"Agreed, but you forgot the music industry. They've been seriously hurting artists and customers for decades, and the market still hasn't corrected."
I don't think he did. The market is self-creating in their case, but it is taking longer because they've had a complete monopoly for so long and they still have a lot of popular artists on their side. There simply wasn't an alternative in their case, but now there are alternatives and more alternatives keep arising. But it is happening. I think that proves his point quite well -- no matter how deeply entrenched a monopoly may be, it will eventually be broken, if it takes 80 years or even longer.
"I grew up in the city. If there's on thing that pisses me off, it's people that post definitions of common words, as if to imply they were imparting deep wisdom unto the masses."
The thread earlier about blogger plagarism proved that sometimes that this is a good idea, as many posters clearly didn't understand the difference between plagarism and copyright infringement.
Same here. When I reported a bug I stumbled on with QtParted I got an email the next day. The project manager told me to update because he thought he had it fixed, but added to be sure to email him if I ran into it again. But after seeing people sued for reporting vulnerabilities in prop software I wouldn't even try. Hey, it's closed source so I can't help but feel like why bother to help them anyway? They're making money off of it and they're not going to pay you for helping them and may, in fact, attempt to have you prosecuted.
"If the choice is 'Moby Dick' or Playstation, I think we know which one a kid will pick"
When I was a kid in the 70s they said the same thing about television. (Jesus, don't people remember that? God, I'm not THAT old!) My grandmother told me once that they said the same thing about radio when she was a kid. So what did they blame before radio? I'd imagine it was wanting to play outside instead of reading. Hint: many kids don't like reading all that much, especially ponderous books like Moby Dick
First of all, I recommend Avast! If they're running Win 98 or (heaven help them) Me, Avast! won't work so I recommend AVG. But I also recommend Win Patrol; it blocks a hell of a lot of spyware as well as most of the kind of malware (trojans, etc) that can download themselves into your system just while you're online.
"Lol, yeah you're parents should totally use Linux."
Indeed, they should try Xandros. I've tested several of the easy-to-use distros and I think it's the easiest and most user-friendly. And as I said quite recently, explaining the difference between root and a regular user account and pointing them to the Xandros is much easier than trying to teach novice Windows-users about computer security. When will people learn that Windows is not really easier to use but simply presents the illusion of being easier to use? It should be pretty obvious that it's just an illusion as soon as system is infected with malware to the hilt because the novice user simply installed whatever came with their computer, ususally McAffee or Norton's (both of which suck like black holes, in my experience). Most novice users don't even realize that anti-virus won't protect against spyware and vice versa. Take my word for it, fixing problems like that is my job.
"You slashdot nerds are too much, acting like this music service has anything to do with fundamental rights or democracy shows how far gone you are."
It does and you're an absolute fool not to realize that. First of all, it tramples Fair Use, which is supposed to be a fundamental right. Secondly, when you buy a copy of any media that copy is supposed to belong to you and they're taking that away from you.
Just because you're stupid enough to be suckered into this doesn't the rest of us are. Don't expect us to have any sympathy for you when you only have to the right to listen to a song you've paid for once and have to pay each and every time afterward because that is definitely where this is headed. Goodamnit, why are people like you so stupid?!
"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."
So it is still not illegal. No guarantees about tomorrow, however.
Considering that Alexa is installed with IE 6 by default and it was known spyware even when IE6 came out, why trust Microsoft's anti-spyware? I'm really not trying to just troll here, but if they bundled IE with links to a known spyware provider in the first place, one has to wonder if a certain amount of spyware isn't deliberately overlooked by their program for business reasons.
"But, an extremely significant percentage (I'll bet it's over 80%) of Windows users continue to be logged in with administrative priveleges -- most without knowing and understanding what that even means."
More of them do than you might think -- because if they tried it they quickly found out that a lot of programs don't work under a regular user account. I've heard this complaint over and over again from people who tried to make their Widnows box more secure and learned about this. The privilege system on Windows seems to be years behind compared to most versions of *nix. This is why even something like over half of those who do know the difference will still run it with administrator privileges; it's such a pain to do otherwise. As to the specifics, you'd have to ask a Windows user who knows from first-hand experience.
