I agree with you in many respects. But should those rights (burning, shredding, editing) extend to selling?
Perhaps not. But one of the companies in question wasn't doing anything at all to the movie itself. They were selling an add-on product that recognized and blacked/bleeped out "offending" scenes. Is that really any worse than telling somebody, "you should fast-forward past the nude scene 15 minutes into the movie"?
Here's what makes me want to puke on these directors...there are a lot of good good movies out there that had to add a single vile scene so they would be able to get the R rating their marketting folks said would sell better
This is nonsense. Studios lean on directors to cut scenes because their marketing folks tell them an R rating loses money. So if a film has a nude scene, chances are that the director felt that it was absolutely essential to the story he was trying to tell.
Yeah, that was my thought too.... If they're saying it won't be finished until at least the end of 2004, and expected for official "launch" in 2005 - that's too long a wait for the next Playstation.
Microsoft will already have at least 2 more X-Box upgrades on the shelves by then.... virtually guaranteeing it will dominate over the outdated PS2.
I wouldn't be surprised if Sony's goal in releasing this early info is to panic Microsoft into doing just that. The big appeal of consoles to consumers and developers is that they have long product lives relative to computers. Companies that rush the next generation to market too fast get a bad reputation with consumers and developers, as Sega discovered.
If all goes well for the XBox, it may catch up to the PS2 in sales by the end of the year, and maybe in userbase by the end of the following year, so Sony has plenty of time. And if they panic Microsoft into releasing Xbox upgrades, they may have even longer....
This couldn't be more false, in my opinion. I have written, called, e-mailed, and written, called, and e-mailed again, my congresspeople and senators, and I have a stack of e-mails and letters all stating the same generic thing: "I agree with you, but here's how I feel, and why." What does it take to get results from the people that we voted into power?
Convinding them that your letter represents the view of the people and not just a person.
In her 5 point plan, where is the limitation to prevent a group purchace and share? She assumes the existence of secure media, with a single pay to play distribution point. The media will become free after the inital investor gives shares the media with only one who made no payment.
So what? I'd gladly pay a quarter a song for the sheer convenience of using such a site, even if I could with a little more effort borrow the song from a friend or look around and find it free on the net. For a quarter, you don't need scarcity, just good service.
And if a group of people get together to download a bunch of songs they all like from the site and share, so what? Chances are that they'd end up downloading more songs than they would individually, and probably end up spending nearly as much money apiece as they would individually.
There is no natural numbering of dimensions, so time doesn't have to be the 4th. While time can be treated as a dimension, it's easier to think about additional spacial dimensions. Some current models in theoretical physics have a bunch of extra spacial dimensions in addition to time.
Lois isn't sold on the E-Book thing, so she isn't likely to do this.
However, she has "The Mountains of Mourning" up on Baen's free library site. Perhaps she isn't sold on selling E-Books--as opposed to electronically releasing some of your old works to build interest in your current tiltes.
Until portable readers are a lot better (say the size and weight of a paperback, with the text resolution of print, a page flipping mechanism as fast as a real book, and capable of holding at least a 12-hour charge), I'm going to be reading books on paper. But I might well start a book in electronic form, and order the paperback if I get into it.
One possible effect will be all those near misses [slashdot.org] and potential threats [slashdot.org] becoming reality.
No, remember that the earth's total gravity can't change unless we gain mass from somewhere. At asteroid distances, these slight asymmetries are going to average out, and the earth will attract like a point mass.
I think that Escher knew what perfectly well what went in the center. But what goes in the middle is an infinite regress in which objects get indistinguishably small very fast. Ultimately, you have to give up and stop drawing at some point. Escher just decided to stop drawing before everything started repeating, leaving that mysterious blank spot--and a nice prominent place to put his signature.
The only reason the images on the site work is that they blow up the center so that you can see what's really going on. Without the zoom, you can't really make much sense of the center of the picture, anyway.
Which is just as sensationalist as an asteroid on a "collision course." It is utter nonsense to say that we are killing the earth, since the earth isn't alive. And if we managed to kill ourselves (or got wiped out by an asteroid), the earth's biosphere would recover in a geological eyblink.
