Re:Theft? What is theft of music?
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 2
I believe that "Theft of music" in the minds of the RIAA, ultimately is, what another poster pointed out; participating in one's culture without paying the RIAA tax.
That is; owning the CD (having it on the shelf where your friends can see it, see how cool you are for liking that band), or listening to the CD for your own enjoyment (or cultural indoctrination, however you want to look at it), or playing the CD for your friends (see situation #1).
Re:are copyrights necessary?
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 2
Well, the RIAA's argument is that you can toss a few coppers at a minstrel, but it's not equivalent to the modern mind-blowing culturally rooted experience of watching a gang of highly trained and talented young boys or girls dancing in leather pants showing hot young lines, to highly produced electronic music on MTV.
This stuff was expensive to create and promote. So pay up, you bastard.
Re:The RIAA's problem began 15 years ago...
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 4
bullshit. They tried PLENTY to stop people from copying tapes. What they got was a 1992 American Home Recording Act which specifies a thingie called Fair Use which says that as an American, you DO have the right to copy for non-commercial purposes.
It's *NEVER* been legally wrong. The RIAA mind-control goons just want us to believe that.
The money that goes into the computer, and the internet account, is good for many many other things besides Napster. Many useful beneficial things, like email, balancing checkbooks, online shopping, online education, news, etc.
Then there's the point you make that the music is not portable.
Get a CD Burner, and it's portable to any other CD player.
Get a portable MP3 player, and it's likewise, portable.
Plus, you save yourself the trouble of getting screwed when you pay $15 for a CD with one good song on it. Plus, you have the FANTASTIC flexibility and convenience of burning your own mix CDs of your favorite songs from various artists, but perhaps most worthwhile of all, if you do OWN the music as a CD copy, you don't have to worry about scratching or losing your only copy, and having to buy another COSTLY RIAA-sanctioned copy. You have backups.
All in all, the MP3-situation is good for the consumer in almost every way. Superior to the old model. And far superior to the new models I've heard proposed by the RIAA (SDMI). Any new model that comes along will have to compete with the current MP3 model in all of these convenience and safety features - not simply cost (free!).
However, I believe in the basic goodness of humans, and I believe that once the record industry hits on a technology that offers the same flexibility and convenience, that people would rather pay for the "official" "licensed" version, than have to have that nagging little voice in the back of their heads reminding them that they stole. (even though they didn't, because it's covered under fair use; loan a CD to one friend, share an MP3 with 6 million friends, it's THE SAME). But we'll all feel better when we don't have "borrowed" or "shared" stuff, when we own our own property that we paid (a fair price, like 5-10 cents a song) for.
. . . and try not to be too harsh. She's going to go home and read these, and cry. Maybe take some booze and downers.
I *CAN* get some satisfaction after all!
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 4
It's satisfying, to me, to see some MAINSTREAM press, actually letting people talk and speak their views. I usually hate ZDNet, but this is the best talkback ever!
The flamage, the carnage, oh, the humanity!
I love it. I guess stuff like this is why I stick around this dump.
It's not ONLY too expensive. Motorola has Apple trapped in a time-warp where CPU's are at the level they were a year and a half ago, as far as performance goes.
I got myself all worked up and exited about the potential of the PPC platform with a kick butt OS, back in 1994, as the savior of all things that compute. But it remains an empty promise, and we're still bound by the shackles of Microsoft and Intel. Our only true hope these days seems to be AMD and Linux.
Read all of the apple forums, all the Mac users are BITCHING about the UI. (Ars Technica for that matter!).
I say that Apple has FAILED to put a decent GUI on top of Unix. Apple apparently no longer is about user interfaces. If you think so, read that Ars Technica review again.
In this case, Apple has a special team of well-connected people who are in charge of product placement. They're the ones who have blitzed every TV show with Apple products in the past two years.
Didn't anybody else notice the wholesale adoption of Macs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Except that in last night's Angel episode, the iBook had a sticky-note strategically placed over the Apple logo. I wonder what that was all about?
Steve didn't want to have a way to tell these things apart because that way they could more easily screw their customers.
I bought a Rev A G3 Beige, I did not know that there was going to be a Rev B. So I'm stuck not able to do the slave drive thing. Of course they can easily clear out the channel of Rev As after Rev B ships, because the customer has no way of making an official specification of the difference.
