What the hell do you expect to happen when you let these companies conglomerate all this power without so much as a "Remember Ma Bell"? Of course they're going to screw us over, they're corporations. If it was legal and made them money they would feed kitten entrails to school-children.
Too true! But you're addressing an audience that would love to get in on that entrail business before the stock splits.
...than copyright infringement, imagine what kind of press we'd have. The investigative effort taken to write the USA Today piece isn't great; yet it's many times that expended on government malfeasance or white collar crime, together the most expensive forms of lawlessness in America.
We might well ask why USA Today has suddenly and inexplicably taken on the mantle of moral sleuth (rather than its usual guise: dutiful stenographer), and the answer isn't hard to see. The lessons of Watergate--battered stock price for the Washington Post, hatred from half or more of the readership--have been well learned. Today's press finds it easier to rouse itself against the petty violations of the man-on-the-street than the grander corruption in our citadels of power. How brave.
"A survey of US and UK music buyers reveals that although 25 per cent of people admit to downloading music from file-sharing services, only seven per cent of iPod owners do so. Proving that iPod users are either scrupulously honest or more paranoid they'll get sued by RIAA than owners of lesser music players."
If you poll drug dealers about how they make a living, you're also likely to "prove" that a majority of them don't sell drugs. Similarly, you might poll politicians on taking bribes from lobbyists and discover that corruption is defunct in Washington--nope, nada, never see any of it. Funny how that works, isn't it?
There's an ingenuousness in the top poster's desire to believe that the silly poll data proves something. It's as banal as Balmer's assertion that iPods are piracy pods.
...the rich and powerful were the only ones allowed to speak in most American fora. For the proles, the letters page of the newspaper was considered enough.
While the essential domains still remain under lock and key (e.g., Congress, the courts, patent reexaminations), the decline in newspaper readership as people move to the Net has--possibly briefly--democratized speech in the world's "greatest democracy."
But that still doesn't mean you get to say boo about M$ patents. That's the cost of freedom.;-)
I mean, what's next? Opening a mis-formed text file with Notepad gives an attacker root access?
What's ahead is even worse, I'm afraid.
Removing the shrinkwrap from the Windows Vista box will dangerously elevate levels of static electricity, which in turn will cause your hair to stand up, thus scaring your dog who will reply by beginning to hump your leg. This will excite ions whose interstitial harmonic resonances will cause all your passwords to be mailed to a Czech porn site that, not coincidentally, will use them as a cipher to decode the current US nuclear launch codes. The Czech porn site is a sideline for a major producer at Fox News who lost his penis attempting congress with a food processor, and, understandably, blames liberalism. He'll use his influence with a Pentagon bigwig known to favor military strategies for expediting the Rapture, and together they'll blackmail a meth addict manning a missile silo in North Dakota to go all Strangelove on Iran. That'll start World War III, which will be over before you can finish installing Vista.
There isn't even the slightest irony in the US government ignoring social priorities in favor of supplying better TVs. TV is the lever in fifty years of social control, and nobody in power wants his hand pried lose.
The analog-to-digital crisis--nothing that requires emergency expenditures of billions is not a crisis--points up TV's supremacy in American life. Those screens dare not go blank, even for a moment. It is from TV that Americans take proper instruction in the backstabbing rituals of the I Got Mine society ("reality TV"), learn to fear the system's guardians (cops and courtroom dramas), routinely covet what they can't afford (advertising) and get hallucinatory reassurance from square-jawed automatons ("news"). For the dwindling few who still watch such things, it's also where the marionette-in-chief periodically appears on glistening guide wires to rattle off his sermons.
If Congress didn't help lift the declining middle and growing Wal-Mart classes into the digital age, there'd be trouble. You can't run a nation into debt servitude, steal its liberties, mire it in futile (and feudal) distant wars, corrode its health and environment, leave it to drown in natural disasters, and force it to work longer hours all while presiding over historical levels of official corruption if you also hide the electronic teat. Baby, as every momma knows, wants milk.
