Unfortunately I can find no fault with your logic, as I to rather despair at the direction America is heading. The only thing that gives me some measure of hope is that the situation in America is still better than most parts of the world, give or take. The problem though isn't the governmental system, rather it's entirely unhealthy levels of media control by select organizations, certain key regulations that encourage mega-corp monopolies, and an increasing degradation of the separation between church and state. I almost wish it were possible to hide the identities of candidates for political offices and only vote on their agendas as that would go a long way towards eliminating extraneous factors like race, religion, and sex.
It is more or less because people have a vested interest in the titles he makes. I don't care much for instance for Adam Sandler, but I don't make a big deal out of it because he mostly does his own work, so if the movie bombs, no harm comes of it. Uwe on the other hand takes existing properties, ones that people genuinely enjoy, and would like to continue to see good releases of, and turns them into utter crap-fests. All things being equal, that shouldn't matter, but once a series starts going down hill, or otherwise develops a bad reputation it becomes increasingly hard to convince people to produce new versions, or to go see the ones that are produced. Look for instance at the last hulk movie, which was crap by most peoples standards. Because of that one crap movie, I know several people that have said they probably won't go see the new Hulk movie that's being made. Now, to fans of the Hulk, this is a problem, as presumably they want more Hulk movies to be made, but because the first one sucked so bad, it's an uphill battle to get new ones made and released. Even if the next one is great, it's still going to be hard to get further ones produced.
That's why people hate Uwe, he ruins it not only for the crap movies he makes, but he also tarnishes any other potential movies from the same properties.
Theory is great for solving strange problems, or squeezing that last bit of performance out of a critical routine, and strong grounding in theory you should be able to get from most universities. That being said, not understanding the basics, or knowing how to apply theory to the real world will sink you when you actually have a job to do, and most schools don't spend much time there. I also find the lack of focus on the basics, particularly early on, to be rather discouraging. Students should be run through a BASIC language initially to get down some of the flow control concepts and basic variable usage, and then transitioned into assembly to really give them a feel for how it is that computers actually work. From there C, and then Java or C# are the next logical progression, and once you've reached that level, well, the sky's the limit. For electives any of Python, Ruby, or Perl would not be amiss either.
Languages don't matter in and of themselves, but rather the concepts and ways of approaching problems (design patterns) embodied in them, and the experience of actually learning to apply those solutions to real problems are the important part.
Having been in on several interviews, it's always been less about what your resume says, and more about if you can actually answer questions that your resume says you should be able to answer. If it says you've got 4 years doing Java development, you'd better be able to explain at least minimally what the various collections classes are.
The degree will get you past the HR screen for a position. Being able to interview well and answer the questions correctly gets you the job. To that end, it doesn't matter much where the degree is from, as once you get past HR no one cares at all whether you even have it or not.
There's also a sub-text that the AI's are essentially people as well and that they can't be controlled, only reasoned with like a normal person. If I recall correctly in 2nd Gig they retire the original Tachikoma because the brass felt they were too unpredictable (that is they had free will of a sort), and opted for dumber more controllable ones that ended up being rather useless compared to the originals. I was rather disappointed that the Tachikoma didn't make it into the original movie, although it was nice that they managed to get at least one of the tanks in at the end.
One of the nice things about the Tachikoma is that there's a lot of room to play around with the ideas of identity and consciousness there. All the Tachikoma share one identity, that diverges during the day, and re-syncs at night, so it's almost like they begin each morning as one person, and as the day goes by they become individuals. Not sure if it was ever done in the series, but it would be interesting for instance if one of the Tachikoma was cut off and unable to sync for a while, say a few months, and then to see how far his personality had diverged from the other Tachikoma, and further what kind of impacts it would have on the group personality when he was re-synced.
