Oh come on, Virtualization isn't that hard. It's not like he's trying to build a huge virtualized computational cluster or something. Install RHEL 5 with the Zen kernel extensions. You can use the GUI to do most of the rest. Get a nice workstation with a couple of dual core CPUs, 4 gigs or so of RAM and a couple of 500G drives. Build however many VMs as you need (2 to replicate the old system if that's easiest), and snapshot them all regularly. Backup to to the second drive. If you really wanna be paranoid, backup to an external drive and keep it in a fireproof safe. Whole rest of the building could burn down and with a new workstation you could have the computer system back up and running inside 4 hours. With a not terribly expensive 2 x dual core system he's could totally flub the VM resources and not even notice compare to what they had before. Domain zero could use half the resources on the computer and the VMs would still seem down right snappy.
It did for a while, but then came clustering and people realized that 20 $1000 Intel servers could handle more load than 1 $30000 Sparc Server, and when 1 of the 20 inevitably breaks you can just pull it out and repair or replace it with out affecting overall cluster performance much at all. Plus you could replace the cluster servers over time and scale to even more power without having to buy another $30000 single Sun server in 3 years. There's still market for the single large powerful server machine, but the number of customers that require them is much smaller. Not everything can be done on clusters, but it turns out that a lot of things can. I used to work for SGI, and this was our big problem. Sure, you could sell a National Lab, a university, or a huge oil company the occasional 10 or 20 or even 100 million dollar system, but the margins are in the 20 or 30 or 100 thousand dollar systems, and most people with kind of budget would rather buy a cluster. The really big systems are expensive as hell to integrate and often get sold to discount customers (gov't and academia).
It's got all of that too (technically I think "sh" is an alias to "bash", but that's pretty common in all the modern PC Unixes these days) . It's also pre-installed with Perl and Python, all the standard shells (bash is the default though), and essentially any tool that you would expect a "workstation" install of any modern Linux or BSD to have (Yes, gcc too, if you install the free Dev kit).
I think it might be more honest (and fair) to say that all the "Unixy" features of OSX can be configured via text files. Some of the stuff Apple designed from the ground up might be unable to be text configured (although it all maybe, I'm not sure), but all the underlying Unix parts of the OS, and any Unix daemons or services that Apple installs or you install later can be. Almost all of the things you list are things Apple added to the "Unix base" of the OS. I could sit down right now and write a "Time Machine" clone for Linux that used a proprietary database back-end for configuration info and could only be configured via the GUI (it'd be kinda silly to do of course, but I theoretically could). That wouldn't make my version of Linux "not Unix like" it would make it a "Unix like system, that has GUI configurable backup software."
Nice to see I'm not the only one. I learned to read the.cf file before there were.mc files and now I find them much easier to read. Not that either of them is exactly user friendly.
I dunno. I was just saying that Apple isn't the only remaining "Commercial Unix" vendor, even if Sun goes away. The pool is definitely getting small though. IBM seems to be pretty FOSS friendly, so they may open more of Sun's tech, but Sun itself was reasonable about keep their tech "Open" too, so there may be some other concerns that prevented some of those technologies from being opened up.
IBM still sells AIX, and I would guess they plan to continue selling Solaris after purchasing Sun. HP still sells HPUX, but I think that they're trying not to. I get the impression that they'd rather use something off the shelf like Linux, but can't quite get all of their customers on board.
Outside of validating my theory that the British conquered the world in the 18th and 19th centuries purely in a quest to find decent food, your post ignores Louisiana. In Louisiana (at least the southern parts) we will happily set your mouth on fire just to watch it burn.
You would be the Paparazzi. Haven't noticed to many of them with huge criminal records. There are some of course, but those are the ones that make the foolish mistake of trespassing or otherwise breaking the law to get their shots.
