Well the thing is here, that the ISP legally HAS to take the website down following the complaint, whether it is a legit complaint or not. I could theoretically ask for anyones website to be pulled, and then once its offline, attempt to find some infrindgement and hope they dont sue me for the false claim..
It dosn't matter if you find infringement or not, getting the site pulled may be your actual intention. If you have made a complaint using a false (or ficticious) name now is anyone going to track you down. Even if they can track you down what if you were in a different country? In most cases you wouldn't even get an extradition request made...
It may well be legal in Australia, too; this looks like an ISP that rolls over and dies whenever a complaint is lodged.
A situation hardly unique to Australia. This also happens in North America and Europe.
Nowhere does it say that the Minerals Council demonstrated a copyright infringement, it just says that they complained and the host took the site down. It hasn't gone to court
That's part of the problem. Someone making a complaint dosn't need to "go to court" and prove their case, even their identity, before action is taken. To take out a court injunction would require convincing a judge that there is at least some possibility of there being a case to answer. In practice it's more likely that the site owner must prove a negative to the hoster/ISP. Which hardly improves supplier/customer relations.
and it looks to me as if the Minerals Council is just hoping that Rising Tide won't have the resources to mount an effective legal challenge.
Since "Rising Tide" don't have a time machine all they could be would be to sue "Minerals Council" for damages.
The site-host has to respond to the Takedown notice within 24 hours. They will always take the site down first and then restore it later if there's no issue. From the hoster's point of view that's the best course of action - they can't get legal advice on every single takedown request they get. But it does mean the process is open to abuse by copyright holders.
It may actually be simply "open to abuse". If the hoster will take the site down before they even attempt to find out if the complaint is valid how do they know if the complaining entity has any claim at all to copyright on the site in question? Even that they actually exist... IIRC this was exactly what some European researchers discovered when they made takedown requests in the names of ficticious organisations against sites with only public domain material on. If there is no comeback for making a bogus takedown request they will be used maliciously.
The flipside to this is that, under Australian Copyright law, using copyrighted material for the purposees of satire is OK. It's great that this is getting so much attention. The satirists are within their rights and it makes the (enourmously powerful) mining lobby look like a bunch of wankers with no sense of humour.
Indeed going after the satirists has been an effective "foot shooting" exercise on the part of the lobby. All too often people (especially "corporate people", including religious and political groups) fail to realise that trying to ban something can have the opposite effect.
And here we have the (obvious) difference between physical things and ephemeral IP, one can be copied, used, and reused indefinitely. The other cannot. Yet copyright law exists to create an artificial duplication boundary for such ephemeral products, ostensibly so that creators will be able to extract economic value from their work as an incentive to create more.
Copyright is thus intended as a means rather than an end in itself. There may thus be an optimal level of copyright to do this. It's even possible that an excess is worst than none at all. e.g. a dead person cannot possibly create any more of anything yet his or her grand children might prevent people creating derived works which are more accessable to people now.
Thus, the problem is not DRM - that is a symptom. The problem is a series of modern changes to copyright law that now do not function to drive value creation, but instead were enacted as political payback to a corporate media cartels.
Most obviously extending copyright on already existing works...
But, you could never have a service like this without DRM. Imagine a movie rental store that burned movies on DVD-Rs instead of handing you the original disk.
Note that your "movie rental store" is actually private lending library. If they hand you the original disk they need to know who you are so that they can be sure of getting it back. If they gave you a copy then they have no reason to care. All they need to do for a viable business model is to ensure that they charge you enough money to at least cover their costs, which could include a royalty payment as well such things as the cost of the disk, the service of burning it, some amount towards the overhead of running the shop, etc.
Furthermore, many people would stop paying full price for a movie
This is more an indication of a problem with the business model behind "full price" DVDs that any kind of endorsement for DRM.
however, the internet renders such a model inefficient in comparison. now, the artist and consumer can interact directly. the internet has replaced the distribution model the riaa's constituent companies are attempting to defend. there defenses are unsuccessful so far, and will continue to be
You also have the likes of DVD region coding, which attempt to replicate inefficancies of older distribution methods.
