Or, what if you wrote it down and cannot find the slip? If a system truly was just then there should be no way that anybody could do anything about that unless they can prove it's some sort of ruse...Of course we all know that is how you'd be treated whether you were being honest or not.
What if you think you know it, try it and it doesn't work....because you remember it wrong....Your word should be good enough - what are they going to do, torture it out of you? (actually, I don't even want to think about what some of these fascists would try to do if you couldn;t remember your key, but from a legal standpoint I can't see how they could prevail unless they could somehow prove that you were withholding it).
What if you had a folder encrypted and had either genuinely lost the key, or were trying to make it look that way and had emailed the software manufacturer saying "Hey,I have lost my key for this archive, what can I do?" and they email back saying "You're screwed without the key, basically" - could that email then serve to prove your point and cover your ass?
That is a good point you make. We have institutionalized corruption in America - and it has evolved with a diabolical incrementalism, and its not like it has just happened at random, via some fucked up legal natural selection.
Things never seem to get better for the average person, and if they do, it's one step forward and two steps back....I wish there was a way to do an end run around all of this bullshit and get some sort of protection for the common people....Like, a contract with government that defines our rights and protects them, makes clear that they are inherent and not granted by man, and in order to work properly it would have to make clear that it alone is the highest law of the land.......ehhh
The exclusivity deals are a part of this - AT&T is what it is right now because of the Iphone, without that they wouldn't have the market share they do...I have to say that I think it's time for mass resistance to this kind of shit. All of this kind of stuff is why I think, instead of feeling bad, a lot of people actually feel great when they download corporate copyrighted material, or reverse engineer their handsets or do whatever it is they want to do with their technology...it's the only way a lot of people feel like they can fuck these assholes back for once.
The only way your attempted analogy would work is if there was only *one* single digital file version of every song...
See the difference? You can make a million copies of a song or video, and they all generally are just as useful as the original...You cannot do this with a domain name, hence someone is hurt, hence your analogy doesn't work.
To your astute political analysis, I add the following snippet of pop culture: Don't forget what Eastern Europe has done for modern porn; if not for Eastern Europe you'd all be watching the same tired women from the San Fernando Valley.
I have a lot of problems with this, not to mention the fact that it can be difficult to control the range of such things.
You never know what is going to happen, and because of that the potential risk and issues that go along with jamming outweigh the benefits of jaming.
If the school can't find a better way to prevent cellphone froms becoming an distractiong, that's an indictment of whatever they're currently trying, not an indicator that they need to unlawfully repress a vital communications technology.
The point isn't that organic foods have "magical health properties" - it's to avoid the additives and anything unnatural in industrially produced foods.
They have it backwards - it's almost like the following scenario: You have four bowls of soup, three of which are poisoned - four people sit down and eat the soup, and three of them die. We don't say "Gee, one of those soups had magical health benefits, that's why this guy lived," we say "three of those soups had poison."
I am not saying that non-organics are all bad, or anything - I personally like organic stuff because it generally tastes better, but if you're going to study this, study the food which aren't organic - in all of their various forms.
That's the thing too - it is very difficult to accurately study this sort of thing - a single study isn't necessarily going to show results unless it has all sorts of foods, some that are GM, some where different pesticide techniques are used, some where hormones are used etc - and it might not be that this stuff is even that harmful in occasional doses - but over a lifetime this stuff may have determental effects - and unless you are studying a large segment of people, monitoring everything they eat and comparing them to a control group made up of their twins who are eating organic versions of th same foods - how are you going to have truly reliable results?
Seriously....I had an entire >cassette with songs about videogames around that time; it was Buckner and Garcia's "Pacman Fever" - and in addition to Pac Man it had songs about Centipede, Defender, and many others.
So I think by the time a campy album has been released, based on the smash success of a novelty single, that video games were indeed popular.
They weren't 3D (well, not really, I supposed you could say that Tempest was 3D in a way), but there was Intellivision, Atari, and awesome Apple ][ games too (i use the word "awesome" in a very relative sense).
At least make it an AR15 instead of what is likely some ex soviet bloc knockoff - although my guess is that would cost twice as much for them to do....
AK's are great if you get a decent one...Very reliable weapons, but the variation in quality is so wide that unless you know what you're getting, you don't REALLY know what you're getting.
