They also own their version of Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water and Kimba, the White Lion.

Just a reminder that Disney doesn't just shamelessly steal from American folklore and then try to lock it up forever; they are quite happy to steal from other cultures too.

Keep this in mind in a few years when Disney tries to find a way to loophole their way into retaining ownership of the original Steamboat Willie -- which, if I'm understanding this ruling, Disney can no longer keep perpetually copyrighted through bribing congress.

It IS all about him. Him and his agent, Greenwald.

Snowden doesn't give two squirts of piss about what he found, merely that it got him the attention he felt he deserved. In addition, there were only so many cases of Greenwald pulling the "The Goverment could (possibly in my deranged mind) wiretap all phonecalls! Now, without any evidence at all, lets talk about this newly established fact that the Government is somehow tapping all phone calls, everywhere."

Follow that up with Greenwald acting like an AOL troll circa 1990 to anyone who calls him out on his bullshit (seriously, watch his twitter feed, it's like watching an 8 year old playing Journalist) and his "newspaper," The Guardian editing articles without retractions when they realize just how full of shit he is, and, well...

In a few years we'll all realize Greenwald and Snowden are mostly full of shit, for the time being, they make interesting sock puppets for the InfoWar style conspiracy nuts amongst us.

Real fans get the precision down to the number of lines of dialogue, percentage of total screentime, or number of minutes (out to two decimal places), you insensitive clod!

Lets not forget a major part of this panic is due to old manufacturing companies starting to realize that if we can print something for 5 cents, then why would we pay $5 for it?

While we're not at that point yet, we certainly will be in 5 years. In 10-15 years, we'll be able to print iPods. Once that happens... why buy an iPod, when you can download a crowd-engineered alternative that's better and cheaper?

I expect some form of faux outrage to ramp up and 3D printing to be banned or seriously restricted soon. It's too disruptive for us us mere plebeians to be allowed to have.

I was actually speaking of the comics, not the cartoons. The great unforgivable sin was that Viz wanted something like $0.25 a chapter and had a 2 week delay (which has since been lowered to same day) release lag. The "pro-piracy" arguments were hilarious, and stupid.

Or as I said before -- blubbering, entitled Manchildren. Especially when you consider the company they're defending, NOEZ, has made a fortune ripping off Japanese and US IP for years now.

Anyway, DRM is no excuse. If a company wishes to sell you something with some restrictions, well, that's their right. It might be considered wrong, but oh well. That's where we're at as a culture right now -- casual theft has led to the point where companies have to put at least a token effort into protecting their goods.

It does not mean people have the right to steal it just to spite them.

You laugh, but to be fair, when things are readily available digitally, piracy does drop off quite a bit.

Yes, there's always going to be cuntrags that bitch -- the whining blubbering mass of entitled manchildren that cry every time Viz shuts down another Naruto / One Piece / Bleach piracy site being the example that immediately comes to mind -- but for the most part, people pirate not because they don't want to pay, it's because they want convenience.

Relevant Oatmeal link.

You're forgetting the magic words that summon Venture Capitalists:

"It's Demoware... IN THE CLOUD"

A major problem with Pandora is you never hear, in theory, anything you dislike -- but also never hear anything NEW, you MIGHT like, either.

I remember about a year, maybe two, ago there was discussion about Google and Bing and the like "censoring" your search results -- tailoring them to news sources and (this is the big one) ideologies that it thought you were a part of, due to their data mining.

This created a minor bubble, a lesser kind of the bubble you see Fox News (or god forbid, Infowars) followers stuck in. This is a disaster in the making when dealing with news, but it's also pretty darned bad when talking about entertainment.

For example, I use Pandora for stand up comedy. I have a station for each comedian, and the new shuffle thing at least mixes things up. But I never hear comedians other than the X number of stations I have +/- a few more, give or take a rare playing of some odd or new comedian.

Contrast this with playing a comedy radio station, an actual radio station, one where the music is all set by a DJ or a "impartial" randomization routine. Will I hear stuff I dislike? Probably. Will I hear new stuff I wouldn't have heard on Pandora? Absolutely.

I don't know how to fix that particular problem. Maybe Pandora should allow for an option where for an hour a day, or at random, it goes into "Pandora Power Hour" where it loosens up the algorithms and intentionally makes you listen to things you might not have known you liked? Not sure.

Hah, how sensationalist. No, they just added a third person camera like all the old Mechwarrior offline games and a bunch of tryhards who seem to know better than the developers -- and these sort ALWAYS think they know better than the developers -- are upset about it.

Yes.

Proud but still concerned,
A citizen that hasn't been nuked or given ebola from iron age religious psychopaths... yet.

Winamp Lite is an afterthought. Originally you had no choice but to stick with the increasingly "AOL-afied" Winamp releases they put out. They got really quite bad at the low point, I don't know if it ever recovered or not.

Heck I didn't even know about Winamp Lite until just now, heh.

It's probably a reference to DEADBEEF, the coding term. To quote Wikipedia:

"0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. DEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized -- when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the DEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[16]"

Basically it's one of those words you can write in HEX and has come to mean "This software has crashed in a way that we know is absolutely NOT hardware related."

Am I the only one who stuck with Foobar2000 back in the day, once Winamp self destructed?

I mean I have the rather... shoddy... Google Play Music on my Android Tablet, but on the PC, Foobar2000 does everything I thought I needed. Is there a compelling reason to try Clementine / Amarok?

Exactly. The management was quite willing to bargain with the union for a pay cut, then gave themselves YET ANOTHER pay increase and bonus. The pay cut was supposedly because the company was dying, the pay increase and bonus was because it sure as hell wasn't management's fault that the company was going bad, and heck, they were so innovative in conning the union members into working for less than they were worth -- again.

That was the breaking point, that caused the Union to strike. And of course, Fox News and the crony capitalist crowd did their aggressive projecting crap to turn it around on the Unions. They do the same thing all the time, particularly in political debates, it's honestly a brilliant (but dishonest) tactic.

So you support Right to Mooch States, where the Unions fight for benefits that apply to all the workers, but the workers don't have to support the union to get them?

Or did you honestly think that a company would pay union members one wage and non-union another? The entire point of a union is to be collective.