I've generally been pretty satisfied with Google's treatment of the old Dejanews archive. Dejanews was *great* while it existed. You didn't have to be "registered" to post to USEnet in the early stages of its existence, the "author profile" feature was always really fun, and it featured well-thought-out article tracking and thread handling. Deja.com was something else entirely (one of the strangest company metamorphosis ever, really) yet the few months post-Deja and pre-Google were really nightmarish--I didn't realize what a resource Usenet archives could be until they weren't around.
Google's first version of "Groups" was very bare-bones, yet while its innovations were sound--in particular, Google's search function was far superior, and its extended-to-early-1980s-archive was a delight--it dropped several features that made Dejanews so much fun. And while Google insisted that it was going to gradually revamp its Groups UI, it never really did so.
Google's big holdout (and one which they apparently were originally intending to fix back in Groups' early days) was its inefficient sorting system. Groups has a quirk/bug that Deja managed to avoid: simply put, threads with like-titles are "merged together" in the "view thread" interface, despite not necessarily having anything to do with each other. Say you're searching for information, and it comes up in a thread called "The Beatles on tape." You click on the "View thread" button. In the left pane will be a huge list of responses. But most will likely not be related to the discussion at hand, as Google throws all threads ever titled "The Beatles on tape" into that list. Deja would intelligently organize by article ID, generally preventing that sort of thing from happening, but Google never bothered to fix that design quirk despite promises to the contrary.
From the look of the new Groups, it appears as if Google's trying to create an odd synthesis between Yahoo Groups and Usenet. I certainly hope they don't forget that providing a well-thought-out Usenet interface should be priority #1, with Yahoo-esque bells-and-whistles as a secondary concern.
Point taken. I was referring specifically to things like archive releases, and things whose final mix might not primarily exist on DAT. In that (and many other) cases, I assume Apple just pulls the tracks from CDs.
I've actually been pretty fortunate as far as computer accidents are concerned, in that it honest to goodness is rarely actually my fault when something goes horribly wrong. Really. Albeit in something of a "pleading ignorance" way. How was I supposed to know the installation routine for X and X program was going to do what it did? That sort of thing. Even when I do cause things to go horrible wrong, it's generally worked out in the end (I once attempted to flash a friend's DVD drive firmware, only to discover that his computer had neglected to inform me he was using an OEM drive unlisted by rpc1.org. By all rights his drive should've been hosed, but it accepted being flashed back to its previous state). Nice.
An exception:
When I first became aware of computers, it was in an almost-entirely school focused setting, and my school (like almost every other in the late 80s/early 90s) had Apples and Macs. I remember being blown away when we finally internally "upgraded" and started getting Macs in the elementary school. They were so much fun to toy around with (something which, incidentally, I feel has been lost in recent OS revisions, but I digress). Somewhat surprisingly, I don't recall any major melt-downs occuring on any of the Macs.
Unfortunately, this protection did not extend to the legacy Apple IIEs we had lying around. My friends' Macs used to "greet" them on boot-up, and programs usually had some mentioning of to whom they belonged, etc. Still do. My ten-year-old mind thought this was exquisite, and I wondered if Apple IIE programs could do the same thing.
At the time, the primary word-processing program we were using was...maybe AppleWrite, or something? I can't remember the name. But I wanted it to remember mine--I was the "admin" of my fifth-grade class, see--so I set about trying to find that option, which I was positive existed.
And then I found it...or so I thought. "Initialize disc!" Surely that meant put my initials on it, right?
So I ran that option. On all 10 copies of the program we had. Without checking to see whether it had "worked" on the previous copies.
Needless to say, I felt very, very stupid afterwards. A hard lesson learned.
I doubt it. I really, highly doubt that these record companies are letting Apple access their master tapes. The logistics--manpower, organization, etc.--are hilariously improbable.
More likely, Apple's AAC is indeed encoded from commercially-available digital sources.
48kHz could hardly be called a "significant" increase in quality from 44.1kHz. And I would think that any advantage gained from not having to adjust the sample rate downward would be rendered moot by the lossy encoding process (those extra high frequencies would probably be shaved anyway).
The liberals of 1776 (our founding fathers) would probably be the libertarians of today.
Indeed, at least insofar as social matters go. The Constitution has a strong liberatarian bent with regard to government interference in the private lives of its citizens, as does (obviously) the Declaration.
