Granted, any Google search service, or any search engine for that matter, makes it easier to locate information (well, usually... I mean, try to look up the XXX movie starring Vin Diesel without getting a glut of pr0n sites). However, this information is available in other places. Okay, so you want to know the exact location of the White House, its square-footage, its exact orientation in relation to point X, its geographic co-ordinates. Sooo... Do some research. Buy a $5 city map, go to the public library and check out the reference section, check out public records branch of the US government, go scout the place out in person carrying a GPS unit for crying out loud. With the exception of the pretty pictures, Google and Google Maps don't provide any information that a bit of traditional research and a teeny bit of logic can't get you.
I mean, how did intelligence agents gather intelligence before the advent of the Internet?
The only way to stop information from getting to terrorists is to stop it from getting to everyone else! In order to protect the country from terrorists, it is the patriotic duty of all Americans not to demand information! In time, the USA will triumph in their quest to become the worst educated industrialized nation on the planet. In order to protect the country, citizens must base decisions on rumor and innuendo as provided by the almighty television, without paying attention to the facts or even thinking that it would be useful to look for facts on the matter in the first place. Only total lack of information will protect the great United States of America!
And in the meantime, people from countries that are pissed off about American foreign policy will go to Europe or Canada for their education/research/spying, and then use that knowledge to attack the States on their own soil.
...it's popular, too. Back in high school (early '90's), those of us who liked anime were ridiculed by our peers. Okay, we were the "odd ducks" and someone would have found a reason to make fun of us anyway, but that's not what I'm getting at. If we wanted to watch the shows that we loved, we had no choice but to scrounge 10th-generation VHS dubs of fansubs. If you went to a movie rental or sales store, you were lucky to find a worn-out copy of Astro Boy in the kids' section, or maybe a dusty copy of Akira or Ninja Scroll stuffed in behind a Schwarzenegger movie in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi section. The only popular anime on television was the badly americanized Sailor Moon, which even a lot of otaku hated.
Now, with how easy it is to get a hold of videos on the internet, suddenly anime is popular. The casual peruser is no longer limited to one or two cult favorites and Bad American Dubs. You can download and watch stuff that sounds interesting for free, if you have any interest whatsoever. Due to a lack of multi-generation dubs, you don't even have to hit the pause button between subtitles to try and decipher what the last one was about.
Now, due to increased interest, you can find many titles in your local movie rental/sales store, and more come into stock every day. The argument of dubs vs. subs is now moot -- both versions are ususally available on the same DVD. Due to red tape, North America is always a couple of years behind the Japanese market when it comes to anime releases. This is actually is a good thing because it gives the companies a chance to see how well the show will do in NA by watching what is being downloaded and talked about online.
Suddenly, anime is popular, and the companies are making a profit on DVDs even if people originally downloade the fansubbed shows -- because people are willing to pay for a good, legitimate copy of a good product! This is the same reason that North American movie and music companies are losing money due to file swapping; they are not providing enough content that people are willing to watch/listen to more than once.
People will pay money for good content even if they've seen the content before. Hollywood movie/TV makers, pop musicians, and software programmers take note. Even if it's available for free, people will pay money for a product if they actually think it's actually worth it.
...that you should never demonstrate computer skills above and beyond that of a high school's staff.
Please note that I'm not saying what the students did wasn't wrong. I believe that the idea behind it, i.e. showing the security flaws in the system, was a good one, but they didn't have to go after the flaws in an illegal fashion. However, not only the students deserve a reprimand here -- what were the SSN's doing on an internet-accessible database in the first place?
Students who demonstrate intelligence beyond their years or insight into problems which the teacher cannot comprehend are VERY threatening to the teacher.
I've found this to be especially true in the realm of computers. If a student is extremely good at, say, math or English or biology, the teachers will often look at the student as a prodigy, although they may suspect the student of cheating in some way if they seem to do so well entirely without effort.
However, when it comes to computers, most teachers and staff at the elementary and high school levels only have the bare minumum knowledge required to turn on their computer and run the applications they have to use in order to keep their jobs. Don't blame the teachers, most of them had the computer age dumped on them with little to no training. But because most records are kept on computers these days, students who are extremely proficient with computers are the equivalent of students who could pick filing cabinet locks and alter their grades thirty years ago. The problem is, thirty years ago, if you learned how to pick locks and forge grades, you probably were doing it for "nefarious purposes." These days, computers aren't just a tool for "nefarious purposes," they are a tool that is used every single day by many students and they are a part of everyday life. But many teachers can only see a student who is good with computers as someone who carries a set of lock picks to school.
Case in point:
My little brother, who was the darling of my high school's (rather meager) computer department, happened to be in the library when another student hacked into the school's database through a terminal in the library. The other student was not known to the staff as being a computer geek, so the blame fell on my brother. But the staff of the school (with the exception of the computer teachers, who for some reason were not consulted on the matter) were not proficient enough with computers to prove who had actually broken the school rules. Based only on the fact that my brother was known to be good with computers, the staff then banned my brother from the school library for the rest of his high school career with no proof that he had done anything wrong. First of all, how is this helping him learn? Secondly, because the school staff did not understand enough about computers, my brother was banned only from the library, not from the school network, nor was his school network ID taken away. He proceeded to graduate from high school after taking every single computer class offered by the school (which were taught on computers that were on the same network as the library) and then to spend two semesters as a teaching assistant, teaching other students the same skills that got him banned in the first place.
The moral of the story is: with the possible exception of the computer teachers, never let elementary/high school teachers and/or staff know that you, as a student, are proficient with computers.
It doesn't necessarily take a fancy food or drink concoction to ruin a keyboard. From personal experience, I know that a glass of Brita-filtered tap water can permanently ruin a keyboard. Although, also from personal experience, a rum-and-coke will also do the trick in a pinch, if you're out of regular H2O.
