"But sadly this will only make it easier for people unwilling to pay for windows to continue to use it. It would be better if they had to find a cheeper (legal) solution."
Can someone please hand me a penguin to bash this man over the head with?
you can get a DVD burner within the $40 price point. If you know an SVID port from your ass and have a half-decent vid card, you can then do the same thing with your VHS tapes.
Another advantage of DVD is that media prices are falling into the quarter apiece range if you go with cheap brands and shop around. VHS tapes are still 2 bucks apiece. It's a big difference if you are converting or copying a collection of 200-500 films. As a matter of fact, backing up a collection of that size would justify itself in the media cost alone, even considering the purchase of a low-end burner. (200*2 = 400; 200*0.25 = 50 + 100 = 150)
Power Users, Ready for a Refill By MICHEL MARRIOTT
MIHOKO HAKATA, a freelance illustrator and recent art-school graduate, ducked into a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan last week, desperate for a jolt of energy.
She had work to do. But as she removed her materials from her backpack, it became clear that the energy she was seeking could not be found in a cup. She had a more pressing need: to find a power outlet for her laptop computer, whose battery had died.
"I realized they have this," said Ms. Hakata, a 29-year-old Tokyo native, as her hand slipped beneath a table to deftly plug her I.B.M. ThinkPad into a wall socket.
Before Ms. Hakata, who lives on a drafty boat on the Hudson River, could settle into her work, a young man clutching a dying cellphone rushed in.
"I just have to charge it," he said, asking Ms. Hakata if he could share one of the two power outlets under her table. She smiled politely and nodded.
Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.
Starbucks and other establishments catering to wired customers appear to do little to discourage or regulate customers who plug in, either to work on AC power or charge up. In large part, the power seekers seem to negotiate their needs among themselves with cooperative grace, following a series of unspoken rules.
Chief among them, some say, is never to use more than half of the sockets in a wall outlet. If an outlet provides four sockets, electrical etiquette dictates that you can plug in, say, your laptop and your cellphone, but not the iPod, too.
Those who disregard this courtesy may find themselves the targets of grumblings and harsh stares.
"It's better not to hog all the outlets, of course," said Zyphus Lebrun, a graduate student in journalism at Columbia University. "It's like when you go to the Laundromat and there is one person using four dryers."
While some devices, like a dying cellphone, require only a few minutes of charging to regain short-term use, most devices, like laptops, take much longer. It is not uncommon for users of electronics with more ravenous appetites to camp out for hours near an electrical outlet. In some cases, those staking a claim do so by plugging in a device - even a $2,000 laptop - only to leave it unattended while fetching a $4 coffee.
Much of the mounting quest for power stems, some hardware manufacturers say, from battery performance that has generally not kept up with the rapidly expanding capabilities of today's consumer electronics.
In turn, some battery makers blame hardware makers for adding power-consuming extras like larger, brighter display screens on laptops and bigger hard drives in digital music players. The result is devices that can operate for little more than four to six hours between charges.
As a consequence, knowing the location of a well-placed (and unused) electrical outlet may be considered more vital than knowing the closest public bathroom.
"It has become part of your lifestyle," Ralph Bond, the consumer education officer for Intel, said of the continual challenge of taking advantage of the widening offerings of digital electronics but not becoming a slave to the socket. "I can give you a guided tour of the two concourses for United Airlines in Chicago O'Hare." He then rattled off a long list of airports where he knows the whereabouts of obscure but accessible electrical outlets. "I can show you where the very valued and highly prized electrical outlets are for frequent travelers that need to jui
Whenever I go hiking/camping/whatever I always carry a couple of these:
http://www.lumastrobe.com/traffic2.htm
With 4-5 it's easy enough to set up a small perimeter of easily visible (especially at night) lights flashing in random sequence (place them ~3 feet apart on an elevated, easily visible surface.) 20 hours apiece means that these and a family pack of heavy-duty AA's (I like the Energizer E2's because they last forever), will make your warning lights last longer than your food supply. And the best part is you can't be sued for using one.
which is more effective? One person asking a Sears store's manager to lower prices and walking out, or a thousand people shoplifting frm that store and making it known it's because of the prices?
