It's not so much the FBI warning as the ads. As for getting around it, some discs let you skip, some don't. All this talk of players that can skip it are just people skipping discs that allow you to. I have yet to see a player aside from high end ones ($800) that will add the disabled features.
However I'm not really being specific when I say "disabled". When a DVD is authored, said features arent' disabled, they're actually enabled. The team encoding the dvd decides what capabilities to enable per track. It's not like there's some sort of lock enabled on the FBI warning, and the dvd commercials, preventing skipping. It's simply NOT THERE. If the commands aren't available, it's difficult to do something with it ^.~ Your best bet is some sort of free software DVD player software for a PC. I say free because commercial software actually pays the rights to decode the dvd and so they adhere to other copyright laws and such.
And what did we used to do with VHS movies when we watched them? We fast forwarded the trailers. 9 times out of 10 this works fine on dvd players. Who are we to think that since the technology makes it possible, we should have access to all it's features? If movie companies didn't care if we skipped their ads, THEY WOULDN'T INCLUDE THEM. The beauty of fast forwarding is that you still have to watch a small portion of the ad/trailer, which is fine for the company ^.~
As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.'
I agree, and I'm a "young people"! I see it as an unfortunate sign of evolution. We're approaching a time when we don't have to remember anything on our own because everything is stored for us and the web will soon spawn walkthroughs for even the most simple tasks like feeding yourself or wiping your ass. Sure it's difficult to accept. You think cave people took it lightly when their toes shrank and they couldn't climb trees (at least that's my theory as to why we still have toes. They're just not as large and functionable any more) I bet they were pretty mad when Gronk couldn't scale that tree, but they lived on. Now it's little Steve who can't be separated from his palm pilot that society is complaining about. They're just jealous because THEY have to still think for themselves. I know I am. I don't want to think. It's my human nature to take the easiest way out, and I want someone else to do the thinking for me dangit!
One great thing we did at my school was create a "super"computer using beowulf clusters. The computer was put together out of old parts we were just gonna throw out, and the nodes were a bunch of donated systems that alone, probably couldn't computer their way out of a wet paper sack. Multiple nodes is really the only way you can truely get your students to appreciate Linux's true power. And besides, it's really cool when people stand in front of your new creation and commenton how "hot it is over here" =D
Another great idea is the Tech Support team, or the Nerd Squad as I like to call it. We get a lot of free time and rather than waste it on homework...I mean...never mind ^_^ We rush about school fixing all the little problems that happen from day to day. It's a great way to earn suck up points with the teachers, and you get to learn a lot about Windows' many faults, and it sparks interesting new questions like, "How drunk were these guys when they wired this network!?"
Or if you're looking for the painful computer lesson, you could always do what my friend did for his AP CompSci final project, write your own operating system =D Good 'ol MattX. Made to run on the Mattalon processor;) It even actually ran some stuff, though not very well. Really not much different than a Mac without a GUI ^_~
What gets me is the "internet thugs" that insist on downloading albums at a time. I work at Rutgers and Napster has been killing our bandwidth. What once was 2K/sec is now easily 50K/sec, usually more now that Napster is gone. Napster made music piration so easy that any "internet thug" could sit down at their computer, type in their favorite song or artist or ALBUM and walk away knowing that those songs were available and that they wouldn't have to fight dead links. FTP has been around for years and there's been no problems with it. This is because the RIAA is not fighting MP3s, but they're fighting the easiness of acquiring them via Napster. FTP was complicated, or at least complicated enough to scare away those who use their computer solely to play solitare and listen to their new fangled CD. Complication is good, because it limits acess to music to those who know what they're doing. There's also better options with FTP, like setting up a ratio so that you couldn't download a whole album without uploading one first, or at least the required amount of files depending on the ratio. The common "internet thug" has no intrest in sharing, it just so happens that they share the files they download because by default Napster will share the files in the user's download folder, and a very large percentage of Napster users are not intelligent/patient enough to change that (stop growling at me. I said a large percentage. Many slashdot users excluded. If you're smart enough to know how to install Linux then you probably don't fit in the category of "internet thug" ^_^)
I believe that if the RIAA wins this battle, the next subject will be other sharing communities such as Gnutella and scour exchange. The Scour Exchange community is already incredibly huge(last time I logged on there were 10.94 TB of data available) and even easier to use than Napster. The large amounts of porn and pirated movies on it doesn't help it's reputation either.
