And just when, in the last 2 millenia or so, has it ever been "acceptable" to be, say, a Christian?
One of the main reasons why people left Europe to travel to the New World was to escape religious persecution: if you weren't a Christian, or if you were the wrong type of Christian, then you were a social pariah in most of Europe from the medieval period until today.
Indeed, Christianity was such a dominant force in Europe that exporting it to other lands by force was seen as good and righteous. Or haven't you heard of the Crusades?
Furthermore, until recently, being a non-Christian was the biggest social stigma possible in most of the western world. Getting an education was impossible to non-Christians as universities only practiced religious persecution.
Virtually any educational institute that you care to name that's over a hundred years old will have been founded by one religious order or another, and the names of many universities and colleges gives this away (eg, Notre Dame, Brigham Young University et al in the US; various Oxford and Cambridge colleges called Jesus or Christ, Magdalen, St Andrews University, et al in the UK). In fact, when University College London was established in 1826, it became the first university to accept people regardless of their class, race, religion or gender. Such a liberal attitude towards religion had others deriding UCL as "the Godless of Gower Street".
To say that being Christian has never been acceptable in the last two millennia is laughable, especially when it's the exact opposite of the truth: not being a Christian has only just become acceptable, and even today that's not a universal truth in the so-called "free" western world.
Oh, get over it. This is information that is 30 years old.
If you want to bitch about revealing the confidences of an ally, let's talk about the detailed briefings the US forces in Afghanistan gave about SAS operations there. In one briefing the US Army disclosed more about an SAS operation in the field than the British government has ever done.
One of the reasons the SAS is so successful is that they keep their tactics very close to their chests. Certainly they never reveal specifics, such as the strength of their assault forces, enemy kills and captures, objectives achieved, casualties sustained, etc. It's so nice of the US Army to fill in the blanks and piss away the concept of operational security for them though.
And I haven't even mentioned "friendly fire" incidents and the subsequent cover-ups with which any related investigations are almost always tainted.
You were saying something about the UK letting the US down?
The British assessment was made after a warning from the then US Defence Secretary James Schlesinger to the British Ambassador in Washington Lord Cromer.
The ambassador quoted Mr Schlesinger as saying that "it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force."
I guess directly naming and quoting the then US Defence Secretary isn't "specific" enough for you.
The difference between the libel laws in the UK and US (and the reason why celebrities prefer to bring libel actions in the UK rather than the US, even though the level of damages that they could possibly be awarded is an order of magnitude lower in the UK) is subtle but easy to understand.
In the UK, it is the person defending the libel action that has the burden of proof thrust upon them. Ie, if John Doe sued me for claiming he had fathered 20 illegitimate children then it would be up to me to prove that he had done so, not for John Doe to prove that he hadn't.
However, in the US, the burden would be on John Doe, the person pursuing the legal action, to prove that my claim was false.
That's the reason why people sue in the UK rather than the US. In either country, as with most places in the world, anything that can be proven can't be libellous.
You are a fucking moron, and your stupid, ill thought out points are not even worth rebutting.
Did you read any of the article? Do you have any capacity for reasoned thought?
Well, I read the article. In full. That's how I know the text is from the 16th century and mentioned it as being so in my post. Did you read any of my post? Do you have any capacity for reasoned thought?
No? Didn't think so.
Isn't it funny how the idiots who can't find the time to properly debate opinions that they disagree with can find enough to come up with hate-filled posts and hit the "Post Anonymously" button?
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
Saying that just because something could be a hoax then it is a hoax is just plain stupid. Like Fermat's Last Theorem, it may be many years before Voynich is proved to be geniune or accurate, but the absence of proof of the former doesn't provide proof of the latter. Remember, even though TLF has been proved, we still don't have the "simple proof" that Fermat himself discovered.
Saying that the manuscript is more likely to be a hoax than not just because computer scientists have theorised that it could have been faked in the 16th century is like a 25th century scholar saying that the Wright Brothers flight, the atomic bomb and the Apollo missions are more likely to be hoaxes than not just because they could have been faked with 20th century technology.
