It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it and I don't feel fine...fine...
While I love the idea of Google raising money for its business I am still keeping my fingers crossed that they can remain faithful to their customers rather than the random whims of their investors.
really like having all that space but the UI is really slick. I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.
I have been using GMail since mid-June. I am completely unimpressed with the labels. Labels are nice and work exactly like folders except for one thing... They aren't nested.
Ok, so they aren't nested, what's the big deal? Most people only have like 5 folders anyway. Well, I use folders for breaking down emails into specific groupings. Can't exactly do that with labels without having two things to click on. Nevermind the fact that the size of the box that they put the label names in is too small and I can't read the entire length of the line... "Geocaching.com Watched Caches" and "Geocaching.com Owned Caches" just show up as "Geocaching.co..." Not very helpful. I reported the "feature/bug" and it hasn't been fixed. Sorry but this is a major annoyance. No one creates labels longer than 12 characters?
My biggest pet peeve is the heavy reliance on JavaScript (including the requirement that you have it enabled in order to use the service). Sorry but JavaScript should not be necessary and should be eliminated completely. But that's just a personal gripe.
Thanks TMBG!
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I just saw TMBG last weekend. Great show. I thought I had kept up with their more recent work, but I was obviously wrong. I only recognized several of the songs that they played. I was actually embarrassed to have mentioned to a friend that told me of the show that I was a "fan".
The show was great. Even the songs I didn't recognize were great. My only complaint was that they were a bit loud and my left ear is still ringing seven days later).
I support TMBG like I would any other band that supports the freedom of music. They allow their live shows to be traded freely (according to FurthurNET) and I was happy to purchase two tickets to see them and help them.
They were a lot of fun and I really love their comment in the NewsWeek article:
Record companies are certainly scared. They should be scared. They're hemorrhaging dough.
Damn straight they are. I have said it 1,000 times here before. While the music companies complain about them losing money they are losing it because they sponsor shit music and treat their customers like shit. At least there are bands, who support freedom of music, that care about their fans/customers. While it might not mean much to TMBG they just made their percentage of the $30 ticket prices I shelled out for them and I was thrilled to do it.
Perhaps we need more bands that love their fans to speak out against the RIAA. Maybe then other bands will see how you can survive for 20+ years by caring for your fans and them caring for you back. I'm pretty certain the RIAA doesn't think about THAT when they come up with contract terms for their cookie cutter noise machines.
It seems, at least according to this review that it's because Will Smith is in it.
We should all jump up and down over product placements and shitty "summer blockbusters" because Will Smith is the star.
And the MPAA wonders why people don't want to pay to see movies? Let's buy the rights to a great author's novel and then make his work trivial by just using the name.
For a more realistic and interesting baseline, I collected about 2,800 lines of Slashdot discussion contributions and ran style against them to get the following ratings summary along with a lot of detail data omitted here:
Kincaid: 7.7 ARI: 8.0 Coleman-Liau: 9.7 Flesch Index: 72.4 Fog Index: 10.7 Lix: 37.1 = school year 5 SMOG-Grading: 9.8 Notice that these results apply to comments from Slashdotters, not to the text on which they're commenting. Look at the source articles and you get very different results because, of course, most are professionally written or edited -- although there is an interesting oddity in that ratings for files made up by pasting together stories posted by "Michael" are consistently at least one school year higher than comparable accumulations made from postings (other than press releases) by "Cowboyneal."
Yeah, first off, I want to know what 2,800 lines he took. I would hope he didn't use a random method of comment gathering as anything under +3 is generally junk (and thus why it holds there). I want to know if he has taken a look at more recent Slashdot banter or comments generated since its inception. It's a well known fact that the signal to noise ratio has increased over the years (as is expected as the site grows in "popularity").
When he mentions that he wasn't performing this "study" on the text Slashdotters were commenting on, does that mean that he wasn't paying attention to the particular stories we were responding to? That could have a major impact on the results.
