Star Trek generally portrayed beings who took control of their own destinies and turned themselves into "superior" creations (although usually with some crucial failing) such as Khan Noonien Singh (Eugenics Wars), Sargon ("The mind of Man can become so powerful he confuses himself with God") or even Commander Data, who as a surrogate machine human created by a human, would be considered by some to be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder. It was rarely a game of chance with Roddenberry.
Before you even concern yourself about the quality of any modern consumer electronics product with a well-known name, find out if that name is still worthy of its history. Many of the former greats in audio reproduction have sold out to Chinese manufacturers, sold their names, their brands, and the respect they earned in the marketplace. Now they're nothing more than marketing fronts, shadows of their former selves.
Not all maggots are so selective... you have to be pretty specific in the variety.
From National Geographic:
Only a few species of fly larvae, primarily blowflies, are suitable for such duty. Five to ten maggots are placed on each square centimeter (0.2 square inch) of a wound, which is then covered with a protective dressing that allows the maggots to breath. For the next 48 to 72 hours, the maggots dissolve dead tissue by secreting digestive juices and then ingesting the liquefied tissue and bacteria. The maggots grow from about two millimeters (0.08 inch) to nearly ten millimeters (0.4 inch) while doing the doctor's dirty work.
I dunno. I think I'd have to be pretty screwed up to go for that.
A local movie house here gave me almost fifty minutes of commercials, and they weren't movie trailers or anything interesting. Much of it was not even film or video but a slide show of advertising from local businesses (used car dealerships and such) with a lame voiceover. Really torqued me into a pretzel. After that I began showing up about half an hour after starting time, as did a lot of other people. They cottoned on to that rather quickly, and then began varying the actual starting time of the movie.
So I stopped going there. But it just goes to show the mindset of the people running the entertainment industry today. I don't know if I believe the theater owner's complaints about how the studios don't leave them enough money from the ticket sales, and that they need the extra revenue from advertising and $5.00 bottles of water. However, even if it's true there's still something wrong.
She is OK as it turns out but it makes me mad to think the school was just an open playground for a shooter like this with only law enforcement able to stop him.
They did not stop him. He stopped himself, permanently, and the cops had no idea where he was even after he shot two people. Now, I'm not dinging the police here: believe me, I'm not. I have no reason to believe they mishandled the affair in any way and if they did, it will come out later. No, the cops can do only so much in cases like this, and they really have no way to prevent it from happening. All that they can do is try to limit the violence once it has begun, and then pick up the pieces afterwards.
In any event, you're absolutely correct: any unarmed population is a playground for a shooter. If a government chooses to remove firearms from the law-abiding population (regardless of whatever justifications, rationalizations or prevarications are made) it has made the decision to leave the physical defense of that population to law enforcement. That is a frightening state of affairs, for several reasons (not the least of which is the Second Amendment right to a defense against our own government.)
The reality of an unarmed populace is very different from what the (let's face it, largely duplicitous) gun control proponents will tell you. "We don't need guns," they say, "Let the police do their jobs." Sure... and if you happen to find yourself at the wrong end of a gun barrel, odds are there won't be a cop around to take care of you. If all the attacker wants is your wallet or your car, you might get out of it alive. If he wants you dead... you've had it. Doesn't hardly seem sporting, does it?
Personally, I don't own a gun. Haven't felt the need, and I'm not interested in sport shooting at this point. But I'll tell you this:, the time may come when I do need one, and if that happens I will have one, whether the guv'mint wants me to or not. My life is worth more to me than a stupid law, and no matter how hard we try to ban guns they'll always be available, for a price.
We all have the responsibility (and the right!) to defend ourselves and our loved ones from harm, which means we need to be at least as well-equipped as the bad guy. Heck, any honest cop will tell you flat out, he cannot be there to defend you. That's not his job, and even if that were his job, there aren't enough of him to go around.
Like most things of importance, if you want it done right you just have to do it yourself.
as if now all online video hosts will immediately use the technology to annoy their visitors in the maximum way possible.
All of them won't... but a lot of them will.
I have the feeling this won't matter much to Google/Youtube since, if nothing else, a good part of Google's popularity as a search engine has to do with their methodology for placing ads as much as it does search itself. It's unlikely that Google will make the mistake of annoying its viewers to the point where they stop visiting (since that would result in fewer eyeballs, and hence fewer paying customers.) Other sites... well, we'll see. When you give marketers power they didn't have before some of them will abuse it, until they figure out that visiting a Web site is a purely voluntary activity.
