I have never heard of any "illegal music" in the sense you could go to jail just for having a copy of it or listening to it. There IS, however, plenty of "illegal porn." Someone forgot to include in the equation the percentage of people who collect, but would never buy simply because they fear going to jail if caught...
But I'm no defender of all things tux, either. All those things you mention - the cameras and ipods and all that other stuff - are third party gadgets. I don't know anyone who has a new 6MP Microsoft digital camera, or a fancy new 20GB Microsoft MP3 player, or even a cool new Microsoft handheld device. Any of these devices may or may not USE an MS operating system, but whether or not they interface well with any particular desktop is not a function of how well Microsoft supports the device - it's a function of how well the device manufacturer supports Microsoft - or any other desktop.
Quite frankly I do think Linux is getting close - but there's still no distribution I've seen that compels me to totally abandon XP or 2K. My home entertainment system uses win2k and it's one of those "just works" boxes - my greatest agony is having to open the damn case for something, and I can't recall the last time I installed new software on it (oh, wait - yeah I do: it was a few weeks ago when I plugged in a bargain bin USB digitizing tablet). I have mozilla and a dvd player and the tv tuner and it just stays like that.
But my laptop goes through constant change. Because I never have any data on it that isn't also somewhere else I feel no hesitation in trying the latest software. It's a lowly 233MHz Thinkpad 600 - it's a damn tank - and in the last several months it's had at least a half dozen different operating systems installed: RH9, Win2K, Win98, Lindows4.0, Knoppix - even an old Peanut linux. Know what it's running now? XP. Yeah, it's slow as dickens - but it's really no worse than RH9 or Lindows, even with its loaded-for-bear maximum of 288MB of RAM and 586 cpu core.
Linux has far superior program selection compared to windows. Yeah it's easy to go to zdnet and download a bunch of spyware-laden nagware that'll keep your computer teetering on the edge of sanity until the next reformat - but clicking a single button to pull up a list of all available software for your system and then clicking the "I want this button" is even easier.
Really the only problem I see with linux is it's lack of cohesiveness. It doesn't need a dozen managers, it just needs one that works. Drag and drop, cut and paste, click and run - and look good doing it. Compare it to either OSX or XP and it's still a distant third in the looks department. My little laptop looks dynamite with an XP desktop with smoothed fonts. I cannot believe after all these years of talking about "linux is almost ready for the desktop" NO ONE has fixed the goddamned fonts.
When will linux be ready for the desktop? When it has menus that don't look like shards of paper pasted from a stack of magazine clippings. Fix that and the vendors will start worrying about how their widget fits into a desktop that doesn't have a Microsoft copyright.
Shuttle (and others) sell reasonably affordable systems which SOMEONE has to open up to install drives, cpus, and peripherals.
Apple sells systems which no one has to open up, but which also preclude any meaningful competition. If I want a preconfigured shuttle system I can order one of my choosing from any of a thousand dealers, and lots of competition means I get a good value. It also means there are lots of independant dealers who have jobs trying to compete for my dollars instead of no jobs and collecting my money through the government.
Not only do those in the military get medical care, they also get housing, food, and even clothing allotments. All these things may not extend to the entire family, but many of them do. And after they leave the military they still get continuing health care and often get money for extended educations as well. The military provides for our national defense and then sees to it veterans are cared for as much as possible after they serve their time at post.
At the same time Wal-Mart pays its employees low hourly wages it also makes sure they are all considered "part time" as much as possible, thereby relieving themselves of the burden of providing them any sort of benefits whatsoever. Of course, those employees do still get healthcare coverage - the friendly bosses at wallyworld make sure their workers get complete instructions on how to apply for public assistance. So not only does wally get a nice fat piece of land at no cost, he also gets a workforce whose health is maintained by subsidies from the local taxpayers. Wallyworld provides nothing at all to our national defense or anything else - it's just a bank account getting fatter off the labor of a government subsidized workforce. It's corporatized socialism.
By what stretch are these two organizations even remotely comparable?
Ironic, ain't it? This attitude of endowment comes from industries that alledge themselves to be part of "free market capitalism." Wal-mart hands out instructions for obtaining public assistance to its own employees and demands huge tax credits to move stores into towns, fatories insist they'll be around just so long as they don't have to actually support the infrastructure they're taxing (like paying for those new roads, lights, and police to keep it all working) and entertainment companies insist they have a "right" to payment for pretty much every single "use" of anything they produce - never mind if it's even what the public wants.
"Free market" in this country sure looks an awful lot like old soviet socialism. It's no wonder they can't put a dent in "piracy" when the companies claiming to be "victims" look just as evil as Ivan and Boris that run the Ukrainian pressing plants...
It's all about defining "free." BSD code is "free" like natives in the woods - it's a resource there for you to capture and enslave however you choose. GPL code is "free" in the context of liberty - meaning it's running around the same woods with the natives, but has been endowed with "rights" that preserve its liberty.
It really is about freedom. Either you have it, or you don't... and beer has nothing to do with it.
But that's the thing, see. I do agree that it's largley because of MS that machines are so cheap and available as they are today (although I'm not saying another MS wouldn't have come along). Without a "commodity OS" we would not have "commodity systems" and would be well back from where we are today.
Look to the past to see the future: when radio first began it was completely unregulated because no one knew exactly how it even worked. Even after radio receivers had become affordable enough to enter "middle class" homes radio was still largely unregulated - until it came to the point you had neighboring transmitter stations engaging in kilowatt battles for the same frequency space because "that's where people were listening." The bands became increasingly crowded because ANYONE could rig up a transmitter and have at it.
What you and I have come to expect from the PC has been shaped by our participation in the "invention" of it. But a vast majority of users - even users who witnessed that invention process - have no ethical relationship to that community. They no more expect to have to defend their personal computers from attack in their own homes than they expect to have to defend themselves from personal attack in that same space. Even when it comes to "attack" from communications mediums like TV and radio and telephones.
