So, "Mr. Private property," which is it? Censor speech on the radio? You do understand that's a public space... right? As is the spectrum (as it has been viewed for ages). It's not something someone owns, it's something we long ago agreed to hold in trust and license to individuals provided they agree to live by the rules. You want to talk about censorship? What if the guy next door could simply fire up a transmitter more powerful than yours and step all over you because he didn't like what you had to say about the world? It used to be just like that - that's why we have an FCC.
The FCC has every right to prohibit "private property owners" from trying to lock down individuals to their own privately provided services - which is what often happened before the ruling prohibiting "private property owners" from barring otherwise legally approved electronic equipment - just like we don't allow "private property owners" to lock people inside buildings, use unsafe building materials where public safety is an issue, or hold individuals to indentured servitude.
Issues like this are why we have a government, you moron.
Anyway, you can't do any of these things with MPEG, because most editors don't do MPEG editing. Final Cut Pro and Premiere don't even do it (I've tried with v3 and v6 respectively). Why? Because it's lossy!
Hilarious. MJPG is "lossy" too and any editor that cannot do frame accurate editing on that ain't much of an editor.
Anyway, if all you want to do is chop up already produced content, ripping out commercials and such, then get a realeditor made for the job. I used avisynth for years, contributed to the project (and the docs) and I can tell you it has zero trouble giving you frame accurate editing from damn near ANY type stream.
And yes, sending uncompressed video over USB is heinously stupid. If you really care about quality then you get a machine that'll take a PCI card and add a forty dollar video capture card (or if you really care then waste a bunch more on a pro rig - whatever). But you can send 12Mbps MPEG2 (or even 3:1 MJPEG) over USB a whole lot more efficiently and it won't take 2GHz of CPU just to handle the communication protocol and on the fly encoding when you want dvr functionality.
If you're capturing DV you use firewire; if you're capturing HD and you care about quality, get a decent tuner. But if all you're doing is capturing broadcast TV or VHS tapes (and you really do care what the picture looks like) you're going to have to post-process it anyway and there's no fucking way you'll ever see the "loss" in the final product from that initial encode to 12Mbps MPEG2, much less high quality MJPEG.
complete bullshit. Follow the trail of money, lock up their ability to perform commerce, and you shut down the spammers. Last thing we need is to fund a bunch of vigilantes.
I dunno about that one part. Put on some lightnin' hopkins or stevie ray vaughan with a high power amp turned down nice and comfy, then feed the same speakers from a nice 6bq5 amp and really crank it. It's all subjective, but I can tell you I'll take the cranked 6bq5 every time.
I have a 600MHz PIII/320mb stinkpad running gnome 2.4 (mdk10 default) and a friend - whom I setup with a similar thinkpad (only a 366mhz system w/256mb) just used the mdk10.1 install to "upgrade" hers to 2.6 and even there the improvement in responsiveness could be seen.
Pedophiles are no more child molesters than are child molesters pedophiles.
That statement does NOT mean they are the same thing. Look up "situational offenders" - and then look up the APA definition of a pedophile.
Here, I'll do half the work for you:
A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger).
B. The person has acted on these urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.
C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.
Now, hit google with a request for interviews with sexual offenders and you will find a very significant portion of the known sexual offenders (and keep in mind this really only represents a fraction of all sexual offenders) are not pedophiles at all even tho they may have molested one or more children.
I didn't say the two lines never crossed - I said they are often parallel and sometimes even divergent traits (ex: there are many pedophiles who are not situational and would never molest a child and may even defend that child from others). You cannot assume a=p anymore than you can assume a!p
before there were cheap opamps there were tube opamps. An "opamp" is really just a high gain device stabilized by lots of negative feedback - which means you're just as likely to get a wideband (more than 500khz), flat frequency response, LOW THD signal from tubes than from "cheap opamps." Saying "tubes have significant THD" is meaningless and inaccurate - the fact is transistors generally have loads more of that "distortion" but they're so small it's easy to employ 100 or more of them making an ultra high gain (more than 120db) amplifier that can be stabilised by 100db of negative feedback. Take away the NFB and you have a VERY low bandwidth (often less than 1KHz) gain stage with very high THD.