And what if you've got an unsecured wireless connection in your house or wherever you have internet service? Alright, it's an extremely stupid thing to do, but if you go war driving you'll find out how many places that you can steal internet service from, let alone all the places that provide free wi-fi. Technically the person paying for the account could get sued for whatever use of the internet connection was deemed illegal, but how do you prove that the person whose name on the bill is the one who performed the illegal action? What if it was someone who was pirating your internet connection, or someone who was using a shared wi-fi spot like at Starbucks?
In large a corporation the ISP division would not be responsible for helping the media producing divisions. It's likely that these two areas of the company only share a CEO, with the rest of the corporate structure being completely separate.
The strange thing about companies that are fighting the order so fiercely since many of them own entertainment subsidiaries that produce TV and film content is that one side of a business, e.g. Sympatico MSN* produce and distribute content for free online, while the TV and film side of things Bell ExpressVu** want you to pay throught the nose for the same content... The thing that the higher-ups in these companies often don't realize is that what customers are really wiling to pay for is the service that gets them the content. It's just yet another example of the one hand not knowing what the other one is doing.
* ** Please note that I am not saying that this is what Bell does, I just am not all that familiar with Videotron and the companies that own it. I'm just giving an example of a company that provides both kinds of services.
I am a musician myself and am under the camp that music should be free and people get paied for doing SHOWS.
Hear, hear!
However, I think it would be fair, if you wanted the song recorded on a piece of media, to pay for the cost of the media, cost of reproduction, and, if you want it, the cost of producing the fancy packaging, maybe even a small profit margin for the people who run the packaging business. That would bring it to $2 or $3 per mass-marketed CD, at a guess. Plus the taxes that go to Our Almighty Lords in the Government.
If you want to circulate the music yourself using your own resources instead of paying someone else to do get the music for you, that should be your choice. You're still spending money to do it -- that computer you're using wasn't free, nor was the bandwidth you're using, nor the recordable media/mp3 storage device from which you're listening to the music. You're still supporting industry and anything you buy sends taxes to the government.
What the RIAA is missing is that, when all's said and done, IT'S STILL A RECORDING, it will never compare to a live show, and for that reason people will continue to go to concerts. People will always buy merchandizing that lets them show off their love for a band/movie/whatver. Musicians make a hell of a lot more profit from live shows and merchandizing than recordings anyway, so giving people the impetus to go to live shows would be a much more effective way to protect the artists' interests, wouldn't you say? It's not like people who download songs taking credit for the creation of the work. Rather, they're saying "so-and-so is a really good artist, I should share some of their work with you!"
Essentially, the media industry is a packaging business for the works of original artists. They're packaging entertainment in small chunks so that it can be easily consumed by the fans. If you think of recordings (music CD's and video DVD's) as a kind of advertisement for the real deal (live concerts and movies shown at theatres that are ridiculously above and beyond your puny entertainment system at home) with the potential to make massive $$$ off of marketing (think Duff Stuff and Star Wars toys), then you'll start to see where the entertainment industry really is. The RIAA wishing it weren't so won't change things. To the RIAA and other like organizations: there is still a ton of money to be made in the entertainment industry without sueing people right and left and generally pissing off the very customers that need to attract. You have to change your business plan, not try and get the world to change around your current plan -- the latter is futile in any case and you'll just lose even more money. And if you don't hurry up about it, while you're losing all that money that you claim people are "stealing" from you, another company/organization is going to leapfrog past your antiquated business model and yank the media carpet right out from under you.
Hmm, I think I see a business plan looming. Anyone want to buy shares in an up-and-coming company?
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
I agree, totally and completely.
It drives me nuts that so many people are so keen on every movie that is based on a book, comic, historic event, etc. being perfectly accurate to the original source. People get so hung up with how the movie compares to what they've cooked up in their imaginations when reading the book/comic that they forget to watch the movie for the movie. The nice thing about books, comic, and many other ways of telling stories, is that they allow you to fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Nobody's imagination is exactly the same, so any movie based on a previous work will never be exactly what you were hoping for. But it can still be a good movie in and of itself!
If you are so devoted to a story that you can't bear any innacuracies in a new interpretation of said story, don't go see the movie. It'll just piss you off. And for God's sake, if there's a movie coming out that you know is based on a book/comic, don't go out and read the print version right before you see the movie. With the original story fresh in your mind, the inconsistencies will drive you nuts even if you're not an accuracy nazi. The fact is, because movies are limited in time, budget, acting skills, etc., they will be more limited than your imagination.
There's probably a lot of people out there who are thinking "well, that's bloody obvious..." as they read this. But there are so many accuracy nazis out there who freak out at the slighest deviation from the print version that these facts obviously have to be stated again and again before they actually understand. If you can't enjoy a movie simply because it is an entertaining movie, and not because it is precisely accurate to an author's deathless prose (which, by the way, has been gone over by an editor with a fine-toothed comb and picked apart so it'll sell well long before it was released to the masses), then you shouldn't be going to movies in the first place.
And yes, some of the movies based on previously created stories do suck in and of themselves. But not all books/comics are all that good either. They just don't tend to flop on the front page of the newspaper's entertainment section, they tend to kind of slide into ambiguity.
The thing is, they're not charging for how effective the ad is. They're charging for how effective its placement is, like how Superbowl ads cost a frigging fortune in comparison to something that runs on the local cable channel. It's very much as if Google was a huge shopping mall, and the advertisements are the signs and the ads in the windows of the stores. When you pay rent to the landlord to have your store in a mall, you pay more for the same square footage dependant on the location of the mall, the store's location in the mall, the popularity of the mall, etc. -- basically all of the things that the mall itself can provide that makes it more likely that people will come into your store. But it's not the landlord's responsibility to get the people actually into your store (that's your ads, signage, and window displays), or to buy anything in your store (that's based on your products and prices). PPC is just a way of tracking if the "mall" is actually drawing people to your "store". This makes Google tracking the click-to-purchase ratio pretty useless. Now, if the site itself is tracking the traffic-to-purchase ratio, that's a different matter entirely.
