Last I checked, each person pays 15% of their paycheck to SS and medcaid. Then the lowest tax bracket is 10%. that is 35% for the poorest people. Then about 5% to the state and another 5% to sales tax. State taxes rival the federal income tax pretty easilly. Don't even get me started on property tax.
Considering there are much higher than 10% tax brackets, we pay a lot of taxes.. (of course most "small busineses" write it all off and never pay a tax but that is another story altogether). We pay so much yet have nothing to show for it except a bunch of schools shutting down because of ignorant presidents.
You should really try the firefox webdev toolbar plugin. It has a CSS editor which lets you edit the CSS in real time in a side pannel.
I only wish this plugin would let you pick a better text editor with hilighting an code completing.. as the built in editor is kindof weak and forces your CSS to word wrap which is kinda silly.. But it REALLY makes it easy to edit CSS in there for experiments and trial and error, and cut n paste it back into my main editor when I have it how I want it.
If nothing else, go try it out and tell me what you think... I think you would be impressed with its power (and potential!)
Any evidence to back this up? Programers are hired for their expertise in deciding what to do in a program, not merely telling him/her to program a very well defined list of features (sometimes it is though). So the programer owns the particular realization of what is a very broad project to implement for a given problem.
Still confused?
It may be that the law protects the IP for professors. I don't know. But somehow I think it has a lot to do with the policy of the university. Unless the professors have a contract in place preserving their copyright, or there is a state law which preserves it for them while working for the state, then your argument is pretty groundless.
Then again, I don't know either way. I'm just pointing out that the only way for the professor to keep his copyright on a lecture would for him to have a contract or a state law which grants him those rights explicitly. And I am currently unaware of any such contracts or laws (but I'm sure they exist in some places and instances.)
Your post touches on NOTHING in my post. I never said anything about long term business profits. I never said it was "bad" for a business to not look out for their shareholders.. In fact, you make a good point. Businesses MUST look out for their shareholders FIRST and foremost. In every instance of this scenerio, that is automatically putting the environment, health, and safty of the people who are not shareholders at risk. Also please note that my entire post was based upon long term profits, not short term runs.
Since you didn't read my entire post above, I should probably point out that I never said it would be profitable for "a 2 year run". In fact, I explicitly offered a scenerio where coporations crank up production on purpose to put their competitors out of business, causing an unstable market... for the long term. This is what happens already in several industries in the US. There would be nothing stopping them from doing this harmful and hazardous abuse if the federal regulations did not exist.
I didn't read this out of a textbook. It is common sence. Every unregulated profitable business in this country has turned into a large coporation serving large coporate interests. If farming regulations went away, you would have multibillion dollar coporations spout up overnight.
I never said coporations own all the farms. I simply stated that you can't just go off and act like farmers will protect their land. They won't when a paycheck which will set them for life is at stake.
Yea, only that if every Farmer Brown didn't follow industry practice, then it becomes a public health issue.
Now matter how you look at it there are concerns for hte public health and safety and the rule of law. That is the number one reason the government exists. If they are going to bail out on regulating a consistant supply of food then they might as well shut down shop and we can all just run as an anarchy.
" Dont be prey to false logic. People protect their stuff."
Yea right.. We aren't talking about generation to generation farmers here. Start looking at the greater economic picture, where every industry turns into a small number of large coporations who leech off the resources. It will always be more profitable to leech off the land for 5 years and dump it, only to buy new land and do the same, over and over again. I'm not talking about Farmer Brown who sits around driving his tractor and taking care of his crops. He has a vested interest in his land and his family farm. But the same absolutely CANNOT be said about a coporation, no matter how you slice it.
Even if coporations outsoruced all their farming to the locals, they would just cut big bonus checks to them to crank out the max in the short term and then drop them. The local wouldn't have a problem because he would probably be set for life after that point. What does he care if his soil is useless... He is rich now and has a retirement account.
