To be blunt, if you're actively encouraging people to commit copyright infringement with your software, then you should be liable for infringement. It would be different if you were just writing software alone and not advertising about getting free music with it. You cannot encourage people to break the law and then shield yourself from the law, too. That's just not right. Now they'll sue the right people.
Well you're not going to cure the cursed 'Homer Simpson Syndrome' with mere politics and leglislation. It's the public education system that's broken by churning out robots and sheep, and not creators and intellectuals.
Perhaps instead of not encouraging people to vote, we need to encourage people to get a brain so that they can vote intelligently.
Oh, wtf am I kidding? People want to be stupid and have all the thinking done for them. As long as they have their remote control in one hand, and a beer in the other, they don't give a shit about nothing. Maybe you're right after all. Why fuck up this country even more by encouraging their stupidity?
Is it just me or could any website (likely malevolent, or compromised) that wanted to plant kiddie porn on your drive simply hide itself as a 1x1 dot in the web browser while downloading? How the hell are you supposed to know what you even have in the first place? Is surfing the web going to be like a mine field now, where anyplace you surf to could potentially destroy your life, put you in prison, compel you to register once you get out and carry that wretched stigma around with you for the rest of your life?
I'd like to think myself as someone that's somewhat trusting of people, but if this ends up being the way it's going to be because of come crooked lawyer that wants to set a dangerous precedent for a buck, then I'll have no reason to trust anyone online, that's for sure.
The Walmart where I go to in Alpena is kind of nice, but the parking lot is usually fairly well packed, and you get to see a handful of rednecks in there, though. However, it's night and day compared to the Walmart in Port Huron where I used to live. That place is constantly packed with goofy looking and ignorant behaving rejects. Then again, that's not so much an indication of Walmart as it really is an indication of the people in the city itself as it's really nothing but a shithole full of ignorant and self centered people of all socioeconomic classes. I'm just glad to have moved out of that place. People here actually act civilized and even a little friendly although they're certainly in no hurry in doing anything.
In larger communities, Walmart does like to try and put up stores really close to one another. Everytime I go downstate via Highway M-15 south of Bay City, I'd drive by a few anti-walmart signs stating, "Hey Walmart! We already have a store a few miles away from here. We don't need another one." Another sign will say, "Made in China. A great American Story by Sam Walton." and stuff like that. At first, I dismissed it as people being paranoid. However, if there's one thing that Walmart is good for, it's that if the city won't allow Walmart to build within the city, then they'll simply plant themselves in the township just outside the city limits and then drain away the city's local economy like a leech or a vampire as though to make them sorry for not letting them in. So, depending on where you're from, Walmart is either a blessing or an abominition. It's good for me, but ymmv.
...but I'll have to respectfully disagree. In my town, you've got literally two people that own all the businesses. Two. And both of them charge exorbitant prices on their groceries and their other goods. One of them even sells meats that look all half-rotten and shit. I wouldn't be the least bit suprised if this asshole is mixing rotten shit with his fresh stock in his ground meat. Would you also like overpriced milk with that, too? Better check the 'sell by' dates really close around here.
No, I don't think I'm willing to let myself get gouged left and right and potentially put myself in danger of food poisoning for someone else's 'feel good' rendition of what healthy competition ought to be. Not when I can do better for less at Walmart. Instead, they need to get off their lazy butts and learn how to compete instead of always crying foul because nobody wants to buy their overpriced, rancid shit. If you're not willing to compete, then you can go out of business for all I care. Just like I'm not willing to keep an employee if he/she's not willing to put in the effort that his job requires. Besides, perhaps in the next 30 years, Walmart might get displaced by another megastore for all we know, and we could make the argument that killing Walmart would hinder competition and how Foo-Mart is all evil and that. This is how the market economy works. Without the Walmart 25 miles away for competition, we'd have a bad monopoly here right now.
Alas, if there's anything bad about the Walmart expirience I can think of at the top of my head, it's that you'll get to see some of the scariest, and goofiest looking rejects imaginable, but then again, I don't go there to pick up women, neither.;-)
I'm not too suprised that they were so thoroughly proven wrong like that because imo, their claims were totally illogical and unprovable to begin with.
Because I like the simplicity of just sticking a tape into the VCR and pushing RECORD. That, and the picture is still halfway decent for a piece of dated technology. Certainly isn't DVD or digital quality, but it's still good enough for basic usage. DVD recorders don't seem to be quite as convienient in that respect. (Do you have to 'finalize' a VHS tape?)
