That's the thing. Most college students share files. It's been happening since people could record - Reel-to-reel, 8 tracks, cassettes...it's just on the internet now. By the RIAA's definition, they are actually guilty. The jury is still out on whos side the law supports (no pun intended).
If I sat down with 100 college students that had a P2P program running on their machine and files in their upload directory, I'm guessing that 100 of them would have swapped files with other users on the network. If I tried 10,000, I might find a dozen who haven't, and just forgot they installed it.
We're not talking about grandma who had a precoscious 7 year old over for the weekend a couple of months ago. This is the prime demograpic for the wares the RIAA is selling.
I think the current usage of copyright law totally defeats the purpose of copyright in the first place, but we're not talking about innocent bystanders or people who 'just don't understand computers' here.
No, you can't wind this game, especially not on slashdot.
Renting is a antiquated term when viewed with respect to digital media of any type. The biggest issue is that there has been a tiered pricing model in the past based on length of access - that access was limited by a physical medium. Both the software and music industries recognized that there is no "rental" when the data is so easy to reproduce as to be trivial - and in response they made certain that copyright law forbid the rental of the physical media which contained those works (I don't have the citiation, but in the US it is true). For video, it was relatively expensive and/or inconvenient to copy the works, and rental stores flourished. I still remember annual and initiation fees (many north of $100) just to have the priveledge to rent the movies.
The idea of renting something doesn't really make sense in a world where there are no incremental costs to produce, and no exclusivity of use of an item. But there's the problem, too. Most consumers put a lower price expectation on a "loaned" item than to own the item - that's natural because we've all grown up to believe in scarcity. There is no scarcity in digital media - the first copy costs an insane amount to produce; the second costs almost nothing. Now, on the opposite side of that debate are the content providers/producers. They value their end-user item at a fixed cost, as if there were an incremental production, packaging, handling, and delivery cost - just like they've always had. In return for reducing or eliminating most of those costs, a lower fee may be paid for a time-limited use. Except that digital media eliminates nearly all of the incremental costs.
So we're at a stalemate where consumers expect a $2-$3 product and the producers want to sell a $20 product. No, let me correct that - the producers expect to sell a $30 product - the "suggested retail price" - even though consumers are used to finding the traditional product at a significant discount, closer to $20. So you've got a 10:1 expectation gap as a result of the data revolution. Until that gets settled, there will be DRM, and nobody will really be happy.
How true. I remember looking forward to geekily flipping through it's pages. I remember when the first desktop dropped below $1000, and laptops dipped below $1500. Midwest Micro and Dirt Cheap Drives come to mind. Man, that was a long time ago.
I understand the attempt at humor, but you may be more correct than you intended. Without really knowing the details, my understanding of this patent was that everybody thought they have already complied, but some portion of the patent was effectively backdated and became a "new" requirement for full licensing. There may yet be patents that Vorbis violates that have not surfaced, which are applicable to the code base and predate the Vorbis development. That would suck.
This may be one of those fine-line cases. Making a work available in meatspace may not cross the line, on the web probably does, and doing so on using P2P software (for which the primary intent is mutual distribution of files) definietly does. Not that I think the law actually says that, just that the practical application suggests it. Sadly, laws are finite in scope and all have loophole between intent and application. Depending on the situation it may work for you or against you. Laws written for physical media don't translate well to digital space where both delivery and reproduction costs are essentially zero.
Software exists for OCR from camera sources such as cell phones. Would the presence of, say, a bookstore which allows patrons to browse the shelves and - presumably - photograph the pages be liable under this expansion? What are the special circumstances for libraries, and could they be considered liable under this distribution interpretation?
It would be nice if MS created a group of tweaks (menu style if necessary, but not three layers embedded I'd hope) that would reset the default to maximum speed of operation, and let you de-optimize it from there. As with many others here, I have my desktop set to windows classic mode. I've tried the changes over the years, but quite honetly I thought NT3.51 pretty much got it right. I never want to see my computer fall behind my input. With two billion operations a second, it should never have to.
Making the tool: okay Using tool: okay Showing others how to use the tool: still okay Selling the tool: not okay.