You are comparing this to a service where you pay periodically according to a contract or something, and where you can only avail of the special discount one time (per household, or whatever). This is how subscriptions work. They keep track of who you are, so you can't repeatedly get a "first month free" deal by closing your cable TV account every month and signing up again. So the regular subscribers are not being penalized just because they offer a special short-term deal for new users.
So long as the the special price is for only a month, when it's for six months to a year or even an ongoing cheaper package not (easily) available to existing customers then it is likely to start annoying people.
When was the last time you got a subscription renewal notice (like for a magazine subscription) where they said, "Renew now and take advantage of our yearly subscription price that is 55% HIGHER than the newsstand price!" I would venture to say that you've never seen anything like that in your mailbox. The whole POINT of subscription schemes is for the seller to get a guaranteed yearly amount from you, while on your end you get a big DISCOUNT off the regular purchase price of the magazine (or whatever).
There are also advantages to the publisher. They know that they have X magazines which they will definitly need to print and ship to customers. This is a number they can give to advertisers. Whereas the regular retail copies may or may not sell and if they don't sell tend to need to be collected for disposal/recycling. Thus the number of potentially unsold copies needs to be factored into the cover price. The other advantage is that you tend to get money from subcriptions before you have sold the customer anything. Most likely before you've even produced it. Whereas the money from retail sales comes in only afterwards, possibly quite some time afterwards when the retailer pays you. Just about any business would prefer to be paid in advance, especially so far in advance that they can gain a decent amount of interest.
Bottom line is this: new customers ARE more valuable to them and they know it
Which makes little sense considering that there are costs associated with new customers which do not apply to existing customers. e.g. setting up an account, credit checks, confirmation communications, even dispatching new hardware. All I can think is that there is some sort of stock market manipulation going on where the number of new customers is significent, but the total number of customers, even the nmumber of leaving customers isn't.
Lots of companies do this, and they wouldnt do it if it didnt work.
CABLE, PHONE, & INTERNET ONLY $29.99 A MONTH!!!!!!!!*
*first 3 months regular rate of $150 a month applies 4th month and on.
Most likely also with "Offer not available to new customers" Sometimes even "Not available to existing or previous (within the last X months) customers". Presumably avoid (annoyed) customers saying "right i'd like to cancel then sign up". It's hard to see how this can be good business sense, not only does this create a lot of bad feeling amongst customers, it actually costs them money to add customers, remove customers, deal with complaints/enquries and have a human make manual changes to a customer account. Wouldn't automatically giving existing customers as good as (even better deals) actually be cheaper for the suppliers concerned?
On a more serious note, this beg the questions of what more can be added to the Windows Operating system? Isn't going to be complete at some point? I played around with Vista and there are some like a nice improvements, but I don't see six-years of work or enhancements.
This also applies to MS Office as well. At what point are you getting change for the sake of change?
Just the same, they reserve the right to take down or remove programmes that have run on their channels which might damage relationships; examples might be football offerings or 'edited' shows."
They might also want to supress things which are embarassing. Like live footage of someone claiming a building has fallen down when it's still there in the background. Especially if that building does fall down some time later.
This has nothing to do with icons on a desktop, the patent is explicitly written as such. This patent applies specifically to buttons on a portable device. If you push the email button quickly it opens the email program, but if you hold the email button down for two seconds it immediately jumps to starting a new email, and if you hold the email button down for three seconds it performs a send/receive. Nobody else had thought to do that, so Microsoft did it and patented it.
