If the U.S. Senate's cybersquatting bill becomes law (the House has yet to approve it), you would be in danger of up to $100,000 in fines. The one area in which these cybersquatting laws have teeth is when someone knowingly registers a company's corporate name or product name, and Price Waterhouse Coopers almost certainly still has all legal rights to the old name.
Since you registered it "for giggles," I'd dump the domain -- or at least do nothing improper with the domain and cave like a house of cards the moment Price Waterhouse Coopers becomes interested in the matter.
If you need any proof of Malda's celebrity, look no further than the hordes of Slashdotters rushing to defend a perceived slight against his honor.
I read the piece as a mild elbow-to-the-ribs of the PR firm that wrote the release, not Malda. You shouldn't have to apologize... it's not like you did something truly evil, like keeping a nine-year-old from seeing Eyes Wide Shut without his mom present.
I'm sure Katz has the technical brillance to run WinAmp, and I'm sure he has the intelligence to grasp when he presses play no movie plays, simply music.
Jon Katz wrote a column stating that the furthest he had ever gotten into the inner workings of a computer was to run a word processor and create a new document.
I don't think you can be so sure he's capable of running WinAmp or understanding why it plays MP3s as sound only.
"mp3 'em" does not mean "download the movies in mp3 format," it means "do to the movie industry with asf/mpeg/avi/mov what people already do to the record industry with mp3."
Jon Katz isn't that clear on any technical subject on the best day of his life. "MP3 'em" could mean either thing, but the more obvious interpretation is that this lifelong journalist with extremely limited technical skills thinks MP3 is a format that can be used to pirate movies.
Regardless, it's still the kind of sloppy accuracy and oversimplification that is the hallmark of bad technology reporting in the mainstream press. That it appears on Slashdot, which was supposed to be an antidote to that kind of reporting, is a shame.
I took Jon's advice and hung out at the local cineplex talking to some of the pre-teen boys who were there without adult supervision.
It took a while, but I finally found one who was both (a) a geek, and (b) looking for new experience that only an adult can make possible.
I offered to give him my stub, but I suggested that we make the exchange in the bathroom so those fascist tyrant anti-libertarian closed source theater workers wouldn't see us.
Long story short, there was an unfortunate misunderstanding and now I'm a registered sex offender who can't move without appraising the county authorities of my whereabouts.
The only positive to this experience is that while I'm under house arrest I have more time to MP3 my collection of NC-17 movies for distribution to oppressed children via Hotline.
One technical question for Jon: Why is it when I MP3 my films, only the sound gets digitized? I hope you can help!
Because non-geek kids are too busy learning to use the new computers Slashdot readers bought them after Katz's essay on democraticizing computer use among all classes of people.
This is "news for nerds." Why shouldn't we expect more from a writer here than the kind of laughable technical mistakes that occur in traditional media? Slashdot is supposed to be a respite from that kind of idiocy. The writers should know enough about MP3s not to use them as a verb when they are championing video piracy.
The message I'm replying to should not have been moderated down -- it was both on-the-point and funny. I love the folks who either (a) claim to never watch TV, or (b) claim only to watch PBS when they're watching. Why aren't they turning up their noses about the Web, which is capable of being far as crass, mundane and mind-numbingly stupid than television?
Crap. Now that I've heard of him, I feel like I've lost a member of my family. I'm going to go buy some flowers and put them outside his Topeka home. He was America's archduke.
Maybe it's time you caught up with the 18th century and started rounding off prices to the nearest penny, instead of playing games with "centicents" and expecting the rest of the world to embrace your antiquated system.
While American schools may suck, I'm glad one of their misplaced priorities was not the teaching of a numerical system in which merchants divide pennies into smaller units as a means of making their prices as confusing as humanly possible.
I shudder to think at what products you must be hawking, given your need to achieve more pricing precision than a penny.
Crumb of bread: 42/100ths of a penny
Previously chewed gum: 98/100ths of a penny
10 molecules of air: 12/100ths of a penny (limit 100 per customer)
The MP3, like the TV zapper, has turned out to be an intensely political bit of technology. Zappers and switchers permitted TV watchers to take control of their sets back from the three networks that monopolized TV programming for half-a-century. People could make choices about what they wanted to watch, and were no longer forced to choose from the tepid offerings of three networks.
I'm having trouble seeing the "intensely political" benefit of the remote control. Before I had one, I could take back control of my TV set from the three major networks by getting off my ass, walking to the TV, and changing the channel. I could take even more control by turning the thing off.
