I'm willing to bet 50 bucks that they've got some kind of filter, spyware, or censor program in the software somewhere; If the source code is out somebody should try looking for something like that.
This is just another pathetic attempt for MTV to control everything that people see and hear, so they can jump their advertising sales.
Not to mention MTV is mind rotting dumb, and mainly consists of them interviewing N'Sync all day.
I know a lot of people that just sit around watching crap like that, and it makes me really sad, I can't watch stuff like that for more than 5 minutes without feeling my brain cells explode. I'm serious, it's just painful.
Fiber optics are essentially the same thing, except they don't completely 'trap' light, allowing all your leet warez to continue flowing. But fiber optics do a pretty good job nontheless of containing light.
If you've ever seen a fiber optic lighting system, you'll kindof know what i'm talking about. The light follows through the fiber, instead of just shooting out at the bottom.
This is a small peice of what I posted in the other China newsbit.
You guys are -way- too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres, Tibets and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!) do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates, or they're building some more Falun Gong firewalls or something.
This isn't just some bland racism, or an overboarding sense of "patriotism", China is a brutal, dangerous country, and a testament to the powers of corruption.
Oh, and speaking on the specific topic, I do recall the president of China's son having some connections with Red Flag Linux (their communist-toted linux -copy-), so I'm sure that Red Flag is going to win in the end. I'd rather have linux be chosen for it's technical quality, and not for it's connections with a bunch of sleazy corrupt politicians. God help us all.
You guys are seriously overthinking this, and you're way too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates.
They're "going to some other country to learn about programming"? Do you see people from other countries going around the world looking for the "secrets of the programmers"? It's probably just some communist "waste of time" project. And you know what they're probably going to do with it? Program some firewalls and a Falun Gong website exploit or something.
God I'm sick of china. Did you know that they took some Linux distribution code, hacked it up a little bit and called it "Red Flag Linux"? Can you beleive that? That's a spit in the face of everything that Linux represents, being a freedom operating system in all it's possible descriptions. China's probably using it for a Falun Gong firewall or something. Pathetic.
"This is not a sport," Commerce undersecretary Phil Bond said. "This is a serious crime. These people should do some hard time."
Oh my god. They have the NERVE to do crap like this right now? Aren't these people supposed to be helping trace down terrorists, instead of arresting teenagers in their bedrooms because they can't afford $500 worth of photo editing software and movies? The BSA must have bribed a LOT of people.
This is slowly becoming my favorite sentence: Animals don't belong in cages, politicans do.
Uhm, you're kidding, right? Are you the guy that works in China's PR department or something?
China is the most unprogressive murderous repressive shelter-state on the planet right now, I'm astounded you can say things like that.
Yeah, but whats with the overmerchandising...
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
It was an ok movie, IMHO.
But god damn, I'm getting sick of all the merchandising crap. A friend and I were walking down a store and we saw a "Harry Potter Magic Wand". You want to know what it was? A fake plastic treestick. It was curved and bent to represent something you'd pull off a treebranch, except it was plastic. God, thats thick.
Around here a few years back (In Minnesota) there was a guy that put an undercover camera in the distributing rooms for UPS, and it showed them playing basketball with packages, hitting them, pushing them across the floor with hockey sticks, you name it. A bunch of newscasters took and wrote a report on this, and a LOT of people got pissed off at UPS.
One idea is to give some of your local media accesses a call. Maybe the local paper, or maybe suggest it for one of those "undercover eyewitness" segments on TV news, ect. UPS will be very embarassed, probably reimburse your money, and they might even fire those morons that keep trashing your packages. I'd love to see those jockqueens out in the middle of the streets on a cold Canadian night.;)
It's astounding how quickly the land of the free turned into a big government fuedal system, not terribly different from the oppressionistic style of communism. I bet if other countries got hold of this they would scoff at us and tell us how non-free we are. Frankly, I'd agree with them.
I don't have anything really big to say that all the slashdotters haven't said in the forum yet. I just have one small thing to add to all of this:
If this passes, a LOT of people are going to leave the country. Me included.
I only live about 200 miles from the Canadian border anyways...
-KD
The reason Miyazaki did the contract with Disney, and not the 2 other candidates, is because they were the only ones that wouldn't censor and cut his films. And most of the small anime companies never cut things, unless they're putting them to TV. I've yet to see a film done by a recent anime company that has been cut in any way.
