So you're saying they can block whatever they want without repercussions ? If they do the only thing they can do, which is to install a bunch of Cisco PIX boxes and filter all P2P traffic down to 0.001 bit/sec, couldn't that be considered Denial-of-service to legal content providers on P2P nets ?
I really wish people would just mind their goddamned business. If ISPs are indeed immune to prosecution then it is in their best interests to not cooperate with the MAFIAA at all. Their allegiance is to their customers! Let the MAFIAA die already, before they infect every aspect of our lives with their welfare whining.
Date your backups and store them in a logical system. When the specified period has expired, just grab a box and destroy the data. Document the process, and assign someone from each department (I.T., HR, archives etc) or designate a central authority to carry out the procedure in an ordered manner.
Really, that's all you're legally required to do. This DRM crap is just marketing babble, people have been sanely filing documents for centuries without Microsoft sending them a monthly invoice.
Child pornography is bad, very bad, and should be stopped. I am in total agreement with that. I do have a problem with this "guilty until proven innocent" bullshit the "authorities" have been pulling in the last decade regarding any sort of electronic or intellectual crime.
I would hope that someone being wrongly victimized by these rash police procedures would do the right thing and take it to the (liberal) media. Hang those cops out to dry, and they will eventually tattle on the dirty organizations that have been pulling their strings. The police officer is just an agent, a messenger, a tool manipulated by the suits above their head and the "financial interests" paying their salary. If that master/slave relationship causes them too much grief, they will turn and that's precisely what today's world needs.
Well the thing is, college teaches you submission. An old-school tech wizard will know a LOT more than the college kid, but at least from what I've seen, we come factory-built with bonus BOFH attitude, while the new kid is utterly useless but very polite about it (to middle management). When the going gets tough, the tough complain while slurping sounds start emanating from the college kids' cubicles. Fast-forward ten years, the guy with a degree is now your bosses' boss, while you're still maintaining the same old Novell cluster you've been loathing since you got the job.
It's an ass-kissers market, and what better way to kiss establishment's ass than to spend a quarter million on a shiny degree ?
This raises the question: If all these "acceptable" webcasters can afford the inflated fees, wouldn't those monies be better spent viciously attacking SoundExchange and its political backers ? If the MAFIAA can play the frivolous lawsuit game, maybe we should play it right back to them.
If you're in the business of online music distribution, and this extortion organization is threatening your bottom line, it is your duty to protect the livelihood of your business, by suing the enemy.
Okay, so this guy is suing Yahoo because he's under fire for breaking "laws" in his own country. Look here, if I'm committing a "crime", say uh, smoking dope in my Canadian backyard and some NDP neighbor calls the pigs, well my neighbor is an asshole but I was still technically breaking the local law. I can harbor seething distaste for my politically-inferior cohabitant, but I have no legal ground to sue him.
Do we agree with China's corrupt censorship ? No. Does that mean it's ok for us to ignore their government's laws and impose our liberal views on THEIR citizens ? No. This guy got what was coming to him. If he doesn't want to be punished for speaking his mind, he should move to a free country.
I'm all for the Chinese government doing more and more repressive crap because it will encourage the Chinese people to work around it, and when they do, the entire world will benefit from Chinese innovation (an oxymoron, I know). Better web proxies and anonymizers will benefit Americans as more and more lawsuits get thrown around by the MAFIAA and other corrupt factions of Corporate America.
We may not know what the CIA is up to, but the press outlets are always happy to dig up dirt on foreign nations. There is much we can learn from them.
IANAA (i am not an American), but if SoundExchange is supposed to be a non-profit, doesn't that mean they have to actually spend a significant portion of those funds on whatever issue they're supporting ?
I know here in Canada, charitable organizations have to spend something like 80% of their income on the cause, with the remaining 20% expected to cover administrative expenses and salaries. I could be wrong on the numbers but it's in the ballpark. There is also a limit on how long an org can sit on their money, so for example they couldn't raise 1 million in a year and siphon off the 20% over five years. If that weren't the case, everyone and their mother would have their own non-profit company as a tax-free retirement account.
And don't start telling me they're actually paying the artists. They're paying the publishers, the agents, the producers, the "everything up to 11" pop mix "engineer", and of course the lobbyists. Besides, SoundExchange's information is such a market driver that it's in the industry's best interests to have doped and skimmed numbers depending on who they're pushing that particular week.
