At the globe and mail : http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20 030904.ucd0904/BNStory/Front/
they have the Canadian angle on the story, but:
Cassettes are going to be priced at about $9US, compared to $13US for a CD, yet tapes cost a lot more to manufacture;
In Canada, there is the infamous CD copyright levy which allows all Canadians to copy CDs for their own use without breaking the law. Because we pay the levy wether, like myself, you backup the software and programs I write for a living, or copy your friends' CDs, it would make it your duty as a Canadian to copy CDs because you're paying for that right. Contrast this with the quote that:
"Mr. Lennox said that all of his company's CDs featuring Canadian artists will soon have copy-protection technology built in."
On one hand, it's perfectly legal to copy a CD for our own use, wether it be our own, or a friends, and in return the music industry collects a copyright levy, and on the other, they're still charging us the levy, but stopping us copying a CD by technological measures. This is obviously wrong. Due to the CD levy, it's also a very grey area as to wether file sharing is also illegal in Canada, especially if you burn your downloads onto CD!
Still over $12US - that's still gouging! And why the heck is a tape (which costs more to produce) costing less. When you're buying music, you're not paying for the product - you're paying for some crappy singer's IP that they sold to a record company for a dime.
Musicians have got it rich - they do a little work and make a record, but expect to be able to get money every time someone else sells it for them. Real people get payed a wage for the hours that they work. Real people don't get royalties. Workers at Ford don't get payed extra every time one of their cars gets sold.
It's rich to hear musicians complaining of people copying their music. If they didn't wan't it copied, why did they compose / sing / record it in the first place. They're doing a "luxury" artists job and they expect to be given a life of luxury because they can "sing". They should get some perspective on things. What they do is not important. They're just musicians.
Surely it would be better to set up Snapster to raise enough money to mount a hostile takeover of the RIAA (and record companies) one at a time, shutting each down and donating all their copyrights to the public domain. Buy them one at a time so you never become a monopoly.
if the test has a false positive rate of 1 in a Million, then, depending on the size of your country, there could be between 30 - 250 ish people who would test false positive.
Let's assume you're innocent.
Out of those, say, 30 people, another 28 are going to be innocent like yourself. Therefore the probability that you're innocent is 29/30 - a very high probablity. The probability that you're guilty is 1/30, very low.
So for innocent people, the 1 in a million false positive DNA match leads to a very high statistical probability that's you're innocent, yet most people think that the 1 in a million false positive rate means that if you test positive you're almost certainly guilty.
That's why DNA evidence should never be used to convict, only to acquit.
Even if there was just one other person in your geographical area that matched the DNA profile (the real criminal), if they pick you up, it's a 50% chance they're wrong to accuse you!!
That's why DNA tests should never be performed on whole populations to "trawl" for the criminal - they'll just stop at the first person that they find matches...
DNA testing is not infallible. If you think it is, you're living in clooud cuckoo land...
DNA testing doesn't actually test wether your DNA is the same as the sample. What is tests is that when you remove one of the 4 chemicals in the DNA, the relative masses of the strands that are left are very similar. To do a proper DNA test, you've have to fully sequence both specimins, which is NOT what they're doing.
Statistically, this means that there's a large chance that they'll get the wrong person using DNA testing alone.
DNA is pretty good for proving you're innocent, buut lousy at proving you're guilty.
Are you denying that the picture quality was terrible? It is a fact that the picture quality is not up to usual cinema standards. What's not factual about that?
You can't see the picture quality on a movie until you've payed your cash and sat down in the cinema chair. No review I've read mentions that the picture quality is dreadful, so I'm doing a public service announcement to warn you.
Schindler's List was high quality, beautiful black and white, not washed out VHS from the rental store black and white. There's a difference.
Go on - tell me how excellent the picture quality is, and tell me how superb the movie is and I'll tell you you're not qualified the criticise the movie because you're Steven Spieldberg.
The fact is that the picture qualit on the movie is unwatchable and looks like VHS. This isn't a "subjective" bit of filn criticism, but a quite objective fact. I've watched enough TV and movies to know bad picture quality when I see it.
I actaully saw the movie on a free preview, and was shocked at how utterly bad it was, and because no review I've read of it tells the truth about the awful picture, I'm telling slashdotters so that they can save their hard earned cash. I'd recommend that if you do wish to see the movie, you buy a DVD, because that's what you're watching in the cinema, just scaled up many times.
