Isn't their problem with the AO mark (as explained in the summary) that many US chains won't stock it at all as a matter of principle meaning that AO in the US is a de facto ban? I doubt Rockstar would've complained about getting an 18 rating in the UK (basically a legally enforceable AO rating - the same rating as given to the recent GTA games) as game stores don't have a problem with selling those titles over here.
Personally I thought Manhunt sucked, but I'm now looking to buy the sequel out of sheer irritation at being told I can't.
Doesn't cost much? Perhaps not in North America or if you get it with a new PC but in the UK an upgrade from XP to Vista Ultimate is £180. You could get a good new monitor, half decent graphics card or 4GB of RAM for the same money. I think it's this cost issue (combined with the perceived lack of necessity) which is putting people off upgrading. I'll get Vista when I get a new PC (like you I mostly use my home one for games) which should be in about a years time.
There's a fairly sick tendency in the British press to exploit murders (especially murders of children or young people) to make political points. From what I remember of this case (from an analysis of it in Private Eye a couple of years back) a reporter for the Sun approached the parents and made a lot of false claims to them about the killer and the game which led to him getting the quotes he wanted which allowed him to write the anti-video games story his editor wanted. And, of course, under the bizarre rules of newspaper evidence, quotes from the victim's family (even if obtained under false pretences) trump any statements from the police or the court trying to set the record straight so it is now an accepted part of British tabloid newpaper lore that Manhunt caused a murder.
See also the attempts to blame the James Bulger murder on the movie Childplay even though there was no evidence (outside the fevered imaginations of tabloid editors) that the killers had even seen the film.
They're the sort of people to whom evidence doesn't matter. They don't want to believe it and therefore they won't believe it no matter what evidence is presented (and, yes, the same applies to fundamentalist Christians in connection with evolution). On a side note I've always found it odd that the sort of people who deny the holocaust (neo-nazis, Islamic chauvenists etc) are the kind of evil scumbags who you'd expect to approve.
I find it particularly ironic that Muslims should be trying to suppress study of the Holocaust as, if there is ever another genocide in Europe (and, while I sincerely hope there isn't, I am geniunely worried that the way things are going there will be at some point in the next 30 to 40 years - maybe after a big environmental or economic disaster) the Muslims, as the most visible minority group in Europe, are going to be the victims.
I seem to recall that as well (and that was at a time when the 512KB Amiga upgrade was costing about £150). I think the reason DM isn't on the list is that it was released for the ST about a year ahead of the Amiga version. I certainly remember all the ST fanboys at school using the availability of DM as one of the principal arguments in favour of the ST (that and the MIDI port).
Despite how it's described in the summary and articles this isn't really an anti-trust/competition law case. It's a single market issue. The principle is that if you live in an EU state you should be able to buy goods and services on sale in any other EU state and import them to your home state without restriction (save for certain limited exemptions for reasons of public morality etc). The EU Commission has power to enforce this and, especially in the period following the Single Market Act coming into force in 1992 under Leon Brittan, was very aggressive at going after both governments and private companies who breached this principle. The number of cases dropped off as governments and companies realised that the Commission was serious about the single market and started to play by the rules.
What Apple has been doing with iTMS in Europe is so flagrantly in breach of the principles underlying the single market I'm frankly amazed it's taken the commission this long to get round to investigating them. I'd love to know who's been giving Apple their legal advice - I assume they're going to try to run an argument that they're providing a service rather than selling goods and therefore aren't caught in the single market rules - and will be very interested to see how this one turns out. We've not had a good free movement of goods case for a while...
Sorry, I was talking about the HD audio formats. The PS3 does, of course, have S/PDIF but this can only be used for Dolby digital and DTS (or, I suppose PCM stereo) - the old DVD standard soundtracks in other words. To get the linear PCM uncompressed 7.1 surround soundtrack you'll need either a decoder that can take the HDMI digital input (very rare for now) or an on-board decoder with analog outputs you can plug into your amp's anolog 5/6.1 inputs (which most surround sound amps made recently have). I'm not saying that the ability to play the linear PCM soundtrack is worth it, but it is a functional difference which will be important to some people.
One important difference is audio capabilities. If, like me and, I would imagine, pretty much everyone else who's bought a surround sound system in the last 10 years, you have a perfectly good amp that's not compatible with the new HD audio formats used on blu-ray but do have a set of 6/5.1 analog inputs then you'll need a player with a decent on-board decoder and appropriate analog outputs to take advantage of them. All the standalone HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players I've seen reviewed have these. The PS3 doesn't being HDMI or RCA stereo out only.
