To answer your question first, if only 144,000 celibate men are to be saved then this god of yours is pretty much a dick. First, no women will be saved, so he created them to be damned. Second, only those who spread the Gospel, so no murdered or 'sacrificed' (see below) children will be saved; nor will anyone born before the gospel (Adam? Moses? David?). No one who's followed the 'go forth and multiply' line, since they've defiled themselves with women. The majority of people on this planet are not descendants of the 12 tribes, so their out before they were born. By your reasoning, there's no point in trying since we're all pretty much damned already.
I am against the death penalty because one of the Ten Commandments is "thou shall not kill". Same applies for euthanasia.
So you consistently follow the 'ten commandments'? Don't forget these:
Exodus 32:18
The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.
32:20
But the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck. All the firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.
34:22
And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
34:23
Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before the LORD God, the God of Israel.
34:28
And he wrote upon the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. [In other words, the passages immediately preceding, some of which are above.]
I'm not sure, but that 32:20 sounds a lot like kill your child. This one's a little clearer:
Ex.22:29
Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.
Yeah, it's fun ignoring contradictions by either not reading for ourselves or by selective omissions of what was read.
Given all of biblical history, why would anyone with decent critical thinking skills believe that God would suddenly, at the end of history, change his (unchangeable) personality and try to trick people into accepting the mark?
You're forgetting the story of Job. You know, where god makes a bet with satan and then proceeds to torture the pious Job by killing is family, his livestock, and his crops, leveling his home, and giving him horrible diseases. The lesson being that if your life sucks, buck up. God probably just has another bet with satan, and you're the lucky one to prove him right! Some day you too will be given everything back and live to 140! As long as you keep praying! At our church! Did you notice the hat we're passing around?
I've long wondered why they are so gung-ho against the death penalty and euthanasia. I mean, wouldn't the wrongly killed be treated justly in the afterlife? And why keep the old and in-pain here suffering when if they deserve it they'd get into ye old land of honey?
Of course, it's probably because of Rev. 14.3-4:
And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
So only 144,000 celibate men are being saved, so I doubt many are in a rush to hurry things along. Of course, I may have just inadvertently turned some Slashdot readers into fundamental Christians... (Interesting aside: this and similar verses are why priests swear celibacy.)
It comes from the fact that most PR statements are reviewed by multiple people who can catch each others' mistakes. The brain thinks faster than it types and has a tendency when rereading a passage to read what it meant to say instead of what it wrote*. As such, little mistakes like repeated words are missed, and run-on sentences are recognized.
*As an example, before I click Preview I had written 'and has a tendency when rereading a passage to read what it meant to say instead of what it meant to say'. I almost didn't catch it. I can easily accept that in an answer set as long as the one given little slips like this will exist and show that it probably wasn't reviewed by another. He almost certainly reviewed himself but with how long it was it would be easy not to notice small slips.
Translation: yeah, we had a problem, but the fact that our problem could take down the whole grid isn't our fault. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty stupid excuse, but then, that's just my reading of it.
The way I read it he's actually taking responsibility for what he should. The First Energy screwed up is one issue. That their screw up produced such an blackout is a seperate issue. He's owning up to the first one, but pointing out that because of the overall grid problems anyone could have caused it, and in fact it could probably happen again in some manner.
It is a slim difference and definitely hard to nail down. As an arbitrary parallel, say 12 people leave 12 different acids out in a lab they thought would be locked overnight. During the night, some one walks in and dumps one of them down the drain messing up the entire building's plumbing. While it's easy to identify which of the 12 the acid belonged to and say 'you should have put that away', it is also true that a) if the room had in fact been locked it wouldn't have happened, and b) any one of the 12 acids could have been used.
Yes, that's a little different from the non-trimmed trees perspective, but the point remains that even if they or another company had had a legitamit, no-fault problem of the same magnatude the blackout probably would have happened.
