Because when they raided (or rather, greased some palms so the FBI would raid) easybuy2000 and other similar websites that sold smart card writers, they took the customer databases and sued everyone who bought one. Nevermind there are a ton of legit uses for smartcard writers (though there probably are a lot more illegitimate ones.)
Keep in mind, Apple has created a very strong brand with the iPod. People don't just want an MP3 player, they want an iPod. Also, I'm willing to bet that the iRiver player requires a lot of tinkering (like every other MP3 player I've used except the iPod) to get the tags to show up, upload music, etc. The iPod just automagically works, auto-syncing your music library with your iPod. Oh, and it charges the batteries while it's doing that too. There's more to a "feature set" than tech specs. The iRiver may be okay for slashdot tech geeks, but get your sister one and she won't be able to figure out how to upload music without you showing her 20 times.
Unfortunately, US copyright law does not make that distinction. If you have something someone else made, and they didn't give or sell it to you, that's all that matters. It's still theft. The best example is photography; you can duplicate a photograph, even though you didn't take (as in steal) the original, it's still theft. Stop trying to be so condescending to people, it just makes you look like an idiot when you're wrong.
Well the spreadsheet example is probably a bad one:) What I meant was, it's easier (and cheaper) to sit a business school grad down at a Windows machine and let them be productive than to train them to use Linux and haggle with any problems that come up. On a major project like LotR, they have gobs of money to spend and have an entire staff of sysadmins and programmers to deal with issues like this. They can afford to spend money on customized systems because they know they'll make it back at the box office tenfold. Windows does its job the way it's supposed to on desktop applications, and that's really all that matters.
They don't use Windows because it's a lot harder to write programs and you're pretty much locked into MFC if you want to write anything reasonably complex. On Linux, you get easier access to hardware without having to worry if some of the "black boxes" in Windows are going to get fucked up by messing with certain things. I've said this before and I'll say it again: Windows is not better than Linux, nor is Linux better than Windows. If all you're doing is entering stuff into a spreadsheet and surfing the net, Windows is better. If you need to write a lot of custom applications and don't want to spend years doing it, Linux is the way to go. Different uses demand different tools, which is why Linux will probably never seriously crack the desktop market, but will be (is?) a force to be reckoned with in a lot of "middleware" applications.
Well, all we have to do is wait for the political climate to turn against large corporations and we'll see a new wave of trustbusting. Besides, with corporations taking more and more these days, it's just a matter of time before people get pissed off enough to do something. This situation is nothing new, it happened in the first part of last century and will probably happen again in the first part of this one.
Response to disclaimer: I'll probably get lynched for saying this, but Gates is actually not a bad guy. Really. He's already given away somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion, roughly half his fortune, and is actively working on giving the rest of it away. He's said in the past he doesn't want to leave anything to his kids; he wants to give it all away before he dies so they have to make their own fortunes. If anything, it seems like a nice system of wealth redistribution; as his favorite charities help out some of the poorest people in the world. His company (in which he has little say in business decisions anyway these days) may not be very nice but I think it's wrong to characterize him as evil.
Sure. The more people buy, the better the people they're buying them from do; but also the better the company that shipped the goods, the stores that sell the goods, the advertising company that did the marketing campaign, the advertising company for the store, etc. do. These companies are staffed by blue and white collar workers, and because people buy lots of stuff, they get to keep their jobs. I'm not saying you should go out and spend beyond your limits, simply that not consuming is bad for things. Massive debt is always bad, but trying to convince people they should not perform an important role in the economy is just stupid.
Agreed. New Orleans is actually pretty damn disgusting; the French Quarter is covered in this black sludge and Bourbon Street is as commercial as it gets. The rest of the city looks like... any other industrialized city, as NO has been for the past few hundred years. Bad example of a beautiful city; the place is a dirty tourist trap:)
You act like consumerism is a bad thing. Consumerism is what drives economies. A steady increase in consumer spending almost inevitably leads to a boom period for the economy. When people stop consuming at a high rate, the economy heads down. It's also really, really stupid to have "buy nothing day" on the biggest shopping day of the year. The amount of money flying around on the day after Thanksgiving are so high that companies are not going to notice if a few broke hippies don't shop that day. If you want anyone to notice your stand against The Man, you should do it on a slow shopping day when more people might be willing to comply with you.
