So then what? If I download from p2p or copy from friends, I'm a criminal. If I break the DRM, I paid for it fair and square but I'm still a criminal.
Downloadable music is the future. We buy our books online, hardware, medicine, news, advice, electricity and phone services. If something can be delivered directly as information like music then it certainly will be. It all ends up on our MP3/Ogg players so why stick to CD's as the transport mechanism?
Downloadable music is the future. The only choice is whether it's DRM'd or if we can keep ownership. Keep refusing the DRM and you will get the music unecumbered. Accept DRM and you will lose it.
A decade from now, DRM will become moral or immoral. But first there is a fight to decide how society will regard it and this has nothing to do with right or wrong - only which faction wins.
I didn't know that either, although I had a vague awareness there was something out there that would do this. The point for me though is that I want to buy the music but find it difficult because I no longer have a Windows system. While I had it, I'd buy a few songs every month. Since I went completely Linux I've bought nothing.
I know some people have managed to get iTunes running using Wine but it didn't look like a quick job. Once this is ported to Linux though, I'll resume buying songs from iTunes.
Result: Apple wins! And if they're smart, they wont fight to overcome this too hard because it increases their market withoutthem having to piss off the MPAffia to do it.
It was (is?) a part German part US tv series. I only saw the pilot four episodes and I don't know how the actual series (with a slightly different cast) turned out. It's not comedy like Red Dwarf, but it has a vein of very dark humour running through it. Be warned - one episode has Rutger Haur playing a psychotic transvestite gang leader, the supporting cast included a few dozen preserved (and kidnapped) brains and the highlight for me was when the ship was attacked by a 500' blonde in bondage gear.
Definitely get hold of the original four episodes. Definitely don't expect it to be anything like Red Dwarf and defintely let me know if you figure out why the shower in the ship's bathroom is a penis.
What if income from international sales were built into the show's budget?
Then that brings us back to whether the program is good or bad. First one's always free, you know?
Now if it's bad - minor loss through a few people being put off (few because only those who care about Dr. Who are likely to download the 350MB file). If it's good then major boost through distributing a sample. And it wont stop people buying the DVD of the first episode either because the quality and the extras will be better.
Actually, there doesn't have to be someone on the other end of the phone line. There are machines that will dial numbers for you en masse and the moment someone picks up on one of them, the machine connects that line to the person using it.
I'm not sure what form this machine takes (or if it will run Linux), but if you've ever received a sales call that begins with a moment's silence before you're connected, then it's likely one of these. And if you get silent calls, it doesn't mean you are being stalked, it's likely one of these machines that found someone else to pick up before you did.
I sometimes work from home and use my home line for business. These calls are a fucking nuisance that costs me paid time. If someone makes a phone with a Send-1000v-Down-Line button, I'll buy it!
Okay - I know that Quicktime is a container format. What I was saying is that I have all the codecs I've ever needed before, whatever is in it. So I'm hoping that someone out there can tell me what new (to me) format this one contains so I can get a codec and play this.
If you can play this, are you able to tell me specifically what you are using? It might help.
Well, I was wrong. I've now downloaded it and it wont play at all! Xine just gives me a long string of decoding errors. I've always been able to play other.mov files.
Is anyone aware of any new formats being used or can confirm whether this has worked on their system (and using what). I downloaded the 75MB file from the direct link that was posted earlier.
Well, I'm still downloading it (75MB) but it's a.mov file, i.e. Quicktime so you should be able to play it if you have the right codec. You can use either Xine or Mplayer and probably others. Once installed, download the codec for Quicktime (the standard package available from the Mplayer site includes this) and then once in the appropriate directory, you should be ready to go.
Sorry to answer my own question - probably bad form and all, but following the editor's link to his home page, I found this adorable quote:
I post on Slashdot as "timothy," to great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
So it's deliberate then, is it? If/. wants to be taken seriously, then the editors need to take it more seriously themselves and filter out badly written and self-contradictory articles like this one. There is plenty going on in the world of science that can be discussed and would be of interest to the/. audience. I was previously a subscriber, and I Meta-Moderate (usually upwards) to do my bit. But with editorial attitudes like this, what's the point? I'll look elsewhere.
