If guns are legal to own, then they have absoloutely no right to fire him for buying, or intending to buy one.
This is Maryland we're talking about here. In terms of gun control laws, it might as well be Canada. In a state where the authorities are sympathetic to the RKBA, he might have a case. In Maryland, good luck even finding a lawyer who'd argue it.
I've also been to the arcade, so in a basic sense (Time Crisis 2, House of the Dead), I know how to pick up a gun, aim, and fire.
Not to call you out on this one, but I'd like to address the underlying mentality.
I carry a gun. I drill with guns frequently, and I teach others. I enjoy gunning down people in GTA, I love the visceral chainsaw in Gears of War, and the ragdoll physics in Crackdown are a total blast.
But the real thing is a different arena completely. Trust me, videogames don't teach you how to handle a gun. In fact, most gamers do very badly at the range, as they've got ingrained misconceptions that have to be unraveled. Light-guns, force-feedback and hi-res graphics don't prepare you for the real thing. I've had countless people fire a real gun, flinch, and remark something to the effect of, "I didn't expect that...it's not like games at all."
Real guns are much louder (~150db), recoil is more pronounced, people in real life don't just grunt, fall down and melt into the floor when shot or stabbed. I've seen (but not inflicted) both in real life, and trust me, it's completely different in reality. Real blood has a smell.
There is a level of detachment in vicarious media, no matter how "realistic" it may be, and no amount of "desensitization" will prepare someone to cross the line into real-world violence. Plenty of two-legged predators never play videogames. The factors contributing to real-world violence are completely different. You can play Bonestorm 3D 18 hours a day, but essentially, you're just interacting with pixellated content. There's still a "leap of faith" (I can't think of a better phrase) from that to inflicting violence on living things.
IIRC, Seung-Hui Cho wasn't a big gamer. Neither were Charles Whitman or George Hennard. Sure, videogame violence can look shocking and visceral, but I've yet to see credible evidence that it crosses over into physical violence.
The Rio Karma had a lot of great things going for it. My dream unit would be:
Supports Ogg, Wav, Flac (with encoding to all three)
Efficient HDD buffering, so there are no "glitches" in recording
Gapless playback, at least for Ogg and Flac.
Optical in/outs, with a flat line-out, unlike the iRivers
Replaceable battery
Usb MSC compliance without the need for proprietary software, so it'll work in any decent OS.
Adjustable-band equalizer ala Rio Karma
Size and weight are not real concerns, since these things have already gotten very small. Main concern would be how easy the controls are to find and manipulate, particularly in the dark (bear in mind, this will be used by many for live recording). As far as a color screen with video/picture viewing...whatever. I'd prefer an uncluttered interface on a readable screen of any type.
Look to the best parts of the Karma (gapless, flat signal-out, good databasing) and the iRiver IHP series (HDD recording, USB mass-storage) and combine those qualities, and build it. They will come...
This has been announced numerous times over the past, oh, four years or so. Cameron's wanted to do it for a long time, but each time it looks promising, it gets yanked away. I doubt he's even started a screenplay yet.
As far as making a movie of it, I'd hope they were planning more than one, as there's no way you can tell the whole story arc in two hours.
It deserves to be made into a movie, but it also deserves to be done right.
A good title is everything. Serenity is not a good title for a movie. What is their target audience?
Actually, geeks like us are the core audience. Chances are, there isn't going to be a big multimedia promotion blitz, and it won't matter if they call it Gigli 2. What'll count here is word-of-mouth from the fans--same thing that drove so many folks to catch the show on DVD.
Remember, this show (like Futurama) was subjected to almost every stupid tactic Fox could think of to sink it, and it still ended up successful. No matter what happens, this won't be a film made or broken by hype.
I used to work in a really horrid section of Atlanta, and luckily, the local police were regular fixtures there. One night, I was talking to two officers when an older woman approached them, in near-hysterics, shrieking about how someone had broken the window to her house.
They told her they'd take a report, but that there was no way to fingerprint glass that had been shattered into very tiny pieces, so the chances of capturing the bad guy were minimal.
She then started screaming about a footprint that she found on the ground below the window and how she, "watches that CSI show" and knows that "they can make a plaster cast of the footprint" and whatnot. By the time she mentioned collecting DNA evidence, they were clearly getting bugged.
Thing is, cops are getting this ALL THE TIME. Everybody, no matter how small the infraction, wants a forensics van and a crack team of government scientists to bring out the big machinery.
I've never had to do this, nor have the two other people I know directly who have them. Like anything else, it's the minority who's most vocal, not the folks who're satisfied.
Still, as I said, if there were ANY other player out there that did gapless, I'd consider it, but until then, I'll take my chances with the Karma.
