If it was on a different label, there was no way for Nebula to legally get your money for the album anyway, unless you went to whatever country they issued the album in and bought it there, which I'm guessing is a bit more than you're willing to do just to buy an album.
Many albums (and movies, and books, and games, etc) are published by different entities in different countries/regions, which is one reason we have the regional restrictions on downloaded media. If Label A has the distribution rights to a given album in the UK, say, while Label B has the rights for the same album in the US, and the iTunes Store carries stuff from Label A but not Label B, it can't just go and sell this album to everyone in the US, since it violates Label B's distribution rights. If all media publishers published all their material in all territories, it'd be a lot easier to get stuff in all markets, but distribution rights for various works are often carved up and split between lots of individual entities, and a store can't just ignore all that and offer everything everywhere.
LucasArts made those wonderful graphic adventures for years, and apparently they did well for a while in the '80s and '90s, but I guess they fell by the wayside as gamers became obsessed with first-person shooters. Grim Fandango won all kinds of acclaim, but sold poorly (under 75k units, IIRC). I was really disappointed; I was hoping for a Mac version, but they don't generally bother with Mac ports of games that sold so few copies on the PC to begin with.:(
I always wondered why, when LucasArts was seemingly determined to make Star Wars games in just about every other genre imaginable (combat flightsims, first-person, racing games, RTS, platform action, fighting games, etc.), with varying results, they never tried to do one in the one game genre at which the company historically excelled and was well-known for. If they'd done a graphic adventure in the Star Wars universe and had it turn out as well as just about all their other graphic adventures, it could have given a shot in the arm to the whole field of graphic adventures. I always thought it would be cool to have, say, an adventure where you played Han and Chewie shortly before the original trilogy, around the timeframe and in a storyline along the lines of the old Brian Daley novels, or perhaps a semi-comic Droids game where you played Artoo and Threepio; in either of these ideas you could switch from one of the two leads to the other, to use whichever character is more appropriate for a given situation. Seriously, it could've been really cool, but they totally, utterly ignored the SCUMM-style adventures when it came to Star Wars, even though they did all sorts of other things as graphic adventures (everything from licensed games with the other major Lucasfilm property, Indiana Jones, to crazy, inspired stuff like Grim Fandango) at the same time they were doing Star Wars in every other genre. Why?
Those songs are sold with DRM on iTunes because other songs from the major labels are sold that way, and iTunes doesn't discriminate by label to know whether to apply DRM or not. It's simply universally applied to everything sold there, in accordance with the wishes of the majors who sell there (and whose music, I'm sure, overwhelmingly dominates sales there as elsewhere).
eMusic doesn't have major label stuff precisely because it doesn't do DRM (well, that, plus it's not as lucrative). That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course; as an eMusic user myself for a fair while, I've come to realize one of the many benefits of the service is how it fosters discovering new/obscure music, and that's frankly easier without the same major label stuff one can get elsewhere anyway dominating the site and distracting one from the hidden real treasures. However, it does mean there's an additional factor that has to be taken into account when comparing DRMed iTunes to DRMless eMusic.
There are in fact a bunch of download services, both with DRM and without (iTunes, eMusic, Audio Lunchbox, Napster, etc.), and the line dividing the ones with major label material from ones without is the same line dividing the ones with DRM from ones without. There's a reason for that, and it's a lot bigger than Apple, since only one of the download services is theirs.
Well, not only that, but Harrison has always seen potential in the Indy character for more than just the action heroics; the character's development in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles bears this out. Indy can work as a purely dramatic character even in a non-action-oriented movie. Ford apparently sees Han as more dramatically limited by comparison, and feels he's fully explored the character already. Many years ago (late '80s or early '90s), an interviewer asked Ford if there was "any talk" of a new Star Wars movie, and Ford replied, "not in my house."
The article summary is slightly wrong, incidentally (so what else is new?). Ford has already played Indy a fourth time (in the "bookends" wraparound segments for a Young Indy two-parter, "Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues"). For that matter, he's also played Han Solo four times already, too (the second time being in The Star Wars Holiday Special).
