Technically no, but they might as well be. Large corps are using the courts like a weapon. Threatening to sue someone is threatening to bankrupt them - even if the suit has no legal justification.
You are kidding, right? I've rarely played a more repetitive game. Endless hexagonal levels. Snooze.
The jeep (Warthog?) was the best part of the game and it was too sparse. The allies were cool, but rarely of any use, just NPCs to die.
The best moment in Halo was with an NPC in the back of the warthog jumping over a sand dune into the midst of a bunch of enemies, with the guy in the back whooping about the jump. Unfortunately that got old.
Unreal 2004 in Onslaught mode has better gameplay and, depressingly, almost as much story interaction.
Suck it up and quit defending games with crap that keeps them from being fun to play.
Crap like this means I can't sit down and play as much as I like of a game, replaying the fun bits, or getting through the annoying bits as quickly as possible. In other words, I bought it and I want to play it the way I like. Being forced through bad or lazy design to play it in a way reminiscent of a 1980s console isn't as much fun.
Have fun with playing Prince of Persia, I'll go play something designed for a computer. You know, something that isn't a button pushing frenzy. Something that users can mod and add content to. Pretty much not a console game, or a port of one.
Is there a "we" who have presented a hypocritical view? I have not.
I always said they should go after the offenders, not the creators or innocent users of the P2P systems.
When they started cracking down on the offending users my only complaints were that their scare tactics (like DirectTV) harmed the innocent and violated the privacy of innocent users, as well as punishing people beyond reason to deter others.
I really think the government should simply step in and try to enforce copyright. If we want consistent application of the laws we shouldn't expect companies to hire mercenaries to do it. If we, as a society, believe copyright is useful, we should help enforce it, and at the same time, keep the RIAA companies from going on a rampage.
Would piracy stop overnight even if *the* perfect solution was found, or would it take time for people to realize that kazaa was no longer the easiest solution?
But, what's really important is loss. Have the labels *ever* shown proof of a loss due to piracy? They claim that every copy of every song in existance would have been bought at full price but I know it's a lie. I grabbed a friend's MP3 collection for the trance/techno stuff and also got a bunch of pop music like BSpears which I'd have never paid for, but I simply haven't bothered to sort through and delete yet.
IMHO, once the interface and the convenience of the online stores gets to the point where it's easier to use than downloading a bunch of badly named rips, most of which I won't want, I'll go for it. But I'm not paying $1+ per track to discover I don't like it.
Yes, I realize that the "right" thing to do is not listen to the music, but I don't think anyone wants that. Artists want money, and to share their music, and I want to hear that music. I'll spend money to do so, but only if the overall process isn't painful. If you prevent my listening to music without paying first (no free trial) I simply won't buy anything. Crack down too much and you'll find that nobody is willing to buy.
Most "creators" do so only because of access to earlier media. If all media in existance was locked and required per-use access fees, or in many cases, didn't work because the publisher went out of business and their access control servers were removed, how would anyone learn anything?
Those "original" creators owe a huge debt to society and they default on that debt when they package their work in such a way that new generation can't tinker.
Copyright is a give and take. You give me access to your work, and eventual full access, for which I (a taxpayer and thus a member of government) grant you a limited monopoly on the creation of that work. When you stop giving me anything, why should I still grant you anything?
IMHO, work sold in a DRMed form should lose its copyright because you're failing to provide your half of the bargain.
The user still posesses the key, or a device holding the key. Look at the XBox and SmartCard hacks to get an idea of what people are able to do to protected hardware. Besides, the ease of access to the key isn't directly relevant, as long as one user can access one key, everyone can posess unlocked media.
Besides, only some DRM schemes involve hardware, many like those on PCs, are all software based because there isn't (yet...) a key server chip on a PC.
If you want to quote yourself, that's fine, but paste a snippet and a link to the text. I'm not going to download and read a PDF on the off chance that you say something relevant.
Being able to ban imports is a very bad thing. You should be able to choose not to sell directly to some people - right of association and all, but not to restrict future owners of your work from associating (and selling) with those people.
Basically, once something goes to market you should lose *all* control over every purchased copy.
Your copyright does not mean I can't distribute modified copies of your work. If I buy a book and scribble out the dirty words and make margin notes and then sell it, it's perfectly legal. There are some technicalities that make this difficult with a CD, but the underlying law is the same. Perhaps one CD/DVD of the original and a CD with a patch file...
