The US doesn't determine oil prices. The global market determines oil prices.
I know before the invasion, France and Russia were the two biggest customers of Iraqi oil. I don't know who is today, but the world doesn't completely revolve around the US.
I didn't realize that all Native Americans fit this stereotype.
If you study Native American religions, you'll see there are a variety of believes that span the variety of tribes across the country. Some tribes were nomadic out of necessity. Many plains Indians travelled to follow a herd, hence the mobility of the teepee.
However, not all Native homes were so mobile. And many natives did have strong ties to specific locations. Devil's Tower comes to mind.
Literally, as the third act of Avatar unfolded with the military troops marching into a forest to battle low-tech aliens, I turned to my wife and said "where are the Ewoks with logs?"
I believe James Cameron has said the core concept has floated around his head for 20 years now. But the film as he made it today seems to have a strong Iraq message.
I agree that there was a huge parallel with Native Americans. The Na'vi language sounded like Lakota. They even yelped like Natives. They used Native actors to voice some of the Na'vi roles. They wore bones and feathers, rode horses, fired arrows, and behaved like the stereotype of plains Indians. (It should be noted that not all Native American/Indian tribes lived in the plains, nor resemble this stereotype, but it is the most predominant stereotype of Natives).
I'm sure there are US corporations who are profitting greatly, since they are getting contracts to rebuild. But we're also hiring Iraqi workers, and spending money to build physical structures as well as infrastructure.
The American public is funding this with taxes, and while some corporations are receiving some of that money, on the whole I'd say this is a massive fiscal loss.
I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I will say this. No one talks about Clinton bombing four countries without permission, nor do they talk about Bush helping liberate Liberia without a single bullet fired. It is far easier to paint simple partisan pictures of Republicans as thieves and war-mongers, where as Democrats are saints and heroes.
In the end, both parties like money and cater to corporate America. When it came down to foriegn relations, I think Clinton just said what people wanted to hear, but ultimately didn't care much. Bush did what he believed is right. Was it right? That's certainly debatable, but I don't think he was intentionally malicious.
Bush didn't fight Democrats or get into partisan bickering, even during the last campaign. He never lashed out at Obama, but rather worked with Obama on a bill to push for strict fuel economy standards. (Congress passed a much weaker version).
Bush also pushed for the hybrid tax breaks, and passed for penalties on auto-makers who didn't offer hybrids. He funnel tons of money into fuel-cell research and said repeatedly that he wanted the country off oil.
Yet most Americans believe Bush was only interested in stealing oil. The fact that 30 million people lived in fear of their lives, and that diplomacy had failed for over 12 years in Iraq don't matter. People prefer the simple view over the complex one.
I wouldn't say Titanic and Avatar are morally pointless, just morally simplistic.
It is wrong to murder innocent people to steal resources. Just as it was wrong for Billy Zane's character in Titanic to engage is classism. Titanic was about the rich oppressing the poor.
However, others have explored these themes and done a better job with it.
District 9 was a sci-fi action film this year that explored the same themes as Avatar and did a better job of it. In fact, the protagonist in District 9 better represents the failings of flawed morals that lead into the situation.
They were operating as mercs. I'm not sure how and why military members were able to leave their current duty, take military uniforms and equipment and serv as mercs for a corporation. That part wasn't made clear.
The villian used the phrases "fight terror with terror" and "preemptive attack". He was described as gearing up a "shock and awe" attack.
He was using the military to steal a valuable foreign resource, and funnel it into private/corporate hands, killing civilians along the way.
You're saying the message of the movie isn't supposed to be a parallel for Iraq?
For the record, I don't think it is a fair comparison because we're not stealing oil in Iraq. The Iraqi people own the oil and receive every penny for selling the oil. If anything, going into Iraq was a fiscal nightmare for the US. We're footing the bill for the war, and for reconstruction. We're funneling tons of money into Iraq, and liberated 30 million people from a cruel dictator. But given that Cameron is a vocal Democrat who drives a Prius and has suggested Bush lied about Iraq to steal oil, I'm sure he very much intended that to be the message of the movie.
The OSS code bases for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS are both called Chromium. You can do anything you want with the code basically, because it is under a BSD license.
Chrome however is a trademark. Calling you release Chrome means meeting certain standards. As you noted, Mozilla doesn't allow official branding of unofficial builds.