You can see how the fact that this dealer is doing this is generating publicity; very successfully I might add - look at us discussing this, we're all over the world and we're talking about a car dealer in Missouri. It's because it's controversial....It shouldn't be, but it is, because it scares some people. It shouldn't - but it does.
It's too bad that a large percentage of the populace is so ignorant about firearms and have lost touch with this aspect of American heritage; the only exposure they really have is through TV, movies, news reports, and fanatical anti-gun organizations - and it's universally negative and threatening.
Guns are tools, pure and simple, and only as dangerous or evil as the person using it. If the people trying to get rid of guns could actually snap their fingers and make all guns in the entire world past and future disappear and never have existed, then maybe they might actually accomplish what they are setting out to do - if they could do that, I might even sign on.....But that's just not reality - and the founders of this country - as imperfect as they were with their slaves and wealth and selfish reasons for some of the things they did - they did recognize that their fledgling republic could (and likely would) end up under tyranny at some point in the future if the people didn't have the right to stay armed.
There are situations that can happen, even in modern day America where anybody who has really thought about it is likely going to want to be armed or be with someone they trust who is armed; I know I will - any major civil emergency for starters....In live in a major American city, and I can guarantee you that if all power was cut, once we reached the 48 hour point it would be a very uncivilized and dangerous cutthroat place.
It may be the law that is used to deal with legitimate raves, but a 15 guest private birthday party for a 30 year old is not a fucking rave - the police should have recognized their error and apologized and left - only to come back if there was an actual legitimate disturbance.
When police abuse the public trust and act like asshole thugs who refuse to back down when they're wrong, bad things happen...Cops that pull this kind of shit contribute to hatred for all police - when in fact not all police are egotistical power hungry assholes with inferiority complexes.
I was wondering what things would be like today for the music industry, artists, and music lovers if the RIAA had never waged this campaign against filesharing - and napster continued unabated...What do you think?
Would it be better than it is now? Would it be worse? Would it be the same? Why?
I guess I think that eventually artists would have gotten involved - and since they aren't multinational corporations, they might not have been as successful at getting the authorities on their side. Some probably would have acted like Lars Ulrich; but ultimately I think more of them would have resorted to interfacing directly with their fans, kind of like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails - but I am curious what other people think.
*note: I am all for filesharing...I have a massive vinyl and CD collection. I used to have a ton of cassettes too before I transfered the non-replaceable ones to CD and downloaded (without paying a second time I might add) everything I already owned on cassette in MP3 and FLAC versions. I still buy music from time to time, but most of what I donwload are live shows and stuff I already have paid for at least once. If I download something new and end up liking it, then usually I will buy it. So I hate the RIAA, I think they rip off musicians, they exist for one purpose: to protect and enrich the large media conglomerates. They don't give a fuck about artists - only about an artist's ability to produce money for the machine, and if they can get more of the money by extending ownership of master tapes or anything else which fucks the artist, they love doing so.
You know that if Obama went on TV on this issue, he likely would be standing next to Biden - and all of the RIAA lawyers he has promoted into the DOJ...He's likely NOT on the "right" side of this issue.
I need to get a passport soon, but this issue kind of concerns me - people who think those of us who are concerned are being overly paranoid just don't get it - just because there isn't anything disturbing happening with these things right now at this moment (that we know of) doesn't mean that we know things will remain copacetic in the future...Once the apparatus for widespread monitoring/tracking is in place, it's in place - it isn't a good or a bad thing, it's a tool that can be used in either manner.
I have heard about RFID shields, but have heard various concerns about their effectiveness.
I am wondering how these passports are actually constructed. Could the tag be removed when you don't want it there and re-inserted when you need it there?
Then again, some people may feel it's stupid to worry about such a thing when you carry a cell phone that has a GPS chip in it, and there may be some truth to that; only, my cell phone can be turned off and doesn't come directly from a government and it's not mandated that I carry it for identification when I travel internationally..
I just cut 2 power cables off of old power supplies, I have spliced the cut ends together; pos to pos, neg to neg, grd to grd. It's one long cable terminating in a 3 prong power plug at each end!
It's so eloquent!!!
