This is how these things work sometimes - in a case such as this, if an agreement/settlement is reached between the two parties, the judge will usually go along with it.
Both sides made a good decision here. MS knew they weren't going to get that sheer amount of money from this kid, and he probably didn't want to have every paycheck for the rest of his life have a percentage of 'Microsoft Tax' trimmed off to go towards paying it off, so they sat down and reached an agreement - the side that was wronged get what they feel is an appropriate punishment and the side being punished agreed to take it. This is how justice should be done, people - don't slam MS solely because TFA was poorly-written and suggested they were acting like some sort of judge, jury and executioner - this is perfectly normal practice.
For some of you IE7 CSS 2.0 support may be a big thing and I am not trying to belittle it, but for me CSS 2.0 support lives in the shadow of being able to actually use IE7.
You've hit the nail right on the head there - IE's weakest link is it's lack of ease-of-use features (now things like tabbed browsing have been popularised by Firefox) and, a slightly distant but increasingly slow second, it's security issues. These are what are important to the average person. Just like every other slashdotter on here, I'm going to use my mother as an example. She doesn't give a flying monkey shit if IE7 supports CSS2 or not. She's a part of the 80%-odd of the computing world who care only about how much effort it takes to switch between browser windows (which tabbed browsing solves) and whether or not that SEO-spammed site she just clicked on from Google is going to 0wn her computer and set her homepage to hardcore-zoo.com (which FireFox's security model solves). She doesn't care about the intricacies of 'CSS2 support', and all the people that do have already switched browsers, or weren't running IE in the first place.
Any market-share IE might lose because of it's failure to support CSS2 is negligible. The market-share it will continue to lose while it's default settings allow any passing page to drive-by install PowerScan, CoolWebSearch and christ knows what else is far more significant.
Nothing the average user doesn't know about, let alone care about, can be IE's 'weakest link'.
but maybe their EULA gives them permission to do this?
EULAs (and all other forms of contractual agreement) do not have the power to override the law.
That is, at least in the US or the UK, I cannot do anything to you that is not permitted by law, even if you've signed a contract explicitly saying I can - same applies to Microsoft (at least until they buy more politicans).
And my (Australian) government is happy to hand people over to the Americans who have broken no laws in Australia
What this guy did was breaking the law in Australia - you guys have copyright laws too - The issue here is not whether or not he broke the law, but why he's been extradited for such a relatively minor crime.
I can accept this guy is guilty and that warezers on this sort of scale are the kind of people the law should be going after, but I can't for the life of me see why America can't let the guy be tried under Australian law for crimes he committed while in Australia. That's the issue under scrutiny here, not whether or not he broke the law.
...as if millions of Slashdotters cried out "dupe", and were suddenly silenced.
Jeez, editors, we'll let you off having to search through the (broken) search feature before you post your latest, greatest headline, but d'ya think you could at least take a peek at the front page? The original story's less than 7 hours old...
Because it's the government boogiemen doing something online. Every time the spooks do something involving the internet, it seems to go into 'Your Rights Online' because that's the closest-fitting category (they're supposed to protect your rights, and they're doing something online).
That said, it's not really that fitting a description - the link between stories such as this and the idea of 'Your Rights Online' is tenuous at best, unless the editor who posted it was looking for the 'OMG NET WIRETAPPINGZ!' response, but there's been so many stories mysteriously filed under 'Your Rights Online' recently, many of them to do with governments or government agencies - I think/. is crying out for a spooks.slashdot.org category...
This isn't a Firefox issue, it's an application-specific issue - the applications are hard-coded to launch IE for whatever it is they're using the web for. If the apps really *needed* IE they'd stick an IE window within the app itself. This is one of the biggest problems for FF acceptance, in my opinion - as well as MSN Messenger, does anyone else know of some widely used or essential apps that refuse to accept anything but IE as the default browser?
