Episode IV practically invented the "summer blockbuster" for better or worse. It should be listed first.
Back then it was just called Star Wars. And any version where Han doesn't shoot first---any version where Greedo gets a shot off at all---automatically gets moved down the list.
And the first real summer blockbuster was Jaws, although Star Wars certainly raised the bar.
What kind of tyrant
forces their IT folks to wear clothes
On its very earliest years, Sun Microsystems supposedly had this very problem---an engineer who after a few consecutive days in the office would eventually start wandering the halls---stark nekkid. The reality of a naked engineer forced Sun to adopt a simple one-line dress code: "You will be dressed."
You'll probably spin out walking down the hall because they're at right angles to each other.
Nylon pants, wool carpet and low humidity turn you into one hell of a capacitor anyway. If you could build up inductance that fast you'd be able to degauss monitors with your breath and format hard drives by glaring at them.
The same place you signed up to get the porn industry to pay for carpel tunnel surgery.
That last one got me an office with a door. That stays shut. And nobody barges in without knocking.
And the MPAA/RIAA's response will be...
on
Darknets Coming Soon?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...treachery. Seriously. If they can't go through a public channel to find wrongdoers (that is, to find unprofitable conditions), they will start using undercover agents to befriend and betray their way into darknets. So basically they'll have spies pose as college students then coaxing real students into inviting them into the henhouse.
Hell, they'll probably set up a few darknets of their own, as "loss leaders" in their quest to fuck as many people out of as much money as possible. And they'll start a terror campaign, too. Did I say terror? I meant public relations. As in "The Guy You're Sharing Files With Might Be A Cop."
With due respect, it's not a particularly stupid ruling. Grokster did in fact promote its product as a way of doing something illegal. The Supreme Court agreed that doing so exposed them to liability. If Sears/Craftsman promoted its crowbars as "The Burglar's Best Friend," they'd be liable for that, right? If Louisville Slugger had a booth at the local skinhead rally, promoting its bats as the perfect fag-bashing tool, they'd be liable for that, too. It's that simple---promote an illegal use, accept responsibility for illegal use. Why shouldn't Grokster be liable for promoting the illegal use of its products?
I have no problem with uniformly enforcing product liability laws. My problem is with the insanity of today's copyright laws. TFA was very sloppy starting off with a falsehood like
The Supreme Court might have stirred up a bigger problem than it settled when it ruled last June that file-sharing networks such as Grokster could be sued if their members pirated copyrighted digital music and video.
The Supreme Court said no such thing. But the RIAA/MPAA will of course do everything they can to take a mile from this very straightforward inch.
I can download it without installing it, right? If I don't install it, I don't violate the EULA. I'll just examine the contents using third-party tools and do some good old fashioned reverse-engineering.
And I'm 90% sure this part of the EULA wasn't written by a lawyer. Defendant can basically say "This isn't research" and tapdance all the way to the bank.
Honestly, next thing they'll be saying is that strapping these dummies to a table and yanking their entrails out with an iron hook is "anatomical research." It'll be fun to win that case by telling the jury I wasn't doing research---I was drawing and quartering a spyware manufacturer. The best part will be hearing the foreman say "not guilty on account of he was drawing and quartering a spyware manufacturer. And here's the addresses of a few spammers I know about."
By reading this note the teller agrees that the Funds Recovery Action undertaken by the Funds Recoverer is not a bank robbery.
Teller agrees to withdraw and surrender such funds as the Funds Recoverer demands.
Teller agrees that the Funds Recoverer is not responsible for any financial loss resultant from Teller's participation in the Funds Recovery Action.
Any attempts at funds recovery undertaken by Teller or his or her employeer against the Funds Recoverer is expressly disallowed as a derivative work of this Funds Recovery Action.
Any video recordings of the Funds Recovery Action are expressly disallowed as a derivative work of this Funds Recovery Action and are the property of the Recoverer.
Teller agrees to fund all legal and medical expenses incurred by the Recoverer resultant from the Teller's refusal to cooperate in the Funds Recovery Action.
Teller agrees that any violation of this Agreement, including refusal to accept the Agreement, shall entitle the Recoverer to financial compensation of twice the amount demanded in the original Recovery Action.
