I am not challenging you to be a dick, but it is not doubtful at all. Mafia groups have constantly beeen involved in the record business. MCA has a long history of mob connections to the point that they were burning down buildings of retailers who could not push their crap. The connection is not tenuous but SOLID, read Stiffed: A True Story of McA, the Music Business, and the Mafia ( it is available online many places )
Don't kid yourself these bastards are purely evil.
I do not think you are paranoid, but your example is poor. The nutcases with the racks of cosmoline coated AK's in the backwoods would have gone nuts and started shooting people long before it got to this point.
However I can see them selling negative value CD's that would reduce your grocery bill if you took one. But that would be easy to skip also.
"But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it."
I have no problem whatsoever renting my DVD's at a shop, I refuse to give up my rights to fair use to allow me to download Buffy The Vampire Slayer from Blockbuster.com. So they can keep their digital offerings and their bloody TPM. I will not buy, rent nor trade for anything that restricts my ability to make a copy for regular use, all it takes is people standing up for themselves and their bank balances will remove this issue from play.
Since 2001 I have not purchased a t-shirt, CD, concert ticket, key chain, etc from any band that falls under the RIAA. It is obvious that many of you still buy their BS or they would not have the revenue to do these types of things. You should all be ashamed especially since so many great bands have nothing to do with the RIAA.
Hell if you read about the music industry you would stop supporting them anyways, anyone who thinks organized crime is not heavily involved in the industry is ignorant or just plain bloody stupid.
After all my check should not work if I do not have the money to cover it.
But seriously, the real problem is that credit is so easy to get. Fix that by realistic legislation that would require me to be there in person with my ID pic MATCHING my face. Opening credit accounts usually are too easy because merchants get money for having people open them, that is a stupid idea.
Competition means improvement, perhaps now we can get something other than UI changes and Genuine Disadvantage programs from MS, and I am willing to bet Google will do it better and I can skip MS entirely. We need someone that can go toe to toe with MS, because regardless of who is hear in 10 years, our software will be better.
I had the same thought when I called IBM about an OS2 issue and the losers informed me I would have to install WIN95 on my machine to get support (I have not used OS2 since that day) but the reason your local vendor sold them blank, and the big guys did not is that Microsoft used market forces to stop them from doing so, cheaper prices for volume buys, higher prices if you did not use only their products etc.
Monopolistic market forces, but still that is what prevented them.
Now Dell is promoting piracy! Hasn't Microsoft told us that selling machines without Windows just means that people install pirated copies of their OS?:-)
If each country maintained its own national DNS servers I would not have a problem with it, then you script in only the countries you needed, leaving the rest commented out. Since I already block free.spam mails e.g. hotmail, aol, and yahoo, ignoring one country would cut my 419 scams entirely. As a work issue, in my work environment, no one needs access to any foreign sites in any way, this would greatly simplify all our firewall and access issues.
Then we need to pass some laws eliminating the ability of federal or state governments to apply any restrictions to which countries a person has the right to access from home/library.
'We always knew there was a finite number of early adopters out there and a finite number of Microsoft haters who would switch to something new, but we didn't know what that number was. It looks like we're approaching it.'"
What an interesting quote, it shows a good deal of bias and is factually inaccurate at the same time but I love the assumption that you have to hate MS to move to a better product. The lag in Firefox adoption is not due to people preferring IE, it is due to many reasons:
1. Users who do not understand that that AOL is not the internet 2. Lazy IS departments and lazy IS techs (heck I temped at a Hospital chain that was "upgrading" from Windows 3.1 with Novell as a Network to Windows95 with Novell as a network, and it was 2002!) 3. Choosing a browser requires thought 4. Half the systems I see are so badly overran with autoupdate checks (Umm where do Sun, Real, Apple QT, etc get off thinking they can abuse processor usage), adware, and spyware that it takes 15 minutes to boot them, I can understand why people do not want to install software at that pace. 5. Most basic users do not even know there is a difference, Microsoft used an excellent route to stomp out Netscape and did it so well that the "integrated" browser has obtained a large lock on the never do anything but look up recipes crowd.
Apple has the amazing ability to shoot itself in the foot, and they will keep paying for it. No one there seems to have realized that consumer products have to made differently than Apple desktop that people care for like children ( but that is because at the price Apple desktops run, I can understand it). They should have spent more time testing, and then this would not have been an issue. Ignoring the consistant flaws in their hardware would be like ignoring the consistant flaws in Microsoft's software.
What is truly sad is that I would plunk down USD$150 tomorrow for a copy of an Apple produced and supported OSX that would run on my PC, but they do not want to make one?