It's comparatively easy to make a low gain stage with decent linearity from either tubes or transistors. It's not so easy to make a stable tube amp with 120db open loop gain as it is a transistor amp, which means a very good tube amp might have an order of magnitude more THD (ie.02% at 1khz vs.002%) - meaningless unless you spend your time listening for sine harmonics. However, where it counts, it's relatively easy to make a tube amp with 20db or so open loop gain that, with just a tiny bit of feedback (maybe even just a db or two) will be very stable and have very good power response... and low THD (as if that was what mattered).
The seventies and eighties saw a home hifi market flooded with crap gear from japan (Manufacturers like Sansui and Sony and Kenwood and Pioneer) that boasted incredibly low THD... and provided its owners incredibly bad sound.
Try it. Another exercise would be to try the picture from your local digital cable on a decent television set compared to the same signal captured into a PC and displayed on your monitor. In both cases the limited bandwidth and other distortions will help "blend" the signal in a (to most eyes and ears) satisfying way.
I've had scads of people tell me how crappy directv looked on my system (when I had it) and boast about how great it looked on theirs. Then I'd show them how stupendous DVDs looked on the same rig (courtesy a high end Panasonic DVD deck with 10 bit convertors) and watch their faces as it dawned on them how very much of the picture they were missing from their $1000 "tv sets."
I been doing this for years. If you REALLY want to do it up right you can't use these cheapass rf modulators, tho. It appears he has yet to discover the wideband beauty that is AM when properly fed from an old tube modulator stage.
Seriously. Listen to some Myles Davis or Gatemouth Brown through an old RCA tabletop being fed a signal from an old single ended AM modulator/exciter stage (ie "three tube transmitter"). It's been so long that AM has been out of favor very few realize nowdays how very good it can sound with "honest" frequency response up into the top octave... if you have a decent AM radio.
Look at the cutaway - it really is a "hot rod." It appears the n2o tank is, like, six feet in diameter and right behind the crew with the engine right behind that. Yeesh, it's almost like one of those jet powered dragsters with wings - and some brave soul is gonna take it into space? I guess the next evolution will be nothing more than a good flight suit, an engine, and some carbon fiber bungee cords...
Way back when it was in about version 2.something I sent money to the writer of ez-cd extractor. Back then it was (although it may still be) one of the easiest *high quality* rippers around. Last I looked it was up to about version 7.3 or so. Now, in that time I have moved two or three times (email, I mean) so I sometimes have a hard time remember which address to use to request the latest reg code - and EVERY new version lately needs a new reg code. Mostly this resulted in me not worrying about it (there are other ways now that are nearly as easy) but sometimes I'll want one of the features so I install it. Then I have to wait 3 or 4 days until he gets arund to emailing me my new reg code.
often I have used "cracked" codes because the feature I wanted to use was not in the "free trial" version. So I am a legit user, but I am using a "cracked" code. So how is it right I am to be treated as a criminal?
I sent the developers of ReGet Deluxe 20 bucks because I found it to be the "absolut" best download manager for windows. Unfortunately those wacky russians have decided I never paypal'd them that twenty bucks at all and have denied me support for quite some time. As a result I felt no unease at all about using cracked versions of their software.
Of course, now that I no longer rely on windows they have been replaced by a very nice OSS package - RIP ReGet.)
Quite frankly, I think ANY developer nowdays who tries to sell "consumer software" and worries about piracy is not too much different than, say, Dow suing that farmer in canada for growing "their" rape (or is it wheat?) when the seed blew in from neighboring pastureland.
There is so much open source software nowdays it's becoming harder to find "shareware" that ISN'T in some way based at least partly on OSS. I have no qualms with someone trying to make a living writing software, I just think they need to choose their market carefully. Nowhere in our law does it PROMISE you an income simply for offering something for sale, and there are limits to how far one is allowed to go to "police" behavior.
If that were the case then what would happen to Microsoft?
I've had the mandrake installer format my windows drive (an 80gb drive FULL of movies and music) without even asking first - just click "next" after assigning partitions and blammo, off it goes formatting everything without so much as a warning.
Which is entirely different than maliciously doing so. In the cases of Microsoft and Mandrake it was simply boneheaded software - in this case it was a boneheaded developer.
