DRM or no DRM - making a back up is perfectly reasonable.
I was actually considering the iPod as my first ever Mac device purchase (although I have had some Mac hand-me-downs before). But after all that, I can hardly see the point. It seems to me that iPod just lost its supposedly number one reason for being better than the competition - the much advertised "ease of use." Without "ease of use" what is left beyond the fashion accessory argument?
It doesn't matter what happens to you as long as you can back up to a point before you had a problem.
Tight security is a good idea. Maintain your own files somewhere other than the root. Lock down your files with passwords, etc. Make a CD/DVD/removeable drive of your most important shit fairly often (keep a recent copy off-site if your stuff is VERY IMPORTANT to you). Use anti-virus programs and a firewall, etc. All well and good.
But a good backup means little more than a long unexpected coffee break in the worst case scenario (for most desktop users). Format and recover, step out for lunch or something.
No big.
Once we drill this into everyone, virus writers will just be nuisances unable to fuck over even the biggest lamers. We can shut them down with a permanent strategy, not this bullshit game of leap-frog we have been playing with the virus writers and the anti-virus vendors.
I won't go so far as to claim that the a-v vendors are creating the viruses themselves, but I will say that they do not offer a permanent solution to the problem in a worst case scenario. Ultimately, the vendors are a symptom of the problem: we run a-v products because the viruses exist, the a-v products do nothing to get around that simple fact. To the contrary, it's good for the a-v business that viruses exist in the first place.
Sure, I might be off-topic - or maybe, just maybe, I am thinking about this at a deeper level.
Hey, I don't care what the guy does in his writing. I personally find him only passable as a writer. He doesn't tend to do anthing interesting that he didn't swipe from William Burroughs or maybe Proust.
And baby, you are living in fairyland. The reality is that CC is sort of de facto in the natural/social world and that copyright is a legal fiction. Can you see how you have the concepts reversed?
The harsh reality is that corporations are about to learn that everyone's eyes are wide open to this issue.
That said, no one wants to take the bread off a creative person's table. But how many generations after him are we expected to feed?
Reasonableness means limits. All monopolies come to an end.
He dodged the only interesting question he was asked, the one on the future of publishing and copyrights. It'll get sorted out in time, eh? Wow, visionary stuff that...
Hey, I practically hate most of the guy's movies - but let's not forget what Lucas has done for special effects, cinema sound, etc. Somehow he was also partly responsible for the film "Mishima" which I think is quite brilliant. "American Graffiti" wasn't bad either.
But anyway, the next time the special effects appear to be seemless and the sound quality vibrates your theater seat - remember Lucas for caring about that stuff. He's certainly moved some things along which is more than most people do.
I am sorry to inform you that you are a complete fucking moron that has apparently never been to any other western countries.
There are many thing to admire about the U.S., but surely you realize that we do not lead in all categories any longer. In fact, we lead in very few. Many other countries have a higher standard of living and often provide even greater freedom for their citizens. I would call a national healthcare plan a kind of freedom. There is just something so civilized in knowing that if you needed some radical medical treatment it would actually be provided to you.
More proof that Tolkien was a terrible editor of his own material. He put the love story in the appendix and instead included a "Green Man" that sticks out like a sore thumb - just how many of these "old god" types do we need running around in the storyline? Tom is a useless character that Jackson was smart enough to leave out.
Tolkien = good. Tolkien as retold by Jackson, et al = better.
Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Check the date on that one. IIRC Bush changed how the government collects it's data by purposefully underfunding and cutting certain unemployment tracking programs.
Let's face it - the gang in power is just a bunch of "Cheap Labor Republicans." They are gunning for your job because it can be done cheaper somewhere else. These guys make money by keeping labor costs down, not by a a booming economy that benefits you or yours. Catch a clue.
