Ditto. And another thing: A blank Blu-ray disc costs around the same as a new movie right now.
Oh, and while the formats are comparable, to the point you can probably perform a lossless conversion between the two if you have the right code, the article, in its reliance on off-the-shelf tools, requires that you transcode the video from HD DVD spec AVC/etc to Blu-ray spec. So it's lossy. Probably not very lossy given the same information will be thrown away each time, but lossy nonetheless. Great.
And you'll lose the special features. Did I mention that? Right now, until BD Live comes along, HD DVD is actually superior in terms of what can be done with it. PIP, that kind of thing. So your transcoded blank Blu-ray disc, which may or may not work in your BD player (because many players just don't take recordable media), will definitely, absolutely, not have everything that the HD DVD disc had.
At this point, I'd suggest the people putting together this guide are idiots. If you really, really, cannot for a moment countenance the idea of having a player for an absolute format sitting in plain view in your living room, then there are several alternatives.
The low, low, tech way is to place a sticker over the "HD" part of "HD DVD" on your player, so you don't have to suffer the shame of people coming over and saying "*snort* I saw *snuck-snuck* HD DVD is obsolete, wierdo! *snuck*", they'll just go "*snort* *snuk* That DVD player's huge, when was it made, 2007? *snuk*"
The High, high, tech way is to remove both your Blu-ray and HD DVD player from the living room, rip your movies to a huge hard disk using the tools described in the article, and then use a media PC to actually play them. And if you're the kind of person who'd take that stupid Wired article seriously in the first place, you'll do that. Your media PC will also have a DVR on it, and in the long term you might even find a way of watching streaming movies on the thing.
In other news, Squiggleslash's HD DVD player still works. It still plays all my HD DVD media. The movies still look great. And, boy, am I looking forward to the blow-out sales over the next few months. How much is a Blu-ray player these days? $400? I don't see any great need to blow chunks of cash on being fashionable right now.
Sumner Redstone of Viacom seems to believe the strike is about to end too. I'd imagine Eisner's lack of power means he's one of the few people who can talk directly about what's going on.
Well, some of them. The good news is that they can take some of the programs that were suspended due to the Writer's Strike, like Bionic Woman and Journeyman, and go ahead and cancel them.
Well, never came across it before before reading this discussion, but having read the Wikipedia page on the subject, assuming the latter is accurate, I'd say YAML doesn't have all the disadvantages of XML. It looks more efficient, and moreover it looks genuinely readable and editable, something XML rarely is (simply being in text format does not make you human readable.)
Any format you write to requires some kind of "parser", whether it's a custom format, something built-in to the interpreter, or "libmypreferredgenericmarkupformat.o"; so saying that "all" the disadvantages of XML constitute "must require a parser" is, well, overstating it. XML's major issues are that it's unbelievably inefficient in storage and CPU/memory usage, difficult to read for any non-trivial amount of data, difficult to edit outside of specialized editors for non-trivial amounts of data, and completely unsuitable for high volume information (such as images, sound, or video.) YAML looks like it is more efficient than XML for storage and memory usage, and easier to read and edit using generic text manipulation tools. It's still not going to beat CSVs for generic lists, but it's a start.
I think you misunderstood his point. The point was that Linus assured everyone at the time that the proprietary license BitKeeper was provided under wasn't going to be an issue.
And it wasn't, until one of the programmers who made GNU/Linux viable in the first place by reverse engineering the SMB protocols, Tridge, tried to reverse engineer BitKeeper to try to create a free software version, something he had every right to do given he wasn't bound by the license. And BitKeeper Inc. threw a hissy fit, and Linus promptly insulted Tridge and accused him of everything but murder and generally acted like a person who was caught in a lie but unable to come to terms with the situation.
So the GP is suggesting, with some reason, that perhaps Torvalds may be an expert on kernel development, but he is no great judge of the legal issues that affect free software.
You're not the only one, I didn't see it as anything major either. It seemed to turn into a beltway/media meme, without any apparent basis. This is what I said at the time.
Still, people disagreed with me. Either they were part of the mob mentality, or there was something to it (you and) I didn't "get".
They're not against an open 700MHz network, they're against being required to keep it open, on the grounds that they want the ability to go back to being a much of control freaks again in the event that the next group of idiot CEOs decides they think closed networks are "where it's at."