The anti-spyware market looks to be the next area they're looking to conquer, at the same time as fighting on the Home Office and Media Player fronts. There is a reason most new PCs (over here in the UK anyway) come with MS Office (or at least Word and Excel) pre-installed - because MS want to continue to dominate that market and the best way to do that is to include it with the OS. Actually, as Word et al. use their proprietary standards to lock people in, a closer analogy is probably with Windows Media Player - they know that there are people who could easily recommend a better player with probably more features, that some kind company like Apple or Nullsoft are giving away for free, they keep adding all these bells and whistles like easy CD burning, ripping (only to WMA of course), etc and then they bundle it with the OS to give people no reason to search out their alternatives.
I think it's pretty much going to be the same deal with MS AntiSpyware - they'll never charge for it when there are enough average people out there who know of the alternatives (hell, even my mother knows to run SpyBot once a week and she still thinks that little blue 'e' is 'the internet') and know they're free. Spyware is such a huge problem that people will automatically seek a quick solution once IE wont stop popping up 'Super-Breasted Megababes Only $14.99!!!!' at them and a paid-for solution will not draw people in - how many people, for instance, use Ad-Aware's paid-for version? I'm betting hardly any. It's a Download-Run-Relief business, and the only way MS is going to conquer this market is to cut out the first step - Expect MS AntiSpyware to start coming preinstalled on shop-bought PCs in the next few months, but don't expect them to ever demand payment.
Adult Fan of Lego? we've really got an acronym for this now? Seriously, what's wrong with just 'Lego fan'? Can we stop the frivolous acronyms, they're absolutely unneccessary and getting out of control.
I'm pretty sure the loss of a few blogs is less damaging to the average Iranian than the loss of their life, which is something that's bound to happen if the US try another one of their 'liberation' stunts. Look at Iraq, where people are still dying nearly everyday because of Islamic militants setting off car-bombs to kill American troops and Iraqi 'collaborators'. Do you really want that to happen in Iran for the sake of a few blogging sites? At least with Iraq, Saddam had a proven track record of genocide against his own people, so perhaps the Americans had a good reason to invade, but the fact is there is still bloodshed of innocent people going on nearly everyday. With Saddam you can turn round and say "but he killed thousands of Kurds, that's far worse than what's going on now". What are you going to say about Iran when the death toll continues to climb long after Bush declares 'victory'? Are you going to complain about how those evil dastardly Iranians stopped their people reading John and Jenny Doe's blog post about how their toddler's potty-training?
As for executing a retarded rape victims, that's not much worse than the US executing people found incompetent to stand trial, people suffering from severe mental illness and people professionally adjudged to have the mental age of an 11-year-old child. I could probably find more, but I remember that press release distinctly and had it bookmarked. Admittedly those people had committed crimes rather than been the victim, but it's really not that big a step. Lastly, don't get me started on the 'illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure' comment - you've got the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world, who are you (as a country) to call any other nation's nuclear infrastructure illegal? Does DRM come on tactical warheads now? Seriously, this is no reason to be blowing up anyone - it's just not worth it... and doesn't China have the 'Great Firewall of China' and executions for frivolous crimes? Oh, I forgot, they're too big for good ol' George Dubya to go after.
I'd say the fact that Firefox is immune to 99% of adware and spyware is what makes it a better browser, amongst other things. Tabbed browsing and plug-ins might make it a better browser for us geeks, but for Joe Average, a browser that you can use safe in the knowledge that your box isn't going to be full to bursting with ad bars and 'Power Scan' icons afterwards is a better one, surely?
Immunity to spyware is part of what makes Firefox a better browser, not something else entirely.
The problem with MSN Plus! is that when you run it's 'Update' feature, it adds the CoolWebSearch (I think that's what they're still bundling in with it) without the 'Agree or Disagree' menu. Just the regular installer has the option, but the update feature just sprays CWS all over your machine, at least in older versions it did - perhaps Patchou has fixed it by now.
So with behaviour like that I'm glad it's labelled adware, and probably illegal too - seeing as I'd specifically refused to have CWS on my machine beforehand during installation.
