Instead of a fee based on actual disposal costs of your unloved computer, it turns into a flat tax unaffiliated with the actual cost of disposing of your computer.
I did not say anything one way or the other about it being a flat fee or specific to the model of computer. There is no reason that cheaper-to-recycle computers could not have smaller recycling fees at the point of sale.
In fact, if you are going to have variable fees, the best place for them is point-of-sale where the customer can use that information to make an informed decision when purchasing the unit.
One way or another, the customer is always the one who pays, it is just a question of "how much?" and "when?"
My preference is that the fee be levied as far down the "value chain" as possible - probably at point of sale, like it is for the states with recycle fees on soda containers.
Charging the fee at point of sale does a couple of good things:
1) The customer knows what they are paying for, it isn't hidden away in the total price. This knowledge helps to prevent the fees being raised as an arbitrary form of taxation - income tax gets taken out of most people's paychecks before they ever even see the money, thus obscuring the direct impact of the tax. I wish to avoid that happening with any new taxes.
2) If the fees were directly assesed to the distributor or manufacturer, then they would be inflated with each step in the process just as the price of the system is. In effect, paying the fee at point of sale is like paying the "wholesale" cost but charging the manufacturer the fee would result in it being marked up to "retail" pricing by the time the end-consumer pays for it, possibly even doubling the original "wholesale" fee level for no added benefit to the environment or the consumer.
People today are using BT to download games for their modern consoles and PCs. Instead of relying on game reviews and rentals, they're making their own digital duplicates and then deciding if it's worth their money.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
Says you. How is the scenario you described substantively different from people listening to the radio and deciding if the music they hear is worth buying?
This is hearsay, I have not checked any transport streams myself, but it has been reported that broadcasters have already started using the broadcast flag in almost all of their HDTV content. Sure there is not any equipment that obeys the BF, but they are probably thinking that since it is just a bit to flip, they might as well flip it now.
Assuming the reports are true (which is admittedly a fair-sized assumption) this near total use of the BF already puts the lie to the MPAA's statement that it would only be used to "protect" high-value content like live sports and broadcast movie premiers.
There must be a protocol, and I wish someone would clue me in.
You pay for a $10K per plate seat at a fundraiser dinner which gets you about 5 minutes of "personal time" with the senator - just long enough to identify yourself and your issue of interest. Then you get handed off to their secretary who will schedule you in for a regular appointment in the near future where you will be expected to bring a check for the balance of your campaign contributions and depending on the size of the check you will get some amount of time to make your case, and maybe offer to fund a fact-finding trip for the Senator and his family to the Bahamas.
if asked, I would accept the terrorist threat as one strong reason to be able to correctly and positively identify people.
1) ID cards do not gurantee the correct and positive identification of people - they just make buying a forgery even more useful.
2) These cards are not intended for identification, they are intended for blanket authorization - anywhere they will be required they become a point at which the holder can be rejected, even held, should the identity system label the card holder a criminal. That is a lot more power in the hands of the government than exists today, and a lot more opportunity to make life hard for people who are not criminals, just simply inconvenient for those who control the system.
If you disagree with #2, then answer what is the point of "correctly and positively" identifying terrorists (you know, the whole reason we gotta have these cards) if you aren't going to hold them when you do? Or do you think it will be implemented like the "no-fly" list -- a list of people so rephrensibly evil that their mere presence endangers an entire airplane and yet at the same time so lily-white that they can't even be arrested.
No, I didn't. I'm not arguing out of personal experience.
Hhm, when you start becoming internally inconsistent the jig is up, please count the instances of "I" and "my" in the following: "I seldom use cash which means almost every purchase I make, and where I make it, is recorded somewhere; if someone wants to know where I go when I travel, they can; my medical history is freely available to my physicians; my credit history and rating are available to just about anyone who wants to pay for it.
And yet, I don't perceive any loss of liberty."
Don't even bother claiming that your rationalization isn't completely self-centered.
You line of thought, such as it is, would, for example, lead to the conclusion that obtaining a passport will threaten an individual's liberties.
Passports = not mandatory.
Don't rant about the evils of government, or make vague allusions to "political dissidents".
This is your fundamental problem. Let's turn it around. You are ranting about how one more card won't make a difference and making vague allusions to "already subject to being tracked."