As far as the earth's biosphere is concerned, an asteroid would likely do more damage than man has managed to do since we evolved on the planet. Indeed, compared to some of the non-human ecological disasters suggested by the geological and fossil record, we're still pretty small potatoes. The earth has survived worse than us, many times.
We are dismayed because we've managed to kill off a handful of species that are appealing to us as humans--things that we enjoy seeing, like birds and whales. Meanwhile, most of the biomass on the planet is microorganisms and insects, most of which have hardly noticed our presence, and would hardly notice our absence.
The best-known example of this phenomenon was the cold-fusion debacle of the late '80s. A group of researchers claimed (essentially) to have initiated nuclear fusion in a beaker using heavy water and palladium electrodes. No-one else was able to reproduce the experimental results. The result, however, was not just to discredit the report's authors, but to cause a scepticism so immense that no electro-chemist could publish a paper which mentioned a similar experiment.
I don't see that as a fault in the peer-review system. At some point, when multiple labs have failed to reproduce a phenomenon, scientists give up on it as a dry hole. Especially when experience has shown that a particular type of experiment is fraught with potential for artifacts, skepticism is understandable. At this point, to revive cold fusion, somebody would have to come up with a very different, and reproducible, approach.
How is.doc which is a closed format with no published spec open while.pdf which is an open format with all specs published and freely available "proprietary"? Your comment makes no sense in context.
Uh, the suggestion was to use.pdf in preference to.doc to avoid using a proprietary format. How you conclude from that that.pdf is a proprietary format?
It seems like what would make sense from Apple's perspective would be to write AppleWorks import modules for StarOffice, and bundle StarOffice with OS X under the name "AppleWorks X"
Most people I know would be delighted to chuck MS Office, even though it is cheap (by academic pricing). It is slow, buggy, and awkward. We can always hold onto our old copies of MS Office for the occasional document that doesn't translate right.
Our legislative system is bogged down with bureaucracy and partisan game-playing.
Indeed it is. It always has been, because it was intentionally desiged that way. Our founding fathers carefully set up a system in which legislation must pass through a long gauntlet of red tape before taking effect, because their experience had taught them that efficient government was the single greatest threat to individual freedom. There is nothing more dangerous than a government that can turn on a dime.
I don't think that it's OK for Microsoft to do it either. But Microsoft has a long history of unethical practices. It is a shame to see Apple following the same road.
I'm not convinced that the flaky sometimes-it-mounts, sometimes-it-doesn't behavior of home directories can be blamed on applications. I'm running an absolutely basic set-up, just as described in the manual. There are no non-Apple applications running on my server, and problems frequently occur on login when no non-Apple applications are running on the clients. Besides, I think that it is the responsibility of the OS to protect itself from damage by applications.
$1000 for an upgrade to my 1 year old server seems outrageous. I can't help wondering if we'll need to upgrade to get a fix to the buggy Netinfo. Making people pay extra to get a fix for something that should have worked right in the first place is the sort of thing that I usually associate with Microsoft.
I remember enjoying platform games that included level editors, creating my own levels and playing those created by others. Lode Runner was one of the first that I recall.
I've been trying to remember the name of an Apple II platform title that I created a whole set of new levels for. I remember that one unique element was tiny "bombs" that you could walk on momentarily before they exploded and killed you.
And it takes someone with a slightly different outlook to see Quake and think "build world" instead of "frag llamas".
Of course it does. It just happens to be the very same outlook that led a few people to look at a rack of games and pick out "Adventure Construction Set" instead of "Final Fantasy."
The fact is that these Construction Set games were never wildly popular. With a lot of effort, you could create a game that still didn't quite measure up to commercial versions. And that was when commercial games were designed by a couple of guys in a garage, not a huge teame or programmers, designers, artists and musicians. I imagine that there is still just about as much activity with mod creation as there ever was with "Construction Set" games. Whether or not the product is really "standalone" makes no practical difference.
And don't forget all of the "Sim" type games on PC. While these aren't "game construction kits," they are a lot like computerized legos, and similarly appeal to the desire to design and construct something.
If 'aliens' were colonizing the cosmos like rabbits and there are a billion suitable worlds out there, why would they want to come here anyways? I mean, why waste their time/resources colonizing such an abused world as this one?
