I'm willing to bet that an overwhelming majority of the artists that the RIAA "represents" are against this whole "let's sue our fans" thing. Michael Jackson spoke out and denounced the RIAA's actions, yet I remember seeing several of his songs listed
I'm just shocked to see Green Day on that list.
IANAT (I Am Not A Teenager) but I seem to remember them being relatively left-wing/anti-corporate, didn't they speak out against this bullshit too?
It looks to me as if the RIAA are deliberately including the work of objecting artists in their "relatively short list of files", perhaps as a PR defense against those artists making further noise i.e. the RIAA will be able to say "but look, we've caught all these who actually downloaded your work, we are merely your servants protecting your interests, attacking us is hypocritical".
Or perhaps the RIAA is playing an elaborate game of chicken, daring artists to stick their necks all the way out. Very few artists with a contract really want to risk losing corporate patronage, not even Michael Jackson. There is at least one artist with real balls that I know of who made sure to stay clear from all that bullshit right from the beginning, hopefully we'll see more of that independent artistic spirit re-awaking in the wake of Enron etc.
For a while I was using the eval version on my home Squid cache to asist in blocking porn site popups while not preventing intentional porn surfing.
It's not the choice element I object to but, rather, the fact that choice is skewed by lack of privacy.
Many an enlightened employer has put in an unrestricted DS3 connection for the office and expected that the employees will do the right thing (call it self-censorship, call it responsibility, whatever), only to start reviewing usage reports and discover that the sites that get hit most often are autopr0n and QuietSurfer.
"Many an enlightended employer.." Have you got actual figures on that? In my (admittedly limited) experience, trust extended to workers is rewarded. Anything above basic monkey-work requires the employee to be self-motivated to at least some extent, management "crack-downs" may temporarily boost productivity on the shop floor but, in the longer run, this disempowerment shifts responsibility away from the worker and onto management, a teacher/child relationship which ends up consuming vast amounts of management time. Work become a "while the cats away" game.
I'm not saying that some people don't abuse trust at times but this is generally a personal discipline issue that the person concerned is struggling with and that his co-workers and managers are all too aware of: if someone isn't pulling his weight, it's pretty obvious without having to discover through Internet logs. If he can't develop the self-discipline to do his job without requiring vast amounts of supervision, that worker actually belongs in a teacher/child relationship.
That's the point at which the company has to decide whether they do teacher/child or adult/adult (you can't be both types of company)and act accordingly, hiring and retaining the appropriate staff. I have no doubt as to which model is more efficient.
And what exactly are you doing accessing this site from work, using the shareholder's computer and bandwidth?
I don't buy that argument either. All too many slashdotters, especially during the whole dotcom hallucination, will have personally experienced the culture of underpaid overtime promoted by management.
Most people in both the US and the UK are working far too many hours, in stressful, understaffed and underfunded environments but one concession that has evolved is that they can conduct a certain amount of personal business (paying bills etc) online, reading their kids' school reports, stuff that would have required time-off or at least sane going-home times in the past.
Okay, checking out a political site or reading the news might not be absolutely vital but we all work to a rhythm, with varying levels of focus throughout the day and a certain amount of off-time and reward. Some might call this goofing off but both the quality of your work and your sanity would disintegrate if you try to apply yourself fully every second of the day.
That's just how humans work best, much as that thought might upset the poor auld shareholders.
Also, to complain about this use of "the shareholder's computer and bandwidth" is ridiculous when your sweating over that computer 60 hours a week for said shareholder and probably "up-skilling" yourself with an O'Reilly book on your own time during the weekend.
Or just wait until you go home and access the "Dean for President" site on your own time.
Again, you might not have that much time at home if you're working insane modern hours - better to build that sort of thing into your at-work rhythm.
> I don't care if I send her ten bucks she doesn't deserve,
> if the media picks up on it and runs a heart-warming story
> about how a bunch of geeks came to the aid of a poor kid
> being abused by a big bully trade organization.
