Probably because they're so ass-slow about getting their releases out. A popular show screens in Japan, and there are two or three fansubs out within the week.
These days, the video quality is generally high, not quite DVD standard, but fairly close.The translation by most groups is generally on par with the official releases (I don't speak Japanese, but I do know English pretty well, and often the official releases come with poor grammar, spelling mistakes, and poor sentance construction) and the subbing is much better - anti-aliased fonts, different coloured text for different characters' dialog, culutral notes explaining otherwise inexplicable events, etc.
About all the official releases have going for them is the artwork on the DVD boxes and the fact that they're official. That's not a lot of benefits to compete against fansubs, particularly when most anime fans are already used to getting their fix via fansubs. The official distributors are trying to break in to an already existing market.
All that said, I do buy licensed anime when it is released. But I can definately understand the attitude of those that don't. I've ordered in volume 3 of The Scrapped Princess for Christmas (that's December 2005) which will replace the fansubs I've had on my computer since 2003.
Large organized religions, especially Islam and Christianity, have been a curse to mankind, the cause of hundreds of millions of deaths and the worst cruelties, and continued poverty and ignorance.
I always hear this same response trotted out in every thread on religion. "Religion has caused the deaths of millions of people", "Religion has caused more wars than anything else", etc. And it always annoy me. Religion doesn't cause war any more than politics or economics causes war.
All wars are caused by one thing: people wanting power. Now that may be a good thing or a bad thing. It may be people wanting to have power over their own country (American War of Independance, numerous revolutions) or it may be people wanting to exert their power over other countries (World War II, Vietnam, etc). They may be fighting for political power, economic power, or spiritual power (that is, the ability to control people's spirituality, not some cosmic force).
Religion, especially organized religion, is involved in so much conflict not because there is something inextricably warlike about religion, but because it represents a seat of power. Whoever is the head of a religion has a large amount of power. Therefore, people who want power fight and squabble over it, and the person who already has it fights to maintain it and expand it. Exactly the same as in politics.
So what I'm saying is basically that the problem isn't religion, the problem is that at certain times, we've let power-mongering gits be in charge of it. If the dominant force during the medievel period had been secular instead of religious, you would probably have had the same things occuring, because the same people who fought over control of the church would have fought over control of the monarchy instead. The crusades would still have happened, just instead of being "kill the heathens", it would have been "kill the foreign devils".
It depends on how you define "role play". Yes, it had hero units, who gained experience and new abilities and progressed, and it seems that's the defining characteristics of computer RPG players these days. But role-playing taken literally doesn't mean your characters go up levels every now and then. It means the game gives you the opportunity to experience the world through your characters eyes. It generally means some level of emotional involvement in the characters - thus all the posts on the net about Aeris' fate in FF7, or the various relationships your character could have in Baldur's Gate.
The Hero unit made WC3 a more interesting game, and changed it's playstyle from a lot of other RTS games, but I don't think it made it any more of an RPG.
I don't know who the AC below is, but it definately isn't me.
When I look through slashdot posts on law, politics, economics and suchlike, I see a lot of crap. But I also see a lot of posts that give a well-thought out argument, with references and quotations from reputable sources.
I'm not saying all coders and technologists are always logical and give well-researched opinions. But some do, and those that do (on slashdot anyway) are generally modded up (although a lot of the groupthink posts are modded up too).
When I compare that to the stories we hear about politicians passing the DMCA before they've read it, or some of the pure untruths lawyers have spread about the "viral nature" of the GPL (out of ignorance, not out of malice), then I can't really help but think that a lot of these people don't particularly care to investigate things before they start legislating about them/suing over them. And given that this is their job (as opposed to the commentary on slashdot), that really is inexcusable.
The parallel for a coder, I suppose, would be recommending a language they've never used, or system they've never looked at for a project they don't understand. That doesn't happen too often, mostly because when a coder makes that sort of recommendation, it's going to be them that ends up having to deal with it. Whereas when a new law is passed, or precedent established, it's everyone else who takes the consequences.