They could be fairly close (by galactic standards) and not even know we are here, assuming no means of faster-than-light observation. We simply haven't been advertising our presence for all that long.
Slashdot Mirror
If all goes well for the XBox, it may catch up to the PS2 in sales by the end of the year, and maybe in userbase by the end of the following year, so Sony has plenty of time. And if they panic Microsoft into releasing Xbox upgrades, they may have even longer....
And if a group of people get together to download a bunch of songs they all like from the site and share, so what? Chances are that they'd end up downloading more songs than they would individually, and probably end up spending nearly as much money apiece as they would individually.
This one is on Mozilla's frequently reported bugs list:
2 24
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126
There is no natural numbering of dimensions, so time doesn't have to be the 4th. While time can be treated as a dimension, it's easier to think about additional spacial dimensions. Some current models in theoretical physics have a bunch of extra spacial dimensions in addition to time.
Until portable readers are a lot better (say the size and weight of a paperback, with the text resolution of print, a page flipping mechanism as fast as a real book, and capable of holding at least a 12-hour charge), I'm going to be reading books on paper. But I might well start a book in electronic form, and order the paperback if I get into it.
The only reason the images on the site work is that they blow up the center so that you can see what's really going on. Without the zoom, you can't really make much sense of the center of the picture, anyway.
As far as the earth's biosphere is concerned, an asteroid would likely do more damage than man has managed to do since we evolved on the planet. Indeed, compared to some of the non-human ecological disasters suggested by the geological and fossil record, we're still pretty small potatoes. The earth has survived worse than us, many times.
We are dismayed because we've managed to kill off a handful of species that are appealing to us as humans--things that we enjoy seeing, like birds and whales. Meanwhile, most of the biomass on the planet is microorganisms and insects, most of which have hardly noticed our presence, and would hardly notice our absence.
I don't see that as a fault in the peer-review system. At some point, when multiple labs have failed to reproduce a phenomenon, scientists give up on it as a dry hole. Especially when experience has shown that a particular type of experiment is fraught with potential for artifacts, skepticism is understandable. At this point, to revive cold fusion, somebody would have to come up with a very different, and reproducible, approach.
It seems like what would make sense from Apple's perspective would be to write AppleWorks import modules for StarOffice, and bundle StarOffice with OS X under the name "AppleWorks X"
Most people I know would be delighted to chuck MS Office, even though it is cheap (by academic pricing). It is slow, buggy, and awkward. We can always hold onto our old copies of MS Office for the occasional document that doesn't translate right.
I don't think that it's OK for Microsoft to do it either. But Microsoft has a long history of unethical practices. It is a shame to see Apple following the same road.
I'm not convinced that the flaky sometimes-it-mounts, sometimes-it-doesn't behavior of home directories can be blamed on applications. I'm running an absolutely basic set-up, just as described in the manual. There are no non-Apple applications running on my server, and problems frequently occur on login when no non-Apple applications are running on the clients. Besides, I think that it is the responsibility of the OS to protect itself from damage by applications.
$1000 for an upgrade to my 1 year old server seems outrageous. I can't help wondering if we'll need to upgrade to get a fix to the buggy Netinfo. Making people pay extra to get a fix for something that should have worked right in the first place is the sort of thing that I usually associate with Microsoft.
I remember enjoying platform games that included level editors, creating my own levels and playing those created by others. Lode Runner was one of the first that I recall.
I've been trying to remember the name of an Apple II platform title that I created a whole set of new levels for. I remember that one unique element was tiny "bombs" that you could walk on momentarily before they exploded and killed you.
The fact is that these Construction Set games were never wildly popular. With a lot of effort, you could create a game that still didn't quite measure up to commercial versions. And that was when commercial games were designed by a couple of guys in a garage, not a huge teame or programmers, designers, artists and musicians. I imagine that there is still just about as much activity with mod creation as there ever was with "Construction Set" games. Whether or not the product is really "standalone" makes no practical difference.
And don't forget all of the "Sim" type games on PC. While these aren't "game construction kits," they are a lot like computerized legos, and similarly appeal to the desire to design and construct something.