Your points only make sence if every farmer in the country ran like a small family business and passed it down through the generations selling to local grocery stores and farmer's markets. This lala land you dream of doesn't exist. There are greater economic factors at work here. Walmart sells produce now if you haven't noticed. Small businesses don't sell to walmart. Small businesses don't sell to Walmart's competitors. The economics are so significantly more complicated than you can imagine, and you boil it all down to "People protect their stuff." Give me a break.
Crop rotation is a great thing, but why force it on land owners?
You must apprentice for 4 years to become certified as a brick layer. Why force it on the people? Why not just let people lay their own bricks, and bricks all over town? Why go through any kind of government regulation if all it is is just laying bricks? Lets all just tell the Joe Schmoe's around town to start laying bricks, and when they all fall on Granny Smith next year and cause her to fall and break her hip and have a heart attack, we will just rebuild it like we did origionally... Nobody will feel bad because Joe Schmoe didn't know any better that he layed them in a verticle stack.. Then another brick wall falls on Joe Sixpack. But nobody really cares... He is just a drunk. Suddenly, all the bricks in town fell over and hit Dick and Jane, knocked down the neighboring house, cave in a grocery store full of Jills and Franks, and let all the small time drug users out of state prison. How about that? I bet you think that is a good idea to ehh?
I am not a geek, but a supervisor of geeks. I buy what they recommend. I skim Slashdot now and again to see how you - the expert computer community thinks. More and more, they (you) recommend Apple
You post just lost all creadability with that statement. Sorry.
Ok you have a good point.. There is nothing keeping states from regulating "interstate" commerce.. The constitution (even the 10th amendment)doesn't ban states from using powers which are granted to congress. It just says that congress has a right to trump them (in some instances such as if it necessary and proper, or federal government could withold funding if you don't comply.. etc etc) There really is nothing anywhere preventing states from regulating interstate commerce except their borders...
Arkansas isn't going to do much good enforcing a tax or making a regulation which tells texas they can't sell dell computers to oklahoma. But if Arkansas wants to put an import tax on the dell computers for their own state, that is their problem.
I think that is what the problem really is, I only didn't read between the lines enough to realize that states can't really regulate interstate commerce, only their own internal commerce, and commerce which comes into their state (which is still internal to them) So in short, nothing prevents states from regulating interstate commerce except the physical borders. If arkansas wants to put a tax on importers to tennessee from texas, they could definately do that if they wanted to travel through their state. But like I said, it wouldn't (really) be interstate commerce.
Find me the part that denies regulating interstate commerce to the states.
It is pretty close to the top of the constitution my friend: Article. I. Section 1.
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
then later on in Article. I. Section 8. Clause 3.
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Guess you didn't bother to read the link you posted. And just in case you don't know what "vested" means:
vested: adj. 1. Law: Settled, fixed, or absolute; being without contingency: a vested right. 2. Dressed or clothed, especially in ecclesiastical vestments.
Shall I count the number of Mac-related articles that include the obligatory smart-ass line indicating the authors disdain for everything Mac?
Please do. It would be interesting to show the number of pro-apple articles posted vs the number of anti-apple articles. You can probably count the latter on one hand in the past year or so. saying that slashdot doesn't have an apple bias is like saying macaddict doesn't have an apple bias. The editors cater to apple enthusiasts and fanboys to gain readership from one of the more outspoken tech crowds. The more apple flamebait they post the more hits they get. Thus their bottom line gets bigger.
There have been four or so generations of the original ipod, then a few generations of the ipod mini... all of which allowed song list synchronization (at least for mp3 files) with any desktop to which they were attached.
WRONG: Please don't spread misinformation. iTunes continues to be updated to PREVENT this exact action. There are 3rd party tools which do it. But that is because Apple keeps changing iTunes from being allowed to drag files from the iPod to the computer. Once you get them on there, they don't come back off without hax. Please read this website for more information: Getting music off your iPod
You're asserting that in light of that history it's unreasonable to assume the same might be true of the shuffle...