Seconded! Who approved this piece of crap! I quote from the beginning of the article:
them on attracting the world's most downloaded program in history as a contributor to its coffers. With three billion files downloaded each month on Kazaa, the Red Cross could almost rebuild Asia single-handedly from what must be a generous pool of dollars from Sharman
Most downloaded program in the world? Rebuild Asia singe-handedly? This isn't hyperbole, this pure Improbability-Drive-A-Bole! The editor only needed to read three short paragraphs in to reach this rubbish! So either no-one read the article, or else they didn't understand what they were reading.
My two pence!
If anything, it'll give the NSA a chance to write their own worms before the exploit is fixed.
Which is an anti-selling point to governments in the rest of the world. If you were the Japanese government, would you want to know that the US were getting preferential treatment?
So either Microsoft is giving up on fighting OSS for other governments, or this program will shortly be extended to other nations.
And if it's extended to other nations, then all those posters who were worried about the USAF staff having advanced knowledge of vulnerabilities, can go into total panic now.;)
The tragic thing where Bobby Fischer is concerned, is that any child in the USA today that exhibited the attitudes and behaviours that he did, would be drugged up and subjected to a bombardment of "therapy" to make him normal.
Bobby Fischer is so good at chess, that most people aren't capable of understanding how good he is. But his genius is not a seperate thing to the rest of his personality. The next 'Bobby Fischer' might be into maths, or biology or physics and he's probably being blitzed with psychiatrists right now.
Well, you're right. D&D playing probably has a statistically small relationship to people's psychological well-being and if anyone's detached from reality it's probably the Israeli top-brass that are basing policy on this.
But I still think the little statistical blip is in the direction of D&D being good for team-spirit, anyway.;)
But it's ok, the trainers do a pretty good job of making even the most stubborn person a good soldier anyway.
Hmmm. I think you are right in this. If someone were unimpressionable then this would be less of a disadvantage for the army trainers, who have time, resources and unrestricted control over the recruits, than it normally would be for an enemy faction that were limited to the odd pamphlet or pretty girl in a bar.
Still, the point I was making was primarily that the military's problem is not a recruit being impressionable, they want this. The problem is, as you point out, the recruit remaining impressionable after he's already been pressed into the shape the army wants him.
Just to bring this back to the news article itself though, I don't think a D&D'er would be any more "impressionable" than average. It depends what you mean by impressionable.
If you're saying it means easily convinced of another's argument, then I would disagree as the role-player is used to playing and discarding different world-views / character types. This would at first make you think they would be quick to take on a different set of beliefs, but in fact they are more used to (a) detaching themselves from these roles-beliefs and (b) comparing these roles and choosing which is most suitable. That objectivity hinders others from trapping you in their own world-view.
Of course, this ability would be called too "impressionable" by an army where they wanted a recruit to adhere to a role best for them and not for the recruit. I think the biggest risk to the army for soldiers being impressionable today, is not an enemy nation, but currently peace campaigners and economists. I mean - how is a thinking soldier supposed to maintain the belief that he is fighting for freedom when he reads about Haliburton oil contracts and the rest of it? If all soldiers were "impressionable" then we might get into a few fewer wars.
Now, if you have any concrete examples to the contrary (regarding the training of the soldiers), I would like to hear them, but for now, it just seems that you're making this up (or heavily extrapolating).
As with many things, a lot of it comes down to your own view, reflected in the choice of words. It's like the difference between cult and religion depending on which side you're on.
And with Army induction, you could call it training or brainwashing according to your opinion.
First off - killing. This is not something that comes naturally to the vast majority of people. It takes an extraordinary amount of pressue for most people to go as far as murder. To bring these people to the point at which they will kill requires extensive conditioning. My source for this was a talk given by a US Marine in a documentary in which he cited casualty statistics from WWII and modern psychological testing that came out with about 2/100 people being "natural killers." Clearly something radical has been done to the completed soldiers if they are now nearly all capable of killing (not that there may not be psychological trauma afterwards).
Now as to the actual techniques of how this is achieved, I'll offer the following examples. Note that this is only an outline of techniques that on "the other side" would be considered brainwashing.
Firstly, links to existing social values must be severed.
Secondly, links to the new social values must replace them.