Now put the money in the bag and lie down on the fucking floor.
for most protestant cristians [sic] (as in Kansas), catholics [sic] are devil-worshipers, and the pope [sic] is Satan himself
That's about as uninformed, knee-jerk and altogether wrong as I have seen---seen on Slashdot, which is saying something. As someone raised Protestant in America, I gotta tell you that for most of the Protestants I know, Catholicism is just another branch of Christianity. It has some theological problems, minor by today's standards. Certainly not big enough to have a killing war over---the kind the English and Irish have managed to sustain for centuries now. For that matter I'm pretty sure that Catholics in the U.S. are ridiculed as liberal backsliders by Catholics elsewhere---like Panama, maybe---for crazy ideas like God valuing women as something more than a processing tank for male Catholics to make more male Catholics.
For most low-church Protestants in the U.S. , Catholicism's just kinda fancy---lots of saints, and lots of aerobics. A five course meal in a Big Mac country.
> describe machine
It's a Tee Remover.
> put rabbit in machine
Okay, the rabbit is now in the machine.
> press button
With a cry of "Mazel tov!" the rabbi leaps from the machine
and runs off into the distance.
>kick trent
That game cost me a lot of GPA back in 1988.
Back in the day, I used DOS at work. Sure, the machine had Windows on it, which I would switch into for Freecell or Minesweeper, but task switching in Windows 3.1 was largely hysterical and the apps I needed had no non-sucky Windows equivalent (the exception being GroupWise, which was way ahead of its time). My editor would let me "shell" to the compiler, so I had pretty much everything I needed.
Then at work I installed a shell called NDOS and was blown away at how much more powerful my computer became. I had macros. I had control structures. I had aliases. I had a usable batch language and could automate the build process to an amazing degree---going from a 30-minute interactive process to a 10-minute job started with a single command.
Most of my wasted time was dealing with unprotected memory and 64K segments. Ever since the 80386 I had been hearing about the Holy Grail of computing---a flat memory model. Never mind it was ubiquitous outside the DOS world---for those in Microsoft's thrall it was a myth. So I bought myself a big fat 420MB hard drive (probably $500 at the time) and went to some guy's house to buy a 4-cd Linux collection from him. He sold me his battered copy of UNIX in a Nutshell---my first O'Reilly book. I installed Slackware and a 1.0.8 kernel and tinkered and tinkered and tinkered. Eventually I had my "main" Pentium/166 running Windows, my 486/66 Linux workstation and a Pentium/150 Linux server, all wired together with thinnet. The server was headless and had a VT220 serial terminal on the back. I was blown away by what I could do from the Bash prompt. When my office trained me up on Oracle and bought a $30,000 Sun Ultra for it, I was the only guy in the office who knew Unix, so
So what keeps me in Windows? Honestly? Porn. That's pretty much it..ASF,.WMV,.AVI are very Windows-centric, so my Unix machine is a Samba server (file and print shares) and the Windows machine is the client. And as long as I have a Windows machine running I may as well run Thunderbird on it, and Firefox, and Office. My GPS software only runs under Windows, so even without the porn I'd need Windows some of the time. Porn or otherwise, for "real" work I usually have two or more PuTTY windows open to the Unix box, each with six or seven screen sessions---I still need a command prompt to manage my collection. If I have a large set of files on my Windows box, I usually move them to Unix, use the tools there to organize them, then move them back. That's generally easier than trying to accomplish anything with Windows and its crippled shell.
I misread your statement as "NASA Scraps Shuttle And Returns to Catapults." I was fully prepared to write six paragraphs slamming the U.S. government's non-military budget cutbacks. I continued with a rant about how the spring tensions would be uncontrollable and that we should use some peak in the Andes as the pivot for a gigantic trebuchet.
Please don't post to Slashdot until I've had more coffee.
TV, being linear, forces the ads to the exclusion of anything else
TV is not so linear anymore---it's multithreaded. Back in the days of three networks and no remote control, you were almost guaranteed not to be channel surfing. When your show started, you sat down and watched it to the end. Ads were basically thirty seconds of someone shouting a product name at you, loudly enough you could hear it from the kitchen. Modern TV advertisers know that you can surf, so ads are better designed to grab your attention quickly and actually entertain you, because otherwise you'll surf or Tivo away from it.