That sort of thinking is precisely how security holes are born. If the IT guy / librarian can't be bothered to add a simple wireless key to each laptop, then I certainly wouldn't expect them to know what a DMZ is and how to set one up. Meanwhile I'm sitting at home with three distinct networks when the only user who isn't me, is my spouse, and she's smart enough to not get infected too easily.
If I were adminning a network where teenagers tread, I'd lock that thing down tighter than the Chinese internet. Children typically have no sense of morals at that age, and deem it "cooler" to be a "leet hacker". A long time ago, in a land far far away, I was a college student too. I've seen quite a few of my classmates get into serious trouble for abusing the network, and this was in the 90's back when news anchors called it "the information super-highway". We didn't have MySpace, everyone ran Netscape and the only sites with dynamic scripting were NetMinder and http-over-email services.
It's called dynamic range compression, and it's going to take your baby away! Compression makes soft sounds louder, and loud sounds softer (relatively). It also makes cheap stereos sound "better", and good stereos sound like they're about to die.
It actually has some very important uses, for example in FM broadcasting where it boosts weak frequencies in the music to improve their signal-to-noise ratio after modulation. It's also used properly by respectable sound producers to bring out hidden character in instruments or vocals, or to make that speed metal guitarist sound like he has fingers made of steel. It's used in films to keep the background music from clobbering dialogue. It is extensively used on drums to make them punchier. It's also the not-so-secret sauce behind the techno-dance sound by Benny Benassi and Daft Punk, that carefully controlled distortion that makes everything pump with the bass kick.
Like any great thing, it is royally abused by a certain group of asshats. It's what makes commercials sound so damned loud relative to your show. It's what makes film soundtracks survivable on shitty home theater kits. Worst of all, it's mostly controlled by two knobs: 1. how sensitive do you want it, and 2. how much boost do you want. Pop music "producers" just turn these all the way up and call themselves hitmakers.
It's like taking the subtly charming warmth of mag tape or tube amps, multiplying it by 1000 and watching the unwashed masses fall victim to harmonic heresy. Given that the large majority of people have underperforming stereos with poor treble that already compress the sound to some extent, they often don't notice the crap quality of the source. Then you drop the same album on a refined stereo, and you hear this grungy fuzz coming from your speakers. Musical whispers that should have been barely audible are now fighting with the lead guitar for attention.
Self-taught pros are a rare exception, most people would be completely helpless without some sort of organized brainwashing like the kind that happens in western schools. In any case, the classroom teaches social interaction (to some extent). It might result in highly social morons, but at least they're social:P People who are moronic AND antisocial are in tough shape.
In fact there is evidence of negligence by the school's IT staff, since they never renewed their license for virus and spyware protection. Any damn kid could have surfed any of the thousands of porn domains that spring up every day, and they probably did, which is what set the PC up for popups in the first place. Couple that with poor (read: nonexistent) local security settings and the sysadmin is every bit as guilty as this prof, which is to say: not very guilty at all.
The other thing is: ok so a bunch of teens saw some boobs on a computer screen... so what ? They're probably already checking that stuff out at home when mom & dad aren't watching. It won't make them into lesser beings. On the other hand, dragging this bening issue into court and legally abusing a teacher is one hell of a bad example to set for your kids. That's right son, when the going gets tough, shrug responsibility and sue someone!
Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo?
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 1
I have to say, there is something funny about Microsoft providing a Firefox plugin. Very cool in the geek sense, but kinda weird.
That's funny, I've run Vista on a standard 1 gig system just fine. I still think it's bloated, but a lot of the problems people attribute to Windows have little to do with the OS at all, and a lot more to do with the tons of crap software they load onto their machines. If you keep a Windows PC clean and uncluttered, it will run fast, and stay fast. My Windows uptime rivals that of my Linux servers, 100+ days isn't uncommon. I reboot when I need to open up the PC for some hardware lovin'. I don't need to format every six months and I certainly don't feel like it gets any slower as time passes.
