Second rate fantasy? That's like calling a lexus a "second rate car".
BTW, whoever modded you "insightful" is going to lose his karma when the metamods get through with them. "Honest question" indeed? Nice troll there, fellow!
...unless that money can be used to buy votes elsewhere
The candidate doesn't matter; HE'S the one for sale. The scandal isn't the buying of votes, it's the buying of legislators. When you've donated ten million to the Democrat and another ten million to the Republican, it doesn't matter who loses, you win.
So the banks are more impportant than the ballots here. But it's what one would expect in a plutocracy.
Tne bankers and stockbrokers know what's important in America, and it isn't your vote. What's important ios the campaign "contribution" bribery to both major party candidates.
this joint has really gone downhill over the last 2 years
Sorry dude, my bad. We're getting some killer hydro next week, here have a toke.
seriously, look at the front page. I don't see another ars story and haven't for quite a while. Are you trying to troll? If so you really do suck at it.
I had to RTFA because somebody said "winamp was bad". I didn't read far; its history was wrong. It claimed that malware started when the internet becaie popular during the dotcom boom.
Malware has been around longer than PCs. "Boot sector viruses" were the norm during the eighties when freeware was passed around and sold on floppys and BBSes. A book on computer viruses I read some time in the eighties had the first virus sometime in the seventies iirc.
My guess is that somebody who works for Microsoft or Sony or McAffee or some other evil corporation in his list of evil corporations got mod points.
The sad thing is it will take another moderator to fix it, and often times (as I've seen with some of my own comments) one won't, so a funny/insightful/informative post gets modded "troll" and stays that way. By the time metamods get hold of it the article and comment are long forgotten, and the only thing that can be done is to take away the mod's karma.
IMO Moderators should have to sign their mods. But this comment (as is yours) is offtopic and should be modded as such. Modding myself down, "No karma bonus" checked.
Ok buddy thanks a lot. Winamp is my second favorite media player (XMMS is my favorite). You made me RTFA.
In the heady days of the dot com boom, many software companies were happy enough to give out free software and trust that the money would somehow arrive later, magically (some, like the authors of WinAmp, would live to see this happen when their company was bought by America Online). Other companies released trial or demo copies of their software which could be unlocked for a fee.
That was the only place in TFA the word "winamp" appeared.
So what was/is so bad about winamp? Yeah XMMS is better but afaik it won't run in Windows.
Evolution has been tested. There are organisms that have a short life span (e.g. fruit flys). You don't test a theory to prove it, you test a theory to disprove it.
Evolution is testable, has been tested, and so far has not been disproven. If it is disproven, then another theory will take its place.
Nobody here is going to flame you for promoting or explaining science, you're not at whitehouse.gov. I am, however, pleasantly surprised that you were modded "insightful" rather than "offtopic".
(Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.)
We? Who's "we"? Is "Dionysius, God of Wine" one of those accounts that a bunch of friends contribute to? Or is it him and Timmie? At any rate it's a rather wimpy rejoinder.
Open source, he [Gates] said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
I think Billy Boy was misquoted here, because it's fucktardedly wrong, and the richest man in the world can't be that stupid, can he? Or does he think that it's us that's stupid? But at any rate, Proprietary, closed source is the one that creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software." Open source is open by definition, and by definition anybody with the right skillset can improve it. If I want a better Firefox I can compile one. If I want a better IE I have to download Firefox or Opera.
And I bemoan the squandered money I spend when I buy closed source, particularly when I have to buy the same damned program over and over because the new version that I can't fix is completely incompatible with the old version. As the athiests say, thank God for open source!
If you didn't get pulled over and ticketed and most importantly didn't plead guilty or were found guilty then you did not, in fact, speed or run a red light. YOU ARE INNOCENT. If you're not proven guilty then you're innocent.
Do you have doicumentation that half of all drivers ignore red lights and speed limits? If it isn't documented it isn't true. Some people won't believe it even if it is documented (e.g. athiests believe that the bible is fiction).
And they did repeal the national 55 MPH speed limit, as well as alcohol prohibition. Two down, ten million to go.