This is true, but is also true that a great deal of spyware installs itself into a user's machine while they're online without their knowledge or consent. That is a flaw in the operating system, that its default settings are to allow others to remotely make changes to your system without your knowledge or consent -- and you can't change this without third-party software and/or a hardware router, which even when combined are not 100% effective. People who know enough to use a firewall and something like Win Patrol have no idea how bad it is out there for a machine running without these; you don't even have to go to any site and spyware is downloading itself straight into your computer immediately.
But is automatic protection and education needed for average users? Hell yeah. I just finished fixing up on a computer in which the neighbor's kid installed something that was absolutely loaded with spyware. What's funny is that the kid is taking a computer class in school! I wonder what they're teaching in that class, how to play WoW? Christ. Anyway, my point in this paragraph is that we obviously can't count even on regular schools to teach the next generation even the slightest thing about computer security, so this problem isn't going away any time soon. We really need to try harder to educate people about spyware.
Lastly, I'd like to add that this is part of why I recommend Xandros to computer newbies. Explaining the difference between root and a regular user account and pointing them towards the Xandros forums is a hell of a lot easier than teaching a novice Windows user how to secure their machines. I've done both more than once. That "Windows is so much easier to use" is a load of BS, I think (whether you regard this as a flame or not). It may seem easier to use, but that's an illusion that lasts only for a short time -- just long enough for the machine to get infected with a boatload of malware because the user simply doesn't know any better and security has always way down on the list for MS.
"When AIDS first appeared, it was not accepted as a real disease either."
True. I remember that. If AIDS had turned out not to be real my eldest sister would still be alive.
Just out of curiosity, how many unreal diseases are there with so many patients claiming to have it? That is, where it's not especially beneficial for the government to claim it doesn't exist, like Gulf War Syndrome? I can't think of any that haven't proven to be very real as time went on and more people got it.
But you can't expect people on the internet to be intellectually honest about such matters. To be perfectly frank, reading the posts here you can see how many take it as an opportunity to indulge in cruelty and mockery. Others don't want to feel threatened and so deny it and attack anyone who presents the idea that it might not be a hoax.
"People aren't going to less movies because of the quality. It's because there's so much else to do. "
My husband and I were avid movie-goers and DVD-collectors until two years ago. Are we older? Sure, we're older than we were two years ago, but we're not that much older. Since you work in film, take this to heart: all of the movies that have been released in the last two years really are crap. I'm not trying to troll you, I'm trying to make you understand that people aren't just saying that. It's true. And we miss having decent new movies to watch. The last DVD I bought was a copy of Citizen X on Amazon.com, a movie that premiered about 10 years ago. We haven't bought a DVD of a recent movie in 2 years now. Absolutely none of the movies released in the last 2 years appealed to us. We didn't download any of them either; they're not worth watching, not even for free.
Make some decent movies and we will go see them and buy the DVDs. Make crap and/or DRM the DVDs to the hilt, so that I can't even take screenshots while watching it on a computer, and you won't get our money. If you really think that the reason ticket and DVD sales have fallen so is because there is more to do than you are deluded. There has always been much more to do than go to a movie theater or watch a DVD. None of that has changed. What has changed is that the movies coming out aren't worth watching.
In short, make some decent movies, not yet another remake of an old sitcom or a movie based on a good game that is an insult to the game itself. Then sales will rise. The current decline has nothing to do with there being more to do besides go to a movie or with piracy. Those are excuses. Stop making the excuses and make some decent movies. We really do want there to be some movies worth watching again.
I don't get it either. How is this even a news story? (Note I'm not blaimg Zonk for posting it, rather whoever wrote it and thought this mattered even slightly.) Hell, I don't care if they use a GameCube housing for the final product, let alone the demo. I wouldn't even care if the Wii housing was as butt-ugly as my 9th grade English teacher, what I care about is how well the system works and what games will run on it.
