"This guy has actually understood what's going on. Cynical and sad, but I believe obvious too."
For those of us who know and love Walter on other fora(ums, ae, i?!) (Y! Scox and IV Scox) he has been the most cynical of all of us, and he's been right more often than is comfortable sometimes.
If you ever get it in your head that IBM is going to FiNaLlY CrUsH Scaldera, all you have to do is read one of Walter's posts, and you're back to reality and more delay.
...+3 and over, I have to say one thing about ebay:
Fuck no.
I wrote here about one of my issues I had with them last year, and it just seems to get "stupider and stupider"
That people will willingly put up with rampant fraud just so they can possibly get something on the cheap just boggles my mind. I'm sorry, but my sanity is worth more than having to deal with trying to figure out who is and who isn't out to just wantonly rip me off. If I want to gamble, I'll buy stocks or go to Foxwoods and play blackjack, thanks. At least I know that a casino is there to try to extract money from my pocket, but at least they play by rules or get shut down.
I'm going to get me some popcorn, kick back, and watch as ebay implodes due to a critical mass of daft.
Please, if someone should catch me placing a bid on something on ebay, shoot me.
"Have you bought any blank CD's lately in the USA? There are two types. Data CD's and Audio CD's. Audio CD's have a pre-paid royalty for music to be recorded on them."
Do you have a link for that? Have I been under a rock?
I opened one, it's so embarassing. I opened one of those bad ones. It was so weird. I swear I knew it was XXX I swear I did. It said on it...it said on it "Riga Girls Go Like This" and I said "Riga girls go like this? That's the email?" So I clicked on it, and it was like springtime on my screen *poof! poof! poof! poof!* I had like 15 things open and my computer just crashed. I was like "niiiice, nice" curiosity killed my computer. So we wrote this song about that... "
-Steve Tannen
So since Microsoft recommends nuking from orbit as the solution to malware (format and reinstall), this means that all upgrade versions aren't valid after the first wipe? Ahahahahahah.... Go ahead, Microsoft, squeeze your customers. Frustrate them. Madden them. Drive them completely 'round the bend. OS/X and Linux are waiting.
-- BMO
"It's just a little bit of snake oil; tinfoil. It takes so little charm to keep you hangin' on" - The Weepies "Riga Girls"
"So why didn't you take the CD back to the shop and tell them it was defective ? If enough people did that, then the music companies might take a hint."
You are right, and I did, but I shouldn't have to.
"If you're honest? It does. Piracy is a tax on the honest, not the content providers."
What, exactly, do you expect I should do? Eh? Bomb Piratebay.se!?
"Correlation doesn't equal causation."
True, but it does give an insight sometimes. The record companies have recently figured out that their back catalog is now suddenly a gold mine. Tell me, where are the folks getting the idea that old music is good music? It ain't on the radio.
DRM doesn't prevent piracy, as witnessed by all the movies you can download. It only screws people who play by the rules, i.e., the customers who actually fork over money.
That's all well and good to say but what about those of us who can't write fiction, draw, and have a voice that gets you shut off at the bar when you start singing?
Eh?!
It's great when I'm in front of a CAD station or Bridgeport, but don't ask me to draw the female form, and most of all don't ask me to sing. You will regret it.
"Then you shoudl be pissed at all the asshats who do illegally distribute music and videos."
No. Because it's out of my control. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. However, UMG _is_ something I can do something about, albeit in my own little way, and in this case they _have_ picked my pocket.
I tell my friends that it's bad karma to DL songs and not pay for them, but I'm not going to shove it down their throats.
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, at the apogee of Napster's popularity, CD sales were _also_ similarly good. And when Napster was sued out of existence, CD sales simultaneously fell.
"I am quite worried by DRM, because I see a significant potential for backlash against copyright holders when the public realises that we are not keeping up our end of the bargain."
"We"? Who is "We"?
If you are indeed in the industry, please read my previous messages to the OP of this thread.
UMG has ceased to treat me as a customer. Instead, they have treated me as a potential thief. I have ceased to treat them as something to respect. I could just start downloading UMG content off the 'net out of spite, but I won't, because I won't sink to the level that they expect me to.