Your only position is to wave your hands and say, "now now, none of that nonesense," regardless of the points made. That's classic ostrich syndrome - limit your perspective to the dirt under a rock and of course you won't see the lion slinking towards you.
If someone is alreadu walking around with several forms of ID in his pocket, just what's supposed to happen when an ID card is added?
Wait, didn't you just say that "Certainly not from personal experience of ID cards, which do not exist."
So, which is it - ID cards are already so prevalent one more doesn't matter, or they don't exist? More internal inconsistency in your arguments, even within the same post now.
I can only conclude that your real paranoia is directed at the institution of government itself, regardless of who's actually governing at any given time.
You are familiar with the truism that, "Power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately" right? There is only one cure for that, and guess what - it isn't further centralization of power.
You liberals are all like, claiming "trust us, bigger government will take care of you" and dismissing the opinions of those with whom you disagree with snotty disdain - "paranoia", "You line of thought, such as it is," "Nice try," "Lame, but nice," etc. At least you don't hold office.
That's ridiculous. The coffee was so hot that she got charred wounds and eschars
If you were really a derm, you would know that "3rd degree burn" refers to a full-thickness burn - i.e. all layers of skin were burnt. While 3rd degree burns from flame or other dry sources usually produce charing, burns from boiling water need not and yet can still damage all layers of the skin.
It's impossible that she got more than 2nd degree burns in the most exposed area even if she sat and poured boiling coffee for a minute or so from a container that's kept warm.
The scalding coffee was partially absorbed by her pants and thus held against her skin.
No society is free if the individuals who comprise it are not free.
You make the statement but you fail to understand it.
You argue that you have not experienced a loss of liberty based on your personal experience. Not everyone is like you. Even if your experience is the same as the majority of the population, it still is not the experience of the entire population.
What "additional power" is going to be given to the government?
Answer this and you will answer your own question - Why does the government want everyone to have an ID? Why does the government justify requiring ID by pointing at terrorists?
She wouldn't be traveling with her grandkids then, right?
Read more carefully. Her kids were adults with children. She and the grandkids were dependent on her kids' earnings to survive. They were killed, so the grandkids were orphaned and in a perverse sense, so was the grandmother.
And at any rate, naturally the actual "flags" are much more complex than my crude examples.
Flags are flags. They are chosen by humans and since humans are fallible there will, by definition, be holes. All it takes is for someone to find a hole and all the work becomes useless. The ironic thing is that profiling provides a feedback loop - with a large enough control population, all the enemy has to do is send enough people through and watch who gets flagged for interrogation and who doesn't. Do enough of that, and the criteria in use becomes readily apparent to the attacker.
Besides, its hard to argue with success. It has been over 30 years now. Mayne, just maybe, they are doing something right?
As another poster has already pointed out, all they've done is harden one point of vulnerability enough to make other points more attractive targets. Targets for which there have been and continue to be constant failure.
So, tell me, how is one more card supposed to ruin my life?
Personal liberty is not for you. It is for society. Our society requires that the population be free to think, speak, associate and travel without some all powerful entity watching over their shoulders.
You are clearly not a political dissident. Nor a whistle-blower on government corruption, nor any of hundreds of other things that can be (and will be, human nature being what it is) surpressed with the additional power such a system gives those who control the government. While rare, those roles are critical components of our society and are a whole lot more common than the terrorists or whatever the evil-doer-dejour being cited as justification for these systems.
So, while you think you have nothing to fear from "one more card," by blithely accepting a system designed to curtail the freedoms of whoever the people in power consider enemies, you and every other regular joe will suffer from the societal pollution, stagnation and corruption that is the inevitable result of such policies.
while ignoring a 70-year old grandmother flying with her grandchildren back to their parents from Disney world.
In an Israeli airport, the grandmother would sail through security,
Sounds like a loophole to me.
Consider the grandmother who has had all of her children killed by the Israeli army and their home bulldozed. She is too old to work, her life and the lives of her grandchildren depended on the support of her now deceased kids. Without them, her grandchildren will probably end up on the Palestinian street and dead before they reach 20, she'll be dead in two years because she can no longer afford the treatment for her diabetes.
They've got motive and with the help of Hamas they've got the means and enough false id to pass as jewish. They can sail right through those profile-based security checks carrying enough sarin in mickey-mouse thermoses to kill everyone on that plane in minutes.