However, coders and technologists will generally (definately not in all cases) try to grasp the basics of the implications of intellectual property laws. As coders, we are interested in understanding systems and finding out how they work.
Lawyers and politicians however, don't generally bother finding out how a computer does what it does, as long as it does what they legislate it to do.
In the same way the men give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other. Men do shameful things with each other, and as a result they bring upon themselves the punishment they deserve for their wrongdoing.
Not at the moment it isn't, no, but as far as I'm aware, that is mostly due to political controversy rather than any technical reason why aborted embryos are less suited for research.
You fail to take into account what is euphemistically known as "therepeutic cloning". This is where scientists clone human embryos specifically to destroy them and harvest their stem cells. This is not generally done, but it has been proposed, and the only thing that keeps it from happening is this type of debate.
I have no problem with using dead embryos for research, any more than I do for using cadavers for research. I don't believe abortion in most cases is ethical, but regardless, I don't believe there is anything wrong with using the aborted embryo for research - nothing stops us from using the bodies of murder victims for research, if they are suitable.
One of the major problems with the abortion debate is that there is no real way to say when an embryo becomes a human. You imply that a 16-cell embryo isn't human. Then what is? When it hits 32 cells? A hundred? A hundred thousand? When appendages become visible? When its heart starts beating? When does a foetus become a human, and what is the logical reason for choosing the cut off? Most people choose a point that is purely arbitrary - one that is easy to recognize, but that doesn't really say anything about the "humanity" of the entity in question.
Until that question is answered satisfactorially, whether abortion is murder or medical procedure can not be adequately answered. People who choose to act without knowing the answer to this question are not considering ethical implications.
Despite all the posts along similar themes, I've found quite the opposite. I disagree with the majority opinion on slashdot quite a lot in some areas, but I've generally found that articulate, well-written responses do tend to get modded up, even when they're against the majority view.
Of course, there are always more response modded up for the majority view, and the quality threshold for modding-up seems to be lower for them, but they still don't obliterate the well-written opposing posts.
I would doubt it. Most insurance policies of this sort are void if you *knowingly* infringe whatever it is they're covering you against. Same as fire insurance. It protects against accidental destruction by fire, but if you burn it down yourself, you're screwed.
The main problem with beamed solar power (as I understand) is getting it back down here once it's collected. If you beam it down, it will lose energy passing through the atmosphere. It would also need to be very precisely targeted - at those sort of distances, a fraction of a degree off could result in blasting some poor shmucks house of the face of the earth. And even once it's beamed down, we'd need to convert it to electricity again. So you'd have:
Collected(solar) -> Electrical (stored in satellite) -> Beamed (microwave) -> Stored (electrical)
That's a lot of conversion, and energy is lost at each step. Just need some of those smart people doing wierd quantum things with sub-atmoic particles to figure out how to teleport energy, and beamed solar power would have a chance.
The thing is, if use of encryption becomes widespread - and I'd expect at an institution like CM it would be - the signal:noise ratio would be high enough that even with top equipment and good luck, it would be impossible to decrypt even a fraction of the traffic within a meaningful timeframe. Needle in the haystack type deal.
because they were worried that they'd read something clever, store it in the back of their minds, and then use something similar UNINTENTIONALLY to solve some OSS problem.
That wouldn't be infringing copyright. Looking at code, seeing how an algorithm works, then reproducing that algorithm is not an infringement of copyright. It would be an infringement of a patent on that algorithm, if it was patented. But copyright only impacts code that is identical to the original - not code that runs along the same lines.
That said, Im guessing the Open Source project managers recommended their developers avoid the code, not because they were worried about their developers *actually* committing copyright infringement, but because they were worried that Microsoft would *accuse* them of copyright infringement, and they'd then have to spend bucketloads defending themselves.
