Scenario 1: Your mother hands you $20 in cash on your birthday.
Scenario 2: You see several rioters looting a store. One of them reaches into the cash register and hands you $20.
That is, hands down, the worst Napster analogy I've ever seen.
Nice demonstration of how coincidence does not qualify as evidence. Sure video games look like they cause violence, but the actual causal element has not been demonstrated. There are hundreds or thousands of cases (like myself) of people who can play violent videogames for eighteen years running and never once go out and shoot someone in a fit, but evidence that does not support this thesis is discarded out-of-hand by the likes of Ashcroft. But take the logical structure of the "video games cause killers" and substitute cheese for videogames, as you have done, and the absurdity of the chain of reasoning becomes evident.
Others have repeatedly posted in this forum that we need more Christianity for our kids, and that the country is just plain goin' to hell in a handbasket, and that 40 years ago the biggest problem in school was chewing gum and talking in class. None of this is backed up by any real evidence either. As a parent yes I'm concerned that there appear to be more school shootings than ever before, but in reality I think the chances of my child being shot by another child are probably less their chances of being hit by the bus that picks them up to bring them home. We are probably more victims of media hype than anything else, and the best way to combat this is to reduce the rewards to the media for sensationalizing the crime by not tuning in for the news, and not buying the newspaper. I haven't done so in years, and frankly I haven't missed anything important.
Since your an artist, I would advise that you switch management because, if your only getting 7 points on the deal someone has done something incorrectly.
Maybe this wasn't obvious -- I am an artist as a hobby only. I do not now and never have made money off this. That's because as I started my musical career I encountered the parasitical slime who inhabit the industry and decided that I would rather kill myself than sell my soul to those kinds of people. The guys who stuck with it (I've kept in touch) ended up with quite the raw end of the stick almost every time.
PLEASE advise me where. I have no idea that the cost have gotten that low. Last I knew, it was in the.70's to.90's in 500,000 volumes for the duplication and packaging.
I can make Cd's for less than 50 cents in my house. It costs me about $3 to print the cover because of the ink costs. But I got my information from a friend who still records and performs (classical music, not rock) professionally from time to time. If he was exaggerating that's my bad. But it seems reasonable that the economies of scale win out there. Ten years ago it was about three dollars a unit -- printing and packaging. That's the last time I encountered the real cost of CD reproduction.
I think that Artist in general need to become aware that they need proper legal representation when they are greeted by the Record Companyies. Too many time I see artist in general give it all up just to get that break. Also artist need to understand that Music ( if made for profiting ) must be looked at as a business, and as a business it should be handled with everything reviewed by a lawyer.
I agree here. The artist, however, usually doesn't have the resources, or the savvy, to actually go this route. When I was doing this for real, I think I made about $40 a week, if that. Most of the time the money went right back into the band. I delivered pizzas to feed myself. Most bands seem to be highly self-destructive units. The people can't get along, they don't share the same priorities, they don't really even know what it is they're after. The music industry finds young kids, promises them huge financial rewards, and screws them with legalese. The musicians realize they're trapped in a hole, and frequently destroy themselves with drugs. That's why as an artist now I am trying just to get my art out to people without the financial need for making money. I produce about as much new music per year as a working band. I definitely would like to play more. Keeping a band of hobbyists together is a nightmare. Most of the time I end up just overdubbing the parts myself. I give my CD's away, almost all the time. But I count myself lucker than the ones who continued on. I have a job a family a house and a career, and I still get to have my music. Online distribution offers me a means to actually get an audience, if I can just find a good means of distribution. But I'm deliberately staying away from Napster because of the destructive fallout, and it's pissing me off. I shouldn't have to worry that I'll find myself in some lawsuit or find lawyers sending threatening letters to my email address for putting my own music online. But frankly that's what I expect to happen in this climate. So I'm waiting until the hysteria dies down, and in the meantime continuing to do what I've always done -- record the music for my own personal edification and enjoyment.
What does a Liberal Arts Grad say to an Engineering Grad?