Perhaps they should just do that for the next Star Wars movie, shoot it on miniDV, make a DVD from it and play that in the cinema from a cheepo video projector. It'll give you the feel that you're watching "interstellar news" or something.
Perhaps they should make all movies on VHS so that you can enjoy the same high quality picture at home as you do in the cinema, seeing exactly what the director intended.
"The picture quality is not bad, it's just different from what most movies choose" - wrong.
The picture quality is BAD - actually very bad. It's technically inept. It looks atrocious. To say that the picture quality gives you "a sense that you are watching some post-apocalpyse news item" is just rubbish. A good director can make you see grit and realism while presenting you with a perfect picture - a poor director will just show you a gritty picture. It's not clever to make a picture look deliberately bad - it's a slur on the audience who payed good money to see a movie that looks worse than many student movies I've seen.
What's worse is that directorially from a picture composition point of view and editing, the movie was very well done. If only they'd take care with the picture it would have been watchably tollerable, but it never would have excused the bad plot.
It's a movie of contrasts - it's not low budget, but has a zero budget look and feel, the picture quality is bad, but composition and editing are great, the plot is bad, but the acting good. Overall it's a movie that leaves you with a bad headache and a ripped off feeling in the wallet.
The picture quality on 28 days later is so bad it's unwatchable. It's not a low budget movie (15 million) but for "artistic" reasons they shot it on miniDV, and didn't take any care with the picture quality at all. PAL miniDV can look quite good in the cinema if you take care to enlarge it correctly with good interpolation, and shoot it carefully so you don't over expose, and especially turn down (or preferably off) the sharpness control on the camera.
The people who shot this movie did none of these - or should I say, the opposite of this. They turned the bad digital sharpness full up (which makes the picture look like bad VHS) and over-exposed. The film print was obviously made with no attempt to improve the picture in any way at all.
The end result is a movie that looks so bad on the big screen it's barely watchable - and they expect you to pay real money to see it. There's no excuse for this - it's a movie that doesn't treat the viewer with respect.
If you must see this movie, see the DVD, because that's the same picture you'll see in the cinema - just many times larger....
It's actually worse than that. Simple statistics tells us:
if the test has a false positive rate of 1 in a Million, then, depending on the size of your country, there could be between 30 - 250 ish people who would test false positive.
Let's assume you're innocent.
Out of those, say, 30 people, another 28 are going to be innocent like yourself. Therefore the probability that you're innocent is 29/30 - a very high probablity. The probability that you're guilty is 1/30, very low.
So for innocent people, the 1 in a million false positive DNA match leads to a very high statistical probability that's you're innocent, yet most people think that the 1 in a million false positive rate means that if you test positive you're almost certainly guilty.
That's why DNA evidence should never be used to convict, only to acquit.
Even if there was just one other person in your geographical area that matched the DNA profile (the real criminal), if they pick you up, it's a 50% chance they're wrong to accuse you!!
That's why DNA tests should never be performed on whole populations to "trawl" for the criminal.
DNA testing doesn't do a "bit for bit" comparison between the two DNA samples - it uses a couple of techniques to simplify that matter.
Even if the "false positive" rate was as low as 1 in a million (I suspect it's actually much higher) then there's likely to be many people in a country who fit the profile.
This means that DNA evidence is really good at proving you didn't do something, but really bad at proving you did do something.
DNA evidence alone should never be enough to convict someone.
Just because you're blind to digital artifacts (not grit, not grain, but technical shite) and over-enhanced edges, doesn't mean that it was a good artistic decision. Real people pay real money to see movies and deserve to be treat with respect by the film makers. To intentionally reduce the picture quality to sub-student film standard when you've got the money (15 million) to do it properly is to be disrespectful to your viewers. To call it "grit" is to see value in the emporer's new clothes.
It had a 15 million budget. That's not low budget. The choice of DV was a failed artistic choice.
Did you not notice the excessive edge enhancement around objects? It looked abysmal - worse than VHS in places. However you look at it, artistice choice or not, that level of quality is just not acceptable for a paying audience.
Anyway, it was a highly un-original british highly-derivative movie with little or no redeeming features.
And shot on DV, then mucked around in the computer to make it look as bad as possible, then dumped onto film in a really bad way, then end result being unwatchable - looking remarkably like bad VHS....
I saw it at a free preview and I that was a waste of money - I pity anyone who actually payed cash to see that rubbish.
Because when you sell your software, you don't generally sell the source code. The software is copyright protected (for way too long, but that's another issue).