You are seriously out of line. The history shows that Apple has put fourth significant effort to keep 3rd parties from getting songs off the iPod once they are loaded on. Your facts are the ones that are wrong. Just because somoen cracked the ipod and figured out how to get songs off it doesn't mean this feature isn't disabled from the factory.
This is the SAME EXACT thing that the article is bitching about on the SONY player. Did you not read the above posts AT ALL?
Your refusal to see the issue any more flexibly is itself rather strong evidence of bias on your part.
Your refusal to not admit that the iPod doesn't allow you to drag files off it by default. You must use 3rd party plugins which have figured out a workaround to apple's protection. Someone even wrote a workaround and apple disabled it in future updates (rad the article I posted from engadget). You are simply uninformed.
laptops don't typically have a lot of airflow going through them. They typically try to use the chassis of the laptop as a heatsink. You notice this by the heat on the surface of your powerbook. It spreads throughout the aluminum case.
Sure, there is a fan, but the airflow it creates is regulated to a single area of the laptop which is essentially just a heatsink for the CPU.
In a desktop system, there is a definate airflow throughout the case. If you have negative air pressure in the case (ie, the fans suck out more than blow in) then you are sucking unfiltered air through your DVD drive, through all the cracks in the case. This will generally destroy your drives much faster. If you make your case have positive pressure (more airflow going in from fans than out from fans) then you have a chance to filter the air which goes in, and at least be able to control to a small extent the quality of air which hits all of your components.
Either way, in a desktop system, smoke is a killer because over the months it will coat all the internal components, wether there is dust or not. Including the lense on your CDROM drive.
the submitter was making an assumption, one which in my opinion is unfortunate but not altogether unreasonable.
Why is this assumption not unreasonable? Because this is slashdot and slashdot tries to hide the weaknesses of the iPod? Thus propogating FUD about competing products? It is a loop that can never end if you try to claim that it is NOT unreasonable to make that assumption. The very act of you claiming it is not unreasonable hints that biased reporting already exists on slashdot.
Even if the submitter didn't know (which you could say either way, I won't make that judgement) the subsequent approval of the story by the slashdot editors is what makes the story bias.
I can agree with you that the submitter may or may not have had an agenda when doing his writeup. But that is not the same as slashdot editors intentionally spreading FUD about one product, and then supporting a product which features the same exact problems as the origional product they were trashing. You can rest assured that this slashdot editor knows of this weakness on the iPod and chose to ignore it with his approval of this story.
The same works for any news organization. They all have "journalists" or people in the field providing stories. Almost all jounralists add bias to their stories (some more than others). It is the editors who approve the articles who decide which type of bias their publication has. In this case, slashdot has a clear bias favoring apple products even when they know their products have the same problems they bitch about in their competitors.
Agreed. I will not purchase an ATI drive until they release a top notch driver (with similar quality to nVidia's official linux drivers) on a regular basis...
Currently, nVidia has a stronghold on the linux market and it shows. It is simply ridiculous that I cannot buy a new model ATI card, plug it in, and have it work with video games under linux. Not only is it ridiculous, it is embarassing.
You said: Regarding the non-transferrability of songs off of a disk-based ipod, it's a weak protection...
From the story: Well, of course the [Sony] obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker.
They have both been figured out. The sony figured out right after it came out. Both were ment to keep people from sharing songs from player to others. Whether or not one is more obfusciated than the other really doesn't matter because they were both ment to do the same thing, and both broken in a similar timeframe and with trivial means. Not to mention that you even admit tha the iPod shuffle is in a much more serious situation w.r.t. this aspect.
but I'm not sure this story submission rises to bias
How can you say that? The story puts the Sony and iPod directly against eachother. It then goes on to say that the Sony player has problems and that Sony needs to wake up. It says nothing about the same EXACT problems on the iPod (which came out BEFORE the sony). The story is clearly biased, whether you want to be sure about it or not.
No disrespect to the submitter. I feel his pain about not being able to drag n drop files to his new player. But that is the way the cards fall and I would hope this will be a learning experience for him not to buy the hottest new Sony products. There are several better priced and better quality players out which beat the living daylights out of the Sony. Just because they have a name doesn't mean they manufacture a quality product.
