While it is true that you are not moving the keyboard / mouse, you are still moving your hands, which weigh significantly more than a little piece of plastic. Likewise, while tapping on a hard piece of plastic in theory takes less energy than tapping on moving keys, the keys also serve to deaden the impact. I tend to find tapping angrily on solid surfaces to become uncomfortable rather quickly, and would doubt long-term use would be good for the joints.
If you are looking for something ergonomic to reduce the strain on your wrists, use your keyboard navigation as much as possible, and when not possible try a trackball. Assuming you're in Windows land (which is why you would need a mouse), the Kensington Expert Mouse has a wonderful series of chordable buttons that can be mapped to basically any function you might do frequently, giving you a palette of 35 imput commands per program. Plus you don't move your arm, wrist, or anything but your fingers when you point.
I hate to be the one to site pornography and other questionable material as the driving factor in most of humanity's entertainment expression mediums (with the exception of Videogames, oddly), but with a real lockdown of media and information on the Windows platform, won't that encourage more people to transition to alternatives such as Linux and Macintosh? Considering the BSA's estimates that 2/3rds of all software is pirated, and if this turns out to be a truly effective way to stop the piracy of not just programs but also video and audio data, it seems like TCO arguments by otherwise law abiding citizens will sway towards mediums that are easier to pirate on. The Playstation, for example, was notoriously easy to pirate, and that helped drive sales as a platform. Pirating Playstations doesn't help Sony persay (although late in the life of the platform hardware sales were profitable for Sony), but a preponderance of available software does help Microsoft retain their leveraging points (and I don't mean the quality of their software).
Now, perhaps some sort of middle ground will finally be reached, between overbroad click-through agreements and overly cheap end consumers. Or perhaps many people will make a move to a system where, for example, Kazaa will still work. Or perhaps Microsoft will take the intelligent (from their business standpoint) road and setup a system which allows piracy to flourish but can protect studio-released content from seeping into that region.
Either way, this looks great for that other OS, OpenBEOS. I mean, Linux.
ATT was the worst offender for a long time. Apparently they do respect do-not-call requests, but they also call with the same offer on average once per week. It makes you wonder why you would go with a company who burns money calling you every week, but can't adequately staff a help line.
I don't want anyone to think I'm in favor of intrusive marketing practices, but I've found the telemarketing industry to be surprisingly good about holding to their do-not-call lists. Having 5 credit cards (3 unused), I tend to be on a lot of lists. Eventually, I became fed up with advert calls on my cellular phone, and began telling them as such. Calls went from 4 per day, to zero... I haven't recieved an advert call in at least six months (the last one from AT&T to convince me to switch from my current cellular provider, AT&T).
I must admit, the telemarketing industry has been very good to me at least about respecting my marketing preferences. Perhaps if more people knew such a thing was an option we wouldn't need such legislation.
Now, E-mail marketers have been nothing but evil. But that, sadly, is a different bill.
I would expect that with the large marketshare of the PSX, with the long shelf-life, and with the more and more trivial size of CD's compared to HDD's, we'll see very little archival problems of PSX games. Remember, when the 16 mb Street Fighter 2 was released for the SNES, a good hard drive was only 500 MB. Plus CD archival tools are common in nearly every computer, whereas every ROM that was saved was done with some rare hardware.
I'm not too worried yet. Technology seems to be outpacing obscurity at this point. Compress the redbook to MP3 and you can burn a few dozen PSX games to DVD.
So, they have a back button that is linear instead of making weird jumps, stays in memory after shutting down, and can have any number of pages stored? Congratulations, You've just invented Opera! Sheesh, if they really wanted to speed up the back button you would think they would reinvent mousegestures or 5 button mice.
I ignored this the first time it came around. I took it in strides the second time. But this time I just have to say it: This is not news! Nothing they are talking about is new or newsworthy. The browsing world does not consist of I.E. and Netscape. There is also Konqueror, ICab, Opera, Lynx, Phoenix, Arachne, XMosaic, Omniweb, and a host of others. Some of those back buttons behave in a similar fasion. The only thing mentioned in the article that none of the above do is provide little thumbnails of the pages, but many of them cache the entire page so that thumbnails are unnecessary.
