And that's exactly why they're not using it. Sony Studios or any other MPAA member doesn't want to sell movies on a medium that can be easily reproduced.
I'd say one of the reasons we're seeing such a big push for a new HD-DVD standard is the fact that we now have dual-layer DVD-Rs on the market.
You're well beyond too late. People already buy FFXI characters off of eBay, hence a lv 27 red mage who couldn't grasp that I could only provoke every 30 seconds.
Really, all you would need to do is setup a search option that would let you apply a blacklist of sellers' names so that their auctions don't appear in your search results. That would solve all sorts of things.
"Users have to pay for each track they download, but sharing songs they've purchased from Peer Impact earns them credits they can spend on the service."
So the RIAA is setting up a pyramid scheme? How appropriate!
That, but I see it more as a sign of how important it is that you keep an eye on who's running for state and local office around you, the ones who'd be making these eminent domain decisions to begin with.
Think about how this case came about to begin with.
"With the current state of affairs, there is arguably no way for a conscientious American to serve their country through the military."
Depends on where you live. By federal law, "state gaurd" units (or whatever your home state decides to call it) cannot be called to serve outside their home state. They're still subject to any potential drafts, but it's still service to the state without being considered part of the federal armed forces.
Of course, since the feds don't pay for it like they do with the National Guard, many states opt not to have one.
"So...you have a blog. You write in it daily. Its on the web where anyone can read it. Supposedly, you _want_ people to read it."
The entire point of copyright law is content distribution solely on the creator's terms. If the author doesn't like the way you're redistributing his content, you are in violation of copyright law, period.
"Sure, they can't copy your blog and use it in advertising or anything but actually consuming the information you're putting out on the web is also wrong?"
Consuming is one thing. They're actively aggregating it and selling it to someone else, and that process would seem to be distribution without the author's consent.
"Isn't the whole point of blogging to let other people know what you think about something?"
And the entire point of copyright is that people will have to come to you in order to to get that content. It seems that with copyright you have the right to parse and aggregate all these blogs on your own, and perhaps it'd be legal to sell the tools necesary to do this (depending on how you look at the DMCA and who has the most expensive lawyer). However, selling the end-product of that aggregation seems to violate the copyright of every single blogger whose data you mined.
Nowadays you don't need a Hotmail account to get a Passport, the option is also there to tie your Passport to an existing email address.
You also have the option of signing up for a "limited" account in which they give you a bogus @passport.com address, solely for the purpose of signing into Passport.
I wish someone had made me aware of this when I had to tie my MCSE cert to a Passport, especially since it now seems impossible to move that tie to a less-intrusive form of Passport.
Same here, but I think I have a differnet threshold of "annoyance" than most people. Ads that pertain to the site and the intended audience of the site (unless the ad is particularly heinous), do not get blocked. For example, I don't block game ads on penny-arcade.com
However, ads that were placed by advertisers who pay absolutely no attention to the sites their ads are appearing on get blocked. "Hit the monkey" gets blocked, no matter where it apepars or how benign the ad format is.
By this rule, I'm sorely tempted to block all those Microsoft ads here, since someone wasn't running on all cylinders when they thought putting them on a rabidly anti-Microsoft website was a good idea. What next, ads for RealPlayer?
In the book, I'd argue that civillians have more rights (such as the right to peacably assemble) that civillians in the modern United States seem to lack.
10% of the websites out there are inaccessable to 10% of the browsers? Even assuming that every website is visited equally, that still leaves us with a problem that only affects 10% * 10% = 1% of the people out there.
Odds are, the sites that are incompatible with Firefox aren't heavily visited, anyway.
... except that wasn't a launch issue, it was an issue that cropped long after the purchase, an issue of wear. And really, if you were a little more delicate than the average 8 year-old kid, you wouldn't have that problem to begin with.
Besides, new connectors are easy to come by on eBay. You can't say that about PSP shells.
"America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War."
