Re:RTFA instead of looking at the pretty picture
on
A Visual History of Spam
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Well, let me try to be more concise (since being circumspect does not apply), but Micro$oft has taken what open source developers created from the Arpanet and turned it into a playground where every icon on a desktop looks like a treat without consequences.
That is exactly what they've contributed to without giving enough attention to encouraging people to be responsible with the tools they use to communicate in an open environment where virtually everyone on the planet can review firsthand the behavior of all others. I stand behind my 99% estimate. Care to offer something different?
Also, take a look at the definition of circumspect before using the term. My argument has no impact on others. It implicates no one but myself since I'm merely offering an opinion. M$ has created software and an environment where 95% of the world is forced to use one tool to do the job of communicating in the Internet medium. I'd argue the term applies much more accurately to the proliferation of their software due to the way they've manipulated the market to ensure it was the only tool in place for most people.
Incidentally, Slashdot is the rebuttal. What are you doing here? >:)
Re:RTFA instead of looking at the pretty picture
on
A Visual History of Spam
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I also looked at the pretty picture and embellished my personal knowledge base by reading the article, as well.
I agree with the person you responded too; this guy's level of spam is nil. And, the true irony is that M$ (for whom this suck-ass works) is probably 99% of the reason spam exists anyway!
The true question is why is this even remotely "news for nerds. stuff that matters." Don't understand how it made the press when most of us here get as much spam on some days that this prick has received since 1997. News?
I'm hoping that with the demise of the RIAA and the traditional music model, DRM will become equally irrelevant. It's only in America that we let our distributors of artistic content limit our music choices to such a degree that we believe our only choice is to buy what they present us.
The means to production for artists is cheaper than in history and most indie music I've been experiencing surpases 90% of what's on the Billboard in quality, talent, creativeness and variety within and outside of genres. There's more to music thatn hip-hop, unless all you watch is MTV.
Let Micro$oft get into the Music-selling industry. They can sell the same industry-approved music the rest of the dying veterans of the commercial music biz sell and at their same increasingly dwindling rate of return.
True artists don't sell; they create. Another thing Micro$oft has never done on it's own. Most artists are happy to sell off their 1,000 units at $10/copy and earn $25K a year selling CDs, playing music and interacting with people who sincerely enjoy the music experience without all the consumeristic baggage with which it has been packaged in U.S. culture by the media conglomerates who now own and define it.
As a couple of people have already stated in previous posts, they've left IT anyway; albeit some have conveyed a certain sense of loss or depression about it. I say we tell the Industry good riddance.
I'm a poor, but happy performing singer / songwriter now and stay as far away from IT as possible. I'm keeping a couple small sysadmin contracts to keep a few bucks flowing in until I get a job waiting tables, or tending bar.
Tried the consulting thing, but what ends up happening with those 3 - 6 month $50/hr contracts for fortune-500 biotechs is they inject tons of project creep and then blame you for gauging for change-orders. You end up making adjustments to your rate to appease them and they're never pleased in the end. This didn't used to happen when I consulted for IBM because IBM had big balls too and told them they could fuck the rate adjustments if they weren't willing to pay for the additional features they asked for.
Really, who cares folks? The rate for a consultant ends up being about $25/hour after all is said and done, and you can make that slinging drinks for people if you aren't an asshole. None of us are going to be millionaires anyway unless we weasle our way into management and continue the trend once there of sending skilled American jobs to places besides America. And software design isn't about innovation or revolutionary algorithms; it's about service pack 4000 for Windows; still the only game in town.
So fly; be free little birds. Let those irritating stressful bullshit jobs go wherever they want. I don't feel like doing that shit for anyone else anyway. I'll just keep my website updated with my latest song.
I already know how to administer Lunix and Apache / PHP / MySQL so like I give a rats-ass about finding a good programmer to maintain it and keep it running. I've already got one and don't make him work any harder than he wants to.
Good riddance to an industry that won't compensate you for a difficult job, anyway. Best of luck dudes and dudettes!
"Oddly enough, that's *exactly* how the *nix folks have been behaving for years...."
Actually, *nix folks have been securing their systems since 1970 and created an OS architecture from it's foundation that places priorities on security and stability. While the desktop still isn't as pretty as the other one, it's never hidden it's features or security considerations from the operator.
The other one made it pretty and left it wide open and they've been trying rather unsuccessfully for 5 years to attempt to secure it.