Common techniques used by cults, professional interrogators, etc. that are in common with the army are as follows:
restricted communication with family and friends
detachment: sleeping away from home / placed in strange environment
fatigue and discomfort, physical punishment
peer group pressure: suppressing doubt and resistance to new ideas by exploiting the need to belong.
disinhibition - encouraging child-like obedience by orchestrating child-like behaviour
ritual
communal eating / travel / work
lack of privacy
lack of control over own actions / routine
lack of information about schedule / routine
strictly enforced reward and punishment system for obediance
verbal abuse : including enforcing a willingness to accept it
dress code: removing individuality by demanding conformity to the group dress code.
Hopefully, it can be seen how these support the above goals of bringing the recruits personal values into line with the army's and fostering dependance. Of course, the graduate of this, will see it as pride in the army, serving a greater cause or simply having endured it and "become a man." Of course, regardless of whatever has been gained, the recruit has traded in some measure of his own ability to measure the value of things and accepted the value system of the organization. As I said at the start of this, whether you want to regard it as brainwashing or training, is up to you. If you consider however, that psychologically, the exact same process and attitude change is gone through by an Al-Quaeda soldier in Afghanistan (by incidentally, the US Army trained Osama bin Laden) just as with a US marine, then you might feel a certain cognitive dissonance if you think of them as different. In both cases, recruits come to obey the orders and beliefs without questioning them.
I remember a kid who was half-way through boot camp, telling me gleefully how he was on whatever his jargon term was for latrine duty. He took pride in enduring the punishment - doing it by hand! He was one of the best examples of the effectiveness of these techniques I'd ever met. He was boasting about having to scoop out shit with his bare hands.
Oh come on, do you even know how Israeli soldiers are trained, or are you just relying on your political views of Israel?
You know nothing about my political views at the time of posting, so please spare me irrelevant and baseless personal
The players easily adapt to the fantasy world of D&D, so their beliefs can be changed easily than others.
Assuming that this were true, then it would be a plus for the army trainers. It would make it easier to condition normal people to kill others and obey orders contrary to their own interests. That's what half of military training is about.
Being in the military is, by necessity, to be part of a team and the team has to come first,
D&D, and most other role-playing games are exactly the embodiment of this. They are about teams achieving things, and it is not uncommon for one member to make a personal (or ultimate) sacrifice so that the team can achieve their goal. What they seldom have however, is a strict hierachy. This is a good thing in that the team learns to work together through willing co-operation and pooling creativity and knowledge. In practice, this is not how a [modern Western] military unit operates. Instead, they condition soldiers to obey orders and not question.
If there is any basis for the Israeli army's bias other than ignorance, then it is the creativity and ability to think away from the official point of view that is the "problem."
Just too many D&D'ers must ask themselves what is the alignment of my army, and come up with the answer Lawful Evil.
You are wrong. In England, at least, it is a search warrant that is required, not a Warrant Card, which is just an ID card that the filth carry.
Just to back you up on this with some actual information, The Beat Officer's Companion (10th Ed.) states that a policeman does not have power to enter a private premises unless authorised to do so by a senior officer of the rank of Inspector or above. I believe the officer needs authority of a judge to do this. The main exception to this is arresting someone on the premises. If they're after material / evidence as well then they'll likely need a warrant.
If you're holding a public meeting in your house or something though or burning the house down, then all bets are off.
Inland Revenue. The tax office actually has greater enter and search powers than the police, in the sense that they need less judicial approval / paperwork to do it. They can be bloody sneaky about it too (co-ordinated raids on seperate premises etcetera).
Europe is still today rife with anti-Jewish bigotry. Just ask a Jew--if you can find one.
Okay - I could ask one tomorrow at work, but I don't feel the need. What in my post led you to think I was so naive? There's plenty of anti-semitism, anti-arab, anti-gay, anti-american, anti-men, anti-women, anti-black, anti-white hatred in people everywhere who are too lazy to think for themselves and want to blame their problems on others.
Call my statement 'bullshit' if you like, but I know a little about the time period and Hitler's government was based on suspension of the rule of law, secret-police and the all-time favourite of the modern despot, the nation being at war with (self-created) enemies. To refer to the Nazi government as being what the people wanted -the rule of the majority - as the parent poster did, is wrong. It is also wrong to assume that the German people had easy access to sensitive information at that time. Both total government control of the media and Goebel's propaganda ministry saw to that.
