can i ask what you've written? after reading a few of your posts in this topic and previous ones, I'd be interested to try some of your (I presume) commercial science fiction work:)
I live in the UK and I've imported over $3000 in Region 1 DVDs from the US/Canada. In Blu Ray happy DRM land - I can't. For I'm lumped in with Africa and Australia. I can't even import Japanese DVDs because they've defected from DVD region 2 (same as the UK) to BluRay region 1 (same as the US) Meanwhile my HDDVD collection is growing impressively due to the strong pound/dollar exchange rate, and the readily available set of import sites that offer around 40% discount off MRSP.
Jumping into bed with MS may kill my little internal Apple fanboy a little, but with an xbox 360 that doesn't even implement HDCP for 1080p, and a very cheap HDDVD addon that can also be used on Windows (if and when I boot camp) - Blu Ray just cannot compete, even if they never ever used their region locking scheme.
You obviously missed the part about Edge saying they're rating games that are still playable now. Not that they're technologically playable - I'm sure there's like 3 billion java SpaceWar applets (and after all, that was the first video game (AFAIK) which should almost certainly give it a position in the Top 100) but that they're still enjoyable by today's standards.
As in little Joe Bloggs who never lived through the 80s, and didn't know the pleasure of blowing on cartridges to get them playing on the NES or listening to ZX spectrums screech as they load - this is the set of games he should play to get a feel for gaming heritage.
Personally I'd have loved it if Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri was in there - however I know that playing it now would be fun, but it has essentially been bettered in most if not all respects by Halo.
Having revisited Mario 1 last weekend (emulated via Mario All-Stars) I can kind of feel that they're right. Games now are far more expansive - they're a different prospect. (I still have foremost respect for Mario - and I'm of the opinion that Mario World should be higher than Mario 64 - but that doesn't blinker myself to the fact that people demand more from games now than they did when I was a kid playing an hour at a time after school)
Planetes is Science Fact in a lot of ways - admittedly the story sometimes goes into the zany (as is necessary to keep an anime about space garbage collectors fun) but for every zany episode, there's 2 or 3 serious, intelligent and sometimes even touching episodes where a lot of actual thought and science has went in - amazingly, it does work really well, and there's very little treknobabble or convenient inventions in sight.
And, as you see in the anime, space debris does threaten lives.
And I'd like to chastise Russell for his efforts and say good riddance to a show that molested the corpse of a well loved franchise.
Doctor Who was a glorious series originally. It was dark and subtle and magnificent without too much self-importance, and it remained fantasy escapism.
The new version is Doctor Who lite: for the ADD generation. Fart humour, politics that are transparently disguised as the average housebrick, and commercialisation on a massive scale (no I don't want Dalek bubble bath, a Cyberman helmet, or a UV pen disguised as the sonic screwdriver, thankyou.) made a mockery of the original series. Joking that a jukebox is an iPod, and then playing Britney Spear's Toxic only goes to demonstrate precisely how out of touch Russell and his writing team are with the spirit of the original show. I'll give the cast their due - they tried their best, and both 'new' doctors could have fitted in with the old series well, if their scripts weren't garbage.
The only remotely satisfying episode the new series offered us was the creepy 'gasmask kids' episode - which was clever without becoming the shambles the rest of the series has become.
It's a sad day to know that new doctor who will never regain the glory and prestige of the old series, but then that's tempered with a glad feeling that it won't sink any lower into the steaming pile of excrement that's consumed it.
I upgraded all the songs I could to iTunes+ format - it cost me £4.40. I know that I can burn them as many times as I like (I guess watermarking the CDs would break the red book audio format?) and I can share them between my work PC, my home macs, and potentially with my girlfriend. I've got no intention of giving them away to strangers, although I'm happy to provide a 'mix tape' to my friends if they're interested.
This seems the reasonable, sensible solution to provide sufficient revenue protection for music companies, without being obtuse or unnecessarily limiting what a user can do with them. Here's hoping the music companies take note, rather than burying their heads in the sand, singing 'la la la' and demanding menaces money from everyone that has a P2P client sharing something with a name similar to any song/album released ever.
