Documentaries should not do "regular film editing" if such editing would lead the public to believe something decidedly different had actually occurred.
What bothers me the most about all these sorts of arguments is that you're at the same time taking the "look how smart I am I figured out he's manipulating film" stance, while at the same time taking the "everyone else is too stupid to see that it's manipulated, therefore it's bad" stance. You are not some super genius. People watching this movie know that things have to be left out.
Another great example was buying ammo in the Canadian Wal-Mart. Moore wasn't just "a regular citizen", he's a regular citizen who obtained a firearms importation license in Canada. Through "regular film editing," that part was never mentioned by Moore.
Well, he's obviously not a Canadian citizen (which NO ONE who watched that movie could possibly be confused about). But he was showing what a regular citizen could do, but to do it himself he had to get a license. You give people too little credit.
Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary French director who helped to launch the New Wave movement in the 1960s, had harsh words for Moore this week. Godard's latest film, Notre Musique, premiered on Monday, the same day as Fahrenheit 9/11. Later in the week, Godard lashed out at Moore at a press conference, calling him "halfway intelligent." Godard went on to say that the Flint, Mich.-born director lacks subtlety. "Moore doesn't distinguish between text and image," Godard argued. "He doesn't know what he's doing." "Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary."
And way to imply that Godard made that last comment, whereas if you read the link you will find that it comes from two men who are about to release an anti-Moore book. Good work using Moore's supposed tactics against him.
And Michael Moore's film will be ranked with these? This was most likely a politcal statement which damages the cridibility of the award you hold in such high regard.
And Easy Rider wasn't left-leaning at all? Yet it won. As the grandparent said, the Palme goes to:
films that show creativity and changes lives
Moore's films are often creative, effective, and are obviously changing lives because there's already 1200 posts on this story. The Palme d'Or is a film award, and an effective film hardly has to be one without a political message. You could much more easily argue the opposite - that it would have to have a political message.
Now let's talk about bias. When the story broke about the bomb going off that was hooked up to a sarin gas shell (Sarin is a nerve agent, a weapon of mass destruction), for that day and the next, you could find no news story on CNN.com about it.
When has Sarin ever been used on more than a few hundred people?? How do you know it didn't enter the country later? Where did it come from? Who set it off? Those questions need to be answered before this becomes a smoking gun.
I think his point was that by keeping the people underfed and deny them access to any kind of outside resources it made it impossible for them to rise up. Or even be informed enough to rise up, because even if they could get outside materials, they were too busy trying to get enough food to live.
It also reinforced Saddam's ability to tell the people that he was the only thing keeping the country together, in the face of all sorts of opposition.
Dictators survive on fear and punishment. The less afraid you can make the people the more their power weakens. And starving them does not further that goal.
I haven't seen the thing and I am sure it is politically biased
Everything you see is biased. From the choice of what to put in and leave out, the angles the subjects are shot at, the way they're lit, the juxtapositions they use.
At least Moore is OBVIOUS about it. He's not changing ads in the background and making the goal of so many movies to obtain financial and a hot girlfriend that you don't even think about it any more.
Moore generates DEBATES, just like this one. Which in the end is much more valuable than a boring movie that no one sees or talks about. Trolls are annoying when they bring up the same argument, but NOT when they incite debate on topics that people really NEED TO THINK ABOUT. Voter apathy is at an all time high. The candidates all try to sound alike to avoid offending anybody. We NEED blatantly biased opinions back in our society, so people can have real discussions about real issues.
But I agree that we should have the chance to see it before we argue any more.:)
I wonder where Taco got the idea it was the first to receive the Honor? Maybe from Moore himself? It's the kind of self-aggrandizing BS I've come to expect from the guy.
I love that you're criticizing Moore for spreading BS, while at the same time using pure speculation to back up your conclusions. What reason do you have to believe that Moore would have even spoken to slashdot??
What is all the portability for? In the end 99,9% of the products end up running on Wintel. I think that it would still be nice to have software developped in Assembly language, and it would even be profitable, but this goes against current market practices, that require cheap programmers (even if they are not too skilled), and short development periods.
Optimize last?? Hello?? Have you taken any programming courses?
How real, optimized engines are written (i.e. Quake, Doom, Unreal) is by: - writing it first in a 'high' level language (probably C, which isn't high any more, but you get the picture) - making sure it works - finding out what parts are slow - optimizing these in assembly, and making sure they get the same results as the slower, easier to debug version.