The operators of these rather different OS architectures usually side with one or the other based upon how their philosophy lines up with which: security first, or useability? *nix users usually know where all the vulnerabilities are because they can find them easily since it's open; Windows users are hopelessly stuck clicking on things and _still_ rebooting when all hope fails. But, since I'm just a UNIX/Linux "zealot," quoting security 101, I doubt this makes much sense to typical Windows folks.
They're entirely different animals and I'll start considering Windows users to be acceptably effective at securing their machines when they learn as much about their own architecture as most *nix users know about them. If you read the tech headlines every couple months, you know that is far from the case.
What MP3.com promised initially was very encouraging as a songwriter, independent producer of music, but got subjugated by processes very similar to how M$ has garnered it's software inventory: they made it somewhat successful and sold out, leaving the artists who'd invested tremendous time and effort into a project with no potential to gain any benefit from what they contributed.
I'm sure the next model will be much less viable since these artists have been once bitten. There's always the potential for the next mp3.com to be usurped by some company linked to the RIAA. They won't get any useful content to build this site. Most artists I talk to are done with this futile activity. It's the same end result as sending CD's to labels so they can get thrown away by some A & R rep.
Commercial music is crap. Indies need to take their units out to the clubs and present and sell their material there. That's the only place "The Institution" cannot compete on merits.
People don't buy Macs to run Apache. They blow the dust off an old PII for that and then run BSD, or Linux.
You run Macs for hi-end i/o-intensive bandwidth applications like ProTools, PhotoShop, and Premiere. Best I recall, you can't do those things on OpenBSD.
WRT the patch, most Macs don't run in hostile environments either. So the realities of not getting these "security" patches, while irritating, is probably not going to expose any vulnerable machines. The precedent Apple sets to their customers, however is something I find disturbing. The only reason I'm running XP for my ProTools LE is for the same predicament it appears Apple is placing it's users. Perhaps I won't buy that Mac after all... seems like the same problem Micro$oft has been inflicting on me for the past 15 years without having to spend $2k on proprietary hardware. The decision metric just changed back in favor of Mickey$oft, Apple; hope you guys are listening...
"...Why do you think certain artists appear in top 10 spots?..."
Same way certain google searches show an ad for a company in the results -- it's paid for. Someone pays radio stations to play certain songs and some songs more than others.
People will buy what's sitting in front of them: the DoubleMint gum on the Circle-K display rack, the 2 for $3.00 20 oz Budweiser cans next to it, and Britney CDs and posters in a display rack at Sam Goody's as you enter the store.
It's more likely that will be bought by the generic consumer than the Robert Cray CD in the back in the Heritage section.
You're right about the advertising that labels can do that artists can't afford to do. As far as distribution, now....
Your comments ignore the issue this article was meant to emphasize. Please, educate the uninformed that copyright holders have rights. That's perfectly appropriate. But, also educate them that the holders of copyrights aren't necessarily the people who wrote the material that was copyrighted, as well. Make sure you let them know the RIAA represents the interests of organizations that exploit artists for 95% or so of their rights for the works they create for commercial gain for very, very long periods of time in the interests of making money.
What the RIAA is doing is quite legal. But, what they've done to gain those copyrights is morally quite questionable. Artists create out of compulsion; not of commercial aspiration. Unfortunately, the wheels of commerce usurp that product to the exclusion of the creator and, while they're legally justified in suing consumers for gaining access to that content outside the distribution channels they concocted for that purpose, they _must_ come to terms with the reality that the consumer is now wise to what they've done to the creators of those legal assets.
Educate the consumer as to the law, sure... But, please give the proceeds to those who create the art, or you're supporting the system to the demise of those for which the system was originally set up. You need to teach that in your college class...
You're onto something here, and I'm not sure what it is exactly, but noting that the offended artists are all established and rely heavily on the existing royalty model, would have to infer that they just wouldn't get as much scratch from singles as they currently get from the album model. So, I'm guessing it's all about money.
I agree with you on the best of and/or remake concept. But, I also think a singles model is fine as well. We should be arguing less about choices today since we have so many of them and start concerning ourselves more with content since we have much more access to it than we used to (even before the "rock" phenomena of the 50's occurred).
