Anyone charged under it will have their hearing in a closed session, and are strictly prohibited (penalty of 5 years imprisonment) from informing anyone other than their lawyer, so media coverage seems unlikely.
You must be new here.:-)
Do you really think the media will care about a privacy restriction like that if they've got a solid story to run backed by solid evidence? The media getting hold of things like this brings down governments, and their oppressive laws with them. Such is the benefit of having a free press.
Sorry bub, but the world sucks and most of it is not the fault of the US.
Actually, a rather significant amount of the sucking in the world today is the fault of the US, or more specifically certain policies adopted by recent US governments. Their supporters then come up with every sound-bite under the sun to try to justify their actions in defiance of all reasoned argument, and rely on the fact that you're bigger and stronger than the next guy (at least for now) and therefore you are unlikely to be subject to the same retribution that would befall a smaller state adopting the same policies.
Before you go bashing the UN, you might recall that the objectors were actually correct when they said you hadn't made the case against Iraq's WMDs, and that it was the US and its allies that lied and broke international law by invading a country with the goal of regime change. Like many in my country, I am digusted that our leaders played along, but we haven't yet had an election to make our opinions clear. You guys have, and look where it got you.
You argue that the money or weapons or terrorists in the Middle East are a threat to you, and yet you forget that the US supplied much of their firepower to fund its defence industry, and trained many of their operatives for its intelligence services to use.
You argue against Kyoto, when you are the biggest polluter in the world. You make absurd arguments about how your economy justifies this, yet continue to drive around in trucks with engines 2-3x the size of everyone else's cars.
You refuse to accept the International Criminal Court, and then act all surprised when the rest of the world gets upset about your illegal detention of people in Guantanamo bay.
You claim you're under threat of terrorist attacks, yet your own government has done more to strike fear into your citizens than any terrorist network ever could.
You allow copyright and patents to become more powerful by the day, and force other countries to sign up to your own ideals, yet you fail to prosecute the big media corps for their cartel-like price-fixing behaviour.
I could go on, but really, the point should be pretty clear by now. Clean up your own backyard before you go blaming everyone else for the world's problems, eh?
If someone needs it bad enough then they will pay for it. If they do not need it then they won't.
And when 100 groups can collectively afford the expertise required to develop something of benefit to all of them, but no one individual group can if they're immediately going to give it to their competitors as well, then that development probably doesn't happen.
Y'know, we could try some sort of mechanism to make it worthwhile to invest in that scenario. We could call it, I dunno, "copyright" or something.:-)
"his seen his (small, privately owned, good-to-its-staff) employer hurt as a result of gratuitous copyright infringement"
That is unfortunate for you, however what is your solution, to take away everyone's computer away and impose government mandated DRM to protect copyright holders' right to profit? That is not a bargan i'm willing to do, and it is best if you and others learn that in the digital age, information will flow and a tune your profit models accordingly or go out of business.
If everyone like my employer went out of business, you'd be in deep ****. As I've just explained to another poster, the odds of anyone writing the kind of detailed mathematical libraries we write for a living purely for their own entertainment are slim at best. And yet without those libraries, pretty much every major CAD package on earth would be seriously diminished. That's just a personal example, and the details of my employer aren't particularly relevant to this discussion, but the same holds true of any number of small software businesses that rely on copyright to protect them, as was its original intent.
Without those businesses, DRM would be the least of your worries. Finding a working vehicle might be higher on the list, or finding health care more up-to-date than what we had in the second world war. But you go ahead, and argue that DRMing you out of Britney is a great loss if it makes you happy. Just don't blame the rest of us when the whole software development industry falls apart, and the only apps left in the world are cloned office suites running on a cloned OS or bespoke applications used by a single business. We'll all be much better off then, thanks to the likes of you.
Supply and demand: with a monopoly on the supply of information the copyright holder can set the price. With information flowing freely, the supply is increased which *decreases* the price.
Ah, I see, standard anti-copyright argument number 7. I counter with standard pro-copyright argument number 1: in your world, who is going to produce all this extra supply, when there is nothing in it to pay the rent? Certainly I can't imagine anyone writing the software my colleagues and I write for a living just for fun, though it plays an essential part in many essential applications in the manufacturing business.
