MPAA(and RIAA) really wants to sell a "license" to watch the movie/song on the media you purchased it.
They don't really want you putting songs from a CD on tape or (backup?) CD or on an MP3 player, they don't want you to tape (on VHS) a movie from a DVD, they don't want you to be able to back up anything.
Well, when I say they "don't want" I really mean that in the most tinfoilhat wearing sort of way. On the other hand, remember back to how freaked out they were that people could copy tapes? Or VHS machines could record? Or that people could hear songs on the radio and not go to live concerts???
Think about it though, if you bought a DVD movie for $20 and showed it at your home, but invited 20 friends to see it on your big-screen... The MPAA are out the money that each of your friends could have choked up for their own "license", er, copy of the DVD. (Or Blockbuster Rental, but that's another story.)
Unless it's a good movie, lots of people aren't going to purchase a movie that they've already scene, er, seen.
But MPAA/RIAA would rather approach it from the standpoint of stopping those nasssty piratesess... not in allowing consumers to have the rights to their purchase.
Well, from the standpoint that you could make a "backup" of a book (hardbound or paperback) it's not as feasible to backup a book, but a CD or DVD you could.
Consider that a disk that runs the risk of being easily scratched (whatever happened to those "indestructable CDs" that we heard about so much in the 80's?) should be able to be backed up... one would think.
OR they should have some sort of process where, if you have a CD or DVD that is scratched and you can't play, you can send it in and for FREE get another copy. You purchased the "license" for it, after all.
But wait, I forget. They'd rather have media that slowly self-destructs over time or use so that every 10 years (or less) you need to rebuy your collection. Backups are for wussies after all!:)
Either way, I want a product that lasts if I'm going to pay good money for it. If it's not going to last, I want to be able to make a backup of it so that my "investment" isn't lost.
(Wait, I'm sorry, this is the proverbial "choir" right?;) )
Isn't it ironic, don't ya think, that on one hand everyone is "Free Mitnick!" yet on the other hand everyone is "Tar and feather these German virus writers!"
Don't get me wrong, I'm in the "Free Mitnick" crowd and firmly in the "string up virus writers and spammers by the gonads" camp... but why is this?
Perhaps because Kevin was just another one of "us" who learned and didn't really seem to have done harm, yet those of us who have had to deal personally with the hassle of servers being taken down by a virus/worm or of personally cleaning our machines or worse --- losing data or time that could be better spent getting girlfriends or boyfriends?
Bah. So hang the bastards, hang 'em high, is what I say.
The company has come under fire in the last year since initiating controversial litigation to protect intellectual property rights on parts of the Linux operating system, source code that had been considered open source or freely exchanged technology. Recently the SCO Group notified companies using the technology in question that they would be sued if they didn't pay up.
This might be poignant, but at least if I were to murder someone and the news media were reporting on it they would say "...an alleged murderer"... Why can't they say "alleged intellectual property rights" as SCO hasn't proved anything yet and there is still doubt here.
----
SCO... An alleged company with an alleged business plan.
Well, in some respects a new PC could be cheaper than a new word processor... Microsoft Office anyway, and hey you get the hardware thrown in for a pittance more!;)
Wasn't it Bill Gates recently who said something to the effect that hardware will eventually, essentially become the "free" part of a computer and the software (OS, packages, Office Suites) would be the part you pay for?
This is from a print ad concerning the "Plot" to bury AT&T with a black and white picture of a bunch of people with shovels on top.
We're going underground. Bit by bit we're burying our telephone lines in
many parts of the country to give you better service.
Our purpose is not just to unclutter the landscape, although neighborhoods
will look neater. Underground cables are rarely affected by storms.
And they're never kayoed[?] by falling limbs or wayward autos.
Our service is good but we keep trying to make it better. And ourselves
more welcome than ever around your home. Going underground is one part of
that effort. We may be the only phone company in town, but we try not to act like it.
"Kayoed"??? What unique language is this? *reaching for dictionary*
Oh I see.
kayo
n. Sports pl. kayos
A knockout in boxing.
tr.v. kayoed, kayoing, kayos
1.Sports. To knock out.
