The numbers are for America only though. iRiver is a Korean company, who are very big domenstically and also big in Europe (probably larger than Apple).
Interestingly, those numbers would indicate that HD based players dominate in America (dividing gives 70%) while I am quite convinced that both in volume and value flash based players dominate completely here. iPod's are still relatively rare, but a small flash player on a necklace has become the latest necessary fashion accessory.
What are you smoking? With commercial television you do not pay a cent for it unless you choose to.
If it bothers you (I suppose this is what you mean) that companies selling you things are spending money on advertising rather than lowering prices, then all you have to is choose better, cheaper altneratives that are not adervtised. At least where I am, it is easy to find generics and private labled products that are never advertised on TV.
As it turns out, I still often choose the brand names because it turns out that those companies can both advertise on TV and offer me a better product for a money then I would be getting if they were not around. That is not a cost to me, it is a benefit.
a) Movie based around a video game whose entire plot was "bad things came from hell, kill them."
b) First time scriptwriter.
c) B-Movie director whose best credits are Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds, and involvement in such classic stinkers as Species and Speed, changed in to direct at last minute.
d) Will star The Rock and a washed out Bond girl in leading parts.
e) Tossed around between studios.
I think we are looking a three or four Academy awards, at least!
Bullshit. John Carmack wrote about a similar thing (Diamandis' Zero G airplane ride) the other week: "Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). "
By buying a space tourism ticket, you are helping drive the development of cheap, reusable, sustainable space faring technology in the absolutely best way possible. You are paying the salaries of the people who are working on the next generation spacecraft, and spurring investment and competition toward improving spaceflight. To say that this does "absolutely nothing to benefit society" is so stupid and short sighted I don't know where to begin.
Beyond that I would like to say that I find your general attitude despicable. When people make money fairly - that is given to them by people who made a free choice to do so - they have a right to do as they please with that money. They owe NOTHING to the the looters and moochers who whine and complain because they did not feel inclined to make the money themselves. Egoism is the ultimate morality: it is forced , faked, altruism that is the root of evil.
The mercury missions have not been more or less reproduced. What has been reproduced are the flights of the X-15 which flew to the same altitude 40 years ago after being dropped from a B-52 (just like SS1 is dropped from a carrier).
Whether or not a real space program could have been developed from the X-15 is an open question, but it is not clear that one could make a practical orbital craft in that manner. One would have to imagine a WhiteKnight the size of a 747 carrying a much larger space ship that with most probably two stages (perhaps both manned and reusable?).
A lunar shot is more or less out of question. Have you seen a Saturn rocket? It bigger than most office buildings - even if you had to biggest ship in the world you couldn't carry that to altitude, and it would make shit all difference compared to adding another stage.
So everybody is waiting for the next great search engine to come along and out-google Google, but it seems to me that they are looking in the completely wrong places.
All Clusty, A9 and the other more recent search engines seem to do is add more gimmicks to search results from yahoo and Google respectively. To some extent, this seems to be exactly what Google is doing recently as well: the searches are hardly getting beter, instead we can search news, search references (try define:), search printed text, do automatic conversions, etc etc.
But the truth is that not only are the searches at Google not getting better: they are getting worse. It seems like PageRank is more or less unused nowadays, and Google just uses easily manipulated things like searchterm in URL, searchterm in Title, how recently updated, to rank pages. I think anybody who uses Google to search for specific things must have observed that it works only a fraction of how well it did when it was new.
So what is going on here? Does everybody consider the basic searching a solved problem, and that we don't need to find pages better than google does? Or is a good search that cannot be manipulated really an intractable problem?
If I owned Google stock, I would really be wondering how many of all those thousands of PhD's at the Googleplex are working on this, and how many are writing gimmicks and elegant webmail applications. Or maybe one of them already proved that the problem can't be solved, and Google is just hoping to make as much money as possible before the secret comes out...
... is silent censorship. And that is the kind of censorship that I find the most frightening about the digital age.
When you censor a physical document, it has to go somewhere. You have to take it, you have to steal it, you have to burn it, etc. On the web, a page that is gone is just gone, quietly and painlessly, with only perhaps a few broken links to show that it was ever there. Google may think those broken links are just an annoyance, but in truth they are all that seperates the futile censorship that regimes have practiced since civilization began from 1984.
If the Chinese government wants to censor sites, then we cannot stop them. Since they claim that they are doing it for the good of their own people, then they can have that discussion with those people, and we should not be accomplices to sweeping it under the rug.