Now all I have to is plug one side into an outlet and plug the other side into another outlet that is about 5 feet away!!! I'm sure It'll probably send those secret stealing feds into an endless loop.
I've got one side plugged in, just gotta get this other side plugged in and THEN WE'LL SEE WHO'S LAUGHING!!!
When I first saw the headline, I thought "Oh shit - one of the few free music apps that works perfectly and actually has good content is now going to be ruined;" not because I have any objection to paying a fair price for things, but because historically with free music sites/services online, once money becomes involved they change, and usually not for the better.
However, I find this pricing model pretty appropriate - if you are listening over 40 hours a month, 99 cents is a small price to pay to support the site. This doesn't look to me like a way to exploit their userbase for huge economic gains, rather, it looks like a site doing what they need to do to survive without taking advantage of their user base.
If they raise it substantially, quickly - I might feel differently, but from what I understand they were having to deal with this seems like a pretty good way to go - managable and fair, and only affecting heavy users.
What is RIDICULOUS is the fact that he got sentenced to 4 years in prison for this.
There are some finer points to this story that don't really seem to be covered in the Scientific American article, there is more to the story. I am not saying the guy acted intelligently here, but the government is using him to make a point.
What you have to understand is that the entire system is geared towards a plea bargain - most people in the US have no idea of how the criminal justice system really functions - forget all that shit you learned in school about "fair trials" and shit.
They bring a huge amount of pressure to bear on these people, and set things up in a way where it's going to cost them so much money to continue to fight and they stack the desk against them and set it up in a way so that they really can't win. Then, likely their lawyer has a conversation with them that sounds something like the following:
"Look, I know it's not right, but you should take the plea bargain - if you take the plea bargain and agree to plead to these charges there will be no trial - your legal bills will cease, you can get your affairs in order then do your time and you'll be out in 4 months - should you choose to go to trial you'll face 35 times the amount of time and a very large fine, the trial and perparation will cost obscene amounts of money and I cannot say that your chances are even 50-50 - this is a politicized trial and they will be doing every little trick they have to ensure that you lose, and when you lose they will take you straight to jail - if you want to be a martyr for the cause, I fully support that and will be right there with you as long as you can continue to pay me - but my best advice to you, as your lawyer, is to take the plea bargain,"
I agree; if we haven't learned by now to carefully pay attention to the click-thrus when installing anything (especially anything downloaded for free) then a change in search defaults may be fairly mild compared to some of the other stuff that can end up installed on our machines.
I have been wondering how the business arrangements for such things work; you mention Ask toolbar - which I have seen trying to sneak it's way onto my machines with paid software, (Nero 9 is one of these, IIRC)...The thing that I keep wondering is: why would a company that has a product with such a good reputation include this stuff selected-by-default? Are they really being paid that much money to include it? Don't they realize it kind of annoys and pisses people off? I really don't like it, it makes me feel like I have to be doubly careful with dealing with anything I get from that company. I'm assuming there must be some sort of significant payoff in it for them.
I realize that these search competitors have to do something to compete with Google's dominance; i mean, their name has morphed into a verb for all things search - (kind of like "coke" for all things cola) - but I would think that there has to be a better way to get people to try a new search engine out rather than using this method, which I imagine serves to kind of give a negative association with the product, (especially among technically savvy people - at least, it does for me - having to uncheck "install ask.com search bar" when I am trying to install something completely unrelated just makes me think their service must not be that great because they have to pay to sneak on to people's machines).
The prosecution of this woman for bogus charges was ridiculous.
Yes, she was cruel, but:
1. Violating a website's TOS is not illegal; 2. She was not responsible for the girl's suicide, that is why it was a suicide and not a murder; 3. Abusing the legal system to punish someone who has done something extremely unpopular with the masses by either trumping up charges or using ridiculous interpretations which are byond novel should be a criminal offense if anything should be; 4. The authoritarian leaning people in government and industry in this country hoped to be able to use this case and the bogus charges to set precedents that would have left pretty much all of us who use the net regularly at risk for all kinds of shit.
I just read a post where someone referred to one of the scumbags who was teasing this girl as "the killer." If that doesn't illustrate that people have a poor and overly emotional "TV cop show" understanding of the law and ethics, then I don't know what will.
