I've had a lame little blog for the past 9 months or so, mainly just a place for me to repost links for my friends to see. Anyway, in the last 3 months or so the comment spam has been really out of control. I have filters setup in a way that the comment spam never makes it to my page, but what it does do is generate about 100 emails to my admin account everytime that goddamn online poker motherfucker spams my server. Every email reads something like this:
To approve this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl To delete this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl
Currently 146 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel:
http://fakeurl.com/moderation [snip]
He does it from zombies so it's a different IP address every time, and recently they've stopped putting anything with the word "poker" in the comments because they figured out that by now most bloggers have the keyword poker filtered and the comments never reach the page.
You know what is the most aggravating thing of all? Even though none of the comments have ever made it through my moderation system, the fuckers still try and spam my server every single day!!! It's aggravating beyond belief and pretty much makes me not want to bother running a blog any more. I guess I can have a little more sympathy for what the Slashdot editors have to put up with (although on a much smaller scale).
I keep wondering if it wouldn't be better to have something like VMWare a standard part of a consumer OS. You would intantiate a VMWare-type virtual machine, preloaded with your Web browser, email client, etc., for all external communications. You would leave your "real machine" with no Net connection, but use it for other tasks that didn't need a live Net connection. Attacks from the outside would have no way to damage anything other than a virtual machine. If it got screwed up or infected, even by your kids playing with it and saying "Yes" to download offers, you'd just delete it and instantiate a new one.
Good idea. Actually, most modern *nixes already have the capability of doing this through the use of what's called a "chroot jail". If you were sufficiently tin-foil hat wearing and paranoid, you could run Mozilla Firefox in it's own chroot jail. Just create a user named firefox without a valid shell (therefore no way to login normally), install Firefox in a directory owned by this user, and have Firefox run as that user, confined to it's own little chroot jail. No matter how much Firefox wants to, it can't write to any other files or touch anything else on your system besides it's own files. Of course, it could get totally infected with toolbars and other browser-based spyware and adware, but it would not affect the rest of your system.
Too bad Windows can't do that.
Re:Autovectorization
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Is it just me, or is this the first "we will make it easy to program the Cell" step that Sony and IBM were promising?
Could be, but auto-vectorization will help not only Altivec enabled architectures (PowerPC G4, PPC970 G5, Cell), but it should also help x86 architectures as well, since SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 are Intel's version of vectorization, or essentially applying the same mathematical operation to many bytes of data at the same time. I think all modern architectures should see a speed increase, especially with multimedia type applications like video encoding/decoding/transcoding.
Seeing as they're the major systems out there. But IA-64? I've barely heard of that, and TFA says Microsoft dropped XP for that. Can anyone elaborate as to why this one was kept?
It's because of HP. HP and Intel together are both flogging the dead horse that is IA64 and trying to get people to switch to their lame platform. I would imagine that HP contributes enough development time to keep the IA64 port of Debian viable.
What about all of the abuses that are taking place in the name of the Patriot act? I'm specifically talking about the DOJ taking the Patriot act on a road show in 2003 and giving state and local law enforcement lessons on how to apply the Patriot act to local drug offenders. I couldn't find a link to an article talking about this, but I did find this that was similar:
In the Spring of 2003, Ashcroft's PROTECT Act was signed into law limiting judges' discretion in sentencing criminal offenders below the Justice Department's sentencing guidelines. While each individual case carries with it countless unique circumstances that a judge uses to form a fair and appropriate sentence, John Ashcroft acted bravely to prohibit judges from considering the individuality of cases for fear of being black-listed by the Justice Department.
This caused uproar among judges across the nation including conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Members of Congress inspired by Ashcroft's success are proposing the VICTORY Act to employ tactics similar to the Patriot Act on suspected drug offenders.
The Bill of Rights Amendments specifically affected by the Patriot Act and other Bush Administration efforts are the following:
The First Amendment: The Patriot Act allows the search of libraries' and religious organizations' records without cause. This might infringe upon the First Amendment's declaration that the government may not abridge freedom of speech nor prohibit the "free exercise" of religion.
The Fourth Amendment: The Patriot Act allows searches and seizures of U.S. citizen's property without probable cause and without a specific warrant. This is expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
The Fifth Amendment: The Bush Administration claims it may designate Americans as "enemy combatants" and detain them without conviction in court. This is in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment stating that persons may not be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Supreme Court has regularly upheld the "due process" requirement even in national security crises.
