Does anyone know of a site where you can download the movie and save it to disk? The ad was, I believe, directed by Ridley Scott (of Alien and Blade Runner), so I'd like to keep a copy for myself.
It saves to PP ok, but not great. Most text boxes, bullet points, etc. get translated more-or-less correctly, but (in my experience) one always needs to do some (in some cases, more) tweaking to make the exported PP look "right."
However, the equation editor exports present a greater problem: Keynote groks PDF out of the box, and keep it as PDF - so you get smoothly scalable graphics. PP cannot handle PDF - it *must* convert the PDF to a bitmap before adding the graphic to the slide. This not only loses the transparency, but can introduce jaggies. Overall, I think PP's handling of graphics is inferior to Keynote.
The main reason I use Keynote - even though it doesn't have all of the features of PP - are that (a) it has basically all of the features I need, (b) it's easier to create professional-looking presentations, and (c) (most importantly) I find that, unlike PP, when I create a presentation I work *with* the program, rather than against it. YMMV.
Can somebody please enlighten me as to the benefits of region encoding?
It's not a "benefit", but one thing that it allows companies to do is released different versions of movies in different countries. So it isn't just the same movie being released.
I know this because I live in the UK and I got burned buying the Indiana Jones boxed set. There's no warning on the discs that they are different from the "theatrical release" in the States. However, I put in the DVD for Temple of Doom and noticed that the name on the disc was something like "UK_CENSORED". I did a little poking around on line and found out that - because the original release of Temple of Doom was censored to satisfy the UK critics (in particular, they removed the scene where Mola Ram pulls the guy's heart out), Spielberg & co. decided to release that version in the UK, as it was the only version that UK audiences had seen.
Well, this pissed me off - in part because the cuts make mincemeat out of that section of the movie. Mola Ram is shown reaching to the guys chest, cut to Indy gasping, then you're shown Mola Ram holding a heart in the air, cut back to Indy saying "He's still alive!"... and we have no reason to know why we should be surprised by that.
I call Paramount in the US to see if I could exchange my R2 DVD for an R1 DVD (exercise in futility) and, after talking to a "customer service" rep for 1-2 minutes, got transferred to the special person that they keep in the back room for handing "difficult" customers.;-)
So, that's a so-called "benefit" of region encoding.
However, I find that if you have any real sort of equations,
it's going to get kinda scary when you move it from one computer to another.
This is why Apple's Keynote software rocks. You can import PDF graphics (and it keeps them as vector graphics, rather than PP), which means you can use LaTeX to prepare the equations, export them as PDF, and drop them directly on the slide. For example, see the LaTeX Equation Editor
> Sooner or later, some malware will arrive that does the > Unthinkable on a Windows box.
And what is the Unthinkable? A virus that blasts itself to everyone in the user's Outlook address book and then reboots the computer, after writing a sequence of random numbers over the file allocation table? If so, why hasn't that happened yet? It seems like such a thing would be the ebola of computer viruses and some hacker would have wanted to stake a claim on that one. Would certainly be interesting to watch... especially all of the fury and negative press Microsoft would receive.
President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Funny, substitute "President Clinton" in there, and I think it reads the same...
Yeah, except Clinton really is a Rhodes scholar and a damned smart chap, whereas Bush really is a C-student who barely scraped through college. And is also extraordinarily inarticulate most of the time (wonder how long he rehearsed his address to the U.K.)...
Since it deals with a popular subject, TIMES moved it to their paid content... so the free version is no longer available. Go HERE and read the top line. In short, I doubt its a conspiracy, TIMES is just being greedy and wants more money. Which as a company is its right.
I think you are missing the point. Read the table on contents again, carefully. Where is the letter from Bush Sr. listed in the table of contents? It isn't. The concern is not that an article which was previously available for free has now been moved into the pay section. Rather, the concern is that an article which was available at all (free or not be damned) has, it seems, been wiped from the "official record" of what was published in that issue of Time. Even if you are willing to pay for a copy, you can't order it without knowing it was published, because it isn't listed.
> Why is electronic voting so tough??? Go in, cast a vote, > verify a vote, print the result on a strip of paper, hell, two > strips of paper and move on. What's the holdup here???
You are missing the point. Because the system is completely closed and incapable of independent examination (it's a felony under the DMCA), there need be no connection between the recorded vote and what appears on the strip of paper.
You are assuming the machine is trustworthy. Trust has to be earned.
> Sent home after drinking a Coke? You must be kidding > me...
