Problem is, many times the manufacturer will use the date of manufacture to determine the warranty in the absence of the store receipt. Say you buy it 11 months after manufacture, and the product breaks after two months, you'll be out of the 12-month warranty and the manufacturer will refure to offer warranty service. Sometimes only the receipt can prove the date of purchase, which is when the warranty officially begins.
[IANA...well, whetever is relevant - lawyer, historian, whatever.]
Actually, it started out the other way around... Originally, the labels didn't want radio stations to play their songs, b/c they wanted to sell albums instead, and they thought it was a bad idea for the songs to be heard "for free". (Sound familiar, anyone?) Eventually the stations took the labels to court and got what is called "mandatory licensing" - meaning that the labels *must* allow the stations to play their music for a set price. And once the labels got used to the idea that the radio stations were *good* for sales instead of bad, the radio stations started requiring the labels to pay *them* for playing the songs (and this far outweighed what the radio stations were forced to pay the labels by the law). This is called payola, and the gov't outlawed it.
What these webcasters are suing for is not *what* the RIAA was doing, but *how* they were doing it. A U.S. senator forced the webcasters to make a deal with the RIAA, threatening to have his own staff write the agreement instead (which of course would have been disastrous) if they didn't. So a small subsection of webcasters went and made the deal with the RIAA. The problem is that webcasters right now are required to pay 2-4 times as much as a radio station for the same songs! This means death for many small webcasters who can't hope to pay the full amount - even the radio payments can be oppressive to a small radio station sometimes.
So there is a difference between *legal* and *right*. And in this case, there is sufficient evidence that the RIAA was using their political clout to artificially impede competition and market forces that they may have actually run afoul of antitrust laws. (Heck, the major members of the RIAA have already been convicted of price fixing by the DOJ!)
So now it is up to the courts to decide whether or not what they have been doing is, in fact, legal.
It's a matter of economy and return on investment. If there's a large enough customer base to generate enough revenue (and profit!) to justify the extra cost of developping/testing/maintaining for an extra platform, then the project will go ahead.
The fact that there are two platforms already means that a decision-maker somewhere thought there was enough money to be made to support the second platform.
So the key is to convince the decision-maker(s) that *nix has enough of a monetary base to rationalize the costs of building/supporting it.
But for the questioner: what is considered "landmark"? Is it a CG effect that was copied in other movies and became a standard? Or was it simply something that resonated with the audience but had CG elements in it?
For the moment, I'll define "landmark" movies with CG content as 1) ones I remember for years afterward and 2) ones that have technology/a way of life that I would very much like to have some day. So there are two others I would mention:
5th element Johnny Mnemonic
The 5th element used obvious but highly stylized CG elements to greatly enhance the overall look of the movie. It also had amazing vision throughout, not just in the CG parts. I watch this movie regularly in awe of the creative vision of normal life. I think it may be Bladerunner's equal in this respect.
Johnny Mnemonic had one part that always intrigued me - the 3D representation of an OS in virtual reality. I've been waiting for this IRL for years, and still haven't found what I'm looking for. That's the only thing from the movie I remember; the rest was pretty bad. But it was the first time I'd ever seen that particular idea actually visualized, and it was cool.
I sound like a stepped-on frog when I sing, no amount of computer trickery is going to make me into a Christina whatsherface.
Liselle is absolutely right... At least about the second part (I've never heard this person sing, so I can't speak to that.) But I can't believe that no one has pointed this out yet... we're talking about *pitch*, people! This has NOTHING to do with the tonal quality of the voice! There are some people who still sound pretty bad even when they sing on pitch (think Fran Dresher)!
The *quality* of the voice is much more important in the long run than the pitch. Even when I sing absolutely on pitch, I still can't match the absolute tonal beauty of Andrea Bocelli. The tibmre of the voice is still a major factor in vocal beauty even when pitch is removed from the equation.
No, all Vietnamese do not have perfect pitch. There is a higher *incidence* of perfect pitch among people who natively speak a tonal language. Vietnamese happens to be widely studied. Chinese (most branches), Thai, and (to a lesser degree) Korean, some African languages, and even Swedish are all somewhat tonal (i.e., the meaning of a word is based in part on the inflection given to it by the speaker).
...why no one has brought this up yet. Anyone ever hear of the bends??
