Dude, if you're unsatisfied with getting $2200 a year for doing eight hours of voice-over work in a year, maybe you need another job. Take some other acting gigs, drive a truck for UPS, learn a trade. Hell, flip burgers if you're that hard up for cash.
Funny, that's exactly what most actors do. They don't call it being a "struggling actor" for nothing.
As for your advice to, "take some other acting gigs" -- you really don't understand how hollywood works do you?
There are some that argue that copyright as it exists today is itself unethical - not only is it theft from the public domain but the punishments are out of proportion compared to serious crimes like murder and rape.
Remember that the law in general has very little to do with ethics - ask anyone working for a Fortune500 company and they can tell you that "corporate ethics" are just CYA for lawsuits that might hurt the company and not about actually "doing the right thing."
For the most part, copyright is simply a default contract between creator and consumer. Do you make a big effort to prevent any other 3rd party contractual violations by members of your LAN parties? Like taking steps make sure they won't default on their credit card bills? Or what about other even more criminalized behaviours like 17 year olds hooking up with 16 year olds for a little satutory rape after the lan party? Or maybe just an underage drinking and pot smoking party?
It seems to me that unless you are a Copyright Crusader, there is nothing more nor less important about copyright than a whole host of other grey areas that you could just as well be concerned with.
Lots of employers make their employees take drug tests as part of the hiring process and some of them even subject their employees to drug tests during their employment. Usually, such practices are justified as being required by the Drug Free Workplace Act of 1988. But, such justifications are false. All the DFWA requires are drug awareness programs, and the definition of such a program is almost entirely left up to the employer, they can be as simple as handing out dilbert anti-drug pamphlets to new employees.
How is this connected to software piracy at lan parties? It is advice via analogy.
Do as the smart companies do with respect to drugs. Formulate a policy forbidding piracy, hand out a pamphlet of piracy boojums and then don't worry about it unless somone actively brings an act of piracy to your attention. You will have covered your ass, which is all any organization outside of the BSA and SPAA needs to do, and at the same time wasted as few of the precious non-profit resources on fighting someone else's battle.
"Um... Oh sure, you were here looking the other day."
It is standard in sales to never say "no" - the guy did not remember you, he just pretended to because it makes the potential customer feel like he's important enough to be remembered.
From what I have heard ESR/RMS are considering requiring companies who derive revenue from GPL'd code (Amazon & Google for example) to provide a revenue stream back to the authors.
I'm pretty sure it is bogus - it was posted to slashdot after all.
The article in that post sounded a whole lot more like the misinterpretation of the words of the guy who owns sleepycat (current authors of db). I haven't seen any sort of confirmation from any other source and the fact that it is so antithetical to the idea of Free software pretty much rules it out anyway.
That is season one - note how it only showed up on UHD after it finished its run on SciFi. The article poster was referring to season two, which will probably suffer the same delay. If they were smart, they would simulacast season two on both SciFi and UHD.
Power supply noise isn't an issue below some critical value.
However, in PC's that critical value tends to be a lot higher than one expects. Far too often, PC power supplies get really noisy when pushed to anywhere near their maximum rating. The results can be very mysterious - all kinds of components from hard disks to ram "randomly" failing.
I've literaly seen the benefits of improved power sources myself - over on avsforum there was an EE freak in the canadian boonies who was all about making sure you have copious amounts of clean power available to assure maximum stable performance in a PC. He used to sell personally modified versions of video-capture cards. He would take a garden-variety $30 NTSC capture card, replace the caps and a few other components in the power supply path and resell it for about $100. The end result was the cleanest video capture short of pro equipment in the $1K+ price range - all because of his improvements to the power circuitry on the cards.
Someone hacks the government servers, and puts in data, data that says you are a terrorist, a dangerous terrorist with knowledge of how to build bombs.
You, of course, are just an avarage joe...
The danger is not to the average Joe (maybe the average Joe for whom a hacker has a grudge perhaps) but the real danger is to those people who are considered a threat by those who officially/legally control the database.