If you like drag n drop and want a flash player I would strongly recommend Lexar's LDP-800 for serious audiophiles, and LDP-200 for those who want a shuffle-quality player with better features and a lower price.
Both of these players are top notch with mass storage device music loading (ie: drag n drop) and expandable memory. The LDP-200 comes with a 1GB SD memory card for less than the 1GB shuffle, and it has a LCD screen with EQ and other niceness. The fact that you can swap out cards is ridiculously awesome as this is the most saught after feature for the consumers of flash players.
The LDP-800 supports OGG music and has a built in radio transmitter. It even features an OLED display. I know several people with the LDP-600 (the precursor to the 800) and it is a top notch player in both quality and durability. Everything I have been reading about the LDP-800 will make it the king of the hill for at least a little while. They are supposed to hit store shelves friday april 15.
"But wait -- you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to run them through Sony's obfuscation software first. The obfuscated files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you can't just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever. Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker."
Wait a minute. Why are they bitching about this? Apple PIONEERED this technique with the iPod. You cannot do this with the iPod so why are they trashing the sony players for doing the SAME LIMITATION? This story has BIASED written all over it.
Even with the iPod, brave hackers have figured out a way to share the MP3's loaded onto an iPod with iTunes.
How can you say that? Scott Bakula is the only reason that show had a chance from the begining. Lay off the actors... most of them are pretty decent. and scott bakula definately isn't the reason the show did poor (maybe for you it is.. you probably have something aganst him though)
Slashdot Mirror
They do?
Last I checked, each person pays 15% of their paycheck to SS and medcaid. Then the lowest tax bracket is 10%. that is 35% for the poorest people. Then about 5% to the state and another 5% to sales tax. State taxes rival the federal income tax pretty easilly. Don't even get me started on property tax.
Considering there are much higher than 10% tax brackets, we pay a lot of taxes.. (of course most "small busineses" write it all off and never pay a tax but that is another story altogether). We pay so much yet have nothing to show for it except a bunch of schools shutting down because of ignorant presidents.
I can assure, it wasn't the anti war peoploe in the SUV, it was the screaming redneq turned commuter.
The anti war people all drive honda civics and hyundai's.
I would imagine many people would be home and not working.
maybe they can find a job closer to their house.. rather than commuting to a different city every day.
Or they could stop driving those wanker SUV's on a 1 hr commute every day to their office.. pretty lame if you ask me.
You should really try the firefox webdev toolbar plugin. It has a CSS editor which lets you edit the CSS in real time in a side pannel.
I only wish this plugin would let you pick a better text editor with hilighting an code completing.. as the built in editor is kindof weak and forces your CSS to word wrap which is kinda silly.. But it REALLY makes it easy to edit CSS in there for experiments and trial and error, and cut n paste it back into my main editor when I have it how I want it.
If nothing else, go try it out and tell me what you think... I think you would be impressed with its power (and potential!)
Any evidence to back this up? Programers are hired for their expertise in deciding what to do in a program, not merely telling him/her to program a very well defined list of features (sometimes it is though). So the programer owns the particular realization of what is a very broad project to implement for a given problem.
Still confused?
It may be that the law protects the IP for professors. I don't know. But somehow I think it has a lot to do with the policy of the university. Unless the professors have a contract in place preserving their copyright, or there is a state law which preserves it for them while working for the state, then your argument is pretty groundless.
Then again, I don't know either way. I'm just pointing out that the only way for the professor to keep his copyright on a lecture would for him to have a contract or a state law which grants him those rights explicitly. And I am currently unaware of any such contracts or laws (but I'm sure they exist in some places and instances.)
Your post touches on NOTHING in my post. I never said anything about long term business profits. I never said it was "bad" for a business to not look out for their shareholders.. In fact, you make a good point. Businesses MUST look out for their shareholders FIRST and foremost. In every instance of this scenerio, that is automatically putting the environment, health, and safty of the people who are not shareholders at risk. Also please note that my entire post was based upon long term profits, not short term runs.
