I thought this movie was great. I live in east asia (though not in Tokyo), and virtually all the expats I've met that have lived out here for a reasonable amount of time thought this movie was great, too.
The director -- Sophia Coppola was it? -- apparently lived in Tokyo for sometime, and used her experiences when making the movie. Whatever it was, it really shines through. No matter how enculturated you become (for example, I've lived in Shanghai for years now, speak Chinese, and am possibly now more comfortable with Chinese culture than the one I was born with), there are always these hopeless times where you realize that no amount of xenophelia will ever make you fit in, and that you will always be an outsider, if only because of your race.
Lost in Translation captures this feeling of hopelessness in such an incredibly poetic way.
Most of the people I've discussed this movie with that didn't like it (and sibling posts bear this out) seem to be mostly concerned with the fact that the film has the slow pace of real life rather than the accelerated pace of Hollywood blockbusters. It's really much more like a French film than an American one, I think, in terms of pace and style.
If you're not into that sort of thing, well... what can I tell you?
But understand that you are probably not the intended audience of this movie. It's about culture shock, and if you haven't experienced culture shock, you probably aren't going to identify with it.
That's interesting. I wasn't aware that Swizerland was a direct democracy.
Actually, some searching on the web suggests that it is actually not a direct democracy, but rather has the potential to be -- you guys have referendums on everything, meaning that the people can directly intervene in decisions. This actually doesn't sound like a bad plan.
The problem with a true democracy is that there are no "politicians", per se. People vote on issues, not people. Essentially, the government is the people -- there is no "middle tier" (for example, in a true democracy, there would be no Federal Council).
The problem is that in a reasonably complex society, keeping track of all the issues and being appropriately educated on them becomes a full time job. We could argue that in a republic, politicans don't bother educating themselves and just do what lobbiests pay them to do, but when speaking theoretically the idea behind electing representatives is that a representative does nothing but politics and is supported by the people.
It's perhaps a bit like delegating responsibility. Most people cannot work 9-5 and educate themselves on every proposed bill and issue that other folks want to pass.
Now, it seems as though Swizerland has a good balance -- a federalist, nominally republican system where the people have referendums on all issues, meaning that the populace can fall back on direct democracy when they care about an issue, but otherwise can simply lay back and let the full-time politicians do the deciding. Am I right about this? I'm just gathering this from what I just read on the internet, so it might be totally off base.
But I maintain that true democracy, in which every issue is voted on by the people, becomes unworkable at a certain level of complexity. I would agree, though, that representatives in a republic would be unwilling to allow referendums on their decisions because they don't want their power eroded.
Not saying a republic is the end all be all or anything. Just that true democracy is rather hard to manage.
What does socialism have to do with democracy, or a republic? You can have socialist republics (pretty much any scandinavian country, and to a lesser extent, France) and you can quite happily have capitalist dictatorships (Singapore, lots of Latin American countries).
You may not like the socialist economic system; you may prefer capitalism. This is fine. But don't confuse economic systems with systems of government, or assume that in a free, democratic republic voters won't choose socialism, or even communism. This was the essential problem during the war on communism -- lots of democratic states seemed to actually want socialism instead of capitalism. Imagine that.
Furthermore, capitalism does not imply freedom. Singapore is a good example again. And socialism does not inherently imply lack of freedom. We don't call Norway & Co socialist states because that reminds us of the USSR, and that's Bad[tm], but the fact remains that in those countries, many many industries are nationalized. In Norway, if you get pregnant, the state will give you a place to live and pay your way through university, provide day care, etc.
As it happens, most third world regimes aren't big on freedoms, regardless of their economic system. But socialist style systems weren't as beneficial to the US because they reduced our ability to trade with those countries. So we created the whole communism == not free, capitalist == free fallacy. If you look around, you'll realize this does not need to be the case.
