They certainly did rip off lots of concepts from Nadia, and even some animation sequences from what I've seen of it.
It wouldn't be entirely fair if I were to say that the movie was a TOTAL rip off, as I haven't seen it yet. Much like the Lion King, there is probably quite a bit of noticable influence.
The Lion King was sort of a mix between Kimba the White Lion and Hamlet, IMO. It didn't completely rip off of Kimba, but it was easy to tell that Disney took a lot of influence from that show.
Why doesn't Disney just go ahead and say something like, "We were influenced by Gainax's brilliant Nadia series." If they had said something like this when announcing the movie, they would probably get better PR. Instead, they flat out lie and deny that any of their animators have ever seen these series.
I think if they admitted the similarities as tribute or influence, instead of anime fans calling foul on Disney for ripping off Nadia, they'd be heading to the theater more eagerly to see Atlantis to find the tributes to Gainax's work.
Knowing Disney there is probably a decent amount of differences in the show, and I'm sure with all the lame songs that'll be there, that it won't be nearly as good as Nadia anyway.
Do you know what the definition of theft is?
If I took candy from a baby, that would be theft.
If I shoved DVDs from Best Buy in my jacket pockets then walked out without paying them, that would be theft. If I play a DVD I payed money for on a DVD player, that is NOT theft.
And how is using a region-free player getting a free ride? People pay money for a player, and
People pay good money for DVDs, and many people want to buy DVDs from other regions because perhaps the foreign DVD has better extras, or maybe the foreign DVD just isn't available in their home region.
Most of the people I know who use region free players use them to play legit DVDs they purchased from Japan. They bought it. They should be able to play it without having to buy an extra DVD player.
I see nothing illegal about playing a DVD that was payed for.
I don't know where people get the idea that when someone useses a product they bought the way they want to, they are stealing if the company who made the product loses money somehow. In the case of DVDs, I don't see how a DVD producer is losing money if I play their disc on a region free player.
Parents often mistakingly think that if their child becomes "smarter", they will do well in school, and thus an "investment" like a computer
will directly show up with higher grades.
One of the kids I knew in high school didn't do so well in his classes. He didn't fail them, mind you, but he got a lot of C's because he wasn't doing his homework (he did excellent on the tests, IIRC).
What was he doing? He was spending most of his time programming and learning various assembly languages. He had more logical thinking skills and practical technical knowledge than just about anyone his age because of all the programming he did, and in this respect it made him "smarter."
However, according to our blatantly flawed education system, his grades said he merely "average."
I've come to accept that there are people out there who cheat. When I choose to play a game with a bunch of faceless people over the internet, I know that some of them are going to cheat. Some might have blatant cheats going on, others are more subtle, but there are tons of people out there who cheat in various ways.
While it is cool that a company is listening to consumers for once, I don't think it is a huge deal. I find that multiplayer games are most fun when you are playing with people you know locally.
Not only is there less lag, but cheating occurs at a lower rate, from my experience. (Of course, this is the cause of many weaknesses with massive multiplayer RPGs in my book, since you can't play them locally).
If someone on the net wants to feel "leet" by cheating, let them. Gamers who play for skill might actually benefit from taking on players who have given themselves huge, unfair advantages through cheating.
When I was a Freshman in high school (school will remain nameless), our administrators thought it'd be a good idea to give everyone at school an email address. This was before most people had email accounts, so this was actually a fairly cool idea.
However, one day my mom got a phone call saying that I had sent a death threat to the teacher in charge of the email accounts. I was sent to the Principal's the next day, and I was interrogated by the teacher, the assistant principal, and a police officer.
Needless to say, I did not write the email. The idiot teacher kept the passwords to all the accounts (which we were not allowed to change) in a black notebook in his room, which was easily accessible by students when the teacher was not present. In short, any student out to get me (and there were probably a few being that I was a computer geek subject to occaisional ridicule) could easily obtain my password and send an email from my account.
Thankfully, this was way before the whole spree of school shootings, so there was no paranoia among the school staff. I actually was able to proove to the assistant principal and the officer that anyone could have sent that email. Because of the fact that anybody could obtain anyone else's password, things were resolved in my favor. The next year, IIRC, school email was no longer available.