I remember watching Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) and thinking how horribly it could've been butchered if it were dubbed in English. The director (Guillermo del Toro) specifically chose the actor for Pan because of his voice, so in essence watching it dubbed means you really are missing out on "the art." Fun fact, the guy who played Pan (Doug Jones, he also did Abe Sapien in Hellboy I and II) didn't speak any Spanish before doing that movie. On the DVD for Pan's Labyrinth there's a cool interview with him where he talks about how panicked he was at having to do the movie in Spanish, but how everyone helped him along and how it turned out really well.
Read faster? I usually don't have problems with subtitled movies, but every once in a while I do (usually from cheap bootlegs out of China). I've got a Chinese copy of the Nadesico movie (picked it up back before their was a english subtitled release available in the US or Japan) and some of the scenes just have so much going on it's ridiculous and really is impossible to keep up. In one scene in particular I had to play the movie in slow motion just to follow the dialogue because the geniuses doing the subbing put subtitles on literally everything. It was on the ships bridge, and not only did they have subtitles for about 5 different characters all on screen at the same time, but they also translated all the text on the dozen or so screens on the bridge. Not sure how they found room to actually show the scene with that wall of text in the way.
... and rather than provoke the religious right with scenes of nudity and orgies (in the manga and in some of the GitSAC 2nd GiG episodes) that appeal to the tastes of the target audience in Japan they will almost certainly censor certain scenes and concepts entirely or alter the dialog in others. They will also dumb down the plots because, lets be honest, the depth and complexity of the interwoven agendas in GitS would be lost on most American audiences (i.e. less talk and more action please). If you get certain copies of the original manga that's published in the USA the orgies have all been removed (as well as some drug references). Those pages are simply omitted from the manga. I was rather pissed when I found out, not because I really miss those pages (more like cut scenes really, didn't add much to the story), but because of the fact that it was censored without warning, and no choice was even offered to purchase the uncensored version (well, if you look around I'm sure it can be found, but the censored one should still be labeled). I'm really getting sick of the religious right, the politically correct, and the pro nanny-state factions all trying to decide what's best for us all.
The only way I need to express my dissatisfaction with Mr. Boll is to simply not see his movies.
To loosely paraphrase a well known quote, I may hate his movies, but I defend his right to make them and for people to watch them.
Signing a petition to ask him to stop doing it just seems rather pointless to me. I'll vote with my wallet, thank you.
Cheers
Unfortunately you should still sign the petition so that the studios don't get the wrong idea. If you simply boycott his movies the studios may interpret it that the properties the movies are based on aren't popular or appealing, not as you intended that you think Uwe Boll does shit work and ruins everything he touches. It would really be best for everyone is Mr. Boll was removed from the movie business because it would mean someone who might actually stand a chance of doing a good movie might get their hands on the various series. Maybe Mr. Boll could try his hand at something original, and when those start selling we might trust him with something established.
According to io9, they are going to kill Goku either in the first movie or the beginning of the second. And then spend the next 3 movies trying to get him resurrected while he trains with a not-quite-dead-yet master to learn the ultimate super movie to defeat the bad guy. Until the next guy comes along and kills him again and he learns a new ultimate super move. Also the entirety of the 4th movie will be him powering up his new super move, and the bad guy trashing his friends.
Battle Angel may still be ongoing as a manga though, I know it switched publishers, and name at one point but I haven't looked recently to see if it's completed it's run or if it's still being serialized. The manga series is still ongoing, but it's a sequel to the original (it's set after the end of the last one with Alita being revived in a new body). I'm not 100% certain but I believe the title is Battle Angel: Last Order, or something along those lines. I'm currently collecting it, but it's being released really slowly in America, not sure on the release schedule in Japan though. The last one was released at least 3 months ago, and it seems it's been averaging about 6 months or so between releases (last one I saw was 9 btw). The series does seem to be winding down though, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next one was the last one. The last couple issues have been flashbacks explaining the background of the vampires, and frankly have been something of a drag, being rather without the title character or anything remotely sci-fi.