A republic is simply a system of government where representatives of the people, democratically elected, make decisions on laws and government policy (whereas in a democracy, the people vote directly on policy, but in practice this doesn't work unless you're a small tribe or village). This has nothing to do with freedoms (other than the freedom to select your representatives), nothing to do with welfare, or anything else.
No one here (or at least, no one sane) is denying the utility of copyright.
Further, when someone says "artificial scarcity", they are speaking economically: the "artificial" isn't meant as a way to slander the product or to imply it shouldn't exist.
What is meant is simply this. Suppose I want to sell you something like, hm, coal. Well, perhaps I have a mine, or I'm a middleman and I have a supplier. But I only have X tons of coal and can only sell so much. This is scarcity. There is a limit on how much coal I can sell, because there is a limited amount of it. If I sell it to you, you are free to sell it to someone else, or use it, or whatever, but it changes hands -- it comes from a supplier and is then used, and once used, it cannot be used again. It is therefore scarce.
Now, digital media, written works, pieces of music, and the like, are somewhat different. They are information, and intangible. They are usually distributed on a physical medium, such as a book, a CD, or a floppy disk. In the past, the scarcity of the medium of transfer provided the scarcity for the product. By this I mean, for example, that before the printing press, books needed to be copied by hand. This was a tremendous amount of work, and so even though technically I could sell a book I'd written to a friend and he could meticulously copy it by hand in order to sell a new copy without giving me a cut, this was rather unlikely to happen.
Well, with the invention of the printing press, computers, cassette tapes, and the like, this "hurdle" stopped being so high, and so copyright was invented. Here's the idea: these things, these "ideas", which can be copied easily, are of real value, but they aren't scarce. And unfortunately, our economic system doesn't work well with such resources. Because if you give me a book you've written, with a little bit of work and a printing press, I could start printing millions of copies, selling those, and giving you nothing for it.
Worried that artists, authors, and the like would be reticent to publish their works given that they could be copied so easily, Congress passes copyright law. Essentially, copyright law says, only the copyright holder (usually the author) can copy this material, for a limited period of time. This "creates" scarcity for a product that by its nature is not scarce, hence the "artificial" modifier.
Now, the reason copyright is not indefinite is because it is meant to make music/books/etc act like a real scarce resource -- for example, the coal I was talking about earlier. You own a mine, but eventually, you'll run out of coal -- the mine will stop producing, or whatever. Realistically, you'll only be able to sell a scarce resource for a limited period of time, because eventually, you'll run out.
Do you understand? Copyright is meant to make a non-scarce resource behave as if it were scarce, to allow its creation to be economically viable, because Congress recognized that sometimes stuff that isn't scarce still has value. It's an economic hack, really.
It isn't a bad idea.
But the fact that this scarcity is artificial does play a part when you start talking about theft, because if you steal some of my coal, that's one less piece of coal I can sell -- my coal really is scarce. But with a composition, a file, or a published work, it isn't the same, because the scarcity is created by temporal limits, not by limits on the number of times you can make a sale, as would be the case with any tangible object you tried to sell.
So when I infringe your copyright, I do not cost you money. I simply (perhaps) make money on something, without giving you a cut.
These two things are both bad, but they are not the same (which is worse or whether one even is worse depends on your POV). But we must make the distinction legally (and we do).
While I certainly agree with the spirit of your post, and am likewise rankled by the unfairness of it all, the point we're trying to make here is that theft has a very specific definition, and that copyright infringement does not apply, because nothing tangible is being physically taken.
Your post unfortunately also misuses the term theft, thus further confusing the term. While we as the public certainly ought to eventually reappropriate works after a reasonable period of time, the constant legal loopholing and campaigning by corps to prevent their copyrighted materials from lapsing into the public domain does not constitute theft. There is nothing physical being taken from its original owner, for two reasons: one, copyrighted works aren't tangible objects, and two, we didn't own them originally.
