Now the RIAA and MPAA have done some nefarious things to convince people to stop sharing music and movies, but getting the mob involved.. I haven't heard that one yet. Even when they get Uncle Sam involved, there is a chance of due course.
That's because **AA is the mob; they don't need to hire more mobs to do their job.
Don't forget the difference between Hollywood movies and porn movies is that you at least get to see the titties and whatnot in porn. With today's Hollywood movies, they're all basically super-softcore porn anyhow (plot et al.).
But there's a huge difference between physical items and digital items. If you rip DVDs from Netflix, they don't magically delete themselve off your computer when you return the DVD or cease your subscription with them.
OpenBSD is mainly developed in Canada (and ftp.openbsd.org is hosted in Canada), so I don't see why US law is worth worrying about to them. In fact, it usually isn't (unless the US law is basically the same as the Canadian law in a particular area).
Yet even by dismantling the internet, real piracy will continue to exist. I'm talking about the people who work at DVD pressing factories typically on the eastern half of the world. Those people can easily create mass copies of discs and sell them at cheap prices. I've heard how bad it is in some countries where you can't even find a legitimate DVD; they're all pirated copies.
You've completely fucking missed the point. Locks protect physical property. Y'know, things that can be stolen and prosecuted for in a criminal court of law. Locking up 0's and 1's that can be losslessly copied doesn't even make sense. You can't lock up a public idea (although you can keep it private, but now you no longer will be making money by publishing it), so don't even begin to make that comparison.
I've heard from school network admins that doing a school's IT is the worst. Some teachers don't have the slightest clue on how to even turn on their computer let alone use it, while many students are constantly trying to blackhat the network. In a normal job, you could just get the troublemakers fired, but you can't exactly fire a student for messing around with the network (especially with an apathetic school administration if applicable). Then you have state or local laws requiring crap like nanny software to be installed to "protect the children", so it's not like you can just let everyone go wherever they want without legal repercussions.
I truly do feel sorry for school IT admins, but I do wish they'd at least get out of the way of those students that would otherwise just end up constantly trying to bring the entire network down out of their own frustrations with their arbitrary limitations while you're frustratingly trying to explain how to "right click" something to some old fart of a teacher. Students like you should be left alone; they obviously know what they're doing, so much less maintenance is necessary for that particular luser.
For the shell scripts thing, use "white-space: pre-wrap;". Most of your other problems have already been solved or probably will be in CSS 2.1 and CSS 3.
You write a single CSS file (which will get cached on the user agent's end). You have multiple pages on your site. You've just saved an asswad of bandwidth if you get a bunch of users.
Using CSS, you can cut down the size of the markup pages to negligible, and a one-time download of a CSS file isn't bad either. Downloading a crapload of useless tables that don't even show tabular content (y'know, more than one column and one row, each column and row is related to each other somehow, a "table" of "data" if you will) wastes a lot of space and bandwidth even in the short run.
Templates may be part of MVC, but if you ignore the fact that the model is the XHTML and the view is the CSS, you're already defeating the purpose of using MVC in a web application by not even using it.
But tables are way, way easier to learn than css layout is.
I think I can speak for most people who have used CSS for a while by saying that once you actually know how to use CSS, table layouts are far harder, tedious, and time-consuming than semantic markup and some CSS. I'd recommend trying to redesign a table-based site (with no tabular content to boot; that's like using a spreadsheet program as an actual database). Oh wait, that might take a while as you have to change every fucking page and deprecated element to match your new idea for a theme. Or, you could edit a single CSS file and have a completely new theme and layout (like Slashdot did).
Hey now, what's wrong with Chrono Trigger? You do need it after all to revive--oh, the game, not the item. Hey, it's another great game, but no game is worth being elitist about.
Microsoft doesn't want to pay the extortion fees either. It seems that tech companies are the ones who have most to lose, while the big media companies that already exist can just turn the internet into cable TV.
You can still mod your game consoles. Even if the DMCA were somehow able to prevent the sale of mod chips, you could still hack your own mod chip together with some instructions a some experience with EE.
Just to nitpick, but the USA PATRIOT Act was also an acronym, yet you didn't include that with your acronym list. Many bills are given corny and sometimes misleading names that spell out something stupid as an acronym.
Pretty much all printers nowadays support both PostScript and direct PDF printing besides their native printer language (if it's not PS or PDF). Getting printers to support XPS would take a while, and first XPS would have to be popular enough to warrant it. However, without the bonus of direct printing like with PDF, hardly anyone (with influence) will support it. Don't forget, Adobe InDesign (document layout and publishing program, others include Quark XPress) likes to export to PDF, and since PDF is Adobe's standard, I don't think they'll be too keen on pushing that out the door.
Now if XPS isn't released as an unencumbered, open standard, it will fail miserably. Microsoft isn't Adobe, so they can't get away with a new format in Adobe's big fields without the advantages of open standards.
Firefox 3.0 is a long way away, and there's still Firefox 2.0 along with its security releases through Firefox 3.0's early lifetime as well. By the time 3.0 is absolutely necessary, the pre-2K computers could have already upgraded to Ubuntu.
