I think it would be a cool movie to make if it were set in the late 19th Century, like the original story itself.
It's not that stories of the past can't be brought into the present day to good effect, the way some theatre companies and filmmakers opt to do up-to-date versions of Shakespeare's works, but once in a while I'd really like to see a work of hundred-year-old science fiction done as if it were taking place in the author's time rather than our own.
This upcoming "Sky Captain" movie is, I'm hoping, going to be along the lines of what I'm talking about. But I think Sky Captain isn't based on an actual book from the late 1930s, which is, as Stuart Smalley would say, "okay."
Is this yet another example of technologically illiterate politicians eagerly passing bills without bothering to find out what the law is going to do?
At first, I read the post and thought, why are all these businesses opposed to this law? It must be a good law if a lot of big corporations don't like it.
But after reading the article, I think that the legislators' efforts went off half-cocked, and they let one company write the bill to suit themselves.
I wonder why these big companies waited until after the bill passed to begin lobbying. If the governor signs the bill, isn't it going to be a lot harder to get rid of it?
I'm in favor of laws limiting spyware and adware, but I think it's important to get it right the first time. If the FTC doesn't even have a definition for spyware, it's back to the drawing board.
Presenters of the music-playing machine found themselves being unmercifully heckled by a man calling himself Mssr. Jacques de Vaucanson, who proclaimed loudly that he had accomplished robotic music more than two hundred years prior to this demonstration.
When the presenters pointed out that Mssr. Vaucanson would have to be long dead as of this late date, the suddenly horrified heckler collapsed into a pile of dust, and the remainder of the presentation was conducted without further interruption.
Now, this is totally off-topic, but wouldn't it be cool if they could get David Bowie to play Wonko the Sane in the upcoming HGTG movie?
I doubt that the movie will get that far in the storyline (maybe the third one will), but Bowie is at the perfect age right now to play the character that was described as looking like him.
This article's mention of product liability warnings reminds me of that Bloom County strip in the 80s where sleazy lawyer Steve Dallas is contemplating whom to sue after getting pummelled and hospitalized by Sean Penn's forehead.
After explaining why he shouldn't sue Sean Penn ("juries love famous people, and he might return to beat up the plantiff"), or his wife, Madonna ("proving liability might be difficult, and she might return to beat up the plantiff"), or Opus the Penguin ("never, ever sue poor people"), he settles on suing the Nikolta Camera Corporation, a "huge, multinational corporation with gobs of liquid cash," on the grounds that they were "criminally negligent in not placing a warning sticker on their cameras that reads, 'serious injury may result from photographic psychopathic Hollywood hotheads.'"
He then finishes up by waving a flag and declaring, "America, Land of the Lawsuit... God bless her!"
I guess the P2P software companies are likewise criminally negligent in not warning people that their products could lead to some harm.
Since there's no warning sticker on this spindle of blank CD-ROMs on my desk, I think I'll see how many of them I can shove down my throat.
On the same subject, have you seen some of the warning stickers manufacturers DO put on their products? Can I get a reply with some examples? I'll start off by citing the sticker on the baby stoller that reads "Do not fold stroller with infant inside."
Getting real tired of reading this left-wing bullshit. Give one iota of proof please. THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH IS NOT THAT POWERFUL. In the end it won't be some freigner that brings this country down. It'll be dome dumbfuck like you thinking he knows better!
You see, everyone, what the right wing firebrands have to resort to? They don't have a calm, rational argument to make, so they resort to namecalling and hate speech. Harldy makes my job difficult. I just make an observation and let the right-wingers bury themselves under a pile of invectives.
I refer to the presidential administration as the "Bush Admin," hardly inflammatory, and this guy refers to me as "Fucktard." That's really persuasive. Wow, what a compelling argument. Your point is the more valid one because I'm a "fucktard."
As far as the proof you ask for, the post I'm replying to is proof enough. The US is trying to get someone sent over here to face charges related to internet crimes, so I don't see why it's so far fetched that they'd send someone abroad for the same reason. It certainly would put the fear of God into every American adult site operator, and it would win massive kudos from the AFA and Christian Coalition. Of course, making Christian websites available would also be a crime in the MIddle East, but there'd be an exception made in the law for that.
The Bush Admin is taking a hard-right turn, just listen to his speeches of late.
