If they were to do such a thing, it would make more sense to show the same show twice, once english dubbed in one set of timeblocks, and once hard subbed with japanese. SAP and close-captioning support (or rather, the ease of using such features) is too sketchy to make that an integral part of the scheme. They'd be showing the same show multiple times a week anyway, why not mix it up a bit. I'd say show subbed first in a late night time slot and then the next day dubbed in a prime-time slot. If you really wanted to, you could put Japanese SAP on the dubbed so people could do "raw" if they wanted.
Oh yeah. Also: F) What market there is would be filtered by the fact that it would be on digital cable only, as there is no longer room on the (far more widespread) analog cable spectrum for it, at least not without eliminating something else. I only got Cartoon Network itself 2 years ago on my local cable provider (Goddamn Comcast).
A) There's not a big enough market for it. B) Nobody could afford to license the TV rights for enough anime to cover a whole channel C) Even if you had access to every anime ever produced, it still wouldn't be enough for one channel and you'd be showing stuff over and over again once you'd gone through it all. D) What market the channel would have can't watch TV all day. Huge swaths of time would have essentially no viewership. E) That wouldn't stop the market from trying to watch as much as possible, and they'd get burnt out and stop watching.
Bottom line - Adult Swim is actually doing the right thing here. They've got a daily time slot that keeps people coming back, and a strong brand that they can potentially expand when the time is right. Much like there is a Toonami block on KidsWB, there will probably eventually be an Adult Swim block one or two times a week on a regular channel in prime time (which is what AS needs the most), probably on the WB. In the meantime, they need to get enough of a library that they don't need to show the same things over and over again, and can do shows once a week instead of all week long to fill time.
I feel compelled to mention, now that we're on the subject of intense content, that Narutaru (AKA Shadow Star) is THE most misadvertised show, EVER, in all respects, and even more intense than NTHT in its own right. Superficially it looks like Pokemon-type kids-with-magic-monsters, it's broadcast on Kid Station, the opening is cutesy, the first few episodes are inoffensive.
Then the abuse and slaughter cuts in.
And boy, does it get nasty. By the 13th episode anyone who isn't completely dead inside will be sickened by what's happening, even if they liked the show, and appalled at how misleading the previously mentioned things are. Apparently this had to do with the manga - it wasn't doing well in its original form for elementary kids, so the authors tweaked it "a bit" for an older audience, catching the US translators and distributors unaware, among others.
I wouldn't be surprised the the TV Execs in Japan were fooled too, it happened before when they put Evangelion on at 5pm. The $64k question is will they make more anime or not?
NTHT on Cartoon Network? I think not. While not as explicit as some, it's one of the more brutal series on a psychological level. Christ man, it's got kids getting raped and beating each other to death. I'd like to see Saikano, Berserk, GTO, or Initial D, but like it or not there are limits. Maybe if AS was split off onto it's own channel with it's own age standards they could get away with it, but even then...
FMP:F deserves to go on TV though, although I found the original boring and unoriginal. I never got to the end of Wolf's Rain but based on what I saw I liked. It's from the same people who did Cowboy Bebop and has top-notch animation, so it's highly likely it'll make it regardless. GITS:SAC is a no-brainer.
Witch Hunter Robin, IMHO, blows. I have no idea why anyone would find this boring unimaginative series with its gigantic-craniumed characters appealing. Except perhaps for really angsty people like goths. To which I say, you should read/watch more shoujo. (On a side note, where did this infinite castle thing come from anyway? It was in Get Backers also...) For some reason I feel like mentioning I hated Noir too. All style, no substance.
In my opinion, Cartoon Network or somebody should pick up the following shows, which are all really, really good and require little to no editing (although several need to be licensed and translated, and some would perhaps be better suited for Toonami, or better yet a non-existant mid-level block): Hajime no Ippo (rocks); Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu (damn funny); Naruto (duh); Hellsing (blood's OK if you've got vampires); Read or Die (Original OVA and TV); Excel Saga (insane, the logical follow-up to FLCL); Hunter X Hunter (grows on you); Last Exile (awesome); Nadia (old but good); NieA_7 (wierd); and others.
