Randi is a real character. If you don't know who he is, check out James Randi on Wikipedia or The James Randi Educational Foundation. One of his boosters is comedian and magician, Penn Jillette, whose TV show, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! he frequently appears on. He's ruffled quite a few feathers over the years by being the poster-boy for skepticism, especially with respect to "mystic" or "supernatural" claims, so don't expect there to be many objective takes on him out there.
Gimp's support for open standards is a big win to start. Some of the filters have features that Photoshop doesn't, though it's been years since I did a full comparison (last time was when I was writing a Gimp plugin article for The Perl Journal, which you can find collected with other articles in Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk: Best of the Perl Journal). I especially enjoy the usability of The Gimp, though. There are some big problems (like the split between "Script Fu" and "Filters" which has no end-user meaning) but overall, Gimp is far easier for a new user to pick up, and figure out how to use.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but I read Slashdot because I don't have time to read a dozen articles about nonsense. I instead read a quick summary and fire off a comment if it strikes me as worth it. I've done so for many years, and will continue to do so.
You mean you're actually proud enough of spouting your mouth off in ignorance to defend it as the superior option to either (a) shutting up or (b) doing a little reading? Let me ask you a question: when is the last time that you fact-checked one of the articles that Slashdot points to? I've done it, but it's something I've done an order of magnitude less often than my already infrequent browsing of the article itself. I would not presume to claim any authority over a topic just because I read the (usually atrocious) article that Slashdot linked to.
No, the solution is to be broadly well read. Reading Slashdot is only one vector for such a regimen. Reading the Wall St. Journal infrequently; browsing Reuters headlines daily and reading summaries on other sites (like Digg) gives me a broad understanding of what's going on. I drill down for depth when I feel that my life will somehow be made more complete by understanding a topic more fully.
Not even close. True! Photoshop isn't half as useful to me as The Gimp. Many of the features that I use on a regular basis are available to photoshop users only if they buy commercial plugins from third parties. What's more, I use The Gimp under Linux which means that I don't have to deal with a horrible operating system just to edit my photographs.
For Web work, The Gimp is unrivaled. For some sorts of print work, I would either use Photoshop or Inkscape, depending on what it was that I needed to do. For editing stills for film, I'd use Cinepaint or Photoshop.
I'm reminded of a meme that's missing from the currently active slashdot poll, namely "RTFA" No.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but I read Slashdot because I don't have time to read a dozen articles about nonsense. I instead read a quick summary and fire off a comment if it strikes me as worth it. I've done so for many years, and will continue to do so.
If article summaries can't be written clearly enough to convey the basics accurately, then I'll have a misleading idea about what's in the article, and may post less useful comments. There's not much I can do about that without adding a 25th hour to the day.
$2000 is probably fair. The problem is that, much as many people would want this information, no legitimate news outlet is going to pay for what is known to be stolen goods, so they have to go to the Web sites and tabloids that are hungry enough to break the law. They, in turn, can't afford to pay much.
If they had stolen a couple of things quietly, then they could have gotten more money, but this was clearly an amateur who just didn't realize that they were screwing themselves by taking too much, too noisily.
I hope no one buys the stuff and they get caught. This kind of theft is certainly less harmful than stealing someone's life savings, but it's still criminal, and I'd still like to see justice done.
Then I saw the dreaded reference to "Chomsky" introduced. And gave up. First off, you're responding to the wrong post. I didn't bring up Chomsky. That said, unless you've been a linguistics professor since the 60s and are recognized as an expert in the field, I really don't think you get to hand-wave at Chomsky like that. If you want to make specific points about his work that you feel contradict his findings or the way his work is interpreted, then I'd welcome the discussion. Otherwise, you're just a kid the schoolyard complaining that "these damned structural engineers" get bridge design all wrong.
Google is susceptible to an erosion of moral tenacity, just like any other corporation. Vague and unsubstantiated claim noted.
Someone from within has given the keys to someone who has paid a lot of money to get them. Why would this kind of left-field claim with absolutely no facts to back it up be modded up? This is pure rumor mongering, and even for Slashdot this is a rather crude bit of slander.
A good, working knowledge of grammar is very important. I don't think the post to which you were replying claimed anything otherwise. Of course understanding grammar is important. Try to avoid straw man arguments, please.
The problem is with pedants who insist that the language as they learned it in some book is the "one true English." This is absurd. Someone trying to maintain a book about the English language must work hard to keep up with the changes in the language, and they're always doomed to be several steps behind reality. English is the language that is spoken and written by people, not the language that's described in a book. The simplest proof of this is that English pre-dates any book about it.