Are you going to say that Firefox isn't OSS because they have branding standards for what they call an official release?
Last time I checked, Red Hat also has the same policies on branding, hence CentOS. Are you also going to suggest that Red Hat and Linux aren't OSS?
Didn't they open their hardware design for power supplies? Apparently they save a fortune by running pure DC data centers.
Google also releases patches for projects like MySQL, pays for Google Summer of Code, employs people to solely work on OSS projects (such as kernel developers), fights to protect open standards, is helping push for HTML 5, and pushed for Ogg in HTML 5, etc. etc. etc.
Didn't Google just release Android out in the open, and Chrome browser, and Chrome OS?
It took years, but Firefox continues to gain where IE continues to fall behind.
I really honestly believe if all the FOSS advocates out there made an effort to switch a handful of family and friends to Linux, that they in turn would do the same.
I'm converting my family and friends because I'm tired of being asked to clean viruses and the like. With the web being as dangerous as it is, can we in good conscience allow our friends and family who don't know any better continue to fire up IE and infect their PCs?
My wife had never seen Wrath of Khan before. Last night we rectified that. I was honestly worried that she wouldn't sit through the film, because of the pacing. Wrath of Khan is a slow developing character piece wrapped in the trappings of sci-fi blockbuster.
I really wonder if a film like that can be made today with a sizable budget.
The latest Harry Potter was editted pretty tight, rushed, and they felt the need to add an extra attack sequence that wasn't in the books. The best parts were the scenes in between because the principle actors have such good chemistry with each other at this point. But I fear Hollywood would never allow a major film to hinge on such moments.
As for the glory days of sci-fi, I find it sad that Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are far more famous than The Twilight Zone. Not everything that came before was all that great. But as you said, when you only had a few stations, no cable, no internet, you took what you can get.
You would think in era of ten million choices, competition would make everything better. Yet cat videos and stupid memes gather more attention that quality entertainment. I don't get it at all.
I understand disappointment. I was greatly disappointed with the film myself. That being said, all this hyperbole is still missplaced. Episode 1 isn't one of the worst films I've ever seen.
When filming Star Wars (retitled A New Hope), Harrison Ford said to George Lucas, "you may be able to type it on a page, but you sure as hell can't say it!"
There are stories of lines being improved and changed on set far more often with the original Star Wars movies. George Lucas has always struggled with dialogue. That's why he hired someone else to actually write the scripts for Empire and Jedi.
George Lucas even said himself in his AFI award acceptance speech that he isn't a very good script writer.
So why in the world did he insist on writing the scripts for all 3 prequels? Even Episode 1 turned into a decent novel. I suspect if a better writer had been given free reign on the script, it would have been a much better film.
The first Matrix film was littered with metaphor. In the second and third films, they hammer than metaphor into your head with needless exposition, akin to reading The Scarlet Letter. (A stands for Adultery!)
That being said, Matrix 2, which I've also heard called the worst film of all time, has perhaps one of the best action sequences of all time. That freeway sequence really is incredible.
I was rooting for a final battle in the real world, and Matrix at the same time between Neo and the Agent. You have a stylized, over the top fight going on in the Matrix, and cut back to a gritty, realistic fight with two bodies duking it out.
The actual ending is really weak sauce, but it completes the parallels between The Matrix and Gnostic Christianity. (Note in the final scene, the reborn Oracle is even wearing Neo's glasses, and the use of three visible arches in Neo's sex scene, etc.) They really went nuts with taking symbolism too far.
I agree that in the enterprise environment, very few people care about FOSS values, but how can you say OSS on the whole failed to produce good software?
I run Linux not because of idealogy, but because it is a superior OS. Apache is fantastic. Firefox and Chromium are fantastic. KDE is fantastic. Amarok, Digikam, k3b, etc. etc.
The only area where FOSS doesn't compete is with big budget, AAA-gaming titles. Battle for Wesnoth is a great free game, but it will have a hard time competing with Starcraft 2. However, in use case after use case, I find the FOSS products are often superior to their paid counterparts.
The only problem is that he feels he is the only one who should be able to define freedom, and his definition is a series of restrictions.
True freedom is public domain. Do whatever you want with zero restrictions. But that isn't what he advocates.
When Stallman writes letters to Canonical saying their distribution should drop Firefox, because Firefox allows the installation of proprietary extensions, and saying users should not have the option to install any non-oss, he goes entirely too far.
