we have exchange at work. i am a fan of MS office. it works great and OO.o isn't anywhere near as great as MS office. thunderbird is a great email client, but it is most definitely NOT an outlook replacement. it is anything but that. it supports email and the address book, but it doesn't have a calendar, to-do list, and i'm not sure if it did, it would support all the stuff that exchange can do. as someone above said, just tossing in different programs as alternatives to the various MS office pieces isn't enough. they need to integrate with each other seamlessly. outlook syncs perfectly with exchange, allowing me to see all my calendar entries, to-do lists, task lists, mail, folders, contacts, etc. on outlooks web access from any computer connected to the internet.
i would love to see an open source alternative to MS office, but the fact of the matter is that none of them work as nicely as MS office. i tried OO.o once. it was slow, laggy, and took forever to startup unless you had the little loader running when your computer started, which hogged resources. and people try to say MS office is bloated.
so are you saying that artists and musicians should just get real jobs? how about programmers? they should just write code and give it all away for free making money doing something else because it's not real work? give me a break.
distributing works that you don't have the rights to distribute is worse than stealing because you are not making any money on it to give back to the artists. and those who are making money (such as the people on canal st in NYC selling bootleg movies and music) are not giving the money to the people who own the rights to the work. in effect, you are preventing the owners of the work from selling their works for the price they determined. because they are selling it for an unreasonable price doesn't make doing this right.
the difference is that the file sharers are not getting caught for downloading (which is stealing in most cases). they are getting caught for distribution, which has a harsher punishment under the law. let's say i go and rip off a candy store for a $2 candy bar. that's stealing. now let's say someone else goes and rips off a candy truck on its way to deliver candy to the candy store. steals the truckload of candy and then sells it on the black market for below cost. the guy who is selling it makes bank because his costs were $0, while the candy store got ripped off because they end up having to pay for higher wholesale costs to cover the new cost of added security for the truck driver and the consumer buying from this candy store now has to pay higher retail prices because the candy store owner can't afford to sell at the same price, yet buy at an increased wholesale price.
if you go into a store and steal a CD, that's the equivalent of downloading an album of mp3's from the internet and not paying for it. it is not the same as going and stealing all the CD's from the distributor and selling them, keeping all the money to yourself (meaning no money gets to the record label (doesn't matter if it's RIAA or indie), which means no money gets to the artists themselves).
no copyright infringement is not stealing, it's much worse if you ask me and people who do it deserve what they get.
i knew they changed... just wasn't sure why. thanks for the explanation.
however, i do have an issue with this part:
For a similar reason that when closing a sentence with a quote you must place the period after the endquote mark, not before it. The reasoning is that the quote marks belong only to the quote while the period belongs to the entire sentence, not just the quote. Similarly, an apostrophe now always denotes possessivity (except when you bracket a word or phrase with two of them). putting the period outside the quotation marks is pretty recent. the norm when i learned grammar was to put them inside the end quote mark, regardless of if it was for the quote or the sentence.
and to be a bit nit-picky, the apostrophe is still used for contractions.:)
actually, the apostrophe is only mis-used if you go by newer rules of grammar. about 15-20 years ago, using the apostrophe in that case was 100% correct.
since i don't think rules of grammar should arbitrarily change, i consider it correct and use it when i write (of course that's how i'm used to writing).
also, please ignore my lack of capital letters. i hate the shift key.
you're the one blowing hot air. you know as well as i know as well as an 80 year old knows that there's a difference between mature for a 14 year old and mature enough for college.
sure, maturity doesn't have a good measurement, but development does. and at 14, a child (yes, developmentally, both physically and mentally, still a child), is not ready for life outside the family.
while it might be some "judeo-christian" thing from the last century, human development does evolve and the environment affects our evolution. in pretty much every developed nation, you don't see 14 year olds out on their own. maybe they're mature enough in the undeveloped countries where people have to fend for themselves. maybe we should throw our kids out of the house at 12 so they can learn to be "men". i don't know what you're getting at here, but it's a whole lot more hot air than anything i've said. clearly you don't know a whole lot about human development. having a super high IQ and being super intelligent does not make someone mentally developed enough to be on their own.
