Parody IS fair use, and, more than that, constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but using actual Star Wars in the background is a violation of their IP.
It's a bummer, but there it is. They could make a parody movie of it (a la "Spaceballs") but they can't reproduce the content exactly, while over-dubbing, without getting permission.
400 dollars is 100% higher than the average pair of Oakley sunglasses. Even a sweet pair of polarized polaroid lenses only costs around 300. Here is what they're selling and for how much.
It DOES have an mp3 player attached. $400-$500 is reasonable for top of the line sunglasses with a mp3 player incorporated.
I myself am waiting until I can get shades with infrared and lidar, wireless internet, mp3s, ambient audio amplification, and a smartgun link. That's just me.
You can read it here or here. You can also check these pictures. As you can see their ATMS are a complete joke, easily as bad as their voting machines.
All of these applications are pretty trvial to code from scratch to only do a very narrow range of tasks, thus making them easy to audit, and easy to secure. Diebold is a complete amateur at this stuff, and I hope to see them eventually sued into a greasy smear on the corporate highway.
My thought was, "How the hell can you change it's spin without first measuring its position?" Again, I am a sub-atomic tyro. I guess they are not related.
My mad physics skillz are pretty useless if whats going on isn't one big thing smashing into another big thing, so if someone out there who RTFA'd would like to tell me how this squares with Heisenberg, I'd be much obliged.
I don't see how you can say ANYTHING got less coverage than that. If we have 3 year retrospectives over the prison abuses, I may reconsider.
I don't see how it's "Defeat Bush at any cost" to point out actual facts regarding torture and abuse perpetrated against helpless prisoners by our troops. It's not a liberal bias to report facts, and my opinions on the prison scandal are based on facts. 1) It happened. 2) The general supposedly in charge was aware. 3) Independant human rights groups were aware. 4) The acts were directly in conflict with the Geneva convention on multiple levels. 5) Memos were received by Rumsfeld who took no action until after the press broke the story.
To me that is a huge story. It's the first time we've ever been handed hard proof that our troops were abusing prisoners of war, and no, I don't think systematic is too strong a word. To have it met with near indifference from the government is appalling. If those things were happening to our POWs, then we would be decrying the offenders in the strongest terms. But, hey, we're still better than Saddam, sort of.
I don't think you can seperate the world in to Fox News and Michael Moore. First of all, its disingenous, because Moore is one guy, not a tv network. Second, because I agree with you in regards to Moore. He's a whacko. He's occasionally amusing, but he's so biased it's hard to take anything he says seriously.
But Fox is no better. You may consider all mainstream media to have a liberal bias, but then you turn around and defend Fox, just because you like their bias. They both suck. But I consider the mainstream to be a middle ground. Sure it's biased. But it is not as biased as Fox. The fact that most of the world isn't made up of right wingers or left wingers pretty much guarantees that to be the case.
Who's more interested in free speech and freedom of the press? Liberals. Who's less into big business? Liberals. Who's more likely to empathise with the plight of their fellow man? Liberals. Who's more likely to object to Gov't/coporate control of the media? Liberals.
On the other hand: Who's more likely to be in favor of censorship? Conservatives. Who's more likely to be in favor of ignoring the excess of big business? Conservatives. Who's more likely to social programs in favor of lower taxes? Conservatives. Who's most famous media outlet is owned by the largest media monopoly in the world? Conservatives.
Be thankful that reporters are more liberal. Liberal means a lot of things, one of which is a healthy disrespect for authority.
As for venom, and vitriol, are you saying that conservatives are less venemous? Less vitrolic? I consider myself a moderate. I'd be happy if the whackos on both sides keeled over dead.
I've never considered Fox News to actually be news, any more than I get my news from the Daily Show.
I think it is easy enough to see the difference between Fox News and any other major news outlet, just by the pundits they employ. No other news outlet has so many pundits who are unabashedly conservative. No other news outlet has as many LIBERAL pundits as Fox has conservative ones.