The "rabid and fanatical response of the fashionistas" is simply a handful of people who came upon your post at more or less the same time and responded with their own points of view. That many people might come across your post within a short period can hardly be unexpected on Slashdot, a site whose very name has become synonymous with colossal server loads from scads of people checking a linked site at the same time, and that many of those people might have favorable views of a product that earned overwhelming dominance in a particular market is similarly predictable. It has nothing to do with caring what you want to do or what you want to use; it's simply your own arrogance in assuming what you like is appropriate for everyone else here, and it certainly isn't the product of some organized bunch of Apple zealots keeping a watchful eye on criticism and alerting its members to attack, as you seem to think. I honestly don't care whether you like your Zen or not, and furthermore, for your obviously much-needed edification, I personally don't want any company's products, no matter how good, to achieve a, say, Microsoft-like monopoly on the market for that kind of product; I personally don't want to see iPods displace all other players, though I'm quite happy to see them succeed. I really don't want to see them utterly crush everyone else, though, and I honestly don't care what you use. I'm simply responding to your statement it succeeded only because of marketing; as I see it, it's offered numerous other compelling advantages since its introduction (some of them only at one point or another, like the battery life or the fast transfer speed, others over the iPod's entire life, like the size and weight, or the ease of use).
I do acknowledge your assertion "most players will support more" formats is news to me. I was genuinely not aware most of the hundreds of portable MP3 players played more than six audio formats - most of the ones I've seen specs for note only two or three (say, MP3, WMA and maybe WAV, for example); I'm aware of the existence of a number that play many more formats than that, but the revelation such 7-formats-or-more-audio-formats models make up more than half of all players out there is a real surprise. Can you furnish any substantiation?
divx would indeed be a nice feature to have, for precisely the reasons you've stated. It's hardly a deal-killer for many of us, though, since (as I indicated in my own earlier post), the iPod is designed to do one thing (play audio, specifically music) really well, and the various other functions are just icing (how any of these devices plays music is most likely far more important than how it plays video for the overwhelming majority of users). I'd indeed love to see it added, though, and for that matter I'd love to see support for FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, etc. added as well, even if I probably won't use it myself.
Great. The Zen meets your needs, while the iPod doesn't. Fine. Nobody cares if you want to get something other than an iPod. However, your implicit assumption "all other people are idiots for buying and using and liking iPods" is a bit much.
The iPod didn't get to where it's gotten solely on brilliant marketing; it had to actually have some real advantages to back it up. Go and look at iPod reviews from the beginning, and you'll see them talk about how good the battery life is (believe it or not, it was once a real advantage, though other players have caught up with that), how fast the transfer times were (remember, the iPods started out using FireWire back when most other players used USB, and I don't mean USB2), how small and light it was (even now, most other players of the same capacity are bulkier, and it's always been that way, and this isn't just a fashion thing - people who exercise with their players, for example, have real reason to want them as light as possible), and its utter simplicity (yeah, Ok, so the Zen may make more sense to you; just remember it doesn't necessarily make more sense to most normal people). Note also how, while Apple has added tons of features and whatnot since the iPod's inception, it's done so without changing the fundamentals of how it works as a music player; they've wisely chosen to keep it a gadget that does one thing really well and simply has additional features, rather than turning it into a jack of all trades, master of none. Further note that, for all the talk of zomgDRM!DRM!DRM! and lock-in and whatnot, it actually plays more formats than most other players (MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF, Audible, and Apple Lossless, and that's just the audio formats, not the video or image ones).
Sorry your archnemesis' iPod ran over your dog, raped your sister and stole your Bible, but as we say on Earth, c'est la vie.
Here's why: because even if the average user does bother to burn a CD every time he downloads new files (which, by the way, iTunes DRM counts against a maximum number of times you can burn a given track), trying to re-import them back into iTunes will leave the songs without any metadata.
Apologies for nitpicking, but two points: iTunes DRM doesn't count the the maximum number of times you can burn a given track, only the maximum number of times you can burn a given playlist, and any individual track can be put into any number of playlist and burned as many times as one likes; also, reimporting the songs back into iTunes will not in fact leave them without metadata. iTunes remembers a CD that's been in the computer before, and if it had any metadata then it'll have it now. If you put in a brand-new CD that it's never encountered before and add the tags (either typing it in or getting it from CDDB), it'll show up for that disc the next time you insert it; similarly, it'll remember the data for audio CDs you burn of tracks from iTunes.
Moreover, this concern assumes the point of the burn is for reripping to get around the DRM, which it may not even be. Believe it or not, there are still people in the world who occasionally listen to music via CD players.
