The only upcoming "sequel" sci-fi I'm looking forward to is Babylon 5 : The Lost Tales. It's more B5 I already thought that Babylon 5 itself was a sequel too far after Babylon, Babylon II, Babylon III and Babylon IV: The Quest for Peace.
I have seen the future, and it's direct to DVD Funny, but it's not totally implausible if they want to milk the franchise enough.
Remember Hellraiser, that late-80s sado-masochistic horror film? If you do, you're probably aware that there was a sequel. You might even remember the noticably lower-budget MTV-ised third entry in the series.
But did you know they made eight of the damn things?
I'm not kidding; Netcraft.... erm, IMDB confirms it. Even the fourth film apparently made it into the cinema; but 5, 6, 7 and 8(!!) were straight to video. I've never seen them, have no interest in doing so, and suspect that most people feel the same way. My guess is that they're low-budget efforts aimed at the diehard obsessive fans; a loyal but small audience.
Now, the Terminator franchise (I loathe that word, but it's appropriate) is- and will probably remain- more popular than Hellraiser. But if they start churning out films without Arnie (or any of the other famous actors), over-milk the formula, and cut the budgets, I can see their appeal going down *fast*. The hardcore fanbase will turn up regardless (even if they bitch about it). However, such audiences overestimate their importance and are dwarfed by the fickle masses that *any* mainstream cinema film needs to fill multiplexes.
Could "Terminator" films end up going straight to video? Sure.
I think "Crappy choice of music" would be a better description, rather than it being a US-centric thing.
Most of the songs listed sucked here in the States as well. Sure, but I assume that they were hits, which was the point I was making. Even if Americans think they're cheesy now, it's what they grew up with as teenagers (or have heard since) and this- I assume- is part of the game's appeal.
OTOH, most of the songs (and even some of the bands) are pretty unknown in the UK, and I'm not convinced that the point of a game like Guitar Hero is to have unknown songs.
Of the seven songs listed in the article, only two of them ("Heat of the Moment" and "I want Candy") were hits in the UK. Of the others, "I Ran", "Mental Health" and "Holy Diver" didn't even reach the Top 40. The Twisted Sister one isn't even listed as a Top 75 single (if it was released here at all). As for Ratt... who?! I've never heard of them, but apparently the best they could do was #50 in the album charts (no Top 75 singles listed).
Ta very much "Guinness British Hit Singles and Albums"...:-)
Anyway, maybe they'll redo it for different markets, or maybe they'll assume that the target audience is too young to remember the 80s, so they don't think it'll matter anyway. I don't know how important osmosis is (i.e. hearing songs on the radio later on or rifling through your parents record/CD collection) in that case.
Where is the sultans of swing, one of the greatest guitar solos ever. And one of the only 80s hits that comes to mind that didn't suck shit through a straw. Sultans of Swing originally came out in 1978.
Does Ghostbusters even have guitar in it? I seem to recall all the music being from a synthesizer. Yes... IIRC (also) Ghostbusters was primarily/all synth. Though, the bits where he's saying "I ain't afraid of no ghost" used it in a somewhat guitar-like manner.
As for the GP mentioning Van Halen's "Jump"... not a good choice for a supposed guitar game either. Listen to it... the whole driving force of the song is those in-your-face synth chords. The guitar's only really prominent during the bridge and at the start of the middle-8. Sure, someone could re-arrange the synth parts for guitar, and it would probably work, but it wouldn't be Jump in all its early-80s-analogue-synth cheesiness, would it?
Twenty years from now, how many CD-ROM players will there be? Still a fairly large number, I should imagine. Some may wear out, the majority may be thrown out, but there will still be a large amount in workable order, simply because so many were sold in the first place; and someone can always transfer it to another media type.
And if you really think that the X-No-Archive header is honored by more than a very small fraction of sites, I have some dot-com stock from a few years back that you may be interested in... That raises the question of the legality of such retention, given the use of a standard mechanism to indicate that the user *doesn't* want the data retained.
And in fact, this raises a more general issue regarding Usenet; when posting to it, what are reasonable expectations? What would the same expectations have been 10-15 years ago?
That is, when I posted stuff to Usenet in the mid-90s, it was still seen as ephemeral (see here), and yet now we find out it had been permanently archived. Does someone have a right to do that with my message? Or does someone have a right to take my message and redisplay it with adverts on it? Or even to reuse it in a different context?
