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This was the title of an article from the New York Times about Yury Gitman and his Magicbike last December. Here is a permanent link to this article (free registration needed).

Maybe a little OT, but does anyone know what caused the drop in published articles seen in the graph?

Funny how another article in the NYT says "The US is losing dominance in the sciences". Keep it up, Bush team! Soon we'll be living in that conservative, backwards anti-scientific paradise in no time!

"We stand at a pivotal moment," Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, recently said at a policy forum in Washington at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation's top general science group. "For all our past successes, there are disturbing signs that America's dominant position in the scientific world is being shaken."

I thought science was the one area where there should be no borders. Why is it so disturbing that other countries are doing well in scientifical-type stuff?

Mr. Daschle accused the Bush administration of weakening the nation's science base by failing to provide enough money for cutting-edge research.

Okay - this is ridiculous. The graphs cover 20 years - 1983-2003. Bush has been in office for ~3 years. Explain again how this is his fault...??

PS I'm not defending Bush - I'm defending basic math skills.

Oh, and here is a link to the printer-friendly version. Kudos to the submitter for including a link to the reg-free version.

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

Amusing anecdotes aside, the fact of the matter is that Americans simply don't value education as much as other nationalities. I'm sure I'm not the only one who came here from Europe, Asia or India as a kid and realized he was three grades ahead of his peers in math and science. It goes without saying, if a child is unaware of basic physics and chemistry, he'll never wonder, marvel at and be curious about just how we went from light bulbs to transistors to microchips. While not everyone needs to be like that, at least we should provide the knowledge required to roughly understand how technology works, to spur those individuals who really want to know just how a processor decides what "transistor" of the millions it has on board is switched.

...We had to explain to her about the Communist's "Great Firewall of China" and how they block/inspect/proxy damn near everything.

I've heard this a lot, but personally when I've been in China I've found only one web site which I couldn't get to, BBC News. I found I could get to many other sites which I half expected not to be able to get to, including the rest of the BBCs site, CNN, NYTimes, and many others. Why they choose to block some sites, whilst leaving many others which you might reasonably expect to be blocked for similar reasons is beyond me.

Even these blocks didn't stop me, I just tunneled anything I wanted to access over SSH (which I was using heavily to access our servers anyway).

Not a very effective great firewall as far as I could see.

A bit of a curiosity:
Earlier this week, a norwegian comedian, Shabana Rehman, insulted the well-known, and reportedly militant, mullah Krekar by lifting him up in an attemt to prove that he was not very dangerous. The Mullah, which found this very humiliating, has filed a complaint to the police (and managed to attack a journalist while doing so).

However, this incident has now resulted in a online game called "Lift a mulla".

Actually a bit boring. Use your left and right arrows to play if you must

There's an article about Plugging the Linux Holes!

While it's true no American president was ever elected with a minority of the electoral vote,

[BZZT!]
"I'm sorry, thank you for playing, next contestant please..."

John Quincy Adams, 1824. Andrew Jackson had both a higher popular vote and electoral college vote, but neither had a majority. Under constitutional provisions, the top three candidates were voted on by the house; the fourth threw his support behind Adams, giving him enough for a victory. (Additional reference source)

The 1876 Hayes/Tilden election also might qualify, as an electoral commission of dubious provenance decided the fates of votes from 4 disputed states, with Hayes finally winning by a single electoral vote.

And, of course, the Florida electoral votes would have been enough to swing the 2000 election, if you want to bring those shenanigans back up....

That's weird. The original post had the Google link in it (see below). But it didn't have the links to all the game sites - didn't have time to add them.

It makes sense for developers who are already familiar with PC game development to work on Xbox console games. That is not a trend in itself and will not overthrow the reigning console king, Sony.

What is interesting is that many highly-anticipated and benchmark-setting games are Xbox-exclusive or Xbox-first. Besides those mentioned in the article, the most notable Xbox-exclusive example was Halo - originally a PC title - but that was following Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie. These are third-party developers who are opting to go the Xbox route, with no overt interest or incentive in developing for Xbox-only beyond the relative ease of development vs. the notoriously arcane PS2.