Since you didn't read my entire post above, I should probably point out that I never said it would be profitable for "a 2 year run". In fact, I explicitly offered a scenerio where coporations crank up production on purpose to put their competitors out of business, causing an unstable market... for the long term. This is what happens already in several industries in the US. There would be nothing stopping them from doing this harmful and hazardous abuse if the federal regulations did not exist.
I didn't read this out of a textbook. It is common sence. Every unregulated profitable business in this country has turned into a large coporation serving large coporate interests. If farming regulations went away, you would have multibillion dollar coporations spout up overnight.
I never said coporations own all the farms. I simply stated that you can't just go off and act like farmers will protect their land. They won't when a paycheck which will set them for life is at stake.
Yea, only that if every Farmer Brown didn't follow industry practice, then it becomes a public health issue.
Now matter how you look at it there are concerns for hte public health and safety and the rule of law. That is the number one reason the government exists. If they are going to bail out on regulating a consistant supply of food then they might as well shut down shop and we can all just run as an anarchy.
Thank you for your post. I'm glad there is some reason on this forum.
" Dont be prey to false logic. People protect their stuff."
Yea right.. We aren't talking about generation to generation farmers here. Start looking at the greater economic picture, where every industry turns into a small number of large coporations who leech off the resources. It will always be more profitable to leech off the land for 5 years and dump it, only to buy new land and do the same, over and over again. I'm not talking about Farmer Brown who sits around driving his tractor and taking care of his crops. He has a vested interest in his land and his family farm. But the same absolutely CANNOT be said about a coporation, no matter how you slice it.
Even if coporations outsoruced all their farming to the locals, they would just cut big bonus checks to them to crank out the max in the short term and then drop them. The local wouldn't have a problem because he would probably be set for life after that point. What does he care if his soil is useless... He is rich now and has a retirement account.
Your points only make sence if every farmer in the country ran like a small family business and passed it down through the generations selling to local grocery stores and farmer's markets. This lala land you dream of doesn't exist. There are greater economic factors at work here. Walmart sells produce now if you haven't noticed. Small businesses don't sell to walmart. Small businesses don't sell to Walmart's competitors. The economics are so significantly more complicated than you can imagine, and you boil it all down to "People protect their stuff." Give me a break.
Crop rotation is a great thing, but why force it on land owners?
You must apprentice for 4 years to become certified as a brick layer. Why force it on the people? Why not just let people lay their own bricks, and bricks all over town? Why go through any kind of government regulation if all it is is just laying bricks? Lets all just tell the Joe Schmoe's around town to start laying bricks, and when they all fall on Granny Smith next year and cause her to fall and break her hip and have a heart attack, we will just rebuild it like we did origionally... Nobody will feel bad because Joe Schmoe didn't know any better that he layed them in a verticle stack.. Then another brick wall falls on Joe Sixpack. But nobody really cares... He is just a drunk. Suddenly, all the bricks in town fell over and hit Dick and Jane, knocked down the neighboring house, cave in a grocery store full of Jills and Franks, and let all the small time drug users out of state prison. How about that? I bet you think that is a good idea to ehh?
I am not a geek, but a supervisor of geeks. I buy what they recommend. I skim Slashdot now and again to see how you - the expert computer community thinks. More and more, they (you) recommend Apple
You post just lost all creadability with that statement. Sorry.
Ok you have a good point.. There is nothing keeping states from regulating "interstate" commerce.. The constitution (even the 10th amendment)doesn't ban states from using powers which are granted to congress. It just says that congress has a right to trump them (in some instances such as if it necessary and proper, or federal government could withold funding if you don't comply.. etc etc) There really is nothing anywhere preventing states from regulating interstate commerce except their borders...
Arkansas isn't going to do much good enforcing a tax or making a regulation which tells texas they can't sell dell computers to oklahoma. But if Arkansas wants to put an import tax on the dell computers for their own state, that is their problem.
