Here is the letter I just wrote. Please plagiarize as needed to get your point across to YOUR representative:
I would genuinely like to know why our government would insist on providing legal protection to companies so they can continue to turn profits.
The RIAA/MPAA refuse to provide copyrighted material in a sane and fair fashion to those who desire it. They insist on demonizing their very customers to the point where making a videotape of something you see on TV is held in the same light as the rape of a woman [see previous statements of Jack Valenti]. The newly opened RIAA-sanctioned online music venues push consumers into an even more punishing relationship with the aforementioned group. For those people who haven't payed their monthly "music" bill, they lose not only the ability to download new songs, but all of their previously paid for songs as well.
When did it come to this? Copyright was a deal between the public and copyright holders. They get a limited monopoly on money made, and ultimately the work enters the public domain for the enrichment of all society. When did our government decide that Hilary Rosen knows more about writing laws than the founders of our country?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries..." That's what the Constitution of our country said, and nearly all aspects of it have been trampled in the entertainment industries' search for more profit. The fact that I will never, in my lifetime, get public domain access to ANY work created in my time fills me with a deep sadness, for we are not talking about things like popular music and tomorrow's movie premier. We are talking about literature, music, and scientific research. Those words used to have meaning. They used to represent the aspects of our society that we cherished: the Arts. Now they're perverted so that a music executive earns another $50,000 bonus this year. People used to make incredible sacrifices to be able to learn how to read; now the publishing industry would like to charge every time a page in a book is turned. Music used to be an honorable profession, musicians were artists; now our music is churned out on an assembly line so that the RIAA members can increase their bottom line. I make such points not to slander the artists or authors, but to make a point that our society has slowly transformed from one that respects the Arts to one that consumes artcraft.
I will make the bold statement that this legislation is bought and paid for. I say this not out of incredible naivety of our political system, but out of the frustrated realization that the entertainment industry has performed an end-run on our culture. They believe that they define our culture, that they should have the right to sell us our own culture, one byte at a time. I say that they reflect our culture, like a mirror, and they should thank society on their knees that we let them charge us at all.
Why? Why is it that some parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are held in such high regard, such as the right to Free Speech, and others, such as copyright, are looked upon as the acts of the devil? Why is copyright extended every 20 years? Why can't I copy an out of print book from 1950 and give it to my friends? Are we ready to draw a line in the sand and say that profits are more important than education? More important than wonder? This is not about MP3s, or DIVX movie streams. This is about taking the basic deal between content producer and content consumer and twisting it until every one of us must pay for every second we are exposed to anything created by anyone. There is no more concept of property. I don't "own" a book, or a dvd anymore. I am merely leasing it from the company.
In court, we are frequently asked to deliberate on the "intent" of the law, rather than the wording. I say that the original intent of copyright law does not exist even slightly anymore. Moreover, instead of a bill that gives ever more rights to copyrightholders and ever more penalties to copyright consumers, perhaps our elected representatives could swing the proverbial pendulum back in our favor by stripping the entertainment industry of its most devastating weapon against freedom of information: the DMCA.
I sincerely hope that our dear Senators take to heart the fact that they are putting the pleading of an industry above the country's Constitutionally provided contract with its own people. For those who have read this far, thank you for your time.
Holy jeez! What would happen if this got slashdotted? Would the poor guy burst into flames? Or would his liver melt?
We have this already and its name is...
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
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· Score: 0
SSSSEEEEEEEGGGGWWWAAAAYYYYYYYYYY
...or Ginger ...or IT
Whatever you want to call the durn thing. Seriously, I thought Segway was supposed to be what this thing is describing: small, mobile, quick relative to heavy transit, safe, efficient, etc.
Oh my God, you noticed that during the Superbowl too?
Yeah, more and more these days my head explodes if I look at any government produced TV commercial. To say some stoner is responsible for the vast security breakdown that occured for sep 11th to happen is mind-boggling. Maybe (and I may be wrong) the blame could perhaps fall on some of the congresspeople and senators who only passed legislation that benefited their "real" constituents (read: donors), rather than the country at large.
So fuck all this, if President Bush wants to say that some dope is responsible for the Taliban, I can make up something equally asinine, like President Bush is the LEADER of the Taliban! If you support President Bush, you hate democracy (though, since he never actually won the presidency, the above is true anyways).
The govt is probably gearing up now for the War on Piracy.:)
So now, if you use drugs, you support terrorists, but tomorrow we may be told that listening to an MP3 is the same as running a hundred civilians straight into the world trade center at several hundred miles per hour.
See the chain works thusly: War on Drugs <-> War on Terror <-> War on Piracy.
Perhaps the Homeland Chief of Defense will be Hilary Rosen, with Jack Valenti at her side!
