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Comment: Re:Blame Napster (Score 1) 334

by Shakrai (#38976369) Attached to: File Sharing In the Post MegaUpload Era

Harry potter would be a simple movie to do. There is nothing in that could not be done with some plastic models, and a little time painting negatives. Would it look like it does today, nope, but it would perfectly clear to the audience what is happening and they would have no trouble understanding what stuff was "supposed to be".

So essentially you are arguing against progress because the movies of yesteryear told the story just as good as the movies of today? You got modded up for it too; on what other subject could an argument against technology get a positive moderation on /.?

BTW, I'd love to see how you'd bring this scene to the big screen with negative printing.

Comment: Re:Blame Napster (Score 1) 334

by Shakrai (#38976313) Attached to: File Sharing In the Post MegaUpload Era

If Ealing Studios had made it in the 50s it would have cost less than a million dollars in today's money even with Alec Guinness playing one of the leads.

Bridge on the River Kwai had a budget of $3,000,000 in 1950s money. That's 24 million and change in 2012 dollars. Got another bad argument you want shot down?

Comment: Re:Blame Napster (Score 4, Interesting) 334

by Shakrai (#38972445) Attached to: File Sharing In the Post MegaUpload Era

or we can accept it and make a world that the artists (not corporate middlemen) can make a living.

That's a great theory where music is concerned and any start up band can get going with a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment and a broadband connection. I'm not so certain how it translates into movies though. To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio? All of the special effects, the editing, the cinematographers, the actors, director, stunt performers, etc, etc? How do you propose to see that the "artists" in this example get paid without having some sort of corporate middleman?

If you accept that movies are a part of our culture then there has to be a sane middle ground between "information wants to be free!" and "we are going to control where and when you can watch the movie you paid for"

Comment: Blame Napster (Score 5, Interesting) 334

by Shakrai (#38972011) Attached to: File Sharing In the Post MegaUpload Era

Blame Napster for making file sharing main stream. Back in the day when we had to walk uphill to school both ways the only way to pirate stuff was to be a geek or know someone who was. In the glory days most piracy happened on BBS'es, IRC and USENET. The former two were generally only available to those "in the know" while the latter was mostly used by people seeking pornography (who remembers working on PCs and finding gigabyte sized Free Agent cache directories?)

In the end even the RIAA/MPAA types know that they will never stop piracy. Driving it further underground and returning it to the domain of the technically informed would stem their perceived losses though. I'm not sure if this is an obtainable goal with the internet being what it is but you can bet they will keep trying as long as they draw breath. The only thing that will stop this is the rise of meaningful (read: cheap and easy to use) online services that make piracy more trouble than it's worth. A lot of people think that iTunes did this for music, though I would argue that Pandora has done more to negate music piracy than iTunes. I don't think you can directly translate Pandora into movies though.

Comment: Re:non-interventionist != anti-war (Score 4, Insightful) 857

by Shakrai (#38916867) Attached to: How the GOP (and the Tea Party) Helped Kill SOPA

Actually Pearl Harbor can be laid square at the feet of FDR who ignored the will of the people to start a war, sound familiar? I would urge everyone to read Herbert Hoover's biography, its free and online in several places, where he lays out how FDR went out of his way to insult the Japanese at every turn and give them NO way out that would allow them to save face

Even if you accept that FDR was trying to bully the Japanese into a war (a conclusion I found doubtful given that the official policy of his administration was Europe First, read the Plan Dog memo) they still had a way out. Had they simply attacked the Dutch East Indies and Singapore it's exceedingly unlikely that FDR would have brought the United States into the war. The American people would not have marched to war over European colonial possessions in the Far East. Instead they opted to sneak attack a country with eleven times their GDP/industrial plant and were rightfully bitch slapped for it.

instead he simply ignored how they repeatedly said they did not want their sons dying in Europe and the Pacific and kept bitchslapping both Germany and Japan until they got tired of it. Hoover also lays out how many were telling FDR including him that getting involved at that time in any capacity was not only foolish but gave Stalin all the cards because if the USA would have stayed out Stalin and Hitler would have wiped each other out and Japan was buried in a quagmire in China that was keeping the factions all turned on each other and keeping the communists from gaining an upper hand. Read the book, its quite enlightening.

And thank god he did in hindsight. Do you really think world history would be better if the United States had remained on the sidelines? You really think that without lend-lease the Soviets could have fought the Germans to a stalemate? Unlikely -- research the logistics of the Eastern Front sometime. Lend-lease is the only thing that kept the Soviets in the war and ultimately enabled them to defeat Nazi Germany. Why don't you ponder how many more Americans would ultimately have died if the United States wound up fighting a Nazi Germany that had successfully conquered European Russia. While you're at it, read Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan for the Slavs. It would have made the Jewish holocaust look like a warm up by comparison.

FDR brought us into the war at the right time and place. Our casualties were among the lowest of any country involved in the war. That would not have happened if Germany had attained superiority over the Soviet Union and we had to fight the German Army on our own. Do you honestly think that the United States could have peacefully co-existed with the Thousand Year Reich?

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