They'll change their mind when they go to war with a country that has paid Microsoft more than they have (or a country that Microsoft has purchased). And the entire Defense department falls apart from deeply embedded backdoors that have been sold to the 'enemy'.
Global corporations are just that, they don't owe loyality to any nation or any nation's war machine. The Americans will probably learn this (as they learn everything) the hard way.
In a similar vein, I would believe that all the ultra-high tech weapons that the Americans have sold to their more dubious allies do actually have back-doors that allow the Americans to disable these weapons should they be used against Americans by a country that has had a revolution. This was the lesson of Iran in the late 1970's. Hopefully it will be learned before all the high-tech weapons sold/given to Egypt over the past thirty years are used against the Americans and Israelis after the fall of Murabak's regime and the assendency of an Egyptian Islamic Republic.
Half of the people in senior level of any college don't belong in college in the first place. They aren't scholars,nor academics, or intelllectuals. They are there because their parents have insisted that they be there, and because there is no other place for them to be.
Little that they are 'studying' will be of any use to whatever job they eventually do after they leave college. So what difference does it make to anyone whether someone buys a termpaper on John Milton or actually reads or attempts to read what the fool wrote hundreds of years ago?
University is corrupt racket perpetrated by the administrators and teachers who themselves were tricked into believing in it previous generations ago. It is the epitome of 'bait and switch' false advertising. No society needs to have 30-50% percent of its young people graduating from college. Especially when the young people exit the experience with a lifetime's worth of debt and no guaranteed way to relieve it.
Eventually everything that you 'learned' in college will be either discarded as surplus intellectual baggage or will be actually learned correctly when you need to know the material in question in order to actually be paid to do a job that requires specific and focused knowledge.
Let's examine the real reason that many young people accept the degradation of the university experience. They want to party, puke, get high, and fuck sluts. Well you have a basic natural human right to do this. You don't need to pay $20,000 a year to some creeps running an 'academic institution' in order to validate your normal instincts.
Then there is the social class issue, which is the at the unspoken crux of the college experience. Historically, graduation from a university puts one in either the upper class of society or in the fast track there. That isn't true any more. Upper class people are that way because there parents had or made money. You are the opposite. You went from being debt-free and having no money and no job to being $80,000 in debt and having a shit job after graduation. You are in a lower social class after your graduation by the reality of having an $80,000 debt that has no tangible assets attached to it. You went from being a uneducated freeman to a poorly-educated indentured servant. College tricked you; you didn't rise in social class, you fell.
Intelligent and savvy young people are beginning to realize that college is a no-win trap today and are beginning to (very quietly) avoid it.
The way to deal with this is to either organize like in the old union workshop days of the 20th century or to more likely come to an understanding that any one of 'our people' (defined by us) is simply not subject to any adverse consequences of not following the copyright laws. This is a difficult concept to convey because 'we' have no real political power and this is basically a politcal issue.
But it starts with the deeply radical thought that 'we', the technological elite of the world, are 'immune' to the consequences of any laws concerning technology that 'we' don't agree with. Once enough of 'us', regardless of our nationality or political status, come to an unspoken agreement amongst ourselves that this is the way that it is going to be, then we can decide amongst ourselves what (if any) punishment should be allocated to our people by our people for enjoying the world's culture through file sharing and other technological means.
This again is a deeply radical concept because it assumes that the technological elite of the world (that's us, folks) will not be subservient to national or corporate laws that govern the application of technology. Currently it is assumed by the political and corporate forces of the world that the people who create, design, program, and operate technology are subject to the same whims of the politicians and CEOs as are all the other peasants, er, excuse me, consumers.
As you realise as a Slashdaughter, that is not exactly true. We need to define and conceptualize among ourselves the extent that we, as a new class in the new world order, will allow ourselves to be subjected to the whims of the CEOs, dumb-as-dirt politicians, and other Luddites. You see they can't really continue to rule as they currently do without our co-operation.
They depend on the technology that we create for them. That makes them limited in the extent that they can use this technology against us.
These discussions about DRM and the RIAA/MPAA on Slashdot are a sign that we, as the world's technological elite, are beginning to recognize this situation for what it really is.
They agreed to pay what $30 million dollars???? I cry horseshit! Nobody who actually has $30 million dollars has ever, does ever, or will ever just agree to give it away to someone. Especially something as legally dubious as an RIAA lawsuit.
Most likely they agreed to 'pay' some absurd amount of money knowing full well that barely more than a few thousand dollars would ever be passed to the RIAA under any circumstances. They agree to some sum that they would never have (after all they aren't any different from you and me, gentle Slashdaughters) if there was any posssiblity that they would actually have to come up with the cash. I would guess that 'E-Donkey incorporated' owes $3,000,000,000,000,000 dollars for their 'crime', and the people and programmers who actually were eating all the pizza at E-Donkey's parties don't have to pay anything. As long as they agree to 'be good in the future'.
If the actual people had to pay even 1/1000th of the this absurd amount for their 'crime', then I'll bet that they would be planning serious mayhem on the RIAA lawyers that were personally involved with this bullshit lawsuit.
Look, I'm against violence and horror as much as the next girl, but, in the real world, when you're up against real assholes like the RIAA, then violence and horror goes a long way to 'equalizing' the legal chessboard. Sooner or later the RIAA is going to figure this out. Probably each lawyer will, individually, as they watch their guts drip out onto the floor of their BMW just after winning another extortion lawsuit for downloading 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy' against that one wrong person.
Set up a meeting with the RIAA attorney to arrange payment. Have a gun and a piece of paper that says that the suit is dropped by the RIAA.
Meet the RIAA. Pull the gun. Tell the creep that either their signature will be on the paper or their brains will be. If he doesn't sign the paper dropping the suit, then blow his brains out. If he does sign, then don't harm him. After all, you are a man of honor even when dealing with worthless scum like RIAA lawyers that the world would be better off not having anyway.