Yes, but the GGP post that was being replied to was (based on contextual evidence) being made from the US, and complaining about his house not being removed from Street View. Now the fact that GGP was in turn replying to a post saying that Google removes photos on request with evidence to the contrary and GP post seemed to completely miss that might be a legitimate complaint, however your point is completely immaterial.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
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Linux Needs Critics
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But do they want widespread adoption? That's the essential question. Lot's of people inside the Linux Community seem to want everyone to use Linux. A noble goal. You're right that FOSS people (excepting companies like RH or Canonical) aren't trying to sell a product, but many if not most of them are trying to sell an idea. The idea that their software, and in some cases even their whole mindset, is superior to closed alternatives. If they want to sell their ideas, or even their ideals to the rest of the world (as many of them seem to want to), then these hardware issues are their problem. Because Mr. Joe Average isn't going to go out and buy a new computer, a new printer, or a new wireless card purely for the privileged of FOSS using software. It's all well and good to complain about a person who already uses Linux, or is specifically buying a computer FOR Linux not having done their research, but in actual fact I'd venture that most new user Linux installs are going to be on whatever hardware the user already has.
Do NOT hand cyber-security over to the military. Gods, I've never work with people so capable of coming with pointless security regulations, excess paperwork, and generally over the top requirements while still not managing to really secure anything. It's amazing.
You... didn't... realize... Gods I hope you're joking. Please? A 200 year old newspaper announces that it is not only switching to a pure "Twitter" format, but rewriting its entire (200 year old) archive into the same format (On April 1st), and you thought there was the slightest chance it could be serious? I see.
So I have this bridge in Arizona. It's a really hot buy, but the last customer fell through. Would you be interested? I really need to unload this thing, so I'll be quite generous with the terms.
There hasn't been a serious story on/. yet today. I always hope nothing important actually happens on April 1st, for fear it'll be ignored and get filed as "yet another gag"
Does that seems a touch hypocritical to you? "No! you can't look at my headlines to line your evil corporate pockets using news aggregation! but.. you know.. if anybody is searching for me, uh, point them my way, K?"
If you don't want Google to profit off of your work, I don't see any reason why you should profit off of theirs.
There's plenty of creativity. The masses just don't want to pay. There's no business model to compensate for that, so the only choice is to go out of business. Unfortunately this will hinder a lot of actually creative people in the process who would, you know, like to continue eating.
This is the next great challenge of our time I think. In a world where every kind of media can be digitized and exist on every computer on earth instantly (or near enough as to make the distinction pointless) have we reached a point in which entertainment can only be an amateur affair? If they can't find a way to either (a) make people want to pay for content that they could get for free if they tried, or (b) make it impossible to get the content for free, we may eventually reach a point at which there is no money to made in any non-live performances.
Some people seem to think that this is a good thing, but honestly I kind of enjoy the occasional TV show or Big Budget Movie. Yeah a lot of what corporate media companies produce is crap, but some of it is pretty good. Anyway a lot of what amateurs produce is crap too, and crap made with no budget tends to be even worse than crap made with a few bucks to spend on special effects. I'm not saying we should all cave to the RIAA/MPAA and give up all our rights, but at the same time I'm not going to thrilled if all the movie and TV production companies go out of business and my entertainment flow is reduced to "Ask a Ninja" streamed 24/7 on you-tube.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is. I just know that two facts are fairly incontrovertible: (1) More and more people are seeing the value of a digital recording (Music, video, code, whatever) as essentially zero because of the ease of copying and transferring those recordings, and (2) those recordings all require substantially more that zero value to produce. Movie and music companies don't help their cases by reaping in HUGE profits whenever they can, thus giving the "information (and the latest blockbuster movies) wants to be free" crowd even more ammunition, this is true. On the other hand even if the "fair value" of a ten song CD is closer to $10 than the $20 it's currently being sold for, no one is going to want to produce it for $0. If some compromise isn't found we will eventually lose the entire concept of "professional" entertainment. For all the problems these industries have, I still think that would be unfortunate.
If the locked down root really bothers you that much do a "sudo su -" and reactivate the account. The same trick works in OSX if anyone has ever wondered. As long as your sudoers file gives your account ALL(ALL) it should work fine.