My Rio Karma still trounces everything else, if for no other reason than the fact that it plays tracks back without the annoying gaps that every other player out there puts in. It's even smart enough to eliminate the tiny gaps that the mp3 format includes by default.
Show me any other player that can do gapless playback, and I'm there. Until then, I won't consider any DAP that doesn't play back music the way it was recorded.
Here ya go. I've had one for several months now, and though I've had it lock up a few times, it hasn't done so any more than the Creative Jukeboxes. Otherwise, I think it's the best player on the market.
Why's it better than the iPod? Better battery life, better format support (Ogg and Flac), better playlisting features, and most of all, gapless playback. As far as I know, it's the only player on the market that does this. Ogg and Flac play back exactly as originally recorded, and mp3 plays just as well about 90% of the time.
Nice, flat output that's clear across the spectrum. No muddy bass or tinny treble "enhancement." Excellent fully-customizable parametric EQ.
So yeah, there've been some bad hard-drives out there, but after my experience with a Creative Jukebox, I've learned to always get the extended warranty in this case. I've not had any problems beyond 6-7 lockup/resets, and yes, it's used as a portable with me.
Wow. They MAY actually be ahead of us in some respects.
Sorry, but I'll repeat what's already been said here: if it's so $%&*ing important, take care of it elsewhere. You have no right to inflict your lack of courtesy on others.
The last time I went to see the Emerson Quartet perform in Atlanta (which has the rudest audiences I've ever seen), the whole experience was repeatedly interrupted by ringing and "hushed" conversations. It screwed up the audience's (and worse) the performers' concentration and made the whole performance an excercise in frustration. I paid sixty bucks--I deserve to enjoy it.
Bad idea. You want to run a franchise into the ground this is the way to do it.
No, the way you run a franchise into the ground is to release a theatrical series of "prequels," which systematically betray and murder the mythology you spent the better part of a decade building. It also helps to utilize an alien that talks like Buckwheat and a younger, whiny version of your most classic villain.
Minidisc had the potential to be a huge cash cow for Sony, but for every step they took forward, they took two steps back in the name of "Rights Management." Had they initially released the format without DRM restrictions, you'd have MD data readers in a huge section of the home-computer market, and they'd have beaten the whole ~1GB portable-storage market before it started.
ATRAC sounds great, but since music MDs and data MDs are two completely different (and incompatible) things, the whole idea is crippled. If that barrier didn't exist, there'd be no market for the flash-players out there, and Sony would be sitting on top of the world. Same goes for the appalling mess that they made of NetMD. If MD portables acted as simple mass-storage devices, they'd be huge (and in time, cheap), and folks wouldn't see a need for a HDD-based mp3 player. It's a wonderful format for live recording, but when you're done, how the heck do you get it uploaded to a PC? You just don't. I still have a great Sharp unit that I use for recording, but it's a pain to have to play it into the line-in jack of my PC in realtime just to edit and store the thing.
In other news, Car & Driver reviewed several cars, including the Mazda Miata, AMC Pacer, Chevy Vega, Yugo GV, and the venerable Ford Pinto. Editors were pleasantly surprised to find that the Miata won, hands down.
Seriously, the Karma's the best one out there. I've tried most of the others, including the iRiver ihp-120, and there are alot of things that can't be described in print, but the Karma just gets everything right.
No, seriously. It's incredible. You can catch it in syndication or on the 1st-Season DVD. It's a huge but short space battle with some incredible animation, both hand-drawn and CGI. Plus, it's led by the immortal Zap Brannigan.
That's why I moved north from Atlanta to Kennesaw a few years ago. I have MUCH less need of a sidearm now. Something to do with the local ordinance requiring gun ownership, I suppose.
Sure. What about punched-cards? Nothing graphical about that. As long as it's displayed on a TTY (glass TELETYPE), it could count. Plus, all that goofy ASCI art could qualify...
That process is known as transcoding, and it's a bad idea.
This'll come up as more and more people switch from mp3 to Ogg. The plain fact is, mp3 and ogg use different compression algorithms, both of which are lossy. If you've converted a file to mp3, then you've lost some information. Transcoding it over to Ogg will cause loss of even more information. It will always sound worse.
Unfortunately, the only real solution is to reconvert from the original source material.
Several mainstream mp3 players now support Ogg. The Rio Karma does a perfect job (gapless playback and everything), and most iRiver HD-based players now support it.
Since Ogg already supported by Winamp and almost every Linux piece of audio software, the arguments not to switch are getting thinner.
Despite the annoying DRM conundrums, mp3 was never ready for primetime anyway. Ogg isn't quite perfect yet, but it's capable of improvement, as opposed to mp3, which is essentially a locked standard with alot of inherent (and, at this point) unfixable bugs.
Here's hoping more folks decide to check out "that Ogg thing" they keep hearing about.