I gave no explicit permission when I posted, and whilst a court would probably rule that I implicitly gave permission for redistribution via the standard Usenet mechanisms of the time and for people to see and respond in a standard manner, does this grant the right to uses or issues a typical user would not have foreseen seen at the time?
It's easy to say so now, but in 1992, someone posting to Usenet had no expectation that their comments would be archived forever and be easily searchable by anyone with an internet connection and 10 seconds to spare. This is quite true; there's a lot of adolescent drivel out there with my real name on it which I posted circa '93-95 (and some even later) that I didn't realise would be archived. Usenet then *was* seen to be ephemeral.
In the future, given the merging of information databases (including weblogs containing cookies and/or IPs) and data-mining software's improved ability to automatically spot patterns and "join-the-dots" connecting superficially unconnected identities, it wouldn't surprise me if it was trivially possible to find out who someone posting behind an anonymous account (today) was at some stage in the future.
Personally, I don't assume that *anything* I post on the Internet nowadays will remain unconnected with me forever.
As for the panopticon concept, if it gets really bad, it may be that human behaviour and attitudes will be forced into changing. Society may end up "accepting" that people say and do things in different contexts, and that no-one is perfect under the surface and politely disregarding such things in much the same way that city-dwellers pretend that the other people on a busy train aren't there.
Hmm... I'm just going by what I've heard and (as I implicitly acknowledged in my original post) going by what people apparently thought at the time; of course people wouldn't want that stuff nowadays. Actually, going by what you were saying, it sounds like you didn't like it back then either:-)
What I actually remember of 70s TV is negigible (I was only 4 when the 80s started). Having said that, there was a lot of stuff I remember liking in the very early 80s that in retrospect I realise was more commonly associated with the 70s. Specifically ABBA (mainly via records, what I'd seen of them on TV was negligible, so I wasn't prejudiced by the 70s kitsch clothes), The Goodies and It's a Knockout. Oddly, they all disappeared circa 1982....
And the "variety" type shows I think you're getting at I think were still going well into the next decade, and you're right. That sort of stuff *was* cheesy crap. Actually, looking back on it, vast swathes of early-80s shows were crap; even stuff I thought I liked.
Now that Google is taking over the entire ad space, it's one simple entry in the ad blocking software to eliminate most ads. Get Adblock properly configured and you'll rarely if ever see an ad. That's ironic, because Googles ads are generally the ones I feel no need to block; they're not particularly intrusive. By contrast, the reason I switched to Google from Yahoo in the first place was specifically the annoying popup ads (mainly for X10).
Let's make this clear; Yahoo lost me permanently as a user (rare email use aside) *specifically* because of the annoying popups; and ones mainly aimed at one advertiser at that. Now, I'm probably not enough of an ad-clicker (either at Yahoo or Google) that they'd shed any tears over the loss of people like me. However, I wonder how many profitable users Yahoo lost because of one annoying short-term ad-campaign on their site.
It's like a TV station showing obnoxious advertising (*) during peak/mealtimes. It makes me wonder about people changing the channel in the face of this and the subsequent loss to other advertisers- and potential loss of the audience altogether if something more interesting was on the other station.
(* One unpleasant example- skip if you're having your lunch- woman discussing the consistency of their "stools" in a cafeteria. No, not the ones they were sitting on. Yes, this is a real advert in the UK. Can't remember if they showed it at peak or mealtimes, probably because I don't watch the kind of programmes it would appear with very often).
I don't think it matters. With yoogle poised to do "revenue sharing" for videos hosted on their systems, the described abuse seems likely to become more popular. With less well-known companies, perhaps, but not with Gootube. Any short-term gains would be easily outweighed by the damage to the company's reputation. I don't think they can afford to mix-and-match Good Google/Bad Google, even if it were theoretically possible.
In truth, while Raiuno is really bad - like UK tv from the 70s I should point out that the 1970s is considered by many to be the "golden age" of UK television; and that UK television is in general far better than many other countries'. So whether your comment was a valid insult depends on the context you meant it from; was it that of a modern viewer from another country?
