Sure, Spam is as annoying as hell. I hate getting spammed, but it's no more annoying than the coupons that I get in the mail every thursday. In all honesty, if I were given the choice I'd rather eliminate those damned coupons from my life than spam.
There's no way that anyone can justify to me that someone should be looking at time in federal (ie buttraping) prison just for sending some unsolicitated emails.
No one cares about you and your puny little life and conversations. But you would certainly care if someone was planning on blowing up your train station or office building.
Ever heard of INSLAW?
That's why they do this. To find out who is planning to do bad things that hurt lots of people. They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight.
You obviously don't get it. You probably never will. Do you pay your bills using postcards? Or do you send in checks using envelopes?
What do all the worlds geeks DO with their PDA's? Aside from email, notes, adresses? Seems to be an expensive use of my already premium pocket space. Is it just the "gadget factor" or are there folks who really rely on this type of device?
Where to start. First of all DOPE WARS!
Second, keeping names and telephone numbers. I actually use the Palm Desktop software on my computer more than I use my Visor. Because I like the layout.
Have you ever seen the look on a bartender's face when you change the channel or volume on the TV with your handheld and OmniRemote? It's priceless.
However they are lobbying to make it legal for them to erase peoples hard drives so that they will not be gangsters (in the eyes of the law anyways).
In order to find illegal songs on your hard drive they would need to access your machine right?
What if someone wrote a VB script to stop that (bear with me). Essentially, they'd be copying the information from the FAT or MDB or whathave you. If you call your VB program a copy protection mechanism, they'd fall afoul of the DMCA.
hole. About six or seven months ago, he was the guest on Mike Reagan's radio talk show. After about half an hour of hearing him talk out of his ass, I got sick of it and called into the show. I singlehandedly ripped him a new asshole.
"No, Doom doesn't condition you to shoot people. You shoot Zombies, Demons, and globulous red orbs."
"No, America's Army doesn't teach kids that you can frag your superior officers and get away with it, you get sent to the brig."
"I'm also a hunter and a target shooter. No game can teach you how important it is to mate the buttstock to your shoulder to handle recoil."
This asshole is only interested in making money for himself, like the tobacco lawsuit lawyers.
how hard it is not to laugh in someone's face when they tell you that they need to buy "Some more RAMS of memory for my computer", or when they tell you that "My son says that I need at least 8 Gigglebytes of memory"
The results of that? 1) The people working the front counters of the computer store hating their jobs due to arguing with customers about whether or not they tried overclocking their CPUs.
People argue about returning equipment that they fsck up all of the time. When I used to work at Computer City (6 yrs ago), there was a guy who came in just about every month after boogering up his system and argue that he shouldn't have to pay for service, even though he was out of warranty.
2) The prices for these CPUs going up due to the return/exchange rate on them.
Neglible. Overclockers tend to overclock slower and thus cheaper CPUs.
3) Like in the case of some stores with Apex and other high-return brands, they just take a harder stance on people that want a straight exchange of the product.
You get what you pay for, right?
Who wins here? The company selling the adaptor. No one else.
Pardon my French, but WHO THE FUCK ELSE is supposed to win? People (most people) create and market products to make money for themselves. Even new Cancer and AIDS drugs are sold with the express purpose of making money!!!!
Adobe's ONLY hold right now is photoshop.. and photoshop 4 is still very VERY useable....
I cut my teeth on Photoshop 3. There are still certain functions that I find easier to perform using Photoshop 3 than with the Photoshop 6 that I now have installed.
Well, presumably the Terminatrix went in first, and little things like doors and military men with guns weren't going to stop her.
No gunfire? No alarms?
Even if John Connor hadn't explicity stated it in T3, it's pretty clear in T2 that the Terminator acted very much as a father figure for him. Due to their physical similarity, I'm willing to forgive John treating him like a human... he does look and behave like a human... and one who's saved John's life dozens of times at this point.
Then get the hell past the blast door and yell a thanks back to him. The TX was RIGHT THERE!!!!
Was it ever stated that the power goes out everywhere? The computer was controlling the Nuclear strikes, I'd assume Skynet targetted the missiles to leave more then enough infrastructure to start it's base of operations from. Including power.
Two problems with that. Skynet launched the US's missiles. Missiles coming back were defensive responses, which would have been targetted to cripple the country. Even if they weren't, the EMP from the strikes would have been enough to shut down the power in most if not all of the country.
It was a rough day, I'll forgive it.