1) I'm getting senile in my old age, I should have thought of the hosts file
2) Search engines will give you a list of players, and I'm sure there are hundreds of them at least, but the search engines won't tell you which ones are like XMMS (My favorite, it's on the Linux side of the PC) or which ones suck. Having a few dozen friends (fans? slashdot is weird) give reccomendations is far, far more useful than any search engine.
If you have a song named "unforgiven" and I hear of it but can't remember the name of your band, the RIAA has just fucked you - because if I search for "unforgiven" I'm most likely to find a Metallica song or a Clint Eastwood movie.
And this is exactly how the MAFIAA wants it. You are their competetion. The RIAA wants to keep your music out of my ears, not keep Metallica's music out of my ears (or they wouldn't play it on the radio).
Re:makers of grammophones to sue too
on
ISP Sued By Irish RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
is it possible that the average person has a certain budget for entertainment and just spends the money buying what they want?
Most people don't work on a commission or have an unlimited amount of funds. Normal people have a certain FIXED INCOME* (salary, wages, retirement, etc). I don't know about Ireland but we're paying a hell of a lot more for gasoline here in the US. Every dollar I spend at the gas station is a dollar I can't spend on a CD.
-mcgrew
*If it's a fixed income how come I'm always broke?
If there was a highway where %30-50 of the vehicles were widely known to be transporting something illegal, would you be surprised if the local authorities took an increased interest in that particular road and began to watch things a bit more closely?
If that many people were breaking transportation law, I'd question the rationality of the existance of those laws.
The people who buy books might even buy less without a library
I know I certainly would. It would be incredibly stupid to just buy some random book from some random author that the odds are you won't get through the first chapter on. But if I've borrowed a book and found it enjoyable, I'll buy books by that author.
This is actually why the RIAA labels let radio play their music and want to kill P2P and why indie bands usually have free MP3s on their websites.
The materials in the libraries are all duly licensed for lending
There is no such thing as "licensed for lending" and you don't have to be a public library to lend a book. I can loan any of my books to anybody I want. I can loan my CDs to anybody I want. They are mine - I own them.
The entire concept of copyright has been turned upside down since the advent of computers. A license is a license to copy and distribute - the author licenses the work to the publisher, who pays the author for each copy made and sold.
But computer software started out incredibly expensive, running on incredibly expensive machines. When there are only a hundred GargantuaMainframe100s in the world and they cost ten million dollars each to build, you license the end user; the owner of the GargantuaMainframe100. You write a contract for its IT department or fiscal people to sign.
But somebody wound up making the equivalent of the GargantuaMainframe100 affordable for the average joe. Instead of a hundred of them there are a hundred million of them. And the sooftware manufacturers try to keep the same paradigm that they had when there were only 100 copies of that software needed, that of the end user license.
Only they neglected to have a contract. Now people assume that there is a "license agreement" on their OS, word processor, book, or music CD.
Sometimes evolution produced daisies, and sometimes it produces snakes. With law, it usually comes up "snakes" without devine intervention (legislation).
Music and video downloads (and e-books) however DO increase the number of copies. And copying is as good as free in effort and cost.
And a certain western superpower wants to base its economy on "intellectual property" that can be copied and transmitted free. The same western superpower that has convinced its population that "free" equals "worthless".
Maybe I shouldn't try to talk my kids into giving me grandkids. They'll grow up in a third world country if the US continues to let the plutocrats run America.
I'm sure the software has a list of legal download sites.
And I'm just as sure that the list can't be comprehensive. What if ten new sites pop up tomorrow? What of sites selling non-IRMA indie music, which is the RIAA/IRMA's real enemy and the one they really want destroyed?
The fight against file sharing isn't to keep you from hearing Britney Spears, all you have to do to hear her is turn on the radio. And that radio stream is easily sampled. The fight against file sharing is a fight against their commercial competetion - the indies.
Wilipedia is often inaccurate. I mean, would you cite Wikipedia on your doctorate thesis? Instead, you should cite the realUncyclopedia! "Noy ya lissen ta me ba, thur's ten poynds o' saimtex under yer carr, an' it's gonna fockin' bloe ya ta kingdom come!" ~ Oscar Wilde
Slashdot Mirror
Second rate fantasy? That's like calling a lexus a "second rate car".
BTW, whoever modded you "insightful" is going to lose his karma when the metamods get through with them. "Honest question" indeed? Nice troll there, fellow!