Same thing with iMacs. I was shopping for the latest (Rev F) iMac for my wife. I saw an ad at Costco for an iMac for $699, but they didn't specify what kind. I went, and it was a bondi-blue pre-slot-loading iMac. I bought a Rev F (indigo) directly from Apple after that. But I could see how someone who didn't KNOW could have been totally screwed over.
The VCR manufacturers have been doing this for years.
Funny thing about Apple Menu and Windows; windows USED to have a neat feature similar to Apple Menu, (not scalable tho), called QuickLaunch, where you could create a nice little toolbar on the Task Bar, and put your own aliases on it.
This was the ONE decent feature of IE 4.0, and bundled with Active Desktop. Of course, when they got the survey study results that said nobody used Active Desktop, they killed that feature in IE 5.0 - so you only retain QuickLaunch if you install IE 4.0, THEN IE 5.0. If you install a new system, and never run IE 4.0, and install IE 5.0 to upgrade IE 3.0, then you don't get QuickLaunch, and you CANNOT get it. Unless there's some goofy registry hack to reenable it. But QuickLaunch was the coolest feature ever. Even if you couldn't scale it, and you were limited to just a few dozen icons at most. You could put folders in there. . . it was the #1 best way to keep my NT desktop from becoming cluttered. Now I spend a good portion of a day every two weeks clearing out clutter on my desktop.
We need an AskSlashdot on solar power for the home. I bought a home this year, and I'm strongly considering installing rooftop solar - considering I live in California, I could probably benefit from the sunny weather here.
oh yeah, and one REALLY cool little detail about OS X.
If you type in the wrong password in the GUI login, the dialog box responds by shaking back and forth, you can almost hear it say "nope". It is the most brilliant example of computer-human interface I have ever seen.
I've also been using it for almost two weeks. No reboots either.
There are lots of UI quibbles, which we all know that either Apple will fix, or third parties will. I'm not concerned about the loss of spring loaded folders or windowshades (actually, the Cocoa-ified Stickies HAS windowshades!).
I think the BIGGEST weakness of this OS will be Carbon. Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary, but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa, and if they need to address the Solaris and NT market, use the portability stuff inherent in Cocoa (OPENSTEP). Instead, ISV's seem to be confused, running scared, and when we have apps that aren't Carbon OR Cocoa, we have to run the Classic environment, which is a huge waste of time. Classic boot times are slow, the necessity of running classic is a geek concept; normal users won't understand it. It's a memory hog, and many apps don't run at all, while many more run so damn slow it's not even funny. There are still several that run just fine. But the end result is so inconsistant as to be utterly baffling. I think Apple may have taken the only course they could, and how they did it was elegant as possible, but damn, I sure wonder how things would have worked out if Apple had evangelized Cocoa a LOT more strongly pushed the cross-platform features, and ease of programming, and not done the work on Carbon, and not made Classic so easy to fall back on. Personally, if I have any Classic apps I have to run, I'm going to dual-boot to get there, for a LONG while. Make a stronger case for Cocoa, and maybe more ISV's would have taken it seriously, instead of shunning it for either Carbon, or completely ignoring OS X altogether.
Um, not really, the Christian God doesn't pass judgement, he forgives.
Inequalities here on Earth are a symptom of the fact that material existance is imperfect.
You know what? You're absolutely right. It does NOT matter one bit what any hopelessly lost soul, or saved soul does with their Earthly time and money.
Everyone goes to Heaven. If they want to.
While we're here on Earth, we were given the Earth to take care of it. God does expect us to take care of it. It's our assigned duty. But in the end, your soul matters more, because eventually, the Earth will be swallowed up by the sun, the sun turn into a black hole and evaporate into Hawking radiation, and the very protons will decay, and nothing will exist in the material sense anymore. When you're in Heaven, blink, and you'll miss it, because eternity lasts a long time.
The last oil-crisis was NOT caused by gas-guzzling cars. It was caused by greedy oil companies, and OPEC constraining supplies to boost profits. Just as they are trying to do now.
However, they didn't learn their lesson last time, evidently, that when you do that, you fuck-over the economy so bad that you throw the world into a deep recession.
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I believe that "Theft of music" in the minds of the RIAA, ultimately is, what another poster pointed out; participating in one's culture without paying the RIAA tax.
