2) She goes into a dressing cabin to try on a new dress.
3) She unknowingly gets caught on a camera in the dressing cabin installed there to prevent shoplifting.
4) The camera operator gets a boner and saves the tape for his collection.
5) Camera operator needs cash and sells his private coolection to porn-mongerer.
6) You accidentally walk in on a colleague in the men's room at work. And find that he is wankinig him self off over a vidcap of your wife's naked tittes that he downloaded from www.amateur-sluts.com.
I'd be interested in hearing what the Brits think about this issue them selves.
This system can be a bused and it has been. There have been instances of the people opereating it selling tapes with "amusing highlights" on the internet. Another point is that this system can be used to monitor people and keep track of them. Be it for governmental business or just because you like to keep track of your hated neighbour so that you can spread nasty rumours about him/her.
On the other hand it was also camaras like these who solved the Bulger case. If it was not for them the Police would never have hit on him being murdered by a couple of ten year olds and would still be looking for an adault murderer.
So are these cameras more trouble they are worth?
The British government certainly seems more bent on monitoring its subjects than other governments are. Last I knew they were also testing systems that scans peoples passports when they enter/exit the UK and logs their travelstatistics in a database. Another intersting development is a system of cameras on Highway bridges that scan liscence plates and can be used to keep track of certain cars by simply entering the possible liscense plate numbers into a database. These systems are useful for their intended function of finding terrorists and keeping track of stolen cars. But also offer some "interesting" possibilities for abuse.
Agree with you completely but monitoring adault content on the net is a practical impossibility. With differing laws in diffrent countries porn will allways be avaiable from somewhere.
I live just moved to Bavaria in Germany. Here the laws on these things are strict ISP's have in the past constantly made progressively more and more responible for what their cutomers use their networks and servers to do, to the point that it has recently begun to border on idiotic. I am for example not even able to access the alt.binaries news groups. Why? Well some of them have cracks on them others porn so ALL these groups were banned. Even those that I am interested in where perfectly legal binaries like Linux drivers were being exhanged. Not that this measure of the Bavarian government stops anyone. The perverts and pedophiles just log onto public Newsservers in France, the UK, Russia or the US where carrying these groups is allowed.
Combating Porn on the net is hopeless unless:
Every country on earth passes uniform laws and regualtions to deal with it.
Cross border prosicution of internet criminals becomes significantly easyer than it is today.
Internet traffic is monitored closely and visitors to offending sites repremanded.
Every cuntry on earth sticks to the above measures closely.
And still we have several unsolved issues. Like Pedophiles in chatrooms for example? What can we do about them? short of radio tagging them with chips and putting a Pervert sensor in every computer little or nothing. Except maybe monitor every chatroom on the planet with text reckognition software.
Or how about this: take a bunch of illegal porn Jpegs and rename them Capter1.doc and so an pack them in a Zip file and upload it to an FTP server for a fellow pervert to download. How is the Police or the ISP supposed to find them? Looking for files with the.jpg extention is still a reasonable proposition. The moment you start disguising the porn pics even as simply as I suggested the problem of tracking them down becomes more complex by several orders of magnitude. If only because of the volume of data you have to scan.
And I have not even touced the surface of the sea of other possibilites pedophiles an pornmongerers have for evading detection. Much as I would like to see pedophilic porn disappear from the Internet I am afraid it is impossible to do this without sacrificing more freedoms and more privacy than we are prepared for. Would the US for example be prepared to pay for a porn free Internet with 1984, big brother style surveillance? I think not, even we Europeans who have considerably less problems with restricted freedom of expression than Americans have problems accepting that sort of a measure.
How much clout do you think the German government has? How much money do you think the German intelligence service has? Unlimited when it comes to Nazis. So why dispite all this is "Radio Wolfschanze", run by a few skinhead ape men still operating? All the Germans have to do according to that logic is pass a few Petrograd Cops a few hundred D-marks under the table and basta.... that Russian ISP's office gets trashed.
