It is, however, against the law to bypass any copy protection - e.g. CSS - in order to do so. So, get to copying all those non-CSS DVD titles you "own*". See you back here in 5 minutes...
(Sorry - it just annoys me that, for a group of people who are so obsessed and rock-solid sure about their "rights", so many of you get these basics totally wrong...)
-----
(* this is what shits me about DVD advertising - on the one hand, the MPAA/equivalents are shouting that you don't "own" anything except the limited right to watch, on machinery blessed by them, the content of the individual disc you bought; while on the other hand they are allowed to continue to advertise "{$Latest_Movie} - own it now on DVD!"
Make up your feckin' minds, you two-faced lying c*nts...)
It is normal for the dominant fashion of a nation to be modelled on its leader
Which is fine when your leadership is stable, lasting anywhere from 10-40 years. When you know you're guaranteed a leadership change every 4 or 8 years, doing so starts to make you look a bit psychotic.
Interesting about the syphillis though. Never thought of it that way, and never encountered it in my readings of history. Now I'm curious to see if it's true - it sounds like something made up after the fact to emphasise the decadence of the upper classes of the time...
Nah, my favourite is when it comes pre-installed, has never been configured, and yet suddenly decides to block DNS requests!
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this three times in one week. If I'm going to have to drive backwards and forwards across town to fix this kind of crap behaviour, I have no qualms about telling customers that any and all Nortons products are steaming piles of shit to be avoided at all costs.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft finally did something right. The only problem is, they've since recanted...
If the production company is able to guarantee $3.3M in revenue per episode that means a ROI of at least 10%... When the episode is completed, it is released to the public domain and the money is released to the production company.
And this works - up to the point where the principles of the production company start thinking "hey, if there was just some way I could make money from syndication and residuals, that'd be all profit!"
Then they get to work trying to warp the system - change the production agreements, gang together with other production companies, lobby the government to change the rules, etc.
Such a system benefits all parties
Well, yes - but, for the inevitable greedy few, it doesn't benefit them enough.
How else do you think things got the way they are now?
Furthermore it is 100% free-market, no government intervention required, no dollars wasted on the FBI tracking down pirates because piracy is meaningless in such a system.
Bullshit. You'd need government to maintain the free (as in libre) utopia - laws to prevent the greedy taking advantage of the 'freedom', and the dollars saved on the FBI not tracking down copyright infringers would go to the FBI to pay for tracking down libre-infringers. Until, after a bit of creative lobbying, the government turned 'round and said "well, they took all risk - it's only right that they have the opportunity to make a little more..."
Re:You hit the nail - it's really the end of CABLE
on
CableCARD In-Depth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The day they succeed in locking down the incoming cable stream so I can't record things and watch them whenever I want to as many times as I want to is the day I no longer need the cable stream.
Yes, but until then you're still giving them $60/Mo...
Why not stop now?
What you're doing is more like an abusive/dysfunctional relationship than anything else - you know you're going to be smacked hard and beaten to a pulp in the future, but until that actually happens you'll stick with it because, damn it, you're enjoying yourself NOW!
Consipicuously absent are any wire-based telcos; without them, there's little chance of this going anywhere.
Telco Providers.
Alcatel & Ericsson are the major hardware providers outside of North America, with a complete range of wire, mobile, and wireless hardware. NEC & Siemens too, with a smaller presence. Motorola do lot of radio/wireless/mobile stuff, and Nokia do mainly mobiles.
What's interesting is the non-appearance of North American hardware vendors, like Nortel, on the list.
I dislike genres in general - what is it, 200+ different genres in some implementations of ID3v2 (not counting free-form)? It seems that the industry has to create a new genre for every new band, just so they can market them as "different".
Or maybe it's a fan problem - after all, the Industrial you listen to is better than the Industrial everybody else listens to, so it *has* to have a new genre, right?;-)
Personally, I think there should just be 3 different genres - "sucks", "doesn't suck", and "I'm not sure"...
Simple solution: just wait. What you call "Alternative" now will be "Pop" in 5 years time, and "Easy Listening" in 20...
Sure, just because people are playing games doesn't mean that people are filling their lives with emptyness - no more than believing in organised religion, smoking pot, drinking booze, or working your arse off for 60 hours a week does. But, often people do exactly those things to fill their lives.
Now, I'm not a gamer, don't frequent or read gamer boards, and wouldn't know JT from a hole in the ground. Hell, I don't even know what game this is about! But reading that extract of the offending post - which has been held up as an example of the most offensive part of the whole - I can't see the problem. He's a little bit preachy, yeah, which as I said is most definitely not my thing, but the point (of that part) is clear:
If you have a hole in your life, one which is strong enough that you actually feel a void, an emptyness inside you, don't waste your time trying to fill it with somewhing which is ultimately worthless. Church, dope, piss, work, or games - they're not the goal, the point, the purpose. Life is.
