April fools jokes work best when you take the 500 ideas you have, and pick the one or two that are good, and do a great job on them. Posting the other 498 is just boring, tedious, and unfunny.
Furthermore, it defeats the whole fucking point of April Fools: fooling people.
If Slashdot snuck in one or two jokes among the usual postings, people might be fooled. Instead, people simply know that pretty much everything on Slashdot is worthless today, and ignore it. No one gets fooled.
Isn't there still a big, exploitable hole? The hole was that iTMS actually provides music without DRM, and iTunes adds the DRM after the download. The original exploit was to use a client other than iTunes to download, and that client did not add the DRM. This fix is to require the use of iTunes.
So what happens if you download with iTunes, but are running a packet sniffer to grab all the data? Couldn't you then look at those packets and get the unencrypted music from them?
Maybe this has changed in the last few years, but the last time I looked into this, there was a significant risk in having DNA on file. The problem was that DNA tests consist of comparing the sample against the sample from the presumed criminal at a small number of positions. There will actually be many people in the world who will match the criminal's DNA.
When properly used, this is not a problem. "Properly used" means that you find your suspects using traditional methods, and afterwards run a DNA test on them. Get a match there, and you've got your criminal. It's a Bayesian thing, basically.
What is not proper is to start with DNA, and test the criminal's against all the people you happen to have DNA on file for, looking for a match.
Using DNA to find suspects is only good when you either have a comprehensive database that has DNA from everyone, or your tests are so accurate that they really do uniquely identify people. Like I said, I don't know if they are accurate enough for that. A few years ago, they were not.
A survey of 6000 people does not represent the millions of gamers in North America
If there was no significant bias in how the sample was chosen, then yes it does. The accuracy of a random survey is a function of the number of people surveyed, and NOT a function of the size of the total population. 6000 is plenty.
Repeat after me. Quartz is part of OS X. OS X is derived from BSD Unix. If BSD Unix had been under the GPL, OS X would have violated the GPL, lest the GUI and OS been sold seperately and no claim of inseperability made
You need to go read the GPL. It doesn't say what you think it does.
Apple decided that being driven out of business by clone manufactures wasn't in their best interests, and wisely decided to stop the licensing that was allowing that to happen
The only reason the clones were cannibalizing Apple sales instead of expanding the market is because Apple basically forced that to happen. The cloners were required to use Apple designs for key subsystems, and even buy Apple parts for some. Thus, they basically were Apple machines that happened to be in non-Apple cases and did not have an Apple logo on the front.
So, it is no surprise the market for them was almost exactly the same as Apple's. (Remember, this was in the era when Apple's case design was not really distinctive, so being in a different case was no big deal).
Power Computing did show off some prototypes of Mac clones that they designed entirely on their own, which probably would have grown the market instead of cannibalizing, and they publically begged Apple to be allowed to sell them, but Apple refused.
I have a guess as to why Apple went after that rumor site, after years of pretty much ignoring the rumor sites, even when the rumors turned out to be true.
I think the idea is to discredit rumor sites in the future. If Apple can get it in people's minds that they sue sites that spread real leaks, then when they do not sue a rumor site, most people will assume that it is because the rumor is not true.
Sure, if you think about it logically, that's not a good assumption for people to make, but we're dealing with perceptions here, not logic. People won't think "well, Apple didn't sue, but they only have sued once, so that doesn't mean anything". They will think "hmmm...if this rumor were true, Apple would be suing".
We had a free online chat server at work, and one of the problems was dealing with jerks. If we banned someone by name, they could just come back with a different name, and with dynamic IP addresses so common, also a different IP address.
If we could have used something like this to ban by computer, that would have been great.
Why wouldn't the music industry just make all songs $4 instead of doing it that way? Think about it.
Because they would want to maximize profit. If there is a song that I will buy at $4, but that you will not, but you would buy at $1, pricing it at $4 gets them $4. Pricing it at $1 gets them $2. Pricing it at $4 for me and $1 for you gets them $5.
