At the same time, its late release here in Ireland (same time as UK) and higher price (extremely important, most Europeans don't realize how much they get ripped off) prompted me to buy it while I was in America. The only two people I know with the PSP in Ireland also bought it in the States.
I kind of wonder if these figures would be higher if they had just mirrored the US price, or are the consumers here truely sheep waiting ot be fleeced...
Steve Ballmer can kill anyone he wants! Steve Ballmer throws chairs ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that Steve Ballmer was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Ballmer killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Steve Ballmer totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
...they just wnat in on this price gouging that the oil companies are enjoying right now.
I can just see the RIAA, overcome with jealousy over OPEC, arranging a Music shortage. Prices going to $60 an album, people waiting in giant lines at record stores just to pick up a new Black Eyed Peas album. People avoiding playing music while driving to work because it's a precious commodity, while the record industry rakes in profit. Network news would alternately go nuts about how apocalyptic it is, then reassure people that it actually isn't the highest price peralbum ever when adjusted for inflation, informing us that people used to pay more for wax cylinders that could barely hold a song. Then the record industry would graciously recieve generous subsidies from the US government as part of a giant omnibus Music bill. Politicians will promise to help reduce America's dependance on foreign music, and to help keep the chart hits American.
Then we'll invade France to take control of Khaled and his snappy North African pop beats.
I'm an American living in Ireland and a proud owner of a Smart Fortwo convertible. While it's true that the scourge of the SUV fad hasnt hit here yet, mainly due to how they tax and insure vehicles here (by engine displacement), there's still no shortage of large vehicles with which I share the road. Yet I feel quite safe inside of it, it has better safety features as standard than most irish cars on the road.
And the gas mileage is sweeeeet. I drive it on my commute every day and I only need to fill up every 2.5 weeks, yes, weeks. And even though gas costs about $4.00 a gallon here (you Americans think you have it bad, hahahaha...) I still spend less on gas per month on that car than I do when I visit the USA with other cars. I was in New York City and Boston in the past few weeks and was disgusted by how many Hummer H2's were driving around. A Smart is the PERFECT city vehicle, and it's just ignorance to dismiss it because of it's sensible size.
Somehow I doubt that the "MS Team" (by this I'm assuming mainly software engineers, etc) would be entrusted with the name for a flagship product. Codename perhaps, but I'll bet that a name as meaningless-yet-initially-resistant-to-punnery (just look at how Apple treated the Longhorn code name) like Vista would be coined by an amalgam of dozens of vacuous marketing executives.
Though really I'm just surprised they didnt do a google search of the name to see if there's any similar companies or products out there called Vista...
Well, speaking of ostensibly non-lethal weapons, what's more entertaining than the idea of just spraying dope on people was a weapon that was actually looked into by the CIA, the Gay Bomb, designed to spread an aphrodisiac over the enemy, filling them with such uncontrollable lust that they'd have to show that affection for each other, distracting them from whatever they were doing.:)
Apeaking of the microwave weapon, this isn't a new device, but the reason its use didnt go beyond testing in the USA was the fear of damaging tissue such as the eyes. Not impressed to see them foist an imperfect but forceful weapon off to Iraq...
I'm just trying to figure out if the submitter's ebook comment is a joke or not. It probably is, as the idea of a submitter on Slashdot coming out in favor of DRM is anathema to this entire status quo.:)
But seriously, I don't think ebooks have a hope of getting further than they have so far. I'm not saying that the book as we know it will never change, because they have (though extremely little in many centuries. Stone tablets to scrolls to bound books to printed books.) Reading on a screen will simply never replace reading on paper.Staring into a screen is like staring into a lightbulb while you're reading.
Ultimately, this story is just about tight security surrounding the biggest fiction franchise ever seen since the Book of Genesis. Calling it "old fashioned DRM" is really pushing it, like saying that a 300lb bouncer outside a night club is an old fashioned firewall.
