"The officers had no choice but to use some degree of force to remove her from the vehicle and get her to comply."
You have to be one of those nutty gung-ho cops to really believe this. Every action doesn't have to result in beatings. Cop say "get out of car". Person says "I'll be there in a minute". Cop says "You're not listening to me, I get to beat you up or kill you".
It the same mindset that didn't let the Branch Davidians just slowly come to their sense and avoid dozens of senseless deaths. What an ego on these cops. They equate a woman on the phone with an escaping armed bank robber.
I guess when you hire gorillas for cops, you get gorilla solutions to the everyday and mundane.
"Why is our government so not on the side of consumers this time?"
For a concrete reason: fear.
Congress is being told by everybody...Alan Greenspan, Record Companies, Industry Execs, Bill Gates, etc that the future of the economy is "Intellectual Property".
So as congressperson, you've got to believe it if every expert is telling you that you need tougher and tougher IP legislation.
It doesn't help when we get the phony "Terrorists use pirated stuff to finance doing bad stuff to America" nonsense. That's the political cover these guys need to screw the common person through ridiculous copyright and patent laws.
Here they have a device which for most users will ancillary to their home or laptop DVD player. So people would buy these things as travelling movies.
I assumed the movies would be in the $8-14 dollar range.
Nope. Full price, and in most cases *more* than the DVD.
Now, I'm not a marketing expert, but if I were sony, I'd drop the price to $8 for UMD movies, I'd throw them into the box along with the DVD ("Buy the DVD and get the UMD for free!!!"). Get the format established.
Nobody will buy UMD's at $23, yet that's the price. And if nobody will buy them, Sony can't get the format established. Which means nobody will commit to the format.
I guess they're just too smart for me over at Sony marketing.
I'm a comcast subscriber, and comcast subscribers get an included subscription to Rhapsody.
Well, I loaded the Rhapsody client, and its really just a modified version of the Real software.
After installation, I checked what was going on in the task list. The Rhapsody install loaded a bunch of software and drivers onto my PC that ran all the time, even when Rhapsody wasn't running. That's unacceptable to me. WMP 10 does that, and I don't like it, but I have little choice with the OS vendor into that market. And given what I know about Real, is it reporting on what programs and data I have on my PC? Will it prevent me from using my CD or DVD burner in some circumstances? I just don't know. I emailed Rhapsody/Real my concerns about not knowing what was going on, and they just sent me a stock response about "thanks for the input". I guess they don't actually read their email.
I don't want to load down my machine and distrust it just for a bit of music. I don't care for iTunes, but at least when I quit the program, there's no trace fo it running on my machine taking resources.
So in the end, I removed Rhapsody, and then I spent another hour removing bits of it from my HD and registry. Can anyone explain why programs refuse to remove themselves from my PC when I uninstall them?
And by the way, between Shoutcast and iTunes, there are tons of free music on the Internet. Maybe not on demand, but in the end its a good thing to listen to something new and unexpected and not the same 100 song playlist over and over. I've even discovered www.somafm.com as a source of interesting and unexpected music.
" Now now we all want to think the MPAA are guilty but as TFA says its an allegation thats being investigated."
Isn't this similar to the record and movie companies who want to get info from ISP's about alleged copyright infringement without going to a court of law?
The media companies have *seen* people stealing, so they assume people guilty and want to just fine them directly without doing that long, involved courtroom stuff.
"Corporations/businesses exzisted LONG before government."
If you define "business" as "bartering, then you're right.
But corporations are a relatively recent invention as compared to government. Many people today point to the Dutch East India company as the first modern limited liability company. If I remember my 9th grade history correctly, it was set up to allow multiple investors the ability to pool risk and reward, since ocean voyages were very costly.
If we go further back I think the first real corporation was in the 14th century, but I don't remember the name or the purpose.
Some people even say there were corporations of a sort in ancient rome. Wouldn't surprise me; Rome was very advanced.
But to say that corporations are older than governments is not supported by any history that I know.
I don't think there is anything special about considering a corporation a person; I personally think its wrong; its simply a financial tool, there's nothing morally that says a bunch of guys who pool risk has the same rights as a person.
What does that makes 128kb/s? Or 192kb/s? Sooperdooperaudiophonicbeyondcompare quality?
The only thing that is CD quality is...a CD. And while 128kb/s AAC is fine (and somewhat better than MP3 and WMA), it isn't even close to CD quality.