Now the average joe's PC usually has a bunch of resident apps, many of which aren't even used at all. It's quite common to see people with two or more virus scanners running concurrently, because they buy whatever's cheapest and forget (or don't know) to uninstall the old one when it expires. Add a half-dozen trojans (and I'm being kind), a couple IE toolbars and a system partition that's never been defragged, and you've got yourself the slowest PC on the face of the earth, yet a few minutes of careful pruning can bring it back to a youthful sprint.
Vista may be pointless, but it's nowhere near the resource hog people claim it to be. It's not that much worse than XP, and if your video card can't run Aero Glass, well maybe you should upgrade to something less than 5 years old, or stick with what you presently have and quit your bitching.
My thoughts exactly. People do crazy things to cover up their weaknesses. Some people learn from their mistakes, most people would rather overcompensate and act proud. It's human nature, and it's the reason why the world's leaders are so mentally screwed.
It seems every day there's another "I love Ubuntu" blog post making the rounds on the TGPs.. I mean Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Technorati whatever. It seems Ubuntu is the hot vessel for ad-whoring these days.
I am personally sick of it. Ubuntu is great, yes, but please people shut up about it! It's all just a ploy to attract eyeballs and bump up ad revenue for these shallow souls. It makes me want to blog about how much I love Windows 2003. Well guess what, I do love Win2k3 because it's stable, fast and runs everything I want, including games. Will it get my article featured on X-Random Link Farm ? No. I'm not saying Ubuntu is any less good, but enough already with the honeymoon articles. This isn't news! Ubuntu is doing what it's supposed to do, which is to make a Linux-based desktop system usable and enjoyable with a minimum of technical savvy. I'm glad that people like it, but people have better things to do than read (and write) love poems about a piece of software.
How about some USEFUL tricks to enhance the Ubuntu experience ? By useful, I mean something that you researched, designed and/or programmed, and that isn't obvious to a moderately skilled user. "How to share files with Samba" is obvious and trivial for anyone who needs that feature. "How to make all your KDE apps load faster" is a lot meatier.
The only thing revolutionary about the iPhone is the Apple brainwashing that goes along with any of their products. Everyone will want it, most everyone else will clone it, and the few that remain will complain that these sheep produce no wool.
Apple did some things right, but this perverse worshipping is juvenile and irrational. The only noteworthy thing about Apple is that they actually have hired designers, while every other technology company is an asian scamshop whose "design" department is one guy with a bunch of pictures of the competition.
Yep I've seen the same thing happen, moving from a small town to a huge one. I've always been largely anti-social, mainly because I'm an elitist asshole:) but I've always at least known my neighbors to some extent... until I moved to the nation's capital. Here, half the people on my street are freaks, and the other half look away when they walk past anyone. People just aren't approachable at all, now they even have ME worrying that they'll pull out some lame-ass personal alarm or pepper spray if I dare to ask their name. If I were running at them with a machete, well then I'd understand, but I can't think of any incident where an innocent bystander was assaulted with a box of blank DVD-Rs.
This leads to some rather stupid entanglements, like having the police called for every little thing. People don't even have the "bravery" to come knock on the door when someone's music is a little louder than they'd like. I remember one time that happened to me, years ago. I kept getting noise complaints for every little thing, they even bitched about my bathroom exhaust fan being too noisy! So I started filing equally dubious complaints right back at the pest. The cops have a three-strike rule for most personal issues, so after the 2nd visit, my neighbor decided to walk the 15 feet to my door and knock. Now I'm a 5'11" 250lb young white guy, I opened my door to this 5'2" middle-aged runt (his wife's a butch), and he literally jumped back when he saw me. Did he think I'd lunge out and pummel him ? Probably, but he composed himself and asked if I could turn it down "a tiny bit". I said "No problem, sorry about that". Did I have the physical and tactical means to hurt him ? Sure! But would I ? Probably not, so what's with this ingrained fear that's destroying society ?
I'm just talking out of my ass here, but didn't the Soviet Union have absolutely no concept of intellectual property back in the day ? Any and all research was the property of the government, as far as I know. Considering how that government ceased to exist on Dec 25th 1991, any IP they "held" would revert back to the public domain, no ?
Slashdot Mirror
Kung Fu ?
So you're saying they can block whatever they want without repercussions ? If they do the only thing they can do, which is to install a bunch of Cisco PIX boxes and filter all P2P traffic down to 0.001 bit/sec, couldn't that be considered Denial-of-service to legal content providers on P2P nets ?
