Leaving conspiracy theories aside for a second, isn't it just as interesting and worth commenting on that several American military administrator users that are accessible over the internet aren't password protected, or that the same government is trying to throw this person in jail for sixty years for using these accounts, double what you'd get in the UK (the hacker's own country) for murder?
I'd personally love to see the version of Star Wars episode 4 that George Lucas showed to his friends before it had the music and special effects in it. For comedy value alone, it'd be great to hear someone shout "bang!" when Tarkin destroys a planet, hear Chewbacca proclaim "that old man's mad!" instead of growling, hear the voice of the person who played Darth Vader's body, as well as seeing all the cardboard cutout stormtroopers.
No doubt many other people are going to write in talking about "fat americans" being the problem - and its true that nutrition in America is a serious problem, but the comparison is to England, so not the cause of the differences.
While I agree that obesity is unlikely to be the sole cause, it does sound like more of a problem in the USA than the UK. The article you link to states:
[In] 1998, [the number of obese people in England] had almost trebled to 21% of women and 17% of men.
A further 32% of women and 46% of men are overweight, meaning that most people in England (58%) are now either fat or obese.
This is still quite a bit less than in the USA, as pointed out by the same source, BBC News:
In the past year, the adult obesity rate rose in 48 of America's states, and nationally from 23.7% to 24.5%, Trust for America's Health found.
Currently, about 119 million, or 64.5%, of US adults are either overweight or obese.
There is, however, a four year lag between those articles being written, which may account for some of the difference. This is clearly a growing concern in both countries.
Time Warner. They bought AOL and never looked forward since.
Yep. This is the same Time Warner that bought Atari, then got upset when the people working there claimed the 2600 wouldn't last forever and that they were already working on it successor. Time Warner is a rich company with no knowledge of how technology works. They just buy out other companies that seem like fashionable cash cows at the time.
So if this catchy phrase takes off, free software will use three separate definitions of the word free - no price, freedom and not containing something. Yeah, that should make things clearer.
Egghead professor-type gets sucked into something Really Important To the World (tm) with the help of a very intelligent woman who happens to be an expert in the Really Important Thing (tm) but STILL needs him to explain everything to her anyway. While they try to make it to the end of the book they are pursued by a merciless killer who wants to bump them off before they discover the Big Secret (tm). Did I forget anything?
In Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code (and the upcoming third book in the series), the egghead professor-type isn't just an expert in any old thing, but that which makes merciless killers drop to their knees in terror: art history and symbology! Clearly, before you try to save the world, you'd better brush up on what ancient artists were saying between the lines.
Not that any of this stops the books from being very good fun to read. And they'd have made great interactive fiction, I suspect.
What makes a game good is gameplay. What makes a film good is plot. The two have nothing to do with one another. Hence running around hitting your head on blocks, avoiding turtles and eating magic mushrooms makes a very fun game, but a lousy film. Conversely, many films have been licensed to make bad games (such as ET on the Atari 2600).
Ever since the seperation of style and content via CSS, the web has been moving much faster towards the goal of being equally well rendered in every medium. This is why you should measure fonts in ems rather than pixels, and measure other elements in percentages or ems. That way, your site will look just as good on a projector as it will on a mobile phone. With a move to liquid layouts and SVG, and a lack of references to pixels, the devices the webpage will be rendered on should become completely irrelevant to web developers.
From chapter six of the book Analog Days, talking about the album In a Wild Sanctuary:
One of their new techniques, used on a track called "Spaced," was quickly copied by a famous Marin County film company and became a standard in movie theatres. It is played right at the start of the show: a distant note seems to get closer and closer to the listener before splitting into a tumultuous eight-note chord.
All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
Well, when you put it like that it sounds like such a waste that we take this technology for granted and squander it so much. On a similar note, I still can't believe that we actually have geostationary satellites, or that we mainly use them to watch television.
The original game was already beautiful, with stunning animation (achieved by rotoscoping, soon to become popular again when A Scanner Darkly comes out). It was really quite amazing considering it was all "conceived, written, programmed, drawn, and rendered by one individual" (see the Wikipedia link). This looks like an update that actually stays true to the original, making it closer to what its creator originally wanted to make had the technology existed at the time, only with a slightly slicker look. Let's hope it is as good as it looks.