The sad thing is that Google already have a precedent here: the way they mark search results that have been censored due to the DMCA (cf this). If they truly believed in "not being evil" they would do the same thing with Chinese news: place a disclaimer that some results have been removed because the news sources are available in China. Leave it to CG to explain why.
Here is a preview that talks about exactly what scenes have been added (huge spoilers, of course.)
Re:Can you guys drop the Socialist moniker please?
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
Which just goes to show that a single dimensional value is not enough to show economic freedom. If you look at the categories, you will see that Sweden is at 118 of 123 in the size of the government, and 89 out of 95 in labor market regulations. Sweden's fall in wealth among the OECD nations has been accordingly.
Now that people have started to use firewalls, and the risk of worms and rootkits that infect through open, exploitable, holes grows smaller, it is time to expect more and more exploits to follow alternative vectors.
Note how many buffer-overflow exploits there have been in server daemons. Well, there is no reason to believe that servers are any worse written with regards to input than client applications - quite the contrary actually.
People think they are safe with a firewall. But I'm willing to bet there are undiscovered exploits in just about every application they run. WinZip? WinAMP? Acrobat Reader? Media player? Anything that handles files received over the Internet is potentially a vector for viruses and possibly worms.
This time it was bad escaping, which made the exploit trivial, but there a buffer overflow would have served just as well. Neither firewalls nor anti-virus software will protect you.
And not using the service prevents me from trying to remind people here exactly what they are lauding in what way?
Every free bit of advertising that you and your DRM convert friends give to iTunes takes us another step in that direction. And while it is easy for the rest of us to ignore it for now, that direction is the one that leads to Palladium and "Trusted computing" and an Internet where websites and even ISPs require those things. I have a right to be upset that people here are cheering on the process that will take the Internet away from those who will not accept that their computer decides over them!
DRM is the totalitarianism of the digital age. To allow our communications devices the right to control how we communicate is to give up our most essential means of self determination. Read Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" and try to understand that these are first steps down exactly that road. To my mind, peddling DRM is just as bad as segregation/prejUdIce.
2. Apple is here to make money. First and fore most. They are not the red cross. Before, you'd have to by a full CD to get most songs, since cd producers didn't make singles of every song. They also cheapened the cost.
Indeed, but when they make that money in unethical ways, we should be making the world aware of that, not congratulating them on a job well done.
4. Every journey starts with a single step. Apple made it feasible to do something not so inovative, something a lot of people wanted, a cheaper cd. Buying singles. In digital form. I don't commend Apple in making money. Anyone can make money. I commend apple for successfully causing change. Is that wrong?
You are right that every journey starts with a single step. The journey to world where every bit of communication is controlled by computers not acting on behalf of their users but against them was initiated by Apple. Alas, I always knew that DRM was going to to win, I just didn't imagine that it would be thanks to Apple, a company I used to like, and certainly not that Slashdot would be cheering them on.
Yet you get more rights with downloading itunes songs than with buying a cd?
You want to start hosting Playfair development, and see if you get DMCA attacked? When was last time cdparanoia had to switch hosts because of legal threats?
Oh man am I sick of the apologist bullcrap where Apple can be whatever DMCA wielding DRM monglers they want, and still stay the shining idols of Slashdot because "The RIAA made them do it."
If I had a store, and the person I bought goods off said I could not sell them to people of a certain ethnic group, then I would tell him to fuck off. Likewise, if I was selling data online, and the person I was buying it off told me I could only sell it under the condition that I shafted my customers freedom and self determination by binding them to shitty laws saying they don't have a right to do as they will with their own computers, I would say the same. The RIAA didn't save Apple's ass with by allowing the iTMS: Apple stepped in and saved the RIAA by legitimatizing DRM. They are loving it.
And, in the end, I don't give a crap whose fault it is that Apple are peddling DRM and attacking free software developers. If they want to make money then that is fine, and while I hate the laws that allow them to, they are the laws as they stand. What I find disgusting is that such practices get commended and congratulated around here. It frightens me to no end that this community could be so easily subverted and 180ed completely into sycophantic lackeys of the RIAA and those who wish the Internet and PC were no more!
Most of all, I would like to congratulate Apple on their fantastic use of the DMCA to crush free software developer writing applications (PlayFair) that can handle the formats in which they sell music. We like to commend such positive use of the DMCA here on Slashdot, so that perhaps more companies will start using the DMCA and attacking small developers!