Sir Winston Churchill, New York Enquirer, 1936
What did you expect him to say? "As First Lord of the Admiralty, I manipulated the sinking of the Lusitania, filling the cargo holds of a 'passenger liner' with ammunition and deliberately routing her through waters filled with German submarines, for the very intent of dragging the US into the war. Because we needed something to break the stalemate." Heck, most of that stuff was still classified in the 1930's.
Oh, and don't forget what else he's not going to say to the American press at the time: "No, we're still not going to pay for all that stuff that we got from you during the war." No "Lend-Lease" stuff during that war, they were lucky we didn't demand cash up front (which, in hindsight, we probably should have). He was suggesting that they didn't need the materiel, anyway.
"Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism,"
We entered after the overthrow of the Czar. When Wilson urged Congress to "make the world safe for democracy," Russia was the democracy he was referring to. After the ousting of the Czar, it became the first and only democratic combattant. Before that, even with the Lusitania incident, Wilson was hard-pressed to convince Americans why we should get into a yet another royal family feud in Europe.
(And not long before, we were just as likely, if not more likely, to enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria. The UK was doing some of the same things the Germans were doing to our ships.)
"and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany."
Yeah, all our fault. We didn't even sign the damned treaty! The US negotiated a separate peace treaty because we didn't like the way it looked.
"If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government"
What parliamentary government? The UK was really the only example of anything resembling decent democracy in Europe, as had been the trend for the past few centuries at that point. Mainlaind Europe, including/especially the countries he listed, had always been wracked with internal strife (communism was 30-40 years old by that point). The only difference, really, was that the Powers that Be bloodied themselves and each other enough during the Great War that the unwashed masses actually had a chance to overpower them for once.
Heck, Germany and Italy as unified countries was still a relatively new concept going into the Great War.
" I do not think this guy was a very good writter."
Judging from all the "(illegible)" bits, it was a hand-written first draft.
"Even though he saw hair falling out of children, he dicounted the idea of radiation sickness."
No, he didn't think the radiation came from returning to the bombed area.
And even then, he talked about the doctors' opinions, as well as one or two cases that poked holes in their theory that the radiation came from fallout rather than the initial blast.
"He spent some time on the war stories of POWs too. This was a digression."
He wrote what he saw in Nagasaki. By the time he got in there it was a big "tourist" destination for former POWs that had nothing else to do at the time. That, and Nagasaki itself housed several POW camps, one of which was used to man the factory that was targeted by the bomb.
"How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?"
Perhaps not, but I can think of another big US amphibious landing: Veracruz.
"Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?"
We had our feelings hurt that we weren't allowed to continue playing both sides.
We got involved in a family feud among European royalty under the guise of "making the world safe for democracy." The specific democracy was the newfound democracy in Russia, to where we sent a lot of troops to actually fight against said democracy, trying to keep them in the war.
The history of the Twentieth Century might have been very different had we not gotten so involved in internal Russian affairs. Soviet communism might not have taken as much of a hard line as it did if the ostensibly democratic US weren't actively shooting at them (the bourgeois royalists from the UK were all but expected, but us?)
At any rate, don't forget that our involvement in WWI comes not long after the Spanish-American War.
"There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present."
Not quite. What they were actually saying was "give the blockade more time." It had been up for months prior, slowly starving the islands, but there was no sign of wavering in the Japanese military command. Instead, they send the Yamato off with no fuel (thanks to the blockade), with the intent of beaching her on Okinawa and acting as static guns.
"Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option."
Diplomacy? With the same country that had negotiators pretending to negotiate a peaceful resolution to their invasion of China with the US while an attack fleet was steeming towards Pearl Harbor at the same time? "Fool me once, shame on you..."
What conditions would they push for in that diplomacy? That the US abandon support for China? Hang on to some of the islands they grabbed in 1941?
Yes, there were parts of the Japanese government looking for peace, but they had no power in their government. Those in power were waiting for the eventual invasion of the home islands and forcing the US into a pyrrhic victory in order to negotiate from more strength. And to that end they gave spears to children. They only surrendered when the atomic bombs demonstrated there was no hope to make the victory costly for the US beyond the price tag of the bombs.