Yes, George Lucas was the executive producer of Howard the Duck, a bad adaptation of a good Marvel comic from the '70s. Lucas didn't write or direct the movie, but it's routinely trotted out as an all-trumping condemnation of his filmmaking acumen, a textbook example of why he's so lousy. Admittedly, it's not a good movie (though I confess to guilty affection for it), but I think the routine citations of this one movie by people who somehow simultaneously ignore the considerable number of better movies for which he served in exactly the same capacity is a bit unfair.
Lucas takes a lot of drubbing for Howard the Duck from his many critics, but those same people never seem to mention his involvement with, oh, say, Labyrinth... or Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters... or Tucker: The Man and His Dream... or Latino... or Twice Upon a Time... you get the idea. Of course few/none of those movies, good or bad, are really his in the way THX 1138, Willow and the Star Wars, American Graffiti and Indiana Jones movies are; the lion's share of the credit and/or blame for those others should go to their own writers, directors, etc., and for the most part, that's what happens. Hardly any of Lucas' executive-producer-only credits ever get mentioned in discussions about Lucas, except for Howard the Duck, easily the most ridiculed and poorly-regarded movie in that otherwise mostly-praised selection.
That's not to say he hasn't done plenty with his own actual creations to earn derision, of course. There's plenty of stuff to lament about the Star Wars prequels (and special editions), not to mention Radioland Murders, as much as it pains me to say so. That said, I do think there's more than enough to criticize him over re: his own movies without dragging other people's movies into it that he had some relatively marginal involvement with.
DRM should be more like Everquest or Steam, I can install them on as many systems as I like but I can only log into one at a time.
I'm not sure I follow. As things are now, you access Apple's servers to authorize a computer to play the DRMed files (and of course to browse the store and buy those files in the first place), but otherwise don't need to talk to them at all. If you're suggesting that a fair tradeoff for having as many computers as you want able to play the DRMed music (currently limited to five per account) you'd instead log in each time you wanted to play, wouldn't that be a dramatically bigger and more intrusive hassle? What if you want to play music on a machine that's not even connected to the internet?
And how can you watch "Mirror, Mirror" now knowing that despite Mirror-Spock reforming the Terran Empire, the human race ends up subjugated by an alliance of Klingons, Cardassians, and Bajorans?
The same way I can watch "Space Seed" knowing that despite what seems like a good solution at the time for the problem of what to do with Khan, he'll eventually regain control of a Starfleet vessel and cause all sorts of havoc ending with the deaths of Spock (temporarily) and David Marcus, a political headache for the Federation in the form of the Genesis planet, and the destruction of the Enterprise, among other things. This sort of extension and modification of prior resolutions of storylines isn't an entirely new thing for Trek, it seems...
No, they were in fact released here on laserdisc as well. In 1993 they remastered the movies for a big boxed laserdisc set, called Star Wars Trilogy: The Definitive Collection. This was state of the art at the time, and loaded with extras. In 1995, after plans were announced for the special editions, there were new VHS tapes and CLV laserdiscs released, using the masters from the CAV laserdisc set.
No, the original May 1977 release (and the '78 and '79 reissues) did in fact say just "Star Wars" at the beginning, with no "Episode IV: A New Hope." The first release of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope with that title was in April of '81, eleven months after the release of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.
In fact, FutureCop L.A.P.D was even released by EA itself as a Windows / Macintosh hybrid disc (though most other EA titles that made it to the Mac were ported and distributed by other companies such as the aforementioned Aspyr).
That's a very fair and valid point. However, with regard to the argument iPod sales may be levelling or falling simply because of market saturation, what have overall MP3 player sales done? What is the iPod's current marketshare?
That depends upon your threshold for concern. In theory, a Mac could get a virus, but in practice it just doesn't happen. Yeah, I guess OS X users should be concerned with viruses, in much the same way they should be concerned with being hit by lightning...
The official word is indeed that they'll be non-anamorphic. Why on earth they'd do it this way, who knows. Supposedly the laserdisc masters are the best available elements for these discs.
However, that doesn't make sense, for a couple reasons. For one thing, the announcement explicitly notes this will include the actual original version of the original movie, i.e., from back when it was just "Star Wars" as opposed to "Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope" (the title was extended to its present full version only after it became clear the dream of a whole series of these would be viable, since at the time the first one was made, no one realized how successful it would be). It got the full title with its April '81 reissue, and its first video release was more than a year after that, in August of '82; every home video release ever offered has had the extended, full title. The '77 version has never been released before, not even on the laserdiscs whose masters are supposed to be used for these DVDs, but these DVDs are supposed to feature the '77 movie complete with its original short title.