What's a union got to do with it? Governments institute industrial controls in order to improve their image and make theirs goods more desirable. Doesn't matter if you can get things out of China dirt cheap if no one will by them because they have a rep for being highly toxic. We're already starting to see it with the massive recalls for products with paint from China. Prior to that it was food from China. If they don't start to get their act together real soon there isn't going to be much they'll actually be able to export.
Better take your sarcasm detector in for an overhaul, it's obviously faulty. The first part was serious, the second was a joke about government efficiency and bureaucratic paperwork.
Nothing quite so fantastic as all that. First of all, China will be a self correcting problem. We outsource to them currently because they're going through a period of rapid industrialization that allows them to produce items who's quality if quickly approaching that of ours, but because of the rapid industrialization their industry controls haven't gone into place (which make for safer work environments and products, and also add a fair bit of overhead to the final cost) which allows for cheaper products. Once they achieve parity with the rest of the modern world the next step is to introduce the proper industry controls at which point costs will also achieve parity and it will no longer be economically advantageous to offshore to them.
Secondly, we knew of the mistake almost as soon as it happened. It's just that we only recently finished processing the paperwork. The next step is to file the paperwork that gets those fuses sent back over here. ETA is somewhere in 2015.
Slightly off topic with regard to the article, but not this thread. The question was, what's preventing other companies from adopting an approach similar to what google has. The answer is that other companies would have more concern over their employees violating licensing issues. The way the legal system is structured, the company that owns the PCs is liable for their contents. They can go after the employee after they pay out to the BSA to recoup their losses (that is, file suit against the employee in response to the BSAs suit against them), but it's an entirely different lawsuit from the one the BSA would bring. They can't just turn around and tell the BSA "Hey, that guy over there did it, sue him not us.", it just doesn't work that way. Whether you're google or not, the security aspect is kind of hard to argue with, although even there google would tend to have less issue than other companies simply because their employees would tend to know what sorts of behaviors are suspicious, but because they've attempted to harden their infrastructure even a compromised machine should be relatively simple to isolate.
As for licensing... I really don't know if engineers have any higher standards in this area than people at accounting. Not really a question of standards, it's more an awareness of what your doing on your computer. Many people just know you click next a bunch of times until the software gets installed, and the licensing issue doesn't really cross their mind much. They may even think that the license they have for their home system can be used to perform the install on their corporate system (in some cases it might, but you actually need to read that license to know for sure). To a great many users software is just something you put on the computer to do things and they don't give a second thought to where it comes from, or what license it uses. Engineers (or developers or system administrators, pick your IT title) usually have a better grasp of software, and a more refined understanding of where things come from, and the implications of clicking that "I accept" button.
So what mistake could one employee make to ruin it for everyone?
Installing your entire warez collection on your work computer. Sure you'd get fired when you finally get caught, but if the BSA raids the company before you're found out it could be major fines the company is responsible for. Yes they could go after you in court for it to pass on the cost, but that's even more overhead dealing with the legal system. Even barring that, there's lots of ways to misplace license keys, and the BSA won't cut you any slack unless you've got damned good records.
Okay... Sounds interesting, but how exactly security and proper licensing is maintained? Could other companies emulate it? Maybe. Depends a lot on the company I imagine. Part of the reason it flies at google is because of something mentioned in the article. Almost everyone is an engineer of some type, and they all have security training. The security bit isn't as important, but as far as licenses go, most of them should understand you can't for instance bring your copy of MS Word in from home and install it on your company system. At companies with less technically inclined individuals, they may not see the problem with installing whatever software they can find on their company systems (talking from a purely licensing standpoint here, not talking about security). Essentially if Google got raided by the BSA they'd probably fair pretty well, but some other non-IT centric company might not fair as well with a similar IT policy. Of course, there's no reason for any company not to implement a similar policy for all their technical users at least.