I believe I read somewhere that during Napster's heyday, cd sales were at an all-time high. After they shut Napster down, I believe I read that cd sales went into the toilet.
Even though I personally agree with the above, I have to point out that there is no proven causal relationship between the death of Napster and Hillary Rosen's current nightmares. The economy was starting to tank as far back as January, and why in the world would CD sales stay high if people stopped buying many other (more useful) things.
Personally, I've actually purchased more CDs in the last 6 months than I did between 1997 and 2000, mostly because of Napster going out of business. However, I am extremely pissed off that more than half of the CDs I got for Christmas I can't rip to MP3 for my entertainment server at home.
umm, I saw this got modded as, like, Insightful? What about Funny instead. I seriously doubt that Moses is thousands of evolutionary steps behind me. Maybe generations, not evolutions.
Of course, maybe Jesus really was an X-Man, and his super healing ability was just to make up for the damage his hidden adamantium toenails dealt to unbelievers.
Speaking as a member of the QuickBooks team, what makes you say this? Just wondering, I always like to hear customer (or in this case, an obvious non-customer) feedback.
But there is no friggin' way in hell I'm going to *PAY* $10 a month for more commercials. I will happily pay $12.95 a month though to Sirius for commercial free music.
It may sound good now, but just wait a few seconds. If Sirius ever has the slightest bit of financial trouble, out comes the spam. This is my opinion, but an educated one I believe. Companies are so greedy these days that even if Sirius were to make a ton of money on sat radio, at some point they would need to increase the bottom line even more for their shareholders, and you just know that that little twinkle in their eye will turn sat radio into the EXACT same radio we have now: 12 minutes of music per hour, 1 solid hour of music per day, and two inane, failed comedians prank calling the local guy who won the cheese log carving contest (i.e., a 'morning show').
On a not-quite-tangent story, I told most everyone I knew on Sep. 12th that the airline industry was going to use the tragedy to rip every one of us in America a new economic anus, and damned if I wasn't right. "Our sales are down! boo-hoo." "We need aid from the governement! boo-hoo." "We have to have layoffs! boo-hoo." [is it Christmas time yet?] "Every ticket is $1500. It doesn't matter where you're going!"
The airline industry managed to convince everyone that life sucked, and they cut enough flights so that when it came time for the holidays, they could rightfully charge whatever they wanted for tickets. Hey it doesn't matter if people are scared to fly this year, if they want to be with their family, they're gonna pump our bottom line, so we can charge anything. Demand exceeds supply, therefore I go broke if I don't want to be alone in Cali this Christmas. Airlines make me sick.
If you are a relatively small business, my (somewhat) limited knowledge of QuickBooks Merchant Services is that they are pretty fair. I have heard of quite a lot of beta customers that were satisfied (then again, I guess I'm a tad biased, heh...).
"Particularly since Sept. 11, a lot of people are deciding which bills to cut out," said a spokesperson for one major California-based ISP, who asked not to be named. "People are freaked out."
This is laughably a non sequitur. Just what do people have to fear from their DSL line due to Sep. 11? Maybe, maybe, I'd see it as a result of the declining (according to the MS-CNBC-SI folks) economy, but to think that the first (or second, or hundredth) thing that people thought about after Terror Attacked Us, and then we declared War On Terror, was "Jesus Dianne! If they could do that to the World Trade Center with planes, just think of what they could do to us with.. with DSL!" This Unnamed Source is a damn retard, but its certainly not uncommon these days for companies to blame all of their short-sighted decisions on Sep. 11.
At my work, I was in charge of purchasing the KVMs to set up our lab environment. We needed 3 matrix KVMs (8 CPUs to any of two workstations) that would be chained into ports on our Rariton (which is hella expensive, but works like a peach).
I first bought the Belkin OMNIVIEW Matrix 2x8, and I have to warn everyone who's even thinking of looking that it sucks hardcore. We run an automation lab, and we simply could not have KVMs that would lose the keyboard at startup, prompting a halting error (Keyboard not found). In addition, they would occasionally lock up completely, and the only way to reset it was to unplug it. Oops, for some reason Belkin made it so even when its unplugged, it can still drain power from the boxes attached to it. So I got to unplug 8 computers (keyboard, mouse, and monitor) and plug them back in every time the damn thing locked. I hated those Belkins.
Then we said forget it, and bought 3 Avocent KVMs (I believe the model was OUTLOOK 2160ES). They were marginally more expensive, but we haven't had a single problem with them yet, and they have a really nice GUI, with a good amount of customization.
Anywho, just wanted to let all of you know that while Belkins are relatively cheap, they do NOT perform as advertised. And to anyone who asks, we returned/replaced two of the Belkins because we thought they might have been defective, and the two we got in replacement were exactly the same.