Also, the cool thing about America is that there is no single culture. There are urban cultures, rural cultures, religious cultures, and so on. Each one draws from a different set of influences. America has no defining culture because our population is so diverse. Each culture has its own different food, literature, art, music, etc. Mexican-American culture is significantly different from Mexican culture.
You also seem to be mixing up the iconography of a culture with the true values of a culture. I think most Italians would probably be offended if all you could think about Italy was pasta. All the Coke analogy proves is that Coke has been successful at selling their image. Everyone knows Coke is from America, whether it's an important part of our culture or not, so you just kind of make the relation.
Personally, I plan to make my kids - should I ever have any - aware that I'll be logging everything they do on their computer until the day that they move out, and if they want to move out before they're 18, they have to become emancipated, which I will cheerfully assist them with.
Sounds like you don't want kids anyway. Do us a favor and keep out of the gene pool, it'll make all of us happier.
Anyone who wants public faith in the voting system over accuracy and security is opening the door to election fraud. Unfortunately for them, contempt levels with the government are so high right now (especially after Dubya's little fib about WMD in Iraq) that we don't trust anything they say. Stop lying to the people and they'll trust you. Until then, we'll continue to ask questions to make sure we're getting a fair deal and not a rigged election (well, they're all pretty much rigged anyway with party-based gerrymandering of voting districts, but that's a whole other issue.:)
Hah yes except Walt Disney was hardly a model American. He was a backstabbing cheat who made his way to the top through intimidation and lies. Let's also not forget the egomania that so engrossed Walt that it inadvertently led to a cult of personality surrounding him. And Walt was kinda anti-copyright because he got screwed over by copyright laws when he was starting out, but after he was rich he bent them to his advantage.
Zionist conspiracy theories are about as plausable as alien abductions. First off, the Jews did not decide to settle in Israel, the UN basically freaking gave it to them. Nevermind though, that they have no less claim to the land than the arabs, christians, anyone. Israel has been contested land for the past 2000 years, don't expect it to change anytime soon. I also don't blame them for being paranoid and having a massive military; if they didn't, they would have been bulldozed a long time ago.
Actually, no. The republicans won't come out and say it, but they want an absolute minimalist government (with a large military to protect us from the rest of the world) and are willing to do anything to get it. The idea of cutting welfare, medicare etc. would be political suicide, so they give out a bunch of tax cuts and suffocate those programs with a lack of money. They're pretty much intentionally mismanaging the national budget to eliminate social programs.
I totally agree. No matter how much stupid mythology you include, you still have to rely on basic storytelling fundamentals, which the Wachowskis don't seem to have time to squeeze in between the orgies of special effects. The first movie was so popular because of the premise. But now, the premise is old so they need to rely on filling out their characters, and not flooding the stage with a hundred new ones (a la Reloaded) I didn't hate Reloaded, it was a fun movie, but nowhere near as cool as the first.
Actually "Episode IV" wasn't added to SW until ESB came out. It was intended to be a standalone movie but it was so popular Lucas did two more. And then three more.
Hackers can't even agree on the definition of the word "hacker," why would they agree on a logo? Hell, they can't even decide the name of an operating system, hence the GNU/Linux BS. The logo should, nonetheless, be something that all hackers can identify with. That's why I propose the logo for hackerdom should be a hand, because it is a lifelong love partner for most of them.
I know you think you're a smart shopper, but also consider this: which company is gonna be around in 5 years? Some company with 'i' in their name? Or the company that started the whole damn iEverything craze in the first place? 5 years from now, is the iRiver going to have working drivers? Or is it going to fall into the abyss of neglect like so many other products of the same ilk? Your line of thinking is "It's cheaper and the numbers say they're the same so it's gotta be better!" Not to mention the iPod has that "Oh wow those things are super cool. I'm a hot chick, will you have sex with me?" factor. You and your stupid iRiver will be jerking in the corner while me and my iPod are tapping some of dat azz.