It is very important that companies like Apple help show the world that is completely possible to shove DRM down consumers throwts, and that we will smile, swallow, and ask for more. And then compliment them on a job well done sticking it to us! Perhaps if we do this loudly enough, more and more companies will realize that closed, proprietary, DRMed systems is the way they should be heading, and give them the knowledge and comfort of knowing that we will support them when they attempt to send anybody who reverse engineer these systems to jail!
Thank you Apple, thank you Jobs, and thank you iTMS for a job well done teaching us to be a soulless, consume-on-command suckers that we are supposed to be. You are helping us realize that how stupid all this talk of a Free Internet intended for open communication between people rather than a closed delivery mechanism for big media really is. The congratulations know no end!
It is no use explaining all this. Armadillo are the Ogg Vorbis of spaceflight: in the real world, out of the running, but here on Slashdot they'll always be most important.
Narrator: Was it ticking? Airport Security Officer: Actually throwers don't worry about ticking 'cause modern bombs don't tick. Narrator: Sorry, throwers? Airport Security Officer: Baggage handlers. But, when a suitcase vibrates, then the throwers gotta call the police. Narrator: My suitcase was vibrating? Airport Security Officer: Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... [whispering] Airport Security Officer: it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article "a dildo", never "your dildo". Narrator: I don't own...
I see we have a new member of the "I can sprout bullshit and get +5 club."
(a) If you are so worried about interception that you think cryptography is not enough (meaning you are worried about traffic analysis and alike) then you won't be using a wireless network anyways.
(b) WEP is not secure enough for any application. When the grandparent said encrypt things, he didn't necessarily mean WEP: for example, run an encrypted VPM over the WIFI network. WEP may suck, but claiming that commercial encryption systems can't be used for military applications is dead wrong. Well implemented systems based on AES and RSA and even TLS are as secure as you can get today. The modern crypto algorithms are NOT crackable today - people who can't understand the difference between theory and practice deserve no place in security (or in the military).
Slashdot Mirror
The numbers are for America only though. iRiver is a Korean company, who are very big domenstically and also big in Europe (probably larger than Apple).
Interestingly, those numbers would indicate that HD based players dominate in America (dividing gives 70%) while I am quite convinced that both in volume and value flash based players dominate completely here. iPod's are still relatively rare, but a small flash player on a necklace has become the latest necessary fashion accessory.
What are you smoking? With commercial television you do not pay a cent for it unless you choose to.
If it bothers you (I suppose this is what you mean) that companies selling you things are spending money on advertising rather than lowering prices, then all you have to is choose better, cheaper altneratives that are not adervtised. At least where I am, it is easy to find generics and private labled products that are never advertised on TV.
As it turns out, I still often choose the brand names because it turns out that those companies can both advertise on TV and offer me a better product for a money then I would be getting if they were not around. That is not a cost to me, it is a benefit.
Let's see here. What have got:
a) Movie based around a video game whose entire plot was "bad things came from hell, kill them."
b) First time scriptwriter.
c) B-Movie director whose best credits are Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds, and involvement in such classic stinkers as Species and Speed, changed in to direct at last minute.
d) Will star The Rock and a washed out Bond girl in leading parts.
e) Tossed around between studios.
I think we are looking a three or four Academy awards, at least!
Of course I'm just computing numbers without fact checking and maybe missing something.
You mean like the fact that humans are not single cellular organisms?
I think you may have forgotten to multiply by the number of cells in the human body...
What is this? A change in policy on Slashdot. This can only be for the worse. I am very angry. Rabble rabble rabble (or something).
Bullshit. John Carmack wrote about a similar thing (Diamandis' Zero G airplane ride) the other week: "Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). "
By buying a space tourism ticket, you are helping drive the development of cheap, reusable, sustainable space faring technology in the absolutely best way possible. You are paying the salaries of the people who are working on the next generation spacecraft, and spurring investment and competition toward improving spaceflight. To say that this does "absolutely nothing to benefit society" is so stupid and short sighted I don't know where to begin.
Beyond that I would like to say that I find your general attitude despicable. When people make money fairly - that is given to them by people who made a free choice to do so - they have a right to do as they please with that money. They owe NOTHING to the the looters and moochers who whine and complain because they did not feel inclined to make the money themselves. Egoism is the ultimate morality: it is forced , faked, altruism that is the root of evil.
The mercury missions have not been more or less reproduced. What has been reproduced are the flights of the X-15 which flew to the same altitude 40 years ago after being dropped from a B-52 (just like SS1 is dropped from a carrier).
Whether or not a real space program could have been developed from the X-15 is an open question, but it is not clear that one could make a practical orbital craft in that manner. One would have to imagine a WhiteKnight the size of a 747 carrying a much larger space ship that with most probably two stages (perhaps both manned and reusable?).