What novel was it where researchers found hidden messages from whoever created the Universe (God, aliens, whatever) when the value of Pi was calculated out to some enormous number of digits? I guess if we're ever going to find those messages we're just gonna have to bump the clock speeds up some more.
and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola.
I was a game programmer, back in the mid-eighties, and we did not subsist on doughnuts and any kind of "generic" cola. We drank only honest-to-God Mountain Dew and Jolt (all the sugar and twice the caffeine) Cola.
It's a matter of degree. CSS encryption, for example, really didn't have much impact on ordinary users of the DVD. The discs played and the encryption stopped the vast majority of people trying to copy the media using ordinary copy programs. Frankly, I believe that's all CSS was ever meant to achieve, and it did. They knew that sooner or later it would get broken and you know what? It was broken, and Joe Average still hasn't a clue how to copy that disc he just bought or rented so it's still doing its job. Many seem to count CSS as a failure the moment DVD Jon figured it out, but the fact of the matter is that CSS was a success and still is to this very day.
The problem is not so much the DRM (bad as it is) but that in their neverending quest to prevent copyright infringement (pardon me, "theft of their intellectual property") they've begun to deny legitimate purchasers of their product the ability to actually use that for which they plunked down good money. Oh, I'm sure Sony figured out well in advance that some number of purchasers would get screwed, but decided that the risk was acceptable. I guarantee it won't be acceptable to me, if I ever mistakenly happen to buy a Sony Pictures DVD.
This has got to run afoul of more than a few laws, and it sure as hell isn't a good way to run a business.
you pay, you get added crap. you *cough* and you get the movie without crap. interesting dilemma.
No dilemma. No dilemma at all. The only reason there isn't more downloading going on is because there aren't more people that know how to do it. I mean, my goodness, if everyone that had a broadband connection knew how to install a BitTorrentclient, head over to TorrentSpy or Mininova or The Pirate Bay and download stuff and knew about codecguide.com's Codec Packs so they could play all that media without any problems on their Windows boxes, why, I think we'd see a lot more people watching crap-free entertainment.
You see, these are people that have long been accustomed to selling whatever they please, because they knew we had no choice but to accept it no matter how they chose to present it. If we wanted a movie, we took whatever they threw at us. That's changed, for now, and lawsuits, the DMCA and the rest aside, I don't think they've fully come to grips with that.
don't you love it, when you but a DVD, you get all the bonus commercials you HAVE to see before you can start the movie?
I've bought a lot of DVDs over the past eight or nine years. Lots of them. I like movies, I do. But I have to say, watching purchased DVDs has become similar to the experience I get at the local movie house: i.e., disappointing and not what it used to be. And both groups complain that sales are down. Cripes, what does it take to give these people a clue? The media companies dis their customers when those customers have alternate means of receiving their products (in this case, means that provide no revenue) and they expect sales to increase? Give me a break.
It would surprise me if Sony executives ever got down from their ivory towers (or whatever the obviously isolated spot where they store their upper management) and spoke directly with typical consumers of their products to see what, if anything, said people like about Sony products. Oh, I'm sure Sony's marketing drones have plenty of "focus groups" and "surveys" and all the rest of the trappings of modern marketeering... but they don't seem to be paying much attention upstairs.
Media Marketing Rule #1 should be "if the customer BUYS THE DISC it should PLAY."
This is not rocket science. This is about good business. It's about continuing to have a business.
Yes, well, in the U.S. at least we'll probably have to wait until we can get in that new President and Congress we ordered. The current ones are malfunctioning and in need of replacement.
I have an old Apex model that I'll never get rid of for the same reason (it's the one that has the hidden menu that allows you to turn off all the protection features, including Macrovision on the analog outs.) Even plays discs full of MP3s, which was pretty impressive eight years ago. And yeah, the thing is huge by modern standards, that's for sure, but it's built like a brick outhouse. Of course, that was back before Apex went to crap like most Chinese brands seem to, eventually.
