At least for my PowerBook, you can alternately mute it before a (rare) shutdown, or quickly do fn+F3 (that's the key combo for mute) after turning on the power. Either will prevent the "baaahh" sound.
Off-topic from the off-topic, but, You Must Be New Here. Even if you comment AC, it eliminates any moderation you gave for the comments on the story. File that under "whoops".
Your question presupposes that there is a need for individuals to prove that they purchaced some music. I say that there is not. Should a group of the RIAA ilk take consumers to court for owning supposedly pirated music, then the RIAA or the group like them will need to prove to the court that the music is indeed illegitimate; "beyond a reasonable doubt" for criminal cases, and they must have sufficient evidence for strong suspicion for civil damages (IANAL, so I don't know all the legalese speak for the necessary evidence in a civil case).
Where they get you, however, is when you distribute said music. Getting everyone at work to upload all the music they own to the jukebox server, is what RIAA et. al. defines as "stealing". Most people here think this is a good idea, but it does violate copyright laws (since you're basically making a local copy each time you listen to a song on the server), and is not covered by Fair Use.
If you have digitized music, copyright laws and DMCA have little chance of harming you in court, because the onus is on the litigant to prove that you violated these laws. If there is any way that you could have happened upon DRM-free copies of the music, any lawyer worth the $100 you pay for an hour in court will get the case promptly thrown out, and most likely will get the prosecuting party to pay the bill for wasting everyone's time.
I have a few different password systems, but one I started using more recently involves just using an alternate keyboard layout. That way, I can have a nice, easy password like, say, "MyComputer'sAwesomePassword". Then I type it as if the keyboard was a DVORAK layout. Or, if it's a DVORAK keyboard, type as if it were QWERTY. Throw in a few numbers for good measure, and you got a decent password.
While I am not as familiar with sound compression techniques, JPEG and MPEG-4 video compression (as in the H-264 component only, no sound) uses a DCT, not a FFT. But FFT is used for signal processing, compressing wireless signals, partial diff-eq solving, and similar, I remember that much from classes.
And those acronyms are "Joint Photographic Experts Group", "Motion Picture Experts Group", "Discrete Cosine Transform", and "Fast Fourier Transform", for those who do not know and are too busy/lazy to look it up.
I originally was going to sign up with Netflix. And I tried, I really did. But their website completely turned me off. I encountered two major problems signing up, which may or may not have been a temporary issue. When I tried signing up for Blockbuster, there were no issues.
First, I registered on Netflix's site, gave e-mail address and password I wanted. I get the email with the "is this really your email?" confirmation link. "Congratulations, your account is activated!" Then it logs me out. Ok, so I click the log-me-back-in link, fill in the email and password I put in not 2 minutes before and... "Sorry, we have no record of an account with that email address." WTF? Ok, so maybe I typed the password in wrong... try again, same thing. Try to change the password, and am sure to input it correctly this time, click the link in the your-password-has-been-changed email, and I'm logged in again. I log out to test it, and I get, you guessed it: "Sorry, we have no record of an account with that email address." Using the email link logs me in fine, but I cannot log in "normally".
Second, I tried to finish the registration, with mailing address, payment, etc. I'm already wary at this point because it seemed Netflix couldn't properly implement a simple login form. But I fill in the information anyway, click submit, and... "We're sorry, the postal address you gave is invalid." EXCUSE ME? I think I know my own fscking address. Nobody else has any problems delivering to that very same address. For the next five minutes, I'm wondering if perhaps Netflix hired chimpanzees to handle account creation.
Compare to Blockbuster. I go on the site, give email and the password I want, and it recognizes it without a problem. I give them my address, and it doesn't give me any "Your address doesn't exist!" nonsense. I finish registering in 30 seconds. I don't give a shit about the in-store rentals, the supposedly smaller library, or that the envelopes are white and yellow instead of red. I just care that signing up and logging into Blockbuster didn't piss me off, and doing the same for Netflix did.
