idol: something your worship, or put on a pedestal (or vote for in a popularity contest on TV) idle: sitting doing nothing, a car engine 'idling', an 'idle' threat.
And the big thing that scares Microsoft is the idea of not having a the vast majority of control over software that people use. If there were ever fair competition, then they wouldnt be able to break file formats and network protocols at will, they would have to be compatible to continue to hold *any* portion of the market, and they would actually have to compete on reliability, usefulness, etc. And that has never been one of their strong points.
I would suggest that part of your refutation should call attention to the difference in 'deprivation of use'. If someone is stronger than you and takes your (real) property away from you, then you are now deprived of the use of it. Copying a song (or a movie, or a computer program, or even an idea) does deprive you of your use of it. You still have your (song/movie, etc)
And again, what the RIAA-members want is to eliminate the CD and replace it with a new proprietary format that can't be copied and requires one to buy additional copies for each device you might want to listen on. And they'd love to give extra points for a system that let them count and charge for every time you listen. Grand Prize for a way to bill you if you even hum one of "their" songs to yourself or in your head. What they don't give a damn about is wether its digital or analog, or wether anyone wants to pay for it that way. They figure if they can eliminate everything else, the herd will just go along with the only choice they make available.
There seems to be this mass mis-concept that CD's are not digital music, and the word 'digital' being misused to mean 'Internet downloadable only', or something like that.
CD's continue to have several advantages, at least to the purchases, that have been fairly scarce with 'Internet downloadable' music:
1. Its a full 44 Khz non-compressed. (Granted, egotistcal audiophiles will still prefer their vinyl, but we're are talking the average consumer here)
2. No built-in "Digital Restrictions" - you can copy the audio (compressing it, if you choose) into the same device-and-location independent type of 'digital' file that you might get from an Internet download. You can also make a full uncompressed archival copy (either to CDR's, or you could put perhaps 5 of them on a DVD-R if you wanted) (Or you can use the original as the archive and take your copy for everyday use)
3. A standard publicly documented open format readable by anyone.
That said, they still have some disadvantages:
1. Usually grossly overpriced. 2. You have to go physically get them, or order and wait for them to be shipped.
Unfortunately, the labels seem have taken an attitude that they are going to be damned if they are going to make music available to people with the advantages but with the disadvantages. And as you can see, they even want to eliminate CD's. I'm sure they hate them, becuase they allow others to to fill in the gap, by taking the physical CD's, and turning them into online downloadable files. They usually do compress them, but that is the far more minor of the disadvantages than the DRM is.
If any player in the music industry were to ever offer online downloadable music, in a standard open format, without DRM, at a reasonable price, it would be news. The head of one of the 'publishers' decrying CD's (and using the wrong term to describe non-CD music), isn't really news.
Ah yes, and companies that make arc-welders should take into account so the average moron can weld. Oh, and rocketships should be more simpler. And backhoes.
A computer is neither a toy now an appliance. It is a tool. It is a very powerful and complex tool. Expecting a "computer company" (Im not sure if you are referring to PC OEM's like Dell and HP, or Microsoft) to be able to successfully design a system to be both meaningfully usable by an idiot to accomplish anything useful while still remaining secure is unrealistic.
Everyone thinks Microsoft did such greate things for IT and computers, when in fact all it did was pretend that it could eliminate the intelligence requirement for using a complex tool. Unfortunately the average moron is now firmly convinced this is true.
I don't know about any else, but I dont run anti-virus software because I dont use Microsoft operating systems. It isnt needed, and isnt even available (well, there are scanners that *nix mailservers can run so that MS-based email clients dont get infected, but unless you are running a mailserver they really arent relevant)
I dont use any special anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, or anti-phishing software, and if my firewall was turned off I wouldn't have access to the Internet (Routers dont work very well when powered off). Oh, and there is no such thing as a 'software' firewall.
Virus makers tend to target a different platform than the one I use, since its underlying design is easy to code such things for. Ditto on spyware.
