Re:Only in sweden (and maybe a couple others)
on
Swedish Pirate Demo
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· Score: 1
The complete lack of freely available software out there today just shows how necessary it is to have these IP laws in place.
How many free software authors manage to support themselves on donations or support fees versus having a day job (where they probably code software for a commercial company)?
People just simply won't make software, or music or films or perform any kind of artistic or creative endeavour, unless they've been co-erced and cajoled into it through the operations of the capitalist system.
Yes, I'm sure David Fincher or Peter Jackson would have plenty of time to make films if they had to spend 8 hours a day working at the grocery store or driving a bus.
*Every* musician I know struggles with having to spend time on work as opposed to writing music.
Don't those anarchists understand, if it wasn't for EMI's financing of Johann Sebastian Bach, we'd have no such thing as music at all today?
Bach was financed by royalty and the church. The money to finance his lifestyle and allow him to compose didn't materialize out of thin air or come from donation buckets.
How on earth could SpaceWar ever have been invented, if it wasn't for Electronic Arts working those poor MIT hackers to death with the promise of untold riches at the end of it all?
Yes, because a game like Space War, which incorporates simple physics, a 2D playfield, and monochrome vector graphics is *so* comparable to a modern 3D title.
In fact, I'm sure GTA3 or Morrowind could easily have been coded in the spare time of some teenage hackers and given away for free.
This is a legit stance and one that can certianly be taken seriously.
I am not sure that it is.
The reason Western society values Intellectual Property is theoretically to provide rewards for people who come up with new ideas.
Look at the former Soviet Union, or today's Hong Kong. There, it was/is easily possible to copy someone else's hardware design and sell it yourself, because of the level of IP law enforcement.
If (to use a real example*) a Soviet company could produce exact copies of Nintendo's Game and Watch toys, their selling of them wouldn't be taking away any merchandise from Nintendo, and yet Nintendo would still be losing out on sales to a massive number of people - especially since the Soviet company, with minimal R&D and labour costs could sell their product at a reduced price.
If IP law didn't exist at all, what is the incentive for Nintendo to develop the original product in the first place if someone is just going to clone it and sell it for a lower price?
* In the 80s, Nintendo investigated moving into the Soviet market. Their contact there, as a show of Soviet manufacturing ability, produced an exact copy of the Game and Watch toy, minus the Nintendo logo. To my knowledge it was never mass-produced.
There are several ethical systems (e.g. Rule Utilitarianism) that are based exclusively on logic and not dependent on religion or personal beliefs.
Re:The problem with HDTV right now...
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For me, the actual television shows wouldn't matter. I don't watch broadcast or cable, I use my TV as a monitor for watching DVDs on.
I would love to have an HDTV so I could see more detail in the films I watch. I'm not interested in paying the ridiculous amounts of money that they cost right now, so it will probably be a few years before I have one.
How about finding some statistics for how many patents were granted to companies working under contract for NASA, especially during an era like the 60s space race?
I'd check Microsoft themselves instead of relying on third party sites
That site was linked to from the MS security bulletin itself. I didn't see a way to find out the details of the vulnerability without leaving the MS site.
Why you are content to use a broken system, I do not know.
Yeah, no kidding. This isn't a problem with Windows, it's a problem with a screwed-up installation.
We have a little over 11,000 Win2k Pro machines in use at the company I work for, and they are patched regularly. 95-99% of the time there is no problem with the patches, and when there is it has *always* been because the user has done something bad to their machine, like install dubious IE toolbars and decrepit Sumerian-era applications that replace modern DLL and OCX files with ones that were coded in cuneiform.
It's just as possible for a Linux, Mac, etc., workstation to get in a bad state. At an old job years ago we had a Linux web/mail server that the previous sysadmin had set up, and when I tried to run X on it I got a blank screen with a cursor and no windows or other controls. Does that mean Linux is unreliable? No, it means that that particular Linux machine was in a bad state.
Do you create all your HTML documents from scratch?
This worm release is pretty cool, I think. This is the first time I've got to see the patch deployment process I built with a couple of other people from my group send out patches to the entire company and get pretty much everybody taken care of before the worm was released. We built it from SMS SUS and a bunch of in-house components. 11,000 workstations across the country patched in less than a week, and we could have done it even faster in an emergency.