It's because people used to be willing to spend lots of money on "games that cost a fortune to make but are crap", and the industry doesn't understand why they won't anymore. There are a few reasons for this I think. For one, games have reached a plateau of awesomeness for graphics and sound. It used to be that you could buy the sequel of a game, and even if it was basically the same game, you could count on it looking and sounding way better. It was win-win. You got to essentially play a game you already knew you liked, maybe add a few combo moves and change a few boss fights, and it looked WAY better. How nice. We've reached a point now where games pretty much look and sound as good as they're going to in any abstract way. They may not look "realistic"; but if they are supposed to be cartoony, they look like hand animated cartoons, if they are supposed to be realistic, they look real. Now when you buy that sequel and you get basically the same game with some inconsequential graphics improvements that you hardly even notice you think, "It's the same game! Why did I pay $50 for this! I could see it being a $20 expansion, but they charged me full price for the same damned thing."
For another there's the whole recession thing. People are not as willing to part with money to play the latest "to cool to be real" game, especially when there's games in the bargain bin that are a year old and probably play just as well (See first point above). People are still willing to pay for stuff they really want and really expect to be good (Stuff from Blizzard, Id, Square, etc. Like you said), because they are confident that Diablo III is not going to just be Diablo II with some new shaders, and a much higher polygon count. Blizzard hasn't to this point been one to release crap, and every one expects that to continue.
Finally, and maybe most importantly: given enough time people learn. After the 10th or 12th time you paid $50 or $60 for something you didn't enjoy at all, you start to think maybe you should either stop buying every new game that comes out, or you should at least wait for them to be a bit cheaper than they were at release. Again, the best studios, the ones that rarely if ever disappoint, get something of a pass on this. At this point I'll always give Blizzard money for the next game, unless and until they give me a compelling reason not to. If I was more of a FPS fan, the same would be true of ID. The same is not true of other software houses. I'm going to wait for reviews and maybe for the price drop before I buy those games.
I'm extremely pleased with the 3G on my wife's iPhone (mine's a first gen, so it's a non-compete for that) here in Huntsville, AL. I've heard that the big city's (NYC, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, most of the West Coast, etc) can be badly under provisioned though. The only fairly large city we've visited since she got her phone has been Tampa though, and it was mostly OK there. There were a few times that it was only comparable with the Edge performance of my 1st gen phone, but even then it wasn't awful; just not as good as we were used to.
There's a serious problem here then. TV shows cost money to make. Good ones cost a fairly large amount of money to make. Even crappy reality TV costs a pretty fair amount. In our brave new "content is worth nothing" world, who is going to make content.
See the problem though is that all of those antiquated old media "TV Stations" make all the shows worth watching. Granted they make a lot of crap too, and very occasionally something like "Dr Horrible" comes along outside the structure, but in general the "stations" fund the studios and the studios make the content that is worth watching (along with lots of content that isn't). You-tube has proved that while there are a few creative individuals out there who can make amusing shorts and cute videoettes on little or no budget, you mostly need a lot of money and a big staff to do more. Even in the "amusing shorts and cute videoettes" department You-tube is so full of noise that finding the signal can be a real pain.
Even Dr. Horrible (which I enjoyed, though I didn't think it was quite the level of awesome that the Internet as a whole seemed too) required a few hundred grand in production costs and the free time of some normally very expensive actors, directors, and technicians. Had it not been for the writers strike leaving a bunch of fairly wealthy, fairly talented people with nothing better to do it would never have happened.
If you could convince the studios that a Pay to Play model, where essentially everything is released to DVD (or the Internet equivalent) without airing via advertising support first would be as profitable as the current model they might be willing to play. I just don't see it. The current model for non-cinematic content works like this:
1) AIR the show on the TV! Make A LOT of money on advertising, especially for popular shows.
2) Put the show on the Internet. Stream it with advertising. Make a little money, mostly just enough to cover costs. But it builds and maintains the fan base for (1) above. The people who watch online probably are potential new viewers, or fans that missed an episode for some reason.
3) Put it on iTunes (or similar service). Make very little money, but it's cheap to do, so what the Hell. It's a few bucks and makes some people from the (2) demographic even happier. Probably makes more than it costs, but either way lost in the noise.
4) Sell DVDs of the show. Make pretty decent money, but nothing like (1). Sales are largely to people who are already fans and want to be able to rewatch episodes, or new fans trying to catch up on old seasons. Very rarely does someone go into the "TV shows" section and just buy a season of some random show sight unseen.