When you sell a new machine you invent, your competitor can take it apart and see how it works, and reproduce it. This is where patents are useful.
Any "software invention" is essentially a mathematical algorithm. You don't invent maths, you discover it. You don't patent maths because it's like patenting the english language - it serves the best interest of all by being fully in the public domain.
I don't pay to listen to the radio. Why should I pay to listen to music off P2P - (not that I do. Music on P2P sucks and I can never find anything good, or of decent quality rip.)
Don't say that the radio gets payed for by advertisers - it doesn't. They're the profit to the radio station. The payment for the music comes from the artists themselves. It's the only form of advertising music. We have to be able to hear or or we won't buy it - it's that simple. The musicians pay radio stations to advertise their music. They pay to give it away free.
Why don't they just cut the middle men, stick it on P2P, and profit?
I'd also add in pretty much the rest of Pink Floyd's catalogue, and Roger Waters - Amused to Death. Alan Parson's conept albums and War of the Worlds are also best listened to as a whole. And don't forget the vast amount of classical works...
If they don't want to sell singles - fine. I suggest that they also will get no sales of their over-hyped, filler full album.
If they are true artists they should realise that artists don't make money until they're dead - or in the case of music, not at all.
If they are truely commercial, then why do they give their stuff away for free (for the end listener anyway - it costs them to advertise) on the radio? Why don't they face the commercial realiaty that music just isn't worth anything anymore?
Who devalued the music to next to worthlessness? They did -by their own greedy hands. They devalue it by radio play. They devalue it by "copy protections", by letting the RIAA screw them over so they don't actually get any money from sales, by not playing their own musicical instruments, by not singing their own songs and by not composing their own tunes.
If people don't hear music for free, then they don't buy music. You've got to give it away to charge for it!!!
Let the reality sink in - they're a dead industry.
Slashdot Mirror
At the globe and mail : http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20 030904.ucd0904/BNStory/Front/
they have the Canadian angle on the story, but:
Cassettes are going to be priced at about $9US, compared to $13US for a CD, yet tapes cost a lot more to manufacture;
In Canada, there is the infamous CD copyright levy which allows all Canadians to copy CDs for their own use without breaking the law. Because we pay the levy wether, like myself, you backup the software and programs I write for a living, or copy your friends' CDs, it would make it your duty as a Canadian to copy CDs because you're paying for that right. Contrast this with the quote that:
"Mr. Lennox said that all of his company's CDs featuring Canadian artists will soon have copy-protection technology built in."
On one hand, it's perfectly legal to copy a CD for our own use, wether it be our own, or a friends, and in return the music industry collects a copyright levy, and on the other, they're still charging us the levy, but stopping us copying a CD by technological measures. This is obviously wrong. Due to the CD levy, it's also a very grey area as to wether file sharing is also illegal in Canada, especially if you burn your downloads onto CD!
Still over $12US - that's still gouging! And why the heck is a tape (which costs more to produce) costing less. When you're buying music, you're not paying for the product - you're paying for some crappy singer's IP that they sold to a record company for a dime.
Musicians have got it rich - they do a little work and make a record, but expect to be able to get money every time someone else sells it for them. Real people get payed a wage for the hours that they work. Real people don't get royalties. Workers at Ford don't get payed extra every time one of their cars gets sold.
It's rich to hear musicians complaining of people copying their music. If they didn't wan't it copied, why did they compose / sing / record it in the first place. They're doing a "luxury" artists job and they expect to be given a life of luxury because they can "sing". They should get some perspective on things. What they do is not important. They're just musicians.
Virtual PC doesn't run on the G5 because of it's lack of pseudo little endian support.
Surely it would be better to set up Snapster to raise enough money to mount a hostile takeover of the RIAA (and record companies) one at a time, shutting each down and donating all their copyrights to the public domain. Buy them one at a time so you never become a monopoly.
But how do you find them? And how do you prove you're one of the false positives?
DNA evidence is fine until it's used against you. Even if you're innocent, you're screwed.
But how do you know that some of the other people are not local??
But people are convicted on DNA evidence because the general public think it's infallible. A jury would think it infallible.
Simple statistics tells us:
if the test has a false positive rate of 1 in a Million, then, depending on the size of your country, there could be between 30 - 250 ish people who would test false positive.
Let's assume you're innocent.
Out of those, say, 30 people, another 28 are going to be innocent like yourself. Therefore the probability that you're innocent is 29/30 - a very high probablity. The probability that you're guilty is 1/30, very low.
