To be fair, the film screws up so badly in all areas,
A major point -- because the whole fucking plot depends on it -- the aliens with their fleet of gigantic spaceships and thousands of fighters have to use a message bounced off one of our comsats to synchronise their attack. Thus giving Goldblum the clue to what, and when, they're up to. Apparently the aliens don't have eggtimers.
the popular opinion is that all ROMs are, by definition, illegal
"Popular opinion?" Maybe 1% of the population knows what a ROM is. The WSJ stated they were pirated, and thus illegal, as if it were a fact. Personally I agree with you; however it seems odd that the WSJ (a rather staid, very pro-business newspaper) was implicitly endorsing what it said was an illegal act.
Well, making comments like the above doesn't seem to get through to the editors. But we might make a small impact via the tag feature. Quite a lot of Roland's stories are already tagged "Piquepaille" &/or "Roland". I propose something a little more judgemental: "fuckroland". As I understand it, if enough people tag a story with a particular word it shows up on the home page.
I thought this is what most bloggers do: provide links, some copy-pastes.
So why bother with a blog that is just a rehash of an original article when you can link to the original article? Slashdot submitters and editors already supposedly make extracts and links.
Granted, those changes would probably be so you can use selective enforcement... doh.
Doh indeed. As it stands, copyright law does allow selective enforcement; unlike trademark law you're not obligated to defend your copyright. However, I imagine that while you could shut down anyone abusing your copyright, if you had been liberal in allowing abuse you might have a hard time collecting much compensation.
More like a monkey-trap: some food inside a hole in a tree trunk. The hole is just small enough for the monkey to slide its hand in, but if it grabs the food it can't pull its fist out. So you can escape if you give up what you were looking for.
Are we really, as a community, this simple-minded to be taken in by pyramid schemes like this?
It's not the "community" that selects the stories. It's the editorial staff. They don't care that Roland is a parasite. When they deign to notice comments like this on Roland's stories stuffed with his links to his own "blog", they tend to mod them to invisibility.
From TFA: "Emulators, which are widely available free online, allow any computer to run the programming of older consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System. Combined with a pirated online version of the game called a ROM, a normal PC can duplicate the Nintendo experience. Mr. Lastowka spent about six hours recreating the bottom of the 10th..."
And nothing but praise in TFA for his ingenuity. Fine, so why are other people being threatened with enormous fines for doing exactly the same thing? Interesting to see if there is any fallout from that detail.
When I try to RTFA, I get caught in an endless Flash loop that tells me, ironically, that I have free access to the entire site. "Skip intro" just reloads it.
'I want a computer factory that takes raw beach sand in one end and outputs fully assembled Macs from just that raw material.' What a crazy, wonderful idea.
Now we need a factory that takes old fully assembled Macs and produces raw beach sand.
I'd honestly rather see these computers given schools than destroyed.
Consider the nightmare of supporting a classroom of unique computers. Better to put up some ads and offer it cheap (if free, someone will just take it and try to sell it and probably end up throwing it away) and it'll probably end up with someoen who can use it. Schools would be better getting a bunch of Mac Minis.
So your dead mac is worth money. Pull the roms, send the rest back.
10 years ago that was true. Now it's cheaper to buy a used G3 or G4 Mac entire than screw around with clones or emulation (if any of these are still sold at all) of an obsolete OS.
S-video out for a TV interface. No need for a computer monitor.
That's IN ADDITION to normal VGA. I live in Hong Kong, you can get used 14 or 15" CRT monitors free, people are throwing them out all over to get LCD screens. You can buy them in a PC junk shop for US$3. Bigger monitors ar absurdly cheap too if you have the deskspace.
The full specs of the PC are here. The video specs:
ATI Radeon 7000-M
33MHz 32-bit PCI
Internalized with 16MB DDR RAM buffers
Support VGA port & S-Video output
It's really small; weighs 650g, half the Mac Mini.
the sci-fi "idiot plot," a plot which can only carry on forward motion if everyone involved is an idiot.
Hardly just sci-fi. Just about every big budget summer action movie falls into that category; and almost every horror/slasher movie. And lots of TV, eg 24, Alias, in which no one acts rationally, murder mysteries, like Monk with absurd coincidences and perfectly normal people who decide to commit elaborate "almost" perfect crime, for no good reason.
The dramas that seem both convincing and entertaining are so rare they're cherished, like NYPD Blue, The Sopranos.