Not much to this article but there are a few interesting tidbits. A lot is in the summary, so not much need to go to the actual article, but something interesting not in the summary is when he talks about googles security environment, and why it's not really a security risk to let people install whatever they want. What it boils down to, is that the old style security of locking down the endpoints (that is, peoples workstations) makes people sleep better, but doesn't actually provide much in the way of security. Instead they focused on securing the infrastructure, such as running AV software on the mail server, and intrusion detection software that monitors the networks and servers, plus one would assume properly configured firewalls. He also mentions that being a search company they already had really tight security in place and that few people had access to customer data, so adding security to support outside enterprise data wasn't a big leap.
Looking back at the original link it does list Symantec as not being affected, so maybe I'm thinking of another vulnerability. Their were two actual security releases based on this, one involving a buffer overflow, and another involving uncaught exceptions that lead to program crashes, so maybe it's only vulnerable to one of those. Or maybe I'm just confused and it's an entirely different security advisory I'm thinking of. This link does list 7-zip, and bzip2 (and tar, but it will depend on which version of bzip2 it's compiled against) as vulnerable but fixed in versions 4.5.7 and 1.0.5 respectively.
I need to go back and find the link, but if you click around a bit you can get to one of the security releases that has a more detailed list of affected products (including listing not only tar and bzip2, but the versions that fix the bug being exploited).
Are you sure? I always thought that Mono was a completely independent implementation. At least that was what I was told at uni. Independently implemented != safe from patents. It just means it's safe from copyright and certain provisions of the DMCA. Until the idiocy of software patents is abolished doing any sort of development work on absolutely anything is the legal equivalent of running through a minefield.
I think the point here is more that in the case of things like Mono, they blatantly violate a known patent, and exist mostly by the permission of the patent holder. The risk of implementing anything on Mono (or similar patent encumbered software) is that at any time the patent holder can step in and throw a major wrench in your operations. With a truly "Free" implementation there is no known patent infringement, and even though there's always the chance it violates a patent held by someone somewhere the odds of that are significantly lower as it's essentially a given that the encumbered implementations do in fact violate patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately I can find no fault with your logic, as I to rather despair at the direction America is heading. The only thing that gives me some measure of hope is that the situation in America is still better than most parts of the world, give or take. The problem though isn't the governmental system, rather it's entirely unhealthy levels of media control by select organizations, certain key regulations that encourage mega-corp monopolies, and an increasing degradation of the separation between church and state. I almost wish it were possible to hide the identities of candidates for political offices and only vote on their agendas as that would go a long way towards eliminating extraneous factors like race, religion, and sex.
It is more or less because people have a vested interest in the titles he makes. I don't care much for instance for Adam Sandler, but I don't make a big deal out of it because he mostly does his own work, so if the movie bombs, no harm comes of it. Uwe on the other hand takes existing properties, ones that people genuinely enjoy, and would like to continue to see good releases of, and turns them into utter crap-fests. All things being equal, that shouldn't matter, but once a series starts going down hill, or otherwise develops a bad reputation it becomes increasingly hard to convince people to produce new versions, or to go see the ones that are produced. Look for instance at the last hulk movie, which was crap by most peoples standards. Because of that one crap movie, I know several people that have said they probably won't go see the new Hulk movie that's being made. Now, to fans of the Hulk, this is a problem, as presumably they want more Hulk movies to be made, but because the first one sucked so bad, it's an uphill battle to get new ones made and released. Even if the next one is great, it's still going to be hard to get further ones produced.
That's why people hate Uwe, he ruins it not only for the crap movies he makes, but he also tarnishes any other potential movies from the same properties.
Theory is great for solving strange problems, or squeezing that last bit of performance out of a critical routine, and strong grounding in theory you should be able to get from most universities. That being said, not understanding the basics, or knowing how to apply theory to the real world will sink you when you actually have a job to do, and most schools don't spend much time there. I also find the lack of focus on the basics, particularly early on, to be rather discouraging. Students should be run through a BASIC language initially to get down some of the flow control concepts and basic variable usage, and then transitioned into assembly to really give them a feel for how it is that computers actually work. From there C, and then Java or C# are the next logical progression, and once you've reached that level, well, the sky's the limit. For electives any of Python, Ruby, or Perl would not be amiss either.