> If anyone pipes up and blows the true story, all the better.
Brilliant idea and you're right in thinking that it's just the kind of heart-warming crap that would go down well with the American public but you're forgetting exactly that the same creeps who own the music companies own all the news sources with any kind of reach. No ambitious journalist or editor who values his career is going to run with a story that he thinks might blot his copybook.
Corporate America doesn't piss on Corporate America, just Americans.
For what it's worth, though, I think we should still do it, I'll contribute. And, hey, maybe we should buy her an ipod.
I used to buy a lot of CDs but, gradually, came to resent both the inflated prices here in Europe and the attitude of the music industry to their customers. So, I stopped buying CDs for myself.
I continued, however, buying CDs as gifts for others; it's so easy to order them online and have them sent to a friend/relative/the girl of the moment with a nice message. Everyone likes music whereas if you send a book it probably won't, with the best intentions in the world, actually get read.
But no more. I am now on an official boycott, the RIAA is getting no more money from me.
I am sickened by the way they singled out a family living in a project was singled out(and I'm aware of how much tougher it is to be poor in America).
I am appalled the obvious way in which, as soon as they saw it turning into a PR nightmare, they quickly arranged some sort of deal and concocted these statements from the mother. The whole thing stinks.
Pity the kid who's about to become the only teenager in her neighborhood who's ability to explore new music is stunted by specific legal agreement.
And pity my friends too: they'll be getting books from now on.
Does this particular story add anything to the debate...
Yes, it's FUNNY.
No matter how many facts I know about the hypocrisy and idiocy of the patent system OR Microsoft OR the Government, I am heartened by anecdotes that do a good job of illustrating and bringing to life those facts.
BTW, this patent trepasses on one I filed last month covering pepper-shakers generally. I'll be contacting each of you individually to let you know how you can bring your kitchens into licensing compliance.
Hilarious, for those of you who can't be bothered wading through the application here is the important bit, the actual "what is claimed part":
What is claimed is:
1. A construction with novelty value in enhancing the known functioning of a pepper shaker in the shaking dispensing of the condiment pepper upon foods, said construction comprising a hollow simulated dog of ceramic construction material sized to be grasped during shaking use in the hand of a user, a body with depending legs of said shape effective to provide a non-use condition thereof on a support surface with said body in a clearance position above said support surface to facilitate the grasping about said body in said hand of said user, said hollowness of said shape delimited by an external surface bounding a storage compartment for a supply of said pepper condiment, a supply of pepper condiment in said storage compartment, a hindquarters of said simulated dog shape, and plural pepper condiment dispensing openings characterized by embodiment in said hindquarters and in communication with said stored supply of pepper condiment, and operative up and down shaking of said grasped shape by said user effective to dispense pepper condiment through said hindquarters dispensing openings upon foods, whereby there is a cognitive synergism caused by similarity between the words pepper and pooper contributing to novelty value in the advertising of said shaker.
You can tell this guy isn't too used to writing patents because he's specified far too much, right down to stuff that's trademark-related; any manufacturer who wanted to get around his patent would find it quite easy but, somehow, I don't think they'll bother.
"...offering users a choice of viewing a site and having it logged, or not viewing it"
This may sound like quite an elegant solution, especially compared to the outright blocking of sites not recognised by their master database but this could well end up creating a far more dangerous climate of self-censorship.
For instance, if a perfectly legimate but not "mainstream" site, say an anti-war one, hasn't yet made it onto their database, you have to accept that your boss will be notified of your visit and made aware of your doubts about the government.
This may seem, at first, to be a tad off-topic but actually relates directly to the matter under discussion: whether laughing at this kid is just plain wrong and we shouldn't do it, if it's kind of wrong and we should buy him ipods to assuage our guilt or if it's fair game and the kid should get the Hell over it and enjoy all the resultant opportunities that seem to be heading his way.