Sitting through a TV ad requires time but is not that disruptive: Shows (and televised events) are designed around commercial breaks, which are used to define acts, build suspense or underscore a plot point. Web ads are far more disruptive---the equivalent of cutting to commercial while the game-winning play is underway.
When I'm working on the web, a popup is always an interruption of flow. It makes me angry at the site that did it and at the product being advertised. So I block popups---although some clever wankers sometimes find a way around them. I also use the Flashblock and Aardvark extensions in Firefox, because blinking and flashing annoy and distract me. If a website blinks and flashes I cannot pay attention to its content, which means I mentally flag it as a useless website and won't return to it. So Flashblock hides nearly all Flash; the Esc key makes gifs stop blinking; and if all else fails I can use Aardvark to actually remove the ad from the page. An ad that crawls or dances across the text that I am trying to read is met with a Ctrl-W and active resentment towards the perpetrators.
The bottom line: The less intrusive the ad, the more likely I am to let it live, and therefore the more likely I am to look at it if it applies to me.
The problem I see with this kind of testing is the cases where the diagnosed individual refuses treatment.
I can see this being the case for many types of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, but anxiety disorders are a little different. People come into the emergency room absolutely convinced that they are dying or having a heart attack or really going full-blown crazy. They know something is wrong, and the overwhelming majority of them will be very relieved to hear the doctor say "You're not dying. You're not going crazy. You have a treatable condition called generalized anxiety disorder. We can start working on it right now if you'd like."
If anything I'd worry about some patients might feel a little let down, having something as mundane as "generalized anxiety disorder. For them, instead of calling it "generalized anxiety disorder" I would call it "Barris's Anxiety Disorder" or some other made-up name---that way it sounds like they're fucked up in a particular way, rather than just generally fucked up. They'll feel special, hell, even brag to their friends. Either way, as long as they seek treatment they'll be happier.
Ethernet-level would have better latency than an IP stack, sure, but ties to back a platform-dependent transmission medium---you may as well use a speaker wire. And you have to write your own underlying network layer. If each speaker is running the same stack, it's going to have pretty much the same latency anyway---the worst problems arise combining digital and analog speakers.
The advantage of TCP/UDP/Music-Transport-Protocol is that the medium suddenly becomes less relevant. Take wireless, for example. Imagine being able to cart your Big Speakers outside for a patio party without running a single audio wire. Or just to install speakers on the other side of your house (or in your shed) without having to grovel through the attic or crawlspace.
Imagine how useful this could be for concerts: the sound board now has one wire running to it---the power line. Likewise with your front, middle and back stacks, and your monitors.
Another plus is that we have a nice bidirectional protocol, as well as a chance for side-channel data: speakers can report their health back to the control panel, or to other speakers in the same stack. And since each speaker is doing its own DSP anyway, getting the equalization right for a given speaker is a matter of sending it a message.
You know what? Forget the speaker---sell compact, portable, one-speaker wireless-enabled amplifiers and let people convert their existing speakers into packet-switched audio devices.
"Phonorecords?" You mean I can get around the EULA by having Bender read it aloud to me? Cool! "One zero zero zero one one zero one zero one zero zero zero one one zero..."
all I can find here (dvd, cd, games, books) have printed on them in nice friendly letters:
All rights reserved.
Yep. Those are copyrights. They've reserved them. Those words would be meaningless without copyright law behind them.
Just because something is published doesn't mean the owner the owner has put in in public domain.
Until 1978 it worked exactly like that: If a work did not have a copyright notice, it wasn't copyrighted. In 1968 a few prints of Night of the Living Dead were let out without a copyright notice, so the movie is in the public domain. Anybody can copy it and show it on late night TV. There are, or course, some rather nasty entanglements: Once a TV show went out with no notices on it, and a company started selling videotapes of its episodes. The producers successfully sued, because while the show itself wasn't copyrighted, the scripts were, and the show was a derivative work.
Since 1978, a work is automatically copyrighted simply by being created, notice or no. A notice (and registration) certainly help, if you're defending your work, but they are not strictly required.
Look at it this way: If you write a play, and I start producing it on Broadway without your permission and without paying you a dime, you're going to want to sue me, right? Under what statutes do you have legal standing? Copyright isn't an intrensic right of man; it is created and enforced by laws. Laws can be created and destroyed at a whim---what is natural today may be a felony tomorrow, or vice-versa.
