The other day I purchased some domain space and dusted off my old domain name I had sitting around for about a year. When I went to change my DNS records via netsol, this is what I got:
"It's appears you haven't agreed to our new revised terms of service. You must do so before you proceed."
So, before agreeing to something I haven't even seen, I went and checked it out. HOLY JESUS -- The thing had to have been about 300 pages long. Besides being soaked in legal double talk, the thing was straight up unreadable in size. This is not service agreement, it's a freaking tome! Needless to say, while I tried to read it, it was all too much and I just agreed to it in the end. I mean, I just need to change a DNS record, not spend 2 days trying to digest the most uninteresting thing ever written. Besides, what if I saw something totally evil in there anyway? Chances are, I would have agreed. What am I going to do, let my domain name go to waste? I already payed for it. Shenanigans!
It's a sad state of affairs. Shouldn't there be some sort of limit on the length of a TOS agreement? It reminds me of the old cartoons where somebody would pull out some insane contract with a library of congress's worth of text on the bottom that could only be read with a microscope.
Ya know what my big gripe about watching video content on a PC is? There doesn't seem to be a TV out card that will do total fullscreen for the PC. Every single one that I've tried or seen always has a black bar at the top, bottom, or both.
Has anyone here ever run across a TV out card that doesn't have this annoying flaw? I would like to know if there is one out there that will present video correctly. Also, there is a strange scanline artifact issue with most of these I've seen out there that doesn't happen with set top DVD players and the like. For me, that is the single most important reason I would be interested in buying something like this kiss player.
I'm really serious. If anybody has seen a tv out card that is TOTALY full screen and doesn't have this scanline issue I want to know, because I'd like to build a nice box for the livingroom tube with something like MythTV installed.
Yes, nobody would ever use a mod chip for anything but piracy. The big homebrew ps2 scene is just a myth, right?
I can't beleive I'm feeding an obvious troll here, but some of us are big into application development for the ps2 and that requires a mod chip. God forbid anyone program for a peice of hardware the own.
Man, if these kids are interested in playing music, and one of them asked "What's Freebird?" they are obviously making a joke. Everybody thats ever been in a band has at least played one show where a drunk in the crowd yells:
"PLAY SOME FUCKIN' SKYNYRD!!!"
It's sort of a rule of statistical probabilites here.
Whoever might be thinking that this is just your typical round of script kiddies attacking dalnet is dead wrong. DALnet is in more that serious trouble -- for the most part it's already dead.
As a DALnet vetran and an op of one of the top 20 channels (#80s-cartoons), I can tell you that almost all of the major channels have now moved to other networks for good. Ever since the begining of december we had outages that would last anywhere from 4 days to a WHOLE WEEK where no one could connect to a single server in the network.
The gaul of some people is pretty amazing. Apparently, these current DDos attacks have been orchestrated by some one (or group of people) that are holding the DALnet network ransom and are demanding that dalnet pays them X amount of money to stop the attacks. Mind you, these attacks have been going on for about 2 months now, and these people still aren't in custody of law enforcement. It just goes to show you that the only thing that seems to get the FBI involoved in computer crimes is corporate cash. I guantee you if such an attack was launched against a commercial website, the feds would snag these fools within one day; But since this is a non-profit organization, they seemingly don't give a shit.
A lot of the big channels from DALnet have gone to EFnet. The irony in this is quite painful (Since DALnet was initaly formed by disgruntled people from EFnet trying to escape shitty service in the first place.)
One plus about leaving DALnet on to greener pastures has been zero PM spam on the new networks at least. Well, for now.
First, I found it sorta wierd that he decided to use director as a front end -- Personaly I would have used flash since actionscript is less archaic than lingo is and for doing dynamic vector stuff flash cant be beat. But hey, more power too him.
I am, however, curious as to how he is getting this data (1's and 0's) from the serial port to director? I wasn't aware that lingo had any hardware level control (besides the keybord and mouse) -- unless he's got it wired up so the bx board is actualy simulating a mouse click, but he doesn't say. I find myself wanting more details.
And by the way, the article is a little misleading. $50 for the sensors, breadboard and card reader. Flat screen LCD, foozball table and computer not included. See store for details.