Imagine if, in order to help shore up his fundamentalist Christian base, he and his buddies in Congress decided to begin extraditing adult website operators over to, say, Saudi Arabia, for prosecution under that country's less-than-zero tolerance for anything that even mentions sex.
Get a couple of sympathetic hard-right federal judges on-board, and Danni Ashe could wind up being publicly flogged in Riyadh.
I saw a show about something like this on TV a couple years ago. A couple bought a missle silo and moved into it. They fixed it up really nice, with a grand piano and carpeting and everything.
Or maybe I just dreamed it.
Wretched, foul, irredeemable.
on
Spam Bits
·
· Score: 2
BEGIN RANT:::
If I hear one more spammer refer to himself as a victim I'm going to lose my lunch. Yeah, spammer, you're a victim, just like Charles Manson and Kenneth Bianchi were victims.
And hearing spammers justify what they do based on how much money they bring in likewise makes my stomach start to heave.
Another favorite is when they claim an inherent right to spam people. "Hey, don't use email if you don't want to get advertisements," is their repugnant, pathetic little battle cry, like a serial killer who justifies committing murder by claiming that people who don't want to be murdered shouldn't be born.
I remember this humorous tagline in a Car Wars supplement that read, "If you don't like the way we drive, stay off the streets (and the sidewalks and the lawns)." Spammers have the same kind of tagline going in real life, "If you don't like getting spammed, stay off the internet." But that's quite a bit less humorous, especially when people are having to weed hundreds of stupid spam messages out of their inboxes every day, after waiting fifteen minutes to download them all.:::END RANT
Really, though, isn't it about time that the media stop referring to people sharing music files online as "piracy"? Selling it on the streets is piracy. Granted, sharing it online for free may be illegal, but if the sharer makes no money how can that be piracy?
If that's piracy, then there must have been pirates in the 18th Century that would go to all the trouble of taking over an enemy ship and then give all the gold, jewels, and spices away.
"Y'ar, we'll be givin' away these doubloons to anyone what wants 'em, 'cause we be pirates. Y'ar."
Something about this post makes a Phish song play in my head, with alternate lyrics.
Give the director a pocket protector. a license dissector, a FUD-rat deflector, a source code convector, a lawsuit reflector, a picture of Hector (Ruiz?).. any Phish-heads wanna help me out with the rest, here?
I think the song "Cavern" could be thoroughly rewritten to be about the FSF. Don't know if it should be, but it could be.
Whoops, I was just about to make a joke about emoticons from female American soldiers automatically displayed wearing veils at the other end, but it's the wrong country. I recycle that joke when this technology starts being used with Saudi Arabia or Iran.
That reminds me of that Bill Engvall routine called, "Here's your sign," about stupid people needing to wear signs that read "I'm stupid" so that other people will be able to accomodate them.
In more direct reply to the above post, my g/f needs a 'do not disturb' sign to wear. Something about her makes people think that she's eager to be spoken to. The fact is she really wants to be left alone, like many of us.
I concur with the above reply. Please, please, if you are a young person who likes loud music, I beg you to be careful with your ears, and not make the mistakes that so many of my generation made. Maybe you think that you'll never, ever be in your thirties or forties and wishing that the ringing in your ears would go away and that you could hear again, but if you're blasting music into your ears, you will be. Doesn't matter if it's through headphones or that crazy car stereo that goes thump thump thump and scares people, the damage you do to your ears is permanent, and spending the second half of your adult life having to ask everyone to speak up and repeat themselves because of hearing loss suck-diddly-ucks.
Please believe me, kids, you will be thirty years old one day, and how well you are able to hear at that time depends very much on how well you treat your delicate, sensitive ears today.
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode called "The Package," when Elaine keeps getting the shaft at the doctor's office after being labeled as "difficult."
Imagine how you'll be treated when your chart has you labeled as "malpractice lawsuit plaintiff." The doctor won't even come into the room.
You can get discount tickets to this event if you agree to spend 90 minutes discussing timeshare vacation resort properties with one of our sales representatives. A $20 deposit is required. No obligation, of course (wink, wink).
Those of you in the Orlando area know just what I'm talking about, I'm sure. Heh, heh.
What I said before was pretty harsh... I don't think the guy deserves prison time, but he's in for some harsh civil penalties, I bet. There's an update here at the same site as the original article.