Thing is the "power" button on many ATX machines works in this kind of way. Press and release sends a signal to the operating system. Hold it down for several seconds and the PSU switches to standby. Similarly there are plenty of devices where a brief press of the reset button just does a restart, but holding it down causes a reload of some default configuration. You also find this "press and release" being distinct from "press and hold" quite frequently on electronic watches. (As well as being a mechanism to access "service features". e.g. "press and hold for stupidly long time" or "hold down this button when powering up".) Even having a "press/release", "press/short hold", "press/long hold" set of options probably isn't that much of an innovation. The problem is that the more functions you want to attach to one button the more cumbersome things become from the user POV.
umm... you don't need a signature to agree to any kind of contract. do you think any of the oss libraries require the user to sign something? of course not. simply using it means they agree to the terms of the license.
You need permission from the copyright holder to distribute copyrighted works to other parties. The likes of the GPL and LGPL are conditional permission statments. They are not "contracts" in any normal sense of the term and are subject to different laws.
Since the code is original, copyright does not apply.
Actually copyright most certainly does apply. It's more the case that the copyright holder has given permission for their code to be published in this way (or even done so themselves).
A friend of mine received a letter from the University, notifying him that the RIAA had his information and was accusing him of file-sharing.
Did this letter have any kind of sender's address on it.
He was provided a number to contact them and settle out of court. This was three years ago, so it's not a new tactic. As to what happens when you do not respond? Apparently, nothing. He's not heard from them since.
Which implies this is more about income generation than enforcement. Because not only does taking court action cost the RIAA money it also enables the person they accuse to defend themselves and/or make a counterclaim. In order to win in court they need to produce evidence sufficent to convince a third party. In order to just as for money they need prove nothing to anyone.
What I want to know, however, is what they hope to gain by extorting money from people who don't have it. If, for example, they sent me such a letter, I would simply wipe my ass with it and send it back (obviously, an email wouldn't be tactile enough, but you get the idea.)
If you reply to them (or their lawyer) it would cost them...
Basically, they are fishing - and taking the path of least resistance. Most of these type of out of court settlements are calculated to be just low enough to make hiring an attorney and fighting it out in court cost-prohibitive. (DirecTV did a lot of this years ago).
I didn't know it was possible for someone to file a lawsuit where the defendent had to use a lawyer. Especially if someone were to say "The plaintiff has no case and I wish to counterclaim for my time".
I'm talking about people like myself, who don't use P2P download, yet STILL get those freaking letters! It's like living next door to a drug dealer and the cops accuse you of dealing along with him! I have no issue with them trying to make downloaders pay, but people who DON'T download, and who don't have enough money to spend on that, that's extortion and it's illegal.
It also looks rather like "bogus invoice fraud". However until a court says so you don't owe anything, legally.
Can you somehow add a ball point pen and chewing gum into making the dish?
Ironically last night on Discovery was a programme which explained how Aldrin had to fix a broken switch in the LEM using a pen whilst Armstrong flew the craft.
Because the uses of encryption that the DMCA protects can never be "strong" - DRM is all about giving people the decryption keys to decode the content but trying to trick them through elaborate obfuscation into not realizing they have the keys. That kind of scheme can never be cryptographically secure,
In some cases they migyht even toss in a cypher machine too. The other way in which the whole idea just falls apart is that you have to output some kind of plaintext.
the MAFIAA got the DMCA passed which makes it illegal instead of impossible. The MAFIAA are a bunch of lawyers, to them the laws of man are just as good, if not more useful than the laws of math and physics.
They don't appear to realise that the laws on man do not override the laws of the universe.
The star is quite often the major driving factor in a lot of people's choices to go see the movie (or not). If Generic Actor X is shmoozing the US market, he can't be doing the same in the UK at the same time.
There's this technology which has been around for a while, called "live television", which allows for someone's voice and image to be shown several thousand miles away. They can even do a live interview with the interviewer being in a studio nowhere near them. This has been possible for at least the last 25 years. Failing that there's a machine which has been around for closer to 50 which can transport people to anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours.
