"It should be illegal because it could confuse people about coypright law."
The way it works now is that if the creator of a copyrighted work doesn't act when he or she knows it's being infringed on, then they're basically waiving their right to protect it. So if somebody copycats this movie and it pisses off Warner Brothers, then they'll have to go after the first one before they can go after the second one.
It'd be real nice if they could recieve a "We grant you permission to use this" letter from those places.
" "Why don't these people write their own stories, based on their own created characters, etc etc, then we might have some new worthwhile cinema and new ideas coming though"
Easier said than done. It's hard to get noticed on-line. But if you start leg-humping another hot-property, then you've instantly got people who are curious.
When the setting is familiar, it's easy to get a few people to say "what the hell" and get it.
Don't worry about the noise generated by garbage out there. Look for the gems.
"What's the freaking point anyway. I mean I respect their creativity/artistry n stuff but come on... use them on something else other than matrix copycat."
Gotta start somewhere.
Even if it sucks, it doesn't matter. If lots of people watch it, then the chances are good that it will attract more indie filmmakers. It legitimizes P2P and it provides the MPAA with much needed competition. Imagine if the MPAA felt it needed to make movies available on-line in order to reach that new market they tried to destroy?
"Actually, it doesn't really hurt the sound/video/light/CGI/FX/whatever crews [i.e. the celeried/salaried workers]--they get paid regardless..."
He's right. You can't blame the 100 million dollar cost of making a movie on piracy. When movie companies have to scale back their budget to 10 million dollars because they aren't making enough money back, then they can use that line with me.
"Piracy happens become the product/work/whatever isn't free in the first place, and some people would rather thieve it than buy it."
Correction: Piracy happens when something is unreasonably priced and there's an audience for it. Piracy isn't a big issue here in the USA. The price is a little on the high side, but still affordable. DVD retailers are making money quite comfortably. Now, go somewhere with a lower cost of living, and piracy is rampant.
Piracy is an extension of supply and demand, though the MPAA or RIAA will never admit to that.
"Well, it's their network so they can block anyone they want."
Sure. I also have the right to complain if I don't like it.
"If you don't like their rules (I don't), why don't create a free/open/documented IM network? Make it better than the commercial offerings, and people will come."
And exactly how is one supposed to get this out in the world? Think about it. If they're using Trillian, isn't it because there are already too many protocols out there? Are your friends going to want to install yet another client in order to talk to just you?
"Of course Jabber is not affected. Why would it be? That is the beauty of Jabber and a good reason why everyone should be using it instead of closed IM protocols."
Is Jabber using some kind of neural networking algorithm to analyze the change in Yahoo's protocols and adapt to them? If so, when did 7 of Nine join the team?
"Imagine your a stupid computer user and it does crazy shit to you. It would scare you. You'd get stressed out and panic. That isn't good for office morale. What about when they find out it's you? What may be a joke to you might not be to another person."
Lighten up, man. Has it occured to you that targets of jokes like these quite often deserve it?
My company was demo happy. Any time a new feature made it into our software, our hyper-active sales guy would go demo happy. As a result, I had to make a LOT of demos, many of them web based. One day, inspired by a book I read, I created a web page with a fake error message that came up on top of it.
"The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your monitor."
I uploaded the page to our websever, sent out a company-wide email to try out the new demo, and went home. I got a frantic call at 7am in the morning. The first victim of my joke was the type to wash her hands in anti-bacterial soap if somebody dirty just looked at her. I had to keep from laughing, it wasn't easy. She eventually figured out it was a joke, but found it amusing, so she didn't tell anybody else.
I fired off a note to the sysadmin to let him in on the joke, but I wasn't sure if he got it in time. Unfortunately, he was the guy who everybody ran to first. When I got to his office, the dead-weight woman who was always calling in sick all the time was there explaining what she had seen. I intercepted the conversation and asked her what happened. She told me that her computer had radiated her. So I asked if she felt okay, and she put her hand on her stomach and with worried eyes she non-commitally said "I think so..." I glanced over at the sys-admin whose head suddenly disappeared behind his monitor. I found out later that he had read my email and was trying to keep from laughing.
I decided to carry this joke a little further. You all know Front Page, right? That WYSIWYG HTML editor that everybody here hates? Well it has a kick ass feature. It'll download a web page and you can just type right into it. Then, it'll maintain all the links for you. So I downloaded one of CNN's health pages and wrote up a 3 paragraph news alert about the "Microwave Virus". The basic gist of the article was that a virus took control of your monitor and amplified the ultra violet gun to burn out the shielding. Symptoms included fatigue, irritability, and a couple of other things you normally feel at the office. In about 15 minutes, I had a fake web page and I had set up Microsoft's 'Personal Web Server' to serve it up from my computer. I had then renamed my computer to www.cnn-news.com, and hosted the page. A new 'FYI' email was sent out, and I went to lunch.