At this point, I'd say he's in the clear unless he's selling the tools or the schematics (though you probably can sell the schematics, since you apparently can sell access to the Patent database.) You actually have to make something and sell it to violate a patent - personal use is just fine.
I'm not an expert on LED lighting, but most of the white LEDs I've seen are the result of an LED pumping fluorescent compounds to produce a "white" light made up of discrete bandwidths. That's the same problem we have with current fluorescents - they produce lousy color rendition. The "warm" ones end up either too pink or too yellow. You can't buy a consumer CFL with better than an 85CRI, and most are in the 70s. Okay, that last part is a guess, but when the manufacturers won't even quote a color temp or CRI, you know it's going to look like crap.
LEDs can be efficient, but they are limited by some of the same problems as fluorsecents when it comes to color rendition. And, just like fluorescents, as the CRI goes up, the efficiency goes down.
Seriously, this thing may run a version OS X, but it's going to be nowhere near the functionality of the full OS since you won't be allowed to install anything but the embedded apps.
If you just want one to play with, the price is $211 higher than the advertised rate, no phone service included. Go in, pay for the phone and the $36 connection fee, then cancel the contract and write a check for the $175 early termination fee.
I specifically meant to compare VSB and QAM. Oh, sure, you can double the bandwidth over cable with QAM, but do you have to? Would it not have been better to have a single tuner standard, with a single encoding standard, and a single resolution standard? I'm an audio/video geek, I admit it. But to be honest, after watching a decade of failed product after failed product I'm inclined to believe the Television should be like a Mac - it should just work. It's not optimal, it's not the best you can get, it certainly puts limitations on the delivery content (booo - no 12.1 sound), but it certainly would make life a lot easier. Of course, if I were king, I'd forbid (a) encryption of OTA content regardless of provider, and (b) in house or exclusive contracts for production of decoding hardware by network providers. CableCard would be required to be national, fee-free standard, too.
Did I mention in the original post I wanted a pony?
Magnatune et. al. are great, but it's not apples to apples. AllofMP3 sells the same music without DRM that you can only get with DRM in other outlets. Its all fine to bash the top 100 here on/., but there really is a lot of market there. If you ignore the legal loopholes AllofMP3 is exploiting (they're practically Americans!) you get to see a pay-for-quality model on mainstream music. It has much more applicability than trying to compare the major lables to smaller labels, or trying to glean some data from P2P networks, because the product and the market are the same.
There must be some sort of Godwin's Law for AllofMP3 references.
DirecTV has already done it, and that's more than half of the sat world to most consumers. Of course, they cannabalized their (mumble mumble) data service to do it. Dish just keeps adding dishes to the lawn to bring in more sats.
It takes less bandwidth for digital cable than OTA, and having two hundred more shopping channels isn't exactly on consumer's must-have-now list.
10 years is a long time. Consumer HD devices have been out for quite some time, it's been the encoding that has kept the whole thing from going anywhere. Most of the problems with the roll out stem from the FCCs total lack of backbone in setting the standard (singular). Instead, we got a "whatever you guy want" spec that is a royal PITA to implement. And don't even think of arguing VSB or QAM. As a consumer, I don't give a shit which has more technical superiority in certain circumstances - I want it to work. The FCC should have mandated a single type of encoding. Period. We all agree that VHS was chosen over Betamax for user-friendliness over quality - but you get enough eggheads and technophiles in a room with the bean counters and you can pretty much just ask the consumer to drop trou and bend over.
Maybe everyone has applied for hardship extensions - hey, it kept all but one of my local stations from having to convert to digital broadcasts for 4-5 years.
Seriously, though, I'd forgotten it was coming up because it had been delayed so long. Of course, we could all be watching HD on either full sets or STBs if the FCC had had the balls to decide on a single ATSC format 20 years ago. Instead, they "let the industry and market forces" decide. Apparently, the industry prefers a clusterfuck, 'cause that's what they got.
There are two possibilities for the lack of digital tuners: (1) there's so much stock that we won't see them for a year and/or (2) every body is switching to providing "monitors" witht he next release, figuring it's still more profitable to produce a small set without any tuner than to have to include a digital tuner. With the market penetration of cable and satellite STBs, they may not be wrong (much to the dismay of the 10-15% of us that still get terrestrial broadcasts over the air).
