Call me cynical if you must but this smells of a rat to me. I doubt that anyone who registered a domain so similar to a huge corporations trademark could claim utter surprise when Microsoft got involved in this however right or wrong that involvement was.
I think there is a strong possibility that Mike Rowe planned this all along, what did he have to lose? If it came down to it he could surrender the domain and he's lost $10, once they have the domain Microsoft have no reason to push for anything else.
On the other hand he could enrage Microsoft run to the media and make it look like the big bad guy is squashing the little tiny guy and seeing if Microsoft caved and gave him free stuff, he seems to of got lots of traffic to his site(along with a nice little money making banner advert) and according to the article Microsoft are going to pay to redirect his traffic so whatever he renames it to is likely to is likely to be more successful then it would have been had none of this ever happened. Also when you think about it mikerowesoft is a really lame name.
Surely in order for this to work NASA would have to know who on the list was a terrorist and who wasn't. It's like giving somebody a list of people's age and weight (and no other information) and asking them to figure out a system for knowing if they voted republican or not, it's just impossible to do without knowing voting trends for those weights and ages.
The only way I could see this being used is to look at who gets drunk and causes problems on flights (I assume that airlines keep information on this) and place extra staff on flights with a high number of these types of people and while that's not a bad idea it's hardly "a matter of national security"
The fact that SCO has never seen or handled that code in any way is irrelevant. It is perfectly possible that IBM has infringed on SCO's property by copying code that IBM wrote for AIX/others into Linux.
And it's perfectly possible that Microsoft has copied GPL code into one of their programs, does that mean the developers can blindly accuse them, force them to show us source to all their products and force anyone who uses any Microsoft product to buy a vastly overpriced licence?
Note: I don't think there really is GPL code in any Microsoft products, if I'd written some code that crashed THAT much I'd keep it closed source.
mailwasher is free (as in beer) lets you log into any pop3 server and preview the messages that are on it and delete and/or bounce any mail you don't want without having to download it. This is helpfully if someone sends you a huge e-mail and you don't want to waste hours downloading it.
I think some of the responsibility has to rest with the parents in this matter. A normal child of 10 can understand the difference between real life and video games and knows that similar violence in real life is unacceptable, if they don't it needs explaining by a responsible adult. If that doesn't seem to work then the kid has problems and needs to be kept away from violent games/movies/sharp objects.
The problem is it's easier for parents to blame video games for all our problems and fight that instead of trying to figure out why people really go into a school and shoot half their class. maybe video games did inspire it somewhat but lets face it happy well-balanced people don't do that, people with serious issues do that and the cause of these issues isn't playing a few hours of doom.
As a side note it was mentioned on penny-arcade a few days ago that a local news show actually reported the donations were made by a local catholic school, no real point in me mentioning that, just seemed to kind of suck.
Itunes is different, Apple meets your obligations for you, and you pay for Apple to do so, and get you music in a convenient format. This isn't the same as you doing it for yourself, without permission."
My point was that Itunes wouldn't have happened if we'd all played by the rules, what would they (record labels) have to gain? Maybe this is a case of 2 wrongs making at least half a right, it's a nice saying but I don't think it's always true.
"Is greed a sufficient justification to deprive these folks of what they are due from their creations?"
Record labels don't seem to have a problem with doing it
"please explain to me how it is depriving them of what revenues they can generate demonstrates aawareness of or support for their plight?"
Do you think that Itunes and anything similar would have happened if people hadn't downloaded pirated music? I think the record industry was a bit to comfortable in its position of being able to shove a whole album down our throats if we wanted 3 songs to do anything that might risk it's ability to screw us over.
When a decent legal music download service is available in the UK I'll get whatever I can off that and whatever I can't off kazaa but until then I'll pirate what I want.
Your maths is flawed I'm afraid, taking your assumption that a used CD is about $5 and say you get 10 songs on a CD that works out at 50 cents a song so $1000 of ACC songs world work out at about $500 which is considerably more then $70 although the resale value of the CDs obviously increases with the amount spent on them.
Also while online music stores are by no means perfect (or even better) used CDs have their problems.
1) You end up paying for a whole load of songs you don't like or get duplicate versions (If I had a million dollars is on 5 barenaked ladies albums)
2) You can only get a used CD when someone has sold it which limits you considerably especially when it comes to new albums, true classics and rare stuff. This is only going to get worse as less people buy CDs in favour of downloads.
I guess the fact that you have the physical property is the flipside, one thing I've never understood with DRM is what are you supposed to do when you need to format a hard drive.
Microsoft got where they did by getting in everyone's home and office. For the first 6 years Microsoft almost encouraged piracy of their operating system from the DOS 4.X to the windows 3.11 Era.
True, I reckon that the biggest breakthrough for free software will be when Microsoft makes a decent anti-piracy system, I first considered Linux when I got sick of ME but saw the major hassle of XP product activation and didn't much fancy paying daft amounts of money for every computer I own every 2-3 years. I got myself a corporate version of XP in the end but I installed mandrake on my second (slightly decrepit) hard disk and while I don't think its going to be my main operating system for a while ("In order to install this device you need to download a file from http://..." would have been ok if said device wasn't my modem) it's defiantly got me interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Tie their engine to their OS, and why would the masses go out to the web to search anymore? They could just do it from the desktop.
google deskbar already does this
How can you sit in one place for 10 hours?