The internet has become (in my opinion, at least) one of the greatest inventions of mankind. EVER. Because of Tim Berners-Lee's refusal to privatize or commercialize the internet.
Just to clarify, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, not the Internet, which it runs on. Thankfully, the Internet is also open to anyone who wants to have access to it and contribute to it, be it in the form of e-mail, IRC, or that old medium of free speech, USENET. And you're right: that's the way it should be, and it has gone a long way to showing oppressed people a glimpse of freedom.
This keeps coming up. Note that the writers aren't calling CDs analog, but rather comparing the physical media of CDs to (digital) downloads which are delivered absent of a physical media.
So because CDs contain digital data that haven't freed themselves from the shackles of a tangible medium, they don't have the right to be called digital? It's surely going to confuse the public into thinking that CDs are analogue if the press constantly refers to them in terms of being opposed to digital media. Why not just call downloaded music "downloads" instead of "digital"? That way, you can refer to them as something which the rival format isn't.
"Porn for women" has been around as long and been more widely available than "porn for men", yet no one complains, does studies, or even talks about it. But, that is ok because porn for women isn't pictures, it is words. And, we all know that reading books and stories doesn't effect the thoughts and minds of people unless there are pictures, right?
Interesting point. I guess the difference is that if you're reading a book with no pictures in it, you're probably considered emotionally old enough to handle the content in a mature and responsible manner.
Incidently, this is pretty similar to an article on E2 I was reading today, about how books are rarely censored compared to films, games and so on (a good case in point is that the book Fight Club teaches you how to make bombs; the film version was edited to take out a few of the necessary steps).
Really, portable music players that use lossy codecs are only designed to play finished songs. If you want to record bits of solo work and glue them together, you should save them in a lossless format such as.aif, and copy them across to your fellow group members by putting them onto a portable drive (such as the iPod can be, but there are better ones that aren't also music players) as regular files rather than as songs they should play.
Unless you just want to listen to each other's noodlings as they are, without futher modification, in which case, you can put your iPod in any computer running OS X, close iTunes back down when it automatically pops up, go into the Terminal, cd on over to/Volumes/[The name of your iPod] and cp the files across.
I know plenty of people who use itunes, but none who use realplayer. Still, both are irritating adware & nagware
Um, which iTunes adverts are you referring to? There's no version that requires payment that they try to nag you to buy. If you're talking about the MiniStore, try going to Edit > Hide MiniStore (this may be different in Windows; I'm using OS X).
Wendy Carlos soundtrack
on
The Story of Tron
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Something the article doesn't mention is that Tron also had a futuristic soundtrack by Wendy Carlos, the same woman who composed (at least, she composed the song Timesteps) and performed the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.
You can rip and encode them to any format without transcoding if they become obsolete
There's no DRM on real, unsabotaged CDs
They're even more universally accepted by media players than MP3s, let alone any other codecs
Pros of audio files:
They can't get scratched or fall apart after ten years
You don't need to buy more shelves as your record collection grows
While I usually rip my CDs to AAC as soon as I get them, I still always buy my music on audio CDs so that if I like the album, I can always re-rip it whenever the previous codec I encoded it with gets surpassed by a more efficient one, and so that if I dislike the album, I can delete the copy I made and sell it second hand. I also buy a lot of albums second hand, something which is a bit of a grey area with legally downloaded DRM-encumbered audio files right now. If the audio CD dies as a medium, it will probably be a lot better for the environment, but a lot worse for the second hand market until companies either improve DRM or give up on it altogether.
French = Freedom. I think that's already been established by the US Congress.
That's the reason US eateries serve "freedom" fries instead of French fries now? I did wonder... That sounds a bit petty though. Let's hope France doesn't take back the statue of liberty in retaliation!
If these online video stores end up becoming popular enough to supplant TV distribution, fair use is screwed. These videos are DRM encumbered, and breaking that protection is against the law.