The thing is that the guy sold the website address, or at least he supposedly claimed to have. That was pretty dumb, I think. If it were me, and I needed to stop paying for the hosting, I'd have handed the whole site over on a CD, transferred the domain name to the town's ownership, and then shut off the site.
I read the first article before I posted, and didn't even know the guy had a personal defense website up. It really looked to me like the guy was scamming, and I really hate scammers, especially greedy ones. But why would they charge him with extortion if he hadn't demanded that money to keep the site up?
This guy gives website designers a bad name. I'd say he definitely belongs in prison. 3.5 million hits per month? Oh, yeah, right. I get the feeling that this guy was planning to pull this stunt all along, but I bet he wasn't counting on getting arrested. Another clue is the fact that he set the domain name up as his own property so the town would be unable to switch to another server. What a noble thing to do. And then there's his final bill... $300,000?! To offset the "huge expense" of running the website? WHAT huge expense? How much was he paying for hosting? DIdn't want to lose any more money? Why didn't he just set it up on a different server and let the town pay for it themselves? I think this guy wants to the town to pay for the loss he's taken running his business in the first place, and shutting the server down while handing over such a massive bill is, IMHO, extortion, and should be treated as such. I hope they throw the book at him, and throw it at him hard, to serve as a warning to anyone else thinking of pulling a stunt like this. Whew, I'm outta breath. Gotta go lay down for a minute.
At the risk of being modded Redundant because someone else happens to be typing this at the exact same time that I am, we used to do something like this every weekend at the local showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I have received email from people with PhDs who head up university departments that have just as many typos as that message. I guess that they're in a hurry to get the message out, and don't have anyone around to proofread. The typos in the message in this case are the kind someone doing a fast hunt-and-peck without regard for the consequences might make.
And on a cynical note, I think that high-up, well-to-do people don't think enough of most of their email recipients to bother with accurate typing or grammar. They save the careful typing and sentence structure for the people who are at the same level or higher than them on the food chain. They'll even have their secrectaries proofread and recompose their email before sending it to their own superiors.
Slashdot Mirror
I heartily concur, old chap!
"Octopuses," said he, "that's what I calls 'em. Talk about fishers of men--fighters of fish it is this time!"
"It ain't no murder killing beasts like that," said the first speaker.
"Why not shell the darned things strite off and finish 'em?" said the little dark man. "You carn tell what they might do."
"Where's your shells?" said the first speaker. "There ain't no time. Do it in a rush, that's my tip, and do it at once."
I think it would be a cool movie to make if it were set in the late 19th Century, like the original story itself.
It's not that stories of the past can't be brought into the present day to good effect, the way some theatre companies and filmmakers opt to do up-to-date versions of Shakespeare's works, but once in a while I'd really like to see a work of hundred-year-old science fiction done as if it were taking place in the author's time rather than our own.
This upcoming "Sky Captain" movie is, I'm hoping, going to be along the lines of what I'm talking about. But I think Sky Captain isn't based on an actual book from the late 1930s, which is, as Stuart Smalley would say, "okay."
-- Sigh --
Is this yet another example of technologically illiterate politicians eagerly passing bills without bothering to find out what the law is going to do?
At first, I read the post and thought, why are all these businesses opposed to this law? It must be a good law if a lot of big corporations don't like it.
But after reading the article, I think that the legislators' efforts went off half-cocked, and they let one company write the bill to suit themselves.
I wonder why these big companies waited until after the bill passed to begin lobbying. If the governor signs the bill, isn't it going to be a lot harder to get rid of it?
I'm in favor of laws limiting spyware and adware, but I think it's important to get it right the first time. If the FTC doesn't even have a definition for spyware, it's back to the drawing board.
Presenters of the music-playing machine found themselves being unmercifully heckled by a man calling himself Mssr. Jacques de Vaucanson, who proclaimed loudly that he had accomplished robotic music more than two hundred years prior to this demonstration.
When the presenters pointed out that Mssr. Vaucanson would have to be long dead as of this late date, the suddenly horrified heckler collapsed into a pile of dust, and the remainder of the presentation was conducted without further interruption.
Now, this is totally off-topic, but wouldn't it be cool if they could get David Bowie to play Wonko the Sane in the upcoming HGTG movie?
I doubt that the movie will get that far in the storyline (maybe the third one will), but Bowie is at the perfect age right now to play the character that was described as looking like him.
Oh, c'mon, we could have condoms that bestow immortality on the women we use them with, and we still ain't gettin' any.
