IMHO, because software patents can still be filed in Europe, there will always be the threat of passing some kind of legislation in the future that will enforce European software patents...this danger changes forms as necessary, but does not go away.
...on how you word your statement. If it had been super aggressive (such as: "the RIAA is correct, and consumers are fucking stupid"), I would have modded you down immediately. However, in the context of the point you are trying to convey-a dissenting opinion, I don't think I would have taken you below "1", just because you are trying to come across as not just an RIAA shill. Now if you had made a pro-RIAA statement, and actually cited a bunch of supporting arguments in the form of hyperlinks and quotes (with the original posting), then it's no longer just trying to make a simple statement and the thought of modding you down would have never crossed my mind-not that I had any mod points to begin with of course.
As someone else pointed out, it's better to try to educate someone, than to immediately assume they are just wrong.
That being said, mod points can be emotional in nature...which is just a side effect of having them. Maybe this is a good example of that. As a general rule, to avoid being tagged as a troll/overrated, making statements that show some thinking involved is the best defense.
Note-I do not download songs via P2P, I buy used CD's from Amazon and such, so while I have no sympathy for the RIAA, AFAIK, I also do not put myself at high risk. I get my MP3's via NNTP and a few internet-based vendors, but not iTunes...yet.
The RIAA has gone after all kinds of people, dead and alive, using techniques that simply border on unethical. Corporate bullying, in some cases. In addition, copyright infringement isn't theft. It may be a crime, but it is not the same thing as physical theft-the RIAA always claims it is.
I think I would have modded you troll or overrated if I had mod points based on your original comment.
There may be something positive to say about the RIAA, but this particular subject isn't one of them. Oh, and neither are their efforts to attempt to deep-six internet radio, and then there is the DMCA...yeah, the RIAA doesn't have a lot of good karma, IMHO.
You want a politician to respond to you? Snail mail is *still* the best way. Take ideas from a template if you must, but make most of the stuff, if not all of it up yourself. Be concise, but be sure and make your point. Bitching about a situation is obviously easier, but I got a reply back from Senator Boxer about a week ago (with the original letter sent in late May), which stated the following:
Thank you for writing to me regarding proposed changes to the assessment
of royalty fees that Internet radio broadcasters pay to musicians and
record labels. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.
As you probably know, the federal Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has
released its plan for charging online radio broadcasters for royalties.
The Internet Radio Equality act of 2007 (S.1353), which was recently
introduced in the Senate, would nullify the CRB's proposal and prevent the
new royalties assessment plan from taking effect.
S.1353 is currently being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Please be assured that I will take your comments under advisement, should
this legislation come before the full Senate.
Again, thank you for writing to me. Please keep in touch with me about
this and any other issue of concern to you.
The reason you had your dream concerning your gaming experience is because what you have been thinking about before you try to sleep, has a significant input to your dreams. In other words, you can control your dreams to a high degree. The first time I had heard of this concept was when I was in high school more than 15 years ago, but the ideas http://www.wikihow.com/Control-Your-Dreams are still valid today.
There is a reason for why you have the initial dreams you do. The stronger your focus before you go to sleep, the more likely you will have a dream concerning that particular subject. It is likely once you finished the game you were not actively thinking about it the following night at the same level of intensity, which is why you did not dream about it much if at all, the following night.
I work part time as a school teacher Saturday mornings. We have old Celeron 800 Mhz computers with 128 megs of RAM, an nVidia TNT 2 16 meg VRAM that just barely manage to run Windows XP Pro SP2. Weak frackin' hardware, I know. So I burned several copies of Ubuntu 7.04 hoping I could demonstrate that version of Linux to the students, and after the initial menu selection, all the machines (the hardware is identical) got to where the X Server is coming up with the tan color, and then nothing else happened. What is supposed to happen is the two desktop icons show up for installing, but it never got that far.
This doesn't affect my favorable Linux view, but this is the first time I have tried a Linux distro on old hardware and it just wouldn't work. I works fine on my Dell Insprion 8200 laptop though. I would have expected Mandriva to do this, but not Ubuntu.