ATMs are more robust because bankers demand it.
There, fixed that for you.
...unless that money can be used to buy votes elsewhere
The candidate doesn't matter; HE'S the one for sale. The scandal isn't the buying of votes, it's the buying of legislators. When you've donated ten million to the Democrat and another ten million to the Republican, it doesn't matter who loses, you win.
Polotics and money, what a great parallel.
So the banks are more impportant than the ballots here. But it's what one would expect in a plutocracy.
Tne bankers and stockbrokers know what's important in America, and it isn't your vote. What's important ios the campaign "contribution" bribery to both major party candidates.
this joint has really gone downhill over the last 2 years
Sorry dude, my bad. We're getting some killer hydro next week, here have a toke.
seriously, look at the front page. I don't see another ars story and haven't for quite a while. Are you trying to troll? If so you really do suck at it.
History of malware...
I had to RTFA because somebody said "winamp was bad". I didn't read far; its history was wrong. It claimed that malware started when the internet becaie popular during the dotcom boom.
Malware has been around longer than PCs. "Boot sector viruses" were the norm during the eighties when freeware was passed around and sold on floppys and BBSes. A book on computer viruses I read some time in the eighties had the first virus sometime in the seventies iirc.
-mcgrew
My guess is that somebody who works for Microsoft or Sony or McAffee or some other evil corporation in his list of evil corporations got mod points.
The sad thing is it will take another moderator to fix it, and often times (as I've seen with some of my own comments) one won't, so a funny/insightful/informative post gets modded "troll" and stays that way. By the time metamods get hold of it the article and comment are long forgotten, and the only thing that can be done is to take away the mod's karma.
IMO Moderators should have to sign their mods. But this comment (as is yours) is offtopic and should be modded as such. Modding myself down, "No karma bonus" checked.
Ok buddy thanks a lot. Winamp is my second favorite media player (XMMS is my favorite). You made me RTFA.That was the only place in TFA the word "winamp" appeared.
So what was/is so bad about winamp? Yeah XMMS is better but afaik it won't run in Windows.
Man, there's one hell of a joke there just begging to be typed but it seems the mods today have too much gravity and not enough levity.
So I'll let it pass.
No, on second thought I'll link to uncyclopedia. I mean, if I'm going to get modded down anyway -
Evolution has been tested. There are organisms that have a short life span (e.g. fruit flys). You don't test a theory to prove it, you test a theory to disprove it.
Evolution is testable, has been tested, and so far has not been disproven. If it is disproven, then another theory will take its place.
Nobody here is going to flame you for promoting or explaining science, you're not at whitehouse.gov. I am, however, pleasantly surprised that you were modded "insightful" rather than "offtopic".
(Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.)
We? Who's "we"? Is "Dionysius, God of Wine" one of those accounts that a bunch of friends contribute to? Or is it him and Timmie? At any rate it's a rather wimpy rejoinder.
Open source, he [Gates] said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
I think Billy Boy was misquoted here, because it's fucktardedly wrong, and the richest man in the world can't be that stupid, can he? Or does he think that it's us that's stupid? But at any rate, Proprietary, closed source is the one that creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software." Open source is open by definition, and by definition anybody with the right skillset can improve it. If I want a better Firefox I can compile one. If I want a better IE I have to download Firefox or Opera.
And I bemoan the squandered money I spend when I buy closed source, particularly when I have to buy the same damned program over and over because the new version that I can't fix is completely incompatible with the old version. As the athiests say, thank God for open source!
-mcgrew
If you didn't get pulled over and ticketed and most importantly didn't plead guilty or were found guilty then you did not, in fact, speed or run a red light. YOU ARE INNOCENT. If you're not proven guilty then you're innocent.
Do you have doicumentation that half of all drivers ignore red lights and speed limits? If it isn't documented it isn't true. Some people won't believe it even if it is documented (e.g. athiests believe that the bible is fiction).
And they did repeal the national 55 MPH speed limit, as well as alcohol prohibition. Two down, ten million to go.
1) I'm getting senile in my old age, I should have thought of the hosts file
2) Search engines will give you a list of players, and I'm sure there are hundreds of them at least, but the search engines won't tell you which ones are like XMMS (My favorite, it's on the Linux side of the PC) or which ones suck. Having a few dozen friends (fans? slashdot is weird) give reccomendations is far, far more useful than any search engine.