A lunar shot is more or less out of question. Have you seen a Saturn rocket? It bigger than most office buildings - even if you had to biggest ship in the world you couldn't carry that to altitude, and it would make shit all difference compared to adding another stage.
I understand that everybody wants to make a buck, but it is becoming anoying to have to add and so on to a search.
That is pretty fresh coming from somebody spamming his every post with commercials for a two-bit pyramid scheme...
So everybody is waiting for the next great search engine to come along and out-google Google, but it seems to me that they are looking in the completely wrong places.
All Clusty, A9 and the other more recent search engines seem to do is add more gimmicks to search results from yahoo and Google respectively. To some extent, this seems to be exactly what Google is doing recently as well: the searches are hardly getting beter, instead we can search news, search references (try define:), search printed text, do automatic conversions, etc etc.
But the truth is that not only are the searches at Google not getting better: they are getting worse. It seems like PageRank is more or less unused nowadays, and Google just uses easily manipulated things like searchterm in URL, searchterm in Title, how recently updated, to rank pages. I think anybody who uses Google to search for specific things must have observed that it works only a fraction of how well it did when it was new.
So what is going on here? Does everybody consider the basic searching a solved problem, and that we don't need to find pages better than google does? Or is a good search that cannot be manipulated really an intractable problem?
If I owned Google stock, I would really be wondering how many of all those thousands of PhD's at the Googleplex are working on this, and how many are writing gimmicks and elegant webmail applications. Or maybe one of them already proved that the problem can't be solved, and Google is just hoping to make as much money as possible before the secret comes out...
... is silent censorship. And that is the kind of censorship that I find the most frightening about the digital age.
When you censor a physical document, it has to go somewhere. You have to take it, you have to steal it, you have to burn it, etc. On the web, a page that is gone is just gone, quietly and painlessly, with only perhaps a few broken links to show that it was ever there. Google may think those broken links are just an annoyance, but in truth they are all that seperates the futile censorship that regimes have practiced since civilization began from 1984.
If the Chinese government wants to censor sites, then we cannot stop them. Since they claim that they are doing it for the good of their own people, then they can have that discussion with those people, and we should not be accomplices to sweeping it under the rug.
The sad thing is that Google already have a precedent here: the way they mark search results that have been censored due to the DMCA (cf this). If they truly believed in "not being evil" they would do the same thing with Chinese news: place a disclaimer that some results have been removed because the news sources are available in China. Leave it to CG to explain why.
Here is a preview that talks about exactly what scenes have been added (huge spoilers, of course.)
Which just goes to show that a single dimensional value is not enough to show economic freedom. If you look at the categories, you will see that Sweden is at 118 of 123 in the size of the government, and 89 out of 95 in labor market regulations. Sweden's fall in wealth among the OECD nations has been accordingly.
Swedes take note: Rix Telecom have better and cheaper VoIP service then digisip.
Now that people have started to use firewalls, and the risk of worms and rootkits that infect through open, exploitable, holes grows smaller, it is time to expect more and more exploits to follow alternative vectors.
Note how many buffer-overflow exploits there have been in server daemons. Well, there is no reason to believe that servers are any worse written with regards to input than client applications - quite the contrary actually.
People think they are safe with a firewall. But I'm willing to bet there are undiscovered exploits in just about every application they run. WinZip? WinAMP? Acrobat Reader? Media player? Anything that handles files received over the Internet is potentially a vector for viruses and possibly worms.
This time it was bad escaping, which made the exploit trivial, but there a buffer overflow would have served just as well. Neither firewalls nor anti-virus software will protect you.
Ergo post hoc, ergo proctor hoc!
That's great!
But in August? Not so much...
And not using the service prevents me from trying to remind people here exactly what they are lauding in what way?
Every free bit of advertising that you and your DRM convert friends give to iTunes takes us another step in that direction. And while it is easy for the rest of us to ignore it for now, that direction is the one that leads to Palladium and "Trusted computing" and an Internet where websites and even ISPs require those things. I have a right to be upset that people here are cheering on the process that will take the Internet away from those who will not accept that their computer decides over them!
1. Segregation/Prejiduce != DRM.
DRM is the totalitarianism of the digital age. To allow our communications devices the right to control how we communicate is to give up our most essential means of self determination. Read Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" and try to understand that these are first steps down exactly that road. To my mind, peddling DRM is just as bad as segregation/prejUdIce.
