Is "Xeroflulogitic" a real word?
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 1
linux - Linus Is Not Usually Xeroflulogitic
The only web matches I could find on "Xeroflulogitic" were for this acronym. Interestingly, Yahoo had a few more matches than Google on it. An online dictionary search for this word had no matches. I suggest substituting "Xeroflulogitic" with "Xenophobic" as at least that makes sense.
emacs - Escape Meta Alt Control Shift
It is technically a backronym, but I think it's more accurate to think of it as a clever comment on how EMACS works than an attempt to explain what it means.
I don't see how this is possible, or credible speculation even for a company a evil as MS is perceived on slashdot. I'm no MS fanboy, but I've had reasonable "service" from MS on issues of keys to activate my machines under some unusual circumstances.
This may get sticky for MS, but for goodness sake we've got to find better bashing material on MS (and I believe there be plenty) if we want to maintain any street cred. There's no WAY MS won't be giving license keys to legitimate purchasers of XP (especially considering the vast majority are pre-activated shelf-delivered versions).
I think you're probably right. However, all companies in similar situations don't act this way. A few years ago I bought a Russian-English translation program for my PC. I got the best one on the market. I didn't use it a lot, but it was useful to me for quick translations from Russian to English for email. At the time I didn't know Russian as well as I do now and while I could do translations by hand, it took a very long time. It was certainly worth the money to have a computer program do it for me in a few seconds and then I could double check the weird parts and re-translate those myself. It turned what might be a 2 hour translation job at the time into a 10 minute job at worse. A year or so later I had a catastrophic Windows failure and had to do a destructive reinstall. Although I had a valid license key for the translation program, it wouldn't work after the reinstall. The vendor told me their keys are valid for one use only and although I explained that I had bought the product (and they knew I had) and had to do a reinstall of Windows, I got basically "Too bad. So sad. Here's a 10% discount off our lowest price." in response, which still meant I had to buy the product at pretty close to it's normal value. I sucked it up and did that and installed my new key. However, I was very angry because I realized that to the software vendor if I needed a new key I was probably a thief and if I wanted another key, I was going to have to pay for it. After another year or so, guess what? Yep, I had to do another destructive reinstall of Windows. I decided not to rebuy the software. The babelfish translator, which is free, is not as good, but my Russian had improved a lot and I had less real use for a computer translation program. For as little as I needed to use one, babelfish was good enough. However, the vendor of the translation program has lost me forever as a customer because they weren't willing to give me the benefit of the doubt about my problem and my choice was either to buy a new key or live without the program. Their attitude was "If you need a new key, you're a thief". Since then a guy on a forum told me the magic needed to make old keys work on a reinstall, but I've never bothered with it.
For example, a handy that is powered by movement, and thus stays charged forever aslong as you're walking/moving would be a very practical thing to have for many people.
The reference to "handy" is probably meaningless to most Slashdotters, but it's what Germans call a mobile telephone. I have no idea if the term is in use in Austria or Switzerland, but I've seen it used in Germany.
From the article: I don't have my gun possession rights restored yet, but apparently that's merely a formality with the BATF, and I'll be taking care of that soon.
(sarcasm on) Well Thank God because it's a miracle that you survived these past 13 years without a gun. Certainly this is the most important part of getting your name cleared. (sarcasm off)
Which is why i don't understand why Sony made the MD format.
MiniDisc was intended to replace audio cassettes. It was never intended to replace compact discs as people claim. Keep in mind that MD made its debut around 1992. At this time portable CD players were non-existent or close to non-existent. I bought one of the first ones I knew of around 1995. MD was intended to be a portable way to play music you recorded to it as portable MD players came out almost immediately. MD has many advantages over audio cassettes. It has instant access to tracks like CDs and higher quality audio than cassette tapes. The problem with MD is that very quickly it became cheap to make good quality portable CD/MP3 players and once that happened, MD wasn't needed. Cassette tapes are a dead format and I'm glad for that, but Sony couldn't read the future and they had no way to know that CDs, not MDs, would kill off cassette tapes.
I'm not a Sony fanboy, but a lot of people talk crap about how MD was supposed to replace CD and stuff like that and it's simply not true. Sony mismanaged the MD format and cost and poor design of players and recorders helped to doom it, but the ability of people to make their own CDs and create and play MP3 files were ultimately what finished off MD.
... as someone who was recently refused a visitors' visa to the USA because I've worked 1 month in Saudi Arabia as a CRM consultant, I can't help a grin followed by an "oh bummer!"
I'm guessing by your name here that you are Brazilian as Carvalhao is definitely a Portuguese language name. Portuguese citizens are part of the Visa Waiver program which allows entry to the US without a visa for stays of 90 days or less. Brazilians do need visas. I'm sure it didn't help at all that you worked in Saudi Arabia, but your countrymen have a rather unusually high rate of illegally overstaying US visas. I don't know anything about your background, but it could be that you don't have a lot of money (that might be why you worked in Saudi Arabia) and that plus working in Saudi Arabia plus being a citizen of a country that is known to overstay visas made you too big a risk to the person who looked at your application. You should also be aware that unfortunately, the US government holds its consulate and embassy employees personally responsible when they approve visas for people who overstay them. If you give out too many visas to people who overstay, it hurts your career. This puts pressure on employees to err on the side of caution and they have a tendency to deny applications if anything at all looks suspicious. There is (as you know) no appeal process if your visa application is denied and US government employees do not have to justify why they denied an application, so the safest course of action is to deny applications if there are any questions.
