iCommune signed when they clicked through the iTunes license agreement
He he. In the UK, a contract is invalid if one of the signees is intoxicated. I keep a nice supply of beer and pot handy for whenever I need to install software.
Google has recently issued a cease and desist letter to Gewgle.com
They also did the same to Amazon Light, who's first version of the site basically was Amazon with a google-like front end.
Very basic page, very similar logo, and the results of your searches were very much in google's style. There is a screen capture of the original layout and the explaination in their own words here.
I wasn't aware the music industry was supposed to be competing with the technology industry.
They are competing for your money. It's your choice where it goes and both want as much of it as possible.
p2p and "free" music are generally based around "new" technology like computers, broadband, portable media players, software tools like CD to mp3 converters and so on. I'd always considered the RIAA as fighting new technology since they started to get on their high horse. They'd rather we were rebuying "The Dark Side of the Moon" on vinyl, cassette, CD then DRM than converting it to mp3s from the CD itself. No profit for them, simple ecconomics. Plus, you can easilly make a copy for the car or holiday home when you might have bought multiple copies instead.
It's worrying that they are colluding. Unless they have just realised they can't possibly win this war without having an mp3 police to break down your door and delete your files, and have full control of the software on the internet. It was always a pipe dream.
In the UK, you cannot really shoot anyone for mere burglary (see R v Martin).
Not a perfect test case. The thief was shot in the back while running away, and left to bleed to death. The farmer deserved to go to jail, must have watched too many Rambo movies in his life.
it is up to the defendant to show that the force is reasonable.
i.e. he didn't stand a chance in this case...;-)
I think you would only be able to lock the attacker out of your site in self-defence
Impossible to do really. You could block their IP, but they'll no doubt be going via a zombied PC somewhere and simply switch to another. The other alternative is to disable the system they used to get in, but as you have that system live on the net, you must have a need for that system, so you'll be losing your own accessibility. You can't win unless you fix the security hole itself.
How many times does it have to be said, "WEP IS BROKEN"?
You don't understand the point of WEP. It is an encryption standard to get you onto the wireless network segment. If you are using a shared access point, you must either have no WEP enabled, or everyone uses the same WEP key. How easily it can be broken is completely irrelevant in any discussion about shared access points. It's like being on a normal CAT-5 shared network segment (hub, not a switch). With the WEP key in place, all traffic is available to you. No different to being in a internet cafe, would you trust your packets in that enviroment?
WEP can be used by private firms or home users to lock down access to their own network. It is here that the weakness lies.
The net is an unencrypted and completely insecure network. Just because the last mile is suddenly insecure, it's no reason to suddenly start to panic. If you are concerned, get some good VPN software, or stick to encrypting by protocol. It's the only way to limit access to your communications. Oh, and avoid using the phone as well.
Personally, I'm more concerned that POP/IMAP over SSL is as rare as it is currently, especially given how easy it is to configure. You want something to worry about? Who's holding this back? Where's my tinfoil hat?
You must have a hard time finding an entire wardrobe made by non-exploited workers, never eating bananas, never being able to fill your car with gas
Damn right. So hard that it's impossible. Do you manage it?
But I do avoid certain companies, and own a fuel efficient car. The best I can do really, without resorting to sitting around naked in a field all day, eating grass.
do you mean you live life by what is morally correct, as long as it fits your lifestyle?
No.
i never knew downloading roms made you morally right.
I never said that. I implied that it wasn't morally wrong.
I also never said that I was morally "right" as a whole either. What exactly was the point you were trying to make?
Apparently some of the NTSC region free ones can output PAL disks as NTSC, probably because of this problem. So I was mostly right...and you got lucky. (unless you bought your DVD player with region free in mind)
The problem does still exist in the PAL world though, I have a number of friends who have this issue when playing NTSC disks.
Is your DVD player an Apex one by any chance?
most of the world uses NTSC - everywhere except Europe, I believe.
Pretty much. There are a few other places with PAL such as Austrailia. I could start the "my system is better than yours" argument, but I won't. Oh, wait...I just did.;-)
Argh! Piracy is not stealing, not that old argument again. If it were stealing, the courts would have decided long ago that there are no need for anti-piracy laws, because the anti-thieving laws already cover it.