If you give me your code (by me buying your product, or whatever) and I modify it, I'm perfectly within my rights (as long as I don't create more than one copy - one copy is allowable because software usually won't run on the distribution media). If I then show you this copy it's not a violation, unless for some reason this counts as public display (which is probably legal with software anyways).
It's as if I scribble in a book and show an author the modified copy. Perfectly legal.
Your frantic call to your IP lawyer will just waste you money and make you look like an idiot. Partially for being upset at the idea of someone else seeing and commenting on your work, partly for being such a strict bastard, and partly for passing up the best candidate you're ever likely to see - someone who cares enough to present you with an example of real-world code and how they've discovered flaws in it.
Remember, copyright law was created to grant monopoly rights on the creation of copies, to protect your financial interests, nothing else. Nobody cares if you like what I write in the margins of your book - you lose the right to complain when you sell the book.
In the real world, how do you suppose someone demonstrates a need for the suits to purchase rights to a work? You grab a low-res copy of a photo and put the calendar or whatever over it, the suits like it and you arrange the licensing of the full-res image. You grab a bunch of samples from whatever music you have lying around and you make a dance mix, the suits hear it and get the lawyers to arrange licensing the bits you used.
This doesn't harm the original creator in any way and in fact helps them market their work.
Besides, it's exactly in line with the stated goal of copyright - to preserve the marketing rights for the creator, to encourage creation of new works, while enriching the public domain by making more works available for public use.
IMHO, if you DRM a work in such a way that nobody can build upon it (quote it, use pieces of it in a substantially new work, etc) you should lose the copyright on it. It's all about a give and take - my tax dollars fund the protection of your copyright, as long as I get an enriched public domain. When you stop living up to your end of the bargain I think you should lose my protection.
Exactly. Everything is going to be offensive to someone so it's a neverending fight. Further, the truly offensive has been going on for centuries and we need to give people the tools to see it for what it is, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that the media and the internet are the only ways of disseminating knowledge.
No, no, no. Restriction of speech does not make groups stronger. Free speech potentially does. But it's a cost of doing business and a necessity unless you want to enter into that deal with the devil where speech codes begin to infringe on everyone's rights and the rise of tyrannical governments becomes almost inevitable.
Do you have any proof of this? I've seen people drawn to things they can't talk about, thinking there's a mystique.
If everyone sees David Duke routinely insulted on TV it's not going to be popular to associate yourself with him. On the other hand, if what he says is so powerful "The Man" can't let him say it...
A few thin-skinned people might be hurt by going to a hateful website. That happens all the time with non-banned topics.
If Apple tried to use their monopoly control of the platform in the ways that Microsoft does, people would talk about breaking them up too. Apple has usually played well with companies that produce add-ons (software or hardware) and they're generally liked.
But a lawyer is going to tell you to settle with DirectTV, if they're a good lawyer at least, because that's the way to save money. This isn't finding $150 for an hour to talk to a lawyer, this is finding $5k or more in order to mount an effective defense, all to save paying $5k or so...
I agree about the jury thing, I can imagine many cases where five random people are likely to be directly opposed to my point of view.
The system might not need a total overhaul to be useful, it might even be 90% of the way there, but that 10% of exploitability is enough for someone like DirectTV to bankrupt thousands of people without any fear of the consequences.
As long as this is possible you have to doubt every judgement if one side is richer than the other. The trust people need to have in an impartial judicial system is gone. I personally have no faith in the ability of the US judicial system to uphold any freedoms if there's a corporation passing out a lot of "campaign contributions" to squash it. At this point I have no motivation to work inside the system because I don't believe the system works.
It's as if the police "only" framed 10% of the people they stopped. Nobody would trust them at all.
The point is that the difference is pointless semantics. It's merely a system by which an opponent with a large legal budget can bankrupt anyone, for anything.
Eventually, one trial is going to go against you for some reason and you're going to end up in jail or deep in debt, not for the actual offense, but some minor related event.
Fuck, why not just skip criminal trials, with these stupid standards of evidence and jump straight to a state-assisted civil trial. Don't bother locking up the criminals for crime, bankrupt them and then lock them up in the poor house.
I get it, but isn't it still unfair for a court to decide (jury or otherwise) that they couldn't prove that OJ killed his wife and thus he's innocent, and then another court to operate under the assumption that he killed his wife and is thus liable for damages?
They were suing him for damages during an event they can't legally claim he committed.
Isn't this obviously bunk?
This is why nobody respects the legal system. You're protected against double jeapordy, except that really you aren't because there are a million offenses you can be tried for during the hypothetical kidnapping and with punishments up the the judge you could end up going away for years for some minor crime (tresspassing) that happened when you walked past the scene of the murder they failed to prove you did.
