To the MPAA, everyone's a pirate. If you have a region-free DVD player, you're circumventing their market-protection system, and you're a pirate. If you crack the encryption on a DVD you bought so you can watch it on your laptop without the disc in the drive, you're a pirate. If you download the movie from a P2P service so you don't have to figure out how to do all of that, you're a pirate.
If you capture a screenshot from the movie and edit it to use as your desktop wallpaper, you're a pirate. If you copy sound bites to use as your sound effects in Windows, you're a pirate. If you say something bad about the movie in an email, you bring a cell phone with video capability into a theater, or opposed DivX players (the ones that competed with DVD for 2 weeks), or support DivX playback on DVD players (the file format/codec of choice for decent quality video over the internet), you're a pirate.
If you download mp3 files of Britney Spears through P2P sites, the MPAA could care less, except that you're going down the slippery slope to becoming a movie pirate.
This is probably true in the majority of cases, people resist change, after all. In many cases they may not have much choice in their lifetimes anyway, though it may improve the situation for future generations in the communities that receive the computers.
In my case, I was brought up on a succession of different operating systems, and didn't see a Windows machine until I was in my teens (I started using computers at home before I started school). I run Windows on my laptop for gaming, and on the other systems for ease of support (it's hard for me to support a system using an OS that I don't have in front of me if I'm away from home). If the laptop had more storage space and better support under Linux, I'd dual-boot to support my wife's computer use (as I don't see many reasons she couldn't use Linux), but that's not really an option at this point in time.
In other words, people would probably generally be better off if they were brought up with their operating system changing every time they changed computers. It would teach them to adapt more easily to different environments, and to understand the similarities between systems. However, for people in developing nations its obviously better if you're not paying a monetary price for the software on the system, and even better if those that wish to learn more about the underlying system can study (and modify) the underlying code.
That's a flawed example because it is not the case in that specific game. In GTA if you beat a random pedestrian with a baseball bat, you will very likely call attention to yourself and have the police after you in short order (much more quickly than you likely would if you did the same thing in real life, and with a much better chance of the police being able to identify you as the person that committed the crime in question). I'm not sure if GTA games after III and Vice City have skill points are not, but up to and including those games they did not, and it's hard to argue that you wouldn't become more skilled with a baseball bat by using it, even against defenseless victims.
--When any game (video or otherwise) rewards a player for brutalizing --a passive, non-threating character, I think it's reasonable to call --that a desensitization device
Now, if only there were some examples to go with here... Maybe I'm slightly behind the times here, as I don't have any of the current consoles (though I have all 4 of the last generation consoles (PS2/XBox/GC/DC)), but I haven't played many (if any) games that reward players for brutalizing passive, non-threatening characters. Even in the most publicized cases of people trying to censor and ban violent video games the games themselves attempted to punish players for doing so, or simply didn't present such characters to begin with.
It doesn't really matter anyway. All of our grandchildren will grow up in padded rooms. There will be no violence in the media, and the government will no longer fear the people, as they'll have managed to remove the brain's capability for violence, as well as the means to produce violence action.
Of course, watching kids' TV shows and listening to XMas music incites me to violence, so you never can tell with some people.
I could really care less, 99% of the time, anyway, if the President favors any particular state or not. In reality the position doesn't give anyone a lot of power to do anything for any particular state. Most of the time they simply get to take the blame for everything that goes wrong while they're in office, and once in a while they get credit for things they had only a minor influence over (such as picking someone that actually does well at their job in one of the few positions the President can appoint). Most of the time we just end up with people that make semi-informed decisions regarding appointments and the occasional veto, or just go along with their party's platform, and their historical significance is mostly determined by congress.
And the reality is that most people who are looking for information supporting getting their children immunized (or people supporting it in the first place and posting information on the internet) are obviously not going to YouTube.
At this point, though, you'd think that most people would realize that the majority of the vaccines being given to their children are, at the very least, similar to (if not the same as) those they were given, and maybe even realize that they saved their own lives so that they could have children.
And really, even though the Chicken Pox didn't kill me, I don't need my daughter to get them if I can prevent them, and if I can do anything to prevent her from getting an STD or cancer (or an STD that might cause cancer), I will. If I can't find a better reason to convince her not to have sex for a while (especially unprotected sex), that's an issue with my education.
Every state has their own method of replacing the senator, though it usually comes down to a special election. Frankly, I think it's a cop-out for a senator to hold their seat while they're running for another office, but then so few of them actually take the step of resigning the office when their party finally chooses them as a candidate any more (Bob Dole is the last I can think of).
It may no longer be their job to represent their state, but they may make promises in that regard, or be expected to continue the politics of the state they came from. On the other hand, the President doesn't really have the level of control that would allow them to help their state much, anyway, except to choose not to veto something that includes special interests for their state. The biggest power the office has is to hold up Congress on controversial issues that can't get votes to override a veto. Some people in Congress may see him as a leader to rally around, and he (like anyone else in the country) can put forth a plan of action for them to follow, but they don't really have to do anything he wants them to.