Profiling works by focusing your attention on people with certain characteristics and by necessity relaxes your attention on the people who don't fit the profile. As soon as your enemy figures out how to avoid your profile, his job gets 10x easier.
Might save a lot of time stacked up at passport control.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little free time deserve neither liberty nor more free time. --What Ben Franklin might have said
How about scrapping the ID plan, and instead taking 1% of the budget of the ID plan and using it to improve passport control efficiency by adding more staff?
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
I think you are mistaken. Every for-profit corporation contains a declaration in its founding document (Articles of Corporation) which somewhere explicitly states that the purpose of the coporation is to make money.
You are confusing job with purpose. Indeed, the purpose of a corp is to earn money and the way they are suppossed to do so in a free-market is by performing their job.
Just like most employees have a job in order to earn money to live -- their job is doing whatever results in them getting paid. You can change jobs and so could Ford but in either the personal or the corporate case, regardless of what the job is, their purpose in doing it would still be to earn money.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This - in my view - is one of the deficiancies of capitalism. It takes the eyes off what was supposed to be the ball, and instead force focus to profits
It isn't a deficiency of capitalism per se, but rather the flawed implementation of it that we currently have. There are two reasons Ford can be successful profitwise by making poor quality cars:
1) The market values cheaper priced cars over higer-quality cars - that is good capitalism because the market demand is being satisified. You may not agree with that demand, but it will continue to exist regardless and attempting to deny that demand would be an expensive, long-term loser.
2) The market has been manipulated through non-free-market forces such as government regulation (protectionism and the like) or information-hiding (like lawsuit settlements with non-disclosure requirements). That is capitalism diluted with corporate welfare and is completely bad and should not be allowed to happen in a true free-market.
Your example of the woman at the resort does fall into the realm of 'public performance', and as such probably needs to be paid for/licensed as required.
Only if the unnamed carribean nation has implemented US-style copyright laws. I bet they have not, which would make what the lady did completely legal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the library went to U.S. Biometrics to begin with.
10-to-1 somebody on the BoD of US Biometrics or an influential shareholder is also connected to the library system. I've seen the same thing in the Boulder, CO area. A local library in one of the nearby communities just out of the blue decides it needs a big brand spanking new building to "better serve the patrons" a few years back.
Turned out that a member of the library's board owns the construction company that is going to build the library and another one owns the land that the library is buying to build on.
The guy is an employee and his employer has ever right to control what he says, especially when he says it on his employee's dime and on his employee's property.
His employer is the student body, the administration is just a proxy for them. Since he was able to attract an audience of 150 students, by definition he was doing exactly what his employer wished.
The problem here is that the administration, like yourself, have forgotten that they are just a proxy for the student body and have started to think they are the actual employer.
I went home as promised and looked at my walmart purchased lawnmower man DVD. It is double-sided and it has exactly the same deleted scenes as he specified. You are wrong about seeing them in the theater, imdb specifically lists them as part of a director's cut.
As for your DVD being single-sided, Sony-tristar-columbia has a despicable practice of silently converting their double-sided releases into single-sided ones to save a few pennies. They do this without changing the UPC and sometimes the first pressings still use the old artwork that claims double-sided. Usually this means dropping the widescreen side and keeping the foolscreen side. These discs often show up in wal-marts dump bins before they show up anywhere else, but eventually they replace the title at all retailers. Also, when wal-mart first adds a title to a dump-bin it is still double-sided and only turns into single-sided after a few restocks.
Now, that is sony and Lawnmower man is Newline, but maybe they do the same kind of thing too - which would be terrible but like Sony would be Newline's fault and not wal-mart. Again, my lawnmower man that I purchased from wal-mart is double-sided, but I bought it a long time ago.
The DVDs you rent are burned and silk screened by Netflix more often than not (to replace the ones that are broken or damaged in shipping)
You are just making that up. For one, netflix's dvds are not burned, I have never seen a single DVD-/+R disc from them, they are all factory pressed originals. Nobody does onesies and twosies of pressed discs.
So I don't think the mastering or production runs would be much of a problem.
You've lost the context of the discussion. This is about whether or not WAL-MART (not netflix) SELLS (not rents) specially censored versions of DVDs.
Errr, pardon me for inquiring, but why is it so expensive to produce both an edited and unedited version of a DVD? All the edits have already taken place (for TV, VHS, whatever)...so where's the expense?