A couple of years ago I wrote a short paper (in.doc format) on copyright law. It does a fair job of tracing the history of copyright. You're welcome to read a draft of it.
Could you please explain what rights to eg "Happy Birthday" you would have if there were no copyright laws?
All of them? Copyright defines---that is, limits---who has the right to copy something. Something that is not copyrighted is in the public domain---that is, it can be used by everybody in any way they see fit.
Yep. They sure do. A copyright that under current rules protects the show for almost a hundred years. Seventy-five years from now, when your dead and your grandchildren are curious about your generation, they can get sued for downloading it, too, just like dear old Grandpa.
There are two reasons I have few problems with this type of filesharing: First, the copyright deck is stacked exclusively in favor of the distributors. This is not how it was meant to be. The U.S. Constitution declares Congress's power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Limited Times back then meant 14 with an option for one 14-year renewal. For up to 28 years, you could take all the money for your creation. After that, it belonged to everybody. This is called balance: you get to make some dough, but after that everybody in the country gets to enjoy your work---and build on it.
Compare this to a world where a song written in 1893 and whose authors died in 1946 is owned by Time Warner until 2030. The song in question is "Happy Birthday to You." It is copyright infringement to perform that song in front of an audience, or to transmit a representation or performance of that song. Singing it over the phone to Grandma is, in fact, a federal crime.
That's how one-sided and wrong copyright laws are: you can get sued for singing "Happy Birthday." Time Warner, a company which did not exist when this song was written, will do the suing.
So that's the first reason I'm okay with a certain amount of stealing from these guys: They're robber-barons. They have legal rights to things that should not be legal. Under the rules the framers of the Constitution envisioned, we would currently be able to enjoy everything created before 1977 and this time next yere we could enjoy everything created before 1978. And I could sing "Happy Birthday" without fear. It's civil disobedience against our real masters---not the government, but the corporations by which it is controlled.
The second reason I'm okay with a certain amount of sharing is that it many cases it serves as a sliding-scale. Broke college kids, instead of going down the hall to the guy with the two-head tape deck, can rip a CD or two. Once they can afford to buy music---whose affordability is determined by a cartel with government-granted monopoly rights---they can buy it as they see fit.
Okay, I went over my two-paragraph limit. But I really do see a distinction between stealing something you shouldn't have and stealing back something you should.
As for Rome in particular, it sucks. I wouldn't steal it if it Charlize Theron knocked on my door, handed me a copy and offered to go down on me while I watched it. But hey, that's just me.
The younger, less experienced folks CAN perform the same tasks.
Yep. Two or three younger, less experienced people can usually perform the tasks in four or five times the time---after they've fucked it up six or seven times.
Keep good documentation and any competent person should be able to get up to speed in a decent amount of time.
Spoken like a soldier who's never been shot at. That "decent amount of time" is called a career.
Sometimes the documentation is written with an experienced audience in mind. Sometimes it's written on the assumption that you already know the basics---"basics" in this case being what you pick up over the first decade. And sometimes---important, career-defining times---you're dealing with things that just aren't documented. Like stuff from third-party vendors. Or for an infrastructure that's decades old. Or problems solved by folks who had already been there ten or twenty years, to whom the solution was so bleedin' obvious it down didn't even occur to them to write it down.
About fifteen years ago a bunch of very clever MBAs---who are usually more interchangeable than janitors---decided that the major RBOC they managed could save a whole lot of money if they "incentivized" their most senior employees into early retirement. So they offered them very generous severance packages and most of them left. Within months the infrastructure started going to hell---badly enough that even the MBAs could tell something was wrong. Subtle problems began to creep up---problems that employees with only fifteen years experience couldn't figure out how to fix. So the newly-retired employees got together and formed consulting firms---and their former employer paid them an amazing hourly rate. It was either pay them or face the choice of letting the current infrastructure collapse or "re-engineering" it at a cost that exceeded the market value of the company. They had already spend two billion dollars studying re-engineering, after which it was discovered that many problems already solved should stay solved the way were solved, because Ghod help you if you unsolved them.