My question is, why is this open-source specific? I've been looking into professional indemnity insurance lately, and the policy backed by the Australian Computer Society (a voluntary IT professional organisation) includes insurance against inclusion of copyrighted code into your product.
Nothing about Open Source copyright makes it any more risky than any other sort of copyright. Why is there insurance *specifically* against violating Open Source copyright?
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movies, and I think that they were some of the best book-to-movie conversions, especially on that sort of scale, that I've ever seen. But I really do wish they'd included Scouring of the Shire. It was my favourite chapter, and really added quite a lot to the book. Tolkien even wrote specifically about that chapter in his forward, saying that it was an essential part of the books, and planned from the very beginning.
No, they don't owe me anything. And I'm not saying that because they don't release it it's right for me to download it. I'm saying that some (perhaps most) illegal downloading is a direct result of their release schedule, and that their schedule is not because of the time taken to bring the product to market, but because they want to manipulate the market to maximize their sales. Their actions create (in part) the black market, and I don't feel any sympathy because of that.
They're using their influence to try and control the market, and the market's bouncing back and biting them on the ass. And I don't particularly care.
(Note that I'm only arguing this way for products that have not been released yet. When the real thing is available, and people download it anyway, then that's just people being cheap, and a different sort of issue. I think DVDs are fairly reasonably priced, and have no objection to buying them.)
If you say 'no', then you're admitting that the existence of a god could never be demonstrated. "A god exists" is a very extraordinary claim, and yet the claim itself has been carefully designed to be self-supporting so that it may resist be disproven. That's about as unscientific as unscientific gets.
That doesn't mean you don't believe the scientific method isn't valid. It means you don't think science can answer the question of wether God exists or not. That's fine. Science never claimed to be able to answer every question. Scientifically, anything that is not a formally proven law is open to question. Disbelieving something that has not been formally proven is not unscientific - even if that theory does have the preponderance of evidence.
The trouble they have with these is that people leak them. When their movie is released on the internet 2 months before the DVD is available to buy it can really hurt them.
So release the DVD already. I own over 150 DVDs. I also have a number of downloaded illegal movies. All the downloaded movies I have are of movies (either old or new, mostly old) that the studios will not let me buy. I have money, I'm willing to buy their product, but they won't sell.
They try and hold out on the DVD release until the last possible minute so they can suck every drop from the box office and rentals. They are using their control of the product to artificially restrict supply, and the downloading of their movies is (at least partially) a direct result of this. Their artificial restrictions create a black market.
I'm not going to weep for them losing money as a direct result of them squeezing too tightly. Not that they lose money from people like me anyway - I buy the DVD as soon as it's available. Now, not everyone who downloads movies buys the real thing when it's out. But I'd bet that if the DVD was released a month or so after the theatrical release, pirated downloads would be reduced significantly. Of course, I doubt that would show up on their bottom line, since I'm of the belief that the vast majority of downloaders fall into either the "never would have bought anyway" or "will buy as well" camp.
The pollution is shifted to wherever the power to make the metals is produced.
But this is a good thing. If a large number of vehicles were converted to use this system, at the moment, it wouldn't accomplish anything, environmentally speaking. But what it means is that whenever we upgrade the power plants, every car that depends on them is upgraded as well. At the moment, to change our cars fuel, we need to completely re-develop the distribution system. If we can get our cars running off the energy produced by standard generators (or, as in this case, off an object that stores energy produced by standard generators) then we can upgrade thousands of cars just by upgrading the power stations - whether that's nuclear, wind, hydro, geothermic, biodiesel, whatever.
That's not to mention the increased efficiency and ease of regulation when you can monitor a single point as opposed to a thousand cars puttering all over the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Same in New Zealanderese
Probably because they're so ass-slow about getting their releases out. A popular show screens in Japan, and there are two or three fansubs out within the week.