I would say the people using the app get what they deserve anyway. It's not as if there aren't many other ways to "convert" MPEG and AVI files. I've used warez reg codes on software I BOUGHT simply because the developers ignore their emails requesting new codes or even deny you ever had one. I personally ain't gonna use such animals ever again, but if I were I sure wouldn't use software from someone like this.
Any windows users remember a certain CD burner software that used to regularly come with "booby traps?"
Been out for some time. Everything from prisms attached to stovepipe-type light corridors to massive light fiber bundles.
What I find ridiculous is the notion that this place is somehow "safe." It uses propane, and it's underground - just close up the ventilation shafts, cut the DC lines from the solar panels, and wait for the poor souls locked inside to come out... or to suffocate.
I've used egold a lot and know others who have (the EFF even accepts egold donations) and I've never heard a complaint about the commerce in any independant forum.
Pretty ironic, people with insecure browsers and/or browser settings accusing others of being clueless...
Hardly. By any measure I've seen, MOST of the people who use the internet have spent at least part of that time looking for pornography. I'm willing to bet there are way more people wanting porn than people pressuring paypal to rebuke it in the name of the lord jesus christ.
Porn sites have traditionally had very high chargeback rates, tho it doesn't sound like that would have anything to do with this "fine" nonsense. Actually, that just sounds like a way for them to poliitically position themselves to avoid US "money laundering" regulations.
sucks to be them - they are nearly to the point of being useless when compared to (slightly more expensive) anonymous services like egold and slightly less known services like bidpay. I was one of those people who had his account frozen for no good reason and then suddenly "released" last year when they were facing all that pressure - but never again will I link a bank account to their service and I make sure my friends all know to do the same.
It might add ten percent to the price of a transaction to use egold instead of using paypal, but so what? I can get an actual one-time-use visa number (if I even need to - already it appears more services outside ebay are taking egold than paypal), make the transaction as I fucking well please, and don't have to worry about some bank nazis stealing the rest of my money because they don't like where I spent the last bit of it.
Actually, you can get a very good used laptop on ebay that will do everything one of these does, will run linux like a champ, and you can get it for $300 or less - heck, you can pick up a 266mhz machine with a 12" screen these days for as ittle as a hundred bucks. My own machine has a 13" TFT, 500MHz PIII, 320mb ram, a 20gb hard drive (with 18 months left on the warranty) and still could be had for less than what they are asking for this thing - and in another year the stinkpad will STILL be an actual pc that's worth something, not just another has-been trendy gadget of yesteryear (although this point may be moot - as that thing looks so incredbly ticky-tacky cheap it will probably be dead in a year or two anyway).
I don't get these "too fucking big for a pocket and too fucking tiny to type on" devices. If I'm going to have to carry something like this in a bag or briefcase anyway, why the hell not just carry a small laptop?
While I'm certain there is scads of child porn circulating in private p2p circles and chat servers, there is alspo SCADS of child porn being created in russia by people who have no direct interest in pedophilia save the money it brings them. hit google and type "lolita" then spend an hour or two following the trail of thumbnail galleries and you'll find plenty of stuff made by people who do it just for the money simply because they can. When you have streets filled with Millions (literally) of homeless children life tends to be pretty cheap. Instead of wasting money tracking down people who want to look at pictures we need to be spending money finding - or creating - foster homes for those kids sucking dicks in train stations and freezing to death in doorways.
And the people "consuming" this porn are NOT necessarily the people molesting children. The people actually molesting children are going to be trading their trophy shots in the underground, not visiting "mainstream" websites. My cousin ended up in jail for trying to fuck his daughter and he doesn't even know how to use a pc. Another cousin had her second husband imprisoned after she found out he had been repeatedly molesting her daughter (his stepdaughter). The jails are full of people who have molested children who aren't even pedophiles - they simply had the opportunity to fuck a little kid and got caught at it. Don't confuse child molestors with pedophiles.