Now, despite the fact that I'm being anal retentive about the term "theft", I agree with your point. We (the people) agreed contractually (copyright law) to give a creator of a work a temporary monopoly on his or her created resource, in exchange for the understanding that after a reasonable time has passed, it would enter the public domain.
This artificial limitation exists solely because in a "Free" (in the libertarian sense) society, there would be no such protection, and any author of a work would be unable to publish his or her work without someone copying it. We give up our right to copy for a temporary period of time to encourage artists to publish. It's as simple as that.
Essentially, the political lobbying done by Disney and Co is an erosion of our rights; we gave up those negative rights to allow Disney to make money on Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy for a temporary period, and now Disney wants us to give up our rights for an even longer period of time so they can make even more money.
In that case, you're dealing with a calculated loss. When a record store buys CDs, they intend to sell them at a profit. There is an element of risk; some of those may not be sold. But the bet is, they will make enough on what they do sell to recoup the price of the albums they don't. And many of those albums, if in the store long enough, will actually sell -- if someone is willing to steal them, there must be demand of some sort, right?
The issue with P2P and other digital copying systems is that what is being "stolen" is not a CD, but rather the content on the CD. So if I copy your CD, for example, you still have your CD.
I think the GPs point is a good one. Copyright infringement is a serious offense in our current legal system, but it is not theft. Whether or not this makes it less serious is a matter of personal opinion, and if you get caught, a matter of the judge's opinion. But the two crimes are fundamentally not the same, because, as the GP said, if you steal a CD, you are taking something the record store paid money for, and you are taking it away from them -- they cannot sell it once you've stolen it, and recoup their loss.
If you just copy it though, they can still sell it. No one loses money, but admittedly, no one made money when you copied the work.
The argument is that they should have been able to make money. Do you agree with that?
You know, if you ever actually talked to girls, you'd realize they find men rather difficult to "maintain" as well.
So really all your post manages to do is insult women. They aren't computer equipment.
Believe it or not, there are actually girls that read Slashdot, and this kind of thing is offensive. Please don't do it. And if you see it, don't mod it up.
I know it sucks to be PC, but it wouldn't hurt to be sensitive to other people, just for once. If you practice, you might actually get laid someday.
Certification is a load of crap. Standards provide a clearly written definition of how something is supposed to work; if an implementation doesn't work the way the standard outlines it, it is by definition buggy. We don't need certifiers to "look it over" for us; they're just humans anyway and in an open source project we have many more eyeballs than they do. Witness how POSIX compliant the Linux kernel is, despite having never been certified.
Certification is a marketing thing, really. An appeal to authority (ie, standards org says we comply, and since you trust them, you can trust us!)
As for just "doing what Windows does", this is a very bad idea, for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that if we accept this, we'll always be playing catchup to MS's latest bug. Everytime they release a new ACPI parser, it's gonna have some new quirk in it -- they'll probably start doing it on purpose once they realize we're trying to emulate them.
No, far better to get the OEM manufacturers on the standards boat. They claim to comply with a published standard; we can use this against them when they obviously don't. It would be bad form for them to claim to comply when they don't -- in the US, this is even illegal (false advertising), and as such a lot of them are willing to fix their bugs if we just report them. Since they mostly only test with Windows, I'll wager, they may honestly not even be aware of them.
Linux is becoming more and more important, believe it or not. People might not run it on the desktop much, but they run it on servers, and they want stuff to just work. It's becoming stupider and stupider for OEM manufacturers to break compatibility with Linux, because if word gets out that their hardware won't run Linux or runs it poorly, they'll get bad press. This is why they care.
We're past the point (really) of chasing MS's coattails. Most small web companies are using low end PC-compats running Linux, not dual Xeons running Win Server 2k3. We don't need to be the world's main desktop OS to matter.
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Biffy Onzoolie! I love the new who, man! It rocks all over Windrunner's version!
