I just used paypal to pay for them. Apparently they can't take it anymore, so next time I'll spend an extra couple of bucks and use a stored value card from one of the credit card companies.
And it doesn't really have anything to do with getting caught; it would be trivially easy for the US to track down every single person that gave these people money - all they need to do is compel the cc companies to report such use (just as they do already with many illicit businesses). It's more a matter of commerce in the new world of capitalism, and PR regarding enforcement. It's alright for Dow to pay a buck a day to exploit workers in a nation with no enforcement of environmental laws, spew toxic crap into the world with no regard for safety (remember the chlorine leak in India?), but it's not ok for us to order music from a nation with the "intellectual property" equivalent to this sort of non-protection?
and the prices are good, too. Problem is those "wav" files seem to be ripped in analog format or something, cuz their quality is very erratic.
No fucking way am I gonna pay a buck a song and ten bucks an album for downloads unless I really like the work and can get pristine quality. Thus far I would say Magnatune does it best: you can listen to anything they have (and you can actually hear it because the quality doesn't suck) and, if you want to buy it, you can set the price and download it in high quality formats. I've bought a few albums there and have actually found myself going back to buy a work again because I decided I liked the work more than I thought and I felt bad about being such a cheap bastard.
if the record companies would trust people to do the right thing and stop calling us all thieves they could make a LOT more money. If I can buy a used CD for five bucks, rip it and get the quality I want, why the fuck would I pay twice that for the download? Magnatune gets it... the others don't.
Modders have also been around for ages - but you're not talking about homebrewing. Hit the audio forums, read old issues of The Audio Amateur and see the modders that came before ye.
I think casemodding could be cool, but most of them I find seriously boring. Whoopee, we take a square case and add windows and lights! The mini-ITX stuff i find similarly drab with very few exceptions. The one where the guy made an anime girlfriend is cool but not because it's a computer, just because it's a good DIY if you want to learn to sculpt with plastic.
When I was sixteen I was expelled from school because I had skipped so much they told me not to come back. I went to RETS (electronic vo-tech) for a while because I thought I could get some accreditation. I had to spend hours in the library every day so to occupy my time I wire wrapped a 6502 based computer on four vector cards. A few years later I modded my VIC20 into a square box, detached keyboard (six foot ribbon cable from radio shack!) and had a general ball with both, but in the end they were fairly useless because it was "computing for computing's sake." Look what you can do now - take an old (useless, free) PC, attach some motors on the parallel port and make a milling machine, or a motor for your telescope, or a large scale printer that will let you do CNC graffiti on the side of a building - and just about anything else you can imagine... using materials that can often be found on the side of the road.
I like to work with tube stuff too - there's no reason you can't still do ALL this stuff. You also can't trivialize what DIYers can do today with the raw materials at our disposal.
IBM supports linux on its thinkpads. Motorola (who said it was getting out of the modem game) offers linux drivers for its modems, and I know from experience they work OOTB (and they don't cost more than the modem itself, unlike "linuxant.")
If you want to talk laptops: it takes at least three pieces of proprietary software (windows, pgp, bestcrypt) to put together a reasonably secure laptop, and it takes several hours to install all this. I can put mandrake on a laptop, configure the (encrypted) user and data partitions from single user mode, and have it all working before you can even get through the windows installer.
Vendor support means little - once you have it working, it works. Doesn't matter where those drivers come from, what matters is the system is robust and easily serviced WITHOUT having to return it to the vendor.
I cannot tell you how many people I've talked with who, at some point in their past, had been on the phone with Microsoft support for HOURS working to undo damage caused by that system's vulnerabilities. The funny thing is these folks have always said how great MS tech support was because they "stayed with them." They had them doing all this geeky command line shit for three or four hours when they MORE easily could have just reinstalled XP to another folder, run a virus cleaner, then reinstalled again. But no... keep them busy, spin a bunch of bullshit and make it look really, really hard, recite enough incantations, and these simple-minded dolts will believe you're the god of hellfire.
Certified. He hangs about in usenet forums like "alternative architecture" and "alternative energy" and espouses some seriously stupid ideas. It's like he's gone from "you can DIY" to "that won't work at all." Very negative, and very weird.