It's not the specs, stupid. Anyone can make an MP3 player with a hard drive. That's easy. The iPod is so cool because it works the way you expect it to. The interface is so incredibly nice and easy to work with that you can pick up an iPod and figure it out within 10 seconds. This is what the competitors fail to copy; their interfaces are clunky and not very intuitive. If you get your boners off big spec numbers, then Apple doesn't make anything you can't get for cheaper elsewhere. If you just want to listen to some fucking music and not have to fuck with drivers, software, etc. (the "I Plug it in and it Works" factor) the iPod is for you.
Also consider the source of the article. PC World are blind, rabid Mac-haters. Show me some third party benchmarks and I'll give a shit. Well, no, still probably not even then. Point being that these stupid holy wars mean nothing, absolutely nothing in the real world. Let's play out a scenario:
Geek: My Mac is better than your Winblows machine! Hot chick: Um, right.
How about another? Ok.
Geek: Linux rulez all! BSD is dead! Boss: I don't care. We bought 5000 Windows licenses. We use Windows. Geek: I refuse to use Windows, it stifles my Linux fag superiority complex. Boss: Ok, you're fired.
This is about how much these things matter. Get over it.
No, the oracle was replaced. They used her replacement in Enter the Matrix and wrote off the new actress with some retarded one-line explanation. Hopefully that won't be part of the movie, but the game is supposedly Matrix canon, so that's probably the official story.
You watch too many movies:) Years from now I won't give a flying fuck whether or not I told some company their software is fucked up, unless of course telling them that landed me in jail and prison bitch to a 6'6" black guy named Tiny. I'd probably care about that. It's not a fork in the road of life, it's a situation where the guy has nothing to gain and lots to lose, so the sane thing to do is just say "fuck it." It's not going to land him a job (if indeed it is Blackboard software, as it's produced by an educational institution) and it's not going to endear him to anyone. If his school finds out he's been hacking the homework system, expulsion with no questions asked. You can be idealistic all you want, but the simple truth of the matter is that this is the way things are. Legal counsel would tell you the same thing I'm saying: Don't start trouble where there is none.
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Because when they raided (or rather, greased some palms so the FBI would raid) easybuy2000 and other similar websites that sold smart card writers, they took the customer databases and sued everyone who bought one. Nevermind there are a ton of legit uses for smartcard writers (though there probably are a lot more illegitimate ones.)
And this whole exchange is a perfect example of why people buy TiVOs.
Keep in mind, Apple has created a very strong brand with the iPod. People don't just want an MP3 player, they want an iPod. Also, I'm willing to bet that the iRiver player requires a lot of tinkering (like every other MP3 player I've used except the iPod) to get the tags to show up, upload music, etc. The iPod just automagically works, auto-syncing your music library with your iPod. Oh, and it charges the batteries while it's doing that too. There's more to a "feature set" than tech specs. The iRiver may be okay for slashdot tech geeks, but get your sister one and she won't be able to figure out how to upload music without you showing her 20 times.
Unfortunately, US copyright law does not make that distinction. If you have something someone else made, and they didn't give or sell it to you, that's all that matters. It's still theft. The best example is photography; you can duplicate a photograph, even though you didn't take (as in steal) the original, it's still theft. Stop trying to be so condescending to people, it just makes you look like an idiot when you're wrong.
Well the spreadsheet example is probably a bad one :) What I meant was, it's easier (and cheaper) to sit a business school grad down at a Windows machine and let them be productive than to train them to use Linux and haggle with any problems that come up. On a major project like LotR, they have gobs of money to spend and have an entire staff of sysadmins and programmers to deal with issues like this. They can afford to spend money on customized systems because they know they'll make it back at the box office tenfold. Windows does its job the way it's supposed to on desktop applications, and that's really all that matters.
They don't use Windows because it's a lot harder to write programs and you're pretty much locked into MFC if you want to write anything reasonably complex. On Linux, you get easier access to hardware without having to worry if some of the "black boxes" in Windows are going to get fucked up by messing with certain things. I've said this before and I'll say it again: Windows is not better than Linux, nor is Linux better than Windows. If all you're doing is entering stuff into a spreadsheet and surfing the net, Windows is better. If you need to write a lot of custom applications and don't want to spend years doing it, Linux is the way to go. Different uses demand different tools, which is why Linux will probably never seriously crack the desktop market, but will be (is?) a force to be reckoned with in a lot of "middleware" applications.
