Wow. It's amazing that someone can be so condenscending and yet so wrong.
As I said before, you are so completely wrong that there's no real way I can reach you. I gave it my best shot to make you understand. Several others (dev_sda and jimsum) have given it attempts too. Their explanations were perfectly lucid, but you still refuse to understand.
Fortunately, the way you don't recognize videotaping in a movie theater as copyright violation will flag you as too clueless to be heeded, and protect anyone else from accidentally listening to your crazy position.
Since perfect responses to your position were made several posts up, I'll just answer a few more of your most trivially correctable points.
Copyright law doesn't cover copying, it covers reproduction? reproduce - To produce a counterpart, image, or copy of.
That is not what I said. You claimed that distribution isn't illegal. I pointed out that the law covers both repdroduction and distribution.
As soon as I go to slashdot.org slashdot sends me a copy of the HTML, which is stored in the browser cache.
Yes, exactly. When you go to slashdot.org, a copy is made. Until a human, you, went to slashdot, there was no copying. You, the downloader, caused the copy to happen. If that had been an illegal copy, it'd be your fault.
It's the same thing as someone making hundreds of copies of a CD and handing them out on the street.
No, it is not the same. Handing out CDs on the street means that hundreds of copies were made before anyone came to grab them. Setting a file as downloadable only creates a copy as soon as some remote person starts the copy being made. The person who makes the copy is the downloader.
Besides, how can I instruct your computer to copy a file for me? Unless I've hacked it, the only way I could do that is if you let me.
Yes, I let you make a copy. I let you make a copy. Who made the copy? You did! I let you, and you made a copy. How could it be any simpler?
You committed the crime, and I let you. I can be responsible too, as an accessory, accomplice, or conspirator; but you did it. (Alternatively, we both did it. If a gangster hires an assasin to kill a man, both can be guilty of the same murder)
That can be defeated too... There will be a back&forth struggle of technological trickery. The publishers edit the ads to be further obfuscated, so that software cannot distinguish them from content or tell how to skip them, and then the ad-blocker guys adjust and eventually make smarter software that can recognize even more styles of ads.
For users where the Flash plug-in detect script has found Flash present, make the "click to proceed" button part of the Flash animation
There's 2 ways the ad-blockers can counter this. The cleverer (and easier) way is to subvert the functioning of the Flash detect script. Recognize that on some websites, the only use of flash is for ads, and report to those websites that you have no flash.
If the detect-script runs on a per-page basis, they can actually disable reporting Flash ability only on an intersital page. If the site keeps a cookie on you, it might get suspicious/confused if the same user keeps on losing and regaining the abliity to view flash, so the ad-blocker would have to disable it sitewide.
However, that method gives the publishers a countermeasure: they can increase the use of Flash on their site, so that the desired content is in Flash as well. They can even blend the content and ads into a single Flash file.
When that happens (and it might), ad-blockers will be helpless for a long time. But eventually, they'll learn to read Flash themselves. First they'll be able to categorize an individual SWF as content or ad, and much later they'll actually be able to detect ads within a Flash, and skip displaying them.
Because the SWF format is so closed and confusing, as compared to HTML, it'll take a long time for ad-blockers to reach the level of sophistication where they can understand the inner-workings of Flash data. But that day will eventually come.
Talking with you is like arguing that the sky is not running red with blood. There's really no point talking with someone who can't understand the evidence in front of his eyes- and precious little way for me to convince you otherwise. But I'll give it one more try. If you know any sane people (especially nice would be an English teacher or law enforcer), show them this thread and they'll agree that you're wrong.
No. Copyright law covers making copies.
100% false. Copyright law doesn't actually cover copying. But, it covers both "reproduction" and "distributing copies" of a copyrighted work. Distribution is illegal.
The copying and distribution happen at the uploader's end.
No, the copying and distribution happens at both ends. And position is irrelevant; whose "end" it took place at doesn't matter. The question is, who made the copy? The copy was made by some software, but software can't be blamed. The person who operated that software can. And who instructed the software to make a copy? The person who issued a download request.