Cooper is a gun for hire. On his blog, he disgracefully smears his own Nation colleagues--the better to make it clear that if there's a buck to be turned somewhere, even if it's at Pajamas Media, he'll do it. That's known, politely, as having no principles. Reading him gas on about how he needs a low six-figure salary to be a tribune of the people, I do believe he's finally found the right trough.
If your definition includes deranged lectures from the very neo-cons who brought us Iraq and can't wait to bog down US National Guardsmen in the next hellhole of their making, then, sure, Pajamas Media is a "serious political blog."
Social network blogs are killing internet content.... Blogs should not be used for trivial diaries, and that I fear is what the AOL users will use them for.
You're 100% right: we need a lot more hot chicks mashing up their boobies for webcams.
We're also short on opinionated guys posting iTunes playlists of every twee indy song they've ever downloaded. And while that's a whole kind of satisfaction by itself, I'm always looking for the next genius who posts links to definitive 200-word AP news stories while rehearsing a few clichés he learned on Fox News. I just groove on the insight, you know?
When Microsoft rushes something out the door (in this case, the XBox 360), there will be problems which inevitably show up. In any case, you have a warranty on it, and should Microsoft ever acknowledge that there is anything wrong with the game consoles, you can get a full repair/replacement:-)
+5 Funny!
No sympathy here for gypped 360 owners. Are you guys on crack? If the endless problems with MS OSes didn't teach you anything, maybe the bad drives in original Xboxes should have. Welcome to the Microsoft standard of quality: monopoly values for monopoly victims.
You've been had, boys. And not only by Microsoft: also by a gaming industry press that fed your fanboy desires with lots of talk about "being first" before Sony, turning you into little marketing droids for Microsoft, which then bit you in the ass.
There is nothing in the Apple universe to replace MS Office at the moment for Joe Average -- NeoOffice/J (OpenOffice for the Mac) works fine for me, but most Apple users I know gag on it not being completely aquified.
That's a contradiction in terms. Joe Average doesn't care about anything being aquified; that's why he's on a Wintel box.
You are talking instead about Joe Delicate, an aesthete too prissy to touch OOo or NeoOffice/J without aquification. In fact, OOo is a perfectly fine platform on OS X, with or without X11, as anyone who actually writes on it quickly discovers--as you appear to have done. It's also free and not Microsoft, two considerable advantages.
If some Mac users need a blue scrollbar before they'll use a word processor, so be it. Microsoft is happy to take their money.;-)
That is why TV is portrayed as the best way to spend any extra time you may have, so as to not even think about reading.
And not only TV: video games, too. Not that I'm immune to their siren call or anything (he says, eyeing the Xbox controller).
Over the past half century, America has become intellectually incurious. Her once-strong publishing industry is in decline, and her newspapers (even in crudely dumbed-down form) lose 3% of their readership annually. It's no secret why. The visual is easier; and easier is what a complacent people have come to demand.
Literacy itself isn't a defense against fascism--the Germans were and are great readers--but the absence thereof is an invitation to tricksters and fabulists. And just look at who is leading America: a man who brags about never having finished a book, while sending his agents to harass those who do.
Yes. God forbid a politician think for him or her self, instead of doing what they are told.
It's politicians like Lieberman (not that I'm a big fan) and McCain who stand up for what they believe in *despite* party affiliation that keeps me from losing respect for the political process entirely.
I'm all for pols thinking for themselves, including Mr. Lieberman. If only he would! Throughout his predictable and mind-numbing career, he has taken his cues from two brain trusts: the defense industry and the American puritan tradition. That's obedience, and it's admirable in a dog. But it isn't thinking.
Now, let's get our terms straight. "Declining middle class" isn't a secret code for communism, as you seem to think. The phrase means the economy doesn't create enough good jobs to move people up from the working class. It also means that members of the present middle class move downward as professional jobs are outsourced or businesses fail, with the result that these displaced workers have to take lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs.
