"With all due respect, a person's stance on gaming isn't generally what one should base their votes on."
However, it does make an interesting statement about American democracy. Gamers, like many people, have specific hobbies and interests, and they'd like to keep or recover freedom to explore those interests. When it comes to voting, though, they're stymied by a majority that doesn't care about those particular freedoms and votes according to other ideals, emotion, or family tradition.
That should read "sales", not "profits", as the Slashdot editors would have realized had they read the first sentence of the article linked to.
Initially, reading the Slashdot headline, I thought "joke's on you Universal -- there won't be any profits for you to get a cut of!". But it turns out it's actually a royalty for every sale that Universal received. I wonder how much it is, and how bad Microsoft's losses on these things will get when all the other labels make the same deal.
"Fortunately these problems aren't nearly as difficult, and current solutions would suffice (with the only pitfall being poor grammer in the destination language, and a robotic sounding voice)."
*Good* translation is extremely difficult unless you stick to "see Dick run"-type sentences. Good translation between non-related languages (like Japanese and any Indo-European language) doubly so.
Advanced machine translation on par with human will require nothing less than artificial intelligence, most likely.
"Burma is actually a legitimate name to call the nation."
Precisely, Burma is its name in English. It's name in Burmese might approximate the sounds "myanmar" but that only matters when you're speaking Burmese.
"I didn't need a passport to go on a cruise, and I didn't need a passport to fly to Cozumel, Mexico."
The editor is a dunce. Passports, when required, are required by the country you enter, not the country you leave! (Except in Soviet Russia, and increasingly Soviet America.)
Perhaps the South's plan for reunification involves taking away the freedoms their northern neighbours lack one by one. The right to freely associate is a good place to start. Next, maybe they can make critizing the government a crime.
"Really, I don't know why any US companies can do business with China."
Few US companies do business with "China".
US companies -- groups of individuals -- engage in beneficial trade with other individuals in China. How evil the Chinese and US governments may be has no bearing on the right of two individuals to carry out their own private business.
If you're saying it's ridiculous for the US government to use violence against its own citizens to keep them from doing business with Cuban people, and not use that same violence against people who trade with Chinese people, I'd agree. (But probably for the opposite reason you intended.)
"Who are you and what have you done with the real editors?!?!?!??"
Although the Slashdot editor only added two sentences of his own, he managed to commit two errors (one of punctuation and one of grammar) within that brief space. You may rest assured that the same elite editing talent as always is running the site.
As a foreigner living in Japan, I must say this neither surprises or upsets me. So many of the other foreigners I see here are crass, rude, and have little regard for Japanese customs.
Besides, this Ask Slashdot entry is about Americans who value freedom and want to find it abroad. Since the right of a person to allow and disbar whom he wants on his own property is not of any value to you, I suggest you're not the sort of person this entry is aimed at.
Dutch is probably the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (well, Frisian and Afrikaans might have something to say about that, but still...).
I'm currently making a life for myself in Japan and learning Japanese (and getting pretty good at it), so I have little sympathy for anyone who thinks Dutch is a problem.:)
"So if some islamist group threatens, say, danish journalists/cartoonists, the ranking of Danemark [sic] will go down."
That's a good point, but if that group's power or ability to levy punishment is significant, I think it makes sense to include. The reason censorship is wrong is that it's a violence-based denial of free speech. Whether it's a government, para-government, mafia, or militant group is largely irrelevant to the overall problem: lack of freedom. Presumably, the ranking takes into account the severity of the threat involved.
If Mr. Calacanis is complaining that he publishes entire articles in his RSS feed, and then complains about where and how people read his RSS feed, he's a moron.
I've tried this hack in the past, but IE has too many bugs for it to be useful. For example, if you do this to use a PNG file as a background image, links and forms in front of the image stop working.
"King Kong did not "barely break even", it's the 36th highest grossing film of all time with nearly $400m of profit to its name."
Are you sure of your numbers? King Kong's domestic take was $218 million, and typically only half of that ends up in the studio's hands -- theatres and distributors taking the rest. Additionally, King Kong's $208 million production budget doesn't include its marketing budget, which was probably in the area of $50 million. In other words, they were $150 million in the hole with the US gross. Foreign gross probably got them close to break-even, and DVD sales pushed them over.
Also, under Russian joined the international copyright convention with various exceptions to the normal rules. For example, non-Russian works produced before 1970 (I think) have no copyright protection at all for Russian distributors. Copyright's all just an artificial government monopoly anyway, I'm glad Russia plays by their own rules.
The Slashdot blurb asks some reasonable questions but misses the crux of the matter.
The government is in charge of the "official".ie registry. Like any state, the Irish government has no useful metric for figuring out what the "right thing to do" is, nor do they have any particular interest in doing so. Whatever they do will please some and piss of others, with those others having no useful recourse to change things.
However, no one's forcing you to use the Irish state's.ie registry. The Internet is a de-centralized network, and anyone can set up their own DNS server. Anyone can also change their networking settings to use third-party DNS services other than the government's. It's unfortunate that organizations with little or no accountability have laid claim to the official servers, but private DNS exists and people could switch if things got bad enough. At the moment, the costs of government censorship and other domain name issues have yet to exceed the convenience of relying on government-run DNS, but it may not necessarily always be so.