When you've got a customer walking out knowing that his alternatives are shit, he'll be back, and can therefore be ignored. When you've got a customer capable of downloading the same thing for free, you've got a whole lot more reason to earn his/her purchase.
You're wrong. Piracy does serve a purpose. One that most of the rich fat asses of society will argue with, yes. One that some will see as invalid, yes. But a purpose nevertheless. It gives the companies (software) motivation to succeed in lowering prices and improving their product so that people will be motivated to buy rather than pirate. Sadly, this leads to more bloatware, because companies want their precious product to take a while to pirate. The movie/tv/music industry: this gives them someone to race against. Think about it, if not for Napster there would be no iTunes. If not for KaZaa, MusicMatch would be dead, because people would still be listening to CDs. iPod would be "another obscure product by those bozo's at Apple", and broadband would be 56.7kbps instead of 56.6. Piracy gives the music industry a reason to improve the quality of it's music (in both senses), gives the movie industry a reason to release something other than 2.5 hour shitfests about two guys that met in a Cafe and ended up in a baseball game together, and instead give us an experience WORTH the $10 (the CGI sequences in the Matrix movies, and all of LOTR simply cannot be recreated unless you have a theatre in your home, and I do not mean a big TV).
The second reason for piracy is affordability. There are those who can afford a decent computer but cannot afford $50 daily for a new game. I am one of them. I built my PC for $650 and have added $450's worth of upgrades in the past two years. Unlike physical goods, where I actually cause real damage to someone, I wasn't going to buy these games anyway. Or, for the classic example, Photoshop. How many of us do you think can afford the $700 for Photoshop CS? Do you suggest we mortgage our homes so that some fatass at Adobe can get himself a Lexus? This is not something we would likely do anyway, but without warez we would be forced to look into free and open-source alternatives, most of which are insignificant compared to their professional alternatives. Therefore, in cases like mine... cases which constitute what I see as the majority of warez users, I see warez as justified.
My sympathy goes to this guy, and my "head up your ass" award goes, once again, to the corporate brown-nosers that our authorities have dwindled to.
only everything. You speak out on behalf of someone who deserves to be punished, but is not. I take the opposing side of the argument. Don't take me wrong, I am no equal opportunity/rights activist, there do exist distinctions from case to case, but you, like most of society, assume that every man taken into police custody "must've done sumthin'", an assumption that could not be more wrong. Are there people that lie, steal, cheat, murder, oppress, and rape without punishment? Yes. Have some of those guilty been released on lack of evidence? Yes. Does that mean that every man arrested has to carry their cross? I think we've got the wrong scapegoat here. The scapegoat should be the millionaire asshole that slices his wife up and walks. The scapegoat should be the jackass that launders billions of dollars and walks. The scapegoat should be the jackass who steals other people's work (or buys it for pennies) to become the world's richest man, and walks.
But no, they're rich. That means they walk. In order for society to get it's head out of it's ass (and out of the clothing of a few ugly celebrities) it would need to change. And that is what we'll never get our heads around. Therefore consider yourself correct.
I beg your pardon... the last I checked these devices were sold for $50 apiece, if not more. They are bountiful, but still expensive. What I'm waitinh for is a $5 IDE-usb enclosure, with a $10 CF2-usb adapter (CF being the master). While I applaud these devices' innovation, they are going in the wrong direction (bells and whistles instead of reliability and affordability).
And what of the guy who happened to stop by someone's house 2 hours before they got murdered, was brought in, put on CNN, and then released due to the fact that the cops realized he couldn't have been guilty? Does he have to "take one for the team", and if so what has "the team" ever done for him? Is it just to damn the innocent man to a lifetime of unemployment due to an apathy-ridden, paranoid social system?