I'm pretty certain if it's standard postage you can refuse delivery as you can any piece of mail. That's part of the point of postage & a return address - if the parcel is refused or undeliverable it will be returned. This happens to some percentage of mail daily and is incorporated into the cost up front. There's no law that you have to accept something, just because it was mailed to you. Two possible outcomes would be that AOL's mail room costs escalate, or that the Post Office recognized the higher refuse rate of their CDs and raises their costs appropriately.
As for the www.nomoreaolcds.com, I don't really see how this would ever do anything to AOL. They say they'll "make our quest across America to give them all back to their rightful owner, AOL and say 'stop doing this'." How? Dump them on their property? Littering/trespassing, and the police will be called in to deal with it. By their dates/counts, they won't even do that until 2009 - by then we'll be receiving the full downloads in email instead.
The title of his address Tuesday night to the Computer Digital Expo at Mandalay Bay was: "There's No Free Lunch -- or Free Linux."
Little known fact: Darl's address was originally scheduled for the late morning, but was moved when they realized they didn't want to give everyone a free lunch.
Somehow SCO's UNIX is Julius Caesar, Linux was the conspirators, and he (Darl) is Antony:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Hate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
- Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene i
Or he's just watched Star Trek VI too many times, if you'd rather a nerdy reference. He's certainly wreaking Havoc, in any case.
yet I seem to get MORE of those 1024 free AOL hours CD's now than ever before
Ever notice there's a return address? Slap a label over your address that says 'return to sender' and drop it off in a mailbox. Imagine their mailroom problems if just 10% were returned. Usually junk mail's not worth the effort since it can just be tossed in the recycling bin, but why should my landfill fill up with these CDs and their cases? Send them back and let AOL deal with it.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying he used code used in iTunes Music Store and released the result as an independant shareware product? If that's true he could be charged with theft of trade secrets - about the only thing that would protect him is if it was his idea, but even then if he used it in an Apple product he can't turn around and use it in his own product. He'd have been in even more trouble if he'd released the source code directly.
While for obvious reasons Apple would have liked to keep this quiet, there's as little information to show they were wrong as there is to show that they were right. There's a fair chance he used Apple-given computers to develop this, or that he used 'trade secrets' or information he learned while working at Apple, and that the dispute amounted to them pointing this out and him saying 'What are you talking about?'
Don't get me wrong - I hate the thought that what I work on on my own time would get claimed. But we really have no way of knowing for certain that the developer was on the right side of the law.
I'll see your commercial and raise you a Leno bit.
To quote:
Randal: It's times like this it occurs to me that we were lied to
by "The Jetsons".
...
Dante: Yeah, well most of us rational thinkers weren't banking on a
cartoon to offer us a viable glimpse into the future of technological
development.
"Native Americans" is a myth. There were dozens of primitive tribes that often battled with each other when the first Europeans arrived. If the Europeans had taken another century to get here, more than likely the stronger groups would have grown enough to destroy the smaller ones. The Europeans acted no differently to them then they had to any group that had met before or after. (For example, circa 1600 B.C.E. when they arrived with their chariots in Babylon.) Some groups were friendly and some weren't on both sides. It wasn't until all of the native groups were all together in suffering that they put aside their differences to try to guilt their oppressors into making concessions.
As for the Apache specifically, they were a warrior tribe. Whether they could have come to terms with the Spaniards is now irrelevant. They fought with the Spaniards and the Comanche over territory and food, and the United States government acquired the fight when they acquired New Mexico. At that point negotiation may or may not have been possible - this page doesn't say if it was attempted and it took long enough to find this. In the end the military could either defeat them or be defeated, and the end was unavoidable.
The same thing happened repeatedly throughout history. The Goths, the ancient greeks, ancient Israel, all were harrassed and wiped out to varying degrees by other cultures. The "Native Americans" were not all full of greatness, and there are definitely groups that were treated shamefully. But there has hardly been a century in human history that doesn't have one (or usually more) group that was treated shamefully. To continue to browbeat others who weren't involved is selfish and self defeating. Millions of people have come to the U.S.A. to escape oppression, not to be accused of it.