Yes, all of us Slashdotters are stuck-up assholes, but I seriously doubt that the higher rated comments are written at a 5th grade reading level unless you are looking at -1 to +5 instead of +1 and above (which I assume that most people read at).
Perhaps he posted this, knowing full well we would troll it, just to prove his point?
I guess if this hadn't originally been posted to MacNewsWorld I would I have found it extremely funny that the storey was posted by "pudge" instead of Cowboyneal...
If you have a Roadrunner cable modem and have ever called tech support, chances are you've been talking to someone at a local Ottawa firm called Convergys. I bet you never knew it, either.
Local firm? Convergys isn't local. They are all over (Canada and the US). In fact, they handle quite a few different types of cable modems (ATTBI used them, AT&T @Home used them, several phone companies, cable TV companies, etc).
At least he'll be using his own plane, so the only life he's risking in this situation is his own and maybe one or two willing others. Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed. That's rather high stakes to be guessing...
Yeah, I agree, but I think that we have much more to fear in drunken pilots and just plain retarded ones.
It is not a political statement, it is a bad act. Why do so many seem to hate Bush and/or the US so much that they come to see murder as some sort of abstract "political act"?
In other parts of the world (and unfortunately here even though we claim they aren't) Religion and Politics are one in the same. These people saw what they did to be right as their religion tells them it's acceptable.
I was just putting myself in his shoes to play the devil's advocate. Don't get yourself all up in a huff.
While I disagree with just about everything he has to say he did mention (paraphrase) "now that the Cold War is over and now they want to wipe me out because I am useless." He's probably right. The USSR was using their hand picked superstars (athletes mostly) to make their country seem superior. Bobby Fischer certainly made the US look much better than usual in that regard, but he has the view that he single-handedly changed the view of the United States from a baseball and football (US) country to one of intellectuals... This I just don't agree with. Maybe for that brief moment in time (1972). It's certainly not considered that now (or in 2001).
Google's sucess is based off of how good its product is, Microsoft's success is based off of how well it can lock its consumers in.
I realize that through shady deals and whatnot MSFT established itself as the industry leader and continues to do so today...
Now, while Google didn't use shady deals to become the #1 search engine out there do you think that they will resort to lock-in tactics later? Perhaps after they go public and money begins to control innovation and not the other way around?
What next? in 5 years maybe I'll be able to google my name and see a private mail of mine saying "hey look at that d!rty picture of the secretary on my picasa account! (don't tell anyone about this, hey...)" with a nice link to my private picasa pic? Thanks but no thanks.
After using GMail and deciding it's not for you and you delete all your mail, empty your trash, and delete your account does Google keep all that data in its index?
Or how about identification of individual people? So that I can outline a section of a given picture and it'll find all other pictures which contain a similar section (AKA a given person).
The technology utilizes a ModelGlove developed by the researchers to record the force exerted by hand when depressing and shaping a block of clay. This force-feedback information, as well as information on hand position and speed of fingertip motion, is instantaneously communicated to a personal computer where a virtual block of clay -- possessing characteristics mimicking the physical properties of the clay -- is shaped precisely to the contouring of the actual clay.
The next generation of the ModelGlove will have sensors on all fingers and on the palm of the hand to give users full finger control of virtual clay.
"Touch is the next frontier in the evolution of virtual reality," Kesavadas says. "Most virtual-reality technologies to this point have focused on 3D visualization, but the sense of touch may be the most powerful way to make virtual reality more real."
"I'm torn between hot and sexy", said Hugh Heffner when asked about this interactive research project being worked on at the Playboy Research Labs;-)
As you can clearly see, Mono brings almost limitless possibilities in breaking down the barrier between desktops: a commercial software provider would target Mono and it would "just work" on all platforms that Mono supported. How is this different from Java? In my opinion Java makes things harder than it needs to be. For starters, enforced exception handling can't auto-box/unbox primitive types and doesn't support arbitrary length parameter lists String.Format() style.
