Fan projects like this only help to keep the IP in people's minds, effectively generated free promotion.
Anyone recall the early days of the internet when Fox and Lucas were threatening to sue all the X-Files and Star Wars fan pages on the internet in order to protect their trademarks? At some point they decided it was too hard to fight, and that fan pages weren't a threat to their trademarks. So why are fan movies different?
Nevermind that most of those casualties come from militants blowing up fellow Iraqis. Sunni and Shiite conflict just claimed the lives of 30 innocent civilians in Pakistan the other day.
It is easier simply to cite the uncounted (and assume very high) casualties in Iraq and blame the US coalition. Surely the US intended for there to be heavy casualties. Individual soldiers did their part to kill innocents they had no beef with. We'll ignore the constant bombings, and let most of the true villains go without blame.
We shouldn't pursue militants killing people.
We're ignore the fact that Saddam did fund terrorist camps, and had an open pledge to give money to any terrorist who kids Jews in Israel.
We'll ignore the fact that we're doing our damnest to get off oil, that Bush went after oil companies, passing bills to demand cleaner water and air standards. We'll ignore the tax breaks he passed on hybrids. We'll ignore the money be put into fuel cell research. We'll ignore that he pushed to drill more US oil.
We'll assume it is all about controlling Iraqi oil, which we don't do anyway today.
War is far more complicated than we'd like to believe. Why not spin it in simple lies that we want to swallow?
My only problem was I visited a site with Chrome in Windows with Adblock+. The ad still rendered, but was hidden. This slows down page rendering, but worse, there was malicious code that downloaded and tried opening a virus-infected PDF file.
This was a drive-by ad when I was reading Ain't It Cool News. I went right back to Firefox.
I like a lot of things about Chrome, but I need a good Adblock solution.
Chromium is ocmpletely open-source, and there is a fork with a built-in Adblock solution called Iron, but it is apparently fairly unstable, and extensions are completely broken at the moment.
Someone could take the proper Adblock code from the Iron fork and submit it as a patch to the main Chromium tree and see what happens.
Chrome largely looks the same on Windows and Linux. Firefox used to, but Mozilla has been working to make Firefox on each platform look more integrated.
I happen to believe KDE 4.3 looks as good as any desktop on the planet. There are plenty of great looking Linux apps. I say that as a guy who spends 90% of his time in Windows between my two jobs, and runs both Windows 7 and openSUSE at home.
Windows 7 failed to recognize my RAID card, sound, my printer, and my video card. I had to grab drivers for all three. I haven't even bothered trying with my old web cam. I doubt a x64-bit Windows 7 driver exists. For many printers, Windows 7 drivers just don't exist at all.
Linux detected all my hardware without additional drivers.
That was the first way to get Chrome running under Linux, was with Wine. I wouldn't be shocked if some people were still doing that.
My wife doesn't like the lack of top and buttom buttons on the scrollbar with the GTK/Linux version of Chrome, where as the Windows version has normal scroll buttons. If she keeps griping about them, I may install Chrome via Wine on her laptop.
I agree that Apple computers are over-priced. But people don't always go for the cheapest product.
Toyota sales keep rising and rising. They don't make cheap cars. In fact, their cars are often the most expensive in their respective classes. People want to pay for quality.
There is also a notion of prestige pricing, where people feel better if they pay more. A $500 purse likely isn't any better than a $50 purse, but my wife will feel better buying a $500 purse, because of prestige pricing.
With their pricing, Apple markets themselves as a prestige item. You wouldn't show off cheap Wal-Mart furniture with pride. But you will show off a $2,900 Macbook with pride.
(Note, I prefer the better value, but not everyone thinks the same way.)
The users aren't as focused on security because the OS is seen as traditionally secure. I love Linux. I advocate Linux as a safer way to browse the web.
Flash exploits on a web site are going to target Windows, as opposed to the small Linux market.
However, Flash exploits do exist.
My original point is that this is an odd prediction saying that Flash will become an issue in 2010, when I already think it was the biggest issue in 2009.
Acrobat and Flash vulnerabilities were two of the biggest issues I saw in 2009, even more than Office vulnerabilities.
