I heard about this number yesterday, and you know they're going to argue it left and right (Mind you, I do believe Napster as it was was in the wrong, but not to the extent RIAA wants us to believe). There was another article in today's Chicago Tribune (but carried by AP, so probably in everyone's major paper somehow) that talked about the creator of DeCSS, and out of 4 1/2-page columns, only one sentence mentioned the purpose of DeCSS (linux dvd viewing), and most of the rest on how DeCSS can be used to copy movies left and right.
Even if the media outlet is not owned by any subsidary or company of RIAA or MPAA, they are going to be biased because they have a strong urge to make sure copyright controls stay as 'strong' as they are. If, say, the Napster or DeCSS case overthrew strong copyright protections, then a site like NYTimes could easily watch as a free outlet scoops up all the articles for the day and posts them themselves; the work done by NYTimes writers, but benefits reaped in by another. Of course, I do believe that a significant fraction of media outlets do respect fair use issues, which is why DeCSS in general gets a more favorable light by some of these compared to Napster, since the media themselves rely heavily on fair use for publishing.
But again, this all boils down to statistics and how well you can spin them. I agree with others that there is no control case here: you need to compare the change of sales in a situation with and without Napster with all other conditions being the same, which is practically impossible. So we can spin them to say they're invalid, or RIAA can spin them to say they lost 1/3rd of their profits. The only somewhat justifiable comparison is to show the change in sales over the last twenty years on a year by year basis, incorporating the number of potental buyers (weighted age-group averages) and number of CDs available (again, weighted interest averages). I would suspect that the trend is higher, and if not only that, mimics the general trend in the GNP or other consumer price levels, such that you'd see the dip from Reagen-omics and the increase from the latest improved economy.
Which all means that CD sales haven't been affected at all by Napster, much less any other factor more-so than the economic levels.
This game came out about 2 years ago, and basically was a turn-based game set in a fantasy world, it was pseudo-RPG-ish since you could also develop your hero with basic stats, but the heard of the game was a turn-based game; each piece had a limited number of moves or attacks it could make each turn. However, besides the standard turn-based mode, it also had a hybrid mode where each player would make their moves simulataneously for that turn; if you and your opponent both had forces a space outside of a city, you'd have to react quickly to get your force inside the city before he did. You'd still have only an allocated number of moves for each piece in that turn, of course. The game also featured a built-in email version of itself to allow it to be played with others in less-than-real time.
It didn't do so hot, but I have heard rumors of a AoW2 to be put out, so maybe it did sell a good number of copies. But it certainly wasn't a shelf-clearer like DII.
If it's dropped now, and then we wait until copy protection is ubiquitious and present a stronger case, sure we'll have a better chance of winning.
However if we wait till then, copy protection controls WILL be ubiquitious. The US SC will state that the studios and hardware producers will need to remove or alter their hardware and software to allow fair use. How fast do you think RIAA, MPAA, and the others will move on this? They'll pull the Microsoft arguement then; the cost and time to 'fix' the problem will be huge, just like IE was so embedded in Windows that it couldn't be removed without great cost (a fallacy, I know, but...). Certainly people will have the option after such a decision to buy new equipment, but most people will not want to change, and some might even be 'brainwashed' by RIAA/MPAA and think that copy protection is the only way to fairly pay the artists.
In other words, if we wait for the next better case, it will be practically impossible to go back to how it is now without SDMI.
The DeCSS case is a very strong case, maybe not as strong for trying to remove provisions in the DMCA, but is very strong in terms of free speech in regard to linking, etc. However, it needs more lawyer-speak power, and I'm wondering if Lessig and other law professors that have stood out for 2600 and DeCSS aren't trying to figure out how to get onto this case.
Many of the older browsers (at least one version below what is considered current with IE and Netscape) have a bunch of bugs in standard HTML rendering that were not fixed before the current version was put into play. The two biggest examples were IE 3 and NS pre4.5 - both which had terrible support for CSS 1 to the point of breaking pages with perfectly correct CSS. Because of this, good webmasters that wanted as close to 100% cross-browser readability would be required to not use certain features that should be available to them in order to let people read pages.
