Long, long ago (in the '90s), when pondering an activist anti-spam site, I was able to get the name and phone number of Spamford Wallace's mom through doing a variety of online searches, and was seriously considering posting it with a suggestion that people call her and tell her what a terrible mother she must be for raising such a scumbag of a son.
The reason I didn't... such a sword cuts both ways. If I put his mom in play, all moms became fair game.
But this was 8 or 9 years ago, and the only thing that reporter cited that I wasn't able to do then was examine satellite photos of Spamford's mom's house.
What maybe only you could do 9 years ago, find an address, today many more people can do, and all might not have your reasoning. Some might be drinking and say "fuck it", and hit post.
Don't we have websites today where people can post embarassing camera phone pictures of other people, without getting the consent of the other person?
And what about credit checks? I see websites that will let anyone do a credit check if they know a SSN number and they can pay the fee. And the same thing for a Private Investigators report, who knows what information they have on that. Did anyone ever pay the $49.95 to get that report on someone?
If I really wanted to fuck up someones life, I could not do it better than using google and the internet. For example, if I knew from your credit report that you have a revolving account at a store, and there is a large balance, then I know you shop there alot. What if I decided to go in there, and whisper to some employees that you have AIDS or are transgender and I don't want you trying on clothing??
Which is more scary, that privacy in general is a hard to obtain or that the Internet makes it readily available to anyone with too much time on their hands.
The courts and republican administrations have done everything they can to take away all privacy. Check out the promises the republican national committie and the City of Boston made during the conventions. Boston installed thousands of cameras throught the city, to provide added security for the republican convention. Boston promised to take them down as soon as the convention was over. Guess what? Those cameras are still up, the city said it cost so much to put them in place, they might as well keep them. Chicago followed next, adding 3,000 cameras.
But the internet is worse. Anyone can put any information on the internet, and it is hard to find the source.
I'll give one example from my local newspaper. Someone at the local high school snapped some pictures of a girl he disliked, her naked and I don't know what else, and he put that on the internet. Then he emailed his classmates telling them what website to look at. The girl was humiliated. Could you go back to highschool if everyone saw you naked? How can you concentrate in math class when you feel like everyone is staring right through your clothing. And the jokes, they can be very cruel. Who is going to pay for her counceling, for her pain and suffering?
What is the solution?
We need to remember that privacy is important. Where I live is my buisness, it should not be in a database for anyone to look up.
I will give one example. Say there is Joweski and Co Construction. They build million dollar mansions, and the owner, Mr. Joweski is very rich. Should I be able to google him up, find out all his buisness, where he goes, his home address, and find a way to ambush him, to steal his money, to steal his identity. Or should be be relativly anonymous to 99% of the people. If he steals or srews someone over, the police have the drivers license data, his taxes, they can track him down. But what once was private is now everywhere on the web.
We need a law that says anything which personally identifies a person must be removed from a website unless that person gives continuing concent to keep it up (like agreeing again every 6 months).
I'm trying to answer this question for my own website right now. It's a program that lets you manage a dance studio, and I'm starting to design the registration page. I noticed that I instinctively starting adding first name, last name, address, fields, but then I realized, why do I care?
So now I'm wondering, how can I design a registration page when all I require is a userID and password? Wouldn't that look weird as a registration page? Any advice?
I think the #1 problem new websites will have is the bad experiances people had in the past. 10 years ago you might have been able to ask for first name, last name, and people might have given it to you. Today, nobody trusts a new website.
If I was starting a website, and I wanted to build trust, I would make a tiered registration system. Maybe a simple registration that makes a limited account. The user supplies his username, password, and email for activation. That gives him the ability to read most of the forum, and to post in specific areas. Once trust is established, maybe there can be a second registration, where the first name is asked, or something more where people can know each other better. When do you offer the second registration? After 500 posts? 1000 posts? Once a senior member, other forums are visible, and the person can post everywhere.
If I was starting a buisness, maybe all I would need on the computer would be username and password. Maybe I would have all the other information faxed over, the name and billing address, and I would keep that information off-line.
I don't know the anwser to your particular buisness. I do know some websites now, when they validate a new account, check the IP address of the user and match it up with the state they say they reside in. If the state and IP does not match, they reject the user. The problem is, unless you have thousands of people wanting to join, this could make recruiting members impossible.
What kind of interaction do you want with your members? Will you need to contact them often, to email them?
The admin being responsible and the hacker being responsible are not mutually exclusive ideas.
That is extortion. What you are saying is nobody can start an internet buisness where they have customers data unless they hire a competent administrator?
Say I want to sell the Worlds Best Cookies, they are homemade by me, nobody else has them. I decide to set up a simple website, use tomact and write some code where people enter in their names, addresses and credit card numbers. I don't want to pay for a third company on the web to process the credit cards, I call them all in myself in the morning. But the way my website is set up, all the orders are just appended to a text file on my server. I open that file in the morning, and validate all the orders.
What you are saying is, if someone hacks in and steals that text file with credit card numbers, the store owner would be at fault?
Now lets look at it your way. Instead, I hire an administrator at $75 an hour. He is the cheapest admin with a good work history, an admin that has his MSCE and other certifications that the industry accepts as proving competence. He works for 50 hours setting up my server and website, and also tells me to subscribe to an on-line credit card processing service, but they charge 9% of all transactions, plus a monthly fee. The admin also has an 1 hour per month fee, for maintinance and consulting and keeping my account active.
Do any people know what my cookies would now cost? It would probably cost more for the admin and banks than the flour, butter, suger, and chocolate chips that goes in the cookies. The cost would go way high.
Now, if it was 50 years ago, people would not confuse the issue. There is only one wrong doer, the criminal who steals. It is the theft that is wrong, not the weakness of the target.
Yesterday at the local businessman's meeting, security expert Mr. Smith revealed that the cheap, Walmart brand padlocks in use on many stores can be broken into very easily with a ordinary pen. Mr. Smith said that these locks should be replaced and are even in use on the jewelry store down the street where a number of us have our membership rings being resized... and two weeks later the jewelry store is broken into with a pen but someone happened by and the robbers ran away without stealing much.
So the owner of the store is at fault for storing his customers valuables somewhere that it is easy to steal?
Is that the kind of laws we want? I know my lock does not work. I take in your valuables to store them. Then someone steals everything, and I am to blame for not replacing the locks?
What if the Jewlery store did not want any locks? What if all they wanted was for people to obey the law?
Are we living in a society with no honor? Are we living in a time when everything that is wrong is okay, the "poor me" I did not mean to do it, but it was too tempting?
The only reason I say I don't know what the anwser to this problem is, is because the jails are over crowded as it is. We did not have a lack of respect of other people 50 years ago, in the Leave it to Beaver age. Many fewer people stole, lied, and cheated. So why is it today we have more people who steal, lie, and cheat? Is it the aninimity the internet offers? Or is it the way society is changing, no more norms and standards, no more shame? It seems like every deviant lifestyle is being accepted as normal. Nobody can call a crook a crook anymore, because the crook might sue for pain and suffering.
In this situation though, the buffer was always underunning. The picture quality was sub par for even regular streaming video.
I agree. Someone at the streaming website should do basic math. At what point can the buffer be large enough that even though you are watching more data than is being recieved, you have enough data in the buffer to watch the whole episode. Either that, or increase the amount of servers and bandwith, so you can send out a larger stream.
From the article:
Time Warner's Road Runner Internet service, customers download and install a media player made for Time Warner by RealPlayer onto their computers.