I hope that your S.O. finds you more important than that.
think he was only popping pills because of the motorcycle accident... somewhat legit medical usage. And we only saw him drink one beer, which he didn't even remotely finish. I wouldn't have called him a drunk or a pill-popper.
An entire bottle of pills is hardly a legit medical use. Maybe I was assuming too much, but it seemed to me that it was not his first beer that day that he dropped into the water.
LK
Re:No Knee-jerk Privacy responses please...
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For the same reason no one used linux in 1980, it didn't exist.
The ability to test for DNA has been with us for over a decade. Why haven't we been using it all of this time? Because prosecutors want to keep every conviction that they can stack up. Whether or not an innocent man is behind bars is less important than whether or not they followed all of the rules in the trial.
LK
Re:Privacy implications are nill
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
OJ walked.
Yes he did. Get over it. But, on one level that is a good thing. For one, OJ is not a threat to society at large. Maybe unfaithful wives should beware, but you and I have nothing to fear from OJ being a free man. Second, police departments across the country took another look at the way they process blood evidence after the OJ trial. "No detective, take the sample STRAIGHT to the lab, don't go home for the night first." These changes will help keep people who are dangerous to the rest of us off of the street. Thanks Juice!
If it now turns out that incomplete DNA can give a false postive then this should be carefully studied. Next time they will no that the DNA shows that "it is either him or a close relative". THen you can start talking to close relatives and see if they have an alibi.
Moot point in this case. The murder happened 15 years ago, I couldn't tell you where I was on July 5th 1988. Would that make me a suspect to a crime that one of my relatives committed?
LK
Re:No Knee-jerk Privacy responses please...
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 1
If you feel the need to object to DNA privacy issues, bear in mind that three men were wrongly convicted of the murder initially and cleared much later before a new investigation finally caught the real perpetrator.
If they had DNA evidence, why wasn't it used to clear the men who were wrongly convicted BEFORE they caught the real killer?
Yes, but I don't have a license to buy freon, and I don't have the equipment to collect the freon before I start the repair.
If you do, then you're a better woman/man than I. If you don't then you are, by your own logic, dumb. You're paying someone else what are most probably obscene prices to fix something that you could easily fix yourself, if you simply weren't too lazy to go figure it out. A lot of these things aren't rocket science.
I also charge people obscene prices to fix their computers when the fsck them up. It is the way of the world.
Once, as I was about to change the 3.6v lithium batters in some guy's Mac, I told him that it was very easy to do, but if he wanted I would put it in for him for $20. He said that he would pay the $20. When I rang up the charge 2 minutes later he was amazed that it was as easy as I said it was.
Why would the Terminator be molded after an old man? Arnold looks great, but he's not the glistening Austrian god he was in T1.
I have thought on this one as well. Arnold could play a human leader, someone who acts as a mentor to John Connor. Skynet learns of his charisma through torturing captured humans. Skynet decides to model the T-800 M-101 after him in order to gain better infiltration capabilities.
Arnold gets to be in the movie as an old man, and it explains why so many F'ing T-800s were made to look just like him.
I found myself thinking that if these two idiots are the best hope for mankind, I might be better off if I get caught in a blastwave on "Judgement Day".
The timelines don't match up. Kyle Reese was sent back to fight the T-800 in 1984. That was when he impregnated Sarah with John. So, John would have been born in 1985. John says that he was 13 when the second T-800 was sent back to protect him, that would have placed the events of T2 AFTER judgement day was originally supposed to happen(August 29, 1997).
Sarah being dead was a disappointment. But I like the fact that she was such a forward thinker, she made provisions, just in case it wasn't really over.
There is a repeated theme from T2, that is when they have eluded the new and improved terminator, they make the point of going into the Lion's Den, so to speak and try to save Kate's father.
How do Kate and John just waltz into a top secret military research facility? No ID? No search to see if they're armed? "Sure ma'am just bring in that AK-47 and those C4 charges. It's cool."
When the T-X is about to incinerate them at Crystal Peak, John actually takes the time to stop and thank the T-800. WHAT?!?!?!?! It's a F***ING MACHINE! It doesn't care about your gratitude.
They dashed to pieces John's belief that there was No Fate. Obviously according to this movie, there is fate. We can't stop or change it, we can only delay it.
Also, Skynet is no longer a single computer, but Skynet is software distributed over the widest of wide area networks. I guess I can understand that the internet was designed to operate in the event of a nuclear war, but when the power plants go out, so do all of the computers that make up Skynet.
If Skynet is no longer a central machine, how then can John and Kyle Reese "smash" its defense grid and defeat in 20 or so years?