So to make things work the way you want you're in a position where you either have to somehow cut out the people that currently make almost everything worth watching, or convincing those same people to abandon their primary revenue stream in favor of currently much smaller secondary and tertiary revenue streams. Hell your most preferred distribution method (3), is probably the one that currently makes the lest money for them.
The problem with that particular bit of the Bible is that it's two fricken completely different stories that both got included. People who actually READ the language of the ORIGINAL agree on this. Plus there's the fact that they are both based on different Mesopotamian creation stories. Translation actually has very little to do with it in the case of the Old Testament. Many, many people still read the original language, it's the religious language of the Jews and a modern variant is the spoken language of Israel. there are some bits where current vs. older meanings of words and similar linguistic developments call into question specific meanings and interruptions occasionally. The most popular I can think of being the passage which says, "thou shalt not suffer a 'witch' to live." There's question about whether the word "witch" means "Practitioner of magic", "Evil practitioner of magic", or simply "Poisoner of wells". That's a specific question about word definition and development of language though, not a "How do we read this text, we're not sure" question.
The New Testament can be a bit more persnickety when it comes to translation. No one currently speaks Aramaic as a primary language, and modern Greek is not all that similar. Since the vast majority of the world's Christians have been working from various translations for centuries, doctrinal questions have been answered (or backed up by) some dicey translations.
IANAL, but my understanding was that even in this country (the US) there is no actual legal requirement to log. You just have to be willing to turn over what logs you have. Since most ISPs do keep logs (for their own purposes) it's pretty hard to argue that they shouldn't have to turn those logs over in the event of a court order (or PATRIOT act order). There is no law saying you have to keep logs, it's just best practices to do so for reasons that usually don't have anything to do with the reasons the FBI might want those logs. You want to know where your users are going so you can make sure that the network is provisioned properly, any traffic shaping you're doing isn't impacting specific users, etc. By not keeping logs you're not (I don't think) breaking any laws, you're just making your life a bit harder in the service of complete user anonymity.
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Oh come on, Virtualization isn't that hard. It's not like he's trying to build a huge virtualized computational cluster or something. Install RHEL 5 with the Zen kernel extensions. You can use the GUI to do most of the rest. Get a nice workstation with a couple of dual core CPUs, 4 gigs or so of RAM and a couple of 500G drives. Build however many VMs as you need (2 to replicate the old system if that's easiest), and snapshot them all regularly. Backup to to the second drive. If you really wanna be paranoid, backup to an external drive and keep it in a fireproof safe. Whole rest of the building could burn down and with a new workstation you could have the computer system back up and running inside 4 hours. With a not terribly expensive 2 x dual core system he's could totally flub the VM resources and not even notice compare to what they had before. Domain zero could use half the resources on the computer and the VMs would still seem down right snappy.
Just comment out all of that pesky code stuff.
It did for a while, but then came clustering and people realized that 20 $1000 Intel servers could handle more load than 1 $30000 Sparc Server, and when 1 of the 20 inevitably breaks you can just pull it out and repair or replace it with out affecting overall cluster performance much at all. Plus you could replace the cluster servers over time and scale to even more power without having to buy another $30000 single Sun server in 3 years. There's still market for the single large powerful server machine, but the number of customers that require them is much smaller. Not everything can be done on clusters, but it turns out that a lot of things can. I used to work for SGI, and this was our big problem. Sure, you could sell a National Lab, a university, or a huge oil company the occasional 10 or 20 or even 100 million dollar system, but the margins are in the 20 or 30 or 100 thousand dollar systems, and most people with kind of budget would rather buy a cluster. The really big systems are expensive as hell to integrate and often get sold to discount customers (gov't and academia).
It's got all of that too (technically I think "sh" is an alias to "bash", but that's pretty common in all the modern PC Unixes these days) . It's also pre-installed with Perl and Python, all the standard shells (bash is the default though), and essentially any tool that you would expect a "workstation" install of any modern Linux or BSD to have (Yes, gcc too, if you install the free Dev kit).
