Then again, if you're a true skeptic, you'd recognize that the probability that scientists have underestimated the problem of global warming is just as likely an outcome as the probability that they have overestimated it.
"If you’re a user, you want to know that you can make a transaction online without your credit card information falling into the wrong hands..."
Yes, because all "internet users" are supposed to use the internet for is to consume.
Feed the beast. If you are a consumer, you can be controlled, and we don't have to worry about you actually doing anything about the predicament this world is in.
So? Americans spend more on EVERYTHING. That's just the nature of our country - we like to spend gobs of money. We spend more on cars. We spend more on houses. We spend more on videogames and DVDs and computers. That's not a negative result.
It would be considered a negative result when you look at the overall stats on mortality and life expectancy...it would appear Americans have barely average health statistics among developed nations, despite the fact they spend so many multiples more than everyone else.
Hopefully this solves the problem of having to program games to deal with the various combinations of computers that are out there. EA has been driven crazy by this lately, and notice...no Madden for PC this year. Say what you will, but I'm talking about one of the most popular annual games.
Hardcore fans preferred the PC version because of the ability to customize rosters and such. For the last few years, many new features have been directed only to the consoles, and omitted from the PC game. This year, EA has still seen fit to axe the PC version, because they can no longer control the user experience (e.g. many buyers will think the game, and therefore EA, is crap)
I don't understand why the record companies just think in terms of the "casual music fan" that buys CD's at Walmart.
Many people are devotees of certain artists, and would gladly shell out money for alternative product if the music companies would just consider offering it.
For example, take live concert recordings. A fan can generally download a copy from a likn on a fansite. The recording is likely crappily recorded using a wireless phone, yet the fan is willing to invest valuable time in downloading the recording, properly labelling each song and adding some homemade "cover art" to add to their collection - especially for a never-before heard or unique track.
Instead, why not offer professionally recorded live recordings, properly labelled and tagged with art from the show, conveniently located on iTunes for a small fee a few days after the show?
There's so many ways that the recording industry can compete with free...by offering something outside the single/album format they've been wedded to for the last 60 or so years.
So if Jobs believed it's a good thing for Apple to get rid of DRM, why doesn't he Just Do It (TM).
Many music labels sell unprotected MP3s for their artists already. Puretracks now sells songs in both WMA and MP3 format. Apple could EASILY do the same as a warning shot to the other music labels. It would also serve as a good test, which can show the labels that MP3's actually improve sales (as the product has more value to consumers than a restricted file).
I don't think Jobs wants to get rid of DRM at all - he's just trying to deflect the heat for DRM onto the labels.
We don't even know for sure that Iran is looking for the bomb. IAEA has not found evidence. However we don't care.
Our objective is for full control of the nuclear energy cycle. Anyone who wants to generate energy from nuclear sources has to play by our rules, purchase uranium through our markets, with our currency, and be 100% monitored by our agencies. We want the right to pull the plug on any nation at any time.
With the help of the Saudis, we've managed virtually that degree of control over oil. However, with countries like Venezuela and Iran having some power, it scares us just a bit. As oil runs out, other sources of energy will power our planet. We need to maintain control over those sources of energy. Because our economy doesn't actually make anything the world needs, the only way we can maintain the dominant position needed to keep up our lifestyle is through military force to ensure financial control.
This isn't about 'consumers', those incredibly dumb entities that eat products and shit cash.
I agree - "consumer" has to be the most derogatory term that one can have for a fellow human being. I'd rather be called a c*@t any day than a consumer.
Burn down the disco Hang the blessed D.J. Because the royalties that they do not pay When they play all the songs off their ipods Hang the bleseed D.J. Because the royalties oh, they do not pay
If you read the article, you'll note that they're only looking at the Top 10. They're not comparing overall music sales.
I think overall, top 10 format radio is down from prior years. as people decide to listen to the music on their iPods, or satellite radio, which offers a lot more variety than can be found in the Top 10. Also witness the populatiry of stations like "Jack FM" which play a varied playlist instead of the same 20-30 songs over and over again. People are listening to more music, and for the most part, better music than what can be found on the charts.