This is a known issue with Music Match, though the cause is debatable. 1) Having two handlers watching for the iPod causes irreconcilable problems, so iTunes disables what would conflict out of altruism. 2) They didn't notice that this happened. 3) This didn't need to happen, but they wanted it to.
Personally, I think 1) is most likely, since they require running code to watch for on iPod to be plugged in and then launch the frontend and connect to it. The obvious followup question would be 'Why not give an option to switch which is running?' The nice answer to that is they didn't have time develop a method the worked reliably and was easy to use. The likely answer is that they thought, logically (in their view), if you want to use iTunes to buy music, it only comes locked-AAC, so if you have an iPod you have to use iTunes. There's also the Keeping it Simple factor. Yes, power users would probably want to use what they've been using, but since they intend for people to get hooked on iTunes and then buy the iPod their reasoning is valid. I haven't seen anything but I'm guessing iTunes is replacing MusicMatch in shipping iPods for Windows.
What's fishy? They sold a product labeled either for Windows or for Mac. Then they produced a tool for their line of computers that would convert the Windows version to a Mac version. Yes, that's a bonus for people who decide to move to the Mac platform. Why should they waste resources on people who want to move away? That's not conspiracy, that's good business sense. Besides, are you a systems engineer who developed HFS+ and knows NTFS or whatever the Windows version uses? How do you know if it's even possible to go the other way without data loss?
And from another point of view, a number of companies sell software packages for either Windows, Mac, or Linux, or even PS2 or Xbox if we're talking games. How many release a free utility that lets you use the same product on different systems? You want Madden for 3 systems, you'll have to pay for Madden for 3 systems.
Besides which, if you connect the computers together (don't all modern have ethernet ports?) you can move the music manually before you reformat, since it's all on the hard drive first anyway. So you get a new computer, copy over your music (which you'd probably want to do anyway to listen at the computer without the iPod), reset the iPod, and reload it. Gee, maybe that is a horrible conspiracy after all.
3 days is arbitrary. The point is once all of your CDs are on any mp3 player, than you no longer have to pre-choose what you'll want to listen to. Especially if your CDs only have 2-4 songs max each that you actually like.
Note that I'm using the general "you". You, personally, may have hundreds of CDs of which you like every song and can always choose before an 8 eight hour road trip exactly what you'll feel like listening to. But mp3 players are great for people who have CDs they hardly ever use since they don't feel like hauling it around just for a song or two.
And yes, we could mix and burn new CD collections of the singles we like, but then we have to invest the time in ripping and burning and thinking about making sensible mixes. With my iPod I just grab a dozen CDs at a time, pop them in the computer, uncheck the songs I don't like and click Import. After a couple sessions of this I plug the iPod in and in under 2 minutes it downloads however many hundreds of songs I've ripped. Set it to all songs on random and boom - songs I haven't heard in years rotating through with no further effort.
This is especially good for yard-work. Nothing passes the time like AC/DC going to Johnny Cash then the Sex Pistols followed by Billy Joel and next Run D.M.C. Throw in the Beatles, Cinderella, Cake and the Pogues and that raking just flies by.
About the only thing that can be laid on Apple's feet is that iTunes should refuse to attempt to connect to the iPod in question. Nothing reported suggests that the iPod doesn't still work with the Mac, which is all it was sold to do.
In fact it specifically says do NOT use it with Windows. XPlay is an unsupported hack, so as far as Apple is concerned the iPod in question never worked with Windows, so the fact that it still doesn't now really isn't an issue.
I often seen it posted about how the stockholders can/should react for fraud/deciept/whatever. But can normal employees sue the actual executives in civil court in some manner? No matter how this plays out, won't developers with 'SCO' on their resumes essentially be tainted, and possibly avoided by all other Unix/Linux based companies?
Just a thought. Maybe they should unionize and strike - that could certainly throw a wrench into things.
Let's say the RIAA bulks at Walmart's demands. What are they going to do? Remove all music from their stores? Who cares? There are dozens of other places to buy music, from stores and online.