Political Reality Redacted
Several months ago I watched Joe Hough, President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary, speak on Bill Moyers "Now" and I was immediately impressed by both his passion as well as the following statement that he made:
HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do.
http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transc...print.ht ml
Now some of you may be thinking that the above statement is somewhat extreme, and I used to wonder about that myself. But the statement haunted me. The reality is that some of what our current government is doing only makes sense if you consider "bankrupting the government" their actual goal. Have they not reduced taxes for the top 1%? Have they not also run a record deficit? When is a tax cut not a tax cut? When you run a deficit.
The bottom line is that it seems to be okay to run a deficit paying off federal war contracts to Halliburton, but god forbid they should run a deficit supporting job creation programs. And you'll forgive me if I don't consider the expansion of our military "true" job creation.
So what are they really doing? Why are they doing it? You have to ask those questions because it would be a mistake to assume that anyone, esp. an apparent imbecile like Bush, acts without purpose. The appearance of the dolt just might be the mask of a sly con man.
So who has the answers? There's this one guy that has it completely nailed. His stuff is so savvy, so on point that it is frankly scary in it's simplicity and clarity. So don't hesitate - go read it. If you can't handle it all at once, pace yourself - but read it, all of it. It's just four pages: two long, two short. And the rest of the site is excellent too if you still need more.
Labor is the true engine of any economy, wealth is not (it is the mere distribution of the results of labor). A boom economy benefits anyone that works for a living because labor is then scarce and labor is valued more highly. Those at the top require cheap labor to maximize their profits - so they hate boom economies. Everything our government is doing right now is intended to devalue labor. The unequal distribution of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of non-laborers makes democracy almost impossible (which is why the founders favored limits on almost everything that concentrated wealth into too few hands).
Let it sit with you a while and you will begin to realize that it explains everything from bad schools, pri
Stephenson attempts to cleverly deflect a very sound argument against his work by suggesting that he rebelliously, and rightly, opposes traditional wisdom in what makes for good writing. But as the comment above asserts, he fails spectacularly at producing the masterpiece in support of his rebellion. At best Stephenson's most recent works are "interesting" but not necessarily good.
You want to compare good works of different lengths? Read:
"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse "The Brothers Karamozov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K Dick "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card Etc.
But don't feel bad for Stephenson, he's just one of those guys that needed a better editor - just like Edmund Spenser who wrote the "Faerie Queen" or JRR Tolkien with his bullshit "The Lord of the Rings."
I keep telling my nephew that the best example of bad writing that most people think is good is LOTR. Don't agree? Why is the human interest angle (i.e. the love story) in an appendix? That's unforgivable. Any moron should have been able to read the book and noticed that problem immediately.
Length is not the point. Whatever you have to say must be well told. Brevity is a good rule of thumb given that most people have limited amounts of things to express in their writing.
Oh and btw: ---------------
rule of thumb - noun. plural rules of thumb A useful principle having wide application but not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable in every situation.
My own experience is almost never having to reboot on WinXP Pro. I have 3 machines running all the time and except for some hardware or software installs that may require a shut down or warm reboot they just run 24/7. My media server is XP pro and it never dies - and I'm running it on an old POS P3 with 512 RAM. Myself, I think XP Pro is extremely stable - not perfect, but stable.
I think casual users versus knowledgeable users is a big factor here in the study. A properly managed box can run for a really long time without interference. Some may claim that the degree of knowledge required to "properly manage" a WinXP Pro box is too high a threshold for the casual user - so that might be true, but the same is true of Linux and most OSS.
Personally, I don't see that as a totally bad thing. People should have a solid understanding of what is going on with their boxes. Once upon a time I knew far less and my satisfaction as a computer user suffered for it - I was a clueless idiot and bad stuff was always happening to me because of it. Now I know at least something about what I am doing and I am a far happier user - stuff almost never goes wrong.
Somebody should do a new study on knowledge as relates to satisfaction of use of a product. I just bet the more you know about something the happier you are in relation to it. Satisfaction comes from knowing the product inside and out - because while you may become familiar with the product's shortcomings you will also come to know how to easily work around those shortcomings to get what you need out of a given product.
