This seems to be a partial mirror. I thought I saw a collection posted to/. back when Mark first announced his assimilation, perhaps someone can dig it up from the/. archive? It is possible the Shrock "bt" collection is that collection.
With a pile built of a DVD/VCR Combo, stereo system, vinyl player, over-the-air digital converter, and some old Nintendoes, I don't need another box to wire up.
I wouldn't mind hearing about Netflix escaping the Windows/IE trap. I would approve of streaming Netflix to my laptop that's running Ubuntu. Well, if the wireless card would work on it...
It is a pity that, after they fire up the Large Hadron Collider, we won't survive to hear Hawking's reluctant admission that tiny black holes don't evaporate.
They aren't aiming at my crowd, the Windows 2000 SP4 user. "Try again from a computer with Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista." Try again? What is this, a scratch-off ticket? At least support Ubuntu since it will work on my laptop (which won't run 2000, or even XP without using Hacking 101 skills on it because of driver drama caused by ______, where blank is no good reason at all) and will probably become my OS for the future.
A pity, I would like to stream movies for my personal interests (I.E., Futurama, SF B films) and use the mail service for family-friendly (comedy and action) films.
Because in the US, soda is sold most commonly by 12 ounce cans. Vending machines usually go by 16 or 20 ounce if they use bottles instead of cans. One litre is availiable, but usually litre is reserved for 2- and 3-litre large bottles. Glass is 8 ounce or 12 ounce, if you can find glass.
Did anyone not see this coming? It's clearly a case of needing to become what you are fighting, and the thing about open expansion options, like the toolbars, is that they will expand out of control. Viz, that old screenshot of an IE window with every installable toolbar in the world consuming the entire screen but a sliver of browser space at the bottom.
I hate to shill, but I went Opera a long time ago when FF first started trying to do too much and I never once turned away. The only time I use it is on a fresh Linux install with FF -integrated-; I think it's Ubuntu or SuSE that integrates it so you can't remove it without disurpting the OS...didn't a certain Borg-led OS company do that once to ill-effect?
FF's best route at this point is to integrate into the program in an efficient manner the best features of the most popular toolbars, and add a limit on the plugins... three perhaps. As long as toolbar adding is unlimited, people will bloat their installations and then complain as if it's FF's fault. A limit will inconvenience, but not drive off, much of the user base, and impose a bit of discipline.
I find it amusing that you can put a dusty old woman in a jangling dress with a crystal ball, a little golden pyramid, and a chart of constellations on the wall, and people will give up their money to "have their fortune told," but offer to do it for real and they step back.
It's a cultural problem that people aren't brought up to take control of their lives to the extent they can, and leave the remainder to fate, under the name of whatever diety you think looks coolest on your lunch box.
Risking the chance of sounding like a Tyler Durden or John "Jigsaw" Kramer, a fear of knowing one's fate is a true cowardise that has troubled humanity for ages. Faced with one's mortality, humans will avert their eyes in ignorance, fall to their knees in prayer, or just bawl like infants far more frequently than they will take a breath, think of a plan to make use of their life, and strive toward a goal.
This makes sense, when you remember that a large amount of the population, told they have 1% of their lifetime remaining, will look back at the past 99% being sunk into wastetimes like watching American Idol, arguing with potential life-mates over use of hand towels, and choosing for or against the strinne-green sofa. You only notice the time you've wasted when you look at the clock.
"Because viewers are more likely to watch these clips than myriad user-generated ones, advertisers are willing to pay more for them."
Isn't the myriad the point? YOUtube, and not THEIRtube? It appears to me this is an attempt to finally define the internet's replacement for television, since past attempts to hybridize (WebTV, for example) have failed to become accepted as widely as the entertainment industry would like.
If They were paying attention, they would realize that you need to advertise evenly. It doesn't matter if someone's watching the second episode of Who's the Boss or three fat kids on a webcam lip-syncing to The Safety Dance, someone is watching a video, give them an ad. Selling ads specifically on a given video is TV-era thinking. This is the mighty internet tube system, it doesn't work the same way.