Please, people. If you are going to be doing a major research project into improving other people's online experience, for crying out loud do your homework and find out what is out there. It's called exploratory research, and your thesis advisor should have required you to do some before beginning. I know, I know, they ARE the thesis advisors, which says a lot about the University of Canterbury.
Re:It looks like they're patenting database "filte
on
NCR Patents the Internet
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
How does one submit prior-art to the patent office? I doubt there is a single person here who wouldn't mind firing off a few dozen examples to help keep patents in line with reality...
Nothing is going to change until we start suing the patent office to recoup costs on claims related to gross negligence on the part of the patent office. A method by which a remote client can query a database and recieve a result? We're not talking about a child on a swing here, we're talking about patenting things for which entire industries have existed since the 70's. This is gross negligence of the highest order, with prior art just a quick altavista search away. Come to think of it, Altavista is prior art.
This gross negligence on the part of the patent office is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars, while adding absolutely nothing to the general pool of knowledge. If the underfunded patent office found it was more resource-efficient to hire competent personel than it would be to simply fail at their appointed task, then we wouldn't have these sorts of problems.
I say we get a class-action suit against the patent office. Any lawyers with me?
Opera, WinAmp, XP. Despite my overwhelming effort to get Linux to play nicely with Docs, Internet-Explorer only sites, and all of those games written in Direct X, it doesn't seem to do a lick of good. Why would anyone have a deep seeded hatred of anything if they weren't being forced to use it? I hated many modern children's cartoons, but I never hated them enough to rant about it on the internet until a friend's child started watching them.
You're right torpor, as this moral majority anonymous coward so colorfully pointed out... According to ABCnews.com, support for a war has climbed to 61% since Powell's speech. Up until a few weeks ago rationality had a slim margin. And with 51% seeing Al-Qaeda ties? That reminds me of a US poll from several months back asking whether or not they believed Iraqis piloted the planes into the world trade center. More than %50 believed half of the hijackers were Iraqi, and nearly 95% believed at least one was (there were, in fact, none).
I see I was being overly optimistic. Or perhaps being in Cambridge, Massachusetts engenders a worldview more in line with Europe than with Pleasantville, Ohio.
You may continue hating Americans again. We're going to kill hundreds of thousands of people through bombings and shootings in order to prevent the possible deaths of hundreds in a gas subway attack. Well, math never was our strong point.
Let's see, tear down cuba, put Fidel Castro in place. Tear down Afghanastan, put the Taliban in place. Tear down Iran, put in Kohmami. Tear down Iraq, put in Hussein. I guess pattern recognition wasn't taught in schools either.
You get the job if you can add yourself to their roster without anybody noticing?
That reminds me of the FBI recruiter on campus career day several years back. All you had to do was walk up and leave your name. If they liked you, they would call you back.
What can you do? We fought. We screamed. We protested. But we're still being lead by a person utterly unable to understand even the most obvious results of his actions. Don't equate the desires of the American people with the decisions of its leaders. We're trapped in this little box, and we're being taken for a ride. We trivialize because the weight of the situation is too great and the inability to actualize so apparent that it is our only emotional defense. But we don't parrot the propaganda machine... I have yet to speak to anyone on the streets who has more than a passing agreement with the idea that going to war is a good idea.
If you believe the American people are ready to go to war again and die in Iraq you have been listening to too much of our government's propaganda. They're doing it, by and large, without our support.
If you can convince the U.N. to stop us, then please, for the good of the American people, stop our leaders. They are so in tuned with the reality of warfare that they think this can be ended by cutting off the enemy's shell access. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, and they haven't the slightest clue.
I don't know what else we can do besides a 100,000 person march and widespread civil disobedience. All that I can think of is if the UN passed a resolution requiring all memberstates to get an explicit UN backing for all non-defensive military maneuvering, then backed that up with a real coalition army. Unless there is some sort of enforcement on the UN's side, I can't see how they can enforce order.
So... the first step in our war is to send the Geek Corps to Iraq to teach everyone how to use computers. Then we sick SUN on them to convince them to upgrade to mission-critical workstations and servers. While we do that, we use old equipment to get individuals and businesses stuck on the.doc format. Finally, we convince Saddam to consolidate his technological resources under XP,.NET, and Office.
At which point, why do we have to invade at all? Microsoft can just run their government like they do ours.