Slashdot Addiction (I really want that first post)
Call me cynical if you must but this smells of a rat to me. I doubt that anyone who registered a domain so similar to a huge corporations trademark could claim utter surprise when Microsoft got involved in this however right or wrong that involvement was.
I think there is a strong possibility that Mike Rowe planned this all along, what did he have to lose? If it came down to it he could surrender the domain and he's lost $10, once they have the domain Microsoft have no reason to push for anything else.
On the other hand he could enrage Microsoft run to the media and make it look like the big bad guy is squashing the little tiny guy and seeing if Microsoft caved and gave him free stuff, he seems to of got lots of traffic to his site(along with a nice little money making banner advert) and according to the article Microsoft are going to pay to redirect his traffic so whatever he renames it to is likely to is likely to be more successful then it would have been had none of this ever happened. Also when you think about it mikerowesoft is a really lame name.
Surely in order for this to work NASA would have to know who on the list was a terrorist and who wasn't. It's like giving somebody a list of people's age and weight (and no other information) and asking them to figure out a system for knowing if they voted republican or not, it's just impossible to do without knowing voting trends for those weights and ages.
The only way I could see this being used is to look at who gets drunk and causes problems on flights (I assume that airlines keep information on this) and place extra staff on flights with a high number of these types of people and while that's not a bad idea it's hardly "a matter of national security"
Sure there is. MS Services for Unix contains some.
Touche, replace Microsoft with any other software company if it makes you happier (I'd suggest SCO but they haven't really made software in years)
The fact that SCO has never seen or handled that code in any way is irrelevant. It is perfectly possible that IBM has infringed on SCO's property by copying code that IBM wrote for AIX/others into Linux.
And it's perfectly possible that Microsoft has copied GPL code into one of their programs, does that mean the developers can blindly accuse them, force them to show us source to all their products and force anyone who uses any Microsoft product to buy a vastly overpriced licence?
Note: I don't think there really is GPL code in any Microsoft products, if I'd written some code that crashed THAT much I'd keep it closed source.
mailwasher is free (as in beer) lets you log into any pop3 server and preview the messages that are on it and delete and/or bounce any mail you don't want without having to download it. This is helpfully if someone sends you a huge e-mail and you don't want to waste hours downloading it.
I think some of the responsibility has to rest with the parents in this matter. A normal child of 10 can understand the difference between real life and video games and knows that similar violence in real life is unacceptable, if they don't it needs explaining by a responsible adult. If that doesn't seem to work then the kid has problems and needs to be kept away from violent games/movies/sharp objects.
The problem is it's easier for parents to blame video games for all our problems and fight that instead of trying to figure out why people really go into a school and shoot half their class. maybe video games did inspire it somewhat but lets face it happy well-balanced people don't do that, people with serious issues do that and the cause of these issues isn't playing a few hours of doom.
As a side note it was mentioned on penny-arcade a few days ago that a local news show actually reported the donations were made by a local catholic school, no real point in me mentioning that, just seemed to kind of suck.
Itunes is different, Apple meets your obligations for you, and you pay for Apple to do so, and get you music in a convenient format. This isn't the same as you doing it for yourself, without permission."
My point was that Itunes wouldn't have happened if we'd all played by the rules, what would they (record labels) have to gain? Maybe this is a case of 2 wrongs making at least half a right, it's a nice saying but I don't think it's always true.
"Is greed a sufficient justification to deprive these folks of what they are due from their creations?"
Record labels don't seem to have a problem with doing it
"please explain to me how it is depriving them of what revenues they can generate demonstrates aawareness of or support for their plight?"
Do you think that Itunes and anything similar would have happened if people hadn't downloaded pirated music? I think the record industry was a bit to comfortable in its position of being able to shove a whole album down our throats if we wanted 3 songs to do anything that might risk it's ability to screw us over.
When a decent legal music download service is available in the UK I'll get whatever I can off that and whatever I can't off kazaa but until then I'll pirate what I want.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
Why? Do you think there's a shortage of bad ones?
Your maths is flawed I'm afraid, taking your assumption that a used CD is about $5 and say you get 10 songs on a CD that works out at 50 cents a song so $1000 of ACC songs world work out at about $500 which is considerably more then $70 although the resale value of the CDs obviously increases with the amount spent on them.
Also while online music stores are by no means perfect (or even better) used CDs have their problems.
1) You end up paying for a whole load of songs you don't like or get duplicate versions (If I had a million dollars is on 5 barenaked ladies albums)
2) You can only get a used CD when someone has sold it which limits you considerably especially when it comes to new albums, true classics and rare stuff. This is only going to get worse as less people buy CDs in favour of downloads.
I guess the fact that you have the physical property is the flipside, one thing I've never understood with DRM is what are you supposed to do when you need to format a hard drive.
Microsoft got where they did by getting in everyone's home and office. For the first 6 years Microsoft almost encouraged piracy of their operating system from the DOS 4.X to the windows 3.11 Era.
True, I reckon that the biggest breakthrough for free software will be when Microsoft makes a decent anti-piracy system, I first considered Linux when I got sick of ME but saw the major hassle of XP product activation and didn't much fancy paying daft amounts of money for every computer I own every 2-3 years. I got myself a corporate version of XP in the end but I installed mandrake on my second (slightly decrepit) hard disk and while I don't think its going to be my main operating system for a while ("In order to install this device you need to download a file from http://..." would have been ok if said device wasn't my modem) it's defiantly got me interested.
in case you are wondering I'm British
It's called Great Britain, I bet it'd be called Amazing Britain if it wasn't for people like you dragging down the average