I agree! Although the most popular movies will be preserved, so much other stuff will disappear, never to return. It's already happening.
If it weren't for these long copyright laws, people could openly archive and share these cultural artifacts so that they will be available to future generations.
Incidentally, this is why I think electronic-only, DRM-encumbered releases of books, music, and videos are vastly inferior to physical copies of the same. Physical media (well books and vinyl records anyway) will outlast technologies and whims of history, and can be digitized hundreds of years from now.
I bought around 5 CDs. In American slang, one common use of the word "like" is to qualify a statement as being an approximation, guess, or exaggerated perception. ("It's like a hundred degrees outside!" [Fahrenheit])
Amen to no compression / lossless compression. I just bought like 5 CDs today. Not only is sound quality a huge factor, but I perceive some benefit to owning tangible, non-DRMed media rather than something that's filling up a hard drive which can go bad, or home-burned CD-Rs collecting dust in a closet. If I want to make car listening copies or custom compilations, I can rip the CDs onto the computer. From there I can also copy to an iPod-type device. But I don't have to. For my money I already have a plastic disc with printed liner notes which I don't need to fool around with if all I want is a quick listen.
With downloaded music, not only is the audio lossy, but then I also have to spend my precious time producing archival or car listening CD-Rs on my own separately-purchased, questionably-durable media, labeled with a Sharpie or some mediocre inkjet-printed sticker.
And what about rare music? When some remix/promo single or obscure album/12" is long out of print and not carried by places like the iTunes Store, and the torrents have all died down, I may still be able to track down an authentic, full-quality release at a used/collectible shop. I doubt I could be so lucky with old download-only releases, where any company hosting them would likely be sued out of business.
If you and your sister log in to your favorite or most important websites, then those sites know at least some portion of your respective identities. Mix in a little collusion--er, cooperation/affiliation between said sites and their advertisers, and I would suspect that M$/Google could distinguish between the two of you, given enough information and clever, weaselly data mining.
I like and use Firefox, but it seems awfully chummy with Google for my taste. I don't think it's the default, but Firefox 2.0 allows you to check with Google whether each site you visit is a "suspected forgery." Probably a sizable percentage of Firefox users takes Google up on its offer.
My Compaq laptop came severely cluttered with OEM-pre-installed turds, including twenty-some "games", which had to be uninstalled one-by-one. Since I get to work with clean Microsoft Volume Licensing copies of WinXP Pro at work, this did not change my opinion of the OS itself. It did make the OOBE quite irritating, though, and I'm sure that this sort of thing impacts people's opinions of Windows. Funny how Microsoft hasn't cared about rampant Windows XP crappification but now that they want to promote a new OS, it matters.
FWIW, I think that Microsoft should at least pressure OEMs to provide customers with the <em>option</em> of installing a relatively clean copy of Windows from the recovery discs/partition, as a non-patronizing alternative to the industry standard OEM junkfest.
I haven't listened to the RDM podcasts, partially for fear of spoilers, but perhaps I should. Thanks for bringing up this interesting info.
Do the human colony worlds circle a single sun, or are they scattered in space? The writers tossed these out, and no one, including RDM, had an answer. (actually, the last question RDM said that he thought that although it was astronomically unlikely, the human worlds did orbit a single sun... but he wasn't real definite on that).
In "Home, Part 2" (s2e07), didn't the revelation at the tomb of Athena show clearly that the different colonies were each situated in their own star systems, within their respective constellations as seen from Earth and/or Kobol?
Or were those constellations merely patterns that are on the flags of each colony, irrespective of the colonies' locations? Now that I consider this more, in light of the miniseries and jumping beyond "the red line" into uncharted space, it would make more sense for the colonies to be either orbiting the same star, or more plausibly within the same group of stars in fairly close proximity to each other.