Fact is there is plenty of sites in Russia includig ones that would make the DVD mafia go green that havent been touched for months. Even if local officials could be bribed these sites just migrate somewhere else. What would be required is to bribe a minister to go after these sites. In view of the fact that Russian tax-collectors move in armoured vehicles and do their collecting dressed in combat gear I think the Russians have bigger fish to fry than nailing a few copiright violators to enrich bloated western record companies.
I just bougt a new AMD based system and was confronted with the same choice. Being an Engineer I allways solve these problems by calculating Cost vs. Effectiveness or Bang for Buck if you prefer.
Basically you get a performance increase of what? 5-12%? Or there abouts.
From what I have seen these new DDR's and the motherboards that can take them cost alot more than 5-12% more than the old stuff more like 250-350% more for a 5-12% performance increase.
I concluded that buying DDR's was pitifully little bang for obscenely many bucks. I decided to buy a PC133 SDRAM based system and use the money I would have blown on DDR's to pay for a proper 19" flatscreen monitor. After two weeks of using it I am pleased to report that I get more of a kick out of the monitor than buying 5-12% extra performance for a kings ransom would have given me.
How about Russa or one of its (ex)republics? They do not seem to be subject to any international law and if they are they could care less. The German government has been trying to shut down Russian (Petrograd) based Neo Nazi sites like "Radio Wolfschanze" for ages without success. So if Neonazi scumbags can get away with it why not a Napster style site.
With the central website safe the record companies would either have to find a way to get at the tens of thousands of endusers. Or try to get the Russian officials to do something about the situation and the Russians can be very frustrating to deal with.
Of course downloading copyrighted music is still stealing someones work, be it in Sealand, Russia or anywhere else. No matter how much you try to paint it pink!
B: No that is just what they (governments) want you to think to trick you into enableing them to keep bug your communications.
A: Your'e paranoid.
Is B paronoid? No I don't think so but he is only partly right. It is not just governments that like to bug people with uncomfortable views that do not like effective encryption. It is corporations as well. It is really amazing to what lengths rival companies and corporations will go to spy on their competitors. You are well advised to encrypt everything your companie transmitts electronically, burn the contents of your waste baskets your self and encrypt telefax and telephone communications as well. Your rivals might use all these methods to get at your patented material, I've seen it happen. Once that happens you will have a hard time proving they stole your ideas in court and even if you do they will have made a handsome profit any way. Hell even shredding papers is not enaugh these days. There actually are people who specialize not only in bugging your fax/telephone and hacking your computers but also stealling your waste in re-assembling shredded material.
Presumably one side would loose a full blown engagement of Space ships trying to defind its planet. With the fleet out of the way the other side would then try to subjugate them. Obviously it would be advantageous if the defeated side surrendered. If they were reluctant I suppose artificially triggered meteor impacts would be an option, but that would be a bit to random. surface bombardment sounds better, I for one would not leave orbit for all the tea in China. At least not for six months or so. Having couple of dosen or so big starships go into orbit and start thumping them with railguns and even atomics would be more precise. Failing that if the enemy decided to go the way of the Third Reich and stick it out to the end the winning side would have to choose between a Mexican stand off like we have in Iraq or beginning the slow buildup of equipment for an invasion on a nearby moon (assuming the planet has one). That would potentially involve developing a whole new series of ground, atmospheric and aquatic fighting vehicles and building enaugh to equip an army of at least 500.000 combat troops. The economic cost of that alone would make the operation allmost impossible.
A last alternative would be a to besiege them, after the obital bombardment has destroyed the planetary defence grid a set of satilites could be constructed and reenforced by a relatively small fleet. Then one sits down and waits until the natives get tired enaugh of the blockade, the sporadic orbital bombardments of any military facilitie they constuct and the icky stuff that ruins their crops to lynch the government and negotiate.
It would be kinda nice to see a realistic science fiction story deal with, say an Earth vs. Mars colony war set in the late 22nd century?? with much the same background as the American Revolution. Something that sticks a bit closer to the laws of physics as we know them than Star Treck
Would'nt spread on the dropzone be a problem? I can just imagine a battalion being spread over half a continent running into problems trying to regroup.