Since IE3 is still default for Win95 installs (yes, it's not sold, but many people have kept with this version regardless of the latest MS upgrades), it's hard to convince end users to upgrade past this key version.
Now, I do agree that before they go all draconian and declare that everyone must upgrade or die, the WSP should have evaluated the state of compatiable browsers on all platforms, including the various UNIXs, as as others have said, NS hasn't been upgraded and cured of poor HTML interpretation for those platforms. Sure, they're a minority, but that's still significant. Instead of telling consumers to upgrade, they should be asking Netscape at least, and possibly MS, to make their browsers fully compliant. Maybe go the route of Sun and Java -- if the browsers don't pass their compliancy test, they then cannot call themselves HTML-x compliant.
In an attempt to keep in step with their American counterparts, the Russia Space Agency is now going to attempt to land Mir on Eros. "If American snotty-heads can put dinky satelite on asteroid, we can certainlik put Mir on it too!" head officals were reported to say.
All this means is that Napster is still dead, as the appeals court agreed with the bulk of the circuit court ideas, but that the injunction was too overbroad. Within a few weeks, the circuit court will have their new injunction, and at that time, free-Napster will be shutdown.
I have a feeling that the brief issues given already are trying to limit the Napster case to strictly Napster, and not trying to extend the result to an overencompassing decision for the Internet, because there's more issues at stake than just what Napster offers. By stating that the circuit court's decision is overbroad, this is a strong sign that the appealate court is avoiding a massive investigation of the copyright system and digital mediums.
The article and implications do not say that you won't be able to purchase these games. But, it will force stores that carry these games to make sure that only adults or supervisied children can browse and purchase M titles. If the implication that you couldn't even purchase these games was in there, then tons of established free speech issues are in play, and last I check, the porn industry is still thriving.
However, I do think that limiting advertizing is questionable. I think that the industry needs to work with game magazines and the gov't to set self-regulating standards for print and internet ads that, while advertizing an M-rated game, don't cross a PG line, when these ads are in 'family' settings. For example, printing Q3A will full-gore on screenshots, or showing the heroine in the skimpy bathsuit is questionable. Of course, I could demand that they don't publish beer ads in sports magazines, since I'm sure kids read those too...
Free speech will win out in the end, and fortunately the game industry has the porn industry which has fought with congress alot on these established fronts to make their point.
1) When companies merge or buy out services, it generally results that after sufficient time for the merger to settle down that the ratio of support staff/funding to customers is less than what it was of either company to start with. It seems a lot of these service companies believe that they can scale their support staff on the order of O(log N), as opposed to O(N). Recently, Ameritech/SBC got slammed for doing this after SBC bought them out; they cut support staff and now the companied company is getting an earful from irate utilities commissions in the midwest for bad service.
2) Mergering of services nearly almost always adjust to the lowest common demonator, based on the extent of the service. I know of small dialup ISP which offered a true 24/7 connection (that is, you can be dialed-up online at all times, save for necessary redials, and they wouldn't blink), and when bought out, this service option suddenly disappeared, forcing users to moderate their connect time to free the modem pool for others. One of the things I'm watching for is the vast differences in what you can do on the upstream end of your DSL line that exist between the providers - some allow nearly everything you can do and don't care if you saturate your upstream line, some say you can't even read certain sites on the net, much less use ip masq or services. When the DSL providers start to merge, it'll be interesting to see how they handle this service merging.
3) As a whole, Americans have grown adjusted to the fact that you can't get good service anymore; on the viscious circle, companies realize they don't need to worry about good service, and cut back, giving their customers even worse service. This is not just in the ISP/telecom industry, but all over the place. Gas stations allow you minimal if any interaction with the store clerk to avoid that hassle, supermarkets have options to bypass the cashier with self-scanning items, and the introduction of the ATM has made the teller person nearly obsolete -- nearly all of these innovations came about because those stores and businesses undercut their service staff, creating inefficient and poor service; the automated versions were created to aliviate that problem, but as more people opt for these automated services over the real person, the service personnel become deadweight, and service is cut back more...
I don't think there's really any way to get out of this trap of poor service leading to expect poor service, either.
