A lot of people are forgetting the fact that a lot of the crap Enterprise has been slammed for by many (including myself, so don't think all my comments in this thread are from someone who thought the show could do no wrong) is GONE. The time travel/Nazi crap/etc. is GONE. I couldn't stand the show for a long time, but now that the stuff that wasn't working out is GONE, the writing has gotten far better, and I've actually been enjoying the episodes that my TiVo has been recording for me. I've heard from others that they, too, feel recent episodes have been far better than the previous season.
There's no real excuse to bash a show that did suck, but now doesn't really suck so much anymore because the creators realized what peoples' reactions were like and did something about it and as a result are getting positive reactions.
Or have you not seen the new stuff, or do you think the present season sucks? I think it's not as good as TNG/DS9, but I think the current season is pretty enjoyable.
It seems you are forgetting that fiction has an important role in society. It looks like you think that anything fictitious is not worth any effort whatsoever.
But in fact, science fiction and other forms of speculation DO have an important role to play. If you watch PBS a lot (as do I) you know that they will frequently run documentaries on subjects such as the Apollo lunar program. While the documentaries will focus on the 'how it was done' aspect and interview scientists and researchers and other individuals who worked on those projects, they will also sometimes mention the inspiration for them. And it's important to pay attention to those things.
Take the case of Jules Verne, for instance. Verne was a prodigious science fiction writer who imagined Project Apollo to an amazing degree of accuracy -- his ship looked roughly like Apollo's command and service modules, was roughly the same size, carried a three-person crew, was named Columbia, and was launched from the coast of Florida. This is almost exactly how the Apollo program operated by the time the first actual manned lunar mission was launched in 1968 (Apollo 8; no landing actually occurred until 1969.)
Now, while it is true that many people did not believe such a thing was possible (Robert Goddard was laughed at for believing that a rocket would function in a vacuum, for instance) and Verne's stories were dismissed as fantasy (nuclear-powered submarines!? Are you crazy!?) they came true, in time.
Going back to Project Apollo, you may or may not remember that the first few crews to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return to make sure that there were no dangerous organisms on them or their clothing or in their spacecraft. The fear of a possible contamination of Earth was raised, in part, by Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, as well as by points raised by the scientific community. As a result, quarantines continued until we had enough experience with returning Apollo crews to believe that they were no longer necessary. (Apollo 12's recovery of Surveyor hardware, and the subsequent discovery of terrestrial bacteria surviving on some of that equipment, proved that organisms could survive for long periods of time in space.)
We have also been influenced by other major works of science fiction (War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, for instance, has long been held as an example of how we might react to the idea of hostile alien life, and ET is an example of how we could react to more friendly aliens.)
For something to happen, it has to be imagined first. Sometimes, that takes the form of science fiction stories. Not worth it? Far from it. We'll be forever stuck in the present and never stop to imagine what might come in the future without the ideas that come from those who dare to say "Hey, what if this was possible?"
Moronic? I don't think it's moronic to decide that you want to help keep something going that you like that some bureaucrat decided wasn't worth their time. I feel it's worthwhile to keep the Hubble Telescope operating, for instance. If I decide to donate money toward that cause, instead of the time I have already spent writing letters to those who claim (according to voting records, they don't) to represent me in Congress, does that make me a moron? No. It merely means I have chosen to support a cause which I feel is worthy of my time. If you choose not to support that cause, does that make you a moron? No. It merely means that you feel that the cause in question is not worth enough to you to make a donation.
In other words, no one is a moron for choosing to donate to a cause. In fact, it shows that they care enough to support things that they, and others, feel are valuable enough. It also shows that they are willing to expend more effort to protect things they care about, since I think the majority of people out there will just roll over and take it when some faceless uninterested accountant (whether it be private party, as in this case, or government, as in the case of the HST) decides that some project which has public support should be killed.
I think it's a thing to applaud, not a thing to sneer at. If only more people would take action in such cases!