Or have entirely filled all their CD storage units, have literally no room for any more and have reached the conclussion that the production values of 99% of the popular music recorded today are so low that the compression doesn't make much difference (the only album I've downloaded from iTMS in the last year that I felt was recorded well enough for me to go buy the CD as well is Ys by Joanna Newsom). I am not very satisfied by this compromise, however, and agree that, given the the prices iTMS charges, all songs should be available as lossless (and be easily convertable to lower bit rates for transfer to your iPod). It's very irritating when an album (and this is especially true for old albums, at least in the UK) is actually cheaper on CD then from iTMS.
Obviously the police are not homogenous. However, so far as I'm concerned the competent, uncorrupt members of the force (assuming there are any) only have the right to be differentiated from the mass if they're prepared to actually bring their incompetent and corrupt colleagues to account rather than closing ranks, stalling and "misplacing" evidence whenever allegations of corruption or incompetence are made. If the police want to stick together they're going to have to be judged together. Sorry, but years of reading Private Eye and its Police 5 section has made me deeply sceptical of the motives of the police.
They're hypocrits who don't like the powers they've granted the police to be turned on them one little bit. For example, when the police are pumping bullets into some guys head down in Stockwell tube because, well there wasn't really a because other than that there'd been a bombing the previous week and the police fancied shooting someone foreign looking, they're "doing an excellent job in difficult circumstances". However, when the police arrest Blair's assistants in dawn raids as part of the cash-for-honours scandal, they're described as heavy handed bully boys harassing people who should be presumed innocent.
I suspect this extention of phone tapping to MPs is specifically aimed as George Galloway as Blair's desperate for dirt on one of the biggest thorns in his side.
I'm not trying to judge people. Different people have different experiences and reach different, and perfectly valid since these things are ultimately subjective, conclusions about themselves and their conditions. I would like to write more about this but I have to rush off to see my therapist. I would just say though, in response to your comment that it's ignorant and malicious individuals, rather than AS, which have impacted my quality of life I would certainly agree that was true at school and university. These days, though, it's my inability to talk to people and form relationships, and the lonliness and isolation this causes, which is the main problem and this "clinically significant impariment in social interaction" stems directly from the AS without help from third parties.
I have AS, it's ruined my life and I would like nothing more than to be cured (while acknowledging that, even if such a thing were possible, I'd almost certainly be too old for it to make any difference. You mention keeping your personality quirks under control but I've always found that's the easy part. How do you deal with the isolation and loneliness engendered by the inability to talk to people or make conversation about anything other than technical subjects? That's the part that has me sobbing myself to sleep at night and periodically contemplating suicide.
I understand your point. However as someone who's life has been ruined by Asperger's Syndrome I have to say there are other perspectives.
I was seriously bullied and discriminated against at school (by teachers and pupils) and all through university and subsequent life, I have literally no friends or anyone to talk to outside of immediate family members, no chance of ever being in a loving relationship as the only women prepared to have anything to do with me turn out to be menatally ill - seriously, of the two women who've slept with me one turned out to be a schizophrenic and the other had Munchausen syndrome - and a career which has stalled due not to a lack of ability but rather to my inability to connect with people and the fact everyone at work finds me just so damn weird. As a result of these and other problems connected with my AS I now, at the age of 35, suffer from chronic intractable depression. I was, in fact, formally diagnosed with AS after being referred to a consultant psychiatrist for depression last year.
I fully acknowledge that if I did not have AS I would not be the same individual that I am. That does not bother me. So far as I'm concerned AS has caused me to have a life that is not really worth living and I would have been quite happy (in so far as that concept has meaning when discussing an emotional reaction to non-existence) for someone else, with a slightly different set of genes to me who would have been better at life and enjoyed it a little more, to have taken my place (my therapist hates this line of argument btw - we have huge rows about whether people who say they are happy with AS really believe what they say or are just fooling themselves in a desperate attempt to bolster their self esteem and playing the "noble, stoic cripple" role that society prefers its handicapped members to adopt). If there was a cure I would jump at it.
I also have to say that, although it's a moot point (see above), if I did ever find a woman willing to breed with me, having had the life I've had and having gone through what I've gone through I would seek genetic counselling and take whatever steps were available to prevent any child of mine from being born with AS (or any other form of autism). I know that the question of whether a bad existence is better than non-existence is extremely difficult from a theoretical perspective but, so far as I'm concerned, if you bring child into the world who you know will have a hellish existence and you could have prevented it, you've done wrong.