Pilotless dropships that could take a cannister with 10-20 grunts + 1 officer and some gear or a piece of heavy duty hardware like a tank would be much easier to insert with precision.
Isn't cloning the least of all evils in the whole discussion about genetics and its impact on the future of the human race?
Nota Bene. In case anyone did not "get" the <RANT> tags, the below is not nesecarily an expression of my opinion but an echo of the opinions of other people.
Cloning? It will happen. We live in a free market system, why should those that can afford it not have a headless organ/limb repository cloned to serve them as a source of spares in later life? Sort of like we have savings accounts at the bank today. And as medicine perfects methods of reconnecting severed nerves we could simply switch bodies when the old ones wear out.
It has also been suggested by some that in the future there will be a new class division the "genetically optimized" and the "unoptimized" genetic underclass. The world in this scenario would be divided between those that can afford a 500 IQ, super muscles and stamina, body like the young Appollo/Afrodite, Moviestar looks etc. genetic upgrades for their kids and those that can not.
Is ist so wrong or unrealistic that we will see Genetically optimized/improved people in the next half century or so? Those that can afford this will want it and since they have the most power it will be legalized. And if it is not legalized in the Democracies of Europe/America/Asia there will allways be countries where it can be done discreetly.
This only leaves the question, Do you want a grand child with a little text behind it 's ear that reads "Encoded by Microsoft" or would you prefer an "Open source" grand child? Will there be Geneitic bugfixes and service packs?? Will there be region codes? What about the copyright issue?</RANT>
The encryption is there only to prop up region coding.
Right that is what encryption IS there for.
....wants to keep his/her movie/music/software from being pirated.
This is what they SAY encryption is there for.
Now if they wanted to encrypt DVD's to keep them from being pirated (next to impossible unless you can also enshure that the DVD can not be cloned or the material copied to a file) I could care less. But how the hell does Region encoding do anything to inhibit pirating????
(Of course SlashDot would hate this stuff as well, but I am just pointing out that the "encryption" has nothing to do with piracy prevention)
That is true I am rather suprised that I have not been lynched yet here on slashdot for my approval of anti piracy mesures. I suppose the whole anti piracy issue is a hornets nest. On the one hand the normal user has a right to copy music and such for private use. At least here in Germany where the courts have just made a ruling in that direction (if my memory serves me correctly). Now.mp3's being traded on the net is not illegal as long as no money changes hands.
The real culprits are the bigtime pirates who make carbon copies of the CD/DVD and sell it by the container load. So why is the industry so worried about the normal consumer making copies with his recorder? It would seem more logical to go after the big boys. That is where all the big bucks are lost. But maybe the DVD industry is like Greepeace. It is allways easyer to pick on the little guy than to take on the real bastards.
The problem is of course that it is impossible to maintain the littly guys right to copy his DVD for non personal use without opening the floodgates to piates. So assuming that it is possible to create an "intelligent" DVD that is it impossoble to make a carbon copy of onto a "blank" disc that still left a window open for the normal user to copy material form the DVD to storage all the Pirate would have to do is rip the disc and create his own non CSS DVD that he could sell. Unless of course we get nonsense like DVD drives refusing to play anything but CSS DVD's which makes recording home movies onto DVD pointless because you can not play it.
The conclusion is that allthough I understand perfectly well why some one would want to prevent his work from being pirate copied and sold and support peoples right to copyright protect their creations to make money off them. I am afraid that anyone trying to prevent Piracy of digital media is probably going to discover sooner or later that he is jousting with windmills.
That is a point I left out. I Cant think or everyting I suppose. I certainly did not mean to offend everyones Capitalist sentiments with Marxism.... Tovarich!:)
The analogy you draw between tapes and CD's is exactly the same as between DVD and VHS. The higher quality and convenience of DVD is simply worth the price to the buying public. I was just trying to point out that New technologies tend to be obscenely expensive at first and than drop rapidly in price as production gets going.