THAT'S why the modern PC is still not what it needs to be. not for grandma who just wants to check her email and surf the net. If grandma wants to play games there's nothing at all wrong with being able to download free games from a website - but there absolutely SHOULD be mechanisms in place to prevent grandma's computer from requiring a repairman's attention simply because the game didn't "like" her computer. Yes, it would take a lot of clock cycles to have this kind of protection. And yes, it would impact performance. But clock cycles are ever increasingly cheap, and there's nothing to prevent grandma from learning HOW that box works and then delving deeper.
The solution IS technological. the internet is not "broken" but it still needs a way to be "fixed" at least as perceived by the majority of inexperienced home users. And it better come quick, because the lawyers and lobbyists are lining up their constituents.
You should not have to know how to build a radio just to be able to listen to music. And you should not have to know how to "install a program" and "configure user identities" just to be able to surf public spaces, correspond via email and chat, play games and watch movies and listen to music without being accosted or verbally abused in your own home.
If we don't fix it, the politicians will... or they'll bleed us to death trying.
I work in tech support too. And I've seen more than one system botch a windows update and end up having to be reinstalled from the ground up. Doesn't mean a format, but it does mean the OS was so botched in the process the ME or XP installer no longer recognizes it as a repairable version of itself. I'm one of several hundred in the building (and several thousand on the total support staff) and I see this problem twice a month, easy. Sometimes it seems to be caused by the POS Norton anti-virus software so technically it's not MS' fault - but then, whose fault is it these users are all forced to load crap like NAV on their system in the first place?
I too use a windows desktop at home, and I too have rarely become infected - and the two times it happened it was entirely my fault (once before I started worrying about keeping my machine on dialup patched, the other when I stupidly rebooted on a machine still plugged into the network fresh from a new install - took code red all of ten seconds to find me all over again).
Anyway, I use Mozilla too, and I use proxomitron, and I use an IPCop firewall - and my system has STILL been intruded upon (right before the most recent SSL flaw was made public) even with "Zone alarm" running on the windows box that was attacked. In fact, the first thing the intruder did was disable ZA and all my system logging.
XP with the XP firewall is still XP. No OS is absolutely secure, but there's simply no way I would connect a personal windows workstation directly to the internet any more. Out of necessity I'll allow my laptop to swim in that ocean, but I make sure there's NO personal info on that and I purposefully keep the HD small and the partition empty as possible so as to make for quick image reinstalls.
User education would go a loooooong way to fixing this problem. But I argue that the Windows PC system itself is flawed in regard to home computing: rather than put up "safety barriers" that can be easily overcome with a modest amount of education, the system is instead setup in "hack me" mode right out of the box. Do I need RPC services to be able to check email and surf the internet? SHOULD I need these services just to be able to do those simple things? No - then why is it enabled by default?
The list goes on from there, of course, but I do think you get the point. Giving administrative priviledges to every executable on the desktop of an admin who knows nothing at all about computers is an exercise in insanity. XP comes configured to make user accounts easy to create and use - but do they even bother to educate the user on WHY these should be used? Of course not - MS is not going to tell the user their machine is vulnerable out of the box! That would be like Ford including instructions in the owner's manual on "what to do when the steering wheel stops working" or "what to do when the brakes fail."
And how do you keep people in other countries in line? Tell their governments to work with us or we invade (er, "Liberate their people")?
Maybe we should talk to china about licensing their firewall technology. After all, it seems to be working well for them.
Historically, law rarely represents the ethics of the proletariat. And so long as we foster a society that regards pure information (vs. information services) as a tradeable commodity there is no reconciling.
Most users are too lazy and/or ignorant to even realize their computer is gradually becoming more and more "broken" because of all the shit that gets force fed to it by their surfing the web with five year old operating systems that have zero security. Even when they have brand new systems they still end up surfing the net as admin with desktop security set to "rape my peecee, please" and so every few weeks have to call someone to "fix" their computer for them. "2.5GHZ and 512MB RAM and your computer is slow? Well gee m'am, I dunno why it's like that... how long ago did you install kazaa?"
I'm establishing a wireless community network and you damn betcha it's filtered. IPCop at the door, DNS and packet filters, 80GB of localized cache and QOS assurance - no ad domains, no popups, and no p2p apps. We're a small town but there are still other ISPs available even here - if someone wants to run kazaa let'em pay $20 a month for dialup access and leave the rest of us to enjoy our fat, ad-free community. Common carrier status? Tell that nonsense to AOL and MSN...
Hey kids... uh... why do you even WANT a "tv out" on a system? I mean, I know you can buy a cheap 27" TV at Wal-mart now for like $200, but uh... why would you? You can buy a used monitor for about the same money and it has RGB inputs. Or better still stop being a cheap bastard and shell out a few hundred for a decent rear projection set large enough to be able to actually enjoy watching movies.
Getting decent video into a computer is pretty easy. And getting decent video out is as easy as hooking up a decent monitor to a PC. But no way is 450MHz "enough to do video" on any system that has access to HD programming. I have a 1.6GHz system with an ATi card and even it is hard pressed to keep up with full screen 1080i MPEG2. And you can forget it completely if you want to try compressing that to full resolution MPEG4. Hell you wouldn't even be able to play back the HD 520p stuff I encoded to HD Xvid from a digital sat rip on a 500MHz machine! Thankfully, a mobo/cpu/ram/box that CAN handle that still only costs like $350 these days, so what's it matter if a "free" 450MHz system in the closet isn't up to that task?
BTW "AC97" simply denotes a product that meets certain interface standards for PC audio. It hasn't a fucking thing to do with sound quality and there are some very good AC97 compatible sound systems out there. And no, I don't mean that crap from Creative.
...if you think about it, the latest music they play on the radio isn't necessarily good anyways. Fate will decide that.
Methinks you are another of those aging denim rockers who has confused popularity with quality. Listen to a "classic top 40" station and you'll hear plenty of old Michael Jackson; listen to a "classic rock" station and you'll get plenty of Foreigner and Journey and Kansas and Styx and Boston... all formulaic bands that sucked twenty years ago when I was a kid, and still suck today. The fact they hgave stuck in the throat of our culture like a chronic post-nasal drip doesn't make them "great." This is the very same lesson even PBS refuses to get - as exemplified by their incessant rerunning of such ancient pablum as "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "Are You Being Served?"
