Dude, Equilibrium was literally the worst film I've ever seen. While most bad films become so-bad-its-funny-and-therefore-actually-good (e.g. "Navy Seals"), Equilibrium was downright awful. The plot was utterly laughable, the acting was atrocious, even the fight scenes were stunningly dull. It was so bad, me and my friends sat in horrified silence, where normally we would be either laughing or mocking. To this day that film remains my benchmark of a terrible movie without any saving grace whatsoever.
The bottom line is that the causes aren't so straightforward as to just be "oh, those French pansies". It seems to me almost as if the current trend of "belittle the French" might stem more from modern annoyance in the States with France's political opposition to current administrative doctrine than any historical accuracy or fairness. This whole meme is quite suspect.
Fantastic post.
The whole "French surrender" thing is absolutely laughable, it could only arise amongst people with almost no sense of history whatsoever: they can't even look back 100 years. Whilst a lot of people are familiar with the notion that WW2 was a rerun of WW1, these days less are aware that WW1 partially stemmed from the Congress of Vienna in similar ways to WW2 stemming from Versailles.
And what was the Congress of Vienna? Oh yeah, when Napoleon's France was finally defeated having run ramping 0wning most of Europe and Russia for the past 20 odd years. Not really the behaviour of surrender monkeys.
And you only have to go a decade back into the previous century to see France inventing the modern concept of democracy, which makes the whole "Freedom fries" thing extremely funny for those of us with a historical memory longer than five minutes.
GS: Right. The press pack for the soundtrack said most of it was recorded almost entirely with acoustic instruments that you then modified electronically. Did you play all the instruments yourself, or did you--
AT: Actually there's things that you'll hear when you listen to the soundtrack which will be very revealing about all that. I'd rather not go into the recording techniques too much, if that's OK?
For a more honest look at how he actually composes ("play all the instruments yourself", haha:) ), then try this interview from Sound on Sound magazine.
It's funny, but the/. stance on sampling and electronic music seems curiously luddite for people so enamoured with the idea of collaborative software development, "commons"-style re-use of ideas, creative product and 'intellectual property'. I often see statements like "sampling is just stealing someone else's tune because you're too lame to write your own", which is an extremely naive and prejudiced opinion - albeit an understandable one, if the only sample-based music you've been exposed to is P Diddly.
Honestly - read the interview, which covers both the practical and "ethical" aspects of sampling, and check out Tobin's music, and see if you don't feel a little different. Here's a taster:
Sometimes I'll have an idea for a melody and that gets really tricky; for example, I'll find three or four saxes that have the right notes, so I'll try and piece them all together."
Amon has a pragmatic and highly effective way of dealing with the discrepancies between the tone and production of the samples. "It's amazing what you can do with filters; I look at it as being a bit like watercolours, when you've got various different blotches and then you use a wash to bring it all together. I also use a lot of effects in my stuff for that reason -- it's not particularly because I love delays and reverbs or whatever. Processing is the answer. I'll take a lot of samples to make a melody, then process it with one type of filter or modulation effect, re-record it, cut it up, and by then it will sound like one sample -- but sometimes if it doesn't, it can be really interesting anyway."
Filters and EQ also play a big part in isolating specific sounds or instruments within a sample. "You can take out an entire frequency that holds an instrument, so that you can no longer hear it, or you can hear it in such a background way that it becomes an interesting subliminal part. Unfortunately that means it can sometimes sound really harsh, because the EQ has to be so extreme. Some people have even said it's a characteristic of my sound. I love that -- here's something I f**ked up, and someone relishes that!
...but of course I only see the article after it's "old news", and my post will probably remain unseen by the hordes.
Anyhow, I'm in an independent band, keiretsu. As our members have a lot of side-projects, we started an organisation d:art recordings to oversee things. However, the name is a con really - we're not a record label, it's just a device for common publicity and branding.
How do we use the internet? Well, many different ways:
Mailing list - obvious, but essential. Harvest email addresses on a clipboard after gigs, then you can remind people who liked you when you next return to that city.