I hope we don't see this judge bow to the inevitable pressure that will be heaped upon him by the scores of people thirsting for vengeance after they hear about this ruling - there are TONS of injustices that are far worse than what that bitch and her nutty kid did to this poor girl, some of which may make life harder or more miserable for already suffering people - who may then commit suicide...Where is the outrage for them?
These outraged people would better spend their time donating money to suicide prevention programs or volunteering for suicide helplines; but hey, there's no voyeuristic sick venegeance pleasure to be gained by doing so....
This isn't about usenet - and it never ceases to amaze me when I hear people claim that usenet is only used for binaries and spam. I would tell you to go ahead and help make these case for those who want to take away your freedoms - if it didn't remove mine as well.
Usenet is important, it's used for a lot of things - binaries are just one of them. People send copyrighted files AND spam by email as well, but I don't hear you bitching about email servers and SMTP protocol.
I believe that this company was a directory index of binaries posted to the internet - similar to newzbin. They were making money off of providing access to these files for people who couldn't take the time to learn how to use a proper newsreader.
Haven't you heard? If you quote and carry a copy around a copy you are now consiered a "constitutionalist," which, according to several dubious law enforcement training pamphlets makes you a likely "homegrown terrorist."
The supreme court has already ruled that this is protected free speech. Why the hell is anybody wasting time harrassing this man? You can't charge people with a crime because you don't like their taste in art.
You can't say "Oh, this means that he's a pedophile, and even though he hasn't done anything to anyone, we think he's thinking about it."
It makes me want to create children faces (or maybe use famous child actors) with their faces affixed to nude bodies (maybe generated ones) in politcal parody cartoons about this and mail it to these backwards asshole prosecutors. See what they do with two controversial activities already ruled as protected.
People who say things like "the guy is clearly a pedophile and should be removed from society" have it totally wrong, you can't charge someone based on a personal assumption - for good reason...That kind of shit would make it easier for all of us to lose our rights and people who say such things have a very limited understanding of freedom and the law.
It's fucking irrelevant what you or I think of how tasteful or disgusting his "art" is - the fact is that he should have the right to create it. Maybe he is a pedophile, maybe he isn't - but you can't brand him that because of "art."
You buy them because it is the one modification you can make in this day and age that will have a dramatic impact on the speed of your computing experience.
Adding more RAM, stepping up to a faster processor with twice as many cores - yeah, you'll notice those things a bit (especiaslly when multitasking) but if you want to do something that may cust your start up time to a third of what it was, and make it seems like you've turbochraged your machine, for most people an SSD will do that - especially on a laptop where yo're generally not going to have a 10k or 15k RPM drive or a striped array - but there is a cost, and it's significant, and there are a lot of SSD drives to choose from that use different sorts of technologies, generally speaking you get what you pay for with these.
SO then can he sue those techs for all of the pain and suffering he would have to bear because of those images they illegally found?
I wonder if these were genuine child porn pictures - I have heard of many, many occasions of people getting in toruble because they have either pictures of family members running around naked as children that clearly aren't pornogrpahic, as well as people getting in trouble for drawings, or porn photos of 18 year olds who look young where the court cannot definitively prove they teens are under 18.
I still repair PCs for people sometimes, though not as much as I used to (I run and IT dept now), and when I did it a lot I would occasionally find photos of the owner of the PC and their significant other engaging in sex, etc. Sometimes these people were in college, once one was a senior in high school - I didn't say shit, I just backed those pictures up and moved them to their new machine without saying a word
I just don't see someone who is a serious pedophile with real child porn handing their computer over to techs at circuit city. I suppose it happens, but generally I would think these people would know better.
You know what's crazy? I have tried those different shavers, and three blades seems to be the sweet spot - with those 4 and 5 blade cartridges, there isn;t enough room between the blades for them to get close enough to your skin, for the stubble to get in there - they just don't work as well, but I guess the standard marketing bullshit applies: "More is better*, because this is America"
*if it doesn't work better, or even as well, that is okay, because the customer's pride in knowing that they have the newest and best overcomes any actual shortcomings of function.
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What if you genuinely forgot the key?
Or, what if you wrote it down and cannot find the slip? If a system truly was just then there should be no way that anybody could do anything about that unless they can prove it's some sort of ruse...Of course we all know that is how you'd be treated whether you were being honest or not.