If you listen to classic rock and oldies, you are guaranteed the best music from that era.
I cannot recall the last time I heard Cowboys International, Wire, Martha and the Muffins, or Joy Division, or even Bampff or Carolyne Mas on a "Classic rock" station. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's true simply because it just ain't gonna happen. "Classic" in our vernacular means "popular" and none of those acts I mentioned were "popular" outside the demographic that shunned the mainstream culture of the seventies and eighties. No amount of popularity is ever going to make Bosteigner Kanjourtyx "the best music" of that era to anyone except the zombified stoners who have now become the undead-heads of the middle aged.
For the sake of argument let's refocus a bit and just consider "popular" acts of the time. If they play alice Cooper, what do they play? Elected? Billion Dollar babies? Maybe. More likely they play some later stuff from his first attempted comeback when he was doing soundtrack work and horror movie appearances. Most likely of all is they'll just play some of his new crap simply because the corporations need to move it from the record club shelves and Vinnie gets to keep too much of the money when they move his old stuff. Ever hear "Black Juju" or "Steven" on the radio?
One of the most thrilling parts of the many Heart shows I went to were when Nancy would play her extended acoustic solo intro to "Crazy on You." This later became a studio track called "Silver Wheels" on their "Bebe LeStrange" album - ever heard it on the radio? I never did in spite of the fact "Crazy on You" remains a staple of "Classic radio" to this day.
Ever see "Almost Famous?" Listen to the music Nancy Wilson wrote for that movie and tell me it doesn't sound exactly like other popular hits of the era.
"It's only me, Arthur Pee, welcoming you to WRIF - the Motor City home of the most profitable corporate rock ever recorded! And now here's Fever Dogs by that little band from Troy..."
Again, this is already proven false. A very good film camera costs upwards of $300 with interchangeable lens. A very good digital camera costs about $900 with interchangeable lens. And if you want to go to the very cheap end of the spectrum, I already covered that one.
Orders of magnitude better image quality
For whom? The experienced photographer? The person who spends all his free time playing in his home darkroom, mixing toxic chemicals and lurking in the dark? Surely you don't mean for the person who uses a thirty dollar instamatic to capture pics of the family picnic.
Orders of magnitude longer lifespan for the images
Umm.. yeah. I can copy a digital image ten thousand times over and it's the exact same image I started with. We've already lost thousands of historical and classic films to fire, water, and outright studio neglect. So long as there's a single digital copy of a work in circulation somewhere that work can be preserved.
I have zero photobooks. Even the porn mags are going out of business because no one wants to be burdened by books anymore - fragile heaps of paper that collect moisture out of thin air and fade in just a few years. A jpeg is a jpeg is a jpeg - to argue the format will somehow become "unreadable" without being able to migrate the data contained within would be an exercise in buffoonery.
Possible to use specialized films (Infra-Red, Slide, Ultra-Fine grain, very high speed, special colour saturation curves like Kodak VC or XC, etc) with no need to spend a cent on special equipment.
But spend a fortune on film itself - not to mention processing that film. It costs a fortune even to get goddamn B&W prints and developing these days - how the hell is that not "extra?"
And who the fuck needs all that crap if their goal is to preserve grandma's smile and tommy's first steps?
Batteries last for thousands of exposures vs dozens for digital.
Uhhh... batteries can be recharged. And no, I don't spend "hours" recharging them - that's what the fucking recharger is for. It takes me about ten seconds to reach in my pocket and swap in a fresh set - and that's if I'm not using the camera on an ac adapter. When I get home it takes another thirty seconds to load up the charger. nimh cells are so cheap these days it's trivial to carry an extra set or two.
Virtually no depreciation on equipment value vs 50% year for digital.
Ummm... I have an Argus camera made in the 1960's that cost a pretty good chunk of change back then. Today you can pick one up at a carport sale or on ebay for about a buck. Seems to me that qualifies as a pretty hefty depreciation. In practical terms it's very nearly infinite.
Digital
You can preview your images on a little 1.5" screen.
I can preview my images on a 15" tft screen in about ten seconds. Since this is pretty much the same technology I will be using to view them after they are "developed" (assuming I want to photoshop them) then I have convenience and accuracy that film cannot possibly match.
No cost for pictures you screw up
No cost for those I keep, either. And no cost to publish them, if that's what I'm about.
Images already in a digital format so you can transmit them without having to waste time scanning them or finishing a whole roll.
Or paying someone else to develop them - or sell me chemicals and paper so I can do it myself.
Film simply doesn't compare any more. Sure there are cases where it's desirable - but those are completely subjective measures almost entirely based in the "artsy" realm. And even then, in order to have merit, the arguments must exclude the possibility of digital being able to provide the same qualities. Given that film photography has had "an order of magnitude" more time to eveolve than digital photography, such assumptions would be precariously short sighted at best.
It's not just this sherriff. Something seems to have caused a particularly nasty case of mass hysteria in Arizona over this issue. Not only is the state sort of infamous for it's "tough stance" on "pedophiles" (ie "if you even think about touching a kid, we will hunt you down and make you wear pink undies") now it seems to have completely spiraled into the prototypical "state of fear."
Officials say the problem could be even more widespread: Some of the tens of thousands of rapists, molesters and others missing nationally could be hiding in Arizona, they say, especially because an estimated 33,500 are missing in California.
Note there's no real evidence for any of this except "lots of sex offenders are missing and Arizone is such a fantastic place to live we suspect they're all moving here."
Maybe they're onto something. After all, the numbers mentioned in this article equate to a statewide population of more than 13,000 registered sex offenders for a population of about 5.5 Million residents - about a half a percent of its population. Compare that to 3000 for the entire state of Conneticut for a population of a little over 3 Million, or less than 0.1% of its population.
Are things really so much better in Arizona that there should be five times as many registered sex offenders? Per capita, their sex offender registry is nearly double that even of California!
Must be all the sunshine and beaches they have in Arizona. Especially in Tucson. I lived there a couple of years one winter and I recall there being old people everywhere. And we all know it's those dirty old men who fiddle little kids in the park... those bastards.