64kb/s? That isn't even FM radio quality. I'm not talking Clear Channel 99.something playing the top five hits over and over FM. I'm talking real FM quality (i.e. WGMS in Washington DC, or hundreds of PBS/NPR stations across the U.S.). Heck, I've not heard a WMA that I would compare to CD, and I'm not talking expensive stereos; I'm talking about listening on a stock car stereos.
I realize this is a silly rant, and there are people who listen who really can't tell the difference. But lets stop pretending on audio quality. It reminds of the 60's when every amplifier manufacturer was claming the most ridiculous power outputs until the government stepped in and made them stop.
Let me say I think that Apple has every right, the RIAA has every right, the MPAA has every right to use every technical means at their disposal to protect their copyright.
Where I draw the line is that I don't think the FBI should be the enforcement arm to protect these technical means of protection.
In essence, what I'm saying is this...if people are commercially copying this stuff, the FBI should get involved, because it is related to the actual copyright law.
However, if Apple uses Fairplay, and people use a program that negates Fairplay, then Apple should have two options...ignore it, or stop selling it to me. In my opinion, this puts market forces into effect:
1) Apple either stops selling music (or the RIAA or whomever) 2) Apple lowers prices to make their songs more appealing with DRM 3) They accept that no system is perfect and get on with business 3) They removed the DRM
But these people want to be protected from the market forces that ultimately make a DRM'd song worth less than a non-DRM'd song and that is *annoying* to businesses. They want to have their cake and eat it too. I'd like that as well, but I don't get the benefit of congress and the FBI to help me out.
I agree, don't buy from iTMS...I think the quality is average, and the prices too high by a factor of 2-3. But I understand it is *reasonable* to buy from iTMS and expect to use the song anywhere I want as long as I don't violate the copyright.
When you attach your web server to the internet, you're letting everyone look at it.
Part of that process is that people will look at it, classify it and judge it.
It inherent in attaching a web server. If you don't like it, the best thing to do is unplug the ethernet cable from your web server, and tell people to dial directly (or through Minitel) to your server, because you feel that putting it on the internet places you in a difficult position.
I don't see how you can have it both ways...they want wide exposure, so they place it in the most public place on the planet, then they complain that it isn't viewed in precisely the way they envisioned.
"What you mean is that fraudulantly offering an unredeemable rebate should be illegal, which it already is."
Here's my beef.
Rebates in some theoretical sense are fine.
There's two things I have a problem with, one of them is philosophical, one of them is practical. Lets start with the practical.
I have in several cases, sent in rebates. I'm usually very careful. I have in several cases (a) not received a response ever or (b) The rebate fulfillment house claims I didn't send in enough paperwork (and well past the deadline for submission.
I have no recourse in these situations. I'm just out the money. And what's worse, nobody has an incentive to make this right, because the company is simply out money if its correct, and they get more money if I'm screwed.
On a more philosophical level, I have a beef with rebates. Lets go through this:
Merchant: Buy this widget for $2, and I'll give you $1 back in the mail.
Me: Why not just sell it to me for $1?
Merchant: Because I'm hoping you'll forget to send it in, and I won't have to pay you that $1.
You see? Its almost fraud but not quite. So from that viewpoint, I understand why people think it should be illegal to offer rebates.
But even if you disagree with my philosophical conclusion, how do you deal with the practical aspect of a system that has no ability to be corrected? Its like playing the lotto as to whether that rebate actually comes.
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"The officers had no choice but to use some degree of force to remove her from the vehicle and get her to comply."
You have to be one of those nutty gung-ho cops to really believe this. Every action doesn't have to result in beatings. Cop say "get out of car". Person says "I'll be there in a minute". Cop says "You're not listening to me, I get to beat you up or kill you".
It the same mindset that didn't let the Branch Davidians just slowly come to their sense and avoid dozens of senseless deaths. What an ego on these cops. They equate a woman on the phone with an escaping armed bank robber.
I guess when you hire gorillas for cops, you get gorilla solutions to the everyday and mundane.
"Why is our government so not on the side of consumers this time?"
For a concrete reason: fear.
Congress is being told by everybody...Alan Greenspan, Record Companies, Industry Execs, Bill Gates, etc that the future of the economy is "Intellectual Property".
So as congressperson, you've got to believe it if every expert is telling you that you need tougher and tougher IP legislation.
It doesn't help when we get the phony "Terrorists use pirated stuff to finance doing bad stuff to America" nonsense. That's the political cover these guys need to screw the common person through ridiculous copyright and patent laws.
