Oh, and the music industry does try to have extra things as well. A lot of the time when you buy a CD now you get a surplus DVD with music videos and stuff.
Movie downloading isn't as widespread as music downloading, so far, so the MPAA can afford to be the nice guy, for now, and not sue its customers, yet.
Forgot to mention that I think Buymusic has only been in development since the obvious successes of Itunes back in April. If it was in development before that, it was probably much slower development. So, they shouldn't have launched with something this half-baked.
One of the large reasons, I'm sure, that the Apple service works so much better is that it only runs on Apple computers. As anyone knows, there isn't nearly as much variation possible between any two Apple computers as there is between any two PC's. So, Apple had an easier time of testing their service and making sure it would work. Which isn't to say that Buymusic did or is doing as well as they should at customer service or testing or really anything. Far from it. But their position doesn't really surprise me.
Also, it's probably pretty obvious that there are more people who like to "abuse the system" among the PC community than there are among Mac users. There are more hackers on PC's who are going to try to bypass the DRM, and they'll probably find some ways of doing it. And, as Macs are more expensive and more specialized, the Mac user base is generally more affluent and more constituted of the professional community. They probably don't mind paying, quite as much as we vulgar x86 serfs. I'm guessing that's one of the reasons why Buymusic has more restrictive DRM. They have more to worry about from crazy oddball PC users who could be anybody at all, than does Apple from its fairly consistent base of the same people who have always bought Macintoshes. So let's wait and see how the Itunes Music Store for Windows turns out. Maybe they'll have more restrictive DRM for Windows than they do for Macs, and maybe they'll have as many or more problems dealing with variations in people's systems as Buymusic has had. One thing I know they won't have, though, is as poor customer support as Buymusic seems to have.
Buymusic had to get their service out before it got to be too close to the time for the tried-and-true Itunes to launch for Windows, which is supposed to happen sometime in the next few months. They probably decided that they're better off launching a little early, building up a pretty steady following, and getting their kinks worked out before Itunes has a chance to come in and steal any potential customers. That plan may be backfiring, now that there have been so many problems and a lot of the press is advising that people wait a few more months. Again, though, we have to wait and see if Itunes for Windows is anywhere near as good as Itunes for Mac.
Well, yes, except they can prove you were using a certain IP address at a certain time, and that almost 500 gigs of stuff was being served from that IP address. They only need the record that it was possible to download that stuff from you to incriminate you, which they can establish pretty easily before they come to your door. They won't exactly be scratching their heads at the rack of hard drives under the electromagnet; it will be blatantly obvious to them where all the pirated stuff went. Circumstantial evidence, true, that you scrambled your hard drives, but they'll have those records to show what you were up to before you nixed your data. It's almost like if they had pictures of you selling pot, and they had an undercover guy buy some pot from you and they know it's real pot, but you flush your stash down the toilet when they're breaking your door down, and all they find are a few dozen empty ziploc baggies scattered around the john, they could probably still get you. Maybe not on as many charges, but you can bet the judge will give you the maximum sentence to make up for the ones you got out of.
What's really funny is that some standards for tap water are actually higher than those for bottled water. A different government agency (the FDA) oversees standards for bottled water than the one (the EPA) for tap water.
Very often bottled water is really just tap water, or worse. Just look at this article. Some bottled water is actually from very dangerous sources near industrial waste sites, and the FDA requires significantly less frequent testing for bottled water sources than does the EPA for tap water.
Some standards, though, like the maximum permissible amount of lead, are actually lower for tap water, but only by a miniscule amount: a difference of 10 parts per billion. If you're really nervous about that insignificant amount of lead, though, you can always get a Brita or Pür water filter to remove it, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying water by the bottle (refer again to FDA article for that).
There is also the consideration, though, that the minerals in mineral water make it taste better, not to mention make it possibly better for you, than probably the tap water of your region. But a lot of bottled water, like the Coca-cola company's Dasani, ain't mineral water ("Ingredients: water, magnesium sulfate, potassium chloride, salt"). Be sure about the significance, or lack thereof, to your health of what you're buying. I think that for most intents and purposes bottled waters by varying degrees are scams, and for that matter so are sodas, at the prices we get charged.
i think that realistically it's going to be just as bad as the recent star wars and james bond movies....similar to james bond in that the continuation of all the old themes of the series will have become totally ridiculous. think of how pointlessly two-dimensional the villians are, and how silly Q's gadgets have become. INVISIBLE CARS, anyone?!? just look how sagging and old pierce brosnan is now; they'd better be damn realistic in the Indiana Jones movie about what old people can (thoughtfully puzzle things out) and cannot (seduce women under 30) do.
