To top off their audacity, they then threaten a lawsuit against the researcher who alerted the public to this fraud. This is completely ridiculous. What next, a medical researcher's tests prove that Quack Corp.'s Snake Oil does not really enlarge your penis, so the researcher is sent to prison?
Funny you should mention that. From page 100 of Naomi Klein's No Logo:
Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a world-renowned scientist and expert on the blood disorder thalassemia, entered into a research contract with the drug-company giant Apotex. The company wanted Olivieri to test the effectiveness of the drug deferiprone on her young patients suffering from thalassemia major. When Olivieri found evidence that, in some cases, the drug might have life-threatening side effects, she wanted to warn the patients participating in the trial and to alert other doctors in the field. Apotex pulled the plug on the study and threatened to sue Olivieri if she went public, pointing to an overlooked clause in the research contract that gave it the right to suppress findings for one year after the trials ended.
Great. Now I'm going to be sued either by that drug company or by the publishers of the book for copyright breach...
I'll be seriously impressed when someone writes a "Hello, World" program that converts to an audio file of them saying "Hello, World." Any takers?:)
It probably wouldn't be that hard... You'd have code to say "Hello world" in plain text and quit, ignoring anything after that point. That'd only take a few bytes and barely be perceptible on speakers. Then you'd just have the data of someone saying "Hello world" as raw PCM audio. It wouldn't play as a.wav or.aiff file as those store special information at the beginning saying what the bitrate is, but you'd be able to save it as a raw audio file and tell someone the kHz and if it's 8-bit or 16-bit audio, and they'd hear ":squeak: Hello, World."
Comes in 3D with integrated surround sound and both voice and tactile command recognition.
You managed to get real life to execute a command via voice recognition? How'd you manage that? I can only use the voice recognition to talk to other people.
I am Neo from the Nebuchadnezzar. Go and tell the Merovingian that if he will give us food from his restaurant, he can join us in our quest for the keymaker.
I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen. Err, he's already got one, you see?
Sequels are generally bad, yes (Terminator 2 aside), but this was always meant to be a trilogy. There's a difference.
Watch the first one again and notice the subtle shot of the architect's video wall just before Smith interrogates Neo. Watch the second one and notice the nearly-as-subtle shot of someone being taken through the restaurant, who's going to feature more prominently in the third film. They're more interwoven than you think.
The first one introduces the characters. The second puts them in a bad place. The third one gets them out of it. that's a trilogy, not a good film with two poor sequels.
When you rent a movie, it's spelled out for you in that FBI warning what you can and cannot do with a movie. You can't show it publically, for example. (I remember noticing that in grade school on a rainy day when they decided to show us Star Wars.) CD's have no such warning.
There's two ways to view things like this. Either as a tool to enhance something (if you can't sing, for example), which is the intended use... Or to be used as an instrument in its own right.
The latter gets my vote a lot more. Before you get upset and hope it never takes off, just think: Mellotrons haven't replaced orchestras, drum machines haven't replaced drummers, and samplers haven't replaced every other instrument in the history of time. They all sound good in their own right, not as clones of other things.
Nearly. It was a vocoder, but the end effect is very similar. The main practical difference is that vocoders can be used to make anything sound in pitch, and even let people sing chords rather than single notes. That and they've been around far longer. Hmm, maybe I should submit them as a new technology for a Slashdot article...
The simspsons was geared a lot towards children usually, where I always felt Futurama was more for adults (Any one remember the death by snu-snu joke in the amazon woman episode?)
By adults, do you mean Kevin-Smith-fan-type adults?
Maybe one day we can have international power lines where all the countries with lots of sunshine provide power to the rest of the world?
I somehow doubt they could afford the high prices. These would be the countries with people that can afford to eat "real meat" (fast food) only once a week.
If the Australian government starts to use free software, it definately won't be on America's good side. They oppose it and anyone who supports it as much as they opposed communism in the fifties. Why? Because both posed a threat to the multinationals that reside there.
Picture MP3 only you don't have to pay royalties and it sounds better. Actually, I heard it's more similar to ATRAC, the audio encoding format used by Sony.
Using "I might want to copy it to a friend" as an argument for being able to buy the songs in a lossless format won't exactly help..
True. Many of the albums I own are because people copied single tracks from them to me (I think I bought three Tribe 8 albums on the basis of two of their songs once, which someone anonymously FTP'd to me). I don't expect companies to understand this though, what with them usually being geared to much shorter term goals.
Personally I really like the idea of buying non-tangible music online, with no queueing, no stores being closed due to the time of day, no having to wait for something to arrive in the mail and no wasted CDs being produced that no one will buy, ending up on a landfill somewhere.
I'd only buy such music in practice though, if it's distributed in a lossless format (.wav,.aiff, FLAC, whatever), because I might want to encode it to mp3 to listen to on a personal player, or Vorbis to copy it to a friend online and so on.
Developed countries SELL!
Developed countries BUY!
Developing countries make.
There's many examples given by people like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. From No Logo:
...I ment a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers."
Slashdot Mirror
To top off their audacity, they then threaten a lawsuit against the researcher who alerted the public to this fraud. This is completely ridiculous. What next, a medical researcher's tests prove that Quack Corp.'s Snake Oil does not really enlarge your penis, so the researcher is sent to prison?