I swear to God that the next housewife I see simultaneously waving her little flag around while proclaiming that she'd "certainly give up some freedoms to be safe".... god, it's so frustrating living in a world like this.
That's not a complete sentence. What do you mean? That you're going to attack that housewife? Or just complain to yourself?
Actually, when I wrote that I couldn't finish my thought, I was so drained. Look, all of this [the de-freedom-ing of America] makes me want to bash my head into a brick wall rather than attempt to correct the millions of "news facts" that the media, Capitol Hill, and goddamned forwarded emails are spewing these days. It has been well more than a century (possibly two) since the government really, honestly cared about the country's well-being. Today politicians speak of focus groups, and polls, and who knows what else. To me, all pretense of a democracy (or republic, however you want to classify the Great Experiment) has been dropped in the United States of America as our statesmen have sold themselves to the highest corporate bidder.
And to what end? So Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a percent. Let's make that stock go down.
I have a very sick feeling in my stomach right now, for several reasons:
I have always, and do still applaud Russ Feingold on taking a stand. I'm from Wisconsin, and this man has done everything in his power to enact at least some campaign finance reform, while here standing up for civil rights. At the same time you just know (you KNOW) that come re-election time the scum who's going to run against Mr. Feingold will say he is an "enemy of America" or some such bullshit because he's the only one willing to stand up. That makes me want to puke.
I swear to God that the next housewife I see simultaneously waving her little flag around while proclaiming that she'd "certainly give up some freedoms to be safe".... god, it's so frustrating living in a world like this.
Let's be real here, there have been people with little or no education for a long time, people who knew nothing about the political process, or what the king was actually doing, or what the dictator was planning, but everyone has always rallied around the concept of freedom. Jesus, what did people fight for for the last 6 millenia? And our countrymen would now lay down and give up so that they could be "a little safer".
President Bush, how exactly will a missle defense shield, email tracking, and shutting down online casinos do anything when the terrorists used box cutters, sent messages through the mail, and had money wired to them Western Union?
I think the great American democratic experiment is almost at an end... wait... a little longer... its done. So, what's up next? Oligarchy? Sounds good to me I suppose. Where do I send my RIAA tithes?
...like, 3 months ago, I was in a CS curriculum that came down extremely hard on Academic Misconduct (I know from experience). The thing was, when all the employers came to recruit, I was inevitably sat down and asked questions such as "Tell me about a time you worked on a team project," or my favorite "How well do you work with others?" Overlook the fact that everyone works with others all the time (in elementary school we are taught to get along with others), and you see that they are asking how well you work on [technical] projects in a team. So, how does a student achieve that all important piece of paper that jobs are looking for while being threatened with non-paper-receiving-ness if they even think about helping each other out, or working together?
No, this is the abuse of monopoly power in the radio markets to control the content of what we are exposed to. It's corporate censorship, not government censorship.
Dude, if you thought that radio was ever anything but a monopoly, I'm sorry that this shattered your worldview. The truth is, radio stations are beggars living off of the scraps that the music industry hands their way. They live and die by their advertisers and hoping that Britney will do an appearance at their studio when her tour comes to town. Of course, not all stations play Britney, so substitute Staind, or perhaps Mary J. Blige as appropriate. Clear Channel is worse than most; I mean Christ, just the other day I figured out that they own exactly half of the radio stations on my first FM presets in my car!
Now, we can look at this as a conspiracy to shove more N'Sync and Britney down our throats, or we can see this as an enormous corporate arm that's attempting to sweep up as much money as it can, and that means: don't piss off the advertisers. If even one advertiser thinks a song is inappropriate, and pulls his ads, that's most likely too much for Clear Channel.
Now, Clear Channel can broadcast anything they want, its their company and they own the airwaves, but that doesn't mean that the American public has to like it. If people called in and said, I'm not listening to you anymore because what you're playing sucks, and I'm certainly not going to patronize the advertisers that subsidize this crap, well then maybe they would get it through their executive heads that this is a bad idea. Or you could call up the businesses who advertise and say that you would not support any business that advertises on a Clear Channel station. This is all idealogical claptrap, but it is a solution, albeit not a realistic one.
I'd like to thank our great government for listening to the radio media in their time of need and graciously deregulating radio so that Clear Channel had the opportunity to now own, what, a third of the FM bandwidth? More than a third? Anyways, I'd like to thank the government for that. I'd also like to give a shout-out to my homey Orrin Hatch for the DMCA, and all the other playa pros in Congress who are working tirelessly for the rights of the RIAA, the MPAA, and the BSA. Peace.