As far as I can see, the only way to really satisfy both sides is for the pirate "industry" to revert back to what it once was - an elitist group enjoying the benefits of their intelligence. At that point, we were small and independent enough that Big Brother didn't notice us because we were too small to be worth their attention, and even if we were noticed there was not much that could be done due to the fact that we "evolved" seperately, and the closest thing to a central nervous system we had was the BBS, which in and of themselves were a greatly diversified network of independent channels.
If we were to revert back to such a small and independent structure, we would once again go "under the radar" by making the costs of legal action against us outweigh the benefits thereof.
And, since God knows/. has enough equal rights activists, I make my argument against the newbies and the "unwilling to learn but willing to benefit" thus excluded, which sadly have swelled the warez community to the size it is. The elite do have the right to consider themselves "better" than them. Just as a BMW owner should not have to drive at 5mph due to the fact that that's the maximum speed of a 1965 Dodge van, or a genius should not have to solve 5th-grade level math problems in 12th grade due to the fact that a Special Ed student can do no better. Averages are for the masses, and it has been a firm belief of society that those who can improve their life by excelling above the dumb masses, should. Hence, sports; Hence, executive positions; Hence, Ferarri. Et cetera ad infinum. So if someone has the skills to be in an elite community and others do not, or are too lazy to learn them, they deserve to be excluded.
In certain cases RFID tags should not be destroyed (aforementioned work scenario.) But in such cases, is it not possible to "freeze" or temporarily disable RFID. I'm sure within a year of this becoming massively implemented there will be a device that works on the basis of "stick this to your arm and RFID cannot be read until it's removed or the battery dies", something like an RFID jammer. I'm sure as the tags gain popularity, so will "it", until companies can't give the damn things away (think cell phone antenna boosters).
Well, I personally have a job but the prospect of saving up $250+ for a gadget I could otherwise get for free. Call me a communist, but I prefer "free" over "paid for"
Not only that, OSS provides some code to newbies that books could not, a field experience of sorts. Plus it "magically" updates itself and broadens the pool of useful code experienced programmers draw from.
It is thus well-worth the money and effort applied to it, in the end. A shady pyramid scheme that has a 10% chance of giving you an iPod if you complete a bunch of stringent requirements and requires you to sell out a bunch of people is not, for most. But what the hell, for some of us (those with a lack of disposable cash and an excess of free time) it provides a decent chance to get a gadget we would otherwise never get around to buying.
A Web Offer Too Good to Be True? Read the Fine Print By BARBARA WHITAKER
Published: December 26, 2004
THE e-mail messages are tantalizing: "Join now and receive a free I.B.M. laptop." "Your complimentary iPod with free shipping is waiting."
These offers and similar ones on the Internet promise gifts for buying products or services. Are they for real? At best, yes, but they can also be riddled with problems. Participants may have to spend a lot to qualify or may not get the reward if they fail to follow what can be complicated rules. Ultimately, they may end up with nothing more than a big increase in spam as their e-mail address and other information is passed along or sold.
Advertisement
Complaint sites are filled with messages from consumers who say they participated in such programs only to come up empty-handed.
One person, Vic of Northport, N.Y., participated in a deal and was disappointed in the experience. On a message board on RipOffReport.com, he wrote: "The lesson is that the only thing on this earth that is truly free is your mother's love. Everything else has a string or catch attached."
Behind the offers are marketing companies whose goal is to generate customers for a wide range of businesses. They offer incentives - money or products - to people who sign up for items like credit cards, CD clubs or newspaper subscriptions. In return, the marketing company receives a fee, or bounty, for every customer it signs up.
Although the marketing companies will not divulge what they are paid per person, those familiar with the business say it averages $40 to $60.
This type of marketing is not new. But where companies once offered gifts like coffee mugs or beach towels in return for, say, signing up for a credit card, the Internet is making it possible for marketers to make more money by bringing multiple offers and consumers together. In return, they offer pricier enticements.
Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said no reports of fraud involving such operations had been made to the bureau's Internet Fraud Complaint Center (www.ifccfbi.gov). But he recommended that consumers examine such offers carefully.
