Good for the rest of the world, good for the powers that be in China, not so good for the average Chinese worker.
Is it really good for the rest of the world? China has been destroying so much domestic production in so many different nations that I have to say it is not. The U.S. may be the biggest target in China's economic sights, but it is by no means the only one.
No, more like a complete and utter lack of environmental concern. China has a serious pollution problem, and I wouldn't care about that except that, as the GP pointed out, that has effects beyond their borders. This is typical of rapidly industrializing nations, who are all about getting there and aren't too concerned about the consequences. Mexico is another example of a nation that desperately wants modern industry but doesn't give a rat's ass who it hurts in the process.
Enough of the irrelevancies already. The GP was right... America and China are completely different nations, with completely different traditions, and no, neither is perfect. We made a lot of mistakes a long the way, and yes what happened to the Native Americans and African slaves was tragic: but we, as a society, have accepted that what was done in those cases was wrong. We look back at those periods of our history with distaste, and we don't glorify what was done. Slavery is illegal here in the United States you know, or perhaps that little fact escaped you. Hell, we fought a destructive internecine war to put a stop to it: how many other slave-trading nations have done that? Our Native American friends still have their own territories, have won major concessions from our government, because we do bear some collective guilt for what was done to them. So if you're going to try and slam the U.S. and its citizens find something a little more consequential to do it with. Or are you trying to justify any negative behavior on China's part by saying, "hey, even the much-vaunted United States has done bad things, so it's okay if China does too"?
Furthermore, neither the United States nor China qualify as Empires in the classical sense. I really wish people who don't understand the term would just stop using it. America will never be an empire: we're too far past our prime for that and in any event we no longer have an industrial base capable of supporting the requisite war machine. Perhaps you don't realize how far the U.S. has cut its military since the Cold War days. And even if we still had that capability, the American people would never stand for it. We're pretty pissed off about Iraq, as it happens.
You know, a lot of people around the world are completely confused about that, because pretty much every other nation in history that has had such a relatively massive military has done so for the express purpose of acquiring territory. China now... well. I have no idea (and neither does anyone else) what ambitions China's leadership may have in that regard: they're about as secretive as one can get. Seems to me they have their hands full at home, but they are in the midst of a massive military buildup, are currently waging economic warfare on the entire planet and, well... you never know.
Look, the Romans had an Empire, a real one (join us or die.) So did the British. So did the Russians. So did a lot of other countries over the centuries. When America or China starts moving some heavy military equipment and lots of personnel around, annexing other countries by main strength, killing anyone who opposes them and forcibly making them part of some "North American Empire" or a "People's Empire of China" I'll agree with you. And no, I don't count the occupation of Iraq as being anything similar, in spite of any ambitions Mr. Bush might have. That was just stupid.
I wouldn't recommend one of these home theatres, though, til the kids get outta the 'break everything in sight' phase.
I'm not sure I'd recommend one of them, period. Remember Scott Adam's comment that "the Holodeck will be humanity's last major invention"? Well, one of those home theater setups is about as close as we can come to a Holodeck nowadays. I'm not sure that I would ever leave it, particularly if there were a plentiful supply of refrigerated beer behind one of those fifty-odd panels. In fact, that's the one thing that seems to be missing from most of these layouts.
Well, sure, that's just basic security. But this isn't really about the specific issue of telco complicity... it's about how our government jumped the track, and what we can do to put it back. If we tolerate such egregious abuses of government power and make excuses for it, they'll keep grabbing more until they have it all. As citizens, we need to push back, and push back hard, or matters will only get worse.
I get a hell of a lot of hits on my network from China-based IPs. Some dipstick kept trying to log into my FTP server as "ADMINISTRATOR" with random passwords, as if I would bother with an active remote account with that name. This was going on for weeks. Every morning, there he was in the log, over and over. I don't know what he expected to find. At least he had the decency to cut it out when I ping-flooded him. A couple of months ago it was another idiot from India, who kept trying "GUEST" over and over.