I suspect that you have about one more year in which new film releases (or remakes like this) will be available in both VHS and DVD formats; after that point, it will be DVD only for a good majority (75%-90%) of the movies; the only studios that will continue to support VHS will be places like Disney that cater movies to kids. You'll probably be able to still get rental VHS movies, and you'll be able to special order movies on VHS, but after a year, VHS shelves are going to begin to be discontinued.
This is a strong case, as well as many others of recent, that put faults at the Zero-Tolerence against (something) implemented at many schools. Some others that I've read about was the 6-yr old boy, when hearing the school bus pull up, ran naked to the front window from the bath (where his mom was trying to keep him as he was sick), and because a few girls on the bus saw it, he was punished for sexual harassment; a young teenager suspended for having a Tweety 6" long keychain, in voilation of the school's ban on any weapons including chains that could be used to choken ppl; and several cases where prescription drugs were taken away from students when they needed them (some requiring medical attention afterwards) as the school has a zero-drug policy.
Zero-tolerence does not work -- there is no ground for common sense and specifics of the case, and in some cases, enforcement can vary depending on whom is doing the enforcement -- what's to stop a teacher saying that a flip-comb couldn't be used as a weapon? In addition, zero-tolerence does not allot for those brain-fart mistakes that result from the hecetic morning (a good example, thankfully not z-tolerence enforced, is that I need to wear safety shoes in my workplace, I did happen to forget these one day, and wore tennis shoes - forturnately, nothing bad came of it, as I stayed out of the hazardous areas).
I think with this, and with failures of the 3-strikes law for convinctions in CA (with the example of a guy getting significant number of years for stealing some candy on his 3rd conviction), is going to push away zero-tolerence policies, and go back to at least some sensable way to determine guilt before placing judgement. It can punish those that has no intent to commit a crime, and cost millions in lawsuits as seen here. If the school did have in place the informent program but took steps to make sure that students weren't tossing around random blame nor to fully investigate the effects, then none of the lawsuits would have happened, and the student that was blamed would have not had been expelled in the first place.
Even without V/IP, long distance has become less and less of a profitable industry with the introduction of celphones. Before various legislations (in the states), there were only 3 or 4 major LD providers; now, not only can your local phone company offer the LD service, but so can a large handful of small regional players in addition to the 3/4 giants. The market is sufficiently saturated that competition in LD rates has brought the profit margin down for most of these companies...
Which is why all of the big players have alterative service businesses which do make them the money: AT&T for example has it's cable (and cable ISP) services. If and when LD becomes a ubiquitious charge comparable to a standard local phone call (whether due to V/IP or not), these companies will not die out thanks to their other holdings. As things move more digital with all phones using V/IP (once we get IP6), these companies will become a virtual IP, mainly helping to maintain and navigator your phone device to the internet backbone; they'll make their money from the fact that you do need to 'connect' your phone to the internet somehow which is where they will continue to make their service dollars. Of course, those with dedicated connections that they already pay for, like DSL, won't need to repay to use V/IP.
Those that lost verizonsucks and guinesssucks should be furious at the inconsistancy of WIPO and trademark law for domain names that are obviously (to us) not trying to impede a commercial domain, and they they should be looking for lawyers to help proceed with a lawsuit against WIPO. I bet they can get the help of the ACLU, since free speech has also entered this (eg, the allowing of Xsucks for critique of X without going to the point of slander or libel). If a new company is going to be worried about critism, then they better be ready to grab those Xsucks sites as well; if they forget this step, that's too bad for them.
If anything, we need a way to challenge WIPO rulings; as such, they are considered final and thus one cannot appeal them. Or even better, reinstate the initial policy: first come, first served, whiners can show their own way to the door.
There is a defense, at least against the small-time script kiddie: you educate the public at large how to check for viruses, compramised computers, and get OS features up to speed as that untrusted code cannot be run without user intervention.
The DDoS attacks last year relied on the ability for Mafiaboy to install programs that would help propigate the DDoS across a large number of unintental volunteers' computers, such that all he had to do was wake them up at a given time with a given target, and that's all he needed. He was able to get such programs installed thanks to the help of email viruses, web page javascripting, and activeX. IIRC, many of the computers that were found to be part of the attack were computer clusters at universities, implying how easy it was to get this propigated.