Let's take this very slowly. Copyright law, as I've just pointed out, covers both reproduction (making a copy) and distribution of a copy. Now, what does it mean to "copy"? Let's perform an experiment:
Go to the File menu in the upper-left of this window, and go down to Save. Type "slashdot.htm" in the little box, and push OK. Do you see what you just did? You made a copy of a file. Here's another experiment for you- see if you can go to ftp.gnu.org and take a copy of welcome.msg. (Right click on it, and push Save...)
Do you see what's going on here? By interacting with remote Web/FTP servers, you are making copies. Other people have set up software which allows you to make copies, but they are not doing the copying themselves.
If you performed those experiments, I dare you to lay palm on a holy book and swear on your honor: "I never made a copy of welcome.msg. This file on my harddrive; this local copy of data from ftp.gnu.org; I didn't make it! There is a copy on my computer, but I never copied it"
If you can't understand how flat-out wrong that statement is, there's no real hope for you.
Sorry, giving music to a friend has never been legal. Fair use only covers personal use.
Sharing with a friend may or may not be fair use, on a case-by-case basis. The border to criminal infringement isn't a firm line. Personal copies will almost always be fair use, giving to a friend usually not.
But if you give someone 30 seconds of a song for his evaluation purposes, that is actually protected fair use (in the same way that Ebert & Roeper can play 75 seconds of "Matrix Revolutions" on TV for critical purposes, without breaking the law). Many old school file-traders tried to hide behind this, by running banners on their FTP sites saying "For evaluation only; files must be deleted within 24 hours". That's a nice try, but any prosecutor or judge could see that by and large, the activities they pursued were not evaluation, but hoarding.
Transmitting a fragment of a copyrighted work which is too small to be independently enjoyable is actually a decent argument that the use is fair.
If you think this is inaccurate, please point to anything in copyright law that talks about receiving a copyrighted work.
We don't have to. Copyright law plainly outlaws "copying". When you download, you are making a copy. And if you know that you've got no right to do this, the crime is yours.
Prostitution is illegal. Cocaine dealing is illegal. Copyright infringment is illegal. Each of is a forbidden exchange between two people. Either the giver or reciever could be arrested, but the police may prefer the one who seems easier to convict, or is the instigator, or more likely to repeat the act.
If distribution is illegal (it is), then uploading and downloading can BOTH be illegal.
If I rip a CD and run a public FTP from my hard disk, have I broken any law? No, not yet. No distribution has occured because no one has made a copy.
I leave the computer, and somebody connects and starts to download. At that point, illegal copyright violation has occured. And what specific act initiated this lawlessness? A download. By placing files in a place where they were easily downloadable, I'm an accomplice or a conspirator- but the criminal act was performed by the downloader.
Consider videotaping a movie in a theater. That's recieving data from someone showing it to you, so it's equivalent to downloading. But no one would argue that it's illegal.
By that logic, wouldn't it be wise to "err on the side of caution" by outlawing abortion since the possibility exists that fetuses are human beings?
The stakes for abortion aren't nearly as high. Whether or not the fetuses are human (they are), whether or not they deserve protection (maybe), abortion could never kill off more than a percentage of humanity.
a new type of packaging that is completely biodegradable in a very short amount of time when exposed to water. This replaces plastic which basically doesn't biodegrade ever.
Your explanation doesn't contain enough information to tell if this is really a win or not. How much more expensive is the new package than the old? (Higher energy costs to produce, which might outweigh later savings). And how effective is the packaging? For biscuits it prehaps doesn't matter, but the distribution chains for other, more important foodstuffs depends on sturdy, plastic packaging.
If a material is biodegradable, it means that pests and vermin (any kind of nasty biology) will have an easier time tearing through it to consume and contaminate the product. This creates a need for more packaging around the packaging, adding weight and fuel consumption to every shipment that is moved.
Interestingly, if the goal was to reduce waste handling costs for consumer foodstuff packages, the only approach certain not to have an environmental downside would be to ban decorative boxes. Many companies use unnecessarily elaborate packs for promotional/marketing reasons, going far beyond what's needed to protect the food.
The occasional dialog in The Matrix was miles better than in Keanu's previous cyperpunk excursion. That was one movie where I honestly did turn the sound of partway through, but kept watching for the FX.
the occasional social commentary, like "Training Day"
Training Day clearly falls into the stack of clean, convenient Hollywood endings. Prehaps it's not as bad as most, but the movie falls apart as it becomes formulaic towards the end.