2.Slang. To put out of commission.
Ah, there must be one other/.er who knows that on sight!
(Well it's mildly amusing to me anyway.)
Well at least Microsoft's motto isn't "We may be the only OS in town, and we act like it."
Patrick Arthur Richard, 37, faces four felonies, including extortion, for allegedly holding the sheriff's office Web site hostage in exchange for money. Richard's Running Wolf Inc. operated the sheriff's office Internet site for nearly three years as a free service before shutting it down three months ago because the county wouldn't pay him.
...
Officials noted that defendant Richard is unrelated to current sheriff's office Corrections Sgt. Pat Richard.
Nice of them to point out that two men with almost the same names aren't in any way related...?
Oh... come on you have to admit it's kind of funny! "Really, Pat Richard and Pat Richard aren't related!"
It's clear from the article that this joker should be in Prison for theft, and other crimes...
But according to him he's raking in the big bucks! He used to be fat, but now he's 240lbs! Hey, I wonder if he has a large penis now as well?
Point is, the article failed to mention the fact that he is still stealing resources from other ISP machines. While he claims that the Internet isn't free, and he's one of those good "internet marketer bulk emailers" and that all 40 million email addresses were opt-in, and that he's not one of those scummy "hard core spammers" and he honors all remove requests...
Spammers ALWAYS LIE!
He and Darl should get together sometime...
----
I know, this is probably redundant and has probably already been said... but I do hate when thieveses like this joker just keep getting away with spamming.... so the question is asked. Who is giving him the money to continue his "business" and how can we (or anyone) stop it?
Well... if you were to kill your neighbor's dog that would be theft.
However, the RIAA would like you to feel that killing your neighborbor's dog is actually as serious as a crime they like to call "copyright infringement"...
Oh wait, I guess you could only do that if you put your neighbor's dog meat on a P2P site for all to, uh, download...
(See, cause "copyright infringement != theft" because you aren't denying the original owner of the use of their dog and... Oh, never mind... mod me down, it made funny sense when I first wrote it.....)
Sometimes when ya roll a d4 you get a 4... and sometimes ya get a 1... They were just unlucky this time, but that's okay because as you said it'll right itself by unfolding!
Better yet! Send someone who only have a year or so left to live.. Cancer, whatever. Something that might end their life soon, but not be completely dehabilitating. (That the word I mean?)
Think about it, if I had a year left to live, and going to Mars was a dream of mine, and I was a scientist.. why not go on a one-way trip to Mars with a Scientific buddy who is also going to die soon. Think of how much they would be seen as Heros! But also they could spend their last few days on another planet, exploring, and how having to worry about coming home?
Can you say Scientist Make-a-Wish Foundation anyone?:)
Be kind of bad though if they were die on the way, and not make it.
Actually if you think about it perhaps it makes sense.
At least in my addled mind. Here goes.
1:Look for caves or a region of Mars that is likely to have caves without the constant hazard of caveins.
2:Look for that in a region of Mars that tends towards the more Tropical and is lower altitude. That way even if it's a high of 10F during the day the explorer wouldn't have to expend as much energy trying to stay warm. Besides, if you have a cave chances are you will be able to better survive one of those nasty (max 25mph?) dust storms.
3:Send the astronaut (or two, or three) in a vehicle that can return to Earth, but don't necessarily send all the fuel required to do so the first trip. Instead send food, water, etc.
4:Send the supplies in a device similar to the way the recent landing were: with parachutes and airbags. Send the astronauts in a vehicle that can "land" but don't burden them down with all the supplies. An astronaut can better walk to where the bags bounced (hopefully) to pick up the new supplies of PowerBars than a rover could.
5:Someone suggested a nuclear reactor. I agree with this one, and ship it separately. But have enough spare solar panels for backup too.
6:Free lifetime subscription to the Playboy Channel. Oh, and DirectTV. But only during the day when the earth is facing Mars. (Wouldn't PPV be a real bitch?)
