What is with this urge over the last decade to make the browser an OS?
I already have an OS. It plays movies, games, and anything else I throw at it. I don't need to run a 2nd OS on top of it to replicate the functions of the original.
Maybe we can come up with something to replace the browser that runs inside our current browser and then replicate everything again. If we can replicate functions twice, why not three or more times?
Personally, I think corporations are often evil regardless of the "direct" actions of their leaders or employees. Sometimes all it takes is for individuals to simply do their job well.
In large groups of highly specialized workers, it can be very difficult for individuals to see beyond their specific role in an organization, meaning that the problem of evil is inherent in the byzantine hierarchy itself and not in the specific actions of its individual constituents.
I'm very tired right now and I'm not sured I explained that well, but hopefully someone will understand what I mean...
Libertarianism is a leftist philosophy that suffered a schism in the early to mid 20th century, with many allying themselves with the authoritarian right (modern day conservatives) in opposition to the rise of what was perceived as the authoritarian left (socialism/communism); the old "enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenario.
This schism has warped the meaning of the word libertarian over time. These modern right-wing libertarians are now called vulgar libertarians by the more classical libertarians. They may even use the word Randroid as a pejorative to deride them for their fundamentalist devotion to Ayn Rand.
The most confusing part is that both may make similar statements but mean different things. For example, "Welfare State" might primarily refer to the government perversion of the free market in favor of the rich and powerful to a left libertarian while to an extreme right-wing libertarian it could primarily mean the government robbing workers of their hard-earned money through taxes to support lazy parasites who don't want to get a job. Both are examples of a "welfare state", but the emphasis is quite different.
So you can't necessarily assume that because someone is "libertarian" that they are inherently right wing.
They're not passing a law, they're making rule of employment. You want a job with us, you don't badmouth us. That's perfectly reasonable, whether a private or public employer. If an employee doesn't like it, they can quit. It's that simple.
That depends on what the bad mouthing is about. If an employee in the private sector is bitching about working conditions and talking about forming a union on Facebook then the speech would be protected by the NLRA (National Labor Relations Act) and an employer would be subjection to federal action for terminating or punishing said employee.
Granted, the NLRA doesn't have any real teeth and most people don't file complaints, but the protection does exist.
Re:Firefox + NoScript + Adblock Plus + FlashBlocke
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 1
are the problem with malware infections, it is the millions of joe sixpacks.
I disagree. It's the developers who are the problem by unnecessarily requiring said users to use insecure technologies to simply view a site that rarely has anything more than text and pictures on it.
The fact is that malware exists purely because of nerds. They either develop it directly, or they aid and abet it through the above. Joe Sixpack is nothing but a victim.
If the Internet were a car, web developers would require that air bags and seatbelts be removed in order for the car to function, they would install sharp metal spikes on the dash, and then blame the driver when he got in an accident and impaled himself.
by doing what you should have the gawddamn right to do on your own property!
It's not your property. Here is a somewhat humorous parody that happens to illustrate the point and even addresses the topic of this thread:
"The Peasant's New Property"
Not so many years ago lived a peasant, though he didn't think of himself as such, who thought so much of real property ownership that he spent most of his time slaving away in his cubicle at work to acquire enough money to purchase some. He had little time for friends, family, or other amusements; in fact, the only thing he thought much about was his bi-weekly paycheck. His schedule contained labor for almost every hour of the day, and as one would say of a peasant, "He is out in the fields", so one could say of him, "He is in his cubicle".
The suburb where he desired to own property was very gay; every day many strangers from all parts of the globe arrived. One day two swindlers came to this suburb; they made everyone believe they were real estate agents and declared that they could sell the finest property one could own. Their architecture and design, they said, were not only exceptionally beautiful, but the homes and land possessed the wonderful quality of having its ownership unperceivable by any man who was irrational or unpardonably stupid.
"That must be wonderful property," thought the peasant. "If I were to own such property I should be able to find out which of my fellow men are irrational, and I could distinguish the clever from the stupid. I must have this property without delay." And he gave a large sum of money to the swindlers, in advance, that they should set to work without any loss of time. They prepared lots of paperwork and pretended to be very hard at work. They asked for commissions and all sorts of fees which were quickly drawn from the man's bank accounts, and they appeared to work until late at night.