I can get a sure weekly southpark fix from the local bittorrent dealer in a dark alley of an internet and watch it hours after it was broadcasted at prime time.
It isn't all one way though. People in the US have to watch Torchwood via the same means...
Whe have to wait at least 6 months, which made sense in the old days when the marketing machines would also arrive 6 months late. At least the release was in sync with the marketing peak. Now, we do see movie trailers, reviews, blogs, parodies, pleasant scandals and bloopers at the same time the Americans do, thus months before the movies enter our movietheatres.
Why is it that books, even video games can get their act together. But the motion picture industry can't...
Most DVD players in.eu are region-free now (I 'hacked' mine), otherwise we can't watch the movies we legally order over the internet!
Since the EU is in two DVD regions they'd have a tough time attempting to enforce this region coding.
err, you're assuming the f-22 is slated to carry nuclear weapons. In fact the radiation from these weapons will defeat the stealth technology. Pu239 is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles won't penetrate much of anything. The only time a missile can alter the RCS of a stealth plane is when the weapons bay doors are open and immediatly after firing (the missile may well have a much larger RCS than the plane itself) the nature of the warhead is irrelevent here.
Actually, only one of the regimes you threw out were genocidal religious maniacs - the Baath party in Iraq were genocidal secular maniacs.
Which the US played no small part in helping into power.
Having siad that, the US has no business screwing up the Middle East anyway, other than being Israel's bitch.
An excuse the US didn't need when it came to dumping on Central and South America. Though it might be interesting to find out exactly why the US Government is so enthusiastic about protecting the interests of a tiny country several thousand miles away.
If the US really wanted to promote regional stability, it would be better to isolate Israel, and cut off subsidy for that state of land thieves until they get their fundamentalist maniac settlers out of the occupied territories and pay full reparations to the victims of their ethnic cleansing in 1948.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the thing is here, that the ISP legally HAS to take the website down following the complaint, whether it is a legit complaint or not. I could theoretically ask for anyones website to be pulled, and then once its offline, attempt to find some infrindgement and hope they dont sue me for the false claim..
It dosn't matter if you find infringement or not, getting the site pulled may be your actual intention. If you have made a complaint using a false (or ficticious) name now is anyone going to track you down. Even if they can track you down what if you were in a different country? In most cases you wouldn't even get an extradition request made...
It may well be legal in Australia, too; this looks like an ISP that rolls over and dies whenever a complaint is lodged.
A situation hardly unique to Australia. This also happens in North America and Europe.
Nowhere does it say that the Minerals Council demonstrated a copyright infringement, it just says that they complained and the host took the site down. It hasn't gone to court
That's part of the problem. Someone making a complaint dosn't need to "go to court" and prove their case, even their identity, before action is taken. To take out a court injunction would require convincing a judge that there is at least some possibility of there being a case to answer.
In practice it's more likely that the site owner must prove a negative to the hoster/ISP. Which hardly improves supplier/customer relations.
and it looks to me as if the Minerals Council is just hoping that Rising Tide won't have the resources to mount an effective legal challenge.
Since "Rising Tide" don't have a time machine all they could be would be to sue "Minerals Council" for damages.
Unless Australian law allows a phrase such as "brought to you by mining" to be copyrighted, this whole fair use tangent is beside the point.
Possibly it might be a trademark, but since the satirical site isn't selling anything that should be irrelevent.
The site-host has to respond to the Takedown notice within 24 hours. They will always take the site down first and then restore it later if there's no issue. From the hoster's point of view that's the best course of action - they can't get legal advice on every single takedown request they get. But it does mean the process is open to abuse by copyright holders.
It may actually be simply "open to abuse". If the hoster will take the site down before they even attempt to find out if the complaint is valid how do they know if the complaining entity has any claim at all to copyright on the site in question? Even that they actually exist... IIRC this was exactly what some European researchers discovered when they made takedown requests in the names of ficticious organisations against sites with only public domain material on.