If Microsoft can convince third-party developers to make the Xbox their first choice when considering new development projects, Sony will have to respond with some strong incentives to stay on top. If gamers can get the titles that they want most only on one console why wouldn't they vote with their dollars?

Xbox-Exclusive Games a Growing Trend

The New York Times Technology's Michel Marriott reports on the growing trend of developers making Xbox-exclusive games, bypassing the Sony PS2 and Nintendo GameCube. Microsoft is 'playing catch-up on the console' with some notable examples of Xbox-exclusive (or Xbox-first) games that include Doom 3, Unreal Championship 2, Advent Rising and Full Spectrum Warrior. Marriott interviews Todd Hollenshead (id), Mark Rein (Epic), J. Allard (Microsoft), and Donald Mustard (Majesco) among others that include Sony and THQ. The question is, will gamers follow the developers' preferences? Sony's dominance in the next game console wars could be toppled if they do. 'If Microsoft can woo more developers to Xbox, the balance of power in the next round could change.'

The rich ARE getting richer in this IPO...

catching up the console

Well, what do you propose we do? Spend billions to convince Joe Farmer that new-q-ler power plant over yonder isn't going to make his dick turn green and his sister grow an extra titty?

let's stick with coal/oil until the nuclear genie is fully out of the bottle, and mabye by then we can figure out, realistically, what to do with the waste.

I mean, hasn't nuclear power pretty much been tried, sentenced, and executed in the court of public opinion? There hasn't been a new nuclear plant brought on line in this country in what, 10 years? 20?

Even if we do move away from coal, which seems unimaginable considering how much we're sitting on, and that we already have the infrastructure in place, but let's say we do move away from it. We'll still have all those trucks and cars burning oil, unless we're gonna convert them to electric, which again would require a significant re-tooling of industry.

The environmental movement has *completely* screwed up in the last three decades by not picking their battles based on the actual damage done by the technologies in play.

uh oh
my god what a dragon

Totally agree.

1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".

2. And the current administration is the strongest proponent of lifting those restrictions on gun control.

3. The counter-party is blocking the appointment of new judges to replace retiring officials. Sounds like being against speedy trials to me.

4. Thank you Clinton for using executive orders to confiscate land and turn it into federal parks.

You're right, we need to clean out half of congress... but we will argue about which half needs to go.

i do agree with your point, but...

Some won't expire.
Some you don't care if it expire.
But some people just don't care at all.

Clearly though unless someone finds out (oh say, the New York Times) nothing would happen. I suspect there's a hard drive hiding in someone's stuff waiting for the heat to cool down.

When it comes to doing illegal shit in the military always remember rule one: "What you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here let it stay here" (Once posted on the road out of Los Alamos) aka "Shut the fuck up".

Bringing up arguments about eighteenth century "right to publish" is bogus. The first amendment automatically protects your right to publish. It even protects your right to parody a copyright work (although not to gain financially from such parody). As a previous post already said, Whatever helps you sleep at night "

The funny thing is, copyright as conceived in our constitution regards creative works--I said 'information' because that's a more basic designation than 'art' and is the most general subject of the Framer's Federalist paper discussions, but 'artistic' works if you insist-- as already belonging as much to the public who through generations of particapatory culture made current creativity possible as to the authors of that work.

The law does not grant protection to those who create "original" works in the strict sense if not the legal, because there are no original works. Every work is in some way derivative. Instead, the law grants temporary copy privileges to novel expressions, which is certainly tenuous ground no matter how you look at it. If you think there is 'genius' creativity, or are 'original' works out there, then you may be right to some small extent--but as the Framers correctly understood, the far larger influence is public culture that freely available.