Actually no. As I understand it, in the UK you can be guilty of slander (or libel) even if what you say is factually true, but the telling of it causes injury to someone.
In the US that isn't possible. As long as you can show you have a reasonable reason to believe that what you're saying is true, you're covered.
Don't talk rubbish. To prove slander or libel you have to prove two things: that the statement in question is both untrue and damaging to one's reputation.
If I say that someone is a liar and a cheat, then I am not committing slander if they have been shown to be a liar and a cheat. So, I can can safely call the sprinter Ben Johnson a liar and a cheat because he did indeed lie and cheat. He could try to sue me for either slander (if the allegation is spoken) or libel (if it is written) but as it can be proven that he did lie and cheat he'd get laughed out of court.
Next time, perhaps you should engage your brain before you suggest that accurate reporting of the facts can be considered actionable.
See? You Kazaa addicts couldn't quit while you were ahead, could you? Now RIAA's fighting back, and it's fighting dirty. You think those lawsuits on 12-year-olds were their ultimate weapon? They were just the warm-up act.
A new album from William Shatner? What next, Leonard Nimoy following up his musical tribute to Bilbo Baggins with one to the Fellowship? An album of medical-related cover versions (Something's Got A Hold Of My Heart, etc) from DeForest Kelly?
Do you see what Star Trek-related madness you file swappers have unleashed upon us all?
Is Michael allowed to smoke pot on the job?
on
Message in a Battle
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· Score: 5, Funny
RotK clearly wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good.
Duh. And in other news, Titanic wouldn't have been much of a movie if the ship hadn't sunk, Pearl Harbor wouldn't have been much of a movie if the Japanese hadn't attacked and X-Men would have been pretty bad if none of the characters had special powers.
Sure, there are a couple of hobbits winding their way to Mount Doom but Lord Of The Rings was always about epic battles - it's a bit hard to have an ultimate "good vs evil" struggle without a major conflict or two.
When people talk about these movies, they they talk about the battles within the mines of Moria, at Helm's Deep, at Isengard, and at Minas Tirith. They don't talk about Gandalf's fireworks at the Shire, or Frodo vs Gollum at the volcano's mouth. It's the major fight scenes that get us talking and it's those fight scenes where the real money is spent.
Of course Return Of The King wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good. Neither would any major sci-fi or fantasy film you care to mention if equally bereft of seriously meaty action. Duh.
Huh, forget about Ludivine Sagnier. Monica Bellucci's as Persephone had some amazing visual effects going on in Matrix Revolutions, definitely worthy of Oscar recognition.
Heck, forget about the Oscars, those babies deserve a pair of Golden Globe awards.
Just to let you know, in Texas you are not liable for killing someone who is in your house.
I think that depends on the circumstances. If you get pissed off that your wife didn't put too much salt on your dinner or if the electrician that just fixed your short circuit gives you a bill that's $100 more than you were expecting to pay you don't automatically have the right to blow them away.
The right of self-defence, to respond with appropriate force when threatened, is different from the right to kill at will. Just to let you know.
The law is an ass. Legislating against radio waves is like legislating against magnetism or gravity. Fucking stupid.
Get a clue, you motherfucking retard.
Wow. How nice of you to read the last sentence of the post to which you were replying. Is it any wonder with such an insightful argument and eloquent turn of phrase that you chose to post this as an AC? Why be anonymous if you're so certain about the righteousness of your views?
The law might be an ass. But it is the law. And, the relevant law doesn't isn't "legislating against radio waves", it's legislating the ownership of particular frequencies.
I'm guessing that if you're so vehement that radio waves are public domain you don't have any objection to me tapping into your telephone conversations when you use a cordless or mobile phone? Or of me hacking into your home network via your wireless hub? Oh, you do mind?
You see, the law is there to protect you too.
