I think the problem here is that even if we accept that "marriage is what society holds up to be the ideal," society has held up a loving, monogamous homosexual marriage to be a better ideal than a hating, abusive heterosexual relationship. Or at least, the society in the blue states does.
I still think that the red states should just secede - the differences between urban and rural areas are so different we live in two different nations that happen to share the same political boundaries.
The problem is that it seems that California and New York are being held to the will of the rural states. This is why Bush got the presidency despite the fact that more people didn't wanted the other guy to be president.
And so far as I can tell, I'm more than happy to see some states, like the ones in the South, secede. The difference between the educated, urbane populations and the faith-based folk in the rural areas are so great that they require two seperate systems of governance.
Personally, I don't trust Rural people, who don't know what it's like to live in the real world. Presidents who get the rural vote by pandering to talk about God, Guns, and Gays, don't have to worry at all about health-care, social security, people who SALTWATER fish for a living (or did you think all those coastal ports were rural?) cops, industrial workers, institutions of higher learning, terrorism, or anything else that takes place within major urban areas.
Rural people don't know what it's like to live in the real world.
But there is nothing good on over-the-air TV. Nothing. I can't name a single show that's watchable. I have the rabbit ears - I don't really use them.
I thought about getting cable, but I realized that I'd be paying $50 a month to get The Daily Show. Which is nice - and probably the best show on TV - but hardly worth $1.66 a day. I wish I could subscribe to just that one show - and maybe some of the adult swim stuff on Cartoon Network - a la carte channels just won't do it.
So this broadcast flag? Sorry, but you actually have to broadcast something I want to watch before I buy a new TV tuner card or anything else. If that means I get nothing but snow on my TV after 2005, it won't make much of a difference.
QUOTING PARENT:
(a) By "terrorists", I assume you're talking about al Qaeda. How does al Qaeda gain from the presidential election? Neither Bush nor Kerry is likely to stop hunting them down.
Actually, terrorists would have alot to gain by disrupting the election. Bush never really *started* hunting them down - he got sidetracked in Iraq.
(b) There are lots of groups with more stake in who becomes president and who are better equipped to screw with the election -- either political party, for instance. An activist programmer. A state official involved in the machines. I'm worried about *them* mucking with the election, not with terrorism.
What I'm scared of is the vandals. The thing about touch-screen voting is that if you don't want touch screen voting in your district, all you need to do is get N friends together, go in with some sort of pen knife as the absolute first voters of the day, and trash the touchscreen. The problem is, what polling place is then going to have spare voting machines OR enough paper ballots for the district? None. Which means that if you want to go to a county that tends to vote for one party or the other in a swing state... trash the machines, and you get voter intimidation.
I disagree.
If journalists did the kind of hard-hitting news in the U.S. that they did in other countries, they'd be murdered for it. It's just that no one in the U.S. is willing or able to do this type of news.
This is the serious bit: One of the unavoidable facts about U.S. news is that news needs money. We hit a good equilibrium around the 1960s and 1970s, where news organizations existed as news companies and not as subsidiaries to larger corporate interests - because database searches, man-hours to go through stacks of old government records, man-hours to interview people - it almost goes without saying that the bigger your news company's resources, the better you can report the news - which is why no one raised the alarm when the news corporate mergers started happening.
But now, journalists are faced with an increasingly important distinction - you can do soft news which everyone will listen to at one of the big news corps, or you can do hard news which just about no one will listen to at one of the little news outlets.
There is hard news journalism in the U.S., but it's, well, found in the smallest corners. It's overlooked by 95% of the population. I'm not just talking about little outfits - but, honestly, even among established media, there's a very very very small population that reads the New Yorker compared to the number of people who watch Fox News.
At my high school, typing was already being phased out for a "computer studies" course which taught you how to use a computer. Note that this was 1995, and no where in "computer studies" were we to learn about graphical operating systems, the mouse, or, in fact, anything other than dumb terminals running WP 5.1 on a mainframe.
At the end I was able to pass by typing an astounding 120 wpm, but only by fooling the software. See, I could type up to 30wpm, but you were allowed X number of mistakes. But, leave off the last line (just press enter) and that line is completed in an instant! Viola - instant 120 wpm score. I informed the teachers about the bug in the program - they literally didn't care and graded me on the 120wpm test score.