You don't understand the magnitude of the problem. I can tell that most people that think Americans should "Buy American" don't understand it either, although I can understand why. In any event, the situation is far worse than you may realize. The nearly thirty years I've spent in and out of numerous industries tells me there's Big Trouble in Little China: our industrial base is collapsing and the process is accelerating.
Here's the bigger picture. By the time your major retail outlets are flooded with cheap products from a nation like China, with no significant competitive products from domestic manufacturers, it means you've lost your supply and manufacturing chain. It's far too late to do much about it, since the very facilities that used to make everything from the clothes on your back to the computer on your desk are gone. Finished. Kaput. Worse yet, the machine tools that used to make those products locally have been sold off to China for pennies on the dollar. Consequently your country couldn't make that stuff any more even if it wanted to.
Remember the way Japan dominated (that's far too mild a word... decimated is a better one) our electronics industry in the seventies? They didn't try competing only by selling finished goods directly to consumers: Americans would still have had the choice to buy a local product, and it's possible the domestic producers might have survived. Nope. Japan went after key manufacturers of components, the folks that make transistors, capacitors, resistors, integrated circuits and all the thousands upon thousands of other parts used to build modern electronics. Japan used every dirty trick in the book, predatory pricing, dumping, outright patent theft, whatever they could do to kill off any American component maker. This remarkably successful effort made companies further down the supply chain dependent upon Japanese suppliers, because there was no where else to go to get what they needed. It worked too: when they were done, they owned the remaining consumer electronics firms here, and proceeded to finish them off entirely. Don't believe me? When was the last time you saw any piece of consumer electronics with Made in USA on it? I'll bet that anyone under the age of thirty has never seen one. In truth, the Japanese taught us a valuable lesson there, but we just ignored it when it came to China. More the fools us.
This approach is devastating to an industrial economy because it doesn't leave the consumer any ability to "vote with his dollar", leaves him totally dependent upon his politicians and industry leaders to defend him from such depredations. By the time he realizes that something is amiss, his country is screwed. So, Japan knocked off some crucial industries here in the U.S.: electronics of course, and a good chunk of heavy industry. Hell, almost twenty years ago I was doing some systems work out at United States Steel Corporation's Gary Works. Huge place, at the time one the few remaining major American producers of industrial steel. I was inside Concast No. 2... a giant machine several stories high that took raw metal in the top and produced a continuous slab of steel out the bottom. You'd think that United States Steel would be running American technology, wouldn't you? Nope. High up on the side of the Concast was a big metal plaque. "SUMITOMO" it pronounced, in raised lettering. I was told by the engineering manager that I was "pretty deep into Japanese territory."
The only thing that saved American industry from total devastation at the hands of the Japanese was the fact that Japan isn't that big. Oh, sure: Japan is an ally, technically, but they certainly did wage outright economic warfare on us. However, China is that big, and is hitting us on all fronts. You globalists and free-traders can ramble on about how it's really a good thing that America willingly gave up its own means of production, its own means of cr
Well, I don't know they work in the various spinoffs but in TOS, the Bridge doors were operated by a couple of pull-ropes. There was member of the stage crew standing behind the set walls, who would pull the ropes and whisk the doors open on cue. During the filming of one episode, the poor guy stationed back there actually dozed off (the set lighting made it very hot back there) and when Shatner tried to stride off the bridge into the turbolift he ran smack into the door and broke his nose.
Yeah. It's just about enough to make you want to throw up. Did you ever read Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids"? This is what happens when you have a race of beings (or, for that matter, a group of people) whose only purpose is to protect us from ourselves whether we want them to or not.
The girl I was living with at the time Star Trek: The Next Generation first came out was one of those people (an English major, as it happens) for whom Star Trek, indeed science-fiction in general, held no appeal. Science either, for that matter. Just didn't see the point ("What good is that Space Shuttle? Bring it down to Earth and spend that money on social programs.")