He says your grammar is atrocious, your argument is based on specious generalizations, your logic is abominable, and he makes plenty of money as a self-taught programmer anyway. Along with some stuff about how plotting a novel (or an essay, or a piece of music), writing it all down, and revising it with merciless attention to detail and internal consistency not being a whole lot different when the code is in C++ rather than English, or musical notes. Talent is talent. Discipline is discipline. Brains are brains. The first programmer had to teach himself. Who says I can't do it too? Not my employer, who pays me awfully well.
I learned programming on my job. My degree is in English Lit. I never had any trouble picking up programming, and I don't make peanuts doing it. It depends on your aptitude for logic, and your attention to detail. And I fully believe one can learn them in the wild as well as in an academic environment. Provided the aptitude is there.
I did that in 9th grade -- stuck my hand under the stream of nitrogen as it was poured onto the floor -- without knowing what it would do, of course. Boy was that stupid. It turned out to be harmless (in fact, I'm quite sure the nitrogen never actually touched me) but it was one of those things I looked back on and said to myself, "Self, don't ever be so irretrievably stupid again."
think that record companies make money all the time but they also take alot of risk with artist
Please, don't make me come find you and vomit in your face. "Alot" is not a word. It's "A lot." Definite article "A", adjective "lot." Two words.
Oh, and also, record companies don't take any risk whatsoever with an artist. The artist is required to pay back all of the record company's "risk" out of their own measly 7% return on the record sales.
The average first album for any band almost invariably is recorded in a period of one or two days. I can think of a number of memorable examples (the first Beatles album took 12 hours to record, I believe) where the "risk" cost the record company exactly dick in terms of effort. One day's worth of normal operations wasn't a fuck of a lot. Then there's the mass-production. This is where a record company really cashes in. CD reproduction costs less than a penny per in major quantities. The cover, minus the cost of commissioning the art, is even less. And again most "first albums" by bands feature cover art in the form of a blurred photograph of the band with some cheap computer-generated lettering showing the band's name. So the major cost is in marketing the album. We all know where those marketing dollars go -- to Britney Spears' account, of course! The record company, after investing what I guarantee you is less than ten thousand real dollars on this kind of "risk" then puts their CD out, and immediately realizes a massive return of 93% per unit sold, especially if the band already has an underground following. If the band is one of those Nirvana-types that actually spawns a whole movement, the record company immediately starts scouting the area where the band first broke through and picks up every phony-ass act that sounds just like them and pimps them out there too. There's no risk at all in marketing a Bush album. Fuck, the band doesn't even need to know how to play (believe me, I've seen them in person and they don't). So frankly you are either ignorant or a shill. It's hard to tell.
Record companies are not interested in the well-being of musicians, or their music, or the audience that the music is directed to. They are merely there to collect fees as the music passes from the creator to the listener. That's why they own the copyright on the recordings, not the artist, without whom the recording is completely impossible.
Also you said: I know if I owned a Record company I would hound you till the ends of the earth.
It's funny, as a musician I hound people all the time to take free copies of my music. Because I know that if the message therein reaches you you'll be back for more of what counts. Record companies can only view this kind of behavior in terms of "potential lost sales." The concept of generating a loyal customer base designed around repeat business due to the high quality of one's product just doesn't seem to be in vogue in corporate america these days. Instead most prominent and popular business models seem to revolve around finding an already existing popular source of wanted products, frequently created at someone else's expense and with someone else's efforts, squatting on the source of that with an army of asshole lawyers, and charging the holy hell out of people to get access to it. The typical record company is an excellent example of this. They do not create the music (some of them seem to be unaware that their product is in fact music), they do not actually record it, and it exists entirely independent of them. The Internet makes their existence far less important, they know it, and are running around in a blind panic trying to prevent the inevitable.
some of the big artists to go off on their own and make their songs availiable for a small fee (50 cents?) without giving one red cent to a record company.
I think if you examine the affair logically you will see this is exactly what the RIAA is afraid of. The recent record sales certainly aren't slagging off enough to warrant this attack. There have always been pirates, and there's always been home copying, and it's never damaged them in the slightest before. What never existed, and what the Internet brings, is a wide, rapid distribution system that the RIAA cannot control. This allows the artists, if they have half a brain, to do a complete end-run around the useless middlemen of the recording industry. Let's face it most of them probably don't make much more than 50 cents per unit off their CD sales today so having a reasonable distribution system that didn't include the bloodsucking record companies would be a giant bonus. With digital recording technology prices falling into the basement it's only a matter of time before an act makes it really big without ever having to put a CD in a record store. Ani DiFranco is probably the scariest example for the RIAA in recent memory.