Jeez, read the news. Lookup "candyman" for one. Recently there was another bust made in russia involving one of the biggest site rings on the web, although I can't recall the name of it. The news report said the sites (along with a car, cameras, lighting equipment, costumes...) were seized - but they are still on the net, so you figure out who's running the show there. The feds will bust a site operator, then keep the site open (yes, delivering gigabyte after gigabyte of real actual child porn - your tax dollars at work) until they feel they have enough evidence to nab the most "dangerous" visitors (frequent subscribers, contributors, people in authority over children.)
And how, exactly, would spending "the majority of child protection tax dollars" on running "sting" sites to bust visitors in the US prevent the exploitation of little latvian girls? More importantly, how would that protect little american girls and boys at all? It's nothing but a witch hunt and a complete waste of US tax dollars. You could lock up every pedophile in the US and the site operators would still be in business... their customers are all over the world.
I disagree with that part of what you said. Actually, with the cheap horsepower available nowdays I think CGI could be the tool that allows "little guys" to ultimately attract headliner talent into projects that otherwise might not get made - even if the script is for a very old story. There's way more to a film than just a script (although it, admittedly, starts there). But with CGI an entire film could be composited together without any onscreen talent (no Jolie jokes here) and shopped around in nearly complete fashion - no money needed up front for expensive cameras, location shoots, film labs...
I don't know how great or bad this movie is, but I hope it succeeds just because it could help set a good tone for the (near) future. Think how things could change if a few talented art-geek types could put together the proverbial garage project that draws in some mainline talent and promotional money. Here's another I had big hopes for, although it seems to be taking forever...
Actually, wal-mart could potentially kick ass here. Because they already have physical infrastructure all over rural america, there's little to prevent them from making some of those "supercenters" also act as local distribution centers. The stores are god-awful huge, the employees already at hand - all they have to do is decide which rural centers would supply the best service improvement for the most users, then turn over a few hundred feet of storage space to the venture.
Interesting info about the netflix policies. Still I'll stick with them until I get my UFO, space1999, Lost in Space and Twin Peaks sets completed... that is, unless somone else with a better price picks up on these offerings.
I don't know where you live, but where I live there still is no cable tv, and the phone lines often run for miles through the country before they get to the phone router on the highway. The only hope here for broadband is low-band wireless, and we're still years away from that. Unless the government decides next year to subsidize wireless with a TVA-like plan through rural america, something tells me netflix has at least a decade or two of life left in their current business model.
But I have noticed netflix is starting to slowdown in response time. My turnaround time with them is generally 1-2 days - sometimes it's just a few hours (get it in the mail, rip it to my hd, stuff it back in the post office box). For a while there I could get three new movies every week quite reliably, but now they've started playing games: I'm sure the movies don't take any longer to come and go, but instead of three days each way it's becoming four and five and even six days from the time I send in my movies until I see the next "arriving soon" notices in my email. At this rate I'm going from "about 12 movies a month" for $23 to maybe 9 and possibly as few as six. Given that I mostly rent foreign and old scifi releases (the 99 cent stuff at most stores) this is not a very good deal.
I hate the long drive and the selection isn't nearly as good at the "local" (40 miles) movie gallery, but I can rent five movies there for five days for only about six bucks - and two disc sets don't count as two discs, but one rental. That's half the netflix rate just for the inconvenience of stopping off at the rental place twice a week.
I hope to see wal-mart fire up the competition soon. Competition is a good thing:)
Watch it live? Dunno where you live, but where I live West Wing has been on hiatus for.. I dunno. Six months it seems. And when it comes back from hiatus it's unlikely I'll be able to rent the show on DVD the day after it airs. The NBC affiliate in my rural area still doesn't have an HD plan, but I can get a high quality, straight from HD, 480p MPEG2 encoded rip within 48 hours of the show's first air.
And yes, it's of substantially higher quality than anything DirecTV had to offer when I was a subscriber. DirecTV, IME, absolutely sucks hairy ass. Blurry, chroma-rich blacks that were inevitably any color but; images so compressed faces "float" in dark scenes like disembodied spirits in the night - just a very washed out, low quality image. People who think their picture quality is acceptable are either nearsighted or have not seen how bad it looks on an HD set compared to even a relatively low quality DVD. I used to have a couple of Bjorks vids ripped from MTV and DirecTV defenders were always amazed when I would show them side by side screencaps compared to the DVD versions.