Unfortunately the US legal system is next to worthless these days. If you don't settle, and quickly - not enough time to properly investigate the issue - DirectTV hit you with a high-dollar case and enough paperwork to choke a horse. A lawyer, or anyone with ready access to one, might be able to fight. Anyone else just got run over.
It simply isn't possible to represent yourself, especially on a budget.
This ignores twenty years of Microsoft history. Microsoft's strategy is to take an existing, BSDL, section of code and insert it (closed source) into their products. Later, when convenient, they make a slight backwards compatible change and wait for everyone to use it. Because it's closed and backwards compatible, nobody knows they aren't using the original. Five years later when they have more market share, MS removes the backwards compatibility and segments the market. This either locks customers to them, or "demonstrates the shoddy quality of their competitors".
They've tried to comoditize every protocol they've ever had significant market share in. HTML, Kerberos, Word documents (pointless changes every version), etc. They'd try TCP/IP as well except that they need the backbone of the internet and it's not leaving Unix anytime soon.
This isn't just Microsoft, look at everyone who will jump up in response to this post and say it's just good business sense. Feh. Good business sense, in the long run, is rounding up everyone who says that and killing them. Then, twenty years down the road we've been much more efficient because nobody keeps trying to fragment the user base of critical infrastructure.
Because of the risk of this, the risk that someone will intentionally try to sabotage the market to gain more control, I feel that all standards-implementing software *must* be GPLed before I'll trust it. Because of this, if the government (the funders of the invention of the internet) invents something I want it GPLed. Otherwise we're just sticking our necks in a noose for the next Microsoft to yank us around by.
A painter can do a single image very well. A game developer has to do the back of the image in case you jump up on the pedastal and walk around, they have to make it look good from a distance, or up close, and make it do something realistic when hit with a rocket.
Same with movies to a degree. You don't have to allow the viewer to select a viewpoint, but the Mona Lisa wouldn't be a very expressive actor unless you had a different master-level painting for every scene.
I like how GURPS does that. They've got a spectrum of rules, from trivial ones to decide the fate of thousands to hex maps and detailed step-by-step combat. They try to make the overall outcome about the same, which allows you to run most of the game quickly and yet give more detail to specific parts.
I often run both types of rules simultaneously. Let one player mark off their movement step by step and strategically try to disarm an opponent or gain a slight advantage through a series of complex feints and maneuver the enemy into bad footing, and let the other people roll a simple to-hit and damage roll.
I wish more games would do this. Let me play in 'arcade' mode for just general goofing around, but give me a more detailed more for when I'm getting better and I want to do expert-level moves. In Quake-type games there're usually two types of floors, ice and everything else. How about giving all the different surfaces different characteristics, from friction to noise-level? Let some bullets ricochet, allowing some level of indirect fire. But turn turn this off (for me and the bad guys) from beginner mode.
Driving games and flight sims do this, but it hasn't reached the majority. I'd love to see a game like Civ but where the battles could be resolved in either a Risk-like system of simple rolls, or a hex-based elaborate man-by-man system, and let me choose for each battle.
The process of democracy only works when it's honest and open - muck with that and you're well on the road to not having it. Some of the things the USA is doing are destroying personal freedoms and while they don't override the constitution, the lowered burden of proof needed to arrest and indefinately hold a terrorist (and who isn't, if you spin it right) make much of the constitution irrelevant.
Sure, the USA is better than Iraq, but it's also being held to higher standards. We expect censorship, unlawful arrests, government coverups, etc, in Iraq, but the USA should be above this. The USA is better only because people bitch like it's the end of the world when the smallest right gets violated. I'm sure Bush thinks he's doing good, but he's trying to fight terrorism with nuclear hand grenades, the collateral damage to freedoms in the USA is terrible.
I recently read (in a real newspaper, not some indie rag) about a meth dealer who got arrested and charged as a terrorist for making Weapons of Mass Destruction! Apparently the concept that meth isn't normally deadly and people voluntarily take it has escaped the government. Worse, 80% of the people I tell about this shrug and say "good, he's a drug dealer".
Argh! "... and when they came for me there was nobody left to speak up."
I'm Canadian, so it's not like I'm pushing my favorite party.
Let me know what you find, I'll be checking for perl modules that do this fairly soon and I'll tell you if I find anything.
You should also consider naming your photos with a five-digit number (prepend a zero at first), or six. I'm already pushing 30k (11k with the 300D plus 18k with the G2) and anticipating 100k...