The Google Uploader app is, of course, Windows only.
Odd, that, considering that most professional video is created on Macs... So you create the video, export it to whatever format that you want it distributed in, then transfer it to a PC (and depending on how large the file is, this could take a while), and then upload it to the net. As if the uploading and encoding won't take long enought anyway. What a PITA.
Huh. Yet another reason for ISP's not to give in to RIAA pressure and adopt a code of conduct agreement. If broadcasting is put into the hands of individuals, then bandwidth usage is going to go through the roof. The ISP's will like this since it will generate more business for them and potentially force people to sign up for more expensive "business" as opposed to "personal" accounts. But how in the world will they be able to tell, based on bandwidth alone, whether someone is pirating music/video/software, or whether they're running their own virtual TV station? Hmmm, methinks that the ISP's have yet another reason to tell the RIAA to go f**k themselves.
I work for a company that produces video programs for broadcast TV, and we haven't been decimated by the internet either. Rather, we use it as a tool to quickly send different stages of the videos to our clients, as opposed to sending out VHS drafts or having the clients drive all the way to where we are and to screen the cuts. Our clients like this system because it is faster and they don't have to commute. The volume of work that we do has actually gone up.
And as for the distribution side of things, the internet is just a new medium on which the shows that we produce can be "broadcast". So what if some of the things we do are free to view on our client's website? Our company still gets paid, and our clients have content on their sites that draws people in to buy the things that our clients do charge for. Like starrsoft's travel agency, we have adjusted. In business, everything is constantly changing, it's only the companies that refuse to change with the times that become obsolete.
Now, what would happen if our ISP was required to provide records of all of our company's internet traffic? We do high-volume video swapping via FTP sites, P2P services, and IM's. As we own the copyrights for all the material or are working with the permission of those who own the copyrights, all of our traffic is perfectly legit. But can you imagine how being investigated by the RIAA would damage the reputation of a legit media company? That's one of the things I fear if this deal goes through.
Keep your own information secure *first*...
on
Offshored Identity Theft
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And then worry about international identity theft.
I can understand being worried that your personal information ends up being sent outside of your country of citizenship as an effect of outsourcing. It doesn't really matter where it's shipped to, as soon as it crosses the border, it becomes that much harder to catch and prosecute.
The thing is, if people want something badly enough, they will put up with the risk of identity theft. And some people just don't care enough or know enough to take simple precautions. I'll give you an example. I work for a Canadian company that takes orders from both Canada and the United States. We do not take orders through our email, because we do not have any kind of security with regards to our email system. When we contact clients, we specifically say not to email us credit card numbers, expiry dates, or other sensitive information. This isn't in the fine print, either, it's right in the body of the message! Yet people email us that kind of information all the time. And although an American tracing identity theft to Canada is probably a hell of a lot easier than tracing it to India, and our laws are similar in many respects, we are still accross a border. As such it would be significantly more difficult to trace and prosecute an offence committed in Canada from the States.
Identity theft, nationally or internationally, will not stop until people start taking personal responsibility for their information as much as possible. It's like locking your door whenever you leave the house -- a determined theif is not going to be deterred by a lock when there is a window that can be smashed. Locks are just there to keep honest people honest. At least protect yourself against crimes of opportunity.
... is getting projects approved by the Powers That Be (i.e. the clients). I work for a small company, and in order to stay in business, our production schedules have to be followed to the letter. Things must be done to schedule even if the computers crashed and there was no contingency time budgeted and we have to work unpaid overtime to get the project finished by the due date. Then we send it off to the clients and wait... and wait... and wait... and wait for approval or changes, often past the final deadline of the entire project. At this point, of course the deliverables are late -- and it always seems to be "our fault".
And of course, a lot of the time there are changes to be made to the final product even if we have been sending daily/weekly rough versions for evaluation as the project develops. Somehow, it's always a case of "This is exactly what I asked for.. But not what I wanted!" -- and the clients don't figure that out until they look at the final, polished, ready-for-the-public version. It drives me absolutely frikkin' nuts. What is the point of demanding progress reports if you don't look at them?
I think that people would be surprised by the number of crashes they blame on software that are actually caused by hardware.
I'll second that... I keep getting bad sticks of PC RAM -- ones that will cause my computer to spontaneously reboot, for example, or ones that are the source of randomly generated program errors (which, of course, make it LOOK like it's the software that is faulty). My PC is constantly being upgraded in a piecemeal fashion, so it's not how the RAM reacts with any given piece of hardware. Of course, most of the time on any computer other than my home PC, the same errors would be caused by the software and not the hardware... Especially on Windows machines.
On the other hand, in my experience, crashes on Macs can usually be traced back to the hardware, not the software... Please note that I am not saying that Mac hardware is inferior in any way to PC. I'm saying that I have experienced very few crashes on Macs when compared to the number of those I have survived when working with PC's... And usually, if my Mac crashes, then some piece of hardware has worn out or been fried. On the systems I work with, it's usually old hard drives that have finally given up the ghost.
...in order to pay off the money that Apple could sue him for, I bet that Apple is making him sign an NDA regarding how much money he actually does have to pay. How much you want to bet he doesn't violate this non-disclosure agreement?