If there is no comeback for making a bogus takedown request they will be used maliciously.
The flipside to this is that, under Australian Copyright law, using copyrighted material for the purposees of satire is OK. It's great that this is getting so much attention. The satirists are within their rights and it makes the (enourmously powerful) mining lobby look like a bunch of wankers with no sense of humour.
Indeed going after the satirists has been an effective "foot shooting" exercise on the part of the lobby. All too often people (especially "corporate people", including religious and political groups) fail to realise that trying to ban something can have the opposite effect.
And here we have the (obvious) difference between physical things and ephemeral IP, one can be copied, used, and reused indefinitely. The other cannot. Yet copyright law exists to create an artificial duplication boundary for such ephemeral products, ostensibly so that creators will be able to extract economic value from their work as an incentive to create more.
Copyright is thus intended as a means rather than an end in itself. There may thus be an optimal level of copyright to do this. It's even possible that an excess is worst than none at all. e.g. a dead person cannot possibly create any more of anything yet his or her grand children might prevent people creating derived works which are more accessable to people now.
Thus, the problem is not DRM - that is a symptom. The problem is a series of modern changes to copyright law that now do not function to drive value creation, but instead were enacted as political payback to a corporate media cartels.
Most obviously extending copyright on already existing works...
But, you could never have a service like this without DRM. Imagine a movie rental store that burned movies on DVD-Rs instead of handing you the original disk.
Note that your "movie rental store" is actually private lending library. If they hand you the original disk they need to know who you are so that they can be sure of getting it back. If they gave you a copy then they have no reason to care. All they need to do for a viable business model is to ensure that they charge you enough money to at least cover their costs, which could include a royalty payment as well such things as the cost of the disk, the service of burning it, some amount towards the overhead of running the shop, etc.
Furthermore, many people would stop paying full price for a movie
This is more an indication of a problem with the business model behind "full price" DVDs that any kind of endorsement for DRM.
however, the internet renders such a model inefficient in comparison. now, the artist and consumer can interact directly. the internet has replaced the distribution model the riaa's constituent companies are attempting to defend. there defenses are unsuccessful so far, and will continue to be
You also have the likes of DVD region coding, which attempt to replicate inefficancies of older distribution methods.
You are comparing this to a service where you pay periodically according to a contract or something, and where you can only avail of the special discount one time (per household, or whatever). This is how subscriptions work. They keep track of who you are, so you can't repeatedly get a "first month free" deal by closing your cable TV account every month and signing up again. So the regular subscribers are not being penalized just because they offer a special short-term deal for new users.
So long as the the special price is for only a month, when it's for six months to a year or even an ongoing cheaper package not (easily) available to existing customers then it is likely to start annoying people.
When was the last time you got a subscription renewal notice (like for a magazine subscription) where they said, "Renew now and take advantage of our yearly subscription price that is 55% HIGHER than the newsstand price!" I would venture to say that you've never seen anything like that in your mailbox. The whole POINT of subscription schemes is for the seller to get a guaranteed yearly amount from you, while on your end you get a big DISCOUNT off the regular purchase price of the magazine (or whatever).
There are also advantages to the publisher. They know that they have X magazines which they will definitly need to print and ship to customers. This is a number they can give to advertisers. Whereas the regular retail copies may or may not sell and if they don't sell tend to need to be collected for disposal/recycling. Thus the number of potentially unsold copies needs to be factored into the cover price. The other advantage is that you tend to get money from subcriptions before you have sold the customer anything. Most likely before you've even produced it. Whereas the money from retail sales comes in only afterwards, possibly quite some time afterwards when the retailer pays you.
Just about any business would prefer to be paid in advance, especially so far in advance that they can gain a decent amount of interest.
