Linkin' Park is among the bands refusing to sell on the Apple Store because they beleive the album format (i.e. a disc composed of multiple tracks in a particular order) is something important to preserve. The seperation of the album into individual tracks, to artists like them, ruins this part of their art.
This is really too bad, and a problem I never considered until they brought it up a couple months ago. I respect the artist's point of view, however, there's really not a lot of bands where I like to listen to the whole album. In fact, this is the reason I started buring CD's (actually, making tapes, back in the day) in the first place - I like variety. I specifically avoid putting two songs by the same artist on a CD. I also hate listening to any CD in the same order all the time (regardless of if it's a mix or an album) -- when it gets to the point that I hear the end of a song and start humming the next one, I'm irritated.
It's really mostly a convience thing. When I'm in my car, I don't want to listen to just Linkin Park (for example) for 60 minutes (no offence to Linkin Park, of course), then something else for 60 minutes. And changing CD's every 6 minutes while trying to drive is not pratical. So, the mix CD comes in.
I understand the artist's wish that you listen to their album as they wanted, but at the same time, they should respect the way their audience wants to hear it.
Radio stations don't play a Linkin Park album continously, then when it's done, play Pink continusouly, etc. If they did, they'd lose a lot of listeners. Why should they try and force their fans that buy their music to listen to them this way?
If the response rate is already very low, then relatively simple technological solutions would probably suffice to drive them low enough to make spam unprofitable.
But thats the problem - once you can send spam, sending more spam is not exepensive at all. The spammers philosophy is "if the response rate is 0.1%, and we send out 1,000,000 emails, then we get 100 responses. So if we want 1000 responses, we send out 10,000,000 emails".Since most spammers are using hacked/open-relay systems (afaik), it costs them nothing but an internet connection.
I'm wondering if all security problems would have been caught, or if that was really the goal of the analysis.
It would seem to me that security problems caused by unchecked buffers, and other such coding problems would be caught. But it's possible to write 100% solid code that has flawed logic that leads to a security hole.
Remember, computers do exactly what you tell them. If you tell them to do something wrong (even if your code is perfect), they'll do it perfectly wrong every time.:)
Not only is selling below cost not our problem, it should be illegal as it is in the EU.
Why is that? This is not an uncommon busniess stragety. As the original post said, if you sell below cost, you're taking a gamble. Sometimes businesses will sell a certain item below cost (and below the price of their competitors') just to get people into the store, with the hope that they'll buy other things once they're there. It's called a loss-leader or something like that (I'm not a marketing guy).
Sometimes a business will sell an item below cost to keep their customer happy, if they've done something to piss them off.
Either way, if you're selling below cost and not recouping that somewhere else, you're not going to last long. Natural selection for busniesses, if you will.
The big problem seems to be that the concentration isn't on traffic even with hands-off versions of mobile phones.
Yeah, the problem is trying to get the little rubber seal on the phone open and plug in the headset. I bought a headset, and it's great to use (despite the attention thing, which I totally agree with you on), but a lot of the time if someone calls I don't bother with it, because it's harder to try and get that thing in than it is to drive one-handed for a couple minutes.
Canadians aren't allowed to watch DTH (direct to home) TV.
No, otherwise Bell Expressvu and StarChoice wouldn't exist. It's just that those two are the only licenced broadcasters allowed to broadcast into Canada.
This is where the big grey area occurs.. DirecTV and Dish etc are not allowed to broadcast into Canada, so, obviously, they're also not allowed to sell the equipment here. It's not illegal for Canadians to own the equipment. It's also not illegal to recieve DirecTV broadcasts because DirecTV isn't allowed to broadcast here. If they made a law saying Canadians aren't allowed to recieve the signals, then that's basically contradicting the fact DirecTV isn't allowed to broadcast here.
Note: IANAL, and this is just how it's been explained to me.
With ZenWorks, you can lock down a users' W2K or XP workstation, deploy/install applications and printers without leaving your desk and remote control their PC if they are having a problem (technical support).
