* They're not banning access to the internet from non-municipal sources. This is not giving the government "ownership and control of access" to the internet. This is not analogous to "turn[ing] over all the printing presses" etc. to the government. It's like saying that because the FBI has a web site, this means that the government is controlling web sites, so therefore they are impeding our rights because everyone should be able to have a web site yet they control web sites.
* These are the governments of towns and cities (AKA "municipalities"). This is not The Government that could send in the jack-booted thugs at any moment that we've all been hearing so much about. One wonders what you would think if the state government successfully banned city governments from offering wireless access? That's a government, too, and that shouldn't be trusted...
* There is a scuff on your tin foil hat. I recommend Stop & Shop "heavy duty" tin foil as it is slightly thicker and lasts much longer. Remember to keep the shiny side pointed away from your head.
Please. Star Wars was always about special effects and nothing else.
The first Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars of that year. It did not do so because of only technical acheivement. It was because it had compelling story and characters.
Look at Chewbacca. He can only speak in unintelligible grunts, yet he is a complex character with conflicting traits whom we end up caring about by the end of of the movie. Look at Jar-Jar Binks. His only trait is that he's annoying, and by the end of the story the audience wants him dead.
There are scenes in Star Wars that are so memorable that they've become shared cultural cliches. The garbage-smasher scene. Luke's swing across the abyss. They Cantina scene, or Leia as Jabba the Hutt's slave. These scenes have been parodied countless, countless times in other contexts. It's hard to imagine any such equivalent in the Phantom Menace.
Look at the Imperial Walkers. We first see them as tiny, blurry ants through the underpowered lens of a rebel infantrymen's binoculars. We see them growing larger until they're huge and seemingly unstoppable, all the while moving slowly and formidably. This is dramatic structure. You find yourself caring about whether or not the rebels win, you feel their frustration along with them, and the slow unveiling of the walkers makes it more believable -- not the beautiful CGI. They're actually ugly, industrial-looking, rigid and inflexible.
Try to think of anything like this in the prequels.
The millenium falcoln. The Death Star. The Imperial Walkers. They are cool not because of the fantastic rendering. They are cool because they are scary, or dramatic, and their properties are interesting and novel even if only in a purely theoretical way, not simply because of how realistic they look.
Star Wars was always about the human imagination. The special effects were always only a medium for that imagination. You cannot capture the human imagination with wooden characters doing uninteresting things. Chewbacca is a 8 foot tall hairy monster that can't speak English but we end up caring about him because of his human-like complexities. Without stuff like that, all that animation is like a math textbook with a pretty dust jacket.
Feudalism is not free market... therefore, it must be socialist?
Oligarchy isn't free market... therefore, it must be socialism?
If socialism is not capitalism, that doesn't mean that everything that is not capitalism is socialism. The logical error should be pretty damn obvious. Draw a freaking Venn Diagram.
Neither kind of political or economic system has a monopoly on the other. Hitler and Stalin, acquired total, unquestionable control over their political systems, which they promptly used to kill everyone in sight. If a democratically decides to give subsidy payments to the poor, this has nothing to do with that. Get a grip.
I watched some of the originals (originals, mind you -- VHS and everything) this weekend. Conclusion: I didn't enjoy them as much having seen the first 3. They were actually made worse by the prequels.
The backstory between Vader and Obi-wan was much, much more interesting to have to imagine yourself than Lucas' fluid, undulating, oscillating animation and flat story, characters and acting.
You know what? The special effects in the original, non-special edition Star Wars movies looks cheesy. You know what? It doesn't matter. I don't care that I can't see the ice creature on Hoth very well. Does the fact that we can't see Vader's ships landing on Hoth affect our enjoyment of the movie? No! You know what? HUMAN IMAGINATION IS BETTER THAN ANY CGI. If you can imply something, fine, sometimes it's actually as good as spending a cajillion dollars on the CGI.
What imagination needs is compelling, interesting characters. And story. If you can make the audience want to imagine the characters, they will. And that's as good, if not better, as rendering the same thing in CGI.
The prequels made the characters worse. Pah.
Someone needs to go back in time to 1986 QUICK and kill George Lucas. OR, for the faint of heart, convince him that it would be really cool if he made the prequels using ONLY 1978 technology. I guarantee that would have made a much more interesting movie.
They were probably listening when the Wall Street Journal announced a couple weeks ago that its online subscription service brings in much more than its dead-tree business.
A pretty rock which somebody found in a hole is nice, but a man-made diamond is a testament to the wonders of modern engineering.