There is a whole lot more to DVD production than simple video editing. It requires duplication of the mastering process, duplicate production runs, etc. Essentially it is the same thing as producing two entirely different DVDs. That might be reasonable for a title that sells for $20, but the given example of "The Lawnmower Man" is one that was actively stocked for only a few few months and then only in the Wal-mart "$5-$6" dump bins. Those discs have seriously little margin to begin with and don't sell in the kind of volume that the major new releases sell in that there is no way it would be profitable for the studio to go to the effort - they would just not sell the title to wal-mart in the first place.
Furthermore, wal-mart's point-of-sale system is set up so that if you are buying a DVD with scenes that walmart thinks are inappropriate for children it prompts the cashier to verify that the buyer is at least 17 years of age. If walmart were selling watered down DVDs, they would have no need to make such verifications in the first place.
Can anyone here point me to a netflix-like service that provides service to Peurto Rico? All of them that I have tried so far won't support residents of PR. I guess none of them have a local distribution center and the cost of mail to the mainland is too much.
Then I started watching them... and noticed DUBBING over some swear words... WHAT THE HELL? Scenes were missing... the same ones that USA or TNT would cut out (In the Lawnmower man, the only GOOD parts were removed). Needless to say, I was SO furious, I too refuse to shop at the place
I don't believe you. Producing an edited version and an unedited version of a DVD is an expensive proposition and not something a studio is going to do for DVDs that sell for ~$5. It would almost certainly be a money loser even at the volumes wally-world buys at.
I purchased lawnmower man from the same wal-mart dump bins. So, please post the timecode for an example of this editing and I will go and try to confirm it on my copy tonight.
These are nice for movies, but DVDs scratch badly as it is. I don't want something even less durable.
They may get scratched physically, but they do not lose data as easily as all that. Most players will play right through most scratches without a hiccup. And when there is a scratch bad enough to cause a hiccup, you can often polish it out with toothpaste or a more conventional disc polisher. Plus, unlike CDs, DVDs have a layer of plastic on both sides of the aluminum substrate so scratches on the "label side" have to be exceedingly deep before they cause any data loss at all.
Slashdot Mirror
When going past a certain dept, I think it's mainly a O2 + Helium mix, hence divers sounding like Donard Duck.
Only the asian ones.
Instead of a fee based on actual disposal costs of your unloved computer,
it turns into a flat tax unaffiliated with the actual cost of disposing of your computer.
I did not say anything one way or the other about it being a flat fee or specific to the model of computer. There is no reason that cheaper-to-recycle computers could not have smaller recycling fees at the point of sale.
In fact, if you are going to have variable fees, the best place for them is point-of-sale where the customer can use that information to make an informed decision when purchasing the unit.
One way or another, the customer is always the one who pays, it is just a question of "how much?" and "when?"
My preference is that the fee be levied as far down the "value chain" as possible - probably at point of sale, like it is for the states with recycle fees on soda containers.
Charging the fee at point of sale does a couple of good things:
1) The customer knows what they are paying for, it isn't hidden away in the total price. This knowledge helps to prevent the fees being raised as an arbitrary form of taxation - income tax gets taken out of most people's paychecks before they ever even see the money, thus obscuring the direct impact of the tax. I wish to avoid that happening with any new taxes.
2) If the fees were directly assesed to the distributor or manufacturer, then they would be inflated with each step in the process just as the price of the system is. In effect, paying the fee at point of sale is like paying the "wholesale" cost but charging the manufacturer the fee would result in it being marked up to "retail" pricing by the time the end-consumer pays for it, possibly even doubling the original "wholesale" fee level for no added benefit to the environment or the consumer.
People today are using BT to download games for their modern consoles and PCs. Instead of relying on game reviews and rentals, they're making their own digital duplicates and then deciding if it's worth their money.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
Says you. How is the scenario you described substantively different from people listening to the radio and deciding if the music they hear is worth buying?
This is hearsay, I have not checked any transport streams myself, but it has been reported that broadcasters have already started using the broadcast flag in almost all of their HDTV content. Sure there is not any equipment that obeys the BF, but they are probably thinking that since it is just a bit to flip, they might as well flip it now.
Assuming the reports are true (which is admittedly a fair-sized assumption) this near total use of the BF already puts the lie to the MPAA's statement that it would only be used to "protect" high-value content like live sports and broadcast movie premiers.
There must be a protocol, and I wish someone would clue me in.