I think it might be more honest (and fair) to say that all the "Unixy" features of OSX can be configured via text files. Some of the stuff Apple designed from the ground up might be unable to be text configured (although it all maybe, I'm not sure), but all the underlying Unix parts of the OS, and any Unix daemons or services that Apple installs or you install later can be. Almost all of the things you list are things Apple added to the "Unix base" of the OS. I could sit down right now and write a "Time Machine" clone for Linux that used a proprietary database back-end for configuration info and could only be configured via the GUI (it'd be kinda silly to do of course, but I theoretically could). That wouldn't make my version of Linux "not Unix like" it would make it a "Unix like system, that has GUI configurable backup software."
Nice to see I'm not the only one. I learned to read the .cf file before there were .mc files and now I find them much easier to read. Not that either of them is exactly user friendly.
I dunno. I was just saying that Apple isn't the only remaining "Commercial Unix" vendor, even if Sun goes away. The pool is definitely getting small though. IBM seems to be pretty FOSS friendly, so they may open more of Sun's tech, but Sun itself was reasonable about keep their tech "Open" too, so there may be some other concerns that prevented some of those technologies from being opened up.
IBM still sells AIX, and I would guess they plan to continue selling Solaris after purchasing Sun. HP still sells HPUX, but I think that they're trying not to. I get the impression that they'd rather use something off the shelf like Linux, but can't quite get all of their customers on board.
Outside of validating my theory that the British conquered the world in the 18th and 19th centuries purely in a quest to find decent food, your post ignores Louisiana. In Louisiana (at least the southern parts) we will happily set your mouth on fire just to watch it burn.
You would be the Paparazzi. Haven't noticed to many of them with huge criminal records. There are some of course, but those are the ones that make the foolish mistake of trespassing or otherwise breaking the law to get their shots.
Yes, but the GGP post that was being replied to was (based on contextual evidence) being made from the US, and complaining about his house not being removed from Street View. Now the fact that GGP was in turn replying to a post saying that Google removes photos on request with evidence to the contrary and GP post seemed to completely miss that might be a legitimate complaint, however your point is completely immaterial.
But do they want widespread adoption? That's the essential question. Lot's of people inside the Linux Community seem to want everyone to use Linux. A noble goal. You're right that FOSS people (excepting companies like RH or Canonical) aren't trying to sell a product, but many if not most of them are trying to sell an idea. The idea that their software, and in some cases even their whole mindset, is superior to closed alternatives. If they want to sell their ideas, or even their ideals to the rest of the world (as many of them seem to want to), then these hardware issues are their problem. Because Mr. Joe Average isn't going to go out and buy a new computer, a new printer, or a new wireless card purely for the privileged of FOSS using software. It's all well and good to complain about a person who already uses Linux, or is specifically buying a computer FOR Linux not having done their research, but in actual fact I'd venture that most new user Linux installs are going to be on whatever hardware the user already has.
Do NOT hand cyber-security over to the military. Gods, I've never work with people so capable of coming with pointless security regulations, excess paperwork, and generally over the top requirements while still not managing to really secure anything. It's amazing.
You... didn't... realize... Gods I hope you're joking. Please? A 200 year old newspaper announces that it is not only switching to a pure "Twitter" format, but rewriting its entire (200 year old) archive into the same format (On April 1st), and you thought there was the slightest chance it could be serious? I see.
So I have this bridge in Arizona. It's a really hot buy, but the last customer fell through. Would you be interested? I really need to unload this thing, so I'll be quite generous with the terms.
There hasn't been a serious story on /. yet today. I always hope nothing important actually happens on April 1st, for fear it'll be ignored and get filed as "yet another gag"
Does that seems a touch hypocritical to you? "No! you can't look at my headlines to line your evil corporate pockets using news aggregation! but.. you know.. if anybody is searching for me, uh, point them my way, K?"
If you don't want Google to profit off of your work, I don't see any reason why you should profit off of theirs.
There's plenty of creativity. The masses just don't want to pay. There's no business model to compensate for that, so the only choice is to go out of business. Unfortunately this will hinder a lot of actually creative people in the process who would, you know, like to continue eating.