Also, a bunch of pre-SE versions of shots from the movies (including even the old title, in fact) are already presented in anamorphic in the documentary material on the 2004 DVD set. If there's enough material available to do anamorphic transfers of some of these shots, including several of the ones changed for the special editions and the later DVD release, why couldn't they do the whole movies?
That... depends. I'm not opposed to them trying to get the show closer to its original intentions.
With Star Wars, a lot of what people objected to was the alteration of things in ways that actually changed meaning in the narrative. AFAICT, the #1 objection people had to the SEs was Greedo shooting; other major objections included Luke's scream as he falls from the gantry after his duel with Vader in Cloud City. Were it not for those two things, a lot of the animosity people harbor toward the "special editions" would just fizzle away.
Moreover, they've always messed with the originals. There are so many movies that have been released in multiple cuts for one reason or another (censorship, commercial running time considerations, whatever) it's not even funny. The Star Wars movies already existed in multiple versions even prior to the SEs, and other s/f / fantasy works with multiple versions include Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you name it.
In fact, this actually isn't the first time this has even been applied to Star Trek, though it hasn't been done on this scale before. There've been multiple versions of the first couple movies for years.
Possibly. However, if you're apparently laboring under the impression that the company's name is "Mac," as appears to be the case from your post, it's clear some of your impressions of "Mac" are a bit off.
Well, sure, but it's just not going to work that way. The products are being sold for the "real price"; the rebates can be and frequently are steeper than an ordinary discount, because they can count on not everyone redeeming them. If everybody who buys a product gets a discount applied at the register, it obviously can't be for as much as it can be if only a small percentage gets it (and even then not right away).
The point of the rebate from the manufacturer or retailer's point of view is to entice more people to buy it, some of whom will subsequently fail to bother with the redemption even though the intent to redeem was part of what got them to buy the product in the first place. In order to see this sales boost, the manufacturer / retailer is willing to sacrifice some of the money back to the consumers, since (hopefully) it will still be offset by the overall increase in revenue from all the people who bought the thing that might not have had there been no rebate. Since rebates can be quite steep (while they're obviously not always so steep as this, I've more than once seen rebates on an item that equalled or even exceeded the whole price, making the item essentially free except for the sales tax and the wait), they clearly cannot be applied to products as conventional discounts at the same levels.
So, it's better to buy something for $100 and have that be the end of it than it is to buy something for $100 and then get $25 back a few weeks later? Er, yeah...
It's one thing if the complaints about rebates are about companies that supposedly never received the rebate request, or that find some minor technicality on which to deny the rebate or whatever, but I think a lot of it simply has to do with the hassle. Lots of consumers buy stuff with rebate offers fully expecting to redeem the rebate, but then put it off until the rebates expire, or they lose the required documentation or whatever. I'm just as capable of such laziness or carelessness as everyone else and admit I've failed to take advantage of rebates because of it (which of course is what the companies count on), but that's not the companies' fault.
I think it sucks because I frequently do get the rebates done, and while I'm sure some of the "horror stories" about rebate fraud are true, I personally haven't ever had one fail; the closest I've ever come was waiting far longer than necessary for a rebate on a modem I bought once, but I did at least eventually receive it.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I'm not looking forward to the end of rebates. Often they're far more substantial than any savings that could ever be offered through sale prices or whatever; the fact so many people never claim them means they can offer huge rebates that entice more people to buy, and those people who actually do bother to jump through the hoops do in fact wind up getting some pretty sweet deals. With the rebates gone, it doesn't mean we'll suddenly start seeing all those rebates suddenly turned into instant, at-the-register price cuts; it just means we won't have as many opportunities to save as much money on the purchases, period. As someone who frequently does go to the trouble of going through the rebate process and enjoys the rewards of doing so, I'm disappointed one or more retailers are going to stop offering me rebate opportunities because other people are too lazy to take advantage of them and make a point of complaining that companies "unfairly" entice them into purchases with rebates they wind up not taking advantage of.