If I had my history books with me, I'd post some references, but as it is and you are so convinced I'm talking 'bullshit' then you do some research to show it. I think you'll find that things aren't as black and white as you think.
Even if that means killing all the Jews! How enlightened you are!
I'm not taking issue with the Europe vs. America stance, because I'm staying in the UK at the moment, and Blair is trying to force through new legislation that overturns the right to a trial. But you picked a bad example because most of Germany (which I must guess you are talking about) had no idea what was happening. Nor would they have been in favour of it. It was the exact opposite of the government doing what the people wanted.
Now back on-topic: what possible gloss are the corporations putting on these laws to spin them to the public. There must be something, however implausible.
Okay - cooling off period here too. I think we're talking at slightly different cross-purposes. I DO understand your point, but I still disagree with it. I'm afraid that this is possible.
I'll take you at your word that your objection is based solely on it being a change, rather than racism. My disagreement with your argument wasn't actually based on thinking that you're racist.
However, I'll summarise why your argument comes across that way:
Firstly you are objecting to a change. Previously you were basing the "Ford is white" belief on the books. The only solid base for Ford being white is the TV series. You could argue that the TV series is the basis for the movie, but many of us, more I should think, came to HG2G through the books hence it is not a change for us.
I think the second objection, which is more subjective, is whether Ford's race is actually a change regardless of the TV series. Clearly the actors are different races, but equally they are different heights, different hairstyles, different clothes. I could make a good argument that Ford's choice of clothes is more significan, given that the TV version was pretty patchwork and the Mos incarnation is undeniably stylish. What does this conscious choice say about the character as opposed to the happenstance of race? The point therefore would be why is race the big change that causes you cognitive dissonance?
The third objection is probably the most important however, and it is this. Mos Def seems talented, but your reasoning would be that he should have been turned down based not on merit, but on the expectations of some of the audience who think that Ford should be white. Ford's race, as you yourself said earlier is irrelevant to the character. So at what point does that expectation cross over into discrimination. For me, it has.
Now, I expect we have very different beliefs and attitudes to life, but we seem to both recognize that rationalism is the only way to cut through subjective beliefs and attitudes and reach some kind of truth. So I'm glad we're able to resume rational argument on this. I suspect neither of us is actually an idiot.
It's still not relevant, btw, but I'm not black (you guessed wrong;).
Slashdot Mirror
So then what? If I download from p2p or copy from friends, I'm a criminal. If I break the DRM, I paid for it fair and square but I'm still a criminal.
Downloadable music is the future. We buy our books online, hardware, medicine, news, advice, electricity and phone services. If something can be delivered directly as information like music then it certainly will be. It all ends up on our MP3/Ogg players so why stick to CD's as the transport mechanism?
Downloadable music is the future. The only choice is whether it's DRM'd or if we can keep ownership. Keep refusing the DRM and you will get the music unecumbered. Accept DRM and you will lose it.
A decade from now, DRM will become moral or immoral. But first there is a fight to decide how society will regard it and this has nothing to do with right or wrong - only which faction wins.
I didn't know that either, although I had a vague awareness there was something out there that would do this. The point for me though is that I want to buy the music but find it difficult because I no longer have a Windows system. While I had it, I'd buy a few songs every month. Since I went completely Linux I've bought nothing.
I know some people have managed to get iTunes running using Wine but it didn't look like a quick job. Once this is ported to Linux though, I'll resume buying songs from iTunes.
Result: Apple wins! And if they're smart, they wont fight to overcome this too hard because it increases their market withoutthem having to piss off the MPAffia to do it.
What is this? i must see it!!
It was (is?) a part German part US tv series. I only saw the pilot four episodes and I don't know how the actual series (with a slightly different cast) turned out. It's not comedy like Red Dwarf, but it has a vein of very dark humour running through it. Be warned - one episode has Rutger Haur playing a psychotic transvestite gang leader, the supporting cast included a few dozen preserved (and kidnapped) brains and the highlight for me was when the ship was attacked by a 500' blonde in bondage gear.
Definitely get hold of the original four episodes. Definitely don't expect it to be anything like Red Dwarf and defintely let me know if you figure out why the shower in the ship's bathroom is a penis.