So are aluminum soda cans. Doesn't make them valuable.
What makes things valuable is this: brainless obedience to marketing.
This aluminum can may look cheap, but it's actually a limited special edition of which if you collect all of the varieties can mail in and earn "cola points" that can get you the luxury of this new credit card...
If DeBeers can run a few ads around Valentine's Day to create the illusion that mined stones are worth more than they really are...
I for one welcome with open arms the end of the De Beers reign of terror. De Beers is probably the most evil monopolist ever to scourge the face of the Earth.
You think Microsoft is bad? Microsoft never used armies of prison labor. Apartheid prison labor. Or bought their products second-hand from murderous revolutionaries.
Read any history of De Beers, it's pretty lurid. And don't forget that every girl in the world wants a diamond engagement ring is a cultural rule that was constructed from scratch by De Beers' marketing in the 20th century. They control most of the diamond mines in the world.
If they could just sell any arbitrary amount and still get the $15 per unit... then sure, they should just produce as many as they possibly can. What if they produced 200,000 for $15? 1,000,000 for $15? The company would be better off, so they should make the million units. If the demand was always there, then yes, there would be no point to such tactics.
The whole point is that demand is limited, and there aren't always people out there willing to snap these toys up. This makes sure that every single one gets snapped up, full price, and the total amount sold by the end will far exceed what they ever could have expected without doing this sort of thing.
Of course, they don't actually have to limit supply, they can just limit perceived supply. Haven't you ever noticed that every late-night commericial promises "limited quantities available" and "limited time offer" etc? Another tactic of fad marketers is a big PR scheme to try and push stories into the media about how stores are running out of said product...
I'd argue that Nintendo might be better served waiting until *after* the Christmas season. There's been several "OMG I must have!" Christmas toys that nobody can find, everybody's going onto Ebay and bidding hundreds of dollars for.
You see, not being able to get it makes people want it more. It's fairly standard marketing practice to actually artificially make your product more scarce, because it makes people want it more.
Many of those fad Christmas gifts were hard to find... because it was all planned that way by the people making them. Intentionally making shipments erratic, etc. There's no reason why they couldn't flood the market with the product... but then nobody would want it as badly. Of course once the Christmas season they give up on the charade and just ship them normally.
Remember when Gmail was "invite-only" and everyone that you know couldn't get an invite fast enough? Again, articially-induced scarcity.
Nintendo is losing big by missing Christmas, a time when demand is typically quintupled. They would miss it only if they had no other choice.
Einstein's original papers should be free to everyone in the world.
APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive.
So does wikipedia.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science.
Yea, why should people have access to the physical laws that make them up?
Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's
What sets of a less prestiguious journal from a more prestigious one?
furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.
What a irrelevant objection. This is probably false; people will silly theories don't need access to physics papers to make up silly theories, and if they did they would know where to look for them.
Even if true this would be a awfully small price to pay to pay let every poor student in the world have free access to some of the greatest achievements of all mankind.
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
Oh come on, is this really a "danger"? Nothing in any open source license says that you keep the right to direction of whatever your code ends up as.
This is like the "danger" that your source code can be "hijacked" in commercial applications if you use the BSD license.
KHTML is not objectively any worse off because of this... Apple isn't hurting them, Apple isn't taking anything away from them, their project is not imperiled in any way. It may make them feel bad that their source is out there with improvements and it's not as easy for them to merge them back into KHTML as they would like. It's quite a mental exercise to try to think of a rational justification for that feeling without becoming extremely vague (try it), one which no open source license could ever protect them.
To borrow a phrase from ABC News' mustachioed libertarian: Gimme a break.
People know a lot more about terrorism than they know what Congress is doing, which is a pity because Congress will always have a much greater effect on our lives. I wonder if that's a coincidence?
Slashdot Mirror
I heard the unenclosed ice scating rink in Hell just finished construction, too.
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt, not swallowed.
--Josh Billings
Did you notice:
* They're not banning access to the internet from non-municipal sources. This is not giving the government "ownership and control of access" to the internet. This is not analogous to "turn[ing] over all the printing presses" etc. to the government. It's like saying that because the FBI has a web site, this means that the government is controlling web sites, so therefore they are impeding our rights because everyone should be able to have a web site yet they control web sites.
* These are the governments of towns and cities (AKA "municipalities"). This is not The Government that could send in the jack-booted thugs at any moment that we've all been hearing so much about. One wonders what you would think if the state government successfully banned city governments from offering wireless access? That's a government, too, and that shouldn't be trusted...
