I live in Tennessee, and while I'm 20 and don't really worry about it, it still seems completely absured. However, like i said in the topic my state has had this law for awhile (that's a link to the strengthening of the existing law), and there isn't much I can do about it. If I had known about it before they voted on it maybe I could have done something, but it's a little too late for that now.
A friend of mine happens to own a video store and he says he's losing a lot of revenue (aka money) because of the law. Thanks Mr. Sunquist (our govenor)
We in the bible belt will suffer, but everyone else is okay. We still can't buy beer on Sundays or have court without prayer first. Some things just take a long time to get rid of. The south, if anything, wants its roots, and keeps them.
There's a simple reason why a candidate will never (read: NEVER) be popular on Slashdot: There is no way a canidate can be all things to all people. The entire culture/community/whatever of slashdot is one of technology-based and interested. Sure, we want to know about science and anime and whatnot, but when you try to represent the entire country, some things must be given up. Firstly, most canidates drop the notion of even bringing up technology.
Most voters are well over 25 and still watch newscasts. Do any of us regularly tune in to watch Ted Koppel or Sam Donaldson go on about things that we already know, or, if we don't already know them, appear to be pure fluff about 'our health' or the Class of 2004? You can call it the Apathy Crisis or whatever, but the simple fact is that everything, that means everything political is commercial. Everything has a message, and behind that message is 'brought to us by...' directly after it. We don't care about what they have to say because we already know what they're going to go on about. They tell us what we want to hear and the 30+ adults out there soak it up like some kind of dilapidated sponge. Please mister Democrat, tell me you care about this. Please mister Republican, save my children. Please mister Nader, save the bad commercials from ruining our country. It's all sold-out over-hashed and under-messaged bullshit. We've become so jaded to the facts ads are in our face all day, we don't see or care what else is behind it.
A politician on slashdot is basically a bullseye target. Someone to knock down, pick up, then knock down again. They didn't do this, so slight them. They voted against this, pick them up and kick them again. There's no way you can continue to berate those who are in office and still expect them to respect and listen to you.
If a politician hasn't sold out to lobbyists and/or corporations, nobody has heard of them. If they have, people can't stand/believe that they would lower themselves to accepting money from such and such people. You can't have it both ways people. So which way do you want it?
Due to the lack of proofreading, here is the entire question:
Recently I was in the North East of England for a quick visit. When the time came for me to depart Londonwards I needed to look up a train timetable so wandered in to my local library for a quick lookup on the net. The AUP document I was required to sign was so authoritarian as to be unbelievable. As well as the usual clauses about porn and virii it forbade the use of chatrooms and - get this: EMAIL. To add to this, they had set up the machines so that the only app that could be run was Internet Explorer. They also had blocking software that blocked evil, depraved sites like oh, deja.com. I think this is not acceptable in a service that is funded out of (partly) taxpayers pockets is so over-regulated as to be utterly useless. Are other libraries in the UK taking a similar line? Does anyone else know more about this, or is this just an individual council going overboard?" A few libraries in the US are moving to this kind of system as well. It's a tricky situation, and it was inevitable that we were going to have this kind of conflict when accessing the Internet through publicly funded outlets. Are there better ways to handle this situation?
Star Wars was aimed at children. Fortunately, it involved themes that 'kids at heart' could get back in 1977. Hence, the whole world went nuts for the good/evil battle. Today we have kids/adults/teenagers that are so used to knock-offs of the original that we've become too jaded to see the good in it. Episode 1 was great for those younger than twelve who didn't yet have that 'I'm too cool for this' attitude.
As for the Matrix, what more do you want? A hacker-mentality movie with an absolute (and you have to agree) kick-ass soundtrack around a wonderful never-done-before plot and cool fight sequences (they should pay royalties to John Woo though..). The Matrix is a true tour-de-force on the senses, and the DVD set the standard (currently the best selling DVD of all time) of all DVDs to come after it. Its a real trip to go into the mindset that nothing you do means anything for two and a half hours.
Pi broke through the barriers of mathmatics being boring, intertwining the Jewish use of numbers as letters (and names) along with simple geometry and the stock market all in one. It worked on so many levels, and still manages to impress me on multiple viewings (the DVD kicks as too. Can you say TWO commentary tracks?). The ability to make such a low budget black and white film while still making it amazingly interesting and well written (could that ending BE any more shocking?), Pi is a great movie that most people have heard or expect too much out of. When you just take it for face value, the tempo and the mood and the pacing just take over.
I'm sorry if I pounced on your 'I'm to cool' attitude, but maybe you should go into films with lower expectations.
In short, he's The King of 3D Tech on the PC, but this is being equated with the driving pulse of computer games.
Well, have you ever heard of a little game called DooM? Or how about Quake? Or, if you want to get old school, how about Wolfenstein 3d? Wolfenstein was simply the first person shooter EVER. That's Ever with a big E. DooM is the most successful computer game on the planet. Hands down. Quake started the online multiplayer movement. There would be no EverQuest or Diablo II massive-multiplayer abilities if Quake hadn't broken the old creed that multiplayer wasn't viable. QuakeWorld quickly and simply made everyone turn their heads and wake up to the fact that millions of people would like to play other people far distances from them. In real time. With hardly any lag that NetQuake suffered. QuakeWorld still has thousands of people playing it today. DooM was the first to let you build your own levels (this is debatable, as you could build them in Wolf3d, and perhaps Rise of the Triad, but I'm not sure about the latter). Quake introduced QuakeC, allowing people to make their own games that had NOTHING to do with the original game. Ever heard of Quake Rally the racing game? or how about Air Quake where you got to fly around in airplanes and tanks and such?