It makes me wonder if the author didn't write this up in the hope that it would be misinterpreted and make Nintendo look bad, while retaining some journalistic integrity. Hmmm, maybe I do get it after all.
As flamy as this AC's post may be, I'm afriad I have to agree with him or her. These are potentially serious "gotchas" that could cause real problems for devs who include java with their OSes and have apparently been overlooked. Sun hasn't exploited these sections of their license recently to my knowledge, but they wouldn't be there if they didn't intend to. Makes me wonder if they weren't trying for a dirty tactic there -- get the community dependent on their java and then exploit the license to unduly influence it. Read it yourself and think about what a corporate exec could do with this.
If I'm not mistaken, the $100 laptop has low CPU power but 1 gig of RAM. Would java run on it? Depends on the java program -- if it requires much CPU, no, but it's RAM-dependent, yes.
Hmmm, I have to respectfully disagree. Guns are made to be able to kill, whether in self-defense or not. This proposed law is more like outlawing surgeon's knives because Jack the Ripper (supposedly) used one, never mind that surgeons use them to save lives; network tools are used to hack networks but are also used to secure them. That's the most apt comparison I can think of.
"The biggest unreliability with Windows is the stupid things that users do."
Knowing how ignorant of computers the average user is, I would have believed you, but there are two reasons I don't. One is experience with Windows myself. No matter how well you secure it -- limited user privileges, behind a router, use ZA, Avast!, WinPatrol and PeerGuardian -- something will happen to it. And limited user privileges is not the answer to security problems anyway. There are too many programs that require admin access, unlike modern *nix systems. Also unlike *nix, user accounts are not in any separate. If user A gets a virus, the system has a virus. On *nix if user A gets a (hypothetical) virus, you can delete that user account and make another because the system is not infected.
Another reason is an experiment I pulled with two people who were poor enough that they got little from Windows because they didn't have the money to buy third-poarty software. Understand, they knew practically nothing about computers as well, so of course their Windows installation was ruined in no time flat. I explained the difference between a user account and root and then switched them to Xandros. I also pointed them to the Xandros forums, where they could learn everything else they needed to know. Knowing that all this software was free was a big thing to them so they were willing to give it a shot. My experiment worked and their computers are reliable and secure -- yes, I checked up on them. These people still just the basics; log in as root, update and use APT to get more software. They know little else about *nix and nothing about security other than to update. They don't need to.
In conclusion, people who claim that Windows can be just as secure as *nix don't know *nix and certainly don't understand the difference between the security models of the OSes. Furthermore, it's inaccurate to claim how secure Windows can be since security requires so much software to secure it, which is not required with an OS that is designed to be secure in the first place, which Windows never was.
I agree. I recommended AVG for years to my customers, but decided to give Avast! a try on a customer's infected PC after AVG. Avast! found a virus AVG didn't and uses 15%-20% less memory.
But I also recommend winpatrol. Not an AV program, it blocks out most malware, including some of the nastier stuff that can stealth-download itself into a Windows computer as long as the user is online. It only uses about 4 mb of memory to run in the background -- but I have no idea how much an enterprise solution would cost, as the regular version is free to home users. WinPatrol Plus costs $29.95 normally, so if there is no enterprise version, I guess it would depend on how many computers you need to isntall it on.
As someone who meta-mods every day here, I'd like to say thanks. I see abuse of the mod system almost every time I meta-mod -- I'd estimate that around 90% of negative moderations are abusive (i.e., the mod disagreed with the poster). It's very refreshing to see someone trying to be fair.
"If you're telling me that downloading music from the internet that you didn't pay for isn't stealing, then I don't know what to say. "
And if you tell me that anyone can "own" music, then I'm going to tell you that you need to buy air from me. If you're breathing than you'd better be paying me, buster. See how easy it is to claim something is wrong just because you're not making money from it?
