The fact is, this is a losing battle for the MAFIAA... Any DRM scheme that can be dreamed up can be cracked eventually. They would benefit more form making their content easily accessible, readily available, and cheap enough for people to get at that piracy becomes a background issue. Eventually, all that content is going to get from DVDs to the Internet -- if I were them I'd given up trying to stop people via DRM and start trying to woo people by giving some content away.
I second Bill Richardson. As a former NM resident, I know how hard he worked/is working for the state, and the country. He has a broad depth of experience (foreign/domestic), can go toe-to-toe with anyone, and is frankly a lot easier to digest than your garden-variety Democrat. He seems to surround himself with good people too, which I think is half the trouble any President has -- the last few have been surrounded by "yes men".
Agreed. The MySpace page is peripheral to the campaign, and while it's not in his best interest to ignore it (lest negative information be published about him), the fact is, if he makes too big a stink about this, it could become a media/Internet circus. He can run his own web site and in the meantime just keep the guy happy; what's 50K USD at this point?
You ever get the feeling that the Presidential campaign starts wayyyyyyy too early?
He's not charging $49k to give the name back - he started the site as a supporter of Obama 2 freakin years ago, not knowing that Obama would run for president.
I seriously doubt that he didn't realize Obama might run some day. From the moment this guy showed up on the political radar in Washington, D.C., people have been saying he's got the makings of a President. If not, no one would have ever heard of him. And now this guy, for better or worse, is trying to get his piece of the pie. Frankly, Obama should just pay the money and get it over with, before this becomes some kind of distraction or worse, heavily over-hyped media incident that hurts the campaign (remember Howard Dean's war whoop?!?).
What happens when Obama does something the volunteer doesn't like, and the volunteer decides to use his page to spread vicious rumours about the candidate?
Personally, I have resisted the siren call of Dell for a long time. This changes my mind. I need a new machine and this could be just the ticket -- it was either that or refurb an old HP with a new HD and a copy of Feisty Fawn. I like the idea of it pre-loaded.
Skyfacet's consultant didn't improve their rankings at all, instead causing them to plummet. One wonders just how lucrative this sort of thing is? After all, if this consultant has done this for them, perchance he/she/they have done it to others? Perchance it would be a good idea to a) sue them, b) report them to BBB, and c) begin a this-google-consultant-sucks.com website.
...thieves have not only been stealing the iPods, but cutting off their victim's fingers as well. Given this new threat, the Home Secretary is calling for iPods controlled by brain waves.
The BCC would like to apologize for being called the BBC for all those years; we realize this will create chaos and confusion to our viewers, but mild sedatives should make the whole thing right.
NOTE: And for anyone reading this post, the posts mentioning the typo are now out of date, as the error has been corrected. We apologize to any Slashdot readers who are confused, and suggest that a spot of work will make everything right.
...in the bushes, hoping to catch someone in the act or dig through someone's trash than it is to allow for benefit of the doubt. The RIAA's tactics are not new, but they are certainly not good publicity. They are treating people like MAC/IP addresses, not like potential customers/users. They are putting such an enormous amount of effort into trying to trap the unwary, instead of redirecting that energy toward giving their customers what they want: usable, shareable, transferable music. If they just gave up this futile attempt to reign in every "pirate", they might stop burning valuable public capital before it's too late. I suspect, however, that like the kamikaze pilot, the RIAA is hell bent on its suicidal mission and won't be deterred.
Agreed. As I've said many times, until Linux reaches the point where you pop in the CD, answer a few questions, and *poof*, most people will continue to use Windows because it happens to be the OS that's on their box currently. Ubuntu is clearly reaching that point and if the comparison is accurate (and we all know that everyone will claim it's not for various reasons), then Vista may have a serious challenger. Mind you, it isn't suddenly going to explode overnight and claim many a Windows box, but it certainly would give users frustrated with Windows an option they didn't have previously. Personally, if I'm the Ubuntu group, I think being tied with Windows is a good thing.
I half expected to see the Ubuntu and Vista development teams engaged in some sort of firefight -- blood, gore, explosions, and the like. Imagine my disappointment.
