GoDaddy disabled my website (www.jlist.com) once because an email address I had registered with was bouncing. A major website, down for hours because of a bouncing email address. It sure got my attention right away, that's for sure -- and I'm in the market for a better registrar.
I caught a post on Slashdot the other day about a surge in high school dropouts in the U.S., and was saddened at the news. In Japan, compulsory education covers six years of elementary school and three years of junior high school, and during that time the basics that everyone needs to know are taught -- math, social studies, kanji, morals, and so on. High school has never been required, and there's nothing keeping a sixteen year old who has something better to do with his time from not going on past the 9th year of school. Just the same, there's a heavy stigma -- the dreaded label "chu-sotsu," meaning someone who only attained the level of junior high -- against anyone who doesn't graduate from high school, and the vast majority (96%) do go on. High schools in Japan function as a miniature version of the university system, complete with entrance exams, and competition for the best schools -- Takasaki High School and Maebashi Girl's School are the highest-ranked in our prefecture -- is fierce, requiring years of preparation. Just as with universities, it's possible for students to aim too high and fail their tests, and become a "ronin," a word which used to mean masterless samurai but which now refers to a student who is in limbo while he prepares for next year's tests.
I, for one, work hard, and got my first job at McDonald's by impressing the owner by saying "I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty." And I meant it, even when someone did a number 2 in the urinal (ugh, that was a dark day). When i went to Frankfurt I got a tour, some guy driving us around in a Mercedes showing us the sights. He was pretty Nazi, kept saying things like, "Well, of course I as a German could never say anything like that about the jews..." and generally amusing us no end. Anyway, bottom line was, he kept complaining about the foreigners in the country (11% of Germany comes from Turkey, or something like that), even while he talked about how he hated to work, they shouldn't need to work and should get more time off. As a business owner (jlist.com) I was more than a little shocked at this. I, for one, am raising my son to respect hard work and be ready to do it himself.
We have been lucky, I'd say. One G4 sent in for repairs once, and one MacBook that died causing me to buy a MacBook Pro from an Apple store since I was on the road (Apple took the MB back for a full refund even though six weeks had passed). We did have a terrible time when our database kept corrupting itself, which turned out to be a bad server (G4), which I replaced, which fixed the problem.
I run my business with Macs, and we have like 20 Macs and two PCs. Which is funny since we make PC software (PC dating-sims, if you know what they are). Anyway, cost is always a factor, but really, consider that the cost of a person's SALARY is way, way more than any computer, and considering that we're going to be using each computer for 3-4 years, isn't it logical to assume that good design, reliability, and "it just works" is certainly worth, oh, another $500 or whatever over a PC? Sure, lower cost is important, and I'd love for Apple to make a "Mini Plus" that had a normal sized hard drive and real graphics for $899. But jeez, considering the reliability of a Mac over most PCs, and the fact that we've not had day one of downtime due to viruses, um, I think Apple is doing just fine, at least in our case?
It's especially lucky for America that we have good Catholics like my nephew who will follow the restrictions against contraception, as it's clearly a Sin Before God and all that, yet they're perfectly happy to have as much pre-marital sex as they can find, engage in divorce multiple times (my father managed *six* wives before St. Peter came a-callin', although it was Episcopalian), and so on and so forth.
(I'll skip the obvious joke about how Americans are just growing and growing, in population as well as belt size...)
I am an American living in Japan, where the population has just started shrinking as of this year. No one has babies -- too much stress, cost, and there are subtle pressures to have 1-2 kids because everyone else is having 1-2. It's odd and a little scary. Is population shrinkage (which will be small of course, and much less imporantant than the tendency of people to get the heck out of the "inaka" (the sticks) and head for the cities, either big ones or medium sized ones) really a bad thing? Does it mean permanently shrinking GDP, or is it just one more of those things that we'll deal with? (I suspect the latter).
Anyway, it's great to read all those books from the 1950s about how we'd all be shoulder-to-shoulder by now, with absolutely no room to stretch in any direction. Just goes to show.
Apple's bug reporter can be found at https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Rad arWeb.woa . I've found them to be extremely good about follow up on bug reports -- almost scarily so, since they called my house once when they couldn't get a reply from me by email on a bug I'd reported. The feature that lets you set the width of icon grids in 10.5 is *absolutely* a result of me reporting the lack of ability to do so (it was a popular OS 8.5/9 feature but they missed it in all versions of OS X up til now), which makes me think that they actually listen to their customers.