Also, if Adult Swim Anime were to stop calling itself "Action" and break out into other genres they'd have more flexibility. Onegai Teacher/Twins would draw an audience and notoriety, I guarantee it. So would Love Hina and Chobits. Some of the more crossover Shoujos might do well if given the chance and the right advertising, like Fruits Basket.
I could go on all day, but there's not that much point. Adult swim will get what their limited budget, limited influence on the production and distribution companies, limited time slots, limited late night audience, and Standards and Practices allows, and no more. I'm sure much of what we've suggested they've already thought about and either can't afford or can't clear with S&P. Hellsing comes to mind on both counts.
An "analysis" written by fans - or even worse, a fan - is generally guaranteed to be uncritical garbage. As far as I'm concerned if you're going to produce/consume masturbation material about a show/series, stick to fanfics stay away from slashdot. This seems like a good place to start for Philip and Hemos.
It seems to me that if you had a single standard that 1) Had a common format for the basic basic functionality (the master index is here, has this format, and shows which blocks the files are on; the files are arranged as a heirarchy like so, with these hardlinks/softlinks/aliases; the basic descriptive data is right here, the arbitrary metadata is over here, and alternative OS-specific indices are stored here)
2) Provided for any sort of arbitrary metadata and database/indexing/journaling schemes, with standards for the more common types like file/folder types, application types, long file names, etc.
XML was invented for a similar purpose - a common way of expressing structured information, allowing programs to work with as it suited their needs, especially when those needs overlapped.
Would somebody please tell me why they can't make a filesystem (or filesystem family) that preserves the basic functionality common to all filesystems but supports all the bells and whistles (resource forks, metainfo, etc.) needed to keep the various operating systems happy and can therefore be used with multiple machines with different OSs without jumping through hoops? I'm not saying every machine should use the same FS, I'm just saying there should be a basic standard that allows full functionality for any one OS and basic functionality for any given OS. And if there is one, why isn't anyone using it? It's not like this is an unusual issue - (CD/DVD)(+/-)(RW)s, floppy/zip disks, and portable drives of all kinds have had this problem for as long as I can remember. Why should finding/reading/writing/indexing a string of bits or grouping a bunch of files in a heirarchy readable to any machine be so troublesome?
I can just imagine a Naruto game where you actually have to make the hand seals to use a jutsu. That'd totally rock. Too late for the PS2 fighter though.
Let's assume that (somehow) SCO wins, and starts charging large sums of money for the OS they didn't really develop. What can be done? Can the offending bits be removed from the Linux source tree, and SCO cut out of the loop entirely (which is how I expect the case will really go)? How taxing would it be for companies that can't afford SCO's fees to move to another free open source OS, like FreeBSD?
The sad thing is this is what it took to bring the recording industry kicking and screaming into the modern arena of digital music distribution. Apple can't make any profit for something with a lowered distribution cost relative to comparably priced physical media, and are forced to do so indirectly via a locked-in hardware device. I reckon if they could make a profit on the music, the price of the iPod would go down, it would support other services, and iTunes would support other players. If that isn't a pathetic indicator of the greediness and short-sightedness of the recording industry, I don't know what is. I kind of wish Apple hadn't invented iTMS, just so I could have watched the music industry die an ignoble death.
The Solanaceae family also includes potatoes, chile peppers, and eggplants.
So not just tomacco on your sandwiches, but also tomatsup and a side of potacco fries. A trip to taco bell would be loaded with tobalsa, in addition to tomacco. Tomeggplant parmesan with tomacco sauce would be absolutely loaded with it.
What MSH is proposing really isn't such a bad idea. It's something I've thought about before, actually. I think it wouldn't be that hard to apply principles of object orientation (or alternatively, functional programming) to the existing programs, while laying the foundation for future improvements.
In unix files are just a sequence of bytes - they have no structure. Generally all of them can be treated as text. Likewise every piece of returned data can be treated as text. This is simple - but it can also be a problem, because files are NOT the same. If there was a standardized means for knowing data structure and nature in unix (as well as ignoring it) it could allow more intelligent behavior. A program could return a standardized database table object to the shell, and instead of just outputing it as a plain data stream it could format it for easy reading. Or if that object were piped to another program, the program would know to handle it as a database table, including knowing the headers and relevant information. Even better, because pipes are actually based on lazy evaluation, they would take only the data they needed.
