Actually, I believe "Screamers" is a much more faithful adaptation of PKD's story "Second Variety" than the other filmed version of the story (better known by the title "The Terminator."
Right now, the Ricoh eCabinet NAS device uses a DVD+RW drive for backup and recovery. I'm surprised this trend hasn't received more attention by journalists who cover the tech industry. Actually, I'm surprised that Ricoh (which also owns the Savin, Gestenter and Lanier brand names) doesn't get more press attention for the innovative technology they've introduced in recent years in the field of multifuntion digital copiers/printers/scanners/fax devices.
Not in the case of the LindowsOS. Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Michael Robertson before the product was even released, citing their ownership of the very name "Windows." The suit was initially dismissed when the judge ruled that "windows" is a generic term for graphical representations of objects on a computer screen that pre-dates Microsoft's use of it, but MS appealed and the case now awaits a further hearing. In the meantime, the LindowsOS is now up to Version 3.0 and apparently doing fairly well in the marketplace, though it is in no way a threat to MSFT. The company could still go out of business if the next hearing fails to end in a judgment in their favor.
I seem to recall seeing an interview with Weird Al on this subject on VH-1. They showed Coolio's press conference slamming Weird Al and denying that they ever gave him permission to parody Gangsta's Paradise. Then they showed Al apologizing to Coolio, and saying that he had contacted Coolio's management for permission to parody the song. While Coolio himself may never have had any knowledge of the arrangement, Al said Coolio didn't have any problem cashing the check they wrote him for the rights to use the melody.
I take comfort in the fact that Weird Al is still popular after all these years and still making great music. Coolio is not just five minutes ago, but more like five years ago, and hasn't released anything of note in at least as long.
Well, as one of those admins who was burned by this fucker, I have a few things to say in my defense. The patch released last July was a bitch to install, and our centralized IT management authority didn't want us to install anything they hadn't thoroughly tested and approved. The recommendation from higher up was to just wait until the service pack was released a few months later. The service pack was finally released on January 17, only eight days before the worm hit us. I had downloaded it and applied it to my test server on my home network, but still hadn't been given the go ahead to install it on the production server at the office. And, of course, this thing hit us at midnight EST on a Friday night before the Super Bowl, so nobody was around to do anything about it until Saturday morning.
As soon as I heard about it on the radio that morning (Thanks to Leo LaPorte), I knew I'd have a very busy weekend, and indeed, I spent several hours on Saturday and Sunday making sure we were back in operation by 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. Not that fixing the thing was all that hard, since SQL2KSP3 did automate most of the configuration changes that would have had to be done manually if I'd used the July 2002 Hotfix, but I did have some nervous hours waiting for things to speed up and identifying MSDE installations on workstations that I wasn't previously unaware of.
When things got back to normal on Monday, I was a hero, and was congratulated for a job well done, rather than being blamed for not keeping my servers patched properly. I guess I don't have to worry about losing my job over this incident, since they probably can't find anyone else who'd be willing to put up with the shit that goes on here. We have only three Admins to support over 400 users, and we have way too much to do even when the network functions normally. I'm the only SQL admin in the office, so it all falls on my shoulders.
And even Pixar is not immune from copyright problems (e.g., Monsters, Inc. has characters and situations lifted entirely from work done by underground cartoonist Stanley Mouse, as referenced in an earlier/. story from the SF Chronicle)
I seem to recall a/. story some years ago (perhaps it was the last time there were rumors that OS/2 was dead) about some high profile speaker at WarpStock (the biggest--or perhaps the only--annual OS/2 conference) pleading with IBM to release OS/2 as open source to save it as a viable platform. My faulty memory seems to associate the name Ralph Nader with this story, but perhaps I should do a search to confirm.
