No, Microsoft's response would be "It doesn't hurt, in fact it feels great." but the person making the response is facing the wrong way because both his eyes have been poked out.
Alternatively, you could actually pay attention to the situation and step in if need be.
FEMA offered. They were turned down for days. I won't argue that FEMA did a good job, but it was screwed up worse by local and state authorities.
You don't an engraved invitation to offer help.
Um. The help was offered. It was turned down for several days. I guess you would have the President violate the State's rights and move in and take over?
Some private citizen old geezer in Texas understood this. Why doesn't "the leader of the free world".
Apparently you don't. It's not his job to run the state. It's the state's job to run the state. That's where the real failure occurred, but Bush makes such an easy target, so I guess I have to expect all criticism to land on him even when the real fault is not his nor of people who work for him. If, God forbid, something like this happens again in the near future, I'm betting Governor Jindal will not handle it so incompetently.
I got laid off from AOL a while back. No need for revenge, they are doing it to themselves. There are a ton of smart people at that company (despite the fact that most of them quit), but fortunately, management is proficient enough to keep anything productive they could do from actually making a difference.
Re:Morals aside - what's the end result?
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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· Score: 2, Funny
Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost. No more magical Hollywood special effects.
Good. Maybe they'll go back to making movies that are actually worth watching and wouldn't insult the intelligence of even a Congressman. Not that I condone piracy, even if what you are copying is worthless.
You're not going to see Lord of the Rings get produced under a Creative Commons license.
It's already been done. But, wait, "The Hobbit" is being made now. Oh noes! Hopeless... Fanboy... Must... Allow Corporate Overlords To Do Whatever They. Want. In... Order. To. See. More. Hobbit Action. [drool]
Taking advice from nerds on topics in which the nerds are experts shows a great deal of common sense.
Taking advice from nerds (or anyone else) on topics in which they are not experts is the problem. That's why I have a problem with politics because most of the things being advised by politicians are being advised by people who have little or no expertise in the subject at hand. Seeking foreign policy advice from Senator Obama or Governor Huckabee, for instance, shows a lack of common sense. Seeking advice on how to make tons of money hawking doom and destruction from Al Gore is a very good idea. Seeking advise on how to tick off not only your political opponents here and abroad but all the people who elected you in the first place from President Bush is bound to get you the best information on the planet.
If nerds suggest you use Firefox, I think that's a good idea. I'm a nerd and I promote Firefox among my non-techie friends and family, and I know what I'm talking about.
First off, you save your silly rant for someone else and for the right context. The article has to do with ripping CDs that you own for your own use, which the RIAA doesn't recognize as valid, but it falls squarely under Fair Use laws. It is not just my opinion that they are wrong on this issue. It is the clear law in the U.S., as confirmed by the courts in the Sony case back in 1984.
Second, I've spent (rough ballpark guess) $15,000 over the past 25 years or so to amass my entirely legal music collection, including several hundred records, about 1000 CDs and a couple hundred albums from eMusic and a couple dozen more on Mindawn and Jamendo. Musicians have made a lot of money off of me and I've gotten more than my money's worth from them.
Third, I am active in several online communities devoted to progressive rock, and am personal friends (online) with several professional musicians, managers and other people in the business. I've even provided the (modest) cover art for a CD from one of my professional friends, which you can find here. I promote (though not formally nor professionally) a few groups in particular whenever possible (Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings, and The Tangent) who work for a label that is an RIAA member and I have legally purchased all the recordings available from each of those groups. These are exceptional artists who merit much more attention than they get. In fact, I've purchased roughly a third of everything this label has ever released.
And third, I have created my own music and have shared it freely with others. You can find one of my tracks here. I can provide a few more upon request and several more if I get off my duff and digitally master them, but honestly I don't think too many people would be interested.
So in summary, I think this gives me more than the right to express a simple opinion on the RIAA. All I said was that their opinion on the matter of ripping is as irrelevant as my opinion of them is, which is a objectively true and correct statement. Fair Use laws are clearly on the side of those of us who rip our legally acquired and licensed music to our own devices for our own use.