It would only be misappropriated funds if the money used for this purpose was raised by telling donators that it would be used for something entirely different.
Yes, people have certainly done this -- the X-Prize, while some of the funds came from major companies, was partly funded by individuals. Yes, some of that was rich people who could donate a lot of money, but that does mean that there are people out there who will fund making it possible for ordinary citizens to visit space.
Furthermore, some of the individual X-Prize teams operated off money gained from ordinary commercial ventures. An example of this is Armadillo Aerospace of Texas, which used funds gained from sale of PC-based games to fund its program. A good portion of the people here probably donated to that effort by purchasing the software built in part by one of the lead techs of AA; millions more members of the general public did the same.
I would guess that a large percentage of those people probably did not know that they were helping to fund a private space program (which has yet to launch anything more than test vehicles, but which hasn't given up yet even though the prize has been won) and much of the cash was earned before the X-Prize became a reality.
But I, personally, can say that I stepped up to the cash register, box in hand, knowing that some minor percentage of the money I paid for what I took home would be used to put ordinary civilians in space.
Pete Seeger wrote the original song "Where Have All The Flowers Gone", inspired by Sholokhov's novel "And Quiet Flows the Don". So yes, the text is correct. Peter, Paul & Mary and the Kingston Trio have both recorded renditions of this piece, and there are probably many more covers of it out there.
Where has all the spyware gone? Long time passing? Where has all the spyware gone? Long time ago Where has all the spyware gone? Gone to spammers, everyone.
When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
(Apologies to Mikhail Sholokhov, Pete Seeger & parent poster)
The theme song didn't bother me. The fact that they doctored the photo of the orbiter Enterprise being rolled out of the Rockwell plant did. (Enterprise NEVER had her name written below her flight deck windows, and the tile pattern on the doctored image is that of one of the later orbiters.) How hard would it have been for them to get a few frames from the ALT test videos, which you can download for free from the Dryden Centre website? They're specifically not copyrighted, if I remember correctly...
And they at least had faith that the ISS would be completed as planned. O'Keefe and his fellow idiot managers sure killed THAT idea.
I caught up on all four eps on my Tivo (missed "33" but it will record that later this week) and I agree, it's great -- but why is it they can't seem to afford a Steadicam mount to do something about the annoying we-filmed-with-a-handheld constantly-moving camera?
However, I was quite amused to notice that one of the ships in the feature film had a space shuttle flight deck in it. Complete with the hexadecimal keypad used to talk to the GPCs.
They have to get a warrant because they want to use this information against you in a court as part of a criminal investigation. These laws are protection against the temptation to abuse these investigative powers to unlawfully imprison people (the protection against loss of life, liberty, or property.)
Private companies can't do the same things that law enforcement is empowered to do, so they aren't restricted in the same way.
But when they get the rights, do they provide subtitles? If they don't, this doesn't help me -- as per my comment earlier in this discussion, I'm hearing-impaired. If I were to watch a series that was distributed this way (I'm not into anime, so I don't) and used the subtitles, then I went out and bought a DVD because the subtitled versions went away -- and the DVD wasn't subtitled -- boy, would I be upset... I'd probably start specifically telling people I know NOT to buy from that studio, ever.
For the hearing-impaired (like me) relatively low-quality captioning (like live-style captioning which is delayed, scrolls by instead of just popping up, etc) is better than NO captioning.
I am not an anime fan but I always approved of what the fansub groups were doing -- if I ever chose to become a fan, the shows were more accessible to me.
I am a 'subtitle snob' not out of choice but out of necessity. I wonder if the studios ever thought of THAT. Providing subtitled versions would literally make their work available to thousands more people (the number of individuals who MUST use captioning or subitles to watch television or movies is not small -- and that's in the US alone.)
Let them check a box on a webform for managing their account that lets them receive mail from foreign domains that spam. Explain what the blocking is about, default it to on, but allow them to remove it if they really want to (e.g. if they call to complain, tell them how to get to the admin page).