You are arguing as if there needed to be some positive impetus in order to 'free' creative productions from their rightful ownership. That is simply wrong in both a historical and conceptual interpretation of copyright. Information and artistic expression already will spread if unimpeded, and copyright's primary function is to make the incentives to produce small enough that that spread will be as unimpeded as possible.

Copyright is a grant to protect one thing and one thing only--progress for the benefit of the public. That's what the constitution says, and you are free to disagree, but you better have better rationale than just an assumption that an author has a vague set of 'rights' that are granted by a spurious conception of total creativity of "original" works. At least the Framers listed their principles.

P2P is many things, but more studies are showing that, though the RIAA and copyright 'moral intuitionists' such as yourself don't want to hear it, P2P is culturally enabling a lot more than it is disabling, and regardless of trifling questions of legality is thus more of a boon to the true, real and forgotten purpose of copyright than it is an attack.

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

From Misleader.org

In a move designed to blur the issue, the Administration today said it was revising its previous effort to terminate overtime protections for 8 million workers. But even by the Bush Administration's own admission, the "new" regulations will mean that tens of thousands of lower-income workers will be cut off. Opponents of the Administration's plan say that the revisions would still cause problems for mean millions. The regulations are so bad for workers that some state legislatures have even rushed through legislation to block them.

Oh, yes, he was elected. As spelled in the Constitution, by representatives sent to Electorate College by all of the States of the Union.

This is a commonly believed lie.

He was not elected. The election results in Florida were miscounted, as has been reported by a number of independant (as well as biased but detailed and cross-referenced) sources.

This isn't about theGore winning the popular vote by over a half million votes. It isn't even about the 11,000 individual complaints to the Justice Department about voting rights violations in Florida.

This is about the fact that Al Gore legally won Florida, and therefore the 2000 presidential election.

I think this NYTimes article had a nice justification for both the cost and delay in the project:

Dr. Everitt agreed. "We could have done it better and quicker, but not enormously quicker," he said, adding: "The medieval cathedral builders took longer."

Link here (soul reaving required).

In the article Watson is quoted as saying that any hacker can figure out this exploit in five minutes from the vaguest explanation. If that's true, why reveal the exploit until someone has figured out how to completely patch it? Or has the fix already been figured out? I couldn't tell from the article.

That's just one more reason this is a great story for slashdot. It's about a girl who's fairly cute , seems to be left leaning politically, is involved with computers, and owns a apple laptop . If only there was some way to tie in Linux...

I'm actually surprised there have not been more television biographies on hackers. It seems A&E Biographies, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel etc. would want to tell these stories.

www.reeddavid.com

All news agencies mix FACT and OPINION together pretty freely these days. Today's news that "Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to ..." is NOT A FACT, even though it's reported by the New York Times (that bastion of journalistic integrity) and probably will be fact within 24 hours. And most talking heads on TV give us unvarnished OPINION.

Clearly, many blogs are filled with OPINION. That's all they promise to do. I don't have a problem with the Drudge report's spin on things -- their primary reason for existence is to add spin, and it's obvious.

The problem comes when "journalists" use a respected platform to spout opinion, hide the facts, or report lies ("an unnamed source in the White House said today...") and thus distort or change peoples' opinions under the guise of authority.

But blogs, by definition, have no accountability to anyone. The author can't be fired for editing a news photo in Photoshop, or for reporting what isn't true, or mis-quoting someone's words. The same is true for someone standing on a soapbox in Hyde park. You, the reader, have to take it with a grain of salt and compare what you're reading with everything else you know and read.

The rallying cry used to be "Question Authority!". But these days, you have to question practically everything.

Apparently the fact that some folks perfer dialup is front page news to the paper of record.

brilliant:

you say ''Cox is quoted in the article as saying, 'I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower. Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'''

No she ISN'T

From the article

'The rules of the blogosphere demand displaying corrections quickly and prominently, said Mr. Denton [the publisher of wonkette] ... 'I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower, he said. "Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy."'

try this link

Link

click!