Slashdot Mirror
Technically no, but they might as well be. Large corps are using the courts like a weapon. Threatening to sue someone is threatening to bankrupt them - even if the suit has no legal justification.
You mean the president?
You are kidding, right? I've rarely played a more repetitive game. Endless hexagonal levels. Snooze.
The jeep (Warthog?) was the best part of the game and it was too sparse. The allies were cool, but rarely of any use, just NPCs to die.
The best moment in Halo was with an NPC in the back of the warthog jumping over a sand dune into the midst of a bunch of enemies, with the guy in the back whooping about the jump. Unfortunately that got old.
Unreal 2004 in Onslaught mode has better gameplay and, depressingly, almost as much story interaction.
Suck it up and quit defending games with crap that keeps them from being fun to play.
Crap like this means I can't sit down and play as much as I like of a game, replaying the fun bits, or getting through the annoying bits as quickly as possible. In other words, I bought it and I want to play it the way I like. Being forced through bad or lazy design to play it in a way reminiscent of a 1980s console isn't as much fun.
Have fun with playing Prince of Persia, I'll go play something designed for a computer. You know, something that isn't a button pushing frenzy. Something that users can mod and add content to. Pretty much not a console game, or a port of one.
Is there a "we" who have presented a hypocritical view? I have not.
I always said they should go after the offenders, not the creators or innocent users of the P2P systems.
When they started cracking down on the offending users my only complaints were that their scare tactics (like DirectTV) harmed the innocent and violated the privacy of innocent users, as well as punishing people beyond reason to deter others.
I really think the government should simply step in and try to enforce copyright. If we want consistent application of the laws we shouldn't expect companies to hire mercenaries to do it. If we, as a society, believe copyright is useful, we should help enforce it, and at the same time, keep the RIAA companies from going on a rampage.
Would piracy stop overnight even if *the* perfect solution was found, or would it take time for people to realize that kazaa was no longer the easiest solution?
But, what's really important is loss. Have the labels *ever* shown proof of a loss due to piracy? They claim that every copy of every song in existance would have been bought at full price but I know it's a lie. I grabbed a friend's MP3 collection for the trance/techno stuff and also got a bunch of pop music like BSpears which I'd have never paid for, but I simply haven't bothered to sort through and delete yet.
IMHO, once the interface and the convenience of the online stores gets to the point where it's easier to use than downloading a bunch of badly named rips, most of which I won't want, I'll go for it. But I'm not paying $1+ per track to discover I don't like it.
Yes, I realize that the "right" thing to do is not listen to the music, but I don't think anyone wants that. Artists want money, and to share their music, and I want to hear that music. I'll spend money to do so, but only if the overall process isn't painful. If you prevent my listening to music without paying first (no free trial) I simply won't buy anything. Crack down too much and you'll find that nobody is willing to buy.
Most "creators" do so only because of access to earlier media. If all media in existance was locked and required per-use access fees, or in many cases, didn't work because the publisher went out of business and their access control servers were removed, how would anyone learn anything?
Those "original" creators owe a huge debt to society and they default on that debt when they package their work in such a way that new generation can't tinker.
Copyright is a give and take. You give me access to your work, and eventual full access, for which I (a taxpayer and thus a member of government) grant you a limited monopoly on the creation of that work. When you stop giving me anything, why should I still grant you anything?
IMHO, work sold in a DRMed form should lose its copyright because you're failing to provide your half of the bargain.
The user still posesses the key, or a device holding the key. Look at the XBox and SmartCard hacks to get an idea of what people are able to do to protected hardware. Besides, the ease of access to the key isn't directly relevant, as long as one user can access one key, everyone can posess unlocked media.
Besides, only some DRM schemes involve hardware, many like those on PCs, are all software based because there isn't (yet...) a key server chip on a PC.
If you want to quote yourself, that's fine, but paste a snippet and a link to the text. I'm not going to download and read a PDF on the off chance that you say something relevant.
Being able to ban imports is a very bad thing. You should be able to choose not to sell directly to some people - right of association and all, but not to restrict future owners of your work from associating (and selling) with those people.
Basically, once something goes to market you should lose *all* control over every purchased copy.
Your copyright does not mean I can't distribute modified copies of your work. If I buy a book and scribble out the dirty words and make margin notes and then sell it, it's perfectly legal. There are some technicalities that make this difficult with a CD, but the underlying law is the same. Perhaps one CD/DVD of the original and a CD with a patch file...
