On an online forum like this you would expect the very first comment to be about the impending loss of internet access. Yet, not a word. I scrolled down , and down, and gave up when all I saw were comments (although justified) about overreach against "terrists". Isn't loss of internet freedom a concern to the/. crowd at ALL ?
That is precisely how it was up here in Canada. You couldn't even find a store clerk who even knew what a circuit board WAS. And not a single electronic component for sale any more. One difference from the states , it seems, was that they changed their name tosomething else (which escapes me ATM) and started selling.. um.. overpriced cellphones:-). But successfully. I think the Canadian franchise must have been sold ten, because one day I woke up and found out all the stores had this new name. They're still in business today.
Since our magnetic shield is almost toast right now, this really is GOOD news. I, for one. don't care to be bombarded with high energy protons, and right now the sun has been loosing them on us at a furious pace...
There's no challenge anymore. No mods permitted anymore, and no mod sites. doesn't matter if it were mac or pc, although usually we all had both, and often a third OS running on (usually) a pc.. although I had BeOS on a mac.. No thrill of successfuly connecting via dialup to a BBS, etc etc. It feels a bit of a loss.It's all just too easy nowadays...
State dependance is very real. When we wrote, and rehearsed, material with the last major band I was in, we smoked quite a bit oif the ol ganja. But even though we had our parts down, when performiing live I absolutely could not remember how these tunes started out at all, among other problems, until we had some herb. Basically until several bars went by I had to fake it Of course after 100 times of playing them I finally got it, but basically, if we wrote it while smoking, we had to perform it wafter smoking. It was also the same with alcohol.. except in this case, when I was a regular drinker, I needed a couple of pints or my playing suffered. Apparemnly it was the same with other musicians I talked to... The thing was, when I cut back on drinking to only occasionally having a pint, I found my playing suffered after a few pints, whereas before easily twice as much actually improved it. Herb, however, still improved the groove even if I only occasionally indulged. *if* I could remember where I was in the tune and didn't get lost;-)
Don't think anyone here would shed a tear if it *were* Oracle;-). What baffles me, however, is that he was smart enough to pull this off for a hundred mils, but too dumb to use some of that cash to skip town with a new ID. Which he should have planned out in detail, ahead of time!
This is extortion. It's one thing to disclose leaked information to expose corruption, which is something good journalists do. However, journalism doesn't involve using leaked information as leverage to make demands. That is called extortion or blackmail. Wikileaks has shown that, at best, it's a criminal organization. I'm dismayed that so many people at Slashdot always rush to defend Wikileaks and Julian Assange in articles like these. It says a lot about the complete lack of character of most of the users on this site, which is also why there is so much tech-related crime. All of you should he ashamed of yourselves.
Yes, it's true that it is extortion. The question becomes, then, is it ever justified? I think, when you are dealing with either corrupt entities, or entities that pervert the legal system to meet their needs at the expense of the public, it may well BE justified. Nothing is ever set in stone, except for the 10 commandments (whioh is where the saying "set in stone" originated, after all).
Have you TRIED ever unsubbing? Even with "respectable" publications such as certain computer publications, it seem to have no effect whatsoever. And these other ones that automatically pass your email to all their other associated pubs, and I find myself unsubbing the same ones over and over. And it's a lot of them
You heard "Merry Christmas" more this year than in previous years? It seems like it wasn't too many years that Bill O'Reilly invented the "War on Christmas". Comedians had fun mocking him because, you know, everybody still said Merry Christmas despite his angry rants to the contrary. I guess all it took was an even angrier man to claim even louder that there was a war on Christmas---but don't worry, we won!---before everybody "remembers" it actually happening. I guess next week we'll all suddenly remember how we've always been at war with Eastasia, whereas Eurasia has always been our ally. If we're lucky, unemployment might even drop to 15%!
I, like most every non-unicorn-riding American, have no problem with the phrase Merry Christmas. However, if a store clerk told me to have a "blessed day", it would probably evoke the same feelings in me as if said clerk stared inappropriately at my daughter.