I really wish people would just mind their goddamned business. If ISPs are indeed immune to prosecution then it is in their best interests to not cooperate with the MAFIAA at all. Their allegiance is to their customers! Let the MAFIAA die already, before they infect every aspect of our lives with their welfare whining.
Easy: have policies and practices in place.
Date your backups and store them in a logical system. When the specified period has expired, just grab a box and destroy the data. Document the process, and assign someone from each department (I.T., HR, archives etc) or designate a central authority to carry out the procedure in an ordered manner.
Really, that's all you're legally required to do. This DRM crap is just marketing babble, people have been sanely filing documents for centuries without Microsoft sending them a monthly invoice.
Eh-Men!
Child pornography is bad, very bad, and should be stopped. I am in total agreement with that. I do have a problem with this "guilty until proven innocent" bullshit the "authorities" have been pulling in the last decade regarding any sort of electronic or intellectual crime.
I would hope that someone being wrongly victimized by these rash police procedures would do the right thing and take it to the (liberal) media. Hang those cops out to dry, and they will eventually tattle on the dirty organizations that have been pulling their strings. The police officer is just an agent, a messenger, a tool manipulated by the suits above their head and the "financial interests" paying their salary. If that master/slave relationship causes them too much grief, they will turn and that's precisely what today's world needs.
The only advanced things in London are the drugs, house music and the aging problem.
Well the thing is, college teaches you submission. An old-school tech wizard will know a LOT more than the college kid, but at least from what I've seen, we come factory-built with bonus BOFH attitude, while the new kid is utterly useless but very polite about it (to middle management). When the going gets tough, the tough complain while slurping sounds start emanating from the college kids' cubicles. Fast-forward ten years, the guy with a degree is now your bosses' boss, while you're still maintaining the same old Novell cluster you've been loathing since you got the job.
It's an ass-kissers market, and what better way to kiss establishment's ass than to spend a quarter million on a shiny degree ?
This raises the question: If all these "acceptable" webcasters can afford the inflated fees, wouldn't those monies be better spent viciously attacking SoundExchange and its political backers ? If the MAFIAA can play the frivolous lawsuit game, maybe we should play it right back to them.
If you're in the business of online music distribution, and this extortion organization is threatening your bottom line, it is your duty to protect the livelihood of your business, by suing the enemy.
That is precisely why we need to support PiratByran and their efforts. They seem to "get it".
Okay, so this guy is suing Yahoo because he's under fire for breaking "laws" in his own country. Look here, if I'm committing a "crime", say uh, smoking dope in my Canadian backyard and some NDP neighbor calls the pigs, well my neighbor is an asshole but I was still technically breaking the local law. I can harbor seething distaste for my politically-inferior cohabitant, but I have no legal ground to sue him.
Do we agree with China's corrupt censorship ? No. Does that mean it's ok for us to ignore their government's laws and impose our liberal views on THEIR citizens ? No. This guy got what was coming to him. If he doesn't want to be punished for speaking his mind, he should move to a free country.
I'm all for the Chinese government doing more and more repressive crap because it will encourage the Chinese people to work around it, and when they do, the entire world will benefit from Chinese innovation (an oxymoron, I know). Better web proxies and anonymizers will benefit Americans as more and more lawsuits get thrown around by the MAFIAA and other corrupt factions of Corporate America.
We may not know what the CIA is up to, but the press outlets are always happy to dig up dirt on foreign nations. There is much we can learn from them.
IANAA (i am not an American), but if SoundExchange is supposed to be a non-profit, doesn't that mean they have to actually spend a significant portion of those funds on whatever issue they're supporting ?
I know here in Canada, charitable organizations have to spend something like 80% of their income on the cause, with the remaining 20% expected to cover administrative expenses and salaries. I could be wrong on the numbers but it's in the ballpark. There is also a limit on how long an org can sit on their money, so for example they couldn't raise 1 million in a year and siphon off the 20% over five years. If that weren't the case, everyone and their mother would have their own non-profit company as a tax-free retirement account.
And don't start telling me they're actually paying the artists. They're paying the publishers, the agents, the producers, the "everything up to 11" pop mix "engineer", and of course the lobbyists. Besides, SoundExchange's information is such a market driver that it's in the industry's best interests to have doped and skimmed numbers depending on who they're pushing that particular week.
