Then we'd have know all about it for some time. If there were a planet there, it would have had an effect on the orbits of other planets that are directly observable.
And space probes would also be likely to pick up on it. If amazingly no one had guessed before. (like from the invasion of Cybermen;)
Except that the Congress has written copyright laws that take this into account: 17 USC 117 specifically grants the owner of a copyrighted work the right to make any copies needed for the functioning of the work (e.g. copying part or all of a program from a CDROM to RAM, VM, writable disks, cache, and the CPU) as well as permission to create a backup copy.
You are not violating MS's rights by buying a copy of Windows, refusing to agree to the license, circumventing the installer and running it anyway, IMO, though IANAL.
If you agree and disregard the license that's a little iffier, though current judicial thinking is that software licenses are generally not valid IIRC.
Personally, if I wrote software and sold it and retained a copyright on it, I wouldn't include a license - it's superfluous. Most day-to-day software does not require licenses to protect the copyright owner.
I didn't say that the clear optical mouse sucked - just that the xy sensor was too far back. It ought to be about 1cm from the front of the mouse.
I haven't had trouble with the button pivot, but there is an adjustment wheel for the tension of the pivot which might help you out.
As for MS's mice, I'm not a fan. All of the current generation of opticals (unsurprisingly - they're all based on the same HP technology) skip at critical times in FPS games. But more importantly, the MS mice are generally too large, too heavy, and too right-handed for my tastes.
Oh, I don't know - I liked the iPuck very much. True, you couldn't rest your hand on it, but the roller was effectively farther towards the front of the mouse. (where it belongs)
Currently I'm using the new buttonless mouse. The damn sensor is too far back (it ought to be trivially easy to have it at the front tip, those dorks) but I don't have to worry about sliding my mousepad all over, or getting cruft into it.
As always though, the thing isn't chained to the computer. People should carefully investigate mice, keyboards and monitors and choose for comfort; after all, those are the parts of the computer that you use the most.
Steve was pointing out (and demonstrated) putting a burned DVD into a generic standalone player.
And since it'll accept any QT file, it ought to be easy to rip dvd movies. *BUT* who can say how well the authoring software will cope with fancy menus, anamorphic video, alternate sound and text tracks, etc.
If I had the cash, I'd be willing to take a chance on it though.
While the transformer wouldn't be a big deal, it would be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with having a PAL TV in an NTSC country. I'd be more interested to see if there are cheap 16:9 TVs in Japan, as it also uses NTSC.
As for content protection, my opinon would be that it's an abuse of the privleges of copyright. (which no one is entitled to anyway, either by nature or in the US) So why not strip the copyright of protected works until such time as the copyright holder stops protecting them? Seems like a decent solution to me.
Don't worry, no one likes the dub of Bubblegum Crisis, very few like Bubblegum Crash at all, and opinions are mixed on BGC2040. (me, I didn't like it) And if you think it's hard to get people to take Cowboy Bebop seriously b/c of the name, then you'll know there's no chance for Bubblegum Crisis.
I'd suggest watching the subtitled version, and being lenient; BGC is pretty old, and the animation and storyline didn't improve to today's standards until the 5th episode. (of course a lot of the stuff on Cartoon Network, American or Japanese is barely animated anyway....)
Anyway, have you seen "Key the Metal Idol"? I never really got into it, but according to good friends of mine, it's supposed to be similar to Lain, but better. Me, I love Escaflowne, the second Patlabor movie, Wings of Honneamise, nigh-anything by Miyazaki.... Check those out - they're all good stuff.
Actually, at least at one point (and possibly even today) Adobe's programs looked over LANs, if they were available, to see if other copies of the programs were running and had identical serial numbers. But I do think that it's not a big secret that MS and other big companies, though they would prefer everyone to buy their software, tolerate large scale piracy because at least it harms their competitors in the mindshare arena.
Er, there are people with photographic memories. My maternal grandfather had one, for instance. It's not awfully common, and it won't get you far in life all by itself, but they are real.