True, but how is that different from DVDs (some of which won't even let you skip the adverts at the beginning unless you are using an illegal player), or the direction digital TV broadcasts are headed? I'm guessing that soon, there won't be any (legal) unencrypted video files or streams at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving conspiracy theories aside for a second, isn't it just as interesting and worth commenting on that several American military administrator users that are accessible over the internet aren't password protected, or that the same government is trying to throw this person in jail for sixty years for using these accounts, double what you'd get in the UK (the hacker's own country) for murder?
I'd personally love to see the version of Star Wars episode 4 that George Lucas showed to his friends before it had the music and special effects in it. For comedy value alone, it'd be great to hear someone shout "bang!" when Tarkin destroys a planet, hear Chewbacca proclaim "that old man's mad!" instead of growling, hear the voice of the person who played Darth Vader's body, as well as seeing all the cardboard cutout stormtroopers.
What does Lucasfilm have that so few movies today lack? Timelessness
Yep, Star Wars Holiday Special makes people cringe just as much today as it did when it first aired.
2 Trillion US Dollars... [is] in short more important than anything.
Not quite, it's second to someone's phone bill.
No doubt many other people are going to write in talking about "fat americans" being the problem - and its true that nutrition in America is a serious problem, but the comparison is to England, so not the cause of the differences.
While I agree that obesity is unlikely to be the sole cause, it does sound like more of a problem in the USA than the UK. The article you link to states:
This is still quite a bit less than in the USA, as pointed out by the same source, BBC News:
There is, however, a four year lag between those articles being written, which may account for some of the difference. This is clearly a growing concern in both countries.
Time Warner. They bought AOL and never looked forward since.
Yep. This is the same Time Warner that bought Atari, then got upset when the people working there claimed the 2600 wouldn't last forever and that they were already working on it successor. Time Warner is a rich company with no knowledge of how technology works. They just buy out other companies that seem like fashionable cash cows at the time.
So if this catchy phrase takes off, free software will use three separate definitions of the word free - no price, freedom and not containing something. Yeah, that should make things clearer.
Egghead professor-type gets sucked into something Really Important To the World (tm) with the help of a very intelligent woman who happens to be an expert in the Really Important Thing (tm) but STILL needs him to explain everything to her anyway. While they try to make it to the end of the book they are pursued by a merciless killer who wants to bump them off before they discover the Big Secret (tm). Did I forget anything?
In Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code (and the upcoming third book in the series), the egghead professor-type isn't just an expert in any old thing, but that which makes merciless killers drop to their knees in terror: art history and symbology! Clearly, before you try to save the world, you'd better brush up on what ancient artists were saying between the lines.
Not that any of this stops the books from being very good fun to read. And they'd have made great interactive fiction, I suspect.
What makes a game good is gameplay. What makes a film good is plot. The two have nothing to do with one another. Hence running around hitting your head on blocks, avoiding turtles and eating magic mushrooms makes a very fun game, but a lousy film. Conversely, many films have been licensed to make bad games (such as ET on the Atari 2600).
Ever since the seperation of style and content via CSS, the web has been moving much faster towards the goal of being equally well rendered in every medium. This is why you should measure fonts in ems rather than pixels, and measure other elements in percentages or ems. That way, your site will look just as good on a projector as it will on a mobile phone. With a move to liquid layouts and SVG, and a lack of references to pixels, the devices the webpage will be rendered on should become completely irrelevant to web developers.
From chapter six of the book Analog Days, talking about the album In a Wild Sanctuary:
All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
Well, when you put it like that it sounds like such a waste that we take this technology for granted and squander it so much. On a similar note, I still can't believe that we actually have geostationary satellites, or that we mainly use them to watch television.
The original game was already beautiful, with stunning animation (achieved by rotoscoping, soon to become popular again when A Scanner Darkly comes out). It was really quite amazing considering it was all "conceived, written, programmed, drawn, and rendered by one individual" (see the Wikipedia link). This looks like an update that actually stays true to the original, making it closer to what its creator originally wanted to make had the technology existed at the time, only with a slightly slicker look. Let's hope it is as good as it looks.