Hey buddy.. how can you mention cnc without mentioning this one? I mean, turbocnc is alright and all, but it IS still "shareware" and, as such, not completely Free with the big F.
And if you're gonna talk diy cnc, don't forget the most obvious one: ebay. Lots of bargains to be had for the careful shopper - just know your price and stick to it.
What are you talking about? You sound as if the US isn't already well at the top of the heap. And, as the last years have proven, when we don't get our way we have the might to just go ahead and do whatever the hell we damn well please anyway - just like Russia did in Aghanistan, just like China will do the second Singapore gets too cocky.
Quite frankly, given the choices now available I'm wondering if I shouldn't just throw my vote to parasite jr. After all, if he truly does have diminished capacity to lead in the world because he so fucked up the last four years, keeping him in office might help knock the US down a few more pegs. And, more than anything, given our "response to 911" and the direction we've headed since, this country needs some serious fucking humbling.
get the actors together in the theater and run the film privately
record their parody
sell the CD set with instructions on how to use it.
If anything, this would help INCREASE the number of star wars rentals and sales to home video, which you-know-who could hardly object to. And, since the work is completely original in its released context, the theater company has great protection AND a nice whallop of milkable publicity.
I cancelled mine as well. when I was in the big city I had cable, after I got fed up with thta crap I got directv. Once I realized I was spending about $100 a month just to watch tv, I dropped that as well and got all my content from newsgroups. When I wanted MTV I went online to any of the (then) multitude of streaming sites and got content almost as crisp (if it could be called that) as the crap directv signal.
Once I went back to the country and had witrhdrawals I ordered sat again - until I realized I was now spending even more than $100 a month to watch tv. Now I just watch a couple of reality shows (aain, if they coud be called that) and the few shows I actually care about (like west wing, joan of arcadia, enterpise) I download of fthe internet - the quality is better than I can get OTA locally and WAY better than anything I ever saw when I had directv.
But beyond that, most of this is a nonissue. Why? Because you can still get "degraded" 720x480 content even after the BC flag goes in. Now, how many of you ive in an area where the local broadcaster is actually USING HD? We have two digital stations here and both of them simply used the opportunity to cram in more content - one adopting UPN and a weather channel, the other the PBS affiliate using the extra bandwidth for distance learning projects and specialized content. Broadcast flag or no, Dan Rather is still gonna be in 720x480 rez.. so what? That's DVD quality, which is fine by me.
All you folks bitching about not having access to unprotected content... well, there's a simple solution to that: produce some and get it on the air. When you do, make sure it's in the broadcast contract the presentation is to be unprotected.
It's little different than complaining about online radio stations not being able to carry madonna and britney: if you want an online station, pick up the indies who DON'T have sharecropper deals with hollywood - but shut the fuck up - and stop complaining about how the big boys won't let you play in their he-man club.
I don't get all the folks here who say things like "this is evil" or "google sold out." ANY corporation has to live by the rules of the nation where it's doing business, and to wish it were any other way is simply to wish for a nation to (even FURTHER) give up its freedom to corporate tyranny.
fact is, no one said "yahoo is free" or "google is free" or any one site could ever do that - the idea is "the internet is free." If someone in china wants news sites that are not censored, they are going to have to learn how to deal with proxies (just as someone in the US might if they want certain sites banned in the US for similar reasons). If you want to be informed it's your responsibility - not google's - to learn, and to devise the means to do so. All altruism would get google is banishment from china completely - which ultimately serves no one. Just be glad there even is a service like google, and a means to work around the localized defects.
you should say "they have no right" (meaning yoko and son) in the same breath as the white album.
You'll never win this battle with me as I know full well what copyright is all about and, if you are a member and can hit the archives, you'll see we may well agree. But on this issue, especially given your ill researched example, you're just plain wrong.
Have you even heard the white album? Do you know anything at all about the beatles? If you did, you'd certainly know yoko was there - and her contribution, for better or worse, is "on record."
What's most hilarious is you are argung with me after I was the one who pointed out why this law was ruled down. Are you paying attention at all? Does the collective IQ drop on the weekends around here or something?