I will NEVER install anything from RealPlayer on my computer, ever again. They might as well not offer the service. RealPlayer is spyware.
Why would you ever give all that personal info to a random website? Even if you're a big Firefox advocate, what possible value does it add to the project to provide them with your home address? At best, you're going to get spammed. at worst, you get your identity stolen. duh.
I never give real information to any websites. None. I have one spam email account that I use just for activating crap. I give them the wrong state, wrong everything. I don't want to even be included in accurate demographics. Why should I? I just know the information will be sold to some mega corporation. The "privacy statememnt" is not worth the paper it is printed on.
I'll give one example. There was an awesome website with information for EVERY tv show ever on tv. They had episode information, forums, cast lists, everything. It was called TvTome. For 3 or 4 years, I was a memeber, I loved that website, I talked to lots of people about shows I loved. Then one day, a corporation comes by, and takes this hobby board, and offers the owner 5 million dollars to buy all his data, website, everything. All the people who registered at the old website had their information sold to the new corporation. The new website sucks. It is non-functional, nobody uses it. Do I want some large company buying my personal information? NO!!
If it was due to the vulnerability present in older versions of Drupal (pre June 29th) then it was the admins of spreadfirefox.com that left it unpatched until July 10th (11 days). There is no excuse for that kind of delay in patching a vulnerability on a system that could affect as many users as SpreadFirefox caters to.
This kind of thinking is wrong and outdated.
What you are saying is, if I have a door and the lock breaks, it is my fault if I get robbed because I did not change the lock??
The problem is with the criminal who breaks into websites. If I wanted zero security for my website, I should be allowed to have zero security and not have anyone hack in.
I don't know the anwser. Do we increase jail time for hackers? Do we lock out countries where we know there are problems, have an internet embargo. Nothing in and nothing out? Do we change the whole internet to require some form of identification from everyone who uses it, something more than an IP address that can be spoofed. How do we stop people from hacking websites and causing disturbances?
In an age of worms and malicious programs, you never hear of ATM's getting hacked.
Too bad IBM did not try and market OS/2 as the secure OS. Then again, once you throw services on any OS, they all become equally vulnerable. Put a web server and database on Linux, hook it up, broadcast, and it can be hacked. Just like windows.
Then again, I bet it is a stripped down version of OS/2 that runs ATM's. There is no need for a full OS. What will people do? Play a game of solitare at the ATM? Email someone?
OS/2 is still around? Thats news to me! I guess I'm not a real geek, but that last time I heard anyone used that operating system was in 1995.
Same here. I got a free copy of OS/2 from a computer store in chicago back in 93 or 94. Everyone suspected OS/2 was going to die, and I think they were trying to get more people to use it.
The version I had was very much like Win 3.1. Maybe a little nicer. But I could not get software to run on it. If OS/2 would have had games, I would have kept it longer.
It is around the same time I got my HP 48gx calculator. And the HP is still in use.
I wonder what will happend with all the OS/2 code? IBM should publish it and make it public. Maybe someone can use parts of it in non-commercial ways (so M$ does not exploit it).
And what did OS/2 look like after the mid 90's. Were there any large updates? Any MMX stuff? Any DVD support? Any modern stuff added??
When I put up a website, I'm not putting up a poster; I'm setting up a news stand and handing out copies to everyone who walks by. Do I have a right to take back all of those papers I handed out, and disallow every person who took one from showing it to somebody else?
Yeah, but the copies you are handing out to people exist only as long as they are at your website. Your analogy of opening a newspaper stand and handing out copies is not right. It is more like if you have a reading room, and anyone who comes in your reading room can look at your content, but they can not take it out of the room.
It is like politics. Maybe someone out there who is a moderate in most elections, really, really hates Al Gore. So they start a website, where they post political ramblings. It starts getting heated, and the person looses their cool, and starts posting more extreme thoughts than what they trully believe. Should that snapshot define that person? Can people change their minds and opinions? Do we want to corner people into what they posted on the web, because it will be impossible to know the context of the original posting.
I guess the best example I can give is a friend I knew in college who was a libertarian. He had a political science class with a teacher who was a libertarian. He read John Stuart Mill. So he started a libertarian website, that defended individual freedom, regardless of what the person did, as long as it did not invade another persons rights. Some of the things he defended would have 90% of the civilized world backlash against him (like being pro doctor assisted suicide, being pro any kind of sex between two concenting adults inclduing prostitution and sex work, being against any taxes). As the years passed, and more books and newspapers were read, his views changed. But should that libertarian website haunt him the rest of his life?
Will every person have a history that is as public as when someone runs for office? Did we really need to know Clintons sex life? Did we need to know Bush was an alcoholic? It seems we know more about their private lives than what their professional opinions and votes will be. For example, with Court Justices, we knew everything about Clearence Thomas's sex life, his personal life, but he was a clam when it came to talking about his views on abortion or court issues.
In my opinion, this all comes down to a privacy issue. If someone gives a statement, they have a right to retract it. Obviously, they can't take away your memory of it. But if the message comes in the form of a website, they should be able to take it down. Or should they?
Hobart writes "Richard Stallman has just posted on his personal website a request for his readers to 'Don't Buy Harry Potter Books,' and offered to leak the plot - in protest of the Canadian Supreme Court ruling
By the way, if anyone contacts me anonymously giving me some of the plot information that these Canadians have been forbidden to read in the books they bought, I will post the information. I am not a Harry Potter fan, and I would not have greatly minded whether I learned the plot of this book tomorrow, Saturday, next year, or never; but when governments spit on human rights, humans must protest. I suggest that anyone wishing to leak this information call me at +1-617-253-8830 from a pay phone.
Did this guy just put up his phone number on the internet??
In my opinion, with regards to Harry Potter, is if someone has read the book, who cares if that person tells others what he thinks. Are the publishers worried this person might ruin the advertising campaign by saying "it sucks", or by giving a spoiler? I could understand how that would piss people off.
This reminds me of the movie "Basic Instinct", with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone (the movie where she shows her twat). Anyways, some lesbian-homo weirdo group, in protest that the movie makes lesbians look like werdios, decided to leak the ending. They group had people go to movie theaters and talk about the ending of the movie, while people waited in line to buy the tickets.
That is their property. Nobody has a right to take a snapshot of it, store it, or recreate it.
Or do we need patents on website content? Copywrites? Or can we trust people to not steal?
For example, say there is a college kid who really likes beer and porn. He likes it so much, he sets up a website that becomes popular, it lists different beers, and reviews porn. One drunken night, this college kid uses his cell phone to take a couple low resolution pictures of himself having sex, and he puts it up.
A few years pass, somehow he graduates and starts looking for work. Someone tells him that his website comes up when googled, and that might not be the best thing when it comes for finding work.
So the guy pulls the plug. beerandporn dot com dies. Or did it? It seems others liked his hobby as well, and downloaded all the content, and started hosting it. Problem is, google now links to these new sites, with his face and work for the world to see.
Should this guy have a right to erase his past creations?
I'll give one more example. A woman who is 26 years old has 2 kids, and no skills. She got knocked up by a bum. Now she is working in a grocery store, as a check out clerk for $7 an hour, not enough to feed and cloth her family.
She starts up a website where she gets naked. She is making good money, and she manages to make enough to get a nicer place to live, feed her kids, and go to college. A couple years later, she takes down the website. She has a good job. But someone decides to put the content back up. Her kids are now 13 years old. Her employeer also knows how to use google. Should people judge her based on who she used to be, what she did to survive within a specific context of existance?