I believe the actual court cases extend fair use to the purposes to time- and space-shifting (i.e. recording something off the air for later viewing or copying something you legally own to a new format, e.g. from CD to tape, for your own use).
Mod parent up. I was just about to write the same thing.
The Supreme Court decision on home videotaping *only* covers time-shifting for non-archival purposes. They never made a ruling that allows you to tape something off of a broadcast and use it instead of buying a copy of the commercial release.
The grandparent post that compares time shifting of a television program to taping a concert is flawed on a number of levels. One of the most important is that concerts take place on private property. The owner of that property has the right to set whatever limits they like on audio and video taping, including banning them completely.
Good link, check out this one [wreckedexotics.com]. Hummer ought to put that in their ads, somehow I think this is really the appeal after all.
Actually, I doubt it is.
That Hummer is in relatively good shape because the collision was obviously at a low enough speed that it never made it all the way over the other car.
When I was at university, I saw what happens when an SUV does that same head-on collision at high speed - it uses the other car as a ramp, and does a sideways roll onto its roof, like you see stunt cars do in films.
The SUV I saw use a BMW James Bond car as a ramp ended up with its roof crushed in completely and the driver dead. The driver of the BMW walked away.
Boeing actually tested the waters by announcing a supersonic jetliner [geocrawler.com] that would have a reduced sonic boom.
The Sonic Cruiser was a subsonic plane, it was never intended to be supersonic. It was going to fly at something like 90-95% of the speed of sound, and cut an hour or two off of intercontinental flights.
I wish they'd built it just so we could have planes that look like they belong in the 21st century at our airports.
I think I'll start a Christian industrial band. It will be my keyboard, drum machine, Jesus, and I making music together.
It's already been done. The oldest one I know of is Argyle Park, who put out the album Misguided with the classic tune "Misanthrope." Sadly it is the only good tune on the CD.
I am agnostic, but I grew up in a Christian family and I fully agree with you about the music and other products. I think it is much more productive to sell products made in a way that supports your beliefs, rather than trying to trumpet them to the world.
e.g. I am vegan, so I wear boots from Vegetarian Shoes, but you wouldn't know it unless you looked at the little tags on the back (or asked me). By comparison, the "Christian Music" equivalent would be to have "VEGAN" in giant block letters running up the sides. It would make a statement, but it would also be pretty dorky.
Evanescence, I think, is a good example of a band of Christians who got it right. They make good music, and if someone wants to know more about what they believe, so be it.
Hmm...for about $31K...you can get a '93-'94 Viper....that's what I'm in the market for. Better looking and MUCH more powerful....
Are you kidding? The DeLorean is the only decent-looking American car produced between 1969 and a few years ago, and that's only because it was designed by an Italian.
Also, what is the deal with hating Rick Berman? He worked on part of TNG, DS9, Voyager, and now Enterprise.
Berman and Braga's worst aspect is that they are the ones who introduced the story style where the crew solves problems by recalibrating the phase inducers to produce a modulated deus ex machina-tron wave instead of coming up with a real plot.
Berman also earns special points because it was *his* idea to move to new (e.g. non-TNG) character-based series like DS9. Why? Because he doesn't make as much money when he uses characters invented by Roddenberry.
DS9 and Voyager had some good points. I even liked the Borg episodes of Voyager unlike a lot of critics of that series (although I hated pretty much all of the rest of it).
Enterprise and Nemesis are just awful. They are concentrated forms of the Berman/Braga badness. Their only appeal is the "oh! they'd never [drive dune buggies with laser machine guns/have the crew eating meat and gloating over it to the Vulcan chick/have an "adult" scene with the Vulcan chick and some other guy soaping each other up] on the *old* Star Trek!" factor, which is stupid.
Star Trek used to be fun because it painted a picture of interesting people in interesting situations. Now it's just an exercise in Berman and Braga mining another old episode for ideas and screwing up the continuity.
I agree with the other posters that you seem to be a little confused about the speed of light. When people refer to "the speed of light," they generally mean "the speed of light in a vacuum," which is a constant, and cannot be exceeded except by theoretical particles like tachyons.
In some media, like water, the speed of light is slower. In fact, in water it is slow enough that when you put control rods from a reactor into it, they emit particles that exceed the speed of light *in water* (but not the speed of light in a vacuum), and you get the blue Cherenkov glow.
This doesn't mean that the speed of light in a vacuum is an average, or that regular particles can exceed it.