When I came back, the woman that was in on the joke told me "all hell had broken loose, you better get to the dead-weight girl's office." When I got there, two of my coworkers were having a discussion about whether they should go home or go see their doc. From there, I lost, I couldn't keep a straight face anymore. I told them of the joke. They took it in stride, but they didn't think it was so funny. You see, they didn't realize I had faked the web-page. They thought I read it on CNN's site and I had faked the message. They were more amused when they found out I had faked the site too, but I think they were paranoid for weeks any time I sent out an FYI email. Heh.
On a side note, the sysadmin there didn't really like me until that day. He was impressed at how I had set that up. We were actually friends after that. Heh.
"Install VNC as a service and connect from your machine."
One of the engineers where I worked pulled a stunt like that on a naieve PR lady. He had a computer set up on a table on the opposite end of his office. He was tinkering with it via VNC. She asked him what he was up to and he told her that he had written some voice recognition software.
"Go ahead, say something."
"What should I say?"
And when she said that he fired up Notepad and wrote "What should I say?" on it. We all thought it was pretty funny until we found ourselves stopping an announcement that we had a new product in development.
Well the title of this article painted a different image in my mind. I thought it meant a cable that links two wireless devices together. Defeating the purpose? No. My company built a system that has a video camera sending digital data to a small PC. Instead of a monitor, they use an iPaq wirelessly connected to the capture unit to do things like change exposure and start/stop record. It doesn't need to be on all the time, but rather it works a lot like a remote control.
Unfortunately, not all areas are WiFi friendly. I remember bringing this unit to Siggraph one year and there was so much interference we couldn't connect. Because of this problem, we also have to include an ethernet card + cable to physically link them.
Gotta wonder, why don't they provide some sort of standard cable to link wireless devices in the event of interference?
Okay, not really on-topic, though it would help this guy if he did use the wireless USB device. It'd be another sysadmin type tool to keep around this house in case the microwave screws it up or something.
"On the way to work, I saw state-contracted workers pressure washing the center divider."...and students are getting fewer days in school and losing programs.
... I'd suggest a PocketPC. I have one and I use it for voice dictation all the time. It has a record button that starts a record even when the unit is off. It's sort of like talking into a walkie talkie. When it's done, you get a nice little.WAV file. I like this because it's easy to organize short notes. I can rename the file to something more descriptive and file it away under whatever folder is appropriate. It's very handy.
However, Microsoft did not get everything right. *grr* They use a compression format that Windows doesn't by default have a codec for. (That codec is available for download, though.) Also, ActiveSync backs up everything BUT the sound notes. (note: this may have been fixed in the most recent PocketPC OS, Mine's 2 years old.)
Also, I'm not sure you can get that running in Linux. Maybe a Palm Pilot with voice capability would suit your needs? Or a Zaurus? (Uhh I don't think the one out now has that capability, but I think the next one does...)
It may be a little spendier than you'd want to do, but the neat thing about using a PDA for a voice recorder is that you don't necessarily need to have your computer around for it.
" when you actually do get some disturbed character walking down the street ranting to himself, nobody pays any attention as they assume he's just on the phone to someone..."
I just assume the guy he's talking to is named Al.
"Killer metallic salt and pepper shakers, ugly 1960s red phone booths, and an aging guy with a curly afro. I can't wait for this to appear on the airwaves again."
When it comes back, try listening to the talkie bits of it.
"With all due respect, if the revival Dr Who is equivalent to the quality of Enterprise, I'd rather they not revive the series at all. I am still very skeptical, despite this article."
You should be. When Doctor Who didn't have the fx budget, it forced them to come up with other creative ways of making the show interesting. Give them the FX budget, will they have the drive to keep it interesting, or will they opt for whatever's visually interesting that's been done before.
Slashdot Mirror
.. if they had just found a way to use the word Klingon in it.
"This should be legal for two reasons:"
Playing devil's advocate here:
"It should be illegal because it could confuse people about coypright law."
The way it works now is that if the creator of a copyrighted work doesn't act when he or she knows it's being infringed on, then they're basically waiving their right to protect it. So if somebody copycats this movie and it pisses off Warner Brothers, then they'll have to go after the first one before they can go after the second one.
It'd be real nice if they could recieve a "We grant you permission to use this" letter from those places.