These days, the video quality is generally high, not quite DVD standard, but fairly close.The translation by most groups is generally on par with the official releases (I don't speak Japanese, but I do know English pretty well, and often the official releases come with poor grammar, spelling mistakes, and poor sentance construction) and the subbing is much better - anti-aliased fonts, different coloured text for different characters' dialog, culutral notes explaining otherwise inexplicable events, etc.
About all the official releases have going for them is the artwork on the DVD boxes and the fact that they're official. That's not a lot of benefits to compete against fansubs, particularly when most anime fans are already used to getting their fix via fansubs. The official distributors are trying to break in to an already existing market.
All that said, I do buy licensed anime when it is released. But I can definately understand the attitude of those that don't. I've ordered in volume 3 of The Scrapped Princess for Christmas (that's December 2005) which will replace the fansubs I've had on my computer since 2003.
Large organized religions, especially Islam and Christianity, have been a curse to mankind, the cause of hundreds of millions of deaths and the worst cruelties, and continued poverty and ignorance.
I always hear this same response trotted out in every thread on religion. "Religion has caused the deaths of millions of people", "Religion has caused more wars than anything else", etc. And it always annoy me. Religion doesn't cause war any more than politics or economics causes war.
All wars are caused by one thing: people wanting power. Now that may be a good thing or a bad thing. It may be people wanting to have power over their own country (American War of Independance, numerous revolutions) or it may be people wanting to exert their power over other countries (World War II, Vietnam, etc). They may be fighting for political power, economic power, or spiritual power (that is, the ability to control people's spirituality, not some cosmic force).
Religion, especially organized religion, is involved in so much conflict not because there is something inextricably warlike about religion, but because it represents a seat of power. Whoever is the head of a religion has a large amount of power. Therefore, people who want power fight and squabble over it, and the person who already has it fights to maintain it and expand it. Exactly the same as in politics.
So what I'm saying is basically that the problem isn't religion, the problem is that at certain times, we've let power-mongering gits be in charge of it. If the dominant force during the medievel period had been secular instead of religious, you would probably have had the same things occuring, because the same people who fought over control of the church would have fought over control of the monarchy instead. The crusades would still have happened, just instead of being "kill the heathens", it would have been "kill the foreign devils".
It depends on how you define "role play". Yes, it had hero units, who gained experience and new abilities and progressed, and it seems that's the defining characteristics of computer RPG players these days. But role-playing taken literally doesn't mean your characters go up levels every now and then. It means the game gives you the opportunity to experience the world through your characters eyes. It generally means some level of emotional involvement in the characters - thus all the posts on the net about Aeris' fate in FF7, or the various relationships your character could have in Baldur's Gate.
The Hero unit made WC3 a more interesting game, and changed it's playstyle from a lot of other RTS games, but I don't think it made it any more of an RPG.
I don't know who the AC below is, but it definately isn't me.
When I look through slashdot posts on law, politics, economics and suchlike, I see a lot of crap. But I also see a lot of posts that give a well-thought out argument, with references and quotations from reputable sources.
I'm not saying all coders and technologists are always logical and give well-researched opinions. But some do, and those that do (on slashdot anyway) are generally modded up (although a lot of the groupthink posts are modded up too).
When I compare that to the stories we hear about politicians passing the DMCA before they've read it, or some of the pure untruths lawyers have spread about the "viral nature" of the GPL (out of ignorance, not out of malice), then I can't really help but think that a lot of these people don't particularly care to investigate things before they start legislating about them/suing over them. And given that this is their job (as opposed to the commentary on slashdot), that really is inexcusable.
The parallel for a coder, I suppose, would be recommending a language they've never used, or system they've never looked at for a project they don't understand. That doesn't happen too often, mostly because when a coder makes that sort of recommendation, it's going to be them that ends up having to deal with it. Whereas when a new law is passed, or precedent established, it's everyone else who takes the consequences.
However, coders and technologists will generally (definately not in all cases) try to grasp the basics of the implications of intellectual property laws. As coders, we are interested in understanding systems and finding out how they work.