I thought this movie was great. I live in east asia (though not in Tokyo), and virtually all the expats I've met that have lived out here for a reasonable amount of time thought this movie was great, too.
The director -- Sophia Coppola was it? -- apparently lived in Tokyo for sometime, and used her experiences when making the movie. Whatever it was, it really shines through. No matter how enculturated you become (for example, I've lived in Shanghai for years now, speak Chinese, and am possibly now more comfortable with Chinese culture than the one I was born with), there are always these hopeless times where you realize that no amount of xenophelia will ever make you fit in, and that you will always be an outsider, if only because of your race.
Lost in Translation captures this feeling of hopelessness in such an incredibly poetic way.
Most of the people I've discussed this movie with that didn't like it (and sibling posts bear this out) seem to be mostly concerned with the fact that the film has the slow pace of real life rather than the accelerated pace of Hollywood blockbusters. It's really much more like a French film than an American one, I think, in terms of pace and style.
If you're not into that sort of thing, well... what can I tell you?
But understand that you are probably not the intended audience of this movie. It's about culture shock, and if you haven't experienced culture shock, you probably aren't going to identify with it.
That's interesting. I wasn't aware that Swizerland was a direct democracy.
Actually, some searching on the web suggests that it is actually not a direct democracy, but rather has the potential to be -- you guys have referendums on everything, meaning that the people can directly intervene in decisions. This actually doesn't sound like a bad plan.
The problem with a true democracy is that there are no "politicians", per se. People vote on issues, not people. Essentially, the government is the people -- there is no "middle tier" (for example, in a true democracy, there would be no Federal Council).
The problem is that in a reasonably complex society, keeping track of all the issues and being appropriately educated on them becomes a full time job. We could argue that in a republic, politicans don't bother educating themselves and just do what lobbiests pay them to do, but when speaking theoretically the idea behind electing representatives is that a representative does nothing but politics and is supported by the people.
It's perhaps a bit like delegating responsibility. Most people cannot work 9-5 and educate themselves on every proposed bill and issue that other folks want to pass.
Now, it seems as though Swizerland has a good balance -- a federalist, nominally republican system where the people have referendums on all issues, meaning that the populace can fall back on direct democracy when they care about an issue, but otherwise can simply lay back and let the full-time politicians do the deciding. Am I right about this? I'm just gathering this from what I just read on the internet, so it might be totally off base.
But I maintain that true democracy, in which every issue is voted on by the people, becomes unworkable at a certain level of complexity. I would agree, though, that representatives in a republic would be unwilling to allow referendums on their decisions because they don't want their power eroded.
Not saying a republic is the end all be all or anything. Just that true democracy is rather hard to manage.
Uhhhh....
Democratically elected socialist state?
What does socialism have to do with democracy, or a republic? You can have socialist republics (pretty much any scandinavian country, and to a lesser extent, France) and you can quite happily have capitalist dictatorships (Singapore, lots of Latin American countries).
You may not like the socialist economic system; you may prefer capitalism. This is fine. But don't confuse economic systems with systems of government, or assume that in a free, democratic republic voters won't choose socialism, or even communism. This was the essential problem during the war on communism -- lots of democratic states seemed to actually want socialism instead of capitalism. Imagine that.
Furthermore, capitalism does not imply freedom. Singapore is a good example again. And socialism does not inherently imply lack of freedom. We don't call Norway & Co socialist states because that reminds us of the USSR, and that's Bad[tm], but the fact remains that in those countries, many many industries are nationalized. In Norway, if you get pregnant, the state will give you a place to live and pay your way through university, provide day care, etc.
As it happens, most third world regimes aren't big on freedoms, regardless of their economic system. But socialist style systems weren't as beneficial to the US because they reduced our ability to trade with those countries. So we created the whole communism == not free, capitalist == free fallacy. If you look around, you'll realize this does not need to be the case.