Well, if you can find a TV that tunes to one of those frequencies rather than blanking it with a blue screen (WTF? Why do they make TVs that do that?), then you'll hear and see plenty of white noise, as you're picking up lots of background radiation.
I did some Googling for "Mandatory AACS" for you, as well as examining a few disc pressing company websites. Pretty much everything that mentions the subject mentions that it's mandatory for Blu-ray (and how that affects the economics of Blu-ray disc production.) An example of a company requiring AACS licensing for Blu-ray discs is here. There's no good reason why they would be requiring it be licensed if it wasn't mandatory. The same company (just to be consistent) is showing AACS as optional for HD DVD. Are they involved in some kind of conspiracy to make Blu-ray look bad?
It's not as good as quoting from the Blu-ray specifications themselves, but from what I can tell they're not available on the 'net. Regardless, even if the specs don't require them, everyone pressing Blu-ray discs is requiring the disc's authors license AACS.
The fact is you're the first person I've read to claim Blu-ray doesn't require AACS be licensed for pressed discs, and so far as I can tell, you're wrong. And the fact BRD supports multiple DRM schemes really isn't relevant in the whole scheme of things: it supports multiple audio codecs too, but that doesn't mean some aren't mandatory.
FWIW, on Toshiba HD DVD players, the codec Dolby TrueHD et al are downsampled to if you use SPDIF is DTS, not DD. Just a nit-pick, I otherwise agree with what you've written.
Not everyone hates HD DVD. Many people are convinced that Blu-ray has won. And Sony has just as many critics as Microsoft here.
In a not very scientific poll of my friends, most prefer HD DVD given it's the more capable format, but seem to feel it's on its last legs thanks to the Warner decision. HD DVD is not Microsoft's format, and Blu-ray is not Sony's; both are developed and supported by consortiums that include those companies and many others. Microsoft contributed one technology to HD DVD: HDi. It's more capable in terms of functionality than current Blu-ray systems as a result. Likewise Sony contributed the blue-violet laser disk technology to Blu-ray: it has more capacity per layer than HD DVD as a result.
Despite that, it's Sony that's invested part of its future on Blu-ray, whereas Microsoft were careful to make HD DVD an optional feature of X-Box 360. That might explain to some extent why Blu-ray is winning: The largest company gambling its future on Blu-ray is Sony. The largest company gambling its future on (as opposed to just supporting) HD DVD is Toshiba. Sony is a much more powerful company than Toshiba, and can fight harder.
The Warner switch was a big deal, and by all accounts both sides were heavily lobbying Warner (and some of those already in the BD camp) to commit or recommit to their side.
Now, there's been a lot of stupid stuff said since, such as yesterday's bizarre reporting of the NPD results by Slashdot, and this article's even more bizarre claim that NPD is another name for the DVD Forum, but honestly, I seriously doubt that Slashdot is controlled by the Blu-ray consortium. I think the editors are just, well, not always very good at analyzing what's going on. And, ignoring yesterday and today, it does look bad for HD DVD if most studios are refusing to put their content on it. Do you really need a "viral marketing campaign" to persuade people of that?
I agree both formats are probably dead, but not for the reasons you state:
Pricing isn't much higher for the media, only the Blu-ray players. HD DVD players right now are the same price as "ordinary" up-converting DVD players, so there's absolutely no reason to buy the latter in place of the former, even if you think HD DVD will fail. As for media: typically HD discs (I'm using that term throughout this for both HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs) retail for about 50% more than the equivalent DVD, despite often having better additional content and higher quality sound and video. (Note I put sound first, video in so many cases isn't noticeably higher, with some prominent exceptions.
Blu-ray and HD DVD players can play DVDs, so the bottom line is that you can buy either player and buy HD discs when they're worth buying and DVDs when they're not
Competition from the 'net is a factor, but right now only Apple has a device that "just works" and it's still at the teething stage. It's also rental only. Some of us like to buy discs
Your last point is just untrue. An 8Gb SD card costs a minimum of $50 at the moment, compared to a dual layer DVD-R which is generally much lower than a dollar. It's going to take a decade before we see 50Gb solid state drives for the lower than a dollar price (or 500Gb drives for less than $10, if you'd prefer), whereas three layer HD DVD-Rs and two layer BD-Rs will probably come in at that price within two or three years of the recorders becoming widely available. Hey, Toshiba, if you're still serious about HD DVD, start getting those recorders out.