Now that I have a remote control, I can take back control of my TV set from the three major networks by remaining on my ass.
Have we become so sedentary as a society that the ability to stay on our asses is an intensely political victory?
I look forward to reading Katz's celebratory column when technology finally gives us the ability to Web surf on the toilet.
Geeks read Wired as if it were the Koran. Everybody else read it because they were afraid not to.
It's fitting that in writing a eulogy for the "Wired era," one of its writers continues the magazine's longest-running trend -- masturbatory love.
Amid all the hype for new media and the emerging digital culture, you could always count on Wired to be more excited about itself than any of the subjects it was slavishly heaping praise on. Wired continues the trend this month by placing on its cover one of its contributors, Po Bronson, at the center and in front of four people he's writing about.
No one is more prominent in the photograph than Bronson, who coincidentally has penned a wonderful article in the issue about those other four shlumps -- people who came to Silicon Valley to make it rich in this IPO-mad climate and failed more often than not.
Wired strongly believed how important it all was because that made the magazine and its writers important, too. Never mind the fact that many of the things it hyped most were least deserving of it -- remember videogame-design-supergroup Rocket Science and zippies? I don't either.
When Conde Nast finally succeeds in removing anything that was ever good about Wired magazine, it will be best remembered more for what its refugees did afterward, such as Suck, The Fray and ClearStation.
(Some refugees, at least.)
As for the "Era" it supposedly ushered in, file that along with push, Netizen, the failed HotWired IPO and other as-if speedbumps on the road from gopherspace to here.
Wired published some nice articles -- and a good news site -- about a parade it more often followed than led. It paid some great writers and Web designers and hawked 1,000 technologically wonderful but completely unnecessary gadgets like the digitally enhanced notepad. (I'm still waiting for teledildonics.)
Let's not get carried away, though. I refuse to get excited about any digital revolution that wasn't fought at the command line.
I enjoy the magazine, but what vision of the future is 2600 peddling? One in which all people have equal access to the inbound numbers of pay telephones and C source code to viruses?
I think that NEED TO KNOW was kidding when they wrote that "good luck in your new job" bit -- a sly reference to all the Netscape firings by AOL that occured during the week.
Slashdot Mirror
If the U.S. Senate's cybersquatting bill becomes law (the House has yet to approve it), you would be in danger of up to $100,000 in fines. The one area in which these cybersquatting laws have teeth is when someone knowingly registers a company's corporate name or product name, and Price Waterhouse Coopers almost certainly still has all legal rights to the old name.
Since you registered it "for giggles," I'd dump the domain -- or at least do nothing improper with the domain and cave like a house of cards the moment Price Waterhouse Coopers becomes interested in the matter.
If you need any proof of Malda's celebrity, look no further than the hordes of Slashdotters rushing to defend a perceived slight against his honor.
I read the piece as a mild elbow-to-the-ribs of the PR firm that wrote the release, not Malda. You shouldn't have to apologize ... it's not like you did something truly evil, like keeping a nine-year-old from seeing Eyes Wide Shut without his mom present.
I'm sure Katz has the technical brillance to run WinAmp, and I'm sure he has the intelligence to grasp when he presses play no movie plays, simply music.
Jon Katz wrote a column stating that the furthest he had ever gotten into the inner workings of a computer was to run a word processor and create a new document.
I don't think you can be so sure he's capable of running WinAmp or understanding why it plays MP3s as sound only.
"mp3 'em" does not mean "download the movies in mp3 format," it means "do to the movie industry with asf/mpeg/avi/mov what people already do to the record industry with mp3."
Jon Katz isn't that clear on any technical subject on the best day of his life. "MP3 'em" could mean either thing, but the more obvious interpretation is that this lifelong journalist with extremely limited technical skills thinks MP3 is a format that can be used to pirate movies.
Regardless, it's still the kind of sloppy accuracy and oversimplification that is the hallmark of bad technology reporting in the mainstream press. That it appears on Slashdot, which was supposed to be an antidote to that kind of reporting, is a shame.
I took Jon's advice and hung out at the local cineplex talking to some of the pre-teen boys who were there without adult supervision.
It took a while, but I finally found one who was both (a) a geek, and (b) looking for new experience that only an adult can make possible.
I offered to give him my stub, but I suggested that we make the exchange in the bathroom so those fascist tyrant anti-libertarian closed source theater workers wouldn't see us.
Long story short, there was an unfortunate misunderstanding and now I'm a registered sex offender who can't move without appraising the county authorities of my whereabouts.