I dont need anything other than my own wetware to avoid phishing, mostly they are bleeding obvious, because I dont have an account at the institution/site they purport to come from. For those institutions/sites that I do have an account with, its almost as easy. A combination of not using email software that lets email 'disguise' URL's as anything other than the actual URL, some basic common sense about what those institutions are likely to email me about and when, and for anything that gets past that, I still ignore the email and instead log into that site directly (using my non-virus-and-spyware-susceptible software&platform) and if the email was something to be concerned about, there would be a notice there.
And I dont need any 'extra' software to protect my machine from the Internet. By default it doesnt leave things accessible remotely.
One more last thing - banks DO NOT send you an email telling you that they will suspend your account if you dont hurry up and click the link and type in your sensitive personal information. If you get one, its a scam. Period. And if by some insane chance a bank really does that, you still don't want to follow those instructions. You want to drive to the bank and close all your accounts there and bank somewhere else.
Could it be that Skype isn't compatible with anything else? VoIP is booming, at least between devices and software that use open documented standards and are interoperable with each other (Asterisk, SIP ATA's and phones, SIP/IAX service providers). Not to mention they dont depend on a PeeCee with a soundcard to use. Not to mention you can often get *free* outbound to PSTN (well, you pay flat-per-month rather than per-minute)
Skype was a curiousity at best, but was always destined to be a loser.
Spammers can use the 'get a human to do it' as easily as any one else can do.
They can set up fake porn sites with registrations (collecting more email addresses to spam in the process), and when someone wants to 'register' for the free porn, the spammers site scrapes a captcha from the site they want to get into with a bot, and show it to their user trying to sign up for porn. The eager pornhound dutifully types in the answer, which the spammer's scripts can then supply to the site the capthcha originally came from. They can even feedback the results - if the answer doesnt work at the real site, then the user made a mistake, and get another.
If you are able to install this mailhide script, it would be simpler, instead of posting your email address, to post a link to a form where someone wanting to contact you can type their message, give you their email address (or link to their contact form, if they like:), and then have it submit to a script that emails you the contents of the form (make sure your email address is hardcoded in the script, and *not* included in a hidden form field)
Presumably you 'ripped' it on Windows, and you didnt get the actual CD audio data, but instead got something else that either a driver that installed from the ROM portion of the CD installed gave you, or perhaps Windows itself.
Get a system not encumbered by Microsoft, and you likely to have better results.
Uhm, you do realize that software patents get in the way of the 'Four Freedoms' ? And that someone could distribute code (or allow it to be distributed) under the GPL, but have (or claim to have) patents on what it does, thus implying that even though the GPL license protects your freedoms, if you exercise them, you are then violating their patents?
I've used services that use MS-based maps, and Ive used services that use Google-based ones. Due to them working horridly if at all, I generally dont ever go back to the MS-based ones.
If your goal is to provide a standards-compliant service that works well with a wide variety of clients, use Google.
If your goal is to support Microsoft's goal of controlling and dominating everything to the exclusion of anything else, and to hell with compatibility or interoperability, then by all means use MS.
Yer lucky if you get any sort of disk at all, even an OEM one that puts all the crap on. Most these days ship with that on an HD partition instead, which if you hose without first burning to CD or DVD (assuming the machine comes with a burner) you're SOL. (Well, actually, you could be on the beginning of a path to never being SOL again, if as a result a friend helps you decide to skip MS in favor of something less shitty)
That you have to pay $8.95 "shipping" for their free CD, yet somehow Netflix is able to mail DVDs around the country for.41 each (albeit in a crappy envelope that often jams in the USPS sorting machines and so usually has to be hand-sorted) But even if they packaged the CD properly and sent it via Priority Mail it would only cost $4.05. I havent ordered any so I don't know how they actually ship them, but I suspect its via a lower-class service.
Given that CD's cost less than a quarter to mass-produce, its easy to see they are making a killing on these 'Free' CD's.
Aside from their shipping cost scam, the things themselves look like they would be of benefit only to utter nincompoops, and even then only marginal benefit.
Presumable in vodafones case its the _proxy_ (which presumably has a direct wired connection) thats downloading "everything", and probably stripping the nonessential items out when relaying it over vodafone's network to the phone itself.