In other words, even if Clinton wants to do something for the state of NY, and gets elected President, Congress would determine whether or not she actually could do anything for the state.
I think a really big part of the legislation geared towards securing our children from the evils of computers, video games, and the internet has to do with the number of parents that don't understand these things, while their kids do quite well. My wife and I understand that our child does not need a computer, internet access, and video game system in her room (as did my father, though most would say he was ahead of his time), but many people do not. While we should be educating parents and telling them quite simply that they should keep the computer and video game systems in areas of the house where the parents can see what they're doing, we have to spend our time educating the legislature about the very same thing, especially since it's likely to take them much longer to figure it out (and they're likely to screw everything up before they learn anything).
On the other hand, far too many parents don't want their children playing video games where they can hear them, so they move them to the child's room, so the parents can have some peace. Out of sight (and earshot), out of mind, and then the parents are appalled when they find out the game they bought the child (clearly marked M, though the parent doesn't understand what that means because they don't read the 17+ part, or even necessarily understand that games have ratings, and the MPAA doesn't allow people to use their rating system for other media) includes guns and semi-realistic violence, they thought they were playing pong...
It used to be that kids got in trouble when they went to play somewhere out of your sight, and for the most part it was harmless or they got in more immediate trouble (for minor things), and people weren't afraid to tell your kid to stop doing something or go home. Now when they get in trouble out of the house they get away with anything that won't get them arrested because everyone's afraid of getting sued for telling a kid anything, and they have access to far more in the house when their parents aren't paying attention (and far more parents aren't paying attention, so that other kids may bring more into the house than they did in the past.
Then again, I was playing Doom as a teenager, almost obsessively, and amazingly I didn't shoot up a school or shopping mall, and have almost made it through my 20s.
The job of a U.S. senator is to represent the state in congress, making federal laws... It really has nothing to do with governing the state, which is one of the reasons so few senators have become President.
Then again, the Democrats are seemingly obsessed with the idea of having another JFK somewhere along the line, and he was the last person to go straight from the senate to the Presidency (without having to sit as VP for a while).
Of course, this year the front runners mostly appear to be senators, so we may not have much choice. Then again, I won't be voting for either party, as I'd rather see my vote go towards possibly improving the funding for a party I actually agree with rather than getting thrown away in the electoral process when the state decides to go with the democrats.
Under ISO 9000 there most likely is in some organizations. Or maybe that would fall under OHSA/ISO 14000. But it's sure to change next week when someone realizes their job depends on confusing people rather than actually getting a cup of coffee made properly.
I changed a flight (several times, actually) before I could finally get everything taken care of at an FAA site in Washington state, only to find that I had to go through extra screening at Sea-Tac before getting on the flight from Seattle to New Jersey.
Never mind that the FAA, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security were all in the chain of people involved in what I was doing in Washington in the first place, as apparently the TSA doesn't really care enough to see if someone's had a federal background check before they screen them.
On the other hand, I got through the security line much faster, but short 1 cigarette lighter (and they read me the riot act over that one, I assure you). Bonus points: security searching my checked luggage a few days ago handed over my spare lighters saying I could take them with me on the plane. Guess the TSA decided they were better off not worrying about what someone's going to do with a lighter or book of matches compared with what the TSA's going to do to dispose of the millions of lighters they've taken from airline customers over the last 6 years.
Many times a simple trip through the pages of one of the main corporate sites will give you enough information. For example, http://www.sonybmg.com/ has a link to a list of labels (though it's not complete, or there are many sub-labels to the labels listed), which includes Arista Records, Burgundy Records, Columbia Records, Epic Records, J Records, Jive Records, LaFace Records, Legacy Recordings, Provident Music Group, RCA Records, and Verity Records (as well as several derivations of RCA, Sony, etc). The strange part is that Sony/ATV music publishing is the division that manages (possibly the largest part of) the copyrights that Sony holds for music, so it would be assumed that this particular division would be the most important one to list, and yet it's not listed.
http://www.wmg.com/about/
Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry including Asylum, Atlantic, Bad Boy, Cordless, East West, Elektra, Lava, Maverick, Nonesuch, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Rykodisc, Sire, Warner Bros. and Word. Warner Music International, a leading company in national and international repertoire operates through numerous international affiliates and licensees in more than 50 countries. Warner Music Group also includes Warner/Chappell Music, one of the world's leading music publishers. http://www.emigroup.com/About/Overview/music.htm
EMI's record labels, which include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol,[...] EMI,[...] Manhattan, Mute, Narada, Parlophone, and Virgin http://new.umusic.com/Labels.aspx?Group=1 (Universal)
Geffen Records, Interscope Geffen A&M, Island Def Jam Music Group, Lost Highway Records, MCA, Mercury, Motown Records, UNI Records, Universal Records, Verve Music Group This page is also helpful, though it lists only the individual labels, and not where they belong in the list of major labels: http://www.riaa.org/aboutus.php?content_selector=a boutus_members
Honestly, compression is only an issue with a small subset of music anyway (though it may be a large portion of the high-volume sales). The real issue with the whole CD vs. LP debate is that most music hasn't even been recorded in analog in almost 20 years anyway, and hasn't been mastered in analog in 15 years or more. I don't even think most modern CDs include the 3 letter SPARS code to tell you whether it was recorded, mixed, and mastered in analog or digital. Most of the LPs I own were recorded in digital and converted to analog, not the other way around (for the CD version).