Well, if you have lots of time on your hands and you want a really nice end product, you could do it this way:
1) Use a good negative scanner to scan each individual frame from your 8mm or 16mm film at the highest resolution that you can manage. 2) Use Adobe Photoshop or your favorite image editing program to tweak the images. 3) Import the images into Adobe After Effects or your favorite an animation program. 4) Depending on the frame rate that you shot the original film at, make each image the appropriate length so that the final product plays back at 30fps. e.g. If you originally shot the film at 15fps, each frame of film should last 2 frames in the After Effects project. This might be a little rough-looking, but it'll keep the video from being sped up. If you shot at 24fps, the smoothest way to transfer the video is to use 3-2 pulldown (you can find instructions about how to do this through Google), which is how the film industry has been transferring film to video for years. It might take a little research and some calculations to get the smoothest result depending on your original frame rate, but it's worth it. 5) Tweak until you are satisfied with the results, using the "preview" option often. 6) Add titles and effects if you so desire. 7) Render out the video to whatever format you need in order to make your DVD. 8) Burn DVD.
Sorry for being so Adobe-centered, they just happen to be the programs that I am most familiar with since I work with them every day. I am sure that there are other programs that work equally well, I just don't know about them!
...most every filesharing program is used by 99% of its users for illegal activity.
The problem is that each country has its own copyright laws and laws regulating what is considered a crime over the internet. For example, here in Canada it's illegal to upload copyright files, but not illegal to download them. And when it's P2P, the argument can be made that nobody is uploading (since the P2P service is not being used to transport media to or or store media on a server or webpage) and everyone is downloading. The Internet is a means of international communication, and P2P networks serve not only the United States but the entire world. How can MGM argue that tools like Grokster and its like do not have the legal right to exist if the "illegal" actions that take place under services are not illegal everywhere? MGM could potentially argue that stricter bans/filtering/whatnot are necessary within areas in which downloading of copyrighted material is a crime, or that Grokster work with law enforcement in a way similar to phone companies, but that's about all.
...not another thing to make it more difficult to talk on a cell while driving in a car! There are enough idiots zooming around at breakneck speeds, using only half of their attention to drive while they have one hand on the wheel and the other holding a cell phone (or fumbling thorough their pocket/purse/backpack to find the damn thing once it rings). Now people are going to have to try to take a picture of themselves while driving that is steady enough to be recognized by the software. That's it, from now on if my destination is not in walking distance of my house, I'm not going.
So then why didn't apple's site have the system setup to detect the conflict and inform the buyers that this might be a problem?
Why, exactly, should Apple assume that the software you're buying is necessarily related to the hardware you're buying? For all they know, he originally went online to buy the software for the G5 he already has, saw the Mac Mini, thought it was nifty, and added it to his shopping cart. Or possibly the other way around. Or the order was for a company or household running multiple machines. Or multiple people combined on one order to save on shipping costs (granted, I have no idea what the shipping regs are from the online Apple Store, but I've seen people do this with lots of other companies).
Come on. Apple can't cater to every person out there at every level of knowledge. If you, the customer, are going to buy something, you have to do your research. Apple, to their credit, does post pretty much everything you need to know online, and they don't have a piece of information posted then you can always use a web search engine. Don't understand something about the product? Ask someone more technically inclined to explain it to you in terms that you can understand. Making sure that the computer you have has the capability to run the software that you want to buy is akin to taking measurements of the doors to your house before you buy a piece of furniture. Just because a salesperson didn't out and outright tell you that an entertainment unit might not fit through your front door doesn't mean that you shouldn't check anyway. How are they supposed to know what kind of house you have? And, among other things, that's not their job.
When I worked retail, I hated dealing with people like you.
There is a reason that 99% of companies print their return policies on the back of their receipts and also have the return policy posted in clear view somewhere in the store as well. This goes for all kinds of retail companies, whether they sell Macs, PC's, or anything else. If it's an online store, then they have the return policy posted clearly somewhere on the site. Don't have a receipt? Sorry, you can't return it. Opened the package to something that the return policy states cannot be returned after opening the package? You can't return that either.
It is up to the buyer to read the fine print, whether that be the return policy or the system requirements. If you knew that you'd want to run those programs and had done a bit of research before spending the money, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble. Despite the fact that an individual store manager may be willing to bend their policies for you, they don't have to.
Besides, isn't blaming the company who makes the product for what you consider to be an unsatisfactory retail experience kind of silly? That's like saying "all movies distributed through Alliance Atlantic suck because the salesperson at was a jerk?" Granted, Apple both makes and sells Macs, but you're confusing customer relations with the quality of the product they sell. I assume you'll be going back to PC's after this, which is fine by me. But if you had bought an expensive piece of software for PC and didn't bother to read the system req's before you opened the package, do you really think that whatever store you bought it from is going to have a different policy than the Apple Store's? It is time to start implementing a personal common sense policy if you don't want to keep shelling out money for stuff that you can't use.
...after-hours door-entry things at bank ATMs... Invariably, any such door I've tried will respond to any magnetic card at all. What is the point of these?
Especially since most people will be polite and hold the door open for someone behind them... It doesn't even keep homeless people from sheltering in the ATM vestibule, because they just have to wait for someone to go in the door and then slip into the vestibule before the door closes. All the swipe-card locks on ATM vestibules do is make it more annoying to get into the building in the winter, when it means that you have to take your gloves off in the freezing cold to get that stupid card out of your wallet. Yeesh.
the *last* thing you want is a geek who will insist that all production systems should run the latest, most bleeding edge stuff.
On the other hand, you want someone who at is geeky enough to know that 5-year-old computers will break down more often than new ones and they compile a hell of a lot slower... My current manager does not get this and keeps saying that our comps cost X-thousands-of-dollars when we bought them five years ago, we can't possibly need new ones yet. And a budget for repairs & replacement parts? These computers were expensive! Why would we ever need to fix them?
A little technical knowledge goes a long way in management, if only to be able to balance the cost of new computers with the ability of the group one is managing to finish the project on time or, even better, get those wonderful bonuses for getting things done early.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, I don't think so.