What if you think you know it, try it and it doesn't work....because you remember it wrong....Your word should be good enough - what are they going to do, torture it out of you? (actually, I don't even want to think about what some of these fascists would try to do if you couldn;t remember your key, but from a legal standpoint I can't see how they could prevail unless they could somehow prove that you were withholding it).
What if you had a folder encrypted and had either genuinely lost the key, or were trying to make it look that way and had emailed the software manufacturer saying "Hey,I have lost my key for this archive, what can I do?" and they email back saying "You're screwed without the key, basically" - could that email then serve to prove your point and cover your ass?
That is a good point you make. We have institutionalized corruption in America - and it has evolved with a diabolical incrementalism, and its not like it has just happened at random, via some fucked up legal natural selection.
Things never seem to get better for the average person, and if they do, it's one step forward and two steps back. ...I wish there was a way to do an end run around all of this bullshit and get some sort of protection for the common people....Like, a contract with government that defines our rights and protects them, makes clear that they are inherent and not granted by man, and in order to work properly it would have to make clear that it alone is the highest law of the land.......ehhh
The exclusivity deals are a part of this - AT&T is what it is right now because of the Iphone, without that they wouldn't have the market share they do...I have to say that I think it's time for mass resistance to this kind of shit. All of this kind of stuff is why I think, instead of feeling bad, a lot of people actually feel great when they download corporate copyrighted material, or reverse engineer their handsets or do whatever it is they want to do with their technology...it's the only way a lot of people feel like they can fuck these assholes back for once.
The only way your attempted analogy would work is if there was only *one* single digital file version of every song...
See the difference? You can make a million copies of a song or video, and they all generally are just as useful as the original...You cannot do this with a domain name, hence someone is hurt, hence your analogy doesn't work.
That is quite insightful..
To your astute political analysis, I add the following snippet of pop culture: Don't forget what Eastern Europe has done for modern porn; if not for Eastern Europe you'd all be watching the same tired women from the San Fernando Valley.
I have a lot of problems with this, not to mention the fact that it can be difficult to control the range of such things.
You never know what is going to happen, and because of that the potential risk and issues that go along with jamming outweigh the benefits of jaming.
If the school can't find a better way to prevent cellphone froms becoming an distractiong, that's an indictment of whatever they're currently trying, not an indicator that they need to unlawfully repress a vital communications technology.
Mass resistance; do it anyways.
If that doesn't work, have everyone piss in the pool.
(i know, I know, but nanny state nonsense pisses me off and makes me feel like maybe we should give these nannies som conventional nanny hassles).
The point isn't that organic foods have "magical health properties" - it's to avoid the additives and anything unnatural in industrially produced foods.
They have it backwards - it's almost like the following scenario: You have four bowls of soup, three of which are poisoned - four people sit down and eat the soup, and three of them die. We don't say "Gee, one of those soups had magical health benefits, that's why this guy lived," we say "three of those soups had poison."
I am not saying that non-organics are all bad, or anything - I personally like organic stuff because it generally tastes better, but if you're going to study this, study the food which aren't organic - in all of their various forms.
That's the thing too - it is very difficult to accurately study this sort of thing - a single study isn't necessarily going to show results unless it has all sorts of foods, some that are GM, some where different pesticide techniques are used, some where hormones are used etc - and it might not be that this stuff is even that harmful in occasional doses - but over a lifetime this stuff may have determental effects - and unless you are studying a large segment of people, monitoring everything they eat and comparing them to a control group made up of their twins who are eating organic versions of th same foods - how are you going to have truly reliable results?
Seriously....I had an entire >cassette with songs about videogames around that time; it was Buckner and Garcia's "Pacman Fever" - and in addition to Pac Man it had songs about Centipede, Defender, and many others.
So I think by the time a campy album has been released, based on the smash success of a novelty single, that video games were indeed popular.
They weren't 3D (well, not really, I supposed you could say that Tempest was 3D in a way), but there was Intellivision, Atari, and awesome Apple ][ games too (i use the word "awesome" in a very relative sense).
At least make it an AR15 instead of what is likely some ex soviet bloc knockoff - although my guess is that would cost twice as much for them to do....