In closing, as far as music downloading is concerned, in the end it will/should be that only the smart shall prevail.
Not owning a DVD player myself I haven't been paying much attention to anime releases on DVD, but I am a big anime fan and I do own a copy of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke). I found it considerably violent, quite excessive for Disney. In the first five minutes a giant monster gets an arrow shot into each of his two eyes. Does this sound like something Disney would put out unedited? I'd love to see how this one turns out. Hopefully it won't go the way of the Sailor Moon Super Censored North American Dubs.
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It's not so much the FBI warning as the ads. As for getting around it, some discs let you skip, some don't. All this talk of players that can skip it are just people skipping discs that allow you to. I have yet to see a player aside from high end ones ($800) that will add the disabled features. However I'm not really being specific when I say "disabled". When a DVD is authored, said features arent' disabled, they're actually enabled. The team encoding the dvd decides what capabilities to enable per track. It's not like there's some sort of lock enabled on the FBI warning, and the dvd commercials, preventing skipping. It's simply NOT THERE. If the commands aren't available, it's difficult to do something with it ^.~ Your best bet is some sort of free software DVD player software for a PC. I say free because commercial software actually pays the rights to decode the dvd and so they adhere to other copyright laws and such. And what did we used to do with VHS movies when we watched them? We fast forwarded the trailers. 9 times out of 10 this works fine on dvd players. Who are we to think that since the technology makes it possible, we should have access to all it's features? If movie companies didn't care if we skipped their ads, THEY WOULDN'T INCLUDE THEM. The beauty of fast forwarding is that you still have to watch a small portion of the ad/trailer, which is fine for the company ^.~
...And shut down port 80 completely :-P It looks very unprofessional when one's url ends in ":90" :-(
As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.' I agree, and I'm a "young people"! I see it as an unfortunate sign of evolution. We're approaching a time when we don't have to remember anything on our own because everything is stored for us and the web will soon spawn walkthroughs for even the most simple tasks like feeding yourself or wiping your ass. Sure it's difficult to accept. You think cave people took it lightly when their toes shrank and they couldn't climb trees (at least that's my theory as to why we still have toes. They're just not as large and functionable any more) I bet they were pretty mad when Gronk couldn't scale that tree, but they lived on. Now it's little Steve who can't be separated from his palm pilot that society is complaining about. They're just jealous because THEY have to still think for themselves. I know I am. I don't want to think. It's my human nature to take the easiest way out, and I want someone else to do the thinking for me dangit!
Another great idea is the Tech Support team, or the Nerd Squad as I like to call it. We get a lot of free time and rather than waste it on homework...I mean...never mind ^_^ We rush about school fixing all the little problems that happen from day to day. It's a great way to earn suck up points with the teachers, and you get to learn a lot about Windows' many faults, and it sparks interesting new questions like, "How drunk were these guys when they wired this network!?"
Or if you're looking for the painful computer lesson, you could always do what my friend did for his AP CompSci final project, write your own operating system =D Good 'ol MattX. Made to run on the Mattalon processor ;) It even actually ran some stuff, though not very well. Really not much different than a Mac without a GUI ^_~
-VicBond007
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I believe that if the RIAA wins this battle, the next subject will be other sharing communities such as Gnutella and scour exchange. The Scour Exchange community is already incredibly huge(last time I logged on there were 10.94 TB of data available) and even easier to use than Napster. The large amounts of porn and pirated movies on it doesn't help it's reputation either.
In closing, as far as music downloading is concerned, in the end it will/should be that only the smart shall prevail.
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