I've also noticed that the back catalog has become cheaper, you can get some decent albums from the last 10 years for the price of $9.99 (Canadian) or thorough 2 for $20 deals at most CD shops, which works out to about 8 and a half bucks U.S, cheaper even than used CD's sometimes. This has cannibalized from marginal releases - I'd rather wait until it goes in the bargain bin in a few months, and get the chance to become more familiar with other songs on the CD before buying.
Let's hope they don't add these to their list of blocked artist/song names .
The The REM (how many words contain those three letters in that order?) Or for that matter: M (Pop Muzik) Any Solo artists with common names (like Michael Jackson - does that mean that nobody can share files with Michael in the name anymore? Train, Jewel?
The list could go on. It's a good thing the labels don't protect their entire catalog, since I'm sure the entire English dictionary would be blocked out.
The above poster describes the process of hypnosis EXACTLY.
I had the fun experience of going to the Anthony Cools show in Vegas. My wife and the guy sitting beside me (also a hypnotist who was coming to watch) somehow convinced me to go along with it.
While I knew that the end result would probably be embarassing, I just told myself to go along with it. Turns out that I was the star of the show.
And yes, I f_cked a chair. But what happens in Vegas...
Long story short, there is no way a hypnotist could get you to do anything you don't want to do. You are still very much in control of your actions. It's the relaxation, coupled with the power of suggestion, that going along with the act is going to be better for you than saying no and potentially ruining a really incredible show.
While I'm all for the idea of a non-proprietary DRM standard that works with all kinds of files and all kinds of O/S, I can't see this ever getting buy-in from the content industry.
With it being completely open source, how could this be implemented so that the DRM cannot be reverse-engineered to just bypass whatever checking mechanism is put in place?
If it's using some kind of connection to the file's creator or some kind of authorization agent, then I can't see it being reliable enough to make the DRM'd content worth buying - for example if it doesn't work while the computer is offline.
"One study showed that children who played a violent game for less than 10 minutes and then took a mood assessment test rated themselves with aggressive traits and aggressive actions shortly after playing.
Teachers of 600 8th and 9th graders, aged 13 to 15, said children who spent more time playing violent video games were more hostile than other children and more likely to argue with authority figures and other students. "
It would have been interesting if they asked the kids the next day what actual violent acts they committed.
Presumably, if it's lighter outside when we get home from work, we'll use less energy.
Never mind increasing automobile mileage standards, let's change the time to make us feel better about using twice as much energy as anyone else on the planet.
Flamebait?? This comment is insightful. Because of this action, how many more asshats out there will start up spy-shit tracker cookie uninstallable scumware companies in hopes of striking it rich?
Interesting position. I've actually been more interested in buying CD's since getting an iPod. The reasons:
1 - I'm getting the original CD, which I can lend to friends, or listen to at my convenience.
2. I can quickly make a copy of the CD in iTunes, and play it on the iPod as a full album or in shuffle with the rest of my collection.
3. I don't have to rely on DRM'd files that are going to disappear at some point in the future. I can also use whatever bitrate mp3 I want. Nor do I have to worry about making a backup copy - the CD is my backup.
4. Most record stores have lowered their prices, especially for catalog albums. I can get generally get 2 good, fairly recent albums for $25 (Canadian). Plus, many good used CD's cost less than the $9.99 iTunes is selling them for.
More value for the money.
The only drawback - hare-brained DRM schemes on some newer CD's that don't allow the files to be copied. So far, I've had no problems - if I choose not to install the crappy player software, iTunes still recognizes the files on the CD, although the track & artist data doesn't get automatically filled in.
On Friday, my brand-new Mac Mini arrived, and I started setting it up to use as my main multi-media machine. Having a large library of photos and songs in iTunes, and hearing about how the Mac OS just works, integrates seamlessly with Windows and has the complete iLife suite included in the box, I figured it would be a good buy.