The framework of Mono provides the ability to make a very tedious task in C/C++ almost trivial in C#. As the above example, RegEx, shows, it helps the programmer concentrate on the program itself, rather than the logic supporting the code.
Yes, it is very exciting to have developers be able to easily write code that will work both on Linux, Windows, and OS X (obviously with the correct libraries) but will the coders utilize Mono when doing their work? Will they be concerned enough that Linux and OS X users are worthwhile supporting to make sure it is cross-platform?
So far the PFS has observed a depletion of carbon dioxide and an enrichment of water vapour over some of the large extinct volcanoes on Mars. Ammonia is not a stable molecule in the Martian atmosphere. If it was not replenished in some way, it would only last a few hours before it vanished.
An underground lava theory seems much more plausible than microbes hoarding nitrogen. Underground lava beneath the extinct volcanoes could be releasing the ammonia into the atomosphere and thus explains how it is replenishing so quickly. Without other specific evidence of microbial life I really think we should just not get our hopes up, at least not yet.
It's coming right back at ya buddy... Slashdot does not require me to accept a cookie to read their content. I can choose to not have a cookie and not login and I can still read everything on the site.
Luckily for them I have chosen to accept the cookie and to put up with their advertising to "better their site" (subjective).
Of course they haven't opposed that. Sony created the mini disc. Sony owns music distribution channels and music rights. The RIAA letter to the Senate even mentions that they support Sony and even mentions that the Sony Betamax was created not just for making illegal copies!
S. 2560, introduced by Senators Hatch, Leahy, Boxer, L. Graham and both Majority Leader Frist and Democratic Leader Daschle - is timely, warranted legislation. We urge you to support it. It is intended to target bad actors only - those who have built business models to get away with stealing the creative work of predominantly American artists. The bill finds the right balance to protect both technology AND content innovators.
I *love* that they use the word "stealing". No matter what spin they try to put on this issue, spreading and copying music is not stealing.
Four of the top ten downloaded applications on the Internet are P2P programs operated by companies who purposefully set them up to be used for illegal conduct. Popular for sure... but lawbreaking nonetheless.
Oh, I just LOVE this. Yes, BitTorrent (just took over as the leader in P2P traffic) was created for illegal use. I could see Kazaa or Napster, but BitTorrent, no, I just don't believe that.
But it has been hijacked by some unscrupulous operators who have constructed a business model predicated on the taking of property financed by my member companies.
As far as I am aware, BitTorrent has no true business model. I got the software legally and without cost.
We take profits from sales - when we're good and lucky enough to get them - and plow money back into the search for that next great talent who will thrill music fans around the globe.
When you're lucky? Give me a fucking break. You support the consolidation of radio and other music distribution networks so you have tight control on who listens and how they listen. Perhaps if radio and music distribution wasn't controlled by you and your existance wasn't backed and supported by the government (who should have broken you up years ago) I would believe you.
In 2000, the top ten hits sold 60 million units in the U.S. Seven of the ten sold more than 5 million units each; every one of them sold at least 3 million units. Then the slide kicked in. Last year, in 2003, the top ten hits were cut almost in half, to 33 million units. Just two of the ten sold more than 5 million units; five of those top ten hits sold less than 3 million units.
Where are you statistics about units shipped? I don't see them listed there. Looks like spin to me.
This creative product is lost forever. Many of our greatest performers took years to catch on before their careers took off. In today's world, those performers are being cut before they have a chance to delight fans and realize their own dreams.
*BARF* You don't have creative products for the most part. You have cookie-cutter talent that you create and promote. You cut their chances at survival by overplaying their one-hit-wonders via your controlled outlets.
They are havens for pornographers that project their filth into your homes when your kids innocently seek to find their favorite artists.
Yes, news at 6, your children are affected by porno!
Do these illegitimate services compensate artists? No. Songwriters? No. Pay taxes on the value of product? No. Compensate the record label in any way? No. Invest in the generation of new art? No.
