That might be, but that won't get you the highestquality movie, but "only" the most popular one, which is IMHO a great difference.
I think plausibility is a good criterion for judgeing a SF Movie's quality, since it gives it a value above pure entertainment. The more plausible a Movie is the more importance it has for our own live, gattaca is an exelent example for this, it gives us many ethical or political arguments we should think about.
In A discussion about Pre Natal Diagnostics, you could show this Moive and ask how we can avoid the World from turning this way.
It is simmilar for the Matrix, which is Plausible after you accepted the (unlikely) "root" fact of the Matrix, it is a nice setting for a Philosophical "What If..." Discussion.
A Pure Popularity contest tells us nearly nothing about these aspects, I mean even Titanic made it onto one of the topmost Places.
There are things we don't understand. I'm not saying we should embrace some sort of blind ignorance; at the moment science is the best thing we've got. But science by far does'nt even begin to answer the mysteries of the Universe.
So what, why do we need to answer them, I am more than content with saying I don't know about that (maybe not yet, maybe not ever), and have no need for a explanation.
Its better to truthfuly say I don't know than to make some silly excuses to cover up our ignorace.
The problem is, who defines what is suspicious? Well, if you are cautious, everything out of the normal is suspicous (especially for conservative forces which are the prime supporters of such measures), so one gets in trouble for beeing out of the Norm.
The fact is that many things which are nowadays are legal, and normal have once been illegal. (Think of prohibition, or beeing gay) If there were Universial Surveilance, in these Days, these People, would have been even more prosecuted and I doubt that the Legislation would have changed.
Such Laws exist even now, and I'm even going a step further they will ever exist. There is no such thing as a perfect Rule system, and no matter what we do there will always be people who are discriminated by the Law.
We have a saying here in Germany which says: "Wo kein kläger da kein Richter" which translates to Where there is no one to sue, there is no judge. We all do things that are strictly speaking illegal, at some time, because there are some laws which just doesn't make sense (any more|in this situation|never had) If enough people find that they don't obey a given law anymore, and that it doesn't do any harm, the law will probably be abandoned/changed (A thing which should be done more often if you ask me)
With omnipresent surveilance there would be a judge everywhere, and all the people would just be sued, and the changes in law will be even slower.
>...EU (confisticatory taxes, government owned media),...
I think you are oversimplyfing something here. You can always "step out of the church" (I don't know what the right word is this is a verbatim translation) and don't have to pay the taxes any more.
(Its not that I like the Churches collecting taxes, since I belive, that Religions have to much influence all together, but thats another topic)
As for Goverment owned Media, where is your problem? It isn't that we only have GOM, we also have more then enough private media stations, so you can always choose.
Besides, and that is far more important, the ownership of the state is also as far as the influence gets.
The GOM, doesn't get paid by taxes, but by a separate fund, which everybody who owns a television has to pay
(Its kind of an obligatory Pay-TV if you like)
The Gouvernment has no say in Budget or Program these Stations do.
The GOM have an obligation, that it has to be reaceved in every Home, and because it doesn't have to think overly much of Quotes and aquiering Comercials, (in fact they are not allowed to air comercials after 20:00)
They can do a program for minoritys at a very high level.
If you take the time to actually watch some (for example) news, on this "Unfree" GOM in the EU, you will see, that they are more objective and have a less Goverment influenced Oppinion, than for example the "free" CNN or even NBC
> Region coding does make sense with DVDs. You see, there's often a long delay before US movies are
released in other countries.
And why is it so? Does that make sense?
Well here in Germany I could probably understand why, since the Movies get syncronated(? is that the word?)
but why do they have to delay the start in GB?
And movies Like LOTR and Harry Potter have shown that it is no problem to release a movie at the same Date all over the world.
> but let's face it: How many of them are actually using imports?
Who cares, the few who do have a right to do so, and that right gets taken away from them.
A Wrong doesn't get justifyed because it affects only a minority.
Your conclusion is wrong, since there are many things the compiler can optimize for you.
There is for example memory allignment for the variables, which differs depending hardware.
There are the different execution costs of certain asm comands, so the compiler can chose the best for every arch.
All these things have nothing to do with Kernel or Librarys, and no (Binary) Distro can do this optimizatons for you, since these binarys won't run on every arch.
(e.g. i686 binaries won't run on i586)
And belive it or not, this realy makes a difference. Especially huge Programs, like X or KDE gain noticiably from this Optimisations.
The other advantage of Compiling yourself is control, you can control any aspect of the build process.
Take Mozilla as an example, you can choose whether you want Mail/News client, SVG, MathML, you can prefer certain librarys over others (each of which has its own pros and cons) you can even choose which kind of garbage collection you want it to heav, if any.
And another upside is that you can also do any step manually, which teaches you many things, and gives you even more freedom.
I never leard more about the inner workings of Linux, as when I first installed it manually from sources for the first time.
(see http://www.linuxfromscratch.org, IIRC the devel Team from Sourcerer used this as a Starting point)
Why does anybody think of RTFM as insulting?
If somebody tells me to RTFM, I always think
doh, it was right there, and I didn't see it.
Normaly RTFM comes with a hint on Which FM you shoud read, and what you sould look after.
If not ask again, for that info. If the other one cant give it he is the idiot.
You cant expect people who are doing this for fun to always sovle the same problems that are already
solved, just because you are to lazy to invest 10 minutes prior to bothering others.
And if you say but M$ answers this questions,
yes they do, but they charge for it, and the time you save against reading the FAQ, won't suffice for earning that money
I use Visual Studio when working for a custumer,
but I am always happy when I can get back to my
xemacs envoirement.
The editor of VS is just crap in comparison to emacs.