" "Why don't these people write their own stories, based on their own created characters, etc etc, then we might have some new worthwhile cinema and new ideas coming though"
Easier said than done. It's hard to get noticed on-line. But if you start leg-humping another hot-property, then you've instantly got people who are curious.
When the setting is familiar, it's easy to get a few people to say "what the hell" and get it.
Don't worry about the noise generated by garbage out there. Look for the gems.
"What's the freaking point anyway. I mean I respect their creativity/artistry n stuff but come on... use them on something else other than matrix copycat."
Gotta start somewhere.
Even if it sucks, it doesn't matter. If lots of people watch it, then the chances are good that it will attract more indie filmmakers. It legitimizes P2P and it provides the MPAA with much needed competition. Imagine if the MPAA felt it needed to make movies available on-line in order to reach that new market they tried to destroy?
"Actually, it doesn't really hurt the sound/video/light/CGI/FX/whatever crews [i.e. the celeried/salaried workers]--they get paid regardless..."
He's right. You can't blame the 100 million dollar cost of making a movie on piracy. When movie companies have to scale back their budget to 10 million dollars because they aren't making enough money back, then they can use that line with me.
"Piracy happens become the product/work/whatever isn't free in the first place, and some people would rather thieve it than buy it."
Correction: Piracy happens when something is unreasonably priced and there's an audience for it. Piracy isn't a big issue here in the USA. The price is a little on the high side, but still affordable. DVD retailers are making money quite comfortably. Now, go somewhere with a lower cost of living, and piracy is rampant.
Piracy is an extension of supply and demand, though the MPAA or RIAA will never admit to that.
"Well, it's their network so they can block anyone they want."
Sure. I also have the right to complain if I don't like it.
"If you don't like their rules (I don't), why don't create a free/open/documented IM network? Make it better than the commercial offerings, and people will come."
And exactly how is one supposed to get this out in the world? Think about it. If they're using Trillian, isn't it because there are already too many protocols out there? Are your friends going to want to install yet another client in order to talk to just you?
"Of course Jabber is not affected. Why would it be? That is the beauty of Jabber and a good reason why everyone should be using it instead of closed IM protocols."
Is Jabber using some kind of neural networking algorithm to analyze the change in Yahoo's protocols and adapt to them? If so, when did 7 of Nine join the team?
"The majority of people who by DVDs aren't even aware there is a region system, let alone know how to modify their player. "
We're talking about Star Trek here, not Will and Grace. These fans will do it.
Okay, so Nigeria won't be entering the Federation any time soon.
"Imagine your a stupid computer user and it does crazy shit to you. It would scare you. You'd get stressed out and panic. That isn't good for office morale. What about when they find out it's you? What may be a joke to you might not be to another person."
Lighten up, man. Has it occured to you that targets of jokes like these quite often deserve it?
My company was demo happy. Any time a new feature made it into our software, our hyper-active sales guy would go demo happy. As a result, I had to make a LOT of demos, many of them web based. One day, inspired by a book I read, I created a web page with a fake error message that came up on top of it.
"The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your monitor."
I uploaded the page to our websever, sent out a company-wide email to try out the new demo, and went home. I got a frantic call at 7am in the morning. The first victim of my joke was the type to wash her hands in anti-bacterial soap if somebody dirty just looked at her. I had to keep from laughing, it wasn't easy. She eventually figured out it was a joke, but found it amusing, so she didn't tell anybody else.
I fired off a note to the sysadmin to let him in on the joke, but I wasn't sure if he got it in time. Unfortunately, he was the guy who everybody ran to first. When I got to his office, the dead-weight woman who was always calling in sick all the time was there explaining what she had seen. I intercepted the conversation and asked her what happened. She told me that her computer had radiated her. So I asked if she felt okay, and she put her hand on her stomach and with worried eyes she non-commitally said "I think so..." I glanced over at the sys-admin whose head suddenly disappeared behind his monitor. I found out later that he had read my email and was trying to keep from laughing.
I decided to carry this joke a little further. You all know Front Page, right? That WYSIWYG HTML editor that everybody here hates? Well it has a kick ass feature. It'll download a web page and you can just type right into it. Then, it'll maintain all the links for you. So I downloaded one of CNN's health pages and wrote up a 3 paragraph news alert about the "Microwave Virus". The basic gist of the article was that a virus took control of your monitor and amplified the ultra violet gun to burn out the shielding. Symptoms included fatigue, irritability, and a couple of other things you normally feel at the office. In about 15 minutes, I had a fake web page and I had set up Microsoft's 'Personal Web Server' to serve it up from my computer. I had then renamed my computer to www.cnn-news.com, and hosted the page. A new 'FYI' email was sent out, and I went to lunch.