Those who have actually been arrested (Lord Levy et al) should already have been added. It always amuses me how the politicians give the police their unconditional support when they're, for example, pumping bullets into some guy's head in down in Stockwell tube station but start whining about the presumption of innocence and police heavy handedness the moment these powers start being used to investigate the politicians' own criminal behaviour.
The record industry is interesting. It is so powerful, that it can make change and introduce new products and formats (like CD), yet ultimately it has a product that people can do without.
The bizarre thing about the music industry is that they simply do not seem to be able to understand this point. They
honestly believe that people can not go without music and so, if music sales are falling, it must mean that the difference is being made up by piracy. I remember seeing a statement to this effect in the information memorandum prepared for the banks in connection with the first LBO of HMV (in the late 90s, shortly before downloads took off) which claimed that the music retail industry was immune to economic downturn because (it claimed) music buyers regard CDs as essential goods which they can not do without. Essentially they felt music lovers were addicted to music. Despite everything that's happened since then to show that music is just another branch of the entertainment industry competing for people's ever shrinking leisure time and one which is fast losing ground to DVDs, the Internet and video games. I think the music industry still isn't ready to give this belief up and accept that it's days of setting the pop cultural agenda are long gone. To avoid acknowledging this reality, and to deal with the cognitive dissonance they must be suffering, record company executives have throw childish tantrums in which they blame their declining profits on everything but themselves and their refusal to accept they need a new business model to deal with a new reality in which the music business is closer to book publishing than anything else (i.e. a business with a huge number of titles, few of which sell better than moderately).
The main advantage of the iPod over the Sony players, in my view, is not the style (some of the Sony players are really very nice looking) but the software. I suppose it may have been improved in the 8 months or so since I last had to use it, but SonicStage is utterly appalling. However, if you've never used anything else you may not realise just how bad it is. I didn't until I switched to an iPod and started using iTunes (version 7.00 notwithstanding).
I had a Sony NetMD player for a number of years, then the first Sony HD player (the one that wasn't compatible with any codec but ATRAC) until finally buying an iPod in March of this year. The reason I changed was that I upgraded my PC and discovered that, notwithstanding I'd copied my music over to an external USB drive, the DRM applied by the Sony SonicStage software refused to allow it be played back on a PC other than the PC it had been ripped on, notwithstanding these were my own shop bought CDs. After a dismissive email from Sony technical support informing me that I would, indeed, have to rip my music collection again I thought "screw you" and bought an iPod. Having learnt my lesson I now rip everything as high bitrate mp3s which I'll always be able to play anywhere.
The creators have no right to be cheated. Look at any text book and it will say the theoretical jusitification for copyright is that it gives artists an economic incentive to produce work and so enrich (slightly dubious in Cliff Richard's case I know, but that's the theory) society by their efforts. When these artists currently whinging about copyright expiration made the relevant recordings they knew they'd "only" get 50 years worth of royalties, yet they did it anyway.
The proposed copyright extention was an attempt by the record industry to increase the value of their back catalogue by, essentially, transferring wealth from the general public to the record industry. I am heartened and, quite frankly, amazed that the Blair government has declined to go along with it. I hope this is the last we talk we hear in the UK of extending copyright. But with 7 years to go before the Beatles recordings start becoming public domain the record industry has got plenty of time to try again. They'll probably shift their lobbying efforts to Brussels now.
Because, despite communism's purported scientific basis, it actually, especially in its early years, took on many of the trappings of a religion which elevated the writings of Marx and Engels (and later Lenin) to the status of sacred texts. There were great, impassioned and pointless arguments about how certain writings should be interpreted and the most effective way to bring down a rival became to accuse him or her of some slight deviation from orthodoxy. Delegations were sent to Engels, while he lived, to seek the oracle's advice on Marx's more obscure passages. It was almost as if, while these people rejected god and religion, they still were unable to think for themselves and simply replaced a mystical belief system with a secular one. And it was a secular religion just as inflexible, dogmatic and unscientific as any mystical religion has ever been. The opening chapters of Orlando Figge's "A Peoples' Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution" is very good on this issue and the socio-economic background of those it appealed to
So, just as Catholics belief that murdering heretics (preferably as painfully as possible) was doing god's work justified the genocide of the Cathars (as just one example), the communists' belief that they were hastening the arrival of post-capitalist society justified their own murderous depredations.
The point is that unquestioning belief in any set of propositions (whether mystical or secular) leads people (not all of them, but certainly enough, as history has shown us, to be a concern) to do very bad things.