It is far more likely that we will see such a database used to harass the political opposition (we've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence of that with the no-fly list already). We are also likely to see it used to benefit the "friends" (aka campaign contributors) of the database controllers - corporate whistleblowers for example.
A national ID system is one of the most un-American things to arise from the 9-11 kneejerkers. The only possible benefit is that it will catch stupid terrorists - the ones not smart enough to buy a counterfeit ID or bribe the right underpaid clerk. Meanwhile it is a huge sacrifice of freedom (you know, one of those principles this country was founded on) that will lead to further centralization of power, increased corruption and of course a huge tax bill to pay for the boondoggle.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life." -- Osama bin Laden, Oct 21, 2001.
'Our companies want to continue to show their movies and television shows to viewers who don't or can't subscribe to cable or satellite systems. But without the broadcast flag, that option will look less and less appealing. In the end, it will be the consumers who suffer the most if the broadcast flag is not mandated for the digital era.'
What Glickman doesn't understand, or more likely wishes weren't true, is that his argument holds no water in a free market system. All it takes is a very simple thought experiment to make it clear:
If no studios allow "their" content to be broadcast in high-def because there is no broadcast flag, then there will be an unmet market demand. Sooner or later at least one company -- be it an established studio or a new upstart -- will decide that they don't need a broadcast flag in order to license their movies for high-def broadcast. At that point they will have the entire market to themselves and it will be easy money to fullfill that previously unmet market demand.
Once one company is seen to be making easy money, others will decide they would like some of that easy money themselves and will enter the market too. Eventually either all the old studios will be in the market just as they are for standard-def broadcasts, or they will have isolated themselves, becoming niche players in the over all "content" market.
The key to the free market system here is that the studios need the audience way more than the audience needs them. Without an audience they will starve and die, without high-def movies, we'll just watch DVDs, read a book or do something else like go skiing.
fluff magazines like Time -- that USED TO BE a news magazine, but has gone for for pop news now)
Time Magazine has ALWAYS been pop news, right along with Newsweek and USA Today (although, surprisingly the newspaper has been trying to get serious recently).
For real news, the bare minimum is US News & World Report. Still kinda fluffy but a whole lot more dense than Time and Newsweek. Graduate to The Economist and you'll be reading the closest there is to real news in print.
Major spoiler for both films that illustrates how watered down "The Ring" was:
In "Ringu" the curse can never be escaped, only passed on to someone else by making them watch the cursed video tape. So to save the little boy from the curse, his grandfather volunteers to watch it, take the curse and die so the kid can live.
In "The Ring" the curse is dispelled by simply making a copy of the cursed video tape. Big freaking deal, that's not a horror movie, that's a puzzle movie. Hollywood is such a bunch of pussies.
The Passion of the Christ
The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre is only notable for the historical context in which it played (i.e. post-911 revival of Christian religiosity). Try Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Jesus Christ" if you want a meaningful take on the passion play.
Is 1080i not the equivalent of 540p... of which both of those projectors is capable of?
Not on a digital projector which is inherently a progressive display. It has to convert the interlaced signal to progressive in order to do anything useful with it. Because of the way film material (versus stuff recorded directly on videotape) is shot, you can turn 1080i/60 into 1080p/24 with no loss of information at all - in fact it probably started out as 1080p/24 before being interlaced.
At least I know when I feed my projector 1080i its shows it as 540p.
Some projectors/scalars do that and it is pretty much the worst possible way to handle the signal and still look semi-passable. Essentially the projector is throwing out half of the vertical resolution. It is also the easiest way to handle 1080i, which is probably why your projector does it, it was a cheap and easy shortcut on the manufacturer's part.
Patching a unix kernel is one thing, patching an NT kernel is appearently much more of a challenge.
It is no harder than patching any other binary for which you do not have source code.
You might need a specialized tool to do it, but speaking as a guy who has worked on a few device drivers, putting together such a tool isn't terribly difficult.
The checks for a debugger are in the kernel. Good luck patching that out.
Do you really know that, or are you just making it up? If you do know it, how do you know it? And finally, what's so hard about patching the kernel? People have been patching live unix kernels for decades now.
