You'd think the music companies would have at least one economist on staff who could explain to them, slowly and gently, that under certain circumstances it is actually possible to make more money when each individual unit is priced lower. It really takes some stubborn failure of logic to prioritise your sale price above your actual monetary returns.
Of course, it's also possible that the music quality will just decline to compensate for the drop in price.
(that even America is making moves to protect its citizens against) Why the "even"?
Because America and Britain are supposedly so very close and buddy-buddy, it's more shocking to hear that America is this repelled by British libel law. If it was some middle-eastern country that hates us nobody would be surprised, but it's a point of note and shameful fact to politicians over here that our laws are bad enough that you guys can't even ignore them, but have to actively seek ways to protect yourselves from them.
Seriously, anyone who can claim with a straight face that Britain has less freedom of speech than China (and hence is only beginning to take steps to elevate above it) is living in a fantasy world.
"When it comes to censoring publications and blocking online content, it is arguable that Britain has an even worse record than China." - Simon Singh, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7294539/Simon-Singh-it-is-too-late-for-me-but-libel-laws-must-change-for-the-public-good.html
But yes, there may have been a trace of hyperbole in my post, on the internet. Gold star!
Seriously, anyone who can claim with a straight face that Britain has less freedom of speech than China (and hence is only beginning to take steps to elevate above it) is living in a fantasy world.
"When it comes to censoring publications and blocking online content, it is arguable that Britain has an even worse record than China." - from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7294539/Simon-Singh-it-is-too-late-for-me-but-libel-laws-must-change-for-the-public-good.html
However, yes, there may have been a trace of hyperbole in this post, on the internet. Gold star!
Well, given that it is now approaching 9PM in the UK, it is more correct to say Simon Singh was in court today. And so far things look promising – Lord Judge is less than impressed by BCA's case. See http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/02/simon-singh-chiropractic-bca-libel-appeal
You got to posting the important link before me, so let me instead say that even if Simon wins this round there is still a whole lot more work to be done; firstly, this is only the appeal against the previous judge's decision of what was meant by his use of the word 'bogus', and a win here will just make the rest of the case easier to fight. Secondly, Britain still lacks a proper 'public interest' defense in these sorts of cases, and that is why it is important to support full and considered libel reform so that this ridiculous charade does not have to be repeated, at enormous expense, for every individual who would reasonably criticise his peers.
I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.
Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.
Echoing this recommendation - have used NFSN for a few years now, and am very pleased with the 'pay for what you actually use' structure. As long as you're comfortable at using FTP without the help of a cPanel interface, they're hands-down the best deal you're going to find.
At last, they've made DRM so obnoxious, intrusive and butt-fuckingly annoying that even the average Joe will become enraged at the audacity of the thing. Hope Ubisoft has a team of people standing by ready to explain to people with shaky wireless routers or traffic-shaping ISPs why their game keeps booting them out.
I'm calling it - less than three months after release before they patch this out due to overwhelmingly bad press. Christ Ubisoft, who do you think you are?
Oh, hey, I wonder if there's a "Replied To Own Post" achievement....
Or 'have a post replied to'?
Really? The recommended methodology of the police is the same as that used by opportunistic criminals to steal credit card information, that the police warn about?
C'mon, it's just impossible to satirize this kind of thing. It's not fair.
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.