PNG's got its advantages, and the browsers today don't crash dead on them the way IE 4.x did back in the day.
Thing is, they're still bigger files. The Web is still full of people on dialup, and to cram png files down the line when a smaller, optimized.gif or.jpg will do, that's just not good. The main use I see of png at our shop is as the originals for all Web graphics -- people use Macromedia Fireworks and its (bloated) pngs as their sources, and export to.gifs and.jpgs for the sites themselves.
Apple is treating everyone as equvalents in that all labels receive equal treatment with the same deal, the same agreements and you work with the same team of people.
All the independent labels, you mean?
This clearly isn't true for the big labels. Some "hits" can only be bought if you take the whole album -- they won't sell Don MacLean's "American Pie" for $0.99 -- and exceptionally long tracks (>7 mins) often have the same restriction. Some albums also stick to the $0.99-per rule past the $9.95-per-original-disk rule. That's only fair when a classical or jazz track might be ten minutes long, but it ain't the universal deal we're supposedly talking about.
Not that I'm po'ed about this. Basically Apple had to compromise to get some of the deals with big companies. Seems like they're trying to address the very thing/. spent the first week going over and over -- smaller labels, less well-known artists -- without killing anyone on either end.
Maybe you and the other people making anti-American comments ought to get off Slashdot.
Maybe if you can't handle a tiny bit of back and forth on a public message board, you should steer clear of, say, Usenet groups and slashdot. Things aren't as controlled here as they are on Fox. Too bad.
The comment was that Americans are nationalist -- delivered with a wry grin. "Nationalism: a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups." You'd be proud to call yourself a nationalist, wouldn't you?
I'm not sure where the "racist" part of that comes in... Get a grip.
Wozniak does seem to be the low pressure to Jobs's high pressure zone. Talking about the first prototype:
I used the smallest, cheapest chips I could in my design. Most of the chips I got for free from our lab stock at Hewlett Packard. I kept my supervisor informed about my hobby and HP had a policy of allowing engineers to have chips to build things of their own design with a supervisor's approval. It was a very good and excellent policy for those, like myself, who wanted to design things, and therefore better themselves.
Apple under Jobs seems like a decent place to work -- my sister's employed there, they've been a solid employer with integrity, at least measured against (ahem) some other examples I could think of. But as far as this sort of policy goes, doesn't it seem like Jobs has the professional design people sending out the memos and the engineers reading them, rather than communication in both directions? Jobs id's a market niche, he sets designers working on it, and the engineers make it work, is how I read it.
Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?
Let's see, the BSA needs to tell us the sky is falling, and they also need to justify their own tactics and existence... So we get 40% down to 39%, and
The decline is attributed to the BSA's enforcement techniques.
So congratulations to the BSA, I guess, 'cause without them around piracy would be so much worse. Rich. They're really stemming the tide by strong-arming their blackmail victims into accepting MS-only agreements... "protection" like this you can see in the gangster movies.
(Or maybe this was the kid with his finger in the dyke, not Chicken Little... whatever.)
The licensing arrangements on the store must be a pain to deal with already. You can see it in the little pricing wrinkles -- some albums are "By Song Only," some labels refused the $9.95 cap and price their complete albums somewhat higher, some big hits (and some longer [>7 min.] songs) can only be purchased if you take the whole album too...
Add to that "Don't show Britney songs to people in the EU" stuff in the database and the front end, fronting European licenses for completely different music... I can see it, and I'm sympathetic, but you might not want to hold your breath.
(Not that the world doesn't need Britney-filtering routines to be written, you understand. It's a noble cause, and if anyone's going to accomplish it, it'll be Generalissimo Jobs.)
But the most obvious way for someone to compete with them is to offer a download service at a lower price--so expect someone to do that shortly.
Maybe so. RealNetworks announced their (listen.com-hybrid) service last week, at 79 cents a track. Also -- oops -- $10 a month subscription. It's amazing how the competition doesn't seem to recognize that subscription fees are the obstacle. Apple's buck-a-song is just so easy to get your head around. We want to pay for songs, not to belong to some Columbia records club with monthly dues. The iTunes interface is fine, but it's the per-song-only thing that sells it over the alternatives.