Several former Fox insiders have resigned, and written books outlining blatant bias being openly spun in the staff meetings. I don't think it's ever really been in question that they have a bias. Many people consider all other news to be biased, but if you think that all other news is biased....Well, there's not much I can say to that. I don't trust the regular news all that much, but I've never found it to be as biased as Fox.
As for the two examples you mentioned, I think that's a classic example. Systematic prisoner abuse in violation of international treaties that used to protect our soldiers being instigated by civillian contractors and nodded at to the very highest levels? Hard to see how you can blow that out of proportion. It goes completely counter to our mission in Iraq, and our image of ourselves as liberators. Verses a guy getting beheaded, which played luridly on Fox for the same number of days that a prominent Senator getting beheaded would have netted on a "biased" channel.
You really don't see an agenda there? One is a stain on our national honor...Fox doesn't really care about that. Only people who would care are probably French, right? One is the televised execution of a civillian, which happened to be available on seriously gory video. That THAT got tremendous airplay? Why? Sure it's interesting but a lot of interesting things seem not to make the news on either side, and I doubt Fox ever covered the weirder bits. It just wasn't that big a story, if you weren't glorying in the lurid video.
I think you should reconsider your news source. Sure, if you like it, watch it. But don't believe everything they tell you.
Meh. Not too sure how much that matters. A lot of the impetus on that scale comes from environmentalism and economics, where the pope can be a lot more liberal than any politician (especially an American politican, because we suck in those areas). Don't doubt that he and the most right wing american politicos have similar views on traditional morals.
If you think Truth = Fox News then yes, actually, I'm right and everyone who thinks Fox News is 100% true is completely wrong. Stupid too. Anyone who thinks any one news channel or outlet is 100% correct is a fool.
When you sandwich a "Talk Show Host" between two news programs on a 24 hour news channel, and he spends his entire show talking about the news, you can't claim that he doesn't count, though many Fox people do, in an attempt to pretend that they aren't utterly biased.
I have a similar contempt for liberal pundits (Michael Moore leaps to mind) and if Moore was on a news channel with Franken and Mahr and some feckless moderate passed off as "conservative" I'd hold that channel in the same sort of towering contempt I have for Fox News. As there doesn't seem to be such a station yet, I get to focus on Fox. Unfair, and Unbalanced. I wouldn't let my dog watch that station.
Sadly, I agree. I know a LOT of people who consider Clinton to be an utter, complete, flaming liberal, which is laughable to anyone who actually looks at his record. I've also heard people refer to Bush as a moderate, which is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Still, the rest of the world isn't a whole hell of a lot better. Think we're conservative? Check the Middle East bub. At least our religious whackos haven't taken over yet.
The converse must also be true then, that the people who believe that Fox news is, as they claim, "Fair and Balanced" must also lie in the intersection of people who believe Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Hannity tell nothing but the unvarnished truth.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, the intersection of groups on both sides who think that all the radical pundits are full of shit is still bigger.
Kerry is a waffler because he voted both for and against bills dealing with issue X.
This is true. This is a fact. It applies to several issues.
But it is also a fact that alot of the bills he voted against are bills with unsupportable riders that EVERYONE voted against, and that would have been used against him had he actually voted FOR them.
Both are facts. Both are true. But I think the second one is a "better" fact, because it pokes a hole in the misconception that he votes erratically for no reason.
The problem with pure truth is that, in context, it can be made to look like many different things. I would prefer to have the truth set in a context without agenda or bias, as much as is possible.
I agree with you about untrustworthy news sources, but it bothers me, because I don't have much trust for news consumers and their ability to discern truth from fabrication or opinion.
It's good if people are capable of recognising bias. I've had people quote Fox News items at me like if Hannity said it, it must have come from God himself.
There is a parable about finding the truth, which says (super short version), ask a friend, then ask an enemy. You get both sides of the story, and you can figure out roughly what happened. But what if you don't bother to get the other side?