The RIAA has no real incentive to give them much of a better deal than they give anyone else, as far as I can see. They already have half a dozen online stores essentially giving them money for nothing. If they give Walmart an obviously better deal the rest will want it too.
Walmart has power - if you want your toys sold there, you have to give in. If you want your frozen pizzas sold there, you have to give in. But if you are the only source of something you have just as much, if not more, power.
I'd never really watched Dr. Who before, but I enjoyed this - probably because of Professor Chronotis and good ol' Adam's wit. I'll watch the newer ones when I get a chance, but I figured I'd point this out for those the Adam's fans that didn't see the link on the bbc page.
(There's also another 6 episodes called 'Real Time', talking about the return of Cyber Men. Probably an inside Dr. Who thing - if you've never seen Dr. Who but are interested and are a Douglas Adam's fan his series is probably the best introduction.)
Objectively, they want to know what SCO told them that makes them think the case is valid and SCO is a wise investment. Since SCO hasn't presented any real evidence in court or public, there are two possibilities: 1) SCO has evidence that the investment firms have seen but also not released, and this is a way for IBM to see it. 2) There is no evidence for the case, but other shady information that convinced Baystar and others to rate them well. IBM could use either of these in their cases, but would probably drop off their findings with the SEC or someone to follow up on.
Or 3), there is no real evidence or shady dealings, just an amazing spin job that investment firms bought. While that wouldn't directly help IBM, it probably wouldn't look good for the investment firms in the long run.
Do not start a land war in Asia, do not enter a paper war with IBM. Sheesh!
Or: SCO: Don't get involved in a lawsuit with SCO, when intellectual property is on line! Aha-ha-ha-ha! Aha-ha-h- [CLUNK]
The Press: And to think, all that time it was SCO with the infringing code.
IBM: They both had the same code. I built up an immunity to lawsuits over it by following the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
To answer your question first, if only 144,000 celibate men are to be saved then this god of yours is pretty much a dick. First, no women will be saved, so he created them to be damned. Second, only those who spread the Gospel, so no murdered or 'sacrificed' (see below) children will be saved; nor will anyone born before the gospel (Adam? Moses? David?). No one who's followed the 'go forth and multiply' line, since they've defiled themselves with women. The majority of people on this planet are not descendants of the 12 tribes, so their out before they were born. By your reasoning, there's no point in trying since we're all pretty much damned already.
I am against the death penalty because one of the Ten Commandments is "thou shall not kill". Same applies for euthanasia.
So you consistently follow the 'ten commandments'? Don't forget these:
Exodus 32:18
The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.
32:20
But the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck. All the firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.
34:22
And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
34:23
Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before the LORD God, the God of Israel.
34:28
And he wrote upon the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. [In other words, the passages immediately preceding, some of which are above.]
I'm not sure, but that 32:20 sounds a lot like kill your child. This one's a little clearer:
Ex.22:29
Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.
Yeah, it's fun ignoring contradictions by either not reading for ourselves or by selective omissions of what was read.
Given all of biblical history, why would anyone with decent critical thinking skills believe that God would suddenly, at the end of history, change his (unchangeable) personality and try to trick people into accepting the mark?
You're forgetting the story of Job. You know, where god makes a bet with satan and then proceeds to torture the pious Job by killing is family, his livestock, and his crops, leveling his home, and giving him horrible diseases. The lesson being that if your life sucks, buck up. God probably just has another bet with satan, and you're the lucky one to prove him right! Some day you too will be given everything back and live to 140! As long as you keep praying! At our church! Did you notice the hat we're passing around?
I've long wondered why they are so gung-ho against the death penalty and euthanasia. I mean, wouldn't the wrongly killed be treated justly in the afterlife? And why keep the old and in-pain here suffering when if they deserve it they'd get into ye old land of honey?
Of course, it's probably because of Rev. 14.3-4:
And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
So only 144,000 celibate men are being saved, so I doubt many are in a rush to hurry things along. Of course, I may have just inadvertently turned some Slashdot readers into fundamental Christians... (Interesting aside: this and similar verses are why priests swear celibacy.)