From earlier in the month, from Usenet, a post from Me. This is what DRM does.
*begin paste*
Alt.Rhode_Island buys music. REPOST
So I'm an Elvis Costello fan. I bought "The River In Reverse" and "The Delivery Man"
The CD for "River in Reverse" wasn't copy protected, but the DVD would only play in my wicked small low-fi portable DVD player that has 1 inch speakers. It craps out after about 5 minutes in anything else. I watched the whole thing. It wasn' worth the effort. They're doing copy protection for THAT?
The first CD in "Delivery Man" is copy protected and will only play in the low-fi DVD player.
I heard mutterings of the CEO of UMG saying that ipods are repositories of stolen music. I didn't figure that he'd be stupid enough to follow through. And good luck figuring this out on your own, as these disks are not labeled as such plainly. The "Delivery Man" cd is labeled as "enhanced cd" on a tiny logo on the back of the package instead of the standard Compact Disc label. In other words, they get around not selling a Compact Disc by not calling it a Compact Disc as defined by the Phillips standard (which gets the manufacturer the Compact Disc label).
I went to the UMG site that describes the copy protection. Apparently if you have a Macintosh you're screwed. They're "working on it" because they say that the only software they have to let you play the cd works only for Windows PCs and it's spotty on that depending on the age and model of your optical drive.
Fine.
I have been hosed for being an honest guy.
I'm not a thief. I will never pay another cent to UMG. This is insane.
"There is no right for anybody to be able to purchase a movie without DRM. Nobody's rights are being violated."
So go and buy the latest Elvis Costello CD and put it in your computer's CD drive.
You've already bought it, and it _will not play_.
"But how about my rights to buy a new car with an eight-track player built in"
No, this is like buying a car and finding it won't function on Interstate 95.
How did I find out? I spent a hundred bux on CDs and found out the hard way. UMG got my money for that one purchase, but no more. If it's something I want, and it's on UMG, I'll go without, thanks. Fuck them.
For me, this isn't about freedom. This is about being ripped off.
A. Ralph Yarro? I should be so lucky. B. A Canopy/SCO employee? See A. C. Someone with a vested interest in the.xxx scheme? See A. C. Someone who lives in Utah, has absolutely no sense of humor and doesn't get the Ralph Yarro reference? DING DING DING DING!
Slashdot amazes me sometimes. *smirk*
OB On topic:
Back before Myspace (my eyes! my eyes!), the truckloads of spam, and a lot of the other evil stuff that happens on the 'net (yes, myspace is evil), there were parents I knew that were considering letting their kids use the 'net, and I had this speech explaining some of the pitfalls and how the 'net is a microcosm of society in general with good and bad people and that there is _always_ the "off switch." I said that unless you are involved, it's like giving your kid a few thousand bucks and dropping him off at Columbus Circle and saying 'go have fun.'
Like I said in my previous message, "the internet is not a babysitter" and all this stuff about.xxx and CP80 is because people want to use the 'net as one. They expect it to be like TV. Many of them supposedly have IQ's above room temperature and some even have political power. These people need either to get a clue or be thrown in jail for child neglect.
Should either.xxx or CP80 be implemented, the idiots pushing such ideas will soon learn that what they've done is absolutely useless because scemes like that assume that the "bad guys" will simply follow the rules. Human nature being what it is, I highly doubt that even 1 percent of the "rules are for other people" crowd will take any of it seriously.
"At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all.xxx domains"
If only.
The.xxx domain is just another way of creating a new "land rush" for domains. That's it. It does nothing else unless you're going to, by fiat, make all porn sites move there. And who gets to define what porn is? Who decides what doesn't "contribute to the delinqency of a minor?"
In my Dad's day it was Rock&Roll and pinball machines that were T3H 3V1L
All because some people can't remove the twist from their undies.
"eBay is a big, profit-focused company. They don't walk away from money unless there is a reason. Either they've decided it will become a problem in the future, or more likely, it's a problem for them now. That could be the cost and ill-will of complaints for selling virtual items is now making it cost more than they're making out of it. What do you think?"