You forget: The populace has to be willing to make the effort to be informed. I think more than anything else, this is the problem. People believe what they see on the TV news of their choice, and they don't bother to add more facts or even check the competition.
I mean, the amount of our political discoure that is decided by the radical right and left is ridiculous. Most of us are neither, yet look at the big issues: Abortion, gun control, prayer in schools. Jesus.
And god, so uninformed. I'd like to see a day where you had to answer a five question multiple choice test about each candidate you vote for, and if you blow more than one, NO VOTE FOR YOU! No doubt the people putting the test together would run statistics and try to weigh the test against people who vote for their opponents.
I think news with an obvious and strong bias is dangerous, whether its Fox News or another.
I think the founding fathers were overly optimistic in this respect: I doubt they would have believed that a news station with such a viscious and pronounced bias could gather the market share it has.
Most people who dislike Fox news dislike it for the reason you said: Because they don't agree. But some of us dislike it because it's an unabashed propaganda outlet aimed directly at a potion of the populace that doesn't think too carefully about what it's looking at.
Of what journalism could be doing. Being a voice of reason, and trying to stick unemotionally to the facts even when no one wants to hear them. There are a lot of people I'd like to be able to sit down and argue solid facts with for a day or so.
Television journalism makes me sick; I'm not sure whether they're the "Guy who wants to go to the Ballgame" or "The Sales Representative." I can't really see them as one of the other 12.
Hello! Are Journalism and Politics inextricably mixed? Why don't you ask the obviously analogous question: Are senses and perception inextricably mixed? You need the whole article title to even say anything intelligent on the subject.
As for the quality of journalism, I'm not so sure. The question becomes, "Are people more likely to make a good desicion if they have access to better facts." I don't think I've ever seen anything that would prove that. People have access to some pretty damn good facts, and rarely if ever bother to avail themselves of them. On the contrary, people go out of their way to find facts that back up their preconceived notions. I even do it myself on occassion.
What would really happen is what's happening now: political candidates are judged minutely on everything they've ever done in their whole lives. I don't like Bush, but does it really matter that he did coke, skipped out on the national guard, or had a DUI? Does it make that much of a difference? But it's a much larger issue than his foreign policy blunders and blatant cronyism.
No, it's all reduced to soundbites, and all the issues are reduced to shady poll numbers and the pundits dissect every tiny piece of information into meaningless atoms, before producing unfounded tripe to throw at both sides. We're obsessed with things that could not matter less, and the things that people SHOULD be caring about, no one even TALKS about. What's Kerry's voting record REALLY like? How many times has Bush vetoed things that are popular to the American people? Who knows? You'd have to read fringe papers and the goddamn Congressional Report to figure these things out.
So yea, I think we need "better" journalism, but it's not the same "better" that everyone thinks of. It's not better scandal mongering, or even more psychotically in-depth coverage of shit that doesn't MATTER in people's personal lives, but instead real coverage of the issues, and real coverage of what the candidates have actually DONE in office (we're not talking interns here)!
The complete lack of substance in the political debate is utterly fed by the media. They need to stop playing the game, and stop pandering to the lowest common denominator and start covering shit with substance. I don't see it ever happening, but that's what needs to happen.
I mean, if this thing is daylight only, as, of course, it must be, since it's converting sunlight to energy, then there will be room for a solid state vegetable sandwich of darkness!
Really, what kind of techie is going to go out into the SUN to use his electronics? Do they know their market at all?
Wonder how it compares in efficiency/durability with a modern solar cell? High efficiency solid state would be damn useful there.
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If I'm in florida, and I vote for Gore, along with 49.9% of my fellow floridians, how is it fair that nearly 50% of us have our vote count for crap?
If I'm in a state full right wing whackos (as I am), I might as well not vote, because vote or no vote, my say is worth exactly CRAP.
Explain to me how that is the best system? How is a system in which the majority does not, in fact rule, even a reasonable democracy?
New York Times Registration Generator
Parody IS fair use, and, more than that, constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but using actual Star Wars in the background is a violation of their IP.
