I have an old P2-400 machine that was basically doing nothing. So I decided to turn it into a PVR. The requirements on the machine are borderline, but it works fine. Here are the specs:
-P2 400
-128 meg of RAM
-8 Gig drive
-Video card with TV out
-Hauppage WinTV PCI card ($99 including IR remote, you can get a cheaper mono version for $49)
- Snapstream PVS ($50, http://www.snapstream.com)
- Windows 2000 (I average about 30 days uptime w/o rebooting.)
-10/100 Ethernet card
Some of you might be turned off at the capture specs, but hear me out. Snapstream captures the video at 320 by 240 @ 30 fps at 330kbits/s. It's compressed in real time using Microsoft's Media Encoder. So the resulting file is in.WMV format. You can also capture to Divx, etc, but to be honest my best luck has been with MS's software. Don't worry, it's pretty open.
The picture quality's certainly watchable, but it is noticably artifact'd. My goal was to fit 4 hours to a CD, I could double the data rate and get much nicer quality. The truth is, though, that the only shows I'd want to do that for are Farscape and Deep Space Nine. They are very beautifully filmed and this format does deaden it a bit. (Again, it's very watchable.)
I sometimes watch the videos on the TV in my bedroom via the old video card with TV out. I also send them over the network to my main machine sometimes. It has a dual monitor setup, so I frequently watch the video in a little window on one screen while I'm doing things like e-mail. To tell you the truth, I'm addicted to watching TV this way. I'm able to pause it, zoom past commercials, and even search for stuff about previous episodes.
I'm very happy with this setup. When DVD writables get cheaper, I intend to upgrade the computer so I can get closer to broadcast quality. But I'm not in a huge hurry to do this. Most shows (especially sitcoms) can survive running at really low resolution. Low resolution = low data rate = low CPU Usage = more I can capture and play back. You guys might find it interesting that once I encoded an episode of Quantum Leap at 160 by 100 @ 100kbps at 7fps and played it back on my old Jornada PocketPC. I was pleasantly surprised at how watchable it was, especially considering I was on a flight to LA. I damn near went out and bought a microdrive so I could store more shows on that guy to watch. Heh.
I've been using this machine for over a year now. The biggest change I've noticed is that I don't turn on my big TV very often now. I'm very happy with how it came out.:) Not bad for $150 + finding a use for an old computer.
I have a dual monitor setup at home. Sometimes while i'm browsing forums etc I get kind of bored, so I have media player playing a show in a little window kind of out of the way. It's very easy to glance at it when something interesting comes on.
I have a home brew PVR in my apartment (I'll describe it in a later post...) and it quietly captures shows for me. I find my time's a little more efficiently spent. Since I don't edit out the commercials (I usually watch and then delete), I have a few minutes to tidy up my email box or fiddle with Lightwave.
I'll tell you a few totally cool things about this setup:
1.) When the show is being dull etc, I have other ways to pass the time on my computer.
2.) Easy to glance at, no more turning my head. Face it, no matter how close your TV is, you'll have to turn your head.
3.) I can pause/rewind/etc and make sure I don't miss anything that sounded interesting
4.) My TV hasn't been turned on in weeks.
5.) With the extra monitor, the video's never intrusive.
I realize most people would probably be turned off by this idea, but I thought I'd share my epxerience on this topic. I've managed to catch up on a lot of shows I don't normally have time for!
"I don't know if I'd like my rescue workers battling BSODs in the midst of an earthquake."
BSOD's are so... 1995. The only reason I've had one in the last 3 years was due to a crappy mobo. BSOD's virtually disappeared when Windows 2000 came around. (I know, people are going to argue with me. I've had 4 Win2k machines personally, and nearly all my coworkers are running it just fine. You're not going to say anything to convince me that Windows 2000 is garbage.)
In all seriousness, the phone systems today can *not* handle everybody simultaneously calling their loved ones. I prefer a litte pocket device that acts kind of like ICQ where I can send off a few messages and get beeped when they respond. Surely, that'd be far more reliable in one form or another. My girlfriend has an e-mail pager. If I wasn't already carrying a cell phone, I'd get one of those guys. She prefers it to a cell phone because it's not as intrusive, plus it's a lot smaller. I know I'm sick of my phone ringing.