Lawyers and politicians however, don't generally bother finding out how a computer does what it does, as long as it does what they legislate it to do.
- It uses too much bandwidth, which the university FUP doesn't allow.
- It may use resources you are not permitted to give access to if you're using a university computer
Neither of which makes one iota of difference to someone who is running their own computer off their own network connection.In the same way the men give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other. Men do shameful things with each other, and as a result they bring upon themselves the punishment they deserve for their wrongdoing.
Romans 1:27
Not at the moment it isn't, no, but as far as I'm aware, that is mostly due to political controversy rather than any technical reason why aborted embryos are less suited for research.
A lot of it does, but not all. And more would come from fetuses if there were not currently a stigma on that particular source of stem cells.
You fail to take into account what is euphemistically known as "therepeutic cloning". This is where scientists clone human embryos specifically to destroy them and harvest their stem cells. This is not generally done, but it has been proposed, and the only thing that keeps it from happening is this type of debate.
I have no problem with using dead embryos for research, any more than I do for using cadavers for research. I don't believe abortion in most cases is ethical, but regardless, I don't believe there is anything wrong with using the aborted embryo for research - nothing stops us from using the bodies of murder victims for research, if they are suitable.
One of the major problems with the abortion debate is that there is no real way to say when an embryo becomes a human. You imply that a 16-cell embryo isn't human. Then what is? When it hits 32 cells? A hundred? A hundred thousand? When appendages become visible? When its heart starts beating? When does a foetus become a human, and what is the logical reason for choosing the cut off? Most people choose a point that is purely arbitrary - one that is easy to recognize, but that doesn't really say anything about the "humanity" of the entity in question.
Until that question is answered satisfactorially, whether abortion is murder or medical procedure can not be adequately answered. People who choose to act without knowing the answer to this question are not considering ethical implications.
Despite all the posts along similar themes, I've found quite the opposite. I disagree with the majority opinion on slashdot quite a lot in some areas, but I've generally found that articulate, well-written responses do tend to get modded up, even when they're against the majority view.
Of course, there are always more response modded up for the majority view, and the quality threshold for modding-up seems to be lower for them, but they still don't obliterate the well-written opposing posts.
I would doubt it. Most insurance policies of this sort are void if you *knowingly* infringe whatever it is they're covering you against. Same as fire insurance. It protects against accidental destruction by fire, but if you burn it down yourself, you're screwed.
The main problem with beamed solar power (as I understand) is getting it back down here once it's collected. If you beam it down, it will lose energy passing through the atmosphere. It would also need to be very precisely targeted - at those sort of distances, a fraction of a degree off could result in blasting some poor shmucks house of the face of the earth. And even once it's beamed down, we'd need to convert it to electricity again. So you'd have: Collected(solar) -> Electrical (stored in satellite) -> Beamed (microwave) -> Stored (electrical) That's a lot of conversion, and energy is lost at each step. Just need some of those smart people doing wierd quantum things with sub-atmoic particles to figure out how to teleport energy, and beamed solar power would have a chance.
The thing is, if use of encryption becomes widespread - and I'd expect at an institution like CM it would be - the signal:noise ratio would be high enough that even with top equipment and good luck, it would be impossible to decrypt even a fraction of the traffic within a meaningful timeframe. Needle in the haystack type deal.
We don' t have the time to listen to all of that.
because they were worried that they'd read something clever, store it in the back of their minds, and then use something similar UNINTENTIONALLY to solve some OSS problem.
That wouldn't be infringing copyright. Looking at code, seeing how an algorithm works, then reproducing that algorithm is not an infringement of copyright. It would be an infringement of a patent on that algorithm, if it was patented. But copyright only impacts code that is identical to the original - not code that runs along the same lines.
That said, Im guessing the Open Source project managers recommended their developers avoid the code, not because they were worried about their developers *actually* committing copyright infringement, but because they were worried that Microsoft would *accuse* them of copyright infringement, and they'd then have to spend bucketloads defending themselves.