For one, Office only seems to hit the enterprise sector, and most enterprise users have at least some security. Office is more likely to be patched by users, and there were fewer vulnerabilities.
Most users don't have the latest version of Acrobat or Flash. They effect home and enterprise users.
Even more alarming, it seems that Flash vulnerabilities are one of the biggest weaknesses on Mac and Linux, where security is an after-thought.
For Windows users, I often recommend they swap Acrobat with a free reader like Sumo or Foxit, which is smaller, faster, and has less vulnerabilities. Sadly, there aren't many GOOD Flash alternatives.
I really hope HTML 5 phases out the popularity of Flash.
The iPhone ads that show a specific feature are textbook examples of great ads.
Not everyone was in the smartphone market. They didn't think they needed one. Apple runs an ad and shows you what the iPhone can do for you in simple terms. It doesn't get any more basic or effective than that.
I'm not sure if people realize it, but the device portion is largely taken care of.
Try upgrading to Windows 7 today, and notice that suddenly your printer or web cam no longer work, because there are no drivers, especially since OEMs are pushing x64 bit versions of Windows 7.
Conversely, Linux supports more hardware than any OS on the planet, from small embedded devices, legacy hardware, desktops, servers, tablets, phones, to super-computers.
The 2.6.33-rc1 kernel even has an OSS Nvidia driver built in now. Most Nvidia and ATI hardware should work out of the box without proprietary drivers (not that I'm opposed to proprietary drivers if they truly work better).
I find most hardware just works out of the box with no work in Linux, but I find myself hunting for drivers in Windows all the time. People are stuck in this mindset that Linux hardware support is lacking, but that just isn't the case.
Marketing is more than advertising, which is just a sub-set of marketing. Marketing is also about closing sales and landing exclusive contracts. Microsoft did a great job of positioning themselves in their respective markets and strong-arming the competition.
But Apple is so clever at reversing that strategy. It is always the PC who comes to the Mac and tries to bully them saying how they are superior. The Mac takes the abuse, plays the nice guy, and comes out on top.
Even though Apple is slamming Microsoft in these ads, they play themselves off as the victim. It is the most clever mud-slinging campaign I've ever seen. It really is brilliant.
Microsoft is still a very profitable behemoth, but in this decade, Windows Mobile has been seen largely as a flop and some suggest it may be dropped completely.
Microsoft paid for exclusive titles for the XBox platform like mad, which had hardware failures like mad, and the XBox division just hermorhages money left and right.
The Zune is regularly mocked as a weak immitator to the iPod (though I wish my iPhone had an OLED screen).
Microsoft lost OS market share to Apple, lost massive browser share to Firefox, and was hammered twice by the EU with massive fines. The EU mandates they embrace interoperability.
It hasn't been the best decade for Microsoft. The 80's and 90's were far kinder.
There is also plenty of evidence to suggest we might be finally shifting alot of our need for oil to other sources.
The cost/benefit analysis for your scenario doesn't justify a war just to get access to oil. Heck, we had the capability to buy oil from Iraq before the war.
Iraq and Canada both have a population of about 30 million, except Iraq had the stronger military, was father away, and had less oil.
Again, if the decision was just to invade someone to get oil, Canada is by far the most logical choice. You can easily build a direct pipeline, getting troops to Candaa is easy, and they have more oil.
Iran has more oil than Iraq, and we have worse relations with Iran. Saudi Arabia has more oil than Iraq, though if we took over Mecca, well, I don't even want to go there.
I was just watching features on the Tropic Thunder BluRay the other night, and Ben Stiller was talking about how much Tropic Thunder changed over the decade he worked on the film.
Initially the film was supposedly to just be about actors attending a two-week boot-camp and overreacting to how terrible it supposedly was, when it reality, it is weak sauce compared to what real soldiers go through.
Avatar bounced around Cameron's head for some time. He said he first had the concept 20 years ago. But the current incarnation, the film he actually made, does specifically evoke Bush and Iraq. Using the terms "shock and awe", "fight terror with terror" and "preemptive attack" are no accident, especially given Cameron's political views.