Please read a basic book on economics. The implications of a technology that could distribute a new recording from a single source to every desktop PC in the world within a matter of hours are rather different from the implications of a copying technology that requires a significant amount of time to copy a whole album/movie and requires physical distribution on media that costs money. The standard "it's not theft, it doesn't harm the copyright holder" argument is mostly waste paper at this point, in case you missed it.
While you're reading that book on economics, please do the case study on generating income as a practising musician. I know quite a few semi-pros (playing regular gigs with established local bands in their spare time) and a couple of full-time pros. I guarantee you that most of these guys don't make anything out of the gigs; sure, they'll get enough from the bars/pubs/hotels/whatever to cover their expenses and buy a few drinks after the show, but they'd never make a living from it, nor even pay for all the equipment and rehearsal time.
In fact, the guys who gig for more than pure enjoyment all produce CDs that they sell at their shows, and rely on income from those for a significant amount of their profits. The high street price for CDs actually helps these guys stay afloat, because theirs go for a similar rate, making way more profit than the relatively expensive to produce merchandise. At a good gig with say 150 people in a large bar, they might sell as many as 50 CDs in a night, which makes them several times what they'd get for the gig itself from the bar management.
I know at least one local group who played a short season of very popular gigs at local bars, sold loads of CDs after the first one, but hardly any at the next four. Was that because they had exactly the same audience five times? Doubtful, because the gigs were 30+ miles apart. So why do you think the drop happened? (Clue: their stuff showed up on P2P within 48 hours of the first gig.)
Now, you'd like to go up to these guys, and suggest to them that they stop making CDs and just rely on concerts for income. Do I have to do it with a straight face and in a sincere tone of voice as well?
Your point would have merit, if it weren't completely one-sided and conveniently ignoring vast amounts of the big picture that happen to disagree with your argument. For one thing, I defy you to conduct a genuine survey that shows the majority of people rip music/movies on the net, or even feel it is fair to do so, without sampling only, say, Kazaa users or the 16-21 age group.
Next up, on the perversion of copyright: copyright does exist to secure rights for the creators of new works, and it does do that so that there is an incentive to create and circulate those works for the benefit of society. I'm not for an instant claiming that no-one has ever abused copyright; the protection of Disney's works for the apparently indefinite period is taking the ****. But not all recording companies and film-makers are like that, nor all authors of books, software developers, semi-pro musicians, etc. Ignoring the underlying principle of copyright, or just removing the law entirely without thought for the consequences, will damage these people a lot more than it will damage the RIAA/MPAA.
Ultimately, the distribution problems will take care of themselves without any help from selfish law-breakers. If there is a market for on-line distribution, as clearly there is, then in time the providers will fill that market. It may take a little longer, but it's hardly copyright law that's stopping it.
Basically, you are one of those people who think everything should be free, because. You give little or no thought to why these laws exist in the first place, nor the long-term implications of removing them. You buy the "information wants to be free" tag-line as though willing it to be true will make it so. You presumably don't have even a basic understanding of the economic implications of mass file sharing, and I imagine you also bitch when people use the term "theft" to describe copyright infringement. You place no value on the work of others, and want everything without having to make any sort of contribution yourself.
As someone who pays for every CD he buys, only downloads tracks from legal sources, buys DVDs of good movies and rents from the video shop if he wants to preview before buying, and incidentally writes software for a living and his seen his (small, privately owned, good-to-its-staff) employer hurt as a result of gratuitous copyright infringement, I know where my vote will going, and people like you will be first at the cash machine to pay the fines.
The real problem is where something shared P2P supposedly hampers the sales of such a created product. I think there is much evidence to suggest that P2P sharing doesn't damage sales the way it is pretended.
The thing is, a lot of people think that, but none of them ever cite it. Can you show us some genuine, statistically sound evidence that P2P is not harming record industry sales figures?
In my time I have downloaded one of the LOTR movies and many episodes of Invader Zim. Would it surprise anyone here to learn that I have purchased all of the extended LOTR DVDs and all 3 of the Invader Zim DVD releases? I bet not. Having numerous Invader Zim AVIs clogging my hard drives did not in any way assuage my desire to purchase the DVDs practically the moment they came out. Quite the opposite.
That is commendable, and if I were a media company exec I'd be looking at how I could help people like you.