I think that could do it... then they can turn the blocks back on if they start getting excessive spam.
A-fucking-men. The original poster is a hypocrite. Stop whining about spam when you're spamming other people trying to get them to basically buy something for you.
I think you mean to say that they should have learned after Challenger...
Re:I'm by far not a pro-web developer...
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 1
It looks like you and I do the same thing to build standard code, but as for your specific question, there's no real automated way that I know of, though it'd be a cool service to automate.
All you can do is validate your code and then load the site in different browsers to see how it looks.
Here's what I do:
I use the validators on the W3C site to determine if my pages are coded correctly, and furthermore I have placed the buttons for checking this directly on the site. This lets visitors check for themselves if they're so inclined, rather than taking my word for it, and it also lets visitors know that such things as standards-validators exist.
This also allows me to dodge complaints that the site doesn't look good in browser (x) -- though I tested it in a variety of them and it looked fine, although I don't guarantee that Navigator 4 will work though not through much trying on my part to get it to be at least passable. If I get complaints I point to the verification icons and explain how browser standards work (thus, since the page is validated to be correctly built, I can't control what the user's browser is doing) and let 'em know that they might get better results if they try a different browser. Fortunately, I haven't gotten any complaints in recent memory.
For browsers I don't have (Opera, for example) I contact friends who do have those browsers, and ask them to take screenshots and send me the screenshot. A longtime friend of mine uses Opera nearly constantly, so it wasn't a problem for him to supply a bit of help. I did the same for Omniweb, etc.
My idea for an automated service: send the server the URL of a page you want to check, and it will load the requested site into a variety of different browsers and take screenshots of the browser windows and let you login later to view the results or email you the images. This would let developers check how their pages look in browsers they don't normally have access to.
Would save you and I (and others!) a lot of trouble!
I use Discreet's Cleaner (was Media Cleaner) here to compress videos taken of cells through a light microscope. While we save our videos in Quicktime format as we are an all-Mac lab (with one or two unavoidable exceptions) and as the QT Player is free and can be downloaded easily by Windows users, Cleaner can also process other formats as well -- it can create RealPlayer files (but not read them, which drives me crazy when I want to do personal conversion projects on the side... WTF?), MPEG streams, QT files (of course), and so on. It is very good at optimizing video for different kinds of uses (you'd be tuning for web use) and is quite good at compression. It will work with any QT codecs you drop into the appropriate folder, should you be using a Mac; I've never used the Windows version, so I can't give advice there.
It can also do batch conversion -- we set up an entire batch of files to convert overnight, set it going, and walk away. When we return in the morning, it's ready and waiting.
If you encode on a Windows box, use cleaner XL. If you use a Mac, like we do, use cleaner 6.
Be sure to provide download links for appropriate players on your page, if you don't already. Users are likely to not know about vlc and other appropriate players.
Have you ever tried it? Most of the CD burning programs and drives out there can't do it. But there are exceptions to every rule. But most people aren't going to be able to do it.
You can copy console games, too, if you really know what you're doing.
Either way, it's hard to do, on purpose, but it can be done. Doesn't matter if it's PC software or console software.
Interesting. Thanks! I sometimes will post there and it's nice to know that other users also use Firefox/Moz.
There is a 'Farkit' extension available for Firefox to make it easier to quote others in discussions, so I wonder if some of those users didn't hear of the extension, decide to try it, download Firefox, and like it so much that they stuck with it.
There are also semi-regular anti-spyware discussions in which a number of people suggest trying Firefox, so some of that may be responsible too. (There are always people who fire back with the fact that they still use IE but manage to keep spyware off their machines, but I'd guess that those people are just lucky. Certainly most people don't know how to do that... though the number is growing.)
You can't copy PC games, either. Ask anyone who's tried using the duplication feature of their CD burning app to do it, and they'll tell you the resulting disk won't work.
I don't think that law has anything to do with the lack of PC game rental stores. It does say "computer program" but a console is a computer as much as a PC is, so if that were the reason there are no PC rental stores, there would be no console rental stores either.