Also it is easy to reduce pricing of DVD's CD's and such to production cost. There is alot more that goes into the price calculation than that . Including Cost of R&D, cost of building factories, cost of producing material you put on a DVD, attractiveness of product to the consumer, the greed of the manufactrurers, trade barriers, cost of disposing of product once it is thrown away , taxes. All of these factors influence price to a greter or lesser degree and I probably forgot to mention a legion of others.
Isn't it just a matter of supply and demand? As long as the video players are dominant the DVD is an item which is going to be more expensive. After all it is not just the manufacturing cost that goes into a DVD's price but the Digitalization, Creating sound tracks in N different languages and subtitles in even more languages. On top of that comes the cost of new production facilities and development costs that have to be paid off etc.. etc....
The prices of DVD should go down with time as the technology becomes more popular. Unless the price is KEPT high artificially by the DVD/movie crowd. Which is a rape of everithing our free market system is supposed to be.
I dont mind encrypted DVD's what I object to is the region coding. I understand perfectly why an artist, a studio or a softwaredeveloper wants to keep his/her movie/music/software from being pirated. After all they did put alot of effort, money, creativity and brainpower into producing it and want to be able to live off the results of their labour. Just like I (or any of I assume) do not want to slave away for years to pay for a car only to have it stolen a week after buying it. I do not save for a car so that some lazy bastard can get a car for free.
What bugs me is this whole reginon code nonsense. There is really no reason for it to exist other than to create artificial trade barriers. I do not mind paying for DVD movies but I will continue to approve of efforts like OMS while idiotic schemes like Region codes continue to come out of messed up brains of Hollywood beancounters.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have said: "than other European governments are."
Perhaps 'Everything you say can be used against you' should be said to newborn babies.
Try tattooing that to the inside of their eyelids in luminescent ink. It's good advice.
1) Your wife goes to a departments store.
2) She goes into a dressing cabin to try on a new dress.
3) She unknowingly gets caught on a camera in the dressing cabin installed there to prevent shoplifting.
4) The camera operator gets a boner and saves the tape for his collection.
5) Camera operator needs cash and sells his private coolection to porn-mongerer.
6) You accidentally walk in on a colleague in the men's room at work. And find that he is wankinig him self off over a vidcap of your wife's naked tittes that he downloaded from www.amateur-sluts.com.
Hahaha funny? Or maybe not!
I'd be interested in hearing what the Brits think about this issue them selves.
This system can be a bused and it has been. There have been instances of the people opereating it selling tapes with "amusing highlights" on the internet. Another point is that this system can be used to monitor people and keep track of them. Be it for governmental business or just because you like to keep track of your hated neighbour so that you can spread nasty rumours about him/her.
On the other hand it was also camaras like these who solved the Bulger case. If it was not for them the Police would never have hit on him being murdered by a couple of ten year olds and would still be looking for an adault murderer.
So are these cameras more trouble they are worth?
The British government certainly seems more bent on monitoring its subjects than other governments are. Last I knew they were also testing systems that scans peoples passports when they enter/exit the UK and logs their travelstatistics in a database. Another intersting development is a system of cameras on Highway bridges that scan liscence plates and can be used to keep track of certain cars by simply entering the possible liscense plate numbers into a database. These systems are useful for their intended function of finding terrorists and keeping track of stolen cars. But also offer some "interesting" possibilities for abuse.
I live just moved to Bavaria in Germany. Here the laws on these things are strict ISP's have in the past constantly made progressively more and more responible for what their cutomers use their networks and servers to do, to the point that it has recently begun to border on idiotic. I am for example not even able to access the alt.binaries news groups. Why? Well some of them have cracks on them others porn so ALL these groups were banned. Even those that I am interested in where perfectly legal binaries like Linux drivers were being exhanged. Not that this measure of the Bavarian government stops anyone. The perverts and pedophiles just log onto public Newsservers in France, the UK, Russia or the US where carrying these groups is allowed.
Combating Porn on the net is hopeless unless:
Every country on earth passes uniform laws and regualtions to deal with it.
Cross border prosicution of internet criminals becomes significantly easyer than it is today.