How can you "own" sounds? Nobody owned music until the technology existed to record it and record companies suddenly had the rights to the music and managed to take away everyone else's rights. It wasn't illegal or wrong until someone decided it was. Before then you could play any song you wanted without getting sued and no one considered that stealing. You've been brainwashed into thinking that not promoting their greed and power is wrong. It's no different than a religious tenet to obey the priests or not to worship other gods -- just because they say it's wrong doesn't change the fact that this issue actually has no bearing on right or wrong. Please stop pretending it does. If you're gonna get preachy about right and wrong, you need a far beter subject to start with. Maybe try giving a damn about others instead of worrying about the greed of corporations not being accomodated in every little way they want.
"The user in your scenario can't be bothered to go to a website to get the weather, so you might want to try finding another weather tray tool. I don't know of any off the top of my head but there have to be several out there."
Weather Watcher comes in a freeware version and an ad-supported version. Neither contains actual spyware.
I know I'm sure as hell not being paid! If I'm supposed to be getting paid for saying I'm going to get a Wii, then where is my money? Sorry, dude, but this accusation just doesn't hold water.
As to Sony and Microsoft... no thanks. My husband is a rabid gamer and I'm something of a gamer myself. We still have our Playstation, PS2 and XBox, but the only console we're planning to get is the Wii. We know people who've gotten 360s and they report that they're somewhat crash-prone, not to mention hearing so much about them over-heating. Too bad, because the original XBox totally rocked; we've never had any trouble with it. And the PS3? Don't make me laugh. We're not even slightly interested in Blu-Ray and we're not going to spend that much for a gaming console, even if it runs Linux. So that leaves the Wii. We're not Nintendo fans, but it's simply the process of elimination here working in their favor.
A very good point. Along with the session history and the minimize config option I posted above, these two could and probably should be put on the options panel. Make it as simple as checking and unchecking it -- "Set session history to 0? (Saves memory, slows some pages)" should work fine.
Slashdot Mirror
"Agreed, but you forgot the music industry. They've been seriously hurting artists and customers for decades, and the market still hasn't corrected."
I don't think he did. The market is self-creating in their case, but it is taking longer because they've had a complete monopoly for so long and they still have a lot of popular artists on their side. There simply wasn't an alternative in their case, but now there are alternatives and more alternatives keep arising. But it is happening. I think that proves his point quite well -- no matter how deeply entrenched a monopoly may be, it will eventually be broken, if it takes 80 years or even longer.
"I grew up in the city. If there's on thing that pisses me off, it's people that post definitions of common words, as if to imply they were imparting deep wisdom unto the masses."
The thread earlier about blogger plagarism proved that sometimes that this is a good idea, as many posters clearly didn't understand the difference between plagarism and copyright infringement.
Same here. When I reported a bug I stumbled on with QtParted I got an email the next day. The project manager told me to update because he thought he had it fixed, but added to be sure to email him if I ran into it again. But after seeing people sued for reporting vulnerabilities in prop software I wouldn't even try. Hey, it's closed source so I can't help but feel like why bother to help them anyway? They're making money off of it and they're not going to pay you for helping them and may, in fact, attempt to have you prosecuted.
"If the choice is 'Moby Dick' or Playstation, I think we know which one a kid will pick"
When I was a kid in the 70s they said the same thing about television. (Jesus, don't people remember that? God, I'm not THAT old!) My grandmother told me once that they said the same thing about radio when she was a kid. So what did they blame before radio? I'd imagine it was wanting to play outside instead of reading. Hint: many kids don't like reading all that much, especially ponderous books like Moby Dick
First of all, I recommend Avast! If they're running Win 98 or (heaven help them) Me, Avast! won't work so I recommend AVG. But I also recommend Win Patrol; it blocks a hell of a lot of spyware as well as most of the kind of malware (trojans, etc) that can download themselves into your system just while you're online.
"Lol, yeah you're parents should totally use Linux."