This is the next great challenge of our time I think. In a world where every kind of media can be digitized and exist on every computer on earth instantly (or near enough as to make the distinction pointless) have we reached a point in which entertainment can only be an amateur affair? If they can't find a way to either (a) make people want to pay for content that they could get for free if they tried, or (b) make it impossible to get the content for free, we may eventually reach a point at which there is no money to made in any non-live performances.
Some people seem to think that this is a good thing, but honestly I kind of enjoy the occasional TV show or Big Budget Movie. Yeah a lot of what corporate media companies produce is crap, but some of it is pretty good. Anyway a lot of what amateurs produce is crap too, and crap made with no budget tends to be even worse than crap made with a few bucks to spend on special effects. I'm not saying we should all cave to the RIAA/MPAA and give up all our rights, but at the same time I'm not going to thrilled if all the movie and TV production companies go out of business and my entertainment flow is reduced to "Ask a Ninja" streamed 24/7 on you-tube.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is. I just know that two facts are fairly incontrovertible: (1) More and more people are seeing the value of a digital recording (Music, video, code, whatever) as essentially zero because of the ease of copying and transferring those recordings, and (2) those recordings all require substantially more that zero value to produce. Movie and music companies don't help their cases by reaping in HUGE profits whenever they can, thus giving the "information (and the latest blockbuster movies) wants to be free" crowd even more ammunition, this is true. On the other hand even if the "fair value" of a ten song CD is closer to $10 than the $20 it's currently being sold for, no one is going to want to produce it for $0. If some compromise isn't found we will eventually lose the entire concept of "professional" entertainment. For all the problems these industries have, I still think that would be unfortunate.
If the locked down root really bothers you that much do a "sudo su -" and reactivate the account. The same trick works in OSX if anyone has ever wondered. As long as your sudoers file gives your account ALL(ALL) it should work fine.
Because you're not wearing the funny buckethat. Get a funny hat and we'll totally believe you. Really.
It's because people used to be willing to spend lots of money on "games that cost a fortune to make but are crap", and the industry doesn't understand why they won't anymore. There are a few reasons for this I think. For one, games have reached a plateau of awesomeness for graphics and sound. It used to be that you could buy the sequel of a game, and even if it was basically the same game, you could count on it looking and sounding way better. It was win-win. You got to essentially play a game you already knew you liked, maybe add a few combo moves and change a few boss fights, and it looked WAY better. How nice. We've reached a point now where games pretty much look and sound as good as they're going to in any abstract way. They may not look "realistic"; but if they are supposed to be cartoony, they look like hand animated cartoons, if they are supposed to be realistic, they look real. Now when you buy that sequel and you get basically the same game with some inconsequential graphics improvements that you hardly even notice you think, "It's the same game! Why did I pay $50 for this! I could see it being a $20 expansion, but they charged me full price for the same damned thing."
For another there's the whole recession thing. People are not as willing to part with money to play the latest "to cool to be real" game, especially when there's games in the bargain bin that are a year old and probably play just as well (See first point above). People are still willing to pay for stuff they really want and really expect to be good (Stuff from Blizzard, Id, Square, etc. Like you said), because they are confident that Diablo III is not going to just be Diablo II with some new shaders, and a much higher polygon count. Blizzard hasn't to this point been one to release crap, and every one expects that to continue.
Finally, and maybe most importantly: given enough time people learn. After the 10th or 12th time you paid $50 or $60 for something you didn't enjoy at all, you start to think maybe you should either stop buying every new game that comes out, or you should at least wait for them to be a bit cheaper than they were at release. Again, the best studios, the ones that rarely if ever disappoint, get something of a pass on this. At this point I'll always give Blizzard money for the next game, unless and until they give me a compelling reason not to. If I was more of a FPS fan, the same would be true of ID. The same is not true of other software houses. I'm going to wait for reviews and maybe for the price drop before I buy those games.
I'm extremely pleased with the 3G on my wife's iPhone (mine's a first gen, so it's a non-compete for that) here in Huntsville, AL. I've heard that the big city's (NYC, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, most of the West Coast, etc) can be badly under provisioned though. The only fairly large city we've visited since she got her phone has been Tampa though, and it was mostly OK there. There were a few times that it was only comparable with the Edge performance of my 1st gen phone, but even then it wasn't awful; just not as good as we were used to.