I setup a Netware-based network in a school a few years ago (just after Novell 5 came out, i think), never having used netware before. It took me about two weeks, but in the end, I had a very solid setup. Win95 workstations could be deployed from Norton Ghost on any machine in the building, all drivers would auto-detect etc. It would boot into the client setup, you enter it's name and network details, import it into the tree, and it's a functioning system. All applications were done using zenworks, which was just amazing. Apps could be assigned per-workstation/lab, or per-user/class. Very nice for students in a graphics class to be able to log on in the library (where there isn't normally a graphics app) and be able to do their work.
Printer assignment was the same way, which was really nice. Teachers could print to any printer in the school, while students could only print to the nearest printer to the workstation they were on.
I was amazed how well application distribution worked, and how well lock-down policys could apply. I tried setting up an ActiveDirectory-based network at a.com company not too much later, and it was garbage compared to Netware. (although I'm not a MSCE or anything). Although application distribution is very handy - espessially for getting a broken system running again - we ended up disabling it because it didnt work properly half the time. Maybe it was just me, but I had it working amazingly well on Netware the first time I used it (not to metion in an network 10 times the size), and this wasn't the first windows network I've installed.
I think the exception to this is Beer ads (In Canada, at least. We get a lot of US tv, and their beer ads aren't as good).
Take for example one of Molson's ads (5.2mb). It's old now, but pretty funny.
Labatt has a really good campaign going now too, on the theme of having a good time with friends. There's a great trailer they play in the theaters (hey, talking about annoying ads - how about the 10 minutes they put at the start of movies now..) that's just a longer version. It's mostly amateur-looking video of pranks, and includes things like tricking someone into jumping into a lake (4 guys run down a dock, 3 stop suddenly at the end and laugh at the other guy after he jumps); pushing someone into a 12' high display of paper towels in the grocery store; and watching someone open the door to their truck as hundreds of golf balls fall out.
Anyways, those are at least entertaining. I can remember them. I can't remember what the last car ad I saw was, or what happened in the last mop commercial, although I'm sure i've seen at least one of each in the last couple days.
"For all those that fail or are rejected, an 'undelivered mail item' message is sent back to the sender, in this case the sender/spammer then simply deletes the rejected names from his generated list. What is left is a list of authenticated email addresses that is then used to deliver spam messages and is also on-sold to other spammers," he said.
The part in this article about spammers testing for the validity of a dictionary-generated email addresses is a load of crap.
Actually, it's not. I have a friend that works at an ISP, and he's showed me their mail filter system (which incidentally blocks these attacks), and you can see it happening. They get attacked like this on average of once per day, and they're just a small local ISP.
A more comprehensive set of tests may have shown that, in fact, Windows 2003 Server is best, at least ignoring cost, licensing, etc.
Windows is a great platform for getting a full network setup. Fresh from the install, you can get most network services configured and running very quickly.
Where Windows breaks down is in flexibility. As soon as you want to do something slightly differently than MS expects you to, you run into a brick wall. If you're lucky, there's a company that's already developed a solution to do what you want, although it will likely cost you a fair chunk of change.
With Linux, it takes more work to set things up, but the result is (usually) that you understand everything a whole lot better. When there's a problem, you can track it down a lot faster. If you want to do something differently than most people, and there's not already an option for it, then you're a lot more likely to find an OSS solution that fits or is close, and you can modify it to work, and contribute back your changes. If all else fails, you have the source code to tweak, which is a lot easier than trying to figure out MS's APIs and how to hook in to do what you want. Of course, that's assuming the API calls you need are even documented..
The publisher only makes money off of a very few best sellers.
This is basically the same way the music industry works. They sign lots of 6 figure deals with bands. They pay out big advances. Artists get rich.
Of course, what really happens is their "advance" is really more like a line-of-credit, and has to be paid back. Only a small percentage of those bands actually make their advance back, and an even smaller percentage make a big profit for the record company.
Courtney Love wrote a really good article about this a while back. As much as I don't like the way the record industry works, there's not many other ways to get $1,000,000 to produce an album, record a video, and live off of for a year, espessially since the stats say that well over half of the bands will flop. And a bank certainly wouldn't be writing off that $1,000,000 loan because you "didn't make it"..