Anything that challenges Microsoft makes software better for everyone. IE was stagnant from the time of crushing Netscape until Firefox, even hotmail, and msn search are better as a result of google. I would never use a Microsoft product outside of work or so my wife can run Photoshop CS2, but I do appreciate the rising tide raising all boats.
I wish Microsoft and Google could merge, then Microgle would produce beta products that worked already, and alpha products that are not impressive enough to upgrade to!
When the nation is incapable of electing anything other than way to far left or way to far right nutcases you end up with Presidents like Clinton and Bush who select radicals for important positions. Stop voting democrat and republican because your parents did and vote for candidates who value both civil liberties and values.
When Mozilla has been a real concern (for example since.9) on a big scale close tohalf the time IE has been a real concern, this will not be an issue, and in the meantime security through obscurity beats using the primary target of ever scumbag coder on the planet.
I have not been to the Yahoo site since the 90's. Altavista once rocked, then they lagged in updating their database, so I switched to Google. I never have liked the overcrowded look of Yahoo, nor the clutter involved in gathering basic info. I understand they added, mail, chat etc and so has google but without being offensive about it.
Yahoo deserves to fail for focusing on the 13-18 crowd, all the extra is just making it obvious for the slow.
There was once a game like that, then it was released and sadly it had dated graphics and the computer systems of the time could not support that level of processing, the name was Battlecruiser 3000 BTW.
Not to be mean here, but that sort of comment is EXACTLY why people keep buying this craptacular trash. There is no difference between climbing down a ladder/taking an elevator/sliding on a force shield on a ship/plane/planet. Since back in 1995 game Descent used a fully 3D polygonal graphics engine to render opponents (previous games had used sprites). It also escaped the "pure vertical walls" graphical restrictions of earlier games in the genre, and allowed the player six degrees of freedom of movement (up/down, left/right, forward/backward, pitch, roll and yaw). (some text stolen from the wiki)
I do not have to play it, I do not have to buy it. This is yet another Doom/Wolfenstein type game that anyone over the age of 12 has been bored to death by since the early 90's.
Bet next review is another Command and Conquer, or another Wing Commander, remember when they actually made NEW games? Don't give me that MMORPG tripe, I was playing MUDS in the early 90's also, all they did was add pictures. There has not been a major advance in the actual GAMES since I last booted my Amiga 500.
Okay! We all know that the MPAA ( The group of people hired by the Mafia who represent their wholly owned industry of Hollywood) whines that online piracy is causing them huge loses, but as Newsday stated so well, Shed no tears for the motion picture industry
The facts are that no matter how many press releases they shove down the throats of their news subsidiaries they are not losing money on any measurable scale because of people downloading video camera captures of movies online. If they ever cleared the system of book keeping they use so that stars, writers, producers etc did not have to sue to collect actual profits Excerpt from How the Movie Wars Were Won by John W. Cones and even going so far as to try to tell Stan Lee that the movie "Spiderman" made no money forcing him to sue for revenue, then MAYBE I might have some sympathy for them. Were you aware that based on Hollywood bookkeeping four of the top ten movies of all time...LOST MONEY!!! So they have no idea what their actual revenues are versus costs, so at this point no one can say if they are losing money. I think the entire problem is that the massive amounts of money generated by this industry have resulted in one overwhelming problem. Greed.
So, lets talk about why there is a decline in movie attendance, based on the assumption of it NOT being piracy. Well, first lets examine the fact that,
"In 2004, domestic box office sales were $9.2 billion (with three-quarters going to the major distributors, who must share the box office gross with the theaters), up slightly from 2003. DVD sales and rentals came in at $21.2 billion, up almost a third from the previous year." -Newsday
Hmm so they made MORE money in 2004 than 2003, okay well what about the current 2005 movie year?
"Blase adds that 2005's gross reflects that 10 fewer films have been released by the studios so far this year. And, she says, if you eliminate 2004 anomalies like "The Passion of the Christ" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" - the highest-grossing religious and documentary films ever - 2005's box office is actually up by 2 percent" -Newsday
So in 2005 the box office is lagging and they have released fewer films, and have not produced any automatic sellouts like those based on a religion held by a majority of the nation or those based on propaganda that would make Leni Riefenstahl happy. It is easy to see the real truth is that the evil online pirates sharing second rate views of movies are the problem here, isn't it? The problem is the MPAA and their watchword. Greed.