Re:Isn't that what they want?
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've worked part-time in a video store, so I watch films, new disks and old, frequently. Trends I've noticed include:
Fade-in/fade-out. Seems to be a decendant of the old Macrovision system. I've seen it happen a few times, notably when I popped The Fox and the Hound (not the most recent issue) in the store's DVD player. I've run other films, Disney and otherwise, that played properly. Amongst customers, I've received multiple independent complaints of the fading problem specifically on academy (4:3) aspect discs -- they try the widescreen and it plays normally, so this may be a move to extinct academy.
Glitched chapters. I bought my father Dances with Wolves -- the complete cut with the pretty box -- but he said it wouldn't play correctly, getting stuck or glitching in particular scenes. I ran it on my computer and there it too glitched and faulted. Both my father's player and the DVD drive I used were Sony, so let the conspiracy theories abound. Physical damage can cause read errors of course, but DwW was bad out of the box. I've handled similar complaints at work. Even if a disk isn't brand new and has hairline scratches, that isn't enough to cause catastrophic playback errors, when I've seen perfect playback from disks that look like they were used for air hockey.
As for worn discs, my store's policy is if a disc receives two complaints it's pulled, but for old fims that we rent off for free 80% of the time anyway, there is no replacement of the title. New films we'll give the customer a different disc of the same title, but if that fails as well, and often it does, there's not much we can do about it since the whole run doesn't work in particular players.
Step 1: Complain about drop-in-the-ocean piracy for a decade. Step 2: Get DMCA on your side so you can make a criminal out of anyone at will. Step 3: Sell defective products. When people are compelled to pirate on a larger scale because the Disney DVD they rented for the kids keeps fading in and out visually and audiably, or skips and dies on a particular scene... Step 4: Point at all the new, higher piracy figures and dance around singing about how the piracy problem is getting worse and how you need more DRM power. Step 5: Wait for the sheep to get used to the new order.
Fortunately, it's unlikely this will work. Look at DVD advertisements. I recently popped in Joe's Apartment (it was free and I like bad films) and there was not trailers, commercials, or even a stop at the menu screen. Straight to reel one. A short while back I was watching a new release (I forget the title) and it was telling me all about how the new HD-DVD (or Blueray, I wasn't paying much attention) is going to be worth buying new hardware at shocking prices because the disc will play the film immediately....apparently the ads and menu page were snuck into the DVD ISO standard when we were sleeping.
Thus, the cycle is complete; the studios received just enough annoyed customer complaints about the previews, ads, and intro garbage that they started making them skipable, or at least fastforwardable, and now they're going to temporarily give us immediate play back. Aren't we loved?
Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -- we've been tolerating them since '46. It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.
Have they ever gotten around to telling us why we want Aero-glass? First thing I do whenever I'm on a XP machine, including other peoples' because I'm rude, is disable the XP theme system and get back to something useful. I don't want the close button on a window to be large because that makes it easy to hit by accident. GUI design 101, and XP fails it hard.
So, what makes bubble buttons and transparency effects something I should want? Is Microsoft trying to bank on GUI wiener-size competition to get people to pay hundreds of dollars for a legtimate installation of the OS?
Oh, yeah...they're going to try to stick it in the gamer market by making everyone upgrade for DX10...which will likely only give you full performance on Trusted Hardware, just like the high-res video bunk.
Let's hear it for Microsoft. 1) My GUI looks better than yours. 2) DX10 is so much more efficient, it almost makes up for the performance lost by binding 70% of your system resources to the GUI that looks better than yours. 3) We don't like your installation of Linux on your other partition, so we're using Oklahoma power to reach in and delete it all, and install this cool IDE device driver from StarForce. 4) You're welcome!
