Dubs of anime films are usually done by studios specializing in bringing as many anime films over as possible as cheap as possible, and use voice acting roughly on par with cheap children's programs.... With a little practice you can read it fast enough to go watch the screen at the same time. I've noticed it's only people who have only watched one or two subbed movies in their life who seem to have problems keeping up with it -- but most of them pick it up fairly well by the end of a series.
Animation with subs seems only a slight improvement over print. (It's different for live actors, mind you, I won't watch those dubbed.) If I'm going to invest in a theatrical experience, I want to suspend disbelief, and reading over animation (or wrong voices coming out of human mouths) just removes me from immersion.
That said, it seems that when John Lasseter is involved, the chances of the dub being acceptable improves vastly. He worked on many of the Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli releases in english, and some of them are great. At least someone with insight and studio-power cares.
It`s not just about sovereignty, first of all, and it isn`t a strictly private company: the canadian taxpayer subsidized this program, something like a billion dollars (real numbers are unclear). We just don`t want to be ripped off.
Considering that it`s the little friendly nation next door with a small military and tons of resources, yer damn right we should be worried about our sovereignty; we`re subject to a flood of media, business purchases, and political pressure by the elephant to the south. USA farts, we notice.
One of the biggest threats to our sovereignty right now is surveillance by your institutional conspiracy theorists, the spooks. Selling off our surveillance tech won`t help.
Seems like using a good calibrated CRT or a nice Truecolor LCD as the iMac's second monitor would be the best hack around using it for colour-sensitive work.
Not sure if the dvi-analog conversion will cause problems with calibration, but the imac supports an extra monitor.
I just finished reading Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, great book, excellent sf. The central plot hinges on a similar idea:
SPOILER AHEAD
There's a giant accelerator being built around Jupiter, that will simulate the first.01 second of the universe... only the central characters figure out that it won't be just a simulation, but a new one, expanding and overwriting this part of this one.
There are end-of-world religious nuts who find that out and strive to make sure it happens. Much mayhem and a touch of soldier cyberpunk. Fun stuff and excellent speculation, especially the other part about what it's liked to be jacked in with other people.
I don't think Obama is racist, but when he compared his gradmother's occasional casual racism to a man who spews it every day and with clear design, I have to question his judgement. Does he really not understand the difference? I admit people sometimes have a blind spot with people they grew up with, but still...
For all that it's forefront in daily experience, Americans haven't really had it out with the problem of Race and Racism, and are pretty confused about it... especially, being blind to its ongoing influence and just how it works in many ways.
Your comment exemplifies this. First, I can't find anything like spewed racism in Wright's sermons, the ones I've seen online. They're strenuous complaints about the ongoing legacy of slavery and racism in the form of overt and covert white supremacy, not extolling the virtues of race doctrine. They might be argued to be inaccurate or possibly prejudiced, sure, but racist? Not unless he's in a position to become the dominant group under a doctrine of society organised by race. He's no black supremacist.
Second, that naming of "occasional casual racism" that his grandmother exhibited was used as reference to a kind of mindset that was generally imbued in a whole generation of mostly polite "white" americans. Since subtle prejudice is like halitosis--it's always everyone else's problem--americans of european extraction or appearance tend to deny its existence or significance.
That mindset revealed in the "typical white" comment points to a huge, semi-coordinated and largely unspoken/taboo structuring of society, into a complex set of hierarchies. It has real effects, and the 'cross the street' kneejerk response is merely a tip of an iceberg. Obama's point is valid and accurate, not prejudiced or racist... that attitude was typical, even mild, for her time. So what's everyone's problem with his comment? They doth protest too much, methinks.
That is why recent studies have shown that those casual comments are more antagonising than virulent racism, since they contain a threat that can't be spoken.
I never know such places existed in Canada, but there are bad neighborhoods everywhere I guess. Still, I've seen a lot worse in the U.S. I used to live near East St. Louis, and that place was more like a shelled-out DMZ than a town.