Internet traffic is monitored closely and visitors to offending sites repremanded.
Every cuntry on earth sticks to the above measures closely.
.jpg extention is still a reasonable proposition. The moment you start disguising the porn pics even as simply as I suggested the problem of tracking them down becomes more complex by several orders of magnitude. If only because of the volume of data you have to scan.
And still we have several unsolved issues. Like Pedophiles in chatrooms for example? What can we do about them? short of radio tagging them with chips and putting a Pervert sensor in every computer little or nothing. Except maybe monitor every chatroom on the planet with text reckognition software.
Or how about this: take a bunch of illegal porn Jpegs and rename them Capter1.doc and so an pack them in a Zip file and upload it to an FTP server for a fellow pervert to download. How is the Police or the ISP supposed to find them? Looking for files with the
And I have not even touced the surface of the sea of other possibilites pedophiles an pornmongerers have for evading detection. Much as I would like to see pedophilic porn disappear from the Internet I am afraid it is impossible to do this without sacrificing more freedoms and more privacy than we are prepared for. Would the US for example be prepared to pay for a porn free Internet with 1984, big brother style surveillance? I think not, even we Europeans who have considerably less problems with restricted freedom of expression than Americans have problems accepting that sort of a measure.
Respectfully
Da Rabbit!
How much clout do you think the German government has? How much money do you think the German intelligence service has? Unlimited when it comes to Nazis. So why dispite all this is "Radio Wolfschanze", run by a few skinhead ape men still operating? All the Germans have to do according to that logic is pass a few Petrograd Cops a few hundred D-marks under the table and basta.... that Russian ISP's office gets trashed.
Fact is there is plenty of sites in Russia includig ones that would make the DVD mafia go green that havent been touched for months. Even if local officials could be bribed these sites just migrate somewhere else. What would be required is to bribe a minister to go after these sites. In view of the fact that Russian tax-collectors move in armoured vehicles and do their collecting dressed in combat gear I think the Russians have bigger fish to fry than nailing a few copiright violators to enrich bloated western record companies.
In a geek bar I would like to find Good looking Female Geeks with big hooters.
I just bougt a new AMD based system and was confronted with the same choice. Being an Engineer I allways solve these problems by calculating Cost vs. Effectiveness or Bang for Buck if you prefer.
Basically you get a performance increase of what? 5-12%? Or there abouts.
From what I have seen these new DDR's and the motherboards that can take them cost alot more than 5-12% more than the old stuff more like 250-350% more for a 5-12% performance increase.
I concluded that buying DDR's was pitifully little bang for obscenely many bucks. I decided to buy a PC133 SDRAM based system and use the money I would have blown on DDR's to pay for a proper 19" flatscreen monitor. After two weeks of using it I am pleased to report that I get more of a kick out of the monitor than buying 5-12% extra performance for a kings ransom would have given me.
How about Russa or one of its (ex)republics? They do not seem to be subject to any international law and if they are they could care less. The German government has been trying to shut down Russian (Petrograd) based Neo Nazi sites like "Radio Wolfschanze" for ages without success. So if Neonazi scumbags can get away with it why not a Napster style site.
With the central website safe the record companies would either have to find a way to get at the tens of thousands of endusers. Or try to get the Russian officials to do something about the situation and the Russians can be very frustrating to deal with.
Of course downloading copyrighted music is still stealing someones work, be it in Sealand, Russia or anywhere else. No matter how much you try to paint it pink!
Just a thougt!
Da Rabbit!
A: Is encrytion only for criminals?
B: No that is just what they (governments) want you to think to trick you into enableing them to keep bug your communications.
A: Your'e paranoid.
Is B paronoid? No I don't think so but he is only partly right. It is not just governments that like to bug people with uncomfortable views that do not like effective encryption. It is corporations as well. It is really amazing to what lengths rival companies and corporations will go to spy on their competitors. You are well advised to encrypt everything your companie transmitts electronically, burn the contents of your waste baskets your self and encrypt telefax and telephone communications as well. Your rivals might use all these methods to get at your patented material, I've seen it happen. Once that happens you will have a hard time proving they stole your ideas in court and even if you do they will have made a handsome profit any way. Hell even shredding papers is not enaugh these days. There actually are people who specialize not only in bugging your fax/telephone and hacking your computers but also stealling your waste in re-assembling shredded material.
