No, this is akin to someone saying "We want you to guarantee that MY name can be Bill and nobody else's can, just in case someone else gets to the name first!".
After all, I'm sure there are plenty of similar organizations to the RIAA around the world that would want to lay claim to the same GTLD as the RIAA (which is an American organization), too. And then, all the legitimate uses of the GTLD that would have nothing to do with the RIAA (who, again, don't represent every musician in the nation - much less the world).
No ... no . . . this is just a bunch of spoiled twats that want something promised to them rather than having to "compete" for it like everyone else.
This must be a Windows thing, because I installed Skype about two or three months ago and it never installed any toolbars or other crap -- either in Firefox nor Chrome.
Until they find out that everyone's going to get it via bit torrent, anyway.
Also, have these people never heard of America? We get british stuff ages after it airs in the UK. And the UK often gets our stuff ages later. It's not like any of this is new.
Porn is defined as creative content (movies, images, books, etc) with no value whatsoever other than sexual stimulation. I know the country is trying awfully hard to say otherwise, but a naked human body is neither sexual nor pornographic.
Perhaps I was a bit hyperbolic in stating that you couldn't live if you cut out P&G products. What I should have said was that you would have to be exceedingly pro-active in enforcing a boycott of such a conglomerate, because while there are alternatives to each of the products they sell they are responsible for so much of the inventory in a grocery store that the average household is certain to buy many of their products every trip to the store, unless they check each individual item as it goes into the cart.
The same goes for companies like Colgate and many others. If you divided your local shopping place (groceries, office supplies, variety, etc) up in corporate territories on a map, it would be four or five superpowers and then a sprinkling of tiny nation states.
Of course, the problem gets worse if you start saying that if one corp shares a board member with other corps, you're not going to buy anything produced by *those* corps, either.
I could have been clearer in my post. I wasn't indicating ownership of properties on the right of the "==" to the entities on the left. I was just pointing that those two companies from the letter of support are directly associated with the ones on the right.
Everyone knows what ICE is. They don't belong policing the internet. They belong policing ports of entry and physical items actually in the country. Not domain names.
Ideally, I mean. Obviously the rest of the government feels they belong doing just that.
If it takes too long, they can just do what Google did and go from version 1.0 to version 8.0 in like eighteen months or whatever (though, to be fair, I seem to recall Slackware doing that about a decade ago, too).
Viacom == CBS, Comedy Central (Colbert/Daily Show), BET, The CW, MTV, Showtime, many radio stations, last.cm, CNET, download.com, gameFAQs, GameSpot, Metacritic, techrepublic, tv.com, ZDNet, Simon & Schuster, Westinghouse, etc.
NBC Universal == General Electric, Comcast, NBC, USA network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, Weather Channel, AT&T, Hulu, Vivendi, MCA, SyFy, Universal Music, Biography channel, National Geographic channel, A&E, Tivo, many radio/tv stations, etc.
Not to mention the many other subsidiaries of the companies and branches listed above. And that's just two companies. Chances are good that you'll buy something (or many things) in the next year that benefit Nike or Adidas or Activision, but are under brands and subsidiaries that we aren't familiar with.
It is extremely difficult to actually boycott a corporation these days. Hell, if you decided to boycott Proctor & Gamble, you'd probably never be able to buy a single thing for the rest of your life.
Yeah, you're totally right. The masses really truly care about these things. I mean, just look at the backlash when Sony removed "other OS" support. Or the uproar from the masses that don't know any better than to buy $80 Monster Cable products. Or the masses that will buy a television because because it says "LED" and they aren't aware that a LED light source is not the same as an LED display panel. Or the masses who get upsold on needless crap every time the go out to purchase something at an electronic store.
The overwhelming majority of consumers do not know any better and those are the people companies care about. They don't care about the small percentage of trouble-making knowledgeable people who want to tweak things, have higher expectations, use more resources, and so on.
The masses don't even know what the fuck a "custom rom" is, much less want to use one.