There must be some other reason -- perhaps perceived lack of demand? Console games are more self-contained, so perhaps no one feels the PC game is well-suited to rental use.
That said, all someone needs to do is start a chain of CD rental libraries that does nothing BUT rent CDs. All you have to do is ensure that it doesn't turn a profit under the rules of the localities it operates in -- not that hard to start a nonprofit organization. My local VW club is doing it.
So can I, sadly. There's really no way you can say "I ordered the deaths of several hundred people because they MIGHT have done something I didn't like, even though it wasn't their fault" and not end up with a tarnished image, though. I don't know if there's ever been a fully satisfactory investigation into the entire thing, although there was another look at it a few years ago that brought more info to light. But the amount of coverup was insane and irresponsible, and I would certainly be angry if one of my family members or friends were killed this way and the guilty took years to get around to making it right (not that they ever can... those people are DEAD), communist, paranoid, or not.
That's what's really sad about it. And it reflects on how large bureaucratic institutions seem to so often (invariably?) generate fatal situations like this.
I do know. But it doesn't stop me from wondering why the pilot didn't hail base and say "Hey, this is a civilian plane!". As the Soviets found out the hard way, you'd better have a DAMN good reason for shooting down a civilian aircraft, and they never had one -- navigation errors are, after all, more common than most people think. The pilot could have tried harder to make sure he was seen from the cockpit, etc. and getting the pilots' attentions -- you don't hear about Cessnas being blown out of the sky; you hear about the fighters getting the pilots' attention and then asking what happened after they land.
It would be interesting to see information about whether the pilot gave any testimony regarding what he did (with a high-profile accident like that I can't imagine there not being an investigation), especially any in which he discusses what measures he took and when.
I would think that IFF training was required then like it is now... it's been a problem for a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people are forgetting the fact that a lot of the crap Enterprise has been slammed for by many (including myself, so don't think all my comments in this thread are from someone who thought the show could do no wrong) is GONE. The time travel/Nazi crap/etc. is GONE. I couldn't stand the show for a long time, but now that the stuff that wasn't working out is GONE, the writing has gotten far better, and I've actually been enjoying the episodes that my TiVo has been recording for me. I've heard from others that they, too, feel recent episodes have been far better than the previous season.
There's no real excuse to bash a show that did suck, but now doesn't really suck so much anymore because the creators realized what peoples' reactions were like and did something about it and as a result are getting positive reactions.
Or have you not seen the new stuff, or do you think the present season sucks? I think it's not as good as TNG/DS9, but I think the current season is pretty enjoyable.
It seems you are forgetting that fiction has an important role in society. It looks like you think that anything fictitious is not worth any effort whatsoever.
But in fact, science fiction and other forms of speculation DO have an important role to play. If you watch PBS a lot (as do I) you know that they will frequently run documentaries on subjects such as the Apollo lunar program. While the documentaries will focus on the 'how it was done' aspect and interview scientists and researchers and other individuals who worked on those projects, they will also sometimes mention the inspiration for them. And it's important to pay attention to those things.
Take the case of Jules Verne, for instance. Verne was a prodigious science fiction writer who imagined Project Apollo to an amazing degree of accuracy -- his ship looked roughly like Apollo's command and service modules, was roughly the same size, carried a three-person crew, was named Columbia, and was launched from the coast of Florida. This is almost exactly how the Apollo program operated by the time the first actual manned lunar mission was launched in 1968 (Apollo 8; no landing actually occurred until 1969.)
Now, while it is true that many people did not believe such a thing was possible (Robert Goddard was laughed at for believing that a rocket would function in a vacuum, for instance) and Verne's stories were dismissed as fantasy (nuclear-powered submarines!? Are you crazy!?) they came true, in time.
