Once again, the corporations losing this war on the basis that corporate types don't seem to be thinking on the same level as geeks.
And this is why the corporations are never going to win. They are predictable, and the geeks are innovative.
This is how it works. Picture if you will a major record company meeting room... for the sake of argument, let's call them the Big Music Guys. Systems analysts #1, #2 and #YesMan are meeting with big corporate pointy-haired type.
Management: "This Copywrite stuff is getting out of hand and making us obsolete. Help us control people's money again by providing a useless service."
Geek #1: "How do you expect to do that?"
Management: "Well, we're gonna make some way that stops them from copying our releases."
Geek #1 breaks out into laughter. Manager fires him.
Geek #2: "Y'see, the problem is that any way that we can possibly work on it to make it inaccessible, the rest of the world will find some other way around it. We can't possibly keep up with the public domain."
Management: "You're not being a team player. You're fired."
Pseudo-Geek YesMan: "I'll get right to work on it."
And YesMan, having attained his stature through ass-lipgluing as opposed to technical know-how, will spend much of his time working game #4711 of Freecell. Once he has attained this, he will spend about 12 hours putting together some simple encryption device that will fall to the suggestion of Geek #2. Management type returns to stockholders, says "We're currently working on a state-of-the-art encryption device to keep copywrite crackers from getting to our music" and stock prices go up. Shareholders revel in their smart investment as the company releases inferior technology developed by a yes-man which will get worked around approximately 12 hours after its release. Cycle continues.
Especially since these days, with the ever-rising popularity of free-information and licenses such as GPL that companies are finding it harder and harder to set standards, because the geeks are beating them to better ones, and as a result they can't make anything with any built-in security to it...
"If you were to design a language from the ground up, what features would you include and why?"
I figure I'd address this question...
Since I'm not really working in the industry as of yet, quite honestly, the one major feature I'd omit in my building a programming language (see... thing is I'd be doing this for myself so I could write programs and scripts for me and not really much else) is an overly elaborate stable GUI system, just on the basis that personally, I really prefer working at the command prompt level.
Thing is this wouldn't really serve the general world at large too much... But so be it... Like I said, I wouldn't be really writing it for other people...
I guess I got indoctrinated from learning to program via LPC and my graphing calculator... Heheh...
With Pay-Per-View:
Advantages over rental:
- Don't have to leave the house.
- Don't have to pay late fees.
With Cool-New-Useless-Technology
- Still have to leave the house.
- Get a cool new plethora of coasters.
With Movie Theater:
Advantages over rental:
- Big screen Big Sound
- Popcorn requires less effort and tastes better
With Cool-New-Useless Technology:
- Same Screen Same Sound
- Popcorn inevitably gets burnt in the Microwave.
I like the idea, but only if four years down the road everybody realizes that the latter of the two laws is pointless and serves nobody except for lobbyists and the law gets wiped out of existence. Because, quite frankly, this debate has been going on for a helluva long time, ever since the Error 23 debates on C64s. Should a publisher still maintain distributive control once they've sold the product? I mean, if I pay $80 for my latest Expansion kit for Diablo II, I should bloody well be allowed to do whatever I want with it and not face any type of litigation . I'm not saying that I will in this day & age, because, well, software pirating is so common that it's a moot point these days, but the corporations are still looking for ways to stop people from doing it (Copy-protected CDs,.nap audio file compression, and the list goes on). Software companies it seems learned a long time ago to give up on cracking down on software pirating, but it seems that peripheral companies that are now being affected by the technological boom, and thus the subculture of free-access-to-anything that has spawned out of the internet, and so now _they_ get to do the same. The only problem is, because, unlike software companies in the 80's, they already have a firm stranglehold on the corporate universe, so they make a lot more noise when their company becomes obsolete.
Personally, I'd rather just see this be the end of Record Companies altogether. The courts seem to be attempting to crutch them, when in reality, they don't realize that what's happening is that they no longer have a purpose, and as such we have no reason to keep giving them money. The industry as an industry is dying. Maybe now Music can become art again.
Alright. This article seems dead now, though, so I'll stop ranting.
God forbid they impose copywrites to what copywrites were originally intended for... you know... protect your intellectual property so that someone couldn't say that they did it... or so that someone couldn't make money off of what you did without your permission...