I had read about the hidden menu in an online article the night before I went to Circuit City to buy it. I took it home and it worked like a charm, even made some perfect VHS recordings just to prove I could do it. I then read that the MPAA had threatened Apex with termination of their DVD license if they didn't remove that menu. The very next day the new ones with the "fixed" firmware arrived: I know because my old supervisor tried to get one but none of the ones they had available had the hidden feature anymore.
... have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players.
Windows, for example, has many similar features, although most of us call them "bugs" or "exploits". But sure, if Sony wants to call a complete functional failure a "feature", that's okay by me.
Yes and no. I'm a touch-typist myself (although I failed typing back in high school... Mrs. Roberts never did like me anyway) and I've found that because the mechanics of typing are transparent, I'm able to document my code more thoroughly and painlessly than a hunt-and-pecker. If you can barely type fast enough to get the code itself out of your brain and into the computer in a reasonable amount of time, the odds are you won't have time to spend putting in many comments.
The music studios got in trouble with Phillips on that score: they were told flatly that if it doesn't conform to the published spec they can't use any relevant tradmarks, call it a Compact Disc, use the CD logo, etc. But given how the DVD industry is structured, I doubt much will come of this.
A modification to a spacecraft parameter, intended to update the High Gain Antenna's (HGA) pointing direction used for contingency operations, was mistakenly written to the incorrect spacecraft memory address in June 2006.
To me, that sounds like they need some "managed code" up there. Windows SE.NET (Space Edition) would have prevented this, I'm sure.
No, because once they decide to go after you (rightly or wrongly) you're pretty well screwed unless you settle, or have the means (and the cojones) to defend yourself. What's needed is a proactive defense, which pretty much has to be technological in nature. A retroactive defense such as an open WAP doesn't do you much good if you're trying to stay out of court in the first place, and probably isn't much of a defense anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Star Trek generally portrayed beings who took control of their own destinies and turned themselves into "superior" creations (although usually with some crucial failing) such as Khan Noonien Singh (Eugenics Wars), Sargon ("The mind of Man can become so powerful he confuses himself with God") or even Commander Data, who as a surrogate machine human created by a human, would be considered by some to be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder. It was rarely a game of chance with Roddenberry.
Good advice all around, folks. Take that class.
I think pot usage must be on the rise.
Before you even concern yourself about the quality of any modern consumer electronics product with a well-known name, find out if that name is still worthy of its history. Many of the former greats in audio reproduction have sold out to Chinese manufacturers, sold their names, their brands, and the respect they earned in the marketplace. Now they're nothing more than marketing fronts, shadows of their former selves.
Not all maggots are so selective ... you have to be pretty specific in the variety.
From National Geographic:
Only a few species of fly larvae, primarily blowflies, are suitable for such duty. Five to ten maggots are placed on each square centimeter (0.2 square inch) of a wound, which is then covered with a protective dressing that allows the maggots to breath. For the next 48 to 72 hours, the maggots dissolve dead tissue by secreting digestive juices and then ingesting the liquefied tissue and bacteria. The maggots grow from about two millimeters (0.08 inch) to nearly ten millimeters (0.4 inch) while doing the doctor's dirty work.
I dunno. I think I'd have to be pretty screwed up to go for that.
A local movie house here gave me almost fifty minutes of commercials, and they weren't movie trailers or anything interesting. Much of it was not even film or video but a slide show of advertising from local businesses (used car dealerships and such) with a lame voiceover. Really torqued me into a pretzel. After that I began showing up about half an hour after starting time, as did a lot of other people. They cottoned on to that rather quickly, and then began varying the actual starting time of the movie.
So I stopped going there. But it just goes to show the mindset of the people running the entertainment industry today. I don't know if I believe the theater owner's complaints about how the studios don't leave them enough money from the ticket sales, and that they need the extra revenue from advertising and $5.00 bottles of water. However, even if it's true there's still something wrong.
She is OK as it turns out but it makes me mad to think the school was just an open playground for a shooter like this with only law enforcement able to stop him.
... and if you happen to find yourself at the wrong end of a gun barrel, odds are there won't be a cop around to take care of you. If all the attacker wants is your wallet or your car, you might get out of it alive. If he wants you dead ... you've had it. Doesn't hardly seem sporting, does it?
