Wouldn't have been any better with McCain and the bimbette. Probably worse, in fact.
But this was a point that I was trying to get across when Obama was elected: do not get your fucking hopes up, because he's going to be as subject to the beltway brigade as anyone else, and he's going to get run by the corporations as much as anyone else. Lo and behold...big win for the banks, the multinationals, the copyright mafia, health insurance providers, and even that biggest of fuckups, BP. The main difference if McCain won is that the winners list is shorter with Obama.
Actually, it costs Cox to have Usenet on tap, because their Usenet implementation has been outsourced to Highwinds for years.
It's moderately annoying to lose it, especially as the overall price won't drop, but what's been lost here is actually no great shakes -- there's low caps on both connections (4) and speed, and the retention is 30 days if you're lucky. No SSL either, which has become pretty standard.
Yes, it means paying for an alternative...although it doesn't have to be Giganews. Astraweb works very well, and is fairly low cost on their unlimited plans, and if Astraweb is too costly and you don't care about posting access, there's Cheaper, which has plans starting at $4 a month the last I looked.
I guess it took Cox some time to come up with an almost friendly, harmless-sounding name for throttling, considering that they've been throttling users in all of their markets for better than a year now. Day or night P2P and other users can expect to see a lot of jiggering of throughput.
Curiously enough, I'm only a buyer, and the loss of seller ability to leave negative feedback pisses me off -- partly because it means more sellers than ever just don't bother leaving ANY feedback. Why should they? It's a joke.
While I don't miss the possibility of revenge feedback from bad sellers (and just had one rip-off artist who would have done just that), I'm annoyed that eBay pretty much set it up so that buyers can screw up sellers very easily -- mess with the DSR to get it under 4.6, and a seller gets a thirty day suspension; leave negative feedback and once it hits a certain point, suspension.
Selelrs can cover their asses by using tracking -- it comes automatically with UPS and similar shippers, and it's 45 cents at the USPS. Other buyer scams are easily foiled too. Hell, legitimate buyer complaints are easily foiled -- I've been rooked by scam artists using PayPal.
In the short term eBay's apparently boneheaded moves are going to cost them...but if their plan is to become a huge shopping portal instead of an auction site, then making moves to dump all the smaller guys is exactly what they would do. It's entirely possible, however, that they're simply just screwed up.
Same situation where I am. The issue is the same one that's commonly plagued analog TV as well, though not to this extent -- everybody is broadcasting from a different bloody location, and it becomes a nightmare to try and point the antenna at the right mast for any given station.
What's done in the UK and Europe (an dother places) is to centralize the actual transmission antennas on a single mast. Voila, one-shot aiming. The one downside to this is if you have a situation like the Ilkley Moor mast collapse, where the structure failed under bad weather conditions and blacked out television over a large area for some time.
Here it's a pain in the ass. I can get my local PBS stations though. Fox? Forget it. Sorry, Joss Whedon, no Dollhouse for me I guess (yeah, yeah, who bothers with broadcast TV these days?)
I used to be on a board that tracked amazon pricing errors -- picked up quite a few items for next to nothing that way. They used to play along and make good on such orders, but it got to the point where it was costing them so much and causing such disruptiveness that they changed the policy, and mispriced orders now are usually canceled. That's been in effect for at least the last five years.
They don't always notify the buyer -- which I think is a customer service issue where people fall through the cracks -- and they only rarely offer a make-nice like a gift certificate.
Well, you're full of shit there -- LucasArts/Lucasfilm don't prosecute over fan fiction, they actively encourage it and even have very lightweight guidelines for it. Which is why there's so damn much of it out there, including full-length film productions. Paramount/CBS very lightly police Star Trek, and understand very well that allowing such productions as New Frontiers to exist encourages sell-through on the official products.
That you mention Vivendi is also telling. You mean Universal/NBC? Also very lightweight on fanfic -- and they're one of the tougher crews around when it comes to being pissy about downloading.
...and then we elected Republicans left and right, rolled back those social an civil gains, and generally made a big stinky mess. We're more technologically advanced, but, frankly, it's the over-fifties that are shitting up the nest and setting a wonderful example for those following. Why should they care? They're inheriting a royally screwed world that has gret bread and circuses.
Misdelivery doesn't grant a right to possession; if you don't arrange for return or correct delivery (by simply giving it back to the delivering agency) then legally is can be seen as common theft. In cases where a mailman leaves an item with a neighbor for the correct recipient to pick up, it could be seen as interfering with the mail.
In real-world practice, of course, 70% of the people who get something misdelivered to them keep the item.
It becomes more absurd when you consider that this is the UK, and it's entirely possible the station being listened to at the time was one of the BBC stations, such as Radio One, or one of the BBC locals. The BBC is supported by a mandatory license fee (it's called a TV license usually, but it covers radio as well, and may be broadened to include computers.) Thus, no advertising involved.