But the show was on at 5:00 PM every Saturday, and it didn't matter what social plans she might have made for the evening, I wasn't leaving until I'd received my Star Trek fix. I could have taped it, but that wasn't the point: this is my show and you will work around it. Now at first, this irritated her to no end, but as I watched each episode she would hang around in the background, feigning disinterest but with her curiosity obviously piqued. After a couple months of this, she sat down next to me and asked, "so... who's the guy with the greenish skin that talks so oddly?" I explained to her that Lt. Commander Data was actually an android, who was trying hard to understand us better so as to be more human. A couple of months more, and she would answer the phone with, "Sorry, Debby, we can't come over now... Star Trek's on. I'll call you later. Bye!" Turned her into a Trekkie just from secondhand exposure, and as a consequence she began to think about the relevance of science and technology to any modern culture, that in fact they make our lifestyle possible. She'd never really thought about that before. Most Americans don't, when you get right down to it: everything might as well be powered by magic.
So it is possible. Trekkiedom is not solely the province of male geeks and nerds, much as some of us might like to believe that. I remember reading in the book "The Making of Star Trek" (original series) that the female test audiences were just completely in love with Mr. Spock, and oddly enough resented Uhura ("Who does she think she is, anyway, doing man's work on the bridge and wearing an outfit like that!") Things were a bit different back in the sixties.
Damn flu medicine makes my head feel like its full of glue. I could have sworn the title was "Sun To Create Underground Japanese Detector". I had to go read the article to try and figure out what underground Japanese are, and why you would want to detect them.
He's protected by the Microsoft Mobile Infantry: a fiercely loyal force of commando La-Z-Boys that will fly into action at the least provocation to crush any threat.
No he's not. He's being perfectly realistic. Porno consumes a significant chunk of global bandwidth today, and that will only increase as transfer speeds increase. What it will mean is that now I can get my skin flicks streamed in widescreen hi-def, rather than a small 5x6" window on my desktop.
True... but the media outfits aren't as rational about it as you are. I mean, they've already shown that they're more than willing to throw all of us into the fire as long as they get what they want. Besides, I don't believe that the bang I get for my ISP buck should be limited to what is acceptable to a bunch of self-serving corporate entities, most of whom aren't even U.S. companies anyway! Incredible.
But you're right though. As the economy continues to worsen and Americans are being forced to work harder and harder to hold on to what they have, there's less and less leisuretime available. That means less time to watch their movies, and given that we now have a lot more potential distractions (cable/satellite TV, cellphones, Internet, email, etc. etc.) the movie people are going to have to work a lot harder for a piece of our action.
I've had NetFlix for six months or so, and while it's a good service and reasonably priced... I really don't use it as much as I thought I would. Which is fine by NetFlix: they don't care what you do so long as you pay your monthly fee. But I've had the last three discs out now for, what, a couple of weeks and have only watched on of them. I could send it back and get the next one in the queue, but why? I still have two more to go anyway. I don't even have cable TV, but still I manage to find things to do that don't involve sitting in front of a video screen. Huh. Maybe that's because I don't have cable TV.
The media companies (well, the motion picture companies) will do everything in their power to prevent it. All they have to do is have Congress or the FCC keep the telcos in power and we'll never see anything more than we have now. The very last thing they want is for it to be as quick to download movies as it currently is to download music.
Well, my understanding is that the RIAA wins the default judgments before informing the intended victims^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdefendants that they've already lost. Consequently, they have no chance to defend themselves. That basically seems to be how it works: they call you up, tell you that you've lost the case, and that if you give them money they won't finish suing your pants off. It's weaselly at best.
Well, I have AT&T's (yeah, I know... SBC, what can I say) CallVantage service and it works very well. Never had a problem with it, and it has a lot of nifty features (call logging, whitelists, LocateMe, voicemail as email attachments, etc.) Dunno about international calls, however, since I really don't make any. $25/month. And they're big enough that I don't think Verizon is likely to try any lawsuits in the near future.
and so artists are starting to realize that the artist should get a larger share of the profit
Artists are starting to realize they can have all the profits, that the studios just really aren't all that relevant anymore. For that matter, they're starting to realize the sale of their music can actually have profits, if they just don't contract out to a major studio. Radiohead's recent efforts in this regard have certainly pointed the way to self-publishing on the Web as a way to make serious money.