Had this happened within the last two years, I can envision that I probably would have been suspended, or even expelled, and that I might have even faced criminal charges due to the school's own stupidity. I feel sorry for high school kids today, because if they are even accused of something like this, they will probably get off much worse than I did, even if they never did anything at all.
My biggest concern is not that the software comes with the OS, it is that it might become impossible to uninstall like IE is now.
If I decide I want to use AOL's messenger, is the MSN messenger going to pop up annoying messages that I should use that?
Microsoft is FORCING their software on you.
I have the sinking feeling that you're going to have to use Windows XP the way THEY want you to use it, rather than the way YOU want to use it.
Well, I'm sure that this is a two-sided strategy. First and most obvious is that they want to track those who are possibly using an illegal copy of Windows on their machines. I don't really know what they'll do effectively with this data, since there is no way to know if someone who bought a PC sans OS is running an illegal copy of Windows, or another OS. The second strategy is probably a way to get a feel for how many people are potentially using a non-Windows operating system. I guess every non Windows box sold is another potential Linux/BSD/BeOS box out there.
It is obvious to me that the media is just plain evil. For years they have attempted to control the general population through television, so they could get people to buy and do what they wanted.
Over the past few years, they've stepped up the effort by buying laws that trounce over consumer rights, and promoting technologies that they have sole control over. They have even gained the influence to use law enforcement agencies and the like to their whim.
All the while, America is becoming more and more of a police state where we are being forced to give up many liberties so that these media companies can make more money off of us.
I'm quite afraid that the world of the future will be one where everyone is a meaningless drone of these corporations. We're definately on our way there, it seems, when Hollywood has a say in if or not I can copy a file between computers.
Unfortunately, too many.com businesses are using a business model that focuses primarily on gaining venture capital until they are able to go public. Then the idea is that everyone sells out of the company and gets rich, and until then, it is perfectly OK to lose money.
This is a pretty pathetic business model, if you ask me. Is it so desireable to become filthy rich that you screw over your employees and investors? Is it okay to create a company that you know is doomed to fail within a year after it goes public?
The current laws prevent people from selling out right after IPO, but perhaps it should be lengthened even more for the top shareholders, just so that this model becomes undesireable.
Sorry, Katz. Politics seem to be alive and kicking. The Libertarian movement and apathy
seem more prevalant than they really are if you observe a page like this, where a lot of people are super critical of the political systems world wide. However, it seems to me that the lack of interest in the Presidential race this year has to do with the fact that there are two lackluster candidates. The fact that McCain wasn't nominated for the Republican ticket, despite his immense popularity, just prooves to me that the party system in the US is still quite strong, and that the parties would rather have someone they can control running, than someone who was sure to win
against the candidate from the other party.
For once I wish Katz was right. I'd very much like to see US politics get overhauled. It wouldn't even require a change to many of our laws or documents. The two party system has a stronghold on our choices for candidates in almost
every election, and it is very rare that a third party candidate wins at any level of public office. Unfortunately, I think we'll be seeing
the same old thing for many years to come.
One thing that I've noticed in the past about consoles is that they have traditionally required
much more efficient coding, because the programmers are dealing with a very limited amount of memory. While systems like the X-Box might change this a bit, I think that consoles will still have this limitation to a degree. Since I'm sure the same will be true for a Linux based console, do you think that the code developed in the making of a console system could someday lead us to a more efficient, less bloated GUI for Linux that would replace X?
3Dfx obviously fell into a position of comfort and even arrogance as the #1 card maker, and it hurt them pretty badly. They started producing products that didn't live up to expected improvement, and had some delays that cost them the market share.
This let NVidia come out on top.
Now I see a few minor delays in some NVidia products, and I'm concerned that NVidia might be starting to show the same kind of behavior 3Dfx did. NVidia needs to be careful to stay on top, and not let itself fall into the same pattern 3Dfx did.
Yeah. That was a big problem at UCSD last year, and apparently it is a problem again this year. Students do not realize that when they close the Napster window, that the little icon is still in their systray and Napster is still running, sharing files with others.