One of the reasons the Downtown Eastside is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada and has tens of thousands of junkies is climate: one can survive most weather most of the year. Another is its status as Terminal City (no pun, really), since if you keep going west (or south) you wind up there. It's a regional sink, for British Columbia (and the prairies too), a vast vast area.
The sudden surge in crystal meth use (speed, to you old timers) across the country contributes hugely to the problem. Recently I was travelling through a small town called Cache Creek, and chatting with a young clerk about life there. She complained "it's ruined... all my friends are getting into meth and crack or other stuff like "K" and they're whacked out all the time and lying, they just aren't friends anymore, it's just in the last five years, the place sucks now." I checked in other small towns and it's happening there, too. Many of these partiers go too far, fall too low, run off and they wind up junkies in Vancouver.
But I have to say I didn't used to feel any threat there when it was mainly a heroin-and-rice-wine kind of mess. Now with speed and crack all over the place it's much more aggressive, the desperation's dangerous.
It was always the case that parking your car down there was just a question of when, not if, you got a broken window for your loose change.
A PC built of high-quality parts is still about $250 - $300 dollars cheaper than a Mac of equal power.
Since my day rate is $250, and i figure it will take about 8 hours of researching, ordering, receiving, testing, and assembling parts, I plan on building a hackintosh just for a lark and I'll break even.
My real motivation in this is to build the headless iMac that I crave into a quiet shuttle-sized case with the right jacks on the front. I actually won't really break even once I buy a nice 24" samsung monitor and then waste time fiddling with system updates, but to hell with apple's failure to provide this key product.
I do not allow anyone (including me) to run the work Macs as admin.
There's no compelling reason to run as admin, unless you're trapped trying to run canon's uber-crappy drivers or are saddled with similar boneheaded apps or drivers that require it. But, to be fair. they're pretty rare in Mac-land. If you need to change a setting, the OS lets you escalate privileges gracefully enough. If you're doing lots of installing or tweaking, there's fast user switching. I'm curious why you'd run as admin. Laziness, or drivers?
If the phone calls in the middle of the night, it won't be one of my brothers having trouble installing a new sound card anymore. It'll be something that does actually matter in the middle of the night!
Lucky you. I get phone calls late at night from my little brother to get help with troubleshooting ALSA and codecs and obscure SiS driver problems with different linux distros. Cheap brat should just buy a decent used machine for a change instead of dumpster diving for hardware. I sometimes regret turning him on to OSS.
And I still get calls from windows users, because I "know computers."
by saying that it is a mining town constrasts better with the technology they're trying to implement.
Yah, well, they could've called it a logging town to the same effect, with much better accuracy. Though given the recent massive sell-off of mill infrastructure, who knows how long that will last.
If you live on Vancouver Island or nearby, and rely on BC Ferries like many of us do, they post real-time GPS images of ferry location and direction. They're highly addictive, since either the ferries are late, or I am. I'm a mac user mostly, so I have a web clip of my spouse's daily commute ferry one touch away.
I think all major transport systems would benefit from this.
(excuse the wording)? What the hell? This is what is wrong with America. I swear to God I am so sick of this political correct cry baby crap. He is black, call him black. I am white, why the hell is it perfectly acceptable to call me white instead of "Irish-American" or some other hypenated nonsense, but its a big deal to call a black guy black. Why the hell would you need to be excused for calling him black?
American mainstream culture grossly oversimplifies identity. I was involved in a youth conference for high school students from the "african diaspora" that involved schools from Toronto, Windsor, and Detroit. The school in Toronto identified over 80 ethnicities and many mother tongues, and the african-canadian group that came hailed from many different places. The Detroit school identified three main ethnicities: Black, White, Latino. WTF? That's messed up, apartheid style thinking: stay in your place. (Yeah, I know, canadians have nasty bigotries to deal with too, but it's not so extreme, and generally seen as shameful.)