What, you don't want to be him? What the hell is wrong with you? The guy's wife is a smokin' redhead that looks 25. His mistress is even hotter. Last week he ran a marathon, next weekend he's taking his friggin yacht out. I would kill to wake up one day and be him!
Fine, except I don't believe it was insulting, or that I was grilling a casual user. I was pointing out that if he merely *tried* to register, he would likely succeed (unless for some reason there is an invitation model for some schools as thisisjace seems to have encountered). Where I come from, it is customary to get a few jests in when pointing out the bleeding obvious. If it was not apparent that the reference to the Oklahoma guy was a joke, then either my or your humor detector needs some work, eh?
Why yes. Yes I did. And I got the following message on the screen immediately after:
"Thanks, we have just sent a confirmation email to (removed)@hotmail.com.
Please click on the confirmation link inside it to confirm your email address and finish your registration."
And I checked my old hotmail two seconds later, and I had an email from Facebook!
I wish there was an invite model for the high school section of the site, then it would at least add a little hurdle from random people signing up. But all I had to do was pick a school, a graduation year, and a birthdate, and I was set.
I wasn't talking about computer literacy or tirades. I was talking about the ability to read and comprehend basic English. It's quite simple; s/he wants on Facebook. S/he goes to the site. Maybe s/he'll see the button that says "Register". The page becomes a registration form for college, with a linky on the top to switch to the high school registration. Fill in name, contact email, standard stuff. Fill in the text in an image to prove that it is a human and not a computer registering. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, registered for Facebook.
Dude. WTF. You're just like that moronic city manager in Oklahoma that went on a tirade against CentOS developers for "hacking" his city's website when he saw the default configuration page for Apache on CentOS.
College Facebook requires a university '.edu' address. They don't care if it's just school.edu, or faculty.school.edu, or staff.school.edu, or alumni.school.edu. You just need the address, and you're set.
High School Facebook requires... nothing. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from regisering. At all. That's why a lot of people got pissed off when the college and high school sites were integrated. At least with the college one, you knew that other people on it were affiliated with the school in some way, and could see the email address registered to the account so you could see that, for example, the profile for Chewbacca is really jsmith@school.edu, which could then be looked up in a school directory. High school lets anyone in.
Anyway, back on the topic of the article. I fell out of my seat when I saw that the management turned down a $750 million offer and are asking for $2 billion. Internet bubble 2.0 indeed. Sure it's a "valuable demographic", but even with the number of hits, the revenue off of two banner ads, a localized text ad, and occasional sponserships do not justify even $100 million, let alone billions. Especially when this "valuable demographic" is also the most likely to block both banner ads.
"The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago."
Ok. Show me the online music store where I can download legal songs -- legal in the sense that the RIAA isn't throwing a hissy fit over it -- at a decent (>=128kbps) bitrate, for $0.99 or less per song. It also needs to have a good selection, so nothing like some tiny independant label that sells only their own library. If a friend tells me I need to hear a song, I want to have a reasonably good chance of finding it. Point me to that store, and I will begin using it immediately, recommend it to everyone I know, and no more iTMS for me.
Oh, I'm sorry, it doesn't exist? Well then that's just tough noogies for you, ain't it? Apple's DRM is the least restrictive I have seen in any music service. It Just Works, and continues to do so until you try to do something that is blatantly wrong; like buying an album in iTMS, buying a cheap 100-CD spindle at your tech store of choice, burning 100 copies of that album, and giving them away or selling them. Nope, you can only do that 7 times.
I don't know if you've ever had any training in rhetoric, but I think everyone can safely assume that you haven't. Rhetoric 101 makes it pretty clear that a slippery slope argument is a BAD argument. Your argument is a typical slippery slope argument. Come up with a better way to argue why you're right, the rest of the world is wrong, and should change, and I might listen.