I used to frequent their mailing list, I got in big arguments with the more snidey members of the list about how THERE WAS NO WAY TO GET THE MOVIES LEGALLY. At semi-resonable prices, anyways. Bunch of losers, the some of them.
On the contrary, Minneapolis has the largest alternative media audience in the country. There are tons of pirate radio stations and public access TV centers, too. We also actively speak out against consolidation, and the 'californication' of society, which is at the heart of most of the alternative media sources. Beleive it or not. I don't care if you don't beleive me;)
Think about this another way. It snows up here for 7-8 months a year. WHAT ELSE ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?!?!?!
I am a HUGE miyazaki fan. Princess Mononoke is very good, but I think some of his older films (Laputa, Porco Rosso) are even better, and it's sad that none of these videos are being released. It IS true that mononoke bombed (well, it made money, but not the kind of money disney expects), and that dissapointed them from releasing Laputa, which was to be their next theater release. Disney also released one of his movies, Kiki's Delivery service, which is also a very good movie. Go watch it, trust me, you'll love it.
The problem is that Miyazaki's company picked the wrong company to do the job. It's not their fault, really; They've had very bad luck with exporting their movies.
To cite an example, his Nausicaa movie was brought over to America by one company. (the manga is better than the movie, BTW, and is commercially available from Viz) That company did a DISQUISTING job of the dubbing, they cut 30 MINUTES of the movie, changed characters names, cut music, dialouge, and did a terrible dubbing job. Ever since then, Miyazaki's lost all interest in bringing his movies over to the states. Then he picked disney, and they botched it too. Sure, they might be the best quality dubbers on the market, but I'd rather settle for a little less quality, and much better consistancy.
I think it would have been better done by a smaller anime company, such as Manga or ADV. Miyazaki would disagree with me, because he wants his movies to be seen on the big screen, not on televisions. This is a perfect death trap for his movies, because, lets face it folks, Miyazaki is great, but he's not mainstream around here. He's not 'pop culture'. All the diva queens are going to go see American Pie 2 instead of great movies like his, and I guess I don't mind. Who wants to share the same favorite movies with people that like having sex with pies, anyways? So I'm snobby, sue me;-)
As for availability, the bootleg market for that stuff is pretty strong. You can find his stuff on popular movie downloading networks, and places like that. My reccommendations are Laputa and Porco Rosso, but they're all gems. It's a shame that he's retiring.
I love the way the DSL network came into place. I was able to get a faster connection, and keep my ISP that i've been using for years.
The thing with local ISPs is there's so damned many of them, that the big MPAA-type companies don't have the time to deal with them.
I've had a very established working relationship with my ISP, which has incredible uptimes (due to their commercial hosting sector) and friendly, local staff. If they had some kind of MPAA problem like this, I'd storm right into their office, which is only about 5 miles away, and give them hell.
You should take a look at the potentials of local ISPs, especially in relation to privacy, port 80 blocking, MPAA thug attacks, code red worms, and all this other stupid crap that the big boys keep coming up with. If they enforce something on their service that you don't allow, just call up one of the other 40 ISPs in the phone book. A lot of them even give you UNIX shell accounts!
Most people that haven't used a BSD operating system before would be surprised to find out that most BSD developers don't consider the GPL free at all. I kindof agree with them.
They all use a lot of GPL software, though, just because they don't neccessarily want to re-do all the code themselves.
If you're interested, take a look at these URLs:
I have not heard more over-conclusive research since the report that classical music made babies smarter. And people beleived that one, too.
Not only is this data flawed, but relatively pointless, as well. I think most of us could conclude that doing math for your whole life would probably make you smarter. But would that really make you a better person?
On the contrary to this man's research, and many other people's beleifs, I think that the recent rising in rote-education is a dangerous thing. I think that when studying becomes a more important element than being a kid, you're ultimately just teaching the kid how to be a drone. Those are people that truely don't think.
If you just sit around doing math all day, for this researcher's delicious example, you'd miss out big time on your creative drive. I know a lot of people that are hardcore A+ students, and they're some of the stupidest people I've ever met. Most of them talk like morons, and have miserable tastes in creative culture. (AKA they sit around listening to nsync and watching MTV all day.)
Which brings me to my next point, that this research doesn't conclude very well. Maybe video games are like this in comparison to doing math puzzles, but what about watching MTV all day? This is his conclusion and proposed solution to the problem, at the end of the article:
"But the other thing is to ask them to play outside with other children and interact and to communicate with others as much as possible. This is how they will develop, retain their creativity and become good people."
