So how is it any different that the copies are bits now?
My guess is that they will remove the 15% breakage deduction and replace it with a 25% piracy reduction. Or a 30% "Indy artists are stealing our profits" deduction.
...Johnny managed to get the missing half by mirroring the good half...
I loved this movie (despite the primitive graphics)...
...and despite the lack of attention to an important detail: People are not perfectly symmetrical. If you create an image of someone by mirroring one half of his or her face, it will be noticeably different from a normal picture of that person. (Unless, of course, the movie noted that the person in question was unusually symmetrical... haven't seen the movie.)
...There is no software ever written that can distinguish one blank slate from another.
You'd be surprised how many different ways there are to think "Duuuuhhhhh...". This potential technology gives a huge improvement over simple password authentication, because there is only one way to spell "12345".
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to change the combination on my luggage.
I wonder if this program, with a different set of algorithms, would be able to detect whether a coporate mission statement was created using the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. (Beware; Dilbert.com is pop-up hell.)
Movies in general stink because of the way they are made...
Hot-shot producer wannabe sees something popular--a game, a TV show, a toy--and decides to capitalize on the item's popularity by making a movie.
Producer picthes the idea to the major studios, who will only back it if it follows a 'proven forumla'--in other words, has all major thematic elements identical to every B-movie that did more than break even in the last two years.
Producer signs a deal with a studio, who hires their 'proven' production crew, guaranteeing that this flick will be indistinguishable from anything else this team has produced.
Casting agency hires a male lead with more muscles than talent, or a female lead with lips almost as big as her boobs, then spends the remaining pocket change hiring unknowns for the other roles.
Studio pays a couple of reviewers to stick their thumbs up...somewhere... and also give a favorable review.
Fans of the original concept are disappointed because a) the movie wasn't faithful to the original, and b) you can't make a movie out of that concept anyway.
Twenty years later, another producer wannabe thinks it would be really cool to exhume the old tomato. (Okay, that has to be the worst metaphor I've come up with in years, but it's better than any aspect of the latest version of The War of the Worlds.)
A fair point. Although I didn't see the original BSG characters as being terribly well-developed either. (I've never seen the new series.)
As for the "Animal House meets Star Trek" movie, I've refined my casting a little:
Owen Wilson - James T. Kirk
Vince Vaughn - Spock
Ben Stiller - Bones McCoy
Mike Myers - Scotty
Lindsay Lohan - Nursing Student Chapell
Ashley Olsen - Janice Rand (in high school near the Academy)
Mary Kate Olsen - Anne Rand (Janice's evil twin)
Frankie Muniz - Randy Rand (just to complete the obligatory minor-character family subplot)
William Shatner - Admiral Dean Wormer (Ooh! Aren't we clever with our casting!)
Jim Carrey - Kahn Noonian Singh (re-defined as Kirk's arch-rival at the Academy)
Brent Spiner - Dr. Noonian Soong (young, swinging, but absent-minded professor of Robotics)
The major plot would center around Kirk dragging Spock and Bones off on drunken binges, Kirk putting the moves on a high school student (Janice Rand), then getting Anne Rand "in trouble" in a case of mistaken identity, and almost getting beaten up by her scrawny brother. Bones, meanwhile, has the hots for Chapell, but she ends up sleeping with Professor Soong.
When Kirk staggers in for his Kobayashi Maru exam with a pounding hangover, he re-programs the simulation, getting the highest mark in the class, much to the disgust of Kahn, who spent all week preparing for the exam, and would have been the first student in Academy history to solve the scenario legitimately if Kirk's re-programming hadn't messed up his solution. He vows revenge on Kirk, yaddah yaddah.
Near the end of the movie, after Admiral Dean Wormer puts the Delta Quadrant House on "double... secret... PROBATION!", the gang takes a road trip in an Academy shuttle, and quite accidentally saves the life of a high-ranking admiral, earning Kirk command of the newly-commissioned Enterprise. (Captain Pike's command is conveniently forgotten.)
I distinctly remember a shark fin in the water at the end of the fourth movie, when everyone jumped off the sinking Klingon "wessel". As I remember, every character jumped over it.
Then we got Star Trek V: Don't Let Shatner Direct.
On the other hand, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was a well-directed, well-scripted thriller that would have been a perfect END to the Star Trek movie franchise.
