> Governments have responded by shutting down these operations, seizing equipment and cutting off service to lines they suspect of using Internet telephony.
I am Neal, Boy of Cow, and I please to have your assistance! My father was the operator of a VoIP service until the government of Ghana have responded by shutting down the VoIP operation, seizing his equipment and cutting off service to lines it suspect of using Internet telephony. I have an OC-48 of bandwidth available for all ur spamming need, but 1st u must deposit me the IP addresses of 256 open proxies of stupid lusers with open proxies on verizon.net, attbi.com, rr.com, charter.com, or cogentco.com! PLS HELP, U HELP ME, I CAN HELP U! GOD BLESS U!!!1!
> However, as for how you phrased it, sounds to me you're just itching for an all out fist fight, or trying to find some conspiracy or vendetta. Legitimate companies want your business. They don't want you pissed at them (those customers do not buy from them).
You know that, and I know that, but does the marketing department know it?
After four years of hearing his professors preach "Marketing helps consumers decide what they want by telling them about the wonderful products out there! We provide an essential service!", the kid fresh outa Marketing school (and his boss, who learned the same way) actually believes that schtick.
I met a guy in the ad industry through a friend-of-a-friend, we had the most fascinating debate. I was as jaw-droppingly-stunned by his belief that he was "helping people" as he was jaw-droppingly-stunned by my insistence that many of us didn't want his "help". Ever. For Anything. It was actually fun (for both of us) in that it was like making first contact with an alien species.
Imagine a Christian missionary encountering an ancient Mesopotamian at a party. Each of them would stare bewildered at each other and think the same thing: "This guy he looks like a rational human being, but can he really believe God is like that?" ("A guy nailed to a tree comes back to the dead 'cuz his Dad loves us, and the guy on the tree and his ghost are also his Dad? How the fuck did he come to believe that?!?", or "Salt water and fresh water fucking? Who invented that?!")
> > "We'll be giving the dog what the dog wants to eat," James F. Lyons, president of direct-marketing consultancy Optima Direct told the paper. > >
See? Isn't that better? They're saying that, now that they can check ahead of time and not call people who are going to refuse any kind of telemarketing effort, their 'success per call batch' rate will improve. I realize this takes away from some flame bait, but honesty is usually good.
That may have been what the marketing fuckwad meant, but it's a testament to the poor practices of his industry that regardless of what he meant, this is what we heard:
"Those who register on the do-not-call list don't want our phone calls, therefore they must want our spam and junk mail. Give the dog what he asks for. And if they just wanna be left alone, fuck 'em, let's spam 'em silly just for spite. Let's beat that fuckin' yiptoy to a pulp, the dog asked for it."
And y'know, re-reading it - regardless of "what he meant", he still has enough room in those words to do "what we heard". I, for one, think he'll do both.
> he was probably thinking more about concrete shoes in the harbor or just a knife tearing violently through spammer flesh - again and again and again and again...
(humming along, a happy tune in my heart)
"[...] Well I told him I was busy, but he still just kept on askin',
So I turned around and stabbed him in the face.
(right in the face)
(Oh, and) Wouldn't you know it, my knife got stuck.
I guess that's prob'ly bound to happen now and then.
But I'm afraid I may have bent the tip a little,
And I know that blade will never ever be quite as sharp again.
(Quite as sharp again...)
(Oh tell me) why does this always happen,
Why does this always happen to me?"
- Weird Al Yankovic feat. Ben Folds on piano,
"Why Does This Always Happen To Me" (Poodle Hat, 2003)
> And actually, the 5-7-5 pattern is not strict, and neither is having exactly three lines. H Haiku should always mention - implicitly - a season, and should have a change of perspective or other "turn", perhaps to the point of awaking surprise.
0WN1N8D!
Buffer 'sploit known since last spring.
(I fixed it for you.)
> I've noted that the domain quoted in the article http://www.defacers-challenge.com doesn't appear to resolve to anything at the moment.