Is playing outside with other children better for your brain? He didn't actually test that, of course. Knowing the people that I'd romp around in the grass with as a kid, I seriously deny that it made me very creative. I still think it's a good idea to get your kids some fresh air, just because of physical health concerns, and man, nothing beats a good game of paintball for us non-frontal-lobe developed apemen;)
Here's another quote from dr. hype: it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement.
In contrast, arithmetic stimulated brain activity in both the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe - the area of the brain most associated with learning, memory and emotion.
The students who played computer games were halting the process of brain development and affecting their ability to control potentially anti-social elements of their behaviour.
This bozo of a scientist has taken readings on the activity of brainwaves during short tasks, and uses that to conclude the entire lifespan of a person's brain development. He also doesn't bother to mention the kind of video game subjected to them (some games can be REALLY boring) or the ages of the subjects, a severe gap of data.
In fact, now that I think about it, this is EXACTLY what happened in the classical music fiasco. What happened there, was a professor took brain readings from college students for a certain amount of time, while they were listening to varying types of music, and found that their mental abilities temporarily rose a bit more when they listened to classical music. From that, he concluded that babies listening to classical music would make them smarter, and everybody started dancing around with their babies to classical music. A truely histerical scene, and an almost historical testament to how many people will accept B.S. as fact.
I really wish this society (and others, apparently) would stop beleiving every single research study that comes out. It's poorly done research like this that leads to things like the classical music fiasco, and the whole global warming bit which EVERYBODY beleives, even though it has yet to be proven using accurate scientific means. (have YOU personally done any real research on global warming, or just accepted what somebody else told you?)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm willing to bet 50 bucks that they've got some kind of filter, spyware, or censor program in the software somewhere; If the source code is out somebody should try looking for something like that.
Is it REALLY that hard to install your own friggin' linux distribution?
Besides, i'd rather have a choice than only have red hat as an option. Ask them to sell clean hard drives and we'll talk.
Use COBOL. Highest powered language you can get. It's like running 5 crays at the same time its so powerful
"One thing I never knew was that "...wiretaps cost an average of $56,767.""
LOL.
I can wire tap a phone with a pair of wire strippers and some alligator clips
It's about a $10 more job to put a transmitter in it so you can do it remotely
Typical government overspending.
I can fix that problem right now.
*runs over to the AOL internet uplink*
******SNIP*****
Problem solved.
It's not like AOLers contribute anything useful to the internet anyways
This is just another pathetic attempt for MTV to control everything that people see and hear, so they can jump their advertising sales.
Not to mention MTV is mind rotting dumb, and mainly consists of them interviewing N'Sync all day.
I know a lot of people that just sit around watching crap like that, and it makes me really sad, I can't watch stuff like that for more than 5 minutes without feeling my brain cells explode. I'm serious, it's just painful.
Fiber optics are essentially the same thing, except they don't completely 'trap' light, allowing all your leet warez to continue flowing. But fiber optics do a pretty good job nontheless of containing light.
If you've ever seen a fiber optic lighting system, you'll kindof know what i'm talking about. The light follows through the fiber, instead of just shooting out at the bottom.
This is a small peice of what I posted in the other China newsbit.
You guys are -way- too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres, Tibets and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!) do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates, or they're building some more Falun Gong firewalls or something.
This isn't just some bland racism, or an overboarding sense of "patriotism", China is a brutal, dangerous country, and a testament to the powers of corruption.
Oh, and speaking on the specific topic, I do recall the president of China's son having some connections with Red Flag Linux (their communist-toted linux -copy-), so I'm sure that Red Flag is going to win in the end. I'd rather have linux be chosen for it's technical quality, and not for it's connections with a bunch of sleazy corrupt politicians. God help us all.
Did I question its LEGALITY? No.
You guys are seriously overthinking this, and you're way too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates.
They're "going to some other country to learn about programming"? Do you see people from other countries going around the world looking for the "secrets of the programmers"? It's probably just some communist "waste of time" project. And you know what they're probably going to do with it? Program some firewalls and a Falun Gong website exploit or something.