It is their crap and they can license it any way they want, but I stopped buying any big media music decades ago, once I realized what a bed of snakes those companies are. I guess in that sense I've been even more of a zealot than you have: the last disc I bought was in 1981 or thereabouts. Oh sure, I do buy used discs (and I don't want to get into another discussion about how I'm still indirectly supporting the media companies, etc. etc.) but none of my hard-earned cash goes directly into their pockets. Fortunately, my tastes don't run towards the latest-greatest hot-off-the-presses releases anyway. And besides, there's plenty of ways to buy music that don't involve supporting a particularly nasty oligopoly, especially nowadays. The Internet does make that really easy, so unless you absolutely must have music from specific big-label artists, there no excuse for giving those bloodsuckers another dime. Heck, peer-to-peer technology could disappear tomorrow, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference in how much money they get from me.
I happened to get interested in the mechanics of the music business and its "industry trade organization" a long time ago, and after performing my due diligence decided I didn't want anything to do with them. However, until the rise and fall of Napster, most people had never even heard of the RIAA, and really didn't make any distinctions between the big labels (I mean, nobody walks into a Best Buy looking for the latest Sony release.) Seems to me, though, that the RIAA's (ahem!) "anti-piracy" campaign has raised the music industry's profile, and made more people aware of the kind of people they're dealing with. Like you, I also do my part to raise awareness of these shenanigans. During the whole Sony copy protection fiasco, I got asked numerous times, "Hey... what's a 'rootkit'?" I would explain in some detail... that raised more than a few eyebrows, let me tell you. As in, "WTF? Hell, I think I might have bought one of those!" By just letting people know what's going on, I've probably cost Sony a few grand.
Put it this way: the people running the music business are a protected criminal class, one with delusions of grandeur and a strong sense of entitlement. After I figured that out, I decided that I could not, in good conscience, continue to do business with them. So I didn't, and I believe that I'm not the only one. Recent comments by studio execs that "the war on consumers was a mistake" indicates that they, too, are starting to understand that John Q. Public is wising up. It remains to be seen if they'll actually do anything about their drain-bamaged business practices. Perhaps they will... but either way we're still stuck we all the bad law they bought.
In some ways, I think they should have just kept quiet and took the heat, rather than showing their true colors to so many people. Most of us know, implicitly, that the world's major corporations have us on the express elevator to Hell. There's often not a lot we can do about that, so we'd rather just not know too much about it. However, forcing consumers to realize they've been bending over for a bunch of self-righteous, self-serving corporate thugs for the past half-century or so may not be the best long-term strategy.
Yes, but experienced programmers tend not to make obvious mistakes, because they've already made those mistakes at some point in the past. That's why they qualify as experienced. That also means that the seasoned types tend not to have obvious, glaring bugs but the more subtle, hard to find kind. On the other hand, these guys had a major systems failure... every forty minutes the car's processor would crash. That's not subtle, nor is rebooting the system at fixed intervals a valid "solution."
And the RIAA should know this. But they don't seem to care.
They do, and that's why I tell people like the original poster in this thread that nobody at that organization is about defending their copyrights from pirates ^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeer to peer users. So far as I know, the RIAA doesn't even own any copyright: the studios hold those. The RIAA is all about the projection of power, the projection of fear, and those large statutory damages fall right in line with the deterrent effect they're trying for. Doesn't really seem to be working, though.
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Good for the rest of the world, good for the powers that be in China, not so good for the average Chinese worker.
Is it really good for the rest of the world? China has been destroying so much domestic production in so many different nations that I have to say it is not. The U.S. may be the biggest target in China's economic sights, but it is by no means the only one.