If you give me your code (by me buying your product, or whatever) and I modify it, I'm perfectly within my rights (as long as I don't create more than one copy - one copy is allowable because software usually won't run on the distribution media). If I then show you this copy it's not a violation, unless for some reason this counts as public display (which is probably legal with software anyways).
It's as if I scribble in a book and show an author the modified copy. Perfectly legal.
Your frantic call to your IP lawyer will just waste you money and make you look like an idiot. Partially for being upset at the idea of someone else seeing and commenting on your work, partly for being such a strict bastard, and partly for passing up the best candidate you're ever likely to see - someone who cares enough to present you with an example of real-world code and how they've discovered flaws in it.
Remember, copyright law was created to grant monopoly rights on the creation of copies, to protect your financial interests, nothing else. Nobody cares if you like what I write in the margins of your book - you lose the right to complain when you sell the book.
In the real world, how do you suppose someone demonstrates a need for the suits to purchase rights to a work? You grab a low-res copy of a photo and put the calendar or whatever over it, the suits like it and you arrange the licensing of the full-res image. You grab a bunch of samples from whatever music you have lying around and you make a dance mix, the suits hear it and get the lawyers to arrange licensing the bits you used.
This doesn't harm the original creator in any way and in fact helps them market their work.
Besides, it's exactly in line with the stated goal of copyright - to preserve the marketing rights for the creator, to encourage creation of new works, while enriching the public domain by making more works available for public use.
IMHO, if you DRM a work in such a way that nobody can build upon it (quote it, use pieces of it in a substantially new work, etc) you should lose the copyright on it. It's all about a give and take - my tax dollars fund the protection of your copyright, as long as I get an enriched public domain. When you stop living up to your end of the bargain I think you should lose my protection.
Exactly. Everything is going to be offensive to someone so it's a neverending fight. Further, the truly offensive has been going on for centuries and we need to give people the tools to see it for what it is, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that the media and the internet are the only ways of disseminating knowledge.
Do you have any proof of this? I've seen people drawn to things they can't talk about, thinking there's a mystique.
If everyone sees David Duke routinely insulted on TV it's not going to be popular to associate yourself with him. On the other hand, if what he says is so powerful "The Man" can't let him say it...
A few thin-skinned people might be hurt by going to a hateful website. That happens all the time with non-banned topics.
If Apple tried to use their monopoly control of the platform in the ways that Microsoft does, people would talk about breaking them up too. Apple has usually played well with companies that produce add-ons (software or hardware) and they're generally liked.
Wow, that's really nice looking for being cross-platform.
But a lawyer is going to tell you to settle with DirectTV, if they're a good lawyer at least, because that's the way to save money. This isn't finding $150 for an hour to talk to a lawyer, this is finding $5k or more in order to mount an effective defense, all to save paying $5k or so...
I agree about the jury thing, I can imagine many cases where five random people are likely to be directly opposed to my point of view.
The system might not need a total overhaul to be useful, it might even be 90% of the way there, but that 10% of exploitability is enough for someone like DirectTV to bankrupt thousands of people without any fear of the consequences.
As long as this is possible you have to doubt every judgement if one side is richer than the other. The trust people need to have in an impartial judicial system is gone. I personally have no faith in the ability of the US judicial system to uphold any freedoms if there's a corporation passing out a lot of "campaign contributions" to squash it. At this point I have no motivation to work inside the system because I don't believe the system works.
It's as if the police "only" framed 10% of the people they stopped. Nobody would trust them at all.
The point is that the difference is pointless semantics. It's merely a system by which an opponent with a large legal budget can bankrupt anyone, for anything.
Eventually, one trial is going to go against you for some reason and you're going to end up in jail or deep in debt, not for the actual offense, but some minor related event.
Fuck, why not just skip criminal trials, with these stupid standards of evidence and jump straight to a state-assisted civil trial. Don't bother locking up the criminals for crime, bankrupt them and then lock them up in the poor house.
I get it, but isn't it still unfair for a court to decide (jury or otherwise) that they couldn't prove that OJ killed his wife and thus he's innocent, and then another court to operate under the assumption that he killed his wife and is thus liable for damages?
They were suing him for damages during an event they can't legally claim he committed.
Isn't this obviously bunk?
This is why nobody respects the legal system. You're protected against double jeapordy, except that really you aren't because there are a million offenses you can be tried for during the hypothetical kidnapping and with punishments up the the judge you could end up going away for years for some minor crime (tresspassing) that happened when you walked past the scene of the murder they failed to prove you did.
