The first ads I thought of being recycled were the Mentos commercials. They are made in Germany I think to be shown in the U.S., so they have no dialog in them. They just overlay some song on it. The best thing about reusing them is that they never have ANYTHING to do with Mentos. Guy is in some very difficult situation, pops a Mento, and then finds some clever way out of or around it. You could replace the Mentos with Certs, candy bars, toothpaste, deodorant, athlete's foot spray, etc. They would have to clip that couple of seconds where he puts one in his mouth if they wanted to use it for a non-food item.
I need to refute several things you countered against me.
>Says who? You? No, says Megan. "It's not like they warned you or anything that it wasn't legal," she said. If she was not sharing music, she would have said so. Instead, her defense is that the Kazaa website and software didn't advertise that copying and sharing music was illegal.
>You come right out and say fuck-em, they're guilty anyway, right? Well, that is pretty much the gist of it. If the RIAA continued to pursue people who say they were not sharing files, and they were accused of that by mistake, I would be upset about that. When the best answer they have is "I didn't know it was wrong.", then they are lucky to get off with a smaller settlement.
>It's a lose-lose situation for the family being sued, and the lesser loss is to just pay the $3,500. Even if someone paid their court defense for them, you would still be correct about "lose-lose" because the judgement would go against them! She admitted she did it. She would be liable for the exhorbitant penalties of law. Getting her "day in court" would be WORSE for her.
Remember what happened with those who were falsely accused. They didn't have to defend themselves in court, and they didn't even have to pay a settlement. They didn't do it, so they were not pursued further. The Slashdot community is complaining about how those who WERE sharing music got "bullied" into paying a settlement. You say they should have a chance to defend themselves and not have to pay the settlement just because they can't afford to pay for the legal defense. Normally I would agree with you in other realms such as the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) suing small business for not hiring the right quotas of minorities. That is big money bullying small money in a lot of cases. In the file sharer cases, though, you are forgetting the small detail of what would happen if they did go to court. They would be found GUILTY and have to pay the full legal penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars for copyright infringement. They had better be glad they can get off with these settlements instead of fighting it. It's not bullying because they are not innocent.
There is a separate issue, though, that the amounts of the legal penalties are crazy, but that's just how the law is written.
And you know why this strengthens their reputation as opposed to the closed source places that don't announce break-ins? Debian says, "We found a door that was unlocked. We are blocking off the house for a while to check and make sure nothing has been tampered with." Microsoft won't announce things like that--they'll just quietly lock the door and hope no one knew that it was left unlocked. They only make an announcement when they come home and find the unlocked door has been opened, and their furniture has been moved out onto the front lawn and into the street, where there's no chance of hiding it. That is what helps Debian's reputation--they are honest about every possible intrusion, rather than just the ones where there is no chance of secrecy.
I have a vested interest in this analogy since my company is in one of the Rambus lawsuits. They are going to take a while to play out to the bitter end, but there has been quite a bit of back and forth in them. I think they are currently looking good from their most recent appeal, but there are still cases ongoing with multiple companies. Rambus, at least, unlike SCO are still able to continue with their real business instead of just becoming a litigation factory. They were originally convicted of fraud, but that was overturned on appeal. The suits continue. I see the same possibility of repeated appeals in the SCO case, so don't look for them to be crushed in the first decision and that be the end of it.
I see MS and Linux as both being indicative of the behavior of "free market". Originally MS had a good product in Windows. (I don't want a debate of how they acquired the product or their lack of innovation.) People liked it, bought it, and MS's business grew. But, with any free market system, monopolies naturally develop, unless countered by government, because they are most profitable to the company. Linux is also an example of free market forces, though, because the government is not restricting competing companies from entering the field. Some people dislike the product and/or behavior of the monopolist, so they create an alternative. More people come to support the alternative, and its business grows.
The key is that alternatives can be made, and people are free to choose between the monopoly and the alternatives.
Oh, so you order a "250 milliliter" or "quarter liter" instead of a pint at the pubs? There is a great essay about how the metric system looks all good to write, but is way inconvenient to actually use. How do you divide a meter in thirds?, etc. It also tells about the origin of the fahrenheit scale as being a binary scale (64 degrees) between the freezing point of water and body temperature (96 originally) so that the scale could be accurately duplicated based on those two setpoints.
Regional pronunciation differences have been a hobby curiosity of mine. I finally found a web site from a linguistics survey done by Harvard. They got survey results from around the country and turned up some cool results of what words people use for stuff and how they say them. Here is the link to the study. It has great stuff like soda/pop/coke as the term for a soft drink, how do you pronounce crayon, coupon, mischevous, etc. Really cool stuff.