I read a little further in TEU and it discusses how quantum physics explains the two-slit experiment. There are two ways of thinking about it, and they both generate the same results.
One is that the photons (or electrons, or whatever) are represented by probability waves (or "wave functions") rather than discreet particles, and they can cause interference with themselves that way.
The other is that each particle takes every possible path on its way to its destination, but the less probable ones end up cancelling each other out and all you're left with is the one that actually happened, or something like that (which is what Feynman came up with). I'm a little fuzzier on this one.
It's only weird if you think that photons are individual physical things which move from the projector to the wall.
Since there is no evidence that this is the case and there is plenty of evidence that light is a wave propogated through a medium (reference this very experiment which also works with any other kind of wave) you can see how this would not be weird at all.
No, it's still weird.
To have interference in a wave experiment like you describe (e.g. with waves in water), you need two waves to interfere with each other.
The two-slit experiment shows that a single photon will act as though there's interference even when there isn't another one out there for it to interfere with.
You know the two-slit experiment? Well, its just like that -- standard explanation for weird quantum things when you don't know the right answer.
I was just reading about that last night in The Elegant Universe.
For those who haven't heard of it before, here's the experiment:
- take a wall with light shining on it from a projector.
- place a board in-between the wall and the projector that interrupts the beam of light. The board should have two vertical slits cut in it, which can be opened and closed independently of each other.
If you open just the left one, you get a vertical bar of light on the wall.
If you open just the right one, you also get a vertical bar of light on the wall, offset from the one that was there with the left one open.
Now, intuitively you would think that if you opened both at once, you would just get two vertical bars of light, but you don't. Wave interference means you get a whole bunch of light and dark vertical bars on the wall.
Here's the spooky quantum-mechanical part - the same interference effect happens even if the projector is designed to only emit one photon at a time, then wait until it has hit the wall (or the board) before sending another. You will still get the bands of dark and light.
Okay, this is a serious pet peeve. Fark is not a word, never was, never will be, STOP USING IT unless you want to be placed in the same category as lusers who make the Vulcan "V" sign. Farscape was a TV show, not "reality", and the only reason the word was "invented" was because Scifi didn't want the rating level increase that would come with characters actually properly swearing. If you're gonna swear, swear properly.
You know, SuperBanana, there are plenty of decaffeinated brands that are just as tasty as the real thing.
Is the case that comes with the iHP players leather, or something synthetic but leather-like? I would like to get one, especially since the support for the Karma seems to be pretty abysmal, but I don't buy leather products.
I think that's a horrible example. The restored Jabba scene was one of the worst things that happened to the "improved" ANH.
I'm not saying he should stick them back in. I just want to see them in a seperate deleted scenes section. Most of them I can only assume weren't finished anyway, so they wouldn't fit into the actual films.
Is it just me, or was there a disturbing lack of deleted scenes being mentioned in that article?
When I buy the trilogy on DVD, I want the section from ANH with Biggs on Tatooine. I want the bits of the expanded snow monster things in the base on Hoth, and the shots of Lando on the outside of the Millennium Falcon rescuing Luke in ESB. I want the escape to the Falcon from Jabba's palace and the scenes on the *other* command ship at the battle of Endor in ROTJ.
Don't tell me you don't have them, Lucas, because I've seen them for sale on bootleg VHS tapes. If you can restore the Jabba scene in ANH, you can do those too.
Since most of these massive bodies are relatively spherical, wouldn't the "curve" around the entire sphere cancel itself out since the same curve on the other side of the sphere would be the same but 180 degrees opposite?
No, because the curves are in different places. A bowling ball on a trampoline doesn't *not* distort the trampoline just because it's spherical, and space-time is the same way.
Of course, the trampoline analogy is a little flawed, because space-time is represented as a 2D plane instead of a 3D volume. It's kind of hard to visualize the distortion in 3D, though.
Slashdot Mirror
The complete lack of freely available software out there today just shows how necessary it is to have these IP laws in place.
How many free software authors manage to support themselves on donations or support fees versus having a day job (where they probably code software for a commercial company)?
People just simply won't make software, or music or films or perform any kind of artistic or creative endeavour, unless they've been co-erced and cajoled into it through the operations of the capitalist system.
Yes, I'm sure David Fincher or Peter Jackson would have plenty of time to make films if they had to spend 8 hours a day working at the grocery store or driving a bus.