Apple needs to... support a true Mac virtualisation application.
Like the rumoured Chameleon virtualisation application?
Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?
Nature's already working on that.
The internet has become (in my opinion, at least) one of the greatest inventions of mankind. EVER. Because of Tim Berners-Lee's refusal to privatize or commercialize the internet.
Just to clarify, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, not the Internet, which it runs on. Thankfully, the Internet is also open to anyone who wants to have access to it and contribute to it, be it in the form of e-mail, IRC, or that old medium of free speech, USENET. And you're right: that's the way it should be, and it has gone a long way to showing oppressed people a glimpse of freedom.
This keeps coming up. Note that the writers aren't calling CDs analog, but rather comparing the physical media of CDs to (digital) downloads which are delivered absent of a physical media.
So because CDs contain digital data that haven't freed themselves from the shackles of a tangible medium, they don't have the right to be called digital? It's surely going to confuse the public into thinking that CDs are analogue if the press constantly refers to them in terms of being opposed to digital media. Why not just call downloaded music "downloads" instead of "digital"? That way, you can refer to them as something which the rival format isn't.
"Porn for women" has been around as long and been more widely available than "porn for men", yet no one complains, does studies, or even talks about it. But, that is ok because porn for women isn't pictures, it is words. And, we all know that reading books and stories doesn't effect the thoughts and minds of people unless there are pictures, right?
Interesting point. I guess the difference is that if you're reading a book with no pictures in it, you're probably considered emotionally old enough to handle the content in a mature and responsible manner.
Incidently, this is pretty similar to an article on E2 I was reading today, about how books are rarely censored compared to films, games and so on (a good case in point is that the book Fight Club teaches you how to make bombs; the film version was edited to take out a few of the necessary steps).
Really, portable music players that use lossy codecs are only designed to play finished songs. If you want to record bits of solo work and glue them together, you should save them in a lossless format such as .aif, and copy them across to your fellow group members by putting them onto a portable drive (such as the iPod can be, but there are better ones that aren't also music players) as regular files rather than as songs they should play.
Unless you just want to listen to each other's noodlings as they are, without futher modification, in which case, you can put your iPod in any computer running OS X, close iTunes back down when it automatically pops up, go into the Terminal, cd on over to /Volumes/[The name of your iPod] and cp the files across.
I know plenty of people who use itunes, but none who use realplayer. Still, both are irritating adware & nagware
Um, which iTunes adverts are you referring to? There's no version that requires payment that they try to nag you to buy. If you're talking about the MiniStore, try going to Edit > Hide MiniStore (this may be different in Windows; I'm using OS X).
Something the article doesn't mention is that Tron also had a futuristic soundtrack by Wendy Carlos, the same woman who composed (at least, she composed the song Timesteps) and performed the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.
Pros of CDs:
Pros of audio files:
While I usually rip my CDs to AAC as soon as I get them, I still always buy my music on audio CDs so that if I like the album, I can always re-rip it whenever the previous codec I encoded it with gets surpassed by a more efficient one, and so that if I dislike the album, I can delete the copy I made and sell it second hand. I also buy a lot of albums second hand, something which is a bit of a grey area with legally downloaded DRM-encumbered audio files right now. If the audio CD dies as a medium, it will probably be a lot better for the environment, but a lot worse for the second hand market until companies either improve DRM or give up on it altogether.
French = Freedom. I think that's already been established by the US Congress.
That's the reason US eateries serve "freedom" fries instead of French fries now? I did wonder... That sounds a bit petty though. Let's hope France doesn't take back the statue of liberty in retaliation!
Where is the Google map of the Universe? I'd like to go to the "Restaurant at the end of the Universe".
Is the answer to life, the universe and everything close enough?
If these online video stores end up becoming popular enough to supplant TV distribution, fair use is screwed. These videos are DRM encumbered, and breaking that protection is against the law.
True, but how is that different from DVDs (some of which won't even let you skip the adverts at the beginning unless you are using an illegal player), or the direction digital TV broadcasts are headed? I'm guessing that soon, there won't be any (legal) unencrypted video files or streams at all.