Are you like that "Jimmy" guy from Seinfeld where he refers to himself always in third-person (eg: "Jimmy like to read Slashdot") But instead of that quirk, you redefine current discussion in the context in terms of Star Trek, the Next Generation? We have a guy like that at work that redefines everything in terms of Simpsons episodes. So, if we have a server problem, he pipes up and says "you know, this is just like in season three where Homer & Bart...etc, etc. etc.)
Interesting. That's just like this episode of TNG where Picard's stranded on this planet with an alien whose actual language the universal translator understands, but whose syntax is totally weird because he speaks entirely in allegory and unknown cultural references. "Shaka - when the walls fell!"
Problem: I am not releasing one tenth of the stuff into the world that I create because of this attitude from people and inability to fully control distribution.
What a shame. Too bad. I, for one, would happily put up with there being only a tenth as many crappy pop acts and mindless Hollywood sputum cluttering up the place, rather than live in a world where some Government-mandated media-cartel influenced third party effectively has root on my system, and instructs it on what it may and what it may not copy. We're cutting off our nose here to spite our face: crippling all computers and installing government spies on them, just to make Britney Spears a bit more money?
And, to my mind, executive power can be derived only from a mandate from the masses. If the majority of people believe it to be no wrong when they copy a CD or DVD, then what right has government to tell them otherwise? Surely we aspire to democracy, where government does the bidding of the people - not feudalism, where the government does the bidding only of the rich and influential?
What I've never figured out is why the law doesn't allow for reimportation of goods, so that people could purchase in a cheaper market and export back to a more expensive market. If globalization is good for the company, it must be good for the consumer too!
In small quantities and for personal use, I think you can reimport whatever you please. Hence the rush towards DRM and region coding: if they can't do you for illegal importing, they'll jolly well do you for violating the DMCA.
However, this kind of thinking is beginning to cause legal troubles in Europe. Consider the European Union. In this corner, we have the UK. Extremely rich. In this corner, we have Slovenia. Relatively impoverished. Now, RecordCartel USA would like to sell music downloads in the EU. They'd prefer to charge British customers a hell of a lot more than Slovenians, because they can afford to pay more. Again we have the quirk of information commerce that it costs nothing to create a new mp3 file, so its cost is solely determined by what people in a particular marker are prepared to pay.
However, these two countries, very different in per-capita wealth, are both part of a single market. European law is very firm about the single market: the EU is a free trade zone. Thus I can import anything I like from any member state (subject to legality from state to state - there are things I'd like to import from the Netherlands which I can't because they're illegal here) and pay no duties, levies or taxes on them.
(Yes, fellow British/.'ers: there is NO legal limit on the amount of booze and fags you can bring back from Calais. But if you bring back so much that Customs think you intend to sell 'em, you'll have trouble convincing them otherwise...)
Hence, any media cartel that means to do business across Europe cannot play this game of manipulating markets. Well, they can - sort of... most people will use the website in their native language, after all. But it's looking a lot like they won't be able to play the Intellectual Property card to try to restrict free trade, as they normally like to do. The Single Market treaties are a pretty high-value trump card in the game of European Law.
Sure, the Sheriff of Nottingham must deliver the taxes to Prince John, after all.
The Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John get an unfairly bad press. Yes, taxes were absurdly high. Yes, they dropped once King Richard got back from the Crusades. Yes, the two events were related. But not in the way Disney will have you believe.
King Richard was taken prisoner on his way home from the Crusade. His captors demanded a king's ransom for his release. There's a reason why 'a king's ransom' has become a byword for a ridiculously large amount of money. John was forced to raise this massive sum from taxation on England. It took a long time. It would have taken a whole lot less time if some ponce in a green hat hadn't kept robbing the money...
One of the best features of mplayer is it's no-nonsense approach to DVD playback. It just launches the movie. No menus, no FBI warnings, no ads, no crap.
Oh, you still get to see the ads and warnings with mplayer.