Wal-Mart, Fred Meyers? Right now in Portland you would be LUCKY to get a job there even. It's not just the tech sector here, it's everything. I think the whole state of Oregon might be on unemployment right now. I know people with masters degrees that can't get a job flipping burgers at Mcdonalds.
A funny story about how bad it is in Portland right now: A few months ago, a position for a waitress opened up at a resturant in SE. Apparently, nearly 300 people applied for the job.
Dude, where are you located exactly? In my area (Portland, Oregon) At&t bi has been the best ISP I've ever had in my life (And I've gone through alot of them).
Right now, for $45 Bucks a month I get:
1) 30k Up, 2M Down 2) A Kick ass usenet server that has none of the usual completion issues, decent retation, no "filtering", and I can D/L from it with all 2M with only 2 threads. 3) *MY* pings to stuff in town cool at about 10-30MS 4) Games work just great. 5) Although their TOS states no servers or any kind, I haven't gotten a notice about the Web Server, Mail Server, or IRC DCC Server I've been running. 6) One other thing about the usenet service. I've posted ALOT of stuff (About 10 Gigs) and they haven't bothered me about that either (And that way suprises me)
Now, I can tell you I am EXTREAMLY pissed off about this commcast buyout. Commcast not only has a very bad reputation on DSL reports, but they are the leading ISP in clamping down on users about p2p usage, they have NO usenet server (not even a shitty one like say earthlink), and their service is more expensive with less bandwidth.
I don't know what I'm going to do when this happens, because commcast as an ISP will be unacceptable to me (I have to VPN into work quite a bit -- I believe commcrap will chew you out good for this). DSL *REALY* sucks out here too thanks to how horrible Qwest is. To get what I'm getting now from at&t I would have to pay qwest $250 (And still would only have 1.1M down instead of 2M). Plus the CO is far has hell away from my house.
Thanks FTC. Glad to see you fuckers were on the ball. While your at it, why dont you aprove a merger between, say, Viacom and Time Warner/AOL? That would be REAL good for the consumer.
Anybody remember the McDLT? That super genius marketing scheme from McDonalds back in the early 80's that made the packaging for their cold/hot sandwatch a huge styrofome container 3 times the size of anything else being piched in the garbage?
I am the fartherst thing from an enviromentalist wacko (I barely remember to recycle most of the time), but holy cownuts. That's pretty fucking stupid.
Oh well. I'm sure Bush will get us into a nice nuclear exchange sometime in the next year or so that will take care of this "humanity" problem earth has right now. Too bad everything else on the planet has to die as well.
When will consumers see this technology?
on
87GB On DVD-Sized Media
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You know, I've been waiting a damn long time for a optical storage solution that catches up to the size the will make backing up todays hard drives (40 Gigs and Up) a realistic possibility. 700 Megs just isn't cutting the mustard anymore when were talking about trying to back up 200+ Gigs worth of data.
I Currently have about 1.4 TB of data sitting here in my room on CD-R right now, and let me tell you -- it's getting out of hand. DVD writables are not a solution (Too little, too late theory). I would love nothing more than to consolidate the 13 200 CD Cases I have here into something a little bit more compact.
I've seen a couple of companies working on something like this (Optical CD-Sized solution that stores around 100 GB). Anybody have any theories to when the common dude can roll down to compusa (pick your posion) and snag a few blank 100 GB Disks for a reasonable price? I'm starting to feel like it's 1995 again when a 1.4M Floppy disk was as good as it got.
That you can check your email wicked fast with that baby!
Seriously.. This whole speed thing is becoming quite the moot point now. How much power does a fella need? I'm still sitting behind a 600mhz machine and don't feel the need to upgrade at all. I would even go as far as calling myself a power user (Running intense applications such as Photoshop, doing video editing, etc). Sure, may have to wait a bit for super intense things, but the FEEL of the machine pretty much remains good enough.
Giving it some thought though, it's just a "bigger dick" war. Like guys that get all up an arms over how much horsepower their camaro has or something.
Backs up their music in a proprietary Microsoft format to begin with? It isn't like there is any real benefit over any other open and free format. It's like the same thing with real video -- It's going to be real funny (no pun intended) when real media goes out of business, all their players expire, and all those fools out their encoding stuff in that format are SOL.