Obviously this is a problem, and shutting Napster down for bandwidth reasons is acceptable, especially since a campus network is to be used primarily for educational purposes. However, I don't want to see Napster shut down on the RIAA's terms. Bandwidth is the only legit reason to shut it down.
There is a lot of action, but there is also a lot of pointless talking between the good guys and the bad guys that makes the series drag on for a very long time.
Yes, this is basically a Soap Opera for guys. They even have characters get killed off, only to return!
By no means is this even close to the upper echelon of anime.
It is too bad that Mystery Science Theater 3000 never got the chance to give a lot of major Hollywood films the same treatment they were able to give to the low budget B movies.
I'd love to hear what kind of comments that Mike, Crow, and Tom would dish out to films such as "Independence Day" or "Mission to Mars." Even a good movie, or a movie with a lot of fans, could probably benefit from a good chewing out by Mike and his robots.
What MST3k really did was squeeze the entertainment value out of even the worst of films. Films so bad that they make Jar Jar seem like the coolest character ever. What else could make these movies watchable?
There is no way that the Lain creators could have possibly ripped the Matrix off, since they were working on Lain before the Matrix was released.
The two have a lot in common superficially, but if you actually watch all 13 episodes of Lain, you'll see that the two are like night and day.
The US release of Lain happened after everyone saw the Matrix, so a lot of misinformed people on this side of the ocean think that Lain ripped off the Matrix, when in fact it did not.
It seems that most of the Slashdotters around here are pretty happy to see an anime topic. However, there are quite a few that aren't.
The majority of other programmers and "nerds" I know like anime. Some like it more than others, and so I see no problem with the topic on Slashdot. If you don't like anime, you can IGNORE anime topic posts, just like you would a Katz article. Not everyone likes anime. Not everyone likes Star Wars either, but it still has its own topic and nobody seems to complain.
Slashdot is supposed to be news for all types of nerds. Not just "your" type of nerd, so your always going to see things you don't like. Live with it.
I don't care how a page looks, feels, or how many flashy things I see. A page is badly designed, in my opinion, if it does not correctly follow the W3C's standards.
Every page should load acceptably not only in Netscape and IE, both of which are very guilty for adding their own tags and features which are not standars, but also every other browser out there.
I should be able to navigate a page in every browser, including Lynx, and get to the content I want. If Microsoft's features make this impossible (which I'm sure some will), then they should not be used.
This is typical Microsoft practice. Now that they have 86% market share, they're going to try to force competition completely out of the market by extending the standard. They are so bold to do this sort of thing even when they are being persecuted by the Government for such practices.
Web Designers need to say "NO" to Microsoft's extensions and remember that there IS a standard, and that they should follow it.
If you don't count the ease to distribute fansubs on VHS, DVD is clearly the better medium to have anime on. Not only do you get the better sound and video quality of the DVD, you also get the ability to turn the subtitles on and off at will, and even (groans) fall back on the English re-dub incase there is someone in the room who simply can't read fast. Although I don't agree with stamping out the VHS market so rapidly, I think the shift to DVD is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Ritsuko: "The Third Impact will occur if Disney comes into contact with any anime."
Gendou: "According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first two angels, Kiki and Laputa, will arrive shortly."
It wouldn't be entirely fair if I were to say that the movie was a TOTAL rip off, as I haven't seen it yet. Much like the Lion King, there is probably quite a bit of noticable influence.
The Lion King was sort of a mix between Kimba the White Lion and Hamlet, IMO. It didn't completely rip off of Kimba, but it was easy to tell that Disney took a lot of influence from that show.
Why doesn't Disney just go ahead and say something like, "We were influenced by Gainax's brilliant Nadia series." If they had said something like this when announcing the movie, they would probably get better PR. Instead, they flat out lie and deny that any of their animators have ever seen these series.
I think if they admitted the similarities as tribute or influence, instead of anime fans calling foul on Disney for ripping off Nadia, they'd be heading to the theater more eagerly to see Atlantis to find the tributes to Gainax's work.
Knowing Disney there is probably a decent amount of differences in the show, and I'm sure with all the lame songs that'll be there, that it won't be nearly as good as Nadia anyway.