I was reading the other day that during disasters email tends to work a lot better than the phone. In Bellevue Washington, they're talking about deploying wireless devices to disaster workers. Here's the article:
http://www.komotv.com/news/story_m.asp?ID=17879
I can't help but think that this would be a better service to keep running than POTS with the money. Text messages are so much easier to get through than voice.
"If I'm carrying a Playboy and I don't want anyone to know, I'd put it in a bag. If I carry it openly then I must expect that some people will look."
Let me ask you something, though: Let's say an attractive woman is walking through a park and her shirt rips open, so she walks around holding it closed. If she asks you not to look, are you going to be polite and mind your business, or are you going to shout "Her shirt's almost off! C'mon and peek, guys!" ? She's in a public place, but what's under her clothes is not for public consumption without consent.
I'm reasonably sure that you'd respect her wishes even though you'd like to gander at her goodies.
It's only useless to somebody who's intent on linking. The whole idea of my post is that it's superficially easy to let somebody know you don't want them to do that. If you politely say "if you want to refer somebody here, please send them to this addie..."
If somebody leaves their site up so it's easy to link to, don't cry about people linking to it. If you take steps to educate the user that you don't want them to, then I think you have grounds to whine.
"You've never heard of robots.txt? It's certainly the easiest and preferred way to keep robots from visiting your site."
I didn't fully articulate my thought, sorry about that.
I'm not sure if a site'd want to totally give up being searchable, so one alternative would be to have the main page present different info to the spider. If the text it provided was 'search bait', then when people click to it they'd enter through the front door.
Just to be clear, I'm *not* suggesting what porn sites did when they made a bunch of 0-sized text saying 'ass ass ass ass ass', I'm talking about a legitimate preview of what site they're entering.
Granted, I'm sure it'd easily be abused, but still if somebody doesn't want links to content on their site they can take simple steps to contrl it.
Yah.. I know. You're right, the AMD/heat jokes are rather abundunt here. At least give me credit for trying an alternative approach,heh.
To be fair, I have a dual athlon setup at work. Not only is my office noticably warmer, but the fans I put in it are really noisy. I really love the performance of AMD's, but man I'm paying for it. Heh.
I hate when people say stupid shit like this. Let me explain why:
1.) You're not subscribing for news, you're subscribing to view slashdot pages without ads. If you log out, you still have acess to EVERYTHING on slashdot.
2.) Last I checked, $5 bought you 1,000 ad-free page views. Assuming I'm not mistaken about the rates, that's $.02 a page view. Oh Slashdot is really ripping you off.
3.) What business is it of yours if anybody pays for it or not? You're not being told to subscribe. You're being offered an opportunity to pay a small price to not get ads. I, for one, find Slashdot really entertaining. Even if the story's not interesting to me, usually the comments are. I see value, therefore I either subscribe or contribute. You don't hear me bitching about the subscription.
I realize this is off-topic, and I apologize for that. But I am sick and tired of people making posts like these as if it's a big deal. If you're here reading the comments, then Slashdot is providing you with a service, whether you like it or not.
It's not really that hard to prevent people from doing it. Why try to stop an individual when Google's going to find it anyway?
If you don't want to have pages directly linked to, you have a few very simple options:
1.) You can identify a search engine spider from it's logs, and set up your site to present it with different content. If you're using PHP, for example, all you have to do is create an if/then statement that basically says "if it's google, send them no data. Anything else, let them on through." It's not very hard to write this type of script in PHP. It'd take me minutes to do.
2.) Frames setup: There are some sites there that use a frames setup where by default a bookmark set in any portion of the site will only be established to the portal into it. It's easy to get around, but you could get your message known.
3.) You can trap the right mouse button so that an error box comes up that says 'Please do not link to this page, send them to the home page instead.' Being polite about it, like that, would be useful in preventing somebody from doing something you don't want them to do.