Oh, and you're possibly missing the pointed ironic intent of my sig. American, aren't you?;-)
Oh, and in addition to my last comment: As much as I loved her in the beginning, I agree with you about Granny. Notice in the last couple of books where Nanny Ogg appears tangentially, she seems to be being groomed to take over Granny's "Most Powerful Witch" position?
Thinking of her appearance in "Thief of Time" in particular...
Granny has lost the "way out of her depth, knowledge-wise, but will march on regardless and win - mainly through bluster and confusion" charm she had in books like "Equal Rites" or "Witches Abroad". "Lords and Ladies" saw the end of that.
* fumes angrily at being referred to as part of a sad inbred clique, on SLASHDOT of all places *
Well, it's been years since I lurked on a.f.p. - I stopped around the time the cabal changed from a mythological in-joke to actually being a bunch of anally retentive old-timers emailing non-cabal posters to berate them for perceived violations of the invisible "rules". Maybe it's changed;-)
(Oh, and I only read/. when I'm bored, and post for fun;-)
I would have mentioned "Night Watch", except that it seemed like it might presage a step back to the "everything for everybody" era. Maybe it was just the circular Vimes/Keel conundrum it introduces, or the additional Vimes/Patrician link (though, maybe the Patrician truly *understands* the nature of Time?). Maybe it was just the "it's The Watch, so it's got to have Colon & Nobby in it even if it's 30-40 years ago" that annoyed me.
"... Gates' prediction has come true for people using the right tactics and advanced filtering technology."
Like OSX?
Seriously, since buying a Mac a few years ago and using Mail.app, the amount of spam I see is almost nil - maybe one a month, with maybe one false positive every 2 or 3 months. Everything else has been detected by Mail.app's own filters after a bit of training.
Call me a callous bastard, but I think that's actually a pretty reasonable response to events. Maybe it doesn't play well with the faux breast-beating and hand-wringing that normally accompanies media and public comment after a community death, but that's a problem with the way people have decided to reconcile death with their own attitudes and actions in modern times.
Let's take a look at what he's saying, paragraph by paragraph:
* A bit of religious solace. Well, I'm not a fan, but people seem to take comfort in it.
* Everybody has a void inside, a space they are driven to try to fill. Trying to fill it with pointless attention-driven activity ain't the way.
* Lots of people have the same afliction, to a degree that causes emotional pain. And lots of them try to fill it the same way.
* Get a life. Good advice, in any realm. Devoting all your time, trying to fill that void with anything - work, gaming, alcohol, drugs, whatever - other than enjoying your life, is ultimately hurtful. These things may be adjuncts to enjoying life, but they're bad as a sole purpose.
* What's going on here is a circle-jerk of inbreds. Many of you have the same problems, and what's your answer? Throw yourself deeper into the problem!
* Yeah, denial - let's pretend that it was a one-off, an unforseen circumstance, that it couldn't happen to me, that the not-me's were too self-absorbed to help. Yeah, right - stop pretending you're immune, that you'd notice at all, or behave any differently if you did.
* Think about this...
All anybody is really upset about here is that JT's not conforming to the usual petty, self-centred, "acceptable" public way of dealing with death. He's asking them to *think* about it, and themselves, and their ongoing actions.
Admittedly, he brings religion into it, which is a definite faux-pas in these circles - but religion can be a wonderful thing if it works for you. Everybody needs something to fill these holes, and religion is as good as anything - and has the advantage of at least being nice to everybody else (radicalist nutjobs of whatver stripe aside...)
I'd agree with you, in general - it seems like, for a while at least, he listened too much to the sad inbred clique of a.f.p. and wrote books that tried to fit everybody's favourite characters and bits in. After the first one of those, they became formulaic - every book had to have the Watch, A-M, the Wizards, at least a passing nod to the witches, etc.
But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh!;-).
But still, the best stand-alone books would be "Pyramids" or "Small Gods". The latter, however, is probably too deep - it was my least favourite to start with but, having read it maybe a dozen times, each time I find some new deep cutting insight into organised religion, and enjoy it more and more...
(It has to also be said that, for a long time there, the man couldn't write a decent ending to save his life. The later books, however, are much much better in this regard.)
Maybe the players are region-free - but, as the GP said, part of the Cinea spec is "Do not enable CSS". Since they did, the disc is no longer valid under the Cinea spec, and the player rightly refuses to play it.
It might also be that part of the decryption code checks that the player itself is region-coded, but not the disc. The player region-code may be used to make up the encryption hash, preventing BAFTA voters from playing discs meant as Oscar previews?
...basically grants permission to Apple and several other companies to do anything they damn well please - including re-writing the entire EULA without notification or consent.
So, in other words, it's much like every other consumer-level contract.
Ever read your home DSL/cable contract?