After turning the thing on, I see a cryptic picture of the mouse apparantly showing how to insert the batteries, which I had already done correctly. After cursing a bit, I read in the users manual that you need to plug in a keyboard & mouse first, then set up the driver for the Bluetooth keyboard & mouse. Luckily, I have my PC which has a USB keyboard, but its mouse is wireless too, so I have to find a USB mouse, which again, luckily I had one lying around. Many people would give up at this point, or have to buy USB ones so that they can then proceed to set up the nice new Apple Wireless components they bought.
After installing the drivers (at least Windows would have recognized the hardware with Plug & Pray), I could actually use the (admittedly beautiful and stylish) new wireless keyboard & mouse.
Next step was setting up the network. After fumbling around for an hour trying to find out where to input my SSID and WEP passphrase (it doesn't actually say SSID - it says something like Network) that finally worked. I'm on the net, set up my e-mail account, and that worked great. I then proceeded to access my Windows machine where I keep my multi-media files, and begin importing them to the Mac.
Despite an 802.11g network, the thing was slow - probably about 54 KB/sec insteasd of 54MB. Took about an hour to import the first 50 songs of my 6000 song library. Went to bed exepcting a library full of songs.
Wake up the next morning, the network connection must have gone down for a time, but indeed all my songs are in the library. But for some strange reason, about 100 were duped. I delete the dupes, not realizing that the dupes were actually pointing to my shared folder. So now 100 songs are missing from my main iTunes library. Had to click on every single song to see which ones were missing, then copy them back to the PC. However every time I tried this, crash after about 2 min. and an error message. At this point I'm cursing Steve Jobs' very existence.
After searching countless sites for a lead on whether I've set up the network properly or not, turns out that Mac OSX is only supposed to be able to READ NTFS, and not write to it. So OK - I'll use my firewire portable hard drive, and copy the songs over that way. But of course, that means reformatting the portable drive as FAT32 first.
After finally copying everything to the portable drive, deleting everything from iTunes and basically starting over, I still have dupes. Some of the file names with weird characters have problems, so the Mac decides to make a second copy of the file when importing to iTunes. At least this time I had learned my lesson, and click on Get Info every time to make sure the path is the same on both files.
I just don't know what to expect the Mac to do - it seems to do everything on its own with no user input. Even the screen resolution - when I restart the machine, it starts on a different resolution than I last left off with, and has no apparant way to set a screen resolution as default.
I have to say that today I much prefer Windows XP - having spent many years with it, I know how to keep it virus and spyware free, and I'm willing to live with managing the security problems, since the user experience is so much more consistent and customizable. Maybe I'll feel different after using more of the toold in OSX.
when I was in experiencing multiple levels of frustration with a strange BSOD in Windows XP.
The online poker game I was playing caused a crash, and the thing got a blue screen every time I rebooted. Took until about 3AM when I finished cursing Bill Gates's name in every language imaginable. Turns out I had to uninstall all the drivers for my USB devices and reinstall them one by one. Of course I had to uninstall my keyboard & mouse driver, and tear the house down trying to find the install CD's that I had so recently cleaned up and organized.
I don't think there's anything that can induce more rage than Microsoft operating systems.
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste
into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
So that equals a rate of 6.7 barrels per ton of turkey guts.
The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.
OK, 1,333 barrels of oil per day per plant.
In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil.
Or, 10.9 million barrels/day. That means 385 such plants, at a cost of only $7.7 billion to build.
So why haven't we done it already? - That's about 1/10 the cost of 1 years worth of the Iraq war.
I agree completely, those responsible for creating these "terminator seeds" are propogating the most horrible kind of evil. The whole premise is one of ensuring that farmers are unable to harvest their own seeds, and must rely on the "producer" to continue to farm their crops.
If these things get out into the wild, it will mean humanity's end, as nations will slowly lose the capability to feed themselves without a multi-national corporation's blessing.
Those responsible should die a slow and horrible death. Spreading this type of technology is an equal crime to genocide in my view.