If we had OSes and browsers that would not run untrusted code unless the user said yes, the DDOS would not have had been as effective. Even if that option's there, the important of what untrusted code is is not well implied. MS's 'error' message if you use prompting for ActiveX controls and scripting is "Scripts and ActiveX controls are usually safe..."; this is NOT true. Sandbox the browser, do not let it access any system files (as there's need for it to!). And make sure that computer users KNOW this and the effects that running such programs can have, don't take a passive view of "oh, a new bug fix is out, you ought to install it when you get a chance...".
I've done the peer-review publishing thing. With most non-computer journals, they ask for your document in Microsoft Word format, with figures as full paper items that would be photo-reduced for the print version. While the article submitters have to take some time to make sure that the article layout is formated and understandable, the bulf of the preprinting formatting is done by the typesets for the specific journals; after this is done, the submitter gets a proof back to make sure everything's lined up as is.
And there is a LOT of supply for most of these journals, particularly ones that have been around for a while. Tet letters is one of the most respected journals generally because of high quality and good editorialship. Because it's also meant for so-called rapid communications, which means less than a 2 month turnaround time from submission to publication, a lot of people submit stuff as to try to be the first innovator in the field of study and get significant credit down the road. So there is rarely an end to the supply side of material for these journals.
And as long as the college has a semi-decent staff of chemists, in this case, they are going to *demand* that the college library carry this journal, because it is the top of the line journal for chemists. And nearly every library that I know about does carry this one. But remember, for much of the money that professors and researches take in from grants and funding a large chunk, anywhere between 20 and 50%, goes right back into the school for things like utilities, lab space, janitorial, and yes, library services. So it's not like that journal subscription is already subsidized by research grants. But the problem then becomes that there's still limited dollars for purchasing subscriptions , and after you purchase the 'must haves' such as Tet Letters, you don't have the money left over for smaller, less-costly but still knowledgable, journals.
And what's even worse is that most editors, authors, and whatnot associated with some of these journals are *already* employeed as professors or scientists or doctors, and are already getting a sufficiently respectible salary. Sure, particularly for a journal like Tetrahedron Letters which is published on a weekly basis, you do need to pay the typesetters and publishers, but when you consider than any respectible college is going to carry a subscription to this journal because of it's importance, there's still the question of where the extra money goes to.
This reminds me of a good commentary that was on NPR yesterday: at a recent conference of dot.coms, they were trying to figure out where to point the finger of blame for all the failures. To the execs, it came down to "pizza kids" as the commentator put it, but basically the true hackers and developers of most free software. The execs felt that these pizza kids decieved them into investing heavily into such value-added software, expecting big returns, and then were laughed at by these pizza kids when it all backfired. But the guy understood the premise of free software: he states that the pizza kids were never in it for the money, but writing the software for the fun and enjoyment of it, and went on to point out that most of today's software like email and web browsing was build on this so-called "R&D department of the internet". He did go on to say that there are some of these pizza kids that did try to do the reverse; develop software and try to get investors into it, but this wasn't a majority of them.
The skill needed to do the scripted and some ad hoc stunts in WWF as to avoid injury to yourself and your opponents while still trying to make it look real is not the same skill set as needed to be able to wrestle in an official event (such as the Olympics), where you need to overpower and outwit your opponent whom will use unpredictable moves on you in order to succeed. Both skill sets are valued by someone, but IMO, the latter skill is one that I'd have a bit more appriciation for when done well. So it's not that the WWF Wrestlers aren't skilled, just that they aren't skilled in the art of professional wrestling.
I didn't mean to imply that the outcome of the games was scripted. I do believe that 90% of the XFL players out there are trying to play football as if they were in the NFL or whatever. But, for the few people that I felt they chose as "stars"
(such as the "he hate me" person), they still played the game professionally while the game clock was ticking, but outside of that, some of their actions *felt* scripted. There were a lot more altercations after plays were completed in the early part of the game than I would expect from an equivalent NFL game.
So I agree that the games are not fixed, but some actions unrelated to the outcome of the game appear to be, as to increase the 'plot' of the overall season.