The best we can hope for is sell those condoms to guys with waistbands under 48 inches and use the money to buy porn.
This article's mention of product liability warnings reminds me of that Bloom County strip in the 80s where sleazy lawyer Steve Dallas is contemplating whom to sue after getting pummelled and hospitalized by Sean Penn's forehead.
After explaining why he shouldn't sue Sean Penn ("juries love famous people, and he might return to beat up the plantiff"), or his wife, Madonna ("proving liability might be difficult, and she might return to beat up the plantiff"), or Opus the Penguin ("never, ever sue poor people"), he settles on suing the Nikolta Camera Corporation, a "huge, multinational corporation with gobs of liquid cash," on the grounds that they were "criminally negligent in not placing a warning sticker on their cameras that reads, 'serious injury may result from photographic psychopathic Hollywood hotheads.'"
He then finishes up by waving a flag and declaring, "America, Land of the Lawsuit... God bless her!"
I guess the P2P software companies are likewise criminally negligent in not warning people that their products could lead to some harm.
Since there's no warning sticker on this spindle of blank CD-ROMs on my desk, I think I'll see how many of them I can shove down my throat.
On the same subject, have you seen some of the warning stickers manufacturers DO put on their products? Can I get a reply with some examples? I'll start off by citing the sticker on the baby stoller that reads "Do not fold stroller with infant inside."
You see, everyone, what the right wing firebrands have to resort to? They don't have a calm, rational argument to make, so they resort to namecalling and hate speech. Harldy makes my job difficult. I just make an observation and let the right-wingers bury themselves under a pile of invectives.
I refer to the presidential administration as the "Bush Admin," hardly inflammatory, and this guy refers to me as "Fucktard." That's really persuasive. Wow, what a compelling argument. Your point is the more valid one because I'm a "fucktard."
As far as the proof you ask for, the post I'm replying to is proof enough. The US is trying to get someone sent over here to face charges related to internet crimes, so I don't see why it's so far fetched that they'd send someone abroad for the same reason. It certainly would put the fear of God into every American adult site operator, and it would win massive kudos from the AFA and Christian Coalition. Of course, making Christian websites available would also be a crime in the MIddle East, but there'd be an exception made in the law for that.
The Bush Admin is taking a hard-right turn, just listen to his speeches of late.
Imagine if, in order to help shore up his fundamentalist Christian base, he and his buddies in Congress decided to begin extraditing adult website operators over to, say, Saudi Arabia, for prosecution under that country's less-than-zero tolerance for anything that even mentions sex.
Get a couple of sympathetic hard-right federal judges on-board, and Danni Ashe could wind up being publicly flogged in Riyadh.
I saw a show about something like this on TV a couple years ago. A couple bought a missle silo and moved into it. They fixed it up really nice, with a grand piano and carpeting and everything.
Or maybe I just dreamed it.
BEGIN RANT:::
:::END RANT
If I hear one more spammer refer to himself as a victim I'm going to lose my lunch. Yeah, spammer, you're a victim, just like Charles Manson and Kenneth Bianchi were victims.
And hearing spammers justify what they do based on how much money they bring in likewise makes my stomach start to heave.
Another favorite is when they claim an inherent right to spam people. "Hey, don't use email if you don't want to get advertisements," is their repugnant, pathetic little battle cry, like a serial killer who justifies committing murder by claiming that people who don't want to be murdered shouldn't be born.
I remember this humorous tagline in a Car Wars supplement that read, "If you don't like the way we drive, stay off the streets (and the sidewalks and the lawns)." Spammers have the same kind of tagline going in real life, "If you don't like getting spammed, stay off the internet." But that's quite a bit less humorous, especially when people are having to weed hundreds of stupid spam messages out of their inboxes every day, after waiting fifteen minutes to download them all.
Time for popcorn.
Piratism?
That's not a word!
What you meant to say is "piratry." Heh heh.
Really, though, isn't it about time that the media stop referring to people sharing music files online as "piracy"? Selling it on the streets is piracy. Granted, sharing it online for free may be illegal, but if the sharer makes no money how can that be piracy?
If that's piracy, then there must have been pirates in the 18th Century that would go to all the trouble of taking over an enemy ship and then give all the gold, jewels, and spices away.
"Y'ar, we'll be givin' away these doubloons to anyone what wants 'em, 'cause we be pirates. Y'ar."