Therefore, they don't give a damn about "the ones who know what they're doing". They want those masses who don't care about such things. If the masses gave a damn, they wouldn't be making the statement that people who want that sort of thing should find another company to do business with. They're making the statement precisely because what I said is true. The majority of people don't know what they're doing -- about most things. Especially when it comes to technology. They just want stuff and they want it to work and their expectations are minimal.
Nobody says they have to care any more than that, either. The point is that they don't and because the vast masses do not, companies feel no need to cater to or tolerate the small percentage of knowledgeable people. Those people are a nuisance to their business.
[cite]demonstrated that, just as in the physical world, prosecutors and courts can judiciously assess evidence and distinguish between legitimate businesses and criminal enterprises that flout the law and profit from the ingenuity of others[/cite]
By judiciously assess, they of course mean act as all branches of government and law enforcement instantaneously and therefore forgo formal due processes. After all, if I see someone accused of something I'm smart enough to know when a guilty sumbitch is a guilty sumbitch. Why waste all that due process when I can just call a spade a spade and exert my own justice, right there?
Hell, we didn't need that whole formal due process bullshit for those Duke Lacrosse guys. It was obvious they were guilty right up front. Should have just locked them up and thrown away the key. All this bullshit wastin' my tax dollars when everyone under the sun knows them boys did what they were accused of! Well, I mean . . . except when all that due process found that they were not only innocent, but that the police department failed in numerous capacities and the prosecutor was guilty as hell.
Yeah. Awesome - I'll just make sure that I move out of Oregon so that I'm in on way supporting Nike, Adidas, or Columbia Sportswear (WTF?) through state business breaks of any kind. And discontinue my access to the internet, so I'm not supporting those companies And then I'll be sure not to watch a significant chunk of movies, from the film companies below. Or video games, since about 50% of games seem to come from Activision.
The thing is, I understand the concerns of these companies. I understand that they want to be able to attack forgeries piracy, wherever they may originate (and note, by "piracy", I mean the guys who make and sell copies of digital and other content and sell it for a profit as their own; not some kid in his basement playing an illegitimate copy of a game that he downloaded).
I just don't understand why so many are entertaining the idea - neigh, supporting it - of violating so many rights in such clear and offensive ways. Why not support bringing lawsuits against people who run domains like "CheapNikeKnockoffsRightHere.com" and then sell forgeries for a tenth the cost of the real thing rather than supporting yanking their domains without due process? In fact, yanking the domains should be a lengthy formal process; not a whim.
Also . . . ICE? Immigration? WTF?
Also . . . isn't it great that DHS/Homeland Security is now involved in EVERYTHING? The fate of the entire country is at stake! Code orange must now be raised to terrorism code red, because this guy has a dozen fake Rolexes! Oh noes!
Oh well. I still have netflix, starbucks, minivans, teh baby jebus, and nascar -- and as an American, that's all I need to be content and shut my mouth and look the other way.
If you want nudity and sex, there are nearly infinite choices out there. Free, even.
Playboy is known for their excellent and often unique interviews. I believe there is even a series of six or more volumes of books that you can buy, called The Playboy Interviews. Well worth the read.
That's the opinion that most companies have. Your ISP doesn't want a bandwidth heavy advanced tech savvy user. They want grandma to pay $60/mo to get her five emails and read the church newsletter online. Companies want the overwhelming masses of users who don't put a strain on services, are happy with what they get, and won't play around with firmware, roms, torrents, etc.
Of course, they're saving on bandwidth by serving shitty stereo audio. Granted, they recently announced that they are doing 5.1, but I've yet to find any content that is actually provided (by Netflix) in anything other than stereo.
Fixing and replacing damaged product. Replacing lost product. I believe I once read that a significant percent of their physical movies get lost in transit.
Yeah, that's another big part of the problem with netflix streaming. A HUGE amount of their content is from Starz, which is often poor quality and sometimes edited. I'm really disappointed when I pick out a stack of movies and then I see "STARZ" when I start to play them.
Agreed. I don't use physical DVDs, because when I want to watch something, I want to watch it. I don't want to wait three days for the whole process. And pack it back up and stick it in the mail and so on. I want to see it, click on it, and watch it.
