I guess I'm too late in the conversation to really get heard, but here goes anyway.
I recently bought myself a Creative Nomad, preferring the cost over anything wonderous iPod could give me. My fiancee has an iPod herself and has been downloading music from the iTunes Music Store for a few months now. When it came out on Windows, I couldn't wait to try it out, but the only problem was - how do I get this stuff onto my Nomad?
At the end of the day, it's pretty simply, though a little tedious. Download the music from iTunes, burn it onto a CD, rip it with Windows Media Player, and then do a manual search for the album name, since Media Player can't automatically find them. Nothing new here, but the ease with which I can do this just makes me angry. Surely, the RIAA and Apple must know it's this easy?
I don't use P2P to get my music, I'm more than happy to pay for it. However, Apple just hasn't go it right. If I lose the music downloaded on my computer (which my fiancee did at one point) I don't have the right to download it again. I pay 99c to purchase the right of use on my box and a few others. What should happen is that the RIAA keeps a store for all time that I have a right to play this music. If I authorize my car stereo, I can play it there. If I authorize my refrigerator (in the not-too-distant future), then I can play it there. But no, they proceed from the assumption that I'm a criminal, and make my life difficult in doing so. It's like being frisked at the Target every time I buy a song. So I simply go around their mechanisms to play the music I paid for in the way that I want to hear it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that all of this is enough to turn one into a "criminal" who uses P2P. The irony here is absolutely dripping.
Way back when, when I was reading that classic crytographic book whose name I can't remember by that guy whose name I also can't remember, he was saying that a 256 bit symmetric key would be practically unbreakable since you'd need the total energy output of the Sun for a year to make that many phase changes in the computer.
So, in that kind of light, can anybody here with thermodynamic knowledge compare the total number of phase changes required for this speed versus the energy which has been claimed it needs?
Here's an idea off the top of my head. Build a new protocol, specifically for sending Spam. Then, the spammers can't complain about their "freedom of speech" rights, and network administrators can simply turn off this source of network usage whenever they like.
If there's one thing I don't understand - and it's because of my almost complete ignorance of all things chemistry beyond first year college - is why chemists are doing this sort of thing.
Do new elements like this one have uses in industry, or is it pure research insomuch as the ability for certain elements to exist in nature? Is there a primer for people like me? Is there any theory about which elements -can- exist?
I suppose Napster is ultimately representative of the mighty battle waged here on Slashdot. P2P sharing of music is theft. No, it's not, copyright is more limited than property rights, and besides, the music suits haven't given me any better opportunities to download music.
Well, here's a chance for people to argue with their pocketbooks. As in the post, yes, it doesn't share many similarities with the original Napster, but so what? In an earlier posting today, I said I'd bought myself a Nomad, so I'm keen to try this thing out - yes, the music suits are bad, bad! i tells ya for taking in 90% of the money i pay for a CD or a downloaded song, but, well, that's the price, and I'm willing to pay.
I guess, at the end of the day, all I'm trying to say is score one for the idea that music theft is theft, plain and simple, black and white. And it won't just be talk, I'm going to vote with my pocketbook.
I don't suppose iTunes would be compatible with anything but the iPod? Yeah, my fiancee has one, and they're small and cool and all, but goddamn if they're not expensive. So, I went out and bought myself a Creative Nomad. Does anybody know if there'll be any way to get iTunes songs onto it?
Theft is not what anybody wants
on
Why Only Music?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Maybe this will be considered a troll. But, I feel that sometimes the posting as written needs to be questioned - we can't just take it as the truth and proceed from there.
"...the MPAA hasn't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want..."
In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.
This may sound flippant, but they'll realize that increased penalties don't act as a deterrent around about the same time that that realize that fact for every other type of crime.
My understanding is that they had a dreadful time with these sorts of caps in Australia.
I believe it was Telstra which gave users a 'download meter' which recorded how much you had downloaded in the month. Only problem was that it was never accurate, and you could well be paying through the nose for being above your cap, while your little meter said everything was just fine and dandy.