I remember something about this. A quick Google turned up the following blurb. I don't know that this is true (a little more digging should confirm/reject it):
Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia had sponsored a "Coke in Education Day" in order to win $500 from the Coca-Cola company. One kid (Michael Cameron) wore a Pepsi shirt to school to protest and was suspended.
So, the report, albeit incorrect, was not *that* far off the mark. And the above story of Greenbrier High School, if true, is very worrisome.
> Computer use can turn you into a pessimist too; after > losing a months worth of data because you forgot to > back up for a while,
Other things can make you a pessimist, too. I had not backed up my laptop for about a year (it was running linux, didn't have a cd-rw drive, and I had no access to a tape backup or external drive). It was then stolen when my flat got broken into. Poof! A year of work effectively lost.
Was I stupid not to backup? Yes. However, if it's hard to do, every single time one makes the cost-benefit analysis comparing "backing up now" to "backing up later" with the low probability of something going wrong, "backing up later" wins.
Aren't felonies better kept for more serious and henious crimes, like rape, murder, and embezzling millions of dollars?
Sorry, but I hardly believe that Jr. grabbing (or posting) a copy of the Matrix from Kazaa because he can is in the same league as the above. But then the thought that the punishment should fit the crime has not had a place in the American Judicial System for some time. The whole fiasco with the three strikes laws and the War on Drugs reveals this.
One other question is how long it will take for CGI to enter the adult industry. After all, so many of the stars have undergone radical surgical alteration that it would have just been easier to create a photo-realistic Lara Croft and send her off into action. Wouldn't need to pay wages or worry about STDs, etc.
As the subject says, I'd love to have a couple of plates of slow glass in my flat. Transform this clunky joint in NE London to a nice spot in the Mediterranean. Guns that won't fire because of fingerprint scans? Wouldn't it just be easier to crack down on who you can sell guns to?
I just cannot tell you how much the yellow line in football improved my enjoyment of the game.
What, was *estimating* the position really that hard? It cost how many millions to create that technology? Good god, people need everything shown to them nowadays.
> No, dividends are taxed at the (now reduced) capital > gains rate, instead of the ordinary income rate.
One point which greatly concerns me about this is that the federal income tax is slowly changing into a "wage tax," by which I mean that a greater portion of tax is being collected from wages and salaries, while other types of income, like dividends, have their tax rate decreased. Now, in principle a wage and salary tax applies to everyone but in reality it primarily affects the middle and lower class while creating another tax loophole for the rich.
Think about it - reducing the rate at which dividend incomes are taxed basically reduces the amount of taxes that the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison types need to pay. All of these big players can afford to have their corporate CEO salary set at $1 while taking all of their real compensation in stock options. Since dividends from stocks are taxed at a lower rate, it's much better for the CEO's to earn $100 million via dividends than $100 million as a salary.
Moreover, this trick allows most people to think that CEOs are acting benevolently. "Oh, look - I just read that Mr. Top CEO only has a salary of $1 a year. That just shows his devotation to the company and his lack of extreme greed." No. But it does show that Mr. Top CEO understands the baroque U.S. tax system a lot better than Jane and Joe Sixpack (who, even if they did understand it, couldn't take advantage of the biggest benefits).
This probably sounds like a rant, but I fear there is truth in what I'm saying. The U.S. tax code is now something like 3-5 times *longer* than the King James Bible. That complexity can function as a great way to hide benefits to the rich. That, plus the extent to which corporate interests control American politics now, really make me suspect that the U.S. government has become a government of the people, by the people, for the few.
>which printer uses the cheapist ink cos im going >to get one soon?
If you don't need to print color, I'd suggest buying a laser printer. Not only do you get better quality all the time, but the toner cartridges, even though they are more expensive per unit, last vastly longer.
News flash - Bill Gates downplays linux
on
Bill Gates On Linux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> Gates seems to be considering Linux as a passing > thru competition just like OS/2.
Well, what would you expect him to say? That Linux may (if people get their act together) start threatening Windows on the desktop, and that people are really not fond of Microsoft's draconian licensing schemes and forced inclusion of DRM in their products?
A newspaper interview with a businessman is nothing more than an opportunity for free advertising. You don't think Bill knows that?
Perhaps a bit more detail?...
on
Does Google = God?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Would it be possible for the posters of articles to include at least some hint of the content of the piece?
I mean, my first reaction to the question "Is Google God?" is "No... Next topic!" Presumably the article is asking something at least slightly more compelling or interesting, but we have no idea of what that might be.
