The problem is that the RIAA is going around like this, seemingly at random.
RIAA (To Random User): We have proof you were sharing 50,000 songs on Kazaa. We're going to sue you for $150,000 per song. Keep in mind that we have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers should you choose to defend yourself.
Granny: What? I don't even know what Kazaa is! Let me call a lawyer.
Lawyer: You want to fight the RIAA? Well, you'd probably win, but my legal fees may range into the tens of thousands of dollars. That is, if the RIAA doesn't appeal or stall in court. Then it could cost more.
RIAA: It seems you are denying your crimes. Very well, we're feeling charitable today. If you fess up, we'll settle for $2,000. We're letting you off easy.
Granny: Defending myself with cost me at least ten grand. I should take the RIAA's deal, even though I haven't done anything.
(Not that that this will ever get past the screening processes, so this is more of an open letter and rant.)
Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry:
It seems that neither of you are truly interested in reducing the size and scope of the Federal Government, protecting our Constitutional Rights, or taking the necessary steps to make the United States a less desireable target for international terrorists.
However (thanks to your campaign underlings), I now know a lot more about your service records from the Vietnam Era than I really would care to know about.
It is pretty obvious from decades of Republicrat rule that the following things have happened.
1. The Constitution and our civil liberties have been pissed on repeatedly by just about everyone in D.C. 2. Our tax dollars are squandered on overpriced and unecessary legislation. 3. Congress is for sale to the highest bidder. 4. Terrorists continually target us because you guys need feel the need to get involved in issues world wide we have no business sticking our nose in.
So, my question is this: It totally baffles me how the American populace is continually conned into voting for either of your parties. How do you achieve such levels of media mastery? Do you guys really have those mind control rays I've heard about?
Just like in EQ, only the most uber hard core elite players who spend gobs of time and money will be able to level their PCs up to level 99 and afford the most l33t equips (case mods).
No, they are. At least the stuff that has lived on to become part of our culture.
These de facto infinite copyrights that we have now will enable the entertainment industry to charge over and over again for music and movies that should be in the public domain.
You can be guaranteed that if a new physical format for distributing music (the successor to the CD or whatever) takes hold, the record companies will re-release old Elvis and Beatles albums in this format (among plenty of others). They'll probably release them as "commemorative editions" and charge up the wazoo for them as well.
With how things are now, some record company executives who weren't even born yet when the Beatles were creating music will continue to get rich off of their work, even after the remaining two are long dead and buried.
Another prevailing view is that because the market is no longer willing to pay six figures for a HTML jockey who once flipped through "C++ in 21 days", then the market is shot to hell
Not correct. The market is shot because idiot HR departments assume that everyone who applies is an HTML jockey who once flipped through "C++ in 21 days" unless they have a PHD and have 10+ years experience with.NET, are graphic artist experts with all Adobe and Macromedia software, have experience designing and adminning on all major databses, and can perform hardware maintainence on legacy mainframe machines from the 80s.
Okay, I may be exaggerating, but I see a lot of job postings in my area with insane requirements requiring the ideal applicant to basically be able to wear all the hats. The pay may be nice for these positions, but the person they hire is probably lying about their skill set and will likely be working 80 hours a week doing all of this crap.
Case in point a recent job I applied for in my area. The description of the job was to do work designing and maintaining a database that would be accessed from a web interface.
Over the phone they made it sound like the tasks of designing the actual page and all the coding outside of the DB would be handled by other people and I'd be working together with those people as a team.
But I start getting asked questions at what experience I have with graphic design and Active X during the interview. The interview was conducted by an HR person who admitted that she had no technical experience.
I answered honestly that these aren't my areas of expertise. Needless to say, I wasn't called back for a second interview.
Maybe I was mistakenly interviewed for the wrong position, but it seemed to me that they were hoping for a single person that could create them a dynamic, database driven website from scratch by themselves.
The first is that this issue isn't played up as a big deal in the popular media, where most Americans get their "news." Right not the media is focusing on things that don't really matter in the election. Basically, crap like military record discrepancies from decades ago that really have not bearing on current issue.
The second is that many people have been conned into thinking it is "Patriotic" to trust the Government at all times, no matter what.
It seems completely ignored that the company who makes these things is a strong supporter of one of the parties, and that there are lots of ways for these machines to be tampered with. I feel that votes could be "tweaked" without much proof available that tweaking was done in a very close election.
The following link gives an example. Any of the Adware.whatever. These are detected by Norton AntiVirus 2004 and later (2003 and earlier won't detect them):
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/auto/index/ind ex A.html
I hear a lot of complaints from friends and relatives about how they dislike the government getting involved with their lives too much. At the same time, they are afraid to let go of their "presumed" security that they falsely believe the government gives them. This prevents them from accepting the Libertarian view that government power should be reduced.