7:At regular intervals send airbag protected supplies, but also smaller probes that could be launched with rocks, sand, and other materials back to Earth. Don't burden them down with parachutes for Earth entry, just pick them up in orbit when it's convienent.
8:Did I mention send Fuel for that rocket back?
9: Find astronauts who don't mind drinking their filtered recycled urine.
10: Send tanks of O2 as well.
I could be mistaken, but I'd think that making a shipping system similar to the Rover's lander, without having to add a rover, would be less expensive and you could launch a bunch of them at a time and just keep sending them..
Martians are gonna get pissed off about us littering their planet.. but hey...
It would be much harder to sterilize a human trip to Mars, especially if you are planning on them living, dying and rotting on the planet.
Well, I'm not sure about rotting. Isn't the temperature on Mars usually below 0F (freezing) all the time except for the sunny tropical parts of Mars where it gets up to 10F-20F?
So, a body on Mars might not do more than just stay in cold storage until it gets disturbed.
But yeah.. point is true... but at least on Mars we wouldn't have to compete with any other pre-existing life. Oh you know the Native Martians, but we'll call them Indians, of course, because... oh I dunno, tradition or something.:)
Because of the absolutely phenomenal number of requests for this site (due to its being listed on Slashdot), we have had to take the unusual step of temporarily disabling the content of the
site until things calm down:-) We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.
If you get one or two email within a configurable time frame (1 minute? 30 seconds?) the email goes through.
If all SMTP ports were "honeypots" as such... perhaps the quantity of spam would drastically drop.
And, as a previous poster pointed out.. then you'd have all shards of glass looking for an SMTP port/service that wasn't so modified.
(That and I've always been partial to Mr. Gates one spam fighting idea.. delay sending of any one email by 3-5 seconds. Trying to send a million spam then becomes kind of a bitch.)
I've heard the standard paranoid BS about how sites are supported by banner ads and how we must all be good little boys and girls and click on them.. or at least look at them to support the free sites.
No offense to anyone here who runs a site supported by banner ads... but much like spam: I don't buy things from banner ads, I don't buy things from pop-up ads, and I don't buy things from spam.
So I block all banner ads, pop-ups, and spam that I possibly can. I help to teach others how to do so too. I refuse to be held hostage by the idea that I must somehow "support" websites anymore than I am forced to watch TV commercials (I always switch) or listen to radio commercials (I switch, turn it off, or listen to CDs.)
I say YAY for any product that allows people to block banners. When people are still on dial-up (poor slobs) why should they be forced to download bs ads that they may or may not support.
Block the ads, I say. Let them hang. Let them find a new business model---I refuse to feel responsible for their businesses because I chose not to blindly have ads force-fed down my throat.
I fear I may be already repeating someone else, hm? I also refuse to feel sorry for RIAA or the poor starving musicians who can only buy 4 H2's this year instead of 5.;)
Ohhh, but then the free sites I enjoy won't be free anymore... Aww. I can't take responsibility for that, sorry, any more than I can for telemarketers being out of a job or a spammer living in a trailer.. I mean.. nice house paid for with ill gotten gains.
This Is OffTopic, but I too saw the American version of Coupling last night... Though Jeff on the BBC version is goofy, in a "weird friend" sort of way, I felt the American Jeff was... creepy... almost perverse.
Maybe because I'm used to the British (Scottish?) Jeff, but the American Jeff just didn't play well with me... Just my 2 cents.
"Jane" was very cute though!!!
SCO thought that exact code alignment could be used to sway the general public...
The only problem is the only people who care about the whole SCO crack-smoking-binge... is us bunch of geeks.
I tried explaining to my mom the other day as well as to my sister and I eventually gave up. Not that I couldn't explain it, but it's just too much to explain about GPL and Open Source and IP and company claims and Linus and "open letters" and everything...
Had to just throw my figurative hands in the air and say, "Well, they're just being idiots is all!" and left it at that.
*Includes myself in the bunch of geeks who care about SCO illicit claims... Also only us bunch of geeks who cares about RIAA, or online rights, or copyrights extended to eternity...
Point is...I'm just not sure the general public groks what's going on enough to even care!
