Hey, you! You with the fancy logic and common sense! You get away from here with all that nonsense! This is Slashdot, fella, and we don't need someone coming around here and muddying up the message. YouTube runs on kitten farts and moonbeams, not MONEY! It represents the death of Big Entertainment and NOTHING ELSE! Power to the open-sourced people and death to the MPAA! Forget your shoveled-out Hollywood crap like Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men, the future of entertainment is in the hands of the masses and we are the future! Ten thousand videos of tweenage girls singing "Fergalicious" into soup ladles can't be wrong!
> How do you know he put up people to mistate his whereabouts
It's one of the accusations listed in the very last PDF file linked in the story.
> Have you ever been served? Do you know the process?
Never been served, but I took a couple of law classes and I've seen it on tv a lot. Doesn't make me a lawyer, but I think I understand the process fairly well. (said 50% tongue in cheek)
> it would be natural for people not to reveal true identities to a stranger knocking on the door.
True, but this is a guy involved in a lawsuit and the pdf file I mentioned makes it pretty clear that the guy knew what was going on. Admittedly the pdf is from the opposing side, but you can only fudge the facts so much in a legal document. Unless they're flat-out distorting the facts (who? Lawyers? Never...) the guy doesn't seem to be acting like someone innocent, but someone who's trying to hide. He was served on multiple occasions and was mysteriously *never* at his primary residence (according to his dead father and brother who he hasn't seen in a year.) Despite the "ZOMG TEH RIAA HARASSES MAN AT WORK!1" tone of the story, the call at work was more along the lines of "Hi, we've been trying to serve an employee of yours for a month. Are there legal papers on his desk?"
> How do you know he tampered with evidence? And by the way, what evidence?
Again from the pdf. They subpoenaed (confiscated? shangaied?) his hard drive and the one he handed over, again, according to the prosecuting side, couldn't possibly have been the one that they requested. I don't know if that's "tampering with evidence" as it's defined in the law, but it certainly seems shady.
I still haven't read all the documentation concerning the case (there are a zillion links for this one case along) and I was incorrect about Raymond being the primary defendant in the case, but when the RIAA files suit against you and the very first thing you do is reinstall your OS and wipe the drive... well, let's just say that it seems a little suspicious.
The guy was illegally downloading music, dodging legitimate subpoenas, having people lie about his whereabouts to avoid legitimate subpoenas, having people *impersonate his dead father* to help him dodge legitimate subpoenas, and then after finally being served he tampers with evidence?
Say what you will about our thieving jackbooted fascist powertripping RIAA overlords, I'm having a hard time mustering up much sympathy for this guy. I disagree with much (if not all) of the **AA's tactics, but I'm just as rapidly running out of compassion for people who don't have the nerve to man up and just *do without* all their downloaded music and movies. At least the stoners have the nerve to stand right in front of the cops in a crowd of thousands and say "go ahead, arrest us all." I've yet to see a single person say "yes, I'm illegally filesharing and I'm willing to take the legal consequences as a symbol protest." Instead all I hear is "b-b-but it's not stealing, it's sharing! Everybody does it! Your business model is outdated and you're *mean*! Lower your prices! Britney sucks!"
Hey you! You take your highbrow "logic" and "insightfulness" and get the hell out of here! All movies suck, it's Hollywood's fault, and THAT'S IT! Now if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to torrenting my copy of "The Fountain" in an attempt to stick it to Big Media by pointing out that everything they do is soulless and not worth my time or mone... er, my money.
Shakespeare never had many original ideas to begin with. He took a lot of shit from history and traditional folk tales, who flatout did romance, tragedy and anything historical better than us. I am a firm believer that we make better comedy and Scottish plays and that's it. Once you take these two away, we are left with zero creativity.
Scheduling the production of a full-blown feature film is - to say the least - a bitch. From what what I've read (which is little, since I wouldn't have gone to see the remake if you held a gun to my head) they were shooting 99% of the movie on the Emory campus, so they essentially had their entire schedule tossed out the window when their location got yanked. That means shutting the entire movie down until it's reset / rescheduled, and at that point things only get worse. Are any of your actors scheduled to work on any other shows during your new schedule? Gotta recast or offer them enough cash to quit the other job, which they won't do because that'll get them blacklisted for being unreliable (and let's face it, if you're starring in a ROTN remake you probably need all the good press you can get.) Same with crew. Do you keep them on the clock while you reschedule? If not, they all go find new jobs and you now have to find an all-new crew. Plus, all this delay is eating into your post-production schedule. The movie is already scheduled for release next summer and you just lost - what, a month? Two? If the studio was fully behind the movie and was willing to throw piles of cash at it those are all obstacles that can be overcome, but if the studio was fully behind the movie then it would be being made by Fox proper and not Fox Moonbat or whatever the sub-studio is called. Emory pulled the plug, the accountants said "write it off," and that was the end for that movie.
