Can't believe the trailer compared it to Blade Runner. The King Crimson / Pink Floyd references were cute tho.
I agree! The current events overtones with the Homeland Security and illegal immigrant killings/deportations were only for the benefit of attracting those in the reviewer community that hate the US' current administration. Their plan worked and it got rave reviews.
I saw it opening weekend because I needed to get out of the house but other than that it wasn't worth the $8.75/ticket I paid. The MPAA wonders why piracy is popular? If they think that people want to continue to pay nearly $20 (for a couple) to see politically motivated bullshit with horrendous and unnecessary violence then they have their heads further up their asses than I knew.
If there's absolutely nothing else to see at the rental place, I suggest watching it. Otherwise you're better off going to the back room and getting some cheesy 70s porn on VHS.
But allofmp3 didn't give you unlimited, flat rate access. If you're not interested in such a service, that's fine, but many people are. So the question is, would such a service would be viable without DRM?
You are correct, they didn't have an "unlimited" flat rate access but they offered streaming music for free. I would happily listen to the streaming feed of an album prior to purchasing it and we're not talking 30 second clips of each song that I have to manually click to get it to play.
I just don't understand why you feel that DRM is necessary to make this type of service work. Is there something inherently different about paying more money to download based on a monthly fee rather than a traffic based or per song model? Not to me there's not.
Ack. You have fallen for the conglomerates' campaign. You are now officially brainwashed into thinking that DRM is "good".
DRM exists for the benefit of the distributors and not the artists as they so readily claim. Why do the various distribution schemes out there have to have DRM in order to be viable? For some reason allofmp3.com worked just fucking fine for everyone (streaming and/or downloading) without the DRM. For me, it worked even better because I could get them in various bitrates and/or FLAC/WAV if I saw fit (and I did at times).
We need to REJECT at every turn the conglomerates' suggestions that we should bow to their demands. They are businessmen and they will respond favorably when the populace stops giving the fuckers money. It's people like you (and nearly everyone else) that makes DRM laden music viable.
Me? I'll stick to what is best... Music that is freely distributable by bands that don't make their money by sitting in a studio for one album but instead are out there working their asses off touring. I'm planning on going to see 5 shows in the next few weeks (it's what I can afford right now) and they are all bands that I would support.
That's what everyone should be doing to "give the artists the money they deserve", not paying the RIAA thieves so that the artists can gain a few pennies after a lower quality DRMd download.
Second is the physcological factors - the fact that when out running, my mind has to do a certain amount of work paying attention to where I am going, the surface, other road/pavement users etc this means consiously I can 'turn-off', whereas on a treadmill I need to think about something, and even though the treadmills at my gym have TVs and they might even be showing something I am interested in, I still spend a great deal of time looking around, still in 'vigilant mode'; The fact that I *can* step off at any time, ultimately means that after 4 or 5 miles I *will* just do that, when you are 5 miles from home, you just keep going, you can stop but you still have to at least walk home -so I keep running.
I know that swimming is different than running but I found that I stopped paying attention after a while when I was swimming long distances. It was better for me to be "turned off" as I ended up not feeling the burn and/or boredom as much.
They can only maintain their environment of fear if they're winning their cases or getting settlements.
That's where you're wrong. They can only maintain the environment of fear if the media conglomerates they pay publish the information they want rather than the "little guy hero" stories that have been showing up here lately.
Right there it tells you how to turn the fucking thing off.
User-agent: TurnitinBot Disallow: /
One of the McLean High plaintiffs wrote a paper titled "What Lies Beyond the Horizon." It was submitted to Turnitin with instructions that it not be archived, but it was, the lawsuit says.
So, instead of suing first, I assume that these students sent a certified letter demanding the content be removed from the database? The article doesn't specifically say, but I have a feeling that's not what happened.
When are people going to start using basic encryption (or better yet onion routing and strong anonymity)? There are technical solutions that make all this surveillance useless. We must implement steganographic techniques too so that there's no way to block the crypto.
We can't get people in the US to care enough to vote against politicians who are interested in curtailing freedoms. Hell, these people WANT to be "protected". You think that we are going to get them to start learning to use software to protect against something that they have been brainwashed into believing they want?
These are the same people that buy a new computer to stop their spyware problem instead of installing Firefox and some other simple software to stop it. Yeah, not gonna work.