I have always felt that they cut out all but the introduction to some much longer and more interesting gridbugs scene. She says "they look like trouble." But no trouble ever comes of them, and they vanish immediately after their intro.
Any day now, some asshole record exec is going to get this idea to copyright the chord progression I IV V I, and then western civilization will come crashing to its final halt. So let's hope none of them are reading this . . .
Actually there's a fuck of a lot more sugar in a regular ol' Coke than any candy bar could boast. Unless it's a really _huge_ candy bar. That's how come Coke is making more diabetics than ever.
Carbon-14 isn't what's used for those kinds of timelines. It's longer-lived substances like Uranium. And the fact of the matter is your concerns would have some weight if it weren't for the fact that something like five separate methods, using separate radioactive isotopes, achive dating results that are in precise agreement with each other.
Also, if radioactive decay rates were greater in the past (by the extent required to explain the Creationist timeline) then the ambient radioactivity on the surface of the earth would have wiped it clean of life in Biblical times.
Also, If rates of radioactive decay varied even by a little bit such devices as atomic bombs and nuclear reactors would simply not work. Fission explosions require nanosecond timing in the machinery of the bomb.
Finally, you can postulate all you like about exterior conditions to radioactivity but you have not established causality. You have proposed no mechanism that could be used to explain variable radioactivity, let alone put forward a testable hypothesis. Just because you don't understand it does not mean that it's incomprehensible.
Creationists try to make this subject sound much more subjective than it is. Don't take my word for it. Read up on the subject, if you're as open minded as you claim. Nuclear physics is really not that hard to understand when you want to know the whys and wherefores of these kinds of issues. But don't appeal to your own ignorance. I already know how it works and am comfortable with it. So is anyone who bothers to understand what they're talking about. And if you're too lazy to, well I'm sorry. You'll get the same kind of RTFM responses that any other kind of clueless newbie would get.
Well, I've personally seen an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner demonstrated, and the technician operating it told me that a bobby pin could achieve speeds of up to 40 mph in the immediate vicinity of that device. People with leg pins and head plates were right out. I imagine it would do a pretty good job on anything that went through it.
So I guess everyone who wants to come into my house is going to have to crawl through a little two-foot diameter tube and pass their keys and credit cards through in a sack afterwards, if any sort of scheme like this is to work.
What they don't realize is that just because they aren't out shooting and killing people, that doesn't mean that people's lives are not being affected by their choice of living
Being in a free society means that choices like these are choices not enforced conformity. It is not society's business whether I live a happy, productive life. It is only the opportunity that is provided.
Look, from this code snippet I can't tell much more than those two registry keys are being looked at. Those quite clearly tell what operating system is hosting the client. I don't know what isRegistered() does or what the MSID member is. Both are apparently members of the RegCtrlWiz object. But it's obvious that you don't know what they are either. I can tell you that if they wanted the product key it's encrypted in the registry. They don't need to decrypt it on your side; they surely have the crypt keys. SO why not open that registry key explicitly? They're not doing it, as far as I can tell.
But even if they did, you have to know that their whole product ID database must be trash. I personaly have installed about 300 NT servers with the product id of "111-111111". That key works on almost any MS product up until a couple of years ago. They teach you that in MCSE class, for crying out loud. There are eight thousand machines at my place of business with the same copy of Windows 95 on them. Sure we have licenses, but I'll be damned if I'm going to install it eight thousand times by hand. We use disk imaging like most companies of any size. In that case, knowing our product ID's would be useless to MS.
So even if they're gathering your product ID (of which there is zero evidence in this code) there's not jack they can do with it. They're bound to have millions of multiple entries.
And if they were, someone like NTBugtraq or the l0pht would have publicized a security exploit about it now. For that matter when I am at work again I'll just plug up a sniffer while I surf their site and see for myself what those functions retrieve. But you don't need to attribute to malice what is easily explained by idiocy.
All this does is select some action based on what operating system you're using. It's probably the same thing they use in Windows Update. There isn't anything particularly sinister about this.