Secondly, I expect more out of DVDs because you can put in seperate audio tracks, make menus, and other stuff like that, and you can't do that just from hitting the RECORD button. That takes real work to do - something you don't have to worry about with VHS.
Lastly, DVDs are great for archiving a final project and doing really cool stuff with, but doesn't seem optimized for doing general everyday recordings.
Perhaps, but some blogs also seem to nothing more than a gathering place for severely biased and mentally maligned people to congregate and spew their rhettoric. Most of which I'm beginning to shy away from. Especially if it's got anything to do with the RIAA and filesharing - which has really degenerated into nothing but a propaganda war.
I think that just about the only blog I read anymore is Groklaw and that's to check if the stupid asswipes at SCO are still afloat or not. That, and hang out here.
If you're specifically talking about high school, then I would certainly agree. Even a normal person with average intelligence know that the only thing you'll get out of high school is a degree of burger flipping and an education on how to deliver pizzas.
On the other hand, college is a totally different animal and you're only going to get out of it what you put into it. Hey, as long as you got a goal to shoot for, then you're already doing better than I was back in the day. Back when I was in school, I had major problems with just about everybody there that was in a position of authority. I thought the other students were nothing but mindless automatons, and just about the only thing that kept me out of real trouble was serious counseling and lots of Ritalin. (Yes Slashdot crowd, I'm coming out with my personal life here, but I think my expirences might be a touch relevant here.)
Yeah, school's hell, and likely even worse nowadays, but don't fuck it up like I did for if I knew then what I know now, I could've been a eccentric scientist making good money instead of just sitting in Rednecksville fixing people's spyware problems for a few clams and having to rely on a disability check, too. And if you drop out because you can't deal with the drooling retards, then you'll end up becoming a social retard because you can't deal with real people, and as much as real people suck, it's still nice to have a few friends.
What's also funny is that once upon a time, I used to win the local spelling bees at school. Now I spend more time proofreading my mistakes than I do typing. Actually, it's really sad, because now I'm too reliant on spellcheckers that automagically correct my mistakes. Ahhh, the perils of modern convieniences and the eventual intellectual laziness that it causes.;-)
I'd also say that it's better to download, install, and use OpenOffice, than it is to go pay big bucks for M$ Office, open the package, read the EULA, install it, register it, activate it, (gasp) then finally use it. Of course you could also download it and get the crack for it, but why bother committing copyright infringement to have Clippy and all that bloatware when you can download something better for nothing, and be legal, too? For me, OO.org is really a no brainer.
And I thought everyone spelled it M$? I certainly don't sit in front of the desk all day spouting OS evangelistic drivel like. "teh M$ is so 1337, it getz me laid! w00t!"
In the meantime, I'm breaking my habit of astroturfing in the neverending RIAA/p2p fight. It's wasting my time and not doing anything for my karma.
With that being said, if anyone cares to hear a real opinion, I like OpenOffice.org a lot better for word processing than M$ Office. For me, it seems more stable and the interface makes more sense to me, but as far as spreadsheets go, I have no opinion as I don't really have any use for them in what I do. Regardless on what other people use, my pet peeve is people insisting on sending me shit in DOC format when RTF is sufficient for my needs. I simply don't see the point of having 1001 different file formats that I could write a freaking letter with.
For me, this is a battle against corporate control of the internet, a battle for the future of ideas and democracy (yes DRM is that dangerous, just look at what they do with the DMCA). So sooooorry if you can't have your games and your music this instant because you are such a petulant little troll that you can't be bothered putting some effort into the fight.
I can definately agree with you there, too. However, with so many tech companies jumping onto this bullshit TCPA bandwagon, and selling themselves out to the corrupt entertainment industry, I believe that the battle may be already lost. I surely hope not, but does anyone here really see a way to actually win at this point? (and I don't mean some stupid and pointless boycott that virtually nobody will participate in) Meanwhile, since the gov't is buying the line that p2p sponsors terrorism and is rife with child pornography, there's no way that anyone can even have an intelligent debate about it, let alone see through all the misinformation. Meanwhile, I'm really sick and tired of hearing people passing their own moral edicts onto other people and swinging their little dicks around like their opinions ought to be facts and that everybody else is wrong, a terrorist, or simply evil!! Lastly, Joe Sixpack would rather have his music than his freedom. Heaven forbid the sheep ever stand up for their rights. Even Apple's sold out by going to Intel (with their built in DRM, which they deny of course), and with applause from some of their userbase, too. (which has totally thrown me for a loop) This may or may not prove to be their undoing, but will likely kill them if they try to stand toe to toe with M$ again.