No no no no no. That would be too idealistic in this world. In this world, copywrites only exist to make record/movie/tv/(insert media here) companies richer than they need to be. Or so they'd have us believe.
Lots of hype about people spending billions upon billions of dollars on Superbowl ads...
So there's this one where a monkey in an E-trade t-shirt walks up to a stereo, presses play and gets up on a table in front of someone's garage, and there's these two guys sitting on either side clapping. The monkey proceeds to dance to the polka music for about 20 seconds.
then they cut to the text that says:
"We just wasted 8 billion dollars. What're you doing with your money?"
"E-trade.com"
This is amusing in that car-wreck sort of way. Who wants to bet that when this crashes on Mrs. Tingle's Rose Garden in Bummsville, Idaho and there's a lot of media attention, that the government is gonna spend lots of money to go up there and give these things emergency navigation systems so that they can easily fall on unsuspecting sea mammals instead of J. Random Human?
What's holding the glue in place? Gravity? I personally don't believe in Gravity. The Earth just sucks.
Besides. The HoZone doesn't exist in Ireland. When's the last time you heard specifically of a case of socks being lost in the dryer? I've never heard an irishman explain that something missing has gone somwhere mysterious like socks in the dryer.... I think an interested third party is responsible for this discrepancy.
But this is getting too wagnerian for me so I'm gonna stop ranting.
'Tis sweet... but there's a big problem I could forsee (dunno if the article addressed this... I kinda jumped through it...)...
If we went and did testing on this with humans, how would we be sure to inhibit the reproduction of said tissue? I'm just wondering if these tissues would reproduce the same way that embryos would.
If it did, then it's quite possible that we could eventually replace _all_ the organs in the body (With pretty much the exception of the brain) and thusly we now have a theoretical "fountain of youth" (Any bio nuts wanna call me on this one? I'm not certain how plausible this would be... haven't taken biology in years...). If it doesn't, how can we be certain that growth inhibition wouldn't be lost somewhere in here, and thusly this kind of transplant would end up giving us happy little tumors? Especially if you're transplanting something like a heart, it'd be a Bad Thing to have your heart itself turn into a gigantic tumor...
(Excuse the amateur biologist in me... I'm just wondering...)
The great Irony of this situation is that people have been noticing this for the last three hours and thusly you're about the 30th person to mention that this is a repeat...
Honestly. There's a lot more shows that pull in worse ratings than Invader Zim and that don't have the same cult following that Zim has behind it.
I think Nickelodeon didn't think when they gave a man who happened to author a comic called "Johnny The Homicidal Maniac" a Children's TV Show.
Go watch Dark Harvest. What kind of Kid wouldn't get nightmares from watching that episode? Honestly... just whenever he opens his mouth and you see all the guts inside.
Not to mention the unaired FBI Warning episode, which is as such simply because it was apparently too controversial (Anybody care to shed some light behind why? I think it had something to do with Sept11...).
This is a Viacom move, I'm guessing... and thusly political. Nickelodeon is Viacom's Kids Network, and being that Zim, much like Undergrads, The Oblongs, The Simpsons (so far the only one out of that list that was actually promoted _right_) and a pantheon of other cartoons aren't geared towards kids, were promoted as kids' shows, of course it's going to get pulled...
The problem is the only more recent controversial cartoon that actually managed to survive through all of it got worn out in the first year (*coughSouthParkcough*) and after that it wasn't really funny anymore...
So it's not a kids show. I honestly think Viacom should look around at its other channels (MTV?) for support of Zim.
And while they're at it, they should push someone in Canada to pick it up. I hate having to watch all the episodes on my computer.
The one nice thing about this, though, is that now Jhonen can concentrate on possibly releasing a second series of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Ooooooo.... It almost makes me go head-explodey just thinking about it. =)
But do you seriously believe that The Police, Steve Miller and all the other aforementioned bands didn't give permission or anything?
Honestly... think about it... If Sting sang Every Breath You Take at the MTV music awards and almagamated it into I'll Be Missing You wouldn't that imply that perhaps he condoned it?
The Verve is simply an example of someone who didn't ask permission for it.
I'm more pointing out the difference between Copywrite laws that protect the artist and copywrite laws that give more money to corporations.
If the artist gives their permission for someone to bastardize their music, that's their own damn fault.
