Who needs a $50,000 luxury car? Who needs a hummer? Who needs a sports car that can do 150 mph? Who needs to spend $25,000 on aftermarket parts?
Cars make the best parallels here but you can do this for a lot of other industries. Some people want the biggest, best, fastest, and most powerful. For some people its about material possessions, others its about showing off, others its insecurity.
The bottom line is that people with money are willing to part with it by buying hugely expensive things that they don't need, and therefore there will be people that recognize the market.
Why the poster even made mention of it was probably rhetorical but from the early posts a lot of people are taking it way too seriously.
"This is the first computer animated movie with huge breasted massively tentacled killer zombies who take over Japan and have wicked nasty hardcore sex with every 18 year old school girl they can get their hands on, who all suddenly become sex starved sluts thanks to the zombie's mental powers!"
Yeah you are right... it does get silly after a while... but that would be a great movie don't you think?
Okay, I don't get it. In one breath, slashdotters complain that they don't understand why people are willing to buy or otherwise obtain a bootleg video taped copy of a big name movie. In the other breath, they complain of movie ticket prices reaching upwards of $9 apiece. That dull thud you heard was a clue bouncing off a dense cranium.
Thanks to my 8-5 job and steady income, I can afford to pay these immensely outrageous ticket prices these days. I still enjoy the experience of going out to the movies and sitting in the theater with a bunch of people and watching a huge screen.
Not everyone can afford the price. Not everyone cares about the quality the theater gives you. Lots of people want to see these big release movies. And not everyone thinks its immoral to get a bootleg copy of a movie like this.
You'll find plenty of people who fall into the above four categories. That's a market, a market the MPAA is loathe to exploit because to reach the market they'd have to lower ticket prices and that's not going to happen. However, while they have no true figures on what kind of damage piracy would do to any industry, they don't want to take the chance that what's happening to the music industry happens to movies.
Many people don't particularly care for the movie theater experience. As it stands, you MUST go to the theater to see a first run movie, and wait otherwise. If you don't have to wait, why go to the movies? The MPAA would lose control and in order to make movie theaters attractive again they'd have to... yup, you guessed it, drop ticket prices.
To me the jury is still out on Gmail, because I don't trust any company, Google included, to responsibly use my personal information. Let me play devils advocate for just a second.
1) This bill according to everything I can see only restricts Google to how it can advertise. It can advertise on demand as emails are brought up, but what it can't do is create a massive indexed database with personal information based on emails I send with which to shell out advertisements to me. Why aren't more people scared to death of a database like that? We bitch and moan about governments creating databases like that, and giving up information to advertisers, why aren't we scared of this?
2) Everyone here is saying "if you don't like it, don't sign up for it." Great, but what happens when Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, etc, start doing it themselves? It makes it a lot more serious, especially if all those guys now have databases with personal information. My nice local ISP doesn't have that problem, but consumers are decent people who just don't have time to learn all this computer shit like everyone else, so they use hotmail. Go easy on them.
3) Does anyone one have a link to this law... PLEASE? People claim to have "read" this law but I'm too damn lazy to go searching for it when I've never even bothered to go to the California website to check it out. If there's no link here how are people making real comments on it... flamers usually don't usually read this stuff anyway so pardon me if I don't trust the Slashdot crowd;) All I can go by is this article, for now.
4) This isn't restricting if Gmail can advertise, just how and what it does with personal information. There are already several laws and practices on the books about personal information. Collecting personal information is a huge boon to any major company because then they can shove ads down your throat, despite what most people truly want. Doing the wrong thing with personal information gets some companies in hot water but a lot of times it creates a huge windfall for that same company.
The parent comment is one problem I have here with this review. It hypes the book as good but the book itself is obsoleted by more effective and up to date searching of the web. Books are too slow to troubleshoot problems these days.
The other problem I have is the comment that "Macs aren't as trouble free as one is led to believe." While no computer is perfect, Mac software and hardware have a far better reliability track record than Wintel PCs do. This is at least in my experience, but there are a lot of research reports and experts out there who agree with me.
This smacks of marketing hype. "oooooohhhh buy this book because you are going to have problems.... *scary clanking noises*" That coupled by the fact that instead of buying a reference manual you can get all this information for free online makes me think its just another attempt to make money on something not needed.
I mean cmon... will this book have information on the help viewer/safari security problem? It hit the presses and already it is out of date.
This is nothing new though, the same thing is true for windows and linux troubleshooting guides too.
This is probably too late to the discussion, but has anyone seen any good analysis in terms of environmental risk and damage between Oil (or even coal) and nuclear?
My problem with the whole debate between fossil fuels and nuclear is that people are scared to death of what nuclear power could do them, but the are perfectly okay with the effects of burning fossil fuels.
My point is, is nuclear any more dangerous than burning gasoline every day to go to work?
Sometimes I wonder if it's just people over-reacting to a new technology because its related to the a-bomb or big green-glowing pieces of metal which help kill you in a gruesome way.
Slowly killing all life over the next 150 years doesn't scare us enough, it seems.