Anyway, before I go too far offtopic, I suppose Zawinski will either be back to Linux on his PPC Mac hardware after a few years just to have some sort of OS support, or move on to an x86 Mac that's really going to be nothing more than an overhyped, overpriced PC clone. Oh, I will sadly miss the days when I used to poke fun at Mac users for being different. Now they'll be different alright, just like everybody else. Oh well, and the world will still continue to turn anyway.
I'll definately agree with that one. A whole lot of useless grief and aggravation would be saved just by getting a whitebox system with an OS agnostic motherboard and good quality hardware. If you try installing Linux on some cheap, piece of shit consumer grade computer like some God awful HP, eMachines, Dell or whatever brand that's only 'Recommended for Windows XP', or whatnot, then a lot of things will simply not work - like your dodgy integrated video, your noname sound card, and your worthless winmodem. In my opinion, if the hardware is really that dodgy anyways, then why even support it? Who knows if that same flaky hardware won't make the kernel crash prone, too? I just think that it's completely stupid and asinine to just change OSs just because of a hardware problem. It really looks to me that this Jamie Zawinski fellow sounds like a real blowhard. WTF is he even on the front page of Slashdot for?
...to continue to make more defective junk. Except now, we're just going to drop all pretenses about actually giving a shit about quality. (yawn)
Re:Great. So this means that x86 will never go awa
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
·
· Score: 1
Actually, yes it is the pinnacle of arch development. It's stable, mature, fast, compatible, and apparently highly expandable. It does it all, and everybody uses it, so why replace the damn thing when it's not broken? Or have we learned nothing from the Itanic disaster?
Of course we'll need the extra cores. Not right this second, but this is the future. The old way of ramping up the clock speeds on single cores for added performance is done and over with. It's time to start taking advantage of the extra cores instead of wondering why we even need them. Hell, with that way of thinking, we could also say, "Well why do we need anything more than 16 bit 8088s, 640kb of memory, twin 5 1/4 floppy drives, and MS-DOS? That's good enough. We don't need no stinking 64 bit CPUs, 1Gb of RAM, RAID arrays, DVD burners, blah, blah, blah..." Yeah, whatever. I'm not going to grab a pair of rose colored glasses and go with that backwards train of thought. We need progress, and we also need to open up those I/O bottlenecks while we're at it, or in really simple terms: More speed, dammit!! More speed!!;-)
On my Epson, there's a spongy spot where it goes to waste ink, er, I mean, clean the cartridge. Anyways, I let mine sit for almost a year after I used up all the ink first since I really don't do too much printing to begin with. After I finally got around to getting new ink, I decided to fire it up, put in the cartridges, and then before I let it purge, I take that spongy spot inside, (which was dried up solid) and soaked it with rubbing alcohol. Then I let the print head soak on that and purge itself a few times. Works great now. That's what I would do first before I yank out the print head, especially when you're off warranty anyway. Works for me on an Epson Stylus C62, but YMMV. Some people might not like them, but IMO, anything is better than a goddamned cheap assed Lexmark. I just figured that if the rubbing alcohol can remove the dried up ink stains on the damn thing when nothing else will, then it couldn't hurt to try it out with the spongy thing soaked and sitting on the print head and see what happens.
I'd like to thank whomever that left that link here a while back to http://lasermonks.com/ as it saved me big $$$.
Slashdot Mirror
To be blunt, if you're actively encouraging people to commit copyright infringement with your software, then you should be liable for infringement. It would be different if you were just writing software alone and not advertising about getting free music with it. You cannot encourage people to break the law and then shield yourself from the law, too. That's just not right. Now they'll sue the right people.
Perhaps instead of not encouraging people to vote, we need to encourage people to get a brain so that they can vote intelligently.
Oh, wtf am I kidding? People want to be stupid and have all the thinking done for them. As long as they have their remote control in one hand, and a beer in the other, they don't give a shit about nothing. Maybe you're right after all. Why fuck up this country even more by encouraging their stupidity?
I'd like to think myself as someone that's somewhat trusting of people, but if this ends up being the way it's going to be because of come crooked lawyer that wants to set a dangerous precedent for a buck, then I'll have no reason to trust anyone online, that's for sure.