I know a few people like you who genuinely do just preview material and then buy it anyway. The problem with generalising this is that for everyone like you I know, I know of half a dozen people who just rip everything, and haven't paid for a CD or DVD in years, though they used to be frequent buyers. They know damn well that they're breaking the law, but they don't care because they don't expect to get caught.
Now I am sure the RIAA and the MPAA would love to pass legislation requiring us to buy Brittany's latest drivel, but I think it will never come to that. Sadly, we have to *WANT* to buy it. And once someone has heard Brittany's latest drivel - well, who would wish to buy it? Did they really think I was going to drop $15 USD for a CD on the weight of one tepid song or something? What a laugh!
That's an entirely fair argument. On the other hand, if you're going to accept that people can preview stuff effectively for free now, and not risk 15 dollars on something they might not like, then you also have to accept that the price of the good stuff is going to rise significantly to maintain the industry bodies' incomes. Personally, I'd rather they did that, and I'd accept the higher price in exchange for albums where half the tracks that weren't released as singles suck. But I'd expect to pay 20 dollars (or the UK equivalent, in my case) for those CDs instead of what I pay now. It would be nice to think that the governments would then investigate the media corps for price-fixing and force them to set more realistic price levels for their products, too, but that's a different discussion.
Final thought: There was a discussion here the other day about Babylon 5, in which someone said they'd never seen the entire series. Someone replied with the address of a torrent. They were immediately modded into oblivion, with several replies asking the OP to buy the DVDs instead. Why? Because the fans know that (a) the show was nearly cancelled, (b) the guy behind it has never gone for milking the merchandise, (c) it didn't make a huge profit, but (d) it was one of the best s.f. shows in recent history, and they want to support it. That show was an excellent example of what could happen to good TV/movies/etc. when the budget is tight. Not everything that gets ripped on-line is a million-dollar-profit-clone.
So stop it because you want to play CDs in your car? And use the internet the way corporations tell you to use it? That low, omnipresent thrumming you hear is the millions who died for your nation's freedoms roto-tilling their graves.
I don't want to use the Internet only the way the corporations demand. I want to use it any way the law allows. It is the file-swappers who are threatening to turn one reality into the other, and that is exactly my problem with a lot of the comments in the discussion of this story.
"Copyright law is there for a reason..."
That reason is solely corporate lobbying. There was no public interest in or demand for changes like a 70 year extension.
If the movies being ripped today were 65-year-old films that had long-since recovered their costs, you'd have a case with that... but they're not.
Let the **AA try that, they won't sell a single piece of shit. They will go out of business.
Stop and think about this for a minute. The **AA aren't making money from the people they're suing, and no matter how you you try to rationalise it, it's a good bet that those people are costing them money. The whole argument about "suing their own customers" is one big straw man: they're not customers if they're not buying anything.
If this all happens, the **AA will carry on selling genuine CDs, DVDs, etc. to those who pay for them, backed with huge, confidence-inspiring guarantees about "playable everywhere" and so on that Joe Consumer loves to hear. Suing a few teeny wannabes into oblivion along the way will be a small price to pay for them to save their business model, and when they have as much invested in that model as they do, you can bet your ass they're going to do anything they can to protect it.
The bottom line is that they can't lose by trying to fight this.
You're probably right. It will be known as the Taking and Killing Innocent Professional Gentlemen To Help Eradicate Profit-Impeding Sharing Schemes Act. It will be wantonly abused and lead to a lot of people who create good technology being summarily executed.
And it will be entirely the fault of the people who abused that technology to break the law.
Morons like these are the reason I can't play the music CD I just bought (legitimately, from a local shop) in my car CD player. It's not a real CD any more, it just looks like one, because it's full of copy-protection stuff to block the morons spreading it all over the net without paying for it.
A lot of the kids around here think they're very clever: "We'll just develop mass-market, instant, anonymous file-sharing tech and then they'll never catch us!" they cry. Newsflash, kids: if they can't beat your system for breaking the law with their current methodology, they will simply push for still more draconian legislation. It will probably start with making it illegal to run private networks capable of high-speed file-sharing without oversight (see the recent Internet 2 threads). That will quickly be followed by making any sort of anonymous data transfer illegal. (Or those two might be the other way around; it doesn't really matter.) Then there will be a legal requirement to use only "approved" hardware to play any sort of media, followed by a ban on any legacy devices that can circumvent the protections. When measures like these come in, those who are using things like torrents (or video recorders, or CD burners, etc. etc.) for genuine reasons will be the first ones to lose out.