Thom Swiss, editor of The Iowa Review Web and a professor of English at the University of Iowa who focuses on those forms of hypertext, said that to him Mr. Brown's creation seemed mechanical. "While inventive if buggy, I'm not sure how useful it is," he said. "At this stage of its development, it's more of a game and less literature - and not because of the pulp story but because the formal elements of composing the piece are given to you: you just fill in the content."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/business/media/1 5real.html?ex=1082606400&en=766d7abf51c0291f&ei=50 62&partner=GOOGLE

I think it's a given here that physically impaired people will only be about 30% of the market once this becomes perfected. Let's put the facts together:
"or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.ht ml
"would be fully implanted in the brain, transmitting information without wires."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.ht ml?pagewanted=2
"Our 12" disco ball is made hundreds of highly reflective tiny glass mirror squares."
https://ssl.adhost.com/noveltylights/merchant.cfm? pid=70&step=4
I have nothing more to say.

I think it's a given here that physically impaired people will only be about 30% of the market once this becomes perfected. Let's put the facts together:
"or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.ht ml
"would be fully implanted in the brain, transmitting information without wires."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.ht ml?pagewanted=2
"Our 12" disco ball is made hundreds of highly reflective tiny glass mirror squares."
https://ssl.adhost.com/noveltylights/merchant.cfm? pid=70&step=4
I have nothing more to say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.ht ml?ex=1082433600&en=a9a9d7096d1a147f&ei=5062&partn er=GOOGLE

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.ht ml?ex=1082433600&en=a9a9d7096d1a147f&ei=5062&partn er=GOOGLE

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2003 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

The argument that Would. Not. Die. Seriously, you can see this argument popping up in discussion forums everywhere with great regularity. Then you can read it in major computer industry publications, too. I'd like to believe that ./ readers know better. For those that don't, here's an interesting article.

Reg Free Link. Enjoy!

AC

Lottery Numbers and Books With a Voice
By PAMELA LiCALZI O'CONNELL
April 8, 2004
ONLINE DIARY

Fill out this online survey and you may win a prize! The StudyResponse Project (studyresponse.com) helps conduct online surveys that offer incentives (mostly raffle-type prizes) to encourage participation in social-science research. It links researchers with registered volunteers through a system of anonymous messages and reminders, thus ensuring privacy.

The site owes a debt to consumer marketers in more ways than one. "E-commerce sites have trained a wide swath of people to fill out online surveys -- it's a kind of basic literacy now -- and that has helped us," said Jeffrey M. Stanton, an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, which administers the site. His job is to study the studies -- that is, to draw conclusions on the best way to collect research data on the Web.

The project has attracted more than 53,000 volunteers and has been used by 65 research studies on topics ranging from the death penalty to emotional intelligence. The average age of volunteers is 33.9; 68 percent are women. In most studies, participants have a 2 percent to 3 percent chance of winning a prize, typically an Amazon gift certificate. "Some of our volunteers are curious about the research topics, but most are more interested in the prizes," Dr. Stanton said.

With mail and phone surveys encountering high rates of refusal, online research has become mainstream. Recent studies that have used the site have achieved response rates between 20 percent and 30 percent using surveys that took about 10 to 15 minutes to fill out, he added. Shorter surveys have sometimes reached response rates of 50 percent.

But researchers must adhere to strict rules to tap the StudyResponse panel. For instance, participants must be allowed to skip questions.

"If you force a response, you'll get bogus data," Dr. Stanton said.

Pick a Number

Lotto players, note: it's awfully hard to come up with a truly random number or number sequence.

Most online random-number generators actually offer "pseudo-random" numbers because computers aren't good at doing anything by chance. To generate numbers that are truly random requires a source of entropy, or disorder, outside the computer itself.

A new site, randomnumbers.info, locates such a source in quantum physics, specifically, the reflection of a light particle on a semitransparent mirror. The site exploits this optical process to generate up to 1,000 random numbers on demand.