Slashdot Mirror
Many albums (and movies, and books, and games, etc) are published by different entities in different countries/regions, which is one reason we have the regional restrictions on downloaded media. If Label A has the distribution rights to a given album in the UK, say, while Label B has the rights for the same album in the US, and the iTunes Store carries stuff from Label A but not Label B, it can't just go and sell this album to everyone in the US, since it violates Label B's distribution rights. If all media publishers published all their material in all territories, it'd be a lot easier to get stuff in all markets, but distribution rights for various works are often carved up and split between lots of individual entities, and a store can't just ignore all that and offer everything everywhere.
I always wondered why, when LucasArts was seemingly determined to make Star Wars games in just about every other genre imaginable (combat flightsims, first-person, racing games, RTS, platform action, fighting games, etc.), with varying results, they never tried to do one in the one game genre at which the company historically excelled and was well-known for. If they'd done a graphic adventure in the Star Wars universe and had it turn out as well as just about all their other graphic adventures, it could have given a shot in the arm to the whole field of graphic adventures. I always thought it would be cool to have, say, an adventure where you played Han and Chewie shortly before the original trilogy, around the timeframe and in a storyline along the lines of the old Brian Daley novels, or perhaps a semi-comic Droids game where you played Artoo and Threepio; in either of these ideas you could switch from one of the two leads to the other, to use whichever character is more appropriate for a given situation. Seriously, it could've been really cool, but they totally, utterly ignored the SCUMM-style adventures when it came to Star Wars, even though they did all sorts of other things as graphic adventures (everything from licensed games with the other major Lucasfilm property, Indiana Jones, to crazy, inspired stuff like Grim Fandango) at the same time they were doing Star Wars in every other genre. Why?
eMusic doesn't have major label stuff precisely because it doesn't do DRM (well, that, plus it's not as lucrative). That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course; as an eMusic user myself for a fair while, I've come to realize one of the many benefits of the service is how it fosters discovering new/obscure music, and that's frankly easier without the same major label stuff one can get elsewhere anyway dominating the site and distracting one from the hidden real treasures. However, it does mean there's an additional factor that has to be taken into account when comparing DRMed iTunes to DRMless eMusic.
There are in fact a bunch of download services, both with DRM and without (iTunes, eMusic, Audio Lunchbox, Napster, etc.), and the line dividing the ones with major label material from ones without is the same line dividing the ones with DRM from ones without. There's a reason for that, and it's a lot bigger than Apple, since only one of the download services is theirs.
The article summary is slightly wrong, incidentally (so what else is new?). Ford has already played Indy a fourth time (in the "bookends" wraparound segments for a Young Indy two-parter, "Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues"). For that matter, he's also played Han Solo four times already, too (the second time being in The Star Wars Holiday Special).
I do acknowledge your assertion "most players will support more" formats is news to me. I was genuinely not aware most of the hundreds of portable MP3 players played more than six audio formats - most of the ones I've seen specs for note only two or three (say, MP3, WMA and maybe WAV, for example); I'm aware of the existence of a number that play many more formats than that, but the revelation such 7-formats-or-more-audio-formats models make up more than half of all players out there is a real surprise. Can you furnish any substantiation?
divx would indeed be a nice feature to have, for precisely the reasons you've stated. It's hardly a deal-killer for many of us, though, since (as I indicated in my own earlier post), the iPod is designed to do one thing (play audio, specifically music) really well, and the various other functions are just icing (how any of these devices plays music is most likely far more important than how it plays video for the overwhelming majority of users). I'd indeed love to see it added, though, and for that matter I'd love to see support for FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, etc. added as well, even if I probably won't use it myself.
The iPod didn't get to where it's gotten solely on brilliant marketing; it had to actually have some real advantages to back it up. Go and look at iPod reviews from the beginning, and you'll see them talk about how good the battery life is (believe it or not, it was once a real advantage, though other players have caught up with that), how fast the transfer times were (remember, the iPods started out using FireWire back when most other players used USB, and I don't mean USB2), how small and light it was (even now, most other players of the same capacity are bulkier, and it's always been that way, and this isn't just a fashion thing - people who exercise with their players, for example, have real reason to want them as light as possible), and its utter simplicity (yeah, Ok, so the Zen may make more sense to you; just remember it doesn't necessarily make more sense to most normal people). Note also how, while Apple has added tons of features and whatnot since the iPod's inception, it's done so without changing the fundamentals of how it works as a music player; they've wisely chosen to keep it a gadget that does one thing really well and simply has additional features, rather than turning it into a jack of all trades, master of none. Further note that, for all the talk of zomgDRM!DRM!DRM! and lock-in and whatnot, it actually plays more formats than most other players (MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF, Audible, and Apple Lossless, and that's just the audio formats, not the video or image ones).