I read the subject of your post, and suddenly remembered a book I read years ago, called (surprise, surprise) Virtual Light. The book takes place in 2005, and was written in 1994. Always neat to see old books and movies doing a good job of predicting future technologies.
Of course, California would have to break up into two, and homeless would have to take over the Bay Bridge.. but hey, theres still a couple years for that.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The land that wind power is on can also be used for other purposes such as farming or grazing.
Denmark built an off-shore wind farm, which seems like a pretty good idea. The wind currents are stronger over the ocean, and it doesn't take up any land. Includes pictures.
I've never been to a LAN party, but this kinda popped into my head, not sure if it's been tried before or not:
Make a CD that boots windows and includes drivers and such for most common devices (or is it even possible for that to work?), and CD's with the games on them. I suppose you could make them run from the fileserver for anything that needs to be saved to disk, or perhaps even run everything off fileserver(s) if it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth.
Then you eliminate configuration problems (provided everyone has decently popular hardware), and eliminate cheating since they can't install any cheats.
Of course, this might be impossible for any number of reasons:
Windows won't boot from CD
Windows won't fit on a CD
Violates Windows licence
and so on..
Could be a neat thing to do with linux (and Wine to get some of the games going), since it can boot from a CD for sure. Would basically turn their computer into a fancy console..
On that note, what about LAN parties using actual consoles? Use PS2's on a LAN.. ?
The traditional "radio" business model is broken too, just like record distribution. What needs to happen is not just "cutting out the middleman", more like a complete revolution of the entire process -- from musical instruments, recording processes, distribution, and listening.
Ok, that's easy to say. So who starts first? A single radio station says "yeah, we're no longer going to go with this major label, we want to use these independent labels, that dont have any of the major artists right now". Or do the artists switch first? "We're going to break our contracts and sign with a small label that doesn't have any influence on the industry".
Perhaps if a major well-known artist were to switch to an independent label, it could begin to work, since stations will look for their music specifically. But all major well-known artists have record deals, and I'd bet it's not that simple to break those contracts..
Selling CDs is only a minor part of profits for a band (albeit, producing their own CD's will change this). The reason they go through the big 5 has nothing to do with not being able to print their own CD's. It has to do with the fact to get any major radio/video play, you need to be in record pools and on distribution lines.
Frankly, it's easier for a radio station or much/mtv to deal with 5 companies (who each deal with thousands of artists) and get their music through them, than it would be for them to deal with thousands of independent labels, each with a handful of bands.
Record pools could help here. A record pool takes music from various sources, and sends out either compilations of music every week/month, or singles as they get them. Of course, the record pool would have to deal with the thousands of individual companies, and there's a lot riding on a radio station to switch over to another distribution channel likt that. They might not release a song that becomes a big hit (pool doesn't carry that artist, they decided it wasnt a good song, whatever), but their competitors might.
And once a pool gets big enough, there's the same sort of "corruption" thats easily possible. For example, if a pool is a big supplier of some big stations (say they supply MTV with most of their music), they can start to do things like charge large 'handling' fees to the labels. You then get right back to the same situation we have now where only the big ones with lots of money can do anything.
If you totally cut out the middle man (ie, no record companies, pools, etc), then you're left with artists dealing directly with each station. There are millions of artist, and millions of stations. Each (artists and stations) would need at least one person (and realistly, probably a team of 10-20 people) dedicated to dealing with the stations/artists. Each station individually has to decide whether a song is a hit or crap, or somewhere in the middle, and how much airtime it should get.
I think we're running into issues any way it goes right now. We need a new method. And I'm not sure what that is right now.
Issue a warrant for ignoring a summons. The whole point of the court is THEY decide if you you're doing anything wrong or not.. not you. Likely this action will result in the police at your door within hours.
You know something is wrong when the defendant pays $12,000 to settle, when he knows he could win, the plaintiff is probably going to ask for damages in the millions, and the whole thing is rediculus anyways since searching for music is just one possible illegitimate use of a legitimate system.