It's not that we see anything that doesn't work like MS Office as a 'glitch', it's the time and effort involved in relearning how to use our office suite for little or no benefit. I'm a Windows and Linux user, and a zealot towards neither, and I run Office XP on my Debian box under CrossOver rather than use OpenOffice. Now before the/. Lynch Mob comes after me baying for blood, hear me out;
If I have to learn a whole new interface, even just a little different to the one I'm used to, I'm not going to bother to change unless some new killer feature or huge usability boost tempts me over. It's not that I don't like OpenOffice for not being like MS Office in every way, it's just it lacks any sort of 'killer feature' that would justify me switching away from Redmond's offering. If OpenOffice started leading the way in innovation and useful features rather than desperately trying to re-implement every aspect of MS Office's stagnant featureset, I'd switch instantly, but as it is OpenOffice is just trying to be a carbon-copy of MS Office, and that isn't enough incentive to make me want to switch. I'm waiting for AbiWord to put out a whole suite, as if anyone's going to make an office suite better than MS, it's going to be them.
Everyone's favourite WinAmp-related animal is a Llama. There's no such animal as a Lamma or a Llamma. The former is the name of a small island off the west coast of Hong Kong, however, but it's lack of an ass, whipped or otherwise, means the analogy still doesn't quite fit.
My first memory of playing with a computer would be experimenting with the Commodore 64 my parents bought when I was little - nothing beat a quick round of Sea Wolf on the paddles or a few frustrating rounds of that ice-block-pushing penguin game who's name evades me at the moment. I still have it in my loft somewhere.
My first memory of real computing was, after being told by the teacher that the computer (the only one that wasn't an ancient BBC or Acorn) kept a record of everything that was typed on the keyboard after a friend and I had been bashing in some pretty nasty stuff (for a six-year-old) into the word processor about our draconian headmaster. After a couple of hours work, I'd established that it did no such thing and went off smugly to play with the Lego.
Pretty damn good for a six-year-old, eh? (Apart from all you child geniuses out there who were hacking the kernel of your own personal UNIX box rather than watching Sesame Street, obviously).
Because on Slashdot you can usually tell with little or no prior knowledge of the topic if the moderation was good or not; If it made you laugh, it's clearly +1, Funny, for example. The same goes for most of the other moderations with the exception of Informative, which implies that whatever is stated in the post is fact - that requires a little more knowledge of the subject at hand to know if what the poster has put is true or just something they dreamt up off the top of their heads. It's a little more difficult, no?
Now imagine a site where every post was adjudged on whether it was +n, Informative or not - no other categories are availible. Now imagine that site relies on it's articles being genuinely informative for it to be taken seriously - after all, Wikipedia is trying to be an encyclopaedia, which obviously rely on the reliability of their content for their (fragile) credibility. The problem with 'people may learn a lot from just metamoderating' is that with a project like wikipedia, you need to know about the subject before you can decide whether it's entry is good or not... and that's where the problem of a lack of experts comes into play. You can't expect Joe User to know if an article on Quantum Mechanics is correct or not when it gets served up at him through the random metamoderation process - Just my $0.02.
If I haven't put my point across too well, forgive me, I've been up for 2 days and we're out of caffiene.
all but three of the independent, locally owned, record stores within sixty-five miles of here have closed. that leaves three stores to serve a metro population of 1.7 million.
We had 3 local hardware stores in our area close in the past year. Who's pirating screwdrivers?
Independant businesses going up against big chains always run the risk of failure, especially when the chains they're up against step up their advertising as they have in the wake of the increase in piracy awareness (at least I think that's the reason - I've certainly seen a two- or three-fold increase in the amount of ads for CDs or DVDs from the major chains since the piracy crackdown, but that could be coincidence). I think that's likely to be just as big a cause, if not bigger.
Yes, it is. Except to file complaint you have to admit you were trying to download a "pirated audio file".
Not neccessarily. A few months ago, I went on a P2P jaunt to download all the songs from Tool's last album, Lateralus. I'll tell you that, and I'll gladly tell any RIAA SWAT team that wants to come crashing through my window that, too - why? Because I own the damn CD, I've just lost it - It's probably under the sofa or somewhere else unaccessible. I've got the case, I've got the inlay, I've got the floppy plastic outer cover the case came in, I've even got the little clear plastic flipbook of the skinless dude artwork. I could probably even find the receipt if that wasn't enough to convince them I own the damn thing.