It's not like they haven't already paid for it...
on
Novell Still Runs Windows
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just because Novell is offering Linux doesn't make it heresy that they have boxes with Windows dual-booted. If they've already bought their licences for Windows, MS is already paid. Not exercising the licences they own out of protest isn't going to make a dent. Meanwhile, their devs need to be able to run stuff on Windows, so it kinda makes sense that they have Windows at their disposal.
Speaking as someone who lost a number of potentially productive days trying to get Windows 2000 SP4-slipstreamed to install on a 250G harddrive without crapping out at boot-time when it saw a partition beyond the 128GB barrier, Linux is looking better every day. In fact, after spending five minutes in Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSE, the chameleon won and is now installed on my hda4. But I still need Windows to run a few things...yes, mostly games, and a few college websites that just have to have IE6. But I already own Win2K, and I'd be silly not to use it just because MS is an idiot sometimes.
Keeping Windows around for the things Windows is good at makes my computer more powerful. I don't support MS, but I'm not going to rend my nose to spite Bill's face.
Windows, or at least, the Microsoft Operating System, is never going to go away. If Linux seriously erodes Microsoft's position, they'll sink their pentillions of dollars into making a solid, quality, viable OS product. So don't mind Novell, or myself, for installing SuSE and Windows next to each other. You need not be a zealot or a martyr to be a soldier.
Perhaps, but perhaps not.
I've never really been 'into' D&D or RPGs or any of the fantasy stuff. But Morrowind I enjoyed because it was FIRST PERSON, and because it didn't saddle me with a linear plot to follow. My first time through, it was months before I bothered to do the primary quest, because I was busy filling out all the little squares on the auto map, looting every hole I could find and piling a mountain of gear on the second story floor of Ghorak Manor.
It was like some big 'ole sandbox to play in, with all the toys laid out for me.
I tried Neverwinter last night on a friend's box, and it just wasn't fun. Too much clickie this and wait for maybe something to respond, not enough run around and enjoy the world.
Then again, I find D&D players annoying. They say things like "Dee Twenty" instead of "Icosahedral Die." Plato would spin in his grave.
As a gamer who hasn't bought console since SNES, I couldn't care less about precious XBox ver. 2 and the steamroller of hype.
But the issues I do care about are: * That article includes a screenshot with an Argonian, who looks like an alien bug or something. Nowhere near the lizardy look that Morrowind had, which ruled. If they screwed up the models' heads just to make the human full-helmets and boots fit them, I'm sorely disappointed. The critter people need custom gear. * HDR is crap. I don't care what the wankers who played Lost Coast say, it looks bad. Ambient lit places look fine, but all of those screenshots that have anything white or metal in them look like overexposures through a soap opera filter. * From the E3 videos, they seem to think we need to zoom in on every pore of a person's face when they're in a conversation. I hope that has a toggle to turn it off. * It was supposed to be out on November 22nd, but now, it seems XBox releases got pushed back, and now ES4 "isn't done yet." They'd better fix my Argonians while I'm waiting. * Also from videos, they were showing off the new dungeons. While dungeons were pretty much cookiecutter in Morrowind, I didn't like how the demo seemed to be filled with gimmicky traps and such. I hope that's just for press, and I won't find myself guessing where the next 'suprise' trap is going to be. (Like how Doom 3 'scares' you by trapping every gun and spawning monsters behind you.) * In the video, we see that digital dogs haven't progressed much. Just like in Deus Ex, when a dog turns, it magically spins about it's center. I have a dog, she doesn't turn like that.
Anyway, my $5 are already down, and it's not like I'm going to not buy it, anyway, nomatter how much they wreck things.
As far as I know, traditional Japanese bedding is very susceptible to rotting, since it's made from organic matter, and has to be properly aired, sunned, and maintained.
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people.
Oh, snap!