Seriously, I don't mean to be harsh, but you sleep in the bed you make for yourself. It's sad that most people dont see the obvious advantages to using open formats instead (You think wmf is going to out live something like mpeg? Are you high?) but man -- if I felt sorry for every dumb shmuck on the planet I would be crying to hard to post to slashdot.
As a side note, a little guy like myself (135lbs) can't handle anything bigger than a small these days. I usualy order the "kiddie" meal whereever I go. I sort of sucks to not be a lard ass in america, because the sizes of drinks and meals here were made for those people in excess of 300 lbs I think.
Well, now I can't spend any mod points on this article because I'm forced to post.:)
I'd like to point out that Matador is owned by a major label (Sony Music I think).. They stopped being indie a long time ago.
Viable alternatives to the type of stuff Matador is crankiing out:
Check out:
Touch and Go Drag City Quarter Stick Minty Fresh Southern Jade Tree K Records Kill Rock Stars Merge
A bunch of others are way good too.. But those are the labels that are on the top of my list. They all have got fantastic stuff that should suit anybody's tastes. And oh yah, their music is a million times better than this shit that's being cranked out by the major labels.
For instance, some musical recomedations:
Pop: Papas Fritas Komeda
Loud Good Old Rock n' Roll: Shellac Oxes Dianogah Mogwai Slint Uze da
Songwritter type stuff: Smog Neutral Milk Hotel Edith Frost
I better stop.. this list could become quite long.
I'd like to make an interesting point about "The Beatles" (as artists) being effected by Audiogalaxy..
Ehem.. Of the two still alive (Paul and Ringo).. They make exactly $0.00 a year off of beatles records sold. Paul lost the rights to beatles songs a long ass time ago.
So, Steal all the beatles songs you can. Isn't like the artists would see any cash if you went out and bought one of their CD's anyhow.
Holy crap! Excuse me for being a doubting thomas, but can you point to some evidence about the $0.21 tax on CD-R (Data - not audio). If your right about that, I think I might seek out a lawyer and try to sue the RIAA. I'm not kidding at all.
See, as an indipendent musician, I press my songs to CD-R's that I sell at shows I play, online, and through mail order. Now, I've known about the whole CD-R Audio scam for a while, and that's why I've never purchesed a CD writter that requires one of these taxed CD-R Audio discs. I mean, common! Why should the RIAA, who are by all means my main competitor, get any cut of the money I make off of selling my music? What kind of mafia extortion bullshit is this? But if it's true that regular CD-R's (data) are "taxed" as well, I think the RIAA owes me *ALOT* of money.
Once again, I'm not kidding. Are you an indie musician too, who is using CD-R's as your sales medium? Sue the RIAA. Talk about an abusive monopoly -- this should be the definition in Websters.
Come to think of it, this should piss off more than just musicians. How many companies back up server data (or whatever) onto CD-R? Should record labels get a cut of the money you spend on CD-R's, even though it's used for data?
So, anybody got any links/etc to back up this claim? I think it's time to try to rape the RIAA for some money for a change. Turn the tables, so to speak.
Back in the summer of 2000 I was working for a company in Soho called Netcreations -- you may have heard of them before (Opt-In email company that some people accuse of spam even though they are against spaming). Anyway, it was about the time of the big dot-communist bust, so the co. wasn't doing so well. Guess who comes along to buy us out? Yup -- Doubleclick.
Anyway, the main deal is that Netcreations had the biggest email list of all the direct mail players at the time, and DC was trying to start their own direct mailing program without much luck. They wanted to buy us in a typical Microsoft fashion (We suck at this area of business, so we'll just buy a company that's good at it because although we are incompetent we have an ass load of cash).
Well, at first NC thought it may be a good idea. DC was making all kinds of promises that they would never abuse the database of emails or connect it to all the personal information they had been collecting by tracking users over these years. They said they would respect Netcreations Double Opt-In only policy (In other words -- you *HAVE* to sign up for email from NetCreations servers, and after you do, you need to verify again that you really really want unsolicited email). Profits were down, so NC said what the hell, and started to sign on-bored.
Here is the funny part. At that exact time me, and like 50% of the tech department there quit. Being the smart little rodents we were, we knew that Doubleclick's word wasn't worth shit, and besides that, really didn't want to be Doubleclick employees. I mean, if you work for DC, how can you godamn sleep at night?? I even went to the "Welcome Aboard" party that DC had for us after I put in my 2 weeks, just so I could drink all their free beer and steal some shit out of their office (Common! You'd do it to if given the opportunity!).