I'm not a signed artist and have spent about $5,000 on my current CD, Wasted Tears and understand the business of producing music. It's painful and expensive, but it's done because of the joy you get when you finish a song and that song is a part of a collection of other songs to such extent that you put them together on a CD. Some of these tunes are no more related to the other songs on this CD than Linkin' Park's "In the End" is related to Burt Bacharach's "Close to You," but they happen to be on the same CD because it makes more sense in the modern context to put more than one song into the finished product. I actually could care less if someone took "Ostracising the Ostrich" as a single rather than abstain from buying the Wasted Tears CD because it was too expensive given they just wanted that one song. But, then I haven't gone platinum or made millions from my "art" so I don't know what it's like to lose out to the lesser over the greater revenue I'd be realizing if I had sold hundreds of thousands of CDs.
In the end, I'm guessing that ultimately the consumer will decide what they want to buy and my hope is that if they buy one of my singles for $.99 they'll wonder what the other songs on that production sound like and buy the whole CD. Either way, I'd be grateful that I got anything out of it and that someone else enjoyed what I'd produced. That's really what being an artist is all about. If people buy your produced work; that's just a bonus. I'd have more respect for Jewel if she were to spin that message rather than the nickle and diming one...
Knowledge is power. If newbies can't compile their own kernels and don't have the technical ability to do so, they will be stuck with what they are given until they learn how to do it for themselves. The source and tools are all free and GPLed for them to learn how, if they so desire.
I would love to fly helicopters, but don't have a license to do so and have no idea how to pilot a helicopter. If I want to fly one, I'll have to learn, or just pay someone to take me up there. Sucks to be me. That's the way things work.
A boycott will work. The money people spend on mainstream music _absolutely_ funds the efforts of the RIAA. NONE of that money goes to the artist. Very little of that money goes to production. A little of it goes to marketing. ALMOST ALL of it goes to the bottom line of RIAA-sponsored companies. If you don't give them $19 for a CD, they just lost somewhere between $10 and $15 per unit for their campaign. Eventually, their lawyers on staff and their lobbyists will go do their lawyering and lobbying for some other cause when the RIAA has to trim costs for actual operations of their labels.
When people spend that money for competing content, like local and regional unsigned artists at fairs, bars, coffee shops and other places not controlled by Clear Channel Communications and Miller Beer Co., they accomplish two things: 1) take money from the RIAA to keep suing them and force-feed what they want people to hear down their throats; and, 2) provide for local artists to create and produce new content giving people more choices of music content.
CD prices of signed artists will also go down. They will have to since record companies that don't make money cannot stay in business. Boycotts are one of the most bullet-proof tools in a capitalist economy. Use it...
A picture within a news publication is news. Within the context of fact-reporting journalism, we should be able to expect that all representations are factual and undoctored. Outside of that realm (in artistic / and other subjective contexts), we know we can't have that expectation.
There are already some very subjective elements in news reporting and it doesn't build our diminishing trust in the media when we can no longer expect images to be accurate and undoctored.
It wouldn't upset my news gathering experience in the least if "MS"NBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the rest of their ilk would just cut all the adjectives from their stories completely and leave me with facts; objective reporting. It would take less time to get caught up on current events, and let me come to my own conclusions about how I feel about what's being reported.
I agree that in this case, the changes are pretty trivial and that firing the reporter is pretty extreme, but anything not altered from it's original visual depiction is still not fact. People are probably overreacting because there's so damn much spin in our world these days...
Sendmail is OSS. Complete source code is available to you if you wish to use the software. If that scares someone, they might want to reconsider taking on the responsibility of running a server.
What Red Hat does with that software is another story. I probably wouldn't trust Red Hat as much as I'd trust Sendmail so there might be something to your suggestion there.
So, you're contending that running a server should be easy. Possibly, but it isn't. M$ suggested the same thing with NT 3.51 and still maintains that to some degree, Mitzi the receptionist can be your server administrator.
I hadn't had to touch my sendmail servers since Jan 3 2001. I have to upgrade my ssh daemon every year, or two; Apache about the same. GLIBC about the same. I have to reboot my systems every 3 - 36 months, or so. It's a lot of work, I agree, but someone has to do it. Back before service pack 3 on my Windows 2000 active server I used to have to reboot it every couple weeks due to new browser flaws that could result in a root compromise, or SQL server problem, or some buffer overflow in my MP3 player. So, that used to be kind of a pain in the ass, too. Then M$ came out with SP3 and told me in the Supplemental EULA that if I installed it, they could have my machine. So, that's really not a big maintenance chore, anymore.