The Sixth Amendment: With the claim to designate Americans "enemy combatants", the Bush Administration also states that it may imprison persons indefinitely without trial, without access to an attorney, and without any means to challenge their detention. The entire Sixth Amendment is essentially shredded in this case.
[End of quoted article]
I don't think that's a lot of fuss about nothing. I can think of several abuses already, including Jose Padilla, who has been held for years now and has never been charged with anything. He's a goddamn US citizen for chrissakes. If you don't think that's scary that the Feds can come lock you up in a military brig indefinitely without charging you with any crime, then you need to pull your head out of the sand and take a look at what's going on around you.
Not to mention a lot less "Lose all contents of your drive." Solaris is a stuck up bitch and won't go out with scrubs who can only give her a partition.
Funny comment, but you're incorrect. I have a brand new x86-64 box, and I was able to install Ubuntu, Solaris 10, and Windows XP, using GRUB as my boot manager, and I can triple boot (all off of ONE hard drive).
Solaris 10 needs a single primary partition. It puts all of your UFS filesystems, plus swap inside this same partition.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to share swap space with Linux, but that's not a big deal to allocate another 1GB given today's hard drive sizes (160GB in this box).
No, the real question is whether or not Apple will simultaneously open the iTunes Ringtone Store (iTRS)... You see, this would be the smart move to make. In Europe, ringtone sales exceed paid internet song downloads. Once you get your sleek new iTunes enabled cellphone, you're going to want to go crazy with the Amazon patented one-click $0.99 RINGTONES!
If you're the kind to leave private XLS, DOC, MDB, and other sensitive data on a PUBLIC server thinking it's safe just because nobody can "see" it, to put it delicately, you're an idiot.
The only thing preventing the trifecta and instant Hall of fame induction is that you didn't PGP encode the email as it left the server.
Funny post, but didn't you mean:
The only thing preventing the trifecta and instant Hall of fame induction is that you didn't use GnuPG to PGP encode the files before they were FTPd to the server.
I think that Jack Thompson does this for his own personal fame rather than for the best interests of his client. If I were that teen, I would dump Jack Thompson NOW.
RTFA, numbnuts... Jack Thompson is a civil attorney that is suing Take Two Interactive and Walmart on behalf of the victims families. He's not a defense attorney that is defending the kid.
I've got to say that they DON'T have a right. I was a victim of their DR-DOS isn't compatible trick. I was forced to go buy Dos 6.0 and then it ATE MY DATA! I became rather negative towards this convicted monopolist when I found out they had done that on purpose!
Hell, I was a victim of their DR-DOS trick too. I was even more of a victim since I used to work at WordPerfect, and then Novell after that. But this is a totally different scenario. It's not like their restricting you from running Windows on a competing platform. They're just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a customer first".
Interestingly enough, the Winamp plugin required to do this - Output Stacker - was pulled from the winamp site. Which I find a little odd, since there are perfectly legal uses for the plugin - so I don't understand why they're playing censorer (to be safe?)
I don't find it odd at all. Winamp is owned by Time Warner, so you better believe if they hear that one of their tools is being used to "pirate" music, they're going to pull it to protect their music interests. It's just common sense.
The jig is up. I was hoping I'd finish my 14-day trial before anyone found out about this. Oh well, I got 8 gigs already, and I can get more today.
I use a program called tunebite that plays the files back and records them to MP3, as well as copying over album/artist metadata from the tags.
Good luck... I hope you can listen to all 8 gigs during your 14 day trial period... Don't you have to wait while the music data is recorded in real-time? It would be nice if they could convert it faster than 1:1. 70-80 minutes per CD could take longer than your trial period.
Ok, so maybe it supports AAC, but the songs that come from the iTunes Music Store have DRM protection in them, and Windows Media Player definitely won't support that format. So sure, you can copy your own songs encoded by iTunes into AAC, but why use AAC if it isn't DRM'd?
Yeah, I'm not exactly clear how it supports iTMS PlayFair DRM either. The linked article mentions only MPEG4, not iTunes, so it is quite a leap to assume that this phone is the iTunes mobile phone that Apple and Motorola have been talking about.