You bring someone to court, you lose, you paid for the legal fees on both sides.
If such a system were in place, we'd see less "I'm gonna sue his ass" crap, a lot less "if I threaten to sue they'll do as we want" crap, and a whole lot less of "we'll sue them into bankruptcy" crap.
You are correct. My best friend is an attorney and I think it would be fair to say that he expressed dread at the idea of this becoming law, even though since he now specializes in bankruptcies this would have no impact on him if it ever became law. I asked him about this idea and he offered up the usual attorney arguments that a loser pays system would discourage honest people who've been wronged from taking cases to court because they might lose and then have to pay all the costs. Actions against big corporations might also go down because most people can't afford to pay the army of expensive lawyers that big corporations hire. I'm not convinced that on the whole society wouldn't benefit and the gain of having less nonsense in the courts wouldn't offset any honest people who lose in court. Attorneys would surely lose in such a system as it would reduce the number of court cases and lessen the need for so many attorneys. I'm finding impossible to believe that the current system is so good that this kind of change is unnecessary.
Congratulations on first post, but your grammar is atrocious. Several of your sentences don't actually make sentences. And it's 'lose', not 'loose'.
In the hopes of trying to be helpful and follow up on this comment, I would like to add that it's "just won't stop" not "just want stop". Sadly, I've seen a lot worse than this. At first I thought it was just our American educational system failing to do its job, but I see truly horrible examples of grammar regularly on various forums from people in Canada, the UK, Australia (right now they seem particularly bad to me) and New Zealand, so it's not just us.
BM is still digging into SCO's near corpse to find the detials of SCO's accusations.
You'll get no disagreement from me, but what amazes me is that SCO is still trading at barely over a dollar a share. It's at $1.02 a share as I write this. What this means is that there won't be any delisting any time soon and that would be one sure way to end this legal nonsense quickly. SCO is reminding me of Karen Ann Quinlan who lived for about 9 years after being taken off a respirator and was the subject of a famous legal battle in the mid 1970s. There's still life in SCO's near corpse as long as the stock market continues to hold on to the irrational belief that the company has value and may yet prevail in its court battle.
I can't say that I'm surprised to read that this happened in Kennesaw, Georgia. For those of you who don't know what kind of place Kennesaw is, it has a law that requires the head of every household to own a firearm with ammunition. It's also the place that former US Representative Bob Barr called home and he was much loved there. That should give you an idea of the politics of the place, so no, I'm not surprised at all by this.
Mind you, the raid itself seemed a bit extreme. They found none of the stuff that made them think they should go in armed. Still, I don't know what percentage of raids of this type do turn up arms/drugs, or how many they have to do, the gun toting could simply be policy.
I hate to use a phrase from the Iraq War, but it fits. It's "shock and awe" tacticts. Despite what Slashdotters want to believe, the DJs are bootleggers. This article stated that it found 25,000 CDs. A previous article I believe put that number at 75,000. Folks, this is an organized bootleg operation that got shut down. Going in armed is typical of this type of operation to shut down bootleggers. They do it to try to send a message of fear to other people who might be involved in the same thing.
This is not exactly unique for Amazon. It is quite common that companies send goods to people (mostly registered customers) that they have not ordered, and supply an invoice. People either have to just pay, or to call the company, complain and return the goods.
It is easy to suspect that Amazon did this on purpose.
It's easy to suspect anything but that doesn't mean that it was done deliberately. I would offer up the argument that it would be a very foolish thing for Amazon to do deliberately as no good can come of this. Either they will lose customers over the incident or they'll at a minimum have to eat the postage costs on getting stuff returned to them. That's just not good business strategy.
I am not a lawyer either, but it is my understanding from my best friend, who is a lawyer, that Amazon is on shakey ground here and a strong case can be made that they just have to suck it up and live with the huge discount. My guess is that so many got sold that they can't just eat it as it will have an impact on profits, which means pissed off shareholders. Can you imagine telling the shareholders "We would have turned a profit in Q4 2006 except we botched a last minute DVD box set promotion and instead of doing buy 1 get 1 free, we basically gave away 2 for free or next to nothing." I gaze into my crystal ball and I see lawsuits... I think Amazon is gambling that most customers don't know their rights and will either pay the charge or return the goods, in which case they can be re-sold later. I think Amazon knows that they will lose customers because of this action now, but in the short term it will help the Q4 2006 profits, which is all the stock market cares about.
I have protested credit card charges several times and I have never lost. Never. If you have evidence to support your claim, you will win every time. That's the problem here. If you have some way of proving that the price you paid in December was $0 or 1 cent or whatever through a screen capture or a credit charge at the time, you have a leg to stand on. Amazon's argument that it was a mistake and you knew it was a mistake and took advantage of them is valid and may or may not hold up in court (depends on the judge). However, if you can prove that Amazon agreed to that price at the time and is now after the fact changing their mind, that will give you what you need to win the chargeback, but you need something more than "he said, she said". Bottom line - if you can prove your side of the dispute, you will win.
I've never understood why tech companies listened to the music industry in the first place. Perhaps I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the tech companies are far bigger in monetary value and hence far more powerful than the music industry in the first place so don't understand why these companies supported, rather than fought DRM from day one.