Slashdot Mirror
If guns are legal to own, then they have absoloutely no right to fire him for buying, or intending to buy one.
This is Maryland we're talking about here. In terms of gun control laws, it might as well be Canada. In a state where the authorities are sympathetic to the RKBA, he might have a case. In Maryland, good luck even finding a lawyer who'd argue it.
I've also been to the arcade, so in a basic sense (Time Crisis 2, House of the Dead), I know how to pick up a gun, aim, and fire.
Not to call you out on this one, but I'd like to address the underlying mentality.
I carry a gun. I drill with guns frequently, and I teach others. I enjoy gunning down people in GTA, I love the visceral chainsaw in Gears of War, and the ragdoll physics in Crackdown are a total blast.
But the real thing is a different arena completely. Trust me, videogames don't teach you how to handle a gun. In fact, most gamers do very badly at the range, as they've got ingrained misconceptions that have to be unraveled. Light-guns, force-feedback and hi-res graphics don't prepare you for the real thing. I've had countless people fire a real gun, flinch, and remark something to the effect of, "I didn't expect that...it's not like games at all."
Real guns are much louder (~150db), recoil is more pronounced, people in real life don't just grunt, fall down and melt into the floor when shot or stabbed. I've seen (but not inflicted) both in real life, and trust me, it's completely different in reality. Real blood has a smell.
There is a level of detachment in vicarious media, no matter how "realistic" it may be, and no amount of "desensitization" will prepare someone to cross the line into real-world violence. Plenty of two-legged predators never play videogames. The factors contributing to real-world violence are completely different. You can play Bonestorm 3D 18 hours a day, but essentially, you're just interacting with pixellated content. There's still a "leap of faith" (I can't think of a better phrase) from that to inflicting violence on living things.
IIRC, Seung-Hui Cho wasn't a big gamer. Neither were Charles Whitman or George Hennard. Sure, videogame violence can look shocking and visceral, but I've yet to see credible evidence that it crosses over into physical violence.
Repeat after me: William H. Macy was born to play Ned Flanders. No live-action Simpsons movie will work without him.
Think about it.
Size and weight are not real concerns, since these things have already gotten very small. Main concern would be how easy the controls are to find and manipulate, particularly in the dark (bear in mind, this will be used by many for live recording). As far as a color screen with video/picture viewing...whatever. I'd prefer an uncluttered interface on a readable screen of any type.
Look to the best parts of the Karma (gapless, flat signal-out, good databasing) and the iRiver IHP series (HDD recording, USB mass-storage) and combine those qualities, and build it. They will come...
I'm Han Solo. What's that make me?
Oh, an Unitarian, I guess.
It can't be. It says right here, "0wned by D00mHax0r Billy." Makes sense, since he's holding all my files hostage.
This has been announced numerous times over the past, oh, four years or so. Cameron's wanted to do it for a long time, but each time it looks promising, it gets yanked away. I doubt he's even started a screenplay yet.
As far as making a movie of it, I'd hope they were planning more than one, as there's no way you can tell the whole story arc in two hours.
It deserves to be made into a movie, but it also deserves to be done right.
A good title is everything. Serenity is not a good title for a movie. What is their target audience?
Actually, geeks like us are the core audience. Chances are, there isn't going to be a big multimedia promotion blitz, and it won't matter if they call it Gigli 2. What'll count here is word-of-mouth from the fans--same thing that drove so many folks to catch the show on DVD.
Remember, this show (like Futurama) was subjected to almost every stupid tactic Fox could think of to sink it, and it still ended up successful. No matter what happens, this won't be a film made or broken by hype.
I used to work in a really horrid section of Atlanta, and luckily, the local police were regular fixtures there. One night, I was talking to two officers when an older woman approached them, in near-hysterics, shrieking about how someone had broken the window to her house.
They told her they'd take a report, but that there was no way to fingerprint glass that had been shattered into very tiny pieces, so the chances of capturing the bad guy were minimal.
She then started screaming about a footprint that she found on the ground below the window and how she, "watches that CSI show" and knows that "they can make a plaster cast of the footprint" and whatnot. By the time she mentioned collecting DNA evidence, they were clearly getting bugged.
Thing is, cops are getting this ALL THE TIME. Everybody, no matter how small the infraction, wants a forensics van and a crack team of government scientists to bring out the big machinery.
More proof that television is rotting our brains.
I've never had to do this, nor have the two other people I know directly who have them. Like anything else, it's the minority who's most vocal, not the folks who're satisfied.
Still, as I said, if there were ANY other player out there that did gapless, I'd consider it, but until then, I'll take my chances with the Karma.
My Rio Karma still trounces everything else, if for no other reason than the fact that it plays tracks back without the annoying gaps that every other player out there puts in. It's even smart enough to eliminate the tiny gaps that the mp3 format includes by default.