Not only that, did anyone else think the designers of this phone took too many cues from the Xbox? It's ugly, black and green, and I can't imagine Steve Jobs would be caught dead putting iTunes mobile on a device so hideous looking.
As for burning mix CDs and letting your friends borrow them, did you read the iTMS terms of service?
Sorry, but I don't see anywhere in the TOS where it says that I can't burn CDs and lend them to my friends. That is considered fair use under copyright laws as far as I know.
"Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves?"
From TFA:
In the forest, this falling biomass is crucial for soil and the next generation of trees but that's not the case in my yard. If genetic engineers could figure out a way to make the suburban Doug fir keep its needles, I'll put away the chainsaw.
Actually, come to think of it, a GM Douglas fir tree that didn't shed needles would be a real danger to the environment if it spread to the forest, for exactly the same reason that TFA says he wants one... Because they don't shed needles, they don't contribute biomass to the ecosystem, thereby unbalancing the entire food chain. This is exactly why GM organisms are so dangerous... they have the potential to destabilize entire ecosystems.
The food chain is a delicate, precarious thing that requires hundreds if not thousands of organisms in each ecosystem to sustain it. Give even one of those organisms an unfair advantage and watch the whole thing crumble like a house of cards, and take homo sapiens with it.
"Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves?"
From TFA:
In the forest, this falling biomass is crucial for soil and the next generation of trees but that's not the case in my yard. If genetic engineers could figure out a way to make the suburban Doug fir keep its needles, I'll put away the chainsaw.
Actually, come to think of it, a GM Douglas fir tree that didn't shed needles would be a real danger to the environment if it spread to the forest, for exactly the same reason that TFA says he wants one... Because they don't shed needles, they don't contribute biomass to the ecosystem, thereby unbalancing the entire food chain. This is exactly why GM organisms are so dangerous... they have the potential to destabilize entire ecosystems.
The food chain is a delicate, precarious thing that requires hundreds if not thousands of organisms in each ecosystem to sustain it. Give even one of those organisms an unfair advantage and watch the whole thing crumble like a house of cards, and take homo sapiens with it.
Then you're allowed to have it on three computers. Which I think is pretty slick -- you can have a set on your work computer and then on your home computer. I would have to say that the three computer deal was one of the things that made me sign up.
You should try the iTMS, it let's you keep your music on up to 5 computers. This feature is hardly revolutionary... I believe all of the music stores have this functionality.
The biggest annoyance is the fact that you can't rip them to a CD without buying them. I wanted to rip them to a CD to listen to them in the shower and in the car, but I can't without buying the rights. Then there is the feeling that I really don't own the 6.5G that I downloaded, and that if I stop paying then I am screwed.
See, that would kill it for me right there. I'm not about to replace my 6-disc in-dash CD changer in my car and I love being able to buy music on iTMS and burn it to CD instantly. As a matter of fact, it makes me feel better about paying $9.99 for a few intangible bits of data if I can burn it to physical media right away. Also, I can burn a couple of copies and let my friends borrow it... Hey, isn't music meant to be shared between friends? I was making my friends mix tapes back when I was only 12 years old and I'm not about to stop now just because Napster says I can't do that with their music...
[Apu voice mode] Thank you... come again... [/Apu voice mode]
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a lame little blog for the past 9 months or so, mainly just a place for me to repost links for my friends to see. Anyway, in the last 3 months or so the comment spam has been really out of control. I have filters setup in a way that the comment spam never makes it to my page, but what it does do is generate about 100 emails to my admin account everytime that goddamn online poker motherfucker spams my server. Every email reads something like this:
0 .252.73.2
From: xxxx@xxxxxxx.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Message-Id:
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:01:45 -0500 (EST)
A new comment on the post #66 "I'm Back" is waiting for your approval
Author : free online poker (IP: 160.252.73.2 , slsconf.shinshu-u.ac.jp)
E-mail : qyhsfto@a5af13b6415e47154138bf629771e475b.com
URL : http://online-----poker.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=16
Comment:
poker tips - WPT, free poker online | poker books - texas holdem, world poker tour | internet poker - partypoker, texas hold'em poker | partypoker - poker books, party poker | poker rooms - poker tournaments, paradise poker | online poker - partypoker, partypoker | poker - poker rules, online poker rooms | empire poker - world poker tour, online poker sites | paradise poker - poker games, internet poker | internet poker - poker stars, paradise poker | poker stars - internet poker, poker tips | world poker tour - poker tips, poker tournaments | poker online - poker chips, poker tips
To approve this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl
To delete this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl
Currently 146 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel:
http://fakeurl.com/moderation
[snip]
He does it from zombies so it's a different IP address every time, and recently they've stopped putting anything with the word "poker" in the comments because they figured out that by now most bloggers have the keyword poker filtered and the comments never reach the page.