Google is, generally, the best search engine for English, and it's normalization is quite good -- i.e. widening the search to include plurals or singulars, recognize words that might need accent marks, and so on.
But frankly, Google and Pagerank suck when it comes to searching in languages like Japanese. I can search for a Japanese company or item and get two pages of completely irrelevant links first. Not spam links, but junk like blog posts. Normalization sucks; Japanese uses a mixed script (phonetic kana plus Chinese characters), and Google does no conversion or normalization when searching. It would be a cinch for anyone to top Google in the huge Japanese market, and I think they're already getting pummelled by Chinese search engine.
Bodily functions in Japan -- and indeed, most of the world outside North America -- are not considered dirty or taboo. Here in Japan, they have co-ed washrooms in a lot of places. Even the more modern segregated washrooms are often laid out so anyone can see you taking a whiz when they walk past the door. It's not at all unusual for the cleaning lady to come in and start cleaning the urinal next to you.
Maybe your city is different than mine (Nagoya). It's extremely rare that I see anyone using a cell phone for anything other than calls or mail. Maybe once or twice I've seen people using that new widescreen phone with a TV tuner (but then, there's nothing cellphone-specific about portable TV devices).
The time I have seen it used, I think it was to watch TV dramas or variety shows, and not sports.
There are so many reviews of video sharing sites that look at the features but miss the fundamentals.
For example, speaking as someone who follows plenty of video links but doesn't use the service as an uploader, YouTube is unsatisfactory. 1. Video quality is terrible. It's impossible to make out detail on interesting movies. 2. No save function. 3. YouTube's bandwidth is inadequate. It's set up to play immediately while streaming, but YouTube can't stream at the same speed the movie plays. (No, there is no bottleneck on my end; I have 45 mbps fibre.)
One tech columnist was able to confirm that Zune will encumber *any* music file you want to share with its three-day DRM, whether it's your own song, or something in the public domain, or something under the Creative Commons.
Actually, according to the terms of their incorporation, they promise to uphold certain principles above shareholder value, and they have no legal responsibility to reneg on this promise.
Hopefully, Google and other search engines will start warning users that Amazon.com is a known malware distributor when the site comes up in search results.
Slashdot Mirror
"With all due respect, a person's stance on gaming isn't generally what one should base their votes on."
However, it does make an interesting statement about American democracy. Gamers, like many people, have specific hobbies and interests, and they'd like to keep or recover freedom to explore those interests. When it comes to voting, though, they're stymied by a majority that doesn't care about those particular freedoms and votes according to other ideals, emotion, or family tradition.
That should read "sales", not "profits", as the Slashdot editors would have realized had they read the first sentence of the article linked to.
Initially, reading the Slashdot headline, I thought "joke's on you Universal -- there won't be any profits for you to get a cut of!". But it turns out it's actually a royalty for every sale that Universal received. I wonder how much it is, and how bad Microsoft's losses on these things will get when all the other labels make the same deal.
"Fortunately these problems aren't nearly as difficult, and current solutions would suffice (with the only pitfall being poor grammer in the destination language, and a robotic sounding voice)."
*Good* translation is extremely difficult unless you stick to "see Dick run"-type sentences. Good translation between non-related languages (like Japanese and any Indo-European language) doubly so.
Advanced machine translation on par with human will require nothing less than artificial intelligence, most likely.
"What's the diff? Republicans and republicans lite."
I agree wholeheartedly.
"(e.g. bringng in medicare like every other developed nation)"
I.e. North Korea, Cuba, and the defunct Soviet Union? I guess there's Canada too (and what a crappy system it is, I can tell you as a Canadian).
"Burma is actually a legitimate name to call the nation."
Precisely, Burma is its name in English. It's name in Burmese might approximate the sounds "myanmar" but that only matters when you're speaking Burmese.
"I didn't need a passport to go on a cruise, and I didn't need a passport to fly to Cozumel, Mexico."
The editor is a dunce. Passports, when required, are required by the country you enter, not the country you leave! (Except in Soviet Russia, and increasingly Soviet America.)
Perhaps the South's plan for reunification involves taking away the freedoms their northern neighbours lack one by one. The right to freely associate is a good place to start. Next, maybe they can make critizing the government a crime.
"Really, I don't know why any US companies can do business with China."
Few US companies do business with "China".
US companies -- groups of individuals -- engage in beneficial trade with other individuals in China. How evil the Chinese and US governments may be has no bearing on the right of two individuals to carry out their own private business.
If you're saying it's ridiculous for the US government to use violence against its own citizens to keep them from doing business with Cuban people, and not use that same violence against people who trade with Chinese people, I'd agree. (But probably for the opposite reason you intended.)
"Who are you and what have you done with the real editors?!?!?!??"
Although the Slashdot editor only added two sentences of his own, he managed to commit two errors (one of punctuation and one of grammar) within that brief space. You may rest assured that the same elite editing talent as always is running the site.