*Every* musician I know struggles with having to spend time on work as opposed to writing music.
Don't those anarchists understand, if it wasn't for EMI's financing of Johann Sebastian Bach, we'd have no such thing as music at all today?
Bach was financed by royalty and the church. The money to finance his lifestyle and allow him to compose didn't materialize out of thin air or come from donation buckets.
How on earth could SpaceWar ever have been invented, if it wasn't for Electronic Arts working those poor MIT hackers to death with the promise of untold riches at the end of it all?
Yes, because a game like Space War, which incorporates simple physics, a 2D playfield, and monochrome vector graphics is *so* comparable to a modern 3D title.
In fact, I'm sure GTA3 or Morrowind could easily have been coded in the spare time of some teenage hackers and given away for free.
This is a legit stance and one that can certianly be taken seriously.
I am not sure that it is.
The reason Western society values Intellectual Property is theoretically to provide rewards for people who come up with new ideas.
Look at the former Soviet Union, or today's Hong Kong. There, it was/is easily possible to copy someone else's hardware design and sell it yourself, because of the level of IP law enforcement.
If (to use a real example*) a Soviet company could produce exact copies of Nintendo's Game and Watch toys, their selling of them wouldn't be taking away any merchandise from Nintendo, and yet Nintendo would still be losing out on sales to a massive number of people - especially since the Soviet company, with minimal R&D and labour costs could sell their product at a reduced price.
If IP law didn't exist at all, what is the incentive for Nintendo to develop the original product in the first place if someone is just going to clone it and sell it for a lower price?
* In the 80s, Nintendo investigated moving into the Soviet market. Their contact there, as a show of Soviet manufacturing ability, produced an exact copy of the Game and Watch toy, minus the Nintendo logo. To my knowledge it was never mass-produced.
Morals are not facts, they're beliefs.
There are several ethical systems (e.g. Rule Utilitarianism) that are based exclusively on logic and not dependent on religion or personal beliefs.
For me, the actual television shows wouldn't matter. I don't watch broadcast or cable, I use my TV as a monitor for watching DVDs on.
I would love to have an HDTV so I could see more detail in the films I watch. I'm not interested in paying the ridiculous amounts of money that they cost right now, so it will probably be a few years before I have one.
Number of patents granted to NASA in 2002: 89
Number granted to IBM in 2002: 3,334
What was this about spinoffs again?
How about finding some statistics for how many patents were granted to companies working under contract for NASA, especially during an era like the 60s space race?
I'd check Microsoft themselves instead of relying on third party sites
That site was linked to from the MS security bulletin itself. I didn't see a way to find out the details of the vulnerability without leaving the MS site.
Isn't it funny how an exploit in NT 4.0 also appears on NT 5.x systems?
No, not really. If they weren't using NT code, why would they call it NT5.x, even internally?
I know... they should completely re-write their OS for every release! I'm sure that would make it more secure =P.
Everyone knows not to use windows products until after at least 1 service pack, this is an old problem that was fixed with service pack 1.
Uh... what?
Buffer overflow in certain Active Directory service functions in LSASRV.DLL of the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) in Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP6a, 2000 SP2 through SP4, XP SP1, Server 2003, NetMeeting, Windows 98, and Windows ME, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by causing long debug entries to be generated for the DCPROMO.LOG log file. (emphasis mine)
Why you are content to use a broken system, I do not know.
Yeah, no kidding. This isn't a problem with Windows, it's a problem with a screwed-up installation.
We have a little over 11,000 Win2k Pro machines in use at the company I work for, and they are patched regularly. 95-99% of the time there is no problem with the patches, and when there is it has *always* been because the user has done something bad to their machine, like install dubious IE toolbars and decrepit Sumerian-era applications that replace modern DLL and OCX files with ones that were coded in cuneiform.
It's just as possible for a Linux, Mac, etc., workstation to get in a bad state. At an old job years ago we had a Linux web/mail server that the previous sysadmin had set up, and when I tried to run X on it I got a blank screen with a cursor and no windows or other controls. Does that mean Linux is unreliable? No, it means that that particular Linux machine was in a bad state.
Looks like they just cut and pasted that page.
Do you create all your HTML documents from scratch?
