The "armani" shirts you bought for $10 were counterfeits. Not necessarily low quality, but definitely counterfeit.
The very well organised groups who make the counterfeits actually have members who get employed in the official Armani (Gucci, Prada, etc.) production lines, so they can match all the little tags and codes and everything on the product almost perfectly.
"Another proof at how the left wing doesn't know what its extreme left wing is doing."
Both the Elephant and Donkey parties are actually right wing parties. Really, how different are their platforms? The "extreme" left wing parties don't have much say at all in US politics.
"Who the hell are they giving tariff royalties to from blank media? That's asinine. The CPCC are just like our RIAA, all a pack of crooks. If you want royalties to go to the Artists, than lower the damn price of the music your sell and people might actually buy a CD. Inflating the price of a CD to pay for the CPCC/ RIAA Rats, who claim to "protect" Artists is wrong! I'm curious how much of these collected tariffs actually makes its way back to the Artists."
The tariffs go "to organizations representing record companies, producers, and others who own the rights to copyrighted material."
"Since the regime was established in December 1999, the CPCC has collected over $87 million in levies. According to the CPCC's website, however, copyright holders have only received $26 million to date."
Pioneer (now known as Geneon) has recently fixed this problem. Check out any release or preorder with a street date of June 2005 or later. For titles with MSRPs of US$29.95 and US$24.95, the Canadian MSRPs are now CDN$36.95 and CDN$29.95 respectively. Check out this thread for more information.
Though at this point there is still no hope for all those older titles with the stupidly high price points.
"I'm not aware of a site called "Amazonspaymentsystemsucks.com," nor have I heard any horror stories about Amazon stiffing customers."
The problem with amazon is that their DVD sections (marketplace only) are rife with bootlegs, fraudulent copies, knock-offs, etc. Look up any DVD classified as "anime" and any seasoned buyer will spot 95% of the items as boots.
There's no easy way to alert amazon or other shoppers about the bootleg sellers and amazon probably does not want to know because they make money from every sale. Considering the thousands of feedback each one of these bootleg importers has gotten, I shudder to think of how many people thought all such products are garbage and then avoided the legitimate, high quality and more expensive releases.
" Who's paying a buck a piece for DVD+Rs? I bought a 25-pack for 8 bucks at CompUSA last week?"
That would be people who buy quality media. You can definitely get DVDR discs for less than 50c each, but the Princo or Infodisc-manufactured garbage will become unreadable relatively quickly.
"There is nothing wrong with speadsheets and they are very usefull for analysis but what happens is people try to use them for everything and eventually you have a spreadsheet that is used as a company database."
Nono... Please, ignore this fool!
(Note: I am only saying this because I have made thousands upon thousands of dollars designing proper database systems systems for companies whose excel databases got out of control and then imploded, and I intend to continue making such money in the future.;-)
"Tell that to the hypothetical mother who put her baby's photo CD into her drive, only to have the disk explode into a million pieces, or the student who can't get his photos or report off the disk, or the guy who put his family's Christmas present onto a DVD that isn't readable in any other players.
These devices are about the most important I/O device a computer has besides the monitor and keyboard."
Backing up your data is more important than the reliability of any I/O device. If I have something important to store (like my iPhoto library) then I am danged sure to back it up on two different physical hard drives and DVD+Rw. If your CD with the sole copy of your important data dies, it is your own fault for not burning it twice on different brands/batches of discs!
"There is a stigma to making extremely small purchases with CCs, and that seems to be where I spend all of my cash."
It's not a stigma. It's because there are fees levied by the credit card companies. The merchants have to pay a percentage of the purchase plus a base fee to the provider of their merchant account. As purchases get smaller, these fees become a significant percentage of the purchase. Therefore merchants do not want you to use your CC for small purchases for very quantifiable reasons.
This is also why some small businesses do not accept credit cards. It eats into their profits.
Everything in Japan is expensive. DVDs. CDs. Housing. Fruits and vegetables. Their economic system is based on a system of lots of middlemen that all take a cut, sort of like accepted inefficiencies so more people can have jobs at the expense of higher prices.
I challenge you to find any hard data showing that Japanese television producers need DVD sales to break even. And I also challenge you to do it in properly constructed sentences without the childish insertion of sections all in caps.
"If you want Japanese cartoons before they're released in English, learn Japanese. It's fun and easy if you're not an idiot, and you can do it while you're at work if you have headphones and a cd-rom drive."