Granted, any Google search service, or any search engine for that matter, makes it easier to locate information (well, usually... I mean, try to look up the XXX movie starring Vin Diesel without getting a glut of pr0n sites). However, this information is available in other places. Okay, so you want to know the exact location of the White House, its square-footage, its exact orientation in relation to point X, its geographic co-ordinates. Sooo... Do some research. Buy a $5 city map, go to the public library and check out the reference section, check out public records branch of the US government, go scout the place out in person carrying a GPS unit for crying out loud. With the exception of the pretty pictures, Google and Google Maps don't provide any information that a bit of traditional research and a teeny bit of logic can't get you.
I mean, how did intelligence agents gather intelligence before the advent of the Internet?
The only way to stop information from getting to terrorists is to stop it from getting to everyone else! In order to protect the country from terrorists, it is the patriotic duty of all Americans not to demand information! In time, the USA will triumph in their quest to become the worst educated industrialized nation on the planet. In order to protect the country, citizens must base decisions on rumor and innuendo as provided by the almighty television, without paying attention to the facts or even thinking that it would be useful to look for facts on the matter in the first place. Only total lack of information will protect the great United States of America!
And in the meantime, people from countries that are pissed off about American foreign policy will go to Europe or Canada for their education/research/spying, and then use that knowledge to attack the States on their own soil.
Give me a freaking break.
...it's popular, too. Back in high school (early '90's), those of us who liked anime were ridiculed by our peers. Okay, we were the "odd ducks" and someone would have found a reason to make fun of us anyway, but that's not what I'm getting at. If we wanted to watch the shows that we loved, we had no choice but to scrounge 10th-generation VHS dubs of fansubs. If you went to a movie rental or sales store, you were lucky to find a worn-out copy of Astro Boy in the kids' section, or maybe a dusty copy of Akira or Ninja Scroll stuffed in behind a Schwarzenegger movie in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi section. The only popular anime on television was the badly americanized Sailor Moon, which even a lot of otaku hated.
Now, with how easy it is to get a hold of videos on the internet, suddenly anime is popular. The casual peruser is no longer limited to one or two cult favorites and Bad American Dubs. You can download and watch stuff that sounds interesting for free, if you have any interest whatsoever. Due to a lack of multi-generation dubs, you don't even have to hit the pause button between subtitles to try and decipher what the last one was about.
Now, due to increased interest, you can find many titles in your local movie rental/sales store, and more come into stock every day. The argument of dubs vs. subs is now moot -- both versions are ususally available on the same DVD. Due to red tape, North America is always a couple of years behind the Japanese market when it comes to anime releases. This is actually is a good thing because it gives the companies a chance to see how well the show will do in NA by watching what is being downloaded and talked about online.
Suddenly, anime is popular, and the companies are making a profit on DVDs even if people originally downloade the fansubbed shows -- because people are willing to pay for a good, legitimate copy of a good product! This is the same reason that North American movie and music companies are losing money due to file swapping; they are not providing enough content that people are willing to watch/listen to more than once.
People will pay money for good content even if they've seen the content before. Hollywood movie/TV makers, pop musicians, and software programmers take note. Even if it's available for free, people will pay money for a product if they actually think it's actually worth it.
Am I the only one to notice that TFA is bisected by a huge color ad for Dell computers with "Intel Inside"? Ah, the irony is enough to gag on.
...that you should never demonstrate computer skills above and beyond that of a high school's staff.
Please note that I'm not saying what the students did wasn't wrong. I believe that the idea behind it, i.e. showing the security flaws in the system, was a good one, but they didn't have to go after the flaws in an illegal fashion. However, not only the students deserve a reprimand here -- what were the SSN's doing on an internet-accessible database in the first place?
Students who demonstrate intelligence beyond their years or insight into problems which the teacher cannot comprehend are VERY threatening to the teacher.
I've found this to be especially true in the realm of computers. If a student is extremely good at, say, math or English or biology, the teachers will often look at the student as a prodigy, although they may suspect the student of cheating in some way if they seem to do so well entirely without effort.
However, when it comes to computers, most teachers and staff at the elementary and high school levels only have the bare minumum knowledge required to turn on their computer and run the applications they have to use in order to keep their jobs. Don't blame the teachers, most of them had the computer age dumped on them with little to no training. But because most records are kept on computers these days, students who are extremely proficient with computers are the equivalent of students who could pick filing cabinet locks and alter their grades thirty years ago. The problem is, thirty years ago, if you learned how to pick locks and forge grades, you probably were doing it for "nefarious purposes." These days, computers aren't just a tool for "nefarious purposes," they are a tool that is used every single day by many students and they are a part of everyday life. But many teachers can only see a student who is good with computers as someone who carries a set of lock picks to school.
Case in point:
My little brother, who was the darling of my high school's (rather meager) computer department, happened to be in the library when another student hacked into the school's database through a terminal in the library. The other student was not known to the staff as being a computer geek, so the blame fell on my brother. But the staff of the school (with the exception of the computer teachers, who for some reason were not consulted on the matter) were not proficient enough with computers to prove who had actually broken the school rules. Based only on the fact that my brother was known to be good with computers, the staff then banned my brother from the school library for the rest of his high school career with no proof that he had done anything wrong. First of all, how is this helping him learn? Secondly, because the school staff did not understand enough about computers, my brother was banned only from the library, not from the school network, nor was his school network ID taken away. He proceeded to graduate from high school after taking every single computer class offered by the school (which were taught on computers that were on the same network as the library) and then to spend two semesters as a teaching assistant, teaching other students the same skills that got him banned in the first place.
The moral of the story is: with the possible exception of the computer teachers, never let elementary/high school teachers and/or staff know that you, as a student, are proficient with computers.
It doesn't necessarily take a fancy food or drink concoction to ruin a keyboard. From personal experience, I know that a glass of Brita-filtered tap water can permanently ruin a keyboard. Although, also from personal experience, a rum-and-coke will also do the trick in a pinch, if you're out of regular H2O.
