Is this woman _REALLY_ suing the RIAA? That seems pretty retarded to me.
First, she isn't, but others have already answered that.
Second, the RIAA comprises those companies. There is no difference between saying "the RIAA" and listening its members. If you and I started a company, calling it by name or calling it "JSG and Builder, Inc." would both be accurate. In either case, it's the same thing.
"And that's the news for June 21, 1997. Be sure to log on to our cybersite at aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-you double-you double-you dot kay arr ay pee dot cyberlinkupprovider dot com forward slash! It's really neat!"
If you think "e-everything" was annoying, then you probably don't remember everyone pronouncing every bit of punctuation in long URLs. "Then, tilde, that's the little squiggly thing up in the top left corner!"
And while I'm at it, I detest "log on" as a substitute for "visit". No, I won't log on to your new home page, but I might check it out. And I won't "surf to" it either. Damn kids on my lawn.
Netiquette applies just as much to Fidonet, Bitnet, Usenet[1] and other networks.
Google Groups has the first Usenet post containing it in 1983. After 24 years, I think people need to get used to the word (and wish they'd get used to the concept, but hey).
Cookie? Wiki? I guess I just don't get those. Sure, wiki sounds odd until you get used to it, but it doesn't have the pretense of "blog" or the idiocy of "blook". And what's so bad about a nice little cookie?
Possibly unintentional irony from the article:
Earlier this month, the growing use of words inspired by cyberspace was highlighted when the Collins English Dictionary announced that a string of them would be included in their ninth edition.
So, was the list of irritating words inspired by "cyberspace, as in the Internet", or "cyberspace, the original most irritating word"?
In composing the Open Source Definition, my aim was that there would be NO legal burden upon users at all.
Bruce, the last thing that bugs me about the GPLv3 drafts is the idea that if a GPLv3'd web application has a "download source" link, then users can't dike out that link. Wouldn't that disqualify v3 as an Open Source license for pretty much the exact same reasons?
I mean, this seems like a pretty good apples-to-apples comparison. In either case, a web application wants to include invariant parts and still be Open Source. So, am I missing an important distinction, or do you have the same concerns with GPLv3?
The US is still winning by far if you look at emissions per capita, which is the more relevant figure.
If you had a nation-state of 100 people that did nothing but burn coal and crude oil all day, their per-capita would be huge but the total impact would be tiny. I think that total emissions are a lot more interesting than a population's average.
I'm guessing the hassle of managing AFS and its requirements (kerberos, synchronized time, client-side cache) are more than he'd like just to recover some disk space.
Kerberos? It's only hard the first time, and an Active Directory server will probably get you 99% of the way there (although I haven't specifically tried AFS against one). Time? apt-get install ntp-simple and be done with it; NTP should be absolutely mandatory on all networked devices anyway. The client-side cache is the only tricky part, but that was what he wanted to do in the first place. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he's wanting to trade local store for network usability, not vice versa.
when bsd gets videocard support surpassing that which linux has, it will be a good contender. until then, its server only.
Considering that it runs the exact same drivers as every other X.org-based X server, that will basically never happen. In other news, neither Windows nor OS X have better X.org drivers than Linux.
As someone who just bought a paper copy of the Unicode 5 standard, with annexes and code charts and all, weight 10lb or so, even though it's all downloadable for free, I am really getting a kick out of these replies.
1 -- I can flip through a book in front of the TV. Not so a PDF. Yes, I have a tablet PC.
I sit in front of the TV with a magazine, and maybe my DS. You nestle in with a 10lb Unicode book? My friend, you have shot right past "geek" and are solidly in "nerd" territory. Why don't you come back here where it's sunnier?
True, but it gets tricky when no crime has necessarily been committed. It's legal to break your own laptop, and the terms of the contract are that if your laptop is broken then they will replace it.
Now, I'm not defending the practice, and I think it's a scummy thing to do. That doesn't automatically make it illegal, though. I could even imagine a moral defense of the behavior in that Dell offered those conditions to their customers, and it's not the customers fault for using them in ways that Dell had not intended. Again, I'm not condoning it, but I can see both sides of the issue.
A quick review of the MP3 players currenty for sale at Amazon and Best Buy shows that every MP3 player except for the iPods plays WMA.
My Sansa e280 plays WMAs - by first converting them to MP3. In that sense, it also plays OGGs and WAV and AIFF and MID and Amiga.MOD files. The real question is how many of those support it natively.
On a certain date, deliberately damage the merchandise, and the insurance that you bought will get you a new one.
OK, yes, I completely understand your point and I wouldn't do it myself. On the other hand, the contract says "if you pay us money and break your laptop, we will replace it". I'm not really sure if I'd consider it fraud if someone does exactly what their contract permits them to do. Sleazy, sure. Fraudulent? I don't know; Dell wrote the contract and those are the terms they offered.