even today, the school day is still about 6-6.5 hours, which includes lunch (which i think in most high schools is about half an hour). i went to a private high school. the school day started around 8:30 and ended around 2:30. this allowed the ability to have sports practice after any extra help sessions and still get out by 4 or 5. because it was a private school, the rules were a bit different, but the public school in my town started around 7:30 or 8 and ended around 2 or 2:30. it was still no more than 7 hours of being there.
but again, the biggest issue is parental involvement. my mother runs an after school program that goes until 6-6:30 every day. the parents don't get to spend a whole lot of time with their kids. it's really sad. in some cases the parents don't want any involvement other than the occasional fun thing to make the kid think their parents are awesome. it's pretty bad.
but yes, i made a generalization on the length of the school day. the problem is schools are trying to pack more and more into the school day thinking that quantity means something.... when it really means that the kids sit in class longer and get bored more often. the teachers are a part of the problem, but it has nothing to do with "old school schooling". unfortunately, the classroom setting is the best way to get through to all the different types of learners, though teachers have to be sure to accommodate everyone and not just lecture and test. there needs to be some hands on stuff and different methods of explaining things. i used to be a substitute teacher for a while and when i was doing a lesson on percentages with a 7th or 8th grade class, they had no idea how to get it. what was worse is that the book didn't explain it well and their teacher followed the book word for word. she was a really shitty teacher and should have been fired. i explained percentages the way i learned and they all got it, but were tested on the book's way. i was put on the spot and managed to come up with a way to incorporate my method with the book's method. their teacher who didn't know what she was doing (either that or she was just plain lazy) wasn't teaching them, she was making them just regurgitate stuff.
i never said treat them like babies, i simply said that they are not adults and are not ready to handle adult situations. at 14, you still have a lot of life learning to go through and it can't just hit you all at once. there are responsibilities that 14 year olds should have and responsibilities that they should not have. living on their own is not the type of responsibility a 14 year old should have. they are still at a development level that, though most of them would disagree with me, leaves them dependent on their parents for certain things.
college used to be the type of place where people went because they wanted to, but it's becoming the type of place where people go because they think they are supposed to (or in some cases because parents force them to). because of that, students are learning only what their majors tell them they need to and their extracurricular stuff or extra work on the side is generally drinking and having fun rather than exploring academic interests (usually because the academic interests just aren't there). unfortunately, society has started to say that if you don't have a college education, you aren't good enough.
I agree that forcing the younger students to deal with an older student is probably a bad idea. However, in the case of this 14 year old, his obviously higher intelligence was probably going to make it difficult to adjust to "real life". I'm not sure that going to the University for his PhD at that age would make it any worse. As you mentioned later on, maybe some sort of gifted program for kids who have completed their schooling early would be better. a gifted program would have definitely helped this kid. while a phd wouldn't hurt, going through college as a child does not help development. development is a part of schooling, believe it or not. slower learners need more help, sometimes one on one. gifted students also need help, again, sometimes one on one. when i was in grammar school, they had this program for gifted students (granted none of us were super-geniuses, but our classes didn't fulfill us as much as they could have, i also went to a private school) that met once a week and we got to do things that interested us. one student made a claymation movie, others did a radio show, i did extra drawing. it gave us time to do something we were interested in and then show it off. programs like that should be in place for students who need extra attention or time to explore.
by what reasoning can you say that 14 years old is pretty much an adult? let's see... can't drive, can't vote, can't live on your own, can't even join the military. i'd say that a 14 year old is nowhere near an adult. heck, most college students i know aren't adults yet, even those over 21.