You know what? I'm all for it... if it means they are willing to discount the less-popular stuff in exchange. Then people who want to pay four bucks a song for the latest "boy band" can do so, and I can get all my favorite fucked-up indie stuff on the cheap. It's win-win!
Not in the long run. Paul Goldstein, a noted professor of copyright law from Stanford, pointed out something very interesting in a lecture I attended around 10 years ago. When music (or other copyrighted material, for that matter) is sold electronically (he was envisioning some kind of satellite on-demand streaming service, but the idea still applies), in a way that allows the sellers to keep track of the purchase history of individual buyers, then they could go to variable pricing that is variable per person, rather than just per song like you are imagining.
That is, they could figure out that you like that "fucked-up indie" stuff, and so charge you $4 for it, whereas if I think it is merely OK they might only ask $0.50 from me.
Note: Goldstein didn't say this would be a good thing. He was just pointing out the possibility that it might happen.
There was also some speculation as to how consumers could deal with this. I don't remember if Goldstein suggested this, or if it was something that me and my friends came up with while discussing the lecture later. Consumers could purposefully purchase stuff they don't like, in order to try to screw up the profile data, to keep the music companies from knowing what their favorites are. If buying a couple $0.50 songs from a genre you hate will keep them from raising one of your favorites from $2 to $4, it would be worth it. The music companies would probably tie in the purchase prices to the data from streaming services, so heavy music buyers could subscribe to streaming services, and have their computers listen to crappy music all day to skew the data.
Or maybe people could group together. Find someone who gets a low price on what you like, and for whom you have a low price on what he likes, and purchase for each other.
Since planes very rarely fall out of the sky, maybe it would be better to check the ID of every person who gets on a freeway onramp, since accidents on freeways are much, much more likely
Generally, accidents on freeway onramps do not spark urgent investigations. Also, generally they tend to be accidents. Finally, if they aren't accidents, there generally aren't hundreds of uninvolved victims that need to be eliminated from investigation.
Nearly everyone focuses on how ID won't prevent terrorists from getting onto planes, and points out that the 9/11 terrorists had IDs.
However, what about after an attack? When a plane goes down with a couple hundred people on it due to terrorism, won't it be very useful to the investigators then to have a list of who claimed to be on the plane? Remember, most of the passengers will NOT have used fake IDs, and it will be possible to quickly check them out and not waste investigative resources on them.
Even recording for your own use is a copyright infringement, except that it has been found to be a permissible Fair Use
If it is Fair Use, it is not infringement.
Furthermore, you've overlooked the first sale doctine, 17 USC 109: "Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 (3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord".
When you record a broadcast, that is a lawfully made copy that you own. It seems to me that first sale says you can sell it.
Your comments on lending to friends, etc., are simply nonsense.
Hmmm...two days ago, this was on Slashdot linking to Rueters. Yesterday, it was here, linking to USA Today. Now it is here a third day in a row, linking to the BBC.
Checking Google news, I see another 100 or so news sites that covered this.
Are we going to see a Slashdot story a day for the next 100 days on this, or what?
I have held off from getting TiVo or the equivalant as I had figured that this would happen
I don't think there is a need to hold off on a PVR out of concern that the company will go away, at least if your TV service provider is reasonable and you buy one that they support.
I bought an UltimateTV a few months before Microsoft/RCA/DirectTV killed that product, but Microsoft and DirectTV have provided a couple of major updates since then, and it has continued working fine.
Perhaps at some point, DirectTV will stop supporting it, and I'll have to move to something else, but I expect they will offer a good deal on that, and overall I'll be better off than if I'd went without a PVR while waiting for the "final" solution to arrive.