First, while I am not a staunch defender of the California bay area (even though I am living here for now), Oakland is the city you move to if you are interested in significantly increasing your risk. San Francisco is not without problems, but the crime rate difference is noteworthy.
NASA is a US government organization http://nasa.gov/. It's always going to be internally vulnerable to politics, budget cuts, but also shares one trait that plagues many government branches-inefficiency. As the Ansari X-prize demonstrated, NASA is good for some stuff concerning space flight, including doing key research that could not easily be done by private individuals, but at the same time, it is not a one-organization-fits-all solution.
I'm still disappointed that Frank Welker is not the voice of Megatron. I'll still see the film, but Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are equally important to an old school audience. Granted, Megatron will not be a gun either, but still, I would have preferred Frank Welker over Hugo Weaving.
Don't you have better things to do than make assumptions about other people's posts? Maybe you don't. In any event, you add NOTHING to why I got modded down, but I sound more like an EV-DO commercial probably.
You said:"Internet access is rarely provided or flakey at best"
Could you please elaborate a bit further? You see the problem I have with your statement is I am now using EV-DO via my smart phone for high speed wireless broadband in major metropolitan areas, tethered to my machine here (PDA net). My plan is currently via US Sprint, although you can also go with Verizon and Cingular/AT&T has their own system called 3G. I can tell you from personal experience that EV-DO from my place here is 450 kilobit/sec download-anything but flakey and in select cities, like San Francisco EV-DO is even faster, supporting up to 1 megabit/sec download.
Oh and the upload speeds are lighting quick too, exceeding 150 kilobits/sec most of the time.
The fee? $15 a month-unlimited data, on top of a voice plan which is $40 per month (450 minutes), and if you run out of minutes, just use Skype...so using Google's stuff isn't so bad, really, depending on where you are in the country.
I do Adobe Flash development for some of my work, and I do also use other Adobe/Macromedia tools, like Fireworks and Illustrator. I don't know how I would have done some of the previous work if the alpha channel in PNG wasn't available. Obviously, Adobe Flash is one way to get past the lack of transparency support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
A great way to see how JPG is still smaller than PNG in file size, is to use the "Save For Web" feature on a lot of Adobe products, like Photoshop/ImageReady and you can then see the file size estimates adjacent to each other.
PNG is well supported today though. This application, called PAINT.NET http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html (needs.NET 2.0 Framework) defaults to PNG. PAINT.NET is a superior free replacement to MSPAINT, IMHO.
Many branches of the US Federal Government have former Microsoft employees in strategic places and vice versa, so it's one way that Microsoft keeps close watch on their bigger US Federal Government accounts (like the Navy).
That being said, there are some US Federal Government accounts that are tightly integrated with Microsoft products, and there are others who may not even use Microsoft products obviously. Workstations and servers are often upgraded in groups, but not all at once. For some US Federal Government accounts, they'll still upgrade to Windows Vista in a year or two (or maybe three) from now when all of their workstations meet the minimum requirements for Windows Vista, but many of them have group policy enabled to turn off the "Aeroglass" interface.
Well, I don't know all the details on the active duty side of the house so well. I know for a fact that though that civilians can be fired over one DUI incident, because a contractor I know, just recently took a "drug and awareness" class, and he was telling me that how it's tough to get fired, it's not impossible. Contractors of course, can be let go at the end of the contract, if it is not renewed/refunded. They are getting tougher though for active duty folk concerning things like domestic violence, but not enough to fire you over it. I'll have to ask about officers versus enlisted staff though 'cause I hadn't thought about that difference...
Getting fired from the Federal Government is generally tough-especially if you are prior military. Unlike private industry, it requires TONS of paperwork, and/or an extraordinary event. You have to really fuck up to get canned. Typically, the way to deal with a problem employee is to promote them into another department or position-that is usually how it is done. This is one reason why the Federal Government has some seriously mismatched people in certain positions. Also, the closer you are to retirement, the less likely they will actually fire you. You can be marginalized, but you won't get fired very easily. Some branches of the military are cracking down on some bad behavior. For example, the US Coast Guard will fire you if you get yourself a DUI as a civilian, and if you are active duty you COULD get two DUI's (pending a board review) before being fired, but that's it. On the flip side, you could be a lazy bum and be a low productivity worker for decades, and probably make it to retirement while being paid moderately well.