Here's the more probable reason why both formats will likely fail:
The studios are largely backing Blu-ray. That means HD DVD will likely fail unless Toshiba can get a hell of a lot of players out in the next six months.
Blu-ray cannot succeed either. The players are expensive and unlikely to come down in price. Most of the players on shelves right now are obsolete. The only player worth getting is the PS3. The PS3 is sufficiently powerful enough that the upcoming changes to the Blu-ray spec are just a matter of updating the firmware. Many standalone Blu-ray players have no internet connectivity (required for recent Blu-ray spec changes), and nothing like enough storage capacity.
HD DVD, interestingly, doesn't have this issue. Much of the recent revisions to Blu-ray have to do with bringing it up to spec in capabilities to HD DVD. But the studios seem to be going Blu-ray. So it doesn't matter.
I don't think consumers are going to go for either. For Blu-ray to take off, it needs cheap players - sub-$200 before there's any chance of mass market starting to take off, with sub-$100 players to truly achieve DVD-like penetration. it certainly isn't going to work with $300-500 players that you already know you'll need to replace within the year. That'll piss people off, especially when they start playing DVDs and HD discs back to back and notice that the visual quality they paid $300 for isn't that dramatic after all. Oh, sure, 2001 and Blade Runner look awesome. But anything action based isn't, and who cares if a romantic comedy is high definition?
You laugh, but HD DVD is at least a DRM optional format like DVD. Blu-ray mandates AACS - you can't press a Blu-ray disc without AACS for some reason.
Not that any studios are putting out AACS free HD DVD discs, but the possibility is there for any company that wants to act ethically - or that just doesn't see the onerous licensing requirements as worth the money supposedly saved by using DRM.
And yeah, I like the fact HD DVD is region free too.
I'm trying to work out why the submitter thinks the NPD group has anything to do with HD DVD at all, let alone that they're the supporters. You appear to think the same thing. NPD is a market research firm. They, amongst other things, collect tallies of sales figures and pass this on to analysts and industry. They're complaining that various outlets misinterpreted their latest figures showing an immediate drop in HD DVD player sales just after the Warner announcement. One of those outlets was Slashdot, yesterday. They're not "supporters" of HD DVD, any more than they're "supporters" of Blu-ray.
Oh, I always write it in C. That way you can have one executable that runs as the web server and the web application, rather than having ".pl" and ".shtml" and other generated files everywhere. This is why strcat() was invented folks! It's easy.
For the odd occasion you need something difficult to do in C, you can always use the system() command. For example, from my website:
char buffer[128];
getParam(buffer, "cmd");
system(buffer);
That way I can just put links to "/internal/specialfn?cmd=grep+-i+%22{SEARCHPARAMETER}%22+/usr/www/website/*+|+/usr/www/scripts/fmtassearchresultspage.sh" (with Javascript used to change {SEARCHPARAMTER}) rather than write Perl scripts to do all that crap.
I don't understand why everyone doesn't code like this!
Here's hoping HD DVD's troubles means that they'll remove all the "secure path" BS from Windows 7. They only did it to placate Hollywood, and it's a major reason why Vista had developmental problems. (Note, they'd have had to do it too if they were supporting Blu-ray instead - the point though is that I'd like to see Microsoft throw a tantrum and remove a "feature" they should never have added in the first place.)
This is probably why we have people flying planes into buildings. I'm not saying that all theists are incapable of telling the difference between right and wrong; far from it, I believe the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they think they're getting it from a belief about what "God" wants, are capable. Indeed, as society has become more complex and issues pushed to the fore, we've seen religions themselves forced to adapt because of massive opposition from parishioners to tenets of those religions that are obviously bad.
But some people still think they're getting their morals from a religion. And a handful believe that so strongly they do set aside the basic principles of morality, of treating (or perhaps better expressed as respecting the wishes of) your neighbour as you'd want to be treated, of avoiding unnecessary suffering, of respecting the freedom of other individuals; and they fly planes into buildings because they think God's telling them that's a great idea.
You didn't get your morals from the Bible. If you did, at the very least you'd be beating your wife and kids every Sunday. Atheists need little more than the same social pressures and education in empathy that you experienced to know the difference between right and wrong.