"I should very much like to know how they are getting on with my purchase," thought the peasant. But he felt rather uneasy when he remembered that he who was irrational or stupid couldn't perceive its ownership. Personally, he was of the opinion that he had nothing to fear, yet he thought it advisable to send somebody else first to see how matters stood. He told everyone he knew what remarkable quality the property possessed, and all were anxious to see how bad or stupid their neighbors were.
"I shall send my friend who is an accountant to the agents," thought the peasant. "He can judge best the ownership, for he is intelligent, and nobody understands his office better than he."
The accountant went to the property where the swindlers sat, perused the paperwork and asked lots of questions. "Heaven preserve us!" he thought, and opened his eyes wide, "I cannot see any ownership at all," but he did not say so. Both swindlers requested him to come near, and asked him if he did not admire the exquisite deal they were offering, pointing to the paperwork on the desk. The accountant tried his very best, but he couldn't see it. "Oh dear," he thought, "can I be so stupid? I should never have thought so, and nobody must know it! Is it possible that I am irrational? No, no, I cannot say that I was unable to perceive the ownership."
"Now, have you got nothing to say?" said one of the swindlers, while he pretended to be busily punching numbers into his calculator.
"Oh, it is quite the deal," replied the accountant looking through his glasses. "To finally own real property! I shall tell my friend that I like the deal very much."
"We are pleased to hear that," said the two agents, and described to him in great detail the minutiae of property ownership. The accountant listened attentively, that he might relate to his friend
How can you explain your children that they are 'criminals' if they download music or video?
You don't. You explain to them that corporations and governments are criminals and then teach them how to defend themselves from them by using darknets, etc.
It's completely ass backwards and results in a total thwarting of creativity.
I compiled some research recently to assess creative work ethic amongst musical artists from the 60s to the present. It had nothing to do with copyright originally, but the data can easily be arranged to show some interesting things about what effect increasing copyright lengths may or may not have on creativity.
Using album lengths of studio albums for these artists I came up with a figure I called CPY, which just stands for content per year, which is measured in minutes. For this post, I took my data and divided the artists between 2 groups: Pre 1978 & Post 1978. Jan 1, 1978 is when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect BTW.
The Pre 1978 group had an average CPY of 42.55 minutes The Post 1978 group had an average CPY of 30.6 minutes
This is about a 28.1% reduction in creative output after the copyright act took effect. Now, correlation does not imply causation, so it can't necessarily be said that this dramatic drop was caused by the copyright act. However, it can certainly be said that the copyright act definitely is NOT causing an increase in creative output. There is no evidence of such in the data whatsoever. In fact, creative output has held close to the margin of error from the 80s onward in my data.
Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least?
Absolutely. I can't even use Google by accident by following a link as their entire domain and all of their subsidiary's domains that I know of are completely blocked from my network.
This has had virtually no impact whatsoever on my existence. There are plenty of replacements for everything they do.
It's rather ironic that you have used up a lot of censorship points to attempt to bury other people's opinions through promoting those opinions you do approve of and hence burying those you don't, if not burying them directly, and then turn around and post anonymously to say people shouldn't be afraid to say unpopular things.
The fear of being modded into oblivion stifles unpopular speech on this forum, doesn't it?
Moderating is ultimately the same kind of social tyranny you say you don't want to exist in the world and yet you admit to having done lots of it...
At the current rate, people will shy away from Google as it's becoming an omnipresence on the internet which is raising concern.
Oh, if only that were true. Only nut-jobs like me "shy away" from Google. Everyone else will use it until they can't, completely missing the point that they shouldn't be supporting it in the first place once it achieves a given mass.
The biggest threat to liberty and equality in the world is the unchecked accumulation of wealth, and the power inherent in it, in individuals and the organizations (corporations, governments, etc.) said individuals collude together to form. History has been quite clear on this. There have been no exceptions.
As such, everyone who cares at all for posterity and justice should oppose such accumulation to the best they can.
Personally, I try not to support any company that controls over 10% of its market. I haven't completely succeeded yet, but I'm getting damn close...
It is not outdated. Politicians take an oath to uphold the constitution, but don't. They should be thrown in jail. There is no interpretation of it, it's very easy to read and understand.