4.) If you really really want to prevent somebody from deep linking, you could provide a registration page so that somebody with a valid username/password can get to it. Kind of like NYTimes.
As you can see, there are steps you can take before you get the lawyers out. Try those first, being polite to the user and letting them know what you do/don't want is far more effective than challenging their rights.
The concept is still interesting. From what I gathered from the article, what they want this thing to do is make this your 'one computer'. So when you're at home, dock it and a big screen monitor and keyboard and mouse are all up and running. When you go somewhere, undock it and take it with you.
I find this concept interesting. I have both a desktop and a laptop, and to tell you the truth I'm a little sick of trying to keep everything sync'd. There are some apps where the laptop excels for it's mobility, and then there's my desktop which is just a better layout for woking in.
Coming from the point of view of 'All you need is this device' instead of using a PDA as an accessory to my computer, I'd say it's a pretty cool idea.
As for XP, I remember a while back they announed some sort of interface for XP that was geared for Television. The idea was that the buttons had to be big and tuned to the app that it was running. Presumably, this type of interface would also facilitate using Windows XP in lower resolution modes, including that of a PDA. If that's the case, then this device may take advantage of that functionality.
As for the apps, I think you have a good point. Existing apps may behave kind of funny on it. I'm curious if they'll have to wedge IE into the smaller form factor, of if they have some other trick up their sleeve.
"It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."
Since when do they need permission to use a parodized name? I thought that parody law not only allowed one to use a similar name ('Goldmember' is not THAT similar...), but also their original artwork could be closely mimicked.
Anybody remember reading about that guy who put up an 'aolsucks.com' site? AOL attempted to sue him because he used their artwork to parodize him. His lawyer said he was well within his rights because it was a pardoy/criticism of the company.
Question: Wouldn't the same logic be applied as it was for this guy, or is there a variable I'm not considering?
"Dear christ, why not just overcome your fear and deal with it?"
Fear? It's not fear I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the fact that I can't get away from what happened. Go turn on the news, check out the bs that's happening around the world. If I go to a movie, it's so I can ESCAPE the real world. If they start bringing in reminders of how different our world is today, then there's really little point to going to movies, isn't there.
"Besides, wouldn't it be nice to see a good guy kicking ass on a site where we royally fucked up? Think about it."
I wish I could see it that way, because I think you have a point. But it's not as easy as that. Maybe in a year or two, but today it's still distrubing. It's just too soon.
Maybe when CNN stops reporting about all the other terrorist bs going on around the world.
"On a side note, isn't that traditional defintion of a monopoly? "
It makes you wonder why there isn't more than one organization, doesn't it. I have no idea what's stopping somebody from saying "Well I'm going to sign on some artists and do a web play."
I hardly think that ruined the movie. I would suggest being more sensitive to those who lost loved ones than trying to keep a scene in that's stupid to begin wtih.
Never mind that only an idiotic pilot would fly through those two buildings.
"Force yourself to face your fears and GET OVER IT"
It's real easy to act like you have solutions for a problem you don't have to deal with.
I want a version of this...
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
... for reporting spam. I am NOT playing vigilante for copyrighted software. It is NOT that hard to find. And what would my reward be?
Screw that. But if I could press an F button to say 'this is spam' and have it reported, then in theory maybe somebody'll do something about it, and I'll have less shit in my inbox. That would be a rather satisfactory incentive for me to report stuff like this.
"These are the results of the capitalistic system in the USA. Money talks. Corporations at their finest. In a few years you will have to pay money to take pictures of the statue of liberty. The DMCA will only get stronger because it suits the corporations. Is that the best reason they could come up with to sui sony? What a fucked up country. America at its finest. Why do we forget the right of sony to shoot anything they want in their movie? They do have that right, yes? Oh well, not that i care anymore but it's just sad to see these kind of things happening. Too bad really. "
I see those days happening, too. Fortuantely, though, people (individuals) are waking up to this fact and standing up against it. Look at what happened to the SSSCA, it was universally rejected. Despite all the money that was put into it, it still was universally rejected. We had our say and we won.