I did eventually become the fastest typist I know (ideal conditions, I can type around 100wpm without cheating) but most of that came from IRC roleplaying games and a history major.
Long story short, sure, kids will pick up on typing on their own - but kids won't pick up on anything that a school does a piss-poor job of teaching.
"Michael Moore has consistently insisted that at least a significant portion of his film is satire and not meant to be taken seriously, but he won't tell us which parts or what makes them untrue."
Right. Because it's just *so difficult* to tell that George Bush, his Cabinet, and Tony Blair were never the stars of Bonanza...
It's not as incredulous as it might seem.
I use a Mac for my day to day operations - so I don't get virii or trojans or worms - but I do keep a Windows laptop around - I usually only use it when I'm travelling on the road or the mac breaks down.
Well, my cable modem's out for about 24 hours, so I decide to take the laptop for a spin earlier this month - connecting to my ISP through the phone line. This, of course, bypasses the router I usually keep the Windows computer on.
Without exaggeration, the computer got attacked by the sasser worm within two minutes. PCCillin caught it, but not before it did some damage. I didn't think much of it, and I was back on the Mac within days and let the computer go through a reformat.
A few days later, my girlfriend's computer starts having problems - basically, the guy who put it together was a whiz with the hardware but messed up on several software related issues - he didn't install service packs, he even got the partition table wrong (Over 2/3rds of the hard drive was unpartitioned - my girlfriend was using 40 gigs of a 120 gig drive.)
So, we decide to reformat and install Windows XP.
Now, I'm part of a university which has a licence to software, so I can just download stuff like antivirus programs and firewalls.
I decide to download the antivirus first, then the spybot, then the service packs, then the hotfixes... big mistake.
After waiting hours to do a complete reformat and another couple of hours tinkering with it to get it to work right, Windows XP reboots unexpectedly then keeps rebooting.
I know *exactly* what this is, but the only way to fix it is a reformat - which means that we're going to get hit with the same problems again as soon as it comes online - we have to go online to download the patches... gah!
Eventually, we drove back to my place, used my macintosh to download all the patches and hotfixes and whathaveyou - and we made sure to install the firewall -first-.
The firewall did the trick, of course, and we were able to get it going. I had to explain to my girlfriend how to *use* the firewall, but considering the alternative, she was very pleased.
But the fact that this can happen is completely insane! When the hell will Microsoft fix their operating system? Viruses have gotten progressively worse and more destructive over the past couple of years - and Longhorn is WAY too far away from release (not that I'd want all the DRM crap on it anyway)
If it wasn't for the fact that games usually don't work on Linux, I'd have told my girlfriend just to switch over that day...
Snak (IRC Client)
Adium (AIM client)
Photoshop
In Design
Microsoft Word (Until a native version of OO.o is produced)
Garage Band
Thoth (Newsreader)
Roxio Toast (DiscBurner)
VideoLan Client
DVD Backup/DVD2OneX (For backing up DVDs. Not encrypted DVDs because that would be illegal)
Why the hell aren't we?
Linux will never take back the desktop, nor will open-source, as long as this continues - in my opinion, all major open-source projects should freeze - right at this instant - all code dealing with function, and start focusing on form.
Yes, form follows function, but only if you actually bother on form!
RIAA's tactics, of course, has changed whether or not people will file-share.
Hell, I quit myself and I told my friends and family to quit until the whole thing blows over (which, after the court case knocking out RIAA vs. Verizon) it seems close to doing.
However, everytime I told people this, I also told them about the false arrests, and the fact that they're suing 12 year olds from the projects, and said "If you want them to stop, stop buying CDs."
Then I point them at CDBaby.
I've bought more albums in the past 8 months since they've started this crap than I have in my entire life - and NONE of them have been from RIAA member labels.
Oh, also...
That doesn't mean that stopping P2P stops downloading. Newsgroups and IRC are still going strong, and are only bolstered by this.