If someone wants to put up a website, they have that right. But it appears that people don't have a right to remove their content from circulation. That is the problem.
The great thing about life is people can change, they can move away to a new community, they can start over. The internet in some ways is making that impossible. It is like jobs that do credit checks, to work as a secretary they want to know how much money you owe, and if you paid it off on time.
My girlfriend lives and works in West Africa and on my next visit she has asked me to help her do some mapping of uncharted villages. I want to make this study really accurate
There might be villages that don't want to have their exact location well known.
Lots of these villages have been at war with other villages and tribes for a long, long time.
Many African governments are currupt, and would love to do ethnic cleansing.
Your wanting to provide accurate maps might do more harm than good.
I can just see some Diamond company in the USA, which hears about a new mine that had Diamonds at some coordinate. They then look at your map, and exterminate a whole village. It has happened in the past
This should be a map that only includes those who wish to be included. Don't force anyone on the map. Some tribe might decide to have you for dinner.
So you can be watching a solid, intelligent news program, while your friend can be watching some reactionary, right wing Nazi propaganda show. Wait, my TV already does that.
Fox News?
LOL!!!
This reminds me of something Rush Limbaugh did when he had his TV program in the late 80's, early 90's. One day Rush announced "I did not realize this, but there is a large audiance that can not understand me, people who we wish to turn to, to embrace. From now on, at the bottom 1/9th of the screen, the home viewer will be able to watch a translator, who will translate my show into ebonics". The bottom 1/9th of the screen, for the rest of that show had a black man, dressed like an African hunter, jumping up and down, turning in circles, and making a clicking noise with his mouth.
What Rush was really missing was the translator who would take the other 1/9th of the screen, and have a bottle of Lous III in a $1000 crystal glass, while he mumbles in a british accent "you will never be as rich as me, no matter how you smash the unions, you will never have old money. your corvette, i laugh at your corvette, you could not even afford an entry level ferarri, not that those are any better. *british laugh* dare i say, i believe the janitor is forcing you to pay him $5 an hour. you'll never be rich enough. never!!".
LCD's are cheap. Need to show different images to the person next to you? Get another LCD!
There is alot going on here. Cheap 15" LCD's are out there. But they don't look that great and they are small.
What if I want to run High Definition content? What does the resolution max out at?
What happens if my pr0n collection for whatever reason decides to make an appearance on this separate channel?
Face turns red? Everyone laughs?
But in all honestly, have you ever veiwed porn if someone was in the same room with you, even if they were at a computer facing the opposite direction? Who would do that, it is about as dumb as thinking you have privacy at work in your cubicle and want to check out playboy.
Someone should send you the video of the fat boy in the college dorm room who forgot to lock his door. Meanwhile, a buddy cracked the door open, saw the kid masturbating, ran back to his room, grabbed his camcorder, and recorded the kid beating off. The kid turns around and there are 10 people who start laughing, and the one doing the recording.
If anything is needed, it's an LCD that restricts wide-angle viewing so that only the person actually using the laptop gets to see anything.
I think these are out. I believe I saw advertising for it. But I could not tell you what manufacturer, because I try and block out advertising.
Okay, here is my wishlist. A good, inexpensive, 1600 by 1200 23" widescreen LCD for under $300. If you can make that, I will be a buyer.
And for a HDTV, how about a 48" widescreen 1024*768 LCD for under $900?? That will do DVD 480p and ESPN satelite 720p without downscaling. Baseball would look so awesome on that!!! Hopefully it will be someone in the USA who can make it, and not China, I would like to support USA workers.
BTW, can someone explain to me why a normal tv with 480i looks better than something of the same size on my computer monitor? Does higher resolution ability make a lower resolution picture look worse?
why is it exactly that you refuse to install Flash?
I didn't instal it for many reasons. I'll give you just one example. While I have not done this for over a year, I bet it is the same. Go to ESPN's website without flash. It loads quicker. Go to their website with flash, and you get a huge distracting 1/3rd the size of a 17 inch monitor flash graphics. And you can not disable it. It is worse at some websites that use Flash for their advertising. I HATE FLASH FOR ADVERTISING. It is about as distracting as the banner that flashes from white to red "YOU HAVE WON... click here*".
I want control over my computer, and I want it to be easy. I don't want to have to read a tech manual to learn how to disable something. It is one of the reasons I will not instal Real Media on my computer.
Did Macromedia steal your bike or something?
They stole my time and my nerves. And that is just as bad.
Or are you one of the few dozen folks still relying on a 28.8 connection?
Is this supposed to be a knock on people without broadband. Should the whole internet work flawlessly for those with 350k connections, and screw the rest for simple text pages?
Do you have any idea how many people use AOL or dial up? And NEWSFLASH, that 56k modem ain't 56k, I have looked at over a dozen dial-ups, and the best I EVER saw was 8k a second, most are like 4k or 5k a second. If a 56K modem ever gave a consistant 35k a second, broadband never would have caught on like it did.
It is simple for me. If a website does not work the way I want it to, I don't visit it. End of story. The person putting up the website must do so in a way I approve of, if he expects me to visit it. And in my case, I think I share criteria with millions of other people.
And oh, I surf with javascrip disabled too. It is one of the reasons I no longer use email services which require javascript to be enabled. I'd rather open up a source code window and read the html and find the links myself than let javascript do it.
it is macromedia flash, something i don't have on my computer, and something i refuse to instal.
damn it!
what ever happened to the low bandwith page, incase someone wanted to veiw a simple html page? at one point in time, lots of websites gave a non-frame, non-macromedia, low bandwith alternative link. it is a nice courtesy.
Wow, how did they get speilberg to sign on for a toy movie? I wonder what his motivation is since he can do whatever the hell he wants... and it's my beloved transformers...
I love the transformers too. It was one of my favorite cartoons in the 80's.
But I have to question what Speilberg can add to the transformers. Why not bring back the crew who did the original 1980's show? Give them the same tools they had back then. That is what will make money, Dads taking their kids to see a cartoon movie they loved as a child.
The only great thing that Speilberg might be able to add is a good story, which could be worth its weight in gold. I doubt he will want to do a story that sucks, and will most likely have veto power over scripts. I hope Speilberg was a fan of the original 1980s series, and not the newer one.
To be 100% honest, I don't think I want Speilberg doing this movie. He will attract top notch actors, and I don't know if I want Danny DeVitto voicing Megatron, or Chris Rock voicing StarScream.
The other problem with Speilberg is this movie could become a 20 million dollar animation project. Will Optimus Prime look like what we remember, or will creativity change him completely??
I was a huge fan of the transformers in the early 80's. It was a great block of cartoons. There was He-Man, then Transformers, and then GI Joe (which I thought was weak). Oh, and for a couple years, they had Robotech, which was awesome, followed by Voltron. Talk about good cartoons, I don't think even Thundercats could dethrone those cartoons. Nothing good today like those cartoons.
Back to the Transformers. The new series stunk. It was not true to the old one. I don't think I even saw Megatron, at least not the way I remembered him. He was fairly smart back in the 80's, not crazy like starscream. The new series has no thought in it, that is why i dislike it. It is just like one thoughtless attack after another, no strategy.
And what happened to the robot that replaced Optimus Prime, when he died, I remember this robot was stuck inside a comet or astroid, and he had to be found.
Oh, and bring back the big mega robot, that is combined by 5 smaller ones, the green one that is all the construction machines that form a big robot.
Please, please, please, get this movie right. It will be a delight for all of us who watched the original series. Put most of the money in the script, something really good. I would rather have an awesome story and so-so graphics than a bad story and million dollar graphics.
