> Is there really a reason we get movies released here any later than other countries?
They can't afford to print enough actual physical copies of the film to release everywhere in the world at once, and someone has to be last. (Unless they released worldwide, but with only a few cinemas in each country showing it at once, which would screw up their marketing campaigns (poor them)). Digital transmission and projectors might make that irrelevent in the future.
If they didn't also region-encode classic old movies and movies with limited distribution, it might be a more plausible excuse. (Are "direct-to-DVD" releases region coded? Do they even exist yet, or is it still all direct-to-video?)
*Designed for*. Not "used for and already showing a profit". He might be wrong about "Never Gonna Happen", but for now he's still right about hasn't happened yet.
On the other hand, Cargolifter and Zeppelin NT are far from the only companies with airship plans - see The Airship Association links at
http://www.airship.demon.co.uk/net.html
But yes, I remember when the Skyship 500 (the airship used in A View To a Kill) was going to be the start of a new wave of airships. (I saw it at Farnborough). It wasn't. --
> I've seen very few people make real cases for buying a Tivo without the service. The service is what makes Tivo great. Without it, it's a pretty expensive VCR.
There's a very real case for caring whether it will still work if you think there's a significant risk the service won't stay around for years.
A VCR still works (and can be serviced anywhere), even if Sony or Panasonic or JVC go out of business. If Tivo go out of business, you want to at least be left with an expensive VCR, not just an expensive box of parts.
> I only need to view the paper for a second to break the security, while I'd have to remove your key, go get it copied, and return it.
A friend of mine is a prison officer. He told me he has inmates who can view a door key for a few seconds and then make a working copy from memory.
If you can get your hands on a key for a few seconds you can make a wax impression (assuming you planned in advance).
You can get Google's own version from
http://www.google.com/options/buttons.html
And dictionary lookup:
javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){vo id (Qr=prompt('Enter word to find in Merriam-Webster Dictionary:',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www. m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?'+escape(Qr)+' '
> Cannons fire spherical shot, not bullets, and have straight smooth barrels (not rifled), so they are classified as shotguns
I've been told (urban legend alert) that you can own a working tank with only a shotgun licence (so long as it has a smoothbore gun), but the only place you can legally fire it is on an Army firing range with the Army's permission - which the Army don't grant.
> And given the number of things said in various business magazines about businessmen around the world, and the relatively few lawsuits that make the news about them, most businessmen seem not to mind, apparently. Movie stars, on the other hand...
Possibilities (not exhaustive):
Law suits involving movie stars are more newsworthy.
Businessmen are more likely to negociate an out of court settlement to avoid publicity.
Articles about movie stars are more likely to be read by brainless members of the public who take anything they read at face value.
Movie stars careers are more sensitive to the opinion of brainless members of the public.
Movie stars have more money to spend on lawsuits, unfounded or not. --
> Your comment about zero visibility is the first time anyone's given me a reason to change my mind and consider GPS.
An even better reason - zero visibility on magnetic rock. (Black Cuillin, on Skye - on the plus side, it's a lot smaller than the Rockies).
There's a danger of people relying on GPS as a substitute for knowing how to use a map and compass, but as an additional tool it definitely has its uses. --
> Assuming I were to live forever, why should I want to?
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rec.arts.sf.fandom
But seriously, it's not compulsary, and even if his rings worked you could take them off when you had enough.
GPL has been demonstrated to work reasonably but isn't to everybodies taste, but BSD are just a bunch of wackos no-one takes seriously? I think that's rather harsh on the BSD camp.
http://www.ntk.net/
Not sure how we managed to report this one before Slashdot, but the European Parliament report on Echelon is (leaking) out all over the place, with the following recommendations included: that the Member States "develop and manufacture encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software", and "public administrations of the member states are called upon systematically to encrypt e-mails so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm".
Looking forward to running the diffs on the final, published report.
--
Re:You call *that* a review?
on
Thief of Time
·
· Score: 2
> Initially, these books were a parody of "Conan the Barbarian"-style fantasy
Among other styles - there's a bit very like the Lankhmar books, and another Pern-like bit. But yes, anyone who picks up one of the first two and decides its ok but a bit lightweight ought to try a later one before rejecting them.
> the "Mandala" is clearly derived from the Mandelbrot set
Maybe. But it's also derived from a mandala.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?mandala
"1 : a Hindu or Buddhist graphic symbol of the universe"
> Death is a fun character, but he lacks personality by his very nature.
That's not entirely true - there's quite a bit about how the anthropomorphic personifications do pick up personalities because they are anthropomorphic.
Death says (or thinks) at one point that it's a good thing _he_ hasn't ever changed, but that doesn't mean it's true. --
> I guess you never read the magazine "Amiga Power". A UK based Amiga games mag that really didn't hold back in their reviews.
There's a lot of Amiga Power stuff on
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/ (including the scoring system http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/info/marks.html
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/bad/summit.html is publishers deciding the market was dead, then coming up with excuses for it and blaming other people.