The RIAA's strategy just doesn't work on a fundimental level. The only people who are going to be informed enough of the strategy to be frightened are going to be frightened enough to be pissed at the labels and not buy their stuff.
Well, first off, I disagree that without DRM, the entertainment industry is fucked. I would imagine that they'd be more fucked WITH DRM. But that's just me.
Secondly, if the entertainment industry IS going to insist on DRM, why do you have to go along with it? If you don't want DRM, you could always - big surprize - not buy DRMed products.
I recently had to drive cross-country, using a laptop to guide me. While I never operated the laptop while the vehicle was in motion, I'm wondering if I could still be pulled over if I had to glance at the monitor for mapping while I was driving.
Thankfully, I didn't have to do that. Know why?
Because I kept my directions on my Palm Pilot. The illuminated screen meant I could read the directions in the dark - which would have been *harder* to do and more dangerous to do with a piece of paper.
First off, Ashcroft has made it clear to all governmental agencies that if a FOIA request can be rejected for any reason, it will be rejected. Secondly, since the requester of the information has to PAY for the information that is being requested although there is no set amount per page, many places are getting around FOIA by charging exhorbitant fees ($125 a page, for example,) for requests.
True enough, although I tend to use a Mac for three reasons: 1) Everything at my school runs on a Mac, 2) I do alot of graphic design stuff (including comic coloring,) and 3) I haven't had a problem with the system yet.
While I do use Linux on the laptop, the problem becomes a) GIMP is good but is not only not what I'm used to but simply not good enough yet for what I need to do b) hardware doesn't 100% work (although SuSE 9 is getting there, my Belkin WiFi card doesn't work in Linux) and c) MacOSX programs are typically designed better in the UI department.
I wouldn't buy a new Mac if you're 100% comfortable with Linux either, but it's just good news for those of use that actually could use the Mac.
Konquerer is my browser of choice on Linux, and it's cool that we've got another choice for browser. Yeah, I use Safari, but as this is one step to porting most of the KDE stuff, I can't help but wonder if this is a big step towards the holy grail of Linux-to-MacOSX conversions, OpenOffice.
QUOTE:
1. They're bigger, and with HDTV they're likely to become even bigger still. DVD players in general don't play DivX content, and full DVDs are many gb each. Of course, this reason is fading, but is still strong.
2. Errors/corrupt downloads are much more annoying. I.e. you'd likely only see the movie once or twice, while you might listen to a CD track 100 times. Checking it once takes a lot more time, relatively. Still, integrity checking is improving.
3. They're "one product". Unlike albums with single tracks, you don't get a bunch of crap you don't want thrown in.
4. Typically you have only one device where you like to play DVD movies. As for music, you'd like them on your computer, home stereo, portable player, car player etc etc. Which makes it fairly OK to have just one copy in form of the original disc.
5. They're relatively low priced. If you look at it cost-efficiently, it's smarter to download mp3s/warez/gamez and buy DVDs than the other way around.
6. You really don't mind spending one minute to put in a DVD to watch several hours of entertainment, but you do mind doing the same to listen to that 3 minute melody you suddenly *had* to hear.
Personally, the one thing I hate about DVDs is region coding. It's quite simply an abuse of copyright protection to enforce artifical market barriers and price gouging. Stuff like that is what can be their undoing, if they try to really enforce those (I think everywhere but the US multi-region players are common now).
Kjella
-The fool who knows that he's a fool is for that reason a wise man; the fool who thinks that he's wise is a fool indeed.
REPLY:
Indeed - Region Coding is, in my opinion, the #1 reason why people pirate - either they can't get it where they live, or they don't want the censored version.
That said...
One of the reasons that the Movie industry won't go the way of the music industry is that, for one, it costs less to see a movie than to hear a song.
This is literally true in purchase price, usually, but it's also true in that you can *rent* a movie for $5 a pop at a rental store.
The price point is low enough to where practically anyone - and anyone who can afford a computer and broadband connection - can afford it.