Now, I have seen similar clauses used to protect the customer. My friend bought some random gadget from a big box store and realized that it didn't meet the specs on the box. When he tried to return it, the CS rep insisted that you could only return defective or damaged merchandise.
Rep: So, you can't return that.
Friend: Wait, your sign says that if it's broken I can.
Rep: But it's not broken.
Friend:....yet. See where I'm going with this?
Rep: Do you want that in cash or store credit?
they just have a lower market share and thus aren't as much of a target.
It has such a tiny market share that not one person in the entire world has been interested enough to step up and write the first virus or worm? Really? That tiny?
Market share might account for part of the equation, but since about 1 in 20 people are running Macs, I find it impossible to believe that there's no interest whatsoever in cracking them.
I'm pretty sure the primary source of NCAA funding isn't taxes, but in fact from licensing,
That is, licensing the trademarks of the schools comprising it. As a not-for-profit entity (educational institution status), it funnels most of that money back to its members, which are largely taxpayer-funded schools.
Basically, they want all the perks of being a government institution without any of the obligations.
Given that a large percentage of NCAA schools are publicly funded, and the NCAA harps ad nauseam about their role in developing successful students, it would seem to follow that it's mostly a taxpayer-funded educational institution. I can understand them saying "you can't redistribute our coverage without our consent", but I see no way they can justify saying "you can't distribute your own take on the events you're watching that you funded out of your own wallet".
Want to retain all rights to an event's coverage? Well, good luck with that, but don't spend my tax dollars enforcing it.
There are markets ( such as the one I am in ) where software itself has almost no intrinsic or marketable value- but the software is what sells an end-to-end system.
That's the perfect place to go all-GPL. Since you're not actually selling the software, just including it as part of the whole system, what benefit do you get from keeping it proprietary?
And as for telling a company live TiVO that their DVR must function as a PC is just ridiculous.
No one anywhere has ever told TiVo that their DVR must function as a PC. It's their DVR. However, once they sell it to a customer, it's now that customer's DVR to do with as they see fit, including using it as a PC or a hammer or a paperweight. I see no way in which TiVo has a legal or moral right to prevent their customers from hacking it to pieces if they want to, just so long as those customers don't distribute the proprietary bits without authorization.
Do you understand Open Source at all?? The WHOLE POINT IS TO LET OTHER'S USE YOUR CODE!!
Nitpick: that's actually the point of Free Software. The point of Open Source is to let everyone see your software and tell you how to fix it without having to actually let them use it.
coding to IE was much easier because it was much better at interpreting how you wanted something to look like without worrying about being 100% 'standards compliant'.
Of course, by "easier" you mean "much harder", because that junk browser has so many workarounds and broken functionality that you never really have an idea of what's going to pop up on the screen until you try it. Even if you code your site perfectly, there's a good chance you'll trigger some random "CNN.com broke this so we have to support it" behavior.
IE is the bane of a web developer's existence. I've never heard a professional developer claim otherwise.
Agreed. No, they can't fix appendicitis (although I had an insane neighbor once who claimed that they could). I just had to see them dismissed completely because of some of those extreme claims.
I wouldn't go to a chiropractor because of indigestion, but it's unlikely that I'll go to an MD for back pain again.
What is the chance that any given *NON* *IPOD* mp3 player supports AAC?
Pretty good. In fact, I'd reverse it and ask if any significant music players don't support it. I certainly wouldn't look at any that didn't.
Game playing, your redefining not playing as poor quality.
It's the worst quality. My little Sansa e280 can play non-DRMed AACs, so that extra 3/10 of a dollar gets me something I can actually use.
Then why disable the 'Convert to mp3'? Better still why do I have to buy AAC for my MP3 player???
Who knows why they disabled it, but since it's no big deal, why fret about it? And since every review puts AAC ahead of MP3 for sound quality at a given bitrate and doesn't require royalties to distribute or stream, it's pretty much set up to be MP3's replacement.
I never accused you of it, I put a reasoned explanation as to why Apple are playing games
You did technically offer reasons, even if they're easily deflated. I'm just pointing out that you don't have to be an Apple lover to see that your whole argument is weak.
Right off the bat, the most useful feature of DRM free music, the ability to move the music to any device is killed. You made no comment.
I didn't comment because it was dumb. First, the odds are constantly improving that a given player will support AAC natively. Second, any number of other converters can do the same job, and there are probably scripts for iTunes that handle it automatically. OK, so it's slightly less convenient. That's far different than saying it's impossible.
Linking two things. Why can't I buy DRM free music at the same bit rate?
Apparently, they ran the numbers and the market wasn't there. You and I might pay extra for DRM-free tracks, but for most people the higher quality is the biggest seller.
I can't hear the difference.