I do have to reboot it every week, or so anyway. Not exactly sure why. I just do....
Yeah, sendmail has problems... So do lots of things, but I'm not about to ditch it just 'cause it needs a patch after running for the past couple years since I last upgraded it. Funny thing about sendmail is that's the most important service I run. Go figure...
Open source vs. closed source. Red Hat packages (most of them) are GPL-ed open source software. You can get the source code and see specifically what the code does. These guys needed to use a sniffer to find out what information was being transmitted to M$. What isn't sinister about that?
I won't even touch on the fact that all this software package comparison could be compared locally and that how is it M$'s business that I have Quicken installed? Unless of course they think I should have Money instead... Someone else who replied to this thread said it best: thugs.
"...can only come to pass when our representatives in congress are not representing us."
After the last presidential elections -- esp. in FL -- there is a general perception among US citizens that our vote really doesn't count and that we aren't currently being respresented as advertised. The process can be altered by other means (judicial review of ballots) to ensure a particular result. (Paranoid, sure, but it establishes the perception.)
This will come to pass because we're about to head into war. There isn't much we can do about that either because the decision-makers we've elected have already set the wheels in motion. Once we're in a state of war, this proposal will become a law in a form very similar to the ideas discussed in the articule. Just like PATRIOT I.
Best move you can make as a US citizen is to do the things you mention (sure, it can't hurt to vote, I guess) and keep a very low profile. Or expatriate. But, better do that before this becomes law, otherwise the consequences of that will change quite a bit, also.
Sounds about right to me. About $500 / track in the studio. Costs go down as you press and sell more. Definitely not $500,000. I'm certain those types of expenses would include promotion, so the article title might not be dead on...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let me try to be more concise (since being circumspect does not apply), but Micro$oft has taken what open source developers created from the Arpanet and turned it into a playground where every icon on a desktop looks like a treat without consequences.
That is exactly what they've contributed to without giving enough attention to encouraging people to be responsible with the tools they use to communicate in an open environment where virtually everyone on the planet can review firsthand the behavior of all others. I stand behind my 99% estimate. Care to offer something different?
Also, take a look at the definition of circumspect before using the term. My argument has no impact on others. It implicates no one but myself since I'm merely offering an opinion. M$ has created software and an environment where 95% of the world is forced to use one tool to do the job of communicating in the Internet medium. I'd argue the term applies much more accurately to the proliferation of their software due to the way they've manipulated the market to ensure it was the only tool in place for most people.
Incidentally, Slashdot is the rebuttal. What are you doing here? >:)
I also looked at the pretty picture and embellished my personal knowledge base by reading the article, as well.
I agree with the person you responded too; this guy's level of spam is nil. And, the true irony is that M$ (for whom this suck-ass works) is probably 99% of the reason spam exists anyway!
The true question is why is this even remotely "news for nerds. stuff that matters." Don't understand how it made the press when most of us here get as much spam on some days that this prick has received since 1997. News?
What was it you said... Doh? Telling response....
I want to know why this guy has only received 3,500 spams since 1997?
1-800-WAA-AAAH!
Cheez!
I'm hoping that with the demise of the RIAA and the traditional music model, DRM will become equally irrelevant. It's only in America that we let our distributors of artistic content limit our music choices to such a degree that we believe our only choice is to buy what they present us.
The means to production for artists is cheaper than in history and most indie music I've been experiencing surpases 90% of what's on the Billboard in quality, talent, creativeness and variety within and outside of genres. There's more to music thatn hip-hop, unless all you watch is MTV.
Let Micro$oft get into the Music-selling industry. They can sell the same industry-approved music the rest of the dying veterans of the commercial music biz sell and at their same increasingly dwindling rate of return.
True artists don't sell; they create. Another thing Micro$oft has never done on it's own. Most artists are happy to sell off their 1,000 units at $10/copy and earn $25K a year selling CDs, playing music and interacting with people who sincerely enjoy the music experience without all the consumeristic baggage with which it has been packaged in U.S. culture by the media conglomerates who now own and define it.
As a couple of people have already stated in previous posts, they've left IT anyway; albeit some have conveyed a certain sense of loss or depression about it. I say we tell the Industry good riddance.