The bends is caused by the expansion of nitrogen in the joints that derives from a dissolution from the bloodstream due to a rapid pressure decrease (usually experienced by divers who are surfacing too quickly). In extreme cases, it is deadly, but it is always painful.
So obviously, a change in pressure *can* cause pain. And a rapid change in barometric pressure, while not as severe as, say, the difference between the surface and 200 meters, is still a candidate for pain, albeit a lesser pain.
All right, I'll buy that. But this *is*/. after all, and bitching is what we do best here, isn't it?
I agree with some of the other posters that it seems amazing that this guy admitted that the movies sucked, even if it was in a roundabout fashion.
And you're right that we should probably give them a little slack. But history tells us that trends continue until they're forced to change, and I think their history speaks volumes. They do what they can to maximize their profit despite the cost to society or other people, and the warnings that are given here are sometimes right on. Better for people to be aware and cautious, I think. In fact, that's part of the reason I read/. in the first place - to get information about things I don't get from other news sources. I think this falls into that category.
And to say that what happens here has no bearing on the world outside of/. is somewhat incorrect - each of these geeks, to some degree or another, has some contact with the outside world and can affect things there. So even if the ripples are small, I think it's important to recognize them. So our Chicken Little cries here may be a little premature, but they may yet serve some purpose.
What I am somewhat surprised at is that the executive didn't seem to realize the VERY important potential for SMS and the like to improve sales of good movies! This may very well work out to be a blessing and a curse for them. But the MPAA traditionally doesn't see the good side of technology - viz. VHS, DeCSS, etc. Perhaps this time they'll be a little more enlightened. I'm very curious to see what the outcome from this is.
You're right, and Ang Lee is an amazing director. I really think that having made a movie of The Hulk that was actually watchable - think camera angles and acting, people, not story - is an incredible feat. Aside from the Nick Nolte rant in the middle there, I think it was a decent movie from a directorial perspective.
Yeah, there was a lot that could have been better, but look what he had to work with! (The Hulk's story line complexity isn't exactly Spider Man's, yes?) I think it's much, much, (much(^23!)), worse that LXG - something that had an incredible premise and *such* potential - was made into something that sucked so bad I walked out in the middle. (And I'm a very tolerant film watcher.)
I think we got spoiled by Spider Man which Just Didn't Suck.
Except that of that $131 million a significant percentage goes to the theaters
Unfortunately, that's not usually the case. Most blockbuster movie revenues go straight back to the producing studio. In fact, for the past 2 Star Wars movies, the movie theatres got NO MONEY from the sales of tickets. Absolutely none. Every red cent of ticket sales went back to Lucas and the studio. The theatres were able to collect money on refreshments only. (Ever wonder why it's so damn expensive to buy refreshments at the theatre?) Of course, when tens of millions of people are going to the theatre to see a movie, that's a lot of refreshment sales. But the theatres really have no power.
that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands
Nearly any information, used incorrectly, maliciously, or by evil people can be devestating. Making information secret in the interest of "security" is a bad move. This is why many people advocate full disclosure, and why most security experts think that "security through obscurity" is a bad idea. Security should come because systems are strong, not because those systems are "secret".
Unfortunately, I can't support this opinion... I tried Sibelius 2.0 for the PC awhile ago and found it completely lacking. I could record from my digital piano, but when I played it back, it automatically played the treble clef on MIDI channel 1 and the bass clef on MIDI channel 2. This, despite that I played the grand staff completely on channel 1 in real-time to record! (And there were no MIDI control settings to be found anywhere.)
Now, it's possible that the mac version doesn't have this (or many of the other) limitation(s), and/or they may have fixed them in subsequent releases, but I couldn't believe that the 2.0 version had been released to the public at all. It was an abomination.
Finale for the PC is completely counter-intuitive for the novice (again, your Mac mileage may vary), but once you get used to the design it is powerful and good.
But I can't wait for someone to make an open source scoring program that competes with these two programs. I wish I could do it myself.
Y'know, even a standard format for cross-application viewing of scored documents (complete with all d.s. al coda's, decresc., etc.) would be a great start...