I agree with you in "spirit" (hehe), but they aren't being thrown in jail and there is quite a lot of arguing over interpretation so something needs to be done. Maybe my answer isn't the right one, but there still needs to be one.
Well, but then we'd need to maintain a meta-meta constitution, and a meta-meta-meta constitution, ed infinium... Pretty soon you'd have Genies to grant meta-amendments, and such.
Now I like the idea even more. We can trap the politicians in such an infinite loop that they will be unable to do their jobs at all. They'll just argue about it for all eternity...
So, what you propose is to create not only a new constitution every fifty years, but also to maintain a meta-constitution to restrict even the creation of the fifty-year constitution?
Not an entirely new constitution, but an update that removes bugs, unwanted features, and security holes while improving its documentation. Constitution 1.1 if you will...
Although I do like the "get everyone to agree on the terms by which they will consent to be governed every generation." idea
This is really important if you ask me. It's basically tyranny to force people to adhere to a social contract they had no part in making.
What about the spirit of the 4th amendment? Sure, it may not violate the amendment as it's worded, but was that the intent of it when it was put in?
The American Constitution is dead. It's an outdated document that has been viciously exploited by the frauds who claim to represent us. What we need to do is to call a Constitutional Convention and rewrite the thing with a clearer and MUCH expanded Bill of Rights.
In fact, I think that such a convention should be mandatory about every 50 years and there should be very clear rules that each iteration must always err in favor of the rights of the people and never increase the power of government. In fact, it should be mandatory that any increases in power that have occurred in the interim be removed at each convention.
Honestly, just making javascript operate on a whitelist basis only would reduce online malware attacks by about 99.5%
I realize that I am far from an average user, but I have been using computers for 30 years (the last 15 using Windows) and have never gotten a virus, worm, or any other form of malware on a single computer I have ever owned despite not really using AV software, always logging in as admin, and spending an inordinate amount of time acquiring software on 119th St.
I don't deny that these things exist but obviously the user is the weakest link as everything you have said is already available to any user who knows how to apply them. Education would go a long way to fixing the problem. Maybe we should require the completion of a computer safety course before a person can be issued a license to use a networked computer?
As for the article topic, I have blocked google from my network, so again this malware in its current form doesn't exist for me...
I have been gaming since the days of Win3.x, and never before have we gamers been treated so badly, charged so much for substandard fare, and generally spit upon for daring to pay good money
I've been gaming since the Apple II came out and you missed an age when it was just as bad. The pre Win3.1 era was loaded with even more annoying and intrusive DRM. Not only were the floppies copy protected, but you had all sorts of in-box DRM such as code-wheels, having to type words in from the manual and other game-stopping, annoying BS.
The games were also more expensive when you adjust for inflation and often had horrible game design flaws like dead-ends in them. Get stuck? Sorry, no Internet. You can call an outrageously priced hint-line though...
The CD-Rom is what made the PC platform playable again. Developers got rid of all the annoying DRM until about late 1999 and then the 00s became the new 80s, with shitty value and annoying DRM coming back into the scene.
Strangely enough, I didn't pirate in the 90s, but pirated like crazy in the 80s and 00s. Perhaps there is a correlation?
The market decides the price, not the publishers, and if people refused to pay those prices they would drop down to affordable levels.
The fact is that people are spineless consumers who never take a stand on anything. They are happy to take it in the ass no matter how loudly they proclaim otherwise. They create all their own problems and then blame the companies whose power they've created through their own pusillanimity. They're basically slaves, but have convinced themselves otherwise.
I swear Nike could come out with manacles with their iconic swoosh on them, push it with a catchy commercial and a celebrity sponsor and people would line up to buy them and brag to their friends about how awesome their $200 Air Chains are. Isn't hyperbole fun?
all music that people want ends up on P2P networks, for anyone to get hold of
Slightly off-topic, but I was doing research recently on how prolific various artists were over the last 50 years and hence needed to get the lengths of their studio albums to determine it. For artists from the 60s it was often impossible to get this information from Internet discographies. As such, I simply pirated the music to get the running times.
Rather ironic that piracy does a better job of preserving information about our historical artistic culture than the legitimate Internet in my specific case.
I actually did delete every file I downloaded once I got the info I needed BTW. Not because I care in the slightest about copyright, but because I don't support patented formats, and hence won't use mp3s.
