I liked the BBC version. It was glib, flakey, low-budget and understated, exactly like Adams' writing. I loved it. Nobody could do a better Marvin, or Ford Prefect, or Auther Dent.
I'm tried of the studios rehashing fables of my youth.. nostalgia is cool, but only when you're with friends. Otherwise, these large scale remakes just feel like someone is milking my voyeurist weakness for nostalgic bits of my past.
I can't believe how many people yearn for remakes considering all the legal wrangling going on in the copyright world designed to foster more cultural innovation and creativity. If they really want to be more creative, make up a new story for pete's sake, and let the classics be!
(What would be much more interesting, and in the spirit of art and creativity would be a new movie _inspired_ by the type of comedy and characterization seen in HHGTTG.. that way you can do pretty much the same thing, but avoid the risk of spoiling the original.. tho I realize you're giving up X% in garaunteed ticket sales from HHGTTG fans going that route.)
Dont' forget the part where you make the plot in the trailer seem more interesting and bait-and-twist than the plot of the real movie.
That's a common tactic.. people should go back and watch trailers aftering watching the movie; often they make the 'plot' in the trailer more interesting than the movie.
Re:Don't you get it? Their job is to get bad PR
on
RIAA Smacked by DoS
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· Score: 2
A valid point, but...
Kinda makes you wonder how we can go around yammering about how every person on the planet should have the wonderful democracy that we do when the groups seeking the most power and influence on our population don't have an ounce of public accountability (other than 'the market', but that argument isn't going to fly with this poster, so stop reaching for the reply button you pro-freemarket economist wannabes), nevermind don't give a flying fuck about PR!:)
Just another example of how companies truely are the new government. Where's the accountability when it comes to groups who are not mentally connected to the product being purchased in most consumers minds at the point of sale?
Well, no matter how badly people try and paint him, his opposition always bests him in the areas of nonsubstance and rhetoric.
The guy has smarts, but those who are winning the world are dictating the rules, so guess which way things are going. I think most people seem to view the world as a 'just world', where those in power are there because they deserve it, and thus must be doing the correct things for us. I just feel bad for those who think his ideas are useless; they can't seem to make the distinction between a good system and a system out of control as it relates to current copyright and patent laws.
I just cant figure out if his/. anti-fans deride him because its the hip in-crowd thing to do, or if it's MS employees.;)
You could get around those simply mby omitting the text but making reference to the company, product, and timline, and then note you couldn't publish it.
Likely, it'd be the only notable thing about the EULA worth keeping on record.
>Do they actually expect people to keep thier NES hooked up to thier TV for 20 years?
Don't laugh, but part of it is that they dont want you playing a franchise from 20 years ago when the Nth franchise game just came out for the PS2.
They don't want you to remember how good it was; they want you to be forced into buying the latest incarnation of the franchise (and/or the "Classics" collections).
>You cant talk for 10 hours about stuff that isnt relevant to your point.
Fortunately, its a free world, and you can.
And I believe he does address the questions, ultimately, in his answers.
But man, there is a whackload of bonus information and thinking in there that I am *glad* he includes. You can never expound too much; its up to the person asking the question to filter the reply and use what information is relevent to them.
This is so funny - short of him doing an experiment in your livingroom, any refernece he provided could be easily dismissed as you. You sound like you dont want to believe anything. How could he provide proof?
Take your blinders off. Suggesting our 'western rules' must be upheld in scientific discovery is exactly the problem he's dicussing; that politics is superceding any actual search for scientific truth.
And by the way, if you want to discredit him, why not provide some facts and proof yourself? People's distrust of counter-institution thinking is hilarious given how history suggests that its the only type of thinking that generally leads to the 'progress' we so enjoy today. If everybody thought like you, we'd still think that Earth was the center of the universe.
No, thats fair enough, I did get a little baity there. My apologies.
>Of course artists have influences, but they don't actively contribute to each other's work.
But thats not true.:( Lots of artists do. Lots. Tons. Many. Maybe not in pop/folk/rock (where the songwriter is, admittedly, often a lone individual) but in many other forms of music, this is how songs are written.