Copyright law is there for a reason, and however much some/. readers might like to wish otherwise, you are not allowed to copy music, films, etc. for free rather than paying for them like everyone else. If you do so, you will get slapped down, and the more arrogant you become the harder you will get slapped in the end. Now please grow up, and stop dragging the rest of us who are trying to do legal things on the Internet down with you.
... I don't think two hours of people opening their eyes real wide while giving a stern look to someone and having the other person fall over dead makes good movie watching.
OK, here's a new idea: they could open their eyes wide, have a funky eye-flash SFX, hypnotise their victims in an SFX spooky voice, and then send them on a suicide mission instead...
Disagree for the 200% better part, currently there is no functionnality which can gives a 200% improvement in language design.
I don't quite agree with that. The following are relatively recent additions to the programming world -- at least outside of academia -- that yield productivity benefits way better than that in their respective areas of strength:
RAD tools (Visual Basic, Delphi, etc.) for GUI development
functional programming (ML, Haskell, elements of several popular scripting languages) for back-end code.
Garbage collection is just such a huge win in terms of productivity in many programmers' eyes, not to mention its ability to prevent viruses/exploits from buffer overflows.
<Obligatory> Garbage collection prevents certain classes of memory leak. It has nothing to do with buffer overflows. </Obligatory>
As others have pointed out, the episodes were written a season at a time. This partly explains why season 5 was only OK compared to the brilliant seasons 3 and 4: they suspected that they might not be able to make it, so the final episode (ultimately shown as the final ep of season 5 when it did go ahead) was actually filmed at the end of season 4, and a lot of the details seem to have been moved forward a series to guarantee that they were there. Series 5 didn't fit in as well as the others, because most of it was expendable to the main story arc.
Personally, I would rather they hadn't made that final episode anyway, nor the official final episode to season 4 (the one jumping into the future more and more). IMHO, they should either have done season 5 properly, or have finished everything with Sheridan and Delenn on the ship on the way back to B5, with a stronger voice-over about space being ours to look after now. Alas, the TV execs apparently didn't leave this as an option they could plan for in advance.
The looking into the future episodes, particularly those so far ahead that all my favourite characters are long-dead and the universe has moved on, always diminished the scale of the main series to me, rather than showing how worthwhile it had all been as I suspect JMS intended. Far better to set another series slightly after the original -- as Crusade would have been, and the film apparently will be -- where you've got the grand framework of the main series as a backdrop, making a difference.
Oh, and the fates of Marcus and Lennier -- the only two truly honourable characters in the whole series -- were very sad, too. Their destinies may have been perfect for the reality of the series, but if we can save the whole universe, couldn't they at least have found room for two characters in five whole series to have the happy endings they deserved?
And you don't keep your Documents and Settings folder on the disk that is beeing backed up?
I do, yes. But as I pointed out previously, most people won't know how to, and even if they do, Microsoft are bitchy about supporting systems where you've moved key folders like this, with dire warnings all over MSDN about not doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Convenient, that, isn't it?
You must be new here. :-)
Do you really think the media will care about a privacy restriction like that if they've got a solid story to run backed by solid evidence? The media getting hold of things like this brings down governments, and their oppressive laws with them. Such is the benefit of having a free press.
Actually, a rather significant amount of the sucking in the world today is the fault of the US, or more specifically certain policies adopted by recent US governments. Their supporters then come up with every sound-bite under the sun to try to justify their actions in defiance of all reasoned argument, and rely on the fact that you're bigger and stronger than the next guy (at least for now) and therefore you are unlikely to be subject to the same retribution that would befall a smaller state adopting the same policies.
Before you go bashing the UN, you might recall that the objectors were actually correct when they said you hadn't made the case against Iraq's WMDs, and that it was the US and its allies that lied and broke international law by invading a country with the goal of regime change. Like many in my country, I am digusted that our leaders played along, but we haven't yet had an election to make our opinions clear. You guys have, and look where it got you.
You argue that the money or weapons or terrorists in the Middle East are a threat to you, and yet you forget that the US supplied much of their firepower to fund its defence industry, and trained many of their operatives for its intelligence services to use.