The site is supposed to be news for nerds... not sound bites for nerds. Although I guess that is a lot of what passes for news in the States.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know of a site where you can download the movie and save it to disk? The ad was, I believe, directed by Ridley Scott (of Alien and Blade Runner), so I'd like to keep a copy for myself.
It saves to PP ok, but not great. Most text boxes, bullet points, etc. get translated more-or-less correctly, but (in my experience) one always needs to do some (in some cases, more) tweaking to make the exported PP look "right."
However, the equation editor exports present a greater problem: Keynote groks PDF out of the box, and keep it as PDF - so you get smoothly scalable graphics. PP cannot handle PDF - it *must* convert the PDF to a bitmap before adding the graphic to the slide. This not only loses the transparency, but can introduce jaggies. Overall, I think PP's handling of graphics is inferior to Keynote.
The main reason I use Keynote - even though it doesn't have all of the features of PP - are that (a) it has basically all of the features I need, (b) it's easier to create professional-looking presentations, and (c) (most importantly) I find that, unlike PP, when I create a presentation I work *with* the program, rather than against it. YMMV.
It's not a "benefit", but one thing that it allows companies to do is released different versions of movies in different countries. So it isn't just the same movie being released.
I know this because I live in the UK and I got burned buying the Indiana Jones boxed set. There's no warning on the discs that they are different from the "theatrical release" in the States. However, I put in the DVD for Temple of Doom and noticed that the name on the disc was something like "UK_CENSORED". I did a little poking around on line and found out that - because the original release of Temple of Doom was censored to satisfy the UK critics (in particular, they removed the scene where Mola Ram pulls the guy's heart out), Spielberg & co. decided to release that version in the UK, as it was the only version that UK audiences had seen.
Well, this pissed me off - in part because the cuts make mincemeat out of that section of the movie. Mola Ram is shown reaching to the guys chest, cut to Indy gasping, then you're shown Mola Ram holding a heart in the air, cut back to Indy saying "He's still alive!"... and we have no reason to know why we should be surprised by that.
I call Paramount in the US to see if I could exchange my R2 DVD for an R1 DVD (exercise in futility) and, after talking to a "customer service" rep for 1-2 minutes, got transferred to the special person that they keep in the back room for handing "difficult" customers. ;-)
So, that's a so-called "benefit" of region encoding.
This is why Apple's Keynote software rocks. You can import PDF graphics (and it keeps them as vector graphics, rather than PP), which means you can use LaTeX to prepare the equations, export them as PDF, and drop them directly on the slide. For example, see the LaTeX Equation Editor
The iPod can record with a Belkin add-on mic. It records right to disk, so you can record hundreds of hours of stuff.
> Sooner or later, some malware will arrive that does the
> Unthinkable on a Windows box.
And what is the Unthinkable? A virus that blasts itself to everyone in the user's Outlook address book and then reboots the computer, after writing a sequence of random numbers over the file allocation table? If so, why hasn't that happened yet? It seems like such a thing would be the ebola of computer viruses and some hacker would have wanted to stake a claim on that one. Would certainly be interesting to watch... especially all of the fury and negative press Microsoft would receive.
Yeah, except Clinton really is a Rhodes scholar and a damned smart chap, whereas Bush really is a C-student who barely scraped through college. And is also extraordinarily inarticulate most of the time (wonder how long he rehearsed his address to the U.K.)...
I think you are missing the point. Read the table on contents again, carefully. Where is the letter from Bush Sr. listed in the table of contents? It isn't. The concern is not that an article which was previously available for free has now been moved into the pay section. Rather, the concern is that an article which was available at all (free or not be damned) has, it seems, been wiped from the "official record" of what was published in that issue of Time. Even if you are willing to pay for a copy, you can't order it without knowing it was published, because it isn't listed.
> Why is electronic voting so tough??? Go in, cast a vote,
> verify a vote, print the result on a strip of paper, hell, two
> strips of paper and move on. What's the holdup here???
You are missing the point. Because the system is completely closed and incapable of independent examination (it's a felony under the DMCA), there need be no connection between the recorded vote and what appears on the strip of paper.
You are assuming the machine is trustworthy. Trust has to be earned.
> Linux-trained staffers,
Well, duh, you only have to buy bananas!
> Does this mean I can finally record that rock opera I've
> always dreamed about?"
Yes, but it will still suck.
> Will it make coffee?
No, but it will cook eggs.
> Sent home after drinking a Coke? You must be kidding
> me...
I remember something about this. A quick Google turned up the following blurb. I don't know that this is true (a little more digging should confirm/reject it):
Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia had sponsored a "Coke in Education Day" in order to win $500 from the Coca-Cola company. One kid (Michael Cameron) wore a Pepsi shirt to school to protest and was suspended.
