By the same token, it was perfectly possible to use LokiTorrents without registering at all. You couldn't view detailed descriptions of the.torrent files, but that's about it.
I myself used LokiTorrents many times, without ever registering. I also deliberately avoided anything which bore the taint of the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA, if for no other reason than the fact that I view torrent sites as a way of finding neat things which I could not get any other way. I can go to the local Best Buy if I want any MPAA or RIAA meat food product product; but obscure corners of the internet are the only place I can get me some of those goofy Tamil music videos or Egyptian rap music.
I mean, geez, why on earth would I want to spend my time and bandwidth getting the new Avril Lavigne album? I can get that anywhere, if I decide I like it enough to buy it.
This just goes to demonstrate, once again, the truth of the old axiom that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
Never mind that -- to me, the most significant issue here is the fact that the person handling FOIA requests for the Post Office is none other than Jane Eyre! I can only shudder at the thought of what calamitous misfortune must have befallen her to thrust her once more from the bosom of her family and into the New World to find her destiny.
Or perhaps it means that the Postmaster General is a brooding and dashingly mysterious rake who keeps an insane Condoleeza Rice chained up in his attic.
I remember one major coding crunch at the small software company I used to work for: We were preparing a significant set of enhancements to our core product, while at the same time working on bringing to market a major new product. The two projects shared giant chunks of code and logic, so it wasn't completely off the wall, but it was still clear that we were going to have an awfully long, hard slog ahead of us.
As a kind of non-overtime overtime incentive pay, management set up a deal to pay a bonus at the end of the project, based on hours worked above a certain point, with all kinds of complicated sliding averages and whatnot. My office-mate and I crunched the numbers, and realized that in order to get any appreciable bonus at the end of the project, we would basically have to commit to 60 hour weeks for the indefinite future.
Well, you know, neither of us were exactly in our twenties any more. I had a wife and a brand new house and a 45 minute each way (non rush hour) commute; and while I still felt spry and nimble, I no longer felt immortal and god-like, even with the help of Mountain Dew and m&ms. I was in my mid-to-upper thirties. I decided that, while I was still capable of working arbitrarily many hours in a week for short bursts during an emergency, there was no way that my health would stand up to 55 to 60 hour work weeks every week, indefinitely. Both my office-mate and I decided not to bother signing up for the bonus program.
<irony>(A couple of years later, I fell ill with a chronic and incurable medical condition which has left me essentially unable to perform any work at all; so I suppose I needn't have bothered being so careful).</irony>
In fact, much to management's chagrin, only one member of our small programming staff -- call him "X" -- actually decided to commit to their schedule.
Determined to get a decent bonus for his troubles, X threw himself into it, working 60 and 65 hour weeks. In the meantime, my office-mate and I upped our hours, too, but to a lesser extent: 55 hours one week, 52 the next; and so forth.
The weeks wore on, and we inched along towards our various goals. X was doing his usual fine work, but he was looking more and more haggard (we were all a bit worse for wear, actually). His code got a little sloppier at times.
And then one morning, he committed a bunch of working code to the wrong place, and instantly wiped out about 20% of our company's source code repository.
Did we have backups? Yes, we had backups; but still, it took three or four of us much of the day to both restore everything and to verify that everything was correct. The final tally was, roughly, at least one full man-day flushed down the drain in fifteen seconds due to nothing more than pure exhaustion.
Eventually, the crush passed, of course. It is probably a coincidence that X left the company shortly thereafter, although he came back a year later or so. He's a very good programmer, but some of the code he wrote during that crunch -- especially later on -- was, shall we say, sub-optimal.
I don't really have any problem at all imagining that a major city which is regularly hit by hurricanes would have good records on the precise size and nature of the glass windows in their downtown skyscrapers down at the permits and planning offices. That seems like fairly useful information for them to keep around for the next time they are thinking about updating their building codes, for instance.
I also appreciate the way that Caruso has fully mastered the Shatner style of restrained emoting, whereby he takes a normal line of dialogue, and randomly interjects... pauses... and sudden moments... of emphasis... into them.
People think Shatner is all about the "KHAAAAAAAN!", but they forget that he is tremendously versatile: He can overact quietly, too.
I am reminded of the last big hit show set in Miami: The production budget for each episode of Miami Vice was greater than the annual operating budget of the Miami Vice Squad.
His wife and fellow SF editor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, also has an excellent (and much more heavily-trafficked) blog, Making Light. Both are highly recommended.
The bit about DailyKos is true, aside from the implication that it was Kos himself who posted that, as well as the implication that Hunter, who did post it, was actually wrong.