Even if he doesn't exist, aren't there some pretty good ideas from religions in general? (spare me and cut the seized and butchered religious stuff out of your logic) If the he in your sentence is the Judeo-Christian God, then that's spelled "He."
So, this is usually, the last defense of someone who realizes that religion is just a coping mechanism, and it might be right. The question is: how would you know? It's not clear to me that if Dr. Martin Luther King were an atheist that he would not have come to the conclusion that peaceful protest was the way to change the world. Same goes for Gandhi and his religion. It's just not clear to me that men aren't capable of the good ideas that they manifest without the underpinnings of religion.
That said, I'm always frustrated that people don't act on their religions' philosophies more. How can you be a Christian, read the Book of Matthew and take part in a war? How can you read the 10 commandments and kill your neighbor in cold blood? Religion doesn't actually seem to to its job if its job is to teach the lessons of civilized behavior.
This is getting to be a regular post for me, but I'll make it anyway:
You cannot judge a patent by the cute name given to it by the press, or even by a summary of it. You have to look at each claim. Is Amazon's 1-click patent obvious? I don't know because I haven't read the claims. If they claim that clicking on one button to buy something is obvious, then the answer is no, but that's almost certainly not the only element of their claims.
There are some things you can do to protect yourself. I've been running my own mail server for over 10 years, and I have to say that it's the least of my headaches from my home server. Keeping up with spam filtering technologies is a mild pain, but SpamAssassin has gotten quite good at making that less of an issue. I do wish MX handling were smarter than it is, but you don't *have* to worry about it.
The only thing is that it ends up costing me in ISP price. Most of the net has gravitated toward the position that MTAs are not valid if they're within dynamic IP ranges, which painful though it may be to see the "network of peers" reduced to the "network of clients and servers," I had to adapt to. Sadly everyone and his brother now believes that static IP addresses are some sort of "advanced business solution," so you have to go to a small provider like Speakeasy to get decent pricing.
Booth was a patriot I always wonder about people who say this. It's a horribly ambiguous statement. It could mean that you feel that Booth was acting in a patriotic way in killing the President of the United States (kind of an odd thing to think, but there it is). The other take would be that Booth, a patriot, committed the most unpatriotic of acts in the name of this misguided sentiment. Presumably this would be intended as a cautionary comment on the nature of blind patriotism.
I just don't see how such a deeply ambiguous comment is a useful expression (unless it's just intended to annoy people like me that actually pay attention to what other say, but then wouldn't this be counter-productive in the extreme... encouraging only people who don't take you seriously?)
The power of the United States government derives from the American Citizens. We the People have passed some of our power to the Federal government. We are granted certain protections based on that passing of power. That's certainly a fine idea, but that's not at all what the Constitution says. What it says is that the Federal Government's power is clearly demarcated and there are certain freedoms which it is not allowed to infringe on. The word "citizen" is not used in connection with many of those limitations on federal power. We've carved out (quite carefully) the areas in which we believe those freedoms may, in fact, be infringed anyway (hate speech, etc.), and I'm not aware of any caselaw that has established citizenship as a guideline for the bill of rights. Please, feel free to direct me to such references.
It would be ridiculous to try to made the document apply to people outside of the US
There is only one Constitution, and that document only applies to the government, at all times, period. There is no "special" Constitution outlining the powers of the government with respect to non-citizens. Thank you.
We so often think of the Constitution as a laundry list of favors that the Government, in its all-powerful benevolence, has decided to grant us. It's not. It's a list of the ways in which we, the people choose to limit our form of government. It doesn't grant you the freedom of speech, it prevents the government from taking it away.
The Constitution outlines the limitations of the Federal Government of the United States. It doesn't say that laws concerning non-citizens can limit speech, it just says that laws shall not limit speech. Thus, no law (concerning any person) may limit speech.
Anyone who tells you that the Constitution doesn't apply to non-citizens needs to re-read the document because while they're correct, that fact doesn't mean what they think it means.
a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale.
And all that's apparently missing is ensuring the surfer has Flash installed.
Personally I detest Flash ads and for this reason keep renaming the NPSWF32.dll file as NPSWF32.dllfsdfsd (while I don't have an instance of Firefox open
First off, you don't have to worry about Google Flash ads unless you're surfing on sites that will actually display them. My site for example, does not display anything bug Google's text ads and Amazon links to specific products that I review. The fact Google they gives sites a choice of how to treat their visitors is the #1 reason that I do business with Google.