There's a serious problem here then. TV shows cost money to make. Good ones cost a fairly large amount of money to make. Even crappy reality TV costs a pretty fair amount. In our brave new "content is worth nothing" world, who is going to make content.
See the problem though is that all of those antiquated old media "TV Stations" make all the shows worth watching. Granted they make a lot of crap too, and very occasionally something like "Dr Horrible" comes along outside the structure, but in general the "stations" fund the studios and the studios make the content that is worth watching (along with lots of content that isn't). You-tube has proved that while there are a few creative individuals out there who can make amusing shorts and cute videoettes on little or no budget, you mostly need a lot of money and a big staff to do more. Even in the "amusing shorts and cute videoettes" department You-tube is so full of noise that finding the signal can be a real pain.
Even Dr. Horrible (which I enjoyed, though I didn't think it was quite the level of awesome that the Internet as a whole seemed too) required a few hundred grand in production costs and the free time of some normally very expensive actors, directors, and technicians. Had it not been for the writers strike leaving a bunch of fairly wealthy, fairly talented people with nothing better to do it would never have happened.
If you could convince the studios that a Pay to Play model, where essentially everything is released to DVD (or the Internet equivalent) without airing via advertising support first would be as profitable as the current model they might be willing to play. I just don't see it. The current model for non-cinematic content works like this:
1) AIR the show on the TV! Make A LOT of money on advertising, especially for popular shows.
2) Put the show on the Internet. Stream it with advertising. Make a little money, mostly just enough to cover costs. But it builds and maintains the fan base for (1) above. The people who watch online probably are potential new viewers, or fans that missed an episode for some reason.
3) Put it on iTunes (or similar service). Make very little money, but it's cheap to do, so what the Hell. It's a few bucks and makes some people from the (2) demographic even happier. Probably makes more than it costs, but either way lost in the noise.
4) Sell DVDs of the show. Make pretty decent money, but nothing like (1). Sales are largely to people who are already fans and want to be able to rewatch episodes, or new fans trying to catch up on old seasons. Very rarely does someone go into the "TV shows" section and just buy a season of some random show sight unseen.
So to make things work the way you want you're in a position where you either have to somehow cut out the people that currently make almost everything worth watching, or convincing those same people to abandon their primary revenue stream in favor of currently much smaller secondary and tertiary revenue streams. Hell your most preferred distribution method (3), is probably the one that currently makes the lest money for them.
The problem with that particular bit of the Bible is that it's two fricken completely different stories that both got included. People who actually READ the language of the ORIGINAL agree on this. Plus there's the fact that they are both based on different Mesopotamian creation stories. Translation actually has very little to do with it in the case of the Old Testament. Many, many people still read the original language, it's the religious language of the Jews and a modern variant is the spoken language of Israel. there are some bits where current vs. older meanings of words and similar linguistic developments call into question specific meanings and interruptions occasionally. The most popular I can think of being the passage which says, "thou shalt not suffer a 'witch' to live." There's question about whether the word "witch" means "Practitioner of magic", "Evil practitioner of magic", or simply "Poisoner of wells". That's a specific question about word definition and development of language though, not a "How do we read this text, we're not sure" question.
The New Testament can be a bit more persnickety when it comes to translation. No one currently speaks Aramaic as a primary language, and modern Greek is not all that similar. Since the vast majority of the world's Christians have been working from various translations for centuries, doctrinal questions have been answered (or backed up by) some dicey translations.
IANAL, but my understanding was that even in this country (the US) there is no actual legal requirement to log. You just have to be willing to turn over what logs you have. Since most ISPs do keep logs (for their own purposes) it's pretty hard to argue that they shouldn't have to turn those logs over in the event of a court order (or PATRIOT act order). There is no law saying you have to keep logs, it's just best practices to do so for reasons that usually don't have anything to do with the reasons the FBI might want those logs. You want to know where your users are going so you can make sure that the network is provisioned properly, any traffic shaping you're doing isn't impacting specific users, etc. By not keeping logs you're not (I don't think) breaking any laws, you're just making your life a bit harder in the service of complete user anonymity.
(I could be totally wrong here of course.)