Ok, how about this; every day, there are a lot of computers sold. A large percentage of these computers have Windows XP pre-installed. All the computers with Windows XP installed have IE. I have not yet seen any computer that had XP pre-installed that also had Firefox pre-installed. I know it pains you, but computers sold with desktop Linux just aren't that popular among the general population; they want their Play-skool Windows, with the nice big 'e' that says 'Internet'. There are also a lot of corporate/education products that require ActiveX controls, and thus IE. For those two reasons alone, I doubt Firefox will ever break 20% share of the "browser market" among the general population.
Speaking of which, why does everyone talk about it as "market share"? Last I checked, it's been a decade since any major browser other than Opera was not free (as in beer). The only real advantage to "market share" that I see is, the browser maker gets to set the initial default homepage...
So now, instead of trying to take a peek at/modify the machine guts, they try to peek at the communication, or just get a bunch of zombie computers to pwned! the servers. And aren't most of the scams with gambling machines inside jobs? Please, tell me how consolidating the working of a large group of slots into ONE MACHINE is going to increase the security? Just tell a bunch of your friends that row X of slots are going to be winning for 5 minutes starting at a certain time. Keep payouts small, but positive, and it probably won't be caught.
Ok, this is the second time I've seen/. accept a submission from this web site run by high school students with poor writing and little real knowledge of technology. One time posting their site is understandable. Twice posting this crap (from an AC no less!) is just feeding the ad monster.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, so I'm taking a little risk and trying to post in the first thread...
I'm hoping that everybody realizes that they're responding to three high school students, of which only two seem to have enough grasp of the English language to passibly write in it. The other one is a "tech news analyst", whatever that means.
And you know what? Y'all (and me too...) just got pwned. They've managed to get a website going with minimal content, and seems to be over 50% ads, with crappy writing. Normally, this would be a bust. But, get your site on slashdot with a controversial subject and.... forgive the cliché:
Get crappy site on slashdot
...
Profit!
At least you can feel good about getting Sandeep and Ravdeep money for college.
Ah, what the hell. Give the kids a break. We were all kids once too, and probably thought a bunch of stupid shit like "Microsoft is teh inovator!" But this definitely doesn't belong on/., it's pure flamebait. (not to mention sneaky devious, just like the guys in the black van outside... but they can't fool ME!!!)
> Although I do hope they add that scroll button to their laptops.
The PowerBooks have a nifty little feature, where if you use two fingers on the trackpad, it scrolls. I got so used to that after *one hour* that I began habitually using it on other laptops.
Of course, you're completely right. You know son, I think you would be a good match for a few positions we have here at Homeland Security. We need people like you to convince the rest of the nation that terrorism is a serious problem, killing people, injuring even more, and causing freedom-loving Americans to change their way of life.
You can convince the public that our actions are needed. Like the case of that apartment building we stormed, and arrested all the residents... oh, you never heard of it? Let me explain...
A few months ago, we got an anonymous tip about a terrorist that was living in an apartment outside of Chicago. We at Homeland Security take these things very seriously, so at approximately 2:30 am local time on Saturday morning, our agents raided the building. The tip only mentioned the building, not a specific room number, so to be safe we arrested all the residents. You have no idea how many black vans we needed to cart off over 1,800 suspected terrorists... but I digress.
Anyway, since it is better to be on the safe side, our agents arrested everyone on suspicion of terrorism, and shipped them to one of our facilities in the territory of our Cuban allies. That means the people are now safer, and will never run into that terrorist. Oh sure, there is some inconvenience to anyone who is not a terrorist, but the peace of mind is worth it, right?
Where are all these people now, you ask? Well, you have to understand, our resources are limited. Our investigators have not had the time to follow up on the suspected terrorist's cases, so all of them are still being held. Really, it was their own fault, seeing as the apartment complex was in a bad area, full of gangs, drug dealers, and foriegners. If they lived in an area that was not a haven for these bad people, they wouldn't be in this situation.