I want something like IE's cookie notice, which tells you for whatever page you're on who tried to send you a cookie, and what the browswer did with that cookie.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a "you must accept cookies in order to see this site" message, and had to pull up a page's HTML source code just to try to find out what address the cookie was coming from.
Firefox is ahead of IE on so many levels, but is years behind on this one.
And the thing that blows the most about Windows Media Player, there's no way to turn off this security-destroying "feature". Every time I start WMP, even though I've turned off every setting, for Codecs, licences, etc. Zone Alarm still asks me if I want WMP to connect to the net every time the program starts up. By definition, WMP IS SPYWARE!
Why on earth wont they allow an advanced user to stop their media player from communicating with whomever the creators of the media files want you to talk to? I just want a dumb player that does what its told!
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, if you're a true skeptic, you'd recognize that the probability that scientists have underestimated the problem of global warming is just as likely an outcome as the probability that they have overestimated it.
"If you’re a user, you want to know that you can make a transaction online without your credit card information falling into the wrong hands..." Yes, because all "internet users" are supposed to use the internet for is to consume. Feed the beast. If you are a consumer, you can be controlled, and we don't have to worry about you actually doing anything about the predicament this world is in.
So? Americans spend more on EVERYTHING. That's just the nature of our country - we like to spend gobs of money. We spend more on cars. We spend more on houses. We spend more on videogames and DVDs and computers. That's not a negative result.
It would be considered a negative result when you look at the overall stats on mortality and life expectancy ...it would appear Americans have barely average health statistics among developed nations, despite the fact they spend so many multiples more than everyone else.
Hopefully this solves the problem of having to program games to deal with the various combinations of computers that are out there. EA has been driven crazy by this lately, and notice...no Madden for PC this year. Say what you will, but I'm talking about one of the most popular annual games. Hardcore fans preferred the PC version because of the ability to customize rosters and such. For the last few years, many new features have been directed only to the consoles, and omitted from the PC game. This year, EA has still seen fit to axe the PC version, because they can no longer control the user experience (e.g. many buyers will think the game, and therefore EA, is crap)
I don't understand why the record companies just think in terms of the "casual music fan" that buys CD's at Walmart. Many people are devotees of certain artists, and would gladly shell out money for alternative product if the music companies would just consider offering it. For example, take live concert recordings. A fan can generally download a copy from a likn on a fansite. The recording is likely crappily recorded using a wireless phone, yet the fan is willing to invest valuable time in downloading the recording, properly labelling each song and adding some homemade "cover art" to add to their collection - especially for a never-before heard or unique track. Instead, why not offer professionally recorded live recordings, properly labelled and tagged with art from the show, conveniently located on iTunes for a small fee a few days after the show? There's so many ways that the recording industry can compete with free...by offering something outside the single/album format they've been wedded to for the last 60 or so years.
So if Jobs believed it's a good thing for Apple to get rid of DRM, why doesn't he Just Do It (TM).
Many music labels sell unprotected MP3s for their artists already. Puretracks now sells songs in both WMA and MP3 format. Apple could EASILY do the same as a warning shot to the other music labels. It would also serve as a good test, which can show the labels that MP3's actually improve sales (as the product has more value to consumers than a restricted file).
I don't think Jobs wants to get rid of DRM at all - he's just trying to deflect the heat for DRM onto the labels.
We don't even know for sure that Iran is looking for the bomb. IAEA has not found evidence. However we don't care.
Our objective is for full control of the nuclear energy cycle. Anyone who wants to generate energy from nuclear sources has to play by our rules, purchase uranium through our markets, with our currency, and be 100% monitored by our agencies. We want the right to pull the plug on any nation at any time.
With the help of the Saudis, we've managed virtually that degree of control over oil. However, with countries like Venezuela and Iran having some power, it scares us just a bit. As oil runs out, other sources of energy will power our planet. We need to maintain control over those sources of energy. Because our economy doesn't actually make anything the world needs, the only way we can maintain the dominant position needed to keep up our lifestyle is through military force to ensure financial control.
You mean like this???
I agree - "consumer" has to be the most derogatory term that one can have for a fellow human being. I'd rather be called a c*@t any day than a consumer.
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed D.J.
Because the royalties that they do not pay
When they play all the songs off their ipods
Hang the bleseed D.J.
Because the royalties oh, they do not pay
Hang the D.J...
I think overall, top 10 format radio is down from prior years. as people decide to listen to the music on their iPods, or satellite radio, which offers a lot more variety than can be found in the Top 10. Also witness the populatiry of stations like "Jack FM" which play a varied playlist instead of the same 20-30 songs over and over again. People are listening to more music, and for the most part, better music than what can be found on the charts.
I've also noticed that the back catalog has become cheaper, you can get some decent albums from the last 10 years for the price of $9.99 (Canadian) or thorough 2 for $20 deals at most CD shops, which works out to about 8 and a half bucks U.S, cheaper even than used CD's sometimes. This has cannibalized from marginal releases - I'd rather wait until it goes in the bargain bin in a few months, and get the chance to become more familiar with other songs on the CD before buying.
Let's hope they don't add these to their list of blocked artist/song names .
The The
REM (how many words contain those three letters in that order?)
Or for that matter: M (Pop Muzik)
Any Solo artists with common names (like Michael Jackson - does that mean that nobody can share files with Michael in the name anymore?
Train, Jewel?
The list could go on. It's a good thing the labels don't protect their entire catalog, since I'm sure the entire English dictionary would be blocked out.
I had the fun experience of going to the Anthony Cools show in Vegas. My wife and the guy sitting beside me (also a hypnotist who was coming to watch) somehow convinced me to go along with it.
While I knew that the end result would probably be embarassing, I just told myself to go along with it. Turns out that I was the star of the show.
And yes, I f_cked a chair. But what happens in Vegas...
Long story short, there is no way a hypnotist could get you to do anything you don't want to do. You are still very much in control of your actions. It's the relaxation, coupled with the power of suggestion, that going along with the act is going to be better for you than saying no and potentially ruining a really incredible show.
With it being completely open source, how could this be implemented so that the DRM cannot be reverse-engineered to just bypass whatever checking mechanism is put in place?
If it's using some kind of connection to the file's creator or some kind of authorization agent, then I can't see it being reliable enough to make the DRM'd content worth buying - for example if it doesn't work while the computer is offline.
Now teachers would not be a group that has a pre-existing bias, would they?
From the study
"One study showed that children who played a violent game for less than 10 minutes and then took a mood assessment test rated themselves with aggressive traits and aggressive actions shortly after playing.
Teachers of 600 8th and 9th graders, aged 13 to 15, said children who spent more time playing violent video games were more hostile than other children and more likely to argue with authority figures and other students. "
It would have been interesting if they asked the kids the next day what actual violent acts they committed.
Never mind increasing automobile mileage standards, let's change the time to make us feel better about using twice as much energy as anyone else on the planet.
Flamebait?? This comment is insightful. Because of this action, how many more asshats out there will start up spy-shit tracker cookie uninstallable scumware companies in hopes of striking it rich?
Yes, and car manufacturers certainly do advertise the amount of horsepower available and the ability of their automobiles to reach illegal speeds.
Sounds like some of the anti-car activists may have a precedent to help them go after the automakers.
1 - I'm getting the original CD, which I can lend to friends, or listen to at my convenience.
2. I can quickly make a copy of the CD in iTunes, and play it on the iPod as a full album or in shuffle with the rest of my collection.
3. I don't have to rely on DRM'd files that are going to disappear at some point in the future. I can also use whatever bitrate mp3 I want. Nor do I have to worry about making a backup copy - the CD is my backup.
4. Most record stores have lowered their prices, especially for catalog albums. I can get generally get 2 good, fairly recent albums for $25 (Canadian). Plus, many good used CD's cost less than the $9.99 iTunes is selling them for. More value for the money.
The only drawback - hare-brained DRM schemes on some newer CD's that don't allow the files to be copied. So far, I've had no problems - if I choose not to install the crappy player software, iTunes still recognizes the files on the CD, although the track & artist data doesn't get automatically filled in.
After installing the drivers (at least Windows would have recognized the hardware with Plug & Pray), I could actually use the (admittedly beautiful and stylish) new wireless keyboard & mouse.
Next step was setting up the network. After fumbling around for an hour trying to find out where to input my SSID and WEP passphrase (it doesn't actually say SSID - it says something like Network) that finally worked. I'm on the net, set up my e-mail account, and that worked great. I then proceeded to access my Windows machine where I keep my multi-media files, and begin importing them to the Mac.
Despite an 802.11g network, the thing was slow - probably about 54 KB/sec insteasd of 54MB. Took about an hour to import the first 50 songs of my 6000 song library. Went to bed exepcting a library full of songs.
Wake up the next morning, the network connection must have gone down for a time, but indeed all my songs are in the library. But for some strange reason, about 100 were duped. I delete the dupes, not realizing that the dupes were actually pointing to my shared folder. So now 100 songs are missing from my main iTunes library. Had to click on every single song to see which ones were missing, then copy them back to the PC. However every time I tried this, crash after about 2 min. and an error message. At this point I'm cursing Steve Jobs' very existence.
After searching countless sites for a lead on whether I've set up the network properly or not, turns out that Mac OSX is only supposed to be able to READ NTFS, and not write to it. So OK - I'll use my firewire portable hard drive, and copy the songs over that way. But of course, that means reformatting the portable drive as FAT32 first.
After finally copying everything to the portable drive, deleting everything from iTunes and basically starting over, I still have dupes. Some of the file names with weird characters have problems, so the Mac decides to make a second copy of the file when importing to iTunes. At least this time I had learned my lesson, and click on Get Info every time to make sure the path is the same on both files.
I just don't know what to expect the Mac to do - it seems to do everything on its own with no user input. Even the screen resolution - when I restart the machine, it starts on a different resolution than I last left off with, and has no apparant way to set a screen resolution as default.
I have to say that today I much prefer Windows XP - having spent many years with it, I know how to keep it virus and spyware free, and I'm willing to live with managing the security problems, since the user experience is so much more consistent and customizable. Maybe I'll feel different after using more of the toold in OSX.
The online poker game I was playing caused a crash, and the thing got a blue screen every time I rebooted. Took until about 3AM when I finished cursing Bill Gates's name in every language imaginable. Turns out I had to uninstall all the drivers for my USB devices and reinstall them one by one. Of course I had to uninstall my keyboard & mouse driver, and tear the house down trying to find the install CD's that I had so recently cleaned up and organized.
I don't think there's anything that can induce more rage than Microsoft operating systems.
So that equals a rate of 6.7 barrels per ton of turkey guts.
OK, 1,333 barrels of oil per day per plant.
Or, 10.9 million barrels/day. That means 385 such plants, at a cost of only $7.7 billion to build. So why haven't we done it already? - That's about 1/10 the cost of 1 years worth of the Iraq war.I agree completely, those responsible for creating these "terminator seeds" are propogating the most horrible kind of evil. The whole premise is one of ensuring that farmers are unable to harvest their own seeds, and must rely on the "producer" to continue to farm their crops. If these things get out into the wild, it will mean humanity's end, as nations will slowly lose the capability to feed themselves without a multi-national corporation's blessing. Those responsible should die a slow and horrible death. Spreading this type of technology is an equal crime to genocide in my view.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a "you must accept cookies in order to see this site" message, and had to pull up a page's HTML source code just to try to find out what address the cookie was coming from.
Firefox is ahead of IE on so many levels, but is years behind on this one.
Why on earth wont they allow an advanced user to stop their media player from communicating with whomever the creators of the media files want you to talk to? I just want a dumb player that does what its told!