The MPAA are set to reveal later today their new SLT (Streaming Lawsuit Technology) offering. This should make the extortion process easy and seamless for end-users.
Modern islam has no sense of humor and no perspective.
That might be so; I wasn't really arguing that point, I don't know enough about Islam to do so. The main point I was making was that most modern religions "take themselves seriously"; it's just that what they take seriously isn't generally as confrontational as that which Islam does.
I'd agree with your first statement (to some extent) - Islam is today where Christianity was a little over 500 years ago;, but not with your second - it takes itself *way* too seriously.
It's not a case of them "taking their religion too seriously", it's a case of their religion and their state becoming seriously intertwined. In the West, we had that under the catholic church (and to a lesser extent, some other denominations). The problem when you have church and state together, is that when someone criticises the church, it has an impact on someone's political power. It's that - the threat to power - that makes leaders repress their people.
The guns will never come out. How long has the USA had GWB while the guns have not come out?
US citizens do what they're damn well told, even if it is "go kill these people who were no threat to us". They do it with pride in their hearts, yet they won't walk across the street to vote.
Why should they? Violent revolution is an extreme act. People won't turn to it until it's the last option left, until the alternative is worse. At the moment, it's not. It might be for the Iraqis, but there have been very few rebellions centred around bettering the lot of others. For the most part, it takes a large impact on people's own lives to drive them to desperate measures, and despite the number of stupid and oppressive laws passed during GWBs presidency, they haven't had enough of an effect (yet) to drive people out of their complacency, let alone into rebellion.
The original poster's point was that eventually *no* jury will convict people on those charges. In that event, calling a new trial would do nothing, as the next jury would come to the same verdict. If the judge can't find a jury willing to convict, then there can't be a conviction. It's sort of democracy's last gasp against an unfair law before the guns come out.
Which is why they used the word Draconian (which, taking a literal meaning as you are intent on doing, would mean "Draco-like" or "after the fashion of Draco") instead of Draco's, which would indicate the sort of posession you're talking about.
Since there is no Soviet Union anymore, and the term third world has already evolved to mean something beyond its original meaning, might it not be useful to appropriate second world to similar purposes?
No, not really. All it does is confuse the issue. The terms first, second and third world with their original meanings had fairly precise definitions. If you start using them to refer to the economic states of countries, they start to become fuzzy. When does a third world country become second? When does a second world country become first? The whole point of language is communication. If you and the person listening to you don't have the same understanding of a word, then that word is, at best, useless, and at worst, counter-productive. That's the point that a lot of the "English is a living language" crowd don't get; yes, words change over time, but while the original meaning is in common use, its still just as valid as the new one.
I can. As someone on ADSL from Australia, battle.net lag is always nasty. That sort of game is very latency-sensitive, more so than MMORPGs like WoW and EQ. It was, after all, pretty much a single-player game with multi-player online support tagged on. With bnetd, a friend on cable could run a mini-server, and me and a few friends could play with much lower latency. Or we could set one up at LANs, when we didn't have access to an outside net connection.
It doesn't really matter if Linux users are being targetted or not, if they're still being affected. The motivations may differ, but the end result is still the same.
They may be trying to kill of cheaters, but they're treating Linux users as collatoral damage and (to all appearances so far) don't care. They may have been trying to kill off piracy with their burying of bnetd, but they also hurt people who used it for legitimate reasons (Linux users, people who ran it at LANs where they didn't have net access, etc). It doesn't matter if the gunman was aiming for you or not, if the bullet hits you, you're still dead.
However, I would still suggest that the froth-at-the-mouth-whore-of-Babylon scaremongering that tends to surround sexually explicit content (in all media) is perhaps a little disproportionate to that found around violent imagery.
I'd agree, but I'd also argue that that "froth-at-the-mouth-whore-of-Babylong scaremongering" isn't due to the motivations listed above - it's due to politicians trying to score points with the Mums and Dads whose motivation is what I talked about above.
Exactly. You were saying that sex was no different from a sandwich or taking a dump. That's ridiculous; sex can have long-term consequences that eating a sandwich doesn't. And I don't know about you, but I've known since primary school school what "can or can't be done to get pregnant".
The great-grandparent said: "In what country is killing fine?"
The grandparent said: "Turn on the TV/computer game, look at all the killing!"
I said: "That's not killing, that's simulated killing; murder is still illegal in the western world"
I appreciate that violence can lead to desensitisation, and that desensitisation makes a person more capable of performing the acts that they were desensitised to. All I was saying is that the reason people are more worried about sex than violence is that (in general, there are some notable exceptions) they don't believe that exposure to violence will make their kid more violent, but they do believe that exposing them to sex will lead them to explore sex without considering the consequences. That may or may not be correct, but that's the prevailing view.