Gigs listings - let people know when they can see you
MP3 downloads - we've had tons of listeners from people thousands of miles away, where we have never and maybe will never do a live gig. Although nothing has come off yet, we have even had promoters contact us about tentative international dates.
CD Sales - We provide free MP3 clips of every track of our album, and a full download of one of the tracks. I also share this album preview pack on P2P clients like Soulseek. If you like what you hear, you can buy it, via Paypal (or the good old fashioned of snail-mailing me UK currency). I've despatched dozens of CDs across the pond to America.
It goes hand in hand with the real-world, of course. Our CD booklet prominently features our URL, as does the large banner we display behind or above the band at gigs, wherever possible.
My overall verdict: the internet is an invaluable marketing tool, and you can't neglect the online facet of operations when trying to push an independent music act. It's too big these days. On the other hand, you have to be very unique and special indeed to turn "the internet" alone into a profitable business model. Without continuous gigging, which is still the most effective way of getting yourself heard and building up a fanbase, our online CD Sales would probably not amount to much.
Just as an opposing anecdotal data point, my experience is the opposite.
I live in the UK and nobody ever checks my signature - well - to be specific, they do appear to look at it, but it's obviously just "keeping up appearances". I never developed a proper signature, it's fairly different every time, and especially different when I try and sign the back of a credit card, staying within that tiny area. Other times I've forgotten to sign the card before using it and they just say "You know you're supposed to sign it right" before doing the transaction anyway.
On the otherhand it rather overestimates the Royal Mail to actually work this way. I remember hearing about someone once who sent 50 or 60 letters addressed in this fashion. Something like 3 arrived!:o
I work at an educational institution, as part of the student support team for some Distance Learning programmes. We have somewhere over 1000 students in somewhere over 90 countries.
I think frankly your best bet here is to be freeform. They know best how their addresses are written. So long as the country goes last, to get the parcel from your country out to the appropriate country, the rest of the address should be written to their custom so that their postal service will be most likely to deliver it.
I've seen all the things you describe - stuff like "90167 Bucharest" where the postcode precedes the city - and you're just not going to cope with all that if you try and enforce a complex system of validation.
Our database just has Address1-Address5 (use as many or as few as you want), Postcode (this can be blank), Country (this can't be).
When we tried entering a lot of addresses into the address book software of a certain well-known courier company, we ran into all sorts of problems. It would keep insisting on postcodes where they weren't appropriate, and so on. It's just more hassle than it's worth, and creates more problems (with literally not being able to enter what you know is correct) than it solves (stopping accidental bad data entry).
Spamming is already is illegal in US. But anyone can spam from other countries.
You're kidding yourself if you think that's the explanation. I reckon 80% of the spam I get is US based. No, I don't know that it's sent from mail servers in the US, probably zombies, but it definitely advertises US products to a US audience. Rx??? Didn't even know what that meant til I got 50 spam a day about it. What the hell is it with you guys and prescription medicine anyway? Approved for a new low rate? Is it really so difficult to find a mortgage via legitimate means?
Anyway, the point is it seems to me that if I WANTED to buy from the vast majority of spammers, then as a non-US citizen they wouldn't be interested in my custom.
From where I'm standing, at least, spam is mostly an American problem. Spanish-language second coming in a fairly distant second. China? Never seen any spam whatsoever advertising Chinese products to a Chinese audience.
And, imho, where the spam is technically sent from is utterly irrelevant. Follow the money!!
Fifteen of the 23 used the Kazaa peer-to-peer network, four used Imesh, two used Grokster, one used WinMix and one was on BearShare.
Looks like slsk is still below their radar (unsurprising, being 99% dedicated to non-major label stuff).
The trouble with the "they only go after uploaders" theory is that p2p stops working if people stop sharing. You can't say "it's alright, we can still get away with downloading", when nobody dares make their files available for you to download.
I'm not sure if you would count Yugoslavia as part of Europe
Dude....
Yugoslavia doesn't exist!
I pity all the Americans I see protesting "we're not ALL totally unaware of the world outside our borders", when people like you keep giving us Europeans reason to believe the stereotype;)
I've clicked on pretty much every single "this is MY favourite web comic" link that I've seen in the thread up (or should I say down) to this point, and so far not a single one of them has been remotely funny.