Indeed, they should try Xandros. I've tested several of the easy-to-use distros and I think it's the easiest and most user-friendly. And as I said quite recently, explaining the difference between root and a regular user account and pointing them to the Xandros is much easier than trying to teach novice Windows-users about computer security. When will people learn that Windows is not really easier to use but simply presents the illusion of being easier to use? It should be pretty obvious that it's just an illusion as soon as system is infected with malware to the hilt because the novice user simply installed whatever came with their computer, ususally McAffee or Norton's (both of which suck like black holes, in my experience). Most novice users don't even realize that anti-virus won't protect against spyware and vice versa. Take my word for it, fixing problems like that is my job.
"You slashdot nerds are too much, acting like this music service has anything to do with fundamental rights or democracy shows how far gone you are."
It does and you're an absolute fool not to realize that. First of all, it tramples Fair Use, which is supposed to be a fundamental right. Secondly, when you buy a copy of any media that copy is supposed to belong to you and they're taking that away from you.
Just because you're stupid enough to be suckered into this doesn't the rest of us are. Don't expect us to have any sympathy for you when you only have to the right to listen to a song you've paid for once and have to pay each and every time afterward because that is definitely where this is headed. Goodamnit, why are people like you so stupid?!
"You have the ability to burn CD's, yes, but you do not have the ability to rip them (legally anyways). "
WRONG! The RIAA recently tried to claim it is illegal but before then their lawyer said in front of the Supreme Court
"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."
So it is still not illegal. No guarantees about tomorrow, however.
Considering that Alexa is installed with IE 6 by default and it was known spyware even when IE6 came out, why trust Microsoft's anti-spyware? I'm really not trying to just troll here, but if they bundled IE with links to a known spyware provider in the first place, one has to wonder if a certain amount of spyware isn't deliberately overlooked by their program for business reasons.
"But, an extremely significant percentage (I'll bet it's over 80%) of Windows users continue to be logged in with administrative priveleges -- most without knowing and understanding what that even means."
More of them do than you might think -- because if they tried it they quickly found out that a lot of programs don't work under a regular user account. I've heard this complaint over and over again from people who tried to make their Widnows box more secure and learned about this. The privilege system on Windows seems to be years behind compared to most versions of *nix. This is why even something like over half of those who do know the difference will still run it with administrator privileges; it's such a pain to do otherwise. As to the specifics, you'd have to ask a Windows user who knows from first-hand experience.
This is true, but is also true that a great deal of spyware installs itself into a user's machine while they're online without their knowledge or consent. That is a flaw in the operating system, that its default settings are to allow others to remotely make changes to your system without your knowledge or consent -- and you can't change this without third-party software and/or a hardware router, which even when combined are not 100% effective. People who know enough to use a firewall and something like Win Patrol have no idea how bad it is out there for a machine running without these; you don't even have to go to any site and spyware is downloading itself straight into your computer immediately.
But is automatic protection and education needed for average users? Hell yeah. I just finished fixing up on a computer in which the neighbor's kid installed something that was absolutely loaded with spyware. What's funny is that the kid is taking a computer class in school! I wonder what they're teaching in that class, how to play WoW? Christ. Anyway, my point in this paragraph is that we obviously can't count even on regular schools to teach the next generation even the slightest thing about computer security, so this problem isn't going away any time soon. We really need to try harder to educate people about spyware.
Lastly, I'd like to add that this is part of why I recommend Xandros to computer newbies. Explaining the difference between root and a regular user account and pointing them towards the Xandros forums is a hell of a lot easier than teaching a novice Windows user how to secure their machines. I've done both more than once. That "Windows is so much easier to use" is a load of BS, I think (whether you regard this as a flame or not). It may seem easier to use, but that's an illusion that lasts only for a short time -- just long enough for the machine to get infected with a boatload of malware because the user simply doesn't know any better and security has always way down on the list for MS.
"When AIDS first appeared, it was not accepted as a real disease either."
True. I remember that. If AIDS had turned out not to be real my eldest sister would still be alive.
Just out of curiosity, how many unreal diseases are there with so many patients claiming to have it? That is, where it's not especially beneficial for the government to claim it doesn't exist, like Gulf War Syndrome? I can't think of any that haven't proven to be very real as time went on and more people got it.
