In a nutshell I argue current interpretation and enforcement of copyright has to be reexamined in the context of the intent of copyright (which is a GRANT to the originator by power of law for benefit of the greater society, not an inherent right to be exploited to the detriment of greater society.)
Depending on the size of your high school, the probability of spending an overwhelming time with the same bunch of kids for the whole day is pretty low, unless you're at the bottom or at the top of the rung (ie, remedial math, or AP calc.) [or unless you participate in some extra-curricular/sports/music activity where you all spend a lot of time together.]
At my HS, we had 3,000 students. Assuming an even distribution (a bad assumption given that some students will drop out or transfer to a private school as they advance) that's 750 students per grade. Assuming 30 students per class, you have a 4 percent chance of having the same classmate for another class (with modifiers such as the type of class - if you're taking one AP class, it's much more likely you'll share the same classmates in another AP class.) With 6 periods, that's 1 in 4 chance you'll run into given classmate outside of extra-curricular activities, lunch, or morning break.
At the opposite extreme, I recall one HS out in the High Desert where the graduating Senior class was 3. I hope they all got along, 'cause I would have gotten sick of the same 2 faces after 4 years...
I have no problems with them teaching the SAT, as long as students are required to take it and pass it (pass being being at least say a 1000 combined math/verbal) before graduating Junior High. That's right - not the PSAT, but the SAT. Seriously, there's no math or english on the SAT that any student shouldn't be able to handle and get a decent score on PRIOR to entering High School. There's no trig, no logarithms, the calculator-enabled math is a fucking joke (in my day there WERE NO CALCULATORS ALLOWED.) If you can read an intelligently discuss a book, the english/vocab part should be doable as well.
That we can't even get HS seniors, with the benefit of a supposed 12 years of education to score decently on the SAT is merely a symptom of how bad the problem is. Seriously, why are we wasting money with remedial education for adults when we should have spent that money when they were still minors?
Someone please explain to me, after spending one year on learning algebra, they switch to geometry and let you forget everything you learned, after which, they put you into a year of algebra, where you spend half the year re-learning all the algebra you forgot in the year previous?
Seriously, is there a conspiracy to keep students stupid, or do they just not get it?
I'd advocate spending Pre-algebra and the first part of algebra the first year of junior high, and follow through in eighth grade with algebra/algebra2/trig and a good dose of AP Chemistry. Ninth grade, you get trig/pre-calc with AP Physics. Tenth grade, you get AP Bio with statistics. Eleventh grade, you do 2 sememsters of college calculus (AP calc is weak, for get it). Twelfth grade, you take shitloads of standardized tests, and optional linear algebra with multivariable calculus.
Or you could do basic math and continuously flunk, and have to pass remedial math as a senior in order to graduate...
Don't think I'm neglecting history or english either - the AP Language and AP Literature tests are so similar that you might as well do both and get the extra credits. AP US History, US and comparative government, AP Music Theory, etc. My philosophy is you should be prepared for grad school when you do your undergrad, assuming you've got sufficient maturity to do so. No point spending 4 years of your life taking shit courses (most of them weeders) you should have gotten out of the way when you had the chance as a High School student.
Seriously, how can you explore different career choices if they have you doing the same remedial crap everyone else is taking?
Not into higher math eh? Just wait until you have to design and implement more effcient algorithms. Having only a passable calculus background (which I had since forgotten), I had to resort to brute-forcing all of my solutions when I was taking programming in school. For example, instead of notating in polar coordinates, I coded in degrees and converted into X/Y coordinates (this was for a X-windows clock written in LISP.) It worked (ie, it got me the grade), but it was ugly, and ate up a lot of processor cycles. At least take some classes on graphing and number theory. Linear algebra too...
Perhaps she needs a bluetooth earpiece to receive pages/calls without bothering other people? Somebody, hurry up and put this sucker into production so we needn't worry about accidentally beating the crap out some poor schlob who forgot to turn his/her cellphone/pager off during a movie.