$ mplayer dvd://1
-- Publisher's logo
$ mplayer dvd://2
-- copyright warning
$ mplayer dvd://3
-- copyright warning, in Flemish
$ mplayer dvd://4
-- copyright warning, in Linear A
$ mplayer dvd://5
-- trailers for upcoming releases
$ mplayer dvd://6
-- original theatrical trailer
$ mplayer dvd://7
-- interview with director
$ mplayer dvd://8
-- interview with voice actor
$ mplayer dvd://9
-- interview with dub voice actor
$ mplayer dvd://10
-- THE FILM! YAY! AT LAST! * sits back, grabs snacks and b33r *
but obviously we cannot trust people, we know that majority of people do not care about copyright laws, we also cannot jail everyone who brakes these laws, so it makes sense to use technology to enforce laws.
Problem: The majority of people think a particular law is silly and irrelevant and habitually break it.
Your solution: Lock down their property with technology controlled by a third party to enforce that law. Sounds to me like dictatorship.
My solution: Repeal that law. Sounds to me like liberty.
Surely this just opens up a new market for a "insurance" style product. You pay a premium from a company that has a list of open source software etc that it will protect.
When an industry sells products in foreign countries cheaper than in their home market, it is called dumping, and trade sanctions usually result. Why has this not happened to the MPAA?
I think dumping is only when you sell a product at below cost. Since the cost physically to produce a DVD is effectively nil, they aren't dumping. They're just adding on whatever mark-up the market will bear, which is rather less in, say, Thailand than it is in Japan. Then they're using the region coding to try to prevent the cheap discs here from migrating to the rich countries here...
Twilight Princess is approaching release, and I've been tempted to drop the cash just to buy a Gamecube. I've never been interested in owning one before, but all it takes is one killer app.
Eh. Might be OK if you can get a GC really cheap, but I'm thinking that Twilight Princess is going to come out not long before the Revolution - which will be backward compatible. Revolution looks damn tempting in itself... and I'll be able to get myself one and then clean up on those 'pre-owned' GC games. Yay.
Checking the white/master sword caves after every dungeon to see if I was "ready"
IIRC, you could get the White Sword once you had two Triforce pieces, and the Magical Sword once you had six.
I always used to skip the sixth dungeon and go straight to the seventh, get the better sword and then do the sixth. Too many Like Likes in that bloody place.
Is there any evidence that zoning on DVDs increases sales?
That's not what zoning is about.
The idea behind zoning is to prevent Europeans from getting hold of the American DVD release while the movie's still showing in their cinemas - and thereby to protect cinema revenues. Otherwise they'd have to release movies simultaneously in both areas, which messes up their marketing.
It's also important to help them squeeze cash out of poorer countries. The typical Indian or Chinese can't afford to pay as much for a DVD as the typical Canadian or German. Region coding allows the studios to sell the exact same product in India for far less than they sell it in Germany, and not have to worry about those dastardly Germans buying mail-order from India instead of paying their own vastly inflated rates.
It's not about increasing sales, so much as profits. Region coding allows them to get away with rip-offs that would otherwise be impossible.
Rigil Kent is more commonly known by its Bayer designation, Alpha Centauri.
Well, we don't want to send a spaceship there. Not yet, anyway. We want to wait for the 25% boost to thrust you get with Fusion Power, and for the 50% discount on construction of it that you get once you've built the Space Elevator.
We'll want to make certain of security, and conduct thorough psychological assessments on the people we send, too. You don't want to risk there being a major quarrel among the crew enroute - if that happens, what with cabin fever and all, chances are somebody will bump off the captain, and the whole lot of them will divide into factions and land separately. A complete mess, basically.
Did anyone else see that episode of Deep Space Nine when they used a solar sail space ship?
Yep. I started out by whining about how the dialogue clearly implied that the distance they were travelling was interstellar, and that you can't do that in a solar sail of that size in a single episode, you'd need warp drive, that's the whole POINT you fools!... but then shut up, because it was a really damn good episode. Do I lose geek points for that?:-)
Solar sails are well nifty things... I really wish it wasn't so politically incorrect to orbit nuclear engines, though. An ion drive backed by a nuclear reactor instead of a bank of solar cells - now THAT would give you a fair old kick!
Yeah... because heaven forbid that we use something better than linear searching to test for matches. I don't really know the details of how face recognition works, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't use a tree-like structure to do only O(log n) comparisons to find a specific person.