Are you going to honestly suggest that those specific phrases in the script, coupled with the overall plot and theme of the movie are not intentionally designed to parallel a certain view of Iraq?
Then again, it is far easier to shirk away from a stupid comment when you post AC. Next time, man up, sign up, and stand behind your comments. Frankly, I don't know why I bother responding to ACs.
This is a long post. Some may want to skip to the bottom, bolded tl;dr portion.
Maybe in theory, in practice the oil is controlled by a government that came to power in a process heavily controlled by the USA and that government remains heavily dependent on the USA.
We did not control the formation of the government. Congress said they would only back going into Iraq if Iraq had full control over how they formed their new government. Just as Afghanistan formed their own government on their own, so did Iraq.
I hear all the time how the US forms all these puppet/shadow governments that we control. This simply isn't true. We (in the past) did help put certain leaders in power, but that didn't mean we had influence over them. For instance, he helped put Saddam in power. That didn't mean we controlled Saddam the way an adult controls their child. Your analogy fails.
Not directly. First, the supposedly substantial cost of "extracting" the oil is skimmed off the top (mostly by foreign corporations) and even then the remaining money is only spent on projects that are supposedly for the benefit of the Iraqi people (the money is not given to them directly).
Reputable source please? Iraq was fully capable of obtaining their own oil before. I know that the oil fields and refineries were damaged in attacks, but I haven't seen anything to suggest tht foreign corporations suddenly control Iraqi oil.
I do recall reading that Bush proposed the idea that oil revenue would go into a welfare-type pool until the Iraqi government was fully formed, so they could determine how to deal with it. However, there has been an Iraqi government for some time. I'm not sure how they currently distribute oil profits.
But the Iraq war has been a very very good dream for the high level executives at companies like Haliburton (lots of profits to justify fabulous incentive bonuses) - executives who happened to be close friends with the Bush administration.
You should have watched the vice-presidential debates 5 years ago. Cheney was asked about his ties to Haliburton. He didn't deny that he worked for them in the past and still had friends there. However, his tax returns and campaign contributions were public record. He said that he hadn't received one penny from Haliburton, and to ensure no one accusing him of favortism, he was specifically excluding Haliburton from bidding on the first round of contracts.
Haliburton did receive some prime contracts in Iraq, but they had to make bids that a Democrat controlled Congress voted on. Haliburton happens to be one the largest and most capable contractors for those specific bids.
I'm not aware of Bush-specific ties to Haliburton. I assume you meant to say Cheney.
However, please understand that both parties voted on a ridiculous bail-out program that just handed out pork like mad to corporate pockets. We doubled the national debt overnight with that bill. And we continue to hand out more money to corporations every day. Both parties are corrupt, and both parties are stealing our tax dollars to give it to their cronies. Even worse, they're stealing more money than we have, and giving away money with deficit spending. The fact that no one seems to care about his truly terrifies me.
...the current war on Iraq is an unjustified war of aggression....
The justification or villification of Iraq is a lengthy debate in and of itself. Know this. The Iraqi people are glad that Saddam and the Ba'th party were deposed. You had Kurds leaving their cities and living in mountain caves for fear of their lives. You had gestapo-type secret police dragging people away to rape and torture centers.
Saddam did attempt genocide. He was pursuing it again. He did directly fund terrorists. And he did violate UN Security Council resolutions time and time again.
France was perhaps the most vocal saying they'd veto any r
Slashdot Mirror
Serious fan-films like this aren't seen as parody though.
Fan projects like this only help to keep the IP in people's minds, effectively generated free promotion.
Anyone recall the early days of the internet when Fox and Lucas were threatening to sue all the X-Files and Star Wars fan pages on the internet in order to protect their trademarks? At some point they decided it was too hard to fight, and that fan pages weren't a threat to their trademarks. So why are fan movies different?
Nevermind that most of those casualties come from militants blowing up fellow Iraqis. Sunni and Shiite conflict just claimed the lives of 30 innocent civilians in Pakistan the other day.