I cut my PC teeth on OS/2 Warp 3 and then upgraded to Warp 4. A friend had helped me build my first computer in 1994 and suggested that the best OS available at the time was OS/2. I bought a used copy for $50 that I saw in a classified ad. I was using DOS and Windows 3.1 at my office, and OS/2 was just so far advanced compared to those braindead systems that I was an instant convert. Before I knew it, my friend and I were co-sysops of a popular BBS running on OS/2, I was publishing both a print and electronic newsletter on the machine and having a blast.
When my office lost its Network Admin, I took over the job and had to learn NetWare and Windows NT 3.51 on the server side, then we upgraded our PC workstations to Win95 and I had to learn that as well. I began using OS/2 less and less, the BBS faded into obscurity as the internet took over, and my home network had to evolve into something that resembled a standard office enviornment, which doesn't often include OS/2. Since then, I've had to grow myself into NT 4.0 and Win2K, Mac OS 8.x, 9.x and X.x and I now use Linux at home as well (Caldera 2.3, SuSE, RedHat 7.3 and 8.0).
It is amazing how much OS/2 technology you can still see under the NT desktop (the NTFS file system is a clever clone of OS/2's HPFS), but I haven't used it in several years. I sold my Warp 3 box at a garage sale, but I still have my Warp 4 package. I still see OS/2 for sale on eBay and IBM was still selling it up until the end of 2002, so you can still buy it if you know where to look.
Government regulation has almost always done more harm than good, and de-regulation of formerly regulated industries has almost always done more good than harm. If you're posting on slashdot, you've already demonstrated a level of competence with a computer greater than that of most average users. Do you think you need a government regulatory agency run by political flunkies to certify that you know how to install an OS and troubleshoot an IRQ conflict?
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I work for a government regulatory office, and the last thing I'd want to see in the computer industry is a bureacracy like mine interfering in private enterprise. We have managers and executives here making $100,000 a year who really do very little beyond pushing paper around and signing their names to requisitions.
Honestly, has the Bureau of Automotive Repair ever done anything to curb abuses in the car repair business? Why do we need the Bureau of Consumer Affairs to "certify" hairdressers? Government Bureacracies feed on themselves and always grow continuously beyond their limits, regardless of whether they are necessary to protect the public safety. Your tax dollars are wasted on these ridiculous entities. I speak from experience.
Not necessarily so. The political system is already rigged by the incumbent party just as much as Sony rigs EQ. And the McCain-Fiengold Campaign Finance Reform Act is more properly called the 2002 Incumbent Protection Act.
I speak from experience, as a Libertarian candidate for the state assembly (California) and longtime Libertarian Party activist. Republicans and Democrats put it to the taxpayers just as hard and as often as Sony buggers the EverQuest citizens.
Uh, no. Max Headroom was originally produced for British TV, either by BBC or Channel 4. The stateside version may have done production in Canada for financial reasons, though.
Clinton only called himself a "libertarian" when it came to allowing gays in the military. And apparently, he was lying about that! Give me an example of anything he said that didn't later turn out to be an outright lie.
True Libertarians are working with the ACLU and the EFF to fight this kind of thing.
No, he was not pardoned. Caspar Weinberger was convicted of some of the same crimes, but George H.W. Bush pardoned *him*. John Poindexter was never pardoned; he was just able to get some of his convictions overturned on appeal. That does not mean he's not a criminal. He WAS CONVICTED of FIVE FELONIES.
There are two different businesses and technologies here. DirecTVDSL is a regular DSL provider that uses the telephone lines, just as all the others do. Has nothing to do with owning a DirecTV dish or satellite TV service. They used to be Telocity DSL. Telocity filed for Chapter 11 just before Rhythms DSL did. DirecTV bought Telocity's customers and assets and thought they could keep it going and make it profitable. Too bad it didn't work.
DirecWay (aka DirecPC, IIRC) is the Satellite broadband service also offered by DirecTV, but this does require a Satellite dish and a dual LNB connection on the dish (or two separate dishes). One lead goes to your satellite receiver, the other goes to your PC. But this service is severely asynchronous. You only get high speed data throughput downstream. There is no upstream channel. If you wanted an upstream path, you had to have a regular dial-up modem and an independent ISP (or a different broadband service).