While on Tattooine, I believe in Mos Eisly, one Stormtrooper says something and refers to another stormtrooper with a serial identification. It's THX 1138.
I'm such a bad fan for not remembering the quote but it's used as a serial identifcation for a stormtrooper at some point.
I'm shocked the list missed this its the most obvious reference and really the only one I knew.
No not on the death star. Thats when an officer says "T8247 what is your position" during the scene when the Millenium Falcon is captured and the gang sneak off to find a way to disable the tractor beam.
Notice his post was modded as funny, and there was that cute little line about adding one's name to a list. It was completely meant to be tongue in cheek.
Sorry to be captain obvious but someone has to do it.
See, Movies have a foot in two worlds, business and art.
If you look at movies as a business, fine, you are right. It's his right to make the movie in his head, and we have the right to not pay for it and not see it. No biggie.
However, we are sci fi geeks, space opera fans, and obsessive star wars watchers. We live in the world of art. Fuck all those capitalistic pig ideas... I want to discuss art, explore this as art. I want an epic that stands the test of time. I want be impressed with artistic expressions of what makes a great movie. I WANT ART.
I don't want a fucking $8 piece of paper that gives me the right to watch images on a screen. I want a masterful story told in widescreen that entertains me and makes me think.
Your capitalistic ideas are stepping on my bleeding heart liberal overly idealistic idea of the perfect movie and damnit I will complain until I get it!
Sony and EA have huge market shares, but they are not monopolies! It is illegal for a monopoly to use its monopoly power to gain dominance in another industry. Sony is far from innocent, but it's not a monopoly and is not subject to the same rules as other companies. Microsoft does not "compete." They embrace, extend, and extinguish.
I'm appalled that Slashdotters continue to think Microsoft isn't doing something seriously wrong. Sony, EA, and Microsoft are all immoral, most companies are. However, Microsoft is breaking laws, microsoft is making money at the expense of consumers, because they do NOT allow competition. Get that through your head!
The nice thing about unions is that they mean job security, and protection from overzealous greedy companies. They give the workers a voice and strength against getting screwed by a few rich bastards.
The bad thing about unions is they mean you don't have to work hard to keep a job, even at a generous, well managed company. They give workers a lever to use against management to get what they want even if it means screwing a management who's actually doing a decent job.
Sounds like the same union huh?
Unions themselves aren't inherently evil, but they are easily abused these days. I'd rather have lazy stupid people wandering around happy they have a job than lazy stupid people screaming with picket signs and complaining to me that they have no job and they have the right to break into my house and steal my things because society sucks. I believe in that social safety net and all.
However, tighting up a few rules and introducing some healthy competition into unions would be a stellar idea. How about requiring that companies have more than one union for the same workers?! The union that performs better gets better bonuses from the company. How about restricting some of the practices with unions, like making strikes illegal for more important service companies like SBC, where service is crucial.
But of course, evil unions have lobbies, and would never allow that to happen.
Whew, the flamage around here is about as bad as that Lava. It's also attacking the wrong thing.
#1 This is the "British Tabloid, The Sun." Tabloid! Hello, McFly? Are you all really giving that much weight to everything that rag says? Oh, I'm sorry, this is slashdot, my bad.
#2 The article quotes: The Hollywood source said: "Anakin and Obi-Wan fight on platforms on the lava. They control these like surfboards." Sounds like its poorly described. I read that as "controlled with the feet." This is a Tabloid so getting any more detailed than "like surfboards" will bore their readers. This is just sneak peak bullshit designed to get people reading and worked up.
#3 If its described badly, don't can the scene until you've seen it. THEN can it. Have the friggin proof right in front of you. Oh, I'm sorry, this is slashdot, my bad.
#4 Why hasn't anyone complained about the physics of the lava sequence? Now, near the surface, lava is pretty hot and shouldn't be messed with, but you could probably put things on it or hover over it a few feet and not get burnt. But if this is an epic battle, I'm thinking "fires of Mordor" here, deep in the earth or in a volcano. That's friggin HOT. Even if they aren't touching it, the platform should probably melt, or their feet catch fire and/or melt from the sheer heat just above it. Has anyone bothered to analyze this? And, I'm sorry, but if Anakin were to fall into the lava... instant crispy Jedi. None of this horribly scarred nonsense. Who cares if its not "geeky cool" or "artistically cool." Lets can the stupid physics like we used to around here!
#5 Several other sources of Star Wars history cite that in the epic battle between the two, it was acid, not lava. Not that I think Lucas would actually bother to try to keep the timeline consistent, but hell, that actually sounds more realistic and no less cooler than the lava. Can we go back to this please?
It got picked up by Sci-Fi and new episodes have been running. It's no longer in syndication, and Andromeda I believe is only running friday nights on Sci-fi, but since this is a cable channel, it works out better as you don't have to have such a huge share.
Now that at least some Windows users are starting to become aware of this sort of thing, are Mac users next?
Ummm huh? Starting? This has been an issue since the MS DOS days (can you type del *.*?). Everyone who's a computer geek knows this can affect any and every computer system.