I imagine they could play a game of Guess Who with the database... first of all split it to Men or Women, then narrow it down to People With Thick Eyebrows, People With Big Ears, People With Beards, etc. But you're looking at a billion or so people here, so even once you've knocked down most of the faces on the Guess Who board you've still likely got a huge number of people to check. I imagine the easiest marker a computer can pick out would be hair colour - but this is China...
You'll want to keep playing Guess Who as long as possible, to minimise the number of faces you have to actually compare directly. So... what's the resolution of the cameras likely to be, and of the ID card photos? This is still going to be an enormous computational task.
My guess is that they're not going to attempt automatically recognising everyone who comes by and logging their locations, the whole 1984 thing. Not yet. What they'll do is record the video feeds, and then when they've got a suspect for some crime they'll feed his likeness into the machine and find out where he's been in the past. Then they're only matching each face seen by the cameras against one face on record - the suspect's. That's certainly feasible.
Then, ten or twenty years down the line, Moore's Law has increased the available computer power - and they can go ahead with full-scale automatic recognition.
Someone mentioned doing video compression... because you could send the compressed file back. Well ok, except, A. video cards only have 256mb of ram... so your uncompressed video would only be like what 30 seconds? B. getting the data back to the hard drive would be like transfering files over a serial cable... like old PS/2 serial, not USB2 serial.
A: so do it in chunks. My computer's only got half a gig of memory, but I've compressed whole DVDs using it... hey, how did I manage that?
B: There's the trouble. Perhaps one could integrate USB2 circuits onto the card, and run a cable out the back of the computer and straight back in to the USB port?:-)
Let's say that they deploy this thing in only one city. It sees, shall we say, ten million faces a day.
Each face has to be compared against the database. The database of the Chinese population, because you can't assume that everyone stays in the same city all the time. One point two billion people.
I make that twelve quadrillion comparisons that will have to be made each day by this system. This thing's going to have to make the Earth Simulator look like an abacus...
But some people still consider Halo "original" since it follows a storyline - like Marathon didn't?
Or, for that matter, the original System Shock? Damn, that was a good game. Nothing beats turning on your top-level personal shield, sparking up the lightsab^Wlaser rapier and charging right into SHODAN's elite cyborg armies...
I recently changed how my site dishes out most pictures with PHP. Picture thieves (or those with broken referrers) get a nice view of goatse guy.
SomethingAwful does that. Dear God, though. They don't use goatse. They have many, many things that are as bad as goatse, but that you haven't seen before - so you don't even have your jaded web veteran's defence mechanism of 'oh, how boring, another goatse'.
I only ever hotlinked to SomethingAwful once. Never again. Uggggggghhhhhhhhhh....
I pray for the day when science packages based on reconfigurable standard designs can be simply and inexpensively launched from a space station. (A la Star Trek probes.) The mass production would allow us to launch more probes for less, and the orbital launch would save tens of millions on each probe.
You're right about mass production, but how do you get 'em to the space station in the first place? Still need the rocket from Earth - unless you have an asteroidal or lunar industrial facility capable of building the things from raw materials.
Mass production of standard probes might well be a good idea, though. The Mariner probes of the 70s were big successes, and ESA has been doing something similar lately - Venus Express (enroute) is the same basic design as the current Mars Express. Just swap out the experiment modules on the same basic spacecraft. Probably not as helpful with landers, which have to handle different gravities, atmospheres etc. dependent on target, but it would be well worth establishing a network of cheap Orbital Observer probes around the solar system.
Godwin - preventing legitimate discussion in the 'net since 1990!
The reason Godwin's Law has caught on so strongly is that it's a useful rule of thumb. Once a discussion on USENET has reached the point where people are citing the Nazis, chances are it has long ago stopped being worth reading.
However, there are circumstances in which comparisons to the Nazis are not unreasonable and cannot be put down to the usual hyperbole found in flamewars. This discussion is one of them. We are dealing here with American corporations doing business in a totalitarian state, and - through the nature of the business they are doing - aiding and abetting the unpleasant regime there in the very deeds for which they are despised.
In the 1940s, it was IBM supplying the machinery needed to handle the great indexes and lists needed to keep track of the processing of six million or so undesirables, and the consultants and technical assistance needed to set up and run that machinery.