So its a service that vodafone is providing to its users that allows them (at least theoretically) to automatically have *all* websites converted for better viewing on their phone (and possble even using a better transform, since presumably vodafone has more knowledge of the capabilities of its customer's phones than some random website might).
A web server/site doesnt have any intrinsic right to know what type or version of browser that is accessing it: User-Agent is voluntary. And quite frankly, I'd like to see it be a default-off toggle in new browsers, so that sites had to start deciding to make standards based W3C compliant code instead of writing browser-brand specific code.
I can already make calls without having to pay toll, and I dont have to use my computer or a proprietary system to connect to it. What possible use would this be to me?
I predict the imminent demise of the entire concept of 'long distance' and tolls.
Hopefully soon 'per minute' charging (regardless of wether its a flat rate for x-thousand minutes, or a meter running with post-use billing) for cell airtime will die too.
Kites that weight more than 5 pounds and go higher than 150 feet generally dont fall into the 'entertainment/hobbyist' category - they fall into the scientific experiment and/or commercial use category. But even if you did have a heavey kite that flew that high, a helipad 4.9 miles from you wouldnt remove your right to fly it entirely, it would just mean you need to get clearance from the FAA so that they know you will be flying your 5 pound kite in the airspace near the helipad, so they can advise pilots to keep clear. You probably would have no problem getting that clearance.
Everyone having exclusive private property rights that extended to unlimited altitude is incompatible with the more public-serving thought that aircraft (commercial transportation, private transportation, fire/police/air resuce helicopters, and kites and rockets that might reach certain altitudes) should be allowed to fly over other peoples property. Management and coordination of that traffic to ensure maximum safety for the pilots and passengers and for protection of property needs to be given to someone, and that someone in the US is the FAA.
So yes, that means you dont have the unlimited right to put anything you want as high as you want into the air of your own property. It means that above a certain altitude, or for objects above a certain size/weight, you need to check with the FAA to make certain that there wont be any conflicts. And while there are alwas people in all walks of life that might abuse positions of power, and certainly some of them work for the FAA, I think its highly likely that your reasonable request to fly a kite would be granted as long as there wasnt a serious conflict that would cause a danger to aircraft. (And yes, I think the ability for a fire rescue/police helicopter to operate safely to perform its job is probably more important than your right to fly a very heavy kite in its flightpath for personal enjoyment, should there in fact be a conflict)
I read someone suggested satellite, apparently they didnt fully read your post.
Someone suggested 3G cell, apparently they don't get that even if that is offered where you are, the fact that cell access 'just barely' works probably means it isnt or wont where you are.
If this is a legitimate business need, then you need a business Internet connection. If you have a phone line, you get get a leased line (A T-1 would probably be the place to start looking). It wont be cheap (although it might still be less than 4 phone lines and 4 Internet accounts unless you can get real cheap prices on both) Probably the less expensive way rather than pay for the T1 line itself, as well as Internet service, would be to just get a T1 between your house and your employer. That will give you the best response for remote management, and then you can tap into the Internet connection that I assume is there for whatever (business purpose) access you need to that.
For the record, that seems to pretty much only apply to kites that weigh more than 5 pounds or that you intend to fly higher than 500 feet. (and some other restrictions having to do with airports and flight visibility).
And it is entirely legitimate for the FAA to be concerened about things in the airspace where planes are allowed to fly (including of course the planes themseves, for which there are also of course regulations). Since neither the FAA nor anyone else can waive the 'two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time' rule.
If Virgin mobile complied with the terms of the license that the photo was provided to them under, then they are not liable.
I see no rationale for the authors of the license used to be remotely involved, and certainly not liable.
The photographer may or may not be in trouble - it depends on wether he had permission to use the image of the girl in question and wether he had permission to release it under the license that he did.
--
Does anyone know what the law says in regards to copyright of a photograph of a person? I would think that both the photographer as well as the photograph-ee should both have some rights, which they can grant choose to grant to each other or not.
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idol: something your worship, or put on a pedestal (or vote for in a popularity contest on TV)
idle: sitting doing nothing, a car engine 'idling', an 'idle' threat.