The Walmart where I go to in Alpena is kind of nice, but the parking lot is usually fairly well packed, and you get to see a handful of rednecks in there, though. However, it's night and day compared to the Walmart in Port Huron where I used to live. That place is constantly packed with goofy looking and ignorant behaving rejects. Then again, that's not so much an indication of Walmart as it really is an indication of the people in the city itself as it's really nothing but a shithole full of ignorant and self centered people of all socioeconomic classes. I'm just glad to have moved out of that place. People here actually act civilized and even a little friendly although they're certainly in no hurry in doing anything.
In larger communities, Walmart does like to try and put up stores really close to one another. Everytime I go downstate via Highway M-15 south of Bay City, I'd drive by a few anti-walmart signs stating, "Hey Walmart! We already have a store a few miles away from here. We don't need another one." Another sign will say, "Made in China. A great American Story by Sam Walton." and stuff like that. At first, I dismissed it as people being paranoid. However, if there's one thing that Walmart is good for, it's that if the city won't allow Walmart to build within the city, then they'll simply plant themselves in the township just outside the city limits and then drain away the city's local economy like a leech or a vampire as though to make them sorry for not letting them in. So, depending on where you're from, Walmart is either a blessing or an abominition. It's good for me, but ymmv.
No, I don't think I'm willing to let myself get gouged left and right and potentially put myself in danger of food poisoning for someone else's 'feel good' rendition of what healthy competition ought to be. Not when I can do better for less at Walmart. Instead, they need to get off their lazy butts and learn how to compete instead of always crying foul because nobody wants to buy their overpriced, rancid shit. If you're not willing to compete, then you can go out of business for all I care. Just like I'm not willing to keep an employee if he/she's not willing to put in the effort that his job requires. Besides, perhaps in the next 30 years, Walmart might get displaced by another megastore for all we know, and we could make the argument that killing Walmart would hinder competition and how Foo-Mart is all evil and that. This is how the market economy works. Without the Walmart 25 miles away for competition, we'd have a bad monopoly here right now.
Alas, if there's anything bad about the Walmart expirience I can think of at the top of my head, it's that you'll get to see some of the scariest, and goofiest looking rejects imaginable, but then again, I don't go there to pick up women, neither. ;-)
Yes. Definately score one for common sense.
Secondly, I expect more out of DVDs because you can put in seperate audio tracks, make menus, and other stuff like that, and you can't do that just from hitting the RECORD button. That takes real work to do - something you don't have to worry about with VHS.
Lastly, DVDs are great for archiving a final project and doing really cool stuff with, but doesn't seem optimized for doing general everyday recordings.
I think that just about the only blog I read anymore is Groklaw and that's to check if the stupid asswipes at SCO are still afloat or not. That, and hang out here.
Wow! Wish I had some mod points to give you for that one.
On the other hand, college is a totally different animal and you're only going to get out of it what you put into it. Hey, as long as you got a goal to shoot for, then you're already doing better than I was back in the day. Back when I was in school, I had major problems with just about everybody there that was in a position of authority. I thought the other students were nothing but mindless automatons, and just about the only thing that kept me out of real trouble was serious counseling and lots of Ritalin. (Yes Slashdot crowd, I'm coming out with my personal life here, but I think my expirences might be a touch relevant here.)
Yeah, school's hell, and likely even worse nowadays, but don't fuck it up like I did for if I knew then what I know now, I could've been a eccentric scientist making good money instead of just sitting in Rednecksville fixing people's spyware problems for a few clams and having to rely on a disability check, too. And if you drop out because you can't deal with the drooling retards, then you'll end up becoming a social retard because you can't deal with real people, and as much as real people suck, it's still nice to have a few friends.
What's also funny is that once upon a time, I used to win the local spelling bees at school. Now I spend more time proofreading my mistakes than I do typing. Actually, it's really sad, because now I'm too reliant on spellcheckers that automagically correct my mistakes. Ahhh, the perils of modern convieniences and the eventual intellectual laziness that it causes. ;-)
Whyz everybudy allways pickin' on me? ;-)
I stand corrected. Damn my spelling sucks sometimes. ;-)
Oh, man that's so funny! (roflmao!)