If he laughs at you, shoot his hand apart like in "Taxi Driver". If he stares you in the eye and offers to reduce your fine by 20%, then shoot him in the leg. Take his wallet and leave. If he offers to go down to 50% of the fine after you shoot him in the leg and blow his hand apart, then agree to the 50% fine. Then pay him a retainer and have him become your lawyer in all future dealings with the RIAA. He's a pit bull.
If everybody did this then we wouldn't have this kind of trouble from these asshats. Nobody in Iraq or Russia or the Congo ever has to worry about the RIAA, why should we? After all, killing an RIAA lawyer isn't exactly killing a human being, is it?
I agree that there is no real reason to 'upgrade' a Microsoft operating system. MS has reached the point where they have received a sum of money for a reasonably functional operating system on nearly every PC in the world. So the only way that they have to keep their profits and stock price high is to convince everybody to buy the same reasonably functional again and again at full price. But if you remove the eye candy, is MS Vista or whatever significantly better than the OS that you bought from them three years ago? (I know you didn't, but think of yourself as the IT manager of a corporation with a few thousand employees).
No it isn't.
And all the weird registration hoops and hidden DRM and secret commercial links and co-sponsorship arrangements. Shit, all you have to do is look at monkey boy and you know that the only reason that he exists is to sell you as a product to all the other corporations in the Fortune 500.
Personally I run Windows 98 on the PC that I need to have direct programmable access to the I/O ports and Windows 2000 on any other PC that I use. And when Windows 2000 stops working for some incomprehensible reason, then I will switch to Linux. Very slowly, but most surely all of the programs that I use are being converted in functionality to open-source. I'd be happy to contribute to the process, but no one needs or wants Visual Basic 6 or AVR assembler coded applications 'polluting' the open-source universe.
The VIC-20 was originally meant to be called Vixen, but this name was inappropriate in Germany, Commodore's second most important market, because it sounds like wichsen, the German language word for "masturbate". VIC, which was subsequently chosen, has a similar problem--it can be pronounced like fick[en], the German word for "fuck". Therefore the VIC-20 was finally marketed as the VC-20 "Volkscomputer" in German-language countries--an obvious play on "Volkswagen".
By the same twisted logic, the RIAA could say that since you bought a knife six months ago, then you are responsible for every stabbing in the city for the past six months. Real, serious legal systems have long Latin names and judicial processes for this type of questionable legal behavior. The USA is in the process of going from a judicial system based on 'due process' to one based on financial resources. Trial by money with the more money that you have to 'contribute' to the legal process - how many lawyers and legal services that you can buy - then the more likely you are to have any legal situation decided in your favor.
Although everyone agrees that this is an undesirable situation, no one seems to be able to halt the process.
I suspect that people will hire mafia-type organizations to deal with the RIAA. Someone gets a shakedown notice from the RIAA, and they pay $500 to an anti-RIAA mafia group instead of paying thousands to the RIAA. Then this mafia group threatens to use violence against the individual lawyers of the RIAA unless the shakedown case is dropped for the individual who hired the anti-RIAA mafia group. Since the RIAA is simply selecting people at random for extortion anyway, then they will just choose someone else from the phonebook. In this situation, what usually happens is that the mafia group will simply start killing the RIAA lawyers themselves and take over the extortion of the public directly, therefore getting money from both sides of the deal. File sharing will continue as it always has.
Wii is actually the most stupid name because in North American English, it invokes the term 'wee-wee', which is a child's term for urination. It invokes an image among the primary targeted audience of childishness and toilet-training. Insanely bad marketing.
No one in their right mind would have named a game machine a wee-wee. But they did. Almost as bad of a name as the Commodore VIC-20 (in Germany).
Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function. Like "TWiki". At best, the name of the program should be a very short two word description of the program's function and at worst, a metaphor of the program's function. In the above example, "TWiki" should be called "GroupEditor" or at worst, "BullPen".
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context. Giving programs stupid names is a deep disfunction of the Linux/Open Source community. Seriously, we need to get over this.
Show them the issue of Architectural Digest that featured Rod Stewart and his big Malibu house. Tell them that they will go to jail for not paying money to this creep and his record companies. Then explain to them the concept of the public domain and how the 'entertainment' companies have stolen the public domain by bribing legislators to pass laws indefinitely extending the copyright period.
Most will put two and two together and realize that the 'entertainment' companies are ripe for plucking.
As for the rock stars in the room, they wouldn't even notice the fans unless they had excessive secondary sexual attributes ('big tits' for all you rock stars reading this). The talent is kept to coked up and dazzled by their corporate handlers to be able to pay attention to details of the music industry business. It's only after they have been discarded by their companies and the tits and coke stop coming that they start to count the pennies flowing from their greatest hits CD sales.
Basically this was sold as a way to prevent anyone from using two VCRs to copy a rented videotape. It (Macrovision) was placed on most commercial videos of Hollywood product from the mid-1980s to the present. Since the 'owner' of the video content had to pay a stiff license fee to Macrovision company, almost no porn tapes from that era had this nonsense added.
Macrovision is a burst of noise added to the vertical sync in the brief period after the current frame has ended and the next frame (a single 'photograph' or still image on the television set) begins. This burst of noise happened about once every ten to fifteen seconds. It caused the picture image to lose sync and 'roll' and/or 'tear up' for a short period of time until the vertical sync stabilization circuitry in the recording process kicked in and made the picture stable.
This is how Macrovision was able to mess up the video copy without destroying the video integrity when watching the original commercial video tape. The sync stablizer circuitry only was active during the recording period, not during playback. But the video copy was polluted by tearing and rolling every ten seconds or so.