Second, you don't have to play games with your plugins. Just grab a copy of Flashblock. It will place a Flash logo over the area of the page that the plugin would have rendered in, and you can click on it if you really want to execute it (e.g. for sites with otherwise useful content encoded in Flash like youtube).
Commercials will be embedded in the programs and viewers will not be able to skip through them... So, this implies either a) a proprietary player or b) a requirement for Windows Media Player and thus Windows.
Thus, no one running a real OS will be able to watch this crap. Problem solved.
This new protocol family shall function exactly the same as legacy IPv4 based protocol family with the following extensions:
1. Every 4 byte field containing an IP address shall be extendeed to 4x4=16 bytes, containing an IPv4x4 address.
2. Every IPv4x4 address within the subnet 128.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.0.0.0.0/96 shall be interpreted as a legacy IPv4 address.
3. Top half of the address range (addresses with the first octed having value higher than or equal to 128) shall be reserved for future rationalisation of special block allocations. Lower half is available for normal unicast addresses, except for all zeroes which will be reserved for global broadcast and must be routed to every location including legacy IPv4 networks except where an equivalent legacy IPv4 network would fail to route such a broadcast. No other rationalisation of private blocks or multicast blocks from legacy address ranges to new ranges is done at this point. All of what you suggest is, of course, in IPv6, but what IPv6 provides that your suggestion does not is a way for ISPs and backbones to route this gargantuan namespace without having to keep routers lying around with several terabytes of RAM. When you route an IPv6 address, you perform a fast table lookup that's similar to DNS. You check to see if the packet is routed to an address within your "namespace". If it is, you rely on your local routing tables. If it's not, then you look at the first chunk where it's different and address it to that point, which might simply mean handing it off to your default route or, if you're at a higher level, consulting a small table of responsible peers.
CIDR becomes a thing of the past, and all of those giant routing tables simply cease to exist, making IPv6 hardware much simpler and thus cheaper.
IPv6 itself can be deployed in as simple a mode as you suggest, however. We could have done that years ago. We failed. I suspect that, for the most part, this is the fault of the backbones who see tremendous expense and customer-management in doing something that they have no real incentive to do... yet.
People probably have that idea because every $0.01 of every click in your unpaid Adsense account was paid for, up front, by the advertisers, with real money. Take an accounting class or two, and you'll quickly learn that events that seem to be related to the layman have absolutely no connection in the world of balance sheets. One event you mention is a credit. One is a debit. The money you get from Google has nothing to do with the money that they get from their customers. You are a vendor that provides clicks. You get paid when your bill comes due (the end of the month that your account is equal to or in excess of $100). That your account has also generated revenue makes it a vendor relationship worth keeping, but that's as far as you can draw the dotted line.
I'm all for this idea. We're counting Flash and Javascript as external programs too, right? Your sarcasm isn't lost.
There are dozens of other problems with this, not the least of which is the fact that 90% of what an astute user applies a virus scanner to is searching through obscure programs acquired from questionable sources for known threats. It's the virus scanner's JOB to look at an unknown program and match it to a vast database of harmful programs. If it can't do that, then it's junk.
Now, a whitelist might work out for grandma. I'm just as happy to see her not get a Web page working on some random site, but for the rest of us, we actually do need to be able to download something that someone just cobbled together and try it out. That's how a community works. Over the last several weeks, very little of my activity has been under Windows, but even in that small slice of time, I've downloaded Cygwin applications; mods for games and an automatic updater for them; a network activity monitor; and a new version of The Gimp. If my virus scanner had tried to refuse to accept any one of those without presenting a credible threat as reason, I would have thrown its media in the trash, uninstalled it and moved on to their competition.
You might argue that I'm the exception, but I tend to doubt that. I think that I'm exceptional only in my depth of understanding, not in how many tools I download and use. As people younger than me, who don't remember an Internet before the Web become the majority, this will only become more true.
I'm often confused by why people think that there's some mystery cash floating around in Google's (or any other online advertiser's) pocket. There's an obvious need, when payments are tiny, to limit the frequency of transactions so that aggregation can happen. However, it's not like your Google AdSense account is a money market account with cash sitting in it, gathering interest. Google simply has a line-item in their budget for payables that cannot be issued yet because the transaction fees on cutting someone a check for $0.03 cost them more than the payment itself.