But of course, you are one of the enlightened few, you already understand this. Now, what kind of offer can I make you?...
I agree, except on the wiping of the accounts. Really, what reason do they have to do this? Not only would it piss off a lot of users who will lose months of archived emails, but there really isn't anything for Google to gain by doing so. Methinks somebody is just a little peeved that there happen to be lots of people named "Matt Perry", and several of them happened to be more "in the loop", and got invites first.
But yeah, I can see Google moving in the same direction as Yahoo! with this stuff, tying domain registration with gmail, and possibly hosting.
As for the original question of how big the user base is*, I would say it's about as big as it's gonna get for a while. I've had 50 invites for the past week, and whenever I invite a few people, it just fills back up again. I practically have to beg people to take them. And before anyone says it, one account is plenty for me, and I like having my OWN hard drives thankyouverymuch.
* And by user base, I mean those people actually using Gmail for real e-mail purposes, not remote file storage.
I have a 72-pin SIMM (8MB) as my keychain. Does that mean my pockets are...
Oh, nevermind.
Re:Trillian is nice... but that lost me with that.
on
Trillian 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's also important to realise that Trillian is commercial-ware and that the 'free' version is, at best, a crippled attempt at tempting you to buy the actual featured version.
Oh yes, because heaven forbids developers from ever wanting to make any money off their work.
Sheesh, you know, I love F/OSS, it is a great development model when it is done correctly. But sometimes, this whole sense of entitlement thing really turns people off to the whole movement. When zealots say things like "Oh, they're trying to SELL software, yuck!", the reactions of most people who live in the real world is: "So? Can't they make an honest living too?"
For the people who are not of the "warez" generation, there isn't much of a problem. The old free version of Trillian (it was v.0.74F last I checked, BTW) was more than enough for most users. Pro added some goodies, both with 1.0 and 2.0, but there are people who have paid for TPro, and never use the "extras". It's called honesty, people liked using the free version, and so reward the developers with a subscription. But this concept seems to be lost on those that find no problem with pirating thousands of dollars of software (read: developer time), let alone a measly $25/year subscription.
Re:So now I can't open my passport safely?
on
Tin Foil Passports?
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· Score: 1
Don't attribute to malice that which stupidity sufficiently explains. In case you haven't noticed, the Marketing Department (tm) has picked up on the terms 'RFID', 'wireless', and 'biometric identification' recently on the technology front. They have also picked up on the words 'terrorism', 'passport', and 'security'. True to marketoid form, the buzzwords are taken and randomly thrown together with such words as: 'paradigm', 'synergy', 'low-cost', and 'solutions' among others. Since all the words are important, any combination of them must also be important and good.
Some people probably do want to use the itty-bitty chips to track others. But most of the people pushing things like this are just plain stupid, not out to get you.
Slashdot Mirror
At least for my PowerBook, you can alternately mute it before a (rare) shutdown, or quickly do fn+F3 (that's the key combo for mute) after turning on the power. Either will prevent the "baaahh" sound.
Off-topic from the off-topic, but, You Must Be New Here. Even if you comment AC, it eliminates any moderation you gave for the comments on the story. File that under "whoops".
I believe the proper response for this is "mu".
Your question presupposes that there is a need for individuals to prove that they purchaced some music. I say that there is not. Should a group of the RIAA ilk take consumers to court for owning supposedly pirated music, then the RIAA or the group like them will need to prove to the court that the music is indeed illegitimate; "beyond a reasonable doubt" for criminal cases, and they must have sufficient evidence for strong suspicion for civil damages (IANAL, so I don't know all the legalese speak for the necessary evidence in a civil case).
Where they get you, however, is when you distribute said music. Getting everyone at work to upload all the music they own to the jukebox server, is what RIAA et. al. defines as "stealing". Most people here think this is a good idea, but it does violate copyright laws (since you're basically making a local copy each time you listen to a song on the server), and is not covered by Fair Use.