What, you can't buy a R1 DVD player off of ebay just as easily as you can buy the DVDs? There are also a plethora of region free players. If you're going to break the law by importing contraband content, you may as well illegally import somehting to play it on.;-)
Good thing you don't have our commercial where a couple is driving on two wheels up the side of a building. That's got to be illegal. (Note that there is a disclaimer that driving on the edge of buildings is fantasy, and should not be attempted, iirc - this is America, land of the lawyers).
(1) Poor penetration of high speed net access. Delivering ATSC 720p ODP programming will saturate all but the absolute fastest residential pipes, and even then there would only be one stream at a time available. Overcompression and pipe optimization help the few iptv over fiber providers. If some people have this and others don't, then its more likely to lead to
(2) Piracy. Who wants all those precious little bits out there, just waiting to be swapped for free? I mean, except everyone save the studio execs.
(3) Product cannabalism. If you can get what you want, when you want it, for a "reasonable" fee, it's likely to cut someone or some product out of the media food chain. Since the law of media is that no revenue source shall ever see a reduced cash flow (except when complaining about those nasty pirates), this causes problems. Overhauling the way you do business to make "just as much money" some other way is not a viable business strategy when you control the game. Preserving revenue streams and expanding into non-competing streams is where they really want to go, not replacement of revenue streams.
Let me just say that, as an American, I feel entirely superior in my media consumption, as I have the ability to watch 3 minutes after every 5 minutes of TV show, stand in long queue lines, pay high prices for seating and refreshments, all to watch 20 mins of lead-up-to-the-main-feature advertisements before I get to watch the poor quality movie, only to then wait several months before I can purchase the DVD, which rapidly gets superceded by the arrival by the Gold Edition, then the Extra Gold Directors Cut Edition, then the SuperMegaHypeUltraBlaster edition, up to a year or more before you get to get caught up in the whirlpool!
Quite honestly, I'd say you're in the perfect position. With global commerce, you can get the DVD, rip it to disc, and watch the whole thing before the theatrical release even get to Australia! Of course, that's 6 months after you could have downloaded it of oosnet-yay (the first rule of...) as a screener or cam-capture (they're getting better you know, thanks to the Canadians).
Of course, none of this makes up for the fact that we (and I mean "we" in the most generic, ugly American sense, not me personally) are churning out an amazing volume of absolute crap every year, which we so carefully delay in sending you.
Somehow, in the era before the internet and digital cinema, it made a certain amount of sense to have a staggered release. Given enough theaters with digital projection capabilities, it shouldn't really matter. I know that time is not here yet, but it's close enough that it could be. Maybe it's a little like HDTV in the US. If the FCC had had a backbone in the 90s, we could have all been happily watching 720p already. (And for you 1080i zealots - wouldn't it have been better to have 720p that actually worked than the spaghetti that is HDTV now?)
exuse me...NO, bartender, I'm just fine...in fact you can top me off if you would. Of course I won't be driving home...
Iran says the same stuff about the US in Iraq. They say it's provovative for us to stay - a destabilizing force in the region. That we are only there to prepare for war with Iran.
I've got news for you - Americans list wanting to invade Iran somewhere below "cutting off our own leg and eating it." But it's a political rallying cry. To have good, you must have evil (thanks to K. Vonnegut and Ms. Hawk from 11th grade literature for that insight). Who is more evil than someone half a world away, with different color skin, different clothes, different customs, and a reading from a different holy book?
Yes, the proper response should have been "we don't care[1]." But it's worth so much more political capital to make a big deal about it. The US administration has reason to give this legs - it's fresh, it's a threat, and it doesn't involve explaining how incompetent we were in Iraq. There's political and economic reasons to make this a big deal, when in reality the only people who should even consider giving it significant thought are Irans nearest neighbors.
[1] in this context, "don't care" should be pronouced "don't give a flying fuck"
Education? Exactly how do you expect education to protect people against a fairly common virus which can easily be transmitted through sexual contact between a monogamous pair?
If this is shown to work, you may as well chalk it up with the rest of the immunizations. The only reason people are getting all bent out of shape is that the disease affect the reproductive system of women. Why not spend the $400 on the vaccine and drop annual gyn visits to every other year (which are based on that time frame primarily for pap tests)? That'll save more than the cost of the immunization in four years, tops.