And even so - I can remember a number of books and movies and such well enough to recreate them enough for it to be deemed copyright infringement if I tried to sell a copy I made. Thankfully no one has jurisdiction over thought, though I'm sure that publishers are short-sighted enough to wish that they did.
If the FAA will let it. There've also been some experiments to build unmanned high-altitude drones that could circle over a large city for several months.
Personally, I like the blimps though - particularly if they run ads for Mars colonization on them;)
While it is under assault, it is not necessarily required that you license samples AFAIK, NB IANAL. If the new work is sufficiently transformative that it qualifies for copyright protection, it's quite unlikely that a court would find that it was also so derivative that the samples must be bought.
MST3K does not do enough with the films that they heckled, so they had to get rights to display them. On the other hand, if an independently copyrighted work happened to be in a movie, it's pretty likely not infringement because there's so much more.
Negativland has some notes about sampling on their web site... they're pretty active about it.
Regardless of whether I actually want those benefits or would prefer, say, a larger paycheck or more flexible hours.
MS offers certain benefits to their employees. What is actually happening of course is that the temps who qualified as employees (that is they meet the definition of an employee in all ways except in name) were denied access to the benefit programs. Now they're eligable. No one is forcing them to take advantage of the MS health plan (which like many in WA is probably rather good) but at least the decision rests with the temp.
It's certainly possible that they can then start negotiating away some of their benefits, but they've achieved access that they didn't have before.
Bonehead and proud of it. I have this wacky belief that agreements made between consenting adults should be honored, even if one person decides several years later that he's changed his mind. I especially oppose the concept that it is the government's job to tell me what agreements I can and cannot make because I am incapable of running my own life.
Yet there has long been the principle that not all contracts are legal. A contract to commit a crime is not binding. Nor are contracts that are simply reprehensible (e.g. giving up everything you have for something utterly worthless), or made by people who are not of sound mind when agreeing (e.g. drunk) or with minors. The contracts in question here were perfectly valid as long as the employees were contract workers. But the state law, which overrides the contract, establishes definitions of terms in the contract more authoritatively than the contract itself does, and offers a place of recourse should there be a breach.
It's a free country, and you can lobby to have the protections that exist in the law taken away from you if you want, to a certain extent, but I don't think that would be great. True, I don't think that the govt. should hold everyone's hands, but neither should it passively let people fall into pits that they have no hope of escaping from. Shall we revive debtors' prison next?
If anything, this ruling makes it more likely that people will starve in the streets, because it increases the cost that companies must pay to hire workers. As cost goes up, they will be less willing to hire. The law of supply and demand is not subject to repeal by the legislature.
Not really. There's nothing that prevents MS from hiring temps, they must however treat them as temps. If they want to treat them as employees, they'll have to be hired as employees. The new policy will cause there to be greater turnover among the temps, and will increase hiring for those workers who simply must be kept on longer. Seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other. The local economy is going to be impacted far more by MS's recent stock drops than a change in employment policy.
We clearly have radically different definitions of the word "abuse". Every single temp worker involved in this suit had at least two choices: continuing to work as a temp, or quitting. (And most of them probably had many more options.) By choosing to work as temps, they demonstrated that they were better off with Microsoft than without it. I fail to see how this mutually beneficial agreement can be termed "abuse".
Sure. But the thing is, MS treated the temps like employees in every way except in name, and in the benefits. These were refused them. It's all of the quid and none of the quo. The settlement establishes that the workers of whom special 'employee-esque' demands are regularly made need to really be employees and get the perks therof, and that those who are treated as actual temporary 'here today gone tommorow' workers are also treated as such.
Among the tech crowd there are a lot of contractors who like the flexibility and pay, but most temp workers do not get those benefits either; the largest employer in the country is a temp agency. Why? Because so many businesses hire temps instead of employees. Why? So as to dodge the benefits programs that employees had to fight to get in the first place. I'm sure that there are taxes and workplace requirements that can get skirted around too. For MS and other businesses (e.g. Amazon which has been harrassing labor organizers recently) it's about money. They couldn't care less about why you want to be a temp.