The other difficulty is pipes themselves - they're best suited for stringing together programs that take or return 0-1 chunks of data (which may include arrays). They aren't so good for programs that take multiple arguments.
Basically what we want to do is have programs return objects we can use instead of raw data. The solution is for all apps to return "raw" type objects by default, which still have certain basic attributes. Basic utility functions to convert the data to a particular type and integrate old style commands could
I think OS X is quite well suited for this. The existing cocoa frameworks provide a high degree of functionality and a huge set of object types ready to go. ObjC is dynamic, and its simple, powerful nested syntax is very nice. The only problem is it's quite wordy to write.
I don't think anyone is accusing anyone of anything - I was just saying this sort of research increases the possibility of someone doing such a thing. Expressing a single protein isn't a terribly complicated thing to engineer (relatively speaking).
It's true, HIV is like that. However, it's not likely to mutate into an airborne variant since it requires an envelope derived from the host cell and thus cannot survive drying and needs to make its way to the bloodstream somehow. The nastiest of diseases (Rabies etc) frequently require intimate contact for these reasons.
The worry is that these research principles could be applied to other, more infectious viruses or even naturally occuring bacteria to make them impossible to protect against and ultimately fatal.
It's not far fetched. In particular, I'm trying to remember a book I read 20 years ago, from a school shelf. It was the first science fiction I ever read, and I don't remember the title. I do remember some of what happened in it. Unfortunately, the book was probably published in the late 70s or early 80s and thus I don't think Amazon covers it (I can't find it through their search).
I also don't remember a lot of other books I've read, because I used to read dozens of novels a year and checked most stuff out through the library. Sometimes I was just picking stuff off the shelf based on the back cover alone. While I enjoyed most of them at the time most didn't leave that much of an impression on me, and I remember the titles from only a choice few. Hence, I don't remember the title, not because I'm trolling or forgetful but because I read virtually nothing more than once, and I've read many times more books than you have.
In perhaps a more common scenario, people may remember books but not remember the title correctly, but can narrow it down by inspecting/searching the contents.
How many novels have you read that you liked, and would purchase to read again if only you could remember what the title was, and all you know are a few choice quotes or unique scenes?
OTOH, the article raises a valuable point about books like cookbooks, which are just collections of small bits of information, and the simple act of returning a page obviates the need to buy the book in the first place.
It seems to me the authors, publishers, and vendors need to coordinate their efforts and produce satisfactory solutions; for instance, allowing cookbooks to be searched for things like ingredients or recipe names but only returning the recipe names and the books that have them.
If anyone's ever seen the Crest of the Stars (Sekai no Monshou) anime, you know what I'm talking about. The Abh are a genetically engineered race of humans specifically built to live in space their entire lives.
To wit; resistance to radiation, normal physiology in low gravity, better performance at high Gs, a sixth space sense, etc. There's a great explanation here. The anime is actually based on a series of novels; consequently it has a level of narrative depth far higher than most TV series. To me, it feels like a book more than a TV series, and I loved it.
Legal issues aside, p2p eats bandwidth for breakfast, and it never loses its appetite.
The burden of transfer may have been shifted from central servers to individual users, but it's still there. With p2p, the providers don't pay a cost, so they get lazy or greedy and start distributing bigger and bigger files, and the end users don't see the cost, because they pay a flat rate. The ISPs get hammered by this unbridled, unrestricted, unprofitable use, as people find newer and better ways to exploit their "endless" bandwidth. Unfortunately for everyone, they tend to try to "solve" this problem with litigation and intimidation rather than placing explicit limits or billing by use.
It's like roads. If you build more roads, that are bigger, and faster, and don't cost anything to run on, it doesn't ease traffic for long because pretty soon more people will be driving on them, more often and for longer distances, for free, until it's at the barely tolerable point and requiring lots of tax dollars just to keep it moving.
Don't believe me? Typical streaming video kps for files has ballooned from 30 to 500kps in a matter of years, with your typical 25minute anime episode being 175mb in size - regular tv episodes are even larger, and movies are generally about 700mb each. Imagine how that will be as people start demanding HD quality and start recording them onto DVD-R instead of CD-R. 320kps mp3s are commonly distributed, and non-lossy but poor-compression formats are being embraced. Companies are encouraging video mail and chat. Games are going increasingly online.