Mac user have always had to worry about this, its never changed. The only difference is that before OS X, you had to create said trojan using Applescript. It was also a little harder in OS 9 and before because folders weren't quite as homogenous as they are in X. The only file you were guarenteed to have on a hard drive was the system folder, and no one was ever, EVER allowed to delete that while that was the active system folder. I myself have, however, experienced many trojans which were in fact simply renamed and reiconed applications. For example, In OS 8, there used to be an application called "shut down" that would run from your apple menu. This was used to make it easier to shut down the app without having to go to the finder. Re-icon that with the picture of a woman's face and rename it to "FREE pr0n!" and watch the entire dorm wing scream and holler as their macs were shut down.
This trojan can't kill a Mac and force a reinstall, as similar windows trojans can, as the Mac will rebuild the home directory for the affected account and you'd be back to square one. Of course, you have to worry about losing your data, but what can you do? You ran a program you thought did A but did B... you can't protect against if you aren't paying attention!
Most trojans can be defeated by a little bit of knowledge, but nongeeks have no time to mess around with learning it. Anti-viral programs catch common trojans, but what about those small time trojans that run around rampant on college campuses and hotline networks? You just have to know, and keep good backups.
If the system does in fact work that way and it fixes itself, isn't that a Good Thing?
Even in a better system than we have now, some patents would get through. That's why you need a checks and balances system, so that when one gets through, you can fix it by showing its a bad patent.
It's like how bad laws are thrown out when they are unconstitutional, because one of those checks kicked in.
At the same time, if tons of patents are thrown out, more than were actually upheld, someone might take notice if you put the right spin on it. For example "Look at how much money we are wasting on patent verification when it doesn't even work!" Some people might finally take notice.
Okay I'm sick and tired of this. Riverworld should not have been a movie. Ringworld should not be a movie. Neither should I-Robot or any other classic sci-fi that doesn't fit the TV or movie art medium. It's just WRONG!
1) Books are a completely different medium than visual media. The plot arc evolves differently, the medium expects people to be reading words to understand, and so much is lost in translation to the screen. I-Robot and Riverworld are/were completely mangled and have nothing to do with the book. Hell, call I-robot by another name and include references to the three laws belonging to Asimov and you've probably taken care of legalities and still won't lose any sales. The movie is geared towards average joe american who doesn't even know who Philip Hose Farmer or Isaac Asimov are... why the hell do we do this to ourselves? I have no doubt Ringworld will lose a lot of what made the books interesting.
2) Books can span huge timeframes, movies cannot (though if your lucky TV can and does, though they fuck it up more often than not because of the business). When you make something into a movie you most often destroy the plot and condense the material into a 2 hour timeslice.
3) A movie's climax is almost always at the end, except for your really way out avant gard film pieces. A books climax, especially for less mainstream novels, is all over the place. Classic novels from Asimov and Larry Niven don't act like a screenplay. There are rules to each medium and they don't fit well with each other.
4) Most modern mainstream novels read much like a screenplay. Okay, translate your John Grissom, Tom Clancy, and J.K. Rowling books, because hell when I read those, I think I'm reading a script. Take those and translate them, but Asimov wrote these for deep sci fi fans, not your occasional star trek trash novel fan. It's the wrong audience, and the movie is too expensive to make unless it's mainsteam, so don't make it!!
5) Go on how you want about LotR... currently I consider that the sole exception because Peter Jackson and his trio were the only people who wanted to attempt a real artistic translation, not a $50 hack job.
6) someone PLEASE come up with something new! I am Farscape, what the fuck ever, just give me something that was meant to be seen on TV or the big screen! Can all hollywood do is recycle?
My fuel is exhausted... I'm going to go beat my head against the wall now.
Where do all the "HAN FIRES FIRST!" flame throwers go? Are we delegated to the side entrance or are you ignoring us? Don't make me start shooting green people just to get noticed!!!
If the rules are changing and speed/tactical operations are the New Way, I wonder whether high manoeuvrability "tanks" will be back on the agenda as well, then?
Okay, so I watch the History Channel and I love Mail Call with R. Lee Ermey. The fact is that there ARE high speed "tanks" of a sort. The army and marines both have light attack vehicles which are fasted and armored, but not nearly as well fortified as a M1A1. The Marine's main assault vehicle is in fact amphibious, useful for beach landings and fording rivers. The Marine's vehicle is also wheeled and mounts a 30 mm gun, much smaller than the devastating gun mounted on the M1A1.
I wish I had links for you, but those types of tanks have been in existence for years. The navy may be behind a bit because with the size and cost of the craft, the development cycle of new naval tech is often a little longer.
I think this simply the same idea as trying to force people to buy cell phones with cameras. They are more expensive, and not everyone uses cameras, but hey, if it you can force the people to buy it, then great! You can't really do that with cell phones yet, but with consoles I can see them getting away with it, especially since most consoles are sold as loss-leaders, with the money made up via game licensing.