Instead of leaving Densel as an ambiguous "cop who goes too far", and leaving him to dish out dark justice to hoodlums, he turns into an over-the-top, shoot-at-your-partner, child-as-hostage, ranting-raving scenary-chewing badguy. The film gives the audience an out by painting him as conclusively evil, rather than letting viewers ponder it for themselves.
And his demise in a spray of vengeful gunfire? That's pure "Crime doesn't pay" moralizing.
a show like the Sopranos, which is a "mob background" to a soap opera, is not ground-breaking TV.
Oh really? What other shows can you list which featured a blatant murderer as the main character? (Those where he renounces a life of crime in episode one and becomes a wandering vigilante certainly don't count).
I've seen a few fansubs with supremely better translations than the later, official releases. Escaflowne and Hack/Sign stick out particularly. (And no, I don't mean the multiated televised Escaflowne. Even the DVD release was markedly incomprehensible, especially in the last episode)
Fansubbers have some distinct advantages over commercial translators: being non-commercial, and aren't pressured to alter the content into something . They also don't have to write a script English dubbers can use, so they're free of all kinds of word-sound sync problems which bind commercial translators today.
But that's no security violation. If someone wants to run the equivalent of an anonymous FTP server, let him. (I assume these are on separate disks than the main OS install, right?)
Occasionally in the lose college environment like that, you find students leaving text files on other people harddrives, things like "Hey I like your MP3s, where do you live? I'm in Kenmore 402!", because they find shares but have no knowledge of the owner.
PS. What I don't believe is the number of administrators at your school collecting $1,800,000 severance after zero days of work!
There's a trend towards more client-side filtering of undesirable web content (advertisements). This threatens to reduce already low banner revenues to zero. (This mirrors the threat TiVo poses to television, but is in the world of software where innovation and counter-innovation on both sides can come more quickly, so the endgame could approach sooner)
There's 3 ways the web publishing industry can respond:
Fight it. Use technical means to break ad-blocking software, by blending ads into the content more and more confusingly so that filters can't tell which is which. This can work for a while, but I see the tides of technology on the side of the end user. Plus, too much mingling of ads and content may break some FCC regulations.
Fight it. Use legal means to preserve a technically outdated business model. Get client-side editing of digital documents declared a form of copyright infringement, or computer hacking, or DRM circumvention. ("Trusted Computing" might create web browsers that "protect" users from viewing "damaged" pages)
Accept it, and move on. Just tell the users to pay for the site, and find a way to make it work.
Face it, advertising is just a sneaky, indirect way to get money to the publisher by first tricking the reader into doing business with a corporation she wouldn't otherwise buy from, and then the corp giving a fraction of that to the web publisher. As we all know from Newtonian physics, every additional link in a chain of interactions adds inefficiency which drains power from the final output. Wouldn't it be better to cut out the middleman, and let readers directly pay for the content, instead of all that rigamarole?
Of course it would, so long as the overhead cost of making the payment is less than the costs the advertiser incures on the publisher. For that to happen, we need a high-tech, efficient way to pay for webpages. We need micropayments.
So far, "micropayments" have failed (and few attempted projects have even really tried micro payments). But that's because they've never had any content viewers really wanted to buy. With the specter of vanished ad revenue hanging over them, there'd be a true incentive for big-name sites to move into pay-only mode. And they'd have desparate incentive to make the software convenient enough for global use.
I won't go further into micropayments, because they've been covered extensively. I just wanted to present the hope that necessity will someday mother the invention.
Render your entire story into one big PNG, ads included.
Ok, maybe that's going a little far. But some degree of mixing ad+content into the same graphic file can work. For example, a site like cnn.com includes a topical photograph in every story. So expand that PNG to 200 pixels taller, and paste the ad to the bottom (after a respectable whitespace to ensure the ad isn't seen as part of the topic) Or do the headline text as a wide PNG, with the ad graphic a few hundred pixels to the right.
Techniques like that will undermine web client's ability to adjust pagelayout for nonstandard viewer resolutions. But web publishers are willing to pay a price in userfriendliness to protect their ads. (After all, advertising is almost by definition user-unfriendly, as it is the mixing of requested content with undesired or even harmful material)
Intersitals will make the web look more like TV for a while, but won't solve publishers' problems.