Actually,if they said that, I'd be looking for their mennonite hat hid under the customer service desk..."Goodbye.. Kind sir.. and have a blessed day" "And, please do not trip over my dead mother on your way out"! Frankly, it reminds me of most of Steven King's novels...
But, as concerns "Merry Christmas", Merry Xmas is as offensive to Christians as if you told a Jewish person "Happy Hanky" instead of "Hannukah:". "Christmas" , after all, is a "Christian" holiday.. Don't like it, then just say "Happy Yuletide" or something...
Do you have any suggestions for such alternatives?
Er...I've heard there's some german system.. name escapes me.. And some other american system.. name escapes me, as well. I think I've made my point... Most vendors only offer PP anyways, so the whole "policy update" appears to me to be, in addition to a rate update, a "talk nicely about usor you're gonna be TOAST!"
Yeah, but.. they ARE banning it just about everywhere. They've already had these laws here in BC for years.. Pubs and taverns cried foul, but their business has only dropped 40%, and they eventually found loopholes such as smoking outside in a patio, away from any door, which keep getting shut down, the ashtrays eventually returned to the doorways when it was found that the streets were suddenly littered with butts. The crack industry is now booming as it is the only employment left, because the monthly income's support on disability is almost less than a month's pack a day , although most people on disability harvest butts. See? There's always a way, where there's a will....
ixquick, aka "Startpage". Essentially, anonymous and non personalised google results. Read their blurb on the bottom of the page "How we protect you". I'm stumped as to why more folks haven't brought it up...
I've been using DDG since the day it first came out. Not very often, until recently, precisely because of, as you say, the "quality of their results". These have improved significantly, but not enough, yet, for me to use it as my go-to search engine. Although, mostly out of habituation, I still have Google as my home page on my browsers, fact is, for searches, I usually use ixQuick, which I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned, yet, here on SD. You've done a great explanation of DDG here, and due to physical limitations I'm not able to type as exhaustive a description of ixquick, but the quick description is it acts as a "shim" between your browser and Google, so Google only ever sees the ixquick request, and nothing else. It then hands over the results to ixquick, or "start page" as it is also known, which then strips out all the tracking info, and hands over results without any "personalization" , meaning you het ALL the results, not just the ones that Google thinks you might want the most. I've probabl;y done a poor job explaining it all, but there's an easy and clear explanation on their "start page" (https://www.ixquick.com/). Between DDG and ixQuick I feel pretty much covered..
Yup, but I recall people saying a few years ago the same thing as in... "realistically, most people will never use more than 4 gigs of RAM".. Never thought I would have to switch to a 64 bit OS for years yet.
As another indy musician I totally agree with the previous one... CD-Rs are absolute crap. They are a terrible way to present your music, and do not last.. . Unless you can present on a silver CD, your music wonb;'t survive a tenth as long as on a cassette tape. The quality of moodern tapes is excellent, you know.. or you would if you listened to them...;-)
Agreed. No fun no more. Not even no, but hell no, as AC said..The sound of an 8 bit modem connecting to a mysterious BBS that had programs and even the occasional mod and screamtracker files section.. no mp3s, just yet.. they were just too large for a BBS.. but all sorts of files to mod out your WfW insrtall, or even , if you were lucky enough to get a fully functional Nt3.1 install going (I was), some files to increase it's capabilities, or even getting NT 3.1 on the net... which was NOT a simple matter..We had ethernet here already in '92, but dns addrressing was a different matter entirely, and something NT didn't recognize. Another thing was the thrift shops. They were absolute goldmines of old computers to fool around with. Mac Se/30s, powermacs, even found a next cube once. I'll never forget the time some business dumped a whole bunch of Sllicon Graphics machines.. with the RAM still intact! And, of course, lots of 386s and pentiums, every so often a bunch of servers would ahow up. Eventually I had 2 rooms chock full of computers and almost nowhere to sit (and yeah, I saw that armchair made from PCs on the web;-) Novel idea). But now? Can't find a SINGLE thriftshop that will carry any computer. Period. "Can't, because the hard drive has personal information" is the line I get. They always used to pull out all the RAM, so how hard is it to yank a HDD? Of course then they can't prove it works, so they have to sell it "as is" and so then they can't bleed the customers dry. I really don't know who they are there in business for, anyways. That's the nature of the beast though..The 60s ended sometime around '75.. Macs stopped being "friendly" after OSX came into being.. and windows changed enough to prompt Nathan to create his timeless "IE is EVIL" website. and if you want a quick nostalgia run he's got his "gui gallery" to peruse. Still, it's a sea change in how it's got no coolness factor anymore, and how the "fun" has left, because it really has. Won't come back, either...:sigh:
Yes. who could ever have anything against those sweet li'l mouses? Except.. uh.. they actually, naturally , harbor much deadlier diseases than rats (rats just pick up unsanitary filth from their living conditions). and unlike rats, they hate people. Rats are far more sociable and if raised in captivity, actually LIKE people. How people feel about THEM, is another question;-)
The record company most certainly does NOT pocket the sales. They have absolutely no legal right to do so. It's the management that collects the income.. and according to any agreement they have made previously with the artists they split the proceeds, usually with an unusually generous cut for management. Unlkess you're Kiss, merchandise makes shit for proceeds. In fact, toiuring is , or at least has been in the past, according to the old system, is the only income the band makes until uit pays off the loan from the Record company. Things are somewhat different now, with artists having so muchh more input and control over their management and the label usually being independant. People signed via the classic major label method, such as, say, Hip Hop artists , still go through the old system though...
Slashdot Mirror
On an online forum like this you would expect the very first comment to be about the impending loss of internet access. Yet, not a word. I scrolled down , and down, and gave up when all I saw were comments (although justified) about overreach against "terrists". Isn't loss of internet freedom a concern to the /. crowd at ALL ?
That is precisely how it was up here in Canada. You couldn't even find a store clerk who even knew what a circuit board WAS. And not a single electronic component for sale any more. One difference from the states , it seems, was that they changed their name tosomething else (which escapes me ATM) and started selling .. um.. overpriced cellphones :-). But successfully. I think the Canadian franchise must have been sold ten, because one day I woke up and found out all the stores had this new name. They're still in business today.
Since our magnetic shield is almost toast right now, this really is GOOD news. I, for one. don't care to be bombarded with high energy protons, and right now the sun has been loosing them on us at a furious pace...
"Looks like he accidentally told the truth. ...."
Poof! Can't have that, now. Looks like he's going to have to apologize for apologizing for his apology, now
There's no challenge anymore. No mods permitted anymore, and no mod sites. doesn't matter if it were mac or pc, although usually we all had both, and often a third OS running on (usually) a pc.. although I had BeOS on a mac.. No thrill of successfuly connecting via dialup to a BBS, etc etc. It feels a bit of a loss.It's all just too easy nowadays...
Heh, you're right. In all the sniveling about patents I lost track of the facts. My apologies.
It's the article that has it backwards.. therein lies the confusion...
State dependance is very real. When we wrote, and rehearsed, material with the last major band I was in, we smoked quite a bit oif the ol ganja. But even though we had our parts down, when performiing live I absolutely could not remember how these tunes started out at all, among other problems, until we had some herb. Basically until several bars went by I had to fake it Of course after 100 times of playing them I finally got it, but basically, if we wrote it while smoking, we had to perform it wafter smoking. It was also the same with alcohol.. except in this case, when I was a regular drinker, I needed a couple of pints or my playing suffered. Apparemnly it was the same with other musicians I talked to... ;-)
The thing was, when I cut back on drinking to only occasionally having a pint, I found my playing suffered after a few pints, whereas before easily twice as much actually improved it. Herb, however, still improved the groove even if I only occasionally indulged. *if* I could remember where I was in the tune and didn't get lost
Don't think anyone here would shed a tear if it *were* Oracle ;-). What baffles me, however, is that he was smart enough to pull this off for a hundred mils, but too dumb to use some of that cash to skip town with a new ID. Which he should have planned out in detail, ahead of time!