"The thing to know about this is that anybody can do it," said Gary Stein, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, an Internet consultancy. "They can be fraudulent, real or somewhere in between."
The marketers operate in numerous ways.
Gratis Internet, a Web marketer based in Washington, has developed a system in which it buys pricey products like iPods - www.freeipods.com - and gives them away. To receive the iPod, participants are asked to sign up for one of about 10 different offers and to persuade five others to do the same. They have developed similar programs giving out $700 desktop computers (freedesktoppc.com), $800 flat-screen televisions (freeflatscreens.com) and high-end designer handbags (freehandbags.com). The main difference between the offers is how many others must be signed up for the main participant to receive the "free" merchandise. Its customers include Time Warner's AOL; BMG Music Service, a CD club owned by Bertelsmann; and USA Today, which is owned by the Gannett Company.
Rob Jewell, co-founder of Gratis, says the company gives away 500 iPods a week. It posted revenue of nearly $5 million in 2003 and expects that to hit $15 million for 2004, he said.
"It's a very cost-effective way for advertisers to attract new customers," said Mr. Jewell, who is 27, "and it's good for consumers as well because they're getting a piece of that."
Mr. Jewell and his friend and business partner, Peter Martin, 28, started their operation with freecondoms.com, on which participants get points for purchases or signing up for programs, and the points can be redeemed for condoms.
Then they realized if they incorporated more people into the process they could offer a bigger prize, which led to the iPod giveaway.
Easier to use: Check. To open a movie you meed to do a maximum of extracting and mounting it. Only a matter of time before the program that downloads it extracts it into the specified folder for you and mounts it onto the necessary amount of drives or adds it to your WinAmp playlist. Besides, xvid movies need two clicks to work: left left.
Faster to get: Semi-check. Though 100mbps is available in some parts of Sweden, it will be some time before we have access to such amounts of bandwidth cheaply enough to make them a viable option. Then again, 5 years ago it was God's blessing to have 56k.
Conclusion: Unless the movie industry does something, and does something fast, to get out of the nosedive they've been in since the Napster suit, they will crash and burn. Soon and hard.
You are assuming all hell has not already broken loose. You are wrong.
Lately, I've noticed a sharp increase in the amount and quality of "copyright-protected" movies, music, and games. As a matter of fact, a quick check of VCDQuality shows that "Cellular", "Ladder 49", "Taxi", and a few others are already available in high (read: DVD) quality XVID rips.
See the steps here? Entertainment industry pushes DRM, pirates push their art. BT gains popularity, more users = more speed etc. Result? Faster, better warez. So the "hell breaks loose" process has already begun. We have already answered MPAA/RIAA's slap in the face. The next move is theirs.
What I fear is what that next move will be.
With the developement of bluray and hd-dvd, the MPAA will be placing near-cinema quality videos in the user's hands. As they have copy protection on the lowest of formats (VHS), and enhanced protection on DVDs, and nazi protection on HD video, I can but tremble imagining what will be placed on the next generation of players.
The worst part is that though they may lose the intellectual half of their users who understand what is happening to them, they will always have the backup 'cows' of Average Joe and Janes nationwide, for whom "makin' it purdierer" is the important part, and who have no concerns over privacy, fair use, drm, or time wasted on commercials. Regardless of our failure to see this, we are a minority.
Therefore if we want to stop the DRM movement we must, in my opinion, use stronger action, that is, we must continue to expand piracy until it is within reach of the average consumer, boycot nazi drm schemes, and inform the general public what they are being herded into.
Slashdot Mirror
"But sadly this will only make it easier for people unwilling to pay for windows to continue to use it. It would be better if they had to find a cheeper (legal) solution." Can someone please hand me a penguin to bash this man over the head with?
you can get a DVD burner within the $40 price point. If you know an SVID port from your ass and have a half-decent vid card, you can then do the same thing with your VHS tapes.