I'd get hold
What if income from international sales were built into the show's budget?
Then that brings us back to whether the program is good or bad. First one's always free, you know?
Now if it's bad - minor loss through a few people being put off (few because only those who care about Dr. Who are likely to download the 350MB file). If it's good then major boost through distributing a sample. And it wont stop people buying the DVD of the first episode either because the quality and the extras will be better.
Actually, there doesn't have to be someone on the other end of the phone line. There are machines that will dial numbers for you en masse and the moment someone picks up on one of them, the machine connects that line to the person using it.
I'm not sure what form this machine takes (or if it will run Linux), but if you've ever received a sales call that begins with a moment's silence before you're connected, then it's likely one of these. And if you get silent calls, it doesn't mean you are being stalked, it's likely one of these machines that found someone else to pick up before you did.
I sometimes work from home and use my home line for business. These calls are a fucking nuisance that costs me paid time. If someone makes a phone with a Send-1000v-Down-Line button, I'll buy it!
Just for anyone who missed it above, someone has got it working on Linux. Just search above for mplayer.
mplayer -vc qtsvq3 -nosound Batman_Net.mov
Thanks for that. I must take the time to learn how Mplayer works properly. Incidentally, sound works fine on mine if I use SDL like so:
mplayer -vc qtsvq3 -ao sdl Batman_Net.mov
Have just finished watching it. Quite good fun actually.
Okay - I know that Quicktime is a container format. What I was saying is that I have all the codecs I've ever needed before, whatever is in it. So I'm hoping that someone out there can tell me what new (to me) format this one contains so I can get a codec and play this.
If you can play this, are you able to tell me specifically what you are using? It might help.
Same problem here but I haven't got as far as sound. Recent codecs, trying in Xine, can play
I have no solution, but it isn't you. Can anyone confirm they've been able to view this and if so on what please?
Well, I was wrong. I've now downloaded it and it wont play at all! Xine just gives me a long string of decoding errors. I've always been able to play other
Is anyone aware of any new formats being used or can confirm whether this has worked on their system (and using what). I downloaded the 75MB file from the direct link that was posted earlier.
Well, I'm still downloading it (75MB) but it's a
Sorry to answer my own question - probably bad form and all, but following the editor's link to his home page, I found this adorable quote:
I post on Slashdot as "timothy," to great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
So it's deliberate then, is it? If
Seconded! Who approved this piece of crap! I quote from the beginning of the article:
them on attracting the world's most downloaded program in history as a contributor to its coffers. With three billion files downloaded each month on Kazaa, the Red Cross could almost rebuild Asia single-handedly from what must be a generous pool of dollars from Sharman
Most downloaded program in the world? Rebuild Asia singe-handedly? This isn't hyperbole, this pure Improbability-Drive-A-Bole! The editor only needed to read three short paragraphs in to reach this rubbish! So either no-one read the article, or else they didn't understand what they were reading.
My two pence!
If anything, it'll give the NSA a chance to write their own worms before the exploit is fixed.
;)
Which is an anti-selling point to governments in the rest of the world. If you were the Japanese government, would you want to know that the US were getting preferential treatment?
So either Microsoft is giving up on fighting OSS for other governments, or this program will shortly be extended to other nations.
And if it's extended to other nations, then all those posters who were worried about the USAF staff having advanced knowledge of vulnerabilities, can go into total panic now.
The tragic thing where Bobby Fischer is concerned, is that any child in the USA today that exhibited the attitudes and behaviours that he did, would be drugged up and subjected to a bombardment of "therapy" to make him normal.
Bobby Fischer is so good at chess, that most people aren't capable of understanding how good he is. But his genius is not a seperate thing to the rest of his personality. The next 'Bobby Fischer' might be into maths, or biology or physics and he's probably being blitzed with psychiatrists right now.
Well, you're right. D&D playing probably has a statistically small relationship to people's psychological well-being and if anyone's detached from reality it's probably the Israeli top-brass that are basing policy on this.
But I still think the little statistical blip is in the direction of D&D being good for team-spirit, anyway.
But it's ok, the trainers do a pretty good job of making even the most stubborn person a good soldier anyway.