I see what you are getting at, but given that a body of artistic work has no formal scope, it sounds to me like you're saying, "I like to work from point A to point B. Then I will open it up for reinterpretation because I understand that culture doesn't work if we cannot borrow or rephrase or ever restate what has been said before." (Which opens up an interesting point - simply because language space is a finite size, one MUST be able to accept ver-batim copies of one's work simply because there is a fixed amount of resources with which to create.) Working collaberatively on the same song can happen in the exact same way except instead of point A being the start of a song and point B is the end of a song, they are points within a piece of work that will be born from said collaberation.
It's almost like a mandlebrot set. You can zoom in and zoom out on the scope of collaberation - at what point is it OK to start borrowing or contributing to the creation of bodies of works, whether it be a few measures, a song, or an album? I think thats a purely personal decision that should never be formalized in such a way that it must be applied to a social body of artists, which is why your statement about what artists like in terms of control seems like a very dangerous claim to apply to the artistic community at large.
Sorry about the tone in my reply above, its just a hot button issue for me that artists are this, artsits are that. Artists make their living from creating seemingly new things, so to place constraints or generalizations on how they do/must work is tantamount to destroying what they need to create in the first place. It wouldn't be creative if we knew exactly what was needed to get there in the first place.
> different musicians contributing riffs and lyrics and vocals and whatnot to create songs
How do you think music is made? Do us musicians just pull ideas out of our ass? They are tiny modifications, changes to other hooks, melodies we've heard. Some are so obvious, critics' can identify a musical 'top of the hat' to other musicians in their recordings. Musicians dont have to sit beside eat other to contribute riffs and lyrics - they do by listening to other musicians and generating ideas out of them. Music (culture and art, for that matter) IS one huge open-source collaborative process.
> most professional musicians would want to control every creative aspect of the songwriting process
s/most/some. Thats a very broad generalization that does not hold up a lot of the time.
> So far, there just haven't been viable alternatives.
There is something called public opinion that is more powerful than anybody can comprehend.
If everybody just started disliking folks that operatate in the world of "is" instead of "should", we'd be fine. As it stands, going "Hey, thats how it is" is part of the reason that we can't seem to find a viable alternative.
> capitalism isn't altruistic
Sure it is. Competition can be altruistic if everybody participating understands that a little competition will fuel people's desire to make stuff better, faster, cheaper, etc. It's only once its participants start beliving that using every single possible advantage and loopwhole to exploit their leverage is fair game does it cease to be. That's not capitalism, because capitalism was never meant to be that. Gains are meant to come on the back of development and innovation; any other means of competition is abusing the rules of the game and ultimately doing the league a disservice.
I know thats not how it is right now, but that sure as hell isn't going to make me excuse anybody from straying from the noble goals of capitalism. I won't be sympathetic because some company sinks to whatever low the next company does even if it's the only means to that company's economic survival. Manipulating grey areas of rules and laws is as inexcusable as abusing the black and white rules and laws, doubly so when most people seem to agree that the aforementionned questionable behaviour is not the kind of behaviour capitalism was designed and enforced to encourage.
Making music, is, by definition, and Open Source process.
Open Source. Free as in speech, not free as in beer (or free as in CDs, if that helps.)
Please know what you are talking about before you comment on it.
It's not about giving it away, its about your music being trasparent. Your musician friends are Open Source friendly whether they like it or not - I can go to a show, transcibe their music, make some modifications, alter it. Now, I can't sell it, but that doesn't mean that I'm not able to know how the music was built. I can find out just by listening to it.
Compilers are like (neccessary) noise-makers.. you obfuscate the 'sound' of the software such that I can't transcribe it and use it as imput/inspiration to another creative work. In music, the 'source' and the 'compiled version' are usually, in practice, synonymous.
And the reason your musician friends dont give music away for free is because if anybody gave all their product away for free, nobody would make a living. Duh. That doesn't mean that they should try and prevent people from knowing how their sound/songs were built, because that kind of information is what *drives* culture. No artist has ever created anything original - art is just a history of creative "patches" to others' work.