"Why don't we get rid of all those old farts? They never seem to be doing anything." Sounds like the start of one of those wonderful Zen koans where the neophyte discovers that what the masters are doing is so subtle that he'll need half a lifetime to even see it, and the other half to get there himself.
Thank you for declaring this "flamebait." That you're doing it to supress somebody for badmouthing the President whose appointee is responsible for this is all the irony I need in one day.
As Lenny Bruce once said, if you take away the right to say "fuck," you take away the right to say "fuck the government." And I can't think of a more fuckworthy government than the one we have now. They have done horrible, horrible things to defile the Constitution, in this case the First Amendment:
They have detained and deported foreign nationals for speaking out against American tyrrany. They have created "free speech zones" to corral and observe those who speak out against them. They hosted the G8 summit on an island and refused to let any but approved press observers come.
And in this case, they have decided to impose their own sexual mores on us by outlawing the transmission of images, words and sounds depicting activities they have declared "deviant."
So yes, I'm genuinely afraid that even as an American citizen, I will be monitored, harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, interrogated, bankrupted, jailed, defamed and ruined by this government, for things I write or say. For saying "fuck Bush" and "fuck his government." When I say "the United States' activities in the Middle East both created and encouraged the people behind the September 11 attacks," I must remember that I'm speaking out against a government that has disappeared people for saying much the same, shipped them to countries whose idea of Q&A is to Q while smashing your hands with hammers then pouring boiling water on your legs until they get the "right" A.
And I don't see a hell of a lot of difference between a government that attacks those who truthfully document its atrocities and one that attacks those who trade pictures of people in handcuffs getting blowjobs. In either case it is a government that has ignored its own Constitution because it is inconvenient to the crusades---both figurative and literal---of the men and women currently in power.
Slashdot Mirror
Back then it was just called Star Wars . And any version where Han doesn't shoot first---any version where Greedo gets a shot off at all---automatically gets moved down the list.
And the first real summer blockbuster was Jaws , although Star Wars certainly raised the bar.
On its very earliest years, Sun Microsystems supposedly had this very problem---an engineer who after a few consecutive days in the office would eventually start wandering the halls---stark nekkid. The reality of a naked engineer forced Sun to adopt a simple one-line dress code: "You will be dressed."
Nylon pants, wool carpet and low humidity turn you into one hell of a capacitor anyway. If you could build up inductance that fast you'd be able to degauss monitors with your breath and format hard drives by glaring at them.
That last one got me an office with a door. That stays shut. And nobody barges in without knocking.
Hell, they'll probably set up a few darknets of their own, as "loss leaders" in their quest to fuck as many people out of as much money as possible. And they'll start a terror campaign, too. Did I say terror? I meant public relations. As in "The Guy You're Sharing Files With Might Be A Cop."
I have no problem with uniformly enforcing product liability laws. My problem is with the insanity of today's copyright laws. TFA was very sloppy starting off with a falsehood like
The Supreme Court said no such thing. But the RIAA/MPAA will of course do everything they can to take a mile from this very straightforward inch.
And I'm 90% sure this part of the EULA wasn't written by a lawyer. Defendant can basically say "This isn't research" and tapdance all the way to the bank.
Honestly, next thing they'll be saying is that strapping these dummies to a table and yanking their entrails out with an iron hook is "anatomical research." It'll be fun to win that case by telling the jury I wasn't doing research---I was drawing and quartering a spyware manufacturer. The best part will be hearing the foreman say "not guilty on account of he was drawing and quartering a spyware manufacturer. And here's the addresses of a few spammers I know about."
That's about as uninformed, knee-jerk and altogether wrong as I have seen---seen on Slashdot, which is saying something. As someone raised Protestant in America, I gotta tell you that for most of the Protestants I know, Catholicism is just another branch of Christianity. It has some theological problems, minor by today's standards. Certainly not big enough to have a killing war over---the kind the English and Irish have managed to sustain for centuries now. For that matter I'm pretty sure that Catholics in the U.S. are ridiculed as liberal backsliders by Catholics elsewhere---like Panama, maybe---for crazy ideas like God valuing women as something more than a processing tank for male Catholics to make more male Catholics.
For most low-church Protestants in the U.S. , Catholicism's just kinda fancy---lots of saints, and lots of aerobics. A five course meal in a Big Mac country.