In high school, when I worked in a movie theatre, the ushers were there to let people in, and to clean up afterwards. Unless someone complains, there usually won't be anyone from the theatre staff in there to notice, especially in a multiplex, where they have 5 people trying to manage 10 different crowds coming in and out.
The idea of of the law, I think, is to put limits on the usage of cellphones, especially for the clueless who assume that if there isn't a law against it, they can do whatever they wan't. Well, thanks to them, there's now a law...
I'd leave the show and demand my money back. I'm paying for an enjoyable movie experience, and if the theatre can't deliver, they should reap the consequences.
Talking during the movies - they should issue cluesticks specifically for beating the crap out of these kinds of people...
There's probably lots of stuff out there that is now public domain. The problem is, how much of that is accessible? Promoting creation of material, and making it accessible by the public are two entirely different problems.
Think about that the next time your local library throws out part of its collection because it's running out of room to store those items, or because funds are not available to preserve them.
Supposedly, the Library of Congress is supposed to have a copy of everything that is copyrighted. This is no longer true these days, because of space issues - they'll let you turn in a "representative sample" of your work, ie a set of photos for a film. Keep in mind though, that there's plenty of stuff that's never explicitly registered, and barring some collector preserving a copy of the item, these items will not survive for future generations to enjoy, as the copyright laws originally alloed.
I would suggest an amendment to copyright law: set the upper bounds for ownership of a copyright by a corporation to 25 years, with PAID extensions in 25 year intervals until 100 years. The paid extensions would go toward restoring and preserving material in the Library of Congress collection. Essentially, you're licensing the right to continue charging for the work in exchange for supporting the preservation of the work for future access.
Again, to re-iterate, access is just as important as copyright when material passes into the public domain. If I was evil I could try and recall and destroy every copy of my work before my rights expired. When the rights did pass into the public domain, they would be useless because there wouldn't be a copy of the work left.
This isn't an academic issue - consider films like Gone With the Wind, where portions of the original technicolor negative were severly damaged, because the studio neglected the film for so long. Who's to say the assets of MGM will not fall on hard times AGAIN, and be allowed to rot further? Or, the original Star Wars, which now exists in the "revised" Lucas form. I don't have to be explicitly evil to deny my work to future generations, I could just be incredibly neglectful (not hard to do if you're a corporation.)
Ironically it may the pirates who preserve work for future generations. Already some film restorations have been made possible only because someone found some footage, some from academic repositories, and some from "private" collections. Who's to say that digital works (arcade roms, early amiga/apple II/commodore games, etc.) will not go the same way...
However, the main thing is if you allow value to be preserved indefinitely (100+ years is pretty indefinite), there will be no incentive for the copyright owner to allow copying, so long as they can milk the item for as much money as they can. Setting an upper bound (75 years) and forcing them to maintain the copyright by filing extensions and paying maintenance fees (as they have to do with patents) would help balance things. Either that, or they have to ensure that the copy at the LOC is kept in pristine condition for the duration of their copyright.
Heh, sorry for the misleading subject. Actually, in the US you can CAN own a font, you just can't own a typeface. A font is a computer program, and as such, is protectable under copyright law. The name of a font or typeface (like Helvetica) is a trademark, and as such is protectable under trademark law. However, the design for the typeface itself, although protectable in many parts of the world (Europe, Australia), is NOT protectable in the United States.
This pisses off font designers in the US. Ironically, the preceedent for this dates back to the 18th century, when US font manufacturers (who made their fonts by pouring lead into moulds), wanted free license to rip off their counterparts in the Old-world. They got fonts declared non-protectable, much to their chagrin several centuries later...
Back in modern times (about 10 years ago), this loophole was exploited by fly-by-night punks (precursors to spammers) who created "shovel-ware" CDS, packed with fonts created by scanning in the output of established fonts. The lazier ones omitted the step of printing out and rescanning typefaces, and instead resorted to "jiggling" the coordinates in an existing font and selling the output as their own, or by ripping off commercial/shareware/freeware authors by taking just the font and renaming it. These guys (the ones who skipped the scanning step) got slapped with a lawsuit by Adobe and a bunch of other font producers, and have since disappeared.