You pay for a $10K per plate seat at a fundraiser dinner which gets you about 5 minutes of "personal time" with the senator - just long enough to identify yourself and your issue of interest. Then you get handed off to their secretary who will schedule you in for a regular appointment in the near future where you will be expected to bring a check for the balance of your campaign contributions and depending on the size of the check you will get some amount of time to make your case, and maybe offer to fund a fact-finding trip for the Senator and his family to the Bahamas.
It does not take money to do the things that make for happiness.
However, it does take money to avoid all the things that make for unhappiness
like starvation, infection, homelessness and so on.
if asked, I would accept the terrorist threat as one strong reason to be able to correctly and positively identify people.
1) ID cards do not gurantee the correct and positive identification of people - they just make buying a forgery even more useful.
2) These cards are not intended for identification, they are intended for blanket authorization - anywhere they will be required they become a point at which the holder can be rejected, even held, should the identity system label the card holder a criminal. That is a lot more power in the hands of the government than exists today, and a lot more opportunity to make life hard for people who are not criminals, just simply inconvenient for those who control the system.
If you disagree with #2, then answer what is the point of "correctly and positively" identifying terrorists (you know, the whole reason we gotta have these cards) if you aren't going to hold them when you do? Or do you think it will be implemented like the "no-fly" list -- a list of people so rephrensibly evil that their mere presence endangers an entire airplane and yet at the same time so lily-white that they can't even be arrested.
No, I didn't. I'm not arguing out of personal experience.
Hhm, when you start becoming internally inconsistent the jig is up, please count the instances of "I" and "my" in the following: "I seldom use cash which means almost every purchase I make, and where I make it, is recorded somewhere; if someone wants to know where I go when I travel, they can; my medical history is freely available to my physicians; my credit history and rating are available to just about anyone who wants to pay for it.
And yet, I don't perceive any loss of liberty."
Don't even bother claiming that your rationalization isn't completely self-centered.
You line of thought, such as it is, would, for example, lead to the conclusion that obtaining a passport will threaten an individual's liberties.
Passports = not mandatory.
Don't rant about the evils of government, or make vague allusions to "political dissidents".
This is your fundamental problem. Let's turn it around. You are ranting about how one more card won't make a difference and making vague allusions to "already subject to being tracked."
Your only position is to wave your hands and say, "now now, none of that nonesense," regardless of the points made. That's classic ostrich syndrome - limit your perspective to the dirt under a rock and of course you won't see the lion slinking towards you.
If someone is alreadu walking around with several forms of ID in his pocket, just what's supposed to happen when an ID card is added?
Wait, didn't you just say that "Certainly not from personal experience of ID cards, which do not exist."
So, which is it - ID cards are already so prevalent one more doesn't matter, or they don't exist?
More internal inconsistency in your arguments, even within the same post now.
I can only conclude that your real paranoia is directed at the institution of government itself, regardless of who's actually governing at any given time.
You are familiar with the truism that, "Power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately" right? There is only one cure for that, and guess what - it isn't further centralization of power.
You liberals are all like, claiming "trust us, bigger government will take care of you" and dismissing the opinions of those with whom you disagree with snotty disdain - "paranoia", "You line of thought, such as it is," "Nice try," "Lame, but nice," etc. At least you don't hold office.
That's ridiculous. The coffee was so hot that she got charred wounds and eschars
If you were really a derm, you would know that "3rd degree burn" refers to a full-thickness burn - i.e. all layers of skin were burnt. While 3rd degree burns from flame or other dry sources usually produce charing, burns from boiling water need not and yet can still damage all layers of the skin.
It's impossible that she got more than 2nd degree burns in the most exposed area even if she sat and poured boiling coffee for a minute or so from a container that's kept warm.
The scalding coffee was partially absorbed by her pants and thus held against her skin.
No society is free if the individuals who comprise it are not free.
You make the statement but you fail to understand it.
You argue that you have not experienced a loss of liberty based on your personal experience. Not everyone is like you. Even if your experience is the same as the majority of the population, it still is not the experience of the entire population.
What "additional power" is going to be given to the government?
Answer this and you will answer your own question - Why does the government want everyone to have an ID? Why does the government justify requiring ID by pointing at terrorists?
She wouldn't be traveling with her grandkids then, right?
Read more carefully.
Her kids were adults with children.