I have yet to see a single 'work' that does not use someone else's 'work'
Indeed. As a musician myself, I literally cringe when someone uses the word "create" in reference to writing music. It's so utterly arrogant and delusional. No one creates music. We build by accretion upon the works of past artists and within the influence of the culture and technology we grow up in and with.
Human beings have been playing music on instruments for about 40,000 years and much longer without. Funny how all these nonsense "rights" only sprung up in the last couple centuries and the lies that music wouldn't be written without them as well...
its not the best browser alright but its a huge step in right direction
The only reason it's a step in the right direction is because every other browser has dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into the present. They certainly wouldn't have done it on their own...
in a library you have to wait for a new book or the one you want. i want to borrow some CD's but they are in a branch that's an hour away and i don't want to spend the time going there
I've always found it silly that the requirement to legally acquire works for free is to get in one's car and drive to a library.
If I simply pirate all the works to create my own library and then drive around the block in my car a few times before consuming them every now and then, I've essentially done the same thing.
Just to be clear, this was a mild attempt at humor...
The real purpose of libraries in America is an adjunct to public education; to make available and instill in individuals the knowledge to identify threats to liberty and prevent the rise of tyranny. It is meant to protect a "government by the people" from becoming one run by an elite ruling class. As such, the presence of "entertainment" in a library is secondary.
Sadly, and although it is anecdotal, over the last couple decades I have noticed in the communities I have lived in a shift away from libraries being repositories of knowledge and instead becoming little more than entertainment "rental" establishments.
The fiction sections keeping getting larger and larger and the inclusion of DVDs, CDs, and other media have all come at the expense of the non-fiction section. I would guess that at my current library, only about 20-25% of the selections are non-fiction.
Obviously, libraries are failing at their purpose to the same degree that the public education system is, with the former serving more to distract than teach, and the latter to train for wage slavery rather than to truly educate.
The American experiment was an interesting idea even if it is failing completely at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
"Knowledge Sir, should be free to all." ----Harcourt Fenton Mudd
(in response to an accusation by James T. Kirk that he didn't pay royalties on patents.)
Star Trek Original Series Season 2 Episode 8 - "I, Mudd" (1967)
Time of quote in Episode: 13:37
Can I FINALLY get my nerd card now?
What is with this urge over the last decade to make the browser an OS?
I already have an OS. It plays movies, games, and anything else I throw at it. I don't need to run a 2nd OS on top of it to replicate the functions of the original.
Maybe we can come up with something to replace the browser that runs inside our current browser and then replicate everything again. If we can replicate functions twice, why not three or more times?
Personally, I think corporations are often evil regardless of the "direct" actions of their leaders or employees. Sometimes all it takes is for individuals to simply do their job well.
In large groups of highly specialized workers, it can be very difficult for individuals to see beyond their specific role in an organization, meaning that the problem of evil is inherent in the byzantine hierarchy itself and not in the specific actions of its individual constituents.
I'm very tired right now and I'm not sured I explained that well, but hopefully someone will understand what I mean...
there is no way to judge who is right and who is wrong, under laws that do not yet even exist.
This is just an appeal to law fallacy. Laws don't determine right and wrong, and we don't need them to be able to make such a distinction.
Libertarianism is a leftist philosophy that suffered a schism in the early to mid 20th century, with many allying themselves with the authoritarian right (modern day conservatives) in opposition to the rise of what was perceived as the authoritarian left (socialism/communism); the old "enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenario.
This schism has warped the meaning of the word libertarian over time. These modern right-wing libertarians are now called vulgar libertarians by the more classical libertarians. They may even use the word Randroid as a pejorative to deride them for their fundamentalist devotion to Ayn Rand.
The most confusing part is that both may make similar statements but mean different things. For example, "Welfare State" might primarily refer to the government perversion of the free market in favor of the rich and powerful to a left libertarian while to an extreme right-wing libertarian it could primarily mean the government robbing workers of their hard-earned money through taxes to support lazy parasites who don't want to get a job. Both are examples of a "welfare state", but the emphasis is quite different.
So you can't necessarily assume that because someone is "libertarian" that they are inherently right wing.
They're not passing a law, they're making rule of employment. You want a job with us, you don't badmouth us. That's perfectly reasonable, whether a private or public employer. If an employee doesn't like it, they can quit. It's that simple.