Maybe they can incorporate this information into the flag or their license plates or something. It would appear Arizona is the mecca for sex offenders!
Unlike spherical aberration, coma or astigmatism, shows points as points, but the focal points do not match across the image center and periphery in image planes, so that the image is gradually bent out of shape toward the edges....
A phenomenon in which straight lines are not rendered perfectly straight in the picture.
Curvature of field can be improved but not eliminated by stopping down the lens...
Curvature of field basically describes the amount of surface curvature as defined by an image's individual chief rays.
As a result, the points making up the curvature of field and the optical energy peak will not match except when using extremely small apertures
Mkay, so maybe they don't know what they're talking about, either?
Oh, and I have no problem mentioning what I got, I just don't see how it's germane to any of this. Comparing convenience to "mojo" (ie cd to lp, film to digital) is always pointless. But here ya go anyway.
A $30 cheapo camera without lens distortion? Well, I have to ask which model this might be, exactly? Perhaps a twenty year old Nikon picked up at a garage sale would have such a trait, but you're not going to find a new $30 camera that doesn't have a cheap shit fixed plastic lens, which means you still get the distortion.
Oh, and by the way, the disortion is simply a "fisheye" effect which can also be a desirable effect depending on the theme. It's not necessarily a sign of bad manufacturing, it's simple a limitation caused by not being able to change and select lenses and apretures. So unless you're asserting you can pick up a camera body and a few lenses for 30 bucks you're in the same boat either way.
So far as bad color, etc etc etc... how is this WORSE than not having the shot at all? I can touch up a poor picture in photoshop, but I can't touch up a picture I don't have.
The best argument you can make is that for $110 I could pick up a relatively cheap used 35mm P&S... but then we're right back to having to carry film, develop film, scan the pictures I want, wait hours to days before I even know if I have a shot...
But for most people film is still better. A typical person who shoots 5-10 rolls a year on vacations and at parties will find that digital has a much higher per-shot cost over the lifetime of the camera; a $300 digital gives comperable features and feel to a $30 P&S film camera. At 5-10 rolls/year you will never recoup those costs over the life of the camera.
What? I just paid less than $80 for a 3MP digital camera. It has 3x digital zoom, flash, autofocus and even a macro setting that actually works. It also has considerable lens distortion at the edges of the frame, leaving absolutely no straight surfaces if you should photograph, for example, somone standing in a doorway.
But it was 80 bucks. And it takes better pictures than I've ever seen out of one of those $30 cheapos you're raving about. And even after I throw in another $30 for a 128MB flash card it's STILL just a tad over a hundred bucks - and I can keep the flash card long after the camera has fallen prey to water or sand or falls from a great height or whatever ends up claiming its mortality.
So, for $110 I got a 3MP camera that will let me take pictures of "family events" pretty much all day and when I get home it costs me NOTHING to share those pictures with the others who were there. I NEVER have to worry about a "dead" shot taking up space on my film roll, so I never have to worry about getting home and finding out three days later that final shot of grandma didn't turn out.
How can you possibly argue film is cheaper than that? The whole rig cost only a couple of days pay even for someone on minimum wage earnings, and from there on out it's free, free, free. If family members want prints they can buy their own ink and paper... or they can send'em to the Rite-Aid, where a 4x6 print from a digital source costs all of 29 cents.
The point to focus on is not that one name is almost the same as some other corporate name, it's that one person in Finland or Sweden or Shitholistan thinks that they can change the behavior of millions of people. Then they believe that they have the authority to enforce this because they have some form of legal position in their own country.
Like those arrogant, fundamentalist-endowed leaders in that other country (starts with a U, and it ain't Ukraine) who seem to think they have the right to do exactly this all over the world... and are presently doing it.
This is like some fundamentalist judge in Iran ordering the entire alchool industry in the world to shut down because it is forbidden by the Koran, and actually being taken seriously in areas outside the range of his private army.
Hmmm... like some other puritanical government teetering on the edge of tyranny, bullying sovereign governments all over the world into conducting raids and arresting their own citizens even when their own local laws allow their citizens the exact behavior they are being persecuted for...
Why do so many keep parroting this nonsense about video eating RAM? I have a system with 384MB of RAM and it does just fine. In fact, it's not appreciably faster than it was with 128MB of RAM at doing just video. No machine will be unless you are one of those who insists Adobe makes the only competent video editor and you need all that ram just to provide it with decent "scratch space."
At full tilt avisynth eats up about 120MB. It'll do that all day, even with a complex filter, because a frame of video is only a few MB - video simply doesn't NEED any more RAM. Even on a higher end linux networked station you don't need more than half a gig, and that's on a system that doesn't even have a damn hard drive...
I had a problem with someone breaking into my home system. So, after giving up on a "software firewall" (ha!) I decided to give smoothwall a try - based, in large part, on positive comments here. I didn't care for the "license" part but I bit my tongue and gave it a shot.
OOB install, within just a few days my network was owned yet again.
After googling for a more objective balance of info on smoothwall I found the numerous (negative) comments about the guy behind it, as well as many positive discussions leading me to ipcop. Took me about an hour to wipeout smoothwall and install ipcop, and it has performed fantastically ever since.
Sorry, but I see absolutely no value in smoothwall. Why agree to a more restrictive license for the "opportunity" to use a less secure product?
Those copies of telegram are NOT new. They may be "like new" or they may even be "old but never opened" (although I don't know how). Go to her website and look around - it's not even in her discography.
So, please explain to us all how me shelling out even six bucks for a USED CD that's not even in release anymore generates income for Bjork? It's not as if she's signing them and shipping them out herself.
So far as "five great p2p only artists" that's easy. I already named a few... let's do it again.
Linda (Rusia)
Creatures (GB/France)
Sultana (Turkey)
Hi-Fi (Russia)
Control Machete (Mex)
Banco Da Gaia (GB)
Native Tongue (US?)
I can name more if you like. Many of these are actually ON labels in their native countries but are unavailable - or very nearly so - internationally. Others you may find in a store but first existed online outside "the machine" before being picked up for meatspace distribution. A couple absolutely are NOT available anywhere except at one of their shows or via downloads or purchase from the web. And ALL of them came to my attention via usenet - from shopping "point and click" at easynews and discovering I liked what I heard.