That is; owning the CD (having it on the shelf where your friends can see it, see how cool you are for liking that band), or listening to the CD for your own enjoyment (or cultural indoctrination, however you want to look at it), or playing the CD for your friends (see situation #1).
Well, the RIAA's argument is that you can toss a few coppers at a minstrel, but it's not equivalent to the modern mind-blowing culturally rooted experience of watching a gang of highly trained and talented young boys or girls dancing in leather pants showing hot young lines, to highly produced electronic music on MTV.
This stuff was expensive to create and promote. So pay up, you bastard.
bullshit. They tried PLENTY to stop people from copying tapes. What they got was a 1992 American Home Recording Act which specifies a thingie called Fair Use which says that as an American, you DO have the right to copy for non-commercial purposes.
It's *NEVER* been legally wrong. The RIAA mind-control goons just want us to believe that.
guest-fodder on Battlebots!
not necessarily.
The money that goes into the computer, and the internet account, is good for many many other things besides Napster. Many useful beneficial things, like email, balancing checkbooks, online shopping, online education, news, etc.
Then there's the point you make that the music is not portable.
Get a CD Burner, and it's portable to any other CD player.
Get a portable MP3 player, and it's likewise, portable.
Plus, you save yourself the trouble of getting screwed when you pay $15 for a CD with one good song on it. Plus, you have the FANTASTIC flexibility and convenience of burning your own mix CDs of your favorite songs from various artists, but perhaps most worthwhile of all, if you do OWN the music as a CD copy, you don't have to worry about scratching or losing your only copy, and having to buy another COSTLY RIAA-sanctioned copy. You have backups.
All in all, the MP3-situation is good for the consumer in almost every way. Superior to the old model. And far superior to the new models I've heard proposed by the RIAA (SDMI). Any new model that comes along will have to compete with the current MP3 model in all of these convenience and safety features - not simply cost (free!).
However, I believe in the basic goodness of humans, and I believe that once the record industry hits on a technology that offers the same flexibility and convenience, that people would rather pay for the "official" "licensed" version, than have to have that nagging little voice in the back of their heads reminding them that they stole. (even though they didn't, because it's covered under fair use; loan a CD to one friend, share an MP3 with 6 million friends, it's THE SAME). But we'll all feel better when we don't have "borrowed" or "shared" stuff, when we own our own property that we paid (a fair price, like 5-10 cents a song) for.
. . . and try not to be too harsh. She's going to go home and read these, and cry. Maybe take some booze and downers.
It's satisfying, to me, to see some MAINSTREAM press, actually letting people talk and speak their views. I usually hate ZDNet, but this is the best talkback ever!
The flamage, the carnage, oh, the humanity!
I love it. I guess stuff like this is why I stick around this dump.
Carnivore is making me feel like a juicy piece of meat right about now. . .
This will be no problem as soon as the One World Government (New World Order) is fully in place.
well, he did. . .
It's not ONLY too expensive. Motorola has Apple trapped in a time-warp where CPU's are at the level they were a year and a half ago, as far as performance goes.
I got myself all worked up and exited about the potential of the PPC platform with a kick butt OS, back in 1994, as the savior of all things that compute. But it remains an empty promise, and we're still bound by the shackles of Microsoft and Intel. Our only true hope these days seems to be AMD and Linux.
Read all of the apple forums, all the Mac users are BITCHING about the UI. (Ars Technica for that matter!).
I say that Apple has FAILED to put a decent GUI on top of Unix. Apple apparently no longer is about user interfaces. If you think so, read that Ars Technica review again.
In this case, Apple has a special team of well-connected people who are in charge of product placement. They're the ones who have blitzed every TV show with Apple products in the past two years.
Didn't anybody else notice the wholesale adoption of Macs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Except that in last night's Angel episode, the iBook had a sticky-note strategically placed over the Apple logo. I wonder what that was all about?
MS will assign this task to their engineering team. SO we're assured that it will be 65 million lines of (legal) code.
Shut the fuck up and try one. You'll see.
lets start with the politicians, then move to the CEO's, then just to be sure, anyone who golfs.
all golf courses can then be converted to another more productive use; skate parks!
Steve didn't want to have a way to tell these things apart because that way they could more easily screw their customers.