What you're saying here is that MS should be above the law. That they can follow it or flaunt it at their convenience. I utterly disagree. If they have a problem with the law, they're perfectly capable of arguing that it is overridden by a contrary, higher law, or that it's unconstitutional.
But furthermore, the only good argument for ignoring a law is the moral argument. If there were slaves here, I'd help them escape regardless of the law or the constitutionality of the law b/c that's one of the times when my morals compel me to act regardless. This doesn't mean that I'd expect to go free if caught. I'd gladly go to prision. I'd wear it like a badge.
But in this case, not only is the law on the temps' side, but I think that they should not be mistreated by MS either. So both ways, I'm still in favor of the temps, and as far as the legal system goes, only the first is even necessary.
If MS wants employees, then they're entitled to the benefits that the state requires. If they want temps, they shouldn't be kept but on a temporary basis. MS can afford lawyers, they know this, and they've no excuse for their behavior. I just don't see any contradictions here, sorry.
I live near MS, and I have a crapload of neighbors who work there, and my understanding is that regardless of what MS and the temps agreed to, the heart of the issue is federal and state law.
Even if you're a temp with a contract, if you're given the duties of an employee, the demands upon you are the same as an employee, and this persists for a long enough time to convince a judge that it's not a temporary situation, you are in effect an employee. As such, even if the contract says otherwise, you are required to get all the employee benefits.
Basically, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, a piece of paper indicating that it's a goose isn't relevant.
MS tried to skirt around this by hiring de facto employees, calling them temps and dodging their legal responsibilities to give them benefits. The temps may not have gone in asking for it, but there's nothing wrong with forcing MS to comply with the law when they're the ones who weren't doing it.
There are plenty of boneheads on/. who will claim that this is awful, and that contracts should be honored no matter what. I think that they forget that human beings are not economic bacteria in a cycle of stimuli-response, but that we have social desires (e.g. preventing people from starving in the street) that are more important than adhering to an imperfect system of economics. (i.e. any of them)
I don't see a contradiction in this case. It is more important that employers not abuse their employees than it is to let the employees accept it because they have very little choice in the matter.
actually they still sell Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3. Four was okay, but way, way too short. There really should have been an additional act in there... perhaps as Elaine?
my favorite game, which I do play a pirated copy of, is Bolo for the Apple II. (not the same as Bolo for the Mac!)
It's very simple, but kicks an amazing amount of ass. If only there were some way to tell which way your tank was pointing if you've been using the turret...
Yeah, I had a Bernoulli 230. The last of the really good things that Iomega made.
The reason people liked them, even though SyQuests were more common, was that they were solid as a rock. I don't think that I've ever heard of a Bernoulli failing. The disks were nigh-indestructable.
Given how much hard disks cost in the early 90's, I loved 'em. OTOH, the cartridges cost ~$100 a pop which was affordable at the time. However, Iomega brought the cheap Zip media, the large Jaz media, and CDRs became commonplace, with cheap, large, easily portable media. The Bernoullis never had a chance. Sniff.
While the FL Legislature can suspend a general election in the case of emergency, does this qualify? If so, would the choosing of the FL presidental electors on a date other than the date required in the US Constitution be legal?
Basically are the requirements of the US Constitution compatable with the FL Legislature saying 'If no presidental electors are chosen to our satisfaction, we can choose ourselves, with the choice made retroactively"?
IANAL, but it's not at all clear what the right answer is here, and if the stakes weren't so high, I'm sure that judges all over the place would be salivating to get their hands on such an interesting case. Instead it looks like the SCOTUS is trying to avoid things by handing it back to SCOFL for clarification. (Which I'm sure they're thrilled about)
No they can't. The Constitution requires that the electors are all chosen on the same day through the entire country. If the FL Legislature had taken over on Nov 7 they'd be on solid ground federally (though the Constitution of Florida would prohibit this I expect) but they can't do it now.
Voltron's only one of the original mecha series in the states. Look further back to MS Gundam, Tetsujin 28, Mazinger Z....