This is a very naive comment. Even if you do know the language, importing the DVDs from Japan is incredibly expensive. (It's not like everyone in the world has access to Japanese network TV!) It's not uncommon to have two episodes to a DVD that costs US$50 before any kind of shipping or customs fees. The profit margins must be incredible here, because the price per episode on the US discs is perhaps one quarter of that.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the popular series, Witch Hunter Robin. The Japanese release is thirteen discs long @ 5000 yen (USD 48) per two episode disc. The official legal US release (not to be confused with the many Hong Kong bootlegs) has an MSRP of US$30 per four episode disc, and you can get it for closer to $20 if you shop around. This is a very typical case. The R2 discs cost even more after factoring in shipping from Japan.
So is learning Japanese easy and fun? Maybe. If you feel like learning the 2000+ JLPT level 1 kanji, each with multiple pronounciations and a specific stroke order. But paying for the discs is NOT easy and fun. While this does not legitimise fansubs in any way, it does show that your argument for abandoning fansubs for learning Japanese is poorly conceived.
" I got a couple of Washington Mutual phishes that a URL like http://www.wamu.com/chooseyourstate.asp?redirect=h ttp://some.ip.address/~username/.wamu/index.html, so the initial link actually did go to the right site. Probably sneaky enough to lure in my parents, unfortunately.
Oh, and no, I haven't verified even the Washington Mutual part of the URL."
I think WAMU customers deserve to get hit by these things because their bank is so stupid and because the fraudsters actually created quite a good replica of the bank's site. Let me elaborate:
I also received this spam and tried to report it to the bank. (The spamcop report only reported to some address in Asia whose owner probably can't read English anyway.) The bank has this online form reporting system that filters out a wide variety of characters. It would not even accept the URL of the phishing website.
So I told them I had received such a spam and asked them to contact me for the URL because their webform did not accept such characters. They never contacted me. Two days later, the scam site was still up.
Crap, there goes my joke. (In case you aren't aware, that was a play on Malda's comments back in 2001 about the 'lame' new invention from Apple called the iPod.)
"Only a fool would try to fly by pulling their hair upwards. Everyone knows you have to throw yourself at the ground and miss to fly."
Technically, if you took off your shoe and threw it at the ground with enough force, the 'kickback' from this action would cause you to 'fly' for a short time. (So says Newtons' Third Law of Motion.)
"But really, old monitors and other computer parts should go to proper recycling facilities due to the heavy metals and other dangerous chemicals in them that should not be kept away from open landfills."
Whoops, I obviously meant "should not reach open landfills."
"Why not? Plenty of extremely superstitious fundamentalists thought it was all going to end on 12/31/1999, after all. And there are still those who try to adjust that for what the believe was the most likely date for the actual birth of their diety."
Damn straight. One of my relatives married into a family of fundamentalists from the Southern US, and come the end of 1999, she and her husband 'escaped' up here to Canada for a while until the rest of the family figured out that the world was not coming to and end.
"Why be alarmed by this. If I recall correctly from teh xfiles movie. December 2012 will be the end of the mayan calendar and thus the end of our civilization."
No, that just means that the next cycle of ~12K years of the Mayan calendar begins. There's no need for alarm.
It must have been nice to live in the Mayan civilisation though. Imagine how infrequently you'd need a new calendar!:P
But seriously, I wonder if anthropoligists 5000 years from now will think we believed that civilisation would end at the conclusion of the year '9999' in our calendar.
Slashdot Mirror
The very well organised groups who make the counterfeits actually have members who get employed in the official Armani (Gucci, Prada, etc.) production lines, so they can match all the little tags and codes and everything on the product almost perfectly.
"Because that worked so well for Al Gore, didn't it?" Absolutely, look at the voting totals from that election for the proof.
Both the Elephant and Donkey parties are actually right wing parties. Really, how different are their platforms? The "extreme" left wing parties don't have much say at all in US politics.
The tariffs go "to organizations representing record companies, producers, and others who own the rights to copyrighted material."
"Since the regime was established in December 1999, the CPCC has collected over $87 million in levies. According to the CPCC's website, however, copyright holders have only received $26 million to date."
(source)
Though at this point there is still no hope for all those older titles with the stupidly high price points.
That's my whole point.
The problem with amazon is that their DVD sections (marketplace only) are rife with bootlegs, fraudulent copies, knock-offs, etc. Look up any DVD classified as "anime" and any seasoned buyer will spot 95% of the items as boots.