> describe machine
It's a Tee Remover.
> put rabbit in machine
Okay, the rabbit is now in the machine.
> press button
With a cry of "Mazel tov!" the rabbi leaps from the machine
and runs off into the distance.
>kick trent
That game cost me a lot of GPA back in 1988.
Then at work I installed a shell called NDOS and was blown away at how much more powerful my computer became. I had macros. I had control structures. I had aliases. I had a usable batch language and could automate the build process to an amazing degree---going from a 30-minute interactive process to a 10-minute job started with a single command.
Most of my wasted time was dealing with unprotected memory and 64K segments. Ever since the 80386 I had been hearing about the Holy Grail of computing---a flat memory model. Never mind it was ubiquitous outside the DOS world---for those in Microsoft's thrall it was a myth. So I bought myself a big fat 420MB hard drive (probably $500 at the time) and went to some guy's house to buy a 4-cd Linux collection from him. He sold me his battered copy of UNIX in a Nutshell---my first O'Reilly book. I installed Slackware and a 1.0.8 kernel and tinkered and tinkered and tinkered. Eventually I had my "main" Pentium/166 running Windows, my 486/66 Linux workstation and a Pentium/150 Linux server, all wired together with thinnet. The server was headless and had a VT220 serial terminal on the back. I was blown away by what I could do from the Bash prompt. When my office trained me up on Oracle and bought a $30,000 Sun Ultra for it, I was the only guy in the office who knew Unix, so
So what keeps me in Windows? Honestly? Porn. That's pretty much it. .ASF, .WMV, .AVI are very Windows-centric, so my Unix machine is a Samba server (file and print shares) and the Windows machine is the client. And as long as I have a Windows machine running I may as well run Thunderbird on it, and Firefox, and Office. My GPS software only runs under Windows, so even without the porn I'd need Windows some of the time. Porn or otherwise, for "real" work I usually have two or more PuTTY windows open to the Unix box, each with six or seven screen sessions---I still need a command prompt to manage my collection. If I have a large set of files on my Windows box, I usually move them to Unix, use the tools there to organize them, then move them back. That's generally easier than trying to accomplish anything with Windows and its crippled shell.
Please don't post to Slashdot until I've had more coffee.
Interesting. Do they bleep the "pig" in "pig fucker?"
TV is not so linear anymore---it's multithreaded. Back in the days of three networks and no remote control, you were almost guaranteed not to be channel surfing. When your show started, you sat down and watched it to the end. Ads were basically thirty seconds of someone shouting a product name at you, loudly enough you could hear it from the kitchen. Modern TV advertisers know that you can surf, so ads are better designed to grab your attention quickly and actually entertain you, because otherwise you'll surf or Tivo away from it.
Sitting through a TV ad requires time but is not that disruptive: Shows (and televised events) are designed around commercial breaks, which are used to define acts, build suspense or underscore a plot point. Web ads are far more disruptive---the equivalent of cutting to commercial while the game-winning play is underway.
When I'm working on the web, a popup is always an interruption of flow. It makes me angry at the site that did it and at the product being advertised. So I block popups---although some clever wankers sometimes find a way around them. I also use the Flashblock and Aardvark extensions in Firefox, because blinking and flashing annoy and distract me. If a website blinks and flashes I cannot pay attention to its content, which means I mentally flag it as a useless website and won't return to it. So Flashblock hides nearly all Flash; the Esc key makes gifs stop blinking; and if all else fails I can use Aardvark to actually remove the ad from the page. An ad that crawls or dances across the text that I am trying to read is met with a Ctrl-W and active resentment towards the perpetrators.
The bottom line: The less intrusive the ad, the more likely I am to let it live, and therefore the more likely I am to look at it if it applies to me.
I can see this being the case for many types of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, but anxiety disorders are a little different. People come into the emergency room absolutely convinced that they are dying or having a heart attack or really going full-blown crazy. They know something is wrong, and the overwhelming majority of them will be very relieved to hear the doctor say "You're not dying. You're not going crazy. You have a treatable condition called generalized anxiety disorder. We can start working on it right now if you'd like."