Personally, I think that the big losers in this thing are the TV industry. They DON'T offer their products at reasonable prices. ($60 for Firefly, season one?) If you could download your favorite TV shows for $1/11 minutes (a 22 minute "half-hour" show would cost $2, a 44 minute "hour" show would cost $4 - this is more expensive than what they're charging now with DVDs, it's just that you can pay it in piecemeal...) can you imagine how much money would roll in? Advertisers would still be on board, just make sure that you don't sell your shows until they hit "rerun" territory. There's plenty of great shows out there - and "TV DVDs" are really taking off.
If dial-up users can suffer through a 10 minute wait to get iTunes, broadband users can suffer through a 10 minute wait to get Angel or Firefly.
-- Funksaw
1) Ashcroft's been pushing out judicial authority in sentencing guidelines, and that has turned even the more moderate of judges (who tend to be, *duh* well educated and well read) against the Bush Administration.
2) Bush tried to pack the courts with neo-conservatives. How would you like it if any decision you make on unconstitutional grounds was overturned because the person in the higher (or equal) court really doesn't give a flying fleck about the constitution?
The courts, for good or ill, tend to be the most educated of the 3 branches of government. This does not mean that they're on the bleeding edge, tech wise, but they DO tend to be quick studies. And since justice moves *slow* by the time it reaches an appeals court, the technical issues DO catch up.
If you're on a dial up, keep in mind that these aren't exactly "must have" updates if you're not an AOL customer. 50 megs is alot, but let's face it, you can easily wait till 10.4. The only stuff you really NEED are the security updates.
And since you can set this thing to download overnight, unless you're so rural as to be paying toll-calls to a dialup ISP, 50 megs can be done in 1 or 2 nights, since Apple Update supports resuming (TTBOMR)
The RIAA scared me off in the first round. I wasn't a "hardcore" pirate. I had maybe 1000 mp3s, but maybe 20 were shared weren't shared, I didn't keep Kazaa running - hell, I didn't even listen to the MP3s on the the same computer I downloaded them on. Now, keep in mind, that's 1000 MP3s over 5 years - about 200 a year... less than 4 a week. But when I first heard all this, I deleted all the files, reformatted computers, the whole 9 yards.
I'll admit it, they scared me. But then I got smart and I read up on the situation.
See, they scared me. But I don't like being scared. So I stopped buying their product. I wasn't a big spender when it came to CDs, but I did buy more than a few in my day.
Any RIAA title I get now is a used CD - and I haven't even bought one of those. I bought 5 albums in the past year - all through CDBaby. I keep emailing Apple to make it easy to find the indie stuff in with the RIAA stuff by seperating it somehow, but they're not listening, so I don't buy from them.
Yeah, they got me to stop file-sharing. But they also lost a customer - permanently. And I tell everyone I know not to buy RIAA music.
As for my collection? Since I've deleted it, it's grown to 3000 MP3s over the past 9 months. It would be accurate to say that alot of them were from CD-Baby rips and other albums I own. (I'm not admitting anything, but let's just say that P2P isn't the only way to wage "civil disobedience" against the RIAA.)
What has the RIAA accomplished as far as me, little microcosm? Well, it's got me reading Slashdot more frequently, I listen to more music - buy nothing from the RIAA, and send money that I would have spent on CDs to indie musicians, the EFF, and the ACLU.
People don't like to be scared. It gets them pissed.
Some spyware programs have the capacity to prevent my idiot (only in regards to tech) father from using Internet Explorer? The same reason he ends up getting all those virii and spyware anyway?
Well, hell, I'll take three of those! 99% of his computer problems could be fixed if he just switched to Mozilla, ran his antivirus software (switching to OpenOffice instead of MSOffice might help) and stopped accepting click-throughs that pop up on webpages.
100% of his computer problems could be fixed by switching to Linux, but he'd come up with 10% new ones.
Mp3.com may have been the best well known, but since Vivendi got a hold of it, it sucked.
It just did. Between vitaminic.com, garageband.com, and others, artists now have a chance to put their stuff on websites that actually give a damn whether or not indie music brings traffic to the site.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. Technicality. "More people who gave enough of a sh*t to actually vote wanted Gore to be president."