It comes from the fact that most PR statements are reviewed by multiple people who can catch each others' mistakes. The brain thinks faster than it types and has a tendency when rereading a passage to read what it meant to say instead of what it wrote*. As such, little mistakes like repeated words are missed, and run-on sentences are recognized.
*As an example, before I click Preview I had written 'and has a tendency when rereading a passage to read what it meant to say instead of what it meant to say'. I almost didn't catch it. I can easily accept that in an answer set as long as the one given little slips like this will exist and show that it probably wasn't reviewed by another. He almost certainly reviewed himself but with how long it was it would be easy not to notice small slips.
Translation: yeah, we had a problem, but the fact that our problem could take down the whole grid isn't our fault. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty stupid excuse, but then, that's just my reading of it.
The way I read it he's actually taking responsibility for what he should. The First Energy screwed up is one issue. That their screw up produced such an blackout is a seperate issue. He's owning up to the first one, but pointing out that because of the overall grid problems anyone could have caused it, and in fact it could probably happen again in some manner.
It is a slim difference and definitely hard to nail down. As an arbitrary parallel, say 12 people leave 12 different acids out in a lab they thought would be locked overnight. During the night, some one walks in and dumps one of them down the drain messing up the entire building's plumbing. While it's easy to identify which of the 12 the acid belonged to and say 'you should have put that away', it is also true that a) if the room had in fact been locked it wouldn't have happened, and b) any one of the 12 acids could have been used.
Yes, that's a little different from the non-trimmed trees perspective, but the point remains that even if they or another company had had a legitamit, no-fault problem of the same magnatude the blackout probably would have happened.
I'm pretty certain if it's standard postage you can refuse delivery as you can any piece of mail. That's part of the point of postage & a return address - if the parcel is refused or undeliverable it will be returned. This happens to some percentage of mail daily and is incorporated into the cost up front. There's no law that you have to accept something, just because it was mailed to you. Two possible outcomes would be that AOL's mail room costs escalate, or that the Post Office recognized the higher refuse rate of their CDs and raises their costs appropriately.
As for the www.nomoreaolcds.com, I don't really see how this would ever do anything to AOL. They say they'll "make our quest across America to give them all back to their rightful owner, AOL and say 'stop doing this'." How? Dump them on their property? Littering/trespassing, and the police will be called in to deal with it. By their dates/counts, they won't even do that until 2009 - by then we'll be receiving the full downloads in email instead.
The title of his address Tuesday night to the Computer Digital Expo at Mandalay Bay was: "There's No Free Lunch -- or Free Linux."
Little known fact: Darl's address was originally scheduled for the late morning, but was moved when they realized they didn't want to give everyone a free lunch.
Somehow SCO's UNIX is Julius Caesar, Linux was the conspirators, and he (Darl) is Antony:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Hate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
- Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene i
Or he's just watched Star Trek VI too many times, if you'd rather a nerdy reference. He's certainly wreaking Havoc, in any case.
yet I seem to get MORE of those 1024 free AOL hours CD's now than ever before
Ever notice there's a return address? Slap a label over your address that says 'return to sender' and drop it off in a mailbox. Imagine their mailroom problems if just 10% were returned. Usually junk mail's not worth the effort since it can just be tossed in the recycling bin, but why should my landfill fill up with these CDs and their cases? Send them back and let AOL deal with it.
Yeah, but having that 'Users are Losers' sticker sure helped get me through my customer support period.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying he used code used in iTunes Music Store and released the result as an independant shareware product? If that's true he could be charged with theft of trade secrets - about the only thing that would protect him is if it was his idea, but even then if he used it in an Apple product he can't turn around and use it in his own product. He'd have been in even more trouble if he'd released the source code directly.
While for obvious reasons Apple would have liked to keep this quiet, there's as little information to show they were wrong as there is to show that they were right. There's a fair chance he used Apple-given computers to develop this, or that he used 'trade secrets' or information he learned while working at Apple, and that the dispute amounted to them pointing this out and him saying 'What are you talking about?'