All for the best, frankly. The original is perfect as it is. They'd make more money by re-releasing the first one then a remake would ever see.
Oh please! I warez all my games to show the industry that they're useless. Every time I log on to the Pirate Bay and see 7,000 people sucking on a torrent of the latest game, I can only pray that somewhere there's a game developer looking at those same numbers and saying "that's 7,000 voices crying out in the darkness that our games are terrible... WHERE HAVE WE GONE WRONG?!"
Same goes for all my Britney and Rihananana mp3's, too. It's all about sticking it to the man in the name of higher quality.
And my first thought after reading that was "we should all buy the song and give the same name," which would defeat their (I assume) goal of tracking copies of the song on p2p networks. However, after thinking a bit more, I realize that if the net rose up en masse to buy the song under the same name there would also be the added effect of demonstrating just how many people will buy a track just to support the idea of drm-less music. If 500,000+ copies of the track were sold to "Anonymous Coward" (or hell, even to "Hugh Jorgan") then there's always an infinitely small glimmer of hope that the suits would finally get the message.
> And as for their pure "artistic vision", they regularly violate it when they make full-screen movies
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
> TV versions,
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
> and rereleases of the same movie every 10 years.
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
While this is a complex case, and there's definitely a need for dialogue on the subject, I think you now see my fundamental problem with this case. I sympathize with parents who want to shield their children from mature subject matter and support their efforts to do so, but I strongly object to someone re-releasing a film in this way. Yes, there's a certain grain of truth in the "OMFG! HOLLYW0oD IS ALL ABT TEH DRM N $$$!!!1!" bullshit that's being slung around in here, but believe it or not the credits on a film really do *mean* something.
If I see "Edited by Walter Murch" I want it to be a film cut by Walter Murch and not "Edited by Walter Murch and the ladies of the Salt Lake Third Ward Sewing Circle." If I see "Directed by David Lynch," I want it to mean just that and not "Directed by David Lynch, except for the part with the two women kissing because that's against God's will." Remember when ABC wanted "Saving Private Ryan" on network tv and Spielberg said "you can't cut it?" They said "you can't say 'fuck!' on primetime television and Spielberg said "Normandy wasn't Disneyland. Show it uncut or suck it." ABC showed it uncut, the blue-hairs lost their minds, and the world just kept right on turning. Yes, there are a lot of whores in Hollywood, but there are also a lot of people who stand behind what they did and what it says and don't want people leaving their name on art that they didn't create.
(And as an aside, did you see the firestorm that broke out when a movie with a strong Christian message was rated PG because the MPAA thought that parents might want to "shield their children from movies with mature themes?" Boy, dont'cha just hate it when some outside organization messes with your art because they're afraid of what it might do to the children? Dont'cha, Utah? Hm?)
Did you willfully go out of your way to miss the point of my post? I never even remotely claimed that doctors should diagnose with nothing but their own senses. However, the doctor's senses - including smell - are just as valuable a part of the diagnostic process as any laboratory work will ever be. If you can't wrap your brain around that simple concept then that's your problem. I won't waste another moment of your valuable time trying to have an above retarded-level conversation.
> The human nose is not a very good way for doctors to make a diagnosis.
Actually, the sense of smell has been an invaluable medical tool for centuries. Cyanide poisoning can look like a dozen other medical emergencies, so a smart trauma doc will remember to take a smell of the patient's breath. Smells like almonds? It's cyanide. For years the smell of a wound that had gone gangrenous (but still looked okay) was how war theatre surgeons triaged out the ones who had a better chance of surviving. I've heard many anecdotes about doctors and surgeons who swear that many conditions have a specific smell attached to them. The nose may not be the *best* way for a doctor to make a diagnosis, but the best medical practitioners will use *all* of their senses to do their jobs.
(disclaimer - I am not a medical professional in any way, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night. Oh, I also watch a lot of "Scrubs.")
...and after people go there and spend five minutes, they'll see exactly what I did. Namely, that Kinderstart is just another generic link site full of SEO craplinks, half of which are either broken or go to squatter sites because the domains have expired. The sad part is that Kinderstart is (at least in theory) aimed at child development and the links that do work generally lead to *really* crappy sites like "Auburn Birth Works® & HypnoBirthing®."
Yeesh... Google couldn't have shitcanned that site quickly enough.