God I'm sick of china. Did you know that they took some Linux distribution code, hacked it up a little bit and called it "Red Flag Linux"? Can you beleive that? That's a spit in the face of everything that Linux represents, being a freedom operating system in all it's possible descriptions. China's probably using it for a Falun Gong firewall or something. Pathetic.
"This is not a sport," Commerce undersecretary Phil Bond said. "This is a serious crime. These people should do some hard time."
Oh my god. They have the NERVE to do crap like this right now? Aren't these people supposed to be helping trace down terrorists, instead of arresting teenagers in their bedrooms because they can't afford $500 worth of photo editing software and movies? The BSA must have bribed a LOT of people.
This is slowly becoming my favorite sentence: Animals don't belong in cages, politicans do.
-vmalloc
Uhm, you're kidding, right? Are you the guy that works in China's PR department or something?
China is the most unprogressive murderous repressive shelter-state on the planet right now, I'm astounded you can say things like that.
It was an ok movie, IMHO.
But god damn, I'm getting sick of all the merchandising crap. A friend and I were walking down a store and we saw a "Harry Potter Magic Wand". You want to know what it was? A fake plastic treestick. It was curved and bent to represent something you'd pull off a treebranch, except it was plastic. God, thats thick.
Around here a few years back (In Minnesota) there was a guy that put an undercover camera in the distributing rooms for UPS, and it showed them playing basketball with packages, hitting them, pushing them across the floor with hockey sticks, you name it. A bunch of newscasters took and wrote a report on this, and a LOT of people got pissed off at UPS.
;)
One idea is to give some of your local media accesses a call. Maybe the local paper, or maybe suggest it for one of those "undercover eyewitness" segments on TV news, ect. UPS will be very embarassed, probably reimburse your money, and they might even fire those morons that keep trashing your packages. I'd love to see those jockqueens out in the middle of the streets on a cold Canadian night.
Hope that helps,
-Kyle
It's astounding how quickly the land of the free turned into a big government fuedal system, not terribly different from the oppressionistic style of communism. I bet if other countries got hold of this they would scoff at us and tell us how non-free we are. Frankly, I'd agree with them. I don't have anything really big to say that all the slashdotters haven't said in the forum yet. I just have one small thing to add to all of this: If this passes, a LOT of people are going to leave the country. Me included. I only live about 200 miles from the Canadian border anyways... -KD
The reason Miyazaki did the contract with Disney, and not the 2 other candidates, is because they were the only ones that wouldn't censor and cut his films. And most of the small anime companies never cut things, unless they're putting them to TV. I've yet to see a film done by a recent anime company that has been cut in any way.
I used to frequent their mailing list, I got in big arguments with the more snidey members of the list about how THERE WAS NO WAY TO GET THE MOVIES LEGALLY. At semi-resonable prices, anyways. Bunch of losers, the some of them.
On the contrary, Minneapolis has the largest alternative media audience in the country. There are tons of pirate radio stations and public access TV centers, too. We also actively speak out against consolidation, and the 'californication' of society, which is at the heart of most of the alternative media sources. Beleive it or not. I don't care if you don't beleive me ;)
Think about this another way. It snows up here for 7-8 months a year. WHAT ELSE ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?!?!?!
-vmalloc
I am a HUGE miyazaki fan. Princess Mononoke is very good, but I think some of his older films (Laputa, Porco Rosso) are even better, and it's sad that none of these videos are being released. It IS true that mononoke bombed (well, it made money, but not the kind of money disney expects), and that dissapointed them from releasing Laputa, which was to be their next theater release. Disney also released one of his movies, Kiki's Delivery service, which is also a very good movie. Go watch it, trust me, you'll love it.
;-)
The problem is that Miyazaki's company picked the wrong company to do the job. It's not their fault, really; They've had very bad luck with exporting their movies.
To cite an example, his Nausicaa movie was brought over to America by one company. (the manga is better than the movie, BTW, and is commercially available from Viz) That company did a DISQUISTING job of the dubbing, they cut 30 MINUTES of the movie, changed characters names, cut music, dialouge, and did a terrible dubbing job. Ever since then, Miyazaki's lost all interest in bringing his movies over to the states. Then he picked disney, and they botched it too. Sure, they might be the best quality dubbers on the market, but I'd rather settle for a little less quality, and much better consistancy.