USA can make whatever draconian laws they choose as I don't live there, but my point is that they're making it an international law
Right, I was actually going to point out in my post that none of the DMCA legally does or in practice should apply to you, but I guess I forgot to add that part. sorry.
Under Californian law, I can be sued there because it is considered an attack on the MPAAs interests which reside in California, to create a tool, *which is nessecerry to exercise my norwegian rights*, that can convert the DVD to a different format, because such a program must circumvent the copyright protection. In other word, I can be sued by a state in a *foreign* country for making a tool that *if* spread to foreign countries *could* be used for piracy.
I just wanted to point out that the DMCA allows for YOU to write a program that decrypts YOUR DVDs so YOU can play them on YOUR dvd player. That is perfectly legal. But as soon as you disseminate or sell that program, its off to the poop deck with ye. This is where my major beef with the DMCA comes in: the various entertainment industries actually convinced Congress that, if people were pushed to the point where they absolutely needed to break the encryption to do something "legal" (and be sure the RIAA/MPAA included the quotes around legal), they could always figure out themselves how to write their own software for the job. Never mind that I have a com sci degree, and know a bit about how DVDs work and there's no way in hell I could write a program to do it. Obviously the public has that capability. C'mon, what do you take them for? Oh, wait... AOL... MSN...
I wonder just how much Congress was purchased for? I mean, I would hope that they at least were able to pocket some of the money, because if all those bribes just went to campaign funding, that really pisses me off. I hope little Thurston Howell IV got some more for his post-collegiate yachting fund, or better yet, I hope a little bit of that money went to the Bush twins so they could get some good fake id's. I mean, c'mon!
I'm fairly certain this is a troll, but I'll bite anyways:
You must guarantee that, of all the people you encounter in a day, you do not kill, assault, steal from, or kill 100% of them. You must also guarantee that of everything you say, 100% of it is neither slander nor libel, nor someone else's work.
No, you think about it. Listening to music is not killing, assaulting, slandering, libeling anyone. Now lets get to steal from: you may think it is, and the law may say it is, and even I think it is, but me and tens of thousands of other people will continue to do it. I know why I download music: because I like to listen to music. I used to buy CDs when I was younger, but you know what? You can only take it so many times when you buy a whole CD and there's 2 good songs on the album. Liner notes? Piss off, I put the CDs in a mobile carry case anyways. Not fair to the artist? I'll gladly pay the artist micropayments for the songs I take, but no way in hell am I going to contribute to the R($)I($)A($)A($). So what I listen to radio music? People say things like, "well, of course you only like two songs, its because that artist sucks, blah blah blah." No way, if some 'artist' (c'mon, most of the Pop world aren't artists, they're subcontractors of the studios) wants me to shell out $15+ for a CD that the RIAA says can only listen to in an RIAA approved method, they better entertain the hell out of me.
So, I know I'll keep downloading the newest Top 40 hits from Audiogalaxy (which sucks, but I use it so infrequently that I could care less), without giving a damn about the artist. The artists I want to give my money to are the ones who give me the music for the value of my money every time (Wyclef Jean pops immediately to mind).
Not that it is on-topic or anything, but it realy pisses me off that the domain for my first name: zachery.com, is being developed by a retarded 6 year old's retarded family.
Jesus! Did you use enough Javascript on that page, junior?
It would be one thing if the cameras themselves accidentally marked him as a criminal (as the headline misleadingly suggests), but the only way you're gonna prevent problems like this is if you force all publications to remove all faces from their photographs so that ex-wives in Oklahoma don't mistake strangers for deadbeat husbands.
Thinketh the businessman (or his lackey): By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
So, on a system designed to be open for everyone's use, you want to decide the priority of transmissions. I wonder who's going to have higher priority under your new schema: you selling an underwater douche kit to some lamer for $14.95, or me researching a paper on Astrophysics for a college class? These capitalism-for-higher-profit-at-all-costs types make me sick.
Allright, without going too far off the deep end, I have got to scream out that movies suck. period. Seriously, does the MPAA expect me to spend up to $10 to go see one of the following films?
America's Sweethearts: I was always under the impression that 'romantic comedies' were a genre of film that was quite formulaic, in that they were about some schmuck (be it guy or girl) who wanted to go out with some other schmuck who was already attached to someone. We get real sad that poor Blah isn't going to end up with his/her true love, but many music montages later, they end up in love. Hoo-hah. Now you want me to go see a movie where the characters are Hollywood stars and their secretaries, and you want me to feel sorry for them? As if I should care about the lives of two (even fictional) Hollywood people and their love problems(heh, whereas I do care about dinosaurs overunning a small island off the coast of Costa Rica. touche.) I'm sorry, I know movies are about transporting us to this magical land, but with the whole point of the movie to be we feel sorry for the characters, this one loses me a bit.