Writing the whole thing in assembly would just be ludicrous. Did you ever use the first version of wordperfect for windows?? Written in assembly, and boy was it buggy. And not noticeably faster than anything else.
If you optimize first you will never get anywhere meaningful.
A lot of Hollywood directors took inspiration from him, but nobody has managed to copy his formula.
I actually thoroughly enjoyed The Corruptor, a Hollywood movie which definitely has elements of what you describe as "the Woo style" (not to mention Chow Yun-Fat). It's nothing earth shattering, but it's a damn solid action movie.
The Transporter would have been about eight times better if the entire movie was just him transporting stuff. It all went downhill when it tried to grow a plot.
My idiot roommate tried splitting the line to the modem without telling anybody first, then when we hooked it back up it wouldn't hold a connection for more than about 3 minutes.
When we got the Rogers guy to come he couldn't figure out why it was hooked to that outlet, and couldn't even figure out how the cable got to that point in the wall (it had been that way since I moved in about 3 years before). He put in a new wire, closer to where it came in the house, and we were fine from then on.
am not going to be a Star Trek appologist as the 60's era trek was all about American Imperialism and spreading the values of the Federation except when the "prime directive" was going to be violated (unavoidable).
I thought the whole point of the Prime Directive was a commment on American involvement in Vietnam?? Or are you saying that's revisionsim?
I only use overrated because there's no appropriate "wrong" or "incorrect" moderation for posts that are factually incorrect. I don't like using it, but there's no other way.
Yeah...I was amazed how many of my friends in social sciences used shared e-mail accounts to share class notes. I was even more shocked when I took a film elective and the prof was doing that to distribute the actual course notes!
Considering that our University has a program setup where students get paid to make webpages for any prof that asks, I found this just ridiculous. It's amazing how people stick to what they know, rather than take five seconds to learn how to make a webpage, or get someone to do it for them.
Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to: # Live off the land
If your high school is in a (sub/)urban area, how useful is this? Or possible?
# Modify our cars
My high school had auto courses (my school was in Southern Ontario, Canada)
# Hack computers
I took 4 or 5 computer courses in high school. Basic application use, programming in Turing and C++, graphics in 3D Studio, large projects.
# Understand personal finance
I believe there were business courses along these lines, I didn't take any, though. I think this was also covered in the general stream of math.
# Write contracts # Defend ourselves in court
We had grade 12 and 13 law. I'm not sure how much time was given to contracts (I only took half of the grade 12 course), but we even went on a visit to court in both mandatory grade 10 history and optional grade 12 law.
# Defend ourselves physically
In grade 9 gym we covered wrestling. The upper gym courses covered more defense.
# Handle a gun safely
Not really a big deal in Canada. I know a lot of people who learned this in cadets or the reserves, though.
# Change our government for the better
History (Canadian, Ancient, American, 20th Century), Politics, Law...all covered this. Your comment about understanding the past rather than the present is missing the point entirely. But we did always talk about current elections in classes, even in elementary school.
# Think critically In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.
Doesn't calculating the area under a curve require critical thinking?? Regardless, Calculus wasn't taught till grade 13, and anything past grade 10 math was optional. If you're school taught you anything at all you probably learned to think critically. Didn't you have to write essays? Solve problems? Every single one of our grade 13 classes had an "independent study unit" which we had to do something on our own, requiring critical thinking.
We even covered media bias in our english classes (I didn't take the full english media class, but we did cover it in the required grade 13 english class). We took stories and advertisements from different newspapers and looked at their political bias. Then we watched some Chomsky videos.
As far as I can tell most Americans seem to need to move to Canada to actually get their American values.
I think this whole conversation is BS, but just to clear something up - the cell tower puts out higher power than the phones, for two reasons:
1) it is transmitting on multiple channels simultaneously 2) it can have more expensive/bulky/power hungry receivers than a mobile unit, and therefore can pick up a weaker signal than the mobile. So the tower most likely is broadcasting stronger than the mobile.
It was only ever true above certain levels (i.e. 40-bit SSL was legal, 128-bit not, 56kbps modem encoding (!) was not). I think this has been since rescinded, because you no longer get those crazy legal warnings when downloading browsers..and I don't think you can even get 40-bit versions any more.