You argue against Kyoto, when you are the biggest polluter in the world. You make absurd arguments about how your economy justifies this, yet continue to drive around in trucks with engines 2-3x the size of everyone else's cars.
You refuse to accept the International Criminal Court, and then act all surprised when the rest of the world gets upset about your illegal detention of people in Guantanamo bay.
You claim you're under threat of terrorist attacks, yet your own government has done more to strike fear into your citizens than any terrorist network ever could.
You allow copyright and patents to become more powerful by the day, and force other countries to sign up to your own ideals, yet you fail to prosecute the big media corps for their cartel-like price-fixing behaviour.
I could go on, but really, the point should be pretty clear by now. Clean up your own backyard before you go blaming everyone else for the world's problems, eh?
Heh. Big Blunkett is watching you! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!
Oh, wait...
And when 100 groups can collectively afford the expertise required to develop something of benefit to all of them, but no one individual group can if they're immediately going to give it to their competitors as well, then that development probably doesn't happen.
Y'know, we could try some sort of mechanism to make it worthwhile to invest in that scenario. We could call it, I dunno, "copyright" or something. :-)
If everyone like my employer went out of business, you'd be in deep ****. As I've just explained to another poster, the odds of anyone writing the kind of detailed mathematical libraries we write for a living purely for their own entertainment are slim at best. And yet without those libraries, pretty much every major CAD package on earth would be seriously diminished. That's just a personal example, and the details of my employer aren't particularly relevant to this discussion, but the same holds true of any number of small software businesses that rely on copyright to protect them, as was its original intent.
Without those businesses, DRM would be the least of your worries. Finding a working vehicle might be higher on the list, or finding health care more up-to-date than what we had in the second world war. But you go ahead, and argue that DRMing you out of Britney is a great loss if it makes you happy. Just don't blame the rest of us when the whole software development industry falls apart, and the only apps left in the world are cloned office suites running on a cloned OS or bespoke applications used by a single business. We'll all be much better off then, thanks to the likes of you.
Ah, I see, standard anti-copyright argument number 7. I counter with standard pro-copyright argument number 1: in your world, who is going to produce all this extra supply, when there is nothing in it to pay the rent? Certainly I can't imagine anyone writing the software my colleagues and I write for a living just for fun, though it plays an essential part in many essential applications in the manufacturing business.
Please read a basic book on economics. The implications of a technology that could distribute a new recording from a single source to every desktop PC in the world within a matter of hours are rather different from the implications of a copying technology that requires a significant amount of time to copy a whole album/movie and requires physical distribution on media that costs money. The standard "it's not theft, it doesn't harm the copyright holder" argument is mostly waste paper at this point, in case you missed it.
While you're reading that book on economics, please do the case study on generating income as a practising musician. I know quite a few semi-pros (playing regular gigs with established local bands in their spare time) and a couple of full-time pros. I guarantee you that most of these guys don't make anything out of the gigs; sure, they'll get enough from the bars/pubs/hotels/whatever to cover their expenses and buy a few drinks after the show, but they'd never make a living from it, nor even pay for all the equipment and rehearsal time.
In fact, the guys who gig for more than pure enjoyment all produce CDs that they sell at their shows, and rely on income from those for a significant amount of their profits. The high street price for CDs actually helps these guys stay afloat, because theirs go for a similar rate, making way more profit than the relatively expensive to produce merchandise. At a good gig with say 150 people in a large bar, they might sell as many as 50 CDs in a night, which makes them several times what they'd get for the gig itself from the bar management.
I know at least one local group who played a short season of very popular gigs at local bars, sold loads of CDs after the first one, but hardly any at the next four. Was that because they had exactly the same audience five times? Doubtful, because the gigs were 30+ miles apart. So why do you think the drop happened? (Clue: their stuff showed up on P2P within 48 hours of the first gig.)
Now, you'd like to go up to these guys, and suggest to them that they stop making CDs and just rely on concerts for income. Do I have to do it with a straight face and in a sincere tone of voice as well?
Your point would have merit, if it weren't completely one-sided and conveniently ignoring vast amounts of the big picture that happen to disagree with your argument. For one thing, I defy you to conduct a genuine survey that shows the majority of people rip music/movies on the net, or even feel it is fair to do so, without sampling only, say, Kazaa users or the 16-21 age group.