Also regarding the prequel issue, lots of movies come about
world war II and are quite good despite people knowing
how world war II turned out they still seem to have good plots.
American war movies tend to make America the victor even if they weren't even in the battle (U-571) or lost (We Were Soldiers) and generally demonise the opponents (The Patriot amongst many). So watching an American war movie IS predictable, but not in the way you meant. But "good plots"....
I don't know how the graphical preview mode could be ported
Print to Postscript, display directly or as PDF. I use some older DOS DTP apps (running under Windows), mostly I work in their own interface, but instead of printing to the actual printer to check layout I do PDF proofs most of the time now; simple enough to automate this.
Yes, anyone technically savvy can probably crack this. However, the tons of people running pirated windows, that got installed by their friend, or son, or *gasp* local fly-by-night computer shop, will not be able to. Those are the people Microsoft is going after, the unwashed masses. The victims.
The "victims" won't have to crack it. The pirated version will come pre-cracked. And people are in most cases well aware that they're not buying a legit install, they're not "victims".
I have never heard of a success story where someone got infected, but micromanaging the firewall prevented the infection from creating havoc.
Not really "infections" or "havoc", but lots of software likes to phone home, and when the firewall alert comes up I generally block these. That protects my privacy at least. And if MS did make outward blocking default, this behaviour would be exposed and discouraged; companies would be asked to explain just what is is they're sending form your computer to theirs. Real black-hat stuff of course won't be stopped in either case; once it's in it can do anythng.
The monkeys and Shakespeare meme has an obscure history. This page tracks it back to statistical mechanics, ca. 1913.
[Babelfish translation]
Let us conceive that one drew up a million monkeys randomly to be struck the keys of a typewriter and that, under the monitoring of illiterate foremen, these monkeys typists work with heat ten hours per day with a million typewriters varied types. The illiterate foremen would gather the blackened sheets and would connect them in volumes. And at the end of one year, these volumes would be to contain the exact copy of the books of any nature and all languages preserved in the richest libraries of the world. Such is the probability so that it occurs during one very short moment, in a space of some extent, a notable variation of what statistical mechanics regards as the most probable phenomenon
Émile Borel, ``Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité,'' J. Phys. 5e série, vol. 3, 1913, pp.189-196.
It's interesting that the sense of the idea has been reversed: originally it was meant to show how staggeringly unlikely it was that an ordered situation would emerge by chance. Now it often is used to imply that if you throw enough monkeys/time/computing power at a problem that you can brute force it.
The analogy with drugs is flawed. With drugs, there is one product sold for ine use (healing sick people). With movies, there are several different products derived from the same "movie": cinema, pay TV, free TV, DVD at least. So DVD income does not have to cover the entire cost of production; in fact the cinema release generally does, or at least most of it (insert joke about Hollywood accountants).
I walked into an adult video store once, and most of the DVDs were priced at $60 and up.
The funny thing is that, in Hong Kong and China, the porn (often Japanese, but all kinds) is even cheaper than normal bootlegs, like 20 cents per disk. The theory being that even if it's legal, the porn producers aren't going to be able to take anyone to court, especially overseas. A lot of places that used to sell bootleg software now are wall-to-wall porn. Since the porn sellers can just copy from each other, the price quickly falls to just a little over the cost of a blank disk.
Slashdot Mirror
A major point -- because the whole fucking plot depends on it -- the aliens with their fleet of gigantic spaceships and thousands of fighters have to use a message bounced off one of our comsats to synchronise their attack. Thus giving Goldblum the clue to what, and when, they're up to. Apparently the aliens don't have eggtimers.
Wargames was made in 1984. Truetype was first used in 1991 in Mac OS 7.
How is using a proxy illegal?
"Popular opinion?" Maybe 1% of the population knows what a ROM is. The WSJ stated they were pirated, and thus illegal, as if it were a fact. Personally I agree with you; however it seems odd that the WSJ (a rather staid, very pro-business newspaper) was implicitly endorsing what it said was an illegal act.
Well, making comments like the above doesn't seem to get through to the editors. But we might make a small impact via the tag feature. Quite a lot of Roland's stories are already tagged "Piquepaille" &/or "Roland". I propose something a little more judgemental: "fuckroland". As I understand it, if enough people tag a story with a particular word it shows up on the home page.