Nobody's "forcing" anyone into the middle class. Just the opposite--people are trying hard as hell to get into it! And failing. This is a national problem that we have to fix. As our middle class dissolves, we can tell from history what will happen: higher prices because of declining consumption, slowdowns in markets, rising social ills like crime and drug use, and the weakening of our industries as other nations move to capitilize on our failures.
Don't take it from a left-winger, either. Ronald Reagan's former assistant treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts will tell you as much. You should read the conservative Roberts; even professors can learn new tricks! Writing in March of this year in his Creators Syndicate column, Roberts observed:
The US has lost its ability to create middle class jobs or for that matter any jobs. During the last four years the US has experienced a net loss of 760,000 private sector jobs (January 2001 - January 2005). Think what this means for graduating classes and people coming of age to enter the work force.
If you agreed with my earlier post up to the last sentence, then you, too, think this hacking story is meant to distract us from our real problems. Let's get the nation focused on what really matters--we've got much bigger fish to fry than Chinese hackers!
Of course this is propaganda. Stories of this nature aren't released so that the citizenry can be "informed" or the Guinness Book editors kept up to date.
The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China is deep, complicated and paradoxical. In cursory summary: the two nations are economic and military rivals with ties as trading partners so strong as to forge huge interdependencies. China's booming economy is rapidly consuming oil that the US wants, but it is also the crucial lifeline to US overconsumption. Chinese purchases of US debt have made available the cheap credit that fueled the fading housing boom and credit card-spending sprees, which in turn assures the US can buy the products on Wal-Mart shelves supplied by Shanghai factories. In short, China is now completely essential to the "way of life" that Vice President Dick Cheney has declared "non-negotiable."
Against this lovey-dovey interconnectedness, we see US elites playing upon the nativist fears of ordinary citizens. Big bad China--or so Time magazine breathlessly reports--is coming to hack us! Why, imagine that: great powers engaged in espionage! Whenever elites inject fear about other nations into the timid veins of Time magazine readers, it's important to ask why. One reason is that the cozy relationship between US and Chinese authorities must not be allowed to take the post-911 population off its expectation of a permanent war footing. If your economy is built on war, you need to stoke the home fires every so often--especially to divert attention from real crises (criminal investigations of the White House, declining middle class, slowing housing market, lost war, post-holiday layoffs around the corner, etc).
Once you've learned how to program (in C, Fortran, or LOGO for that matter), you can start thinking about user-interface issues, program design issues, efficiency of algorithms, etc.
This is a big reason why so much software is clunky and nonintuitive. It's an engineering solution for programmers--not a user solution for humans.
I mean on your server--is iTunes enough to keep you reminded of what you have? Or do you possess a phenomenal memory, too?:-)
As digital collections grow, it seems an image-based UI might help. Maybe that's just me, but I grew up with album covers being an essential part of my music, and they were part of the way I organized my collection. Relating to a text database isn't as satisfying.
Slate is home to much that is too clever by half, often served up snottily. And this is no exception:
What we need is a system that will continue to pack the corporate coffers yet be fair to music lovers.
Who besides corporations wants to fill corporate coffers? It's self-evident in the decline of corporate music profits and the rise of iTMS sales that people actually want the opposite: they wish to make music buying decisions that put their own interests (i.e., low pricing, convenience, immediacy) ahead of those of the pigopolists.
Slate's author isn't concerned about "fairness to music lovers," anyway:
If a single climbed to $5, consumers couldn't complain that it costs too much, since they would be the ones driving up the price.
Really? But isn't it in fact all those who bought the song in advance of oneself who are driving up the price? Why consent to a system that has a random probability of increasing our per-song music costs? Because music that I don't want might be cheaper for someone who does want it? And I couldn't complain about such a fair arrangement?
We can test Slate's reasoning in a fairly recent example of group behavior and commodity pricing: the Iraq war. Architects of the misadventure anticipated paying for it by appropriating Iraq's oil (sometimes described as allowing Iraq to "repay" us for "liberating" them). However, not only has nothing of the sort come to pass. But oil prices have spiked instead. By Slate's logic, nobody can complain about prices at the pump because an overwhelming number of Americans supported the war--they bought that song and dance.
US law is extensively politicized, as you can learn from even a glance at our loud, interminable legislative battles over judicial appointments. They're not stacking the courts for fun, you know.
That's not to say the EFF is any more effective than claimed in the Register's sneering article. Instead, we need to be very skeptical about the nature of "effectiveness" when fighting large, monied corporations. The playing field is quite far from level, and many fights are over before they're begun. That doesn't mean you stop fighting; it means that winning against oligarchs is rare and takes time and hard, thankless work. So it's additionally shitty when one's putative allies put the boot in.
"Pigopolists," to use the Reg's own term, have endless millions for exerting undue influence over the law. Even children can understand that in US legal affairs, money talks. Why can't the Reg?
His line "I believe in spiracles!" to the tune of Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate is pretty def shit. So is the opening to his Beach Boys parody, which goes:
Well, since she left me flat,
I've been living in another dimension.
I've been feeling as alone
As an angle at a circle convention.
But if you had to sit through this...
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, yeah, get her out of my heart.
...while he gyrated in those 80s-style sunglasses, I think you'd have to go all Shaolin on his ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Because when you already have all the money and porn you can stand, the last pleasure is power, baby.
Just ask Larry Flynt. He mods here all the time.
Too true! But you're addressing an audience that would love to get in on that entrail business before the stock splits.
We might well ask why USA Today has suddenly and inexplicably taken on the mantle of moral sleuth (rather than its usual guise: dutiful stenographer), and the answer isn't hard to see. The lessons of Watergate--battered stock price for the Washington Post, hatred from half or more of the readership--have been well learned. Today's press finds it easier to rouse itself against the petty violations of the man-on-the-street than the grander corruption in our citadels of power. How brave.
Shhh... You're doing Apple Marketing's job for them--for free. ;-)
If you poll drug dealers about how they make a living, you're also likely to "prove" that a majority of them don't sell drugs. Similarly, you might poll politicians on taking bribes from lobbyists and discover that corruption is defunct in Washington--nope, nada, never see any of it. Funny how that works, isn't it?
There's an ingenuousness in the top poster's desire to believe that the silly poll data proves something. It's as banal as Balmer's assertion that iPods are piracy pods.
While the essential domains still remain under lock and key (e.g., Congress, the courts, patent reexaminations), the decline in newspaper readership as people move to the Net has--possibly briefly--democratized speech in the world's "greatest democracy."
But that still doesn't mean you get to say boo about M$ patents. That's the cost of freedom. ;-)
Very insightful comment. The level of silly fantasizing on rumor sites is strange indeed, and you've aptly nailed it.
What's ahead is even worse, I'm afraid.
Removing the shrinkwrap from the Windows Vista box will dangerously elevate levels of static electricity, which in turn will cause your hair to stand up, thus scaring your dog who will reply by beginning to hump your leg. This will excite ions whose interstitial harmonic resonances will cause all your passwords to be mailed to a Czech porn site that, not coincidentally, will use them as a cipher to decode the current US nuclear launch codes. The Czech porn site is a sideline for a major producer at Fox News who lost his penis attempting congress with a food processor, and, understandably, blames liberalism. He'll use his influence with a Pentagon bigwig known to favor military strategies for expediting the Rapture, and together they'll blackmail a meth addict manning a missile silo in North Dakota to go all Strangelove on Iran. That'll start World War III, which will be over before you can finish installing Vista.
So you see, monthly patches are sufficient.
The analog-to-digital crisis--nothing that requires emergency expenditures of billions is not a crisis--points up TV's supremacy in American life. Those screens dare not go blank, even for a moment. It is from TV that Americans take proper instruction in the backstabbing rituals of the I Got Mine society ("reality TV"), learn to fear the system's guardians (cops and courtroom dramas), routinely covet what they can't afford (advertising) and get hallucinatory reassurance from square-jawed automatons ("news"). For the dwindling few who still watch such things, it's also where the marionette-in-chief periodically appears on glistening guide wires to rattle off his sermons.
If Congress didn't help lift the declining middle and growing Wal-Mart classes into the digital age, there'd be trouble. You can't run a nation into debt servitude, steal its liberties, mire it in futile (and feudal) distant wars, corrode its health and environment, leave it to drown in natural disasters, and force it to work longer hours all while presiding over historical levels of official corruption if you also hide the electronic teat. Baby, as every momma knows, wants milk.
Cooper is a gun for hire. On his blog, he disgracefully smears his own Nation colleagues--the better to make it clear that if there's a buck to be turned somewhere, even if it's at Pajamas Media, he'll do it. That's known, politely, as having no principles. Reading him gas on about how he needs a low six-figure salary to be a tribune of the people, I do believe he's finally found the right trough.
If your definition includes deranged lectures from the very neo-cons who brought us Iraq and can't wait to bog down US National Guardsmen in the next hellhole of their making, then, sure, Pajamas Media is a "serious political blog."
You're 100% right: we need a lot more hot chicks mashing up their boobies for webcams.
We're also short on opinionated guys posting iTunes playlists of every twee indy song they've ever downloaded. And while that's a whole kind of satisfaction by itself, I'm always looking for the next genius who posts links to definitive 200-word AP news stories while rehearsing a few clichés he learned on Fox News. I just groove on the insight, you know?
Now, that's internet content, mf'er!
+5 Funny!
No sympathy here for gypped 360 owners. Are you guys on crack? If the endless problems with MS OSes didn't teach you anything, maybe the bad drives in original Xboxes should have. Welcome to the Microsoft standard of quality: monopoly values for monopoly victims.
You've been had, boys. And not only by Microsoft: also by a gaming industry press that fed your fanboy desires with lots of talk about "being first" before Sony, turning you into little marketing droids for Microsoft, which then bit you in the ass.
So tell us. How does it feel...scratchblaster?
That's a contradiction in terms. Joe Average doesn't care about anything being aquified; that's why he's on a Wintel box.
You are talking instead about Joe Delicate, an aesthete too prissy to touch OOo or NeoOffice/J without aquification. In fact, OOo is a perfectly fine platform on OS X, with or without X11, as anyone who actually writes on it quickly discovers--as you appear to have done. It's also free and not Microsoft, two considerable advantages.
If some Mac users need a blue scrollbar before they'll use a word processor, so be it. Microsoft is happy to take their money. ;-)
And not only TV: video games, too. Not that I'm immune to their siren call or anything (he says, eyeing the Xbox controller).
Over the past half century, America has become intellectually incurious. Her once-strong publishing industry is in decline, and her newspapers (even in crudely dumbed-down form) lose 3% of their readership annually. It's no secret why. The visual is easier; and easier is what a complacent people have come to demand.
Literacy itself isn't a defense against fascism--the Germans were and are great readers--but the absence thereof is an invitation to tricksters and fabulists. And just look at who is leading America: a man who brags about never having finished a book, while sending his agents to harass those who do.
I'm all for pols thinking for themselves, including Mr. Lieberman. If only he would! Throughout his predictable and mind-numbing career, he has taken his cues from two brain trusts: the defense industry and the American puritan tradition. That's obedience, and it's admirable in a dog. But it isn't thinking.
Dude's having this totally awesome dream about the Olsen twins.
Thanks, professor!
Now, let's get our terms straight. "Declining middle class" isn't a secret code for communism, as you seem to think. The phrase means the economy doesn't create enough good jobs to move people up from the working class. It also means that members of the present middle class move downward as professional jobs are outsourced or businesses fail, with the result that these displaced workers have to take lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs.
Nobody's "forcing" anyone into the middle class. Just the opposite--people are trying hard as hell to get into it! And failing. This is a national problem that we have to fix. As our middle class dissolves, we can tell from history what will happen: higher prices because of declining consumption, slowdowns in markets, rising social ills like crime and drug use, and the weakening of our industries as other nations move to capitilize on our failures.
Don't take it from a left-winger, either. Ronald Reagan's former assistant treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts will tell you as much. You should read the conservative Roberts; even professors can learn new tricks! Writing in March of this year in his Creators Syndicate column, Roberts observed:
(Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03012005.html)
If you agreed with my earlier post up to the last sentence, then you, too, think this hacking story is meant to distract us from our real problems. Let's get the nation focused on what really matters--we've got much bigger fish to fry than Chinese hackers!
The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China is deep, complicated and paradoxical. In cursory summary: the two nations are economic and military rivals with ties as trading partners so strong as to forge huge interdependencies. China's booming economy is rapidly consuming oil that the US wants, but it is also the crucial lifeline to US overconsumption. Chinese purchases of US debt have made available the cheap credit that fueled the fading housing boom and credit card-spending sprees, which in turn assures the US can buy the products on Wal-Mart shelves supplied by Shanghai factories. In short, China is now completely essential to the "way of life" that Vice President Dick Cheney has declared "non-negotiable."
Against this lovey-dovey interconnectedness, we see US elites playing upon the nativist fears of ordinary citizens. Big bad China--or so Time magazine breathlessly reports--is coming to hack us! Why, imagine that: great powers engaged in espionage! Whenever elites inject fear about other nations into the timid veins of Time magazine readers, it's important to ask why. One reason is that the cozy relationship between US and Chinese authorities must not be allowed to take the post-911 population off its expectation of a permanent war footing. If your economy is built on war, you need to stoke the home fires every so often--especially to divert attention from real crises (criminal investigations of the White House, declining middle class, slowing housing market, lost war, post-holiday layoffs around the corner, etc).
This is a big reason why so much software is clunky and nonintuitive. It's an engineering solution for programmers--not a user solution for humans.
As digital collections grow, it seems an image-based UI might help. Maybe that's just me, but I grew up with album covers being an essential part of my music, and they were part of the way I organized my collection. Relating to a text database isn't as satisfying.
What we need is a system that will continue to pack the corporate coffers yet be fair to music lovers.
Who besides corporations wants to fill corporate coffers? It's self-evident in the decline of corporate music profits and the rise of iTMS sales that people actually want the opposite: they wish to make music buying decisions that put their own interests (i.e., low pricing, convenience, immediacy) ahead of those of the pigopolists.
Slate's author isn't concerned about "fairness to music lovers," anyway:
If a single climbed to $5, consumers couldn't complain that it costs too much, since they would be the ones driving up the price.
Really? But isn't it in fact all those who bought the song in advance of oneself who are driving up the price? Why consent to a system that has a random probability of increasing our per-song music costs? Because music that I don't want might be cheaper for someone who does want it? And I couldn't complain about such a fair arrangement?
We can test Slate's reasoning in a fairly recent example of group behavior and commodity pricing: the Iraq war. Architects of the misadventure anticipated paying for it by appropriating Iraq's oil (sometimes described as allowing Iraq to "repay" us for "liberating" them). However, not only has nothing of the sort come to pass. But oil prices have spiked instead. By Slate's logic, nobody can complain about prices at the pump because an overwhelming number of Americans supported the war--they bought that song and dance.
Oddly enough, most people are complaining.
That's not to say the EFF is any more effective than claimed in the Register's sneering article. Instead, we need to be very skeptical about the nature of "effectiveness" when fighting large, monied corporations. The playing field is quite far from level, and many fights are over before they're begun. That doesn't mean you stop fighting; it means that winning against oligarchs is rare and takes time and hard, thankless work. So it's additionally shitty when one's putative allies put the boot in.
"Pigopolists," to use the Reg's own term, have endless millions for exerting undue influence over the law. Even children can understand that in US legal affairs, money talks. Why can't the Reg?
His line "I believe in spiracles!" to the tune of Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate is pretty def shit. So is the opening to his Beach Boys parody, which goes:
Well, since she left me flat,
I've been living in another dimension.
I've been feeling as alone
As an angle at a circle convention.
But if you had to sit through this...
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, help, help me, Rhombus.
Help me, Rhombus, yeah, get her out of my heart.
The job of a car thief is hard enough without also having to consult the Weather Channel for opportune times to strike. ;-)