They did not stop him. He stopped himself, permanently, and the cops had no idea where he was even after he shot two people. Now, I'm not dinging the police here: believe me, I'm not. I have no reason to believe they mishandled the affair in any way and if they did, it will come out later. No, the cops can do only so much in cases like this, and they really have no way to prevent it from happening. All that they can do is try to limit the violence once it has begun, and then pick up the pieces afterwards.
In any event, you're absolutely correct: any unarmed population is a playground for a shooter. If a government chooses to remove firearms from the law-abiding population (regardless of whatever justifications, rationalizations or prevarications are made) it has made the decision to leave the physical defense of that population to law enforcement. That is a frightening state of affairs, for several reasons (not the least of which is the Second Amendment right to a defense against our own government.)
The reality of an unarmed populace is very different from what the (let's face it, largely duplicitous) gun control proponents will tell you. "We don't need guns," they say, "Let the police do their jobs." Sure
Personally, I don't own a gun. Haven't felt the need, and I'm not interested in sport shooting at this point. But I'll tell you this:, the time may come when I do need one, and if that happens I will have one, whether the guv'mint wants me to or not. My life is worth more to me than a stupid law, and no matter how hard we try to ban guns they'll always be available, for a price.
We all have the responsibility (and the right!) to defend ourselves and our loved ones from harm, which means we need to be at least as well-equipped as the bad guy. Heck, any honest cop will tell you flat out, he cannot be there to defend you. That's not his job, and even if that were his job, there aren't enough of him to go around.
Like most things of importance, if you want it done right you just have to do it yourself.
as if now all online video hosts will immediately use the technology to annoy their visitors in the maximum way possible.
... but a lot of them will.
... well, we'll see. When you give marketers power they didn't have before some of them will abuse it, until they figure out that visiting a Web site is a purely voluntary activity.
All of them won't
I have the feeling this won't matter much to Google/Youtube since, if nothing else, a good part of Google's popularity as a search engine has to do with their methodology for placing ads as much as it does search itself. It's unlikely that Google will make the mistake of annoying its viewers to the point where they stop visiting (since that would result in fewer eyeballs, and hence fewer paying customers.) Other sites
What novel was it where researchers found hidden messages from whoever created the Universe (God, aliens, whatever) when the value of Pi was calculated out to some enormous number of digits? I guess if we're ever going to find those messages we're just gonna have to bump the clock speeds up some more.
and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola.
I was a game programmer, back in the mid-eighties, and we did not subsist on doughnuts and any kind of "generic" cola. We drank only honest-to-God Mountain Dew and Jolt (all the sugar and twice the caffeine) Cola.
"Generic cola". Ha.
Very true ... kind of like the Holter and cardiac event monitors they use for heart patients.
Surgeons will go for the CT scan every time. It costs more.
And provides a lot more information than this handheld gadget can. Given a choice, I'd opt for some real imaging rather than a high-tech studfinder.
Just wait until someone makes "Paranoid P2P"
The way things are now, with all this legal stuff flying through the air, you can just shorten the name back to P2P (Paranoid To Paranoid.)
It's a matter of degree. CSS encryption, for example, really didn't have much impact on ordinary users of the DVD. The discs played and the encryption stopped the vast majority of people trying to copy the media using ordinary copy programs. Frankly, I believe that's all CSS was ever meant to achieve, and it did. They knew that sooner or later it would get broken and you know what? It was broken, and Joe Average still hasn't a clue how to copy that disc he just bought or rented so it's still doing its job. Many seem to count CSS as a failure the moment DVD Jon figured it out, but the fact of the matter is that CSS was a success and still is to this very day.
The problem is not so much the DRM (bad as it is) but that in their neverending quest to prevent copyright infringement (pardon me, "theft of their intellectual property") they've begun to deny legitimate purchasers of their product the ability to actually use that for which they plunked down good money. Oh, I'm sure Sony figured out well in advance that some number of purchasers would get screwed, but decided that the risk was acceptable. I guarantee it won't be acceptable to me, if I ever mistakenly happen to buy a Sony Pictures DVD.
This has got to run afoul of more than a few laws, and it sure as hell isn't a good way to run a business.
Yes, but if you're in a drunken stupor it comes out much like the GP said.
you pay, you get added crap. you *cough* and you get the movie without crap. interesting dilemma.
... but they don't seem to be paying much attention upstairs.