Another advantage of DVD is that media prices are falling into the quarter apiece range if you go with cheap brands and shop around. VHS tapes are still 2 bucks apiece. It's a big difference if you are converting or copying a collection of 200-500 films. As a matter of fact, backing up a collection of that size would justify itself in the media cost alone, even considering the purchase of a low-end burner. (200*2 = 400; 200*0.25 = 50 + 100 = 150)
1,000 GB of porn on a card the size of a postage stamp?
Slashdotters, rejoice.
...The enthusiasm about how computers, the Internet, and good software can help people...
Am I the only one bothered by that phrase?
Bill Gates still has time to give interviews... ...guess his e-mail filtering department's doing it's job.
speak for yourself...
I'm using Firefox 1.0 right now, it's rendering fine @ 1024x768...
http://www.dreamingpoint.com/projects/cellphone/fi naldisplay.jpg
if it ain't broke...
Which crash?
AFAIK there were 2 crashes this time around: one when he was toying with the digicam and a bsod when he tried to run the game
Here's the article:
Power Users, Ready for a Refill
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
MIHOKO HAKATA, a freelance illustrator and recent art-school graduate, ducked into a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan last week, desperate for a jolt of energy.
She had work to do. But as she removed her materials from her backpack, it became clear that the energy she was seeking could not be found in a cup. She had a more pressing need: to find a power outlet for her laptop computer, whose battery had died.
"I realized they have this," said Ms. Hakata, a 29-year-old Tokyo native, as her hand slipped beneath a table to deftly plug her I.B.M. ThinkPad into a wall socket.
Before Ms. Hakata, who lives on a drafty boat on the Hudson River, could settle into her work, a young man clutching a dying cellphone rushed in.
"I just have to charge it," he said, asking Ms. Hakata if he could share one of the two power outlets under her table. She smiled politely and nodded.
Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.
Starbucks and other establishments catering to wired customers appear to do little to discourage or regulate customers who plug in, either to work on AC power or charge up. In large part, the power seekers seem to negotiate their needs among themselves with cooperative grace, following a series of unspoken rules.
Chief among them, some say, is never to use more than half of the sockets in a wall outlet. If an outlet provides four sockets, electrical etiquette dictates that you can plug in, say, your laptop and your cellphone, but not the iPod, too.
Those who disregard this courtesy may find themselves the targets of grumblings and harsh stares.
"It's better not to hog all the outlets, of course," said Zyphus Lebrun, a graduate student in journalism at Columbia University. "It's like when you go to the Laundromat and there is one person using four dryers."
While some devices, like a dying cellphone, require only a few minutes of charging to regain short-term use, most devices, like laptops, take much longer. It is not uncommon for users of electronics with more ravenous appetites to camp out for hours near an electrical outlet. In some cases, those staking a claim do so by plugging in a device - even a $2,000 laptop - only to leave it unattended while fetching a $4 coffee.
Much of the mounting quest for power stems, some hardware manufacturers say, from battery performance that has generally not kept up with the rapidly expanding capabilities of today's consumer electronics.
In turn, some battery makers blame hardware makers for adding power-consuming extras like larger, brighter display screens on laptops and bigger hard drives in digital music players. The result is devices that can operate for little more than four to six hours between charges.
As a consequence, knowing the location of a well-placed (and unused) electrical outlet may be considered more vital than knowing the closest public bathroom.
"It has become part of your lifestyle," Ralph Bond, the consumer education officer for Intel, said of the continual challenge of taking advantage of the widening offerings of digital electronics but not becoming a slave to the socket. "I can give you a guided tour of the two concourses for United Airlines in Chicago O'Hare." He then rattled off a long list of airports where he knows the whereabouts of obscure but accessible electrical outlets. "I can show you where the very valued and highly prized electrical outlets are for frequent travelers that need to jui
Save yourself the risk...