But you can't expect people on the internet to be intellectually honest about such matters. To be perfectly frank, reading the posts here you can see how many take it as an opportunity to indulge in cruelty and mockery. Others don't want to feel threatened and so deny it and attack anyone who presents the idea that it might not be a hoax.
"People aren't going to less movies because of the quality. It's because there's so much else to do. "
My husband and I were avid movie-goers and DVD-collectors until two years ago. Are we older? Sure, we're older than we were two years ago, but we're not that much older. Since you work in film, take this to heart: all of the movies that have been released in the last two years really are crap. I'm not trying to troll you, I'm trying to make you understand that people aren't just saying that. It's true. And we miss having decent new movies to watch. The last DVD I bought was a copy of Citizen X on Amazon.com, a movie that premiered about 10 years ago. We haven't bought a DVD of a recent movie in 2 years now. Absolutely none of the movies released in the last 2 years appealed to us. We didn't download any of them either; they're not worth watching, not even for free.
Make some decent movies and we will go see them and buy the DVDs. Make crap and/or DRM the DVDs to the hilt, so that I can't even take screenshots while watching it on a computer, and you won't get our money. If you really think that the reason ticket and DVD sales have fallen so is because there is more to do than you are deluded. There has always been much more to do than go to a movie theater or watch a DVD. None of that has changed. What has changed is that the movies coming out aren't worth watching.
In short, make some decent movies, not yet another remake of an old sitcom or a movie based on a good game that is an insult to the game itself. Then sales will rise. The current decline has nothing to do with there being more to do besides go to a movie or with piracy. Those are excuses. Stop making the excuses and make some decent movies. We really do want there to be some movies worth watching again.
I don't get it either. How is this even a news story? (Note I'm not blaimg Zonk for posting it, rather whoever wrote it and thought this mattered even slightly.) Hell, I don't care if they use a GameCube housing for the final product, let alone the demo. I wouldn't even care if the Wii housing was as butt-ugly as my 9th grade English teacher, what I care about is how well the system works and what games will run on it.
It makes me wonder if the author didn't write this up in the hope that it would be misinterpreted and make Nintendo look bad, while retaining some journalistic integrity. Hmmm, maybe I do get it after all.
As flamy as this AC's post may be, I'm afriad I have to agree with him or her. These are potentially serious "gotchas" that could cause real problems for devs who include java with their OSes and have apparently been overlooked. Sun hasn't exploited these sections of their license recently to my knowledge, but they wouldn't be there if they didn't intend to. Makes me wonder if they weren't trying for a dirty tactic there -- get the community dependent on their java and then exploit the license to unduly influence it. Read it yourself and think about what a corporate exec could do with this.
If I'm not mistaken, the $100 laptop has low CPU power but 1 gig of RAM. Would java run on it? Depends on the java program -- if it requires much CPU, no, but it's RAM-dependent, yes.
Hmmm, I have to respectfully disagree. Guns are made to be able to kill, whether in self-defense or not. This proposed law is more like outlawing surgeon's knives because Jack the Ripper (supposedly) used one, never mind that surgeons use them to save lives; network tools are used to hack networks but are also used to secure them. That's the most apt comparison I can think of.
"The biggest unreliability with Windows is the stupid things that users do."
Knowing how ignorant of computers the average user is, I would have believed you, but there are two reasons I don't. One is experience with Windows myself. No matter how well you secure it -- limited user privileges, behind a router, use ZA, Avast!, WinPatrol and PeerGuardian -- something will happen to it. And limited user privileges is not the answer to security problems anyway. There are too many programs that require admin access, unlike modern *nix systems. Also unlike *nix, user accounts are not in any separate. If user A gets a virus, the system has a virus. On *nix if user A gets a (hypothetical) virus, you can delete that user account and make another because the system is not infected.