However Voltron hardly had good mecha combat scenes, which is what the thread was looking at. (besides, while there was lion voltron, there was _also_ little vehicle voltron. and three-robot voltron, IIRC)
No, that wouldn't be good either. We don't want people ignoring the laws when possible, and France is a sovereign state.
I'd suggest that yahoo.fr comply with the order. But there's nothing requiring yahoo.com to do so, and if french citizens access a foreign site then it's unreasonable to expect yahoo.com to adhere to the order.
D'oh! I of course, did mean medium. Well that's tamago on my face.
As to Giant Robo, oh yes. It's absolutely incredible. As it happens I was listening to the soundtrack just now. I'm really upset that we're stuck waiting for about a year still for the US DVD release - I would have even taken it before Mac+.
For people not familiar with Giant Robo, let me explain. In the 60's was a comic by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, upon which the popular live action TV series we know in the US as 'Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot' is based. Much later, Giant Robo was based on this (and it's a lot better...)
It's a 7 part series, the music as previously mentioned is supurb (a full orchestral score) and the animation is excellent. The whole thing has a very retro feel to it, as the source material dates back so far; it takes place in the future, but the animation style is deliberately somewhat old (Blazing Transfer Student, a fairly obscure short OAV series is another good example, and the Gekiganger segments in Nadesico as well) and the plot is what you would get if the James Bond folks thought _big_.
There are some hard to find VHS tapes and very hard to find LDs in the US of Giant Robo, so I strongly suggest that y'all look for it, but the DVD ought to be great if the Japanese box set is any indication.
(Wings of Honneamise is also very good, and quite different, but I hear that the DVD is pretty lousy, so....)
There are a couple good sites here: http://members.tripod.com/~giantrobo/ and here: http://www.ex.org/3.2/04-feature_gr1.html
Slashdot Mirror
Then we'd have know all about it for some time. If there were a planet there, it would have had an effect on the orbits of other planets that are directly observable.
;)
And space probes would also be likely to pick up on it. If amazingly no one had guessed before. (like from the invasion of Cybermen
Except that the Congress has written copyright laws that take this into account: 17 USC 117 specifically grants the owner of a copyrighted work the right to make any copies needed for the functioning of the work (e.g. copying part or all of a program from a CDROM to RAM, VM, writable disks, cache, and the CPU) as well as permission to create a backup copy.
You are not violating MS's rights by buying a copy of Windows, refusing to agree to the license, circumventing the installer and running it anyway, IMO, though IANAL.
If you agree and disregard the license that's a little iffier, though current judicial thinking is that software licenses are generally not valid IIRC.
Personally, if I wrote software and sold it and retained a copyright on it, I wouldn't include a license - it's superfluous. Most day-to-day software does not require licenses to protect the copyright owner.
I didn't say that the clear optical mouse sucked - just that the xy sensor was too far back. It ought to be about 1cm from the front of the mouse.
I haven't had trouble with the button pivot, but there is an adjustment wheel for the tension of the pivot which might help you out.
As for MS's mice, I'm not a fan. All of the current generation of opticals (unsurprisingly - they're all based on the same HP technology) skip at critical times in FPS games. But more importantly, the MS mice are generally too large, too heavy, and too right-handed for my tastes.
But, to each his own!
Oh, I don't know - I liked the iPuck very much. True, you couldn't rest your hand on it, but the roller was effectively farther towards the front of the mouse. (where it belongs)
Currently I'm using the new buttonless mouse. The damn sensor is too far back (it ought to be trivially easy to have it at the front tip, those dorks) but I don't have to worry about sliding my mousepad all over, or getting cruft into it.
As always though, the thing isn't chained to the computer. People should carefully investigate mice, keyboards and monitors and choose for comfort; after all, those are the parts of the computer that you use the most.
Steve was pointing out (and demonstrated) putting a burned DVD into a generic standalone player.
And since it'll accept any QT file, it ought to be easy to rip dvd movies. *BUT* who can say how well the authoring software will cope with fancy menus, anamorphic video, alternate sound and text tracks, etc.
If I had the cash, I'd be willing to take a chance on it though.
they just started charging, sorry.