And as you can't buy these ROMs anywhere, how are you depriving someone of any income? Even if you were paying for them, who would the money go to? Not the original developers, I can tell you that much!
Can you say "victimless crime"? No one is hurt, so frankly I couldn't care less. I base my life around what is morally correct, not what is on the lawbooks.
Most players - including my 60$ apex can play in either pal or ntsc mode.
Yup, that was the only thing I omited from the original post. I wasn't aware of the fact that some of the new players can do this. Every one I've heard mention it has mentioned Apex players, are they unique in this way?
The important difference between PAL and NTSC discs is the frame (really, field) rate of the encoded MPEG2 stream: ~59.9 fps for NTSC, 50 for PAL.
Nope, I still stand by what I say. See my earlier reply to another "you're wrong!" post, or do a web search for "DVD black white region".
RGB signals can't carry macrovision!
Ah! I wasn't aware of that! Macrovision is irrelevant to me, had that disabled on my DVD player before I got it home. Allows me to pipe the DVD player signal thru my VHS into the RF feed around my home. DVD/VHS/Cable in every room. Macrovision is mostly irrelevant anyway now, thanks to DeCSS.
US component outputs are explicitly NTSC (Luma [y], and two Chroma channels [Cr, Cb]), not RGB.
Must be US specific, my Euro player has Cr,Cb,Y outputs as RCA jacks, a normal S-Video out put, and two SCART sockets, one outputing RGB and the other as RGB input for pass-thru connection of my other RGB gear (PSOne / PS2), as well as some composite/audio jacks that are wired to my VHS. The number of hook-ups on the back was the deal clincher. It's a Sony 725D model if anyones interested, but they might not sell them anymore, it was four years ago it came out.
I guess most or all UK VCRs can't record the RGB signal
Yup, that's right. In all my (expensive) AV years, I've never seen a video with RGB inputs, only S-VHS/S-Video units and they were rare and expensive.
It also explains the PS2 having a green picture when playing a DVD over RGB. I never did find out why they did that, until you dropped the macrovision hint! Thanks!;-)
Anyhow, all region-free DVD players I've seen in the US will perform the necessary frame rate conversion for you - my cheap Apex player certainly does.
Another new thing learned for me, some of the new(ish) DVD players can allow you to choose the colour format you want. In my older DVD player, that's not an option, it bases it on the disk.
This gives another option to the "must-have" table:
Use RGB
Use a TV capable of using either NTSC/PAL colour
Use a DVD player capable of sending either NTSC/PAL colour.
Actually, I'm not. I've been importing DVDs for personal use ever since the format came out. I was one of the early adopters, who had trouble with the limited selection of Region 2 disks in the early days. What disks there were had little or no special features, or cost much more than the region 1 alternative.
You are arguing with an AV/hi-fi autophile. I'm speaking from personal experience and research on all counts.
A Region 1 DVD and a Region 2 DVD are identical, save for the region code.
Nope. A Region 1 DVD has a frame rate of ~30 fps (60 Hz scan rate), a Region 2 DVD has ~25 (50 Hz). It's another thing that can go wrong in playing foreign media, but I never mentioned that because most TVs made in the last 5-8 years can handle either. On old ones, you could adjust the V-HOLD dial to compensate. Have a problem here, you'll get a rolling screen with no option to fix other than a new TV.
Thus, if you have an NTSC region free DVD player hooked to an NTSC television and you stick a Region 2 DVD into it, it will display perfectly.
Nope. Try it. You need component video, or a PAL supporting television. The DVD player still has to encode the colour information into either PAL or NTSC, if you want to feed it through composite or S-Video. That's the way those hook-ups work. It does this based on the original format of the disk; put in PAL disk, you'll get a PAL signal.
Component video doesn't require PAL/NTSC encoding because the colour information doesn't need to be encoded. I'm cool on both counts, my TV has RGB inputs as well as being capable of displaying either PAL/NTSC.
If you don't believe me, try a google groups search for "DVD black white region free", or take a look at this FAQ.
but there's more oil in Canada than there is in the middle east.
Much of it is in environmentally protected areas. Not that it's going to mean much when the rest of the worlds supply runs out.
