Terminally Incoherent

Do this thought experiment for me. Pick a science fiction movie or a TV show. You can pick whatever you want, as long as this movie or show has space ships and contains at least one scene where 2 or more ships meet/battle in deep space. Got one? Ok, now recall this deep space scene. I will bet you that no matter what movie you picked you will see the same strange little thing. For some strange reason all the ships are aligned to some invisible plane. In other words, all the ships are situated so that you can define one direction which will mean “down” to all the ships on the screen (sans some fighters zooming around really fast).

There is also something you will never see - a ship situated so that it is perpendicular to one or more of it’s neighbors. If it’s a battle scene, you will always see ships attacking head on, or tailing the enemy - but never attacking from above or below. When a ship rams another ship, they will either ram the enemies prow, or the side. Why the hell is that? Space is 3D, yet most of movie makers treat space battles like sea battles - only with invisible water line.

Sure it makes sense that during battle ships would align to carry out an attack - but then again once they start fighting there should be considerable amount of movement up and down. Actually, the only way a pilot can define “up” is by looking at other ships - once everyone starts rolling and pivoting to get in a good shooting position, you loose that point of reference. It would not make sense to try to align to some pre-defined plane in space during battle.

Same thing goes for peaceful encounters. You always have two ships, traveling to different destinations, taking different routes and etc. Yet, when they meet they always somehow manage to end up in prow to prow position. Similarly, if you are planning to dock, or move allot of cargo from one ship to another it would make sense. Now in battle it might be useful to position yourself this way. But when you are just chattering on the comms or beaming people up and down, or send out swift moving transport pods - why bother? If you can beam someone to the other ship, does it matter if it is upside down, or perpendicular to you?

This is one of my pet peeves. I really think most of the people who make these shows, and movies simply can’t figure out that 3D space thing. I’m not even going to mention the horrible abuse of physics in most of scifi movies. This is a topic for a whole other rant… But is is really that difficult to show two ships in space that are not perfectly aligned?

BTW, if your show/movie (the one you picked at the beginning) did portray the ships perpendicular, upside down and at weird angles to each other - please let me know! I want to see it!

I’m a procrastinator… Making big decisions is not really my thing so I tend to wait till the last minute. For example, I haven’t decided if I want to go to do my MS until my last semester as an undergrad.

Similarly, I’m two semesters away from a Masters and I still don’t know if I want to continue my education. I think I do want to get a PHD but I still don’t have this crystal clarity of mind that comes about only when you make decisions the last minute.

But I think the last minute is here already. I just talked to one of my professors and he told me that if I want to get to a decent school I need to start applying now. Crap!

I don’t even know where to go… Who has good CS programs around here? I definitely want to stay local, but I have no clue which schools are good and which suck. I spent the past 5 years of my life here at MSU. I would do a PHD here, but we don’t even have a CS PHD program here. I figured I’ll sort all of this out next semester - but it seems like I might need to start now.

Of course if I fuck this up and apply to late, I can always take a semester/year off and try looking for a job in the industry. Sigh… I’m confused…

It is sad… Not a single person in my Image Processing class has a clue about how text files work. The task is simple - you need to prepend a 3 line header to a binary file. Easy as pie - you create a new file, write out the header, and then just copy everything over from the binary file.

I had like 5 people arguing that you can just easily prepend stuff to files. They were looking at me funny, and trying to explain to me how “you just have to seek to the beginning of the file and insert 3 blank lines”. At first I thought they were just joking, but no - they were deadly serious. I mean, what the hell do they think a blank line is? It’s a fucking ASCII character! Jesus!

This were all graduate students! Every single one of them had a BS in computer science, engineering or electronics or whatnot. But not a single person knew how files work. This is sad…

I mean come on! I know that this is how a text editor works, but text editors do not work on files. They work on buffers! It is easy to prepend strings to beginning of a memory buffer. It is easy to rearrange stuff in memory. It is actually easier, and more efficient to read in and write out a whole file rather than shift it by n bytes to accommodate the header.

I stumbled upon this while browsing boingboing today, and I must say this page makes my skin crawl. If I ever have children remind me to add uspto.gov to the web filtering software. Besides, I think pr0n is much healthier for children than this revolting propaganda.