He wasn't, because he never said that the documents were genuine; he simply pointed out that the people who were arguing that they were forgeries were, frankly, full of it. In the long run, they may have been right, but their arguments weren't -- their arguments involved a great number of claims about what was and wasn't possible with contemporary machines, and most of those claims were simply wrong.
It may not seem like a big deal in retrospect, but there's a reason why we tell our students to show their work on word problems.
I remember reading the on-the-scene blog coverage of the Democratic National Convention and thinking that it was an interesting, but not, shall we say, entirely successful experiment (talk about your public betas!). However, even if the entire four days of everyone's convention coverage had been nothing but "Dead baby" jokes and gossip about Big Brother 5, it would still have been worth it just because that's where I discovered Fafblog.
Fafblog: At last, those mutant animated rodent-like things from the Quiznos commercial finally get around to discussing the pressing issues of the day!
Nonsense. Kos himself hardly said anything at all about those memos; several of the more dedicated readers and participants of the site, such as Hunter, put in a tremendous amount of effort in looking at the documents and, mostly, at the arguments against the documents.
Hunter has never declared the documents to be genuine; all that he has done is collect and analyze, at great length, the "evidence" that was being presented for the documents being forgeries; and, not surprisingly, he was able to show what anyone who spent a lot of time typing in the 70s already knew: The arguments were full of crap.
Note, however, the considerable distance between "The evidence you presented to make the case that these documents are forgeries is false" and "The documents are not forgeries." It's the difference between "not proven" and "innocent."
And while there certainly were -- and still are -- many individual posters at Daily Kos who do insist that the memos are genuine, they aren't the ones posting the pages of carefully collected research, like Hunter or maha -- they're mainly content to sit around and accuse Kevin Drum of being a closet Republican for ever having dared to doubt the documents' authenticity.
But they're not Kos, any more than clueless "First post!"ers and SCO apologists are Cowboy Neal.
When I first read the headline, "MST3K Rightsholders Sue Over Theater Commentary," I thought that perhaps Best Brains had decided to sue anyone who talked in the theater while a movie was being shown.
Kind of a shame, really -- they had the makings of a wonderful Class Action lawsuit against Obnoxious Yapping Assholes.
I was watching the US women's soccer match against Australia the other morning, and the stands were quite honestly emptier than any stands I've ever seen for any sporting event, ever. The Whitbread across the ocean yacht race had more spectators. Mile 143 of the Iditarod had more spectators.
There were no spectators on the far side of the stadium from the cameras. There were no spectators in the stands at either end zone. Not figuratively; literally: zero. And while I know that there must have been some spectators on the near side, because I heard one or two "USA!" cheers and, I think, an "Aussie Aussie Aussie!" cheer (also, the announcers mentioned that some of the players had family in attendance), they were invisible to the high stadium camera.
Presumably, they were all clustered low, near the center line or behind the benches; but with the exception of one suspiciously close-cropped shot of a couple of cheering fans used as B-roll footage on a return from commercial, there was no visual evidence that anyone was in attendance.
Now, I understand that women's socccer is not exactly as popular in Greece as it is in America, or even, say, Germany or Mexico; but I live in Atlanta and, you know, we sold out Archery -- not exactly a sport designed for thrilling live audiences -- in 1996. We sold out Field Hockey. We sold out the Modern Pentathlon. We sold out Team Handball, fer chrissakes, and it's hard to imagine a more obscure or unpopular sport in America (my wife and I went to it, too, and it was great fun to watch).
In terms of movie and book sales, scifi/fantasy comprise a very small portion of the total amount.
You would have been okay with "book sales," perhaps, but movies? Of the top eight highest-grossing movies of all time, all save Titanic are fantasy or SF. If you include movies where animals talk (Finding Nemo and The Lion King), you have to go all the way down the list to Forrest Gump at #17 and The Passion of the Christ at #23 to find movies which are unambiguously not fantasy or science fiction. It's not until Troy, Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and Pretty Woman at 39-42 that you finally get an actual run of consecutive movies on the list which aren't fantasy or science fiction.
If you look over that list, the top fifty highest-grossing movies of all time are almost all fantasy or science fiction.
So when he says that "Sci-fi is popular and everywhere," he's pretty much right.
On the other hand, Firefly was an absolutely tremendous show, and people who don't like it pretty clearly hate Jesus and eat babies. I cannot wait to see this movie, and I, for one, welcome our new Firefly Overlords.
One common example of this type of copyright dispute is in housing floorplans and architecture. Often someone will see a floorplan they like in a magazine (copyrighted), and move a few things around and have blueprints drawn from that. That's an infringement on the original copyright, because the resulting work is really just a derived form of the original.