"The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this,"
Yeah, the parts that had no power. These were some of the same voices that said going to war with the US was a bad idea back in 1941, but if anything they lost influence as Japan lost captured territories over the years (since it became easier to see us as filthy gaijin invaders).
"and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway."
Not in the way they wanted. The constitution MacArthur forced down their throats, the one that reduced the political influence of the emperor to that of a figurehead at best, is not one that they would have accepted voluntarily. One of the less etherial reasons parts of the Japanese government wanted to leave the emperor's office unchanged is that the military forces effectively ruling the country used their power in his name. They knew that, if their offices relied more on a popularly-elected legislature, they'd be replaced with people like the peaceniks they were busy supressing.
John of England got to keep his throne, too. But there was still the little matter of the Magna Carta...
"Probably there were some people responsible for the deaths in China in Nagasaki, but Do you think they were all involved?"
More than you think there were. "Civillians" were drafted into service in those factories (such as the Mitsubishi factory in Nagasaki). To the Japanese government, at home and abroad, the line between "soldier" and "civillian" was very vague, if not non-existent.
"The children too?"
The children were being given bamboo spears with which to defend the home islands at the time. They drilled with them daily in their schools. It would have been a glorious death to charge US guns and tanks with those spears, I'm sure, were it not for the atomic bombs.
"There is no such a thing as collective responsibility, individual people are responsible for what they do."
If individualism trumps everything in all cultures, then the individual Japanese were guilty of directly supporting the actions of their military abroad by continuing to work in those military factories.
"What if you surname was Smith and I punish you because a Smith hurt me?"
What if I was the one that put the gun in his hand?
Slashdot Mirror
"And it's already standardized."
And that's exactly why they're not using it. Sony Studios or any other MPAA member doesn't want to sell movies on a medium that can be easily reproduced.
I'd say one of the reasons we're seeing such a big push for a new HD-DVD standard is the fact that we now have dual-layer DVD-Rs on the market.
Then the terrorists have already won! We cannot allow a mineshaft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bad writer gap!
You're well beyond too late. People already buy FFXI characters off of eBay, hence a lv 27 red mage who couldn't grasp that I could only provoke every 30 seconds.
Really, all you would need to do is setup a search option that would let you apply a blacklist of sellers' names so that their auctions don't appear in your search results. That would solve all sorts of things.
"Users have to pay for each track they download, but sharing songs they've purchased from Peer Impact earns them credits they can spend on the service."
So the RIAA is setting up a pyramid scheme? How appropriate!
Nitpiks
"They can do so much with the scores to Zelda"
Listen to just about any Zelda game released from the SNES era onward.
"or Metroid"
Metroid: Zero Mission for the GBA.
"original NES and its midi sounds."
The NES wasn't anywhere near advanced enough to handle MIDIs. IIRC, it was all analog.
That, but I see it more as a sign of how important it is that you keep an eye on who's running for state and local office around you, the ones who'd be making these eminent domain decisions to begin with.
Think about how this case came about to begin with.
Cantaffordium
"Paid the rats?" They are the rats!
"With the current state of affairs, there is arguably no way for a conscientious American
to serve their country through the military."
Depends on where you live. By federal law, "state gaurd" units (or whatever your home state decides to call it) cannot be called to serve outside their home state. They're still subject to any potential drafts, but it's still service to the state without being considered part of the federal armed forces.
Of course, since the feds don't pay for it like they do with the National Guard, many states opt not to have one.
IANAL
"So...you have a blog. You write in it daily. Its on the web where anyone can read it. Supposedly, you _want_ people to read it."
The entire point of copyright law is content distribution solely on the creator's terms. If the author doesn't like the way you're redistributing his content, you are in violation of copyright law, period.
"Sure, they can't copy your blog and use it in advertising or anything but actually consuming the information you're putting out on the web is also wrong?"
Consuming is one thing. They're actively aggregating it and selling it to someone else, and that process would seem to be distribution without the author's consent.
"Isn't the whole point of blogging to let other people know what you think about something?"