He is trying to directly rob me of the freedom to choose what software I want to install. He doesn't get to take that choice from me.
I honestly couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing. I've yet to speak to a die hard Star Wars fan who has watched the whole thing. It really is that bad.
Read Mr. Cranky and he will make the greatest film on the planet sound terrible. Every film is flawed.
The prequels on the whole failed to live up to lofty expectations. But they aren't terrible on a Batman and Robin scale either.
Episode 1 ultimately fails due to a poorly written script. Not just in dialogue, but also in structure. A tentpole blockbuster film comes down to a series of meetings followed by a series of meetings. Lucas forget screenwriting 101 - show, don't tell. That being said, the saber duels in Episode 1 are the best of the series. The pod race sequence is pretty decent. The movie also invented 8.1 channel sound, didn't it?
I don't understand the massive vitrol aimed at films that ultimately aren't half as terrible as people would like us to believe. The same person who wrote this probably sat through Transformers 2 without having an aneurysm. Really, which film was worse?
Webkit itself is LGPL. The rest of Chrome is licensed in an extremely open manner. Microsoft can take the javascript engine, per process model, UI, etc. and keep the code closed.
What is Linux? Linux was we know it is a userland stack on top of a Linux kernel. We have no qualms calling embedded Linux Linux, even though it doesn't resemble the distros we know and love. We have no qualms calling a headless server Linux, even though it doesn't resemble the desktops we run at home.
Android is a userland stack on top of a Linux kernel. It is Linux, whether you realize it or not.
You say it could be something else tomorrow. Well, Ubuntu got placed on top of an OpenSolaris kernel in a forked project. Does that make the main Ubuntu project not worthy of being called Linux?
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The US doesn't determine oil prices. The global market determines oil prices.
I know before the invasion, France and Russia were the two biggest customers of Iraqi oil. I don't know who is today, but the world doesn't completely revolve around the US.
I say that as an American.
I didn't realize that all Native Americans fit this stereotype.
If you study Native American religions, you'll see there are a variety of believes that span the variety of tribes across the country. Some tribes were nomadic out of necessity. Many plains Indians travelled to follow a herd, hence the mobility of the teepee.
However, not all Native homes were so mobile. And many natives did have strong ties to specific locations. Devil's Tower comes to mind.
http://www.aaanativearts.com/article471.html
Literally, as the third act of Avatar unfolded with the military troops marching into a forest to battle low-tech aliens, I turned to my wife and said "where are the Ewoks with logs?"
I believe James Cameron has said the core concept has floated around his head for 20 years now. But the film as he made it today seems to have a strong Iraq message.
I agree that there was a huge parallel with Native Americans. The Na'vi language sounded like Lakota. They even yelped like Natives. They used Native actors to voice some of the Na'vi roles. They wore bones and feathers, rode horses, fired arrows, and behaved like the stereotype of plains Indians. (It should be noted that not all Native American/Indian tribes lived in the plains, nor resemble this stereotype, but it is the most predominant stereotype of Natives).
I'm sure there are US corporations who are profitting greatly, since they are getting contracts to rebuild. But we're also hiring Iraqi workers, and spending money to build physical structures as well as infrastructure.
The American public is funding this with taxes, and while some corporations are receiving some of that money, on the whole I'd say this is a massive fiscal loss.
I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I will say this. No one talks about Clinton bombing four countries without permission, nor do they talk about Bush helping liberate Liberia without a single bullet fired. It is far easier to paint simple partisan pictures of Republicans as thieves and war-mongers, where as Democrats are saints and heroes.
In the end, both parties like money and cater to corporate America. When it came down to foriegn relations, I think Clinton just said what people wanted to hear, but ultimately didn't care much. Bush did what he believed is right. Was it right? That's certainly debatable, but I don't think he was intentionally malicious.
Bush didn't fight Democrats or get into partisan bickering, even during the last campaign. He never lashed out at Obama, but rather worked with Obama on a bill to push for strict fuel economy standards. (Congress passed a much weaker version).
Bush also pushed for the hybrid tax breaks, and passed for penalties on auto-makers who didn't offer hybrids. He funnel tons of money into fuel-cell research and said repeatedly that he wanted the country off oil.