While the transformer wouldn't be a big deal, it would be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with having a PAL TV in an NTSC country. I'd be more interested to see if there are cheap 16:9 TVs in Japan, as it also uses NTSC.
As for content protection, my opinon would be that it's an abuse of the privleges of copyright. (which no one is entitled to anyway, either by nature or in the US) So why not strip the copyright of protected works until such time as the copyright holder stops protecting them? Seems like a decent solution to me.
Don't worry, no one likes the dub of Bubblegum Crisis, very few like Bubblegum Crash at all, and opinions are mixed on BGC2040. (me, I didn't like it) And if you think it's hard to get people to take Cowboy Bebop seriously b/c of the name, then you'll know there's no chance for Bubblegum Crisis.
I'd suggest watching the subtitled version, and being lenient; BGC is pretty old, and the animation and storyline didn't improve to today's standards until the 5th episode. (of course a lot of the stuff on Cartoon Network, American or Japanese is barely animated anyway....)
Anyway, have you seen "Key the Metal Idol"? I never really got into it, but according to good friends of mine, it's supposed to be similar to Lain, but better. Me, I love Escaflowne, the second Patlabor movie, Wings of Honneamise, nigh-anything by Miyazaki.... Check those out - they're all good stuff.
Actually, at least at one point (and possibly even today) Adobe's programs looked over LANs, if they were available, to see if other copies of the programs were running and had identical serial numbers. But I do think that it's not a big secret that MS and other big companies, though they would prefer everyone to buy their software, tolerate large scale piracy because at least it harms their competitors in the mindshare arena.
Er, there are people with photographic memories. My maternal grandfather had one, for instance. It's not awfully common, and it won't get you far in life all by itself, but they are real.
And even so - I can remember a number of books and movies and such well enough to recreate them enough for it to be deemed copyright infringement if I tried to sell a copy I made. Thankfully no one has jurisdiction over thought, though I'm sure that publishers are short-sighted enough to wish that they did.
If the FAA will let it. There've also been some experiments to build unmanned high-altitude drones that could circle over a large city for several months.
;)
Personally, I like the blimps though - particularly if they run ads for Mars colonization on them
It's also known as Tempest.
While it is under assault, it is not necessarily required that you license samples AFAIK, NB IANAL. If the new work is sufficiently transformative that it qualifies for copyright protection, it's quite unlikely that a court would find that it was also so derivative that the samples must be bought.
MST3K does not do enough with the films that they heckled, so they had to get rights to display them. On the other hand, if an independently copyrighted work happened to be in a movie, it's pretty likely not infringement because there's so much more.
Negativland has some notes about sampling on their web site... they're pretty active about it.
MS offers certain benefits to their employees. What is actually happening of course is that the temps who qualified as employees (that is they meet the definition of an employee in all ways except in name) were denied access to the benefit programs. Now they're eligable. No one is forcing them to take advantage of the MS health plan (which like many in WA is probably rather good) but at least the decision rests with the temp.
It's certainly possible that they can then start negotiating away some of their benefits, but they've achieved access that they didn't have before.
Bonehead and proud of it. I have this wacky belief that agreements made between consenting adults should be honored, even if one person decides several years later that he's changed his mind. I especially oppose the concept that it is the government's job to tell me what agreements I can and cannot make because I am incapable of running my own life.
Yet there has long been the principle that not all contracts are legal. A contract to commit a crime is not binding. Nor are contracts that are simply reprehensible (e.g. giving up everything you have for something utterly worthless), or made by people who are not of sound mind when agreeing (e.g. drunk) or with minors. The contracts in question here were perfectly valid as long as the employees were contract workers. But the state law, which overrides the contract, establishes definitions of terms in the contract more authoritatively than the contract itself does, and offers a place of recourse should there be a breach.
It's a free country, and you can lobby to have the protections that exist in the law taken away from you if you want, to a certain extent, but I don't think that would be great. True, I don't think that the govt. should hold everyone's hands, but neither should it passively let people fall into pits that they have no hope of escaping from. Shall we revive debtors' prison next?