So... whatever happened to the time when...
on
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Copywrite laws existed to protect the artist and not the corporations that bought the artists out.
Music is intellectual property, not physical property. When are people going to figure this out?
I remember the days when music copywrite was simply so that someone couldn't blatantly rip off some artist and then claim it as their own work. For instance, if The Verve decided to blaringly take a riff from a Rolling Stones tune without permission, the Rolling Stones should be given all the money that The Verve makes on said song, or at least a portion thereof.
Now all of a sudden intellectual property means The Ability To Listen To said song.
Since when do Music corporations have a right to limit how far the music is reached? Doesn't this compromise the artist's intent in itself? Honestly, what this is doing is once again putting more power in the hands of those with the money and reinforcing Murphy's Golden Rule (whoever has the etc.).
Morons. All of them. Especially since they don't realize the awesome power (wow, this sounds like a speech from Masters of the Universe or something) of Filesharing, and that the existence of mp3s/Divx/mpgs/exes/whatevers is going to negate any attempt to control flow of music/information. napster got shut down. Everybody said it was over. Out sprung a dozen clones. Now Kazaa gets shut down. If Morpheous, Audiogalaxy et al follow suit, I personally guarantee this number reaching out in the fifties. And eventually genre-driven ones and all that kind of stuff.... It'll be glorious.
Wow. That was cheesy. I'm gonna stop before it gets worse.
As mentioned before, a thematic PC has already been proven to be a load of crap, basically toys for overpriviledged kids *coughBarbiecoughHotwheelscough*. While this does appeal more to the College/High-School generation that has a big sale rate for computers (Common graduation gift, I spose), understand that they are going to be buying them for that purpose: College and High school... so the odds of getting an entertainment-based system over something with a bit more practicality are slightly lower.
So the question is here: Why not just make an entertainment-based Console computer? Honestly, stop trying to make them PCs and come up with the Nintendo/MTV MusicCube or something like that... Be a helluva lot cheaper and thusly more likely that you're going to make some kind of dent on the market itself...
I'm still waiting for a subpoena from back in December 99 from some guy threatening to sue some people on alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror for "slander" (guy claimed to be a software patent lawyer and didn't even know the difference between "slander" and "libel"... it was classic) because we made him lose money on e-bay, as we pointed out that his so called "Super Rare" (which, since then, has become blaspheme on the Rocky Horror newsgroup... but mostly because me and a Frank-N-Furter from Vegas spammed the board one night with a plethora of jokes about "Suck my super-rare schlong" and the like...) Rocky Horror Dolls he was selling on e-bay for $80 were available at your local Spencer's gifts for about $16....
This is just another case of someone threatening with lawsuits when they're really just full of chicken$#!+. Come on. Who here hasn't been threatened with legal action by some moron online?
I still say the coolest part of that whole flame war (which, btw, lasted a good month) was that he kept giving us phone numbers for the Pittsburg department of investigations (being that I'm Canadian, it would've been quite impressive that someone whose jurisdiction I'm not even in the same country as would be investigating me) saying that it was his proof that he was going to see us in court. And then he called us evil viscious [sic] morons.
"Come to think of it, there already are a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and usenet is _NOTHING_ like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton.
Honestly. They put up a link to a Lisa 2 Web server and expect that it will stay running? The only redeeming conversation that's going to come out of this whole post is going to be the jokes made of it... (I personally like the Parrot-Brain one...)
Everybody seems to have already jumped on "Well, OSX isn't universal".
The thing though is that this article isn't looking from the geek or computer programmer perspective...
It's looking from a World Market perspective, which is what companies willing to fund the development of a Linux GUI will be looking at. Linux isn't going to gain popularity on the sole basis that the public has no reason to like it. They have OSX for the Mac (which the educated public looking for something user-friendly will opt for) and WinXP for the PC (which everybody else looking for something user-friendly will go for).
Linux remains the domain of those who want to be able to tweak and toggle with the OS itself and want to play around with their friends' computers relatively easily. So the apocalyptic Linux-is-going-down attitude is harshly erroneous.
That being said, the point the article is _making_ is that Linux in a user-friendly form most likely isn't going to be made, because on the most part, Linux users can probably be quite happy with a hack-and-slash GUI and still can make quite the use of command-level prompts.