I also thought that it was stupid that Kate starts to fall for John the SAME F'ING DAY that her fiance gets murdered by the T-X. Maybe a brief period of mourning would have been in order.
John is also a pill popping boozer. I'm not sure how that plays into his future role as "leader" of humanity.
But there were many points that I did like. For example, they showed what was obviously the first gen Terminator, the T1. They showed prototypes for the HK. They show exactly HOW it was that John came to be thought of as a leader.
Not perfect, not as good as the other two, especially when taking them all as a trilogy, but still worth plunking down $8.00 to see. I enjoyed it, more for the background on the Terminator universe than for its own merits, but I still enjoyed it.
I recommend not tossing systems when you upgrade--pre-ban PCs should be worth a tidy sum soon.
I guess that "soon" is a subjective term, but I remember when Bill Clinton signed the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994, "high capacity magazines" skyrocketed in price. 13 round magazines for my.45 were selling for well over $120 when a 10 round magazine for the same gun sold for ~$25.
From experience I can say that, you raise a valid point.
Not maybe; it is. Those "button mashers" in the South have problems with all things technological.
When I did tech support for a certain nameless satellite TV company, we used to HATE getting calls from people south of Maryland and east of Arizona. Every once in a while you'd hear someone cry out in frustration "NO! NO! NO! Press the power button! Don't 'mash' the volume anymore!!!!", or something like that.
I have alerted Cingular about it and they said there's nothing they can or will do.
Like what? A 7 day wait on telephone purchases? A technological background check? Mandatory dialing training before you can purchase a telephone?
How does racist crap like this get modded insightful?
I don't see how what he said is racist? Tech jobs (and many non-tech jobs) are being exported to Asia, where labor is cheaper.
Echostar communications spend big $$$ to open a call center in the Philippines. I guess that the $9.00/hr that they pay entry level operators was too much for them to shoulder.
But that is not the point, the point is that it is not racism to point out that many companies are looking to Asia for cheap labor.
Back in the late 80s, early 90s when they started putting the "Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics" labels on music, I remember seeing those CDs/Cassettes fly off of the shelves.
The 2 Live Crew got rich because of those labels. Their music was awful, funny but awful. They sold millions of records because of that little sticker.
Those labels are tantamount to labeling a product like this "Rich old white people don't want you to buy this. Stick it to the man and purchase me!"
Hmmm. Under the current model, doesn't the first person to rip a file pay for a CD and then share it?
In theory. However, there is another theory. That the record companies themselves allow these leaks so that they can profit off of piracy with money that is off of the books and that the artists don't see.
"When users want one, they pay a royalty fee. If they want to share files, the system forces the next person who wants to get it to also pay the fee. '
So you use your computer and bandwidth and kazaa gets to take a little slice of what the MPAA/RIAA charges you?
With all due respect WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE IDIOTS THINKING? If someone has to pay to download, there is no compelling reason to share that file when finished.
When it's free (and illegal) there is a sense of community, giving something back to that community is a big reason why people rip and share these things.
When it is legal and no longer free (as in beer) the attitudes will change and kazaa will die.
LK
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 1
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
It is obvious to me that you have never encountered a Packard Bell machine when someone came to you for information about an upgrade.
Assemblyman: Hmm... Let's amend the bill to make it a felony to sell the SSN of a political officeholder.
Two point here. 1. Ex post facto, if they are thinking about passing such a law. The info would be released immediately. 2. Term limits. These guys won't be political officeholders forever.
My point is that by performing the same exercise before the vote, they might have influenced the vote to go the way they wanted. By doing this after the vote, at best, they require the process to start over again with a new bill to achieve what they want.
Had they asked nicely before the vote (which I assume they did, they are lobbyists after all) they would have been ignored. If they had released this information they would have been accused of attemption to extort the assemblymen.
You don't persuade a burglar to not rape your wife or steal your property. You make sure that it is too costly for him (personally) to even try. If the big dog in the back yard doesn't discourage him, maybe the NRA bumper sticker on the pickup outside will.
Ask nicely beforehand, and if you are ignored, punish severely afterward.
These politicians already cared nothing for the privacy bill, perhaps because it was an abstract idea to them. Now that their information is at risk, it is more than just a concept. It is important to each and every one of them. Who cares if they like you? They will do the right thing because it will now benefit them.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on now people, let's get real.
Sure, Spam is as annoying as hell. I hate getting spammed, but it's no more annoying than the coupons that I get in the mail every thursday. In all honesty, if I were given the choice I'd rather eliminate those damned coupons from my life than spam.