I can explain this to you. Your problem is that you are a rational human being. You must understand first of all that the music industry is irrational. Imagine the following conversation, which illustrates the problem: Tech company: We'd love to sell your music in non-DRMed format. Music company: We're not interested in selling it without DRM. Tech company: We're not going to sell it with DRM! Music company: Fine. Don't sell it. Get nothing. We can live without online sales. If you want a piece of the pie, you have to sell it with DRM. No negotiations. No exceptions. That's how it will be done. Take it or leave it.
Yes, the music industry really is that dumb. They would rather not sell it at all then sell it without DRM. Remember, their goal is to rip you off. They have proven time and time again that they would rather sell one CD for $18 than 3 for $10 each. This is irrational behavior, but they have been very consistent in it. If they can't sell you something at their price and on their terms, then they don't want your money. They really don't. It truly is "their way or the highway". So when you realize that the only deal that could be made was to sell music with DRM or not sell it all, is it any wonder that Yahoo and Apple and everyone else agreed to DRM? There weren't going to be any sales without it. Besides, they were able to make the major labels take the heat for DRM, which is totally fair, so it wasn't a difficult business decision to sell DRM music since they could make money off it and they wouldn't have to answer to pissed off customers who don't like DRM since it wasn't their fault the music had DRM. It really is that simple. Make money off selling DRMed music or make nothing.
Remember too that I am talking about the major music industry companies and smaller labels or individual artists have a more rational outlook. How rational is it to decide "We'd rather sell one at $18 than 3 for $10 each", but that is exactly how they operate.
It's comparable to Captain Queeg's determined investigation of the theft of ice cream in the classic Bogart film, The Caine Mutiny
Since there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the film about ice cream and it was strawberries that got stolen, I think you ought to lose every point you were given for being "insightful". Making crap up because you're too lazy to look it up should take away from your point score.
I thank God daily that I am not American. Please understand, I don't intend to bash Americans, but I am scared to death of the police state that is forming. Gitmo makes the Japanese internment camps of WWII look like quilting bees. It frightens me so much that I'd even move out of Canada just to get further away from that, except for people like Josh Wolf.
It figures that you are Canadian. America bashing is your new national sport, isn't it? Even more popular than hockey now. Did you happen to notice that Norway, not the USA, was referenced in another article on Slashdot about considering putting in a national firewall to block objectionable material? Did you happen to notice that in the USA, you are still free to speak your mind and if I want to do something stupid like question the Holocaust (this is only an example and for the record I do believe it happened), I will not go to jail?
As far as Guantanamo goes, I don't feel sorry for these people at all. If you do, that's fine. In fact, I'd go so far as to Guantanamo is one of the few good things Bush has done. I think there should be a place where bad people who want to harm my country go and they stay there until they die. Unfortunately, my government did a poor job of screening those who it sent there and an ever poorer job of figuring out in a timely manner who was and who wasn't a terrorist of those they sent there. But there are very very bad people there and if you look for a variety of sources about, for example, David Hicks, I think you will come to the conclusion that this is not a good man wrongly imprisoned as his lawyer would have you believe, but a hardcore jihadist who wants nothing more than to kill as many non-Muslim Westerners as he can. I've heard that Australia's PM has said off the record that he has no objections to Hicks being detained forever because he can't be charged under Australian law and they know that if he ever gets released, he'll leave Australia and try to go somewhere (Chechniya?) where he can kill non-Muslims and cause problems. I have little doubt that if Hicks were released he would represent a very serious and real threat to my country.
"Windows Media DRM has had fewer security breaches than Apple's FairPlay, yet WM DRM is licensed out the wazoo: there are more than a dozen companies with WM DRM licenses"
Hmmmm.... could it because no one really cares about downloading wmv files? The point is that if the product sucks, no one will bother even to break into it.
Windows Media has certainly been hacked, but the hacks involve getting a legal license first and then removing the DRM. One of the alt groups on Usenet late in 2006 posted the WMV version of Terminator 2 that was released a few years ago in yet another DVD repackaging of the movie, but without the DRM. The WMV version of the film was the theatrical release (no extra footage) encoded in high definition with WMV and with some really restrictive DRM where you only had 5 days in which to watch the movie and if you lived outside of the US and Canada, you couldn't get a license at all. You can do a web search and find a lot of angry reviewers who complained bitterly about the restrictions on the WMV high def release of the film, but it's now possible to watch the film with no DRM thanks to the work of some hackers.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Microsoft audio and video codecs by Microsoft haters. I work as a Unix system admin and I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their video and audio codecs do not suck and are actually one of the few things they got right. WMV is fine and in fact, one of the possible HD codecs in use for BluRay and HD-DVD is VC-1, which is based directly on WMV. If you think WMV sucks, then either you've seen it badly encoded or you are just bashing Microsoft for no good reason.
It's possible the schoolmaster assumed he could make unlimited copies of the software for non-profit, academic use only. If he works at a school that has to watch every penny in its budget (like 90% of schools in the world), and he makes barely enough to live on himself (like 90% of teachers in the world), he probably assumed Microsoft would not attempt to charge a price that he and his school would be unable to pay.