So a month or so past, and I'm still in contact with all my buddys back at NC (Me and the CTO got along great). Turns out, NC decided after all to back out of the deal because, surprise surprise, the signals were there that DC wouldn't keep it's word, and was really planning on abusing the NC email database and connecting it all that cool ass DART shit. NC, not being scum bags, decided that was bullshit and dropped out of the deal.
So yah.. I saw this coming. And ya know what? At least I stole some shit from these guys.
Bah -- do what I do (and other smart people that run their own mailserver) -- set up an aliases list for your email address. Everytime you need to give somebody your email address (For required registrations and all the other stuff that makes the web annoying as hell these days) just make an alias to your "real" address, get your mail from the company, then go and remove that alias -- Voila! You got your registration ID or whatever, and now that company has a bunk email address that they can sell out to spammers, with no concequence to yourself.
There already exists such a thing. Check out http://www.ordb.org/ and you can set up sendmail (Or whatever you use) to check their database for known open relays. If found out about this little gen when my mail server was found to have a hole in it. Only bumb deal about it is that now that I have the hole fixed, I can't seem to get my mailserver off their damn list.:)
But jokes aside, if you run a mailserver and want to block a good deal of spam, you should check out their site.
I have seen the same thing being said about Family Guy as well. What the hell is going on over there at FOX? I can only hope that the reason all these really good shows (Fox's only good shows in my opinion) haven't been renewed for new seasons is whomever job it is to renew shows is waaaaaay asleep at the wheel.
I bet they're going to tell fans it's because of file sharing and 9/11. Sounds like a scummy network thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of insane "agreements"....
The other day I purchased some domain space and dusted off my old domain name I had sitting around for about a year. When I went to change my DNS records via netsol, this is what I got:
"It's appears you haven't agreed to our new revised terms of service. You must do so before you proceed."
So, before agreeing to something I haven't even seen, I went and checked it out. HOLY JESUS -- The thing had to have been about 300 pages long. Besides being soaked in legal double talk, the thing was straight up unreadable in size. This is not service agreement, it's a freaking tome! Needless to say, while I tried to read it, it was all too much and I just agreed to it in the end. I mean, I just need to change a DNS record, not spend 2 days trying to digest the most uninteresting thing ever written. Besides, what if I saw something totally evil in there anyway? Chances are, I would have agreed. What am I going to do, let my domain name go to waste? I already payed for it. Shenanigans!
It's a sad state of affairs. Shouldn't there be some sort of limit on the length of a TOS agreement? It reminds me of the old cartoons where somebody would pull out some insane contract with a library of congress's worth of text on the bottom that could only be read with a microscope.
We just picked up a transmission from jupiter:
"All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa. Attempt No Landing There. Use Them Together. Use Them in Peace."
Ya know what my big gripe about watching video content on a PC is? There doesn't seem to be a TV out card that will do total fullscreen for the PC. Every single one that I've tried or seen always has a black bar at the top, bottom, or both.
Has anyone here ever run across a TV out card that doesn't have this annoying flaw? I would like to know if there is one out there that will present video correctly. Also, there is a strange scanline artifact issue with most of these I've seen out there that doesn't happen with set top DVD players and the like. For me, that is the single most important reason I would be interested in buying something like this kiss player.
I'm really serious. If anybody has seen a tv out card that is TOTALY full screen and doesn't have this scanline issue I want to know, because I'd like to build a nice box for the livingroom tube with something like MythTV installed.
debunkmyth()
{
flamesuiton = true;
Yes, nobody would ever use a mod chip for anything but piracy. The big homebrew ps2 scene is just a myth, right?
I can't beleive I'm feeding an obvious troll here, but some of us are big into application development for the ps2 and that requires a mod chip. God forbid anyone program for a peice of hardware the own.
}
Wil, is that you?
Man, if these kids are interested in playing music, and one of them asked "What's Freebird?" they are obviously making a joke. Everybody thats ever been in a band has at least played one show where a drunk in the crowd yells:
"PLAY SOME FUCKIN' SKYNYRD!!!"