They were classified as "munitions" for some reason.
my roommate (an engineering physics student) was recently bitching about having to use the "inverse centimeter" as a unit of measurement for one of his quantum classes. It's pretty mind bending.
I think the point is that even an inefficient gain from braking is better than the NO gain in a traditional vehicle. So you are essentially getting more power 'for free', in traditional terms. Obviously it's going to be expended again...but it cuts down on the amount expended from fuel.
The thing is they definitely have to have a good idea of what the average aggregate traffic per subscriber area is, in order to correctly buy bandwidth from THEIR ISP, etc. And if one area is suddenly above average, it's not going to take them very long to find you. And since bandwidth directly affects their bottom line, they WILL look into it, IMO.
The point is they don't have to be monitoring everyone all the time. They just have to have alarms on each area for unexpected increases in average traffic. And then probe from there. So yeah, you could get away with creep up a few hundred kbps, probably, but not uncapping completely.
Do you actually own your cable modem? Or is rented? Do you have to return it after you switch providers?
As for cable modem hacking, that's old, old news, and they WILL find you. Don't think they don't have access to all the same UNIX packet sniffing tools you know and love. It's even easier than finding an illegal grow operation that circumvents their power meter (which is also quite regularly done), BECAUSE THEY HAVE YOUR DAMN IP ADDRESS. Yes the caps are implemented at the modem, but there's no reason they can't monitor them upstream.
Surely they can sue them for loss of earnings and contamination especially if the big companies think they can sue them for theft of seed that was carried naturally.
You'd hope so, but this is still very much undecided in Canada. *sigh*
IMAP users can now benefit from support for the IMAP IDLE command which allows the mail server to push notifications such as new mail arriving as soon as it arrives.
Having your email delayed by a brief polling interval is surely less important than eliminating polling overhead on the server. That the Mozilla folks don't grasp this suggests an unpleasant disconnect from real world problems.
Umm..correct me if I'm wrong, but if the server is pushing notifications, can't it use interrupts rather than polling? Why would the server need to poll the file for changes when it can just trigger an event when the file actually changes?? Or just use the 'mail arrival' event??
Slashdot Mirror
Documentaries should not do "regular film editing" if such editing would lead the public to believe something decidedly different had actually occurred.
What bothers me the most about all these sorts of arguments is that you're at the same time taking the "look how smart I am I figured out he's manipulating film" stance, while at the same time taking the "everyone else is too stupid to see that it's manipulated, therefore it's bad" stance. You are not some super genius. People watching this movie know that things have to be left out.
Another great example was buying ammo in the Canadian Wal-Mart. Moore wasn't just "a regular citizen", he's a regular citizen who obtained a firearms importation license in Canada. Through "regular film editing," that part was never mentioned by Moore.
Well, he's obviously not a Canadian citizen (which NO ONE who watched that movie could possibly be confused about). But he was showing what a regular citizen could do, but to do it himself he had to get a license. You give people too little credit.
Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary French director who helped to launch the New Wave movement in the 1960s, had harsh words for Moore this week. Godard's latest film, Notre Musique, premiered on Monday, the same day as Fahrenheit 9/11. Later in the week, Godard lashed out at Moore at a press conference, calling him "halfway intelligent." Godard went on to say that the Flint, Mich.-born director lacks subtlety. "Moore doesn't distinguish between text and image," Godard argued. "He doesn't know what he's doing." "Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary."
And way to imply that Godard made that last comment, whereas if you read the link you will find that it comes from two men who are about to release an anti-Moore book. Good work using Moore's supposed tactics against him.
And Michael Moore's film will be ranked with these? This was most likely a politcal statement which damages the cridibility of the award you hold in such high regard.
And Easy Rider wasn't left-leaning at all? Yet it won. As the grandparent said, the Palme goes to:
films that show creativity and changes lives
Moore's films are often creative, effective, and are obviously changing lives because there's already 1200 posts on this story. The Palme d'Or is a film award, and an effective film hardly has to be one without a political message. You could much more easily argue the opposite - that it would have to have a political message.
Now let's talk about bias. When the story broke about the bomb going off that was hooked up to a sarin gas shell (Sarin is a nerve agent, a weapon of mass destruction), for that day and the next, you could find no news story on CNN.com about it.
When has Sarin ever been used on more than a few hundred people?? How do you know it didn't enter the country later? Where did it come from? Who set it off? Those questions need to be answered before this becomes a smoking gun.