Back again to the tomb of Athena, what really happened there? Did the Arrow of Apollo transport people briefly to somewhere on Earth? If not, then the constellations make it appear that Kobol is in fact Earth! It's been months since I've seen this episode, so I don't remember for sure, but didn't the cylons chase the fleet away from Kobol? Kobol seemed like a more habitable place than New Caprica, so why doesn't the fleet return or send military recon expeditions back to Kobol?
No doubt this Windows update will undergo intensive scrutiny by individuals and companies interested in computer security, especially in light of this excitement surrounding the DHS recommendation. Any suspicious functionality will be discovered, even though we do not have the source code. The government knows this, so I would be amazed if they actually included nefarious code in this update. Besides, WGA can probably spy on us just fine, thank-you-very-much.;)
Is the article by Paul Thurrott still accurate? It is not from last week -- it is a year old! Perhaps Microsoft has made IE7 more standards-compliant since then.
Firefox 2 contains an optional phishing filter which would provide so much information to Google that it's worse than phishing itself. And now this deal with Real... I am disappointed.
Time to switch back to a different Gecko-based browser, such as Seamonkey. Or better yet, Opera 9. Now that's a good browser, albeit unfortunately not open.
The article is rather scant on details, but includes this information:
"Caprica" will be set more than 50 years prior to the events of "Battlestar Galactica" and focus on the lives of two families -- the Adamas (ancestors of future Galactica commander William) and the Graystones. Humankind's Twelve Colonies are at peace and on the verge of a technological breakthrough: the first Cylon.
As "Battlestar Galactica" is about a lot more than space battles, "Caprica" will be as much family drama as sci-fi tale.
I have mixed feelings about this spin-off. On the one hand, I have become more or less addicted to Battlestar Galactica and want something to tide me over until the third season starts. On the other hand, the plot of Caprica, as presented in this write-up, strikes me as cheesy. Is this a family feud? With billions of people in the twelve colonies, why does the Adama family need a central role in the new show? (Isn't one series enough? Was there a pre-William Adama back story in the original show or in Hatch's books? Being a BSG fan of only recent vintage, I don't know. This just reminds me of the 130-year McFly-Tannen conflict in Back to the Future.)
Battlestar Galactica is a riveting show. Hopefully its creators will achieve similar success with Caprica.
What's next... claiming that inclusion of MS Paint is anti-competitive?
Exactly. I see AD as an integral part of Windows Server, and although I usually opt to use other media players, I think it makes good sense to include WMP with Windows. True, it does put competing products at a disadvantage, but I as a customer wouldn't want to have to obtain third-party products just to do simple things like viewing images or web pages. As long as alternative products are able to work with the system to the same degree as Microsoft's offerings, I see no problem. Bundling small apps with the OS and increases the value of the system to the average user. If Microsoft is guilty of this, then how much moreso are *BSD and Linux distros?
I have an old eMac running Tiger as a secondary box at work, but I don't get to use it much. My shop is staunchly Microsoft-centric, and there is little I can do about it, aside from promoting non-IE web browsers and occasionally popping in a live CD. I'd love to run Linux or *BSD instead of XP, but sadly it is not permitted.
I stopped using the quicklaunch bar because whenever I would update or install some programs, they would spam shortcuts into it, making it a maintenance pain. For years now, I've been happily using keyboard shortcuts for most of the programs I am likely to use. No moving a mouse across the screen to click a tiny box. Just press a familiar key combo and the app starts. I recommend it.
Actually, it would be more like the difference between 10.1 and the upcoming 10.5.
That's a real stretch, unless you're just looking at the length of time between releases. Today's Windows XP SP2 is markedly better than XP RTM, and even that was not as weak as OS X 10.1. Mac OS X has come a long way. Although I look forward to ditching XP for Vista at work, I doubt it is that much of a departure. </imho>
I hope that live bookmarks will get implemented, because it makes it extremely easy to find out what's new at all of my favorite sites, and jump straight to interesting articles, all within the web browser (and compactly yet accessibly stored within my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree! Although the most popular movies will be preserved, so much other stuff will disappear, never to return. It's already happening.