Yeah, population growths in western countries are low, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about birth rate vs murder toll. In other words, the amount of screwing versus the amount of killing. In most countries, there's still more sex than murder, and murder carries a harsher penalty than having sex. The position of the original poster (that western countries hate sex more than they hate murder) is patently false when looking at the actual acts - it's only referring to the representation of violence and sex in our entertainment.
Oooh, so you're not talking about actual sex or violence, you're talking about simulated sex and violence. Because it's bloody obvious that most societies disapprove ov violence more than sex - even in the US, I think you're birth rate is still higher than your murder-rate. I'd say the reason people are more okay with violence on the screen than sex is that they consider it unlikely that little Johnnie is going to go out and blow up a city block with a bazooka from a commandeered humvee no matter how many action flicks he sees. If he watches a lot of skin flicks though, it's probably going to give him ideas next time he's alone with little Sally.
Violence is obviously wrong, and you can usually rely on that as enough of a disincentive to discourage it. Even if you can't, the availability of bazookas also limits it. Sex, on the other hand isn't obviously wrong like violence, but it can lead to unwanted and unconsidered consequences - pregnancy, disease, etc, as well as increasing the complexity and intensity of a relationship. It has to be discouraged because it's so available - whereas violence of the action-movie sort remains remote; the viewer is rarely going to be in a situation where they could emulate it.
You said that you didn't believe he'd buy the series if he liked it; you accused him of being a thief, just because it was your opinion that he wouldn't do what he said. You had no real basis for that comment. You said that if someone downloaded the full series, then there's no reason for them to buy it, and they are therefore a thief. Since this is your attitude, I extrapolate that you see no difference between the series downloaded from bittorrent, and the series bought from a store. For some, however, there is a difference between the two, not just of quality/packaging/extras, but in the satisfaction of owning a legitimate copy.
The advantage of bittorrent is that you can select individual files to download. Clearly this guy is an idiot and doesn't know how to use that, wasting bandwidth, or he's a thief and thought he was getting himself 5 years of TV for free.
AFAIK, you can't do that using the basic client (although it's been a while since I used it). So, he might just be using the vanilla client. Or he might have wanted to see the whole series before he bought it (a lot of stuff is mostly good, but has a really crappy ending that lets the whole thing down - I generally don't buy a series unless I've watched it through).
As for the list:
Buffy (All 7 Seasons)
Firefly
Stargate (Currently own first 3 seasons, working on the rest)
Scrapped Princess
Full Metal Panic
Vision of Escaflowne
Angelic Layer
Mai Hime (only partially released in Aus)
Planetes (only partially released in Aus)
Whisper of the Heart
10 Things I Hate About You
The Dark Crystal
Fight Club
Finding Neverland
Knight's Tale
Lord of the Rings (all 3)
The Matrix
Neverending Story
Shrek 1 & 2
They're all things I've downloaded, and later bought. I'm not going to list every DVD I own, as I've got more than 200. Currently, the stuff I've still got on my HD:
Hikaru no Go (Unreleased in Aus)
Gakuen Alice (Unreleased in Aus)
The Snow Queen (Unreleased in Aus)
Ocean Waves (Unreleased in Aus)
Mysterious Cities of Gold (Unreleased in Aus)
There are other movies I've downloaded and not bought, and later deleted. Can't remember all of them, but they included Highlander, Existenz, bunch of others. Can't remember them because I wasn't too impressed with them. Also a whole bunch of anime in here that I can't particularly recall either: Kiddy Grade, Witch Hunter Robin, few others.
You're an idiot. I've downloaded tonnes of shows and movies over BT, only to purchase the full series when they arrived on DVD. Just because you're a skinflint who'd rather stick with an illegal copy over the real thing, don't try and project that attitude on to everyone else. As to why he downloaded all 5 seasons, it was probably because the torrent contained all 5 seasons, and he just let it run.
Speculative Fiction isn't a euphamism for Sci-Fi, it's a general term for all genres that deal with an altered universe - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The MPAA are set to reveal later today their new SLT (Streaming Lawsuit Technology) offering. This should make the extortion process easy and seamless for end-users.
Modern islam has no sense of humor and no perspective.
That might be so; I wasn't really arguing that point, I don't know enough about Islam to do so. The main point I was making was that most modern religions "take themselves seriously"; it's just that what they take seriously isn't generally as confrontational as that which Islam does.