Right now we're in a pre-commercial stage of video on demand, and it's already become painfully obvious how ill-prepared even the fastest broadband ISPs are to support the cost of transferring all that data. Colleges are increasingly unwilling to put up with the endless and expensive tide of non-academic traffic eating up literally all of the bandwidth, and are capping and closing ports right and left.
Know this: there will NEVER be bandwidth too cheap to measure. Media files will simply get larger to accomodate greater resolution, and services will communicate more traffic.
It seems to me, I could be wrong, but anyone that says anything critical about open source or Linux or the GPL is instantly attacked.
You could say the same thing about the right-wing neoconservatives running the government and so much of the media these days. Like all real zealots their main (non-violent propaganda) tactics rest on volume and repetition, not truth. Does that make them terrorists? Well, a not-insignificant number of people in the world thinks so. Of course they mainly think that because we're bombing the crap out of countries on the weakest of pretexes, but many of the more level-headed ones aren't yet laying the blame on the American people yet. They're saving it for after the 2004 election, if necessary.
So are linux zealots terrorists? No, because they haven't hurt anybody, except maybe a few companies that used Linux but wouldn't honor the GPL. They are, however, profoundly annoying.
Exactly. Apple released ITMS for Windows because Apple HAD to release ITMS for Windows. If they didn't, iTunes and the iPod would not only have lost their lead in the digital music scene, they would have been buried by all these new competitors popping out of the woodwork taking advantage of the Windows market, if Apple didn't start playing in the Windows market themselves. That's doesn't just mean lost revenue, it means losing labels and artists to exclusive deals or fatter corporate wallets - and that really WOULD be the death of iTunes. It also keeps the iPod from getting lost in a sea of slightly better priced competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
If they were to do such a thing, it would make more sense to show the same show twice, once english dubbed in one set of timeblocks, and once hard subbed with japanese. SAP and close-captioning support (or rather, the ease of using such features) is too sketchy to make that an integral part of the scheme. They'd be showing the same show multiple times a week anyway, why not mix it up a bit. I'd say show subbed first in a late night time slot and then the next day dubbed in a prime-time slot. If you really wanted to, you could put Japanese SAP on the dubbed so people could do "raw" if they wanted.
Oh yeah. Also:
F) What market there is would be filtered by the fact that it would be on digital cable only, as there is no longer room on the (far more widespread) analog cable spectrum for it, at least not without eliminating something else. I only got Cartoon Network itself 2 years ago on my local cable provider (Goddamn Comcast).
A) There's not a big enough market for it.
B) Nobody could afford to license the TV rights for enough anime to cover a whole channel
C) Even if you had access to every anime ever produced, it still wouldn't be enough for one channel and you'd be showing stuff over and over again once you'd gone through it all.
D) What market the channel would have can't watch TV all day. Huge swaths of time would have essentially no viewership.
E) That wouldn't stop the market from trying to watch as much as possible, and they'd get burnt out and stop watching.
Bottom line - Adult Swim is actually doing the right thing here. They've got a daily time slot that keeps people coming back, and a strong brand that they can potentially expand when the time is right. Much like there is a Toonami block on KidsWB, there will probably eventually be an Adult Swim block one or two times a week on a regular channel in prime time (which is what AS needs the most), probably on the WB. In the meantime, they need to get enough of a library that they don't need to show the same things over and over again, and can do shows once a week instead of all week long to fill time.
I feel compelled to mention, now that we're on the subject of intense content, that Narutaru (AKA Shadow Star) is THE most misadvertised show, EVER, in all respects, and even more intense than NTHT in its own right. Superficially it looks like Pokemon-type kids-with-magic-monsters, it's broadcast on Kid Station, the opening is cutesy, the first few episodes are inoffensive.
Then the abuse and slaughter cuts in.
And boy, does it get nasty. By the 13th episode anyone who isn't completely dead inside will be sickened by what's happening, even if they liked the show, and appalled at how misleading the previously mentioned things are. Apparently this had to do with the manga - it wasn't doing well in its original form for elementary kids, so the authors tweaked it "a bit" for an older audience, catching the US translators and distributors unaware, among others.