The point? You can own a font, you can own the name of a typeface, but you can't own the design for a typeface in the US (with one exception - if you can get the US Patent office to grant you a design patent, you can own the design.)
And, creating typefaces (and going one step further, turning them into fonts) is a difficult and underappreciated occupation in the US, so don't be surprised if few people (if anyone) rise to the challenge of creating one for free.
OpenType is the bastard child of the fight between Microsoft/Apple and Adobe (yes, TrueType was spawned by Microsoft and Apple when Adobe was being stubborn about Type 1 licensing fees.) In the end, they all made up and created OpenType, which despite the name, has nothing to do with Open Source. It's a superset of instructions for fonts which can encapusulate an existing Type 1 or TrueType font in an OpenType wrapper.
It may be a better font format, but it doesn't solve any problems with regards to IP ownership.
Quite true. TrueType is incredibly difficult to tame - I would rather just design the bitmaps myself and have them subbed in at the right sizes, than to have the TrueType engine try and make sense of the glyph hints that are generated by commercially available editing programs.
What most people have to understand is that desiging a TrueType font is a 2 step process:
designing the character set, which is a whole discipline unto itself, concerning matters such as proportion, balance, readability, and style. Most designers can do this.
and:
drawing the curves and programming the hints for a TrueType program that can represent the original design as faithfully and as legibly as possible under as many conditions (screen and printed) as possible.
This is not easy. It is VERY hard. Whole staffs (with hardcore programmers) are dedicated to this. It is easier to deal with Type 1 implementations because the hinting there is much simpler, and primarily designed for printing only (back when printers were 300dpi). With Type 1, you deal with small print screen sizes with bitmap substitutions, which in my mind makes a lot more sense than programming a general outline with all the different possible glyph hints at every possible resolution!
Regarding substituting fonts, the most important thing to duplicate are the character spacings and general proportions. This is so you dont fsck up someone's document layout with different character spacings.
This was 40 minutes cut from the inital rough cut. There are probably hours, if not days of footage that were actually shot. Only the best of the day's shoots are actually sent to the editor, and of those only a portion make it to the final cut. Actors don't nail scenes on the first try, stuff gets rewritten, buildings get blown up (ie, WTC) so they have to cut scenes with them as not to offend people, executives/audiences don't like the first cut, stuff has to get trimmed to fit music, etc.
Now with this said, some directors are tighter than others - Spielberg storyboards his films, essentially editing before he shoots. Other directors go out into the field and don't even have shot lists, and end up just chewing through raw stock trying to make the film up as they go along.
Would it be cheaper to do it Spielberg's way? Hell yes! Every minute while the crew is standing around waiting for the director to make up his mind about what to shoot and how to shoot it is expensive time. Every can of film represents an investment in time to set up a shot, load and unload the camera, break down and set up, lighting, and prop rentals. Loading and unloading alone can take up to 20 minutes, and even if you're shooting 1000' of film, that's only about 11 minutes of footage that's going to get spent on retakes.
Lucas saved a shitload of time using tape on EP2, though he probably should have spent that extra time rewriting his script and rehearsing his actors. Better technology doesn't necessarily make for better films.
Doh! UScentric reporting led me to believe that the President of India was THE big cheese over there. Didn't realize that they had a parlimentary form of government. My bad...
Ahhh, it's not the money you spend, it's the idea of getting something that would otherwise be ultra-expensive or impossible to get, for the cost of a lot of time and energy. Kind of like a unix-like operating system on top of 6 year old office equipment that's been thrown away by the local university.
I haven't seen the chair (it's been slashdotted), but I'm assuming you wouldn't be able to drop by OfficeDepot and pick one up, hence the geek factor in modding one up for yourself.