...more...realistic fare like Battlestar Galactica...
You used "realistic" and "Battlestar Galactica" in the same sentence... and weren't being ironic?
Okay, Firefly I can almost see; interplanetary rather than interstellar, and in the recent movie version (Serenity) they actually had a silent space encounter, but BG is only as realistic as the next space opera.
As for the movie, go Animal House version! Owen Wilson as Kirk, Vince Vaughn as Spock, Ben Stiller as Bones, Amanda Bynes as Nurse Chapell, and throw in Craig T. Nelson as Dean Wormer and Jim Carrey as Kahn (because a consistent timeline hasn't seemed to matter since Enterprise), and you've got a movie that might make back its production cost after a few years of DVD downloading--I mean, sales.
This makes me think of the law some jurisdictions have against wearing personal stereo headphones while driving, on the basis that it makes you unable to hear anything outside the car. But the same jurisdictions have no decibel limits on car stereo speakers.
The distraction factor is certainly a legitimate concern, but probably no more so than talking to someone in the back seat, or even listening to talk radio (and arguing with the radio pundits). Or how about eating while driving? Or looking at your map book?
There are scores of activities that can distract you from the road, far too many to ban specifically. But if you have an accident while doing any of them, that will increase your at-fault percentage (depending on how fault works in your jurisdiction), and cost you more money.
I think the original quote is something like "Law, without force, is impotent."
Unfortunately, I don't have the Tom Clancy novel where I saw that, so I can't name the speaker. Let's hope he's not still alive, and an IP nazi, so he can sue me for publishing his words without proper attribution.
...but I'm quite sure the thousands of people injured by an encounter with a retard playing Michael Shumaker behind the wheel every year would have loved the car to forcibly keep the driver in check.
And there lies the rub. Do you give the customer complete freedom, and run the risk of being sued because you didn't do everything you could to tame an unskilled driver's poor driving, or do you force everyone to use a restrictive traction control system and run the risk of getting sued by a skilled driver who could have avoided an accident with a radical maneuver the system would not allow?
Maybe there should be two types of driver's licenses: a standard license for anyone who can tell the steering wheel from the gas pedal (which seems to be what half of the drivers in Vancouver have), and a license for drivers who can pass a much more rigorous driving test, which allows you to "unlock the bonus features" of your vehicle.
...and BBSpot will set up a Wiki to solve the Y2K problem. 85% of this Wiki will consist of suggestions from people who don't know what the problem was, and think it sill exists. The other 15% will consist of people asking Brian Briggs how to contact Ensenam Ayele.
No, it was definitely Venus. I'm 36, and the OP brought back perfect images of Steve Austin being chased around by a big, sloping-sided space probe. The reason it was nearly invincible on Earth was because it was designed to stand up to Venus' harsh conditions.
It's worse than you think. The reason the ESA is only releasing a few selected images is because it found a planet full of people who were so pacified, they were unwilling to do anything about global warming. Eventually they just lay down where they were... forgot to go to work, forgot to breed, forgot to eat...
Except of course, for the 1/10 of 1% of the population that had the opposite effect... and became politicians!
The surprise here is that China and Japan are doing what they said they would do, even selling off some of their holdings. If Japan and China are not buying the government debt, who is? The little islands of the Caribbean stand out. Obviously, they are not wealthy nations with the wherewithal to buy such quantities for their own natives. They are acting on behalf of investors from other nations who are passing money through the banks of the Caribbean to make their purchases. Unfortunately, the US Treasury is unable to capture the true source of this money since they only know the first party of their transactions. The most cynical observers offer a theory that the US government itself might be behind these offshore operations in an attempt to prop up the dollar. They have no evidence, and we are unlikely to ever know.
So the scary part is, the US Treasury can't tell who is financing it, but it is apparently not China
You see the thing is, the US is actually a rather large country... Canada has a very large portion of the country that is not populated as well...
Just a little Canadian perspective. While Canada has a higher percentage of urbanization than the USA, its population is actually more spread out and more mobile than the American population. Canadians consume more energy per capita than anyone else.
A great deal of this is due to temperature. My home town in northern Manitoba has a temperature range of nearly a hundred degrees Celsius, from -50 degrees in the winter to +40 degrees in the summer.