"provoked the Japanese into bombing us"?!?! It's just a troll. It's just a troll. It's just a troll. It's just a troll. It's just a troll. It's just a troll. It's just a troll.
When LOTR is over it will have taken PJ 10 years of deticated work. Doubt anyone has the stumack for making a movie for 20 years.
Heh, Lucas had the stomach to spend 10 years on a movie series, 20 years doing other stuff and then another 10 years on more movies in the series. I agree, though, that 20 years in a row on the same project would suck the life from anyone.
For the most part, humans do think this way, but there is one area we don't: children. The loss of a child's life is amazingly tragic, whereas the loss of an adult's life is less so. This doesn't make much sense, in that the adult had more time on them, and more learning
Actually, I think you are misunderstanding people's perceptions of this. Their concern is on a subconscious level still about time, as you say. You are just looking at the timeline before their death, whereas most people look at the timeline after. People are not concerned with the time used--it's about the time NOT used. Older people who die in accidents got to use most of the time in their lives how they wanted. They only had another 10 years or so taken from them. Young people had 50-60 years taken from them that they did not get to use.
I know people ask you to RTFA a lot, but in this case, if people would have even RTFS (summary) they would have gotten it right. Everyone is running with what Slashdot twisted the title around to say. SCO will not pay just to not use Linux. It is for SWITCHING FROM Linux. I do see finally a use for those Linux XBOXes now. Switch it back to a game console and get paid! I'm not sure what their conditions are for the type of system it has to be. If their restrictions are not specific enough, go find an old 286 or such around, install Linux, and then "migrate away" for profit.
Is that the real origin of this ??? Profit! thing? I've seen that in the comments of almost every story and didn't know where that came from. Thank you for the enlightenment.
You say someone should set up a petition. Guess what? Here it is! I've signed it already. I hope this can get signed by the millions of Slashdot readers and maybe GL will take notice. The page today says the petition has 45,145 signatures.
Yeah, when you read the original story, it has a very suspicious line: "A spokesperson for Apple declined comment, and a representative of McDonald's was unavailable for comment."
So, in a supposed agreement between two companies, neither one will confirm it. This is worthy of printing because.....???
I don't think they intentionally biased it--"manufacture an inaccurate outcome", as you say. This is just generally in a grey area. When RIAA asked them to do this survey, they were probably aware of how it would work out. NPD tried to come up with the best way it could think of to take this data, but when people are volunteering to be monitored for illegal activity, the results are almost surely going to be skewed. You can't put a +/- error% on a survey where those being surveyed have a motivation to behave differently than people not being surveyed.
So, simple summary: NPD didn't do it on purpose, but the results are "political numbers", and rational people should take the results with a case of salt.
Given that the company has been doing statistical research since 1967, I suspect that they are well aware of the potential biases that can be introduced into a statistical survey.
I don't doubt that in the least, but considering they are probably being paid pretty well by the RIAA to do this survey and report the results, they don't really have an obligation to announce how inaccurate the data is if it reflects the "success" of the RIAA's litigious tactics.
also...
You are making an assumption about the behavior of how people would answer a survey without having any data to support that assumption, other than, I suppose, your own reaction to how you would participate.
I think he has plenty of data to support that assumption. If the RIAA hadn't sued anyone for sharing music before, it would be an ungrounded assumption, but as there are new announcements every week about more people getting sued or settling their lawsuits with the RIAA, it is pretty well established that people being asked to participate in a survey like this would be out of their minds to admit to it. I mean the RIAA is subpoenaing ISPs to get people's information to sue them. People know it would be financial suicide to admit to it in an RIAA-sponsored survey. Hunter: I need some help to find out if the barrel of my shotgun is clean. Any volunteers? Duck: Oh, OK. Let me take a look.
Here is a good summary of this scam from Snopes.com. The cashiers check is the aspect of this that makes it scary. He sends you the money first, which makes it seem like it's not a scam, and then when the bank shows that it actually deposited, it all seems good. Most people don't realize that a bank would deposit before they could confirm the source of funds.
Damn right! You will have to buy a brand new 10GHz Pentium V with 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, and the latest $900 video card just to boot the damn thing.
Yup, that is so right. On the other hand, I feel caught in the middle of rooting for this or not because of where I work. On the one hand, I do use Windows and hate how each version takes twice the resources the last one did. But, I also work for a U.S.-based semiconductor company, so when the next version of Winbloat comes along, it starts another profitable computer upgrading cycle. Good for my profit sharing paycheck, good for the economy, etc.