On the other hand, some people still use analog for various parts of the recording chain because they like a certain sound they get from a particular piece of equipment, and attribute this strictly to an analog/digital difference, even though digital components could reproduce the analog sound if someone took the time to make it do so (usually by analyzing the modifications made to the sound by the analog equipment and then reproducing them on the digital).
Since my car stereo is only decent, and the amount of road noise inside my car is insane anyway, I tend to just rip MP3s to CD-R to use in the car. In the case that someone breaks into my car and steals all of the CDs, they don't get anything I can't easily replace. I could store MP3 files on my XM radio (Pioneer Inno), but with the limited storage space on that device (and the signal loss over the FM transmitter), I'd rather just use the CD-Rs.
In general I would have to agree that the music industry shot themselves in the foot here. They could've stressed the increased quality of CD music vs. MP3 files (often, especially early on, in low bitrates), and then made a solid push for a new format with higher quality. Instead, we got another format war (DVD-Audio vs. SA-CD), with little to no support from the industry (just a handful of artists that were either pushed into it by their labels or were actually interested in remastering their music for the new formats). DVD-Audio has the benefit of playing at full quality in many (if not most) households now, but doesn't have the compatibility with CD players, while SA-CD has the compatibility but can't play at full quality without the purchase of new equipment by everyone. When I started seeing dual-disc releases (DVD content on one side, CD content on the other), I was hoping it would lead to a larger push to this format for DVD-Audio, but it doesn't look like it went that way at all (and in most cases the DVD side was just used for videos anyway).
I downloaded it twice to make sure the download wasn't corrupt. The beta isn't even remotely useable on my laptop (crashes and none of the menus are visible, the address bar text is not visible or enterable, and it won't even render Apple's website correctly).
I find that most people need to understand the link between the encryption and the "features" that irritate them before they will actually realize why this is a big issue to a small number of people. For instance:
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the FBI anti-piracy warning that everyone skipped on their VHS copies of the same movie.
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).
- Not being able to copy the movie to their laptop hard drive before they go on a trip to prevent having to take that stack of DVDs through airport security and possibly damaging the disc in transit.
If they understood the reason for the things they have problems with, rather than just blaming it on their DVD player or a shortcoming in their computer, perhaps more people would be irritated by what the movie industry is doing. Instead, the focus of most press on DVD encryption breaks is piracy and copying movies, when the reality is that most people would be happy just to break the format restrictions and keep buying movies.
In a lot of ways I see the same issues with CDs, where the RIAA shot themselves in the foot by saying people were stealing their product by downloading MP3 files when they could have emphasized (and increased) the benefits of the CD format vs. MP3 files. Anyone that listens to a lot of Pink Floyd and hasn't listened to it in any format other than MP3 in a while should throw the CD in the drive and hear what's missing from their MP3 files. Instead, though, we get the music industry trying to make people buy their product again, in a more limited format, and trying to find a way to wrap the older product in a layer of encryption to keep people from ripping the files to use elsewhere.
MS IS managing to do a few things to leverage Windows in the console space, but they're primarily small, value-added items that extend the functionality of the XBox 360 into the realm of Windows Media Center. They can basically put the 360 up as a media extender or possibly a DVR and extend the installed base if people see it as competetive in these areas. This will allow them, eventually, to get more games developed for their console, and possibly sell more games (where they'll make some money from the whole thing).
This follows along with the idea that people bought PS2s as cheap DVD players, and that people might buy PS3s and XBox 360s as mid- to low- range Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players, and then might pick up a game once in a while. In the console world your game sales make the money, but your installed base ensures that people make the games that your customers might want to buy for YOUR console, and hopefully not the other guy's console.
However, once someone has an XBox 360, what do you do to get them to buy the next-generation hardware? Basically they end up having to cut the 360 short of its full potential to give people a reason to buy the new one if they are primarily using it for the secondary features, much like they have with the original XBox. I think in the end the 360 wins on this angle over the PS3 anyway, because the market for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies isn't going to be there until one of them fails, if ever.
or Carcass, Dragon Force,... a lot has changed in metal in the last 20 years, and many people more or less trace it back to Carcass' movement from early Grindcore to their later work, bringing in Melodic Death Metal as a new sub-genre.
