it?
Conspiracy requires an overt act in furtherance of the crime.
Get legal advice before relying on postings on slashdot. This isn't true in England, I don't think it's true in Scotland, I'd be stunned if it were true in France, and I recall reading it isn't true in all US states (for example, most broad generalisations break down in Louisiana).
`Freakonomics' ascribes the huge drop in US teen crime through the 90s to Roe vs Wade. It's an excellent example of a theory designed to offend absolutely everyone: the idea that more disadvantaged women having abortions and therefore fewer delinquent children being born (hence your point about the shift towards more affluent criminals) manages to offend left, right and religious in equal doses. It has the ring of truth, though.
I've not seen an analysis, but a similar bout of hysteria about teen crime in the early 90s followed by its collapse (no matter what the red-tops think) would seem to co-incide with the UK abortion law changing a few years before Roe.
The closest analogue (ho, ho) I can think of to the US NTSC->HDTV cutover is the UK's analogue switchoff, scheduled to happen over the next five to ten years. Freeview, Sky and the other digital platforms have huge traction (60 to 70% already, I think) and the price of set top boxes has dropped to below fifty quid. That presumably would be the solution for the huge estate of NTSC TVs in the US: boxes that take in an aerial and put out NTSC. The government is saying (in not so many words) that for large groups of the disadvantaged population they'll provide a free STB come switchoff.
But remember that in the UK, we have one major advantage in the consumer space: every TV sold for the past fifteen-odd years has SCART. It's a horrid connection in many ways, but it's ideal for these sorts of jobs. There are set top boxes with RF outputs, but they're only required for the sort of TVs that really won't be in use come 2011.
Also (and I don't know how this works in the US) Freeview is being broadcast on the same bands as analogue, so people don't need a new aerial unless they have signal level issues. And as the spectrum progressively moves over (a la the TACS->GSM migration) the power differential will decrease, so by the time of the analogue switchoff a lot of people who curren tly have issues with Freeview will no longer have a problem. Where I live there's on paper no coverage, and I need an 18-element Yagi and a masthead preamp. But then the picture's is way better, because I don't have the problems of the ghosting from the hill behind me. That's with ~100W from the transmitter, as against the ~250kW that the analogue signal has (Sutton Coldfield).
So I think a switchover is manageable, given the will.
I always enjoyed #UPPER and #LOWER. The 1900 had such short instructions (24 bit words, 4 6-bit bytes) that you could only access beyond the first 1024 (I think) bytes by using a register (accumulator in those days) as a modifier. #LOWER memory was directly addressable, #UPPER required the addition of a 24 bit accumulator to the base address. And doing IO by initaiting the card (or whatever) moving, then doing as much as you could before calling SUSBY to wait for the IO to complete. Happy days. I'm not old enough to have done it for a living, but I had access to a 1902A (access in the sense of walking into the machine room with a deck of cards) in my early teens in the late seventies.
You Americans are so proud of the fact that you don't have any sort of Data Protection Legislation. Apparently, restricting the rights of business to hold any data they like and process it in any way they like under any protection they can be bothered to cobble together is the American Way, and actually giving data subjects the right of audit and access is communist.
SLR Camera (that's acknowledged in the article) --- the sensor isn't revealed except during the actual taking of the picture, the rest of the time there's a mirror in the way.
Ordinary digicam, but use the optical viewfinder and keep your hand over the lens until you take the picture.
If they're using wavelength X for the detection process, just use a filter that blocks that wavelength and work in black and white (perfectly acceptable for most trade show spying)
Polarising filter will probably screw things up.
Lens Hood would mean the detection system would need to be on-axis.
It was government funded research trying to push a string.