Presumably one side would loose a full blown engagement of Space ships trying to defind its planet. With the fleet out of the way the other side would then try to subjugate them. Obviously it would be advantageous if the defeated side surrendered. If they were reluctant I suppose artificially triggered meteor impacts would be an option, but that would be a bit to random. surface bombardment sounds better, I for one would not leave orbit for all the tea in China. At least not for six months or so. Having couple of dosen or so big starships go into orbit and start thumping them with railguns and even atomics would be more precise. Failing that if the enemy decided to go the way of the Third Reich and stick it out to the end the winning side would have to choose between a Mexican stand off like we have in Iraq or beginning the slow buildup of equipment for an invasion on a nearby moon (assuming the planet has one). That would potentially involve developing a whole new series of ground, atmospheric and aquatic fighting vehicles and building enaugh to equip an army of at least 500.000 combat troops. The economic cost of that alone would make the operation allmost impossible.
A last alternative would be a to besiege them, after the obital bombardment has destroyed the planetary defence grid a set of satilites could be constructed and reenforced by a relatively small fleet. Then one sits down and waits until the natives get tired enaugh of the blockade, the sporadic orbital bombardments of any military facilitie they constuct and the icky stuff that ruins their crops to lynch the government and negotiate.
It would be kinda nice to see a realistic science fiction story deal with, say an Earth vs. Mars colony war set in the late 22nd century?? with much the same background as the American Revolution. Something that sticks a bit closer to the laws of physics as we know them than Star Treck
Would'nt spread on the dropzone be a problem? I can just imagine a battalion being spread over half a continent running into problems trying to regroup.
Pilotless dropships that could take a cannister with 10-20 grunts + 1 officer and some gear or a piece of heavy duty hardware like a tank would be much easier to insert with precision.
Isn't cloning the least of all evils in the whole discussion about genetics and its impact on the future of the human race?
Nota Bene. In case anyone did not "get" the <RANT> tags, the below is not nesecarily an expression of my opinion but an echo of the opinions of other people.
Cloning? It will happen. We live in a free market system, why should those that can afford it not have a headless organ/limb repository cloned to serve them as a source of spares in later life? Sort of like we have savings accounts at the bank today. And as medicine perfects methods of reconnecting severed nerves we could simply switch bodies when the old ones wear out.
It has also been suggested by some that in the future there will be a new class division the "genetically optimized" and the "unoptimized" genetic underclass. The world in this scenario would be divided between those that can afford a 500 IQ, super muscles and stamina, body like the young Appollo/Afrodite, Moviestar looks etc. genetic upgrades for their kids and those that can not.
Is ist so wrong or unrealistic that we will see Genetically optimized/improved people in the next half century or so? Those that can afford this will want it and since they have the most power it will be legalized. And if it is not legalized in the Democracies of Europe/America/Asia there will allways be countries where it can be done discreetly.
This only leaves the question, Do you want a grand child with a little text behind it 's ear that reads "Encoded by Microsoft" or would you prefer an "Open source" grand child? Will there be Geneitic bugfixes and service packs?? Will there be region codes? What about the copyright issue?</RANT>
Da rabbit has spoken!
The encryption is there only to prop up region coding.
....wants to keep his/her movie/music/software from being pirated.
Right that is what encryption IS there for.
This is what they SAY encryption is there for.
Now if they wanted to encrypt DVD's to keep them from being pirated (next to impossible unless you can also enshure that the DVD can not be cloned or the material copied to a file) I could care less. But how the hell does Region encoding do anything to inhibit pirating????
(Of course SlashDot would hate this stuff as well, but I am just pointing out that the "encryption" has nothing to do with piracy prevention)
.mp3's being traded on the net is not illegal as long as no money changes hands .