She and the grandkids were dependent on her kids' earnings to survive. They were killed, so the grandkids were orphaned and in a perverse sense, so was the grandmother.
And at any rate, naturally the actual "flags" are much more complex than my crude examples.
Flags are flags. They are chosen by humans and since humans are fallible there will, by definition, be holes. All it takes is for someone to find a hole and all the work becomes useless. The ironic thing is that profiling provides a feedback loop - with a large enough control population, all the enemy has to do is send enough people through and watch who gets flagged for interrogation and who doesn't. Do enough of that, and the criteria in use becomes readily apparent to the attacker.
Besides, its hard to argue with success. It has been over 30 years now. Mayne, just maybe, they are doing something right?
As another poster has already pointed out, all they've done is harden one point of vulnerability enough to make other points more attractive targets. Targets for which there have been and continue to be constant failure.
So, tell me, how is one more card supposed to ruin my life?
Personal liberty is not for you.
It is for society.
Our society requires that the population be free to think, speak, associate and travel without some all powerful entity watching over their shoulders.
You are clearly not a political dissident. Nor a whistle-blower on government corruption, nor any of hundreds of other things that can be (and will be, human nature being what it is) surpressed with the additional power such a system gives those who control the government. While rare, those roles are critical components of our society and are a whole lot more common than the terrorists or whatever the evil-doer-dejour being cited as justification for these systems.
So, while you think you have nothing to fear from "one more card," by blithely accepting a system designed to curtail the freedoms of whoever the people in power consider enemies, you and every other regular joe will suffer from the societal pollution, stagnation and corruption that is the inevitable result of such policies.
while ignoring a 70-year old grandmother flying with her grandchildren back to their parents from Disney world.
In an Israeli airport, the grandmother would sail through security,
Sounds like a loophole to me.
Consider the grandmother who has had all of her children killed by the Israeli army and their home bulldozed. She is too old to work, her life and the lives of her grandchildren depended on the support of her now deceased kids. Without them, her grandchildren will probably end up on the Palestinian street and dead before they reach 20, she'll be dead in two years because she can no longer afford the treatment for her diabetes.
They've got motive and with the help of Hamas they've got the means and enough false id to pass as jewish. They can sail right through those profile-based security checks carrying enough sarin in mickey-mouse thermoses to kill everyone on that plane in minutes.
Profiling works by focusing your attention on people with certain characteristics and by necessity relaxes your attention on the people who don't fit the profile. As soon as your enemy figures out how to avoid your profile, his job gets 10x easier.
Might save a lot of time stacked up at passport control. How about scrapping the ID plan, and instead taking 1% of the budget of the ID plan
and using it to improve passport control efficiency by adding more staff?
I think you are mistaken. Every for-profit corporation contains a declaration in its founding document (Articles of Corporation) which somewhere explicitly states that the purpose of the coporation is to make money.
You are confusing job with purpose. Indeed, the purpose of a corp is to earn money and the way they are suppossed to do so in a free-market is by performing their job.
Just like most employees have a job in order to earn money to live -- their job is doing whatever results in them getting paid. You can change jobs and so could Ford but in either the personal or the corporate case, regardless of what the job is, their purpose in doing it would still be to earn money.
This - in my view - is one of the deficiancies of capitalism. It takes the eyes off what was supposed to be the ball, and instead force focus to profits
It isn't a deficiency of capitalism per se, but rather the flawed implementation of it that we currently have. There are two reasons Ford can be successful profitwise by making poor quality cars:
1) The market values cheaper priced cars over higer-quality cars - that is good capitalism because the market demand is being satisified. You may not agree with that demand, but it will continue to exist regardless and attempting to deny that demand would be an expensive, long-term loser.
2) The market has been manipulated through non-free-market forces such as government regulation (protectionism and the like) or information-hiding (like lawsuit settlements with non-disclosure requirements). That is capitalism diluted with corporate welfare and is completely bad and should not be allowed to happen in a true free-market.
Your example of the woman at the resort does fall into the realm of 'public performance', and as such probably needs to be paid for/licensed as required.
Only if the unnamed carribean nation has implemented US-style copyright laws. I bet they have not, which would make what the lady did completely legal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the library went to U.S. Biometrics to begin with.
10-to-1 somebody on the BoD of US Biometrics or an influential shareholder is also connected to the library system. I've seen the same thing in the Boulder, CO area. A local library in one of the nearby communities just out of the blue decides it needs a big brand spanking new building to "better serve the patrons" a few years back.