Speaking of houses and gadgets...why the heck don't they start putting in DC power? That is, have a beefy power supply somewhere, and make some common DC voltages available at all the outlets, in addition to the usual 120 VAC. Then, instead of plugging power bricks into power strips whenever we want to power some small gadget, we could plug it in to the wall jack.
It would be especially great to have computers get power this way, so that the hot and noisy power supply could be left out of them.
Now go look that up in a few other translations. It is quite a bit different.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
This whole area is just a mess when it comes to documentation, making it hard to figure out what the hell you actually need. Take LDAP, for example. I understand the lightweight in LDAP is in comparision to X.500. OK, cool. The problem is most of the documentation for various LDAP products seems to assume you are intimately familiar with X.500 stuff. So, I suppose someone coming from the X.500 would would be quite delighted with LDAP.
However, for those who know little or nothing of X.500 and are just looking for simple directory services, this makes the LDAP documentation pretty much worthless or extremely annoying, depending on just how tenacious you are.
I don't mean to pick on the various LDAP projects. This kind of thing happens all over the place with free enterprise software.
Until recently, music subscription services have been somewhat restricted in their ability to transfer songs they provide to portable players, while Apple has sold millions of portable iPods by allowing users to buy songs from iTunes and store them on iPods
Divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold, and it works out to only something like 5 or 10 albums per iPod. Unless people are buying much much bigger players than they need for some reason, it looks like people are mostly putting things other than iTMS music on their iPods.
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Furthermore, it defeats the whole fucking point of April Fools: fooling people.
If Slashdot snuck in one or two jokes among the usual postings, people might be fooled. Instead, people simply know that pretty much everything on Slashdot is worthless today, and ignore it. No one gets fooled.
You mean like this?
So what happens if you download with iTunes, but are running a packet sniffer to grab all the data? Couldn't you then look at those packets and get the unencrypted music from them?
When properly used, this is not a problem. "Properly used" means that you find your suspects using traditional methods, and afterwards run a DNA test on them. Get a match there, and you've got your criminal. It's a Bayesian thing, basically.
What is not proper is to start with DNA, and test the criminal's against all the people you happen to have DNA on file for, looking for a match.
Using DNA to find suspects is only good when you either have a comprehensive database that has DNA from everyone, or your tests are so accurate that they really do uniquely identify people. Like I said, I don't know if they are accurate enough for that. A few years ago, they were not.
You could do what you wanted before, with Hymn.
If there was no significant bias in how the sample was chosen, then yes it does. The accuracy of a random survey is a function of the number of people surveyed, and NOT a function of the size of the total population. 6000 is plenty.
Then they will be sued by Zamfir, master of the Pan flute.
You need to go read the GPL. It doesn't say what you think it does.
(Hint: contemplate Tivo)
Yeah, investing $150 million dollars in a company that had several billion cash in the bank at the time makes a big difference...
The only reason the clones were cannibalizing Apple sales instead of expanding the market is because Apple basically forced that to happen. The cloners were required to use Apple designs for key subsystems, and even buy Apple parts for some. Thus, they basically were Apple machines that happened to be in non-Apple cases and did not have an Apple logo on the front.
So, it is no surprise the market for them was almost exactly the same as Apple's. (Remember, this was in the era when Apple's case design was not really distinctive, so being in a different case was no big deal).
Power Computing did show off some prototypes of Mac clones that they designed entirely on their own, which probably would have grown the market instead of cannibalizing, and they publically begged Apple to be allowed to sell them, but Apple refused.
I think the idea is to discredit rumor sites in the future. If Apple can get it in people's minds that they sue sites that spread real leaks, then when they do not sue a rumor site, most people will assume that it is because the rumor is not true.
Sure, if you think about it logically, that's not a good assumption for people to make, but we're dealing with perceptions here, not logic. People won't think "well, Apple didn't sue, but they only have sued once, so that doesn't mean anything". They will think "hmmm...if this rumor were true, Apple would be suing".
If we could have used something like this to ban by computer, that would have been great.