I doubt there'd be much urgency in tapping undersea cables because of 9/11. What you would want is more imagery or more satellites collecting that COMINT from cell phones and radios. Exactly. 9/11 isn't actually the stimulus for this, however. Our partner nations in international surveillance had been getting cold feet over the last 10 years or so leading up to 9/11. The Australians specifically had made a number of rather public comments that were difficult for the U.S. to ignore (relating to the listening posts that we have on that continent, designed to listen in on satellite-based comms to most of S.E. Asia per the sketchy details that were available at the time of Australia's slip). Building more capacity for space-based analysis (e.g. possibly snooping for signal coming from the ground to comms satellites) really makes a lot of sense, as it removes reliance on foreign governments. If that plan had been on the drawing board on Sept. 10, you can bet your sweet plutonium it would have been front-burnered the next day.
Yeah sometimes cool features don't evolve into benefits. News? Not really. What's news is that we're still dragging our heels on IPv6. We dodged the bullet once by developing and widely deploying NAT and at the same time reclaiming large amounts of unused address space via switching core routing to CIDR. However, that trick only bought us a certain amount of time. As the world becomes increasingly connected, we're going to face the same problem again. Why are we waiting until it's a crisis to deal with it?
Either you use a low bitrate, or listen to short track (or both). My music collection is just over 2000 tracks at the moment, and is just under 16GB. It will probably go over 16GB by the time I get a new iPod; I've been waiting for a 24GB iPod Nano. I took a random sampling of my mp3s which includes one 44MB concert, 2 x 26ish MB symphonies, and a plethora of other files. They average 5569258 bytes or about 3000 songs per 16GB.
If you're using an aggressively large bitrate, then perhaps you are seeing only 2/3rds of the song capacity that I am. That's not outside the bounds of probability at all. I've ripped mine with a mix of tools over the years, and it looks like I'm averaging about 144 Kbits/s, with most being 128 or 192 Kb/s.
Apple's trying to freeze out not only Linux, but any other player which tries to write to the iPod. Exactly. What they want to avoid is having to compete on the iPod-manager software front. They don't give a rat's whiskers about the Linux tools, but if Microsoft puts out their own tool that syncs the iPod up to the Zune Website and ships it with their OS... there goes Apple's user lock-in.
On the one hand, I empathize with wanting control of the platform. On the other, I just can't work up any sympathy for them. They're certainly going to fail in the long-term, unless the invoke the DMCA... a move which would alienate them with the rip/burn crowd they've courted over the last many years, but might make them friends with the networks that they've lost.
Slashdot Mirror
Randi is a real character. If you don't know who he is, check out James Randi on Wikipedia or The James Randi Educational Foundation. One of his boosters is comedian and magician, Penn Jillette, whose TV show, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! he frequently appears on. He's ruffled quite a few feathers over the years by being the poster-boy for skepticism, especially with respect to "mystic" or "supernatural" claims, so don't expect there to be many objective takes on him out there.
Gimp's support for open standards is a big win to start. Some of the filters have features that Photoshop doesn't, though it's been years since I did a full comparison (last time was when I was writing a Gimp plugin article for The Perl Journal, which you can find collected with other articles in Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk: Best of the Perl Journal). I especially enjoy the usability of The Gimp, though. There are some big problems (like the split between "Script Fu" and "Filters" which has no end-user meaning) but overall, Gimp is far easier for a new user to pick up, and figure out how to use.
You mean you're actually proud enough of spouting your mouth off in ignorance to defend it as the superior option to either (a) shutting up or (b) doing a little reading? Let me ask you a question: when is the last time that you fact-checked one of the articles that Slashdot points to? I've done it, but it's something I've done an order of magnitude less often than my already infrequent browsing of the article itself. I would not presume to claim any authority over a topic just because I read the (usually atrocious) article that Slashdot linked to.
No, the solution is to be broadly well read. Reading Slashdot is only one vector for such a regimen. Reading the Wall St. Journal infrequently; browsing Reuters headlines daily and reading summaries on other sites (like Digg) gives me a broad understanding of what's going on. I drill down for depth when I feel that my life will somehow be made more complete by understanding a topic more fully.
For Web work, The Gimp is unrivaled. For some sorts of print work, I would either use Photoshop or Inkscape, depending on what it was that I needed to do. For editing stills for film, I'd use Cinepaint or Photoshop.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but I read Slashdot because I don't have time to read a dozen articles about nonsense. I instead read a quick summary and fire off a comment if it strikes me as worth it. I've done so for many years, and will continue to do so.