Jurassic Park III: This is the story of the movie studio that went to the well one too many times without a sturdy bucket. In fact, I don't even think the writers had a bucket. I think they may have been using cheese cloth and vegetable strainers. There was so much potential for the Jurassic Park series. As the first book ended, the dinosaurs were last seen headed for the mainland. You could have set JP movies in the South American rainforest, or even the American Southwest, and had a more believable movie than sending another group of retards to the island and land their damn plane there!! Ah well, as McTeague once said, "Art can go no further!"
Final Fantasy: Another movie like the Jurassic Park sequels, in that it had so much going for it, they could work with so many different subplots of the greater FF storyline. They could have had Summoners, Ninjas, Wizards, Moogles (well maybe not the last one). The point is they decided to focus on no real creatures, no exotic weapons (c'mon, those things were just laser guns, I want to see a bio-rifle that shoots out a green cloud while going 'WHAA-OOO-WAA-OOO-WAA-OOO'), and no magic or summoning per se (you could consider Aki's little show either, but don't kid yourself). In fact, the ONLY thing I noticed that was remotely in connection with the games was the earth Gaia, that was straight outta FF7. Overall, I wasn't too disappointed, because I had seen the reviews in advance, and my expectations were pretty low. In fact, the animation was even better than I was expecting, even as the plot almost made my brain melt [why would that retarded general keep firing that gun even when it said it was going to explode? if he wanted to get his revenge, why in the hell wouldn't he just lay off and let the gun recharge so he could keep firing full strength?].
These are some probably off-base trains of thought, but I just woke up, so please excuse my insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the letter I just wrote. Please plagiarize as needed to get your point across to YOUR representative:
..." That's what the Constitution of our country said, and nearly all aspects of it have been trampled in the entertainment industries' search for more profit. The fact that I will never, in my lifetime, get public domain access to ANY work created in my time fills me with a deep sadness, for we are not talking about things like popular music and tomorrow's movie premier. We are talking about literature, music, and scientific research. Those words used to have meaning. They used to represent the aspects of our society that we cherished: the Arts. Now they're perverted so that a music executive earns another $50,000 bonus this year. People used to make incredible sacrifices to be able to learn how to read; now the publishing industry would like to charge every time a page in a book is turned. Music used to be an honorable profession, musicians were artists; now our music is churned out on an assembly line so that the RIAA members can increase their bottom line. I make such points not to slander the artists or authors, but to make a point that our society has slowly transformed from one that respects the Arts to one that consumes artcraft.
I would genuinely like to know why our government would insist on providing legal protection to companies so they can continue to turn profits.
The RIAA/MPAA refuse to provide copyrighted material in a sane and fair fashion to those who desire it. They insist on demonizing their very customers to the point where making a videotape of something you see on TV is held in the same light as the rape of a woman [see previous statements of Jack Valenti]. The newly opened RIAA-sanctioned online music venues push consumers into an even more punishing relationship with the aforementioned group. For those people who haven't payed their monthly "music" bill, they lose not only the ability to download new songs, but all of their previously paid for songs as well.
When did it come to this? Copyright was a deal between the public and copyright holders. They get a limited monopoly on money made, and ultimately the work enters the public domain for the enrichment of all society. When did our government decide that Hilary Rosen knows more about writing laws than the founders of our country?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
I will make the bold statement that this legislation is bought and paid for. I say this not out of incredible naivety of our political system, but out of the frustrated realization that the entertainment industry has performed an end-run on our culture. They believe that they define our culture, that they should have the right to sell us our own culture, one byte at a time. I say that they reflect our culture, like a mirror, and they should thank society on their knees that we let them charge us at all.
Why? Why is it that some parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are held in such high regard, such as the right to Free Speech, and others, such as copyright, are looked upon as the acts of the devil? Why is copyright extended every 20 years? Why can't I copy an out of print book from 1950 and give it to my friends? Are we ready to draw a line in the sand and say that profits are more important than education? More important than wonder? This is not about MP3s, or DIVX movie streams. This is about taking the basic deal between content producer and content consumer and twisting it until every one of us must pay for every second we are exposed to anything created by anyone. There is no more concept of property. I don't "own" a book, or a dvd anymore. I am merely leasing it from the company.
In court, we are frequently asked to deliberate on the "intent" of the law, rather than the wording. I say that the original intent of copyright law does not exist even slightly anymore. Moreover, instead of a bill that gives ever more rights to copyrightholders and ever more penalties to copyright consumers, perhaps our elected representatives could swing the proverbial pendulum back in our favor by stripping the entertainment industry of its most devastating weapon against freedom of information: the DMCA.