Do you fairly compensate them? Do you pay taxes like you should? Do you care about anything other than your bottom line? Would you have mentioned your own compensation if you did?
My industry can continue to sue users, many of them kids, to establish deterrence and educate the public. But the real villains are not the kids. The real villains are those profiteers who offload liability on these kids and are laughing all the way to the bank as American courts struggle to apply existing law (or misapply it) to this abuse of good technology.
So stop suing the children you claim you want to protect from the supposed evils of P2P. Also, please show me where BitTorrent (again the leading P2P application) is making enough money s
I never said it was Crichton's idea. What I said was that I was hoping it was more fiction than reality.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case in this instance. Self-sustaining, swarms, of tiny robots flying around and doing shit using their own AI is scary.
Sounds an awful lot like Michael Crichton's novel Prey. The story's description (from the above link): cloud of nanoparticles -- micro-robots -- has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey.
I hoped that this was more fiction than reality. Perhaps Prey is going to become a movie and they are writing this up to get people interested?
Doesn't the thought of an intelligent swarm of nearly indestructible particles scare people? I know I am paranoid and all but I can't fathom the damage that could occur if these got out and were self-sustaining even for a short time.
On the other hand their is antoher newspaper in town that charges $90/year for access to their sports archives and at last estimate they had close to 1000 subscribers.
That's also $7.50 a month for unlimited usage of their sports archive. That's not $3 for a single article.
Of course, like many things about the business operations of a traditional publisher that has ventured online, the reasons are simple but the solutions complicated. The New York Times requires that its users register, which makes it difficult for search engines to spider its content.
As a rule I do not read any newspaper online that I have to register for. In fact, I refuse to purchase the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press here in Minnesota because of their policy requiring user registration. Fake accounts be dammed, you want me to read your paper and have to look through your ads you will let me do so without a cookie linked to information, fake or otherwise.
an even more impenetrable barrier is the Times' paid archive. Because it stows material more than a week old behind an archive wall, you have to cough up $3 per article. Since few are willing to pay for content they can get free elsewhere, search engines, which often base results on relevancy (read: popularity), will continue to dis the Times -- as well as other media sites that make you register or pay for old news (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal).
This is a horrible problem that I have run into in recent times trying to do simple research on the web. I was trying to look for articles pertaining to a friend that currently resides in Perrysburg, OH. I did a simple search on the Toledo Blade's website only to find a link to a third-party archive company that required me to pay a fee to access more than a short blurb about the story. Unwilling to drive the 665 miles to Toledo from where I currently live just to read a hardcopy I gave up on my search for these articles due to this barrier. But while doing research about NEPA I find that The Scranton Times has a much better free searchable archive of information than does the The Times Leader which requires you to pay to visit their archive. Wonder who gets my visits?
I really think that these policies could lead to the downfall of traditional news outlets. I have absolutely no desire to pay money for information that should be easily available. Hell, if you are going to charge I can't see a $3 fee! A couple hundred words are worth $3 in storage? No way. Perhaps if I asked them to mail me the copy of the article then $3 would be reasonable.
"There isn't a compelling business argument today that would suggest that giving away our content is a good idea," Nisenholtz said. Even though the Lexis-Nexis deal is an all-you-can-eat model -- not based on usage -- the Times can ill afford to undermine its relationship with such an important customer. It simply can't charge Lexis-Nexis tens of millions of dollars while giving away the same content free over the Web.
The argument that makes sense is that people aren't going to be willing to pay you $3 for a computer copy of an article that is only a couple hundred words. Make the fee something reasonable or watch as you begin to waste a lot of money paying the third party archive to host your data and no one retrives it. Perhaps a rival newspaper would open their database up and people would start going to them instead. We can always hope.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I don't feel fine...fine...
While I love the idea of Google raising money for its business I am still keeping my fingers crossed that they can remain faithful to their customers rather than the random whims of their investors.
There's no sorting option and I don't want to search for all items as a query when I am trying to break mail down with filters.
