Also missing from a legacy browser is a spelling checker. There is a good one available for FireFox as a downloadable add-on extension.
Now I don't look like an illiterate idiot because of misspelled words in my messages. With a legacy browser, I would have to write the message, load MS Word, cut-and-paste the message text to Word, do a spelling check, and cut-and-paste the corrected text back to the message box on the legacy browser.
No more. I hope to never have to go back to the legacy browser.
A paraphrase of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's media campaign of 1971 ("War is Over, if you want it").
I no longer accept anyone's definition of copyright or the expectation of any person or corporation that they can legally deny access to any digitized recording, image, or written work for any reason.
Think I'm "stealing"? Think what you like, I don't care.
'The LAW explicitly says...". I don't care. The people who pass laws are directly paid by the corporations to pass laws that are directly benefit the corporations and no one else. That isn't law, it's just purchased muscle.
"The poor exploited musicians...", Give me a break. Get a job. Stop expecting people to give you money because "you're cool". The more the economy sinks, the less I feel inclined to give money to people because they extrude charisma.
I'm really beginning to wish that all the celebrities would all just go the fuck away. I really don't need them, I don't care about them, they don't care about me. I'm never going to give them any more money, regardless of what they do, or how great their new CD or film is. The 20th century is over, there's a new thing around, something is happening but you don't what it is, do you, Ms. Jones?
Get out of my face, and take your tits with you.
How to get 4000 minutes of music on a 39 cent disk
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10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 1
Go to the local public library and check out the entire rock and pop collection. Rip these CDs to your PC hard drive. Buy a DVD burner for $70. Copy the entire MP3/OGG collection to the blank DVD that came with the DVD burner. Take the DVD burner back to Fry's. You have a 4000 minute 39 cent DVD.
LP's ??? You must be kidding..
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Having grown up in the LP era and spent large amounts of hard-earned lawn mowing and snow-shovelling money on them, I can honestly say about them "Good Riddance!".
They are primitive sound technology. They are expensive, fragile, and don't sound good. You can always tell an MP3 file of an old 60's pop song made from an LP as opposed to one ripped from a CD. The fidelity is just not there.
An LP held 45 minutes of music for most of its life and about 60 minutes at its most advanced. It cost about $20 (in today's US dollars). Now a blank DVD ROM holds about 4000 minutes in high-quality MP3 or OGG files and sells for $0.39 (in today's US dollars). An exact copy of this set of 4500 minutes can be made on another 39 cent blank disk in about 15 minutes. And you can control which selections will be copied and the order.
To get ultra high fidelity audio from LPs requires thousands of dollars of precision equipment, very fragile and sensitive to the local room conditions. To get the same fidelity from high quality 320kbps MP3 and OGG files takes a $59 player. And it even puts out this high fidelity sound when you are running with it.
It seems that the media idea of a terrorist is not quite correct. These people are not poorly educated villagers trying to protect their traditional way of life from constantly encroaching Westernism. They are instead people who are quite fully comfortable and adept to Western lifestyles and middle-class interactions.
But they have also developed an obsession to randomly murder the people that they chose to surround themselves with. These people generally are different from the suicide bombers or shaheed individuals. The suicide bombers are 'brainwashed' by standardized cult methods into mass murder. They are ill-educated and working class youth in societies that have no real opportunity for young people because the population has grown much more faster than the economy. And because the governments are frozen in corruption and patronage, with little interest in change that would allow the needed growth.
In other words, there seem to two seperate types of people who do terrorism: the cadre and the cannon fodder. The well-educated who can function in the West and have no qualms about mass murder of random innocent peoples and those who are looking for a cheap ticket to heaven because life on earth sucks.
The well-educated mass-murders are most likely under the control of a cult. Because random mass-murder is not normal behavoir for educated middle-class people from any society or religion.
This matters because cultists aren't really committing crimes for politcal or economic reasons that have negotiated political solutions. Governments can never stop these people by giving them what they want because the only thing that they really want is to do is kill people. All the religious, economic, historical, military, and political arguments used to justify these acts of mass murder are just a smokescreen to buy time for the next mass murder.
It may be necessary to fight these death cults by creating counter death cults that infiltrate Islamic societies and create havoc and random murder to the point where the anti-West death cults first have to fight these new groups before they can engage in murder in the West. The West fights terror incidents in its own country by creating large numbers of secret cults of murderous psychopaths who disrupt Islamic societies with such a high level of random mass murder that the Al-Qaida groups too busy defending their own people to launch operations that murder people in the West.
Creating these cults with deep brainwashing and post-hypnotic suggestions would be a war crime in anyone's law book. But it's possible that the West may turn to doing this because they have run out of other options. This would be a crime on th level of the massive saturation bombing of cities in order to kill everyone military or civilian that was done in World War II. But that kind of mass murder ended with the defeat of the Axis governments and armies. This kind of mass murder would go on forever. Its point would not be to obtain any specific objective, but rather to constantly brutalize a society to the point where it couldn't function anymore, and would decend into total barbarism. It may come that the wealthy areas of the world will force the poor areas into permanent sub-civilized conditions with no hope of improvement in order to deny them the means of launching random murderous attacks on the daily life in the developed world.
Hermiston is a curious place
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When Pigs Wifi
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Hermiston is in the north central section of Oregon right on the Columbia river. The largest close city is Pendleton in Oregon and the Tri-Cities in Washington to the north. It is a transport hub for rail, trucking, and river traffic.
Yawn...
Hermiston is also one of the world centers for weapons of mass destruction. And not just massive amounts of pig excrement either. It is a major storage center for large stockpiles of nerve gas chemical weapons. These weapons currently are in the process of being burned and destroyed. However every time Allah directs the faithful to attest to his merciful benevolence by blowing up a bus or day-care center the process of destroying this massive supply of deadly nerve gas stops for another review of safety procedures.
Just north of the chemical weapon storage facility is the Hanford Nuclear Development site where most of the plutonium that powers the 20000 Hydrogen bombs in the US arsenal was produced. Heaven knows what else is produced or done there.
If I were sitting in a cave by the campfire trying to decide where Allah will next demonstrate his mercy and benevolence by having his followers murder innocent children, tourists, and commuters, anywhere near Hermiston Oregon would be the one last place on earth that I would choose to demonstrate once again Allah's bountiful mercy and Islam's great wish for a loving and peaceful world.
Actually, it would appear that we are doing quite a bit. According to Rolling Stone magazine, sales of prerecorded CDs are falling about 5-7% a year. This is happening despite various superstar's hot new albums and mass purchases of must-have new releases. And despite that so many teeny-boppers have so much of their parent's money to spend and no political awareness whatsoever. Plus the audience of young people continues to grow worldwide and there is generally more money available for the purchase of recordings. The number of recorded music sales should be growing each year, but it is not.
Perhaps it is because we are effectively disseminating the message that there are alternatives to purchasing RIAA product on their terms and on their demanded price levels.
As for doing some kind of symbolic political action that attempts to presuade American politicians to consider a particular course of action? Forget it, symbolic political actions like marches, petitions, demonstrations, have no effect on the political process in the USA any more. You'll just end up getting sunburned, maced, tazered, arrested, and laughed at on the Murdoch-Clear Channel new outlets.
Keep quietly downloading, copying, and trading music and movies with your friends, and spending less and less on RIAA and MPAA product. It will take another 15-20 years, but eventually they will come to us to negotiate their continued existance on our terms, regardless of what stupid laws that they get their purchased politicians to pass.
These guys are having a real hard time understanding that this is the beginning of the information age and the age of the nation/state corporate or communist control of the economy is passing. In the information age, the people who create and guide the technology that distributes information have more power than the people who are able to control the systematic application of violence.
This is a long and slow transformation, but it is irreversable. Eventually the RIAA and MPAA will be on the side of the P2P designers and decentralized information distributers. They have no other real place to go. However, it's going to take a long time and there are going to be a lot of people put in prison for listening to music during the transistion. Do try not to be one of them.
In the long run, after doing an analysis of the coding practices of many companies, the companies that emphasise heavyweight procedures (like detailed algorythms) and doing things "properly" (methodically) will do better financially than the companies that coddle to the whims of their superstar programmers. Software engineering is not Hollywood.
There are successful software entities in both camps, of course. But the algorythmic process companies have the long term advantage. Superstar programmers appear all over the world, and it is more profitable to lay off the good programmers in expensive countries and hire superstars in low-wage countries. With PayPal, internet Skype telephone service, and free large file e-mail attachments, the writing of complex software is rapidly relocating to the cheapest countries on earth. Programmers that are willing and able to relocate to super cheap countries will have an advantage over those stuck by families and mortages in high-cost areas. When the military conscription starts again in the USA in the next few years, young American programmers will emigrating to secret private little sections of distant countries. They will bribe local authorities to ignore passport and visa violations and survive by taking programming jobs and getting paid through PayPal and international offshore bank transfers. They will form programming teams with other expats in conscription exile from various countries for mutual protection and support. Global tribes of atomized individuals who have never met, and have no idea what their fellow tribe members real identities are or where they are physically located in the world.
It's certainly true that the commenting and code documentation is a pain and takes a lot of time. I suggest trying a speech-to-text system like the IBM ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking. Take the time to train it to your voice.
Then, when the code is finished, start the speech program in the background. Bring up the source and describe it into the microphone as if you were trying both to impress a boss who was not technically proficient and a doctoral oral committee challenging every detail. Save the text file as, oh, 'rambling docs.txt' and save it with the code. Instant painless detailed documentation.
It only seems like a weird concept until the first time that someone complements you on how incredibly adept you are with modern technology (and gives you a promotion and raise).
I simply must raise a point at the seemingly obvious statement that a 'good' programmer is so much better than an average programmer.
Lord knows that applies to artists, look at the paintings that Botticelli did of me back when I was still alive compared to the ones done all of those other greasy creeps.
But programming is supposed to be a science and a process. If you prepare a precision algorythm and carefully test it before coding with all manner of valid and absurd inputs, then it shouldn't matter what level of so called skill a programmer has when the coding proceeds.
Oh, you mean a 'good programmer' is one who by lucky accident gets working code without using developing a complete algorythm first? What do you guys do, design microwave ovens for a living?
There's no such thing as a good vs average programmer. There's only those who follow the algorythm and the lucky artists.
Thank you, Simonetta Vespucci 1454-1476 Florence, EU
...but it is one incident of savagery out of many incidents of savagery on both sides.
This was a incident focused on people outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are many groups outside of Israel-Palestine that have claim to the region for various historical and religious reasons. Israel has never focused a military or terrorist attack on any of these peoples, Hamas specifically chose to murder people from outside the conflict with this incident.
How much cash is a human life worth. You are mostly cheapening the lives of those killed to set a price tag on their deaths...
Yassir Arafat and Saddam Hussein paid $2000 to the families of suicide bombers. We believe that the lives of the individual people killed by these bombers are worth considerably more. The value of each individual life is determined by disinterested agencies according to factors like projected future earnings, number of dependents, etc... by an international court of law. Financial compensation is the primary means (and has been for hundreds of years) for settling obligations between the families of the victims and those who were responsible for their wrongful deaths.
In a global context, the brutal tribal warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians is of little consequence. The real global issue in this endless and pathetic war is what the world will do should the Palestinians chose to extend their military stategy of mass murder of innocent civilians outside of Israel-Palestine borders.
The initial incidents (like Munich 1972 and the various bombings around Europe since) will be ignored. Should the Palestinians continue to murder international civilians outside of their region, they will inevitably provoke a reaction from the world community. Presently the world accepts whatever the Israelis do to the Palestinians as necessary to keep the carnage localized. If the Israelis be unable to contain Palestinian terrorism in the future to the region, then the world will respond by massive genocidal attack on the Palestinian people. This will be an extranational attack, not identified with any nation or group. It will be a massive version of the small scale terrorist attacks endlessly launched by Palestinians, only directed at the Palestinians. It will be historically unprecedented. An attack of massive destruction specifically designed for the genocidal elimination of a specific nationality of people all at one time. It is the type of incident that everyone in the world wants to avoid because it could lead to a chain of ever-escalating attacks that would lead to omnicide, which is the systematic murder of all humans.
This is the real danger of terrorism and it is the real reason that all civilized people outside of the Islamic world condem the use of terrorism as a military and political strategy.
This post is well-written, but wrong. Whatever good Hamas claims to bring to the Palestinian people is completely negated by their actions. In specific the action of planting a bomb in the cafeteria of the Frank Sinatra Center of Hebrew University several years ago that murdered seven international students and maimed 80 others.
This is a act of inconceivable savagery that can only be described as the work of monsters. This judgment would be reached by any group of civilized people in any society at any time.
There is no political or historical justification for such a vile and brutal act of mass murder.
By shielding from international justice (the murder of international students in an international university demands an international court of justice) the persons responsible for planning and executing this act of mass murder, Hamas departs ranks from a social service organization and becomes in international law, a criminal and terrorist organization.
Your other arguments are simply fluff and disjointed verbiage, meaningless within the context of this horrible act that Hamas sponsored.
When these criminals are brought to justice and Hamas extends fair and appropriate financial compensation to the families of the students who were murdered in this savage crime, then we might talk history and philosophy.
Hamas is really the closest counterpart to Hagana,...
Hagana never placed a bomb in the cafeteria of the Student Center of the University, nor did they ever proclaim that killing teenage archeology students was a moral and military victory.
Hamas did this before and, given any opportunity, would do it again.
Morality is what morality does, to paraphrase the Forest Gump movie. Hamas is not an organization seeking focused and obtainable goals leading to the independence and prosperity of the Palestinian people. It is a violent fascist organized confederation of gangsters, who have deluded themselves with disfunctional religious fantasy into believing that they are freedom fighters instead of the sub-human thugs that the rest of the world (outside of the Islamic lands) can plainly see that they are.
Thank you for taking the time to write a long and detailed reply to comment.
I will research the incidents that you have referred to in your comment and realign my perspective in order to get closer to a just truth and balanced point of view.
All the reasons listed above are the reasons why I am 100% against accepting statehood for Palestine. The Palestinians have been the leaders of terrorism against both Israel and the West for 35 years now. Most of the incomprehensibly brutal and sub-human things that we have come to associate with organized terror they either invented or brought into international prominence. And they have done it for one reason only, to be accepted as an independent country by the rest of the world.
Therefore to accept the legitimacy of a Palestinian state would also mean accepting the legitimacy of the means that they used to achieve it. It means granting them a free pass for all the horrible, horrible crimes that they have committed against innocent people for 35 years.
And it means that every group of disaffected shit-for-brains losers in the third world with a case of AK-47s, a pound of C4, and a psychopathic holy man (and there are a lot of groups like this) will believe that the way to a seat in the UN is to murder innocent Americans and Europeans. After all, they will think, it did work for the Palestinians!
I believe that that world should accept that regardless of whatever legitimate political grievances that the Palestinians may have, the possibility of their having a independent country is an impossibility given the crimes that they have committed against ordinary people for decades. For every innocent civilian murdered by the Palestinians, the global diplomatic acceptance of their country should be postponed for one year.
Basically in international relations, you get the type of behavior that you reward. If we legitimize the crimes of the Palestinians, then we are guaranteed to get many more crimes of this nature committed against us in the future.
It's said that the Palestinians are simply too backward and dysfunctional to understand this concept. It's said that the Palestinians 'never miss an opportunity to ''miss an opportunity.'' Well, that is their problem, not ours.
The whole Palestine question is quite minor compared to the amount of news media attention that they have received for the past 35 years. You could take all the Palestinians out of the Middle East and put them in Mexico City and it would be weeks before anyone noticed that they were there.
Hell, you could take all the Palestinians and put them in the middle of the endless slums of Lagos or Nairobi or Abidjan or Kinshasa and they would just -disappear- as if they never existed. The only reason why they are considered important news is just laziness and inertia on the part of the new media companies. What they do is considered important only because, for some unknown reason, they were considered important in the distant past. The Palestinians are like some absurd American daytime television soap opera; no one knows or cares the endless twists of their plots and history but the show can't be canceled because everything is on auto-pilot.
Can you imagine if from the late 1940's to the present day the African-American people of the USA adopted the same tactics and methods to obtain justice that the Palestinians have used? Both groups were at basically the same position as oppressed minorities in their societies at that time. If the Black people did to the White people in America the same things that the Palestinians have done to the Israelis, there would today only be about 50,000 or so African-Americans left alive. And they would all be living in a concentration camp in northern Alaska. And every one would have a microchip embedded in their head; broadcasting their location to the helicopters flying over the camp 24/7/365.
With all respect and honor - Shalom - to the memory of those lost in the holocaust
The Palestinians don't realize how lucky they are to have the Israelis as the occupying force in their land. Having suffered the wors
Atari's ST came out in 1985-86 and it was a low-cost direct steal of the Apple Macintosh GUI. It sold at 1/10th the price of the Apple.
Microsoft's Windows version 3 was a direct copy/steal of the Apple Macintosh GUI. It seperated the software from the hardware and was therefore able to sell for 1/10th the price of the Atari ST. Windows 3 users did need to upgrade to new Intel 386 -class machines in order to run Windows 3.
Each company attempted to get rich by stealing the same concept and reducing its price by 90%. Yet it didn't work. It didn't work until 1995 when Windows 95 (or version 4 - a debugged version 3 that finally implemented the 32-bit advanced CPU technology introduced in the 80386 in 1986) was released for the Pentium class machines that were becoming affordable.
It didn't work because management was greedy. Greed does not sell technology. That't the point.
Yes, Apple did steal the idea for a graphic user interface from the demo visit that Jobs and crew made to Xerox PARC. Jobs and crew were primed for a completely new user interface for a low-cost (here meaning less than $50000 US 1981 dollars) business computer. They came, they saw, they copied.
Xerox hired great people who created a new computer environment. Xerox management saw it and realised that it could make them rich. Xerox slapped a $50,000 price on it, sat back, did nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Apple hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Apple management saw Xerox's work and realised that it could make them rich. Apple copied it, slapped a $10,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Atari hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Atari's 'management' saw Apples's work and realised that it could make them rich. Atari copied it, slapped a $1,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Microsoft hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Microsoft management saw Atari's work and realised that it could make them rich. Microsoft copied it, slapped a $100 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it soar, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry Unix programmers to see it.
The point? Stop your management monkeys from looking at the technology world as a means to get rich and more as way to build the framework and infrastructure that will allow wealth to be generated by new organizations and processes that are made possible by new technology. Then they will be able to make enough money to keep their pointy little heads happy.
Stop being so fucking greedy. Greed is not good. In the long run, it doesn't work.
they probably figured a cheap, easy means to get people who otherwise did not know they had a pirated version...
I don't believe that there are many people who don't know that they are using a "quote" pirated "unquote" version of Windows. In the USA, it is extremely rare for unregistered versions of Windows to be used in Offices. And most people who buy PCs 'ready-to-operate' will have the Windows license included at a vastly reduced bulk price. People who build their own PC from components will know that the installed Windows is unregistered.
The only people who might not know that their Windows is unregistered are those who have had a friend or relative assemble a super-cheap PC from components for them. Or who have received a hand-me-down or secondhand PC from someone who installed an unregistered Windows, and didn't pass this piece of information along.
This is maybe 1% or less of all users in the USA. Outside the wealthy countries of the world, the situation would be that people would probably assume that either the Windows on the PC was unregistered or would not be aware that Microsoft was actually expecting to receive a large sum of money for every copy of Windows on every PC.
But Microsoft should lighten up about this policy. They are already the richest software company. Their chairman is the richest man in the world and possibly the richest man that every lived. They don't really do anything with the money that they already have. It would be in their best interest to lower the cost of their operating system in the developing world. Not by actually lowering the price, which would cause arbitrage from the wealthy countries, but by reducing the difficulty of inplementation of unregistered and by not penalizing people who use unregistered copies. They already have all the money that they are going to get from operating systems, so they should concentrate on preserving market share in the face of low cost alternatives like Linux.
Not one comment about cannibus cultivation using this system? My you'all really are a bunch of nerds. Many cultivators are caught by an analysis of the amount of electricity needed to recreate sunlight in places where the plants being grown by this artificial sunlight can never be exposed to casual public view.
But a light pipe that can channel sunlight from the solar tower to underground growing chamber without showing up on the computerized electricity bills? Something new under the sun!
Now we need a truly innovative way to store sunlight. The light capacitor. And while we're mixing up brains, we also need a way to use sunlight to seperate salt from water and to serperate water molecules into storable hydrogen and oxygen.
But, hey, one step at a time. And this is a cool step.
Re:No sting -- Their wrists were already armored
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Sony Agrees to Stop Payola
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If the large corporations of the music industry can get an image of "large tax provider" they will become more protected too. Effective DRM and an internet music tax would be ideal for this.
This would be an interesting situation for the music industry. They could double their prices, give half of their new earnings to the tax collectors, get priviledged status (any laws that they wanted would be rubberstamped), and blame everything on music file downloaders.
But this is not a good analogy with the tobacco industry. They sell an addictive drug primarily to the working class. Tobacco addicts have no real low-cost substitute. The music industry faces low cost CD-R and DVD-ROM blanks, where people can buy a $70 DVD burner and put 1000 songs on a single 40 cent blank DVD. Plus there are many sources of non-RIAA controlled music.
Most of this non-RIAA music is not good, but that can be solved by putting out sampler disks (1000 songs by 300 bands on a low-cost DVD). Bands can also have websites where people can write them to explain why they don't like a song and upload examples of other songs that are similar but better. Imagine doing that with a major RIAA band selling millions of title disk. Think Mariah Carey cares that there's too much pseudo-gospel non-verbal 'ooo' and 'ohh'-ing on her tracks? Goodness no, she does what the producer tells her to.
Full Tilt Boogie Shitstorm on the pirates, but nothing against the companies that stole the public domain by bribing politicians to extend the copyright period indefinitely!
Typical corrupt Republican nonsense. And please don't tell me that Clinton signed the DMCA. He's just one more corrupt Republican too.
This whole piracy thing is all nothing but a pricing issue. The global entertainment corps insist that the old model of having every piece of product having the same price forever is finally breaking down into two basic price levels: expensive and free.... And free is a very good price (to quote the local mattress TV huckster).
The entertainment industry can't face reality so they deal with it by demanding that 1/4 of the world's population be put in prison for listening to music that they have deluded themselves into believing that they own.
They're all quite pathetic actually.
But the corrupt politicians will continue to accept money from them and go through the facade that passing moronic laws will make a difference.
Besides, they can always put a tap on some dorm's internet connection, find some poor schmuck 19-year-old breaking the 'law', and offering him a choice of either 10 years in an American rape-torture prison or 5 years enlistment in the permanent endless insane All-American war. Current playing this year in Iraq but always on the road like a psychotic circus from hell. That'll pump up the sagging enlistment numbers!
Typical American 21st-century politics: the endless lunatic cluster-fuck. Do try to make an effort not to get caught. And keep practicing your Spanish so that you can just leave when the ship sinks.
Morse is fine for a communication backbone format. But it should be done in the background. With microcontrollers selling for 25 cents each that can convert Morse to ASCII and back, learning the code isn't really important any more.
Microprocessors aren't going to go away. They're going to continue to get more powerful, more reliable, and cheaper. There's no real need to rely on century-old technology forms to ensure reliability in amateur radio communication. Just put in a 50-cent uC that converts Morse to voice ".- - ---..." becomes spoken 'A'-'M'-'O'-'S' and back again.
Slashdot Mirror
Also missing from a legacy browser is a spelling checker. There is a good one available for FireFox as a downloadable add-on extension.
Now I don't look like an illiterate idiot because of misspelled words in my messages. With a legacy browser, I would have to write the message, load MS Word, cut-and-paste the message text to Word, do a spelling check, and cut-and-paste the corrected text back to the message box on the legacy browser.
No more. I hope to never have to go back to the legacy browser.
A paraphrase of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's media campaign of 1971 ("War is Over, if you want it").
I no longer accept anyone's definition of copyright or the expectation of any person or corporation that they can legally deny access to any digitized recording, image, or written work for any reason.
Think I'm "stealing"? Think what you like, I don't care.
'The LAW explicitly says...". I don't care. The people who pass laws are directly paid by the corporations to pass laws that are directly benefit the corporations and no one else. That isn't law, it's just purchased muscle.
"The poor exploited musicians...", Give me a break. Get a job. Stop expecting people to give you money because "you're cool". The more the economy sinks, the less I feel inclined to give money to people because they extrude charisma.
I'm really beginning to wish that all the celebrities would all just go the fuck away. I really don't need them, I don't care about them, they don't care about me. I'm never going to give them any more money, regardless of what they do, or how great their new CD or film is. The 20th century is over, there's a new thing around, something is happening but you don't what it is, do you, Ms. Jones?
Get out of my face, and take your tits with you.
Go to the local public library and check out the entire rock and pop collection. Rip these CDs to your PC hard drive. Buy a DVD burner for $70. Copy the entire MP3/OGG collection to the blank DVD that came with the DVD burner. Take the DVD burner back to Fry's. You have a 4000 minute 39 cent DVD.
Having grown up in the LP era and spent large amounts of hard-earned lawn mowing and snow-shovelling money on them, I can honestly say about them "Good Riddance!".
They are primitive sound technology. They are expensive, fragile, and don't sound good. You can always tell an MP3 file of an old 60's pop song made from an LP as opposed to one ripped from a CD. The fidelity is just not there.
An LP held 45 minutes of music for most of its life and about 60 minutes at its most advanced. It cost about $20 (in today's US dollars). Now a blank DVD ROM holds about 4000 minutes in high-quality MP3 or OGG files and sells for $0.39 (in today's US dollars). An exact copy of this set of 4500 minutes can be made on another 39 cent blank disk in about 15 minutes. And you can control which selections will be copied and the order.
To get ultra high fidelity audio from LPs requires thousands of dollars of precision equipment, very fragile and sensitive to the local room conditions. To get the same fidelity from high quality 320kbps MP3 and OGG files takes a $59 player. And it even puts out this high fidelity sound when you are running with it.
And some silly people want to go back to LP?
It seems that the media idea of a terrorist is not quite correct. These people are not poorly educated villagers trying to protect their traditional way of life from constantly encroaching Westernism. They are instead people who are quite fully comfortable and adept to Western lifestyles and middle-class interactions.
But they have also developed an obsession to randomly murder the people that they chose to surround themselves with. These people generally are different from the suicide bombers or shaheed individuals. The suicide bombers are 'brainwashed' by standardized cult methods into mass murder. They are ill-educated and working class youth in societies that have no real opportunity for young people because the population has grown much more faster than the economy. And because the governments are frozen in corruption and patronage, with little interest in change that would allow the needed growth.
In other words, there seem to two seperate types of people who do terrorism: the cadre and the cannon fodder. The well-educated who can function in the West and have no qualms about mass murder of random innocent peoples and those who are looking for a cheap ticket to heaven because life on earth sucks.
The well-educated mass-murders are most likely under the control of a cult. Because random mass-murder is not normal behavoir for educated middle-class people from any society or religion.
This matters because cultists aren't really committing crimes for politcal or economic reasons that have negotiated political solutions. Governments can never stop these people by giving them what they want because the only thing that they really want is to do is kill people. All the religious, economic, historical, military, and political arguments used to justify these acts of mass murder are just a smokescreen to buy time for the next mass murder.
It may be necessary to fight these death cults by creating counter death cults that infiltrate Islamic societies and create havoc and random murder to the point where the anti-West death cults first have to fight these new groups before they can engage in murder in the West. The West fights terror incidents in its own country by creating large numbers of secret cults of murderous psychopaths who disrupt Islamic societies with such a high level of random mass murder that the Al-Qaida groups too busy defending their own people to launch operations that murder people in the West.
Creating these cults with deep brainwashing and post-hypnotic suggestions would be a war crime in anyone's law book. But it's possible that the West may turn to doing this because they have run out of other options. This would be a crime on th level of the massive saturation bombing of cities in order to kill everyone military or civilian that was done in World War II. But that kind of mass murder ended with the defeat of the Axis governments and armies. This kind of mass murder would go on forever. Its point would not be to obtain any specific objective, but rather to constantly brutalize a society to the point where it couldn't function anymore, and would decend into total barbarism. It may come that the wealthy areas of the world will force the poor areas into permanent sub-civilized conditions with no hope of improvement in order to deny them the means of launching random murderous attacks on the daily life in the developed world.
Hermiston is in the north central section of Oregon right on the Columbia river. The largest close city is Pendleton in Oregon and the Tri-Cities in Washington to the north. It is a transport hub for rail, trucking, and river traffic.
Yawn...
Hermiston is also one of the world centers for weapons of mass destruction. And not just massive amounts of pig excrement either. It is a major storage center for large stockpiles of nerve gas chemical weapons. These weapons currently are in the process of being burned and destroyed. However every time Allah directs the faithful to attest to his merciful benevolence by blowing up a bus or day-care center the process of destroying this massive supply of deadly nerve gas stops for another review of safety procedures.
Just north of the chemical weapon storage facility is the Hanford Nuclear Development site where most of the plutonium that powers the 20000 Hydrogen bombs in the US arsenal was produced. Heaven knows what else is produced or done there.
If I were sitting in a cave by the campfire trying to decide where Allah will next demonstrate his mercy and benevolence by having his followers murder innocent children, tourists, and commuters, anywhere near Hermiston Oregon would be the one last place on earth that I would choose to demonstrate once again Allah's bountiful mercy and Islam's great wish for a loving and peaceful world.
Mr. Thompson needs lots of chip implants to keep track of all his illegitimate children.
Actually, it would appear that we are doing quite a bit. According to Rolling Stone magazine, sales of prerecorded CDs are falling about 5-7% a year. This is happening despite various superstar's hot new albums and mass purchases of must-have new releases. And despite that so many teeny-boppers have so much of their parent's money to spend and no political awareness whatsoever. Plus the audience of young people continues to grow worldwide and there is generally more money available for the purchase of recordings. The number of recorded music sales should be growing each year, but it is not.
Perhaps it is because we are effectively disseminating the message that there are alternatives to purchasing RIAA product on their terms and on their demanded price levels.
As for doing some kind of symbolic political action that attempts to presuade American politicians to consider a particular course of action? Forget it, symbolic political actions like marches, petitions, demonstrations, have no effect on the political process in the USA any more. You'll just end up getting sunburned, maced, tazered, arrested, and laughed at on the Murdoch-Clear Channel new outlets.
Keep quietly downloading, copying, and trading music and movies with your friends, and spending less and less on RIAA and MPAA product. It will take another 15-20 years, but eventually they will come to us to negotiate their continued existance on our terms, regardless of what stupid laws that they get their purchased politicians to pass.
These guys are having a real hard time understanding that this is the beginning of the information age and the age of the nation/state corporate or communist control of the economy is passing. In the information age, the people who create and guide the technology that distributes information have more power than the people who are able to control the systematic application of violence.
This is a long and slow transformation, but it is irreversable. Eventually the RIAA and MPAA will be on the side of the P2P designers and decentralized information distributers. They have no other real place to go. However, it's going to take a long time and there are going to be a lot of people put in prison for listening to music during the transistion. Do try not to be one of them.
In the long run, after doing an analysis of the coding practices of many companies, the companies that emphasise heavyweight procedures (like detailed algorythms) and doing things "properly" (methodically) will do better financially than the companies that coddle to the whims of their superstar programmers. Software engineering is not Hollywood.
There are successful software entities in both camps, of course. But the algorythmic process companies have the long term advantage. Superstar programmers appear all over the world, and it is more profitable to lay off the good programmers in expensive countries and hire superstars in low-wage countries. With PayPal, internet Skype telephone service, and free large file e-mail attachments, the writing of complex software is rapidly relocating to the cheapest countries on earth. Programmers that are willing and able to relocate to super cheap countries will have an advantage over those stuck by families and mortages in high-cost areas. When the military conscription starts again in the USA in the next few years, young American programmers will emigrating to secret private little sections of distant countries. They will bribe local authorities to ignore passport and visa violations and survive by taking programming jobs and getting paid through PayPal and international offshore bank transfers. They will form programming teams with other expats in conscription exile from various countries for mutual protection and support. Global tribes of atomized individuals who have never met, and have no idea what their fellow tribe members real identities are or where they are physically located in the world.
It's certainly true that the commenting and code documentation is a pain and takes a lot of time. I suggest trying a speech-to-text system like the IBM ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking. Take the time to train it to your voice.
Then, when the code is finished, start the speech program in the background. Bring up the source and describe it into the microphone as if you were trying both to impress a boss who was not technically proficient and a doctoral oral committee challenging every detail. Save the text file as, oh, 'rambling docs.txt' and save it with the code. Instant painless detailed documentation.
It only seems like a weird concept until the first time that someone complements you on how incredibly adept you are with modern technology (and gives you a promotion and raise).
I simply must raise a point at the seemingly obvious statement that a 'good' programmer is so much better than an average programmer.
Lord knows that applies to artists, look at the paintings that Botticelli did of me back when I was still alive compared to the ones done all of those other greasy creeps.
But programming is supposed to be a science and a process. If you prepare a precision algorythm and carefully test it before coding with all manner of valid and absurd inputs, then it shouldn't matter what level of so called skill a programmer has when the coding proceeds.
Oh, you mean a 'good programmer' is one who by lucky accident gets working code without using developing a complete algorythm first? What do you guys do, design microwave ovens for a living?
There's no such thing as a good vs average programmer. There's only those who follow the algorythm and the lucky artists.
Thank you,
Simonetta Vespucci 1454-1476 Florence, EU
...but it is one incident of savagery out of many incidents of savagery on both sides.
This was a incident focused on people outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are many groups outside of Israel-Palestine that have claim to the region for various historical and religious reasons. Israel has never focused a military or terrorist attack on any of these peoples, Hamas specifically chose to murder people from outside the conflict with this incident.
How much cash is a human life worth. You are mostly cheapening the lives of those killed to set a price tag on their deaths...
Yassir Arafat and Saddam Hussein paid $2000 to the families of suicide bombers. We believe that the lives of the individual people killed by these bombers are worth considerably more. The value of each individual life is determined by disinterested agencies according to factors like projected future earnings, number of dependents, etc... by an international court of law. Financial compensation is the primary means (and has been for hundreds of years) for settling obligations between the families of the victims and those who were responsible for their wrongful deaths.
In a global context, the brutal tribal warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians is of little consequence. The real global issue in this endless and pathetic war is what the world will do should the Palestinians chose to extend their military stategy of mass murder of innocent civilians outside of Israel-Palestine borders.
The initial incidents (like Munich 1972 and the various bombings around Europe since) will be ignored. Should the Palestinians continue to murder international civilians outside of their region, they will inevitably provoke a reaction from the world community. Presently the world accepts whatever the Israelis do to the Palestinians as necessary to keep the carnage localized. If the Israelis be unable to contain Palestinian terrorism in the future to the region, then the world will respond by massive genocidal attack on the Palestinian people. This will be an extranational attack, not identified with any nation or group. It will be a massive version of the small scale terrorist attacks endlessly launched by Palestinians, only directed at the Palestinians. It will be historically unprecedented. An attack of massive destruction specifically designed for the genocidal elimination of a specific nationality of people all at one time. It is the type of incident that everyone in the world wants to avoid because it could lead to a chain of ever-escalating attacks that would lead to omnicide, which is the systematic murder of all humans.
This is the real danger of terrorism and it is the real reason that all civilized people outside of the Islamic world condem the use of terrorism as a military and political strategy.
This post is well-written, but wrong. Whatever good Hamas claims to bring to the Palestinian people is completely negated by their actions. In specific the action of planting a bomb in the cafeteria of the Frank Sinatra Center of Hebrew University several years ago that murdered seven international students and maimed 80 others.
This is a act of inconceivable savagery that can only be described as the work of monsters. This judgment would be reached by any group of civilized people in any society at any time.
There is no political or historical justification for such a vile and brutal act of mass murder.
By shielding from international justice (the murder of international students in an international university demands an international court of justice) the persons responsible for planning and executing this act of mass murder, Hamas departs ranks from a social service organization and becomes in international law, a criminal and terrorist organization.
Your other arguments are simply fluff and disjointed verbiage, meaningless within the context of this horrible act that Hamas sponsored.
When these criminals are brought to justice and Hamas extends fair and appropriate financial compensation to the families of the students who were murdered in this savage crime, then we might talk history and philosophy.
Hamas is really the closest counterpart to Hagana,...
Hagana never placed a bomb in the cafeteria of the Student Center of the University, nor did they ever proclaim that killing teenage archeology students was a moral and military victory.
Hamas did this before and, given any opportunity, would do it again.
Morality is what morality does, to paraphrase the Forest Gump movie. Hamas is not an organization seeking focused and obtainable goals leading to the independence and prosperity of the Palestinian people. It is a violent fascist organized confederation of gangsters, who have deluded themselves with disfunctional religious fantasy into believing that they are freedom fighters instead of the sub-human thugs that the rest of the world (outside of the Islamic lands) can plainly see that they are.
Thank you for taking the time to write a long and detailed reply to comment.
I will research the incidents that you have referred to in your comment and realign my perspective in order to get closer to a just truth and balanced point of view.
All the reasons listed above are the reasons why I am 100% against accepting statehood for Palestine. The Palestinians have been the leaders of terrorism against both Israel and the West for 35 years now. Most of the incomprehensibly brutal and sub-human things that we have come to associate with organized terror they either invented or brought into international prominence. And they have done it for one reason only, to be accepted as an independent country by the rest of the world.
Therefore to accept the legitimacy of a Palestinian state would also mean accepting the legitimacy of the means that they used to achieve it. It means granting them a free pass for all the horrible, horrible crimes that they have committed against innocent people for 35 years.
And it means that every group of disaffected shit-for-brains losers in the third world with a case of AK-47s, a pound of C4, and a psychopathic holy man (and there are a lot of groups like this) will believe that the way to a seat in the UN is to murder innocent Americans and Europeans. After all, they will think, it did work for the Palestinians!
I believe that that world should accept that regardless of whatever legitimate political grievances that the Palestinians may have, the possibility of their having a independent country is an impossibility given the crimes that they have committed against ordinary people for decades. For every innocent civilian murdered by the Palestinians, the global diplomatic acceptance of their country should be postponed for one year.
Basically in international relations, you get the type of behavior that you reward. If we legitimize the crimes of the Palestinians, then we are guaranteed to get many more crimes of this nature committed against us in the future.
It's said that the Palestinians are simply too backward and dysfunctional to understand this concept. It's said that the Palestinians 'never miss an opportunity to ''miss an opportunity.'' Well, that is their problem, not ours.
The whole Palestine question is quite minor compared to the amount of news media attention that they have received for the past 35 years. You could take all the Palestinians out of the Middle East and put them in Mexico City and it would be weeks before anyone noticed that they were there.
Hell, you could take all the Palestinians and put them in the middle of the endless slums of Lagos or Nairobi or Abidjan or Kinshasa and they would just -disappear- as if they never existed. The only reason why they are considered important news is just laziness and inertia on the part of the new media companies. What they do is considered important only because, for some unknown reason, they were considered important in the distant past. The Palestinians are like some absurd American daytime television soap opera; no one knows or cares the endless twists of their plots and history but the show can't be canceled because everything is on auto-pilot.
Can you imagine if from the late 1940's to the present day the African-American people of the USA adopted the same tactics and methods to obtain justice that the Palestinians have used? Both groups were at basically the same position as oppressed minorities in their societies at that time. If the Black people did to the White people in America the same things that the Palestinians have done to the Israelis, there would today only be about 50,000 or so African-Americans left alive. And they would all be living in a concentration camp in northern Alaska. And every one would have a microchip embedded in their head; broadcasting their location to the helicopters flying over the camp 24/7/365.
With all respect and honor - Shalom - to the memory of those lost in the holocaust
The Palestinians don't realize how lucky they are to have the Israelis as the occupying force in their land. Having suffered the wors
Atari's ST came out in 1985-86 and it was a low-cost direct steal of the Apple Macintosh GUI. It sold at 1/10th the price of the Apple.
Microsoft's Windows version 3 was a direct copy/steal of the Apple Macintosh GUI. It seperated the software from the hardware and was therefore able to sell for 1/10th the price of the Atari ST. Windows 3 users did need to upgrade to new Intel 386 -class machines in order to run Windows 3.
Each company attempted to get rich by stealing the same concept and reducing its price by 90%. Yet it didn't work. It didn't work until 1995 when Windows 95 (or version 4 - a debugged version 3 that finally implemented the 32-bit advanced CPU technology introduced in the 80386 in 1986) was released for the Pentium class machines that were becoming affordable.
It didn't work because management was greedy. Greed does not sell technology. That't the point.
Yes, Apple did steal the idea for a graphic user interface from the demo visit that Jobs and crew made to Xerox PARC. Jobs and crew were primed for a completely new user interface for a low-cost (here meaning less than $50000 US 1981 dollars) business computer. They came, they saw, they copied.
Xerox hired great people who created a new computer environment. Xerox management saw it and realised that it could make them rich. Xerox slapped a $50,000 price on it, sat back, did nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Apple hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Apple management saw Xerox's work and realised that it could make them rich. Apple copied it, slapped a $10,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Atari hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Atari's 'management' saw Apples's work and realised that it could make them rich. Atari copied it, slapped a $1,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Microsoft hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Microsoft management saw Atari's work and realised that it could make them rich. Microsoft copied it, slapped a $100 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it soar, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry Unix programmers to see it.
The point? Stop your management monkeys from looking at the technology world as a means to get rich and more as way to build the framework and infrastructure that will allow wealth to be generated by new organizations and processes that are made possible by new technology. Then they will be able to make enough money to keep their pointy little heads happy.
Stop being so fucking greedy. Greed is not good. In the long run, it doesn't work.
Yo, Senator!
How about a 25% tax increase on all the corporations who register in tiny dipshit Delaware in order to avoid paying taxes in their home areas?
Taxes that are supposed to go to pay for children's services like health care, security, and education?
Oh? No longer interested? Fuck you, shitheel politician whore!!!
they probably figured a cheap, easy means to get people who otherwise did not know they had a pirated version...
I don't believe that there are many people who don't know that they are using a "quote" pirated "unquote" version of Windows. In the USA, it is extremely rare for unregistered versions of Windows to be used in Offices. And most people who buy PCs 'ready-to-operate' will have the Windows license included at a vastly reduced bulk price. People who build their own PC from components will know that the installed Windows is unregistered.
The only people who might not know that their Windows is unregistered are those who have had a friend or relative assemble a super-cheap PC from components for them. Or who have received a hand-me-down or secondhand PC from someone who installed an unregistered Windows, and didn't pass this piece of information along.
This is maybe 1% or less of all users in the USA. Outside the wealthy countries of the world, the situation would be that people would probably assume that either the Windows on the PC was unregistered or would not be aware that Microsoft was actually expecting to receive a large sum of money for every copy of Windows on every PC.
But Microsoft should lighten up about this policy. They are already the richest software company. Their chairman is the richest man in the world and possibly the richest man that every lived. They don't really do anything with the money that they already have. It would be in their best interest to lower the cost of their operating system in the developing world. Not by actually lowering the price, which would cause arbitrage from the wealthy countries, but by reducing the difficulty of inplementation of unregistered and by not penalizing people who use unregistered copies. They already have all the money that they are going to get from operating systems, so they should concentrate on preserving market share in the face of low cost alternatives like Linux.
Not one comment about cannibus cultivation using this system? My you'all really are a bunch of nerds. Many cultivators are caught by an analysis of the amount of electricity needed to recreate sunlight in places where the plants being grown by this artificial sunlight can never be exposed to casual public view.
But a light pipe that can channel sunlight from the solar tower to underground growing chamber without showing up on the computerized electricity bills? Something new under the sun!
Now we need a truly innovative way to store sunlight. The light capacitor. And while we're mixing up brains, we also need a way to use sunlight to seperate salt from water and to serperate water molecules into storable hydrogen and oxygen.
But, hey, one step at a time. And this is a cool step.
If the large corporations of the music industry can get an image of "large tax provider" they will become more protected too. Effective DRM and an internet music tax would be ideal for this.
This would be an interesting situation for the music industry. They could double their prices, give half of their new earnings to the tax collectors, get priviledged status (any laws that they wanted would be rubberstamped), and blame everything on music file downloaders.
But this is not a good analogy with the tobacco industry. They sell an addictive drug primarily to the working class. Tobacco addicts have no real low-cost substitute. The music industry faces low cost CD-R and DVD-ROM blanks, where people can buy a $70 DVD burner and put 1000 songs on a single 40 cent blank DVD. Plus there are many sources of non-RIAA controlled music.
Most of this non-RIAA music is not good, but that can be solved by putting out sampler disks (1000 songs by 300 bands on a low-cost DVD). Bands can also have websites where people can write them to explain why they don't like a song and upload examples of other songs that are similar but better. Imagine doing that with a major RIAA band selling millions of title disk. Think Mariah Carey cares that there's too much pseudo-gospel non-verbal 'ooo' and 'ohh'-ing on her tracks? Goodness no, she does what the producer tells her to.
Full Tilt Boogie Shitstorm on the pirates, but nothing against the companies that stole the public domain by bribing politicians to extend the copyright period indefinitely!
... And free is a very good price (to quote the local mattress TV huckster).
Typical corrupt Republican nonsense. And please don't tell me that Clinton signed the DMCA. He's just one more corrupt Republican too.
This whole piracy thing is all nothing but a pricing issue. The global entertainment corps insist that the old model of having every piece of product having the same price forever is finally breaking down into two basic price levels: expensive and free.
The entertainment industry can't face reality so they deal with it by demanding that 1/4 of the world's population be put in prison for listening to music that they have deluded themselves into believing that they own.
They're all quite pathetic actually.
But the corrupt politicians will continue to accept money from them and go through the facade that passing moronic laws will make a difference.
Besides, they can always put a tap on some dorm's internet connection, find some poor schmuck 19-year-old breaking the 'law', and offering him a choice of either 10 years in an American rape-torture prison or 5 years enlistment in the permanent endless insane All-American war. Current playing this year in Iraq but always on the road like a psychotic circus from hell. That'll pump up the sagging enlistment numbers!
Typical American 21st-century politics: the endless lunatic cluster-fuck. Do try to make an effort not to get caught. And keep practicing your Spanish so that you can just leave when the ship sinks.
Morse is fine for a communication backbone format. But it should be done in the background. With microcontrollers selling for 25 cents each that can convert Morse to ASCII and back, learning the code isn't really important any more. ..." becomes spoken 'A'-'M'-'O'-'S' and back again.
Microprocessors aren't going to go away. They're going to continue to get more powerful, more reliable, and cheaper. There's no real need to rely on century-old technology forms to ensure reliability in amateur radio communication. Just put in a 50-cent uC that converts Morse to voice
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