I remember when I first got cable. I loved having an extra 30 channels. MTV played music.
Now, channles often have nothing to do with what they are named. MTV might as well be reality TV... 4 episodes of Real World followed by 4 episodes of Road Rules, followed by 8 episodes of Real World versus Road Rules. Ugh. Then, for the 200th time a repeat of "When the 80's ruled".
But here is what gets me pissed off. Did everyone hear MTV is now using the money we paid (through watching the advertising) to start a new tv network for gays and weirdo's.
Same thing with a Nerd network. Do we really need it? How about haveing The Learning Channel and Discovery channel having real science programming? Has either station ever played The Mechanical Universe? I know it is PBS programming, but they show it at 2am once a week on a friday. Or what about either of those two stations following NASA? Or having a weekly tech show. Instead, TLC is airing Trading Spaces, a show where two neighbors redecorate their houses, and then suprise each other (How do you like it, I knew you would love your living room painted lime green).
Names are meaningless today. Just like when government passes the Patriot Act. They just pick a popular name for marketing purposes, it really does not tell you much about what it is. They should have called it the Terrorism Prevention Act, it would come a little closer to the truth, or better yet Lets Take Away All Civil Liberties Act.
I don't need 100 channels. I need 10 good ones. Give me a true science and tech channel. Give me one true news station, and not an editorial station. I already have ESPN, they are pretty good with sports. I think you could combine FoodTV and Home and Garden to have one channel, on Living (Do we really need 6 episodes of $40 dollars a day, highly offensive to me, as I watch this woman suffer to feed herself on only $40 each day, while I live off $4 a day).
Toss in a movie station for a 5th station.
And while we are at it, some RULES for all TV stations to follow. #1, get rid of the laugh track. It is not funny when a character comes on stage. I don't need a pre-recorded laughing sound to know when to laugh or what is funny. Are people that stupid that most laugh because they hear laughing? Once you hear the laugh track, and you become aware of it, it will ruin all your shows. It will become very annoying.
Rule #2, No more advertising while a TV show is airing. I don't mean commercials. I mean the boxes that pop up and take 1/9th of the screen with an advertising for what is on TV next. Or what movie is playing this weekend. Or even the ones that identify what station you are watching. I know what station I am watching.
Rule #3, Don't cut off the end credits to a show. Some of us want to know who an actor on a show was. Some of us hate the screen splitting, with an advertising on the opposite side. Some of us want to take the last minute to enjoy what we just saw, as we watch the credits.
stop inflating grades (a recent article reflected on how many schools now have so many valedictorians (one in Seattle actually had 47 valedictorians!)
people need to feel good about themselves. not everyone has a 120+ IQ. there are pleanty of people in high school with a 95-100 IQ.
is it fair that one person has to spend 10 minutes doing their math homework and they understand it, and another person suffers for 60 minutes and does not understand it?
if grades were based on effort, that nerd would have an F and the 90 IQ jock would have an A. i find it amazing that the 120 IQ kids sit back and take such delight in how "dumb" everyone else is. if they can understand it in 10 minutes and are done, why not spend 20 minutes with someone less fortunate and help them??
think of it from the opposite end. there are some kids that are more muscular, flexible, and have higher endurance. remember pe class, say tennis or softball. the guy who finished his math in 10 minutes now can't coordinate hitting a softball even after 60 minutes. how many jocks would take the time to say "okay, lets try and fix your swing, lets start with your stance, your legs should be like this, you should swing from the hips and not arms, you should do x, y, and z. let me help you"???
is huamn nature so currupt that anyone wants to exploit any advantage they have over the less fortunate??
i think it is a fantastic idea to give grades not based on work produced, but effort too. more can be learned by teaching someone not to give up. unless the purpose of highschool is to find ways to break people, and then socialize them into conformity.
more emphasis on (mathematics) basics.
this is a horrible idea!! 90% of people never need more math than algebra. highschool is not competition ground in math and science to see who gets selected to MIT.
i would say to reduce the amount of math taught in highschool. why? because more can be gained by teaching history and english and foriegn languages than by teaching math. if the goal of life is happiness, then teaching something about what happiness is, how it is gained, problems others have suffered and how they overcame will go a lot further to fostering a sense of well being, more than being able to do multi-variable calculus.
highschool should be a fun time. it should be filled with parties and learning about people, how to get along, how to have fun together. highschool should not be the place where people start seperating and getting classified. the nerds in preperation of the ivy schools, the dumb jocks in preperation for low paying jobs, the cheerleaders taught to be second citizens and use sex as a tool.
you could learn something from watching "the breakfast club". people are not different from each other. we learn that from assholes who say everyone needs to know trig, and those who struggle are worth less.
you'll find that currently the only way to go above 480p on them is to use a dvi or hdmi
DVI is not encrypted, is it?
This reminds me of the macroflash that some DVD players have. If you try and copy a DVD to a VHS tape, it will phase in and out of the picture in all sorts of colors. Did people think that a 480p picture needs to be protected from being copied on a format that is half the resolution and interlaced?
I am still awaiting a technology giant to dare Hollywood to not support a format and thus lose the sales that way. Of course with companies like Sony running their own music and movie divisions that probably will not happen any time soon.
The problem is not with copying a DVD. Studios don't lose money because someone copies a DVD and trades it. Studios loose money when you already have the $29.99 blockbuster hit on DVD, and two years later they re-release the same movie on DVD and clean it up a bit. Who wants to buy the same shit twice? It pisses people off, and that is when they start thinking about copying a DVD. No, they don't copy the ultra edition, because that is the one they want to buy and have as a part of their DVD collection. They copy the crappy first release. Now I have known some DVD collectors with 700+ DVD's to copy a DVD, and then see the DVD was done right, and buy the first version. People don't want to buy shit.
Studios do not respect people. If Studios respected me as a person, they would not waste my time. Not in theaters with 20 minutes of commercials and $5 popcorns. Not with DVD's that disable the menu and fast forward buttons. Not with DVD's that get re-released three times.
And we will be stuck with DVD's that will only play in ways the manufacturors want. I wonder if one day there will be a small microchip on the DVD itself, in the center, which will be programmed the first time it is played, so it will only play on one DVD player, like what DVD's did with region locks on computers, after 3 changes it is locked.
But what does it matter anyways? Will there EVER be something that will take full use of the resolution? For example, take the cleanest looking 720p ESPN baseball game, how much higher can the resolution get? There must be some relationship between screen size and the perceptible difference. For example, can people see more detail on a 42" screen if one is 480p and the other is 720p? Maybe on a 120" projection screen it becomes noticable, but how much?
Truth be told, I would be more happy with the current 480p that DVD can play now if the studios treated customers better. No more re-releasing a DVD 3 times, with the first release being shitty and a buy it for $29 or have nothing attitude. Then 18 month later is the re-release "ultimate edition" which cleans the picture up. Coulnd't the studio release a clean picture the first time? And do away with fraud, for example the season 2 boxed set of Magnum PI has a bonus episode of the A-Team, and this episode looks fantastic, very clean. But if you get the boxed set of the A-Team, the other episodes don't look like they have as much resolution. Did the studio spend all their time making the one "free" episode look as good as possible, and neglected the rest because the studio knew the free one was going to sell the set?
And while we are at it, NO MORE FUKING "COPYWRITE" WARNINGS THAT CAN NOT BE FAST FORWARDED AND NO DISABLING OF THE MENU BUTTON DURING PREVIEWS!!! I fucking hate studios that lock me into 5 minutes of copywrite warnings, previews and the studio logo.