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people without putting our boys and girls in harm's way. Slight difference there. You make it sound like they're trying to roll out waves of little Terminators. No, they're just trying to achieve the same field presence without having to deal with sending as many sad letters to the families of kids who's final group photo was under an array of U.S. flags inside boxes within the cargo hold of a C-130.
And why, exactly, is region coding something that should be protected? *insert "buy a book in New York, read it in Paris, sell it in London" arguement here*
Has anyone seen the crap they've been funding these last few years? Absolutely atrocious
Hey, that MST3k funding has to go somewhere. Look at it as an investment toward MST3k's potential return. After all, if Sci-Fi owns the movies, they don't have to worry about the licensing nightmare MST3k's always been.
Perhaps because it's really difficult to get enough coffee up to your floating observatory to keep your stargazers awake all night? Even Starbucks only has one shop per seventeen parsecs out there.
Stance 1: They're selling you a CD.
If you buy a CD, you buy the limitation that it only plays on limited devices. You can't play it on your phonograph or eight-track, and it may not work on hardware that isn't Trusted. However, anything you can do with it (under fair use) you must be able to. Play it on your walkman, with audio out to the audio in of your linux box, and wash it through Audacity to get it on an MP3, if you like. You have that right because it's YOUR CD, and format-shifting is fair use.
Stance 2: They're selling you a limited license to listen to a collection of music.
If you buy a license to music, you have the right to hear that music. Copy protection that prevents your accessing your licensed music on devices that are Audio CD compatible (note the little "compact disk" logo on all standards-meeting CD playback devices) is an infringement on your rights to access your licensed property.
They don't want to sell you a CD, because they lose control over it, but they are not letting you use the material you are legally licensed to when you 'buy' a CD's content for personal use. It'd be nice if they'd make up their minds beyond "give us your money, and up yours."
Slashdot Mirror
http://court.shrock.org/sysinternals/
http://court.shrock.org/sysinternals-bt/
This seems to be a partial mirror. I thought I saw a collection posted to /. back when Mark first announced his assimilation, perhaps someone can dig it up from the /. archive? It is possible the Shrock "bt" collection is that collection.
With a pile built of a DVD/VCR Combo, stereo system, vinyl player, over-the-air digital converter, and some old Nintendoes, I don't need another box to wire up.
I wouldn't mind hearing about Netflix escaping the Windows/IE trap. I would approve of streaming Netflix to my laptop that's running Ubuntu. Well, if the wireless card would work on it...
It is a pity that, after they fire up the Large Hadron Collider, we won't survive to hear Hawking's reluctant admission that tiny black holes don't evaporate.
2007: Too many.
Future: Way too many.
They aren't aiming at my crowd, the Windows 2000 SP4 user. "Try again from a computer with Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista." Try again? What is this, a scratch-off ticket? At least support Ubuntu since it will work on my laptop (which won't run 2000, or even XP without using Hacking 101 skills on it because of driver drama caused by ______, where blank is no good reason at all) and will probably become my OS for the future. A pity, I would like to stream movies for my personal interests (I.E., Futurama, SF B films) and use the mail service for family-friendly (comedy and action) films.
Because in the US, soda is sold most commonly by 12 ounce cans. Vending machines usually go by 16 or 20 ounce if they use bottles instead of cans. One litre is availiable, but usually litre is reserved for 2- and 3-litre large bottles. Glass is 8 ounce or 12 ounce, if you can find glass.
Did anyone not see this coming? It's clearly a case of needing to become what you are fighting, and the thing about open expansion options, like the toolbars, is that they will expand out of control. Viz, that old screenshot of an IE window with every installable toolbar in the world consuming the entire screen but a sliver of browser space at the bottom.
I hate to shill, but I went Opera a long time ago when FF first started trying to do too much and I never once turned away. The only time I use it is on a fresh Linux install with FF -integrated-; I think it's Ubuntu or SuSE that integrates it so you can't remove it without disurpting the OS...didn't a certain Borg-led OS company do that once to ill-effect?