(It's frame based, so the latter two links lose some context.) --
Yep, the hi-fi shop just along the road from here has mostly multi-region players.
http://www.richersounds.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?i d= 13&sid=df2e280e2.123456
(Lists about 30 multi-region, and five Region 2 (one of which has a multi-region upgrade disk advertised too).
I don't know how well they all work with RCE, and having a significant market where DVD players legally have to multi-region will certainly help the situation for everyone (well everyone except the MPAA). --
Yes, there's a jwz rant on Slashdot on the same subject that I can't be bothered to look up now,
and an interview that I have searched for and couldn't find where GTK's authors say they did it that way because they wanted to learn about what was involved in writing a toolkit layer. (I can't remember wheher they said they would definitely have used Xt if they knew where it was going to end up, but I think at was at least more likely).
But it's probably too late to be worth changing GTK to use Xt now.
> I'd hope you wouldn't pidgin hole her into something as unbelievably uninteresting as databases
Hey, I used to work in a database group that was less than a tenth of the total techies in the company, and included half the female techies. And the work was interesting.
Then I moved to a database group in another company where none of the three female techies even worked on the same floor. The work was (mostly) still interesting though.
Of course that doesn't mean there aren't lots of really really boring database jobs too.
So what better use for it than playing around with his OS?
His page says "Also, I seemed to have collected a bunch of old non-x86 machines that need something running on them. I figure, "Hey, why dont I just port my OS over?" The rest is history."
> And it is closely related to "price discrimination", which is illegal under Robinson-Patman. Price discrimination is when you charge different prices to different individuals without having different costs.
Like when DVD's have the same production cost but a different price with a different region code?
> * Yes, Mozilla is _vastly_ better in the 0.9 release. I know that. But in the meantime, the company has still seen it's market share go from nearly half to zero.
Mozilla's a browser. Netscape's _server_ market share, according to Netcraft, is about 6% and has been for a couple of years, and was never close to 50%. It's not like people were buying Communicator much before it went Open/Free, even when it was supposed to be free for evaluation purposes only (and was competing with Mosaic).
Slashdot Mirror
See e.g. "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory"
--
> Is there really a reason we get movies released here any later than other countries?
They can't afford to print enough actual physical copies of the film to release everywhere in the world at once, and someone has to be last. (Unless they released worldwide, but with only a few cinemas in each country showing it at once, which would screw up their marketing campaigns (poor them)). Digital transmission and projectors might make that irrelevent in the future.
If they didn't also region-encode classic old movies and movies with limited distribution, it might be a more plausible excuse. (Are "direct-to-DVD" releases region coded? Do they even exist yet, or is it still all direct-to-video?)
--
> It is designed for tourism
*Designed for*. Not "used for and already showing a profit". He might be wrong about "Never Gonna Happen", but for now he's still right about hasn't happened yet.
On the other hand, Cargolifter and Zeppelin NT are far from the only companies with airship plans - see The Airship Association links at
http://www.airship.demon.co.uk/net.html
But yes, I remember when the Skyship 500 (the airship used in A View To a Kill) was going to be the start of a new wave of airships. (I saw it at Farnborough). It wasn't.
--
> I've seen very few people make real cases for buying a Tivo without the service. The service is what makes Tivo great. Without it, it's a pretty expensive VCR.
There's a very real case for caring whether it will still work if you think there's a significant risk the service won't stay around for years.
A VCR still works (and can be serviced anywhere), even if Sony or Panasonic or JVC go out of business. If Tivo go out of business, you want to at least be left with an expensive VCR, not just an expensive box of parts.
--
> I only need to view the paper for a second to break the security, while I'd have to remove your key, go get it copied, and return it.
A friend of mine is a prison officer. He told me he has inmates who can view a door key for a few seconds and then make a working copy from memory.
If you can get your hands on a key for a few seconds you can make a wax impression (assuming you planned in advance).
--
it's not ready yet.
http://flyingmice.com
(Hmm - just says "advanced devices" now. It used to say something about 6-degrees-of-freedom input devices).
--
You can get Google's own version from
o id (Qr=prompt('Enter word to find in Merriam-Webster Dictionary:',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www. m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?'+escape(Qr)+' '
http://www.google.com/options/buttons.html
And dictionary lookup:
javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){v
--
> Cannons fire spherical shot, not bullets, and have straight smooth barrels (not rifled), so they are classified as shotguns
I've been told (urban legend alert) that you can own a working tank with only a shotgun licence (so long as it has a smoothbore gun), but the only place you can legally fire it is on an Army firing range with the Army's permission - which the Army don't grant.
--
> And given the number of things said in various business magazines about businessmen around the world, and the relatively few lawsuits that make the news about them, most businessmen seem not to mind, apparently. Movie stars, on the other hand...
Possibilities (not exhaustive):
Law suits involving movie stars are more newsworthy.
Businessmen are more likely to negociate an out of court settlement to avoid publicity.
Articles about movie stars are more likely to be read by brainless members of the public who take anything they read at face value.
Movie stars careers are more sensitive to the opinion of brainless members of the public.