And the entire point of copyright is that people will have to come to you in order to to get that content. It seems that with copyright you have the right to parse and aggregate all these blogs on your own, and perhaps it'd be legal to sell the tools necesary to do this (depending on how you look at the DMCA and who has the most expensive lawyer). However, selling the end-product of that aggregation seems to violate the copyright of every single blogger whose data you mined.
Nowadays you don't need a Hotmail account to get a Passport, the option is also there to tie your Passport to an existing email address.
You also have the option of signing up for a "limited" account in which they give you a bogus @passport.com address, solely for the purpose of signing into Passport.
I wish someone had made me aware of this when I had to tie my MCSE cert to a Passport, especially since it now seems impossible to move that tie to a less-intrusive form of Passport.
Same here, but I think I have a differnet threshold of "annoyance" than most people. Ads that pertain to the site and the intended audience of the site (unless the ad is particularly heinous), do not get blocked. For example, I don't block game ads on penny-arcade.com
However, ads that were placed by advertisers who pay absolutely no attention to the sites their ads are appearing on get blocked. "Hit the monkey" gets blocked, no matter where it apepars or how benign the ad format is.
By this rule, I'm sorely tempted to block all those Microsoft ads here, since someone wasn't running on all cylinders when they thought putting them on a rabidly anti-Microsoft website was a good idea. What next, ads for RealPlayer?
In the book, I'd argue that civillians have more rights (such as the right to peacably assemble) that civillians in the modern United States seem to lack.
Actually, the easiest way to scare off recruiters are three little words: "history of asthma."
Heck, I had a friend kicked out of the National Guard after they found out he once had asthma.
10% of the websites out there are inaccessable to 10% of the browsers? Even assuming that every website is visited equally, that still leaves us with a problem that only affects 10% * 10% = 1% of the people out there.
Odds are, the sites that are incompatible with Firefox aren't heavily visited, anyway.
"it may eventually THINK for itself"
Oh, I'm sure it will be posting on Slashdot long before that.
... except that wasn't a launch issue, it was an issue that cropped long after the purchase, an issue of wear. And really, if you were a little more delicate than the average 8 year-old kid, you wouldn't have that problem to begin with.
Besides, new connectors are easy to come by on eBay. You can't say that about PSP shells.
"What if the Chinese government is using the right approach?"
So what? The ends do not justify the means.
Except Senate rules are enforced by the Senate. If they want to ignore their own rules, nobody is going to stop them, so sayeth Article I.
"America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War."
Sir Winston Churchill, New York Enquirer, 1936
What did you expect him to say? "As First Lord of the Admiralty, I manipulated the sinking of the Lusitania, filling the cargo holds of a 'passenger liner' with ammunition and deliberately routing her through waters filled with German submarines, for the very intent of dragging the US into the war. Because we needed something to break the stalemate." Heck, most of that stuff was still classified in the 1930's.
Oh, and don't forget what else he's not going to say to the American press at the time: "No, we're still not going to pay for all that stuff that we got from you during the war." No "Lend-Lease" stuff during that war, they were lucky we didn't demand cash up front (which, in hindsight, we probably should have). He was suggesting that they didn't need the materiel, anyway.
"Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism,"
We entered after the overthrow of the Czar. When Wilson urged Congress to "make the world safe for democracy," Russia was the democracy he was referring to. After the ousting of the Czar, it became the first and only democratic combattant. Before that, even with the Lusitania incident, Wilson was hard-pressed to convince Americans why we should get into a yet another royal family feud in Europe.
(And not long before, we were just as likely, if not more likely, to enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria. The UK was doing some of the same things the Germans were doing to our ships.)
"and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany."
Yeah, all our fault. We didn't even sign the damned treaty! The US negotiated a separate peace treaty because we didn't like the way it looked.
"If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government"
What parliamentary government? The UK was really the only example of anything resembling decent democracy in Europe, as had been the trend for the past few centuries at that point. Mainlaind Europe, including/especially the countries he listed, had always been wracked with internal strife (communism was 30-40 years old by that point). The only difference, really, was that the Powers that Be bloodied themselves and each other enough during the Great War that the unwashed masses actually had a chance to overpower them for once.