So, the report, albeit incorrect, was not *that* far off the mark. And the above story of Greenbrier High School, if true, is very worrisome.
Could someone explain just why this is useful? Sounds like a terrible waste of robotics to me.
> Computer use can turn you into a pessimist too; after
> losing a months worth of data because you forgot to
> back up for a while,
Other things can make you a pessimist, too. I had not backed up my laptop for about a year (it was running linux, didn't have a cd-rw drive, and I had no access to a tape backup or external drive). It was then stolen when my flat got broken into. Poof! A year of work effectively lost.
Was I stupid not to backup? Yes. However, if it's hard to do, every single time one makes the cost-benefit analysis comparing "backing up now" to "backing up later" with the low probability of something going wrong, "backing up later" wins.
>>My Win2k solution
>If that was the solution, what the heck was the problem?!
His computer wouldn't stop working properly.
Isn't the majority of this post a copy-and-past job from ADOT Troll (687975) above?
Aren't felonies better kept for more serious and henious crimes, like rape, murder, and embezzling millions of dollars?
Sorry, but I hardly believe that Jr. grabbing (or posting) a copy of the Matrix from Kazaa because he can is in the same league as the above. But then the thought that the punishment should fit the crime has not had a place in the American Judicial System for some time. The whole fiasco with the three strikes laws and the War on Drugs reveals this.
One other question is how long it will take for CGI to enter the adult industry. After all, so many of the stars have undergone radical surgical alteration that it would have just been easier to create a photo-realistic Lara Croft and send her off into action. Wouldn't need to pay wages or worry about STDs, etc.
As the subject says, I'd love to have a couple of plates of slow glass in my flat. Transform this clunky joint in NE London to a nice spot in the Mediterranean. Guns that won't fire because of fingerprint scans? Wouldn't it just be easier to crack down on who you can sell guns to?
I just cannot tell you how much the yellow line in football improved my enjoyment of the game.
What, was *estimating* the position really that hard? It cost how many millions to create that technology? Good god, people need everything shown to them nowadays.
> No, dividends are taxed at the (now reduced) capital
> gains rate, instead of the ordinary income rate.
One point which greatly concerns me about this is that the federal income tax is slowly changing into a "wage tax," by which I mean that a greater portion of tax is being collected from wages and salaries, while other types of income, like dividends, have their tax rate decreased. Now, in principle a wage and salary tax applies to everyone but in reality it primarily affects the middle and lower class while creating another tax loophole for the rich.
Think about it - reducing the rate at which dividend incomes are taxed basically reduces the amount of taxes that the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison types need to pay. All of these big players can afford to have their corporate CEO salary set at $1 while taking all of their real compensation in stock options. Since dividends from stocks are taxed at a lower rate, it's much better for the CEO's to earn $100 million via dividends than $100 million as a salary.
Moreover, this trick allows most people to think that CEOs are acting benevolently. "Oh, look - I just read that Mr. Top CEO only has a salary of $1 a year. That just shows his devotation to the company and his lack of extreme greed." No. But it does show that Mr. Top CEO understands the baroque U.S. tax system a lot better than Jane and Joe Sixpack (who, even if they did understand it, couldn't take advantage of the biggest benefits).
This probably sounds like a rant, but I fear there is truth in what I'm saying. The U.S. tax code is now something like 3-5 times *longer* than the King James Bible. That complexity can function as a great way to hide benefits to the rich. That, plus the extent to which corporate interests control American politics now, really make me suspect that the U.S. government has become a government of the people, by the people, for the few.
>which printer uses the cheapist ink cos im going
>to get one soon?
If you don't need to print color, I'd suggest buying a laser printer. Not only do you get better quality all the time, but the toner cartridges, even though they are more expensive per unit, last vastly longer.
> Gates seems to be considering Linux as a passing
> thru competition just like OS/2.
Well, what would you expect him to say? That Linux may (if people get their act together) start threatening Windows on the desktop, and that people are really not fond of Microsoft's draconian licensing schemes and forced inclusion of DRM in their products?
A newspaper interview with a businessman is nothing more than an opportunity for free advertising. You don't think Bill knows that?
I mean, my first reaction to the question "Is Google God?" is "No... Next topic!" Presumably the article is asking something at least slightly more compelling or interesting, but we have no idea of what that might be.
The site is supposed to be news for nerds... not sound bites for nerds. Although I guess that is a lot of what passes for news in the States.