Diamond rings, balloon trips - they're for the masses. Now, if you were to forge your own ring out of titanium and gold, in your microwave, with a diamond bought wholesale off of ebay which you etched using a electron-beam-tomograph, proclaiming your love, which you then used an AI-controlled balloon running linux to drop off to your SO, then you would be the envy of geeks everywhere!
Not for forging the ring or coding the balloon-control AI, but for having a SO...
No. What's wrong are the legions of newly minted "web designers" putting their sites together using fancy GUI page editors, which pack their page code with extra nubs here and there which just bloat the code and provide minimal real functionality. Even worse, it becomes so easy to integrate stuff like flash, that flash becomes the default, even for PAGES THAT DON'T NEED IT! Ever run into a site that runs fine without Javascript, but won't let you in if you turn it off?
Oh, and I blame Macromedia, not Flash, for encouraging this trend - they'd like nothing better than for every platform to have Flash enabled by default, and to sell more Flash tools. Ditto for the 3D guys - they want to sell hardware, remember that!
In the meantime, I code my stuff by hand on my 7 year old computer, running a 6 year old operating system (Mac OS 7.6.1). Don't forget, you want to design for a wide audience, you have to include the disabled, some of whom are blind (some just color-blind). The option to override page defaults exists for a reason - if you have vision problems and need to use a high-contrast body text/background combo, you should be able to do it. Ditto if you need to use a text reader to navigate.
I dunno, the current administration of India seems to be headed by quite an ambitious guy (AKA Missile-man). I wouldn't put it past him or the rest of the x-billion Indians to do the things that the rest of the world has only been discussing in planning meetings, namely:
1. Reestablish a manned presence on the moon (yeah, this is an unmanned shot, but where will it lead?)
2. Get regular launches past LEO
3. Spur some real competition in the space game
4. Get more metal/air into space where we can use it
Let's just hope any fissionable materials that they send into space are fashioned as reactors, rather than warheads.
I agree. I originally cut my projects together with Premiere (this was 6 years ago, the only other option at the time was avid), and unfortunately, put a lot of work into my scratch tracks using Premiere's tools.
Premiere sucks. It's lousy for editing video, and the audio controls are almost non-existent.
Once I learned ProTools, it was like discovering natural light after living life in a cave lit by candlelight. Big difference. I only wish ProTools ran on OS X - that'd be reason enough for me to get an OS X machine...
Of course, now that I'm mixing a clean track, I need to re-record sound effects, so now I gotta learn about mics, and the whole nine yards. Oh well.
The question is, who would make a good target? Senators are more expensive to defeat, but whoever you get in will last 6 years, and you'll make a big impression to boot, especially if you knock out someone with senority - that removes them from the committees that they chair (ie intelligence, intellectual property, etc.), and weakens their party's control over major legislative decisions.
On the other hand, we could spend that money on a handful of Representatives who could draft legislation favorable to our cause, and send a message that people on the take from the corporations better get lost.
The most important this is to spend money where it counts - trying to unseat Diane Feinstein (no matter how much I would love that) would probably not be a good use of money. I don't know Holling's situation, but if it takes less than 3.6 mil to get him reelected, and he's got a good challenger in the next election, then maybe.
Don't forget, state representatives/senators, state attorney generals, and state governors can be powerful allies as well, the DOJ has given up on Microsoft - it's the state attorney generals who are keeping the fight alive. Besides, local contests are cheaper to influence.
I look forward to the day when we can direct-dial via point-to-point links through user-owned wireless, bypassing the monopolies. Bloodsuckers will get what's coming to them...
Slashdot Mirror
regarding public domain material and accessibility.
5 027
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=38224&cid=409
In a nutshell I argue current interpretation and enforcement of copyright has to be reexamined in the context of the intent of copyright (which is a GRANT to the originator by power of law for benefit of the greater society, not an inherent right to be exploited to the detriment of greater society.)
Yes, I'm karma whoring, damnit!