I'm a poor, but happy performing singer / songwriter now and stay as far away from IT as possible. I'm keeping a couple small sysadmin contracts to keep a few bucks flowing in until I get a job waiting tables, or tending bar.
Tried the consulting thing, but what ends up happening with those 3 - 6 month $50/hr contracts for fortune-500 biotechs is they inject tons of project creep and then blame you for gauging for change-orders. You end up making adjustments to your rate to appease them and they're never pleased in the end. This didn't used to happen when I consulted for IBM because IBM had big balls too and told them they could fuck the rate adjustments if they weren't willing to pay for the additional features they asked for.
Really, who cares folks? The rate for a consultant ends up being about $25/hour after all is said and done, and you can make that slinging drinks for people if you aren't an asshole. None of us are going to be millionaires anyway unless we weasle our way into management and continue the trend once there of sending skilled American jobs to places besides America. And software design isn't about innovation or revolutionary algorithms; it's about service pack 4000 for Windows; still the only game in town.
So fly; be free little birds. Let those irritating stressful bullshit jobs go wherever they want. I don't feel like doing that shit for anyone else anyway. I'll just keep my website updated with my latest song.
I already know how to administer Lunix and Apache / PHP / MySQL so like I give a rats-ass about finding a good programmer to maintain it and keep it running. I've already got one and don't make him work any harder than he wants to.
Good riddance to an industry that won't compensate you for a difficult job, anyway. Best of luck dudes and dudettes!
"Oddly enough, that's *exactly* how the *nix folks have been behaving for years.
Actually, *nix folks have been securing their systems since 1970 and created an OS architecture from it's foundation that places priorities on security and stability. While the desktop still isn't as pretty as the other one, it's never hidden it's features or security considerations from the operator.
The other one made it pretty and left it wide open and they've been trying rather unsuccessfully for 5 years to attempt to secure it.
The operators of these rather different OS architectures usually side with one or the other based upon how their philosophy lines up with which: security first, or useability? *nix users usually know where all the vulnerabilities are because they can find them easily since it's open; Windows users are hopelessly stuck clicking on things and _still_ rebooting when all hope fails. But, since I'm just a UNIX/Linux "zealot," quoting security 101, I doubt this makes much sense to typical Windows folks.
They're entirely different animals and I'll start considering Windows users to be acceptably effective at securing their machines when they learn as much about their own architecture as most *nix users know about them. If you read the tech headlines every couple months, you know that is far from the case.
What MP3.com promised initially was very encouraging as a songwriter, independent producer of music, but got subjugated by processes very similar to how M$ has garnered it's software inventory: they made it somewhat successful and sold out, leaving the artists who'd invested tremendous time and effort into a project with no potential to gain any benefit from what they contributed.
I'm sure the next model will be much less viable since these artists have been once bitten. There's always the potential for the next mp3.com to be usurped by some company linked to the RIAA. They won't get any useful content to build this site. Most artists I talk to are done with this futile activity. It's the same end result as sending CD's to labels so they can get thrown away by some A & R rep.
Commercial music is crap. Indies need to take their units out to the clubs and present and sell their material there. That's the only place "The Institution" cannot compete on merits.
People don't buy Macs to run Apache. They blow the dust off an old PII for that and then run BSD, or Linux.
You run Macs for hi-end i/o-intensive bandwidth applications like ProTools, PhotoShop, and Premiere. Best I recall, you can't do those things on OpenBSD.
WRT the patch, most Macs don't run in hostile environments either. So the realities of not getting these "security" patches, while irritating, is probably not going to expose any vulnerable machines. The precedent Apple sets to their customers, however is something I find disturbing. The only reason I'm running XP for my ProTools LE is for the same predicament it appears Apple is placing it's users. Perhaps I won't buy that Mac after all... seems like the same problem Micro$oft has been inflicting on me for the past 15 years without having to spend $2k on proprietary hardware. The decision metric just changed back in favor of Mickey$oft, Apple; hope you guys are listening...
"...Why do you think certain artists appear in top 10 spots?..."
Same way certain google searches show an ad for a company in the results -- it's paid for. Someone pays radio stations to play certain songs and some songs more than others.
People will buy what's sitting in front of them: the DoubleMint gum on the Circle-K display rack, the 2 for $3.00 20 oz Budweiser cans next to it, and Britney CDs and posters in a display rack at Sam Goody's as you enter the store.
It's more likely that will be bought by the generic consumer than the Robert Cray CD in the back in the Heritage section.