Which would you rather have:
1. A society where you have no rights to privacy when you make a mobile phone call and where you can watch TV for free (at someone else's expense); or
2. One where you do have a right to privacy and you have to pay the market rate for services that you receive?
Make your mind up time. Let me know which you prefer. In the meantime, I'll go "get a clue", although it might take me some time as I'm clearly a "motherfucking retard" as you suggest.
(OK, I going to get flamed to hell and back for posting this, but here goes nothing.)
This "if your signals penetrate my airwaves then they belong to me and I can do whatever I like with them" argument really is flawed.
Yes, if you were an island state that would hold true, but you're not, you're an American citizen (or the citizen of another country) and you're bound by the rules and laws of the country that you live in.
Now, if you live in the US, you have to play by the US government's rules. One of the rules says that killing someone is forbidden, and that if you kill someone then that's a crime and you have to pay for your crime.
Another one of the rules says that certain wavelengths of the RF spectrum belong to (or are for the exclusive use of) certain governmental organisations (eg, the US armed forces, police departments) or private corporations (eg, DirecTV). In the former case, these wavelengths are used without compensation, but in the latter case, the corporations concerned are paying for the right to exclusive use of those frequencies.
Just who are they paying? Well, directly, they are paying your government, and hence, indirectly, they are paying you/i>. So, although they might not be sending you personally a cheque (check) in the post, you are being paid for the use of those airwaves.
Now, if you disagree with this arangement, if you don't like any third party owning then the solution is simple: Lobby your Congressman and/or other representatives.
But, please, don't pretend that DirecTV or whoever has no right to be upset when you decode their signals without paying for their service. They have every right, and that right was sold to them by your government.
Obviously, this arrangement of rights between the individual, the government and the corporation will vary from country to country. (For example, if you're Canadian, then intercepting signals intended for the US market and doing with them whatever you want is legal, as determined by the Canadian legal system.)
But pretending that the law of the land can be ignored and that "if you beam signals directly toward me, you don't get to complain when I use them", and "you are not allowed to take away basic rights of perception in order to save a few bucks", are poor arguments that fail to take into account that the rights here (as determined by law) are with the transmitter and not the receiver.
Now feel free to retort. Just keep the personal insults out of it please?
Of course Java apps don't have the same speed as natively written apps. You sacrifice something for cross-platform support and that something is speed.
I had thought that that much was bleeding obvious. Looks like I was wrong.
The choice of phrase "eMusic was a nice try - next time give it a shot with popular bands - they're all on Kazaa anyway, so what do you have to lose?" sounds like implicit support to me.
I can't be the only person who read that and thought that you basically were saying "hey, if you can't find the music that you're after at eMusic, Kazaa will have it for you."
It may not have been you intention to promote Kazaa or P2P copyright infringement in anyway but that's how you came across. And, be fair, I said implicit support, as in "implied though not directly expressed", not explicit support. Whether you like it or not, that's what your words seemed to imply.
Perhaps other readers could tell us if they read the same post and came to the same conclusions that I did?
You're staring at the default pricepoint for no good reason. If they raised the default pricepoint, likely the majority of people would still pay the default, and yet they'd rake in more money. What's encouraging is that the majority of people will pay more than they have to, and a sizeable portion will pay more than recommended (which is pretty astonishing).
Well, as I pointed out 65 percent of purchases are at either the default price or the lowest price possible, which isn't quite the same thing as people willingly paying more than they have to. If you include the number of people opting to pay $6 of $7 per album, that figure rises to 76 percent, so that's over 3 in 4 sales that are at the default price or below.
You might consider that the default price point is unimportant but I think that's an oversimplification. Currently, one 1 percent of purchases are at $9, but if that was the default price point don't you think that it'd be near 50 percent?
Just look at the distribution of sales at the default and the two price points either side of it - $7 accounts for 1 percent of the sales, $8 for 44 percent and $9 for 1 percent again. Which do you think is more likely, that people opt for $8 because it's "just right" or because it's the default option?
So, tell me again how I'm staring at the default pricepoint for no good reason when it accounts for 44 percent of the sales?