Depending on the size of your high school, the probability of spending an overwhelming time with the same bunch of kids for the whole day is pretty low, unless you're at the bottom or at the top of the rung (ie, remedial math, or AP calc.) [or unless you participate in some extra-curricular/sports/music activity where you all spend a lot of time together.]
At my HS, we had 3,000 students. Assuming an even distribution (a bad assumption given that some students will drop out or transfer to a private school as they advance) that's 750 students per grade. Assuming 30 students per class, you have a 4 percent chance of having the same classmate for another class (with modifiers such as the type of class - if you're taking one AP class, it's much more likely you'll share the same classmates in another AP class.) With 6 periods, that's 1 in 4 chance you'll run into given classmate outside of extra-curricular activities, lunch, or morning break.
At the opposite extreme, I recall one HS out in the High Desert where the graduating Senior class was 3. I hope they all got along, 'cause I would have gotten sick of the same 2 faces after 4 years...
I have no problems with them teaching the SAT, as long as students are required to take it and pass it (pass being being at least say a 1000 combined math/verbal) before graduating Junior High. That's right - not the PSAT, but the SAT. Seriously, there's no math or english on the SAT that any student shouldn't be able to handle and get a decent score on PRIOR to entering High School. There's no trig, no logarithms, the calculator-enabled math is a fucking joke (in my day there WERE NO CALCULATORS ALLOWED.) If you can read an intelligently discuss a book, the english/vocab part should be doable as well.
That we can't even get HS seniors, with the benefit of a supposed 12 years of education to score decently on the SAT is merely a symptom of how bad the problem is. Seriously, why are we wasting money with remedial education for adults when we should have spent that money when they were still minors?
Someone please explain to me, after spending one year on learning algebra, they switch to geometry and let you forget everything you learned, after which, they put you into a year of algebra, where you spend half the year re-learning all the algebra you forgot in the year previous?
Seriously, is there a conspiracy to keep students stupid, or do they just not get it?
I'd advocate spending Pre-algebra and the first part of algebra the first year of junior high, and follow through in eighth grade with algebra/algebra2/trig and a good dose of AP Chemistry. Ninth grade, you get trig/pre-calc with AP Physics. Tenth grade, you get AP Bio with statistics. Eleventh grade, you do 2 sememsters of college calculus (AP calc is weak, for get it). Twelfth grade, you take shitloads of standardized tests, and optional linear algebra with multivariable calculus.
Or you could do basic math and continuously flunk, and have to pass remedial math as a senior in order to graduate...
Don't think I'm neglecting history or english either - the AP Language and AP Literature tests are so similar that you might as well do both and get the extra credits. AP US History, US and comparative government, AP Music Theory, etc. My philosophy is you should be prepared for grad school when you do your undergrad, assuming you've got sufficient maturity to do so. No point spending 4 years of your life taking shit courses (most of them weeders) you should have gotten out of the way when you had the chance as a High School student.
Seriously, how can you explore different career choices if they have you doing the same remedial crap everyone else is taking?
Not into higher math eh? Just wait until you have to design and implement more effcient algorithms. Having only a passable calculus background (which I had since forgotten), I had to resort to brute-forcing all of my solutions when I was taking programming in school. For example, instead of notating in polar coordinates, I coded in degrees and converted into X/Y coordinates (this was for a X-windows clock written in LISP.) It worked (ie, it got me the grade), but it was ugly, and ate up a lot of processor cycles. At least take some classes on graphing and number theory. Linear algebra too...
Perhaps she needs a bluetooth earpiece to receive pages/calls without bothering other people? Somebody, hurry up and put this sucker into production so we needn't worry about accidentally beating the crap out some poor schlob who forgot to turn his/her cellphone/pager off during a movie.
In high school, when I worked in a movie theatre, the ushers were there to let people in, and to clean up afterwards. Unless someone complains, there usually won't be anyone from the theatre staff in there to notice, especially in a multiplex, where they have 5 people trying to manage 10 different crowds coming in and out.
