"There are hundreds of thousands of slashdot readers who refute me"
You mean "repudiate".
From Nigel Warburton - Philosophy: The Basics: "If you refute a statement, you demonstrate that it is false. In other words, you make an overwhelming case against it. If you repudiate it, you simply deny it.
If it's that difficult to play in iTunes, then just download some software for which it's easy.
Vorbis is not dead, just not well supported. I've seen generic music players that support it, but if you insisted that it was essential you'd be restricting yourself quite a bit.
In the future, I think we might see players being more customisable (i.e. open source firmware). For now, you'd have to install Linux on your iPod.
Indeed, or allofmp3.com is a legal download service based in Russia. It allows you to download from a massive library in many different formats, and is extremely cheap (two cents a meg!).
There are plenty of DRM-less legal download services available, if you look around. And with prices like that, you'd have to be mad to stay with iTunes.
Unless this is a scheme designed to avoid paying people minimum wage. Because the work is paid by task, they can pay a lower amount than they would have to if employing people on salary.
This may actually bring about more good than you think. What if extremely poor people in, say, Thailand, start doing this (assuming somehow they get access to internet, using, say, one of those new "$100 laptops" they were given). In countries where a dollar is an enormous amount of money, if there was some way for them to actually get the money, this would be a fantastic scheme.
Actually, that was Microsoft's strategy too when they were young. They really did obtain "highly innovative, creative, and motivated individuals" to create good software. Now, the acquire them to keep them from creating something that would threaten their monopoly.
It's both. Google wants to stop other companies having ideas that would threaten their monopoly, but it also wants ideas itself.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
I'm afraid this isn't obvious to me. I never buy CDs from record stores; I buy them on the internet, often second hand. It is cheaper, easier (order from your house, and they deliver), and I don't like browsing in shops. People are still buying music, legally, just not from you. They buy on the internet, either CDs or downloads (e.g. iTunes Music Store).
Scores to Beethoven's Symphonies are not necessarily public domain. The Symphonies themselves are (i.e. those notes in that order), but any copy of the score, whether as a PDF or manuscript, might be copyright. This is because music publishers produce new editions, correcting the "mistakes" of Beethoven and his editors. So a book of Beethoven's symphonies would be copyright unless it is old enough to be public domain.
I've used E7even for over a year now. They're the cheapest ADSL available in the UK, and they're run by techies so all of their employees know what they're doing.
(I don't have any link to them - I'm just a very satisfied customer.)
What's taking so long?Two words: British Telecom
Yep. BT own the lines, and so can offer expensive line rental. Companies like NTL can install their own lines, but it costs them money, whereas BT have the infrastructure in place already.
If the regulator simply forced BT to offer cheaper wholesale broadband to ISPs, then everything would be fine. At the moment, BT charge ISPs £13 a month for a broadband line (up to 2Mb) (about $25). In France, you can get 2Mb for about 5 Euros/month (about $5). In. BT's service itself is okay. NTL's is very poor.
Why do Record Companies want DRM in music downloads? Even notwithstanding that DRM will always be broken, there doesn't seem to be any need. They don't put DRM on CDs, and it didn't damage CD sales. Copying on the internet is easier, but DRM will always be broken and people will eventually develop swarming P2P which cannot be shut down. A much better strategy would be:
Sell DRM-free files direct from the record companies, cheaply because of minimal individual production costs (bandwidth instead of stamping and transporting a CD).
Sue everyone still stealing files.
The problem with Bittorrent at the moment, now that eXeem has fixed the centralisation problem (no torrent websites, because they can be shut down), is that it isn't anonymous. You need to know the IP address of other people in the torrent in order to connect to them, so even if the IP address is sent encrypted, the peer it is sent to could be a representative of the copyright-holder (e.g. the MPAA, the RIAA). A solution would be to route communications through an anonymous relay, but this causes a bandwidth problem. What is needed is for everyone (not just on that specific torrent, or indeed on any torrent) to act as anonymous relays. It would slow everything down by half, but would solve the anonymity problem. And bandwidth isn't a problem, or won't be.
If someone did develop an anonymous P2P torrent system, then the RIAA and the MPAA wouldn't be able to sue anyone (as in Point 2). But they'd still have to do Point 1 in order to compete. (I wouldn't buy from them if there was no way I could be sued. But some people would.) In the same way, Encyclopædia Brittanica have had to release their content for free on their website and be advertising-supported. If they charge even a penny for it, people simply go to other web-based encyclopedias. Brittanica have to use their brand to get used. And it isn't much on the web compared to Wikipedia. They only get bought as a book by mad librarians who haven't caught up yet, and like to waste paper as libraries.
Unfortunately, the represents a whole new phase of the "Tragedy of the Commons", where resources are not scarce (i.e. files can be copied infinitely), and the price mechanism ceases to operate as a throttle. Ultimately, if no one buys from record companies as soon as a track is available on the internet, anonymously and for free, the record companies won't have enough money to produce albums of the high standard we expect.