Sure hyphenated identities are complicated, but that's life in a settler state. I don't see the USA pulling out of its entrenched race divisions until people start thinking about identity in more realistic ways.
You're right. Most people in the world don't have the ability to own the land their house sits on, and their governments don't think they should be able to. [sarcasm deleted]
Most people in the USA don't own the land their house is on (in practical terms), a bank or landlord does.
Believing that it's okay for 5% of the population to own about 50% of the country's assets, and the bottom 40% are just shiftless scum, well yeah, that is right wing. Sorry if that bothers you.
True story: back during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I had lunch with a well educated, mild-mannered, drug and gun running mujehaddin working in India. When he found out I wasn't going to be a customer, he relaxed and we talked religion. He asserted that there were more Buddhists than any other religion. I scoffed and began quoting the other statistics in this thread, but he replied:
"Few christians are actually christian, and few muslims are actually muslim... but most buddhists are actually buddhist."
Or did you maybe mean to say that you like your absolutes better because they're yours, and you use more inclusive language to express them?
absolute: (noun) A value or principle that is regarded as universally valid or that may be viewed without relation to other things. (Just to point out that no, you aren't reading me right. Try empiricism, it's a more fundamentally satisfying fundamentalism!)
OK, so how about: there may be a civil society somewhere that is moralistic to the point of self-oppression and delusion that doesn't indulge in a tendency to absolutes, but historians and anthropologists and xenobiologists haven't discovered it yet.
Straight guys don't have homosexual experiences unless they are gay or at least bi. That's like saying an out gay man has heterosexual experiences. It isn't common and it isn't true to the person's feelings. I guess what I'm trying to say is if Germany is so liberal towards gays and there is no stigma, then why are these "straight" people so scared to come out?
One of the markers of an overly moralistic society is the tendency to absolutes, black and white, right and wrong, gay and straight.
Most people are intrinsically bi, along some kind of spectrum. In north america, at least, both het and gay sides of the fence exert a lot of pressure on people to be one thing or the other, and this causes plenty of grief.
I happen to live in a community where it's easier than just about anywhere for people to switch, and it happens more often than you might imagine. There are many ways to be in the closet, and bi's are pushed there by both sides.
Just because Sony builds everything bigger and brighter than the rest, doesn't mean they know what they're doing. They know how to sell, which is the only thing that has kept that bastard company alive all these years.
....Sony loves to invent ridiculous expensive things with good old Taiwanese build quality:P, and they're very good at forcing them onto consumers. They are deceptive, greedy and deaf to their customers.
There is no "they" there. There are many divisions to Sony, and many products. Granted, some suck, and badly. And yes, they have predatory pricing (see below). Sometimes, however, they deliver.
Consider the PD-150. This video camera is legendary, for good reason (and its even better follow-up, the PD-170). They produce great SD video, they're small, sturdy, somewhat expandable, and reliable as hell. Very tough. Controls are in a good location, other design features are balanced, etc. This is the camera that guerilla documentarians had to have, for many years. They're still in heavy use, years after being discontinued.
The other side of that is predatory. I once lost the remote control to a video deck, that had controls on it not available on the deck face controls, basic stuff like displaying timecode. Now other than a few specialized buttons, there is nothing special about this remote, it's a little black bar with infrared. Sony Canada wanted $500 freakin' dollars for a replacement... for a $15 dollar part, at best. Classic nasty company policy. Of course I bought a fully functional third party item for 1/6th the price. Video pros have a serious love-hate thing going with Sony.
Thanks, that's quite interesting... however I wasn't just thinking about the environment, but social justice too. Don't like the idea of 12-year olds going slowly blind in a sweatshop, or miners communities dying of mercury poisoning... etc.
Land that they had lived on for hundreds or thousands of years was most likly taken without their consent, or otherwise stolen...