This worm release is pretty cool, I think. This is the first time I've got to see the patch deployment process I built with a couple of other people from my group send out patches to the entire company and get pretty much everybody taken care of before the worm was released. We built it from SMS SUS and a bunch of in-house components. 11,000 workstations across the country patched in less than a week, and we could have done it even faster in an emergency.
Regular SUS took care of our servers a week ago.
I believe the actual court cases extend fair use to the purposes to time- and space-shifting (i.e. recording something off the air for later viewing or copying something you legally own to a new format, e.g. from CD to tape, for your own use).
Mod parent up. I was just about to write the same thing.
The Supreme Court decision on home videotaping *only* covers time-shifting for non-archival purposes. They never made a ruling that allows you to tape something off of a broadcast and use it instead of buying a copy of the commercial release.
The grandparent post that compares time shifting of a television program to taping a concert is flawed on a number of levels. One of the most important is that concerts take place on private property. The owner of that property has the right to set whatever limits they like on audio and video taping, including banning them completely.
Good link, check out this one [wreckedexotics.com]. Hummer ought to put that in their ads, somehow I think this is really the appeal after all.
Actually, I doubt it is.
That Hummer is in relatively good shape because the collision was obviously at a low enough speed that it never made it all the way over the other car.
When I was at university, I saw what happens when an SUV does that same head-on collision at high speed - it uses the other car as a ramp, and does a sideways roll onto its roof, like you see stunt cars do in films.
The SUV I saw use a BMW James Bond car as a ramp ended up with its roof crushed in completely and the driver dead. The driver of the BMW walked away.
"Tired of our dreary, repressive society?
Start an exciting new life on the outer planets!"
Let's go... to the colonies! *
* This message brought to you by the Shimada-Dominguez Corporation.
Boeing actually tested the waters by announcing a supersonic jetliner [geocrawler.com] that would have a reduced sonic boom.
The Sonic Cruiser was a subsonic plane, it was never intended to be supersonic. It was going to fly at something like 90-95% of the speed of sound, and cut an hour or two off of intercontinental flights.
I wish they'd built it just so we could have planes that look like they belong in the 21st century at our airports.
I think I'll start a Christian industrial band. It will be my keyboard, drum machine, Jesus, and I making music together.
It's already been done. The oldest one I know of is Argyle Park, who put out the album Misguided with the classic tune "Misanthrope." Sadly it is the only good tune on the CD.
I am agnostic, but I grew up in a Christian family and I fully agree with you about the music and other products. I think it is much more productive to sell products made in a way that supports your beliefs, rather than trying to trumpet them to the world.
e.g. I am vegan, so I wear boots from Vegetarian Shoes, but you wouldn't know it unless you looked at the little tags on the back (or asked me). By comparison, the "Christian Music" equivalent would be to have "VEGAN" in giant block letters running up the sides. It would make a statement, but it would also be pretty dorky.
Evanescence, I think, is a good example of a band of Christians who got it right. They make good music, and if someone wants to know more about what they believe, so be it.
Hmm...for about $31K...you can get a '93-'94 Viper....that's what I'm in the market for. Better looking and MUCH more powerful....
Are you kidding? The DeLorean is the only decent-looking American car produced between 1969 and a few years ago, and that's only because it was designed by an Italian.
Also, what is the deal with hating Rick Berman? He worked on part of TNG, DS9, Voyager, and now Enterprise.
Berman and Braga's worst aspect is that they are the ones who introduced the story style where the crew solves problems by recalibrating the phase inducers to produce a modulated deus ex machina-tron wave instead of coming up with a real plot.
Berman also earns special points because it was *his* idea to move to new (e.g. non-TNG) character-based series like DS9. Why? Because he doesn't make as much money when he uses characters invented by Roddenberry.
DS9 and Voyager had some good points. I even liked the Borg episodes of Voyager unlike a lot of critics of that series (although I hated pretty much all of the rest of it).
Enterprise and Nemesis are just awful. They are concentrated forms of the Berman/Braga badness. Their only appeal is the "oh! they'd never [drive dune buggies with laser machine guns/have the crew eating meat and gloating over it to the Vulcan chick/have an "adult" scene with the Vulcan chick and some other guy soaping each other up] on the *old* Star Trek!" factor, which is stupid.
Star Trek used to be fun because it painted a picture of interesting people in interesting situations. Now it's just an exercise in Berman and Braga mining another old episode for ideas and screwing up the continuity.