There should be two seperate options.
really like having all that space but the UI is really slick. I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.
I have been using GMail since mid-June. I am completely unimpressed with the labels. Labels are nice and work exactly like folders except for one thing... They aren't nested.
Ok, so they aren't nested, what's the big deal? Most people only have like 5 folders anyway. Well, I use folders for breaking down emails into specific groupings. Can't exactly do that with labels without having two things to click on. Nevermind the fact that the size of the box that they put the label names in is too small and I can't read the entire length of the line... "Geocaching.com Watched Caches" and "Geocaching.com Owned Caches" just show up as "Geocaching.co..." Not very helpful. I reported the "feature/bug" and it hasn't been fixed. Sorry but this is a major annoyance. No one creates labels longer than 12 characters?
My biggest pet peeve is the heavy reliance on JavaScript (including the requirement that you have it enabled in order to use the service). Sorry but JavaScript should not be necessary and should be eliminated completely. But that's just a personal gripe.
I just saw TMBG last weekend. Great show. I thought I had kept up with their more recent work, but I was obviously wrong. I only recognized several of the songs that they played. I was actually embarrassed to have mentioned to a friend that told me of the show that I was a "fan".
The show was great. Even the songs I didn't recognize were great. My only complaint was that they were a bit loud and my left ear is still ringing seven days later).
I support TMBG like I would any other band that supports the freedom of music. They allow their live shows to be traded freely (according to FurthurNET) and I was happy to purchase two tickets to see them and help them.
They were a lot of fun and I really love their comment in the NewsWeek article:
Record companies are certainly scared.
They should be scared. They're hemorrhaging dough.
Damn straight they are. I have said it 1,000 times here before. While the music companies complain about them losing money they are losing it because they sponsor shit music and treat their customers like shit. At least there are bands, who support freedom of music, that care about their fans/customers. While it might not mean much to TMBG they just made their percentage of the $30 ticket prices I shelled out for them and I was thrilled to do it.
Perhaps we need more bands that love their fans to speak out against the RIAA. Maybe then other bands will see how you can survive for 20+ years by caring for your fans and them caring for you back. I'm pretty certain the RIAA doesn't think about THAT when they come up with contract terms for their cookie cutter noise machines.
It seems, at least according to this review that it's because Will Smith is in it.
We should all jump up and down over product placements and shitty "summer blockbusters" because Will Smith is the star.
And the MPAA wonders why people don't want to pay to see movies? Let's buy the rights to a great author's novel and then make his work trivial by just using the name.
Ok, this is absolute troll food but I'm hungry:
For a more realistic and interesting baseline, I collected about 2,800 lines of Slashdot discussion contributions and ran style against them to get the following ratings summary along with a lot of detail data omitted here:
Kincaid: 7.7
ARI: 8.0
Coleman-Liau: 9.7
Flesch Index: 72.4
Fog Index: 10.7
Lix: 37.1 = school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 9.8
Notice that these results apply to comments from Slashdotters, not to the text on which they're commenting. Look at the source articles and you get very different results because, of course, most are professionally written or edited -- although there is an interesting oddity in that ratings for files made up by pasting together stories posted by "Michael" are consistently at least one school year higher than comparable accumulations made from postings (other than press releases) by "Cowboyneal."
Yeah, first off, I want to know what 2,800 lines he took. I would hope he didn't use a random method of comment gathering as anything under +3 is generally junk (and thus why it holds there). I want to know if he has taken a look at more recent Slashdot banter or comments generated since its inception. It's a well known fact that the signal to noise ratio has increased over the years (as is expected as the site grows in "popularity").
When he mentions that he wasn't performing this "study" on the text Slashdotters were commenting on, does that mean that he wasn't paying attention to the particular stories we were responding to? That could have a major impact on the results.
Yes, all of us Slashdotters are stuck-up assholes, but I seriously doubt that the higher rated comments are written at a 5th grade reading level unless you are looking at -1 to +5 instead of +1 and above (which I assume that most people read at).