I think his point was that by keeping the people underfed and deny them access to any kind of outside resources it made it impossible for them to rise up. Or even be informed enough to rise up, because even if they could get outside materials, they were too busy trying to get enough food to live.
It also reinforced Saddam's ability to tell the people that he was the only thing keeping the country together, in the face of all sorts of opposition.
Dictators survive on fear and punishment. The less afraid you can make the people the more their power weakens. And starving them does not further that goal.
If you don't believe me, just pull up a tape of Michael Moore's speech at the Oscars.
And was he not booed? Weren't the Dixie Chicks pulled off Clear Channel for making anti-Bush statements oversees?? Open your eyes.
I haven't seen the thing and I am sure it is politically biased
:)
Everything you see is biased. From the choice of what to put in and leave out, the angles the subjects are shot at, the way they're lit, the juxtapositions they use.
At least Moore is OBVIOUS about it. He's not changing ads in the background and making the goal of so many movies to obtain financial and a hot girlfriend that you don't even think about it any more.
Moore generates DEBATES, just like this one. Which in the end is much more valuable than a boring movie that no one sees or talks about. Trolls are annoying when they bring up the same argument, but NOT when they incite debate on topics that people really NEED TO THINK ABOUT. Voter apathy is at an all time high. The candidates all try to sound alike to avoid offending anybody. We NEED blatantly biased opinions back in our society, so people can have real discussions about real issues.
But I agree that we should have the chance to see it before we argue any more.
I wonder where Taco got the idea it was the first to receive the Honor? Maybe from Moore himself? It's the kind of self-aggrandizing BS I've come to expect from the guy.
I love that you're criticizing Moore for spreading BS, while at the same time using pure speculation to back up your conclusions. What reason do you have to believe that Moore would have even spoken to slashdot??
What is all the portability for? In the end 99,9% of the products end up running on Wintel. I think that it would still be nice to have software developped in Assembly language, and it would even be profitable, but this goes against current market practices, that require cheap programmers (even if they are not too skilled), and short development periods.
Optimize last?? Hello?? Have you taken any programming courses?
How real, optimized engines are written (i.e. Quake, Doom, Unreal) is by:
- writing it first in a 'high' level language (probably C, which isn't high any more, but you get the picture)
- making sure it works
- finding out what parts are slow
- optimizing these in assembly, and making sure they get the same results as the slower, easier to debug version.
Writing the whole thing in assembly would just be ludicrous. Did you ever use the first version of wordperfect for windows?? Written in assembly, and boy was it buggy. And not noticeably faster than anything else.
If you optimize first you will never get anywhere meaningful.
A lot of Hollywood directors took inspiration from him, but nobody has managed to copy his formula.
I actually thoroughly enjoyed The Corruptor, a Hollywood movie which definitely has elements of what you describe as "the Woo style" (not to mention Chow Yun-Fat). It's nothing earth shattering, but it's a damn solid action movie.
The Transporter would have been about eight times better if the entire movie was just him transporting stuff. It all went downhill when it tried to grow a plot.
My idiot roommate tried splitting the line to the modem without telling anybody first, then when we hooked it back up it wouldn't hold a connection for more than about 3 minutes.
When we got the Rogers guy to come he couldn't figure out why it was hooked to that outlet, and couldn't even figure out how the cable got to that point in the wall (it had been that way since I moved in about 3 years before). He put in a new wire, closer to where it came in the house, and we were fine from then on.
am not going to be a Star Trek appologist as the 60's era trek was all about American Imperialism and spreading the values of the Federation except when the "prime directive" was going to be violated (unavoidable).
I thought the whole point of the Prime Directive was a commment on American involvement in Vietnam?? Or are you saying that's revisionsim?
I only use overrated because there's no appropriate "wrong" or "incorrect" moderation for posts that are factually incorrect. I don't like using it, but there's no other way.
Yeah...I was amazed how many of my friends in social sciences used shared e-mail accounts to share class notes. I was even more shocked when I took a film elective and the prof was doing that to distribute the actual course notes!
Considering that our University has a program setup where students get paid to make webpages for any prof that asks, I found this just ridiculous. It's amazing how people stick to what they know, rather than take five seconds to learn how to make a webpage, or get someone to do it for them.
Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to:
# Live off the land
If your high school is in a (sub/)urban area, how useful is this? Or possible?