I sincerely hope that our dear Senators take to heart the fact that they are putting the pleading of an industry above the country's Constitutionally provided contract with its own people. For those who have read this far, thank you for your time.
Holy jeez! What would happen if this got slashdotted? Would the poor guy burst into flames? Or would his liver melt?
SSSSEEEEEEEGGGGWWWAAAAYYYYYYYYYY
...or Ginger
...or IT
Whatever you want to call the durn thing. Seriously, I thought Segway was supposed to be what this thing is describing: small, mobile, quick relative to heavy transit, safe, efficient, etc.
What happened, Dean Kamen?
Oh my God, you noticed that during the Superbowl too?
Yeah, more and more these days my head explodes if I look at any government produced TV commercial. To say some stoner is responsible for the vast security breakdown that occured for sep 11th to happen is mind-boggling. Maybe (and I may be wrong) the blame could perhaps fall on some of the congresspeople and senators who only passed legislation that benefited their "real" constituents (read: donors), rather than the country at large.
So fuck all this, if President Bush wants to say that some dope is responsible for the Taliban, I can make up something equally asinine, like President Bush is the LEADER of the Taliban! If you support President Bush, you hate democracy (though, since he never actually won the presidency, the above is true anyways).
The govt is probably gearing up now for the War on Piracy. :)
So now, if you use drugs, you support terrorists, but tomorrow we may be told that listening to an MP3 is the same as running a hundred civilians straight into the world trade center at several hundred miles per hour.
See the chain works thusly: War on Drugs <-> War on Terror <-> War on Piracy.
Perhaps the Homeland Chief of Defense will be Hilary Rosen, with Jack Valenti at her side!
I believe I read somewhere that during Napster's heyday, cd sales were at an all-time high. After they shut Napster down, I believe I read that cd sales went into the toilet.
Even though I personally agree with the above, I have to point out that there is no proven causal relationship between the death of Napster and Hillary Rosen's current nightmares. The economy was starting to tank as far back as January, and why in the world would CD sales stay high if people stopped buying many other (more useful) things.
Personally, I've actually purchased more CDs in the last 6 months than I did between 1997 and 2000, mostly because of Napster going out of business. However, I am extremely pissed off that more than half of the CDs I got for Christmas I can't rip to MP3 for my entertainment server at home.
umm, I saw this got modded as, like, Insightful? What about Funny instead. I seriously doubt that Moses is thousands of evolutionary steps behind me. Maybe generations, not evolutions.
Of course, maybe Jesus really was an X-Man, and his super healing ability was just to make up for the damage his hidden adamantium toenails dealt to unbelievers.
Just promise me no QuickBooks, OK?
Speaking as a member of the QuickBooks team, what makes you say this? Just wondering, I always like to hear customer (or in this case, an obvious non-customer) feedback.
But there is no friggin' way in hell I'm going to *PAY* $10 a month for more commercials. I will happily pay $12.95 a month though to Sirius for commercial free music.
It may sound good now, but just wait a few seconds. If Sirius ever has the slightest bit of financial trouble, out comes the spam. This is my opinion, but an educated one I believe. Companies are so greedy these days that even if Sirius were to make a ton of money on sat radio, at some point they would need to increase the bottom line even more for their shareholders, and you just know that that little twinkle in their eye will turn sat radio into the EXACT same radio we have now: 12 minutes of music per hour, 1 solid hour of music per day, and two inane, failed comedians prank calling the local guy who won the cheese log carving contest (i.e., a 'morning show').
On a not-quite-tangent story, I told most everyone I knew on Sep. 12th that the airline industry was going to use the tragedy to rip every one of us in America a new economic anus, and damned if I wasn't right. "Our sales are down! boo-hoo." "We need aid from the governement! boo-hoo." "We have to have layoffs! boo-hoo." [is it Christmas time yet?] "Every ticket is $1500. It doesn't matter where you're going!"
The airline industry managed to convince everyone that life sucked, and they cut enough flights so that when it came time for the holidays, they could rightfully charge whatever they wanted for tickets. Hey it doesn't matter if people are scared to fly this year, if they want to be with their family, they're gonna pump our bottom line, so we can charge anything. Demand exceeds supply, therefore I go broke if I don't want to be alone in Cali this Christmas. Airlines make me sick.
I signed up for Quickbooks's merchant service...
DISCLAIMER: I work for Intuit.
If you are a relatively small business, my (somewhat) limited knowledge of QuickBooks Merchant Services is that they are pretty fair. I have heard of quite a lot of beta customers that were satisfied (then again, I guess I'm a tad biased, heh...).
Holy MegaWeapon! KPMG's flash intro is the most godawful piece of trash the world has seen since, since-- well at the very least since Geocities.