Today, it is Yahoo handing over the emails of activists, and Google censoring search results. Is this quite the same scale of evil as IBM's collaboration in the Final Solution? No. Is it, however, qualitatively the same, even if it is quantitavely lesser? Yes. Just as happened back then, our corporations are collaborating in the sordid work of tyrants.
Godwin's Law, therefore, cannot be applied. Comparisons to the Nazis are clear and appropriate.
"A lawful evil character methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He's comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He is loath to break promises, and is therefore very cautious about giving his word unless a bargain is clearly in his favour."
Sounds pretty much like a typical corporation to me.
It continues:
"Many lawful evil characters use society and its laws for selfish advantages, exploiting the letter of the law over its spirit whenever it best suits their interests."
Now, tell me that's not Microsoft all over.
(quotations from Wikipedia, although presumably originating in D&D sourcebooks - I recognise the text from NWN:-)
Well, as long as that involves being willing to de-recognize countries that elect the "wrong" people, like Hamas. After all, its not real democracy if you don't vote the way that we want you to.
"Because might makes right,
And, till they've seen the light
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
Till somebody we like can be elected!"
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. That's just like this episode of TNG where Picard's stranded on this planet with an alien whose actual language the universal translator understands, but whose syntax is totally weird because he speaks entirely in allegory and unknown cultural references. "Shaka - when the walls fell!"
What a shame. Too bad. I, for one, would happily put up with there being only a tenth as many crappy pop acts and mindless Hollywood sputum cluttering up the place, rather than live in a world where some Government-mandated media-cartel influenced third party effectively has root on my system, and instructs it on what it may and what it may not copy. We're cutting off our nose here to spite our face: crippling all computers and installing government spies on them, just to make Britney Spears a bit more money?
And, to my mind, executive power can be derived only from a mandate from the masses. If the majority of people believe it to be no wrong when they copy a CD or DVD, then what right has government to tell them otherwise? Surely we aspire to democracy, where government does the bidding of the people - not feudalism, where the government does the bidding only of the rich and influential?
In small quantities and for personal use, I think you can reimport whatever you please. Hence the rush towards DRM and region coding: if they can't do you for illegal importing, they'll jolly well do you for violating the DMCA.
However, this kind of thinking is beginning to cause legal troubles in Europe. Consider the European Union. In this corner, we have the UK. Extremely rich. In this corner, we have Slovenia. Relatively impoverished. Now, RecordCartel USA would like to sell music downloads in the EU. They'd prefer to charge British customers a hell of a lot more than Slovenians, because they can afford to pay more. Again we have the quirk of information commerce that it costs nothing to create a new mp3 file, so its cost is solely determined by what people in a particular marker are prepared to pay.
However, these two countries, very different in per-capita wealth, are both part of a single market. European law is very firm about the single market: the EU is a free trade zone. Thus I can import anything I like from any member state (subject to legality from state to state - there are things I'd like to import from the Netherlands which I can't because they're illegal here) and pay no duties, levies or taxes on them.
(Yes, fellow British /.'ers: there is NO legal limit on the amount of booze and fags you can bring back from Calais. But if you bring back so much that Customs think you intend to sell 'em, you'll have trouble convincing them otherwise...)
Hence, any media cartel that means to do business across Europe cannot play this game of manipulating markets. Well, they can - sort of... most people will use the website in their native language, after all. But it's looking a lot like they won't be able to play the Intellectual Property card to try to restrict free trade, as they normally like to do. The Single Market treaties are a pretty high-value trump card in the game of European Law.
The Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John get an unfairly bad press. Yes, taxes were absurdly high. Yes, they dropped once King Richard got back from the Crusades. Yes, the two events were related. But not in the way Disney will have you believe.
King Richard was taken prisoner on his way home from the Crusade. His captors demanded a king's ransom for his release. There's a reason why 'a king's ransom' has become a byword for a ridiculously large amount of money. John was forced to raise this massive sum from taxation on England. It took a long time. It would have taken a whole lot less time if some ponce in a green hat hadn't kept robbing the money...
Oh, you still get to see the ads and warnings with mplayer.