Nothing I can't get via Google or Dogpile or any number of other search engines. Google is still champ for the clean interface with simple tabbed options.
And I really hate the Amazon tie-in with the cookie tracking my name, search history and etc. That's too creepy for ordinary searching. The last thing I need to know at a later time is some of the weird meaningless shit I sometimes look up on the web. If I need to know where I've been I have my own browser history I can look back through.
When the people you employ have no chance of living under the same conditions that you do, it's exploitation. You are exploiting their lower standard of living for profit. You are exploiting their less free political system for profit. You are exploiting their near starvation level of subsistence for profit. No, it's not quite slavery - but perhaps not leaps and bounds better either.
When the conditions in China improve, then we can start this conversation again.
See:
"Exporting America : Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas"
by Lou Dobbs
"The power of big business over our national life has never been greater. Never have there been fewer business leaders willing to commit to the national interest over the selfish interest, to the good of the company over that of the company's they head."
See also:
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript334_fu ll.html
DOBBS: I want to hear one of these candidates sharply and clearly say this country is about the people who live in it.
...
DOBBS: You have a responsibility not only to your investors, you have a responsibility to the marketplace, you have a responsibility to your customers, to the community in which you work. You have a responsibility to the country that makes your business possible in the first place.
MOYERS: Heresy. Are you a traitor to your class? The investor class.
DOBBS: Well, I'm, you know, I think most of us are investors. And I hardly think I'm a traitor. I think it's traitorous and treasonous and absolutely ignorant for these people to be out ballyhooing double-digit returns on equities when first we have to get our house in order in this country. And bring back integrity, principle, leadership to our business enterprises, to our markets. And try to do a lot better for the people who count. That is the middle class.
...
MOYERS: You begin with a stunning quote. I'll read it. Quote, "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
DOBBS: Absolutely. Corporate America has at this time controls the national media. It controls nearly every avenue of an American citizen's access to information about the way he or she lives, about those forces that are influencing our lives.
And corporate America is protected in Washington by the dollars it spends. It is protected in the media by some virtue of ownership.
Y'know, I just have what I need already. Word processors are essentially perfected, though I mainly use plain vanilla Textpad... Graphics programs already do far more than the average user needs for them to do... I'm happy with Foobar2K and Winamp 5 for my EAC ripped VBR MP3s... I'm very happy with my Opera and Thunderbird combo... There's a buttload of free CD burning, DVD ripping and backup stuff out there already... I'm using a NAT router, I use free firewall and antivirus software...
What the fuck do I need to spend money on software for?
Do they really think I'm going to spend more and more money every year to have to relearn new interfaces and suffer with DRMed software schemes?
Once upon a time - I did buy Photoshop at full retail. Never again - it does what I need it to do. And I have heard too much about the new DRMed versions to be pursuaded that they offer anything I need - so, no thanks.
Seriously - do you buy new dishes and flatware EVERY fucking year? I sure don't. I've got the same set of carbon steel knives I've been using and maintaining for over 10 years.
Maybe we should send these economic geniuses a list of all the shit we don't buy new EVERY freaking year!
With the VBR MP3s that I rip, no one can tell the differences between them and the original CDs, even while listening via my posh Grado headphones.
And open source or not, there will always be encoders and devices to play MP3 - legally or illegally. Whatever.
I go to HydrogenAudio to get good advice about basic stuff. I ignore the posts by the people whose ears are supposedly better than my own - it's not precisely that I doubt their words, I'm just not going to buy into the "hi-fi" dreamworld of sound reproduction, it's too expensive and full of nonsense solutions.
We all danced this dance before with the advent of the CD. I am not going to buy mutliple discographies again in a new format - I just don't care.
The RIAA has reached the end of the road enriching itself from back catalogues. We can take it from here, thanks.
