Though you'd have to neutralize for relatively high velocity, and map to a different signal entirely (probably radio), before converting into sound... Doppler would tell you relative speed, and you would need some sort of tracking system (headset/goggles + sensors?) to locate your ears...
The original post asked, to the effect, of who would need all the GHz/GB that was being pumped out, and I gave an example that *I*, as a non pro consumer Mac owner needed all the GB and all the GHz I could get.
I never claimed I needed more resources than anybody else. I just claimed that I needed more than I currently had, and that I could easily use >> 2GB ram, >> 40GB hard disk, and >> 2GHz CPU.
Hehe, but a PC solves none of my problems. A PC doesn't do Final Cut Express any faster, it can't handle my 2,200 iPhoto collection any better, it can't burn iDVD DVD-Rs faster, it can't run iMovie... so there:P
When someone designs something that uses all of it.
I own a Mac, so the situation is slightly different, but as a user of iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut Express, I can use *all* the ram, CPU, and HD space I can get. Two hours of footage take 30gb of raw storage. Rendering 5 minutes of video takes 30 minutes. iPhoto takes 1.2gb of ram.
What will Apple release in 2005 to match Longhorn?
All I know is that as an enduser, Apple is very much meeting my expectations. As an enduser, are users of Windows XP and eventually Longhorn having their expectations met?
How many RPC vulnerabilities a year is that again?
There must be a misunderstanding if you think I don't value my freedom, or I frown upon military research ^^
I think the B2 bomber is incredibly cool I love the M1911A and all it's variants I like the F14 fighter, and the modern replacements F22/23
All I ever said, and all I am fighting in this argument, is for the scientist to have the right to make a moral stand; to disagree with the government's use of his research *because* that is the very freedom that someone like you would die for.
Something I too would die for.
Just because you disagree with his stance does not make him wrong and you right, and that's *all* I've ever tried to argue here.
There's Camino, there's Mozilla, and there's Firebird, so there's three different builds to play with on the same source tree. Then there's the fact that new bugs get fixed all the time.
I used to do it nightly, maybe a year ago, before Camino was developed.
Do you understand the term? It's to posit a strawman only for you to knock it down.
You keep bringing up straw men.
The *only* nation in the world that has ever fielded nuclear weapons in war is the United States. In that respect, it is in everyone else's interests to research and develop deterrents to stop *us* from dominating them with the threat of nuclear war.
That was what drove Russia, and the USSR, into social and economic collapse, because they couldn't keep up with us.
That is the straw man. Even if we do not research (cannot, really) defenses against nuclear programs, will not stop attacks; the terrorists of 9/11 did not use nuclear weapons, after all. They used our *freedom* against us. It's something we have to watch, because our strength is our weakness. We let them buy tickets, we let them carry box cutters, we let them take flying lessons, we let them peaceably congregate, we let them communicate using our phone, mail, and internet infrastructures, work, pay taxes, live in the US.
You cannot stop the terrorists of 9/11 without also taking away the freedoms that make our country unique and special.
Better weapons had no influence on the terrorists. We supplied them with the Boeing airliners and the jet fuel they used as weapons.
What research can we perform then that will stop that?
But back to your straw man argument. You seem to have missed the point of my previous post; if your research led to a better way to manufacture steel, which would be used to make more reliable rifles, do you have an ethical or moral responsibility to see that it doesn't get used to make weapons?
Weapons that your local neighborhood gangster will buy to use against you or your cousin?
The question is: What is the line where you as an individual take responsibility for the actions perpetrated because of your lack of foresight? Even worse, perpetrated because you ignored your foresight?
These scientists can see terrible things happening because of their research, and rather than pursue the research and see the terrible things, they change their focus and use different monies and try to actively create a better world than the one that is being asked of them.
You fail to see that. You only see "Us vs them" and "Kill or be killed". Thats not the question. The gun that's used to kill little children in neighborhoods is the same technology that is used by the soldier to kill enemies in Viet Nam. How many times can you name where we, as a country, had to defend ourselves in the past 100 years?
I can only think of *one* situation... Pearl Harbor.
And prior to that, how often were we the aggressor, and how often were we the victim? I think, unfortunately, the paintbrush of history will look upon our nation as violent and aggressive.
If you want to save money on power bills and want to avoid un-hiberation, get a Mac ^^
My Mac averages about 120W consumed in use, but when the monitor goes to sleep that drops to 50W, and when the drive spins down it's 30W, and when everything is asleep except for the RAM, it's at 10W...
