So yeah they're terrible, which is still probably not as bad as Washington DC.
I'd like to point out that the guy from Washington DC also has private sector experience if you're worried about icky public sector cooties getting all over your new public sector employee. He's also very big on open and transparent government. His resume's a bit light to figure out how good he'll be, but he's probably got a huge leg-up on working with people in Washington.
The lady from Cisco, however, managed a doomed subsidiary of Motorola based on an uneconomical GaAs-on-Si technology before eventually presiding as CTO over the continued slow decline of a company that hasn't had an exciting product since the RAZR years ago before moving on to fill a position at Cisco which had been vacant for two years. While she does want to see more funding for fundamental research and development (not surprising given her fabrication background), the association with Motorola and Cisco does not scream the best and brightest of the private sector to me. Given her academic credentials, she's probably very brilliant, but I don't see how that's translated into success for her companies.
Maybe it's just a sign that the latent racism which assumes that just because someone was born in India they can't be a US citizen is coming to an end.
Heh. True.
Padmasree Warrior grew up in India and went to IIT, but she majored in Chemical Engineering and later got a masters in the same subject at Cornell. She started at one of Motorola's fabs and went on to management later. As far as I can tell, she's never been part of the software and systems side of the IT industry outside of management, instead working her way up through the fab side. (Much like I wouldn't consider John Sculley of Apple fame to have been an "IT guy" having an architecture major who went into marketing and management at PepsiCo before becoming an infamous Apple CEO.)
Vivek Kundra, while ethnically Indian, grew up in Tanzania not India, speaking Swahili. He came to the US at age 11, and I'd bet a dollar that he was a US citizen by the time he went to college. He has a BS in psychology and a MS in information technology from the University of Maryland. He also has private sector experience.
So, to sum up: One Indian-American never went into IT so much as into plant design and later management, and the other was not only probably a US citizen at the time, but was more African than Indian in cultural upbringing.
Do you think that stealing from a person is much worse than stealing from a store?
Well, you could make that argument from multiple angles, but again you're dealing with straw men.
The problem is not the relative moral culpability of the acts so much as the accuracy of the analogy. Stealing a CD from a record store is far more like not paying the RIAA for a download -- especially since downloaded music easily substitutes for a store purchase. Breaking into someone's home is totally inaccurate. When you download a song from someone else, you aren't stealing the song from them, you're just not paying the rights owner for it.
However, when they began this campaign, they were basically starting from zero. I don't think most people started out thinking of copying files as a crime, but certain powers have really fought to have it labelled as "piracy" and "theft".
Not really. The software industry had laid the groundwork for that for years. "Don't copy that floppy," anybody?
Even though they've made some headway, ask most people, "Is downloading a song from the internet the same thing as breaking into someone's house and stealing a CD?" I don't think many people will say "yes" unless they have some sort of political stake in pushing that PR.
Of course not! That's not even close to the analogy that any sane person would think of.
The analogy that the RIAA wants you to think of is shoplifting, not B&E and burglary -- stealing from the store, not stealing from another buyer! Gah, what a terrible straw man. That's not even close to what the RIAA is pushing for because it makes no damned sense.
So do you have a problem with ALL live-action remakes or with HOLLYWOOD'S live-action remakes?
Mostly with Hollywood's, because there I have the most exposure to awfulness, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any other country that does live-action remakes well. The Hong Kong Dragonball Z was atrocious. The only good live-action version of an anime from Japan I can think of is GTO -- the rest are awful. There are a few decent Chinese & Korean live-action films based on comics, but generally if it got an animated version first, the later live-action was a horror.
Well, no, I'd disagree there. After all, that's the real battleground here, isn't it?
I'll bet if you asked most people on the street if downloading MP3s off the internet without paying for them was "stealing music," most of them would say, "Yeah." The average layman is probably not aware of the legal distinction between theft and infringement, probably sees little moral distinction between the two acts of getting something without paying the people who have the legal right to demand payment, and I almost guarantee you has not thought of the economics of scarcity that makes the real distinction in effect.