It's a bummer, but there it is. They could make a parody movie of it (a la "Spaceballs") but they can't reproduce the content exactly, while over-dubbing, without getting permission.
It would take a HUGE fan to keep it from overheating and causing a board shutdown or a processor meltdown.
I've got a 3.02 ghz, mildly overclocked, and the fan shutting down and the board automatically shutting down due to high heat are nearly simultaneous.
400 dollars is 100% higher than the average pair of Oakley sunglasses. Even a sweet pair of polarized polaroid lenses only costs around 300. Here is what they're selling and for how much.
It DOES have an mp3 player attached. $400-$500 is reasonable for top of the line sunglasses with a mp3 player incorporated.
I myself am waiting until I can get shades with infrared and lidar, wireless internet, mp3s, ambient audio amplification, and a smartgun link. That's just me.
You can read it here or here. You can also check these pictures. As you can see their ATMS are a complete joke, easily as bad as their voting machines.
All of these applications are pretty trvial to code from scratch to only do a very narrow range of tasks, thus making them easy to audit, and easy to secure. Diebold is a complete amateur at this stuff, and I hope to see them eventually sued into a greasy smear on the corporate highway.
Sounds like someone is excited that "Star Trek" style Transporters are once again theoretically possible.
=P
My thought was, "How the hell can you change it's spin without first measuring its position?" Again, I am a sub-atomic tyro. I guess they are not related.
My mad physics skillz are pretty useless if whats going on isn't one big thing smashing into another big thing, so if someone out there who RTFA'd would like to tell me how this squares with Heisenberg, I'd be much obliged.
I don't see how you can say ANYTHING got less coverage than that. If we have 3 year retrospectives over the prison abuses, I may reconsider.
I don't see how it's "Defeat Bush at any cost" to point out actual facts regarding torture and abuse perpetrated against helpless prisoners by our troops. It's not a liberal bias to report facts, and my opinions on the prison scandal are based on facts. 1) It happened. 2) The general supposedly in charge was aware. 3) Independant human rights groups were aware. 4) The acts were directly in conflict with the Geneva convention on multiple levels. 5) Memos were received by Rumsfeld who took no action until after the press broke the story.
To me that is a huge story. It's the first time we've ever been handed hard proof that our troops were abusing prisoners of war, and no, I don't think systematic is too strong a word. To have it met with near indifference from the government is appalling. If those things were happening to our POWs, then we would be decrying the offenders in the strongest terms. But, hey, we're still better than Saddam, sort of.
I don't think you can seperate the world in to Fox News and Michael Moore. First of all, its disingenous, because Moore is one guy, not a tv network. Second, because I agree with you in regards to Moore. He's a whacko. He's occasionally amusing, but he's so biased it's hard to take anything he says seriously.
But Fox is no better. You may consider all mainstream media to have a liberal bias, but then you turn around and defend Fox, just because you like their bias. They both suck. But I consider the mainstream to be a middle ground. Sure it's biased. But it is not as biased as Fox. The fact that most of the world isn't made up of right wingers or left wingers pretty much guarantees that to be the case.
Who's more interested in free speech and freedom of the press? Liberals.
Who's less into big business? Liberals.
Who's more likely to empathise with the plight of their fellow man? Liberals.
Who's more likely to object to Gov't/coporate control of the media? Liberals.
On the other hand:
Who's more likely to be in favor of censorship?
Conservatives.
Who's more likely to be in favor of ignoring the excess of big business? Conservatives.
Who's more likely to social programs in favor of lower taxes? Conservatives.
Who's most famous media outlet is owned by the largest media monopoly in the world? Conservatives.
Be thankful that reporters are more liberal. Liberal means a lot of things, one of which is a healthy disrespect for authority.
As for venom, and vitriol, are you saying that conservatives are less venemous? Less vitrolic? I consider myself a moderate. I'd be happy if the whackos on both sides keeled over dead.
I did say yet...
Ugly scene. What's wrong with us?