I was thinking it sounded a bit suspect when he said he offered DLO the rights to sell his product for the measly sum of the $20,000 he invested, then painting DLO as mean spirited when they refuse. I seems very reasonable to refuse to sell someone else's product through no means but a patent suit (it's not as if DLO bought them out or something.) And given the rather small fee Cambell was asking, it sounds like there may have been some other string attached... What if he wanted it to be sold as "Jack Cambell's PodBuddy?"
In any case, don't buy the martyr act on the "It gets worse" segment of that article.
The *why* is quite simple, their techs and point-haired's have probably gone nuts trying to get accurated site-visitation numbers, and every time a story goes up on slashdot, we simply obliterate the accuracy of their logging. So I don't expect them to be happy with slashdot.
While I perfectly understand why that would piss off people at the NYT, and how Slashdot is known for obliterating webservers in minutes, calling Slashdot malicious because of the famed Slashdot Effect is like calling an elephant malicious because it steps on a hamster.
Re:Spoiler Warning: Star Wars movies have it too
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
That reminds me of the commentary of Attack of the Clone done by Toastyfrog (www.toastyfrog.com) on his Thumbnail Theatre section (now defunct.)
After pointing out how much the factory sequence was like a platform game, when they got to the climactic battle with Count Dooku, Obi Wan says "Watch out Anakin! Considering this whole film has been ripped off from video games, when you kill him he'll probably turn into a giant two headed angel or something!"
I'd imagine he's answered that question numerous times and is probably just sick of it. Any reading of a movie's IMDB "goofs" page will reveal a banal and seemingly endless list of tiny, niggling continuity errors, especially for popular films that recieve an undue amount of scrutiny and obsession (ie, Lord of the Rings films.)
Many of these errors are so minor I don't think they deserve any note whatsoever.
The way film sets typically deal with this is that they hire one person to be in charge of continuity for the set during the shoot (an immensely boring job, I suffered through it once) which basically involves keeping glasses of water at the same level, items that get moved replaced in the same position after every take. However for a porduction as huge as RotS, they'd probably have to have many people poring over every aspect. And considering the continuity problem appeared to be a major costume error, it seems like the different takes must have been seperated by a significant period of time for so many people not to notice it during filming.
But ultimately, the main failing of Mr Ebert here was not posting pictures. Mm... Natalie...
One more thing: it's all fun and games until you suck a whale into the input pipe! But seriously, if you pump up nutrient-rich soup from the deep, in a few years your pipe is going to be so clogged up with marine critters that your flow rate is going to tend towards zero...
Not to mention it'll be damn traumatic for anyone who digs out some of the deep sea's scarier denizens from those pipes...
I was in a hurry to get the post on here, so I missed the link in the geek.com story to the original article...
Sheesh, go easy on yourself for missing out on a link in your original post. Four links in one post is like the bibliography of a PhD disseration for Slashdot:)
I've heard legend of the Alamo Drafthouse. It's where they hold the SxSW Film Festival (South by Southwest) I believe. The guys over at Red vs Blue have done some events there, which would have definately been worth seeing.
It reminds me of particular cinemas in you find in Europe. For instance, here in Ireland there's the Irish Film Centre (http://ifi.ie/ which is government funded with a mandate to show varied and culturally relevant films, giving it the biggest variety of old and new films of any cinema I know. Also, they have a restaurant and bar in the lobby, which has won architectural awards itself.
What just about beats that is the cinema experiance I had in Berlin, wandering about the Bohemian quarter, we went down a random back alley to find a cinema showing Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano's), even though it was subtitled in German, I could easily understand it all thanks to the 7 bottles of Heineken I brought in with me from the lobby. The cinema itself felt like someone's living room with loads of chairs and a big screen, but with everyone crammed in there it actually felt very communal, in a good way.
Megaplexes can be good in some ways, but I vastly prefer the quirkier venues for my films. In this case, I'm reminded of a tour done in the UK by Stella Artois where they'd show films like Apocalypse Now in an abandoned air force hanger and Hamlet in an old castle.