I've spent a decent amount of time in Ukraine and while Ukraine is not Russia, it's roughly equivalent. First of all, I am amazed that a school teacher was targeted for this crackdown. He must have made some enemies somewhere is all I can figure. I know two teachers in Ukraine who teach English. In one case, the teacher is someone who teaches because she views it as her contribution to society, but she told me she can't make enough money just on her teacher's salary to live. She also gives English lessons as a private tutor and she makes a lot more money from private lessons than as a teacher. The other teacher no longer teaches in school and lives only by giving private English lessons as she makes a lot more money that way. I even once knew a college professor around 30 years old who was still living with her parents in Ukraine in part because she didn't make a lot of money.
Schools in that part of the world don't have money to buy Microsoft products, which get no discounts. Multiply the price of software by 5 and consider what it would be like if you had to pay it and you have a very rough idea of what the econonmic conditions are like over there. I'm amazed that the school even has PCs and it probably doesn't have very many of those. There is no way the school could afford to buy Microsoft products, but a very good question is why is this school and this teacher being cracked down upon? Who did they piss off? I've read some estimates that at least 90% of Microsoft products in the ex-USSR are cracked versions and from what I've seen I believe it. I'm sure there is no shortage of offices in Moscow where nobody has a legal copy of Windows, yet it's a rural school teacher they are going to make an example of.
If you're even slightly more than a casual Beatles fan, wouldn't you already have all the Beatles music you need. Are there going to be people actually seeking out Beatles songs on iTunes?
Having the Beatles on iTunes is so they can sell to the under 30 crowd who don't want any music they can't download. These people don't buy CDs. They don't have a problem with paying to download though. There is no way right now to sell any Beatles songs to these people, leaving them no choice but to turn to P2P networks to get it for free. Apple Corp. knows they are missing out on a lot of sales to this market segment, so that's why they're going to iTunes.
There is also a similar story in the Chitral Valley in northern Pakistan, where many of the local Kalash people have blue eyes and blond hair and worship a pantheon of gods.
Nice story, but probably not a word of truth in it. Remember, this is Pakistan. This is where the crazy Taliban folks got started. You might have heard of the Taliban. They blew up statues of Buddha when they ran Afghanistan. They put Christian aid workers on trial for their lives for supposedly trying to convert the local populice. Do you really think it's credible that anywhere in Pakistan people who "worship a pantheon of gods" would be allowed to live and do so? Because I don't. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia entry on the region - "The culture is conservative Islamic." I think this casts a lot of doubt about the accuracy of your post.
So, it just might be illegal. Consider the following scenarios, none of which may be true and all of which are just speculation by me. Again, none of these may be true, but it shows how this kind of thing is more than "no big deal". 1) If Dell hid this money from the IRS and failed to pay taxes on it, that would certainly be illegal. 2) If Dell claimed this money under "sales" when in fact it was a gift, that might have caused their stock to be inflated by making their sales look better than they were. That would certainly lead to a class action lawsuit by unhappy shareholders. 3) Paying someone to keep out another competing product is actually anti-capitalistic you Ayn Rand loving morons! Similar cases have gone before the Federal government in the past and typically they weren't looked upon so favorably. Just because someone pays someone to do something that doesn't mean it's legal. Do you losers really think that if Coke gave millions of dollars in payouts to keep Pepsi out of grocery stores that Pepsi would just shrug it off as "good business by Coke"?
GOFA would create a U.S.-government-designated list of "Internet restricting countries"
* United States
* China
* Korea
There's no such country now as "Korea", so I argue that this doesn't meet the qualification to be modded insightful . The original poster should explain whether he means the DPRNK (Democratic People's Republic of North Korea), the ROK (Republic Of Korea - that is, South Korea) or both.
AFAIK, the.SU TLD was known to be obsoleted for a very long time. Think about it, USSR was no more years before web happened. People who bought names in there have themselves to blame for the trouble along with the registrar.
You're showing your youth here. The internet was here years before the web existed and.su was a valid domain for email "back in the day". Note to grammatically challenged Slashdotters - note the correct use of "you're" and "your" in my first sentence. Read it and learn.
However, you are certainly right that with the advent of the web that people should have realized that the.su domain was meaningless as the USSR was dead for several years. I took a quick look at a few.su sites and they appear to be Russian sites that are for some reason too lazy to move over to the.ru domain.
Very perceptive, but I'd say the odds are too high. I'd put it at 3:1 right now. If it looks like Russia is going to have to hand him over, it'll get closer to even money.
I mean, this statement: As much as 50 per cent of the world's pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
Worldwide?! There is just no fucking way. We don't even hold a tiny candle to what goes on in Asia.
You are correct. I attribute this "50 per cent" statement either to deliberate hyperbole or the belief in Hollywood that only American movies count, so perhaps changing this statement to read "50% of pirated American movies come from Canada" would be accurate.
I should say that I'm American. Hollywood and most Americans think that "Them durn foreigners can't make good movies. They just make those weird films where everybody talks and nothin' gets blowed up." The "Best Foreign Film" Oscar is a just sham to make foreign film producers think that "Hollywood cares" when in fact, they don't. They think any foreign people who make films are just sadly misguided. So yes, I certainly believe that when Hollywood talks about "50 per cent of the world's movies" they have equated WORLD = USA.
...asked GoDaddy to remove a site that happened to archive a list of thousands of MySpace usernames and passwords...
Sounds reasonable to me.
And me too, but we seem to have the minority opinion here. I love reading the justifications on why this is "evil" of GoDaddy to do this. Then again, what do you expect from Slashdot readers? Last week everyone was up in arms because the RIAA and a SWAT team arrested a guy for "making mix tapes" when in fact he was a bootlegger with over EIGHTY THOUSAND bootleg CDs that got confiscated and it had nothing to do with mix tapes.