Many people were influenced by the speed of Thrash and Grindcore but had a thirst for more complexity (hinted at by early Metallica, Megadeth, and Testament (whose original lead guitarist now plays jazz primarily)). So, now we have Melo-Death and Progressive Metal (i.e. Prog Rock at metal pace), as well as more interesting musical choices in a number of sub-genres.
And do we categorize Painkiller as a metal band, or a jazz band? Many would argue jazz, and I might be inclined to agree, but really there's nothing preventing it from being a metal band, other than ease of classification. It's so much easier to throw music into certain jazz sub-genres, some of the more generic electronic genres, or industrial (or industrial-rock, industrial-metal), than to accept that so much of the music has a common base in older jazz and the blues.
Of course, you also have to realize that many extremely intelligent kids adopt a facade to prevent the feelings of alienation that hit them when they display their intelligence at an early age. Most of the metalheads I knew in high school were very intelligent, although it often took a long time for me to see it, even years after establishing friendship.
As the article stated, much of it is based on the needs of intelligent people to listen to intelligent music. Very few other forms of music take as broad a set of political, religious, and moral views as a basis for their lyrics, and these subjects appeal more to an intelligent teenager than the lyrics of the average top 40 song, or the subject matter of other modern genres of music that tend to appeal to people between the ages of 10 and 25.
Also, many intelligent people tend to be obsessive about skill in the various things they pursue. If you choose to listen to music based on the skill of the individuals playing the music, your choices tend towards jazz and metal, with very few other broad genres having as many skilled contributers.
On the other hand, there are some deranged people in the world, and some of them are metalheads, too.
Like many other situations (true line-item-vetos, for instance), neither party wants to change the current situation for fear the other party will benefit (or worse yet, those evil 3rd parties).
California is a good example, though, because Nader, for instance, could've gained as many as 2 electoral votes there, and Bush could've gained 20-something quite easily, while Gore would've come up with just 28 or 29, instead of 54. That's the sort of thing that could actually make a big difference.
Additionally, the only reason Bush is even paying attention to California at all is because his father was the last Republican to carry the state (but not in the re-election) in a Presidential race, and Arnold took over as governor. The polls certainly aren't showing him doing any better there now than he did four years ago. So, when both candidates normally ignore such a large state simply because state-wide elections tend to go to the democrats (look at its house members vs. senate members), splitting the votes would either not change the situation or would improve it, as the split in the votes can make a very big difference in the national election.
10 million people voted in California in 2000. There are more people eligible to vote in the surrounding county of any one of the three largest cities in the state. Of course, when over 4 million people in California voted for Bush, and weren't counted in the electoral college that ultimately decided the election, it's easy to see why so many people that are eligible to vote in that state simply don't.
If they're encrypted, how would anyone know if they were files for DNF or just kiddy porn, RIAA-infringing MP3 files, MPAA-infringing DivX files, and 0-day warez for a private 3DRealms p2p service?
Most of my CDs get used exactly once: to rip high bit-rate MP3 files to my hard drive. Once that's done, the original CD goes back in its case and on the shelf. If my wife wants to listen to it in the car I'll copy the CD while it's in the DVD-ROM drive, or I'll convert it from the MP3s (her car's speakers are so bad that very few people would be able to tell the difference, and I'd suspect those that do would attribute the problems with the car to the MP3 conversion).
I haven't gotten to this point with DVDs yet, but that's primarily because I haven't setup a computer in my living room yet (never mind the half terrabyte or so it would take to store them all at their original bit rate). Believe me, though, I completely intend to setup a computer in there, although initially the hard drive's primary purpose will be for storing those MP3s (maybe I'll re-encode my CDs with FLAC or something).
Multitasking as it's used on PCs is not considered a good thing on consoles, simply because the game developers want to be able to use as much of the system as possible. If you add multitasking to the equation, you get suboptimal performance from the games when people are doing all of those other things, leading to support headaches.
Beyond that, an OS as we think of it isn't really needed for some of these things. You just have to look at XBox Live to see that, with things like VoIP and Instant Messaging part of the requirements for XBox Live support, and WMA playback from the hard drive being commonly supported by many games.
In some ways, the APIs for these features could be considered a stripped-down OS, especially combined with the interface that comes up when a game is not in the drive, but in the end you still can't do things that the game developers didn't compile into their game when their game is running.
The PS2, especially when compared to the XBox, is a model of why add-on hardware is not as good as what's built into the original console. The only way the PS2 could ever match the feature set of the XBox would be if Sony had mandated support for the hard drive from the beginning, and the network access will never be the same as long as they leave it completely to the game developers (not that I particularly have a problem with that, but the experience is obviously quite different). One good example is saving to the hard drive, which can be done with every XBox game that has save capabilities, while I don't own a single game (except maybe FFXI, which I don't currently play) which saves to the hard drive on the PS2. At best it sits there as a backup for my memory cards.
