Of course they refused to take it, as "it" was about 1/100th the amount a legitimate contract would have produced. It would be like a Chineese company knocking off Gucci handbags, and then offering Gucci ten cents a bag so they'll feel better about being ripped off.
And AllOfMP3 had nothing to lose by making the offer. If accepted, it would have "legitimized" the arrangement. And if rebuffed, as they knew it had to be, they get to keep the money AND still announce that they'd made the offer, with all of the PR value it entailed.
And as such it worked, because it's obvious that "some people" bought into their PR...
"...you might as well make them different shapes from each other, as done so successfully in other countries."
Changing the bill size would be an option... other than the fact that we probably have millions of hardware bill scanners already out there in vending machines, automated checkout lines, and so on.
Not to mention the fact that every ATM in the country would have to be reworked.
Then we have every cash register and cash drawer to consider...
Yeah, one can almost hear the violins playing in the OP, "...suing unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids, all kinds of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations."
What I'd like to know is how many of these poor people with no resources actually did what that for which they're being accused? If the RIAA is shotgunning anyone and everyone, then that's obviously a bad thing. If, however, the vast majority of the allegations are on target, then the level of my sympathy is strictly limited.
What's needed is to setup a fairly high penalty for false lawsuits, which would in turn provide incentive for legal counsul to profit from the RIAA's mistakes, which in turn would limit the number of lawsuits down to those in which the RIAA was VERY sure they had a case.
Ditto. People drive twenty miles to save five dollars on a $500 TV. As such, too many companies compete on price, and buy the cheapest possible components to do so.
Or you have the WalMart effect, where they've beat their suppliers wholesale prices down to the point where the suppliers are forced to do the same thing, buying and building cheap just to stay in business.
End result? You "saved" five dollars buying a flimsy POS, and you'll get the chance to do the same thing a year from now when it breaks down and dies.
"Singapore straits for anyone who has been out there is full of pirates. High earning pirates with gunboats and helicopters. I think piracy is deep within human nature. The spirit of rebellion and freedom."
Yeah, pirates who commit theft and rape and torture and murder. That's the spirit, alright...
"You have no way of knowing why the fine for littering is a $1000...is conjecture at best."
Having sat in on the local city concil meeting when they upped the fine to that level, I'd have to say it's a bit more than "conjecture". Increasing the fine changed the risk/reward balance, and slapping the increased fines on a few locals served to advertise the fact that littering in the face of such might be, how do you say... stupid?
"If someone steals a leather jacket they'll be charged with a crime relative to the value of that jacket (say a couple of hundred dollars)."
Actually, the charge may well be much more serious than that, especially if this is a repeat offense. If the "fine" was directly proportional to the cost of the jacket, everyone would try to steal jackets, since at worst you'd just be paying retail for it if you're caught. In other words, there's no deterrent value.
Secondarily, the fines tend to be much higher when there's a greater difficulty of finding and/or catching someone in the act. Look at the high fines for, say, littering along the highway. $1,000 sounds steep, but the odds are that you'll get away with it, but... is it really worth the risk?
Ditto. And as mentioned above, using "audiophile" and "portable music player" in the same sentence is a bit absurd. Too many of us listen to music on such devices on the street, in a car, on the subway, at the gym, or at any number of other places where the ambient noise levels are going to drown out any perceived "superiority" in sound quality anyway.
So unless you're going to record totally loseless and listen with $300 headphones in a quiet room... don't bother.
I have a Memorex POS with this U3 crap on it, and which doesn't have an uninstall option at all. Worse, it insists on mounting a U3 virtual CD, which also needs to be dismounted to "correctly" removed the drive.
"I just don't get why people buy downloaded music at all...a CD gives you your music..."
I have 270 songs I've purchased off the iTMS. Of these, only 50 songs are complete albums/CDs (4 albums) . The rest are singles.
As such, I got EXACTLY the 220 songs I wanted for a buck a piece, didn't have to find and pay for 179 CDs, and I didn't have to waste my personal time ripping them, finding artwork, extracting the songs I wanted in the first place, and so on. And since most of that music is listened to off my pod in noisy environments (car, subway, street) anyway, having a lossless audiophile experience isn't going to happen anyway.
"Most however are young kids who can't afford to buy the music in the first place... so they're not screwing the artist..."
Now THAT'S just another rationalization. When I was a kid music was important to me, and somehow my friends and I always managed to find the money needed to get the music we wanted. We might not have been able to afford everything we WANTED, but we did manage to buy the stuff that was important to us, using money from jobs, allowances, and so on.
Today, too many kids make the same rationalization that you just did... and then go spend the money they "didn't have" on clothes or other things they can't rip off quite so easily.
First you say, "Last time I checked, Firefox was still open source software. If they're not fixing bugs fast enough for your liking, by all means, download the source and fix them yourself."
But then, "I wish I had the skill to fix it myself; I would if I could."
I like that. In one post you state that no one should criticize or complain about it, they should just fix the problems, and at the same time you acknowledge that not everyone has the skill, time, or knowledge needed to do so.
I guess they should just huddle silently in a corner then, thankful for their cold bowl of porridge?
Personally, I think the team set expectations too high with a "major" 2.0 version number increase, when in actuallity there's little added that seemed to warrant such a major release.
I suspect that if this had been released as FF 1.6 little of this type of criticism would be appearing, because then the implication would not have been that of releasing a new "blockbuster", but that they're simply adding improvements and features at a smooth, steady pace.
I kind of doubt that you're going to find 17,532 people in the Linux "community" who're capable of objectively evaluating all of MS's patents and determining their "impact" on Linux. I can see it now:
"Okay, here's a patent on automatically executing downloaded code over an electronic medium to do 'user specific tasks'."
"Oh, man, that's bogus. Bound to be some prior art on that somewhere."
"I agree, this one's busted. Hey, I've got to go, got a kernel build in progress..."
According to the managers of several local Apple stores, about 75% of the people who buy MacBook Pros choose the matte screen option, so there's plenty of people who think like you. The brushed aluminum case doesn't print easily, doesn't show dust, is non-glare, and the system avoids the "hey, I'm working here" LEDs.
Some people complain about scratches, but I just handed off a two-year-old PB, which only had one minor scratch on one edge, barely noticable. All I did was put it into a sleeve before tossing it into my backback.
A friend, however, has a shiny new (literally) HP "multimedia" notebook with all of the "features" you mentioned above. He's had it for two weeks now, and it already looks like a POS.
"You'd have to be asleep for the past 10 years to not know that crime is absolutely out of control online, in the forms of phishing, spam, kiddie porn, etc."
Phishing, yes. Spam, certainly. Kiddie porn? Out of control? Don't believe everything the press feeds you.
The person I replied to (not you) said he closed his door (again, apparently not you) and put a note on it. Hence my response.
As to you, most of the developers in the last company I worked at all wore headphones and listened to music anyway. In fact about a quarter of them had the Bose noise-cancelling model. Perhaps that would help eliminate all of those errant sound waves...
"Software giant Microsoft is helping the law track down and find phishers and political boarders are no boundary for them."
What I want think we should do is find out who's renting rooms and/or space to these "political boarders". Once we do that it should be easy to evict them and shut them down.
Or are we looking for politcally-biased skate boarders? Always knew those guys were no good...
"...your neighbor's loud conversation can be annoying and disturb your concentration..."
Most of the developers in the last company I worked at all wore headphones and listened to music anyway. In fact about a quarter of them had the Bose noise-cancelling model
Nothing's stopping someone from hanging the same sign on a 'cube.
In fact, one company I worked at had "quiet times" in the morning and afternoon. If you interupted someone, then the damn building had better be burning down.
Of course, the post above me also had it straight. It's not just about you...
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Of course they refused to take it, as "it" was about 1/100th the amount a legitimate contract would have produced. It would be like a Chineese company knocking off Gucci handbags, and then offering Gucci ten cents a bag so they'll feel better about being ripped off.
And AllOfMP3 had nothing to lose by making the offer. If accepted, it would have "legitimized" the arrangement. And if rebuffed, as they knew it had to be, they get to keep the money AND still announce that they'd made the offer, with all of the PR value it entailed.
And as such it worked, because it's obvious that "some people" bought into their PR...
"...you might as well make them different shapes from each other, as done so successfully in other countries."
Changing the bill size would be an option... other than the fact that we probably have millions of hardware bill scanners already out there in vending machines, automated checkout lines, and so on.
Not to mention the fact that every ATM in the country would have to be reworked.
Then we have every cash register and cash drawer to consider...
But hey, great idea!
Yeah, one can almost hear the violins playing in the OP, "...suing unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids, all kinds of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations."
What I'd like to know is how many of these poor people with no resources actually did what that for which they're being accused? If the RIAA is shotgunning anyone and everyone, then that's obviously a bad thing. If, however, the vast majority of the allegations are on target, then the level of my sympathy is strictly limited.
What's needed is to setup a fairly high penalty for false lawsuits, which would in turn provide incentive for legal counsul to profit from the RIAA's mistakes, which in turn would limit the number of lawsuits down to those in which the RIAA was VERY sure they had a case.
At which point I say, "Have at 'em."
Ditto. People drive twenty miles to save five dollars on a $500 TV. As such, too many companies compete on price, and buy the cheapest possible components to do so.
Or you have the WalMart effect, where they've beat their suppliers wholesale prices down to the point where the suppliers are forced to do the same thing, buying and building cheap just to stay in business.
End result? You "saved" five dollars buying a flimsy POS, and you'll get the chance to do the same thing a year from now when it breaks down and dies.
"Singapore straits for anyone who has been out there is full of pirates. High earning pirates with gunboats and helicopters. I think piracy is deep within human nature. The spirit of rebellion and freedom."
Yeah, pirates who commit theft and rape and torture and murder. That's the spirit, alright...
"TV Execs should be asking themselves Is there actually a business case for traditional TV?"
You'd better hope so. Otherwise there's going to be a lot less stuff available for you to 'torrent...
"You have no way of knowing why the fine for littering is a $1000...is conjecture at best."
Having sat in on the local city concil meeting when they upped the fine to that level, I'd have to say it's a bit more than "conjecture". Increasing the fine changed the risk/reward balance, and slapping the increased fines on a few locals served to advertise the fact that littering in the face of such might be, how do you say... stupid?
"qwerks"
Is that some new kind of quirky keyboard?
"If someone steals a leather jacket they'll be charged with a crime relative to the value of that jacket (say a couple of hundred dollars)."
Actually, the charge may well be much more serious than that, especially if this is a repeat offense. If the "fine" was directly proportional to the cost of the jacket, everyone would try to steal jackets, since at worst you'd just be paying retail for it if you're caught. In other words, there's no deterrent value.
Secondarily, the fines tend to be much higher when there's a greater difficulty of finding and/or catching someone in the act. Look at the high fines for, say, littering along the highway. $1,000 sounds steep, but the odds are that you'll get away with it, but... is it really worth the risk?
"Sound quality's not really the point of my insistence on lossless compression."
So you like wasting hard drive space on "quality" you can't hear?
Ditto. And as mentioned above, using "audiophile" and "portable music player" in the same sentence is a bit absurd. Too many of us listen to music on such devices on the street, in a car, on the subway, at the gym, or at any number of other places where the ambient noise levels are going to drown out any perceived "superiority" in sound quality anyway.
So unless you're going to record totally loseless and listen with $300 headphones in a quiet room... don't bother.
I have a Memorex POS with this U3 crap on it, and which doesn't have an uninstall option at all. Worse, it insists on mounting a U3 virtual CD, which also needs to be dismounted to "correctly" removed the drive.
"I just don't get why people buy downloaded music at all...a CD gives you your music..."
I have 270 songs I've purchased off the iTMS. Of these, only 50 songs are complete albums/CDs (4 albums) . The rest are singles.
As such, I got EXACTLY the 220 songs I wanted for a buck a piece, didn't have to find and pay for 179 CDs, and I didn't have to waste my personal time ripping them, finding artwork, extracting the songs I wanted in the first place, and so on. And since most of that music is listened to off my pod in noisy environments (car, subway, street) anyway, having a lossless audiophile experience isn't going to happen anyway.
"Most however are young kids who can't afford to buy the music in the first place... so they're not screwing the artist..."
Now THAT'S just another rationalization. When I was a kid music was important to me, and somehow my friends and I always managed to find the money needed to get the music we wanted. We might not have been able to afford everything we WANTED, but we did manage to buy the stuff that was important to us, using money from jobs, allowances, and so on.
Today, too many kids make the same rationalization that you just did... and then go spend the money they "didn't have" on clothes or other things they can't rip off quite so easily.
First you say, "Last time I checked, Firefox was still open source software. If they're not fixing bugs fast enough for your liking, by all means, download the source and fix them yourself."
But then, "I wish I had the skill to fix it myself; I would if I could."
I like that. In one post you state that no one should criticize or complain about it, they should just fix the problems, and at the same time you acknowledge that not everyone has the skill, time, or knowledge needed to do so.
I guess they should just huddle silently in a corner then, thankful for their cold bowl of porridge?
Personally, I think the team set expectations too high with a "major" 2.0 version number increase, when in actuallity there's little added that seemed to warrant such a major release.
I suspect that if this had been released as FF 1.6 little of this type of criticism would be appearing, because then the implication would not have been that of releasing a new "blockbuster", but that they're simply adding improvements and features at a smooth, steady pace.
If you could get the patent data you could try setting up a Wiki somewhere....
I kind of doubt that you're going to find 17,532 people in the Linux "community" who're capable of objectively evaluating all of MS's patents and determining their "impact" on Linux. I can see it now:
"Okay, here's a patent on automatically executing downloaded code over an electronic medium to do 'user specific tasks'."
"Oh, man, that's bogus. Bound to be some prior art on that somewhere."
"I agree, this one's busted. Hey, I've got to go, got a kernel build in progress..."
According to the managers of several local Apple stores, about 75% of the people who buy MacBook Pros choose the matte screen option, so there's plenty of people who think like you. The brushed aluminum case doesn't print easily, doesn't show dust, is non-glare, and the system avoids the "hey, I'm working here" LEDs.
Some people complain about scratches, but I just handed off a two-year-old PB, which only had one minor scratch on one edge, barely noticable. All I did was put it into a sleeve before tossing it into my backback.
A friend, however, has a shiny new (literally) HP "multimedia" notebook with all of the "features" you mentioned above. He's had it for two weeks now, and it already looks like a POS.
"You'd have to be asleep for the past 10 years to not know that crime is absolutely out of control online, in the forms of phishing, spam, kiddie porn, etc."
Phishing, yes. Spam, certainly. Kiddie porn? Out of control? Don't believe everything the press feeds you.
The person I replied to (not you) said he closed his door (again, apparently not you) and put a note on it. Hence my response.
As to you, most of the developers in the last company I worked at all wore headphones and listened to music anyway. In fact about a quarter of them had the Bose noise-cancelling model. Perhaps that would help eliminate all of those errant sound waves...
Cubes. And MS Office. ;)
"Software giant Microsoft is helping the law track down and find phishers and political boarders are no boundary for them."
What I want think we should do is find out who's renting rooms and/or space to these "political boarders". Once we do that it should be easy to evict them and shut them down.
Or are we looking for politcally-biased skate boarders? Always knew those guys were no good...
"...your neighbor's loud conversation can be annoying and disturb your concentration..."
Most of the developers in the last company I worked at all wore headphones and listened to music anyway. In fact about a quarter of them had the Bose noise-cancelling model
Nothing's stopping someone from hanging the same sign on a 'cube.
In fact, one company I worked at had "quiet times" in the morning and afternoon. If you interupted someone, then the damn building had better be burning down.
Of course, the post above me also had it straight. It's not just about you...