If article summaries can't be written clearly enough to convey the basics accurately, then I'll have a misleading idea about what's in the article, and may post less useful comments. There's not much I can do about that without adding a 25th hour to the day.
$2000 is probably fair. The problem is that, much as many people would want this information, no legitimate news outlet is going to pay for what is known to be stolen goods, so they have to go to the Web sites and tabloids that are hungry enough to break the law. They, in turn, can't afford to pay much.
If they had stolen a couple of things quietly, then they could have gotten more money, but this was clearly an amateur who just didn't realize that they were screwing themselves by taking too much, too noisily.
I hope no one buys the stuff and they get caught. This kind of theft is certainly less harmful than stealing someone's life savings, but it's still criminal, and I'd still like to see justice done.
Then I saw the dreaded reference to "Chomsky" introduced. And gave up. First off, you're responding to the wrong post. I didn't bring up Chomsky. That said, unless you've been a linguistics professor since the 60s and are recognized as an expert in the field, I really don't think you get to hand-wave at Chomsky like that. If you want to make specific points about his work that you feel contradict his findings or the way his work is interpreted, then I'd welcome the discussion. Otherwise, you're just a kid the schoolyard complaining that "these damned structural engineers" get bridge design all wrong.
The problem is with pedants who insist that the language as they learned it in some book is the "one true English." This is absurd. Someone trying to maintain a book about the English language must work hard to keep up with the changes in the language, and they're always doomed to be several steps behind reality. English is the language that is spoken and written by people, not the language that's described in a book. The simplest proof of this is that English pre-dates any book about it.
So, this is usually, the last defense of someone who realizes that religion is just a coping mechanism, and it might be right. The question is: how would you know? It's not clear to me that if Dr. Martin Luther King were an atheist that he would not have come to the conclusion that peaceful protest was the way to change the world. Same goes for Gandhi and his religion. It's just not clear to me that men aren't capable of the good ideas that they manifest without the underpinnings of religion.
That said, I'm always frustrated that people don't act on their religions' philosophies more. How can you be a Christian, read the Book of Matthew and take part in a war? How can you read the 10 commandments and kill your neighbor in cold blood? Religion doesn't actually seem to to its job if its job is to teach the lessons of civilized behavior.
This is getting to be a regular post for me, but I'll make it anyway:
You cannot judge a patent by the cute name given to it by the press, or even by a summary of it. You have to look at each claim. Is Amazon's 1-click patent obvious? I don't know because I haven't read the claims. If they claim that clicking on one button to buy something is obvious, then the answer is no, but that's almost certainly not the only element of their claims.
There are some things you can do to protect yourself. I've been running my own mail server for over 10 years, and I have to say that it's the least of my headaches from my home server. Keeping up with spam filtering technologies is a mild pain, but SpamAssassin has gotten quite good at making that less of an issue. I do wish MX handling were smarter than it is, but you don't *have* to worry about it.
The only thing is that it ends up costing me in ISP price. Most of the net has gravitated toward the position that MTAs are not valid if they're within dynamic IP ranges, which painful though it may be to see the "network of peers" reduced to the "network of clients and servers," I had to adapt to. Sadly everyone and his brother now believes that static IP addresses are some sort of "advanced business solution," so you have to go to a small provider like Speakeasy to get decent pricing.
I just don't see how such a deeply ambiguous comment is a useful expression (unless it's just intended to annoy people like me that actually pay attention to what other say, but then wouldn't this be counter-productive in the extreme... encouraging only people who don't take you seriously?)
There is only one Constitution, and that document only applies to the government, at all times, period. There is no "special" Constitution outlining the powers of the government with respect to non-citizens. Thank you.
We so often think of the Constitution as a laundry list of favors that the Government, in its all-powerful benevolence, has decided to grant us. It's not. It's a list of the ways in which we, the people choose to limit our form of government. It doesn't grant you the freedom of speech, it prevents the government from taking it away.
The Constitution outlines the limitations of the Federal Government of the United States. It doesn't say that laws concerning non-citizens can limit speech, it just says that laws shall not limit speech. Thus, no law (concerning any person) may limit speech.
Anyone who tells you that the Constitution doesn't apply to non-citizens needs to re-read the document because while they're correct, that fact doesn't mean what they think it means.
And all that's apparently missing is ensuring the surfer has Flash installed.