The line of separation for GS positions typically stops at the GS-12 level-there are still some incompetent workers at the 13, 14 and 15 levels, but the numbers are far fewer, because at those levels incompetency and general specialist/management efficiency becomes blurred.
Note, there is a little hope on the horizon-the Federal Government IS though moving some jobs away from the GS classification into a new pay banding system that rewards you based on performance, but unions are suing to slow down the change over with mixed results. That's why some job postings say GS and others have the new classification. Under the new pay banding, the probability of getting fired doesn't change much, but it is harder to move up if you are a bad worker.
It seems obvious to me he's a friend of the RIAA. He runs an anti-P2P company according to this link http://p2pnet.net/story/10845/ and had some kind of DRM scheme or something...
Intervideo/Corel has the dominant OEM market share of the largest PC vendors, and many of the middle-tier vendors, so don't assume Hollywood will suddenly default to Cyberlink's PowerDVD in the future, just because WinDVD 8 got hacked. This dominance of OEM's is what allowed them to have a mildly successful IPO, so compared to Cyberlink, Intervideo/Corel has a lot more money, and generates a much larger volume of DVD sales than Cyberlink and others could anytime soon.
Just because Mel Karmazin and others want to merge with XM, doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Recall what happened when Dish Network tried to buy DirectTV? It went on for a year, before regulators shut it down-so if I were you, I wouldn't be concerned at this time.
If I thought that these groups had any traction at all-I'd likely be more open to this, but the industry has a 9-and-0 record against the censors. That is a very strong precedent. Now I wasn't alive when the movie and comic book industries went through this process, but to use a canned phrase, "this too shall pass" and 10 years from now, politicians will be looking at some other scapegoat.
Citing their constitutional rights is what Federal judges are most concerned about-the decisions they provide are well reasoned and are pretty much free of the emotion that was used to draft the faulty "laws" in the first place.
I don't like to cite this name as he's an attention whore by default, but the anti-video game activist, John Bruce Thompson reflects EXACTLY what I think is going on now and what will happen in the near future-just at a faster, more personalized pace. A complete replay of "Seduction Of The Innocent" all over again. He was initially very loud and had an unproven record trying to link video game violence to murder among other things back when the Columbine incident hit. John Carmack ignored the accusations without commenting on them, which was the appropriate response-now, only a very few even remember that detail. Fast forward to the present, he's still on the war path, but he isn't getting much press and after his most recent failure, he did manage to finally get a bar complaint against him. He's not yet been successful as an ambulance chaser, but like Caldera International, as the failures mount, less and less people pay attention, ultimately forgetting the situation entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, because software patents can still be filed in Europe, there will always be the threat of passing some kind of legislation in the future that will enforce European software patents...this danger changes forms as necessary, but does not go away.
...on how you word your statement. If it had been super aggressive (such as: "the RIAA is correct, and consumers are fucking stupid"), I would have modded you down immediately. However, in the context of the point you are trying to convey-a dissenting opinion, I don't think I would have taken you below "1", just because you are trying to come across as not just an RIAA shill. Now if you had made a pro-RIAA statement, and actually cited a bunch of supporting arguments in the form of hyperlinks and quotes (with the original posting), then it's no longer just trying to make a simple statement and the thought of modding you down would have never crossed my mind-not that I had any mod points to begin with of course.
As someone else pointed out, it's better to try to educate someone, than to immediately assume they are just wrong.
That being said, mod points can be emotional in nature...which is just a side effect of having them. Maybe this is a good example of that. As a general rule, to avoid being tagged as a troll/overrated, making statements that show some thinking involved is the best defense.
Note-I do not download songs via P2P, I buy used CD's from Amazon and such, so while I have no sympathy for the RIAA, AFAIK, I also do not put myself at high risk. I get my MP3's via NNTP and a few internet-based vendors, but not iTunes...yet.