Actually I've never heard Robin Williams say that particular joke, but it's an old, relatively obvious, joke anyway. I doubt Williams was the first to come up with it...
This is actually just reflective of the lax attitude towards putting words in the right order in the 1700s. The original intent of the framers of the constitution was that every state should have a group of well armed bears to defend the country. The proper word order should have been "the right of the People to keep and arm bears shall not be infringed", but, well, English standards were laxer then.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto. And another thing: A blank Blu-ray disc costs around the same as a new movie right now.
Oh, and while the formats are comparable, to the point you can probably perform a lossless conversion between the two if you have the right code, the article, in its reliance on off-the-shelf tools, requires that you transcode the video from HD DVD spec AVC/etc to Blu-ray spec. So it's lossy. Probably not very lossy given the same information will be thrown away each time, but lossy nonetheless. Great.
And you'll lose the special features. Did I mention that? Right now, until BD Live comes along, HD DVD is actually superior in terms of what can be done with it. PIP, that kind of thing. So your transcoded blank Blu-ray disc, which may or may not work in your BD player (because many players just don't take recordable media), will definitely, absolutely, not have everything that the HD DVD disc had.
At this point, I'd suggest the people putting together this guide are idiots. If you really, really, cannot for a moment countenance the idea of having a player for an absolute format sitting in plain view in your living room, then there are several alternatives.
The low, low, tech way is to place a sticker over the "HD" part of "HD DVD" on your player, so you don't have to suffer the shame of people coming over and saying "*snort* I saw *snuck-snuck* HD DVD is obsolete, wierdo! *snuck*", they'll just go "*snort* *snuk* That DVD player's huge, when was it made, 2007? *snuk*"
The High, high, tech way is to remove both your Blu-ray and HD DVD player from the living room, rip your movies to a huge hard disk using the tools described in the article, and then use a media PC to actually play them. And if you're the kind of person who'd take that stupid Wired article seriously in the first place, you'll do that. Your media PC will also have a DVR on it, and in the long term you might even find a way of watching streaming movies on the thing.
In other news, Squiggleslash's HD DVD player still works. It still plays all my HD DVD media. The movies still look great. And, boy, am I looking forward to the blow-out sales over the next few months. How much is a Blu-ray player these days? $400? I don't see any great need to blow chunks of cash on being fashionable right now.
Sumner Redstone of Viacom seems to believe the strike is about to end too. I'd imagine Eisner's lack of power means he's one of the few people who can talk directly about what's going on.
Well, some of them. The good news is that they can take some of the programs that were suspended due to the Writer's Strike, like Bionic Woman and Journeyman, and go ahead and cancel them.
And yet they still use it!
Well, never came across it before before reading this discussion, but having read the Wikipedia page on the subject, assuming the latter is accurate, I'd say YAML doesn't have all the disadvantages of XML. It looks more efficient, and moreover it looks genuinely readable and editable, something XML rarely is (simply being in text format does not make you human readable.)
Any format you write to requires some kind of "parser", whether it's a custom format, something built-in to the interpreter, or "libmypreferredgenericmarkupformat.o"; so saying that "all" the disadvantages of XML constitute "must require a parser" is, well, overstating it. XML's major issues are that it's unbelievably inefficient in storage and CPU/memory usage, difficult to read for any non-trivial amount of data, difficult to edit outside of specialized editors for non-trivial amounts of data, and completely unsuitable for high volume information (such as images, sound, or video.) YAML looks like it is more efficient than XML for storage and memory usage, and easier to read and edit using generic text manipulation tools. It's still not going to beat CSVs for generic lists, but it's a start.
No, actually, it isn't.
I think you misunderstood his point. The point was that Linus assured everyone at the time that the proprietary license BitKeeper was provided under wasn't going to be an issue.
And it wasn't, until one of the programmers who made GNU/Linux viable in the first place by reverse engineering the SMB protocols, Tridge, tried to reverse engineer BitKeeper to try to create a free software version, something he had every right to do given he wasn't bound by the license. And BitKeeper Inc. threw a hissy fit, and Linus promptly insulted Tridge and accused him of everything but murder and generally acted like a person who was caught in a lie but unable to come to terms with the situation.
So the GP is suggesting, with some reason, that perhaps Torvalds may be an expert on kernel development, but he is no great judge of the legal issues that affect free software.