If you have digitized music, copyright laws and DMCA have little chance of harming you in court, because the onus is on the litigant to prove that you violated these laws. If there is any way that you could have happened upon DRM-free copies of the music, any lawyer worth the $100 you pay for an hour in court will get the case promptly thrown out, and most likely will get the prosecuting party to pay the bill for wasting everyone's time.
I have a few different password systems, but one I started using more recently involves just using an alternate keyboard layout. That way, I can have a nice, easy password like, say, "MyComputer'sAwesomePassword". Then I type it as if the keyboard was a DVORAK layout. Or, if it's a DVORAK keyboard, type as if it were QWERTY. Throw in a few numbers for good measure, and you got a decent password.
And those acronyms are "Joint Photographic Experts Group", "Motion Picture Experts Group", "Discrete Cosine Transform", and "Fast Fourier Transform", for those who do not know and are too busy/lazy to look it up.
I originally was going to sign up with Netflix. And I tried, I really did. But their website completely turned me off. I encountered two major problems signing up, which may or may not have been a temporary issue. When I tried signing up for Blockbuster, there were no issues.
First, I registered on Netflix's site, gave e-mail address and password I wanted. I get the email with the "is this really your email?" confirmation link. "Congratulations, your account is activated!" Then it logs me out. Ok, so I click the log-me-back-in link, fill in the email and password I put in not 2 minutes before and... "Sorry, we have no record of an account with that email address." WTF? Ok, so maybe I typed the password in wrong... try again, same thing. Try to change the password, and am sure to input it correctly this time, click the link in the your-password-has-been-changed email, and I'm logged in again. I log out to test it, and I get, you guessed it: "Sorry, we have no record of an account with that email address." Using the email link logs me in fine, but I cannot log in "normally".
Second, I tried to finish the registration, with mailing address, payment, etc. I'm already wary at this point because it seemed Netflix couldn't properly implement a simple login form. But I fill in the information anyway, click submit, and... "We're sorry, the postal address you gave is invalid." EXCUSE ME? I think I know my own fscking address. Nobody else has any problems delivering to that very same address. For the next five minutes, I'm wondering if perhaps Netflix hired chimpanzees to handle account creation.
Compare to Blockbuster. I go on the site, give email and the password I want, and it recognizes it without a problem. I give them my address, and it doesn't give me any "Your address doesn't exist!" nonsense. I finish registering in 30 seconds. I don't give a shit about the in-store rentals, the supposedly smaller library, or that the envelopes are white and yellow instead of red. I just care that signing up and logging into Blockbuster didn't piss me off, and doing the same for Netflix did.
What, you don't want to be him? What the hell is wrong with you? The guy's wife is a smokin' redhead that looks 25. His mistress is even hotter. Last week he ran a marathon, next weekend he's taking his friggin yacht out. I would kill to wake up one day and be him!
Fine, except I don't believe it was insulting, or that I was grilling a casual user. I was pointing out that if he merely *tried* to register, he would likely succeed (unless for some reason there is an invitation model for some schools as thisisjace seems to have encountered). Where I come from, it is customary to get a few jests in when pointing out the bleeding obvious. If it was not apparent that the reference to the Oklahoma guy was a joke, then either my or your humor detector needs some work, eh?
"Did you even register? WTF Dude?"
Why yes. Yes I did. And I got the following message on the screen immediately after:
"Thanks, we have just sent a confirmation email to (removed)@hotmail.com.
Please click on the confirmation link inside it to confirm your email address and finish your registration."
And I checked my old hotmail two seconds later, and I had an email from Facebook!
I wish there was an invite model for the high school section of the site, then it would at least add a little hurdle from random people signing up. But all I had to do was pick a school, a graduation year, and a birthdate, and I was set.