There's no way that anyone can justify to me that someone should be looking at time in federal (ie buttraping) prison just for sending some unsolicitated emails.
LK
No one cares about you and your puny little life and conversations. But you would certainly care if someone was planning on blowing up your train station or office building.
Ever heard of INSLAW?
That's why they do this. To find out who is planning to do bad things that hurt lots of people. They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight.
You obviously don't get it. You probably never will. Do you pay your bills using postcards? Or do you send in checks using envelopes?
LK
What do all the worlds geeks DO with their PDA's? Aside from email, notes, adresses? Seems to be an expensive use of my already premium pocket space. Is it just the "gadget factor" or are there folks who really rely on this type of device?
Where to start. First of all DOPE WARS!
Second, keeping names and telephone numbers. I actually use the Palm Desktop software on my computer more than I use my Visor. Because I like the layout.
Have you ever seen the look on a bartender's face when you change the channel or volume on the TV with your handheld and OmniRemote? It's priceless.
If only I had more time.
LK
However they are lobbying to make it legal for them to erase peoples hard drives so that they will not be gangsters (in the eyes of the law anyways).
In order to find illegal songs on your hard drive they would need to access your machine right?
What if someone wrote a VB script to stop that (bear with me). Essentially, they'd be copying the information from the FAT or MDB or whathave you. If you call your VB program a copy protection mechanism, they'd fall afoul of the DMCA.
BOOM back to racketeering.
LK
hole. About six or seven months ago, he was the guest on Mike Reagan's radio talk show. After about half an hour of hearing him talk out of his ass, I got sick of it and called into the show. I singlehandedly ripped him a new asshole.
"No, Doom doesn't condition you to shoot people. You shoot Zombies, Demons, and globulous red orbs."
"No, America's Army doesn't teach kids that you can frag your superior officers and get away with it, you get sent to the brig."
"I'm also a hunter and a target shooter. No game can teach you how important it is to mate the buttstock to your shoulder to handle recoil."
This asshole is only interested in making money for himself, like the tobacco lawsuit lawyers.
LK
how hard it is not to laugh in someone's face when they tell you that they need to buy "Some more RAMS of memory for my computer", or when they tell you that "My son says that I need at least 8 Gigglebytes of memory"
LK
The results of that? 1) The people working the front counters of the computer store hating their jobs due to arguing with customers about whether or not they tried overclocking their CPUs.
People argue about returning equipment that they fsck up all of the time. When I used to work at Computer City (6 yrs ago), there was a guy who came in just about every month after boogering up his system and argue that he shouldn't have to pay for service, even though he was out of warranty.
2) The prices for these CPUs going up due to the return/exchange rate on them.
Neglible. Overclockers tend to overclock slower and thus cheaper CPUs.
3) Like in the case of some stores with Apex and other high-return brands, they just take a harder stance on people that want a straight exchange of the product.
You get what you pay for, right?
Who wins here? The company selling the adaptor. No one else.
Pardon my French, but WHO THE FUCK ELSE is supposed to win? People (most people) create and market products to make money for themselves. Even new Cancer and AIDS drugs are sold with the express purpose of making money!!!!
LK
Adobe's ONLY hold right now is photoshop.. and photoshop 4 is still very VERY useable....
I cut my teeth on Photoshop 3. There are still certain functions that I find easier to perform using Photoshop 3 than with the Photoshop 6 that I now have installed.
LK
Well, presumably the Terminatrix went in first, and little things like doors and military men with guns weren't going to stop her.
No gunfire? No alarms?
Even if John Connor hadn't explicity stated it in T3, it's pretty clear in T2 that the Terminator acted very much as a father figure for him. Due to their physical similarity, I'm willing to forgive John treating him like a human... he does look and behave like a human... and one who's saved John's life dozens of times at this point.
Then get the hell past the blast door and yell a thanks back to him. The TX was RIGHT THERE!!!!
Was it ever stated that the power goes out everywhere? The computer was controlling the Nuclear strikes, I'd assume Skynet targetted the missiles to leave more then enough infrastructure to start it's base of operations from. Including power.
Two problems with that. Skynet launched the US's missiles. Missiles coming back were defensive responses, which would have been targetted to cripple the country. Even if they weren't, the EMP from the strikes would have been enough to shut down the power in most if not all of the country.
It was a rough day, I'll forgive it.
I hope that your S.O. finds you more important than that.
think he was only popping pills because of the motorcycle accident... somewhat legit medical usage. And we only saw him drink one beer, which he didn't even remotely finish. I wouldn't have called him a drunk or a pill-popper.