And finally despite its correctness as a statement of fact, it was clearly and obviously meant to be a joke. Someone here is being illogical and childish, but it surely isn't I. Maybe you should criticize what I am actually saying rather than your completely wrong prejudices. That's not too much to ask, is it?
Government agencies can do great things when competent people are put in charge
FEMA in the 90's might have been good, I really have no specific knowledge, but if it was, it was an exception. The problem is that agencies are largely set up to encourage waste, and the most competent people in the world won't fix that, and the people in government are almost never the most competent people in the world.
Just because you say government can do good (and I agree with you) doesn't mean it does. And even if every government agency was a paragon of efficiency, 95% of what the Federal government does is not authorized by the Constitution, regardless of how certain clauses are tortured. I stand by my statement.
Originally it was 14 years. It was raised to 28 sometime in the 20th century. Now I think it's something the projected life of the universe minus one year.
Too bad Microsoft doesn't have a research department where some of the many boffins who work for them could solve some of these interesting problems and provide useful technology. Oh, wait, they do. Too bad nothing from Microsoft research ever seems to see the real world. MS Management would never go for selling software that people actually want. Only loser companies who aren't monopolies do that.
The biggest problem I found with Outlook is that its performance is O(n^2) based on the number of messages in the folder. Or maybe the bug where it starts randomly losing and corrupting data after the mail store gets over something like 1.5GB? Did they ever fix that? Did they ever even acknowledge that problem? I have never seen software that works so hideously and yet is considered a real product that people would actually choose to use. Oh, wait, yes I have, it's called "Word".
Microsoft only cares about maintaining their monopoly. They stopped being a software company about 10 years ago.
I hope you filed a patent for it. You don't need to actually have invented anything or made anything, just patent any idea that comes into your head and litigate your way to wealth, fame and fortune!
It's a stepping stone that will help boost their economy, which in turn will spur technological advances and could help alleviate the problem. That's how it works. I don't think it's fair to deny these things to poorer countries simply because we in the West got these things before they were considered to be so bad.
The alternative is to let them stay poor and backwards. After all, we got ours, the rest of the world can go to hell!
Such narrow thinking. In a hundred years we could have processing plants extracting all the metals we could ever want from the oceans, which have more metals dissolved in them than we could use in a long, long time.
Nanotechnology might allow us to build superstrong materials that don't even need metals. Why not make machine parts and structural elements out of carbon nanotubes or even diamond?. Nanotech could also allow for recycling with a level of efficiency that can only be imagined today.
We live a mere 240,000 miles from a huge source of all kinds of minerals that could easily be mined, launched into orbit with mass drivers and brought to earth for manufacturing. Then there's the idea of mining the asteroids, or even towing one to Earth orbit for our convenience.
There's also that somewhat wacky but still plausible idea of "artificial matter" using a semiconductor matrix of quantum wells to trap electrons, which can mimic the properties of any kind of real matter.
There are plenty of challenges facing the future of the human race, and there's all kinds of potential disasters, but I seriously doubt that if anything catastrophic happens, running out of metals will be the one that does us in.
It was Vista Home or the "You're screwed, Neener neener neener!" version. I would have expected the Business version since it was a decent machine, but as I always say, "Microsoft hates me!"
I used NT 3.51 and it was rock solid in my experience. So was NT 4, at least until SP2 came around. Windows 2000 was also reasonably stable and has proved to have great longevity... my kids still use it because the machine it runs on blue screens when trying to install XP. XP was better, especially by the time SP2 came around. The NT side of Windows never suffered from huge stability issues, and even when it did 90% of the time it was obviously and directly related to hardware drivers. No, the NT line was never perfect and there were features and bugs that would drive any user insane, but overall they were decent products that were worth the upgrades.