OK, which one of you guys 0wn3d it before we Slashdotted what was little remained into a steaming pile of goo in the corner of the server room? Fess up.
Traditionally, the Haiku form must not only follows the 5-7-5 syllable progression, but it must also evoke a pastoral, reflective feeling in the reader upon contemplating the seas[|~||{{[{
WE 0WN ALL J00R B4S3
TEH INTERWEB IS ALL MINE
FUCK J00 1TS SUMMER!
> So somehow the government is going to collect and store all this data on all of us. How many of us will be needed to snoop on the rest of us? How many of us will be actually earning our keep, rather than coercing (taxing) it away from someone else? Will our economy, already crumbling from the effects of our inefficiency, absorb yet more non-productive loading?
Well, yeah. That's what brought down East Germany, for instance. Relatively few STASI members, overloaded with paper from a huge number of STASI informants. The system was "bottom-heavy", if you will.
The goal here is to cut costs by not requiring the large number of informants. Humans are better at some intelligence-gathering tasks, but only when highly-trained. (Untrained humans, when it comes to those tasks, are probably worse than nobody at all, as the East German experiment bore out.:)
So - get rid of the informants, replace them with machines. Massive cost savings. Funnel some of those savings into more analysts, and some into making sure the tools they use to deal with the mountain of data are the best there is - maximizing each analyst's productivity. Machines do the drudgework, brains do the puzzle-solving, and dot-connecting.
I think that part of the plan's working.
Problem is, your star analyst discovers an Evil Plot to Attach Frickin' Laser Beams to Sharks, he still can't do anything about it, due to the bureaucracy. He can jump up and down all day waving a red flag, and none of the higher-ups will see him behind the stacks of memos he has to write and the line of asses he has to kiss to get anyone to pay attention.
I'm not yet convinced we've cut out enough of the bureaucracy to get more security with the new system.
(Sure, we've been mostly attack-free since 9/11 - but is that because we've got better intel and are kicking bad-guy ass behind the scenes, or is it the same reason my Green Unicorn-Rat Protection System has kept me safe from strangely-colored one-horned rats the size of horses since childhood? Most of us don't have a Need to Know, so we won't find out until I read a history book in 2025 and see who won.:)
As to your original question - taxes - whether it works or not is irrelevant if the question is whether or not we're gonna bog down our economy by having to jack up taxes to pay for the new security state.
Therefore, I contend is that unlike the old-style "police states", we're sufficiently able to leverage technology to create a new-style security state that's cheap, efficient, and (I haven't completely forgotten you ACLU-types) vastly less intrusive.
And on the cost front, it's not "free [as in beer]" (unless you do something impossibly kooky-radical like end prohibition, de-fund the DEA by 50% and reallocate their intel and manpower for HomeSec, and do the same at the state-prison level too, in which case you get a net budgetary surplus, plus tax revenue from the drugs, just like alcohol and tobacco!:)
But since that's not gonna happen, it's gonna cost some money. But considering the economic impact of not being able to monitor the population for enemy activity (read: 9/11 or worse) - even if the "natural" probability such an event occurring is only 5% over 10 years - the money being spent towards cutting that 5% to 2.5% is still a pretty good return on investment.
> It's great from the consumer standpoint, because that's who they're trying to please.. but when you start to look at humanity as a whole, it seems the profit motivation leads to things which are counter-productive....
I happen to enjoy living in a system where success is largely a function of your ability to convince someone to buy your stuff.
The alternatives seem to be systems where success is either a function of your ability to browbeat others into paying for your product whether they want it or not (socialism), or worse - once the browbeaters are there, simply bribing the browbeaters into keeping competitors away from your market ("mixed" economies - capitalist, but only insofar as the principal industry is the lobbying of government officials).
> Why is bringing this to the masses important? You mentioned profit over customer/employee safety. The masses demanded, and received, laws to establish safety guidelines so businesses couldn't completely sacrifice those things for profit. If privacy concerns are raised more vocally and more often, the masses may begin demanding privacy guidelines as well.