That said, thanks to today's shifting definitions, it often seems as if contemporary liberalism is closest in spirit to that attitude, although not by much. Conservatism is far too frequently embraced by those who wish to create a Rockwell-esque, "old-days" semi-theocracy; liberalism, on the other hand, is the domain of the overcompensating social reactionaries. Neither is ideal, but the Christian Coalition and its ilk are arguably closer to the Conservative political mainstream than Greenpeace, et cetera, are to the liberal equivalent.
Um. Sentencing guidelines as deterrant...yeah, those work. You have any idea what minimum sentencing laws for drug offenses are like? And I hear people still toke up.
"Trek's longevity is owed not to any boldness on it's part but a clever legerdermain of appearing to be progressive and bold while playing it safe on every issue it covered."
I actually agree with you on that. The DS9 episode "Far Beyond the Stars" is perhaps one of the most simplistic treatments of racism that I've ever seen--complete with awkward over-acting from the usually-excellent main cast (Brooks's breakdown near the end...oy)--but if you only watched the DVD supplements, you'd get the impression that the episode was STIRRING! and THOUGHT PROVOKING! and CUTTING EDGE! and TAKING A STAND. It's all masturbatory back-slapping and it's seriously painful to watch.
and it's the perfect example of a SACD with a different mix on the CD layer. So if you're comparing the CD and DSD layers of this CD: they have intentionally been messed with so that you come to the conclusion that DSD is better.
"It's funny how the major request of most consumers (more available playtime per-disc) never seems to increase though, despite the technical advances in other areas. Of course, consumers might get just a bit upset if the music labels can make a disc with 10 hours or more of high- quality recording time, and they only use 45 minutes for one album at 3 times the price of a regular CD."
EXACTLY. One thing I wanted from the DVD format was the ability to throw multiple CDs onto one DVD disc. The thing is, DVD-Video doesn't natively support this; it doesn't accept 44.1kHz audio, for starters, and it needs some sort of video stream. That DVD-Video doesn't support a sort of "CD Audio on DVD" mode annoys me very much.
DVD-Audio *does* kind of support this, but DVD-Audio authoring packages are incredibly expensive (esp. if you want to use MLP).
I wish some electronics manufacturer would get off their asses and make some sort of multi-disc audio player that could handle SHN, WAV, FLAC, MLP, and other formats written in UDF or other formats on a data disc (CD or DVD). That would be *awesome*. But nobody seems to do it. It's just MP3 this and MP3 that.
I recognize that you're just baiting, but I'll bite anyway. PCM does indeed produce discrete samples at some interval. The traditional fallacy is that these samples *are* the audio, and that your speakers are throwing 44100 of them at you a second, too fast for you to "notice;" by contrast, the reasoning goes, analogue is "continuous" and that's why it's "superior." The sampling points *represent* the audio, and when passed through an AD converter, the audio is continuous; there isn't some magical "loss of data" in the intervals during which no sampling occurs. I hate to cite Nyquist again--as that almost always encourages a "THIS IS FLAWED!" orgy--but there are distinct situations where CD audio captures theoretically all of the audio data; an impossibility, one would think, if the aforementioned sampling fallacy was true.
(and heck, "magic analogue" is hardly continuous, as you have to deal with fun phenomena like surface discontinuities and coloration. People tend to like analogue distortion, though).
A couple I know is fulfilling one of the long-term items that requires them to be handcuffed to each other until Sunday (each year, the list includes a few of these long-term payoff items). Note that there's absolutely no leniancy there; thus, they have to go to the bathroom together, eat together, shower together, et cetera.
The funny thing is, the standard reaction people give when encountering them handcuffed to each other is some variant of "Oh, so, uh, you went and got married?"
-D
Glad that high opinions of matrimony persist in this country.
You're actually completely right, as the word "piracy" is used to refer to the unauthorized printing/reprinting of books fairly early on in the evolution of printed material. One could argue, though, that it was more than a bit loaded as language then.
Soulseek's been down all day, for example, even though I haven't seen any information specifically saying that this new Netsky targets said network (Kazaa and Edonkey are the two that I frequently see cited, as in the linked article). It's an odd choice of target--it's far smaller than Kazaa/FastTrack--but then again, Edonkey's not too high on the usual radar, either. Some bittorrent sites are also especially wobbly today, but that could be coincidence.