But they didn't suddenly try to increase market share by allowing OEMs. Will things be different this time around if competition heats up?
Uh, aren't you forgetting the approved PowerMac clones from Umax et al? If anything, I think the lessons learned from that experiment (the clones eating into Apple's own market share rather than those of its Wintel competitors) mean that Apple is going to be reluctant to open up iTMS to non-iPod owners than anything else.
The last thing that Apple needs after having invested so much time, money and effort into this project is for a third party portable music player that out-iPods the iPod* to destroy their best laid plans.
(By third party portable music player that out-iPods the iPod, I mean a device that's, say, cheaper, smaller, lighter yet with just as much storage, functionality and cool. Don't laugh, such things happen in business all the time. Just look at the mobile phone industry.)
Well, the $5 choice might not be the one taken most but it is the choice taken most often by those who err from the default $8 per album price point. In fact, 65 percent of the sales are for either $5 or $8.
Furthermore, if you add up those sales and do the sums, the mean average price paid by the current Magnatune audience for an album is $8.35. While it's encouraging that that's $0.35 above the default price, what's not encouraging is that it's not much above it - surely the cost of implementing such a service and the potential drawbacks (ie, almost everyone paying the minimum or nobody paying above the default) make this a less than attractive option to even a liberal music exec.
Remember, the current Magnatune audience probably includes a large proportion of people that are drawn to the service precisely because it gives them the opportunity to reward their favourite artists more than they have to. I might be being cynical, but I have to think that if the service was used by a larger audience then the proportion of people willing to pay more than they have to would dwindle.
As I said, this might be a cynical view but you'll probably agree with me that it's a pragmatic one.
Well I'm glad business is going great but do you really think that condoning Kazaa usage ("eMusic was a nice try - next time give it a shot with popular bands - they're all on Kazaa anyway, so what do you have to lose?) as you did in your original post is wise?
One day, you may well have to deal with someone who looks at Kazaa as a tool built specifically for copyright infringement (which it was; P2P may have legal uses but, be honest folks, 99.9999 percent of the traffic is in copyrighted material) and who screws you over because of your implicit support for P2P applications.
If and when that happens, it might not be fair - business rarely is - but it'll definitely be bad news for your customers.
Summary: Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes its big, yes its heavy, yes its loud and YES IT DOES GET YOUR CPU AND GPU COLD - VERY COLD - EVEN DAMN COLD! Is -100C cold enough for you?
Forget the cold feet, it's going deaf from the noise all that cooling generates that is your real problem. What's the point of having a PC that's so loud that you need to wear ear mufflers to be able to use it or else risk losing your hearing?
Being able to hear yourself think while you work or hear the in-game audio while you play is a good thing.
They have to pay royalties (for codecs, etc) for every copy of Winamp 5.0 Pro they ship. So giving away even, say, 10,000 copies of 5.0 Pro would cost them $25-50,000 just for the MP3 codec.
Assuming that roughly half of the $14.95 cost goes towards paying those royalties, giving away 10,000 copies of 5.0 Pro would cost $75,000. Hmmm, take a $75,000 hit or have a very, very small number of users be ticked off? Gee, let me think...
Remember, people who shelled out for a souped-up version of Winamp previously were doing so for the convenience factor - as many people have pointed out, that extra functionality can be had for free elsewhere, but not in a comparable "all-in-one" package. People who were willing to pay $15, roughly the price of one CD album, for a souped-up version of Winamp then will most likely show very little hesitation and almost no resentment at paying $15 for a new and improved souped-up version of Winamp now.
It may not be the charitable or ideal approach but it's certainly a practical and pragmatic one. I, and many others like me, won't begruge Nullsoft from trying to earn a living so that they can put food on their plates, especially if their product is a good as it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
And just when, in the last 2 millenia or so, has it ever been "acceptable" to be, say, a Christian?
One of the main reasons why people left Europe to travel to the New World was to escape religious persecution: if you weren't a Christian, or if you were the wrong type of Christian, then you were a social pariah in most of Europe from the medieval period until today.
