Then the pragmatist in me woke up, realized that the average customer has a 20 minute memory and even if they heard about the hubris of sony, they wouldn't understand/care. Nothing will change except that people on places like/. will avoid sony and inform their friends/relatives not to buy it.
Lack of understanding might actually work against Sony. Their rootkit made national news; the average person might not understand what a rootkit is and why it's dangerous, but they can grasp "Sony discs do bad stuff to your PC." The average person is also unlikely to know how to recognize a DRM'ed disc in the store, so they may end up avoiding anything from Sony to be on the safe side. Then there's the lawsuits that are getting started; those will keep the bad press going for a while.
Besides, I don't think that this story is over yet. Sony-BMG's other DRM scheme (MediaMax) is almost as intrusive as XCP, and the other labels undoubtedly are trying similar tricks.
Without getting into any specific examples, the reason I tend to distrust conspiracy theories is because conspiracy theorists have a nasty habit of starting from their conclusion and then cherry-picking evidence to support it. Having made an affirmative claim, they try to push the burden of proof onto the other side. They frequently respond to contrary evidence with ad hominem attacks, strawman arguments, appeals to motive, and/or other logical fallacies. Finally, they continue to assert their claims regardless of how much evidence to the contrary is presented to them.
In short, I distrust conspiracy theorists because their tactics show them to be dishonest.
From the information I could find, Ralsky was sending something on the order of a billion spams a day and has been spamming since 1997. That's somewhere on the order of 2.92 trillion spams sent. At a half-second of prison time each, I come up with a sentence of approximately 46 years.
Compared to that, the 20 years he could get is actually lenient.
To be fair to the GP, most of the speculation I've seen about Vista has predicted that a mid-to-high-range card will be necessary for acceptable graphics performance, so there probably are people upgrading already in anticipation of higher system requirements when Vista comes out.
Having said that, I'd imagine that there are far more people upgrading because of a combination of larger monitors and graphically demanding games like HL2, Battlefront 2, and Doom 3.
Re:I think the better question is..
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Because blocking ads takes effort.
Using adblock and a hosts file requires practically no effort at all. There's even a filterset.g updater extension now, so all I have to do is check every once in a while for updates to the hosts file and right-click + "adblock image" on anything that filterset.g doesn't get.
For that minimal investment of effort, I get improved page load times on my 28.8k connection and I no longer have to put up with the all-singing, all-dancing ads. It's well worth it.
"We want a standard that's going to be around for 10 or 15 years" really means "We want DRM that won't be broken for 10 to 15 years, at which point we'll have CSS^4 lined up to replace it."
It is a critical security update. There are people out there who just park a windows box on an always-on connection with no kind of protection whatsoever. Left to their own devices, the owners would happily leave their PCs sitting there as part of a botnet forever (with perhaps a little head-scratching over why their computer is so slow.) At least this way there's some chance of getting their computer patched and de-loused.
I'm sure that somewhere out there, there are idiots uninstalling their anti-virus because they've got "this new anti-virus thingee" from Microsoft. My point was that Microsoft does not describe it as being a substitute for anti-virus software and in fact states that an anti-virus is still necessary. They're not trying to drive anyone out of business... well, not with the tool we're discussing, at any rate.
First off, Microsoft mentions in the download details for the malicious software removal tool that it is not a substitute for antivirus software. It simply scans for some of the more prevalent trojans and worms and attempts to remove them. If you look at the Microsoft knowledge base you'll note that all of the malware it currently targets are worms, trojans, or rootkits.
Second, it's amusing to me that you chose Webroot for your example since they offer SpySweeper to MSN dialup customers at no charge. In fact, my dad uses it (rather than the copy of Ad-Aware I installed for him) because it is the "official" Microsoft product.
So, they are trying to convince me that the reason THEY are DRM-ing their CD's is because of Apple?
No; they're trying to convince you that it's Apple's fault that their copy-protection scheme (theoretically) forces you to copy tracks in a format that iTunes doesn't read. They're also trying to convince you that there's no easy method of circumventing their copy-protection scheme... like, say, disabling autorun or ripping the disc from a non-Windows PC.
Im sorry, but who do they expect will be convinced by this? We're not talking about Momma and Poppa Joe here who will be complining- this will be educated individuals from the internet generation. These people will easily be able to see right through this decieteful childsplay.
Your last sentence is the reason why tech-savvy people won't be the ones complaining; they have the knowledge to circumvent these kinds of measures. The complaints will come from the people who've never heard of DRM before and don't know that there's even a difference between an AAC music file and a WMA music file.
This is a foolish act by Sony that makes them sound like even more of faceless evil megacorporation than they already do.
My layman's understanding is that a nuclear warhead produces energy in the form of X-rays; air tends to absorb them, producing a fireball and overpressure wave. In space the warhead would impart its energy to the asteroid directly, vaporizing a portion of its surface and (hopefully) providing enough of an impulse to prevent it from hitting the earth. So at least as I understand it, a nuclear weapon should be just as effective in space as it would be in an atmosphere.
Disclaimer: I opted for marine biology instead of physics. Take the above with a grain of sea salt.