&
it'll probably be like star wars in that it will have umpteen dozen fruitcake references to the former movies. this is what i'm really afraid of. they'll make it silly by compromising the integrity of the story as a plot unto itself, & make the movie into an excuse for jokes about aging, and all the womanizing Indiana Jones has done, and how he always drops something (his gun or his whip) at the wrong moment. not to mention merchanising. merchanidising is taken into full account during the very fabrication of the story on these types of movies, nowadays. you can bet they'll have all the same old silly tricks like goofy sidekicks & bumbling, ridiculous members of whatever asian culture running all around. action figures as well as cheap plot devices, maybe?
so, at best it'll be a rehash with a cardboard plot, & at worst it'll be a toy commercial with a cardboard plot. expect all the things that you should, by now, be used to hollywood doing, and not any more that that.
of course, they could always surprise us, but it seems doubtful because the people who are really in charge of this either see the movie as an investment (and THOSE people have freakin' equations telling them which plot devices and elements of comic relief are likely to make for a more successful movie), or they're old and have no updated sense of what's entertaining, meaning they're likely to turn out something almost as good as they used to, but they'll one-up themselves by exagerrating everything to all hell, making it terribly tired & strained.
of course...they could always surprise us...
But no confirmation was as spectacular, and tragic, as the one that came on Aug. 6, 1945, when the destruction of Hiroshima testified to E=mc^2, nature's profligate exchange of mass for energy.
...And that is simply incorrect. E=mc^2 was confirmed when the first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity Site in New Mexico at 5:29:45am on July 16, 1945, about three weeks prior to the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. One more example of a lightweight journalist with no background on what he's writing about, or maybe he just ignored Trinity because it seems more dramatic to write about Hiroshima. I might be mistaken, but I think once a year or so the public is allowed onto the Trinity Site (anything radioactive has been removed) where they can find shards of glass that were blasted from sand into that form by the intense heat of the bomb going off.
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Oh, and the music industry does try to have extra things as well. A lot of the time when you buy a CD now you get a surplus DVD with music videos and stuff.
Movie downloading isn't as widespread as music downloading, so far, so the MPAA can afford to be the nice guy, for now, and not sue its customers, yet.
Forgot to mention that I think Buymusic has only been in development since the obvious successes of Itunes back in April. If it was in development before that, it was probably much slower development. So, they shouldn't have launched with something this half-baked.
One of the large reasons, I'm sure, that the Apple service works so much better is that it only runs on Apple computers. As anyone knows, there isn't nearly as much variation possible between any two Apple computers as there is between any two PC's. So, Apple had an easier time of testing their service and making sure it would work. Which isn't to say that Buymusic did or is doing as well as they should at customer service or testing or really anything. Far from it. But their position doesn't really surprise me.
Also, it's probably pretty obvious that there are more people who like to "abuse the system" among the PC community than there are among Mac users. There are more hackers on PC's who are going to try to bypass the DRM, and they'll probably find some ways of doing it. And, as Macs are more expensive and more specialized, the Mac user base is generally more affluent and more constituted of the professional community. They probably don't mind paying, quite as much as we vulgar x86 serfs. I'm guessing that's one of the reasons why Buymusic has more restrictive DRM. They have more to worry about from crazy oddball PC users who could be anybody at all, than does Apple from its fairly consistent base of the same people who have always bought Macintoshes. So let's wait and see how the Itunes Music Store for Windows turns out. Maybe they'll have more restrictive DRM for Windows than they do for Macs, and maybe they'll have as many or more problems dealing with variations in people's systems as Buymusic has had. One thing I know they won't have, though, is as poor customer support as Buymusic seems to have.
Buymusic had to get their service out before it got to be too close to the time for the tried-and-true Itunes to launch for Windows, which is supposed to happen sometime in the next few months. They probably decided that they're better off launching a little early, building up a pretty steady following, and getting their kinks worked out before Itunes has a chance to come in and steal any potential customers. That plan may be backfiring, now that there have been so many problems and a lot of the press is advising that people wait a few more months. Again, though, we have to wait and see if Itunes for Windows is anywhere near as good as Itunes for Mac.