Indeed, Christianity was such a dominant force in Europe that exporting it to other lands by force was seen as good and righteous. Or haven't you heard of the Crusades?
Furthermore, until recently, being a non-Christian was the biggest social stigma possible in most of the western world. Getting an education was impossible to non-Christians as universities only practiced religious persecution.
Virtually any educational institute that you care to name that's over a hundred years old will have been founded by one religious order or another, and the names of many universities and colleges gives this away (eg, Notre Dame, Brigham Young University et al in the US; various Oxford and Cambridge colleges called Jesus or Christ, Magdalen, St Andrews University, et al in the UK). In fact, when University College London was established in 1826, it became the first university to accept people regardless of their class, race, religion or gender. Such a liberal attitude towards religion had others deriding UCL as "the Godless of Gower Street".
To say that being Christian has never been acceptable in the last two millennia is laughable, especially when it's the exact opposite of the truth: not being a Christian has only just become acceptable, and even today that's not a universal truth in the so-called "free" western world.
Here's where to get it quickly, via the official BitTorrent: http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/.
The torrents are pretty fast; faster than the mirrors in my personal experience.
Oh, get over it. This is information that is 30 years old.
If you want to bitch about revealing the confidences of an ally, let's talk about the detailed briefings the US forces in Afghanistan gave about SAS operations there. In one briefing the US Army disclosed more about an SAS operation in the field than the British government has ever done.
One of the reasons the SAS is so successful is that they keep their tactics very close to their chests. Certainly they never reveal specifics, such as the strength of their assault forces, enemy kills and captures, objectives achieved, casualties sustained, etc. It's so nice of the US Army to fill in the blanks and piss away the concept of operational security for them though.
And I haven't even mentioned "friendly fire" incidents and the subsequent cover-ups with which any related investigations are almost always tainted.
You were saying something about the UK letting the US down?
Read the 5th and 6th paragraphs of the link:
The British assessment was made after a warning from the then US Defence Secretary James Schlesinger to the British Ambassador in Washington Lord Cromer.
The ambassador quoted Mr Schlesinger as saying that "it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force."
I guess directly naming and quoting the then US Defence Secretary isn't "specific" enough for you.
You've still got it wrong.
The difference between the libel laws in the UK and US (and the reason why celebrities prefer to bring libel actions in the UK rather than the US, even though the level of damages that they could possibly be awarded is an order of magnitude lower in the UK) is subtle but easy to understand.
In the UK, it is the person defending the libel action that has the burden of proof thrust upon them. Ie, if John Doe sued me for claiming he had fathered 20 illegitimate children then it would be up to me to prove that he had done so, not for John Doe to prove that he hadn't.
However, in the US, the burden would be on John Doe, the person pursuing the legal action, to prove that my claim was false.
That's the reason why people sue in the UK rather than the US. In either country, as with most places in the world, anything that can be proven can't be libellous.
You are a fucking moron, and your stupid, ill thought out points are not even worth rebutting.
Did you read any of the article? Do you have any capacity for reasoned thought?
Well, I read the article. In full. That's how I know the text is from the 16th century and mentioned it as being so in my post. Did you read any of my post? Do you have any capacity for reasoned thought?
No? Didn't think so.
Isn't it funny how the idiots who can't find the time to properly debate opinions that they disagree with can find enough to come up with hate-filled posts and hit the "Post Anonymously" button?
...but it's another thing to prove it.
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
Saying that just because something could be a hoax then it is a hoax is just plain stupid. Like Fermat's Last Theorem, it may be many years before Voynich is proved to be geniune or accurate, but the absence of proof of the former doesn't provide proof of the latter. Remember, even though TLF has been proved, we still don't have the "simple proof" that Fermat himself discovered.
Saying that the manuscript is more likely to be a hoax than not just because computer scientists have theorised that it could have been faked in the 16th century is like a 25th century scholar saying that the Wright Brothers flight, the atomic bomb and the Apollo missions are more likely to be hoaxes than not just because they could have been faked with 20th century technology.