Bottom line is this: new customers ARE more valuable to them and they know it
Which makes little sense considering that there are costs associated with new customers which do not apply to existing customers. e.g. setting up an account, credit checks, confirmation communications, even dispatching new hardware. All I can think is that there is some sort of stock market manipulation going on where the number of new customers is significent, but the total number of customers, even the nmumber of leaving customers isn't.
Lots of companies do this, and they wouldnt do it if it didnt work.
CABLE, PHONE, & INTERNET ONLY $29.99 A MONTH!!!!!!!!*
*first 3 months regular rate of $150 a month applies 4th month and on.
Most likely also with "Offer not available to new customers"
Sometimes even "Not available to existing or previous (within the last X months) customers". Presumably avoid (annoyed) customers saying "right i'd like to cancel then sign up".
It's hard to see how this can be good business sense, not only does this create a lot of bad feeling amongst customers, it actually costs them money to add customers, remove customers, deal with complaints/enquries and have a human make manual changes to a customer account. Wouldn't automatically giving existing customers as good as (even better deals) actually be cheaper for the suppliers concerned?
On a more serious note, this beg the questions of what more can be added to the Windows Operating system? Isn't going to be complete at some point? I played around with Vista and there are some like a nice improvements, but I don't see six-years of work or enhancements.
This also applies to MS Office as well. At what point are you getting change for the sake of change?
Just the same, they reserve the right to take down or remove programmes that have run on their channels which might damage relationships; examples might be football offerings or 'edited' shows."
They might also want to supress things which are embarassing. Like live footage of someone claiming a building has fallen down when it's still there in the background. Especially if that building does fall down some time later.
This has nothing to do with icons on a desktop, the patent is explicitly written as such. This patent applies specifically to buttons on a portable device. If you push the email button quickly it opens the email program, but if you hold the email button down for two seconds it immediately jumps to starting a new email, and if you hold the email button down for three seconds it performs a send/receive. Nobody else had thought to do that, so Microsoft did it and patented it.
Thing is the "power" button on many ATX machines works in this kind of way. Press and release sends a signal to the operating system. Hold it down for several seconds and the PSU switches to standby. Similarly there are plenty of devices where a brief press of the reset button just does a restart, but holding it down causes a reload of some default configuration.
You also find this "press and release" being distinct from "press and hold" quite frequently on electronic watches. (As well as being a mechanism to access "service features". e.g. "press and hold for stupidly long time" or "hold down this button when powering up".) Even having a "press/release", "press/short hold", "press/long hold" set of options probably isn't that much of an innovation. The problem is that the more functions you want to attach to one button the more cumbersome things become from the user POV.
umm... you don't need a signature to agree to any kind of contract. do you think any of the oss libraries require the user to sign something? of course not. simply using it means they agree to the terms of the license.
You need permission from the copyright holder to distribute copyrighted works to other parties. The likes of the GPL and LGPL are conditional permission statments. They are not "contracts" in any normal sense of the term and are subject to different laws.
Since the code is original, copyright does not apply.
Actually copyright most certainly does apply. It's more the case that the copyright holder has given permission for their code to be published in this way (or even done so themselves).
A friend of mine received a letter from the University, notifying him that the RIAA had his information and was accusing him of file-sharing.
Did this letter have any kind of sender's address on it.
He was provided a number to contact them and settle out of court. This was three years ago, so it's not a new tactic. As to what happens when you do not respond? Apparently, nothing. He's not heard from them since.
Which implies this is more about income generation than enforcement. Because not only does taking court action cost the RIAA money it also enables the person they accuse to defend themselves and/or make a counterclaim.
In order to win in court they need to produce evidence sufficent to convince a third party. In order to just as for money they need prove nothing to anyone.
What I want to know, however, is what they hope to gain by extorting money from people who don't have it. If, for example, they sent me such a letter, I would simply wipe my ass with it and send it back (obviously, an email wouldn't be tactile enough, but you get the idea.)
If you reply to them (or their lawyer) it would cost them...