Unfortunately, people have lived for so long with an unconstitutionally invasive government and have been spoon fed lies from fearmongers that they need a massive government.
I believe this is the strongest challenge the Libertarian Party faces. This is especially true since 9/11, since many people assume giving the government more power will protect them.
What are your strategies for convincing people that their lives would be better and safer by reducing the power and scope of the government rather than increasing it?
Also, where do you personally place the blame for the origins of government bloat? Do you think the root cause is an apathetic public unwilling to stand up to the government, or have we (as a whole) merely been tricked by slick politicians?
Please kill Star Trek while we still have fond memories of the franchise, rather than milking every penny they can by creating crappy series with the "Star Trek" name on them.
High School focuses on preparing for college too much, and doesn't even do a very good job of it (I don't feel my high school education, despite the fact that I did very well there, came close to preparing me for University Study). Most high school cirriculums dom't even consider that college is not going to be the correct path for 100% of the students.
This wouldn't work on a massive level. The dependence on a whole crew (even if you just count the bridge officers and the chief engineer as the crew) to be online at the same time is difficult.
Not to mention the griefers....
Captain: Perhaps we can negotiate with the Klingons peacefully...
There is a patch for Norton AntiVirus you can get via LiveUpdate so that it will report itself properly to the Security Center.
As much as I hate the "in your face" way the security center works, isn't really a fault of SP2, but rather just the fact that the makers of some AntiVirus software did not design their software anticipating that Microsoft would place this feature in the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the RIAA is going around like this, seemingly at random.
RIAA (To Random User): We have proof you were sharing 50,000 songs on Kazaa. We're going to sue you for $150,000 per song. Keep in mind that we have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers should you choose to defend yourself.
Granny: What? I don't even know what Kazaa is! Let me call a lawyer.
Lawyer: You want to fight the RIAA? Well, you'd probably win, but my legal fees may range into the tens of thousands of dollars. That is, if the RIAA doesn't appeal or stall in court. Then it could cost more.
RIAA: It seems you are denying your crimes. Very well, we're feeling charitable today. If you fess up, we'll settle for $2,000. We're letting you off easy.
Granny: Defending myself with cost me at least ten grand. I should take the RIAA's deal, even though I haven't done anything.
No, all real ninja are too busy killing pirates to worry about stealing art.
Not really. They may even be able to get above 10 FPS with this thing!
Bingo!!
(Not that that this will ever get past the screening processes, so this is more of an open letter and rant.)
Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry:
It seems that neither of you are truly interested in reducing the size and scope of the Federal Government, protecting our Constitutional Rights, or taking the necessary steps to make the United States a less desireable target for international terrorists.
However (thanks to your campaign underlings), I now know a lot more about your service records from the Vietnam Era than I really would care to know about.
It is pretty obvious from decades of Republicrat rule that the following things have happened.
1. The Constitution and our civil liberties have been pissed on repeatedly by just about everyone in D.C.
2. Our tax dollars are squandered on overpriced and unecessary legislation.
3. Congress is for sale to the highest bidder.
4. Terrorists continually target us because you guys need feel the need to get involved in issues world wide we have no business sticking our nose in.
So, my question is this:
It totally baffles me how the American populace is continually conned into voting for either of your parties. How do you achieve such levels of media mastery? Do you guys really have those mind control rays I've heard about?
Just like in EQ, only the most uber hard core elite players who spend gobs of time and money will be able to level their PCs up to level 99 and afford the most l33t equips (case mods).
Brilliant!
No, they are. At least the stuff that has lived on to become part of our culture.
These de facto infinite copyrights that we have now will enable the entertainment industry to charge over and over again for music and movies that should be in the public domain.
You can be guaranteed that if a new physical format for distributing music (the successor to the CD or whatever) takes hold, the record companies will re-release old Elvis and Beatles albums in this format (among plenty of others). They'll probably release them as "commemorative editions" and charge up the wazoo for them as well.
With how things are now, some record company executives who weren't even born yet when the Beatles were creating music will continue to get rich off of their work, even after the remaining two are long dead and buried.
Yes, well, the ironic thing is that I applied for that job because a friend at work told me about it.
I can see why they were offering a much better salary than my current job. The job duties are apparently insane. =)
Another prevailing view is that because the market is no longer willing to pay six figures for a HTML jockey who once flipped through "C++ in 21 days", then the market is shot to hell
.NET, are graphic artist experts with all Adobe and Macromedia software, have experience designing and adminning on all major databses, and can perform hardware maintainence on legacy mainframe machines from the 80s.