And the big thing that scares Microsoft is the idea of not having a the vast majority of control over software that people use. If there were ever fair competition, then they wouldnt be able to break file formats and network protocols at will, they would have to be compatible to continue to hold *any* portion of the market, and they would actually have to compete on reliability, usefulness, etc. And that has never been one of their strong points.
I would suggest that part of your refutation should call attention to the difference in 'deprivation of use'. If someone is stronger than you and takes your (real) property away from you, then you are now deprived of the use of it. Copying a song (or a movie, or a computer program, or even an idea) does deprive you of your use of it. You still have your (song/movie, etc)
Well someone (P. T. Barnum?) said there's a sucker born every minute. Presumably some of them buy that thing.
Anyway, if you do have a scratched-up CD, there's CDParanoia - http://xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html
And again, what the RIAA-members want is to eliminate the CD and replace it with a new proprietary format that can't be copied and requires one to buy additional copies for each device you might want to listen on. And they'd love to give extra points for a system that let them count and charge for every time you listen. Grand Prize for a way to bill you if you even hum one of "their" songs to yourself or in your head. What they don't give a damn about is wether its digital or analog, or wether anyone wants to pay for it that way. They figure if they can eliminate everything else, the herd will just go along with the only choice they make available.
There seems to be this mass mis-concept that CD's are not digital music, and the word 'digital' being misused to mean 'Internet downloadable only', or something like that.
CD's continue to have several advantages, at least to the purchases, that have been fairly scarce with 'Internet downloadable' music:
1. Its a full 44 Khz non-compressed. (Granted, egotistcal audiophiles will still prefer their vinyl, but we're are talking the average consumer here)
2. No built-in "Digital Restrictions" - you can copy the audio (compressing it, if you choose) into the same device-and-location independent type of 'digital' file that you might get from an Internet download. You can also make a full uncompressed archival copy (either to CDR's, or you could put perhaps 5 of them on a DVD-R if you wanted) (Or you can use the original as the archive and take your copy for everyday use)
3. A standard publicly documented open format readable by anyone.
That said, they still have some disadvantages:
1. Usually grossly overpriced.
2. You have to go physically get them, or order and wait for them to be shipped.
Unfortunately, the labels seem have taken an attitude that they are going to be damned if they are going to make music available to people with the advantages but with the disadvantages. And as you can see, they even want to eliminate CD's. I'm sure they hate them, becuase they allow others to to fill in the gap, by taking the physical CD's, and turning them into online downloadable files. They usually do compress them, but that is the far more minor of the disadvantages than the DRM is.
If any player in the music industry were to ever offer online downloadable music, in a standard open format, without DRM, at a reasonable price, it would be news. The head of one of the 'publishers' decrying CD's (and using the wrong term to describe non-CD music), isn't really news.
Ah yes, and companies that make arc-welders should take into account so the average moron can weld. Oh, and rocketships should be more simpler. And backhoes.
A computer is neither a toy now an appliance. It is a tool. It is a very powerful and complex tool. Expecting a "computer company" (Im not sure if you are referring to PC OEM's like Dell and HP, or Microsoft) to be able to successfully design a system to be both meaningfully usable by an idiot to accomplish anything useful while still remaining secure is unrealistic.
Everyone thinks Microsoft did such greate things for IT and computers, when in fact all it did was pretend that it could eliminate the intelligence requirement for using a complex tool. Unfortunately the average moron is now firmly convinced this is true.
I don't know about any else, but I dont run anti-virus software because I dont use Microsoft operating systems. It isnt needed, and isnt even available (well, there are scanners that *nix mailservers can run so that MS-based email clients dont get infected, but unless you are running a mailserver they really arent relevant)
I dont use any special anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, or anti-phishing software, and if my firewall was turned off I wouldn't have access to the Internet (Routers dont work very well when powered off). Oh, and there is no such thing as a 'software' firewall.
Virus makers tend to target a different platform than the one I use, since its underlying design is easy to code such things for. Ditto on spyware.
I dont need anything other than my own wetware to avoid phishing, mostly they are bleeding obvious, because I dont have an account at the institution/site they purport to come from. For those institutions/sites that I do have an account with, its almost as easy. A combination of not using email software that lets email 'disguise' URL's as anything other than the actual URL, some basic common sense about what those institutions are likely to email me about and when, and for anything that gets past that, I still ignore the email and instead log into that site directly (using my non-virus-and-spyware-susceptible software&platform) and if the email was something to be concerned about, there would be a notice there.