You entirely missed the point, which was that most new music players can play DRM-free AAC files. The new files sound better on my player than the old ones did because music sounds better than silence.
And that is a negative, bigger files, means fewer tracks on your Nano, or my MP3 player.
We've already established that transcoding is trivially easy. So, since you're dead set on converting everything to MP3, you should welcome the higher-quality source material so that the transcoded result will sound better. You don't have to have a golden ear to appreciate that AAC->MP3 doesn't sound great under the best circumstances, so anything to make it less bad is a win.
Honestly, you're grasping at straws here.
Not so, firstly we have the better quality that you can hear and I cannot.
Addressed above - the problem was with your reading comprehension.
So they're offering a *worse* product at a higher price. The big advantage of DRM free has been neutralized.
The higher quality is a negative pretending to be a positive. That's a game.
I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means, but the lengths you're going to in order to justify your absurd position that better is worse are amazing.
Regardless if a user accepts a EULA, its actually against the law to unlawfully restrict their rights in tapping into some legal protection for sale of faulty goods.
Actually, he's alleging that Gateway broke their support contract, right? I've been wondering about this. If they broke the contract, then why is he still bound to it? I'd be naively tempted to try that angle: since the purchase contract is now null and void, and the EULA was dependent on the purchase, than the EULA is void and here's your court summons.
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First, she isn't, but others have already answered that.
Second, the RIAA comprises those companies. There is no difference between saying "the RIAA" and listening its members. If you and I started a company, calling it by name or calling it "JSG and Builder, Inc." would both be accurate. In either case, it's the same thing.
No, first it was "cyber". As in:
"And that's the news for June 21, 1997. Be sure to log on to our cybersite at aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-you double-you double-you dot kay arr ay pee dot cyberlinkupprovider dot com forward slash! It's really neat!"
If you think "e-everything" was annoying, then you probably don't remember everyone pronouncing every bit of punctuation in long URLs. "Then, tilde, that's the little squiggly thing up in the top left corner!"
And while I'm at it, I detest "log on" as a substitute for "visit". No, I won't log on to your new home page, but I might check it out. And I won't "surf to" it either. Damn kids on my lawn.
Cookie? Wiki? I guess I just don't get those. Sure, wiki sounds odd until you get used to it, but it doesn't have the pretense of "blog" or the idiocy of "blook". And what's so bad about a nice little cookie?
Possibly unintentional irony from the article:
So, was the list of irritating words inspired by "cyberspace, as in the Internet", or "cyberspace, the original most irritating word"?
Alternatively, you could RTFSummary which said the same thing (but more accurately). You know, in case you forgot.
Bruce, the last thing that bugs me about the GPLv3 drafts is the idea that if a GPLv3'd web application has a "download source" link, then users can't dike out that link. Wouldn't that disqualify v3 as an Open Source license for pretty much the exact same reasons?
I mean, this seems like a pretty good apples-to-apples comparison. In either case, a web application wants to include invariant parts and still be Open Source. So, am I missing an important distinction, or do you have the same concerns with GPLv3?
If you had a nation-state of 100 people that did nothing but burn coal and crude oil all day, their per-capita would be huge but the total impact would be tiny. I think that total emissions are a lot more interesting than a population's average.
Kerberos? It's only hard the first time, and an Active Directory server will probably get you 99% of the way there (although I haven't specifically tried AFS against one). Time? apt-get install ntp-simple and be done with it; NTP should be absolutely mandatory on all networked devices anyway. The client-side cache is the only tricky part, but that was what he wanted to do in the first place. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he's wanting to trade local store for network usability, not vice versa.
Considering that it runs the exact same drivers as every other X.org-based X server, that will basically never happen. In other news, neither Windows nor OS X have better X.org drivers than Linux.
I sit in front of the TV with a magazine, and maybe my DS. You nestle in with a 10lb Unicode book? My friend, you have shot right past "geek" and are solidly in "nerd" territory. Why don't you come back here where it's sunnier?
True, but it gets tricky when no crime has necessarily been committed. It's legal to break your own laptop, and the terms of the contract are that if your laptop is broken then they will replace it.
Now, I'm not defending the practice, and I think it's a scummy thing to do. That doesn't automatically make it illegal, though. I could even imagine a moral defense of the behavior in that Dell offered those conditions to their customers, and it's not the customers fault for using them in ways that Dell had not intended. Again, I'm not condoning it, but I can see both sides of the issue.
My Sansa e280 plays WMAs - by first converting them to MP3. In that sense, it also plays OGGs and WAV and AIFF and MID and Amiga .MOD files. The real question is how many of those support it natively.
OK, yes, I completely understand your point and I wouldn't do it myself. On the other hand, the contract says "if you pay us money and break your laptop, we will replace it". I'm not really sure if I'd consider it fraud if someone does exactly what their contract permits them to do. Sleazy, sure. Fraudulent? I don't know; Dell wrote the contract and those are the terms they offered.
