I bet they're sort of flailing around because they haven't been able to sell any albums. I remember putting my legally bought and paid for St. Anger CD into my computer to listen to it and finding what came out of my speakers a far greater insult than shutting down a system designed to spread copyrighted material.
Rather than spend time working on songs we might actually want to listen to, they'll go around making useless changes to their business model while ignoring the fact that they don't have a product fans want to buy.
Gabriel says it's not accurate to say the RIAA dropped its suit for lack of evidence. He says the user name Gotenkito may have been inspired by Kylee, since she admitted she liked Dragon Ball Z, a Japanese anime TV series that has a character with a similar name. He also says Andersen said in her deposition that she knew or listened to some of the country and rock artists whose songs were offered for download.
If you take a far enough stretch, you can 'prove' anything.
Hey, anyone here ever heard of Bon Jovi? THERE! PROOF YOU'RE A THIEF!
Hey, is your kid a fan of a wildly popular TV show? THERE! THE COMPLETELY UNRELATED GUY'S USERNAME WAS VAGUELY JAPANESE! PROOF POSITIVE YOU'RE A THIEF!
Hey, RIAA member companies brought Rammstein, a german band, to prominence. Hitler was German. THERE! PROOF POSITIVE THAT THE RIAA HELPED RUN NAZI DEATH CAMPS!
Engineers can understand other engineers pretty well, but oddly enough, whenever I take a writing seminar, they say things like "If you fail to communicate to your audience, you're not effectively communicating".
It'd be nice if engineers could just complain and demand supplication like women do. "I shouldn't have to explain what I'm talking about, you just don't get it but you should!!"
Rule 1: Never assume that someone who is working is sending legitimate signals.
She was just trying to flirt to get better tips.
Rule 2: Never take any indicators of interest from someone you've just met seriously.
If it's not a false indicator meant to get better tips, early indicators only say you're not hideously ugly or ungroomed. It's what happens afterwards that decides the outcome.
I'd say the toothless legal attacks against government officials in recent years, as well as the blatantly illegal orders given by the president with absolutely no punishment, show that the third box fails by default.
As a none(sic) resident of the USA I feel quite justified in saying you can take your laws and shove them up your arse.
*ahem* sorry, but the summary just forced me to say that.
The evening of 9/10/01, I fell asleep reading about Dimitri Skylarov being charged by Adobe under the new Digital Millenium Copyright act for writing a program that allowed blind people to read Acrobat files by removing the files rot13 'encryption'. That morning
And you know what? Next time someone gets fed up with it and runs a plane into American buildings, they'll be out YET AGAIN whining "Oh, why do people hate us? We're the good guys!".
And before anyone pulls out the "Oh, don't compare copyright to terrorism!", remember that it was US bombs exploding over another sovereign nation's soil that inspired Osama bin Laden to bring down the twin towers. Remember that it was America who removed the democratic government from Iran 60 years ago and replaced it with it's current theocracy. Remember it was America who supported the rise of the aliban in Afghanistan. Remember it was Americans who installed Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
All I'm saying is, maybe if Americans respected other nation's sovereignty once in a while, maybe they wouldn't be losing trillions fighting wars against their former allies all the time?
Be fair. The battery life on the ol' Tungsten isn't exactly astronomical.
I've got an E2, and I figured it'd be the be-all end-all, letting me do anything I wanted with it, removing the need for an iPod, an eBook reader, a Nintendo DS, and a thousand other little devices, but the thing is, most of those devices run for 20 hours on a charge, but the Palm, while very shiny, and very useful for a good number of functions, doesn't come close to that in terms of holding a charge -- plus, when one of my devices runs out of juice, I can use another one, where with the Palm, I'm stuck on an 8 hour trip with 4 hours of watching alfalfa roll by.
You missed a major point. In the game, you're the illegitimate child of the person who created the vita-chambers, thus one of a small handful of people who gain effective immortality through them. This, along with your brainwashing, makes you a literally unstoppable killing machine.
Would you kindly play through the game again and pay more attention to the plot?
I managed to learn wings-3d in an afternoon. It may not be the most powerful app on the planet, but it proved to me that the problem wasn't me "wrapping my head around 3d", it was that the editors I used before it were unintuitive as hell.
Which is to say, it's as intuitive as driving a car entirely using your tongue. A car with a manual transmission.
Just hit 'b', then 'x', then 'shift-r', then 'ctrl-alt-enter', and you'll finally do what a sane UI could've done in three mouse clicks!
God, I spent days learning the UI, and once I knew it, I knew it was shit. It's the sort of UI that I designed for my first editor application, and it only took a few months using it before I realised that leaving all the key functions hidden behind keyboard shortcuts without any way to get at them with the mouse is really pathologically stupid.
If you want to talk about a well designed keyboard+mouse UI design, I'm all about autoCAD. You don't need to memorise anything to do the job, but when you do, you'll start getting stuff done even quicker than you did before(And if you forget a command, you can still press the button).
I'm sure you wrote something brilliant in your comment, but when I see something like that, how can I assume anything other than that you are a first class moron?
So people can still drive around in Cadillacs paying pennies for gas, live in homes that a human being can pay off within their lifetime, and you can use the same 50 cents you could buy a magazine with to buy a magazine today?
Are you aware that the average household savings in the US has dropped to levels we haven't seen since 1924? Are you aware that a quarter of your tax dollars go directly to China and other nations holding US debt, and that percentage increases every year because of the skyrocketing federal debt? Are you aware that the US dollar has reached lows not seen for 25 years in some markets, which will hurt US consumers because you import all your goods from China?
I'm actually from a country that came close to having serious issues because of our debt. The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada ran the federal debt up to 500 billion from around 200 billion, and the high interest rates of the '80s hit us HARD. The next government started paying down debt through aggressive budget cuts, and in the past 10 years we've paid back about 100 billion of our debt.
This is just the fundamentals here. "If you jam down your accelerator, eventually you'll surpass the speed limit.", and you're sitting here saying "But we're not surpassing the speed limit yet, and you've been saying that ever since we were stopped!"
Think about it like a household. If you ran up debt, ran up debt, continued to run up debt year after year, if you were in the red hundreds or thousands or millions of dollars every year, and instead of paying down any debts, you just took out more, what would happen? It wouldn't happen right away, it wouldn't happen for years, maybe decades. Eventually though, you'd reach a point where you're absolutely fucked.
It's pretty ignorant of you to say "It hasn't happened yet so it'll never happen" when we're just talking about basic mathematics. Either the US will have to stop deficit spending, massively cutting spending and increasing taxes, or they'll keep on deficit spending until the country's finances reach a critical mass where the country won't have the liquidity to pay for debt maintenance. The amount of money the US can take in through taxes is limited to a relatively small amount compared to the debt, and increases in debt increase the maintenance, so every year there are fewer and fewer tax dollars available to actually do things, so it's only a matter of time.
Ok, I understand now. Honestly though, judging from what I've heard about Chinese schools, I think you're safe. They're all about quotas up there, churning out X number of people with pieces of paper, not skills. That's fine for communist China, but India has to compete on the global market, so I'd assume the schools are far more skills oriented than Chinese schools.
If I ever find a video or audio file that VLC doesn't play, I'll accept that it's not perfect. As things stand, I can't play dick-all on Windows Media Player, haven't been able to get it to play a video file for ages, but VLC will play anything I load.
Aw great. More chowderheads complaining about complaining.
You know, I come to Slashdot hoping to read about the latest tech news, and all I get to hear are a bunch of slackers complaining about all the bitching going on.
If you were in a technical class, did you bother standing up and telling him that you're not paying him to soliloquise about the state of international markets?
Just asking. I know where I went to school, we didn't have any sermonizing in our classrooms, and it's always amazing to me that Americans seem to.
US GDP is pretty badly skewed by the massive amounts of debt created by the US government.
Take into consideration that when a bank has a dollar in savings, it can lend someone some ridiculous amount like 250, and you'll realise that the 500 billion dollars a year Americans borrow leads to some serious green moving around the economy in a very bad way.
I wouldn't be surprised if some country out there, especially one like China, who holds tonnes of US debt, could get some amazing growth very quickly. After all, the US gained it's power by industrialization in the world wars. They became the largest arms dealer in the world, and while countries like Britain became debt ridden, the US became the largest debtor.
Personally, given the circumstances, I'd say the US is entering the perfect storm leading to it's own demise.
In the days before travel between cities became safe, you could hire some rough looking thugs to protect against bandits.
Personally, I feel it's best not to have a society which requires you to hire rough looking thugs in the first place, than to say "Well, the thugs you can hire are better than the thugs who attack you!".
Nice. 3 seconds of thinking to realise that this post might -- JUST MIGHT be intended as a humorous jab at slashdot 'urban legends', and the mod uses 2.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Well, in order to buy one euro worth of oil, you'll have to buy one euro. This means that when the euro goes up, the US dollar cost of oil increases by that amount. When the euro goes down, US dollar cost oil decreases by that.
It's fine when the US dollar is doing well, but when the US dollar does poorly, it takes a lot of money to buy something.
You'll find this out first hand if you're American. your dollar is doing VERY poorly, you're going to start seeing your cheap imported goods getting very expensive soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet they're sort of flailing around because they haven't been able to sell any albums. I remember putting my legally bought and paid for St. Anger CD into my computer to listen to it and finding what came out of my speakers a far greater insult than shutting down a system designed to spread copyrighted material.
Rather than spend time working on songs we might actually want to listen to, they'll go around making useless changes to their business model while ignoring the fact that they don't have a product fans want to buy.
Gabriel says it's not accurate to say the RIAA dropped its suit for lack of evidence. He says the user name Gotenkito may have been inspired by Kylee, since she admitted she liked Dragon Ball Z, a Japanese anime TV series that has a character with a similar name. He also says Andersen said in her deposition that she knew or listened to some of the country and rock artists whose songs were offered for download.
If you take a far enough stretch, you can 'prove' anything.
Hey, anyone here ever heard of Bon Jovi? THERE! PROOF YOU'RE A THIEF!
Hey, is your kid a fan of a wildly popular TV show? THERE! THE COMPLETELY UNRELATED GUY'S USERNAME WAS VAGUELY JAPANESE! PROOF POSITIVE YOU'RE A THIEF!
Hey, RIAA member companies brought Rammstein, a german band, to prominence. Hitler was German. THERE! PROOF POSITIVE THAT THE RIAA HELPED RUN NAZI DEATH CAMPS!
I'm going to patent a method for going to the store by using the road and a motor vehicle.
(Seriously, since when can you patent what amounts to maps?)
2-3 years? Are you high on smack?
If we didn't have a nuke within 6 months of the need arising, I'd become an expat in shame.
Engineers can understand other engineers pretty well, but oddly enough, whenever I take a writing seminar, they say things like "If you fail to communicate to your audience, you're not effectively communicating".
It'd be nice if engineers could just complain and demand supplication like women do. "I shouldn't have to explain what I'm talking about, you just don't get it but you should!!"
Rule 1: Never assume that someone who is working is sending legitimate signals.
She was just trying to flirt to get better tips.
Rule 2: Never take any indicators of interest from someone you've just met seriously.
If it's not a false indicator meant to get better tips, early indicators only say you're not hideously ugly or ungroomed. It's what happens afterwards that decides the outcome.
Feel free, but do me a favour and fix my typos. :)
I'd say the toothless legal attacks against government officials in recent years, as well as the blatantly illegal orders given by the president with absolutely no punishment, show that the third box fails by default.
As a none(sic) resident of the USA
I feel quite justified in saying you can take your laws and shove them up your arse.
*ahem* sorry, but the summary just forced me to say that.
The evening of 9/10/01, I fell asleep reading about Dimitri Skylarov being charged by Adobe under the new Digital Millenium Copyright act for writing a program that allowed blind people to read Acrobat files by removing the files rot13 'encryption'. That morning
And you know what? Next time someone gets fed up with it and runs a plane into American buildings, they'll be out YET AGAIN whining "Oh, why do people hate us? We're the good guys!".
And before anyone pulls out the "Oh, don't compare copyright to terrorism!", remember that it was US bombs exploding over another sovereign nation's soil that inspired Osama bin Laden to bring down the twin towers. Remember that it was America who removed the democratic government from Iran 60 years ago and replaced it with it's current theocracy. Remember it was America who supported the rise of the aliban in Afghanistan. Remember it was Americans who installed Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
All I'm saying is, maybe if Americans respected other nation's sovereignty once in a while, maybe they wouldn't be losing trillions fighting wars against their former allies all the time?
Be fair. The battery life on the ol' Tungsten isn't exactly astronomical.
I've got an E2, and I figured it'd be the be-all end-all, letting me do anything I wanted with it, removing the need for an iPod, an eBook reader, a Nintendo DS, and a thousand other little devices, but the thing is, most of those devices run for 20 hours on a charge, but the Palm, while very shiny, and very useful for a good number of functions, doesn't come close to that in terms of holding a charge -- plus, when one of my devices runs out of juice, I can use another one, where with the Palm, I'm stuck on an 8 hour trip with 4 hours of watching alfalfa roll by.
You missed a major point. In the game, you're the illegitimate child of the person who created the vita-chambers, thus one of a small handful of people who gain effective immortality through them. This, along with your brainwashing, makes you a literally unstoppable killing machine.
Would you kindly play through the game again and pay more attention to the plot?
I managed to learn wings-3d in an afternoon. It may not be the most powerful app on the planet, but it proved to me that the problem wasn't me "wrapping my head around 3d", it was that the editors I used before it were unintuitive as hell.
Blender is as intuitive as Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Which is to say, it's as intuitive as driving a car entirely using your tongue. A car with a manual transmission.
Just hit 'b', then 'x', then 'shift-r', then 'ctrl-alt-enter', and you'll finally do what a sane UI could've done in three mouse clicks!
God, I spent days learning the UI, and once I knew it, I knew it was shit. It's the sort of UI that I designed for my first editor application, and it only took a few months using it before I realised that leaving all the key functions hidden behind keyboard shortcuts without any way to get at them with the mouse is really pathologically stupid.
If you want to talk about a well designed keyboard+mouse UI design, I'm all about autoCAD. You don't need to memorise anything to do the job, but when you do, you'll start getting stuff done even quicker than you did before(And if you forget a command, you can still press the button).
Never heard of Fractional Reserve Banking, eh?
How a bank can lend more than it has
I'm sure you wrote something brilliant in your comment, but when I see something like that, how can I assume anything other than that you are a first class moron?
So people can still drive around in Cadillacs paying pennies for gas, live in homes that a human being can pay off within their lifetime, and you can use the same 50 cents you could buy a magazine with to buy a magazine today?
Are you aware that the average household savings in the US has dropped to levels we haven't seen since 1924? Are you aware that a quarter of your tax dollars go directly to China and other nations holding US debt, and that percentage increases every year because of the skyrocketing federal debt? Are you aware that the US dollar has reached lows not seen for 25 years in some markets, which will hurt US consumers because you import all your goods from China?
I'm actually from a country that came close to having serious issues because of our debt. The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada ran the federal debt up to 500 billion from around 200 billion, and the high interest rates of the '80s hit us HARD. The next government started paying down debt through aggressive budget cuts, and in the past 10 years we've paid back about 100 billion of our debt.
This is just the fundamentals here. "If you jam down your accelerator, eventually you'll surpass the speed limit.", and you're sitting here saying "But we're not surpassing the speed limit yet, and you've been saying that ever since we were stopped!"
Think about it like a household. If you ran up debt, ran up debt, continued to run up debt year after year, if you were in the red hundreds or thousands or millions of dollars every year, and instead of paying down any debts, you just took out more, what would happen? It wouldn't happen right away, it wouldn't happen for years, maybe decades. Eventually though, you'd reach a point where you're absolutely fucked.
It's pretty ignorant of you to say "It hasn't happened yet so it'll never happen" when we're just talking about basic mathematics. Either the US will have to stop deficit spending, massively cutting spending and increasing taxes, or they'll keep on deficit spending until the country's finances reach a critical mass where the country won't have the liquidity to pay for debt maintenance. The amount of money the US can take in through taxes is limited to a relatively small amount compared to the debt, and increases in debt increase the maintenance, so every year there are fewer and fewer tax dollars available to actually do things, so it's only a matter of time.
Ok, I understand now. Honestly though, judging from what I've heard about Chinese schools, I think you're safe. They're all about quotas up there, churning out X number of people with pieces of paper, not skills. That's fine for communist China, but India has to compete on the global market, so I'd assume the schools are far more skills oriented than Chinese schools.
I'm from Canada.
If I ever find a video or audio file that VLC doesn't play, I'll accept that it's not perfect. As things stand, I can't play dick-all on Windows Media Player, haven't been able to get it to play a video file for ages, but VLC will play anything I load.
Aw great. More chowderheads complaining about complaining.
You know, I come to Slashdot hoping to read about the latest tech news, and all I get to hear are a bunch of slackers complaining about all the bitching going on.
Thanks a lot. You've ruined my evening. Ass.
If you were in a technical class, did you bother standing up and telling him that you're not paying him to soliloquise about the state of international markets?
Just asking. I know where I went to school, we didn't have any sermonizing in our classrooms, and it's always amazing to me that Americans seem to.
US GDP is pretty badly skewed by the massive amounts of debt created by the US government.
Take into consideration that when a bank has a dollar in savings, it can lend someone some ridiculous amount like 250, and you'll realise that the 500 billion dollars a year Americans borrow leads to some serious green moving around the economy in a very bad way.
I wouldn't be surprised if some country out there, especially one like China, who holds tonnes of US debt, could get some amazing growth very quickly. After all, the US gained it's power by industrialization in the world wars. They became the largest arms dealer in the world, and while countries like Britain became debt ridden, the US became the largest debtor.
Personally, given the circumstances, I'd say the US is entering the perfect storm leading to it's own demise.
In the days before travel between cities became safe, you could hire some rough looking thugs to protect against bandits.
Personally, I feel it's best not to have a society which requires you to hire rough looking thugs in the first place, than to say "Well, the thugs you can hire are better than the thugs who attack you!".
Nice. 3 seconds of thinking to realise that this post might -- JUST MIGHT be intended as a humorous jab at slashdot 'urban legends', and the mod uses 2.
Smark defendants...
Defendants who enjoy pro wrestling even though they know it's all fake?
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Well, in order to buy one euro worth of oil, you'll have to buy one euro. This means that when the euro goes up, the US dollar cost of oil increases by that amount. When the euro goes down, US dollar cost oil decreases by that.
It's fine when the US dollar is doing well, but when the US dollar does poorly, it takes a lot of money to buy something.
You'll find this out first hand if you're American. your dollar is doing VERY poorly, you're going to start seeing your cheap imported goods getting very expensive soon.