How the fuck did that nonsense get modded "insightful?" Not only is it a bitch to read, it's also full of utter cluelessness. When I die I no longer can burden the cellphone company - dead men don't make phone calls, ergo no need for the service (but if I leave an outstanding bill, don't think for a minute the phone company won't bind my estate for the payoff). And dead factory workers generally cannot perform proper welds and most certainly cannot be held libel for any work they may be able to perform post mortem, so again this "point" of yours is entirely nonexistent.
And copyright terms, while arguably well overextended, are still limited - so those paragraphs you wasted on that pomposity are likewise utterly moot.
So far as Lennon.. I suggest you do some research. So far as mechanical rights, Apple still controls most of the beatles recorded catalog, and... well, go ask Steve Jobs who runs that show and if the remaining beatles have any stake those recordings and Apple Corps... even if the masters are still owned by one of those big, evil, corporations.
None of that is relevant to the topic. Artists dead and gone aren't giving concerts today.
Wow, you really are clueless, aren't you?
The point is entirely relevant. Look up "precedent" at harvard law or something. While you're at it look up "overly broad" - you'll find lots of those entries if you just look up "Larry Flynt."
The original article was fairly correct, but this rerun is not only a dupe, it's a dupe of the worse kind - a troll. The article really reads nothing at all like this headline, it seems to have gained a great deal since the first time through.
The judge did NOT say "copyright law illegal" he said a law prohibiting the sale of live recorded works - bottlegs - recordings that technically HAVE no "real" copyright because they were not registered by the record companies that may have the artists under contract.
Somehow, in the last three hours, this has turned into "copyright law illegal." Maybe Timothy is taking journalism lessons from Dan "I'd Rather I hadn't done that."
And BTW, copyright law was never intended for that use you so obtusely outlined. If you keep a journal and drop dead, and I find it long after your death and decide to publish it, your estate is still going to have to rely on copyright law to prevent me from doing so... and if it's past the enforcement term, you're SOL. You may never have wanted your diary published, you may have said some incriminating things that would hurt your descendants - tough.
Same goes for live recordings. Until those ridiculous rulings in the paranoid 80s when the press was finding pedophiles in every daycare center, this even applied to stuff like child porn - essentially anything that has been recorded, published or otherwise (thanks to that other ruling that said "it's covered from the second you create it, no registration needed") is protected by copyright law. That means, once copyright has expired, your estate is gonna have to come up with something else to prevent publication of that diary I found.
You cannot have "rights" end with the death of an author, since the "author" might be killed in a plane crash next week - well before the people he licensed those rights to have the opportunity to recoup. I know that's a dirty word, but the fact is rights that cannot be traded have no value, and some rights are what gives artists value. You cannot make them die with the author, since those rights would then have substantially less value (imagine if his rights to the white Album died the day Lennon was shot - all that money from the inevitable "death windfall" made by the remaining beatles and the record companies and nothing at all to his widow and son? No Justice there.)
The constitution clearly spells out the formla - that those rights are to be a limited time, and they be exclusive - meaning I can license my work to you and not your competitor, meaning I have value doubly because you can be shielded from RICO type laws while signing me to an "exclusive contract." Without this exlcusive right to license, artists and creators of all flavors - even programmers who work under contract - would have even less protection from corporate exploitation.
don't get to have "wishes." And copyright was never intended to serve as a perpeptual right to not be published anymore than they were intended as a right to perpeptual control over publication. Consider artists that have been dead for years - should they all end up like zappa or hendrix, "owned" in perpetuity by either money grubbing publication estates or estates that refuse to allow merest mention fo their work? Consider the case of Anais Nin, who wrote her entire life - from the time she was nine until she died well over fifty years later. Should we NEVER be allowed access to any of that work? What about people like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson? Should their estates be allowed to lock away any rights to quote their words, in whole or in part, in perpetuity?
Thi isn't just about what artists want. There are numerous precedents that could be set by a law granting perpeptual rights, and few (if any) outweigh the public's right to information in a free society.
If you look at a band like garbage - a great recorded band that a lot of people collect (or used to) live, I would agree. Shirley usually sounded like shit live, but she was easy on the eyes so I guess people like to think of that when they listen.