I bought a Rev A G3 Beige, I did not know that there was going to be a Rev B. So I'm stuck not able to do the slave drive thing. Of course they can easily clear out the channel of Rev As after Rev B ships, because the customer has no way of making an official specification of the difference.
Same thing with iMacs. I was shopping for the latest (Rev F) iMac for my wife. I saw an ad at Costco for an iMac for $699, but they didn't specify what kind. I went, and it was a bondi-blue pre-slot-loading iMac. I bought a Rev F (indigo) directly from Apple after that. But I could see how someone who didn't KNOW could have been totally screwed over.
The VCR manufacturers have been doing this for years.
Funny thing about Apple Menu and Windows; windows USED to have a neat feature similar to Apple Menu, (not scalable tho), called QuickLaunch, where you could create a nice little toolbar on the Task Bar, and put your own aliases on it.
This was the ONE decent feature of IE 4.0, and bundled with Active Desktop. Of course, when they got the survey study results that said nobody used Active Desktop, they killed that feature in IE 5.0 - so you only retain QuickLaunch if you install IE 4.0, THEN IE 5.0. If you install a new system, and never run IE 4.0, and install IE 5.0 to upgrade IE 3.0, then you don't get QuickLaunch, and you CANNOT get it. Unless there's some goofy registry hack to reenable it. But QuickLaunch was the coolest feature ever. Even if you couldn't scale it, and you were limited to just a few dozen icons at most. You could put folders in there. . . it was the #1 best way to keep my NT desktop from becoming cluttered. Now I spend a good portion of a day every two weeks clearing out clutter on my desktop.
We need an AskSlashdot on solar power for the home. I bought a home this year, and I'm strongly considering installing rooftop solar - considering I live in California, I could probably benefit from the sunny weather here.
oh yeah, and one REALLY cool little detail about OS X.
If you type in the wrong password in the GUI login, the dialog box responds by shaking back and forth, you can almost hear it say "nope". It is the most brilliant example of computer-human interface I have ever seen.
I've also been using it for almost two weeks. No reboots either.
There are lots of UI quibbles, which we all know that either Apple will fix, or third parties will. I'm not concerned about the loss of spring loaded folders or windowshades (actually, the Cocoa-ified Stickies HAS windowshades!).
I think the BIGGEST weakness of this OS will be Carbon. Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary, but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa, and if they need to address the Solaris and NT market, use the portability stuff inherent in Cocoa (OPENSTEP). Instead, ISV's seem to be confused, running scared, and when we have apps that aren't Carbon OR Cocoa, we have to run the Classic environment, which is a huge waste of time. Classic boot times are slow, the necessity of running classic is a geek concept; normal users won't understand it. It's a memory hog, and many apps don't run at all, while many more run so damn slow it's not even funny. There are still several that run just fine. But the end result is so inconsistant as to be utterly baffling. I think Apple may have taken the only course they could, and how they did it was elegant as possible, but damn, I sure wonder how things would have worked out if Apple had evangelized Cocoa a LOT more strongly pushed the cross-platform features, and ease of programming, and not done the work on Carbon, and not made Classic so easy to fall back on. Personally, if I have any Classic apps I have to run, I'm going to dual-boot to get there, for a LONG while. Make a stronger case for Cocoa, and maybe more ISV's would have taken it seriously, instead of shunning it for either Carbon, or completely ignoring OS X altogether.
shit, people won't laugh at Waterworld anymore. . .
Um, not really, the Christian God doesn't pass judgement, he forgives.
Inequalities here on Earth are a symptom of the fact that material existance is imperfect.
You know what? You're absolutely right. It does NOT matter one bit what any hopelessly lost soul, or saved soul does with their Earthly time and money.
Everyone goes to Heaven. If they want to.
While we're here on Earth, we were given the Earth to take care of it. God does expect us to take care of it. It's our assigned duty. But in the end, your soul matters more, because eventually, the Earth will be swallowed up by the sun, the sun turn into a black hole and evaporate into Hawking radiation, and the very protons will decay, and nothing will exist in the material sense anymore. When you're in Heaven, blink, and you'll miss it, because eternity lasts a long time.
The last oil-crisis was NOT caused by gas-guzzling cars. It was caused by greedy oil companies, and OPEC constraining supplies to boost profits. Just as they are trying to do now.
However, they didn't learn their lesson last time, evidently, that when you do that, you fuck-over the economy so bad that you throw the world into a deep recession.