Unfortunately the US legal system is next to worthless these days. If you don't settle, and quickly - not enough time to properly investigate the issue - DirectTV hit you with a high-dollar case and enough paperwork to choke a horse. A lawyer, or anyone with ready access to one, might be able to fight. Anyone else just got run over.
It simply isn't possible to represent yourself, especially on a budget.
This ignores twenty years of Microsoft history. Microsoft's strategy is to take an existing, BSDL, section of code and insert it (closed source) into their products. Later, when convenient, they make a slight backwards compatible change and wait for everyone to use it. Because it's closed and backwards compatible, nobody knows they aren't using the original. Five years later when they have more market share, MS removes the backwards compatibility and segments the market. This either locks customers to them, or "demonstrates the shoddy quality of their competitors".
They've tried to comoditize every protocol they've ever had significant market share in. HTML, Kerberos, Word documents (pointless changes every version), etc. They'd try TCP/IP as well except that they need the backbone of the internet and it's not leaving Unix anytime soon.
This isn't just Microsoft, look at everyone who will jump up in response to this post and say it's just good business sense. Feh. Good business sense, in the long run, is rounding up everyone who says that and killing them. Then, twenty years down the road we've been much more efficient because nobody keeps trying to fragment the user base of critical infrastructure.
Because of the risk of this, the risk that someone will intentionally try to sabotage the market to gain more control, I feel that all standards-implementing software *must* be GPLed before I'll trust it. Because of this, if the government (the funders of the invention of the internet) invents something I want it GPLed. Otherwise we're just sticking our necks in a noose for the next Microsoft to yank us around by.
A painter can do a single image very well. A game developer has to do the back of the image in case you jump up on the pedastal and walk around, they have to make it look good from a distance, or up close, and make it do something realistic when hit with a rocket.
Same with movies to a degree. You don't have to allow the viewer to select a viewpoint, but the Mona Lisa wouldn't be a very expressive actor unless you had a different master-level painting for every scene.
I like how GURPS does that. They've got a spectrum of rules, from trivial ones to decide the fate of thousands to hex maps and detailed step-by-step combat. They try to make the overall outcome about the same, which allows you to run most of the game quickly and yet give more detail to specific parts.
I often run both types of rules simultaneously. Let one player mark off their movement step by step and strategically try to disarm an opponent or gain a slight advantage through a series of complex feints and maneuver the enemy into bad footing, and let the other people roll a simple to-hit and damage roll.
I wish more games would do this. Let me play in 'arcade' mode for just general goofing around, but give me a more detailed more for when I'm getting better and I want to do expert-level moves. In Quake-type games there're usually two types of floors, ice and everything else. How about giving all the different surfaces different characteristics, from friction to noise-level? Let some bullets ricochet, allowing some level of indirect fire. But turn turn this off (for me and the bad guys) from beginner mode.
Driving games and flight sims do this, but it hasn't reached the majority. I'd love to see a game like Civ but where the battles could be resolved in either a Risk-like system of simple rolls, or a hex-based elaborate man-by-man system, and let me choose for each battle.
The process of democracy only works when it's honest and open - muck with that and you're well on the road to not having it. Some of the things the USA is doing are destroying personal freedoms and while they don't override the constitution, the lowered burden of proof needed to arrest and indefinately hold a terrorist (and who isn't, if you spin it right) make much of the constitution irrelevant.
Sure, the USA is better than Iraq, but it's also being held to higher standards. We expect censorship, unlawful arrests, government coverups, etc, in Iraq, but the USA should be above this. The USA is better only because people bitch like it's the end of the world when the smallest right gets violated. I'm sure Bush thinks he's doing good, but he's trying to fight terrorism with nuclear hand grenades, the collateral damage to freedoms in the USA is terrible.
I recently read (in a real newspaper, not some indie rag) about a meth dealer who got arrested and charged as a terrorist for making Weapons of Mass Destruction! Apparently the concept that meth isn't normally deadly and people voluntarily take it has escaped the government. Worse, 80% of the people I tell about this shrug and say "good, he's a drug dealer".
Argh! "... and when they came for me there was nobody left to speak up."
I'm Canadian, so it's not like I'm pushing my favorite party.
Let me know what you find, I'll be checking for perl modules that do this fairly soon and I'll tell you if I find anything.
You should also consider naming your photos with a five-digit number (prepend a zero at first), or six. I'm already pushing 30k (11k with the 300D plus 18k with the G2) and anticipating 100k...