If John Carmack isn't the founder of modern gaming, I don't know who is. The reason he's speaking only of 3d graphics, algorithms and such is because id is keeping its mouth shut on Doom 3 or Doom2k or whatever they're calling it. What else is there to talk about when you can't talk of the game? The technology that makes them work.
I think the simplest answer would be licensing for the amount of bandwidth one can use at one time.
For example, there would be classes and classifications. Levels A1-A5 would be a residential, and B1-B5 would be business, C1-C5 would be like a school, university, govt branch, etc. You could purchase the licenses as well as having to pass tests on your knowledge and assert long-term trust with such ability as 100Mb/sec. A1's wouldn't need anything more than a good ISDN or cable connect, while A5's may run a little hobby site that gets a few thousand visitors a month and needs the bandwidth. The bigger the business the better the bandwitdth. It's all ratio'd out as he explained in the article.
I agree that there shouldn't be broadband of that magnitude in the home unless you are trusted and approved with that kind of access.
I want to state clearly that I am all for this type of thinking.
Why? Well, first, we're (the US citizens out there) taxed to death. We do not need another tax, let alone an internet one (though it seems one is on its way...isn't that right California?). Some of the ideas by these guys seem proposterous, but weren't all those 'wacky' ideas of the sixties of fax machines and the internet in general seen as nutty?
I've been reading the comments doubting the ability for there to be a common internet currency. Though many tries have failed, the story of an interviewer and Thomas Edison comes to mind. The interviewer asked, "It took a thousand and one tries to invent the light bulb. How did it feel to fail 1000 times?" To which he replied, "I didn't fail 1000 times. The lightbulb was simply an invention that required 1001 steps." Internet currency CAN work. And it WILL work, one day.
The US Government takes 1/3rd of your wages. Do you think that figure is going to go down? And furthermore, do you think that big a cut is worth it? Does the goverment do 1/3rd of your laundry, or 1/3rd of your coding? Do they do anything with that money but blow a large percentage of it on things we don't need? Or gold-plated toilet seats? Or $500 screwdrivers?
If the idea of no war is so insane, why haven't we had a major one in years? What's up with the Serbs or the Bosnians? Do we care? They fight over land and food and things we have in such great abundance that our military expertise ends up with the equivalent of government masterbation. Our military is so good in fact, that nobody will fight us. And who would have the balls? So after everyone turns to the internet, and a common global currency is developed, the only thing you would have to worry about is shipping. I see, if anything, security would have to be developed for food shipping than anything else. Food can be stored properly and sent ANYWHERE. There is no limit as to where things can go or what they can do.
You know what? I think, looking at the grand scheme of things, that FedEx and UPS stock is lookin MIGHTY tasty right now.
Okay, you can moderate me for off-topic, though if you read this completely you may not.
Anyway.
I recently rented Ghost In The Shell DVD and just finished watching it. Being a big fan of anime, or at least a moderately big one, I was unimpressed. The sound was amazing, the action sequences (what, all three?) were good, but it seemed strung-out, over-long and the music after ten minutes kinda got annoying. I know this is one of those 'top-notch' anime movies, and while I thought Akira was a masterpiece, this seems like some pretty CG and interesting story wrapped around too-long shots of the city and that annoying soundtrack.
What I would like to do is hear what other people's definition of 'good anime'. What makes good anime? What makes DBZ so great? Or so bad? I would love to hear from the thousands of/.'s who regularly watch this sort of thing.
Thanks
Obi
Watch the karma plummet faster than Christina Aguilera on Carson Daly...
...there was Oog. Oog knew nothing of these 'puterators' or 'input machines'. He knew fire. He knew hurt. He knew woman. And one day, he stumbled on something he named the 'wheel'. It was round and made getting around easier. He couldn't wait to show his friend Ug.
Ug picked up on this, making his own wheel and distributing it with the notion that it was _his_ idea. Oog was not happy, but nevertheless wanted to share with the world his discovery. After Ug sold his patent and namesake, the 'UgRoll' (as it was then called) sold like hotcakes, amazing the world and caveman society alike. And all the while, Oog gave away his free wheel. Ug soon had him destroyed, by a pack of mean, nasty dogs and a bodyguard named Stomp.
Generations later, there was Bill. Bill was a skinny, geeky kid, and he had an idea. He had a proposterous idea. And he was going to find other people to make it work. So he did. And they flourished. Soon, he was the richest man in the world! There were parties. Women. Cars. Etc. But, somehow, it didn't make him happy. He couldn't be satisfied with being number one. He had to have EVERYTHING. So he began bullying, and terrorizing. And threatening. And soon, he was known throughout out the world for his actions, and a bad rep was attained in a few short years.