Mandatory vaccines aren't about protecting a particular person from getting a disease, they're about protecting the population. If it weren't for everyone esle, I'd say your kid can just skip them all. The problem is that your kid goes to school with my kid, and I don't want her to get some of the diseases that are out there.
I just wanted to say thanks for operating this way, and I hope you've received enough from registrations to make it worth your while. I don't use BlueBox, but I appreciate the thought.
I will admit that I have way too much pirated software on my system at home. Of course, I'm also not using most of it. For the most part, I prefer to demo software I've never used - it's just too hard to get through the marketing hype to determine if it really works for me. I must have thirty or forty apps for video conversion. I use three. No, scratch that - I'm down to two now. One is freeware, and the other I registered.
Sadly, 15 day - and sometimes 30 day - trials just aren't enough. Because I'm busy, I may install something to try it, and then not really get to try it out fully for a couple of months. Which means I either get a cracked copy to try it, or I pass.
While I may not have all the software I own registered, I make sure to register those that really help - even those that don't require it. Since I'm not a programmer, I do rely on these "little" apps to help out. Rename1-4a, IrfanView, and a couple of others I find indespensible. I always make sure I pay for anything I'm still using after 6 months. If I 'm still using it, it's got to be good enough to pay for. Oddly, I still have some crakced versions I use becuase I'm too lazy to enter the real SNs. I have two or three versions of Nero floating around, not all of them with legitimate SNs, but I have three consecutive version retail registry numbers I paid for, so I'm calling it even.
Anyway, thanks for being generous. Some of us out here really appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the thing. Most college students share files. It's been happening since people could record - Reel-to-reel, 8 tracks, cassettes...it's just on the internet now. By the RIAA's definition, they are actually guilty. The jury is still out on whos side the law supports (no pun intended).
If I sat down with 100 college students that had a P2P program running on their machine and files in their upload directory, I'm guessing that 100 of them would have swapped files with other users on the network. If I tried 10,000, I might find a dozen who haven't, and just forgot they installed it.
We're not talking about grandma who had a precoscious 7 year old over for the weekend a couple of months ago. This is the prime demograpic for the wares the RIAA is selling.
I think the current usage of copyright law totally defeats the purpose of copyright in the first place, but we're not talking about innocent bystanders or people who 'just don't understand computers' here.
No, you can't wind this game, especially not on slashdot.
Renting is a antiquated term when viewed with respect to digital media of any type. The biggest issue is that there has been a tiered pricing model in the past based on length of access - that access was limited by a physical medium. Both the software and music industries recognized that there is no "rental" when the data is so easy to reproduce as to be trivial - and in response they made certain that copyright law forbid the rental of the physical media which contained those works (I don't have the citiation, but in the US it is true). For video, it was relatively expensive and/or inconvenient to copy the works, and rental stores flourished. I still remember annual and initiation fees (many north of $100) just to have the priveledge to rent the movies.
The idea of renting something doesn't really make sense in a world where there are no incremental costs to produce, and no exclusivity of use of an item. But there's the problem, too. Most consumers put a lower price expectation on a "loaned" item than to own the item - that's natural because we've all grown up to believe in scarcity. There is no scarcity in digital media - the first copy costs an insane amount to produce; the second costs almost nothing. Now, on the opposite side of that debate are the content providers/producers. They value their end-user item at a fixed cost, as if there were an incremental production, packaging, handling, and delivery cost - just like they've always had. In return for reducing or eliminating most of those costs, a lower fee may be paid for a time-limited use. Except that digital media eliminates nearly all of the incremental costs.
So we're at a stalemate where consumers expect a $2-$3 product and the producers want to sell a $20 product. No, let me correct that - the producers expect to sell a $30 product - the "suggested retail price" - even though consumers are used to finding the traditional product at a significant discount, closer to $20. So you've got a 10:1 expectation gap as a result of the data revolution. Until that gets settled, there will be DRM, and nobody will really be happy.
How true. I remember looking forward to geekily flipping through it's pages. I remember when the first desktop dropped below $1000, and laptops dipped below $1500. Midwest Micro and Dirt Cheap Drives come to mind. Man, that was a long time ago.