I've been using PeerGuardian2 recently. It's alarming how often I get queried by companies keeping track of P2P users. 30 queries an hour, on various ports (P2P) that I don't use. Use it if you don't want to get sued.
"Perhaps Apple actually listened to people complaining about overpriced upgrades."
No, Apple would have researched and found that the price elasticity of demand was such that if they lowered prices, they could sell more and increase overall profits.
Just like Amazon realising that instead of spending money on TV advertising, they could just drop their prices, sell more and increase overall profits.
A couple have people have said that the FBI should get Google to index their records. They should go one step further - make all public (not secret) records available on the internet. This would solve all the problems mentioned about a single freedom of information request taking up hours of civil servant time (and therefore using up taxpayers' money). The FBI and other agencies could say "You want the information: search for it yourself."
Whether they would want to do this or not (citing the expense (even if they really just don't want to make it easy to get records)) is another matter.
I doubt it.
That when Mozilla (or anything not by Microsoft) has a bug, people say "Let's hope that these will be fixed soon!", but when IE (or anything by Microsoft) has a bug, people say (")Hahahahaha!(")?
Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard?
The keyboard isn't going to die any time soon. The shape may change, as the Twiddler has shown, but the basic requirement to input text remains. A mouse just doesn't have enough buttons. (It would, of course, be possible to fully operate a computer with just two buttons, using one button to scroll through a list of possible keyboard buttons until you get to the one you want, then pressing the second button.)
We need to input text. The keyboard is currently the best way to do this. Text-to-speech might get better, but I prefer the keyboard anyway. Soon we'll be able to control the computer with the power of thought - maybe we'll input in a manner similar to a keyboard, maybe not.
Even if the input method did change, this will not cause the death of the command line.
Programs are text-based. As long as this is the case (can anyone conceive another method?), the command line is the most direct way for controlling them, or at least programming them, so the command line interface will remain essential for developers.
Wikipedia didn't get as much - I think they're a more worthy cause, because they provide knowledge, whereas browsers merely access it.
Also, why Firefox? Why has the Open source community thrown its weight behind Firefox, specifically?
You can spoof the URL using onmouseover in any browser, what is the big deal?
Not true - in Firefox, you can disallow scripts access to the status bar.
Slashdot Mirror
And the best way to help other countries develop is to trade freely with them. Ordinary capitalism, in other words.
Creative capitalism? Capitalism is already creative. Growth is caused by creativity.
"There are hundreds of thousands of slashdot readers who refute me"
You mean "repudiate".
From Nigel Warburton - Philosophy: The Basics:
"If you refute a statement, you demonstrate that it is false. In other words, you make an overwhelming case against it. If you repudiate it, you simply deny it.
Yahoo Music Unlimited isn't the best deal around. AllOfMP3.com offer legal, DRM-free downloads at 0.02 USD per 1 Mb.
If it's that difficult to play in iTunes, then just download some software for which it's easy.
Vorbis is not dead, just not well supported. I've seen generic music players that support it, but if you insisted that it was essential you'd be restricting yourself quite a bit.
In the future, I think we might see players being more customisable (i.e. open source firmware). For now, you'd have to install Linux on your iPod.
Indeed, or allofmp3.com is a legal download service based in Russia. It allows you to download from a massive library in many different formats, and is extremely cheap (two cents a meg!).
There are plenty of DRM-less legal download services available, if you look around. And with prices like that, you'd have to be mad to stay with iTunes.
Unless this is a scheme designed to avoid paying people minimum wage. Because the work is paid by task, they can pay a lower amount than they would have to if employing people on salary.
This may actually bring about more good than you think. What if extremely poor people in, say, Thailand, start doing this (assuming somehow they get access to internet, using, say, one of those new "$100 laptops" they were given). In countries where a dollar is an enormous amount of money, if there was some way for them to actually get the money, this would be a fantastic scheme.
Exactly. I'm surprised that many movie studios/record companies are not doing this already. And with 10,000 or 20,000 IPs.
If this takes off, most people will just switch to private trackers with Captchas verification.
Actually, that was Microsoft's strategy too when they were young. They really did obtain "highly innovative, creative, and motivated individuals" to create good software. Now, the acquire them to keep them from creating something that would threaten their monopoly.
It's both. Google wants to stop other companies having ideas that would threaten their monopoly, but it also wants ideas itself.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
I'm afraid this isn't obvious to me. I never buy CDs from record stores; I buy them on the internet, often second hand. It is cheaper, easier (order from your house, and they deliver), and I don't like browsing in shops. People are still buying music, legally, just not from you. They buy on the internet, either CDs or downloads (e.g. iTunes Music Store).
Scores to Beethoven's Symphonies are not necessarily public domain. The Symphonies themselves are (i.e. those notes in that order), but any copy of the score, whether as a PDF or manuscript, might be copyright. This is because music publishers produce new editions, correcting the "mistakes" of Beethoven and his editors. So a book of Beethoven's symphonies would be copyright unless it is old enough to be public domain.