With this last SuperBowl, there weren't enough plays where the matrix shots were useful; there was the one runback where the player was running on the opposite side of the field from where the camera was, and was hard to tell how narrow a corridor he had to run -- the opposite angle showed it quite well.
Sure, it was grainy, but that was to be expected; you had 27 live video feeds over a course of a play at 24fps for anywhere between 5 and 30 secs; at a modest 320x240 at 32bbp, that's nearly 6 gigs of data to process within minutes (since that was also used for any coaches challenge). If you reduce the resolution by half both ways, you cut that number by 4, and 1.5 gigs is a bit more reasonable to process.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the media outlet is not owned by any subsidary or company of RIAA or MPAA, they are going to be biased because they have a strong urge to make sure copyright controls stay as 'strong' as they are. If, say, the Napster or DeCSS case overthrew strong copyright protections, then a site like NYTimes could easily watch as a free outlet scoops up all the articles for the day and posts them themselves; the work done by NYTimes writers, but benefits reaped in by another. Of course, I do believe that a significant fraction of media outlets do respect fair use issues, which is why DeCSS in general gets a more favorable light by some of these compared to Napster, since the media themselves rely heavily on fair use for publishing.
But again, this all boils down to statistics and how well you can spin them. I agree with others that there is no control case here: you need to compare the change of sales in a situation with and without Napster with all other conditions being the same, which is practically impossible. So we can spin them to say they're invalid, or RIAA can spin them to say they lost 1/3rd of their profits. The only somewhat justifiable comparison is to show the change in sales over the last twenty years on a year by year basis, incorporating the number of potental buyers (weighted age-group averages) and number of CDs available (again, weighted interest averages). I would suspect that the trend is higher, and if not only that, mimics the general trend in the GNP or other consumer price levels, such that you'd see the dip from Reagen-omics and the increase from the latest improved economy.
Which all means that CD sales haven't been affected at all by Napster, much less any other factor more-so than the economic levels.
It didn't do so hot, but I have heard rumors of a AoW2 to be put out, so maybe it did sell a good number of copies. But it certainly wasn't a shelf-clearer like DII.
However if we wait till then, copy protection controls WILL be ubiquitious. The US SC will state that the studios and hardware producers will need to remove or alter their hardware and software to allow fair use. How fast do you think RIAA, MPAA, and the others will move on this? They'll pull the Microsoft arguement then; the cost and time to 'fix' the problem will be huge, just like IE was so embedded in Windows that it couldn't be removed without great cost (a fallacy, I know, but...). Certainly people will have the option after such a decision to buy new equipment, but most people will not want to change, and some might even be 'brainwashed' by RIAA/MPAA and think that copy protection is the only way to fairly pay the artists.
In other words, if we wait for the next better case, it will be practically impossible to go back to how it is now without SDMI.
The DeCSS case is a very strong case, maybe not as strong for trying to remove provisions in the DMCA, but is very strong in terms of free speech in regard to linking, etc. However, it needs more lawyer-speak power, and I'm wondering if Lessig and other law professors that have stood out for 2600 and DeCSS aren't trying to figure out how to get onto this case.
Marrissa Amber Flores Picard
(Google is your friend).
Since IE3 is still default for Win95 installs (yes, it's not sold, but many people have kept with this version regardless of the latest MS upgrades), it's hard to convince end users to upgrade past this key version.
Now, I do agree that before they go all draconian and declare that everyone must upgrade or die, the WSP should have evaluated the state of compatiable browsers on all platforms, including the various UNIXs, as as others have said, NS hasn't been upgraded and cured of poor HTML interpretation for those platforms. Sure, they're a minority, but that's still significant. Instead of telling consumers to upgrade, they should be asking Netscape at least, and possibly MS, to make their browsers fully compliant. Maybe go the route of Sun and Java -- if the browsers don't pass their compliancy test, they then cannot call themselves HTML-x compliant.
(With apologies to GNU :)
No, they're going to DISNEY LAND!