"You need a quantum process if you want real randomness," said Grégoire Ribordy, chief executive of Id Quantique, a commercial spinoff of the University of Geneva, the project's originator.

Other sites also offer true random numbers, said Mads Haahr, lecturer in computer science at Trinity College, Dublin. His site, random.org, uses atmospheric noise from a radio as a source of disorder; the random numbers at HotBits (www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits) are generated by radioactive decay; and LavaRnd (www.lavarnd.org) taps the unpredictability of lava lamps.

Aside from players looking for an edge in Pick Six, true random number are needed in applications like cryptography. But people also have used random.org's output in unexpected ways. One writer used random numbers to help decide on the next plot twist in his novel. Others have tapped the site to determine the order of words asked in a spelling bee and to help decide which chores on a list to do first.

For some, then, random numbers are the holy grail of decision-support tools: a truly unbiased source.

Books With a Voice

Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.net) is well known for offering free electronic versions of famous public-domain texts. Now Telltale Weekly (tel

I think the issue is pretty straightforward, and if their service is interfering with emergency bands then it needs to be reallocated. The good question is, what's fair for them afterwards? It doesn't seem like such a move should put them out of business, but some are trying to do so.

The FCC couldn't make up their minds at the last meeting, will things change at the next? I have a feeling this could get pushed around for a while.

This will probably be modded OT but I think something should be said.

Here's the original post (including the missing financial context and Google link) that I wrote up shortly after reading the article at midnight last night when the New York Times site is updated.

Hollywood's Rising Fascination With Video Games

The New York Times Technology's Laura M. Holson writes about a growing trend: Hollywood movie directors making videogames. The reason? Big money, sometimes even more than they made from the movies they directed. Peter Jackson missed out on the bonanza from the Lord of the Rings trilogy but will have creative control of Ubisoft's King Kong movie tie-in. John Woo's (Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2, Hard-Boiled) Tiger Hill Games and Sega have a 30-person team developing a heist game (maybe a Metroid title too?). Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator) and Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State) are in talks with major game executives. Finally, the Wachowski brothers raked in millions from the Enter the Matrix game, which Warner Brothers declined to back. Determined not to miss more opportunities, the studio founded Warner Games, led by Monolith co-founder and ex-CEO Jason Hall. What if the games are better than the movies they are based on?

Admittedly, it's a bit long and deserves some necessary editing (substituting the IMDB link for the directors' respective filmographies and movie credits for example).

When I logged in early this morning, the post was rejected and in mid-afternoon simoniker posted the story (1 of only 2 today - it's after 6:30 PM as I write this comment). It's entirely possible - though somewhat unlikely considering the sequence of events - that simoniker stumbled on the article by himself and wrote it up entirely by himself.

In the past I've largely ignored that fact that many articles submitted when simoniker was editing invariably are rejected and then - often very similar or identical text - are posted uncredited.

I'm not the first person here to take notice of the pattern or to point this out.

It's not about the Karma or complaining that something wasn't posted, or anything of that sort because I've been maxed out on Karma for a long time, I have lots of submitted items posted, and probably even more rejected because someone else thought to submit it before me. Rejected posts aren't the problem.

It's about common courtesy and respect for the readers and the people who make Slashdot work.

Slashdot works because of the people who take the time to write in and let their fellow readers know about items of interest to geeks everywhere. It's more than a little irritating to take time to do a write-up on a holiday weekend, have it rejected and then see a nearly identical (less so in this particular case) item uncredited.

Most people have had at least one experience of a pinhead boss taking credit for their work, and most people have tolerated it because they get paid to do their jobs and don't want to risk workplace wrath. Here, nobody's getting paid except the Slashdot editors, to whom none of us are accountable. The reader/reporters aren't getting paid and the virtual tip of the hat as thanks is the only reward. I've read people's compaints about a relative lack of submissions or stories in the Games section. If this type of behavior is the reason, it goes a long way to explaining why.

simonker, 'Stuff that matters' is part of Slashdot's slogan. The bottom line: Give credit where credit is due.