There's no easy way to alert amazon or other shoppers about the bootleg sellers and amazon probably does not want to know because they make money from every sale. Considering the thousands of feedback each one of these bootleg importers has gotten, I shudder to think of how many people thought all such products are garbage and then avoided the legitimate, high quality and more expensive releases.
Full USB support
FAT32
Though I see what you're trying to say and I think your point makes sense.
That would be people who buy quality media. You can definitely get DVDR discs for less than 50c each, but the Princo or Infodisc-manufactured garbage will become unreadable relatively quickly.
(1.0. - 1.0.3)"
I downloaded it four times for the same machine:
1.0
1.01
1.02
1.03
:-)
Nono ... Please, ignore this fool!
(Note: I am only saying this because I have made thousands upon thousands of dollars designing proper database systems systems for companies whose excel databases got out of control and then imploded, and I intend to continue making such money in the future. ;-)
Backing up your data is more important than the reliability of any I/O device. If I have something important to store (like my iPhoto library) then I am danged sure to back it up on two different physical hard drives and DVD+Rw. If your CD with the sole copy of your important data dies, it is your own fault for not burning it twice on different brands/batches of discs!
It's not a stigma. It's because there are fees levied by the credit card companies. The merchants have to pay a percentage of the purchase plus a base fee to the provider of their merchant account. As purchases get smaller, these fees become a significant percentage of the purchase. Therefore merchants do not want you to use your CC for small purchases for very quantifiable reasons.
This is also why some small businesses do not accept credit cards. It eats into their profits.
I challenge you to find any hard data showing that Japanese television producers need DVD sales to break even. And I also challenge you to do it in properly constructed sentences without the childish insertion of sections all in caps.
This is a very naive comment. Even if you do know the language, importing the DVDs from Japan is incredibly expensive. (It's not like everyone in the world has access to Japanese network TV!) It's not uncommon to have two episodes to a DVD that costs US$50 before any kind of shipping or customs fees. The profit margins must be incredible here, because the price per episode on the US discs is perhaps one quarter of that.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the popular series, Witch Hunter Robin. The Japanese release is thirteen discs long @ 5000 yen (USD 48) per two episode disc. The official legal US release (not to be confused with the many Hong Kong bootlegs) has an MSRP of US$30 per four episode disc, and you can get it for closer to $20 if you shop around. This is a very typical case. The R2 discs cost even more after factoring in shipping from Japan.
So is learning Japanese easy and fun? Maybe. If you feel like learning the 2000+ JLPT level 1 kanji, each with multiple pronounciations and a specific stroke order. But paying for the discs is NOT easy and fun. While this does not legitimise fansubs in any way, it does show that your argument for abandoning fansubs for learning Japanese is poorly conceived.
I think WAMU customers deserve to get hit by these things because their bank is so stupid and because the fraudsters actually created quite a good replica of the bank's site. Let me elaborate:
I also received this spam and tried to report it to the bank. (The spamcop report only reported to some address in Asia whose owner probably can't read English anyway.) The bank has this online form reporting system that filters out a wide variety of characters. It would not even accept the URL of the phishing website.
So I told them I had received such a spam and asked them to contact me for the URL because their webform did not accept such characters. They never contacted me. Two days later, the scam site was still up.
I would never open a WAMU account.
Sorry, after 50G of transfer in 1 day, I had to take the videos down.
XE.com - Universal Currency Converter
I will probably re-encode these to MPEG1 and re-upload.
clicky
Crap, there goes my joke. (In case you aren't aware, that was a play on Malda's comments back in 2001 about the 'lame' new invention from Apple called the iPod.)
Technically, if you took off your shoe and threw it at the ground with enough force, the 'kickback' from this action would cause you to 'fly' for a short time. (So says Newtons' Third Law of Motion.)
Whoops, I obviously meant "should not reach open landfills."
No wireless. Less space than a Vaio. Lame.
Damn straight. One of my relatives married into a family of fundamentalists from the Southern US, and come the end of 1999, she and her husband 'escaped' up here to Canada for a while until the rest of the family figured out that the world was not coming to and end.
No, that just means that the next cycle of ~12K years of the Mayan calendar begins. There's no need for alarm.
It must have been nice to live in the Mayan civilisation though. Imagine how infrequently you'd need a new calendar! :P
But seriously, I wonder if anthropoligists 5000 years from now will think we believed that civilisation would end at the conclusion of the year '9999' in our calendar.