In less than an hour, I will see The Walt Disney Company's second attempt to adapt Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio to the silver screen. I wonder how Disney's going to screw this one up. (Update: See my review in the comments.)

Before October 1998, my biggest beef with Disney was the fact that the writers mutilated classic stories beyond the minimum necessary for a movie adaptation, often completely changing the meaning of a story. Just look at what Disney did to, say, the story of Pocahontas.

After October 1998, I find the fact that Disney lobbied hard for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act more than enough to demonize Disney. The company goes in, takes advantage of stories that have fallen into the public domain, then goes and gets a copyright extension so that other companies can't do the same thing. Now how hypocritical is that?

You can find more reasons to hate Disney at the web site of The Society of Disney Haters, which has been discussed on Kuro5hin.

Who else has something to say against The Walt Disney Company?

toupsie wrote in "Mac OS X Switcher Stories":

"The Floppy is dead" and its continued promotion is a disservice to the public. It is not a cost effecient storage medium, takes up a ridculous amount of space for its storage ability and environmentally unsound. A 20 cent 700mb CD is far more efficient than a 5 cent 1.5mb Floppy. The only group that still believes in this tech are the floppy manufacturers and their marketing departments.

I am all for replacing floppy disks with recordable compact discs, but I see a few problems in the way:

A 12-cm (5-inch) CD-R disc does not fit into the pocket as well as a 3.5" floppy does. A spindle of fifty 8-cm (3-inch) CD-R discs currently costs significantly more than a spindle of fifty 12-cm CD-R discs. I could not find the smaller jewel cases for 8-cm discs at a Best Buy store or any other computer store within my walking distance, and using an 8-cm disc with a case for a 12-cm disc defeats the purpose of having an 8-cm disc.

Without a floppy disk drive, how does a fellow load the drivers for the CD-ROM drive so that one may begin installing the operating system on an older machine that does not support booting from an El Torito bootable CD?

Without a floppy disk drive, how does a fellow make an El Torito bootable CD in Roxio Easy CD Creator 4? In that program, when the user chooses New > Bootable CD, the program does the Windows API equivalent of dd to read 1440 KB of data sector-by-sector from the A: drive. Canceling the read cancels creation of the bootable CD.

Without a floppy disk drive, how does a fellow make a boot disk containing the Linux kernel for use in environments hostile to GRUB, such as dual-booting with Windows after installing some Windows service packs?

Without a floppy disk drive, how does a fellow move files from a four to six year old laptop computer (for which an internal CD recorder was never produced) to a new computer?

In the Slashdot FAQ, CmdrTaco writes:

What about separating the rating (+1,-1) from the qualifier (off-topic, informative)? Often a post may be flamebait, but of excellent quality nevertheless.

While this may be true in some cases, its limited applicability doesn't justify complicating the moderators' user interface. Also, there's too much potential for abuse.

In effect, this has already been done. Each positive moderation has a corresponding negative moderation in the same spirit.

• Interesting - "Yeah, it's interesting, but it relates to the parent comment, rather than to the article, so I'll mod you down as Offtopic."
• Informative - "Yeah, it's informative, but somebody else posted a related point two seconds before you posted your comment, so I'll mod you down as Redundant."
• Insightful - "You mean Inciteful. -1, Flamebait."
• Funny - "It had me laughing out loud, but it's not politically correct. -1, Troll."
• Underrated - "No, I'd rather push this comment down with the page-widening posts and never be held responsible in metamoderation. -1, Overrated."

Here, you can discuss this or any other issue concering Slashdot itself.

Discuss Slashdot's comments and moderation system here.

My latest essay, titled DMCA in Plain English, may help you begin to explain the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the American masses and perhaps get more letters faxed to your representative and senators. (Yes, faxed, not e-mail that gets lost in the spam, not paper mail that is assumed to contain anthrax spores.) It's still very much a work in progress; please add comments.

This is a picture of a Nintendo 64 controller. ==>

The N64 controller handles many PC action games better than most PC game pads, especially USB Sidewinder pads whose directional controls are rotated clockwise 20 degrees, making it very hard to press straight south.

You can pick up a Nintendo 64 to USB adapter at Wishtech.com, or, if you're handy with a soldering iron, you can build a parallel port adapter and use it with the DirectPad Pro software for Windows or with a recent version of the Linux joystick driver. DirectPad Pro also supports adapters for PlayStation and Super NES joypads.

If you're not handy with a soldering iron, and your games do not need analog control, get a Gravis GamePad Pro USB. For $20, you get the feel of a PSX controller.