It is easier simply to cite the uncounted (and assume very high) casualties in Iraq and blame the US coalition. Surely the US intended for there to be heavy casualties. Individual soldiers did their part to kill innocents they had no beef with. We'll ignore the constant bombings, and let most of the true villains go without blame.
We shouldn't pursue militants killing people.
We're ignore the fact that Saddam did fund terrorist camps, and had an open pledge to give money to any terrorist who kids Jews in Israel.
We'll ignore the fact that we're doing our damnest to get off oil, that Bush went after oil companies, passing bills to demand cleaner water and air standards. We'll ignore the tax breaks he passed on hybrids. We'll ignore the money be put into fuel cell research. We'll ignore that he pushed to drill more US oil.
We'll assume it is all about controlling Iraqi oil, which we don't do anyway today.
War is far more complicated than we'd like to believe. Why not spin it in simple lies that we want to swallow?
Let's just live in fucking fantasy world.
My only problem was I visited a site with Chrome in Windows with Adblock+. The ad still rendered, but was hidden. This slows down page rendering, but worse, there was malicious code that downloaded and tried opening a virus-infected PDF file.
This was a drive-by ad when I was reading Ain't It Cool News. I went right back to Firefox.
I like a lot of things about Chrome, but I need a good Adblock solution.
Chromium is ocmpletely open-source, and there is a fork with a built-in Adblock solution called Iron, but it is apparently fairly unstable, and extensions are completely broken at the moment.
Someone could take the proper Adblock code from the Iron fork and submit it as a patch to the main Chromium tree and see what happens.
I'm running openSUSE 11.2 64-bit. I installed the actual 64-bit Flash with 64-bit Chrome. It works well.
How is this not modded Troll or Flamebait?
Chrome largely looks the same on Windows and Linux. Firefox used to, but Mozilla has been working to make Firefox on each platform look more integrated.
I happen to believe KDE 4.3 looks as good as any desktop on the planet. There are plenty of great looking Linux apps. I say that as a guy who spends 90% of his time in Windows between my two jobs, and runs both Windows 7 and openSUSE at home.
Windows 7 failed to recognize my RAID card, sound, my printer, and my video card. I had to grab drivers for all three. I haven't even bothered trying with my old web cam. I doubt a x64-bit Windows 7 driver exists. For many printers, Windows 7 drivers just don't exist at all.
Linux detected all my hardware without additional drivers.
The entire Chrome application is open under a BSD license. You can check out the licenses of the dependencies as well here:
http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html
That was the first way to get Chrome running under Linux, was with Wine. I wouldn't be shocked if some people were still doing that.
My wife doesn't like the lack of top and buttom buttons on the scrollbar with the GTK/Linux version of Chrome, where as the Windows version has normal scroll buttons. If she keeps griping about them, I may install Chrome via Wine on her laptop.
I got Flash working just fine with Chrome and openSUSE 11.2, but I manually had to copy the file to /opt/google/chrome/plugins I believe.
I agree that Apple computers are over-priced. But people don't always go for the cheapest product.
Toyota sales keep rising and rising. They don't make cheap cars. In fact, their cars are often the most expensive in their respective classes. People want to pay for quality.
There is also a notion of prestige pricing, where people feel better if they pay more. A $500 purse likely isn't any better than a $50 purse, but my wife will feel better buying a $500 purse, because of prestige pricing.
With their pricing, Apple markets themselves as a prestige item. You wouldn't show off cheap Wal-Mart furniture with pride. But you will show off a $2,900 Macbook with pride.
(Note, I prefer the better value, but not everyone thinks the same way.)
That is what I meant. For a user, if they want to go to Youtube, they can't simply uninstall Flash and make the site work with Silverlight.
Flash is so utterly predominant on the web, that most users feel it is necessity.
The users aren't as focused on security because the OS is seen as traditionally secure. I love Linux. I advocate Linux as a safer way to browse the web.
Flash exploits on a web site are going to target Windows, as opposed to the small Linux market.
However, Flash exploits do exist.
My original point is that this is an odd prediction saying that Flash will become an issue in 2010, when I already think it was the biggest issue in 2009.