But LOTS of bands are awesome live, tired or not. Then there are those greats like SRV or Lightnin Hopkins or Myles Davis you'll never, ever get to see live unless it's a recording - so what do you do? These artists were great live and it would be a trajedy to lose access to those recordings - authorized or not.
this ain't "real" -- not even close, actually, because it's so overdone. But it IS close enough to make for great special effects if they would make use of it. Why doesn't someone make one of these ala a "sky captain" type feature? Throw in plenty of "analog noise" and it would all look much more convincing.
Actually, your points are incongruous when directed toward thew question asked - because, when people get shot, it's usually by guns. And when people die in car accidents, it's usually because they were in cars.
Many surveys of college students have shown as many as 30% of incoming freshman admit having been molested in some fashion - raped, touched inappropriately, or being exposed to someone's genitals or pornography in an overt fashion by someone who was in a position of responsibility over them.
Thirty percent.
Keep in mind most of these reported surveys (google'em, many are online) were taken well before the internet became what it is. and most of these people were accosted in their own homes by relatives or friends of the family.
This is the truth no one dare speak in public. It's not the strangers parents have to worry about - more often it's their own spouse, the babysitter, or uncle Frank or aunt Sally.
they are going to get away with using the blacklist? There are already thousands (if not millions) of units in the field (Pioneer, for one, uses that TI chip) and "blacklisting" either Pioneer or TI will result, in effect, the DTLA functionally destroying those devices.
I specifically mentioned source devices for a reason. But since you did mention it I really don't believe that "blacklist" is going to survive past the class action suit that will arise from the first time they use it.
1) You are thinking like a geek way too much. Why the hell whould I worry about what folder something goes into? The way software is installed on linux parts of an app go into several different folders anyway.
If you want to make it easy to install software, make a control panel app with some sanity that allows easy selection of all available software. With the exception of having four separate buttons and stupid nagscreen on each ("you just said you want to - install, remove, manage - software... is it ok if we do that now?") mandrake is pretty close to doing this. But you still have to set it up for the package repository, and the search capabilities suck. Both these issues could be fully addressed by someone wiling to create and maintain a proper website dedicated to the task and/or create a better installation panel. But it's already so very close as to be a non issue: how often do you launch software by drilling down to it's folder? I don't ever - if it's installed it's probably on my path, so I just type the name from a command line or the "Run..." box.
2) I recently setup a friend's computer to run mdk10. She's a 40 year old mom of a teenager who spends most of her time online in mud-type forums and playing games, and she got her first system MAYBE ten years ago. The one I was working on is an HP she bought at wal-mart and it's connected to an h-p printer/scanner/copier gizmo she also bought at wal-mart. I ran the mandrake install wizard, and when it was finished I showed her the basics of using her new linux system by scanning a picture of her daughter using the gimp, retouching it to get rid of the scratches, and printing it. The only thing that didn't work was the POS lucent winmodem, which I resolved by setting her up with a new Motorola winmodem that has (proper) linux driver support from motorola.
Lack of ability to do this universally is not a failure of linux - it's fucking amazing it even works as well as it does when you consider nearly every one of those drivers came from someone's individual dedication, not some corporate monkey's need for a weekly paycheck (although that noble volunteer may well be a corporate monkey by day). If you want better linux support for peripherals, get onto the folks at staples and tell them you need shit that works with linux. And when you find something supported by the manufacturer, make sure they know why you bought their product.
Of course, that all depends on no one being able to get 1394 chips that have this encryption. Fact is, there are already plenty of them on the market. and they have serial interfaces just like D/A convertors (how do you think those 169 folks add 1394 interfaces to set top boxes?).
this is the giant hole I wrote about a year ago, and thus far I see no one addressing it. I suppose the industry expects no one will offer PCI cards for sale that have, say, a TI 1394 interface chip on it - but given the NWO and the fact most of the rest of the world doesn't have any law against it, I expect this "security" will be moot from the day it begins. Worse case is you end up sending your source device to a tweaker who will just disable the encryption either in firmware or by replacing the 1394 chip with a pin-compatible device that lacks the encryption "feature."