Although it can also work the other way around. I work for a law firm and what a law firm (at least the type of law firm I work for) does is produce Word documents. Our clients and other law firms we send them to have to be able to open them (pdfs are generally not used as they're much more difficult to mark-up) so we stick with Word 2000.
And then you have the other kind of sci-fi dystopia where it's the state that exerts totalitarian control over its citizens...
Not to disagree with but, while your penultimate paragraph is certainly true, it's equally true that if the government or any of its agencies were to decide to harass you for some reason you'd have even less chance of redress. I think focusing on large corporations misses the point that the rights of the individual are threatened by large, well funded organisations of any sort and, despite what a lot of people think, the state is still the largest and richest of all those organisations. In the UK, for example, I could be made to dissappear to 28 days (soon, it seems, to be 90), with no judicial review and it would be a criminal offence for anyone to report what had happened to me. I've never heard of any corporation doing that.
No reason you should believe me, but I work with a lot of people of the sort who feature as players in the "corporations are taking over the world" type conspiracy theories and, in my experience, they're greedy and selfish but absolutely terrified of what will happen if they go to far and the state finds out what they're up to. Even more so since the Enron trials and the extradition of the NatWest Three. They all understand that, in the end, the state, with its police forces, standing armies and weapons of mass destruction has far greater capacity to project power and inflict violence than any company.
This does, though, beg the question of whether the state can be suborned by an individual corporation. My view is that, at least at present, it can't be because there are such a large number of companies with differing interests lobbying governments that their efforts neutralise each other, at least to some extent.
Generally you don't have people getting really emotional about hurting animals, not like the way they get all involved in hurting other people.
I thought there was significant evidence that many of those who go on to become anger-excitation rapists and other serial killers of the sort who enjoy torturing their victims usually start off torturing animals then move up to humans when animals no longer provide the same thrill. I certainly once attended a lecture by a forensic psychologist who made this claim and argued that adolescent torture of animals was the clearest indicator of future sociopathy in a person that he was aware of and that courts should take it more seriously as a sign of future violent potential.
Re:But what about the battery?
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And yet none of those reasons have ever been seen as a serious enough design challenge to prevent the rechargable, custom batteries in cell phones, digital cameras and other brands of personal stereo being user replacable.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I thought Manhunt sucked, but I'm now looking to buy the sequel out of sheer irritation at being told I can't.
Doesn't cost much? Perhaps not in North America or if you get it with a new PC but in the UK an upgrade from XP to Vista Ultimate is £180. You could get a good new monitor, half decent graphics card or 4GB of RAM for the same money. I think it's this cost issue (combined with the perceived lack of necessity) which is putting people off upgrading. I'll get Vista when I get a new PC (like you I mostly use my home one for games) which should be in about a years time.
See also the attempts to blame the James Bulger murder on the movie Childplay even though there was no evidence (outside the fevered imaginations of tabloid editors) that the killers had even seen the film.
I find it particularly ironic that Muslims should be trying to suppress study of the Holocaust as, if there is ever another genocide in Europe (and, while I sincerely hope there isn't, I am geniunely worried that the way things are going there will be at some point in the next 30 to 40 years - maybe after a big environmental or economic disaster) the Muslims, as the most visible minority group in Europe, are going to be the victims.
I seem to recall that as well (and that was at a time when the 512KB Amiga upgrade was costing about £150). I think the reason DM isn't on the list is that it was released for the ST about a year ahead of the Amiga version. I certainly remember all the ST fanboys at school using the availability of DM as one of the principal arguments in favour of the ST (that and the MIDI port).
What Apple has been doing with iTMS in Europe is so flagrantly in breach of the principles underlying the single market I'm frankly amazed it's taken the commission this long to get round to investigating them. I'd love to know who's been giving Apple their legal advice - I assume they're going to try to run an argument that they're providing a service rather than selling goods and therefore aren't caught in the single market rules - and will be very interested to see how this one turns out. We've not had a good free movement of goods case for a while...
Sorry, I was talking about the HD audio formats. The PS3 does, of course, have S/PDIF but this can only be used for Dolby digital and DTS (or, I suppose PCM stereo) - the old DVD standard soundtracks in other words. To get the linear PCM uncompressed 7.1 surround soundtrack you'll need either a decoder that can take the HDMI digital input (very rare for now) or an on-board decoder with analog outputs you can plug into your amp's anolog 5/6.1 inputs (which most surround sound amps made recently have). I'm not saying that the ability to play the linear PCM soundtrack is worth it, but it is a functional difference which will be important to some people.