Ok, this is a common theme with people who don't understand the Japanese, so I'll field it.
You take a generation of children. You make them all dress the same. You emphasize gender differences in clothing, to make sure nobody accidently becomes attracted to members of the same sex. You do this throughout the entire period a person develops genitals, develops sexual feelings, hits puberty, falls in love, enters the most intense period of sexual excitation in their lives, peaks, then slowly eases off that peak. Only then do you let the opposite sex wear whatever they want. I can guarentee you just made a double-digit percentage of that group a fetishist of whatever clothing that opposite sex group wore. Women are lucky (sort of) in this situation because they don't peak until significantly after such a time when their opposite sex group can change clothing, and therefore generally don't develop this fetish.
And, of course now the only people wearing thoes fetishized clothes are age 6-19 year old girls. But it isn't really about the children, it's about the clothes. My mother (japanese) looked like she was 12 until the day she turned 50. If you're attracted to 14 year old japanese girls, chances are you would be every bit as attracted to a 35 year old japanese woman in a schoolgirl outfit. Without falling onto all look same stereotypes, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the two apart.
Schoolgirls in manga isn't about child pornography, it's a deeply rooted schoolgirl uniform fetish. It's one of the more powerful fetishes I've come across (though I don't have it, thankfully), and it is one that we are going to pass onto our children if we persist with these rediculous school uniform rules we have popping up around the country.
I bump into them in comic book shops every now and then. I don't know why they are still made, but if they sell well in europe... I guess that answers my question.
Comics here are only sold in Comic book stores. Comic book stores are testosterone soaked things for the 9 to 16 year old demographic, and a place which no self-respecting parent would bring their child... all of which does very poorly with Donald Duck comics.
Since when did American comics fail? Last I looked Spiderman, Superman, Batman, X-Men and many others were on just about every newsstand.
My god, you haven't looked at newsstands in a LOOOONG time.
If you are not in a big city where we have real newsstands, or aren't near an airport where fake newsstands inhabit, go into any supermarket or drugstore and look at the newspaper / magazine aisle. Chances are, you won't find any comics, or you will only find children's comics that are badly out of date. MAD is still there, yes, but the serial comic book has fallen greatly from it's 1950's high point of accessability. These days if you want a comic book, you really do have to go to a comic book store or a hip music joint.
Now trashy romance novels: *Those* are on every newsstand.
I can think of 3 reasons that haven't been mentioned yet why Comics aren't accepted in the US as compared to Japan.
1. Overused / unrelatable characters. In the US comic market, there are three types of characters: thoroughly recycled, new but testosterone saturated, and "girl's stuff." The "New" spiderman has been done for so many generations it is hard to get anyone interested. The Maxx was a highly accessable character with a surprising amount of depth... if you could get past the fact that he looked like a van with p3nises coming out of his hands. Most people can't. And if you are only selling comics in bastions of testosterone (comic book shops), how do you plan to sell comics about human issues? Japanese comics come in all flavors, all sizes. They're not as stereotyped, but they don't go out of their way to fit a stereotype. Not every manga cover in Japan involves a big sweaty guy holding a weapon. (Yes, I'm aware that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is a small sweaty guy holding a weapon. That's why he's more accessable.)
2. Most American comic books are franchises of a successful main character, while manga are plot-driven stories involving characters. Many comics are written as independent stories by multiple authors, which makes it difficult to change anything canon about the character / world without getting a quorum at a committee. The character is left exactly where he started at the beginning of the comic book having gone nowhere. And there generally is only superficial interaction between the independent stories. Manga seem decidedly more plot driven, with characters serving as focal points rather than subject matter. Kaneda was hardly in Akira in any substantive way, and mostly served to allow the story to unfold. No one in their right mind would suggest an Akira 2 just because you could carry the character over. But such a thing is assumed in American comics all the time.
3. Comic books are unsatisfyingly short. After actively searching out a source, finding a comic book shop, and driving to it to get the latest copy of Big Sweaty Guy with a Gun: Reborn, you would expect to be have at least some entertainment from it... right? Well, unless you found that rarity of American comics, the compilation, chances are it is 20 pages long, 1/2 of which are action tiles and need no reading, and which can be finished in about 7 minutes. And don't forget to tune in again next month when they release the next 7 minutes of the story. Either your story is going to have a plot that wouldn't challenge the teletubbies, or your reader is going to get bored and move on in the year and a half it takes to finish your storyline. In japan, compilations seem to be far more common than they are here, with many, many more pages to read. I have never seen a japanese comic anywhere near as short as ours, page for page. It's just not worth bothering to spend 20 minutes every month for a year picking up a comic that you are going to read in 7... but picking up one of those ubiquitous manga in 30 seconds while shopping, and reading it for 2 hours? That's not a bad deal.