Dude, like a gym membership you need to make sure there is a clause guaranteeing a way out of the contract in the event of inability to use the service. Given you don't own the house that is alarmed any longer, such a clause would have given you the needed out.
This happened to me a long time ago in Chicago with a gym membership. I insisted on a clause that let me out of the deal if I was ever more than 20 miles from a gym location that would make use of the gym prohibitive. I wasn't being a dick, but life happens and I don't want to get stuck paying for services I couldn't use even if I wished to do so. That's just crazy.
AMD is not only a maker of excellent processors, but I like the fact that some at least some are made in Europe. I think the XP processors are made in Germany.
I like buying hardware that makes me feel good about the working conditions of the people manufacturing the product.
As I said last week, just another bloody subsidy - more of your tax dollars at work for private interests.
This really has to stop somewhere.
How much more can we do for private interests? We are already fighting a war for no good reason serving a public good.
Let the RIAA, MPAA, and whoever the fuck else, fight their own battles with their own fucking money. It's what you would have to do in their position.
The part that makes me crazy is that something like 40-60% of the people that might read this will disagree with me and think that strengthening IP laws in this way is a good thing - that it protects jobs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
DRM or no DRM - making a back up is perfectly reasonable.
I was actually considering the iPod as my first ever Mac device purchase (although I have had some Mac hand-me-downs before). But after all that, I can hardly see the point. It seems to me that iPod just lost its supposedly number one reason for being better than the competition - the much advertised "ease of use." Without "ease of use" what is left beyond the fashion accessory argument?
Crap product. Move along...
Well, here's the thing...
It doesn't matter what happens to you as long as you can back up to a point before you had a problem.
Tight security is a good idea. Maintain your own files somewhere other than the root. Lock down your files with passwords, etc. Make a CD/DVD/removeable drive of your most important shit fairly often (keep a recent copy off-site if your stuff is VERY IMPORTANT to you). Use anti-virus programs and a firewall, etc. All well and good.
But a good backup means little more than a long unexpected coffee break in the worst case scenario (for most desktop users). Format and recover, step out for lunch or something.
No big.
Once we drill this into everyone, virus writers will just be nuisances unable to fuck over even the biggest lamers. We can shut them down with a permanent strategy, not this bullshit game of leap-frog we have been playing with the virus writers and the anti-virus vendors.
I won't go so far as to claim that the a-v vendors are creating the viruses themselves, but I will say that they do not offer a permanent solution to the problem in a worst case scenario. Ultimately, the vendors are a symptom of the problem: we run a-v products because the viruses exist, the a-v products do nothing to get around that simple fact. To the contrary, it's good for the a-v business that viruses exist in the first place.
Sure, I might be off-topic - or maybe, just maybe, I am thinking about this at a deeper level.
That's all I've got on this one.
Hey, I don't care what the guy does in his writing. I personally find him only passable as a writer. He doesn't tend to do anthing interesting that he didn't swipe from William Burroughs or maybe Proust.
And baby, you are living in fairyland. The reality is that CC is sort of de facto in the natural/social world and that copyright is a legal fiction. Can you see how you have the concepts reversed?
The harsh reality is that corporations are about to learn that everyone's eyes are wide open to this issue.
That said, no one wants to take the bread off a creative person's table. But how many generations after him are we expected to feed?
Reasonableness means limits. All monopolies come to an end.
He dodged the only interesting question he was asked, the one on the future of publishing and copyrights. It'll get sorted out in time, eh? Wow, visionary stuff that...
Hey, I practically hate most of the guy's movies - but let's not forget what Lucas has done for special effects, cinema sound, etc. Somehow he was also partly responsible for the film "Mishima" which I think is quite brilliant. "American Graffiti" wasn't bad either.
But anyway, the next time the special effects appear to be seemless and the sound quality vibrates your theater seat - remember Lucas for caring about that stuff. He's certainly moved some things along which is more than most people do.