I think the “birds and the bees” conversation will be much more straightforward than the ethically overburdened “why entertainment industry tries to destroy fair-use” talk.

The one quote that really disturbed me was this:

Your mom gave you a printer that can print out iron-on transfers and you want to make a bunch of T-shirts with a famous cartoon character or movie star screaming your name.

IANAL but I think that making a custom “Bugs Bunny Hearts Little Johny” t-shirt for your kid hardly seems like copyright infringement. I would argue that this would fall under fair use. I think you are fine as long as you don’t make the t-shirts for the whole neighborhood, or sell them to people.

How about this one:

You capture pictures from TV shows and post them on your website along with soundbytes that make you laugh.

You mean that the 62,600,000 web pages indexed by google under the keyword “screenshots”, are committing some horrible copyright infringement crimes? Please tell me how does bunch of grainy battlestar galactica screencaps posted on the web financially hurts the people who produce the show? Is a kid posting the 15 second wave clip of the ewok song financially hurting George Lucas?

I used to moderate on a popular farscape message board and I knew people who had literally gigabytes of DVD quality screen captures, and hours of sound clips posted on their web pages. No one ever said anything to anyone. The only time Henson lawyers got involved was when people were selling t-shirts with Farscape logo on them.

This has always been a gray area. If you seek your lawyers against the screen-grabbers you are basically pissing off the most rabid, zealot fans. They usually have big following, as fans rally around them creating their own internet societies. These people are advertising your show for free! Geez…

You need to do a report for school and you found one on-line that’s exactly what you were planning to write.

I’m at a complete loss with this one. Do people at USPTO know how to spell reference material? Obviously, they can’t spell “prior art” but that’s a whole different story…

Wendy Seltzer comments on the other questions in her blog. She makes some excellent points there.

Sigh… I think that teaching children about the counter-intuitive concept of “intellectual property” might be one of the hardest things I might have to do as a parent one day. How do you educate your children without mindlessly repeating the brain-damaging propaganda? How do you tell them the truth about greed, corporate corruption, and effects of clinging to a broken business model without destroying their innocence? How do you teach them how to fight the copyfight, and at the same time make them aware of the dangers of un-inhibited infringement?

Sex and terrorism are the easy things to explain compared to this…

Remember when TiVo was the coolest thing under the sun because it actually “learned” what you liked and recorded stuff for you? It was hyped as the ultimate appliance for a TV viewer - a little box that will save all your shows, and devote it’s existence to finding TV that you, the consumer, would actually consider worthy of watching.

But it seems that all of this is just bunch of hype. Apparently TiVo nowadays cares more about the copyright holders than about it’s clients. Some poor users just found out that some of the shows aired on popular networks can only be saved for 7 days due to some shady copyright restrictions. Wait… What restrictions? There are no restrictions that prohibit recording TV shows.

Cory Doctorow says it best:

Hey, TiVo: since 1984’s Betamax decision, Americans have had the right to record TV shows even if the rightsholder doesn’t like the idea. That’s straight from the Supreme Court’s mouth.

PVRBlog has more info, and screenshots. Note the wording on the TiVo warnings. They tell you that the recording will be deleted because of policy set by copyright holder. Hey, I can make a policy too. Anyone can make their own policy. But policies don’t mean anything. No one is allowed to tell me what I can or cannot tape! There is no law anywhere saying that you need to honor any kind of policy set forth by the copyright holder when it comes to TV broadcast. How come everyone else can tape these shows just fine - only TiVo customers are screwed?

This is very short sighted move for TiVo. They are undoubtedly accepting some nice “donation” from the industry in exchange for removing functionality from their product. But guess what? This will make them loose customers! There is no way in hell I would buy a TiVo set after seeing this.

And just imagine how this is going to piss off someone that just came back from a long business trip just to find out that TiVo deleted all the episodes of his favorite show due to some stupid policy.

And I guess this is what the entertainment industry is aiming for. They sure as hell don’t want any customer friendly products on the market. They are scared shitless of anything that can make digital recordings. TiVo scares them, so they aim to reduce it’s customer base by taking away the most appealing thing about the product - the ability to record and save shows for unlimited period of time.

First you bribe it, then you cripple it, then you wait until it loose all the good customers, then you buy it and finally you run it into the ground. Scary technology eliminated…