Tabbed browsing already makes it easier for web readers to "channel surf during the commericials" than it is for (pre-TiVO) TV viewers, since they won't risk missing the resumption of the show. I do this on TheOnion.com; select all the stories I want from the front page in multiple tabs. Some of the pages load a 15 second Flash ad, but by the time I go to back to read the story, the advertisement is over.
When the in-between page comes up, ad-blockers will quickly learn to white out the whole page. Or replace it with a handy countdown-clock until the real content arrives.
If the ad page includes an option to click past the ad (rather than relying HTTP refresh to carry the viewer onward), then in short order adblock programmers will make browsers automatically follow links to the real page. (A potential countermeasure is for the server to refuse granting the desired content until a per-user timer has indicated he's spent enough time looking at the ad)
A more interesting approach for Slashdot specifically would be to move ads further down the page. Not just a 180x600 stripe in the upper right, but 60x60 boxes interspered through the comment display. (There's this whole uninhabited white column on the left side of this page)
Aside from the frontpage, your average slashdot page is scores of screens long, and only the first screen shows any ads. While your statistics claim that the majority of Slashdot readers don't view the comments (which I question), those who do read the discussion could be offered to advertisers as a more valuable audience (they tend to be more engaged in really looking at the page for long periods, instead of just scanning through for any good headlines)
Yeah, this argument was really great when I first heard it in 1990. It's a crock of shit now. After 15 years of The Simpsons and a number of moderately successful adult cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s,
In actuality, US consumers file animation into two categories: children and comedy. (And the entry into adult comedy wasn't pioneered by The Simpsons. The Flintstones, Looney Tunes, even Steamboat Willy all had adult audiences in mind)
So of something looks like a "cartoon", but isn't funny, USians don't know what to make of it.
you go to Finding Nemo, you'll get mildly scary scenes with a heartwarming ending
Does Finding Nemo have a villian? I suppose the human girl counts. The great advantage of Ghilbi works over Disney animated features is the frequent lack of an unambiguously evil opponent. Disney almost parodies themselves with OAV releases like "Villians", which emphasize how much they categorize evil as a quality of other people, rather than a force that can manifest in anyone.
Only as a satire of Anime, maybe. And therefore it should never be recommended to someone who's asking introductory questions about what anime even is. Weird without a point of reference isn't funny, just weird.
It was at the end, wasn't included in the released film. It was the part where the surviving commander returns to the US, only to be sentenced to 30 years for sexual assault of a minor.
Jin Roh's not that great. The plot is senseless, making the sacrifices of certain sympathetic characters completely arbitrary.
("Good job you two! You really demolished those badguys, and prevented them from $SPOILER1. So now we've got to $SPOILER1, because that's the only way to prevent our enemies from $SPOILER1. Although exactly what those enemies would have to fear from $SPOILER2 is unclear, especially since said enemies all just recieved 14+ bulletwounds each. Nonetheless, go $SPOILER1 at once!")
From a literary standpoint, it's poor. Good stories start with exposition of characters and external pressures, then examine the effects of the mixture. Jin Roh continues to introduce new factions right up until the end ("But wait! We, yet more unremarkable men in bland suits, were members of the super-secret group within the secret group, not to be confused with your super-secret group, which we joined only to betray")
As an action movie it's poor. It shares a bizarre shortcoming with the works of Jean-Claude Van Damme: there is no fighting! It has no fighting in the same sense that a punching bag, slaughterhouse, or guillotine have no fighting. It takes two to fight: each side must resist the other. In the climactic "battle" of JinRoh, it turns out the hero is entirely bulletproof, so no real combat ever takes place.
(Why doesn't Van Damme fight? Typical plotline has him beating up on 10-15 helpless whelps with zero ability to resist him. That's not fighting, just hitting. Then his father will be kidnapped, forcing him to allow an enemy to beat on him for 10 minutes until the hostage is rescued, whereupon he reverts to using every other stuntman as a punching bag in the big finish)
I haven't seen any Linux distribution use an approach like that yet. (They allow Gnome/KDE to start esound/arts, of course. But those don't work with legacy/dev/dsp apps, and neither has great audio quality)
I think the conclusion was that software mixing is a user-space job,
Clearly software mixing falls under the category of "hardware abstraction", which is a job for the OS. Whether it happen in kernel or userspace is up to the implementors.