And it'll still act like a webserver and printserver at 30W ^^
And waking up from sleep only takes 2 seconds. Who needs MRAM 3 years from now when you can have a Mac today?
These scientists who develop the technology to make more efficient guns arm both murders, policemen, and soldiers.
Safety is not a product of more powerful weapons. Safety is a product of trust and peace, neither of which rely on the existence or usage of weapons.
I am *not* a pacifist. I do not mean to suggest that I discourage the development of weapons or technology for the sake of weapons or in spite of weapons. I just happen to think these scientists have a point: That their morals, their conscience, won't let them work on projects that will, in the long run, only lead to their own ruin.
Someone, somewhere, must have a conscience in order to wield it, and sometime someone has to make a stand in order for right to be upheld. These scientists, for better or worse, make their stand here.
Where do you make your stand? You don't have to agree with the line, but I think you have to agree that a line has to exist somewhere, otherwise what makes any of these scientists good, moral, decent people?
No one ever said anything about regression, so it's kind of silly to bring it up, isn't it?
The question isn't about developing weapons to protect your cousin, it's developing weapons that will kill him. KILL, not DEFEND. The technology that is being developed, the science that is researched, will be defensive, will be useful, will be peaceful, but it will also be deadly.
Let's use the past as an example. You have the opportunity to take government money to develop a more efficient and reliable mass production factory line, one that you know will be used to mass produce more reliable, cheap, and powerful rifles. Rifles that will be used to kill people.
Now the question is, would you willingly work on that system knowing this, with the very strong possibility that such rifles will be used against your cousin in the dissident south? Or your brother at college, who is protesting the Viet Nam war? Or any number of situations?
Because developing technology that makes it easier to kill has *nothing* to do with defense. It means when a mugger has such a weapon, when a policeman has such a weapon, when a kid steals such a weapon, then it's that much easier for your cousin, son, brother, sister, mother to be killed.
Do you have a moral or ethical responsibility, knowing that, to abstain from such research?
Some of these scientists feel that kind of moral guilt.
This isn't about defense contracts... this is about developing technology that will be used to kill people.
Fundamentally, would you take money to develop something that may one day kill your cousin? That's the moral dilemma, in an extreme and absurd nutshell, that the researchers have to struggle with.
It's not about nationalism (us vs them) or patriotism (we're great rah-rah), it's about humanism (people are people).
Imagine you are doing research in neurobiology, understanding how the brain works... on one hand useful for the development of drugs to treat disorders and diseases, to regenerate severed spinal columns, and heal quadrapalegics. On the flip side, you also know it is being used to develop more effective efficient neurotoxins, sleep agents, drugs to confuse or cripple soldiers, and civilians.
Then you also realize that eventually these same weapons will be used against *your* family, as soon as someone figures out how to reverse engineer the compound, or at least how to replicate a grossly inefficient knockoff.
Nothing to do with liberty, freedom, peace, or defense. Just moral distaste and disagreement coupled with a little foresight and understanding.
There are different usage models, you know, without calling someone out on FUD.
My Mac, for example... on 24/7, goes to sleep after three hours.
Goes from something like 120W during average use, to 80W with monitor in sleep, and then to 9W when the whole system goes to sleep. Possibly less.
However, one thing that I don't have to deal with every morning is loading an OS, loading apps into memory, and the extra disk access as part of that process, since it's all already in memory.
So in one compromise situation, my drives aren't spinning up every morning, they spin down after 20 minutes if inactivity, and my monitor, video card, CPU, and eventually the rest of the system power off one by one until the whole thing is asleep...
Why would someone turn 'off' their PC if they don't turn off their TV?
Leave the machine (in my case, a Mac) in standby, just like a TV. Touch a key, the power button, or the remote, and it switches on in less than 2 seconds...
From all external appearances, my Mac is off, except for the glowing power button.
I bet at the time of initial consideration of vendors, there were no competitive Opteron or Itanium solutions (none with chassis, the slides say), and I am also willing to bet that Apple had at least a hardware prototype they could demonstrate, at least a motherboard + dual CPU setup, even if the chassis was incomplete and the not all the major subsystems were 100%
Just enough to demonstrate that Apple *would* have a solution, and enough that VT could narrow down the decision to a possible, pending the actual production and purchase of a single machine... then, the contract being 99% complete, they just had to sign a couple papers and purchase, overnight, 1,100 dual G5s.
On the flip side I bet they had a similar contract in the wings with other vendors, all pending on 'simple' bottlenecks.