Lik-Sang imported PSPs from Hong Kong to the UK mainland, but weren't based in the UK. Sony prosecuted them under the UK copyright/trademarks legislation. They won. In defending their case, Lik-Sang went under.
Even though Hong Kong is not even a UK territory, the UK courts managed to sink their business by imposing Sony's legal fees (iirc).
CD-Wow will probably be another casualty as the courts directly contravene the spirit of a free market. Yay.:(
Too much, and that's why we should pay the good companies all our hard earned cash to drill giant tubes for all our torrents, MP3s, smut and VoIP calls. Or at least, wasn't that what they were arguing for?;)
heh, if you think the upstage is stylish and feature packed, I've got some flares with combat trouser pockets and a wife-beater with knitted bandolier to sell you.:P
The idea of constantly turning over an item to achieve separation of functionality just makes me wonder whether it's an MP3 player glued onto a phone and firmware hacks to achieve comms between the two...
Who will be turning between the front and back to use it? That must be a very uncomfortable way to do things if you're flitting between phone and MP3 player. Why have 2 screens on opposing sides (before anyone makes the comparison - it's not a DS - they can't both face you at the same time) when you could cut costs and make a better product by using one?
> Hmm... Did their sales take a dive? (The company is www.advfilms.com)
Iirc they experimented with Gantz releasing the DVDs very cheaply ($15 iirc - I'm from the UK but import so I'm not sure exactly what it was) but with two episodes per disk. Now the recent ADV releases have been 4-5 episodes per disk, but then a lot of the series recently are only half seasons (13 eps) and Funimation is making a big land grab towards what were formerly 'safe' ADV prospects for licencing.
I've always felt that Geneon were the best though. They at least push out a very cheap thinpak once standard sales dry up:)
> Some anime series are overpriced: the maker puts 5 episodes on the first DVD, whittling it down to 2 episodes (on a $30 DVD) on the last.
Recently they've stopped doing that. Iirc the last disk that did that was Chobits. But most series now are 6 disks long, rather than 7 and average 4 episodes per DVD.
The anime Planetes really isn't so far from the truth after all...
(if you haven't seen it, or think that anime is all about tentacles, schoolgirls, product marketing, or bulging muscles - it's an anime about a team of people who clean up space for a living. It's well worth seeing.)
The best thing about petrol tax compared to road pricing as well is that it actually is relevant to the car you drive and how economical that car is. A gas guzzler will consume more petrol per mile and thus be taxed higher than an economical runabout or hybrid. There's simply no need for jeeps and land rovers in city areas.
Admittedly petrol tax won't change congestion, but that's a different kettle of fish. Living near one of the most poorly designed roads (the two lane A1 motorway nr Newcastle) that NEEDS widening for both safety and flow of traffic, it's frustrating yes, but I still think congestion is a lesser evil than road pricing.
> we obey laws that are locally convenient, not too intrusive, and not plainly a bad idea
unfortunately far too many don't have decent judgement when obeying those three rules. More and more people aren't stopping for amber and red lights, I note.:( Nevermind lane discipline, behaviour at roundabouts, etc:(
I don't think there is that limited a history, stare at history, and you'll see a very clear picture:
MegaDrive (Genesis): Successful but still a flop, lost to inferior SNES Dreamcast: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS1 N64: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS1 Xbox: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS2 Gamecube: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS2 N-Gage: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior GBA PSP: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior DS (although one might argue it's not dead yet, the stats seem to suggest they've got a long way to go to win) Gizmondo: Unsuccessful flop, lost to inferior DS
Nevermind the Atari Jaguar or NeoGeos...
On my own biased side, I'm looking forward to Sony having a real chance of losing. I'm sick of their gaming stranglehold, and will enjoy seeing a good Wii60 combo reign over this generation - 360 with the advanced tech games, Wii with the innovation.