;)
Hoo boy, witty comment witty comment, nonsensical link! Witty geek comment!
There, now all I gotta do is lie back and let the karma roll in
"Particularly since Sept. 11, a lot of people are deciding which bills to cut out," said a spokesperson for one major California-based ISP, who asked not to be named. "People are freaked out."
This is laughably a non sequitur. Just what do people have to fear from their DSL line due to Sep. 11? Maybe, maybe, I'd see it as a result of the declining (according to the MS-CNBC-SI folks) economy, but to think that the first (or second, or hundredth) thing that people thought about after Terror Attacked Us, and then we declared War On Terror, was "Jesus Dianne! If they could do that to the World Trade Center with planes, just think of what they could do to us with.. with DSL!" This Unnamed Source is a damn retard, but its certainly not uncommon these days for companies to blame all of their short-sighted decisions on Sep. 11.
At my work, I was in charge of purchasing the KVMs to set up our lab environment. We needed 3 matrix KVMs (8 CPUs to any of two workstations) that would be chained into ports on our Rariton (which is hella expensive, but works like a peach).
I first bought the Belkin OMNIVIEW Matrix 2x8, and I have to warn everyone who's even thinking of looking that it sucks hardcore. We run an automation lab, and we simply could not have KVMs that would lose the keyboard at startup, prompting a halting error (Keyboard not found). In addition, they would occasionally lock up completely, and the only way to reset it was to unplug it. Oops, for some reason Belkin made it so even when its unplugged, it can still drain power from the boxes attached to it. So I got to unplug 8 computers (keyboard, mouse, and monitor) and plug them back in every time the damn thing locked. I hated those Belkins.
Then we said forget it, and bought 3 Avocent KVMs (I believe the model was OUTLOOK 2160ES). They were marginally more expensive, but we haven't had a single problem with them yet, and they have a really nice GUI, with a good amount of customization.
Anywho, just wanted to let all of you know that while Belkins are relatively cheap, they do NOT perform as advertised. And to anyone who asks, we returned/replaced two of the Belkins because we thought they might have been defective, and the two we got in replacement were exactly the same.
Over and out.
I swear to God that the next housewife I see simultaneously waving her little flag around while proclaiming that she'd "certainly give up some freedoms to be safe".... god, it's so frustrating living in a world like this.
That's not a complete sentence. What do you mean? That you're going to attack that housewife? Or just complain to yourself?
Actually, when I wrote that I couldn't finish my thought, I was so drained. Look, all of this [the de-freedom-ing of America] makes me want to bash my head into a brick wall rather than attempt to correct the millions of "news facts" that the media, Capitol Hill, and goddamned forwarded emails are spewing these days. It has been well more than a century (possibly two) since the government really, honestly cared about the country's well-being. Today politicians speak of focus groups, and polls, and who knows what else. To me, all pretense of a democracy (or republic, however you want to classify the Great Experiment) has been dropped in the United States of America as our statesmen have sold themselves to the highest corporate bidder.
And to what end? So Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a percent. Let's make that stock go down.
Let's be real here, there have been people with little or no education for a long time, people who knew nothing about the political process, or what the king was actually doing, or what the dictator was planning, but everyone has always rallied around the concept of freedom. Jesus, what did people fight for for the last 6 millenia? And our countrymen would now lay down and give up so that they could be "a little safer".
President Bush, how exactly will a missle defense shield, email tracking, and shutting down online casinos do anything when the terrorists used box cutters, sent messages through the mail, and had money wired to them Western Union?
I think the great American democratic experiment is almost at an end... wait... a little longer... its done. So, what's up next? Oligarchy? Sounds good to me I suppose. Where do I send my RIAA tithes?
...like, 3 months ago, I was in a CS curriculum that came down extremely hard on Academic Misconduct (I know from experience). The thing was, when all the employers came to recruit, I was inevitably sat down and asked questions such as "Tell me about a time you worked on a team project," or my favorite "How well do you work with others?" Overlook the fact that everyone works with others all the time (in elementary school we are taught to get along with others), and you see that they are asking how well you work on [technical] projects in a team. So, how does a student achieve that all important piece of paper that jobs are looking for while being threatened with non-paper-receiving-ness if they even think about helping each other out, or working together?
Dude, if you thought that radio was ever anything but a monopoly, I'm sorry that this shattered your worldview. The truth is, radio stations are beggars living off of the scraps that the music industry hands their way. They live and die by their advertisers and hoping that Britney will do an appearance at their studio when her tour comes to town. Of course, not all stations play Britney, so substitute Staind, or perhaps Mary J. Blige as appropriate. Clear Channel is worse than most; I mean Christ, just the other day I figured out that they own exactly half of the radio stations on my first FM presets in my car!