One important difference is audio capabilities. If, like me and, I would imagine, pretty much everyone else who's bought a surround sound system in the last 10 years, you have a perfectly good amp that's not compatible with the new HD audio formats used on blu-ray but do have a set of 6/5.1 analog inputs then you'll need a player with a decent on-board decoder and appropriate analog outputs to take advantage of them. All the standalone HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players I've seen reviewed have these. The PS3 doesn't being HDMI or RCA stereo out only.
Where are you getting the price for a Wii? The UK price is nearer £180 (if you can find one...)
Or have entirely filled all their CD storage units, have literally no room for any more and have reached the conclussion that the production values of 99% of the popular music recorded today are so low that the compression doesn't make much difference (the only album I've downloaded from iTMS in the last year that I felt was recorded well enough for me to go buy the CD as well is Ys by Joanna Newsom). I am not very satisfied by this compromise, however, and agree that, given the the prices iTMS charges, all songs should be available as lossless (and be easily convertable to lower bit rates for transfer to your iPod). It's very irritating when an album (and this is especially true for old albums, at least in the UK) is actually cheaper on CD then from iTMS.
I suspect this extention of phone tapping to MPs is specifically aimed as George Galloway as Blair's desperate for dirt on one of the biggest thorns in his side.
I'm not trying to judge people. Different people have different experiences and reach different, and perfectly valid since these things are ultimately subjective, conclusions about themselves and their conditions. I would like to write more about this but I have to rush off to see my therapist. I would just say though, in response to your comment that it's ignorant and malicious individuals, rather than AS, which have impacted my quality of life I would certainly agree that was true at school and university. These days, though, it's my inability to talk to people and form relationships, and the lonliness and isolation this causes, which is the main problem and this "clinically significant impariment in social interaction" stems directly from the AS without help from third parties.
I have AS, it's ruined my life and I would like nothing more than to be cured (while acknowledging that, even if such a thing were possible, I'd almost certainly be too old for it to make any difference. You mention keeping your personality quirks under control but I've always found that's the easy part. How do you deal with the isolation and loneliness engendered by the inability to talk to people or make conversation about anything other than technical subjects? That's the part that has me sobbing myself to sleep at night and periodically contemplating suicide.
I was seriously bullied and discriminated against at school (by teachers and pupils) and all through university and subsequent life, I have literally no friends or anyone to talk to outside of immediate family members, no chance of ever being in a loving relationship as the only women prepared to have anything to do with me turn out to be menatally ill - seriously, of the two women who've slept with me one turned out to be a schizophrenic and the other had Munchausen syndrome - and a career which has stalled due not to a lack of ability but rather to my inability to connect with people and the fact everyone at work finds me just so damn weird. As a result of these and other problems connected with my AS I now, at the age of 35, suffer from chronic intractable depression. I was, in fact, formally diagnosed with AS after being referred to a consultant psychiatrist for depression last year.
I fully acknowledge that if I did not have AS I would not be the same individual that I am. That does not bother me. So far as I'm concerned AS has caused me to have a life that is not really worth living and I would have been quite happy (in so far as that concept has meaning when discussing an emotional reaction to non-existence) for someone else, with a slightly different set of genes to me who would have been better at life and enjoyed it a little more, to have taken my place (my therapist hates this line of argument btw - we have huge rows about whether people who say they are happy with AS really believe what they say or are just fooling themselves in a desperate attempt to bolster their self esteem and playing the "noble, stoic cripple" role that society prefers its handicapped members to adopt). If there was a cure I would jump at it.
I also have to say that, although it's a moot point (see above), if I did ever find a woman willing to breed with me, having had the life I've had and having gone through what I've gone through I would seek genetic counselling and take whatever steps were available to prevent any child of mine from being born with AS (or any other form of autism). I know that the question of whether a bad existence is better than non-existence is extremely difficult from a theoretical perspective but, so far as I'm concerned, if you bring child into the world who you know will have a hellish existence and you could have prevented it, you've done wrong.
In many Muslim countries apostasy is a crime punishable with death.
Those who have actually been arrested (Lord Levy et al) should already have been added. It always amuses me how the politicians give the police their unconditional support when they're, for example, pumping bullets into some guy's head in down in Stockwell tube station but start whining about the presumption of innocence and police heavy handedness the moment these powers start being used to investigate the politicians' own criminal behaviour.