It's sort of a rule of statistical probabilites here.
Whoever might be thinking that this is just your typical round of script kiddies attacking dalnet is dead wrong. DALnet is in more that serious trouble -- for the most part it's already dead.
As a DALnet vetran and an op of one of the top 20 channels (#80s-cartoons), I can tell you that almost all of the major channels have now moved to other networks for good. Ever since the begining of december we had outages that would last anywhere from 4 days to a WHOLE WEEK where no one could connect to a single server in the network.
The gaul of some people is pretty amazing. Apparently, these current DDos attacks have been orchestrated by some one (or group of people) that are holding the DALnet network ransom and are demanding that dalnet pays them X amount of money to stop the attacks. Mind you, these attacks have been going on for about 2 months now, and these people still aren't in custody of law enforcement. It just goes to show you that the only thing that seems to get the FBI involoved in computer crimes is corporate cash. I guantee you if such an attack was launched against a commercial website, the feds would snag these fools within one day; But since this is a non-profit organization, they seemingly don't give a shit.
A lot of the big channels from DALnet have gone to EFnet. The irony in this is quite painful (Since DALnet was initaly formed by disgruntled people from EFnet trying to escape shitty service in the first place.)
One plus about leaving DALnet on to greener pastures has been zero PM spam on the new networks at least. Well, for now.
First, I found it sorta wierd that he decided to use director as a front end -- Personaly I would have used flash since actionscript is less archaic than lingo is and for doing dynamic vector stuff flash cant be beat. But hey, more power too him.
I am, however, curious as to how he is getting this data (1's and 0's) from the serial port to director? I wasn't aware that lingo had any hardware level control (besides the keybord and mouse) -- unless he's got it wired up so the bx board is actualy simulating a mouse click, but he doesn't say. I find myself wanting more details.
And by the way, the article is a little misleading. $50 for the sensors, breadboard and card reader. Flat screen LCD, foozball table and computer not included. See store for details.
Wal-Mart, Fred Meyers? Right now in Portland you would be LUCKY to get a job there even. It's not just the tech sector here, it's everything. I think the whole state of Oregon might be on unemployment right now. I know people with masters degrees that can't get a job flipping burgers at Mcdonalds.
A funny story about how bad it is in Portland right now: A few months ago, a position for a waitress opened up at a resturant in SE. Apparently, nearly 300 people applied for the job.
What is going on Oregon??!?!
Dude, where are you located exactly? In my area (Portland, Oregon) At&t bi has been the best ISP I've ever had in my life (And I've gone through alot of them).
Right now, for $45 Bucks a month I get:
1) 30k Up, 2M Down
2) A Kick ass usenet server that has none of the usual completion issues, decent retation, no "filtering", and I can D/L from it with all 2M with only 2 threads.
3) *MY* pings to stuff in town cool at about 10-30MS
4) Games work just great.
5) Although their TOS states no servers or any kind, I haven't gotten a notice about the Web Server, Mail Server, or IRC DCC Server I've been running.
6) One other thing about the usenet service. I've posted ALOT of stuff (About 10 Gigs) and they haven't bothered me about that either (And that way suprises me)
Now, I can tell you I am EXTREAMLY pissed off about this commcast buyout. Commcast not only has a very bad reputation on DSL reports, but they are the leading ISP in clamping down on users about p2p usage, they have NO usenet server (not even a shitty one like say earthlink), and their service is more expensive with less bandwidth.
I don't know what I'm going to do when this happens, because commcast as an ISP will be unacceptable to me (I have to VPN into work quite a bit -- I believe commcrap will chew you out good for this). DSL *REALY* sucks out here too thanks to how horrible Qwest is. To get what I'm getting now from at&t I would have to pay qwest $250 (And still would only have 1.1M down instead of 2M). Plus the CO is far has hell away from my house.
Thanks FTC. Glad to see you fuckers were on the ball. While your at it, why dont you aprove a merger between, say, Viacom and Time Warner/AOL? That would be REAL good for the consumer.
Is this motherfucking 1982 world here?
Anybody remember the McDLT? That super genius marketing scheme from McDonalds back in the early 80's that made the packaging for their cold/hot sandwatch a huge styrofome container 3 times the size of anything else being piched in the garbage?