But alas! There is hope! Years earlier, a young man by the initials L.T. and something to do with a penguin made an amazing discovery: if you give it away, it will be better. Who needs this 'money' and 'stock'. Who needs 'coporations' and 'takeovers'. Give it away! He screamed. Give it back!
A bitter battle ensued, with the now heartless and evil Bill battling L.T. to the end. L.T. wanted nothing, and Bill wanted it all. They fought for years, in all battlegrounds imaginable. It was bloody, and violent. One 'Del' lead to another 'rm -rf'. One '.xls' lead to '.whatever-you-want-your-extention-to-be'. Lives were lost. Programmers were saddened. Many funerals were attended.
And in the end, it goes back to Oog and Ug and who wanted to make the best wheel. One wanted his wheel to be the bestseller, and the other just wanted it to give it away. Sometimes you want to do the right thing, and other times you get your balls cut off while screaming "Freedom!!!" Does it make sense? Will it ever? Only the future knows that secret, and it never tells...
Microsoft is trying to bully people. Imagine that.
Microsoft made promises it didn't keep. Imagine that.
Microsoft got shunned in court and have to pay damages that equal little more than lunch money for Bill Gates' daughter. Imagine that.
Unix has Microsoft running scared.
Um.
Huh?
Wait a minute...that wasn't in the article...but, but it said, and I mean, I mean it said something about Microsoft fooling these Bristol people and...Unix technologies in Windows?
For its part, AOL has long disowned any involvement in the development of Gnutella. The company has said nearly from the time that Gnutella was launched that it was the unauthorized creation of an AOL subsidiary, and that AOL has not supported nor endorsed the peer-to-peer program.
A few questions: who is this AOL subsidiary? Why were they not sued? Well, a good answer to the latter would be that AOL works in BILLIONS. But what's the point? AOL 'didn't know' (/sarcasm) that it was being developed, and this whole lawsuit reeks of the "lets sue gun makers because guns kill people" type of legal action.
This will get thrown out of court as fast as they can slap the gavel down on mp3board, who are, obviously, just trying to save their ass from paying millions in damages from their own lawsuit by the RIAA.
As quoted from The New York Times from a Press Venue with the X-Box Representative from Microsoft:
"While we're aware that the Playstation 2 will be released a year earlier, with a large selection of titles, DVD Support and stable gaming, the X-Box will provide...."
(The spokesman pauses and turns, asking an assistant if this is correct.)
"Um, excuse me. The X-Box will provide...a PC-like enviroment...with...is this word 'faulty'? Yes? Drivers, a 'No-Firewire Zone' sticker on the bottom, and will ultimately...suck?"
(he turns and runs toward the assistant)
"That wasn't the press release! Hey! Don't you work at VA Systems?"
Corporatism. Buy-outs. Sell-outs. Monopolization. We've grown used to these types of words, and these types of actions.
Like most things, there are two ways to look at this. Central Hosts, as Dyson so, um, 'accurately' put it, are made so by the fact that they are better. Why is Coke #1? Why is Microsoft #1? Before the flaming starts, realize that there is NO software more easily installable (it's grandma-approved) or application-supported than Windows. If there were a better coke, or a friendlier OS, would those monopolies be there?
The other side is this (and basically spouted by all those against big-corps): "Big corporations are heartless! They could care less about the end user and they just want profits profits profits!" And in some companies, this is very true. The dollar is numero uno and the shareholders just want to see the numbers go up. They are greed. They are everywhere.
What most of us (I'm speaking to the geek and geek-friendly alike) think the latter. That these huge conglomerates want big business, and they don't care what little people they have to stomp on to get it. But it's not so much identifying the problem as it is finding the solution. Think about it: What if Debian or Redhat or Slackware just so happen to get so user-friendly, so installable (grandma-friendly) and so supported that THEY (that distrobution) were in 95% of the computers in the world? What would our thoughts be then? Would we turn our back because they were successful? Because they made money using a kernel that everyone worked on? What kind of ironical hypocritical situation would that be?
People such as Dyson don't think as much about the big picture as they do about the paycheck they go home with.
People like us don't think about the paycheck as much as we do the big picture.
In the middle is the internet, torn between huge conglomerates, and those who want it to be completely open and free to anyone who wants anything. There are two sides, and Dyson so wonderfully forgot the other side of that coin.
Let's face it: Those wonderful politicians in Washington only want to do one thing: stay in office. If a 'leader' says that 'no, we don't need filtering software', that's the same as saying to the American public, "Yeah, I think little Johnny should be looking at porn in the library."
Joe Sixpack's last thought is what harm this could do. Everyone is so obsessed with "giving the rights back to the people," and the absurd notion of "Family Values" (Check this out to see what I mean about "absurd") that they don't realize what this could do to the Net and the future of it. They just want their politicians to be nice, white, all-American (whatever that means) farm boys who just "wanna do good fer you and me". This bill means as much to them as DMCA did.
We can't ignore the fact that this is probably going to pass. It's already passed both houses, and our time to speak has come and gone. We're going to sit back, bitch about it, and watch as the Net gets changed and formed and mutilated by whoever has the 'power'.
Sometimes you wonder, which is better: To care and watch them do it anyway, or to not care and watch them do it anyway.
If someone knows of useable Linux filtering software, please let me know.