For thoseof us who use our computers near-constantly there doesn't seem to be a point of making it easier to go from computer to TV, I don't think this box is for us. Now, if iTunes gets more movies and/or better pricing on movies and TV shows, then that may help.
Exactly. At first glance this seems like an awesome solution until I realize that I already have two laptops in the living room and one can be moved the three feet that's required to reach the TV's S-video cable and audio jacks.
iTunes would need to beat out my $50/month DirecTivo and offer the same features. It doesn't (and I fucking LOVE my TiVo) and I can't see a reason to go this route. Wake me up when I can set it up to record Voltron episodes and watch them later w/o having to download them or pay iTMS and then it would rock.
They just lost scanned images, nothing else AND they were able to recreate those images using the original documents anyway.
I worked with document imaging for a technical college from 2002 through last year. I'm not quite sure why their imaged documents were stored on magnetic/tape only. It should have been written to optical every few hours (you scan directly to magnetic and the storage solution writes that data out to the optical as it can) and thus the WORM drive cannot be formatted.
What ordinary user even swapped his speakers from the craptastic freebies that came with his Dell?
You mean like the Harmon Kardon speakers that came with mine that sound fantastic even to my audiophile ears (just not when connected to the on-board audio jacks)? Craptastic HK are not.
What, another hyperbole-filled, wildly inaccurate Slashdot post? Inconceivable.
Several articles across the web quote the $38 billion dollar figure. I would go on to say that not only are you trolling but so was the media release that went out over this.
And who, according to insurance companies, is the riskiest group? Teenage boys.
I still find myself wanting to take turns faster and change lanes as if no one was really there (no signaling, etc) after playing a few games of Gran Turismo and I'm 28.
Generally I have more control over this impulse than a 16 to 19 year old might have but still the impulse is there. As the numbers of individuals that still play video games continues to increase into the 20/30 age range it *could* have an effect on the driving styles of those individuals past the "teenage boy risky group" you mention.
I was interviewed by the WSJ Online tech writer Andrew LaVallee for this article. Mr. Lavellee was interested in my take on the entire MSN issue because I listed myself as an "Ex-Dodgeball Junkie" during this discussion on a local blog.
Dodgeball doesn't work (its Friend of a Friend function hasn't worked in nearly a year and a half) and there are SO many fucking douchebags that are trying to use Dodgeball as if it is Twitter instead of using Twitter.
I'm half glad that I wasn't quoted as the questions the writer asked weren't really pertaining to MSNs but more to the drama that was occurring on Dodgeball locally here in the Twin Cities based on the Metroblogging post I linked above.
Dodgeball was great two years ago when I started using it but after Google bought it out it has remained in nearly the same state while other services have exploded. Google obviously cares only about the database of venues and the visit frequency of its users and not so much about anything else. We'll see if they do anything with it now that MSNs have really taken off in the media.
Or get a little more creative. Google knows you contact someone through g-mail and orkut a lot. The gPhone knows that they visit a particular resturant on a regular basis. The next time you walk by this resturant, that resturant sends you a targeted message letting you know that your friend is there.
It's why they bought out Dodgeball. Mobile Social Networking has been getting a lot of mention lately (especially with SXSW going on last week) and while Dodgeball isn't at all innovative anymore (other MSNs have more features now) it will become important when Google has a HUGE database of venues in 20+ cities and the visit frequency of its users along with reviews, tags, etc.
It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.
Since when is it up to anyone except the owner of the content to protect their interests? There is only one reason that a third party would want to get involved with this bullshit -- kickbacks from the MPAA and other media conglomerates.
Different tap water gives me the runs for days until I grow used to it (usually when I'm on vacation). Even cooking or bathing with the water can cause this for me. I grow used to the water in the new location and return home to sit in the bathroom again for several more days.
Just don't claim that 'non-GM' corn is 'as nature intended'. It just took humans longer to modify it.
And thus people grew accustomed to eating the variations over the centuries. When you modify something and it's vastly different than what the body can handle it can cause serious issues.
I have no opinion on what should and shouldn't be done but I certainly haven't seen all that much benefit, so far, to what we have played with to "help out" nature.
Stop googling for "jihad death to american president" if you're worried about getting caught.
Excuse me?! I live in America and if I want to research the results of the search terms "jihad death to american president" I'm well within my fucking rights.