However, the Linux developers strongly support backwards compatibility. And existing software (like quake1) expects to open/dev/dsp to make noise. This means a kernel-based interface to software mixing is the only way to go. (I suppose the kernel could use a trick to feed data sent to/dev/dsp into userspace code, then back down into the real sound driver)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. It's amazing that someone can be so condenscending and yet so wrong.
As I said before, you are so completely wrong that there's no real way I can reach you. I gave it my best shot to make you understand. Several others (dev_sda and jimsum) have given it attempts too. Their explanations were perfectly lucid, but you still refuse to understand.
Fortunately, the way you don't recognize videotaping in a movie theater as copyright violation will flag you as too clueless to be heeded, and protect anyone else from accidentally listening to your crazy position.
Since perfect responses to your position were made several posts up, I'll just answer a few more of your most trivially correctable points.
Copyright law doesn't cover copying, it covers reproduction? reproduce - To produce a counterpart, image, or copy of.
That is not what I said. You claimed that distribution isn't illegal. I pointed out that the law covers both repdroduction and distribution.
As soon as I go to slashdot.org slashdot sends me a copy of the HTML, which is stored in the browser cache.
Yes, exactly. When you go to slashdot.org, a copy is made. Until a human, you, went to slashdot, there was no copying. You, the downloader, caused the copy to happen. If that had been an illegal copy, it'd be your fault.
It's the same thing as someone making hundreds of copies of a CD and handing them out on the street.
No, it is not the same. Handing out CDs on the street means that hundreds of copies were made before anyone came to grab them. Setting a file as downloadable only creates a copy as soon as some remote person starts the copy being made. The person who makes the copy is the downloader.
Besides, how can I instruct your computer to copy a file for me? Unless I've hacked it, the only way I could do that is if you let me.
Yes, I let you make a copy. I let you make a copy. Who made the copy? You did! I let you, and you made a copy. How could it be any simpler?
You committed the crime, and I let you. I can be responsible too, as an accessory, accomplice, or conspirator; but you did it. (Alternatively, we both did it. If a gangster hires an assasin to kill a man, both can be guilty of the same murder)
That can be defeated too... There will be a back&forth struggle of technological trickery. The publishers edit the ads to be further obfuscated, so that software cannot distinguish them from content or tell how to skip them, and then the ad-blocker guys adjust and eventually make smarter software that can recognize even more styles of ads.
For users where the Flash plug-in detect script has found Flash present, make the "click to proceed" button part of the Flash animation
There's 2 ways the ad-blockers can counter this. The cleverer (and easier) way is to subvert the functioning of the Flash detect script. Recognize that on some websites, the only use of flash is for ads, and report to those websites that you have no flash.
If the detect-script runs on a per-page basis, they can actually disable reporting Flash ability only on an intersital page. If the site keeps a cookie on you, it might get suspicious/confused if the same user keeps on losing and regaining the abliity to view flash, so the ad-blocker would have to disable it sitewide.
However, that method gives the publishers a countermeasure: they can increase the use of Flash on their site, so that the desired content is in Flash as well. They can even blend the content and ads into a single Flash file.
When that happens (and it might), ad-blockers will be helpless for a long time. But eventually, they'll learn to read Flash themselves. First they'll be able to categorize an individual SWF as content or ad, and much later they'll actually be able to detect ads within a Flash, and skip displaying them.
Because the SWF format is so closed and confusing, as compared to HTML, it'll take a long time for ad-blockers to reach the level of sophistication where they can understand the inner-workings of Flash data. But that day will eventually come.
Talking with you is like arguing that the sky is not running red with blood. There's really no point talking with someone who can't understand the evidence in front of his eyes- and precious little way for me to convince you otherwise. But I'll give it one more try. If you know any sane people (especially nice would be an English teacher or law enforcer), show them this thread and they'll agree that you're wrong.
No. Copyright law covers making copies.
100% false. Copyright law doesn't actually cover copying. But, it covers both "reproduction" and "distributing copies" of a copyrighted work. Distribution is illegal.
The copying and distribution happen at the uploader's end.