Maybe you missed the part about the carriers maybe voiding their warranties if they went with non-vendor approved solutions.
Similar leverage to the MAP (Minimum Advertised Pricing) that got the labels dragged through court (they lost) 2 years ago.
The carriers may have made the mistake in borrowing so heavily in the first place, but I think you're missing the big picture - that we shouldn't have to make laws and rules to prevent companies from behaving in fasions that run counter to the purpose of capitalism (to raise everybody's wealth).. in acting out of pure self interest and not in the interest of technology or the market, they are spoiling the change for everybody who enjoy the fruits of capitalism.
Or are we just so disillusioned these days, we don't expect anyone to do anything good unless we have a team of riot police standing by to enforce the order? If we are, fuck that. People are forgetting that altruism is the most 'profitable' course of action in the end for everybody. Any other action designed to profit at the *expense* of progress and co-operation (and it can be done quite easily as we have seen) should be publicly condemned.
> hoping that RoadCorp wont revoke your driving privileges for having a broken tail light
RoadCorp wouldn't do anything to revoke your license outright, even if you're a dangerous driver (after all, more drivers = more money), but they might deny you access to their road unless your tail light is manufactured by a preferred RoadCorp affiliate. Thats the scary part.
Pardon my bluntness, but are you a retard? This black box is sold by a private enterprise. Parents love it. Nowhere does government come into this equation.
What a pitiful little groundless stab at government, whom, might I add, DONT want this in every car. It's the private enterprise that would like it in every car. Total market saturation == most successful business.
As much as I vohmently hate the phrase "Caveat Emptor", when it comes to "So and so for life" offers, its just common sense to understand that absolutely nobody on this planet can garauntee anything service for life.
So move on.. crap, didn't anybody learn anything from e-World (Apple, included?)
> After all, perhaps somebody could talk to these folks and get them to license the patent for free to open source software, thus garnering good will, and they could then just milk the PhotoShops and such of the world.
.. why would you suggest that when thats yet another workaround of the more deeply embedded problem of the patent system? Namely that patents are being used as frivolous tools of commercial leverage rather than as protection and incentive for genuine innovators?
Screwing the corperate domain but not the public domain isn't going to solve the problem you claim we're not helping to solve, and, if anything, will only furthur embed the problem since corperations have a long history of putting up with problems rather than solving them ouright for financial reasons. I'd rather uselessly whine than support pressuring Forgent (sp?) into ignoring the process for purely selfish reasons.
> Whining on slashdot is masturbation.
It sure is, there is some unintended irony to your metaphor that sits fine with me; namely that masturbation is not only fun, according to sexperts, its healthy!
Anyhow, some people whine, and then some others spring into action once they notice how many people are whining. I don't have the time to rationally approach every fight in life, and I believe, neither do you. A vote of dissatisfaction (even if immaturely worded) that stays within the community is still a vote of dissatisfaction. Thats probably where we differ in our opinions.
Ever wonder why Microsoft systems are often targets of viruses? Virii's are often the products of a virus author going, "I'll show you your stupid ad campaigns about how secure your OS is are false!" They are the technical equivilent, in many cases, of an "I Told You So!"
Stupid comments like yours that claim Linux is infailable is what makes virii writers go after your box in the first place.
You're waving a target in the air, with the words "I Dare You" painted on it. Do not do the Linux community this vast disservice, thank you.
"The best way to get shot isn't to wave a gun." misses the point. The best way to be _noticed_ is.. and then you'd learn the reality that nothing is infailable or perfect. Nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not me!
.. nostalgia is cool, but only when you're with friends. Otherwise, these large scale remakes just feel like someone is milking my voyeurist weakness for nostalgic bits of my past.
.. that way you can do pretty much the same thing, but avoid the risk of spoiling the original .. tho I realize you're giving up X% in garaunteed ticket sales from HHGTTG fans going that route.)
I liked the BBC version. It was glib, flakey, low-budget and understated, exactly like Adams' writing. I loved it. Nobody could do a better Marvin, or Ford Prefect, or Auther Dent.