Languages don't matter in and of themselves, but rather the concepts and ways of approaching problems (design patterns) embodied in them, and the experience of actually learning to apply those solutions to real problems are the important part.
Having been in on several interviews, it's always been less about what your resume says, and more about if you can actually answer questions that your resume says you should be able to answer. If it says you've got 4 years doing Java development, you'd better be able to explain at least minimally what the various collections classes are.
The degree will get you past the HR screen for a position. Being able to interview well and answer the questions correctly gets you the job. To that end, it doesn't matter much where the degree is from, as once you get past HR no one cares at all whether you even have it or not.
There's also a sub-text that the AI's are essentially people as well and that they can't be controlled, only reasoned with like a normal person. If I recall correctly in 2nd Gig they retire the original Tachikoma because the brass felt they were too unpredictable (that is they had free will of a sort), and opted for dumber more controllable ones that ended up being rather useless compared to the originals. I was rather disappointed that the Tachikoma didn't make it into the original movie, although it was nice that they managed to get at least one of the tanks in at the end.
One of the nice things about the Tachikoma is that there's a lot of room to play around with the ideas of identity and consciousness there. All the Tachikoma share one identity, that diverges during the day, and re-syncs at night, so it's almost like they begin each morning as one person, and as the day goes by they become individuals. Not sure if it was ever done in the series, but it would be interesting for instance if one of the Tachikoma was cut off and unable to sync for a while, say a few months, and then to see how far his personality had diverged from the other Tachikoma, and further what kind of impacts it would have on the group personality when he was re-synced.
... and rather than provoke the religious right with scenes of nudity and orgies (in the manga and in some of the GitSAC 2nd GiG episodes) that appeal to the tastes of the target audience in Japan they will almost certainly censor certain scenes and concepts entirely or alter the dialog in others. They will also dumb down the plots because, lets be honest, the depth and complexity of the interwoven agendas in GitS would be lost on most American audiences (i.e. less talk and more action please). If you get certain copies of the original manga that's published in the USA the orgies have all been removed (as well as some drug references). Those pages are simply omitted from the manga. I was rather pissed when I found out, not because I really miss those pages (more like cut scenes really, didn't add much to the story), but because of the fact that it was censored without warning, and no choice was even offered to purchase the uncensored version (well, if you look around I'm sure it can be found, but the censored one should still be labeled). I'm really getting sick of the religious right, the politically correct, and the pro nanny-state factions all trying to decide what's best for us all.The only way I need to express my dissatisfaction with Mr. Boll is to simply not see his movies. To loosely paraphrase a well known quote, I may hate his movies, but I defend his right to make them and for people to watch them. Signing a petition to ask him to stop doing it just seems rather pointless to me. I'll vote with my wallet, thank you. Cheers
Unfortunately you should still sign the petition so that the studios don't get the wrong idea. If you simply boycott his movies the studios may interpret it that the properties the movies are based on aren't popular or appealing, not as you intended that you think Uwe Boll does shit work and ruins everything he touches. It would really be best for everyone is Mr. Boll was removed from the movie business because it would mean someone who might actually stand a chance of doing a good movie might get their hands on the various series. Maybe Mr. Boll could try his hand at something original, and when those start selling we might trust him with something established.Actually he retracted that offer. The guy is a raving nut job who shouldn't be allowed within 10 miles of any film set.
What's a union got to do with it? Governments institute industrial controls in order to improve their image and make theirs goods more desirable. Doesn't matter if you can get things out of China dirt cheap if no one will by them because they have a rep for being highly toxic. We're already starting to see it with the massive recalls for products with paint from China. Prior to that it was food from China. If they don't start to get their act together real soon there isn't going to be much they'll actually be able to export.