If it weren't for these long copyright laws, people could openly archive and share these cultural artifacts so that they will be available to future generations.
Incidentally, this is why I think electronic-only, DRM-encumbered releases of books, music, and videos are vastly inferior to physical copies of the same. Physical media (well books and vinyl records anyway) will outlast technologies and whims of history, and can be digitized hundreds of years from now.
How do you pronounce Gi-Fi? "guy-fie"? "giffy"? "jiffy"?
If it's Ghost Corporate edition, I had some problems with crashing in 8.0, but once I upgraded to 8.2 (and later 8.3) it worked.
I bought around 5 CDs. In American slang, one common use of the word "like" is to qualify a statement as being an approximation, guess, or exaggerated perception. ("It's like a hundred degrees outside!" [Fahrenheit])
Amen to no compression / lossless compression. I just bought like 5 CDs today. Not only is sound quality a huge factor, but I perceive some benefit to owning tangible, non-DRMed media rather than something that's filling up a hard drive which can go bad, or home-burned CD-Rs collecting dust in a closet. If I want to make car listening copies or custom compilations, I can rip the CDs onto the computer. From there I can also copy to an iPod-type device. But I don't have to. For my money I already have a plastic disc with printed liner notes which I don't need to fool around with if all I want is a quick listen.
With downloaded music, not only is the audio lossy, but then I also have to spend my precious time producing archival or car listening CD-Rs on my own separately-purchased, questionably-durable media, labeled with a Sharpie or some mediocre inkjet-printed sticker.
And what about rare music? When some remix/promo single or obscure album/12" is long out of print and not carried by places like the iTunes Store, and the torrents have all died down, I may still be able to track down an authentic, full-quality release at a used/collectible shop. I doubt I could be so lucky with old download-only releases, where any company hosting them would likely be sued out of business.
If you and your sister log in to your favorite or most important websites, then those sites know at least some portion of your respective identities. Mix in a little collusion--er, cooperation/affiliation between said sites and their advertisers, and I would suspect that M$/Google could distinguish between the two of you, given enough information and clever, weaselly data mining.
I like and use Firefox, but it seems awfully chummy with Google for my taste. I don't think it's the default, but Firefox 2.0 allows you to check with Google whether each site you visit is a "suspected forgery." Probably a sizable percentage of Firefox users takes Google up on its offer.
...or easily identifiable as that person in your locality who is running a random browsing bot.
Where are my mod points when I need them? ;)
My Compaq laptop came severely cluttered with OEM-pre-installed turds, including twenty-some "games", which had to be uninstalled one-by-one. Since I get to work with clean Microsoft Volume Licensing copies of WinXP Pro at work, this did not change my opinion of the OS itself. It did make the OOBE quite irritating, though, and I'm sure that this sort of thing impacts people's opinions of Windows. Funny how Microsoft hasn't cared about rampant Windows XP crappification but now that they want to promote a new OS, it matters.
FWIW, I think that Microsoft should at least pressure OEMs to provide customers with the <em>option</em> of installing a relatively clean copy of Windows from the recovery discs/partition, as a non-patronizing alternative to the industry standard OEM junkfest.
I haven't listened to the RDM podcasts, partially for fear of spoilers, but perhaps I should. Thanks for bringing up this interesting info.
In "Home, Part 2" (s2e07), didn't the revelation at the tomb of Athena show clearly that the different colonies were each situated in their own star systems, within their respective constellations as seen from Earth and/or Kobol?
Or were those constellations merely patterns that are on the flags of each colony, irrespective of the colonies' locations? Now that I consider this more, in light of the miniseries and jumping beyond "the red line" into uncharted space, it would make more sense for the colonies to be either orbiting the same star, or more plausibly within the same group of stars in fairly close proximity to each other.