$ mplayer dvd://1
-- Publisher's logo
$ mplayer dvd://2
-- copyright warning
$ mplayer dvd://3
-- copyright warning, in Flemish
$ mplayer dvd://4
-- copyright warning, in Linear A
$ mplayer dvd://5
-- trailers for upcoming releases
$ mplayer dvd://6
-- original theatrical trailer
$ mplayer dvd://7
-- interview with director
$ mplayer dvd://8
-- interview with voice actor
$ mplayer dvd://9
-- interview with dub voice actor
$ mplayer dvd://10
-- THE FILM! YAY! AT LAST! * sits back, grabs snacks and b33r *
... oh, shit...
$ mplayer dvd://10 -alang ja -slang en
Hooray for convenience!
Problem: The majority of people think a particular law is silly and irrelevant and habitually break it.
Your solution: Lock down their property with technology controlled by a third party to enforce that law. Sounds to me like dictatorship.
My solution: Repeal that law. Sounds to me like liberty.
Good idea, but Lloyd's of London are way ahead of you...
I think dumping is only when you sell a product at below cost. Since the cost physically to produce a DVD is effectively nil, they aren't dumping. They're just adding on whatever mark-up the market will bear, which is rather less in, say, Thailand than it is in Japan. Then they're using the region coding to try to prevent the cheap discs here from migrating to the rich countries here...
I think you misspelled 'more technologically advanced games than Worms'.
Eh. Might be OK if you can get a GC really cheap, but I'm thinking that Twilight Princess is going to come out not long before the Revolution - which will be backward compatible. Revolution looks damn tempting in itself... and I'll be able to get myself one and then clean up on those 'pre-owned' GC games. Yay.
Two words: Game Boy.
Oracle of Seasons. Oracle of Ages. Minish Cap. Play them. Play them now.
IIRC, you could get the White Sword once you had two Triforce pieces, and the Magical Sword once you had six.
I always used to skip the sixth dungeon and go straight to the seventh, get the better sword and then do the sixth. Too many Like Likes in that bloody place.
That's not what zoning is about.
The idea behind zoning is to prevent Europeans from getting hold of the American DVD release while the movie's still showing in their cinemas - and thereby to protect cinema revenues. Otherwise they'd have to release movies simultaneously in both areas, which messes up their marketing.
It's also important to help them squeeze cash out of poorer countries. The typical Indian or Chinese can't afford to pay as much for a DVD as the typical Canadian or German. Region coding allows the studios to sell the exact same product in India for far less than they sell it in Germany, and not have to worry about those dastardly Germans buying mail-order from India instead of paying their own vastly inflated rates.
It's not about increasing sales, so much as profits. Region coding allows them to get away with rip-offs that would otherwise be impossible.
Well, we don't want to send a spaceship there. Not yet, anyway. We want to wait for the 25% boost to thrust you get with Fusion Power, and for the 50% discount on construction of it that you get once you've built the Space Elevator.
We'll want to make certain of security, and conduct thorough psychological assessments on the people we send, too. You don't want to risk there being a major quarrel among the crew enroute - if that happens, what with cabin fever and all, chances are somebody will bump off the captain, and the whole lot of them will divide into factions and land separately. A complete mess, basically.
Yep. I started out by whining about how the dialogue clearly implied that the distance they were travelling was interstellar, and that you can't do that in a solar sail of that size in a single episode, you'd need warp drive, that's the whole POINT you fools!... but then shut up, because it was a really damn good episode. Do I lose geek points for that? :-)
Solar sails are well nifty things... I really wish it wasn't so politically incorrect to orbit nuclear engines, though. An ion drive backed by a nuclear reactor instead of a bank of solar cells - now THAT would give you a fair old kick!
I imagine they could play a game of Guess Who with the database... first of all split it to Men or Women, then narrow it down to People With Thick Eyebrows, People With Big Ears, People With Beards, etc. But you're looking at a billion or so people here, so even once you've knocked down most of the faces on the Guess Who board you've still likely got a huge number of people to check. I imagine the easiest marker a computer can pick out would be hair colour - but this is China...
You'll want to keep playing Guess Who as long as possible, to minimise the number of faces you have to actually compare directly. So... what's the resolution of the cameras likely to be, and of the ID card photos? This is still going to be an enormous computational task.