Until Vista came around, each new version offered significant improvements, required significantly more resources, added some quirky problems but was overall an improvement. The problem is that with Windows 2000, MS pretty much solved all their major problems (besides security, but that could be mitigated by a little bit of common sense, despite the horrible track record of security issues). By XP SP2, even security issues were starting to be not so severe. The biggest changes between 2000 and XP were minor UI tweaks (and the ugliest theme ever put on a GUI since Tandy DeskMate, but that could be turned off, and was turned off, by anyone who realized it could be), and support for new hardware, especially wireless, which didn't really become "nice" until SP2 came along. All Vista really needed to do was support the newest hardware, throw a little eye candy in (because you always need a little eye candy in a new release) and fix some of the many problems that will always plague any OS and it would have sold like hotcakes. Instead we got a Frankenstein monster of an OS that looks and feels like it was designed and written by Cold-War Era East German government employees, with more bloat than the U.S. Tax Code and fewer useful new features than the, well, the U.S. Tax Code.
IMO, Microsoft has been growing beyond their capacity to manage themselves since the early 90's and they have finally reached the point where they are so large they literally cannot do anything right. Just like the U.S. government, MS is so huge, bloated, mismanaged and downright corrupt, the only way it can possibly be improved is for 95% of it to simply go away.
No managers are brought in to destroy the few good ideas that actually survived the design process. Managers have plenty of experience, just no common sense, or in many cases, signs of intelligence. The higher up you go the worse it gets. In my experience, dealing with anyone at or above middle-management is like dealing with a spoiled 3-year-old that can fire you.
They are "dumbed down" for the average consumer and yet are harder to use. Consumer electronics have taken a huge usability downturn in the past 10 to 15 years, IMO. The biggest reason for that is marketing. It's more important to the manufacturers that the device do more things than the competition, regardless of the utility of those things, whether the consumer actually wants them, or how hard they are to use. It's all about having the most tick marks on some marketroid's checklist. But it's gotten worse with DRM, which is simply a means of making things _not_ work. So we are combining ever-increasing complexity with ever-increasing _non-functionality_ and wondering why things don't work and are hard to use.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Microsoft's response would be "It doesn't hurt, in fact it feels great." but the person making the response is facing the wrong way because both his eyes have been poked out.
Yeah, but it takes 30 years to complete the game level you're building.
Alternatively, you could actually pay attention to the situation and step in if need be.
FEMA offered. They were turned down for days. I won't argue that FEMA did a good job, but it was screwed up worse by local and state authorities.
You don't an engraved invitation to offer help.
Um. The help was offered. It was turned down for several days. I guess you would have the President violate the State's rights and move in and take over?
Some private citizen old geezer in Texas understood this. Why doesn't "the leader of the free world".
Apparently you don't. It's not his job to run the state. It's the state's job to run the state. That's where the real failure occurred, but Bush makes such an easy target, so I guess I have to expect all criticism to land on him even when the real fault is not his nor of people who work for him. If, God forbid, something like this happens again in the near future, I'm betting Governor Jindal will not handle it so incompetently.
I got laid off from AOL a while back. No need for revenge, they are doing it to themselves. There are a ton of smart people at that company (despite the fact that most of them quit), but fortunately, management is proficient enough to keep anything productive they could do from actually making a difference.
Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost. No more magical Hollywood special effects.
Good. Maybe they'll go back to making movies that are actually worth watching and wouldn't insult the intelligence of even a Congressman. Not that I condone piracy, even if what you are copying is worthless.
You're not going to see Lord of the Rings get produced under a Creative Commons license.
It's already been done. But, wait, "The Hobbit" is being made now. Oh noes! Hopeless... Fanboy... Must... Allow Corporate Overlords To Do Whatever They. Want. In... Order. To. See. More. Hobbit Action. [drool]
Curses, foiled again.
Taking advice from nerds on topics in which the nerds are experts shows a great deal of common sense.
Taking advice from nerds (or anyone else) on topics in which they are not experts is the problem. That's why I have a problem with politics because most of the things being advised by politicians are being advised by people who have little or no expertise in the subject at hand. Seeking foreign policy advice from Senator Obama or Governor Huckabee, for instance, shows a lack of common sense. Seeking advice on how to make tons of money hawking doom and destruction from Al Gore is a very good idea. Seeking advise on how to tick off not only your political opponents here and abroad but all the people who elected you in the first place from President Bush is bound to get you the best information on the planet.