Well, in retrospect I did lose focus. The point I meant to make was that the Bush presidency's hawkish and more in-your-face "my way or the highway" attitude in general emphasises that we can't rely on their goodwill, and certainly provides impetus to projects such as Galileo.
(I mentioned Blair because his arsel^w sucking-up to the US presidency ultimately left him in no more influential a position than France and Germany which didn't; which demonstrates the weakness of such a position- people have no reason to cooperate with you.)
The EU and the US are allies at present, and even given recent history it would be stupid for either side not to work together where there is mutual benefit, but the key word here is "allies". As others have said, in a crisis, it's not desirable to be reliant upon a system controlled by someone working in their own self-interest, not yours.
The US GPS system is available worldwide, and with the increased amount of definition now I wonder why they want to invest so much money creating their own. Perhaps a joint US / Europe project to utilize one system, would be cost efficient. Because the US system is under the control of the US. In reality, "friendship" between countries does not exist; countries have allies, not friends.
Beneath the PR gloss the US government has always acted in its own interest to a large extent (don't take that as a criticism, any government in its position would the same). However, in recent years this has become significantly more pronounced with the hawkish arrogance of Bush and co. In particular, Tony Blair's conceit that he has any real influence over the Bush administration is laughable, and has been for some time now. Bush will only do what Blair wants if he was going to do it anyway; out of the PR highlight, U.S. government staff have admitted as much.
I'm sure you'll excuse me if I say that I don't trust the Bush-led government one fucking bit. When push came to shove, if they were forced to choose, they'd act in their own self-interest. Even if the US Democrats won the next election, there's no guarantee that they'd be significantly better, or how long it would be before the Bush-types regain power.
As I said, I personally think it's undesirable to rely on the US-controlled system. You can take this as an anti-U.S. rant or not; what it comes down to IMHO is that we need a system under our own control, not something that can be yanked from under our feet if it proves inconvenient to our allies.
I think you'll find the "epidemic" will dry up in no time. No, I think you'll find that far more people will avoid being tested, and human psychology being what it is, they'll just live with the unknown because things like that always happen to "other people". By the time it's obvious that someone has HIV (i.e. by them developing AIDS) it'll be years later and far too late.
But nice to see that you thought your plan through so well.
What the heck is "talking smack about DRM" supposed to mean anyway? Where I come from, "smack" is slang for heroin, so perhaps he's trying to get Trainspotting onto the iTunes video store...?!
Or maybe Jobs' was just so off his face on drugs that he mistook the head of EMI for his dealer?;-)
I could buy whole albums in the 99 cent bin at the local music store. Mmm... yeah. Cheesy compilations of disco songs that have been "re-recorded to maintain quality [to save money more like, save me the weasel-ish excuse] by as many of the original group as possible", and a few obscure (reached #47 in 1986) non-hits!
There has been some very bad "multiculturalism" case law in the EU recently, where women have been beaten and abused but that was OK because it was supposedly "their" culture and the host country should not interfere. You might find this article interesting. (This broadly coincides with my views on that particular subject.)
May I point out that he himself is a son of immigrants, and not the anti-immigrant caricature You talk as if the first disproves the second. I can assure you that in Britain there are plenty of anti-immigration politicians whose parents *were* immigrants, and would not have got in under the policies their children now support.
I assume that the parent was modded "funny" as a piss-take. Maybe it was meant that way, maybe it's conspiratorial ramblings, but the OP's scepticism is not entirely baseless if this British case is anything to go by. (More here and here). For those willing to dismiss analysis of that case as fringe ramblings, note that it was reported across the world and the subject of several documentaries.
Bear in mind that in forensics, the "drops" of blood can be microscopic. For example, when we hear that XYZ accused had 100 drops of blood on his clothing, it isn't necessarily the massively blood-splattered shirt it might sound like. Now, I don't know how likely it is that we might have drops of blood of such size around our houses/cars as a result of normal activity (which would normally go unnoticed). Still something to consider, though.