It becomes ever crazier.
This isn't the first time this sort of thing has been pulled, in the USA or elsewhere. This kind of thing is absolutely perfect for destroying any desire anybody has to have anything to do with commercial music.
Most people are scum, so i keep my circle of friends trimmed to a minimum -- mostly those who can't run fast enough to escape when I start shooting.
And I solved the sex issue by putting the computer in the bedroom. It worked out even better than expected because of the special USB attachments. And putting the big LCD screen over the bed? Genius, I think.
I just need to figure out a way to deal with the shaky mousework.
Well, this is a smart move on Universal's part, as always. Go from one heavily DRM'd system with millions of users to another even more heavily DRM'd set-up used by, oh, dozens and squirt out files encoded with Microsoft's beloved PlaysForShit technology, which will, despite their license, play on perhaps *one* device if you're lucky (ever try to set up the secondary license files on a second computer? Fails miserably.) Supported by a lot of players that sell perhaps a hundred units apiece, PlaysForShit isn't even supported by Microsoft's own Zune (every one carrying that extra financial bite that goes straight to Universal Music Group to support their artists...oh, wait, I forgot, the artists don't get any of that bonus cash, do they. My bad.)
When their revenue stream slumps again, we know what the cry will be, don't we? "IT WUZ DEM PIRATEEEEEESSSSS!!!!"
I want some new entertainment. Watching the music industry shoot itself in the foot got boring about a year back.
Just wait. Next year Rea;ID is supposed to kick in, and then you either show up with a Federally approved ID under that program, or with a passport -- or you don't fly.
States are fighting this, but DHS and their cohort are giving them a big wet "fuck you" response.
I mean, the Scum is mainly notable for the page three titty shots and the complete sub-Enquirer (hell, sub-Weekly World News!) level of its reporting.
RTD has always indicated that he'll leave sometime between the end of series four and the end of series six, depending on his mood at the time you ask him. He wants to do other things. It's entirely possible he'll step down after series four to concentrate a bit more on Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures; he's said several times he wishes he'd been more involved with Torchwood.
I say we kill all of the sex offenders. And the jaywalkers. And the trash talkers. And pretty much everybody else. A gallows on every corner and six in every town square.
It will be glorious.
(But, yeah, rates of reoffense are too high for comfort.)
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't have been any better with McCain and the bimbette. Probably worse, in fact. But this was a point that I was trying to get across when Obama was elected: do not get your fucking hopes up, because he's going to be as subject to the beltway brigade as anyone else, and he's going to get run by the corporations as much as anyone else. Lo and behold...big win for the banks, the multinationals, the copyright mafia, health insurance providers, and even that biggest of fuckups, BP. The main difference if McCain won is that the winners list is shorter with Obama.
IMHO Cox's Usenet sucked before they outsourced it to Highwinds too.
Actually, it costs Cox to have Usenet on tap, because their Usenet implementation has been outsourced to Highwinds for years. It's moderately annoying to lose it, especially as the overall price won't drop, but what's been lost here is actually no great shakes -- there's low caps on both connections (4) and speed, and the retention is 30 days if you're lucky. No SSL either, which has become pretty standard. Yes, it means paying for an alternative...although it doesn't have to be Giganews. Astraweb works very well, and is fairly low cost on their unlimited plans, and if Astraweb is too costly and you don't care about posting access, there's Cheaper, which has plans starting at $4 a month the last I looked.
+5 Godwined! It always comes down to Nazis, real or implied....
I guess it took Cox some time to come up with an almost friendly, harmless-sounding name for throttling, considering that they've been throttling users in all of their markets for better than a year now. Day or night P2P and other users can expect to see a lot of jiggering of throughput.
Curiously enough, I'm only a buyer, and the loss of seller ability to leave negative feedback pisses me off -- partly because it means more sellers than ever just don't bother leaving ANY feedback. Why should they? It's a joke. While I don't miss the possibility of revenge feedback from bad sellers (and just had one rip-off artist who would have done just that), I'm annoyed that eBay pretty much set it up so that buyers can screw up sellers very easily -- mess with the DSR to get it under 4.6, and a seller gets a thirty day suspension; leave negative feedback and once it hits a certain point, suspension. Selelrs can cover their asses by using tracking -- it comes automatically with UPS and similar shippers, and it's 45 cents at the USPS. Other buyer scams are easily foiled too. Hell, legitimate buyer complaints are easily foiled -- I've been rooked by scam artists using PayPal. In the short term eBay's apparently boneheaded moves are going to cost them...but if their plan is to become a huge shopping portal instead of an auction site, then making moves to dump all the smaller guys is exactly what they would do. It's entirely possible, however, that they're simply just screwed up.