Now, we can look at this as a conspiracy to shove more N'Sync and Britney down our throats, or we can see this as an enormous corporate arm that's attempting to sweep up as much money as it can, and that means: don't piss off the advertisers. If even one advertiser thinks a song is inappropriate, and pulls his ads, that's most likely too much for Clear Channel.
Now, Clear Channel can broadcast anything they want, its their company and they own the airwaves, but that doesn't mean that the American public has to like it. If people called in and said, I'm not listening to you anymore because what you're playing sucks, and I'm certainly not going to patronize the advertisers that subsidize this crap, well then maybe they would get it through their executive heads that this is a bad idea. Or you could call up the businesses who advertise and say that you would not support any business that advertises on a Clear Channel station. This is all idealogical claptrap, but it is a solution, albeit not a realistic one.
I'd like to thank our great government for listening to the radio media in their time of need and graciously deregulating radio so that Clear Channel had the opportunity to now own, what, a third of the FM bandwidth? More than a third? Anyways, I'd like to thank the government for that. I'd also like to give a shout-out to my homey Orrin Hatch for the DMCA, and all the other playa pros in Congress who are working tirelessly for the rights of the RIAA, the MPAA, and the BSA. Peace.
Wow! Mine freezes up on me several times a week!
Right, I was actually going to point out in my post that none of the DMCA legally does or in practice should apply to you, but I guess I forgot to add that part. sorry.
USA does make some of their laws pretty draconian though. yup.
I just wanted to point out that the DMCA allows for YOU to write a program that decrypts YOUR DVDs so YOU can play them on YOUR dvd player. That is perfectly legal. But as soon as you disseminate or sell that program, its off to the poop deck with ye. This is where my major beef with the DMCA comes in: the various entertainment industries actually convinced Congress that, if people were pushed to the point where they absolutely needed to break the encryption to do something "legal" (and be sure the RIAA/MPAA included the quotes around legal), they could always figure out themselves how to write their own software for the job. Never mind that I have a com sci degree, and know a bit about how DVDs work and there's no way in hell I could write a program to do it. Obviously the public has that capability. C'mon, what do you take them for? Oh, wait... AOL... MSN...
I wonder just how much Congress was purchased for? I mean, I would hope that they at least were able to pocket some of the money, because if all those bribes just went to campaign funding, that really pisses me off. I hope little Thurston Howell IV got some more for his post-collegiate yachting fund, or better yet, I hope a little bit of that money went to the Bush twins so they could get some good fake id's. I mean, c'mon!
You must guarantee that, of all the people you encounter in a day, you do not kill, assault, steal from, or kill 100% of them. You must also guarantee that of everything you say, 100% of it is neither slander nor libel, nor someone else's work.
No, you think about it. Listening to music is not killing, assaulting, slandering, libeling anyone. Now lets get to steal from: you may think it is, and the law may say it is, and even I think it is, but me and tens of thousands of other people will continue to do it. I know why I download music: because I like to listen to music. I used to buy CDs when I was younger, but you know what? You can only take it so many times when you buy a whole CD and there's 2 good songs on the album. Liner notes? Piss off, I put the CDs in a mobile carry case anyways. Not fair to the artist? I'll gladly pay the artist micropayments for the songs I take, but no way in hell am I going to contribute to the R($)I($)A($)A($). So what I listen to radio music? People say things like, "well, of course you only like two songs, its because that artist sucks, blah blah blah." No way, if some 'artist' (c'mon, most of the Pop world aren't artists, they're subcontractors of the studios) wants me to shell out $15+ for a CD that the RIAA says can only listen to in an RIAA approved method, they better entertain the hell out of me.
So, I know I'll keep downloading the newest Top 40 hits from Audiogalaxy (which sucks, but I use it so infrequently that I could care less), without giving a damn about the artist. The artists I want to give my money to are the ones who give me the music for the value of my money every time (Wyclef Jean pops immediately to mind).
Not that it is on-topic or anything, but it realy pisses me off that the domain for my first name: zachery.com, is being developed by a retarded 6 year old's retarded family.
Jesus! Did you use enough Javascript on that page, junior?
While we're at it, why not ban all meat and gasoline, plus institute 7 day waiting periods on all chainsaws and running shoes!
Thinketh the businessman (or his lackey): By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
So, on a system designed to be open for everyone's use, you want to decide the priority of transmissions. I wonder who's going to have higher priority under your new schema: you selling an underwater douche kit to some lamer for $14.95, or me researching a paper on Astrophysics for a college class? These capitalism-for-higher-profit-at-all-costs types make me sick.
These are some probably off-base trains of thought, but I just woke up, so please excuse my insanity.