No, the copying and distribution happens at both ends. And position is irrelevant; whose "end" it took place at doesn't matter. The question is, who made the copy? The copy was made by some software, but software can't be blamed. The person who operated that software can. And who instructed the software to make a copy? The person who issued a download request.
Let's take this very slowly. Copyright law, as I've just pointed out, covers both reproduction (making a copy) and distribution of a copy. Now, what does it mean to "copy"? Let's perform an experiment:
Go to the File menu in the upper-left of this window, and go down to Save. Type "slashdot.htm" in the little box, and push OK. Do you see what you just did? You made a copy of a file. Here's another experiment for you- see if you can go to ftp.gnu.org and take a copy of welcome.msg. (Right click on it, and push Save...)
Do you see what's going on here? By interacting with remote Web/FTP servers, you are making copies. Other people have set up software which allows you to make copies, but they are not doing the copying themselves.
If you performed those experiments, I dare you to lay palm on a holy book and swear on your honor: "I never made a copy of welcome.msg. This file on my harddrive; this local copy of data from ftp.gnu.org; I didn't make it! There is a copy on my computer, but I never copied it"
If you can't understand how flat-out wrong that statement is, there's no real hope for you.
Sorry, giving music to a friend has never been legal. Fair use only covers personal use.
Sharing with a friend may or may not be fair use, on a case-by-case basis. The border to criminal infringement isn't a firm line. Personal copies will almost always be fair use, giving to a friend usually not.
But if you give someone 30 seconds of a song for his evaluation purposes, that is actually protected fair use (in the same way that Ebert & Roeper can play 75 seconds of "Matrix Revolutions" on TV for critical purposes, without breaking the law). Many old school file-traders tried to hide behind this, by running banners on their FTP sites saying "For evaluation only; files must be deleted within 24 hours". That's a nice try, but any prosecutor or judge could see that by and large, the activities they pursued were not evaluation, but hoarding.
Transmitting a fragment of a copyrighted work which is too small to be independently enjoyable is actually a decent argument that the use is fair.
If you think this is inaccurate, please point to anything in copyright law that talks about receiving a copyrighted work.
We don't have to. Copyright law plainly outlaws "copying". When you download, you are making a copy. And if you know that you've got no right to do this, the crime is yours.
Prostitution is illegal. Cocaine dealing is illegal. Copyright infringment is illegal. Each of is a forbidden exchange between two people. Either the giver or reciever could be arrested, but the police may prefer the one who seems easier to convict, or is the instigator, or more likely to repeat the act.
If distribution is illegal (it is), then uploading and downloading can BOTH be illegal.
If I rip a CD and run a public FTP from my hard disk, have I broken any law? No, not yet. No distribution has occured because no one has made a copy.
I leave the computer, and somebody connects and starts to download. At that point, illegal copyright violation has occured. And what specific act initiated this lawlessness? A download. By placing files in a place where they were easily downloadable, I'm an accomplice or a conspirator- but the criminal act was performed by the downloader.
Consider videotaping a movie in a theater. That's recieving data from someone showing it to you, so it's equivalent to downloading. But no one would argue that it's illegal.
I'm completely certain that the Leader of the Free World is can recognize IIS, although he personally prefers apache (or even khttpd).
By that logic, wouldn't it be wise to "err on the side of caution" by outlawing abortion since the possibility exists that fetuses are human beings?
The stakes for abortion aren't nearly as high. Whether or not the fetuses are human (they are), whether or not they deserve protection (maybe), abortion could never kill off more than a percentage of humanity.
An environmental catastrophe could kill everyone.
a new type of packaging that is completely biodegradable in a very short amount of time when exposed to water. This replaces plastic which basically doesn't biodegrade ever.
Your explanation doesn't contain enough information to tell if this is really a win or not. How much more expensive is the new package than the old? (Higher energy costs to produce, which might outweigh later savings). And how effective is the packaging? For biscuits it prehaps doesn't matter, but the distribution chains for other, more important foodstuffs depends on sturdy, plastic packaging.
If a material is biodegradable, it means that pests and vermin (any kind of nasty biology) will have an easier time tearing through it to consume and contaminate the product. This creates a need for more packaging around the packaging, adding weight and fuel consumption to every shipment that is moved.