Well, all we have to do is wait for the political climate to turn against large corporations and we'll see a new wave of trustbusting. Besides, with corporations taking more and more these days, it's just a matter of time before people get pissed off enough to do something. This situation is nothing new, it happened in the first part of last century and will probably happen again in the first part of this one.
Response to disclaimer: I'll probably get lynched for saying this, but Gates is actually not a bad guy. Really. He's already given away somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion, roughly half his fortune, and is actively working on giving the rest of it away. He's said in the past he doesn't want to leave anything to his kids; he wants to give it all away before he dies so they have to make their own fortunes. If anything, it seems like a nice system of wealth redistribution; as his favorite charities help out some of the poorest people in the world. His company (in which he has little say in business decisions anyway these days) may not be very nice but I think it's wrong to characterize him as evil.
You forgot Futurama too.
Sure. The more people buy, the better the people they're buying them from do; but also the better the company that shipped the goods, the stores that sell the goods, the advertising company that did the marketing campaign, the advertising company for the store, etc. do. These companies are staffed by blue and white collar workers, and because people buy lots of stuff, they get to keep their jobs. I'm not saying you should go out and spend beyond your limits, simply that not consuming is bad for things. Massive debt is always bad, but trying to convince people they should not perform an important role in the economy is just stupid.
Agreed. New Orleans is actually pretty damn disgusting; the French Quarter is covered in this black sludge and Bourbon Street is as commercial as it gets. The rest of the city looks like... any other industrialized city, as NO has been for the past few hundred years. Bad example of a beautiful city; the place is a dirty tourist trap :)
You act like consumerism is a bad thing. Consumerism is what drives economies. A steady increase in consumer spending almost inevitably leads to a boom period for the economy. When people stop consuming at a high rate, the economy heads down. It's also really, really stupid to have "buy nothing day" on the biggest shopping day of the year. The amount of money flying around on the day after Thanksgiving are so high that companies are not going to notice if a few broke hippies don't shop that day. If you want anyone to notice your stand against The Man, you should do it on a slow shopping day when more people might be willing to comply with you.
Also, the cool thing about America is that there is no single culture. There are urban cultures, rural cultures, religious cultures, and so on. Each one draws from a different set of influences. America has no defining culture because our population is so diverse. Each culture has its own different food, literature, art, music, etc. Mexican-American culture is significantly different from Mexican culture.
You also seem to be mixing up the iconography of a culture with the true values of a culture. I think most Italians would probably be offended if all you could think about Italy was pasta. All the Coke analogy proves is that Coke has been successful at selling their image. Everyone knows Coke is from America, whether it's an important part of our culture or not, so you just kind of make the relation.
Sounds like you don't want kids anyway. Do us a favor and keep out of the gene pool, it'll make all of us happier.
Anyone who wants public faith in the voting system over accuracy and security is opening the door to election fraud. Unfortunately for them, contempt levels with the government are so high right now (especially after Dubya's little fib about WMD in Iraq) that we don't trust anything they say. Stop lying to the people and they'll trust you. Until then, we'll continue to ask questions to make sure we're getting a fair deal and not a rigged election (well, they're all pretty much rigged anyway with party-based gerrymandering of voting districts, but that's a whole other issue. :)
Hah yes except Walt Disney was hardly a model American. He was a backstabbing cheat who made his way to the top through intimidation and lies. Let's also not forget the egomania that so engrossed Walt that it inadvertently led to a cult of personality surrounding him. And Walt was kinda anti-copyright because he got screwed over by copyright laws when he was starting out, but after he was rich he bent them to his advantage.
Zionist conspiracy theories are about as plausable as alien abductions. First off, the Jews did not decide to settle in Israel, the UN basically freaking gave it to them. Nevermind though, that they have no less claim to the land than the arabs, christians, anyone. Israel has been contested land for the past 2000 years, don't expect it to change anytime soon. I also don't blame them for being paranoid and having a massive military; if they didn't, they would have been bulldozed a long time ago.