Whenever I go hiking/camping/whatever I always carry a couple of these:
http://www.lumastrobe.com/traffic2.htm
With 4-5 it's easy enough to set up a small perimeter of easily visible (especially at night) lights flashing in random sequence (place them ~3 feet apart on an elevated, easily visible surface.) 20 hours apiece means that these and a family pack of heavy-duty AA's (I like the Energizer E2's because they last forever), will make your warning lights last longer than your food supply. And the best part is you can't be sued for using one.
which is more effective? One person asking a Sears store's manager to lower prices and walking out, or a thousand people shoplifting frm that store and making it known it's because of the prices? When you've got a customer walking out knowing that his alternatives are shit, he'll be back, and can therefore be ignored. When you've got a customer capable of downloading the same thing for free, you've got a whole lot more reason to earn his/her purchase.
You're wrong. Piracy does serve a purpose. One that most of the rich fat asses of society will argue with, yes. One that some will see as invalid, yes. But a purpose nevertheless.
It gives the companies (software) motivation to succeed in lowering prices and improving their product so that people will be motivated to buy rather than pirate. Sadly, this leads to more bloatware, because companies want their precious product to take a while to pirate. The movie/tv/music industry: this gives them someone to race against. Think about it, if not for Napster there would be no iTunes. If not for KaZaa, MusicMatch would be dead, because people would still be listening to CDs. iPod would be "another obscure product by those bozo's at Apple", and broadband would be 56.7kbps instead of 56.6. Piracy gives the music industry a reason to improve the quality of it's music (in both senses), gives the movie industry a reason to release something other than 2.5 hour shitfests about two guys that met in a Cafe and ended up in a baseball game together, and instead give us an experience WORTH the $10 (the CGI sequences in the Matrix movies, and all of LOTR simply cannot be recreated unless you have a theatre in your home, and I do not mean a big TV).
The second reason for piracy is affordability. There are those who can afford a decent computer but cannot afford $50 daily for a new game. I am one of them. I built my PC for $650 and have added $450's worth of upgrades in the past two years. Unlike physical goods, where I actually cause real damage to someone, I wasn't going to buy these games anyway. Or, for the classic example, Photoshop. How many of us do you think can afford the $700 for Photoshop CS? Do you suggest we mortgage our homes so that some fatass at Adobe can get himself a Lexus? This is not something we would likely do anyway, but without warez we would be forced to look into free and open-source alternatives, most of which are insignificant compared to their professional alternatives. Therefore, in cases like mine... cases which constitute what I see as the majority of warez users, I see warez as justified.
My sympathy goes to this guy, and my "head up your ass" award goes, once again, to the corporate brown-nosers that our authorities have dwindled to.
only everything. You speak out on behalf of someone who deserves to be punished, but is not. I take the opposing side of the argument. Don't take me wrong, I am no equal opportunity/rights activist, there do exist distinctions from case to case, but you, like most of society, assume that every man taken into police custody "must've done sumthin'", an assumption that could not be more wrong. Are there people that lie, steal, cheat, murder, oppress, and rape without punishment? Yes. Have some of those guilty been released on lack of evidence? Yes. Does that mean that every man arrested has to carry their cross? I think we've got the wrong scapegoat here. The scapegoat should be the millionaire asshole that slices his wife up and walks. The scapegoat should be the jackass that launders billions of dollars and walks. The scapegoat should be the jackass who steals other people's work (or buys it for pennies) to become the world's richest man, and walks.
But no, they're rich. That means they walk. In order for society to get it's head out of it's ass (and out of the clothing of a few ugly celebrities) it would need to change. And that is what we'll never get our heads around. Therefore consider yourself correct.
"A dozen a dime"
I beg your pardon... the last I checked these devices were sold for $50 apiece, if not more. They are bountiful, but still expensive. What I'm waitinh for is a $5 IDE-usb enclosure, with a $10 CF2-usb adapter (CF being the master). While I applaud these devices' innovation, they are going in the wrong direction (bells and whistles instead of reliability and affordability).
And what of the guy who happened to stop by someone's house 2 hours before they got murdered, was brought in, put on CNN, and then released due to the fact that the cops realized he couldn't have been guilty? Does he have to "take one for the team", and if so what has "the team" ever done for him? Is it just to damn the innocent man to a lifetime of unemployment due to an apathy-ridden, paranoid social system?