And here is a shocking idea. If the studio made a product the way people wanted it, then maybe there would be less copying. If a $30 dvd was not released 3 times, maybe the first version would not be copied like crazy because nobody wants to get fucked with a crippled version.
And I have a long memory. I have a bunch of music CD's with rot. I have one DVD that pixalates, and it did not do that in the past. None of my VHS tapes lock up or pixilate, they keep playing.
I almost wish the S-VHS caught on with near dvd quality. It would be hard to control an analog source. But that is why studios lie and tell us things like DVD's last forever, when in truth they get rot, or lies like no anaolg source could have the same resolution, which it could.
This is the smartest way to build new technologies. Find some really smart science kids (well maybe not kids, but at my age people in their 20's are puppies).
Anyways, find these smart pups and have an open competition. Not only will the smart kids find ways to build things, but they must be economical. It is not like a lab at Motorola with millions of dollars.
And third, patent everything these kids do, by a univeristy or some trusted public group, and let anyone use the patents for free (except Microsoft, fuck them).
The genius of this system is kids love to compete and show off their genius. They will do it all for pride and because it is interesting. It stimulates their mind, they get caught up in it, and they build fantastic things. Meanwhile, everyone else benifits, no monopolies from these new inventions. And maybe the public group that holds these patents could use them as leverage against large companies, to force them to pay a fee, and in some cases to ban them from using the patent for their preditory buisness practices.
This is how a community can help itself without giving one CEO compelete power to ruin lives.
And I hope these kids build things that soon will be used in real cars, to reduce the amount of gasoline needed. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have cars with 100 miles per gallon of gas, and that emitted 1/10th the amount of pollution? It is possible.
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The reason I didn't... such a sword cuts both ways. If I put his mom in play, all moms became fair game.
But this was 8 or 9 years ago, and the only thing that reporter cited that I wasn't able to do then was examine satellite photos of Spamford's mom's house.
What maybe only you could do 9 years ago, find an address, today many more people can do, and all might not have your reasoning. Some might be drinking and say "fuck it", and hit post.
Don't we have websites today where people can post embarassing camera phone pictures of other people, without getting the consent of the other person?
And what about credit checks? I see websites that will let anyone do a credit check if they know a SSN number and they can pay the fee. And the same thing for a Private Investigators report, who knows what information they have on that. Did anyone ever pay the $49.95 to get that report on someone?
If I really wanted to fuck up someones life, I could not do it better than using google and the internet. For example, if I knew from your credit report that you have a revolving account at a store, and there is a large balance, then I know you shop there alot. What if I decided to go in there, and whisper to some employees that you have AIDS or are transgender and I don't want you trying on clothing??
The courts and republican administrations have done everything they can to take away all privacy. Check out the promises the republican national committie and the City of Boston made during the conventions. Boston installed thousands of cameras throught the city, to provide added security for the republican convention. Boston promised to take them down as soon as the convention was over. Guess what? Those cameras are still up, the city said it cost so much to put them in place, they might as well keep them. Chicago followed next, adding 3,000 cameras.
But the internet is worse. Anyone can put any information on the internet, and it is hard to find the source.
I'll give one example from my local newspaper. Someone at the local high school snapped some pictures of a girl he disliked, her naked and I don't know what else, and he put that on the internet. Then he emailed his classmates telling them what website to look at. The girl was humiliated. Could you go back to highschool if everyone saw you naked? How can you concentrate in math class when you feel like everyone is staring right through your clothing. And the jokes, they can be very cruel. Who is going to pay for her counceling, for her pain and suffering?
What is the solution?
We need to remember that privacy is important. Where I live is my buisness, it should not be in a database for anyone to look up.
I will give one example. Say there is Joweski and Co Construction. They build million dollar mansions, and the owner, Mr. Joweski is very rich. Should I be able to google him up, find out all his buisness, where he goes, his home address, and find a way to ambush him, to steal his money, to steal his identity. Or should be be relativly anonymous to 99% of the people. If he steals or srews someone over, the police have the drivers license data, his taxes, they can track him down. But what once was private is now everywhere on the web.
We need a law that says anything which personally identifies a person must be removed from a website unless that person gives continuing concent to keep it up (like agreeing again every 6 months).
So now I'm wondering, how can I design a registration page when all I require is a userID and password? Wouldn't that look weird as a registration page? Any advice?
I think the #1 problem new websites will have is the bad experiances people had in the past. 10 years ago you might have been able to ask for first name, last name, and people might have given it to you. Today, nobody trusts a new website.
If I was starting a website, and I wanted to build trust, I would make a tiered registration system. Maybe a simple registration that makes a limited account. The user supplies his username, password, and email for activation. That gives him the ability to read most of the forum, and to post in specific areas. Once trust is established, maybe there can be a second registration, where the first name is asked, or something more where people can know each other better. When do you offer the second registration? After 500 posts? 1000 posts? Once a senior member, other forums are visible, and the person can post everywhere.
If I was starting a buisness, maybe all I would need on the computer would be username and password. Maybe I would have all the other information faxed over, the name and billing address, and I would keep that information off-line.
I don't know the anwser to your particular buisness. I do know some websites now, when they validate a new account, check the IP address of the user and match it up with the state they say they reside in. If the state and IP does not match, they reject the user. The problem is, unless you have thousands of people wanting to join, this could make recruiting members impossible.
What kind of interaction do you want with your members? Will you need to contact them often, to email them?
That is extortion. What you are saying is nobody can start an internet buisness where they have customers data unless they hire a competent administrator?
Say I want to sell the Worlds Best Cookies, they are homemade by me, nobody else has them. I decide to set up a simple website, use tomact and write some code where people enter in their names, addresses and credit card numbers. I don't want to pay for a third company on the web to process the credit cards, I call them all in myself in the morning. But the way my website is set up, all the orders are just appended to a text file on my server. I open that file in the morning, and validate all the orders.
What you are saying is, if someone hacks in and steals that text file with credit card numbers, the store owner would be at fault?
Now lets look at it your way. Instead, I hire an administrator at $75 an hour. He is the cheapest admin with a good work history, an admin that has his MSCE and other certifications that the industry accepts as proving competence. He works for 50 hours setting up my server and website, and also tells me to subscribe to an on-line credit card processing service, but they charge 9% of all transactions, plus a monthly fee. The admin also has an 1 hour per month fee, for maintinance and consulting and keeping my account active.
Do any people know what my cookies would now cost? It would probably cost more for the admin and banks than the flour, butter, suger, and chocolate chips that goes in the cookies. The cost would go way high.
Now, if it was 50 years ago, people would not confuse the issue. There is only one wrong doer, the criminal who steals. It is the theft that is wrong, not the weakness of the target.
So the owner of the store is at fault for storing his customers valuables somewhere that it is easy to steal?
Is that the kind of laws we want? I know my lock does not work. I take in your valuables to store them. Then someone steals everything, and I am to blame for not replacing the locks?
What if the Jewlery store did not want any locks? What if all they wanted was for people to obey the law?
Are we living in a society with no honor? Are we living in a time when everything that is wrong is okay, the "poor me" I did not mean to do it, but it was too tempting?
The only reason I say I don't know what the anwser to this problem is, is because the jails are over crowded as it is. We did not have a lack of respect of other people 50 years ago, in the Leave it to Beaver age. Many fewer people stole, lied, and cheated. So why is it today we have more people who steal, lie, and cheat? Is it the aninimity the internet offers? Or is it the way society is changing, no more norms and standards, no more shame? It seems like every deviant lifestyle is being accepted as normal. Nobody can call a crook a crook anymore, because the crook might sue for pain and suffering.