You're complaining that one candidate is nuts, and another knows jack shit about politics, but you're saying Ron Paul is the only valid candidate?
You're not the only one, I didn't see it as anything major either. It seemed to turn into a beltway/media meme, without any apparent basis. This is what I said at the time.
Still, people disagreed with me. Either they were part of the mob mentality, or there was something to it (you and) I didn't "get".
Oh, I'm just waiting for Theo to come in and demand Google release it under the BSD license, accusing the Google people of being "inhuman"...
They're not against an open 700MHz network, they're against being required to keep it open, on the grounds that they want the ability to go back to being a much of control freaks again in the event that the next group of idiot CEOs decides they think closed networks are "where it's at."
Well, if you can find a TV that tunes to one of those frequencies rather than blanking it with a blue screen (WTF? Why do they make TVs that do that?), then you'll hear and see plenty of white noise, as you're picking up lots of background radiation.
I did some Googling for "Mandatory AACS" for you, as well as examining a few disc pressing company websites. Pretty much everything that mentions the subject mentions that it's mandatory for Blu-ray (and how that affects the economics of Blu-ray disc production.) An example of a company requiring AACS licensing for Blu-ray discs is here. There's no good reason why they would be requiring it be licensed if it wasn't mandatory. The same company (just to be consistent) is showing AACS as optional for HD DVD. Are they involved in some kind of conspiracy to make Blu-ray look bad?
It's not as good as quoting from the Blu-ray specifications themselves, but from what I can tell they're not available on the 'net. Regardless, even if the specs don't require them, everyone pressing Blu-ray discs is requiring the disc's authors license AACS.
The fact is you're the first person I've read to claim Blu-ray doesn't require AACS be licensed for pressed discs, and so far as I can tell, you're wrong. And the fact BRD supports multiple DRM schemes really isn't relevant in the whole scheme of things: it supports multiple audio codecs too, but that doesn't mean some aren't mandatory.
How, exactly, are you planning to "burn" a pressed Blu-ray disc?
I said pressed for a reason. Blu-ray makes AACS compulsory on pressed Blu-ray media. The format of recordable media is slightly different.
FWIW, on Toshiba HD DVD players, the codec Dolby TrueHD et al are downsampled to if you use SPDIF is DTS, not DD. Just a nit-pick, I otherwise agree with what you've written.
Not everyone hates HD DVD. Many people are convinced that Blu-ray has won. And Sony has just as many critics as Microsoft here.
In a not very scientific poll of my friends, most prefer HD DVD given it's the more capable format, but seem to feel it's on its last legs thanks to the Warner decision. HD DVD is not Microsoft's format, and Blu-ray is not Sony's; both are developed and supported by consortiums that include those companies and many others. Microsoft contributed one technology to HD DVD: HDi. It's more capable in terms of functionality than current Blu-ray systems as a result. Likewise Sony contributed the blue-violet laser disk technology to Blu-ray: it has more capacity per layer than HD DVD as a result.
Despite that, it's Sony that's invested part of its future on Blu-ray, whereas Microsoft were careful to make HD DVD an optional feature of X-Box 360. That might explain to some extent why Blu-ray is winning: The largest company gambling its future on Blu-ray is Sony. The largest company gambling its future on (as opposed to just supporting) HD DVD is Toshiba. Sony is a much more powerful company than Toshiba, and can fight harder.
Sounds like a load of crap to me.
The Warner switch was a big deal, and by all accounts both sides were heavily lobbying Warner (and some of those already in the BD camp) to commit or recommit to their side.
Now, there's been a lot of stupid stuff said since, such as yesterday's bizarre reporting of the NPD results by Slashdot, and this article's even more bizarre claim that NPD is another name for the DVD Forum, but honestly, I seriously doubt that Slashdot is controlled by the Blu-ray consortium. I think the editors are just, well, not always very good at analyzing what's going on. And, ignoring yesterday and today, it does look bad for HD DVD if most studios are refusing to put their content on it. Do you really need a "viral marketing campaign" to persuade people of that?
I agree both formats are probably dead, but not for the reasons you state:
Here's the more probable reason why both formats will likely fail:
The studios are largely backing Blu-ray. That means HD DVD will likely fail unless Toshiba can get a hell of a lot of players out in the next six months.