That sort of thinking is precisely how security holes are born. If the IT guy / librarian can't be bothered to add a simple wireless key to each laptop, then I certainly wouldn't expect them to know what a DMZ is and how to set one up. Meanwhile I'm sitting at home with three distinct networks when the only user who isn't me, is my spouse, and she's smart enough to not get infected too easily.
If I were adminning a network where teenagers tread, I'd lock that thing down tighter than the Chinese internet. Children typically have no sense of morals at that age, and deem it "cooler" to be a "leet hacker". A long time ago, in a land far far away, I was a college student too. I've seen quite a few of my classmates get into serious trouble for abusing the network, and this was in the 90's back when news anchors called it "the information super-highway". We didn't have MySpace, everyone ran Netscape and the only sites with dynamic scripting were NetMinder and http-over-email services.
It's called dynamic range compression, and it's going to take your baby away! Compression makes soft sounds louder, and loud sounds softer (relatively). It also makes cheap stereos sound "better", and good stereos sound like they're about to die.
It actually has some very important uses, for example in FM broadcasting where it boosts weak frequencies in the music to improve their signal-to-noise ratio after modulation. It's also used properly by respectable sound producers to bring out hidden character in instruments or vocals, or to make that speed metal guitarist sound like he has fingers made of steel. It's used in films to keep the background music from clobbering dialogue. It is extensively used on drums to make them punchier. It's also the not-so-secret sauce behind the techno-dance sound by Benny Benassi and Daft Punk, that carefully controlled distortion that makes everything pump with the bass kick.
Like any great thing, it is royally abused by a certain group of asshats. It's what makes commercials sound so damned loud relative to your show. It's what makes film soundtracks survivable on shitty home theater kits. Worst of all, it's mostly controlled by two knobs: 1. how sensitive do you want it, and 2. how much boost do you want. Pop music "producers" just turn these all the way up and call themselves hitmakers.
It's like taking the subtly charming warmth of mag tape or tube amps, multiplying it by 1000 and watching the unwashed masses fall victim to harmonic heresy. Given that the large majority of people have underperforming stereos with poor treble that already compress the sound to some extent, they often don't notice the crap quality of the source. Then you drop the same album on a refined stereo, and you hear this grungy fuzz coming from your speakers. Musical whispers that should have been barely audible are now fighting with the lead guitar for attention.
Self-taught pros are a rare exception, most people would be completely helpless without some sort of organized brainwashing like the kind that happens in western schools. In any case, the classroom teaches social interaction (to some extent). It might result in highly social morons, but at least they're social :P People who are moronic AND antisocial are in tough shape.
In fact there is evidence of negligence by the school's IT staff, since they never renewed their license for virus and spyware protection. Any damn kid could have surfed any of the thousands of porn domains that spring up every day, and they probably did, which is what set the PC up for popups in the first place. Couple that with poor (read: nonexistent) local security settings and the sysadmin is every bit as guilty as this prof, which is to say: not very guilty at all.
The other thing is: ok so a bunch of teens saw some boobs on a computer screen... so what ? They're probably already checking that stuff out at home when mom & dad aren't watching. It won't make them into lesser beings. On the other hand, dragging this bening issue into court and legally abusing a teacher is one hell of a bad example to set for your kids. That's right son, when the going gets tough, shrug responsibility and sue someone!
I have to say, there is something funny about Microsoft providing a Firefox plugin. Very cool in the geek sense, but kinda weird.
That's funny, I've run Vista on a standard 1 gig system just fine. I still think it's bloated, but a lot of the problems people attribute to Windows have little to do with the OS at all, and a lot more to do with the tons of crap software they load onto their machines. If you keep a Windows PC clean and uncluttered, it will run fast, and stay fast. My Windows uptime rivals that of my Linux servers, 100+ days isn't uncommon. I reboot when I need to open up the PC for some hardware lovin'. I don't need to format every six months and I certainly don't feel like it gets any slower as time passes.