Because if they were really worried about problems like that, they'd crack down on the _actual_ fraud out there instead of making a great show of doing nothing. And it's not like fraud hasn't been pointed out to them. They simply don't care about pissed off customers, because as PT Barnum said, "every crowd has a silver lining."
"Thank you, your answer (and other comments) were right on the mark in this large branch that I started. I'm just jealous that I can't download Googles Linux. Ah well."
You know what? I thought it was good that you brought that stuff up.
And yes, I too am jealous that I can't download Google's Linux.
"It just seems to defeat the open source nature of Linux when you branch in a private way that avoids community code review and source code sharing."
It's obvious that you've not grokked GPL itself.
The GPL covers distribution. No distribution = do whatever you want with the code.
You forget that Google loses the power of peer review for their code, but that's the tradeoff. Having a lot of really smart people in their employ probably makes up for it. So they've got their own branch. They have to do their own heavy lifting.
If you remove the freedom to work on Linux in-house, then you've removed one of the freedoms _allowed_ by the GPL.
"These accuracies result from the mathematics. Why toss out digits simply because we can't be absolutely certain"
Because extra digits do not equal accuracy.
To put it another way, those numbers are nothing more than visual noise. If you can measure something to only four decimal places, it makes absolutely no sense to use any numbers after the fourth decimal place, as they don't represent anything _at all_.
The real world is not like a high-school math class. You don't get any "attaboys" for meaningless extra digits, which is why your science teachers get all excitable about significant digits. Your numbers have to/mean something/.
Slashdot Mirror
the Universe and Man, the Universe always wins.
My Dad calls this "shovelling shit against the tide."
And in this case, it's almost literal.
--
BMO
"This guy has actually understood what's going on. Cynical and sad, but I believe obvious too."
For those of us who know and love Walter on other fora(ums, ae, i?!) (Y! Scox and IV Scox) he has been the most cynical of all of us, and he's been right more often than is comfortable sometimes.
If you ever get it in your head that IBM is going to FiNaLlY CrUsH Scaldera, all you have to do is read one of Walter's posts, and you're back to reality and more delay.
--
BMO
...+3 and over, I have to say one thing about ebay:
Fuck no.
I wrote here about one of my issues I had with them last year, and it just seems to get "stupider and stupider"
That people will willingly put up with rampant fraud just so they can possibly get something on the cheap just boggles my mind. I'm sorry, but my sanity is worth more than having to deal with trying to figure out who is and who isn't out to just wantonly rip me off. If I want to gamble, I'll buy stocks or go to Foxwoods and play blackjack, thanks. At least I know that a casino is there to try to extract money from my pocket, but at least they play by rules or get shut down.
I'm going to get me some popcorn, kick back, and watch as ebay implodes due to a critical mass of daft.
Please, if someone should catch me placing a bid on something on ebay, shoot me.
--
BMO
Mom?!
--
BMO
"Have you bought any blank CD's lately in the USA? There are two types. Data CD's and Audio CD's. Audio CD's have a pre-paid royalty for music to be recorded on them."
Do you have a link for that? Have I been under a rock?
TIA.
--
BMO
--
BMO
"It's just a little bit of snake oil; tinfoil. It takes so little charm to keep you hangin' on" - The Weepies "Riga Girls"
"So why didn't you take the CD back to the shop and tell them it was defective ? If enough people did that, then the music companies might take a hint."
You are right, and I did, but I shouldn't have to.
--
BMO
"If you're honest? It does. Piracy is a tax on the honest, not the content providers."
What, exactly, do you expect I should do? Eh? Bomb Piratebay.se!?
"Correlation doesn't equal causation."
True, but it does give an insight sometimes. The record companies have recently figured out that their back catalog is now suddenly a gold mine. Tell me, where are the folks getting the idea that old music is good music? It ain't on the radio.
--
BMO
>>DRM will fail on its own, because it is anti-consumer
>>>And piracy is pro-business?
False dichotomy alert! Diving stations! Woop! woop!
DRM doesn't prevent piracy, as witnessed by all the movies you can download. It only screws people who play by the rules, i.e., the customers who actually fork over money.
--
BMO
"Stop complaining and work and create."