As far as I'm aware, I'm perfectly entitled to download as many copies of songs I already own as I want, and if the RIAA infected me with spyware for getting hold of a song I have the legal right to get hold of, I'll shove a brick up their collective asshole, right before I file the most serious complaint possible. Not every download of a copyrighted song is an illegal one, and this scattergun approach is, to mix my weaponry-related metaphors, a legal minefield for the organizations involved.
I guess you never tried to shine sunlight into someones eyes with a mirror as a kid. It's not as hard as you think, even with a moving target.
I think it'd be a little harder than you think if that moving target was doing hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet up in the air - remember, a jet aircraft in flight likely to be a tad more difficult to hit than the fat kid who sat at the back of Maths class, no matter what you're packing. I understand this could be a serious issue, but I don't think it's enough for us to start up the Islamic Terrorist Groupthink Machine just yet.
Why is it that most spam is aimed at men when it is obvious that women use the net and e-mail as well?
It's because, deep down, men tend to be far more insecure about their bodies than women, mainly because men can't talk about their bodies amongst themselves the way women can. We just tend to sit and worry about what we perceive as imperfections and, us being men, these worries almost invariably come down to the penis.
Look at the spam going round - as the parent seems to point out, 'en1@rg3 y0ur p3n15!!!' spams have been around forever, yet I've only seen one group of 'en1@rg3 y0ur br3a575!!1' spam, a line which they seemingly abandoned because no-one bought it, mostly because women are more rational about their appearance and can accept that not everything comes down to the size of their breasts, whereas men are very penis-orientated because a bigger cock makes them 'more of a man', and we think it's the only thing women are interested in (though from what I've heard from female friends the things they look at first are the eyes and the ass).
It's not that they think women don't use the 'net or email, it's because they know women are more sensible when it comes to the kind of things they're trying to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how these things work sometimes - in a case such as this, if an agreement/settlement is reached between the two parties, the judge will usually go along with it.
Both sides made a good decision here. MS knew they weren't going to get that sheer amount of money from this kid, and he probably didn't want to have every paycheck for the rest of his life have a percentage of 'Microsoft Tax' trimmed off to go towards paying it off, so they sat down and reached an agreement - the side that was wronged get what they feel is an appropriate punishment and the side being punished agreed to take it. This is how justice should be done, people - don't slam MS solely because TFA was poorly-written and suggested they were acting like some sort of judge, jury and executioner - this is perfectly normal practice.
Major Hangups Over the iPod Phone
Worst.. pun... ever.
(well someone had to say it... and at 200+ posts it was looking dangerously like they wouldn't)
For some of you IE7 CSS 2.0 support may be a big thing and I am not trying to belittle it, but for me CSS 2.0 support lives in the shadow of being able to actually use IE7.
You've hit the nail right on the head there - IE's weakest link is it's lack of ease-of-use features (now things like tabbed browsing have been popularised by Firefox) and, a slightly distant but increasingly slow second, it's security issues. These are what are important to the average person. Just like every other slashdotter on here, I'm going to use my mother as an example. She doesn't give a flying monkey shit if IE7 supports CSS2 or not. She's a part of the 80%-odd of the computing world who care only about how much effort it takes to switch between browser windows (which tabbed browsing solves) and whether or not that SEO-spammed site she just clicked on from Google is going to 0wn her computer and set her homepage to hardcore-zoo.com (which FireFox's security model solves). She doesn't care about the intricacies of 'CSS2 support', and all the people that do have already switched browsers, or weren't running IE in the first place.
Any market-share IE might lose because of it's failure to support CSS2 is negligible. The market-share it will continue to lose while it's default settings allow any passing page to drive-by install PowerScan, CoolWebSearch and christ knows what else is far more significant.
Nothing the average user doesn't know about, let alone care about, can be IE's 'weakest link'.
but maybe their EULA gives them permission to do this?
EULAs (and all other forms of contractual agreement) do not have the power to override the law.
That is, at least in the US or the UK, I cannot do anything to you that is not permitted by law, even if you've signed a contract explicitly saying I can - same applies to Microsoft (at least until they buy more politicans).
And my (Australian) government is happy to hand people over to the Americans who have broken no laws in Australia
What this guy did was breaking the law in Australia - you guys have copyright laws too - The issue here is not whether or not he broke the law, but why he's been extradited for such a relatively minor crime.