FF's best route at this point is to integrate into the program in an efficient manner the best features of the most popular toolbars, and add a limit on the plugins... three perhaps. As long as toolbar adding is unlimited, people will bloat their installations and then complain as if it's FF's fault. A limit will inconvenience, but not drive off, much of the user base, and impose a bit of discipline.
I find it amusing that you can put a dusty old woman in a jangling dress with a crystal ball, a little golden pyramid, and a chart of constellations on the wall, and people will give up their money to "have their fortune told," but offer to do it for real and they step back.
It's a cultural problem that people aren't brought up to take control of their lives to the extent they can, and leave the remainder to fate, under the name of whatever diety you think looks coolest on your lunch box.
Risking the chance of sounding like a Tyler Durden or John "Jigsaw" Kramer, a fear of knowing one's fate is a true cowardise that has troubled humanity for ages. Faced with one's mortality, humans will avert their eyes in ignorance, fall to their knees in prayer, or just bawl like infants far more frequently than they will take a breath, think of a plan to make use of their life, and strive toward a goal.
This makes sense, when you remember that a large amount of the population, told they have 1% of their lifetime remaining, will look back at the past 99% being sunk into wastetimes like watching American Idol, arguing with potential life-mates over use of hand towels, and choosing for or against the strinne-green sofa. You only notice the time you've wasted when you look at the clock.
"Because viewers are more likely to watch these clips than myriad user-generated ones, advertisers are willing to pay more for them."
Isn't the myriad the point? YOUtube, and not THEIRtube? It appears to me this is an attempt to finally define the internet's replacement for television, since past attempts to hybridize (WebTV, for example) have failed to become accepted as widely as the entertainment industry would like.
If They were paying attention, they would realize that you need to advertise evenly. It doesn't matter if someone's watching the second episode of Who's the Boss or three fat kids on a webcam lip-syncing to The Safety Dance, someone is watching a video, give them an ad. Selling ads specifically on a given video is TV-era thinking. This is the mighty internet tube system, it doesn't work the same way.
I've worked part-time in a video store, so I watch films, new disks and old, frequently. Trends I've noticed include:
Fade-in/fade-out. Seems to be a decendant of the old Macrovision system. I've seen it happen a few times, notably when I popped The Fox and the Hound (not the most recent issue) in the store's DVD player. I've run other films, Disney and otherwise, that played properly. Amongst customers, I've received multiple independent complaints of the fading problem specifically on academy (4:3) aspect discs -- they try the widescreen and it plays normally, so this may be a move to extinct academy.
Glitched chapters. I bought my father Dances with Wolves -- the complete cut with the pretty box -- but he said it wouldn't play correctly, getting stuck or glitching in particular scenes. I ran it on my computer and there it too glitched and faulted. Both my father's player and the DVD drive I used were Sony, so let the conspiracy theories abound. Physical damage can cause read errors of course, but DwW was bad out of the box. I've handled similar complaints at work. Even if a disk isn't brand new and has hairline scratches, that isn't enough to cause catastrophic playback errors, when I've seen perfect playback from disks that look like they were used for air hockey.
As for worn discs, my store's policy is if a disc receives two complaints it's pulled, but for old fims that we rent off for free 80% of the time anyway, there is no replacement of the title. New films we'll give the customer a different disc of the same title, but if that fails as well, and often it does, there's not much we can do about it since the whole run doesn't work in particular players.
Step 1: Complain about drop-in-the-ocean piracy for a decade.
...apparently the ads and menu page were snuck into the DVD ISO standard when we were sleeping.
Step 2: Get DMCA on your side so you can make a criminal out of anyone at will.
Step 3: Sell defective products. When people are compelled to pirate on a larger scale because the Disney DVD they rented for the kids keeps fading in and out visually and audiably, or skips and dies on a particular scene...
Step 4: Point at all the new, higher piracy figures and dance around singing about how the piracy problem is getting worse and how you need more DRM power.
