2.) Same with fluoride and detergent permanently polluting the water.
Anyone else get the image of a man in a General's uniform telling Peter Sellers about Purity of Essence?
Interesting that the first trojan horse/virus yet to be seen for OS X uniquely exploits the discordance between the "Classic" pre-OS X way of specifying file types (File Type/Creator metadata) and the new, inherited-from-Windows, file extension method
As I recall, this isn't the first virus to exploit a Classic/OS X conflict. The only other virus I have heard of on OS X (which was also a proof of concept virus, not a malicious one) was one that exploited Classic's version of Quicktime to auto-run a Disk Image containing executable code. Apple released a fix shortly after the exploit was uncovered.
For the life of me I can't find a link, but I swear it was reported on/.
> Actually, with Einstein's relativity, doesn't Ptolemy's theories hold true? Everything is relative to a point of view?
You could build an acurate geocentric model of the solar system. It wouldn't be very pretty, but it could be done. That isn't Ptolemy's model though. Ptolemy constructed a very specific and detailed mathmatical model for predicting the locations of the planets.
The real problem is that Ptolemy used circles, not elipses. The Greek rationalists concieved of circles as perfect, so they wouldn't use anything else, but you can really only describe the planet's motion with 100% percent acuracy using elipses.
Ptolemy comes very close to actual values, and that's why he held sway for so long. Copernicus may have imagined a heliocentric solar system, but he kept with the circles, so his model didn't fit the data as well as Ptolemy's model.
It took Kepler to come along and use elipses to actually produce a model that fit the data better.
iTMS do require that at least some songs be available individually, with the exception that tracks longer than 7 minutes can only be sold as part of an album.
Album prices are set by the label, with a maximum of USD0.99 * number of tracks.
The second rule at least can be broken by major label artists. For instance, Talk Talk's great experimental album "Spirit of Eden" is 6 tracks long and costs $13.99. You can't buy track one, except as part of the album, so that's how they get you to pay more than 99 cents per song.
While that album-only song IS longer than 7 minutes, I am not sure all of them are.
I agree that there is such a thing copyright theft. But if you use that term for making illicit copies of copyrighted material, what term would you use for when one party actually takes the legal ownership of a copyright from its true owner immorally?
Sure, you can use the words extortion, legal trickery, blackmail, etc. to describe how it can be done, but what do you call the actual act of depriving someone of their ownership of a copyright if you have already decided that "copyright theft" denotes a different act?
Quite true. But what I am talking about is the fact that a Hard Drive issue can (and certain System Installs will) remove the key without releasing it. The key diappears into the ether and then you are down to only two keys. If you are having any recurrent computer problems you either have to live without your AACs or else risk loosing all the keys to system problems.
It certainly isn't draconian, but the DRM in iTMS is not always invisible to the casual user (that was the idea, and it is the sort of standard that users hold Apple to).
The key is that the three macs you put the files onto might all be the same mac, if you run into Hard Drive problems. Yes, you can always convert the files to AIFFs, which don't rely on having the DRM key, or burn CD backups, but the fact remains that the inherent instability of computers (including Macs) creates problems when DRM is concerned.
That said, I think the reduced price-tag tends to outweigh the DRM annoyances.
I say if we can spend 87 billion dollars to force our democratic ideas on another country militarily, then we should be able to get a billion or so a year for space exploration.
Then if we find anything there, we can spend another 87 billion dollars to force our democratic ideas on it.
What I think happened here is that the RIAA swooped in and offered them a deal. More than likely they pushed the money to her somehow and it came back. Nice and neat. That's only my opinion without any facts.
But why? To prevent looking like a bully? They still do. If they really wanted to avoid a PR problem why not simply not sue her?
Just because they get the subpoena doesn't mean they have to follow up on it.
Mark my words, one of these days one of those subpoenas will find a lawmaker's kid on the other end, and the RIAA will run away from that court room as fast as they can.
The person who shares the songs is doing so legaly as long as every person who downloads the songs owns a copy.
Wrong. Under current legislation (we all know who paid for that bill) simply sharing a file is illegal infringement. Even if no one downloads it, it is still infringement.
What you say makes sense morally, but is not representative of US law.
It is precisely this idea [art is subjective] that has so ruined contemporary art
Okay. I'll admit that my statement was poorly phrased. What I meant to express was that art can be art, whether or not you like that art. If it has a message and that message affects you, then it is indisputably art, independent of whether you like the message it conveys to you. Art can be bad and still be art.
Art *must* have a defensible manifesto.
What I think I understand you to say (and do correct me if I am wrong) is that something is not art if it has not been endowed with some meaning or asthetic by its creator and instead relies on the subjective experience of the viewer to give it meaning.
If that is what you are saying, then I tend to agree with you. I can see how my previous post may have given the impression that I do not agree with that, though
To defend it, one cannot simply claim subjectivity or a difference of opinion.
As for defending Eminem as an artist, I did not do this because I doubted that the above poster was truly interested in debating the topic and was merely engaging in polemic. Since you seem interested enough in the discussion, I will delve off-topic and do so.
Let me take the definition you cite from Wikipedia and an Eminem song -- how about the much-maligned "Kim."
The first two criteria are "choosing a medium" and choosing "a set of rules for the use of that medium." This is a no brainer: the medium is musical, the set of rules are the stylistic, lyrical and metrical conventions of rap. The last criteria is "to convey either a belief, an idea, a sensation, or a feeling." Here, the idea conveyed is the violent murder of a woman by her mentally disturbed husband, and the sensation is that of shock and horror contrasted against the ironically calm and soothing opening of the man and his child. Finally the third of the four criteria is to have "a set of values that determine what deserves to be expressed." Paradoxically the values expressed are anti-violence values, as the entire piece is meant to instill revulsion at the violent picture that is painted in the listener's head. Wikipedia also adds the debatable qualification "most effective way possible for that medium." Even that would be hard to disqualify Eminem on, since the piece makes use of numerous literary devices and manages to disturb nearly all who listen to it.
since the RIAA's members are promoting so much smut this days which is passed as "art" by them - eminem anyone?
If you really want to find irony in this: consider how many 16-year-old singers whose only merit was sex appeal have been made famous by RIAA companies in the past decade, then ask what their problem with kiddie porn is.
Eminem does make art. You may not think it is good art, you may think it is hatefull art, but art is subjective, so you don't have to like it for it to be art. This is especially the case with satire. And as far as your claim of "smut" goes, since when have depictions of horrible violence been smut?
That's just my opinion though. I want to know, really, what do you all think the "Best Price for an Album is"
I think you have it right when you guess $9.99. I have found that 12.99 is not enough to always make me decide to buy a CD I am wavering on, but the $9.99 sticker price on iTunes has caused me to buy albums I had decided not to buy.
This price cut will mean that Univeral will get a bigger share of my bussiness than normal in a show of support, but that will probably be out of a deliberate attempt to give them that bussiness, rather than my natural buying behavior.
Re:prescription drug research: There's a lot of that going on up here because of our more generous tax credits for drug R&D, as well as lower costs, which translates into more bang for every research dollar. Remember, applied drug research is conducted by private enterprise, not government.
Drug research is conducted by companies for the purpose of making profits on drug sales. The amount of profit has to be high enough to justify the research costs.
In the U.S. drug prices are not regulated, so the drug company will charge whatever they need to in order to get an acceptable level of return on their capital. In Canada, drug prices are artificially low, so that drug companies would not get the acceptable return on their capital if they had to sell at Canadian prices only.
Fortunately, the drug companies make their returns on the American market. They then sell to Canada because of the principle of marginal utility.
The result is that American consumers bear most of the cost of R&D. Without the price-control free American market, the drugs that Canada enjoys (and even ones they develop) would not be profitable enough to develop in the first place.
If it were not for the US, there would either be far fewer prescription drugs, or Canada would have to pay more for its prescription drugs. That is what the above poster refers to.
I do not know enough about the North American military-industrial complex to know if the same principle applies with defense spending.
I have already spent the greater part of a thousand dollars on music this year. I am sure my value to the RIAA will far exceed $12,000 if I come near life expectancy.
Plus you must assume that a large portion of that 12,000 goes to lawyer fees. I doubt it is as easy to screw lawyers as it is to screw musicians.
Okay. If someone else addressed this point and I missed it, I apologize. I thought I'd try to respond to one of your points since you stated that no one had (it does look like you've been swarmed by the flamers; you have my sympathies.)
... Doom 3... Classic Mac apologism at work.
We don't consider this apologism. Most Machead are not big gamers. When we dismiss Doom speeds and Quake framerates as meaningless, it is not because we want to defend the platform irrationally, it is because we honestly don't care about game performance. As with anything there are exceptions, but this attitude is the rule, not the exception.
..."who needs speed when you have MacOS X"... will Mac users please decide whether they care about speed or not?
I can only speak for myself here, but I think many or most macheads would agree with me. I like the Mac OS interface. That is what makes a Mac a Mac, and that is what keeps us loyal.
That said, speed is nice too. After enduring a million snide comments on and offline about how Macs are slow and knowing they were right, it will be nice to once again have a reasonable retort. Plus I am looking forward to those Final Cut Pro render lines completing faster the next time I am pulling an all-nighter to finish a video project.
ho hum, another day, another supercomputer
This was quite a while ago. OS 8 was out and many computers were running System 7. These OSes did not have the sort of respect outside the community that OS X has received. This was not unjustistified. These OSes had their problems, and at this point the Mac OS was an acquired taste. Apple being the first company to release a supercomputer desktop was a mark of pride we could bring out against those who mocked our 'MacinTrashes' and lauded their Mhz myth empowered 3133t Pentiums.
So to answer your question: we love the OS, we like speed, and if we have a snappy retort to the next mac-basher that is pretty cool too.
IIRC, that amendment, though it only recently became law, is very very old. These days amendments must be ratified in seven years in order to be valid (it will say so in the text of the amendment). But the Congressional pay amendment is an old one that just recently recieved the votes of enough states to be ratified.
The only way the Real model gets cheaper is if you download more than 50 songs a month, every month you're subscribed.
Apple's store has been out less than a month IIRC, and I have already downloaded 97 songs. If I had the bandwidth to browse the store more, I would likely have a sustained rate of more than 50 songs per month.
The Real store seems like a viable model for some consumers. I personally prefer Apple's, which is more like the brick and morter pricing system, and I prefer using an Apple player to Real's, but I think Real will make a go with this.
Could it possibly drive up sales as the only method to make your music portable?
A few weeks ago, the ability to stream anywhere did not exist in iTunes. I am sure many people did not know they had this ability (I did not until spymac made its directory). Thus, the loss of it should have very little effect.
I have my tunes stored on my G4, and whenever I want to access them, it is from OS9 machines. That is why I just connect to my G4 over web sharing, or FTP, or AFP and play them from there. It isn't nifty and streaming, but it works for me and I suspect it would solve your dillema as well.
Slashdot Mirror
2.) Same with fluoride and detergent permanently polluting the water. Anyone else get the image of a man in a General's uniform telling Peter Sellers about Purity of Essence?
Is this true what the link says: that these exploits only affect Panther? (also, am I reading the link text correctly)
I am running Jaguar and I followed the link on an earlier story to a benign demonstration of the handler exploit, and to my knowledge it did not work.
As I recall, this isn't the first virus to exploit a Classic/OS X conflict. The only other virus I have heard of on OS X (which was also a proof of concept virus, not a malicious one) was one that exploited Classic's version of Quicktime to auto-run a Disk Image containing executable code. Apple released a fix shortly after the exploit was uncovered.
For the life of me I can't find a link, but I swear it was reported on /.
Wait, we have games now? Shit, there goes my productivity.
You could build an acurate geocentric model of the solar system. It wouldn't be very pretty, but it could be done. That isn't Ptolemy's model though. Ptolemy constructed a very specific and detailed mathmatical model for predicting the locations of the planets.
The real problem is that Ptolemy used circles, not elipses. The Greek rationalists concieved of circles as perfect, so they wouldn't use anything else, but you can really only describe the planet's motion with 100% percent acuracy using elipses.
Ptolemy comes very close to actual values, and that's why he held sway for so long. Copernicus may have imagined a heliocentric solar system, but he kept with the circles, so his model didn't fit the data as well as Ptolemy's model.
It took Kepler to come along and use elipses to actually produce a model that fit the data better.
The second rule at least can be broken by major label artists. For instance, Talk Talk's great experimental album "Spirit of Eden" is 6 tracks long and costs $13.99. You can't buy track one, except as part of the album, so that's how they get you to pay more than 99 cents per song. While that album-only song IS longer than 7 minutes, I am not sure all of them are.
I agree that there is such a thing copyright theft. But if you use that term for making illicit copies of copyrighted material, what term would you use for when one party actually takes the legal ownership of a copyright from its true owner immorally?
Sure, you can use the words extortion, legal trickery, blackmail, etc. to describe how it can be done, but what do you call the actual act of depriving someone of their ownership of a copyright if you have already decided that "copyright theft" denotes a different act?
Quite true. But what I am talking about is the fact that a Hard Drive issue can (and certain System Installs will) remove the key without releasing it. The key diappears into the ether and then you are down to only two keys. If you are having any recurrent computer problems you either have to live without your AACs or else risk loosing all the keys to system problems.
The key is that the three macs you put the files onto might all be the same mac, if you run into Hard Drive problems. Yes, you can always convert the files to AIFFs, which don't rely on having the DRM key, or burn CD backups, but the fact remains that the inherent instability of computers (including Macs) creates problems when DRM is concerned.
That said, I think the reduced price-tag tends to outweigh the DRM annoyances.
Then if we find anything there, we can spend another 87 billion dollars to force our democratic ideas on it.
But why? To prevent looking like a bully? They still do. If they really wanted to avoid a PR problem why not simply not sue her?
Just because they get the subpoena doesn't mean they have to follow up on it.
Mark my words, one of these days one of those subpoenas will find a lawmaker's kid on the other end, and the RIAA will run away from that court room as fast as they can.
Wrong. Under current legislation (we all know who paid for that bill) simply sharing a file is illegal infringement. Even if no one downloads it, it is still infringement.
What you say makes sense morally, but is not representative of US law.
Okay. I'll admit that my statement was poorly phrased. What I meant to express was that art can be art, whether or not you like that art. If it has a message and that message affects you, then it is indisputably art, independent of whether you like the message it conveys to you. Art can be bad and still be art.
Art *must* have a defensible manifesto.
What I think I understand you to say (and do correct me if I am wrong) is that something is not art if it has not been endowed with some meaning or asthetic by its creator and instead relies on the subjective experience of the viewer to give it meaning.
If that is what you are saying, then I tend to agree with you. I can see how my previous post may have given the impression that I do not agree with that, though
To defend it, one cannot simply claim subjectivity or a difference of opinion.
As for defending Eminem as an artist, I did not do this because I doubted that the above poster was truly interested in debating the topic and was merely engaging in polemic. Since you seem interested enough in the discussion, I will delve off-topic and do so.
Let me take the definition you cite from Wikipedia and an Eminem song -- how about the much-maligned "Kim." The first two criteria are "choosing a medium" and choosing "a set of rules for the use of that medium." This is a no brainer: the medium is musical, the set of rules are the stylistic, lyrical and metrical conventions of rap. The last criteria is "to convey either a belief, an idea, a sensation, or a feeling." Here, the idea conveyed is the violent murder of a woman by her mentally disturbed husband, and the sensation is that of shock and horror contrasted against the ironically calm and soothing opening of the man and his child. Finally the third of the four criteria is to have "a set of values that determine what deserves to be expressed." Paradoxically the values expressed are anti-violence values, as the entire piece is meant to instill revulsion at the violent picture that is painted in the listener's head. Wikipedia also adds the debatable qualification "most effective way possible for that medium." Even that would be hard to disqualify Eminem on, since the piece makes use of numerous literary devices and manages to disturb nearly all who listen to it.
nice. :)
If you really want to find irony in this: consider how many 16-year-old singers whose only merit was sex appeal have been made famous by RIAA companies in the past decade, then ask what their problem with kiddie porn is.
Eminem does make art. You may not think it is good art, you may think it is hatefull art, but art is subjective, so you don't have to like it for it to be art. This is especially the case with satire. And as far as your claim of "smut" goes, since when have depictions of horrible violence been smut?
Good luck getting that notarized.
I think you have it right when you guess $9.99. I have found that 12.99 is not enough to always make me decide to buy a CD I am wavering on, but the $9.99 sticker price on iTunes has caused me to buy albums I had decided not to buy.
This price cut will mean that Univeral will get a bigger share of my bussiness than normal in a show of support, but that will probably be out of a deliberate attempt to give them that bussiness, rather than my natural buying behavior.
I find that fact very revealing.
Drug research is conducted by companies for the purpose of making profits on drug sales. The amount of profit has to be high enough to justify the research costs.
In the U.S. drug prices are not regulated, so the drug company will charge whatever they need to in order to get an acceptable level of return on their capital. In Canada, drug prices are artificially low, so that drug companies would not get the acceptable return on their capital if they had to sell at Canadian prices only.
Fortunately, the drug companies make their returns on the American market. They then sell to Canada because of the principle of marginal utility.
The result is that American consumers bear most of the cost of R&D. Without the price-control free American market, the drugs that Canada enjoys (and even ones they develop) would not be profitable enough to develop in the first place.
If it were not for the US, there would either be far fewer prescription drugs, or Canada would have to pay more for its prescription drugs. That is what the above poster refers to.
I do not know enough about the North American military-industrial complex to know if the same principle applies with defense spending.
Plus you must assume that a large portion of that 12,000 goes to lawyer fees. I doubt it is as easy to screw lawyers as it is to screw musicians.
We don't consider this apologism. Most Machead are not big gamers. When we dismiss Doom speeds and Quake framerates as meaningless, it is not because we want to defend the platform irrationally, it is because we honestly don't care about game performance. As with anything there are exceptions, but this attitude is the rule, not the exception.
I can only speak for myself here, but I think many or most macheads would agree with me. I like the Mac OS interface. That is what makes a Mac a Mac, and that is what keeps us loyal.
That said, speed is nice too. After enduring a million snide comments on and offline about how Macs are slow and knowing they were right, it will be nice to once again have a reasonable retort. Plus I am looking forward to those Final Cut Pro render lines completing faster the next time I am pulling an all-nighter to finish a video project.
ho hum, another day, another supercomputer
This was quite a while ago. OS 8 was out and many computers were running System 7. These OSes did not have the sort of respect outside the community that OS X has received. This was not unjustistified. These OSes had their problems, and at this point the Mac OS was an acquired taste. Apple being the first company to release a supercomputer desktop was a mark of pride we could bring out against those who mocked our 'MacinTrashes' and lauded their Mhz myth empowered 3133t Pentiums.
So to answer your question: we love the OS, we like speed, and if we have a snappy retort to the next mac-basher that is pretty cool too.
IIRC, that amendment, though it only recently became law, is very very old. These days amendments must be ratified in seven years in order to be valid (it will say so in the text of the amendment). But the Congressional pay amendment is an old one that just recently recieved the votes of enough states to be ratified.
Apple's store has been out less than a month IIRC, and I have already downloaded 97 songs. If I had the bandwidth to browse the store more, I would likely have a sustained rate of more than 50 songs per month.
The Real store seems like a viable model for some consumers. I personally prefer Apple's, which is more like the brick and morter pricing system, and I prefer using an Apple player to Real's, but I think Real will make a go with this.
A few weeks ago, the ability to stream anywhere did not exist in iTunes. I am sure many people did not know they had this ability (I did not until spymac made its directory). Thus, the loss of it should have very little effect.
I have my tunes stored on my G4, and whenever I want to access them, it is from OS9 machines. That is why I just connect to my G4 over web sharing, or FTP, or AFP and play them from there. It isn't nifty and streaming, but it works for me and I suspect it would solve your dillema as well.