It's also feature upselling. Maybe you didn't know about online games but now its a feature on ALL consoles, so now you have to just plug it in right (I didn't even know there was an adapter for game cube until a few months ago, not that I'll buy it, but still). Maybe you might decide to use it since you have it already, and that generates game sales. Also, think if you are a teenager who got the game for christmas. Last year you convinced your parents to buy the game cube, but couldn't convince them to buy the extra expense adapter. Now, you get a new one next year, and it has the adapter already built in! Mom will never know!;)
I don't agree with this philosophy, as I'd rather have a cheaper version with no connection, but this is a small list of what they are thinking.
We need categories like: game-system (high end video/audio), word-system (low-end MS word,Excel,presentationsm with low memory, low speed etc.), net-server (designed to host a web site or other network), etc. etc. to be come common terms that everyone knows and uses.
The problem with this is the very nature of the market and the nature of the technology. You can customize cars quite extensively, but that knowledge is not as extensive as the knowledge on customizing PCs. We already have the classes you discuss for PCs, but the problem is people don't entirely trust those classes to match their individual needs.
A car transports you and your things from A to B and is very easy to understand the basics (how many people can it carry, how fast can it go, what kinds of fancy electronics does it have to make my ride more enjoyable) and the most complicated things a driver needs to know are how safe it is and what its miles (or KM) per gallon (or Liter) rating is.
A computer is much more abstract, and its needs are tied not only to the hardware you purchase, but the software. And the needs OF the software are tied to the hardware! And yet, you don't have the money to buy a $5,000 monster machine and hope it meets all your needs. The market is going to try to sell just up to what you want, because the market knows that people know just enough about computers to realize "If I don't need 45743 GB of RAM, I can take some of that out to save money" which is the driving force behind the purchase of cheap PCs, saving money.
There are too many choices, but that's because the technology dictated what people can get, and now that people know they have choice, they won't want to give that up. The are intimidated by choice, but they still enjoy it.
Such an argument completely misses the point of monopolistic behavior. Quality is a determining factor in all sales, of course, but under law, you can make a superior product all you want. What you can't do is leverage your market dominance to force another competitor out, no matter how he sucks. Microsoft didn't just compete on quality, they used their monopoly on the OS to make sure PC sellers didn't install netscape ("Install only IE or I'll make your OS prices go up") and by selling their software below cost, at zero cost. That's simply illegal because I could give away free cars all I like, but if I have a monopoly on oil I could just jack up the price of oil and try to squash research on fuel cells and other green energy resources to make up for the sale of the car.
Think about it, had Microsoft competed only on quality and kept a reasonable price, competition would have ensued and maybe both browsers would have become BETTER! That's what competition does.
Besides, calling netscape a piece of crap that rendered poorly is laughable. Sure it was, and so is IE... and still is. You are claiming Netscape was crap, but failing to point out IE was and still is crap. I mean are you that thick, or just a microsoft plant?:)
I don't think the parent did justice to explaining this, so I just want to provide a quick example. Also this needs to be repeated over and over. One day I'll put something on my personal website about this, because this question is asked over and over and over.
In your normal business environment, people compete for your business. They advertise, market, and change prices in order to try to do better than their competitors.
The problem is a monopoly by definition has no competitors. Lets say you have a company which has agressively marketed RAM chips. You cut costs and make deals. This drives all the competitors out of the market and they close their doors. You now have a natural monopoly. This sometimes happens, and the government has to recognize it. If you are a natural monopoly, you fall under new rules because you have no competition.
For example, as a monopoly, say you go to some PC manufacturer and demand they have to pay twice what they pay now? As a monopoly, the PC manufacturer has no recourse and you are now bullying them. Not fair, and illegal as a monopoly. If you had competition, and you did that to someone, the PC manufacturer would laugh their ass off and switch to another RAM provider. This is one example of general "price fixing."
There are other examples, but that's the general idea. Competition means you have to fight to keep your customers. A monopoly means you can bully your customers in a way that's not fair to them. In general, competition is good because competition is the check against unfairness. This is why there is lots of talk about mergers and huge conglomerates who have too much control. Too much control is generally BAD, because the more control you have, the more prices you can fix. Most companies do more convoluted price fixing of sorts these days because that makes it harder to get caught.
Something else that Microsoft did is give away their IE browser for free. Netscape had a browser which eventually cost money and people had to buy. IE stepped in and leveraged their current monopoly by giving away IE. They made huge amounts of money on the OS and office, but made IE attractive by making it free. This is like owning all the oil in the world and giving away a free car when someone buys enough of your oil. The oil may be marked up astronomically, but hey, free car! This will drive the competition for cars into the gutter as their cars still require oil.
Note its also illegal in the US for companies to work together directly to fix prices.
Slashdot Mirror
Who needs a $50,000 luxury car?
Who needs a hummer?
Who needs a sports car that can do 150 mph?
Who needs to spend $25,000 on aftermarket parts?
Cars make the best parallels here but you can do this for a lot of other industries. Some people want the biggest, best, fastest, and most powerful. For some people its about material possessions, others its about showing off, others its insecurity.
The bottom line is that people with money are willing to part with it by buying hugely expensive things that they don't need, and therefore there will be people that recognize the market.