No dilemma. No dilemma at all. The only reason there isn't more downloading going on is because there aren't more people that know how to do it. I mean, my goodness, if everyone that had a broadband connection knew how to install a BitTorrent client, head over to TorrentSpy or Mininova or The Pirate Bay and download stuff and knew about codecguide.com's Codec Packs so they could play all that media without any problems on their Windows boxes, why, I think we'd see a lot more people watching crap-free entertainment.
You see, these are people that have long been accustomed to selling whatever they please, because they knew we had no choice but to accept it no matter how they chose to present it. If we wanted a movie, we took whatever they threw at us. That's changed, for now, and lawsuits, the DMCA and the rest aside, I don't think they've fully come to grips with that.
don't you love it, when you but a DVD, you get all the bonus commercials you HAVE to see before you can start the movie?
I've bought a lot of DVDs over the past eight or nine years. Lots of them. I like movies, I do. But I have to say, watching purchased DVDs has become similar to the experience I get at the local movie house: i.e., disappointing and not what it used to be. And both groups complain that sales are down. Cripes, what does it take to give these people a clue? The media companies dis their customers when those customers have alternate means of receiving their products (in this case, means that provide no revenue) and they expect sales to increase? Give me a break.
It would surprise me if Sony executives ever got down from their ivory towers (or whatever the obviously isolated spot where they store their upper management) and spoke directly with typical consumers of their products to see what, if anything, said people like about Sony products. Oh, I'm sure Sony's marketing drones have plenty of "focus groups" and "surveys" and all the rest of the trappings of modern marketeering
Media Marketing Rule #1 should be "if the customer BUYS THE DISC it should PLAY."
This is not rocket science. This is about good business. It's about continuing to have a business.
Yes, well, in the U.S. at least we'll probably have to wait until we can get in that new President and Congress we ordered. The current ones are malfunctioning and in need of replacement.
I have an old Apex model that I'll never get rid of for the same reason (it's the one that has the hidden menu that allows you to turn off all the protection features, including Macrovision on the analog outs.) Even plays discs full of MP3s, which was pretty impressive eight years ago. And yeah, the thing is huge by modern standards, that's for sure, but it's built like a brick outhouse. Of course, that was back before Apex went to crap like most Chinese brands seem to, eventually.
I had read about the hidden menu in an online article the night before I went to Circuit City to buy it. I took it home and it worked like a charm, even made some perfect VHS recordings just to prove I could do it. I then read that the MPAA had threatened Apex with termination of their DVD license if they didn't remove that menu. The very next day the new ones with the "fixed" firmware arrived: I know because my old supervisor tried to get one but none of the ones they had available had the hidden feature anymore.
... have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players.
Windows, for example, has many similar features, although most of us call them "bugs" or "exploits". But sure, if Sony wants to call a complete functional failure a "feature", that's okay by me.
Yes and no. I'm a touch-typist myself (although I failed typing back in high school ... Mrs. Roberts never did like me anyway) and I've found that because the mechanics of typing are transparent, I'm able to document my code more thoroughly and painlessly than a hunt-and-pecker. If you can barely type fast enough to get the code itself out of your brain and into the computer in a reasonable amount of time, the odds are you won't have time to spend putting in many comments.
but in the twenty-seven years I've been coding I don't think I've ever encountered a Dvorak keyboard user.
Plenty of folks that read his column though.
The music studios got in trouble with Phillips on that score: they were told flatly that if it doesn't conform to the published spec they can't use any relevant tradmarks, call it a Compact Disc, use the CD logo, etc. But given how the DVD industry is structured, I doubt much will come of this.
If we're not careful, we'll soon start seeing original jokes, and then where will we be?
At that point, we'll all have to give up on Slashdot and move over to Digg, I guess.
A modification to a spacecraft parameter, intended to update the High Gain Antenna's (HGA) pointing direction used for contingency operations, was mistakenly written to the incorrect spacecraft memory address in June 2006.
To me, that sounds like they need some "managed code" up there. Windows SE.NET (Space Edition) would have prevented this, I'm sure.
No, because once they decide to go after you (rightly or wrongly) you're pretty well screwed unless you settle, or have the means (and the cojones) to defend yourself. What's needed is a proactive defense, which pretty much has to be technological in nature. A retroactive defense such as an open WAP doesn't do you much good if you're trying to stay out of court in the first place, and probably isn't much of a defense anyways.