I'm of the latter opinion and was one of the first people to sign the petition to help him on his way. Seriously, this whole thing is not only going to pay his way through college but will probably get him his first blow job too.
I genuinely wish him well but, yes, I did make the Fatakin joke. I thought it was funny and, you know what, I still think it's funny.
I have now, HOWEVER, received the moderation record for that post and it's clear that not only those who posted the follow-up posts but also the Slashdot moderators are somewhat split on this whole "humour" thing.
As an interesting testament to just how subjective humour is, I list the mod results for your delectation and viewing pleasure:
1. Starting with a +1, it gets modded up three times, +3 FUNNY, bringing the total up to 4.
2. Some anal retentive mods it down, -1 OVERRATED, bringing the total down to 3.
3. The Karmic balance re-adjusts as some decent soul mods it up, +1 FUNNY, total 4.
4. Spitting in the face of karma, some other anal retentive, possibly connected in some foul and perverted way to the first, mods it down, -1 OVERRATED, total 3.
5. A sudden flood of well-balanced and non-perverted moderators mod it up twice, +2 FUNNY, total 5. Woo HOOOOOO, jackpot!!!!!!
6. My sudden gain is unexpectedly HALVED as one of the post's FUNNY mods is withdrawn "..possibly because the moderator nullified his moderation by posting to the discussion himself". Sadly, we are reminded once again that free speech has it's price. -1 UNMOD, total 4.
7. Never mind, another FUNNY mod, +1, total 5 mo' fo's!!!!
8. AAAAAAhhhhhh, two flaming S.O.B.s, possibly with Al Queda funding, rate me down, -2 TROLL, total 3. What the heck? I can see how this post might be seen as a troll (speaking your mind usually is) but that post was obviously a JOKE.
9. +1 FUNNY, total 4. Although, there's a possibility that this mod was just trolling.
10. -1 FLAMEBAIT, ?????, total 3.
11. +2 FUNNY, total 5.
Of course, now that it's at 5 for a third time, a thousand mods could see it and laugh but be unable to mod it up whereas just one wandering Anal Retentive can take a dislike to it and mod it down accordingly, all while farting in a high-pitched whistle.
"...Amongst other things, the proposed law will require the creation of 'do-not-install beacon products' (do-not-ask, you really don't want to know), force P2P apps to include warning labels that users may be exposed to pornography..."
In that case, surely the entire Internet should be forced to carry a warning that users may be exposed to pornography.
Actually, the RIAA had better put a specific warning on their website because, as soon as I manage to hack it again, they'll be going Goat Sex themselves.
It is quite hard to get hold of but I run a very small online book business in the UK, PristineBooks.com, and have 20 new copies selling for $27 or £17 or 27 Euros payable via PayPal and including free shipping to anywhere in the world. Next day delivery in the UK, three days to mainland Europe and around one week to the US, Asia and Australia.
Apologies for the shameless plug but I guessed that the out-of-print status of this book might cause a lot of frustration to anyone who finds this discussion interesting.
Anyone who's interesting can contact me via the PristineBooks.com site, cheers.
Smith can be entertaining to watch but I just can't imagine his hyperactive persona portraying a robot with any of the dignity Asimov ascribed to them.
Certainly, I can't see him matching Haley Joel Osment's performance in AI.
The article mentions that the film adaption is going to basically be a murder mystery, I just hope that Smith is going to play the cop/private dick/whatever rather than one of Asimov's real stars.
I live in a medium-sized town in the urban central belt of Scotland, only 10 miles from Edinburgh, and I cannot get any form of broadband connection
I'm surprised to hear that, I would have thought that anywhere with an urban population density would have been considered worth cabling. What about the recent enhancement BT made to their ADSL tech, extending the ADSL reach of each of their exchanges? Surely, if you're only 10 miles from here, you must be quite close to an exchange?