I am the fartherst thing from an enviromentalist wacko (I barely remember to recycle most of the time), but holy cownuts. That's pretty fucking stupid.
Oh well. I'm sure Bush will get us into a nice nuclear exchange sometime in the next year or so that will take care of this "humanity" problem earth has right now. Too bad everything else on the planet has to die as well.
You know, I've been waiting a damn long time for a optical storage solution that catches up to the size the will make backing up todays hard drives (40 Gigs and Up) a realistic possibility. 700 Megs just isn't cutting the mustard anymore when were talking about trying to back up 200+ Gigs worth of data.
I Currently have about 1.4 TB of data sitting here in my room on CD-R right now, and let me tell you -- it's getting out of hand. DVD writables are not a solution (Too little, too late theory). I would love nothing more than to consolidate the 13 200 CD Cases I have here into something a little bit more compact.
I've seen a couple of companies working on something like this (Optical CD-Sized solution that stores around 100 GB). Anybody have any theories to when the common dude can roll down to compusa (pick your posion) and snag a few blank 100 GB Disks for a reasonable price? I'm starting to feel like it's 1995 again when a 1.4M Floppy disk was as good as it got.
I hate to be a total star trek dork, but...
Does anybody else get a wierd vibe from looking at that photo that we are looking at a Isolinear Chip? Just a thought.
That you can check your email wicked fast with that baby!
Seriously.. This whole speed thing is becoming quite the moot point now. How much power does a fella need? I'm still sitting behind a 600mhz machine and don't feel the need to upgrade at all. I would even go as far as calling myself a power user (Running intense applications such as Photoshop, doing video editing, etc). Sure, may have to wait a bit for super intense things, but the FEEL of the machine pretty much remains good enough.
Giving it some thought though, it's just a "bigger dick" war. Like guys that get all up an arms over how much horsepower their camaro has or something.
is block the RIAA and member coropartion sites. Now THAT would be justice.
Backs up their music in a proprietary Microsoft format to begin with? It isn't like there is any real benefit over any other open and free format. It's like the same thing with real video -- It's going to be real funny (no pun intended) when real media goes out of business, all their players expire, and all those fools out their encoding stuff in that format are SOL.
Seriously, I don't mean to be harsh, but you sleep in the bed you make for yourself. It's sad that most people dont see the obvious advantages to using open formats instead (You think wmf is going to out live something like mpeg? Are you high?) but man -- if I felt sorry for every dumb shmuck on the planet I would be crying to hard to post to slashdot.
Here it is:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3011/cola.html
As a side note, a little guy like myself (135lbs) can't handle anything bigger than a small these days. I usualy order the "kiddie" meal whereever I go. I sort of sucks to not be a lard ass in america, because the sizes of drinks and meals here were made for those people in excess of 300 lbs I think.
Well, now I can't spend any mod points on this article because I'm forced to post. :)
e da
I'd like to point out that Matador is owned by a major label (Sony Music I think).. They stopped being indie a long time ago.
Viable alternatives to the type of stuff Matador is crankiing out:
Check out:
Touch and Go
Drag City
Quarter Stick
Minty Fresh
Southern
Jade Tree
K Records
Kill Rock Stars
Merge
A bunch of others are way good too.. But those are the labels that are on the top of my list. They all have got fantastic stuff that should suit anybody's tastes. And oh yah, their music is a million times better than this shit that's being cranked out by the major labels.
For instance, some musical recomedations:
Pop:
Papas Fritas
Komeda
Loud Good Old Rock n' Roll:
Shellac
Oxes
Dianogah
Mogwai
Slint
Uz
Songwritter type stuff:
Smog
Neutral Milk Hotel
Edith Frost
I better stop.. this list could become quite long.
I'd like to make an interesting point about "The Beatles" (as artists) being effected by Audiogalaxy..
Ehem.. Of the two still alive (Paul and Ringo).. They make exactly $0.00 a year off of beatles records sold. Paul lost the rights to beatles songs a long ass time ago.
So, Steal all the beatles songs you can. Isn't like the artists would see any cash if you went out and bought one of their CD's anyhow.
*sigh*
First -- MOD THIS PARENT UP
Holy crap! Excuse me for being a doubting thomas, but can you point to some evidence about the $0.21 tax on CD-R (Data - not audio). If your right about that, I think I might seek out a lawyer and try to sue the RIAA. I'm not kidding at all.