I've used E7even for over a year now. They're the cheapest ADSL available in the UK, and they're run by techies so all of their employees know what they're doing.
(I don't have any link to them - I'm just a very satisfied customer.)
What's taking so long? Two words: British Telecom Yep. BT own the lines, and so can offer expensive line rental. Companies like NTL can install their own lines, but it costs them money, whereas BT have the infrastructure in place already. If the regulator simply forced BT to offer cheaper wholesale broadband to ISPs, then everything would be fine. At the moment, BT charge ISPs £13 a month for a broadband line (up to 2Mb) (about $25). In France, you can get 2Mb for about 5 Euros/month (about $5). In. BT's service itself is okay. NTL's is very poor.
If you're using Firefox, get the Bugmenot plugin. http://roachfiend.com/archives/category/extensions /
Ought to use Rod Logic instead.
You could have skipped that and gone straight to the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula.
I use Wikipedia first, Google second.
- Sell DRM-free files direct from the record companies, cheaply because of minimal individual production costs (bandwidth instead of stamping and transporting a CD).
-
Sue everyone still stealing files.
The problem with Bittorrent at the moment, now that eXeem has fixed the centralisation problem (no torrent websites, because they can be shut down), is that it isn't anonymous. You need to know the IP address of other people in the torrent in order to connect to them, so even if the IP address is sent encrypted, the peer it is sent to could be a representative of the copyright-holder (e.g. the MPAA, the RIAA). A solution would be to route communications through an anonymous relay, but this causes a bandwidth problem. What is needed is for everyone (not just on that specific torrent, or indeed on any torrent) to act as anonymous relays. It would slow everything down by half, but would solve the anonymity problem. And bandwidth isn't a problem, or won't be. If someone did develop an anonymous P2P torrent system, then the RIAA and the MPAA wouldn't be able to sue anyone (as in Point 2). But they'd still have to do Point 1 in order to compete. (I wouldn't buy from them if there was no way I could be sued. But some people would.) In the same way, Encyclopædia Brittanica have had to release their content for free on their website and be advertising-supported. If they charge even a penny for it, people simply go to other web-based encyclopedias. Brittanica have to use their brand to get used. And it isn't much on the web compared to Wikipedia. They only get bought as a book by mad librarians who haven't caught up yet, and like to waste paper as libraries. Unfortunately, the represents a whole new phase of the "Tragedy of the Commons", where resources are not scarce (i.e. files can be copied infinitely), and the price mechanism ceases to operate as a throttle. Ultimately, if no one buys from record companies as soon as a track is available on the internet, anonymously and for free, the record companies won't have enough money to produce albums of the high standard we expect. I've been using PeerGuardian2 recently. It's alarming how often I get queried by companies keeping track of P2P users. 30 queries an hour, on various ports (P2P) that I don't use. Use it if you don't want to get sued."Perhaps Apple actually listened to people complaining about overpriced upgrades." No, Apple would have researched and found that the price elasticity of demand was such that if they lowered prices, they could sell more and increase overall profits. Just like Amazon realising that instead of spending money on TV advertising, they could just drop their prices, sell more and increase overall profits.
A couple have people have said that the FBI should get Google to index their records. They should go one step further - make all public (not secret) records available on the internet. This would solve all the problems mentioned about a single freedom of information request taking up hours of civil servant time (and therefore using up taxpayers' money). The FBI and other agencies could say "You want the information: search for it yourself." Whether they would want to do this or not (citing the expense (even if they really just don't want to make it easy to get records)) is another matter. I doubt it.
That when Mozilla (or anything not by Microsoft) has a bug, people say "Let's hope that these will be fixed soon!", but when IE (or anything by Microsoft) has a bug, people say (")Hahahahaha!(")?
Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard?
The keyboard isn't going to die any time soon. The shape may change, as the Twiddler has shown, but the basic requirement to input text remains. A mouse just doesn't have enough buttons. (It would, of course, be possible to fully operate a computer with just two buttons, using one button to scroll through a list of possible keyboard buttons until you get to the one you want, then pressing the second button.)
We need to input text. The keyboard is currently the best way to do this. Text-to-speech might get better, but I prefer the keyboard anyway. Soon we'll be able to control the computer with the power of thought - maybe we'll input in a manner similar to a keyboard, maybe not.
Even if the input method did change, this will not cause the death of the command line.
Programs are text-based. As long as this is the case (can anyone conceive another method?), the command line is the most direct way for controlling them, or at least programming them, so the command line interface will remain essential for developers.
"Schadenfreude" is an English word!
Seriously, the dictionary would just include the words "schadenfreude" and "unheimlich", and give them definitions as if they were any other word.
Wikipedia didn't get as much - I think they're a more worthy cause, because they provide knowledge, whereas browsers merely access it. Also, why Firefox? Why has the Open source community thrown its weight behind Firefox, specifically?
You can spoof the URL using onmouseover in any browser, what is the big deal? Not true - in Firefox, you can disallow scripts access to the status bar.
I particularly liked the mattress, though the program as a whole wasn't as fast moving as Primary and Secondary.