This is extortion. It's one thing to disclose leaked information to expose corruption, which is something good journalists do. However, journalism doesn't involve using leaked information as leverage to make demands. That is called extortion or blackmail. Wikileaks has shown that, at best, it's a criminal organization. I'm dismayed that so many people at Slashdot always rush to defend Wikileaks and Julian Assange in articles like these. It says a lot about the complete lack of character of most of the users on this site, which is also why there is so much tech-related crime. All of you should he ashamed of yourselves.
Yes, it's true that it is extortion. The question becomes, then, is it ever justified? I think, when you are dealing with either corrupt entities, or entities that pervert the legal system to meet their needs at the expense of the public, it may well BE justified. Nothing is ever set in stone, except for the 10 commandments (whioh is where the saying "set in stone" originated, after all).
I can see it now "I Like Dead Ike"...
Have you TRIED ever unsubbing? Even with "respectable" publications such as certain computer publications, it seem to have no effect whatsoever. And these other ones that automatically pass your email to all their other associated pubs, and I find myself unsubbing the same ones over and over. And it's a lot of them
One step closer to "terminator style" liquid metal soldiers!
You heard "Merry Christmas" more this year than in previous years? It seems like it wasn't too many years that Bill O'Reilly invented the "War on Christmas". Comedians had fun mocking him because, you know, everybody still said Merry Christmas despite his angry rants to the contrary. I guess all it took was an even angrier man to claim even louder that there was a war on Christmas---but don't worry, we won!---before everybody "remembers" it actually happening. I guess next week we'll all suddenly remember how we've always been at war with Eastasia, whereas Eurasia has always been our ally. If we're lucky, unemployment might even drop to 15%!
I, like most every non-unicorn-riding American, have no problem with the phrase Merry Christmas. However, if a store clerk told me to have a "blessed day", it would probably evoke the same feelings in me as if said clerk stared inappropriately at my daughter.
Actually,if they said that, I'd be looking for their mennonite hat hid under the customer service desk..."Goodbye.. Kind sir.. and have a blessed day" "And, please do not trip over my dead mother on your way out"! Frankly, it reminds me of most of Steven King's novels...
But, as concerns "Merry Christmas", Merry Xmas is as offensive to Christians as if you told a Jewish person "Happy Hanky" instead of "Hannukah:". "Christmas" , after all, is a "Christian" holiday.. Don't like it, then just say "Happy Yuletide" or something...
Do you have any suggestions for such alternatives?
Er...I've heard there's some german system.. name escapes me.. And some other american system.. name escapes me, as well. I think I've made my point...
Most vendors only offer PP anyways, so the whole "policy update" appears to me to be, in addition to a rate update, a "talk nicely about usor you're gonna be TOAST!"
Yeah, but.. they ARE banning it just about everywhere. They've already had these laws here in BC for years.. Pubs and taverns cried foul, but their business has only dropped 40%, and they eventually found loopholes such as smoking outside in a patio, away from any door, which keep getting shut down, the ashtrays eventually returned to the doorways when it was found that the streets were suddenly littered with butts. The crack industry is now booming as it is the only employment left, because the monthly income's support on disability is almost less than a month's pack a day , although most people on disability harvest butts.
See? There's always a way, where there's a will....
Er.... South Pork
ixquick, aka "Startpage". Essentially, anonymous and non personalised google results. Read their blurb on the bottom of the page "How we protect you". I'm stumped as to why more folks haven't brought it up...