I agree. Someone at the streaming website should do basic math. At what point can the buffer be large enough that even though you are watching more data than is being recieved, you have enough data in the buffer to watch the whole episode. Either that, or increase the amount of servers and bandwith, so you can send out a larger stream.
From the article:
Time Warner's Road Runner Internet service, customers download and install a media player made for Time Warner by RealPlayer onto their computers.
I will NEVER install anything from RealPlayer on my computer, ever again. They might as well not offer the service. RealPlayer is spyware.
I never give real information to any websites. None. I have one spam email account that I use just for activating crap. I give them the wrong state, wrong everything. I don't want to even be included in accurate demographics. Why should I? I just know the information will be sold to some mega corporation. The "privacy statememnt" is not worth the paper it is printed on.
I'll give one example. There was an awesome website with information for EVERY tv show ever on tv. They had episode information, forums, cast lists, everything. It was called TvTome. For 3 or 4 years, I was a memeber, I loved that website, I talked to lots of people about shows I loved. Then one day, a corporation comes by, and takes this hobby board, and offers the owner 5 million dollars to buy all his data, website, everything. All the people who registered at the old website had their information sold to the new corporation. The new website sucks. It is non-functional, nobody uses it. Do I want some large company buying my personal information? NO!!
This kind of thinking is wrong and outdated.
What you are saying is, if I have a door and the lock breaks, it is my fault if I get robbed because I did not change the lock??
The problem is with the criminal who breaks into websites. If I wanted zero security for my website, I should be allowed to have zero security and not have anyone hack in.
I don't know the anwser. Do we increase jail time for hackers? Do we lock out countries where we know there are problems, have an internet embargo. Nothing in and nothing out? Do we change the whole internet to require some form of identification from everyone who uses it, something more than an IP address that can be spoofed. How do we stop people from hacking websites and causing disturbances?
In an age of worms and malicious programs, you never hear of ATM's getting hacked.
Too bad IBM did not try and market OS/2 as the secure OS. Then again, once you throw services on any OS, they all become equally vulnerable. Put a web server and database on Linux, hook it up, broadcast, and it can be hacked. Just like windows.
Then again, I bet it is a stripped down version of OS/2 that runs ATM's. There is no need for a full OS. What will people do? Play a game of solitare at the ATM? Email someone?
Same here. I got a free copy of OS/2 from a computer store in chicago back in 93 or 94. Everyone suspected OS/2 was going to die, and I think they were trying to get more people to use it.
The version I had was very much like Win 3.1. Maybe a little nicer. But I could not get software to run on it. If OS/2 would have had games, I would have kept it longer.
It is around the same time I got my HP 48gx calculator. And the HP is still in use.
I wonder what will happend with all the OS/2 code? IBM should publish it and make it public. Maybe someone can use parts of it in non-commercial ways (so M$ does not exploit it).
And what did OS/2 look like after the mid 90's. Were there any large updates? Any MMX stuff? Any DVD support? Any modern stuff added??
Yeah, but the copies you are handing out to people exist only as long as they are at your website. Your analogy of opening a newspaper stand and handing out copies is not right. It is more like if you have a reading room, and anyone who comes in your reading room can look at your content, but they can not take it out of the room.
It is like politics. Maybe someone out there who is a moderate in most elections, really, really hates Al Gore. So they start a website, where they post political ramblings. It starts getting heated, and the person looses their cool, and starts posting more extreme thoughts than what they trully believe. Should that snapshot define that person? Can people change their minds and opinions? Do we want to corner people into what they posted on the web, because it will be impossible to know the context of the original posting.
I guess the best example I can give is a friend I knew in college who was a libertarian. He had a political science class with a teacher who was a libertarian. He read John Stuart Mill. So he started a libertarian website, that defended individual freedom, regardless of what the person did, as long as it did not invade another persons rights. Some of the things he defended would have 90% of the civilized world backlash against him (like being pro doctor assisted suicide, being pro any kind of sex between two concenting adults inclduing prostitution and sex work, being against any taxes). As the years passed, and more books and newspapers were read, his views changed. But should that libertarian website haunt him the rest of his life?
Will every person have a history that is as public as when someone runs for office? Did we really need to know Clintons sex life? Did we need to know Bush was an alcoholic? It seems we know more about their private lives than what their professional opinions and votes will be. For example, with Court Justices, we knew everything about Clearence Thomas's sex life, his personal life, but he was a clam when it came to talking about his views on abortion or court issues.
In my opinion, this all comes down to a privacy issue. If someone gives a statement, they have a right to retract it. Obviously, they can't take away your memory of it. But if the message comes in the form of a website, they should be able to take it down. Or should they?
By the way, if anyone contacts me anonymously giving me some of the plot information that these Canadians have been forbidden to read in the books they bought, I will post the information. I am not a Harry Potter fan, and I would not have greatly minded whether I learned the plot of this book tomorrow, Saturday, next year, or never; but when governments spit on human rights, humans must protest. I suggest that anyone wishing to leak this information call me at +1-617-253-8830 from a pay phone.
Did this guy just put up his phone number on the internet??
In my opinion, with regards to Harry Potter, is if someone has read the book, who cares if that person tells others what he thinks. Are the publishers worried this person might ruin the advertising campaign by saying "it sucks", or by giving a spoiler? I could understand how that would piss people off.
This reminds me of the movie "Basic Instinct", with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone (the movie where she shows her twat). Anyways, some lesbian-homo weirdo group, in protest that the movie makes lesbians look like werdios, decided to leak the ending. They group had people go to movie theaters and talk about the ending of the movie, while people waited in line to buy the tickets.
So I guess idiots can ruin anything.
Or do we need patents on website content? Copywrites? Or can we trust people to not steal?
For example, say there is a college kid who really likes beer and porn. He likes it so much, he sets up a website that becomes popular, it lists different beers, and reviews porn. One drunken night, this college kid uses his cell phone to take a couple low resolution pictures of himself having sex, and he puts it up.
A few years pass, somehow he graduates and starts looking for work. Someone tells him that his website comes up when googled, and that might not be the best thing when it comes for finding work.
So the guy pulls the plug. beerandporn dot com dies. Or did it? It seems others liked his hobby as well, and downloaded all the content, and started hosting it. Problem is, google now links to these new sites, with his face and work for the world to see.
Should this guy have a right to erase his past creations?
I'll give one more example. A woman who is 26 years old has 2 kids, and no skills. She got knocked up by a bum. Now she is working in a grocery store, as a check out clerk for $7 an hour, not enough to feed and cloth her family.
She starts up a website where she gets naked. She is making good money, and she manages to make enough to get a nicer place to live, feed her kids, and go to college. A couple years later, she takes down the website. She has a good job. But someone decides to put the content back up. Her kids are now 13 years old. Her employeer also knows how to use google. Should people judge her based on who she used to be, what she did to survive within a specific context of existance?
If someone wants to put up a website, they have that right. But it appears that people don't have a right to remove their content from circulation. That is the problem.
The great thing about life is people can change, they can move away to a new community, they can start over. The internet in some ways is making that impossible. It is like jobs that do credit checks, to work as a secretary they want to know how much money you owe, and if you paid it off on time.
There might be villages that don't want to have their exact location well known.
Lots of these villages have been at war with other villages and tribes for a long, long time.
Many African governments are currupt, and would love to do ethnic cleansing.
Your wanting to provide accurate maps might do more harm than good.