It'll cost you about $35 to add FM capability to your iPod.
Re:Think of it as backup and insurance :D
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
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· Score: 2, Informative
But how about an MP3 player that holds all of my songs? What would you suggest, on top of buying a $60 HD?
*Note, with an iPod, all the music is synched, so I've actually got two backups; my PowerMac is the main copy, the iPod is the backup of my music.
**Data storage is actually cheaper using DVD-Rs than HD, so I archive to DVD
***iPods provide 'offsite' backup insurance, where a 120gb HD does not.
Think of it as backup and insurance :D
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've got 80+ albums at an average of $22 each or so (a lot of import CDs from Japan), so maybe $1,760 worth of music resides on my iPod... my then $399 now $299 10gb iPod is cheap insurance against my music collection getting stolen in my car, for example, while simultaneously allowing me to access *all* my music in a simple fashion.
Then there's the fact that my iPod is *also* a backup of my PowerMac, which is worth much more to me than $299; the peace of mind of having a portable bootable backup is immeasurable, short of spending 2 years recreating all the data on my PowerMac.
Sure, there are other hard drive based mp3 players, but none that allow me to boot my PowerMac, and none that allow me to copy my entire music collection onto it in 6 minutes.
Perhaps it is impossible for supersonic travel; but if research in supersonic noise suppression leaks into subsonic aircraft, I still think it's a win for everyone.
You're right that front and rear bow/shock fronts won't interfere, but if you can design the airframe to retard the compression effect, or like cavitation turn the air directly in front of the plane into a plasma, perhaps alternative sound suppresion exist other than noise/wave cancelation.
I believe it's possible to eliminate the major side effect of a sonic boom, to the point that in lay parlance we will have aircraft that do not generate a sonic boom.
If you can manipulate the shockwaves and bowfronts trailing a plane in such a way that they interfere, essentially producing low energy zones at the appropriate distance, and then redirect the rest of the sonic energy to disperse and spread out along a larger surface area and upwards into empty space, you can create supersonic craft with subsonic noise signatures.
IE, the noise the craft generates is self canceled at exactly ground level: Fly higher, and you hear a supersonic rumble, fly lower, and you hear the supersonic rumble; bank, turn, or make any maneuvers, and you hear the supersonic rumble. The rest of the shockwave will necessarily get quieter as it travels farther from the plane such that by the time they reach ground level they are essentially 'quiet'.
Are you suggesting that these school districts should donate the money they are raising to schools that actually need the money?
Doesn't that, I dunno, kinda smack of socialism?
These are districts that already have good textbooks, I wager, and the parents and involved citizens want their kids to get an additional advantage, in this case computer literacy and submersion from an early age.
Just because it's law (copyright law) doesn't make it right, and just because the RIAA is going after them doesn't mean the intention of the law is being followed. The RIAA has no interest in being Right, Legal, or Lawful. They only care about extracting profits, and that's all they should be, as a profit organization.
Law is meant to benefit human society, however, and in this situation I think the RIAA, in pursuing the law, is doing a disservice and discredit to their customers, society, and the legal system. The RIAA, if they want to stick closely to the law, need to attack real pirates, who duplicate and sell CDs at a fraction of the real ones.
And... it is that simple. If you don't like a law, you break it. You break it and suffer the consequences. And if enough people do it, then sometimes the law gets changed. You *can* ignore copyright law if copyright law, or the implementation of copyright law, is wrong. It's been done many times before, when an unjust law, or a law was followed unjustly, exists, and people want to change it.
In this case it isn't nearly so weighty, but it still affects people, as civil rights, or equal rights, or womens rights... but it's still the right of use and ownership. Don't think I disagree with copyright; I take photos and I make videos and my brother is an artist, so we *own* our work. Simultaneously, the act of viewing, enjoying, and appreciating the work necessarily means that other people need access, and you need to balance the *need* for other people to view with my *need* to control the work.
The man is using his money to support a business proposition that he agrees with!
DVD rental 'on demand'. The medium is irrelevant, he could have been donating money to the public library or gardening, but the point is that when you boycott one thing, the money you spend on it necessarily goes to something else, even if its into a bank.
Me, I've not spent money on DVDs or CDs, and have instead gone to see movies (which are generally not money making propositions!), traveled, and gardened. Money well spent I think, among friends, to see friends, and to improve my environment.
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Though you'd have to neutralize for relatively high velocity, and map to a different signal entirely (probably radio), before converting into sound... Doppler would tell you relative speed, and you would need some sort of tracking system (headset/goggles + sensors?) to locate your ears...