Don't forget that high quality downloads from MANY of these artists are available via their own websites. Not ALL artists see music downloads as a threat to their ability to earn income from performing.
BTW Moloko can be had via their website as well - apparently this has also changed since last ( ~2mo ago) I looked. $20 or so will get you a CD signed by Roison, which seems like a fair enough deal. Now if Neil Young would setup a tip jar it would all be great...
If what you say is true, you had a case but you simply gave up because it "seemed to hard." Don't blame your lack of dedication to your rights on someone else.
Re:I DON'T CARE -- I BUY MUSIC LATELY
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Kazaa-lite Shut Down
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Tellyawhat: if you can tell me WHERE to send money I'll do it. It's not as if I haven't tried to find an address to send Russian rock star Linda a few of my American dollars to help fund her lifestyle (whatever it is). Sure, you can buy CDs from one or two places - but only her very most popular work, and I want them all. And the CDs that are for sale here through mail order come from a Russian importer who will not vouch for the pressing company - which means even if I DO buy their CDs odds are I'm not giving any money at all to Linda, but to some Mafia klan.
Any idea how hard it is to find Sultana in the US? There's one mail order company I have found that has one of her CDs despite her allegedly being one of the more popular Turkish rap acts.
And where do I send my money to buy a new copy of Bjork's "Telegram" (which I had on CD and lost and now have only the case it came in). That was a fan club release of which only a few hundred copies were ever distributed - so I guess I just never get to hear those songs again? How does that help the artist? How does Bjork (or her label) profit from my never being allowed again to listen to music from her that I once enjoyed?
Siouxsie and Budgie took the initiative long ago and setup their own online label and they have been able to profit from it ever since. I have no qualms about shelling out $20 for one of their CDs because I know where most of that money is going and I've enjoyed their music for nearly 30 years now. There's a lot of other artists I'd love to send money to - Neil Young, Kate Bush, Linda, Sultana, Bjork (whose albums I have purchased in the past but, sadly, I have had to forego in the last release because of my commitment to boycott the RIAA) and Moloko.
Is it my fault most of these artists either cannot put up personal web spaces because of record company contracts or they simply don't realize there may be profit in it for them?
Even if it was, it ain't anymore. The net has been the best thing in the history of recorded music for the dedicated music fan. It's too bad it's taking so long for the artists to catch up with that revolution... but they will. Just as soon as their old contracts run out.
The simple fact is, that for every artist that makes it "big" there are literally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, even hindered, or destroyed.
Name one
And I DO NOT mean "people who stupidly gave away their rights becausae they thought they would get rich in the music industry." Name one person who has suffered because they created a work and then were prevented, by copyright, from sharing or profiting from the use of their work.
Copyright is granted to the creators of works. If those persons are so stupid as to sign away that right, they have only themselves to blame.
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I have never heard of any "illegal music" in the sense you could go to jail just for having a copy of it or listening to it. There IS, however, plenty of "illegal porn." Someone forgot to include in the equation the percentage of people who collect, but would never buy simply because they fear going to jail if caught...
Quite frankly I do think Linux is getting close - but there's still no distribution I've seen that compels me to totally abandon XP or 2K. My home entertainment system uses win2k and it's one of those "just works" boxes - my greatest agony is having to open the damn case for something, and I can't recall the last time I installed new software on it (oh, wait - yeah I do: it was a few weeks ago when I plugged in a bargain bin USB digitizing tablet). I have mozilla and a dvd player and the tv tuner and it just stays like that.
But my laptop goes through constant change. Because I never have any data on it that isn't also somewhere else I feel no hesitation in trying the latest software. It's a lowly 233MHz Thinkpad 600 - it's a damn tank - and in the last several months it's had at least a half dozen different operating systems installed: RH9, Win2K, Win98, Lindows4.0, Knoppix - even an old Peanut linux. Know what it's running now? XP. Yeah, it's slow as dickens - but it's really no worse than RH9 or Lindows, even with its loaded-for-bear maximum of 288MB of RAM and 586 cpu core.
Linux has far superior program selection compared to windows. Yeah it's easy to go to zdnet and download a bunch of spyware-laden nagware that'll keep your computer teetering on the edge of sanity until the next reformat - but clicking a single button to pull up a list of all available software for your system and then clicking the "I want this button" is even easier.
Really the only problem I see with linux is it's lack of cohesiveness. It doesn't need a dozen managers, it just needs one that works. Drag and drop, cut and paste, click and run - and look good doing it. Compare it to either OSX or XP and it's still a distant third in the looks department. My little laptop looks dynamite with an XP desktop with smoothed fonts. I cannot believe after all these years of talking about "linux is almost ready for the desktop" NO ONE has fixed the goddamned fonts.
When will linux be ready for the desktop? When it has menus that don't look like shards of paper pasted from a stack of magazine clippings. Fix that and the vendors will start worrying about how their widget fits into a desktop that doesn't have a Microsoft copyright.
Apple sells systems which no one has to open up, but which also preclude any meaningful competition. If I want a preconfigured shuttle system I can order one of my choosing from any of a thousand dealers, and lots of competition means I get a good value. It also means there are lots of independant dealers who have jobs trying to compete for my dollars instead of no jobs and collecting my money through the government.
At the same time Wal-Mart pays its employees low hourly wages it also makes sure they are all considered "part time" as much as possible, thereby relieving themselves of the burden of providing them any sort of benefits whatsoever. Of course, those employees do still get healthcare coverage - the friendly bosses at wallyworld make sure their workers get complete instructions on how to apply for public assistance. So not only does wally get a nice fat piece of land at no cost, he also gets a workforce whose health is maintained by subsidies from the local taxpayers. Wallyworld provides nothing at all to our national defense or anything else - it's just a bank account getting fatter off the labor of a government subsidized workforce. It's corporatized socialism.
By what stretch are these two organizations even remotely comparable?
"Free market" in this country sure looks an awful lot like old soviet socialism. It's no wonder they can't put a dent in "piracy" when the companies claiming to be "victims" look just as evil as Ivan and Boris that run the Ukrainian pressing plants...
