It stops some people. Not everybody wants or bothers to torrent movies, and TPB only reliably carries Big/Popular/New movies, they don't really keep a deep library or long tail -- you can find just about any title in existence but the seeders off the main drag are a flaky breed. BluRay DRM seems to be working pretty well if you're trying to make sure people pay for a copy of Cat Ballou or Brigadoon, particularly if the alternative of Hulu or Netflix is a click away.

Also, if they didn't use DRM, then you could rip a DVD without violating the non-cricumvention provisions of the DMCA, and the rights-holders would rather have that against a pirate than not, it gives them more legal options.

As always, the people who buy stuff aren't the targets as much as the aggregator entities like TPB and MegaUpload, who make millions selling ads and subscriptions on "free" downloads.

That's really all DRM is good for on DVDs and Blu-rays. It works better when it's one part of an entire media framework or system -- like Apple/iOS, where it's a mobile device with a locked-down app environment the user can't really get into casually; or the Digital Cinema distribution system, where media is protected with DRM and transported over secure channels, and all the equipment is kept behind locked doors with limited access, and the projection equipment itself is electronically interlocked to keep people from tapping it.

The reason Nazi Germany sometimes gets excluded is:

1) Hitler, on multiple occasions, voiced disgust at Fascism, on nominal nationalist and ideological grounds
2) Mussolini's corporatist ideology differs in several fundamental respects from Nazism, with its stronger emphasis on the syndicalism of Sorel and its demotic character (though this was more or less borne out in practice)
3) The Fascist system was authoritarian, but most people agree that it wasn't totalitarian
4) Along these lines, Italian Fascism was actually a relatively stable regime, at least compared to Stalin's Russia or Germany
4a) The closest analogue, Spanish Falangism, actually persisted into the 1970s.
5) Despite a lot of promises made to their Nazi allies, the Italian Fascists went to lengths to frustrate the genocides that characterized the war-years Nazi regime. Effective Jewish deportations from Italy only took place after Mussolini was executed and the Germans occupied the country. Fascism could be racist, but it wasn't that racist (unless you were Ethiopean).

I can count probably two dozen layers in the opening sequence for my local news.

But that's comping, not editing -- as a general rule, if you noticed something, it's either bad picture editing, or not picture editing at all. On features, the crew who does the opening sequence may do it in Vegas or After Effects of some other "editing" workstation, but they're not called "editors," they're called "designers." People who layer VFX shots aren't VFX editors, they're compositors. The people who actually go by the title "VFX Editor" actually don't do a lot of comping, besides some simple mock-ups and garbage mattes, their gig is more organizational and supervisory over the people that layer the shots.

Maybe someone might do some gig in Vegas or Avid, but there's a line between crafting visual elements for transitions and titles, versus the structuring of a narrative piece with shot selection, order, and pacing. Those are different things. If all you'd ever done was comps and title animation in Vegas, and you went around calling yourself an "editor," you'd get a lot of funny looks and most knowledgable post supervisors in LA and NY would call you out on it.

And believe me, on the front end of the editing process, it can go WAY over 10 video tracks, even for a relatively simple video. Hell, I've used more than that just for one title sequence.

I'm not sure title sequences are editing. I mean, like, Eisenstein didn't write a book about the 6 forms of Matte Keys. Editing is rhythm and storytelling and capturing the best of the performances. It's not kewl explosion transitions with 6 background layers that make the client piss his pants.

Reading this thread, the conversation of "video editing" seems to lead directly to

• hundreds of tracks
• 3d modelling
• Writing your own video filters (probably in Lua or something)
• extensible command line interfaces
• free codecs

"Video editing" actually requires

• never crashing
• interop with industry standards like AAF and SMPTE MFX (patented or not)
• long timelines
• Well-designed and stable UIs (like, buttons and icons don't change for decades)
• Thorough sound and audio metadata, sound matchback workflows, video (or even film) matchback workflows
• never crashing
• 98% of the time, cuts. 1% of the time, an A/B dissolve, 1% of the time, something more complicated a vendor has done for you.

Professional video editing is all about workflows and reliability. "Open source video editing" is all about hacking for 10 hours on a python script for animating the title transitions in your Kickstarter Dr. Who Fanzine Screencast.

Last time I checked, the cheaper version of Vegas sucked, mainly because it had a *very* limited limitation on the number of video tracks allowed on the cheaper non-pro version.

I have about 30-40 credits on Hollywood features in sound editorial. I've seen a picture editor maybe go out to three video tracks. More than one is unusual, unless you're on an NLE that puts titles and dissolves on second tracks.

Some guys need dozens or hundreds tracks of layers for compositing, but that's not the same domain as a "video editing tool."

Hari Seldon warned me about people like you...

"Fascism" was a political system practiced in several Mediterranean European countries in the early part of the 20th century. It usually entailed economic and cultural coordination by the state, a personality cult around a leader, a single-party or sham democratic system, national idealism, and militant, expansionist foreign policy. It's applicability outside of this narrow context is hotly contested, you can start fights among historians by asking "Was Falangist Spain Fascist?" or "Was Nazi Germany Fascist?"