Imagine how easily this could have been avoided had they funneled just half of the board's compensation into IT expenditures.
I understand the attempt at humor, but you may be more correct than you intended. Without really knowing the details, my understanding of this patent was that everybody thought they have already complied, but some portion of the patent was effectively backdated and became a "new" requirement for full licensing. There may yet be patents that Vorbis violates that have not surfaced, which are applicable to the code base and predate the Vorbis development. That would suck.
This may be one of those fine-line cases. Making a work available in meatspace may not cross the line, on the web probably does, and doing so on using P2P software (for which the primary intent is mutual distribution of files) definietly does. Not that I think the law actually says that, just that the practical application suggests it. Sadly, laws are finite in scope and all have loophole between intent and application. Depending on the situation it may work for you or against you. Laws written for physical media don't translate well to digital space where both delivery and reproduction costs are essentially zero.
Software exists for OCR from camera sources such as cell phones. Would the presence of, say, a bookstore which allows patrons to browse the shelves and - presumably - photograph the pages be liable under this expansion? What are the special circumstances for libraries, and could they be considered liable under this distribution interpretation?
It would be nice if MS created a group of tweaks (menu style if necessary, but not three layers embedded I'd hope) that would reset the default to maximum speed of operation, and let you de-optimize it from there. As with many others here, I have my desktop set to windows classic mode. I've tried the changes over the years, but quite honetly I thought NT3.51 pretty much got it right. I never want to see my computer fall behind my input. With two billion operations a second, it should never have to.
Of course, what I want to know is why it's taken him 5 years to teach people to use exloprer's Files and Folders pane. It's really not that hard. ;-)
Making the tool: okay
Using tool: okay
Showing others how to use the tool: still okay
Selling the tool: not okay.
At this point, I'd say he's in the clear unless he's selling the tools or the schematics (though you probably can sell the schematics, since you apparently can sell access to the Patent database.) You actually have to make something and sell it to violate a patent - personal use is just fine.
You're kidding, right?
I'm not an expert on LED lighting, but most of the white LEDs I've seen are the result of an LED pumping fluorescent compounds to produce a "white" light made up of discrete bandwidths. That's the same problem we have with current fluorescents - they produce lousy color rendition. The "warm" ones end up either too pink or too yellow. You can't buy a consumer CFL with better than an 85CRI, and most are in the 70s. Okay, that last part is a guess, but when the manufacturers won't even quote a color temp or CRI, you know it's going to look like crap.
LEDs can be efficient, but they are limited by some of the same problems as fluorsecents when it comes to color rendition. And, just like fluorescents, as the CRI goes up, the efficiency goes down.
It's called an iPod, I think.
Seriously, this thing may run a version OS X, but it's going to be nowhere near the functionality of the full OS since you won't be allowed to install anything but the embedded apps.
If you just want one to play with, the price is $211 higher than the advertised rate, no phone service included. Go in, pay for the phone and the $36 connection fee, then cancel the contract and write a check for the $175 early termination fee.
I pulled it out of my...um...
r _satellite.html
;-)
No. Someone else here quoted 30%. I guessed based solely on my personal experience.
A little googling got me:
Here you go:
27% satellite penetration as of 8/2005 - http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/jdpowe
59% cable penetration as of 12/2006 - http://www.ncta.com/ContentView.aspx?contentId=54
So that's 86% penetration of satellite and cable, leaving 14% either without TV entirely or relying on OTA.
I'd say my ass was pretty accurate today
And that's partly my point.
I specifically meant to compare VSB and QAM. Oh, sure, you can double the bandwidth over cable with QAM, but do you have to? Would it not have been better to have a single tuner standard, with a single encoding standard, and a single resolution standard? I'm an audio/video geek, I admit it. But to be honest, after watching a decade of failed product after failed product I'm inclined to believe the Television should be like a Mac - it should just work. It's not optimal, it's not the best you can get, it certainly puts limitations on the delivery content (booo - no 12.1 sound), but it certainly would make life a lot easier. Of course, if I were king, I'd forbid (a) encryption of OTA content regardless of provider, and (b) in house or exclusive contracts for production of decoding hardware by network providers. CableCard would be required to be national, fee-free standard, too.