Wall Street Analysts lowered their expectations... undoubtedly from reading Slashdot. Microsoft knew this and therefore came up with the whole profit deferment scheme so they'd come out beating market expectations and their stock price would get a significant bump. Let's wait and see what their next earnings report looks like... I suspect it won't be nearly as nice.
Yes, you're correct... they are all short-sighted. Ok, so Vista has not got the clocks right now to bowl anyone over, but that's not to sy ti won't as it "matures". I seem to remember the same hew and cry when XP originally came out, but over time people were convinced it wasn't "half-bad" or their system shipped with it and they didn't have much choice. Now, you might wish to believe that the computer manufacturers can simply kill Vista by not shipping it on their boxes, but nobody really wants to push Microsoft too hard. After all, MS can drop support for XP anytime it really wants to, and can drive up the price as well. The relationship between MS and the computer manufacturers is symbiotic, bordering on parasitic.
However, whilst we got the wireless working fairly easily, there were too big unforeseen problems that my relation suffered:
1. She has a legitimate 3 PC student licence for Office 2003 and has used only one of those licenses on the family desktop PC so far. Vista would not accept the license key for Office 2003 no matter what I tried and in the end I had to tell her to call Microsoft to get them to sort it out.
2. There are no drivers for her Lexmark printer and Lexmark have no plans to release any.
Well, Microsoft wants Vista users to upgrade to Office 2007, so this is no surprise. I suspect MS Tech Support will get it to work, though you can bet she'll be subjected to the "hard sell" the whole time.
That's Lexmark's particular problem. If true, it shows how short-sighted they are. Even if you don't like Vista, you have customers who will use it, and if you choose not to support you printers on Vista, you'll see those users go to someone else who will. Not good business strategy.
Is there any kind of mandate for this? I mean, this is a private organization doing this, not local police or the FBI as part of some larger investigation, so I imagine the suit would have to be civil, rather than criminal. They might have a harder time doing this than they realize. If I were them, i might have gotten law enforcement involved at some point. The link in the article is useless, since it really says nothing about the suit.
Very true, but it gives them time to try and get around the patents in question. So while I suspect the folks at Vonage corporate are happy, the tech staff is probably not popping champagne corks just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, this is a losing battle for the MAFIAA... Any DRM scheme that can be dreamed up can be cracked eventually. They would benefit more form making their content easily accessible, readily available, and cheap enough for people to get at that piracy becomes a background issue. Eventually, all that content is going to get from DVDs to the Internet -- if I were them I'd given up trying to stop people via DRM and start trying to woo people by giving some content away.
Not as odd as if you wear a Masonic ring and are a Mason...
No, but you won't remember anything after the mind-wipe anyway...
The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded...
You could do all that, if they didn't blindfold you first...
I second Bill Richardson. As a former NM resident, I know how hard he worked/is working for the state, and the country. He has a broad depth of experience (foreign/domestic), can go toe-to-toe with anyone, and is frankly a lot easier to digest than your garden-variety Democrat. He seems to surround himself with good people too, which I think is half the trouble any President has -- the last few have been surrounded by "yes men".
Agreed. The MySpace page is peripheral to the campaign, and while it's not in his best interest to ignore it (lest negative information be published about him), the fact is, if he makes too big a stink about this, it could become a media/Internet circus. He can run his own web site and in the meantime just keep the guy happy; what's 50K USD at this point?
You ever get the feeling that the Presidential campaign starts wayyyyyyy too early?
I seriously doubt that he didn't realize Obama might run some day. From the moment this guy showed up on the political radar in Washington, D.C., people have been saying he's got the makings of a President. If not, no one would have ever heard of him. And now this guy, for better or worse, is trying to get his piece of the pie. Frankly, Obama should just pay the money and get it over with, before this becomes some kind of distraction or worse, heavily over-hyped media incident that hurts the campaign (remember Howard Dean's war whoop?!?).
You don't know the power of the Dark Side...
Train yourself to talk like out-of-synch karate movies...
No... so I don't have to cut into my Slashdot reading/writing time... I'm already getting enough flack from my company and my family...
...brought to you by Nissan... VISA... JP Morgan Chase... Al Qaeada...