I realize that there a still quite a few exchanges that haven't yet been upgraded to ADSL capability but, in order to find out which ones they should upgrade next, BT launched a media campaign to find out where the demand was.
They're calling the campaign "We Know You Want It", you can find out about it in this article from the Register: Broadband - 'We know you want it'.
An excerpt from the article:
The scheme - launched earlier this summer - allows people to register their interest in broadband even if they are in an area currently not wired up for ADSL.
So, get out there and encourage your friends and neighbours to add their names and spread the word, particularly to local businesses, no matter how small.
If it's any consolation to you, I actually had to move from Ireland to Scotland to get Broadband, my home-run business depends on it. So much for the Celtic Tiger.
In the other trial location, the price is £15 for residential and business users.
Thanks, I only checked one area. I wonder whether they're basing the difference on increased installation costs or the presumption that customers in the more expensive area will be willing and able to pay more.
Also the bandwidth is higher than the cable offerings, based on the download comparisions (no actual figures I quoted for bandwidth).
I noticed that too but if they're not going to give actual figures I'd take it with a grain of salt. One file download comparison seems to suggest a speed of approximately 1.5MB but they could be basing that on a particular file that's already in their local cache or some other form of pig-in-a-pokery. Not including actual speed is VERY suspicious; their site as a whole is very well put together, not including the speeds HAS to be more than just a simple oversight.
IF (and that's a big if) this goes nationwide then it could be that people in rural areas have better broadband access than people in urban areas currently enjoy.
Well, if they offer faster speeds I, and I expect many other people in Scottish cities, won't have many reservations about switching from our current cable and ADSL packages. Having said that, I know that Telewest's current base of installed modems can actually be remotely configured to provide speeds of almost 10MBs, I think hackers temporarily found a way to get their 512k connections up to 8MBs or so.
Of course if this continues beyond the trial then expect to see the prices increase significantly because the trial is being subsidised by various bodies.
Perhaps not, the subsidisation might be being used to cover the experiment's fixed costs in order to produce consumer prices that mirror that actual planned prices for a larger large-scale rollout (where the fixed costs are divided between a much larger userbase).
That's not quite true. With the wires-only products quite a few ISPs in the UK do a 3 month minimum contract now.
Really? That's interesting; the lower these minimums go, the better it is for people like myself who like to move around a lot or even just the increasing number of people who can no longer afford to get on the UK property ladder and are forced to remain in the nightmare world of short-term letting.
Ideally, these companies should see their initial invest in phone, TV and broadband wiring as an investment in the future of the property rather than one specific customer.
Notwithstanding the monopoly they might be able to get among really rural customers, they're going to have a tough time gaining much of a toe-hold in the Scottish market.
They intended to charge £25 for the basic residential service, Telewest already offer a very good cable broadband service: £25 for 512kb, £35 for 1MB (although, to be eligible for those prices you need to be a subscriber to their at least their basic tv and telephone line packages which costs £11 a month, pretty good value in it's own right).
Two quite nice features of Hydro's service are the fact that they don't charge a connection fee and their minimum service term is only ONE MONTH!! That's as opposed to the minimum one year all of the cable and ADSL providers insist upon.
Why this DOES hurt Microsoft
on
LinuXbox Boots
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· Score: 3, Informative
It won't bug MS. They may lose money on a sale, but it's at least some money back instead of no sale at all.
No, at their current manufacturing costs they genuinely DO lose money on each unit. I understand the argument that an Xbox sitting on a shelf unsold costs them more money but that logic is inherently flawed. Each time a batch of, say, 100,000 begins to run out they must manufacture another batch or risk damaging their supply network i.e. losing their hard won shelf-space down in Electronic Boutique or whatever. Failing to maintain a constant supply of their product is equivalent to withdrawing their product from the market.
Also, the greater number of installed users, the more developers they can attract and therefore they sell a greater number of expensive dev kits and licences.