It really is about freedom. Either you have it, or you don't... and beer has nothing to do with it.
Look to the past to see the future: when radio first began it was completely unregulated because no one knew exactly how it even worked. Even after radio receivers had become affordable enough to enter "middle class" homes radio was still largely unregulated - until it came to the point you had neighboring transmitter stations engaging in kilowatt battles for the same frequency space because "that's where people were listening." The bands became increasingly crowded because ANYONE could rig up a transmitter and have at it.
What you and I have come to expect from the PC has been shaped by our participation in the "invention" of it. But a vast majority of users - even users who witnessed that invention process - have no ethical relationship to that community. They no more expect to have to defend their personal computers from attack in their own homes than they expect to have to defend themselves from personal attack in that same space. Even when it comes to "attack" from communications mediums like TV and radio and telephones.
THAT'S why the modern PC is still not what it needs to be. not for grandma who just wants to check her email and surf the net. If grandma wants to play games there's nothing at all wrong with being able to download free games from a website - but there absolutely SHOULD be mechanisms in place to prevent grandma's computer from requiring a repairman's attention simply because the game didn't "like" her computer. Yes, it would take a lot of clock cycles to have this kind of protection. And yes, it would impact performance. But clock cycles are ever increasingly cheap, and there's nothing to prevent grandma from learning HOW that box works and then delving deeper.
The solution IS technological. the internet is not "broken" but it still needs a way to be "fixed" at least as perceived by the majority of inexperienced home users. And it better come quick, because the lawyers and lobbyists are lining up their constituents.
You should not have to know how to build a radio just to be able to listen to music. And you should not have to know how to "install a program" and "configure user identities" just to be able to surf public spaces, correspond via email and chat, play games and watch movies and listen to music without being accosted or verbally abused in your own home.
If we don't fix it, the politicians will... or they'll bleed us to death trying.
I too use a windows desktop at home, and I too have rarely become infected - and the two times it happened it was entirely my fault (once before I started worrying about keeping my machine on dialup patched, the other when I stupidly rebooted on a machine still plugged into the network fresh from a new install - took code red all of ten seconds to find me all over again).
Anyway, I use Mozilla too, and I use proxomitron, and I use an IPCop firewall - and my system has STILL been intruded upon (right before the most recent SSL flaw was made public) even with "Zone alarm" running on the windows box that was attacked. In fact, the first thing the intruder did was disable ZA and all my system logging.
XP with the XP firewall is still XP. No OS is absolutely secure, but there's simply no way I would connect a personal windows workstation directly to the internet any more. Out of necessity I'll allow my laptop to swim in that ocean, but I make sure there's NO personal info on that and I purposefully keep the HD small and the partition empty as possible so as to make for quick image reinstalls.
User education would go a loooooong way to fixing this problem. But I argue that the Windows PC system itself is flawed in regard to home computing: rather than put up "safety barriers" that can be easily overcome with a modest amount of education, the system is instead setup in "hack me" mode right out of the box. Do I need RPC services to be able to check email and surf the internet? SHOULD I need these services just to be able to do those simple things? No - then why is it enabled by default?
The list goes on from there, of course, but I do think you get the point. Giving administrative priviledges to every executable on the desktop of an admin who knows nothing at all about computers is an exercise in insanity. XP comes configured to make user accounts easy to create and use - but do they even bother to educate the user on WHY these should be used? Of course not - MS is not going to tell the user their machine is vulnerable out of the box! That would be like Ford including instructions in the owner's manual on "what to do when the steering wheel stops working" or "what to do when the brakes fail."
Maybe we should talk to china about licensing their firewall technology. After all, it seems to be working well for them.
Historically, law rarely represents the ethics of the proletariat. And so long as we foster a society that regards pure information (vs. information services) as a tradeable commodity there is no reconciling.
I'm establishing a wireless community network and you damn betcha it's filtered. IPCop at the door, DNS and packet filters, 80GB of localized cache and QOS assurance - no ad domains, no popups, and no p2p apps. We're a small town but there are still other ISPs available even here - if someone wants to run kazaa let'em pay $20 a month for dialup access and leave the rest of us to enjoy our fat, ad-free community. Common carrier status? Tell that nonsense to AOL and MSN...
Getting decent video into a computer is pretty easy. And getting decent video out is as easy as hooking up a decent monitor to a PC. But no way is 450MHz "enough to do video" on any system that has access to HD programming. I have a 1.6GHz system with an ATi card and even it is hard pressed to keep up with full screen 1080i MPEG2. And you can forget it completely if you want to try compressing that to full resolution MPEG4. Hell you wouldn't even be able to play back the HD 520p stuff I encoded to HD Xvid from a digital sat rip on a 500MHz machine! Thankfully, a mobo/cpu/ram/box that CAN handle that still only costs like $350 these days, so what's it matter if a "free" 450MHz system in the closet isn't up to that task?
BTW "AC97" simply denotes a product that meets certain interface standards for PC audio. It hasn't a fucking thing to do with sound quality and there are some very good AC97 compatible sound systems out there. And no, I don't mean that crap from Creative.
Methinks you are another of those aging denim rockers who has confused popularity with quality. Listen to a "classic top 40" station and you'll hear plenty of old Michael Jackson; listen to a "classic rock" station and you'll get plenty of Foreigner and Journey and Kansas and Styx and Boston... all formulaic bands that sucked twenty years ago when I was a kid, and still suck today. The fact they hgave stuck in the throat of our culture like a chronic post-nasal drip doesn't make them "great." This is the very same lesson even PBS refuses to get - as exemplified by their incessant rerunning of such ancient pablum as "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "Are You Being Served?"
If you listen to classic rock and oldies, you are guaranteed the best music from that era.
I cannot recall the last time I heard Cowboys International, Wire, Martha and the Muffins, or Joy Division, or even Bampff or Carolyne Mas on a "Classic rock" station. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's true simply because it just ain't gonna happen. "Classic" in our vernacular means "popular" and none of those acts I mentioned were "popular" outside the demographic that shunned the mainstream culture of the seventies and eighties. No amount of popularity is ever going to make Bosteigner Kanjourtyx "the best music" of that era to anyone except the zombified stoners who have now become the undead-heads of the middle aged.