The reason that there is no filtering software in Linux is because no one believes in it. Why would a coder spend X hours on a product that practically no one would use? Who would be in charge of updating it? There are far more important things to work on and worry about. I would much rather see better drivers, more GUI and a friendlier interface than a 'filtering' program for Linux's 10+ available browsers.
Yeah, this'll work Apple. I hope you've instilled alot of confidence in your employees. I hate to break it to you, a close-minded as you are, but people will gossip regardless.
Let's think about it. Nothing (to most people) is more interesting than gossip. Knowing other people's business is just plain fun to most, myself included. So I'm nosy. I love to read rumors (film myself, Ain't It Cool News and Dark Horizons just rule) and I like to gossip about them. Wonder if this is true or if that is a fake.
The most important thing that gossip generates is PUBLICITY. When people begin to talk about your rumored products, whether they be true or not, they still are talking about YOUR company. Why else would the film industry suddenly be escorting the webmasters of those aforementioned film rumor sites to very advanced preview screenings? (This super early review of How The Grinch Stole Christmas comes to mind.)
You should not condemn those who gossip. With gossip comes truth AND lies, but whats important is the talk, not the substance. Didn't someone once say that there is no such thing as bad publicity?
The identies of the two microbes, once classified by the NSA, were released today:
They are one (1) Jon Katz and two (2) Tom Pabst. These two strains are considered very dangerous for their utter lack of knowledge or comprehension. They can survive anything it is now shown, including space travel. This information is to be a warning to all, to realize how volitile and fragile our little worlds are. And to also understand the concept that ignorance and pure stupidity can never be fully destroyed, only sent out to the cosmos to find more suitable ways of annoyance.
The world rejoices. There are parades in the streets. There is free love, free music, free programs. Everything is everything to everybody. Things haven't been this free since the 60's.
Two: Napster loses
The RIAA, in their pride-filled smirks remark 'See, told you so'. They walk with straight backs and smug looks. They want us to know that when you try to 'take' something, that there is a price to pay. Corporations won't go down so easily. And the lawyers' bills, we can handle those two.
Ramifications of Two: Clone programs will be hunted and destroyed like the buffalo. They will be slaughtered for the simple pleasure of watching them go. Code and underground groups will release more, but there won't be much left of them after a few years of legal action and barriers set up all over the internet. The internet will be a parental-advisory-censored haven for 'the good' of the people, and we are on the receiving end of it. The days of trading music will be a memory, and covert operations will trade music with hundreds of clone programs, available for days at the most, before the links are lost forever, thanks to some suits with big paychecks in their pockets.
This is it folks. Columbine was nothing. THIS is what will shape the internet. "It's just music," some say. That's bullshit. That's like saying the bill of rights is "just a piece of paper." I remember going from 1200 baud BBS' to T3's. Those were good days. Happy days. Days soon to be gone, only left to be revered in textbooks and propoganda films about how all those evil "hackers" were stealing and taking as much as they could, until the good, righteous RIAA and MPAA shut them down for good.
Here is my amateur opinion: Napster is going to lose. Why? Because it makes money. You don't see Gnutella or Napigator or whatever making millions each year. You see them creating a little file-sharing program that can search over thousands of computers. They don't have suits on the other side of the screen but stained coffee mugs and geeks staying up past their bedtime.
Who's next? Scour, of course. Where else can you find every song Napster ever thought about having, plus having that idrive space to back it up. The songs are being saved on 'idrive' and deleted as fast as they are posted. However, idrive isn't keeping up. We've already seen the MPAA freak out over the Scour movie-finding situation. But Scour also has it's own "Napster-ish" program that does the same job for music as it does for movies (on a personal note, the 'movies' on scour normally turn out to be pr0n).
Okay, okay. So, what does this all mean? This means that Goliath is pissed, because we may be stealing some money from them. Money is the root of all evil, didn't somebody say that? A better quote is, and I'm quoting Boiler Room here, 'The people who say money is the root of all evil don't have any'. We're pissed and we can point fingers but we don't get the checks. You know what I say? Screw Napster. Let 'em get canned. They're making millions. There are tens of hundreds of clones out there, and they'd have to be shut down one at a time. There are no lynch mobs to hunt down the coders. There are the courts. And the Internet has (for now) some small bit of privacy (don't let me get Katzy). And that is our advantage. That is our strength.
Who needs one big shiny, rich pebble to kill Goliath when we can make thousands of tiny ones, causing a (metaphor-enduced) avalanche?
I couldn't believe how completely biased this article was. You said the story was going to suck, you said it would never make money, and to beat it all, you even linked the story itself, without the possibility of payment. Well, you corrected the last one. I'm so proud of you [/sarcasm].
Why tell people not to pay for it? Or, that they're not going to pay for it? I know what I want to read and what I don't. I'll give the guy a buck for twenty pages. It was pretty good for twenty pages. You think of the rationel (sp?):
1) You got your 300 page novel at $28.95.
2) That's $.09 a page
3) For twenty pages your paying $1.93, almost two dollars. For one dollar for twenty pages, your getting a bargain.