Exactly like that. It's still a darn good piece of software to help tame IE and make the Internet what you want, or at least block out what you don't. (I see there are other similar products, but for me I've gotten used to this one. )
This is Off Topic, I know, but when I surf from a Windows based platform I use Proxomitron which runs as a proxy on my local machine and basically blocks all things like banner ads, text I don't like (I could have it change "Microsoft" to "Microshaft" if I wanted), and importantly Flash is blocked as well.
It's free software (last time I checked) and pretty easy to use, not to mention you can do all sorts of things like stop gif animations or kill BLINK. (Not that I'm shilling for them, just software that makes going to Yahoo a nice quiet, ad-free experience!;) Did I mention how much I like not having ads or popups? )
Slashdot Mirror
Right.. that's why I put "s around "license".
MPAA(and RIAA) really wants to sell a "license" to watch the movie/song on the media you purchased it.
They don't really want you putting songs from a CD on tape or (backup?) CD or on an MP3 player, they don't want you to tape (on VHS) a movie from a DVD, they don't want you to be able to back up anything.
Well, when I say they "don't want" I really mean that in the most tinfoilhat wearing sort of way. On the other hand, remember back to how freaked out they were that people could copy tapes? Or VHS machines could record? Or that people could hear songs on the radio and not go to live concerts???
Think about it though, if you bought a DVD movie for $20 and showed it at your home, but invited 20 friends to see it on your big-screen... The MPAA are out the money that each of your friends could have choked up for their own "license", er, copy of the DVD. (Or Blockbuster Rental, but that's another story.)
Unless it's a good movie, lots of people aren't going to purchase a movie that they've already scene, er, seen.
But MPAA/RIAA would rather approach it from the standpoint of stopping those nasssty piratesess... not in allowing consumers to have the rights to their purchase.
Consider that a disk that runs the risk of being easily scratched (whatever happened to those "indestructable CDs" that we heard about so much in the 80's?) should be able to be backed up... one would think.
OR they should have some sort of process where, if you have a CD or DVD that is scratched and you can't play, you can send it in and for FREE get another copy. You purchased the "license" for it, after all.
But wait, I forget. They'd rather have media that slowly self-destructs over time or use so that every 10 years (or less) you need to rebuy your collection. Backups are for wussies after all! :)
Either way, I want a product that lasts if I'm going to pay good money for it. If it's not going to last, I want to be able to make a backup of it so that my "investment" isn't lost.
(Wait, I'm sorry, this is the proverbial "choir" right? ;) )
Isn't it ironic, don't ya think, that on one hand everyone is "Free Mitnick!" yet on the other hand everyone is "Tar and feather these German virus writers!"
Don't get me wrong, I'm in the "Free Mitnick" crowd and firmly in the "string up virus writers and spammers by the gonads" camp... but why is this?
Perhaps because Kevin was just another one of "us" who learned and didn't really seem to have done harm, yet those of us who have had to deal personally with the hassle of servers being taken down by a virus/worm or of personally cleaning our machines or worse --- losing data or time that could be better spent getting girlfriends or boyfriends?
Bah. So hang the bastards, hang 'em high, is what I say.
This might be poignant, but at least if I were to murder someone and the news media were reporting on it they would say "...an alleged murderer"... Why can't they say "alleged intellectual property rights" as SCO hasn't proved anything yet and there is still doubt here.
----
SCO... An alleged company with an alleged business plan.
Obligatory Jim Morrison quote?
I, for one, welcome our new Sexually Explicit Spam Overlords...
Wasn't it Bill Gates recently who said something to the effect that hardware will eventually, essentially become the "free" part of a computer and the software (OS, packages, Office Suites) would be the part you pay for?
'Tis a shame then that WalMart DOES carry HDTVs and even plasma TVs.
A Tatung 50 inch plasma display might be gigantic enough for ya? ;)
This is from a print ad concerning the "Plot" to bury AT&T with a black and white picture of a bunch of people with shovels on top.
"Kayoed"??? What unique language is this? *reaching for dictionary*
Oh I see.
kayo
n. Sports pl. kayos
A knockout in boxing.
tr.v. kayoed, kayoing, kayos
1.Sports. To knock out.