US does import more oil from Canada at present than it does from Saudi Arabia.
Saudi is only one of the oil exporting states in the middle east, but I see where you are going.
There are many types of oil in the ground. Some are good for petroleum, some are better for diesel. I believe that the Gulf oil is unique in some ways, but I'm not an expert on the subject.
If its "all about oil" as you seem to claim, the US should be using political leverage to increase pump & oilsands production in Canada, not getting their people killed overseas.
Good question. I wasn't really aware of how vast the reserves in North America were. Perhaps you should ask your leaders that.
The profits to be made here outweigh the number of lifes lost. That's not my thinking, but that of corporations. Like the ones who compare the cost of recall verses the cost of payoffs to people who lost family members in accidents due to faulty products. They don't think along the lines of "we have enough in Canada", they just want "more more more". Even if there was oil all over the place, they'd still want to control or at least profit in some way from every location.
However, there is no question that the USAs interest in the Gulf is primarly for the oil. Even if the forthcoming Iraq invasion isn't to claim Iraq's oil, the action would be intended to "stabilise" the region (no sure if it would actually do that...) to make things easier on other oil exporting countries.
Why is good political satire so hard to find outside of the Simpsons? The only other person doing something worthwhile is the writer of Get Your War On.
South Park is not bad, but they don't focus all that much on politics. They do cover a lot of things in a way that should make you think more about them.
A similar thing to this montage of 9/11 images was done to the Gulf War: Part One. It shows just how bad and sensationist the coverage was, focusing on the computer graphics that were created for the networks.
It was done by Phil Patiris and you can find a clip of it at the Illegal Art webage. Highly recommended. Read the sites legal agreement if you have the time; all is not as it seems. It's a good site, containing lot's of things that people have tried to ban or surpress over the years.
Technically speaking, region free in the USA would be a waste of time. Even if your DVD player could play the disk, you won't be able to watch it.
The problem is the NTSC and PAL standards, which are a completely different on how the colour component of the picture works. If you don't sort this out, you'll be watching black and white. To fix it, you need either a multi-standard television, capable of using PAL and NTSC, or a DVD player and TV that has component video (e.g. RGB) which doesn't use PAL/NTSC to encode the colour information.
Both of these things are pretty uncommon in the US televisions, but fairly common elsewhere. That, and the abundance of media, is why modded DVD players are rare in USA/Canada.
Of course, the MPAA will probably tout this as a success story for region encoding.
But where is the obvious benefit in dragging down Saddam?
Iraq has a lot of oil. And I mean a lot
The whole arab world will hate us even more than they already do
Not true. The arab world hates Saddam as much as Bush. Iraq fought a very long war with Iran, who are a very islamic country. It's during this period, where the US didn't like Iran very much, that the US sold Iraq (on credit!) masses of arms and the capabilities to build weapons of mass destruction.
Anyone that suggests Iraq has Islamic terrorist links is lying to you. The whole of the CIA and NSA has spent the last 4 months trying to come up with proof of this "link" and have they found anything whatsoever? Not even a casual shared aquaintance between them!
And will Iraque be 'free' afterwards?
Ha Ha! Who cares? We've toppled (or helped topple) other governments we didn't like before, and look who we left in their place. Saudi Arabri. Afganistan. Who cares about the population when their is bounty to be grabbed!
PS, that's pretty much why the terrorists hate us. We fucked them and their families over. Literally.
Well, compare it to Afghanistan. Theoretically a free country, but the warlords still rule the countryside.
LOL, Afganistan is now ruled by former business partners of Bush/Cheney, from Haliburton. It's an economic take over. They want access to the oil in the former USSR states to the north, and the only way to pipe it to the Gulf is through Afganistan. That's the reason for the war there, to secure access to the land. The oil companies and US government (same thing at the moment) had been negotiating this for several years with the Taliban. It's only when the contract was awarded to an Argentine group that the Taliban suddenly became "evil". There are press reports prior to 9/11 suggesting a US/Afgan war is iminent.
My advice? Do not watch TV news! It's only designed to keep you watching until the commercials. So they show things that people like watching. Death. Violence. Dispair. Tragedy. Sport.