You know what is the most aggravating thing of all? Even though none of the comments have ever made it through my moderation system, the fuckers still try and spam my server every single day!!! It's aggravating beyond belief and pretty much makes me not want to bother running a blog any more. I guess I can have a little more sympathy for what the Slashdot editors have to put up with (although on a much smaller scale).
I keep wondering if it wouldn't be better to have something like VMWare a standard part of a consumer OS. You would intantiate a VMWare-type virtual machine, preloaded with your Web browser, email client, etc., for all external communications. You would leave your "real machine" with no Net connection, but use it for other tasks that didn't need a live Net connection. Attacks from the outside would have no way to damage anything other than a virtual machine. If it got screwed up or infected, even by your kids playing with it and saying "Yes" to download offers, you'd just delete it and instantiate a new one.
Good idea. Actually, most modern *nixes already have the capability of doing this through the use of what's called a "chroot jail". If you were sufficiently tin-foil hat wearing and paranoid, you could run Mozilla Firefox in it's own chroot jail. Just create a user named firefox without a valid shell (therefore no way to login normally), install Firefox in a directory owned by this user, and have Firefox run as that user, confined to it's own little chroot jail. No matter how much Firefox wants to, it can't write to any other files or touch anything else on your system besides it's own files. Of course, it could get totally infected with toolbars and other browser-based spyware and adware, but it would not affect the rest of your system.
Too bad Windows can't do that.
Is it just me, or is this the first "we will make it easy to program the Cell" step that Sony and IBM were promising?
Could be, but auto-vectorization will help not only Altivec enabled architectures (PowerPC G4, PPC970 G5, Cell), but it should also help x86 architectures as well, since SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 are Intel's version of vectorization, or essentially applying the same mathematical operation to many bytes of data at the same time. I think all modern architectures should see a speed increase, especially with multimedia type applications like video encoding/decoding/transcoding.
Seeing as they're the major systems out there. But IA-64? I've barely heard of that, and TFA says Microsoft dropped XP for that. Can anyone elaborate as to why this one was kept?
It's because of HP. HP and Intel together are both flogging the dead horse that is IA64 and trying to get people to switch to their lame platform. I would imagine that HP contributes enough development time to keep the IA64 port of Debian viable.
What's really funny is that HP and Intel can't even give IA64 servers away.
You installed Ubuntu for amd64 and can boot something else? how did you manage that.
You are correct that Ubuntu blows away your MBR and replaces it with Grub. That's fine. This is how I installed everything:
1. Install Windows first.
2. Install Ubuntu second, then put this in your grub.conf file:
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
3. Install any other OSes next, and simply add a line to grub.conf.
Bad form to reply to my own post, I know, but the link was wrong... here is the correct one:
John Ashcroft
http://www.bushpresident2004.com/ashcroft.htm
From the article:
In the Spring of 2003, Ashcroft's PROTECT Act was signed into law limiting judges' discretion in sentencing criminal offenders below the Justice Department's sentencing guidelines. While each individual case carries with it countless unique circumstances that a judge uses to form a fair and appropriate sentence, John Ashcroft acted bravely to prohibit judges from considering the individuality of cases for fear of being black-listed by the Justice Department.
This caused uproar among judges across the nation including conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Members of Congress inspired by Ashcroft's success are proposing the VICTORY Act to employ tactics similar to the Patriot Act on suspected drug offenders.
The Bill of Rights Amendments specifically affected by the Patriot Act and other Bush Administration efforts are the following:
The First Amendment: The Patriot Act allows the search of libraries' and religious organizations' records without cause. This might infringe upon the First Amendment's declaration that the government may not abridge freedom of speech nor prohibit the "free exercise" of religion.