This is exactly what we did, except, well, legally.
We found a floorplan that we liked, all right, but we then actually shelled out a couple hundred bucks to be able to use it (compared to the cost of a house, it's peanuts, and we got a good set of plans for all our troubles), at which point we took it to an architect, sat down with him, and several sessions and a couple thousand dollars later, we had a full set of blueprints tailored very closely to our needs.
I looked at it this way: Custom-built houses cost around, say, $100 per square foot; if, by using a professional architect, we were able to gain a mere handful of square feet -- say, the size of a single walk-in closet -- of useful space out of the design, the whole thing would end up more than paying for itself. No sense pinching pennies on the upfront costs when you're going to be paying it off for the next thirty years.
By the same token, hardly anybody reads literary fiction. It's not like high-concept high-brow literary fiction is exadctly lighting up the New York Times best-seller lists. In fact, I'd guess that the sales numbers for most lit-fic and most graphic novels are roughly comparable.
How can you have a post on graphic novels without including Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series?
Never mind Neil Gaiman, who at least gets mentioned (although why the author mentions that Alan Moore has written a novel while ignoring the fact that Gaiman has written several novels, at least one of which was prominent on the best seller list of -- wait for it -- the New York Times, is a bit of a mystery); the real oversight is that the article does not, at any point, mention Will Eisner!
I mean, here's a guy who's been doing exactly the sort of storytelling that this article is about, for decades now. He is vastly prolific, still, despite being, well, really old, and is a towering and respected figure in the field.
Writing a long article about the rise of the respectable literary graphic novel without mentioning Eisner (who, after all, coined the term "graphic novel"!) is like writing a long article about the early evolution of the federal Presidency without mentioning George Washington.
Other serious yet popular comics are the comic-version of voyage au bout de la nuit (journey to the end of the night) - the novel by Louis Ferdinand Celine and made into a comic by Tardi. Also in Holland have major novels been turned into comics.
Well, the article in question here was specifically about comic work which is original, rether than being an adaptation of another already-existing work; so while Tintin is an appropriate European example, these other works you mention wouldn't have fit in the article anyway.
So are you saying that the Glasgow Sunday Herald just made up their interview with Moore?
If you go to Suprnova.org's torrent links, you can find a torrent link for an MPG of Michael Moore saying almost exactly those same words in a press conference -- was that footage faked somehow?
Let's all hope this works out better than those unfortunate IPv7 experiments based around the Schumann Resonance. Restoring reality from an offsite backup can be a real bitch.
Slashdot Mirror
By the same token, it was perfectly possible to use LokiTorrents without registering at all. You couldn't view detailed descriptions of the .torrent files, but that's about it.
I myself used LokiTorrents many times, without ever registering. I also deliberately avoided anything which bore the taint of the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA, if for no other reason than the fact that I view torrent sites as a way of finding neat things which I could not get any other way. I can go to the local Best Buy if I want any MPAA or RIAA meat food product product; but obscure corners of the internet are the only place I can get me some of those goofy Tamil music videos or Egyptian rap music.
I mean, geez, why on earth would I want to spend my time and bandwidth getting the new Avril Lavigne album? I can get that anywhere, if I decide I like it enough to buy it.
This just goes to demonstrate, once again, the truth of the old axiom that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
Or perhaps it means that the Postmaster General is a brooding and dashingly mysterious rake who keeps an insane Condoleeza Rice chained up in his attic.
I remember one major coding crunch at the small software company I used to work for: We were preparing a significant set of enhancements to our core product, while at the same time working on bringing to market a major new product. The two projects shared giant chunks of code and logic, so it wasn't completely off the wall, but it was still clear that we were going to have an awfully long, hard slog ahead of us.
As a kind of non-overtime overtime incentive pay, management set up a deal to pay a bonus at the end of the project, based on hours worked above a certain point, with all kinds of complicated sliding averages and whatnot. My office-mate and I crunched the numbers, and realized that in order to get any appreciable bonus at the end of the project, we would basically have to commit to 60 hour weeks for the indefinite future.
Well, you know, neither of us were exactly in our twenties any more. I had a wife and a brand new house and a 45 minute each way (non rush hour) commute; and while I still felt spry and nimble, I no longer felt immortal and god-like, even with the help of Mountain Dew and m&ms. I was in my mid-to-upper thirties. I decided that, while I was still capable of working arbitrarily many hours in a week for short bursts during an emergency, there was no way that my health would stand up to 55 to 60 hour work weeks every week, indefinitely. Both my office-mate and I decided not to bother signing up for the bonus program.