That's the best bit: even if only a tiny handful of people buy Xboxes to use as Mail servers or whatever, the perception of a solid userbase crumbles. Before this, Microsoft could legitimately say "We can prove we have one millions users" and developers could base their decisions on that. Now, however, it's going to be at the back of everybody's minds that there is some sort of erosion of the userbase going on. Even if claim to know the unknowable and put out an estimate that only 0.009% of Xboxes are Linuxed, developers will disregard that and come up with their own estimates that err heavily on the side of safety... it's their development costs after all.
Buying an XBox does not hurt Microsoft.
Buying an Xbox but not buying any games or subscribing to their online service DOES hurt Microsoft.
Spreading the knowledge that Xboxes make nifty mail servers hurts them even more.
"Transform those fast forward and rewind features into skip features. The RomeMP3 can be inserted directly into your car deck and controlled with the car deck's controls!"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm willing to bet that an overwhelming majority of the artists that the RIAA "represents" are against this whole "let's sue our fans" thing. Michael Jackson spoke out and denounced the RIAA's actions, yet I remember seeing several of his songs listed
I'm just shocked to see Green Day on that list.
IANAT (I Am Not A Teenager) but I seem to remember them being relatively left-wing/anti-corporate, didn't they speak out against this bullshit too?
It looks to me as if the RIAA are deliberately including the work of objecting artists in their "relatively short list of files", perhaps as a PR defense against those artists making further noise i.e. the RIAA will be able to say "but look, we've caught all these who actually downloaded your work, we are merely your servants protecting your interests, attacking us is hypocritical".
Or perhaps the RIAA is playing an elaborate game of chicken, daring artists to stick their necks all the way out. Very few artists with a contract really want to risk losing corporate patronage, not even Michael Jackson. There is at least one artist with real balls that I know of who made sure to stay clear from all that bullshit right from the beginning, hopefully we'll see more of that independent artistic spirit re-awaking in the wake of Enron etc.
For a while I was using the eval version on my home Squid cache to asist in blocking porn site popups while not preventing intentional porn surfing.
It's not the choice element I object to but, rather, the fact that choice is skewed by lack of privacy.
Many an enlightened employer has put in an unrestricted DS3 connection for the office and expected that the employees will do the right thing (call it self-censorship, call it responsibility, whatever), only to start reviewing usage reports and discover that the sites that get hit most often are autopr0n and QuietSurfer.
"Many an enlightended employer.." Have you got actual figures on that? In my (admittedly limited) experience, trust extended to workers is rewarded. Anything above basic monkey-work requires the employee to be self-motivated to at least some extent, management "crack-downs" may temporarily boost productivity on the shop floor but, in the longer run, this disempowerment shifts responsibility away from the worker and onto management, a teacher/child relationship which ends up consuming vast amounts of management time. Work become a "while the cats away" game.
I'm not saying that some people don't abuse trust at times but this is generally a personal discipline issue that the person concerned is struggling with and that his co-workers and managers are all too aware of: if someone isn't pulling his weight, it's pretty obvious without having to discover through Internet logs. If he can't develop the self-discipline to do his job without requiring vast amounts of supervision, that worker actually belongs in a teacher/child relationship.
That's the point at which the company has to decide whether they do teacher/child or adult/adult (you can't be both types of company)and act accordingly, hiring and retaining the appropriate staff. I have no doubt as to which model is more efficient.
And what exactly are you doing accessing this site from work, using the shareholder's computer and bandwidth?
I don't buy that argument either. All too many slashdotters, especially during the whole dotcom hallucination, will have personally experienced the culture of underpaid overtime promoted by management.
Most people in both the US and the UK are working far too many hours, in stressful, understaffed and underfunded environments but one concession that has evolved is that they can conduct a certain amount of personal business (paying bills etc) online, reading their kids' school reports, stuff that would have required time-off or at least sane going-home times in the past.