The Fourth Amendment: The Patriot Act allows searches and seizures of U.S. citizen's property without probable cause and without a specific warrant. This is expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
The Fifth Amendment: The Bush Administration claims it may designate Americans as "enemy combatants" and detain them without conviction in court. This is in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment stating that persons may not be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Supreme Court has regularly upheld the "due process" requirement even in national security crises.
The Sixth Amendment: With the claim to designate Americans "enemy combatants", the Bush Administration also states that it may imprison persons indefinitely without trial, without access to an attorney, and without any means to challenge their detention. The entire Sixth Amendment is essentially shredded in this case.
[End of quoted article]
I don't think that's a lot of fuss about nothing. I can think of several abuses already, including Jose Padilla, who has been held for years now and has never been charged with anything. He's a goddamn US citizen for chrissakes. If you don't think that's scary that the Feds can come lock you up in a military brig indefinitely without charging you with any crime, then you need to pull your head out of the sand and take a look at what's going on around you.
Not to mention a lot less "Lose all contents of your drive." Solaris is a stuck up bitch and won't go out with scrubs who can only give her a partition.
Funny comment, but you're incorrect. I have a brand new x86-64 box, and I was able to install Ubuntu, Solaris 10, and Windows XP, using GRUB as my boot manager, and I can triple boot (all off of ONE hard drive).
Solaris 10 needs a single primary partition. It puts all of your UFS filesystems, plus swap inside this same partition.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to share swap space with Linux, but that's not a big deal to allocate another 1GB given today's hard drive sizes (160GB in this box).
Looking at our /. account numbers I am new here :-) Maybe 5 years now?
You're right... I was just making a joke.. Since slashdot has never really had good quality assurance (dupe story postings, etc.).
I miss that Slashdot quality assurance thing that used to be.
You're new around here, aren't you?
Can you play the MP3's as hold music?
... You see, this would be the smart move to make. In Europe, ringtone sales exceed paid internet song downloads. Once you get your sleek new iTunes enabled cellphone, you're going to want to go crazy with the Amazon patented one-click $0.99 RINGTONES!
No, the real question is whether or not Apple will simultaneously open the iTunes Ringtone Store (iTRS)
Like, Oh my god... it can play br1tn3y sp33rs!
If you're the kind to leave private XLS, DOC, MDB, and other sensitive data on a PUBLIC server thinking it's safe just because nobody can "see" it, to put it delicately, you're an idiot.
Or, you're a Diebold employee...
I, for one, welcome our new low-power overlords...
The only thing preventing the trifecta and instant Hall of fame induction is that you didn't PGP encode the email as it left the server.
.
Funny post, but didn't you mean:
The only thing preventing the trifecta and instant Hall of fame induction is that you didn't use GnuPG to PGP encode the files before they were FTPd to the server
(italics and emphasis mine...)
I think that Jack Thompson does this for his own personal fame rather than for the best interests of his client. If I were that teen, I would dump Jack Thompson NOW.
RTFA, numbnuts... Jack Thompson is a civil attorney that is suing Take Two Interactive and Walmart on behalf of the victims families. He's not a defense attorney that is defending the kid.
I've got to say that they DON'T have a right. I was a victim of their DR-DOS isn't compatible trick. I was forced to go buy Dos 6.0 and then it ATE MY DATA! I became rather negative towards this convicted monopolist when I found out they had done that on purpose!
Hell, I was a victim of their DR-DOS trick too. I was even more of a victim since I used to work at WordPerfect, and then Novell after that. But this is a totally different scenario. It's not like their restricting you from running Windows on a competing platform. They're just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a customer first".
Newsflash: Microsoft restricts Windows downloads to people that actually purchase their product!
Let's all get together on Slashdot and WINE about it...
Interestingly enough, the Winamp plugin required to do this - Output Stacker - was pulled from the winamp site. Which I find a little odd, since there are perfectly legal uses for the plugin - so I don't understand why they're playing censorer (to be safe?)
I don't find it odd at all. Winamp is owned by Time Warner, so you better believe if they hear that one of their tools is being used to "pirate" music, they're going to pull it to protect their music interests. It's just common sense.