Slashdot Mirror
linux - Linus Is Not Usually Xeroflulogitic
The only web matches I could find on "Xeroflulogitic" were for this acronym. Interestingly, Yahoo had a few more matches than Google on it. An online dictionary search for this word had no matches. I suggest substituting "Xeroflulogitic" with "Xenophobic" as at least that makes sense.
emacs - Escape Meta Alt Control Shift
It is technically a backronym, but I think it's more accurate to think of it as a clever comment on how EMACS works than an attempt to explain what it means.
I don't see how this is possible, or credible speculation even for a company a evil as MS is perceived on slashdot. I'm no MS fanboy, but I've had reasonable "service" from MS on issues of keys to activate my machines under some unusual circumstances.
This may get sticky for MS, but for goodness sake we've got to find better bashing material on MS (and I believe there be plenty) if we want to maintain any street cred. There's no WAY MS won't be giving license keys to legitimate purchasers of XP (especially considering the vast majority are pre-activated shelf-delivered versions).
I think you're probably right. However, all companies in similar situations don't act this way. A few years ago I bought a Russian-English translation program for my PC. I got the best one on the market. I didn't use it a lot, but it was useful to me for quick translations from Russian to English for email. At the time I didn't know Russian as well as I do now and while I could do translations by hand, it took a very long time. It was certainly worth the money to have a computer program do it for me in a few seconds and then I could double check the weird parts and re-translate those myself. It turned what might be a 2 hour translation job at the time into a 10 minute job at worse. A year or so later I had a catastrophic Windows failure and had to do a destructive reinstall. Although I had a valid license key for the translation program, it wouldn't work after the reinstall. The vendor told me their keys are valid for one use only and although I explained that I had bought the product (and they knew I had) and had to do a reinstall of Windows, I got basically "Too bad. So sad. Here's a 10% discount off our lowest price." in response, which still meant I had to buy the product at pretty close to it's normal value. I sucked it up and did that and installed my new key. However, I was very angry because I realized that to the software vendor if I needed a new key I was probably a thief and if I wanted another key, I was going to have to pay for it. After another year or so, guess what? Yep, I had to do another destructive reinstall of Windows. I decided not to rebuy the software. The babelfish translator, which is free, is not as good, but my Russian had improved a lot and I had less real use for a computer translation program. For as little as I needed to use one, babelfish was good enough. However, the vendor of the translation program has lost me forever as a customer because they weren't willing to give me the benefit of the doubt about my problem and my choice was either to buy a new key or live without the program. Their attitude was "If you need a new key, you're a thief". Since then a guy on a forum told me the magic needed to make old keys work on a reinstall, but I've never bothered with it.
For example, a handy that is powered by movement, and thus stays charged forever aslong as you're walking/moving would be a very practical thing to have for many people.
The reference to "handy" is probably meaningless to most Slashdotters, but it's what Germans call a mobile telephone. I have no idea if the term is in use in Austria or Switzerland, but I've seen it used in Germany.
From the article:
I don't have my gun possession rights restored yet, but apparently that's
merely a formality with the BATF, and I'll be taking care of that soon.
(sarcasm on)
Well Thank God because it's a miracle that you survived these past 13 years without a gun. Certainly this is the most important part of getting your name cleared.
(sarcasm off)
Which is why i don't understand why Sony made the MD format.
MiniDisc was intended to replace audio cassettes. It was never intended to replace compact discs as people claim. Keep in mind that MD made its debut around 1992. At this time portable CD players were non-existent or close to non-existent. I bought one of the first ones I knew of around 1995. MD was intended to be a portable way to play music you recorded to it as portable MD players came out almost immediately. MD has many advantages over audio cassettes. It has instant access to tracks like CDs and higher quality audio than cassette tapes. The problem with MD is that very quickly it became cheap to make good quality portable CD/MP3 players and once that happened, MD wasn't needed. Cassette tapes are a dead format and I'm glad for that, but Sony couldn't read the future and they had no way to know that CDs, not MDs, would kill off cassette tapes.
I'm not a Sony fanboy, but a lot of people talk crap about how MD was supposed to replace CD and stuff like that and it's simply not true. Sony mismanaged the MD format and cost and poor design of players and recorders helped to doom it, but the ability of people to make their own CDs and create and play MP3 files were ultimately what finished off MD.
I'm guessing by your name here that you are Brazilian as Carvalhao is definitely a Portuguese language name. Portuguese citizens are part of the Visa Waiver program which allows entry to the US without a visa for stays of 90 days or less. Brazilians do need visas. I'm sure it didn't help at all that you worked in Saudi Arabia, but your countrymen have a rather unusually high rate of illegally overstaying US visas. I don't know anything about your background, but it could be that you don't have a lot of money (that might be why you worked in Saudi Arabia) and that plus working in Saudi Arabia plus being a citizen of a country that is known to overstay visas made you too big a risk to the person who looked at your application. You should also be aware that unfortunately, the US government holds its consulate and embassy employees personally responsible when they approve visas for people who overstay them. If you give out too many visas to people who overstay, it hurts your career. This puts pressure on employees to err on the side of caution and they have a tendency to deny applications if anything at all looks suspicious. There is (as you know) no appeal process if your visa application is denied and US government employees do not have to justify why they denied an application, so the safest course of action is to deny applications if there are any questions.