How much of a novel do you expect for a buck? Don't you realize that if this is a true novel, then the next installment will be HUGE. People aren't all money-grubbing heartless bastards who want to rip people off. Stephen King is showing us this. What is so wrong to think that (GASP) people might actually PAY for this stuff? You might as well 'instruct' us to your EXACT way of thinking, that we shouldn't pay for such 'rubbish' and never think about giving this guy a cent for his work!
I was truly impressed with X-Men. The story seemed a bit weak, but then again, in 100 minutes, what can you do? Bryan Singer was screwed on all accounts. He had a 150 million budget. This was sliced in half. Then he had until December to release it. This was cut in half. This was a rushed action movie with a decent script and I'm thoroughly impressed he did as well as he did with it.
A few corrections to Jon Katz: I love your articles man, but please, PLEASE, don't say 'post-Columbine' one more time. PLEASE. I'm going to have to shoot myself 'post-annoyance' if you do. Secondly, his last movie was Apt Pupil, not The Usual Suspects (though it was a wonderful film).
It was sadly apparent that Bryan had to cut 30 minutes out of the film. You could just feel the "emptiness" in the congressional meeting, the lack of ANY character development other than four characters (Prof, Magneto, Wolvie and Rogue), and the lack of the Danger Room, which would have been in the film had the budget not been sliced.
But, let's face it: This was Wolverine's movie. Everyone's favorite X-Man got all the screen time he needed. Patrick Stewart was amazing, and I was rather impressed with the gorgeous Anna Paquin (Rogue). Nice effects, a few 'blah' ones, but on the whole, you'll like it. There's nothing anyone can really trash this movie for, other than the compactness of its running time. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine happens to own a video store and he says he's losing a lot of revenue (aka money) because of the law. Thanks Mr. Sunquist (our govenor)
We in the bible belt will suffer, but everyone else is okay. We still can't buy beer on Sundays or have court without prayer first. Some things just take a long time to get rid of. The south, if anything, wants its roots, and keeps them.
Obiwan
misterorange.com - It's like a wonderful movie...poster.
Most voters are well over 25 and still watch newscasts. Do any of us regularly tune in to watch Ted Koppel or Sam Donaldson go on about things that we already know, or, if we don't already know them, appear to be pure fluff about 'our health' or the Class of 2004? You can call it the Apathy Crisis or whatever, but the simple fact is that everything, that means everything political is commercial. Everything has a message, and behind that message is 'brought to us by...' directly after it. We don't care about what they have to say because we already know what they're going to go on about. They tell us what we want to hear and the 30+ adults out there soak it up like some kind of dilapidated sponge. Please mister Democrat, tell me you care about this. Please mister Republican, save my children. Please mister Nader, save the bad commercials from ruining our country. It's all sold-out over-hashed and under-messaged bullshit. We've become so jaded to the facts ads are in our face all day, we don't see or care what else is behind it.
A politician on slashdot is basically a bullseye target. Someone to knock down, pick up, then knock down again. They didn't do this, so slight them. They voted against this, pick them up and kick them again. There's no way you can continue to berate those who are in office and still expect them to respect and listen to you.
If a politician hasn't sold out to lobbyists and/or corporations, nobody has heard of them. If they have, people can't stand/believe that they would lower themselves to accepting money from such and such people. You can't have it both ways people. So which way do you want it?
Recently I was in the North East of England for a quick visit. When the time came for me to depart Londonwards I needed to look up a train timetable so wandered in to my local library for a quick lookup on the net. The AUP document I was required to sign was so authoritarian as to be unbelievable. As well as the usual clauses about porn and virii it forbade the use of chatrooms and - get this: EMAIL. To add to this, they had set up the machines so that the only app that could be run was Internet Explorer. They also had blocking software that blocked evil, depraved sites like oh, deja.com. I think this is not acceptable in a service that is funded out of (partly) taxpayers pockets is so over-regulated as to be utterly useless. Are other libraries in the UK taking a similar line? Does anyone else know more about this, or is this just an individual council going overboard?" A few libraries in the US are moving to this kind of system as well. It's a tricky situation, and it was inevitable that we were going to have this kind of conflict when accessing the Internet through publicly funded outlets. Are there better ways to handle this situation?
is that "nougascope" is now my favorite word of all time. I think I laughed myself retarded on that one.
Star Wars was aimed at children. Fortunately, it involved themes that 'kids at heart' could get back in 1977. Hence, the whole world went nuts for the good/evil battle. Today we have kids/adults/teenagers that are so used to knock-offs of the original that we've become too jaded to see the good in it. Episode 1 was great for those younger than twelve who didn't yet have that 'I'm too cool for this' attitude.
As for the Matrix, what more do you want? A hacker-mentality movie with an absolute (and you have to agree) kick-ass soundtrack around a wonderful never-done-before plot and cool fight sequences (they should pay royalties to John Woo though..). The Matrix is a true tour-de-force on the senses, and the DVD set the standard (currently the best selling DVD of all time) of all DVDs to come after it. Its a real trip to go into the mindset that nothing you do means anything for two and a half hours.
Pi broke through the barriers of mathmatics being boring, intertwining the Jewish use of numbers as letters (and names) along with simple geometry and the stock market all in one. It worked on so many levels, and still manages to impress me on multiple viewings (the DVD kicks as too. Can you say TWO commentary tracks?). The ability to make such a low budget black and white film while still making it amazingly interesting and well written (could that ending BE any more shocking?), Pi is a great movie that most people have heard or expect too much out of. When you just take it for face value, the tempo and the mood and the pacing just take over.
