You know what I did when I got picked on? I picked back.
I'm glad that worked for you. Please understand that it doesn't work in every case. It certainly didn't work for me; clever put-downs, withering looks, abuse in kind, aggression, physical violence, ignoring it, walking away, suffering in silence, looking for help... nothing worked. Nothing. I never found a way to stop it. Arriving at uni and finding that life wasn't always like that was a complete revelation to me.
At least, there is no physical harm done in cyber-bullying.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can wound deeper still, can obliterate self-respect, build psychological walls, destroy personality, make life almost unbearable. Believe me. With verbal abuse there's no effective way to fight back, no evidence to show anyone, nothing for people to take seriously. It can go on constantly, under the noses of teachers or other adults, takes no effort on the part of the abusers, and can be dismissed as oversensitivity or immaturity. It's precisely because there's no physical harm that it can be so pervasive, and so overlooked.
It's hard to explain just how it affected me. I probably suffered very little compared to some - I'm no martyr, and it didn't stop me having a fairly normal childhood, with no obvious lasting damage. I can recall very few actual incidents. But it was always there, always with me, a constant faint background of hatred and cruelty, grinding me down, making me weary and miserable. It started because of my height (I was the shortest kid in the school two years running, though I caught up later), but once it got started there was no way to stop it - and believe me, I tried. I rarely thought "I'm being picked on", because at some level I just assumed that's how life was.
No doubt I was immature and annoying, and probably deserved some of it. No doubt some of it wasn't meant too seriously, and I should have just shrugged it off; and no doubt if many of the kids had realised just how much it hurt, they wouldn't have done so. I don't hold any grudges now (though I came a long way before I could say that). But I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Even now, when I occasionally visit the school building (on unrelated business, and with no kids present) I still find it difficult. It still reminds me of how things were, of how I was - and it's something I really don't want to be reminded of. Even writing this post has been more difficult and painful than I expected.
I'm not suggesting laws or rules or bureaucracy or lawsuits or whatever. You can't stop people talking, you can't stop them laughing, you can't change their attitudes. But please don't dismiss non-physical abuse. I hope none of you knows just how much it can hurt.
IMO, the trouble is that kids can't naturally empathise with others. Empathy seems to be a skill that's picked up gradually, and quite late (if at all).
I found it much easier to deal (in hindsight) with the (mostly verbal) abuse I suffered at school when I realised this. In most cases, the kids concerned didn't actually hate me in the way I used to think; they just didn't know what they were doing to me (and didn't care enough to find out). Hanlon's Razor applies, I guess.
I don't think empathy is something you can teach; it either comes naturally to you, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then you have to put some effort into it, and most people don't bother. You can probably teach the need for it, but I doubt that those who most need to learn the lesson will do so.
Anyway, is it me, or is putting a huge number of kids together, in a high-pressure environment with few adults, little room and nowhere to escape to, a poor way to teach them compassion, empathy, and other social skills?
It was the first time I really felt like I had at least a little grasp of the subject.
Nothing personal, but if there was no mathematical background, then I'd suggest that at best you have a grasp of the consequences of the theory. Like Relativity, QM, and several other recent developments, if you don't know the maths, then I don't think you really understand it - the underlying reasons for its strangeness, how it was developed, the way it fits into our current understanding of the universe, its internal structure or logic.
(I include myself in that category, BTW - despite having a maths degree, and having seen some of the basic mathematical theory for both Relativity and QM, I really wouldn't say I understand them.)
Isaac Asimov had one of his characters in his Black Widowers stories come up with a limerick for each book of the Iliad. In fact, he only came up with a handful before dropping the idea, but those were rather good.
I'll add my vote to that. We seem to be in a small minority, but personally I really enjoyed the complexity and dark edge to BttF 2. Maybe they felt that with a light-hearted romp coming in part 3 (which I found a big disappointment), they were free to explore darker territory than they'd be able to in a self-contained film.
Maybe I'm an atypical movie-goer, but I really enjoy films that you have to think about. Not pretentious pseudo-science and ambiguity like, er, certain sequels I could mention, but where the basic plot isn't spelled out in the first few minutes (and in trailers...). I mean, how often have you sat in a cinema and been genuinely confused?
For example, I saw The Truman Show having seen no promotional material at all, not even knowing who was in it; definitely the best way to see that particular film. And for the first half an hour or so, I remember being a bit bewildered. It was a very unusual and refreshing sensation! And to discover the sheer audacity of the backstory for myself, without having it rammed down my throat in trailers or reviews, was an amazing experience. Since then I try to avoid seeing trailers or previews for films that I think I'll want to see. Especially now that previews have turned into condensed pop-video versions of the whole film, complete with the full plot, the best lines, all the twists and surprises, and an annoying man with an unfeasibly low voice...
BttF2 wasn't quite on that scale, but I still enjoyed it a lot, and can't understand why so few other people appeared to.
I don't think Aliens is a useful example, because it's highly atypical. It's a sequel only in the sense that it's set in the same universe, deals with the same creatures, and is set afterwards.
However, unlike most sequels, it's not a remake of the original in any form. It's in a different style and genre (action rather than suspense and horror), from a different director, wasn't made soon after the original, and shares only one character and almost no locations. In short, it's not trying to be a sequel in the usual cookie-cutter, copy-the-first-one-only-larger sense we've come to know it. It's a separate film in its own right; and it succeeds as such.
Because of this, it also has a slightly different intended audience. People who like suspense and horror but not action are unlikely to enjoy it, especially if they're expecting a cookie-cutter sequel. OTOH, people who enjoy action but might be put off by the first one's tension and gore might enjoy the sequel much more. (I myself fall in between the two, FWIW.)
So: 'X is better than Y' assertions are always subjective; while they may at least have some relevance for cookie-cutter sequels, in this case IMO the two films are so different that I don't think such a statement is valid or helpful.
(Nothing personal, DWIM, just a bugbear of mine. In Amazon's music reviews, for example, I'm fed up with reading that someone thinks this is the best CD in the world -- unless I share their taste in music, that's meaningless. Instead, a description of the style, how it compares to that artist's other work, what other artists it sounds like, &c would be far more useful, even if less exciting to read than endless superlatives.)
How many people said something similar when the WIMP environment (e.g. Mac) went public? "Real computers need you to type everything! Anything worthwhile can be shown as text - if I want to see pretty pictures I'll go to an art gallery! And keep those mice in the toybox where they belong!"
Initially, that took lots of space, seemed a waste of resources, and you couldn't do much with it. Since then, resources have increased tremendously, new applications and methods have been developed that make good use of it, and people see the extra desk space as worthwhile. I don't know if the same might happen to the SenseTable, but I do know that if so, it won't be because it fits today's hardware, apps, and interfaces, but because it'll fit tomorrow's.
AAC is not DRMed. AAC is a compression format, just like MP3. You can encode stuff to AAC and play it anywhere. It's not encrypted or restricted in any way.
What the iTunes Music Store sells is not plain AAC files; it sells.m4p files which are AAC wrapped in a separate DRM layer. It's this layer which restricts to you three Macs and their iPods. Plain AAC files are not restricted; so files you encode yourself or get from other sources are not DRMed.
What the parent fails to mention is that Java's not really intended for that sort of thing, so it's no wonder it doesn't seem to fit. You wouldn't compare Oracle with grep for searching a short file, would you? Or awk with Ada for writing million-line simulations? Or a 128-way cluster with a CD player for playing music?
Yes, yes, I know the initial wave of Java hype centred on applets, but that was really just a way to get it noticed; it's currently doing very well in large in-house systems, server-side work, and that sort of thing.
So although none of the parent's comparisons are totally wrong (though some are arguable), the implications may be so. Please don't assume that because it doesn't seem suited to applets, it's a lousy language, or that because you don't see it used for too many client-side consumer apps, that it's not widely used.
Doesn't it depend upon the road? Here in the UK, the most common approach in dual carriageways with two lanes on each side seems to be for cars just to move away from the centre of the carriageway - cars on the left move left, onto the hard shoulder if there is one, and cars on the right move to the right, up to the central reservation. That usually leaves enough space in between for emergency vehicles to pass. It even works with queues of traffic at traffic lights, too -- the front two cars only need to move half a car's width or so over the line.
Of course, if there's lots of space in the nearside lane, then all the cars can hop into that, leaving the overtaking lane clear for the emergency vehicles. If there's only one lane, then of course you just have to pull over as far as you can. I guess that as long as you're leaving them enough room, and they can see what you're doing, then you're okay.
Citations may not be a big issue for many people. And if they are, maybe some formatting-independent measure can be used; something like 'Chapter M, paragraph N' might be awkward for printed books, but might be easily-automated and accurate enough for ebooks. And it wouldn't need any changes to the text itself.
Similarly, hyphenation is another artefact of the limitations of printing; surely ebooks shouldn't need to suffer from those limitations too? If text is stored in paragraphs, then it's up to the renderer to decide how to flow the lines, whether breaking at whole words (justifying or not), or using its own dictionary to decide good hyphenation points. Personally, I think that hyphenation's main purpose is to avoid wasting paper rather than making things any easier to read, and as that's simply not a consideration for ebooks, we're better off without hyphenation at all.
Presumably, we're not talking so much of converting existing editions, but of making new ones? If so, I expect most publishers have been keeping the pre-hyphenation text of their books for a while now, so OCR limitations may not be an issue for kosher ebooks.
And a very bad standard it is, too, IMO. PDF is great for one thing: producing an exact copy of a work on your screen or printer. Complete with the exact same font sizes, formatting, pagination, and so on.
There are situations that's wonderful -- sheet music is an example I've used recently. But it's a lousy aim for most ebooks. In most cases you don't want the same pagination and formatting - you want the text to be reformatted to match how you're looking at it, to fit your screen size, using your preferred colours and fonts, and so on. How can you read a PDF file on a small, narrow screen? You either need to reduce the font size to something unreadable, or to scroll from left to right with every line you read. Wonderful, eh? Not.
IME most ebooks work far better using logical, not physical, markup. If your machine knows where the chapter/scene/paragraph breaks are, which sections are indented or fixed format, where to use bold or underlined text, then it can make far better decisions about how to lay out the text than any predetermined form. And that, after all, is pretty much what HTML was invented for, however much people insist on using it to specify things pixel-by-pixel...
(While we're on the subject, there's one simple thing HTML can't do well: preserve double-spaces at the ends of sentences. You can faff around with codes, but as well as the hassle, they don't always work as you expect, especially around line endings, and SlashCode seems to strip them out anyway!)
But apart from that, HTML seems a much better format for ebooks than PDF.
However, even plain text can work very well. A few simple conventions for chapter headings, scene breaks,/italics/, *bold*, &c, and you have something which is easy to use and works with far more existing tools and readers than anything else out there. (The same applies to formats which are isomorphic to plain text, such as Palm DOC and TCR.)
Well, yes, of course some photos could be damaging to any company, but that's not really the point. The point isn't even whether M$ have the legal right to fire him; they're bound to have made sure they have.
AISI, the point is: do they have the moral right to fire him? And since it appears that this particular snap wasn't defamatory, obscene, or contained any confidential information or security risk, then I guess it comes down to this question: was there anything in his contract covering the taking of photos per se?
If so, then he should have known better. Regardless of whether or not this particular photo did any damage, by working there he'd agreed to follow their rules (right or wrong), and he should have known that breaking those rules could get him into trouble.
OTOH, if not, then I'd say he had the right to feel very aggrieved indeed. It doesn't look as if it was posted with any malicious intent, or there were any real security implications. Firing him as a deterrent to others is hardly fair if there was no indication it wasn't allowed.
the Concorde is still a breathtaking aircraft to behold
Indeed. I remember the first air show held here in Southend (now an annual event); as well as the Red Arrows and all sorts of other aircraft, Concorde made an appearance. Everyone just stood up! It was jaw-droppingly beautiful. And powerful. And noisy! But standing there with my hands clamped over my ears didn't spoil the occasion. It made a second pass, too, though by the time it had turned around that was a while later:)
It is about time trivial copyright infringements be free of punishment / fine.
So (playing Devil's Advocate here), it's not okay for one corporation to deny an artist his or her dues, but it is okay for thousands of people to do so, a bit at a time?
Much as I agree with most of what you say, the RIAA does have one undeniable fact in their favour: they people they are suing did (in most cases) break the law.
We can argue over whether it's a just law in today's circumstances, whether distributors should be providing legal alternatives, whether the RIAA's motives are selfish, and many other issues, but that doesn't change the fact. It may be immoral for the RIAA to sue, but legally speaking they are right to do so. What music sharers do (in general) is illegal, and (again in general) they known this.
Surely instead of arguing for the law not to be enforced, perhaps we should be arguing for it to be changed?
...of current US xenophobia to assume that the moment they don't control every inch of space, that they are therefore under threat. How typical, how insecure, how sad, and how incredibly dangerous.
At present, I fear that WW3 is most likely to be started by the US. Seeing non-existent 'threats' everywhere and getting their retaliation in first.
In some ways we may have been safer back in the Cold War when there was at least one real enemy to take their mind off all the imaginary ones...
Something the rest of the world has already learned: LIFE IS RISKY. You take a chance just getting up in the morning, crossing the road, or sticking your face in a fan. And yet, somehow, the rest of us manage to carry on anyway. There comes a point when you have to accept that life is risky, and not search for a security that isn't possible, a search that only brings slavery and terror.
Etymotics have two major advantages: quality and isolation. Quality speaks for itself; they sound as good as a huge over-the-ears pair, but are tiny and unobtrusive. The isolation, though, is harder to understand until you've tried it. If you listen on public transport, for example, which is noisier than you might think, you're missing out on the vast majority of the music - and if you turn the music up, you're risking your hearing. By blocking out almost all of the external noise, you can listen at a lower volume level, and yet hear far more detail, clarity, and richness in the sound.
I have an Elacin pair which use the Etymotic drivers, but are made of latex and moulded to my ear canals; they act like earplugs, cutting off all external noise to an amazing degree, and are extremely comfortable. (I sometimes use them as plain earplugs, and have slept in them.) They sound amazing, and the silence they create outside that is extremely relaxing. For the use I've had out of them, I consider them well worth the 200 I spent. (Which you'd find even more surprising if you saw the cheapness of all my other sound gear!)
If that's too much, Slicsound make some latex mouldings that slip over your existing earbuds and try to give the same sort of isolation. I doubt they're anywhere near as comfortable or as quiet, but they're dirt cheap and I'd recommend trying them.
In short: what's the point of spending all that money on an iPod if you can't really hear it? If you have a nice quiet listening environment, then fine, but if like me you listen in noisy places like public transport, with ordinary phones you might just as well rip everything at 32 kbps and get a cheaper player. For me, I value my hearing and my music, and I'm as pleased with my expensive phones as I am with my iPod.
Not me, luckily. I only see about 10 a day, and my mail client's Bayesian filter identifies most of those. Admittedly, my ISP is running BrightMail, which stops another hundred or so each day before they get near me. Still, very manageable. But I sympathise with those who have it far worse.
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I'm glad that worked for you. Please understand that it doesn't work in every case. It certainly didn't work for me; clever put-downs, withering looks, abuse in kind, aggression, physical violence, ignoring it, walking away, suffering in silence, looking for help... nothing worked. Nothing. I never found a way to stop it. Arriving at uni and finding that life wasn't always like that was a complete revelation to me.
At least, there is no physical harm done in cyber-bullying.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can wound deeper still, can obliterate self-respect, build psychological walls, destroy personality, make life almost unbearable. Believe me. With verbal abuse there's no effective way to fight back, no evidence to show anyone, nothing for people to take seriously. It can go on constantly, under the noses of teachers or other adults, takes no effort on the part of the abusers, and can be dismissed as oversensitivity or immaturity. It's precisely because there's no physical harm that it can be so pervasive, and so overlooked.
It's hard to explain just how it affected me. I probably suffered very little compared to some - I'm no martyr, and it didn't stop me having a fairly normal childhood, with no obvious lasting damage. I can recall very few actual incidents. But it was always there, always with me, a constant faint background of hatred and cruelty, grinding me down, making me weary and miserable. It started because of my height (I was the shortest kid in the school two years running, though I caught up later), but once it got started there was no way to stop it - and believe me, I tried. I rarely thought "I'm being picked on", because at some level I just assumed that's how life was.
No doubt I was immature and annoying, and probably deserved some of it. No doubt some of it wasn't meant too seriously, and I should have just shrugged it off; and no doubt if many of the kids had realised just how much it hurt, they wouldn't have done so. I don't hold any grudges now (though I came a long way before I could say that). But I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Even now, when I occasionally visit the school building (on unrelated business, and with no kids present) I still find it difficult. It still reminds me of how things were, of how I was - and it's something I really don't want to be reminded of. Even writing this post has been more difficult and painful than I expected.
I'm not suggesting laws or rules or bureaucracy or lawsuits or whatever. You can't stop people talking, you can't stop them laughing, you can't change their attitudes. But please don't dismiss non-physical abuse. I hope none of you knows just how much it can hurt.
I found it much easier to deal (in hindsight) with the (mostly verbal) abuse I suffered at school when I realised this. In most cases, the kids concerned didn't actually hate me in the way I used to think; they just didn't know what they were doing to me (and didn't care enough to find out). Hanlon's Razor applies, I guess.
I don't think empathy is something you can teach; it either comes naturally to you, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then you have to put some effort into it, and most people don't bother. You can probably teach the need for it, but I doubt that those who most need to learn the lesson will do so.
Anyway, is it me, or is putting a huge number of kids together, in a high-pressure environment with few adults, little room and nowhere to escape to, a poor way to teach them compassion, empathy, and other social skills?
Nothing personal, but if there was no mathematical background, then I'd suggest that at best you have a grasp of the consequences of the theory. Like Relativity, QM, and several other recent developments, if you don't know the maths, then I don't think you really understand it - the underlying reasons for its strangeness, how it was developed, the way it fits into our current understanding of the universe, its internal structure or logic.
(I include myself in that category, BTW - despite having a maths degree, and having seen some of the basic mathematical theory for both Relativity and QM, I really wouldn't say I understand them.)
Australia? That's in Iowa, isn't it?
Isaac Asimov had one of his characters in his Black Widowers stories come up with a limerick for each book of the Iliad. In fact, he only came up with a handful before dropping the idea, but those were rather good.
Maybe I'm an atypical movie-goer, but I really enjoy films that you have to think about. Not pretentious pseudo-science and ambiguity like, er, certain sequels I could mention, but where the basic plot isn't spelled out in the first few minutes (and in trailers...). I mean, how often have you sat in a cinema and been genuinely confused?
For example, I saw The Truman Show having seen no promotional material at all, not even knowing who was in it; definitely the best way to see that particular film. And for the first half an hour or so, I remember being a bit bewildered. It was a very unusual and refreshing sensation! And to discover the sheer audacity of the backstory for myself, without having it rammed down my throat in trailers or reviews, was an amazing experience. Since then I try to avoid seeing trailers or previews for films that I think I'll want to see. Especially now that previews have turned into condensed pop-video versions of the whole film, complete with the full plot, the best lines, all the twists and surprises, and an annoying man with an unfeasibly low voice...
BttF2 wasn't quite on that scale, but I still enjoyed it a lot, and can't understand why so few other people appeared to.
I don't think Aliens is a useful example, because it's highly atypical. It's a sequel only in the sense that it's set in the same universe, deals with the same creatures, and is set afterwards.
However, unlike most sequels, it's not a remake of the original in any form. It's in a different style and genre (action rather than suspense and horror), from a different director, wasn't made soon after the original, and shares only one character and almost no locations. In short, it's not trying to be a sequel in the usual cookie-cutter, copy-the-first-one-only-larger sense we've come to know it. It's a separate film in its own right; and it succeeds as such.
Because of this, it also has a slightly different intended audience. People who like suspense and horror but not action are unlikely to enjoy it, especially if they're expecting a cookie-cutter sequel. OTOH, people who enjoy action but might be put off by the first one's tension and gore might enjoy the sequel much more. (I myself fall in between the two, FWIW.)
So: 'X is better than Y' assertions are always subjective; while they may at least have some relevance for cookie-cutter sequels, in this case IMO the two films are so different that I don't think such a statement is valid or helpful.
(Nothing personal, DWIM, just a bugbear of mine. In Amazon's music reviews, for example, I'm fed up with reading that someone thinks this is the best CD in the world -- unless I share their taste in music, that's meaningless. Instead, a description of the style, how it compares to that artist's other work, what other artists it sounds like, &c would be far more useful, even if less exciting to read than endless superlatives.)
Initially, that took lots of space, seemed a waste of resources, and you couldn't do much with it. Since then, resources have increased tremendously, new applications and methods have been developed that make good use of it, and people see the extra desk space as worthwhile. I don't know if the same might happen to the SenseTable, but I do know that if so, it won't be because it fits today's hardware, apps, and interfaces, but because it'll fit tomorrow's.
AAC is not DRMed. AAC is a compression format, just like MP3. You can encode stuff to AAC and play it anywhere. It's not encrypted or restricted in any way.
What the iTunes Music Store sells is not plain AAC files; it sells .m4p files which are AAC wrapped in a separate DRM layer. It's this layer which restricts to you three Macs and their iPods. Plain AAC files are not restricted; so files you encode yourself or get from other sources are not DRMed.
Yes, yes, I know the initial wave of Java hype centred on applets, but that was really just a way to get it noticed; it's currently doing very well in large in-house systems, server-side work, and that sort of thing.
So although none of the parent's comparisons are totally wrong (though some are arguable), the implications may be so. Please don't assume that because it doesn't seem suited to applets, it's a lousy language, or that because you don't see it used for too many client-side consumer apps, that it's not widely used.
So? The number of stupid posts on /. outnumbers the insightful ones by a million to one. (But still they come...)
Of course, if there's lots of space in the nearside lane, then all the cars can hop into that, leaving the overtaking lane clear for the emergency vehicles. If there's only one lane, then of course you just have to pull over as far as you can. I guess that as long as you're leaving them enough room, and they can see what you're doing, then you're okay.
Similarly, hyphenation is another artefact of the limitations of printing; surely ebooks shouldn't need to suffer from those limitations too? If text is stored in paragraphs, then it's up to the renderer to decide how to flow the lines, whether breaking at whole words (justifying or not), or using its own dictionary to decide good hyphenation points. Personally, I think that hyphenation's main purpose is to avoid wasting paper rather than making things any easier to read, and as that's simply not a consideration for ebooks, we're better off without hyphenation at all.
Presumably, we're not talking so much of converting existing editions, but of making new ones? If so, I expect most publishers have been keeping the pre-hyphenation text of their books for a while now, so OCR limitations may not be an issue for kosher ebooks.
And a very bad standard it is, too, IMO. PDF is great for one thing: producing an exact copy of a work on your screen or printer. Complete with the exact same font sizes, formatting, pagination, and so on.
There are situations that's wonderful -- sheet music is an example I've used recently. But it's a lousy aim for most ebooks. In most cases you don't want the same pagination and formatting - you want the text to be reformatted to match how you're looking at it, to fit your screen size, using your preferred colours and fonts, and so on. How can you read a PDF file on a small, narrow screen? You either need to reduce the font size to something unreadable, or to scroll from left to right with every line you read. Wonderful, eh? Not.
IME most ebooks work far better using logical, not physical, markup. If your machine knows where the chapter/scene/paragraph breaks are, which sections are indented or fixed format, where to use bold or underlined text, then it can make far better decisions about how to lay out the text than any predetermined form. And that, after all, is pretty much what HTML was invented for, however much people insist on using it to specify things pixel-by-pixel...
(While we're on the subject, there's one simple thing HTML can't do well: preserve double-spaces at the ends of sentences. You can faff around with codes, but as well as the hassle, they don't always work as you expect, especially around line endings, and SlashCode seems to strip them out anyway!)
But apart from that, HTML seems a much better format for ebooks than PDF.
However, even plain text can work very well. A few simple conventions for chapter headings, scene breaks, /italics/, *bold*, &c, and you have something which is easy to use and works with far more existing tools and readers than anything else out there. (The same applies to formats which are isomorphic to plain text, such as Palm DOC and TCR.)
In one sense, at least, the original impact point was several thousand miles away, in Horsell Common in Surrey...
AISI, the point is: do they have the moral right to fire him? And since it appears that this particular snap wasn't defamatory, obscene, or contained any confidential information or security risk, then I guess it comes down to this question: was there anything in his contract covering the taking of photos per se?
If so, then he should have known better. Regardless of whether or not this particular photo did any damage, by working there he'd agreed to follow their rules (right or wrong), and he should have known that breaking those rules could get him into trouble.
OTOH, if not, then I'd say he had the right to feel very aggrieved indeed. It doesn't look as if it was posted with any malicious intent, or there were any real security implications. Firing him as a deterrent to others is hardly fair if there was no indication it wasn't allowed.
Indeed. I remember the first air show held here in Southend (now an annual event); as well as the Red Arrows and all sorts of other aircraft, Concorde made an appearance. Everyone just stood up! It was jaw-droppingly beautiful. And powerful. And noisy! But standing there with my hands clamped over my ears didn't spoil the occasion. It made a second pass, too, though by the time it had turned around that was a while later :)
So (playing Devil's Advocate here), it's not okay for one corporation to deny an artist his or her dues, but it is okay for thousands of people to do so, a bit at a time?
We can argue over whether it's a just law in today's circumstances, whether distributors should be providing legal alternatives, whether the RIAA's motives are selfish, and many other issues, but that doesn't change the fact. It may be immoral for the RIAA to sue, but legally speaking they are right to do so. What music sharers do (in general) is illegal, and (again in general) they known this.
Surely instead of arguing for the law not to be enforced, perhaps we should be arguing for it to be changed?
At present, I fear that WW3 is most likely to be started by the US. Seeing non-existent 'threats' everywhere and getting their retaliation in first.
In some ways we may have been safer back in the Cold War when there was at least one real enemy to take their mind off all the imaginary ones...
Something the rest of the world has already learned: LIFE IS RISKY. You take a chance just getting up in the morning, crossing the road, or sticking your face in a fan. And yet, somehow, the rest of us manage to carry on anyway. There comes a point when you have to accept that life is risky, and not search for a security that isn't possible, a search that only brings slavery and terror.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
But it's all okay to post a story for all the PC zealots?
(Yes, I know they're not normally called PC zealots, but that's only coz there are so many of them...)
(Sorry, I forgot ./ has a thing against pound signs. For '200' please read '200 GBP' - about $330.)
I have an Elacin pair which use the Etymotic drivers, but are made of latex and moulded to my ear canals; they act like earplugs, cutting off all external noise to an amazing degree, and are extremely comfortable. (I sometimes use them as plain earplugs, and have slept in them.) They sound amazing, and the silence they create outside that is extremely relaxing. For the use I've had out of them, I consider them well worth the 200 I spent. (Which you'd find even more surprising if you saw the cheapness of all my other sound gear!)
If that's too much, Slicsound make some latex mouldings that slip over your existing earbuds and try to give the same sort of isolation. I doubt they're anywhere near as comfortable or as quiet, but they're dirt cheap and I'd recommend trying them.
In short: what's the point of spending all that money on an iPod if you can't really hear it? If you have a nice quiet listening environment, then fine, but if like me you listen in noisy places like public transport, with ordinary phones you might just as well rip everything at 32 kbps and get a cheaper player. For me, I value my hearing and my music, and I'm as pleased with my expensive phones as I am with my iPod.
Not me, luckily. I only see about 10 a day, and my mail client's Bayesian filter identifies most of those. Admittedly, my ISP is running BrightMail, which stops another hundred or so each day before they get near me. Still, very manageable. But I sympathise with those who have it far worse.