Movie stars have more money to spend on lawsuits, unfounded or not.
--
> Your comment about zero visibility is the first time anyone's given me a reason to change my mind and consider GPS.
An even better reason - zero visibility on magnetic rock. (Black Cuillin, on Skye - on the plus side, it's a lot smaller than the Rockies).
There's a danger of people relying on GPS as a substitute for knowing how to use a map and compass, but as an additional tool it definitely has its uses.
--
> Assuming I were to live forever, why should I want to?
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rec.arts.sf.fandom
But seriously, it's not compulsary, and even if his rings worked you could take them off when you had enough.
--
http://www.icrc-hq.com/st.htmi d= ns9999822
http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?
--
> GPL = the socialist ... BSD = the libertarian
GPL has been demonstrated to work reasonably but isn't to everybodies taste, but BSD are just a bunch of wackos no-one takes seriously? I think that's rather harsh on the BSD camp.
--
http://www.ntk.net/
Not sure how we managed to report this one before Slashdot, but the European Parliament report on Echelon is (leaking) out all over the place, with the following recommendations included: that the Member States "develop and manufacture encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software", and "public administrations of the member states are called upon systematically to encrypt e-mails so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm".
Looking forward to running the diffs on the final, published report.
--
> Initially, these books were a parody of "Conan the Barbarian"-style fantasy
Among other styles - there's a bit very like the Lankhmar books, and another Pern-like bit. But yes, anyone who picks up one of the first two and decides its ok but a bit lightweight ought to try a later one before rejecting them.
> the "Mandala" is clearly derived from the Mandelbrot set
Maybe. But it's also derived from a mandala.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?mandala
"1 : a Hindu or Buddhist graphic symbol of the universe"
> Death is a fun character, but he lacks personality by his very nature.
That's not entirely true - there's quite a bit about how the anthropomorphic personifications do pick up personalities because they are anthropomorphic.
Death says (or thinks) at one point that it's a good thing _he_ hasn't ever changed, but that doesn't mean it's true.
--
> while maintaining the security of the cryptographic keys
t xt
k ms .txt
k ms 2.txt
k ms 3.txt
That would make a change.
http://lwn.net/1999/1202/security.php3
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/pwl.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/brea
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/brea
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/brea
--
> I guess you never read the magazine "Amiga Power". A UK based Amiga games mag that really didn't hold back in their reviews.
l is publishers deciding the market was dead, then coming up with excuses for it and blaming other people.
There's a lot of Amiga Power stuff on
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/ (including the scoring system http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/info/marks.html
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/bad/summit.htm
(It's frame based, so the latter two links lose some context.)
--
The actual movie (along with a couple of others) is on http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/chunks/Videos/
--
Yep, the hi-fi shop just along the road from here has mostly multi-region players.i d= 13&sid=df2e280e2.123456
http://www.richersounds.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?
(Lists about 30 multi-region, and five Region 2 (one of which has a multi-region upgrade disk advertised too).
I don't know how well they all work with RCE, and having a significant market where DVD players legally have to multi-region will certainly help the situation for everyone (well everyone except the MPAA).
--
Yes, there's a jwz rant on Slashdot on the same subject that I can't be bothered to look up now,
and an interview that I have searched for and couldn't find where GTK's authors say they did it that way because they wanted to learn about what was involved in writing a toolkit layer. (I can't remember wheher they said they would definitely have used Xt if they knew where it was going to end up, but I think at was at least more likely).
But it's probably too late to be worth changing GTK to use Xt now.
--
> I'd hope you wouldn't pidgin hole her into something as unbelievably uninteresting as databases
Hey, I used to work in a database group that was less than a tenth of the total techies in the company, and included half the female techies. And the work was interesting.
Then I moved to a database group in another company where none of the three female techies even worked on the same floor. The work was (mostly) still interesting though.
Of course that doesn't mean there aren't lots of really really boring database jobs too.
--
> Amiga (it's dead, face it!)
So what better use for it than playing around with his OS?
His page says "Also, I seemed to have collected a bunch of old non-x86 machines that need something running on them. I figure, "Hey, why dont I just port my OS over?" The rest is history."
--
> And it is closely related to "price discrimination", which is illegal under Robinson-Patman. Price discrimination is when you charge different prices to different individuals without having different costs.
Like when DVD's have the same production cost but a different price with a different region code?
--
> * Yes, Mozilla is _vastly_ better in the 0.9 release. I know that. But in the meantime, the company has still seen it's market share go from nearly half to zero.
Mozilla's a browser. Netscape's _server_ market share, according to Netcraft, is about 6% and has been for a couple of years, and was never close to 50%. It's not like people were buying Communicator much before it went Open/Free, even when it was supposed to be free for evaluation purposes only (and was competing with Mosaic).
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
--
> I'm surprised Perl doesn't support the GO-FROM-idiom yet
_ Pr ogramming.html
You're thinking of "COME FROM".
See "A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less Programming"
http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/Goto-less
It's been implemented in INTERCAL.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/intercal/
--