Ummm... this is about Halo 2, not Half-Life 2. Obviously, since Bungie (the makers of Halo 2) are now owned by Microsoft, there's not much chance of a Linux port.
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To the MPAA, everyone's a pirate. If you have a region-free DVD player, you're circumventing their market-protection system, and you're a pirate. If you crack the encryption on a DVD you bought so you can watch it on your laptop without the disc in the drive, you're a pirate. If you download the movie from a P2P service so you don't have to figure out how to do all of that, you're a pirate.
If you capture a screenshot from the movie and edit it to use as your desktop wallpaper, you're a pirate. If you copy sound bites to use as your sound effects in Windows, you're a pirate. If you say something bad about the movie in an email, you bring a cell phone with video capability into a theater, or opposed DivX players (the ones that competed with DVD for 2 weeks), or support DivX playback on DVD players (the file format/codec of choice for decent quality video over the internet), you're a pirate.
If you download mp3 files of Britney Spears through P2P sites, the MPAA could care less, except that you're going down the slippery slope to becoming a movie pirate.
This is probably true in the majority of cases, people resist change, after all. In many cases they may not have much choice in their lifetimes anyway, though it may improve the situation for future generations in the communities that receive the computers.
In my case, I was brought up on a succession of different operating systems, and didn't see a Windows machine until I was in my teens (I started using computers at home before I started school). I run Windows on my laptop for gaming, and on the other systems for ease of support (it's hard for me to support a system using an OS that I don't have in front of me if I'm away from home). If the laptop had more storage space and better support under Linux, I'd dual-boot to support my wife's computer use (as I don't see many reasons she couldn't use Linux), but that's not really an option at this point in time.
In other words, people would probably generally be better off if they were brought up with their operating system changing every time they changed computers. It would teach them to adapt more easily to different environments, and to understand the similarities between systems. However, for people in developing nations its obviously better if you're not paying a monetary price for the software on the system, and even better if those that wish to learn more about the underlying system can study (and modify) the underlying code.
That's a flawed example because it is not the case in that specific game. In GTA if you beat a random pedestrian with a baseball bat, you will very likely call attention to yourself and have the police after you in short order (much more quickly than you likely would if you did the same thing in real life, and with a much better chance of the police being able to identify you as the person that committed the crime in question). I'm not sure if GTA games after III and Vice City have skill points are not, but up to and including those games they did not, and it's hard to argue that you wouldn't become more skilled with a baseball bat by using it, even against defenseless victims.
--When any game (video or otherwise) rewards a player for brutalizing
--a passive, non-threating character, I think it's reasonable to call
--that a desensitization device
Now, if only there were some examples to go with here... Maybe I'm slightly behind the times here, as I don't have any of the current consoles (though I have all 4 of the last generation consoles (PS2/XBox/GC/DC)), but I haven't played many (if any) games that reward players for brutalizing passive, non-threatening characters. Even in the most publicized cases of people trying to censor and ban violent video games the games themselves attempted to punish players for doing so, or simply didn't present such characters to begin with.
It doesn't really matter anyway. All of our grandchildren will grow up in padded rooms. There will be no violence in the media, and the government will no longer fear the people, as they'll have managed to remove the brain's capability for violence, as well as the means to produce violence action.
Of course, watching kids' TV shows and listening to XMas music incites me to violence, so you never can tell with some people.
I could really care less, 99% of the time, anyway, if the President favors any particular state or not. In reality the position doesn't give anyone a lot of power to do anything for any particular state. Most of the time they simply get to take the blame for everything that goes wrong while they're in office, and once in a while they get credit for things they had only a minor influence over (such as picking someone that actually does well at their job in one of the few positions the President can appoint). Most of the time we just end up with people that make semi-informed decisions regarding appointments and the occasional veto, or just go along with their party's platform, and their historical significance is mostly determined by congress.
And the reality is that most people who are looking for information supporting getting their children immunized (or people supporting it in the first place and posting information on the internet) are obviously not going to YouTube.
At this point, though, you'd think that most people would realize that the majority of the vaccines being given to their children are, at the very least, similar to (if not the same as) those they were given, and maybe even realize that they saved their own lives so that they could have children.
And really, even though the Chicken Pox didn't kill me, I don't need my daughter to get them if I can prevent them, and if I can do anything to prevent her from getting an STD or cancer (or an STD that might cause cancer), I will. If I can't find a better reason to convince her not to have sex for a while (especially unprotected sex), that's an issue with my education.
Every state has their own method of replacing the senator, though it usually comes down to a special election. Frankly, I think it's a cop-out for a senator to hold their seat while they're running for another office, but then so few of them actually take the step of resigning the office when their party finally chooses them as a candidate any more (Bob Dole is the last I can think of).