there's a lot of growing up to do at 14, and at no point did i say that they shouldn't be exposed to responsibility. in fact, i think children as young as 5 or 6 should be exposed to responsibility, though that might be something as menial as sharing (which many adults still have problems with).
the reason i have for a child (yes a 14 year old is a child) not going to college is that most children are not mature enough (not to say that 18 year olds are very mature) to deal with what goes on at colleges. not only that, but they won't be able to get the most out of college. i'm talking about the social experiences, not just the educational ones (which i will say are more important).
anyone who thinks that a child that young should be moving as quickly as possible through school doesn't know a whole lot about child development.
yes... they do need that free time. there are clubs and extracurricular activities. the schooling is just as important as the free time. blame the parents, not the system. the kids whose parents spend time when them sharing their own interests are the kids who end up adjusting well and succeeding in life.
school is only 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for most high school students. the rest of the time should be spent on homework, fun stuff, and hobbies. it's those hobbies that can get people ahead, like your computer hobbyist example.
the mandate is there because some kids won't realize how much they need school until much later in life. then you end up with 18 year olds in class with 10 year olds. that just doesn't work.
the age segregation thing is more beneficial to students than removing it. i remember reading a story about a 14 year old (i don't remember the exact age, but he was too young to drive) going for his phd. that's just messed up. this 14 year old will not adjust properly to real life. the reason that we keep kids of about the same age together is because they are all going through generally the same life cycles at the same time... puberty for instance. they have each other to help each other get through those various points in their life.
while i agree that gifted students should have something else or more advanced work to keep their minds going, they shouldn't be off to college before they can drive. they end up missing out on the most important school (and i know this sounds cheesy, but it's true)... the school of life. there's a reason why geniuses end up being outcasts and maladjusted. they don't grow up the same way as everyone else. parents are too pushy to get them into harder programs and out of school faster, when all they need is a different type of attention while staying in the same grade level as everyone else.
and i want to know where you're getting this idea that adults who try to improve their education are seen in a negative light. maybe in the backwards parts of the country, but here in the northeast, they're applauded.
while i understand why people are disagreeing with you, you are 100% correct. it sounds like she tried to fight the system thinking they might not have the balls to go to court. she tried to fight and lost the american way. there is no way anyone can disagree with what happened. i don't know how you can get much better than this. she actually got to trial and a jury of her peers found her guilty. she should just be glad she wasn't forced to pay $150k per song.
for the record, i am in no way an RIAA sympathizer. i just don't buy their music and i don't illegally download anything. playing on the P2P networks downloading music is like playing russian roulette. you're most likely going to be fine, but there's that one time that you won't. that's what happened here.
no, it's not silly, but in this case where 99% of computers from the major manufacturers are built in china of chinese parts it is quite silly. IBM's thinkpads before they were sold to lenovo were built in china for years, probably in computer sweatshops. sure, the money went to an american company, but that american company sent their work to china.
being a "MS faithful" i will add that the article is trying to compare it to XP it seems. having been using vista since it's release and having zero problems other than a driver/security software issue that was HP's fault, i'd say it's pretty good. some things are a bit slower than XP on my machine and the hardware requirements are a bit out there, but i have seriously had no problems that i can blame MS for (the HP thing was that the software for the fingerprint reader made it take forever for windows to startup).
i do see some regular large memory usage, but that's mostly because i have firefox open all the time. the indexing/cache thing for the file system is always running (and can be turned off) and uses a lot of memory, but it gives it up whenever something else needs it.
i had 2 installations of vista... first was an upgrade, took about an hour (a lot of files had to be moved around to their new directories) and nothing went wrong. the second was a fresh install on the same computer (because i prefer it that way, but wanted to see the upgrade) and that took about 25 minutes, the fastest windows install i had ever seen.
i actually now prefer vista to XP and find it easier to use. no single application can crash all of windows. the networking stuff makes more sense (and it doesn't auto-save every wireless network i connect to). i like the new start menu and the search feature, and the UAC doesn't annoy me all that much as it only comes up when i install software or have to use the server 2003 admin pack. i am really not sure where all these people are getting their problems from, but i have had no issues and absolutely love it.