The idea of of the law, I think, is to put limits on the usage of cellphones, especially for the clueless who assume that if there isn't a law against it, they can do whatever they wan't. Well, thanks to them, there's now a law...
I'd leave the show and demand my money back. I'm paying for an enjoyable movie experience, and if the theatre can't deliver, they should reap the consequences.
Talking during the movies - they should issue cluesticks specifically for beating the crap out of these kinds of people...
I'm surprised that somebody didn't just go up to the guy and beat the shit out of him.
There's probably lots of stuff out there that is now public domain. The problem is, how much of that is accessible? Promoting creation of material, and making it accessible by the public are two entirely different problems.
Think about that the next time your local library throws out part of its collection because it's running out of room to store those items, or because funds are not available to preserve them.
Supposedly, the Library of Congress is supposed to have a copy of everything that is copyrighted. This is no longer true these days, because of space issues - they'll let you turn in a "representative sample" of your work, ie a set of photos for a film. Keep in mind though, that there's plenty of stuff that's never explicitly registered, and barring some collector preserving a copy of the item, these items will not survive for future generations to enjoy, as the copyright laws originally alloed.
I would suggest an amendment to copyright law: set the upper bounds for ownership of a copyright by a corporation to 25 years, with PAID extensions in 25 year intervals until 100 years. The paid extensions would go toward restoring and preserving material in the Library of Congress collection. Essentially, you're licensing the right to continue charging for the work in exchange for supporting the preservation of the work for future access.
Again, to re-iterate, access is just as important as copyright when material passes into the public domain. If I was evil I could try and recall and destroy every copy of my work before my rights expired. When the rights did pass into the public domain, they would be useless because there wouldn't be a copy of the work left.
This isn't an academic issue - consider films like Gone With the Wind, where portions of the original technicolor negative were severly damaged, because the studio neglected the film for so long. Who's to say the assets of MGM will not fall on hard times AGAIN, and be allowed to rot further? Or, the original Star Wars, which now exists in the "revised" Lucas form. I don't have to be explicitly evil to deny my work to future generations, I could just be incredibly neglectful (not hard to do if you're a corporation.)
Ironically it may the pirates who preserve work for future generations. Already some film restorations have been made possible only because someone found some footage, some from academic repositories, and some from "private" collections. Who's to say that digital works (arcade roms, early amiga/apple II/commodore games, etc.) will not go the same way...
However, the main thing is if you allow value to be preserved indefinitely (100+ years is pretty indefinite), there will be no incentive for the copyright owner to allow copying, so long as they can milk the item for as much money as they can. Setting an upper bound (75 years) and forcing them to maintain the copyright by filing extensions and paying maintenance fees (as they have to do with patents) would help balance things. Either that, or they have to ensure that the copy at the LOC is kept in pristine condition for the duration of their copyright.
Heh, sorry for the misleading subject. Actually, in the US you can CAN own a font, you just can't own a typeface. A font is a computer program, and as such, is protectable under copyright law. The name of a font or typeface (like Helvetica) is a trademark, and as such is protectable under trademark law. However, the design for the typeface itself, although protectable in many parts of the world (Europe, Australia), is NOT protectable in the United States.
This pisses off font designers in the US. Ironically, the preceedent for this dates back to the 18th century, when US font manufacturers (who made their fonts by pouring lead into moulds), wanted free license to rip off their counterparts in the Old-world. They got fonts declared non-protectable, much to their chagrin several centuries later...
Back in modern times (about 10 years ago), this loophole was exploited by fly-by-night punks (precursors to spammers) who created "shovel-ware" CDS, packed with fonts created by scanning in the output of established fonts. The lazier ones omitted the step of printing out and rescanning typefaces, and instead resorted to "jiggling" the coordinates in an existing font and selling the output as their own, or by ripping off commercial/shareware/freeware authors by taking just the font and renaming it. These guys (the ones who skipped the scanning step) got slapped with a lawsuit by Adobe and a bunch of other font producers, and have since disappeared.