The other big bar to get over for other services is the licensing agreements. It sure looks like Steve Jobs used his name to get through obstacles that held everyone else up. It's kind of a race, too -- if someone else can get those same deals before the Windows version of iTunes comes out, maybe they can stake out the market share to avoid Apple's winning the new, bigger market of 'doze users. We'll see.
say if they found out an iPod owner chokes up an average of 300 dollars over the life of the iPod
That's what you pay up front for the little deck of cards itself, right? For the 10 gig version?
As gets said a million times whenever someone hints at Mac OS X getting ported to other machines, Apple's a hardware manufacturer. They think of the iLife suite of programs as a "loss leader" that encourages people to buy their hardware. In a lot of ways the new iTunes store is a way to encourage iPod sales -- and whether they would see it the other way around is a big question mark.
Maybe you're right, though. The iTunes for Windows thing does seem to break that model -- they'll be selling software (on the cheap?) to get people hooked on their content service, is the idea. Maybe music is really as completely different a direction and business model as you're saying...
I like the price and the size, but a camcorder seems like a weird place to use this -- unless it was just cheap enough to say "what the heck?" and go ahead, which'd be a really good sign for this drive.
A disk with 1.5 GB doesn't compete with DV tapes at all, so it can't be for the video. This is just replacing a flash card in that "cigarette pack"-sized camera to store stills you take along the way? Is this camcorder going to take stills much above 1.5MP? That's what the decent consumer camcorders that take stills are at -- and this one's a $600 camcorder, so it can't be that great. It'd take a looong while to fill 1.5 GB at that resolution.
Gaming's a huge entertainment industry. It's no surprise TV would want to see if they can tie into it. We've already had our (iffy) movie or three based on game franchises, and throwaway FPS games tied to a handful of middling "grown-up" series as promotional moves, leaving alone countless kids' show tie-ins.
Hard to say whether the great, leveling, lowest-common-denominator of TV will make this marginal even for Fox's viewer base, though. Seems more like an mst3k niche market to me. Or will Wright go more mainstream to get a bigger audience? Even the projects he's done already basically mix genres a bit and come out with a sitcom or a "reality" show/candid camera hybrid. (A sitcom in feudal japan with "suburban issues"? Watching people interact with a robot? Not exactly brand new material, whether or not he uses puppets.)
But more importantly,
Wright also experimented with a life-sized remote-controlled robot as a concept for a reality TV show.
Just how big are robots in real life, before you make them "life-sized"?
"Sticky tape" -- Whatever will they think of next?!?
Seriously, I'm looking at this article and thinking, it could hold x-and-so weight per square centimeter, to release you peel from the side slowly, it loses its stickiness with multiple uses, it's too expensive to make right now and it's a little bit fragile... Just exactly how superior would this be to -- ta dum -- a roll of heavy-grade packing tape? Other than the expense and the fragility of it, it seems to have accomplished basically the same traits.
Maybe the normal tape leaves behind a film of adhesive, where this doesn't? And this is faster to apply and release -- though only for Geckos so far? The accomplishments and accolades should pile up any minute. (Beat. Beat. Still waiting...)
I'll take Tape Woman and her sidekick, Post-it Gal, over whoever this Gecko-based hero is -- at least for now.
Multi-user support was, and is, lacking. So it had the power of a Mac, combined with the simplicity of a Mac (before OS X).
You're just trying for a bon mot, okay, but multi-user support is hardly one of the first ten features we'd describe as "powerful" in any OS. "Flexible," maybe.
Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life.
Who assumes that? Certainly not the SETI @ Home people.
There are quite elaborate "protocols" for weeding through the many, many signal patterns the SETI project does hear, precisely because it ain't necessarily so. That's, um, a whole lot of what the SETI project is doing, if you would care to consider what all those home boxes are up to with their spare cycles.
The most obvious example of a naturally occurring regular pattern -- mentioned prominently in the article/. linked to -- is pulsars, which tick away regularly and give off a very distinct radio signal pattern.
(You really want to read a criticism or two of the "watch watchmaker" thing you're arguing. Go find a critique or two of Darwin's Black Box, which is basically the same argument made on the same, sub-molecular level that you're already thinking of.)
Stop believing what the democrats feed you on the evening news and look reality in the eyes.
Succinct translation: "Watch Fox News."
I consider acts of terrorism and twenty something direct violations of international law and cease fire treaty reasonable fucking provocation.
Please list the "acts of terrorism" toward the US proven to have been committed by Iraq.
We're painfully aware of the Bush administration's attempts to link Al Quaeda to Saddam Hussein using the "intelligence sources" that are now under so much scrutiny in light of the puffed-up WMD argument. Our intelligence also told us Saddam was in that bunker on night one: yesterday the soldiers searching on the scene admitted they could find no evidence of a bunker at the site. Alas, the Ansar al Islam group is now completely off our radar as a result of the war, having scurried across the border to hide, so we can't question them about this subject... Leaving alone the 9/11 hints Condy Rice so quickly disavowed.
Please also contrast this policy toward Iraq's violations of international law with the US policy toward Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, and South Africa over the last 50 years.
FWIW, I agree with you that "without provocation" is an overstatement. The questions for me, and a lot of other people, are whether the war was justifiable and whether it's going to accomplish what it intended to. Right now we're taking it on the chin internationally for having "spun" our pretexts for going to war when we did. I see no evidence that the Bush administration is emerging from its determined solipsism with respect to international opinion; we keep right on acting like right-wing domestic supporters are the only audience for our policies. The jury is very much out on Iraq's reconstruction and the volatility of the middle east -- they're both supposed to become peaceful and stable as a result of this war and its aftermath, but that's a damn tall order, and this was an extremely high risk policy.
Oh, excuse me, I guess all those questions are just "ignorant," so why should we expect answers? You're brave, you're strong, and Fox is the only voice you want in your ear. Never mind.
Let's see, at $0.99 a song you've got 70Gb of music you want to stream? No wonder the Music Store thing took off, you're single-handedly buying all the songs yourself.
I imagine Apple trying to convince the industry types who wanted this restriction to prevent "abuse" using your argument:
"We have users who have 70GB of mp3s they've downloaded who want to stream them to the office, too."
Industry lawyer looks skeptically across table and begins asking pointed questions about where those files are really from...
It's true, the AAC w/DRM Apple's using doesn't truly make the music totally portable without some equipment in support of it. Neither does any other available format in the history of music. (You'll need more than two 30GB iPods to satisfy your ravenous hunger for portable music.)
I don't mean that as an insult, really. But just how common do you think this situation is?
How many individual, private Mac owners have five boxes set up at once, all of which are capable of even running the latest OS X, all of which they want to play iTunes songs on? How many people bought their brand new 30GB iPod but object stenuously to carrying it from room to room because they'd rather listen to their iBook speakers? (You say "the bitch" [ugh] can't be heard over headphones.)
What kind of hobbyist are you, exactly? Is this a small business?
Nothing against you, not anything at all, but you seem like a heck of an outlier in this situation. Maybe your Rendezvous suggestion's the way to go, but it's hard to imagine the argument Apple would make to the record companies to loosen this DRM restriction based on the frustration of people like you. Unless there's, say, more than one of you...
The rest of us all used the "hand-eye coordination" thing as a not-very-persuasive argument for our parents to buy us an Intellivision. (Also "problem-solving skills." Those puzzles in that side-to-side TRON game were really a sort of primer for prioritizing in the white collar sweatshop that is corporate life.) It worked, they bought the game systems, though nobody really believed us.
Props to you for living the dream, though.
Re:Sounds like your typical govt agency
on
IT at the CIA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What makes an org nimble is when they listen to the people who actually dig the trenches. There is no difference in this case, between the CIA, and say, GM.
Working in a big corporate organization, I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly. You can see a million little bureaucratic failings in something like the CIA or the FBI, and they'll remind you of stuff the senior director at your company once did. Colleen Rowley's memo read like my dang diary -- the way they wouldn't even try for a warrant except under the circumstances they were accustomed to was sooo very typical, and the subsequent promotion of the higher-up who wouldn't pursue Moussaui was dead-on corporate America.
(Makes me wonder why we talk so much about electing people who have business experience leading these enormous companies to public office... The CEO of United Airlines is as out-of-touch with the world of cause and effect as anyone out there.)
This "study" rings about as true as the original Retin-A "news" conferences. Remember all the doctors in Lab coats -- with hefty checks in their breast pockets, out of view of the cameras?
Man, if ZDNet can shill for a startup like this CacheLogic without a second thought or any contrary sources in the article, imagine how our Web news sources react when Microsoft or Apple send over a press release. (They copy from the PR document and paste the text into their stories, is what happens.)
And jeez, it's screamingly obvious that the profligate use of bandwidth by p2p services is precisely because of the moving targets p2pers need to be. It's indirectly, but mostly, caused by the media conglomerates who are going to use stories like this as arguments for their own case against p2p. If you try to hide, you're guilty, one way or another. Talk about the logic of the witch trial...
These subscription services need to take the old advertising/drug dealer maxim to heart: The first one is free. Sell me the game cheap, for $5, and give me a month of free play. By then I'm hooked and I'll stay.
The flat rate system would get people into more games. I don't want to have to pay $50 up front and $9 a month to find out if EverQuest is full of camping teenagers who have nothing to do but spend 40 hours a week leveling up. But you're right, under that system people could leave more easily too. (Not sure if that's as big a drawback as you say -- those no-life 60-hour-a-week players with demigod characters would maybe be less common. Hey, maybe competition would make the games better.)
The thing to do is make it easier to adopt the game, and get people hooked. Start them with the sampler/flat fee model, or a very cheap buy, and then move to the locked-in contracts later. It'd take more investment by the company up front, but Lucas Arts or EA could maybe swallow that.
Most if not all shark species, isn't it?
on
Ant Farm PC
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· Score: 2, Informative
Sharks and rays were among the first animals to be identified as having electroreceptive organs. The following description is taken from a paper by Andres and vonDuring from 1988. The main structure involved in electroreception in elasmobranchs is the Ampullae of Lorenzini. It consists of one or more alveoli at the blind end ofa jelly-filled canal. The canal opens to a pore on the skin surface.
...The organ acts as an insulated core conductor.
Great Whites have those pores on their noses. In an old (70s?) TV documentary, they try to keep a juvenile White in captivity, but it keeps banging its head into the wall of its circular loop of a tank -- because some wiring's giving off an electrical field near the tank wall there, IIRC.
Wonder if this is a problem for commonly kept species, like Brown sharks or Nurses? Maybe it's more your pelagic species that rely on this sense so much that they get distracted in a tank? Those'd be the ones that would need it for navigation more...
(Maybe our dream of sharks in the walls of titanium laptops will go forever unfulfilled.)
Isn't the quote, "Might makes right!"
The first quote says that being correct makes you powerful.
The second quote says that being powerful makes you correct.
Yeah, and Minuteman's version is meant to be an ironic, comic-ky sort of thing. Being pedantic seems to have dimished your sense of humor somewhat.;-)
That was my reaction too. You sort of head down the same path, though -- poor people in underdeveloped countries can't "think for themselves"? What do you base this observation on?
Having traveled in subsaharan Africa a bit, I can safely say that people I met there aren't "closed to the idea of democracy." (They're sometimes consciously "closed" to the idea of allowing mammoth, conscience-free American-based multinational corporations to subvert the democratic institutions they do have, though.)
I bet that was just an isolated quote the reporter chose, though. Seems more like her/his bias than the librarians, at first glance.
forbids selling minors any video or computer game depicting violence against law enforcement officials
In the superhero game "Freedom Force," there's a villain who clones cops and turns them into the bad guys, clone cops who'll shoot at our heroes on sight. (When you mouse over a usual officer it says "Defender of the Weak, Protector of the Innocent" or something like that, but the bad ones say "Defender of the Wicked..." -- that kind of thing.) Little did I know that "Freedom Force," whose main character, Minuteman, is honorably saving Patriot City from the forces of evil, was leading my kids astray. Pull it from the shelves, before it subverts all that is true and good! (As Minuteman himself would say, "Right makes might!")
Just goes to show how censorship in any bureaucratic form quickly becomes rigid and wrongheaded in application. There are awful games out there, and the solution most of us recognize is to, um, inform ourselves and not have our kids buy them.
If lots of people buy something that's really evil and vile, you've got bigger problems than censorship is going to solve. Passing sanctimonious laws and making it a constitutional issue to boot isn't going to get the result you wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, they're still bigger files. The Web is still full of people on dialup, and to cram png files down the line when a smaller, optimized .gif or .jpg will do, that's just not good. The main use I see of png at our shop is as the originals for all Web graphics -- people use Macromedia Fireworks and its (bloated) pngs as their sources, and export to .gifs and .jpgs for the sites themselves.
All the independent labels, you mean?
This clearly isn't true for the big labels. Some "hits" can only be bought if you take the whole album -- they won't sell Don MacLean's "American Pie" for $0.99 -- and exceptionally long tracks (>7 mins) often have the same restriction. Some albums also stick to the $0.99-per rule past the $9.95-per-original-disk rule. That's only fair when a classical or jazz track might be ten minutes long, but it ain't the universal deal we're supposedly talking about.
Not that I'm po'ed about this. Basically Apple had to compromise to get some of the deals with big companies. Seems like they're trying to address the very thing /. spent the first week going over and over -- smaller labels, less well-known artists -- without killing anyone on either end.
Maybe you and the other people making anti-American comments ought to get off Slashdot.
Maybe if you can't handle a tiny bit of back and forth on a public message board, you should steer clear of, say, Usenet groups and slashdot. Things aren't as controlled here as they are on Fox. Too bad.
The comment was that Americans are nationalist -- delivered with a wry grin. "Nationalism: a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups." You'd be proud to call yourself a nationalist, wouldn't you?
I'm not sure where the "racist" part of that comes in... Get a grip.
Apple under Jobs seems like a decent place to work -- my sister's employed there, they've been a solid employer with integrity, at least measured against (ahem) some other examples I could think of. But as far as this sort of policy goes, doesn't it seem like Jobs has the professional design people sending out the memos and the engineers reading them, rather than communication in both directions? Jobs id's a market niche, he sets designers working on it, and the engineers make it work, is how I read it.
Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?
So congratulations to the BSA, I guess, 'cause without them around piracy would be so much worse. Rich. They're really stemming the tide by strong-arming their blackmail victims into accepting MS-only agreements... "protection" like this you can see in the gangster movies.
(Or maybe this was the kid with his finger in the dyke, not Chicken Little... whatever.)
Add to that "Don't show Britney songs to people in the EU" stuff in the database and the front end, fronting European licenses for completely different music... I can see it, and I'm sympathetic, but you might not want to hold your breath.
(Not that the world doesn't need Britney-filtering routines to be written, you understand. It's a noble cause, and if anyone's going to accomplish it, it'll be Generalissimo Jobs.)
Apple'd love to. The record companies are worried about licensing agreements for anything but US distribution.
(Just how frightened is the RIAA of its customers? They're literally afraid to sell you something. Jeepers.)
Maybe so. RealNetworks announced their (listen.com-hybrid) service last week, at 79 cents a track. Also -- oops -- $10 a month subscription. It's amazing how the competition doesn't seem to recognize that subscription fees are the obstacle. Apple's buck-a-song is just so easy to get your head around. We want to pay for songs, not to belong to some Columbia records club with monthly dues. The iTunes interface is fine, but it's the per-song-only thing that sells it over the alternatives.
The other big bar to get over for other services is the licensing agreements. It sure looks like Steve Jobs used his name to get through obstacles that held everyone else up. It's kind of a race, too -- if someone else can get those same deals before the Windows version of iTunes comes out, maybe they can stake out the market share to avoid Apple's winning the new, bigger market of 'doze users. We'll see.
That's what you pay up front for the little deck of cards itself, right? For the 10 gig version?
As gets said a million times whenever someone hints at Mac OS X getting ported to other machines, Apple's a hardware manufacturer. They think of the iLife suite of programs as a "loss leader" that encourages people to buy their hardware. In a lot of ways the new iTunes store is a way to encourage iPod sales -- and whether they would see it the other way around is a big question mark.
Maybe you're right, though. The iTunes for Windows thing does seem to break that model -- they'll be selling software (on the cheap?) to get people hooked on their content service, is the idea. Maybe music is really as completely different a direction and business model as you're saying...
A disk with 1.5 GB doesn't compete with DV tapes at all, so it can't be for the video. This is just replacing a flash card in that "cigarette pack"-sized camera to store stills you take along the way? Is this camcorder going to take stills much above 1.5MP? That's what the decent consumer camcorders that take stills are at -- and this one's a $600 camcorder, so it can't be that great. It'd take a looong while to fill 1.5 GB at that resolution.
Gaming's a huge entertainment industry. It's no surprise TV would want to see if they can tie into it. We've already had our (iffy) movie or three based on game franchises, and throwaway FPS games tied to a handful of middling "grown-up" series as promotional moves, leaving alone countless kids' show tie-ins.
Hard to say whether the great, leveling, lowest-common-denominator of TV will make this marginal even for Fox's viewer base, though. Seems more like an mst3k niche market to me. Or will Wright go more mainstream to get a bigger audience? Even the projects he's done already basically mix genres a bit and come out with a sitcom or a "reality" show/candid camera hybrid. (A sitcom in feudal japan with "suburban issues"? Watching people interact with a robot? Not exactly brand new material, whether or not he uses puppets.)
But more importantly,
Just how big are robots in real life, before you make them "life-sized"?
Seriously, I'm looking at this article and thinking, it could hold x-and-so weight per square centimeter, to release you peel from the side slowly, it loses its stickiness with multiple uses, it's too expensive to make right now and it's a little bit fragile... Just exactly how superior would this be to -- ta dum -- a roll of heavy-grade packing tape? Other than the expense and the fragility of it, it seems to have accomplished basically the same traits.
Maybe the normal tape leaves behind a film of adhesive, where this doesn't? And this is faster to apply and release -- though only for Geckos so far? The accomplishments and accolades should pile up any minute. (Beat. Beat. Still waiting...)
I'll take Tape Woman and her sidekick, Post-it Gal, over whoever this Gecko-based hero is -- at least for now.
You're just trying for a bon mot, okay, but multi-user support is hardly one of the first ten features we'd describe as "powerful" in any OS. "Flexible," maybe.
Who assumes that? Certainly not the SETI @ Home people.
There are quite elaborate "protocols" for weeding through the many, many signal patterns the SETI project does hear, precisely because it ain't necessarily so. That's, um, a whole lot of what the SETI project is doing, if you would care to consider what all those home boxes are up to with their spare cycles.
The most obvious example of a naturally occurring regular pattern -- mentioned prominently in the article /. linked to -- is pulsars, which tick away regularly and give off a very distinct radio signal pattern.
(You really want to read a criticism or two of the "watch watchmaker" thing you're arguing. Go find a critique or two of Darwin's Black Box, which is basically the same argument made on the same, sub-molecular level that you're already thinking of.)
Succinct translation: "Watch Fox News."
I consider acts of terrorism and twenty something direct violations of international law and cease fire treaty reasonable fucking provocation.
Please list the "acts of terrorism" toward the US proven to have been committed by Iraq.
We're painfully aware of the Bush administration's attempts to link Al Quaeda to Saddam Hussein using the "intelligence sources" that are now under so much scrutiny in light of the puffed-up WMD argument. Our intelligence also told us Saddam was in that bunker on night one: yesterday the soldiers searching on the scene admitted they could find no evidence of a bunker at the site. Alas, the Ansar al Islam group is now completely off our radar as a result of the war, having scurried across the border to hide, so we can't question them about this subject... Leaving alone the 9/11 hints Condy Rice so quickly disavowed.
Please also contrast this policy toward Iraq's violations of international law with the US policy toward Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, and South Africa over the last 50 years.
FWIW, I agree with you that "without provocation" is an overstatement. The questions for me, and a lot of other people, are whether the war was justifiable and whether it's going to accomplish what it intended to. Right now we're taking it on the chin internationally for having "spun" our pretexts for going to war when we did. I see no evidence that the Bush administration is emerging from its determined solipsism with respect to international opinion; we keep right on acting like right-wing domestic supporters are the only audience for our policies. The jury is very much out on Iraq's reconstruction and the volatility of the middle east -- they're both supposed to become peaceful and stable as a result of this war and its aftermath, but that's a damn tall order, and this was an extremely high risk policy.
Oh, excuse me, I guess all those questions are just "ignorant," so why should we expect answers? You're brave, you're strong, and Fox is the only voice you want in your ear. Never mind.
I imagine Apple trying to convince the industry types who wanted this restriction to prevent "abuse" using your argument:
It's true, the AAC w/DRM Apple's using doesn't truly make the music totally portable without some equipment in support of it. Neither does any other available format in the history of music. (You'll need more than two 30GB iPods to satisfy your ravenous hunger for portable music.)
How many individual, private Mac owners have five boxes set up at once, all of which are capable of even running the latest OS X, all of which they want to play iTunes songs on? How many people bought their brand new 30GB iPod but object stenuously to carrying it from room to room because they'd rather listen to their iBook speakers? (You say "the bitch" [ugh] can't be heard over headphones.)
What kind of hobbyist are you, exactly? Is this a small business?
Nothing against you, not anything at all, but you seem like a heck of an outlier in this situation. Maybe your Rendezvous suggestion's the way to go, but it's hard to imagine the argument Apple would make to the record companies to loosen this DRM restriction based on the frustration of people like you. Unless there's, say, more than one of you...
Props to you for living the dream, though.
Working in a big corporate organization, I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly. You can see a million little bureaucratic failings in something like the CIA or the FBI, and they'll remind you of stuff the senior director at your company once did. Colleen Rowley's memo read like my dang diary -- the way they wouldn't even try for a warrant except under the circumstances they were accustomed to was sooo very typical, and the subsequent promotion of the higher-up who wouldn't pursue Moussaui was dead-on corporate America.
(Makes me wonder why we talk so much about electing people who have business experience leading these enormous companies to public office... The CEO of United Airlines is as out-of-touch with the world of cause and effect as anyone out there.)
Man, if ZDNet can shill for a startup like this CacheLogic without a second thought or any contrary sources in the article, imagine how our Web news sources react when Microsoft or Apple send over a press release. (They copy from the PR document and paste the text into their stories, is what happens.)
And jeez, it's screamingly obvious that the profligate use of bandwidth by p2p services is precisely because of the moving targets p2pers need to be. It's indirectly, but mostly, caused by the media conglomerates who are going to use stories like this as arguments for their own case against p2p. If you try to hide, you're guilty, one way or another. Talk about the logic of the witch trial...
The flat rate system would get people into more games. I don't want to have to pay $50 up front and $9 a month to find out if EverQuest is full of camping teenagers who have nothing to do but spend 40 hours a week leveling up. But you're right, under that system people could leave more easily too. (Not sure if that's as big a drawback as you say -- those no-life 60-hour-a-week players with demigod characters would maybe be less common. Hey, maybe competition would make the games better.)
The thing to do is make it easier to adopt the game, and get people hooked. Start them with the sampler/flat fee model, or a very cheap buy, and then move to the locked-in contracts later. It'd take more investment by the company up front, but Lucas Arts or EA could maybe swallow that.
Great Whites have those pores on their noses. In an old (70s?) TV documentary, they try to keep a juvenile White in captivity, but it keeps banging its head into the wall of its circular loop of a tank -- because some wiring's giving off an electrical field near the tank wall there, IIRC.
Wonder if this is a problem for commonly kept species, like Brown sharks or Nurses? Maybe it's more your pelagic species that rely on this sense so much that they get distracted in a tank? Those'd be the ones that would need it for navigation more...
(Maybe our dream of sharks in the walls of titanium laptops will go forever unfulfilled.)
The first quote says that being correct makes you powerful.
The second quote says that being powerful makes you correct.
Yeah, and Minuteman's version is meant to be an ironic, comic-ky sort of thing. Being pedantic seems to have dimished your sense of humor somewhat. ;-)
Having traveled in subsaharan Africa a bit, I can safely say that people I met there aren't "closed to the idea of democracy." (They're sometimes consciously "closed" to the idea of allowing mammoth, conscience-free American-based multinational corporations to subvert the democratic institutions they do have, though.)
I bet that was just an isolated quote the reporter chose, though. Seems more like her/his bias than the librarians, at first glance.
In the superhero game "Freedom Force," there's a villain who clones cops and turns them into the bad guys, clone cops who'll shoot at our heroes on sight. (When you mouse over a usual officer it says "Defender of the Weak, Protector of the Innocent" or something like that, but the bad ones say "Defender of the Wicked..." -- that kind of thing.) Little did I know that "Freedom Force," whose main character, Minuteman, is honorably saving Patriot City from the forces of evil, was leading my kids astray. Pull it from the shelves, before it subverts all that is true and good! (As Minuteman himself would say, "Right makes might!")
Just goes to show how censorship in any bureaucratic form quickly becomes rigid and wrongheaded in application. There are awful games out there, and the solution most of us recognize is to, um, inform ourselves and not have our kids buy them.
If lots of people buy something that's really evil and vile, you've got bigger problems than censorship is going to solve. Passing sanctimonious laws and making it a constitutional issue to boot isn't going to get the result you wanted.