That's all well and good to say but what about those of us who can't write fiction, draw, and have a voice that gets you shut off at the bar when you start singing?
Eh?!
It's great when I'm in front of a CAD station or Bridgeport, but don't ask me to draw the female form, and most of all don't ask me to sing. You will regret it.
--
BMO
"Then you shoudl be pissed at all the asshats who do illegally distribute music and videos."
No. Because it's out of my control. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. However, UMG _is_ something I can do something about, albeit in my own little way, and in this case they _have_ picked my pocket.
I tell my friends that it's bad karma to DL songs and not pay for them, but I'm not going to shove it down their throats.
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, at the apogee of Napster's popularity, CD sales were _also_ similarly good. And when Napster was sued out of existence, CD sales simultaneously fell.
You figure it out.
--
BMO
"I am quite worried by DRM, because I see a significant potential for backlash against copyright holders when the public realises that we are not keeping up our end of the bargain."
"We"? Who is "We"?
If you are indeed in the industry, please read my previous messages to the OP of this thread.
UMG has ceased to treat me as a customer. Instead, they have treated me as a potential thief. I have ceased to treat them as something to respect. I could just start downloading UMG content off the 'net out of spite, but I won't, because I won't sink to the level that they expect me to.
--
BMO
From earlier in the month, from Usenet, a post from Me. This is what DRM does.
*begin paste*
Alt.Rhode_Island buys music. REPOST
So I'm an Elvis Costello fan. I bought "The River In Reverse" and "The Delivery Man"
The CD for "River in Reverse" wasn't copy protected, but the DVD would only play in my wicked small low-fi portable DVD player that has 1 inch speakers. It craps out after about 5 minutes in anything else. I watched the whole thing. It wasn' worth the effort. They're doing copy protection for THAT?
The first CD in "Delivery Man" is copy protected and will only play in the low-fi DVD player.
I heard mutterings of the CEO of UMG saying that ipods are repositories of stolen music. I didn't figure that he'd be stupid enough to follow through. And good luck figuring this out on your own, as these disks are not labeled as such plainly. The "Delivery Man" cd is labeled as "enhanced cd" on a tiny logo on the back of the package instead of the standard Compact Disc label. In other words, they get around not selling a Compact Disc by not calling it a Compact Disc as defined by the Phillips standard (which gets the manufacturer the Compact Disc label).
I went to the UMG site that describes the copy protection. Apparently if you have a Macintosh you're screwed. They're "working on it" because they say that the only software they have to let you play the cd works only for Windows PCs and it's spotty on that depending on the age and model of your optical drive.
Fine.
I have been hosed for being an honest guy.
I'm not a thief. I will never pay another cent to UMG. This is insane.
You have been warned.
--
BMO
"There is no right for anybody to be able to purchase a movie without DRM. Nobody's rights are being violated."
So go and buy the latest Elvis Costello CD and put it in your computer's CD drive.
You've already bought it, and it _will not play_.
"But how about my rights to buy a new car with an eight-track player built in"
No, this is like buying a car and finding it won't function on Interstate 95.
How did I find out? I spent a hundred bux on CDs and found out the hard way. UMG got my money for that one purchase, but no more. If it's something I want, and it's on UMG, I'll go without, thanks. Fuck them.
For me, this isn't about freedom. This is about being ripped off.
--
BMO
Ooooh! I got modded flamebait!
.xxx scheme? See A.
.xxx and CP80 is because people want to use the 'net as one. They expect it to be like TV. Many of them supposedly have IQ's above room temperature and some even have political power. These people need either to get a clue or be thrown in jail for child neglect.
.xxx or CP80 be implemented, the idiots pushing such ideas will soon learn that what they've done is absolutely useless because scemes like that assume that the "bad guys" will simply follow the rules. Human nature being what it is, I highly doubt that even 1 percent of the "rules are for other people" crowd will take any of it seriously.
Just who have I offended?
A. Ralph Yarro? I should be so lucky.
B. A Canopy/SCO employee? See A.
C. Someone with a vested interest in the
C. Someone who lives in Utah, has absolutely no sense of humor and doesn't get the Ralph Yarro reference? DING DING DING DING!