for the record, i have used linux (and plan on installing ubuntu on my home desktop that currently has XP) and OS X. i work in a primarily windows environment and have to support it, so i use that primarily (though i think i'll be getting a powerbook in the near future, but i'll be dual booting vista).
while i disagree with the RIAA's tactics, i agree 100% with this post. i work in a college IT department and run a training program for my student employees. one of them actually had the balls to ask me where he can get music for free and when i told him that there was only certain types of music he could get for free, and none of it was mainstream, he kept harping on me, wanting me to suggest some miracle P2P network or something. i won't say i never downloaded music for free, but i no longer do it (i also no longer listen to a whole lot of mainstream music and either buy the CD directly from the band or from some other source, and 99% of the time now, it's not RIAA music).
i don't want to hear about price gouging or anything... it still doesn't make it right. if you want the music, there are legal means of getting it, plain and simple. sure, the RIAA sucks, and i agree that they're causing their own demise, but that doesn't excuse downloading or sharing music for free when other people pay for it because it does buy someone's dinner. there are legal ways to fight the system.
the difference is big media pays money to the government... the real terrorists are the people who steal intellectual property and make it available for others free of charge.
i think i either saw something put out by the **AA or one of those commercials they play before movies that basically equated people who pirate music and movies to drug lords and terrorists.
when it rings, it plays for me. other people just happen to hear it. kind of like when i have my stereo turned up and people walking by my car can hear it. i'm not collecting money from people, i'm just listening to the music in the manner that i want.
how is it apple's problem with copyright infringement if people are making their own ringtones from songs that they illegally acquired? i made my own ringtone (for my new LG chocolate) from an mp3 that i ripped from a CD that i own. i don't think i committed any copyright infringement by doing so because i actually purchased the CD.
the problem with that is while most laptop keyboards are pretty quiet (and no student is going to being a laptop and a quieter keyboard), the faster typing as students try to keep up with the professor will make more noise than just someone writing a paper. multiply that about 20-40 and unless the keyboards are next to silent (which they aren't), it gets quite annoying.
then add in the 65% of students who are also chatting with friends on AIM and it gets worse.
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we have exchange at work. i am a fan of MS office. it works great and OO.o isn't anywhere near as great as MS office. thunderbird is a great email client, but it is most definitely NOT an outlook replacement. it is anything but that. it supports email and the address book, but it doesn't have a calendar, to-do list, and i'm not sure if it did, it would support all the stuff that exchange can do. as someone above said, just tossing in different programs as alternatives to the various MS office pieces isn't enough. they need to integrate with each other seamlessly. outlook syncs perfectly with exchange, allowing me to see all my calendar entries, to-do lists, task lists, mail, folders, contacts, etc. on outlooks web access from any computer connected to the internet.
i would love to see an open source alternative to MS office, but the fact of the matter is that none of them work as nicely as MS office. i tried OO.o once. it was slow, laggy, and took forever to startup unless you had the little loader running when your computer started, which hogged resources. and people try to say MS office is bloated.
so are you saying that artists and musicians should just get real jobs? how about programmers? they should just write code and give it all away for free making money doing something else because it's not real work? give me a break.
distributing works that you don't have the rights to distribute is worse than stealing because you are not making any money on it to give back to the artists. and those who are making money (such as the people on canal st in NYC selling bootleg movies and music) are not giving the money to the people who own the rights to the work. in effect, you are preventing the owners of the work from selling their works for the price they determined. because they are selling it for an unreasonable price doesn't make doing this right.