I'm sorry if I pounced on your 'I'm to cool' attitude, but maybe you should go into films with lower expectations.
Well, have you ever heard of a little game called DooM? Or how about Quake? Or, if you want to get old school, how about Wolfenstein 3d? Wolfenstein was simply the first person shooter EVER. That's Ever with a big E. DooM is the most successful computer game on the planet. Hands down. Quake started the online multiplayer movement. There would be no EverQuest or Diablo II massive-multiplayer abilities if Quake hadn't broken the old creed that multiplayer wasn't viable. QuakeWorld quickly and simply made everyone turn their heads and wake up to the fact that millions of people would like to play other people far distances from them. In real time. With hardly any lag that NetQuake suffered. QuakeWorld still has thousands of people playing it today. DooM was the first to let you build your own levels (this is debatable, as you could build them in Wolf3d, and perhaps Rise of the Triad, but I'm not sure about the latter). Quake introduced QuakeC, allowing people to make their own games that had NOTHING to do with the original game. Ever heard of Quake Rally the racing game? or how about Air Quake where you got to fly around in airplanes and tanks and such?
If John Carmack isn't the founder of modern gaming, I don't know who is. The reason he's speaking only of 3d graphics, algorithms and such is because id is keeping its mouth shut on Doom 3 or Doom2k or whatever they're calling it. What else is there to talk about when you can't talk of the game? The technology that makes them work.
For example, there would be classes and classifications. Levels A1-A5 would be a residential, and B1-B5 would be business, C1-C5 would be like a school, university, govt branch, etc. You could purchase the licenses as well as having to pass tests on your knowledge and assert long-term trust with such ability as 100Mb/sec. A1's wouldn't need anything more than a good ISDN or cable connect, while A5's may run a little hobby site that gets a few thousand visitors a month and needs the bandwidth. The bigger the business the better the bandwitdth. It's all ratio'd out as he explained in the article.
I agree that there shouldn't be broadband of that magnitude in the home unless you are trusted and approved with that kind of access.
Any other ideas?
Why? Well, first, we're (the US citizens out there) taxed to death. We do not need another tax, let alone an internet one (though it seems one is on its way...isn't that right California?). Some of the ideas by these guys seem proposterous, but weren't all those 'wacky' ideas of the sixties of fax machines and the internet in general seen as nutty?
I've been reading the comments doubting the ability for there to be a common internet currency. Though many tries have failed, the story of an interviewer and Thomas Edison comes to mind. The interviewer asked, "It took a thousand and one tries to invent the light bulb. How did it feel to fail 1000 times?" To which he replied, "I didn't fail 1000 times. The lightbulb was simply an invention that required 1001 steps." Internet currency CAN work. And it WILL work, one day.
The US Government takes 1/3rd of your wages. Do you think that figure is going to go down? And furthermore, do you think that big a cut is worth it? Does the goverment do 1/3rd of your laundry, or 1/3rd of your coding? Do they do anything with that money but blow a large percentage of it on things we don't need? Or gold-plated toilet seats? Or $500 screwdrivers?
If the idea of no war is so insane, why haven't we had a major one in years? What's up with the Serbs or the Bosnians? Do we care? They fight over land and food and things we have in such great abundance that our military expertise ends up with the equivalent of government masterbation. Our military is so good in fact, that nobody will fight us. And who would have the balls? So after everyone turns to the internet, and a common global currency is developed, the only thing you would have to worry about is shipping. I see, if anything, security would have to be developed for food shipping than anything else. Food can be stored properly and sent ANYWHERE. There is no limit as to where things can go or what they can do.
You know what? I think, looking at the grand scheme of things, that FedEx and UPS stock is lookin MIGHTY tasty right now.
This is possible. And it can happen.
Anyway.
I recently rented Ghost In The Shell DVD and just finished watching it. Being a big fan of anime, or at least a moderately big one, I was unimpressed. The sound was amazing, the action sequences (what, all three?) were good, but it seemed strung-out, over-long and the music after ten minutes kinda got annoying. I know this is one of those 'top-notch' anime movies, and while I thought Akira was a masterpiece, this seems like some pretty CG and interesting story wrapped around too-long shots of the city and that annoying soundtrack.
What I would like to do is hear what other people's definition of 'good anime'. What makes good anime? What makes DBZ so great? Or so bad? I would love to hear from the thousands of /.'s who regularly watch this sort of thing.
Thanks
Obi
Watch the karma plummet faster than Christina Aguilera on Carson Daly...
Ug picked up on this, making his own wheel and distributing it with the notion that it was _his_ idea. Oog was not happy, but nevertheless wanted to share with the world his discovery. After Ug sold his patent and namesake, the 'UgRoll' (as it was then called) sold like hotcakes, amazing the world and caveman society alike. And all the while, Oog gave away his free wheel. Ug soon had him destroyed, by a pack of mean, nasty dogs and a bodyguard named Stomp.