Eventually, the content industries will put out so much crap that people will look to independents to create new stories for them. It's already starting to happen. (Troops, anyone?)
That's why I find court cases like these funny. It's a lot of petty squabbling with millions of dollars at stake. At least it's not coming out of our pockets this tiem!
"First we have Rio De Jenero say that a Simpson's episode doesn't accurately portray the city..."
Rio sort of has a point. The part about the monkeys isn't as disturbing as the part where Homer was kidnapped and held for ransom just for being an american. In these days of keeping an eye open for terrorism, nobody wants to go anywhere where it is a possiblity that'll happen to them. Look at what happened to Pearl, for example.
Brazil's economy is really tough right now, and they're putting lots of money into getting tourists to visit. It doesn't help when an uber-popular TV show basically says that Brazil is no place to visit.
I don't fully agree with them on this topic, but I do sympathize. The Simpsons could have left them alone. I've been to Brazil, and I didn't find that episode all that amusing. Not because I was offended, but just because it was a dull episode. The Australia one, however, cracked me up.
Didn't a billboard get removed during NYE that got a few ppl hacked off?
I remember something along the lines of some news coverage was going on, and depending on which network you were wtaching, you saw a different billboard in the background.
Or was it during coverage of the election? Doh, sorry, I don't remember. I do remember, though, that the issue was heated up recently. This case could be on the tail of that.
"Anything packaged as "real" shouldn't be allowed to do this. "
Um, no. A movie needs all the artistic freedom it can get it's hands on. If they want to change the billboards, more power to them. I mean, how would you feel if this case was going on, but the billboard that was inserted in was a joke in the movie? How would you feel about it then?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey dudes, I mentioned I'd describe my pvr setup at home, here's a link:
3 75 644
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=31380&cid=3
I thought I'd describe my setup at home.
.WMV format. You can also capture to Divx, etc, but to be honest my best luck has been with MS's software. Don't worry, it's pretty open.
:) Not bad for $150 + finding a use for an old computer.
I have an old P2-400 machine that was basically doing nothing. So I decided to turn it into a PVR. The requirements on the machine are borderline, but it works fine. Here are the specs:
-P2 400
-128 meg of RAM
-8 Gig drive
-Video card with TV out
-Hauppage WinTV PCI card ($99 including IR remote, you can get a cheaper mono version for $49)
- Snapstream PVS ($50, http://www.snapstream.com)
- Windows 2000 (I average about 30 days uptime w/o rebooting.)
-10/100 Ethernet card
Some of you might be turned off at the capture specs, but hear me out. Snapstream captures the video at 320 by 240 @ 30 fps at 330kbits/s. It's compressed in real time using Microsoft's Media Encoder. So the resulting file is in
The picture quality's certainly watchable, but it is noticably artifact'd. My goal was to fit 4 hours to a CD, I could double the data rate and get much nicer quality. The truth is, though, that the only shows I'd want to do that for are Farscape and Deep Space Nine. They are very beautifully filmed and this format does deaden it a bit. (Again, it's very watchable.)
I sometimes watch the videos on the TV in my bedroom via the old video card with TV out. I also send them over the network to my main machine sometimes. It has a dual monitor setup, so I frequently watch the video in a little window on one screen while I'm doing things like e-mail. To tell you the truth, I'm addicted to watching TV this way. I'm able to pause it, zoom past commercials, and even search for stuff about previous episodes.
I'm very happy with this setup. When DVD writables get cheaper, I intend to upgrade the computer so I can get closer to broadcast quality. But I'm not in a huge hurry to do this. Most shows (especially sitcoms) can survive running at really low resolution. Low resolution = low data rate = low CPU Usage = more I can capture and play back. You guys might find it interesting that once I encoded an episode of Quantum Leap at 160 by 100 @ 100kbps at 7fps and played it back on my old Jornada PocketPC. I was pleasantly surprised at how watchable it was, especially considering I was on a flight to LA. I damn near went out and bought a microdrive so I could store more shows on that guy to watch. Heh.