Yours is the second mention that Brits do not get spam from Spamazon. I speculate that perhaps there is a stricter standard of law for assault-style marketing in Britain? Or some type of international trade agreement that will give a British victim the right to fuck Amazon blind over spam?
Or is it that their autospam program is too dumb to realize that other domains than.com exist? And could they please patent that so that other spammers can infringe on it?
If it's a hoax, it's very thorough and elaborate, right down to the carefully worded Y2K statement. I followed every link on the site and didn't encounter a fooled-you! page anywhere.
The only thing that's suspicious is that the face of the actual unit is a little "cleaner" to my eyes than a real piece of plastic would be. The lines are just too bright and even; I don't see any texture at all.
It looks for all the world like someone has taken a regular picture of a CD-rom and touched up the face. I zoomed up the jpegs to about 800% and couldn't find anything suspicious; though I'm by no means any kind of expert on digital fakery. I've seen it and done it, but almost anyone could. Also, what the hell is that button on the right supposed to be for? "Eject?"
Ok, I'm getting ever more curious. First of all, there's no place on the order form (gave a fictitious name and address, duh) for any kind of billing. All it asks for is your name, a country, and a valid email address. And an item and quantity. When I clicked "place order" it informed me that all servers were busy. That seems highly unlikely, as they weren't too busy to show me the pictures of the unit.
www.fufme.com is actually "scooby.valueweb.net" according to my DNS server.
My final opinion: either someone's paying a lot of money to have a big laugh, is conducting some sort of cybersex survey, or is running a full-blown scam. The only reason I discount the latter is there doesn't appear to be any way to actually buy one of these. I think it's a survey.
Most people cannot separate the monitor from the computer. Ask them what kind of computer they have and they're just as likely to give you the brand name of the monitor. They have no awareness of the box below it (or if they have a tower, the one at their feet). They call the big box with all the hardware in it the "hard drive" if they're tech savvy. If they're really tech savvy, they call it the "CPU." The cup-holder joke may be an urban myth, but for crying out loud it just isn't that far from the truth.
of course I've also noticed a large portion of the population doesn't seem to be aware that there is a third dimension . . .
Not really. I class all who build such devices as lunatics. Ourselves included. A device like that is no more or less dangerous in the hands of a supposed friend than an enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
That is, hands down, the worst Napster analogy I've ever seen.
Nice demonstration of how coincidence does not qualify as evidence. Sure video games look like they cause violence, but the actual causal element has not been demonstrated. There are hundreds or thousands of cases (like myself) of people who can play violent videogames for eighteen years running and never once go out and shoot someone in a fit, but evidence that does not support this thesis is discarded out-of-hand by the likes of Ashcroft. But take the logical structure of the "video games cause killers" and substitute cheese for videogames, as you have done, and the absurdity of the chain of reasoning becomes evident.
Others have repeatedly posted in this forum that we need more Christianity for our kids, and that the country is just plain goin' to hell in a handbasket, and that 40 years ago the biggest problem in school was chewing gum and talking in class. None of this is backed up by any real evidence either. As a parent yes I'm concerned that there appear to be more school shootings than ever before, but in reality I think the chances of my child being shot by another child are probably less their chances of being hit by the bus that picks them up to bring them home. We are probably more victims of media hype than anything else, and the best way to combat this is to reduce the rewards to the media for sensationalizing the crime by not tuning in for the news, and not buying the newspaper. I haven't done so in years, and frankly I haven't missed anything important.
What option? To have some government fuck do my thinking for me? No thanks.
Maybe this wasn't obvious -- I am an artist as a hobby only. I do not now and never have made money off this. That's because as I started my musical career I encountered the parasitical slime who inhabit the industry and decided that I would rather kill myself than sell my soul to those kinds of people. The guys who stuck with it (I've kept in touch) ended up with quite the raw end of the stick almost every time.
PLEASE advise me where. I have no idea that the cost have gotten that low. Last I knew, it was in the .70's to .90's in 500,000 volumes for the duplication and packaging.