Amusingly, my first thought on reading this, after "I have no idea where Baskin-Robbins is around here" was to go to Google maps.
Because they would want to maximize profit. If there is a song that I will buy at $4, but that you will not, but you would buy at $1, pricing it at $4 gets them $4. Pricing it at $1 gets them $2. Pricing it at $4 for me and $1 for you gets them $5.
Not in the long run. Paul Goldstein, a noted professor of copyright law from Stanford, pointed out something very interesting in a lecture I attended around 10 years ago. When music (or other copyrighted material, for that matter) is sold electronically (he was envisioning some kind of satellite on-demand streaming service, but the idea still applies), in a way that allows the sellers to keep track of the purchase history of individual buyers, then they could go to variable pricing that is variable per person, rather than just per song like you are imagining.
That is, they could figure out that you like that "fucked-up indie" stuff, and so charge you $4 for it, whereas if I think it is merely OK they might only ask $0.50 from me.
Note: Goldstein didn't say this would be a good thing. He was just pointing out the possibility that it might happen.
There was also some speculation as to how consumers could deal with this. I don't remember if Goldstein suggested this, or if it was something that me and my friends came up with while discussing the lecture later. Consumers could purposefully purchase stuff they don't like, in order to try to screw up the profile data, to keep the music companies from knowing what their favorites are. If buying a couple $0.50 songs from a genre you hate will keep them from raising one of your favorites from $2 to $4, it would be worth it. The music companies would probably tie in the purchase prices to the data from streaming services, so heavy music buyers could subscribe to streaming services, and have their computers listen to crappy music all day to skew the data.
Or maybe people could group together. Find someone who gets a low price on what you like, and for whom you have a low price on what he likes, and purchase for each other.
Generally, accidents on freeway onramps do not spark urgent investigations. Also, generally they tend to be accidents. Finally, if they aren't accidents, there generally aren't hundreds of uninvolved victims that need to be eliminated from investigation.
However, what about after an attack? When a plane goes down with a couple hundred people on it due to terrorism, won't it be very useful to the investigators then to have a list of who claimed to be on the plane? Remember, most of the passengers will NOT have used fake IDs, and it will be possible to quickly check them out and not waste investigative resources on them.
If it is Fair Use, it is not infringement.
Furthermore, you've overlooked the first sale doctine, 17 USC 109: "Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 (3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord".
When you record a broadcast, that is a lawfully made copy that you own. It seems to me that first sale says you can sell it.
Your comments on lending to friends, etc., are simply nonsense.
Checking Google news, I see another 100 or so news sites that covered this.
Are we going to see a Slashdot story a day for the next 100 days on this, or what?
I don't think there is a need to hold off on a PVR out of concern that the company will go away, at least if your TV service provider is reasonable and you buy one that they support.
I bought an UltimateTV a few months before Microsoft/RCA/DirectTV killed that product, but Microsoft and DirectTV have provided a couple of major updates since then, and it has continued working fine.
Perhaps at some point, DirectTV will stop supporting it, and I'll have to move to something else, but I expect they will offer a good deal on that, and overall I'll be better off than if I'd went without a PVR while waiting for the "final" solution to arrive.
If it is an APC BE725BB and the sound is a hissing sound, then it is a defect (not safety related, just annoying), and you can get it exchanged.
It would be especially great to have computers get power this way, so that the hot and noisy power supply could be left out of them.
Now go look that up in a few other translations. It is quite a bit different.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
However, for those who know little or nothing of X.500 and are just looking for simple directory services, this makes the LDAP documentation pretty much worthless or extremely annoying, depending on just how tenacious you are.
I don't mean to pick on the various LDAP projects. This kind of thing happens all over the place with free enterprise software.
Divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold, and it works out to only something like 5 or 10 albums per iPod. Unless people are buying much much bigger players than they need for some reason, it looks like people are mostly putting things other than iTMS music on their iPods.