Turned out that a member of the library's board owns the construction company that is going to build the library and another one owns the land that the library is buying to build on.
Business as usual in America.
The guy is an employee and his employer has ever right to control what he says, especially when he says it on his employee's dime and on his employee's property.
His employer is the student body, the administration is just a proxy for them. Since he was able to attract an audience of 150 students, by definition he was doing exactly what his employer wished.
The problem here is that the administration, like yourself, have forgotten that they are just a proxy for the student body and have started to think they are the actual employer.
He's right, you are wrong.
I went home as promised and looked at my walmart purchased lawnmower man DVD. It is double-sided and it has exactly the same deleted scenes as he specified. You are wrong about seeing them in the theater, imdb specifically lists them as part of a director's cut.
As for your DVD being single-sided, Sony-tristar-columbia has a despicable practice of silently converting their double-sided releases into single-sided ones to save a few pennies. They do this without changing the UPC and sometimes the first pressings still use the old artwork that claims double-sided. Usually this means dropping the widescreen side and keeping the foolscreen side. These discs often show up in wal-marts dump bins before they show up anywhere else, but eventually they replace the title at all retailers. Also, when wal-mart first adds a title to a dump-bin it is still double-sided and only turns into single-sided after a few restocks.
Now, that is sony and Lawnmower man is Newline, but maybe they do the same kind of thing too - which would be terrible but like Sony would be Newline's fault and not wal-mart. Again, my lawnmower man that I purchased from wal-mart is double-sided, but I bought it a long time ago.
The DVDs you rent are burned and silk screened by Netflix more often than not (to replace the ones that are broken or damaged in shipping)
You are just making that up. For one, netflix's dvds are not burned, I have never seen a single DVD-/+R disc from them, they are all factory pressed originals. Nobody does onesies and twosies of pressed discs.
So I don't think the mastering or production runs would be much of a problem.
You've lost the context of the discussion. This is about whether or not WAL-MART (not netflix) SELLS (not rents) specially censored versions of DVDs.
Errr, pardon me for inquiring, but why is it so expensive to produce both an edited and unedited version of a DVD? All the edits have already taken place (for TV, VHS, whatever)...so where's the expense?
There is a whole lot more to DVD production than simple video editing. It requires duplication of the mastering process, duplicate production runs, etc. Essentially it is the same thing as producing two entirely different DVDs. That might be reasonable for a title that sells for $20, but the given example of "The Lawnmower Man" is one that was actively stocked for only a few few months and then only in the Wal-mart "$5-$6" dump bins. Those discs have seriously little margin to begin with and don't sell in the kind of volume that the major new releases sell in that there is no way it would be profitable for the studio to go to the effort - they would just not sell the title to wal-mart in the first place.
Furthermore, wal-mart's point-of-sale system is set up so that if you are buying a DVD with scenes that walmart thinks are inappropriate for children it prompts the cashier to verify that the buyer is at least 17 years of age. If walmart were selling watered down DVDs, they would have no need to make such verifications in the first place.
Can anyone here point me to a netflix-like service that provides service to Peurto Rico? All of them that I have tried so far won't support residents of PR. I guess none of them have a local distribution center and the cost of mail to the mainland is too much.
Then I started watching them... and noticed DUBBING over some swear words... WHAT THE HELL? Scenes were missing... the same ones that USA or TNT would cut out (In the Lawnmower man, the only GOOD parts were removed). Needless to say, I was SO furious, I too refuse to shop at the place
I don't believe you. Producing an edited version and an unedited version of a DVD is an expensive proposition and not something a studio is going to do for DVDs that sell for ~$5. It would almost certainly be a money loser even at the volumes wally-world buys at.
I purchased lawnmower man from the same wal-mart dump bins. So, please post the timecode for an example of this editing and I will go and try to confirm it on my copy tonight.
These are nice for movies, but DVDs scratch badly as it is. I don't want something even less durable.
They may get scratched physically, but they do not lose data as easily as all that. Most players will play right through most scratches without a hiccup. And when there is a scratch bad enough to cause a hiccup, you can often polish it out with toothpaste or a more conventional disc polisher. Plus, unlike CDs, DVDs have a layer of plastic on both sides of the aluminum substrate so scratches on the "label side" have to be exceedingly deep before they cause any data loss at all.