It matters.

This will probably be modded OT but I think something should be said.

Here's the original post (including the missing financial context and Google link) that I wrote up shortly after reading the article at midnight last night when the New York Times site is updated.

Hollywood's Rising Fascination With Video Games

The New York Times Technology's Laura M. Holson writes about a growing trend: Hollywood movie directors making videogames. The reason? Big money, sometimes even more than they made from the movies they directed. Peter Jackson missed out on the bonanza from the Lord of the Rings trilogy but will have creative control of Ubisoft's King Kong movie tie-in. John Woo's (Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2, Hard-Boiled) Tiger Hill Games and Sega have a 30-person team developing a heist game (maybe a Metroid title too?). Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator) and Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State) are in talks with major game executives. Finally, the Wachowski brothers raked in millions from the Enter the Matrix game, which Warner Brothers declined to back. Determined not to miss more opportunities, the studio founded Warner Games, led by Monolith co-founder and ex-CEO Jason Hall. What if the games are better than the movies they are based on?

Admittedly, it's a bit long and deserves some necessary editing (substituting the IMDB link for the directors' respective filmographies and movie credits for example).

When I logged in early this morning, the post was rejected and in mid-afternoon simoniker posted the story (1 of only 2 today - it's after 6:30 PM as I write this comment). It's entirely possible - though somewhat unlikely considering the sequence of events - that simoniker stumbled on the article by himself and wrote it up entirely by himself.

In the past I've largely ignored that fact that many articles submitted when simoniker was editing invariably are rejected and then - often very similar or identical text - are posted uncredited.

I'm not the first person here to take notice of the pattern or to point this out.

It's not about the Karma or complaining that something wasn't posted, or anything of that sort because I've been maxed out on Karma for a long time, I have lots of submitted items posted, and probably even more rejected because someone else thought to submit it before me. Rejected posts aren't the problem.

It's about common courtesy and respect for the readers and the people who make Slashdot work.

Slashdot works because of the people who take the time to write in and let their fellow readers know about items of interest to geeks everywhere. It's more than a little irritating to take time to do a write-up on a holiday weekend, have it rejected and then see a nearly identical (less so in this particular case) item uncredited.

Most people have had at least one experience of a pinhead boss taking credit for their work, and most people have tolerated it because they get paid to do their jobs and don't want to risk workplace wrath. Here, nobody's getting paid except the Slashdot editors, to whom none of us are accountable. The reader/reporters aren't getting paid and the virtual tip of the hat as thanks is the only reward. I've read people's compaints about a relative lack of submissions or stories in the Games section. If this type of behavior is the reason, it goes a long way to explaining why.

simonker, 'Stuff that matters' is part of Slashdot's slogan. The bottom line: Give credit where credit is due.

It matters.

Link Found (no soul sucking reg required)
Reading this makes me realize what bastards the MPAA leaders are.

To fight piracy here, where 9 out of 10 DVD's sold are counterfeit copies, Columbia TriStar, a division of Sony, will price DVD's at no more than 299 rubles, or just over $10, less than half its current price. Warner Home Video, a division of Time Warner, has already cut its DVD prices in Russia to the equivalent of $15.

"The idea is to get Russian consumers used to buying licensed material, but at a price that most of the population can afford," said Vyacheslav Dobychin, general director of Columbia TriStar's licensee here.

The low-price idea has long been anathema to industry advocates in the United States. "You can never compete on price with a pirate," said Jack Valenti in a recent telephone interview. The longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, he has made stern copyright enforcement his rallying cry. ...and at the end

Mr. Valenti, who will soon leave his decades-long post as president of the Motion Picture Association, insists, "The only way to kill piracy in Russia is strong copyright law with stern penalties and government resolve to enforce that law."

But there is another way, said Mr. Dobychin of Columbia TriStar's licensee here: "We're changing distribution from the `exclusive model' to the `mass model' in Russia. Our goal is to fight piracy, and with lower prices, we can finally compete."