I wasn't talking about computer literacy or tirades. I was talking about the ability to read and comprehend basic English. It's quite simple; s/he wants on Facebook. S/he goes to the site. Maybe s/he'll see the button that says "Register". The page becomes a registration form for college, with a linky on the top to switch to the high school registration. Fill in name, contact email, standard stuff. Fill in the text in an image to prove that it is a human and not a computer registering. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, registered for Facebook.
Dude. WTF. You're just like that moronic city manager in Oklahoma that went on a tirade against CentOS developers for "hacking" his city's website when he saw the default configuration page for Apache on CentOS.
College Facebook requires a university '.edu' address. They don't care if it's just school.edu, or faculty.school.edu, or staff.school.edu, or alumni.school.edu. You just need the address, and you're set.
High School Facebook requires... nothing. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from regisering. At all. That's why a lot of people got pissed off when the college and high school sites were integrated. At least with the college one, you knew that other people on it were affiliated with the school in some way, and could see the email address registered to the account so you could see that, for example, the profile for Chewbacca is really jsmith@school.edu, which could then be looked up in a school directory. High school lets anyone in.
Anyway, back on the topic of the article. I fell out of my seat when I saw that the management turned down a $750 million offer and are asking for $2 billion. Internet bubble 2.0 indeed. Sure it's a "valuable demographic", but even with the number of hits, the revenue off of two banner ads, a localized text ad, and occasional sponserships do not justify even $100 million, let alone billions. Especially when this "valuable demographic" is also the most likely to block both banner ads.
"The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago."
Ok. Show me the online music store where I can download legal songs -- legal in the sense that the RIAA isn't throwing a hissy fit over it -- at a decent (>=128kbps) bitrate, for $0.99 or less per song. It also needs to have a good selection, so nothing like some tiny independant label that sells only their own library. If a friend tells me I need to hear a song, I want to have a reasonably good chance of finding it. Point me to that store, and I will begin using it immediately, recommend it to everyone I know, and no more iTMS for me.
Oh, I'm sorry, it doesn't exist? Well then that's just tough noogies for you, ain't it? Apple's DRM is the least restrictive I have seen in any music service. It Just Works, and continues to do so until you try to do something that is blatantly wrong; like buying an album in iTMS, buying a cheap 100-CD spindle at your tech store of choice, burning 100 copies of that album, and giving them away or selling them. Nope, you can only do that 7 times.
I don't know if you've ever had any training in rhetoric, but I think everyone can safely assume that you haven't. Rhetoric 101 makes it pretty clear that a slippery slope argument is a BAD argument. Your argument is a typical slippery slope argument. Come up with a better way to argue why you're right, the rest of the world is wrong, and should change, and I might listen.
You want to know the cause of the numbers?
Ok, how about this; every day, there are a lot of computers sold. A large percentage of these computers have Windows XP pre-installed. All the computers with Windows XP installed have IE. I have not yet seen any computer that had XP pre-installed that also had Firefox pre-installed. I know it pains you, but computers sold with desktop Linux just aren't that popular among the general population; they want their Play-skool Windows, with the nice big 'e' that says 'Internet'. There are also a lot of corporate/education products that require ActiveX controls, and thus IE. For those two reasons alone, I doubt Firefox will ever break 20% share of the "browser market" among the general population.
Speaking of which, why does everyone talk about it as "market share"? Last I checked, it's been a decade since any major browser other than Opera was not free (as in beer). The only real advantage to "market share" that I see is, the browser maker gets to set the initial default homepage...
You only wish you had some of this... http://www.google.com/googlegulp/
Hot lesbian action.
So now, instead of trying to take a peek at/modify the machine guts, they try to peek at the communication, or just get a bunch of zombie computers to pwned! the servers. And aren't most of the scams with gambling machines inside jobs? Please, tell me how consolidating the working of a large group of slots into ONE MACHINE is going to increase the security? Just tell a bunch of your friends that row X of slots are going to be winning for 5 minutes starting at a certain time. Keep payouts small, but positive, and it probably won't be caught.