AK's are great if you get a decent one...Very reliable weapons, but the variation in quality is so wide that unless you know what you're getting, you don't REALLY know what you're getting.
You can see how the fact that this dealer is doing this is generating publicity; very successfully I might add - look at us discussing this, we're all over the world and we're talking about a car dealer in Missouri. It's because it's controversial....It shouldn't be, but it is, because it scares some people. It shouldn't - but it does.
It's too bad that a large percentage of the populace is so ignorant about firearms and have lost touch with this aspect of American heritage; the only exposure they really have is through TV, movies, news reports, and fanatical anti-gun organizations - and it's universally negative and threatening.
Guns are tools, pure and simple, and only as dangerous or evil as the person using it. If the people trying to get rid of guns could actually snap their fingers and make all guns in the entire world past and future disappear and never have existed, then maybe they might actually accomplish what they are setting out to do - if they could do that, I might even sign on.....But that's just not reality - and the founders of this country - as imperfect as they were with their slaves and wealth and selfish reasons for some of the things they did - they did recognize that their fledgling republic could (and likely would) end up under tyranny at some point in the future if the people didn't have the right to stay armed.
There are situations that can happen, even in modern day America where anybody who has really thought about it is likely going to want to be armed or be with someone they trust who is armed; I know I will - any major civil emergency for starters....In live in a major American city, and I can guarantee you that if all power was cut, once we reached the 48 hour point it would be a very uncivilized and dangerous cutthroat place.
It may be the law that is used to deal with legitimate raves, but a 15 guest private birthday party for a 30 year old is not a fucking rave - the police should have recognized their error and apologized and left - only to come back if there was an actual legitimate disturbance.
When police abuse the public trust and act like asshole thugs who refuse to back down when they're wrong, bad things happen...Cops that pull this kind of shit contribute to hatred for all police - when in fact not all police are egotistical power hungry assholes with inferiority complexes.
I was wondering what things would be like today for the music industry, artists, and music lovers if the RIAA had never waged this campaign against filesharing - and napster continued unabated...What do you think?
Would it be better than it is now? Would it be worse? Would it be the same? Why?
I guess I think that eventually artists would have gotten involved - and since they aren't multinational corporations, they might not have been as successful at getting the authorities on their side. Some probably would have acted like Lars Ulrich; but ultimately I think more of them would have resorted to interfacing directly with their fans, kind of like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails - but I am curious what other people think.
*note: I am all for filesharing...I have a massive vinyl and CD collection. I used to have a ton of cassettes too before I transfered the non-replaceable ones to CD and downloaded (without paying a second time I might add) everything I already owned on cassette in MP3 and FLAC versions. I still buy music from time to time, but most of what I donwload are live shows and stuff I already have paid for at least once. If I download something new and end up liking it, then usually I will buy it. So I hate the RIAA, I think they rip off musicians, they exist for one purpose: to protect and enrich the large media conglomerates. They don't give a fuck about artists - only about an artist's ability to produce money for the machine, and if they can get more of the money by extending ownership of master tapes or anything else which fucks the artist, they love doing so.
You know that if Obama went on TV on this issue, he likely would be standing next to Biden - and all of the RIAA lawyers he has promoted into the DOJ...He's likely NOT on the "right" side of this issue.
I need to get a passport soon, but this issue kind of concerns me - people who think those of us who are concerned are being overly paranoid just don't get it - just because there isn't anything disturbing happening with these things right now at this moment (that we know of) doesn't mean that we know things will remain copacetic in the future...Once the apparatus for widespread monitoring/tracking is in place, it's in place - it isn't a good or a bad thing, it's a tool that can be used in either manner.
I have heard about RFID shields, but have heard various concerns about their effectiveness.
I am wondering how these passports are actually constructed. Could the tag be removed when you don't want it there and re-inserted when you need it there?
Then again, some people may feel it's stupid to worry about such a thing when you carry a cell phone that has a GPS chip in it, and there may be some truth to that; only, my cell phone can be turned off and doesn't come directly from a government and it's not mandated that I carry it for identification when I travel internationally..
I just cut 2 power cables off of old power supplies, I have spliced the cut ends together; pos to pos, neg to neg, grd to grd. It's one long cable terminating in a 3 prong power plug at each end!