As a foreigner living in Japan, I must say this neither surprises or upsets me. So many of the other foreigners I see here are crass, rude, and have little regard for Japanese customs.
Besides, this Ask Slashdot entry is about Americans who value freedom and want to find it abroad. Since the right of a person to allow and disbar whom he wants on his own property is not of any value to you, I suggest you're not the sort of person this entry is aimed at.
Dutch is probably the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (well, Frisian and Afrikaans might have something to say about that, but still...).
:)
I'm currently making a life for myself in Japan and learning Japanese (and getting pretty good at it), so I have little sympathy for anyone who thinks Dutch is a problem.
"So if some islamist group threatens, say, danish journalists/cartoonists, the ranking of Danemark [sic] will go down."
That's a good point, but if that group's power or ability to levy punishment is significant, I think it makes sense to include. The reason censorship is wrong is that it's a violence-based denial of free speech. Whether it's a government, para-government, mafia, or militant group is largely irrelevant to the overall problem: lack of freedom. Presumably, the ranking takes into account the severity of the threat involved.
If Mr. Calacanis is complaining that he publishes entire articles in his RSS feed, and then complains about where and how people read his RSS feed, he's a moron.
I've tried this hack in the past, but IE has too many bugs for it to be useful. For example, if you do this to use a PNG file as a background image, links and forms in front of the image stop working.
"King Kong did not "barely break even", it's the 36th highest grossing film of all time with nearly $400m of profit to its name."
Are you sure of your numbers? King Kong's domestic take was $218 million, and typically only half of that ends up in the studio's hands -- theatres and distributors taking the rest. Additionally, King Kong's $208 million production budget doesn't include its marketing budget, which was probably in the area of $50 million. In other words, they were $150 million in the hole with the US gross. Foreign gross probably got them close to break-even, and DVD sales pushed them over.
Also, under Russian joined the international copyright convention with various exceptions to the normal rules. For example, non-Russian works produced before 1970 (I think) have no copyright protection at all for Russian distributors. Copyright's all just an artificial government monopoly anyway, I'm glad Russia plays by their own rules.
The Slashdot blurb asks some reasonable questions but misses the crux of the matter.
.ie registry. Like any state, the Irish government has no useful metric for figuring out what the "right thing to do" is, nor do they have any particular interest in doing so. Whatever they do will please some and piss of others, with those others having no useful recourse to change things.
.ie registry. The Internet is a de-centralized network, and anyone can set up their own DNS server. Anyone can also change their networking settings to use third-party DNS services other than the government's. It's unfortunate that organizations with little or no accountability have laid claim to the official servers, but private DNS exists and people could switch if things got bad enough. At the moment, the costs of government censorship and other domain name issues have yet to exceed the convenience of relying on government-run DNS, but it may not necessarily always be so.
The government is in charge of the "official"
However, no one's forcing you to use the Irish state's
Google is, generally, the best search engine for English, and it's normalization is quite good -- i.e. widening the search to include plurals or singulars, recognize words that might need accent marks, and so on.
But frankly, Google and Pagerank suck when it comes to searching in languages like Japanese. I can search for a Japanese company or item and get two pages of completely irrelevant links first. Not spam links, but junk like blog posts. Normalization sucks; Japanese uses a mixed script (phonetic kana plus Chinese characters), and Google does no conversion or normalization when searching. It would be a cinch for anyone to top Google in the huge Japanese market, and I think they're already getting pummelled by Chinese search engine.
I knew someone here would bring that up. :)
Bodily functions in Japan -- and indeed, most of the world outside North America -- are not considered dirty or taboo. Here in Japan, they have co-ed washrooms in a lot of places. Even the more modern segregated washrooms are often laid out so anyone can see you taking a whiz when they walk past the door. It's not at all unusual for the cleaning lady to come in and start cleaning the urinal next to you.
Maybe your city is different than mine (Nagoya). It's extremely rare that I see anyone using a cell phone for anything other than calls or mail. Maybe once or twice I've seen people using that new widescreen phone with a TV tuner (but then, there's nothing cellphone-specific about portable TV devices).
The time I have seen it used, I think it was to watch TV dramas or variety shows, and not sports.
There are so many reviews of video sharing sites that look at the features but miss the fundamentals.
For example, speaking as someone who follows plenty of video links but doesn't use the service as an uploader, YouTube is unsatisfactory.
1. Video quality is terrible. It's impossible to make out detail on interesting movies.
2. No save function.
3. YouTube's bandwidth is inadequate. It's set up to play immediately while streaming, but YouTube can't stream at the same speed the movie plays. (No, there is no bottleneck on my end; I have 45 mbps fibre.)
One tech columnist was able to confirm that Zune will encumber *any* music file you want to share with its three-day DRM, whether it's your own song, or something in the public domain, or something under the Creative Commons.
Actually, according to the terms of their incorporation, they promise to uphold certain principles above shareholder value, and they have no legal responsibility to reneg on this promise.
That goes for both of you!
Hopefully, Google and other search engines will start warning users that Amazon.com is a known malware distributor when the site comes up in search results.