Actually no. As I understand it, in the UK you can be guilty of slander (or libel) even if what you say is factually true, but the telling of it causes injury to someone.
In the US that isn't possible. As long as you can show you have a reasonable reason to believe that what you're saying is true, you're covered.
Don't talk rubbish. To prove slander or libel you have to prove two things: that the statement in question is both untrue and damaging to one's reputation.
If I say that someone is a liar and a cheat, then I am not committing slander if they have been shown to be a liar and a cheat. So, I can can safely call the sprinter Ben Johnson a liar and a cheat because he did indeed lie and cheat. He could try to sue me for either slander (if the allegation is spoken) or libel (if it is written) but as it can be proven that he did lie and cheat he'd get laughed out of court.
Next time, perhaps you should engage your brain before you suggest that accurate reporting of the facts can be considered actionable.
He might be dead but that wouldn't stop RIAA from cashing in on his fame.
See? You Kazaa addicts couldn't quit while you were ahead, could you? Now RIAA's fighting back, and it's fighting dirty. You think those lawsuits on 12-year-olds were their ultimate weapon? They were just the warm-up act.
A new album from William Shatner? What next, Leonard Nimoy following up his musical tribute to Bilbo Baggins with one to the Fellowship? An album of medical-related cover versions (Something's Got A Hold Of My Heart, etc) from DeForest Kelly?
Do you see what Star Trek-related madness you file swappers have unleashed upon us all?
RotK clearly wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good.
Duh. And in other news, Titanic wouldn't have been much of a movie if the ship hadn't sunk, Pearl Harbor wouldn't have been much of a movie if the Japanese hadn't attacked and X-Men would have been pretty bad if none of the characters had special powers.
Sure, there are a couple of hobbits winding their way to Mount Doom but Lord Of The Rings was always about epic battles - it's a bit hard to have an ultimate "good vs evil" struggle without a major conflict or two.
When people talk about these movies, they they talk about the battles within the mines of Moria, at Helm's Deep, at Isengard, and at Minas Tirith. They don't talk about Gandalf's fireworks at the Shire, or Frodo vs Gollum at the volcano's mouth. It's the major fight scenes that get us talking and it's those fight scenes where the real money is spent.
Of course Return Of The King wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good. Neither would any major sci-fi or fantasy film you care to mention if equally bereft of seriously meaty action. Duh.
Huh, forget about Ludivine Sagnier. Monica Bellucci's as Persephone had some amazing visual effects going on in Matrix Revolutions, definitely worthy of Oscar recognition.
Heck, forget about the Oscars, those babies deserve a pair of Golden Globe awards.
Just to let you know, in Texas you are not liable for killing someone who is in your house.
I think that depends on the circumstances. If you get pissed off that your wife didn't put too much salt on your dinner or if the electrician that just fixed your short circuit gives you a bill that's $100 more than you were expecting to pay you don't automatically have the right to blow them away.
The right of self-defence, to respond with appropriate force when threatened, is different from the right to kill at will. Just to let you know.
Go and fuck your mother, you stupid cunt.
The law is an ass. Legislating against radio waves is like legislating against magnetism or gravity. Fucking stupid.
Get a clue, you motherfucking retard.
Wow. How nice of you to read the last sentence of the post to which you were replying. Is it any wonder with such an insightful argument and eloquent turn of phrase that you chose to post this as an AC? Why be anonymous if you're so certain about the righteousness of your views?
The law might be an ass. But it is the law. And, the relevant law doesn't isn't "legislating against radio waves", it's legislating the ownership of particular frequencies.
I'm guessing that if you're so vehement that radio waves are public domain you don't have any objection to me tapping into your telephone conversations when you use a cordless or mobile phone? Or of me hacking into your home network via your wireless hub? Oh, you do mind?
You see, the law is there to protect you too.