Tonight on Fox...
WHEN SOFTWARE ATTACKS!
with host Mitch Pileggi
I think the song "Cavern" could be thoroughly rewritten to be about the FSF. Don't know if it should be, but it could be.
Whoops, I was just about to make a joke about emoticons from female American soldiers automatically displayed wearing veils at the other end, but it's the wrong country. I recycle that joke when this technology starts being used with Saudi Arabia or Iran.
That reminds me of that Bill Engvall routine called, "Here's your sign," about stupid people needing to wear signs that read "I'm stupid" so that other people will be able to accomodate them.
In more direct reply to the above post, my g/f needs a 'do not disturb' sign to wear. Something about her makes people think that she's eager to be spoken to. The fact is she really wants to be left alone, like many of us.
I concur with the above reply. Please, please, if you are a young person who likes loud music, I beg you to be careful with your ears, and not make the mistakes that so many of my generation made. Maybe you think that you'll never, ever be in your thirties or forties and wishing that the ringing in your ears would go away and that you could hear again, but if you're blasting music into your ears, you will be. Doesn't matter if it's through headphones or that crazy car stereo that goes thump thump thump and scares people, the damage you do to your ears is permanent, and spending the second half of your adult life having to ask everyone to speak up and repeat themselves because of hearing loss suck-diddly-ucks.
Please believe me, kids, you will be thirty years old one day, and how well you are able to hear at that time depends very much on how well you treat your delicate, sensitive ears today.
Dr. Michael Bull was written up in Wired magazine, too, and Slashdot carried that story last month. Here it is.
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode called "The Package," when Elaine keeps getting the shaft at the doctor's office after being labeled as "difficult."
Imagine how you'll be treated when your chart has you labeled as "malpractice lawsuit plaintiff." The doctor won't even come into the room.
You can get discount tickets to this event if you agree to spend 90 minutes discussing timeshare vacation resort properties with one of our sales representatives. A $20 deposit is required. No obligation, of course (wink, wink).
Those of you in the Orlando area know just what I'm talking about, I'm sure. Heh, heh.
What I said before was pretty harsh... I don't think the guy deserves prison time, but he's in for some harsh civil penalties, I bet. There's an update here at the same site as the original article.
The thing is that the guy sold the website address, or at least he supposedly claimed to have. That was pretty dumb, I think. If it were me, and I needed to stop paying for the hosting, I'd have handed the whole site over on a CD, transferred the domain name to the town's ownership, and then shut off the site.
I read the first article before I posted, and didn't even know the guy had a personal defense website up. It really looked to me like the guy was scamming, and I really hate scammers, especially greedy ones. But why would they charge him with extortion if he hadn't demanded that money to keep the site up?
How? How can they switch to another provider when the guy who set up the site made himself the owner of the domain name, unless he agrees to it?
This guy gives website designers a bad name. I'd say he definitely belongs in prison. 3.5 million hits per month? Oh, yeah, right. I get the feeling that this guy was planning to pull this stunt all along, but I bet he wasn't counting on getting arrested. Another clue is the fact that he set the domain name up as his own property so the town would be unable to switch to another server. What a noble thing to do. And then there's his final bill... $300,000?! To offset the "huge expense" of running the website? WHAT huge expense? How much was he paying for hosting? DIdn't want to lose any more money? Why didn't he just set it up on a different server and let the town pay for it themselves? I think this guy wants to the town to pay for the loss he's taken running his business in the first place, and shutting the server down while handing over such a massive bill is, IMHO, extortion, and should be treated as such. I hope they throw the book at him, and throw it at him hard, to serve as a warning to anyone else thinking of pulling a stunt like this. Whew, I'm outta breath. Gotta go lay down for a minute.
At the risk of being modded Redundant because someone else happens to be typing this at the exact same time that I am, we used to do something like this every weekend at the local showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Fun!
I have received email from people with PhDs who head up university departments that have just as many typos as that message. I guess that they're in a hurry to get the message out, and don't have anyone around to proofread. The typos in the message in this case are the kind someone doing a fast hunt-and-peck without regard for the consequences might make.
And on a cynical note, I think that high-up, well-to-do people don't think enough of most of their email recipients to bother with accurate typing or grammar. They save the careful typing and sentence structure for the people who are at the same level or higher than them on the food chain. They'll even have their secrectaries proofread and recompose their email before sending it to their own superiors.