Personally I detest Flash ads and for this reason keep renaming the NPSWF32.dll file as NPSWF32.dllfsdfsd (while I don't have an instance of Firefox open
First off, you don't have to worry about Google Flash ads unless you're surfing on sites that will actually display them. My site for example, does not display anything bug Google's text ads and Amazon links to specific products that I review. The fact Google they gives sites a choice of how to treat their visitors is the #1 reason that I do business with Google.Second, you don't have to play games with your plugins. Just grab a copy of Flashblock. It will place a Flash logo over the area of the page that the plugin would have rendered in, and you can click on it if you really want to execute it (e.g. for sites with otherwise useful content encoded in Flash like youtube).
Commercials will be embedded in the programs and viewers will not be able to skip through them... So, this implies either a) a proprietary player or b) a requirement for Windows Media Player and thus Windows.
Thus, no one running a real OS will be able to watch this crap. Problem solved.
This new protocol family shall function exactly the same as legacy IPv4 based protocol family with the following extensions:
1. Every 4 byte field containing an IP address shall be extendeed to 4x4=16 bytes, containing an IPv4x4 address.
2. Every IPv4x4 address within the subnet 128.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.69.0.0.0.0/96 shall be interpreted as a legacy IPv4 address.
3. Top half of the address range (addresses with the first octed having value higher than or equal to 128) shall be reserved for future rationalisation of special block allocations. Lower half is available for normal unicast addresses, except for all zeroes which will be reserved for global broadcast and must be routed to every location including legacy IPv4 networks except where an equivalent legacy IPv4 network would fail to route such a broadcast. No other rationalisation of private blocks or multicast blocks from legacy address ranges to new ranges is done at this point. All of what you suggest is, of course, in IPv6, but what IPv6 provides that your suggestion does not is a way for ISPs and backbones to route this gargantuan namespace without having to keep routers lying around with several terabytes of RAM. When you route an IPv6 address, you perform a fast table lookup that's similar to DNS. You check to see if the packet is routed to an address within your "namespace". If it is, you rely on your local routing tables. If it's not, then you look at the first chunk where it's different and address it to that point, which might simply mean handing it off to your default route or, if you're at a higher level, consulting a small table of responsible peers.
CIDR becomes a thing of the past, and all of those giant routing tables simply cease to exist, making IPv6 hardware much simpler and thus cheaper.
IPv6 itself can be deployed in as simple a mode as you suggest, however. We could have done that years ago. We failed. I suspect that, for the most part, this is the fault of the backbones who see tremendous expense and customer-management in doing something that they have no real incentive to do... yet.
There are dozens of other problems with this, not the least of which is the fact that 90% of what an astute user applies a virus scanner to is searching through obscure programs acquired from questionable sources for known threats. It's the virus scanner's JOB to look at an unknown program and match it to a vast database of harmful programs. If it can't do that, then it's junk.
Now, a whitelist might work out for grandma. I'm just as happy to see her not get a Web page working on some random site, but for the rest of us, we actually do need to be able to download something that someone just cobbled together and try it out. That's how a community works. Over the last several weeks, very little of my activity has been under Windows, but even in that small slice of time, I've downloaded Cygwin applications; mods for games and an automatic updater for them; a network activity monitor; and a new version of The Gimp. If my virus scanner had tried to refuse to accept any one of those without presenting a credible threat as reason, I would have thrown its media in the trash, uninstalled it and moved on to their competition.
You might argue that I'm the exception, but I tend to doubt that. I think that I'm exceptional only in my depth of understanding, not in how many tools I download and use. As people younger than me, who don't remember an Internet before the Web become the majority, this will only become more true.
I'm often confused by why people think that there's some mystery cash floating around in Google's (or any other online advertiser's) pocket. There's an obvious need, when payments are tiny, to limit the frequency of transactions so that aggregation can happen. However, it's not like your Google AdSense account is a money market account with cash sitting in it, gathering interest. Google simply has a line-item in their budget for payables that cannot be issued yet because the transaction fees on cutting someone a check for $0.03 cost them more than the payment itself.
If you're using an aggressively large bitrate, then perhaps you are seeing only 2/3rds of the song capacity that I am. That's not outside the bounds of probability at all. I've ripped mine with a mix of tools over the years, and it looks like I'm averaging about 144 Kbits/s, with most being 128 or 192 Kb/s.
On the one hand, I empathize with wanting control of the platform. On the other, I just can't work up any sympathy for them. They're certainly going to fail in the long-term, unless the invoke the DMCA... a move which would alienate them with the rip/burn crowd they've courted over the last many years, but might make them friends with the networks that they've lost.