That means your average redneck being able to shoot better than most professional soldiers.

The colonial militia actually joined the British Army on it's little adventures through North America.

Basically, you should be able to show up to your local Army base ready for action armed with your own weapons and trained how to use them.

This means being able to own and operate your own pistol, rifle, or machine gun. It's an expectation similar to what you would expect out of the militia in 1790.

She has the right to not incriminate herself PERIOD.

How hard is this to understand?

It's almost like we need the Ten Commandments on courtroom walls just to give morons a good example of a categorical imperative.

Plenty of companies forgo Redhat contracts just as plenty of companies used to forgo Sun contracts.

The idea that you need someone else to blame is mainly an idea of a certain small group of large companies that are darlings of the financial news media.

In other words they made a Superman movie.

If you want another kind of movie, you can always go to the art house down the street. It's a wide open market out there. If the good stuff isn't getting enough love then it's your own fault really.

...except stopping piracy is more like creating the kind of police state that the NSA is trying to create.

It's pretty easy for a single entity to stop breaking the law.

It's much harder to police 300 MILLION individuals in an open society with readily available technology and a high speed planetary communications medium.

Telling the NSA no is a lot easier (and far less harmful) than pulling Gestapo tactics on the entire population of a democracy.

Certainly on the demand side there's a lot to devalue a cinematic release. This doesn't just include alternate ways in which you can get Hollywood content for cheap. This also includes nonsense like LOLcats and Zynga games.

It's not just about pirates and the $5 BluRay bin at Walmart.

> You realize that successful blockbusters aren't the norm right?

Are you kidding? They have been the norm probably longer than you've been alive.

Every single gamble doesn't necessarily payoff. However, that's how it is in ALL businesses. Unless you have a gold mine, you don't have a magic money making machine.

Although on average it works out.

> and there is no way a crappy pirated copy is in any way equivalent to seeing the movie in a decent theater.

Unless you want to go through the trouble of seeing something on the best screen in town on opening weekend, what you will end up with will probably be little better than what you can manage at home with a relatively meager investment in equipment.

In that regard, there might be something to these "opening weekend" numbers.

The part that bugged me is the idea of fixing an obviously badly broken application by just throwing more hardware at it. Although doing this with hardware of dubious reliability does seem like a recipe for disaster.

It's easy to be apathetic when you never or rarely fly.

People are much less prone to stick up for others. If you make it clear that they are going to be impacted then the level of interest is going to increase dramatically.

"free speech zones" just sound like tinfoil ramblings to most people.

As someone else stated, it's all in how you ask the question.

You can engineer the survey to get the result you want. Survey companies have been doing this for a very long time. It's no big secret.

Add in some misleading journalism and the misinformation becomes easier still.

> You could record on a Win7 DVR, compress to Mp4, and then feed those to the AppleTV through itunes.

Or you could just skip the strange and unecessary step of trying to marry an AppleTV to WMC. Your proposal would probably fail for the target demographic even harder than a conventional WMC setup.

For a pedestrian user that has no interest in multi-room viewing, a solution that requires no PC and neither of the big PC vendors would likely be the most logical option (namely, get them a Tivo).

Alternately, just use a single WMC box.

...it's almost like all of the relevant acquisitions that lead to the creation of these monsters should have been supressed by the FTC to begin with.

You're asking the same entity that allowed this nonsense to happen to fix this nonsense. A bit like letting the fox guard the hen house.

I am sure slashdoters objected to many of these mergers when they happened in the first place.

Yes but did build modern scale coliseums. Some of those are still being used today.