There is no market interest in doing a stable GUI for Linux... at least not to the extent that there is in having a clean and user-friendly GUI or WinXP or OSX. OSX is looked upon as the "ultimate alternative" because it's unix-based.
In reality, the only way Linux would gain worldwide popularity would be if Microsoft devoted its efforts to making Windows a Linux-based GUI shell.
But, with M$'s attitude towards Linux and the general geekdom attitude towards M$, it would be both inplausible [sic?] and most likely regarded by the geeks as a Bad Thing.
Within the midst of the world out there, there's a subworld. Communications developing to a point that I can hit on a girl in Indiana from Vancouver Canada through that simple "uh-oh" sound that we've all grown to despise and eventually thalamus out of our minds. My friend was convinced she was going to go on a trip to Holland to meet this guy she met over AIM.
And it goes on.
In the meantime, governments are trying to make the world more comfortable for... well... themselves... without even understanding what's going on.
The ramshackleness (is that a word?) of the world almost resembling the Austro-Hungarian empire prior to World War I is being manipulated by the people with access to this technology to transcend borders. Pornography of 14-year olds is illegal... except in the old Soviet republic of Fookerplakistani (apologies to Austin Powers)...
So it's possible, no matter where you are, to have access to pictures of naked 14-year-old Fookerplakistinians.
This is another attempt of them trying to regulate this borderless world. It's not bloody possible. 50% of the spam mail I get is in some foreign language that is neither french nor english, which suggests to me that it's from outside of Canada, and thusly any regulation the Canadian government will try to do will be in vain because it'll probably cut down on about 2% of my spam mail.
They're slowly trying to work their way into the internet, between Gore "fathering" the internet and the crackdowns on filesharing (I still say that Napster getting shut down was the greatest thing to happen to MP3s since WinAmp...) are becoming more and more regimented (Even audiogalaxy has filters now. Damnit).
So, I guess the point I'm getting at is that this is going to be a slow process because they're just not going to understand that it's a futile move on their part and that the more they try to regulate, the more loopholes the l33t h4x0rz and bored computer geeks will find. But they'll bury their heads in the sand and say that they've won the war on "indecent internet usage" or something like that simply because they've instated a sieve.
Honestly, I dunno how popular my opinion's going to be here but... I dunno. You say this like it's a bad thing.
For a good long time my e-mail.sig quote was "Music Isn't a Product" and I don't know how many times I have to reiterate it before people understand.
Let me just turn on one of the big stations in Vancouver for a minute.
Destiny's Child - Survivor
Britney Spears - Whatever that new one is
Afroman - I Get High.
Well, isn't my life better because I've heard those three songs.
The thing is, these are relatively high-production quality but at the same time the music is entirely mediocre. Essentially can be summed up in one word: Overproduction.
And it's interesting, The more I hear new music the more I realize that local Indie groups are the only ones that sound at all intelligently produced and aren't designed simply for the lowest common denominator of music.
Either that or Imported stuff (yay Cheesy Rotterdam!) that is incredibly hard to get over here in any form other than MP3...
Take electronic music. It's been going on for a good 25+ years now, but only around '96 to '98 did it really get noticed by the record labels. And as a consequence the music went drastically downhill (see: Alice Deejay) in terms of novelty and intelligence behind the music being produced.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe record companies folding isn't such a bad thing. Then maybe more talented artists (And by artists I _don't_ mean dancers...) can get the exposure and respect _as_ artists that they deserve.
Like I've said in the past, Copywrite Laws are a casualty of the war against corporate dogma that says we have to like what they want us to... Wear somebody's name on your underwear... Be Young, Have Fun, Drink Pepsi...
(I suppose you're all tired of my idealistic anarchistic preaching so I'm gonna stop now.)
Slashdot Mirror
I got lots of karma to kill... yay me!
And the geek vs. Corporate war continues.
Once again, the corporations losing this war on the basis that corporate types don't seem to be thinking on the same level as geeks.
And this is why the corporations are never going to win. They are predictable, and the geeks are innovative.
This is how it works. Picture if you will a major record company meeting room... for the sake of argument, let's call them the Big Music Guys. Systems analysts #1, #2 and #YesMan are meeting with big corporate pointy-haired type.