I am sorry to inform you that you are a complete fucking moron that has apparently never been to any other western countries.
There are many thing to admire about the U.S., but surely you realize that we do not lead in all categories any longer. In fact, we lead in very few. Many other countries have a higher standard of living and often provide even greater freedom for their citizens. I would call a national healthcare plan a kind of freedom. There is just something so civilized in knowing that if you needed some radical medical treatment it would actually be provided to you.
So what the hell are you talking about?
More proof that Tolkien was a terrible editor of his own material. He put the love story in the appendix and instead included a "Green Man" that sticks out like a sore thumb - just how many of these "old god" types do we need running around in the storyline? Tom is a useless character that Jackson was smart enough to leave out.
Tolkien = good. Tolkien as retold by Jackson, et al = better.
Check the date on that one. IIRC Bush changed how the government collects it's data by purposefully underfunding and cutting certain unemployment tracking programs.
Let's face it - the gang in power is just a bunch of "Cheap Labor Republicans." They are gunning for your job because it can be done cheaper somewhere else. These guys make money by keeping labor costs down, not by a a booming economy that benefits you or yours. Catch a clue.
Political Reality Redacted
Several months ago I watched Joe Hough, President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary, speak on Bill Moyers "Now" and I was immediately impressed by both his passion as well as the following statement that he made:
HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do. http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transc...print.ht ml
Now some of you may be thinking that the above statement is somewhat extreme, and I used to wonder about that myself. But the statement haunted me. The reality is that some of what our current government is doing only makes sense if you consider "bankrupting the government" their actual goal. Have they not reduced taxes for the top 1%? Have they not also run a record deficit? When is a tax cut not a tax cut? When you run a deficit.
The bottom line is that it seems to be okay to run a deficit paying off federal war contracts to Halliburton, but god forbid they should run a deficit supporting job creation programs. And you'll forgive me if I don't consider the expansion of our military "true" job creation.
So what are they really doing? Why are they doing it? You have to ask those questions because it would be a mistake to assume that anyone, esp. an apparent imbecile like Bush, acts without purpose. The appearance of the dolt just might be the mask of a sly con man.
So who has the answers? There's this one guy that has it completely nailed. His stuff is so savvy, so on point that it is frankly scary in it's simplicity and clarity. So don't hesitate - go read it. If you can't handle it all at once, pace yourself - but read it, all of it. It's just four pages: two long, two short. And the rest of the site is excellent too if you still need more.
"CHEAP-LABOR CONSERVATIVE" ISSUES GUIDE
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/blurbs.htm
CATALOGUE OF BOGUS CONSERVATIVE IDEAS
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/bogusideas.htm
"PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY" AND WAGES
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/wages...bility.h tm
THE WRATH OF THE MILLIONAIRE WANNABE'S
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/milli...nnabes.h tm
What's all this about in a few short sentences?
Labor is the true engine of any economy, wealth is not (it is the mere distribution of the results of labor). A boom economy benefits anyone that works for a living because labor is then scarce and labor is valued more highly. Those at the top require cheap labor to maximize their profits - so they hate boom economies. Everything our government is doing right now is intended to devalue labor. The unequal distribution of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of non-laborers makes democracy almost impossible (which is why the founders favored limits on almost everything that concentrated wealth into too few hands).
Let it sit with you a while and you will begin to realize that it explains everything from bad schools, pri
Brevity isn't the point, not precisely.
Stephenson attempts to cleverly deflect a very sound argument against his work by suggesting that he rebelliously, and rightly, opposes traditional wisdom in what makes for good writing. But as the comment above asserts, he fails spectacularly at producing the masterpiece in support of his rebellion. At best Stephenson's most recent works are "interesting" but not necessarily good.
You want to compare good works of different lengths? Read:
"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse
"The Brothers Karamozov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K Dick
"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
Etc.