Did I mention in the original post I wanted a pony?
In Soviet Russia...aw hell.
/., but there really is a lot of market there. If you ignore the legal loopholes AllofMP3 is exploiting (they're practically Americans!) you get to see a pay-for-quality model on mainstream music. It has much more applicability than trying to compare the major lables to smaller labels, or trying to glean some data from P2P networks, because the product and the market are the same.
Magnatune et. al. are great, but it's not apples to apples. AllofMP3 sells the same music without DRM that you can only get with DRM in other outlets. Its all fine to bash the top 100 here on
There must be some sort of Godwin's Law for AllofMP3 references.
DirecTV has already done it, and that's more than half of the sat world to most consumers. Of course, they cannabalized their (mumble mumble) data service to do it. Dish just keeps adding dishes to the lawn to bring in more sats.
It takes less bandwidth for digital cable than OTA, and having two hundred more shopping channels isn't exactly on consumer's must-have-now list.
10 years is a long time. Consumer HD devices have been out for quite some time, it's been the encoding that has kept the whole thing from going anywhere. Most of the problems with the roll out stem from the FCCs total lack of backbone in setting the standard (singular). Instead, we got a "whatever you guy want" spec that is a royal PITA to implement. And don't even think of arguing VSB or QAM. As a consumer, I don't give a shit which has more technical superiority in certain circumstances - I want it to work. The FCC should have mandated a single type of encoding. Period. We all agree that VHS was chosen over Betamax for user-friendliness over quality - but you get enough eggheads and technophiles in a room with the bean counters and you can pretty much just ask the consumer to drop trou and bend over.
Maybe everyone has applied for hardship extensions - hey, it kept all but one of my local stations from having to convert to digital broadcasts for 4-5 years.
Seriously, though, I'd forgotten it was coming up because it had been delayed so long. Of course, we could all be watching HD on either full sets or STBs if the FCC had had the balls to decide on a single ATSC format 20 years ago. Instead, they "let the industry and market forces" decide. Apparently, the industry prefers a clusterfuck, 'cause that's what they got.
There are two possibilities for the lack of digital tuners: (1) there's so much stock that we won't see them for a year and/or (2) every body is switching to providing "monitors" witht he next release, figuring it's still more profitable to produce a small set without any tuner than to have to include a digital tuner. With the market penetration of cable and satellite STBs, they may not be wrong (much to the dismay of the 10-15% of us that still get terrestrial broadcasts over the air).
What, you can't buy a R1 DVD player off of ebay just as easily as you can buy the DVDs? There are also a plethora of region free players. If you're going to break the law by importing contraband content, you may as well illegally import somehting to play it on. ;-)
Good thing you don't have our commercial where a couple is driving on two wheels up the side of a building. That's got to be illegal. (Note that there is a disclaimer that driving on the edge of buildings is fantasy, and should not be attempted, iirc - this is America, land of the lawyers).
There are three things stopping them:
(1) Poor penetration of high speed net access. Delivering ATSC 720p ODP programming will saturate all but the absolute fastest residential pipes, and even then there would only be one stream at a time available. Overcompression and pipe optimization help the few iptv over fiber providers. If some people have this and others don't, then its more likely to lead to
(2) Piracy. Who wants all those precious little bits out there, just waiting to be swapped for free? I mean, except everyone save the studio execs.
(3) Product cannabalism. If you can get what you want, when you want it, for a "reasonable" fee, it's likely to cut someone or some product out of the media food chain. Since the law of media is that no revenue source shall ever see a reduced cash flow (except when complaining about those nasty pirates), this causes problems. Overhauling the way you do business to make "just as much money" some other way is not a viable business strategy when you control the game. Preserving revenue streams and expanding into non-competing streams is where they really want to go, not replacement of revenue streams.
Let me just say that, as an American, I feel entirely superior in my media consumption, as I have the ability to watch 3 minutes after every 5 minutes of TV show, stand in long queue lines, pay high prices for seating and refreshments, all to watch 20 mins of lead-up-to-the-main-feature advertisements before I get to watch the poor quality movie, only to then wait several months before I can purchase the DVD, which rapidly gets superceded by the arrival by the Gold Edition, then the Extra Gold Directors Cut Edition, then the SuperMegaHypeUltraBlaster edition, up to a year or more before you get to get caught up in the whirlpool!