Interestingly, if the goal was to reduce waste handling costs for consumer foodstuff packages, the only approach certain not to have an environmental downside would be to ban decorative boxes. Many companies use unnecessarily elaborate packs for promotional/marketing reasons, going far beyond what's needed to protect the food.
The occasional dialog in The Matrix was miles better than in Keanu's previous cyperpunk excursion. That was one movie where I honestly did turn the sound of partway through, but kept watching for the FX.
the occasional social commentary, like "Training Day"
Training Day clearly falls into the stack of clean, convenient Hollywood endings. Prehaps it's not as bad as most, but the movie falls apart as it becomes formulaic towards the end.
Instead of leaving Densel as an ambiguous "cop who goes too far", and leaving him to dish out dark justice to hoodlums, he turns into an over-the-top, shoot-at-your-partner, child-as-hostage, ranting-raving scenary-chewing badguy. The film gives the audience an out by painting him as conclusively evil, rather than letting viewers ponder it for themselves.
And his demise in a spray of vengeful gunfire? That's pure "Crime doesn't pay" moralizing.
a show like the Sopranos, which is a "mob background" to a soap opera, is not ground-breaking TV.
Oh really? What other shows can you list which featured a blatant murderer as the main character? (Those where he renounces a life of crime in episode one and becomes a wandering vigilante certainly don't count).
I've seen a few fansubs with supremely better translations than the later, official releases. Escaflowne and Hack/Sign stick out particularly. (And no, I don't mean the multiated televised Escaflowne. Even the DVD release was markedly incomprehensible, especially in the last episode)
Fansubbers have some distinct advantages over commercial translators: being non-commercial, and aren't pressured to alter the content into something . They also don't have to write a script English dubbers can use, so they're free of all kinds of word-sound sync problems which bind commercial translators today.
For those who don't know...
But that's no security violation. If someone wants to run the equivalent of an anonymous FTP server, let him. (I assume these are on separate disks than the main OS install, right?)
Occasionally in the lose college environment like that, you find students leaving text files on other people harddrives, things like "Hey I like your MP3s, where do you live? I'm in Kenmore 402!", because they find shares but have no knowledge of the owner.
PS. What I don't believe is the number of administrators at your school collecting $1,800,000 severance after zero days of work!
There's 3 ways the web publishing industry can respond:
Face it, advertising is just a sneaky, indirect way to get money to the publisher by first tricking the reader into doing business with a corporation she wouldn't otherwise buy from, and then the corp giving a fraction of that to the web publisher. As we all know from Newtonian physics, every additional link in a chain of interactions adds inefficiency which drains power from the final output. Wouldn't it be better to cut out the middleman, and let readers directly pay for the content, instead of all that rigamarole?
Of course it would, so long as the overhead cost of making the payment is less than the costs the advertiser incures on the publisher. For that to happen, we need a high-tech, efficient way to pay for webpages. We need micropayments.
So far, "micropayments" have failed (and few attempted projects have even really tried micro payments). But that's because they've never had any content viewers really wanted to buy. With the specter of vanished ad revenue hanging over them, there'd be a true incentive for big-name sites to move into pay-only mode. And they'd have desparate incentive to make the software convenient enough for global use.
I won't go further into micropayments, because they've been covered extensively. I just wanted to present the hope that necessity will someday mother the invention.
If companies want to block all user agents from their sites except for MSIE 6.x on Windows XP, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
There's a thing I can do
Of course, then we get into the interesting terrain where misreporting user-agent becomes criminal hacking. I'd love to see that trial!
Ok, maybe that's going a little far. But some degree of mixing ad+content into the same graphic file can work. For example, a site like cnn.com includes a topical photograph in every story. So expand that PNG to 200 pixels taller, and paste the ad to the bottom (after a respectable whitespace to ensure the ad isn't seen as part of the topic) Or do the headline text as a wide PNG, with the ad graphic a few hundred pixels to the right.