Fascinatingly, I've also been getting absolute tons of emails infected with this variant of Netsky, many of which pretend to have been scanned for viruses and are "clean." This seems particularly lame as an "innovative" get-the-dupes-to-click-on-"document.doc.pif" strategy, but someone must be clicking on these things (verizon seems particularly affected, as every other Netsky spam I get seems to be from that domain).
Ahh well. Hopefully, this particularly-obnoxious variant will be short lived (so we can, of course, begin the cycle anew in a few weeks' time with a new SoBig or...heck, I dunno, Klez? What letter are they up to there?)
Remember the Christian church suffered 300 years of very extreme opression at their beginnings from the Romans. They had to sell out in order to practice their faith publicly
Not...quite. Actually, most modern scholarship--heck, quite a bit of old scholarship as well, e.g. Gibbons' "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"--seems to support the assertion that the Church-propogated "We were persecuted terribly for hundreds of years" claim is at least somewhat false. True, Christians were persecuted, yet the Romans did not go out of their way to suppress the new sect. Rather, early Christians were animated by an intense hatred for the mortal coil; they believed that a second world existed after this one, and that it was infinitely better. And they weren't subtle about this; Tertullian's "Apology" is half snide-justification, half-attack treatise (and he admits that he digs the idea of those Roman higher-ups who would be boiling in hell any day now).
The early Christians rushed to martyrdom; many were *happy* to die. Why fear death? We were goin' to heaven! The idea of a systematic Roman persecution was likely invented later to give the early Christians an aura of even-greater martyrdom.
And IIRC, the first "canonical" bible we have comes from some time in the 5th century--in other words, after Constantine's conversion. "Selling out" would likely have hit a different aura by that point.
No, "sound fidelity" is still wrong, and hopelessly vague.
Once again: it isn't a 16-bit interpretation. Sampling does not involve taking "pieces" of music and then throwing them back, hoping it's going by too fast for you to hear. Sampling involves getting a collection of samples that, when converted back into analogue, represents the input waveform (up 'til the threshold your current sampling specification allows) almost exactly.
As for digital recording, 24bit is used precisely because DSP is so popular. 24bit does give you a greater dynamic range (although popular music doesn't tend to use it), but it also removes the amount of dithering you have to do on a signal, as you have many extra bits being used for various digital process computations.
Sampling rate is another story entirely. Nyquist states that 44.1kHz should be adequate, but I understand the idea of leaving room for error; consequently, 96kHz is certainly appropriate. Anything higher than that, though, and studies show you're probably actually degrading the signal.
...if this has anything to do with this leaking to the internet?
(disclaimer: I have no idea if it's real, but if it is...well, it would make a good case for getting the retail version into stores sooner rather than later, I'd think)
"I use only freeware (mostly open source software) to make dvd backups - i suggest you all head on over to Doom9 and learn how to do the same. I don't make money from my backups either."
Irritatingly, while it's perfectly possible to make decent transcoded DVDs using freeware tools, the higher-quality path seems to require a hilarious amount of Very Expensive software at present.
To wit: even if one decides that pirating CCE is an acceptable offense, most of the guides at doom9.org for backing up using re-encoding (higher quality) instead of transcoding (much faster, but lower quality) seem to use Scenarist, which costs something like $30,000.
I'm sure there're other ways to do this process, but so far nobody seems to have elucidated on them for the benefit of those who are less familiar with the nitty gritty of the procedure.
Maybe I just have a skewed experience here, but I recall that while many porn sites are indeed AOK with people sharing their content, some are particularly aggressive with regard to its protection and--failing that--prosecution of violators. In particular, I seem to remember at least a few cases in which Titan Media and other producers of gay pornography went after websites that posted pictures and other exerpts from their exclusive content.
Parts of the porn industry take "piracy" just as seriously as the RIAA and MPAA; a lack of publicizing of the lawsuits, etc. that have resulting might be more of an issue with the underground nature of the subject.
The best way to get rid of Realsched.exe is to let it sit in your startup menu, but replace the actual executable with a fake file *also* called realsched.exe (a blank text file works fine).
This ALSO works for Apple's QTTASK.EXE program that simply won't go away.