The way to defeat this pollution was/is to use an 1881 sync seperator IC, a track-and-hold circuit, a 4053-type analog 1-of-2 switch IC, and a timer on a microcontroller (or a 555 one-shot timer IC). Use the sync seperator to detect the beginning of the vertical sync pulse. At this time, sample the black video level using the track-and-hold. After sampling, switch the video signal to the recorder (for the content being copied) to the sampled black level for the period before the actual video image analog signal begins. Then switch the recording back to the analog video signal of the original. Your copy will be solid and without tearing and rolling.
Oh my goodness!?! Did I just break your fucking law by explaining this? Oh my, I am sooooooo sorry! Oh well, to quote Emil Faber, "Knowledge Is Good". That's from the first video that I thought was worth copying.
This sounds like a combination of Nigerian 419 scams and the standard government overreaction to anyone caught using cannibus. Plus as Americans we can expect to get a truckload of this kind of ship from all the self-righteous assholes around the world who believe that as Americans we are responsible for every little chickenship thing that goes wrong in their life.
Ten years ago you would get this kind of harrassment (from authority figures, but not on the PC) because you were young and didn't feel like getting killed in some endless insane war. Or if you were a sexual minority (Gay, Lesbo, transexual, etc...). Or if you used cannibus.
25 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, or cannibus friendly.
50 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, Jewish, or cannibus friendly.
100 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, Jewish, or female.
150 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, Jewish, Irish, or female.
Every culture has a certain number of people who feel a gripping inner need to make other people's lives miserable for no good reason. All that changes is the pathetic excuse that they use for their need to discrimate.
20 years from now the people who will be discrimated against will be those fail bogus genetic tests for disease predispositions, or for being Muslim, or all those people caught by the RIAA for 'illegal' downloading.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. The best that you can do is personally refuse to participate in the patterns of discrimination against whoever has been chosen by the Asshole Society for abuse.
The RIAA's problem is that they really think that they own the world's culture.
If you put a recording into the public sphere, play it millions of times for hundreds of millions of people and do that for years, then the recording becomes a public domain part of culture simply by the process of being absorbed by the public.
The recording did not magically appear. It came from musicians who studied the recordings of other musicians, who played the works of the musicians before them, back into time. This is public culture: you can't claim to own public culture. It doesn't matter what laws you bribe the politicians to pass.
The RIAA is like some guy who thinks he owns the ocean just because he makes surfboards.
If this were an actually serious situation, then the US government would physically take over Microsoft's Redmond 'campus' and force all activity on future commercial products to cease until this 'threat' is over. Then the source code would be released to the authorities and universities for review and study for future 'dangerous defects'.
As to why this doesn't happen for Linux, well it's because the US government doesn't take Linux seriously. To them, it's a toy or at best, a minor application program that does...something. To the millions of employees of the US government, 'Microsoft' and 'computers' are identical terms. Most government workers, if asked, would probably tell you that Linux was a Microsoft project mandated to comply with some distant previous anti-trust ruling.
In reality, this is just the US government (or rather, some very minor apparatchek) just talking out of his ass and hoping to get on the evening news.
They do all that is listed above, and they do it from Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Google it and you'll see that it is about as remote as you can get from any North American metropolitian centers.
All their electronic components have to be trucked into Thief River Falls, sorted, counted, catagorized, and stored. Then the orders come in: 32 of a73907-30948-30, 2 of 39047038-alkd39-08, 1 of 90892938-dkfjk-29, etc...
Thousands of orders, every day.
I can't believe that they actually have that many people in Thief River Falls, MN to go around and find the components for each order for the 70,000 listed. But they do manage to get the job done.
Then every order gets shipped out again from TRF to the remotest regions of North America. They must love northern Minnesota. Were it me, I would shift the entire operation to a more centrally located location. As FedEx has done by locating in Memphis, TN or all companies clustered around DFX (Dallas/Ft. Worth Texas) airport.
I worked as a permanent temp in a Hewlett-Packard printer factory in Camas, Washington. I was in a room with a loading dock all alone with about a thousand printers, brand-new, boxed and ready-to-ship. My job was to select several printers a day at random and disassemble them so that the parts could be used to make prototypes of new printers. It was cheaper to hire a permanent temp employee to disassemble printers than it was to fill out the paperwork to get the parts from the assembly line before they were made.
Anyway, I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC as background wallpaper. A few days later I get escorted by an armed guard to the human resources office about a kilometer away and get fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment'. Since I had all the codes and badges to access the loading dock, I was tempted to just rent a truck, drive up, and take all the printers and either dump them in the ocean or sell them myself. Of course, according to Hewlett-Packard, I was 100% trustworthy because I passed a marijuana piss test so I was beyond suspission were the items to be found missing.
I didn't steal anything from them, but I was tempted to because I was so pissed at them. Of course, it came as no surprise to anyone that a few years later the morons who run H-P would just roll over and let Carly trash the entire company to the point where they felt relieved that they could finally get rid of her by giving her 28 million dollars to just...go...away.
So, a word to the wise young people, don't work for insane morons like Hewlett-Packard if you want to have a long and prosperous career in the IT or electronics industry. Choose your employer carefully; believe all crazy rumors about your company management, study Dilbert seriously, be flexible, and always ready to just jump ship at any better job offer. The old mentality and social contract between employer and employee is over.
I've never done text message communications, so I don't know. But do people actually communicate this way?
It seems to be all capital letters to facilitate text entry on a device that is held in hand while entering the characters by pushbutton. There there is the phonetic spelling of middle-class mid-Atlantic Americans. The words precisely follow the speech patterns of a casual conversation among young people (15-20 yrs old). There are agreed-upon abbreviations of ironic figures of speech such as OMG (oh my God!?) LOL (Lots Of Luck? Lick Off Loser? Look Or Leap?), WTF (a copulation obsenity used for general accentuation of the opinion that the writer has on the subject). There is the interesting transposition of character for the number three to visually approximate the capital letter 'E'. This seems oddly out of place in a communication format based on direct representation of spoken audio. Perhaps an affection of the author or a sign that the author is a member of a sub-clique that spends much time in a primarily-text oriented environment. Also interesting is the use of numeric characters to represent conjuctions, such as the use of '2' for 'to' but not 'two'.