Basically, they are fishing - and taking the path of least resistance. Most of these type of out of court settlements are calculated to be just low enough to make hiring an attorney and fighting it out in court cost-prohibitive. (DirecTV did a lot of this years ago).
I didn't know it was possible for someone to file a lawsuit where the defendent had to use a lawyer. Especially if someone were to say "The plaintiff has no case and I wish to counterclaim for my time".
I'm talking about people like myself, who don't use P2P download, yet STILL get those freaking letters! It's like living next door to a drug dealer and the cops accuse you of dealing along with him! I have no issue with them trying to make downloaders pay, but people who DON'T download, and who don't have enough money to spend on that, that's extortion and it's illegal.
It also looks rather like "bogus invoice fraud". However until a court says so you don't owe anything, legally.
Can you somehow add a ball point pen and chewing gum into making the dish?
Ironically last night on Discovery was a programme which explained how Aldrin had to fix a broken switch in the LEM using a pen whilst Armstrong flew the craft.
Because the uses of encryption that the DMCA protects can never be "strong" - DRM is all about giving people the decryption keys to decode the content but trying to trick them through elaborate obfuscation into not realizing they have the keys. That kind of scheme can never be cryptographically secure,
In some cases they migyht even toss in a cypher machine too.
The other way in which the whole idea just falls apart is that you have to output some kind of plaintext.
the MAFIAA got the DMCA passed which makes it illegal instead of impossible. The MAFIAA are a bunch of lawyers, to them the laws of man are just as good, if not more useful than the laws of math and physics.
They don't appear to realise that the laws on man do not override the laws of the universe.
The star is quite often the major driving factor in a lot of people's choices to go see the movie (or not). If Generic Actor X is shmoozing the US market, he can't be doing the same in the UK at the same time.
There's this technology which has been around for a while, called "live television", which allows for someone's voice and image to be shown several thousand miles away. They can even do a live interview with the interviewer being in a studio nowhere near them. This has been possible for at least the last 25 years.
Failing that there's a machine which has been around for closer to 50 which can transport people to anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours.
I can get a sure weekly southpark fix from the local bittorrent dealer in a dark alley of an internet and watch it hours after it was broadcasted at prime time.
.eu are region-free now (I 'hacked' mine), otherwise we can't watch the movies we legally order over the internet!
It isn't all one way though. People in the US have to watch Torchwood via the same means...
Whe have to wait at least 6 months, which made sense in the old days when the marketing machines would also arrive 6 months late. At least the release was in sync with the marketing peak. Now, we do see movie trailers, reviews, blogs, parodies, pleasant scandals and bloopers at the same time the Americans do, thus months before the movies enter our movietheatres.
Why is it that books, even video games can get their act together. But the motion picture industry can't...
Most DVD players in
Since the EU is in two DVD regions they'd have a tough time attempting to enforce this region coding.
err, you're assuming the f-22 is slated to carry nuclear weapons. In fact the radiation from these weapons will defeat the stealth technology.
Pu239 is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles won't penetrate much of anything. The only time a missile can alter the RCS of a stealth plane is when the weapons bay doors are open and immediatly after firing (the missile may well have a much larger RCS than the plane itself) the nature of the warhead is irrelevent here.
Actually, only one of the regimes you threw out were genocidal religious maniacs - the Baath party in Iraq were genocidal secular maniacs.
Which the US played no small part in helping into power.
Having siad that, the US has no business screwing up the Middle East anyway, other than being Israel's bitch.
An excuse the US didn't need when it came to dumping on Central and South America. Though it might be interesting to find out exactly why the US Government is so enthusiastic about protecting the interests of a tiny country several thousand miles away.
If the US really wanted to promote regional stability, it would be better to isolate Israel, and cut off subsidy for that state of land thieves until they get their fundamentalist maniac settlers out of the occupied territories and pay full reparations to the victims of their ethnic cleansing in 1948.
Or even enforce the original partition plan...