So aside from those numbers, let's talk about a trip to the movies. I have a rather 50'sesque Nuclear Family with a Y2K twist, my wife and I have two children half the week and they spend the other half with their father, but we have them weekends. So for the sake of argument I will assume a Saturday evening viewing of a movie and at regular price. Before someone asks why not go to a matinee and save money, locally the regular versus matinee pricing is not really that different, $9.50 evening, and $7.00 matinee. But in the interest of fairness, when I hit my totals cost for the evening subtract 10 bucks if you want matinee pricing. Why have mostly empty daytime showings and not reduce the price to attract more customers? Greed.
So lets go step by step through what it runs my family to see a movie, and I will pick something harmless that we all attended as a base. Charlie and the Shreking Nemo is about as white bread as they come in the movie field, we look it up to find out times, and we pack up the car. Now nearest Gigantagoogplex of screens is in the suburbs because Showcase/AMC etc fear urban areas so much that Magic Johnson is making a mint setting up theatres in cities. My city has 105k people and not a single screen in the city limits but immediately outside of them we have 30 plus screens.
Sweet! When this is done world wide we will be one badass solar flare, or EMP burst away from having to manually rewrite the entire knowledge base of mankind. You know backups will be inadequate or non working.
I used GEICO when I was overseas because they provided insurance to soldiers, from 1991 to 2003 I used GEICO, then I had an accident and filed a claim.
Their adjuster did not really even look at the vehicle and they only repaired the visible damage without even looking underneath the vehicle, when I griped to a person making a followup call, they fixed some of the issues and left the rest unrepaired. Then they would not renew my policy.
I am not the only person they have done this to, they are hands down the worst insurance agency I have ever dealt with, and I am sure that my daring to complain is what lost my coverage. Now I have better coverage at lower rates with another firm.
I hope this is reversed, because geeks do not let geeks use GEICO.
Oh no I was fully aware they were different, just that anyone who visited it on Friday and had an interest in linux probably noticed that 12 pitch font on every page noting their other reviews, no reason to post an older review 72 hours later.
It is more like, "OMG WTF ZYX HAVE OTHER ARTS!"
Maybe someone can submit one old review from that website each week? BTW Nice failure TO RMFP ( Read My fine Post)
But anyone with an interest looked at their heavily linked off that review story on Xandros already, this is not news, it is a month old review that was made prior to that last linux distro review show by them here on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not challenging you to be a dick, but it is not doubtful at all. Mafia groups have constantly beeen involved in the record business. MCA has a long history of mob connections to the point that they were burning down buildings of retailers who could not push their crap. The connection is not tenuous but SOLID, read Stiffed: A True Story of McA, the Music Business, and the Mafia ( it is available online many places )
Don't kid yourself these bastards are purely evil.
I do not think you are paranoid, but your example is poor. The nutcases with the racks of cosmoline coated AK's in the backwoods would have gone nuts and started shooting people long before it got to this point.
However I can see them selling negative value CD's that would reduce your grocery bill if you took one. But that would be easy to skip also.
"But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it."
I have no problem whatsoever renting my DVD's at a shop, I refuse to give up my rights to fair use to allow me to download Buffy The Vampire Slayer from Blockbuster.com. So they can keep their digital offerings and their bloody TPM. I will not buy, rent nor trade for anything that restricts my ability to make a copy for regular use, all it takes is people standing up for themselves and their bank balances will remove this issue from play.
Since 2001 I have not purchased a t-shirt, CD, concert ticket, key chain, etc from any band that falls under the RIAA. It is obvious that many of you still buy their BS or they would not have the revenue to do these types of things. You should all be ashamed especially since so many great bands have nothing to do with the RIAA.
Hell if you read about the music industry you would stop supporting them anyways, anyone who thinks organized crime is not heavily involved in the industry is ignorant or just plain bloody stupid.
After all my check should not work if I do not have the money to cover it. But seriously, the real problem is that credit is so easy to get. Fix that by realistic legislation that would require me to be there in person with my ID pic MATCHING my face. Opening credit accounts usually are too easy because merchants get money for having people open them, that is a stupid idea.
Competition means improvement, perhaps now we can get something other than UI changes and Genuine Disadvantage programs from MS, and I am willing to bet Google will do it better and I can skip MS entirely. We need someone that can go toe to toe with MS, because regardless of who is hear in 10 years, our software will be better.
I had the same thought when I called IBM about an OS2 issue and the losers informed me I would have to install WIN95 on my machine to get support (I have not used OS2 since that day) but the reason your local vendor sold them blank, and the big guys did not is that Microsoft used market forces to stop them from doing so, cheaper prices for volume buys, higher prices if you did not use only their products etc.
Monopolistic market forces, but still that is what prevented them.