Can't find West Wing? Get a decent usenet account and do a search. Or just visit the newsgroup "alt.binaries.multimedia.west-wing." When dark Angel was on, ditto there (abm.dark-angel) - and ditto (now) Enterprise (one guess where to find those). True, the older shows can now be had on DVD and many of those shows are on my netflix wishlist - ripping them myself is easier than downloading shows because I have no bandwidth out here. But when I lived in LA and had DSL I didn't even have cable - I could get anything I wanted via pacbell and I could watch that material anytime I wanted. Hell, that was like five years ago - the quality of the online material since then has improved tremendously. Thanks to folks in the socialized broadband-active countries in euroupe and asia, several groups even carry raw HD VOB rips and ISOs of DVDs.
Copyright?
Yeah, right. When Hollywood starts demonstrating a valid recognition of our society's collective rights, I'll show some compassion for theirs.
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The FCC has every right to prohibit "private property owners" from trying to lock down individuals to their own privately provided services - which is what often happened before the ruling prohibiting "private property owners" from barring otherwise legally approved electronic equipment - just like we don't allow "private property owners" to lock people inside buildings, use unsafe building materials where public safety is an issue, or hold individuals to indentured servitude.
Issues like this are why we have a government, you moron.
Hilarious. MJPG is "lossy" too and any editor that cannot do frame accurate editing on that ain't much of an editor.
Anyway, if all you want to do is chop up already produced content, ripping out commercials and such, then get a real editor made for the job. I used avisynth for years, contributed to the project (and the docs) and I can tell you it has zero trouble giving you frame accurate editing from damn near ANY type stream.
And yes, sending uncompressed video over USB is heinously stupid. If you really care about quality then you get a machine that'll take a PCI card and add a forty dollar video capture card (or if you really care then waste a bunch more on a pro rig - whatever). But you can send 12Mbps MPEG2 (or even 3:1 MJPEG) over USB a whole lot more efficiently and it won't take 2GHz of CPU just to handle the communication protocol and on the fly encoding when you want dvr functionality.
If you're capturing DV you use firewire; if you're capturing HD and you care about quality, get a decent tuner. But if all you're doing is capturing broadcast TV or VHS tapes (and you really do care what the picture looks like) you're going to have to post-process it anyway and there's no fucking way you'll ever see the "loss" in the final product from that initial encode to 12Mbps MPEG2, much less high quality MJPEG.
complete bullshit. Follow the trail of money, lock up their ability to perform commerce, and you shut down the spammers. Last thing we need is to fund a bunch of vigilantes.
I have a 600MHz PIII/320mb stinkpad running gnome 2.4 (mdk10 default) and a friend - whom I setup with a similar thinkpad (only a 366mhz system w/256mb) just used the mdk10.1 install to "upgrade" hers to 2.6 and even there the improvement in responsiveness could be seen.
That statement does NOT mean they are the same thing. Look up "situational offenders" - and then look up the APA definition of a pedophile.
Here, I'll do half the work for you:
A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger).
B. The person has acted on these urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.
C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.
Now, hit google with a request for interviews with sexual offenders and you will find a very significant portion of the known sexual offenders (and keep in mind this really only represents a fraction of all sexual offenders) are not pedophiles at all even tho they may have molested one or more children.
I didn't say the two lines never crossed - I said they are often parallel and sometimes even divergent traits (ex: there are many pedophiles who are not situational and would never molest a child and may even defend that child from others). You cannot assume a=p anymore than you can assume a!p
It's comparatively easy to make a low gain stage with decent linearity from either tubes or transistors. It's not so easy to make a stable tube amp with 120db open loop gain as it is a transistor amp, which means a very good tube amp might have an order of magnitude more THD (ie .02% at 1khz vs .002%) - meaningless unless you spend your time listening for sine harmonics. However, where it counts, it's relatively easy to make a tube amp with 20db or so open loop gain that, with just a tiny bit of feedback (maybe even just a db or two) will be very stable and have very good power response... and low THD (as if that was what mattered).
The seventies and eighties saw a home hifi market flooded with crap gear from japan (Manufacturers like Sansui and Sony and Kenwood and Pioneer) that boasted incredibly low THD... and provided its owners incredibly bad sound.