Which would you rather have:
1. A society where you have no rights to privacy when you make a mobile phone call and where you can watch TV for free (at someone else's expense); or
2. One where you do have a right to privacy and you have to pay the market rate for services that you receive?
Make your mind up time. Let me know which you prefer. In the meantime, I'll go "get a clue", although it might take me some time as I'm clearly a "motherfucking retard" as you suggest.
(OK, I going to get flamed to hell and back for posting this, but here goes nothing.)
This "if your signals penetrate my airwaves then they belong to me and I can do whatever I like with them" argument really is flawed.
Yes, if you were an island state that would hold true, but you're not, you're an American citizen (or the citizen of another country) and you're bound by the rules and laws of the country that you live in.
Now, if you live in the US, you have to play by the US government's rules. One of the rules says that killing someone is forbidden, and that if you kill someone then that's a crime and you have to pay for your crime.
Another one of the rules says that certain wavelengths of the RF spectrum belong to (or are for the exclusive use of) certain governmental organisations (eg, the US armed forces, police departments) or private corporations (eg, DirecTV). In the former case, these wavelengths are used without compensation, but in the latter case, the corporations concerned are paying for the right to exclusive use of those frequencies.
Just who are they paying? Well, directly, they are paying your government, and hence, indirectly, they are paying you/i>. So, although they might not be sending you personally a cheque (check) in the post, you are being paid for the use of those airwaves.
Now, if you disagree with this arangement, if you don't like any third party owning then the solution is simple: Lobby your Congressman and/or other representatives.
But, please, don't pretend that DirecTV or whoever has no right to be upset when you decode their signals without paying for their service. They have every right, and that right was sold to them by your government.
Obviously, this arrangement of rights between the individual, the government and the corporation will vary from country to country. (For example, if you're Canadian, then intercepting signals intended for the US market and doing with them whatever you want is legal, as determined by the Canadian legal system.)
But pretending that the law of the land can be ignored and that "if you beam signals directly toward me, you don't get to complain when I use them", and "you are not allowed to take away basic rights of perception in order to save a few bucks", are poor arguments that fail to take into account that the rights here (as determined by law) are with the transmitter and not the receiver.
Now feel free to retort. Just keep the personal insults out of it please?
Yeah, like that's a fair trade for Babe Ruth and almost a century of pain.
Of course Java apps don't have the same speed as natively written apps. You sacrifice something for cross-platform support and that something is speed.
I had thought that that much was bleeding obvious. Looks like I was wrong.
I have no podding idea what the pod you're podding about. Jesus H. Pod, make some podding sense every once in a pod, will ya?
(Here's podding that this pod gets podded down as pod. Dumb podders.)
The choice of phrase "eMusic was a nice try - next time give it a shot with popular bands - they're all on Kazaa anyway, so what do you have to lose?" sounds like implicit support to me.
I can't be the only person who read that and thought that you basically were saying "hey, if you can't find the music that you're after at eMusic, Kazaa will have it for you."
It may not have been you intention to promote Kazaa or P2P copyright infringement in anyway but that's how you came across. And, be fair, I said implicit support, as in "implied though not directly expressed", not explicit support. Whether you like it or not, that's what your words seemed to imply.
Perhaps other readers could tell us if they read the same post and came to the same conclusions that I did?
You're staring at the default pricepoint for no good reason. If they raised the default pricepoint, likely the majority of people would still pay the default, and yet they'd rake in more money. What's encouraging is that the majority of people will pay more than they have to, and a sizeable portion will pay more than recommended (which is pretty astonishing).
Well, as I pointed out 65 percent of purchases are at either the default price or the lowest price possible, which isn't quite the same thing as people willingly paying more than they have to. If you include the number of people opting to pay $6 of $7 per album, that figure rises to 76 percent, so that's over 3 in 4 sales that are at the default price or below.
You might consider that the default price point is unimportant but I think that's an oversimplification. Currently, one 1 percent of purchases are at $9, but if that was the default price point don't you think that it'd be near 50 percent?