Next up, on the perversion of copyright: copyright does exist to secure rights for the creators of new works, and it does do that so that there is an incentive to create and circulate those works for the benefit of society. I'm not for an instant claiming that no-one has ever abused copyright; the protection of Disney's works for the apparently indefinite period is taking the ****. But not all recording companies and film-makers are like that, nor all authors of books, software developers, semi-pro musicians, etc. Ignoring the underlying principle of copyright, or just removing the law entirely without thought for the consequences, will damage these people a lot more than it will damage the RIAA/MPAA.
Ultimately, the distribution problems will take care of themselves without any help from selfish law-breakers. If there is a market for on-line distribution, as clearly there is, then in time the providers will fill that market. It may take a little longer, but it's hardly copyright law that's stopping it.
Basically, you are one of those people who think everything should be free, because. You give little or no thought to why these laws exist in the first place, nor the long-term implications of removing them. You buy the "information wants to be free" tag-line as though willing it to be true will make it so. You presumably don't have even a basic understanding of the economic implications of mass file sharing, and I imagine you also bitch when people use the term "theft" to describe copyright infringement. You place no value on the work of others, and want everything without having to make any sort of contribution yourself.
As someone who pays for every CD he buys, only downloads tracks from legal sources, buys DVDs of good movies and rents from the video shop if he wants to preview before buying, and incidentally writes software for a living and his seen his (small, privately owned, good-to-its-staff) employer hurt as a result of gratuitous copyright infringement, I know where my vote will going, and people like you will be first at the cash machine to pay the fines.
The thing is, a lot of people think that, but none of them ever cite it. Can you show us some genuine, statistically sound evidence that P2P is not harming record industry sales figures?
That is commendable, and if I were a media company exec I'd be looking at how I could help people like you.
I know a few people like you who genuinely do just preview material and then buy it anyway. The problem with generalising this is that for everyone like you I know, I know of half a dozen people who just rip everything, and haven't paid for a CD or DVD in years, though they used to be frequent buyers. They know damn well that they're breaking the law, but they don't care because they don't expect to get caught.
That's an entirely fair argument. On the other hand, if you're going to accept that people can preview stuff effectively for free now, and not risk 15 dollars on something they might not like, then you also have to accept that the price of the good stuff is going to rise significantly to maintain the industry bodies' incomes. Personally, I'd rather they did that, and I'd accept the higher price in exchange for albums where half the tracks that weren't released as singles suck. But I'd expect to pay 20 dollars (or the UK equivalent, in my case) for those CDs instead of what I pay now. It would be nice to think that the governments would then investigate the media corps for price-fixing and force them to set more realistic price levels for their products, too, but that's a different discussion.
Final thought: There was a discussion here the other day about Babylon 5, in which someone said they'd never seen the entire series. Someone replied with the address of a torrent. They were immediately modded into oblivion, with several replies asking the OP to buy the DVDs instead. Why? Because the fans know that (a) the show was nearly cancelled, (b) the guy behind it has never gone for milking the merchandise, (c) it didn't make a huge profit, but (d) it was one of the best s.f. shows in recent history, and they want to support it. That show was an excellent example of what could happen to good TV/movies/etc. when the budget is tight. Not everything that gets ripped on-line is a million-dollar-profit-clone.
I don't want to use the Internet only the way the corporations demand. I want to use it any way the law allows. It is the file-swappers who are threatening to turn one reality into the other, and that is exactly my problem with a lot of the comments in the discussion of this story.
If the movies being ripped today were 65-year-old films that had long-since recovered their costs, you'd have a case with that... but they're not.
Stop and think about this for a minute. The **AA aren't making money from the people they're suing, and no matter how you you try to rationalise it, it's a good bet that those people are costing them money. The whole argument about "suing their own customers" is one big straw man: they're not customers if they're not buying anything.
If this all happens, the **AA will carry on selling genuine CDs, DVDs, etc. to those who pay for them, backed with huge, confidence-inspiring guarantees about "playable everywhere" and so on that Joe Consumer loves to hear. Suing a few teeny wannabes into oblivion along the way will be a small price to pay for them to save their business model, and when they have as much invested in that model as they do, you can bet your ass they're going to do anything they can to protect it.
The bottom line is that they can't lose by trying to fight this.