I've never considered Fox News to actually be news, any more than I get my news from the Daily Show.
I think it is easy enough to see the difference between Fox News and any other major news outlet, just by the pundits they employ. No other news outlet has so many pundits who are unabashedly conservative. No other news outlet has as many LIBERAL pundits as Fox has conservative ones.
Several former Fox insiders have resigned, and written books outlining blatant bias being openly spun in the staff meetings. I don't think it's ever really been in question that they have a bias. Many people consider all other news to be biased, but if you think that all other news is biased....Well, there's not much I can say to that. I don't trust the regular news all that much, but I've never found it to be as biased as Fox.
As for the two examples you mentioned, I think that's a classic example. Systematic prisoner abuse in violation of international treaties that used to protect our soldiers being instigated by civillian contractors and nodded at to the very highest levels? Hard to see how you can blow that out of proportion. It goes completely counter to our mission in Iraq, and our image of ourselves as liberators. Verses a guy getting beheaded, which played luridly on Fox for the same number of days that a prominent Senator getting beheaded would have netted on a "biased" channel.
You really don't see an agenda there? One is a stain on our national honor...Fox doesn't really care about that. Only people who would care are probably French, right? One is the televised execution of a civillian, which happened to be available on seriously gory video. That THAT got tremendous airplay? Why? Sure it's interesting but a lot of interesting things seem not to make the news on either side, and I doubt Fox ever covered the weirder bits. It just wasn't that big a story, if you weren't glorying in the lurid video.
I think you should reconsider your news source. Sure, if you like it, watch it. But don't believe everything they tell you.
Meh. Not too sure how much that matters. A lot of the impetus on that scale comes from environmentalism and economics, where the pope can be a lot more liberal than any politician (especially an American politican, because we suck in those areas). Don't doubt that he and the most right wing american politicos have similar views on traditional morals.
If you think Truth = Fox News then yes, actually, I'm right and everyone who thinks Fox News is 100% true is completely wrong. Stupid too. Anyone who thinks any one news channel or outlet is 100% correct is a fool.
When you sandwich a "Talk Show Host" between two news programs on a 24 hour news channel, and he spends his entire show talking about the news, you can't claim that he doesn't count, though many Fox people do, in an attempt to pretend that they aren't utterly biased.
I have a similar contempt for liberal pundits (Michael Moore leaps to mind) and if Moore was on a news channel with Franken and Mahr and some feckless moderate passed off as "conservative" I'd hold that channel in the same sort of towering contempt I have for Fox News. As there doesn't seem to be such a station yet, I get to focus on Fox. Unfair, and Unbalanced. I wouldn't let my dog watch that station.
Sadly, I agree. I know a LOT of people who consider Clinton to be an utter, complete, flaming liberal, which is laughable to anyone who actually looks at his record. I've also heard people refer to Bush as a moderate, which is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Still, the rest of the world isn't a whole hell of a lot better. Think we're conservative? Check the Middle East bub. At least our religious whackos haven't taken over yet.
The converse must also be true then, that the people who believe that Fox news is, as they claim, "Fair and Balanced" must also lie in the intersection of people who believe Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Hannity tell nothing but the unvarnished truth.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, the intersection of groups on both sides who think that all the radical pundits are full of shit is still bigger.
Well yes, thats true.
Here's my counterexample:
Kerry is a waffler because he voted both for and against bills dealing with issue X.
This is true. This is a fact. It applies to several issues.
But it is also a fact that alot of the bills he voted against are bills with unsupportable riders that EVERYONE voted against, and that would have been used against him had he actually voted FOR them.
Both are facts. Both are true. But I think the second one is a "better" fact, because it pokes a hole in the misconception that he votes erratically for no reason.
The problem with pure truth is that, in context, it can be made to look like many different things. I would prefer to have the truth set in a context without agenda or bias, as much as is possible.
I agree with you about untrustworthy news sources, but it bothers me, because I don't have much trust for news consumers and their ability to discern truth from fabrication or opinion.