I agree with the other posters that you seem to be a little confused about the speed of light. When people refer to "the speed of light," they generally mean "the speed of light in a vacuum," which is a constant, and cannot be exceeded except by theoretical particles like tachyons.
In some media, like water, the speed of light is slower. In fact, in water it is slow enough that when you put control rods from a reactor into it, they emit particles that exceed the speed of light *in water* (but not the speed of light in a vacuum), and you get the blue Cherenkov glow.
This doesn't mean that the speed of light in a vacuum is an average, or that regular particles can exceed it.
I read a little further in TEU and it discusses how quantum physics explains the two-slit experiment. There are two ways of thinking about it, and they both generate the same results.
One is that the photons (or electrons, or whatever) are represented by probability waves (or "wave functions") rather than discreet particles, and they can cause interference with themselves that way.
The other is that each particle takes every possible path on its way to its destination, but the less probable ones end up cancelling each other out and all you're left with is the one that actually happened, or something like that (which is what Feynman came up with). I'm a little fuzzier on this one.
It's only weird if you think that photons are individual physical things which move from the projector to the wall.
Since there is no evidence that this is the case and there is plenty of evidence that light is a wave propogated through a medium (reference this very experiment which also works with any other kind of wave) you can see how this would not be weird at all.
No, it's still weird.
To have interference in a wave experiment like you describe (e.g. with waves in water), you need two waves to interfere with each other.
The two-slit experiment shows that a single photon will act as though there's interference even when there isn't another one out there for it to interfere with.
You know the two-slit experiment? Well, its just like that
-- standard explanation for weird quantum things when you don't know the right answer.
I was just reading about that last night in The Elegant Universe.
For those who haven't heard of it before, here's the experiment:
- take a wall with light shining on it from a projector.
- place a board in-between the wall and the projector that interrupts the beam of light. The board should have two vertical slits cut in it, which can be opened and closed independently of each other.
If you open just the left one, you get a vertical bar of light on the wall.
If you open just the right one, you also get a vertical bar of light on the wall, offset from the one that was there with the left one open.
Now, intuitively you would think that if you opened both at once, you would just get two vertical bars of light, but you don't. Wave interference means you get a whole bunch of light and dark vertical bars on the wall.
Here's the spooky quantum-mechanical part - the same interference effect happens even if the projector is designed to only emit one photon at a time, then wait until it has hit the wall (or the board) before sending another. You will still get the bands of dark and light.
Pretty weird, eh?
Okay, this is a serious pet peeve. Fark is not a word, never was, never will be, STOP USING IT unless you want to be placed in the same category as lusers who make the Vulcan "V" sign.
Farscape was a TV show, not "reality", and the only reason the word was "invented" was because Scifi didn't want the rating level increase that would come with characters actually properly swearing. If you're gonna swear, swear properly.
You know, SuperBanana, there are plenty of decaffeinated brands that are just as tasty as the real thing.
Is the case that comes with the iHP players leather, or something synthetic but leather-like? I would like to get one, especially since the support for the Karma seems to be pretty abysmal, but I don't buy leather products.
I think that's a horrible example. The restored Jabba scene was one of the worst things that happened to the "improved" ANH.
I'm not saying he should stick them back in. I just want to see them in a seperate deleted scenes section. Most of them I can only assume weren't finished anyway, so they wouldn't fit into the actual films.
Is it just me, or was there a disturbing lack of deleted scenes being mentioned in that article?
When I buy the trilogy on DVD, I want the section from ANH with Biggs on Tatooine. I want the bits of the expanded snow monster things in the base on Hoth, and the shots of Lando on the outside of the Millennium Falcon rescuing Luke in ESB. I want the escape to the Falcon from Jabba's palace and the scenes on the *other* command ship at the battle of Endor in ROTJ.
Don't tell me you don't have them, Lucas, because I've seen them for sale on bootleg VHS tapes. If you can restore the Jabba scene in ANH, you can do those too.
Since most of these massive bodies are relatively spherical, wouldn't the "curve" around the entire sphere cancel itself out since the same curve on the other side of the sphere would be the same but 180 degrees opposite?
No, because the curves are in different places. A bowling ball on a trampoline doesn't *not* distort the trampoline just because it's spherical, and space-time is the same way.
Of course, the trampoline analogy is a little flawed, because space-time is represented as a 2D plane instead of a 3D volume. It's kind of hard to visualize the distortion in 3D, though.