That depends on what the bad mouthing is about. If an employee in the private sector is bitching about working conditions and talking about forming a union on Facebook then the speech would be protected by the NLRA (National Labor Relations Act) and an employer would be subjection to federal action for terminating or punishing said employee.
Granted, the NLRA doesn't have any real teeth and most people don't file complaints, but the protection does exist.
are the problem with malware infections, it is the millions of joe sixpacks.
I disagree. It's the developers who are the problem by unnecessarily requiring said users to use insecure technologies to simply view a site that rarely has anything more than text and pictures on it.
The fact is that malware exists purely because of nerds. They either develop it directly, or they aid and abet it through the above. Joe Sixpack is nothing but a victim.
If the Internet were a car, web developers would require that air bags and seatbelts be removed in order for the car to function, they would install sharp metal spikes on the dash, and then blame the driver when he got in an accident and impaled himself.
by doing what you should have the gawddamn right to do on your own property!
It's not your property. Here is a somewhat humorous parody that happens to illustrate the point and even addresses the topic of this thread:
"The Peasant's New Property"
Not so many years ago lived a peasant, though he didn't think of himself as such, who thought so much of real property ownership that he spent most of his time slaving away in his cubicle at work to acquire enough money to purchase some. He had little time for friends, family, or other amusements; in fact, the only thing he thought much about was his bi-weekly paycheck. His schedule contained labor for almost every hour of the day, and as one would say of a peasant, "He is out in the fields", so one could say of him, "He is in his cubicle".
The suburb where he desired to own property was very gay; every day many strangers from all parts of the globe arrived. One day two swindlers came to this suburb; they made everyone believe they were real estate agents and declared that they could sell the finest property one could own. Their architecture and design, they said, were not only exceptionally beautiful, but the homes and land possessed the wonderful quality of having its ownership unperceivable by any man who was irrational or unpardonably stupid.
"That must be wonderful property," thought the peasant. "If I were to own such property I should be able to find out which of my fellow men are irrational, and I could distinguish the clever from the stupid. I must have this property without delay." And he gave a large sum of money to the swindlers, in advance, that they should set to work without any loss of time. They prepared lots of paperwork and pretended to be very hard at work. They asked for commissions and all sorts of fees which were quickly drawn from the man's bank accounts, and they appeared to work until late at night.
"I should very much like to know how they are getting on with my purchase," thought the peasant. But he felt rather uneasy when he remembered that he who was irrational or stupid couldn't perceive its ownership. Personally, he was of the opinion that he had nothing to fear, yet he thought it advisable to send somebody else first to see how matters stood. He told everyone he knew what remarkable quality the property possessed, and all were anxious to see how bad or stupid their neighbors were.
"I shall send my friend who is an accountant to the agents," thought the peasant. "He can judge best the ownership, for he is intelligent, and nobody understands his office better than he."
The accountant went to the property where the swindlers sat, perused the paperwork and asked lots of questions. "Heaven preserve us!" he thought, and opened his eyes wide, "I cannot see any ownership at all," but he did not say so. Both swindlers requested him to come near, and asked him if he did not admire the exquisite deal they were offering, pointing to the paperwork on the desk. The accountant tried his very best, but he couldn't see it. "Oh dear," he thought, "can I be so stupid? I should never have thought so, and nobody must know it! Is it possible that I am irrational? No, no, I cannot say that I was unable to perceive the ownership."
"Now, have you got nothing to say?" said one of the swindlers, while he pretended to be busily punching numbers into his calculator.
"Oh, it is quite the deal," replied the accountant looking through his glasses. "To finally own real property! I shall tell my friend that I like the deal very much."
"We are pleased to hear that," said the two agents, and described to him in great detail the minutiae of property ownership. The accountant listened attentively, that he might relate to his friend
How can you explain your children that they are 'criminals' if they download music or video?
You don't. You explain to them that corporations and governments are criminals and then teach them how to defend themselves from them by using darknets, etc.
It's completely ass backwards and results in a total thwarting of creativity.
I compiled some research recently to assess creative work ethic amongst musical artists from the 60s to the present. It had nothing to do with copyright originally, but the data can easily be arranged to show some interesting things about what effect increasing copyright lengths may or may not have on creativity.
