My great-grand father was a pastor, my grand-mother and mother are protestants, but after going to sunday school and such I've become an atheist when I was a teen (for the reason you cite), and no one pressured me into reconsidering it. IMO the problem is the bigotry of the families you speak of, not that particular religion. BTW, there's "going through hell with your parents" and then there's "being harassed constantly and having your private life thoroughly investigated for dirty secrets to try and get you fired, jailed or institutionalized".

Speaking of my great-grand father, he was the kindest, most selfless man I've ever known (hid jews during WW2, helped develop a small pacific island, ...). He most certainly never pressured his parishioners into giving him or his church money.

Anyway, my point was that despite all the crooked priests and bigot followers, mainstream religions are much less greedy and evil than cults like scientology. For example, you can get the bible for free or at a very moderate cost, and without giving out any personal information. Same with the Qur'an. Try acquiring scientology "courses" for free or anonymously...

Are you saying that catholicism should be forbidden because of what happened centuries ago ? Next you'll tell me I should be apologizing to every black person I come across for slavery...

I don't agree with most of the Catholic church views, and it certainly has major flaws, but *nowadays* the leaders of this religion are not motivated by greed and power (if they are, they're doing a very lousy job at it). Scientology obviously is.

As I say a couple of posts below, the purpose of CSS is to prevent you from copying the disk. If a simple dd invocation could allow you to copy the DVD and have it play on standard DVD players (which can decrypt CSS), there is no way it would have been chosen as the standard copy protection scheme. See TheThiefMaster's post below, I think he's right about how CSS works.

Do you have any source to back up these claims ? They seem highly dubious to me. If you can copy the DVD to your HD this way, what would stop you from burning the ISO to a DVD-R ?And in this case, what would be the point of CSS if you could copy the disk using a standard unix command and an ISO-burning utility ?

I wasn't aware dd implemented DeCSS.

Actually the TV tax only funds France Television channels, which do not produce reality TV shows (I guess that's what the "panel of boring middle-aged guys..." referred to). And there are no ads on these channels after about 8:00PM. In general, there are much less ads on french TV than on US or Australian TV (not sure about England) : there's "only" one commercial break during a movie.

But otherwise I agree with you, TV here globally sucks, I'd gladly pay £150 to see them produce Dr Who instead of the asinine Plus belle la vie... Thank god for eztv ^^

Of course I mainly use VLC, but when I bought my Macbook 3 months ago I thought I'd give the new Quicktime a try, and was surprised that it wasn't the pile of crap I remembered from some years ago.

I think QuickTime X is only available on Snow Leopard, so it's preinstalled, you just need to install a codec pack (Perian is pretty good). After that it works quite well, the UI is minimalist yet pretty : the video takes up the whole window (including borders) and the controls fade in if you hover over the video.

I was talking about the "copy DVD to HD" part, not the encoding part. The encoding itself takes longer indeed. But with disk space getting cheaper and cheaper I think I'll do away with the encoding, and just keep the VIDEO_TS folder in case I need to burn the movie to DVD later.

When I get a new DVD, it spends about 15mn outside its box (the time it takes to rip it), then goes back in never to see daylight again. I then watch the content on my HTPC running XBMC. Same goes for music.

The day I can't rip a DVD (or a CD for that matter) is the day I'll stop buying them.

That's it, basically. For example he says that in the game men can run for miles before quickly proning and sniping someone. IRL you'd have to catch your breath, take your time to get in a good position, ...

It's not available online AFAIK, only in the printed magazine. It's in issue 201, you can order issues online but this one is out of print...

Canard PC (French PC gaming magazine) recently published an article written by a professional soldier about ARMA II, which is regarded as one of the most realistic shooters available. His conclusions were that ARMA was (very) far from being realistic, but that it was OK because it would have been boring and tedious to act exactly like a real soldier in a real war. So no, I don't think realistic shooters exist, and for good reasons.

And some of those "alternatives" don't even have anything in common with the original game : I can't see any similarities between Braid and Dragon Age, or between Dead Space and Deadly Creatures.

First item seems nice, hadn't heard about it. The taskbar is OK, jumplists are neat, but lacks customizability. All the other features were already available in other OS/DE's, apart from DirectX 11 (meh). Oh, and the pony.