I've been using this machine for over a year now. The biggest change I've noticed is that I don't turn on my big TV very often now. I'm very happy with how it came out.
I have a dual monitor setup at home. Sometimes while i'm browsing forums etc I get kind of bored, so I have media player playing a show in a little window kind of out of the way. It's very easy to glance at it when something interesting comes on.
I have a home brew PVR in my apartment (I'll describe it in a later post...) and it quietly captures shows for me. I find my time's a little more efficiently spent. Since I don't edit out the commercials (I usually watch and then delete), I have a few minutes to tidy up my email box or fiddle with Lightwave.
I'll tell you a few totally cool things about this setup:
1.) When the show is being dull etc, I have other ways to pass the time on my computer.
2.) Easy to glance at, no more turning my head. Face it, no matter how close your TV is, you'll have to turn your head.
3.) I can pause/rewind/etc and make sure I don't miss anything that sounded interesting
4.) My TV hasn't been turned on in weeks.
5.) With the extra monitor, the video's never intrusive.
I realize most people would probably be turned off by this idea, but I thought I'd share my epxerience on this topic. I've managed to catch up on a lot of shows I don't normally have time for!
"I don't know if I'd like my rescue workers battling BSODs in the midst of an earthquake."
BSOD's are so... 1995. The only reason I've had one in the last 3 years was due to a crappy mobo. BSOD's virtually disappeared when Windows 2000 came around. (I know, people are going to argue with me. I've had 4 Win2k machines personally, and nearly all my coworkers are running it just fine. You're not going to say anything to convince me that Windows 2000 is garbage.)
In all seriousness, the phone systems today can *not* handle everybody simultaneously calling their loved ones. I prefer a litte pocket device that acts kind of like ICQ where I can send off a few messages and get beeped when they respond. Surely, that'd be far more reliable in one form or another. My girlfriend has an e-mail pager. If I wasn't already carrying a cell phone, I'd get one of those guys. She prefers it to a cell phone because it's not as intrusive, plus it's a lot smaller. I know I'm sick of my phone ringing.
I was reading the other day that during disasters email tends to work a lot better than the phone. In Bellevue Washington, they're talking about deploying wireless devices to disaster workers. Here's the article:
http://www.komotv.com/news/story_m.asp?ID=17879
I can't help but think that this would be a better service to keep running than POTS with the money. Text messages are so much easier to get through than voice.
I did a search for 'River names' on Google and found that the Musselshell River was originally called Mah-Tush by the Native Indians in the area.
Damn I wish Intel'd name a line of processors after that... 'Mah-Tush overheated!'
I can't wait until Intel releases the Shi Tzu chip.
"If I'm carrying a Playboy and I don't want anyone to know, I'd put it in a bag. If I carry it openly then I must expect that some people will look."
Let me ask you something, though: Let's say an attractive woman is walking through a park and her shirt rips open, so she walks around holding it closed. If she asks you not to look, are you going to be polite and mind your business, or are you going to shout "Her shirt's almost off! C'mon and peek, guys!" ? She's in a public place, but what's under her clothes is not for public consumption without consent.
I'm reasonably sure that you'd respect her wishes even though you'd like to gander at her goodies.
It's only useless to somebody who's intent on linking. The whole idea of my post is that it's superficially easy to let somebody know you don't want them to do that. If you politely say "if you want to refer somebody here, please send them to this addie..."
If somebody leaves their site up so it's easy to link to, don't cry about people linking to it. If you take steps to educate the user that you don't want them to, then I think you have grounds to whine.
"You've never heard of robots.txt? It's certainly the easiest and preferred way to keep robots from visiting your site."
I didn't fully articulate my thought, sorry about that.
I'm not sure if a site'd want to totally give up being searchable, so one alternative would be to have the main page present different info to the spider. If the text it provided was 'search bait', then when people click to it they'd enter through the front door.
Just to be clear, I'm *not* suggesting what porn sites did when they made a bunch of 0-sized text saying 'ass ass ass ass ass', I'm talking about a legitimate preview of what site they're entering.