Sadly, none of the above seem to be changing any time soon. Plot driven comics with accessable characters served out in meals not bites? Sadly, not while the big two are still in charge.
Opera appear to be broken. Is this deliberate or a mistake? Who can possibly say?
I'm all for journalistic integrity on Slashdot, but there comes a point when plausable deniability just becomes implausable. Their professional website creators created a style sheet to be fed to specific browsers to improve rendering, yet never checked to see how those browsers would actually render such a thing?
This reminds me of those papers that parrot painfully obvious falsehoods simply because it wouldn't be impartial to stand back and say "hey, that doesn't make any sense at all." And they only *accidently* blocked Opera last time. Sure. They didn't mean to include an uninstaller for Netscape. Dr Dos really was broken. Who can possibly say?
Not terribly difficult. They are intended to aim at walls, but I can't think of any plausable reason besides heat dissapation that aiming one down would be a problem.
You can see that the light is falling all over the person in the image, so there isn't any correction going on.
Another poster mentioned using smoky glass and projecting upwards. For that, you would need to flip the projection or the image on the screen... but I don't imagine that would be too difficult to accomplish. But it would be much cooler.
You could also embedd a rather large Hitatchi 447800 compatible 4-line LCD display, for extra video out, or recess a standard 21" LCD moniter into your countertop, then re-surface with a translucent material.
But yeah, go to Circuit City. By Projector. Aim down.
Slashdot Mirror
Which do you think he's gonna give up, free music or paid music?
Or, more precicely, which do you think he's gonna do, give up free music entirely or walk to his CD player to play CD's?
While it is true that you are not moving the keyboard / mouse, you are still moving your hands, which weigh significantly more than a little piece of plastic. Likewise, while tapping on a hard piece of plastic in theory takes less energy than tapping on moving keys, the keys also serve to deaden the impact. I tend to find tapping angrily on solid surfaces to become uncomfortable rather quickly, and would doubt long-term use would be good for the joints.
If you are looking for something ergonomic to reduce the strain on your wrists, use your keyboard navigation as much as possible, and when not possible try a trackball. Assuming you're in Windows land (which is why you would need a mouse), the Kensington Expert Mouse has a wonderful series of chordable buttons that can be mapped to basically any function you might do frequently, giving you a palette of 35 imput commands per program. Plus you don't move your arm, wrist, or anything but your fingers when you point.
I hate to be the one to site pornography and other questionable material as the driving factor in most of humanity's entertainment expression mediums (with the exception of Videogames, oddly), but with a real lockdown of media and information on the Windows platform, won't that encourage more people to transition to alternatives such as Linux and Macintosh? Considering the BSA's estimates that 2/3rds of all software is pirated, and if this turns out to be a truly effective way to stop the piracy of not just programs but also video and audio data, it seems like TCO arguments by otherwise law abiding citizens will sway towards mediums that are easier to pirate on. The Playstation, for example, was notoriously easy to pirate, and that helped drive sales as a platform. Pirating Playstations doesn't help Sony persay (although late in the life of the platform hardware sales were profitable for Sony), but a preponderance of available software does help Microsoft retain their leveraging points (and I don't mean the quality of their software).
Now, perhaps some sort of middle ground will finally be reached, between overbroad click-through agreements and overly cheap end consumers. Or perhaps many people will make a move to a system where, for example, Kazaa will still work. Or perhaps Microsoft will take the intelligent (from their business standpoint) road and setup a system which allows piracy to flourish but can protect studio-released content from seeping into that region.
Either way, this looks great for that other OS, OpenBEOS. I mean, Linux.
If you have downloaded and installed the Bork edition already, go to Help -> About Opera.
:).
Good to see they can laugh at their own expense too
ATT was the worst offender for a long time. Apparently they do respect do-not-call requests, but they also call with the same offer on average once per week. It makes you wonder why you would go with a company who burns money calling you every week, but can't adequately staff a help line.