It's not a true reflection of the world, and if you watch it every day, you're probably one of those people who worry about being attacked/killed on your way to work, and you live behind closed/locked doors.
I'll admit that drugs like marijuana do have ligitimate medical uses
They also have legitimate recreational uses. If I can damage myself by smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol, then I should be allowed to not damage myself if I prefer pot.
such as those that cause the "high" that can permanently damage the brain's pleasure receptors after frequent use
Bullshit. Pot has no such effect. The only negative effects are the tars from smoking which can be minimized with a water pipe, or completely eliminated by ingesting pot rather than smoking. Other than that and the desire for junk food, there are far worse things you can do to yourself, like get drunk.
But prescription drugs make a nice scapegoat
It's not the drugs themselves, it's the way they are prescribed. I could go down to the doctors just now, say I'm having trouble sleeping (e.g. some sort of worry) and I'd get some Valium without much difficulty. That's a highly addictive and behaviour changing substance. Ditto for prozac.
However, if you cannot go through your life without a certain drug, then you are a drug addict. Granted, you may not be doing the normal things associated with drug addicts, but you are still dependant.
Overall I have no clue why they dropped the Crusader. The project was running under budget
I think you answered your own question. There is a huge amount of corruption in military spending. The arms companies wouldn't have been profiting much from the old system.
He. Reminds me of the sceens in Starship Troopers where the kids get shown the guns and other equipment and are encouraged to sign up.
A strong military presence in civilian life has always been a strong element in negative-utopia books and films. It symbolises brain-washing and propaganda, and the desire to have a massive army.
Personally, I think "America's Army" is a bad idea. It's kind of like using "Saving Private Ryan" as a recruitment. How many times do you get fragged in an evenings play of the game? Then you realise you only have one life in reality, so the last thing you want to do it join the military!
The point is simple. Building it made lots of money for a few companies that have "links" with people in the military who make decissions on these things...
True, multicast should solve most of the problems. My worry is that the card itself would perform some form of buffering, so it's all down to the design of the card on how much buffering it does.
The best way to explain is to give an example. Say you have two cards running from the same source. In order to get them syncronised, they would both need to be initialised at exactly the same time. If you didn't, it's possible that the first could be running with one second of audio in it's buffer, while the other has two seconds of audio.
This project raises more questions than answers! I'm not familiar with multicast, so I may be picking it up wrong, but as I see it, any media over ethernet is going to need some sort of buffering, to handle the times where the frames don't get through on time (congestion and collissions). Any design where sync playback is desired would probably need to design this in the the hardware.
Oops, scratch that, I thought it was wireless. Doh! The same still applies though, get ethernet into each room and you can get audio and soon, video streaming. Saves running a wire for each.
Multiple receivers would be cool as well.
Anyone working on a wireless version?;-) That would be cool, you could make portable receivers that play what is on your main stereo. Good for the bathroom/garden.
Slashdot Mirror
He he. In the UK, a contract is invalid if one of the signees is intoxicated. I keep a nice supply of beer and pot handy for whenever I need to install software.
Problem solved...
They also did the same to Amazon Light, who's first version of the site basically was Amazon with a google-like front end.
Very basic page, very similar logo, and the results of your searches were very much in google's style. There is a screen capture of the original layout and the explaination in their own words here.
They are competing for your money. It's your choice where it goes and both want as much of it as possible.
p2p and "free" music are generally based around "new" technology like computers, broadband, portable media players, software tools like CD to mp3 converters and so on. I'd always considered the RIAA as fighting new technology since they started to get on their high horse. They'd rather we were rebuying "The Dark Side of the Moon" on vinyl, cassette, CD then DRM than converting it to mp3s from the CD itself. No profit for them, simple ecconomics. Plus, you can easilly make a copy for the car or holiday home when you might have bought multiple copies instead.
It's worrying that they are colluding. Unless they have just realised they can't possibly win this war without having an mp3 police to break down your door and delete your files, and have full control of the software on the internet. It was always a pipe dream.