An entire bottle of pills is hardly a legit medical use. Maybe I was assuming too much, but it seemed to me that it was not his first beer that day that he dropped into the water.
LK
For the same reason no one used linux in 1980, it didn't exist.
The ability to test for DNA has been with us for over a decade. Why haven't we been using it all of this time? Because prosecutors want to keep every conviction that they can stack up. Whether or not an innocent man is behind bars is less important than whether or not they followed all of the rules in the trial.
LK
OJ walked.
Yes he did. Get over it. But, on one level that is a good thing. For one, OJ is not a threat to society at large. Maybe unfaithful wives should beware, but you and I have nothing to fear from OJ being a free man. Second, police departments across the country took another look at the way they process blood evidence after the OJ trial. "No detective, take the sample STRAIGHT to the lab, don't go home for the night first." These changes will help keep people who are dangerous to the rest of us off of the street. Thanks Juice!
If it now turns out that incomplete DNA can give a false postive then this should be carefully studied. Next time they will no that the DNA shows that "it is either him or a close relative". THen you can start talking to close relatives and see if they have an alibi.
Moot point in this case. The murder happened 15 years ago, I couldn't tell you where I was on July 5th 1988. Would that make me a suspect to a crime that one of my relatives committed?
LK
If you feel the need to object to DNA privacy issues, bear in mind that three men were wrongly convicted of the murder initially and cleared much later before a new investigation finally caught the real perpetrator.
If they had DNA evidence, why wasn't it used to clear the men who were wrongly convicted BEFORE they caught the real killer?
LK
However: do you know how to repair your car?
Yes.
How about the electrical wiring in your house?
Yes.
Your plumbing?
Yes.
Garbage disposal or washing machine?
Yes.
How about the central air, or the oil heater?
Yes, but I don't have a license to buy freon, and I don't have the equipment to collect the freon before I start the repair.
If you do, then you're a better woman/man than I. If you don't then you are, by your own logic, dumb. You're paying someone else what are most probably obscene prices to fix something that you could easily fix yourself, if you simply weren't too lazy to go figure it out. A lot of these things aren't rocket science.
I also charge people obscene prices to fix their computers when the fsck them up. It is the way of the world.
Once, as I was about to change the 3.6v lithium batters in some guy's Mac, I told him that it was very easy to do, but if he wanted I would put it in for him for $20. He said that he would pay the $20. When I rang up the charge 2 minutes later he was amazed that it was as easy as I said it was.
LK
Probably has some 802.11z or something as well.
LK
Why would the Terminator be molded after an old man? Arnold looks great, but he's not the glistening Austrian god he was in T1.
I have thought on this one as well. Arnold could play a human leader, someone who acts as a mentor to John Connor. Skynet learns of his charisma through torturing captured humans. Skynet decides to model the T-800 M-101 after him in order to gain better infiltration capabilities.
Arnold gets to be in the movie as an old man, and it explains why so many F'ing T-800s were made to look just like him.
LK
I found myself thinking that if these two idiots are the best hope for mankind, I might be better off if I get caught in a blastwave on "Judgement Day".
The timelines don't match up. Kyle Reese was sent back to fight the T-800 in 1984. That was when he impregnated Sarah with John. So, John would have been born in 1985. John says that he was 13 when the second T-800 was sent back to protect him, that would have placed the events of T2 AFTER judgement day was originally supposed to happen(August 29, 1997).
Sarah being dead was a disappointment. But I like the fact that she was such a forward thinker, she made provisions, just in case it wasn't really over.
There is a repeated theme from T2, that is when they have eluded the new and improved terminator, they make the point of going into the Lion's Den, so to speak and try to save Kate's father.
How do Kate and John just waltz into a top secret military research facility? No ID? No search to see if they're armed? "Sure ma'am just bring in that AK-47 and those C4 charges. It's cool."
When the T-X is about to incinerate them at Crystal Peak, John actually takes the time to stop and thank the T-800. WHAT?!?!?!?! It's a F***ING MACHINE! It doesn't care about your gratitude.
They dashed to pieces John's belief that there was No Fate. Obviously according to this movie, there is fate. We can't stop or change it, we can only delay it.
Also, Skynet is no longer a single computer, but Skynet is software distributed over the widest of wide area networks. I guess I can understand that the internet was designed to operate in the event of a nuclear war, but when the power plants go out, so do all of the computers that make up Skynet.