So is a new standard usage for the handheld text messaging medium? Do these trends extend to other languages and cultures that use this medium?
There's a master's degree awaiting for the person who is willing to do the first serious study of this new instant dialect of English. Go for it.
The Israelis sent messages to the cities they intended to bomb so that the people there could leave and not get killed. Why did they bomb the buildings in those cities? Because the people who run those cities had installed thousands of rockets pointed at their neighboring country and had engaged in randomly firing those missles into civilian centers of the neighboring country without any warning!.
This is an unprovoked serious act of war, by a people who have repeatedly and openly sworn to destroy the neighboring country. Against a people who lost 90% of their population in a slaughter the last time they didn't take these warnings seriously.
If the criminal Hizba'allah organization had not repeatedly engaged in serious unprovoked acts of war against a neighboring sovereign state, the Israelis would not be currently bombing the shit out of them.
This is the way that the world works. You would be doing the exact same thing if it were you. The difference between the Israelis killing Arabs and Arabs killing Israelis is that the Arabs wrap their children in high explosives and send them off to blow themselves up in crowded public areas without warning and without mercy. Then they dance in the streets in celabration of their ' great victory'. The Israelis warn the Arabs that they are coming and if they want to live, then leave. Then they agonize over the wisdom and morality of their actions. They offer peace plans that are always rejected. The cycle of madness begins anew.
All this anti-Israeli and 'anti-Zionism' talk around the world is just anti-semitism resurfacing and trying to pretend not to be. The Israelis are great people that are surrounded by millions of people who have surrendered their minds to a death cult. The Israelis do what they must. They don't get any pleasure from it. But they don't shrink from it, either.
Let's see... an Israeli plane blows up a building in Lebanon after warning the people to leave. So some people in Chile are so upset that they put a picture of a bloody child on an American website of a government space agency.
Go to one of the translation websites and type the following:
Osama Bin Laden has just been killed and [your neighbor's name and address here] has just collected the $25 million reward from the Americans!
Translate it into Arabic then cut-and-paste it into one of the Jihad web sites in the Middle East where the beheading videos always get uploaded to first.
Check that your insurance papers are in order and then go take a couple days vacation a few hundred miles away. When you come back, no more asshat neighbors.
Thank you for your reply. I, too, will sometimes press the Spanish key in order to see if I can follow the instructions 'spoken' to me well enough to complete the process. I've never had anyone attempt to correct my choice.
I have noticed that the spoken Spanish is exactly the same as the words displayed on the video screen as the speech synthesizer is creating the sound. I am humbled by the amount of raw brainpower it takes to actually see the exact words being spoken and make the connection between the speech and the text. I have a deep sympathy with the people who are here in the USA and don't speak or understand English very well. Mastering a new language is a major acomplishment and deserves respect regardless of how much money you earn.
I studied French in school but never any Spanish at all. I sometimes wish that the Spanish language television stations would have optional subtitles in English (and Spanish as well) for both the anglophones who are trying to learn Spanish and the Hispanics in the USA who speak English as a primary language and Spanish poorly (if at all).
It's surprising that there is no word in English for not being able to speak or understand the commonly used language. It's a common condition in this era of fast and inexpensive travel. I suggest 'illinguate'; a combination of illiterate and linguistics. I just love making up new words.
Try taking a DVD of a popular Hollywood movie and selecting both Spanish subtitles and Spanish audio soundtrack. With careful listening and concentration you will notice that they are very different. It seems that most films are actually translated twice. Once for the audio spoken translation and once again for the subtitles. They are probably done by different companies. I've never seen the subtitles and foreign language subtitles match in the 50 or so DVDs that I've checked for this.
I'm the one who buys the day-old 'red-band' bananas and find that the automatic cashier hasn't been updated with today's 'red-band' price. So I insist that the cashier at the auto checkout stand leave the station, walk back a half-kilometer to the produce section, and verify that the price of the day is two pennies less than the machine says that it is.
And as soon as the auto-checkout attendent cashier begins their merry journey, your machine has locked up because it is demanding that you show your driver's license to the cashier in order to buy a beer.
It's scan-scan-swipe, people; in-and-out in about 45 seconds or less; how frickin' hard is that to understand?!?
I'm always the person who messes up in the self-checkout line.
I'm the one who presses the Spanish language button by mistake instead of the English. No big deal; but I don't know any Spanish. I'm learning grocery line Spanish, though.
I'm the one who has a jar with 300 pennies that I'm feeding into the coin slot one at a time because I don't want to have to pay a 15% penality at the coin counting machine.
I'm the one who can't tell the difference between the different types of lettuce, press the wrong type, get overcharged, and insist that the cashier void just that one item.
I'm the one who buys one six-pack of soda pop and ends up running one can through the scanner six times, get overcharged, and insist that the cashier void just those six items.
I'm the one who doesn't know the difference between a credit card and a debit card.
The Indian space program is a huge source of national pride for them.
The space program is a huge source of national pride to the engineers that are making big fortunes off the no-bid contracts. The problems with any nation's space program are not specific to any nation. They are the same problems with any nation. They are (the space programs) just giant welfare programs for visionless engineers.
Don't think that just because most of the world is poor and hungry, they have no interest in space travel.
Actually I do think that. The poor and hungry people of the world need food and jobs, not any space program. Ask them and they'll tell you that. The space program's cost is primarilly an opportunity cost. The money spent on these space programs for dubious or no relevant returns is unavailable for investment in programs that have direct and positive returns to any society.
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They'll change their mind when they go to war with a country that has paid Microsoft more than they have (or a country that Microsoft has purchased). And the entire Defense department falls apart from deeply embedded backdoors that have been sold to the 'enemy'.