But another significant contributor to Canadians' energy consumption is distance. If a Canadian in a small town needs to travel to the nearest large city, chances are he is a lot further away than the average small-town American. There aren't as many small-toan Canadians as there are small-town Americans, and there are only 1/10 as many Canadians as Americans in total, but each one uses more energy.
...a set of coded instructions designed to cause a computer...to perform a task,'...
Great! They're going to tax viruses! Every time your computer catches a virus or a keylogger that compromises your credit card information, steals your PayPal password, etc., you will now have to pay state tax on any money that is stolen.
What? You don't think so? If they can write an arbitrary definition of 'software', they can write an arbitrary definition of 'purchase'.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that they will remove the 15% breakage deduction and replace it with a 25% piracy reduction. Or a 30% "Indy artists are stealing our profits" deduction.
...and despite the lack of attention to an important detail: People are not perfectly symmetrical. If you create an image of someone by mirroring one half of his or her face, it will be noticeably different from a normal picture of that person. (Unless, of course, the movie noted that the person in question was unusually symmetrical... haven't seen the movie.)
You'd be surprised how many different ways there are to think "Duuuuhhhhh...". This potential technology gives a huge improvement over simple password authentication, because there is only one way to spell "12345".
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to change the combination on my luggage.
But, as this Slashdot discussion proves once again, everyone's overreaction is the same.
Most web users are unable to tell what browser they are using. Or operating system, for that matter.
Support: What web browser are you using?
User: Microsoft Excel.
Support: Okay, what operating system are you using?
User: Um... Dell?
I wonder if this program, with a different set of algorithms, would be able to detect whether a coporate mission statement was created using the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. (Beware; Dilbert.com is pop-up hell.)
Movies in general stink because of the way they are made...
Turn it uuuup! Turn it uuuuuup!
--Abe Simpson
A fair point. Although I didn't see the original BSG characters as being terribly well-developed either. (I've never seen the new series.)
As for the "Animal House meets Star Trek" movie, I've refined my casting a little:
Owen Wilson - James T. Kirk
Vince Vaughn - Spock
Ben Stiller - Bones McCoy
Mike Myers - Scotty
Lindsay Lohan - Nursing Student Chapell
Ashley Olsen - Janice Rand (in high school near the Academy)
Mary Kate Olsen - Anne Rand (Janice's evil twin)
Frankie Muniz - Randy Rand (just to complete the obligatory minor-character family subplot)
William Shatner - Admiral Dean Wormer (Ooh! Aren't we clever with our casting!)
Jim Carrey - Kahn Noonian Singh (re-defined as Kirk's arch-rival at the Academy)
Brent Spiner - Dr. Noonian Soong (young, swinging, but absent-minded professor of Robotics)
The major plot would center around Kirk dragging Spock and Bones off on drunken binges, Kirk putting the moves on a high school student (Janice Rand), then getting Anne Rand "in trouble" in a case of mistaken identity, and almost getting beaten up by her scrawny brother. Bones, meanwhile, has the hots for Chapell, but she ends up sleeping with Professor Soong.
When Kirk staggers in for his Kobayashi Maru exam with a pounding hangover, he re-programs the simulation, getting the highest mark in the class, much to the disgust of Kahn, who spent all week preparing for the exam, and would have been the first student in Academy history to solve the scenario legitimately if Kirk's re-programming hadn't messed up his solution. He vows revenge on Kirk, yaddah yaddah.
Near the end of the movie, after Admiral Dean Wormer puts the Delta Quadrant House on "double... secret... PROBATION!", the gang takes a road trip in an Academy shuttle, and quite accidentally saves the life of a high-ranking admiral, earning Kirk command of the newly-commissioned Enterprise. (Captain Pike's command is conveniently forgotten.)
I distinctly remember a shark fin in the water at the end of the fourth movie, when everyone jumped off the sinking Klingon "wessel". As I remember, every character jumped over it.
Then we got Star Trek V: Don't Let Shatner Direct.
On the other hand, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was a well-directed, well-scripted thriller that would have been a perfect END to the Star Trek movie franchise.
Spock: I'm very serious, Captain. And don't call my Shirley.
Bones: It's just like that time over Camp Khittomer!
Kirk: I'll... never be over Camp Khittomer.