I can accept this guy is guilty and that warezers on this sort of scale are the kind of people the law should be going after, but I can't for the life of me see why America can't let the guy be tried under Australian law for crimes he committed while in Australia. That's the issue under scrutiny here, not whether or not he broke the law.
...as if millions of Slashdotters cried out "dupe", and were suddenly silenced.
Jeez, editors, we'll let you off having to search through the (broken) search feature before you post your latest, greatest headline, but d'ya think you could at least take a peek at the front page? The original story's less than 7 hours old...
Because it's the government boogiemen doing something online. Every time the spooks do something involving the internet, it seems to go into 'Your Rights Online' because that's the closest-fitting category (they're supposed to protect your rights, and they're doing something online).
/. is crying out for a spooks.slashdot.org category...
That said, it's not really that fitting a description - the link between stories such as this and the idea of 'Your Rights Online' is tenuous at best, unless the editor who posted it was looking for the 'OMG NET WIRETAPPINGZ!' response, but there's been so many stories mysteriously filed under 'Your Rights Online' recently, many of them to do with governments or government agencies - I think
This isn't a Firefox issue, it's an application-specific issue - the applications are hard-coded to launch IE for whatever it is they're using the web for. If the apps really *needed* IE they'd stick an IE window within the app itself. This is one of the biggest problems for FF acceptance, in my opinion - as well as MSN Messenger, does anyone else know of some widely used or essential apps that refuse to accept anything but IE as the default browser?
They'll never charge for it, it's not MS's style.
The anti-spyware market looks to be the next area they're looking to conquer, at the same time as fighting on the Home Office and Media Player fronts. There is a reason most new PCs (over here in the UK anyway) come with MS Office (or at least Word and Excel) pre-installed - because MS want to continue to dominate that market and the best way to do that is to include it with the OS. Actually, as Word et al. use their proprietary standards to lock people in, a closer analogy is probably with Windows Media Player - they know that there are people who could easily recommend a better player with probably more features, that some kind company like Apple or Nullsoft are giving away for free, they keep adding all these bells and whistles like easy CD burning, ripping (only to WMA of course), etc and then they bundle it with the OS to give people no reason to search out their alternatives.
I think it's pretty much going to be the same deal with MS AntiSpyware - they'll never charge for it when there are enough average people out there who know of the alternatives (hell, even my mother knows to run SpyBot once a week and she still thinks that little blue 'e' is 'the internet') and know they're free. Spyware is such a huge problem that people will automatically seek a quick solution once IE wont stop popping up 'Super-Breasted Megababes Only $14.99!!!!' at them and a paid-for solution will not draw people in - how many people, for instance, use Ad-Aware's paid-for version? I'm betting hardly any. It's a Download-Run-Relief business, and the only way MS is going to conquer this market is to cut out the first step - Expect MS AntiSpyware to start coming preinstalled on shop-bought PCs in the next few months, but don't expect them to ever demand payment.
Adult Fan of Lego? we've really got an acronym for this now? Seriously, what's wrong with just 'Lego fan'? Can we stop the frivolous acronyms, they're absolutely unneccessary and getting out of control.
I'm pretty sure the loss of a few blogs is less damaging to the average Iranian than the loss of their life, which is something that's bound to happen if the US try another one of their 'liberation' stunts. Look at Iraq, where people are still dying nearly everyday because of Islamic militants setting off car-bombs to kill American troops and Iraqi 'collaborators'. Do you really want that to happen in Iran for the sake of a few blogging sites? At least with Iraq, Saddam had a proven track record of genocide against his own people, so perhaps the Americans had a good reason to invade, but the fact is there is still bloodshed of innocent people going on nearly everyday. With Saddam you can turn round and say "but he killed thousands of Kurds, that's far worse than what's going on now". What are you going to say about Iran when the death toll continues to climb long after Bush declares 'victory'? Are you going to complain about how those evil dastardly Iranians stopped their people reading John and Jenny Doe's blog post about how their toddler's potty-training?