Acrobat and Flash vulnerabilities were two of the biggest issues I saw in 2009, even more than Office vulnerabilities.
For one, Office only seems to hit the enterprise sector, and most enterprise users have at least some security. Office is more likely to be patched by users, and there were fewer vulnerabilities.
Most users don't have the latest version of Acrobat or Flash. They effect home and enterprise users.
Even more alarming, it seems that Flash vulnerabilities are one of the biggest weaknesses on Mac and Linux, where security is an after-thought.
For Windows users, I often recommend they swap Acrobat with a free reader like Sumo or Foxit, which is smaller, faster, and has less vulnerabilities. Sadly, there aren't many GOOD Flash alternatives.
I really hope HTML 5 phases out the popularity of Flash.
The iPhone ads that show a specific feature are textbook examples of great ads.
Not everyone was in the smartphone market. They didn't think they needed one. Apple runs an ad and shows you what the iPhone can do for you in simple terms. It doesn't get any more basic or effective than that.
I'm not sure if people realize it, but the device portion is largely taken care of.
Try upgrading to Windows 7 today, and notice that suddenly your printer or web cam no longer work, because there are no drivers, especially since OEMs are pushing x64 bit versions of Windows 7.
Conversely, Linux supports more hardware than any OS on the planet, from small embedded devices, legacy hardware, desktops, servers, tablets, phones, to super-computers.
The 2.6.33-rc1 kernel even has an OSS Nvidia driver built in now. Most Nvidia and ATI hardware should work out of the box without proprietary drivers (not that I'm opposed to proprietary drivers if they truly work better).
I find most hardware just works out of the box with no work in Linux, but I find myself hunting for drivers in Windows all the time. People are stuck in this mindset that Linux hardware support is lacking, but that just isn't the case.
Marketing is more than advertising, which is just a sub-set of marketing. Marketing is also about closing sales and landing exclusive contracts. Microsoft did a great job of positioning themselves in their respective markets and strong-arming the competition.
But Apple is so clever at reversing that strategy. It is always the PC who comes to the Mac and tries to bully them saying how they are superior. The Mac takes the abuse, plays the nice guy, and comes out on top.
Even though Apple is slamming Microsoft in these ads, they play themselves off as the victim. It is the most clever mud-slinging campaign I've ever seen. It really is brilliant.
Microsoft is still a very profitable behemoth, but in this decade, Windows Mobile has been seen largely as a flop and some suggest it may be dropped completely.
Microsoft paid for exclusive titles for the XBox platform like mad, which had hardware failures like mad, and the XBox division just hermorhages money left and right.
The Zune is regularly mocked as a weak immitator to the iPod (though I wish my iPhone had an OLED screen).
Microsoft lost OS market share to Apple, lost massive browser share to Firefox, and was hammered twice by the EU with massive fines. The EU mandates they embrace interoperability.
It hasn't been the best decade for Microsoft. The 80's and 90's were far kinder.
But have you seen Jimmy Fallon as Neil Diamond doing the Prince of Bel Air theme song?
http://warmingglow.uproxx.com/2009/11/well-played-jimmy-fallon-2
Reminds me of Don't Copy that Floppy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI
The new ads with kids saying "I'm a PC" are their best ads in a long time, but those are clearly derivative.
Was the last good Microsoft ad campaign the "Start Me Up" ads when Windows 95 launched?
I'm not much of an Apple fan, but damn they know how to advertise.
Alberta has tons of oil.
Heck, we have tons of oil we're not drilling.
There is also plenty of evidence to suggest we might be finally shifting alot of our need for oil to other sources.
The cost/benefit analysis for your scenario doesn't justify a war just to get access to oil. Heck, we had the capability to buy oil from Iraq before the war.
Iraq and Canada both have a population of about 30 million, except Iraq had the stronger military, was father away, and had less oil.
Again, if the decision was just to invade someone to get oil, Canada is by far the most logical choice. You can easily build a direct pipeline, getting troops to Candaa is easy, and they have more oil.
Iran has more oil than Iraq, and we have worse relations with Iran. Saudi Arabia has more oil than Iraq, though if we took over Mecca, well, I don't even want to go there.