Perhaps he posted this, knowing full well we would troll it, just to prove his point?
I guess if this hadn't originally been posted to MacNewsWorld I would I have found it extremely funny that the storey was posted by "pudge" instead of Cowboyneal...
If you have a Roadrunner cable modem and have ever called tech support, chances are you've been talking to someone at a local Ottawa firm called Convergys. I bet you never knew it, either.
Local firm? Convergys isn't local. They are all over (Canada and the US). In fact, they handle quite a few different types of cable modems (ATTBI used them, AT&T @Home used them, several phone companies, cable TV companies, etc).
At least he'll be using his own plane, so the only life he's risking in this situation is his own and maybe one or two willing others. Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed. That's rather high stakes to be guessing...
Yeah, I agree, but I think that we have much more to fear in drunken pilots and just plain retarded ones.
It is not a political statement, it is a bad act. Why do so many seem to hate Bush and/or the US so much that they come to see murder as some sort of abstract "political act"?
In other parts of the world (and unfortunately here even though we claim they aren't) Religion and Politics are one in the same. These people saw what they did to be right as their religion tells them it's acceptable.
I was just putting myself in his shoes to play the devil's advocate. Don't get yourself all up in a huff.
Because he has outspoken political views that don't match what is generally accepted in the United States?
Or is it because he believes that people, in a game that he has mastered since his teenage years, cheat?
Radio Interview from 9/11/2001.
While I disagree with just about everything he has to say he did mention (paraphrase) "now that the Cold War is over and now they want to wipe me out because I am useless." He's probably right. The USSR was using their hand picked superstars (athletes mostly) to make their country seem superior. Bobby Fischer certainly made the US look much better than usual in that regard, but he has the view that he single-handedly changed the view of the United States from a baseball and football (US) country to one of intellectuals... This I just don't agree with. Maybe for that brief moment in time (1972). It's certainly not considered that now (or in 2001).
Google's sucess is based off of how good its product is, Microsoft's success is based off of how well it can lock its consumers in.
I realize that through shady deals and whatnot MSFT established itself as the industry leader and continues to do so today...
Now, while Google didn't use shady deals to become the #1 search engine out there do you think that they will resort to lock-in tactics later? Perhaps after they go public and money begins to control innovation and not the other way around?
What next? in 5 years maybe I'll be able to google my name and see a private mail of mine saying "hey look at that d!rty picture of the secretary on my picasa account! (don't tell anyone about this, hey...)" with a nice link to my private picasa pic? Thanks but no thanks.
After using GMail and deciding it's not for you and you delete all your mail, empty your trash, and delete your account does Google keep all that data in its index?
Or how about identification of individual people? So that I can outline a section of a given picture and it'll find all other pictures which contain a similar section (AKA a given person).
Then I'll get excited...
Then I'll get scared.
The technology utilizes a ModelGlove developed by the researchers to record the force exerted by hand when depressing and shaping a block of clay. This force-feedback information, as well as information on hand position and speed of fingertip motion, is instantaneously communicated to a personal computer where a virtual block of clay -- possessing characteristics mimicking the physical properties of the clay -- is shaped precisely to the contouring of the actual clay.
;-)
The next generation of the ModelGlove will have sensors on all fingers and on the palm of the hand to give users full finger control of virtual clay.
"Touch is the next frontier in the evolution of virtual reality," Kesavadas says. "Most virtual-reality technologies to this point have focused on 3D visualization, but the sense of touch may be the most powerful way to make virtual reality more real."
"I'm torn between hot and sexy", said Hugh Heffner when asked about this interactive research project being worked on at the Playboy Research Labs
As you can clearly see, Mono brings almost limitless possibilities in breaking down the barrier between desktops: a commercial software provider would target Mono and it would "just work" on all platforms that Mono supported. How is this different from Java? In my opinion Java makes things harder than it needs to be. For starters, enforced exception handling can't auto-box/unbox primitive types and doesn't support arbitrary length parameter lists String.Format() style.