the difference is that the file sharers are not getting caught for downloading (which is stealing in most cases). they are getting caught for distribution, which has a harsher punishment under the law. let's say i go and rip off a candy store for a $2 candy bar. that's stealing. now let's say someone else goes and rips off a candy truck on its way to deliver candy to the candy store. steals the truckload of candy and then sells it on the black market for below cost. the guy who is selling it makes bank because his costs were $0, while the candy store got ripped off because they end up having to pay for higher wholesale costs to cover the new cost of added security for the truck driver and the consumer buying from this candy store now has to pay higher retail prices because the candy store owner can't afford to sell at the same price, yet buy at an increased wholesale price.
if you go into a store and steal a CD, that's the equivalent of downloading an album of mp3's from the internet and not paying for it. it is not the same as going and stealing all the CD's from the distributor and selling them, keeping all the money to yourself (meaning no money gets to the record label (doesn't matter if it's RIAA or indie), which means no money gets to the artists themselves).
no copyright infringement is not stealing, it's much worse if you ask me and people who do it deserve what they get.
last nitpick... apostrophes do not always notate possession.
:)
its/it's
however, i do have an issue with this part: For a similar reason that when closing a sentence with a quote you must place the period after the endquote mark, not before it. The reasoning is that the quote marks belong only to the quote while the period belongs to the entire sentence, not just the quote. Similarly, an apostrophe now always denotes possessivity (except when you bracket a word or phrase with two of them). putting the period outside the quotation marks is pretty recent. the norm when i learned grammar was to put them inside the end quote mark, regardless of if it was for the quote or the sentence.
and to be a bit nit-picky, the apostrophe is still used for contractions.
i suppose it could've been longer than that. the books we had when i was in school were not, in any way, new. they could've been about 5-10 years old.
actually, the apostrophe is only mis-used if you go by newer rules of grammar. about 15-20 years ago, using the apostrophe in that case was 100% correct.
since i don't think rules of grammar should arbitrarily change, i consider it correct and use it when i write (of course that's how i'm used to writing).
also, please ignore my lack of capital letters. i hate the shift key.
you're the one blowing hot air. you know as well as i know as well as an 80 year old knows that there's a difference between mature for a 14 year old and mature enough for college.
sure, maturity doesn't have a good measurement, but development does. and at 14, a child (yes, developmentally, both physically and mentally, still a child), is not ready for life outside the family.
while it might be some "judeo-christian" thing from the last century, human development does evolve and the environment affects our evolution. in pretty much every developed nation, you don't see 14 year olds out on their own. maybe they're mature enough in the undeveloped countries where people have to fend for themselves. maybe we should throw our kids out of the house at 12 so they can learn to be "men". i don't know what you're getting at here, but it's a whole lot more hot air than anything i've said. clearly you don't know a whole lot about human development. having a super high IQ and being super intelligent does not make someone mentally developed enough to be on their own.
even today, the school day is still about 6-6.5 hours, which includes lunch (which i think in most high schools is about half an hour). i went to a private high school. the school day started around 8:30 and ended around 2:30. this allowed the ability to have sports practice after any extra help sessions and still get out by 4 or 5. because it was a private school, the rules were a bit different, but the public school in my town started around 7:30 or 8 and ended around 2 or 2:30. it was still no more than 7 hours of being there.
but again, the biggest issue is parental involvement. my mother runs an after school program that goes until 6-6:30 every day. the parents don't get to spend a whole lot of time with their kids. it's really sad. in some cases the parents don't want any involvement other than the occasional fun thing to make the kid think their parents are awesome. it's pretty bad.
but yes, i made a generalization on the length of the school day. the problem is schools are trying to pack more and more into the school day thinking that quantity means something.... when it really means that the kids sit in class longer and get bored more often. the teachers are a part of the problem, but it has nothing to do with "old school schooling". unfortunately, the classroom setting is the best way to get through to all the different types of learners, though teachers have to be sure to accommodate everyone and not just lecture and test. there needs to be some hands on stuff and different methods of explaining things. i used to be a substitute teacher for a while and when i was doing a lesson on percentages with a 7th or 8th grade class, they had no idea how to get it. what was worse is that the book didn't explain it well and their teacher followed the book word for word. she was a really shitty teacher and should have been fired. i explained percentages the way i learned and they all got it, but were tested on the book's way. i was put on the spot and managed to come up with a way to incorporate my method with the book's method. their teacher who didn't know what she was doing (either that or she was just plain lazy) wasn't teaching them, she was making them just regurgitate stuff.