Better take your sarcasm detector in for an overhaul, it's obviously faulty. The first part was serious, the second was a joke about government efficiency and bureaucratic paperwork.
Nothing quite so fantastic as all that. First of all, China will be a self correcting problem. We outsource to them currently because they're going through a period of rapid industrialization that allows them to produce items who's quality if quickly approaching that of ours, but because of the rapid industrialization their industry controls haven't gone into place (which make for safer work environments and products, and also add a fair bit of overhead to the final cost) which allows for cheaper products. Once they achieve parity with the rest of the modern world the next step is to introduce the proper industry controls at which point costs will also achieve parity and it will no longer be economically advantageous to offshore to them.
Secondly, we knew of the mistake almost as soon as it happened. It's just that we only recently finished processing the paperwork. The next step is to file the paperwork that gets those fuses sent back over here. ETA is somewhere in 2015.
Slightly off topic with regard to the article, but not this thread. The question was, what's preventing other companies from adopting an approach similar to what google has. The answer is that other companies would have more concern over their employees violating licensing issues. The way the legal system is structured, the company that owns the PCs is liable for their contents. They can go after the employee after they pay out to the BSA to recoup their losses (that is, file suit against the employee in response to the BSAs suit against them), but it's an entirely different lawsuit from the one the BSA would bring. They can't just turn around and tell the BSA "Hey, that guy over there did it, sue him not us.", it just doesn't work that way. Whether you're google or not, the security aspect is kind of hard to argue with, although even there google would tend to have less issue than other companies simply because their employees would tend to know what sorts of behaviors are suspicious, but because they've attempted to harden their infrastructure even a compromised machine should be relatively simple to isolate.
So what mistake could one employee make to ruin it for everyone?
Installing your entire warez collection on your work computer. Sure you'd get fired when you finally get caught, but if the BSA raids the company before you're found out it could be major fines the company is responsible for. Yes they could go after you in court for it to pass on the cost, but that's even more overhead dealing with the legal system. Even barring that, there's lots of ways to misplace license keys, and the BSA won't cut you any slack unless you've got damned good records.Not much to this article but there are a few interesting tidbits. A lot is in the summary, so not much need to go to the actual article, but something interesting not in the summary is when he talks about googles security environment, and why it's not really a security risk to let people install whatever they want. What it boils down to, is that the old style security of locking down the endpoints (that is, peoples workstations) makes people sleep better, but doesn't actually provide much in the way of security. Instead they focused on securing the infrastructure, such as running AV software on the mail server, and intrusion detection software that monitors the networks and servers, plus one would assume properly configured firewalls. He also mentions that being a search company they already had really tight security in place and that few people had access to customer data, so adding security to support outside enterprise data wasn't a big leap.
Reload the page, it worked for me. Looks like their server is having a minor case of slashdotting.
Looking back at the original link it does list Symantec as not being affected, so maybe I'm thinking of another vulnerability. Their were two actual security releases based on this, one involving a buffer overflow, and another involving uncaught exceptions that lead to program crashes, so maybe it's only vulnerable to one of those. Or maybe I'm just confused and it's an entirely different security advisory I'm thinking of. This link does list 7-zip, and bzip2 (and tar, but it will depend on which version of bzip2 it's compiled against) as vulnerable but fixed in versions 4.5.7 and 1.0.5 respectively.
I need to go back and find the link, but if you click around a bit you can get to one of the security releases that has a more detailed list of affected products (including listing not only tar and bzip2, but the versions that fix the bug being exploited).
I think the point here is more that in the case of things like Mono, they blatantly violate a known patent, and exist mostly by the permission of the patent holder. The risk of implementing anything on Mono (or similar patent encumbered software) is that at any time the patent holder can step in and throw a major wrench in your operations. With a truly "Free" implementation there is no known patent infringement, and even though there's always the chance it violates a patent held by someone somewhere the odds of that are significantly lower as it's essentially a given that the encumbered implementations do in fact violate patent.