It may no longer be their job to represent their state, but they may make promises in that regard, or be expected to continue the politics of the state they came from. On the other hand, the President doesn't really have the level of control that would allow them to help their state much, anyway, except to choose not to veto something that includes special interests for their state. The biggest power the office has is to hold up Congress on controversial issues that can't get votes to override a veto. Some people in Congress may see him as a leader to rally around, and he (like anyone else in the country) can put forth a plan of action for them to follow, but they don't really have to do anything he wants them to.
In other words, even if Clinton wants to do something for the state of NY, and gets elected President, Congress would determine whether or not she actually could do anything for the state.
I think a really big part of the legislation geared towards securing our children from the evils of computers, video games, and the internet has to do with the number of parents that don't understand these things, while their kids do quite well. My wife and I understand that our child does not need a computer, internet access, and video game system in her room (as did my father, though most would say he was ahead of his time), but many people do not. While we should be educating parents and telling them quite simply that they should keep the computer and video game systems in areas of the house where the parents can see what they're doing, we have to spend our time educating the legislature about the very same thing, especially since it's likely to take them much longer to figure it out (and they're likely to screw everything up before they learn anything).
On the other hand, far too many parents don't want their children playing video games where they can hear them, so they move them to the child's room, so the parents can have some peace. Out of sight (and earshot), out of mind, and then the parents are appalled when they find out the game they bought the child (clearly marked M, though the parent doesn't understand what that means because they don't read the 17+ part, or even necessarily understand that games have ratings, and the MPAA doesn't allow people to use their rating system for other media) includes guns and semi-realistic violence, they thought they were playing pong...
It used to be that kids got in trouble when they went to play somewhere out of your sight, and for the most part it was harmless or they got in more immediate trouble (for minor things), and people weren't afraid to tell your kid to stop doing something or go home. Now when they get in trouble out of the house they get away with anything that won't get them arrested because everyone's afraid of getting sued for telling a kid anything, and they have access to far more in the house when their parents aren't paying attention (and far more parents aren't paying attention, so that other kids may bring more into the house than they did in the past.
Then again, I was playing Doom as a teenager, almost obsessively, and amazingly I didn't shoot up a school or shopping mall, and have almost made it through my 20s.
The job of a U.S. senator is to represent the state in congress, making federal laws... It really has nothing to do with governing the state, which is one of the reasons so few senators have become President.
Then again, the Democrats are seemingly obsessed with the idea of having another JFK somewhere along the line, and he was the last person to go straight from the senate to the Presidency (without having to sit as VP for a while).
Of course, this year the front runners mostly appear to be senators, so we may not have much choice. Then again, I won't be voting for either party, as I'd rather see my vote go towards possibly improving the funding for a party I actually agree with rather than getting thrown away in the electoral process when the state decides to go with the democrats.
Under ISO 9000 there most likely is in some organizations. Or maybe that would fall under OHSA/ISO 14000. But it's sure to change next week when someone realizes their job depends on confusing people rather than actually getting a cup of coffee made properly.
I changed a flight (several times, actually) before I could finally get everything taken care of at an FAA site in Washington state, only to find that I had to go through extra screening at Sea-Tac before getting on the flight from Seattle to New Jersey.
Never mind that the FAA, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security were all in the chain of people involved in what I was doing in Washington in the first place, as apparently the TSA doesn't really care enough to see if someone's had a federal background check before they screen them.
On the other hand, I got through the security line much faster, but short 1 cigarette lighter (and they read me the riot act over that one, I assure you). Bonus points: security searching my checked luggage a few days ago handed over my spare lighters saying I could take them with me on the plane. Guess the TSA decided they were better off not worrying about what someone's going to do with a lighter or book of matches compared with what the TSA's going to do to dispose of the millions of lighters they've taken from airline customers over the last 6 years.
http://www.wmg.com/about/ Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry including Asylum, Atlantic, Bad Boy, Cordless, East West, Elektra, Lava, Maverick, Nonesuch, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Rykodisc, Sire, Warner Bros. and Word. Warner Music International, a leading company in national and international repertoire operates through numerous international affiliates and licensees in more than 50 countries. Warner Music Group also includes Warner/Chappell Music, one of the world's leading music publishers. http://www.emigroup.com/About/Overview/music.htm EMI's record labels, which include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol,[...] EMI,[...] Manhattan, Mute, Narada, Parlophone, and Virgin http://new.umusic.com/Labels.aspx?Group=1 (Universal) Geffen Records, Interscope Geffen A&M, Island Def Jam Music Group, Lost Highway Records, MCA, Mercury, Motown Records, UNI Records, Universal Records, Verve Music Group This page is also helpful, though it lists only the individual labels, and not where they belong in the list of major labels:
http://www.riaa.org/aboutus.php?content_selector=
Honestly, compression is only an issue with a small subset of music anyway (though it may be a large portion of the high-volume sales). The real issue with the whole CD vs. LP debate is that most music hasn't even been recorded in analog in almost 20 years anyway, and hasn't been mastered in analog in 15 years or more. I don't even think most modern CDs include the 3 letter SPARS code to tell you whether it was recorded, mixed, and mastered in analog or digital. Most of the LPs I own were recorded in digital and converted to analog, not the other way around (for the CD version).