That is true I am rather suprised that I have not been lynched yet here on slashdot for my approval of anti piracy mesures. I suppose the whole anti piracy issue is a hornets nest. On the one hand the normal user has a right to copy music and such for private use. At least here in Germany where the courts have just made a ruling in that direction (if my memory serves me correctly). Now
The real culprits are the bigtime pirates who make carbon copies of the CD/DVD and sell it by the container load. So why is the industry so worried about the normal consumer making copies with his recorder? It would seem more logical to go after the big boys. That is where all the big bucks are lost. But maybe the DVD industry is like Greepeace. It is allways easyer to pick on the little guy than to take on the real bastards. The problem is of course that it is impossible to maintain the littly guys right to copy his DVD for non personal use without opening the floodgates to piates. So assuming that it is possible to create an "intelligent" DVD that is it impossoble to make a carbon copy of onto a "blank" disc that still left a window open for the normal user to copy material form the DVD to storage all the Pirate would have to do is rip the disc and create his own non CSS DVD that he could sell. Unless of course we get nonsense like DVD drives refusing to play anything but CSS DVD's which makes recording home movies onto DVD pointless because you can not play it.
The conclusion is that allthough I understand perfectly well why some one would want to prevent his work from being pirate copied and sold and support peoples right to copyright protect their creations to make money off them. I am afraid that anyone trying to prevent Piracy of digital media is probably going to discover sooner or later that he is jousting with windmills.
That is a point I left out. I Cant think or everyting I suppose. I certainly did not mean to offend everyones Capitalist sentiments with Marxism.... Tovarich! :)
The analogy you draw between tapes and CD's is exactly the same as between DVD and VHS. The higher quality and convenience of DVD is simply worth the price to the buying public. I was just trying to point out that New technologies tend to be obscenely expensive at first and than drop rapidly in price as production gets going.
Also it is easy to reduce pricing of DVD's CD's and such to production cost. There is alot more that goes into the price calculation than that . Including Cost of R&D, cost of building factories, cost of producing material you put on a DVD, attractiveness of product to the consumer, the greed of the manufactrurers, trade barriers, cost of disposing of product once it is thrown away , taxes. All of these factors influence price to a greter or lesser degree and I probably forgot to mention a legion of others.
Da Rabbit has spoken!
Shut up! Buy a copy of Hustler and learn to jack off!
Pardon my French!
Isn't it just a matter of supply and demand? As long as the video players are dominant the DVD is an item which is going to be more expensive. After all it is not just the manufacturing cost that goes into a DVD's price but the Digitalization, Creating sound tracks in N different languages and subtitles in even more languages. On top of that comes the cost of new production facilities and development costs that have to be paid off etc.. etc....
The prices of DVD should go down with time as the technology becomes more popular. Unless the price is KEPT high artificially by the DVD/movie crowd. Which is a rape of everithing our free market system is supposed to be.
For better or for worse, da Rabbit has spoken!!
Region encoding is just another way to control what get sold and where.
Agree completely! it is just another way to stifle free trade and make money off aritificial trade barriers.
I dont mind encrypted DVD's what I object to is the region coding. I understand perfectly why an artist, a studio or a softwaredeveloper wants to keep his/her movie/music/software from being pirated. After all they did put alot of effort, money, creativity and brainpower into producing it and want to be able to live off the results of their labour. Just like I (or any of I assume) do not want to slave away for years to pay for a car only to have it stolen a week after buying it. I do not save for a car so that some lazy bastard can get a car for free.
What bugs me is this whole reginon code nonsense. There is really no reason for it to exist other than to create artificial trade barriers. I do not mind paying for DVD movies but I will continue to approve of efforts like OMS while idiotic schemes like Region codes continue to come out of messed up brains of Hollywood beancounters.
For better or for worse, Da Rabbit has spoken!!
The D's definetly the D's you can squeeze them and fondle them and do all sorts of other fun things to them ;)
You can only look at the V.
Da Rabbit
-- Thank you m'am! Thank you m'am! Thank you m'am! Oops! Sorry Sam!
Bill Gates, Seinfeld and ABBA