Techniques like that will undermine web client's ability to adjust pagelayout for nonstandard viewer resolutions. But web publishers are willing to pay a price in userfriendliness to protect their ads. (After all, advertising is almost by definition user-unfriendly, as it is the mixing of requested content with undesired or even harmful material)
A more interesting approach for Slashdot specifically would be to move ads further down the page. Not just a 180x600 stripe in the upper right, but 60x60 boxes interspered through the comment display. (There's this whole uninhabited white column on the left side of this page)
Aside from the frontpage, your average slashdot page is scores of screens long, and only the first screen shows any ads. While your statistics claim that the majority of Slashdot readers don't view the comments (which I question), those who do read the discussion could be offered to advertisers as a more valuable audience (they tend to be more engaged in really looking at the page for long periods, instead of just scanning through for any good headlines)
Yeah, this argument was really great when I first heard it in 1990. It's a crock of shit now. After 15 years of The Simpsons and a number of moderately successful adult cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s,
In actuality, US consumers file animation into two categories: children and comedy. (And the entry into adult comedy wasn't pioneered by The Simpsons. The Flintstones, Looney Tunes, even Steamboat Willy all had adult audiences in mind)
So of something looks like a "cartoon", but isn't funny, USians don't know what to make of it.
you go to Finding Nemo, you'll get mildly scary scenes with a heartwarming ending
Does Finding Nemo have a villian? I suppose the human girl counts. The great advantage of Ghilbi works over Disney animated features is the frequent lack of an unambiguously evil opponent. Disney almost parodies themselves with OAV releases like "Villians", which emphasize how much they categorize evil as a quality of other people, rather than a force that can manifest in anyone.
Memento was as linear as any typical Hollywood production. Going backwards is a line too!
(Pulp Fiction, on the other hand, is nonlinear)
Excel Saga is brilliant satire.
Only as a satire of Anime, maybe. And therefore it should never be recommended to someone who's asking introductory questions about what anime even is. Weird without a point of reference isn't funny, just weird.
I must of missed the teary scene.
It was at the end, wasn't included in the released film. It was the part where the surviving commander returns to the US, only to be sentenced to 30 years for sexual assault of a minor.
Jin Roh's not that great. The plot is senseless, making the sacrifices of certain sympathetic characters completely arbitrary.
("Good job you two! You really demolished those badguys, and prevented them from $SPOILER1. So now we've got to $SPOILER1, because that's the only way to prevent our enemies from $SPOILER1. Although exactly what those enemies would have to fear from $SPOILER2 is unclear, especially since said enemies all just recieved 14+ bulletwounds each. Nonetheless, go $SPOILER1 at once!")
From a literary standpoint, it's poor. Good stories start with exposition of characters and external pressures, then examine the effects of the mixture. Jin Roh continues to introduce new factions right up until the end ("But wait! We, yet more unremarkable men in bland suits, were members of the super-secret group within the secret group, not to be confused with your super-secret group, which we joined only to betray")
As an action movie it's poor. It shares a bizarre shortcoming with the works of Jean-Claude Van Damme: there is no fighting! It has no fighting in the same sense that a punching bag, slaughterhouse, or guillotine have no fighting. It takes two to fight: each side must resist the other. In the climactic "battle" of JinRoh, it turns out the hero is entirely bulletproof, so no real combat ever takes place.
(Why doesn't Van Damme fight? Typical plotline has him beating up on 10-15 helpless whelps with zero ability to resist him. That's not fighting, just hitting. Then his father will be kidnapped, forcing him to allow an enemy to beat on him for 10 minutes until the hostage is rescued, whereupon he reverts to using every other stuntman as a punching bag in the big finish)
I haven't seen any Linux distribution use an approach like that yet. (They allow Gnome/KDE to start esound/arts, of course. But those don't work with legacy /dev/dsp apps, and neither has great audio quality)
/dev/dsp to make noise. This means a kernel-based interface to software mixing is the only way to go. (I suppose the kernel could use a trick to feed data sent to /dev/dsp into userspace code, then back down into the real sound driver)
I think the conclusion was that software mixing is a user-space job,
Clearly software mixing falls under the category of "hardware abstraction", which is a job for the OS. Whether it happen in kernel or userspace is up to the implementors.
However, the Linux developers strongly support backwards compatibility. And existing software (like quake1) expects to open
PS. The thing is called JACK (or jackit ?). The Jacks project is something completely different.
Such bluntness and resistance to limp-wristed caution is an attribute to be emulated and admired.
Absolutely! He just got my vote! Maybe once in office, he can get the Pentagon to research diamond body-armor for our GIs in harm's way.