A republic is simply a system of government where representatives of the people, democratically elected, make decisions on laws and government policy (whereas in a democracy, the people vote directly on policy, but in practice this doesn't work unless you're a small tribe or village). This has nothing to do with freedoms (other than the freedom to select your representatives), nothing to do with welfare, or anything else.
No one here (or at least, no one sane) is denying the utility of copyright.
Further, when someone says "artificial scarcity", they are speaking economically: the "artificial" isn't meant as a way to slander the product or to imply it shouldn't exist.
What is meant is simply this. Suppose I want to sell you something like, hm, coal. Well, perhaps I have a mine, or I'm a middleman and I have a supplier. But I only have X tons of coal and can only sell so much. This is scarcity. There is a limit on how much coal I can sell, because there is a limited amount of it. If I sell it to you, you are free to sell it to someone else, or use it, or whatever, but it changes hands -- it comes from a supplier and is then used, and once used, it cannot be used again. It is therefore scarce.
Now, digital media, written works, pieces of music, and the like, are somewhat different. They are information, and intangible. They are usually distributed on a physical medium, such as a book, a CD, or a floppy disk. In the past, the scarcity of the medium of transfer provided the scarcity for the product. By this I mean, for example, that before the printing press, books needed to be copied by hand. This was a tremendous amount of work, and so even though technically I could sell a book I'd written to a friend and he could meticulously copy it by hand in order to sell a new copy without giving me a cut, this was rather unlikely to happen.
Well, with the invention of the printing press, computers, cassette tapes, and the like, this "hurdle" stopped being so high, and so copyright was invented. Here's the idea: these things, these "ideas", which can be copied easily, are of real value, but they aren't scarce. And unfortunately, our economic system doesn't work well with such resources. Because if you give me a book you've written, with a little bit of work and a printing press, I could start printing millions of copies, selling those, and giving you nothing for it.
Worried that artists, authors, and the like would be reticent to publish their works given that they could be copied so easily, Congress passes copyright law. Essentially, copyright law says, only the copyright holder (usually the author) can copy this material, for a limited period of time. This "creates" scarcity for a product that by its nature is not scarce, hence the "artificial" modifier.
Now, the reason copyright is not indefinite is because it is meant to make music/books/etc act like a real scarce resource -- for example, the coal I was talking about earlier. You own a mine, but eventually, you'll run out of coal -- the mine will stop producing, or whatever. Realistically, you'll only be able to sell a scarce resource for a limited period of time, because eventually, you'll run out.
Do you understand? Copyright is meant to make a non-scarce resource behave as if it were scarce, to allow its creation to be economically viable, because Congress recognized that sometimes stuff that isn't scarce still has value. It's an economic hack, really.
It isn't a bad idea.
But the fact that this scarcity is artificial does play a part when you start talking about theft, because if you steal some of my coal, that's one less piece of coal I can sell -- my coal really is scarce. But with a composition, a file, or a published work, it isn't the same, because the scarcity is created by temporal limits, not by limits on the number of times you can make a sale, as would be the case with any tangible object you tried to sell.
So when I infringe your copyright, I do not cost you money. I simply (perhaps) make money on something, without giving you a cut.
These two things are both bad, but they are not the same (which is worse or whether one even is worse depends on your POV). But we must make the distinction legally (and we do).
While I certainly agree with the spirit of your post, and am likewise rankled by the unfairness of it all, the point we're trying to make here is that theft has a very specific definition, and that copyright infringement does not apply, because nothing tangible is being physically taken.
Your post unfortunately also misuses the term theft, thus further confusing the term. While we as the public certainly ought to eventually reappropriate works after a reasonable period of time, the constant legal loopholing and campaigning by corps to prevent their copyrighted materials from lapsing into the public domain does not constitute theft. There is nothing physical being taken from its original owner, for two reasons: one, copyrighted works aren't tangible objects, and two, we didn't own them originally.