I frequently take long geocaching trips and like to have few things with me while I hike. It may be a leftover thing from when I was in Scouting and was constantly out backpacking, but it might just be that I hate carrying shit.
Anyway, I *always* carry with me a mobile phone with Internet service (EDGE/GPRS). In my case I don't have one that I can tether but if you are seriously interested in bringing your computer (I wouldn't, the weight is too much) then at least you will have connectivity in many more areas than if you just had wifi. In addition, I can take quick snapshots and upload them immediately to my mobile images gallery on my website from where ever I am. The quality is shit but at least people can tag along virtually until I upload the nice pictures.
Also, a nice GPS unit with good battery life (this is less of an issue these days with my Garmin 76CS (I haven't upgraded to the x series yet) will last three full days (~30 hours of the unit being on) on two lithium AAs. If I'm using 2500ma rechargables I might get 12 hours total.
The GPS is a nice touch if you want to geo-tag your photos later. Upload your tracks and use one of the pieces of software out there to match the EXIF data to your GPS tracks and then you can map the photos, etc, etc. It's a nice touch.
Actually, the "Windows Tax" gets offset by vendors paying the manufacturers to install all kinds of demo crap on the Windows computers they sell. Remove the Windows Tax, and you also remove the Windows Tax Credit... A PC with a free OS will prolly cost more than the one with Windows on it.
That will quickly stop when all the PC companies start offering it which will force MSFT to eat their own shit. They won't be the single game in town any longer which will force them to continue to "compete" by offering their discounts.
The Government shouldn't be allowed to profit one single bit from the sale of this precious spectrum. There's absolutely no fucking way all of that spectrum they are opening up is going to go to "emergency" bands.
Because the spectrum is owned "by the people" then *we* solely should benefit from any sale. Pay off these fucking boxes, in full, for *everyone* that needs them (which means no fucking partial coupons).
This conversion is nothing but a fleece as I've been saying for the last three fucking years.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't believe the trailer compared it to Blade Runner. The King Crimson / Pink Floyd references were cute tho.
I agree! The current events overtones with the Homeland Security and illegal immigrant killings/deportations were only for the benefit of attracting those in the reviewer community that hate the US' current administration. Their plan worked and it got rave reviews.
I saw it opening weekend because I needed to get out of the house but other than that it wasn't worth the $8.75/ticket I paid. The MPAA wonders why piracy is popular? If they think that people want to continue to pay nearly $20 (for a couple) to see politically motivated bullshit with horrendous and unnecessary violence then they have their heads further up their asses than I knew.
If there's absolutely nothing else to see at the rental place, I suggest watching it. Otherwise you're better off going to the back room and getting some cheesy 70s porn on VHS.
but he does have character.
No, he is a character. There's a difference and IMHO, in his case, it's not a good thing.
But allofmp3 didn't give you unlimited, flat rate access. If you're not interested in such a service, that's fine, but many people are. So the question is, would such a service would be viable without DRM?
You are correct, they didn't have an "unlimited" flat rate access but they offered streaming music for free. I would happily listen to the streaming feed of an album prior to purchasing it and we're not talking 30 second clips of each song that I have to manually click to get it to play.
I just don't understand why you feel that DRM is necessary to make this type of service work. Is there something inherently different about paying more money to download based on a monthly fee rather than a traffic based or per song model? Not to me there's not.
Ack. You have fallen for the conglomerates' campaign. You are now officially brainwashed into thinking that DRM is "good".
DRM exists for the benefit of the distributors and not the artists as they so readily claim. Why do the various distribution schemes out there have to have DRM in order to be viable? For some reason allofmp3.com worked just fucking fine for everyone (streaming and/or downloading) without the DRM. For me, it worked even better because I could get them in various bitrates and/or FLAC/WAV if I saw fit (and I did at times).
We need to REJECT at every turn the conglomerates' suggestions that we should bow to their demands. They are businessmen and they will respond favorably when the populace stops giving the fuckers money. It's people like you (and nearly everyone else) that makes DRM laden music viable.
Me? I'll stick to what is best... Music that is freely distributable by bands that don't make their money by sitting in a studio for one album but instead are out there working their asses off touring. I'm planning on going to see 5 shows in the next few weeks (it's what I can afford right now) and they are all bands that I would support.