It was cracked in Japan and then quickly uncracked. Rather, any of the phone-home restricted content forced an upgrade of the decrypter that was no longer crackable by the original method. T2 was liberated before the phone-home system had started to push out the new software.
The original method amounted to running the player under a debugger and looking for the decryption keys in a known location in memory, grabbing the keys and then using them to manually decrypt to a file. The new software checks for the presence of a debugger and refuses to run. I'm sure it is only a matter of time before that is also circumvented.
In theory, if you have not accepted an upgrade to the windows media system in the last month or so, all of the "on disc" restricted files could still be liberated. It is reportedly a fairly tedious manual process.
I think there is some discussion of the process on doom9.org if you want to dig deeper.
Uhh, no. The second one gave no fuck about Sarah. John was already born, she meant nothing.
Seeing as how I just watched T2 last week (in order to celebrate MS's DRM being cracked and the hi-def WM9 version being liberated from the stupid phone-home digital restrictions), the minutiae are still familiar.
The molten metal mulder replacement terminator was primarily after John, but at one point went after Sarah becase it expected John to go to Sarah too. Unfortunately for mulder replacement, he didn't get there early enough to replace sarah and instead had to fight it out and lose her and john as they sped away with Arnie in their station wagon of hope.
Though I do not know of any projectors that can do 1080i, there are several that can handle 720p, you may want to look into one of those for a better movie-watching experience.
It is all a case of how much money you want to spend.
Right now, the step up to a 1280x720p capable projector requires at the very least 50% more money and then you make a lot of sacrifices like taking the lumens down by 2/3rds. So, full 720p resolution is not as cost effective.
But make no mistake, 800x600 and 1024x768 are sufficiently high enough resolution to visibly benefit from high-def sources (like from comcast's digital cable-box with the extra $5/month HDTV package) in comparison to DVD.
when that term was first coined (centuries ago), people actually feared pirates. Nowadays pirates are characters in cartoons and adventure films for the family with very little resemblance to actual pirates.
These guys make a hypervisor that sits on top of infiniband between multiple blades and turns them into one big shared-memory linux NUMA system, up to around 32 cpus and probably even bigger eventually. Plus they can dynamically move cpus and memory in and out of each virtual machine, split the group into multiple smaller virutal machines, etc.
I have no connection to them, just saw them at one of the east coast linux tradeshows. I think their hypervisor will eventually be superceded by Xen or one of the other virutalization systems, but for now what they've got looks like hot snot on a gold platter.
Yes I too want to go out and spend $15,000 or more on equipment so I can save the $10 or less for a ticket to the movie theater.
You are off by about an order of magnitude.
Cheapest highly-functional system: $ 700 - 800x600, ~800 lumen projector $ 200 - 92" wide da-lite high-power screen $ 60 - Cheap phillips play-everything progressive DVD player $ 500 - Any of 10 or so decent Home theater in a box combos. -------- $1460 Total
Reasonably priced, "sweet-spot" priced system: $1200 - 1024x768 ~2300 lumen projector (brighter than a plasma -) $ 200 - 92" wide da-lite high-power screen (110 ft/lamberts) $ 300 - Avel Linkplayer2 plays-everything plus high-def DVD player $ 400 - Pioneer 49tx receiver $ 800 - Any of 5 or so different, good-quality 5.1 speaker/sub sets --------- $2900 Total
Those are the kind of price-points it takes to get a really big screen experience at home. Those numbers tend to look surprisingly low to people like yourself who have never seriously thought about getting a projection system.
More people ought to be looking, front-projectors beat out "regular" tv's at just about every price-point over ~$500. Once you've watched 8-foot-wide HDTV, you'll never be able to turn on a regular tv set again.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, if you're unsatisfied with getting $2200 a year for doing eight hours of voice-over work in a year, maybe you need another job. Take some other acting gigs, drive a truck for UPS, learn a trade. Hell, flip burgers if you're that hard up for cash.
Funny, that's exactly what most actors do. They don't call it being a "struggling actor" for nothing.
As for your advice to, "take some other acting gigs" -- you really don't understand how hollywood works do you?