The object catalog is a nice feature though, I have to see if I can find it for emacs.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be, but that won't get you the highestquality movie, but "only" the most popular one, which is IMHO a great difference.
I think plausibility is a good criterion for judgeing a SF Movie's quality, since it gives it a value above pure entertainment. The more plausible a Movie is the more importance it has for our own live, gattaca is an exelent example for this, it gives us many ethical or political arguments we should think about.
In A discussion about Pre Natal Diagnostics, you could show this Moive and ask how we can avoid the World from turning this way.
It is simmilar for the Matrix, which is Plausible after you accepted the (unlikely) "root" fact of the Matrix, it is a nice setting for a Philosophical "What If..." Discussion.
A Pure Popularity contest tells us nearly nothing about these aspects, I mean even Titanic made it onto one of the topmost Places.
There are things we don't understand. I'm not saying we should embrace some sort of blind ignorance; at the moment science is the best thing we've got. But science by far does'nt even begin to answer the mysteries of the Universe.
So what, why do we need to answer them, I am more than content with saying I don't know about that (maybe not yet, maybe not ever), and have no need for a explanation.
Its better to truthfuly say I don't know than to make some silly excuses to cover up our ignorace.
The problem is, who defines what is suspicious?
Well, if you are cautious, everything out of the normal is suspicous (especially for conservative forces which are the prime supporters of such measures), so one gets in trouble for beeing out of the Norm.
The fact is that many things which are nowadays are legal, and normal have once been illegal. (Think of prohibition, or beeing gay) If there were Universial Surveilance, in these Days, these People, would have been even more prosecuted and I doubt that the Legislation would have changed.
Such Laws exist even now, and I'm even going a step further they will ever exist. There is no such thing as a perfect Rule system, and no matter what we do there will always be people who are discriminated by the Law.
We have a saying here in Germany which says:
"Wo kein kläger da kein Richter" which translates to Where there is no one to sue, there is no judge.
We all do things that are strictly speaking illegal, at some time, because there are some laws which just doesn't make sense (any more|in this situation|never had)
If enough people find that they don't obey a given law anymore, and that it doesn't do any harm, the law will probably be abandoned/changed (A thing which should be done more often if you ask me)
With omnipresent surveilance there would be a judge everywhere, and all the people would just be sued, and the changes in law will be even slower.
Just my two (Euro)Cent
I think you are oversimplyfing something here. You can always "step out of the church" (I don't know what the right word is this is a verbatim translation) and don't have to pay the taxes any more. (Its not that I like the Churches collecting taxes, since I belive, that Religions have to much influence all together, but thats another topic)
As for Goverment owned Media, where is your problem? It isn't that we only have GOM, we also have more then enough private media stations, so you can always choose.
Besides, and that is far more important, the ownership of the state is also as far as the influence gets. The GOM, doesn't get paid by taxes, but by a separate fund, which everybody who owns a television has to pay (Its kind of an obligatory Pay-TV if you like) The Gouvernment has no say in Budget or Program these Stations do. The GOM have an obligation, that it has to be reaceved in every Home, and because it doesn't have to think overly much of Quotes and aquiering Comercials, (in fact they are not allowed to air comercials after 20:00) They can do a program for minoritys at a very high level.
If you take the time to actually watch some (for example) news, on this "Unfree" GOM in the EU, you will see, that they are more objective and have a less Goverment influenced Oppinion, than for example the "free" CNN or even NBC
Fabio
And why is it so? Does that make sense? Well here in Germany I could probably understand why, since the Movies get syncronated(? is that the word?) but why do they have to delay the start in GB?
And movies Like LOTR and Harry Potter have shown that it is no problem to release a movie at the same Date all over the world.
> but let's face it: How many of them are actually using imports?
Who cares, the few who do have a right to do so, and that right gets taken away from them. A Wrong doesn't get justifyed because it affects only a minority.
Fabio
There is for example memory allignment for the variables, which differs depending hardware. There are the different execution costs of certain asm comands, so the compiler can chose the best for every arch.
All these things have nothing to do with Kernel or Librarys, and no (Binary) Distro can do this optimizatons for you, since these binarys won't run on every arch. (e.g. i686 binaries won't run on i586)
And belive it or not, this realy makes a difference. Especially huge Programs, like X or KDE gain noticiably from this Optimisations.
The other advantage of Compiling yourself is control, you can control any aspect of the build process. Take Mozilla as an example, you can choose whether you want Mail/News client, SVG, MathML, you can prefer certain librarys over others (each of which has its own pros and cons) you can even choose which kind of garbage collection you want it to heav, if any.
And another upside is that you can also do any step manually, which teaches you many things, and gives you even more freedom.
I never leard more about the inner workings of Linux, as when I first installed it manually from sources for the first time. (see http://www.linuxfromscratch.org, IIRC the devel Team from Sourcerer used this as a Starting point)
Why does anybody think of RTFM as insulting?
If somebody tells me to RTFM, I always think
doh, it was right there, and I didn't see it.
Normaly RTFM comes with a hint on Which FM you shoud read, and what you sould look after.
If not ask again, for that info. If the other one cant give it he is the idiot.
You cant expect people who are doing this for fun to always sovle the same problems that are already
solved, just because you are to lazy to invest 10 minutes prior to bothering others.
And if you say but M$ answers this questions,
yes they do, but they charge for it, and the time you save against reading the FAQ, won't suffice for earning that money
I use Visual Studio when working for a custumer,
but I am always happy when I can get back to my
xemacs envoirement.
The editor of VS is just crap in comparison to emacs.
The object catalog is a nice feature though, I have to see if I can find it for emacs.
I can only disagree. The book is in no way to long. It has been an throughtly intresting read,
;)
and I haven't found any boring passages.
Then again I must admit, that I like long books, anythig smaller than a thousand pages I regard as kind of short story