And what if you've got an unsecured wireless connection in your house or wherever you have internet service? Alright, it's an extremely stupid thing to do, but if you go war driving you'll find out how many places that you can steal internet service from, let alone all the places that provide free wi-fi. Technically the person paying for the account could get sued for whatever use of the internet connection was deemed illegal, but how do you prove that the person whose name on the bill is the one who performed the illegal action? What if it was someone who was pirating your internet connection, or someone who was using a shared wi-fi spot like at Starbucks?
In large a corporation the ISP division would not be responsible for helping the media producing divisions. It's likely that these two areas of the company only share a CEO, with the rest of the corporate structure being completely separate.
The strange thing about companies that are fighting the order so fiercely since many of them own entertainment subsidiaries that produce TV and film content is that one side of a business, e.g. Sympatico MSN* produce and distribute content for free online, while the TV and film side of things Bell ExpressVu** want you to pay throught the nose for the same content... The thing that the higher-ups in these companies often don't realize is that what customers are really wiling to pay for is the service that gets them the content. It's just yet another example of the one hand not knowing what the other one is doing.
* ** Please note that I am not saying that this is what Bell does, I just am not all that familiar with Videotron and the companies that own it. I'm just giving an example of a company that provides both kinds of services.
I am a musician myself and am under the camp that music should be free and people get paied for doing SHOWS.
Hear, hear!
However, I think it would be fair, if you wanted the song recorded on a piece of media, to pay for the cost of the media, cost of reproduction, and, if you want it, the cost of producing the fancy packaging, maybe even a small profit margin for the people who run the packaging business. That would bring it to $2 or $3 per mass-marketed CD, at a guess. Plus the taxes that go to Our Almighty Lords in the Government.
If you want to circulate the music yourself using your own resources instead of paying someone else to do get the music for you, that should be your choice. You're still spending money to do it -- that computer you're using wasn't free, nor was the bandwidth you're using, nor the recordable media/mp3 storage device from which you're listening to the music. You're still supporting industry and anything you buy sends taxes to the government.
What the RIAA is missing is that, when all's said and done, IT'S STILL A RECORDING, it will never compare to a live show, and for that reason people will continue to go to concerts. People will always buy merchandizing that lets them show off their love for a band/movie/whatver. Musicians make a hell of a lot more profit from live shows and merchandizing than recordings anyway, so giving people the impetus to go to live shows would be a much more effective way to protect the artists' interests, wouldn't you say? It's not like people who download songs taking credit for the creation of the work. Rather, they're saying "so-and-so is a really good artist, I should share some of their work with you!"
Essentially, the media industry is a packaging business for the works of original artists. They're packaging entertainment in small chunks so that it can be easily consumed by the fans. If you think of recordings (music CD's and video DVD's) as a kind of advertisement for the real deal (live concerts and movies shown at theatres that are ridiculously above and beyond your puny entertainment system at home) with the potential to make massive $$$ off of marketing (think Duff Stuff and Star Wars toys), then you'll start to see where the entertainment industry really is. The RIAA wishing it weren't so won't change things. To the RIAA and other like organizations: there is still a ton of money to be made in the entertainment industry without sueing people right and left and generally pissing off the very customers that need to attract. You have to change your business plan, not try and get the world to change around your current plan -- the latter is futile in any case and you'll just lose even more money. And if you don't hurry up about it, while you're losing all that money that you claim people are "stealing" from you, another company/organization is going to leapfrog past your antiquated business model and yank the media carpet right out from under you.
Hmm, I think I see a business plan looming. Anyone want to buy shares in an up-and-coming company?
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
I agree, totally and completely.
It drives me nuts that so many people are so keen on every movie that is based on a book, comic, historic event, etc. being perfectly accurate to the original source. People get so hung up with how the movie compares to what they've cooked up in their imaginations when reading the book/comic that they forget to watch the movie for the movie. The nice thing about books, comic, and many other ways of telling stories, is that they allow you to fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Nobody's imagination is exactly the same, so any movie based on a previous work will never be exactly what you were hoping for. But it can still be a good movie in and of itself!
If you are so devoted to a story that you can't bear any innacuracies in a new interpretation of said story, don't go see the movie. It'll just piss you off. And for God's sake, if there's a movie coming out that you know is based on a book/comic, don't go out and read the print version right before you see the movie. With the original story fresh in your mind, the inconsistencies will drive you nuts even if you're not an accuracy nazi. The fact is, because movies are limited in time, budget, acting skills, etc., they will be more limited than your imagination.
There's probably a lot of people out there who are thinking "well, that's bloody obvious..." as they read this. But there are so many accuracy nazis out there who freak out at the slighest deviation from the print version that these facts obviously have to be stated again and again before they actually understand. If you can't enjoy a movie simply because it is an entertaining movie, and not because it is precisely accurate to an author's deathless prose (which, by the way, has been gone over by an editor with a fine-toothed comb and picked apart so it'll sell well long before it was released to the masses), then you shouldn't be going to movies in the first place.
And yes, some of the movies based on previously created stories do suck in and of themselves. But not all books/comics are all that good either. They just don't tend to flop on the front page of the newspaper's entertainment section, they tend to kind of slide into ambiguity.
The thing is, they're not charging for how effective the ad is. They're charging for how effective its placement is, like how Superbowl ads cost a frigging fortune in comparison to something that runs on the local cable channel. It's very much as if Google was a huge shopping mall, and the advertisements are the signs and the ads in the windows of the stores. When you pay rent to the landlord to have your store in a mall, you pay more for the same square footage dependant on the location of the mall, the store's location in the mall, the popularity of the mall, etc. -- basically all of the things that the mall itself can provide that makes it more likely that people will come into your store. But it's not the landlord's responsibility to get the people actually into your store (that's your ads, signage, and window displays), or to buy anything in your store (that's based on your products and prices). PPC is just a way of tracking if the "mall" is actually drawing people to your "store". This makes Google tracking the click-to-purchase ratio pretty useless. Now, if the site itself is tracking the traffic-to-purchase ratio, that's a different matter entirely.