I've never seen an EULA on a DVD, let alone anything that says "Do Not Use on Region Free Player."
According to that logic, if I buy a DVD at Store Y, I'm stealing $2 from Store X!!!?
Just because I buy something for cheaper elsewhere doesn't equate to theft.
And how is using a region-free player getting a free ride? People pay money for a player, and
People pay good money for DVDs, and many people want to buy DVDs from other regions because perhaps the foreign DVD has better extras, or maybe the foreign DVD just isn't available in their home region.
Most of the people I know who use region free players use them to play legit DVDs they purchased from Japan. They bought it. They should be able to play it without having to buy an extra DVD player.
I see nothing illegal about playing a DVD that was payed for.
I don't know where people get the idea that when someone useses a product they bought the way they want to, they are stealing if the company who made the product loses money somehow. In the case of DVDs, I don't see how a DVD producer is losing money if I play their disc on a region free player.
One of the kids I knew in high school didn't do so well in his classes. He didn't fail them, mind you, but he got a lot of C's because he wasn't doing his homework (he did excellent on the tests, IIRC).
What was he doing? He was spending most of his time programming and learning various assembly languages. He had more logical thinking skills and practical technical knowledge than just about anyone his age because of all the programming he did, and in this respect it made him "smarter." However, according to our blatantly flawed education system, his grades said he merely "average."
While it is cool that a company is listening to consumers for once, I don't think it is a huge deal. I find that multiplayer games are most fun when you are playing with people you know locally. Not only is there less lag, but cheating occurs at a lower rate, from my experience. (Of course, this is the cause of many weaknesses with massive multiplayer RPGs in my book, since you can't play them locally).
If someone on the net wants to feel "leet" by cheating, let them. Gamers who play for skill might actually benefit from taking on players who have given themselves huge, unfair advantages through cheating.
However, one day my mom got a phone call saying that I had sent a death threat to the teacher in charge of the email accounts. I was sent to the Principal's the next day, and I was interrogated by the teacher, the assistant principal, and a police officer.
Needless to say, I did not write the email. The idiot teacher kept the passwords to all the accounts (which we were not allowed to change) in a black notebook in his room, which was easily accessible by students when the teacher was not present. In short, any student out to get me (and there were probably a few being that I was a computer geek subject to occaisional ridicule) could easily obtain my password and send an email from my account.
Thankfully, this was way before the whole spree of school shootings, so there was no paranoia among the school staff. I actually was able to proove to the assistant principal and the officer that anyone could have sent that email. Because of the fact that anybody could obtain anyone else's password, things were resolved in my favor. The next year, IIRC, school email was no longer available.
Had this happened within the last two years, I can envision that I probably would have been suspended, or even expelled, and that I might have even faced criminal charges due to the school's own stupidity. I feel sorry for high school kids today, because if they are even accused of something like this, they will probably get off much worse than I did, even if they never did anything at all.
If I decide I want to use AOL's messenger, is the MSN messenger going to pop up annoying messages that I should use that?
Microsoft is FORCING their software on you. I have the sinking feeling that you're going to have to use Windows XP the way THEY want you to use it, rather than the way YOU want to use it.
Well, I'm sure that this is a two-sided strategy. First and most obvious is that they want to track those who are possibly using an illegal copy of Windows on their machines. I don't really know what they'll do effectively with this data, since there is no way to know if someone who bought a PC sans OS is running an illegal copy of Windows, or another OS. The second strategy is probably a way to get a feel for how many people are potentially using a non-Windows operating system. I guess every non Windows box sold is another potential Linux/BSD/BeOS box out there.
Over the past few years, they've stepped up the effort by buying laws that trounce over consumer rights, and promoting technologies that they have sole control over. They have even gained the influence to use law enforcement agencies and the like to their whim.
All the while, America is becoming more and more of a police state where we are being forced to give up many liberties so that these media companies can make more money off of us.
I'm quite afraid that the world of the future will be one where everyone is a meaningless drone of these corporations. We're definately on our way there, it seems, when Hollywood has a say in if or not I can copy a file between computers.