Management: "This Copywrite stuff is getting out of hand and making us obsolete. Help us control people's money again by providing a useless service."
Geek #1: "How do you expect to do that?"
Management: "Well, we're gonna make some way that stops them from copying our releases."
Geek #1 breaks out into laughter. Manager fires him.
Geek #2: "Y'see, the problem is that any way that we can possibly work on it to make it inaccessible, the rest of the world will find some other way around it. We can't possibly keep up with the public domain."
Management: "You're not being a team player. You're fired."
Pseudo-Geek YesMan: "I'll get right to work on it."
And YesMan, having attained his stature through ass-lipgluing as opposed to technical know-how, will spend much of his time working game #4711 of Freecell. Once he has attained this, he will spend about 12 hours putting together some simple encryption device that will fall to the suggestion of Geek #2. Management type returns to stockholders, says "We're currently working on a state-of-the-art encryption device to keep copywrite crackers from getting to our music" and stock prices go up. Shareholders revel in their smart investment as the company releases inferior technology developed by a yes-man which will get worked around approximately 12 hours after its release. Cycle continues.
Especially since these days, with the ever-rising popularity of free-information and licenses such as GPL that companies are finding it harder and harder to set standards, because the geeks are beating them to better ones, and as a result they can't make anything with any built-in security to it...
Yay geeks! We rule! Keep it up, kids.
"If you were to design a language from the ground up, what features would you include and why?"
I figure I'd address this question...
Since I'm not really working in the industry as of yet, quite honestly, the one major feature I'd omit in my building a programming language (see... thing is I'd be doing this for myself so I could write programs and scripts for me and not really much else) is an overly elaborate stable GUI system, just on the basis that personally, I really prefer working at the command prompt level.
Thing is this wouldn't really serve the general world at large too much... But so be it... Like I said, I wouldn't be really writing it for other people...
I guess I got indoctrinated from learning to program via LPC and my graphing calculator... Heheh...
With Pay-Per-View:
Advantages over rental:
- Don't have to leave the house.
- Don't have to pay late fees.
With Cool-New-Useless-Technology
- Still have to leave the house.
- Get a cool new plethora of coasters.
With Movie Theater:
Advantages over rental:
- Big screen Big Sound
- Popcorn requires less effort and tastes better
With Cool-New-Useless Technology:
- Same Screen Same Sound
- Popcorn inevitably gets burnt in the Microwave.
And this is supposed to compete??? WTF?
I like the idea, but only if four years down the road everybody realizes that the latter of the two laws is pointless and serves nobody except for lobbyists and the law gets wiped out of existence. Because, quite frankly, this debate has been going on for a helluva long time, ever since the Error 23 debates on C64s. Should a publisher still maintain distributive control once they've sold the product? I mean, if I pay $80 for my latest Expansion kit for Diablo II, I should bloody well be allowed to do whatever I want with it and not face any type of litigation . I'm not saying that I will in this day & age, because, well, software pirating is so common that it's a moot point these days, but the corporations are still looking for ways to stop people from doing it (Copy-protected CDs, .nap audio file compression, and the list goes on). Software companies it seems learned a long time ago to give up on cracking down on software pirating, but it seems that peripheral companies that are now being affected by the technological boom, and thus the subculture of free-access-to-anything that has spawned out of the internet, and so now _they_ get to do the same. The only problem is, because, unlike software companies in the 80's, they already have a firm stranglehold on the corporate universe, so they make a lot more noise when their company becomes obsolete.
Personally, I'd rather just see this be the end of Record Companies altogether. The courts seem to be attempting to crutch them, when in reality, they don't realize that what's happening is that they no longer have a purpose, and as such we have no reason to keep giving them money. The industry as an industry is dying. Maybe now Music can become art again.
Alright. This article seems dead now, though, so I'll stop ranting.
God forbid they impose copywrites to what copywrites were originally intended for... you know... protect your intellectual property so that someone couldn't say that they did it... or so that someone couldn't make money off of what you did without your permission...
No no no no no. That would be too idealistic in this world. In this world, copywrites only exist to make record/movie/tv/(insert media here) companies richer than they need to be. Or so they'd have us believe.
2000...
Lots of hype about people spending billions upon billions of dollars on Superbowl ads...