Sorry your archnemesis' iPod ran over your dog, raped your sister and stole your Bible, but as we say on Earth, c'est la vie.
Apologies for nitpicking, but two points: iTunes DRM doesn't count the the maximum number of times you can burn a given track, only the maximum number of times you can burn a given playlist, and any individual track can be put into any number of playlist and burned as many times as one likes; also, reimporting the songs back into iTunes will not in fact leave them without metadata. iTunes remembers a CD that's been in the computer before, and if it had any metadata then it'll have it now. If you put in a brand-new CD that it's never encountered before and add the tags (either typing it in or getting it from CDDB), it'll show up for that disc the next time you insert it; similarly, it'll remember the data for audio CDs you burn of tracks from iTunes.
Moreover, this concern assumes the point of the burn is for reripping to get around the DRM, which it may not even be. Believe it or not, there are still people in the world who occasionally listen to music via CD players.
If they're truly interested in making translators easier to retain / hire, they might do well to stop disqualifying homosexuals.
Yes, George Lucas was the executive producer of Howard the Duck, a bad adaptation of a good Marvel comic from the '70s. Lucas didn't write or direct the movie, but it's routinely trotted out as an all-trumping condemnation of his filmmaking acumen, a textbook example of why he's so lousy. Admittedly, it's not a good movie (though I confess to guilty affection for it), but I think the routine citations of this one movie by people who somehow simultaneously ignore the considerable number of better movies for which he served in exactly the same capacity is a bit unfair.
Lucas takes a lot of drubbing for Howard the Duck from his many critics, but those same people never seem to mention his involvement with, oh, say, Labyrinth... or Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters... or Tucker: The Man and His Dream... or Latino... or Twice Upon a Time... you get the idea. Of course few/none of those movies, good or bad, are really his in the way THX 1138, Willow and the Star Wars, American Graffiti and Indiana Jones movies are; the lion's share of the credit and/or blame for those others should go to their own writers, directors, etc., and for the most part, that's what happens. Hardly any of Lucas' executive-producer-only credits ever get mentioned in discussions about Lucas, except for Howard the Duck, easily the most ridiculed and poorly-regarded movie in that otherwise mostly-praised selection.
That's not to say he hasn't done plenty with his own actual creations to earn derision, of course. There's plenty of stuff to lament about the Star Wars prequels (and special editions), not to mention Radioland Murders, as much as it pains me to say so. That said, I do think there's more than enough to criticize him over re: his own movies without dragging other people's movies into it that he had some relatively marginal involvement with.
A perfume may be upscale or tony or whatever, but highbrow?
Whoa! That's very interesting; this is the first reference I've seen to being able to do that. Where'd you hear this?
I'm not sure I follow. As things are now, you access Apple's servers to authorize a computer to play the DRMed files (and of course to browse the store and buy those files in the first place), but otherwise don't need to talk to them at all. If you're suggesting that a fair tradeoff for having as many computers as you want able to play the DRMed music (currently limited to five per account) you'd instead log in each time you wanted to play, wouldn't that be a dramatically bigger and more intrusive hassle? What if you want to play music on a machine that's not even connected to the internet?
The same way I can watch "Space Seed" knowing that despite what seems like a good solution at the time for the problem of what to do with Khan, he'll eventually regain control of a Starfleet vessel and cause all sorts of havoc ending with the deaths of Spock (temporarily) and David Marcus, a political headache for the Federation in the form of the Genesis planet, and the destruction of the Enterprise, among other things. This sort of extension and modification of prior resolutions of storylines isn't an entirely new thing for Trek, it seems...
No, they were in fact released here on laserdisc as well. In 1993 they remastered the movies for a big boxed laserdisc set, called Star Wars Trilogy: The Definitive Collection. This was state of the art at the time, and loaded with extras. In 1995, after plans were announced for the special editions, there were new VHS tapes and CLV laserdiscs released, using the masters from the CAV laserdisc set.
No, the original May 1977 release (and the '78 and '79 reissues) did in fact say just "Star Wars" at the beginning, with no "Episode IV: A New Hope." The first release of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope with that title was in April of '81, eleven months after the release of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.