I think the problem here is that even if we accept that "marriage is what society holds up to be the ideal," society has held up a loving, monogamous homosexual marriage to be a better ideal than a hating, abusive heterosexual relationship. Or at least, the society in the blue states does. I still think that the red states should just secede - the differences between urban and rural areas are so different we live in two different nations that happen to share the same political boundaries.
I'm a city person.
The problem is that it seems that California and New York are being held to the will of the rural states. This is why Bush got the presidency despite the fact that more people didn't wanted the other guy to be president.
And so far as I can tell, I'm more than happy to see some states, like the ones in the South, secede. The difference between the educated, urbane populations and the faith-based folk in the rural areas are so great that they require two seperate systems of governance.
Personally, I don't trust Rural people, who don't know what it's like to live in the real world. Presidents who get the rural vote by pandering to talk about God, Guns, and Gays, don't have to worry at all about health-care, social security, people who SALTWATER fish for a living (or did you think all those coastal ports were rural?) cops, industrial workers, institutions of higher learning, terrorism, or anything else that takes place within major urban areas.
Rural people don't know what it's like to live in the real world.
3 years ago this would have concerned me.
But there is nothing good on over-the-air TV. Nothing. I can't name a single show that's watchable. I have the rabbit ears - I don't really use them.
I thought about getting cable, but I realized that I'd be paying $50 a month to get The Daily Show. Which is nice - and probably the best show on TV - but hardly worth $1.66 a day. I wish I could subscribe to just that one show - and maybe some of the adult swim stuff on Cartoon Network - a la carte channels just won't do it.
So this broadcast flag? Sorry, but you actually have to broadcast something I want to watch before I buy a new TV tuner card or anything else. If that means I get nothing but snow on my TV after 2005, it won't make much of a difference.
QUOTING PARENT: (a) By "terrorists", I assume you're talking about al Qaeda. How does al Qaeda gain from the presidential election? Neither Bush nor Kerry is likely to stop hunting them down.
Actually, terrorists would have alot to gain by disrupting the election. Bush never really *started* hunting them down - he got sidetracked in Iraq.
(b) There are lots of groups with more stake in who becomes president and who are better equipped to screw with the election -- either political party, for instance. An activist programmer. A state official involved in the machines. I'm worried about *them* mucking with the election, not with terrorism.
What I'm scared of is the vandals. The thing about touch-screen voting is that if you don't want touch screen voting in your district, all you need to do is get N friends together, go in with some sort of pen knife as the absolute first voters of the day, and trash the touchscreen. The problem is, what polling place is then going to have spare voting machines OR enough paper ballots for the district? None. Which means that if you want to go to a county that tends to vote for one party or the other in a swing state... trash the machines, and you get voter intimidation.
I disagree. If journalists did the kind of hard-hitting news in the U.S. that they did in other countries, they'd be murdered for it. It's just that no one in the U.S. is willing or able to do this type of news. This is the serious bit: One of the unavoidable facts about U.S. news is that news needs money. We hit a good equilibrium around the 1960s and 1970s, where news organizations existed as news companies and not as subsidiaries to larger corporate interests - because database searches, man-hours to go through stacks of old government records, man-hours to interview people - it almost goes without saying that the bigger your news company's resources, the better you can report the news - which is why no one raised the alarm when the news corporate mergers started happening. But now, journalists are faced with an increasingly important distinction - you can do soft news which everyone will listen to at one of the big news corps, or you can do hard news which just about no one will listen to at one of the little news outlets. There is hard news journalism in the U.S., but it's, well, found in the smallest corners. It's overlooked by 95% of the population. I'm not just talking about little outfits - but, honestly, even among established media, there's a very very very small population that reads the New Yorker compared to the number of people who watch Fox News.
At my high school, typing was already being phased out for a "computer studies" course which taught you how to use a computer. Note that this was 1995, and no where in "computer studies" were we to learn about graphical operating systems, the mouse, or, in fact, anything other than dumb terminals running WP 5.1 on a mainframe.
At the end I was able to pass by typing an astounding 120 wpm, but only by fooling the software. See, I could type up to 30wpm, but you were allowed X number of mistakes. But, leave off the last line (just press enter) and that line is completed in an instant! Viola - instant 120 wpm score. I informed the teachers about the bug in the program - they literally didn't care and graded me on the 120wpm test score.
