synaesthesia

Retain copies of all music with a registered ISBN at the Library of Congress. Allow musicians to buy copies for the cost of the media. In order to qualify as a musician, the person must perform at least one unit of time of live music, or produce one recording of original composition, per time period. In this way the copyright laws can still be wielded against cheating consumers, while not stifling the need of musicians to explore and absorb a vast array of works in order to produce significant new art. It also provides an incentive for people to compete for performance venues by improving their music, in that way promoting the progress of the useful arts.

I see very often people use the label 'conservative' to generalize about a group of people. But what does conservative really refer to?

Does it refer to:

– Founding fathers' principles
– Religious/Puritan/Temperance principles
– Protestant/Stoic/Rugged Individual
– Family values (i.e. one man who works, one woman who stays home, married once, with several children)
– Status quo (It ain't broke, so don't fix it)
– Pro-business / economic growth above all else / at the extreme, a Fascist outlook (Govt and business should be bedfellows)
– Fiscal restraint in government
– Foreign policy (Conservative here can either refer to nationalism or to isolationism)

Only once you have figured out what they mean when they say conservative, you can then determine whether or not you disagree with them.

I think it is pretty safe to say that anyone who voluntarily labels themselves as a generic “conservative” these days is simply expressing allegiance with the Republican Party. Which, by most measures, is not a party with conservative
policies, though when trying to push their self-gratifying policies through they tend to appeal to people who self-label as conservative, either through the label itself or through as many of the above listed values (traditionally associated with the label conservative) as possible.

If you want to first copy the DVD to the hard drive for quicker access, use the script dvdbackup or the utility vobcopy.

If the DVD is 4.7GB or less (i.e. not a dual layer), you can simply make a copy of the DVD:

$ growisofs -Z /dev/dvdrw -dvd-compat -V”MY_DVD_TITLE” -dvd-video /path/to/dvdimage

/path/to/dvdimage should contain AUDIO_TS and/or VIDEO_TS directories.

If the DVD is more than 4.7GB (i.e. a DVD-9), it will have to be split and/or transcoded to DVD-5 size (4.7GB) or smaller.