Miles more people than any other country
No, more like a complete and utter lack of environmental concern. China has a serious pollution problem, and I wouldn't care about that except that, as the GP pointed out, that has effects beyond their borders. This is typical of rapidly industrializing nations, who are all about getting there and aren't too concerned about the consequences. Mexico is another example of a nation that desperately wants modern industry but doesn't give a rat's ass who it hurts in the process.
Enough of the irrelevancies already. The GP was right ... America and China are completely different nations, with completely different traditions, and no, neither is perfect. We made a lot of mistakes a long the way, and yes what happened to the Native Americans and African slaves was tragic: but we, as a society, have accepted that what was done in those cases was wrong. We look back at those periods of our history with distaste, and we don't glorify what was done. Slavery is illegal here in the United States you know, or perhaps that little fact escaped you. Hell, we fought a destructive internecine war to put a stop to it: how many other slave-trading nations have done that? Our Native American friends still have their own territories, have won major concessions from our government, because we do bear some collective guilt for what was done to them. So if you're going to try and slam the U.S. and its citizens find something a little more consequential to do it with. Or are you trying to justify any negative behavior on China's part by saying, "hey, even the much-vaunted United States has done bad things, so it's okay if China does too"?
... well. I have no idea (and neither does anyone else) what ambitions China's leadership may have in that regard: they're about as secretive as one can get. Seems to me they have their hands full at home, but they are in the midst of a massive military buildup, are currently waging economic warfare on the entire planet and, well ... you never know.
Furthermore, neither the United States nor China qualify as Empires in the classical sense. I really wish people who don't understand the term would just stop using it. America will never be an empire: we're too far past our prime for that and in any event we no longer have an industrial base capable of supporting the requisite war machine. Perhaps you don't realize how far the U.S. has cut its military since the Cold War days. And even if we still had that capability, the American people would never stand for it. We're pretty pissed off about Iraq, as it happens.
You know, a lot of people around the world are completely confused about that, because pretty much every other nation in history that has had such a relatively massive military has done so for the express purpose of acquiring territory. China now
Look, the Romans had an Empire, a real one (join us or die.) So did the British. So did the Russians. So did a lot of other countries over the centuries. When America or China starts moving some heavy military equipment and lots of personnel around, annexing other countries by main strength, killing anyone who opposes them and forcibly making them part of some "North American Empire" or a "People's Empire of China" I'll agree with you. And no, I don't count the occupation of Iraq as being anything similar, in spite of any ambitions Mr. Bush might have. That was just stupid.
I wouldn't recommend one of these home theatres, though, til the kids get outta the 'break everything in sight' phase.
I'm not sure I'd recommend one of them, period. Remember Scott Adam's comment that "the Holodeck will be humanity's last major invention"? Well, one of those home theater setups is about as close as we can come to a Holodeck nowadays. I'm not sure that I would ever leave it, particularly if there were a plentiful supply of refrigerated beer behind one of those fifty-odd panels. In fact, that's the one thing that seems to be missing from most of these layouts.
why not just expect it to be listened to?
... it's about how our government jumped the track, and what we can do to put it back. If we tolerate such egregious abuses of government power and make excuses for it, they'll keep grabbing more until they have it all. As citizens, we need to push back, and push back hard, or matters will only get worse.
Well, sure, that's just basic security. But this isn't really about the specific issue of telco complicity
I get a hell of a lot of hits on my network from China-based IPs. Some dipstick kept trying to log into my FTP server as "ADMINISTRATOR" with random passwords, as if I would bother with an active remote account with that name. This was going on for weeks. Every morning, there he was in the log, over and over. I don't know what he expected to find. At least he had the decency to cut it out when I ping-flooded him. A couple of months ago it was another idiot from India, who kept trying "GUEST" over and over.
You don't understand the magnitude of the problem. I can tell that most people that think Americans should "Buy American" don't understand it either, although I can understand why. In any event, the situation is far worse than you may realize. The nearly thirty years I've spent in and out of numerous industries tells me there's Big Trouble in Little China: our industrial base is collapsing and the process is accelerating.
... decimated is a better one) our electronics industry in the seventies? They didn't try competing only by selling finished goods directly to consumers: Americans would still have had the choice to buy a local product, and it's possible the domestic producers might have survived. Nope. Japan went after key manufacturers of components, the folks that make transistors, capacitors, resistors, integrated circuits and all the thousands upon thousands of other parts used to build modern electronics. Japan used every dirty trick in the book, predatory pricing, dumping, outright patent theft, whatever they could do to kill off any American component maker. This remarkably successful effort made companies further down the supply chain dependent upon Japanese suppliers, because there was no where else to go to get what they needed. It worked too: when they were done, they owned the remaining consumer electronics firms here, and proceeded to finish them off entirely. Don't believe me? When was the last time you saw any piece of consumer electronics with Made in USA on it? I'll bet that anyone under the age of thirty has never seen one. In truth, the Japanese taught us a valuable lesson there, but we just ignored it when it came to China. More the fools us.
... a giant machine several stories high that took raw metal in the top and produced a continuous slab of steel out the bottom. You'd think that United States Steel would be running American technology, wouldn't you? Nope. High up on the side of the Concast was a big metal plaque. "SUMITOMO" it pronounced, in raised lettering. I was told by the engineering manager that I was "pretty deep into Japanese territory."
Here's the bigger picture. By the time your major retail outlets are flooded with cheap products from a nation like China, with no significant competitive products from domestic manufacturers, it means you've lost your supply and manufacturing chain. It's far too late to do much about it, since the very facilities that used to make everything from the clothes on your back to the computer on your desk are gone. Finished. Kaput. Worse yet, the machine tools that used to make those products locally have been sold off to China for pennies on the dollar. Consequently your country couldn't make that stuff any more even if it wanted to.
Remember the way Japan dominated (that's far too mild a word
This approach is devastating to an industrial economy because it doesn't leave the consumer any ability to "vote with his dollar", leaves him totally dependent upon his politicians and industry leaders to defend him from such depredations. By the time he realizes that something is amiss, his country is screwed. So, Japan knocked off some crucial industries here in the U.S.: electronics of course, and a good chunk of heavy industry. Hell, almost twenty years ago I was doing some systems work out at United States Steel Corporation's Gary Works. Huge place, at the time one the few remaining major American producers of industrial steel. I was inside Concast No. 2
The only thing that saved American industry from total devastation at the hands of the Japanese was the fact that Japan isn't that big. Oh, sure: Japan is an ally, technically, but they certainly did wage outright economic warfare on us. However, China is that big, and is hitting us on all fronts. You globalists and free-traders can ramble on about how it's really a good thing that America willingly gave up its own means of production, its own means of cr
Well, I don't know they work in the various spinoffs but in TOS, the Bridge doors were operated by a couple of pull-ropes. There was member of the stage crew standing behind the set walls, who would pull the ropes and whisk the doors open on cue. During the filming of one episode, the poor guy stationed back there actually dozed off (the set lighting made it very hot back there) and when Shatner tried to stride off the bridge into the turbolift he ran smack into the door and broke his nose.
Yeah. It's just about enough to make you want to throw up. Did you ever read Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids"? This is what happens when you have a race of beings (or, for that matter, a group of people) whose only purpose is to protect us from ourselves whether we want them to or not.
how long rope bridge could be constructed using rope made from carbon nanotubes?
I think they call that a "space elevator".
The girl I was living with at the time Star Trek: The Next Generation first came out was one of those people (an English major, as it happens) for whom Star Trek, indeed science-fiction in general, held no appeal. Science either, for that matter. Just didn't see the point ("What good is that Space Shuttle? Bring it down to Earth and spend that money on social programs.")
... who's the guy with the greenish skin that talks so oddly?" I explained to her that Lt. Commander Data was actually an android, who was trying hard to understand us better so as to be more human. A couple of months more, and she would answer the phone with, "Sorry, Debby, we can't come over now ... Star Trek's on. I'll call you later. Bye!" Turned her into a Trekkie just from secondhand exposure, and as a consequence she began to think about the relevance of science and technology to any modern culture, that in fact they make our lifestyle possible. She'd never really thought about that before. Most Americans don't, when you get right down to it: everything might as well be powered by magic.
But the show was on at 5:00 PM every Saturday, and it didn't matter what social plans she might have made for the evening, I wasn't leaving until I'd received my Star Trek fix. I could have taped it, but that wasn't the point: this is my show and you will work around it. Now at first, this irritated her to no end, but as I watched each episode she would hang around in the background, feigning disinterest but with her curiosity obviously piqued. After a couple months of this, she sat down next to me and asked, "so
So it is possible. Trekkiedom is not solely the province of male geeks and nerds, much as some of us might like to believe that. I remember reading in the book "The Making of Star Trek" (original series) that the female test audiences were just completely in love with Mr. Spock, and oddly enough resented Uhura ("Who does she think she is, anyway, doing man's work on the bridge and wearing an outfit like that!") Things were a bit different back in the sixties.
I guess thats because kids can only hold a thought for 40 seconds. BEEEEEUUUUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZWHOOOMMP
Yes, and they spend about 38 of those seconds thinking about sex, which doesn't leave much time for communication.
"Here, Icxtuatl, hold this."
... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" {fwap!}
"Ok. Say, looks like you're building a bridge or som
Don't even bother replying to those cretins. Slashdot needs a semantic analyzer to weed out the obvious gibberish.
Damn flu medicine makes my head feel like its full of glue. I could have sworn the title was "Sun To Create Underground Japanese Detector". I had to go read the article to try and figure out what underground Japanese are, and why you would want to detect them.
He's protected by the Microsoft Mobile Infantry: a fiercely loyal force of commando La-Z-Boys that will fly into action at the least provocation to crush any threat.
No he's not. He's being perfectly realistic. Porno consumes a significant chunk of global bandwidth today, and that will only increase as transfer speeds increase. What it will mean is that now I can get my skin flicks streamed in widescreen hi-def, rather than a small 5x6" window on my desktop.
I don't have a problem with that.
True ... but the media outfits aren't as rational about it as you are. I mean, they've already shown that they're more than willing to throw all of us into the fire as long as they get what they want. Besides, I don't believe that the bang I get for my ISP buck should be limited to what is acceptable to a bunch of self-serving corporate entities, most of whom aren't even U.S. companies anyway! Incredible.
... I really don't use it as much as I thought I would. Which is fine by NetFlix: they don't care what you do so long as you pay your monthly fee. But I've had the last three discs out now for, what, a couple of weeks and have only watched on of them. I could send it back and get the next one in the queue, but why? I still have two more to go anyway. I don't even have cable TV, but still I manage to find things to do that don't involve sitting in front of a video screen. Huh. Maybe that's because I don't have cable TV.
But you're right though. As the economy continues to worsen and Americans are being forced to work harder and harder to hold on to what they have, there's less and less leisuretime available. That means less time to watch their movies, and given that we now have a lot more potential distractions (cable/satellite TV, cellphones, Internet, email, etc. etc.) the movie people are going to have to work a lot harder for a piece of our action.
I've had NetFlix for six months or so, and while it's a good service and reasonably priced
The media companies (well, the motion picture companies) will do everything in their power to prevent it. All they have to do is have Congress or the FCC keep the telcos in power and we'll never see anything more than we have now. The very last thing they want is for it to be as quick to download movies as it currently is to download music.
Well, my understanding is that the RIAA wins the default judgments before informing the intended victims^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdefendants that they've already lost. Consequently, they have no chance to defend themselves. That basically seems to be how it works: they call you up, tell you that you've lost the case, and that if you give them money they won't finish suing your pants off. It's weaselly at best.
Well, I have AT&T's (yeah, I know ... SBC, what can I say) CallVantage service and it works very well. Never had a problem with it, and it has a lot of nifty features (call logging, whitelists, LocateMe, voicemail as email attachments, etc.) Dunno about international calls, however, since I really don't make any. $25/month. And they're big enough that I don't think Verizon is likely to try any lawsuits in the near future.
and so artists are starting to realize that the artist should get a larger share of the profit
Artists are starting to realize they can have all the profits, that the studios just really aren't all that relevant anymore. For that matter, they're starting to realize the sale of their music can actually have profits, if they just don't contract out to a major studio. Radiohead's recent efforts in this regard have certainly pointed the way to self-publishing on the Web as a way to make serious money.
It is their crap and they can license it any way they want, but I stopped buying any big media music decades ago, once I realized what a bed of snakes those companies are. I guess in that sense I've been even more of a zealot than you have: the last disc I bought was in 1981 or thereabouts. Oh sure, I do buy used discs (and I don't want to get into another discussion about how I'm still indirectly supporting the media companies, etc. etc.) but none of my hard-earned cash goes directly into their pockets. Fortunately, my tastes don't run towards the latest-greatest hot-off-the-presses releases anyway. And besides, there's plenty of ways to buy music that don't involve supporting a particularly nasty oligopoly, especially nowadays. The Internet does make that really easy, so unless you absolutely must have music from specific big-label artists, there no excuse for giving those bloodsuckers another dime. Heck, peer-to-peer technology could disappear tomorrow, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference in how much money they get from me.
... what's a 'rootkit'?" I would explain in some detail ... that raised more than a few eyebrows, let me tell you. As in, "WTF? Hell, I think I might have bought one of those!" By just letting people know what's going on, I've probably cost Sony a few grand.
... but either way we're still stuck we all the bad law they bought.
I happened to get interested in the mechanics of the music business and its "industry trade organization" a long time ago, and after performing my due diligence decided I didn't want anything to do with them. However, until the rise and fall of Napster, most people had never even heard of the RIAA, and really didn't make any distinctions between the big labels (I mean, nobody walks into a Best Buy looking for the latest Sony release.) Seems to me, though, that the RIAA's (ahem!) "anti-piracy" campaign has raised the music industry's profile, and made more people aware of the kind of people they're dealing with. Like you, I also do my part to raise awareness of these shenanigans. During the whole Sony copy protection fiasco, I got asked numerous times, "Hey
Put it this way: the people running the music business are a protected criminal class, one with delusions of grandeur and a strong sense of entitlement. After I figured that out, I decided that I could not, in good conscience, continue to do business with them. So I didn't, and I believe that I'm not the only one. Recent comments by studio execs that "the war on consumers was a mistake" indicates that they, too, are starting to understand that John Q. Public is wising up. It remains to be seen if they'll actually do anything about their drain-bamaged business practices. Perhaps they will
In some ways, I think they should have just kept quiet and took the heat, rather than showing their true colors to so many people. Most of us know, implicitly, that the world's major corporations have us on the express elevator to Hell. There's often not a lot we can do about that, so we'd rather just not know too much about it. However, forcing consumers to realize they've been bending over for a bunch of self-righteous, self-serving corporate thugs for the past half-century or so may not be the best long-term strategy.
Yes, but experienced programmers tend not to make obvious mistakes, because they've already made those mistakes at some point in the past. That's why they qualify as experienced. That also means that the seasoned types tend not to have obvious, glaring bugs but the more subtle, hard to find kind. On the other hand, these guys had a major systems failure ... every forty minutes the car's processor would crash. That's not subtle, nor is rebooting the system at fixed intervals a valid "solution."
And the RIAA should know this. But they don't seem to care.
They do, and that's why I tell people like the original poster in this thread that nobody at that organization is about defending their copyrights from pirates ^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeer to peer users. So far as I know, the RIAA doesn't even own any copyright: the studios hold those. The RIAA is all about the projection of power, the projection of fear, and those large statutory damages fall right in line with the deterrent effect they're trying for. Doesn't really seem to be working, though.