The only positive to this experience is that while I'm under house arrest I have more time to MP3 my collection of NC-17 movies for distribution to oppressed children via Hotline.
One technical question for Jon: Why is it when I MP3 my films, only the sound gets digitized? I hope you can help!
Running to the barf bag,
Why only geek kids?
Because non-geek kids are too busy learning to use the new computers Slashdot readers bought them after Katz's essay on democraticizing computer use among all classes of people.
This is "news for nerds." Why shouldn't we expect more from a writer here than the kind of laughable technical mistakes that occur in traditional media? Slashdot is supposed to be a respite from that kind of idiocy. The writers should know enough about MP3s not to use them as a verb when they are championing video piracy.
The message I'm replying to should not have been moderated down -- it was both on-the-point and funny. I love the folks who either (a) claim to never watch TV, or (b) claim only to watch PBS when they're watching. Why aren't they turning up their noses about the Web, which is capable of being far as crass, mundane and mind-numbingly stupid than television?
Crap. Now that I've heard of him, I feel like I've lost a member of my family. I'm going to go buy some flowers and put them outside his Topeka home. He was America's archduke.
Maybe it's time you caught up with the 18th century and started rounding off prices to the nearest penny, instead of playing games with "centicents" and expecting the rest of the world to embrace your antiquated system.
While American schools may suck, I'm glad one of their misplaced priorities was not the teaching of a numerical system in which merchants divide pennies into smaller units as a means of making their prices as confusing as humanly possible.
I shudder to think at what products you must be hawking, given your need to achieve more pricing precision than a penny.
The MP3, like the TV zapper, has turned out to be an intensely political bit of technology. Zappers and switchers permitted TV watchers to take control of their sets back from the three networks that monopolized TV programming for half-a-century. People could make choices about what they wanted to watch, and were no longer forced to choose from the tepid offerings of three networks.
I'm having trouble seeing the "intensely political" benefit of the remote control. Before I had one, I could take back control of my TV set from the three major networks by getting off my ass, walking to the TV, and changing the channel. I could take even more control by turning the thing off.
Now that I have a remote control, I can take back control of my TV set from the three major networks by remaining on my ass.
Have we become so sedentary as a society that the ability to stay on our asses is an intensely political victory?
I look forward to reading Katz's celebratory column when technology finally gives us the ability to Web surf on the toilet.
Geeks read Wired as if it were the Koran. Everybody else read it because they were afraid not to.
It's fitting that in writing a eulogy for the "Wired era," one of its writers continues the magazine's longest-running trend -- masturbatory love.
Amid all the hype for new media and the emerging digital culture, you could always count on Wired to be more excited about itself than any of the subjects it was slavishly heaping praise on. Wired continues the trend this month by placing on its cover one of its contributors, Po Bronson, at the center and in front of four people he's writing about.
No one is more prominent in the photograph than Bronson, who coincidentally has penned a wonderful article in the issue about those other four shlumps -- people who came to Silicon Valley to make it rich in this IPO-mad climate and failed more often than not.
Wired strongly believed how important it all was because that made the magazine and its writers important, too. Never mind the fact that many of the things it hyped most were least deserving of it -- remember videogame-design-supergroup Rocket Science and zippies? I don't either.
When Conde Nast finally succeeds in removing anything that was ever good about Wired magazine, it will be best remembered more for what its refugees did afterward, such as Suck, The Fray and ClearStation.
(Some refugees, at least.)
As for the "Era" it supposedly ushered in, file that along with push, Netizen, the failed HotWired IPO and other as-if speedbumps on the road from gopherspace to here.
Wired published some nice articles -- and a good news site -- about a parade it more often followed than led. It paid some great writers and Web designers and hawked 1,000 technologically wonderful but completely unnecessary gadgets like the digitally enhanced notepad. (I'm still waiting for teledildonics.)
Let's not get carried away, though. I refuse to get excited about any digital revolution that wasn't fought at the command line.
I enjoy the magazine, but what vision of the future is 2600 peddling? One in which all people have equal access to the inbound numbers of pay telephones and C source code to viruses?
Interesting comment. I'd moderate it upward if Slashdot was giving me the option.
Your posting echoes some of the things I wrote about a few months ago for Stating the Obvious.
Drop me an e-mail.
I think that NEED TO KNOW was kidding when they wrote that "good luck in your new job" bit -- a sly reference to all the Netscape firings by AOL that occured during the week.