<irony> (A couple of years later, I fell ill with a chronic and incurable medical condition which has left me essentially unable to perform any work at all; so I suppose I needn't have bothered being so careful).</irony>
In fact, much to management's chagrin, only one member of our small programming staff -- call him "X" -- actually decided to commit to their schedule.
Determined to get a decent bonus for his troubles, X threw himself into it, working 60 and 65 hour weeks. In the meantime, my office-mate and I upped our hours, too, but to a lesser extent: 55 hours one week, 52 the next; and so forth.
The weeks wore on, and we inched along towards our various goals. X was doing his usual fine work, but he was looking more and more haggard (we were all a bit worse for wear, actually). His code got a little sloppier at times.
And then one morning, he committed a bunch of working code to the wrong place, and instantly wiped out about 20% of our company's source code repository.
Did we have backups? Yes, we had backups; but still, it took three or four of us much of the day to both restore everything and to verify that everything was correct. The final tally was, roughly, at least one full man-day flushed down the drain in fifteen seconds due to nothing more than pure exhaustion.
Eventually, the crush passed, of course. It is probably a coincidence that X left the company shortly thereafter, although he came back a year later or so. He's a very good programmer, but some of the code he wrote during that crunch -- especially later on -- was, shall we say, sub-optimal.
I don't really have any problem at all imagining that a major city which is regularly hit by hurricanes would have good records on the precise size and nature of the glass windows in their downtown skyscrapers down at the permits and planning offices. That seems like fairly useful information for them to keep around for the next time they are thinking about updating their building codes, for instance.
People think Shatner is all about the "KHAAAAAAAN!", but they forget that he is tremendously versatile: He can overact quietly, too.
I am reminded of the last big hit show set in Miami: The production budget for each episode of Miami Vice was greater than the annual operating budget of the Miami Vice Squad.
His wife and fellow SF editor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, also has an excellent (and much more heavily-trafficked) blog, Making Light. Both are highly recommended.
The bit about DailyKos is true, aside from the implication that it was Kos himself who posted that, as well as the implication that Hunter, who did post it, was actually wrong.
He wasn't, because he never said that the documents were genuine; he simply pointed out that the people who were arguing that they were forgeries were, frankly, full of it. In the long run, they may have been right, but their arguments weren't -- their arguments involved a great number of claims about what was and wasn't possible with contemporary machines, and most of those claims were simply wrong.
It may not seem like a big deal in retrospect, but there's a reason why we tell our students to show their work on word problems.
I remember reading the on-the-scene blog coverage of the Democratic National Convention and thinking that it was an interesting, but not, shall we say, entirely successful experiment (talk about your public betas!). However, even if the entire four days of everyone's convention coverage had been nothing but "Dead baby" jokes and gossip about Big Brother 5, it would still have been worth it just because that's where I discovered Fafblog.
Fafblog: At last, those mutant animated rodent-like things from the Quiznos commercial finally get around to discussing the pressing issues of the day!
Nonsense. Kos himself hardly said anything at all about those memos; several of the more dedicated readers and participants of the site, such as Hunter, put in a tremendous amount of effort in looking at the documents and, mostly, at the arguments against the documents.
Hunter has never declared the documents to be genuine; all that he has done is collect and analyze, at great length, the "evidence" that was being presented for the documents being forgeries; and, not surprisingly, he was able to show what anyone who spent a lot of time typing in the 70s already knew: The arguments were full of crap.
Note, however, the considerable distance between "The evidence you presented to make the case that these documents are forgeries is false" and "The documents are not forgeries." It's the difference between "not proven" and "innocent."
And while there certainly were -- and still are -- many individual posters at Daily Kos who do insist that the memos are genuine, they aren't the ones posting the pages of carefully collected research, like Hunter or maha -- they're mainly content to sit around and accuse Kevin Drum of being a closet Republican for ever having dared to doubt the documents' authenticity.
But they're not Kos, any more than clueless "First post!"ers and SCO apologists are Cowboy Neal.
When I first read the headline, "MST3K Rightsholders Sue Over Theater Commentary," I thought that perhaps Best Brains had decided to sue anyone who talked in the theater while a movie was being shown.
Kind of a shame, really -- they had the makings of a wonderful Class Action lawsuit against Obnoxious Yapping Assholes.
That's what they get for sharing free copies of "Blessed Be That City".
Well, there goes a new entry for the Slashdot Incompatability List Wiki...
I was watching the US women's soccer match against Australia the other morning, and the stands were quite honestly emptier than any stands I've ever seen for any sporting event, ever. The Whitbread across the ocean yacht race had more spectators. Mile 143 of the Iditarod had more spectators.