If anything I'd worry about some patients might feel a little let down, having something as mundane as "generalized anxiety disorder. For them, instead of calling it "generalized anxiety disorder" I would call it "Barris's Anxiety Disorder" or some other made-up name---that way it sounds like they're fucked up in a particular way, rather than just generally fucked up. They'll feel special, hell, even brag to their friends. Either way, as long as they seek treatment they'll be happier.
The advantage of TCP/UDP/Music-Transport-Protocol is that the medium suddenly becomes less relevant. Take wireless, for example. Imagine being able to cart your Big Speakers outside for a patio party without running a single audio wire. Or just to install speakers on the other side of your house (or in your shed) without having to grovel through the attic or crawlspace.
Imagine how useful this could be for concerts: the sound board now has one wire running to it---the power line. Likewise with your front, middle and back stacks, and your monitors.
Another plus is that we have a nice bidirectional protocol, as well as a chance for side-channel data: speakers can report their health back to the control panel, or to other speakers in the same stack. And since each speaker is doing its own DSP anyway, getting the equalization right for a given speaker is a matter of sending it a message.
You know what? Forget the speaker---sell compact, portable, one-speaker wireless-enabled amplifiers and let people convert their existing speakers into packet-switched audio devices.
"Phonorecords?" You mean I can get around the EULA by having Bender read it aloud to me? Cool! "One zero zero zero one one zero one zero one zero zero zero one one zero..."
all I can find here (dvd, cd, games, books) have printed on them in nice friendly letters:
All rights reserved.
Yep. Those are copyrights. They've reserved them. Those words would be meaningless without copyright law behind them.
Just because something is published doesn't mean the owner the owner has put in in public domain.
Until 1978 it worked exactly like that: If a work did not have a copyright notice, it wasn't copyrighted. In 1968 a few prints of Night of the Living Dead were let out without a copyright notice, so the movie is in the public domain. Anybody can copy it and show it on late night TV. There are, or course, some rather nasty entanglements: Once a TV show went out with no notices on it, and a company started selling videotapes of its episodes. The producers successfully sued, because while the show itself wasn't copyrighted, the scripts were, and the show was a derivative work.
Since 1978, a work is automatically copyrighted simply by being created, notice or no. A notice (and registration) certainly help, if you're defending your work, but they are not strictly required.
Look at it this way: If you write a play, and I start producing it on Broadway without your permission and without paying you a dime, you're going to want to sue me, right? Under what statutes do you have legal standing? Copyright isn't an intrensic right of man; it is created and enforced by laws. Laws can be created and destroyed at a whim---what is natural today may be a felony tomorrow, or vice-versa.
A couple of years ago I wrote a short paper (in .doc format) on copyright law. It does a fair job of tracing the history of copyright. You're welcome to read a draft of it.
All of them? Copyright defines---that is, limits---who has the right to copy something. Something that is not copyrighted is in the public domain---that is, it can be used by everybody in any way they see fit.
Yep. They sure do. A copyright that under current rules protects the show for almost a hundred years. Seventy-five years from now, when your dead and your grandchildren are curious about your generation, they can get sued for downloading it, too, just like dear old Grandpa.
There are two reasons I have few problems with this type of filesharing: First, the copyright deck is stacked exclusively in favor of the distributors. This is not how it was meant to be. The U.S. Constitution declares Congress's power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Limited Times back then meant 14 with an option for one 14-year renewal. For up to 28 years, you could take all the money for your creation. After that, it belonged to everybody. This is called balance: you get to make some dough, but after that everybody in the country gets to enjoy your work---and build on it.
Compare this to a world where a song written in 1893 and whose authors died in 1946 is owned by Time Warner until 2030. The song in question is "Happy Birthday to You." It is copyright infringement to perform that song in front of an audience, or to transmit a representation or performance of that song. Singing it over the phone to Grandma is, in fact, a federal crime.
That's how one-sided and wrong copyright laws are: you can get sued for singing "Happy Birthday." Time Warner, a company which did not exist when this song was written, will do the suing.
So that's the first reason I'm okay with a certain amount of stealing from these guys: They're robber-barons. They have legal rights to things that should not be legal. Under the rules the framers of the Constitution envisioned, we would currently be able to enjoy everything created before 1977 and this time next yere we could enjoy everything created before 1978. And I could sing "Happy Birthday" without fear. It's civil disobedience against our real masters---not the government, but the corporations by which it is controlled.