I'm tried of the studios rehashing fables of my youth
I can't believe how many people yearn for remakes considering all the legal wrangling going on in the copyright world designed to foster more cultural innovation and creativity. If they really want to be more creative, make up a new story for pete's sake, and let the classics be!
(What would be much more interesting, and in the spirit of art and creativity would be a new movie _inspired_ by the type of comedy and characterization seen in HHGTTG
Dont' forget the part where you make the plot in the trailer seem more interesting and bait-and-twist than the plot of the real movie.
.. people should go back and watch trailers aftering watching the movie; often they make the 'plot' in the trailer more interesting than the movie.
That's a common tactic
A valid point, but ...
:)
Kinda makes you wonder how we can go around yammering about how every person on the planet should have the wonderful democracy that we do when the groups seeking the most power and influence on our population don't have an ounce of public accountability (other than 'the market', but that argument isn't going to fly with this poster, so stop reaching for the reply button you pro-freemarket economist wannabes), nevermind don't give a flying fuck about PR!
Just another example of how companies truely are the new government. Where's the accountability when it comes to groups who are not mentally connected to the product being purchased in most consumers minds at the point of sale?
Holy crap, it was a joke. I wasn't saying anything about the safety of nuclear power one way or the other.
Chillax!
From the link, doesn't this ..
.. scare you more? ;)
NT4/Windows 98 users include ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, Gillette, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd and Ernst & Young International
Well, no matter how badly people try and paint him, his opposition always bests him in the areas of nonsubstance and rhetoric.
/. anti-fans deride him because its the hip in-crowd thing to do, or if it's MS employees. ;)
The guy has smarts, but those who are winning the world are dictating the rules, so guess which way things are going. I think most people seem to view the world as a 'just world', where those in power are there because they deserve it, and thus must be doing the correct things for us. I just feel bad for those who think his ideas are useless; they can't seem to make the distinction between a good system and a system out of control as it relates to current copyright and patent laws.
I just cant figure out if his
You could get around those simply mby omitting the text but making reference to the company, product, and timline, and then note you couldn't publish it.
Likely, it'd be the only notable thing about the EULA worth keeping on record.
>Do they actually expect people to keep thier NES hooked up to thier TV for 20 years?
Don't laugh, but part of it is that they dont want you playing a franchise from 20 years ago when the Nth franchise game just came out for the PS2.
They don't want you to remember how good it was; they want you to be forced into buying the latest incarnation of the franchise (and/or the "Classics" collections).
Well guess what, I already know how to xerox a book and copy a movie, so whats the diff?
>You cant talk for 10 hours about stuff that isnt relevant to your point.
Fortunately, its a free world, and you can.
And I believe he does address the questions, ultimately, in his answers.
But man, there is a whackload of bonus information and thinking in there that I am *glad* he includes. You can never expound too much; its up to the person asking the question to filter the reply and use what information is relevent to them.
Shoulda known from your sig.
By human, I am speaking specifically about humans that have been born.
I will not get dragged into anything more complicated that that.
Uh, how do you give proof?
This is so funny - short of him doing an experiment in your livingroom, any refernece he provided could be easily dismissed as you. You sound like you dont want to believe anything. How could he provide proof?
Take your blinders off. Suggesting our 'western rules' must be upheld in scientific discovery is exactly the problem he's dicussing; that politics is superceding any actual search for scientific truth.
And by the way, if you want to discredit him, why not provide some facts and proof yourself? People's distrust of counter-institution thinking is hilarious given how history suggests that its the only type of thinking that generally leads to the 'progress' we so enjoy today. If everybody thought like you, we'd still think that Earth was the center of the universe.
Only if you think something without conciousness should be slaughtered.
Considering that we (mostly) agree that even the lack of a conciousness in a human doesn't excuse you from slaughtering them, whats the problem?
No, thats fair enough, I did get a little baity there. My apologies.