I'd also say that it's better to download, install, and use OpenOffice, than it is to go pay big bucks for M$ Office, open the package, read the EULA, install it, register it, activate it, (gasp) then finally use it. Of course you could also download it and get the crack for it, but why bother committing copyright infringement to have Clippy and all that bloatware when you can download something better for nothing, and be legal, too? For me, OO.org is really a no brainer.
In the meantime, I'm breaking my habit of astroturfing in the neverending RIAA/p2p fight. It's wasting my time and not doing anything for my karma.
With that being said, if anyone cares to hear a real opinion, I like OpenOffice.org a lot better for word processing than M$ Office. For me, it seems more stable and the interface makes more sense to me, but as far as spreadsheets go, I have no opinion as I don't really have any use for them in what I do. Regardless on what other people use, my pet peeve is people insisting on sending me shit in DOC format when RTF is sufficient for my needs. I simply don't see the point of having 1001 different file formats that I could write a freaking letter with.
Clippy's bloatware? And I thought he actually wanted to help me with my document? I feel so disallusioned. So cheated.
I can definately agree with you there, too. However, with so many tech companies jumping onto this bullshit TCPA bandwagon, and selling themselves out to the corrupt entertainment industry, I believe that the battle may be already lost. I surely hope not, but does anyone here really see a way to actually win at this point? (and I don't mean some stupid and pointless boycott that virtually nobody will participate in) Meanwhile, since the gov't is buying the line that p2p sponsors terrorism and is rife with child pornography, there's no way that anyone can even have an intelligent debate about it, let alone see through all the misinformation. Meanwhile, I'm really sick and tired of hearing people passing their own moral edicts onto other people and swinging their little dicks around like their opinions ought to be facts and that everybody else is wrong, a terrorist, or simply evil!! Lastly, Joe Sixpack would rather have his music than his freedom. Heaven forbid the sheep ever stand up for their rights. Even Apple's sold out by going to Intel (with their built in DRM, which they deny of course), and with applause from some of their userbase, too. (which has totally thrown me for a loop) This may or may not prove to be their undoing, but will likely kill them if they try to stand toe to toe with M$ again.
Anyway, before I go too far offtopic, I suppose Zawinski will either be back to Linux on his PPC Mac hardware after a few years just to have some sort of OS support, or move on to an x86 Mac that's really going to be nothing more than an overhyped, overpriced PC clone. Oh, I will sadly miss the days when I used to poke fun at Mac users for being different. Now they'll be different alright, just like everybody else. Oh well, and the world will still continue to turn anyway.
I'll definately agree with that one. A whole lot of useless grief and aggravation would be saved just by getting a whitebox system with an OS agnostic motherboard and good quality hardware. If you try installing Linux on some cheap, piece of shit consumer grade computer like some God awful HP, eMachines, Dell or whatever brand that's only 'Recommended for Windows XP', or whatnot, then a lot of things will simply not work - like your dodgy integrated video, your noname sound card, and your worthless winmodem. In my opinion, if the hardware is really that dodgy anyways, then why even support it? Who knows if that same flaky hardware won't make the kernel crash prone, too? I just think that it's completely stupid and asinine to just change OSs just because of a hardware problem. It really looks to me that this Jamie Zawinski fellow sounds like a real blowhard. WTF is he even on the front page of Slashdot for?
Amen to that!
...to continue to make more defective junk. Except now, we're just going to drop all pretenses about actually giving a shit about quality. (yawn)
Actually, yes it is the pinnacle of arch development. It's stable, mature, fast, compatible, and apparently highly expandable. It does it all, and everybody uses it, so why replace the damn thing when it's not broken? Or have we learned nothing from the Itanic disaster?
Of course we'll need the extra cores. Not right this second, but this is the future. The old way of ramping up the clock speeds on single cores for added performance is done and over with. It's time to start taking advantage of the extra cores instead of wondering why we even need them. Hell, with that way of thinking, we could also say, "Well why do we need anything more than 16 bit 8088s, 640kb of memory, twin 5 1/4 floppy drives, and MS-DOS? That's good enough. We don't need no stinking 64 bit CPUs, 1Gb of RAM, RAID arrays, DVD burners, blah, blah, blah..." Yeah, whatever. I'm not going to grab a pair of rose colored glasses and go with that backwards train of thought. We need progress, and we also need to open up those I/O bottlenecks while we're at it, or in really simple terms: More speed, dammit!! More speed!! ;-)
I'd like to thank whomever that left that link here a while back to http://lasermonks.com/ as it saved me big $$$.