(No, I don't like it. Yes, I'll continue using iTunes - in fact, I'm downloading the QT/iTunes/10.4.4 updates right now. No, I don't use the iTunes store.)
Is that the one with the banjo solo in the middle?
Re:Extremely easy to disable, and more info
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
When I use the term "malware" I typically mean programs that do one or more of the following... - resist uninstallation - persist after uninstallation attempts - reinstall after uninstallation or "by the roots" removal - hide from the user - hide from the operating system - hide what they are doing * - damage the operating system - replace, interfere with, spoof, or hijack functions such as DNS resolution, home page, file associations and toolbars - create problems in order to sell you a "fix" for them
You're talking about Outlook Express, aren't you?;-)
Their main opponent is not HM Opposition as you might expect, but News Ltd.
Wha' the F?
News Ltd is one of the current government's biggest supporters! Read any News Ltd newspaper here - for example, The Australian - and all you'll see is thinly disguised Liberal party propaganda.
Hell, when the Australian Financial Review - the country's biggest corporate-oriented daily - leans more to the left than the national paper & most of the capital dailies, you realise what a self-interested, inbred, manipulative & fucked-up media regime exists in this country.
Mind you, you're spot on with the testing the waters bit. Really, this article is about nothing more than what goes on in the US or any other so-called "democracy".
You think the idea is to move porn from the rest of the TLDs onto.xxx. The real purpose is twofold:
Make ICANN look good; like it's "thinking of the children".
Make more money by selling more domains.
You think.xxx is going to be your garden-variety $4.95/12Mo.com price? Nooo... it'll be a premium TLD, you'll pay top dollar for it, and renewals will be for 6 or 12 months only (because porn sites go up and down faster than a bride's nightie).
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's called "fair use" in your laws.
It is, however, against the law to bypass any copy protection - e.g. CSS - in order to do so. So, get to copying all those non-CSS DVD titles you "own*". See you back here in 5 minutes...
(Sorry - it just annoys me that, for a group of people who are so obsessed and rock-solid sure about their "rights", so many of you get these basics totally wrong...)
-----
(* this is what shits me about DVD advertising - on the one hand, the MPAA/equivalents are shouting that you don't "own" anything except the limited right to watch, on machinery blessed by them, the content of the individual disc you bought; while on the other hand they are allowed to continue to advertise "{$Latest_Movie} - own it now on DVD!"
Make up your feckin' minds, you two-faced lying c*nts...)
Hell, you don't even need to reach escape velocity - just build a pyramid 36000km high, hoist stuff slowly up the side, then give it a gentle push!
Alien tourists would come to see the only planet in the galaxy that looks like an ice cream cone...
Interesting about the syphillis though. Never thought of it that way, and never encountered it in my readings of history. Now I'm curious to see if it's true - it sounds like something made up after the fact to emphasise the decadence of the upper classes of the time...
(Old Australian joke - if you were Australian you'd be from Wagga Wagga...)
Nah, my favourite is when it comes pre-installed, has never been configured, and yet suddenly decides to block DNS requests!
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this three times in one week. If I'm going to have to drive backwards and forwards across town to fix this kind of crap behaviour, I have no qualms about telling customers that any and all Nortons products are steaming piles of shit to be avoided at all costs.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft finally did something right. The only problem is, they've since recanted...
Then they get to work trying to warp the system - change the production agreements, gang together with other production companies, lobby the government to change the rules, etc.Well, yes - but, for the inevitable greedy few, it doesn't benefit them enough.
How else do you think things got the way they are now?Bullshit. You'd need government to maintain the free (as in libre) utopia - laws to prevent the greedy taking advantage of the 'freedom', and the dollars saved on the FBI not tracking down copyright infringers would go to the FBI to pay for tracking down libre-infringers. Until, after a bit of creative lobbying, the government turned 'round and said "well, they took all risk - it's only right that they have the opportunity to make a little more..."
Why not stop now?
What you're doing is more like an abusive/dysfunctional relationship than anything else - you know you're going to be smacked hard and beaten to a pulp in the future, but until that actually happens you'll stick with it because, damn it, you're enjoying yourself NOW!
^KB, ^KK, ^KX anyone?
I can spell quite well by myself, thank you, and don't need a paper clip or cartoon dog to tell me what I want to do...
Alcatel & Ericsson are the major hardware providers outside of North America, with a complete range of wire, mobile, and wireless hardware. NEC & Siemens too, with a smaller presence. Motorola do lot of radio/wireless/mobile stuff, and Nokia do mainly mobiles.
What's interesting is the non-appearance of North American hardware vendors, like Nortel, on the list.
I dislike genres in general - what is it, 200+ different genres in some implementations of ID3v2 (not counting free-form)? It seems that the industry has to create a new genre for every new band, just so they can market them as "different".
