The irony of this is that a good part of why I watch "restricted" content on my TV is out of the spirit of vindictiveness.
I *think* one of the points that you are trying to make is that by doing this, I am giving content owners the false impression that their restrictions aren't hurting viewership or sales, because they still see the "PC viewers" count increase. If this is the case, then you're right.
What other free content is available? I have 3 different Internet-enabled devices attached to my TV, not counting my laptop, and there's a pretty big lack of completely free content. There's only so much break.com, or Funny or Die, or podcasts that I can handle in a given week. Right now the only free service that offers a substantial amount of free television programming is Crackle, and they seem to be limited mostly to 25+ year old television shows. They have the right idea, just not enough content (yet).
I am looking forward to the day when I can fire Comcast and still be able to watch the things that I want to watch, when I want to watch them.
I agree with this sentiment. I never understood why some contracts with Hulu, for example, will allow streaming to my laptop while connected to the VGA input of my TV, running in full screen mode, but not with my Sony Blu-Ray player. It's slightly more inconvenient to have to get out the laptop, but when I do, it defeats ALL forms of "We do not want this content to be displayed on televisions and mobile devices" licensing.
Suck it, content providers. Pull your heads out of your collective asses.
Ummm.. I think you meant to say "won't give a shit", and I dissagree. What if one of your main sources of income were DVD sales and over the course of a few months (6 at most), the sales pretty much dried up? I think you would take notice. So would the media companies. To think otherwise is obsurd.
While I imagine DVD sales are a non-trivial portion of the movie industry's revenue, I imagine that box office sales account for much more. I don't think they'd really sweat it that much if DVD sales started declining. Contrast this to the record industry, where media sales are are the primary source of income, which leads to....
Look at it this way. When the varied P2P networks started being used MAJORLY to steal the Big Media Company content, what did they do? They did what they thought was needed to protect the incoming money. They will do EXACTLY the same thing if everyone suddenly stopped buying DVD's and going to movie theaters? I predict that DRM type stuff will pretty much vanish and movie theater owners will win much cheaper distribution/viewing costs.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the MPAA is nowhere nearly as aggressive as the RIAA with their enforcement tactics. They seem to be primarily concerned with people that are sharing new movies that aren't yet available on PPV or DVD, and people who are sharing a ton of movies at once. They've already made a ton of money by the time a movie makes it out on DVD, and therefore easier to rip, release, and trade.
I do something similar:
When I go to a site that requires a valid email address for "confirmation" or whatever, I append the site name to my email address with a + like this:
username+slashdot.org@domain.com
The email will go to usernam@domain.com and I can tell right away which site sold my email address to spammers.
Doesn't keep me spam free, but certainly helps me track it.
Alternately, if you run your own email server, you can just set up a one-time alias that's valid long enough to get your confirmation email.
-J
Amen! The aftermath of Columbine sickened me because everybody wanted to play the blame game instead of addressing the real problem.
I don't think that what happened at Columbine was right, but the kids felt as though they had exhausted all other resources they had available to resolve the issue.
But of course this wasn't the problem: it was MTV, it was Marilyn Manson, it was the NRA and private gun owners, it was THE INTERNET...it certainly couldn't be our star football players and highly trained guidance counselors!
It saddens me that all of those people died at Columbine and people still don't get it.
I've been an AT&T Wireless customer since 2000 and I've had nothing but good experiences with their customer service. One of my friends has Sprint and it's painful to hear him talk about the nightmares he's had with them. If what I've experienced over the past four years is considered "bad" customer service, then I really look forward to some "good" customer service.
In fact, when I heard that Cingular was buying ATTWS, I thought to myself "Damn I hope Cingular's customer service don't suck, because I've kinda been spoiled."
I wish the lameness would stop. The WIPO has proven themselves to be about as ineffective and "unbiased" as ICANN.
Does anybody remember if there was a trademark war between the makers of the VAX and the VAX? Apple Records and Apple Computers have been able to coexist peacefully since the late 70s, as well.
I can see the WIPO and lawyers going after domain squatters who are attempting to profit from another company or individual's fame or reputation, but the disputes nowadays are insane, and take away from the value of the Internet as a whole.
OTOH, maybe I should sue the people that own workman.org Since I have probably been around much longer than this site, plus, people might go to this site, thinking that it is my own, and get the wrong impression that I'm a Christian!
(This will probably get modded as a troll, but I don't intend it to be.)
What a lot of people don't understand is that people don't want "workalikes" for certain software. They use (*shudder*) MS Office at work or at school and that's what they want to use at home as well. The same goes for Photoshop, Quark, or whatever. The sad truth of the matter, though is that most likely this software will never be ported to Linux. Most of the "big name" software that has had UNIX ports in the past have been abandoned, with the notable exceptions being FrameMaker and Maya.
For some things, substitute software is fine. I don't see why anybody who's used to Winamp wouldn't like xmms, for example. But for other things, Star/OpenOffice will never be a substitute for Office, Gimp will never be a substitute for Photoshop, and Evolution will never be a substitute for Outlook, regardless of whether or not they do the same job, and maybe even more.
Then, as somebody else mentioned, there's games. Loki was probably our only hope for that, and they're gone. Sure, you've still got a few good games being ported to Linux, but you still have nowhere near the variety available for Windows or the Mac. Loki's failure doesn't exactly encourage game developers to port their products to Linux, either.
As for video codecs, yes I understand that there's some rather nice workarounds. However these still aren't very acceptable solutions for Joe User. When a new codec comes out, he wants to be able to go download it right away so he can enjoy the new porn flick that he just downloaded that requires it, not wait a month or longer for mplayer or xine to support it. Jamie Zawinski has a rather informative rant about his bad experiences with Linux video, and he's far from being "Joe User," so if he has this many problems, imagine what kind of problems poor Joe is gonna have?
It seems that nothing is sacred anymore. First you get everybody and his brother trying to introduce alternate root zones, then you get morons like NewNet that go a step further and require a browser plugin. Now Verisign does this.
I understand that having non-ascii characters in host/domain names would be desirable, however if they can't do it without breaking the DNS protocol, then they should get their ass right back to the R&D lab and try harder.
I can't speak about gun crime in Australia, but you can read this for an exemplary article on just how much banning guns has reduced gun-related crime in the UK.
While I don't have any hard statistics to back it up, it's been my observation that states where firearms are used routinely for sporting purposes such as WV, NC, VT, and TX have much lower accident rates than the "liberal infiltrated" states like Kalifornia, New York, and New Jersey.
I, for example, have been around guns all my life, and my parents never had to lock them up to keep me away from them. I was taught that they weren't toys and that I'd be in the shit if I messed with Dad's guns, and here I am, 30 years old without ever blowing a hole in my own head, or anybody else's for that matter.
Parents nowadays are stupid. They don't want to parent thieir children, they want the government to do it for them. Our society is becoming more braindead with every new law, and every new Supreme Court ruling that becomes "case law."
As an aside: Why do you call yourselves "liberals" when all you want to do is take away?
Because some legacy apps don't like a 24 bit display. Particularly, if you're running old apps from a Solaris or an HP-UX box and displaying them on your Linux machine, there's a chance that they at least want the default visual to be 8 bit. There's been quite a few Linux apps over the years that was like this as well. Wabi comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate, hate, hate how people like you act as though we must always be nice to the police, regardless of how nice they are to us.
It's attitudes like yours that has enabled the police to gain far more authority in this country than they deserve.
I bet you're one of those people who trust police unconditionally, don't you? In 2011 this is extremely foolish.
The irony of this is that a good part of why I watch "restricted" content on my TV is out of the spirit of vindictiveness.
I *think* one of the points that you are trying to make is that by doing this, I am giving content owners the false impression that their restrictions aren't hurting viewership or sales, because they still see the "PC viewers" count increase. If this is the case, then you're right.
What other free content is available? I have 3 different Internet-enabled devices attached to my TV, not counting my laptop, and there's a pretty big lack of completely free content. There's only so much break.com, or Funny or Die, or podcasts that I can handle in a given week. Right now the only free service that offers a substantial amount of free television programming is Crackle, and they seem to be limited mostly to 25+ year old television shows. They have the right idea, just not enough content (yet).
I am looking forward to the day when I can fire Comcast and still be able to watch the things that I want to watch, when I want to watch them.
I agree with this sentiment. I never understood why some contracts with Hulu, for example, will allow streaming to my laptop while connected to the VGA input of my TV, running in full screen mode, but not with my Sony Blu-Ray player. It's slightly more inconvenient to have to get out the laptop, but when I do, it defeats ALL forms of "We do not want this content to be displayed on televisions and mobile devices" licensing.
Suck it, content providers. Pull your heads out of your collective asses.
I've been telling people to stick a fork in the internet for years.
I just wanted it to be known that I was here for this.
Thank you, MD-D.
Yeah $deity forbid that a convicted criminal actually be punished.
Ummm.. I think you meant to say "won't give a shit", and I dissagree. What if one of your main sources of income were DVD sales and over the course of a few months (6 at most), the sales pretty much dried up? I think you would take notice. So would the media companies. To think otherwise is obsurd.
While I imagine DVD sales are a non-trivial portion of the movie industry's revenue, I imagine that box office sales account for much more. I don't think they'd really sweat it that much if DVD sales started declining. Contrast this to the record industry, where media sales are are the primary source of income, which leads to....
Look at it this way. When the varied P2P networks started being used MAJORLY to steal the Big Media Company content, what did they do? They did what they thought was needed to protect the incoming money. They will do EXACTLY the same thing if everyone suddenly stopped buying DVD's and going to movie theaters? I predict that DRM type stuff will pretty much vanish and movie theater owners will win much cheaper distribution/viewing costs.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the MPAA is nowhere nearly as aggressive as the RIAA with their enforcement tactics. They seem to be primarily concerned with people that are sharing new movies that aren't yet available on PPV or DVD, and people who are sharing a ton of movies at once. They've already made a ton of money by the time a movie makes it out on DVD, and therefore easier to rip, release, and trade.
-J
You are sounding like a retard. Think about it.
I do something similar: When I go to a site that requires a valid email address for "confirmation" or whatever, I append the site name to my email address with a + like this: username+slashdot.org@domain.com The email will go to usernam@domain.com and I can tell right away which site sold my email address to spammers. Doesn't keep me spam free, but certainly helps me track it. Alternately, if you run your own email server, you can just set up a one-time alias that's valid long enough to get your confirmation email. -J
Amen! The aftermath of Columbine sickened me because everybody wanted to play the blame game instead of addressing the real problem.
I don't think that what happened at Columbine was right, but the kids felt as though they had exhausted all other resources they had available to resolve the issue.
But of course this wasn't the problem: it was MTV, it was Marilyn Manson, it was the NRA and private gun owners, it was THE INTERNET...it certainly couldn't be our star football players and highly trained guidance counselors!
It saddens me that all of those people died at Columbine and people still don't get it.
--J
In fact, when I heard that Cingular was buying ATTWS, I thought to myself "Damn I hope Cingular's customer service don't suck, because I've kinda been spoiled."
'Tis why I "buy" my music from Gnutella. ;)
I can see the WIPO and lawyers going after domain squatters who are attempting to profit from another company or individual's fame or reputation, but the disputes nowadays are insane, and take away from the value of the Internet as a whole.
OTOH, maybe I should sue the people that own workman.org Since I have probably been around much longer than this site, plus, people might go to this site, thinking that it is my own, and get the wrong impression that I'm a Christian!
-J (Trying to call his lawyer on a Sunday)
Actually, he might get a thrill out of it! ;)
Clam AV has signatures that can block it at the mail server. Best of all it's open source and free.
I got one of the Beagle variants to run under WINE. It was quite funny watching it spew under tcpdump.
Something wasn't right, though....it was sending empty attachments. I think I should report this bug to the WINE development team.
That was no challenge! It let me login with my regular username and password! :)
I read an article somewhere that said that Columbia had a machine running Linux. I wish I still had the link to the article.
I don't think the Linux box had anything to do with the operation of the craft, however.
If you know they are doomed, don't bring them back. There's a space station up there that can hold their butts until rescue arrives.
Columbia wasn't equipped to dock with the space station.
(This will probably get modded as a troll, but I don't intend it to be.)
What a lot of people don't understand is that people don't want "workalikes" for certain software. They use (*shudder*) MS Office at work or at school and that's what they want to use at home as well. The same goes for Photoshop, Quark, or whatever. The sad truth of the matter, though is that most likely this software will never be ported to Linux. Most of the "big name" software that has had UNIX ports in the past have been abandoned, with the notable exceptions being FrameMaker and Maya.
For some things, substitute software is fine. I don't see why anybody who's used to Winamp wouldn't like xmms, for example. But for other things, Star/OpenOffice will never be a substitute for Office, Gimp will never be a substitute for Photoshop, and Evolution will never be a substitute for Outlook, regardless of whether or not they do the same job, and maybe even more. Then, as somebody else mentioned, there's games. Loki was probably our only hope for that, and they're gone. Sure, you've still got a few good games being ported to Linux, but you still have nowhere near the variety available for Windows or the Mac. Loki's failure doesn't exactly encourage game developers to port their products to Linux, either.
As for video codecs, yes I understand that there's some rather nice workarounds. However these still aren't very acceptable solutions for Joe User. When a new codec comes out, he wants to be able to go download it right away so he can enjoy the new porn flick that he just downloaded that requires it, not wait a month or longer for mplayer or xine to support it. Jamie Zawinski has a rather informative rant about his bad experiences with Linux video, and he's far from being "Joe User," so if he has this many problems, imagine what kind of problems poor Joe is gonna have?
It seems that nothing is sacred anymore. First you get everybody and his brother trying to introduce alternate root zones, then you get morons like NewNet that go a step further and require a browser plugin. Now Verisign does this.
I understand that having non-ascii characters in host/domain names would be desirable, however if they can't do it without breaking the DNS protocol, then they should get their ass right back to the R&D lab and try harder.
I can't speak about gun crime in Australia, but you can read this for an exemplary article on just how much banning guns has reduced gun-related crime in the UK.
While I don't have any hard statistics to back it up, it's been my observation that states where firearms are used routinely for sporting purposes such as WV, NC, VT, and TX have much lower accident rates than the "liberal infiltrated" states like Kalifornia, New York, and New Jersey.
I, for example, have been around guns all my life, and my parents never had to lock them up to keep me away from them. I was taught that they weren't toys and that I'd be in the shit if I messed with Dad's guns, and here I am, 30 years old without ever blowing a hole in my own head, or anybody else's for that matter. Parents nowadays are stupid. They don't want to parent thieir children, they want the government to do it for them. Our society is becoming more braindead with every new law, and every new Supreme Court ruling that becomes "case law."
As an aside: Why do you call yourselves "liberals" when all you want to do is take away?
*sigh* I kinda miss gopher.
The The OpenBSD Development Team!
Because some legacy apps don't like a 24 bit display. Particularly, if you're running old apps from a Solaris or an HP-UX box and displaying them on your Linux machine, there's a chance that they at least want the default visual to be 8 bit. There's been quite a few Linux apps over the years that was like this as well. Wabi comes to mind.
-Jeff