Hmmm. I think you are right in this. If someone were unimpressionable then this would be less of a disadvantage for the army trainers, who have time, resources and unrestricted control over the recruits, than it normally would be for an enemy faction that were limited to the odd pamphlet or pretty girl in a bar.
Still, the point I was making was primarily that the military's problem is not a recruit being impressionable, they want this. The problem is, as you point out, the recruit remaining impressionable after he's already been pressed into the shape the army wants him.
Just to bring this back to the news article itself though, I don't think a D&D'er would be any more "impressionable" than average. It depends what you mean by impressionable.
If you're saying it means easily convinced of another's argument, then I would disagree as the role-player is used to playing and discarding different world-views / character types. This would at first make you think they would be quick to take on a different set of beliefs, but in fact they are more used to (a) detaching themselves from these roles-beliefs and (b) comparing these roles and choosing which is most suitable. That objectivity hinders others from trapping you in their own world-view.
Of course, this ability would be called too "impressionable" by an army where they wanted a recruit to adhere to a role best for them and not for the recruit. I think the biggest risk to the army for soldiers being impressionable today, is not an enemy nation, but currently peace campaigners and economists. I mean - how is a thinking soldier supposed to maintain the belief that he is fighting for freedom when he reads about Haliburton oil contracts and the rest of it? If all soldiers were "impressionable" then we might get into a few fewer wars.
Now, if you have any concrete examples to the contrary (regarding the training of the soldiers), I would like to hear them, but for now, it just seems that you're making this up (or heavily extrapolating).
As with many things, a lot of it comes down to your own view, reflected in the choice of words. It's like the difference between cult and religion depending on which side you're on.
And with Army induction, you could call it training or brainwashing according to your opinion.
First off - killing. This is not something that comes naturally to the vast majority of people. It takes an extraordinary amount of pressue for most people to go as far as murder. To bring these people to the point at which they will kill requires extensive conditioning. My source for this was a talk given by a US Marine in a documentary in which he cited casualty statistics from WWII and modern psychological testing that came out with about 2/100 people being "natural killers." Clearly something radical has been done to the completed soldiers if they are now nearly all capable of killing (not that there may not be psychological trauma afterwards).
Now as to the actual techniques of how this is achieved, I'll offer the following examples. Note that this is only an outline of techniques that on "the other side" would be considered brainwashing.
Firstly, links to existing social values must be severed.
Secondly, links to the new social values must replace them.
Common techniques used by cults, professional interrogators, etc. that are in common with the army are as follows:
Hopefully, it can be seen how these support the above goals of bringing the recruits personal values into line with the army's and fostering dependance. Of course, the graduate of this, will see it as pride in the army, serving a greater cause or simply having endured it and "become a man." Of course, regardless of whatever has been gained, the recruit has traded in some measure of his own ability to measure the value of things and accepted the value system of the organization. As I said at the start of this, whether you want to regard it as brainwashing or training, is up to you. If you consider however, that psychologically, the exact same process and attitude change is gone through by an Al-Quaeda soldier in Afghanistan (by incidentally, the US Army trained Osama bin Laden) just as with a US marine, then you might feel a certain cognitive dissonance if you think of them as different. In both cases, recruits come to obey the orders and beliefs without questioning them.
I remember a kid who was half-way through boot camp, telling me gleefully how he was on whatever his jargon term was for latrine duty. He took pride in enduring the punishment - doing it by hand! He was one of the best examples of the effectiveness of these techniques I'd ever met. He was boasting about having to scoop out shit with his bare hands.
Oh come on, do you even know how Israeli soldiers are trained, or are you just relying on your political views of Israel?
You know nothing about my political views at the time of posting, so please spare me irrelevant and baseless personal
The players easily adapt to the fantasy world of D&D, so their beliefs can be changed easily than others.
Assuming that this were true, then it would be a plus for the army trainers. It would make it easier to condition normal people to kill others and obey orders contrary to their own interests. That's what half of military training is about.
Being in the military is, by necessity, to be part of a team and the team has to come first,
D&D, and most other role-playing games are exactly the embodiment of this. They are about teams achieving things, and it is not uncommon for one member to make a personal (or ultimate) sacrifice so that the team can achieve their goal. What they seldom have however, is a strict hierachy. This is a good thing in that the team learns to work together through willing co-operation and pooling creativity and knowledge. In practice, this is not how a [modern Western] military unit operates. Instead, they condition soldiers to obey orders and not question.