I wouldn't be surprised the the TV Execs in Japan were fooled too, it happened before when they put Evangelion on at 5pm. The $64k question is will they make more anime or not?
I didn't particularly enjoy Get Backers (or a lot of series of that ilk), although I watched it. Missed scrapped princess so I can't say.
NTHT on Cartoon Network? I think not. While not as explicit as some, it's one of the more brutal series on a psychological level. Christ man, it's got kids getting raped and beating each other to death. I'd like to see Saikano, Berserk, GTO, or Initial D, but like it or not there are limits. Maybe if AS was split off onto it's own channel with it's own age standards they could get away with it, but even then...
FMP:F deserves to go on TV though, although I found the original boring and unoriginal. I never got to the end of Wolf's Rain but based on what I saw I liked. It's from the same people who did Cowboy Bebop and has top-notch animation, so it's highly likely it'll make it regardless. GITS:SAC is a no-brainer.
Witch Hunter Robin, IMHO, blows. I have no idea why anyone would find this boring unimaginative series with its gigantic-craniumed characters appealing. Except perhaps for really angsty people like goths. To which I say, you should read/watch more shoujo. (On a side note, where did this infinite castle thing come from anyway? It was in Get Backers also...) For some reason I feel like mentioning I hated Noir too. All style, no substance.
In my opinion, Cartoon Network or somebody should pick up the following shows, which are all really, really good and require little to no editing (although several need to be licensed and translated, and some would perhaps be better suited for Toonami, or better yet a non-existant mid-level block): Hajime no Ippo (rocks); Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu (damn funny); Naruto (duh); Hellsing (blood's OK if you've got vampires); Read or Die (Original OVA and TV); Excel Saga (insane, the logical follow-up to FLCL); Hunter X Hunter (grows on you); Last Exile (awesome); Nadia (old but good); NieA_7 (wierd); and others.
Also, if Adult Swim Anime were to stop calling itself "Action" and break out into other genres they'd have more flexibility. Onegai Teacher/Twins would draw an audience and notoriety, I guarantee it. So would Love Hina and Chobits. Some of the more crossover Shoujos might do well if given the chance and the right advertising, like Fruits Basket.
I could go on all day, but there's not that much point. Adult swim will get what their limited budget, limited influence on the production and distribution companies, limited time slots, limited late night audience, and Standards and Practices allows, and no more. I'm sure much of what we've suggested they've already thought about and either can't afford or can't clear with S&P. Hellsing comes to mind on both counts.
An "analysis" written by fans - or even worse, a fan - is generally guaranteed to be uncritical garbage. As far as I'm concerned if you're going to produce/consume masturbation material about a show/series, stick to fanfics stay away from slashdot. This seems like a good place to start for Philip and Hemos .
It seems to me that if you had a single standard that
1) Had a common format for the basic basic functionality (the master index is here, has this format, and shows which blocks the files are on; the files are arranged as a heirarchy like so, with these hardlinks/softlinks/aliases; the basic descriptive data is right here, the arbitrary metadata is over here, and alternative OS-specific indices are stored here)
2) Provided for any sort of arbitrary metadata and database/indexing/journaling schemes, with standards for the more common types like file/folder types, application types, long file names, etc.
XML was invented for a similar purpose - a common way of expressing structured information, allowing programs to work with as it suited their needs, especially when those needs overlapped.
Would somebody please tell me why they can't make a filesystem (or filesystem family) that preserves the basic functionality common to all filesystems but supports all the bells and whistles (resource forks, metainfo, etc.) needed to keep the various operating systems happy and can therefore be used with multiple machines with different OSs without jumping through hoops? I'm not saying every machine should use the same FS, I'm just saying there should be a basic standard that allows full functionality for any one OS and basic functionality for any given OS. And if there is one, why isn't anyone using it? It's not like this is an unusual issue - (CD/DVD)(+/-)(RW)s, floppy/zip disks, and portable drives of all kinds have had this problem for as long as I can remember. Why should finding/reading/writing/indexing a string of bits or grouping a bunch of files in a heirarchy readable to any machine be so troublesome?