I don't want anyone to think I'm in favor of intrusive marketing practices, but I've found the telemarketing industry to be surprisingly good about holding to their do-not-call lists. Having 5 credit cards (3 unused), I tend to be on a lot of lists. Eventually, I became fed up with advert calls on my cellular phone, and began telling them as such. Calls went from 4 per day, to zero... I haven't recieved an advert call in at least six months (the last one from AT&T to convince me to switch from my current cellular provider, AT&T).
I must admit, the telemarketing industry has been very good to me at least about respecting my marketing preferences. Perhaps if more people knew such a thing was an option we wouldn't need such legislation.
Now, E-mail marketers have been nothing but evil. But that, sadly, is a different bill.
I would expect that with the large marketshare of the PSX, with the long shelf-life, and with the more and more trivial size of CD's compared to HDD's, we'll see very little archival problems of PSX games. Remember, when the 16 mb Street Fighter 2 was released for the SNES, a good hard drive was only 500 MB. Plus CD archival tools are common in nearly every computer, whereas every ROM that was saved was done with some rare hardware.
I'm not too worried yet. Technology seems to be outpacing obscurity at this point. Compress the redbook to MP3 and you can burn a few dozen PSX games to DVD.
-C
So, they have a back button that is linear instead of making weird jumps, stays in memory after shutting down, and can have any number of pages stored? Congratulations, You've just invented Opera! Sheesh, if they really wanted to speed up the back button you would think they would reinvent mousegestures or 5 button mice.
I ignored this the first time it came around. I took it in strides the second time. But this time I just have to say it: This is not news! Nothing they are talking about is new or newsworthy. The browsing world does not consist of I.E. and Netscape. There is also Konqueror, ICab, Opera, Lynx, Phoenix, Arachne, XMosaic, Omniweb, and a host of others. Some of those back buttons behave in a similar fasion. The only thing mentioned in the article that none of the above do is provide little thumbnails of the pages, but many of them cache the entire page so that thumbnails are unnecessary.
Please, people. If you are going to be doing a major research project into improving other people's online experience, for crying out loud do your homework and find out what is out there. It's called exploratory research, and your thesis advisor should have required you to do some before beginning. I know, I know, they ARE the thesis advisors, which says a lot about the University of Canterbury.
How does one submit prior-art to the patent office? I doubt there is a single person here who wouldn't mind firing off a few dozen examples to help keep patents in line with reality...
Nothing is going to change until we start suing the patent office to recoup costs on claims related to gross negligence on the part of the patent office. A method by which a remote client can query a database and recieve a result? We're not talking about a child on a swing here, we're talking about patenting things for which entire industries have existed since the 70's. This is gross negligence of the highest order, with prior art just a quick altavista search away. Come to think of it, Altavista is prior art.
This gross negligence on the part of the patent office is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars, while adding absolutely nothing to the general pool of knowledge. If the underfunded patent office found it was more resource-efficient to hire competent personel than it would be to simply fail at their appointed task, then we wouldn't have these sorts of problems.
I say we get a class-action suit against the patent office. Any lawyers with me?
Opera, WinAmp, XP. Despite my overwhelming effort to get Linux to play nicely with Docs, Internet-Explorer only sites, and all of those games written in Direct X, it doesn't seem to do a lick of good. Why would anyone have a deep seeded hatred of anything if they weren't being forced to use it? I hated many modern children's cartoons, but I never hated them enough to rant about it on the internet until a friend's child started watching them.
It's only hypocritical if you enjoy doing it.
You're right torpor, as this moral majority anonymous coward so colorfully pointed out... According to ABCnews.com, support for a war has climbed to 61% since Powell's speech. Up until a few weeks ago rationality had a slim margin. And with 51% seeing Al-Qaeda ties? That reminds me of a US poll from several months back asking whether or not they believed Iraqis piloted the planes into the world trade center. More than %50 believed half of the hijackers were Iraqi, and nearly 95% believed at least one was (there were, in fact, none).
I see I was being overly optimistic. Or perhaps being in Cambridge, Massachusetts engenders a worldview more in line with Europe than with Pleasantville, Ohio.