Are you kidding? I filled up a few great gaps in my day, and it *damned* sure led to a freaky combination of sex and open sores. Why there was this one girl I met in Hollywood - she was fresh off the bus from Kansas City and she wanted to be a star. Well, a few mojitos later and we were in the broom closet at the YWCA and she just couldn't get enough of my...
> It isn't trademakr violation for me to say "I am holding a can of Coke" or "Google offers a search engine". Should it be so legally dubious to do the same via film?
Is it a violation? No. What it is is an invitation for a big company with a lot of disposable income to take you to court for trademark infringement. It's highly unlikely that they'd win unless you're prominently featuring their logo or attributing something to the product that's harmful to the brand ("The terrorists must be using Google Earth to find targets!" or "He choked on that KFC and died!"), but even if they lose you've still had to expend time and money to defend yourself. As a result most productions won't use trademarks unless they're being paid to do so. Amusingly enough, lots of indie/low budget features are partially funded by *offering* to prominently feature specific brands or products onscreen. It's a bit of a Catch-22, really. If you're small enough that they don't think anyone will notice your film, they'll help you advertise. If you're big - but not *too* big - you avoid showing their products because you don't want to attract their attention. And if you're so big that everyone in the world will watch the movie, then they'll pay *you* to show their stuff. It's a crazy business...
Get the most talented animators you can and do what you will, but it'll never be the same. In my opinion, Bugs (and so many others) died along with Mel Blanc. There's no replacing him.
One of the guys in charge of this project used to be my optometrist! I know that that doesn't add the slightest bit of insight to the story, but it's still pretty sweet to be able to say "Hey! Slashdot! The dude you're reading about has had his finger in my eye and used the 'big poof of air to the eyeball' weapon on me!"
Okay, so sue me. I haven't had mod points in a while and I need validation...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you! You with the fancy logic and common sense! You get away from here with all that nonsense! This is Slashdot, fella, and we don't need someone coming around here and muddying up the message. YouTube runs on kitten farts and moonbeams, not MONEY! It represents the death of Big Entertainment and NOTHING ELSE! Power to the open-sourced people and death to the MPAA! Forget your shoveled-out Hollywood crap like Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men, the future of entertainment is in the hands of the masses and we are the future! Ten thousand videos of tweenage girls singing "Fergalicious" into soup ladles can't be wrong!
FREEEEDOOOOMMMM!!
I paraphrase Orson Welles, who said something along the lines of "An artist needs a brush, an author needs a pen, a director needs an army."
Watashi no namae wa Ashuton Kuuchya... watashi wa "awesome" desu!!
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Supe... oh, never mind. It's just a joke up there.
And fifty years ago, the Zune would be hanging upside down from a tree with a fork up its... erm... USB port?
> How do you know he put up people to mistate his whereabouts
It's one of the accusations listed in the very last PDF file linked in the story.
> Have you ever been served? Do you know the process?
Never been served, but I took a couple of law classes and I've seen it on tv a lot. Doesn't make me a lawyer, but I think I understand the process fairly well. (said 50% tongue in cheek)
> it would be natural for people not to reveal true identities to a stranger knocking on the door.
True, but this is a guy involved in a lawsuit and the pdf file I mentioned makes it pretty clear that the guy knew what was going on. Admittedly the pdf is from the opposing side, but you can only fudge the facts so much in a legal document. Unless they're flat-out distorting the facts (who? Lawyers? Never...) the guy doesn't seem to be acting like someone innocent, but someone who's trying to hide. He was served on multiple occasions and was mysteriously *never* at his primary residence (according to his dead father and brother who he hasn't seen in a year.) Despite the "ZOMG TEH RIAA HARASSES MAN AT WORK!1" tone of the story, the call at work was more along the lines of "Hi, we've been trying to serve an employee of yours for a month. Are there legal papers on his desk?"
> How do you know he tampered with evidence? And by the way, what evidence?
Again from the pdf. They subpoenaed (confiscated? shangaied?) his hard drive and the one he handed over, again, according to the prosecuting side, couldn't possibly have been the one that they requested. I don't know if that's "tampering with evidence" as it's defined in the law, but it certainly seems shady.
I still haven't read all the documentation concerning the case (there are a zillion links for this one case along) and I was incorrect about Raymond being the primary defendant in the case, but when the RIAA files suit against you and the very first thing you do is reinstall your OS and wipe the drive... well, let's just say that it seems a little suspicious.
The guy was illegally downloading music, dodging legitimate subpoenas, having people lie about his whereabouts to avoid legitimate subpoenas, having people *impersonate his dead father* to help him dodge legitimate subpoenas, and then after finally being served he tampers with evidence?