Light moves differently than that... it's the same speed no matter where/when/speed of the observer(s). it's really messed up, and even i didn't understand it well in Physics3
You are correct for the most part. However, there have been recent proposals and studies that there may have been a time in the early universe where the speed of light, c, which was still a constant, had a value different from ~3x10^8 where it is now. (I.e., "the speed of light" was not the same as it is now)
IANAP, at least not professionally, though I think I may be able to shed some light (or at least a few photons) on your questions.
I find it interesting that they determined an estimate of the total mass of all the matter in the Universe before they figured out how many stars there are. You'd think they'd come up with the number of stars first, and then base the mass estimate on that.
You are right in thinking that intuitively, this would be the way to work it. (I know that it would be if I were approaching it, but then these guys are probably smarter than me.) The interesting thing is that as part of the work Einstein did, there was a mathematical shortcut which allows us to calculate the total mass of the objects in the universe based on their collective gravitational effects.
It works like this: 1) The universe has a certain amount of objects, each of which have mass. 2) We know that any object that has mass will have a gravitational effect on all others (in the amount of the inverse of the square of the distance between them). 3) We can calculate with reasonable certainty (with infinite sequences - similar to the Fibonacci spiral, etc.) what the total effect of all the gravity would be in the universe based on any arbitrary amount of mass that exists in the universe. 4) We can tell how much of an effect the total gravitational force is by measuring the effects of gravity on galaxies, namely how fast the galaxies are moving, whether they are moving away from or towards one another (on a large scale), and whether the galaxies farther out are moving more slowly or faster than the ones close by. 5) We know what effect (through the math again) a certain amount of mass (x) would have on the universe as a whole. To be more specific, we know that if the equation with (x) works out to be greater than 1 (i.e., f(x)>1, which was sort of arbitrarily chosen, but bear with me here), the universe will eventually pull itself back together and gravity will cause it to end in a big crunch the opposite of the big bang. If (x) makes the equation *exactly* 1, (i.e., f(x)=1), the universe will reach a point of equilibrium and remain stable for eternity. If the value of (x) makes f(x)Interestingly enough, physicists cannot seem to figure out where more than 10% of the matter they think *should* exists is! Based on the empirical evidence, they know that the value should be something like f(x)=.99999999999999999 or something very close to, but ultimately smaller than, 1. In order to make this equation work, they know they need a certain value for (x). But they can't seem to figure out what more than 10% of (x) is - galaxies, stars, black holes, etc. can only account for a small amount of the overall mass needed to make the universe behave how it does (there is a technical reason for this conclusion, but I don't understand it well enough to explain it here).
The other 90% is something physicists call "dark matter", because they haven't been able to see it yet. They're not even sure it exists - the formula may need to be refined somewhat. Einstein discovered this anomaly when he first devised this theory and the math behind it. So he added a "fudge factor" to his equation which helped it all come out in the end. He gave it a spiffy name to make it sound legit - it's called the Cosmological Constant. Before he died, he called the creation of the CC his biggest mistake, but physicists have been absolutely unable to shake it yet, because they still don't know why there's such a big discrepancy between the matter they know about and the matter they need to make the equation perfect. It's one of the great mysteries of physics still.
As for your second question, "if that light has been traveling that whole time toward us, how did we get here first?", think about this: if you are travelling away from someone at the speed of light, and there is one light second between you when you emit a photon, it will take one second for that photon to reach the other perso
I think there's an even darker side than what's being presented here in the brief - consider what happens when one of these 'glitches', whether techinical or PEBKAK, cause inaccurate information to be propogated through the linked government databases such as the TIA? Does joe traveller get strip-searched at every airport he goes to because someone "accidentally" put his name onto a terrorist watch list? Where does the government's responsibility to be accurate and precise with our information end? If the Credit Reporting Agencies are any indication, I think we have a potentially huge problem on our hands.
Slashdot Mirror
But then wouldn't we have to call it blass?
Cute, but no. We'd have to call it Bill Monroe.
Yeah, don't impugn the six-legged frogs, you insensitive...
Oh, never mind.
BTW, I don't mean that you are six-legged, StrawberryFrog. Um, unless of course you are six-legged, which I am just fine with. Really.
This is very true in most cases.