"Infringement is not stealing" is pretty much only a mantra for those few of us who have bothered to get worked up about the issue or who have the appropriate educational background. This group is not the public at large.
Pressing the panic button at this point is pure groupthink.
Depends on what you're pressing it for, and sometimes "groupthink" is better known as "common f---ing sense."
For me, it's just the fact that they're making a live-action movie from an anime and trying to pick up "A-list" celebs with little acting skill. Just the first half of the equation triggers a panic button for me; the latter half is little more than supporting evidence, and I would've felt the same with Nicholas Cage, John Travolta, or any other so-called "sci-fi movie star" in the role.
The Keanu rule of suitability is thus: Is there something wrong with the brain of the character? If so, then Keanu is perfectly suited to play the role.
I can't watch any Keanu Reeves movie without that classic line from Johnny Mnemonic floating through my brain:
"I have a problem..." [points to head] "up here."
Made me giggle a lot through "A Walk in the Clouds."
This is how art works, it builds off itself. If you really love Cowboy Bebop, then you should applaud somebody trying to reach the masses with something based on the original.
Name one live-action adaptation of an anime that was good and didn't just mar the name of an original. Just one.
Or name a live-action adaptation of a western cartoon. Or of a video game. Or any American remake of a non-art film from the east.
The closest I can think of is the American remakes of Japanese horror films (but I'm no fan of either the remakes or the originals), or "The Magnificent Seven" which wasn't a remake so much as a complete recasting of "The Seven Samurai" and is just not the same thing.
Face it, Hollywood getting its hands on an anime for a live-action remake stands a very good chance of being right up there with "Starship Troopers," "Mortal Kombat," "Godzilla," or "Silent Hill." Even those formats which make for fair adaptations stand a good chance of screwing up. Think of the average comic book movie. (e.g. The Hulk) Think of the average remake of a classic movie. (e.g. Cheaper by the Dozen)
Hollywood has almost never taken an original idea and made it better or even nearly anywhere as good as the original. That's not what Hollywood does. A live action Cowboy Bebop, especially one starting Keanu Reeves, stands about as good of a chance as being likable and introducing a whole new audience to the wonders of anime as Congress stands of passing a budget without some pork project in it.
Well first, even if you take the RIAA's side fully, a reasonable person would admit that it's copyright infringement, and not "theft". You can argue that copyright infringement is as bad as theft, but it's not theft.
Actually, if you take the RIAA's side fully, then you'd be using the word "theft" like they do, because you'd believe that property is property and that we should be using the most damning words possible to describe those who do not pay the RIAA for it.
The legality of hosting doesn't really matter. Consider for a moment how easy it is to implement a national filtering proxy and add an entry to blacklist, compared to how much work actually goes into taking down a site.
Why blacklist it when you could monitor it and nab pedophiles in action? I mean, if we're heading in the police state direction, why not go for effective police state solutions? If you blacklist it, you might find a suspect, but you'd have a hard time proving that it wasn't someone innocently stumbling onto the IP. If you get them downloading pictures, then that's different.
What's most worrisome is that the excuse is so, so bad.
Child porn? On the open web? Really?
I'm pretty sure at this point, anyone peddling child porn is entirely doing it through encrypted networks and through isolated darknets even. All the low-hanging fruit of publicly available actual child porn has either been dealt with or can be dealt with in a manner far, far less heavy handed than web filtering. What good does filtering the general web do?
Crying "child porn" is just the sugar to make the poison go down.
Well INAP(I'm Not a Psychiatrist), but I could see how you could use this system to train aggression instead of concentration if you wanted. It basically rewards the players for having correct brainwave patterns.
Isn't rewarding aggression what nearly every violent video game does?
And if you read the interview, you'd see he's not really evil, like many/most/all serial killers, but a very intelligent young person.