People shouldn't be sharing music on the network, that's what's illegal. Someone else said this, but yeah, I'm waiting for the headline that reads "5-year-old's mother sues google for finding porn"
If you have/need a cell phone, buy a decent one with a calendar built in. This doesn't mean it has to be one of those fancy ones with the PDA style screen, or a Blackberry or whatever, just something that has decent software.
I had a Samsung SCH-8500 for the first couple years, and it was amazing. Great place to keep reminders, due dates, group meeting times, etc. It's also very convienent. I've never owned a PDA, but it doesn't look like something that's easy to carry around all the time. A bit to big to clip onto your belt/pocket and go in a bar with. I have my cell phone on me almost 24/7.
And if you do need a cell phone, carrying around both a PDA and a cell phone is a bit excessive.
Earlier this year I bought an SPH-A540, which is basically just a newer model of the 8500, and it's just as great, and even a bit smaller (in fact, my old 8500, which was 'tiny' when I bought it, looks huge compared to this thing).
The only downfall to the cell is that you're paying a monthly fee (I don't think there's many decent pay-as-you-go phones that can compare..). But there is the convienence of being able to be reached all the time, no matter where you are, and to always be able to make calls out.
Oh, and be sure to turn the volume up to full with some really obnoxious ringer when you're in class. Professors love that!
If they don't like the idea of people decoding their signal, they shouldn't broadcast it to everyone.
I agree. My point was that saying you're not going to pay for it anyways doesn't make a difference. Just because you're not going to pay for it, doesn't mean you should get it for free.
However, since they are not allowed to broadcast in Canada, if someone happens to have the equipment to recieve and decode the signal, there's not much they can do. They shouldn't be broadcasting here.
While you're at it, do you mind if I eavesdrop on your cell phone conversations? After all, I'm using my own equipment to intercept signals passing through my property.
If you can, then go right ahead. I can't stop you. Of course, my phone uses a digital signal to communicate, so you have to have some specialized equipment to listen in. And you know what? If you have that, and go through the effort of intercepting that signal that's floating into your house, then sure, you can find out what time I'm meeting my friends downtown, or whatever I happen to be talking about.
Of course, if you come on to my property, and hook on to my phone wires to listen in, then that is illegal, since you're tresspassing and messing with my wires. (Or the telco's boxes, or whatever).
It's the same as if theres some business executives having some private meeting. If they do it sitting in the middle of a park, and you happen to hear what they're saying because you sit on a bench next to them, then there's nothing they can do to stop you. You're using your own equipment (ears) to intercept signals (sound waves) floating past.
Of course, if you were to barge into the board room and sit down, or climb up through the ventilation, then it's an entirely different story, that will likely end with a jail term.
OTOH, maybe they're sitting in the park, but encrypting their conversation by talking in sanskrit. Does it suddenly make it illegal for you to listen using your intimate knowledge of the language, simply because they weren't speaking english?
ecause I don't give them money? For a service I would never pay for? Once again, the signal is there whether I use it or not. There is no impact to DirectTV if I "listen in".
Yeah. I bet the DTV executives are sitting up there saying "hm, well this guy isn't going to pay for it anyways.. we might as well let him have it for free."
Maybe you should write to the Wachowski brothers, and tell them you have no intention of seeing Matrix Revolutions in the theater. They'll probably send you free tickets. While you're at it, write to Porshe, and tell them you have no intention of buying a 911.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really too bad, and a problem I never considered until they brought it up a couple months ago. I respect the artist's point of view, however, there's really not a lot of bands where I like to listen to the whole album. In fact, this is the reason I started buring CD's (actually, making tapes, back in the day) in the first place - I like variety. I specifically avoid putting two songs by the same artist on a CD. I also hate listening to any CD in the same order all the time (regardless of if it's a mix or an album) -- when it gets to the point that I hear the end of a song and start humming the next one, I'm irritated.