Problem is, many times the manufacturer will use the date of manufacture to determine the warranty in the absence of the store receipt. Say you buy it 11 months after manufacture, and the product breaks after two months, you'll be out of the 12-month warranty and the manufacturer will refure to offer warranty service. Sometimes only the receipt can prove the date of purchase, which is when the warranty officially begins.
If a store is printing a receipt on thermal paper, they are printing it from a computer.
If they are printing it from a computer, there is a record of the transaction.
Some places require information about transactions to be kept for a long time.
If all else fails, I would ask the manager at the store to retrieve the computer copy of the sales receipt for corroboration.
You can also use out-of-band documentation to help prove your point - credit card bills, etc. to help prove the validity of the transaction.
[IANA...well, whetever is relevant - lawyer, historian, whatever.]
Actually, it started out the other way around... Originally, the labels didn't want radio stations to play their songs, b/c they wanted to sell albums instead, and they thought it was a bad idea for the songs to be heard "for free". (Sound familiar, anyone?) Eventually the stations took the labels to court and got what is called "mandatory licensing" - meaning that the labels *must* allow the stations to play their music for a set price. And once the labels got used to the idea that the radio stations were *good* for sales instead of bad, the radio stations started requiring the labels to pay *them* for playing the songs (and this far outweighed what the radio stations were forced to pay the labels by the law). This is called payola, and the gov't outlawed it.
What these webcasters are suing for is not *what* the RIAA was doing, but *how* they were doing it. A U.S. senator forced the webcasters to make a deal with the RIAA, threatening to have his own staff write the agreement instead (which of course would have been disastrous) if they didn't. So a small subsection of webcasters went and made the deal with the RIAA. The problem is that webcasters right now are required to pay 2-4 times as much as a radio station for the same songs! This means death for many small webcasters who can't hope to pay the full amount - even the radio payments can be oppressive to a small radio station sometimes.
So there is a difference between *legal* and *right*. And in this case, there is sufficient evidence that the RIAA was using their political clout to artificially impede competition and market forces that they may have actually run afoul of antitrust laws. (Heck, the major members of the RIAA have already been convicted of price fixing by the DOJ!)
So now it is up to the courts to decide whether or not what they have been doing is, in fact, legal.
It's a matter of economy and return on investment. If there's a large enough customer base to generate enough revenue (and profit!) to justify the extra cost of developping/testing/maintaining for an extra platform, then the project will go ahead.
The fact that there are two platforms already means that a decision-maker somewhere thought there was enough money to be made to support the second platform.
So the key is to convince the decision-maker(s) that *nix has enough of a monetary base to rationalize the costs of building/supporting it.
True. Tron was definitely groundbreaking.
But for the questioner: what is considered "landmark"? Is it a CG effect that was copied in other movies and became a standard? Or was it simply something that resonated with the audience but had CG elements in it?
For the moment, I'll define "landmark" movies with CG content as 1) ones I remember for years afterward and 2) ones that have technology/a way of life that I would very much like to have some day. So there are two others I would mention:
5th element
Johnny Mnemonic
The 5th element used obvious but highly stylized CG elements to greatly enhance the overall look of the movie. It also had amazing vision throughout, not just in the CG parts. I watch this movie regularly in awe of the creative vision of normal life. I think it may be Bladerunner's equal in this respect.
Johnny Mnemonic had one part that always intrigued me - the 3D representation of an OS in virtual reality. I've been waiting for this IRL for years, and still haven't found what I'm looking for. That's the only thing from the movie I remember; the rest was pretty bad. But it was the first time I'd ever seen that particular idea actually visualized, and it was cool.
I sound like a stepped-on frog when I sing, no amount of computer trickery is going to make me into a Christina whatsherface.
Liselle is absolutely right... At least about the second part (I've never heard this person sing, so I can't speak to that.) But I can't believe that no one has pointed this out yet... we're talking about *pitch*, people! This has NOTHING to do with the tonal quality of the voice! There are some people who still sound pretty bad even when they sing on pitch (think Fran Dresher)!
The *quality* of the voice is much more important in the long run than the pitch. Even when I sing absolutely on pitch, I still can't match the absolute tonal beauty of Andrea Bocelli. The tibmre of the voice is still a major factor in vocal beauty even when pitch is removed from the equation.