I did eventually become the fastest typist I know (ideal conditions, I can type around 100wpm without cheating) but most of that came from IRC roleplaying games and a history major.
Long story short, sure, kids will pick up on typing on their own - but kids won't pick up on anything that a school does a piss-poor job of teaching.
"Michael Moore has consistently insisted that at least a significant portion of his film is satire and not meant to be taken seriously, but he won't tell us which parts or what makes them untrue."
Right. Because it's just *so difficult* to tell that George Bush, his Cabinet, and Tony Blair were never the stars of Bonanza...
It's not as incredulous as it might seem. I use a Mac for my day to day operations - so I don't get virii or trojans or worms - but I do keep a Windows laptop around - I usually only use it when I'm travelling on the road or the mac breaks down. Well, my cable modem's out for about 24 hours, so I decide to take the laptop for a spin earlier this month - connecting to my ISP through the phone line. This, of course, bypasses the router I usually keep the Windows computer on. Without exaggeration, the computer got attacked by the sasser worm within two minutes. PCCillin caught it, but not before it did some damage. I didn't think much of it, and I was back on the Mac within days and let the computer go through a reformat. A few days later, my girlfriend's computer starts having problems - basically, the guy who put it together was a whiz with the hardware but messed up on several software related issues - he didn't install service packs, he even got the partition table wrong (Over 2/3rds of the hard drive was unpartitioned - my girlfriend was using 40 gigs of a 120 gig drive.) So, we decide to reformat and install Windows XP. Now, I'm part of a university which has a licence to software, so I can just download stuff like antivirus programs and firewalls. I decide to download the antivirus first, then the spybot, then the service packs, then the hotfixes... big mistake. After waiting hours to do a complete reformat and another couple of hours tinkering with it to get it to work right, Windows XP reboots unexpectedly then keeps rebooting. I know *exactly* what this is, but the only way to fix it is a reformat - which means that we're going to get hit with the same problems again as soon as it comes online - we have to go online to download the patches... gah! Eventually, we drove back to my place, used my macintosh to download all the patches and hotfixes and whathaveyou - and we made sure to install the firewall -first-. The firewall did the trick, of course, and we were able to get it going. I had to explain to my girlfriend how to *use* the firewall, but considering the alternative, she was very pleased. But the fact that this can happen is completely insane! When the hell will Microsoft fix their operating system? Viruses have gotten progressively worse and more destructive over the past couple of years - and Longhorn is WAY too far away from release (not that I'd want all the DRM crap on it anyway) If it wasn't for the fact that games usually don't work on Linux, I'd have told my girlfriend just to switch over that day...
That only holds true if you believe that the government didn't have anything to do with 9/11.
Snak (IRC Client) Adium (AIM client) Photoshop In Design Microsoft Word (Until a native version of OO.o is produced) Garage Band Thoth (Newsreader) Roxio Toast (DiscBurner) VideoLan Client DVD Backup/DVD2OneX (For backing up DVDs. Not encrypted DVDs because that would be illegal)
Why the hell aren't we? Linux will never take back the desktop, nor will open-source, as long as this continues - in my opinion, all major open-source projects should freeze - right at this instant - all code dealing with function, and start focusing on form. Yes, form follows function, but only if you actually bother on form!
RIAA's tactics, of course, has changed whether or not people will file-share.
Hell, I quit myself and I told my friends and family to quit until the whole thing blows over (which, after the court case knocking out RIAA vs. Verizon) it seems close to doing.
However, everytime I told people this, I also told them about the false arrests, and the fact that they're suing 12 year olds from the projects, and said "If you want them to stop, stop buying CDs."
Then I point them at CDBaby.
I've bought more albums in the past 8 months since they've started this crap than I have in my entire life - and NONE of them have been from RIAA member labels.
Oh, also...
That doesn't mean that stopping P2P stops downloading. Newsgroups and IRC are still going strong, and are only bolstered by this.
The RIAA's strategy just doesn't work on a fundimental level. The only people who are going to be informed enough of the strategy to be frightened are going to be frightened enough to be pissed at the labels and not buy their stuff.