First, what exactly is "evil?" Some people think that one has to cackle and twirl your moustache with glee at being evil for its own sake, but most people who do horrible and evil things to other people have a good justification for their acts: "I was desperate and I needed the money," "I was just following orders," "I'm protecting my family and my country," "Everybody else gets away with doing it," "My evil rids the world of other evils," "If I didn't, then someone else would," "It was just a job," "It's nothing personal," "Stupid people get what they deserve," "It's just survival of the fittest," etc., etc.
Doing something wrong just because you were in a tight spot and put your own needs over others is no more just than doing it just because you enjoyed it. Evil is evil. While I feel sympathy for his poverty and think that we as a society should focus our government's attention more on preventing the root causes of crime than just "deterrence," I feel no real qualms about stringing someone up if they've crossed the line. He had a choice whether to do right and struggle or to do wrong and prosper. He chose the easier of the two paths.
And second, I'd like to point out that most serial killers were "very intelligent young people." Unlike them, he wasn't mentally ill -- just greedy, ethically bankrupt, and too enthralled by the shiny programming challenge.
So if I buy a door that happens to have a lock with a flaw, it's the fault of the lock maker that my stuff gets stolen? Sorry, but no, the fault lies solely on the shoulders of the thief.
I'm sorry, but why did you buy a door with a lock on it if not to protect against thieves? If someone sells a product that purports to protect you against criminals, and it fails to do as advertised, then that seller has sold a defective product and partially to blame for your loss. To follow your line of logic would absolve locksmiths of any responsibility to make a product that isn't slipshod.
Microsoft thumps its own chest about the safety and security of its system. Their failure to live up to their claims makes them part of the problem and not an innocent bystander.
And where's Halo 3 on that list? After all, it sold for 300 million in just one week.
A) It's not a list. B) What exactly is the curve for sales over the life of a game. Just how much Halo 3 sell after the first week or the first month? I'll bet cash money that the first week's sales weren't sustained.
Because the classic iPhone is huge heavy brick that many potential customers would be embarresed lugging around. By going down a size the new iPhone nano might be the size of a mobile phone.
I kind of stunned by this. What is the standard size for phones nowadays? My iPhone is a heck of a lot slimmer than the Nokia candy bar phone I was using up until now, and it's not much bigger than the RAZRs my family uses. I don't think I could actually reliably hit the buttons on a phone smaller than the iPhone, especially if a smaller phone were a touch screen.
Just remember, the only way to become a member of the Stupid-Smart-People-Club is to proclaim that something is impossible.
Ah, but there's a very big difference between saying something is technically impossible (which is what most people in that club have done) and saying that something is impractical because people are idiots and it only takes a handful to people behaving stupidly to ruin the entire concept.
They're all copies, the "originals" (if Beethoven ever conducted his own symphonies, I guess you could call it an original) are unobtainable because they predate recorded music. Wait until the Beatles music goes out of copyright (if the RIAA ever lets it) before you make any comparison.
Apples and oranges. There's no such thing as a "Mozart cover band," and there never was.
The original musicians are integral to the modern rock experience. Motörhead's "Whiplash" is not Metallica's "Whiplash," and Metallica's "Overkill" is not Motörhead's "Overkill." Classical music, on the other hand, was always intended to be performed by different people across the ages. While the Reiner and the CSO's Debussy is not the same as the performances by Debussy himself, none would dispute that they are still Debussy.
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So yeah they're terrible, which is still probably not as bad as Washington DC.
I'd like to point out that the guy from Washington DC also has private sector experience if you're worried about icky public sector cooties getting all over your new public sector employee. He's also very big on open and transparent government. His resume's a bit light to figure out how good he'll be, but he's probably got a huge leg-up on working with people in Washington.