There were no spectators on the far side of the stadium from the cameras. There were no spectators in the stands at either end zone. Not figuratively; literally: zero. And while I know that there must have been some spectators on the near side, because I heard one or two "USA!" cheers and, I think, an "Aussie Aussie Aussie!" cheer (also, the announcers mentioned that some of the players had family in attendance), they were invisible to the high stadium camera.
Presumably, they were all clustered low, near the center line or behind the benches; but with the exception of one suspiciously close-cropped shot of a couple of cheering fans used as B-roll footage on a return from commercial, there was no visual evidence that anyone was in attendance.
Now, I understand that women's socccer is not exactly as popular in Greece as it is in America, or even, say, Germany or Mexico; but I live in Atlanta and, you know, we sold out Archery -- not exactly a sport designed for thrilling live audiences -- in 1996. We sold out Field Hockey. We sold out the Modern Pentathlon. We sold out Team Handball, fer chrissakes, and it's hard to imagine a more obscure or unpopular sport in America (my wife and I went to it, too, and it was great fun to watch).
As I said to King Kaufman at Salon.com, "2004 in Athens marks the first Olympics to ever be boycotted by its host country."
I would be happy to bet that I could count on my fingers the number of people here that have BOUGHT a piece of software that runs on linux.
Railrod Tycoon II, from the late, lamented LokiGames, here. At Best Buy, even.
You would have been okay with "book sales," perhaps, but movies? Of the top eight highest-grossing movies of all time, all save Titanic are fantasy or SF. If you include movies where animals talk (Finding Nemo and The Lion King), you have to go all the way down the list to Forrest Gump at #17 and The Passion of the Christ at #23 to find movies which are unambiguously not fantasy or science fiction. It's not until Troy, Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and Pretty Woman at 39-42 that you finally get an actual run of consecutive movies on the list which aren't fantasy or science fiction.
If you look over that list, the top fifty highest-grossing movies of all time are almost all fantasy or science fiction.
So when he says that "Sci-fi is popular and everywhere," he's pretty much right.
On the other hand, Firefly was an absolutely tremendous show, and people who don't like it pretty clearly hate Jesus and eat babies. I cannot wait to see this movie, and I, for one, welcome our new Firefly Overlords.
This is exactly what we did, except, well, legally.
We found a floorplan that we liked, all right, but we then actually shelled out a couple hundred bucks to be able to use it (compared to the cost of a house, it's peanuts, and we got a good set of plans for all our troubles), at which point we took it to an architect, sat down with him, and several sessions and a couple thousand dollars later, we had a full set of blueprints tailored very closely to our needs.
I looked at it this way: Custom-built houses cost around, say, $100 per square foot; if, by using a professional architect, we were able to gain a mere handful of square feet -- say, the size of a single walk-in closet -- of useful space out of the design, the whole thing would end up more than paying for itself. No sense pinching pennies on the upfront costs when you're going to be paying it off for the next thirty years.
By the same token, hardly anybody reads literary fiction. It's not like high-concept high-brow literary fiction is exadctly lighting up the New York Times best-seller lists. In fact, I'd guess that the sales numbers for most lit-fic and most graphic novels are roughly comparable.
Never mind Neil Gaiman, who at least gets mentioned (although why the author mentions that Alan Moore has written a novel while ignoring the fact that Gaiman has written several novels, at least one of which was prominent on the best seller list of -- wait for it -- the New York Times, is a bit of a mystery); the real oversight is that the article does not, at any point, mention Will Eisner!
I mean, here's a guy who's been doing exactly the sort of storytelling that this article is about, for decades now. He is vastly prolific, still, despite being, well, really old, and is a towering and respected figure in the field.
Writing a long article about the rise of the respectable literary graphic novel without mentioning Eisner (who, after all, coined the term "graphic novel"!) is like writing a long article about the early evolution of the federal Presidency without mentioning George Washington.
Well, the article in question here was specifically about comic work which is original, rether than being an adaptation of another already-existing work; so while Tintin is an appropriate European example, these other works you mention wouldn't have fit in the article anyway.
Must have been a temporary glitch -- Wikipedia seems to have a pretty decent little article about Bull now.
Reminds me of the first time I ever saw someone on the old Name That Tune say, "I can name that tune in no notes!"
The story would be much more entertaining, of course, if the tune in question had been John Cage's 4'33".
So are you saying that the Glasgow Sunday Herald just made up their interview with Moore?
If you go to Suprnova.org's torrent links, you can find a torrent link for an MPG of Michael Moore saying almost exactly those same words in a press conference -- was that footage faked somehow?
Let's all hope this works out better than those unfortunate IPv7 experiments based around the Schumann Resonance. Restoring reality from an offsite backup can be a real bitch.