I think that is what the problem really is, I only didn't read between the lines enough to realize that states can't really regulate interstate commerce, only their own internal commerce, and commerce which comes into their state (which is still internal to them) So in short, nothing prevents states from regulating interstate commerce except the physical borders. If arkansas wants to put a tax on importers to tennessee from texas, they could definately do that if they wanted to travel through their state. But like I said, it wouldn't (really) be interstate commerce.
Find me the part that denies regulating interstate commerce to the states.
It is pretty close to the top of the constitution my friend: Article. I. Section 1.
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
then later on in Article. I. Section 8. Clause 3.
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Guess you didn't bother to read the link you posted. And just in case you don't know what "vested" means:
vested: adj. 1. Law: Settled, fixed, or absolute; being without contingency: a vested right. 2. Dressed or clothed, especially in ecclesiastical vestments.
Shall I count the number of Mac-related articles that include the obligatory smart-ass line indicating the authors disdain for everything Mac?
Please do. It would be interesting to show the number of pro-apple articles posted vs the number of anti-apple articles. You can probably count the latter on one hand in the past year or so. saying that slashdot doesn't have an apple bias is like saying macaddict doesn't have an apple bias. The editors cater to apple enthusiasts and fanboys to gain readership from one of the more outspoken tech crowds. The more apple flamebait they post the more hits they get. Thus their bottom line gets bigger.
There have been four or so generations of the original ipod, then a few generations of the ipod mini... all of which allowed song list synchronization (at least for mp3 files) with any desktop to which they were attached.
WRONG: Please don't spread misinformation. iTunes continues to be updated to PREVENT this exact action. There are 3rd party tools which do it. But that is because Apple keeps changing iTunes from being allowed to drag files from the iPod to the computer. Once you get them on there, they don't come back off without hax. Please read this website for more information: Getting music off your iPod
You're asserting that in light of that history it's unreasonable to assume the same might be true of the shuffle...
You are seriously out of line. The history shows that Apple has put fourth significant effort to keep 3rd parties from getting songs off the iPod once they are loaded on. Your facts are the ones that are wrong. Just because somoen cracked the ipod and figured out how to get songs off it doesn't mean this feature isn't disabled from the factory.
This is the SAME EXACT thing that the article is bitching about on the SONY player. Did you not read the above posts AT ALL?
Your refusal to see the issue any more flexibly is itself rather strong evidence of bias on your part.
Your refusal to not admit that the iPod doesn't allow you to drag files off it by default. You must use 3rd party plugins which have figured out a workaround to apple's protection. Someone even wrote a workaround and apple disabled it in future updates (rad the article I posted from engadget). You are simply uninformed.
laptops don't typically have a lot of airflow going through them. They typically try to use the chassis of the laptop as a heatsink. You notice this by the heat on the surface of your powerbook. It spreads throughout the aluminum case.
Sure, there is a fan, but the airflow it creates is regulated to a single area of the laptop which is essentially just a heatsink for the CPU.
In a desktop system, there is a definate airflow throughout the case. If you have negative air pressure in the case (ie, the fans suck out more than blow in) then you are sucking unfiltered air through your DVD drive, through all the cracks in the case. This will generally destroy your drives much faster. If you make your case have positive pressure (more airflow going in from fans than out from fans) then you have a chance to filter the air which goes in, and at least be able to control to a small extent the quality of air which hits all of your components.
Either way, in a desktop system, smoke is a killer because over the months it will coat all the internal components, wether there is dust or not. Including the lense on your CDROM drive.
the submitter was making an assumption, one which in my opinion is unfortunate but not altogether unreasonable.
Why is this assumption not unreasonable? Because this is slashdot and slashdot tries to hide the weaknesses of the iPod? Thus propogating FUD about competing products? It is a loop that can never end if you try to claim that it is NOT unreasonable to make that assumption. The very act of you claiming it is not unreasonable hints that biased reporting already exists on slashdot.