Another reason is an experiment I pulled with two people who were poor enough that they got little from Windows because they didn't have the money to buy third-poarty software. Understand, they knew practically nothing about computers as well, so of course their Windows installation was ruined in no time flat. I explained the difference between a user account and root and then switched them to Xandros. I also pointed them to the Xandros forums, where they could learn everything else they needed to know. Knowing that all this software was free was a big thing to them so they were willing to give it a shot. My experiment worked and their computers are reliable and secure -- yes, I checked up on them. These people still just the basics; log in as root, update and use APT to get more software. They know little else about *nix and nothing about security other than to update. They don't need to.
In conclusion, people who claim that Windows can be just as secure as *nix don't know *nix and certainly don't understand the difference between the security models of the OSes. Furthermore, it's inaccurate to claim how secure Windows can be since security requires so much software to secure it, which is not required with an OS that is designed to be secure in the first place, which Windows never was.
I agree. I recommended AVG for years to my customers, but decided to give Avast! a try on a customer's infected PC after AVG. Avast! found a virus AVG didn't and uses 15%-20% less memory.
But I also recommend winpatrol. Not an AV program, it blocks out most malware, including some of the nastier stuff that can stealth-download itself into a Windows computer as long as the user is online. It only uses about 4 mb of memory to run in the background -- but I have no idea how much an enterprise solution would cost, as the regular version is free to home users. WinPatrol Plus costs $29.95 normally, so if there is no enterprise version, I guess it would depend on how many computers you need to isntall it on.
Ah, that would explain those ancient Mayan predictions of something terrible happening to the human race in 2012.
As someone who meta-mods every day here, I'd like to say thanks. I see abuse of the mod system almost every time I meta-mod -- I'd estimate that around 90% of negative moderations are abusive (i.e., the mod disagreed with the poster). It's very refreshing to see someone trying to be fair.
"If you're telling me that downloading music from the internet that you didn't pay for isn't stealing, then I don't know what to say. "
And if you tell me that anyone can "own" music, then I'm going to tell you that you need to buy air from me. If you're breathing than you'd better be paying me, buster. See how easy it is to claim something is wrong just because you're not making money from it?
How can you "own" sounds? Nobody owned music until the technology existed to record it and record companies suddenly had the rights to the music and managed to take away everyone else's rights. It wasn't illegal or wrong until someone decided it was. Before then you could play any song you wanted without getting sued and no one considered that stealing. You've been brainwashed into thinking that not promoting their greed and power is wrong. It's no different than a religious tenet to obey the priests or not to worship other gods -- just because they say it's wrong doesn't change the fact that this issue actually has no bearing on right or wrong. Please stop pretending it does. If you're gonna get preachy about right and wrong, you need a far beter subject to start with. Maybe try giving a damn about others instead of worrying about the greed of corporations not being accomodated in every little way they want.
There's a difference between combat in war than a mass killing spree against unarmed people (kids or adults).
"The user in your scenario can't be bothered to go to a website to get the weather, so you might want to try finding another weather tray tool. I don't know of any off the top of my head but there have to be several out there."
Weather Watcher comes in a freeware version and an ad-supported version. Neither contains actual spyware.
I know I'm sure as hell not being paid! If I'm supposed to be getting paid for saying I'm going to get a Wii, then where is my money? Sorry, dude, but this accusation just doesn't hold water.
As to Sony and Microsoft... no thanks. My husband is a rabid gamer and I'm something of a gamer myself. We still have our Playstation, PS2 and XBox, but the only console we're planning to get is the Wii. We know people who've gotten 360s and they report that they're somewhat crash-prone, not to mention hearing so much about them over-heating. Too bad, because the original XBox totally rocked; we've never had any trouble with it. And the PS3? Don't make me laugh. We're not even slightly interested in Blu-Ray and we're not going to spend that much for a gaming console, even if it runs Linux. So that leaves the Wii. We're not Nintendo fans, but it's simply the process of elimination here working in their favor.
A very good point. Along with the session history and the minimize config option I posted above, these two could and probably should be put on the options panel. Make it as simple as checking and unchecking it -- "Set session history to 0? (Saves memory, slows some pages)" should work fine.