So really, why not make a bug report on this and see what they do? Certainly an option to "turn of background processes" could be added. Might take a version of iTunes to get done, but it's possible.
I'd just like to point out that you are the 823,273's poster on Slashdot who basically said, as for me, I rip all my CDs, although others pirate music. It's funny how this seems like a requirement when discussing music downloads, a blanket denial that you personally have ever downloaded anything copyrighted.
And between Mac and Windows. Eudora was GREAT. I would have kept it but
a) the Japanese versions were always 1.5 years behind the English versions b) that guy Horie who got busted in Japan for insider trading in Japan made the Japanese versions, and his problems didn't bode well for the program c) with things like the Intel switch on the Mac side, one doesn't need to be running weird fringe programs, however cool they may be
One of the little things that's nice about Macs are, they can make PDFs out of the box, have been able to since version 10.0 (which was really a dawg). This is nice though, free PDF-age for anyone who wants it.
Part of the reason download versions need to be less expensive is, we as consumers lose the ability to resell our product. I mean, I've got three copie of Blade Runner, and because they're on DVD I can sell them on Amazon or wherever to recover some of my costs. If a download movie cost the same as a DVD in package, well, I wouldn't buy.
Yes, I am no small Apple supporter, having 15+ Macs in my company (which publishes PC software, go figure). But that article was embarrassing to read -- I hope that too many/.ers didn't get a, you know, bad image of Mac users from it. That would be terrible.
I've gotten 1 year of sold use out of my iPod with video, used maybe 1 hour a day on avg. My wife still has the only 40 gb U2 iPod, which I made by taking the 40 gb G3 iPod and putting it inside her case (had to remove the rubber insides to get it to fit, so if she drops it, it's likely toast, but no problems so far).
Seriously, the only iPod I had die on me was the one I killed by looking at the pretty screen while I walked into an open ditch. Apple gave me a new one, despite the obvious abuse.
Is RC Tycoon based on the retarded, defective 3D interface of Zoo Tycoon 2, or the beautiful, 2D realistic interface of Zoo Tycoon/Marine Mania/Dinosaur Digs? (If you have kids, ***get*** the original Zoo Tycoon, making playgrounds for Chimpanzees is so much funl amost as much fun as trapping all your zookeepers in a cage and making a zoo with only zookeepers)..
I've seen this game trashed in magazine reviews many times, which pisses me off since it's one of the best games I've played in the past ten yeras. Remember, the original Zoo Tycoon, not the inferior sequel with the bad CG.
One of my faves is the ORIGINAL Unreal Tornament, which has many things on the more recent games. One was, those rellics that give you speed, armor and what not just rock. To relieve stress, do this:
a) play a game against bots b) slow the game down to 50% speed (yes, I said SLOW) c) get the Relic of Strength, a permanent quad damage basically d) get lots of weapons e) add 100 bots so that there are 130 or so running around f) kill slowly and deliciously, with many headshots
Playing it slow lets you get beauty kills that are fun. I haven't enjoyed the more recent UT games as much as the original. Happily for Mac users, it runs with no issues at full speed, even with 100 bits while running Windows/Parallels in the background, on Intel Macs.
Dude, I am a former Republican here, and even I know that
a) the whole homosexual marriage thing was purely and utterly manufacturered as a "wedge issue" to excite the voters
b) when the election was won, the issue went away, and lo, it has not been discussed since then
Christians are SO FRIGGING STUPID to fall for this. They are like ANTs. (Note, I consider myself a Christian too, I am not bashing.) It's like, the Bushandlers have a pool going to see what they can make people fall for.
Also, it seems to me the choice of what years to track that 17.4% are exactly the years when the most tech jobs were lost. Which seems to be, you know, from when the tech bubble really burst to now. So, tracking from the maximum IT employment period of the tech bubble, if that's what they're doing, then some really useless numbers are going to come out of it.