Anyone else think that having preview screenings in May for a film with a September release date is a bit insane? Why do it almost 5 months before it's released?
I think that if it isn't possible to legally obtain a work within your own borders, then copyright law should not apply for that work until it is available for purchase/consumption. This kind of issue is most prevalent with anime fansubs, but those tend to be tolerated. What I'm specifically referring to is something like the Chinese film "Hero." Miramax had the rights to distribute it in English, but left it unreleased for three years, then they had the gall to sue people who had imported Chinese copies of the film and were selling it.
Thing is, I know I don't have much to stand on with this. You could use this as an arguement that it's okay for a big budget box office film to be leaked, copied and sold as long as it's before the official release of the film, not something I think is right. What I'm really at issue with, though, are region codes and arbitrary region specific release schedules. Anyhow, that's my 2 cents.
I think Journeyman games were awesome, and one of the best things about it was the Aurthur the wisecracking A.I. buddy didn't annoy the shit out of me. I mean, come on, you have a comedian voicing a smartass computer making jokes all the time... it could have sucked. But instead, he even made fun of the game design sometimes ("Hey that rug looks like it belongs on William Shatner's head...") And finally... it let me live my dream of being killed Monty Python style. By a cow. Mais oui!
"Not to mention... you know what Star Wars movies desperately need? Time travel. Best way to solve problems. End Episode III by having Luke Skywalker travel back in time to fix everything, but that's just an idea. Do what we do and don't have a plan at all until you drive people away. You, George... You plan too much..."
Slashdot Mirror
Then put that space in to make it compatible with older browsers which won't render it anyway.
Wait, if it's being sent into the past, won't it only be read by older browsers?
At the same time, its late release here in Ireland (same time as UK) and higher price (extremely important, most Europeans don't realize how much they get ripped off) prompted me to buy it while I was in America. The only two people I know with the PSP in Ireland also bought it in the States.
I kind of wonder if these figures would be higher if they had just mirrored the US price, or are the consumers here truely sheep waiting ot be fleeced...
Steve Ballmer can kill anyone he wants! Steve Ballmer throws chairs ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that Steve Ballmer was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Ballmer killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Steve Ballmer totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created. The ability to leave the Milky Way is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
/. consisting of just a modified Star Wars quote...)
(My God... that's the second consecutive post I've made on
wow, that site was slashdotted after less then 3 minutes.
"Thats what I'm trying to tell you, kid. It ain't there. It's been totally blown away."
"What? How?"
"Destroyed...by the Empire!"
"The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've..."
...Hopefully they did it all while wearing festive penguin suits, or for the politically correct Bostonians, Spheniscidae American suits.
...they just wnat in on this price gouging that the oil companies are enjoying right now.
I can just see the RIAA, overcome with jealousy over OPEC, arranging a Music shortage. Prices going to $60 an album, people waiting in giant lines at record stores just to pick up a new Black Eyed Peas album. People avoiding playing music while driving to work because it's a precious commodity, while the record industry rakes in profit. Network news would alternately go nuts about how apocalyptic it is, then reassure people that it actually isn't the highest price peralbum ever when adjusted for inflation, informing us that people used to pay more for wax cylinders that could barely hold a song. Then the record industry would graciously recieve generous subsidies from the US government as part of a giant omnibus Music bill. Politicians will promise to help reduce America's dependance on foreign music, and to help keep the chart hits American.
Then we'll invade France to take control of Khaled and his snappy North African pop beats.
Oh wait, the media would never allow themselves to be wrong.
Only in the way Big Brother can never be wrong. It doesn't mean they can't change their position.
I'm an American living in Ireland and a proud owner of a Smart Fortwo convertible. While it's true that the scourge of the SUV fad hasnt hit here yet, mainly due to how they tax and insure vehicles here (by engine displacement), there's still no shortage of large vehicles with which I share the road. Yet I feel quite safe inside of it, it has better safety features as standard than most irish cars on the road.