I have a feeling that the brief issues given already are trying to limit the Napster case to strictly Napster, and not trying to extend the result to an overencompassing decision for the Internet, because there's more issues at stake than just what Napster offers. By stating that the circuit court's decision is overbroad, this is a strong sign that the appealate court is avoiding a massive investigation of the copyright system and digital mediums.
(</humor>)
However, I do think that limiting advertizing is questionable. I think that the industry needs to work with game magazines and the gov't to set self-regulating standards for print and internet ads that, while advertizing an M-rated game, don't cross a PG line, when these ads are in 'family' settings. For example, printing Q3A will full-gore on screenshots, or showing the heroine in the skimpy bathsuit is questionable. Of course, I could demand that they don't publish beer ads in sports magazines, since I'm sure kids read those too...
Free speech will win out in the end, and fortunately the game industry has the porn industry which has fought with congress alot on these established fronts to make their point.
That's good!
The fru-ogert is also cursed...
That's Bad.
Oooohhh....
1) When companies merge or buy out services, it generally results that after sufficient time for the merger to settle down that the ratio of support staff/funding to customers is less than what it was of either company to start with. It seems a lot of these service companies believe that they can scale their support staff on the order of O(log N), as opposed to O(N). Recently, Ameritech/SBC got slammed for doing this after SBC bought them out; they cut support staff and now the companied company is getting an earful from irate utilities commissions in the midwest for bad service.
2) Mergering of services nearly almost always adjust to the lowest common demonator, based on the extent of the service. I know of small dialup ISP which offered a true 24/7 connection (that is, you can be dialed-up online at all times, save for necessary redials, and they wouldn't blink), and when bought out, this service option suddenly disappeared, forcing users to moderate their connect time to free the modem pool for others. One of the things I'm watching for is the vast differences in what you can do on the upstream end of your DSL line that exist between the providers - some allow nearly everything you can do and don't care if you saturate your upstream line, some say you can't even read certain sites on the net, much less use ip masq or services. When the DSL providers start to merge, it'll be interesting to see how they handle this service merging.
3) As a whole, Americans have grown adjusted to the fact that you can't get good service anymore; on the viscious circle, companies realize they don't need to worry about good service, and cut back, giving their customers even worse service. This is not just in the ISP/telecom industry, but all over the place. Gas stations allow you minimal if any interaction with the store clerk to avoid that hassle, supermarkets have options to bypass the cashier with self-scanning items, and the introduction of the ATM has made the teller person nearly obsolete -- nearly all of these innovations came about because those stores and businesses undercut their service staff, creating inefficient and poor service; the automated versions were created to aliviate that problem, but as more people opt for these automated services over the real person, the service personnel become deadweight, and service is cut back more...
I don't think there's really any way to get out of this trap of poor service leading to expect poor service, either.
good, it's an even number, therefore it won't suck :D
Zero-tolerence does not work -- there is no ground for common sense and specifics of the case, and in some cases, enforcement can vary depending on whom is doing the enforcement -- what's to stop a teacher saying that a flip-comb couldn't be used as a weapon? In addition, zero-tolerence does not allot for those brain-fart mistakes that result from the hecetic morning (a good example, thankfully not z-tolerence enforced, is that I need to wear safety shoes in my workplace, I did happen to forget these one day, and wore tennis shoes - forturnately, nothing bad came of it, as I stayed out of the hazardous areas).
I think with this, and with failures of the 3-strikes law for convinctions in CA (with the example of a guy getting significant number of years for stealing some candy on his 3rd conviction), is going to push away zero-tolerence policies, and go back to at least some sensable way to determine guilt before placing judgement. It can punish those that has no intent to commit a crime, and cost millions in lawsuits as seen here. If the school did have in place the informent program but took steps to make sure that students weren't tossing around random blame nor to fully investigate the effects, then none of the lawsuits would have happened, and the student that was blamed would have not had been expelled in the first place.
Which is why all of the big players have alterative service businesses which do make them the money: AT&T for example has it's cable (and cable ISP) services. If and when LD becomes a ubiquitious charge comparable to a standard local phone call (whether due to V/IP or not), these companies will not die out thanks to their other holdings. As things move more digital with all phones using V/IP (once we get IP6), these companies will become a virtual IP, mainly helping to maintain and navigator your phone device to the internet backbone; they'll make their money from the fact that you do need to 'connect' your phone to the internet somehow which is where they will continue to make their service dollars. Of course, those with dedicated connections that they already pay for, like DSL, won't need to repay to use V/IP.