Using album lengths of studio albums for these artists I came up with a figure I called CPY, which just stands for content per year, which is measured in minutes. For this post, I took my data and divided the artists between 2 groups: Pre 1978 & Post 1978. Jan 1, 1978 is when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect BTW.
The Pre 1978 group had an average CPY of 42.55 minutes
The Post 1978 group had an average CPY of 30.6 minutes
This is about a 28.1% reduction in creative output after the copyright act took effect. Now, correlation does not imply causation, so it can't necessarily be said that this dramatic drop was caused by the copyright act. However, it can certainly be said that the copyright act definitely is NOT causing an increase in creative output. There is no evidence of such in the data whatsoever. In fact, creative output has held close to the margin of error from the 80s onward in my data.
Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least?
Absolutely. I can't even use Google by accident by following a link as their entire domain and all of their subsidiary's domains that I know of are completely blocked from my network.
This has had virtually no impact whatsoever on my existence. There are plenty of replacements for everything they do.
It's rather ironic that you have used up a lot of censorship points to attempt to bury other people's opinions through promoting those opinions you do approve of and hence burying those you don't, if not burying them directly, and then turn around and post anonymously to say people shouldn't be afraid to say unpopular things.
The fear of being modded into oblivion stifles unpopular speech on this forum, doesn't it?
Moderating is ultimately the same kind of social tyranny you say you don't want to exist in the world and yet you admit to having done lots of it...
At the current rate, people will shy away from Google as it's becoming an omnipresence on the internet which is raising concern.
Oh, if only that were true. Only nut-jobs like me "shy away" from Google. Everyone else will use it until they can't, completely missing the point that they shouldn't be supporting it in the first place once it achieves a given mass.
The biggest threat to liberty and equality in the world is the unchecked accumulation of wealth, and the power inherent in it, in individuals and the organizations (corporations, governments, etc.) said individuals collude together to form. History has been quite clear on this. There have been no exceptions.
As such, everyone who cares at all for posterity and justice should oppose such accumulation to the best they can.
Personally, I try not to support any company that controls over 10% of its market. I haven't completely succeeded yet, but I'm getting damn close...
It is not outdated. Politicians take an oath to uphold the constitution, but don't. They should be thrown in jail. There is no interpretation of it, it's very easy to read and understand.
I agree with you in "spirit" (hehe), but they aren't being thrown in jail and there is quite a lot of arguing over interpretation so something needs to be done. Maybe my answer isn't the right one, but there still needs to be one.
Well, but then we'd need to maintain a meta-meta constitution, and a meta-meta-meta constitution, ed infinium... Pretty soon you'd have Genies to grant meta-amendments, and such.
Now I like the idea even more. We can trap the politicians in such an infinite loop that they will be unable to do their jobs at all. They'll just argue about it for all eternity...
So, what you propose is to create not only a new constitution every fifty years, but also to maintain a meta-constitution to restrict even the creation of the fifty-year constitution?
Not an entirely new constitution, but an update that removes bugs, unwanted features, and security holes while improving its documentation. Constitution 1.1 if you will...
Although I do like the "get everyone to agree on the terms by which they will consent to be governed every generation." idea
This is really important if you ask me. It's basically tyranny to force people to adhere to a social contract they had no part in making.
What about the spirit of the 4th amendment? Sure, it may not violate the amendment as it's worded, but was that the intent of it when it was put in?
The American Constitution is dead. It's an outdated document that has been viciously exploited by the frauds who claim to represent us. What we need to do is to call a Constitutional Convention and rewrite the thing with a clearer and MUCH expanded Bill of Rights.
In fact, I think that such a convention should be mandatory about every 50 years and there should be very clear rules that each iteration must always err in favor of the rights of the people and never increase the power of government. In fact, it should be mandatory that any increases in power that have occurred in the interim be removed at each convention.
Honestly, just making javascript operate on a whitelist basis only would reduce online malware attacks by about 99.5%
I realize that I am far from an average user, but I have been using computers for 30 years (the last 15 using Windows) and have never gotten a virus, worm, or any other form of malware on a single computer I have ever owned despite not really using AV software, always logging in as admin, and spending an inordinate amount of time acquiring software on 119th St.
I don't deny that these things exist but obviously the user is the weakest link as everything you have said is already available to any user who knows how to apply them. Education would go a long way to fixing the problem. Maybe we should require the completion of a computer safety course before a person can be issued a license to use a networked computer?