And I dont need any 'extra' software to protect my machine from the Internet. By default it doesnt leave things accessible remotely.
One more last thing - banks DO NOT send you an email telling you that they will suspend your account if you dont hurry up and click the link and type in your sensitive personal information. If you get one, its a scam. Period. And if by some insane chance a bank really does that, you still don't want to follow those instructions. You want to drive to the bank and close all your accounts there and bank somewhere else.
Could it be that Skype isn't compatible with anything else? VoIP is booming, at least between devices and software that use open documented standards and are interoperable with each other (Asterisk, SIP ATA's and phones, SIP/IAX service providers). Not to mention they dont depend on a PeeCee with a soundcard to use.
Not to mention you can often get *free* outbound to PSTN (well, you pay flat-per-month rather than per-minute)
Skype was a curiousity at best, but was always destined to be a loser.
Trust me - I've worked with the anti-spam community. Its not an urban legend. (And no, I don't have any specific examples I can give you)
Spammers can use the 'get a human to do it' as easily as any one else can do.
They can set up fake porn sites with registrations (collecting more email addresses to spam in the process), and when someone wants to 'register' for the free porn, the spammers site scrapes a captcha from the site they want to get into with a bot, and show it to their user trying to sign up for porn. The eager pornhound dutifully types in the answer, which the spammer's scripts can then supply to the site the capthcha originally came from. They can even feedback the results - if the answer doesnt work at the real site, then the user made a mistake, and get another.
If you are able to install this mailhide script, it would be simpler, instead of posting your email address, to post a link to a form where someone wanting to contact you can type their message, give you their email address (or link to their contact form, if they like:), and then have it submit to a script that emails you the contents of the form (make sure your email address is hardcoded in the script, and *not* included in a hidden form field)
Presumably you 'ripped' it on Windows, and you didnt get the actual CD audio data, but instead got something else that either a driver that installed from the ROM portion of the CD installed gave you, or perhaps Windows itself.
Get a system not encumbered by Microsoft, and you likely to have better results.
Uhm, you do realize that software patents get in the way of the 'Four Freedoms' ? And that someone could distribute code (or allow it to be distributed) under the GPL, but have (or claim to have) patents on what it does, thus implying that even though the GPL license protects your freedoms, if you exercise them, you are then violating their patents?
I've used services that use MS-based maps, and Ive used services that use Google-based ones. Due to them working horridly if at all, I generally dont ever go back to the MS-based ones.
If your goal is to provide a standards-compliant service that works well with a wide variety of clients, use Google.
If your goal is to support Microsoft's goal of controlling and dominating everything to the exclusion of anything else, and to hell with compatibility or interoperability, then by all means use MS.
I thin it would be 'really cool' if MS continued to slowly collapse under its own weight.
There is a difference between 'supporting' DRM and being 'compliant' with DRM policies.
Refusing to decrypt or access DRM protected 'content' by not supporting it all is still compliant.
Non compliance would be supporting it, but not enforcing the restrictions.
Yer lucky if you get any sort of disk at all, even an OEM one that puts all the crap on. Most these days ship with that on an HD partition instead, which if you hose without first burning to CD or DVD (assuming the machine comes with a burner) you're SOL. (Well, actually, you could be on the beginning of a path to never being SOL again, if as a result a friend helps you decide to skip MS in favor of something less shitty)
That you have to pay $8.95 "shipping" for their free CD, yet somehow Netflix is able to mail DVDs around the country for .41 each (albeit in a crappy envelope that often jams in the USPS sorting machines and so usually has to be hand-sorted) But even if they packaged the CD properly and sent it via Priority Mail it would only cost $4.05. I havent ordered any so I don't know how they actually ship them, but I suspect its via a lower-class service.
Given that CD's cost less than a quarter to mass-produce, its easy to see they are making a killing on these 'Free' CD's.
Aside from their shipping cost scam, the things themselves look like they would be of benefit only to utter nincompoops, and even then only marginal benefit.