i never said treat them like babies, i simply said that they are not adults and are not ready to handle adult situations. at 14, you still have a lot of life learning to go through and it can't just hit you all at once. there are responsibilities that 14 year olds should have and responsibilities that they should not have. living on their own is not the type of responsibility a 14 year old should have. they are still at a development level that, though most of them would disagree with me, leaves them dependent on their parents for certain things.
college used to be the type of place where people went because they wanted to, but it's becoming the type of place where people go because they think they are supposed to (or in some cases because parents force them to). because of that, students are learning only what their majors tell them they need to and their extracurricular stuff or extra work on the side is generally drinking and having fun rather than exploring academic interests (usually because the academic interests just aren't there). unfortunately, society has started to say that if you don't have a college education, you aren't good enough.
by what reasoning can you say that 14 years old is pretty much an adult? let's see... can't drive, can't vote, can't live on your own, can't even join the military. i'd say that a 14 year old is nowhere near an adult. heck, most college students i know aren't adults yet, even those over 21.
there's a lot of growing up to do at 14, and at no point did i say that they shouldn't be exposed to responsibility. in fact, i think children as young as 5 or 6 should be exposed to responsibility, though that might be something as menial as sharing (which many adults still have problems with).
the reason i have for a child (yes a 14 year old is a child) not going to college is that most children are not mature enough (not to say that 18 year olds are very mature) to deal with what goes on at colleges. not only that, but they won't be able to get the most out of college. i'm talking about the social experiences, not just the educational ones (which i will say are more important).
anyone who thinks that a child that young should be moving as quickly as possible through school doesn't know a whole lot about child development.
yes... they do need that free time. there are clubs and extracurricular activities. the schooling is just as important as the free time. blame the parents, not the system. the kids whose parents spend time when them sharing their own interests are the kids who end up adjusting well and succeeding in life.
school is only 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for most high school students. the rest of the time should be spent on homework, fun stuff, and hobbies. it's those hobbies that can get people ahead, like your computer hobbyist example.
the mandate is there because some kids won't realize how much they need school until much later in life. then you end up with 18 year olds in class with 10 year olds. that just doesn't work.
the age segregation thing is more beneficial to students than removing it. i remember reading a story about a 14 year old (i don't remember the exact age, but he was too young to drive) going for his phd. that's just messed up. this 14 year old will not adjust properly to real life. the reason that we keep kids of about the same age together is because they are all going through generally the same life cycles at the same time... puberty for instance. they have each other to help each other get through those various points in their life.
while i agree that gifted students should have something else or more advanced work to keep their minds going, they shouldn't be off to college before they can drive. they end up missing out on the most important school (and i know this sounds cheesy, but it's true)... the school of life. there's a reason why geniuses end up being outcasts and maladjusted. they don't grow up the same way as everyone else. parents are too pushy to get them into harder programs and out of school faster, when all they need is a different type of attention while staying in the same grade level as everyone else.
and i want to know where you're getting this idea that adults who try to improve their education are seen in a negative light. maybe in the backwards parts of the country, but here in the northeast, they're applauded.
while i understand why people are disagreeing with you, you are 100% correct. it sounds like she tried to fight the system thinking they might not have the balls to go to court. she tried to fight and lost the american way. there is no way anyone can disagree with what happened. i don't know how you can get much better than this. she actually got to trial and a jury of her peers found her guilty. she should just be glad she wasn't forced to pay $150k per song.