Yes, and the GP post also overlooks the participation of the mining/resource-extraction company in further disenfranchising the locals, and how much secrecy there is. It's easy to say 'lay your life down for your liberty' typing at a keyboard in comfort.
This is the biggest problem with the way globalization is going: a lack of accountability. The shareholders and regulators don't know how land/culture/society is being raped, because it's being done over there. Corruption pays both foreign companies and local politicians (who were often installed by economic hit-men and political fixers), and it's all hush hush, though if someone does squawk, usually very few listen anyway. There's lots of published evidence, but the GP is willing to post opinions without doing the research.
this train wreck we call modern society.
Here's my dilemma when upgrading or buying a new computer: they're all 'dirty' through various parts of the production chain, and it is literally impossible to purchase a truly ethical or green computer (other than recycling old crap, I guess). Now, I know it's like this with much of the industrial system, shirts and shoes made by convicts and strawberries killing workers with fungicides, yadda yadda, but often there are options. Not with computers.
This is a sticking point. It isn't thieving for two reasons: it is a levy to compensate artists directly (in theory) for section 8 of the copyright act, so it is services received for monies paid (I'm confused about your morals here); and, if it were copyright infringement, which it ain't, read the act I linked to above, it wouldn't be theft, as they are categorically different. Cue arguments about digital vs. physical, etc.--particularly relevant to gas vs. music. Is playing music at a party theft as well? In canadian law, and according to most of the industry, it's the same as personal copying.
Not if tax on the physical commodity, blank CD, is your justification.... I think the rationales for both those types of taxes, and many others, boil down to Imaginary Guilt: whatever convinces enough law-abiding citizens to pretend to believe we owe more to 'the system' than we really do. I also think the entertainment industry is one of the easiest to boycott, and the tax on CD-R's is not enough to change dissuade me from that opinion, so I really don't grok what all the fuss is about.
Alright, so you don't understand what a levy is. It is a blanket fee collected against the purchase of each good or service, in this case CD-R, to compensate for a proposed service rendered. In this case, personal performances of recorded music. It is NOT a tax; the money is received by an industry organisation called SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors, and Musicians) who are mandated to charge the levy for various circumstances like public parties and copying rights, and redistribute the money directly to artists. It's an indirect method, but a transaction nonetheless, not a tax. If one pays the levy but does not copy any music, one is paying for a legal service not received. One ALSO pays taxes on blank CD-R's in Canada, to the tune of about 13% in most places. It is less than the levy, which makes up about 50% of the price of the CDR, and in fact the levy is also taxed, as a service (significantly, no-one is up in arms about "taxing a tax" with respect to the levy).
I do enjoy the meticulous, cogent arguments that I frequently read against Imaginary Property, though. Please keep up the good work.
These arguments are enshrined in Canadian Law and embraced by the industry association. Copies of music aren't theft, they are personal performances. Steal a CD from a record store, you aren't stealing the music, you're stealing the package and avoiding the performance fees. It's obvious you aren't canadian, and can't wrap your head around the concepts involved. Let's just say that your template of reality in this case is misaligned.
Slashdot Mirror
Animation with subs seems only a slight improvement over print. (It's different for live actors, mind you, I won't watch those dubbed.) If I'm going to invest in a theatrical experience, I want to suspend disbelief, and reading over animation (or wrong voices coming out of human mouths) just removes me from immersion.
That said, it seems that when John Lasseter is involved, the chances of the dub being acceptable improves vastly. He worked on many of the Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli releases in english, and some of them are great. At least someone with insight and studio-power cares.
It`s not just about sovereignty, first of all, and it isn`t a strictly private company: the canadian taxpayer subsidized this program, something like a billion dollars (real numbers are unclear). We just don`t want to be ripped off.
Considering that it`s the little friendly nation next door with a small military and tons of resources, yer damn right we should be worried about our sovereignty; we`re subject to a flood of media, business purchases, and political pressure by the elephant to the south. USA farts, we notice.