Okay, checking out a political site or reading the news might not be absolutely vital but we all work to a rhythm, with varying levels of focus throughout the day and a certain amount of off-time and reward. Some might call this goofing off but both the quality of your work and your sanity would disintegrate if you try to apply yourself fully every second of the day.
That's just how humans work best, much as that thought might upset the poor auld shareholders.
Also, to complain about this use of "the shareholder's computer and bandwidth" is ridiculous when your sweating over that computer 60 hours a week for said shareholder and probably "up-skilling" yourself with an O'Reilly book on your own time during the weekend.
Or just wait until you go home and access the "Dean for President" site on your own time.
Again, you might not have that much time at home if you're working insane modern hours - better to build that sort of thing into your at-work rhythm.
> I don't care if I send her ten bucks she doesn't deserve,
> if the media picks up on it and runs a heart-warming story
> about how a bunch of geeks came to the aid of a poor kid
> being abused by a big bully trade organization.
> If anyone pipes up and blows the true story, all the better.
Brilliant idea and you're right in thinking that it's just the kind of heart-warming crap that would go down well with the American public but you're forgetting exactly that the same creeps who own the music companies own all the news sources with any kind of reach. No ambitious journalist or editor who values his career is going to run with a story that he thinks might blot his copybook.
Corporate America doesn't piss on Corporate America, just Americans.
For what it's worth, though, I think we should still do it, I'll contribute. And, hey, maybe we should buy her an ipod.
I committed to not buying music
I used to buy a lot of CDs but, gradually, came to resent both the inflated prices here in Europe and the attitude of the music industry to their customers. So, I stopped buying CDs for myself.
I continued, however, buying CDs as gifts for others; it's so easy to order them online and have them sent to a friend/relative/the girl of the moment with a nice message. Everyone likes music whereas if you send a book it probably won't, with the best intentions in the world, actually get read.
But no more. I am now on an official boycott, the RIAA is getting no more money from me.
I am sickened by the way they singled out a family living in a project was singled out(and I'm aware of how much tougher it is to be poor in America).
I am appalled the obvious way in which, as soon as they saw it turning into a PR nightmare, they quickly arranged some sort of deal and concocted these statements from the mother. The whole thing stinks.
Pity the kid who's about to become the only teenager in her neighborhood who's ability to explore new music is stunted by specific legal agreement.
And pity my friends too: they'll be getting books from now on.
Does this particular story add anything to the debate...
Yes, it's FUNNY.
No matter how many facts I know about the hypocrisy and idiocy of the patent system OR Microsoft OR the Government, I am heartened by anecdotes that do a good job of illustrating and bringing to life those facts.
BTW, this patent trepasses on one I filed last month covering pepper-shakers generally. I'll be contacting each of you individually to let you know how you can bring your kitchens into licensing compliance.
Donnacha
Hilarious, for those of you who can't be bothered wading through the application here is the important bit, the actual "what is claimed part":
What is claimed is: 1. A construction with novelty value in enhancing the known functioning of a pepper shaker in the shaking dispensing of the condiment pepper upon foods, said construction comprising a hollow simulated dog of ceramic construction material sized to be grasped during shaking use in the hand of a user, a body with depending legs of said shape effective to provide a non-use condition thereof on a support surface with said body in a clearance position above said support surface to facilitate the grasping about said body in said hand of said user, said hollowness of said shape delimited by an external surface bounding a storage compartment for a supply of said pepper condiment, a supply of pepper condiment in said storage compartment, a hindquarters of said simulated dog shape, and plural pepper condiment dispensing openings characterized by embodiment in said hindquarters and in communication with said stored supply of pepper condiment, and operative up and down shaking of said grasped shape by said user effective to dispense pepper condiment through said hindquarters dispensing openings upon foods, whereby there is a cognitive synergism caused by similarity between the words pepper and pooper contributing to novelty value in the advertising of said shaker.