It's really a silly word.
How about "reality"?
We'll know they're serious if the president of the company puts his wife in the booth. That would be interesting.
Sony is being dumb with the UMD format.
Here they have a device which for most users will ancillary to their home or laptop DVD player. So people would buy these things as travelling movies.
I assumed the movies would be in the $8-14 dollar range.
Nope. Full price, and in most cases *more* than the DVD.
Now, I'm not a marketing expert, but if I were sony, I'd drop the price to $8 for UMD movies, I'd throw them into the box along with the DVD ("Buy the DVD and get the UMD for free!!!"). Get the format established.
Nobody will buy UMD's at $23, yet that's the price. And if nobody will buy them, Sony can't get the format established. Which means nobody will commit to the format.
I guess they're just too smart for me over at Sony marketing.
They're making it easy to choose a Mac and OS X for my next computer.
I didn't check long enough. I didn't like that my machine was running a bunch of processes that couldn't be explained, so I removed it.
I thought the idea was that it was free, but I'm probably mistaken?
I'm a comcast subscriber, and comcast subscribers get an included subscription to Rhapsody.
Well, I loaded the Rhapsody client, and its really just a modified version of the Real software.
After installation, I checked what was going on in the task list. The Rhapsody install loaded a bunch of software and drivers onto my PC that ran all the time, even when Rhapsody wasn't running. That's unacceptable to me. WMP 10 does that, and I don't like it, but I have little choice with the OS vendor into that market. And given what I know about Real, is it reporting on what programs and data I have on my PC? Will it prevent me from using my CD or DVD burner in some circumstances? I just don't know. I emailed Rhapsody/Real my concerns about not knowing what was going on, and they just sent me a stock response about "thanks for the input". I guess they don't actually read their email.
I don't want to load down my machine and distrust it just for a bit of music. I don't care for iTunes, but at least when I quit the program, there's no trace fo it running on my machine taking resources.
So in the end, I removed Rhapsody, and then I spent another hour removing bits of it from my HD and registry. Can anyone explain why programs refuse to remove themselves from my PC when I uninstall them?
And by the way, between Shoutcast and iTunes, there are tons of free music on the Internet. Maybe not on demand, but in the end its a good thing to listen to something new and unexpected and not the same 100 song playlist over and over. I've even discovered www.somafm.com as a source of interesting and unexpected music.
Except that Adobe is a fan of the DMCA. So they didn't like it when people decrypted their ebook format and had the programmer jailed (!).
So now they're complaining about somebody else doing the same thing. I find their whining at best, uh, whiny.
" Now now we all want to think the MPAA are guilty but as TFA says its an allegation thats being investigated."
Isn't this similar to the record and movie companies who want to get info from ISP's about alleged copyright infringement without going to a court of law?
The media companies have *seen* people stealing, so they assume people guilty and want to just fine them directly without doing that long, involved courtroom stuff.
Am I the only one who sees the irony here?
"Corporations/businesses exzisted LONG before government."
If you define "business" as "bartering, then you're right.
But corporations are a relatively recent invention as compared to government. Many people today point to the Dutch East India company as the first modern limited liability company. If I remember my 9th grade history correctly, it was set up to allow multiple investors the ability to pool risk and reward, since ocean voyages were very costly.
If we go further back I think the first real corporation was in the 14th century, but I don't remember the name or the purpose.
Some people even say there were corporations of a sort in ancient rome. Wouldn't surprise me; Rome was very advanced.
But to say that corporations are older than governments is not supported by any history that I know.
I don't think there is anything special about considering a corporation a person; I personally think its wrong; its simply a financial tool, there's nothing morally that says a bunch of guys who pool risk has the same rights as a person.
Verizon doesn't make any money from that.
That's probably the dumbest thing the CEO of Verizon ever heard.
These Sony players don't look so stylish to me... they look very similar to products in the market.
Love or hate the iPod, you can tell what it is from across the room. The Sony looks like a hundred other far eastern MP3 players.
Now if it could only play MP3's...
Didn't Bush last year propose sending humans to the moon and then mars? And his follow up budget proposes budget cuts to accomplish this?
Did someone explain to those guys that Jules Verne's book is Science Fiction?
Microsoft says 64kb/s WMA is CD quality.
What does that makes 128kb/s? Or 192kb/s? Sooperdooperaudiophonicbeyondcompare quality?