When I came back, the woman that was in on the joke told me "all hell had broken loose, you better get to the dead-weight girl's office." When I got there, two of my coworkers were having a discussion about whether they should go home or go see their doc. From there, I lost, I couldn't keep a straight face anymore. I told them of the joke. They took it in stride, but they didn't think it was so funny. You see, they didn't realize I had faked the web-page. They thought I read it on CNN's site and I had faked the message. They were more amused when they found out I had faked the site too, but I think they were paranoid for weeks any time I sent out an FYI email. Heh.
On a side note, the sysadmin there didn't really like me until that day. He was impressed at how I had set that up. We were actually friends after that. Heh.
"Ask your supervisor for some more work because you obviously have too much damn time on your hands."
Assholes that need to lighten up are often the target of cruel practical jokes. Consider yourself warned.
"Install VNC as a service and connect from your machine."
One of the engineers where I worked pulled a stunt like that on a naieve PR lady. He had a computer set up on a table on the opposite end of his office. He was tinkering with it via VNC. She asked him what he was up to and he told her that he had written some voice recognition software.
"Go ahead, say something."
"What should I say?"
And when she said that he fired up Notepad and wrote "What should I say?" on it. We all thought it was pretty funny until we found ourselves stopping an announcement that we had a new product in development.
"...install Windows. "
Or, if he plays games when he should be working, you could always install Linux.
"You were asking about a cable standard, and ethernet would work for that."
Ah okay. Thank you. I apologize for not reading a little more carefully.
"Wouldn't that be ethernet, or am I missing something?"
Ethernet is a seperate card. I'm talking about running a cable from the 802.11 card to its destination without needing a seperate ethernet card.
Well the title of this article painted a different image in my mind. I thought it meant a cable that links two wireless devices together. Defeating the purpose? No. My company built a system that has a video camera sending digital data to a small PC. Instead of a monitor, they use an iPaq wirelessly connected to the capture unit to do things like change exposure and start/stop record. It doesn't need to be on all the time, but rather it works a lot like a remote control.
Unfortunately, not all areas are WiFi friendly. I remember bringing this unit to Siggraph one year and there was so much interference we couldn't connect. Because of this problem, we also have to include an ethernet card + cable to physically link them.
Gotta wonder, why don't they provide some sort of standard cable to link wireless devices in the event of interference?
Okay, not really on-topic, though it would help this guy if he did use the wireless USB device. It'd be another sysadmin type tool to keep around this house in case the microwave screws it up or something.
"-1, DMCA wielding jackbooted thugs"
*yawn* Are we going to bring this up again? They didn't even use the DMCA.
"I think it's only a matter of time before this occurs; there's just too much money at stake. As a consumer, I'm against it though."
I just hope it's a flat tax. Like I wanna deal with which state gets the tax.
"On the way to work, I saw state-contracted workers pressure washing the center divider." ...and students are getting fewer days in school and losing programs.
Sometimes I just wanna shout "Hail Skroob!"
... I'd suggest a PocketPC. I have one and I use it for voice dictation all the time. It has a record button that starts a record even when the unit is off. It's sort of like talking into a walkie talkie. When it's done, you get a nice little .WAV file. I like this because it's easy to organize short notes. I can rename the file to something more descriptive and file it away under whatever folder is appropriate. It's very handy.
However, Microsoft did not get everything right. *grr* They use a compression format that Windows doesn't by default have a codec for. (That codec is available for download, though.) Also, ActiveSync backs up everything BUT the sound notes. (note: this may have been fixed in the most recent PocketPC OS, Mine's 2 years old.)
Also, I'm not sure you can get that running in Linux. Maybe a Palm Pilot with voice capability would suit your needs? Or a Zaurus? (Uhh I don't think the one out now has that capability, but I think the next one does...)
It may be a little spendier than you'd want to do, but the neat thing about using a PDA for a voice recorder is that you don't necessarily need to have your computer around for it.
" when you actually do get some disturbed character walking down the street ranting to himself, nobody pays any attention as they assume he's just on the phone to someone..."
I just assume the guy he's talking to is named Al.
"Killer metallic salt and pepper shakers, ugly 1960s red phone booths, and an aging guy with a curly afro. I can't wait for this to appear on the airwaves again."
When it comes back, try listening to the talkie bits of it.
"With all due respect, if the revival Dr Who is equivalent to the quality of Enterprise, I'd rather they not revive the series at all. I am still very skeptical, despite this article."
You should be. When Doctor Who didn't have the fx budget, it forced them to come up with other creative ways of making the show interesting. Give them the FX budget, will they have the drive to keep it interesting, or will they opt for whatever's visually interesting that's been done before.