I investigated all of these alternatives when I was shopping around for broadband, and while DirecPC sounded good from a price perspective, when you added on the cost of maintaining your dial-up service, it didn't make sense if you had regular DSL or cable modem available. Since DSL wasn't available in my area, I was left with @Home or DirecPC. I went with @Home (later went bankrupt; now I've got AT&T Broadband, which will be raising their rates in January 2003).
As an NRA member, you've probably already gotten information on John Lott's study published in 2000 entitled "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws." He tries to be as unbiased as possible, but he uses statistics very effectively and lets the numbers speak for themeselves. In states where "concealed carry" laws exist, gun violence is dramatically lower. His assumption is that in such states where citizens can and do carry concealed firearms, an armed criminal is less likely to risk his own life by assaulting a potentially armed victim or breaking into a residence where a gun might be used against him. The numbers gleaned from police reports suggest that in many cases, just revealing a previously concealed weapon was enough to discourage attacks without even a single warning shot being fired. While the NRA may grumble about gun registration laws, the statistics that such laws allow us to compile provide lots of ammunition, er, I mean, data to support the NRA's positions. Just by doing a state-by-state comparison of the numbers of registered gun owners with the numbers of crimes in which guns were used by criminals in those states indicates pretty convincingly that when you have more private gun owners, you have less gun violence. Don't take my word for it. Check out the book and draw your own conclusions. I think it comes closest to answering your query about an "unbiased" analysis of this issue.
For a completely realized world that has a unique ecology, culture and history, try Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Winter and Helliconia Summer). These three novels comprise his longest single work, and are remarkable for many reasons. He has written many influential books and stories (and essays, for that matter), but these three stand out in my mind as being worthy of listing here alongside all the praises for Dune, the Foundation series and Heinleins Future History series.
I guess you've never attended a Libertarian Party Convention... You'd be surprised at how many super-proficient women (and men) you can meet there. Some of whom dress provocatively, and some of whom dress rather conservatively. It's the biggest political tent there is. Live and Let Live.
Microsoft's mandatory SEC 10-Q form was filed earlier this month and is available at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/0001 03221002001614/d10q.htm. The figures indicate that they're bleeding cash from a lot of their products (Xbox is seeing some staggering losses that would bankrupt any other company, but that's kind of what everyone expected), but their other divisions are so profitable that it doesn't matter. Again, they have so much available to them in cash reserves alone, they could purchase and run a money-losing business like United Airlines for years before having to think about running out of money.
As described in Michael Robertson's most recent "Michael's Minute" newsletter (available to LindowsOS early adopters) which addressed this very topic, he comments that the antitrust settlement applies to only the top 20 OEMs. This includes Dell, Gateway, Micron, HP-Compaq, etc. Yet the vast majority of OEMs are beige box mom and pop clone builders, and they are not subject to these pricing provisions. Robertson suggests that if more of these OEMs sign up to be LindowsOS distributors (at a cost of $500/month), then they would probably also be eligible for the 50% discount on Microsoft OEM licenses. The selling point is that for $500/mo., you can sell an unlimited number of LindowsOS machines plus as many WindowsXP boxes as you can sell at half of what WinXP is costing you now.
Excuse me, but did you even read the article? Have you read any of the Janis Ian articles that have popped up on/. in the past nine months? Janis IS making money. Janis IS selling records. PEOPLE ARE BUYING HER CDs because they can do so right from her website. She is promoting herself because the labels are not. Their reasons for not promoting her work are that she is no longer the million selling folk artist that she was in the 70's, so it's not worth their effort to spend $1 million to push her product to a niche market, but that doesn't mean the niche market doesn't exist or that people don't want to hear or purchase her work. She mentioned that she has moved 100,000 copies of her last CD and that her CD sales have tripled since she began offering free MP3 downloads from her site. The least you could do would be to read the USA TOday link before posting such crap.