Government funded's not of itself a bad thing: TCP/IP springs to mind. OSI was worse: it was funded by an unholy alliance of regulated 80s telcos (all that ``no more than 16 telcos per country'' business) and subsidised European computer makers (ICL, Bull, Siemens) and the EU. Quietly, they hoped to leverage one-country/one-vote processes to kick the Americans. And the technology was horrible (I speak as someone who's run a production X.400(88) mailer as the only mail conduit between 500 people and the Arpanet).
at least the DoD is mandating adoption of IPv6 by Service Agencies
They did the same for OSI at one stage, as did most European governments. It didn't help. Protocols tends to take off fairly rapidly, or die a horrible slow death: I can't offhand think of a protocol which sat unused for years and then suddenly burst forth. Had IPv^ just been IPv4 with longer addresses, things might have been different, but IPv6 suffered from the OSI disease of attempting to standardise things for which there was almost no fielded experience or which were shortly to be solved problems anyway.
Multicast and IPSec haven't exactly taken the IPv4 world by storm for anything other than specific tasks, but they're mandatory in IPv6. More seriously, a lot of comprises were made in order to structure the addresses to make routing easier: well, I've taken my Cisco IGS routers out of service a long time ago, and the horror stories (``IPv4 addressing means core routers will need, like, a GIGABYTE of RAM'') just aren't as frightening as they used to be.
IPv6 claims to solve the problems of the 21st century, but it also attacks a lot of the problems of the 20th (RAM is expensive, comms links are slow). In the meantime, the big wins have been the reclamation of most of the Class A space, the absolute ubiquity of CIDR and the tendency for large enterprises to use RFC1918 for internal systems (1996: you want every client on the Internet; 2006: you hide 20K hosts behind one touchpoint).
The set of people who want an MP3 player, haven't got an iPod and yet have the money to buy something in the neighbourhood of iPod prices is essentially null. There are probably a couple of/. readers somewhere who have held off pending Ogg Vorbis support and something that doesn't have fanboys, and perhaps you might be able to make a decent garage industry out of that. Two garages, perhaps.
ian
Re:Has this guy got much legal defence?
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
About the only scenario when you have rights to your image would be a photograph taken somewhere you have a `reasonable expectation of privacy'. If you visit some dude's house and he takes pictures of you, you've pretty well given up any rights if he posts it to the world. If he visits your house you might have more of a case, but even then it would depend on some concept of how private you expected the pictures to be. Paris Hilton may care to give us her opinion on this...
ian
Re:Has this guy got much legal defence?
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
If you sell someone a hard disk containing information that you are the copyright holder of (eg photographs you took yourself, on your own account rather than as a work for hire) then you're going to need a pretty slippery lawyer to argue that you retained the copyright. I'm not saying that you definitely have transferred the copyright, but absent any agreement it's going to be tricky.
The concept of `model releases' is pretty sketchy in UK law: if I go out into the street and photograph random bystanders, those photographs and their copyright belong to me absolutely. See this JISC document. You don't have a right to your image in public.
Since you're playing at being a lawyer, it's worth pointing out that stating that something is defamatory when it isn't is itself defamatory of the author. As I doubt you're a libel lawyer, I'd be interested to know on what basis you believe it to be defamatory.
ian
Re:Truth not always a defense
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 2, Informative
When Liberace sued the Daily Mail over Cassandra's column, which implied that Liberace was gay, homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. The Daily Mail didn't run a justification defence: they argued that the words complained of did not accuse Liberace of a crime. They lost, but not for the reasons you suggest. If I could be bothered I'd fish a book I have about the case out and correct the Wikipedia article.
If you buy a photo from a photographer are you allowed to post it on the internet?
That would depend on what I bought, wouldn't it? If I were Corbis, and I bought a photograph from you, of course I'd have the right to post it to the Internet. And the right to license it in a variety of ways, including re-sale. Now, if I buy a laptop on EBay, what title do I have to the data on that laptop? I don't know. I doubt you know (especially under English law). I doubt there's a hard and fast answer.
ian
Re:Splash damage
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Although it would be an interesting question to ask the police what crime they think they're investigating. You take photographs. You pass those photographs to me in a commercial transaction. I publish them. The only thing I can think of is a copyright dispute, and surely to God the Met have better things to do in 2006 than investigate trivial non-commercial copyright infringement? The third parties might like to bring a case for privacy infringement, but in that scenario the person who put their pictures onto a hard disk and then sold it on EBay might find his position someone exposed (even if they could get a court to accept the basic action, which I doubt).
