Not according to this. Granted, it's just a year-old article on a tech site, but according to them, the DMCA forbids consumers from decrypting discs to format shift. Stupid? I think so, but unless the courts change their mind, VidAngel is headed for a world of hurt.

As much as I hate to say it, you are correct (at least as of October of 2015). The legal wrangling came to the conclusion that because CDs were never encrypted, consumers can format-shift. But DVDs and Bly rays? Not so much. However, it seems to me that given the vast number of people that do this "under the radar" it can't be long before an "exemption" is granted to bring this in line with Fair Use.

I think this will be the salient point of the legal argument. Is VidAngel a distributor? Or are they only reselling discs with filters and letting the consumer apply them as they please?

The only gotcha to this argument is the Family Movie Viewing Act, which is part of the Copyright act, specifically allows a person in their own home modify movies without consent of the copyright holder. VidAngel is arguing that this is exactly what is going on with their service. They provide the movie (unaltered), the filter and let the viewer apply said filter how they wish in their own home. Frankly, I hope VidAngel wins if only so that media producers run into some kind of limit to their seemingly unending power over the consumer.

While I agree with some of your statements and assertions, your conclusion and proposed solution is flawed. Yes, the founding fathers distrusted standing armies and envisioned the 2nd Amendment as a remedy for this. However, some of the founding fathers felt the entire bill of rights as superfluous as the constitution already granted sovereignty to the people, not the elected government. By extension, the notion that there should be a "well armed militia" instead of a standing army is also a contradiction IF (caps on purpose) the army reports to the people. I have no idea how that would be accomplished in practice, but I do know that the order of soap box to ballot box to ammo box is that way for a reason. Power determines the course of civilizations and national and international politics. Money and guns equal power and the federal government started out with neither. Alexander Hamilton provided money to the feds and they use it expertly to influence supposedly sovereign states to bend to their will in small and large ways. Ultimately, it was as you pointed out, the standing army that secured the federal government as the prominent power in our federalism experiment.

Now here is where your conclusion is flawed. Power cannot be taken without power. It can certainly be given up, but that is an idealistic dream. There is not one single case of that ever happening to a nation state without the threat of greater power forced upon it. Machiavelli was right that it is better to be feared than loved and we are proving it again in the USA. The problem is not having guns (power), it's having too many and allowing them to be used for things that they shouldn't be used for. England is an example of what I consider too far to one extreme -- where only hunters are allowed guns and even the police don't regularly carry firearms. I'm not a flag-waiving NRA member, but I do believe that we must uphold the laws of the land, which includes the 2nd amendment. I also believe the US is too far to the other extreme with a militarized police force with too-lax provisions in place to allow them to kill citizens. The founding fathers provided checks and balances at the highest levels of government and I believe this model should be followed down to the lowest levels. If power is the problem, then balancing it is the solution.

Instead of giving up power (guns), we should re-think how guns are distributed and used. I like the Israeli model, where all citizens are trained in the military, possess weapons and know how to use them properly. Their crime rate is famously low for a reason (terrorism aside). My proposal would be to require training for all gun owners (to encourage safe and sensible use), prohibit military weapons or tactics to be used by the police and to return to a state of balance. I could go into greater detail, but I'm neither a lawmaker or policy influencer -- just an armchair philosphizer.

You're right. This isn't about platforms, this is about following the law and IMNSHO, DPD did not do that. Without any information except what has been reported on this and other websites, it appears that after preventing his ability to move, cordoning off the area and attempting to negotiate for hours, they made a judgment call to end his life. He may or may not have been a threat to the general population or to the officers on scene. Regardless, the power to end another life is precisely what is at issue in the mind of the shooter, the mind of the police and the mind of every US citizen that is aware of the increase in police violence. Civilian police forces should not be in the business of killing people and that's what the constitution is talking about with the phrase "due process". It's the military's job to kill people and the military are not peace officers, they are war officers. The distinction is important and bound by law, but increasingly ignored by police forces with the aid of the federal government. The militarization (not just a FUD word, but literally, the conversion of peace officers to war officers) of police forces is the issue and the reason why there was a protest in Dallas and the reason why Johnson went mental and decided to kill cops there. Assassinating him (look up the definition) only reinforces the feeling among Americans that the police are out of control. Did he deserve to die? Most likely, but it isn't the job of police forces to determine that. That is what a judge and jury are for and one of the reasons thirteen colonies because thirteen states after a long and bloody war. If there is not a strong legal reaction to DPD's use of force in this way, the situation will get worse, not better. If there is not a show of restraint by those who are sworn to "serve and protect" there will be escalation that leads to civil war. The USA has already had one and we should do everything we can to avoid another because it was the single great cause of American deaths, ever. If you say you care about people, then you should care about upholding the law, especially for those who are given guns by the government chosen "by the people".

TBH, I was surprised this was a windows box at all. It's been a while since I admined for a station, but the weather graphics were designed/rendered on an SGI box. Like the AVIDs, they had their own support contract. We did have a station IT administered Optiplex for the weather producer to put the segment together, but it was just an interface to the SGI's software. I'm sure that winsoft has caught up to SGI for this application and wouldn't be surprised if SGI was almost out of the market by now.

Having worked IT for a TV station, i can tell you that the weather graphics workstations are often NOT on the local AD domain. This is deliberate and the local IT guy usually doesn't "own" that particular workstation. It's usually up to the weather guy and weather software vendor to provide support. Likely, this little insightful nugget was lost on that pair or they simply didn't care. Either way, it might not be the IT guy's fault at all.

It's a PowerShell command: New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Block Regsrvr32" -Program "%SystemRoot%\System32\regsvr32.exe" -Direction Outbound -Action Block

There is an active and vocal thread (one of many) that lead me to believe that there are a lot of people affected. Personally, I re-installed Win10 from ISO and the problem went away.