Don't get me wrong - I hate the thought that what I work on on my own time would get claimed. But we really have no way of knowing for certain that the developer was on the right side of the law.
I'll see your commercial and raise you a Leno bit.
...
To quote:
Randal: It's times like this it occurs to me that we were lied to by "The Jetsons".
Dante: Yeah, well most of us rational thinkers weren't banking on a cartoon to offer us a viable glimpse into the future of technological development.
"Native Americans" is a myth. There were dozens of primitive tribes that often battled with each other when the first Europeans arrived. If the Europeans had taken another century to get here, more than likely the stronger groups would have grown enough to destroy the smaller ones. The Europeans acted no differently to them then they had to any group that had met before or after. (For example, circa 1600 B.C.E. when they arrived with their chariots in Babylon.) Some groups were friendly and some weren't on both sides. It wasn't until all of the native groups were all together in suffering that they put aside their differences to try to guilt their oppressors into making concessions.
As for the Apache specifically, they were a warrior tribe. Whether they could have come to terms with the Spaniards is now irrelevant. They fought with the Spaniards and the Comanche over territory and food, and the United States government acquired the fight when they acquired New Mexico. At that point negotiation may or may not have been possible - this page doesn't say if it was attempted and it took long enough to find this. In the end the military could either defeat them or be defeated, and the end was unavoidable.
The same thing happened repeatedly throughout history. The Goths, the ancient greeks, ancient Israel, all were harrassed and wiped out to varying degrees by other cultures. The "Native Americans" were not all full of greatness, and there are definitely groups that were treated shamefully. But there has hardly been a century in human history that doesn't have one (or usually more) group that was treated shamefully. To continue to browbeat others who weren't involved is selfish and self defeating. Millions of people have come to the U.S.A. to escape oppression, not to be accused of it.
This is a known issue with Music Match, though the cause is debatable. 1) Having two handlers watching for the iPod causes irreconcilable problems, so iTunes disables what would conflict out of altruism. 2) They didn't notice that this happened. 3) This didn't need to happen, but they wanted it to.
Personally, I think 1) is most likely, since they require running code to watch for on iPod to be plugged in and then launch the frontend and connect to it. The obvious followup question would be 'Why not give an option to switch which is running?' The nice answer to that is they didn't have time develop a method the worked reliably and was easy to use. The likely answer is that they thought, logically (in their view), if you want to use iTunes to buy music, it only comes locked-AAC, so if you have an iPod you have to use iTunes. There's also the Keeping it Simple factor. Yes, power users would probably want to use what they've been using, but since they intend for people to get hooked on iTunes and then buy the iPod their reasoning is valid. I haven't seen anything but I'm guessing iTunes is replacing MusicMatch in shipping iPods for Windows.
Really, it shouldn't matter if it's plugged up to a 'PC' or a Mac. Any 'problem' doing so is placed there artificially.
Yep. Same with the problem I'm having getting this XBox game to run on my Mac...
What's fishy? They sold a product labeled either for Windows or for Mac. Then they produced a tool for their line of computers that would convert the Windows version to a Mac version. Yes, that's a bonus for people who decide to move to the Mac platform. Why should they waste resources on people who want to move away? That's not conspiracy, that's good business sense. Besides, are you a systems engineer who developed HFS+ and knows NTFS or whatever the Windows version uses? How do you know if it's even possible to go the other way without data loss?
And from another point of view, a number of companies sell software packages for either Windows, Mac, or Linux, or even PS2 or Xbox if we're talking games. How many release a free utility that lets you use the same product on different systems? You want Madden for 3 systems, you'll have to pay for Madden for 3 systems.
Besides which, if you connect the computers together (don't all modern have ethernet ports?) you can move the music manually before you reformat, since it's all on the hard drive first anyway. So you get a new computer, copy over your music (which you'd probably want to do anyway to listen at the computer without the iPod), reset the iPod, and reload it. Gee, maybe that is a horrible conspiracy after all.