Ugh.
I'm hoping that everybody realizes that they're responding to three high school students, of which only two seem to have enough grasp of the English language to passibly write in it. The other one is a "tech news analyst", whatever that means.
And you know what? Y'all (and me too...) just got pwned. They've managed to get a website going with minimal content, and seems to be over 50% ads, with crappy writing. Normally, this would be a bust. But, get your site on slashdot with a controversial subject and.... forgive the cliché:
At least you can feel good about getting Sandeep and Ravdeep money for college.
Ah, what the hell. Give the kids a break. We were all kids once too, and probably thought a bunch of stupid shit like "Microsoft is teh inovator!" But this definitely doesn't belong on /., it's pure flamebait. (not to mention sneaky devious, just like the guys in the black van outside... but they can't fool ME!!!)
> Although I do hope they add that scroll button to their laptops.
The PowerBooks have a nifty little feature, where if you use two fingers on the trackpad, it scrolls. I got so used to that after *one hour* that I began habitually using it on other laptops.
You can convince the public that our actions are needed. Like the case of that apartment building we stormed, and arrested all the residents... oh, you never heard of it? Let me explain...
A few months ago, we got an anonymous tip about a terrorist that was living in an apartment outside of Chicago. We at Homeland Security take these things very seriously, so at approximately 2:30 am local time on Saturday morning, our agents raided the building. The tip only mentioned the building, not a specific room number, so to be safe we arrested all the residents. You have no idea how many black vans we needed to cart off over 1,800 suspected terrorists... but I digress.
Anyway, since it is better to be on the safe side, our agents arrested everyone on suspicion of terrorism, and shipped them to one of our facilities in the territory of our Cuban allies. That means the people are now safer, and will never run into that terrorist. Oh sure, there is some inconvenience to anyone who is not a terrorist, but the peace of mind is worth it, right?
Where are all these people now, you ask? Well, you have to understand, our resources are limited. Our investigators have not had the time to follow up on the suspected terrorist's cases, so all of them are still being held. Really, it was their own fault, seeing as the apartment complex was in a bad area, full of gangs, drug dealers, and foriegners. If they lived in an area that was not a haven for these bad people, they wouldn't be in this situation.
But of course, you are one of the enlightened few, you already understand this. Now, what kind of offer can I make you?...
But yeah, I can see Google moving in the same direction as Yahoo! with this stuff, tying domain registration with gmail, and possibly hosting.
As for the original question of how big the user base is*, I would say it's about as big as it's gonna get for a while. I've had 50 invites for the past week, and whenever I invite a few people, it just fills back up again. I practically have to beg people to take them. And before anyone says it, one account is plenty for me, and I like having my OWN hard drives thankyouverymuch.
* And by user base, I mean those people actually using Gmail for real e-mail purposes, not remote file storage.
Oh, nevermind.
Oh yes, because heaven forbids developers from ever wanting to make any money off their work.
Sheesh, you know, I love F/OSS, it is a great development model when it is done correctly. But sometimes, this whole sense of entitlement thing really turns people off to the whole movement. When zealots say things like "Oh, they're trying to SELL software, yuck!", the reactions of most people who live in the real world is: "So? Can't they make an honest living too?"
For the people who are not of the "warez" generation, there isn't much of a problem. The old free version of Trillian (it was v.0.74F last I checked, BTW) was more than enough for most users. Pro added some goodies, both with 1.0 and 2.0, but there are people who have paid for TPro, and never use the "extras". It's called honesty, people liked using the free version, and so reward the developers with a subscription. But this concept seems to be lost on those that find no problem with pirating thousands of dollars of software (read: developer time), let alone a measly $25/year subscription.
Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten
Some people probably do want to use the itty-bitty chips to track others. But most of the people pushing things like this are just plain stupid, not out to get you.