One of the biggest threats to our sovereignty right now is surveillance by your institutional conspiracy theorists, the spooks. Selling off our surveillance tech won`t help.
Seems like using a good calibrated CRT or a nice Truecolor LCD as the iMac's second monitor would be the best hack around using it for colour-sensitive work.
Not sure if the dvi-analog conversion will cause problems with calibration, but the imac supports an extra monitor.
I just finished reading Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, great book, excellent sf. The central plot hinges on a similar idea:
SPOILER AHEAD
There's a giant accelerator being built around Jupiter, that will simulate the first .01 second of the universe... only the central characters figure out that it won't be just a simulation, but a new one, expanding and overwriting this part of this one.
There are end-of-world religious nuts who find that out and strive to make sure it happens. Much mayhem and a touch of soldier cyberpunk. Fun stuff and excellent speculation, especially the other part about what it's liked to be jacked in with other people.
For all that it's forefront in daily experience, Americans haven't really had it out with the problem of Race and Racism, and are pretty confused about it... especially, being blind to its ongoing influence and just how it works in many ways.
Your comment exemplifies this. First, I can't find anything like spewed racism in Wright's sermons, the ones I've seen online. They're strenuous complaints about the ongoing legacy of slavery and racism in the form of overt and covert white supremacy, not extolling the virtues of race doctrine. They might be argued to be inaccurate or possibly prejudiced, sure, but racist? Not unless he's in a position to become the dominant group under a doctrine of society organised by race. He's no black supremacist.
Second, that naming of "occasional casual racism" that his grandmother exhibited was used as reference to a kind of mindset that was generally imbued in a whole generation of mostly polite "white" americans. Since subtle prejudice is like halitosis--it's always everyone else's problem--americans of european extraction or appearance tend to deny its existence or significance.
That mindset revealed in the "typical white" comment points to a huge, semi-coordinated and largely unspoken/taboo structuring of society, into a complex set of hierarchies. It has real effects, and the 'cross the street' kneejerk response is merely a tip of an iceberg. Obama's point is valid and accurate, not prejudiced or racist... that attitude was typical, even mild, for her time. So what's everyone's problem with his comment? They doth protest too much, methinks.
That is why recent studies have shown that those casual comments are more antagonising than virulent racism, since they contain a threat that can't be spoken.
One of the reasons the Downtown Eastside is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada and has tens of thousands of junkies is climate: one can survive most weather most of the year. Another is its status as Terminal City (no pun, really), since if you keep going west (or south) you wind up there. It's a regional sink, for British Columbia (and the prairies too), a vast vast area.
The sudden surge in crystal meth use (speed, to you old timers) across the country contributes hugely to the problem. Recently I was travelling through a small town called Cache Creek, and chatting with a young clerk about life there. She complained "it's ruined... all my friends are getting into meth and crack or other stuff like "K" and they're whacked out all the time and lying, they just aren't friends anymore, it's just in the last five years, the place sucks now." I checked in other small towns and it's happening there, too. Many of these partiers go too far, fall too low, run off and they wind up junkies in Vancouver.
But I have to say I didn't used to feel any threat there when it was mainly a heroin-and-rice-wine kind of mess. Now with speed and crack all over the place it's much more aggressive, the desperation's dangerous.
It was always the case that parking your car down there was just a question of when, not if, you got a broken window for your loose change.
Since my day rate is $250, and i figure it will take about 8 hours of researching, ordering, receiving, testing, and assembling parts, I plan on building a hackintosh just for a lark and I'll break even.
My real motivation in this is to build the headless iMac that I crave into a quiet shuttle-sized case with the right jacks on the front. I actually won't really break even once I buy a nice 24" samsung monitor and then waste time fiddling with system updates, but to hell with apple's failure to provide this key product.