The lady from Cisco, however, managed a doomed subsidiary of Motorola based on an uneconomical GaAs-on-Si technology before eventually presiding as CTO over the continued slow decline of a company that hasn't had an exciting product since the RAZR years ago before moving on to fill a position at Cisco which had been vacant for two years. While she does want to see more funding for fundamental research and development (not surprising given her fabrication background), the association with Motorola and Cisco does not scream the best and brightest of the private sector to me. Given her academic credentials, she's probably very brilliant, but I don't see how that's translated into success for her companies.
Maybe it's just a sign that the latent racism which assumes that just because someone was born in India they can't be a US citizen is coming to an end.
Heh. True.
Padmasree Warrior grew up in India and went to IIT, but she majored in Chemical Engineering and later got a masters in the same subject at Cornell. She started at one of Motorola's fabs and went on to management later. As far as I can tell, she's never been part of the software and systems side of the IT industry outside of management, instead working her way up through the fab side. (Much like I wouldn't consider John Sculley of Apple fame to have been an "IT guy" having an architecture major who went into marketing and management at PepsiCo before becoming an infamous Apple CEO.)
Vivek Kundra, while ethnically Indian, grew up in Tanzania not India, speaking Swahili. He came to the US at age 11, and I'd bet a dollar that he was a US citizen by the time he went to college. He has a BS in psychology and a MS in information technology from the University of Maryland. He also has private sector experience.
So, to sum up: One Indian-American never went into IT so much as into plant design and later management, and the other was not only probably a US citizen at the time, but was more African than Indian in cultural upbringing.
Do you think that stealing from a person is much worse than stealing from a store?
Well, you could make that argument from multiple angles, but again you're dealing with straw men.
The problem is not the relative moral culpability of the acts so much as the accuracy of the analogy. Stealing a CD from a record store is far more like not paying the RIAA for a download -- especially since downloaded music easily substitutes for a store purchase. Breaking into someone's home is totally inaccurate. When you download a song from someone else, you aren't stealing the song from them, you're just not paying the rights owner for it.
However, when they began this campaign, they were basically starting from zero. I don't think most people started out thinking of copying files as a crime, but certain powers have really fought to have it labelled as "piracy" and "theft".
Not really. The software industry had laid the groundwork for that for years. "Don't copy that floppy," anybody?
Even though they've made some headway, ask most people, "Is downloading a song from the internet the same thing as breaking into someone's house and stealing a CD?" I don't think many people will say "yes" unless they have some sort of political stake in pushing that PR.
Of course not! That's not even close to the analogy that any sane person would think of.
The analogy that the RIAA wants you to think of is shoplifting, not B&E and burglary -- stealing from the store, not stealing from another buyer! Gah, what a terrible straw man. That's not even close to what the RIAA is pushing for because it makes no damned sense.
Good Lord, where did you get that idea from?
So do you have a problem with ALL live-action remakes or with HOLLYWOOD'S live-action remakes?
Mostly with Hollywood's, because there I have the most exposure to awfulness, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any other country that does live-action remakes well. The Hong Kong Dragonball Z was atrocious. The only good live-action version of an anime from Japan I can think of is GTO -- the rest are awful. There are a few decent Chinese & Korean live-action films based on comics, but generally if it got an animated version first, the later live-action was a horror.
I guess I'd say, "all live-action remakes," then.
In most people's minds, they're distinct.
Well, no, I'd disagree there. After all, that's the real battleground here, isn't it?
I'll bet if you asked most people on the street if downloading MP3s off the internet without paying for them was "stealing music," most of them would say, "Yeah." The average layman is probably not aware of the legal distinction between theft and infringement, probably sees little moral distinction between the two acts of getting something without paying the people who have the legal right to demand payment, and I almost guarantee you has not thought of the economics of scarcity that makes the real distinction in effect.
"Infringement is not stealing" is pretty much only a mantra for those few of us who have bothered to get worked up about the issue or who have the appropriate educational background. This group is not the public at large.
Pressing the panic button at this point is pure groupthink.