* There is a scuff on your tin foil hat. I recommend Stop & Shop "heavy duty" tin foil as it is slightly thicker and lasts much longer. Remember to keep the shiny side pointed away from your head.
FYI.
Please. Star Wars was always about special effects and nothing else.
The first Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars of that year. It did not do so because of only technical acheivement. It was because it had compelling story and characters.
Look at Chewbacca. He can only speak in unintelligible grunts, yet he is a complex character with conflicting traits whom we end up caring about by the end of of the movie. Look at Jar-Jar Binks. His only trait is that he's annoying, and by the end of the story the audience wants him dead.
There are scenes in Star Wars that are so memorable that they've become shared cultural cliches. The garbage-smasher scene. Luke's swing across the abyss. They Cantina scene, or Leia as Jabba the Hutt's slave. These scenes have been parodied countless, countless times in other contexts. It's hard to imagine any such equivalent in the Phantom Menace.
Look at the Imperial Walkers. We first see them as tiny, blurry ants through the underpowered lens of a rebel infantrymen's binoculars. We see them growing larger until they're huge and seemingly unstoppable, all the while moving slowly and formidably. This is dramatic structure. You find yourself caring about whether or not the rebels win, you feel their frustration along with them, and the slow unveiling of the walkers makes it more believable -- not the beautiful CGI. They're actually ugly, industrial-looking, rigid and inflexible.
Try to think of anything like this in the prequels.
The millenium falcoln. The Death Star. The Imperial Walkers. They are cool not because of the fantastic rendering. They are cool because they are scary, or dramatic, and their properties are interesting and novel even if only in a purely theoretical way, not simply because of how realistic they look.
Star Wars was always about the human imagination. The special effects were always only a medium for that imagination. You cannot capture the human imagination with wooden characters doing uninteresting things. Chewbacca is a 8 foot tall hairy monster that can't speak English but we end up caring about him because of his human-like complexities. Without stuff like that, all that animation is like a math textbook with a pretty dust jacket.
NASA also wouldn't dump boosters into populated areas in the first place.
Feudalism is not free market... therefore, it must be socialist?
Oligarchy isn't free market... therefore, it must be socialism?
If socialism is not capitalism, that doesn't mean that everything that is not capitalism is socialism. The logical error should be pretty damn obvious. Draw a freaking Venn Diagram.
When you say "political socialism" you seem to mean totalitarian dictatorship.
When you say "economic socialism" you mean what everyone else in the world means with the word socialism.
It seems to me that you confound the two (totalitarianism and "economic socialism") when you don't bother with your "political" or "economic" labels.
You're confusing economic and political systems.
China = capitalism + no democracy
Sweden = socialism + democracy
Neither kind of political or economic system has a monopoly on the other. Hitler and Stalin, acquired total, unquestionable control over their political systems, which they promptly used to kill everyone in sight. If a democratically decides to give subsidy payments to the poor, this has nothing to do with that. Get a grip.
Fucking socialist bastards.
Yeah, social democracy always leads to such onerous copyright laws
I watched some of the originals (originals, mind you -- VHS and everything) this weekend. Conclusion: I didn't enjoy them as much having seen the first 3. They were actually made worse by the prequels.
The backstory between Vader and Obi-wan was much, much more interesting to have to imagine yourself than Lucas' fluid, undulating, oscillating animation and flat story, characters and acting.
You know what? The special effects in the original, non-special edition Star Wars movies looks cheesy. You know what? It doesn't matter. I don't care that I can't see the ice creature on Hoth very well. Does the fact that we can't see Vader's ships landing on Hoth affect our enjoyment of the movie? No! You know what? HUMAN IMAGINATION IS BETTER THAN ANY CGI. If you can imply something, fine, sometimes it's actually as good as spending a cajillion dollars on the CGI.
What imagination needs is compelling, interesting characters. And story. If you can make the audience want to imagine the characters, they will. And that's as good, if not better, as rendering the same thing in CGI.
The prequels made the characters worse. Pah.
Someone needs to go back in time to 1986 QUICK and kill George Lucas. OR, for the faint of heart, convince him that it would be really cool if he made the prequels using ONLY 1978 technology. I guarantee that would have made a much more interesting movie.
Don't worry, people should just use Mono for Longhorn.
"Gone, the good story is. Begun, the computer animation has, hardly notice the difference you can."
Yea, but I wish somebody had shown them the $14 steadicam site first...