Now, despite the fact that I'm being anal retentive about the term "theft", I agree with your point. We (the people) agreed contractually (copyright law) to give a creator of a work a temporary monopoly on his or her created resource, in exchange for the understanding that after a reasonable time has passed, it would enter the public domain.
This artificial limitation exists solely because in a "Free" (in the libertarian sense) society, there would be no such protection, and any author of a work would be unable to publish his or her work without someone copying it. We give up our right to copy for a temporary period of time to encourage artists to publish. It's as simple as that.
Essentially, the political lobbying done by Disney and Co is an erosion of our rights; we gave up those negative rights to allow Disney to make money on Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy for a temporary period, and now Disney wants us to give up our rights for an even longer period of time so they can make even more money.
I don't know about you, but that rankles me.
But it still isn't theft.
In that case, you're dealing with a calculated loss. When a record store buys CDs, they intend to sell them at a profit. There is an element of risk; some of those may not be sold. But the bet is, they will make enough on what they do sell to recoup the price of the albums they don't. And many of those albums, if in the store long enough, will actually sell -- if someone is willing to steal them, there must be demand of some sort, right?
The issue with P2P and other digital copying systems is that what is being "stolen" is not a CD, but rather the content on the CD. So if I copy your CD, for example, you still have your CD.
I think the GPs point is a good one. Copyright infringement is a serious offense in our current legal system, but it is not theft. Whether or not this makes it less serious is a matter of personal opinion, and if you get caught, a matter of the judge's opinion. But the two crimes are fundamentally not the same, because, as the GP said, if you steal a CD, you are taking something the record store paid money for, and you are taking it away from them -- they cannot sell it once you've stolen it, and recoup their loss.
If you just copy it though, they can still sell it. No one loses money, but admittedly, no one made money when you copied the work.
The argument is that they should have been able to make money. Do you agree with that?
You know, if you ever actually talked to girls, you'd realize they find men rather difficult to "maintain" as well.
So really all your post manages to do is insult women. They aren't computer equipment.
Believe it or not, there are actually girls that read Slashdot, and this kind of thing is offensive. Please don't do it. And if you see it, don't mod it up.
I know it sucks to be PC, but it wouldn't hurt to be sensitive to other people, just for once. If you practice, you might actually get laid someday.
Certification is a load of crap. Standards provide a clearly written definition of how something is supposed to work; if an implementation doesn't work the way the standard outlines it, it is by definition buggy. We don't need certifiers to "look it over" for us; they're just humans anyway and in an open source project we have many more eyeballs than they do. Witness how POSIX compliant the Linux kernel is, despite having never been certified.
Certification is a marketing thing, really. An appeal to authority (ie, standards org says we comply, and since you trust them, you can trust us!)
As for just "doing what Windows does", this is a very bad idea, for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that if we accept this, we'll always be playing catchup to MS's latest bug. Everytime they release a new ACPI parser, it's gonna have some new quirk in it -- they'll probably start doing it on purpose once they realize we're trying to emulate them.
No, far better to get the OEM manufacturers on the standards boat. They claim to comply with a published standard; we can use this against them when they obviously don't. It would be bad form for them to claim to comply when they don't -- in the US, this is even illegal (false advertising), and as such a lot of them are willing to fix their bugs if we just report them. Since they mostly only test with Windows, I'll wager, they may honestly not even be aware of them.
Linux is becoming more and more important, believe it or not. People might not run it on the desktop much, but they run it on servers, and they want stuff to just work. It's becoming stupider and stupider for OEM manufacturers to break compatibility with Linux, because if word gets out that their hardware won't run Linux or runs it poorly, they'll get bad press. This is why they care.
We're past the point (really) of chasing MS's coattails. Most small web companies are using low end PC-compats running Linux, not dual Xeons running Win Server 2k3. We don't need to be the world's main desktop OS to matter.
We're already very important.
shouldn't that be 'cogito que cogito ergo cogito que sum'?