If Skynet is no longer a central machine, how then can John and Kyle Reese "smash" its defense grid and defeat in 20 or so years?
I also thought that it was stupid that Kate starts to fall for John the SAME F'ING DAY that her fiance gets murdered by the T-X. Maybe a brief period of mourning would have been in order.
John is also a pill popping boozer. I'm not sure how that plays into his future role as "leader" of humanity.
But there were many points that I did like. For example, they showed what was obviously the first gen Terminator, the T1. They showed prototypes for the HK. They show exactly HOW it was that John came to be thought of as a leader.
Not perfect, not as good as the other two, especially when taking them all as a trilogy, but still worth plunking down $8.00 to see. I enjoyed it, more for the background on the Terminator universe than for its own merits, but I still enjoyed it.
LK
I recommend not tossing systems when you upgrade--pre-ban PCs should be worth a tidy sum soon.
.45 were selling for well over $120 when a 10 round magazine for the same gun sold for ~$25.
I guess that "soon" is a subjective term, but I remember when Bill Clinton signed the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994, "high capacity magazines" skyrocketed in price. 13 round magazines for my
From experience I can say that, you raise a valid point.
LK
(May be a southern redneck thing)
Not maybe; it is. Those "button mashers" in the South have problems with all things technological.
When I did tech support for a certain nameless satellite TV company, we used to HATE getting calls from people south of Maryland and east of Arizona. Every once in a while you'd hear someone cry out in frustration "NO! NO! NO! Press the power button! Don't 'mash' the volume anymore!!!!", or something like that.
I have alerted Cingular about it and they said there's nothing they can or will do.
Like what? A 7 day wait on telephone purchases? A technological background check? Mandatory dialing training before you can purchase a telephone?
LK
How does racist crap like this get modded insightful?
I don't see how what he said is racist? Tech jobs (and many non-tech jobs) are being exported to Asia, where labor is cheaper.
Echostar communications spend big $$$ to open a call center in the Philippines. I guess that the $9.00/hr that they pay entry level operators was too much for them to shoulder.
But that is not the point, the point is that it is not racism to point out that many companies are looking to Asia for cheap labor.
LK
Back in the late 80s, early 90s when they started putting the "Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics" labels on music, I remember seeing those CDs/Cassettes fly off of the shelves.
The 2 Live Crew got rich because of those labels. Their music was awful, funny but awful. They sold millions of records because of that little sticker.
Those labels are tantamount to labeling a product like this "Rich old white people don't want you to buy this. Stick it to the man and purchase me!"
This is pure idiocy.
LK
Hmmm. Under the current model, doesn't the first person to rip a file pay for a CD and then share it?
In theory. However, there is another theory. That the record companies themselves allow these leaks so that they can profit off of piracy with money that is off of the books and that the artists don't see.
LK
"When users want one, they pay a royalty fee. If they want to share files, the system forces the next person who wants to get it to also pay the fee. '
So you use your computer and bandwidth and kazaa gets to take a little slice of what the MPAA/RIAA charges you?
With all due respect WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE IDIOTS THINKING? If someone has to pay to download, there is no compelling reason to share that file when finished.
When it's free (and illegal) there is a sense of community, giving something back to that community is a big reason why people rip and share these things.
When it is legal and no longer free (as in beer) the attitudes will change and kazaa will die.
LK
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
It is obvious to me that you have never encountered a Packard Bell machine when someone came to you for information about an upgrade.
LK
Assemblyman: Hmm... Let's amend the bill to make it a felony to sell the SSN of a political officeholder.
Two point here. 1. Ex post facto, if they are thinking about passing such a law. The info would be released immediately. 2. Term limits. These guys won't be political officeholders forever.
My point is that by performing the same exercise before the vote, they might have influenced the vote to go the way they wanted. By doing this after the vote, at best, they require the process to start over again with a new bill to achieve what they want.
Had they asked nicely before the vote (which I assume they did, they are lobbyists after all) they would have been ignored. If they had released this information they would have been accused of attemption to extort the assemblymen.
You don't persuade a burglar to not rape your wife or steal your property. You make sure that it is too costly for him (personally) to even try. If the big dog in the back yard doesn't discourage him, maybe the NRA bumper sticker on the pickup outside will.
Ask nicely beforehand, and if you are ignored, punish severely afterward.
These politicians already cared nothing for the privacy bill, perhaps because it was an abstract idea to them. Now that their information is at risk, it is more than just a concept. It is important to each and every one of them. Who cares if they like you? They will do the right thing because it will now benefit them.