;-)
Or maybe it's a fan problem - after all, the Industrial you listen to is better than the Industrial everybody else listens to, so it *has* to have a new genre, right?
Personally, I think there should just be 3 different genres - "sucks", "doesn't suck", and "I'm not sure"...
Simple solution: just wait. What you call "Alternative" now will be "Pop" in 5 years time, and "Easy Listening" in 20...
And you're missing my point.
;-)
Sure, just because people are playing games doesn't mean that people are filling their lives with emptyness - no more than believing in organised religion, smoking pot, drinking booze, or working your arse off for 60 hours a week does. But, often people do exactly those things to fill their lives.
Now, I'm not a gamer, don't frequent or read gamer boards, and wouldn't know JT from a hole in the ground. Hell, I don't even know what game this is about! But reading that extract of the offending post - which has been held up as an example of the most offensive part of the whole - I can't see the problem. He's a little bit preachy, yeah, which as I said is most definitely not my thing, but the point (of that part) is clear:
If you have a hole in your life, one which is strong enough that you actually feel a void, an emptyness inside you, don't waste your time trying to fill it with somewhing which is ultimately worthless. Church, dope, piss, work, or games - they're not the goal, the point, the purpose. Life is.
Oh, and you're possibly missing the pointed ironic intent of my sig. American, aren't you?
Oh, and in addition to my last comment: As much as I loved her in the beginning, I agree with you about Granny. Notice in the last couple of books where Nanny Ogg appears tangentially, she seems to be being groomed to take over Granny's "Most Powerful Witch" position?
Thinking of her appearance in "Thief of Time" in particular...
Granny has lost the "way out of her depth, knowledge-wise, but will march on regardless and win - mainly through bluster and confusion" charm she had in books like "Equal Rites" or "Witches Abroad". "Lords and Ladies" saw the end of that.
(Oh, and I only read
I would have mentioned "Night Watch", except that it seemed like it might presage a step back to the "everything for everybody" era. Maybe it was just the circular Vimes/Keel conundrum it introduces, or the additional Vimes/Patrician link (though, maybe the Patrician truly *understands* the nature of Time?). Maybe it was just the "it's The Watch, so it's got to have Colon & Nobby in it even if it's 30-40 years ago" that annoyed me.
Seriously, since buying a Mac a few years ago and using Mail.app, the amount of spam I see is almost nil - maybe one a month, with maybe one false positive every 2 or 3 months. Everything else has been detected by Mail.app's own filters after a bit of training.
Let's take a look at what he's saying, paragraph by paragraph:
All anybody is really upset about here is that JT's not conforming to the usual petty, self-centred, "acceptable" public way of dealing with death. He's asking them to *think* about it, and themselves, and their ongoing actions.
Admittedly, he brings religion into it, which is a definite faux-pas in these circles - but religion can be a wonderful thing if it works for you. Everybody needs something to fill these holes, and religion is as good as anything - and has the advantage of at least being nice to everybody else (radicalist nutjobs of whatver stripe aside...)
I'd agree with you, in general - it seems like, for a while at least, he listened too much to the sad inbred clique of a.f.p. and wrote books that tried to fit everybody's favourite characters and bits in. After the first one of those, they became formulaic - every book had to have the Watch, A-M, the Wizards, at least a passing nod to the witches, etc.
;-).
But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh!
But still, the best stand-alone books would be "Pyramids" or "Small Gods". The latter, however, is probably too deep - it was my least favourite to start with but, having read it maybe a dozen times, each time I find some new deep cutting insight into organised religion, and enjoy it more and more...
(It has to also be said that, for a long time there, the man couldn't write a decent ending to save his life. The later books, however, are much much better in this regard.)
Maybe the players are region-free - but, as the GP said, part of the Cinea spec is "Do not enable CSS". Since they did, the disc is no longer valid under the Cinea spec, and the player rightly refuses to play it.
It might also be that part of the decryption code checks that the player itself is region-coded, but not the disc. The player region-code may be used to make up the encryption hash, preventing BAFTA voters from playing discs meant as Oscar previews?
Ever read your home DSL/cable contract?
(No, I don't like it. Yes, I'll continue using iTunes - in fact, I'm downloading the QT/iTunes/10.4.4 updates right now. No, I don't use the iTunes store.)
News Ltd is one of the current government's biggest supporters ! Read any News Ltd newspaper here - for example, The Australian - and all you'll see is thinly disguised Liberal party propaganda.
Hell, when the Australian Financial Review - the country's biggest corporate-oriented daily - leans more to the left than the national paper & most of the capital dailies, you realise what a self-interested, inbred, manipulative & fucked-up media regime exists in this country.
Mind you, you're spot on with the testing the waters bit. Really, this article is about nothing more than what goes on in the US or any other so-called "democracy".
You think the idea is to move porn from the rest of the TLDs onto
You think