I can make Cd's for less than 50 cents in my house. It costs me about $3 to print the cover because of the ink costs. But I got my information from a friend who still records and performs (classical music, not rock) professionally from time to time. If he was exaggerating that's my bad. But it seems reasonable that the economies of scale win out there. Ten years ago it was about three dollars a unit -- printing and packaging. That's the last time I encountered the real cost of CD reproduction.
I think that Artist in general need to become aware that they need proper legal representation when they are greeted by the Record Companyies. Too many time I see artist in general give it all up just to get that break. Also artist need to understand that Music ( if made for profiting ) must be looked at as a business, and as a business it should be handled with everything reviewed by a lawyer.
I agree here. The artist, however, usually doesn't have the resources, or the savvy, to actually go this route. When I was doing this for real, I think I made about $40 a week, if that. Most of the time the money went right back into the band. I delivered pizzas to feed myself. Most bands seem to be highly self-destructive units. The people can't get along, they don't share the same priorities, they don't really even know what it is they're after. The music industry finds young kids, promises them huge financial rewards, and screws them with legalese. The musicians realize they're trapped in a hole, and frequently destroy themselves with drugs. That's why as an artist now I am trying just to get my art out to people without the financial need for making money. I produce about as much new music per year as a working band. I definitely would like to play more. Keeping a band of hobbyists together is a nightmare. Most of the time I end up just overdubbing the parts myself. I give my CD's away, almost all the time. But I count myself lucker than the ones who continued on. I have a job a family a house and a career, and I still get to have my music. Online distribution offers me a means to actually get an audience, if I can just find a good means of distribution. But I'm deliberately staying away from Napster because of the destructive fallout, and it's pissing me off. I shouldn't have to worry that I'll find myself in some lawsuit or find lawyers sending threatening letters to my email address for putting my own music online. But frankly that's what I expect to happen in this climate. So I'm waiting until the hysteria dies down, and in the meantime continuing to do what I've always done -- record the music for my own personal edification and enjoyment.
I for one am disappointed. I would have never expected the Bush administration to be hostile or indifferent to science.
He says your grammar is atrocious, your argument is based on specious generalizations, your logic is abominable, and he makes plenty of money as a self-taught programmer anyway. Along with some stuff about how plotting a novel (or an essay, or a piece of music), writing it all down, and revising it with merciless attention to detail and internal consistency not being a whole lot different when the code is in C++ rather than English, or musical notes. Talent is talent. Discipline is discipline. Brains are brains. The first programmer had to teach himself. Who says I can't do it too? Not my employer, who pays me awfully well.
I learned programming on my job. My degree is in English Lit. I never had any trouble picking up programming, and I don't make peanuts doing it. It depends on your aptitude for logic, and your attention to detail. And I fully believe one can learn them in the wild as well as in an academic environment. Provided the aptitude is there.
I did that in 9th grade -- stuck my hand under the stream of nitrogen as it was poured onto the floor -- without knowing what it would do, of course. Boy was that stupid. It turned out to be harmless (in fact, I'm quite sure the nitrogen never actually touched me) but it was one of those things I looked back on and said to myself, "Self, don't ever be so irretrievably stupid again."
Please, don't make me come find you and vomit in your face. "Alot" is not a word. It's "A lot." Definite article "A", adjective "lot." Two words.
Oh, and also, record companies don't take any risk whatsoever with an artist. The artist is required to pay back all of the record company's "risk" out of their own measly 7% return on the record sales.
The average first album for any band almost invariably is recorded in a period of one or two days. I can think of a number of memorable examples (the first Beatles album took 12 hours to record, I believe) where the "risk" cost the record company exactly dick in terms of effort. One day's worth of normal operations wasn't a fuck of a lot. Then there's the mass-production. This is where a record company really cashes in. CD reproduction costs less than a penny per in major quantities. The cover, minus the cost of commissioning the art, is even less. And again most "first albums" by bands feature cover art in the form of a blurred photograph of the band with some cheap computer-generated lettering showing the band's name. So the major cost is in marketing the album. We all know where those marketing dollars go -- to Britney Spears' account, of course! The record company, after investing what I guarantee you is less than ten thousand real dollars on this kind of "risk" then puts their CD out, and immediately realizes a massive return of 93% per unit sold, especially if the band already has an underground following. If the band is one of those Nirvana-types that actually spawns a whole movement, the record company immediately starts scouting the area where the band first broke through and picks up every phony-ass act that sounds just like them and pimps them out there too. There's no risk at all in marketing a Bush album. Fuck, the band doesn't even need to know how to play (believe me, I've seen them in person and they don't). So frankly you are either ignorant or a shill. It's hard to tell.