Now the average joe's PC usually has a bunch of resident apps, many of which aren't even used at all. It's quite common to see people with two or more virus scanners running concurrently, because they buy whatever's cheapest and forget (or don't know) to uninstall the old one when it expires. Add a half-dozen trojans (and I'm being kind), a couple IE toolbars and a system partition that's never been defragged, and you've got yourself the slowest PC on the face of the earth, yet a few minutes of careful pruning can bring it back to a youthful sprint.
Vista may be pointless, but it's nowhere near the resource hog people claim it to be. It's not that much worse than XP, and if your video card can't run Aero Glass, well maybe you should upgrade to something less than 5 years old, or stick with what you presently have and quit your bitching.
My thoughts exactly. People do crazy things to cover up their weaknesses. Some people learn from their mistakes, most people would rather overcompensate and act proud. It's human nature, and it's the reason why the world's leaders are so mentally screwed.
It seems every day there's another "I love Ubuntu" blog post making the rounds on the TGPs.. I mean Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Technorati whatever. It seems Ubuntu is the hot vessel for ad-whoring these days.
I am personally sick of it. Ubuntu is great, yes, but please people shut up about it! It's all just a ploy to attract eyeballs and bump up ad revenue for these shallow souls. It makes me want to blog about how much I love Windows 2003. Well guess what, I do love Win2k3 because it's stable, fast and runs everything I want, including games. Will it get my article featured on X-Random Link Farm ? No. I'm not saying Ubuntu is any less good, but enough already with the honeymoon articles. This isn't news! Ubuntu is doing what it's supposed to do, which is to make a Linux-based desktop system usable and enjoyable with a minimum of technical savvy. I'm glad that people like it, but people have better things to do than read (and write) love poems about a piece of software.
How about some USEFUL tricks to enhance the Ubuntu experience ? By useful, I mean something that you researched, designed and/or programmed, and that isn't obvious to a moderately skilled user. "How to share files with Samba" is obvious and trivial for anyone who needs that feature. "How to make all your KDE apps load faster" is a lot meatier.
The only thing revolutionary about the iPhone is the Apple brainwashing that goes along with any of their products. Everyone will want it, most everyone else will clone it, and the few that remain will complain that these sheep produce no wool.
Apple did some things right, but this perverse worshipping is juvenile and irrational. The only noteworthy thing about Apple is that they actually have hired designers, while every other technology company is an asian scamshop whose "design" department is one guy with a bunch of pictures of the competition.
Yep I've seen the same thing happen, moving from a small town to a huge one. I've always been largely anti-social, mainly because I'm an elitist asshole :) but I've always at least known my neighbors to some extent... until I moved to the nation's capital. Here, half the people on my street are freaks, and the other half look away when they walk past anyone. People just aren't approachable at all, now they even have ME worrying that they'll pull out some lame-ass personal alarm or pepper spray if I dare to ask their name. If I were running at them with a machete, well then I'd understand, but I can't think of any incident where an innocent bystander was assaulted with a box of blank DVD-Rs.
This leads to some rather stupid entanglements, like having the police called for every little thing. People don't even have the "bravery" to come knock on the door when someone's music is a little louder than they'd like. I remember one time that happened to me, years ago. I kept getting noise complaints for every little thing, they even bitched about my bathroom exhaust fan being too noisy! So I started filing equally dubious complaints right back at the pest. The cops have a three-strike rule for most personal issues, so after the 2nd visit, my neighbor decided to walk the 15 feet to my door and knock. Now I'm a 5'11" 250lb young white guy, I opened my door to this 5'2" middle-aged runt (his wife's a butch), and he literally jumped back when he saw me. Did he think I'd lunge out and pummel him ? Probably, but he composed himself and asked if I could turn it down "a tiny bit". I said "No problem, sorry about that". Did I have the physical and tactical means to hurt him ? Sure! But would I ? Probably not, so what's with this ingrained fear that's destroying society ?
Canadian! (grins)
Seriously guys, world war is lame.
320 BYTES/sec ? Dude 14400 baud would be an upgrade!
Funny, I'd vote him precisely for that short-sighted candor. Maybe that has to do with my belief that Putin is a fucking pussy, after all.
I'm just talking out of my ass here, but didn't the Soviet Union have absolutely no concept of intellectual property back in the day ? Any and all research was the property of the government, as far as I know. Considering how that government ceased to exist on Dec 25th 1991, any IP they "held" would revert back to the public domain, no ?