Well, yes, except they can prove you were using a certain IP address at a certain time, and that almost 500 gigs of stuff was being served from that IP address. They only need the record that it was possible to download that stuff from you to incriminate you, which they can establish pretty easily before they come to your door. They won't exactly be scratching their heads at the rack of hard drives under the electromagnet; it will be blatantly obvious to them where all the pirated stuff went. Circumstantial evidence, true, that you scrambled your hard drives, but they'll have those records to show what you were up to before you nixed your data.
It's almost like if they had pictures of you selling pot, and they had an undercover guy buy some pot from you and they know it's real pot, but you flush your stash down the toilet when they're breaking your door down, and all they find are a few dozen empty ziploc baggies scattered around the john, they could probably still get you. Maybe not on as many charges, but you can bet the judge will give you the maximum sentence to make up for the ones you got out of.
What's really funny is that some standards for tap water are actually higher than those for bottled water. A different government agency (the FDA) oversees standards for bottled water than the one (the EPA) for tap water.
Very often bottled water is really just tap water, or worse. Just look at this article. Some bottled water is actually from very dangerous sources near industrial waste sites, and the FDA requires significantly less frequent testing for bottled water sources than does the EPA for tap water.
Some standards, though, like the maximum permissible amount of lead, are actually lower for tap water, but only by a miniscule amount: a difference of 10 parts per billion. If you're really nervous about that insignificant amount of lead, though, you can always get a Brita or Pür water filter to remove it, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying water by the bottle (refer again to FDA article for that).
There is also the consideration, though, that the minerals in mineral water make it taste better, not to mention make it possibly better for you, than probably the tap water of your region. But a lot of bottled water, like the Coca-cola company's Dasani, ain't mineral water ("Ingredients: water, magnesium sulfate, potassium chloride, salt"). Be sure about the significance, or lack thereof, to your health of what you're buying. I think that for most intents and purposes bottled waters by varying degrees are scams, and for that matter so are sodas, at the prices we get charged.
i think that realistically it's going to be just as bad as the recent star wars and james bond movies. ...similar to james bond in that the continuation of all the old themes of the series will have become totally ridiculous. think of how pointlessly two-dimensional the villians are, and how silly Q's gadgets have become. INVISIBLE CARS, anyone?!? just look how sagging and old pierce brosnan is now; they'd better be damn realistic in the Indiana Jones movie about what old people can (thoughtfully puzzle things out) and cannot (seduce women under 30) do.
&
it'll probably be like star wars in that it will have umpteen dozen fruitcake references to the former movies. this is what i'm really afraid of. they'll make it silly by compromising the integrity of the story as a plot unto itself, & make the movie into an excuse for jokes about aging, and all the womanizing Indiana Jones has done, and how he always drops something (his gun or his whip) at the wrong moment. not to mention merchanising. merchanidising is taken into full account during the very fabrication of the story on these types of movies, nowadays. you can bet they'll have all the same old silly tricks like goofy sidekicks & bumbling, ridiculous members of whatever asian culture running all around. action figures as well as cheap plot devices, maybe?
so, at best it'll be a rehash with a cardboard plot, & at worst it'll be a toy commercial with a cardboard plot. expect all the things that you should, by now, be used to hollywood doing, and not any more that that.
of course, they could always surprise us, but it seems doubtful because the people who are really in charge of this either see the movie as an investment (and THOSE people have freakin' equations telling them which plot devices and elements of comic relief are likely to make for a more successful movie), or they're old and have no updated sense of what's entertaining, meaning they're likely to turn out something almost as good as they used to, but they'll one-up themselves by exagerrating everything to all hell, making it terribly tired & strained.
of course...they could always surprise us...
The article makes the following claim:
But no confirmation was as spectacular, and tragic, as the one that came on Aug. 6, 1945, when the destruction of Hiroshima testified to E=mc^2, nature's profligate exchange of mass for energy.
...And that is simply incorrect. E=mc^2 was confirmed when the first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity Site in New Mexico at 5:29:45am on July 16, 1945, about three weeks prior to the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. One more example of a lightweight journalist with no background on what he's writing about, or maybe he just ignored Trinity because it seems more dramatic to write about Hiroshima.
I might be mistaken, but I think once a year or so the public is allowed onto the Trinity Site (anything radioactive has been removed) where they can find shards of glass that were blasted from sand into that form by the intense heat of the bomb going off.