Granted, I'm sure it'd easily be abused, but still if somebody doesn't want links to content on their site they can take simple steps to contrl it.
Yah.. I know. You're right, the AMD/heat jokes are rather abundunt here. At least give me credit for trying an alternative approach,heh.
To be fair, I have a dual athlon setup at work. Not only is my office noticably warmer, but the fans I put in it are really noisy. I really love the performance of AMD's, but man I'm paying for it. Heh.
"Are you guys actually paying for this stuff?"
I hate when people say stupid shit like this. Let me explain why:
1.) You're not subscribing for news, you're subscribing to view slashdot pages without ads. If you log out, you still have acess to EVERYTHING on slashdot.
2.) Last I checked, $5 bought you 1,000 ad-free page views. Assuming I'm not mistaken about the rates, that's $.02 a page view. Oh Slashdot is really ripping you off.
3.) What business is it of yours if anybody pays for it or not? You're not being told to subscribe. You're being offered an opportunity to pay a small price to not get ads. I, for one, find Slashdot really entertaining. Even if the story's not interesting to me, usually the comments are. I see value, therefore I either subscribe or contribute. You don't hear me bitching about the subscription.
I realize this is off-topic, and I apologize for that. But I am sick and tired of people making posts like these as if it's a big deal. If you're here reading the comments, then Slashdot is providing you with a service, whether you like it or not.
It's not really that hard to prevent people from doing it. Why try to stop an individual when Google's going to find it anyway?
If you don't want to have pages directly linked to, you have a few very simple options:
1.) You can identify a search engine spider from it's logs, and set up your site to present it with different content. If you're using PHP, for example, all you have to do is create an if/then statement that basically says "if it's google, send them no data. Anything else, let them on through." It's not very hard to write this type of script in PHP. It'd take me minutes to do.
2.) Frames setup: There are some sites there that use a frames setup where by default a bookmark set in any portion of the site will only be established to the portal into it. It's easy to get around, but you could get your message known.
3.) You can trap the right mouse button so that an error box comes up that says 'Please do not link to this page, send them to the home page instead.' Being polite about it, like that, would be useful in preventing somebody from doing something you don't want them to do.
4.) If you really really want to prevent somebody from deep linking, you could provide a registration page so that somebody with a valid username/password can get to it. Kind of like NYTimes.
As you can see, there are steps you can take before you get the lawyers out. Try those first, being polite to the user and letting them know what you do/don't want is far more effective than challenging their rights.
"CAUSE AMDS RUN SO HOT!! HAHAHAHA That's so original!!!"
Umm okay...
I missed your joke about this article, could you paste me a link to it?
... AMD has announced that it will focus it's production on high-end processors. In other news, scientists predict a record year for global warming...
The concept is still interesting. From what I gathered from the article, what they want this thing to do is make this your 'one computer'. So when you're at home, dock it and a big screen monitor and keyboard and mouse are all up and running. When you go somewhere, undock it and take it with you.
I find this concept interesting. I have both a desktop and a laptop, and to tell you the truth I'm a little sick of trying to keep everything sync'd. There are some apps where the laptop excels for it's mobility, and then there's my desktop which is just a better layout for woking in.
Coming from the point of view of 'All you need is this device' instead of using a PDA as an accessory to my computer, I'd say it's a pretty cool idea.
As for XP, I remember a while back they announed some sort of interface for XP that was geared for Television. The idea was that the buttons had to be big and tuned to the app that it was running. Presumably, this type of interface would also facilitate using Windows XP in lower resolution modes, including that of a PDA. If that's the case, then this device may take advantage of that functionality.
As for the apps, I think you have a good point. Existing apps may behave kind of funny on it. I'm curious if they'll have to wedge IE into the smaller form factor, of if they have some other trick up their sleeve.
"It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."
Since when do they need permission to use a parodized name? I thought that parody law not only allowed one to use a similar name ('Goldmember' is not THAT similar...), but also their original artwork could be closely mimicked.
Anybody remember reading about that guy who put up an 'aolsucks.com' site? AOL attempted to sue him because he used their artwork to parodize him. His lawyer said he was well within his rights because it was a pardoy/criticism of the company.