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And it doesn't really have anything to do with getting caught; it would be trivially easy for the US to track down every single person that gave these people money - all they need to do is compel the cc companies to report such use (just as they do already with many illicit businesses). It's more a matter of commerce in the new world of capitalism, and PR regarding enforcement. It's alright for Dow to pay a buck a day to exploit workers in a nation with no enforcement of environmental laws, spew toxic crap into the world with no regard for safety (remember the chlorine leak in India?), but it's not ok for us to order music from a nation with the "intellectual property" equivalent to this sort of non-protection?
I don't think so.
No fucking way am I gonna pay a buck a song and ten bucks an album for downloads unless I really like the work and can get pristine quality. Thus far I would say Magnatune does it best: you can listen to anything they have (and you can actually hear it because the quality doesn't suck) and, if you want to buy it, you can set the price and download it in high quality formats. I've bought a few albums there and have actually found myself going back to buy a work again because I decided I liked the work more than I thought and I felt bad about being such a cheap bastard.
if the record companies would trust people to do the right thing and stop calling us all thieves they could make a LOT more money. If I can buy a used CD for five bucks, rip it and get the quality I want, why the fuck would I pay twice that for the download? Magnatune gets it... the others don't.
I think casemodding could be cool, but most of them I find seriously boring. Whoopee, we take a square case and add windows and lights! The mini-ITX stuff i find similarly drab with very few exceptions. The one where the guy made an anime girlfriend is cool but not because it's a computer, just because it's a good DIY if you want to learn to sculpt with plastic.
When I was sixteen I was expelled from school because I had skipped so much they told me not to come back. I went to RETS (electronic vo-tech) for a while because I thought I could get some accreditation. I had to spend hours in the library every day so to occupy my time I wire wrapped a 6502 based computer on four vector cards. A few years later I modded my VIC20 into a square box, detached keyboard (six foot ribbon cable from radio shack!) and had a general ball with both, but in the end they were fairly useless because it was "computing for computing's sake." Look what you can do now - take an old (useless, free) PC, attach some motors on the parallel port and make a milling machine, or a motor for your telescope, or a large scale printer that will let you do CNC graffiti on the side of a building - and just about anything else you can imagine... using materials that can often be found on the side of the road.
I like to work with tube stuff too - there's no reason you can't still do ALL this stuff. You also can't trivialize what DIYers can do today with the raw materials at our disposal.
It's not worse or less... it's just different.
If you want to talk laptops: it takes at least three pieces of proprietary software (windows, pgp, bestcrypt) to put together a reasonably secure laptop, and it takes several hours to install all this. I can put mandrake on a laptop, configure the (encrypted) user and data partitions from single user mode, and have it all working before you can even get through the windows installer.
Vendor support means little - once you have it working, it works. Doesn't matter where those drivers come from, what matters is the system is robust and easily serviced WITHOUT having to return it to the vendor.
I cannot tell you how many people I've talked with who, at some point in their past, had been on the phone with Microsoft support for HOURS working to undo damage caused by that system's vulnerabilities. The funny thing is these folks have always said how great MS tech support was because they "stayed with them." They had them doing all this geeky command line shit for three or four hours when they MORE easily could have just reinstalled XP to another folder, run a virus cleaner, then reinstalled again. But no... keep them busy, spin a bunch of bullshit and make it look really, really hard, recite enough incantations, and these simple-minded dolts will believe you're the god of hellfire.
Certified. He hangs about in usenet forums like "alternative architecture" and "alternative energy" and espouses some seriously stupid ideas. It's like he's gone from "you can DIY" to "that won't work at all." Very negative, and very weird.
And if you're gonna talk diy cnc, don't forget the most obvious one: ebay. Lots of bargains to be had for the careful shopper - just know your price and stick to it.
Instantaneous mouse response (except for when it sticks due to the swapping).
Quite frankly, given the choices now available I'm wondering if I shouldn't just throw my vote to parasite jr. After all, if he truly does have diminished capacity to lead in the world because he so fucked up the last four years, keeping him in office might help knock the US down a few more pegs. And, more than anything, given our "response to 911" and the direction we've headed since, this country needs some serious fucking humbling.
get the actors together in the theater and run the film privately
record their parody
sell the CD set with instructions on how to use it.