It's really mostly a convience thing. When I'm in my car, I don't want to listen to just Linkin Park (for example) for 60 minutes (no offence to Linkin Park, of course), then something else for 60 minutes. And changing CD's every 6 minutes while trying to drive is not pratical. So, the mix CD comes in.
I understand the artist's wish that you listen to their album as they wanted, but at the same time, they should respect the way their audience wants to hear it.
Radio stations don't play a Linkin Park album continously, then when it's done, play Pink continusouly, etc. If they did, they'd lose a lot of listeners. Why should they try and force their fans that buy their music to listen to them this way?
But thats the problem - once you can send spam, sending more spam is not exepensive at all. The spammers philosophy is "if the response rate is 0.1%, and we send out 1,000,000 emails, then we get 100 responses. So if we want 1000 responses, we send out 10,000,000 emails".Since most spammers are using hacked/open-relay systems (afaik), it costs them nothing but an internet connection.
It would seem to me that security problems caused by unchecked buffers, and other such coding problems would be caught. But it's possible to write 100% solid code that has flawed logic that leads to a security hole.
Remember, computers do exactly what you tell them. If you tell them to do something wrong (even if your code is perfect), they'll do it perfectly wrong every time. :)
Why is that? This is not an uncommon busniess stragety. As the original post said, if you sell below cost, you're taking a gamble. Sometimes businesses will sell a certain item below cost (and below the price of their competitors') just to get people into the store, with the hope that they'll buy other things once they're there. It's called a loss-leader or something like that (I'm not a marketing guy).
Sometimes a business will sell an item below cost to keep their customer happy, if they've done something to piss them off.
Either way, if you're selling below cost and not recouping that somewhere else, you're not going to last long. Natural selection for busniesses, if you will.
Yeah, the problem is trying to get the little rubber seal on the phone open and plug in the headset. I bought a headset, and it's great to use (despite the attention thing, which I totally agree with you on), but a lot of the time if someone calls I don't bother with it, because it's harder to try and get that thing in than it is to drive one-handed for a couple minutes.
No, otherwise Bell Expressvu and StarChoice wouldn't exist. It's just that those two are the only licenced broadcasters allowed to broadcast into Canada.
This is where the big grey area occurs .. DirecTV and Dish etc are not allowed to broadcast into Canada, so, obviously, they're also not allowed to sell the equipment here. It's not illegal for Canadians to own the equipment. It's also not illegal to recieve DirecTV broadcasts because DirecTV isn't allowed to broadcast here. If they made a law saying Canadians aren't allowed to recieve the signals, then that's basically contradicting the fact DirecTV isn't allowed to broadcast here.
Note: IANAL, and this is just how it's been explained to me.
I setup a Netware-based network in a school a few years ago (just after Novell 5 came out, i think), never having used netware before. It took me about two weeks, but in the end, I had a very solid setup. Win95 workstations could be deployed from Norton Ghost on any machine in the building, all drivers would auto-detect etc. It would boot into the client setup, you enter it's name and network details, import it into the tree, and it's a functioning system. All applications were done using zenworks, which was just amazing. Apps could be assigned per-workstation/lab, or per-user/class. Very nice for students in a graphics class to be able to log on in the library (where there isn't normally a graphics app) and be able to do their work.
Printer assignment was the same way, which was really nice. Teachers could print to any printer in the school, while students could only print to the nearest printer to the workstation they were on.
I was amazed how well application distribution worked, and how well lock-down policys could apply. I tried setting up an ActiveDirectory-based network at a .com company not too much later, and it was garbage compared to Netware. (although I'm not a MSCE or anything). Although application distribution is very handy - espessially for getting a broken system running again - we ended up disabling it because it didnt work properly half the time. Maybe it was just me, but I had it working amazingly well on Netware the first time I used it (not to metion in an network 10 times the size), and this wasn't the first windows network I've installed.
Not anymore, Palladium is here to save us.