You bring someone to court, you lose, you paid for the legal fees on both sides.
If such a system were in place, we'd see less "I'm gonna sue his ass" crap, a lot less "if I threaten to sue they'll do as we want" crap, and a whole lot less of "we'll sue them into bankruptcy" crap.
You are correct. My best friend is an attorney and I think it would be fair to say that he expressed dread at the idea of this becoming law, even though since he now specializes in bankruptcies this would have no impact on him if it ever became law. I asked him about this idea and he offered up the usual attorney arguments that a loser pays system would discourage honest people who've been wronged from taking cases to court because they might lose and then have to pay all the costs. Actions against big corporations might also go down because most people can't afford to pay the army of expensive lawyers that big corporations hire. I'm not convinced that on the whole society wouldn't benefit and the gain of having less nonsense in the courts wouldn't offset any honest people who lose in court. Attorneys would surely lose in such a system as it would reduce the number of court cases and lessen the need for so many attorneys. I'm finding impossible to believe that the current system is so good that this kind of change is unnecessary.
Congratulations on first post, but your grammar is atrocious. Several of your sentences don't actually make sentences. And it's 'lose', not 'loose'.
In the hopes of trying to be helpful and follow up on this comment, I would like to add that it's "just won't stop" not "just want stop". Sadly, I've seen a lot worse than this. At first I thought it was just our American educational system failing to do its job, but I see truly horrible examples of grammar regularly on various forums from people in Canada, the UK, Australia (right now they seem particularly bad to me) and New Zealand, so it's not just us.
BM is still digging into SCO's near corpse to find the detials of SCO's accusations.
You'll get no disagreement from me, but what amazes me is that SCO is still trading at barely over a dollar a share. It's at $1.02 a share as I write this. What this means is that there won't be any delisting any time soon and that would be one sure way to end this legal nonsense quickly. SCO is reminding me of Karen Ann Quinlan who lived for about 9 years after being taken off a respirator and was the subject of a famous legal battle in the mid 1970s. There's still life in SCO's near corpse as long as the stock market continues to hold on to the irrational belief that the company has value and may yet prevail in its court battle.
I can't say that I'm surprised to read that this happened in Kennesaw, Georgia. For those of you who don't know what kind of place Kennesaw is, it has a law that requires the head of every household to own a firearm with ammunition. It's also the place that former US Representative Bob Barr called home and he was much loved there. That should give you an idea of the politics of the place, so no, I'm not surprised at all by this.
Mind you, the raid itself seemed a bit extreme.
They found none of the stuff that made them think they should go in armed. Still, I don't know what percentage of raids of this type do turn up arms/drugs, or how many they have to do, the gun toting could simply be policy.
I hate to use a phrase from the Iraq War, but it fits. It's "shock and awe" tacticts. Despite what Slashdotters want to believe, the DJs are bootleggers. This article stated that it found 25,000 CDs. A previous article I believe put that number at 75,000. Folks, this is an organized bootleg operation that got shut down. Going in armed is typical of this type of operation to shut down bootleggers. They do it to try to send a message of fear to other people who might be involved in the same thing.
This is not exactly unique for Amazon. It is quite common that companies send goods to people (mostly registered customers) that they have not ordered, and supply an invoice. People either have to just pay, or to call the company, complain and return the goods.
... I think Amazon is gambling that most customers don't know their rights and will either pay the charge or return the goods, in which case they can be re-sold later. I think Amazon knows that they will lose customers because of this action now, but in the short term it will help the Q4 2006 profits, which is all the stock market cares about.
It is easy to suspect that Amazon did this on purpose.
It's easy to suspect anything but that doesn't mean that it was done deliberately. I would offer up the argument that it would be a very foolish thing for Amazon to do deliberately as no good can come of this. Either they will lose customers over the incident or they'll at a minimum have to eat the postage costs on getting stuff returned to them. That's just not good business strategy.
I am not a lawyer either, but it is my understanding from my best friend, who is a lawyer, that Amazon is on shakey ground here and a strong case can be made that they just have to suck it up and live with the huge discount. My guess is that so many got sold that they can't just eat it as it will have an impact on profits, which means pissed off shareholders. Can you imagine telling the shareholders "We would have turned a profit in Q4 2006 except we botched a last minute DVD box set promotion and instead of doing buy 1 get 1 free, we basically gave away 2 for free or next to nothing." I gaze into my crystal ball and I see lawsuits
I have protested credit card charges several times and I have never lost. Never. If you have evidence to support your claim, you will win every time. That's the problem here. If you have some way of proving that the price you paid in December was $0 or 1 cent or whatever through a screen capture or a credit charge at the time, you have a leg to stand on. Amazon's argument that it was a mistake and you knew it was a mistake and took advantage of them is valid and may or may not hold up in court (depends on the judge). However, if you can prove that Amazon agreed to that price at the time and is now after the fact changing their mind, that will give you what you need to win the chargeback, but you need something more than "he said, she said". Bottom line - if you can prove your side of the dispute, you will win.
I've never understood why tech companies listened to the music industry in the first place. Perhaps I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the tech companies are far bigger in monetary value and hence far more powerful than the music industry in the first place so don't understand why these companies supported, rather than fought DRM from day one.
I can explain this to you. Your problem is that you are a rational human being. You must understand first of all that the music industry is irrational. Imagine the following conversation, which illustrates the problem:
Tech company: We'd love to sell your music in non-DRMed format.