The Google Uploader app is, of course, Windows only.
Odd, that, considering that most professional video is created on Macs... So you create the video, export it to whatever format that you want it distributed in, then transfer it to a PC (and depending on how large the file is, this could take a while), and then upload it to the net. As if the uploading and encoding won't take long enought anyway. What a PITA.
Huh. Yet another reason for ISP's not to give in to RIAA pressure and adopt a code of conduct agreement. If broadcasting is put into the hands of individuals, then bandwidth usage is going to go through the roof. The ISP's will like this since it will generate more business for them and potentially force people to sign up for more expensive "business" as opposed to "personal" accounts. But how in the world will they be able to tell, based on bandwidth alone, whether someone is pirating music/video/software, or whether they're running their own virtual TV station? Hmmm, methinks that the ISP's have yet another reason to tell the RIAA to go f**k themselves.
7) Most importantly, is it an African or a European bicycle?
I work for a company that produces video programs for broadcast TV, and we haven't been decimated by the internet either. Rather, we use it as a tool to quickly send different stages of the videos to our clients, as opposed to sending out VHS drafts or having the clients drive all the way to where we are and to screen the cuts. Our clients like this system because it is faster and they don't have to commute. The volume of work that we do has actually gone up.
And as for the distribution side of things, the internet is just a new medium on which the shows that we produce can be "broadcast". So what if some of the things we do are free to view on our client's website? Our company still gets paid, and our clients have content on their sites that draws people in to buy the things that our clients do charge for. Like starrsoft's travel agency, we have adjusted. In business, everything is constantly changing, it's only the companies that refuse to change with the times that become obsolete.
Now, what would happen if our ISP was required to provide records of all of our company's internet traffic? We do high-volume video swapping via FTP sites, P2P services, and IM's. As we own the copyrights for all the material or are working with the permission of those who own the copyrights, all of our traffic is perfectly legit. But can you imagine how being investigated by the RIAA would damage the reputation of a legit media company? That's one of the things I fear if this deal goes through.
And then worry about international identity theft.
I can understand being worried that your personal information ends up being sent outside of your country of citizenship as an effect of outsourcing. It doesn't really matter where it's shipped to, as soon as it crosses the border, it becomes that much harder to catch and prosecute.
The thing is, if people want something badly enough, they will put up with the risk of identity theft. And some people just don't care enough or know enough to take simple precautions. I'll give you an example. I work for a Canadian company that takes orders from both Canada and the United States. We do not take orders through our email, because we do not have any kind of security with regards to our email system. When we contact clients, we specifically say not to email us credit card numbers, expiry dates, or other sensitive information. This isn't in the fine print, either, it's right in the body of the message! Yet people email us that kind of information all the time. And although an American tracing identity theft to Canada is probably a hell of a lot easier than tracing it to India, and our laws are similar in many respects, we are still accross a border. As such it would be significantly more difficult to trace and prosecute an offence committed in Canada from the States.
Identity theft, nationally or internationally, will not stop until people start taking personal responsibility for their information as much as possible. It's like locking your door whenever you leave the house -- a determined theif is not going to be deterred by a lock when there is a window that can be smashed. Locks are just there to keep honest people honest. At least protect yourself against crimes of opportunity.
... is getting projects approved by the Powers That Be (i.e. the clients). I work for a small company, and in order to stay in business, our production schedules have to be followed to the letter. Things must be done to schedule even if the computers crashed and there was no contingency time budgeted and we have to work unpaid overtime to get the project finished by the due date. Then we send it off to the clients and wait... and wait... and wait... and wait for approval or changes, often past the final deadline of the entire project. At this point, of course the deliverables are late -- and it always seems to be "our fault".
And of course, a lot of the time there are changes to be made to the final product even if we have been sending daily/weekly rough versions for evaluation as the project develops. Somehow, it's always a case of "This is exactly what I asked for.. But not what I wanted!" -- and the clients don't figure that out until they look at the final, polished, ready-for-the-public version. It drives me absolutely frikkin' nuts. What is the point of demanding progress reports if you don't look at them?
I think that people would be surprised by the number of crashes they blame on software that are actually caused by hardware.
I'll second that... I keep getting bad sticks of PC RAM -- ones that will cause my computer to spontaneously reboot, for example, or ones that are the source of randomly generated program errors (which, of course, make it LOOK like it's the software that is faulty). My PC is constantly being upgraded in a piecemeal fashion, so it's not how the RAM reacts with any given piece of hardware. Of course, most of the time on any computer other than my home PC, the same errors would be caused by the software and not the hardware... Especially on Windows machines.
On the other hand, in my experience, crashes on Macs can usually be traced back to the hardware, not the software... Please note that I am not saying that Mac hardware is inferior in any way to PC. I'm saying that I have experienced very few crashes on Macs when compared to the number of those I have survived when working with PC's... And usually, if my Mac crashes, then some piece of hardware has worn out or been fried. On the systems I work with, it's usually old hard drives that have finally given up the ghost.
...in order to pay off the money that Apple could sue him for, I bet that Apple is making him sign an NDA regarding how much money he actually does have to pay. How much you want to bet he doesn't violate this non-disclosure agreement?
Well, if you have lots of time on your hands and you want a really nice end product, you could do it this way:
1) Use a good negative scanner to scan each individual frame from your 8mm or 16mm film at the highest resolution that you can manage.
2) Use Adobe Photoshop or your favorite image editing program to tweak the images.