If anything, this would help INCREASE the number of star wars rentals and sales to home video, which you-know-who could hardly object to. And, since the work is completely original in its released context, the theater company has great protection AND a nice whallop of milkable publicity.
Man, it just gets better with every post from you. Did yer momma have any kids that grew up?
Once I went back to the country and had witrhdrawals I ordered sat again - until I realized I was now spending even more than $100 a month to watch tv. Now I just watch a couple of reality shows (aain, if they coud be called that) and the few shows I actually care about (like west wing, joan of arcadia, enterpise) I download of fthe internet - the quality is better than I can get OTA locally and WAY better than anything I ever saw when I had directv.
But beyond that, most of this is a nonissue. Why? Because you can still get "degraded" 720x480 content even after the BC flag goes in. Now, how many of you ive in an area where the local broadcaster is actually USING HD? We have two digital stations here and both of them simply used the opportunity to cram in more content - one adopting UPN and a weather channel, the other the PBS affiliate using the extra bandwidth for distance learning projects and specialized content. Broadcast flag or no, Dan Rather is still gonna be in 720x480 rez.. so what? That's DVD quality, which is fine by me.
All you folks bitching about not having access to unprotected content... well, there's a simple solution to that: produce some and get it on the air. When you do, make sure it's in the broadcast contract the presentation is to be unprotected.
It's little different than complaining about online radio stations not being able to carry madonna and britney: if you want an online station, pick up the indies who DON'T have sharecropper deals with hollywood - but shut the fuck up - and stop complaining about how the big boys won't let you play in their he-man club.
fact is, no one said "yahoo is free" or "google is free" or any one site could ever do that - the idea is "the internet is free." If someone in china wants news sites that are not censored, they are going to have to learn how to deal with proxies (just as someone in the US might if they want certain sites banned in the US for similar reasons). If you want to be informed it's your responsibility - not google's - to learn, and to devise the means to do so. All altruism would get google is banishment from china completely - which ultimately serves no one. Just be glad there even is a service like google, and a means to work around the localized defects.
Wow, thanks for redefining irony.
You'll never win this battle with me as I know full well what copyright is all about and, if you are a member and can hit the archives, you'll see we may well agree. But on this issue, especially given your ill researched example, you're just plain wrong.
Have you even heard the white album? Do you know anything at all about the beatles? If you did, you'd certainly know yoko was there - and her contribution, for better or worse, is "on record."
What's most hilarious is you are argung with me after I was the one who pointed out why this law was ruled down. Are you paying attention at all? Does the collective IQ drop on the weekends around here or something?
And copyright terms, while arguably well overextended, are still limited - so those paragraphs you wasted on that pomposity are likewise utterly moot.
So far as Lennon.. I suggest you do some research. So far as mechanical rights, Apple still controls most of the beatles recorded catalog, and... well, go ask Steve Jobs who runs that show and if the remaining beatles have any stake those recordings and Apple Corps... even if the masters are still owned by one of those big, evil, corporations.
Wow, you really are clueless, aren't you?
The point is entirely relevant. Look up "precedent" at harvard law or something. While you're at it look up "overly broad" - you'll find lots of those entries if you just look up "Larry Flynt."
The judge did NOT say "copyright law illegal" he said a law prohibiting the sale of live recorded works - bottlegs - recordings that technically HAVE no "real" copyright because they were not registered by the record companies that may have the artists under contract.
Somehow, in the last three hours, this has turned into "copyright law illegal." Maybe Timothy is taking journalism lessons from Dan "I'd Rather I hadn't done that."
And BTW, copyright law was never intended for that use you so obtusely outlined. If you keep a journal and drop dead, and I find it long after your death and decide to publish it, your estate is still going to have to rely on copyright law to prevent me from doing so... and if it's past the enforcement term, you're SOL. You may never have wanted your diary published, you may have said some incriminating things that would hurt your descendants - tough.