Just look at the distribution of sales at the default and the two price points either side of it - $7 accounts for 1 percent of the sales, $8 for 44 percent and $9 for 1 percent again. Which do you think is more likely, that people opt for $8 because it's "just right" or because it's the default option?
So, tell me again how I'm staring at the default pricepoint for no good reason when it accounts for 44 percent of the sales?
But they didn't suddenly try to increase market share by allowing OEMs. Will things be different this time around if competition heats up?
Uh, aren't you forgetting the approved PowerMac clones from Umax et al? If anything, I think the lessons learned from that experiment (the clones eating into Apple's own market share rather than those of its Wintel competitors) mean that Apple is going to be reluctant to open up iTMS to non-iPod owners than anything else.
The last thing that Apple needs after having invested so much time, money and effort into this project is for a third party portable music player that out-iPods the iPod* to destroy their best laid plans.
(By third party portable music player that out-iPods the iPod, I mean a device that's, say, cheaper, smaller, lighter yet with just as much storage, functionality and cool. Don't laugh, such things happen in business all the time. Just look at the mobile phone industry.)
Well, the $5 choice might not be the one taken most but it is the choice taken most often by those who err from the default $8 per album price point. In fact, 65 percent of the sales are for either $5 or $8.
Furthermore, if you add up those sales and do the sums, the mean average price paid by the current Magnatune audience for an album is $8.35. While it's encouraging that that's $0.35 above the default price, what's not encouraging is that it's not much above it - surely the cost of implementing such a service and the potential drawbacks (ie, almost everyone paying the minimum or nobody paying above the default) make this a less than attractive option to even a liberal music exec.
Remember, the current Magnatune audience probably includes a large proportion of people that are drawn to the service precisely because it gives them the opportunity to reward their favourite artists more than they have to. I might be being cynical, but I have to think that if the service was used by a larger audience then the proportion of people willing to pay more than they have to would dwindle.
As I said, this might be a cynical view but you'll probably agree with me that it's a pragmatic one.
Well I'm glad business is going great but do you really think that condoning Kazaa usage ("eMusic was a nice try - next time give it a shot with popular bands - they're all on Kazaa anyway, so what do you have to lose?) as you did in your original post is wise?
One day, you may well have to deal with someone who looks at Kazaa as a tool built specifically for copyright infringement (which it was; P2P may have legal uses but, be honest folks, 99.9999 percent of the traffic is in copyrighted material) and who screws you over because of your implicit support for P2P applications.
If and when that happens, it might not be fair - business rarely is - but it'll definitely be bad news for your customers.
Summary: Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes its big, yes its heavy, yes its loud and YES IT DOES GET YOUR CPU AND GPU COLD - VERY COLD - EVEN DAMN COLD! Is -100C cold enough for you?
Forget the cold feet, it's going deaf from the noise all that cooling generates that is your real problem. What's the point of having a PC that's so loud that you need to wear ear mufflers to be able to use it or else risk losing your hearing?
Being able to hear yourself think while you work or hear the in-game audio while you play is a good thing.
They have to pay royalties (for codecs, etc) for every copy of Winamp 5.0 Pro they ship. So giving away even, say, 10,000 copies of 5.0 Pro would cost them $25-50,000 just for the MP3 codec.
Assuming that roughly half of the $14.95 cost goes towards paying those royalties, giving away 10,000 copies of 5.0 Pro would cost $75,000. Hmmm, take a $75,000 hit or have a very, very small number of users be ticked off? Gee, let me think...
Remember, people who shelled out for a souped-up version of Winamp previously were doing so for the convenience factor - as many people have pointed out, that extra functionality can be had for free elsewhere, but not in a comparable "all-in-one" package. People who were willing to pay $15, roughly the price of one CD album, for a souped-up version of Winamp then will most likely show very little hesitation and almost no resentment at paying $15 for a new and improved souped-up version of Winamp now.
It may not be the charitable or ideal approach but it's certainly a practical and pragmatic one. I, and many others like me, won't begruge Nullsoft from trying to earn a living so that they can put food on their plates, especially if their product is a good as it seems.