3 days is arbitrary. The point is once all of your CDs are on any mp3 player, than you no longer have to pre-choose what you'll want to listen to. Especially if your CDs only have 2-4 songs max each that you actually like.
Note that I'm using the general "you". You, personally, may have hundreds of CDs of which you like every song and can always choose before an 8 eight hour road trip exactly what you'll feel like listening to. But mp3 players are great for people who have CDs they hardly ever use since they don't feel like hauling it around just for a song or two.
And yes, we could mix and burn new CD collections of the singles we like, but then we have to invest the time in ripping and burning and thinking about making sensible mixes. With my iPod I just grab a dozen CDs at a time, pop them in the computer, uncheck the songs I don't like and click Import. After a couple sessions of this I plug the iPod in and in under 2 minutes it downloads however many hundreds of songs I've ripped. Set it to all songs on random and boom - songs I haven't heard in years rotating through with no further effort.
This is especially good for yard-work. Nothing passes the time like AC/DC going to Johnny Cash then the Sex Pistols followed by Billy Joel and next Run D.M.C. Throw in the Beatles, Cinderella, Cake and the Pogues and that raking just flies by.
Well, yeah, but the after carrying 3 days worth of CDs around for a while the chiropractor will go through that extra $380 pretty quickly.
About the only thing that can be laid on Apple's feet is that iTunes should refuse to attempt to connect to the iPod in question. Nothing reported suggests that the iPod doesn't still work with the Mac, which is all it was sold to do. In fact it specifically says do NOT use it with Windows. XPlay is an unsupported hack, so as far as Apple is concerned the iPod in question never worked with Windows, so the fact that it still doesn't now really isn't an issue.
I often seen it posted about how the stockholders can/should react for fraud/deciept/whatever. But can normal employees sue the actual executives in civil court in some manner? No matter how this plays out, won't developers with 'SCO' on their resumes essentially be tainted, and possibly avoided by all other Unix/Linux based companies?
Just a thought. Maybe they should unionize and strike - that could certainly throw a wrench into things.
Let's say the RIAA bulks at Walmart's demands. What are they going to do? Remove all music from their stores? Who cares? There are dozens of other places to buy music, from stores and online.
The RIAA has no real incentive to give them much of a better deal than they give anyone else, as far as I can see. They already have half a dozen online stores essentially giving them money for nothing. If they give Walmart an obviously better deal the rest will want it too.
Walmart has power - if you want your toys sold there, you have to give in. If you want your frozen pizzas sold there, you have to give in. But if you are the only source of something you have just as much, if not more, power.
Here - all six episodes.
I'd never really watched Dr. Who before, but I enjoyed this - probably because of Professor Chronotis and good ol' Adam's wit. I'll watch the newer ones when I get a chance, but I figured I'd point this out for those the Adam's fans that didn't see the link on the bbc page.
(There's also another 6 episodes called 'Real Time', talking about the return of Cyber Men. Probably an inside Dr. Who thing - if you've never seen Dr. Who but are interested and are a Douglas Adam's fan his series is probably the best introduction.)
Objectively, they want to know what SCO told them that makes them think the case is valid and SCO is a wise investment. Since SCO hasn't presented any real evidence in court or public, there are two possibilities: 1) SCO has evidence that the investment firms have seen but also not released, and this is a way for IBM to see it. 2) There is no evidence for the case, but other shady information that convinced Baystar and others to rate them well. IBM could use either of these in their cases, but would probably drop off their findings with the SEC or someone to follow up on.
Or 3), there is no real evidence or shady dealings, just an amazing spin job that investment firms bought. While that wouldn't directly help IBM, it probably wouldn't look good for the investment firms in the long run.
Do not start a land war in Asia, do not enter a paper war with IBM. Sheesh!
Or:
SCO: Don't get involved in a lawsuit with SCO, when intellectual property is on line! Aha-ha-ha-ha! Aha-ha-h- [CLUNK]
The Press: And to think, all that time it was SCO with the infringing code.
IBM: They both had the same code. I built up an immunity to lawsuits over it by following the GPL.