Not correct. The market is shot because idiot HR departments assume that everyone who applies is an HTML jockey who once flipped through "C++ in 21 days" unless they have a PHD and have 10+ years experience with
Okay, I may be exaggerating, but I see a lot of job postings in my area with insane requirements requiring the ideal applicant to basically be able to wear all the hats. The pay may be nice for these positions, but the person they hire is probably lying about their skill set and will likely be working 80 hours a week doing all of this crap.
Case in point a recent job I applied for in my area. The description of the job was to do work designing and maintaining a database that would be accessed from a web interface.
Over the phone they made it sound like the tasks of designing the actual page and all the coding outside of the DB would be handled by other people and I'd be working together with those people as a team.
But I start getting asked questions at what experience I have with graphic design and Active X during the interview. The interview was conducted by an HR person who admitted that she had no technical experience.
I answered honestly that these aren't my areas of expertise. Needless to say, I wasn't called back for a second interview.
Maybe I was mistakenly interviewed for the wrong position, but it seemed to me that they were hoping for a single person that could create them a dynamic, database driven website from scratch by themselves.
I'm assuming that this should be modded up as "Funny."
Your impression is correct for two reasons.
The first is that this issue isn't played up as a big deal in the popular media, where most Americans get their "news." Right not the media is focusing on things that don't really matter in the election. Basically, crap like military record discrepancies from decades ago that really have not bearing on current issue.
The second is that many people have been conned into thinking it is "Patriotic" to trust the Government at all times, no matter what.
It seems completely ignored that the company who makes these things is a strong supporter of one of the parties, and that there are lots of ways for these machines to be tampered with. I feel that votes could be "tweaked" without much proof available that tweaking was done in a very close election.
Sixth Mix Plus!
(Burning mod points)
Hackers on Mars have accidentally opened ports allowing Hell to infect PCs with evil viruses and turn them into Zombies!
AntiVirus software isn't enough. Hand me my pistol, my shotgun, my BFG and my flashlight.
The following link gives an example. Any of the Adware.whatever. These are detected by Norton AntiVirus 2004 and later (2003 and earlier won't detect them):
d ex A.html
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/auto/index/in
Yes, NAV does actually detect certain Adware. Not as much as Ad-Aware, etc., but it does.
He was smart by not letting things go hog wild.
I don't personally see a stability difference between XP and 2k in my own use at work or home currently.
I must be either lucky, or there is something that users are doing on their XP machines that is causing this 12% "failure rate."
From what I've seen, Microsoft donations often come with such strings attached.
Now, this is a donation from Gates himself (not the company) so perhaps no such strings exist.
I hear a lot of complaints from friends and relatives about how they dislike the government getting involved with their lives too much. At the same time, they are afraid to let go of their "presumed" security that they falsely believe the government gives them. This prevents them from accepting the Libertarian view that government power should be reduced.
Unfortunately, people have lived for so long with an unconstitutionally invasive government and have been spoon fed lies from fearmongers that they need a massive government.
I believe this is the strongest challenge the Libertarian Party faces. This is especially true since 9/11, since many people assume giving the government more power will protect them.
What are your strategies for convincing people that their lives would be better and safer by reducing the power and scope of the government rather than increasing it?
Also, where do you personally place the blame for the origins of government bloat? Do you think the root cause is an apathetic public unwilling to stand up to the government, or have we (as a whole) merely been tricked by slick politicians?
Please kill Star Trek while we still have fond memories of the franchise, rather than milking every penny they can by creating crappy series with the "Star Trek" name on them.
Bingo.
High School focuses on preparing for college too much, and doesn't even do a very good job of it (I don't feel my high school education, despite the fact that I did very well there, came close to preparing me for University Study). Most high school cirriculums dom't even consider that college is not going to be the correct path for 100% of the students.
This wouldn't work on a massive level. The dependence on a whole crew (even if you just count the bridge officers and the chief engineer as the crew) to be online at the same time is difficult.
Not to mention the griefers....
Captain: Perhaps we can negotiate with the Klingons peacefully...
Tactics Officer: Skr3w j00. 3y3 f1r3 w34p0nz n0wz0rz!!!!1111one.
Try running their console business at a loss.
Thanks to their OS monopoly, they have enough cash to attempt to price everyone out of any market.
Somebody mod this up.
There is a patch for Norton AntiVirus you can get via LiveUpdate so that it will report itself properly to the Security Center.
As much as I hate the "in your face" way the security center works, isn't really a fault of SP2, but rather just the fact that the makers of some AntiVirus software did not design their software anticipating that Microsoft would place this feature in the OS.