Heck, Germany and Italy as unified countries was still a relatively new concept going into the Great War.
" I do not think this guy was a very good writter."
Judging from all the "(illegible)" bits, it was a hand-written first draft.
"Even though he saw hair falling out of children, he dicounted the idea of radiation sickness."
No, he didn't think the radiation came from returning to the bombed area.
And even then, he talked about the doctors' opinions, as well as one or two cases that poked holes in their theory that the radiation came from fallout rather than the initial blast.
"He spent some time on the war stories of POWs too. This was a digression."
He wrote what he saw in Nagasaki. By the time he got in there it was a big "tourist" destination for former POWs that had nothing else to do at the time. That, and Nagasaki itself housed several POW camps, one of which was used to man the factory that was targeted by the bomb.
"How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?"
Perhaps not, but I can think of another big US amphibious landing: Veracruz.
"Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?"
We had our feelings hurt that we weren't allowed to continue playing both sides.
We got involved in a family feud among European royalty under the guise of "making the world safe for democracy." The specific democracy was the newfound democracy in Russia, to where we sent a lot of troops to actually fight against said democracy, trying to keep them in the war.
The history of the Twentieth Century might have been very different had we not gotten so involved in internal Russian affairs. Soviet communism might not have taken as much of a hard line as it did if the ostensibly democratic US weren't actively shooting at them (the bourgeois royalists from the UK were all but expected, but us?)
At any rate, don't forget that our involvement in WWI comes not long after the Spanish-American War.
"There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present."
Not quite. What they were actually saying was "give the blockade more time." It had been up for months prior, slowly starving the islands, but there was no sign of wavering in the Japanese military command. Instead, they send the Yamato off with no fuel (thanks to the blockade), with the intent of beaching her on Okinawa and acting as static guns.
"Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option."
Diplomacy? With the same country that had negotiators pretending to negotiate a peaceful resolution to their invasion of China with the US while an attack fleet was steeming towards Pearl Harbor at the same time? "Fool me once, shame on you..."
What conditions would they push for in that diplomacy? That the US abandon support for China? Hang on to some of the islands they grabbed in 1941?
Yes, there were parts of the Japanese government looking for peace, but they had no power in their government. Those in power were waiting for the eventual invasion of the home islands and forcing the US into a pyrrhic victory in order to negotiate from more strength. And to that end they gave spears to children. They only surrendered when the atomic bombs demonstrated there was no hope to make the victory costly for the US beyond the price tag of the bombs.
"The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this,"
Yeah, the parts that had no power. These were some of the same voices that said going to war with the US was a bad idea back in 1941, but if anything they lost influence as Japan lost captured territories over the years (since it became easier to see us as filthy gaijin invaders).
"and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway."
Not in the way they wanted. The constitution MacArthur forced down their throats, the one that reduced the political influence of the emperor to that of a figurehead at best, is not one that they would have accepted voluntarily. One of the less etherial reasons parts of the Japanese government wanted to leave the emperor's office unchanged is that the military forces effectively ruling the country used their power in his name. They knew that, if their offices relied more on a popularly-elected legislature, they'd be replaced with people like the peaceniks they were busy supressing.
John of England got to keep his throne, too. But there was still the little matter of the Magna Carta...
"Probably there were some people responsible for the deaths in China in Nagasaki, but Do you think they were all involved?"
More than you think there were. "Civillians" were drafted into service in those factories (such as the Mitsubishi factory in Nagasaki). To the Japanese government, at home and abroad, the line between "soldier" and "civillian" was very vague, if not non-existent.
"The children too?"
The children were being given bamboo spears with which to defend the home islands at the time. They drilled with them daily in their schools. It would have been a glorious death to charge US guns and tanks with those spears, I'm sure, were it not for the atomic bombs.
"There is no such a thing as collective responsibility, individual people are responsible for what they do."
If individualism trumps everything in all cultures, then the individual Japanese were guilty of directly supporting the actions of their military abroad by continuing to work in those military factories.
"What if you surname was Smith and I punish you because a Smith hurt me?"
What if I was the one that put the gun in his hand?