See, as an indipendent musician, I press my songs to CD-R's that I sell at shows I play, online, and through mail order. Now, I've known about the whole CD-R Audio scam for a while, and that's why I've never purchesed a CD writter that requires one of these taxed CD-R Audio discs. I mean, common! Why should the RIAA, who are by all means my main competitor, get any cut of the money I make off of selling my music? What kind of mafia extortion bullshit is this? But if it's true that regular CD-R's (data) are "taxed" as well, I think the RIAA owes me *ALOT* of money.
Once again, I'm not kidding. Are you an indie musician too, who is using CD-R's as your sales medium? Sue the RIAA. Talk about an abusive monopoly -- this should be the definition in Websters.
Come to think of it, this should piss off more than just musicians. How many companies back up server data (or whatever) onto CD-R? Should record labels get a cut of the money you spend on CD-R's, even though it's used for data?
So, anybody got any links/etc to back up this claim? I think it's time to try to rape the RIAA for some money for a change. Turn the tables, so to speak.
Back in the summer of 2000 I was working for a company in Soho called Netcreations -- you may have heard of them before (Opt-In email company that some people accuse of spam even though they are against spaming). Anyway, it was about the time of the big dot-communist bust, so the co. wasn't doing so well. Guess who comes along to buy us out? Yup -- Doubleclick.
Anyway, the main deal is that Netcreations had the biggest email list of all the direct mail players at the time, and DC was trying to start their own direct mailing program without much luck. They wanted to buy us in a typical Microsoft fashion (We suck at this area of business, so we'll just buy a company that's good at it because although we are incompetent we have an ass load of cash).
Well, at first NC thought it may be a good idea. DC was making all kinds of promises that they would never abuse the database of emails or connect it to all the personal information they had been collecting by tracking users over these years. They said they would respect Netcreations Double Opt-In only policy (In other words -- you *HAVE* to sign up for email from NetCreations servers, and after you do, you need to verify again that you really really want unsolicited email). Profits were down, so NC said what the hell, and started to sign on-bored.
Here is the funny part. At that exact time me, and like 50% of the tech department there quit. Being the smart little rodents we were, we knew that Doubleclick's word wasn't worth shit, and besides that, really didn't want to be Doubleclick employees. I mean, if you work for DC, how can you godamn sleep at night?? I even went to the "Welcome Aboard" party that DC had for us after I put in my 2 weeks, just so I could drink all their free beer and steal some shit out of their office (Common! You'd do it to if given the opportunity!).
So a month or so past, and I'm still in contact with all my buddys back at NC (Me and the CTO got along great). Turns out, NC decided after all to back out of the deal because, surprise surprise, the signals were there that DC wouldn't keep it's word, and was really planning on abusing the NC email database and connecting it all that cool ass DART shit. NC, not being scum bags, decided that was bullshit and dropped out of the deal.
So yah.. I saw this coming. And ya know what? At least I stole some shit from these guys.
Bah -- do what I do (and other smart people that run their own mailserver) -- set up an aliases list for your email address. Everytime you need to give somebody your email address (For required registrations and all the other stuff that makes the web annoying as hell these days) just make an alias to your "real" address, get your mail from the company, then go and remove that alias -- Voila! You got your registration ID or whatever, and now that company has a bunk email address that they can sell out to spammers, with no concequence to yourself.
As easy as proverbial pie.
There already exists such a thing. Check out http://www.ordb.org/ and you can set up sendmail (Or whatever you use) to check their database for known open relays. If found out about this little gen when my mail server was found to have a hole in it. Only bumb deal about it is that now that I have the hole fixed, I can't seem to get my mailserver off their damn list. :)
But jokes aside, if you run a mailserver and want to block a good deal of spam, you should check out their site.
I have seen the same thing being said about Family Guy as well. What the hell is going on over there at FOX? I can only hope that the reason all these really good shows (Fox's only good shows in my opinion) haven't been renewed for new seasons is whomever job it is to renew shows is waaaaaay asleep at the wheel.
I bet they're going to tell fans it's because of file sharing and 9/11. Sounds like a scummy network thing to do.
Dude, that's silly. Thehun.net would win by a landslide everyday.