As far as I can see, the only way to really satisfy both sides is for the pirate "industry" to revert back to what it once was - an elitist group enjoying the benefits of their intelligence. At that point, we were small and independent enough that Big Brother didn't notice us because we were too small to be worth their attention, and even if we were noticed there was not much that could be done due to the fact that we "evolved" seperately, and the closest thing to a central nervous system we had was the BBS, which in and of themselves were a greatly diversified network of independent channels.
/. has enough equal rights activists, I make my argument against the newbies and the "unwilling to learn but willing to benefit" thus excluded, which sadly have swelled the warez community to the size it is. The elite do have the right to consider themselves "better" than them. Just as a BMW owner should not have to drive at 5mph due to the fact that that's the maximum speed of a 1965 Dodge van, or a genius should not have to solve 5th-grade level math problems in 12th grade due to the fact that a Special Ed student can do no better. Averages are for the masses, and it has been a firm belief of society that those who can improve their life by excelling above the dumb masses, should. Hence, sports; Hence, executive positions; Hence, Ferarri. Et cetera ad infinum. So if someone has the skills to be in an elite community and others do not, or are too lazy to learn them, they deserve to be excluded.
If we were to revert back to such a small and independent structure, we would once again go "under the radar" by making the costs of legal action against us outweigh the benefits thereof.
And, since God knows
In certain cases RFID tags should not be destroyed (aforementioned work scenario.) But in such cases, is it not possible to "freeze" or temporarily disable RFID. I'm sure within a year of this becoming massively implemented there will be a device that works on the basis of "stick this to your arm and RFID cannot be read until it's removed or the battery dies", something like an RFID jammer. I'm sure as the tags gain popularity, so will "it", until companies can't give the damn things away (think cell phone antenna boosters).
Well, I personally have a job but the prospect of saving up $250+ for a gadget I could otherwise get for free. Call me a communist, but I prefer "free" over "paid for"
Not only that, OSS provides some code to newbies that books could not, a field experience of sorts. Plus it "magically" updates itself and broadens the pool of useful code experienced programmers draw from.
It is thus well-worth the money and effort applied to it, in the end. A shady pyramid scheme that has a 10% chance of giving you an iPod if you complete a bunch of stringent requirements and requires you to sell out a bunch of people is not, for most. But what the hell, for some of us (those with a lack of disposable cash and an excess of free time) it provides a decent chance to get a gadget we would otherwise never get around to buying.
Or you could just download SpamKiller and keep the iPod...
what the fuck? I'm in... I've got CVS, Walbaums, a few others
Karma whoring done properly:
A Web Offer Too Good to Be True? Read the Fine Print
By BARBARA WHITAKER
Published: December 26, 2004
THE e-mail messages are tantalizing: "Join now and receive a free I.B.M. laptop." "Your complimentary iPod with free shipping is waiting."
These offers and similar ones on the Internet promise gifts for buying products or services. Are they for real? At best, yes, but they can also be riddled with problems. Participants may have to spend a lot to qualify or may not get the reward if they fail to follow what can be complicated rules. Ultimately, they may end up with nothing more than a big increase in spam as their e-mail address and other information is passed along or sold.
Advertisement
Complaint sites are filled with messages from consumers who say they participated in such programs only to come up empty-handed.
One person, Vic of Northport, N.Y., participated in a deal and was disappointed in the experience. On a message board on RipOffReport.com, he wrote: "The lesson is that the only thing on this earth that is truly free is your mother's love. Everything else has a string or catch attached."
Behind the offers are marketing companies whose goal is to generate customers for a wide range of businesses. They offer incentives - money or products - to people who sign up for items like credit cards, CD clubs or newspaper subscriptions. In return, the marketing company receives a fee, or bounty, for every customer it signs up.
Although the marketing companies will not divulge what they are paid per person, those familiar with the business say it averages $40 to $60.