So there's this one where a monkey in an E-trade t-shirt walks up to a stereo, presses play and gets up on a table in front of someone's garage, and there's these two guys sitting on either side clapping. The monkey proceeds to dance to the polka music for about 20 seconds.
then they cut to the text that says:
"We just wasted 8 billion dollars. What're you doing with your money?"
"E-trade.com"
I was laughing till the next commercial break.
Gir exclaims Yayyyyyyy! We're doomed!
This is amusing in that car-wreck sort of way. Who wants to bet that when this crashes on Mrs. Tingle's Rose Garden in Bummsville, Idaho and there's a lot of media attention, that the government is gonna spend lots of money to go up there and give these things emergency navigation systems so that they can easily fall on unsuspecting sea mammals instead of J. Random Human?
I have to pay royalties for every amino acid that gets synthesized by said Gene?
I suppose the people who patented the Lac Operon could just tax milk, couldn't they?
*sigh*
What's holding the glue in place? Gravity? I personally don't believe in Gravity. The Earth just sucks.
Besides. The HoZone doesn't exist in Ireland. When's the last time you heard specifically of a case of socks being lost in the dryer? I've never heard an irishman explain that something missing has gone somwhere mysterious like socks in the dryer.... I think an interested third party is responsible for this discrepancy.
But this is getting too wagnerian for me so I'm gonna stop ranting.
It wouldn't work without the Heisenberg compensator....
"I just hope that the patent holders do not charge and arm and a leg for the world to use it"
Feel free to Mod me down for this, but I think this is got to be the worst Pun I've ever heard...
'Tis sweet... but there's a big problem I could forsee (dunno if the article addressed this... I kinda jumped through it...)...
If we went and did testing on this with humans, how would we be sure to inhibit the reproduction of said tissue? I'm just wondering if these tissues would reproduce the same way that embryos would.
If it did, then it's quite possible that we could eventually replace _all_ the organs in the body (With pretty much the exception of the brain) and thusly we now have a theoretical "fountain of youth" (Any bio nuts wanna call me on this one? I'm not certain how plausible this would be... haven't taken biology in years...). If it doesn't, how can we be certain that growth inhibition wouldn't be lost somewhere in here, and thusly this kind of transplant would end up giving us happy little tumors? Especially if you're transplanting something like a heart, it'd be a Bad Thing to have your heart itself turn into a gigantic tumor...
(Excuse the amateur biologist in me... I'm just wondering...)
The great Irony of this situation is that people have been noticing this for the last three hours and thusly you're about the 30th person to mention that this is a repeat...
Recursion is fun, kids. =)
So. Who buys the ratings bullshit?
Honestly. There's a lot more shows that pull in worse ratings than Invader Zim and that don't have the same cult following that Zim has behind it.
I think Nickelodeon didn't think when they gave a man who happened to author a comic called "Johnny The Homicidal Maniac" a Children's TV Show.
Go watch Dark Harvest. What kind of Kid wouldn't get nightmares from watching that episode? Honestly... just whenever he opens his mouth and you see all the guts inside.
Not to mention the unaired FBI Warning episode, which is as such simply because it was apparently too controversial (Anybody care to shed some light behind why? I think it had something to do with Sept11...).
This is a Viacom move, I'm guessing... and thusly political. Nickelodeon is Viacom's Kids Network, and being that Zim, much like Undergrads, The Oblongs, The Simpsons (so far the only one out of that list that was actually promoted _right_) and a pantheon of other cartoons aren't geared towards kids, were promoted as kids' shows, of course it's going to get pulled...
The problem is the only more recent controversial cartoon that actually managed to survive through all of it got worn out in the first year (*coughSouthParkcough*) and after that it wasn't really funny anymore...
So it's not a kids show. I honestly think Viacom should look around at its other channels (MTV?) for support of Zim.
And while they're at it, they should push someone in Canada to pick it up. I hate having to watch all the episodes on my computer.
(No GIR, that's a bad thing...)
Heard about this a while ago...
If you're pissed off, check out this online petition and send lots of e-mails to the execs at Nickelodeon.
The one nice thing about this, though, is that now Jhonen can concentrate on possibly releasing a second series of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Ooooooo.... It almost makes me go head-explodey just thinking about it. =)
*Runs off to his poprocks and Cherry Slushies*
But do you seriously believe that The Police, Steve Miller and all the other aforementioned bands didn't give permission or anything?