Quite honestly, I'd say you're in the perfect position. With global commerce, you can get the DVD, rip it to disc, and watch the whole thing before the theatrical release even get to Australia! Of course, that's 6 months after you could have downloaded it of oosnet-yay (the first rule of...) as a screener or cam-capture (they're getting better you know, thanks to the Canadians).
Of course, none of this makes up for the fact that we (and I mean "we" in the most generic, ugly American sense, not me personally) are churning out an amazing volume of absolute crap every year, which we so carefully delay in sending you.
Somehow, in the era before the internet and digital cinema, it made a certain amount of sense to have a staggered release. Given enough theaters with digital projection capabilities, it shouldn't really matter. I know that time is not here yet, but it's close enough that it could be. Maybe it's a little like HDTV in the US. If the FCC had had a backbone in the 90s, we could have all been happily watching 720p already. (And for you 1080i zealots - wouldn't it have been better to have 720p that actually worked than the spaghetti that is HDTV now?)
exuse me...NO, bartender, I'm just fine...in fact you can top me off if you would. Of course I won't be driving home...
Iran says the same stuff about the US in Iraq. They say it's provovative for us to stay - a destabilizing force in the region. That we are only there to prepare for war with Iran.
I've got news for you - Americans list wanting to invade Iran somewhere below "cutting off our own leg and eating it." But it's a political rallying cry. To have good, you must have evil (thanks to K. Vonnegut and Ms. Hawk from 11th grade literature for that insight). Who is more evil than someone half a world away, with different color skin, different clothes, different customs, and a reading from a different holy book?
Yes, the proper response should have been "we don't care[1]." But it's worth so much more political capital to make a big deal about it. The US administration has reason to give this legs - it's fresh, it's a threat, and it doesn't involve explaining how incompetent we were in Iraq. There's political and economic reasons to make this a big deal, when in reality the only people who should even consider giving it significant thought are Irans nearest neighbors.
[1] in this context, "don't care" should be pronouced "don't give a flying fuck"
Education? Exactly how do you expect education to protect people against a fairly common virus which can easily be transmitted through sexual contact between a monogamous pair?
If this is shown to work, you may as well chalk it up with the rest of the immunizations. The only reason people are getting all bent out of shape is that the disease affect the reproductive system of women. Why not spend the $400 on the vaccine and drop annual gyn visits to every other year (which are based on that time frame primarily for pap tests)? That'll save more than the cost of the immunization in four years, tops.
Mandatory vaccines aren't about protecting a particular person from getting a disease, they're about protecting the population. If it weren't for everyone esle, I'd say your kid can just skip them all. The problem is that your kid goes to school with my kid, and I don't want her to get some of the diseases that are out there.
I just wanted to say thanks for operating this way, and I hope you've received enough from registrations to make it worth your while. I don't use BlueBox, but I appreciate the thought.
I will admit that I have way too much pirated software on my system at home. Of course, I'm also not using most of it. For the most part, I prefer to demo software I've never used - it's just too hard to get through the marketing hype to determine if it really works for me. I must have thirty or forty apps for video conversion. I use three. No, scratch that - I'm down to two now. One is freeware, and the other I registered.
Sadly, 15 day - and sometimes 30 day - trials just aren't enough. Because I'm busy, I may install something to try it, and then not really get to try it out fully for a couple of months. Which means I either get a cracked copy to try it, or I pass.
While I may not have all the software I own registered, I make sure to register those that really help - even those that don't require it. Since I'm not a programmer, I do rely on these "little" apps to help out. Rename1-4a, IrfanView, and a couple of others I find indespensible. I always make sure I pay for anything I'm still using after 6 months. If I 'm still using it, it's got to be good enough to pay for. Oddly, I still have some crakced versions I use becuase I'm too lazy to enter the real SNs. I have two or three versions of Nero floating around, not all of them with legitimate SNs, but I have three consecutive version retail registry numbers I paid for, so I'm calling it even.
Anyway, thanks for being generous. Some of us out here really appreciate it.
Would you pay an extra $50 ($650), swallow your Mac pride, and by WM like the HTC Athena?