Record companies are not interested in the well-being of musicians, or their music, or the audience that the music is directed to. They are merely there to collect fees as the music passes from the creator to the listener. That's why they own the copyright on the recordings, not the artist, without whom the recording is completely impossible.
Also you said: I know if I owned a Record company I would hound you till the ends of the earth.
It's funny, as a musician I hound people all the time to take free copies of my music. Because I know that if the message therein reaches you you'll be back for more of what counts. Record companies can only view this kind of behavior in terms of "potential lost sales." The concept of generating a loyal customer base designed around repeat business due to the high quality of one's product just doesn't seem to be in vogue in corporate america these days. Instead most prominent and popular business models seem to revolve around finding an already existing popular source of wanted products, frequently created at someone else's expense and with someone else's efforts, squatting on the source of that with an army of asshole lawyers, and charging the holy hell out of people to get access to it. The typical record company is an excellent example of this. They do not create the music (some of them seem to be unaware that their product is in fact music), they do not actually record it, and it exists entirely independent of them. The Internet makes their existence far less important, they know it, and are running around in a blind panic trying to prevent the inevitable.
I think if you examine the affair logically you will see this is exactly what the RIAA is afraid of. The recent record sales certainly aren't slagging off enough to warrant this attack. There have always been pirates, and there's always been home copying, and it's never damaged them in the slightest before. What never existed, and what the Internet brings, is a wide, rapid distribution system that the RIAA cannot control. This allows the artists, if they have half a brain, to do a complete end-run around the useless middlemen of the recording industry. Let's face it most of them probably don't make much more than 50 cents per unit off their CD sales today so having a reasonable distribution system that didn't include the bloodsucking record companies would be a giant bonus. With digital recording technology prices falling into the basement it's only a matter of time before an act makes it really big without ever having to put a CD in a record store. Ani DiFranco is probably the scariest example for the RIAA in recent memory.
I have always felt that they cut out all but the introduction to some much longer and more interesting gridbugs scene. She says "they look like trouble." But no trouble ever comes of them, and they vanish immediately after their intro.
Any day now, some asshole record exec is going to get this idea to copyright the chord progression I IV V I, and then western civilization will come crashing to its final halt. So let's hope none of them are reading this . . .
On slashdot we have the best baiters, dare I say the master baiters, of the internet.
Actually there's a fuck of a lot more sugar in a regular ol' Coke than any candy bar could boast. Unless it's a really _huge_ candy bar. That's how come Coke is making more diabetics than ever.
Carbon-14 isn't what's used for those kinds of timelines. It's longer-lived substances like Uranium. And the fact of the matter is your concerns would have some weight if it weren't for the fact that something like five separate methods, using separate radioactive isotopes, achive dating results that are in precise agreement with each other.
Also, if radioactive decay rates were greater in the past (by the extent required to explain the Creationist timeline) then the ambient radioactivity on the surface of the earth would have wiped it clean of life in Biblical times.
Also, If rates of radioactive decay varied even by a little bit such devices as atomic bombs and nuclear reactors would simply not work. Fission explosions require nanosecond timing in the machinery of the bomb.
Finally, you can postulate all you like about exterior conditions to radioactivity but you have not established causality. You have proposed no mechanism that could be used to explain variable radioactivity, let alone put forward a testable hypothesis. Just because you don't understand it does not mean that it's incomprehensible.
Creationists try to make this subject sound much more subjective than it is. Don't take my word for it. Read up on the subject, if you're as open minded as you claim. Nuclear physics is really not that hard to understand when you want to know the whys and wherefores of these kinds of issues. But don't appeal to your own ignorance. I already know how it works and am comfortable with it. So is anyone who bothers to understand what they're talking about. And if you're too lazy to, well I'm sorry. You'll get the same kind of RTFM responses that any other kind of clueless newbie would get.
So I guess everyone who wants to come into my house is going to have to crawl through a little two-foot diameter tube and pass their keys and credit cards through in a sack afterwards, if any sort of scheme like this is to work.