Music company: We're not interested in selling it without DRM.
Tech company: We're not going to sell it with DRM!
Music company: Fine. Don't sell it. Get nothing. We can live without online sales. If you want a piece of the pie, you have to sell it with DRM. No negotiations. No exceptions. That's how it will be done. Take it or leave it.
Yes, the music industry really is that dumb. They would rather not sell it at all then sell it without DRM. Remember, their goal is to rip you off. They have proven time and time again that they would rather sell one CD for $18 than 3 for $10 each. This is irrational behavior, but they have been very consistent in it. If they can't sell you something at their price and on their terms, then they don't want your money. They really don't. It truly is "their way or the highway". So when you realize that the only deal that could be made was to sell music with DRM or not sell it all, is it any wonder that Yahoo and Apple and everyone else agreed to DRM? There weren't going to be any sales without it. Besides, they were able to make the major labels take the heat for DRM, which is totally fair, so it wasn't a difficult business decision to sell DRM music since they could make money off it and they wouldn't have to answer to pissed off customers who don't like DRM since it wasn't their fault the music had DRM. It really is that simple. Make money off selling DRMed music or make nothing.
Remember too that I am talking about the major music industry companies and smaller labels or individual artists have a more rational outlook. How rational is it to decide "We'd rather sell one at $18 than 3 for $10 each", but that is exactly how they operate.
It's comparable to Captain Queeg's determined investigation of the theft of ice cream in the classic Bogart film, The Caine Mutiny
Since there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the film about ice cream and it was strawberries that got stolen, I think you ought to lose every point you were given for being "insightful". Making crap up because you're too lazy to look it up should take away from your point score.
I thank God daily that I am not American. Please understand, I don't intend to bash Americans, but I am scared to death of the police state that is forming. Gitmo makes the Japanese internment camps of WWII look like quilting bees. It frightens me so much that I'd even move out of Canada just to get further away from that, except for people like Josh Wolf.
It figures that you are Canadian. America bashing is your new national sport, isn't it? Even more popular than hockey now. Did you happen to notice that Norway, not the USA, was referenced in another article on Slashdot about considering putting in a national firewall to block objectionable material? Did you happen to notice that in the USA, you are still free to speak your mind and if I want to do something stupid like question the Holocaust (this is only an example and for the record I do believe it happened), I will not go to jail?
As far as Guantanamo goes, I don't feel sorry for these people at all. If you do, that's fine. In fact, I'd go so far as to Guantanamo is one of the few good things Bush has done. I think there should be a place where bad people who want to harm my country go and they stay there until they die. Unfortunately, my government did a poor job of screening those who it sent there and an ever poorer job of figuring out in a timely manner who was and who wasn't a terrorist of those they sent there. But there are very very bad people there and if you look for a variety of sources about, for example, David Hicks, I think you will come to the conclusion that this is not a good man wrongly imprisoned as his lawyer would have you believe, but a hardcore jihadist who wants nothing more than to kill as many non-Muslim Westerners as he can. I've heard that Australia's PM has said off the record that he has no objections to Hicks being detained forever because he can't be charged under Australian law and they know that if he ever gets released, he'll leave Australia and try to go somewhere (Chechniya?) where he can kill non-Muslims and cause problems. I have little doubt that if Hicks were released he would represent a very serious and real threat to my country.
"Windows Media DRM has had fewer security breaches than Apple's FairPlay, yet WM DRM is licensed out the wazoo: there are more than a dozen companies with WM DRM licenses"
Hmmmm.... could it because no one really cares about downloading wmv files? The point is that if the product sucks, no one will bother even to break into it.
Windows Media has certainly been hacked, but the hacks involve getting a legal license first and then removing the DRM. One of the alt groups on Usenet late in 2006 posted the WMV version of Terminator 2 that was released a few years ago in yet another DVD repackaging of the movie, but without the DRM. The WMV version of the film was the theatrical release (no extra footage) encoded in high definition with WMV and with some really restrictive DRM where you only had 5 days in which to watch the movie and if you lived outside of the US and Canada, you couldn't get a license at all. You can do a web search and find a lot of angry reviewers who complained bitterly about the restrictions on the WMV high def release of the film, but it's now possible to watch the film with no DRM thanks to the work of some hackers.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Microsoft audio and video codecs by Microsoft haters. I work as a Unix system admin and I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their video and audio codecs do not suck and are actually one of the few things they got right. WMV is fine and in fact, one of the possible HD codecs in use for BluRay and HD-DVD is VC-1, which is based directly on WMV. If you think WMV sucks, then either you've seen it badly encoded or you are just bashing Microsoft for no good reason.
It's possible the schoolmaster assumed he could make unlimited copies of the software for non-profit, academic use only. If he works at a school that has to watch every penny in its budget (like 90% of schools in the world), and he makes barely enough to live on himself (like 90% of teachers in the world), he probably assumed Microsoft would not attempt to charge a price that he and his school would be unable to pay.
I've spent a decent amount of time in Ukraine and while Ukraine is not Russia, it's roughly equivalent. First of all, I am amazed that a school teacher was targeted for this crackdown. He must have made some enemies somewhere is all I can figure. I know two teachers in Ukraine who teach English. In one case, the teacher is someone who teaches because she views it as her contribution to society, but she told me she can't make enough money just on her teacher's salary to live. She also gives English lessons as a private tutor and she makes a lot more money from private lessons than as a teacher. The other teacher no longer teaches in school and lives only by giving private English lessons as she makes a lot more money that way. I even once knew a college professor around 30 years old who was still living with her parents in Ukraine in part because she didn't make a lot of money.