That's what everyone should be doing to "give the artists the money they deserve", not paying the RIAA thieves so that the artists can gain a few pennies after a lower quality DRMd download.
Second is the physcological factors - the fact that when out running, my mind has to do a certain amount of work paying attention to where I am going, the surface, other road/pavement users etc this means consiously I can 'turn-off', whereas on a treadmill I need to think about something, and even though the treadmills at my gym have TVs and they might even be showing something I am interested in, I still spend a great deal of time looking around, still in 'vigilant mode'; The fact that I *can* step off at any time, ultimately means that after 4 or 5 miles I *will* just do that, when you are 5 miles from home, you just keep going, you can stop but you still have to at least walk home -so I keep running.
I know that swimming is different than running but I found that I stopped paying attention after a while when I was swimming long distances. It was better for me to be "turned off" as I ended up not feeling the burn and/or boredom as much.
They can only maintain their environment of fear if they're winning their cases or getting settlements.
That's where you're wrong. They can only maintain the environment of fear if the media conglomerates they pay publish the information they want rather than the "little guy hero" stories that have been showing up here lately.
I didn't want that god damn bot spidering me anymore so I went to the URL they offer during the crawl: http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html
Right there it tells you how to turn the fucking thing off.
User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /
One of the McLean High plaintiffs wrote a paper titled "What Lies Beyond the Horizon." It was submitted to Turnitin with instructions that it not be archived, but it was, the lawsuit says.
So, instead of suing first, I assume that these students sent a certified letter demanding the content be removed from the database? The article doesn't specifically say, but I have a feeling that's not what happened.
When are people going to start using basic encryption (or better yet onion routing and strong anonymity)? There are technical solutions that make all this surveillance useless. We must implement steganographic techniques too so that there's no way to block the crypto.
We can't get people in the US to care enough to vote against politicians who are interested in curtailing freedoms. Hell, these people WANT to be "protected". You think that we are going to get them to start learning to use software to protect against something that they have been brainwashed into believing they want?
These are the same people that buy a new computer to stop their spyware problem instead of installing Firefox and some other simple software to stop it. Yeah, not gonna work.
For thoseof us who use our computers near-constantly there doesn't seem to be a point of making it easier to go from computer to TV, I don't think this box is for us. Now, if iTunes gets more movies and/or better pricing on movies and TV shows, then that may help.
Exactly. At first glance this seems like an awesome solution until I realize that I already have two laptops in the living room and one can be moved the three feet that's required to reach the TV's S-video cable and audio jacks.
iTunes would need to beat out my $50/month DirecTivo and offer the same features. It doesn't (and I fucking LOVE my TiVo) and I can't see a reason to go this route. Wake me up when I can set it up to record Voltron episodes and watch them later w/o having to download them or pay iTMS and then it would rock.
That wasn't my point but thanks for the link.
IMHO, it's certainly not nearly important as them offering OpenCourseWare to the masses for free.
They just lost scanned images, nothing else AND they were able to recreate those images using the original documents anyway.
I worked with document imaging for a technical college from 2002 through last year. I'm not quite sure why their imaged documents were stored on magnetic/tape only. It should have been written to optical every few hours (you scan directly to magnetic and the storage solution writes that data out to the optical as it can) and thus the WORM drive cannot be formatted.
What ordinary user even swapped his speakers from the craptastic freebies that came with his Dell?
You mean like the Harmon Kardon speakers that came with mine that sound fantastic even to my audiophile ears (just not when connected to the on-board audio jacks)? Craptastic HK are not.
What, another hyperbole-filled, wildly inaccurate Slashdot post? Inconceivable.
Several articles across the web quote the $38 billion dollar figure. I would go on to say that not only are you trolling but so was the media release that went out over this.
And who, according to insurance companies, is the riskiest group? Teenage boys.
I still find myself wanting to take turns faster and change lanes as if no one was really there (no signaling, etc) after playing a few games of Gran Turismo and I'm 28.
Generally I have more control over this impulse than a 16 to 19 year old might have but still the impulse is there. As the numbers of individuals that still play video games continues to increase into the 20/30 age range it *could* have an effect on the driving styles of those individuals past the "teenage boy risky group" you mention.
I was interviewed by the WSJ Online tech writer Andrew LaVallee for this article. Mr. Lavellee was interested in my take on the entire MSN issue because I listed myself as an "Ex-Dodgeball Junkie" during this discussion on a local blog.
Dodgeball doesn't work (its Friend of a Friend function hasn't worked in nearly a year and a half) and there are SO many fucking douchebags that are trying to use Dodgeball as if it is Twitter instead of using Twitter.
I'm half glad that I wasn't quoted as the questions the writer asked weren't really pertaining to MSNs but more to the drama that was occurring on Dodgeball locally here in the Twin Cities based on the Metroblogging post I linked above.
Dodgeball was great two years ago when I started using it but after Google bought it out it has remained in nearly the same state while other services have exploded. Google obviously cares only about the database of venues and the visit frequency of its users and not so much about anything else. We'll see if they do anything with it now that MSNs have really taken off in the media.
Or get a little more creative. Google knows you contact someone through g-mail and orkut a lot. The gPhone knows that they visit a particular resturant on a regular basis. The next time you walk by this resturant, that resturant sends you a targeted message letting you know that your friend is there.
It's why they bought out Dodgeball. Mobile Social Networking has been getting a lot of mention lately (especially with SXSW going on last week) and while Dodgeball isn't at all innovative anymore (other MSNs have more features now) it will become important when Google has a HUGE database of venues in 20+ cities and the visit frequency of its users along with reviews, tags, etc.
It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.
Since when is it up to anyone except the owner of the content to protect their interests? There is only one reason that a third party would want to get involved with this bullshit -- kickbacks from the MPAA and other media conglomerates.
Have you ever eaten anything for the first time?
Different tap water gives me the runs for days until I grow used to it (usually when I'm on vacation). Even cooking or bathing with the water can cause this for me. I grow used to the water in the new location and return home to sit in the bathroom again for several more days.
Just don't claim that 'non-GM' corn is 'as nature intended'. It just took humans longer to modify it.
And thus people grew accustomed to eating the variations over the centuries. When you modify something and it's vastly different than what the body can handle it can cause serious issues.
I have no opinion on what should and shouldn't be done but I certainly haven't seen all that much benefit, so far, to what we have played with to "help out" nature.
Stop googling for "jihad death to american president" if you're worried about getting caught.
Excuse me?! I live in America and if I want to research the results of the search terms "jihad death to american president" I'm well within my fucking rights.
Fuck you for saying otherwise.
I frequently take long geocaching trips and like to have few things with me while I hike. It may be a leftover thing from when I was in Scouting and was constantly out backpacking, but it might just be that I hate carrying shit.
Anyway, I *always* carry with me a mobile phone with Internet service (EDGE/GPRS). In my case I don't have one that I can tether but if you are seriously interested in bringing your computer (I wouldn't, the weight is too much) then at least you will have connectivity in many more areas than if you just had wifi. In addition, I can take quick snapshots and upload them immediately to my mobile images gallery on my website from where ever I am. The quality is shit but at least people can tag along virtually until I upload the nice pictures.
Also, a nice GPS unit with good battery life (this is less of an issue these days with my Garmin 76CS (I haven't upgraded to the x series yet) will last three full days (~30 hours of the unit being on) on two lithium AAs. If I'm using 2500ma rechargables I might get 12 hours total.
The GPS is a nice touch if you want to geo-tag your photos later. Upload your tracks and use one of the pieces of software out there to match the EXIF data to your GPS tracks and then you can map the photos, etc, etc. It's a nice touch.
Actually, the "Windows Tax" gets offset by vendors paying the manufacturers to install all kinds of demo crap on the Windows computers they sell. Remove the Windows Tax, and you also remove the Windows Tax Credit... A PC with a free OS will prolly cost more than the one with Windows on it.
That will quickly stop when all the PC companies start offering it which will force MSFT to eat their own shit. They won't be the single game in town any longer which will force them to continue to "compete" by offering their discounts.
First, margins on PC's are razor-thin.
That changes a bit when 50% of the PC cost is eliminated when a free OS is installed with free office software.
The Government shouldn't be allowed to profit one single bit from the sale of this precious spectrum. There's absolutely no fucking way all of that spectrum they are opening up is going to go to "emergency" bands.
Because the spectrum is owned "by the people" then *we* solely should benefit from any sale. Pay off these fucking boxes, in full, for *everyone* that needs them (which means no fucking partial coupons).
This conversion is nothing but a fleece as I've been saying for the last three fucking years.