If there is any basis for the Israeli army's bias other than ignorance, then it is the creativity and ability to think away from the official point of view that is the "problem."
Just too many D&D'ers must ask themselves what is the alignment of my army, and come up with the answer Lawful Evil.
You are wrong. In England, at least, it is a search warrant that is required, not a Warrant Card, which is just an ID card that the filth carry.
Just to back you up on this with some actual information, The Beat Officer's Companion (10th Ed.) states that a policeman does not have power to enter a private premises unless authorised to do so by a senior officer of the rank of Inspector or above. I believe the officer needs authority of a judge to do this. The main exception to this is arresting someone on the premises. If they're after material / evidence as well then they'll likely need a warrant.
If you're holding a public meeting in your house or something though or burning the house down, then all bets are off.
Inland Revenue. The tax office actually has greater enter and search powers than the police, in the sense that they need less judicial approval / paperwork to do it. They can be bloody sneaky about it too (co-ordinated raids on seperate premises etcetera).
Europe is still today rife with anti-Jewish bigotry. Just ask a Jew--if you can find one.
Okay - I could ask one tomorrow at work, but I don't feel the need. What in my post led you to think I was so naive? There's plenty of anti-semitism, anti-arab, anti-gay, anti-american, anti-men, anti-women, anti-black, anti-white hatred in people everywhere who are too lazy to think for themselves and want to blame their problems on others.
Call my statement 'bullshit' if you like, but I know a little about the time period and Hitler's government was based on suspension of the rule of law, secret-police and the all-time favourite of the modern despot, the nation being at war with (self-created) enemies. To refer to the Nazi government as being what the people wanted -the rule of the majority - as the parent poster did, is wrong. It is also wrong to assume that the German people had easy access to sensitive information at that time. Both total government control of the media and Goebel's propaganda ministry saw to that.
If I had my history books with me, I'd post some references, but as it is and you are so convinced I'm talking 'bullshit' then you do some research to show it. I think you'll find that things aren't as black and white as you think.
Even if that means killing all the Jews! How enlightened you are!
I'm not taking issue with the Europe vs. America stance, because I'm staying in the UK at the moment, and Blair is trying to force through new legislation that overturns the right to a trial. But you picked a bad example because most of Germany (which I must guess you are talking about) had no idea what was happening. Nor would they have been in favour of it. It was the exact opposite of the government doing what the people wanted.
Now back on-topic: what possible gloss are the corporations putting on these laws to spin them to the public. There must be something, however implausible.
Okay - cooling off period here too. I think we're talking at slightly different cross-purposes. I DO understand your point, but I still disagree with it. I'm afraid that this is possible.
I'll take you at your word that your objection is based solely on it being a change, rather than racism. My disagreement with your argument wasn't actually based on thinking that you're racist.
However, I'll summarise why your argument comes across that way:
Firstly you are objecting to a change. Previously you were basing the "Ford is white" belief on the books. The only solid base for Ford being white is the TV series. You could argue that the TV series is the basis for the movie, but many of us, more I should think, came to HG2G through the books hence it is not a change for us.
I think the second objection, which is more subjective, is whether Ford's race is actually a change regardless of the TV series. Clearly the actors are different races, but equally they are different heights, different hairstyles, different clothes. I could make a good argument that Ford's choice of clothes is more significan, given that the TV version was pretty patchwork and the Mos incarnation is undeniably stylish. What does this conscious choice say about the character as opposed to the happenstance of race? The point therefore would be why is race the big change that causes you cognitive dissonance?
The third objection is probably the most important however, and it is this. Mos Def seems talented, but your reasoning would be that he should have been turned down based not on merit, but on the expectations of some of the audience who think that Ford should be white. Ford's race, as you yourself said earlier is irrelevant to the character. So at what point does that expectation cross over into discrimination. For me, it has.
Now, I expect we have very different beliefs and attitudes to life, but we seem to both recognize that rationalism is the only way to cut through subjective beliefs and attitudes and reach some kind of truth. So I'm glad we're able to resume rational argument on this. I suspect neither of us is actually an idiot.
It's still not relevant, btw, but I'm not black (you guessed wrong