Why the poster even made mention of it was probably rhetorical but from the early posts a lot of people are taking it way too seriously.
"This is the first computer animated movie with huge breasted massively tentacled killer zombies who take over Japan and have wicked nasty hardcore sex with every 18 year old school girl they can get their hands on, who all suddenly become sex starved sluts thanks to the zombie's mental powers!"
Yeah you are right... it does get silly after a while... but that would be a great movie don't you think?
Okay, I don't get it. In one breath, slashdotters complain that they don't understand why people are willing to buy or otherwise obtain a bootleg video taped copy of a big name movie. In the other breath, they complain of movie ticket prices reaching upwards of $9 apiece. That dull thud you heard was a clue bouncing off a dense cranium.
Thanks to my 8-5 job and steady income, I can afford to pay these immensely outrageous ticket prices these days. I still enjoy the experience of going out to the movies and sitting in the theater with a bunch of people and watching a huge screen.
Not everyone can afford the price. Not everyone cares about the quality the theater gives you. Lots of people want to see these big release movies. And not everyone thinks its immoral to get a bootleg copy of a movie like this.
You'll find plenty of people who fall into the above four categories. That's a market, a market the MPAA is loathe to exploit because to reach the market they'd have to lower ticket prices and that's not going to happen. However, while they have no true figures on what kind of damage piracy would do to any industry, they don't want to take the chance that what's happening to the music industry happens to movies.
Many people don't particularly care for the movie theater experience. As it stands, you MUST go to the theater to see a first run movie, and wait otherwise. If you don't have to wait, why go to the movies? The MPAA would lose control and in order to make movie theaters attractive again they'd have to... yup, you guessed it, drop ticket prices.
Ironic, ain't it?
To me the jury is still out on Gmail, because I don't trust any company, Google included, to responsibly use my personal information. Let me play devils advocate for just a second.
;) All I can go by is this article, for now.
1) This bill according to everything I can see only restricts Google to how it can advertise. It can advertise on demand as emails are brought up, but what it can't do is create a massive indexed database with personal information based on emails I send with which to shell out advertisements to me. Why aren't more people scared to death of a database like that? We bitch and moan about governments creating databases like that, and giving up information to advertisers, why aren't we scared of this?
2) Everyone here is saying "if you don't like it, don't sign up for it." Great, but what happens when Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, etc, start doing it themselves? It makes it a lot more serious, especially if all those guys now have databases with personal information. My nice local ISP doesn't have that problem, but consumers are decent people who just don't have time to learn all this computer shit like everyone else, so they use hotmail. Go easy on them.
3) Does anyone one have a link to this law... PLEASE? People claim to have "read" this law but I'm too damn lazy to go searching for it when I've never even bothered to go to the California website to check it out. If there's no link here how are people making real comments on it... flamers usually don't usually read this stuff anyway so pardon me if I don't trust the Slashdot crowd
4) This isn't restricting if Gmail can advertise, just how and what it does with personal information. There are already several laws and practices on the books about personal information. Collecting personal information is a huge boon to any major company because then they can shove ads down your throat, despite what most people truly want. Doing the wrong thing with personal information gets some companies in hot water but a lot of times it creates a huge windfall for that same company.
The parent comment is one problem I have here with this review. It hypes the book as good but the book itself is obsoleted by more effective and up to date searching of the web. Books are too slow to troubleshoot problems these days.
The other problem I have is the comment that "Macs aren't as trouble free as one is led to believe." While no computer is perfect, Mac software and hardware have a far better reliability track record than Wintel PCs do. This is at least in my experience, but there are a lot of research reports and experts out there who agree with me.
This smacks of marketing hype. "oooooohhhh buy this book because you are going to have problems.... *scary clanking noises*" That coupled by the fact that instead of buying a reference manual you can get all this information for free online makes me think its just another attempt to make money on something not needed.
I mean cmon... will this book have information on the help viewer/safari security problem? It hit the presses and already it is out of date.
This is nothing new though, the same thing is true for windows and linux troubleshooting guides too.
Convict 1: "So Mac... whatcha in fer?"
Convict 2: "I dun killed a man with my bare hands... you?"
Convict 1: "Beat a McDonald's guy for messin up my order."
Convict 2: "Hey you... yeah you over there... the geek looking dork... whatcha in for?"
Howard Carmak: "uhhhh me? I'm a spammer who stole someone's identity."
Convict 2: "Well I guess that makes you the bitch in this cell.. he he he..."
Convict 1: "Naw Mac... that makes him the piggy... lets make the piggy squeal!"
I'll be impressed when they can actually find which state springfield is in!
This is probably too late to the discussion, but has anyone seen any good analysis in terms of environmental risk and damage between Oil (or even coal) and nuclear?
My problem with the whole debate between fossil fuels and nuclear is that people are scared to death of what nuclear power could do them, but the are perfectly okay with the effects of burning fossil fuels.
My point is, is nuclear any more dangerous than burning gasoline every day to go to work?