So for innocent people, the 1 in a million false positive DNA match leads to a very high statistical probability that's you're innocent, yet most people think that the 1 in a million false positive rate means that if you test positive you're almost certainly guilty.
That's why DNA evidence should never be used to convict, only to acquit.
Even if there was just one other person in your geographical area that matched the DNA profile (the real criminal), if they pick you up, it's a 50% chance they're wrong to accuse you!!
That's why DNA tests should never be performed on whole populations to "trawl" for the criminal - they'll just stop at the first person that they find matches...
DNA testing is not infallible. If you think it is, you're living in clooud cuckoo land...
DNA testing doesn't actually test wether your DNA is the same as the sample. What is tests is that when you remove one of the 4 chemicals in the DNA, the relative masses of the strands that are left are very similar. To do a proper DNA test, you've have to fully sequence both specimins, which is NOT what they're doing.
Statistically, this means that there's a large chance that they'll get the wrong person using DNA testing alone.
DNA is pretty good for proving you're innocent, buut lousy at proving you're guilty.
Are you denying that the picture quality was terrible? It is a fact that the picture quality is not up to usual cinema standards. What's not factual about that?
You can't see the picture quality on a movie until you've payed your cash and sat down in the cinema chair. No review I've read mentions that the picture quality is dreadful, so I'm doing a public service announcement to warn you.
Schindler's List was high quality, beautiful black and white, not washed out VHS from the rental store black and white. There's a difference.
Actack the person, not the picture eh?
Go on - tell me how excellent the picture quality is, and tell me how superb the movie is and I'll tell you you're not qualified the criticise the movie because you're Steven Spieldberg.
The fact is that the picture qualit on the movie is unwatchable and looks like VHS. This isn't a "subjective" bit of filn criticism, but a quite objective fact. I've watched enough TV and movies to know bad picture quality when I see it.
I actaully saw the movie on a free preview, and was shocked at how utterly bad it was, and because no review I've read of it tells the truth about the awful picture, I'm telling slashdotters so that they can save their hard earned cash. I'd recommend that if you do wish to see the movie, you buy a DVD, because that's what you're watching in the cinema, just scaled up many times.
Perhaps they should just do that for the next Star Wars movie, shoot it on miniDV, make a DVD from it and play that in the cinema from a cheepo video projector. It'll give you the feel that you're watching "interstellar news" or something.
Perhaps they should make all movies on VHS so that you can enjoy the same high quality picture at home as you do in the cinema, seeing exactly what the director intended.
"The picture quality is not bad, it's just different from what most movies choose" - wrong.
The picture quality is BAD - actually very bad. It's technically inept. It looks atrocious. To say that the picture quality gives you "a sense that you are watching some post-apocalpyse news item" is just rubbish. A good director can make you see grit and realism while presenting you with a perfect picture - a poor director will just show you a gritty picture. It's not clever to make a picture look deliberately bad - it's a slur on the audience who payed good money to see a movie that looks worse than many student movies I've seen.
What's worse is that directorially from a picture composition point of view and editing, the movie was very well done. If only they'd take care with the picture it would have been watchably tollerable, but it never would have excused the bad plot.
It's a movie of contrasts - it's not low budget, but has a zero budget look and feel, the picture quality is bad, but composition and editing are great, the plot is bad, but the acting good. Overall it's a movie that leaves you with a bad headache and a ripped off feeling in the wallet.
The picture quality on 28 days later is so bad it's unwatchable. It's not a low budget movie (15 million) but for "artistic" reasons they shot it on miniDV, and didn't take any care with the picture quality at all. PAL miniDV can look quite good in the cinema if you take care to enlarge it correctly with good interpolation, and shoot it carefully so you don't over expose, and especially turn down (or preferably off) the sharpness control on the camera.
The people who shot this movie did none of these - or should I say, the opposite of this. They turned the bad digital sharpness full up (which makes the picture look like bad VHS) and over-exposed. The film print was obviously made with no attempt to improve the picture in any way at all.
The end result is a movie that looks so bad on the big screen it's barely watchable - and they expect you to pay real money to see it. There's no excuse for this - it's a movie that doesn't treat the viewer with respect.
If you must see this movie, see the DVD, because that's the same picture you'll see in the cinema - just many times larger....
It's actually worse than that. Simple statistics tells us:
if the test has a false positive rate of 1 in a Million, then, depending on the size of your country, there could be between 30 - 250 ish people who would test false positive.