Being in a free society means that choices like these are choices not enforced conformity. It is not society's business whether I live a happy, productive life. It is only the opportunity that is provided.
Look, from this code snippet I can't tell much more than those two registry keys are being looked at. Those quite clearly tell what operating system is hosting the client. I don't know what isRegistered() does or what the MSID member is. Both are apparently members of the RegCtrlWiz object. But it's obvious that you don't know what they are either. I can tell you that if they wanted the product key it's encrypted in the registry. They don't need to decrypt it on your side; they surely have the crypt keys. SO why not open that registry key explicitly? They're not doing it, as far as I can tell.
But even if they did, you have to know that their whole product ID database must be trash. I personaly have installed about 300 NT servers with the product id of "111-111111". That key works on almost any MS product up until a couple of years ago. They teach you that in MCSE class, for crying out loud. There are eight thousand machines at my place of business with the same copy of Windows 95 on them. Sure we have licenses, but I'll be damned if I'm going to install it eight thousand times by hand. We use disk imaging like most companies of any size. In that case, knowing our product ID's would be useless to MS.
So even if they're gathering your product ID (of which there is zero evidence in this code) there's not jack they can do with it. They're bound to have millions of multiple entries.
And if they were, someone like NTBugtraq or the l0pht would have publicized a security exploit about it now. For that matter when I am at work again I'll just plug up a sniffer while I surf their site and see for myself what those functions retrieve. But you don't need to attribute to malice what is easily explained by idiocy.
Ok, I'm an idiot. Immediately after I clicked submit, I read about two people from UK who are getting spammed by Amazon. So I retract my theorem.
All this does is select some action based on what operating system you're using. It's probably the same thing they use in Windows Update. There isn't anything particularly sinister about this.
Yours is the second mention that Brits do not get spam from Spamazon. I speculate that perhaps there is a stricter standard of law for assault-style marketing in Britain? Or some type of international trade agreement that will give a British victim the right to fuck Amazon blind over spam?
.com exist? And could they please patent that so that other spammers can infringe on it?
Or is it that their autospam program is too dumb to realize that other domains than
If it's a hoax, it's very thorough and elaborate, right down to the carefully worded Y2K statement. I followed every link on the site and didn't encounter a fooled-you! page anywhere.
The only thing that's suspicious is that the face of the actual unit is a little "cleaner" to my eyes than a real piece of plastic would be. The lines are just too bright and even; I don't see any texture at all.
It looks for all the world like someone has taken a regular picture of a CD-rom and touched up the face. I zoomed up the jpegs to about 800% and couldn't find anything suspicious; though I'm by no means any kind of expert on digital fakery. I've seen it and done it, but almost anyone could. Also, what the hell is that button on the right supposed to be for? "Eject?"
Ok, I'm getting ever more curious. First of all, there's no place on the order form (gave a fictitious name and address, duh) for any kind of billing. All it asks for is your name, a country, and a valid email address. And an item and quantity. When I clicked "place order" it informed me that all servers were busy. That seems highly unlikely, as they weren't too busy to show me the pictures of the unit.
www.fufme.com is actually "scooby.valueweb.net" according to my DNS server.
My final opinion: either someone's paying a lot of money to have a big laugh, is conducting some sort of cybersex survey, or is running a full-blown scam. The only reason I discount the latter is there doesn't appear to be any way to actually buy one of these. I think it's a survey.
There. Is everyone laughing? Thank you.
Most people cannot separate the monitor from the computer. Ask them what kind of computer they have and they're just as likely to give you the brand name of the monitor. They have no awareness of the box below it (or if they have a tower, the one at their feet). They call the big box with all the hardware in it the "hard drive" if they're tech savvy. If they're really tech savvy, they call it the "CPU." The cup-holder joke may be an urban myth, but for crying out loud it just isn't that far from the truth.
of course I've also noticed a large portion of the population doesn't seem to be aware that there is a third dimension . . .
I overheard a salesguy at CompUSA tell someone that the modem worked faster if it was installed internally. Enough said.
Not really. I class all who build such devices as lunatics. Ourselves included. A device like that is no more or less dangerous in the hands of a supposed friend than an enemy.