In other news, thinking this is in response to the RIAA sounds a little paranoid to me. Cable companies everywhere are looking to make everybody happy without have to spend a cent on infrastructure upgrades. At the end of the day, the very specific audience here at Slashdot means we're probably not getting a good cross-section of the discussion on this topic....
The first thing that strikes me about this article is the difference between hauling 100kg people up into space, and hauling the makings of a 10,000 tonne orbital factory into space. Will one lead to the other? Maybe. Will suborbital microgravity testing stations lead to a factory? Maybe. It just strikes me that we're not at a stage where this sort of thing can be done profitably, no matter who you are. As I say, from a market perspective, is there a logical progression from people to factories? Is there a logical progression from single-celled organisms to a human eye? Maybe, but I sure as hell can't see it. In my view, the government has always had to subsidize this sort of development simple because it can't be profitable at this stage of our development. Sure, the US government (as one example) seems to have forgotten the value of national infrastructure when it comes to Amtrak and the airlines, but surely they can still see the political merits of having an advantage in the space race? From a business perspective, I still can only see Saturn V rockets pulling factories into space. Is there a big enough market of millionaires to subsidize the trillions of dollars of development to put real rockets back into the sky? Maybe.
The markets which such RLVs will serve also seem to be dominated by government. Missile testing? Remove sensing? I can't remember having bought a missile or whatever the hell it is that a remote sensor gives you lately. Seems like we'll be paying for it through taxes for a long time yet.
I'm really interested in the definition of 'failure' here. If a terrorist is spotted in a crowd 50% of the time, I'm not sure how that could be seen as a 'failure.' Without such a system, we are certain to have a 0% success rate.
Sure, there may be other systems which have a greater success rate, but, at least from what I know (sometimes, admittedly very little), there don't seem to be a whole lot of other alternatives which don't require that the security queues at airports extend out in the airport parking lots. Where no other good solution exists, reducing my chances of crashing into a building by 50% sounds damn good to me.
And, at the end of the day, if you simply force people to take off their hats and sunglasses, so that the camera can get a nice, long look at them in closeup, I wonder how much greater the success rate for facial recognition would be?
Reuters 7:40pm: A number of individuals have filed suit against New Line cinemas after their bladders exploded due to a marathon session of watching all 3 LOTR movies, a particular predilection for Coke and salt-topped foods, and a distaste for hanging their weenie out in cinema urinals which were cleaned sometime last decade.
You know, back in the day, when I first came to Slashdot, Open Source was all about the free, wild and woolly creation of software, about freedom from The Man, and doing stuff because it was a Nerd Mountain and by goddamn we were going to climb it. I'm never sure if I should be happy or sad that companies such as Red Hat and Oracle are essentially hijacking the popularity of Linux. At the end of the day, is it about being on everybody's desktop or server, or is it about having written good code without a boss? Coding just for the sake of coding, fixing problems without having to beg marketing to let you do it.
What do I say this? Well, I just can't bring myself to believe that Red Hat has the interests of the greater community at heart here. In my view, they are simply trying to protect their revenue stream. Without companies turning to Open Source, they simply don't have any customers.
Maybe that's obvious, but I think amongst all of the support that this fund will have, it's at least good to have it said.
The credit card companies piss me off, they really do. The only reason people need to ask these sorts of questions at all is because of their irresponsible practices.
Why do they send out millions upon millions of offers per year? Why do they make it so easy to get more credit, both from a procedural and financial perspective, even when you can't afford it?
Easy. Money. They should be held responsible for each and every time their system fails. When they suddenly realise that there needs to be a balance between them making money and them losing it through the courts, maybe they will open their eyes.
Well at least you've got to hand it to them for having balls the size of cannonballs.
Call me an idiot, but I can't imagine that they'd go down this path if they knew they were only bluffing. Who would honestly be stupid enough to take on the US government on a money issue like this, just when the electioneering is getting started for '04, without thinking they could win?
There's that book out there called 'The Tipping Point' which might be of some interest to you. Never read it myself, but from what I've heard about it, it tries to explain why some things go on to be phenomenonally successful (like Levis jeans) while other things fade into obscurity.
As for being thankful about not having bugs and feature requests, well I suppose it depends on your outlook. I can imagine you're the only person who can answer it you. Coding for your own sake? Then it's probably good, you can set your own direction without any monkeys on your back. If you're coding for the glory, well, perhaps a broader choice of topic might help.;)
I wonder how long it will be until a parent sues a spammer purely within the framework of existing laws. IANAL, but I can't imagine it's legal to walk down the street and try to sell pornography to minors, for example. How can it be any different for spam?
Perhaps all you'd need to do is prove that the primary user of an email address was a minor, and wham, bham, thank you for the million bucks.
At the least it might stop people just randomly hitting yahoo.com or hotmail.com email addresses. On the other hand, if you give your email address to a porn site in the first place, some people might argue that you deserve what you get, quite frankly.
Although this sort of thing has happened at Sun before, it's an astonishing admission of defeat, in my books.
Their entire company is based on big iron using Solaris. Given that the prevailing trend is to run Linux on lots of small Intel boxes, how can this not shatter their most basic business model?
Given the way Java is going nowadays, I agree, how can Sun not be doomed?
What does reboot even mean in this context?
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I suppose I don't even know what 'reboot' means in this context. Do planes like this have operating systems? Or does the hardware directly run the code? Does the reboot simply reset the system state from somewhere it shouldn't have been? How fast is a reboot? The only context I have is the few minutes it takes my Linux box or my Windows box at work to reboot.
What's funny is I always thought the guys writing this sort of software were uber-coders, and never had this sort of problem. Throw those few extra hundred million dollars at the coding effort, and I just thought this sort of problem went away. It's worrying though - isn't code which ever needed to be rebooted fundamentally flawed? Can you ever really fix that sort of code, or are we just waiting for the day whenever another edge test case comes along mid-flight, and an F-22 falls out of the sky? Even one of this sort of error seems like impending doom to me.
Uh oh, here I go. I honestly don't understand how the claims in this post are any different from those claimed by SCO.
I just presume that, given the audience that visits Slashdot, people will at least be smart enough to realise that they're now on the other side of the fence. Sure, maybe SCO are wrong. But maybe, just maybe, they believe they're in exactly this same position.
How about you go and tell the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people in the United States who have lost their jobs since the dot-com bust about fair, hey?
Look their little kid in the eye, tell them daddy has lost his job so an Indian can share in the wealth of the globe. Tell the guy who committed suicide because he couldn't find a job for 6 or 12 months about fair.
I'm sorry, but it's a big, bad world out there, and reality can come crashing in on my head just as well as it can on somebody's in India or China. If it's a contest between an Indian or I having my job, then, what do you know, I'd rather it be me, thanks very much. Screw fair.
Maybe I'll be like one of those guys who walks down the mall, naked, ringing a bell, and screaming that the end of the world is nigh, but I really do wonder sometimes if the end of capitalism is nigh here in the United States.
What we're pretty much seeing, yet again, is the valuation of the company over the individual. People like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and pretty much every other CEO in the tech industry are getting richer and richer at the expense of the people who keep them there.
Where will this end? Equilibrium? I honestly can't see that happening. I'm pretty sure you could ship every technical job to India and China, and their cost of living, and hence their salaries, would still undercut the US by a massive margin. So what's to stop the flow? I think that legislation might be the only way. Hey, Mr Gates, if you want to use this country to stay rich, then you have to pay it back, your workforce has to be a certain percentage American.
Without that sort of thing, I worry, I honestly do. All I can try to do is be the best in the global market, not just the local market. But how good can I be. You can hire 5 or 10 Indians for what it takes to keep me in a job here in the States. I just can't compete any more.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently bought myself a Creative Nomad, preferring the cost over anything wonderous iPod could give me. My fiancee has an iPod herself and has been downloading music from the iTunes Music Store for a few months now. When it came out on Windows, I couldn't wait to try it out, but the only problem was - how do I get this stuff onto my Nomad?
At the end of the day, it's pretty simply, though a little tedious. Download the music from iTunes, burn it onto a CD, rip it with Windows Media Player, and then do a manual search for the album name, since Media Player can't automatically find them. Nothing new here, but the ease with which I can do this just makes me angry. Surely, the RIAA and Apple must know it's this easy?
I don't use P2P to get my music, I'm more than happy to pay for it. However, Apple just hasn't go it right. If I lose the music downloaded on my computer (which my fiancee did at one point) I don't have the right to download it again. I pay 99c to purchase the right of use on my box and a few others. What should happen is that the RIAA keeps a store for all time that I have a right to play this music. If I authorize my car stereo, I can play it there. If I authorize my refrigerator (in the not-too-distant future), then I can play it there. But no, they proceed from the assumption that I'm a criminal, and make my life difficult in doing so. It's like being frisked at the Target every time I buy a song. So I simply go around their mechanisms to play the music I paid for in the way that I want to hear it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that all of this is enough to turn one into a "criminal" who uses P2P. The irony here is absolutely dripping.
So, in that kind of light, can anybody here with thermodynamic knowledge compare the total number of phase changes required for this speed versus the energy which has been claimed it needs?
Big, bloated, falls over all the time. Where do I sign up?
Simple as that?
Do new elements like this one have uses in industry, or is it pure research insomuch as the ability for certain elements to exist in nature? Is there a primer for people like me? Is there any theory about which elements -can- exist?
Well, here's a chance for people to argue with their pocketbooks. As in the post, yes, it doesn't share many similarities with the original Napster, but so what? In an earlier posting today, I said I'd bought myself a Nomad, so I'm keen to try this thing out - yes, the music suits are bad, bad! i tells ya for taking in 90% of the money i pay for a CD or a downloaded song, but, well, that's the price, and I'm willing to pay.
I guess, at the end of the day, all I'm trying to say is score one for the idea that music theft is theft, plain and simple, black and white. And it won't just be talk, I'm going to vote with my pocketbook.
I don't suppose iTunes would be compatible with anything but the iPod? Yeah, my fiancee has one, and they're small and cool and all, but goddamn if they're not expensive. So, I went out and bought myself a Creative Nomad. Does anybody know if there'll be any way to get iTunes songs onto it?
"...the MPAA hasn't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want..."
In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.
This may sound flippant, but they'll realize that increased penalties don't act as a deterrent around about the same time that that realize that fact for every other type of crime.
I believe it was Telstra which gave users a 'download meter' which recorded how much you had downloaded in the month. Only problem was that it was never accurate, and you could well be paying through the nose for being above your cap, while your little meter said everything was just fine and dandy.
In other news, thinking this is in response to the RIAA sounds a little paranoid to me. Cable companies everywhere are looking to make everybody happy without have to spend a cent on infrastructure upgrades. At the end of the day, the very specific audience here at Slashdot means we're probably not getting a good cross-section of the discussion on this topic....
The markets which such RLVs will serve also seem to be dominated by government. Missile testing? Remove sensing? I can't remember having bought a missile or whatever the hell it is that a remote sensor gives you lately. Seems like we'll be paying for it through taxes for a long time yet.
Sure, there may be other systems which have a greater success rate, but, at least from what I know (sometimes, admittedly very little), there don't seem to be a whole lot of other alternatives which don't require that the security queues at airports extend out in the airport parking lots. Where no other good solution exists, reducing my chances of crashing into a building by 50% sounds damn good to me.
And, at the end of the day, if you simply force people to take off their hats and sunglasses, so that the camera can get a nice, long look at them in closeup, I wonder how much greater the success rate for facial recognition would be?
Reuters 7:40pm: A number of individuals have filed suit against New Line cinemas after their bladders exploded due to a marathon session of watching all 3 LOTR movies, a particular predilection for Coke and salt-topped foods, and a distaste for hanging their weenie out in cinema urinals which were cleaned sometime last decade.
You know, back in the day, when I first came to Slashdot, Open Source was all about the free, wild and woolly creation of software, about freedom from The Man, and doing stuff because it was a Nerd Mountain and by goddamn we were going to climb it. I'm never sure if I should be happy or sad that companies such as Red Hat and Oracle are essentially hijacking the popularity of Linux. At the end of the day, is it about being on everybody's desktop or server, or is it about having written good code without a boss? Coding just for the sake of coding, fixing problems without having to beg marketing to let you do it.
What do I say this? Well, I just can't bring myself to believe that Red Hat has the interests of the greater community at heart here. In my view, they are simply trying to protect their revenue stream. Without companies turning to Open Source, they simply don't have any customers.
Maybe that's obvious, but I think amongst all of the support that this fund will have, it's at least good to have it said.
Why do they send out millions upon millions of offers per year? Why do they make it so easy to get more credit, both from a procedural and financial perspective, even when you can't afford it?
Easy. Money. They should be held responsible for each and every time their system fails. When they suddenly realise that there needs to be a balance between them making money and them losing it through the courts, maybe they will open their eyes.
I can go down to the Fry's and get myself a nice 200 gig drive for a couple of hundred and change nowadays.....
Call me an idiot, but I can't imagine that they'd go down this path if they knew they were only bluffing. Who would honestly be stupid enough to take on the US government on a money issue like this, just when the electioneering is getting started for '04, without thinking they could win?
Maybe SCO, maybe not.
As for being thankful about not having bugs and feature requests, well I suppose it depends on your outlook. I can imagine you're the only person who can answer it you. Coding for your own sake? Then it's probably good, you can set your own direction without any monkeys on your back. If you're coding for the glory, well, perhaps a broader choice of topic might help. ;)
Perhaps all you'd need to do is prove that the primary user of an email address was a minor, and wham, bham, thank you for the million bucks.
At the least it might stop people just randomly hitting yahoo.com or hotmail.com email addresses. On the other hand, if you give your email address to a porn site in the first place, some people might argue that you deserve what you get, quite frankly.
I'd go online with them any day! Reeeeoow!
Their entire company is based on big iron using Solaris. Given that the prevailing trend is to run Linux on lots of small Intel boxes, how can this not shatter their most basic business model?
Given the way Java is going nowadays, I agree, how can Sun not be doomed?
What's funny is I always thought the guys writing this sort of software were uber-coders, and never had this sort of problem. Throw those few extra hundred million dollars at the coding effort, and I just thought this sort of problem went away. It's worrying though - isn't code which ever needed to be rebooted fundamentally flawed? Can you ever really fix that sort of code, or are we just waiting for the day whenever another edge test case comes along mid-flight, and an F-22 falls out of the sky? Even one of this sort of error seems like impending doom to me.
I just presume that, given the audience that visits Slashdot, people will at least be smart enough to realise that they're now on the other side of the fence. Sure, maybe SCO are wrong. But maybe, just maybe, they believe they're in exactly this same position.
Look their little kid in the eye, tell them daddy has lost his job so an Indian can share in the wealth of the globe. Tell the guy who committed suicide because he couldn't find a job for 6 or 12 months about fair.
I'm sorry, but it's a big, bad world out there, and reality can come crashing in on my head just as well as it can on somebody's in India or China. If it's a contest between an Indian or I having my job, then, what do you know, I'd rather it be me, thanks very much. Screw fair.
What we're pretty much seeing, yet again, is the valuation of the company over the individual. People like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and pretty much every other CEO in the tech industry are getting richer and richer at the expense of the people who keep them there.
Where will this end? Equilibrium? I honestly can't see that happening. I'm pretty sure you could ship every technical job to India and China, and their cost of living, and hence their salaries, would still undercut the US by a massive margin. So what's to stop the flow? I think that legislation might be the only way. Hey, Mr Gates, if you want to use this country to stay rich, then you have to pay it back, your workforce has to be a certain percentage American.
Without that sort of thing, I worry, I honestly do. All I can try to do is be the best in the global market, not just the local market. But how good can I be. You can hire 5 or 10 Indians for what it takes to keep me in a job here in the States. I just can't compete any more.