Say what you will about our thieving jackbooted fascist powertripping RIAA overlords, I'm having a hard time mustering up much sympathy for this guy. I disagree with much (if not all) of the **AA's tactics, but I'm just as rapidly running out of compassion for people who don't have the nerve to man up and just *do without* all their downloaded music and movies. At least the stoners have the nerve to stand right in front of the cops in a crowd of thousands and say "go ahead, arrest us all." I've yet to see a single person say "yes, I'm illegally filesharing and I'm willing to take the legal consequences as a symbol protest." Instead all I hear is "b-b-but it's not stealing, it's sharing! Everybody does it! Your business model is outdated and you're *mean*! Lower your prices! Britney sucks!"
Hey you! You take your highbrow "logic" and "insightfulness" and get the hell out of here! All movies suck, it's Hollywood's fault, and THAT'S IT! Now if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to torrenting my copy of "The Fountain" in an attempt to stick it to Big Media by pointing out that everything they do is soulless and not worth my time or mone... er, my money.
Harrumph.
"Troll?"
...but "troll?"
Incorrect, factually defective, lacking in spaces, and truthiness-challenged, sure...
Seriously. Who's giving out the mod points these days?
Shakespeare never had many original ideas to begin with. He took a lot of shit from history and traditional folk tales, who flatout did romance, tragedy and anything historical better than us. I am a firm believer that we make better comedy and Scottish plays and that's it. Once you take these two away, we are left with zero creativity.
-----------
Fixed that for you.
Scheduling the production of a full-blown feature film is - to say the least - a bitch. From what what I've read (which is little, since I wouldn't have gone to see the remake if you held a gun to my head) they were shooting 99% of the movie on the Emory campus, so they essentially had their entire schedule tossed out the window when their location got yanked. That means shutting the entire movie down until it's reset / rescheduled, and at that point things only get worse. Are any of your actors scheduled to work on any other shows during your new schedule? Gotta recast or offer them enough cash to quit the other job, which they won't do because that'll get them blacklisted for being unreliable (and let's face it, if you're starring in a ROTN remake you probably need all the good press you can get.) Same with crew. Do you keep them on the clock while you reschedule? If not, they all go find new jobs and you now have to find an all-new crew. Plus, all this delay is eating into your post-production schedule. The movie is already scheduled for release next summer and you just lost - what, a month? Two? If the studio was fully behind the movie and was willing to throw piles of cash at it those are all obstacles that can be overcome, but if the studio was fully behind the movie then it would be being made by Fox proper and not Fox Moonbat or whatever the sub-studio is called. Emory pulled the plug, the accountants said "write it off," and that was the end for that movie. All for the best, frankly. The original is perfect as it is. They'd make more money by re-releasing the first one then a remake would ever see.
Oh please! I warez all my games to show the industry that they're useless. Every time I log on to the Pirate Bay and see 7,000 people sucking on a torrent of the latest game, I can only pray that somewhere there's a game developer looking at those same numbers and saying "that's 7,000 voices crying out in the darkness that our games are terrible... WHERE HAVE WE GONE WRONG?!"
Same goes for all my Britney and Rihananana mp3's, too. It's all about sticking it to the man in the name of higher quality.
Okay, we have the first obligatory Tux Racer mention in an article about the price of games. Who had eleven minutes?
And my first thought after reading that was "we should all buy the song and give the same name," which would defeat their (I assume) goal of tracking copies of the song on p2p networks. However, after thinking a bit more, I realize that if the net rose up en masse to buy the song under the same name there would also be the added effect of demonstrating just how many people will buy a track just to support the idea of drm-less music. If 500,000+ copies of the track were sold to "Anonymous Coward" (or hell, even to "Hugh Jorgan") then there's always an infinitely small glimmer of hope that the suits would finally get the message.
I bet the editor of this story lives in Belleville. /obscure?
> And as for their pure "artistic vision", they regularly violate it when they make full-screen movies
s tian.movie.rating.ap/index.html
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
> TV versions,
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
> and rereleases of the same movie every 10 years.
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
While this is a complex case, and there's definitely a need for dialogue on the subject, I think you now see my fundamental problem with this case. I sympathize with parents who want to shield their children from mature subject matter and support their efforts to do so, but I strongly object to someone re-releasing a film in this way. Yes, there's a certain grain of truth in the "OMFG! HOLLYW0oD IS ALL ABT TEH DRM N $$$!!!1!" bullshit that's being slung around in here, but believe it or not the credits on a film really do *mean* something.