Sometimes I wonder if it's just people over-reacting to a new technology because its related to the a-bomb or big green-glowing pieces of metal which help kill you in a gruesome way.
Slowly killing all life over the next 150 years doesn't scare us enough, it seems.
While on Tattooine, I believe in Mos Eisly, one Stormtrooper says something and refers to another stormtrooper with a serial identification. It's THX 1138.
I'm such a bad fan for not remembering the quote but it's used as a serial identifcation for a stormtrooper at some point.
I'm shocked the list missed this its the most obvious reference and really the only one I knew.
No not on the death star. Thats when an officer says "T8247 what is your position" during the scene when the Millenium Falcon is captured and the gang sneak off to find a way to disable the tractor beam.
No, it is not proof
I agree with you, and well, so does Hooptie.
Notice his post was modded as funny, and there was that cute little line about adding one's name to a list. It was completely meant to be tongue in cheek.
Sorry to be captain obvious but someone has to do it.
See, Movies have a foot in two worlds, business and art.
If you look at movies as a business, fine, you are right. It's his right to make the movie in his head, and we have the right to not pay for it and not see it. No biggie.
However, we are sci fi geeks, space opera fans, and obsessive star wars watchers. We live in the world of art. Fuck all those capitalistic pig ideas... I want to discuss art, explore this as art. I want an epic that stands the test of time. I want be impressed with artistic expressions of what makes a great movie. I WANT ART.
I don't want a fucking $8 piece of paper that gives me the right to watch images on a screen. I want a masterful story told in widescreen that entertains me and makes me think.
Your capitalistic ideas are stepping on my bleeding heart liberal overly idealistic idea of the perfect movie and damnit I will complain until I get it!
Sony and EA have huge market shares, but they are not monopolies! It is illegal for a monopoly to use its monopoly power to gain dominance in another industry. Sony is far from innocent, but it's not a monopoly and is not subject to the same rules as other companies. Microsoft does not "compete." They embrace, extend, and extinguish.
I'm appalled that Slashdotters continue to think Microsoft isn't doing something seriously wrong. Sony, EA, and Microsoft are all immoral, most companies are. However, Microsoft is breaking laws, microsoft is making money at the expense of consumers, because they do NOT allow competition. Get that through your head!
The nice thing about unions is that they mean job security, and protection from overzealous greedy companies. They give the workers a voice and strength against getting screwed by a few rich bastards.
The bad thing about unions is they mean you don't have to work hard to keep a job, even at a generous, well managed company. They give workers a lever to use against management to get what they want even if it means screwing a management who's actually doing a decent job.
Sounds like the same union huh?
Unions themselves aren't inherently evil, but they are easily abused these days. I'd rather have lazy stupid people wandering around happy they have a job than lazy stupid people screaming with picket signs and complaining to me that they have no job and they have the right to break into my house and steal my things because society sucks. I believe in that social safety net and all.
However, tighting up a few rules and introducing some healthy competition into unions would be a stellar idea. How about requiring that companies have more than one union for the same workers?! The union that performs better gets better bonuses from the company. How about restricting some of the practices with unions, like making strikes illegal for more important service companies like SBC, where service is crucial.
But of course, evil unions have lobbies, and would never allow that to happen.
Whew, the flamage around here is about as bad as that Lava. It's also attacking the wrong thing.
#1 This is the "British Tabloid, The Sun." Tabloid! Hello, McFly? Are you all really giving that much weight to everything that rag says? Oh, I'm sorry, this is slashdot, my bad.
#2 The article quotes: The Hollywood source said: "Anakin and Obi-Wan fight on platforms on the lava. They control these like surfboards." Sounds like its poorly described. I read that as "controlled with the feet." This is a Tabloid so getting any more detailed than "like surfboards" will bore their readers. This is just sneak peak bullshit designed to get people reading and worked up.
#3 If its described badly, don't can the scene until you've seen it. THEN can it. Have the friggin proof right in front of you. Oh, I'm sorry, this is slashdot, my bad.
#4 Why hasn't anyone complained about the physics of the lava sequence? Now, near the surface, lava is pretty hot and shouldn't be messed with, but you could probably put things on it or hover over it a few feet and not get burnt. But if this is an epic battle, I'm thinking "fires of Mordor" here, deep in the earth or in a volcano. That's friggin HOT. Even if they aren't touching it, the platform should probably melt, or their feet catch fire and/or melt from the sheer heat just above it. Has anyone bothered to analyze this? And, I'm sorry, but if Anakin were to fall into the lava... instant crispy Jedi. None of this horribly scarred nonsense. Who cares if its not "geeky cool" or "artistically cool." Lets can the stupid physics like we used to around here!
#5 Several other sources of Star Wars history cite that in the epic battle between the two, it was acid, not lava. Not that I think Lucas would actually bother to try to keep the timeline consistent, but hell, that actually sounds more realistic and no less cooler than the lava. Can we go back to this please?
It got picked up by Sci-Fi and new episodes have been running. It's no longer in syndication, and Andromeda I believe is only running friday nights on Sci-fi, but since this is a cable channel, it works out better as you don't have to have such a huge share.