Yet most Americans believe Bush was only interested in stealing oil. The fact that 30 million people lived in fear of their lives, and that diplomacy had failed for over 12 years in Iraq don't matter. People prefer the simple view over the complex one.
I wouldn't say Titanic and Avatar are morally pointless, just morally simplistic.
It is wrong to murder innocent people to steal resources. Just as it was wrong for Billy Zane's character in Titanic to engage is classism. Titanic was about the rich oppressing the poor.
However, others have explored these themes and done a better job with it.
District 9 was a sci-fi action film this year that explored the same themes as Avatar and did a better job of it. In fact, the protagonist in District 9 better represents the failings of flawed morals that lead into the situation.
They were operating as mercs. I'm not sure how and why military members were able to leave their current duty, take military uniforms and equipment and serv as mercs for a corporation. That part wasn't made clear.
The villian used the phrases "fight terror with terror" and "preemptive attack". He was described as gearing up a "shock and awe" attack.
He was using the military to steal a valuable foreign resource, and funnel it into private/corporate hands, killing civilians along the way.
You're saying the message of the movie isn't supposed to be a parallel for Iraq?
For the record, I don't think it is a fair comparison because we're not stealing oil in Iraq. The Iraqi people own the oil and receive every penny for selling the oil. If anything, going into Iraq was a fiscal nightmare for the US. We're footing the bill for the war, and for reconstruction. We're funneling tons of money into Iraq, and liberated 30 million people from a cruel dictator. But given that Cameron is a vocal Democrat who drives a Prius and has suggested Bush lied about Iraq to steal oil, I'm sure he very much intended that to be the message of the movie.
Not to mention global sales.
Google pays the salaries of guys like Andrew Morton, lead Linux developer, and tells them just to focus on the kernel.
The paycheck comes from Google, but Morton effectively answers to Linus.
When people keep suggesting that Google is this evil company that doesn't do anything for FOSS, they do so in spite of the facts.
Are there people capable of making forks, and reflashing their phones with modified versions of the code successfully?
Yes.
The OSS code bases for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS are both called Chromium. You can do anything you want with the code basically, because it is under a BSD license.
Chrome however is a trademark. Calling you release Chrome means meeting certain standards. As you noted, Mozilla doesn't allow official branding of unofficial builds.
Are you going to say that Firefox isn't OSS because they have branding standards for what they call an official release?
Last time I checked, Red Hat also has the same policies on branding, hence CentOS. Are you also going to suggest that Red Hat and Linux aren't OSS?
Really?
http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html
I sure thought they said all their code in Chromium is BSD licensed, and libraries they used retain their existing licenses.
They haven't opened everything, but they do open things that give them a competitive advantage. The most recent would be the SPDY protocol.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/11/2x-faster-web.html
Didn't they open their hardware design for power supplies? Apparently they save a fortune by running pure DC data centers.
Google also releases patches for projects like MySQL, pays for Google Summer of Code, employs people to solely work on OSS projects (such as kernel developers), fights to protect open standards, is helping push for HTML 5, and pushed for Ogg in HTML 5, etc. etc. etc.
Didn't Google just release Android out in the open, and Chrome browser, and Chrome OS?
It took years, but Firefox continues to gain where IE continues to fall behind.
I really honestly believe if all the FOSS advocates out there made an effort to switch a handful of family and friends to Linux, that they in turn would do the same.
I'm converting my family and friends because I'm tired of being asked to clean viruses and the like. With the web being as dangerous as it is, can we in good conscience allow our friends and family who don't know any better continue to fire up IE and infect their PCs?
My wife had never seen Wrath of Khan before. Last night we rectified that. I was honestly worried that she wouldn't sit through the film, because of the pacing. Wrath of Khan is a slow developing character piece wrapped in the trappings of sci-fi blockbuster.
I really wonder if a film like that can be made today with a sizable budget.
The latest Harry Potter was editted pretty tight, rushed, and they felt the need to add an extra attack sequence that wasn't in the books. The best parts were the scenes in between because the principle actors have such good chemistry with each other at this point. But I fear Hollywood would never allow a major film to hinge on such moments.
As for the glory days of sci-fi, I find it sad that Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are far more famous than The Twilight Zone. Not everything that came before was all that great. But as you said, when you only had a few stations, no cable, no internet, you took what you can get.
You would think in era of ten million choices, competition would make everything better. Yet cat videos and stupid memes gather more attention that quality entertainment. I don't get it at all.