Going back to Project Apollo, you may or may not remember that the first few crews to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return to make sure that there were no dangerous organisms on them or their clothing or in their spacecraft. The fear of a possible contamination of Earth was raised, in part, by Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, as well as by points raised by the scientific community. As a result, quarantines continued until we had enough experience with returning Apollo crews to believe that they were no longer necessary. (Apollo 12's recovery of Surveyor hardware, and the subsequent discovery of terrestrial bacteria surviving on some of that equipment, proved that organisms could survive for long periods of time in space.)
We have also been influenced by other major works of science fiction (War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, for instance, has long been held as an example of how we might react to the idea of hostile alien life, and ET is an example of how we could react to more friendly aliens.)
For something to happen, it has to be imagined first. Sometimes, that takes the form of science fiction stories. Not worth it? Far from it. We'll be forever stuck in the present and never stop to imagine what might come in the future without the ideas that come from those who dare to say "Hey, what if this was possible?"
Moronic? I don't think it's moronic to decide that you want to help keep something going that you like that some bureaucrat decided wasn't worth their time. I feel it's worthwhile to keep the Hubble Telescope operating, for instance. If I decide to donate money toward that cause, instead of the time I have already spent writing letters to those who claim (according to voting records, they don't) to represent me in Congress, does that make me a moron? No. It merely means I have chosen to support a cause which I feel is worthy of my time. If you choose not to support that cause, does that make you a moron? No. It merely means that you feel that the cause in question is not worth enough to you to make a donation.
In other words, no one is a moron for choosing to donate to a cause. In fact, it shows that they care enough to support things that they, and others, feel are valuable enough. It also shows that they are willing to expend more effort to protect things they care about, since I think the majority of people out there will just roll over and take it when some faceless uninterested accountant (whether it be private party, as in this case, or government, as in the case of the HST) decides that some project which has public support should be killed.
I think it's a thing to applaud, not a thing to sneer at. If only more people would take action in such cases!
It would only be misappropriated funds if the money used for this purpose was raised by telling donators that it would be used for something entirely different.
Yes, people have certainly done this -- the X-Prize, while some of the funds came from major companies, was partly funded by individuals. Yes, some of that was rich people who could donate a lot of money, but that does mean that there are people out there who will fund making it possible for ordinary citizens to visit space.
Furthermore, some of the individual X-Prize teams operated off money gained from ordinary commercial ventures. An example of this is Armadillo Aerospace of Texas, which used funds gained from sale of PC-based games to fund its program. A good portion of the people here probably donated to that effort by purchasing the software built in part by one of the lead techs of AA; millions more members of the general public did the same.
I would guess that a large percentage of those people probably did not know that they were helping to fund a private space program (which has yet to launch anything more than test vehicles, but which hasn't given up yet even though the prize has been won) and much of the cash was earned before the X-Prize became a reality.
But I, personally, can say that I stepped up to the cash register, box in hand, knowing that some minor percentage of the money I paid for what I took home would be used to put ordinary civilians in space.
And I'm damn proud of that.
Pete Seeger wrote the original song "Where Have All The Flowers Gone", inspired by Sholokhov's novel "And Quiet Flows the Don". So yes, the text is correct. Peter, Paul & Mary and the Kingston Trio have both recorded renditions of this piece, and there are probably many more covers of it out there.
Where has all the spyware gone? Long time passing?
Where has all the spyware gone? Long time ago
Where has all the spyware gone?
Gone to spammers, everyone.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
(Apologies to Mikhail Sholokhov, Pete Seeger & parent poster)
The theme song didn't bother me. The fact that they doctored the photo of the orbiter Enterprise being rolled out of the Rockwell plant did. (Enterprise NEVER had her name written below her flight deck windows, and the tile pattern on the doctored image is that of one of the later orbiters.) How hard would it have been for them to get a few frames from the ALT test videos, which you can download for free from the Dryden Centre website? They're specifically not copyrighted, if I remember correctly ...
And they at least had faith that the ISS would be completed as planned. O'Keefe and his fellow idiot managers sure killed THAT idea.