But don't feel bad for Stephenson, he's just one of those guys that needed a better editor - just like Edmund Spenser who wrote the "Faerie Queen" or JRR Tolkien with his bullshit "The Lord of the Rings."
I keep telling my nephew that the best example of bad writing that most people think is good is LOTR. Don't agree? Why is the human interest angle (i.e. the love story) in an appendix? That's unforgivable. Any moron should have been able to read the book and noticed that problem immediately.
Length is not the point. Whatever you have to say must be well told. Brevity is a good rule of thumb given that most people have limited amounts of things to express in their writing.
Oh and btw:
---------------
rule of thumb - noun.
plural rules of thumb
A useful principle having wide application but not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable in every situation.
That's right.
My own experience is almost never having to reboot on WinXP Pro. I have 3 machines running all the time and except for some hardware or software installs that may require a shut down or warm reboot they just run 24/7. My media server is XP pro and it never dies - and I'm running it on an old POS P3 with 512 RAM. Myself, I think XP Pro is extremely stable - not perfect, but stable.
I think casual users versus knowledgeable users is a big factor here in the study. A properly managed box can run for a really long time without interference. Some may claim that the degree of knowledge required to "properly manage" a WinXP Pro box is too high a threshold for the casual user - so that might be true, but the same is true of Linux and most OSS.
Personally, I don't see that as a totally bad thing. People should have a solid understanding of what is going on with their boxes. Once upon a time I knew far less and my satisfaction as a computer user suffered for it - I was a clueless idiot and bad stuff was always happening to me because of it. Now I know at least something about what I am doing and I am a far happier user - stuff almost never goes wrong.
Somebody should do a new study on knowledge as relates to satisfaction of use of a product. I just bet the more you know about something the happier you are in relation to it. Satisfaction comes from knowing the product inside and out - because while you may become familiar with the product's shortcomings you will also come to know how to easily work around those shortcomings to get what you need out of a given product.
Nothing I can't get via Google or Dogpile or any number of other search engines. Google is still champ for the clean interface with simple tabbed options.
And I really hate the Amazon tie-in with the cookie tracking my name, search history and etc. That's too creepy for ordinary searching. The last thing I need to know at a later time is some of the weird meaningless shit I sometimes look up on the web. If I need to know where I've been I have my own browser history I can look back through.
When the people you employ have no chance of living under the same conditions that you do, it's exploitation. You are exploiting their lower standard of living for profit. You are exploiting their less free political system for profit. You are exploiting their near starvation level of subsistence for profit. No, it's not quite slavery - but perhaps not leaps and bounds better either.
When the conditions in China improve, then we can start this conversation again.
See:
u ll.html
...
...
"Exporting America : Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas"
by Lou Dobbs
"The power of big business over our national life has never been greater. Never have there been fewer business leaders willing to commit to the national interest over the selfish interest, to the good of the company over that of the company's they head."
See also:
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript334_f
DOBBS: I want to hear one of these candidates sharply and clearly say this country is about the people who live in it.
DOBBS: You have a responsibility not only to your investors, you have a responsibility to the marketplace, you have a responsibility to your customers, to the community in which you work. You have a responsibility to the country that makes your business possible in the first place.
MOYERS: Heresy. Are you a traitor to your class? The investor class.
DOBBS: Well, I'm, you know, I think most of us are investors. And I hardly think I'm a traitor. I think it's traitorous and treasonous and absolutely ignorant for these people to be out ballyhooing double-digit returns on equities when first we have to get our house in order in this country. And bring back integrity, principle, leadership to our business enterprises, to our markets. And try to do a lot better for the people who count. That is the middle class.
MOYERS: You begin with a stunning quote. I'll read it. Quote, "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
DOBBS: Absolutely. Corporate America has at this time controls the national media. It controls nearly every avenue of an American citizen's access to information about the way he or she lives, about those forces that are influencing our lives.
And corporate America is protected in Washington by the dollars it spends. It is protected in the media by some virtue of ownership.