I understand disappointment. I was greatly disappointed with the film myself. That being said, all this hyperbole is still missplaced. Episode 1 isn't one of the worst films I've ever seen.
When filming Star Wars (retitled A New Hope), Harrison Ford said to George Lucas, "you may be able to type it on a page, but you sure as hell can't say it!"
There are stories of lines being improved and changed on set far more often with the original Star Wars movies. George Lucas has always struggled with dialogue. That's why he hired someone else to actually write the scripts for Empire and Jedi.
George Lucas even said himself in his AFI award acceptance speech that he isn't a very good script writer.
So why in the world did he insist on writing the scripts for all 3 prequels? Even Episode 1 turned into a decent novel. I suspect if a better writer had been given free reign on the script, it would have been a much better film.
The first Matrix film was littered with metaphor. In the second and third films, they hammer than metaphor into your head with needless exposition, akin to reading The Scarlet Letter. (A stands for Adultery!)
That being said, Matrix 2, which I've also heard called the worst film of all time, has perhaps one of the best action sequences of all time. That freeway sequence really is incredible.
I was rooting for a final battle in the real world, and Matrix at the same time between Neo and the Agent. You have a stylized, over the top fight going on in the Matrix, and cut back to a gritty, realistic fight with two bodies duking it out.
The actual ending is really weak sauce, but it completes the parallels between The Matrix and Gnostic Christianity. (Note in the final scene, the reborn Oracle is even wearing Neo's glasses, and the use of three visible arches in Neo's sex scene, etc.) They really went nuts with taking symbolism too far.
I agree that in the enterprise environment, very few people care about FOSS values, but how can you say OSS on the whole failed to produce good software?
I run Linux not because of idealogy, but because it is a superior OS. Apache is fantastic. Firefox and Chromium are fantastic. KDE is fantastic. Amarok, Digikam, k3b, etc. etc.
The only area where FOSS doesn't compete is with big budget, AAA-gaming titles. Battle for Wesnoth is a great free game, but it will have a hard time competing with Starcraft 2. However, in use case after use case, I find the FOSS products are often superior to their paid counterparts.
The only problem is that he feels he is the only one who should be able to define freedom, and his definition is a series of restrictions.
True freedom is public domain. Do whatever you want with zero restrictions. But that isn't what he advocates.
When Stallman writes letters to Canonical saying their distribution should drop Firefox, because Firefox allows the installation of proprietary extensions, and saying users should not have the option to install any non-oss, he goes entirely too far.
He is trying to directly rob me of the freedom to choose what software I want to install. He doesn't get to take that choice from me.
Almost all industry-specific software is proprietary and closed source. People who don't work in IT rarely appreciate what that means.
I honestly couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing. I've yet to speak to a die hard Star Wars fan who has watched the whole thing. It really is that bad.
Read Mr. Cranky and he will make the greatest film on the planet sound terrible. Every film is flawed.
The prequels on the whole failed to live up to lofty expectations. But they aren't terrible on a Batman and Robin scale either.
Episode 1 ultimately fails due to a poorly written script. Not just in dialogue, but also in structure. A tentpole blockbuster film comes down to a series of meetings followed by a series of meetings. Lucas forget screenwriting 101 - show, don't tell. That being said, the saber duels in Episode 1 are the best of the series. The pod race sequence is pretty decent. The movie also invented 8.1 channel sound, didn't it?
I don't understand the massive vitrol aimed at films that ultimately aren't half as terrible as people would like us to believe. The same person who wrote this probably sat through Transformers 2 without having an aneurysm. Really, which film was worse?
Webkit itself is LGPL. The rest of Chrome is licensed in an extremely open manner. Microsoft can take the javascript engine, per process model, UI, etc. and keep the code closed.
What is Linux? Linux was we know it is a userland stack on top of a Linux kernel. We have no qualms calling embedded Linux Linux, even though it doesn't resemble the distros we know and love. We have no qualms calling a headless server Linux, even though it doesn't resemble the desktops we run at home.
Android is a userland stack on top of a Linux kernel. It is Linux, whether you realize it or not.
You say it could be something else tomorrow. Well, Ubuntu got placed on top of an OpenSolaris kernel in a forked project. Does that make the main Ubuntu project not worthy of being called Linux?