The framework of Mono provides the ability to make a very tedious task in C/C++ almost trivial in C#. As the above example, RegEx, shows, it helps the programmer concentrate on the program itself, rather than the logic supporting the code.
Yes, it is very exciting to have developers be able to easily write code that will work both on Linux, Windows, and OS X (obviously with the correct libraries) but will the coders utilize Mono when doing their work? Will they be concerned enough that Linux and OS X users are worthwhile supporting to make sure it is cross-platform?
So far the PFS has observed a depletion of carbon dioxide and an enrichment of water vapour over some of the large extinct volcanoes on Mars.
Ammonia is not a stable molecule in the Martian atmosphere. If it was not replenished in some way, it would only last a few hours before it vanished.
An underground lava theory seems much more plausible than microbes hoarding nitrogen. Underground lava beneath the extinct volcanoes could be releasing the ammonia into the atomosphere and thus explains how it is replenishing so quickly. Without other specific evidence of microbial life I really think we should just not get our hopes up, at least not yet.
Here comes the logic train, last stop is you.
It's coming right back at ya buddy... Slashdot does not require me to accept a cookie to read their content. I can choose to not have a cookie and not login and I can still read everything on the site.
Luckily for them I have chosen to accept the cookie and to put up with their advertising to "better their site" (subjective).
Yeah, let's remember who does that. There's no such thing as election fraud.
Of course they haven't opposed that. Sony created the mini disc. Sony owns music distribution channels and music rights. The RIAA letter to the Senate even mentions that they support Sony and even mentions that the Sony Betamax was created not just for making illegal copies!
Imagine that.
S. 2560, introduced by Senators Hatch, Leahy, Boxer, L. Graham and both Majority Leader Frist and Democratic Leader Daschle - is timely, warranted legislation. We urge you to support it. It is intended to target bad actors only - those who have built business models to get away with stealing the creative work of predominantly American artists. The bill finds the right balance to protect both technology AND content innovators.
I *love* that they use the word "stealing". No matter what spin they try to put on this issue, spreading and copying music is not stealing.
Four of the top ten downloaded applications on the Internet are P2P programs operated by companies who purposefully set them up to be used for illegal conduct. Popular for sure... but lawbreaking nonetheless.
Oh, I just LOVE this. Yes, BitTorrent (just took over as the leader in P2P traffic) was created for illegal use. I could see Kazaa or Napster, but BitTorrent, no, I just don't believe that.
But it has been hijacked by some unscrupulous operators who have constructed a business model predicated on the taking of property financed by my member companies.
As far as I am aware, BitTorrent has no true business model. I got the software legally and without cost.
We take profits from sales - when we're good and lucky enough to get them - and plow money back into the search for that next great talent who will thrill music fans around the globe.
When you're lucky? Give me a fucking break. You support the consolidation of radio and other music distribution networks so you have tight control on who listens and how they listen. Perhaps if radio and music distribution wasn't controlled by you and your existance wasn't backed and supported by the government (who should have broken you up years ago) I would believe you.
In 2000, the top ten hits sold 60 million units in the U.S. Seven of the ten sold more than 5 million units each; every one of them sold at least 3 million units. Then the slide kicked in. Last year, in 2003, the top ten hits were cut almost in half, to 33 million units. Just two of the ten sold more than 5 million units; five of those top ten hits sold less than 3 million units.
Where are you statistics about units shipped? I don't see them listed there. Looks like spin to me.
This creative product is lost forever. Many of our greatest performers took years to catch on before their careers took off. In today's world, those performers are being cut before they have a chance to delight fans and realize their own dreams.
*BARF* You don't have creative products for the most part. You have cookie-cutter talent that you create and promote. You cut their chances at survival by overplaying their one-hit-wonders via your controlled outlets.
They are havens for pornographers that project their filth into your homes when your kids innocently seek to find their favorite artists.