# Modify our cars
My high school had auto courses (my school was in Southern Ontario, Canada)
# Hack computers
I took 4 or 5 computer courses in high school. Basic application use, programming in Turing and C++, graphics in 3D Studio, large projects.
# Understand personal finance
I believe there were business courses along these lines, I didn't take any, though. I think this was also covered in the general stream of math.
# Write contracts
# Defend ourselves in court
We had grade 12 and 13 law. I'm not sure how much time was given to contracts (I only took half of the grade 12 course), but we even went on a visit to court in both mandatory grade 10 history and optional grade 12 law.
# Defend ourselves physically
In grade 9 gym we covered wrestling. The upper gym courses covered more defense.
# Handle a gun safely
Not really a big deal in Canada. I know a lot of people who learned this in cadets or the reserves, though.
# Change our government for the better
History (Canadian, Ancient, American, 20th Century), Politics, Law...all covered this. Your comment about understanding the past rather than the present is missing the point entirely. But we did always talk about current elections in classes, even in elementary school.
# Think critically
In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.
Doesn't calculating the area under a curve require critical thinking?? Regardless, Calculus wasn't taught till grade 13, and anything past grade 10 math was optional. If you're school taught you anything at all you probably learned to think critically. Didn't you have to write essays? Solve problems? Every single one of our grade 13 classes had an "independent study unit" which we had to do something on our own, requiring critical thinking.
We even covered media bias in our english classes (I didn't take the full english media class, but we did cover it in the required grade 13 english class). We took stories and advertisements from different newspapers and looked at their political bias. Then we watched some Chomsky videos.
As far as I can tell most Americans seem to need to move to Canada to actually get their American values.
I think this whole conversation is BS, but just to clear something up - the cell tower puts out higher power than the phones, for two reasons:
1) it is transmitting on multiple channels simultaneously
2) it can have more expensive/bulky/power hungry receivers than a mobile unit, and therefore can pick up a weaker signal than the mobile. So the tower most likely is broadcasting stronger than the mobile.
not all of us are in the USA, you insensitive clod!
It was only ever true above certain levels (i.e. 40-bit SSL was legal, 128-bit not, 56kbps modem encoding (!) was not). I think this has been since rescinded, because you no longer get those crazy legal warnings when downloading browsers..and I don't think you can even get 40-bit versions any more.
They were classified as "munitions" for some reason.
my roommate (an engineering physics student) was recently bitching about having to use the "inverse centimeter" as a unit of measurement for one of his quantum classes. It's pretty mind bending.
I think the point is that even an inefficient gain from braking is better than the NO gain in a traditional vehicle. So you are essentially getting more power 'for free', in traditional terms. Obviously it's going to be expended again...but it cuts down on the amount expended from fuel.
The thing is they definitely have to have a good idea of what the average aggregate traffic per subscriber area is, in order to correctly buy bandwidth from THEIR ISP, etc. And if one area is suddenly above average, it's not going to take them very long to find you. And since bandwidth directly affects their bottom line, they WILL look into it, IMO.
The point is they don't have to be monitoring everyone all the time. They just have to have alarms on each area for unexpected increases in average traffic. And then probe from there. So yeah, you could get away with creep up a few hundred kbps, probably, but not uncapping completely.
Do you actually own your cable modem? Or is rented? Do you have to return it after you switch providers?
As for cable modem hacking, that's old, old news, and they WILL find you. Don't think they don't have access to all the same UNIX packet sniffing tools you know and love. It's even easier than finding an illegal grow operation that circumvents their power meter (which is also quite regularly done), BECAUSE THEY HAVE YOUR DAMN IP ADDRESS. Yes the caps are implemented at the modem, but there's no reason they can't monitor them upstream.
Surely they can sue them for loss of earnings and contamination especially if the big companies think they can sue them for theft of seed that was carried naturally.
You'd hope so, but this is still very much undecided in Canada. *sigh*
IMAP users can now benefit from support for the IMAP IDLE command which allows the mail server to push notifications such as new mail arriving as soon as it arrives.
Having your email delayed by a brief polling interval is surely less important than eliminating polling overhead on the server. That the Mozilla folks don't grasp this suggests an unpleasant disconnect from real world problems.
Umm..correct me if I'm wrong, but if the server is pushing notifications, can't it use interrupts rather than polling? Why would the server need to poll the file for changes when it can just trigger an event when the file actually changes?? Or just use the 'mail arrival' event??