Same situation where I am. The issue is the same one that's commonly plagued analog TV as well, though not to this extent -- everybody is broadcasting from a different bloody location, and it becomes a nightmare to try and point the antenna at the right mast for any given station. What's done in the UK and Europe (an dother places) is to centralize the actual transmission antennas on a single mast. Voila, one-shot aiming. The one downside to this is if you have a situation like the Ilkley Moor mast collapse, where the structure failed under bad weather conditions and blacked out television over a large area for some time. Here it's a pain in the ass. I can get my local PBS stations though. Fox? Forget it. Sorry, Joss Whedon, no Dollhouse for me I guess (yeah, yeah, who bothers with broadcast TV these days?)
Fortunately they still have the option of suing their viewers for piracy! That's worked well for the music industry, you know.
Aha. I was afraid that was the situation. I guess Josh Broedsky needs to get a bit of an update.
The question I have is why the RIAA dropped cases against a bunch of UofA students recently: http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/byauthor/235178
I used to be on a board that tracked amazon pricing errors -- picked up quite a few items for next to nothing that way. They used to play along and make good on such orders, but it got to the point where it was costing them so much and causing such disruptiveness that they changed the policy, and mispriced orders now are usually canceled. That's been in effect for at least the last five years. They don't always notify the buyer -- which I think is a customer service issue where people fall through the cracks -- and they only rarely offer a make-nice like a gift certificate.
Well, you're full of shit there -- LucasArts/Lucasfilm don't prosecute over fan fiction, they actively encourage it and even have very lightweight guidelines for it. Which is why there's so damn much of it out there, including full-length film productions. Paramount/CBS very lightly police Star Trek, and understand very well that allowing such productions as New Frontiers to exist encourages sell-through on the official products. That you mention Vivendi is also telling. You mean Universal/NBC? Also very lightweight on fanfic -- and they're one of the tougher crews around when it comes to being pissy about downloading.
I'm going to be running around in my Messerschmidt Bubble Car.
Good grief, I think that one Godwined with the force of a nuclear explosion...! Mind you, I'll stop laughing when the RIAA rolls out the tanks....
...and then we elected Republicans left and right, rolled back those social an civil gains, and generally made a big stinky mess. We're more technologically advanced, but, frankly, it's the over-fifties that are shitting up the nest and setting a wonderful example for those following. Why should they care? They're inheriting a royally screwed world that has gret bread and circuses.
Next the RIAA will want a sneaker tax....
Misdelivery doesn't grant a right to possession; if you don't arrange for return or correct delivery (by simply giving it back to the delivering agency) then legally is can be seen as common theft. In cases where a mailman leaves an item with a neighbor for the correct recipient to pick up, it could be seen as interfering with the mail. In real-world practice, of course, 70% of the people who get something misdelivered to them keep the item.
It becomes more absurd when you consider that this is the UK, and it's entirely possible the station being listened to at the time was one of the BBC stations, such as Radio One, or one of the BBC locals. The BBC is supported by a mandatory license fee (it's called a TV license usually, but it covers radio as well, and may be broadened to include computers.) Thus, no advertising involved. It becomes ever crazier. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has been pulled, in the USA or elsewhere. This kind of thing is absolutely perfect for destroying any desire anybody has to have anything to do with commercial music.
And I solved the sex issue by putting the computer in the bedroom. It worked out even better than expected because of the special USB attachments. And putting the big LCD screen over the bed? Genius, I think.
I just need to figure out a way to deal with the shaky mousework.
When their revenue stream slumps again, we know what the cry will be, don't we? "IT WUZ DEM PIRATEEEEEESSSSS!!!!"
I want some new entertainment. Watching the music industry shoot itself in the foot got boring about a year back.
Just wait. Next year Rea;ID is supposed to kick in, and then you either show up with a Federally approved ID under that program, or with a passport -- or you don't fly. States are fighting this, but DHS and their cohort are giving them a big wet "fuck you" response.
We're all blind from excessive masturbation, so we actually don't care anymore.
Hell, that's how microwave ovens came about.
I mean, the Scum is mainly notable for the page three titty shots and the complete sub-Enquirer (hell, sub-Weekly World News!) level of its reporting. RTD has always indicated that he'll leave sometime between the end of series four and the end of series six, depending on his mood at the time you ask him. He wants to do other things. It's entirely possible he'll step down after series four to concentrate a bit more on Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures; he's said several times he wishes he'd been more involved with Torchwood.
I say we kill all of the sex offenders. And the jaywalkers. And the trash talkers. And pretty much everybody else. A gallows on every corner and six in every town square. It will be glorious. (But, yeah, rates of reoffense are too high for comfort.)