Now that at least some Windows users are starting to become aware of this sort of thing, are Mac users next?
Ummm huh? Starting? This has been an issue since the MS DOS days (can you type del *.*?). Everyone who's a computer geek knows this can affect any and every computer system.
Mac user have always had to worry about this, its never changed. The only difference is that before OS X, you had to create said trojan using Applescript. It was also a little harder in OS 9 and before because folders weren't quite as homogenous as they are in X. The only file you were guarenteed to have on a hard drive was the system folder, and no one was ever, EVER allowed to delete that while that was the active system folder. I myself have, however, experienced many trojans which were in fact simply renamed and reiconed applications. For example, In OS 8, there used to be an application called "shut down" that would run from your apple menu. This was used to make it easier to shut down the app without having to go to the finder. Re-icon that with the picture of a woman's face and rename it to "FREE pr0n!" and watch the entire dorm wing scream and holler as their macs were shut down.
This trojan can't kill a Mac and force a reinstall, as similar windows trojans can, as the Mac will rebuild the home directory for the affected account and you'd be back to square one. Of course, you have to worry about losing your data, but what can you do? You ran a program you thought did A but did B... you can't protect against if you aren't paying attention!
Most trojans can be defeated by a little bit of knowledge, but nongeeks have no time to mess around with learning it. Anti-viral programs catch common trojans, but what about those small time trojans that run around rampant on college campuses and hotline networks? You just have to know, and keep good backups.
If the system does in fact work that way and it fixes itself, isn't that a Good Thing?
Even in a better system than we have now, some patents would get through. That's why you need a checks and balances system, so that when one gets through, you can fix it by showing its a bad patent.
It's like how bad laws are thrown out when they are unconstitutional, because one of those checks kicked in.
At the same time, if tons of patents are thrown out, more than were actually upheld, someone might take notice if you put the right spin on it. For example "Look at how much money we are wasting on patent verification when it doesn't even work!" Some people might finally take notice.
(lights up the flamethrower and takes aim...)
Okay I'm sick and tired of this. Riverworld should not have been a movie. Ringworld should not be a movie. Neither should I-Robot or any other classic sci-fi that doesn't fit the TV or movie art medium. It's just WRONG!
1) Books are a completely different medium than visual media. The plot arc evolves differently, the medium expects people to be reading words to understand, and so much is lost in translation to the screen. I-Robot and Riverworld are/were completely mangled and have nothing to do with the book. Hell, call I-robot by another name and include references to the three laws belonging to Asimov and you've probably taken care of legalities and still won't lose any sales. The movie is geared towards average joe american who doesn't even know who Philip Hose Farmer or Isaac Asimov are... why the hell do we do this to ourselves? I have no doubt Ringworld will lose a lot of what made the books interesting.
2) Books can span huge timeframes, movies cannot (though if your lucky TV can and does, though they fuck it up more often than not because of the business). When you make something into a movie you most often destroy the plot and condense the material into a 2 hour timeslice.
3) A movie's climax is almost always at the end, except for your really way out avant gard film pieces. A books climax, especially for less mainstream novels, is all over the place. Classic novels from Asimov and Larry Niven don't act like a screenplay. There are rules to each medium and they don't fit well with each other.
4) Most modern mainstream novels read much like a screenplay. Okay, translate your John Grissom, Tom Clancy, and J.K. Rowling books, because hell when I read those, I think I'm reading a script. Take those and translate them, but Asimov wrote these for deep sci fi fans, not your occasional star trek trash novel fan. It's the wrong audience, and the movie is too expensive to make unless it's mainsteam, so don't make it!!
5) Go on how you want about LotR... currently I consider that the sole exception because Peter Jackson and his trio were the only people who wanted to attempt a real artistic translation, not a $50 hack job.
6) someone PLEASE come up with something new! I am Farscape, what the fuck ever, just give me something that was meant to be seen on TV or the big screen! Can all hollywood do is recycle?
My fuel is exhausted... I'm going to go beat my head against the wall now.
Where do all the "HAN FIRES FIRST!" flame throwers go? Are we delegated to the side entrance or are you ignoring us? Don't make me start shooting green people just to get noticed!!!
If the rules are changing and speed/tactical operations are the New Way, I wonder whether high manoeuvrability "tanks" will be back on the agenda as well, then?
Okay, so I watch the History Channel and I love Mail Call with R. Lee Ermey. The fact is that there ARE high speed "tanks" of a sort. The army and marines both have light attack vehicles which are fasted and armored, but not nearly as well fortified as a M1A1. The Marine's main assault vehicle is in fact amphibious, useful for beach landings and fording rivers. The Marine's vehicle is also wheeled and mounts a 30 mm gun, much smaller than the devastating gun mounted on the M1A1.
I wish I had links for you, but those types of tanks have been in existence for years. The navy may be behind a bit because with the size and cost of the craft, the development cycle of new naval tech is often a little longer.