They were probably listening when the Wall Street Journal announced a couple weeks ago that its online subscription service brings in much more than its dead-tree business.
A pretty rock which somebody found in a hole is nice, but a man-made diamond is a testament to the wonders of modern engineering.
So are aluminum soda cans. Doesn't make them valuable.
What makes things valuable is this: brainless obedience to marketing.
This aluminum can may look cheap, but it's actually a limited special edition of which if you collect all of the varieties can mail in and earn "cola points" that can get you the luxury of this new credit card...
If DeBeers can run a few ads around Valentine's Day to create the illusion that mined stones are worth more than they really are...
So like me you've never had a girlfriend, either?
Intel, AMD and IBM don't work the way the diamond industry does. That is, if they commit a crime it's going to be white-collar.
De Beers is much more flexible.
I for one welcome with open arms the end of the De Beers reign of terror. De Beers is probably the most evil monopolist ever to scourge the face of the Earth.
You think Microsoft is bad? Microsoft never used armies of prison labor. Apartheid prison labor. Or bought their products second-hand from murderous revolutionaries.
Read any history of De Beers, it's pretty lurid. And don't forget that every girl in the world wants a diamond engagement ring is a cultural rule that was constructed from scratch by De Beers' marketing in the 20th century. They control most of the diamond mines in the world.
Evil bastards. Good riddance.
If they could just sell any arbitrary amount and still get the $15 per unit... then sure, they should just produce as many as they possibly can. What if they produced 200,000 for $15? 1,000,000 for $15? The company would be better off, so they should make the million units. If the demand was always there, then yes, there would be no point to such tactics.
The whole point is that demand is limited, and there aren't always people out there willing to snap these toys up. This makes sure that every single one gets snapped up, full price, and the total amount sold by the end will far exceed what they ever could have expected without doing this sort of thing.
Of course, they don't actually have to limit supply, they can just limit perceived supply. Haven't you ever noticed that every late-night commericial promises "limited quantities available" and "limited time offer" etc? Another tactic of fad marketers is a big PR scheme to try and push stories into the media about how stores are running out of said product...
I'd argue that Nintendo might be better served waiting until *after* the Christmas season. There's been several "OMG I must have!" Christmas toys that nobody can find, everybody's going onto Ebay and bidding hundreds of dollars for.
You see, not being able to get it makes people want it more. It's fairly standard marketing practice to actually artificially make your product more scarce, because it makes people want it more.
Many of those fad Christmas gifts were hard to find... because it was all planned that way by the people making them. Intentionally making shipments erratic, etc. There's no reason why they couldn't flood the market with the product... but then nobody would want it as badly. Of course once the Christmas season they give up on the charade and just ship them normally.
Remember when Gmail was "invite-only" and everyone that you know couldn't get an invite fast enough? Again, articially-induced scarcity.
Nintendo is losing big by missing Christmas, a time when demand is typically quintupled. They would miss it only if they had no other choice.
Thank god we have Robet X. Cringely to explain these things for us.
sshh America's Shiniest Objects is on right now.
Einstein's original papers should be free to everyone in the world.
APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive.
So does wikipedia.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science.
Yea, why should people have access to the physical laws that make them up?
Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's
What sets of a less prestiguious journal from a more prestigious one?
furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.
What a irrelevant objection. This is probably false; people will silly theories don't need access to physics papers to make up silly theories, and if they did they would know where to look for them.
Even if true this would be a awfully small price to pay to pay let every poor student in the world have free access to some of the greatest achievements of all mankind.
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
Oh come on, is this really a "danger"? Nothing in any open source license says that you keep the right to direction of whatever your code ends up as.
This is like the "danger" that your source code can be "hijacked" in commercial applications if you use the BSD license.
KHTML is not objectively any worse off because of this... Apple isn't hurting them, Apple isn't taking anything away from them, their project is not imperiled in any way. It may make them feel bad that their source is out there with improvements and it's not as easy for them to merge them back into KHTML as they would like. It's quite a mental exercise to try to think of a rational justification for that feeling without becoming extremely vague (try it), one which no open source license could ever protect them.
To borrow a phrase from ABC News' mustachioed libertarian: Gimme a break.
People know a lot more about terrorism than they know what Congress is doing, which is a pity because Congress will always have a much greater effect on our lives. I wonder if that's a coincidence?
Two sides to this coin, man.
What if the Freedom of Information Act was up for renewal every few years? Do you think they would be able to "find the time" to renew it every time?