Presumable in vodafones case its the _proxy_ (which presumably has a direct wired connection) thats downloading "everything", and probably stripping the nonessential items out when relaying it over vodafone's network to the phone itself.
So its a service that vodafone is providing to its users that allows them (at least theoretically) to automatically have *all* websites converted for better viewing on their phone (and possble even using a better transform, since presumably vodafone has more knowledge of the capabilities of its customer's phones than some random website might).
A web server/site doesnt have any intrinsic right to know what type or version of browser that is accessing it: User-Agent is voluntary. And quite frankly, I'd like to see it be a default-off toggle in new browsers, so that sites had to start deciding to make standards based W3C compliant code instead of writing browser-brand specific code.
I can already make calls without having to pay toll, and I dont have to use my computer or a proprietary system to connect to it. What possible use would this be to me?
I predict the imminent demise of the entire concept of 'long distance' and tolls.
Hopefully soon 'per minute' charging (regardless of wether its a flat rate for x-thousand minutes, or a meter running with post-use billing) for cell airtime will die too.
Kites that weight more than 5 pounds and go higher than 150 feet generally dont fall into the 'entertainment/hobbyist' category - they fall into the scientific experiment and/or commercial use category. But even if you did have a heavey kite that flew that high, a helipad 4.9 miles from you wouldnt remove your right to fly it entirely, it would just mean you need to get clearance from the FAA so that they know you will be flying your 5 pound kite in the airspace near the helipad, so they can advise pilots to keep clear. You probably would have no problem getting that clearance.
Everyone having exclusive private property rights that extended to unlimited altitude is incompatible with the more public-serving thought that aircraft (commercial transportation, private transportation, fire/police/air resuce helicopters, and kites and rockets that might reach certain altitudes) should be allowed to fly over other peoples property. Management and coordination of that traffic to ensure maximum safety for the pilots and passengers and for protection of property needs to be given to someone, and that someone in the US is the FAA.
So yes, that means you dont have the unlimited right to put anything you want as high as you want into the air of your own property. It means that above a certain altitude, or for objects above a certain size/weight, you need to check with the FAA to make certain that there wont be any conflicts. And while there are alwas people in all walks of life that might abuse positions of power, and certainly some of them work for the FAA, I think its highly likely that your reasonable request to fly a kite would be granted as long as there wasnt a serious conflict that would cause a danger to aircraft. (And yes, I think the ability for a fire rescue/police helicopter to operate safely to perform its job is probably more important than your right to fly a very heavy kite in its flightpath for personal enjoyment, should there in fact be a conflict)
I read someone suggested satellite, apparently they didnt fully read your post.
Someone suggested 3G cell, apparently they don't get that even if that is offered where you are, the fact that cell access 'just barely' works probably means it isnt or wont where you are.
If this is a legitimate business need, then you need a business Internet connection. If you have a phone line, you get get a leased line (A T-1 would probably be the place to start looking). It wont be cheap (although it might still be less than 4 phone lines and 4 Internet accounts unless you can get real cheap prices on both) Probably the less expensive way rather than pay for the T1 line itself, as well as Internet service, would be to just get a T1 between your house and your employer. That will give you the best response for remote management, and then you can tap into the Internet connection that I assume is there for whatever (business purpose) access you need to that.
For the record, that seems to pretty much only apply to kites that weigh more than 5 pounds or that you intend to fly higher than 500 feet. (and some other restrictions having to do with airports and flight visibility).
And it is entirely legitimate for the FAA to be concerened about things in the airspace where planes are allowed to fly (including of course the planes themseves, for which there are also of course regulations). Since neither the FAA nor anyone else can waive the 'two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time' rule.
If Virgin mobile complied with the terms of the license that the photo was provided to them under, then they are not liable.
I see no rationale for the authors of the license used to be remotely involved, and certainly not liable.
The photographer may or may not be in trouble - it depends on wether he had permission to use the image of the girl in question and wether he had permission to release it under the license that he did.
--
Does anyone know what the law says in regards to copyright of a photograph of a person? I would think that both the photographer as well as the photograph-ee should both have some rights, which they can grant choose to grant to each other or not.