My question is, why is this open-source specific? I've been looking into professional indemnity insurance lately, and the policy backed by the Australian Computer Society (a voluntary IT professional organisation) includes insurance against inclusion of copyrighted code into your product.
Nothing about Open Source copyright makes it any more risky than any other sort of copyright. Why is there insurance *specifically* against violating Open Source copyright?
Two different things. Concerts are live, which is a great part of their attraction. The comparison should be:
How much would you pay to go to the theatre? How much would you pay for a concert?
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movies, and I think that they were some of the best book-to-movie conversions, especially on that sort of scale, that I've ever seen. But I really do wish they'd included Scouring of the Shire. It was my favourite chapter, and really added quite a lot to the book. Tolkien even wrote specifically about that chapter in his forward, saying that it was an essential part of the books, and planned from the very beginning.
No, they don't owe me anything. And I'm not saying that because they don't release it it's right for me to download it. I'm saying that some (perhaps most) illegal downloading is a direct result of their release schedule, and that their schedule is not because of the time taken to bring the product to market, but because they want to manipulate the market to maximize their sales. Their actions create (in part) the black market, and I don't feel any sympathy because of that. They're using their influence to try and control the market, and the market's bouncing back and biting them on the ass. And I don't particularly care. (Note that I'm only arguing this way for products that have not been released yet. When the real thing is available, and people download it anyway, then that's just people being cheap, and a different sort of issue. I think DVDs are fairly reasonably priced, and have no objection to buying them.)
If you say 'no', then you're admitting that the existence of a god could never be demonstrated. "A god exists" is a very extraordinary claim, and yet the claim itself has been carefully designed to be self-supporting so that it may resist be disproven. That's about as unscientific as unscientific gets.
That doesn't mean you don't believe the scientific method isn't valid. It means you don't think science can answer the question of wether God exists or not. That's fine. Science never claimed to be able to answer every question. Scientifically, anything that is not a formally proven law is open to question. Disbelieving something that has not been formally proven is not unscientific - even if that theory does have the preponderance of evidence.
The trouble they have with these is that people leak them. When their movie is released on the internet 2 months before the DVD is available to buy it can really hurt them.
So release the DVD already. I own over 150 DVDs. I also have a number of downloaded illegal movies. All the downloaded movies I have are of movies (either old or new, mostly old) that the studios will not let me buy. I have money, I'm willing to buy their product, but they won't sell.
They try and hold out on the DVD release until the last possible minute so they can suck every drop from the box office and rentals. They are using their control of the product to artificially restrict supply, and the downloading of their movies is (at least partially) a direct result of this. Their artificial restrictions create a black market.
I'm not going to weep for them losing money as a direct result of them squeezing too tightly. Not that they lose money from people like me anyway - I buy the DVD as soon as it's available. Now, not everyone who downloads movies buys the real thing when it's out. But I'd bet that if the DVD was released a month or so after the theatrical release, pirated downloads would be reduced significantly. Of course, I doubt that would show up on their bottom line, since I'm of the belief that the vast majority of downloaders fall into either the "never would have bought anyway" or "will buy as well" camp.
The pollution is shifted to wherever the power to make the metals is produced.
But this is a good thing. If a large number of vehicles were converted to use this system, at the moment, it wouldn't accomplish anything, environmentally speaking. But what it means is that whenever we upgrade the power plants, every car that depends on them is upgraded as well. At the moment, to change our cars fuel, we need to completely re-develop the distribution system. If we can get our cars running off the energy produced by standard generators (or, as in this case, off an object that stores energy produced by standard generators) then we can upgrade thousands of cars just by upgrading the power stations - whether that's nuclear, wind, hydro, geothermic, biodiesel, whatever.
That's not to mention the increased efficiency and ease of regulation when you can monitor a single point as opposed to a thousand cars puttering all over the country.
No, that would be a podaphile. Peda = children (pediatrics) pod = feet (podiatry)