But that's not what I said :)
The original post asked, to the effect, of who would need all the GHz/GB that was being pumped out, and I gave an example that *I*, as a non pro consumer Mac owner needed all the GB and all the GHz I could get.
I never claimed I needed more resources than anybody else. I just claimed that I needed more than I currently had, and that I could easily use >> 2GB ram, >> 40GB hard disk, and >> 2GHz CPU.
Hehe, but a PC solves none of my problems. A PC doesn't do Final Cut Express any faster, it can't handle my 2,200 iPhoto collection any better, it can't burn iDVD DVD-Rs faster, it can't run iMovie... so there :P
When someone designs something that uses all of it.
I own a Mac, so the situation is slightly different, but as a user of iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut Express, I can use *all* the ram, CPU, and HD space I can get. Two hours of footage take 30gb of raw storage. Rendering 5 minutes of video takes 30 minutes. iPhoto takes 1.2gb of ram.
So for me, it's not enough. I need more.
Compare vapor to vapor, right?
What will Apple release in 2005 to match Longhorn?
All I know is that as an enduser, Apple is very much meeting my expectations. As an enduser, are users of Windows XP and eventually Longhorn having their expectations met?
How many RPC vulnerabilities a year is that again?
There must be a misunderstanding if you think I don't value my freedom, or I frown upon military research ^^
I think the B2 bomber is incredibly cool
I love the M1911A and all it's variants
I like the F14 fighter, and the modern replacements F22/23
All I ever said, and all I am fighting in this argument, is for the scientist to have the right to make a moral stand; to disagree with the government's use of his research *because* that is the very freedom that someone like you would die for.
Something I too would die for.
Just because you disagree with his stance does not make him wrong and you right, and that's *all* I've ever tried to argue here.
I dunno, I compile Mozilla about once a week.
There's Camino, there's Mozilla, and there's Firebird, so there's three different builds to play with on the same source tree. Then there's the fact that new bugs get fixed all the time.
I used to do it nightly, maybe a year ago, before Camino was developed.
Do you understand the term? It's to posit a strawman only for you to knock it down.
You keep bringing up straw men.
The *only* nation in the world that has ever fielded nuclear weapons in war is the United States. In that respect, it is in everyone else's interests to research and develop deterrents to stop *us* from dominating them with the threat of nuclear war.
That was what drove Russia, and the USSR, into social and economic collapse, because they couldn't keep up with us.
That is the straw man. Even if we do not research (cannot, really) defenses against nuclear programs, will not stop attacks; the terrorists of 9/11 did not use nuclear weapons, after all. They used our *freedom* against us. It's something we have to watch, because our strength is our weakness. We let them buy tickets, we let them carry box cutters, we let them take flying lessons, we let them peaceably congregate, we let them communicate using our phone, mail, and internet infrastructures, work, pay taxes, live in the US.
You cannot stop the terrorists of 9/11 without also taking away the freedoms that make our country unique and special.
Better weapons had no influence on the terrorists. We supplied them with the Boeing airliners and the jet fuel they used as weapons.
What research can we perform then that will stop that?
But back to your straw man argument. You seem to have missed the point of my previous post; if your research led to a better way to manufacture steel, which would be used to make more reliable rifles, do you have an ethical or moral responsibility to see that it doesn't get used to make weapons?
Weapons that your local neighborhood gangster will buy to use against you or your cousin?
The question is: What is the line where you as an individual take responsibility for the actions perpetrated because of your lack of foresight? Even worse, perpetrated because you ignored your foresight?
These scientists can see terrible things happening because of their research, and rather than pursue the research and see the terrible things, they change their focus and use different monies and try to actively create a better world than the one that is being asked of them.
You fail to see that. You only see "Us vs them" and "Kill or be killed". Thats not the question. The gun that's used to kill little children in neighborhoods is the same technology that is used by the soldier to kill enemies in Viet Nam. How many times can you name where we, as a country, had to defend ourselves in the past 100 years?
I can only think of *one* situation... Pearl Harbor.
And prior to that, how often were we the aggressor, and how often were we the victim? I think, unfortunately, the paintbrush of history will look upon our nation as violent and aggressive.
If you want to save money on power bills and want to avoid un-hiberation, get a Mac ^^
My Mac averages about 120W consumed in use, but when the monitor goes to sleep that drops to 50W, and when the drive spins down it's 30W, and when everything is asleep except for the RAM, it's at 10W...