I prefer to have my collection on the computer; it saves wear and tear on my disks, and I can just skip around through my library as the mood strikes me. So in my case, it would be a good representation of what sort of music I'll pay for.
Of course, god only knows what they'd make of the fact that roughly half of my collection is soundtracks.
According to a poster in this thread, EZTV was being attacked by parties unknown (possibly MediaSentry) who were soaking up bandwidth and trying to inject corrupt file segments. I also saw a comment on the emule board from someone who tossed some random non-infringing files into a shared folder and immediately started getting upload requests. That leads me to believe that they're just trying to soak up as much bandwidth as they can, with legit downloads being collateral damage.
I would suspect that they're running bots on the various P2P networks to leech bandwidth, and that you'd see blocked connections regardless of what files you have shared.
Ultimately, I think it's just a failure to understand the new market they're in. They want to sell downloads the same way they've always sold records, tapes, and CDs, and it's not going to work for them. They're in for some harsh lessons in the marketplace before they figure it out, however.
Having said that, I do think that albums will eventually become as outdated of a concept as "b-sides." Customers are already getting used to the idea of picking and choosing what they want, rather than buying a CD or single to get those one or two songs they've heard on the radio. Especially with younger listeners who are growing up with iTunes, "album-only" downloads are no different than any arbitrary group of 12 songs packaged together.
I've never understood how the slavedriver mentality can be justified as being good for a business. Okay, you've improved the bottom line because fewer employees mean less salary and benefits being paid out. However, the remaining employees are having to work their asses off to make up the difference. Tired people make more mistakes, and fixing those costs money. Fatigue and stress depress the immune system, so your employees get sick more (and with fewer employees, it's harder to cover for someone when they get sick.)
Then they wonder why their employees are ready to jump ship the second they get a better offer.
Teachers of 600 8th and 9th graders, aged 13 to 15, said children who spent more time playing violent video games were more hostile than other children and more likely to argue with authority figures and other students.
I wonder how the teachers in question made that determination. My suspicion would be that they were only looking at the gaming habits of the "problem" children, and that the well-behaved ones log roughly the same amount of time at the keyboard or console.
But let him play Metroid Prime for a few minutes and it makes him so frustrated that he will lash out and smack or kick his sisters if they get too close. After time to calm down, though, he usually becomes mild-mannered again.
My brother and I fought all the time. We'd fight over alleged cheating in Monopoly, what show we were going to watch, or which toy belonged to whom. When we finally got a Nintendo and a computer, we fought over those too. Of course, when I was a kid all the experts were concerned about the dangers of unrealistic violence portrayed in cartoons like G.I. Joe.
The alert level is currently yellow for the general population and has been for months now. The orange alert level was confined to certain areas like mass transit, and was also recently lowered to yellow.
You may be buying a returned item anyway. Having worked at a couple of places where the policy was "all sales final," my experience was that they would still take returns if a customer bitched enough about the policy. If the item was still in saleable condition, the next step was to put it through the shrink wrap machine (if necessary) and stick it back on the shelf.
I can't see nuclear weapons becoming ubiquitous; they're expensive to build and maintain, technically challenging to produce, and the facilities required to produce them are difficult to hide. I'd be more concerned about wack jobs playing around with nerve gas or deadly diseases.
If they didn't include it, they'd have people complaining because their brand-new Longhorn PC with widescreen monitor won't play their new blu-ray movies.
Not that I think there's any reluctance on the part of Microsoft about including DRM. I'd imagine that all of this crap will be quietly back-ported into Windows XP at some point.
According to this, people are already exploiting the JView profiler bug and have been playing around with ways to exploit the color management module bug.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see the label now:
"Use as directed. Side effects include enlarged waistline, impaired vision, and brewer's droop."
Here's what the EFF had to say about Audible Magic.
Besides, I don't think that this story is over yet. Sony-BMG's other DRM scheme (MediaMax) is almost as intrusive as XCP, and the other labels undoubtedly are trying similar tricks.
Without getting into any specific examples, the reason I tend to distrust conspiracy theories is because conspiracy theorists have a nasty habit of starting from their conclusion and then cherry-picking evidence to support it. Having made an affirmative claim, they try to push the burden of proof onto the other side. They frequently respond to contrary evidence with ad hominem attacks, strawman arguments, appeals to motive, and/or other logical fallacies. Finally, they continue to assert their claims regardless of how much evidence to the contrary is presented to them.
In short, I distrust conspiracy theorists because their tactics show them to be dishonest.
From the information I could find, Ralsky was sending something on the order of a billion spams a day and has been spamming since 1997. That's somewhere on the order of 2.92 trillion spams sent. At a half-second of prison time each, I come up with a sentence of approximately 46 years.
Compared to that, the 20 years he could get is actually lenient.
To be fair to the GP, most of the speculation I've seen about Vista has predicted that a mid-to-high-range card will be necessary for acceptable graphics performance, so there probably are people upgrading already in anticipation of higher system requirements when Vista comes out.
Having said that, I'd imagine that there are far more people upgrading because of a combination of larger monitors and graphically demanding games like HL2, Battlefront 2, and Doom 3.