While I agree with you on several points, I for one take the tack that all liberalism should try to "upgrade" itself, at least get to Windows 95-era in terms of packaging, presentation and marketing of its ideas. Part of that is throwing away the word liberal altogether (let's go back to using "progressive" since you can't argue that progress is good, and it's less useless of a term). Let's throw out all the tired old "we will overcome" and "if I had a hammer" crap, since, well, it's been stigmatized big time by the other side. Let's make sure there isn't a lick of old Socialism in the New Progressivism that we want to make people interested in. Let's make sure that people who are rich, or who have a hope of being rich someday (read: everyone who ever went to college, everone who ever bought a share of stock, everyone who ever took interest in a startup company for any reason) doesn't feel they aren't perfectly welcome in this particular tent, which will no longer imply that wealth is bad, or that if a person runs a business or makes a profit they are unclean. Let's make sure that our platform is, reasonable taxes for reasonable services, respect for human rights, logical and far-thinking government.
Let's do some of these things, and see if we can't make a Democratic Party that is a lot more interesting to young people, who (I would venture to guess) tend to vote (R) more than (D) these days, and let's do a lot less of "if I had a hammer."
And, there will be lawsuits down the road, you can be sure. Imagine if Apple sold a license for something, then made it worthless for some reason through their actions? They'd have to make it right, which Apple did in fact do when it purchased PowerComputing's license back when they killed the (crappy) Mac clones.
I doubt if the/. crowd will have seen it, but the last ad Power ran was a cool jibe at Apple showing a cop pulling over a speeder (the "speeding" 250 mhz Power PC 604e, if memory serves) with the caption, "Your license, please." That ruled, definitely up there with Apple's announcement of iTunes on Windows with the caption "Hell froze over."
Haha, I saw this and thought, surely there must be a lot of content at Zune.com, right? Surely, there'll be lots of information, a way to preorder it maybe, just like Apple, since no company generates a ton of buzz without, y'know, trying to benefit from it in terms of sales. Um, THE PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION! Apparently Microsoft doesn't own Zune.com, which is a pretty pathetic situation in my book, up there Nissan now owning Nissan.com, because they let some guy in Michigan get the drop on them, then spend the last decade trying to threaten and sue him rather than NOT working it out, as any reasonable company should. (I have tried to work with the Nissan.com owner in the past, giving him the information he needs to contact President Goshn directly rather than dealing with the local Nissan USA lackeys, but he's not exactly a "problem-solution" oriented person, and neither is Nissan.)
Right on. I mean, we *know* that "zig when your competition zags" and "wait for the next inevitible paradigm shift and take take advantage of it" (i.e. from DOS to Windows, which is why we all use Excel now and now 1-2-3) are spot-on. I'd add "add features that people will want" and "remove all possible downsides to your product" to the list.
If Zune was
a) a hard drive player that did everything the iPod did without lack b) maybe, added some "maybe not perfect, but certainly not bad to have" features like video in the iPod with Video c) maybe, um, threw their existing Windows Mobile platform into the platform, letting us run some software apps from that platform, and maybe allowing devs to come up with a "killer app" that will help them along
it might do better. Currently, being larger, less well designed, and having any significant downsides (like, I can't take my iTMS music with me, I can't use it on my Mac, I can't use it with iTuens) is, well, a deal breaker for anyone with a brain.
I don't know this of course. Maybe there's a lot of pent-up demand for a brown device out there, who knows. In the meantime, I've told my stockbroker to sell MSFT. The "Microsoft is going to lost $50 per unit sold" factor pushed me over the top.
One of the things that burns me up is the rampant, instutionalized piracy of Japanese animation (anime DVDs, music soundtracks, toys and so on) in Taiwan and China. Not only do they have no respect for the law in their own countries, they are happy to export pirated anime products on a large scale to Europe and the U.S., where unwitting consumers of course buy it, then wonder how subtitles could be so bad. The boxed sets of Hayao Miyazaki DVDs for ridiculously low prices on eBay and sold all over Europe are pure crap, but they make lots of money for the companies that bring them out. Anime fans with consciences know to avoid music CDs by Song May and Ever Anime, which are all unlicensed pirate versions from Taiwan. The Japanese companies producers have shown no interest in taking on countries like Taiwan for their large-scale piracy, which is lot worse IMHO than file sharing and "fan subbing" (which has both positive and negative effects on the market for anime products). File sharing may be bad for some resons, such as reducing the resale value of anime products to overseas markets, but at least no Chinese organized crime group is getting wealthy off it.
Slashdot Mirror
GoDaddy disabled my website (www.jlist.com) once because an email address I had registered with was bouncing. A major website, down for hours because of a bouncing email address. It sure got my attention right away, that's for sure -- and I'm in the market for a better registrar.