For the sake of argument let's refocus a bit and just consider "popular" acts of the time. If they play alice Cooper, what do they play? Elected? Billion Dollar babies? Maybe. More likely they play some later stuff from his first attempted comeback when he was doing soundtrack work and horror movie appearances. Most likely of all is they'll just play some of his new crap simply because the corporations need to move it from the record club shelves and Vinnie gets to keep too much of the money when they move his old stuff. Ever hear "Black Juju" or "Steven" on the radio?
One of the most thrilling parts of the many Heart shows I went to were when Nancy would play her extended acoustic solo intro to "Crazy on You." This later became a studio track called "Silver Wheels" on their "Bebe LeStrange" album - ever heard it on the radio? I never did in spite of the fact "Crazy on You" remains a staple of "Classic radio" to this day.
Ever see "Almost Famous?" Listen to the music Nancy Wilson wrote for that movie and tell me it doesn't sound exactly like other popular hits of the era.
"It's only me, Arthur Pee, welcoming you to WRIF - the Motor City home of the most profitable corporate rock ever recorded! And now here's Fever Dogs by that little band from Troy..."
Wow, if it's saturday this must be a SCO story... where is everyone?
Order of magnitude cheaper
Again, this is already proven false. A very good film camera costs upwards of $300 with interchangeable lens. A very good digital camera costs about $900 with interchangeable lens. And if you want to go to the very cheap end of the spectrum, I already covered that one.
Orders of magnitude better image quality
For whom? The experienced photographer? The person who spends all his free time playing in his home darkroom, mixing toxic chemicals and lurking in the dark? Surely you don't mean for the person who uses a thirty dollar instamatic to capture pics of the family picnic.
Orders of magnitude longer lifespan for the images
Umm.. yeah. I can copy a digital image ten thousand times over and it's the exact same image I started with. We've already lost thousands of historical and classic films to fire, water, and outright studio neglect. So long as there's a single digital copy of a work in circulation somewhere that work can be preserved.
I have zero photobooks. Even the porn mags are going out of business because no one wants to be burdened by books anymore - fragile heaps of paper that collect moisture out of thin air and fade in just a few years. A jpeg is a jpeg is a jpeg - to argue the format will somehow become "unreadable" without being able to migrate the data contained within would be an exercise in buffoonery.
Possible to use specialized films (Infra-Red, Slide, Ultra-Fine grain, very high speed, special colour saturation curves like Kodak VC or XC, etc) with no need to spend a cent on special equipment.
But spend a fortune on film itself - not to mention processing that film. It costs a fortune even to get goddamn B&W prints and developing these days - how the hell is that not "extra?"
And who the fuck needs all that crap if their goal is to preserve grandma's smile and tommy's first steps?
Batteries last for thousands of exposures vs dozens for digital.
Uhhh... batteries can be recharged. And no, I don't spend "hours" recharging them - that's what the fucking recharger is for. It takes me about ten seconds to reach in my pocket and swap in a fresh set - and that's if I'm not using the camera on an ac adapter. When I get home it takes another thirty seconds to load up the charger. nimh cells are so cheap these days it's trivial to carry an extra set or two.
Virtually no depreciation on equipment value vs 50% year for digital.
Ummm... I have an Argus camera made in the 1960's that cost a pretty good chunk of change back then. Today you can pick one up at a carport sale or on ebay for about a buck. Seems to me that qualifies as a pretty hefty depreciation. In practical terms it's very nearly infinite.
Digital
You can preview your images on a little 1.5" screen.
I can preview my images on a 15" tft screen in about ten seconds. Since this is pretty much the same technology I will be using to view them after they are "developed" (assuming I want to photoshop them) then I have convenience and accuracy that film cannot possibly match.
No cost for pictures you screw up
No cost for those I keep, either. And no cost to publish them, if that's what I'm about.
Images already in a digital format so you can transmit them without having to waste time scanning them or finishing a whole roll.
Or paying someone else to develop them - or sell me chemicals and paper so I can do it myself.
Film simply doesn't compare any more. Sure there are cases where it's desirable - but those are completely subjective measures almost entirely based in the "artsy" realm. And even then, in order to have merit, the arguments must exclude the possibility of digital being able to provide the same qualities. Given that film photography has had "an order of magnitude" more time to eveolve than digital photography, such assumptions would be precariously short sighted at best.
Officials say the problem could be even more widespread: Some of the tens of thousands of rapists, molesters and others missing nationally could be hiding in Arizona, they say, especially because an estimated 33,500 are missing in California.
Note there's no real evidence for any of this except "lots of sex offenders are missing and Arizone is such a fantastic place to live we suspect they're all moving here."
Maybe they're onto something. After all, the numbers mentioned in this article equate to a statewide population of more than 13,000 registered sex offenders for a population of about 5.5 Million residents - about a half a percent of its population. Compare that to 3000 for the entire state of Conneticut for a population of a little over 3 Million, or less than 0.1% of its population.
Are things really so much better in Arizona that there should be five times as many registered sex offenders? Per capita, their sex offender registry is nearly double that even of California!
Must be all the sunshine and beaches they have in Arizona. Especially in Tucson. I lived there a couple of years one winter and I recall there being old people everywhere. And we all know it's those dirty old men who fiddle little kids in the park... those bastards.
Maybe they can incorporate this information into the flag or their license plates or something. It would appear Arizona is the mecca for sex offenders!
Unlike spherical aberration, coma or astigmatism, shows points as points, but the focal points do not match across the image center and periphery in image planes, so that the image is gradually bent out of shape toward the edges.... A phenomenon in which straight lines are not rendered perfectly straight in the picture. Curvature of field can be improved but not eliminated by stopping down the lens... Curvature of field basically describes the amount of surface curvature as defined by an image's individual chief rays. As a result, the points making up the curvature of field and the optical energy peak will not match except when using extremely small apertures
Mkay, so maybe they don't know what they're talking about, either?
Oh, and I have no problem mentioning what I got, I just don't see how it's germane to any of this. Comparing convenience to "mojo" (ie cd to lp, film to digital) is always pointless. But here ya go anyway.