This type of marketing is not new. But where companies once offered gifts like coffee mugs or beach towels in return for, say, signing up for a credit card, the Internet is making it possible for marketers to make more money by bringing multiple offers and consumers together. In return, they offer pricier enticements.
Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said no reports of fraud involving such operations had been made to the bureau's Internet Fraud Complaint Center (www.ifccfbi.gov). But he recommended that consumers examine such offers carefully.
"The thing to know about this is that anybody can do it," said Gary Stein, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, an Internet consultancy. "They can be fraudulent, real or somewhere in between."
The marketers operate in numerous ways.
Gratis Internet, a Web marketer based in Washington, has developed a system in which it buys pricey products like iPods - www.freeipods.com - and gives them away. To receive the iPod, participants are asked to sign up for one of about 10 different offers and to persuade five others to do the same. They have developed similar programs giving out $700 desktop computers (freedesktoppc.com), $800 flat-screen televisions (freeflatscreens.com) and high-end designer handbags (freehandbags.com). The main difference between the offers is how many others must be signed up for the main participant to receive the "free" merchandise. Its customers include Time Warner's AOL; BMG Music Service, a CD club owned by Bertelsmann; and USA Today, which is owned by the Gannett Company.
Rob Jewell, co-founder of Gratis, says the company gives away 500 iPods a week. It posted revenue of nearly $5 million in 2003 and expects that to hit $15 million for 2004, he said.
"It's a very cost-effective way for advertisers to attract new customers," said Mr. Jewell, who is 27, "and it's good for consumers as well because they're getting a piece of that."
Mr. Jewell and his friend and business partner, Peter Martin, 28, started their operation with freecondoms.com, on which participants get points for purchases or signing up for programs, and the points can be redeemed for condoms.
Then they realized if they incorporated more people into the process they could offer a bigger prize, which led to the iPod giveaway.
Cheaper: Check. $0 vs. $25
Easier to use: Check. To open a movie you meed to do a maximum of extracting and mounting it. Only a matter of time before the program that downloads it extracts it into the specified folder for you and mounts it onto the necessary amount of drives or adds it to your WinAmp playlist. Besides, xvid movies need two clicks to work: left left.
Faster to get: Semi-check. Though 100mbps is available in some parts of Sweden, it will be some time before we have access to such amounts of bandwidth cheaply enough to make them a viable option. Then again, 5 years ago it was God's blessing to have 56k.
Conclusion: Unless the movie industry does something, and does something fast, to get out of the nosedive they've been in since the Napster suit, they will crash and burn. Soon and hard.
You are assuming all hell has not already broken loose. You are wrong. Lately, I've noticed a sharp increase in the amount and quality of "copyright-protected" movies, music, and games. As a matter of fact, a quick check of VCDQuality shows that "Cellular", "Ladder 49", "Taxi", and a few others are already available in high (read: DVD) quality XVID rips. See the steps here? Entertainment industry pushes DRM, pirates push their art. BT gains popularity, more users = more speed etc. Result? Faster, better warez. So the "hell breaks loose" process has already begun. We have already answered MPAA/RIAA's slap in the face. The next move is theirs. What I fear is what that next move will be. With the developement of bluray and hd-dvd, the MPAA will be placing near-cinema quality videos in the user's hands. As they have copy protection on the lowest of formats (VHS), and enhanced protection on DVDs, and nazi protection on HD video, I can but tremble imagining what will be placed on the next generation of players. The worst part is that though they may lose the intellectual half of their users who understand what is happening to them, they will always have the backup 'cows' of Average Joe and Janes nationwide, for whom "makin' it purdierer" is the important part, and who have no concerns over privacy, fair use, drm, or time wasted on commercials. Regardless of our failure to see this, we are a minority. Therefore if we want to stop the DRM movement we must, in my opinion, use stronger action, that is, we must continue to expand piracy until it is within reach of the average consumer, boycot nazi drm schemes, and inform the general public what they are being herded into.
Better yet, hold up the RIAA logo and sic the sharks on them.