Unfortunately, the streaming selection is atrocious. They claim something like 17,000 films and as best I can tell, they must count every single episode of every television show they have as part of that 17,000, too. Anything relatively new or interesting is available by DVD only and their television selection is pretty sparse. Well, their selection of everything is sparse.
And, it's constantly shifting. I frequently find myself having to hurry up and watch things, because they suddenly say they're going to expire in a few days.
They need to spend the money to sign these contracts so they can boost their selection. Otherwise, they'll quickly run out of content worth watching and people like me will cancel. On the other hand, if they increase their selection to 100,000+ and constantly growing, I'd gladly pay double the current subscription fee. (It'd also be nice if they got the actual original films and got rid of all this poor quality, often edited, shitty Starz excuse for actual content).
It's the same problem I had with the Kindle. The first year it came out, I was seriously considering buying one. I started searching for things I'd want to read. A number of fantasy novels. Lots of sci-fi. They had a poor selection of Heinlein, Asimov, etc. Why would I want to read two books of a series on Kindle, but not the rest? Needless to say, it was enough to keep me from buying one and even today, I haven't bothered to do so.
Seriously, they need to stop with the "facebook apps" bullshit and all the goofy "ways to make watching and reviewing netflix content a social experience" and just BUILD UP YOUR CATALOG. No catalog, no subscription.
Agreed. How can all people in a society truly be equal, until even the most disadvantaged can waste away every moment of their life on facebook and masturbating to scat porn!
Also, how does this make the UK the first nation where everyone can use the web? In America, we have these things called libraries that are subsidized by the tax-payers. They used to carry books by the zillions, but now mostly just carry DVDs and have banks of internet connected computers for the public to use and the occasional stack of periodicals for the smelly homeless guys to make a pillow out of in the lesser used dewey's.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, MADD and RIAA are both criminal organizations with ulterior motives and extreme corruption that masquerade as righteous do-gooders.
No, this is akin to someone saying "We want you to guarantee that MY name can be Bill and nobody else's can, just in case someone else gets to the name first!".
After all, I'm sure there are plenty of similar organizations to the RIAA around the world that would want to lay claim to the same GTLD as the RIAA (which is an American organization), too. And then, all the legitimate uses of the GTLD that would have nothing to do with the RIAA (who, again, don't represent every musician in the nation - much less the world).
No . .. no . . . this is just a bunch of spoiled twats that want something promised to them rather than having to "compete" for it like everyone else.
This must be a Windows thing, because I installed Skype about two or three months ago and it never installed any toolbars or other crap -- either in Firefox nor Chrome.
The modder should tell them to fuck off and cease development on the project.
Until they find out that everyone's going to get it via bit torrent, anyway.
Also, have these people never heard of America? We get british stuff ages after it airs in the UK. And the UK often gets our stuff ages later. It's not like any of this is new.
Plus, people who like the WWF usually can't afford computers, anyway, so there's no chance of them finding out until it's aired.
Porn is defined as creative content (movies, images, books, etc) with no value whatsoever other than sexual stimulation. I know the country is trying awfully hard to say otherwise, but a naked human body is neither sexual nor pornographic.
Perhaps I was a bit hyperbolic in stating that you couldn't live if you cut out P&G products. What I should have said was that you would have to be exceedingly pro-active in enforcing a boycott of such a conglomerate, because while there are alternatives to each of the products they sell they are responsible for so much of the inventory in a grocery store that the average household is certain to buy many of their products every trip to the store, unless they check each individual item as it goes into the cart.
The same goes for companies like Colgate and many others. If you divided your local shopping place (groceries, office supplies, variety, etc) up in corporate territories on a map, it would be four or five superpowers and then a sprinkling of tiny nation states.
Of course, the problem gets worse if you start saying that if one corp shares a board member with other corps, you're not going to buy anything produced by *those* corps, either.
I could have been clearer in my post. I wasn't indicating ownership of properties on the right of the "==" to the entities on the left. I was just pointing that those two companies from the letter of support are directly associated with the ones on the right.
Everyone knows what ICE is. They don't belong policing the internet. They belong policing ports of entry and physical items actually in the country. Not domain names.