-- Funksaw
Well, first off, I disagree that without DRM, the entertainment industry is fucked. I would imagine that they'd be more fucked WITH DRM. But that's just me.
Secondly, if the entertainment industry IS going to insist on DRM, why do you have to go along with it? If you don't want DRM, you could always - big surprize - not buy DRMed products.
-- Funksaw
It's still overbroad.
I recently had to drive cross-country, using a laptop to guide me. While I never operated the laptop while the vehicle was in motion, I'm wondering if I could still be pulled over if I had to glance at the monitor for mapping while I was driving.
Thankfully, I didn't have to do that. Know why?
Because I kept my directions on my Palm Pilot. The illuminated screen meant I could read the directions in the dark - which would have been *harder* to do and more dangerous to do with a piece of paper.
-- Funksaw
Have you TRIED FOIA lately?
First off, Ashcroft has made it clear to all governmental agencies that if a FOIA request can be rejected for any reason, it will be rejected. Secondly, since the requester of the information has to PAY for the information that is being requested although there is no set amount per page, many places are getting around FOIA by charging exhorbitant fees ($125 a page, for example,) for requests.
-- Funksaw
True enough, although I tend to use a Mac for three reasons: 1) Everything at my school runs on a Mac, 2) I do alot of graphic design stuff (including comic coloring,) and 3) I haven't had a problem with the system yet.
While I do use Linux on the laptop, the problem becomes a) GIMP is good but is not only not what I'm used to but simply not good enough yet for what I need to do b) hardware doesn't 100% work (although SuSE 9 is getting there, my Belkin WiFi card doesn't work in Linux) and c) MacOSX programs are typically designed better in the UI department.
I wouldn't buy a new Mac if you're 100% comfortable with Linux either, but it's just good news for those of use that actually could use the Mac.
-- Funksaw
Konquerer is my browser of choice on Linux, and it's cool that we've got another choice for browser. Yeah, I use Safari, but as this is one step to porting most of the KDE stuff, I can't help but wonder if this is a big step towards the holy grail of Linux-to-MacOSX conversions, OpenOffice.
-- Funksaw
QUOTE: 1. They're bigger, and with HDTV they're likely to become even bigger still. DVD players in general don't play DivX content, and full DVDs are many gb each. Of course, this reason is fading, but is still strong. 2. Errors/corrupt downloads are much more annoying. I.e. you'd likely only see the movie once or twice, while you might listen to a CD track 100 times. Checking it once takes a lot more time, relatively. Still, integrity checking is improving. 3. They're "one product". Unlike albums with single tracks, you don't get a bunch of crap you don't want thrown in. 4. Typically you have only one device where you like to play DVD movies. As for music, you'd like them on your computer, home stereo, portable player, car player etc etc. Which makes it fairly OK to have just one copy in form of the original disc. 5. They're relatively low priced. If you look at it cost-efficiently, it's smarter to download mp3s/warez/gamez and buy DVDs than the other way around. 6. You really don't mind spending one minute to put in a DVD to watch several hours of entertainment, but you do mind doing the same to listen to that 3 minute melody you suddenly *had* to hear. Personally, the one thing I hate about DVDs is region coding. It's quite simply an abuse of copyright protection to enforce artifical market barriers and price gouging. Stuff like that is what can be their undoing, if they try to really enforce those (I think everywhere but the US multi-region players are common now). Kjella -The fool who knows that he's a fool is for that reason a wise man; the fool who thinks that he's wise is a fool indeed. REPLY: Indeed - Region Coding is, in my opinion, the #1 reason why people pirate - either they can't get it where they live, or they don't want the censored version. That said... One of the reasons that the Movie industry won't go the way of the music industry is that, for one, it costs less to see a movie than to hear a song. This is literally true in purchase price, usually, but it's also true in that you can *rent* a movie for $5 a pop at a rental store. The price point is low enough to where practically anyone - and anyone who can afford a computer and broadband connection - can afford it. Personally, I think that the big losers in this thing are the TV industry. They DON'T offer their products at reasonable prices. ($60 for Firefly, season one?) If you could download your favorite TV shows for $1/11 minutes (a 22 minute "half-hour" show would cost $2, a 44 minute "hour" show would cost $4 - this is more expensive than what they're charging now with DVDs, it's just that you can pay it in piecemeal...) can you imagine how much money would roll in? Advertisers would still be on board, just make sure that you don't sell your shows until they hit "rerun" territory. There's plenty of great shows out there - and "TV DVDs" are really taking off. If dial-up users can suffer through a 10 minute wait to get iTunes, broadband users can suffer through a 10 minute wait to get Angel or Firefly. -- Funksaw
Yikes. BELOW 3.5 is a problem hiring?