You can tell this guy isn't too used to writing patents because he's specified far too much, right down to stuff that's trademark-related; any manufacturer who wanted to get around his patent would find it quite easy but, somehow, I don't think they'll bother.
Donnacha
"...offering users a choice of viewing a site and having it logged, or not viewing it"
This may sound like quite an elegant solution, especially compared to the outright blocking of sites not recognised by their master database but this could well end up creating a far more dangerous climate of self-censorship.
For instance, if a perfectly legimate but not "mainstream" site, say an anti-war one, hasn't yet made it onto their database, you have to accept that your boss will be notified of your visit and made aware of your doubts about the government.
In that situation, most people will just give up and put the corporate propaganda feed-pipe back in their mouths.
Donnacha
This may seem, at first, to be a tad off-topic but actually relates directly to the matter under discussion: whether laughing at this kid is just plain wrong and we shouldn't do it, if it's kind of wrong and we should buy him ipods to assuage our guilt or if it's fair game and the kid should get the Hell over it and enjoy all the resultant opportunities that seem to be heading his way.
I'm of the latter opinion and was one of the first people to sign the petition to help him on his way. Seriously, this whole thing is not only going to pay his way through college but will probably get him his first blow job too.
I genuinely wish him well but, yes, I did make the Fatakin joke. I thought it was funny and, you know what, I still think it's funny.
I have now, HOWEVER, received the moderation record for that post and it's clear that not only those who posted the follow-up posts but also the Slashdot moderators are somewhat split on this whole "humour" thing.
As an interesting testament to just how subjective humour is, I list the mod results for your delectation and viewing pleasure:
1. Starting with a +1, it gets modded up three times, +3 FUNNY, bringing the total up to 4.
2. Some anal retentive mods it down, -1 OVERRATED, bringing the total down to 3.
3. The Karmic balance re-adjusts as some decent soul mods it up, +1 FUNNY, total 4.
4. Spitting in the face of karma, some other anal retentive, possibly connected in some foul and perverted way to the first, mods it down, -1 OVERRATED, total 3.
5. A sudden flood of well-balanced and non-perverted moderators mod it up twice, +2 FUNNY, total 5. Woo HOOOOOO, jackpot!!!!!!
6. My sudden gain is unexpectedly HALVED as one of the post's FUNNY mods is withdrawn "..possibly because the moderator nullified his moderation by posting to the discussion himself". Sadly, we are reminded once again that free speech has it's price. -1 UNMOD, total 4.
7. Never mind, another FUNNY mod, +1, total 5 mo' fo's!!!!
8. AAAAAAhhhhhh, two flaming S.O.B.s, possibly with Al Queda funding, rate me down, -2 TROLL, total 3. What the heck? I can see how this post might be seen as a troll (speaking your mind usually is) but that post was obviously a JOKE.
9. +1 FUNNY, total 4. Although, there's a possibility that this mod was just trolling.
10. -1 FLAMEBAIT, ?????, total 3.
11. +2 FUNNY, total 5.
Of course, now that it's at 5 for a third time, a thousand mods could see it and laugh but be unable to mod it up whereas just one wandering Anal Retentive can take a dislike to it and mod it down accordingly, all while farting in a high-pitched whistle.
Cheers,
Donnacha
They should cast him as Anakin's long lost brother, Fatakin.
This is unbelievable.
Just when Slashdot had managed to reduce the number of stories they repeat, they've gone and taken a post made last week in response to the original Google/Kazaa/RIAA story and repeated it as a story in it's own right!
C'mon, how about some actual News for Nerds?
"...Amongst other things, the proposed law will require the creation of 'do-not-install beacon products' (do-not-ask, you really don't want to know), force P2P apps to include warning labels that users may be exposed to pornography..."
In that case, surely the entire Internet should be forced to carry a warning that users may be exposed to pornography.