On the other hand, some people still use analog for various parts of the recording chain because they like a certain sound they get from a particular piece of equipment, and attribute this strictly to an analog/digital difference, even though digital components could reproduce the analog sound if someone took the time to make it do so (usually by analyzing the modifications made to the sound by the analog equipment and then reproducing them on the digital).
Since my car stereo is only decent, and the amount of road noise inside my car is insane anyway, I tend to just rip MP3s to CD-R to use in the car. In the case that someone breaks into my car and steals all of the CDs, they don't get anything I can't easily replace. I could store MP3 files on my XM radio (Pioneer Inno), but with the limited storage space on that device (and the signal loss over the FM transmitter), I'd rather just use the CD-Rs.
In general I would have to agree that the music industry shot themselves in the foot here. They could've stressed the increased quality of CD music vs. MP3 files (often, especially early on, in low bitrates), and then made a solid push for a new format with higher quality. Instead, we got another format war (DVD-Audio vs. SA-CD), with little to no support from the industry (just a handful of artists that were either pushed into it by their labels or were actually interested in remastering their music for the new formats). DVD-Audio has the benefit of playing at full quality in many (if not most) households now, but doesn't have the compatibility with CD players, while SA-CD has the compatibility but can't play at full quality without the purchase of new equipment by everyone. When I started seeing dual-disc releases (DVD content on one side, CD content on the other), I was hoping it would lead to a larger push to this format for DVD-Audio, but it doesn't look like it went that way at all (and in most cases the DVD side was just used for videos anyway).
I downloaded it twice to make sure the download wasn't corrupt. The beta isn't even remotely useable on my laptop (crashes and none of the menus are visible, the address bar text is not visible or enterable, and it won't even render Apple's website correctly).
I find that most people need to understand the link between the encryption and the "features" that irritate them before they will actually realize why this is a big issue to a small number of people. For instance:
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the FBI anti-piracy warning that everyone skipped on their VHS copies of the same movie.
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).
- Not being able to copy the movie to their laptop hard drive before they go on a trip to prevent having to take that stack of DVDs through airport security and possibly damaging the disc in transit.
If they understood the reason for the things they have problems with, rather than just blaming it on their DVD player or a shortcoming in their computer, perhaps more people would be irritated by what the movie industry is doing. Instead, the focus of most press on DVD encryption breaks is piracy and copying movies, when the reality is that most people would be happy just to break the format restrictions and keep buying movies.
In a lot of ways I see the same issues with CDs, where the RIAA shot themselves in the foot by saying people were stealing their product by downloading MP3 files when they could have emphasized (and increased) the benefits of the CD format vs. MP3 files. Anyone that listens to a lot of Pink Floyd and hasn't listened to it in any format other than MP3 in a while should throw the CD in the drive and hear what's missing from their MP3 files. Instead, though, we get the music industry trying to make people buy their product again, in a more limited format, and trying to find a way to wrap the older product in a layer of encryption to keep people from ripping the files to use elsewhere.
To add to this:
MS IS managing to do a few things to leverage Windows in the console space, but they're primarily small, value-added items that extend the functionality of the XBox 360 into the realm of Windows Media Center. They can basically put the 360 up as a media extender or possibly a DVR and extend the installed base if people see it as competetive in these areas. This will allow them, eventually, to get more games developed for their console, and possibly sell more games (where they'll make some money from the whole thing).
This follows along with the idea that people bought PS2s as cheap DVD players, and that people might buy PS3s and XBox 360s as mid- to low- range Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players, and then might pick up a game once in a while. In the console world your game sales make the money, but your installed base ensures that people make the games that your customers might want to buy for YOUR console, and hopefully not the other guy's console.
However, once someone has an XBox 360, what do you do to get them to buy the next-generation hardware? Basically they end up having to cut the 360 short of its full potential to give people a reason to buy the new one if they are primarily using it for the secondary features, much like they have with the original XBox. I think in the end the 360 wins on this angle over the PS3 anyway, because the market for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies isn't going to be there until one of them fails, if ever.
or Carcass, Dragon Force, ... a lot has changed in metal in the last 20 years, and many people more or less trace it back to Carcass' movement from early Grindcore to their later work, bringing in Melodic Death Metal as a new sub-genre.
Many people were influenced by the speed of Thrash and Grindcore but had a thirst for more complexity (hinted at by early Metallica, Megadeth, and Testament (whose original lead guitarist now plays jazz primarily)). So, now we have Melo-Death and Progressive Metal (i.e. Prog Rock at metal pace), as well as more interesting musical choices in a number of sub-genres.