I was just watching features on the Tropic Thunder BluRay the other night, and Ben Stiller was talking about how much Tropic Thunder changed over the decade he worked on the film.
Initially the film was supposedly to just be about actors attending a two-week boot-camp and overreacting to how terrible it supposedly was, when it reality, it is weak sauce compared to what real soldiers go through.
Avatar bounced around Cameron's head for some time. He said he first had the concept 20 years ago. But the current incarnation, the film he actually made, does specifically evoke Bush and Iraq. Using the terms "shock and awe", "fight terror with terror" and "preemptive attack" are no accident, especially given Cameron's political views.
Are you going to honestly suggest that those specific phrases in the script, coupled with the overall plot and theme of the movie are not intentionally designed to parallel a certain view of Iraq?
Then again, it is far easier to shirk away from a stupid comment when you post AC. Next time, man up, sign up, and stand behind your comments. Frankly, I don't know why I bother responding to ACs.
This is a long post. Some may want to skip to the bottom, bolded tl;dr portion.
Maybe in theory, in practice the oil is controlled by a government that came to power in a process heavily controlled by the USA and that government remains heavily dependent on the USA.
We did not control the formation of the government. Congress said they would only back going into Iraq if Iraq had full control over how they formed their new government. Just as Afghanistan formed their own government on their own, so did Iraq.
I hear all the time how the US forms all these puppet/shadow governments that we control. This simply isn't true. We (in the past) did help put certain leaders in power, but that didn't mean we had influence over them. For instance, he helped put Saddam in power. That didn't mean we controlled Saddam the way an adult controls their child. Your analogy fails.
Not directly. First, the supposedly substantial cost of "extracting" the oil is skimmed off the top (mostly by foreign corporations) and even then the remaining money is only spent on projects that are supposedly for the benefit of the Iraqi people (the money is not given to them directly).
Reputable source please? Iraq was fully capable of obtaining their own oil before. I know that the oil fields and refineries were damaged in attacks, but I haven't seen anything to suggest tht foreign corporations suddenly control Iraqi oil.
I do recall reading that Bush proposed the idea that oil revenue would go into a welfare-type pool until the Iraqi government was fully formed, so they could determine how to deal with it. However, there has been an Iraqi government for some time. I'm not sure how they currently distribute oil profits.
But the Iraq war has been a very very good dream for the high level executives at companies like Haliburton (lots of profits to justify fabulous incentive bonuses) - executives who happened to be close friends with the Bush administration.
You should have watched the vice-presidential debates 5 years ago. Cheney was asked about his ties to Haliburton. He didn't deny that he worked for them in the past and still had friends there. However, his tax returns and campaign contributions were public record. He said that he hadn't received one penny from Haliburton, and to ensure no one accusing him of favortism, he was specifically excluding Haliburton from bidding on the first round of contracts.
Haliburton did receive some prime contracts in Iraq, but they had to make bids that a Democrat controlled Congress voted on. Haliburton happens to be one the largest and most capable contractors for those specific bids.
I'm not aware of Bush-specific ties to Haliburton. I assume you meant to say Cheney.
However, please understand that both parties voted on a ridiculous bail-out program that just handed out pork like mad to corporate pockets. We doubled the national debt overnight with that bill. And we continue to hand out more money to corporations every day. Both parties are corrupt, and both parties are stealing our tax dollars to give it to their cronies. Even worse, they're stealing more money than we have, and giving away money with deficit spending. The fact that no one seems to care about his truly terrifies me.
...the current war on Iraq is an unjustified war of aggression....
The justification or villification of Iraq is a lengthy debate in and of itself. Know this. The Iraqi people are glad that Saddam and the Ba'th party were deposed. You had Kurds leaving their cities and living in mountain caves for fear of their lives. You had gestapo-type secret police dragging people away to rape and torture centers.
Saddam did attempt genocide. He was pursuing it again. He did directly fund terrorists. And he did violate UN Security Council resolutions time and time again.
France was perhaps the most vocal saying they'd veto any r