The point? You can own a font, you can own the name of a typeface, but you can't own the design for a typeface in the US (with one exception - if you can get the US Patent office to grant you a design patent, you can own the design.)
And, creating typefaces (and going one step further, turning them into fonts) is a difficult and underappreciated occupation in the US, so don't be surprised if few people (if anyone) rise to the challenge of creating one for free.
OpenType is the bastard child of the fight between Microsoft/Apple and Adobe (yes, TrueType was spawned by Microsoft and Apple when Adobe was being stubborn about Type 1 licensing fees.) In the end, they all made up and created OpenType, which despite the name, has nothing to do with Open Source. It's a superset of instructions for fonts which can encapusulate an existing Type 1 or TrueType font in an OpenType wrapper.
It may be a better font format, but it doesn't solve any problems with regards to IP ownership.
Quite true. TrueType is incredibly difficult to tame - I would rather just design the bitmaps myself and have them subbed in at the right sizes, than to have the TrueType engine try and make sense of the glyph hints that are generated by commercially available editing programs.
What most people have to understand is that desiging a TrueType font is a 2 step process:
designing the character set, which is a whole discipline unto itself, concerning matters such as proportion, balance, readability, and style. Most designers can do this.
and:
drawing the curves and programming the hints for a TrueType program that can represent the original design as faithfully and as legibly as possible under as many conditions (screen and printed) as possible.
This is not easy. It is VERY hard. Whole staffs (with hardcore programmers) are dedicated to this. It is easier to deal with Type 1 implementations because the hinting there is much simpler, and primarily designed for printing only (back when printers were 300dpi). With Type 1, you deal with small print screen sizes with bitmap substitutions, which in my mind makes a lot more sense than programming a general outline with all the different possible glyph hints at every possible resolution!
Regarding substituting fonts, the most important thing to duplicate are the character spacings and general proportions. This is so you dont fsck up someone's document layout with different character spacings.
This was 40 minutes cut from the inital rough cut. There are probably hours, if not days of footage that were actually shot. Only the best of the day's shoots are actually sent to the editor, and of those only a portion make it to the final cut. Actors don't nail scenes on the first try, stuff gets rewritten, buildings get blown up (ie, WTC) so they have to cut scenes with them as not to offend people, executives/audiences don't like the first cut, stuff has to get trimmed to fit music, etc.
Now with this said, some directors are tighter than others - Spielberg storyboards his films, essentially editing before he shoots. Other directors go out into the field and don't even have shot lists, and end up just chewing through raw stock trying to make the film up as they go along.
Would it be cheaper to do it Spielberg's way? Hell yes! Every minute while the crew is standing around waiting for the director to make up his mind about what to shoot and how to shoot it is expensive time. Every can of film represents an investment in time to set up a shot, load and unload the camera, break down and set up, lighting, and prop rentals. Loading and unloading alone can take up to 20 minutes, and even if you're shooting 1000' of film, that's only about 11 minutes of footage that's going to get spent on retakes.
Lucas saved a shitload of time using tape on EP2, though he probably should have spent that extra time rewriting his script and rehearsing his actors. Better technology doesn't necessarily make for better films.
Robominer... the name and the setup looks awfully like Descent. Any rogue bots crawling around the mines yet?
Doh! UScentric reporting led me to believe that the President of India was THE big cheese over there. Didn't realize that they had a parlimentary form of government. My bad...
Ahhh, it's not the money you spend, it's the idea of getting something that would otherwise be ultra-expensive or impossible to get, for the cost of a lot of time and energy. Kind of like a unix-like operating system on top of 6 year old office equipment that's been thrown away by the local university.
I haven't seen the chair (it's been slashdotted), but I'm assuming you wouldn't be able to drop by OfficeDepot and pick one up, hence the geek factor in modding one up for yourself.