There are some that argue that copyright as it exists today is itself unethical - not only is it theft from the public domain but the punishments are out of proportion compared to serious crimes like murder and rape.
Remember that the law in general has very little to do with ethics - ask anyone working for a Fortune500 company and they can tell you that "corporate ethics" are just CYA for lawsuits that might hurt the company and not about actually "doing the right thing."
For the most part, copyright is simply a default contract between creator and consumer. Do you make a big effort to prevent any other 3rd party contractual violations by members of your LAN parties? Like taking steps make sure they won't default on their credit card bills? Or what about other even more criminalized behaviours like 17 year olds hooking up with 16 year olds for a little satutory rape after the lan party? Or maybe just an underage drinking and pot smoking party?
It seems to me that unless you are a Copyright Crusader, there is nothing more nor less important about copyright than a whole host of other grey areas that you could just as well be concerned with.
Lots of employers make their employees take drug tests as part of the hiring process and some of them even subject their employees to drug tests during their employment. Usually, such practices are justified as being required by the Drug Free Workplace Act of 1988. But, such justifications are false. All the DFWA requires are drug awareness programs, and the definition of such a program is almost entirely left up to the employer, they can be as simple as handing out dilbert anti-drug pamphlets to new employees.
How is this connected to software piracy at lan parties?
It is advice via analogy.
Do as the smart companies do with respect to drugs. Formulate a policy forbidding piracy, hand out a pamphlet of piracy boojums and then don't worry about it unless somone actively brings an act of piracy to your attention. You will have covered your ass, which is all any organization outside of the BSA and SPAA needs to do, and at the same time wasted as few of the precious non-profit resources on fighting someone else's battle.
"Um... Oh sure, you were here looking the other day."
It is standard in sales to never say "no" - the guy did not remember you, he just pretended to because it makes the potential customer feel like he's important enough to be remembered.
From what I have heard ESR/RMS are considering requiring companies who derive revenue from GPL'd code (Amazon & Google for example) to provide a revenue stream back to the authors.
I'm pretty sure it is bogus - it was posted to slashdot after all.
The article in that post sounded a whole lot more like the misinterpretation of the words of the guy who owns sleepycat (current authors of db). I haven't seen any sort of confirmation from any other source and the fact that it is so antithetical to the idea of Free software pretty much rules it out anyway.
That is season one - note how it only showed up on UHD after it finished its run on SciFi. The article poster was referring to season two, which will probably suffer the same delay. If they were smart, they would simulacast season two on both SciFi and UHD.
Power supply noise isn't an issue below some critical value.
However, in PC's that critical value tends to be a lot higher than one expects. Far too often, PC power supplies get really noisy when pushed to anywhere near their maximum rating. The results can be very mysterious - all kinds of components from hard disks to ram "randomly" failing.
I've literaly seen the benefits of improved power sources myself - over on avsforum there was an EE freak in the canadian boonies who was all about making sure you have copious amounts of clean power available to assure maximum stable performance in a PC. He used to sell personally modified versions of video-capture cards. He would take a garden-variety $30 NTSC capture card, replace the caps and a few other components in the power supply path and resell it for about $100. The end result was the cleanest video capture short of pro equipment in the $1K+ price range - all because of his improvements to the power circuitry on the cards.
You, of course, are just an avarage joe...
The danger is not to the average Joe (maybe the average Joe for whom a hacker has a grudge perhaps) but the real danger is to those people who are considered a threat by those who officially/legally control the database.
It is far more likely that we will see such a database used to harass the political opposition (we've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence of that with the no-fly list already). We are also likely to see it used to benefit the "friends" (aka campaign contributors) of the database controllers - corporate whistleblowers for example.
A national ID system is one of the most un-American things to arise from the 9-11 kneejerkers. The only possible benefit is that it will catch stupid terrorists - the ones not smart enough to buy a counterfeit ID or bribe the right underpaid clerk. Meanwhile it is a huge sacrifice of freedom (you know, one of those principles this country was founded on) that will lead to further centralization of power, increased corruption and of course a huge tax bill to pay for the boondoggle.