Funny you should mention that. From page 100 of Naomi Klein's No Logo:
Great. Now I'm going to be sued either by that drug company or by the publishers of the book for copyright breach...
I'll be seriously impressed when someone writes a "Hello, World" program that converts to an audio file of them saying "Hello, World." Any takers? :)
It probably wouldn't be that hard... You'd have code to say "Hello world" in plain text and quit, ignoring anything after that point. That'd only take a few bytes and barely be perceptible on speakers. Then you'd just have the data of someone saying "Hello world" as raw PCM audio. It wouldn't play as a .wav or .aiff file as those store special information at the beginning saying what the bitrate is, but you'd be able to save it as a raw audio file and tell someone the kHz and if it's 8-bit or 16-bit audio, and they'd hear ":squeak: Hello, World."
Kinda like Paul Durham talking to eir djinn.
Comes in 3D with integrated surround sound and both voice and tactile command recognition.
You managed to get real life to execute a command via voice recognition? How'd you manage that? I can only use the voice recognition to talk to other people.
I am Neo from the Nebuchadnezzar. Go and tell the Merovingian that if he will give us food from his restaurant, he can join us in our quest for the keymaker.
I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen. Err, he's already got one, you see?
Sequels are generally bad, yes (Terminator 2 aside), but this was always meant to be a trilogy. There's a difference.
Watch the first one again and notice the subtle shot of the architect's video wall just before Smith interrogates Neo. Watch the second one and notice the nearly-as-subtle shot of someone being taken through the restaurant, who's going to feature more prominently in the third film. They're more interwoven than you think.
The first one introduces the characters. The second puts them in a bad place. The third one gets them out of it. that's a trilogy, not a good film with two poor sequels.
When you rent a movie, it's spelled out for you in that FBI warning what you can and cannot do with a movie. You can't show it publically, for example. (I remember noticing that in grade school on a rainy day when they decided to show us Star Wars.) CD's have no such warning.
Oh no, I can picture the track listings now...
They knew CDs were too high. It's just they thought that they could get away with it until now.
Business isn't about selling at a price consumers want to pay; it's about selling at a price that consumers just about will pay.
It'd be bad if everyone could patent software. It'd be even worse if some people could, and others couldn't, based on which country they live in.
There's two ways to view things like this. Either as a tool to enhance something (if you can't sing, for example), which is the intended use... Or to be used as an instrument in its own right.
The latter gets my vote a lot more. Before you get upset and hope it never takes off, just think: Mellotrons haven't replaced orchestras, drum machines haven't replaced drummers, and samplers haven't replaced every other instrument in the history of time. They all sound good in their own right, not as clones of other things.
Cher really abused it on that "Believe" song.
Nearly. It was a vocoder, but the end effect is very similar. The main practical difference is that vocoders can be used to make anything sound in pitch, and even let people sing chords rather than single notes. That and they've been around far longer. Hmm, maybe I should submit them as a new technology for a Slashdot article...
Here's a Sound on Sound review of the DirectX plug-in version of Antares Auto-Tune... Dated August 2000.
There are still other reasons to boycott Gillette, of course.
This is one of the best finds I've come across on ye olde Usenet.
OK, I'm going to be slightly off topic, but there are a whole heap of interesting olde Usenet posts.
The simspsons was geared a lot towards children usually, where I always felt Futurama was more for adults (Any one remember the death by snu-snu joke in the amazon woman episode?)
By adults, do you mean Kevin-Smith-fan-type adults?
Most file traders don't care about copyright!
In other news, most religious people believe in some sort of soul, and most prisoners have committed a crime.
I somehow doubt they could afford the high prices. These would be the countries with people that can afford to eat "real meat" (fast food) only once a week.
If you want to wave your arms around to make music, you still can't beet a Theremin.
OK everyone, throw away your Prophet 5s, your DX7s, TB-303s, Jupiter 8s and TR-909s. This has made them all obsolete.
If the Australian government starts to use free software, it definately won't be on America's good side. They oppose it and anyone who supports it as much as they opposed communism in the fifties. Why? Because both posed a threat to the multinationals that reside there.
I think they're supported via donations and merchandise. I must say I'm tempted...
Picture MP3 only you don't have to pay royalties and it sounds better. Actually, I heard it's more similar to ATRAC, the audio encoding format used by Sony.
But will it support MP3?
No, wait, that's the other way around...
Using "I might want to copy it to a friend" as an argument for being able to buy the songs in a lossless format won't exactly help..
True. Many of the albums I own are because people copied single tracks from them to me (I think I bought three Tribe 8 albums on the basis of two of their songs once, which someone anonymously FTP'd to me). I don't expect companies to understand this though, what with them usually being geared to much shorter term goals.
Free music! (in both senses of the phrase)
Personally I really like the idea of buying non-tangible music online, with no queueing, no stores being closed due to the time of day, no having to wait for something to arrive in the mail and no wasted CDs being produced that no one will buy, ending up on a landfill somewhere.
I'd only buy such music in practice though, if it's distributed in a lossless format (.wav, .aiff, FLAC, whatever), because I might want to encode it to mp3 to listen to on a personal player, or Vorbis to copy it to a friend online and so on.
Developed countries SELL!
Developed countries BUY!
Developing countries make.
There's many examples given by people like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. From No Logo: