It's kinda like Bush senior. I hated Bush senior. God I wanted him out of office. I thought his policies sucked, I thought he didn't give a damn about the american people, I thought his economic policy was hilariously incompetent. Thought he took too many vacations.
But today, I can look back on him and think, "Well yea, he wasn't the best...But I didn't fear for the country with him in charge." No I didn't agree with him, but I could see where he was coming from, and I could see that he was making decisions based on strong evidence. I may not have agreed with the decisions, but I could see how someone might agree with them.
There are two types of unwinnable arguments. In one, you're arguing with someone, and you end up having to agree to disagree. They believe what they believe, and it's not crazy, it's just not what you believe. Their analysis is rational, you both agree on all the facts, you just come to different conclusions based on the facts.
Then there are the people whose descisions are based on things besides rational thought. They add too much weight to facts that are incidental to the point, they make leaps of logic (faith?) that are unwarranted by the strength of their premises. They argue based on their personal beliefs and feelings rather than on the actual facts, and they misrepresent the facts to support their beliefs.
Having seen far too much of the latter in the last 10 years, I am heartened and refreshed when I come across the former.
I can't help but think that, as self publishing and self publicizing becomes more doable, that there is no way that the old model of the recording megacorps can continue to hold up. It's just not sustainable.
I've been thinking about the whole packaging/transport/etc issue for a while, because iTunes throws the whole deal into a clear perspective. As far as Sony and others are concerned, it costs the same to disburse 12 songs on a CD as it does to disburse them digitally. But obviously that can't be the case, therefore online music is overpriced.
Add into that the fact that the artists still aren't getting anything like their fare share of the profits, and you get a real good insight into how crooked the business really is. All these things, how much shipping, and breaking, and band publication costs, taken as fact by the artists, and supported by the available business records of the industry...Clearly they're cooking the books, at least in terms of online sales, and if there, then why not other places?
I don't see the RIAA lasting. I just don't see how they could. They can't monopolize distribution. Social networking sites make it very easy to self-publicize things like music. Convert venues can decide for themselves if the bands are worth hosting. What else is there? The CD market is on the way out, that's just inevitable. It's a dead-end format and they restrict it more all the time.
People always talk about the buggy whip manufacturers, but the difference is, some people felt bad when the buggy whip manufacturers went out of business.
Hey, remember that this guy is a fricking Republican. He doesn't need to posture...He's got nothing to lose if his party stays in power.
What he's doing is saying, "Hey! President Jackass! Things are going to get ugly around here if you don't start keeping us in the loop! This ain't the House, where they gotta depend on your ass for fundraising! Half of us aren't up for re-election until 2010! So tell us what's going on with this NSA crap, or we may just create us a little gridlock."
Specter is one of the last old school republicans in congress...I can remember when I thought he was a jackass rather than one of the only rational senators.
I'm sure glad they solved all the fricking important problems before they decided on going after streaming mp3s, because, really, when I think of all the things going wrong in the world today, streaming fricking mp3s are the absolute bottom of the list.
What I wouldn't give for someone in Congress to represent the people, instead of just screwing us constantly. I'm waiting for them to just ban listening to music altogether.
No. That's not a quote, that's a verbal blowjob, and straight out of the press release.
Come on, use your fricking brain. He uses the phrase "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" more than once in the so-called quote. I've been working with Redhat for a long time, and I've never heard anyone who knew their ass from a hole in the ground use the phrase "Enterprise Linux". You either say Redhat or Redhat Advanced Server depending on what you're actually using, or, if you don't know enough to even say that, you just say "Red Hat" or "Red Hat Linux". It's like saying "Microsoft Windows Server Product", pure marketdroid bullshit.
People who believe everything they read make my teeth hurt.
You mean TFPR. The eFfing Press Release. Sloppy journalism. That stuff should never just be released without someone at least getting a fricking quote from the FAA.
Hard to feel pain for a rapacious monopoly who sues 12 year olds and grandmothers.
I don't have any problem with buying music. I still buy CDs, even. But the instant some inane, pathetic copy protection pops up when I stick it into my computer, I go nuts. I'm too lazy to burn my junk to MP3. I just want to listen to it while I work, but this isn't allowed in RIAA world, because I might possibly allow other people to infringe on copyright with my legitmate copy.
Screw them. They cross the line all the time, from inflated prices, to screwing the artists, to taking away my fair use rights on something I had the stupidity to buy from them. I support legislation that would make it impossible for the corporations to hold copyrights on music that they didn't create, and I don't take "create" to mean "throw money at".
They don't even deserve to be part of the process anymore.
I deal with users all the time, and there is no WAY this'll work...There is no software ever written that can distinguish one blank slate from another.
The basic MPAA movie rating system is a joke. You never see anything with the highest "public-consumption" rating (NC-17).
Contrast that with ESRB...You see games rated M all the damn time. They've just flopped it in the other direction. M is the equivalent of NC-17, and AO is the equivalent of X, but you see parents buying their kids M rated games, who would collapse with heart failure if they found out their kid had an NC-17 movie in his posession.
Just stupid. People need to get over themselves, and use the damn ratings accurately. I'm tired of listening to parents wigging out because they took their 6 year old to an R movie that should have been damn NC-17, and I'm dead tired of granny buying her 9 year old grandson a fricking M rated game, and then losing it because of how violent it is. It's supposed to be violent, and if they were decent parents, they wouldn't let their kids have access to that stuff in the first place.
I'm security paranoid. I have a custom firewall on my router/gateway box, backed up with some significant auditing and security, and a hardware firewall between my windows box and my main firewall.
So I could give a damn about the crappy products they sell as software firewall solutions. I find them to be pretty lame, and they're always intrusive. If my Windows box gets hacked or trojan'd, I'll be able to tell that from the upstream audit logs.
Meh. I think you're forgetting that Home and Enterprise users will be buying different "flavors" of Vista.
There is no reason that you couldn't reverse your analogy...Be really restictive for home users, because enterprise users will have someone who is capable of opening the needed ports. Configuring a firewall is easy, if you have a baseline of technical knowledge.
I think the big reason why they left the restrictions low by default is not because they thought that enterprise users were too stupid to figure out how to change the settings, but because they thought home users were too stupid to change the settings. Think about it. Dad's Turbo Tax program won't e-file. Mom's "Sims II" won't autopatch. Juniors games won't play online. They'll be calling MS tech support every two days, and be mad as hell, forcing MS to "patch" the firewall down to somethign that won't piss off the average user.
Norton and even Zone alarm are often so restrictive about applications that users disable them before doing anything online, just to prevent the eternal badgering pop-ups.
I've got zone alarm on my laptop, and I find that I either disable my wireless, or I reboot into Linux to get away from it, and I far prefer it to norton.
All that being the case, I think it's a better idea to protect the users as much as possible from themselves, while not annoying them so much that they get ticked and disable the protection.
You miss the bigger point, which is that it's still not illegal to sell rated "R" movies to people under 18.
Games yes, movies, no. Hell, if you could find a place that sells NC-17 movies, you could buy those. Typical hypocrasy. Just love Oklahoma's progressiveness. OMG teh video games r destroying our youths!
The town where I currently live is in the heart of american Kaolin country, so almost all the houses here are also made of brick.
I imagine the housing situation would be even more skewed to brick, if it weren't that we are also in the middle of some of the largest pine plantations in the US. I can only imagine what it would be like if I lived in a rockier place, with good clay, slate, and granite deposits.
So while I "know of" houses that are made of other substances besides brick, I don't know of many houses around me that are a) non-brick and b) non-mobile.
Interesting nitpick, but I have to say that the hypothetical house with no doors or windows would almost certainly be built of something more substantial than vinyl and vapor barrier...Why else would you bother trying to remove all possible ingress and egress? Since I personally have never owned or worked on a house that didn't at least have a layer of wood UNDER the vinyl, I'll have to take your word for the "large portion of the housing market" bit.
My personal abode is, while not window and door-less, made of brick, and more traditional wooden siding, so if I chose to remove all windows and doors, using brick and wood, it would probably present something of a problem to your average thief, who typically doesn't come equipped with long ladders, sledgehammers, and chainsaws.
It's usually easier to pull out a window frame...I used to do contractor work, and a few minutes with a "saws-all", and you can pop the whole window assembly out. Doors can work the same way, but it's not uncommon to have four inch screws connecting your door fram to the house frame.
I don't know. I mean, if MS did bundle another browser, they could set that bundled browser to MSN.com, and reap all the same profits. It would almost have to be expected that they would. In which case, they're wasting money on IE.
The biggest problem with IE is that it is linked to the OS, which is why security exploits in IE are the biggest headache for microsoft. Hell, I love Apache. I view it as pretty secure. But there is no way in hell I'd pick up an OS where Apache was an inextricable part of the kernel. The very idea is absurd...Apache touches the internet, therefore, it is a security problem. End of story. IE touches the internet, therefore it is a security problem. Firefox, Opera, it doesn't matter. Burglars couldn't get into your house if you had no doors or windows.
I think Dvorak is 100% correct (first time for me)...If they used any other browser, they could lay half their security problems at it's feet. They could point the finger, and shake their heads, and talk about how secure their system is and how, if they built a browser, it would be completely secure and oh-so-functional. Instead they look awful, and their browser is a technological fossil.
My usual worry with that is, for the first few weeks after I change my password (And I favor long, complicated passwords without words), I type it slowly, and this raises the odds of someone shoulder-surfing me, but if I try and type it fast, I end up screwing up, and having to repeat, which increases the odds yet further.
Yes, you're quite right. I read "nanoscale" as "nanotube" when I read through it the first time, which shifted my gears mentally into the realm of nanotech rather than chemistry.
I can only plead lack of caffeine as an excuse, because I actually do understand the difference between the two, and was heartly embarassed when I re-read the article to get the quote to point out how utterly right I was...or not.
Am I the onyl one who used global warming as a WMD in that game? If you got yourself a dome, it didn't bother your bases at all, but the computer often wasn't smart enough to read it's impending doom in the rising waters.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Most of the more promising AIDs drugs work like this, so the challenge is to find a drug (or whatever) that will prevent infected cells from reacting with healthy cells.
It is interesting that they're doing it with nano-tech though. What are the odds on becoming Grey Goo? (Well, okay, none because it's not assemblers/disassemblers, but I haven't read anything that makes me real eager to snort a bunch of nano-tube structures either)
Who cares? They sue grannies who don't even own computers on a regular basis. If the court finds sufficient evidence, I don't care if the magic evidence fairy planted it there, I'd like to see them get the full penalty.
They've been awfully free wielding the legal sledgehammer...Time for them to reap the whirlwind.
It's much easier to debug console games, because the hardware is standard. PC game flaws almost always have to do with oddball hardware problems...Or they're content and balance upgrades for the sorts of games that don't often make it to console.
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It's kinda like Bush senior. I hated Bush senior. God I wanted him out of office. I thought his policies sucked, I thought he didn't give a damn about the american people, I thought his economic policy was hilariously incompetent. Thought he took too many vacations.
But today, I can look back on him and think, "Well yea, he wasn't the best...But I didn't fear for the country with him in charge." No I didn't agree with him, but I could see where he was coming from, and I could see that he was making decisions based on strong evidence. I may not have agreed with the decisions, but I could see how someone might agree with them.
There are two types of unwinnable arguments. In one, you're arguing with someone, and you end up having to agree to disagree. They believe what they believe, and it's not crazy, it's just not what you believe. Their analysis is rational, you both agree on all the facts, you just come to different conclusions based on the facts.
Then there are the people whose descisions are based on things besides rational thought. They add too much weight to facts that are incidental to the point, they make leaps of logic (faith?) that are unwarranted by the strength of their premises. They argue based on their personal beliefs and feelings rather than on the actual facts, and they misrepresent the facts to support their beliefs.
Having seen far too much of the latter in the last 10 years, I am heartened and refreshed when I come across the former.
Pretty sad.
I can't help but think that, as self publishing and self publicizing becomes more doable, that there is no way that the old model of the recording megacorps can continue to hold up. It's just not sustainable.
I've been thinking about the whole packaging/transport/etc issue for a while, because iTunes throws the whole deal into a clear perspective. As far as Sony and others are concerned, it costs the same to disburse 12 songs on a CD as it does to disburse them digitally. But obviously that can't be the case, therefore online music is overpriced.
Add into that the fact that the artists still aren't getting anything like their fare share of the profits, and you get a real good insight into how crooked the business really is. All these things, how much shipping, and breaking, and band publication costs, taken as fact by the artists, and supported by the available business records of the industry...Clearly they're cooking the books, at least in terms of online sales, and if there, then why not other places?
I don't see the RIAA lasting. I just don't see how they could. They can't monopolize distribution. Social networking sites make it very easy to self-publicize things like music. Convert venues can decide for themselves if the bands are worth hosting. What else is there? The CD market is on the way out, that's just inevitable. It's a dead-end format and they restrict it more all the time.
People always talk about the buggy whip manufacturers, but the difference is, some people felt bad when the buggy whip manufacturers went out of business.
Hey, remember that this guy is a fricking Republican. He doesn't need to posture...He's got nothing to lose if his party stays in power.
What he's doing is saying, "Hey! President Jackass! Things are going to get ugly around here if you don't start keeping us in the loop! This ain't the House, where they gotta depend on your ass for fundraising! Half of us aren't up for re-election until 2010! So tell us what's going on with this NSA crap, or we may just create us a little gridlock."
Specter is one of the last old school republicans in congress...I can remember when I thought he was a jackass rather than one of the only rational senators.
I'm sure glad they solved all the fricking important problems before they decided on going after streaming mp3s, because, really, when I think of all the things going wrong in the world today, streaming fricking mp3s are the absolute bottom of the list.
What I wouldn't give for someone in Congress to represent the people, instead of just screwing us constantly. I'm waiting for them to just ban listening to music altogether.
No. That's not a quote, that's a verbal blowjob, and straight out of the press release.
Come on, use your fricking brain. He uses the phrase "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" more than once in the so-called quote. I've been working with Redhat for a long time, and I've never heard anyone who knew their ass from a hole in the ground use the phrase "Enterprise Linux". You either say Redhat or Redhat Advanced Server depending on what you're actually using, or, if you don't know enough to even say that, you just say "Red Hat" or "Red Hat Linux". It's like saying "Microsoft Windows Server Product", pure marketdroid bullshit.
People who believe everything they read make my teeth hurt.
You mean TFPR. The eFfing Press Release. Sloppy journalism. That stuff should never just be released without someone at least getting a fricking quote from the FAA.
Hard to feel pain for a rapacious monopoly who sues 12 year olds and grandmothers.
I don't have any problem with buying music. I still buy CDs, even. But the instant some inane, pathetic copy protection pops up when I stick it into my computer, I go nuts. I'm too lazy to burn my junk to MP3. I just want to listen to it while I work, but this isn't allowed in RIAA world, because I might possibly allow other people to infringe on copyright with my legitmate copy.
Screw them. They cross the line all the time, from inflated prices, to screwing the artists, to taking away my fair use rights on something I had the stupidity to buy from them. I support legislation that would make it impossible for the corporations to hold copyrights on music that they didn't create, and I don't take "create" to mean "throw money at".
They don't even deserve to be part of the process anymore.
I deal with users all the time, and there is no WAY this'll work...There is no software ever written that can distinguish one blank slate from another.
The basic MPAA movie rating system is a joke. You never see anything with the highest "public-consumption" rating (NC-17).
Contrast that with ESRB...You see games rated M all the damn time. They've just flopped it in the other direction. M is the equivalent of NC-17, and AO is the equivalent of X, but you see parents buying their kids M rated games, who would collapse with heart failure if they found out their kid had an NC-17 movie in his posession.
Just stupid. People need to get over themselves, and use the damn ratings accurately. I'm tired of listening to parents wigging out because they took their 6 year old to an R movie that should have been damn NC-17, and I'm dead tired of granny buying her 9 year old grandson a fricking M rated game, and then losing it because of how violent it is. It's supposed to be violent, and if they were decent parents, they wouldn't let their kids have access to that stuff in the first place.
I'm security paranoid. I have a custom firewall on my router/gateway box, backed up with some significant auditing and security, and a hardware firewall between my windows box and my main firewall.
So I could give a damn about the crappy products they sell as software firewall solutions. I find them to be pretty lame, and they're always intrusive. If my Windows box gets hacked or trojan'd, I'll be able to tell that from the upstream audit logs.
Meh. I think you're forgetting that Home and Enterprise users will be buying different "flavors" of Vista.
There is no reason that you couldn't reverse your analogy...Be really restictive for home users, because enterprise users will have someone who is capable of opening the needed ports. Configuring a firewall is easy, if you have a baseline of technical knowledge.
I think the big reason why they left the restrictions low by default is not because they thought that enterprise users were too stupid to figure out how to change the settings, but because they thought home users were too stupid to change the settings. Think about it. Dad's Turbo Tax program won't e-file. Mom's "Sims II" won't autopatch. Juniors games won't play online. They'll be calling MS tech support every two days, and be mad as hell, forcing MS to "patch" the firewall down to somethign that won't piss off the average user.
Norton and even Zone alarm are often so restrictive about applications that users disable them before doing anything online, just to prevent the eternal badgering pop-ups.
I've got zone alarm on my laptop, and I find that I either disable my wireless, or I reboot into Linux to get away from it, and I far prefer it to norton.
All that being the case, I think it's a better idea to protect the users as much as possible from themselves, while not annoying them so much that they get ticked and disable the protection.