My guess is that they're not going to attempt automatically recognising everyone who comes by and logging their locations, the whole 1984 thing. Not yet. What they'll do is record the video feeds, and then when they've got a suspect for some crime they'll feed his likeness into the machine and find out where he's been in the past. Then they're only matching each face seen by the cameras against one face on record - the suspect's. That's certainly feasible.
Then, ten or twenty years down the line, Moore's Law has increased the available computer power - and they can go ahead with full-scale automatic recognition.
A: so do it in chunks. My computer's only got half a gig of memory, but I've compressed whole DVDs using it... hey, how did I manage that?
B: There's the trouble. Perhaps one could integrate USB2 circuits onto the card, and run a cable out the back of the computer and straight back in to the USB port? :-)
Cf. the differences between
terrorist and freedom fighter
heretic and prophet
gangster and king
treasonous rebel and founding father
"When I say a word, it means what I want it to mean." -- Humpty Dumpty
Let's say that they deploy this thing in only one city. It sees, shall we say, ten million faces a day.
Each face has to be compared against the database. The database of the Chinese population, because you can't assume that everyone stays in the same city all the time. One point two billion people.
I make that twelve quadrillion comparisons that will have to be made each day by this system. This thing's going to have to make the Earth Simulator look like an abacus...
Or, for that matter, the original System Shock? Damn, that was a good game. Nothing beats turning on your top-level personal shield, sparking up the lightsab^Wlaser rapier and charging right into SHODAN's elite cyborg armies...
SomethingAwful does that. Dear God, though. They don't use goatse. They have many, many things that are as bad as goatse, but that you haven't seen before - so you don't even have your jaded web veteran's defence mechanism of 'oh, how boring, another goatse'.
I only ever hotlinked to SomethingAwful once. Never again. Uggggggghhhhhhhhhh....
You're right about mass production, but how do you get 'em to the space station in the first place? Still need the rocket from Earth - unless you have an asteroidal or lunar industrial facility capable of building the things from raw materials.
Mass production of standard probes might well be a good idea, though. The Mariner probes of the 70s were big successes, and ESA has been doing something similar lately - Venus Express (enroute) is the same basic design as the current Mars Express. Just swap out the experiment modules on the same basic spacecraft. Probably not as helpful with landers, which have to handle different gravities, atmospheres etc. dependent on target, but it would be well worth establishing a network of cheap Orbital Observer probes around the solar system.
The reason Godwin's Law has caught on so strongly is that it's a useful rule of thumb. Once a discussion on USENET has reached the point where people are citing the Nazis, chances are it has long ago stopped being worth reading.
However, there are circumstances in which comparisons to the Nazis are not unreasonable and cannot be put down to the usual hyperbole found in flamewars. This discussion is one of them. We are dealing here with American corporations doing business in a totalitarian state, and - through the nature of the business they are doing - aiding and abetting the unpleasant regime there in the very deeds for which they are despised.
In the 1940s, it was IBM supplying the machinery needed to handle the great indexes and lists needed to keep track of the processing of six million or so undesirables, and the consultants and technical assistance needed to set up and run that machinery.
Today, it is Yahoo handing over the emails of activists, and Google censoring search results. Is this quite the same scale of evil as IBM's collaboration in the Final Solution? No. Is it, however, qualitatively the same, even if it is quantitavely lesser? Yes. Just as happened back then, our corporations are collaborating in the sordid work of tyrants.
Godwin's Law, therefore, cannot be applied. Comparisons to the Nazis are clear and appropriate.
Really? I quote:
"A lawful evil character methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He's comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He is loath to break promises, and is therefore very cautious about giving his word unless a bargain is clearly in his favour."
Sounds pretty much like a typical corporation to me.
It continues:
"Many lawful evil characters use society and its laws for selfish advantages, exploiting the letter of the law over its spirit whenever it best suits their interests."
Now, tell me that's not Microsoft all over.
(quotations from Wikipedia, although presumably originating in D&D sourcebooks - I recognise the text from NWN :-)
"Because might makes right,
And, till they've seen the light
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
Till somebody we like can be elected!"
Tom Lehrer, Send the Marines!