Now Dell is promoting piracy! Hasn't Microsoft told us that selling machines without Windows just means that people install pirated copies of their OS? :-)
If each country maintained its own national DNS servers I would not have a problem with it, then you script in only the countries you needed, leaving the rest commented out. Since I already block free.spam mails e.g. hotmail, aol, and yahoo, ignoring one country would cut my 419 scams entirely. As a work issue, in my work environment, no one needs access to any foreign sites in any way, this would greatly simplify all our firewall and access issues.
Then we need to pass some laws eliminating the ability of federal or state governments to apply any restrictions to which countries a person has the right to access from home/library.
'We always knew there was a finite number of early adopters out there and a finite number of Microsoft haters who would switch to something new, but we didn't know what that number was. It looks like we're approaching it.'"
What an interesting quote, it shows a good deal of bias and is factually inaccurate at the same time but I love the assumption that you have to hate MS to move to a better product. The lag in Firefox adoption is not due to people preferring IE, it is due to many reasons:
1. Users who do not understand that that AOL is not the internet
2. Lazy IS departments and lazy IS techs (heck I temped at a Hospital chain that was "upgrading" from Windows 3.1 with Novell as a Network to Windows95 with Novell as a network, and it was 2002!)
3. Choosing a browser requires thought
4. Half the systems I see are so badly overran with autoupdate checks (Umm where do Sun, Real, Apple QT, etc get off thinking they can abuse processor usage), adware, and spyware that it takes 15 minutes to boot them, I can understand why people do not want to install software at that pace.
5. Most basic users do not even know there is a difference, Microsoft used an excellent route to stomp out Netscape and did it so well that the "integrated" browser has obtained a large lock on the never do anything but look up recipes crowd.
Apple has the amazing ability to shoot itself in the foot, and they will keep paying for it. No one there seems to have realized that consumer products have to made differently than Apple desktop that people care for like children ( but that is because at the price Apple desktops run, I can understand it). They should have spent more time testing, and then this would not have been an issue. Ignoring the consistant flaws in their hardware would be like ignoring the consistant flaws in Microsoft's software.
What is truly sad is that I would plunk down USD$150 tomorrow for a copy of an Apple produced and supported OSX that would run on my PC, but they do not want to make one?
Anything that challenges Microsoft makes software better for everyone. IE was stagnant from the time of crushing Netscape until Firefox, even hotmail, and msn search are better as a result of google. I would never use a Microsoft product outside of work or so my wife can run Photoshop CS2, but I do appreciate the rising tide raising all boats.
I wish Microsoft and Google could merge, then Microgle would produce beta products that worked already, and alpha products that are not impressive enough to upgrade to!
When the nation is incapable of electing anything other than way to far left or way to far right nutcases you end up with Presidents like Clinton and Bush who select radicals for important positions. Stop voting democrat and republican because your parents did and vote for candidates who value both civil liberties and values.
When Mozilla has been a real concern (for example since .9) on a big scale close tohalf the time IE has been a real concern, this will not be an issue, and in the meantime security through obscurity beats using the primary target of ever scumbag coder on the planet.
I have not been to the Yahoo site since the 90's. Altavista once rocked, then they lagged in updating their database, so I switched to Google. I never have liked the overcrowded look of Yahoo, nor the clutter involved in gathering basic info. I understand they added, mail, chat etc and so has google but without being offensive about it. Yahoo deserves to fail for focusing on the 13-18 crowd, all the extra is just making it obvious for the slow.
There was once a game like that, then it was released and sadly it had dated graphics and the computer systems of the time could not support that level of processing, the name was Battlecruiser 3000 BTW.
Not to be mean here, but that sort of comment is EXACTLY why people keep buying this craptacular trash. There is no difference between climbing down a ladder/taking an elevator/sliding on a force shield on a ship/plane/planet. Since back in 1995 game Descent used a fully 3D polygonal graphics engine to render opponents (previous games had used sprites). It also escaped the "pure vertical walls" graphical restrictions of earlier games in the genre, and allowed the player six degrees of freedom of movement (up/down, left/right, forward/backward, pitch, roll and yaw). (some text stolen from the wiki)
oooo the bitmaps in the potholes change!
I do not have to play it, I do not have to buy it. This is yet another Doom/Wolfenstein type game that anyone over the age of 12 has been bored to death by since the early 90's.
Bet next review is another Command and Conquer, or another Wing Commander, remember when they actually made NEW games? Don't give me that MMORPG tripe, I was playing MUDS in the early 90's also, all they did was add pictures. There has not been a major advance in the actual GAMES since I last booted my Amiga 500.