You're right about the advertising that labels can do that artists can't afford to do. As far as distribution, now....
Your comments ignore the issue this article was meant to emphasize. Please, educate the uninformed that copyright holders have rights. That's perfectly appropriate. But, also educate them that the holders of copyrights aren't necessarily the people who wrote the material that was copyrighted, as well. Make sure you let them know the RIAA represents the interests of organizations that exploit artists for 95% or so of their rights for the works they create for commercial gain for very, very long periods of time in the interests of making money.
What the RIAA is doing is quite legal. But, what they've done to gain those copyrights is morally quite questionable. Artists create out of compulsion; not of commercial aspiration. Unfortunately, the wheels of commerce usurp that product to the exclusion of the creator and, while they're legally justified in suing consumers for gaining access to that content outside the distribution channels they concocted for that purpose, they _must_ come to terms with the reality that the consumer is now wise to what they've done to the creators of those legal assets.
Educate the consumer as to the law, sure... But, please give the proceeds to those who create the art, or you're supporting the system to the demise of those for which the system was originally set up. You need to teach that in your college class...
You're onto something here, and I'm not sure what it is exactly, but noting that the offended artists are all established and rely heavily on the existing royalty model, would have to infer that they just wouldn't get as much scratch from singles as they currently get from the album model. So, I'm guessing it's all about money.
I agree with you on the best of and/or remake concept. But, I also think a singles model is fine as well. We should be arguing less about choices today since we have so many of them and start concerning ourselves more with content since we have much more access to it than we used to (even before the "rock" phenomena of the 50's occurred).
I'm not a signed artist and have spent about $5,000 on my current CD, Wasted Tears and understand the business of producing music. It's painful and expensive, but it's done because of the joy you get when you finish a song and that song is a part of a collection of other songs to such extent that you put them together on a CD. Some of these tunes are no more related to the other songs on this CD than Linkin' Park's "In the End" is related to Burt Bacharach's "Close to You," but they happen to be on the same CD because it makes more sense in the modern context to put more than one song into the finished product. I actually could care less if someone took "Ostracising the Ostrich" as a single rather than abstain from buying the Wasted Tears CD because it was too expensive given they just wanted that one song. But, then I haven't gone platinum or made millions from my "art" so I don't know what it's like to lose out to the lesser over the greater revenue I'd be realizing if I had sold hundreds of thousands of CDs.
In the end, I'm guessing that ultimately the consumer will decide what they want to buy and my hope is that if they buy one of my singles for $.99 they'll wonder what the other songs on that production sound like and buy the whole CD. Either way, I'd be grateful that I got anything out of it and that someone else enjoyed what I'd produced. That's really what being an artist is all about. If people buy your produced work; that's just a bonus. I'd have more respect for Jewel if she were to spin that message rather than the nickle and diming one...
Knowledge is power. If newbies can't compile their own kernels and don't have the technical ability to do so, they will be stuck with what they are given until they learn how to do it for themselves. The source and tools are all free and GPLed for them to learn how, if they so desire.
I would love to fly helicopters, but don't have a license to do so and have no idea how to pilot a helicopter. If I want to fly one, I'll have to learn, or just pay someone to take me up there. Sucks to be me. That's the way things work.
A boycott will work. The money people spend on mainstream music _absolutely_ funds the efforts of the RIAA. NONE of that money goes to the artist. Very little of that money goes to production. A little of it goes to marketing. ALMOST ALL of it goes to the bottom line of RIAA-sponsored companies. If you don't give them $19 for a CD, they just lost somewhere between $10 and $15 per unit for their campaign. Eventually, their lawyers on staff and their lobbyists will go do their lawyering and lobbying for some other cause when the RIAA has to trim costs for actual operations of their labels.
When people spend that money for competing content, like local and regional unsigned artists at fairs, bars, coffee shops and other places not controlled by Clear Channel Communications and Miller Beer Co., they accomplish two things: 1) take money from the RIAA to keep suing them and force-feed what they want people to hear down their throats; and, 2) provide for local artists to create and produce new content giving people more choices of music content.
CD prices of signed artists will also go down. They will have to since record companies that don't make money cannot stay in business. Boycotts are one of the most bullet-proof tools in a capitalist economy. Use it...
A picture within a news publication is news. Within the context of fact-reporting journalism, we should be able to expect that all representations are factual and undoctored. Outside of that realm (in artistic / and other subjective contexts), we know we can't have that expectation.