Oh, and by the way, the disortion is simply a "fisheye" effect which can also be a desirable effect depending on the theme. It's not necessarily a sign of bad manufacturing, it's simple a limitation caused by not being able to change and select lenses and apretures. So unless you're asserting you can pick up a camera body and a few lenses for 30 bucks you're in the same boat either way.
So far as bad color, etc etc etc... how is this WORSE than not having the shot at all? I can touch up a poor picture in photoshop, but I can't touch up a picture I don't have.
The best argument you can make is that for $110 I could pick up a relatively cheap used 35mm P&S... but then we're right back to having to carry film, develop film, scan the pictures I want, wait hours to days before I even know if I have a shot...
Nope, it just ain't worth it.
What? I just paid less than $80 for a 3MP digital camera. It has 3x digital zoom, flash, autofocus and even a macro setting that actually works. It also has considerable lens distortion at the edges of the frame, leaving absolutely no straight surfaces if you should photograph, for example, somone standing in a doorway.
But it was 80 bucks. And it takes better pictures than I've ever seen out of one of those $30 cheapos you're raving about. And even after I throw in another $30 for a 128MB flash card it's STILL just a tad over a hundred bucks - and I can keep the flash card long after the camera has fallen prey to water or sand or falls from a great height or whatever ends up claiming its mortality.
So, for $110 I got a 3MP camera that will let me take pictures of "family events" pretty much all day and when I get home it costs me NOTHING to share those pictures with the others who were there. I NEVER have to worry about a "dead" shot taking up space on my film roll, so I never have to worry about getting home and finding out three days later that final shot of grandma didn't turn out.
How can you possibly argue film is cheaper than that? The whole rig cost only a couple of days pay even for someone on minimum wage earnings, and from there on out it's free, free, free. If family members want prints they can buy their own ink and paper... or they can send'em to the Rite-Aid, where a 4x6 print from a digital source costs all of 29 cents.
Like those arrogant, fundamentalist-endowed leaders in that other country (starts with a U, and it ain't Ukraine) who seem to think they have the right to do exactly this all over the world... and are presently doing it.
This is like some fundamentalist judge in Iran ordering the entire alchool industry in the world to shut down because it is forbidden by the Koran, and actually being taken seriously in areas outside the range of his private army.
Hmmm... like some other puritanical government teetering on the edge of tyranny, bullying sovereign governments all over the world into conducting raids and arresting their own citizens even when their own local laws allow their citizens the exact behavior they are being persecuted for...
At full tilt avisynth eats up about 120MB. It'll do that all day, even with a complex filter, because a frame of video is only a few MB - video simply doesn't NEED any more RAM. Even on a higher end linux networked station you don't need more than half a gig, and that's on a system that doesn't even have a damn hard drive...
OOB install, within just a few days my network was owned yet again.
After googling for a more objective balance of info on smoothwall I found the numerous (negative) comments about the guy behind it, as well as many positive discussions leading me to ipcop. Took me about an hour to wipeout smoothwall and install ipcop, and it has performed fantastically ever since.
Sorry, but I see absolutely no value in smoothwall. Why agree to a more restrictive license for the "opportunity" to use a less secure product?
So, please explain to us all how me shelling out even six bucks for a USED CD that's not even in release anymore generates income for Bjork? It's not as if she's signing them and shipping them out herself. So far as "five great p2p only artists" that's easy. I already named a few... let's do it again.
Linda (Rusia)
Creatures (GB/France) Sultana (Turkey)
Hi-Fi (Russia)
Control Machete (Mex)
Banco Da Gaia (GB)
Native Tongue (US?)
I can name more if you like. Many of these are actually ON labels in their native countries but are unavailable - or very nearly so - internationally. Others you may find in a store but first existed online outside "the machine" before being picked up for meatspace distribution. A couple absolutely are NOT available anywhere except at one of their shows or via downloads or purchase from the web. And ALL of them came to my attention via usenet - from shopping "point and click" at easynews and discovering I liked what I heard.
Don't forget that high quality downloads from MANY of these artists are available via their own websites. Not ALL artists see music downloads as a threat to their ability to earn income from performing.
BTW Moloko can be had via their website as well - apparently this has also changed since last ( ~2mo ago) I looked. $20 or so will get you a CD signed by Roison, which seems like a fair enough deal. Now if Neil Young would setup a tip jar it would all be great...
If what you say is true, you had a case but you simply gave up because it "seemed to hard." Don't blame your lack of dedication to your rights on someone else.
Any idea how hard it is to find Sultana in the US? There's one mail order company I have found that has one of her CDs despite her allegedly being one of the more popular Turkish rap acts.
And where do I send my money to buy a new copy of Bjork's "Telegram" (which I had on CD and lost and now have only the case it came in). That was a fan club release of which only a few hundred copies were ever distributed - so I guess I just never get to hear those songs again? How does that help the artist? How does Bjork (or her label) profit from my never being allowed again to listen to music from her that I once enjoyed?
Siouxsie and Budgie took the initiative long ago and setup their own online label and they have been able to profit from it ever since. I have no qualms about shelling out $20 for one of their CDs because I know where most of that money is going and I've enjoyed their music for nearly 30 years now. There's a lot of other artists I'd love to send money to - Neil Young, Kate Bush, Linda, Sultana, Bjork (whose albums I have purchased in the past but, sadly, I have had to forego in the last release because of my commitment to boycott the RIAA) and Moloko.
Is it my fault most of these artists either cannot put up personal web spaces because of record company contracts or they simply don't realize there may be profit in it for them?
Even if it was, it ain't anymore. The net has been the best thing in the history of recorded music for the dedicated music fan. It's too bad it's taking so long for the artists to catch up with that revolution... but they will. Just as soon as their old contracts run out.
Name one
And I DO NOT mean "people who stupidly gave away their rights becausae they thought they would get rich in the music industry." Name one person who has suffered because they created a work and then were prevented, by copyright, from sharing or profiting from the use of their work.
Copyright is granted to the creators of works. If those persons are so stupid as to sign away that right, they have only themselves to blame.