I can just see some Diamond company in the USA, which hears about a new mine that had Diamonds at some coordinate. They then look at your map, and exterminate a whole village. It has happened in the past
This should be a map that only includes those who wish to be included. Don't force anyone on the map. Some tribe might decide to have you for dinner.
Fox News?
LOL!!!
This reminds me of something Rush Limbaugh did when he had his TV program in the late 80's, early 90's. One day Rush announced "I did not realize this, but there is a large audiance that can not understand me, people who we wish to turn to, to embrace. From now on, at the bottom 1/9th of the screen, the home viewer will be able to watch a translator, who will translate my show into ebonics". The bottom 1/9th of the screen, for the rest of that show had a black man, dressed like an African hunter, jumping up and down, turning in circles, and making a clicking noise with his mouth.
What Rush was really missing was the translator who would take the other 1/9th of the screen, and have a bottle of Lous III in a $1000 crystal glass, while he mumbles in a british accent "you will never be as rich as me, no matter how you smash the unions, you will never have old money. your corvette, i laugh at your corvette, you could not even afford an entry level ferarri, not that those are any better. *british laugh* dare i say, i believe the janitor is forcing you to pay him $5 an hour. you'll never be rich enough. never!!".
There is alot going on here. Cheap 15" LCD's are out there. But they don't look that great and they are small.
What if I want to run High Definition content? What does the resolution max out at?
What happens if my pr0n collection for whatever reason decides to make an appearance on this separate channel?
Face turns red? Everyone laughs?
But in all honestly, have you ever veiwed porn if someone was in the same room with you, even if they were at a computer facing the opposite direction? Who would do that, it is about as dumb as thinking you have privacy at work in your cubicle and want to check out playboy.
Someone should send you the video of the fat boy in the college dorm room who forgot to lock his door. Meanwhile, a buddy cracked the door open, saw the kid masturbating, ran back to his room, grabbed his camcorder, and recorded the kid beating off. The kid turns around and there are 10 people who start laughing, and the one doing the recording.
If anything is needed, it's an LCD that restricts wide-angle viewing so that only the person actually using the laptop gets to see anything.
I think these are out. I believe I saw advertising for it. But I could not tell you what manufacturer, because I try and block out advertising.
Okay, here is my wishlist. A good, inexpensive, 1600 by 1200 23" widescreen LCD for under $300. If you can make that, I will be a buyer.
And for a HDTV, how about a 48" widescreen 1024*768 LCD for under $900?? That will do DVD 480p and ESPN satelite 720p without downscaling. Baseball would look so awesome on that!!! Hopefully it will be someone in the USA who can make it, and not China, I would like to support USA workers.
BTW, can someone explain to me why a normal tv with 480i looks better than something of the same size on my computer monitor? Does higher resolution ability make a lower resolution picture look worse?
I didn't instal it for many reasons. I'll give you just one example. While I have not done this for over a year, I bet it is the same. Go to ESPN's website without flash. It loads quicker. Go to their website with flash, and you get a huge distracting 1/3rd the size of a 17 inch monitor flash graphics. And you can not disable it. It is worse at some websites that use Flash for their advertising. I HATE FLASH FOR ADVERTISING. It is about as distracting as the banner that flashes from white to red "YOU HAVE WON... click here*".
I want control over my computer, and I want it to be easy. I don't want to have to read a tech manual to learn how to disable something. It is one of the reasons I will not instal Real Media on my computer.
Did Macromedia steal your bike or something?
They stole my time and my nerves. And that is just as bad.
Or are you one of the few dozen folks still relying on a 28.8 connection?
Is this supposed to be a knock on people without broadband. Should the whole internet work flawlessly for those with 350k connections, and screw the rest for simple text pages?
Do you have any idea how many people use AOL or dial up? And NEWSFLASH, that 56k modem ain't 56k, I have looked at over a dozen dial-ups, and the best I EVER saw was 8k a second, most are like 4k or 5k a second. If a 56K modem ever gave a consistant 35k a second, broadband never would have caught on like it did.
It is simple for me. If a website does not work the way I want it to, I don't visit it. End of story. The person putting up the website must do so in a way I approve of, if he expects me to visit it. And in my case, I think I share criteria with millions of other people.
And oh, I surf with javascrip disabled too. It is one of the reasons I no longer use email services which require javascript to be enabled. I'd rather open up a source code window and read the html and find the links myself than let javascript do it.
it is macromedia flash, something i don't have on my computer, and something i refuse to instal.
damn it!
what ever happened to the low bandwith page, incase someone wanted to veiw a simple html page? at one point in time, lots of websites gave a non-frame, non-macromedia, low bandwith alternative link. it is a nice courtesy.
I love the transformers too. It was one of my favorite cartoons in the 80's.
But I have to question what Speilberg can add to the transformers. Why not bring back the crew who did the original 1980's show? Give them the same tools they had back then. That is what will make money, Dads taking their kids to see a cartoon movie they loved as a child.
The only great thing that Speilberg might be able to add is a good story, which could be worth its weight in gold. I doubt he will want to do a story that sucks, and will most likely have veto power over scripts. I hope Speilberg was a fan of the original 1980s series, and not the newer one.
To be 100% honest, I don't think I want Speilberg doing this movie. He will attract top notch actors, and I don't know if I want Danny DeVitto voicing Megatron, or Chris Rock voicing StarScream.
The other problem with Speilberg is this movie could become a 20 million dollar animation project. Will Optimus Prime look like what we remember, or will creativity change him completely??
I was a huge fan of the transformers in the early 80's. It was a great block of cartoons. There was He-Man, then Transformers, and then GI Joe (which I thought was weak). Oh, and for a couple years, they had Robotech, which was awesome, followed by Voltron. Talk about good cartoons, I don't think even Thundercats could dethrone those cartoons. Nothing good today like those cartoons.
Back to the Transformers. The new series stunk. It was not true to the old one. I don't think I even saw Megatron, at least not the way I remembered him. He was fairly smart back in the 80's, not crazy like starscream. The new series has no thought in it, that is why i dislike it. It is just like one thoughtless attack after another, no strategy.
And what happened to the robot that replaced Optimus Prime, when he died, I remember this robot was stuck inside a comet or astroid, and he had to be found.
Oh, and bring back the big mega robot, that is combined by 5 smaller ones, the green one that is all the construction machines that form a big robot.
Please, please, please, get this movie right. It will be a delight for all of us who watched the original series. Put most of the money in the script, something really good. I would rather have an awesome story and so-so graphics than a bad story and million dollar graphics.
Now, channles often have nothing to do with what they are named. MTV might as well be reality TV... 4 episodes of Real World followed by 4 episodes of Road Rules, followed by 8 episodes of Real World versus Road Rules. Ugh. Then, for the 200th time a repeat of "When the 80's ruled".
But here is what gets me pissed off. Did everyone hear MTV is now using the money we paid (through watching the advertising) to start a new tv network for gays and weirdo's.
Same thing with a Nerd network. Do we really need it? How about haveing The Learning Channel and Discovery channel having real science programming? Has either station ever played The Mechanical Universe? I know it is PBS programming, but they show it at 2am once a week on a friday. Or what about either of those two stations following NASA? Or having a weekly tech show. Instead, TLC is airing Trading Spaces, a show where two neighbors redecorate their houses, and then suprise each other (How do you like it, I knew you would love your living room painted lime green).
Names are meaningless today. Just like when government passes the Patriot Act. They just pick a popular name for marketing purposes, it really does not tell you much about what it is. They should have called it the Terrorism Prevention Act, it would come a little closer to the truth, or better yet Lets Take Away All Civil Liberties Act.