I get one of these about every other week. I might possibly get more, but I use a Yahoo mail account, which is great about finding and filtering out spam. The ones I get usually don't ask for me to send any fees to them. They probably don't because they would have to tell where to send it, and that would leave some trace to them. Instead, they ask me to provide my bank account number, so they can just wire me the money. Oh, goody! I don't have to send them anything; they're going to send me money first!
Slashdot Mirror
The first ads I thought of being recycled were the Mentos commercials. They are made in Germany I think to be shown in the U.S., so they have no dialog in them. They just overlay some song on it. The best thing about reusing them is that they never have ANYTHING to do with Mentos. Guy is in some very difficult situation, pops a Mento, and then finds some clever way out of or around it. You could replace the Mentos with Certs, candy bars, toothpaste, deodorant, athlete's foot spray, etc. They would have to clip that couple of seconds where he puts one in his mouth if they wanted to use it for a non-food item.
I need to refute several things you countered against me.
>Says who? You?
No, says Megan. "It's not like they warned you or anything that it wasn't legal," she said. If she was not sharing music, she would have said so. Instead, her defense is that the Kazaa website and software didn't advertise that copying and sharing music was illegal.
>You come right out and say fuck-em, they're guilty anyway, right?
Well, that is pretty much the gist of it. If the RIAA continued to pursue people who say they were not sharing files, and they were accused of that by mistake, I would be upset about that. When the best answer they have is "I didn't know it was wrong.", then they are lucky to get off with a smaller settlement.
>It's a lose-lose situation for the family being sued, and the lesser loss is to just pay the $3,500.
Even if someone paid their court defense for them, you would still be correct about "lose-lose" because the judgement would go against them! She admitted she did it. She would be liable for the exhorbitant penalties of law. Getting her "day in court" would be WORSE for her.
Remember what happened with those who were falsely accused. They didn't have to defend themselves in court, and they didn't even have to pay a settlement. They didn't do it, so they were not pursued further. The Slashdot community is complaining about how those who WERE sharing music got "bullied" into paying a settlement. You say they should have a chance to defend themselves and not have to pay the settlement just because they can't afford to pay for the legal defense. Normally I would agree with you in other realms such as the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) suing small business for not hiring the right quotas of minorities. That is big money bullying small money in a lot of cases. In the file sharer cases, though, you are forgetting the small detail of what would happen if they did go to court. They would be found GUILTY and have to pay the full legal penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars for copyright infringement. They had better be glad they can get off with these settlements instead of fighting it. It's not bullying because they are not innocent.
There is a separate issue, though, that the amounts of the legal penalties are crazy, but that's just how the law is written.
And you know why this strengthens their reputation as opposed to the closed source places that don't announce break-ins? Debian says, "We found a door that was unlocked. We are blocking off the house for a while to check and make sure nothing has been tampered with." Microsoft won't announce things like that--they'll just quietly lock the door and hope no one knew that it was left unlocked. They only make an announcement when they come home and find the unlocked door has been opened, and their furniture has been moved out onto the front lawn and into the street, where there's no chance of hiding it. That is what helps Debian's reputation--they are honest about every possible intrusion, rather than just the ones where there is no chance of secrecy.
I have a vested interest in this analogy since my company is in one of the Rambus lawsuits. They are going to take a while to play out to the bitter end, but there has been quite a bit of back and forth in them. I think they are currently looking good from their most recent appeal, but there are still cases ongoing with multiple companies. Rambus, at least, unlike SCO are still able to continue with their real business instead of just becoming a litigation factory. They were originally convicted of fraud, but that was overturned on appeal. The suits continue. I see the same possibility of repeated appeals in the SCO case, so don't look for them to be crushed in the first decision and that be the end of it.
I see MS and Linux as both being indicative of the behavior of "free market". Originally MS had a good product in Windows. (I don't want a debate of how they acquired the product or their lack of innovation.) People liked it, bought it, and MS's business grew. But, with any free market system, monopolies naturally develop, unless countered by government, because they are most profitable to the company. Linux is also an example of free market forces, though, because the government is not restricting competing companies from entering the field. Some people dislike the product and/or behavior of the monopolist, so they create an alternative. More people come to support the alternative, and its business grows.
The key is that alternatives can be made, and people are free to choose between the monopoly and the alternatives.
Oh, so you order a "250 milliliter" or "quarter liter" instead of a pint at the pubs?
There is a great essay about how the metric system looks all good to write, but is way inconvenient to actually use. How do you divide a meter in thirds?, etc. It also tells about the origin of the fahrenheit scale as being a binary scale (64 degrees) between the freezing point of water and body temperature (96 originally) so that the scale could be accurately duplicated based on those two setpoints.