If nerds suggest you use Firefox, I think that's a good idea. I'm a nerd and I promote Firefox among my non-techie friends and family, and I know what I'm talking about.
First off, you save your silly rant for someone else and for the right context. The article has to do with ripping CDs that you own for your own use, which the RIAA doesn't recognize as valid, but it falls squarely under Fair Use laws. It is not just my opinion that they are wrong on this issue. It is the clear law in the U.S., as confirmed by the courts in the Sony case back in 1984.
Second, I've spent (rough ballpark guess) $15,000 over the past 25 years or so to amass my entirely legal music collection, including several hundred records, about 1000 CDs and a couple hundred albums from eMusic and a couple dozen more on Mindawn and Jamendo. Musicians have made a lot of money off of me and I've gotten more than my money's worth from them.
Third, I am active in several online communities devoted to progressive rock, and am personal friends (online) with several professional musicians, managers and other people in the business. I've even provided the (modest) cover art for a CD from one of my professional friends, which you can find here. I promote (though not formally nor professionally) a few groups in particular whenever possible (Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings, and The Tangent) who work for a label that is an RIAA member and I have legally purchased all the recordings available from each of those groups. These are exceptional artists who merit much more attention than they get. In fact, I've purchased roughly a third of everything this label has ever released.
And third, I have created my own music and have shared it freely with others. You can find one of my tracks here. I can provide a few more upon request and several more if I get off my duff and digitally master them, but honestly I don't think too many people would be interested.
So in summary, I think this gives me more than the right to express a simple opinion on the RIAA. All I said was that their opinion on the matter of ripping is as irrelevant as my opinion of them is, which is a objectively true and correct statement. Fair Use laws are clearly on the side of those of us who rip our legally acquired and licensed music to our own devices for our own use.
And finally despite its correctness as a statement of fact, it was clearly and obviously meant to be a joke. Someone here is being illogical and childish, but it surely isn't I. Maybe you should criticize what I am actually saying rather than your completely wrong prejudices. That's not too much to ask, is it?
There's no need for the U.K. to boarder France. France has its own country to live in. Oh, wait, you meant "border"?
Thanks for correcting me. I was too lazy to Google it up. Isn't that sad?
The key thing is, it is now essentially perpetual.
That's true, but you don't have very long to enjoy it.
Plus, it's hard to hear anything over Reg Nullify.
Government agencies can do great things when competent people are put in charge
FEMA in the 90's might have been good, I really have no specific knowledge, but if it was, it was an exception. The problem is that agencies are largely set up to encourage waste, and the most competent people in the world won't fix that, and the people in government are almost never the most competent people in the world.
Just because you say government can do good (and I agree with you) doesn't mean it does. And even if every government agency was a paragon of efficiency, 95% of what the Federal government does is not authorized by the Constitution, regardless of how certain clauses are tortured. I stand by my statement.
Originally it was 14 years. It was raised to 28 sometime in the 20th century. Now I think it's something the projected life of the universe minus one year.
Too bad Microsoft doesn't have a research department where some of the many boffins who work for them could solve some of these interesting problems and provide useful technology. Oh, wait, they do. Too bad nothing from Microsoft research ever seems to see the real world. MS Management would never go for selling software that people actually want. Only loser companies who aren't monopolies do that.
The biggest problem I found with Outlook is that its performance is O(n^2) based on the number of messages in the folder. Or maybe the bug where it starts randomly losing and corrupting data after the mail store gets over something like 1.5GB? Did they ever fix that? Did they ever even acknowledge that problem? I have never seen software that works so hideously and yet is considered a real product that people would actually choose to use. Oh, wait, yes I have, it's called "Word".
Microsoft only cares about maintaining their monopoly. They stopped being a software company about 10 years ago.
I hope you filed a patent for it. You don't need to actually have invented anything or made anything, just patent any idea that comes into your head and litigate your way to wealth, fame and fortune!
It's a stepping stone that will help boost their economy, which in turn will spur technological advances and could help alleviate the problem. That's how it works. I don't think it's fair to deny these things to poorer countries simply because we in the West got these things before they were considered to be so bad.