So why bother with a blog that is just a rehash of an original article when you can link to the original article? Slashdot submitters and editors already supposedly make extracts and links.
Doh indeed. As it stands, copyright law does allow selective enforcement; unlike trademark law you're not obligated to defend your copyright. However, I imagine that while you could shut down anyone abusing your copyright, if you had been liberal in allowing abuse you might have a hard time collecting much compensation.
More like a monkey-trap: some food inside a hole in a tree trunk. The hole is just small enough for the monkey to slide its hand in, but if it grabs the food it can't pull its fist out. So you can escape if you give up what you were looking for.
It's not the "community" that selects the stories. It's the editorial staff. They don't care that Roland is a parasite. When they deign to notice comments like this on Roland's stories stuffed with his links to his own "blog", they tend to mod them to invisibility.
And nothing but praise in TFA for his ingenuity. Fine, so why are other people being threatened with enormous fines for doing exactly the same thing? Interesting to see if there is any fallout from that detail.
I went to the WSJ top page and searched for TFA, finally read it.
When I try to RTFA, I get caught in an endless Flash loop that tells me, ironically, that I have free access to the entire site. "Skip intro" just reloads it.
Roger Moore was born in 1927....
Now we need a factory that takes old fully assembled Macs and produces raw beach sand.
Consider the nightmare of supporting a classroom of unique computers. Better to put up some ads and offer it cheap (if free, someone will just take it and try to sell it and probably end up throwing it away) and it'll probably end up with someoen who can use it. Schools would be better getting a bunch of Mac Minis.
10 years ago that was true. Now it's cheaper to buy a used G3 or G4 Mac entire than screw around with clones or emulation (if any of these are still sold at all) of an obsolete OS.
That's IN ADDITION to normal VGA. I live in Hong Kong, you can get used 14 or 15" CRT monitors free, people are throwing them out all over to get LCD screens. You can buy them in a PC junk shop for US$3. Bigger monitors ar absurdly cheap too if you have the deskspace.
The full specs of the PC are here. The video specs:
ATI Radeon 7000-M
33MHz 32-bit PCI
Internalized with 16MB DDR RAM buffers
Support VGA port & S-Video output
It's really small; weighs 650g, half the Mac Mini.
Hardly just sci-fi. Just about every big budget summer action movie falls into that category; and almost every horror/slasher movie. And lots of TV, eg 24, Alias, in which no one acts rationally, murder mysteries, like Monk with absurd coincidences and perfectly normal people who decide to commit elaborate "almost" perfect crime, for no good reason.
The dramas that seem both convincing and entertaining are so rare they're cherished, like NYPD Blue, The Sopranos.
American war movies tend to make America the victor even if they weren't even in the battle (U-571) or lost (We Were Soldiers) and generally demonise the opponents (The Patriot amongst many). So watching an American war movie IS predictable, but not in the way you meant. But "good plots"....
Print to Postscript, display directly or as PDF. I use some older DOS DTP apps (running under Windows), mostly I work in their own interface, but instead of printing to the actual printer to check layout I do PDF proofs most of the time now; simple enough to automate this.
The "victims" won't have to crack it. The pirated version will come pre-cracked. And people are in most cases well aware that they're not buying a legit install, they're not "victims".
Not really "infections" or "havoc", but lots of software likes to phone home, and when the firewall alert comes up I generally block these. That protects my privacy at least. And if MS did make outward blocking default, this behaviour would be exposed and discouraged; companies would be asked to explain just what is is they're sending form your computer to theirs. Real black-hat stuff of course won't be stopped in either case; once it's in it can do anythng.
It's part of geek pop culture now; I noticed a reference in an episode of The Lone Gunmen a couple of years ago.
The analogy with drugs is flawed. With drugs, there is one product sold for ine use (healing sick people). With movies, there are several different products derived from the same "movie": cinema, pay TV, free TV, DVD at least. So DVD income does not have to cover the entire cost of production; in fact the cinema release generally does, or at least most of it (insert joke about Hollywood accountants).
The funny thing is that, in Hong Kong and China, the porn (often Japanese, but all kinds) is even cheaper than normal bootlegs, like 20 cents per disk. The theory being that even if it's legal, the porn producers aren't going to be able to take anyone to court, especially overseas. A lot of places that used to sell bootleg software now are wall-to-wall porn. Since the porn sellers can just copy from each other, the price quickly falls to just a little over the cost of a blank disk.