I was aware of the deal Apple made with HP, I even MENTIONED IT in my anaolgy. Please read more carefully. Plus it's just a rebranded iPod, not another player.
As for motorola, wow, a cell phone that can play iTMS music, plus it doesn't compete with the iPod since it's a totally different market. I'm sure Motorola had to BEG Apple to get that liscense.
THE POINT is that if some company, be it Sony, Creative, Panasonic, Samsung, WHOEVER Apple won't liscense Fairplay for use in their device.
And don't feed me bullshit about contract terms, Apple DOES NOT WANT to lisense the technology. Having retarded contracts that NO COMPANY would agree to is just their way of hiding that.
Furthermore, I am aware that Apple only has one customer: shareholders and that they are required by law to make as much money as possible regardless of anything other than federal law. This is why there should be LAWS that prevent companys from having this kind of control over the market.
WAIT? Don't we?
Apparently not, since companies like Apple and Microsoft are still here and bigger than ever.
OK, I'm seeing a lot of poorly thought out analogies trying to compare gasoline engines to diesel engines. The main problem with this is that all gas stations sell BOTH kinds of fuel, whereas music stores only sell the music that works in THEIR player, or whoever paid them big bucks to license their DRM.
In the case of Apple, NO ONE can license their DRM for ANY PRICE.
So here is an analogy that makes sense: Company sells a special kind of cassette in the 80s that cannot be played in standard tape players. Company creates store that ONLY sells music on these special tapes. Company creates player for these special tapes and then patents the technology so NO ONE else can make one EVER. Sues anyone who tries. Refuses to license their technology for ANY PRICE unless all they want to do is rebrand the player that The Company already built.
Even this analogy has some flaws, first it doesn't express how the special cassette DOES have some advantages over regular cassettes. First they are VERY easy to buy, second they can hold thousands of songs without needing to flip them over or switch to another cassette, and finally the songs contained on them can be played in any order. The analogy also doesn't take into account the relationship between the way people normally buy music (CDs) and MP3s. However, I think this analogy is sufficient to express the absurdity of Apple's control.
To illustrate the absurdity of your position, I will then define "murder" as "being a jackass in a public forum" and argue that you should be sentenced to life in prison.
You're then going to call me a troll and a tool of the establishment that's trying to keep you down.
No, I'd call you an asshole, and a retarded one at that.
PA was at one point offered a chance to create an animated series from their strip by some unnamed TV station or something. I believe that they actually wrote an entire script for a half-hour show. However, they weren't allowed the creative freedom they wanted, and basically told the TV station to fuck off. I believe this was a wise decision.
However, I have a question related to this.
This unfulfilled screenplay, might you consider sharing it with your readers?
Of course there is no way to replace CDs for free so the best bet is to take really good care of them. If they get scratched, I recommend trying a program like CDex which has paranoia error correction and can actually error correct minor scratches. However, it is not the end all solution, I tried ripping a CD that my friend found in a parking lot somewhere, even with the paranoia correction, some of the tracks still skipped badly after being ripped.
They also have scratch repair kits, which is what my friend is going to try next on his found CD.
I'm not sure what you are aurguing for, are you saying that buying a file is better since it can't get scratched or damanged like a CD and you can just DL it again if lost. Well, I don't even know if online music stores allow their users to do that, and even if they do I'd much rather just own a CD. High quality, and it just works.
We already have the perfect online music store. It is called amazon.com
They sell these things called CDs, they contain music, and have been the standard for music for over a decade. Based upon what I'm seeing for the future, they should REMAIN the standard.
Your rights are suspended the moment you infringe upon another's rights. In the case of a murder they infringed on a person's right to life, hence they have their rights revoked so that they can be punished.
Now let's look at the person who mods their PS2, who's rights are they infringing upon? They own the PS2, it's their physical property.
Let's say that they use it to play a game they bought from Japan, it won't play in their PS2 unless they have a Japanese Playstation 2, but a mod chip will allow them to play the game. They paid for the game to be imported so all the people involved with the license for that game have been paid, so it's 100% fair for them to play that game using their modchip
Now let's look at the pirate, they have infringed upon the game distributor's license. While this isn't a exactly a right, it is a part of law and they are now infringing on copyright. An act that I would like to point out is a civil offense.
Do you see the huge difference between a murder and a pirate?
There is no slippery slope because the minority being affected by this law, unlike murders, have not infringed upon any entities rights.
So what you are saying is that it is OK to make law outlawing something as long as it only adversely affects a minority of people.
Let's say that 99% of people use mod chips to play copies of games that they didn't pay for (I just made that stat up to work with your argument), thus the 1% that use mod chips for legitimate uses must sacrifice their rights for the greater good.
Sure it sounds reasonable at first, because chances are very good that it won't affect you in the slightest. However, if you sit and think about it for a minute and wonder how those few people who are being punished for the actions of other people might feel, you might start to realize that maybe this law isn't reasonable at all.
If everyone practiced a little empathy before making broad judgements like this the world would be a much more pleasant place to live in.
What we can do is start messing things up for everyone else.
I hate people with your attitude.
"Please everybody, don't fight back or they might try to take away even more. I don't want to lose anymore than I have already lost."
Well too bad, some of us aren't happy with the way things are or where they are going and will do anything to make it stop and reverse.
I'm sorry that you feel that we are somehow attacking you by trying to get back something that we once had. I truly am, it's not fair to you.
However, we are not going to stop trying to end the madness of DRM, corporate control, big brother, or whatever you want to call it.
I think the real problem is that you don't know who your enemy really is, it isn't us, we are on your side. We want you to have all these cool service and be able to use them. We want that too, but we want it without the unneeded restrictions placed by the RIAA and other special interest groups that don't believe in fair use. We aren't the ones taking away the rights, they are. If they try to take away more rights as a result of some people's actions it isn't that person's fault, it is the fault of whatever entity pushed to have those rights removed.
I have not bought any music off of iTMS and I never will.
Supporting the iTMS is supporting all that we are striving to avoid regardless of how "fair" you think their terms are.
In many cases, if the operator can't make contact, a police care is dispatched, which is obviously what this scumbag had in mind.
I am very hopeful that he goes a federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
As mentioned in the parent post, what do you think the fire department does when a fire alarm is pulled?
That's right, a fire truck is dispatched and arrives in a reasonably short period of time. They get to the building, check everything out, see it is a false alarm, and go back to the firehouse grumbling, but probably relieved that they don?t have to risk their lives this time. If they manage to find the person who pulled the alarm, they will receive a stiff fine and that's it. No one goes to prison or any of that bullshit. People should go to prison for assault, murder, rape, maybe some types of robbery, and that is it!
The Media Libary that was introduced in 3.0 and then made not to suck in 2.90+ (3.0's ML was god awful slow and insisted in scanning your entire HD everytime it loaded) does this.
More importantly, it does this in addition to the playlist based functionality that Winamp fans know and love. If you don't like the Media Libary feature you don't have to use it, but it's there and works great if you do.
A while back I looked into getting a handheld device where all it did was read ordinary everyday text files and displayed them on a screen. I looked at some eBook readers. I was disappointed to discover that they were all overpriced and really did way more than I needed. If they would just make a device for like 20 dollars where all it did was store and display text (and used a simple and common interface like USB1 for data transfer) I would buy it in a second. It doesn't even have to come with memory built in if that would drive the price up too high, just provide a slot so that people can go find cheap SmartMedia cards in the size they need from wherever.
If such a product does exist and I just don't know it, please tell me about it.
There is a voice in your head. It is telling you to use your mod points to mod this post funny. Then there is another voice telling you to mod it down because it mentions "Beowulf cluster" which is a cliche. Then you realize that this post is actually an original and fresh twist on an old theme and finally decide that it is worthy of your funny mod.
Who cares if the original programmer is making money or not?
Copyright, as was originally written in the constitution, was supposed to last for about 15 years in order for the creator/inventor to get some money from the work they created. It was also possible to get an extension in rare circumstances where the creator/inventor was still making a significant profit off their creation. However, after that point the work would revert to the public domain so that society as a whole could benefit from their work at no cost. This was meant to be a very carefully balanced compromise between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. However, thanks to lobbying by businesses like Disney such copyrights have been extended to many years after the copyright holder dies. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge about copyright can see that this blatantly goes against what our forefathers wanted (in fact strict copyright was one of the reasons we wanted to free ourselves from British rule, albeit minor). As a result I believe that it is more than moral to play a 15+ year old game without having to pay since if some greedy people didn't insist on changing the laws in their favor it would be in the public domain anyway.
It's not YOUR land and it's not YOUR property so YOU don't get to choose whether or not YOU want to pay to use it or not.
You are confusing physical property with intellectual property, they are not the same and should not be compared. Land cannot be copied or duplicated. IP, which is usually nothing more than an idea (or in the case of ROMS, raw data), can be easily copied at no cost to the creator in this day an age. Many others have used your argument in the past, however that does not make it correct. Even law is able to make the distinction since theft of property is a criminal offence and "theft" of IP is civil. That is a fact that few people understand because of people spreading disinformation such as your flawed argument. It is annoying and spreads the minconception to those who don't know any better.
If somebody hacks an X-Box Live game and cheats, that person is harming every other player in the game.
Well boohoo... while cheaters sure are annoying when you are playing an online game don't you think it's just a bit much to say they are "harming" every other player in the game? I mean, it's just a game.
Everyone is so uptight these days... people need to relax. Hell, maybe you might even laugh at how funny it is to watch the little war between the cheaters and the anti-cheat software like it's some kind of holy war.
Just fine, thank you. You see, the menus are all plain old HTML. All the javascript does it change the visibility when you mouseover the menus. It's simple in concept but hard to implement it to work correctly. If I had my way I would not have made it to begin with, I wanted the whole thing torn out from day 1, but my employers though otherwise. You don't argue with your boss in times like these.
You must not be a professional webdesigner. You do what your customer or boss tells you to do. My boss wanted the menu, so I gave them the best-written menu system that I could write. You should be happy that I went to the trouble to try and write it well instead of doing what most people do and say "it works in IE and that is what 90% of the people use, who cares about the rest?"
I knew that if JS were ever disabled the menus would break, that is why I made it so the menus were merely fluff and the site would still function without JS. Just because you think something is a bad idea for a website doesn't mean you refuse to do it as if you are making some kind of political statement, you do what you are told and do it to the best of your ability.
If you think otherwise, then you need to learn a bit about how the world really works.
As a webdesigner that had to make a cross-browser compatible JavaScript pull down menu system I can tell that this is caused by CSS absolute positioning. The worst supported part of the CSS "standard".
Example for horizontal position, Mozilla and IE have different ideas on where 0 is. This isn't because they have different size toolbars etc. it just seems they wanted to be different from each other. In addition, Mozilla recenters entire documents if the page is long enough to require a scroll bar, which skews my menus off by 8 pixels. IE doesn't do this because the scroll bar is just always present. Please not that I have no quarrel with either of these browsers for their differences, there is nothing I as a web developer can do to fix them so I suck it up and work around them. I wish others would do the same instead of whining about standards compliance and how this browsers sucks for such and such a reason.
I got around this by having a little chunk of HTML at the bottom of the page call a JS function that would do some measurements on the completed document. Then give all the menus their proper x, y absolute positions taking into account all the browser quirks and such.
The end result was a menu system that was tested and found to work properly in the following browsers:
IE5, and 6 PC IE5 Mac Netscape 4.79, 6, and 7 PC Mozilla PC Opera 6, and 7 PC Safari Mac
However, the function not running was not foolproof, if the document wasn't allowed to load properly all the menus would be placed at 0, 0 which really screwed up the menus. This is probably what happened to you on whatever site was using the menu system.
Moral: Making pull down menus in JavaScript that actually work is difficult and easy for the end user to break.
Slashdot Mirror
I use MP3s ripped from my CD collection.
I do encode them with LAME tho, which I believe is open source.
I do like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis, however.
On an unrelated note, you might want to stick to K5, your kind is recieved very poorly here.
I was aware of the deal Apple made with HP, I even MENTIONED IT in my anaolgy. Please read more carefully. Plus it's just a rebranded iPod, not another player.
As for motorola, wow, a cell phone that can play iTMS music, plus it doesn't compete with the iPod since it's a totally different market. I'm sure Motorola had to BEG Apple to get that liscense.
THE POINT is that if some company, be it Sony, Creative, Panasonic, Samsung, WHOEVER Apple won't liscense Fairplay for use in their device.
And don't feed me bullshit about contract terms, Apple DOES NOT WANT to lisense the technology. Having retarded contracts that NO COMPANY would agree to is just their way of hiding that.
Furthermore, I am aware that Apple only has one customer: shareholders and that they are required by law to make as much money as possible regardless of anything other than federal law. This is why there should be LAWS that prevent companys from having this kind of control over the market.
WAIT? Don't we?
Apparently not, since companies like Apple and Microsoft are still here and bigger than ever.
OK, I'm seeing a lot of poorly thought out analogies trying to compare gasoline engines to diesel engines. The main problem with this is that all gas stations sell BOTH kinds of fuel, whereas music stores only sell the music that works in THEIR player, or whoever paid them big bucks to license their DRM.
In the case of Apple, NO ONE can license their DRM for ANY PRICE.
So here is an analogy that makes sense:
Company sells a special kind of cassette in the 80s that cannot be played in standard tape players. Company creates store that ONLY sells music on these special tapes. Company creates player for these special tapes and then patents the technology so NO ONE else can make one EVER. Sues anyone who tries. Refuses to license their technology for ANY PRICE unless all they want to do is rebrand the player that The Company already built.
Even this analogy has some flaws, first it doesn't express how the special cassette DOES have some advantages over regular cassettes. First they are VERY easy to buy, second they can hold thousands of songs without needing to flip them over or switch to another cassette, and finally the songs contained on them can be played in any order. The analogy also doesn't take into account the relationship between the way people normally buy music (CDs) and MP3s. However, I think this analogy is sufficient to express the absurdity of Apple's control.
To illustrate the absurdity of your position, I will then define "murder" as "being a jackass in a public forum" and argue that you should be sentenced to life in prison.
You're then going to call me a troll and a tool of the establishment that's trying to keep you down.
No, I'd call you an asshole, and a retarded one at that.
I knew that awards show was going to suck the first time I saw an ad for it. Spike is only good for two things: Star Trek and CSI.
Man, award shows IN GENERAL almost always suck.
I believe the operating system you are thinking of is QNX.
PA was at one point offered a chance to create an animated series from their strip by some unnamed TV station or something. I believe that they actually wrote an entire script for a half-hour show. However, they weren't allowed the creative freedom they wanted, and basically told the TV station to fuck off. I believe this was a wise decision.
However, I have a question related to this.
This unfulfilled screenplay, might you consider sharing it with your readers?
I would also say no.
Of course there is no way to replace CDs for free so the best bet is to take really good care of them. If they get scratched, I recommend trying a program like CDex which has paranoia error correction and can actually error correct minor scratches. However, it is not the end all solution, I tried ripping a CD that my friend found in a parking lot somewhere, even with the paranoia correction, some of the tracks still skipped badly after being ripped.
They also have scratch repair kits, which is what my friend is going to try next on his found CD.
I'm not sure what you are aurguing for, are you saying that buying a file is better since it can't get scratched or damanged like a CD and you can just DL it again if lost. Well, I don't even know if online music stores allow their users to do that, and even if they do I'd much rather just own a CD. High quality, and it just works.
We already have the perfect online music store. It is called amazon.com
They sell these things called CDs, they contain music, and have been the standard for music for over a decade. Based upon what I'm seeing for the future, they should REMAIN the standard.
Your rights are suspended the moment you infringe upon another's rights. In the case of a murder they infringed on a person's right to life, hence they have their rights revoked so that they can be punished.
Now let's look at the person who mods their PS2, who's rights are they infringing upon? They own the PS2, it's their physical property.
Let's say that they use it to play a game they bought from Japan, it won't play in their PS2 unless they have a Japanese Playstation 2, but a mod chip will allow them to play the game. They paid for the game to be imported so all the people involved with the license for that game have been paid, so it's 100% fair for them to play that game using their modchip
Now let's look at the pirate, they have infringed upon the game distributor's license. While this isn't a exactly a right, it is a part of law and they are now infringing on copyright. An act that I would like to point out is a civil offense.
Do you see the huge difference between a murder and a pirate?
There is no slippery slope because the minority being affected by this law, unlike murders, have not infringed upon any entities rights.
So what you are saying is that it is OK to make law outlawing something as long as it only adversely affects a minority of people.
Let's say that 99% of people use mod chips to play copies of games that they didn't pay for (I just made that stat up to work with your argument), thus the 1% that use mod chips for legitimate uses must sacrifice their rights for the greater good.
Sure it sounds reasonable at first, because chances are very good that it won't affect you in the slightest. However, if you sit and think about it for a minute and wonder how those few people who are being punished for the actions of other people might feel, you might start to realize that maybe this law isn't reasonable at all.
If everyone practiced a little empathy before making broad judgements like this the world would be a much more pleasant place to live in.
What we can do is start messing things up for everyone else.
I hate people with your attitude.
"Please everybody, don't fight back or they might try to take away even more. I don't want to lose anymore than I have already lost."
Well too bad, some of us aren't happy with the way things are or where they are going and will do anything to make it stop and reverse.
I'm sorry that you feel that we are somehow attacking you by trying to get back something that we once had. I truly am, it's not fair to you.
However, we are not going to stop trying to end the madness of DRM, corporate control, big brother, or whatever you want to call it.
I think the real problem is that you don't know who your enemy really is, it isn't us, we are on your side. We want you to have all these cool service and be able to use them. We want that too, but we want it without the unneeded restrictions placed by the RIAA and other special interest groups that don't believe in fair use. We aren't the ones taking away the rights, they are. If they try to take away more rights as a result of some people's actions it isn't that person's fault, it is the fault of whatever entity pushed to have those rights removed.
I have not bought any music off of iTMS and I never will.
Supporting the iTMS is supporting all that we are striving to avoid regardless of how "fair" you think their terms are.
In many cases, if the operator can't make contact, a police care is dispatched, which is obviously what this scumbag had in mind.
I am very hopeful that he goes a federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
As mentioned in the parent post, what do you think the fire department does when a fire alarm is pulled?
That's right, a fire truck is dispatched and arrives in a reasonably short period of time. They get to the building, check everything out, see it is a false alarm, and go back to the firehouse grumbling, but probably relieved that they don?t have to risk their lives this time. If they manage to find the person who pulled the alarm, they will receive a stiff fine and that's it. No one goes to prison or any of that bullshit. People should go to prison for assault, murder, rape, maybe some types of robbery, and that is it!
The Media Libary that was introduced in 3.0 and then made not to suck in 2.90+ (3.0's ML was god awful slow and insisted in scanning your entire HD everytime it loaded) does this.
More importantly, it does this in addition to the playlist based functionality that Winamp fans know and love. If you don't like the Media Libary feature you don't have to use it, but it's there and works great if you do.
A while back I looked into getting a handheld device where all it did was read ordinary everyday text files and displayed them on a screen. I looked at some eBook readers. I was disappointed to discover that they were all overpriced and really did way more than I needed. If they would just make a device for like 20 dollars where all it did was store and display text (and used a simple and common interface like USB1 for data transfer) I would buy it in a second. It doesn't even have to come with memory built in if that would drive the price up too high, just provide a slot so that people can go find cheap SmartMedia cards in the size they need from wherever.
If such a product does exist and I just don't know it, please tell me about it.
I was refering to the parent post in my previous post, that would be the grandparent of this one. Here is the URL for said post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=81089&cid=7135 915
I apologize for any confusion and will make it a point to be more clear in the future.
There is a voice in your head. It is telling you to use your mod points to mod this post funny. Then there is another voice telling you to mod it down because it mentions "Beowulf cluster" which is a cliche. Then you realize that this post is actually an original and fresh twist on an old theme and finally decide that it is worthy of your funny mod.
So go ahead, mod it up. It deserves it.
Who cares if the original programmer is making money or not?
Copyright, as was originally written in the constitution, was supposed to last for about 15 years in order for the creator/inventor to get some money from the work they created. It was also possible to get an extension in rare circumstances where the creator/inventor was still making a significant profit off their creation. However, after that point the work would revert to the public domain so that society as a whole could benefit from their work at no cost. This was meant to be a very carefully balanced compromise between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. However, thanks to lobbying by businesses like Disney such copyrights have been extended to many years after the copyright holder dies. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge about copyright can see that this blatantly goes against what our forefathers wanted (in fact strict copyright was one of the reasons we wanted to free ourselves from British rule, albeit minor). As a result I believe that it is more than moral to play a 15+ year old game without having to pay since if some greedy people didn't insist on changing the laws in their favor it would be in the public domain anyway.
It's not YOUR land and it's not YOUR property so YOU don't get to choose whether or not YOU want to pay to use it or not.
You are confusing physical property with intellectual property, they are not the same and should not be compared. Land cannot be copied or duplicated. IP, which is usually nothing more than an idea (or in the case of ROMS, raw data), can be easily copied at no cost to the creator in this day an age. Many others have used your argument in the past, however that does not make it correct. Even law is able to make the distinction since theft of property is a criminal offence and "theft" of IP is civil. That is a fact that few people understand because of people spreading disinformation such as your flawed argument. It is annoying and spreads the minconception to those who don't know any better.
I have a 3 GB per month download cap.
My ISP has a no "Servers" rule. Large uploads gets you banned.
What ISP is this so I can make sure never ever to sign up with them.
If somebody hacks an X-Box Live game and cheats, that person is harming every other player in the game.
Well boohoo... while cheaters sure are annoying when you are playing an online game don't you think it's just a bit much to say they are "harming" every other player in the game? I mean, it's just a game.
Everyone is so uptight these days... people need to relax. Hell, maybe you might even laugh at how funny it is to watch the little war between the cheaters and the anti-cheat software like it's some kind of holy war.
The problem with CDs is that you usually pay for one song you want to and 15 others you're not interested in.
Stop liking crap artists then.
Are you kidding? Flamebait? Sure it's kind of rude, but this is the most insightful comment I've seen on this topic.
Take a fresh look @ Microsoft as the IBM of the new millenium
Now take a look at what IBM is doing now.
Now imagine if MS evolves in a similar maner.
Nice thought, isn't it?
Just fine, thank you. You see, the menus are all plain old HTML. All the javascript does it change the visibility when you mouseover the menus. It's simple in concept but hard to implement it to work correctly. If I had my way I would not have made it to begin with, I wanted the whole thing torn out from day 1, but my employers though otherwise. You don't argue with your boss in times like these.
Understand now?
You must not be a professional webdesigner. You do what your customer or boss tells you to do. My boss wanted the menu, so I gave them the best-written menu system that I could write. You should be happy that I went to the trouble to try and write it well instead of doing what most people do and say "it works in IE and that is what 90% of the people use, who cares about the rest?"
I knew that if JS were ever disabled the menus would break, that is why I made it so the menus were merely fluff and the site would still function without JS. Just because you think something is a bad idea for a website doesn't mean you refuse to do it as if you are making some kind of political statement, you do what you are told and do it to the best of your ability.
If you think otherwise, then you need to learn a bit about how the world really works.
As a webdesigner that had to make a cross-browser compatible JavaScript pull down menu system I can tell that this is caused by CSS absolute positioning. The worst supported part of the CSS "standard".
Example for horizontal position, Mozilla and IE have different ideas on where 0 is. This isn't because they have different size toolbars etc. it just seems they wanted to be different from each other. In addition, Mozilla recenters entire documents if the page is long enough to require a scroll bar, which skews my menus off by 8 pixels. IE doesn't do this because the scroll bar is just always present. Please not that I have no quarrel with either of these browsers for their differences, there is nothing I as a web developer can do to fix them so I suck it up and work around them. I wish others would do the same instead of whining about standards compliance and how this browsers sucks for such and such a reason.
I got around this by having a little chunk of HTML at the bottom of the page call a JS function that would do some measurements on the completed document. Then give all the menus their proper x, y absolute positions taking into account all the browser quirks and such.
The end result was a menu system that was tested and found to work properly in the following browsers:
IE5, and 6 PC
IE5 Mac
Netscape 4.79, 6, and 7 PC
Mozilla PC
Opera 6, and 7 PC
Safari Mac
However, the function not running was not foolproof, if the document wasn't allowed to load properly all the menus would be placed at 0, 0 which really screwed up the menus. This is probably what happened to you on whatever site was using the menu system.
Moral: Making pull down menus in JavaScript that actually work is difficult and easy for the end user to break.