Even if the submitter didn't know (which you could say either way, I won't make that judgement) the subsequent approval of the story by the slashdot editors is what makes the story bias.
I can agree with you that the submitter may or may not have had an agenda when doing his writeup. But that is not the same as slashdot editors intentionally spreading FUD about one product, and then supporting a product which features the same exact problems as the origional product they were trashing. You can rest assured that this slashdot editor knows of this weakness on the iPod and chose to ignore it with his approval of this story.
The same works for any news organization. They all have "journalists" or people in the field providing stories. Almost all jounralists add bias to their stories (some more than others). It is the editors who approve the articles who decide which type of bias their publication has. In this case, slashdot has a clear bias favoring apple products even when they know their products have the same problems they bitch about in their competitors.
Agreed. I will not purchase an ATI drive until they release a top notch driver (with similar quality to nVidia's official linux drivers) on a regular basis...
Currently, nVidia has a stronghold on the linux market and it shows. It is simply ridiculous that I cannot buy a new model ATI card, plug it in, and have it work with video games under linux. Not only is it ridiculous, it is embarassing.
You said: Regarding the non-transferrability of songs off of a disk-based ipod, it's a weak protection...
From the story: Well, of course the [Sony] obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker.
They have both been figured out. The sony figured out right after it came out. Both were ment to keep people from sharing songs from player to others. Whether or not one is more obfusciated than the other really doesn't matter because they were both ment to do the same thing, and both broken in a similar timeframe and with trivial means. Not to mention that you even admit tha the iPod shuffle is in a much more serious situation w.r.t. this aspect.
but I'm not sure this story submission rises to bias
How can you say that? The story puts the Sony and iPod directly against eachother. It then goes on to say that the Sony player has problems and that Sony needs to wake up. It says nothing about the same EXACT problems on the iPod (which came out BEFORE the sony). The story is clearly biased, whether you want to be sure about it or not.
No disrespect to the submitter. I feel his pain about not being able to drag n drop files to his new player. But that is the way the cards fall and I would hope this will be a learning experience for him not to buy the hottest new Sony products. There are several better priced and better quality players out which beat the living daylights out of the Sony. Just because they have a name doesn't mean they manufacture a quality product.
If you like drag n drop and want a flash player I would strongly recommend Lexar's LDP-800 for serious audiophiles, and LDP-200 for those who want a shuffle-quality player with better features and a lower price.
Both of these players are top notch with mass storage device music loading (ie: drag n drop) and expandable memory. The LDP-200 comes with a 1GB SD memory card for less than the 1GB shuffle, and it has a LCD screen with EQ and other niceness. The fact that you can swap out cards is ridiculously awesome as this is the most saught after feature for the consumers of flash players.
The LDP-800 supports OGG music and has a built in radio transmitter. It even features an OLED display. I know several people with the LDP-600 (the precursor to the 800) and it is a top notch player in both quality and durability. Everything I have been reading about the LDP-800 will make it the king of the hill for at least a little while. They are supposed to hit store shelves friday april 15.
From the looks of it (and from the looks of the typical iPod owner) this shouldn't be too difficult of a problem...
heh
"But wait -- you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to run them through Sony's obfuscation software first. The obfuscated files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you can't just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever. Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker."
Wait a minute. Why are they bitching about this? Apple PIONEERED this technique with the iPod. You cannot do this with the iPod so why are they trashing the sony players for doing the SAME LIMITATION? This story has BIASED written all over it.
Even with the iPod, brave hackers have figured out a way to share the MP3's loaded onto an iPod with iTunes.
I don't really think people care too much if it lands in Texas. Maybe NY or California... Or Arkansas...
But who cares if it kills a thousand or several in Texas? Would be a relief.
How can you say that? Scott Bakula is the only reason that show had a chance from the begining. Lay off the actors... most of them are pretty decent. and scott bakula definately isn't the reason the show did poor (maybe for you it is.. you probably have something aganst him though)