The alternative is to let them stay poor and backwards. After all, we got ours, the rest of the world can go to hell!
Such narrow thinking. In a hundred years we could have processing plants extracting all the metals we could ever want from the oceans, which have more metals dissolved in them than we could use in a long, long time.
Nanotechnology might allow us to build superstrong materials that don't even need metals. Why not make machine parts and structural elements out of carbon nanotubes or even diamond?. Nanotech could also allow for recycling with a level of efficiency that can only be imagined today.
We live a mere 240,000 miles from a huge source of all kinds of minerals that could easily be mined, launched into orbit with mass drivers and brought to earth for manufacturing. Then there's the idea of mining the asteroids, or even towing one to Earth orbit for our convenience.
There's also that somewhat wacky but still plausible idea of "artificial matter" using a semiconductor matrix of quantum wells to trap electrons, which can mimic the properties of any kind of real matter.
There are plenty of challenges facing the future of the human race, and there's all kinds of potential disasters, but I seriously doubt that if anything catastrophic happens, running out of metals will be the one that does us in.
Argh! I've actually played ADVENT on a PDP-8 and I can't think of anything humorous to say!
It was Vista Home or the "You're screwed, Neener neener neener!" version. I would have expected the Business version since it was a decent machine, but as I always say, "Microsoft hates me!"
I used NT 3.51 and it was rock solid in my experience. So was NT 4, at least until SP2 came around. Windows 2000 was also reasonably stable and has proved to have great longevity... my kids still use it because the machine it runs on blue screens when trying to install XP. XP was better, especially by the time SP2 came around. The NT side of Windows never suffered from huge stability issues, and even when it did 90% of the time it was obviously and directly related to hardware drivers. No, the NT line was never perfect and there were features and bugs that would drive any user insane, but overall they were decent products that were worth the upgrades.
Until Vista came around, each new version offered significant improvements, required significantly more resources, added some quirky problems but was overall an improvement. The problem is that with Windows 2000, MS pretty much solved all their major problems (besides security, but that could be mitigated by a little bit of common sense, despite the horrible track record of security issues). By XP SP2, even security issues were starting to be not so severe. The biggest changes between 2000 and XP were minor UI tweaks (and the ugliest theme ever put on a GUI since Tandy DeskMate, but that could be turned off, and was turned off, by anyone who realized it could be), and support for new hardware, especially wireless, which didn't really become "nice" until SP2 came along. All Vista really needed to do was support the newest hardware, throw a little eye candy in (because you always need a little eye candy in a new release) and fix some of the many problems that will always plague any OS and it would have sold like hotcakes. Instead we got a Frankenstein monster of an OS that looks and feels like it was designed and written by Cold-War Era East German government employees, with more bloat than the U.S. Tax Code and fewer useful new features than the, well, the U.S. Tax Code.
IMO, Microsoft has been growing beyond their capacity to manage themselves since the early 90's and they have finally reached the point where they are so large they literally cannot do anything right. Just like the U.S. government, MS is so huge, bloated, mismanaged and downright corrupt, the only way it can possibly be improved is for 95% of it to simply go away.
Right. I don't authorize the existence of RIAA, and it means about the same thing.
No managers are brought in to destroy the few good ideas that actually survived the design process. Managers have plenty of experience, just no common sense, or in many cases, signs of intelligence. The higher up you go the worse it gets. In my experience, dealing with anyone at or above middle-management is like dealing with a spoiled 3-year-old that can fire you.
They are "dumbed down" for the average consumer and yet are harder to use. Consumer electronics have taken a huge usability downturn in the past 10 to 15 years, IMO. The biggest reason for that is marketing. It's more important to the manufacturers that the device do more things than the competition, regardless of the utility of those things, whether the consumer actually wants them, or how hard they are to use. It's all about having the most tick marks on some marketroid's checklist. But it's gotten worse with DRM, which is simply a means of making things _not_ work. So we are combining ever-increasing complexity with ever-increasing _non-functionality_ and wondering why things don't work and are hard to use.
But usually nothing apparent happens.
My wife is bald, you insensitive clod!
The OP was talking about "copies of iTunes", not songs.