Slashdot Mirror
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Such things may be fascinating cultural artifacts. But they're not remotely what Shakespeare wrote, and had he been alive, he would have had every right to be deeply pissed off.
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I've not seen an analysis, but a similar bout of hysteria about teen crime in the early 90s followed by its collapse (no matter what the red-tops think) would seem to co-incide with the UK abortion law changing a few years before Roe.
ian
It's unusual for a University to have a song and a shooting all to itself, isn't it?
ian
But remember that in the UK, we have one major advantage in the consumer space: every TV sold for the past fifteen-odd years has SCART. It's a horrid connection in many ways, but it's ideal for these sorts of jobs. There are set top boxes with RF outputs, but they're only required for the sort of TVs that really won't be in use come 2011.
Also (and I don't know how this works in the US) Freeview is being broadcast on the same bands as analogue, so people don't need a new aerial unless they have signal level issues. And as the spectrum progressively moves over (a la the TACS->GSM migration) the power differential will decrease, so by the time of the analogue switchoff a lot of people who curren tly have issues with Freeview will no longer have a problem. Where I live there's on paper no coverage, and I need an 18-element Yagi and a masthead preamp. But then the picture's is way better, because I don't have the problems of the ghosting from the hill behind me. That's with ~100W from the transmitter, as against the ~250kW that the analogue signal has (Sutton Coldfield).
So I think a switchover is manageable, given the will.
ian
I always enjoyed #UPPER and #LOWER. The 1900 had such short instructions (24 bit words, 4 6-bit bytes) that you could only access beyond the first 1024 (I think) bytes by using a register (accumulator in those days) as a modifier. #LOWER memory was directly addressable, #UPPER required the addition of a 24 bit accumulator to the base address. And doing IO by initaiting the card (or whatever) moving, then doing as much as you could before calling SUSBY to wait for the IO to complete. Happy days. I'm not old enough to have done it for a living, but I had access to a 1902A (access in the sense of walking into the machine room with a deck of cards) in my early teens in the late seventies.
ian
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SLR Camera (that's acknowledged in the article) --- the sensor isn't revealed except during the actual taking of the picture, the rest of the time there's a mirror in the way.
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Ordinary digicam, but use the optical viewfinder and keep your hand over the lens until you take the picture.
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If they're using wavelength X for the detection process, just use a filter that blocks that wavelength and work in black and white (perfectly acceptable for most trade show spying)
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Polarising filter will probably screw things up.
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Lens Hood would mean the detection system would need to be on-axis.
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Wear old CCDs as jewelery.
ianian
Multicast and IPSec haven't exactly taken the IPv4 world by storm for anything other than specific tasks, but they're mandatory in IPv6. More seriously, a lot of comprises were made in order to structure the addresses to make routing easier: well, I've taken my Cisco IGS routers out of service a long time ago, and the horror stories (``IPv4 addressing means core routers will need, like, a GIGABYTE of RAM'') just aren't as frightening as they used to be.
IPv6 claims to solve the problems of the 21st century, but it also attacks a lot of the problems of the 20th (RAM is expensive, comms links are slow). In the meantime, the big wins have been the reclamation of most of the Class A space, the absolute ubiquity of CIDR and the tendency for large enterprises to use RFC1918 for internal systems (1996: you want every client on the Internet; 2006: you hide 20K hosts behind one touchpoint).
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The concept of `model releases' is pretty sketchy in UK law: if I go out into the street and photograph random bystanders, those photographs and their copyright belong to me absolutely. See this JISC document. You don't have a right to your image in public.
ian
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When Liberace sued the Daily Mail over Cassandra's column, which implied that Liberace was gay, homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. The Daily Mail didn't run a justification defence: they argued that the words complained of did not accuse Liberace of a crime. They lost, but not for the reasons you suggest. If I could be bothered I'd fish a book I have about the case out and correct the Wikipedia article.
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