I think this simply the same idea as trying to force people to buy cell phones with cameras. They are more expensive, and not everyone uses cameras, but hey, if it you can force the people to buy it, then great! You can't really do that with cell phones yet, but with consoles I can see them getting away with it, especially since most consoles are sold as loss-leaders, with the money made up via game licensing.
;)
It's also feature upselling. Maybe you didn't know about online games but now its a feature on ALL consoles, so now you have to just plug it in right (I didn't even know there was an adapter for game cube until a few months ago, not that I'll buy it, but still). Maybe you might decide to use it since you have it already, and that generates game sales. Also, think if you are a teenager who got the game for christmas. Last year you convinced your parents to buy the game cube, but couldn't convince them to buy the extra expense adapter. Now, you get a new one next year, and it has the adapter already built in! Mom will never know!
I don't agree with this philosophy, as I'd rather have a cheaper version with no connection, but this is a small list of what they are thinking.
We need categories like: game-system (high end video/audio), word-system (low-end MS word,Excel,presentationsm with low memory, low speed etc.), net-server (designed to host a web site or other network), etc. etc. to be come common terms that everyone knows and uses.
The problem with this is the very nature of the market and the nature of the technology. You can customize cars quite extensively, but that knowledge is not as extensive as the knowledge on customizing PCs. We already have the classes you discuss for PCs, but the problem is people don't entirely trust those classes to match their individual needs.
A car transports you and your things from A to B and is very easy to understand the basics (how many people can it carry, how fast can it go, what kinds of fancy electronics does it have to make my ride more enjoyable) and the most complicated things a driver needs to know are how safe it is and what its miles (or KM) per gallon (or Liter) rating is.
A computer is much more abstract, and its needs are tied not only to the hardware you purchase, but the software. And the needs OF the software are tied to the hardware! And yet, you don't have the money to buy a $5,000 monster machine and hope it meets all your needs. The market is going to try to sell just up to what you want, because the market knows that people know just enough about computers to realize "If I don't need 45743 GB of RAM, I can take some of that out to save money" which is the driving force behind the purchase of cheap PCs, saving money.
There are too many choices, but that's because the technology dictated what people can get, and now that people know they have choice, they won't want to give that up. The are intimidated by choice, but they still enjoy it.
Such an argument completely misses the point of monopolistic behavior. Quality is a determining factor in all sales, of course, but under law, you can make a superior product all you want. What you can't do is leverage your market dominance to force another competitor out, no matter how he sucks. Microsoft didn't just compete on quality, they used their monopoly on the OS to make sure PC sellers didn't install netscape ("Install only IE or I'll make your OS prices go up") and by selling their software below cost, at zero cost. That's simply illegal because I could give away free cars all I like, but if I have a monopoly on oil I could just jack up the price of oil and try to squash research on fuel cells and other green energy resources to make up for the sale of the car.
:)
Think about it, had Microsoft competed only on quality and kept a reasonable price, competition would have ensued and maybe both browsers would have become BETTER! That's what competition does.
Besides, calling netscape a piece of crap that rendered poorly is laughable. Sure it was, and so is IE... and still is. You are claiming Netscape was crap, but failing to point out IE was and still is crap. I mean are you that thick, or just a microsoft plant?
This is hilarious! Sounds completely tongue in cheek to me. Am I missing something? Everyone else here seems to be taking it seriously.
I don't think the parent did justice to explaining this, so I just want to provide a quick example. Also this needs to be repeated over and over. One day I'll put something on my personal website about this, because this question is asked over and over and over.
In your normal business environment, people compete for your business. They advertise, market, and change prices in order to try to do better than their competitors.
The problem is a monopoly by definition has no competitors. Lets say you have a company which has agressively marketed RAM chips. You cut costs and make deals. This drives all the competitors out of the market and they close their doors. You now have a natural monopoly. This sometimes happens, and the government has to recognize it. If you are a natural monopoly, you fall under new rules because you have no competition.
For example, as a monopoly, say you go to some PC manufacturer and demand they have to pay twice what they pay now? As a monopoly, the PC manufacturer has no recourse and you are now bullying them. Not fair, and illegal as a monopoly. If you had competition, and you did that to someone, the PC manufacturer would laugh their ass off and switch to another RAM provider. This is one example of general "price fixing."
There are other examples, but that's the general idea. Competition means you have to fight to keep your customers. A monopoly means you can bully your customers in a way that's not fair to them. In general, competition is good because competition is the check against unfairness. This is why there is lots of talk about mergers and huge conglomerates who have too much control. Too much control is generally BAD, because the more control you have, the more prices you can fix. Most companies do more convoluted price fixing of sorts these days because that makes it harder to get caught.
Something else that Microsoft did is give away their IE browser for free. Netscape had a browser which eventually cost money and people had to buy. IE stepped in and leveraged their current monopoly by giving away IE. They made huge amounts of money on the OS and office, but made IE attractive by making it free. This is like owning all the oil in the world and giving away a free car when someone buys enough of your oil. The oil may be marked up astronomically, but hey, free car! This will drive the competition for cars into the gutter as their cars still require oil.
Note its also illegal in the US for companies to work together directly to fix prices.
Thus ends the lesson.