And the gas mileage is sweeeeet. I drive it on my commute every day and I only need to fill up every 2.5 weeks, yes, weeks. And even though gas costs about $4.00 a gallon here (you Americans think you have it bad, hahahaha...) I still spend less on gas per month on that car than I do when I visit the USA with other cars. I was in New York City and Boston in the past few weeks and was disgusted by how many Hummer H2's were driving around. A Smart is the PERFECT city vehicle, and it's just ignorance to dismiss it because of it's sensible size.
Somehow I doubt that the "MS Team" (by this I'm assuming mainly software engineers, etc) would be entrusted with the name for a flagship product. Codename perhaps, but I'll bet that a name as meaningless-yet-initially-resistant-to-punnery (just look at how Apple treated the Longhorn code name) like Vista would be coined by an amalgam of dozens of vacuous marketing executives.
Though really I'm just surprised they didnt do a google search of the name to see if there's any similar companies or products out there called Vista...
Well, speaking of ostensibly non-lethal weapons, what's more entertaining than the idea of just spraying dope on people was a weapon that was actually looked into by the CIA, the Gay Bomb, designed to spread an aphrodisiac over the enemy, filling them with such uncontrollable lust that they'd have to show that affection for each other, distracting them from whatever they were doing. :)
Apeaking of the microwave weapon, this isn't a new device, but the reason its use didnt go beyond testing in the USA was the fear of damaging tissue such as the eyes. Not impressed to see them foist an imperfect but forceful weapon off to Iraq...
Last April Acuweather, among others, tried to prohibit the National Weather Service from providing free weather updates, because they viewed it as unfair competition against the private, pay service or advertising supported weather services (most of whom USE NWS data for their reports.)
All the actions of greedy people are asinine, no matter where it happens.
I'm just trying to figure out if the submitter's ebook comment is a joke or not. It probably is, as the idea of a submitter on Slashdot coming out in favor of DRM is anathema to this entire status quo. :)
But seriously, I don't think ebooks have a hope of getting further than they have so far. I'm not saying that the book as we know it will never change, because they have (though extremely little in many centuries. Stone tablets to scrolls to bound books to printed books.) Reading on a screen will simply never replace reading on paper.Staring into a screen is like staring into a lightbulb while you're reading.
Ultimately, this story is just about tight security surrounding the biggest fiction franchise ever seen since the Book of Genesis. Calling it "old fashioned DRM" is really pushing it, like saying that a 300lb bouncer outside a night club is an old fashioned firewall.
I was thinking it sounded a bit suspect when he said he offered DLO the rights to sell his product for the measly sum of the $20,000 he invested, then painting DLO as mean spirited when they refuse. I seems very reasonable to refuse to sell someone else's product through no means but a patent suit (it's not as if DLO bought them out or something.) And given the rather small fee Cambell was asking, it sounds like there may have been some other string attached... What if he wanted it to be sold as "Jack Cambell's PodBuddy?"
In any case, don't buy the martyr act on the "It gets worse" segment of that article.
The *why* is quite simple, their techs and point-haired's have probably gone nuts trying to get accurated site-visitation numbers, and every time a story goes up on slashdot, we simply obliterate the accuracy of their logging. So I don't expect them to be happy with slashdot.
While I perfectly understand why that would piss off people at the NYT, and how Slashdot is known for obliterating webservers in minutes, calling Slashdot malicious because of the famed Slashdot Effect is like calling an elephant malicious because it steps on a hamster.
That reminds me of the commentary of Attack of the Clone done by Toastyfrog (www.toastyfrog.com) on his Thumbnail Theatre section (now defunct.)
After pointing out how much the factory sequence was like a platform game, when they got to the climactic battle with Count Dooku, Obi Wan says "Watch out Anakin! Considering this whole film has been ripped off from video games, when you kill him he'll probably turn into a giant two headed angel or something!"
I'd imagine he's answered that question numerous times and is probably just sick of it. Any reading of a movie's IMDB "goofs" page will reveal a banal and seemingly endless list of tiny, niggling continuity errors, especially for popular films that recieve an undue amount of scrutiny and obsession (ie, Lord of the Rings films.)