Because blocking ads takes effort.
Using adblock and a hosts file requires practically no effort at all. There's even a filterset.g updater extension now, so all I have to do is check every once in a while for updates to the hosts file and right-click + "adblock image" on anything that filterset.g doesn't get.
For that minimal investment of effort, I get improved page load times on my 28.8k connection and I no longer have to put up with the all-singing, all-dancing ads. It's well worth it.
Translation from Marketing Weasel:
"We want a standard that's going to be around for 10 or 15 years" really means "We want DRM that won't be broken for 10 to 15 years, at which point we'll have CSS^4 lined up to replace it."
It is a critical security update. There are people out there who just park a windows box on an always-on connection with no kind of protection whatsoever. Left to their own devices, the owners would happily leave their PCs sitting there as part of a botnet forever (with perhaps a little head-scratching over why their computer is so slow.) At least this way there's some chance of getting their computer patched and de-loused.
I'm sure that somewhere out there, there are idiots uninstalling their anti-virus because they've got "this new anti-virus thingee" from Microsoft. My point was that Microsoft does not describe it as being a substitute for anti-virus software and in fact states that an anti-virus is still necessary. They're not trying to drive anyone out of business... well, not with the tool we're discussing, at any rate.
First off, Microsoft mentions in the download details for the malicious software removal tool that it is not a substitute for antivirus software. It simply scans for some of the more prevalent trojans and worms and attempts to remove them. If you look at the Microsoft knowledge base you'll note that all of the malware it currently targets are worms, trojans, or rootkits.
Second, it's amusing to me that you chose Webroot for your example since they offer SpySweeper to MSN dialup customers at no charge. In fact, my dad uses it (rather than the copy of Ad-Aware I installed for him) because it is the "official" Microsoft product.
My layman's understanding is that a nuclear warhead produces energy in the form of X-rays; air tends to absorb them, producing a fireball and overpressure wave. In space the warhead would impart its energy to the asteroid directly, vaporizing a portion of its surface and (hopefully) providing enough of an impulse to prevent it from hitting the earth. So at least as I understand it, a nuclear weapon should be just as effective in space as it would be in an atmosphere.
Disclaimer: I opted for marine biology instead of physics. Take the above with a grain of sea salt.
I prefer to have my collection on the computer; it saves wear and tear on my disks, and I can just skip around through my library as the mood strikes me. So in my case, it would be a good representation of what sort of music I'll pay for.
Of course, god only knows what they'd make of the fact that roughly half of my collection is soundtracks.
According to a poster in this thread, EZTV was being attacked by parties unknown (possibly MediaSentry) who were soaking up bandwidth and trying to inject corrupt file segments. I also saw a comment on the emule board from someone who tossed some random non-infringing files into a shared folder and immediately started getting upload requests. That leads me to believe that they're just trying to soak up as much bandwidth as they can, with legit downloads being collateral damage.
I would suspect that they're running bots on the various P2P networks to leech bandwidth, and that you'd see blocked connections regardless of what files you have shared.
Ultimately, I think it's just a failure to understand the new market they're in. They want to sell downloads the same way they've always sold records, tapes, and CDs, and it's not going to work for them. They're in for some harsh lessons in the marketplace before they figure it out, however.
Having said that, I do think that albums will eventually become as outdated of a concept as "b-sides." Customers are already getting used to the idea of picking and choosing what they want, rather than buying a CD or single to get those one or two songs they've heard on the radio. Especially with younger listeners who are growing up with iTunes, "album-only" downloads are no different than any arbitrary group of 12 songs packaged together.
I've never understood how the slavedriver mentality can be justified as being good for a business. Okay, you've improved the bottom line because fewer employees mean less salary and benefits being paid out. However, the remaining employees are having to work their asses off to make up the difference. Tired people make more mistakes, and fixing those costs money. Fatigue and stress depress the immune system, so your employees get sick more (and with fewer employees, it's harder to cover for someone when they get sick.)
Then they wonder why their employees are ready to jump ship the second they get a better offer.
How on earth did the parent get modded "troll?"
The alert level is currently yellow for the general population and has been for months now. The orange alert level was confined to certain areas like mass transit, and was also recently lowered to yellow.
You may be buying a returned item anyway. Having worked at a couple of places where the policy was "all sales final," my experience was that they would still take returns if a customer bitched enough about the policy. If the item was still in saleable condition, the next step was to put it through the shrink wrap machine (if necessary) and stick it back on the shelf.
I can't see nuclear weapons becoming ubiquitous; they're expensive to build and maintain, technically challenging to produce, and the facilities required to produce them are difficult to hide. I'd be more concerned about wack jobs playing around with nerve gas or deadly diseases.
If they didn't include it, they'd have people complaining because their brand-new Longhorn PC with widescreen monitor won't play their new blu-ray movies.
Not that I think there's any reluctance on the part of Microsoft about including DRM. I'd imagine that all of this crap will be quietly back-ported into Windows XP at some point.
According to this, people are already exploiting the JView profiler bug and have been playing around with ways to exploit the color management module bug.