If I see "Edited by Walter Murch" I want it to be a film cut by Walter Murch and not "Edited by Walter Murch and the ladies of the Salt Lake Third Ward Sewing Circle." If I see "Directed by David Lynch," I want it to mean just that and not "Directed by David Lynch, except for the part with the two women kissing because that's against God's will." Remember when ABC wanted "Saving Private Ryan" on network tv and Spielberg said "you can't cut it?" They said "you can't say 'fuck!' on primetime television and Spielberg said "Normandy wasn't Disneyland. Show it uncut or suck it." ABC showed it uncut, the blue-hairs lost their minds, and the world just kept right on turning. Yes, there are a lot of whores in Hollywood, but there are also a lot of people who stand behind what they did and what it says and don't want people leaving their name on art that they didn't create.
(And as an aside, did you see the firestorm that broke out when a movie with a strong Christian message was rated PG because the MPAA thought that parents might want to "shield their children from movies with mature themes?" Boy, dont'cha just hate it when some outside organization messes with your art because they're afraid of what it might do to the children? Dont'cha, Utah? Hm?)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/03/chri
Did you willfully go out of your way to miss the point of my post? I never even remotely claimed that doctors should diagnose with nothing but their own senses. However, the doctor's senses - including smell - are just as valuable a part of the diagnostic process as any laboratory work will ever be. If you can't wrap your brain around that simple concept then that's your problem. I won't waste another moment of your valuable time trying to have an above retarded-level conversation.
> The human nose is not a very good way for doctors to make a diagnosis.
Actually, the sense of smell has been an invaluable medical tool for centuries. Cyanide poisoning can look like a dozen other medical emergencies, so a smart trauma doc will remember to take a smell of the patient's breath. Smells like almonds? It's cyanide. For years the smell of a wound that had gone gangrenous (but still looked okay) was how war theatre surgeons triaged out the ones who had a better chance of surviving. I've heard many anecdotes about doctors and surgeons who swear that many conditions have a specific smell attached to them. The nose may not be the *best* way for a doctor to make a diagnosis, but the best medical practitioners will use *all* of their senses to do their jobs.
(disclaimer - I am not a medical professional in any way, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night. Oh, I also watch a lot of "Scrubs.")
...and after people go there and spend five minutes, they'll see exactly what I did. Namely, that Kinderstart is just another generic link site full of SEO craplinks, half of which are either broken or go to squatter sites because the domains have expired. The sad part is that Kinderstart is (at least in theory) aimed at child development and the links that do work generally lead to *really* crappy sites like "Auburn Birth Works® & HypnoBirthing®."
Yeesh... Google couldn't have shitcanned that site quickly enough.
http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-06-22
(sorry, my html is awful here...)
Are you kidding? I filled up a few great gaps in my day, and it *damned* sure led to a freaky combination of sex and open sores. Why there was this one girl I met in Hollywood - she was fresh off the bus from Kansas City and she wanted to be a star. Well, a few mojitos later and we were in the broom closet at the YWCA and she just couldn't get enough of my...
Wait. What?
Open *source*?
never mind...
> It isn't trademakr violation for me to say "I am holding a can of Coke" or "Google offers a search engine". Should it be so legally dubious to do the same via film?
Is it a violation? No. What it is is an invitation for a big company with a lot of disposable income to take you to court for trademark infringement. It's highly unlikely that they'd win unless you're prominently featuring their logo or attributing something to the product that's harmful to the brand ("The terrorists must be using Google Earth to find targets!" or "He choked on that KFC and died!"), but even if they lose you've still had to expend time and money to defend yourself. As a result most productions won't use trademarks unless they're being paid to do so. Amusingly enough, lots of indie/low budget features are partially funded by *offering* to prominently feature specific brands or products onscreen. It's a bit of a Catch-22, really. If you're small enough that they don't think anyone will notice your film, they'll help you advertise. If you're big - but not *too* big - you avoid showing their products because you don't want to attract their attention. And if you're so big that everyone in the world will watch the movie, then they'll pay *you* to show their stuff. It's a crazy business...
Get the most talented animators you can and do what you will, but it'll never be the same. In my opinion, Bugs (and so many others) died along with Mel Blanc. There's no replacing him.
One of the guys in charge of this project used to be my optometrist! I know that that doesn't add the slightest bit of insight to the story, but it's still pretty sweet to be able to say "Hey! Slashdot! The dude you're reading about has had his finger in my eye and used the 'big poof of air to the eyeball' weapon on me!"
Okay, so sue me. I haven't had mod points in a while and I need validation...
IIRC the jump was real and so was the stuntman, but the bike was being guided/supported by wires that were painted out later on.