And don't tell me you don't think it wasn't the **AA's who lobbied in Europe to pass these draconian IP laws? Since nobody wanted it here, they went to other countries, bribed them into passing the laws in question, then the US passed the laws to "harmonise" with other countries. Politicians were able to get their bribes from the **AA without the responsibility of passing the bought laws in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Just use the Ogg link. I'd assume those work in Windows as well provided you using a good media player like VLC.
Don't forget the difference between Hollywood movies and porn movies is that you at least get to see the titties and whatnot in porn. With today's Hollywood movies, they're all basically super-softcore porn anyhow (plot et al.).
But there's a huge difference between physical items and digital items. If you rip DVDs from Netflix, they don't magically delete themselve off your computer when you return the DVD or cease your subscription with them.
Well, there's Gnash, but that's besides the point.
OpenBSD is mainly developed in Canada (and ftp.openbsd.org is hosted in Canada), so I don't see why US law is worth worrying about to them. In fact, it usually isn't (unless the US law is basically the same as the Canadian law in a particular area).
Theo de Raadt, is that you?
Yet even by dismantling the internet, real piracy will continue to exist. I'm talking about the people who work at DVD pressing factories typically on the eastern half of the world. Those people can easily create mass copies of discs and sell them at cheap prices. I've heard how bad it is in some countries where you can't even find a legitimate DVD; they're all pirated copies.
You've completely fucking missed the point. Locks protect physical property. Y'know, things that can be stolen and prosecuted for in a criminal court of law. Locking up 0's and 1's that can be losslessly copied doesn't even make sense. You can't lock up a public idea (although you can keep it private, but now you no longer will be making money by publishing it), so don't even begin to make that comparison.
What, like Freudian Boxers or something?
Oh, but Al Franken can pwn her any day. Take for instance, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. He totally thrashes her in a few of the chapters.
I've heard from school network admins that doing a school's IT is the worst. Some teachers don't have the slightest clue on how to even turn on their computer let alone use it, while many students are constantly trying to blackhat the network. In a normal job, you could just get the troublemakers fired, but you can't exactly fire a student for messing around with the network (especially with an apathetic school administration if applicable). Then you have state or local laws requiring crap like nanny software to be installed to "protect the children", so it's not like you can just let everyone go wherever they want without legal repercussions.
I truly do feel sorry for school IT admins, but I do wish they'd at least get out of the way of those students that would otherwise just end up constantly trying to bring the entire network down out of their own frustrations with their arbitrary limitations while you're frustratingly trying to explain how to "right click" something to some old fart of a teacher. Students like you should be left alone; they obviously know what they're doing, so much less maintenance is necessary for that particular luser.
For the shell scripts thing, use "white-space: pre-wrap;". Most of your other problems have already been solved or probably will be in CSS 2.1 and CSS 3.
You write a single CSS file (which will get cached on the user agent's end). You have multiple pages on your site. You've just saved an asswad of bandwidth if you get a bunch of users.
Using CSS, you can cut down the size of the markup pages to negligible, and a one-time download of a CSS file isn't bad either. Downloading a crapload of useless tables that don't even show tabular content (y'know, more than one column and one row, each column and row is related to each other somehow, a "table" of "data" if you will) wastes a lot of space and bandwidth even in the short run.
Templates may be part of MVC, but if you ignore the fact that the model is the XHTML and the view is the CSS, you're already defeating the purpose of using MVC in a web application by not even using it.
Hey now, what's wrong with Chrono Trigger? You do need it after all to revive--oh, the game, not the item. Hey, it's another great game, but no game is worth being elitist about.
Microsoft doesn't want to pay the extortion fees either. It seems that tech companies are the ones who have most to lose, while the big media companies that already exist can just turn the internet into cable TV.
You can still mod your game consoles. Even if the DMCA were somehow able to prevent the sale of mod chips, you could still hack your own mod chip together with some instructions a some experience with EE.
Hey, at least Google continues to innovate. When was the last time Ma Bell did anything good for us? Don't tell me that inventing C was a good idea ;p
Just to nitpick, but the USA PATRIOT Act was also an acronym, yet you didn't include that with your acronym list. Many bills are given corny and sometimes misleading names that spell out something stupid as an acronym.
Pretty much all printers nowadays support both PostScript and direct PDF printing besides their native printer language (if it's not PS or PDF). Getting printers to support XPS would take a while, and first XPS would have to be popular enough to warrant it. However, without the bonus of direct printing like with PDF, hardly anyone (with influence) will support it. Don't forget, Adobe InDesign (document layout and publishing program, others include Quark XPress) likes to export to PDF, and since PDF is Adobe's standard, I don't think they'll be too keen on pushing that out the door.
Now if XPS isn't released as an unencumbered, open standard, it will fail miserably. Microsoft isn't Adobe, so they can't get away with a new format in Adobe's big fields without the advantages of open standards.
Firefox 3.0 is a long way away, and there's still Firefox 2.0 along with its security releases through Firefox 3.0's early lifetime as well. By the time 3.0 is absolutely necessary, the pre-2K computers could have already upgraded to Ubuntu.
And don't tell me you don't think it wasn't the **AA's who lobbied in Europe to pass these draconian IP laws? Since nobody wanted it here, they went to other countries, bribed them into passing the laws in question, then the US passed the laws to "harmonise" with other countries. Politicians were able to get their bribes from the **AA without the responsibility of passing the bought laws in the first place.