The jig is up. I was hoping I'd finish my 14-day trial before anyone found out about this. Oh well, I got 8 gigs already, and I can get more today.
I use a program called tunebite that plays the files back and records them to MP3, as well as copying over album/artist metadata from the tags.
Good luck... I hope you can listen to all 8 gigs during your 14 day trial period... Don't you have to wait while the music data is recorded in real-time? It would be nice if they could convert it faster than 1:1. 70-80 minutes per CD could take longer than your trial period.
Ok, so maybe it supports AAC, but the songs that come from the iTunes Music Store have DRM protection in them, and Windows Media Player definitely won't support that format. So sure, you can copy your own songs encoded by iTunes into AAC, but why use AAC if it isn't DRM'd?
Yeah, I'm not exactly clear how it supports iTMS PlayFair DRM either. The linked article mentions only MPEG4, not iTunes, so it is quite a leap to assume that this phone is the iTunes mobile phone that Apple and Motorola have been talking about.
Not only that, did anyone else think the designers of this phone took too many cues from the Xbox? It's ugly, black and green, and I can't imagine Steve Jobs would be caught dead putting iTunes mobile on a device so hideous looking.
As for burning mix CDs and letting your friends borrow them, did you read the iTMS terms of service?
Sorry, but I don't see anywhere in the TOS where it says that I can't burn CDs and lend them to my friends. That is considered fair use under copyright laws as far as I know.
"Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves?"
From TFA:
In the forest, this falling biomass is crucial for soil and the next generation of trees but that's not the case in my yard. If genetic engineers could figure out a way to make the suburban Doug fir keep its needles, I'll put away the chainsaw.
Actually, come to think of it, a GM Douglas fir tree that didn't shed needles would be a real danger to the environment if it spread to the forest, for exactly the same reason that TFA says he wants one... Because they don't shed needles, they don't contribute biomass to the ecosystem, thereby unbalancing the entire food chain. This is exactly why GM organisms are so dangerous... they have the potential to destabilize entire ecosystems.
The food chain is a delicate, precarious thing that requires hundreds if not thousands of organisms in each ecosystem to sustain it. Give even one of those organisms an unfair advantage and watch the whole thing crumble like a house of cards, and take homo sapiens with it.
"Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves?"
From TFA:
In the forest, this falling biomass is crucial for soil and the next generation of trees but that's not the case in my yard. If genetic engineers could figure out a way to make the suburban Doug fir keep its needles, I'll put away the chainsaw.
Actually, come to think of it, a GM Douglas fir tree that didn't shed needles would be a real danger to the environment if it spread to the forest, for exactly the same reason that TFA says he wants one... Because they don't shed needles, they don't contribute biomass to the ecosystem, thereby unbalancing the entire food chain. This is exactly why GM organisms are so dangerous... they have the potential to destabilize entire ecosystems.
The food chain is a delicate, precarious thing that requires hundreds if not thousands of organisms in each ecosystem to sustain it. Give even one of those organisms an unfair advantage and watch the whole thing crumble like a house of cards, and take homo sapiens with it.
If you really have to ask? The answer is ...
NO! Of course....
(unless you're Larry Ellison)
Then you're allowed to have it on three computers. Which I think is pretty slick -- you can have a set on your work computer and then on your home computer. I would have to say that the three computer deal was one of the things that made me sign up.
You should try the iTMS, it let's you keep your music on up to 5 computers. This feature is hardly revolutionary... I believe all of the music stores have this functionality.
The biggest annoyance is the fact that you can't rip them to a CD without buying them. I wanted to rip them to a CD to listen to them in the shower and in the car, but I can't without buying the rights. Then there is the feeling that I really don't own the 6.5G that I downloaded, and that if I stop paying then I am screwed.
See, that would kill it for me right there. I'm not about to replace my 6-disc in-dash CD changer in my car and I love being able to buy music on iTMS and burn it to CD instantly. As a matter of fact, it makes me feel better about paying $9.99 for a few intangible bits of data if I can burn it to physical media right away. Also, I can burn a couple of copies and let my friends borrow it... Hey, isn't music meant to be shared between friends? I was making my friends mix tapes back when I was only 12 years old and I'm not about to stop now just because Napster says I can't do that with their music...
[Apu voice mode]
Thank you... come again...
[/Apu voice mode]