As for executing a retarded rape victims, that's not much worse than the US executing people found incompetent to stand trial, people suffering from severe mental illness and people professionally adjudged to have the mental age of an 11-year-old child. I could probably find more, but I remember that press release distinctly and had it bookmarked. Admittedly those people had committed crimes rather than been the victim, but it's really not that big a step. Lastly, don't get me started on the 'illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure' comment - you've got the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world, who are you (as a country) to call any other nation's nuclear infrastructure illegal? Does DRM come on tactical warheads now? Seriously, this is no reason to be blowing up anyone - it's just not worth it... and doesn't China have the 'Great Firewall of China' and executions for frivolous crimes? Oh, I forgot, they're too big for good ol' George Dubya to go after.
George W. Bush: Always picking on the little guy.
I'd say the fact that Firefox is immune to 99% of adware and spyware is what makes it a better browser, amongst other things. Tabbed browsing and plug-ins might make it a better browser for us geeks, but for Joe Average, a browser that you can use safe in the knowledge that your box isn't going to be full to bursting with ad bars and 'Power Scan' icons afterwards is a better one, surely?
Immunity to spyware is part of what makes Firefox a better browser, not something else entirely.
The problem with MSN Plus! is that when you run it's 'Update' feature, it adds the CoolWebSearch (I think that's what they're still bundling in with it) without the 'Agree or Disagree' menu. Just the regular installer has the option, but the update feature just sprays CWS all over your machine, at least in older versions it did - perhaps Patchou has fixed it by now.
So with behaviour like that I'm glad it's labelled adware, and probably illegal too - seeing as I'd specifically refused to have CWS on my machine beforehand during installation.
It's not that we see anything that doesn't work like MS Office as a 'glitch', it's the time and effort involved in relearning how to use our office suite for little or no benefit. I'm a Windows and Linux user, and a zealot towards neither, and I run Office XP on my Debian box under CrossOver rather than use OpenOffice. Now before the /. Lynch Mob comes after me baying for blood, hear me out;
If I have to learn a whole new interface, even just a little different to the one I'm used to, I'm not going to bother to change unless some new killer feature or huge usability boost tempts me over. It's not that I don't like OpenOffice for not being like MS Office in every way, it's just it lacks any sort of 'killer feature' that would justify me switching away from Redmond's offering. If OpenOffice started leading the way in innovation and useful features rather than desperately trying to re-implement every aspect of MS Office's stagnant featureset, I'd switch instantly, but as it is OpenOffice is just trying to be a carbon-copy of MS Office, and that isn't enough incentive to make me want to switch. I'm waiting for AbiWord to put out a whole suite, as if anyone's going to make an office suite better than MS, it's going to be them.
Everyone's favourite WinAmp-related animal is a Llama. There's no such animal as a Lamma or a Llamma. The former is the name of a small island off the west coast of Hong Kong, however, but it's lack of an ass, whipped or otherwise, means the analogy still doesn't quite fit.
My first memory of playing with a computer would be experimenting with the Commodore 64 my parents bought when I was little - nothing beat a quick round of Sea Wolf on the paddles or a few frustrating rounds of that ice-block-pushing penguin game who's name evades me at the moment. I still have it in my loft somewhere.
My first memory of real computing was, after being told by the teacher that the computer (the only one that wasn't an ancient BBC or Acorn) kept a record of everything that was typed on the keyboard after a friend and I had been bashing in some pretty nasty stuff (for a six-year-old) into the word processor about our draconian headmaster. After a couple of hours work, I'd established that it did no such thing and went off smugly to play with the Lego.
Pretty damn good for a six-year-old, eh? (Apart from all you child geniuses out there who were hacking the kernel of your own personal UNIX box rather than watching Sesame Street, obviously).
Where's the -1, Inevitable modifier when you need it?
Because on Slashdot you can usually tell with little or no prior knowledge of the topic if the moderation was good or not; If it made you laugh, it's clearly +1, Funny, for example. The same goes for most of the other moderations with the exception of Informative, which implies that whatever is stated in the post is fact - that requires a little more knowledge of the subject at hand to know if what the poster has put is true or just something they dreamt up off the top of their heads. It's a little more difficult, no?