Announcer: The white zone is for immediate shuttle embarking and disembarking only. There is no starship berthing in the white zone...
Star Trek... and Realism
What are two things that have never shared a room, Alex?
You used "realistic" and "Battlestar Galactica" in the same sentence... and weren't being ironic?
Okay, Firefly I can almost see; interplanetary rather than interstellar, and in the recent movie version (Serenity) they actually had a silent space encounter, but BG is only as realistic as the next space opera.
As for the movie, go Animal House version! Owen Wilson as Kirk, Vince Vaughn as Spock, Ben Stiller as Bones, Amanda Bynes as Nurse Chapell, and throw in Craig T. Nelson as Dean Wormer and Jim Carrey as Kahn (because a consistent timeline hasn't seemed to matter since Enterprise), and you've got a movie that might make back its production cost after a few years of DVD downloading--I mean, sales.
This makes me think of the law some jurisdictions have against wearing personal stereo headphones while driving, on the basis that it makes you unable to hear anything outside the car. But the same jurisdictions have no decibel limits on car stereo speakers.
The distraction factor is certainly a legitimate concern, but probably no more so than talking to someone in the back seat, or even listening to talk radio (and arguing with the radio pundits). Or how about eating while driving? Or looking at your map book?
There are scores of activities that can distract you from the road, far too many to ban specifically. But if you have an accident while doing any of them, that will increase your at-fault percentage (depending on how fault works in your jurisdiction), and cost you more money.
I think the original quote is something like "Law, without force, is impotent."
Unfortunately, I don't have the Tom Clancy novel where I saw that, so I can't name the speaker. Let's hope he's not still alive, and an IP nazi, so he can sue me for publishing his words without proper attribution.
Well, at least there would be one benefit.
And there lies the rub. Do you give the customer complete freedom, and run the risk of being sued because you didn't do everything you could to tame an unskilled driver's poor driving, or do you force everyone to use a restrictive traction control system and run the risk of getting sued by a skilled driver who could have avoided an accident with a radical maneuver the system would not allow?
Maybe there should be two types of driver's licenses: a standard license for anyone who can tell the steering wheel from the gas pedal (which seems to be what half of the drivers in Vancouver have), and a license for drivers who can pass a much more rigorous driving test, which allows you to "unlock the bonus features" of your vehicle.
...and BBSpot will set up a Wiki to solve the Y2K problem. 85% of this Wiki will consist of suggestions from people who don't know what the problem was, and think it sill exists. The other 15% will consist of people asking Brian Briggs how to contact Ensenam Ayele.
No, it was definitely Venus. I'm 36, and the OP brought back perfect images of Steve Austin being chased around by a big, sloping-sided space probe. The reason it was nearly invincible on Earth was because it was designed to stand up to Venus' harsh conditions.
It's worse than you think. The reason the ESA is only releasing a few selected images is because it found a planet full of people who were so pacified, they were unwilling to do anything about global warming. Eventually they just lay down where they were... forgot to go to work, forgot to breed, forgot to eat...
Except of course, for the 1/10 of 1% of the population that had the opposite effect... and became politicians!
From the linked article:
So the scary part is, the US Treasury can't tell who is financing it, but it is apparently not China
Because *THEY* keep financing *YOU*.
Anyone know how many US government T-bills and other securities are held in China?
Just a little Canadian perspective. While Canada has a higher percentage of urbanization than the USA, its population is actually more spread out and more mobile than the American population. Canadians consume more energy per capita than anyone else.
A great deal of this is due to temperature. My home town in northern Manitoba has a temperature range of nearly a hundred degrees Celsius, from -50 degrees in the winter to +40 degrees in the summer.
But another significant contributor to Canadians' energy consumption is distance. If a Canadian in a small town needs to travel to the nearest large city, chances are he is a lot further away than the average small-town American. There aren't as many small-toan Canadians as there are small-town Americans, and there are only 1/10 as many Canadians as Americans in total, but each one uses more energy.
Great! They're going to tax viruses! Every time your computer catches a virus or a keylogger that compromises your credit card information, steals your PayPal password, etc., you will now have to pay state tax on any money that is stolen.
What? You don't think so? If they can write an arbitrary definition of 'software', they can write an arbitrary definition of 'purchase'.
LOL... Where are my mod points when I need them?