Diamond rings, balloon trips - they're for the masses. Now, if you were to forge your own ring out of titanium and gold, in your microwave, with a diamond bought wholesale off of ebay which you etched using a electron-beam-tomograph, proclaiming your love, which you then used an AI-controlled balloon running linux to drop off to your SO, then you would be the envy of geeks everywhere!
Not for forging the ring or coding the balloon-control AI, but for having a SO...
No. What's wrong are the legions of newly minted "web designers" putting their sites together using fancy GUI page editors, which pack their page code with extra nubs here and there which just bloat the code and provide minimal real functionality. Even worse, it becomes so easy to integrate stuff like flash, that flash becomes the default, even for PAGES THAT DON'T NEED IT! Ever run into a site that runs fine without Javascript, but won't let you in if you turn it off?
:P
Oh, and I blame Macromedia, not Flash, for encouraging this trend - they'd like nothing better than for every platform to have Flash enabled by default, and to sell more Flash tools. Ditto for the 3D guys - they want to sell hardware, remember that!
In the meantime, I code my stuff by hand on my 7 year old computer, running a 6 year old operating system (Mac OS 7.6.1). Don't forget, you want to design for a wide audience, you have to include the disabled, some of whom are blind (some just color-blind). The option to override page defaults exists for a reason - if you have vision problems and need to use a high-contrast body text/background combo, you should be able to do it. Ditto if you need to use a text reader to navigate.
Arrgh, mod me down, I'm done ranting.
I dunno, the current administration of India seems to be headed by quite an ambitious guy (AKA Missile-man). I wouldn't put it past him or the rest of the x-billion Indians to do the things that the rest of the world has only been discussing in planning meetings, namely:
1. Reestablish a manned presence on the moon (yeah, this is an unmanned shot, but where will it lead?)
2. Get regular launches past LEO
3. Spur some real competition in the space game
4. Get more metal/air into space where we can use it
Let's just hope any fissionable materials that they send into space are fashioned as reactors, rather than warheads.
I agree. I originally cut my projects together with Premiere (this was 6 years ago, the only other option at the time was avid), and unfortunately, put a lot of work into my scratch tracks using Premiere's tools.
Premiere sucks. It's lousy for editing video, and the audio controls are almost non-existent.
Once I learned ProTools, it was like discovering natural light after living life in a cave lit by candlelight. Big difference. I only wish ProTools ran on OS X - that'd be reason enough for me to get an OS X machine...
Of course, now that I'm mixing a clean track, I need to re-record sound effects, so now I gotta learn about mics, and the whole nine yards. Oh well.
Anyone get this running under a PPC linux (or even OS X)? Just curious...
The question is, who would make a good target? Senators are more expensive to defeat, but whoever you get in will last 6 years, and you'll make a big impression to boot, especially if you knock out someone with senority - that removes them from the committees that they chair (ie intelligence, intellectual property, etc.), and weakens their party's control over major legislative decisions.
On the other hand, we could spend that money on a handful of Representatives who could draft legislation favorable to our cause, and send a message that people on the take from the corporations better get lost.
The most important this is to spend money where it counts - trying to unseat Diane Feinstein (no matter how much I would love that) would probably not be a good use of money. I don't know Holling's situation, but if it takes less than 3.6 mil to get him reelected, and he's got a good challenger in the next election, then maybe.
Don't forget, state representatives/senators, state attorney generals, and state governors can be powerful allies as well, the DOJ has given up on Microsoft - it's the state attorney generals who are keeping the fight alive. Besides, local contests are cheaper to influence.
That's right, we should release them all back into the wild, where they can run free and live long happy lives...
What? The exterminator's number? Oh here. Yeah, rat infestations can be nasty, watch out for those mites...
Back to the lab rats, where was I?
I look forward to the day when we can direct-dial via point-to-point links through user-owned wireless, bypassing the monopolies. Bloodsuckers will get what's coming to them...
Hemos posted the same story back in May: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/0 5/0043203&mode=thread&tid=134