WHOA! That one should have been posted as a /. front page story, I probably missed it when I was getting vitreous sucked out of my eye.
Thankfully the text said "may" rather than "will". We can only hope that the OLPC people come to their senses.
Just so I know; is this supposed to be parody?
The mods think not.
If you have a song named "unforgiven" and I hear of it but can't remember the name of your band, the RIAA has just fucked you - because if I search for "unforgiven" I'm most likely to find a Metallica song or a Clint Eastwood movie.
And this is exactly how the MAFIAA wants it. You are their competetion. The RIAA wants to keep your music out of my ears, not keep Metallica's music out of my ears (or they wouldn't play it on the radio).
is it possible that the average person has a certain budget for entertainment and just spends the money buying what they want?
Most people don't work on a commission or have an unlimited amount of funds. Normal people have a certain FIXED INCOME* (salary, wages, retirement, etc). I don't know about Ireland but we're paying a hell of a lot more for gasoline here in the US. Every dollar I spend at the gas station is a dollar I can't spend on a CD.
-mcgrew
*If it's a fixed income how come I'm always broke?
If there was a highway where %30-50 of the vehicles were widely known to be transporting something illegal, would you be surprised if the local authorities took an increased interest in that particular road and began to watch things a bit more closely?
If that many people were breaking transportation law, I'd question the rationality of the existance of those laws.
The people who buy books might even buy less without a library
I know I certainly would. It would be incredibly stupid to just buy some random book from some random author that the odds are you won't get through the first chapter on. But if I've borrowed a book and found it enjoyable, I'll buy books by that author.
This is actually why the RIAA labels let radio play their music and want to kill P2P and why indie bands usually have free MP3s on their websites.
The materials in the libraries are all duly licensed for lending
There is no such thing as "licensed for lending" and you don't have to be a public library to lend a book. I can loan any of my books to anybody I want. I can loan my CDs to anybody I want. They are mine - I own them.
The entire concept of copyright has been turned upside down since the advent of computers. A license is a license to copy and distribute - the author licenses the work to the publisher, who pays the author for each copy made and sold.
But computer software started out incredibly expensive, running on incredibly expensive machines. When there are only a hundred GargantuaMainframe100s in the world and they cost ten million dollars each to build, you license the end user; the owner of the GargantuaMainframe100. You write a contract for its IT department or fiscal people to sign.
But somebody wound up making the equivalent of the GargantuaMainframe100 affordable for the average joe. Instead of a hundred of them there are a hundred million of them. And the sooftware manufacturers try to keep the same paradigm that they had when there were only 100 copies of that software needed, that of the end user license.
Only they neglected to have a contract. Now people assume that there is a "license agreement" on their OS, word processor, book, or music CD.
Sometimes evolution produced daisies, and sometimes it produces snakes. With law, it usually comes up "snakes" without devine intervention (legislation).
Music and video downloads (and e-books) however DO increase the number of copies. And copying is as good as free in effort and cost.
And a certain western superpower wants to base its economy on "intellectual property" that can be copied and transmitted free. The same western superpower that has convinced its population that "free" equals "worthless".
Maybe I shouldn't try to talk my kids into giving me grandkids. They'll grow up in a third world country if the US continues to let the plutocrats run America.
I'm sure the software has a list of legal download sites.
And I'm just as sure that the list can't be comprehensive. What if ten new sites pop up tomorrow? What of sites selling non-IRMA indie music, which is the RIAA/IRMA's real enemy and the one they really want destroyed?
The fight against file sharing isn't to keep you from hearing Britney Spears, all you have to do to hear her is turn on the radio. And that radio stream is easily sampled. The fight against file sharing is a fight against their commercial competetion - the indies.
Wilipedia is often inaccurate. I mean, would you cite Wikipedia on your doctorate thesis? Instead, you should cite the real Uncyclopedia!
"Noy ya lissen ta me ba, thur's ten poynds o' saimtex under yer carr, an' it's gonna fockin' bloe ya ta kingdom come!" ~ Oscar Wilde
"Soulskull" is Arthur Dent's slashdot name. It's Thursday, give him a break!