The bizarre thing about the music industry is that they simply do not seem to be able to understand this point. They honestly believe that people can not go without music and so, if music sales are falling, it must mean that the difference is being made up by piracy. I remember seeing a statement to this effect in the information memorandum prepared for the banks in connection with the first LBO of HMV (in the late 90s, shortly before downloads took off) which claimed that the music retail industry was immune to economic downturn because (it claimed) music buyers regard CDs as essential goods which they can not do without. Essentially they felt music lovers were addicted to music. Despite everything that's happened since then to show that music is just another branch of the entertainment industry competing for people's ever shrinking leisure time and one which is fast losing ground to DVDs, the Internet and video games. I think the music industry still isn't ready to give this belief up and accept that it's days of setting the pop cultural agenda are long gone. To avoid acknowledging this reality, and to deal with the cognitive dissonance they must be suffering, record company executives have throw childish tantrums in which they blame their declining profits on everything but themselves and their refusal to accept they need a new business model to deal with a new reality in which the music business is closer to book publishing than anything else (i.e. a business with a huge number of titles, few of which sell better than moderately).
I had a Sony NetMD player for a number of years, then the first Sony HD player (the one that wasn't compatible with any codec but ATRAC) until finally buying an iPod in March of this year. The reason I changed was that I upgraded my PC and discovered that, notwithstanding I'd copied my music over to an external USB drive, the DRM applied by the Sony SonicStage software refused to allow it be played back on a PC other than the PC it had been ripped on, notwithstanding these were my own shop bought CDs. After a dismissive email from Sony technical support informing me that I would, indeed, have to rip my music collection again I thought "screw you" and bought an iPod. Having learnt my lesson I now rip everything as high bitrate mp3s which I'll always be able to play anywhere.
The proposed copyright extention was an attempt by the record industry to increase the value of their back catalogue by, essentially, transferring wealth from the general public to the record industry. I am heartened and, quite frankly, amazed that the Blair government has declined to go along with it. I hope this is the last we talk we hear in the UK of extending copyright. But with 7 years to go before the Beatles recordings start becoming public domain the record industry has got plenty of time to try again. They'll probably shift their lobbying efforts to Brussels now.
So, just as Catholics belief that murdering heretics (preferably as painfully as possible) was doing god's work justified the genocide of the Cathars (as just one example), the communists' belief that they were hastening the arrival of post-capitalist society justified their own murderous depredations.
The point is that unquestioning belief in any set of propositions (whether mystical or secular) leads people (not all of them, but certainly enough, as history has shown us, to be a concern) to do very bad things.
Although it can also work the other way around. I work for a law firm and what a law firm (at least the type of law firm I work for) does is produce Word documents. Our clients and other law firms we send them to have to be able to open them (pdfs are generally not used as they're much more difficult to mark-up) so we stick with Word 2000.
Not to disagree with but, while your penultimate paragraph is certainly true, it's equally true that if the government or any of its agencies were to decide to harass you for some reason you'd have even less chance of redress. I think focusing on large corporations misses the point that the rights of the individual are threatened by large, well funded organisations of any sort and, despite what a lot of people think, the state is still the largest and richest of all those organisations. In the UK, for example, I could be made to dissappear to 28 days (soon, it seems, to be 90), with no judicial review and it would be a criminal offence for anyone to report what had happened to me. I've never heard of any corporation doing that.
No reason you should believe me, but I work with a lot of people of the sort who feature as players in the "corporations are taking over the world" type conspiracy theories and, in my experience, they're greedy and selfish but absolutely terrified of what will happen if they go to far and the state finds out what they're up to. Even more so since the Enron trials and the extradition of the NatWest Three. They all understand that, in the end, the state, with its police forces, standing armies and weapons of mass destruction has far greater capacity to project power and inflict violence than any company.
This does, though, beg the question of whether the state can be suborned by an individual corporation. My view is that, at least at present, it can't be because there are such a large number of companies with differing interests lobbying governments that their efforts neutralise each other, at least to some extent.
I thought there was significant evidence that many of those who go on to become anger-excitation rapists and other serial killers of the sort who enjoy torturing their victims usually start off torturing animals then move up to humans when animals no longer provide the same thrill. I certainly once attended a lecture by a forensic psychologist who made this claim and argued that adolescent torture of animals was the clearest indicator of future sociopathy in a person that he was aware of and that courts should take it more seriously as a sign of future violent potential.
And yet none of those reasons have ever been seen as a serious enough design challenge to prevent the rechargable, custom batteries in cell phones, digital cameras and other brands of personal stereo being user replacable.