Not a perfect test case. The thief was shot in the back while running away, and left to bleed to death. The farmer deserved to go to jail, must have watched too many Rambo movies in his life.
it is up to the defendant to show that the force is reasonable.
i.e. he didn't stand a chance in this case... ;-)
I think you would only be able to lock the attacker out of your site in self-defence
Impossible to do really. You could block their IP, but they'll no doubt be going via a zombied PC somewhere and simply switch to another. The other alternative is to disable the system they used to get in, but as you have that system live on the net, you must have a need for that system, so you'll be losing your own accessibility. You can't win unless you fix the security hole itself.
You don't understand the point of WEP. It is an encryption standard to get you onto the wireless network segment. If you are using a shared access point, you must either have no WEP enabled, or everyone uses the same WEP key. How easily it can be broken is completely irrelevant in any discussion about shared access points. It's like being on a normal CAT-5 shared network segment (hub, not a switch). With the WEP key in place, all traffic is available to you. No different to being in a internet cafe, would you trust your packets in that enviroment?
WEP can be used by private firms or home users to lock down access to their own network. It is here that the weakness lies.
The net is an unencrypted and completely insecure network. Just because the last mile is suddenly insecure, it's no reason to suddenly start to panic. If you are concerned, get some good VPN software, or stick to encrypting by protocol. It's the only way to limit access to your communications. Oh, and avoid using the phone as well.
Personally, I'm more concerned that POP/IMAP over SSL is as rare as it is currently, especially given how easy it is to configure. You want something to worry about? Who's holding this back? Where's my tinfoil hat?
Good post. I'm totally in agreement with you...our leaders are just as bad as the kings of old could be. Nothing really changes...
Damn right. So hard that it's impossible. Do you manage it?
But I do avoid certain companies, and own a fuel efficient car. The best I can do really, without resorting to sitting around naked in a field all day, eating grass.
do you mean you live life by what is morally correct, as long as it fits your lifestyle?
No.
i never knew downloading roms made you morally right.
I never said that. I implied that it wasn't morally wrong.
I also never said that I was morally "right" as a whole either. What exactly was the point you were trying to make?
Apparently some of the NTSC region free ones can output PAL disks as NTSC, probably because of this problem. So I was mostly right...and you got lucky. (unless you bought your DVD player with region free in mind)
The problem does still exist in the PAL world though, I have a number of friends who have this issue when playing NTSC disks.
Is your DVD player an Apex one by any chance?
most of the world uses NTSC - everywhere except Europe, I believe.
Pretty much. There are a few other places with PAL such as Austrailia. I could start the "my system is better than yours" argument, but I won't. Oh, wait...I just did. ;-)
And as you can't buy these ROMs anywhere, how are you depriving someone of any income? Even if you were paying for them, who would the money go to? Not the original developers, I can tell you that much!
Can you say "victimless crime"? No one is hurt, so frankly I couldn't care less. I base my life around what is morally correct, not what is on the lawbooks.
You need a (relatively) powerful processor to play DiVX. Fingers crossed these things have the neccessary omph! to do it...
Most players - including my 60$ apex can play in either pal or ntsc mode.
Yup, that was the only thing I omited from the original post. I wasn't aware of the fact that some of the new players can do this. Every one I've heard mention it has mentioned Apex players, are they unique in this way?
My 3/4 year old one can't
Nope, I still stand by what I say. See my earlier reply to another "you're wrong!" post, or do a web search for "DVD black white region".
RGB signals can't carry macrovision!
Ah! I wasn't aware of that! Macrovision is irrelevant to me, had that disabled on my DVD player before I got it home. Allows me to pipe the DVD player signal thru my VHS into the RF feed around my home. DVD/VHS/Cable in every room. Macrovision is mostly irrelevant anyway now, thanks to DeCSS.
US component outputs are explicitly NTSC (Luma [y], and two Chroma channels [Cr, Cb]), not RGB.
Must be US specific, my Euro player has Cr,Cb,Y outputs as RCA jacks, a normal S-Video out put, and two SCART sockets, one outputing RGB and the other as RGB input for pass-thru connection of my other RGB gear (PSOne / PS2), as well as some composite/audio jacks that are wired to my VHS. The number of hook-ups on the back was the deal clincher. It's a Sony 725D model if anyones interested, but they might not sell them anymore, it was four years ago it came out.