Now, I have seen similar clauses used to protect the customer. My friend bought some random gadget from a big box store and realized that it didn't meet the specs on the box. When he tried to return it, the CS rep insisted that you could only return defective or damaged merchandise.
Rep: So, you can't return that. ....yet. See where I'm going with this?
Friend: Wait, your sign says that if it's broken I can.
Rep: But it's not broken.
Friend:
Rep: Do you want that in cash or store credit?
You have pictures of police beating Michael Moore? url plz thx.
It has such a tiny market share that not one person in the entire world has been interested enough to step up and write the first virus or worm? Really? That tiny?
Market share might account for part of the equation, but since about 1 in 20 people are running Macs, I find it impossible to believe that there's no interest whatsoever in cracking them.
That is, licensing the trademarks of the schools comprising it. As a not-for-profit entity (educational institution status), it funnels most of that money back to its members, which are largely taxpayer-funded schools.
Basically, they want all the perks of being a government institution without any of the obligations.
Given that a large percentage of NCAA schools are publicly funded, and the NCAA harps ad nauseam about their role in developing successful students, it would seem to follow that it's mostly a taxpayer-funded educational institution. I can understand them saying "you can't redistribute our coverage without our consent", but I see no way they can justify saying "you can't distribute your own take on the events you're watching that you funded out of your own wallet".
Want to retain all rights to an event's coverage? Well, good luck with that, but don't spend my tax dollars enforcing it.
RMS became a Free Software advocate because he wasn't allowed to make a printer driver work. That right there's irony.
That's the perfect place to go all-GPL. Since you're not actually selling the software, just including it as part of the whole system, what benefit do you get from keeping it proprietary?
No one anywhere has ever told TiVo that their DVR must function as a PC. It's their DVR. However, once they sell it to a customer, it's now that customer's DVR to do with as they see fit, including using it as a PC or a hammer or a paperweight. I see no way in which TiVo has a legal or moral right to prevent their customers from hacking it to pieces if they want to, just so long as those customers don't distribute the proprietary bits without authorization.
Nitpick: that's actually the point of Free Software. The point of Open Source is to let everyone see your software and tell you how to fix it without having to actually let them use it.
Of course, by "easier" you mean "much harder", because that junk browser has so many workarounds and broken functionality that you never really have an idea of what's going to pop up on the screen until you try it. Even if you code your site perfectly, there's a good chance you'll trigger some random "CNN.com broke this so we have to support it" behavior.
IE is the bane of a web developer's existence. I've never heard a professional developer claim otherwise.
Agreed. No, they can't fix appendicitis (although I had an insane neighbor once who claimed that they could). I just had to see them dismissed completely because of some of those extreme claims.
I wouldn't go to a chiropractor because of indigestion, but it's unlikely that I'll go to an MD for back pain again.
Pretty good. In fact, I'd reverse it and ask if any significant music players don't support it. I certainly wouldn't look at any that didn't.
It's the worst quality. My little Sansa e280 can play non-DRMed AACs, so that extra 3/10 of a dollar gets me something I can actually use.
Who knows why they disabled it, but since it's no big deal, why fret about it? And since every review puts AAC ahead of MP3 for sound quality at a given bitrate and doesn't require royalties to distribute or stream, it's pretty much set up to be MP3's replacement.
You did technically offer reasons, even if they're easily deflated. I'm just pointing out that you don't have to be an Apple lover to see that your whole argument is weak.
I didn't comment because it was dumb. First, the odds are constantly improving that a given player will support AAC natively. Second, any number of other converters can do the same job, and there are probably scripts for iTunes that handle it automatically. OK, so it's slightly less convenient. That's far different than saying it's impossible.
Apparently, they ran the numbers and the market wasn't there. You and I might pay extra for DRM-free tracks, but for most people the higher quality is the biggest seller.
You entirely missed the point, which was that most new music players can play DRM-free AAC files. The new files sound better on my player than the old ones did because music sounds better than silence.
We've already established that transcoding is trivially easy. So, since you're dead set on converting everything to MP3, you should welcome the higher-quality source material so that the transcoded result will sound better. You don't have to have a golden ear to appreciate that AAC->MP3 doesn't sound great under the best circumstances, so anything to make it less bad is a win.
Honestly, you're grasping at straws here.
Addressed above - the problem was with your reading comprehension.
I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means, but the lengths you're going to in order to justify your absurd position that better is worse are amazing.
Actually, he's alleging that Gateway broke their support contract, right? I've been wondering about this. If they broke the contract, then why is he still bound to it? I'd be naively tempted to try that angle: since the purchase contract is now null and void, and the EULA was dependent on the purchase, than the EULA is void and here's your court summons.