It's so eloquent!!!
Now all I have to is plug one side into an outlet and plug the other side into another outlet that is about 5 feet away!!!
I'm sure It'll probably send those secret stealing feds into an endless loop.
I've got one side plugged in, just gotta get this other side plugged in and THEN WE'LL SEE WHO'S LAUGHING!!!
When I first saw the headline, I thought "Oh shit - one of the few free music apps that works perfectly and actually has good content is now going to be ruined;" not because I have any objection to paying a fair price for things, but because historically with free music sites/services online, once money becomes involved they change, and usually not for the better.
However, I find this pricing model pretty appropriate - if you are listening over 40 hours a month, 99 cents is a small price to pay to support the site. This doesn't look to me like a way to exploit their userbase for huge economic gains, rather, it looks like a site doing what they need to do to survive without taking advantage of their user base.
If they raise it substantially, quickly - I might feel differently, but from what I understand they were having to deal with this seems like a pretty good way to go - managable and fair, and only affecting heavy users.
I totally disagree.
What is RIDICULOUS is the fact that he got sentenced to 4 years in prison for this.
There are some finer points to this story that don't really seem to be covered in the Scientific American article, there is more to the story. I am not saying the guy acted intelligently here, but the government is using him to make a point.
What you have to understand is that the entire system is geared towards a plea bargain - most people in the US have no idea of how the criminal justice system really functions - forget all that shit you learned in school about "fair trials" and shit.
They bring a huge amount of pressure to bear on these people, and set things up in a way where it's going to cost them so much money to continue to fight and they stack the desk against them and set it up in a way so that they really can't win. Then, likely their lawyer has a conversation with them that sounds something like the following:
"Look, I know it's not right, but you should take the plea bargain - if you take the plea bargain and agree to plead to these charges there will be no trial - your legal bills will cease, you can get your affairs in order then do your time and you'll be out in 4 months - should you choose to go to trial you'll face 35 times the amount of time and a very large fine, the trial and perparation will cost obscene amounts of money and I cannot say that your chances are even 50-50 - this is a politicized trial and they will be doing every little trick they have to ensure that you lose, and when you lose they will take you straight to jail - if you want to be a martyr for the cause, I fully support that and will be right there with you as long as you can continue to pay me - but my best advice to you, as your lawyer, is to take the plea bargain,"
I agree; if we haven't learned by now to carefully pay attention to the click-thrus when installing anything (especially anything downloaded for free) then a change in search defaults may be fairly mild compared to some of the other stuff that can end up installed on our machines.
I have been wondering how the business arrangements for such things work; you mention Ask toolbar - which I have seen trying to sneak it's way onto my machines with paid software, (Nero 9 is one of these, IIRC)...The thing that I keep wondering is: why would a company that has a product with such a good reputation include this stuff selected-by-default? Are they really being paid that much money to include it? Don't they realize it kind of annoys and pisses people off? I really don't like it, it makes me feel like I have to be doubly careful with dealing with anything I get from that company. I'm assuming there must be some sort of significant payoff in it for them.
I realize that these search competitors have to do something to compete with Google's dominance; i mean, their name has morphed into a verb for all things search - (kind of like "coke" for all things cola) - but I would think that there has to be a better way to get people to try a new search engine out rather than using this method, which I imagine serves to kind of give a negative association with the product, (especially among technically savvy people - at least, it does for me - having to uncheck "install ask.com search bar" when I am trying to install something completely unrelated just makes me think their service must not be that great because they have to pay to sneak on to people's machines).
The prosecution of this woman for bogus charges was ridiculous.
Yes, she was cruel, but:
1. Violating a website's TOS is not illegal;
2. She was not responsible for the girl's suicide, that is why it was a suicide and not a murder;
3. Abusing the legal system to punish someone who has done something extremely unpopular with the masses by either trumping up charges or using ridiculous interpretations which are byond novel should be a criminal offense if anything should be;
4. The authoritarian leaning people in government and industry in this country hoped to be able to use this case and the bogus charges to set precedents that would have left pretty much all of us who use the net regularly at risk for all kinds of shit.
I just read a post where someone referred to one of the scumbags who was teasing this girl as "the killer." If that doesn't illustrate that people have a poor and overly emotional "TV cop show" understanding of the law and ethics, then I don't know what will.