Step 5: Wait for the sheep to get used to the new order.
Fortunately, it's unlikely this will work. Look at DVD advertisements. I recently popped in Joe's Apartment (it was free and I like bad films) and there was not trailers, commercials, or even a stop at the menu screen. Straight to reel one. A short while back I was watching a new release (I forget the title) and it was telling me all about how the new HD-DVD (or Blueray, I wasn't paying much attention) is going to be worth buying new hardware at shocking prices because the disc will play the film immediately.
Thus, the cycle is complete; the studios received just enough annoyed customer complaints about the previews, ads, and intro garbage that they started making them skipable, or at least fastforwardable, and now they're going to temporarily give us immediate play back. Aren't we loved?
Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -- we've been tolerating them since '46. It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.
Have they ever gotten around to telling us why we want Aero-glass? First thing I do whenever I'm on a XP machine, including other peoples' because I'm rude, is disable the XP theme system and get back to something useful. I don't want the close button on a window to be large because that makes it easy to hit by accident. GUI design 101, and XP fails it hard.
So, what makes bubble buttons and transparency effects something I should want? Is Microsoft trying to bank on GUI wiener-size competition to get people to pay hundreds of dollars for a legtimate installation of the OS?
Oh, yeah...they're going to try to stick it in the gamer market by making everyone upgrade for DX10...which will likely only give you full performance on Trusted Hardware, just like the high-res video bunk.
Let's hear it for Microsoft. 1) My GUI looks better than yours. 2) DX10 is so much more efficient, it almost makes up for the performance lost by binding 70% of your system resources to the GUI that looks better than yours. 3) We don't like your installation of Linux on your other partition, so we're using Oklahoma power to reach in and delete it all, and install this cool IDE device driver from StarForce. 4) You're welcome!
Just because Novell is offering Linux doesn't make it heresy that they have boxes with Windows dual-booted. If they've already bought their licences for Windows, MS is already paid. Not exercising the licences they own out of protest isn't going to make a dent. Meanwhile, their devs need to be able to run stuff on Windows, so it kinda makes sense that they have Windows at their disposal.
Speaking as someone who lost a number of potentially productive days trying to get Windows 2000 SP4-slipstreamed to install on a 250G harddrive without crapping out at boot-time when it saw a partition beyond the 128GB barrier, Linux is looking better every day. In fact, after spending five minutes in Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSE, the chameleon won and is now installed on my hda4. But I still need Windows to run a few things...yes, mostly games, and a few college websites that just have to have IE6. But I already own Win2K, and I'd be silly not to use it just because MS is an idiot sometimes.
Keeping Windows around for the things Windows is good at makes my computer more powerful. I don't support MS, but I'm not going to rend my nose to spite Bill's face.
Windows, or at least, the Microsoft Operating System, is never going to go away. If Linux seriously erodes Microsoft's position, they'll sink their pentillions of dollars into making a solid, quality, viable OS product. So don't mind Novell, or myself, for installing SuSE and Windows next to each other. You need not be a zealot or a martyr to be a soldier.
Red X's are too MS for us here at Slashdot. We demand old school Mr. Yuck stickers on unsafe sites.
They regenerate, and you want to blow them into pieces? Cut up some starfish while you're at it.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. I've never really been 'into' D&D or RPGs or any of the fantasy stuff. But Morrowind I enjoyed because it was FIRST PERSON, and because it didn't saddle me with a linear plot to follow. My first time through, it was months before I bothered to do the primary quest, because I was busy filling out all the little squares on the auto map, looting every hole I could find and piling a mountain of gear on the second story floor of Ghorak Manor. It was like some big 'ole sandbox to play in, with all the toys laid out for me. I tried Neverwinter last night on a friend's box, and it just wasn't fun. Too much clickie this and wait for maybe something to respond, not enough run around and enjoy the world. Then again, I find D&D players annoying. They say things like "Dee Twenty" instead of "Icosahedral Die." Plato would spin in his grave.