'Our companies want to continue to show their movies and television shows to viewers who don't or can't subscribe to cable or satellite systems. But without the broadcast flag, that option will look less and less appealing. In the end, it will be the consumers who suffer the most if the broadcast flag is not mandated for the digital era.'
What Glickman doesn't understand, or more likely wishes weren't true, is that his argument holds no water in a free market system. All it takes is a very simple thought experiment to make it clear:
If no studios allow "their" content to be broadcast in high-def because there is no broadcast flag, then there will be an unmet market demand. Sooner or later at least one company -- be it an established studio or a new upstart -- will decide that they don't need a broadcast flag in order to license their movies for high-def broadcast. At that point they will have the entire market to themselves and it will be easy money to fullfill that previously unmet market demand.
Once one company is seen to be making easy money, others will decide they would like some of that easy money themselves and will enter the market too. Eventually either all the old studios will be in the market just as they are for standard-def broadcasts, or they will have isolated themselves, becoming niche players in the over all "content" market.
The key to the free market system here is that the studios need the audience way more than the audience needs them. Without an audience they will starve and die, without high-def movies, we'll just watch DVDs, read a book or do something else like go skiing.
fluff magazines like Time -- that USED TO BE a news magazine, but has gone for for pop news now)
Time Magazine has ALWAYS been pop news, right along with Newsweek and USA Today (although, surprisingly the newspaper has been trying to get serious recently).
For real news, the bare minimum is US News & World Report. Still kinda fluffy but a whole lot more dense than Time and Newsweek. Graduate to The Economist and you'll be reading the closest there is to real news in print.
I agree there. Robocop is probly the most effective anti-military-industrial-complex movies out there. Spiderman may be a close second.
I think Starship Troopers is closer to second place than Spiderman.
None of the too film-arty ones
How do you even know if they are too film-arty if you haven't seen them?
The answer, of course, is that you don't.
Reminds me of a favorite lyric:
I know what I like,
and I like what I know.
The Ring
"Ringu" maybe, but "The Ring" - no way.
Major spoiler for both films that illustrates how watered down "The Ring" was:
In "Ringu" the curse can never be escaped, only passed on to someone else by making them watch the cursed video tape. So to save the little boy from the curse, his grandfather volunteers to watch it, take the curse and die so the kid can live.
In "The Ring" the curse is dispelled by simply making a copy of the cursed video tape. Big freaking deal, that's not a horror movie, that's a puzzle movie. Hollywood is such a bunch of pussies.
The Passion of the Christ
The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre is only notable for the historical context in which it played (i.e. post-911 revival of Christian religiosity). Try Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Jesus Christ" if you want a meaningful take on the passion play.
Is 1080i not the equivalent of 540p ... of which both of those projectors is capable of?
Not on a digital projector which is inherently a progressive display. It has to convert the interlaced signal to progressive in order to do anything useful with it. Because of the way film material (versus stuff recorded directly on videotape) is shot, you can turn 1080i/60 into 1080p/24 with no loss of information at all - in fact it probably started out as 1080p/24 before being interlaced.
At least I know when I feed my projector 1080i its shows it as 540p.
Some projectors/scalars do that and it is pretty much the worst possible way to handle the signal and still look semi-passable. Essentially the projector is throwing out half of the vertical resolution. It is also the easiest way to handle 1080i, which is probably why your projector does it, it was a cheap and easy shortcut on the manufacturer's part.
Patching a unix kernel is one thing, patching an NT kernel is appearently much more of a challenge.
It is no harder than patching any other binary for which you do not have source code.
You might need a specialized tool to do it, but speaking as a guy who has worked on a few device drivers, putting together such a tool isn't terribly difficult.
One last product and you'll have covered 99% of the 'manufacturing' that happens in America -- Lawsuits.
Thus Warren Zevon was a prophet of the new American economy when he sang:
The checks for a debugger are in the kernel. Good luck patching that out.
Do you really know that, or are you just making it up? If you do know it, how do you know it? And finally, what's so hard about patching the kernel? People have been patching live unix kernels for decades now.
Please elaborate on MS DRM being cracked.
It was cracked in Japan and then quickly uncracked.