I can just imagine a Naruto game where you actually have to make the hand seals to use a jutsu. That'd totally rock. Too late for the PS2 fighter though.
Apparently, the only social network they recognize is the one amongst windows users. Well, I guess there's always slashdot...
Let's assume that (somehow) SCO wins, and starts charging large sums of money for the OS they didn't really develop. What can be done? Can the offending bits be removed from the Linux source tree, and SCO cut out of the loop entirely (which is how I expect the case will really go)? How taxing would it be for companies that can't afford SCO's fees to move to another free open source OS, like FreeBSD?
The sad thing is this is what it took to bring the recording industry kicking and screaming into the modern arena of digital music distribution. Apple can't make any profit for something with a lowered distribution cost relative to comparably priced physical media, and are forced to do so indirectly via a locked-in hardware device. I reckon if they could make a profit on the music, the price of the iPod would go down, it would support other services, and iTunes would support other players. If that isn't a pathetic indicator of the greediness and short-sightedness of the recording industry, I don't know what is. I kind of wish Apple hadn't invented iTMS, just so I could have watched the music industry die an ignoble death.
If you buy CDs you're paying the RIAA to sic lawyers on 12 year old girls.
Just thought you should know.
OK, I meant Tobatsup.
The Solanaceae family also includes potatoes, chile peppers, and eggplants.
So not just tomacco on your sandwiches, but also tomatsup and a side of potacco fries. A trip to taco bell would be loaded with tobalsa, in addition to tomacco. Tomeggplant parmesan with tomacco sauce would be absolutely loaded with it.
What MSH is proposing really isn't such a bad idea. It's something I've thought about before, actually. I think it wouldn't be that hard to apply principles of object orientation (or alternatively, functional programming) to the existing programs, while laying the foundation for future improvements.
In unix files are just a sequence of bytes - they have no structure. Generally all of them can be treated as text. Likewise every piece of returned data can be treated as text. This is simple - but it can also be a problem, because files are NOT the same. If there was a standardized means for knowing data structure and nature in unix (as well as ignoring it) it could allow more intelligent behavior. A program could return a standardized database table object to the shell, and instead of just outputing it as a plain data stream it could format it for easy reading. Or if that object were piped to another program, the program would know to handle it as a database table, including knowing the headers and relevant information. Even better, because pipes are actually based on lazy evaluation, they would take only the data they needed.
The other difficulty is pipes themselves - they're best suited for stringing together programs that take or return 0-1 chunks of data (which may include arrays). They aren't so good for programs that take multiple arguments.
Basically what we want to do is have programs return objects we can use instead of raw data. The solution is for all apps to return "raw" type objects by default, which still have certain basic attributes. Basic utility functions to convert the data to a particular type and integrate old style commands could
I think OS X is quite well suited for this. The existing cocoa frameworks provide a high degree of functionality and a huge set of object types ready to go. ObjC is dynamic, and its simple, powerful nested syntax is very nice. The only problem is it's quite wordy to write.
I don't think anyone is accusing anyone of anything - I was just saying this sort of research increases the possibility of someone doing such a thing. Expressing a single protein isn't a terribly complicated thing to engineer (relatively speaking).
It's true, HIV is like that. However, it's not likely to mutate into an airborne variant since it requires an envelope derived from the host cell and thus cannot survive drying and needs to make its way to the bloodstream somehow. The nastiest of diseases (Rabies etc) frequently require intimate contact for these reasons.
The worry is that these research principles could be applied to other, more infectious viruses or even naturally occuring bacteria to make them impossible to protect against and ultimately fatal.
It's not far fetched. In particular, I'm trying to remember a book I read 20 years ago, from a school shelf. It was the first science fiction I ever read, and I don't remember the title. I do remember some of what happened in it. Unfortunately, the book was probably published in the late 70s or early 80s and thus I don't think Amazon covers it (I can't find it through their search).
I also don't remember a lot of other books I've read, because I used to read dozens of novels a year and checked most stuff out through the library. Sometimes I was just picking stuff off the shelf based on the back cover alone. While I enjoyed most of them at the time most didn't leave that much of an impression on me, and I remember the titles from only a choice few. Hence, I don't remember the title, not because I'm trolling or forgetful but because I read virtually nothing more than once, and I've read many times more books than you have.