I've had scads of people tell me how crappy directv looked on my system (when I had it) and boast about how great it looked on theirs. Then I'd show them how stupendous DVDs looked on the same rig (courtesy a high end Panasonic DVD deck with 10 bit convertors) and watch their faces as it dawned on them how very much of the picture they were missing from their $1000 "tv sets."
Seriously. Listen to some Myles Davis or Gatemouth Brown through an old RCA tabletop being fed a signal from an old single ended AM modulator/exciter stage (ie "three tube transmitter"). It's been so long that AM has been out of favor very few realize nowdays how very good it can sound with "honest" frequency response up into the top octave... if you have a decent AM radio.
Except one is more affective than the other...
I'm also sick of seeing apostrophe's being used like sugar at a soda fountain...
Look at the cutaway - it really is a "hot rod." It appears the n2o tank is, like, six feet in diameter and right behind the crew with the engine right behind that. Yeesh, it's almost like one of those jet powered dragsters with wings - and some brave soul is gonna take it into space? I guess the next evolution will be nothing more than a good flight suit, an engine, and some carbon fiber bungee cords...
often I have used "cracked" codes because the feature I wanted to use was not in the "free trial" version. So I am a legit user, but I am using a "cracked" code. So how is it right I am to be treated as a criminal?
I sent the developers of ReGet Deluxe 20 bucks because I found it to be the "absolut" best download manager for windows. Unfortunately those wacky russians have decided I never paypal'd them that twenty bucks at all and have denied me support for quite some time. As a result I felt no unease at all about using cracked versions of their software.
Of course, now that I no longer rely on windows they have been replaced by a very nice OSS package - RIP ReGet.) Quite frankly, I think ANY developer nowdays who tries to sell "consumer software" and worries about piracy is not too much different than, say, Dow suing that farmer in canada for growing "their" rape (or is it wheat?) when the seed blew in from neighboring pastureland.
There is so much open source software nowdays it's becoming harder to find "shareware" that ISN'T in some way based at least partly on OSS. I have no qualms with someone trying to make a living writing software, I just think they need to choose their market carefully. Nowhere in our law does it PROMISE you an income simply for offering something for sale, and there are limits to how far one is allowed to go to "police" behavior.
I've had the mandrake installer format my windows drive (an 80gb drive FULL of movies and music) without even asking first - just click "next" after assigning partitions and blammo, off it goes formatting everything without so much as a warning.
Which is entirely different than maliciously doing so. In the cases of Microsoft and Mandrake it was simply boneheaded software - in this case it was a boneheaded developer.
I would say the people using the app get what they deserve anyway. It's not as if there aren't many other ways to "convert" MPEG and AVI files. I've used warez reg codes on software I BOUGHT simply because the developers ignore their emails requesting new codes or even deny you ever had one. I personally ain't gonna use such animals ever again, but if I were I sure wouldn't use software from someone like this.
Any windows users remember a certain CD burner software that used to regularly come with "booby traps?"
Anyone know whatever became of that guy?
What I find ridiculous is the notion that this place is somehow "safe." It uses propane, and it's underground - just close up the ventilation shafts, cut the DC lines from the solar panels, and wait for the poor souls locked inside to come out... or to suffocate.
If you want people to take what you say seriously, have the balls to take the heat - and post without the AC on.
That's because you didn't tell it not to.
I've used egold a lot and know others who have (the EFF even accepts egold donations) and I've never heard a complaint about the commerce in any independant forum.
Pretty ironic, people with insecure browsers and/or browser settings accusing others of being clueless...
Porn sites have traditionally had very high chargeback rates, tho it doesn't sound like that would have anything to do with this "fine" nonsense. Actually, that just sounds like a way for them to poliitically position themselves to avoid US "money laundering" regulations.
sucks to be them - they are nearly to the point of being useless when compared to (slightly more expensive) anonymous services like egold and slightly less known services like bidpay. I was one of those people who had his account frozen for no good reason and then suddenly "released" last year when they were facing all that pressure - but never again will I link a bank account to their service and I make sure my friends all know to do the same.