2.Slang. To put out of commission.
Ah, there must be one other /.er who knows that on sight!
(Well it's mildly amusing to me anyway.)
Well at least Microsoft's motto isn't "We may be the only OS in town, and we act like it."
Nice of them to point out that two men with almost the same names aren't in any way related...?
Oh... come on you have to admit it's kind of funny! "Really, Pat Richard and Pat Richard aren't related!"
But according to him he's raking in the big bucks! He used to be fat, but now he's 240lbs! Hey, I wonder if he has a large penis now as well?
Point is, the article failed to mention the fact that he is still stealing resources from other ISP machines. While he claims that the Internet isn't free, and he's one of those good "internet marketer bulk emailers" and that all 40 million email addresses were opt-in, and that he's not one of those scummy "hard core spammers" and he honors all remove requests...
Spammers ALWAYS LIE!
He and Darl should get together sometime...
----
I know, this is probably redundant and has probably already been said... but I do hate when thieveses like this joker just keep getting away with spamming.... so the question is asked. Who is giving him the money to continue his "business" and how can we (or anyone) stop it?
Well... if you were to kill your neighbor's dog that would be theft.
However, the RIAA would like you to feel that killing your neighborbor's dog is actually as serious as a crime they like to call "copyright infringement"...
Oh wait, I guess you could only do that if you put your neighbor's dog meat on a P2P site for all to, uh, download...
(See, cause "copyright infringement != theft" because you aren't denying the original owner of the use of their dog and... Oh, never mind... mod me down, it made funny sense when I first wrote it.....)
Sometimes when ya roll a d4 you get a 4... and sometimes ya get a 1... They were just unlucky this time, but that's okay because as you said it'll right itself by unfolding!
Better yet! Send someone who only have a year or so left to live.. Cancer, whatever. Something that might end their life soon, but not be completely dehabilitating. (That the word I mean?)
Think about it, if I had a year left to live, and going to Mars was a dream of mine, and I was a scientist.. why not go on a one-way trip to Mars with a Scientific buddy who is also going to die soon. Think of how much they would be seen as Heros! But also they could spend their last few days on another planet, exploring, and how having to worry about coming home?
Can you say Scientist Make-a-Wish Foundation anyone? :)
Be kind of bad though if they were die on the way, and not make it.
Actually if you think about it perhaps it makes sense.
At least in my addled mind. Here goes.
1:Look for caves or a region of Mars that is likely to have caves without the constant hazard of caveins.
2:Look for that in a region of Mars that tends towards the more Tropical and is lower altitude. That way even if it's a high of 10F during the day the explorer wouldn't have to expend as much energy trying to stay warm. Besides, if you have a cave chances are you will be able to better survive one of those nasty (max 25mph?) dust storms.
3:Send the astronaut (or two, or three) in a vehicle that can return to Earth, but don't necessarily send all the fuel required to do so the first trip. Instead send food, water, etc.
4:Send the supplies in a device similar to the way the recent landing were: with parachutes and airbags. Send the astronauts in a vehicle that can "land" but don't burden them down with all the supplies. An astronaut can better walk to where the bags bounced (hopefully) to pick up the new supplies of PowerBars than a rover could.
5:Someone suggested a nuclear reactor. I agree with this one, and ship it separately. But have enough spare solar panels for backup too.
6:Free lifetime subscription to the Playboy Channel. Oh, and DirectTV. But only during the day when the earth is facing Mars. (Wouldn't PPV be a real bitch?)
7:At regular intervals send airbag protected supplies, but also smaller probes that could be launched with rocks, sand, and other materials back to Earth. Don't burden them down with parachutes for Earth entry, just pick them up in orbit when it's convienent.
8:Did I mention send Fuel for that rocket back?
9: Find astronauts who don't mind drinking their filtered recycled urine.
10: Send tanks of O2 as well.
I could be mistaken, but I'd think that making a shipping system similar to the Rover's lander, without having to add a rover, would be less expensive and you could launch a bunch of them at a time and just keep sending them..
Martians are gonna get pissed off about us littering their planet.. but hey...
Well, I'm not sure about rotting. Isn't the temperature on Mars usually below 0F (freezing) all the time except for the sunny tropical parts of Mars where it gets up to 10F-20F?
So, a body on Mars might not do more than just stay in cold storage until it gets disturbed.
But yeah.. point is true... but at least on Mars we wouldn't have to compete with any other pre-existing life. Oh you know the Native Martians, but we'll call them Indians, of course, because... oh I dunno, tradition or something. :)
From the site:
That was fast!
And here I was missing something... and I didn't know what it was...
...My daily SCO fix! Welcome to 2004 and another new year of SCO FUD! :)
So uh yeah... of course they didn't buy what they thought they bought... Maybe this time they will have bought the farm, hm? :)
If you get one or two email within a configurable time frame (1 minute? 30 seconds?) the email goes through. If all SMTP ports were "honeypots" as such... perhaps the quantity of spam would drastically drop.
And, as a previous poster pointed out.. then you'd have all shards of glass looking for an SMTP port/service that wasn't so modified.
(That and I've always been partial to Mr. Gates one spam fighting idea.. delay sending of any one email by 3-5 seconds. Trying to send a million spam then becomes kind of a bitch.)
No offense to anyone here who runs a site supported by banner ads... but much like spam: I don't buy things from banner ads, I don't buy things from pop-up ads, and I don't buy things from spam.
So I block all banner ads, pop-ups, and spam that I possibly can. I help to teach others how to do so too. I refuse to be held hostage by the idea that I must somehow "support" websites anymore than I am forced to watch TV commercials (I always switch) or listen to radio commercials (I switch, turn it off, or listen to CDs.)
I say YAY for any product that allows people to block banners. When people are still on dial-up (poor slobs) why should they be forced to download bs ads that they may or may not support.
Block the ads, I say. Let them hang. Let them find a new business model---I refuse to feel responsible for their businesses because I chose not to blindly have ads force-fed down my throat.
I fear I may be already repeating someone else, hm? I also refuse to feel sorry for RIAA or the poor starving musicians who can only buy 4 H2's this year instead of 5. ;)
Ohhh, but then the free sites I enjoy won't be free anymore... Aww. I can't take responsibility for that, sorry, any more than I can for telemarketers being out of a job or a spammer living in a trailer.. I mean.. nice house paid for with ill gotten gains.
Maybe because I'm used to the British (Scottish?) Jeff, but the American Jeff just didn't play well with me... Just my 2 cents. "Jane" was very cute though!!!
They already have been... throwing numbers in for letters... mixing letters... Just wouldn't look very professional (ha) if they started doing that!
The only problem is the only people who care about the whole SCO crack-smoking-binge... is us bunch of geeks.
I tried explaining to my mom the other day as well as to my sister and I eventually gave up. Not that I couldn't explain it, but it's just too much to explain about GPL and Open Source and IP and company claims and Linus and "open letters" and everything...
Had to just throw my figurative hands in the air and say, "Well, they're just being idiots is all!" and left it at that.
*Includes myself in the bunch of geeks who care about SCO illicit claims... Also only us bunch of geeks who cares about RIAA, or online rights, or copyrights extended to eternity...
Point is...I'm just not sure the general public groks what's going on enough to even care!
Exactly like that. It's still a darn good piece of software to help tame IE and make the Internet what you want, or at least block out what you don't. (I see there are other similar products, but for me I've gotten used to this one. )
This is Off Topic, I know, but when I surf from a Windows based platform I use Proxomitron which runs as a proxy on my local machine and basically blocks all things like banner ads, text I don't like (I could have it change "Microsoft" to "Microshaft" if I wanted), and importantly Flash is blocked as well.
It's free software (last time I checked) and pretty easy to use, not to mention you can do all sorts of things like stop gif animations or kill BLINK. (Not that I'm shilling for them, just software that makes going to Yahoo a nice quiet, ad-free experience! ;) Did I mention how much I like not having ads or popups? )