There's no compelling reason to run as admin, unless you're trapped trying to run canon's uber-crappy drivers or are saddled with similar boneheaded apps or drivers that require it. But, to be fair. they're pretty rare in Mac-land. If you need to change a setting, the OS lets you escalate privileges gracefully enough. If you're doing lots of installing or tweaking, there's fast user switching. I'm curious why you'd run as admin. Laziness, or drivers?
The U.S. transportation system and food industries seem to be by far the most efficient methods currently addressing the problem.
Lucky you. I get phone calls late at night from my little brother to get help with troubleshooting ALSA and codecs and obscure SiS driver problems with different linux distros. Cheap brat should just buy a decent used machine for a change instead of dumpster diving for hardware. I sometimes regret turning him on to OSS.
And I still get calls from windows users, because I "know computers."
Yah, well, they could've called it a logging town to the same effect, with much better accuracy. Though given the recent massive sell-off of mill infrastructure, who knows how long that will last.
If you live on Vancouver Island or nearby, and rely on BC Ferries like many of us do, they post real-time GPS images of ferry location and direction. They're highly addictive, since either the ferries are late, or I am. I'm a mac user mostly, so I have a web clip of my spouse's daily commute ferry one touch away.
I think all major transport systems would benefit from this.
American mainstream culture grossly oversimplifies identity. I was involved in a youth conference for high school students from the "african diaspora" that involved schools from Toronto, Windsor, and Detroit. The school in Toronto identified over 80 ethnicities and many mother tongues, and the african-canadian group that came hailed from many different places. The Detroit school identified three main ethnicities: Black, White, Latino. WTF? That's messed up, apartheid style thinking: stay in your place. (Yeah, I know, canadians have nasty bigotries to deal with too, but it's not so extreme, and generally seen as shameful.)
Sure hyphenated identities are complicated, but that's life in a settler state. I don't see the USA pulling out of its entrenched race divisions until people start thinking about identity in more realistic ways.
Most people in the USA don't own the land their house is on (in practical terms), a bank or landlord does.
Believing that it's okay for 5% of the population to own about 50% of the country's assets, and the bottom 40% are just shiftless scum, well yeah, that is right wing. Sorry if that bothers you.
No, desks are lighter.
whoosh!
True story: back during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I had lunch with a well educated, mild-mannered, drug and gun running mujehaddin working in India. When he found out I wasn't going to be a customer, he relaxed and we talked religion. He asserted that there were more Buddhists than any other religion. I scoffed and began quoting the other statistics in this thread, but he replied:
"Few christians are actually christian, and few muslims are actually muslim... but most buddhists are actually buddhist."
absolute: (noun) A value or principle that is regarded as universally valid or that may be viewed without relation to other things. (Just to point out that no, you aren't reading me right. Try empiricism, it's a more fundamentally satisfying fundamentalism!)
OK, so how about: there may be a civil society somewhere that is moralistic to the point of self-oppression and delusion that doesn't indulge in a tendency to absolutes, but historians and anthropologists and xenobiologists haven't discovered it yet.
There. Qualified enough for ya?
One of the markers of an overly moralistic society is the tendency to absolutes, black and white, right and wrong, gay and straight.
Most people are intrinsically bi, along some kind of spectrum. In north america, at least, both het and gay sides of the fence exert a lot of pressure on people to be one thing or the other, and this causes plenty of grief.
I happen to live in a community where it's easier than just about anywhere for people to switch, and it happens more often than you might imagine. There are many ways to be in the closet, and bi's are pushed there by both sides.
There is no "they" there. There are many divisions to Sony, and many products. Granted, some suck, and badly. And yes, they have predatory pricing (see below). Sometimes, however, they deliver.
Consider the PD-150. This video camera is legendary, for good reason (and its even better follow-up, the PD-170). They produce great SD video, they're small, sturdy, somewhat expandable, and reliable as hell. Very tough. Controls are in a good location, other design features are balanced, etc. This is the camera that guerilla documentarians had to have, for many years. They're still in heavy use, years after being discontinued.