I've been using DDG since the day it first came out. Not very often, until recently, precisely because of, as you say, the "quality of their results". These have improved significantly, but not enough, yet, for me to use it as my go-to search engine. Although, mostly out of habituation, I still have Google as my home page on my browsers, fact is, for searches, I usually use ixQuick, which I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned, yet, here on SD. You've done a great explanation of DDG here, and due to physical limitations I'm not able to type as exhaustive a description of ixquick, but the quick description is it acts as a "shim" between your browser and Google, so Google only ever sees the ixquick request, and nothing else. It then hands over the results to ixquick, or "start page" as it is also known, which then strips out all the tracking info, and hands over results without any "personalization" , meaning you het ALL the results, not just the ones that Google thinks you might want the most.
I've probabl;y done a poor job explaining it all, but there's an easy and clear explanation on their "start page" (https://www.ixquick.com/).
Between DDG and ixQuick I feel pretty much covered..
Yup, but I recall people saying a few years ago the same thing as in... "realistically, most people will never use more than 4 gigs of RAM".. Never thought I would have to switch to a 64 bit OS for years yet.
32 bits outa be enough for anyone... ;-)
As another indy musician I totally agree with the previous one... CD-Rs are absolute crap. They are a terrible way to present your music, and do not last.. . Unless you can present on a silver CD, your music wonb;'t survive a tenth as long as on a cassette tape. The quality of moodern tapes is excellent, you know.. or you would if you listened to them... ;-)
Agreed. No fun no more. Not even no, but hell no, as AC said..The sound of an 8 bit modem connecting to a mysterious BBS that had programs and even the occasional mod and screamtracker files section.. no mp3s, just yet.. they were just too large for a BBS.. but all sorts of files to mod out your WfW insrtall, or even , if you were lucky enough to get a fully functional Nt3.1 install going (I was), some files to increase it's capabilities, or even getting NT 3.1 on the net... which was NOT a simple matter..We had ethernet here already in '92, but dns addrressing was a different matter entirely, and something NT didn't recognize. ;-) Novel idea). :sigh:
Another thing was the thrift shops. They were absolute goldmines of old computers to fool around with. Mac Se/30s, powermacs, even found a next cube once. I'll never forget the time some business dumped a whole bunch of Sllicon Graphics machines.. with the RAM still intact! And, of course, lots of 386s and pentiums, every so often a bunch of servers would ahow up. Eventually I had 2 rooms chock full of computers and almost nowhere to sit (and yeah, I saw that armchair made from PCs on the web
But now? Can't find a SINGLE thriftshop that will carry any computer. Period. "Can't, because the hard drive has personal information" is the line I get. They always used to pull out all the RAM, so how hard is it to yank a HDD? Of course then they can't prove it works, so they have to sell it "as is" and so then they can't bleed the customers dry. I really don't know who they are there in business for, anyways.
That's the nature of the beast though..The 60s ended sometime around '75.. Macs stopped being "friendly" after OSX came into being.. and windows changed enough to prompt Nathan to create his timeless "IE is EVIL" website. and if you want a quick nostalgia run he's got his "gui gallery" to peruse.
Still, it's a sea change in how it's got no coolness factor anymore, and how the "fun" has left, because it really has. Won't come back, either...
Yes. who could ever have anything against those sweet li'l mouses? Except.. uh.. they actually, naturally , harbor much deadlier diseases than rats (rats just pick up unsanitary filth from their living conditions). and unlike rats, they hate people. Rats are far more sociable and if raised in captivity, actually LIKE people. How people feel about THEM, is another question ;-)
But better not let the rats know.
The record company most certainly does NOT pocket the sales. They have absolutely no legal right to do so. It's the management that collects the income.. and according to any agreement they have made previously with the artists they split the proceeds, usually with an unusually generous cut for management. Unlkess you're Kiss, merchandise makes shit for proceeds. In fact, toiuring is , or at least has been in the past, according to the old system, is the only income the band makes until uit pays off the loan from the Record company. Things are somewhat different now, with artists having so muchh more input and control over their management and the label usually being independant. People signed via the classic major label method, such as, say, Hip Hop artists , still go through the old system though...