I guess most or all UK VCRs can't record the RGB signal
Yup, that's right. In all my (expensive) AV years, I've never seen a video with RGB inputs, only S-VHS/S-Video units and they were rare and expensive.
It also explains the PS2 having a green picture when playing a DVD over RGB. I never did find out why they did that, until you dropped the macrovision hint! Thanks! ;-)
Anyhow, all region-free DVD players I've seen in the US will perform the necessary frame rate conversion for you - my cheap Apex player certainly does.
Another new thing learned for me, some of the new(ish) DVD players can allow you to choose the colour format you want. In my older DVD player, that's not an option, it bases it on the disk.
This gives another option to the "must-have" table:
Actually, I'm not. I've been importing DVDs for personal use ever since the format came out. I was one of the early adopters, who had trouble with the limited selection of Region 2 disks in the early days. What disks there were had little or no special features, or cost much more than the region 1 alternative.
You are arguing with an AV/hi-fi autophile. I'm speaking from personal experience and research on all counts.
A Region 1 DVD and a Region 2 DVD are identical, save for the region code.
Nope. A Region 1 DVD has a frame rate of ~30 fps (60 Hz scan rate), a Region 2 DVD has ~25 (50 Hz). It's another thing that can go wrong in playing foreign media, but I never mentioned that because most TVs made in the last 5-8 years can handle either. On old ones, you could adjust the V-HOLD dial to compensate. Have a problem here, you'll get a rolling screen with no option to fix other than a new TV.
Thus, if you have an NTSC region free DVD player hooked to an NTSC television and you stick a Region 2 DVD into it, it will display perfectly.
Nope. Try it. You need component video, or a PAL supporting television. The DVD player still has to encode the colour information into either PAL or NTSC, if you want to feed it through composite or S-Video. That's the way those hook-ups work. It does this based on the original format of the disk; put in PAL disk, you'll get a PAL signal.
Component video doesn't require PAL/NTSC encoding because the colour information doesn't need to be encoded. I'm cool on both counts, my TV has RGB inputs as well as being capable of displaying either PAL/NTSC.
If you don't believe me, try a google groups search for "DVD black white region free", or take a look at this FAQ.
Much of it is in environmentally protected areas. Not that it's going to mean much when the rest of the worlds supply runs out.
US does import more oil from Canada at present than it does from Saudi Arabia.
Saudi is only one of the oil exporting states in the middle east, but I see where you are going.
There are many types of oil in the ground. Some are good for petroleum, some are better for diesel. I believe that the Gulf oil is unique in some ways, but I'm not an expert on the subject.
If its "all about oil" as you seem to claim, the US should be using political leverage to increase pump & oilsands production in Canada, not getting their people killed overseas.
Good question. I wasn't really aware of how vast the reserves in North America were. Perhaps you should ask your leaders that.
The profits to be made here outweigh the number of lifes lost. That's not my thinking, but that of corporations. Like the ones who compare the cost of recall verses the cost of payoffs to people who lost family members in accidents due to faulty products. They don't think along the lines of "we have enough in Canada", they just want "more more more". Even if there was oil all over the place, they'd still want to control or at least profit in some way from every location.
However, there is no question that the USAs interest in the Gulf is primarly for the oil. Even if the forthcoming Iraq invasion isn't to claim Iraq's oil, the action would be intended to "stabilise" the region (no sure if it would actually do that...) to make things easier on other oil exporting countries.
South Park is not bad, but they don't focus all that much on politics. They do cover a lot of things in a way that should make you think more about them.
It was done by Phil Patiris and you can find a clip of it at the Illegal Art webage. Highly recommended. Read the sites legal agreement if you have the time; all is not as it seems. It's a good site, containing lot's of things that people have tried to ban or surpress over the years.
The problem is the NTSC and PAL standards, which are a completely different on how the colour component of the picture works. If you don't sort this out, you'll be watching black and white. To fix it, you need either a multi-standard television, capable of using PAL and NTSC, or a DVD player and TV that has component video (e.g. RGB) which doesn't use PAL/NTSC to encode the colour information.
Both of these things are pretty uncommon in the US televisions, but fairly common elsewhere. That, and the abundance of media, is why modded DVD players are rare in USA/Canada.