Y'know, I just have what I need already.
Word processors are essentially perfected, though I mainly use plain vanilla Textpad...
Graphics programs already do far more than the average user needs for them to do...
I'm happy with Foobar2K and Winamp 5 for my EAC ripped VBR MP3s...
I'm very happy with my Opera and Thunderbird combo...
There's a buttload of free CD burning, DVD ripping and backup stuff out there already...
I'm using a NAT router, I use free firewall and antivirus software...
What the fuck do I need to spend money on software for?
Do they really think I'm going to spend more and more money every year to have to relearn new interfaces and suffer with DRMed software schemes?
Once upon a time - I did buy Photoshop at full retail. Never again - it does what I need it to do. And I have heard too much about the new DRMed versions to be pursuaded that they offer anything I need - so, no thanks.
Seriously - do you buy new dishes and flatware EVERY fucking year? I sure don't. I've got the same set of carbon steel knives I've been using and maintaining for over 10 years.
Maybe we should send these economic geniuses a list of all the shit we don't buy new EVERY freaking year!
You don't even know me, moron. I am not a democrat. Hitchen's article is a load of steaming shit.
Presuming you are the same anon cow as before, try drinking your own kool-aid: why site articles you didn't write?
Do us all a favor: enlist!
Hitchens sucks cock in hell.
If you feel so strongly about this stuff - shut down your pc and enlist. Otherwise:
Shut the fuck up!
http://www.marveldirectory.com/individuals/s/stacy gwen.htm
But somehow endless discussions about Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Anime, etc. are irreproachably "on topic"?
Puh-leaze!
Pull your heads out of your asses and smell the U.S. burning.
With the VBR MP3s that I rip, no one can tell the differences between them and the original CDs, even while listening via my posh Grado headphones.
And open source or not, there will always be encoders and devices to play MP3 - legally or illegally. Whatever.
I go to HydrogenAudio to get good advice about basic stuff. I ignore the posts by the people whose ears are supposedly better than my own - it's not precisely that I doubt their words, I'm just not going to buy into the "hi-fi" dreamworld of sound reproduction, it's too expensive and full of nonsense solutions.
We all danced this dance before with the advent of the CD. I am not going to buy mutliple discographies again in a new format - I just don't care.
The RIAA has reached the end of the road enriching itself from back catalogues. We can take it from here, thanks.
Dude, like a gym membership you need to make sure there is a clause guaranteeing a way out of the contract in the event of inability to use the service. Given you don't own the house that is alarmed any longer, such a clause would have given you the needed out.
This happened to me a long time ago in Chicago with a gym membership. I insisted on a clause that let me out of the deal if I was ever more than 20 miles from a gym location that would make use of the gym prohibitive. I wasn't being a dick, but life happens and I don't want to get stuck paying for services I couldn't use even if I wished to do so. That's just crazy.
And given that fact, why would we need quite so many engineers and creative people here when they are cheaper elsewhere?
The fact that elsewhere may not have the same cost of living or the same level of worker rights is a concern.
I say make it simple: tax foreign labor.
And only the corporations have any rights worth considering.
What a lot of crap that article was...
AMD is not only a maker of excellent processors, but I like the fact that some at least some are made in Europe. I think the XP processors are made in Germany.
I like buying hardware that makes me feel good about the working conditions of the people manufacturing the product.
As I said last week, just another bloody subsidy - more of your tax dollars at work for private interests.
This really has to stop somewhere.
How much more can we do for private interests? We are already fighting a war for no good reason serving a public good.
Let the RIAA, MPAA, and whoever the fuck else, fight their own battles with their own fucking money. It's what you would have to do in their position.
The part that makes me crazy is that something like 40-60% of the people that might read this will disagree with me and think that strengthening IP laws in this way is a good thing - that it protects jobs, etc.
You have the illusion of order. Reality is chaos.
Stop believing the comforting lies.