Depends on what you're pressing it for, and sometimes "groupthink" is better known as "common f---ing sense."
For me, it's just the fact that they're making a live-action movie from an anime and trying to pick up "A-list" celebs with little acting skill. Just the first half of the equation triggers a panic button for me; the latter half is little more than supporting evidence, and I would've felt the same with Nicholas Cage, John Travolta, or any other so-called "sci-fi movie star" in the role.
The Keanu rule of suitability is thus: Is there something wrong with the brain of the character?
If so, then Keanu is perfectly suited to play the role.
I can't watch any Keanu Reeves movie without that classic line from Johnny Mnemonic floating through my brain:
"I have a problem..." [points to head] "up here."
Made me giggle a lot through "A Walk in the Clouds."
This is how art works, it builds off itself. If you really love Cowboy Bebop, then you should applaud somebody trying to reach the masses with something based on the original.
Name one live-action adaptation of an anime that was good and didn't just mar the name of an original. Just one.
Or name a live-action adaptation of a western cartoon. Or of a video game. Or any American remake of a non-art film from the east.
The closest I can think of is the American remakes of Japanese horror films (but I'm no fan of either the remakes or the originals), or "The Magnificent Seven" which wasn't a remake so much as a complete recasting of "The Seven Samurai" and is just not the same thing.
Face it, Hollywood getting its hands on an anime for a live-action remake stands a very good chance of being right up there with "Starship Troopers," "Mortal Kombat," "Godzilla," or "Silent Hill." Even those formats which make for fair adaptations stand a good chance of screwing up. Think of the average comic book movie. (e.g. The Hulk) Think of the average remake of a classic movie. (e.g. Cheaper by the Dozen)
Hollywood has almost never taken an original idea and made it better or even nearly anywhere as good as the original. That's not what Hollywood does. A live action Cowboy Bebop, especially one starting Keanu Reeves, stands about as good of a chance as being likable and introducing a whole new audience to the wonders of anime as Congress stands of passing a budget without some pork project in it.
This is funny at my church, trust me.
Must be in the delivery, then.
Well first, even if you take the RIAA's side fully, a reasonable person would admit that it's copyright infringement, and not "theft". You can argue that copyright infringement is as bad as theft, but it's not theft.
Actually, if you take the RIAA's side fully, then you'd be using the word "theft" like they do, because you'd believe that property is property and that we should be using the most damning words possible to describe those who do not pay the RIAA for it.
The legality of hosting doesn't really matter. Consider for a moment how easy it is to implement a national filtering proxy and add an entry to blacklist, compared to how much work actually goes into taking down a site.
Why blacklist it when you could monitor it and nab pedophiles in action? I mean, if we're heading in the police state direction, why not go for effective police state solutions? If you blacklist it, you might find a suspect, but you'd have a hard time proving that it wasn't someone innocently stumbling onto the IP. If you get them downloading pictures, then that's different.
What's most worrisome is that the excuse is so, so bad.
Child porn? On the open web? Really?
I'm pretty sure at this point, anyone peddling child porn is entirely doing it through encrypted networks and through isolated darknets even. All the low-hanging fruit of publicly available actual child porn has either been dealt with or can be dealt with in a manner far, far less heavy handed than web filtering. What good does filtering the general web do?
Crying "child porn" is just the sugar to make the poison go down.
Re: Title
Why don't you do it yourself? It's not like there's anything stopping you.
Well INAP(I'm Not a Psychiatrist), but I could see how you could use this system to train aggression instead of concentration if you wanted. It basically rewards the players for having correct brainwave patterns.
Isn't rewarding aggression what nearly every violent video game does?
And if you read the interview, you'd see he's not really evil, like many/most/all serial killers, but a very intelligent young person.