You're probably right. It will be known as the Taking and Killing Innocent Professional Gentlemen To Help Eradicate Profit-Impeding Sharing Schemes Act. It will be wantonly abused and lead to a lot of people who create good technology being summarily executed.
And it will be entirely the fault of the people who abused that technology to break the law.
No, not the MPAA, the illegal file-swappers.
Morons like these are the reason I can't play the music CD I just bought (legitimately, from a local shop) in my car CD player. It's not a real CD any more, it just looks like one, because it's full of copy-protection stuff to block the morons spreading it all over the net without paying for it.
A lot of the kids around here think they're very clever: "We'll just develop mass-market, instant, anonymous file-sharing tech and then they'll never catch us!" they cry. Newsflash, kids: if they can't beat your system for breaking the law with their current methodology, they will simply push for still more draconian legislation. It will probably start with making it illegal to run private networks capable of high-speed file-sharing without oversight (see the recent Internet 2 threads). That will quickly be followed by making any sort of anonymous data transfer illegal. (Or those two might be the other way around; it doesn't really matter.) Then there will be a legal requirement to use only "approved" hardware to play any sort of media, followed by a ban on any legacy devices that can circumvent the protections. When measures like these come in, those who are using things like torrents (or video recorders, or CD burners, etc. etc.) for genuine reasons will be the first ones to lose out.
Copyright law is there for a reason, and however much some /. readers might like to wish otherwise, you are not allowed to copy music, films, etc. for free rather than paying for them like everyone else. If you do so, you will get slapped down, and the more arrogant you become the harder you will get slapped in the end. Now please grow up, and stop dragging the rest of us who are trying to do legal things on the Internet down with you.
That is all. YHBT. HAND.
That wasn't a closet, it was an encounter suit, you insensitive clod!
Erin Gray... Claudia Christian... Erin Gray... Claudia Christian... Erin Gray...
Claudia Christian, definitely.
Not serious enough, apparently. :-(
OK, here's a new idea: they could open their eyes wide, have a funky eye-flash SFX, hypnotise their victims in an SFX spooky voice, and then send them on a suicide mission instead...
I don't quite agree with that. The following are relatively recent additions to the programming world -- at least outside of academia -- that yield productivity benefits way better than that in their respective areas of strength:
<Obligatory> Garbage collection prevents certain classes of memory leak. It has nothing to do with buffer overflows. </Obligatory>
"I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you're ever going to see." -- Susan Ivanova, Between the Light and the Darkness
Wouldn't quite work with the whole "the last of the Babylon stations" thing...
As others have pointed out, the episodes were written a season at a time. This partly explains why season 5 was only OK compared to the brilliant seasons 3 and 4: they suspected that they might not be able to make it, so the final episode (ultimately shown as the final ep of season 5 when it did go ahead) was actually filmed at the end of season 4, and a lot of the details seem to have been moved forward a series to guarantee that they were there. Series 5 didn't fit in as well as the others, because most of it was expendable to the main story arc.
Personally, I would rather they hadn't made that final episode anyway, nor the official final episode to season 4 (the one jumping into the future more and more). IMHO, they should either have done season 5 properly, or have finished everything with Sheridan and Delenn on the ship on the way back to B5, with a stronger voice-over about space being ours to look after now. Alas, the TV execs apparently didn't leave this as an option they could plan for in advance.
The looking into the future episodes, particularly those so far ahead that all my favourite characters are long-dead and the universe has moved on, always diminished the scale of the main series to me, rather than showing how worthwhile it had all been as I suspect JMS intended. Far better to set another series slightly after the original -- as Crusade would have been, and the film apparently will be -- where you've got the grand framework of the main series as a backdrop, making a difference.
Oh, and the fates of Marcus and Lennier -- the only two truly honourable characters in the whole series -- were very sad, too. Their destinies may have been perfect for the reality of the series, but if we can save the whole universe, couldn't they at least have found room for two characters in five whole series to have the happy endings they deserved?
Sounds more like where Crusade was apparently going to go, had JMS been allowed more than half a season to get it going on its main story arc.
Nah, this whole story isn't actually going to be written for another three years.
I do, yes. But as I pointed out previously, most people won't know how to, and even if they do, Microsoft are bitchy about supporting systems where you've moved key folders like this, with dire warnings all over MSDN about not doing it.