Let's assume you're innocent.
Out of those, say, 30 people, another 28 are going to be innocent like yourself. Therefore the probability that you're innocent is 29/30 - a very high probablity. The probability that you're guilty is 1/30, very low.
So for innocent people, the 1 in a million false positive DNA match leads to a very high statistical probability that's you're innocent, yet most people think that the 1 in a million false positive rate means that if you test positive you're almost certainly guilty.
That's why DNA evidence should never be used to convict, only to acquit.
Even if there was just one other person in your geographical area that matched the DNA profile (the real criminal), if they pick you up, it's a 50% chance they're wrong to accuse you!!
That's why DNA tests should never be performed on whole populations to "trawl" for the criminal.
DNA testing doesn't do a "bit for bit" comparison between the two DNA samples - it uses a couple of techniques to simplify that matter.
Even if the "false positive" rate was as low as 1 in a million (I suspect it's actually much higher) then there's likely to be many people in a country who fit the profile.
This means that DNA evidence is really good at proving you didn't do something, but really bad at proving you did do something.
DNA evidence alone should never be enough to convict someone.
Grit? No - you mean shit!
Just because you're blind to digital artifacts (not grit, not grain, but technical shite) and over-enhanced edges, doesn't mean that it was a good artistic decision. Real people pay real money to see movies and deserve to be treat with respect by the film makers. To intentionally reduce the picture quality to sub-student film standard when you've got the money (15 million) to do it properly is to be disrespectful to your viewers. To call it "grit" is to see value in the emporer's new clothes.
It had a 15 million budget. That's not low budget. The choice of DV was a failed artistic choice.
Did you not notice the excessive edge enhancement around objects? It looked abysmal - worse than VHS in places. However you look at it, artistice choice or not, that level of quality is just not acceptable for a paying audience.
Anyway, it was a highly un-original british highly-derivative movie with little or no redeeming features.
Sucked big time!
And shot on DV, then mucked around in the computer to make it look as bad as possible, then dumped onto film in a really bad way, then end result being unwatchable - looking remarkably like bad VHS....
I saw it at a free preview and I that was a waste of money - I pity anyone who actually payed cash to see that rubbish.
Copy and paste works great. I've been using this forever with OS X.
Because when you sell your software, you don't generally sell the source code. The software is copyright protected (for way too long, but that's another issue).
When you sell a new machine you invent, your competitor can take it apart and see how it works, and reproduce it. This is where patents are useful.
Any "software invention" is essentially a mathematical algorithm. You don't invent maths, you discover it. You don't patent maths because it's like patenting the english language - it serves the best interest of all by being fully in the public domain.
I don't pay to listen to the radio. Why should I pay to listen to music off P2P - (not that I do. Music on P2P sucks and I can never find anything good, or of decent quality rip.)
Don't say that the radio gets payed for by advertisers - it doesn't. They're the profit to the radio station. The payment for the music comes from the artists themselves. It's the only form of advertising music. We have to be able to hear or or we won't buy it - it's that simple. The musicians pay radio stations to advertise their music. They pay to give it away free.
Why don't they just cut the middle men, stick it on P2P, and profit?
Surely the objective C pre-processor would turn the O-C into POB-C (plain old boring C) and then IBM's C compiler would take over?
I'd also add in pretty much the rest of Pink Floyd's catalogue, and Roger Waters - Amused to Death. Alan Parson's conept albums and War of the Worlds are also best listened to as a whole. And don't forget the vast amount of classical works...
If they don't want to sell singles - fine. I suggest that they also will get no sales of their over-hyped, filler full album.
If they are true artists they should realise that artists don't make money until they're dead - or in the case of music, not at all.
If they are truely commercial, then why do they give their stuff away for free (for the end listener anyway - it costs them to advertise) on the radio? Why don't they face the commercial realiaty that music just isn't worth anything anymore?
Who devalued the music to next to worthlessness? They did -by their own greedy hands. They devalue it by radio play. They devalue it by "copy protections", by letting the RIAA screw them over so they don't actually get any money from sales, by not playing their own musicical instruments, by not singing their own songs and by not composing their own tunes.
If people don't hear music for free, then they don't buy music. You've got to give it away to charge for it!!!
Let the reality sink in - they're a dead industry.
So they finally admit that they're a fascist police state - I won't hear any more talk of democracy or freedom until it is again embraced.