Rather, any of the phone-home restricted content forced an upgrade of the decrypter that was no longer crackable by the original method. T2 was liberated before the phone-home system had started to push out the new software.
The original method amounted to running the player under a debugger and looking for the decryption keys in a known location in memory, grabbing the keys and then using them to manually decrypt to a file. The new software checks for the presence of a debugger and refuses to run. I'm sure it is only a matter of time before that is also circumvented.
In theory, if you have not accepted an upgrade to the windows media system in the last month or so, all of the "on disc" restricted files could still be liberated. It is reportedly a fairly tedious manual process.
I think there is some discussion of the process on doom9.org if you want to dig deeper.
Uhh, no. The second one gave no fuck about Sarah. John was already born, she meant nothing.
Seeing as how I just watched T2 last week (in order to celebrate MS's DRM being cracked and the hi-def WM9 version being liberated from the stupid phone-home digital restrictions), the minutiae are still familiar.
The molten metal mulder replacement terminator was primarily after John, but at one point went after Sarah becase it expected John to go to Sarah too. Unfortunately for mulder replacement, he didn't get there early enough to replace sarah and instead had to fight it out and lose her and john as they sped away with Arnie in their station wagon of hope.
Though I do not know of any projectors that can do 1080i, there are several that can handle 720p,
you may want to look into one of those for a better movie-watching experience.
It is all a case of how much money you want to spend.
Right now, the step up to a 1280x720p capable projector requires at the very least 50% more money and then you make a lot of sacrifices like taking the lumens down by 2/3rds. So, full 720p resolution is not as cost effective.
But make no mistake, 800x600 and 1024x768 are sufficiently high enough resolution to visibly benefit from high-def sources (like from comcast's digital cable-box with the extra $5/month HDTV package) in comparison to DVD.
At least "wikipedia" is a funky pigeon of Hawaiian and English, which is kinda natural for any combo with a Hawaiian word.
But cellphedia sounds more like a social disease than a social network. They need a new name.
when that term was first coined (centuries ago), people actually feared pirates. Nowadays pirates are characters in cartoons and adventure films for the family with very little resemblance to actual pirates.
I guess you haven't been to the pacific southwest recently.
Check out VirtualIron.
These guys make a hypervisor that sits on top of infiniband between multiple blades and turns them into one big shared-memory linux NUMA system, up to around 32 cpus and probably even bigger eventually. Plus they can dynamically move cpus and memory in and out of each virtual machine, split the group into multiple smaller virutal machines, etc.
I have no connection to them, just saw them at one of the east coast linux tradeshows. I think their hypervisor will eventually be superceded by Xen or one of the other virutalization systems, but for now what they've got looks like hot snot on a gold platter.
Yes I too want to go out and spend $15,000 or more on equipment so I can save the $10 or less for a ticket to the movie theater.
You are off by about an order of magnitude.
Cheapest highly-functional system:
$ 700 - 800x600, ~800 lumen projector
$ 200 - 92" wide da-lite high-power screen
$ 60 - Cheap phillips play-everything progressive DVD player
$ 500 - Any of 10 or so decent Home theater in a box combos.
--------
$1460 Total
Reasonably priced, "sweet-spot" priced system:
$1200 - 1024x768 ~2300 lumen projector (brighter than a plasma -)
$ 200 - 92" wide da-lite high-power screen (110 ft/lamberts)
$ 300 - Avel Linkplayer2 plays-everything plus high-def DVD player
$ 400 - Pioneer 49tx receiver
$ 800 - Any of 5 or so different, good-quality 5.1 speaker/sub sets
---------
$2900 Total
Those are the kind of price-points it takes to get a really big screen experience at home. Those numbers tend to look surprisingly low to people like yourself who have never seriously thought about getting a projection system.
More people ought to be looking, front-projectors beat out "regular" tv's at just about every price-point over ~$500. Once you've watched 8-foot-wide HDTV, you'll never be able to turn on a regular tv set again.
Are you under the impression that 3.5 was the first version? There was NT 3.1, and before that OS/2 LAN Manager (same networking).
No, but I am under the impression that you have no sense of humor.