Actually, no. The republicans won't come out and say it, but they want an absolute minimalist government (with a large military to protect us from the rest of the world) and are willing to do anything to get it. The idea of cutting welfare, medicare etc. would be political suicide, so they give out a bunch of tax cuts and suffocate those programs with a lack of money. They're pretty much intentionally mismanaging the national budget to eliminate social programs.
I totally agree. No matter how much stupid mythology you include, you still have to rely on basic storytelling fundamentals, which the Wachowskis don't seem to have time to squeeze in between the orgies of special effects. The first movie was so popular because of the premise. But now, the premise is old so they need to rely on filling out their characters, and not flooding the stage with a hundred new ones (a la Reloaded) I didn't hate Reloaded, it was a fun movie, but nowhere near as cool as the first.
Actually "Episode IV" wasn't added to SW until ESB came out. It was intended to be a standalone movie but it was so popular Lucas did two more. And then three more.
Hackers can't even agree on the definition of the word "hacker," why would they agree on a logo? Hell, they can't even decide the name of an operating system, hence the GNU/Linux BS. The logo should, nonetheless, be something that all hackers can identify with. That's why I propose the logo for hackerdom should be a hand, because it is a lifelong love partner for most of them.
I know you think you're a smart shopper, but also consider this: which company is gonna be around in 5 years? Some company with 'i' in their name? Or the company that started the whole damn iEverything craze in the first place? 5 years from now, is the iRiver going to have working drivers? Or is it going to fall into the abyss of neglect like so many other products of the same ilk? Your line of thinking is "It's cheaper and the numbers say they're the same so it's gotta be better!" Not to mention the iPod has that "Oh wow those things are super cool. I'm a hot chick, will you have sex with me?" factor. You and your stupid iRiver will be jerking in the corner while me and my iPod are tapping some of dat azz.
It's not the specs, stupid. Anyone can make an MP3 player with a hard drive. That's easy. The iPod is so cool because it works the way you expect it to. The interface is so incredibly nice and easy to work with that you can pick up an iPod and figure it out within 10 seconds. This is what the competitors fail to copy; their interfaces are clunky and not very intuitive. If you get your boners off big spec numbers, then Apple doesn't make anything you can't get for cheaper elsewhere. If you just want to listen to some fucking music and not have to fuck with drivers, software, etc. (the "I Plug it in and it Works" factor) the iPod is for you.
Also consider the source of the article. PC World are blind, rabid Mac-haters. Show me some third party benchmarks and I'll give a shit. Well, no, still probably not even then. Point being that these stupid holy wars mean nothing, absolutely nothing in the real world. Let's play out a scenario:
Geek: My Mac is better than your Winblows machine!
Hot chick: Um, right.
How about another? Ok.
Geek: Linux rulez all! BSD is dead!
Boss: I don't care. We bought 5000 Windows licenses. We use Windows.
Geek: I refuse to use Windows, it stifles my Linux fag superiority complex.
Boss: Ok, you're fired.
This is about how much these things matter. Get over it.
No, the oracle was replaced. They used her replacement in Enter the Matrix and wrote off the new actress with some retarded one-line explanation. Hopefully that won't be part of the movie, but the game is supposedly Matrix canon, so that's probably the official story.
I second that. Or third it, as the case may be.
You watch too many movies :) Years from now I won't give a flying fuck whether or not I told some company their software is fucked up, unless of course telling them that landed me in jail and prison bitch to a 6'6" black guy named Tiny. I'd probably care about that. It's not a fork in the road of life, it's a situation where the guy has nothing to gain and lots to lose, so the sane thing to do is just say "fuck it." It's not going to land him a job (if indeed it is Blackboard software, as it's produced by an educational institution) and it's not going to endear him to anyone. If his school finds out he's been hacking the homework system, expulsion with no questions asked. You can be idealistic all you want, but the simple truth of the matter is that this is the way things are. Legal counsel would tell you the same thing I'm saying: Don't start trouble where there is none.