No, it's more important than what you describe.
For instance, if you're a vendor, even if your attitude is "Fuck the masses and their privacy", you may still have a reason to respect your customers' privacy. Not because it's the right thing to do (because you don't necessarily care:), but because you'll LOSE SALES if you do.
I, as a web consumer, value my privacy. I don't want spam. I don't even want unsolicited commercial emails from organizations with which I have prior business relationships. (If I want to buy more stuff from you, I'll go back and browse your website again).
Problem is, every time I want to buy a widget, I have to go Googling to see if widgetseller.com spams its customers.
And if the answer is "yes", then I don't buy from that vendor - I buy from somewhere else, even if it means getting off my ass and buying it in cash from the brick-and-mortar.
(Yes, that means I've never purchased from Amazon or eBay.)
Now - and this is the "important" part - what's more likely to make the e-commerce giants wake the hell up and respect customer privacy: this Washington Post article sparking "the masses" to "raise privacy concerns", or LOSING SALES AS PEOPLE WHO VALUE THEIR PRIVACY TAKE THEIR DOLLARS ELSEWHERE. (Emphasis added for any marketroids reading this who haven't figured out the answer yet;-)
> If citizens of the United States are allowed privacy, a presumption of innocence, or the protection of due process, then the terrorists have already won. > > Wait... that doesn't sound right. Which of us is smoking crack?
I don't know, but the crack-smoker is probably the one who gets arrested first.
> Actually, your life is boring enough that we've mostly stopped watching you. Althoug when we get
bored, we occasionally play a conspiracy geek version of "license plate bingo". The goal is to figure out which Robert Ludlum book you figured out a particular move from.
> > Also, try talking to that girl at the bar next time instead of spitting your drink all over her when she smiles at you. > > Sincerely, > Your friends at the gummint.
You mean that girl wasn't an Agent? Damn! When she said she worked for intel, she meant the CPU maker? Aaaaw, crap! She wuz teh h0t!
(Oh, I get it. You're just softening me up, so that the next time this happens, like, in 2009, it'll really be an Agent, and I'll be all like "Hey, maybe I should talk to her instead of just running away in terror like I did in '03!":)
> Impersonating a peace officer is a misdemeanor in most states. In California, see Penal Code section 538d. The crime is punishable by imprisonment in county jail up to a year and/or a fine up up to $2,000.
> > This might deter many people from attempting such a thing.
Sign up for Police Academy as soon as you get out of college, do the protect and serve for a few years, get a fat pension lined up, get burned out, and use the fact that you're above the law to either go rogue (the dark side) or to help your friends and family out when they get assaulted, robbed, or ripped off on eBay (the light side).
> afaik that's a licensing issue, so mozilla could never include Gtk libs. just wait, i'm sure the xlib and xprint vers will show up.
I did manage to get it working once on a Solaris box. It was... weird. Profiles seemed to chop off the last character of everything typed. (Create.mozilla/foo, display./mozilla/fo, quit, re-run, get told that./mozilla/fo doesn't exist. WTF? That's where I gave up and said "Fuggit, keep using NS4.7, and drop back to NS3 for those web pages with a million nested tables in 'em", and having seen how confused Mozilla was with whatever version of whatever libraries we'd managed to find, the user was actually happy to continue to do so. That was a few releases ago, I'd forgotten about it until today.)
As for the other libraries... well, OK, but this should be in the README for the release. Or the release should be distributed with libraries where there aren't dependency issues. Or there should be a URL in the README that says "You need these libraries. Go here. Download these files. Put them here. Add this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Don't download those files. The are known not to work."
If there are three Mozilla binaries, one for each set of widget libraries, say so. "Download this to use with xlib, that to use with xprint, and the other to use with Gtk. The first two come with all the libraries you need, we tested it on our boxes and it worked. The second doesn't, you need these files from $URL-fu. Use whichever one gives you the widgets you like best.")
I hate to admit it, but it's the one thing about the "release early, release often" part of the Open Source model that doesn't work well - dependencies/documentation. If you're building it yourself from source, great. But if you're trying to quickly address the needs of a user who just want to run the damn code, the model fails.
> That said, you're supposed to type:./mozilla
Me == teh suxor;-) I figured the run-mozilla.sh script was there to prevent me from cd-ing down to./mozilla-the-directory and running./mozilla-the-shell-script-that-calls-mozilla-bin.
I will give credit where it's due - the Win32 installer is fantastic, and likewise the Linux setup.
> If you think about it, the story in Snow Crash was essentially finished, and anyone with half an imagination could fill in the rest on their own. He gets the girl, they live happily ever after, etc.
Yeah, but it's Stephenson's job to tell me about it. (Or rather, it's his job to tell me - even if it's just a few pages long - that they lived happily ever after, right up until the nanotech wars started. Or something different/new that I hadn't imagined. Ten more pages, Stephenson, that's all I'm asking!
Take Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 - OK, new star, yay, book's over. But he had the decency to tease me with an epilogue concerning the evolution of intelligent life on Europa.
Hell, even William Gibson did a better job ending his oh fuck it, I've typed enough.
> To save on bandwith MP3.com should just index their MP3 files and distribute them using a Napster style client. Then the use of bandwidth is distributed among all the users.
MP3.com can't do that; their business model is presumably you seeing banner ads while there's some sort of network connection between you and them.
But that brings me to the part about streaming I never understood: Why the hell bother?
On one hand, you have "download, burn, play". Zero network bandwidth consumed. At 128, 10+ hours of music on a CD-R. Sounds like crap? Encode it at 320-stereo! Now you "only" have 5 hours per disc. Zero pay-per-use issues. Got a favorite disc that got scratched? As long as you have at least one copy of the music back on your hard drive (and you do back up your hard drive, don't you?), just burn it again. Got a favorite band whose website just went dark? No problem, you still have the MP3s they gave you.
On the other hand, you have "streaming". Think of an office with 50 users streaming 128k streams. We're talking metric buttloads of bandwidth burninated, and it all goes to/dev/null:) Sounds like crap? Tough! Take what your stream provider offers you! Pay-per-use - either in bandwidth, or in the fact that if you wanna hear a song again, you gotta beg the server to send it to you again, or in the fact that the server can insert ads - just like radio. Got a favorite streaming server and it goes down or cuts to 64k to save its bandwidth costs? You're... screwed! The best band in the whole universe's web page is now 404? You're... screwed!
Streaming gives you the worst of both worlds - the bandwidth wastage of P2P, with the DRMness of pay-per-view. Maybe I'm a Luddite around here, but when it comes to streaming, I Just Don't Get it.
> Should 60 million people go to jail just so the RIAA can stay in business? I dont think so.
> The law must be changed because the people want it changed. Thats how democracy works.
Slashdot Mirror
I am Neal, Boy of Cow, and I please to have your assistance! My father was the operator of a VoIP service until the government of Ghana have responded by shutting down the VoIP operation, seizing his equipment and cutting off service to lines it suspect of using Internet telephony. I have an OC-48 of bandwidth available for all ur spamming need, but 1st u must deposit me the IP addresses of 256 open proxies of stupid lusers with open proxies on verizon.net, attbi.com, rr.com, charter.com, or cogentco.com! PLS HELP, U HELP ME, I CAN HELP U! GOD BLESS U!!!1!
Drew, what the fuck have you done with CowboyNeal?
You know that, and I know that, but does the marketing department know it?
After four years of hearing his professors preach "Marketing helps consumers decide what they want by telling them about the wonderful products out there! We provide an essential service!", the kid fresh outa Marketing school (and his boss, who learned the same way) actually believes that schtick.
I met a guy in the ad industry through a friend-of-a-friend, we had the most fascinating debate. I was as jaw-droppingly-stunned by his belief that he was "helping people" as he was jaw-droppingly-stunned by my insistence that many of us didn't want his "help". Ever. For Anything. It was actually fun (for both of us) in that it was like making first contact with an alien species.
Imagine a Christian missionary encountering an ancient Mesopotamian at a party. Each of them would stare bewildered at each other and think the same thing: "This guy he looks like a rational human being, but can he really believe God is like that?" ("A guy nailed to a tree comes back to the dead 'cuz his Dad loves us, and the guy on the tree and his ghost are also his Dad? How the fuck did he come to believe that?!?", or "Salt water and fresh water fucking? Who invented that?!")
>
> See? Isn't that better? They're saying that, now that they can check ahead of time and not call people who are going to refuse any kind of telemarketing effort, their 'success per call batch' rate will improve. I realize this takes away from some flame bait, but honesty is usually good.
That may have been what the marketing fuckwad meant, but it's a testament to the poor practices of his industry that regardless of what he meant, this is what we heard:
"Those who register on the do-not-call list don't want our phone calls, therefore they must want our spam and junk mail. Give the dog what he asks for. And if they just wanna be left alone, fuck 'em, let's spam 'em silly just for spite. Let's beat that fuckin' yiptoy to a pulp, the dog asked for it."
And y'know, re-reading it - regardless of "what he meant", he still has enough room in those words to do "what we heard". I, for one, think he'll do both.
(humming along, a happy tune in my heart)
- Weird Al Yankovic feat. Ben Folds on piano, "Why Does This Always Happen To Me" (Poodle Hat, 2003)>
>DO NOT EAT.
Knew a chick in high school who was anorexic. Can she sue the makers of silica gel for that?
0WN1N8D!
Buffer 'sploit known since last spring.
(I fixed it for you.)
OK, which one of you guys 0wn3d it before we Slashdotted what was little remained into a steaming pile of goo in the corner of the server room? Fess up.
> Challenge - July 6
> Please stay away
Traditionally, the Haiku form must not only follows the 5-7-5 syllable progression, but it must also evoke a pastoral, reflective feeling in the reader upon contemplating the seas[|~||{{[{
WE 0WN ALL J00R B4S3
TEH INTERWEB IS ALL MINE
FUCK J00 1TS SUMMER!
>
> BTW. Captain Obvious wants his brain back.
Well, if it's a NASA project and there's metric involved, call it the Fumble Space Telescope, or the Jumble Space Telescope.
If a chunk of ice falls off the launcher immediately after launch, it'll end up as the Tumble Space Telescope.
If it's reported on Slashdot, it's the Rumble and Mumble Space Telescope.
(I had no idea there were that many cool words that ended in "umble". I'm humbled.)
If one's tribe hunts underwater, one's ability to see well underwater has great bearing on one's ability to "get some".
Damn. And a full-size numeric keypad!
And now that they've got decent GPUs, I'm supposed to frag stuff with this keypad how?!
>
> Dear Sir/Madam: Your router is owned.
When owning routers is against the law, only outlaws will 0wn-HEY! Waitaminnit!
Well, yeah. That's what brought down East Germany, for instance. Relatively few STASI members, overloaded with paper from a huge number of STASI informants. The system was "bottom-heavy", if you will.
The goal here is to cut costs by not requiring the large number of informants. Humans are better at some intelligence-gathering tasks, but only when highly-trained. (Untrained humans, when it comes to those tasks, are probably worse than nobody at all, as the East German experiment bore out. :)
So - get rid of the informants, replace them with machines. Massive cost savings. Funnel some of those savings into more analysts, and some into making sure the tools they use to deal with the mountain of data are the best there is - maximizing each analyst's productivity. Machines do the drudgework, brains do the puzzle-solving, and dot-connecting.
I think that part of the plan's working.
Problem is, your star analyst discovers an Evil Plot to Attach Frickin' Laser Beams to Sharks, he still can't do anything about it, due to the bureaucracy. He can jump up and down all day waving a red flag, and none of the higher-ups will see him behind the stacks of memos he has to write and the line of asses he has to kiss to get anyone to pay attention.
I'm not yet convinced we've cut out enough of the bureaucracy to get more security with the new system.
(Sure, we've been mostly attack-free since 9/11 - but is that because we've got better intel and are kicking bad-guy ass behind the scenes, or is it the same reason my Green Unicorn-Rat Protection System has kept me safe from strangely-colored one-horned rats the size of horses since childhood? Most of us don't have a Need to Know, so we won't find out until I read a history book in 2025 and see who won. :)
As to your original question - taxes - whether it works or not is irrelevant if the question is whether or not we're gonna bog down our economy by having to jack up taxes to pay for the new security state.
Therefore, I contend is that unlike the old-style "police states", we're sufficiently able to leverage technology to create a new-style security state that's cheap, efficient, and (I haven't completely forgotten you ACLU-types) vastly less intrusive.
And on the cost front, it's not "free [as in beer]" (unless you do something impossibly kooky-radical like end prohibition, de-fund the DEA by 50% and reallocate their intel and manpower for HomeSec, and do the same at the state-prison level too, in which case you get a net budgetary surplus, plus tax revenue from the drugs, just like alcohol and tobacco! :)
But since that's not gonna happen, it's gonna cost some money. But considering the economic impact of not being able to monitor the population for enemy activity (read: 9/11 or worse) - even if the "natural" probability such an event occurring is only 5% over 10 years - the money being spent towards cutting that 5% to 2.5% is still a pretty good return on investment.
I happen to enjoy living in a system where success is largely a function of your ability to convince someone to buy your stuff.
The alternatives seem to be systems where success is either a function of your ability to browbeat others into paying for your product whether they want it or not (socialism), or worse - once the browbeaters are there, simply bribing the browbeaters into keeping competitors away from your market ("mixed" economies - capitalist, but only insofar as the principal industry is the lobbying of government officials).
I'll take capitalism any day, thanks.
No, it's more important than what you describe.
For instance, if you're a vendor, even if your attitude is "Fuck the masses and their privacy", you may still have a reason to respect your customers' privacy. Not because it's the right thing to do (because you don't necessarily care :), but because you'll LOSE SALES if you do.
I, as a web consumer, value my privacy. I don't want spam. I don't even want unsolicited commercial emails from organizations with which I have prior business relationships. (If I want to buy more stuff from you, I'll go back and browse your website again).
Problem is, every time I want to buy a widget, I have to go Googling to see if widgetseller.com spams its customers.
And if the answer is "yes", then I don't buy from that vendor - I buy from somewhere else, even if it means getting off my ass and buying it in cash from the brick-and-mortar.
(Yes, that means I've never purchased from Amazon or eBay.)
Now - and this is the "important" part - what's more likely to make the e-commerce giants wake the hell up and respect customer privacy: this Washington Post article sparking "the masses" to "raise privacy concerns", or LOSING SALES AS PEOPLE WHO VALUE THEIR PRIVACY TAKE THEIR DOLLARS ELSEWHERE. (Emphasis added for any marketroids reading this who haven't figured out the answer yet ;-)
>
> Wait... that doesn't sound right. Which of us is smoking crack?
I don't know, but the crack-smoker is probably the one who gets arrested first.
>
> Also, try talking to that girl at the bar next time instead of spitting your drink all over her when she smiles at you.
>
> Sincerely,
> Your friends at the gummint.
You mean that girl wasn't an Agent? Damn! When she said she worked for intel, she meant the CPU maker? Aaaaw, crap! She wuz teh h0t!
(Oh, I get it. You're just softening me up, so that the next time this happens, like, in 2009, it'll really be an Agent, and I'll be all like "Hey, maybe I should talk to her instead of just running away in terror like I did in '03!" :)
You can't fool me, you bastards!
>
> This might deter many people from attempting such a thing.
Sign up for Police Academy as soon as you get out of college, do the protect and serve for a few years, get a fat pension lined up, get burned out, and use the fact that you're above the law to either go rogue (the dark side) or to help your friends and family out when they get assaulted, robbed, or ripped off on eBay (the light side).
"Don't hate the pigs, become the pigs!"
No, when I pay Guido the Slug one month's protection money, at least I get protection for the month. :)
I did manage to get it working once on a Solaris box. It was... weird. Profiles seemed to chop off the last character of everything typed. (Create .mozilla/foo, display ./mozilla/fo, quit, re-run, get told that ./mozilla/fo doesn't exist. WTF? That's where I gave up and said "Fuggit, keep using NS4.7, and drop back to NS3 for those web pages with a million nested tables in 'em", and having seen how confused Mozilla was with whatever version of whatever libraries we'd managed to find, the user was actually happy to continue to do so. That was a few releases ago, I'd forgotten about it until today.)
As for the other libraries... well, OK, but this should be in the README for the release. Or the release should be distributed with libraries where there aren't dependency issues. Or there should be a URL in the README that says "You need these libraries. Go here. Download these files. Put them here. Add this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Don't download those files. The are known not to work."
If there are three Mozilla binaries, one for each set of widget libraries, say so. "Download this to use with xlib, that to use with xprint, and the other to use with Gtk. The first two come with all the libraries you need, we tested it on our boxes and it worked. The second doesn't, you need these files from $URL-fu. Use whichever one gives you the widgets you like best.")
I hate to admit it, but it's the one thing about the "release early, release often" part of the Open Source model that doesn't work well - dependencies/documentation. If you're building it yourself from source, great. But if you're trying to quickly address the needs of a user who just want to run the damn code, the model fails.
> That said, you're supposed to type: ./mozilla
Me == teh suxor ;-) I figured the run-mozilla.sh script was there to prevent me from cd-ing down to ./mozilla-the-directory and running ./mozilla-the-shell-script-that-calls-mozilla-bin.
I will give credit where it's due - the Win32 installer is fantastic, and likewise the Linux setup.
Take Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 - OK, new star, yay, book's over. But he had the decency to tease me with an epilogue concerning the evolution of intelligent life on Europa.
Hell, even William Gibson did a better job ending his oh fuck it, I've typed enough.
MP3.com can't do that; their business model is presumably you seeing banner ads while there's some sort of network connection between you and them.
But that brings me to the part about streaming I never understood: Why the hell bother?
On one hand, you have "download, burn, play". Zero network bandwidth consumed. At 128, 10+ hours of music on a CD-R. Sounds like crap? Encode it at 320-stereo! Now you "only" have 5 hours per disc. Zero pay-per-use issues. Got a favorite disc that got scratched? As long as you have at least one copy of the music back on your hard drive (and you do back up your hard drive, don't you?), just burn it again. Got a favorite band whose website just went dark? No problem, you still have the MP3s they gave you.
On the other hand, you have "streaming". Think of an office with 50 users streaming 128k streams. We're talking metric buttloads of bandwidth burninated, and it all goes to /dev/null :) Sounds like crap? Tough! Take what your stream provider offers you! Pay-per-use - either in bandwidth, or in the fact that if you wanna hear a song again, you gotta beg the server to send it to you again, or in the fact that the server can insert ads - just like radio. Got a favorite streaming server and it goes down or cuts to 64k to save its bandwidth costs? You're... screwed! The best band in the whole universe's web page is now 404? You're... screwed!
Streaming gives you the worst of both worlds - the bandwidth wastage of P2P, with the DRMness of pay-per-view. Maybe I'm a Luddite around here, but when it comes to streaming, I Just Don't Get it.
> The law must be changed because the people want it changed. Thats how democracy works.
Total (+5, Funny) material!