Ideally, I mean. Obviously the rest of the government feels they belong doing just that.
If it takes too long, they can just do what Google did and go from version 1.0 to version 8.0 in like eighteen months or whatever (though, to be fair, I seem to recall Slackware doing that about a decade ago, too).
Are you sure about that?
Viacom == CBS, Comedy Central (Colbert/Daily Show), BET, The CW, MTV, Showtime, many radio stations, last.cm, CNET, download.com, gameFAQs, GameSpot, Metacritic, techrepublic, tv.com, ZDNet, Simon & Schuster, Westinghouse, etc.
NBC Universal == General Electric, Comcast, NBC, USA network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, Weather Channel, AT&T, Hulu, Vivendi, MCA, SyFy, Universal Music, Biography channel, National Geographic channel, A&E, Tivo, many radio/tv stations, etc.
Not to mention the many other subsidiaries of the companies and branches listed above. And that's just two companies. Chances are good that you'll buy something (or many things) in the next year that benefit Nike or Adidas or Activision, but are under brands and subsidiaries that we aren't familiar with.
It is extremely difficult to actually boycott a corporation these days. Hell, if you decided to boycott Proctor & Gamble, you'd probably never be able to buy a single thing for the rest of your life.
Yeah, you're totally right. The masses really truly care about these things. I mean, just look at the backlash when Sony removed "other OS" support. Or the uproar from the masses that don't know any better than to buy $80 Monster Cable products. Or the masses that will buy a television because because it says "LED" and they aren't aware that a LED light source is not the same as an LED display panel. Or the masses who get upsold on needless crap every time the go out to purchase something at an electronic store.
The overwhelming majority of consumers do not know any better and those are the people companies care about. They don't care about the small percentage of trouble-making knowledgeable people who want to tweak things, have higher expectations, use more resources, and so on.
The masses don't even know what the fuck a "custom rom" is, much less want to use one.
Therefore, they don't give a damn about "the ones who know what they're doing". They want those masses who don't care about such things. If the masses gave a damn, they wouldn't be making the statement that people who want that sort of thing should find another company to do business with. They're making the statement precisely because what I said is true. The majority of people don't know what they're doing -- about most things. Especially when it comes to technology. They just want stuff and they want it to work and their expectations are minimal.
Nobody says they have to care any more than that, either. The point is that they don't and because the vast masses do not, companies feel no need to cater to or tolerate the small percentage of knowledgeable people. Those people are a nuisance to their business.
They're a few centuries late, then.
[cite]demonstrated that, just as in the physical world, prosecutors and courts can judiciously assess evidence and distinguish between legitimate businesses and criminal enterprises that flout the law and profit from the ingenuity of others[/cite]
By judiciously assess, they of course mean act as all branches of government and law enforcement instantaneously and therefore forgo formal due processes. After all, if I see someone accused of something I'm smart enough to know when a guilty sumbitch is a guilty sumbitch. Why waste all that due process when I can just call a spade a spade and exert my own justice, right there?
Hell, we didn't need that whole formal due process bullshit for those Duke Lacrosse guys. It was obvious they were guilty right up front. Should have just locked them up and thrown away the key. All this bullshit wastin' my tax dollars when everyone under the sun knows them boys did what they were accused of! Well, I mean . . . except when all that due process found that they were not only innocent, but that the police department failed in numerous capacities and the prosecutor was guilty as hell.
Yeah. Awesome - I'll just make sure that I move out of Oregon so that I'm in on way supporting Nike, Adidas, or Columbia Sportswear (WTF?) through state business breaks of any kind. And discontinue my access to the internet, so I'm not supporting those companies And then I'll be sure not to watch a significant chunk of movies, from the film companies below. Or video games, since about 50% of games seem to come from Activision.
The thing is, I understand the concerns of these companies. I understand that they want to be able to attack forgeries piracy, wherever they may originate (and note, by "piracy", I mean the guys who make and sell copies of digital and other content and sell it for a profit as their own; not some kid in his basement playing an illegitimate copy of a game that he downloaded).