Schools in that part of the world don't have money to buy Microsoft products, which get no discounts. Multiply the price of software by 5 and consider what it would be like if you had to pay it and you have a very rough idea of what the econonmic conditions are like over there. I'm amazed that the school even has PCs and it probably doesn't have very many of those. There is no way the school could afford to buy Microsoft products, but a very good question is why is this school and this teacher being cracked down upon? Who did they piss off? I've read some estimates that at least 90% of Microsoft products in the ex-USSR are cracked versions and from what I've seen I believe it. I'm sure there is no shortage of offices in Moscow where nobody has a legal copy of Windows, yet it's a rural school teacher they are going to make an example of.
If you're even slightly more than a casual Beatles fan, wouldn't you already have all the Beatles music you need. Are there going to be people actually seeking out Beatles songs on iTunes?
Having the Beatles on iTunes is so they can sell to the under 30 crowd who don't want any music they can't download. These people don't buy CDs. They don't have a problem with paying to download though. There is no way right now to sell any Beatles songs to these people, leaving them no choice but to turn to P2P networks to get it for free. Apple Corp. knows they are missing out on a lot of sales to this market segment, so that's why they're going to iTunes.
There is also a similar story in the Chitral Valley in northern Pakistan, where many of the local Kalash people have blue eyes and blond hair and worship a pantheon of gods.
Nice story, but probably not a word of truth in it. Remember, this is Pakistan. This is where the crazy Taliban folks got started. You might have heard of the Taliban. They blew up statues of Buddha when they ran Afghanistan. They put Christian aid workers on trial for their lives for supposedly trying to convert the local populice. Do you really think it's credible that anywhere in Pakistan people who "worship a pantheon of gods" would be allowed to live and do so? Because I don't. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia entry on the region -
"The culture is conservative Islamic."
I think this casts a lot of doubt about the accuracy of your post.
So what?
So, it just might be illegal. Consider the following scenarios, none of which may be true and all of which are just speculation by me. Again, none of these may be true, but it shows how this kind of thing is more than "no big deal".
1) If Dell hid this money from the IRS and failed to pay taxes on it, that would certainly be illegal.
2) If Dell claimed this money under "sales" when in fact it was a gift, that might have caused their stock to be inflated by making their sales look better than they were. That would certainly lead to a class action lawsuit by unhappy shareholders.
3) Paying someone to keep out another competing product is actually anti-capitalistic you Ayn Rand loving morons! Similar cases have gone before the Federal government in the past and typically they weren't looked upon so favorably. Just because someone pays someone to do something that doesn't mean it's legal. Do you losers really think that if Coke gave millions of dollars in payouts to keep Pepsi out of grocery stores that Pepsi would just shrug it off as "good business by Coke"?
GOFA would create a U.S.-government-designated list of "Internet restricting countries"
* United States
* China
* Korea
There's no such country now as "Korea", so I argue that this doesn't meet the qualification to be modded insightful . The original poster should explain whether he means the DPRNK (Democratic People's Republic of North Korea), the ROK (Republic Of Korea - that is, South Korea) or both.
AFAIK, the .SU TLD was known to be obsoleted for a very long time. Think about it, USSR was no more years before web happened. People who bought names in there have themselves to blame for the trouble along with the registrar.
.su was a valid domain for email "back in the day". Note to grammatically challenged Slashdotters - note the correct use of "you're" and "your" in my first sentence. Read it and learn.
.su domain was meaningless as the USSR was dead for several years. I took a quick look at a few .su sites and they appear to be Russian sites that are for some reason too lazy to move over to the .ru domain.
You're showing your youth here. The internet was here years before the web existed and
However, you are certainly right that with the advent of the web that people should have realized that the
10:1 this guy dies mysteriously or disappears.
Very perceptive, but I'd say the odds are too high. I'd put it at 3:1 right now. If it looks like Russia is going to have to hand him over, it'll get closer to even money.
I mean, this statement:
As much as 50 per cent of the world's pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
Worldwide?! There is just no fucking way. We don't even hold a tiny candle to what goes on in Asia.
You are correct. I attribute this "50 per cent" statement either to deliberate hyperbole or the belief in Hollywood that only American movies count, so perhaps changing this statement to read "50% of pirated American movies come from Canada" would be accurate.
I should say that I'm American. Hollywood and most Americans think that "Them durn foreigners can't make good movies. They just make those weird films where everybody talks and nothin' gets blowed up." The "Best Foreign Film" Oscar is a just sham to make foreign film producers think that "Hollywood cares" when in fact, they don't. They think any foreign people who make films are just sadly misguided. So yes, I certainly believe that when Hollywood talks about "50 per cent of the world's movies" they have equated WORLD = USA.
Sounds reasonable to me.
And me too, but we seem to have the minority opinion here. I love reading the justifications on why this is "evil" of GoDaddy to do this. Then again, what do you expect from Slashdot readers? Last week everyone was up in arms because the RIAA and a SWAT team arrested a guy for "making mix tapes" when in fact he was a bootlegger with over EIGHTY THOUSAND bootleg CDs that got confiscated and it had nothing to do with mix tapes.