I'd agree with your first statement (to some extent) - Islam is today where Christianity was a little over 500 years ago;, but not with your second - it takes itself *way* too seriously.
It's not a case of them "taking their religion too seriously", it's a case of their religion and their state becoming seriously intertwined. In the West, we had that under the catholic church (and to a lesser extent, some other denominations). The problem when you have church and state together, is that when someone criticises the church, it has an impact on someone's political power. It's that - the threat to power - that makes leaders repress their people.
The guns will never come out. How long has the USA had GWB while the guns have not come out?
US citizens do what they're damn well told, even if it is "go kill these people who were no threat to us". They do it with pride in their hearts, yet they won't walk across the street to vote.
Why should they? Violent revolution is an extreme act. People won't turn to it until it's the last option left, until the alternative is worse. At the moment, it's not. It might be for the Iraqis, but there have been very few rebellions centred around bettering the lot of others. For the most part, it takes a large impact on people's own lives to drive them to desperate measures, and despite the number of stupid and oppressive laws passed during GWBs presidency, they haven't had enough of an effect (yet) to drive people out of their complacency, let alone into rebellion.
The original poster's point was that eventually *no* jury will convict people on those charges. In that event, calling a new trial would do nothing, as the next jury would come to the same verdict. If the judge can't find a jury willing to convict, then there can't be a conviction. It's sort of democracy's last gasp against an unfair law before the guns come out.
Which is why they used the word Draconian (which, taking a literal meaning as you are intent on doing, would mean "Draco-like" or "after the fashion of Draco") instead of Draco's, which would indicate the sort of posession you're talking about.
Since there is no Soviet Union anymore, and the term third world has already evolved to mean something beyond its original meaning, might it not be useful to appropriate second world to similar purposes?
No, not really. All it does is confuse the issue. The terms first, second and third world with their original meanings had fairly precise definitions. If you start using them to refer to the economic states of countries, they start to become fuzzy. When does a third world country become second? When does a second world country become first? The whole point of language is communication. If you and the person listening to you don't have the same understanding of a word, then that word is, at best, useless, and at worst, counter-productive. That's the point that a lot of the "English is a living language" crowd don't get; yes, words change over time, but while the original meaning is in common use, its still just as valid as the new one.
The point I was making was that, to the individuals concerned, it doesn't matter what Blizzard's motivation is, they still got screwed.
We'll finally have an answer to the Grandfather paradox.
Volunteers reqiured for scientific experiment to redefine time as we know it. Lack of attachment to grandparents a plus.
I generally make my own sandwiches. Trying the same with girls, however, is against all the laws of man and nature ;p
PVP is taken as well, although given this is referring to DRM, Player versus Platform may be an acceptable compromise.
I was speaking in general, rather than about the lunatic fringe.
I can. As someone on ADSL from Australia, battle.net lag is always nasty. That sort of game is very latency-sensitive, more so than MMORPGs like WoW and EQ. It was, after all, pretty much a single-player game with multi-player online support tagged on. With bnetd, a friend on cable could run a mini-server, and me and a few friends could play with much lower latency. Or we could set one up at LANs, when we didn't have access to an outside net connection.
It doesn't really matter if Linux users are being targetted or not, if they're still being affected. The motivations may differ, but the end result is still the same.
They may be trying to kill of cheaters, but they're treating Linux users as collatoral damage and (to all appearances so far) don't care. They may have been trying to kill off piracy with their burying of bnetd, but they also hurt people who used it for legitimate reasons (Linux users, people who ran it at LANs where they didn't have net access, etc). It doesn't matter if the gunman was aiming for you or not, if the bullet hits you, you're still dead.
However, I would still suggest that the froth-at-the-mouth-whore-of-Babylon scaremongering that tends to surround sexually explicit content (in all media) is perhaps a little disproportionate to that found around violent imagery.
I'd agree, but I'd also argue that that "froth-at-the-mouth-whore-of-Babylong scaremongering" isn't due to the motivations listed above - it's due to politicians trying to score points with the Mums and Dads whose motivation is what I talked about above.
Exactly. You were saying that sex was no different from a sandwich or taking a dump. That's ridiculous; sex can have long-term consequences that eating a sandwich doesn't. And I don't know about you, but I've known since primary school school what "can or can't be done to get pregnant".
Do you have a point, or are you just rambling?
The great-grandparent said: "In what country is killing fine?"
The grandparent said: "Turn on the TV/computer game, look at all the killing!"