This is a pretty pathetic business model, if you ask me. Is it so desireable to become filthy rich that you screw over your employees and investors? Is it okay to create a company that you know is doomed to fail within a year after it goes public?
The current laws prevent people from selling out right after IPO, but perhaps it should be lengthened even more for the top shareholders, just so that this model becomes undesireable.
For once I wish Katz was right. I'd very much like to see US politics get overhauled. It wouldn't even require a change to many of our laws or documents. The two party system has a stronghold on our choices for candidates in almost every election, and it is very rare that a third party candidate wins at any level of public office. Unfortunately, I think we'll be seeing the same old thing for many years to come.
One thing that I've noticed in the past about consoles is that they have traditionally required much more efficient coding, because the programmers are dealing with a very limited amount of memory. While systems like the X-Box might change this a bit, I think that consoles will still have this limitation to a degree. Since I'm sure the same will be true for a Linux based console, do you think that the code developed in the making of a console system could someday lead us to a more efficient, less bloated GUI for Linux that would replace X?
This let NVidia come out on top.
Now I see a few minor delays in some NVidia products, and I'm concerned that NVidia might be starting to show the same kind of behavior 3Dfx did. NVidia needs to be careful to stay on top, and not let itself fall into the same pattern 3Dfx did.
Obviously this is a problem, and shutting Napster down for bandwidth reasons is acceptable, especially since a campus network is to be used primarily for educational purposes. However, I don't want to see Napster shut down on the RIAA's terms. Bandwidth is the only legit reason to shut it down.
There is a lot of action, but there is also a lot of pointless talking between the good guys and the bad guys that makes the series drag on for a very long time.
Yes, this is basically a Soap Opera for guys. They even have characters get killed off, only to return!
By no means is this even close to the upper echelon of anime.
You mean, embarass Linux geeks just like your desktop themes!?
I'd love to hear what kind of comments that Mike, Crow, and Tom would dish out to films such as "Independence Day" or "Mission to Mars." Even a good movie, or a movie with a lot of fans, could probably benefit from a good chewing out by Mike and his robots.
What MST3k really did was squeeze the entertainment value out of even the worst of films. Films so bad that they make Jar Jar seem like the coolest character ever. What else could make these movies watchable?
Mike, I salute you.
The two have a lot in common superficially, but if you actually watch all 13 episodes of Lain, you'll see that the two are like night and day.
The US release of Lain happened after everyone saw the Matrix, so a lot of misinformed people on this side of the ocean think that Lain ripped off the Matrix, when in fact it did not.
I prefer Saitou because that makes more sense to me. I also prefer to keep the name in Japanese order.
Of course, these are just nitpicky things.
The majority of other programmers and "nerds" I know like anime. Some like it more than others, and so I see no problem with the topic on Slashdot. If you don't like anime, you can IGNORE anime topic posts, just like you would a Katz article. Not everyone likes anime. Not everyone likes Star Wars either, but it still has its own topic and nobody seems to complain.
Slashdot is supposed to be news for all types of nerds. Not just "your" type of nerd, so your always going to see things you don't like. Live with it.
Every page should load acceptably not only in Netscape and IE, both of which are very guilty for adding their own tags and features which are not standars, but also every other browser out there.
I should be able to navigate a page in every browser, including Lynx, and get to the content I want. If Microsoft's features make this impossible (which I'm sure some will), then they should not be used.
This is typical Microsoft practice. Now that they have 86% market share, they're going to try to force competition completely out of the market by extending the standard. They are so bold to do this sort of thing even when they are being persecuted by the Government for such practices.
Web Designers need to say "NO" to Microsoft's extensions and remember that there IS a standard, and that they should follow it.
If you don't count the ease to distribute fansubs on VHS, DVD is clearly the better medium to have anime on. Not only do you get the better sound and video quality of the DVD, you also get the ability to turn the subtitles on and off at will, and even (groans) fall back on the English re-dub incase there is someone in the room who simply can't read fast. Although I don't agree with stamping out the VHS market so rapidly, I think the shift to DVD is a good thing.
The last thing I need to read on the 4th. of July, they day us Americans celebrate the birth of our nation, is a stupid Katz article.