In perhaps a more common scenario, people may remember books but not remember the title correctly, but can narrow it down by inspecting/searching the contents.
How many novels have you read that you liked, and would purchase to read again if only you could remember what the title was, and all you know are a few choice quotes or unique scenes?
OTOH, the article raises a valuable point about books like cookbooks, which are just collections of small bits of information, and the simple act of returning a page obviates the need to buy the book in the first place.
It seems to me the authors, publishers, and vendors need to coordinate their efforts and produce satisfactory solutions; for instance, allowing cookbooks to be searched for things like ingredients or recipe names but only returning the recipe names and the books that have them.
If anyone's ever seen the Crest of the Stars (Sekai no Monshou) anime, you know what I'm talking about. The Abh are a genetically engineered race of humans specifically built to live in space their entire lives.
To wit; resistance to radiation, normal physiology in low gravity, better performance at high Gs, a sixth space sense, etc. There's a great explanation here. The anime is actually based on a series of novels; consequently it has a level of narrative depth far higher than most TV series. To me, it feels like a book more than a TV series, and I loved it.
Legal issues aside, p2p eats bandwidth for breakfast, and it never loses its appetite.
The burden of transfer may have been shifted from central servers to individual users, but it's still there. With p2p, the providers don't pay a cost, so they get lazy or greedy and start distributing bigger and bigger files, and the end users don't see the cost, because they pay a flat rate. The ISPs get hammered by this unbridled, unrestricted, unprofitable use, as people find newer and better ways to exploit their "endless" bandwidth. Unfortunately for everyone, they tend to try to "solve" this problem with litigation and intimidation rather than placing explicit limits or billing by use.
It's like roads. If you build more roads, that are bigger, and faster, and don't cost anything to run on, it doesn't ease traffic for long because pretty soon more people will be driving on them, more often and for longer distances, for free, until it's at the barely tolerable point and requiring lots of tax dollars just to keep it moving.
Don't believe me? Typical streaming video kps for files has ballooned from 30 to 500kps in a matter of years, with your typical 25minute anime episode being 175mb in size - regular tv episodes are even larger, and movies are generally about 700mb each. Imagine how that will be as people start demanding HD quality and start recording them onto DVD-R instead of CD-R. 320kps mp3s are commonly distributed, and non-lossy but poor-compression formats are being embraced. Companies are encouraging video mail and chat. Games are going increasingly online.
Right now we're in a pre-commercial stage of video on demand, and it's already become painfully obvious how ill-prepared even the fastest broadband ISPs are to support the cost of transferring all that data. Colleges are increasingly unwilling to put up with the endless and expensive tide of non-academic traffic eating up literally all of the bandwidth, and are capping and closing ports right and left.
Know this: there will NEVER be bandwidth too cheap to measure. Media files will simply get larger to accomodate greater resolution, and services will communicate more traffic.
It seems to me, I could be wrong, but anyone that says anything critical about open source or Linux or the GPL is instantly attacked.
You could say the same thing about the right-wing neoconservatives running the government and so much of the media these days. Like all real zealots their main (non-violent propaganda) tactics rest on volume and repetition, not truth. Does that make them terrorists? Well, a not-insignificant number of people in the world thinks so. Of course they mainly think that because we're bombing the crap out of countries on the weakest of pretexes, but many of the more level-headed ones aren't yet laying the blame on the American people yet. They're saving it for after the 2004 election, if necessary.
So are linux zealots terrorists? No, because they haven't hurt anybody, except maybe a few companies that used Linux but wouldn't honor the GPL. They are, however, profoundly annoying.
Exactly. Apple released ITMS for Windows because Apple HAD to release ITMS for Windows. If they didn't, iTunes and the iPod would not only have lost their lead in the digital music scene, they would have been buried by all these new competitors popping out of the woodwork taking advantage of the Windows market, if Apple didn't start playing in the Windows market themselves. That's doesn't just mean lost revenue, it means losing labels and artists to exclusive deals or fatter corporate wallets - and that really WOULD be the death of iTunes. It also keeps the iPod from getting lost in a sea of slightly better priced competitors.