If anything, this ruling makes it more likely that people will starve in the streets, because it increases the cost that companies must pay to hire workers. As cost goes up, they will be less willing to hire. The law of supply and demand is not subject to repeal by the legislature.
Not really. There's nothing that prevents MS from hiring temps, they must however treat them as temps. If they want to treat them as employees, they'll have to be hired as employees. The new policy will cause there to be greater turnover among the temps, and will increase hiring for those workers who simply must be kept on longer. Seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other. The local economy is going to be impacted far more by MS's recent stock drops than a change in employment policy.
We clearly have radically different definitions of the word "abuse". Every single temp worker involved in this suit had at least two choices: continuing to work as a temp, or quitting. (And most of them probably had many more options.) By choosing to work as temps, they demonstrated that they were better off with Microsoft than without it. I fail to see how this mutually beneficial agreement can be termed "abuse".
Sure. But the thing is, MS treated the temps like employees in every way except in name, and in the benefits. These were refused them. It's all of the quid and none of the quo. The settlement establishes that the workers of whom special 'employee-esque' demands are regularly made need to really be employees and get the perks therof, and that those who are treated as actual temporary 'here today gone tommorow' workers are also treated as such.
Among the tech crowd there are a lot of contractors who like the flexibility and pay, but most temp workers do not get those benefits either; the largest employer in the country is a temp agency. Why? Because so many businesses hire temps instead of employees. Why? So as to dodge the benefits programs that employees had to fight to get in the first place. I'm sure that there are taxes and workplace requirements that can get skirted around too. For MS and other businesses (e.g. Amazon which has been harrassing labor organizers recently) it's about money. They couldn't care less about why you want to be a temp.
It certainly is.
What you're saying here is that MS should be above the law. That they can follow it or flaunt it at their convenience. I utterly disagree. If they have a problem with the law, they're perfectly capable of arguing that it is overridden by a contrary, higher law, or that it's unconstitutional.
But furthermore, the only good argument for ignoring a law is the moral argument. If there were slaves here, I'd help them escape regardless of the law or the constitutionality of the law b/c that's one of the times when my morals compel me to act regardless. This doesn't mean that I'd expect to go free if caught. I'd gladly go to prision. I'd wear it like a badge.
But in this case, not only is the law on the temps' side, but I think that they should not be mistreated by MS either. So both ways, I'm still in favor of the temps, and as far as the legal system goes, only the first is even necessary.
If MS wants employees, then they're entitled to the benefits that the state requires. If they want temps, they shouldn't be kept but on a temporary basis. MS can afford lawyers, they know this, and they've no excuse for their behavior. I just don't see any contradictions here, sorry.
I live near MS, and I have a crapload of neighbors who work there, and my understanding is that regardless of what MS and the temps agreed to, the heart of the issue is federal and state law.
/. who will claim that this is awful, and that contracts should be honored no matter what. I think that they forget that human beings are not economic bacteria in a cycle of stimuli-response, but that we have social desires (e.g. preventing people from starving in the street) that are more important than adhering to an imperfect system of economics. (i.e. any of them)
Even if you're a temp with a contract, if you're given the duties of an employee, the demands upon you are the same as an employee, and this persists for a long enough time to convince a judge that it's not a temporary situation, you are in effect an employee. As such, even if the contract says otherwise, you are required to get all the employee benefits.
Basically, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, a piece of paper indicating that it's a goose isn't relevant.
MS tried to skirt around this by hiring de facto employees, calling them temps and dodging their legal responsibilities to give them benefits. The temps may not have gone in asking for it, but there's nothing wrong with forcing MS to comply with the law when they're the ones who weren't doing it.
There are plenty of boneheads on
I don't see a contradiction in this case. It is more important that employers not abuse their employees than it is to let the employees accept it because they have very little choice in the matter.
actually they still sell Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3. Four was okay, but way, way too short. There really should have been an additional act in there... perhaps as Elaine?
my favorite game, which I do play a pirated copy of, is Bolo for the Apple II. (not the same as Bolo for the Mac!)
It's very simple, but kicks an amazing amount of ass. If only there were some way to tell which way your tank was pointing if you've been using the turret...