What if the kid just wasn't good at a particular non-job related subject?
Two things:
1) Ashcroft's been pushing out judicial authority in sentencing guidelines, and that has turned even the more moderate of judges (who tend to be, *duh* well educated and well read) against the Bush Administration.
2) Bush tried to pack the courts with neo-conservatives. How would you like it if any decision you make on unconstitutional grounds was overturned because the person in the higher (or equal) court really doesn't give a flying fleck about the constitution?
The courts, for good or ill, tend to be the most educated of the 3 branches of government. This does not mean that they're on the bleeding edge, tech wise, but they DO tend to be quick studies. And since justice moves *slow* by the time it reaches an appeals court, the technical issues DO catch up.
-- Funksaw
If you're on a dial up, keep in mind that these aren't exactly "must have" updates if you're not an AOL customer. 50 megs is alot, but let's face it, you can easily wait till 10.4. The only stuff you really NEED are the security updates.
And since you can set this thing to download overnight, unless you're so rural as to be paying toll-calls to a dialup ISP, 50 megs can be done in 1 or 2 nights, since Apple Update supports resuming (TTBOMR)
-- Funksaw
The RIAA scared me off in the first round. I wasn't a "hardcore" pirate. I had maybe 1000 mp3s, but maybe 20 were shared weren't shared, I didn't keep Kazaa running - hell, I didn't even listen to the MP3s on the the same computer I downloaded them on. Now, keep in mind, that's 1000 MP3s over 5 years - about 200 a year... less than 4 a week. But when I first heard all this, I deleted all the files, reformatted computers, the whole 9 yards.
I'll admit it, they scared me. But then I got smart and I read up on the situation.
See, they scared me. But I don't like being scared. So I stopped buying their product. I wasn't a big spender when it came to CDs, but I did buy more than a few in my day.
Any RIAA title I get now is a used CD - and I haven't even bought one of those. I bought 5 albums in the past year - all through CDBaby. I keep emailing Apple to make it easy to find the indie stuff in with the RIAA stuff by seperating it somehow, but they're not listening, so I don't buy from them.
Yeah, they got me to stop file-sharing. But they also lost a customer - permanently. And I tell everyone I know not to buy RIAA music.
As for my collection? Since I've deleted it, it's grown to 3000 MP3s over the past 9 months. It would be accurate to say that alot of them were from CD-Baby rips and other albums I own. (I'm not admitting anything, but let's just say that P2P isn't the only way to wage "civil disobedience" against the RIAA.)
What has the RIAA accomplished as far as me, little microcosm? Well, it's got me reading Slashdot more frequently, I listen to more music - buy nothing from the RIAA, and send money that I would have spent on CDs to indie musicians, the EFF, and the ACLU.
People don't like to be scared. It gets them pissed.
-- Funksaw
Some spyware programs have the capacity to prevent my idiot (only in regards to tech) father from using Internet Explorer? The same reason he ends up getting all those virii and spyware anyway?
Well, hell, I'll take three of those! 99% of his computer problems could be fixed if he just switched to Mozilla, ran his antivirus software (switching to OpenOffice instead of MSOffice might help) and stopped accepting click-throughs that pop up on webpages.
100% of his computer problems could be fixed by switching to Linux, but he'd come up with 10% new ones.
-- Funksaw
Mp3.com may have been the best well known, but since Vivendi got a hold of it, it sucked.
It just did. Between vitaminic.com, garageband.com, and others, artists now have a chance to put their stuff on websites that actually give a damn whether or not indie music brings traffic to the site.
-- Funksaw