First, what exactly is "evil?" Some people think that one has to cackle and twirl your moustache with glee at being evil for its own sake, but most people who do horrible and evil things to other people have a good justification for their acts: "I was desperate and I needed the money," "I was just following orders," "I'm protecting my family and my country," "Everybody else gets away with doing it," "My evil rids the world of other evils," "If I didn't, then someone else would," "It was just a job," "It's nothing personal," "Stupid people get what they deserve," "It's just survival of the fittest," etc., etc.
Doing something wrong just because you were in a tight spot and put your own needs over others is no more just than doing it just because you enjoyed it. Evil is evil. While I feel sympathy for his poverty and think that we as a society should focus our government's attention more on preventing the root causes of crime than just "deterrence," I feel no real qualms about stringing someone up if they've crossed the line. He had a choice whether to do right and struggle or to do wrong and prosper. He chose the easier of the two paths.
And second, I'd like to point out that most serial killers were "very intelligent young people." Unlike them, he wasn't mentally ill -- just greedy, ethically bankrupt, and too enthralled by the shiny programming challenge.
So if I buy a door that happens to have a lock with a flaw, it's the fault of the lock maker that my stuff gets stolen? Sorry, but no, the fault lies solely on the shoulders of the thief.
I'm sorry, but why did you buy a door with a lock on it if not to protect against thieves? If someone sells a product that purports to protect you against criminals, and it fails to do as advertised, then that seller has sold a defective product and partially to blame for your loss. To follow your line of logic would absolve locksmiths of any responsibility to make a product that isn't slipshod.
Microsoft thumps its own chest about the safety and security of its system. Their failure to live up to their claims makes them part of the problem and not an innocent bystander.
And where's Halo 3 on that list? After all, it sold for 300 million in just one week.
A) It's not a list.
B) What exactly is the curve for sales over the life of a game. Just how much Halo 3 sell after the first week or the first month? I'll bet cash money that the first week's sales weren't sustained.
Let me rephrase that: What it is used for other than piracy?
What is any non-proprietary codec not blessed by hardware manufacturers for use in common consumer electronics used for other than piracy?
Remind me again, how does Matroska + H.264 automagically equals "Blu-ray Rips" and piracy in general?
Everyone knows that's wrong. It clearly automagically equals HDTV ripped anime fansubs and piracy in general instead.
That's simple : DivX is a video software, not a video format. It always has been. DivX 4-6 is based on one standard format ...
Have they always been at war with Eastasia too?
Because the classic iPhone is huge heavy brick that many potential customers would be embarresed lugging around. By going down a size the new iPhone nano might be the size of a mobile phone.
I kind of stunned by this. What is the standard size for phones nowadays? My iPhone is a heck of a lot slimmer than the Nokia candy bar phone I was using up until now, and it's not much bigger than the RAZRs my family uses. I don't think I could actually reliably hit the buttons on a phone smaller than the iPhone, especially if a smaller phone were a touch screen.
Just remember, the only way to become a member of the Stupid-Smart-People-Club is to proclaim that something is impossible.
Ah, but there's a very big difference between saying something is technically impossible (which is what most people in that club have done) and saying that something is impractical because people are idiots and it only takes a handful to people behaving stupidly to ruin the entire concept.
And I seriously hope no one tries to argue that enough baby boomers are on last.fm to skew the data.
You seriously think that baby boomers still don't know how to use the internet?
They're all copies, the "originals" (if Beethoven ever conducted his own symphonies, I guess you could call it an original) are unobtainable because they predate recorded music. Wait until the Beatles music goes out of copyright (if the RIAA ever lets it) before you make any comparison.
Apples and oranges. There's no such thing as a "Mozart cover band," and there never was.
The original musicians are integral to the modern rock experience. Motörhead's "Whiplash" is not Metallica's "Whiplash," and Metallica's "Overkill" is not Motörhead's "Overkill." Classical music, on the other hand, was always intended to be performed by different people across the ages. While the Reiner and the CSO's Debussy is not the same as the performances by Debussy himself, none would dispute that they are still Debussy.