In fact, FutureCop L.A.P.D was even released by EA itself as a Windows / Macintosh hybrid disc (though most other EA titles that made it to the Mac were ported and distributed by other companies such as the aforementioned Aspyr).
That's a very fair and valid point. However, with regard to the argument iPod sales may be levelling or falling simply because of market saturation, what have overall MP3 player sales done? What is the iPod's current marketshare?
That depends upon your threshold for concern. In theory, a Mac could get a virus, but in practice it just doesn't happen. Yeah, I guess OS X users should be concerned with viruses, in much the same way they should be concerned with being hit by lightning...
However, that doesn't make sense, for a couple reasons. For one thing, the announcement explicitly notes this will include the actual original version of the original movie, i.e., from back when it was just "Star Wars" as opposed to "Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope" (the title was extended to its present full version only after it became clear the dream of a whole series of these would be viable, since at the time the first one was made, no one realized how successful it would be). It got the full title with its April '81 reissue, and its first video release was more than a year after that, in August of '82; every home video release ever offered has had the extended, full title. The '77 version has never been released before, not even on the laserdiscs whose masters are supposed to be used for these DVDs, but these DVDs are supposed to feature the '77 movie complete with its original short title.
Also, a bunch of pre-SE versions of shots from the movies (including even the old title, in fact) are already presented in anamorphic in the documentary material on the 2004 DVD set. If there's enough material available to do anamorphic transfers of some of these shots, including several of the ones changed for the special editions and the later DVD release, why couldn't they do the whole movies?
With Star Wars, a lot of what people objected to was the alteration of things in ways that actually changed meaning in the narrative. AFAICT, the #1 objection people had to the SEs was Greedo shooting; other major objections included Luke's scream as he falls from the gantry after his duel with Vader in Cloud City. Were it not for those two things, a lot of the animosity people harbor toward the "special editions" would just fizzle away.
Moreover, they've always messed with the originals. There are so many movies that have been released in multiple cuts for one reason or another (censorship, commercial running time considerations, whatever) it's not even funny. The Star Wars movies already existed in multiple versions even prior to the SEs, and other s/f / fantasy works with multiple versions include Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you name it.
In fact, this actually isn't the first time this has even been applied to Star Trek, though it hasn't been done on this scale before. There've been multiple versions of the first couple movies for years.
Possibly. However, if you're apparently laboring under the impression that the company's name is "Mac," as appears to be the case from your post, it's clear some of your impressions of "Mac" are a bit off.
The point of the rebate from the manufacturer or retailer's point of view is to entice more people to buy it, some of whom will subsequently fail to bother with the redemption even though the intent to redeem was part of what got them to buy the product in the first place. In order to see this sales boost, the manufacturer / retailer is willing to sacrifice some of the money back to the consumers, since (hopefully) it will still be offset by the overall increase in revenue from all the people who bought the thing that might not have had there been no rebate. Since rebates can be quite steep (while they're obviously not always so steep as this, I've more than once seen rebates on an item that equalled or even exceeded the whole price, making the item essentially free except for the sales tax and the wait), they clearly cannot be applied to products as conventional discounts at the same levels.
Isn't that better than just handing your money over to someone, and then not having an opportunity to get any of it back?
So, it's better to buy something for $100 and have that be the end of it than it is to buy something for $100 and then get $25 back a few weeks later? Er, yeah...
I think it sucks because I frequently do get the rebates done, and while I'm sure some of the "horror stories" about rebate fraud are true, I personally haven't ever had one fail; the closest I've ever come was waiting far longer than necessary for a rebate on a modem I bought once, but I did at least eventually receive it.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I'm not looking forward to the end of rebates. Often they're far more substantial than any savings that could ever be offered through sale prices or whatever; the fact so many people never claim them means they can offer huge rebates that entice more people to buy, and those people who actually do bother to jump through the hoops do in fact wind up getting some pretty sweet deals. With the rebates gone, it doesn't mean we'll suddenly start seeing all those rebates suddenly turned into instant, at-the-register price cuts; it just means we won't have as many opportunities to save as much money on the purchases, period. As someone who frequently does go to the trouble of going through the rebate process and enjoys the rewards of doing so, I'm disappointed one or more retailers are going to stop offering me rebate opportunities because other people are too lazy to take advantage of them and make a point of complaining that companies "unfairly" entice them into purchases with rebates they wind up not taking advantage of.
Oh, well.