I think it would have been better done by a smaller anime company, such as Manga or ADV. Miyazaki would disagree with me, because he wants his movies to be seen on the big screen, not on televisions. This is a perfect death trap for his movies, because, lets face it folks, Miyazaki is great, but he's not mainstream around here. He's not 'pop culture'. All the diva queens are going to go see American Pie 2 instead of great movies like his, and I guess I don't mind. Who wants to share the same favorite movies with people that like having sex with pies, anyways? So I'm snobby, sue me
As for availability, the bootleg market for that stuff is pretty strong. You can find his stuff on popular movie downloading networks, and places like that. My reccommendations are Laputa and Porco Rosso, but they're all gems. It's a shame that he's retiring.
If you're interested in more info about his movies, go check out http://www.nausicaa.net
-vmalloc
I love the way the DSL network came into place. I was able to get a faster connection, and keep my ISP that i've been using for years.
The thing with local ISPs is there's so damned many of them, that the big MPAA-type companies don't have the time to deal with them.
I've had a very established working relationship with my ISP, which has incredible uptimes (due to their commercial hosting sector) and friendly, local staff. If they had some kind of MPAA problem like this, I'd storm right into their office, which is only about 5 miles away, and give them hell.
You should take a look at the potentials of local ISPs, especially in relation to privacy, port 80 blocking, MPAA thug attacks, code red worms, and all this other stupid crap that the big boys keep coming up with. If they enforce something on their service that you don't allow, just call up one of the other 40 ISPs in the phone book. A lot of them even give you UNIX shell accounts!
Most people that haven't used a BSD operating system before would be surprised to find out that most BSD developers don't consider the GPL free at all. I kindof agree with them.
They all use a lot of GPL software, though, just because they don't neccessarily want to re-do all the code themselves. If you're interested, take a look at these URLs:
Here and Here
I have not heard more over-conclusive research since the report that classical music made babies smarter. And people beleived that one, too.
;)
Not only is this data flawed, but relatively pointless, as well. I think most of us could conclude that doing math for your whole life would probably make you smarter. But would that really make you a better person?
On the contrary to this man's research, and many other people's beleifs, I think that the recent rising in rote-education is a dangerous thing. I think that when studying becomes a more important element than being a kid, you're ultimately just teaching the kid how to be a drone. Those are people that truely don't think.
If you just sit around doing math all day, for this researcher's delicious example, you'd miss out big time on your creative drive. I know a lot of people that are hardcore A+ students, and they're some of the stupidest people I've ever met. Most of them talk like morons, and have miserable tastes in creative culture. (AKA they sit around listening to nsync and watching MTV all day.)
Which brings me to my next point, that this research doesn't conclude very well. Maybe video games are like this in comparison to doing math puzzles, but what about watching MTV all day? This is his conclusion and proposed solution to the problem, at the end of the article:
"But the other thing is to ask them to play outside with other children and interact and to communicate with others as much as possible. This is how they will develop, retain their creativity and become good people."
Is playing outside with other children better for your brain? He didn't actually test that, of course. Knowing the people that I'd romp around in the grass with as a kid, I seriously deny that it made me very creative. I still think it's a good idea to get your kids some fresh air, just because of physical health concerns, and man, nothing beats a good game of paintball for us non-frontal-lobe developed apemen
Here's another quote from dr. hype:
it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement.
In contrast, arithmetic stimulated brain activity in both the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe - the area of the brain most associated with learning, memory and emotion.
The students who played computer games were halting the process of brain development and affecting their ability to control potentially anti-social elements of their behaviour.
This bozo of a scientist has taken readings on the activity of brainwaves during short tasks, and uses that to conclude the entire lifespan of a person's brain development. He also doesn't bother to mention the kind of video game subjected to them (some games can be REALLY boring) or the ages of the subjects, a severe gap of data.
In fact, now that I think about it, this is EXACTLY what happened in the classical music fiasco. What happened there, was a professor took brain readings from college students for a certain amount of time, while they were listening to varying types of music, and found that their mental abilities temporarily rose a bit more when they listened to classical music. From that, he concluded that babies listening to classical music would make them smarter, and everybody started dancing around with their babies to classical music. A truely histerical scene, and an almost historical testament to how many people will accept B.S. as fact.
I really wish this society (and others, apparently) would stop beleiving every single research study that comes out. It's poorly done research like this that leads to things like the classical music fiasco, and the whole global warming bit which EVERYBODY beleives, even though it has yet to be proven using accurate scientific means. (have YOU personally done any real research on global warming, or just accepted what somebody else told you?)