My blog post on J-List:
I caught a post on Slashdot the other day about a surge in high school dropouts in the U.S., and was saddened at the news. In Japan, compulsory education covers six years of elementary school and three years of junior high school, and during that time the basics that everyone needs to know are taught -- math, social studies, kanji, morals, and so on. High school has never been required, and there's nothing keeping a sixteen year old who has something better to do with his time from not going on past the 9th year of school. Just the same, there's a heavy stigma -- the dreaded label "chu-sotsu," meaning someone who only attained the level of junior high -- against anyone who doesn't graduate from high school, and the vast majority (96%) do go on. High schools in Japan function as a miniature version of the university system, complete with entrance exams, and competition for the best schools -- Takasaki High School and Maebashi Girl's School are the highest-ranked in our prefecture -- is fierce, requiring years of preparation. Just as with universities, it's possible for students to aim too high and fail their tests, and become a "ronin," a word which used to mean masterless samurai but which now refers to a student who is in limbo while he prepares for next year's tests.
I, for one, work hard, and got my first job at McDonald's by impressing the owner by saying "I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty." And I meant it, even when someone did a number 2 in the urinal (ugh, that was a dark day). When i went to Frankfurt I got a tour, some guy driving us around in a Mercedes showing us the sights. He was pretty Nazi, kept saying things like, "Well, of course I as a German could never say anything like that about the jews..." and generally amusing us no end. Anyway, bottom line was, he kept complaining about the foreigners in the country (11% of Germany comes from Turkey, or something like that), even while he talked about how he hated to work, they shouldn't need to work and should get more time off. As a business owner (jlist.com) I was more than a little shocked at this. I, for one, am raising my son to respect hard work and be ready to do it himself.
We have been lucky, I'd say. One G4 sent in for repairs once, and one MacBook that died causing me to buy a MacBook Pro from an Apple store since I was on the road (Apple took the MB back for a full refund even though six weeks had passed). We did have a terrible time when our database kept corrupting itself, which turned out to be a bad server (G4), which I replaced, which fixed the problem.
I run my business with Macs, and we have like 20 Macs and two PCs. Which is funny since we make PC software (PC dating-sims, if you know what they are). Anyway, cost is always a factor, but really, consider that the cost of a person's SALARY is way, way more than any computer, and considering that we're going to be using each computer for 3-4 years, isn't it logical to assume that good design, reliability, and "it just works" is certainly worth, oh, another $500 or whatever over a PC? Sure, lower cost is important, and I'd love for Apple to make a "Mini Plus" that had a normal sized hard drive and real graphics for $899. But jeez, considering the reliability of a Mac over most PCs, and the fact that we've not had day one of downtime due to viruses, um, I think Apple is doing just fine, at least in our case?
It's especially lucky for America that we have good Catholics like my nephew who will follow the restrictions against contraception, as it's clearly a Sin Before God and all that, yet they're perfectly happy to have as much pre-marital sex as they can find, engage in divorce multiple times (my father managed *six* wives before St. Peter came a-callin', although it was Episcopalian), and so on and so forth.
(I'll skip the obvious joke about how Americans are just growing and growing, in population as well as belt size...)
I am an American living in Japan, where the population has just started shrinking as of this year. No one has babies -- too much stress, cost, and there are subtle pressures to have 1-2 kids because everyone else is having 1-2. It's odd and a little scary. Is population shrinkage (which will be small of course, and much less imporantant than the tendency of people to get the heck out of the "inaka" (the sticks) and head for the cities, either big ones or medium sized ones) really a bad thing? Does it mean permanently shrinking GDP, or is it just one more of those things that we'll deal with? (I suspect the latter).
Anyway, it's great to read all those books from the 1950s about how we'd all be shoulder-to-shoulder by now, with absolutely no room to stretch in any direction. Just goes to show.
Apple's bug reporter can be found at https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Rad arWeb.woa . I've found them to be extremely good about follow up on bug reports -- almost scarily so, since they called my house once when they couldn't get a reply from me by email on a bug I'd reported. The feature that lets you set the width of icon grids in 10.5 is *absolutely* a result of me reporting the lack of ability to do so (it was a popular OS 8.5/9 feature but they missed it in all versions of OS X up til now), which makes me think that they actually listen to their customers.