Slashdot Mirror
I've generally been pretty satisfied with Google's treatment of the old Dejanews archive. Dejanews was *great* while it existed. You didn't have to be "registered" to post to USEnet in the early stages of its existence, the "author profile" feature was always really fun, and it featured well-thought-out article tracking and thread handling. Deja.com was something else entirely (one of the strangest company metamorphosis ever, really) yet the few months post-Deja and pre-Google were really nightmarish--I didn't realize what a resource Usenet archives could be until they weren't around.
Google's first version of "Groups" was very bare-bones, yet while its innovations were sound--in particular, Google's search function was far superior, and its extended-to-early-1980s-archive was a delight--it dropped several features that made Dejanews so much fun. And while Google insisted that it was going to gradually revamp its Groups UI, it never really did so.
Google's big holdout (and one which they apparently were originally intending to fix back in Groups' early days) was its inefficient sorting system. Groups has a quirk/bug that Deja managed to avoid: simply put, threads with like-titles are "merged together" in the "view thread" interface, despite not necessarily having anything to do with each other. Say you're searching for information, and it comes up in a thread called "The Beatles on tape." You click on the "View thread" button. In the left pane will be a huge list of responses. But most will likely not be related to the discussion at hand, as Google throws all threads ever titled "The Beatles on tape" into that list. Deja would intelligently organize by article ID, generally preventing that sort of thing from happening, but Google never bothered to fix that design quirk despite promises to the contrary.
From the look of the new Groups, it appears as if Google's trying to create an odd synthesis between Yahoo Groups and Usenet. I certainly hope they don't forget that providing a well-thought-out Usenet interface should be priority #1, with Yahoo-esque bells-and-whistles as a secondary concern.
Point taken. I was referring specifically to things like archive releases, and things whose final mix might not primarily exist on DAT. In that (and many other) cases, I assume Apple just pulls the tracks from CDs.
I've actually been pretty fortunate as far as computer accidents are concerned, in that it honest to goodness is rarely actually my fault when something goes horribly wrong. Really. Albeit in something of a "pleading ignorance" way. How was I supposed to know the installation routine for X and X program was going to do what it did? That sort of thing. Even when I do cause things to go horrible wrong, it's generally worked out in the end (I once attempted to flash a friend's DVD drive firmware, only to discover that his computer had neglected to inform me he was using an OEM drive unlisted by rpc1.org. By all rights his drive should've been hosed, but it accepted being flashed back to its previous state). Nice.
An exception:
When I first became aware of computers, it was in an almost-entirely school focused setting, and my school (like almost every other in the late 80s/early 90s) had Apples and Macs. I remember being blown away when we finally internally "upgraded" and started getting Macs in the elementary school. They were so much fun to toy around with (something which, incidentally, I feel has been lost in recent OS revisions, but I digress). Somewhat surprisingly, I don't recall any major melt-downs occuring on any of the Macs.
Unfortunately, this protection did not extend to the legacy Apple IIEs we had lying around. My friends' Macs used to "greet" them on boot-up, and programs usually had some mentioning of to whom they belonged, etc. Still do. My ten-year-old mind thought this was exquisite, and I wondered if Apple IIE programs could do the same thing.
At the time, the primary word-processing program we were using was...maybe AppleWrite, or something? I can't remember the name. But I wanted it to remember mine--I was the "admin" of my fifth-grade class, see--so I set about trying to find that option, which I was positive existed.
And then I found it...or so I thought. "Initialize disc!" Surely that meant put my initials on it, right?
So I ran that option. On all 10 copies of the program we had. Without checking to see whether it had "worked" on the previous copies.
Needless to say, I felt very, very stupid afterwards. A hard lesson learned.
I doubt it. I really, highly doubt that these record companies are letting Apple access their master tapes. The logistics--manpower, organization, etc.--are hilariously improbable.
More likely, Apple's AAC is indeed encoded from commercially-available digital sources.
48kHz could hardly be called a "significant" increase in quality from 44.1kHz. And I would think that any advantage gained from not having to adjust the sample rate downward would be rendered moot by the lossy encoding process (those extra high frequencies would probably be shaved anyway).
The liberals of 1776 (our founding fathers) would probably be the libertarians of today.
Indeed, at least insofar as social matters go. The Constitution has a strong liberatarian bent with regard to government interference in the private lives of its citizens, as does (obviously) the Declaration.
That said, thanks to today's shifting definitions, it often seems as if contemporary liberalism is closest in spirit to that attitude, although not by much. Conservatism is far too frequently embraced by those who wish to create a Rockwell-esque, "old-days" semi-theocracy; liberalism, on the other hand, is the domain of the overcompensating social reactionaries. Neither is ideal, but the Christian Coalition and its ilk are arguably closer to the Conservative political mainstream than Greenpeace, et cetera, are to the liberal equivalent.
Um. Sentencing guidelines as deterrant...yeah, those work. You have any idea what minimum sentencing laws for drug offenses are like? And I hear people still toke up.
"Trek's longevity is owed not to any boldness on it's part but a clever legerdermain of appearing to be progressive and bold while playing it safe on every issue it covered."
I actually agree with you on that. The DS9 episode "Far Beyond the Stars" is perhaps one of the most simplistic treatments of racism that I've ever seen--complete with awkward over-acting from the usually-excellent main cast (Brooks's breakdown near the end...oy)--but if you only watched the DVD supplements, you'd get the impression that the episode was STIRRING! and THOUGHT PROVOKING! and CUTTING EDGE! and TAKING A STAND. It's all masturbatory back-slapping and it's seriously painful to watch.
Star Trek doesn't like racism, kids. Yay!
Maybe. It depends what copy protection system they're using. Not all are as flaccid as Sunncomm.
and it's the perfect example of a SACD with a different mix on the CD layer. So if you're comparing the CD and DSD layers of this CD: they have intentionally been messed with so that you come to the conclusion that DSD is better.
I suppose you have proof of this?
Not to mention CD "greening" pens ($25 a pop).
"It's funny how the major request of most consumers (more available playtime per-disc) never seems to increase though, despite the technical advances in other areas. Of course, consumers might get just a bit upset if the music labels can make a disc with 10 hours or more of high- quality recording time, and they only use 45 minutes for one album at 3 times the price of a regular CD."
EXACTLY. One thing I wanted from the DVD format was the ability to throw multiple CDs onto one DVD disc. The thing is, DVD-Video doesn't natively support this; it doesn't accept 44.1kHz audio, for starters, and it needs some sort of video stream. That DVD-Video doesn't support a sort of "CD Audio on DVD" mode annoys me very much.
DVD-Audio *does* kind of support this, but DVD-Audio authoring packages are incredibly expensive (esp. if you want to use MLP).
I wish some electronics manufacturer would get off their asses and make some sort of multi-disc audio player that could handle SHN, WAV, FLAC, MLP, and other formats written in UDF or other formats on a data disc (CD or DVD). That would be *awesome*. But nobody seems to do it. It's just MP3 this and MP3 that.
I recognize that you're just baiting, but I'll bite anyway. PCM does indeed produce discrete samples at some interval. The traditional fallacy is that these samples *are* the audio, and that your speakers are throwing 44100 of them at you a second, too fast for you to "notice;" by contrast, the reasoning goes, analogue is "continuous" and that's why it's "superior." The sampling points *represent* the audio, and when passed through an AD converter, the audio is continuous; there isn't some magical "loss of data" in the intervals during which no sampling occurs. I hate to cite Nyquist again--as that almost always encourages a "THIS IS FLAWED!" orgy--but there are distinct situations where CD audio captures theoretically all of the audio data; an impossibility, one would think, if the aforementioned sampling fallacy was true.
(and heck, "magic analogue" is hardly continuous, as you have to deal with fun phenomena like surface discontinuities and coloration. People tend to like analogue distortion, though).
There's also this gem:
since a digitized sound loses all of the sonic information between its sampling points
Clearly written by someone who doesn't understand how PCM works.
A couple I know is fulfilling one of the long-term items that requires them to be handcuffed to each other until Sunday (each year, the list includes a few of these long-term payoff items). Note that there's absolutely no leniancy there; thus, they have to go to the bathroom together, eat together, shower together, et cetera.
The funny thing is, the standard reaction people give when encountering them handcuffed to each other is some variant of "Oh, so, uh, you went and got married?"
-D
Glad that high opinions of matrimony persist in this country.
You're actually completely right, as the word "piracy" is used to refer to the unauthorized printing/reprinting of books fairly early on in the evolution of printed material. One could argue, though, that it was more than a bit loaded as language then.
Soulseek's been down all day, for example, even though I haven't seen any information specifically saying that this new Netsky targets said network (Kazaa and Edonkey are the two that I frequently see cited, as in the linked article). It's an odd choice of target--it's far smaller than Kazaa/FastTrack--but then again, Edonkey's not too high on the usual radar, either. Some bittorrent sites are also especially wobbly today, but that could be coincidence.
.pif" strategy, but someone must be clicking on these things (verizon seems particularly affected, as every other Netsky spam I get seems to be from that domain).
Fascinatingly, I've also been getting absolute tons of emails infected with this variant of Netsky, many of which pretend to have been scanned for viruses and are "clean." This seems particularly lame as an "innovative" get-the-dupes-to-click-on-"document.doc
Ahh well. Hopefully, this particularly-obnoxious variant will be short lived (so we can, of course, begin the cycle anew in a few weeks' time with a new SoBig or...heck, I dunno, Klez? What letter are they up to there?)
...well, I think it's funny.
Not...quite. Actually, most modern scholarship--heck, quite a bit of old scholarship as well, e.g. Gibbons' "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"--seems to support the assertion that the Church-propogated "We were persecuted terribly for hundreds of years" claim is at least somewhat false. True, Christians were persecuted, yet the Romans did not go out of their way to suppress the new sect. Rather, early Christians were animated by an intense hatred for the mortal coil; they believed that a second world existed after this one, and that it was infinitely better. And they weren't subtle about this; Tertullian's "Apology" is half snide-justification, half-attack treatise (and he admits that he digs the idea of those Roman higher-ups who would be boiling in hell any day now).
The early Christians rushed to martyrdom; many were *happy* to die. Why fear death? We were goin' to heaven! The idea of a systematic Roman persecution was likely invented later to give the early Christians an aura of even-greater martyrdom.
And IIRC, the first "canonical" bible we have comes from some time in the 5th century--in other words, after Constantine's conversion. "Selling out" would likely have hit a different aura by that point.
No, "sound fidelity" is still wrong, and hopelessly vague.
Once again: it isn't a 16-bit interpretation. Sampling does not involve taking "pieces" of music and then throwing them back, hoping it's going by too fast for you to hear. Sampling involves getting a collection of samples that, when converted back into analogue, represents the input waveform (up 'til the threshold your current sampling specification allows) almost exactly.
As for digital recording, 24bit is used precisely because DSP is so popular. 24bit does give you a greater dynamic range (although popular music doesn't tend to use it), but it also removes the amount of dithering you have to do on a signal, as you have many extra bits being used for various digital process computations.
Sampling rate is another story entirely. Nyquist states that 44.1kHz should be adequate, but I understand the idea of leaving room for error; consequently, 96kHz is certainly appropriate. Anything higher than that, though, and studies show you're probably actually degrading the signal.
Totally untrue. Vinyl has a *much* lower dynamic range (and a much lower SnR) than does 16bit/44.1kHz PCM.
...if this has anything to do with this leaking to the internet?
(disclaimer: I have no idea if it's real, but if it is...well, it would make a good case for getting the retail version into stores sooner rather than later, I'd think)
"I use only freeware (mostly open source software) to make dvd backups - i suggest you all head on over to Doom9 and learn how to do the same. I don't make money from my backups either."
Irritatingly, while it's perfectly possible to make decent transcoded DVDs using freeware tools, the higher-quality path seems to require a hilarious amount of Very Expensive software at present.
To wit: even if one decides that pirating CCE is an acceptable offense, most of the guides at doom9.org for backing up using re-encoding (higher quality) instead of transcoding (much faster, but lower quality) seem to use Scenarist, which costs something like $30,000.
I'm sure there're other ways to do this process, but so far nobody seems to have elucidated on them for the benefit of those who are less familiar with the nitty gritty of the procedure.
Maybe I just have a skewed experience here, but I recall that while many porn sites are indeed AOK with people sharing their content, some are particularly aggressive with regard to its protection and--failing that--prosecution of violators. In particular, I seem to remember at least a few cases in which Titan Media and other producers of gay pornography went after websites that posted pictures and other exerpts from their exclusive content.
Parts of the porn industry take "piracy" just as seriously as the RIAA and MPAA; a lack of publicizing of the lawsuits, etc. that have resulting might be more of an issue with the underground nature of the subject.
The best way to get rid of Realsched.exe is to let it sit in your startup menu, but replace the actual executable with a fake file *also* called realsched.exe (a blank text file works fine).
This ALSO works for Apple's QTTASK.EXE program that simply won't go away.