I just don't understand why so many are entertaining the idea - neigh, supporting it - of violating so many rights in such clear and offensive ways. Why not support bringing lawsuits against people who run domains like "CheapNikeKnockoffsRightHere.com" and then sell forgeries for a tenth the cost of the real thing rather than supporting yanking their domains without due process? In fact, yanking the domains should be a lengthy formal process; not a whim.
Also . . . ICE? Immigration? WTF?
Also . . . isn't it great that DHS/Homeland Security is now involved in EVERYTHING? The fate of the entire country is at stake! Code orange must now be raised to terrorism code red, because this guy has a dozen fake Rolexes! Oh noes!
Oh well. I still have netflix, starbucks, minivans, teh baby jebus, and nascar -- and as an American, that's all I need to be content and shut my mouth and look the other way.
That actually is the only reason to read Playboy.
If you want nudity and sex, there are nearly infinite choices out there. Free, even.
Playboy is known for their excellent and often unique interviews. I believe there is even a series of six or more volumes of books that you can buy, called The Playboy Interviews. Well worth the read.
Along that line, here's a Playboy interview with Steve Jobs in 1985:
That's the opinion that most companies have. Your ISP doesn't want a bandwidth heavy advanced tech savvy user. They want grandma to pay $60/mo to get her five emails and read the church newsletter online. Companies want the overwhelming masses of users who don't put a strain on services, are happy with what they get, and won't play around with firmware, roms, torrents, etc.
The ones who know what they're doing aren't the masses. They're the ignorable minority.
Of course, they're saving on bandwidth by serving shitty stereo audio. Granted, they recently announced that they are doing 5.1, but I've yet to find any content that is actually provided (by Netflix) in anything other than stereo.
Fixing and replacing damaged product. Replacing lost product. I believe I once read that a significant percent of their physical movies get lost in transit.
Yeah, that's another big part of the problem with netflix streaming. A HUGE amount of their content is from Starz, which is often poor quality and sometimes edited. I'm really disappointed when I pick out a stack of movies and then I see "STARZ" when I start to play them.
Agreed. I don't use physical DVDs, because when I want to watch something, I want to watch it. I don't want to wait three days for the whole process. And pack it back up and stick it in the mail and so on. I want to see it, click on it, and watch it.
Unfortunately, the streaming selection is atrocious. They claim something like 17,000 films and as best I can tell, they must count every single episode of every television show they have as part of that 17,000, too. Anything relatively new or interesting is available by DVD only and their television selection is pretty sparse. Well, their selection of everything is sparse.
And, it's constantly shifting. I frequently find myself having to hurry up and watch things, because they suddenly say they're going to expire in a few days.
They need to spend the money to sign these contracts so they can boost their selection. Otherwise, they'll quickly run out of content worth watching and people like me will cancel. On the other hand, if they increase their selection to 100,000+ and constantly growing, I'd gladly pay double the current subscription fee. (It'd also be nice if they got the actual original films and got rid of all this poor quality, often edited, shitty Starz excuse for actual content).
It's the same problem I had with the Kindle. The first year it came out, I was seriously considering buying one. I started searching for things I'd want to read. A number of fantasy novels. Lots of sci-fi. They had a poor selection of Heinlein, Asimov, etc. Why would I want to read two books of a series on Kindle, but not the rest? Needless to say, it was enough to keep me from buying one and even today, I haven't bothered to do so.
Seriously, they need to stop with the "facebook apps" bullshit and all the goofy "ways to make watching and reviewing netflix content a social experience" and just BUILD UP YOUR CATALOG. No catalog, no subscription.
Also, people are still listening to the radio? For music? What is this, 1990?
Agreed. How can all people in a society truly be equal, until even the most disadvantaged can waste away every moment of their life on facebook and masturbating to scat porn!
Also, how does this make the UK the first nation where everyone can use the web? In America, we have these things called libraries that are subsidized by the tax-payers. They used to carry books by the zillions, but now mostly just carry DVDs and have banks of internet connected computers for the public to use and the occasional stack of periodicals for the smelly homeless guys to make a pillow out of in the lesser used dewey's.