Honestly... think about it... If Sting sang Every Breath You Take at the MTV music awards and almagamated it into I'll Be Missing You wouldn't that imply that perhaps he condoned it?
The Verve is simply an example of someone who didn't ask permission for it.
I'm more pointing out the difference between Copywrite laws that protect the artist and copywrite laws that give more money to corporations.
If the artist gives their permission for someone to bastardize their music, that's their own damn fault.
Copywrite laws existed to protect the artist and not the corporations that bought the artists out.
Music is intellectual property, not physical property. When are people going to figure this out?
I remember the days when music copywrite was simply so that someone couldn't blatantly rip off some artist and then claim it as their own work. For instance, if The Verve decided to blaringly take a riff from a Rolling Stones tune without permission, the Rolling Stones should be given all the money that The Verve makes on said song, or at least a portion thereof.
Now all of a sudden intellectual property means The Ability To Listen To said song.
Since when do Music corporations have a right to limit how far the music is reached? Doesn't this compromise the artist's intent in itself? Honestly, what this is doing is once again putting more power in the hands of those with the money and reinforcing Murphy's Golden Rule (whoever has the etc.).
Morons. All of them. Especially since they don't realize the awesome power (wow, this sounds like a speech from Masters of the Universe or something) of Filesharing, and that the existence of mp3s/Divx/mpgs/exes/whatevers is going to negate any attempt to control flow of music/information. napster got shut down. Everybody said it was over. Out sprung a dozen clones. Now Kazaa gets shut down. If Morpheous, Audiogalaxy et al follow suit, I personally guarantee this number reaching out in the fifties. And eventually genre-driven ones and all that kind of stuff.... It'll be glorious.
Wow. That was cheesy. I'm gonna stop before it gets worse.
As mentioned before, a thematic PC has already been proven to be a load of crap, basically toys for overpriviledged kids *coughBarbiecoughHotwheelscough*. While this does appeal more to the College/High-School generation that has a big sale rate for computers (Common graduation gift, I spose), understand that they are going to be buying them for that purpose: College and High school... so the odds of getting an entertainment-based system over something with a bit more practicality are slightly lower.
So the question is here: Why not just make an entertainment-based Console computer? Honestly, stop trying to make them PCs and come up with the Nintendo/MTV MusicCube or something like that... Be a helluva lot cheaper and thusly more likely that you're going to make some kind of dent on the market itself...
Then again, you could just buy an X-box...
I'm still waiting for a subpoena from back in December 99 from some guy threatening to sue some people on alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror for "slander" (guy claimed to be a software patent lawyer and didn't even know the difference between "slander" and "libel"... it was classic) because we made him lose money on e-bay, as we pointed out that his so called "Super Rare" (which, since then, has become blaspheme on the Rocky Horror newsgroup... but mostly because me and a Frank-N-Furter from Vegas spammed the board one night with a plethora of jokes about "Suck my super-rare schlong" and the like...) Rocky Horror Dolls he was selling on e-bay for $80 were available at your local Spencer's gifts for about $16....
This is just another case of someone threatening with lawsuits when they're really just full of chicken$#!+. Come on. Who here hasn't been threatened with legal action by some moron online?
I still say the coolest part of that whole flame war (which, btw, lasted a good month) was that he kept giving us phone numbers for the Pittsburg department of investigations (being that I'm Canadian, it would've been quite impressive that someone whose jurisdiction I'm not even in the same country as would be investigating me) saying that it was his proof that he was going to see us in court. And then he called us evil viscious [sic] morons.
"Come to think of it, there already are a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and usenet is _NOTHING_ like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton.
... there was some other purpose to the post.
Honestly. They put up a link to a Lisa 2 Web server and expect that it will stay running? The only redeeming conversation that's going to come out of this whole post is going to be the jokes made of it... (I personally like the Parrot-Brain one...)
Everybody seems to have already jumped on "Well, OSX isn't universal".
The thing though is that this article isn't looking from the geek or computer programmer perspective...
It's looking from a World Market perspective, which is what companies willing to fund the development of a Linux GUI will be looking at. Linux isn't going to gain popularity on the sole basis that the public has no reason to like it. They have OSX for the Mac (which the educated public looking for something user-friendly will opt for) and WinXP for the PC (which everybody else looking for something user-friendly will go for).
Linux remains the domain of those who want to be able to tweak and toggle with the OS itself and want to play around with their friends' computers relatively easily. So the apocalyptic Linux-is-going-down attitude is harshly erroneous.
That being said, the point the article is _making_ is that Linux in a user-friendly form most likely isn't going to be made, because on the most part, Linux users can probably be quite happy with a hack-and-slash GUI and still can make quite the use of command-level prompts.
There is no market interest in doing a stable GUI for Linux... at least not to the extent that there is in having a clean and user-friendly GUI or WinXP or OSX. OSX is looked upon as the "ultimate alternative" because it's unix-based.
In reality, the only way Linux would gain worldwide popularity would be if Microsoft devoted its efforts to making Windows a Linux-based GUI shell.
But, with M$'s attitude towards Linux and the general geekdom attitude towards M$, it would be both inplausible [sic?] and most likely regarded by the geeks as a Bad Thing.
Give it up already.
"You have no chance to be funny make your time!" -Glyn
Within the midst of the world out there, there's a subworld. Communications developing to a point that I can hit on a girl in Indiana from Vancouver Canada through that simple "uh-oh" sound that we've all grown to despise and eventually thalamus out of our minds. My friend was convinced she was going to go on a trip to Holland to meet this guy she met over AIM.
And it goes on.
In the meantime, governments are trying to make the world more comfortable for... well... themselves... without even understanding what's going on.
The ramshackleness (is that a word?) of the world almost resembling the Austro-Hungarian empire prior to World War I is being manipulated by the people with access to this technology to transcend borders. Pornography of 14-year olds is illegal... except in the old Soviet republic of Fookerplakistani (apologies to Austin Powers)...
So it's possible, no matter where you are, to have access to pictures of naked 14-year-old Fookerplakistinians.
This is another attempt of them trying to regulate this borderless world. It's not bloody possible. 50% of the spam mail I get is in some foreign language that is neither french nor english, which suggests to me that it's from outside of Canada, and thusly any regulation the Canadian government will try to do will be in vain because it'll probably cut down on about 2% of my spam mail.
They're slowly trying to work their way into the internet, between Gore "fathering" the internet and the crackdowns on filesharing (I still say that Napster getting shut down was the greatest thing to happen to MP3s since WinAmp...) are becoming more and more regimented (Even audiogalaxy has filters now. Damnit).
So, I guess the point I'm getting at is that this is going to be a slow process because they're just not going to understand that it's a futile move on their part and that the more they try to regulate, the more loopholes the l33t h4x0rz and bored computer geeks will find. But they'll bury their heads in the sand and say that they've won the war on "indecent internet usage" or something like that simply because they've instated a sieve.
Honestly, I dunno how popular my opinion's going to be here but... I dunno. You say this like it's a bad thing.
.sig quote was "Music Isn't a Product" and I don't know how many times I have to reiterate it before people understand.
For a good long time my e-mail
Let me just turn on one of the big stations in Vancouver for a minute.
Destiny's Child - Survivor
Britney Spears - Whatever that new one is
Afroman - I Get High.
Well, isn't my life better because I've heard those three songs.
The thing is, these are relatively high-production quality but at the same time the music is entirely mediocre. Essentially can be summed up in one word: Overproduction.
And it's interesting, The more I hear new music the more I realize that local Indie groups are the only ones that sound at all intelligently produced and aren't designed simply for the lowest common denominator of music.
Either that or Imported stuff (yay Cheesy Rotterdam!) that is incredibly hard to get over here in any form other than MP3...
Take electronic music. It's been going on for a good 25+ years now, but only around '96 to '98 did it really get noticed by the record labels. And as a consequence the music went drastically downhill (see: Alice Deejay) in terms of novelty and intelligence behind the music being produced.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe record companies folding isn't such a bad thing. Then maybe more talented artists (And by artists I _don't_ mean dancers...) can get the exposure and respect _as_ artists that they deserve.
Like I've said in the past, Copywrite Laws are a casualty of the war against corporate dogma that says we have to like what they want us to... Wear somebody's name on your underwear... Be Young, Have Fun, Drink Pepsi...
(I suppose you're all tired of my idealistic anarchistic preaching so I'm gonna stop now.)