3) Import the images into Adobe After Effects or your favorite an animation program.
4) Depending on the frame rate that you shot the original film at, make each image the appropriate length so that the final product plays back at 30fps. e.g. If you originally shot the film at 15fps, each frame of film should last 2 frames in the After Effects project. This might be a little rough-looking, but it'll keep the video from being sped up. If you shot at 24fps, the smoothest way to transfer the video is to use 3-2 pulldown (you can find instructions about how to do this through Google), which is how the film industry has been transferring film to video for years. It might take a little research and some calculations to get the smoothest result depending on your original frame rate, but it's worth it.
5) Tweak until you are satisfied with the results, using the "preview" option often.
6) Add titles and effects if you so desire.
7) Render out the video to whatever format you need in order to make your DVD.
8) Burn DVD.
Sorry for being so Adobe-centered, they just happen to be the programs that I am most familiar with since I work with them every day. I am sure that there are other programs that work equally well, I just don't know about them!
...most every filesharing program is used by 99% of its users for illegal activity.
The problem is that each country has its own copyright laws and laws regulating what is considered a crime over the internet. For example, here in Canada it's illegal to upload copyright files, but not illegal to download them. And when it's P2P, the argument can be made that nobody is uploading (since the P2P service is not being used to transport media to or or store media on a server or webpage) and everyone is downloading. The Internet is a means of international communication, and P2P networks serve not only the United States but the entire world. How can MGM argue that tools like Grokster and its like do not have the legal right to exist if the "illegal" actions that take place under services are not illegal everywhere? MGM could potentially argue that stricter bans/filtering/whatnot are necessary within areas in which downloading of copyrighted material is a crime, or that Grokster work with law enforcement in a way similar to phone companies, but that's about all.
...not another thing to make it more difficult to talk on a cell while driving in a car! There are enough idiots zooming around at breakneck speeds, using only half of their attention to drive while they have one hand on the wheel and the other holding a cell phone (or fumbling thorough their pocket/purse/backpack to find the damn thing once it rings). Now people are going to have to try to take a picture of themselves while driving that is steady enough to be recognized by the software. That's it, from now on if my destination is not in walking distance of my house, I'm not going.
So then why didn't apple's site have the system setup to detect the conflict and inform the buyers that this might be a problem?
Why, exactly, should Apple assume that the software you're buying is necessarily related to the hardware you're buying? For all they know, he originally went online to buy the software for the G5 he already has, saw the Mac Mini, thought it was nifty, and added it to his shopping cart. Or possibly the other way around. Or the order was for a company or household running multiple machines. Or multiple people combined on one order to save on shipping costs (granted, I have no idea what the shipping regs are from the online Apple Store, but I've seen people do this with lots of other companies).
Come on. Apple can't cater to every person out there at every level of knowledge. If you, the customer, are going to buy something, you have to do your research. Apple, to their credit, does post pretty much everything you need to know online, and they don't have a piece of information posted then you can always use a web search engine. Don't understand something about the product? Ask someone more technically inclined to explain it to you in terms that you can understand. Making sure that the computer you have has the capability to run the software that you want to buy is akin to taking measurements of the doors to your house before you buy a piece of furniture. Just because a salesperson didn't out and outright tell you that an entertainment unit might not fit through your front door doesn't mean that you shouldn't check anyway. How are they supposed to know what kind of house you have? And, among other things, that's not their job.
When I worked retail, I hated dealing with people like you.
There is a reason that 99% of companies print their return policies on the back of their receipts and also have the return policy posted in clear view somewhere in the store as well. This goes for all kinds of retail companies, whether they sell Macs, PC's, or anything else. If it's an online store, then they have the return policy posted clearly somewhere on the site. Don't have a receipt? Sorry, you can't return it. Opened the package to something that the return policy states cannot be returned after opening the package? You can't return that either.
It is up to the buyer to read the fine print, whether that be the return policy or the system requirements. If you knew that you'd want to run those programs and had done a bit of research before spending the money, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble. Despite the fact that an individual store manager may be willing to bend their policies for you, they don't have to.
Besides, isn't blaming the company who makes the product for what you consider to be an unsatisfactory retail experience kind of silly? That's like saying "all movies distributed through Alliance Atlantic suck because the salesperson at was a jerk?" Granted, Apple both makes and sells Macs, but you're confusing customer relations with the quality of the product they sell. I assume you'll be going back to PC's after this, which is fine by me. But if you had bought an expensive piece of software for PC and didn't bother to read the system req's before you opened the package, do you really think that whatever store you bought it from is going to have a different policy than the Apple Store's? It is time to start implementing a personal common sense policy if you don't want to keep shelling out money for stuff that you can't use.
...after-hours door-entry things at bank ATMs... Invariably, any such door I've tried will respond to any magnetic card at all. What is the point of these?
Especially since most people will be polite and hold the door open for someone behind them... It doesn't even keep homeless people from sheltering in the ATM vestibule, because they just have to wait for someone to go in the door and then slip into the vestibule before the door closes. All the swipe-card locks on ATM vestibules do is make it more annoying to get into the building in the winter, when it means that you have to take your gloves off in the freezing cold to get that stupid card out of your wallet. Yeesh.
the *last* thing you want is a geek who will insist that all production systems should run the latest, most bleeding edge stuff.
On the other hand, you want someone who at is geeky enough to know that 5-year-old computers will break down more often than new ones and they compile a hell of a lot slower... My current manager does not get this and keeps saying that our comps cost X-thousands-of-dollars when we bought them five years ago, we can't possibly need new ones yet. And a budget for repairs & replacement parts? These computers were expensive! Why would we ever need to fix them?
A little technical knowledge goes a long way in management, if only to be able to balance the cost of new computers with the ability of the group one is managing to finish the project on time or, even better, get those wonderful bonuses for getting things done early.