Okay! We all know that the MPAA ( The group of people hired by the Mafia who represent their wholly owned industry of Hollywood) whines that online piracy is causing them huge loses, but as Newsday stated so well, Shed no tears for the motion picture industry
The facts are that no matter how many press releases they shove down the throats of their news subsidiaries they are not losing money on any measurable scale because of people downloading video camera captures of movies online. If they ever cleared the system of book keeping they use so that stars, writers, producers etc did not have to sue to collect actual profits Excerpt from How the Movie Wars Were Won by John W. Cones and even going so far as to try to tell Stan Lee that the movie "Spiderman" made no money forcing him to sue for revenue, then MAYBE I might have some sympathy for them. Were you aware that based on Hollywood bookkeeping four of the top ten movies of all time...LOST MONEY!!! So they have no idea what their actual revenues are versus costs, so at this point no one can say if they are losing money. I think the entire problem is that the massive amounts of money generated by this industry have resulted in one overwhelming problem. Greed.
So, lets talk about why there is a decline in movie attendance, based on the assumption of it NOT being piracy. Well, first lets examine the fact that,
"In 2004, domestic box office sales were $9.2 billion (with three-quarters going to the major distributors, who must share the box office gross with the theaters), up slightly from 2003. DVD sales and rentals came in at $21.2 billion, up almost a third from the previous year." -Newsday
Hmm so they made MORE money in 2004 than 2003, okay well what about the current 2005 movie year?
"Blase adds that 2005's gross reflects that 10 fewer films have been released by the studios so far this year. And, she says, if you eliminate 2004 anomalies like "The Passion of the Christ" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" - the highest-grossing religious and documentary films ever - 2005's box office is actually up by 2 percent" -Newsday
So in 2005 the box office is lagging and they have released fewer films, and have not produced any automatic sellouts like those based on a religion held by a majority of the nation or those based on propaganda that would make Leni Riefenstahl happy. It is easy to see the real truth is that the evil online pirates sharing second rate views of movies are the problem here, isn't it? The problem is the MPAA and their watchword. Greed.
So aside from those numbers, let's talk about a trip to the movies. I have a rather 50'sesque Nuclear Family with a Y2K twist, my wife and I have two children half the week and they spend the other half with their father, but we have them weekends. So for the sake of argument I will assume a Saturday evening viewing of a movie and at regular price. Before someone asks why not go to a matinee and save money, locally the regular versus matinee pricing is not really that different, $9.50 evening, and $7.00 matinee. But in the interest of fairness, when I hit my totals cost for the evening subtract 10 bucks if you want matinee pricing. Why have mostly empty daytime showings and not reduce the price to attract more customers? Greed.
So lets go step by step through what it runs my family to see a movie, and I will pick something harmless that we all attended as a base. Charlie and the Shreking Nemo is about as white bread as they come in the movie field, we look it up to find out times, and we pack up the car. Now nearest Gigantagoogplex of screens is in the suburbs because Showcase/AMC etc fear urban areas so much that Magic Johnson is making a mint setting up theatres in cities. My city has 105k people and not a single screen in the city limits but immediately outside of them we have 30 plus screens.
Sweet! When this is done world wide we will be one badass solar flare, or EMP burst away from having to manually rewrite the entire knowledge base of mankind. You know backups will be inadequate or non working.
I used GEICO when I was overseas because they provided insurance to soldiers, from 1991 to 2003 I used GEICO, then I had an accident and filed a claim.
Their adjuster did not really even look at the vehicle and they only repaired the visible damage without even looking underneath the vehicle, when I griped to a person making a followup call, they fixed some of the issues and left the rest unrepaired. Then they would not renew my policy.
I am not the only person they have done this to, they are hands down the worst insurance agency I have ever dealt with, and I am sure that my daring to complain is what lost my coverage. Now I have better coverage at lower rates with another firm.
I hope this is reversed, because geeks do not let geeks use GEICO.
The only way this scheme is coming into my house is if they give it to me, and I can change them for bandwidth usage.
If TV/Movies are that important to you, then GAFL.
Oh no I was fully aware they were different, just that anyone who visited it on Friday and had an interest in linux probably noticed that 12 pitch font on every page noting their other reviews, no reason to post an older review 72 hours later.
It is more like, "OMG WTF ZYX HAVE OTHER ARTS!"
Maybe someone can submit one old review from that website each week? BTW Nice failure TO RMFP ( Read My fine Post)
because it was part of the post entitled "Review of Consumer-Friendly Linux Distro" http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/05/07/29/2139202.s html?tid=106
But anyone with an interest looked at their heavily linked off that review story on Xandros already, this is not news, it is a month old review that was made prior to that last linux distro review show by them here on slashdot.