You miss the bigger point, which is that it's still not illegal to sell rated "R" movies to people under 18.
Games yes, movies, no. Hell, if you could find a place that sells NC-17 movies, you could buy those. Typical hypocrasy. Just love Oklahoma's progressiveness. OMG teh video games r destroying our youths!
Quite true. Mine's brick on cinderblock up to the second story, with drywall on the inside for that homey feel.
I always kinda wanted an all-brick/stone house, but the wife goes nuts as soon as she can't hammer stuff to the walls.
The town where I currently live is in the heart of american Kaolin country, so almost all the houses here are also made of brick.
I imagine the housing situation would be even more skewed to brick, if it weren't that we are also in the middle of some of the largest pine plantations in the US. I can only imagine what it would be like if I lived in a rockier place, with good clay, slate, and granite deposits.
So while I "know of" houses that are made of other substances besides brick, I don't know of many houses around me that are a) non-brick and b) non-mobile.
Interesting nitpick, but I have to say that the hypothetical house with no doors or windows would almost certainly be built of something more substantial than vinyl and vapor barrier...Why else would you bother trying to remove all possible ingress and egress? Since I personally have never owned or worked on a house that didn't at least have a layer of wood UNDER the vinyl, I'll have to take your word for the "large portion of the housing market" bit.
My personal abode is, while not window and door-less, made of brick, and more traditional wooden siding, so if I chose to remove all windows and doors, using brick and wood, it would probably present something of a problem to your average thief, who typically doesn't come equipped with long ladders, sledgehammers, and chainsaws.
It's usually easier to pull out a window frame...I used to do contractor work, and a few minutes with a "saws-all", and you can pop the whole window assembly out. Doors can work the same way, but it's not uncommon to have four inch screws connecting your door fram to the house frame.
I don't know. I mean, if MS did bundle another browser, they could set that bundled browser to MSN.com, and reap all the same profits. It would almost have to be expected that they would. In which case, they're wasting money on IE.
The biggest problem with IE is that it is linked to the OS, which is why security exploits in IE are the biggest headache for microsoft. Hell, I love Apache. I view it as pretty secure. But there is no way in hell I'd pick up an OS where Apache was an inextricable part of the kernel. The very idea is absurd...Apache touches the internet, therefore, it is a security problem. End of story. IE touches the internet, therefore it is a security problem. Firefox, Opera, it doesn't matter. Burglars couldn't get into your house if you had no doors or windows.
I think Dvorak is 100% correct (first time for me)...If they used any other browser, they could lay half their security problems at it's feet. They could point the finger, and shake their heads, and talk about how secure their system is and how, if they built a browser, it would be completely secure and oh-so-functional. Instead they look awful, and their browser is a technological fossil.
My usual worry with that is, for the first few weeks after I change my password (And I favor long, complicated passwords without words), I type it slowly, and this raises the odds of someone shoulder-surfing me, but if I try and type it fast, I end up screwing up, and having to repeat, which increases the odds yet further.
Yes, you're quite right. I read "nanoscale" as "nanotube" when I read through it the first time, which shifted my gears mentally into the realm of nanotech rather than chemistry.
:)
I can only plead lack of caffeine as an excuse, because I actually do understand the difference between the two, and was heartly embarassed when I re-read the article to get the quote to point out how utterly right I was...or not.
And no, I'm not a carnie.
Am I the onyl one who used global warming as a WMD in that game? If you got yourself a dome, it didn't bother your bases at all, but the computer often wasn't smart enough to read it's impending doom in the rising waters.
And you, sir, are a jackass. But I can become better informed, while civil discourse will forever elude you.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Most of the more promising AIDs drugs work like this, so the challenge is to find a drug (or whatever) that will prevent infected cells from reacting with healthy cells.
It is interesting that they're doing it with nano-tech though. What are the odds on becoming Grey Goo? (Well, okay, none because it's not assemblers/disassemblers, but I haven't read anything that makes me real eager to snort a bunch of nano-tube structures either)
Who cares? They sue grannies who don't even own computers on a regular basis. If the court finds sufficient evidence, I don't care if the magic evidence fairy planted it there, I'd like to see them get the full penalty.
They've been awfully free wielding the legal sledgehammer...Time for them to reap the whirlwind.
It's much easier to debug console games, because the hardware is standard. PC game flaws almost always have to do with oddball hardware problems...Or they're content and balance upgrades for the sorts of games that don't often make it to console.