Global corporations are just that, they don't owe loyality to any nation or any nation's war machine. The Americans will probably learn this (as they learn everything) the hard way.
In a similar vein, I would believe that all the ultra-high tech weapons that the Americans have sold to their more dubious allies do actually have back-doors that allow the Americans to disable these weapons should they be used against Americans by a country that has had a revolution. This was the lesson of Iran in the late 1970's. Hopefully it will be learned before all the high-tech weapons sold/given to Egypt over the past thirty years are used against the Americans and Israelis after the fall of Murabak's regime and the assendency of an Egyptian Islamic Republic.
Half of the people in senior level of any college don't belong in college in the first place. They aren't scholars,nor academics, or intelllectuals. They are there because their parents have insisted that they be there, and because there is no other place for them to be.
Little that they are 'studying' will be of any use to whatever job they eventually do after they leave college. So what difference does it make to anyone whether someone buys a termpaper on John Milton or actually reads or attempts to read what the fool wrote hundreds of years ago?
University is corrupt racket perpetrated by the administrators and teachers who themselves were tricked into believing in it previous generations ago. It is the epitome of 'bait and switch' false advertising. No society needs to have 30-50% percent of its young people graduating from college. Especially when the young people exit the experience with a lifetime's worth of debt and no guaranteed way to relieve it.
Eventually everything that you 'learned' in college will be either discarded as surplus intellectual baggage or will be actually learned correctly when you need to know the material in question in order to actually be paid to do a job that requires specific and focused knowledge.
Let's examine the real reason that many young people accept the degradation of the university experience. They want to party, puke, get high, and fuck sluts. Well you have a basic natural human right to do this. You don't need to pay $20,000 a year to some creeps running an 'academic institution' in order to validate your normal instincts.
Then there is the social class issue, which is the at the unspoken crux of the college experience. Historically, graduation from a university puts one in either the upper class of society or in the fast track there. That isn't true any more. Upper class people are that way because there parents had or made money. You are the opposite. You went from being debt-free and having no money and no job to being $80,000 in debt and having a shit job after graduation. You are in a lower social class after your graduation by the reality of having an $80,000 debt that has no tangible assets attached to it. You went from being a uneducated freeman to a poorly-educated indentured servant. College tricked you; you didn't rise in social class, you fell.
Intelligent and savvy young people are beginning to realize that college is a no-win trap today and are beginning to (very quietly) avoid it.
The way to deal with this is to either organize like in the old union workshop days of the 20th century or to more likely come to an understanding that any one of 'our people' (defined by us) is simply not subject to any adverse consequences of not following the copyright laws. This is a difficult concept to convey because 'we' have no real political power and this is basically a politcal issue.
But it starts with the deeply radical thought that 'we', the technological elite of the world, are 'immune' to the consequences of any laws concerning technology that 'we' don't agree with. Once enough of 'us', regardless of our nationality or political status, come to an unspoken agreement amongst ourselves that this is the way that it is going to be, then we can decide amongst ourselves what (if any) punishment should be allocated to our people by our people for enjoying the world's culture through file sharing and other technological means.
This again is a deeply radical concept because it assumes that the technological elite of the world (that's us, folks) will not be subservient to national or corporate laws that govern the application of technology. Currently it is assumed by the political and corporate forces of the world that the people who create, design, program, and operate technology are subject to the same whims of the politicians and CEOs as are all the other peasants, er, excuse me, consumers.
As you realise as a Slashdaughter, that is not exactly true. We need to define and conceptualize among ourselves the extent that we, as a new class in the new world order, will allow ourselves to be subjected to the whims of the CEOs, dumb-as-dirt politicians, and other Luddites. You see they can't really continue to rule as they currently do without our co-operation.
They depend on the technology that we create for them. That makes them limited in the extent that they can use this technology against us.
These discussions about DRM and the RIAA/MPAA on Slashdot are a sign that we, as the world's technological elite, are beginning to recognize this situation for what it really is.
They agreed to pay what $30 million dollars???? I cry horseshit! Nobody who actually has $30 million dollars has ever, does ever, or will ever just agree to give it away to someone. Especially something as legally dubious as an RIAA lawsuit.
Most likely they agreed to 'pay' some absurd amount of money knowing full well that barely more than a few thousand dollars would ever be passed to the RIAA under any circumstances. They agree to some sum that they would never have (after all they aren't any different from you and me, gentle Slashdaughters) if there was any posssiblity that they would actually have to come up with the cash. I would guess that 'E-Donkey incorporated' owes $3,000,000,000,000,000 dollars for their 'crime', and the people and programmers who actually were eating all the pizza at E-Donkey's parties don't have to pay anything. As long as they agree to 'be good in the future'.
If the actual people had to pay even 1/1000th of the this absurd amount for their 'crime', then I'll bet that they would be planning serious mayhem on the RIAA lawyers that were personally involved with this bullshit lawsuit.
Look, I'm against violence and horror as much as the next girl, but, in the real world, when you're up against real assholes like the RIAA, then violence and horror goes a long way to 'equalizing' the legal chessboard. Sooner or later the RIAA is going to figure this out. Probably each lawyer will, individually, as they watch their guts drip out onto the floor of their BMW just after winning another extortion lawsuit for downloading 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy' against that one wrong person.
Keep your fingers crossed.
Set up a meeting with the RIAA attorney to arrange payment. Have a gun and a piece of paper that says that the suit is dropped by the RIAA.
Meet the RIAA. Pull the gun. Tell the creep that either their signature will be on the paper or their brains will be. If he doesn't sign the paper dropping the suit, then blow his brains out. If he does sign, then don't harm him. After all, you are a man of honor even when dealing with worthless scum like RIAA lawyers that the world would be better off not having anyway.
If he laughs at you, shoot his hand apart like in "Taxi Driver". If he stares you in the eye and offers to reduce your fine by 20%, then shoot him in the leg. Take his wallet and leave. If he offers to go down to 50% of the fine after you shoot him in the leg and blow his hand apart, then agree to the 50% fine. Then pay him a retainer and have him become your lawyer in all future dealings with the RIAA. He's a pit bull.
If everybody did this then we wouldn't have this kind of trouble from these asshats. Nobody in Iraq or Russia or the Congo ever has to worry about the RIAA, why should we? After all, killing an RIAA lawyer isn't exactly killing a human being, is it?
I agree that there is no real reason to 'upgrade' a Microsoft operating system. MS has reached the point where they have received a sum of money for a reasonably functional operating system on nearly every PC in the world. So the only way that they have to keep their profits and stock price high is to convince everybody to buy the same reasonably functional again and again at full price. But if you remove the eye candy, is MS Vista or whatever significantly better than the OS that you bought from them three years ago? (I know you didn't, but think of yourself as the IT manager of a corporation with a few thousand employees).
No it isn't.
And all the weird registration hoops and hidden DRM and secret commercial links and co-sponsorship arrangements. Shit, all you have to do is look at monkey boy and you know that the only reason that he exists is to sell you as a product to all the other corporations in the Fortune 500.
Personally I run Windows 98 on the PC that I need to have direct programmable access to the I/O ports and Windows 2000 on any other PC that I use. And when Windows 2000 stops working for some incomprehensible reason, then I will switch to Linux. Very slowly, but most surely all of the programs that I use are being converted in functionality to open-source. I'd be happy to contribute to the process, but no one needs or wants Visual Basic 6 or AVR assembler coded applications 'polluting' the open-source universe.
From Wikipediea's entry on the VIC-20:
The VIC-20 was originally meant to be called Vixen, but this name was inappropriate in Germany, Commodore's second most important market, because it sounds like wichsen, the German language word for "masturbate". VIC, which was subsequently chosen, has a similar problem--it can be pronounced like fick[en], the German word for "fuck". Therefore the VIC-20 was finally marketed as the VC-20 "Volkscomputer" in German-language countries--an obvious play on "Volkswagen".
By the same twisted logic, the RIAA could say that since you bought a knife six months ago, then you are responsible for every stabbing in the city for the past six months. Real, serious legal systems have long Latin names and judicial processes for this type of questionable legal behavior. The USA is in the process of going from a judicial system based on 'due process' to one based on financial resources. Trial by money with the more money that you have to 'contribute' to the legal process - how many lawyers and legal services that you can buy - then the more likely you are to have any legal situation decided in your favor.
Although everyone agrees that this is an undesirable situation, no one seems to be able to halt the process.
I suspect that people will hire mafia-type organizations to deal with the RIAA. Someone gets a shakedown notice from the RIAA, and they pay $500 to an anti-RIAA mafia group instead of paying thousands to the RIAA. Then this mafia group threatens to use violence against the individual lawyers of the RIAA unless the shakedown case is dropped for the individual who hired the anti-RIAA mafia group. Since the RIAA is simply selecting people at random for extortion anyway, then they will just choose someone else from the phonebook. In this situation, what usually happens is that the mafia group will simply start killing the RIAA lawyers themselves and take over the extortion of the public directly, therefore getting money from both sides of the deal.
File sharing will continue as it always has.
Wii is actually the most stupid name because in North American English, it invokes the term 'wee-wee', which is a child's term for urination. It invokes an image among the primary targeted audience of childishness and toilet-training. Insanely bad marketing.
No one in their right mind would have named a game machine a wee-wee. But they did. Almost as bad of a name as the Commodore VIC-20 (in Germany).
Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function. Like "TWiki". At best, the name of the program should be a very short two word description of the program's function and at worst, a metaphor of the program's function. In the above example, "TWiki" should be called "GroupEditor" or at worst, "BullPen".
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context. Giving programs stupid names is a deep disfunction of the Linux/Open Source community. Seriously, we need to get over this.
Show them the issue of Architectural Digest that featured Rod Stewart and his big Malibu house. Tell them that they will go to jail for not paying money to this creep and his record companies. Then explain to them the concept of the public domain and how the 'entertainment' companies have stolen the public domain by bribing legislators to pass laws indefinitely extending the copyright period.
Most will put two and two together and realize that the 'entertainment' companies are ripe for plucking.
As for the rock stars in the room, they wouldn't even notice the fans unless they had excessive secondary sexual attributes ('big tits' for all you rock stars reading this). The talent is kept to coked up and dazzled by their corporate handlers to be able to pay attention to details of the music industry business. It's only after they have been discarded by their companies and the tits and coke stop coming that they start to count the pennies flowing from their greatest hits CD sales.
Basically this was sold as a way to prevent anyone from using two VCRs to copy a rented videotape. It (Macrovision) was placed on most commercial videos of Hollywood product from the mid-1980s to the present. Since the 'owner' of the video content had to pay a stiff license fee to Macrovision company, almost no porn tapes from that era had this nonsense added.
Macrovision is a burst of noise added to the vertical sync in the brief period after the current frame has ended and the next frame (a single 'photograph' or still image on the television set) begins. This burst of noise happened about once every ten to fifteen seconds. It caused the picture image to lose sync and 'roll' and/or 'tear up' for a short period of time until the vertical sync stabilization circuitry in the recording process
kicked in and made the picture stable.
This is how Macrovision was able to mess up the video copy without destroying the video integrity when watching the original commercial video tape. The sync stablizer circuitry only was active during the recording period, not during playback. But the video copy was polluted by tearing and rolling every ten seconds or so.
The way to defeat this pollution was/is to use an 1881 sync seperator IC, a track-and-hold circuit, a 4053-type analog 1-of-2 switch IC, and a timer on a microcontroller (or a 555 one-shot timer IC). Use the sync seperator to detect the beginning of the vertical sync pulse. At this time, sample the black video level using the track-and-hold. After sampling, switch the video signal to the recorder (for the content being copied) to the sampled black level for the period before the actual video image analog signal begins. Then switch the recording back to the analog video signal of the original. Your copy will be solid and without tearing and rolling.
Oh my goodness!?! Did I just break your fucking law by explaining this? Oh my, I am sooooooo sorry! Oh well, to quote Emil Faber, "Knowledge Is Good". That's from the first video that I thought was worth copying.
This sounds like a combination of Nigerian 419 scams and the standard government overreaction to anyone caught using cannibus. Plus as Americans we can expect to get a truckload of this kind of ship from all the self-righteous assholes around the world who believe that as Americans we are responsible for every little chickenship thing that goes wrong in their life.
Ten years ago you would get this kind of harrassment (from authority figures, but not on the PC) because you were young and didn't feel like getting killed in some endless insane war. Or if you were a sexual minority (Gay, Lesbo, transexual, etc...). Or if you used cannibus.
25 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, or cannibus friendly.
50 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, Jewish, or cannibus friendly.
100 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, Jewish, or female.
150 years ago you would get this ship if your were anti-war, gay, negro (the term at the time for African-American), Spanish-speaking, Jewish, Irish, or female.
Every culture has a certain number of people who feel a gripping inner need to make other people's lives miserable for no good reason. All that changes is the pathetic excuse that they use for their need to discrimate.
20 years from now the people who will be discrimated against will be those fail bogus genetic tests for disease predispositions, or for being Muslim, or all those people caught by the RIAA for 'illegal' downloading.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. The best that you can do is personally refuse to participate in the patterns of discrimination against whoever has been chosen by the Asshole Society for abuse.
The RIAA's problem is that they really think that they own the world's culture.
If you put a recording into the public sphere, play it millions of times for hundreds of millions of people and do that for years, then the recording becomes a public domain part of culture simply by the process of being absorbed by the public.
The recording did not magically appear. It came from musicians who studied the recordings of other musicians, who played the works of the musicians before them, back into time. This is public culture: you can't claim to own public culture. It doesn't matter what laws you bribe the politicians to pass.
The RIAA is like some guy who thinks he owns the ocean just because he makes surfboards.
If this were an actually serious situation, then the US government would physically take over Microsoft's Redmond 'campus' and force all activity on future commercial products to cease until this 'threat' is over. Then the source code would be released to the authorities and universities for review and study for future 'dangerous defects'.
As to why this doesn't happen for Linux, well it's because the US government doesn't take Linux seriously. To them, it's a toy or at best, a minor application program that does...something. To the millions of employees of the US government, 'Microsoft' and 'computers' are identical terms. Most government workers, if asked, would probably tell you that Linux was a Microsoft project mandated to comply with some distant previous anti-trust ruling.
In reality, this is just the US government (or rather, some very minor apparatchek) just talking out of his ass and hoping to get on the evening news.
They do all that is listed above, and they do it from Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Google it and you'll see that it is about as remote as you can get from any North American metropolitian centers.
All their electronic components have to be trucked into Thief River Falls, sorted, counted, catagorized, and stored. Then the orders come in: 32 of a73907-30948-30, 2 of 39047038-alkd39-08, 1 of 90892938-dkfjk-29, etc...
Thousands of orders, every day.
I can't believe that they actually have that many people in Thief River Falls, MN to go around and find the components for each order for the 70,000 listed. But they do manage to get the job done.
Then every order gets shipped out again from TRF to the remotest regions of North America. They must love northern Minnesota. Were it me, I would shift the entire operation to a more centrally located location. As FedEx has done by locating in Memphis, TN or all companies clustered around DFX (Dallas/Ft. Worth Texas) airport.
I worked as a permanent temp in a Hewlett-Packard printer factory in Camas, Washington. I was in a room with a loading dock all alone with about a thousand printers, brand-new, boxed and ready-to-ship. My job was to select several printers a day at random and disassemble them so that the parts could be used to make prototypes of new printers. It was cheaper to hire a permanent temp employee to disassemble printers than it was to fill out the paperwork to get the parts from the assembly line before they were made.
Anyway, I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC as background wallpaper. A few days later I get escorted by an armed guard to the human resources office about a kilometer away and get fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment'. Since I had all the codes and badges to access the loading dock, I was tempted to just rent a truck, drive up, and take all the printers and either dump them in the ocean or sell them myself. Of course, according to Hewlett-Packard, I was 100% trustworthy because I passed a marijuana piss test so I was beyond suspission were the items to be found missing.
I didn't steal anything from them, but I was tempted to because I was so pissed at them. Of course, it came as no surprise to anyone that a few years later the morons who run H-P would just roll over and let Carly trash the entire company to the point where they felt relieved that they could finally get rid of her by giving her 28 million dollars to just...go...away.
So, a word to the wise young people, don't work for insane morons like Hewlett-Packard if you want to have a long and prosperous career in the IT or electronics industry. Choose your employer carefully; believe all crazy rumors about your company management, study Dilbert seriously, be flexible, and always ready to just jump ship at any better job offer. The old mentality and social contract between employer and employee is over.
I've never done text message communications, so I don't know. But do people actually communicate this way?
It seems to be all capital letters to facilitate text entry on a device that is held in hand while entering the characters by pushbutton. There there is the phonetic spelling of middle-class mid-Atlantic Americans. The words precisely follow the speech patterns of a casual conversation among young people (15-20 yrs old). There are agreed-upon abbreviations of ironic figures of speech such as OMG (oh my God!?) LOL (Lots Of Luck? Lick Off Loser? Look Or Leap?), WTF (a copulation obsenity used for general accentuation of the opinion that the writer has on the subject). There is the interesting transposition of character for the number three to visually approximate the capital letter 'E'. This seems oddly out of place in a communication format based on direct representation of spoken audio. Perhaps an affection of the author or a sign that the author is a member of a sub-clique that spends much time in a primarily-text oriented environment. Also interesting is the use of numeric characters to represent conjuctions, such as the use of '2' for 'to' but not 'two'.
So is a new standard usage for the handheld text messaging medium? Do these trends extend to other languages and cultures that use this medium?
There's a master's degree awaiting for the person who is willing to do the first serious study of this new instant dialect of English. Go for it.
The Israelis sent messages to the cities they intended to bomb so that the people there could leave and not get killed. Why did they bomb the buildings in those cities? Because the people who run those cities had installed thousands of rockets pointed at their neighboring country and had engaged in randomly firing those missles into civilian centers of the neighboring country without any warning!.
This is an unprovoked serious act of war, by a people who have repeatedly and openly sworn to destroy the neighboring country. Against a people who lost 90% of their population in a slaughter the last time they didn't take these warnings seriously.
If the criminal Hizba'allah organization had not repeatedly engaged in serious unprovoked acts of war against a neighboring sovereign state, the Israelis would not be currently bombing the shit out of them.
This is the way that the world works. You would be doing the exact same thing if it were you. The difference between the Israelis killing Arabs and Arabs killing Israelis is that the Arabs wrap their children in high explosives and send them off to blow themselves up in crowded public areas without warning and without mercy. Then they dance in the streets in celabration of their ' great victory'. The Israelis warn the Arabs that they are coming and if they want to live, then leave. Then they agonize over the wisdom and morality of their actions. They offer peace plans that are always rejected. The cycle of madness begins anew.
All this anti-Israeli and 'anti-Zionism' talk around the world is just anti-semitism resurfacing and trying to pretend not to be. The Israelis are great people that are surrounded by millions of people who have surrendered their minds to a death cult. The Israelis do what they must. They don't get any pleasure from it. But they don't shrink from it, either.
Let's see... an Israeli plane blows up a building in Lebanon after warning the people to leave. So some people in Chile are so upset that they put a picture of a bloody child on an American website of a government space agency.
Jeez, someone needs to get laid here.
Go to one of the translation websites and type the following:
Osama Bin Laden has just been killed and [your neighbor's name and address here] has just collected the $25 million reward from the Americans!
Translate it into Arabic then cut-and-paste it into one of the Jihad web sites in the Middle East where the beheading videos always get uploaded to first.
Check that your insurance papers are in order and then go take a couple days vacation a few hundred miles away. When you come back, no more asshat neighbors.
Thank you for your reply. I, too, will sometimes press the Spanish key in order to see if I can follow the instructions 'spoken' to me well enough to complete the process. I've never had anyone attempt to correct my choice.
I have noticed that the spoken Spanish is exactly the same as the words displayed on the video screen as the speech synthesizer is creating the sound. I am humbled by the amount of raw brainpower it takes to actually see the exact words being spoken and make the connection between the speech and the text. I have a deep sympathy with the people who are here in the USA and don't speak or understand English very well. Mastering a new language is a major acomplishment and deserves respect regardless of how much money you earn.
I studied French in school but never any Spanish at all. I sometimes wish that the Spanish language television stations would have optional subtitles in English (and Spanish as well) for both the anglophones who are trying to learn Spanish and the Hispanics in the USA who speak English as a primary language and Spanish poorly (if at all).
It's surprising that there is no word in English for not being able to speak or understand the commonly used language. It's a common condition in this era of fast and inexpensive travel. I suggest 'illinguate'; a combination of illiterate and linguistics. I just love making up new words.
Try taking a DVD of a popular Hollywood movie and selecting both Spanish subtitles and Spanish audio soundtrack. With careful listening and concentration you will notice that they are very different. It seems that most films are actually translated twice. Once for the audio spoken translation and once again for the subtitles. They are probably done by different companies. I've never seen the subtitles and foreign language subtitles match in the 50 or so DVDs that I've checked for this.
Thanks again for your reply.
I almost forgot,
I'm the one who buys the day-old 'red-band' bananas and find that the automatic cashier hasn't been updated with today's 'red-band' price. So I insist that the cashier at the auto checkout stand leave the station, walk back a half-kilometer to the produce section, and verify that the price of the day is two pennies less than the machine says that it is.
And as soon as the auto-checkout attendent cashier begins their merry journey, your machine has locked up because it is demanding that you show your driver's license to the cashier in order to buy a beer.
Now ain't that just the worst of them all?
It's scan-scan-swipe, people; in-and-out in about 45 seconds or less; how frickin' hard is that to understand?!?
I'm always the person who messes up in the self-checkout line.
I'm the one who presses the Spanish language button by mistake instead of the English. No big deal; but I don't know any Spanish. I'm learning grocery line Spanish, though.
I'm the one who has a jar with 300 pennies that I'm feeding into the coin slot one at a time because I don't want to have to pay a 15% penality at the coin counting machine.
I'm the one who can't tell the difference between the different types of lettuce, press the wrong type, get overcharged, and insist that the cashier void just that one item.
I'm the one who buys one six-pack of soda pop and ends up running one can through the scanner six times, get overcharged, and insist that the cashier void just those six items.
I'm the one who doesn't know the difference between a credit card and a debit card.
Now, don't you'all just hate me?
The Indian space program is a huge source of national pride for them.
The space program is a huge source of national pride to the engineers that are making big fortunes off the no-bid contracts. The problems with any nation's space program are not specific to any nation. They are the same problems with any nation. They are (the space programs) just giant welfare programs for visionless engineers.
Don't think that just because most of the world is poor and hungry, they have no interest in space travel.
Actually I do think that. The poor and hungry people of the world need food and jobs, not any space program. Ask them and they'll tell you that. The space program's cost is primarilly an opportunity cost. The money spent on these space programs for dubious or no relevant returns is unavailable for investment in programs that have direct and positive returns to any society.