It's good if people are capable of recognising bias. I've had people quote Fox News items at me like if Hannity said it, it must have come from God himself.
There is a parable about finding the truth, which says (super short version), ask a friend, then ask an enemy. You get both sides of the story, and you can figure out roughly what happened. But what if you don't bother to get the other side?
You forget: The populace has to be willing to make the effort to be informed. I think more than anything else, this is the problem. People believe what they see on the TV news of their choice, and they don't bother to add more facts or even check the competition.
I mean, the amount of our political discoure that is decided by the radical right and left is ridiculous. Most of us are neither, yet look at the big issues: Abortion, gun control, prayer in schools. Jesus.
And god, so uninformed. I'd like to see a day where you had to answer a five question multiple choice test about each candidate you vote for, and if you blow more than one, NO VOTE FOR YOU! No doubt the people putting the test together would run statistics and try to weigh the test against people who vote for their opponents.
Human nature sucks.
I think news with an obvious and strong bias is dangerous, whether its Fox News or another.
I think the founding fathers were overly optimistic in this respect: I doubt they would have believed that a news station with such a viscious and pronounced bias could gather the market share it has.
Most people who dislike Fox news dislike it for the reason you said: Because they don't agree. But some of us dislike it because it's an unabashed propaganda outlet aimed directly at a potion of the populace that doesn't think too carefully about what it's looking at.
Of what journalism could be doing. Being a voice of reason, and trying to stick unemotionally to the facts even when no one wants to hear them. There are a lot of people I'd like to be able to sit down and argue solid facts with for a day or so.
Television journalism makes me sick; I'm not sure whether they're the "Guy who wants to go to the Ballgame" or "The Sales Representative." I can't really see them as one of the other 12.
Hello! Are Journalism and Politics inextricably mixed? Why don't you ask the obviously analogous question: Are senses and perception inextricably mixed? You need the whole article title to even say anything intelligent on the subject.
As for the quality of journalism, I'm not so sure. The question becomes, "Are people more likely to make a good desicion if they have access to better facts." I don't think I've ever seen anything that would prove that. People have access to some pretty damn good facts, and rarely if ever bother to avail themselves of them. On the contrary, people go out of their way to find facts that back up their preconceived notions. I even do it myself on occassion.
What would really happen is what's happening now: political candidates are judged minutely on everything they've ever done in their whole lives. I don't like Bush, but does it really matter that he did coke, skipped out on the national guard, or had a DUI? Does it make that much of a difference? But it's a much larger issue than his foreign policy blunders and blatant cronyism.
No, it's all reduced to soundbites, and all the issues are reduced to shady poll numbers and the pundits dissect every tiny piece of information into meaningless atoms, before producing unfounded tripe to throw at both sides. We're obsessed with things that could not matter less, and the things that people SHOULD be caring about, no one even TALKS about. What's Kerry's voting record REALLY like? How many times has Bush vetoed things that are popular to the American people? Who knows? You'd have to read fringe papers and the goddamn Congressional Report to figure these things out.
So yea, I think we need "better" journalism, but it's not the same "better" that everyone thinks of. It's not better scandal mongering, or even more psychotically in-depth coverage of shit that doesn't MATTER in people's personal lives, but instead real coverage of the issues, and real coverage of what the candidates have actually DONE in office (we're not talking interns here)!
The complete lack of substance in the political debate is utterly fed by the media. They need to stop playing the game, and stop pandering to the lowest common denominator and start covering shit with substance. I don't see it ever happening, but that's what needs to happen.
I mean, if this thing is daylight only, as, of course, it must be, since it's converting sunlight to energy, then there will be room for a solid state vegetable sandwich of darkness!
Really, what kind of techie is going to go out into the SUN to use his electronics? Do they know their market at all?
Wonder how it compares in efficiency/durability with a modern solar cell? High efficiency solid state would be damn useful there.
3rd Corollary: If someone who misspells religion cannot have intelligent ideas about religion, then what about someone who misspells intelligent?