Actually, the RIAA had better put a specific warning on their website because, as soon as I manage to hack it again, they'll be going Goat Sex themselves.
Booooooooooooooooooooommmmmmm!!!!!!
Does the U.S. government make worldwide law now?
Where have you been for the past two years?
This is hilarious:
Before I even had a chance to scroll down the page to look at the DMCA message, I noticed that the Adwords are full of links to Kazaa Lite!
I guess Google's financial team is a little tougher than their search team.
Or, indeed, people who can spell.
Whoops, that should have read "Anyone who's interested can contact me".
Of course, interesting people should also feel free to contact me :)
Apologies for the shameless plug but I guessed that the out-of-print status of this book might cause a lot of frustration to anyone who finds this discussion interesting.
Anyone who's interesting can contact me via the PristineBooks.com site, cheers.
Smith can be entertaining to watch but I just can't imagine his hyperactive persona portraying a robot with any of the dignity Asimov ascribed to them.
Certainly, I can't see him matching Haley Joel Osment's performance in AI.
The article mentions that the film adaption is going to basically be a murder mystery, I just hope that Smith is going to play the cop/private dick/whatever rather than one of Asimov's real stars.
I'm surprised to hear that, I would have thought that anywhere with an urban population density would have been considered worth cabling. What about the recent enhancement BT made to their ADSL tech, extending the ADSL reach of each of their exchanges? Surely, if you're only 10 miles from here, you must be quite close to an exchange?
I realize that there a still quite a few exchanges that haven't yet been upgraded to ADSL capability but, in order to find out which ones they should upgrade next, BT launched a media campaign to find out where the demand was.
They're calling the campaign "We Know You Want It", you can find out about it in this article from the Register: Broadband - 'We know you want it'.
An excerpt from the article:
So, get out there and encourage your friends and neighbours to add their names and spread the word, particularly to local businesses, no matter how small.If it's any consolation to you, I actually had to move from Ireland to Scotland to get Broadband, my home-run business depends on it. So much for the Celtic Tiger.
Ideally, these companies should see their initial invest in phone, TV and broadband wiring as an investment in the future of the property rather than one specific customer.
Notwithstanding the monopoly they might be able to get among really rural customers, they're going to have a tough time gaining much of a toe-hold in the Scottish market.
They intended to charge £25 for the basic residential service, Telewest already offer a very good cable broadband service: £25 for 512kb, £35 for 1MB (although, to be eligible for those prices you need to be a subscriber to their at least their basic tv and telephone line packages which costs £11 a month, pretty good value in it's own right).
Two quite nice features of Hydro's service are the fact that they don't charge a connection fee and their minimum service term is only ONE MONTH!! That's as opposed to the minimum one year all of the cable and ADSL providers insist upon.
No, at their current manufacturing costs they genuinely DO lose money on each unit. I understand the argument that an Xbox sitting on a shelf unsold costs them more money but that logic is inherently flawed. Each time a batch of, say, 100,000 begins to run out they must manufacture another batch or risk damaging their supply network i.e. losing their hard won shelf-space down in Electronic Boutique or whatever. Failing to maintain a constant supply of their product is equivalent to withdrawing their product from the market.
That's the best bit: even if only a tiny handful of people buy Xboxes to use as Mail servers or whatever, the perception of a solid userbase crumbles. Before this, Microsoft could legitimately say "We can prove we have one millions users" and developers could base their decisions on that. Now, however, it's going to be at the back of everybody's minds that there is some sort of erosion of the userbase going on. Even if claim to know the unknowable and put out an estimate that only 0.009% of Xboxes are Linuxed, developers will disregard that and come up with their own estimates that err heavily on the side of safety... it's their development costs after all.
Buying an Xbox but not buying any games or subscribing to their online service DOES hurt Microsoft.
Spreading the knowledge that Xboxes make nifty mail servers hurts them even more.
From the RomeMP3 Home Page: