Mobile Surgery
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It seems to me that the real importance of this is the ability to be able to have a mobile surgery suite that can be taken to places where reliable electrical power does not exist, or perhaps field surgical hospitals in disaster areas. And yes, that IS big news to the poster that suggested that this was somehow misdirected priorities.
Every video card comes out with its own programming suite. Reminds me of the bad old days when you had to write your own print interface to every printer you wanted to support.
The nice thing about 'industry standards' is that there are so many to choose from.
So, they found some bugs, none of which had a documented case of actually being used to harm a computer. Admitted it, publicly thanked the persons who brought it to their attention (no stupid use of DMCA to harrass them) and promptly issued a patch.
The fact of the matter is Windows is the most common target of hackers. They occasionall find stuff, it gets fixed.
Then there is this warning to 'be sure to read the EULA' as if there is something in this EULA different than every other EULA for Microsoft Products? It is proprietary software, it has a EULA. Just like every piece of proprietary software from every other non-evil company. Get used to it. Not every company wants to make free software. Not every software makes sense to be created under a free model. And in a free world software developers should have that choice too, should they not?
The people that are really doing the user community a disservice are the ones who, out of misguided stubborness or as a misdirected 'protest' against Microsoft, (or because slashdot implied that the EULA with this patch was somehow troublesome) don't apply security patches. Because now that the vulnerability is well known every script kiddie on the planet can write a few lines of code to use it to do things that harm all users, like set up a DDOS attack on sites.
I am sorry if my post came across as a bit harsh, and there is allways a bit of a problem with trying to generalize the purchasers of any product. A great deal of the wireless hubs being sold to consumers are being used to connect the computer in the den with the computer in the kids' room, both of which are desktops, and is done primarily because the homeowner does not want to be bothered with how to get a wire between them.
On the other hand the supposition that the vast majority of these home wireless LANS never implement any security or even have any of their settings changed from factory default is generally accepted. And the fact that the out of the box settings are wide open is also unarguable.
So the real challenge isn't PEAP or LEAP but to get security that works as a factory default right out of the box. It won't be easy, but it hardly seems impossible either. And consumers will buy it.
That appears to be the real challenge for the wireless vendors. This is perhaps the thing about the article that I agree with the most.
I see all these wireless hubs being sold at consumer electronics stores because they are simpler than wired networks and I think 'is someone who regards plugging CAT5 cables into a hub to be 'too complicated' going to be able to set up any security that is not completely out of the box? These are so wide open they might as well include in the box a warchalking decal to stick on your front window.
The funny thing is that if the wireless hub vendors DID get their act together on this then easy security would be a feature that would resonate strongly with the average consumer.
Remember how long the auto industry argued that requiring airbags in cars would kill auto sales?
The record comanies used to grumble about home taping onto cassette tapes. That grumbling disappeared when it became clear that such home tapes were vastly inferior to the new CDs that everyone was raving about.
Then burning CDs and a reasonable sized compresed verion of the same, MP3, became available and all that changed.
So maybe what sony is saying is...let them have their CDs and their MP3s. We can't stop them. Instead let them come to us because we will offer this vastly superior format that they can't make themselves. Trying to impose some sort of DRM solution on top of CDs and MP3s is a problem because you wind up breaking backward compatibility in the process. On the other hand create a new and superior format with DRM built into it at the start and you can mbake it solid. So I think that this is the beginning of having mp3s fall into the same level of worry from the RIAA as making cassette tapes from radio broadcasts.
The problem is that the industry wants to simply redefine fair use to be whatever they wish. Or perhaps more specifically if a particular technique can be used both for fair use (making a personal backup of a CD or DVE) and not fair use (selling a copy to everyone in your school) then the technique must be made illegal.
What there needs to be is a DMFUA (Digital Millenium Fair Use Act) that spells out exactly what is fair use of digital media and tells the media companies that no matter what protection scheme they come up with it it prevents these fair uses then it is not permissible.
Screenscraping is hardly best practices.
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I think that is is irresponsible to promote screen scraping as a practice. Sure it is unavoidable in some cases but should be used only as a last resort because of how fragile it is. Most screen scraping is done because the programmers are too lazy or cheap to work officially with the content provider.
I dunno, when I come up with a really fast answer that is right 80-90 percent of the time the boss isn't happy at all....
I mean how many times did the 'bugged' pentium yeild a false floating answer and they still considered it a major problem? You might have to perform quite a number of itterations to have a satisfactory confidence level for general computing.
On the other hand I do admit that there are areas of computing, such as image recognition, where speed is more important than absolute accuracy of each calculation. But they are specialized.
Yes, but a lot of what your do in a mmorpg IS planning and discussing and socializing and what you might describe as 'chatroom stuff' and then put together your team and go off to take on some objective.
In some of the more recent mmorpg game designs (Anarchy Online, the upcoming City of Heroes, the currently shelved Lost Continents, etc) you actually go from doing your planning and assembling in the 'open zones' into 'private' or 'mission' zones where just those on your team can be. Conceptually that is very similar to what you wind up here by making what used to be the 'game lobby' be withing the game as well.
My worry is not so much about businesses (who presumably have security personnel and at least a few people who are with it enough to recognize warchalking marks) but the fact that these same wireless devices are being pushed like crazy to home users because they supposedly are so easy to set up.
Such users are much closer to the street and have less blocking mass between the transmitter and the street compared to a business user. These users are far less likely to change default security settings and passwords. Yet as a source of freeloading bandwidth or disguizing an attack they are very fruitfull.
It is like those X10 cameras that they push to consumers, most of which someone with a few dollars of parts picked up at an electronics store can see the signal from your cameras from the street. But this is not a fact at all warned against by the hucksters pushing these devices everywhere you look.
One way of looking at this is a beginning to blur the lines between fps games and massively multiplayer games. That distinction is already being blurred a little with upgoming games such as Planetside, but it looks like the key distinction in the future will go from whether this is a massively multiplayer game or not and instead be whether it is a persistent server based game or whether it is a non-persistent client based game.
What really is the news here?
"Free software is cheaper than paid software"
Or maybe the news it...
"Simpler tools is easier to use for purposes that do not need the features of more complicated tools"
If MySQL is (or is not) a threat and not a completely unrelated product to the likes of Oracle and MS SQLServer then it is because of the notion, touted by many database zealots and salesmen, that ALL of your data, no matter how simple the application, should be in an enterprize database.
The rationale, and it does have a certan logical ring, is that since you can't predict how your data will be grow and be needed in the future it makes sense to have it ALL in a common repository and since that repository represents such a huge asset it must be in the strongest and most powerfull possible storage. The fact that this greatly increase the political power and influence of the DBAs is not to be lost either.
In other words, what do you understand. There are a lot of small business markets...plumbers, exterminators, dentists, veterinarians, churches...the list goes on and on. These folks are looking for someone who knows their problems and will appreciate that you will be to address them without costing them their entire year' income. No fortune 1000 company is going to hire a company with three years experience for anything unless it it very specific. If you can't answer that question then go out and learn more about life.
Come on, the reason why AutoCAD became the standard was because they seeded tons of junior colleges and trade schools with it. In the early days of engineering workstations it was considered commonplace to feed a few dozen into big engineering schools.
C# is nothing but Java with Microsoft's legal restrictions rather than Sun's legal restrictions.
I am amazed that a crowd as supposedly smart as slashdot is making such wildly off the mark conclusions.
The premise had to do with high level clouds created by contrails, not chemicals or ozone or whatever. Clouds are created and dissipate over short periods of time so four days is enough data.
The fact that contrails created clouds and that clouds hold in heat and lessen night/day temperature swings is all well known. This was just taking measurements of the degree of the effect. It was larger than expected. Interesting. Does that mean we have to immediately cease all jet flights? No, but it is better that we know what is happening in nature than not.
Would it have been better if they could have taken more than four days' measurements? Sure. If they could shut down all air travel for a week several times a year to take their measurements I am sure that they would prefer it.
When studying nature you sometimes have to take the data that chance and circumstances give you and make the best of it. Control groups and huge sample sizes that are standard in laboratory science are rare. Circumstances gave them four days of greatly reduced air travel. They took it.
My son is participating in a field study of a particular game bird in a wilderness area. One day one of the radio transmitters of the birds they were tracking led them to a Goshawk nest. Now the Goshawk had long been suspected to be a predator of this bird, but no recorded instance had ever been documented. So they regarded this as first proof that a Goshawk was capable of catching and killing this bird in the wild. When I pointed out that they hadn't really seen it occur either he said "Sometimes that is about as close to proof as nature lets you have."
A rails system does not have to be used by you in order to be beneficial to you. If it takes enough load off of the freeway that you are driving to change it from being congested to uncongested then you have benefited from it.
Smart transportation planners will create shuttle bus routes from the train stations to major employers or satellite parking lots, or the employers themselves will.
Heck, I live in Los Angeles, the car crazy place that it is, and the Metrolink system and the Dash busses are quite well used. If a place as novice about public transport as LA is can figure this out I bet Florida can too.
You must admit that Florida, with the lack of any hills to speak of, is the perfect location for high speed rail. Straight and flat is how to make it flat, no matter what the propulsion.
The summertime market is heavily represented by rentals for viewing during vacations. The November market is heavily represented by gifts. Even among the folks that are buying the DVD this summer they will be influenced by the thought of 'should I buy this or rent it'.
So it makes absolutely perfect sense to release the cheapest version with just the movie during the summer and the really nice version that you would want to give as a gift in the fall. And as others have pointed out since the cheap version is selling for $15.99 at the discount places and has a $10 coupon the net is not much different than a rental fee or two.
So, you want to have it both ways, and be a hero too? Buy the $15.99 version now. Save the reciept and the coupon. Watch it a couple of times in the next month. In November buy the extended version and donate the original to your local public or school library. Between the discount, the savings of rental fees, and the deduction for the charitable donation you have a a good deed and good karma too!
I have a lot of contacts with former Andersen employees.
To start with Anderson is not alone in this. Adelphia, for example, was audited by Deloitte.
Many of these companies sought Andersen out because traditionally Andersen had the highest reputation in the industry.
But here is the real problem, which is also the problem with the current state of the entire business (and unchanged by the recent reform legislation). There was a whole office of people at Andersen, from Partners to junior whose entire careers involved nothing but auditing Enron or Worldcom. If Andersen lost Enron their careers were done. Andersen had a whole separate office, multiple floors, literally inside of Enron's headquarters for convenience. Lose the Enron Engagement and we are all fired. Is that an environment that will allow for independence? Hardly.
Worldcom was the same way, but even more interesting. Andersen was Worldcom's auditor before, KPMG is now. But what most folks don't know is that KPMG acquired Andersen's entire Worldcom related practice unit, intact, as part of that transition! What that means is that the people at KPMG that are unearthing these problems are the exact same folks who at Andersen let them slide. This tells me that they knew things that were bad at Andersen but couldn't take the career risk. Now at KPMG they have a limited window where they can redeem rather than kill their career by being tough.
But in all honesty you could switch the names of the firms around and it would be the same because the pressures to conform come from the situation. The only thing that would have really made a difference is if they made it mandatory to change auditors every few years. Then nobody would feel that their whole career was on the line if they spoke up and these windows of opportunity would be a regular occurence.
MS has been very responsive recently in issuing patches and updates to fix holes that other have discovered and published. Sure you would rather that the holes weren't there in the first place, but this is the real world and MS is not alone in having holes found in their security.
Far more that just 'doing the right thing' I think MS realizes that they want people to come forth with their findings without fear, to say 'hey look I found a hole in this' so that they can fix it rather than have it published only on some obscure hacker bbs in eastern europe.
I mean how may people can these folks contact in an hour? If they are trying to make it look like a chance encounter then they can't be doing it to every person that passes by. And what does a pair of actresses cost per hour? Unless it generates a lot of follow on word of mouth my guess that what is going on here is a bunch of ad execs trying to show off how 'outside the box' they can think.
So the government has trouble writing laws that keep pace with the advances in technology. Is this a surprize? *I* as an individual have trouble keeping up with understanding the rate of change in technology much less how to govern it.
But to say as a result that there should be no government regulation at all?
And yes the concept of fair use has to evolve. Is that any surprize? When the constitution was written the only form of publication was hand operated printing presses using hand-set movable type. The concept of fair use had to be evolved to cover sound recording, radio, and broadcasting. Does that mean (as some fans of file 'sharing' seem to think) that intellectual property is a dead issue and that anybody can broadcast anything they want via the internet.
So the DCMA was an over-reaction. Agreed. It could use serious clairification as to what constitutes 'Fair Use' and 'First Purchase'. Agreed. First attempts at anything this complicated are usually imperfect.
Some people presume that anything that does not let them do whatever they want must be bad, but most of those things, also, in the big picture also allow them to do the things that they want to do (like be able to write a program and be able to expect people to have to pay them to use it or to have musicians that have a financial incentive to make albums)
I for one would buy it anywhere besides through a pop-up ad. As my grandmother would say 'don't talk to them, it only encourages them'.
Ther fact is the pop up ads are just a plain bad idea even from the advertizing standpoint. You don't want advertizing to be so annoying that it drives people from returning to your site and you don't want advertizing to take people away from the content that supposedly they have come to the site for and thus would get them to come back to your site. Pop ups do both.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that the real importance of this is the ability to be able to have a mobile surgery suite that can be taken to places where reliable electrical power does not exist, or perhaps field surgical hospitals in disaster areas. And yes, that IS big news to the poster that suggested that this was somehow misdirected priorities.
Every video card comes out with its own programming suite. Reminds me of the bad old days when you had to write your own print interface to every printer you wanted to support. The nice thing about 'industry standards' is that there are so many to choose from.
The fact of the matter is Windows is the most common target of hackers. They occasionall find stuff, it gets fixed.
Then there is this warning to 'be sure to read the EULA' as if there is something in this EULA different than every other EULA for Microsoft Products? It is proprietary software, it has a EULA. Just like every piece of proprietary software from every other non-evil company. Get used to it. Not every company wants to make free software. Not every software makes sense to be created under a free model. And in a free world software developers should have that choice too, should they not?
The people that are really doing the user community a disservice are the ones who, out of misguided stubborness or as a misdirected 'protest' against Microsoft, (or because slashdot implied that the EULA with this patch was somehow troublesome) don't apply security patches. Because now that the vulnerability is well known every script kiddie on the planet can write a few lines of code to use it to do things that harm all users, like set up a DDOS attack on sites.
On the other hand the supposition that the vast majority of these home wireless LANS never implement any security or even have any of their settings changed from factory default is generally accepted. And the fact that the out of the box settings are wide open is also unarguable.
So the real challenge isn't PEAP or LEAP but to get security that works as a factory default right out of the box. It won't be easy, but it hardly seems impossible either. And consumers will buy it.
I see all these wireless hubs being sold at consumer electronics stores because they are simpler than wired networks and I think 'is someone who regards plugging CAT5 cables into a hub to be 'too complicated' going to be able to set up any security that is not completely out of the box? These are so wide open they might as well include in the box a warchalking decal to stick on your front window.
The funny thing is that if the wireless hub vendors DID get their act together on this then easy security would be a feature that would resonate strongly with the average consumer.
Remember how long the auto industry argued that requiring airbags in cars would kill auto sales?
The record comanies used to grumble about home taping onto cassette tapes. That grumbling disappeared when it became clear that such home tapes were vastly inferior to the new CDs that everyone was raving about. Then burning CDs and a reasonable sized compresed verion of the same, MP3, became available and all that changed. So maybe what sony is saying is...let them have their CDs and their MP3s. We can't stop them. Instead let them come to us because we will offer this vastly superior format that they can't make themselves. Trying to impose some sort of DRM solution on top of CDs and MP3s is a problem because you wind up breaking backward compatibility in the process. On the other hand create a new and superior format with DRM built into it at the start and you can mbake it solid. So I think that this is the beginning of having mp3s fall into the same level of worry from the RIAA as making cassette tapes from radio broadcasts.
The problem is that the industry wants to simply redefine fair use to be whatever they wish. Or perhaps more specifically if a particular technique can be used both for fair use (making a personal backup of a CD or DVE) and not fair use (selling a copy to everyone in your school) then the technique must be made illegal. What there needs to be is a DMFUA (Digital Millenium Fair Use Act) that spells out exactly what is fair use of digital media and tells the media companies that no matter what protection scheme they come up with it it prevents these fair uses then it is not permissible.
I think that is is irresponsible to promote screen scraping as a practice. Sure it is unavoidable in some cases but should be used only as a last resort because of how fragile it is. Most screen scraping is done because the programmers are too lazy or cheap to work officially with the content provider.
I dunno, when I come up with a really fast answer that is right 80-90 percent of the time the boss isn't happy at all.... I mean how many times did the 'bugged' pentium yeild a false floating answer and they still considered it a major problem? You might have to perform quite a number of itterations to have a satisfactory confidence level for general computing. On the other hand I do admit that there are areas of computing, such as image recognition, where speed is more important than absolute accuracy of each calculation. But they are specialized.
Mostly be corrected? Am I the only one for whom this does not sound particularly reassuring...or usefull?
In some of the more recent mmorpg game designs (Anarchy Online, the upcoming City of Heroes, the currently shelved Lost Continents, etc) you actually go from doing your planning and assembling in the 'open zones' into 'private' or 'mission' zones where just those on your team can be. Conceptually that is very similar to what you wind up here by making what used to be the 'game lobby' be withing the game as well.
Such users are much closer to the street and have less blocking mass between the transmitter and the street compared to a business user. These users are far less likely to change default security settings and passwords. Yet as a source of freeloading bandwidth or disguizing an attack they are very fruitfull. It is like those X10 cameras that they push to consumers, most of which someone with a few dollars of parts picked up at an electronics store can see the signal from your cameras from the street. But this is not a fact at all warned against by the hucksters pushing these devices everywhere you look.
One way of looking at this is a beginning to blur the lines between fps games and massively multiplayer games. That distinction is already being blurred a little with upgoming games such as Planetside, but it looks like the key distinction in the future will go from whether this is a massively multiplayer game or not and instead be whether it is a persistent server based game or whether it is a non-persistent client based game.
What really is the news here? "Free software is cheaper than paid software" Or maybe the news it... "Simpler tools is easier to use for purposes that do not need the features of more complicated tools" If MySQL is (or is not) a threat and not a completely unrelated product to the likes of Oracle and MS SQLServer then it is because of the notion, touted by many database zealots and salesmen, that ALL of your data, no matter how simple the application, should be in an enterprize database. The rationale, and it does have a certan logical ring, is that since you can't predict how your data will be grow and be needed in the future it makes sense to have it ALL in a common repository and since that repository represents such a huge asset it must be in the strongest and most powerfull possible storage. The fact that this greatly increase the political power and influence of the DBAs is not to be lost either.
In other words, what do you understand. There are a lot of small business markets...plumbers, exterminators, dentists, veterinarians, churches...the list goes on and on. These folks are looking for someone who knows their problems and will appreciate that you will be to address them without costing them their entire year' income. No fortune 1000 company is going to hire a company with three years experience for anything unless it it very specific. If you can't answer that question then go out and learn more about life.
Come on, the reason why AutoCAD became the standard was because they seeded tons of junior colleges and trade schools with it. In the early days of engineering workstations it was considered commonplace to feed a few dozen into big engineering schools. C# is nothing but Java with Microsoft's legal restrictions rather than Sun's legal restrictions.
I am amazed that a crowd as supposedly smart as slashdot is making such wildly off the mark conclusions. The premise had to do with high level clouds created by contrails, not chemicals or ozone or whatever. Clouds are created and dissipate over short periods of time so four days is enough data. The fact that contrails created clouds and that clouds hold in heat and lessen night/day temperature swings is all well known. This was just taking measurements of the degree of the effect. It was larger than expected. Interesting. Does that mean we have to immediately cease all jet flights? No, but it is better that we know what is happening in nature than not. Would it have been better if they could have taken more than four days' measurements? Sure. If they could shut down all air travel for a week several times a year to take their measurements I am sure that they would prefer it. When studying nature you sometimes have to take the data that chance and circumstances give you and make the best of it. Control groups and huge sample sizes that are standard in laboratory science are rare. Circumstances gave them four days of greatly reduced air travel. They took it. My son is participating in a field study of a particular game bird in a wilderness area. One day one of the radio transmitters of the birds they were tracking led them to a Goshawk nest. Now the Goshawk had long been suspected to be a predator of this bird, but no recorded instance had ever been documented. So they regarded this as first proof that a Goshawk was capable of catching and killing this bird in the wild. When I pointed out that they hadn't really seen it occur either he said "Sometimes that is about as close to proof as nature lets you have."
A rails system does not have to be used by you in order to be beneficial to you. If it takes enough load off of the freeway that you are driving to change it from being congested to uncongested then you have benefited from it. Smart transportation planners will create shuttle bus routes from the train stations to major employers or satellite parking lots, or the employers themselves will. Heck, I live in Los Angeles, the car crazy place that it is, and the Metrolink system and the Dash busses are quite well used. If a place as novice about public transport as LA is can figure this out I bet Florida can too.
You must admit that Florida, with the lack of any hills to speak of, is the perfect location for high speed rail. Straight and flat is how to make it flat, no matter what the propulsion.
The summertime market is heavily represented by rentals for viewing during vacations. The November market is heavily represented by gifts. Even among the folks that are buying the DVD this summer they will be influenced by the thought of 'should I buy this or rent it'. So it makes absolutely perfect sense to release the cheapest version with just the movie during the summer and the really nice version that you would want to give as a gift in the fall. And as others have pointed out since the cheap version is selling for $15.99 at the discount places and has a $10 coupon the net is not much different than a rental fee or two. So, you want to have it both ways, and be a hero too? Buy the $15.99 version now. Save the reciept and the coupon. Watch it a couple of times in the next month. In November buy the extended version and donate the original to your local public or school library. Between the discount, the savings of rental fees, and the deduction for the charitable donation you have a a good deed and good karma too!
I have a lot of contacts with former Andersen employees. To start with Anderson is not alone in this. Adelphia, for example, was audited by Deloitte. Many of these companies sought Andersen out because traditionally Andersen had the highest reputation in the industry. But here is the real problem, which is also the problem with the current state of the entire business (and unchanged by the recent reform legislation). There was a whole office of people at Andersen, from Partners to junior whose entire careers involved nothing but auditing Enron or Worldcom. If Andersen lost Enron their careers were done. Andersen had a whole separate office, multiple floors, literally inside of Enron's headquarters for convenience. Lose the Enron Engagement and we are all fired. Is that an environment that will allow for independence? Hardly. Worldcom was the same way, but even more interesting. Andersen was Worldcom's auditor before, KPMG is now. But what most folks don't know is that KPMG acquired Andersen's entire Worldcom related practice unit, intact, as part of that transition! What that means is that the people at KPMG that are unearthing these problems are the exact same folks who at Andersen let them slide. This tells me that they knew things that were bad at Andersen but couldn't take the career risk. Now at KPMG they have a limited window where they can redeem rather than kill their career by being tough. But in all honesty you could switch the names of the firms around and it would be the same because the pressures to conform come from the situation. The only thing that would have really made a difference is if they made it mandatory to change auditors every few years. Then nobody would feel that their whole career was on the line if they spoke up and these windows of opportunity would be a regular occurence.
MS has been very responsive recently in issuing patches and updates to fix holes that other have discovered and published. Sure you would rather that the holes weren't there in the first place, but this is the real world and MS is not alone in having holes found in their security. Far more that just 'doing the right thing' I think MS realizes that they want people to come forth with their findings without fear, to say 'hey look I found a hole in this' so that they can fix it rather than have it published only on some obscure hacker bbs in eastern europe.
I mean how may people can these folks contact in an hour? If they are trying to make it look like a chance encounter then they can't be doing it to every person that passes by. And what does a pair of actresses cost per hour? Unless it generates a lot of follow on word of mouth my guess that what is going on here is a bunch of ad execs trying to show off how 'outside the box' they can think.
So the government has trouble writing laws that keep pace with the advances in technology. Is this a surprize? *I* as an individual have trouble keeping up with understanding the rate of change in technology much less how to govern it. But to say as a result that there should be no government regulation at all? And yes the concept of fair use has to evolve. Is that any surprize? When the constitution was written the only form of publication was hand operated printing presses using hand-set movable type. The concept of fair use had to be evolved to cover sound recording, radio, and broadcasting. Does that mean (as some fans of file 'sharing' seem to think) that intellectual property is a dead issue and that anybody can broadcast anything they want via the internet. So the DCMA was an over-reaction. Agreed. It could use serious clairification as to what constitutes 'Fair Use' and 'First Purchase'. Agreed. First attempts at anything this complicated are usually imperfect. Some people presume that anything that does not let them do whatever they want must be bad, but most of those things, also, in the big picture also allow them to do the things that they want to do (like be able to write a program and be able to expect people to have to pay them to use it or to have musicians that have a financial incentive to make albums)
I for one would buy it anywhere besides through a pop-up ad. As my grandmother would say 'don't talk to them, it only encourages them'. Ther fact is the pop up ads are just a plain bad idea even from the advertizing standpoint. You don't want advertizing to be so annoying that it drives people from returning to your site and you don't want advertizing to take people away from the content that supposedly they have come to the site for and thus would get them to come back to your site. Pop ups do both.