If anything, we need a way to challenge WIPO rulings; as such, they are considered final and thus one cannot appeal them. Or even better, reinstate the initial policy: first come, first served, whiners can show their own way to the door.
The DDoS attacks last year relied on the ability for Mafiaboy to install programs that would help propigate the DDoS across a large number of unintental volunteers' computers, such that all he had to do was wake them up at a given time with a given target, and that's all he needed. He was able to get such programs installed thanks to the help of email viruses, web page javascripting, and activeX. IIRC, many of the computers that were found to be part of the attack were computer clusters at universities, implying how easy it was to get this propigated.
If we had OSes and browsers that would not run untrusted code unless the user said yes, the DDOS would not have had been as effective. Even if that option's there, the important of what untrusted code is is not well implied. MS's 'error' message if you use prompting for ActiveX controls and scripting is "Scripts and ActiveX controls are usually safe..."; this is NOT true. Sandbox the browser, do not let it access any system files (as there's need for it to!). And make sure that computer users KNOW this and the effects that running such programs can have, don't take a passive view of "oh, a new bug fix is out, you ought to install it when you get a chance...".
And there is a LOT of supply for most of these journals, particularly ones that have been around for a while. Tet letters is one of the most respected journals generally because of high quality and good editorialship. Because it's also meant for so-called rapid communications, which means less than a 2 month turnaround time from submission to publication, a lot of people submit stuff as to try to be the first innovator in the field of study and get significant credit down the road. So there is rarely an end to the supply side of material for these journals.
And as long as the college has a semi-decent staff of chemists, in this case, they are going to *demand* that the college library carry this journal, because it is the top of the line journal for chemists. And nearly every library that I know about does carry this one. But remember, for much of the money that professors and researches take in from grants and funding a large chunk, anywhere between 20 and 50%, goes right back into the school for things like utilities, lab space, janitorial, and yes, library services. So it's not like that journal subscription is already subsidized by research grants. But the problem then becomes that there's still limited dollars for purchasing subscriptions , and after you purchase the 'must haves' such as Tet Letters, you don't have the money left over for smaller, less-costly but still knowledgable, journals.
This reminds me of a good commentary that was on NPR yesterday: at a recent conference of dot.coms, they were trying to figure out where to point the finger of blame for all the failures. To the execs, it came down to "pizza kids" as the commentator put it, but basically the true hackers and developers of most free software. The execs felt that these pizza kids decieved them into investing heavily into such value-added software, expecting big returns, and then were laughed at by these pizza kids when it all backfired. But the guy understood the premise of free software: he states that the pizza kids were never in it for the money, but writing the software for the fun and enjoyment of it, and went on to point out that most of today's software like email and web browsing was build on this so-called "R&D department of the internet". He did go on to say that there are some of these pizza kids that did try to do the reverse; develop software and try to get investors into it, but this wasn't a majority of them.
The skill needed to do the scripted and some ad hoc stunts in WWF as to avoid injury to yourself and your opponents while still trying to make it look real is not the same skill set as needed to be able to wrestle in an official event (such as the Olympics), where you need to overpower and outwit your opponent whom will use unpredictable moves on you in order to succeed. Both skill sets are valued by someone, but IMO, the latter skill is one that I'd have a bit more appriciation for when done well. So it's not that the WWF Wrestlers aren't skilled, just that they aren't skilled in the art of professional wrestling.
So I agree that the games are not fixed, but some actions unrelated to the outcome of the game appear to be, as to increase the 'plot' of the overall season.
Sure, it was grainy, but that was to be expected; you had 27 live video feeds over a course of a play at 24fps for anywhere between 5 and 30 secs; at a modest 320x240 at 32bbp, that's nearly 6 gigs of data to process within minutes (since that was also used for any coaches challenge). If you reduce the resolution by half both ways, you cut that number by 4, and 1.5 gigs is a bit more reasonable to process.