Plus I feel they deserve it for their bully-boy tactics and suicidal urges to use their own formats (not just recently but also in the past)
fair point. My apologies for the generalisation - unfortunately I've only ever encountered the rabid foaming at the mouth sort of vegan who give the rest of vegan society a bad name - the equivalent of the preachers wearing the sandwich boards with bible passages painted on them - thus my devil's advocate arguments. I find they can be cured of their zealotry fairly easily when they're confronted with some of the truths I've used in my parent posts. I don't want to upset any of them to tears, and haven't ever done so, but I find removing their high horse works wonders to gain mutual respect and trust.
Luckily/. seems fairly tolerant of debate (i.e. no troll or flamebait moderations) when there's at least some basic reasoning and effort to make a decent argument...
Plants at least demonstrate reactions - the original post that I made pointed out - they are aware and respond to attackers, and can warn other plants via hormones. Milk does not possess these abilities. Without the introduction of foreign organisms it is inert - plants grow, respire, reproduce, seek light, food, attack and defend. That is the incongruity. Vegetation lives. And arguably, vegetation provides us with nice breathable O2 - rather a useful benefit, wouldn't you say?
So choosing not to eat meat, drink dairy products, or use leather due to the suffering of animals, but then forcing one's dietary needs on a lower part of the food chain is hypocritical. If vegans truly and honestly cared for living creatures, they'd commit suicide before they inflicted any more damage to the planet's ecology. But then, because they do not, they are inherently valuing their lives over a multitude of other living things. Which defeats their own argument that they are protecting life and preventing suffering. They're just redistributing it to something that isn't so cute and fluffy, that can't stare them back in the eyes.
That is my argument.
Slashdot Mirror
surely: "My eyes! The goggles do something useless!" ;)
can i ask what you've written? after reading a few of your posts in this topic and previous ones, I'd be interested to try some of your (I presume) commercial science fiction work :)
precisely the reason I went HD-DVD too.
I live in the UK and I've imported over $3000 in Region 1 DVDs from the US/Canada. In Blu Ray happy DRM land - I can't. For I'm lumped in with Africa and Australia. I can't even import Japanese DVDs because they've defected from DVD region 2 (same as the UK) to BluRay region 1 (same as the US)
Meanwhile my HDDVD collection is growing impressively due to the strong pound/dollar exchange rate, and the readily available set of import sites that offer around 40% discount off MRSP.
Jumping into bed with MS may kill my little internal Apple fanboy a little, but with an xbox 360 that doesn't even implement HDCP for 1080p, and a very cheap HDDVD addon that can also be used on Windows (if and when I boot camp) - Blu Ray just cannot compete, even if they never ever used their region locking scheme.
You obviously missed the part about Edge saying they're rating games that are still playable now. Not that they're technologically playable - I'm sure there's like 3 billion java SpaceWar applets (and after all, that was the first video game (AFAIK) which should almost certainly give it a position in the Top 100) but that they're still enjoyable by today's standards.
As in little Joe Bloggs who never lived through the 80s, and didn't know the pleasure of blowing on cartridges to get them playing on the NES or listening to ZX spectrums screech as they load - this is the set of games he should play to get a feel for gaming heritage.
Personally I'd have loved it if Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri was in there - however I know that playing it now would be fun, but it has essentially been bettered in most if not all respects by Halo.
Having revisited Mario 1 last weekend (emulated via Mario All-Stars) I can kind of feel that they're right. Games now are far more expansive - they're a different prospect. (I still have foremost respect for Mario - and I'm of the opinion that Mario World should be higher than Mario 64 - but that doesn't blinker myself to the fact that people demand more from games now than they did when I was a kid playing an hour at a time after school)
mod parent up.
Planetes is Science Fact in a lot of ways - admittedly the story sometimes goes into the zany (as is necessary to keep an anime about space garbage collectors fun) but for every zany episode, there's 2 or 3 serious, intelligent and sometimes even touching episodes where a lot of actual thought and science has went in - amazingly, it does work really well, and there's very little treknobabble or convenient inventions in sight.