The only thing that is CD quality is...a CD. And while 128kb/s AAC is fine (and somewhat better than MP3 and WMA), it isn't even close to CD quality.
64kb/s? That isn't even FM radio quality. I'm not talking Clear Channel 99.something playing the top five hits over and over FM. I'm talking real FM quality (i.e. WGMS in Washington DC, or hundreds of PBS/NPR stations across the U.S.). Heck, I've not heard a WMA that I would compare to CD, and I'm not talking expensive stereos; I'm talking about listening on a stock car stereos.
I realize this is a silly rant, and there are people who listen who really can't tell the difference. But lets stop pretending on audio quality. It reminds of the 60's when every amplifier manufacturer was claming the most ridiculous power outputs until the government stepped in and made them stop.
The difference is that the RIAA is better at lobbying than book publishers.
Let me say I think that Apple has every right, the RIAA has every right, the MPAA has every right to use every technical means at their disposal to protect their copyright.
Where I draw the line is that I don't think the FBI should be the enforcement arm to protect these technical means of protection.
In essence, what I'm saying is this...if people are commercially copying this stuff, the FBI should get involved, because it is related to the actual copyright law.
However, if Apple uses Fairplay, and people use a program that negates Fairplay, then Apple should have two options...ignore it, or stop selling it to me. In my opinion, this puts market forces into effect:
1) Apple either stops selling music (or the RIAA or whomever)
2) Apple lowers prices to make their songs more appealing with DRM
3) They accept that no system is perfect and get on with business
3) They removed the DRM
But these people want to be protected from the market forces that ultimately make a DRM'd song worth less than a non-DRM'd song and that is *annoying* to businesses. They want to have their cake and eat it too. I'd like that as well, but I don't get the benefit of congress and the FBI to help me out.
I agree, don't buy from iTMS...I think the quality is average, and the prices too high by a factor of 2-3. But I understand it is *reasonable* to buy from iTMS and expect to use the song anywhere I want as long as I don't violate the copyright.
Don't you hate when people complain about this stuff?
Its like people complaining that Windows isn't good enough and they try to push Linux or Macs down your throat.
Don't they get it?
When you attach your web server to the internet, you're letting everyone look at it.
Part of that process is that people will look at it, classify it and judge it.
It inherent in attaching a web server. If you don't like it, the best thing to do is unplug the ethernet cable from your web server, and tell people to dial directly (or through Minitel) to your server, because you feel that putting it on the internet places you in a difficult position.
I don't see how you can have it both ways...they want wide exposure, so they place it in the most public place on the planet, then they complain that it isn't viewed in precisely the way they envisioned.
I really don't understand the beef.
"Apple will easily stop this in the US under "trade dress" litigation." ..and this is good for the consumer because...?
I'll bet you're genuinely angry, aren't you?
Other than stroking some Air Force egos, what does this accomplish?
If a patch is good, and reliable, send it to everybody. The more people that are patched, the better.
If a patch is bad, do we want military computers testing the fix first?
"What you mean is that fraudulantly offering an unredeemable rebate should be illegal, which it already is."
Here's my beef.
Rebates in some theoretical sense are fine.
There's two things I have a problem with, one of them is philosophical, one of them is practical. Lets start with the practical.
I have in several cases, sent in rebates. I'm usually very careful. I have in several cases (a) not received a response ever or (b) The rebate fulfillment house claims I didn't send in enough paperwork (and well past the deadline for submission.
I have no recourse in these situations. I'm just out the money. And what's worse, nobody has an incentive to make this right, because the company is simply out money if its correct, and they get more money if I'm screwed.
On a more philosophical level, I have a beef with rebates. Lets go through this:
Merchant: Buy this widget for $2, and I'll give you $1 back in the mail.
Me: Why not just sell it to me for $1?
Merchant: Because I'm hoping you'll forget to send it in, and I won't have to pay you that $1.
You see? Its almost fraud but not quite. So from that viewpoint, I understand why people think it should be illegal to offer rebates.
But even if you disagree with my philosophical conclusion, how do you deal with the practical aspect of a system that has no ability to be corrected? Its like playing the lotto as to whether that rebate actually comes.
When and where is beer free?
Here's an ex-commisioner's take on the whole FCC censorship issue.
m
He implies that it is a political issue and control of media issue, not a morality issue as such.
http://www.saveradionow.org/nicholasjohnshon.ht
The guy is no kook. Read it and try to understand.
Oh, its an IBM T20.