So really, why not make a bug report on this and see what they do? Certainly an option to "turn of background processes" could be added. Might take a version of iTunes to get done, but it's possible.
I'd just like to point out that you are the 823,273's poster on Slashdot who basically said, as for me, I rip all my CDs, although others pirate music. It's funny how this seems like a requirement when discussing music downloads, a blanket denial that you personally have ever downloaded anything copyrighted.
May I suggest he read through this?
g uid=%7BBE57F0AA-03D9-4320-BC4D-83363B6372F6%7D&sit eid=
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Story.aspx?
And between Mac and Windows. Eudora was GREAT. I would have kept it but
a) the Japanese versions were always 1.5 years behind the English versions
b) that guy Horie who got busted in Japan for insider trading in Japan made the Japanese versions, and his problems didn't bode well for the program
c) with things like the Intel switch on the Mac side, one doesn't need to be running weird fringe programs, however cool they may be
One of the little things that's nice about Macs are, they can make PDFs out of the box, have been able to since version 10.0 (which was really a dawg). This is nice though, free PDF-age for anyone who wants it.
Part of the reason download versions need to be less expensive is, we as consumers lose the ability to resell our product. I mean, I've got three copie of Blade Runner, and because they're on DVD I can sell them on Amazon or wherever to recover some of my costs. If a download movie cost the same as a DVD in package, well, I wouldn't buy.
Yes, I am no small Apple supporter, having 15+ Macs in my company (which publishes PC software, go figure). But that article was embarrassing to read -- I hope that too many /.ers didn't get a, you know, bad image of Mac users from it. That would be terrible.
...I hate you. ^_^
I've gotten 1 year of sold use out of my iPod with video, used maybe 1 hour a day on avg. My wife still has the only 40 gb U2 iPod, which I made by taking the 40 gb G3 iPod and putting it inside her case (had to remove the rubber insides to get it to fit, so if she drops it, it's likely toast, but no problems so far).
Seriously, the only iPod I had die on me was the one I killed by looking at the pretty screen while I walked into an open ditch. Apple gave me a new one, despite the obvious abuse.
Is RC Tycoon based on the retarded, defective 3D interface of Zoo Tycoon 2, or the beautiful, 2D realistic interface of Zoo Tycoon/Marine Mania/Dinosaur Digs? (If you have kids, ***get*** the original Zoo Tycoon, making playgrounds for Chimpanzees is so much funl amost as much fun as trapping all your zookeepers in a cage and making a zoo with only zookeepers)..
I've seen this game trashed in magazine reviews many times, which pisses me off since it's one of the best games I've played in the past ten yeras. Remember, the original Zoo Tycoon, not the inferior sequel with the bad CG.
One of my faves is the ORIGINAL Unreal Tornament, which has many things on the more recent games. One was, those rellics that give you speed, armor and what not just rock. To relieve stress, do this:
a) play a game against bots
b) slow the game down to 50% speed (yes, I said SLOW)
c) get the Relic of Strength, a permanent quad damage basically
d) get lots of weapons
e) add 100 bots so that there are 130 or so running around
f) kill slowly and deliciously, with many headshots
Playing it slow lets you get beauty kills that are fun. I haven't enjoyed the more recent UT games as much as the original. Happily for Mac users, it runs with no issues at full speed, even with 100 bits while running Windows/Parallels in the background, on Intel Macs.
Dude, I am a former Republican here, and even I know that
a) the whole homosexual marriage thing was purely and utterly manufacturered as a "wedge issue" to excite the voters
b) when the election was won, the issue went away, and lo, it has not been discussed since then
Christians are SO FRIGGING STUPID to fall for this. They are like ANTs. (Note, I consider myself a Christian too, I am not bashing.) It's like, the Bushandlers have a pool going to see what they can make people fall for.
Also, it seems to me the choice of what years to track that 17.4% are exactly the years when the most tech jobs were lost. Which seems to be, you know, from when the tech bubble really burst to now. So, tracking from the maximum IT employment period of the tech bubble, if that's what they're doing, then some really useless numbers are going to come out of it.
While I agree with you on several points, I for one take the tack that all liberalism should try to "upgrade" itself, at least get to Windows 95-era in terms of packaging, presentation and marketing of its ideas. Part of that is throwing away the word liberal altogether (let's go back to using "progressive" since you can't argue that progress is good, and it's less useless of a term). Let's throw out all the tired old "we will overcome" and "if I had a hammer" crap, since, well, it's been stigmatized big time by the other side. Let's make sure there isn't a lick of old Socialism in the New Progressivism that we want to make people interested in. Let's make sure that people who are rich, or who have a hope of being rich someday (read: everyone who ever went to college, everone who ever bought a share of stock, everyone who ever took interest in a startup company for any reason) doesn't feel they aren't perfectly welcome in this particular tent, which will no longer imply that wealth is bad, or that if a person runs a business or makes a profit they are unclean. Let's make sure that our platform is, reasonable taxes for reasonable services, respect for human rights, logical and far-thinking government.
Let's do some of these things, and see if we can't make a Democratic Party that is a lot more interesting to young people, who (I would venture to guess) tend to vote (R) more than (D) these days, and let's do a lot less of "if I had a hammer."
Any feedback on my suggestion?
And, there will be lawsuits down the road, you can be sure. Imagine if Apple sold a license for something, then made it worthless for some reason through their actions? They'd have to make it right, which Apple did in fact do when it purchased PowerComputing's license back when they killed the (crappy) Mac clones.
/. crowd will have seen it, but the last ad Power ran was a cool jibe at Apple showing a cop pulling over a speeder (the "speeding" 250 mhz Power PC 604e, if memory serves) with the caption, "Your license, please." That ruled, definitely up there with Apple's announcement of iTunes on Windows with the caption "Hell froze over."
I doubt if the
Haha, I saw this and thought, surely there must be a lot of content at Zune.com, right? Surely, there'll be lots of information, a way to preorder it maybe, just like Apple, since no company generates a ton of buzz without, y'know, trying to benefit from it in terms of sales. Um, THE PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION! Apparently Microsoft doesn't own Zune.com, which is a pretty pathetic situation in my book, up there Nissan now owning Nissan.com, because they let some guy in Michigan get the drop on them, then spend the last decade trying to threaten and sue him rather than NOT working it out, as any reasonable company should. (I have tried to work with the Nissan.com owner in the past, giving him the information he needs to contact President Goshn directly rather than dealing with the local Nissan USA lackeys, but he's not exactly a "problem-solution" oriented person, and neither is Nissan.)
Sigh.
Right on. I mean, we *know* that "zig when your competition zags" and "wait for the next inevitible paradigm shift and take take advantage of it" (i.e. from DOS to Windows, which is why we all use Excel now and now 1-2-3) are spot-on. I'd add "add features that people will want" and "remove all possible downsides to your product" to the list.
If Zune was
a) a hard drive player that did everything the iPod did without lack
b) maybe, added some "maybe not perfect, but certainly not bad to have" features like video in the iPod with Video
c) maybe, um, threw their existing Windows Mobile platform into the platform, letting us run some software apps from that platform, and maybe allowing devs to come up with a "killer app" that will help them along
it might do better. Currently, being larger, less well designed, and having any significant downsides (like, I can't take my iTMS music with me, I can't use it on my Mac, I can't use it with iTuens) is, well, a deal breaker for anyone with a brain.
I don't know this of course. Maybe there's a lot of pent-up demand for a brown device out there, who knows. In the meantime, I've told my stockbroker to sell MSFT. The "Microsoft is going to lost $50 per unit sold" factor pushed me over the top.
One of the things that burns me up is the rampant, instutionalized piracy of Japanese animation (anime DVDs, music soundtracks, toys and so on) in Taiwan and China. Not only do they have no respect for the law in their own countries, they are happy to export pirated anime products on a large scale to Europe and the U.S., where unwitting consumers of course buy it, then wonder how subtitles could be so bad. The boxed sets of Hayao Miyazaki DVDs for ridiculously low prices on eBay and sold all over Europe are pure crap, but they make lots of money for the companies that bring them out. Anime fans with consciences know to avoid music CDs by Song May and Ever Anime, which are all unlicensed pirate versions from Taiwan. The Japanese companies producers have shown no interest in taking on countries like Taiwan for their large-scale piracy, which is lot worse IMHO than file sharing and "fan subbing" (which has both positive and negative effects on the market for anime products). File sharing may be bad for some resons, such as reducing the resale value of anime products to overseas markets, but at least no Chinese organized crime group is getting wealthy off it.
My two yen.
So this is how liberty dies...to thunderous applause.