Personally, I have resisted the siren call of Dell for a long time. This changes my mind. I need a new machine and this could be just the ticket -- it was either that or refurb an old HP with a new HD and a copy of Feisty Fawn. I like the idea of it pre-loaded.
Skyfacet's consultant didn't improve their rankings at all, instead causing them to plummet. One wonders just how lucrative this sort of thing is? After all, if this consultant has done this for them, perchance he/she/they have done it to others? Perchance it would be a good idea to a) sue them, b) report them to BBB, and c) begin a this-google-consultant-sucks.com website.
I done what you told me to Morris, but now that 'is 'ead is lopped off, the bloomin' iPod don' work...
...thieves have not only been stealing the iPods, but cutting off their victim's fingers as well. Given this new threat, the Home Secretary is calling for iPods controlled by brain waves.
The BCC would like to apologize for being called the BBC for all those years; we realize this will create chaos and confusion to our viewers, but mild sedatives should make the whole thing right.
NOTE: And for anyone reading this post, the posts mentioning the typo are now out of date, as the error has been corrected. We apologize to any Slashdot readers who are confused, and suggest that a spot of work will make everything right.
...in the bushes, hoping to catch someone in the act or dig through someone's trash than it is to allow for benefit of the doubt. The RIAA's tactics are not new, but they are certainly not good publicity. They are treating people like MAC/IP addresses, not like potential customers/users. They are putting such an enormous amount of effort into trying to trap the unwary, instead of redirecting that energy toward giving their customers what they want: usable, shareable, transferable music. If they just gave up this futile attempt to reign in every "pirate", they might stop burning valuable public capital before it's too late. I suspect, however, that like the kamikaze pilot, the RIAA is hell bent on its suicidal mission and won't be deterred.
Agreed. As I've said many times, until Linux reaches the point where you pop in the CD, answer a few questions, and *poof*, most people will continue to use Windows because it happens to be the OS that's on their box currently. Ubuntu is clearly reaching that point and if the comparison is accurate (and we all know that everyone will claim it's not for various reasons), then Vista may have a serious challenger. Mind you, it isn't suddenly going to explode overnight and claim many a Windows box, but it certainly would give users frustrated with Windows an option they didn't have previously. Personally, if I'm the Ubuntu group, I think being tied with Windows is a good thing.
I half expected to see the Ubuntu and Vista development teams engaged in some sort of firefight -- blood, gore, explosions, and the like. Imagine my disappointment.
Wall Street Analysts lowered their expectations... undoubtedly from reading Slashdot. Microsoft knew this and therefore came up with the whole profit deferment scheme so they'd come out beating market expectations and their stock price would get a significant bump. Let's wait and see what their next earnings report looks like... I suspect it won't be nearly as nice.
Yes, you're correct... they are all short-sighted. Ok, so Vista has not got the clocks right now to bowl anyone over, but that's not to sy ti won't as it "matures". I seem to remember the same hew and cry when XP originally came out, but over time people were convinced it wasn't "half-bad" or their system shipped with it and they didn't have much choice. Now, you might wish to believe that the computer manufacturers can simply kill Vista by not shipping it on their boxes, but nobody really wants to push Microsoft too hard. After all, MS can drop support for XP anytime it really wants to, and can drive up the price as well. The relationship between MS and the computer manufacturers is symbiotic, bordering on parasitic.
1. She has a legitimate 3 PC student licence for Office 2003 and has used only one of those licenses on the family desktop PC so far. Vista would not accept the license key for Office 2003 no matter what I tried and in the end I had to tell her to call Microsoft to get them to sort it out.
2. There are no drivers for her Lexmark printer and Lexmark have no plans to release any.
Is there any kind of mandate for this? I mean, this is a private organization doing this, not local police or the FBI as part of some larger investigation, so I imagine the suit would have to be civil, rather than criminal. They might have a harder time doing this than they realize. If I were them, i might have gotten law enforcement involved at some point. The link in the article is useless, since it really says nothing about the suit.
Very true, but it gives them time to try and get around the patents in question. So while I suspect the folks at Vonage corporate are happy, the tech staff is probably not popping champagne corks just yet.