And it'll still act like a webserver and printserver at 30W ^^
And waking up from sleep only takes 2 seconds. Who needs MRAM 3 years from now when you can have a Mac today?
These scientists who develop the technology to make more efficient guns arm both murders, policemen, and soldiers.
Safety is not a product of more powerful weapons. Safety is a product of trust and peace, neither of which rely on the existence or usage of weapons.
I am *not* a pacifist. I do not mean to suggest that I discourage the development of weapons or technology for the sake of weapons or in spite of weapons. I just happen to think these scientists have a point: That their morals, their conscience, won't let them work on projects that will, in the long run, only lead to their own ruin.
Someone, somewhere, must have a conscience in order to wield it, and sometime someone has to make a stand in order for right to be upheld. These scientists, for better or worse, make their stand here.
Where do you make your stand? You don't have to agree with the line, but I think you have to agree that a line has to exist somewhere, otherwise what makes any of these scientists good, moral, decent people?
No one ever said anything about regression, so it's kind of silly to bring it up, isn't it?
The question isn't about developing weapons to protect your cousin, it's developing weapons that will kill him. KILL, not DEFEND. The technology that is being developed, the science that is researched, will be defensive, will be useful, will be peaceful, but it will also be deadly.
Let's use the past as an example. You have the opportunity to take government money to develop a more efficient and reliable mass production factory line, one that you know will be used to mass produce more reliable, cheap, and powerful rifles. Rifles that will be used to kill people.
Now the question is, would you willingly work on that system knowing this, with the very strong possibility that such rifles will be used against your cousin in the dissident south? Or your brother at college, who is protesting the Viet Nam war? Or any number of situations?
Because developing technology that makes it easier to kill has *nothing* to do with defense. It means when a mugger has such a weapon, when a policeman has such a weapon, when a kid steals such a weapon, then it's that much easier for your cousin, son, brother, sister, mother to be killed.
Do you have a moral or ethical responsibility, knowing that, to abstain from such research?
Some of these scientists feel that kind of moral guilt.
This isn't about defense contracts... this is about developing technology that will be used to kill people.
Fundamentally, would you take money to develop something that may one day kill your cousin? That's the moral dilemma, in an extreme and absurd nutshell, that the researchers have to struggle with.
It's not about nationalism (us vs them) or patriotism (we're great rah-rah), it's about humanism (people are people).
Imagine you are doing research in neurobiology, understanding how the brain works... on one hand useful for the development of drugs to treat disorders and diseases, to regenerate severed spinal columns, and heal quadrapalegics. On the flip side, you also know it is being used to develop more effective efficient neurotoxins, sleep agents, drugs to confuse or cripple soldiers, and civilians.
Then you also realize that eventually these same weapons will be used against *your* family, as soon as someone figures out how to reverse engineer the compound, or at least how to replicate a grossly inefficient knockoff.
Nothing to do with liberty, freedom, peace, or defense. Just moral distaste and disagreement coupled with a little foresight and understanding.
There are different usage models, you know, without calling someone out on FUD.
My Mac, for example... on 24/7, goes to sleep after three hours.
Goes from something like 120W during average use, to 80W with monitor in sleep, and then to 9W when the whole system goes to sleep. Possibly less.
However, one thing that I don't have to deal with every morning is loading an OS, loading apps into memory, and the extra disk access as part of that process, since it's all already in memory.
So in one compromise situation, my drives aren't spinning up every morning, they spin down after 20 minutes if inactivity, and my monitor, video card, CPU, and eventually the rest of the system power off one by one until the whole thing is asleep...
Why would someone turn 'off' their PC if they don't turn off their TV?
Leave the machine (in my case, a Mac) in standby, just like a TV. Touch a key, the power button, or the remote, and it switches on in less than 2 seconds...
From all external appearances, my Mac is off, except for the glowing power button.
I bet at the time of initial consideration of vendors, there were no competitive Opteron or Itanium solutions (none with chassis, the slides say), and I am also willing to bet that Apple had at least a hardware prototype they could demonstrate, at least a motherboard + dual CPU setup, even if the chassis was incomplete and the not all the major subsystems were 100%
Just enough to demonstrate that Apple *would* have a solution, and enough that VT could narrow down the decision to a possible, pending the actual production and purchase of a single machine... then, the contract being 99% complete, they just had to sign a couple papers and purchase, overnight, 1,100 dual G5s.
On the flip side I bet they had a similar contract in the wings with other vendors, all pending on 'simple' bottlenecks.