I said: "That's not killing, that's simulated killing; murder is still illegal in the western world"
I appreciate that violence can lead to desensitisation, and that desensitisation makes a person more capable of performing the acts that they were desensitised to. All I was saying is that the reason people are more worried about sex than violence is that (in general, there are some notable exceptions) they don't believe that exposure to violence will make their kid more violent, but they do believe that exposing them to sex will lead them to explore sex without considering the consequences. That may or may not be correct, but that's the prevailing view.
Whose a Brit? I'm an Aussie.
Yeah, population growths in western countries are low, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about birth rate vs murder toll. In other words, the amount of screwing versus the amount of killing. In most countries, there's still more sex than murder, and murder carries a harsher penalty than having sex. The position of the original poster (that western countries hate sex more than they hate murder) is patently false when looking at the actual acts - it's only referring to the representation of violence and sex in our entertainment.
Let me know next time your sandwich knocks you up.
Oooh, so you're not talking about actual sex or violence, you're talking about simulated sex and violence. Because it's bloody obvious that most societies disapprove ov violence more than sex - even in the US, I think you're birth rate is still higher than your murder-rate. I'd say the reason people are more okay with violence on the screen than sex is that they consider it unlikely that little Johnnie is going to go out and blow up a city block with a bazooka from a commandeered humvee no matter how many action flicks he sees. If he watches a lot of skin flicks though, it's probably going to give him ideas next time he's alone with little Sally.
Violence is obviously wrong, and you can usually rely on that as enough of a disincentive to discourage it. Even if you can't, the availability of bazookas also limits it. Sex, on the other hand isn't obviously wrong like violence, but it can lead to unwanted and unconsidered consequences - pregnancy, disease, etc, as well as increasing the complexity and intensity of a relationship. It has to be discouraged because it's so available - whereas violence of the action-movie sort remains remote; the viewer is rarely going to be in a situation where they could emulate it.
You said that you didn't believe he'd buy the series if he liked it; you accused him of being a thief, just because it was your opinion that he wouldn't do what he said. You had no real basis for that comment. You said that if someone downloaded the full series, then there's no reason for them to buy it, and they are therefore a thief. Since this is your attitude, I extrapolate that you see no difference between the series downloaded from bittorrent, and the series bought from a store. For some, however, there is a difference between the two, not just of quality/packaging/extras, but in the satisfaction of owning a legitimate copy.
The advantage of bittorrent is that you can select individual files to download. Clearly this guy is an idiot and doesn't know how to use that, wasting bandwidth, or he's a thief and thought he was getting himself 5 years of TV for free.
AFAIK, you can't do that using the basic client (although it's been a while since I used it). So, he might just be using the vanilla client. Or he might have wanted to see the whole series before he bought it (a lot of stuff is mostly good, but has a really crappy ending that lets the whole thing down - I generally don't buy a series unless I've watched it through).
As for the list:
Buffy (All 7 Seasons)
Firefly
Stargate (Currently own first 3 seasons, working on the rest)
Scrapped Princess
Full Metal Panic
Vision of Escaflowne
Angelic Layer
Mai Hime (only partially released in Aus)
Planetes (only partially released in Aus)
Whisper of the Heart
10 Things I Hate About You
The Dark Crystal
Fight Club
Finding Neverland
Knight's Tale
Lord of the Rings (all 3)
The Matrix
Neverending Story
Shrek 1 & 2
They're all things I've downloaded, and later bought. I'm not going to list every DVD I own, as I've got more than 200. Currently, the stuff I've still got on my HD:
Hikaru no Go (Unreleased in Aus)
Gakuen Alice (Unreleased in Aus)
The Snow Queen (Unreleased in Aus)
Ocean Waves (Unreleased in Aus)
Mysterious Cities of Gold (Unreleased in Aus)
There are other movies I've downloaded and not bought, and later deleted. Can't remember all of them, but they included Highlander, Existenz, bunch of others. Can't remember them because I wasn't too impressed with them. Also a whole bunch of anime in here that I can't particularly recall either: Kiddy Grade, Witch Hunter Robin, few others.
You're an idiot. I've downloaded tonnes of shows and movies over BT, only to purchase the full series when they arrived on DVD. Just because you're a skinflint who'd rather stick with an illegal copy over the real thing, don't try and project that attitude on to everyone else. As to why he downloaded all 5 seasons, it was probably because the torrent contained all 5 seasons, and he just let it run.
Fortunately, nobody cares what you generally call anything.
Speculative Fiction isn't a euphamism for Sci-Fi, it's a general term for all genres that deal with an altered universe - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc.