>> ^Sigh:

look another MMO to fail against WoW!


The sad part is you are 100% correct. Pretty much every MMO since WoW has tried far too hard to dethrone it and wound up fading into obscurity a year later. You have to maintain your own niche of players otherwise you will fail miserably. EVE Online does this right, many others do not.

A key example is Warhammer Online itself. It had a strong first month showing (so much so as all the servers were overloaded and they added more frantically) and looked like it was going to do well. Problem is, once you hit maximum level (40) in that game there was little else to enjoy, and the tier system was lopsided from 31-40. People quickly vacated the game in droves and servers merged, making things even worse with population screwups.

They went from a half dozen or so servers at launch to like 50 when it was doing well, and now its back down to 6. Ouch.
Warhammer closes 43 servers
(The game had barely been out half a year)

This goes for you too, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Just because you have a good license like LOTR does not mean automatic win.

>> ^Sigh:

look another MMO to fail against WoW!


It's not a competition, you don't have to beat WoW to be a success.
In fact WoW actually helps other games succeed, whenever first-time MMO players consume its available content and go looking for other MMOs to play.
If you want an analogy, think of WoW as a starter drug.

That would be, if they are in the US, of course...
Luckily, some of us couldn't care less about DMCA, and can do whatever pleases us with our DVDs.

>> ^spawnflagger:

Unfortunately, you are both breaking the law. Specifically the DMCA (digital millenium copyright act), which states that you cannot circumvent any encryption on media. Even if it seems like "fair use", or you say "but I own the DVD!" - doesn't matter. This law is poorly worded for the consumer, and only crafted to support lawsuits by the large media studios. Even the simple DeCSS code used on DVD, which was beaten within months, counts as encryption, so "ripping" DVDs is therefore illegal.

Unfortunately, you are both breaking the law. Specifically the DMCA (digital millenium copyright act), which states that you cannot circumvent any encryption on media. Even if it seems like "fair use", or you say "but I own the DVD!" - doesn't matter. This law is poorly worded for the consumer, and only crafted to support lawsuits by the large media studios. Even the simple DeCSS code used on DVD, which was beaten within months, counts as encryption, so "ripping" DVDs is therefore illegal. CopyLeft was sued for printing t-shirts with the DeCSS source code on them. It also brought about a case of the first "illegal prime number".

(I suppose if you are preserving the DeCSS encryption on the ripped-to-hard-drive copy it might be a legal backup falling under fair use, but I am not a lawyer)

Anyway, that's why there aren't any legal programs to archive all your movies to hard drive (free and widely available does not equal legal). Which is also why most of those dvd's and blu-rays include a separate Digital Copy that includes a lower res, pre-encoded, DRM'd, version of the movie transferable via iTunes or WMP.

I wish that movies had a separate licenses for the content than for the media. If you saw the movie in the theater, you should get a discount on the DVD (or digital iTunes/etc). If you own the DVD, then you should get a discount on the blu-ray.

My biggest gripe with pure-digital media is the lack of a 2nd hand market. You can't sell used iTunes downloads. (at least not a-la-carte. there was a case of a successful sale of an entire iTunes account transfer on ebay)

>> ^deathcow:

I find decoding the content, followed by making a new disc without them, to be very efficient.


>> ^Psychologic:

It usually isn't just for bypassing previews. I back up all of my DVDs on an external mirrored hardrive. Besides protecting against scratched dvds, I can watch any of the movies from any computer in the house over the wireless network without having to keep up with the physical DVDs.
There is plenty of free software that bypasses DRM, and cutting out previews and unwanted extras reduces the size noticably. The only way the process would take close to an hour is if the video is being compressed (calculation intensive). If it's a straight copy then it takes less than 20 minutes and only requires user input at the very beginning.

>> ^Shepppard:

Woah woah woah, say what you will about religion.

Don't fuck with Santa.


Hell yeah. All I ever got from Jesus was some crappy tasteless wafers and some watered down wine.

Santa got me a Millenium Falcon!

Santa > Jesus/Buddha/Allah/FSM

Dinosaurs died out pat- you live in the wrong millenium : - S

>> ^Throbbin:
>> ^srd:
What is it with journalists and the over-the-top poem-recital-at-school enounciations? I really hope archeologists in a millenium won't find any neewsreels from today...

I hope ALL they find is the VS database. They'll think we were a well-educated, horny, funny, and scientifically inclined society.


You left out ridiculously attractive.

>> ^srd:
What is it with journalists and the over-the-top poem-recital-at-school enounciations? I really hope archeologists in a millenium won't find any neewsreels from today...


I hope ALL they find is the VS database. They'll think we were a well-educated, horny, funny, and scientifically inclined society.

What is it with journalists and the over-the-top poem-recital-at-school enounciations? I really hope archeologists in a millenium won't find any neewsreels from today...

The purpose of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is not to provide you with a way to hide how much of a wet wick you are.

Philosophers have identified a pandemic! Philosophy is an area of academia that has no use for statistics or evidence, because they can just say things and that makes it true!

"Thinkers" have been hand-wringing for decades, centuries, and millenium about the horrific corruption of our youth that will surely lead to the collapse of civilization Real Soon.

In order to be taken seriously by the scientific community, these experts would need to actually look at the data, like any professional would, before they declare a pandemic. After they did that, if there was really a pandemic, they would have to do a lot more work (boring!) before implying the cause is rap music and Paris Hilton movies.

From Wikipedia:

"In conjunction with his ideas, Langan has claimed that "you can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics."

Uhuh. This I would like to see.

But as a warm up, why doesn't he tackle the Millenium Problems. He could earn a quick $6 million dollars . . . but perhaps this would divert his attention from his Intelligent Design research . . . hmmm.

Israel as a country was established by the invasion of a piece of land that had been owned by the Arabs since the 7th century AD. The Jews lost it to the Roman's.

It was established in bloodshed by forcibly taking away the land of the Palestinians (who objected of course) and bought with US dollars which built and armed the armies they used to defend themselves in the war of independance.

Just 3 years after the end of the holocaust, Jews were perpetrating similar crimes to the Palestinian people and that has not stopped.

Originally 56% of Palestine was to be ceded to the Jews (the UN mandate), does the West Bank + Gaza look like 44% of the country?

As for "why don't the Arab's help them", take a look at Afghanistan and Iraq... America is the muscle behind Israels "independence". We all remember the patriot missles parked in Israel in the 90's to stop the scud missles? When the Arabs can safely ignore the American gun to their head, Israel will cease to exist and I assure you, will turn the country in to a glass crater before they let the Arabs take it back

You want to see how brave the Israeli's are, stand America down, remove the military subsidies and let them stand on their own.

Hear hear to the minister, his speech is spot on and further more, he has the credentials to actually say what he said without being tarred as anti-semetic. Laughable that such a lauded and long time friend of Israel has called them out for what they are. The jackbooted neo-fascists of the new millenium.

Couldn't invite gorillaman. His sulfuric ejaculate would dissolve cast iron.

And thanks for the * quality, girlfriend.

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
If you, rottenseed, blankfist, thinker and gorillaman all pooled together one evenin, I bet you could "come" up with enough sticky to last us all into the next millenium

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
You'll have to use your own adhesive next time, as I already sniffed my entire batch for the next 5 years. Rottenseed might be able to help you, however. He runs the Drugs channel.

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
Thanks for the quality and sticky love Just wondering, what adhesive is it you used this time, is it that home-made stuff you mentioned before? I'd like to grab some off of you if I may, i've a lot of stickyness in my future what with my 250!

If you, rottenseed, blankfist, thinker and gorillaman all pooled together one evenin, I bet you could "come" up with enough sticky to last us all into the next millenium

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
You'll have to use your own adhesive next time, as I already sniffed my entire batch for the next 5 years. Rottenseed might be able to help you, however. He runs the Drugs channel.

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
Thanks for the quality and sticky love Just wondering, what adhesive is it you used this time, is it that home-made stuff you mentioned before? I'd like to grab some off of you if I may, i've a lot of stickyness in my future what with my 250!