Labatt has a really good campaign going now too, on the theme of having a good time with friends. There's a great trailer they play in the theaters (hey, talking about annoying ads - how about the 10 minutes they put at the start of movies now..) that's just a longer version. It's mostly amateur-looking video of pranks, and includes things like tricking someone into jumping into a lake (4 guys run down a dock, 3 stop suddenly at the end and laugh at the other guy after he jumps); pushing someone into a 12' high display of paper towels in the grocery store; and watching someone open the door to their truck as hundreds of golf balls fall out.
Anyways, those are at least entertaining. I can remember them. I can't remember what the last car ad I saw was, or what happened in the last mop commercial, although I'm sure i've seen at least one of each in the last couple days.
So what if you have to call a tow truck every once in a while..
Actually, it's not. I have a friend that works at an ISP, and he's showed me their mail filter system (which incidentally blocks these attacks), and you can see it happening. They get attacked like this on average of once per day, and they're just a small local ISP.
Windows is a great platform for getting a full network setup. Fresh from the install, you can get most network services configured and running very quickly.
Where Windows breaks down is in flexibility. As soon as you want to do something slightly differently than MS expects you to, you run into a brick wall. If you're lucky, there's a company that's already developed a solution to do what you want, although it will likely cost you a fair chunk of change.
With Linux, it takes more work to set things up, but the result is (usually) that you understand everything a whole lot better. When there's a problem, you can track it down a lot faster. If you want to do something differently than most people, and there's not already an option for it, then you're a lot more likely to find an OSS solution that fits or is close, and you can modify it to work, and contribute back your changes. If all else fails, you have the source code to tweak, which is a lot easier than trying to figure out MS's APIs and how to hook in to do what you want. Of course, that's assuming the API calls you need are even documented..
This is basically the same way the music industry works. They sign lots of 6 figure deals with bands. They pay out big advances. Artists get rich.
Of course, what really happens is their "advance" is really more like a line-of-credit, and has to be paid back. Only a small percentage of those bands actually make their advance back, and an even smaller percentage make a big profit for the record company.
Courtney Love wrote a really good article about this a while back. As much as I don't like the way the record industry works, there's not many other ways to get $1,000,000 to produce an album, record a video, and live off of for a year, espessially since the stats say that well over half of the bands will flop. And a bank certainly wouldn't be writing off that $1,000,000 loan because you "didn't make it"..
Of course, California would have to break up into two, and homeless would have to take over the Bay Bridge.. but hey, theres still a couple years for that.
Denmark built an off-shore wind farm, which seems like a pretty good idea. The wind currents are stronger over the ocean, and it doesn't take up any land. Includes pictures.
Make a CD that boots windows and includes drivers and such for most common devices (or is it even possible for that to work?), and CD's with the games on them. I suppose you could make them run from the fileserver for anything that needs to be saved to disk, or perhaps even run everything off fileserver(s) if it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth.
Then you eliminate configuration problems (provided everyone has decently popular hardware), and eliminate cheating since they can't install any cheats.
Of course, this might be impossible for any number of reasons:
- Windows won't boot from CD
- Windows won't fit on a CD
- Violates Windows licence
and so on..Could be a neat thing to do with linux (and Wine to get some of the games going), since it can boot from a CD for sure. Would basically turn their computer into a fancy console..
On that note, what about LAN parties using actual consoles? Use PS2's on a LAN.. ?
Ah, just go get a nice cursive font. Problem solved.
Ok, that's easy to say. So who starts first? A single radio station says "yeah, we're no longer going to go with this major label, we want to use these independent labels, that dont have any of the major artists right now". Or do the artists switch first? "We're going to break our contracts and sign with a small label that doesn't have any influence on the industry".
Perhaps if a major well-known artist were to switch to an independent label, it could begin to work, since stations will look for their music specifically. But all major well-known artists have record deals, and I'd bet it's not that simple to break those contracts..
Frankly, it's easier for a radio station or much/mtv to deal with 5 companies (who each deal with thousands of artists) and get their music through them, than it would be for them to deal with thousands of independent labels, each with a handful of bands.