You may continue hating Americans again. We're going to kill hundreds of thousands of people through bombings and shootings in order to prevent the possible deaths of hundreds in a gas subway attack. Well, math never was our strong point.
Let's see, tear down cuba, put Fidel Castro in place. Tear down Afghanastan, put the Taliban in place. Tear down Iran, put in Kohmami. Tear down Iraq, put in Hussein. I guess pattern recognition wasn't taught in schools either.
You get the job if you can add yourself to their roster without anybody noticing?
That reminds me of the FBI recruiter on campus career day several years back. All you had to do was walk up and leave your name. If they liked you, they would call you back.
Scary.
cgenman: Yup. Us oldtimers are really a force to be reckoned with,
cgenman: with our years of training and lightning like refl....
Fragged by 31337_phr34k.
8th place with 0
What can you do? We fought. We screamed. We protested. But we're still being lead by a person utterly unable to understand even the most obvious results of his actions. Don't equate the desires of the American people with the decisions of its leaders. We're trapped in this little box, and we're being taken for a ride. We trivialize because the weight of the situation is too great and the inability to actualize so apparent that it is our only emotional defense. But we don't parrot the propaganda machine... I have yet to speak to anyone on the streets who has more than a passing agreement with the idea that going to war is a good idea.
If you believe the American people are ready to go to war again and die in Iraq you have been listening to too much of our government's propaganda. They're doing it, by and large, without our support.
If you can convince the U.N. to stop us, then please, for the good of the American people, stop our leaders. They are so in tuned with the reality of warfare that they think this can be ended by cutting off the enemy's shell access. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, and they haven't the slightest clue.
I don't know what else we can do besides a 100,000 person march and widespread civil disobedience. All that I can think of is if the UN passed a resolution requiring all memberstates to get an explicit UN backing for all non-defensive military maneuvering, then backed that up with a real coalition army. Unless there is some sort of enforcement on the UN's side, I can't see how they can enforce order.
Are these going to apply to people operating in the US?
Are the info-soldiers within the US?
Are these going to be subject to constitutional limitations?
Are they taking resumes?
So... the first step in our war is to send the Geek Corps to Iraq to teach everyone how to use computers. Then we sick SUN on them to convince them to upgrade to mission-critical workstations and servers. While we do that, we use old equipment to get individuals and businesses stuck on the .doc format. Finally, we convince Saddam to consolidate his technological resources under XP, .NET, and Office.
At which point, why do we have to invade at all? Microsoft can just run their government like they do ours.
Ok, this is a common theme with people who don't understand the Japanese, so I'll field it.
You take a generation of children. You make them all dress the same. You emphasize gender differences in clothing, to make sure nobody accidently becomes attracted to members of the same sex. You do this throughout the entire period a person develops genitals, develops sexual feelings, hits puberty, falls in love, enters the most intense period of sexual excitation in their lives, peaks, then slowly eases off that peak. Only then do you let the opposite sex wear whatever they want. I can guarentee you just made a double-digit percentage of that group a fetishist of whatever clothing that opposite sex group wore. Women are lucky (sort of) in this situation because they don't peak until significantly after such a time when their opposite sex group can change clothing, and therefore generally don't develop this fetish.
And, of course now the only people wearing thoes fetishized clothes are age 6-19 year old girls. But it isn't really about the children, it's about the clothes. My mother (japanese) looked like she was 12 until the day she turned 50. If you're attracted to 14 year old japanese girls, chances are you would be every bit as attracted to a 35 year old japanese woman in a schoolgirl outfit. Without falling onto all look same stereotypes, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the two apart.
Schoolgirls in manga isn't about child pornography, it's a deeply rooted schoolgirl uniform fetish. It's one of the more powerful fetishes I've come across (though I don't have it, thankfully), and it is one that we are going to pass onto our children if we persist with these rediculous school uniform rules we have popping up around the country.
I bump into them in comic book shops every now and then. I don't know why they are still made, but if they sell well in europe... I guess that answers my question.
Comics here are only sold in Comic book stores. Comic book stores are testosterone soaked things for the 9 to 16 year old demographic, and a place which no self-respecting parent would bring their child... all of which does very poorly with Donald Duck comics.
Are the ones in Europe new, or just reprinted?
My god, you haven't looked at newsstands in a LOOOONG time.