Many of these errors are so minor I don't think they deserve any note whatsoever.
The way film sets typically deal with this is that they hire one person to be in charge of continuity for the set during the shoot (an immensely boring job, I suffered through it once) which basically involves keeping glasses of water at the same level, items that get moved replaced in the same position after every take. However for a porduction as huge as RotS, they'd probably have to have many people poring over every aspect. And considering the continuity problem appeared to be a major costume error, it seems like the different takes must have been seperated by a significant period of time for so many people not to notice it during filming.
But ultimately, the main failing of Mr Ebert here was not posting pictures. Mm... Natalie...
One more thing: it's all fun and games until you suck a whale into the input pipe! But seriously, if you pump up nutrient-rich soup from the deep, in a few years your pipe is going to be so clogged up with marine critters that your flow rate is going to tend towards zero...
Not to mention it'll be damn traumatic for anyone who digs out some of the deep sea's scarier denizens from those pipes...
I was in a hurry to get the post on here, so I missed the link in the geek.com story to the original article...
:)
Sheesh, go easy on yourself for missing out on a link in your original post. Four links in one post is like the bibliography of a PhD disseration for Slashdot
Be careful who you disclose water's potential to... before you know it you'll have Keanu Reeves trying to outrun blue shock waves on motorcycles...
I've heard legend of the Alamo Drafthouse. It's where they hold the SxSW Film Festival (South by Southwest) I believe. The guys over at Red vs Blue have done some events there, which would have definately been worth seeing.
It reminds me of particular cinemas in you find in Europe. For instance, here in Ireland there's the Irish Film Centre (http://ifi.ie/ which is government funded with a mandate to show varied and culturally relevant films, giving it the biggest variety of old and new films of any cinema I know. Also, they have a restaurant and bar in the lobby, which has won architectural awards itself.
What just about beats that is the cinema experiance I had in Berlin, wandering about the Bohemian quarter, we went down a random back alley to find a cinema showing Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano's), even though it was subtitled in German, I could easily understand it all thanks to the 7 bottles of Heineken I brought in with me from the lobby. The cinema itself felt like someone's living room with loads of chairs and a big screen, but with everyone crammed in there it actually felt very communal, in a good way.
Megaplexes can be good in some ways, but I vastly prefer the quirkier venues for my films. In this case, I'm reminded of a tour done in the UK by Stella Artois where they'd show films like Apocalypse Now in an abandoned air force hanger and Hamlet in an old castle.
Anyone else think that having preview screenings in May for a film with a September release date is a bit insane? Why do it almost 5 months before it's released?
I think that if it isn't possible to legally obtain a work within your own borders, then copyright law should not apply for that work until it is available for purchase/consumption. This kind of issue is most prevalent with anime fansubs, but those tend to be tolerated. What I'm specifically referring to is something like the Chinese film "Hero." Miramax had the rights to distribute it in English, but left it unreleased for three years, then they had the gall to sue people who had imported Chinese copies of the film and were selling it.
Thing is, I know I don't have much to stand on with this. You could use this as an arguement that it's okay for a big budget box office film to be leaked, copied and sold as long as it's before the official release of the film, not something I think is right. What I'm really at issue with, though, are region codes and arbitrary region specific release schedules. Anyhow, that's my 2 cents.
I think Journeyman games were awesome, and one of the best things about it was the Aurthur the wisecracking A.I. buddy didn't annoy the shit out of me. I mean, come on, you have a comedian voicing a smartass computer making jokes all the time... it could have sucked. But instead, he even made fun of the game design sometimes ("Hey that rug looks like it belongs on William Shatner's head...") And finally... it let me live my dream of being killed Monty Python style. By a cow. Mais oui!
"Not to mention... you know what Star Wars movies desperately need? Time travel. Best way to solve problems. End Episode III by having Luke Skywalker travel back in time to fix everything, but that's just an idea. Do what we do and don't have a plan at all until you drive people away. You, George... You plan too much..."