Yes, news at 6, your children are affected by porno!
Do these illegitimate services compensate artists? No. Songwriters? No. Pay taxes on the value of product? No. Compensate the record label in any way? No. Invest in the generation of new art? No.
Do you fairly compensate them? Do you pay taxes like you should? Do you care about anything other than your bottom line? Would you have mentioned your own compensation if you did?
My industry can continue to sue users, many of them kids, to establish deterrence and educate the public. But the real villains are not the kids. The real villains are those profiteers who offload liability on these kids and are laughing all the way to the bank as American courts struggle to apply existing law (or misapply it) to this abuse of good technology.
So stop suing the children you claim you want to protect from the supposed evils of P2P. Also, please show me where BitTorrent (again the leading P2P application) is making enough money s
I never said it was Crichton's idea. What I said was that I was hoping it was more fiction than reality.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case in this instance. Self-sustaining, swarms, of tiny robots flying around and doing shit using their own AI is scary.
Sounds an awful lot like Michael Crichton's novel Prey. The story's description (from the above link): cloud of nanoparticles -- micro-robots -- has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey.
I hoped that this was more fiction than reality. Perhaps Prey is going to become a movie and they are writing this up to get people interested?
Doesn't the thought of an intelligent swarm of nearly indestructible particles scare people? I know I am paranoid and all but I can't fathom the damage that could occur if these got out and were self-sustaining even for a short time.
On the other hand their is antoher newspaper in town that charges $90/year for access to their sports archives and at last estimate they had close to 1000 subscribers.
That's also $7.50 a month for unlimited usage of their sports archive. That's not $3 for a single article.
Of course, like many things about the business operations of a traditional publisher that has ventured online, the reasons are simple but the solutions complicated. The New York Times requires that its users register, which makes it difficult for search engines to spider its content.
As a rule I do not read any newspaper online that I have to register for. In fact, I refuse to purchase the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press here in Minnesota because of their policy requiring user registration. Fake accounts be dammed, you want me to read your paper and have to look through your ads you will let me do so without a cookie linked to information, fake or otherwise.
an even more impenetrable barrier is the Times' paid archive. Because it stows material more than a week old behind an archive wall, you have to cough up $3 per article. Since few are willing to pay for content they can get free elsewhere, search engines, which often base results on relevancy (read: popularity), will continue to dis the Times -- as well as other media sites that make you register or pay for old news (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal).
This is a horrible problem that I have run into in recent times trying to do simple research on the web. I was trying to look for articles pertaining to a friend that currently resides in Perrysburg, OH. I did a simple search on the Toledo Blade's website only to find a link to a third-party archive company that required me to pay a fee to access more than a short blurb about the story. Unwilling to drive the 665 miles to Toledo from where I currently live just to read a hardcopy I gave up on my search for these articles due to this barrier. But while doing research about NEPA I find that The Scranton Times has a much better free searchable archive of information than does the The Times Leader which requires you to pay to visit their archive. Wonder who gets my visits?
I really think that these policies could lead to the downfall of traditional news outlets. I have absolutely no desire to pay money for information that should be easily available. Hell, if you are going to charge I can't see a $3 fee! A couple hundred words are worth $3 in storage? No way. Perhaps if I asked them to mail me the copy of the article then $3 would be reasonable.
"There isn't a compelling business argument today that would suggest that giving away our content is a good idea," Nisenholtz said. Even though the Lexis-Nexis deal is an all-you-can-eat model -- not based on usage -- the Times can ill afford to undermine its relationship with such an important customer. It simply can't charge Lexis-Nexis tens of millions of dollars while giving away the same content free over the Web.
The argument that makes sense is that people aren't going to be willing to pay you $3 for a computer copy of an article that is only a couple hundred words. Make the fee something reasonable or watch as you begin to waste a lot of money paying the third party archive to host your data and no one retrives it. Perhaps a rival newspaper would open their database up and people would start going to them instead. We can always hope.