Back again to the tomb of Athena, what really happened there? Did the Arrow of Apollo transport people briefly to somewhere on Earth? If not, then the constellations make it appear that Kobol is in fact Earth! It's been months since I've seen this episode, so I don't remember for sure, but didn't the cylons chase the fleet away from Kobol? Kobol seemed like a more habitable place than New Caprica, so why doesn't the fleet return or send military recon expeditions back to Kobol?
Yes, this was absolutely the right choice. I just wonder what took them so long!
I also wonder when other organizations will follow suit.
No doubt this Windows update will undergo intensive scrutiny by individuals and companies interested in computer security, especially in light of this excitement surrounding the DHS recommendation. Any suspicious functionality will be discovered, even though we do not have the source code. The government knows this, so I would be amazed if they actually included nefarious code in this update. Besides, WGA can probably spy on us just fine, thank-you-very-much. ;)
Is the article by Paul Thurrott still accurate? It is not from last week -- it is a year old! Perhaps Microsoft has made IE7 more standards-compliant since then.
Firefox 2 contains an optional phishing filter which would provide so much information to Google that it's worse than phishing itself. And now this deal with Real... I am disappointed.
Time to switch back to a different Gecko-based browser, such as Seamonkey. Or better yet, Opera 9. Now that's a good browser, albeit unfortunately not open.
There are only twelve types of BG spinoffs.
But there are many copies...
And they have a plan.
The article is rather scant on details, but includes this information:
I have mixed feelings about this spin-off. On the one hand, I have become more or less addicted to Battlestar Galactica and want something to tide me over until the third season starts. On the other hand, the plot of Caprica, as presented in this write-up, strikes me as cheesy. Is this a family feud? With billions of people in the twelve colonies, why does the Adama family need a central role in the new show? (Isn't one series enough? Was there a pre-William Adama back story in the original show or in Hatch's books? Being a BSG fan of only recent vintage, I don't know. This just reminds me of the 130-year McFly-Tannen conflict in Back to the Future.)
Battlestar Galactica is a riveting show. Hopefully its creators will achieve similar success with Caprica.
Oh, I see. I did that too, for awhile, but stopped once I switched to using keyboard shortcuts.
What's next... claiming that inclusion of MS Paint is anti-competitive?
Exactly. I see AD as an integral part of Windows Server, and although I usually opt to use other media players, I think it makes good sense to include WMP with Windows. True, it does put competing products at a disadvantage, but I as a customer wouldn't want to have to obtain third-party products just to do simple things like viewing images or web pages. As long as alternative products are able to work with the system to the same degree as Microsoft's offerings, I see no problem. Bundling small apps with the OS and increases the value of the system to the average user. If Microsoft is guilty of this, then how much moreso are *BSD and Linux distros?
I have an old eMac running Tiger as a secondary box at work, but I don't get to use it much. My shop is staunchly Microsoft-centric, and there is little I can do about it, aside from promoting non-IE web browsers and occasionally popping in a live CD. I'd love to run Linux or *BSD instead of XP, but sadly it is not permitted.
I stopped using the quicklaunch bar because whenever I would update or install some programs, they would spam shortcuts into it, making it a maintenance pain. For years now, I've been happily using keyboard shortcuts for most of the programs I am likely to use. No moving a mouse across the screen to click a tiny box. Just press a familiar key combo and the app starts. I recommend it.
Actually, it would be more like the difference between 10.1 and the upcoming 10.5.
That's a real stretch, unless you're just looking at the length of time between releases. Today's Windows XP SP2 is markedly better than XP RTM, and even that was not as weak as OS X 10.1. Mac OS X has come a long way. Although I look forward to ditching XP for Vista at work, I doubt it is that much of a departure.
</imho>
Go ahead and shuffle out the door, now, Poddie...
Man, I knew blogging is for the birds! Now this proves it.
I suppose if any pigeons reply to this, they will be posting nested comments. <gr&d>
Thanks for the info! That was helpful.
I hope that live bookmarks will get implemented, because it makes it extremely easy to find out what's new at all of my favorite sites, and jump straight to interesting articles, all within the web browser (and compactly yet accessibly stored within my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder).