My bad. I oversimplified. Yes, some of the controversy about the skirts thing is the posting of those films on the Internet, so it's not quite as off-topic as it first seems. And regardless of the jurisdiction of it, it's still curious to me that Congress is so quick to rush in and protect Hollywood but the issue of invading someone's privacy in such a heinous manner has never been an issue.
The attitude seems to be that IP is important, but personal privacy... eh... whatever.
Amazing that the Senate can get together and pass this unanimously and yet, secretly filming or photographing up a woman's skirt is still not illegal in all 50 states. I suppose if women wearing skirts formed a group and pumped lots of cash and lobbyists into Congress, maybe there would be some action on that too.
I'm not against protecting intellectual property of filmmakers, but it's curious to see where our lawmakers' priorities are.
If you want to really get rid of them, and not be bothered anymore,
That's the point I was making. I'm not bothered. I hang up. I haven't noticed any increase in calls however, so my situation doesn't sound exactly like yours.
I know this isn't a cure-all, but it's a good start. People need to do collectively what I do. Don't bother with "do not call" lists or filing complaints or whatnot. That's never going to work.
Just do this: hang up. As soon as I realize it's a sales call, I hang up. I don't care who it is or what they're selling or how nice they sound. I just drop the phone and carry on with my life.
I've watched friends and family receive sales calls and we all seem to have this Pavlovian response where we're petrified of hanging up on someone. It's rude or it's socially unacceptable behavior or whatever. But then, calling my house and using my phone to sell me something is rude too.
So just hang up on them. Do it and you'll never go back.
Apple introduced the general concept of drag-and-drop in this manner way back with lowly System 7.x (like, back in 1995) and has continued to explore the possibilities and refine it ever since. My Windows-using boss is still awestruck at what I can do with desktop clippings on the Mac (his usual comment is that it "makes me sick that Windows can't do that.")
A friend and I will occasionally share funny or strange images we find on the web via iChat using a well-developed form of drag-and-drop: I grab the image from the Safari window and drag it to his icon in iChat. Boom... the image zips to him with no intermediate saving of the file on my part. If I want to send him the URL, I just grab the location bar icon and drop it on iChat. Apple is light-years ahead on this.
My reason for steering clear of MS can be summed up with a saying. I have no idea who the original author is, but it reminds me of MS's unethical business practices:
"Every consumer decision is a political statement."
Apple's use of open source is simple: They get man-years of development for which they pay nothing. They then resell a product incorporating all of the open source and don't compensate the authors in any way.
Isn't that a part of what makes open source great? The fact that you can take freely available code and build your own products and ideas on top? Are big businesses not allowed to do that too?
This is like trying to figure out why people prefer free things. It's not rocket science. It's not philosophy. It's not Apple making a statement about the ideals of the open source community. They have found a source of free labor. It's that simple.
Nobody contributing to open source has to show up at Apple's campus 5 days a week and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours, etc., etc. Further, they don't have to take orders from Apple's management and any improvements done to Darwin are done for one's own benefit.
It's not free labor. Some of the contributions to open source projects come from companies and paid programmers using code and contributing their improvements or additions back. It's shared code. Nobody is necessarily doing it for free.
So stop exaggerating. Steve Jobs and Apple have done a great deal in helping raise the profile of open source. They've adjusted the APSL license to meet demands made by the open source community. Why do so many elitist open source advocates hate Apple for that? I would think this kind of thing would be welcomed.
Gees, you'd almost think that it hasn't long been established that the airwaves belong to the people not to dumb-ass corporate dweebs. As far as I'm concerned, the high school has more legal and moral claim to it than any business concerns.
Who wants to bet that this false story originated with MS? Seems they're getting a lot of free press out of circulating and then denying it and they still get a residual effect from the standard "don't spend your money on the other guys 'cuz we got something great coming soon... real soon" FUD.
We've seen the battle between Apple (cool, trendy, expensive) and Microsoft (volume) before and I think we know who won.
No, we saw who made more money. MS continues to copy Apple's moves on everything from their venture into music and the innovations in their OS.
So one company got very, very rich, forces its will on others and is largely despised. The other company made some amazing products, exerts an enormous amount of influence and is largely admired.
There were memorable lines in 1 & 2. Just as there were really stupid and awkward moments of dialogue in 4-6. The pages you linked to were not very selective, but you can find some pretty good quotes from 1 & 2 without much effort. It requires you to drop the cynicism and see the Star Wars films for what they are: space operas brought to life. They're not supposed to be fine art.
Just from memory:
"You were right about one thing, master. The negotiations were short."
"Why do I sense we've picked up another pathetic life form?"
"Fear leads to anger... anger leads to hatred... (you know the rest)."
"There's always a bigger fish."
"Wipe them out... all of them."
"We shall pay very close attention to your career."
"But Master Obi-Wan told me to stay here." "No, he told you to protect me. And I'm going to help him. You'll just have to come along."
Anyway, for those of you whining inevitably about the title, think about the double-meaning of "birth." Ahh... yeah... there ya go. Not such a bad title, huh? Or maybe I should apologize because that takes away another reason for you to bitch and moan about how badly George Lucas ruined your life.
Intego is really starting to get on my nerves with this, and their previous, alerts. You could do this little stunt way back in OS 9. Cutting and pasting icons is easy.
Strange that Microsoft has popped up in this one, huh? Hmm... if I were a conspiracy theorist....
The real issues is whether it can it replicate itself and whether it can use security holes in OS X to distribute itself to others. I've been round and round with people on this topic and the conclusion is that, at every point, OS X presents too great a hurdle to allow it to occur. You either have to rely on lots of Apple programs working together to do it (which is too unwieldy and too visible to the user) or you have to rely on the more stealthy Unix stuff, much of which is turned off by default (i.e., no using mail quietly in the background to distribute the trojan/virus because sendmail is off by default.)
It seems to me that Intego is looking to scare people into buying their products and in doing so, they have blown any credibility they have.
Possibly off-topic, but I'm seeing a few posts concerning the fact that a virus couldn't take off on Mac OS X anyway because of small marketshare. Bollocks! The Internet makes it possible. Think of this way. You have a 100 computers networked together and 5 of those machines are Macs. One Mac tries to infect all 100 machines. The 95 that are not Macs are not going to stop the virus from infecting the 5 that are.
You can make the case that more variety of OSes will reduce the severity of viruses and will make it a little harder for a virus to spread, but with the Internet effectively linking together millions of machines, a Mac OS X virus can (and will probably) someday spread itself around. Marketshare and/or user base really doesn't matter that much. Until someone finds a gaping and exploitable security hole in OS X that rivals the stupidity and shortsighted nature of those typically found on Windows, I'll continue to believe that.
Just as MS wasn't built up in a week, it won't take a week to tear it back down. And anyone hanging their hopes on a single bit of litigation will come away disappointed.
It will take a lot of time and a lot of competition from other sources. That's why I'm a big fan of both Linux and Mac OS X right now. I understand that this attitude gets under the skin of some open source purists, but so be it. Every Linux and Mac user has to quietly advocate the advantages of these options compared to MS's offering in every situation we can. I turned an all-Windows dept. into a 50/50 Mac and Windows dept. where I work doing Web development and I'm trying to figure out how to bring a Linux machine into the fold (have to word it just right to our IS dept who are all prefer Windows.)
Prior to that, my colleagues and I fought off an effort by management to get rid of Macs in our dept. (not just for the principle, but it was a graphic design dept. so it made no sense to us to jump to Windows.)
A friend of mine who had previously worked in that same place in the IS dept. managed to get a few Linux machines brought in.
These small efforts matter and it's what will wean people off their MS dependence and gradually shift things. Already my own boss has noted how often the OS X machine trumps the Windows machines, particularly in terms of graphic and design work. He's also been blown away by how much busy work I can get done on the Darwin command line with just a few simple commands.
Little by little it will happen. Years and year maybe, but not overnight.
Right! Thank you. That's what I meant, except I worded it badly because I was in a hurry.
The overall point was that there are other issues with this whole thing that bother me and none of them concern privacy which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even enter into this since it was done in public. I don't understand the focus on that issue alone when there are all these other aspects to it.
From the article: "The grainy footage shows Lane in the lobby of a public housing apartment building on March 16, hugging a girl, putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger."
So let me get this straight. He kills himself in a lobby of a public housing building, i.e., an area accessible by the public, and this is a privacy issue? I understand and sympathize with his mother and agree that whoever let the tape out should be punished, but I believe that privacy cannot be an issue when you do something in a public area.
On a tangential note, would the family of this guy be liable if, say, an impressionable child had wandered into the area right as the event took place?
What bothers me most about this isn't the privacy concern, but rather that there is apparently an appetite out there for viewing this kind of thing.
The war was already declared by obnoxious marketing that produced such lovely ideas as pop-ups and floating javascript ads and whatever else. Like most Internet users, I accepted the idea of banner ads long ago as a necessary evil (even clicking the ones that interested me to help support the sites I visited), but drew the line when it came to advertisers doing pop-ups, maximizing my windows or other obnoxious crap.
Best of luck to anyone trying something new, but by now the attitude is that online ads must die. I don't see there being a cease-fire at this point. Something marketing folks might want to keep in mind: Internet users are not the ones who started the war.
For you fanboys whose lives are destroyed a little bit more by everything Lucas does, let's just get it over with so we don't have to read an incessant number of whiny-ass posts, okay?
Blah blah blah blah blah ruined my childhood blah blah blah blah not as good as Empire blah blah blah blah blah Jar Jar sucks blah blah blah Han shoots first dammit blah blah blah Lucas should be castrated blah blah blah blah I can't masturbate anymore blah blah blah blah Natalie was the only good part blah blah midichlorians?!?! blah blah *sniff sniff* poor me blah blah...
There, all done. Now let the rest of us whose lives and souls don't depend on the purity of Star Wars discuss and enjoy.
I'm sure Xerox weren't happy that Apple copied everything they could from them way back when. They stole the concept of a modern user interface from right underneath their noses. Apple did not invent the UI - they were merely the first to have a popular consumer version.
Apple paid Xerox for it and then added as much new innovations to the concept as Xerox had already developed. Look into it. Not all of it came from Xerox. Google will help you find it if you're not just trolling and really care.
Whoops... the rest of your post isn't worth reading now that the rug has been pulled out from under your entire point, huh?
Boy, how many times can right-wing be used in one post I wonder.
You haven't even seen me get started.;^)
Left-wingers do the same thing
Absolutely, and it doesn't make it right. However, the airwaves are not inundated with liberal talk, drilling the message into the heads of their listeners. I know conservatives love to claim mainstream media is liberal, but that's bunk. There are no lefty versions of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their ilk (well, there are, but they certainly haven't been given the exposure that others have.)
Isn't it sad that we live in an age where information is at your fingertips and people still can't seem to figure out when they're being lied to? Anyone who watched/heard Al Gore's comments in context knew exactly what he meant, and yet these right-wing whack jobs on the radio and TV still managed to spin it like Gore was taking credit for the invention of the Internet. I don't know about the rest of Americans, but when I hear a claim made by media loudmouths, I sit down and Google for it to read the whole story. Invariably, these right-wingers leave out key elements of a given story or take comments totally out of context. I can't imagine that nobody in their audiences bothers to look these things up on their own. That or they don't care. Either way it's somewhat depressing to think about.
There's this right-wing talk show host Kirby Wilbur in Seattle and he rants during a promo for his station that a school district in Yakima, WA turned down free circus tickets for children in the school district because the issuers of the free tickets failed to offer Spanish documentation about the tickets. He even punctuates the rant with a frothy-mouthed comment about how those kids should be learning English and implies that the school has an anti-English/multicultural agenda and is using the circus tickets to push it.
But of course that wasn't the whole story. I went out on the Internet and found the whole story in a matter of minutes. It turns out that the school district in question has a high enough Spanish-speaking population that issuing English-only documentation about the free tickets causes an undue amount of confusion and forces the school to correct the problem at great expense to itself. The school district was simply requesting that the issuers of the free tickets help them out so as not to incur the expense of altering the fliers about the free tickets.
You're always just barely getting the whole story with these guys.
Slashdot Mirror
The attitude seems to be that IP is important, but personal privacy... eh... whatever.
I'm not against protecting intellectual property of filmmakers, but it's curious to see where our lawmakers' priorities are.
That's the point I was making. I'm not bothered. I hang up. I haven't noticed any increase in calls however, so my situation doesn't sound exactly like yours.
Just do this: hang up. As soon as I realize it's a sales call, I hang up. I don't care who it is or what they're selling or how nice they sound. I just drop the phone and carry on with my life.
I've watched friends and family receive sales calls and we all seem to have this Pavlovian response where we're petrified of hanging up on someone. It's rude or it's socially unacceptable behavior or whatever. But then, calling my house and using my phone to sell me something is rude too.
So just hang up on them. Do it and you'll never go back.
A friend and I will occasionally share funny or strange images we find on the web via iChat using a well-developed form of drag-and-drop: I grab the image from the Safari window and drag it to his icon in iChat. Boom... the image zips to him with no intermediate saving of the file on my part. If I want to send him the URL, I just grab the location bar icon and drop it on iChat. Apple is light-years ahead on this.
"Every consumer decision is a political statement."
Says it all.
Isn't that a part of what makes open source great? The fact that you can take freely available code and build your own products and ideas on top? Are big businesses not allowed to do that too?
This is like trying to figure out why people prefer free things. It's not rocket science. It's not philosophy. It's not Apple making a statement about the ideals of the open source community. They have found a source of free labor. It's that simple.
Nobody contributing to open source has to show up at Apple's campus 5 days a week and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours, etc., etc. Further, they don't have to take orders from Apple's management and any improvements done to Darwin are done for one's own benefit.
It's not free labor. Some of the contributions to open source projects come from companies and paid programmers using code and contributing their improvements or additions back. It's shared code. Nobody is necessarily doing it for free.
So stop exaggerating. Steve Jobs and Apple have done a great deal in helping raise the profile of open source. They've adjusted the APSL license to meet demands made by the open source community. Why do so many elitist open source advocates hate Apple for that? I would think this kind of thing would be welcomed.
No, we saw who made more money. MS continues to copy Apple's moves on everything from their venture into music and the innovations in their OS.
So one company got very, very rich, forces its will on others and is largely despised. The other company made some amazing products, exerts an enormous amount of influence and is largely admired.
I'd say it's not very clear at all who "won."
Just from memory:
"You were right about one thing, master. The negotiations were short."
"Why do I sense we've picked up another pathetic life form?"
"Fear leads to anger... anger leads to hatred... (you know the rest)."
"There's always a bigger fish."
"Wipe them out... all of them."
"We shall pay very close attention to your career."
"But Master Obi-Wan told me to stay here." "No, he told you to protect me. And I'm going to help him. You'll just have to come along."
"You'll be the death of me, young padawan."
Anyway, for those of you whining inevitably about the title, think about the double-meaning of "birth." Ahh... yeah... there ya go. Not such a bad title, huh? Or maybe I should apologize because that takes away another reason for you to bitch and moan about how badly George Lucas ruined your life.
Strange that Microsoft has popped up in this one, huh? Hmm... if I were a conspiracy theorist....
The real issues is whether it can it replicate itself and whether it can use security holes in OS X to distribute itself to others. I've been round and round with people on this topic and the conclusion is that, at every point, OS X presents too great a hurdle to allow it to occur. You either have to rely on lots of Apple programs working together to do it (which is too unwieldy and too visible to the user) or you have to rely on the more stealthy Unix stuff, much of which is turned off by default (i.e., no using mail quietly in the background to distribute the trojan/virus because sendmail is off by default.)
It seems to me that Intego is looking to scare people into buying their products and in doing so, they have blown any credibility they have.
You can make the case that more variety of OSes will reduce the severity of viruses and will make it a little harder for a virus to spread, but with the Internet effectively linking together millions of machines, a Mac OS X virus can (and will probably) someday spread itself around. Marketshare and/or user base really doesn't matter that much. Until someone finds a gaping and exploitable security hole in OS X that rivals the stupidity and shortsighted nature of those typically found on Windows, I'll continue to believe that.
It will take a lot of time and a lot of competition from other sources. That's why I'm a big fan of both Linux and Mac OS X right now. I understand that this attitude gets under the skin of some open source purists, but so be it. Every Linux and Mac user has to quietly advocate the advantages of these options compared to MS's offering in every situation we can. I turned an all-Windows dept. into a 50/50 Mac and Windows dept. where I work doing Web development and I'm trying to figure out how to bring a Linux machine into the fold (have to word it just right to our IS dept who are all prefer Windows.)
Prior to that, my colleagues and I fought off an effort by management to get rid of Macs in our dept. (not just for the principle, but it was a graphic design dept. so it made no sense to us to jump to Windows.)
A friend of mine who had previously worked in that same place in the IS dept. managed to get a few Linux machines brought in.
These small efforts matter and it's what will wean people off their MS dependence and gradually shift things. Already my own boss has noted how often the OS X machine trumps the Windows machines, particularly in terms of graphic and design work. He's also been blown away by how much busy work I can get done on the Darwin command line with just a few simple commands.
Little by little it will happen. Years and year maybe, but not overnight.
The overall point was that there are other issues with this whole thing that bother me and none of them concern privacy which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even enter into this since it was done in public. I don't understand the focus on that issue alone when there are all these other aspects to it.
So let me get this straight. He kills himself in a lobby of a public housing building, i.e., an area accessible by the public, and this is a privacy issue? I understand and sympathize with his mother and agree that whoever let the tape out should be punished, but I believe that privacy cannot be an issue when you do something in a public area.
On a tangential note, would the family of this guy be liable if, say, an impressionable child had wandered into the area right as the event took place?
What bothers me most about this isn't the privacy concern, but rather that there is apparently an appetite out there for viewing this kind of thing.
Best of luck to anyone trying something new, but by now the attitude is that online ads must die. I don't see there being a cease-fire at this point. Something marketing folks might want to keep in mind: Internet users are not the ones who started the war.
Blah blah blah blah blah ruined my childhood blah blah blah blah not as good as Empire blah blah blah blah blah Jar Jar sucks blah blah blah Han shoots first dammit blah blah blah Lucas should be castrated blah blah blah blah I can't masturbate anymore blah blah blah blah Natalie was the only good part blah blah midichlorians?!?! blah blah *sniff sniff* poor me blah blah ...
There, all done. Now let the rest of us whose lives and souls don't depend on the purity of Star Wars discuss and enjoy.
Apple paid Xerox for it and then added as much new innovations to the concept as Xerox had already developed. Look into it. Not all of it came from Xerox. Google will help you find it if you're not just trolling and really care.
Whoops... the rest of your post isn't worth reading now that the rug has been pulled out from under your entire point, huh?
You haven't even seen me get started. ;^)
Left-wingers do the same thing
Absolutely, and it doesn't make it right. However, the airwaves are not inundated with liberal talk, drilling the message into the heads of their listeners. I know conservatives love to claim mainstream media is liberal, but that's bunk. There are no lefty versions of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their ilk (well, there are, but they certainly haven't been given the exposure that others have.)
There's this right-wing talk show host Kirby Wilbur in Seattle and he rants during a promo for his station that a school district in Yakima, WA turned down free circus tickets for children in the school district because the issuers of the free tickets failed to offer Spanish documentation about the tickets. He even punctuates the rant with a frothy-mouthed comment about how those kids should be learning English and implies that the school has an anti-English/multicultural agenda and is using the circus tickets to push it.
But of course that wasn't the whole story. I went out on the Internet and found the whole story in a matter of minutes. It turns out that the school district in question has a high enough Spanish-speaking population that issuing English-only documentation about the free tickets causes an undue amount of confusion and forces the school to correct the problem at great expense to itself. The school district was simply requesting that the issuers of the free tickets help them out so as not to incur the expense of altering the fliers about the free tickets.
You're always just barely getting the whole story with these guys.