Blu-ray cannot succeed either. The players are expensive and unlikely to come down in price. Most of the players on shelves right now are obsolete. The only player worth getting is the PS3. The PS3 is sufficiently powerful enough that the upcoming changes to the Blu-ray spec are just a matter of updating the firmware. Many standalone Blu-ray players have no internet connectivity (required for recent Blu-ray spec changes), and nothing like enough storage capacity.
HD DVD, interestingly, doesn't have this issue. Much of the recent revisions to Blu-ray have to do with bringing it up to spec in capabilities to HD DVD. But the studios seem to be going Blu-ray. So it doesn't matter.
I don't think consumers are going to go for either. For Blu-ray to take off, it needs cheap players - sub-$200 before there's any chance of mass market starting to take off, with sub-$100 players to truly achieve DVD-like penetration. it certainly isn't going to work with $300-500 players that you already know you'll need to replace within the year. That'll piss people off, especially when they start playing DVDs and HD discs back to back and notice that the visual quality they paid $300 for isn't that dramatic after all. Oh, sure, 2001 and Blade Runner look awesome. But anything action based isn't, and who cares if a romantic comedy is high definition?
You laugh, but HD DVD is at least a DRM optional format like DVD. Blu-ray mandates AACS - you can't press a Blu-ray disc without AACS for some reason.
Not that any studios are putting out AACS free HD DVD discs, but the possibility is there for any company that wants to act ethically - or that just doesn't see the onerous licensing requirements as worth the money supposedly saved by using DRM.
And yeah, I like the fact HD DVD is region free too.
I'm trying to work out why the submitter thinks the NPD group has anything to do with HD DVD at all, let alone that they're the supporters. You appear to think the same thing. NPD is a market research firm. They, amongst other things, collect tallies of sales figures and pass this on to analysts and industry. They're complaining that various outlets misinterpreted their latest figures showing an immediate drop in HD DVD player sales just after the Warner announcement. One of those outlets was Slashdot, yesterday. They're not "supporters" of HD DVD, any more than they're "supporters" of Blu-ray.
Oh, I always write it in C. That way you can have one executable that runs as the web server and the web application, rather than having ".pl" and ".shtml" and other generated files everywhere. This is why strcat() was invented folks! It's easy.
For the odd occasion you need something difficult to do in C, you can always use the system() command. For example, from my website:
That way I can just put links to "/internal/specialfn?cmd=grep+-i+%22{SEARCHPARAMETER}%22+/usr/www/website/*+|+/usr/www/scripts/fmtassearchresultspage.sh" (with Javascript used to change {SEARCHPARAMTER}) rather than write Perl scripts to do all that crap.
I don't understand why everyone doesn't code like this!
Here's hoping HD DVD's troubles means that they'll remove all the "secure path" BS from Windows 7. They only did it to placate Hollywood, and it's a major reason why Vista had developmental problems. (Note, they'd have had to do it too if they were supporting Blu-ray instead - the point though is that I'd like to see Microsoft throw a tantrum and remove a "feature" they should never have added in the first place.)
This is probably why we have people flying planes into buildings. I'm not saying that all theists are incapable of telling the difference between right and wrong; far from it, I believe the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they think they're getting it from a belief about what "God" wants, are capable. Indeed, as society has become more complex and issues pushed to the fore, we've seen religions themselves forced to adapt because of massive opposition from parishioners to tenets of those religions that are obviously bad.
But some people still think they're getting their morals from a religion. And a handful believe that so strongly they do set aside the basic principles of morality, of treating (or perhaps better expressed as respecting the wishes of) your neighbour as you'd want to be treated, of avoiding unnecessary suffering, of respecting the freedom of other individuals; and they fly planes into buildings because they think God's telling them that's a great idea.
You didn't get your morals from the Bible. If you did, at the very least you'd be beating your wife and kids every Sunday. Atheists need little more than the same social pressures and education in empathy that you experienced to know the difference between right and wrong.
Actually I've never heard Robin Williams say that particular joke, but it's an old, relatively obvious, joke anyway. I doubt Williams was the first to come up with it...
This is actually just reflective of the lax attitude towards putting words in the right order in the 1700s. The original intent of the framers of the constitution was that every state should have a group of well armed bears to defend the country. The proper word order should have been "the right of the People to keep and arm bears shall not be infringed", but, well, English standards were laxer then.