I caught up on all four eps on my Tivo (missed "33" but it will record that later this week) and I agree, it's great -- but why is it they can't seem to afford a Steadicam mount to do something about the annoying we-filmed-with-a-handheld constantly-moving camera?
However, I was quite amused to notice that one of the ships in the feature film had a space shuttle flight deck in it. Complete with the hexadecimal keypad used to talk to the GPCs.
They have to get a warrant because they want to use this information against you in a court as part of a criminal investigation. These laws are protection against the temptation to abuse these investigative powers to unlawfully imprison people (the protection against loss of life, liberty, or property.)
Private companies can't do the same things that law enforcement is empowered to do, so they aren't restricted in the same way.
But when they get the rights, do they provide subtitles? If they don't, this doesn't help me -- as per my comment earlier in this discussion, I'm hearing-impaired. If I were to watch a series that was distributed this way (I'm not into anime, so I don't) and used the subtitles, then I went out and bought a DVD because the subtitled versions went away -- and the DVD wasn't subtitled -- boy, would I be upset ... I'd probably start specifically telling people I know NOT to buy from that studio, ever.
For the hearing-impaired (like me) relatively low-quality captioning (like live-style captioning which is delayed, scrolls by instead of just popping up, etc) is better than NO captioning.
I am not an anime fan but I always approved of what the fansub groups were doing -- if I ever chose to become a fan, the shows were more accessible to me.
I am a 'subtitle snob' not out of choice but out of necessity. I wonder if the studios ever thought of THAT. Providing subtitled versions would literally make their work available to thousands more people (the number of individuals who MUST use captioning or subitles to watch television or movies is not small -- and that's in the US alone.)
Let them check a box on a webform for managing their account that lets them receive mail from foreign domains that spam. Explain what the blocking is about, default it to on, but allow them to remove it if they really want to (e.g. if they call to complain, tell them how to get to the admin page).
... then they can turn the blocks back on if they start getting excessive spam.
I think that could do it
A-fucking-men. The original poster is a hypocrite. Stop whining about spam when you're spamming other people trying to get them to basically buy something for you.
I think you mean to say that they should have learned after Challenger...
It looks like you and I do the same thing to build standard code, but as for your specific question, there's no real automated way that I know of, though it'd be a cool service to automate.
All you can do is validate your code and then load the site in different browsers to see how it looks.
Here's what I do:
I use the validators on the W3C site to determine if my pages are coded correctly, and furthermore I have placed the buttons for checking this directly on the site. This lets visitors check for themselves if they're so inclined, rather than taking my word for it, and it also lets visitors know that such things as standards-validators exist.
The W3C Markup Validation Service is the main page; you can see an example of the output by looking at the review of the site I built at Validation Results. It will also check your CSS, which you can do at The W3C CSS Validation Service (demo output, validation of my pages, at this location).
This also allows me to dodge complaints that the site doesn't look good in browser (x) -- though I tested it in a variety of them and it looked fine, although I don't guarantee that Navigator 4 will work though not through much trying on my part to get it to be at least passable. If I get complaints I point to the verification icons and explain how browser standards work (thus, since the page is validated to be correctly built, I can't control what the user's browser is doing) and let 'em know that they might get better results if they try a different browser. Fortunately, I haven't gotten any complaints in recent memory.
For browsers I don't have (Opera, for example) I contact friends who do have those browsers, and ask them to take screenshots and send me the screenshot. A longtime friend of mine uses Opera nearly constantly, so it wasn't a problem for him to supply a bit of help. I did the same for Omniweb, etc.
My idea for an automated service: send the server the URL of a page you want to check, and it will load the requested site into a variety of different browsers and take screenshots of the browser windows and let you login later to view the results or email you the images. This would let developers check how their pages look in browsers they don't normally have access to.
Would save you and I (and others!) a lot of trouble!