And, as you see in the anime, space debris does threaten lives.
I used all my mod points this morning, but I'd have modded you up :)
404: blinds/curtains/shutters not found.
And I'd like to chastise Russell for his efforts and say good riddance to a show that molested the corpse of a well loved franchise.
Doctor Who was a glorious series originally. It was dark and subtle and magnificent without too much self-importance, and it remained fantasy escapism.
The new version is Doctor Who lite: for the ADD generation. Fart humour, politics that are transparently disguised as the average housebrick, and commercialisation on a massive scale (no I don't want Dalek bubble bath, a Cyberman helmet, or a UV pen disguised as the sonic screwdriver, thankyou.) made a mockery of the original series. Joking that a jukebox is an iPod, and then playing Britney Spear's Toxic only goes to demonstrate precisely how out of touch Russell and his writing team are with the spirit of the original show. I'll give the cast their due - they tried their best, and both 'new' doctors could have fitted in with the old series well, if their scripts weren't garbage.
The only remotely satisfying episode the new series offered us was the creepy 'gasmask kids' episode - which was clever without becoming the shambles the rest of the series has become.
It's a sad day to know that new doctor who will never regain the glory and prestige of the old series, but then that's tempered with a glad feeling that it won't sink any lower into the steaming pile of excrement that's consumed it.
agreed.
I upgraded all the songs I could to iTunes+ format - it cost me £4.40. I know that I can burn them as many times as I like (I guess watermarking the CDs would break the red book audio format?) and I can share them between my work PC, my home macs, and potentially with my girlfriend. I've got no intention of giving them away to strangers, although I'm happy to provide a 'mix tape' to my friends if they're interested.
This seems the reasonable, sensible solution to provide sufficient revenue protection for music companies, without being obtuse or unnecessarily limiting what a user can do with them. Here's hoping the music companies take note, rather than burying their heads in the sand, singing 'la la la' and demanding menaces money from everyone that has a P2P client sharing something with a name similar to any song/album released ever.
Why not ask Lik-Sang that?
:(
Lik-Sang imported PSPs from Hong Kong to the UK mainland, but weren't based in the UK. Sony prosecuted them under the UK copyright/trademarks legislation. They won. In defending their case, Lik-Sang went under.
Even though Hong Kong is not even a UK territory, the UK courts managed to sink their business by imposing Sony's legal fees (iirc).
CD-Wow will probably be another casualty as the courts directly contravene the spirit of a free market. Yay.
Too much, and that's why we should pay the good companies all our hard earned cash to drill giant tubes for all our torrents, MP3s, smut and VoIP calls. Or at least, wasn't that what they were arguing for?
heh, if you think the upstage is stylish and feature packed, I've got some flares with combat trouser pockets and a wife-beater with knitted bandolier to sell you. :P
The idea of constantly turning over an item to achieve separation of functionality just makes me wonder whether it's an MP3 player glued onto a phone and firmware hacks to achieve comms between the two...
:(
Who will be turning between the front and back to use it? That must be a very uncomfortable way to do things if you're flitting between phone and MP3 player.
Why have 2 screens on opposing sides (before anyone makes the comparison - it's not a DS - they can't both face you at the same time) when you could cut costs and make a better product by using one?
Adventurous design - yes. Thoughtless design? Probably.
> Hmm... Did their sales take a dive? (The company is www.advfilms.com)
:)
Iirc they experimented with Gantz releasing the DVDs very cheaply ($15 iirc - I'm from the UK but import so I'm not sure exactly what it was) but with two episodes per disk. Now the recent ADV releases have been 4-5 episodes per disk, but then a lot of the series recently are only half seasons (13 eps) and Funimation is making a big land grab towards what were formerly 'safe' ADV prospects for licencing.
I've always felt that Geneon were the best though. They at least push out a very cheap thinpak once standard sales dry up
> Some anime series are overpriced: the maker puts 5 episodes on the first DVD, whittling it down to 2 episodes (on a $30 DVD) on the last.