Aw, you missed my humor. What possible use would a one line, 16 character, display be? Yeah, I should have picked up on that; it was rather silly:-)
A $10 laptop is an absurdity. OTOH, I'm old enough to remember $500 4 function calculators and would have thought blister-packed $1.00 calculators an absudity. True, but the situations you describe date back 20 to 35 years. In 20 years time, I'm quite confident it'll be possible to build a $10 "laptop" that outperforms the present-day OLPC, albeit with some corners cut (i.e. still don't expect a "real" keyboard). But the $10 laptop proposal clearly isn't designed with this in mind and- as you say- the idea is an absurdity in today's market.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember Hellraiser, that late-80s sado-masochistic horror film? If you do, you're probably aware that there was a sequel. You might even remember the noticably lower-budget MTV-ised third entry in the series.
But did you know they made eight of the damn things?
I'm not kidding; Netcraft.... erm, IMDB confirms it. Even the fourth film apparently made it into the cinema; but 5, 6, 7 and 8(!!) were straight to video. I've never seen them, have no interest in doing so, and suspect that most people feel the same way. My guess is that they're low-budget efforts aimed at the diehard obsessive fans; a loyal but small audience.
Now, the Terminator franchise (I loathe that word, but it's appropriate) is- and will probably remain- more popular than Hellraiser. But if they start churning out films without Arnie (or any of the other famous actors), over-milk the formula, and cut the budgets, I can see their appeal going down *fast*. The hardcore fanbase will turn up regardless (even if they bitch about it). However, such audiences overestimate their importance and are dwarfed by the fickle masses that *any* mainstream cinema film needs to fill multiplexes.
Could "Terminator" films end up going straight to video? Sure.
OTOH, most of the songs (and even some of the bands) are pretty unknown in the UK, and I'm not convinced that the point of a game like Guitar Hero is to have unknown songs.
Of the seven songs listed in the article, only two of them ("Heat of the Moment" and "I want Candy") were hits in the UK. Of the others, "I Ran", "Mental Health" and "Holy Diver" didn't even reach the Top 40. The Twisted Sister one isn't even listed as a Top 75 single (if it was released here at all). As for Ratt... who?! I've never heard of them, but apparently the best they could do was #50 in the album charts (no Top 75 singles listed).
:-)
Ta very much "Guinness British Hit Singles and Albums"...
Anyway, maybe they'll redo it for different markets, or maybe they'll assume that the target audience is too young to remember the 80s, so they don't think it'll matter anyway. I don't know how important osmosis is (i.e. hearing songs on the radio later on or rifling through your parents record/CD collection) in that case.
No, "I'm Gonna be 500 Miles" was originally released in (IIRC) 1988.
As for the GP mentioning Van Halen's "Jump"... not a good choice for a supposed guitar game either. Listen to it... the whole driving force of the song is those in-your-face synth chords. The guitar's only really prominent during the bridge and at the start of the middle-8. Sure, someone could re-arrange the synth parts for guitar, and it would probably work, but it wouldn't be Jump in all its early-80s-analogue-synth cheesiness, would it?
And in fact, this raises a more general issue regarding Usenet; when posting to it, what are reasonable expectations? What would the same expectations have been 10-15 years ago?
That is, when I posted stuff to Usenet in the mid-90s, it was still seen as ephemeral (see here), and yet now we find out it had been permanently archived. Does someone have a right to do that with my message? Or does someone have a right to take my message and redisplay it with adverts on it? Or even to reuse it in a different context?
I gave no explicit permission when I posted, and whilst a court would probably rule that I implicitly gave permission for redistribution via the standard Usenet mechanisms of the time and for people to see and respond in a standard manner, does this grant the right to uses or issues a typical user would not have foreseen seen at the time?
In the future, given the merging of information databases (including weblogs containing cookies and/or IPs) and data-mining software's improved ability to automatically spot patterns and "join-the-dots" connecting superficially unconnected identities, it wouldn't surprise me if it was trivially possible to find out who someone posting behind an anonymous account (today) was at some stage in the future.
Personally, I don't assume that *anything* I post on the Internet nowadays will remain unconnected with me forever.
As for the panopticon concept, if it gets really bad, it may be that human behaviour and attitudes will be forced into changing. Society may end up "accepting" that people say and do things in different contexts, and that no-one is perfect under the surface and politely disregarding such things in much the same way that city-dwellers pretend that the other people on a busy train aren't there.