The second reason I'm okay with a certain amount of sharing is that it many cases it serves as a sliding-scale. Broke college kids, instead of going down the hall to the guy with the two-head tape deck, can rip a CD or two. Once they can afford to buy music---whose affordability is determined by a cartel with government-granted monopoly rights---they can buy it as they see fit.
Okay, I went over my two-paragraph limit. But I really do see a distinction between stealing something you shouldn't have and stealing back something you should.
As for Rome in particular, it sucks. I wouldn't steal it if it Charlize Theron knocked on my door, handed me a copy and offered to go down on me while I watched it. But hey, that's just me.
"Pro-Iranian cyberterrorists attack website, demand nuclear arms."
Yeah. This'll push their agenda forward by about ten thousand years.
P.S. I transcribed the Engrish into my grammar checker and my laptop nearly caught fire. "we want from iran government than quit NPT." Sheesh.
Yep. Two or three younger, less experienced people can usually perform the tasks in four or five times the time---after they've fucked it up six or seven times.
Keep good documentation and any competent person should be able to get up to speed in a decent amount of time.
Spoken like a soldier who's never been shot at. That "decent amount of time" is called a career.
Sometimes the documentation is written with an experienced audience in mind. Sometimes it's written on the assumption that you already know the basics---"basics" in this case being what you pick up over the first decade. And sometimes---important, career-defining times---you're dealing with things that just aren't documented. Like stuff from third-party vendors. Or for an infrastructure that's decades old. Or problems solved by folks who had already been there ten or twenty years, to whom the solution was so bleedin' obvious it down didn't even occur to them to write it down.
About fifteen years ago a bunch of very clever MBAs---who are usually more interchangeable than janitors---decided that the major RBOC they managed could save a whole lot of money if they "incentivized" their most senior employees into early retirement. So they offered them very generous severance packages and most of them left. Within months the infrastructure started going to hell---badly enough that even the MBAs could tell something was wrong. Subtle problems began to creep up---problems that employees with only fifteen years experience couldn't figure out how to fix. So the newly-retired employees got together and formed consulting firms---and their former employer paid them an amazing hourly rate. It was either pay them or face the choice of letting the current infrastructure collapse or "re-engineering" it at a cost that exceeded the market value of the company. They had already spend two billion dollars studying re-engineering, after which it was discovered that many problems already solved should stay solved the way were solved, because Ghod help you if you unsolved them.
"Why don't we get rid of all those old farts? They never seem to be doing anything." Sounds like the start of one of those wonderful Zen koans where the neophyte discovers that what the masters are doing is so subtle that he'll need half a lifetime to even see it, and the other half to get there himself.
Thank you for declaring this "flamebait." That you're doing it to supress somebody for badmouthing the President whose appointee is responsible for this is all the irony I need in one day.
As Lenny Bruce once said, if you take away the right to say "fuck," you take away the right to say "fuck the government." And I can't think of a more fuckworthy government than the one we have now. They have done horrible, horrible things to defile the Constitution, in this case the First Amendment:
They have detained and deported foreign nationals for speaking out against American tyrrany. They have created "free speech zones" to corral and observe those who speak out against them. They hosted the G8 summit on an island and refused to let any but approved press observers come.
And in this case, they have decided to impose their own sexual mores on us by outlawing the transmission of images, words and sounds depicting activities they have declared "deviant."
So yes, I'm genuinely afraid that even as an American citizen, I will be monitored, harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, interrogated, bankrupted, jailed, defamed and ruined by this government, for things I write or say. For saying "fuck Bush" and "fuck his government." When I say "the United States' activities in the Middle East both created and encouraged the people behind the September 11 attacks," I must remember that I'm speaking out against a government that has disappeared people for saying much the same, shipped them to countries whose idea of Q&A is to Q while smashing your hands with hammers then pouring boiling water on your legs until they get the "right" A.
And I don't see a hell of a lot of difference between a government that attacks those who truthfully document its atrocities and one that attacks those who trade pictures of people in handcuffs getting blowjobs. In either case it is a government that has ignored its own Constitution because it is inconvenient to the crusades---both figurative and literal---of the men and women currently in power.
There's a radio commentator here in Atlanta who refers to Bush's moralizing government as "The American Taliban."