Of course, the MPAA will probably tout this as a success story for region encoding.
Iraq has a lot of oil. And I mean a lot
The whole arab world will hate us even more than they already do
Not true. The arab world hates Saddam as much as Bush. Iraq fought a very long war with Iran, who are a very islamic country. It's during this period, where the US didn't like Iran very much, that the US sold Iraq (on credit!) masses of arms and the capabilities to build weapons of mass destruction.
Anyone that suggests Iraq has Islamic terrorist links is lying to you. The whole of the CIA and NSA has spent the last 4 months trying to come up with proof of this "link" and have they found anything whatsoever? Not even a casual shared aquaintance between them!
And will Iraque be 'free' afterwards?
Ha Ha! Who cares? We've toppled (or helped topple) other governments we didn't like before, and look who we left in their place. Saudi Arabri. Afganistan. Who cares about the population when their is bounty to be grabbed!
PS, that's pretty much why the terrorists hate us. We fucked them and their families over. Literally.
Well, compare it to Afghanistan. Theoretically a free country, but the warlords still rule the countryside.
LOL, Afganistan is now ruled by former business partners of Bush/Cheney, from Haliburton. It's an economic take over. They want access to the oil in the former USSR states to the north, and the only way to pipe it to the Gulf is through Afganistan. That's the reason for the war there, to secure access to the land. The oil companies and US government (same thing at the moment) had been negotiating this for several years with the Taliban. It's only when the contract was awarded to an Argentine group that the Taliban suddenly became "evil". There are press reports prior to 9/11 suggesting a US/Afgan war is iminent.
My advice? Do not watch TV news! It's only designed to keep you watching until the commercials. So they show things that people like watching. Death. Violence. Dispair. Tragedy. Sport.
It's not a true reflection of the world, and if you watch it every day, you're probably one of those people who worry about being attacked/killed on your way to work, and you live behind closed/locked doors.
They also have legitimate recreational uses. If I can damage myself by smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol, then I should be allowed to not damage myself if I prefer pot.
such as those that cause the "high" that can permanently damage the brain's pleasure receptors after frequent use
Bullshit. Pot has no such effect. The only negative effects are the tars from smoking which can be minimized with a water pipe, or completely eliminated by ingesting pot rather than smoking. Other than that and the desire for junk food, there are far worse things you can do to yourself, like get drunk.
But prescription drugs make a nice scapegoat
It's not the drugs themselves, it's the way they are prescribed. I could go down to the doctors just now, say I'm having trouble sleeping (e.g. some sort of worry) and I'd get some Valium without much difficulty. That's a highly addictive and behaviour changing substance. Ditto for prozac.
However, if you cannot go through your life without a certain drug, then you are a drug addict. Granted, you may not be doing the normal things associated with drug addicts, but you are still dependant.
I think you answered your own question. There is a huge amount of corruption in military spending. The arms companies wouldn't have been profiting much from the old system.
A strong military presence in civilian life has always been a strong element in negative-utopia books and films. It symbolises brain-washing and propaganda, and the desire to have a massive army.
Personally, I think "America's Army" is a bad idea. It's kind of like using "Saving Private Ryan" as a recruitment. How many times do you get fragged in an evenings play of the game? Then you realise you only have one life in reality, so the last thing you want to do it join the military!
Yeah, the "Fowers By Irene" one was drawing too much attention...
The point is simple. Building it made lots of money for a few companies that have "links" with people in the military who make decissions on these things...
The best way to explain is to give an example. Say you have two cards running from the same source. In order to get them syncronised, they would both need to be initialised at exactly the same time. If you didn't, it's possible that the first could be running with one second of audio in it's buffer, while the other has two seconds of audio.
This project raises more questions than answers! I'm not familiar with multicast, so I may be picking it up wrong, but as I see it, any media over ethernet is going to need some sort of buffering, to handle the times where the frames don't get through on time (congestion and collissions). Any design where sync playback is desired would probably need to design this in the the hardware.
Multiple receivers would be cool as well.
Anyone working on a wireless version? ;-) That would be cool, you could make portable receivers that play what is on your main stereo. Good for the bathroom/garden.