There are already some very subjective elements in news reporting and it doesn't build our diminishing trust in the media when we can no longer expect images to be accurate and undoctored.
It wouldn't upset my news gathering experience in the least if "MS"NBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the rest of their ilk would just cut all the adjectives from their stories completely and leave me with facts; objective reporting. It would take less time to get caught up on current events, and let me come to my own conclusions about how I feel about what's being reported.
I agree that in this case, the changes are pretty trivial and that firing the reporter is pretty extreme, but anything not altered from it's original visual depiction is still not fact. People are probably overreacting because there's so damn much spin in our world these days...
Of course I've checked the source code. Thanks for asking.
What's an RPM?
Sendmail is OSS. Complete source code is available to you if you wish to use the software. If that scares someone, they might want to reconsider taking on the responsibility of running a server.
What Red Hat does with that software is another story. I probably wouldn't trust Red Hat as much as I'd trust Sendmail so there might be something to your suggestion there.
So, you're contending that running a server should be easy. Possibly, but it isn't. M$ suggested the same thing with NT 3.51 and still maintains that to some degree, Mitzi the receptionist can be your server administrator.
Is approach that working?
I hadn't had to touch my sendmail servers since Jan 3 2001. I have to upgrade my ssh daemon every year, or two; Apache about the same. GLIBC about the same. I have to reboot my systems every 3 - 36 months, or so. It's a lot of work, I agree, but someone has to do it. Back before service pack 3 on my Windows 2000 active server I used to have to reboot it every couple weeks due to new browser flaws that could result in a root compromise, or SQL server problem, or some buffer overflow in my MP3 player. So, that used to be kind of a pain in the ass, too. Then M$ came out with SP3 and told me in the Supplemental EULA that if I installed it, they could have my machine. So, that's really not a big maintenance chore, anymore.
I do have to reboot it every week, or so anyway. Not exactly sure why. I just do....
Yeah, sendmail has problems... So do lots of things, but I'm not about to ditch it just 'cause it needs a patch after running for the past couple years since I last upgraded it. Funny thing about sendmail is that's the most important service I run. Go figure...
Open source vs. closed source. Red Hat packages (most of them) are GPL-ed open source software. You can get the source code and see specifically what the code does. These guys needed to use a sniffer to find out what information was being transmitted to M$. What isn't sinister about that?
I won't even touch on the fact that all this software package comparison could be compared locally and that how is it M$'s business that I have Quicken installed? Unless of course they think I should have Money instead... Someone else who replied to this thread said it best: thugs.
"...can only come to pass when our representatives in congress are not representing us."
After the last presidential elections -- esp. in FL -- there is a general perception among US citizens that our vote really doesn't count and that we aren't currently being respresented as advertised. The process can be altered by other means (judicial review of ballots) to ensure a particular result. (Paranoid, sure, but it establishes the perception.)
This will come to pass because we're about to head into war. There isn't much we can do about that either because the decision-makers we've elected have already set the wheels in motion. Once we're in a state of war, this proposal will become a law in a form very similar to the ideas discussed in the articule. Just like PATRIOT I.
Best move you can make as a US citizen is to do the things you mention (sure, it can't hurt to vote, I guess) and keep a very low profile. Or expatriate. But, better do that before this becomes law, otherwise the consequences of that will change quite a bit, also.
Mod parent up.
Borders CD: $18.99
Artist: $0.94
Label: $18.04 from which they pay their RIAA dues, among other things.
Artist CD Direct: $10
Artist: $10 from which we pay for more studio time, guitar strings, etc.
but, Mr. Phucksum's ancestors got to him first....
Yeah, that name is real. >:)
My band's last album cost $1.45 per disc
Sounds about right to me. About $500 / track in the studio. Costs go down as you press and sell more. Definitely not $500,000. I'm certain those types of expenses would include promotion, so the article title might not be dead on...
What do you do then?
Go live life instead...
So, you're saying they didn't get TheThing shut down?
But at the beginning of December, Wolfgang Staehle, owner and director of The Thing, was notified by his service provider, Verio, that The Thing's Internet connection would be severed on Feb. 28, 2003.
Perhaps it is a two-step process:
First - Load;
Second - Shoot.
Happy New Year. Thanks for the post. Glad I've been better informed by your posting it.