If you are not in a big city where we have real newsstands, or aren't near an airport where fake newsstands inhabit, go into any supermarket or drugstore and look at the newspaper / magazine aisle. Chances are, you won't find any comics, or you will only find children's comics that are badly out of date. MAD is still there, yes, but the serial comic book has fallen greatly from it's 1950's high point of accessability. These days if you want a comic book, you really do have to go to a comic book store or a hip music joint.
Now trashy romance novels: *Those* are on every newsstand.
1. Overused / unrelatable characters. In the US comic market, there are three types of characters: thoroughly recycled, new but testosterone saturated, and "girl's stuff." The "New" spiderman has been done for so many generations it is hard to get anyone interested. The Maxx was a highly accessable character with a surprising amount of depth... if you could get past the fact that he looked like a van with p3nises coming out of his hands. Most people can't. And if you are only selling comics in bastions of testosterone (comic book shops), how do you plan to sell comics about human issues? Japanese comics come in all flavors, all sizes. They're not as stereotyped, but they don't go out of their way to fit a stereotype. Not every manga cover in Japan involves a big sweaty guy holding a weapon. (Yes, I'm aware that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is a small sweaty guy holding a weapon. That's why he's more accessable.)
2. Most American comic books are franchises of a successful main character, while manga are plot-driven stories involving characters. Many comics are written as independent stories by multiple authors, which makes it difficult to change anything canon about the character / world without getting a quorum at a committee. The character is left exactly where he started at the beginning of the comic book having gone nowhere. And there generally is only superficial interaction between the independent stories. Manga seem decidedly more plot driven, with characters serving as focal points rather than subject matter. Kaneda was hardly in Akira in any substantive way, and mostly served to allow the story to unfold. No one in their right mind would suggest an Akira 2 just because you could carry the character over. But such a thing is assumed in American comics all the time.
3. Comic books are unsatisfyingly short. After actively searching out a source, finding a comic book shop, and driving to it to get the latest copy of Big Sweaty Guy with a Gun: Reborn, you would expect to be have at least some entertainment from it... right? Well, unless you found that rarity of American comics, the compilation, chances are it is 20 pages long, 1/2 of which are action tiles and need no reading, and which can be finished in about 7 minutes. And don't forget to tune in again next month when they release the next 7 minutes of the story. Either your story is going to have a plot that wouldn't challenge the teletubbies, or your reader is going to get bored and move on in the year and a half it takes to finish your storyline. In japan, compilations seem to be far more common than they are here, with many, many more pages to read. I have never seen a japanese comic anywhere near as short as ours, page for page. It's just not worth bothering to spend 20 minutes every month for a year picking up a comic that you are going to read in 7... but picking up one of those ubiquitous manga in 30 seconds while shopping, and reading it for 2 hours? That's not a bad deal.
Sadly, none of the above seem to be changing any time soon. Plot driven comics with accessable characters served out in meals not bites? Sadly, not while the big two are still in charge.
I'm all for journalistic integrity on Slashdot, but there comes a point when plausable deniability just becomes implausable. Their professional website creators created a style sheet to be fed to specific browsers to improve rendering, yet never checked to see how those browsers would actually render such a thing?
This reminds me of those papers that parrot painfully obvious falsehoods simply because it wouldn't be impartial to stand back and say "hey, that doesn't make any sense at all." And they only *accidently* blocked Opera last time. Sure. They didn't mean to include an uninstaller for Netscape. Dr Dos really was broken. Who can possibly say?
Oh! I want mandatory IQ tests for congress, with printed pass/fail results.
Get a conference room projector. Aim down.
Not terribly difficult. They are intended to aim at walls, but I can't think of any plausable reason besides heat dissapation that aiming one down would be a problem.
You can see that the light is falling all over the person in the image, so there isn't any correction going on.
Another poster mentioned using smoky glass and projecting upwards. For that, you would need to flip the projection or the image on the screen... but I don't imagine that would be too difficult to accomplish. But it would be much cooler.
You could also embedd a rather large Hitatchi 447800 compatible 4-line LCD display, for extra video out, or recess a standard 21" LCD moniter into your countertop, then re-surface with a translucent material.
But yeah, go to Circuit City. By Projector. Aim down.
Well, they are Japanese...
Second, $585?!? Get outta here.
Well, they are Japanese...