Engineers estimate that if you digitally reproduced all the information on a frame of 35mm film, you'd need about 4,000 lines of data. In other words, at least theoretically (and for more on this caveat, click here), 4K scanning captures everything that's on a film.
That's kinda weak.
"Theoretically", you can capture everything a human can hear using 44.1khz "scanning" (sampling). Pro audio still uses 192khz though - when doing ADC, especially if there's any DSP afterwards, you always need to allow way more resolution than 'theoretically' necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, Equilibrium was literally the worst film I've ever seen. While most bad films become so-bad-its-funny-and-therefore-actually-good (e.g. "Navy Seals"), Equilibrium was downright awful. The plot was utterly laughable, the acting was atrocious, even the fight scenes were stunningly dull. It was so bad, me and my friends sat in horrified silence, where normally we would be either laughing or mocking. To this day that film remains my benchmark of a terrible movie without any saving grace whatsoever.
Fantastic post.
The whole "French surrender" thing is absolutely laughable, it could only arise amongst people with almost no sense of history whatsoever: they can't even look back 100 years. Whilst a lot of people are familiar with the notion that WW2 was a rerun of WW1, these days less are aware that WW1 partially stemmed from the Congress of Vienna in similar ways to WW2 stemming from Versailles.
And what was the Congress of Vienna? Oh yeah, when Napoleon's France was finally defeated having run ramping 0wning most of Europe and Russia for the past 20 odd years. Not really the behaviour of surrender monkeys.
And you only have to go a decade back into the previous century to see France inventing the modern concept of democracy, which makes the whole "Freedom fries" thing extremely funny for those of us with a historical memory longer than five minutes.
I was just getting at what you're getting at, really.
That interview says rather slyly:
For a more honest look at how he actually composes ("play all the instruments yourself", haha :) ), then try this interview from Sound on Sound magazine.
It's funny, but the /. stance on sampling and electronic music seems curiously luddite for people so enamoured with the idea of collaborative software development, "commons"-style re-use of ideas, creative product and 'intellectual property'. I often see statements like "sampling is just stealing someone else's tune because you're too lame to write your own", which is an extremely naive and prejudiced opinion - albeit an understandable one, if the only sample-based music you've been exposed to is P Diddly.
Honestly - read the interview, which covers both the practical and "ethical" aspects of sampling, and check out Tobin's music, and see if you don't feel a little different. Here's a taster:
Not true, see here.
Anyhow, I'm in an independent band, keiretsu. As our members have a lot of side-projects, we started an organisation d:art recordings to oversee things. However, the name is a con really - we're not a record label, it's just a device for common publicity and branding.
How do we use the internet? Well, many different ways:
- Mailing list - obvious, but essential. Harvest email addresses on a clipboard after gigs, then you can remind people who liked you when you next return to that city.
- Gigs listings - let people know when they can see you
- MP3 downloads - we've had tons of listeners from people thousands of miles away, where we have never and maybe will never do a live gig. Although nothing has come off yet, we have even had promoters contact us about tentative international dates.
- CD Sales - We provide free MP3 clips of every track of our album, and a full download of one of the tracks. I also share this album preview pack on P2P clients like Soulseek. If you like what you hear, you can buy it, via Paypal (or the good old fashioned of snail-mailing me UK currency). I've despatched dozens of CDs across the pond to America.
- Running a forum so fans can chat with us.
- Getting interviewed on genre-orientated websites, and getting our downloadable tracks featured on genre-orientated websites and MP3 Blogs to further boost our online profile.
It goes hand in hand with the real-world, of course. Our CD booklet prominently features our URL, as does the large banner we display behind or above the band at gigs, wherever possible.My overall verdict: the internet is an invaluable marketing tool, and you can't neglect the online facet of operations when trying to push an independent music act. It's too big these days. On the other hand, you have to be very unique and special indeed to turn "the internet" alone into a profitable business model. Without continuous gigging, which is still the most effective way of getting yourself heard and building up a fanbase, our online CD Sales would probably not amount to much.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,1 2674,1444795,00.html
That's the most interesting thing I've read on slashdot today.... although/because I don't understand. What's O^n 1^n ?