for the record, i am in no way an RIAA sympathizer. i just don't buy their music and i don't illegally download anything. playing on the P2P networks downloading music is like playing russian roulette. you're most likely going to be fine, but there's that one time that you won't. that's what happened here.
no, it's not silly, but in this case where 99% of computers from the major manufacturers are built in china of chinese parts it is quite silly. IBM's thinkpads before they were sold to lenovo were built in china for years, probably in computer sweatshops. sure, the money went to an american company, but that american company sent their work to china.
being a "MS faithful" i will add that the article is trying to compare it to XP it seems. having been using vista since it's release and having zero problems other than a driver/security software issue that was HP's fault, i'd say it's pretty good. some things are a bit slower than XP on my machine and the hardware requirements are a bit out there, but i have seriously had no problems that i can blame MS for (the HP thing was that the software for the fingerprint reader made it take forever for windows to startup).
i do see some regular large memory usage, but that's mostly because i have firefox open all the time. the indexing/cache thing for the file system is always running (and can be turned off) and uses a lot of memory, but it gives it up whenever something else needs it.
i had 2 installations of vista... first was an upgrade, took about an hour (a lot of files had to be moved around to their new directories) and nothing went wrong. the second was a fresh install on the same computer (because i prefer it that way, but wanted to see the upgrade) and that took about 25 minutes, the fastest windows install i had ever seen.
i actually now prefer vista to XP and find it easier to use. no single application can crash all of windows. the networking stuff makes more sense (and it doesn't auto-save every wireless network i connect to). i like the new start menu and the search feature, and the UAC doesn't annoy me all that much as it only comes up when i install software or have to use the server 2003 admin pack. i am really not sure where all these people are getting their problems from, but i have had no issues and absolutely love it.
for the record, i have used linux (and plan on installing ubuntu on my home desktop that currently has XP) and OS X. i work in a primarily windows environment and have to support it, so i use that primarily (though i think i'll be getting a powerbook in the near future, but i'll be dual booting vista).
while i disagree with the RIAA's tactics, i agree 100% with this post. i work in a college IT department and run a training program for my student employees. one of them actually had the balls to ask me where he can get music for free and when i told him that there was only certain types of music he could get for free, and none of it was mainstream, he kept harping on me, wanting me to suggest some miracle P2P network or something. i won't say i never downloaded music for free, but i no longer do it (i also no longer listen to a whole lot of mainstream music and either buy the CD directly from the band or from some other source, and 99% of the time now, it's not RIAA music).
i don't want to hear about price gouging or anything... it still doesn't make it right. if you want the music, there are legal means of getting it, plain and simple. sure, the RIAA sucks, and i agree that they're causing their own demise, but that doesn't excuse downloading or sharing music for free when other people pay for it because it does buy someone's dinner. there are legal ways to fight the system.
whoosh... the sound of the subtle sarcasm of my previous post flying over your head...
the difference is big media pays money to the government... the real terrorists are the people who steal intellectual property and make it available for others free of charge.
i think i either saw something put out by the **AA or one of those commercials they play before movies that basically equated people who pirate music and movies to drug lords and terrorists.
when it rings, it plays for me. other people just happen to hear it. kind of like when i have my stereo turned up and people walking by my car can hear it. i'm not collecting money from people, i'm just listening to the music in the manner that i want.
i'm sorry, my CD is actually a standard CD. there is no copy protection.
how is it apple's problem with copyright infringement if people are making their own ringtones from songs that they illegally acquired? i made my own ringtone (for my new LG chocolate) from an mp3 that i ripped from a CD that i own. i don't think i committed any copyright infringement by doing so because i actually purchased the CD.
the problem with that is while most laptop keyboards are pretty quiet (and no student is going to being a laptop and a quieter keyboard), the faster typing as students try to keep up with the professor will make more noise than just someone writing a paper. multiply that about 20-40 and unless the keyboards are next to silent (which they aren't), it gets quite annoying.
then add in the 65% of students who are also chatting with friends on AIM and it gets worse.