The other side of that is predatory. I once lost the remote control to a video deck, that had controls on it not available on the deck face controls, basic stuff like displaying timecode. Now other than a few specialized buttons, there is nothing special about this remote, it's a little black bar with infrared. Sony Canada wanted $500 freakin' dollars for a replacement... for a $15 dollar part, at best. Classic nasty company policy. Of course I bought a fully functional third party item for 1/6th the price. Video pros have a serious love-hate thing going with Sony.
Thanks, that's quite interesting... however I wasn't just thinking about the environment, but social justice too. Don't like the idea of 12-year olds going slowly blind in a sweatshop, or miners communities dying of mercury poisoning... etc.
Yes, and the GP post also overlooks the participation of the mining/resource-extraction company in further disenfranchising the locals, and how much secrecy there is. It's easy to say 'lay your life down for your liberty' typing at a keyboard in comfort.
This is the biggest problem with the way globalization is going: a lack of accountability. The shareholders and regulators don't know how land/culture/society is being raped, because it's being done over there. Corruption pays both foreign companies and local politicians (who were often installed by economic hit-men and political fixers), and it's all hush hush, though if someone does squawk, usually very few listen anyway. There's lots of published evidence, but the GP is willing to post opinions without doing the research. this train wreck we call modern society.Here's my dilemma when upgrading or buying a new computer: they're all 'dirty' through various parts of the production chain, and it is literally impossible to purchase a truly ethical or green computer (other than recycling old crap, I guess). Now, I know it's like this with much of the industrial system, shirts and shoes made by convicts and strawberries killing workers with fungicides, yadda yadda, but often there are options. Not with computers.
You are sooo off. We'll have used it up and replaced it with a zero point energy lantern and a gravitooni emitter within 10,000,000 years.
This is a sticking point. It isn't thieving for two reasons: it is a levy to compensate artists directly (in theory) for section 8 of the copyright act, so it is services received for monies paid (I'm confused about your morals here); and, if it were copyright infringement, which it ain't, read the act I linked to above, it wouldn't be theft, as they are categorically different. Cue arguments about digital vs. physical, etc.--particularly relevant to gas vs. music. Is playing music at a party theft as well? In canadian law, and according to most of the industry, it's the same as personal copying.
Not if tax on the physical commodity, blank CD, is your justification.... I think the rationales for both those types of taxes, and many others, boil down to Imaginary Guilt: whatever convinces enough law-abiding citizens to pretend to believe we owe more to 'the system' than we really do. I also think the entertainment industry is one of the easiest to boycott, and the tax on CD-R's is not enough to change dissuade me from that opinion, so I really don't grok what all the fuss is about.Alright, so you don't understand what a levy is. It is a blanket fee collected against the purchase of each good or service, in this case CD-R, to compensate for a proposed service rendered. In this case, personal performances of recorded music. It is NOT a tax; the money is received by an industry organisation called SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors, and Musicians) who are mandated to charge the levy for various circumstances like public parties and copying rights, and redistribute the money directly to artists. It's an indirect method, but a transaction nonetheless, not a tax. If one pays the levy but does not copy any music, one is paying for a legal service not received. One ALSO pays taxes on blank CD-R's in Canada, to the tune of about 13% in most places. It is less than the levy, which makes up about 50% of the price of the CDR, and in fact the levy is also taxed, as a service (significantly, no-one is up in arms about "taxing a tax" with respect to the levy).
I do enjoy the meticulous, cogent arguments that I frequently read against Imaginary Property, though. Please keep up the good work.These arguments are enshrined in Canadian Law and embraced by the industry association. Copies of music aren't theft, they are personal performances. Steal a CD from a record store, you aren't stealing the music, you're stealing the package and avoiding the performance fees. It's obvious you aren't canadian, and can't wrap your head around the concepts involved. Let's just say that your template of reality in this case is misaligned.
right.. so when did you hear about it? I found out about 5 years ago... about the same time I got a /. account.