Just a fair warning:
i d= 277978
http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.php?thread
Top dance producers say "Apple can lick my balls....logic 7 is a very bad joke", citing stability issues, and revert to v5/6.x.
I live in the UK and nobody ever checks my signature - well - to be specific, they do appear to look at it, but it's obviously just "keeping up appearances". I never developed a proper signature, it's fairly different every time, and especially different when I try and sign the back of a credit card, staying within that tiny area. Other times I've forgotten to sign the card before using it and they just say "You know you're supposed to sign it right" before doing the transaction anyway.
On the otherhand it rather overestimates the Royal Mail to actually work this way. I remember hearing about someone once who sent 50 or 60 letters addressed in this fashion. Something like 3 arrived! :o
I think frankly your best bet here is to be freeform. They know best how their addresses are written. So long as the country goes last, to get the parcel from your country out to the appropriate country, the rest of the address should be written to their custom so that their postal service will be most likely to deliver it.
I've seen all the things you describe - stuff like "90167 Bucharest" where the postcode precedes the city - and you're just not going to cope with all that if you try and enforce a complex system of validation.
Our database just has Address1-Address5 (use as many or as few as you want), Postcode (this can be blank), Country (this can't be).
When we tried entering a lot of addresses into the address book software of a certain well-known courier company, we ran into all sorts of problems. It would keep insisting on postcodes where they weren't appropriate, and so on. It's just more hassle than it's worth, and creates more problems (with literally not being able to enter what you know is correct) than it solves (stopping accidental bad data entry).
Calling the BBC a "government organisation" is simplified to the point of innaccuracy.
How exactly do you plan to kill people with a wee beam of blue light?
The body of your post is not an example of Catch-22, never mind a good example.
You're kidding yourself if you think that's the explanation. I reckon 80% of the spam I get is US based. No, I don't know that it's sent from mail servers in the US, probably zombies, but it definitely advertises US products to a US audience. Rx??? Didn't even know what that meant til I got 50 spam a day about it. What the hell is it with you guys and prescription medicine anyway? Approved for a new low rate? Is it really so difficult to find a mortgage via legitimate means?
Anyway, the point is it seems to me that if I WANTED to buy from the vast majority of spammers, then as a non-US citizen they wouldn't be interested in my custom.
From where I'm standing, at least, spam is mostly an American problem. Spanish-language second coming in a fairly distant second. China? Never seen any spam whatsoever advertising Chinese products to a Chinese audience.
And, imho, where the spam is technically sent from is utterly irrelevant. Follow the money!!
Fifteen of the 23 used the Kazaa peer-to-peer network, four used Imesh, two used Grokster, one used WinMix and one was on BearShare.
Looks like slsk is still below their radar (unsurprising, being 99% dedicated to non-major label stuff).
The trouble with the "they only go after uploaders" theory is that p2p stops working if people stop sharing. You can't say "it's alright, we can still get away with downloading", when nobody dares make their files available for you to download.
... which p2p networks are they monitoring? :o
Oh, believe me I've seen Neighbours, and I completely agree :)
Dude....
Yugoslavia doesn't exist!
I pity all the Americans I see protesting "we're not ALL totally unaware of the world outside our borders", when people like you keep giving us Europeans reason to believe the stereotype ;)
I've clicked on pretty much every single "this is MY favourite web comic" link that I've seen in the thread up (or should I say down) to this point, and so far not a single one of them has been remotely funny.
That's kinda weak.
"Theoretically", you can capture everything a human can hear using 44.1khz "scanning" (sampling). Pro audio still uses 192khz though - when doing ADC, especially if there's any DSP afterwards, you always need to allow way more resolution than 'theoretically' necessary.
OT (sorry):
I'm fascinated. That's pretty amazing! Do you have a link to that day's /. ?
I read this much and fell about laughing, wondering what brilliant phrase you were going to use to describe the kazoo.
Same as Fosters (lager) - it's purely an export, a true Aussie wouldn't even contemplate watching/drinking that crap!
Disclaimer: I am not an Australian. This is just what I've been told by my Australian friends :)