Hmm... I'm just going by what I've heard and (as I implicitly acknowledged in my original post) going by what people apparently thought at the time; of course people wouldn't want that stuff nowadays. Actually, going by what you were saying, it sounds like you didn't like it back then either :-)
:-)
What I actually remember of 70s TV is negigible (I was only 4 when the 80s started). Having said that, there was a lot of stuff I remember liking in the very early 80s that in retrospect I realise was more commonly associated with the 70s. Specifically ABBA (mainly via records, what I'd seen of them on TV was negligible, so I wasn't prejudiced by the 70s kitsch clothes), The Goodies and It's a Knockout. Oddly, they all disappeared circa 1982....
And the "variety" type shows I think you're getting at I think were still going well into the next decade, and you're right. That sort of stuff *was* cheesy crap. Actually, looking back on it, vast swathes of early-80s shows were crap; even stuff I thought I liked.
So no offense taken
Let's make this clear; Yahoo lost me permanently as a user (rare email use aside) *specifically* because of the annoying popups; and ones mainly aimed at one advertiser at that. Now, I'm probably not enough of an ad-clicker (either at Yahoo or Google) that they'd shed any tears over the loss of people like me. However, I wonder how many profitable users Yahoo lost because of one annoying short-term ad-campaign on their site.
It's like a TV station showing obnoxious advertising (*) during peak/mealtimes. It makes me wonder about people changing the channel in the face of this and the subsequent loss to other advertisers- and potential loss of the audience altogether if something more interesting was on the other station.
(* One unpleasant example- skip if you're having your lunch- woman discussing the consistency of their "stools" in a cafeteria. No, not the ones they were sitting on. Yes, this is a real advert in the UK. Can't remember if they showed it at peak or mealtimes, probably because I don't watch the kind of programmes it would appear with very often).
Well, in retrospect I did lose focus. The point I meant to make was that the Bush presidency's hawkish and more in-your-face "my way or the highway" attitude in general emphasises that we can't rely on their goodwill, and certainly provides impetus to projects such as Galileo.
(I mentioned Blair because his arsel^w sucking-up to the US presidency ultimately left him in no more influential a position than France and Germany which didn't; which demonstrates the weakness of such a position- people have no reason to cooperate with you.)
The EU and the US are allies at present, and even given recent history it would be stupid for either side not to work together where there is mutual benefit, but the key word here is "allies". As others have said, in a crisis, it's not desirable to be reliant upon a system controlled by someone working in their own self-interest, not yours.
Beneath the PR gloss the US government has always acted in its own interest to a large extent (don't take that as a criticism, any government in its position would the same). However, in recent years this has become significantly more pronounced with the hawkish arrogance of Bush and co. In particular, Tony Blair's conceit that he has any real influence over the Bush administration is laughable, and has been for some time now. Bush will only do what Blair wants if he was going to do it anyway; out of the PR highlight, U.S. government staff have admitted as much.
I'm sure you'll excuse me if I say that I don't trust the Bush-led government one fucking bit. When push came to shove, if they were forced to choose, they'd act in their own self-interest. Even if the US Democrats won the next election, there's no guarantee that they'd be significantly better, or how long it would be before the Bush-types regain power.
As I said, I personally think it's undesirable to rely on the US-controlled system. You can take this as an anti-U.S. rant or not; what it comes down to IMHO is that we need a system under our own control, not something that can be yanked from under our feet if it proves inconvenient to our allies.
But nice to see that you thought your plan through so well.
What the heck is "talking smack about DRM" supposed to mean anyway? Where I come from, "smack" is slang for heroin, so perhaps he's trying to get Trainspotting onto the iTunes video store...?!
;-)
Or maybe Jobs' was just so off his face on drugs that he mistook the head of EMI for his dealer?
I assume that the parent was modded "funny" as a piss-take. Maybe it was meant that way, maybe it's conspiratorial ramblings, but the OP's scepticism is not entirely baseless if this British case is anything to go by. (More here and here). For those willing to dismiss analysis of that case as fringe ramblings, note that it was reported across the world and the subject of several documentaries.
Bear in mind that in forensics, the "drops" of blood can be microscopic. For example, when we hear that XYZ accused had 100 drops of blood on his clothing, it isn't necessarily the massively blood-splattered shirt it might sound like. Now, I don't know how likely it is that we might have drops of blood of such size around our houses/cars as a result of normal activity (which would normally go unnoticed). Still something to consider, though.