As a gamer who hasn't bought console since SNES, I couldn't care less about precious XBox ver. 2 and the steamroller of hype.
But the issues I do care about are:
* That article includes a screenshot with an Argonian, who looks like an alien bug or something. Nowhere near the lizardy look that Morrowind had, which ruled. If they screwed up the models' heads just to make the human full-helmets and boots fit them, I'm sorely disappointed. The critter people need custom gear.
* HDR is crap. I don't care what the wankers who played Lost Coast say, it looks bad. Ambient lit places look fine, but all of those screenshots that have anything white or metal in them look like overexposures through a soap opera filter.
* From the E3 videos, they seem to think we need to zoom in on every pore of a person's face when they're in a conversation. I hope that has a toggle to turn it off.
* It was supposed to be out on November 22nd, but now, it seems XBox releases got pushed back, and now ES4 "isn't done yet." They'd better fix my Argonians while I'm waiting.
* Also from videos, they were showing off the new dungeons. While dungeons were pretty much cookiecutter in Morrowind, I didn't like how the demo seemed to be filled with gimmicky traps and such. I hope that's just for press, and I won't find myself guessing where the next 'suprise' trap is going to be. (Like how Doom 3 'scares' you by trapping every gun and spawning monsters behind you.)
* In the video, we see that digital dogs haven't progressed much. Just like in Deus Ex, when a dog turns, it magically spins about it's center. I have a dog, she doesn't turn like that.
Anyway, my $5 are already down, and it's not like I'm going to not buy it, anyway, nomatter how much they wreck things.
As far as I know, traditional Japanese bedding is very susceptible to rotting, since it's made from organic matter, and has to be properly aired, sunned, and maintained.
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people.
Oh, snap!
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people without putting our boys and girls in harm's way. Slight difference there. You make it sound like they're trying to roll out waves of little Terminators. No, they're just trying to achieve the same field presence without having to deal with sending as many sad letters to the families of kids who's final group photo was under an array of U.S. flags inside boxes within the cargo hold of a C-130.
"you need to pay the DVD Forum [dvdforum.org]" .org, why are they taking payments? Sounds like they need to be kicked over to .com to me.
If they're a
And why, exactly, is region coding something that should be protected? *insert "buy a book in New York, read it in Paris, sell it in London" arguement here*
Has anyone seen the crap they've been funding these last few years? Absolutely atrocious
Hey, that MST3k funding has to go somewhere. Look at it as an investment toward MST3k's potential return. After all, if Sci-Fi owns the movies, they don't have to worry about the licensing nightmare MST3k's always been.
Perhaps because it's really difficult to get enough coffee up to your floating observatory to keep your stargazers awake all night? Even Starbucks only has one shop per seventeen parsecs out there.
Stance 1: They're selling you a CD.
If you buy a CD, you buy the limitation that it only plays on limited devices. You can't play it on your phonograph or eight-track, and it may not work on hardware that isn't Trusted. However, anything you can do with it (under fair use) you must be able to. Play it on your walkman, with audio out to the audio in of your linux box, and wash it through Audacity to get it on an MP3, if you like. You have that right because it's YOUR CD, and format-shifting is fair use.
Stance 2: They're selling you a limited license to listen to a collection of music.
If you buy a license to music, you have the right to hear that music. Copy protection that prevents your accessing your licensed music on devices that are Audio CD compatible (note the little "compact disk" logo on all standards-meeting CD playback devices) is an infringement on your rights to access your licensed property.
They don't want to sell you a CD, because they lose control over it, but they are not letting you use the material you are legally licensed to when you 'buy' a CD's content for personal use. It'd be nice if they'd make up their minds beyond "give us your money, and up yours."
Why control the crowd? God sent His agent, the angel Katrina, to show us the truth of human nature.
People aren't going to learn to change themselves until they are thoroughly disgusted with what they currently are. This is step one.