Now imagine a site where every post was adjudged on whether it was +n, Informative or not - no other categories are availible. Now imagine that site relies on it's articles being genuinely informative for it to be taken seriously - after all, Wikipedia is trying to be an encyclopaedia, which obviously rely on the reliability of their content for their (fragile) credibility. The problem with 'people may learn a lot from just metamoderating' is that with a project like wikipedia, you need to know about the subject before you can decide whether it's entry is good or not... and that's where the problem of a lack of experts comes into play. You can't expect Joe User to know if an article on Quantum Mechanics is correct or not when it gets served up at him through the random metamoderation process - Just my $0.02.
If I haven't put my point across too well, forgive me, I've been up for 2 days and we're out of caffiene.
Windows is like a high maintenance wife. Everything is nice to look at, but it cleans out your wallet and there is a lot of down time.
I don't know about you, dude, but I'd be a happy man if my girlfriend went down as much as my Windows install does.
I'd suggest you read a primer or have a friend show you the basics.
Not everybody has that friend. That's who this book is aimed at.
from the San Francisco Chronicle. No soul-selling required;h ronicle/archive/2003/02/10/BA200304.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
all but three of the independent, locally owned, record stores within sixty-five miles of here have closed. that leaves three stores to serve a metro population of 1.7 million.
We had 3 local hardware stores in our area close in the past year. Who's pirating screwdrivers?
Independant businesses going up against big chains always run the risk of failure, especially when the chains they're up against step up their advertising as they have in the wake of the increase in piracy awareness (at least I think that's the reason - I've certainly seen a two- or three-fold increase in the amount of ads for CDs or DVDs from the major chains since the piracy crackdown, but that could be coincidence). I think that's likely to be just as big a cause, if not bigger.
Yes, it is. Except to file complaint you have to admit you were trying to download a "pirated audio file".
Not neccessarily. A few months ago, I went on a P2P jaunt to download all the songs from Tool's last album, Lateralus. I'll tell you that, and I'll gladly tell any RIAA SWAT team that wants to come crashing through my window that, too - why? Because I own the damn CD, I've just lost it - It's probably under the sofa or somewhere else unaccessible. I've got the case, I've got the inlay, I've got the floppy plastic outer cover the case came in, I've even got the little clear plastic flipbook of the skinless dude artwork. I could probably even find the receipt if that wasn't enough to convince them I own the damn thing.
As far as I'm aware, I'm perfectly entitled to download as many copies of songs I already own as I want, and if the RIAA infected me with spyware for getting hold of a song I have the legal right to get hold of, I'll shove a brick up their collective asshole, right before I file the most serious complaint possible. Not every download of a copyrighted song is an illegal one, and this scattergun approach is, to mix my weaponry-related metaphors, a legal minefield for the organizations involved.
I guess you never tried to shine sunlight into someones eyes with a mirror as a kid. It's not as hard as you think, even with a moving target.
I think it'd be a little harder than you think if that moving target was doing hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet up in the air - remember, a jet aircraft in flight likely to be a tad more difficult to hit than the fat kid who sat at the back of Maths class, no matter what you're packing. I understand this could be a serious issue, but I don't think it's enough for us to start up the Islamic Terrorist Groupthink Machine just yet.
Why is it that most spam is aimed at men when it is obvious that women use the net and e-mail as well?
It's because, deep down, men tend to be far more insecure about their bodies than women, mainly because men can't talk about their bodies amongst themselves the way women can. We just tend to sit and worry about what we perceive as imperfections and, us being men, these worries almost invariably come down to the penis.
Look at the spam going round - as the parent seems to point out, 'en1@rg3 y0ur p3n15!!!' spams have been around forever, yet I've only seen one group of 'en1@rg3 y0ur br3a575!!1' spam, a line which they seemingly abandoned because no-one bought it, mostly because women are more rational about their appearance and can accept that not everything comes down to the size of their breasts, whereas men are very penis-orientated because a bigger cock makes them 'more of a man', and we think it's the only thing women are interested in (though from what I've heard from female friends the things they look at first are the eyes and the ass).
It's not that they think women don't use the 'net or email, it's because they know women are more sensible when it comes to the kind of things they're trying to sell.