No, all Vietnamese do not have perfect pitch. There is a higher *incidence* of perfect pitch among people who natively speak a tonal language. Vietnamese happens to be widely studied. Chinese (most branches), Thai, and (to a lesser degree) Korean, some African languages, and even Swedish are all somewhat tonal (i.e., the meaning of a word is based in part on the inflection given to it by the speaker).
Oh, don't worry about coming up with new ones. Just stick with the ones we have and call them "old school".
"Boy, imagine a beowulf cluster of those!"
"Wicked awesome, that is serious old school."
See?
And my Aibo takes my car for weekends; never tells me where he's going, never pays for gas.
Hmm, sounds like a teenager. I didn't know Aibo was that old.
Oh, wait, it's aging in dog years... got it.
I don't believe in the evil atheist conspiracy.
...why no one has brought this up yet. Anyone ever hear of the bends??
The bends is caused by the expansion of nitrogen in the joints that derives from a dissolution from the bloodstream due to a rapid pressure decrease (usually experienced by divers who are surfacing too quickly). In extreme cases, it is deadly, but it is always painful.
So obviously, a change in pressure *can* cause pain. And a rapid change in barometric pressure, while not as severe as, say, the difference between the surface and 200 meters, is still a candidate for pain, albeit a lesser pain.
Hope that helps...!
All right, I'll buy that. But this *is* /. after all, and bitching is what we do best here, isn't it?
/. in the first place - to get information about things I don't get from other news sources. I think this falls into that category.
/. is somewhat incorrect - each of these geeks, to some degree or another, has some contact with the outside world and can affect things there. So even if the ripples are small, I think it's important to recognize them. So our Chicken Little cries here may be a little premature, but they may yet serve some purpose.
I agree with some of the other posters that it seems amazing that this guy admitted that the movies sucked, even if it was in a roundabout fashion.
And you're right that we should probably give them a little slack. But history tells us that trends continue until they're forced to change, and I think their history speaks volumes. They do what they can to maximize their profit despite the cost to society or other people, and the warnings that are given here are sometimes right on. Better for people to be aware and cautious, I think. In fact, that's part of the reason I read
And to say that what happens here has no bearing on the world outside of
What I am somewhat surprised at is that the executive didn't seem to realize the VERY important potential for SMS and the like to improve sales of good movies! This may very well work out to be a blessing and a curse for them. But the MPAA traditionally doesn't see the good side of technology - viz. VHS, DeCSS, etc. Perhaps this time they'll be a little more enlightened. I'm very curious to see what the outcome from this is.
...at least we know there will be fodder for MST3K for years to come!!
You're right, and Ang Lee is an amazing director. I really think that having made a movie of The Hulk that was actually watchable - think camera angles and acting, people, not story - is an incredible feat. Aside from the Nick Nolte rant in the middle there, I think it was a decent movie from a directorial perspective.
Yeah, there was a lot that could have been better, but look what he had to work with! (The Hulk's story line complexity isn't exactly Spider Man's, yes?) I think it's much, much, (much(^23!)), worse that LXG - something that had an incredible premise and *such* potential - was made into something that sucked so bad I walked out in the middle. (And I'm a very tolerant film watcher.)
I think we got spoiled by Spider Man which Just Didn't Suck.
Except that of that $131 million a significant percentage goes to the theaters
Unfortunately, that's not usually the case. Most blockbuster movie revenues go straight back to the producing studio. In fact, for the past 2 Star Wars movies, the movie theatres got NO MONEY from the sales of tickets. Absolutely none. Every red cent of ticket sales went back to Lucas and the studio. The theatres were able to collect money on refreshments only. (Ever wonder why it's so damn expensive to buy refreshments at the theatre?) Of course, when tens of millions of people are going to the theatre to see a movie, that's a lot of refreshment sales. But the theatres really have no power.
but they never advocated anything of the time - it was simply a guy making an observation
/. community would be a little bit kinder.
Well, if they weren't on record already trying to limit or take away our freedoms , rights, and liberties, I think the
Don't you?
Oh, and here are a couple of extras for
good measure.
So resistence...is not futile?
No, no, no... not futile... fatal!
See? Resistance is not fatal...
Nearly any information, used incorrectly, maliciously, or by evil people can be devestating. Making information secret in the interest of "security" is a bad move. This is why many people advocate full disclosure, and why most security experts think that "security through obscurity" is a bad idea. Security should come because systems are strong, not because those systems are "secret".