Already done. I was at a record store over the weekend and checked out their music DVD section. I was particularly interested in two choices. One was Judas Priest's British Steel DVD, which contains the entire album, live concert footage from the tour that promoted it, all the videos from the album and interviews with the band. The other was a Rammstein DVD that included video of an entire concert, all the videos from the songs included, interviews with the band members, and English, French and Spanish subtitles (essential for me, since none of the band speaks English and all their lyrics are in German). Both of these DVDs were priced at $17.95, which was just about the same price as the CDs of the associated records.
Ya know, if you really were serious about having an opinion on the Hugos, there's nothing stopping you from casting your own vote. Anyone who reads books can vote. Make an effort before you cast offal on the people who made the decision.
I really appreciate this kind of input. Ever since this thread began, I've been pondering how it affects me, as a sysadmin for a state health department. Our information security office has a dead link on its intranet page to HIPAA information, indicating that the page is still under development, but they have been of no help at all in explaining how I am to ensure HIPAA compliance for my servers. All of their published policies are really directed toward the end users. They have not provided any security guidelines for the network administration group, except to let us know that we will have to begin maintaining our security audit logs for as long as seven years, instead of overwriting these logs every few months. We don't even have an encryption policy in place, even though we store gigabytes of confidential data on servers scattered all over the state.
My concern over SP3 is that, as the likely scapegoat, and the one who clicks on the "I Agree" radio button in the EULA (when the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer recommends I update the SP on my Win2K servers), I may be liable for the criminal penalties mandated by HIPAA in the event some of this data is compromised, whether it is by Microsoft or some other entity. Other IT staff in my state are already worried about their jobs after our civil service personnel records were hacked last spring and all state employees social security numbers, birthdates and other vital info was scanned and possibly copied by unknown parties. If data on these Pre-SP3 Windows servers can be compromised (residing behind the same kind of firewall that supposedly protects my data center), what assurance do I have that my data is safe?
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Actually, I believe "Screamers" is a much more faithful adaptation of PKD's story "Second Variety" than the other filmed version of the story (better known by the title "The Terminator."
Right now, the Ricoh eCabinet NAS device uses a DVD+RW drive for backup and recovery. I'm surprised this trend hasn't received more attention by journalists who cover the tech industry. Actually, I'm surprised that Ricoh (which also owns the Savin, Gestenter and Lanier brand names) doesn't get more press attention for the innovative technology they've introduced in recent years in the field of multifuntion digital copiers/printers/scanners/fax devices.
Not in the case of the LindowsOS. Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Michael Robertson before the product was even released, citing their ownership of the very name "Windows." The suit was initially dismissed when the judge ruled that "windows" is a generic term for graphical representations of objects on a computer screen that pre-dates Microsoft's use of it, but MS appealed and the case now awaits a further hearing. In the meantime, the LindowsOS is now up to Version 3.0 and apparently doing fairly well in the marketplace, though it is in no way a threat to MSFT. The company could still go out of business if the next hearing fails to end in a judgment in their favor.
I seem to recall seeing an interview with Weird Al on this subject on VH-1. They showed Coolio's press conference slamming Weird Al and denying that they ever gave him permission to parody Gangsta's Paradise. Then they showed Al apologizing to Coolio, and saying that he had contacted Coolio's management for permission to parody the song. While Coolio himself may never have had any knowledge of the arrangement, Al said Coolio didn't have any problem cashing the check they wrote him for the rights to use the melody.
I take comfort in the fact that Weird Al is still popular after all these years and still making great music. Coolio is not just five minutes ago, but more like five years ago, and hasn't released anything of note in at least as long.
Well, as one of those admins who was burned by this fucker, I have a few things to say in my defense. The patch released last July was a bitch to install, and our centralized IT management authority didn't want us to install anything they hadn't thoroughly tested and approved. The recommendation from higher up was to just wait until the service pack was released a few months later. The service pack was finally released on January 17, only eight days before the worm hit us. I had downloaded it and applied it to my test server on my home network, but still hadn't been given the go ahead to install it on the production server at the office. And, of course, this thing hit us at midnight EST on a Friday night before the Super Bowl, so nobody was around to do anything about it until Saturday morning.
As soon as I heard about it on the radio that morning (Thanks to Leo LaPorte), I knew I'd have a very busy weekend, and indeed, I spent several hours on Saturday and Sunday making sure we were back in operation by 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. Not that fixing the thing was all that hard, since SQL2KSP3 did automate most of the configuration changes that would have had to be done manually if I'd used the July 2002 Hotfix, but I did have some nervous hours waiting for things to speed up and identifying MSDE installations on workstations that I wasn't previously unaware of.
When things got back to normal on Monday, I was a hero, and was congratulated for a job well done, rather than being blamed for not keeping my servers patched properly. I guess I don't have to worry about losing my job over this incident, since they probably can't find anyone else who'd be willing to put up with the shit that goes on here. We have only three Admins to support over 400 users, and we have way too much to do even when the network functions normally. I'm the only SQL admin in the office, so it all falls on my shoulders.
And even Pixar is not immune from copyright problems (e.g., Monsters, Inc. has characters and situations lifted entirely from work done by underground cartoonist Stanley Mouse, as referenced in an earlier /. story from the SF Chronicle)
Yep, here it is: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/06/08/213122 7&mode=thread&tid=136/
It actually WAS Ralph Nader!
I seem to recall a /. story some years ago (perhaps it was the last time there were rumors that OS/2 was dead) about some high profile speaker at WarpStock (the biggest--or perhaps the only--annual OS/2 conference) pleading with IBM to release OS/2 as open source to save it as a viable platform. My faulty memory seems to associate the name Ralph Nader with this story, but perhaps I should do a search to confirm.
I cut my PC teeth on OS/2 Warp 3 and then upgraded to Warp 4. A friend had helped me build my first computer in 1994 and suggested that the best OS available at the time was OS/2. I bought a used copy for $50 that I saw in a classified ad. I was using DOS and Windows 3.1 at my office, and OS/2 was just so far advanced compared to those braindead systems that I was an instant convert. Before I knew it, my friend and I were co-sysops of a popular BBS running on OS/2, I was publishing both a print and electronic newsletter on the machine and having a blast.
When my office lost its Network Admin, I took over the job and had to learn NetWare and Windows NT 3.51 on the server side, then we upgraded our PC workstations to Win95 and I had to learn that as well. I began using OS/2 less and less, the BBS faded into obscurity as the internet took over, and my home network had to evolve into something that resembled a standard office enviornment, which doesn't often include OS/2. Since then, I've had to grow myself into NT 4.0 and Win2K, Mac OS 8.x, 9.x and X.x and I now use Linux at home as well (Caldera 2.3, SuSE, RedHat 7.3 and 8.0).
It is amazing how much OS/2 technology you can still see under the NT desktop (the NTFS file system is a clever clone of OS/2's HPFS), but I haven't used it in several years. I sold my Warp 3 box at a garage sale, but I still have my Warp 4 package. I still see OS/2 for sale on eBay and IBM was still selling it up until the end of 2002, so you can still buy it if you know where to look.
Government regulation has almost always done more harm than good, and de-regulation of formerly regulated industries has almost always done more good than harm. If you're posting on slashdot, you've already demonstrated a level of competence with a computer greater than that of most average users. Do you think you need a government regulatory agency run by political flunkies to certify that you know how to install an OS and troubleshoot an IRQ conflict?
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I work for a government regulatory office, and the last thing I'd want to see in the computer industry is a bureacracy like mine interfering in private enterprise. We have managers and executives here making $100,000 a year who really do very little beyond pushing paper around and signing their names to requisitions.
Honestly, has the Bureau of Automotive Repair ever done anything to curb abuses in the car repair business? Why do we need the Bureau of Consumer Affairs to "certify" hairdressers? Government Bureacracies feed on themselves and always grow continuously beyond their limits, regardless of whether they are necessary to protect the public safety. Your tax dollars are wasted on these ridiculous entities. I speak from experience.
Not necessarily so. The political system is already rigged by the incumbent party just as much as Sony rigs EQ. And the McCain-Fiengold Campaign Finance Reform Act is more properly called the 2002 Incumbent Protection Act.
I speak from experience, as a Libertarian candidate for the state assembly (California) and longtime Libertarian Party activist. Republicans and Democrats put it to the taxpayers just as hard and as often as Sony buggers the EverQuest citizens.
Uh, no. Max Headroom was originally produced for British TV, either by BBC or Channel 4. The stateside version may have done production in Canada for financial reasons, though.
Clinton only called himself a "libertarian" when it came to allowing gays in the military. And apparently, he was lying about that! Give me an example of anything he said that didn't later turn out to be an outright lie.
True Libertarians are working with the ACLU and the EFF to fight this kind of thing.
No, he was not pardoned. Caspar Weinberger was convicted of some of the same crimes, but George H.W. Bush pardoned *him*. John Poindexter was never pardoned; he was just able to get some of his convictions overturned on appeal. That does not mean he's not a criminal. He WAS CONVICTED of FIVE FELONIES.
There are two different businesses and technologies here. DirecTVDSL is a regular DSL provider that uses the telephone lines, just as all the others do. Has nothing to do with owning a DirecTV dish or satellite TV service. They used to be Telocity DSL. Telocity filed for Chapter 11 just before Rhythms DSL did. DirecTV bought Telocity's customers and assets and thought they could keep it going and make it profitable. Too bad it didn't work.
DirecWay (aka DirecPC, IIRC) is the Satellite broadband service also offered by DirecTV, but this does require a Satellite dish and a dual LNB connection on the dish (or two separate dishes). One lead goes to your satellite receiver, the other goes to your PC. But this service is severely asynchronous. You only get high speed data throughput downstream. There is no upstream channel. If you wanted an upstream path, you had to have a regular dial-up modem and an independent ISP (or a different broadband service).
I investigated all of these alternatives when I was shopping around for broadband, and while DirecPC sounded good from a price perspective, when you added on the cost of maintaining your dial-up service, it didn't make sense if you had regular DSL or cable modem available. Since DSL wasn't available in my area, I was left with @Home or DirecPC. I went with @Home (later went bankrupt; now I've got AT&T Broadband, which will be raising their rates in January 2003).
As an NRA member, you've probably already gotten information on John Lott's study published in 2000 entitled "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws." He tries to be as unbiased as possible, but he uses statistics very effectively and lets the numbers speak for themeselves. In states where "concealed carry" laws exist, gun violence is dramatically lower. His assumption is that in such states where citizens can and do carry concealed firearms, an armed criminal is less likely to risk his own life by assaulting a potentially armed victim or breaking into a residence where a gun might be used against him. The numbers gleaned from police reports suggest that in many cases, just revealing a previously concealed weapon was enough to discourage attacks without even a single warning shot being fired. While the NRA may grumble about gun registration laws, the statistics that such laws allow us to compile provide lots of ammunition, er, I mean, data to support the NRA's positions. Just by doing a state-by-state comparison of the numbers of registered gun owners with the numbers of crimes in which guns were used by criminals in those states indicates pretty convincingly that when you have more private gun owners, you have less gun violence.
Don't take my word for it. Check out the book and draw your own conclusions. I think it comes closest to answering your query about an "unbiased" analysis of this issue.
For a completely realized world that has a unique ecology, culture and history, try Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Winter and Helliconia Summer). These three novels comprise his longest single work, and are remarkable for many reasons. He has written many influential books and stories (and essays, for that matter), but these three stand out in my mind as being worthy of listing here alongside all the praises for Dune, the Foundation series and Heinleins Future History series.
I guess you've never attended a Libertarian Party Convention... You'd be surprised at how many super-proficient women (and men) you can meet there. Some of whom dress provocatively, and some of whom dress rather conservatively. It's the biggest political tent there is. Live and Let Live.
Microsoft's mandatory SEC 10-Q form was filed earlier this month and is available at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/0001 03221002001614/d10q.htm. The figures indicate that they're bleeding cash from a lot of their products (Xbox is seeing some staggering losses that would bankrupt any other company, but that's kind of what everyone expected), but their other divisions are so profitable that it doesn't matter. Again, they have so much available to them in cash reserves alone, they could purchase and run a money-losing business like United Airlines for years before having to think about running out of money.
As described in Michael Robertson's most recent "Michael's Minute" newsletter (available to LindowsOS early adopters) which addressed this very topic, he comments that the antitrust settlement applies to only the top 20 OEMs. This includes Dell, Gateway, Micron, HP-Compaq, etc. Yet the vast majority of OEMs are beige box mom and pop clone builders, and they are not subject to these pricing provisions. Robertson suggests that if more of these OEMs sign up to be LindowsOS distributors (at a cost of $500/month), then they would probably also be eligible for the 50% discount on Microsoft OEM licenses. The selling point is that for $500/mo., you can sell an unlimited number of LindowsOS machines plus as many WindowsXP boxes as you can sell at half of what WinXP is costing you now.
Excuse me, but did you even read the article? Have you read any of the Janis Ian articles that have popped up on /. in the past nine months? Janis IS making money. Janis IS selling records. PEOPLE ARE BUYING HER CDs because they can do so right from her website. She is promoting herself because the labels are not. Their reasons for not promoting her work are that she is no longer the million selling folk artist that she was in the 70's, so it's not worth their effort to spend $1 million to push her product to a niche market, but that doesn't mean the niche market doesn't exist or that people don't want to hear or purchase her work. She mentioned that she has moved 100,000 copies of her last CD and that her CD sales have tripled since she began offering free MP3 downloads from her site. The least you could do would be to read the USA TOday link before posting such crap.
Already done. I was at a record store over the weekend and checked out their music DVD section. I was particularly interested in two choices. One was Judas Priest's British Steel DVD, which contains the entire album, live concert footage from the tour that promoted it, all the videos from the album and interviews with the band. The other was a Rammstein DVD that included video of an entire concert, all the videos from the songs included, interviews with the band members, and English, French and Spanish subtitles (essential for me, since none of the band speaks English and all their lyrics are in German). Both of these DVDs were priced at $17.95, which was just about the same price as the CDs of the associated records.
Check out her website. She's won multiple Grammy awards for other songs besides "At 17" (though that is the one I remember better than most others).
Ya know, if you really were serious about having an opinion on the Hugos, there's nothing stopping you from casting your own vote. Anyone who reads books can vote. Make an effort before you cast offal on the people who made the decision.
I really appreciate this kind of input. Ever since this thread began, I've been pondering how it affects me, as a sysadmin for a state health department. Our information security office has a dead link on its intranet page to HIPAA information, indicating that the page is still under development, but they have been of no help at all in explaining how I am to ensure HIPAA compliance for my servers. All of their published policies are really directed toward the end users. They have not provided any security guidelines for the network administration group, except to let us know that we will have to begin maintaining our security audit logs for as long as seven years, instead of overwriting these logs every few months. We don't even have an encryption policy in place, even though we store gigabytes of confidential data on servers scattered all over the state.
My concern over SP3 is that, as the likely scapegoat, and the one who clicks on the "I Agree" radio button in the EULA (when the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer recommends I update the SP on my Win2K servers), I may be liable for the criminal penalties mandated by HIPAA in the event some of this data is compromised, whether it is by Microsoft or some other entity. Other IT staff in my state are already worried about their jobs after our civil service personnel records were hacked last spring and all state employees social security numbers, birthdates and other vital info was scanned and possibly copied by unknown parties. If data on these Pre-SP3 Windows servers can be compromised (residing behind the same kind of firewall that supposedly protects my data center), what assurance do I have that my data is safe?