Same goes for live recordings. Until those ridiculous rulings in the paranoid 80s when the press was finding pedophiles in every daycare center, this even applied to stuff like child porn - essentially anything that has been recorded, published or otherwise (thanks to that other ruling that said "it's covered from the second you create it, no registration needed") is protected by copyright law. That means, once copyright has expired, your estate is gonna have to come up with something else to prevent publication of that diary I found.
The constitution clearly spells out the formla - that those rights are to be a limited time, and they be exclusive - meaning I can license my work to you and not your competitor, meaning I have value doubly because you can be shielded from RICO type laws while signing me to an "exclusive contract." Without this exlcusive right to license, artists and creators of all flavors - even programmers who work under contract - would have even less protection from corporate exploitation.
Thi isn't just about what artists want. There are numerous precedents that could be set by a law granting perpeptual rights, and few (if any) outweigh the public's right to information in a free society.
But LOTS of bands are awesome live, tired or not. Then there are those greats like SRV or Lightnin Hopkins or Myles Davis you'll never, ever get to see live unless it's a recording - so what do you do? These artists were great live and it would be a trajedy to lose access to those recordings - authorized or not.
this ain't "real" -- not even close, actually, because it's so overdone. But it IS close enough to make for great special effects if they would make use of it. Why doesn't someone make one of these ala a "sky captain" type feature? Throw in plenty of "analog noise" and it would all look much more convincing.
Many surveys of college students have shown as many as 30% of incoming freshman admit having been molested in some fashion - raped, touched inappropriately, or being exposed to someone's genitals or pornography in an overt fashion by someone who was in a position of responsibility over them.
Thirty percent. Keep in mind most of these reported surveys (google'em, many are online) were taken well before the internet became what it is. and most of these people were accosted in their own homes by relatives or friends of the family.
This is the truth no one dare speak in public. It's not the strangers parents have to worry about - more often it's their own spouse, the babysitter, or uncle Frank or aunt Sally.
I specifically mentioned source devices for a reason. But since you did mention it I really don't believe that "blacklist" is going to survive past the class action suit that will arise from the first time they use it.
If you want to make it easy to install software, make a control panel app with some sanity that allows easy selection of all available software. With the exception of having four separate buttons and stupid nagscreen on each ("you just said you want to - install, remove, manage - software... is it ok if we do that now?") mandrake is pretty close to doing this. But you still have to set it up for the package repository, and the search capabilities suck. Both these issues could be fully addressed by someone wiling to create and maintain a proper website dedicated to the task and/or create a better installation panel. But it's already so very close as to be a non issue: how often do you launch software by drilling down to it's folder? I don't ever - if it's installed it's probably on my path, so I just type the name from a command line or the "Run..." box.
2) I recently setup a friend's computer to run mdk10. She's a 40 year old mom of a teenager who spends most of her time online in mud-type forums and playing games, and she got her first system MAYBE ten years ago. The one I was working on is an HP she bought at wal-mart and it's connected to an h-p printer/scanner/copier gizmo she also bought at wal-mart. I ran the mandrake install wizard, and when it was finished I showed her the basics of using her new linux system by scanning a picture of her daughter using the gimp, retouching it to get rid of the scratches, and printing it. The only thing that didn't work was the POS lucent winmodem, which I resolved by setting her up with a new Motorola winmodem that has (proper) linux driver support from motorola.
Lack of ability to do this universally is not a failure of linux - it's fucking amazing it even works as well as it does when you consider nearly every one of those drivers came from someone's individual dedication, not some corporate monkey's need for a weekly paycheck (although that noble volunteer may well be a corporate monkey by day). If you want better linux support for peripherals, get onto the folks at staples and tell them you need shit that works with linux. And when you find something supported by the manufacturer, make sure they know why you bought their product.
this is the giant hole I wrote about a year ago, and thus far I see no one addressing it. I suppose the industry expects no one will offer PCI cards for sale that have, say, a TI 1394 interface chip on it - but given the NWO and the fact most of the rest of the world doesn't have any law against it, I expect this "security" will be moot from the day it begins. Worse case is you end up sending your source device to a tweaker who will just disable the encryption either in firmware or by replacing the 1394 chip with a pin-compatible device that lacks the encryption "feature."