:( Lots of artists do. Lots. Tons. Many. Maybe not in pop/folk/rock (where the songwriter is, admittedly, often a lone individual) but in many other forms of music, this is how songs are written.
>Of course artists have influences, but they don't actively contribute to each other's work.
But thats not true.
I see what you are getting at, but given that a body of artistic work has no formal scope, it sounds to me like you're saying, "I like to work from point A to point B. Then I will open it up for reinterpretation because I understand that culture doesn't work if we cannot borrow or rephrase or ever restate what has been said before." (Which opens up an interesting point - simply because language space is a finite size, one MUST be able to accept ver-batim copies of one's work simply because there is a fixed amount of resources with which to create.) Working collaberatively on the same song can happen in the exact same way except instead of point A being the start of a song and point B is the end of a song, they are points within a piece of work that will be born from said collaberation.
It's almost like a mandlebrot set. You can zoom in and zoom out on the scope of collaberation - at what point is it OK to start borrowing or contributing to the creation of bodies of works, whether it be a few measures, a song, or an album? I think thats a purely personal decision that should never be formalized in such a way that it must be applied to a social body of artists, which is why your statement about what artists like in terms of control seems like a very dangerous claim to apply to the artistic community at large.
Sorry about the tone in my reply above, its just a hot button issue for me that artists are this, artsits are that. Artists make their living from creating seemingly new things, so to place constraints or generalizations on how they do/must work is tantamount to destroying what they need to create in the first place. It wouldn't be creative if we knew exactly what was needed to get there in the first place.
Sorry, but what planet are you on?
> different musicians contributing riffs and lyrics and vocals and whatnot to create songs
How do you think music is made? Do us musicians just pull ideas out of our ass? They are tiny modifications, changes to other hooks, melodies we've heard. Some are so obvious, critics' can identify a musical 'top of the hat' to other musicians in their recordings. Musicians dont have to sit beside eat other to contribute riffs and lyrics - they do by listening to other musicians and generating ideas out of them. Music (culture and art, for that matter) IS one huge open-source collaborative process.
> most professional musicians would want to control every creative aspect of the songwriting process
s/most/some. Thats a very broad generalization that does not hold up a lot of the time.
> So far, there just haven't been viable alternatives.
There is something called public opinion that is more powerful than anybody can comprehend.
If everybody just started disliking folks that operatate in the world of "is" instead of "should", we'd be fine. As it stands, going "Hey, thats how it is" is part of the reason that we can't seem to find a viable alternative.
> capitalism isn't altruistic
Sure it is. Competition can be altruistic if everybody participating understands that a little competition will fuel people's desire to make stuff better, faster, cheaper, etc. It's only once its participants start beliving that using every single possible advantage and loopwhole to exploit their leverage is fair game does it cease to be. That's not capitalism, because capitalism was never meant to be that. Gains are meant to come on the back of development and innovation; any other means of competition is abusing the rules of the game and ultimately doing the league a disservice.
I know thats not how it is right now, but that sure as hell isn't going to make me excuse anybody from straying from the noble goals of capitalism. I won't be sympathetic because some company sinks to whatever low the next company does even if it's the only means to that company's economic survival. Manipulating grey areas of rules and laws is as inexcusable as abusing the black and white rules and laws, doubly so when most people seem to agree that the aforementionned questionable behaviour is not the kind of behaviour capitalism was designed and enforced to encourage.
Making music, is, by definition, and Open Source process.
.. you obfuscate the 'sound' of the software such that I can't transcribe it and use it as imput/inspiration to another creative work. In music, the 'source' and the 'compiled version' are usually, in practice, synonymous.
Open Source. Free as in speech, not free as in beer (or free as in CDs, if that helps.)
Please know what you are talking about before you comment on it.
It's not about giving it away, its about your music being trasparent. Your musician friends are Open Source friendly whether they like it or not - I can go to a show, transcibe their music, make some modifications, alter it. Now, I can't sell it, but that doesn't mean that I'm not able to know how the music was built. I can find out just by listening to it.