I use Discreet's Cleaner (was Media Cleaner) here to compress videos taken of cells through a light microscope. While we save our videos in Quicktime format as we are an all-Mac lab (with one or two unavoidable exceptions) and as the QT Player is free and can be downloaded easily by Windows users, Cleaner can also process other formats as well -- it can create RealPlayer files (but not read them, which drives me crazy when I want to do personal conversion projects on the side... WTF?), MPEG streams, QT files (of course), and so on. It is very good at optimizing video for different kinds of uses (you'd be tuning for web use) and is quite good at compression. It will work with any QT codecs you drop into the appropriate folder, should you be using a Mac; I've never used the Windows version, so I can't give advice there.
It can also do batch conversion -- we set up an entire batch of files to convert overnight, set it going, and walk away. When we return in the morning, it's ready and waiting.
If you encode on a Windows box, use cleaner XL. If you use a Mac, like we do, use cleaner 6.
Be sure to provide download links for appropriate players on your page, if you don't already. Users are likely to not know about vlc and other appropriate players.
Have you ever tried it? Most of the CD burning programs and drives out there can't do it. But there are exceptions to every rule. But most people aren't going to be able to do it.
You can copy console games, too, if you really know what you're doing.
Either way, it's hard to do, on purpose, but it can be done. Doesn't matter if it's PC software or console software.
Thus, copyability has nothing to do with it.
Firefox eats man... ... Woman inherits the earth.
Interesting. Thanks! I sometimes will post there and it's nice to know that other users also use Firefox/Moz.
There is a 'Farkit' extension available for Firefox to make it easier to quote others in discussions, so I wonder if some of those users didn't hear of the extension, decide to try it, download Firefox, and like it so much that they stuck with it.
There are also semi-regular anti-spyware discussions in which a number of people suggest trying Firefox, so some of that may be responsible too. (There are always people who fire back with the fact that they still use IE but manage to keep spyware off their machines, but I'd guess that those people are just lucky. Certainly most people don't know how to do that... though the number is growing.)
At least I can say I know about IA655. :)
You can't copy PC games, either. Ask anyone who's tried using the duplication feature of their CD burning app to do it, and they'll tell you the resulting disk won't work.
I don't think that law has anything to do with the lack of PC game rental stores. It does say "computer program" but a console is a computer as much as a PC is, so if that were the reason there are no PC rental stores, there would be no console rental stores either.
There must be some other reason -- perhaps perceived lack of demand? Console games are more self-contained, so perhaps no one feels the PC game is well-suited to rental use.
That said, all someone needs to do is start a chain of CD rental libraries that does nothing BUT rent CDs. All you have to do is ensure that it doesn't turn a profit under the rules of the localities it operates in -- not that hard to start a nonprofit organization. My local VW club is doing it.
So can I, sadly. There's really no way you can say "I ordered the deaths of several hundred people because they MIGHT have done something I didn't like, even though it wasn't their fault" and not end up with a tarnished image, though. I don't know if there's ever been a fully satisfactory investigation into the entire thing, although there was another look at it a few years ago that brought more info to light. But the amount of coverup was insane and irresponsible, and I would certainly be angry if one of my family members or friends were killed this way and the guilty took years to get around to making it right (not that they ever can... those people are DEAD), communist, paranoid, or not.
That's what's really sad about it. And it reflects on how large bureaucratic institutions seem to so often (invariably?) generate fatal situations like this.
I do know. But it doesn't stop me from wondering why the pilot didn't hail base and say "Hey, this is a civilian plane!". As the Soviets found out the hard way, you'd better have a DAMN good reason for shooting down a civilian aircraft, and they never had one -- navigation errors are, after all, more common than most people think. The pilot could have tried harder to make sure he was seen from the cockpit, etc. and getting the pilots' attentions -- you don't hear about Cessnas being blown out of the sky; you hear about the fighters getting the pilots' attention and then asking what happened after they land.
It would be interesting to see information about whether the pilot gave any testimony regarding what he did (with a high-profile accident like that I can't imagine there not being an investigation), especially any in which he discusses what measures he took and when.
I would think that IFF training was required then like it is now... it's been a problem for a very long time.