Committing a guy for writing a book is many things, but it ain't fascism. It's people like you who apply it scattershot to every instance of emotive negativity toward the state that have stripped the word of its "rich meaning." You should know who said this:

In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yeah, I think we're missing a big chunk of the story. He constitutionally can't be held against his will unless he's being charged with a crime past a certain point (24 hours I think?)

There is this thing called Involuntary Commitment, laws vary state by state. In Maryland they can hold you for up to 10 days as long as doctors sign off that you have a diagnosis. In the old days they could hold you indefinitely, a la One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest.

Tom Lehrer, is that you?

Google has so far been completely lackadaisical about doing the legwork with business partners to enable their NFC payments system. What Google has to do is go on a stage with Visa and MasterCard, and talk about how every POS will be accepting Android NFC payments in 6 months, and we'll give a free phone to every merchant in America who can't afford to upgrade.

The business deals are necessary before the NFC hardware is useful. Just because Android phones have an antenna and a chip, it doesn't mean that everyone will be drawn by the gravitational force of Market Share to support Android. What they want is a payments platform, and the hardware is only a small part of a platform -- the important, big parts, are the business deals with credit card companies and bank networks. And Google's general attitude with this sort of thing has been "we'll work with banks but we get to define all the terms of the deal," and if banks don't work with us we'll just use include them without their permission anyways.

This is typical of Google's approach in a myriad of business sectors: they design an open system, but design the business model in such a way that they receive a lions share of the benefit, and then they accuse anyone who doesn't work with them of "stifling openness."

All those companies won.

Dell and Gateway were founded after Apple, Apple saw them born and buried them. If you bough $10,000 of Apple stock in 1990 you'd be a millionaire today; if you'd put it on Gateway 2000...

I mean, that they won once is interesting, but what's changed that keeps them from winning? Many steam engine companies are out of business, so why does Apple, a putative "steam engine company," make so much money? Are computers really comparable to steam engines?

GE used to sell steam engines, GE hasn't gone out of business, why not?

Maybe we could say that laptops and mobiles have replaced desktops in the way that internal combustion replaced steam. Fine, but Apple thrives in those businesses as well.

Apple best smartphone? Because it sells most? Does it? So Justin Bieber is one of the best musicians then?

Ironically, Justin Bieber is merely the cutting edge of sort of meme-generated, metric-driven and ad-supported celebrity Google and YouTube have enabled and profit handsomely from. Justin Bieber is the sort of musician you get when people don't pay for music, and "sells most" is merely one trivial statistic. What matters for musicians now is their Brand Reach, their impact, their ability to steer demographic groups to ads and products; music is a component, but only insofar as it helps create the aura of "celebrity" necessary to create the brand.

And in the same way, Google doesn't care if Android handsets are profitable, if the apps are profitable, or even if the users particularly prefer them, considering they're usually getting them for free. All they care about is moving units, getting activations, getting the ads in your face, and getting the use metrics back to their dataset. Being "good" at anything is a secondary consideration.

While I wouldn't say that the EB positively isn't encyclopedic, I wouldn't go around telling people that it's status is indifferent to wether women participate or not, or that the lack of female participation was "natural".

I mean like, "encyclopedia" means, "a walk around all things." Can you say you've covered "all things" if no women contribute? If one contributes, is that sufficient? Two or three? 10 percent? Most of the things in an encyclopedia aren't objective, there are articles on art, history, literature, culture -- if men are giving the prevalent and decisive opinion on all of these things, is that really credible?

Don't mistake the String Theory religion and everything connected to it for science. It isn't.

Notwithstanding the numerous theoretical physicists that devote their time to it. And the fact that America's most prominent theoretical physicist is a string theorist. What a mess.

There's no question that theoretical physics has certainly declined in terms of its practical output since World War II, but that's understandable -- the death of 100K Japanese and the nihilistic horror of a thermonuclear war is a hard act to follow up :) On the other hand, there's definitely some force to the argument that theoretical physics has kinda lost its way because the Philosophy of Science hasn't managed to keep pace. Something that really comes through with Feynman's lectures is that he has a really solid metaphysical, experiential grounding for what he's explaining, like Einstein did. He's thought through everything he's explaining from the basic foundations and takes little for granted, and he's explicit about the things he does take for granted and he understands the limits of his arguments.

Feynman was famous for saying that, if you couldn't explain something to a freshman lecture, it wasn't understood and you probably didn't understand it yourself. If you go up on Hulu and watch Brian Greene's NOVA three-parter on String Theory, it's atrocious -- it's like hearing a Catholic priest explain the nature of Holy Spirit. He doesn't get it -- he exemplifies the unfortunate trend in modern theoretical physics, that if you don't have the answer you want, you haven't done enough Lagrangians.