I hope we don't see this judge bow to the inevitable pressure that will be heaped upon him by the scores of people thirsting for vengeance after they hear about this ruling - there are TONS of injustices that are far worse than what that bitch and her nutty kid did to this poor girl, some of which may make life harder or more miserable for already suffering people - who may then commit suicide...Where is the outrage for them?
These outraged people would better spend their time donating money to suicide prevention programs or volunteering for suicide helplines; but hey, there's no voyeuristic sick venegeance pleasure to be gained by doing so....
This isn't about usenet - and it never ceases to amaze me when I hear people claim that usenet is only used for binaries and spam. I would tell you to go ahead and help make these case for those who want to take away your freedoms - if it didn't remove mine as well.
Usenet is important, it's used for a lot of things - binaries are just one of them. People send copyrighted files AND spam by email as well, but I don't hear you bitching about email servers and SMTP protocol.
I believe that this company was a directory index of binaries posted to the internet - similar to newzbin. They were making money off of providing access to these files for people who couldn't take the time to learn how to use a proper newsreader.
Haven't you heard? If you quote and carry a copy around a copy you are now consiered a "constitutionalist," which, according to several dubious law enforcement training pamphlets makes you a likely "homegrown terrorist."
I only wish I was kidding.
This is bullshit. What a waste of time.
The supreme court has already ruled that this is protected free speech. Why the hell is anybody wasting time harrassing this man? You can't charge people with a crime because you don't like their taste in art.
You can't say "Oh, this means that he's a pedophile, and even though he hasn't done anything to anyone, we think he's thinking about it."
It makes me want to create children faces (or maybe use famous child actors) with their faces affixed to nude bodies (maybe generated ones) in politcal parody cartoons about this and mail it to these backwards asshole prosecutors. See what they do with two controversial activities already ruled as protected.
People who say things like "the guy is clearly a pedophile and should be removed from society" have it totally wrong, you can't charge someone based on a personal assumption - for good reason...That kind of shit would make it easier for all of us to lose our rights and people who say such things have a very limited understanding of freedom and the law.
It's fucking irrelevant what you or I think of how tasteful or disgusting his "art" is - the fact is that he should have the right to create it. Maybe he is a pedophile, maybe he isn't - but you can't brand him that because of "art."
You don't buy SSDs for a bargain..
You buy them because it is the one modification you can make in this day and age that will have a dramatic impact on the speed of your computing experience.
Adding more RAM, stepping up to a faster processor with twice as many cores - yeah, you'll notice those things a bit (especiaslly when multitasking) but if you want to do something that may cust your start up time to a third of what it was, and make it seems like you've turbochraged your machine, for most people an SSD will do that - especially on a laptop where yo're generally not going to have a 10k or 15k RPM drive or a striped array - but there is a cost, and it's significant, and there are a lot of SSD drives to choose from that use different sorts of technologies, generally speaking you get what you pay for with these.
SO then can he sue those techs for all of the pain and suffering he would have to bear because of those images they illegally found?
I wonder if these were genuine child porn pictures - I have heard of many, many occasions of people getting in toruble because they have either pictures of family members running around naked as children that clearly aren't pornogrpahic, as well as people getting in trouble for drawings, or porn photos of 18 year olds who look young where the court cannot definitively prove they teens are under 18.
I still repair PCs for people sometimes, though not as much as I used to (I run and IT dept now), and when I did it a lot I would occasionally find photos of the owner of the PC and their significant other engaging in sex, etc. Sometimes these people were in college, once one was a senior in high school - I didn't say shit, I just backed those pictures up and moved them to their new machine without saying a word
I just don't see someone who is a serious pedophile with real child porn handing their computer over to techs at circuit city. I suppose it happens, but generally I would think these people would know better.
You know what's crazy? I have tried those different shavers, and three blades seems to be the sweet spot - with those 4 and 5 blade cartridges, there isn;t enough room between the blades for them to get close enough to your skin, for the stubble to get in there - they just don't work as well, but I guess the standard marketing bullshit applies: "More is better*, because this is America"
*if it doesn't work better, or even as well, that is okay, because the customer's pride in knowing that they have the newest and best overcomes any actual shortcomings of function.