Sounds like that's what they are doing to their bottom line.
Regional pronunciation differences have been a hobby curiosity of mine. I finally found a web site from a linguistics survey done by Harvard. They got survey results from around the country and turned up some cool results of what words people use for stuff and how they say them.
Here is the link to the study.
It has great stuff like soda/pop/coke as the term for a soft drink, how do you pronounce crayon, coupon, mischevous, etc. Really cool stuff.
Right, the subtitle of his post was that he doesn't have any legitimate CDs--only copies. That thar will land ya in jail son.
"provoked the Japanese into bombing us"?!?!
It's just a troll.
It's just a troll.
It's just a troll.
It's just a troll.
It's just a troll.
It's just a troll.
It's just a troll.
If there were really flushing going on at SCO, they wouldn't be in this deep...
Jeez, Moderator, It's called an analogy--not offtopic.
I know people ask you to RTFA a lot, but in this case, if people would have even RTFS (summary) they would have gotten it right. Everyone is running with what Slashdot twisted the title around to say. SCO will not pay just to not use Linux. It is for SWITCHING FROM Linux. I do see finally a use for those Linux XBOXes now. Switch it back to a game console and get paid! I'm not sure what their conditions are for the type of system it has to be. If their restrictions are not specific enough, go find an old 286 or such around, install Linux, and then "migrate away" for profit.
Is that the real origin of this ??? Profit! thing? I've seen that in the comments of almost every story and didn't know where that came from. Thank you for the enlightenment.
You say someone should set up a petition. Guess what? Here it is! I've signed it already. I hope this can get signed by the millions of Slashdot readers and maybe GL will take notice. The page today says the petition has 45,145 signatures.
Yeah, when you read the original story, it has a very suspicious line: "A spokesperson for Apple declined comment, and a representative of McDonald's was unavailable for comment."
So, in a supposed agreement between two companies, neither one will confirm it. This is worthy of printing because.....???
I don't think they intentionally biased it--"manufacture an inaccurate outcome", as you say. This is just generally in a grey area. When RIAA asked them to do this survey, they were probably aware of how it would work out. NPD tried to come up with the best way it could think of to take this data, but when people are volunteering to be monitored for illegal activity, the results are almost surely going to be skewed. You can't put a +/- error% on a survey where those being surveyed have a motivation to behave differently than people not being surveyed.
So, simple summary: NPD didn't do it on purpose, but the results are "political numbers", and rational people should take the results with a case of salt.
It's funny to see comments like this lure the sucker moderators into the light.
1. Post displaying no understanding of statistical polls. 5 Interesting--D'oh!
2. Simple explanation. No mod.
3. Sarcastic explanation. 4 Funny
4. ???
5. Profit!
Sorry, I knew someone would add that in a reply if I didn't.
I don't doubt that in the least, but considering they are probably being paid pretty well by the RIAA to do this survey and report the results, they don't really have an obligation to announce how inaccurate the data is if it reflects the "success" of the RIAA's litigious tactics.
also...
I think he has plenty of data to support that assumption. If the RIAA hadn't sued anyone for sharing music before, it would be an ungrounded assumption, but as there are new announcements every week about more people getting sued or settling their lawsuits with the RIAA, it is pretty well established that people being asked to participate in a survey like this would be out of their minds to admit to it. I mean the RIAA is subpoenaing ISPs to get people's information to sue them. People know it would be financial suicide to admit to it in an RIAA-sponsored survey.
Hunter: I need some help to find out if the barrel of my shotgun is clean. Any volunteers?
Duck: Oh, OK. Let me take a look.
Here is a good summary of this scam from Snopes.com. The cashiers check is the aspect of this that makes it scary. He sends you the money first, which makes it seem like it's not a scam, and then when the bank shows that it actually deposited, it all seems good. Most people don't realize that a bank would deposit before they could confirm the source of funds.
Yup, that is so right. On the other hand, I feel caught in the middle of rooting for this or not because of where I work. On the one hand, I do use Windows and hate how each version takes twice the resources the last one did. But, I also work for a U.S.-based semiconductor company, so when the next version of Winbloat comes along, it starts another profitable computer upgrading cycle. Good for my profit sharing paycheck, good for the economy, etc.
I get one of these about every other week. I might possibly get more, but I use a Yahoo mail account, which is great about finding and filtering out spam. The ones I get usually don't ask for me to send any fees to them. They probably don't because they would have to tell where to send it, and that would leave some trace to them. Instead, they ask me to provide my bank account number, so they can just wire me the money. Oh, goody! I don't have to send them anything; they're going to send me money first!