Slashdot amazes me sometimes. *smirk*
OB On topic:
Back before Myspace (my eyes! my eyes!), the truckloads of spam, and a lot of the other evil stuff that happens on the 'net (yes, myspace is evil), there were parents I knew that were considering letting their kids use the 'net, and I had this speech explaining some of the pitfalls and how the 'net is a microcosm of society in general with good and bad people and that there is _always_ the "off switch." I said that unless you are involved, it's like giving your kid a few thousand bucks and dropping him off at Columbus Circle and saying 'go have fun.'
Like I said in my previous message, "the internet is not a babysitter" and all this stuff about
Should either
--
BMO
Karma? FAAAAAAAABULOUS!
"At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all .xxx domains"
.xxx domain is just another way of creating a new "land rush" for domains. That's it. It does nothing else unless you're going to, by fiat, make all porn sites move there. And who gets to define what porn is? Who decides what doesn't "contribute to the delinqency of a minor?"
If only.
The
In my Dad's day it was Rock&Roll and pinball machines that were T3H 3V1L
All because some people can't remove the twist from their undies.
--
BMO
It's a scam, just like Ralph Yarro's CP80. (from the Canopy/SCO scam to yet another. What, exactly, is in the water in Utah?)
Jeez. Let's repeat this again:
"THE INTERNET IS NOT A BABYSITTER"
--
BMO
"eBay is a big, profit-focused company. They don't walk away from money unless there is a reason. Either they've decided it will become a problem in the future, or more likely, it's a problem for them now. That could be the cost and ill-will of complaints for selling virtual items is now making it cost more than they're making out of it. What do you think?"
Because if they were really worried about problems like that, they'd crack down on the _actual_ fraud out there instead of making a great show of doing nothing. And it's not like fraud hasn't been pointed out to them. They simply don't care about pissed off customers, because as PT Barnum said, "every crowd has a silver lining."
--
BMO
"Uhhh, soooo, every 50 million years or so, the Himalayas appear or disappear?"
h tml
Not far off. Everest is about 60 million years old.
http://www.mnteverest.net/history.html
At one time, the Appalachians looked like the Himalayas, were eroded flat, and then were uplifted yet again.
http://wrgis.wr.usgs.gov/parks/province/appalach.
Climate change? Change is the norm.
--
BMO
This is a late reply, but here goes.
"Thank you, your answer (and other comments) were right on the mark in this large branch that I started. I'm just jealous that I can't download Googles Linux. Ah well."
You know what? I thought it was good that you brought that stuff up.
And yes, I too am jealous that I can't download Google's Linux.
--
BMO
"Does that change things?"
No.
What part of "The Google Search Appliance is based on the same software that is used in Google's datacenters." do you not understand?
IOW, it's a legally cleaned up version of what they use internally. It's not the same.
Thank you for playing.
--
BMO
Google is building Colossus and Microsoft is building Guardian.
We're hosed. Don't buy any real-estate on Crete.
--
BMO
"You ignore the great unwashed hackish masses at your own grave peril, O Googole."
I don't know about you, but maybe the "unwashed" part may have something to do with it.
--
BMO
"It just seems to defeat the open source nature of Linux when you branch in a private way that avoids community code review and source code sharing."
It's obvious that you've not grokked GPL itself.
The GPL covers distribution. No distribution = do whatever you want with the code.
You forget that Google loses the power of peer review for their code, but that's the tradeoff. Having a lot of really smart people in their employ probably makes up for it. So they've got their own branch. They have to do their own heavy lifting.
If you remove the freedom to work on Linux in-house, then you've removed one of the freedoms _allowed_ by the GPL.
--
BMO
"These accuracies result from the mathematics. Why toss out digits simply because we can't be absolutely certain"
/mean something/.
Because extra digits do not equal accuracy.
To put it another way, those numbers are nothing more than visual noise. If you can measure something to only four decimal places, it makes absolutely no sense to use any numbers after the fourth decimal place, as they don't represent anything _at all_.
The real world is not like a high-school math class. You don't get any "attaboys" for meaningless extra digits, which is why your science teachers get all excitable about significant digits. Your numbers have to
--
BMO