Question: Wouldn't the same logic be applied as it was for this guy, or is there a variable I'm not considering?
"Dear christ, why not just overcome your fear and deal with it?"
Fear? It's not fear I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the fact that I can't get away from what happened. Go turn on the news, check out the bs that's happening around the world. If I go to a movie, it's so I can ESCAPE the real world. If they start bringing in reminders of how different our world is today, then there's really little point to going to movies, isn't there.
"Besides, wouldn't it be nice to see a good guy kicking ass on a site where we royally fucked up? Think about it."
I wish I could see it that way, because I think you have a point. But it's not as easy as that. Maybe in a year or two, but today it's still distrubing. It's just too soon.
Maybe when CNN stops reporting about all the other terrorist bs going on around the world.
"On a side note, isn't that traditional defintion of a monopoly? "
It makes you wonder why there isn't more than one organization, doesn't it. I have no idea what's stopping somebody from saying "Well I'm going to sign on some artists and do a web play."
I hardly think that ruined the movie. I would suggest being more sensitive to those who lost loved ones than trying to keep a scene in that's stupid to begin wtih.
Never mind that only an idiotic pilot would fly through those two buildings.
"Force yourself to face your fears and GET OVER IT"
It's real easy to act like you have solutions for a problem you don't have to deal with.
... for reporting spam. I am NOT playing vigilante for copyrighted software. It is NOT that hard to find. And what would my reward be?
Screw that. But if I could press an F button to say 'this is spam' and have it reported, then in theory maybe somebody'll do something about it, and I'll have less shit in my inbox. That would be a rather satisfactory incentive for me to report stuff like this.
"These are the results of the capitalistic system
in the USA. Money talks. Corporations at their finest. In a few years you will have to pay money to take pictures of the statue of liberty. The
DMCA will only get stronger because it suits the corporations. Is that the best reason they could come up with to sui sony? What a fucked up country. America at its finest. Why do we forget the right of sony to shoot anything they want in their movie? They do have that right, yes? Oh well, not that i care anymore but it's just sad to see these kind of things happening.
Too bad really. "
I see those days happening, too. Fortuantely, though, people (individuals) are waking up to this fact and standing up against it. Look at what happened to the SSSCA, it was universally rejected. Despite all the money that was put into it, it still was universally rejected. We had our say and we won.
Eventually, the content industries will put out so much crap that people will look to independents to create new stories for them. It's already starting to happen. (Troops, anyone?)
That's why I find court cases like these funny. It's a lot of petty squabbling with millions of dollars at stake. At least it's not coming out of our pockets this tiem!
"First we have Rio De Jenero say that a Simpson's episode doesn't accurately portray the city..."
Rio sort of has a point. The part about the monkeys isn't as disturbing as the part where Homer was kidnapped and held for ransom just for being an american. In these days of keeping an eye open for terrorism, nobody wants to go anywhere where it is a possiblity that'll happen to them. Look at what happened to Pearl, for example.
Brazil's economy is really tough right now, and they're putting lots of money into getting tourists to visit. It doesn't help when an uber-popular TV show basically says that Brazil is no place to visit.
I don't fully agree with them on this topic, but I do sympathize. The Simpsons could have left them alone. I've been to Brazil, and I didn't find that episode all that amusing. Not because I was offended, but just because it was a dull episode. The Australia one, however, cracked me up.
Didn't a billboard get removed during NYE that got a few ppl hacked off?
I remember something along the lines of some news coverage was going on, and depending on which network you were wtaching, you saw a different billboard in the background.
Or was it during coverage of the election? Doh, sorry, I don't remember. I do remember, though, that the issue was heated up recently. This case could be on the tail of that.
"Anything packaged as "real" shouldn't be allowed to do this. "
Um, no. A movie needs all the artistic freedom it can get it's hands on. If they want to change the billboards, more power to them. I mean, how would you feel if this case was going on, but the billboard that was inserted in was a joke in the movie? How would you feel about it then?