As for the article topic, I have blocked google from my network, so again this malware in its current form doesn't exist for me...
I have been gaming since the days of Win3.x, and never before have we gamers been treated so badly, charged so much for substandard fare, and generally spit upon for daring to pay good money
I've been gaming since the Apple II came out and you missed an age when it was just as bad. The pre Win3.1 era was loaded with even more annoying and intrusive DRM. Not only were the floppies copy protected, but you had all sorts of in-box DRM such as code-wheels, having to type words in from the manual and other game-stopping, annoying BS.
The games were also more expensive when you adjust for inflation and often had horrible game design flaws like dead-ends in them. Get stuck? Sorry, no Internet. You can call an outrageously priced hint-line though...
The CD-Rom is what made the PC platform playable again. Developers got rid of all the annoying DRM until about late 1999 and then the 00s became the new 80s, with shitty value and annoying DRM coming back into the scene.
Strangely enough, I didn't pirate in the 90s, but pirated like crazy in the 80s and 00s. Perhaps there is a correlation?
$14.99 for a freaking E-BOOK?!?!?!?
The market decides the price, not the publishers, and if people refused to pay those prices they would drop down to affordable levels.
The fact is that people are spineless consumers who never take a stand on anything. They are happy to take it in the ass no matter how loudly they proclaim otherwise. They create all their own problems and then blame the companies whose power they've created through their own pusillanimity. They're basically slaves, but have convinced themselves otherwise.
I swear Nike could come out with manacles with their iconic swoosh on them, push it with a catchy commercial and a celebrity sponsor and people would line up to buy them and brag to their friends about how awesome their $200 Air Chains are. Isn't hyperbole fun?
all music that people want ends up on P2P networks, for anyone to get hold of
Slightly off-topic, but I was doing research recently on how prolific various artists were over the last 50 years and hence needed to get the lengths of their studio albums to determine it. For artists from the 60s it was often impossible to get this information from Internet discographies. As such, I simply pirated the music to get the running times.
Rather ironic that piracy does a better job of preserving information about our historical artistic culture than the legitimate Internet in my specific case.
I actually did delete every file I downloaded once I got the info I needed BTW. Not because I care in the slightest about copyright, but because I don't support patented formats, and hence won't use mp3s.
I have yet to see a single 'work' that does not use someone else's 'work'
Indeed. As a musician myself, I literally cringe when someone uses the word "create" in reference to writing music. It's so utterly arrogant and delusional. No one creates music. We build by accretion upon the works of past artists and within the influence of the culture and technology we grow up in and with.
Human beings have been playing music on instruments for about 40,000 years and much longer without. Funny how all these nonsense "rights" only sprung up in the last couple centuries and the lies that music wouldn't be written without them as well...
its not the best browser alright but its a huge step in right direction
The only reason it's a step in the right direction is because every other browser has dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into the present. They certainly wouldn't have done it on their own...
in a library you have to wait for a new book or the one you want. i want to borrow some CD's but they are in a branch that's an hour away and i don't want to spend the time going there
I've always found it silly that the requirement to legally acquire works for free is to get in one's car and drive to a library.
If I simply pirate all the works to create my own library and then drive around the block in my car a few times before consuming them every now and then, I've essentially done the same thing.
Just to be clear, this was a mild attempt at humor...
The real purpose of libraries in America is an adjunct to public education; to make available and instill in individuals the knowledge to identify threats to liberty and prevent the rise of tyranny. It is meant to protect a "government by the people" from becoming one run by an elite ruling class. As such, the presence of "entertainment" in a library is secondary.
Sadly, and although it is anecdotal, over the last couple decades I have noticed in the communities I have lived in a shift away from libraries being repositories of knowledge and instead becoming little more than entertainment "rental" establishments.
The fiction sections keeping getting larger and larger and the inclusion of DVDs, CDs, and other media have all come at the expense of the non-fiction section. I would guess that at my current library, only about 20-25% of the selections are non-fiction.
Obviously, libraries are failing at their purpose to the same degree that the public education system is, with the former serving more to distract than teach, and the latter to train for wage slavery rather than to truly educate.
The American experiment was an interesting idea even if it is failing completely at this point.