Show me any other player that can do gapless playback, and I'm there. Until then, I won't consider any DAP that doesn't play back music the way it was recorded.
Here ya go. I've had one for several months now, and though I've had it lock up a few times, it hasn't done so any more than the Creative Jukeboxes. Otherwise, I think it's the best player on the market.
Why's it better than the iPod? Better battery life, better format support (Ogg and Flac), better playlisting features, and most of all, gapless playback. As far as I know, it's the only player on the market that does this. Ogg and Flac play back exactly as originally recorded, and mp3 plays just as well about 90% of the time.
Nice, flat output that's clear across the spectrum. No muddy bass or tinny treble "enhancement." Excellent fully-customizable parametric EQ.
So yeah, there've been some bad hard-drives out there, but after my experience with a Creative Jukebox, I've learned to always get the extended warranty in this case. I've not had any problems beyond 6-7 lockup/resets, and yes, it's used as a portable with me.
Wow. They MAY actually be ahead of us in some respects.
Sorry, but I'll repeat what's already been said here: if it's so $%&*ing important, take care of it elsewhere. You have no right to inflict your lack of courtesy on others.
The last time I went to see the Emerson Quartet perform in Atlanta (which has the rudest audiences I've ever seen), the whole experience was repeatedly interrupted by ringing and "hushed" conversations. It screwed up the audience's (and worse) the performers' concentration and made the whole performance an excercise in frustration. I paid sixty bucks--I deserve to enjoy it.
No, the way you run a franchise into the ground is to release a theatrical series of "prequels," which systematically betray and murder the mythology you spent the better part of a decade building. It also helps to utilize an alien that talks like Buckwheat and a younger, whiny version of your most classic villain.
Minidisc had the potential to be a huge cash cow for Sony, but for every step they took forward, they took two steps back in the name of "Rights Management." Had they initially released the format without DRM restrictions, you'd have MD data readers in a huge section of the home-computer market, and they'd have beaten the whole ~1GB portable-storage market before it started.
ATRAC sounds great, but since music MDs and data MDs are two completely different (and incompatible) things, the whole idea is crippled. If that barrier didn't exist, there'd be no market for the flash-players out there, and Sony would be sitting on top of the world. Same goes for the appalling mess that they made of NetMD. If MD portables acted as simple mass-storage devices, they'd be huge (and in time, cheap), and folks wouldn't see a need for a HDD-based mp3 player. It's a wonderful format for live recording, but when you're done, how the heck do you get it uploaded to a PC? You just don't. I still have a great Sharp unit that I use for recording, but it's a pain to have to play it into the line-in jack of my PC in realtime just to edit and store the thing.
If only they had done it right...
Seriously, the Karma's the best one out there. I've tried most of the others, including the iRiver ihp-120, and there are alot of things that can't be described in print, but the Karma just gets everything right.
No, seriously. It's incredible. You can catch it in syndication or on the 1st-Season DVD. It's a huge but short space battle with some incredible animation, both hand-drawn and CGI. Plus, it's led by the immortal Zap Brannigan.
More info here
That's why I moved north from Atlanta to Kennesaw a few years ago. I have MUCH less need of a sidearm now. Something to do with the local ordinance requiring gun ownership, I suppose.
Sure. What about punched-cards? Nothing graphical about that. As long as it's displayed on a TTY (glass TELETYPE), it could count. Plus, all that goofy ASCI art could qualify...
Yeah, there was a film by that name, I'm pretty sure. It was a Paul Veerhoven tribute to the work of Leni Reifenstahl.
I've got a ZipSlack cd and a Knoppix cd which work great for wiping DOS off a hard-drive, and...oh.
You meant "DDoS." My bad.
Is Darl a skript-kiddie?
God help us all, that explains alot.
That process is known as transcoding, and it's a bad idea.
This'll come up as more and more people switch from mp3 to Ogg. The plain fact is, mp3 and ogg use different compression algorithms, both of which are lossy. If you've converted a file to mp3, then you've lost some information. Transcoding it over to Ogg will cause loss of even more information. It will always sound worse.
Unfortunately, the only real solution is to reconvert from the original source material.
Several mainstream mp3 players now support Ogg. The Rio Karma does a perfect job (gapless playback and everything), and most iRiver HD-based players now support it.
Since Ogg already supported by Winamp and almost every Linux piece of audio software, the arguments not to switch are getting thinner.
Despite the annoying DRM conundrums, mp3 was never ready for primetime anyway. Ogg isn't quite perfect yet, but it's capable of improvement, as opposed to mp3, which is essentially a locked standard with alot of inherent (and, at this point) unfixable bugs.
Here's hoping more folks decide to check out "that Ogg thing" they keep hearing about.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that this article directly follows the one announcing Gimp 2.0?
Just wondering...