Haha, sure, but he only asked how much, not when ^^
I use the iMic and the iTrip, and therefore have good expectations out of the iFM as well.
It's like... a streaming cast on a WiFi connection, except using a small handheld or portable audio device as your terminal client...
:D
Imagine an iBook accessing Apple.com's movie trailers with a wireless connection
It'll cost you about $35 to add FM capability to your iPod.
But how about an MP3 player that holds all of my songs? What would you suggest, on top of buying a $60 HD?
*Note, with an iPod, all the music is synched, so I've actually got two backups; my PowerMac is the main copy, the iPod is the backup of my music.
**Data storage is actually cheaper using DVD-Rs than HD, so I archive to DVD
***iPods provide 'offsite' backup insurance, where a 120gb HD does not.
I've got 80+ albums at an average of $22 each or so (a lot of import CDs from Japan), so maybe $1,760 worth of music resides on my iPod... my then $399 now $299 10gb iPod is cheap insurance against my music collection getting stolen in my car, for example, while simultaneously allowing me to access *all* my music in a simple fashion.
Then there's the fact that my iPod is *also* a backup of my PowerMac, which is worth much more to me than $299; the peace of mind of having a portable bootable backup is immeasurable, short of spending 2 years recreating all the data on my PowerMac.
Sure, there are other hard drive based mp3 players, but none that allow me to boot my PowerMac, and none that allow me to copy my entire music collection onto it in 6 minutes.
Perhaps it is impossible for supersonic travel; but if research in supersonic noise suppression leaks into subsonic aircraft, I still think it's a win for everyone.
You're right that front and rear bow/shock fronts won't interfere, but if you can design the airframe to retard the compression effect, or like cavitation turn the air directly in front of the plane into a plasma, perhaps alternative sound suppresion exist other than noise/wave cancelation.
I believe it's possible to eliminate the major side effect of a sonic boom, to the point that in lay parlance we will have aircraft that do not generate a sonic boom.
If you can manipulate the shockwaves and bowfronts trailing a plane in such a way that they interfere, essentially producing low energy zones at the appropriate distance, and then redirect the rest of the sonic energy to disperse and spread out along a larger surface area and upwards into empty space, you can create supersonic craft with subsonic noise signatures.
IE, the noise the craft generates is self canceled at exactly ground level: Fly higher, and you hear a supersonic rumble, fly lower, and you hear the supersonic rumble; bank, turn, or make any maneuvers, and you hear the supersonic rumble. The rest of the shockwave will necessarily get quieter as it travels farther from the plane such that by the time they reach ground level they are essentially 'quiet'.
Are you suggesting that these school districts should donate the money they are raising to schools that actually need the money?
Doesn't that, I dunno, kinda smack of socialism?
These are districts that already have good textbooks, I wager, and the parents and involved citizens want their kids to get an additional advantage, in this case computer literacy and submersion from an early age.
Just because it's law (copyright law) doesn't make it right, and just because the RIAA is going after them doesn't mean the intention of the law is being followed. The RIAA has no interest in being Right, Legal, or Lawful. They only care about extracting profits, and that's all they should be, as a profit organization.
Law is meant to benefit human society, however, and in this situation I think the RIAA, in pursuing the law, is doing a disservice and discredit to their customers, society, and the legal system. The RIAA, if they want to stick closely to the law, need to attack real pirates, who duplicate and sell CDs at a fraction of the real ones.
And... it is that simple. If you don't like a law, you break it. You break it and suffer the consequences. And if enough people do it, then sometimes the law gets changed. You *can* ignore copyright law if copyright law, or the implementation of copyright law, is wrong. It's been done many times before, when an unjust law, or a law was followed unjustly, exists, and people want to change it.
In this case it isn't nearly so weighty, but it still affects people, as civil rights, or equal rights, or womens rights... but it's still the right of use and ownership. Don't think I disagree with copyright; I take photos and I make videos and my brother is an artist, so we *own* our work. Simultaneously, the act of viewing, enjoying, and appreciating the work necessarily means that other people need access, and you need to balance the *need* for other people to view with my *need* to control the work.
The man is using his money to support a business proposition that he agrees with!
DVD rental 'on demand'. The medium is irrelevant, he could have been donating money to the public library or gardening, but the point is that when you boycott one thing, the money you spend on it necessarily goes to something else, even if its into a bank.
Me, I've not spent money on DVDs or CDs, and have instead gone to see movies (which are generally not money making propositions!), traveled, and gardened. Money well spent I think, among friends, to see friends, and to improve my environment.