I don't need 100 channels. I need 10 good ones. Give me a true science and tech channel. Give me one true news station, and not an editorial station. I already have ESPN, they are pretty good with sports. I think you could combine FoodTV and Home and Garden to have one channel, on Living (Do we really need 6 episodes of $40 dollars a day, highly offensive to me, as I watch this woman suffer to feed herself on only $40 each day, while I live off $4 a day).
Toss in a movie station for a 5th station.
And while we are at it, some RULES for all TV stations to follow. #1, get rid of the laugh track. It is not funny when a character comes on stage. I don't need a pre-recorded laughing sound to know when to laugh or what is funny. Are people that stupid that most laugh because they hear laughing? Once you hear the laugh track, and you become aware of it, it will ruin all your shows. It will become very annoying.
Rule #2, No more advertising while a TV show is airing. I don't mean commercials. I mean the boxes that pop up and take 1/9th of the screen with an advertising for what is on TV next. Or what movie is playing this weekend. Or even the ones that identify what station you are watching. I know what station I am watching.
Rule #3, Don't cut off the end credits to a show. Some of us want to know who an actor on a show was. Some of us hate the screen splitting, with an advertising on the opposite side. Some of us want to take the last minute to enjoy what we just saw, as we watch the credits.
people need to feel good about themselves. not everyone has a 120+ IQ. there are pleanty of people in high school with a 95-100 IQ.
is it fair that one person has to spend 10 minutes doing their math homework and they understand it, and another person suffers for 60 minutes and does not understand it?
if grades were based on effort, that nerd would have an F and the 90 IQ jock would have an A. i find it amazing that the 120 IQ kids sit back and take such delight in how "dumb" everyone else is. if they can understand it in 10 minutes and are done, why not spend 20 minutes with someone less fortunate and help them??
think of it from the opposite end. there are some kids that are more muscular, flexible, and have higher endurance. remember pe class, say tennis or softball. the guy who finished his math in 10 minutes now can't coordinate hitting a softball even after 60 minutes. how many jocks would take the time to say "okay, lets try and fix your swing, lets start with your stance, your legs should be like this, you should swing from the hips and not arms, you should do x, y, and z. let me help you"???
is huamn nature so currupt that anyone wants to exploit any advantage they have over the less fortunate??
i think it is a fantastic idea to give grades not based on work produced, but effort too. more can be learned by teaching someone not to give up. unless the purpose of highschool is to find ways to break people, and then socialize them into conformity.
more emphasis on (mathematics) basics.
this is a horrible idea!! 90% of people never need more math than algebra. highschool is not competition ground in math and science to see who gets selected to MIT.
i would say to reduce the amount of math taught in highschool. why? because more can be gained by teaching history and english and foriegn languages than by teaching math. if the goal of life is happiness, then teaching something about what happiness is, how it is gained, problems others have suffered and how they overcame will go a lot further to fostering a sense of well being, more than being able to do multi-variable calculus.
highschool should be a fun time. it should be filled with parties and learning about people, how to get along, how to have fun together. highschool should not be the place where people start seperating and getting classified. the nerds in preperation of the ivy schools, the dumb jocks in preperation for low paying jobs, the cheerleaders taught to be second citizens and use sex as a tool.
you could learn something from watching "the breakfast club". people are not different from each other. we learn that from assholes who say everyone needs to know trig, and those who struggle are worth less.
DVI is not encrypted, is it?
This reminds me of the macroflash that some DVD players have. If you try and copy a DVD to a VHS tape, it will phase in and out of the picture in all sorts of colors. Did people think that a 480p picture needs to be protected from being copied on a format that is half the resolution and interlaced?
I am still awaiting a technology giant to dare Hollywood to not support a format and thus lose the sales that way. Of course with companies like Sony running their own music and movie divisions that probably will not happen any time soon.
The problem is not with copying a DVD. Studios don't lose money because someone copies a DVD and trades it. Studios loose money when you already have the $29.99 blockbuster hit on DVD, and two years later they re-release the same movie on DVD and clean it up a bit. Who wants to buy the same shit twice? It pisses people off, and that is when they start thinking about copying a DVD. No, they don't copy the ultra edition, because that is the one they want to buy and have as a part of their DVD collection. They copy the crappy first release. Now I have known some DVD collectors with 700+ DVD's to copy a DVD, and then see the DVD was done right, and buy the first version. People don't want to buy shit.
Studios do not respect people. If Studios respected me as a person, they would not waste my time. Not in theaters with 20 minutes of commercials and $5 popcorns. Not with DVD's that disable the menu and fast forward buttons. Not with DVD's that get re-released three times.
But what does it matter anyways? Will there EVER be something that will take full use of the resolution? For example, take the cleanest looking 720p ESPN baseball game, how much higher can the resolution get? There must be some relationship between screen size and the perceptible difference. For example, can people see more detail on a 42" screen if one is 480p and the other is 720p? Maybe on a 120" projection screen it becomes noticable, but how much?
Truth be told, I would be more happy with the current 480p that DVD can play now if the studios treated customers better. No more re-releasing a DVD 3 times, with the first release being shitty and a buy it for $29 or have nothing attitude. Then 18 month later is the re-release "ultimate edition" which cleans the picture up. Coulnd't the studio release a clean picture the first time? And do away with fraud, for example the season 2 boxed set of Magnum PI has a bonus episode of the A-Team, and this episode looks fantastic, very clean. But if you get the boxed set of the A-Team, the other episodes don't look like they have as much resolution. Did the studio spend all their time making the one "free" episode look as good as possible, and neglected the rest because the studio knew the free one was going to sell the set?
And while we are at it, NO MORE FUKING "COPYWRITE" WARNINGS THAT CAN NOT BE FAST FORWARDED AND NO DISABLING OF THE MENU BUTTON DURING PREVIEWS!!! I fucking hate studios that lock me into 5 minutes of copywrite warnings, previews and the studio logo.
And here is a shocking idea. If the studio made a product the way people wanted it, then maybe there would be less copying. If a $30 dvd was not released 3 times, maybe the first version would not be copied like crazy because nobody wants to get fucked with a crippled version.
And I have a long memory. I have a bunch of music CD's with rot. I have one DVD that pixalates, and it did not do that in the past. None of my VHS tapes lock up or pixilate, they keep playing.
I almost wish the S-VHS caught on with near dvd quality. It would be hard to control an analog source. But that is why studios lie and tell us things like DVD's last forever, when in truth they get rot, or lies like no anaolg source could have the same resolution, which it could.
Anyways, find these smart pups and have an open competition. Not only will the smart kids find ways to build things, but they must be economical. It is not like a lab at Motorola with millions of dollars.
And third, patent everything these kids do, by a univeristy or some trusted public group, and let anyone use the patents for free (except Microsoft, fuck them).
The genius of this system is kids love to compete and show off their genius. They will do it all for pride and because it is interesting. It stimulates their mind, they get caught up in it, and they build fantastic things. Meanwhile, everyone else benifits, no monopolies from these new inventions. And maybe the public group that holds these patents could use them as leverage against large companies, to force them to pay a fee, and in some cases to ban them from using the patent for their preditory buisness practices.
This is how a community can help itself without giving one CEO compelete power to ruin lives.
And I hope these kids build things that soon will be used in real cars, to reduce the amount of gasoline needed. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have cars with 100 miles per gallon of gas, and that emitted 1/10th the amount of pollution? It is possible.