Record pools could help here. A record pool takes music from various sources, and sends out either compilations of music every week/month, or singles as they get them. Of course, the record pool would have to deal with the thousands of individual companies, and there's a lot riding on a radio station to switch over to another distribution channel likt that. They might not release a song that becomes a big hit (pool doesn't carry that artist, they decided it wasnt a good song, whatever), but their competitors might.
And once a pool gets big enough, there's the same sort of "corruption" thats easily possible. For example, if a pool is a big supplier of some big stations (say they supply MTV with most of their music), they can start to do things like charge large 'handling' fees to the labels. You then get right back to the same situation we have now where only the big ones with lots of money can do anything.
If you totally cut out the middle man (ie, no record companies, pools, etc), then you're left with artists dealing directly with each station. There are millions of artist, and millions of stations. Each (artists and stations) would need at least one person (and realistly, probably a team of 10-20 people) dedicated to dealing with the stations/artists. Each station individually has to decide whether a song is a hit or crap, or somewhere in the middle, and how much airtime it should get.
I think we're running into issues any way it goes right now. We need a new method. And I'm not sure what that is right now.
Issue a warrant for ignoring a summons. The whole point of the court is THEY decide if you you're doing anything wrong or not .. not you. Likely this action will result in the police at your door within hours.
People shouldn't be sharing music on the network, that's what's illegal. Someone else said this, but yeah, I'm waiting for the headline that reads "5-year-old's mother sues google for finding porn"
I had a Samsung SCH-8500 for the first couple years, and it was amazing. Great place to keep reminders, due dates, group meeting times, etc. It's also very convienent. I've never owned a PDA, but it doesn't look like something that's easy to carry around all the time. A bit to big to clip onto your belt/pocket and go in a bar with. I have my cell phone on me almost 24/7.
And if you do need a cell phone, carrying around both a PDA and a cell phone is a bit excessive.
Earlier this year I bought an SPH-A540, which is basically just a newer model of the 8500, and it's just as great, and even a bit smaller (in fact, my old 8500, which was 'tiny' when I bought it, looks huge compared to this thing).
The only downfall to the cell is that you're paying a monthly fee (I don't think there's many decent pay-as-you-go phones that can compare..). But there is the convienence of being able to be reached all the time, no matter where you are, and to always be able to make calls out.
Oh, and be sure to turn the volume up to full with some really obnoxious ringer when you're in class. Professors love that!
I agree. My point was that saying you're not going to pay for it anyways doesn't make a difference. Just because you're not going to pay for it, doesn't mean you should get it for free.
However, since they are not allowed to broadcast in Canada, if someone happens to have the equipment to recieve and decode the signal, there's not much they can do. They shouldn't be broadcasting here.
If you can, then go right ahead. I can't stop you. Of course, my phone uses a digital signal to communicate, so you have to have some specialized equipment to listen in. And you know what? If you have that, and go through the effort of intercepting that signal that's floating into your house, then sure, you can find out what time I'm meeting my friends downtown, or whatever I happen to be talking about.
Of course, if you come on to my property, and hook on to my phone wires to listen in, then that is illegal, since you're tresspassing and messing with my wires. (Or the telco's boxes, or whatever).
It's the same as if theres some business executives having some private meeting. If they do it sitting in the middle of a park, and you happen to hear what they're saying because you sit on a bench next to them, then there's nothing they can do to stop you. You're using your own equipment (ears) to intercept signals (sound waves) floating past.
Of course, if you were to barge into the board room and sit down, or climb up through the ventilation, then it's an entirely different story, that will likely end with a jail term.
OTOH, maybe they're sitting in the park, but encrypting their conversation by talking in sanskrit. Does it suddenly make it illegal for you to listen using your intimate knowledge of the language, simply because they weren't speaking english?
Yeah. I bet the DTV executives are sitting up there saying "hm, well this guy isn't going to pay for it anyways .. we might as well let him have it for free."
Maybe you should write to the Wachowski brothers, and tell them you have no intention of seeing Matrix Revolutions in the theater. They'll probably send you free tickets. While you're at it, write to Porshe, and tell them you have no intention of buying a 911.