Generations later, there was Bill. Bill was a skinny, geeky kid, and he had an idea. He had a proposterous idea. And he was going to find other people to make it work. So he did. And they flourished. Soon, he was the richest man in the world! There were parties. Women. Cars. Etc. But, somehow, it didn't make him happy. He couldn't be satisfied with being number one. He had to have EVERYTHING. So he began bullying, and terrorizing. And threatening. And soon, he was known throughout out the world for his actions, and a bad rep was attained in a few short years.
But alas! There is hope! Years earlier, a young man by the initials L.T. and something to do with a penguin made an amazing discovery: if you give it away, it will be better. Who needs this 'money' and 'stock'. Who needs 'coporations' and 'takeovers'. Give it away! He screamed. Give it back!
A bitter battle ensued, with the now heartless and evil Bill battling L.T. to the end. L.T. wanted nothing, and Bill wanted it all. They fought for years, in all battlegrounds imaginable. It was bloody, and violent. One 'Del' lead to another 'rm -rf'. One '.xls' lead to '.whatever-you-want-your-extention-to-be'. Lives were lost. Programmers were saddened. Many funerals were attended.
And in the end, it goes back to Oog and Ug and who wanted to make the best wheel. One wanted his wheel to be the bestseller, and the other just wanted it to give it away. Sometimes you want to do the right thing, and other times you get your balls cut off while screaming "Freedom!!!" Does it make sense? Will it ever? Only the future knows that secret, and it never tells...
Answer: None.
Microsoft is trying to bully people. Imagine that.
Microsoft made promises it didn't keep. Imagine that.
Microsoft got shunned in court and have to pay damages that equal little more than lunch money for Bill Gates' daughter. Imagine that.
Unix has Microsoft running scared.
Um.
Huh?
Wait a minute...that wasn't in the article...but, but it said, and I mean, I mean it said something about Microsoft fooling these Bristol people and...Unix technologies in Windows?
Bill Gates hits the crack pipe again.
Imagine that.
For its part, AOL has long disowned any involvement in the development of Gnutella. The company has said nearly from the time that Gnutella was launched that it was the unauthorized creation of an AOL subsidiary, and that AOL has not supported nor endorsed the peer-to-peer program.
A few questions: who is this AOL subsidiary? Why were they not sued? Well, a good answer to the latter would be that AOL works in BILLIONS. But what's the point? AOL 'didn't know' (/sarcasm) that it was being developed, and this whole lawsuit reeks of the "lets sue gun makers because guns kill people" type of legal action.
This will get thrown out of court as fast as they can slap the gavel down on mp3board, who are, obviously, just trying to save their ass from paying millions in damages from their own lawsuit by the RIAA.
Man, what a clusterfuck.
"While we're aware that the Playstation 2 will be released a year earlier, with a large selection of titles, DVD Support and stable gaming, the X-Box will provide...."
(The spokesman pauses and turns, asking an assistant if this is correct.) "Um, excuse me. The X-Box will provide...a PC-like enviroment...with...is this word 'faulty'? Yes? Drivers, a 'No-Firewire Zone' sticker on the bottom, and will ultimately...suck?"
(he turns and runs toward the assistant)
"That wasn't the press release! Hey! Don't you work at VA Systems?"
The spokesman had no other comment.
Like most things, there are two ways to look at this. Central Hosts, as Dyson so, um, 'accurately' put it, are made so by the fact that they are better. Why is Coke #1? Why is Microsoft #1? Before the flaming starts, realize that there is NO software more easily installable (it's grandma-approved) or application-supported than Windows. If there were a better coke, or a friendlier OS, would those monopolies be there?
The other side is this (and basically spouted by all those against big-corps): "Big corporations are heartless! They could care less about the end user and they just want profits profits profits!" And in some companies, this is very true. The dollar is numero uno and the shareholders just want to see the numbers go up. They are greed. They are everywhere.
What most of us (I'm speaking to the geek and geek-friendly alike) think the latter. That these huge conglomerates want big business, and they don't care what little people they have to stomp on to get it. But it's not so much identifying the problem as it is finding the solution. Think about it: What if Debian or Redhat or Slackware just so happen to get so user-friendly, so installable (grandma-friendly) and so supported that THEY (that distrobution) were in 95% of the computers in the world? What would our thoughts be then? Would we turn our back because they were successful? Because they made money using a kernel that everyone worked on? What kind of ironical hypocritical situation would that be?
People such as Dyson don't think as much about the big picture as they do about the paycheck they go home with.
People like us don't think about the paycheck as much as we do the big picture.
In the middle is the internet, torn between huge conglomerates, and those who want it to be completely open and free to anyone who wants anything. There are two sides, and Dyson so wonderfully forgot the other side of that coin.
Joe Sixpack's last thought is what harm this could do. Everyone is so obsessed with "giving the rights back to the people," and the absurd notion of "Family Values" (Check this out to see what I mean about "absurd") that they don't realize what this could do to the Net and the future of it. They just want their politicians to be nice, white, all-American (whatever that means) farm boys who just "wanna do good fer you and me". This bill means as much to them as DMCA did.
We can't ignore the fact that this is probably going to pass. It's already passed both houses, and our time to speak has come and gone. We're going to sit back, bitch about it, and watch as the Net gets changed and formed and mutilated by whoever has the 'power'.
Sometimes you wonder, which is better: To care and watch them do it anyway, or to not care and watch them do it anyway.
The reason that there is no filtering software in Linux is because no one believes in it. Why would a coder spend X hours on a product that practically no one would use? Who would be in charge of updating it? There are far more important things to work on and worry about. I would much rather see better drivers, more GUI and a friendlier interface than a 'filtering' program for Linux's 10+ available browsers.
Let's think about it. Nothing (to most people) is more interesting than gossip. Knowing other people's business is just plain fun to most, myself included. So I'm nosy. I love to read rumors (film myself, Ain't It Cool News and Dark Horizons just rule) and I like to gossip about them. Wonder if this is true or if that is a fake.
The most important thing that gossip generates is PUBLICITY. When people begin to talk about your rumored products, whether they be true or not, they still are talking about YOUR company. Why else would the film industry suddenly be escorting the webmasters of those aforementioned film rumor sites to very advanced preview screenings? (This super early review of How The Grinch Stole Christmas comes to mind.)
You should not condemn those who gossip. With gossip comes truth AND lies, but whats important is the talk, not the substance. Didn't someone once say that there is no such thing as bad publicity?
Are you listening Apple?
Tom Pabst. The Jon Katz of Hardware!
So much praise for windows, all in one discussion! I think I gotta go wash! I feel disgusting!
One: Napster wins.
Two: Napster loses Ramifications of Two: Clone programs will be hunted and destroyed like the buffalo. They will be slaughtered for the simple pleasure of watching them go. Code and underground groups will release more, but there won't be much left of them after a few years of legal action and barriers set up all over the internet. The internet will be a parental-advisory-censored haven for 'the good' of the people, and we are on the receiving end of it. The days of trading music will be a memory, and covert operations will trade music with hundreds of clone programs, available for days at the most, before the links are lost forever, thanks to some suits with big paychecks in their pockets.This is it folks. Columbine was nothing. THIS is what will shape the internet. "It's just music," some say. That's bullshit. That's like saying the bill of rights is "just a piece of paper." I remember going from 1200 baud BBS' to T3's. Those were good days. Happy days. Days soon to be gone, only left to be revered in textbooks and propoganda films about how all those evil "hackers" were stealing and taking as much as they could, until the good, righteous RIAA and MPAA shut them down for good.
And there was much rejoicing.
And there was much rejoicing.
Who's next? Scour, of course. Where else can you find every song Napster ever thought about having, plus having that idrive space to back it up. The songs are being saved on 'idrive' and deleted as fast as they are posted. However, idrive isn't keeping up. We've already seen the MPAA freak out over the Scour movie-finding situation. But Scour also has it's own "Napster-ish" program that does the same job for music as it does for movies (on a personal note, the 'movies' on scour normally turn out to be pr0n).
Okay, okay. So, what does this all mean? This means that Goliath is pissed, because we may be stealing some money from them. Money is the root of all evil, didn't somebody say that? A better quote is, and I'm quoting Boiler Room here, 'The people who say money is the root of all evil don't have any'. We're pissed and we can point fingers but we don't get the checks. You know what I say? Screw Napster. Let 'em get canned. They're making millions. There are tens of hundreds of clones out there, and they'd have to be shut down one at a time. There are no lynch mobs to hunt down the coders. There are the courts. And the Internet has (for now) some small bit of privacy (don't let me get Katzy). And that is our advantage. That is our strength.
Who needs one big shiny, rich pebble to kill Goliath when we can make thousands of tiny ones, causing a (metaphor-enduced) avalanche?
Why tell people not to pay for it? Or, that they're not going to pay for it? I know what I want to read and what I don't. I'll give the guy a buck for twenty pages. It was pretty good for twenty pages. You think of the rationel (sp?):
1) You got your 300 page novel at $28.95.
2) That's $.09 a page
3) For twenty pages your paying $1.93, almost two dollars. For one dollar for twenty pages, your getting a bargain.
How much of a novel do you expect for a buck? Don't you realize that if this is a true novel, then the next installment will be HUGE. People aren't all money-grubbing heartless bastards who want to rip people off. Stephen King is showing us this. What is so wrong to think that (GASP) people might actually PAY for this stuff? You might as well 'instruct' us to your EXACT way of thinking, that we shouldn't pay for such 'rubbish' and never think about giving this guy a cent for his work!
A few corrections to Jon Katz: I love your articles man, but please, PLEASE, don't say 'post-Columbine' one more time. PLEASE. I'm going to have to shoot myself 'post-annoyance' if you do. Secondly, his last movie was Apt Pupil, not The Usual Suspects (though it was a wonderful film).
It was sadly apparent that Bryan had to cut 30 minutes out of the film. You could just feel the "emptiness" in the congressional meeting, the lack of ANY character development other than four characters (Prof, Magneto, Wolvie and Rogue), and the lack of the Danger Room, which would have been in the film had the budget not been sliced.
But, let's face it: This was Wolverine's movie. Everyone's favorite X-Man got all the screen time he needed. Patrick Stewart was amazing, and I was rather impressed with the gorgeous Anna Paquin (Rogue). Nice effects, a few 'blah' ones, but on the whole, you'll like it. There's nothing anyone can really trash this movie for, other than the compactness of its running time. Sigh.