2. Apple is here to make money. First and fore most. They are not the red cross. Before, you'd have to by a full CD to get most songs, since cd producers didn't make singles of every song. They also cheapened the cost.
Indeed, but when they make that money in unethical ways, we should be making the world aware of that, not congratulating them on a job well done.
4. Every journey starts with a single step. Apple made it feasible to do something not so inovative, something a lot of people wanted, a cheaper cd. Buying singles. In digital form. I don't commend Apple in making money. Anyone can make money. I commend apple for successfully causing change. Is that wrong?
You are right that every journey starts with a single step. The journey to world where every bit of communication is controlled by computers not acting on behalf of their users but against them was initiated by Apple. Alas, I always knew that DRM was going to to win, I just didn't imagine that it would be thanks to Apple, a company I used to like, and certainly not that Slashdot would be cheering them on.
Yet you get more rights with downloading itunes songs than with buying a cd?
You want to start hosting Playfair development, and see if you get DMCA attacked? When was last time cdparanoia had to switch hosts because of legal threats?
Oh man am I sick of the apologist bullcrap where Apple can be whatever DMCA wielding DRM monglers they want, and still stay the shining idols of Slashdot because "The RIAA made them do it."
If I had a store, and the person I bought goods off said I could not sell them to people of a certain ethnic group, then I would tell him to fuck off. Likewise, if I was selling data online, and the person I was buying it off told me I could only sell it under the condition that I shafted my customers freedom and self determination by binding them to shitty laws saying they don't have a right to do as they will with their own computers, I would say the same. The RIAA didn't save Apple's ass with by allowing the iTMS: Apple stepped in and saved the RIAA by legitimatizing DRM. They are loving it.
And, in the end, I don't give a crap whose fault it is that Apple are peddling DRM and attacking free software developers. If they want to make money then that is fine, and while I hate the laws that allow them to, they are the laws as they stand. What I find disgusting is that such practices get commended and congratulated around here. It frightens me to no end that this community could be so easily subverted and 180ed completely into sycophantic lackeys of the RIAA and those who wish the Internet and PC were no more!
Most of all, I would like to congratulate Apple on their fantastic use of the DMCA to crush free software developer writing applications (PlayFair) that can handle the formats in which they sell music. We like to commend such positive use of the DMCA here on Slashdot, so that perhaps more companies will start using the DMCA and attacking small developers!
It is very important that companies like Apple help show the world that is completely possible to shove DRM down consumers throwts, and that we will smile, swallow, and ask for more. And then compliment them on a job well done sticking it to us! Perhaps if we do this loudly enough, more and more companies will realize that closed, proprietary, DRMed systems is the way they should be heading, and give them the knowledge and comfort of knowing that we will support them when they attempt to send anybody who reverse engineer these systems to jail!
Thank you Apple, thank you Jobs, and thank you iTMS for a job well done teaching us to be a soulless, consume-on-command suckers that we are supposed to be. You are helping us realize that how stupid all this talk of a Free Internet intended for open communication between people rather than a closed delivery mechanism for big media really is. The congratulations know no end!
It is no use explaining all this. Armadillo are the Ogg Vorbis of spaceflight: in the real world, out of the running, but here on Slashdot they'll always be most important.
One of the funniest dialogs in a film, ever:
Narrator: Was it ticking?
Airport Security Officer: Actually throwers don't worry about ticking 'cause modern bombs don't tick.
Narrator: Sorry, throwers?
Airport Security Officer: Baggage handlers. But, when a suitcase vibrates, then the throwers gotta call the police.
Narrator: My suitcase was vibrating?
Airport Security Officer: Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while...
[whispering]
Airport Security Officer: it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article "a dildo", never "your dildo".
Narrator: I don't own...
I see we have a new member of the "I can sprout bullshit and get +5 club."
(a) If you are so worried about interception that you think cryptography is not enough (meaning you are worried about traffic analysis and alike) then you won't be using a wireless network anyways.
(b) WEP is not secure enough for any application. When the grandparent said encrypt things, he didn't necessarily mean WEP: for example, run an encrypted VPM over the WIFI network. WEP may suck, but claiming that commercial encryption systems can't be used for military applications is dead wrong. Well implemented systems based on AES and RSA and even TLS are as secure as you can get today. The modern crypto algorithms are NOT crackable today - people who can't understand the difference between theory and practice deserve no place in security (or in the military).
If she sent actual pictures of herself, she is too stupid to live. This is the Internet, it is overflowing with pictures of a naked girls.
He probably sent a gmail account to some fat, bald dude in exchange for something that showed up on yesterdays autopr0n feed.