And do we categorize Painkiller as a metal band, or a jazz band? Many would argue jazz, and I might be inclined to agree, but really there's nothing preventing it from being a metal band, other than ease of classification. It's so much easier to throw music into certain jazz sub-genres, some of the more generic electronic genres, or industrial (or industrial-rock, industrial-metal), than to accept that so much of the music has a common base in older jazz and the blues.
Of course, you also have to realize that many extremely intelligent kids adopt a facade to prevent the feelings of alienation that hit them when they display their intelligence at an early age. Most of the metalheads I knew in high school were very intelligent, although it often took a long time for me to see it, even years after establishing friendship.
As the article stated, much of it is based on the needs of intelligent people to listen to intelligent music. Very few other forms of music take as broad a set of political, religious, and moral views as a basis for their lyrics, and these subjects appeal more to an intelligent teenager than the lyrics of the average top 40 song, or the subject matter of other modern genres of music that tend to appeal to people between the ages of 10 and 25.
Also, many intelligent people tend to be obsessive about skill in the various things they pursue. If you choose to listen to music based on the skill of the individuals playing the music, your choices tend towards jazz and metal, with very few other broad genres having as many skilled contributers.
On the other hand, there are some deranged people in the world, and some of them are metalheads, too.
Like many other situations (true line-item-vetos, for instance), neither party wants to change the current situation for fear the other party will benefit (or worse yet, those evil 3rd parties).
California is a good example, though, because Nader, for instance, could've gained as many as 2 electoral votes there, and Bush could've gained 20-something quite easily, while Gore would've come up with just 28 or 29, instead of 54. That's the sort of thing that could actually make a big difference.
Additionally, the only reason Bush is even paying attention to California at all is because his father was the last Republican to carry the state (but not in the re-election) in a Presidential race, and Arnold took over as governor. The polls certainly aren't showing him doing any better there now than he did four years ago. So, when both candidates normally ignore such a large state simply because state-wide elections tend to go to the democrats (look at its house members vs. senate members), splitting the votes would either not change the situation or would improve it, as the split in the votes can make a very big difference in the national election.
10 million people voted in California in 2000. There are more people eligible to vote in the surrounding county of any one of the three largest cities in the state. Of course, when over 4 million people in California voted for Bush, and weren't counted in the electoral college that ultimately decided the election, it's easy to see why so many people that are eligible to vote in that state simply don't.
If they're encrypted, how would anyone know if they were files for DNF or just kiddy porn, RIAA-infringing MP3 files, MPAA-infringing DivX files, and 0-day warez for a private 3DRealms p2p service?
Who here actually backs up their DVD's or CD's?
Most of my CDs get used exactly once: to rip high bit-rate MP3 files to my hard drive. Once that's done, the original CD goes back in its case and on the shelf. If my wife wants to listen to it in the car I'll copy the CD while it's in the DVD-ROM drive, or I'll convert it from the MP3s (her car's speakers are so bad that very few people would be able to tell the difference, and I'd suspect those that do would attribute the problems with the car to the MP3 conversion).
I haven't gotten to this point with DVDs yet, but that's primarily because I haven't setup a computer in my living room yet (never mind the half terrabyte or so it would take to store them all at their original bit rate). Believe me, though, I completely intend to setup a computer in there, although initially the hard drive's primary purpose will be for storing those MP3s (maybe I'll re-encode my CDs with FLAC or something).
Multitasking as it's used on PCs is not considered a good thing on consoles, simply because the game developers want to be able to use as much of the system as possible. If you add multitasking to the equation, you get suboptimal performance from the games when people are doing all of those other things, leading to support headaches.
Beyond that, an OS as we think of it isn't really needed for some of these things. You just have to look at XBox Live to see that, with things like VoIP and Instant Messaging part of the requirements for XBox Live support, and WMA playback from the hard drive being commonly supported by many games.
In some ways, the APIs for these features could be considered a stripped-down OS, especially combined with the interface that comes up when a game is not in the drive, but in the end you still can't do things that the game developers didn't compile into their game when their game is running.
The PS2, especially when compared to the XBox, is a model of why add-on hardware is not as good as what's built into the original console. The only way the PS2 could ever match the feature set of the XBox would be if Sony had mandated support for the hard drive from the beginning, and the network access will never be the same as long as they leave it completely to the game developers (not that I particularly have a problem with that, but the experience is obviously quite different). One good example is saving to the hard drive, which can be done with every XBox game that has save capabilities, while I don't own a single game (except maybe FFXI, which I don't currently play) which saves to the hard drive on the PS2. At best it sits there as a backup for my memory cards.
Ummm... this is about Halo 2, not Half-Life 2. Obviously, since Bungie (the makers of Halo 2) are now owned by Microsoft, there's not much chance of a Linux port.