Now, it's possible that the mac version doesn't have this (or many of the other) limitation(s), and/or they may have fixed them in subsequent releases, but I couldn't believe that the 2.0 version had been released to the public at all. It was an abomination.
Finale for the PC is completely counter-intuitive for the novice (again, your Mac mileage may vary), but once you get used to the design it is powerful and good.
But I can't wait for someone to make an open source scoring program that competes with these two programs. I wish I could do it myself.
Y'know, even a standard format for cross-application viewing of scored documents (complete with all d.s. al coda's, decresc., etc.) would be a great start...
You are correct for the most part. However, there have been recent proposals and studies that there may have been a time in the early universe where the speed of light, c, which was still a constant, had a value different from ~3x10^8 where it is now. (I.e., "the speed of light" was not the same as it is now)
Mattcelt
I find it interesting that they determined an estimate of the total mass of all the matter in the Universe before they figured out how many stars there are. You'd think they'd come up with the number of stars first, and then base the mass estimate on that.
You are right in thinking that intuitively, this would be the way to work it. (I know that it would be if I were approaching it, but then these guys are probably smarter than me.) The interesting thing is that as part of the work Einstein did, there was a mathematical shortcut which allows us to calculate the total mass of the objects in the universe based on their collective gravitational effects.
It works like this:
1) The universe has a certain amount of objects, each of which have mass.
2) We know that any object that has mass will have a gravitational effect on all others (in the amount of the inverse of the square of the distance between them).
3) We can calculate with reasonable certainty (with infinite sequences - similar to the Fibonacci spiral, etc.) what the total effect of all the gravity would be in the universe based on any arbitrary amount of mass that exists in the universe.
4) We can tell how much of an effect the total gravitational force is by measuring the effects of gravity on galaxies, namely how fast the galaxies are moving, whether they are moving away from or towards one another (on a large scale), and whether the galaxies farther out are moving more slowly or faster than the ones close by.
5) We know what effect (through the math again) a certain amount of mass (x) would have on the universe as a whole. To be more specific, we know that if the equation with (x) works out to be greater than 1 (i.e., f(x)>1, which was sort of arbitrarily chosen, but bear with me here), the universe will eventually pull itself back together and gravity will cause it to end in a big crunch the opposite of the big bang. If (x) makes the equation *exactly* 1, (i.e., f(x)=1), the universe will reach a point of equilibrium and remain stable for eternity. If the value of (x) makes f(x)Interestingly enough, physicists cannot seem to figure out where more than 10% of the matter they think *should* exists is! Based on the empirical evidence, they know that the value should be something like f(x)=.99999999999999999 or something very close to, but ultimately smaller than, 1. In order to make this equation work, they know they need a certain value for (x). But they can't seem to figure out what more than 10% of (x) is - galaxies, stars, black holes, etc. can only account for a small amount of the overall mass needed to make the universe behave how it does (there is a technical reason for this conclusion, but I don't understand it well enough to explain it here).
The other 90% is something physicists call "dark matter", because they haven't been able to see it yet. They're not even sure it exists - the formula may need to be refined somewhat. Einstein discovered this anomaly when he first devised this theory and the math behind it. So he added a "fudge factor" to his equation which helped it all come out in the end. He gave it a spiffy name to make it sound legit - it's called the Cosmological Constant. Before he died, he called the creation of the CC his biggest mistake, but physicists have been absolutely unable to shake it yet, because they still don't know why there's such a big discrepancy between the matter they know about and the matter they need to make the equation perfect. It's one of the great mysteries of physics still.
As for your second question, "if that light has been traveling that whole time toward us, how did we get here first?", think about this: if you are travelling away from someone at the speed of light, and there is one light second between you when you emit a photon, it will take one second for that photon to reach the other perso
I think there's an even darker side than what's being presented here in the brief - consider what happens when one of these 'glitches', whether techinical or PEBKAK, cause inaccurate information to be propogated through the linked government databases such as the TIA? Does joe traveller get strip-searched at every airport he goes to because someone "accidentally" put his name onto a terrorist watch list? Where does the government's responsibility to be accurate and precise with our information end? If the Credit Reporting Agencies are any indication, I think we have a potentially huge problem on our hands.