Compilers are like (neccessary) noise-makers
And the reason your musician friends dont give music away for free is because if anybody gave all their product away for free, nobody would make a living. Duh. That doesn't mean that they should try and prevent people from knowing how their sound/songs were built, because that kind of information is what *drives* culture. No artist has ever created anything original - art is just a history of creative "patches" to others' work.
Maybe you missed the part about the carriers maybe voiding their warranties if they went with non-vendor approved solutions.
.. in acting out of pure self interest and not in the interest of technology or the market, they are spoiling the change for everybody who enjoy the fruits of capitalism.
Similar leverage to the MAP (Minimum Advertised Pricing) that got the labels dragged through court (they lost) 2 years ago.
The carriers may have made the mistake in borrowing so heavily in the first place, but I think you're missing the big picture - that we shouldn't have to make laws and rules to prevent companies from behaving in fasions that run counter to the purpose of capitalism (to raise everybody's wealth)
Or are we just so disillusioned these days, we don't expect anyone to do anything good unless we have a team of riot police standing by to enforce the order? If we are, fuck that. People are forgetting that altruism is the most 'profitable' course of action in the end for everybody. Any other action designed to profit at the *expense* of progress and co-operation (and it can be done quite easily as we have seen) should be publicly condemned.
Good post but:
> hoping that RoadCorp wont revoke your driving privileges for having a broken tail light
RoadCorp wouldn't do anything to revoke your license outright, even if you're a dangerous driver (after all, more drivers = more money), but they might deny you access to their road unless your tail light is manufactured by a preferred RoadCorp affiliate. Thats the scary part.
Pardon my bluntness, but are you a retard? This black box is sold by a private enterprise. Parents love it. Nowhere does government come into this equation.
What a pitiful little groundless stab at government, whom, might I add, DONT want this in every car. It's the private enterprise that would like it in every car. Total market saturation == most successful business.
As much as I vohmently hate the phrase "Caveat Emptor", when it comes to "So and so for life" offers, its just common sense to understand that absolutely nobody on this planet can garauntee anything service for life.
.. crap, didn't anybody learn anything from e-World (Apple, included?)
So move on
You're very very very wrong. Historically, culturally, and legally.
Fair 'nuff but
.. why would you suggest that when thats yet another workaround of the more deeply embedded problem of the patent system? Namely that patents are being used as frivolous tools of commercial leverage rather than as protection and incentive for genuine innovators?
> After all, perhaps somebody could talk to these folks and get them to license the patent for free to open source software, thus garnering good will, and they could then just milk the PhotoShops and such of the world.
Screwing the corperate domain but not the public domain isn't going to solve the problem you claim we're not helping to solve, and, if anything, will only furthur embed the problem since corperations have a long history of putting up with problems rather than solving them ouright for financial reasons. I'd rather uselessly whine than support pressuring Forgent (sp?) into ignoring the process for purely selfish reasons.
> Whining on slashdot is masturbation.
It sure is, there is some unintended irony to your metaphor that sits fine with me; namely that masturbation is not only fun, according to sexperts, its healthy!
Anyhow, some people whine, and then some others spring into action once they notice how many people are whining. I don't have the time to rationally approach every fight in life, and I believe, neither do you. A vote of dissatisfaction (even if immaturely worded) that stays within the community is still a vote of dissatisfaction. Thats probably where we differ in our opinions.
> Microsoft actually has a support phone number?
Thats not bait? If it isn't, consider the flamebait mod as a replacement for the lack of (-1, living under a rock)
Um.
.. and then you'd learn the reality that nothing is infailable or perfect. Nothing.
Ever wonder why Microsoft systems are often targets of viruses? Virii's are often the products of a virus author going, "I'll show you your stupid ad campaigns about how secure your OS is are false!" They are the technical equivilent, in many cases, of an "I Told You So!"
Stupid comments like yours that claim Linux is infailable is what makes virii writers go after your box in the first place.
You're waving a target in the air, with the words "I Dare You" painted on it. Do not do the Linux community this vast disservice, thank you.
"The best way to get shot isn't to wave a gun." misses the point. The best way to be _noticed_ is