Recently they've stopped doing that. Iirc the last disk that did that was Chobits. But most series now are 6 disks long, rather than 7 and average 4 episodes per DVD.
It would probably be a lame beat-em-up between the main characters anyway.
I wish I had mod points.
:)
That was a really interesting story, and without trying to be all touchy feely - thanks for sharing
The anime Planetes really isn't so far from the truth after all...
(if you haven't seen it, or think that anime is all about tentacles, schoolgirls, product marketing, or bulging muscles - it's an anime about a team of people who clean up space for a living. It's well worth seeing.)
The best thing about petrol tax compared to road pricing as well is that it actually is relevant to the car you drive and how economical that car is. A gas guzzler will consume more petrol per mile and thus be taxed higher than an economical runabout or hybrid. There's simply no need for jeeps and land rovers in city areas.
Admittedly petrol tax won't change congestion, but that's a different kettle of fish. Living near one of the most poorly designed roads (the two lane A1 motorway nr Newcastle) that NEEDS widening for both safety and flow of traffic, it's frustrating yes, but I still think congestion is a lesser evil than road pricing.
I'm pretty sure the lion(s) did...
> we obey laws that are locally convenient, not too intrusive, and not plainly a bad idea unfortunately far too many don't have decent judgement when obeying those three rules. More and more people aren't stopping for amber and red lights, I note. :( Nevermind lane discipline, behaviour at roundabouts, etc :(
excellent, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that immediately thought that.
I don't think there is that limited a history, stare at history, and you'll see a very clear picture:
MegaDrive (Genesis): Successful but still a flop, lost to inferior SNES
Dreamcast: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS1
N64: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS1
Xbox: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS2
Gamecube: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior PS2
N-Gage: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior GBA
PSP: Reasonably successful but still a flop, lost to inferior DS (although one might argue it's not dead yet, the stats seem to suggest they've got a long way to go to win)
Gizmondo: Unsuccessful flop, lost to inferior DS
Nevermind the Atari Jaguar or NeoGeos...
On my own biased side, I'm looking forward to Sony having a real chance of losing. I'm sick of their gaming stranglehold, and will enjoy seeing a good Wii60 combo reign over this generation - 360 with the advanced tech games, Wii with the innovation.
Plus I feel they deserve it for their bully-boy tactics and suicidal urges to use their own formats (not just recently but also in the past)
fair point. My apologies for the generalisation - unfortunately I've only ever encountered the rabid foaming at the mouth sort of vegan who give the rest of vegan society a bad name - the equivalent of the preachers wearing the sandwich boards with bible passages painted on them - thus my devil's advocate arguments. I find they can be cured of their zealotry fairly easily when they're confronted with some of the truths I've used in my parent posts. I don't want to upset any of them to tears, and haven't ever done so, but I find removing their high horse works wonders to gain mutual respect and trust.
/. seems fairly tolerant of debate (i.e. no troll or flamebait moderations) when there's at least some basic reasoning and effort to make a decent argument...
Luckily
Plants at least demonstrate reactions - the original post that I made pointed out - they are aware and respond to attackers, and can warn other plants via hormones. Milk does not possess these abilities. Without the introduction of foreign organisms it is inert - plants grow, respire, reproduce, seek light, food, attack and defend. That is the incongruity. Vegetation lives. And arguably, vegetation provides us with nice breathable O2 - rather a useful benefit, wouldn't you say? So choosing not to eat meat, drink dairy products, or use leather due to the suffering of animals, but then forcing one's dietary needs on a lower part of the food chain is hypocritical. If vegans truly and honestly cared for living creatures, they'd commit suicide before they inflicted any more damage to the planet's ecology. But then, because they do not, they are inherently valuing their lives over a multitude of other living things. Which defeats their own argument that they are protecting life and preventing suffering. They're just redistributing it to something that isn't so cute and fluffy, that can't stare them back in the eyes. That is my argument.