Yeah, I had a Bernoulli 230. The last of the really good things that Iomega made.
The reason people liked them, even though SyQuests were more common, was that they were solid as a rock. I don't think that I've ever heard of a Bernoulli failing. The disks were nigh-indestructable.
Given how much hard disks cost in the early 90's, I loved 'em. OTOH, the cartridges cost ~$100 a pop which was affordable at the time. However, Iomega brought the cheap Zip media, the large Jaz media, and CDRs became commonplace, with cheap, large, easily portable media. The Bernoullis never had a chance. Sniff.
Well, that's where things get hairy.
While the FL Legislature can suspend a general election in the case of emergency, does this qualify? If so, would the choosing of the FL presidental electors on a date other than the date required in the US Constitution be legal?
Basically are the requirements of the US Constitution compatable with the FL Legislature saying 'If no presidental electors are chosen to our satisfaction, we can choose ourselves, with the choice made retroactively"?
IANAL, but it's not at all clear what the right answer is here, and if the stakes weren't so high, I'm sure that judges all over the place would be salivating to get their hands on such an interesting case. Instead it looks like the SCOTUS is trying to avoid things by handing it back to SCOFL for clarification. (Which I'm sure they're thrilled about)
No they can't. The Constitution requires that the electors are all chosen on the same day through the entire country. If the FL Legislature had taken over on Nov 7 they'd be on solid ground federally (though the Constitution of Florida would prohibit this I expect) but they can't do it now.
I concur on the dub, but I don't think I'd get this for three reasons.
1) I honestly do try to support bringing anime over to the US - fansubs are great, but I'm sure this costs a lot more
2) I have doubts about the quality of the subs
3) It's missing the cool 4th DVD from the official R2 Giant Robo Giga Collection.
But if you do get it, or see it, you should post a review of the disc quality on one of the anime groups.
I saw the rare 4 LD set floating around there a while back, but it got snatched up.
Voltron's only one of the original mecha series in the states. Look further back to MS Gundam, Tetsujin 28, Mazinger Z....
However Voltron hardly had good mecha combat scenes, which is what the thread was looking at. (besides, while there was lion voltron, there was _also_ little vehicle voltron. and three-robot voltron, IIRC)
No, that wouldn't be good either. We don't want people ignoring the laws when possible, and France is a sovereign state.
I'd suggest that yahoo.fr comply with the order. But there's nothing requiring yahoo.com to do so, and if french citizens access a foreign site then it's unreasonable to expect yahoo.com to adhere to the order.
D'oh! I of course, did mean medium. Well that's tamago on my face.
As to Giant Robo, oh yes. It's absolutely incredible. As it happens I was listening to the soundtrack just now. I'm really upset that we're stuck waiting for about a year still for the US DVD release - I would have even taken it before Mac+.
For people not familiar with Giant Robo, let me explain. In the 60's was a comic by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, upon which the popular live action TV series we know in the US as 'Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot' is based. Much later, Giant Robo was based on this (and it's a lot better...)
It's a 7 part series, the music as previously mentioned is supurb (a full orchestral score) and the animation is excellent. The whole thing has a very retro feel to it, as the source material dates back so far; it takes place in the future, but the animation style is deliberately somewhat old (Blazing Transfer Student, a fairly obscure short OAV series is another good example, and the Gekiganger segments in Nadesico as well) and the plot is what you would get if the James Bond folks thought _big_.
There are some hard to find VHS tapes and very hard to find LDs in the US of Giant Robo, so I strongly suggest that y'all look for it, but the DVD ought to be great if the Japanese box set is any indication.
(Wings of Honneamise is also very good, and quite different, but I hear that the DVD is pretty lousy, so....)
There are a couple good sites here: http://members.tripod.com/~giantrobo/ and here: http://www.ex.org/3.2/04-feature_gr1.html
While Esca is my favorite series, let me just add Eva to this list. (which ought to about wrap it up for stuff that's easy to find in the US)
;)
Oh, the Children aren't really as good pilots as in the other series, but there's nothing like a 15 story-tall sneakered mecha eating it's enemies.