It might add ten percent to the price of a transaction to use egold instead of using paypal, but so what? I can get an actual one-time-use visa number (if I even need to - already it appears more services outside ebay are taking egold than paypal), make the transaction as I fucking well please, and don't have to worry about some bank nazis stealing the rest of my money because they don't like where I spent the last bit of it.
I don't get these "too fucking big for a pocket and too fucking tiny to type on" devices. If I'm going to have to carry something like this in a bag or briefcase anyway, why the hell not just carry a small laptop?
And the people "consuming" this porn are NOT necessarily the people molesting children. The people actually molesting children are going to be trading their trophy shots in the underground, not visiting "mainstream" websites. My cousin ended up in jail for trying to fuck his daughter and he doesn't even know how to use a pc. Another cousin had her second husband imprisoned after she found out he had been repeatedly molesting her daughter (his stepdaughter). The jails are full of people who have molested children who aren't even pedophiles - they simply had the opportunity to fuck a little kid and got caught at it. Don't confuse child molestors with pedophiles.
And how, exactly, would spending "the majority of child protection tax dollars" on running "sting" sites to bust visitors in the US prevent the exploitation of little latvian girls? More importantly, how would that protect little american girls and boys at all? It's nothing but a witch hunt and a complete waste of US tax dollars. You could lock up every pedophile in the US and the site operators would still be in business... their customers are all over the world.
I don't know how great or bad this movie is, but I hope it succeeds just because it could help set a good tone for the (near) future. Think how things could change if a few talented art-geek types could put together the proverbial garage project that draws in some mainline talent and promotional money. Here's another I had big hopes for, although it seems to be taking forever...
Interesting info about the netflix policies. Still I'll stick with them until I get my UFO, space1999, Lost in Space and Twin Peaks sets completed... that is, unless somone else with a better price picks up on these offerings.
But I have noticed netflix is starting to slowdown in response time. My turnaround time with them is generally 1-2 days - sometimes it's just a few hours (get it in the mail, rip it to my hd, stuff it back in the post office box). For a while there I could get three new movies every week quite reliably, but now they've started playing games: I'm sure the movies don't take any longer to come and go, but instead of three days each way it's becoming four and five and even six days from the time I send in my movies until I see the next "arriving soon" notices in my email. At this rate I'm going from "about 12 movies a month" for $23 to maybe 9 and possibly as few as six. Given that I mostly rent foreign and old scifi releases (the 99 cent stuff at most stores) this is not a very good deal.
I hate the long drive and the selection isn't nearly as good at the "local" (40 miles) movie gallery, but I can rent five movies there for five days for only about six bucks - and two disc sets don't count as two discs, but one rental. That's half the netflix rate just for the inconvenience of stopping off at the rental place twice a week.
I hope to see wal-mart fire up the competition soon. Competition is a good thing :)
And yes, it's of substantially higher quality than anything DirecTV had to offer when I was a subscriber. DirecTV, IME, absolutely sucks hairy ass. Blurry, chroma-rich blacks that were inevitably any color but; images so compressed faces "float" in dark scenes like disembodied spirits in the night - just a very washed out, low quality image. People who think their picture quality is acceptable are either nearsighted or have not seen how bad it looks on an HD set compared to even a relatively low quality DVD. I used to have a couple of Bjorks vids ripped from MTV and DirecTV defenders were always amazed when I would show them side by side screencaps compared to the DVD versions.
Can't find West Wing? Get a decent usenet account and do a search. Or just visit the newsgroup "alt.binaries.multimedia.west-wing." When dark Angel was on, ditto there (abm.dark-angel) - and ditto (now) Enterprise (one guess where to find those). True, the older shows can now be had on DVD and many of those shows are on my netflix wishlist - ripping them myself is easier than downloading shows because I have no bandwidth out here. But when I lived in LA and had DSL I didn't even have cable - I could get anything I wanted via pacbell and I could watch that material anytime I wanted. Hell, that was like five years ago - the quality of the online material since then has improved tremendously. Thanks to folks in the socialized broadband-active countries in euroupe and asia, several groups even carry raw HD VOB rips and ISOs of DVDs.
Copyright?
Yeah, right. When Hollywood starts demonstrating a valid recognition of our society's collective rights, I'll show some compassion for theirs.