The RIAA has gone after all kinds of people, dead and alive, using techniques that simply border on unethical. Corporate bullying, in some cases. In addition, copyright infringement isn't theft. It may be a crime, but it is not the same thing as physical theft-the RIAA always claims it is.
I think I would have modded you troll or overrated if I had mod points based on your original comment.
There may be something positive to say about the RIAA, but this particular subject isn't one of them. Oh, and neither are their efforts to attempt to deep-six internet radio, and then there is the DMCA...yeah, the RIAA doesn't have a lot of good karma, IMHO.
You want a politician to respond to you? Snail mail is *still* the best way. Take ideas from a template if you must, but make most of the stuff, if not all of it up yourself. Be concise, but be sure and make your point. Bitching about a situation is obviously easier, but I got a reply back from Senator Boxer about a week ago (with the original letter sent in late May), which stated the following:
Thank you for writing to me regarding proposed changes to the assessment of royalty fees that Internet radio broadcasters pay to musicians and record labels. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.
As you probably know, the federal Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has released its plan for charging online radio broadcasters for royalties. The Internet Radio Equality act of 2007 (S.1353), which was recently introduced in the Senate, would nullify the CRB's proposal and prevent the new royalties assessment plan from taking effect.
S.1353 is currently being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Please be assured that I will take your comments under advisement, should this legislation come before the full Senate.
Again, thank you for writing to me. Please keep in touch with me about this and any other issue of concern to you.
The reason you had your dream concerning your gaming experience is because what you have been thinking about before you try to sleep, has a significant input to your dreams. In other words, you can control your dreams to a high degree. The first time I had heard of this concept was when I was in high school more than 15 years ago, but the ideas http://www.wikihow.com/Control-Your-Dreams are still valid today.
There is a reason for why you have the initial dreams you do. The stronger your focus before you go to sleep, the more likely you will have a dream concerning that particular subject. It is likely once you finished the game you were not actively thinking about it the following night at the same level of intensity, which is why you did not dream about it much if at all, the following night.
Ah, I hadn't checked that, thanks.
I work part time as a school teacher Saturday mornings. We have old Celeron 800 Mhz computers with 128 megs of RAM, an nVidia TNT 2 16 meg VRAM that just barely manage to run Windows XP Pro SP2. Weak frackin' hardware, I know. So I burned several copies of Ubuntu 7.04 hoping I could demonstrate that version of Linux to the students, and after the initial menu selection, all the machines (the hardware is identical) got to where the X Server is coming up with the tan color, and then nothing else happened. What is supposed to happen is the two desktop icons show up for installing, but it never got that far.
This doesn't affect my favorable Linux view, but this is the first time I have tried a Linux distro on old hardware and it just wouldn't work. I works fine on my Dell Insprion 8200 laptop though. I would have expected Mandriva to do this, but not Ubuntu.
First, while I am not a staunch defender of the California bay area (even though I am living here for now), Oakland is the city you move to if you are interested in significantly increasing your risk. San Francisco is not without problems, but the crime rate difference is noteworthy.
m ?c1=Oakland&s1=CA&c2=San+Francisco&s2=CA
m ?c1=New+York&s1=NY&c2=San+Francisco&s2=CA
m ?c1=Seattle&s1=WA&c2=San+Francisco&s2=CA
m ?c1=Berkeley&s1=CA&c2=San+Francisco&s2=CA
_ quarter_NAR_prices/index.htm?postversion=200705151 4
http://oaklandca.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.ht
Of course, New York is a bit safer than San Francisco in a general sense...
http://oaklandca.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.ht
However, you are trading murder for carjacking and other items in Seattle...
http://oaklandca.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.ht
Finally, they could always try to live in somewhere like Berkeley...
http://oaklandca.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.ht
A much better reason though for not moving here is the hyperinflation of the cost of housing has not subsided-the bubble is in full effect here.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/14/real_estate/first
NASA is a US government organization http://nasa.gov/. It's always going to be internally vulnerable to politics, budget cuts, but also shares one trait that plagues many government branches-inefficiency. As the Ansari X-prize demonstrated, NASA is good for some stuff concerning space flight, including doing key research that could not easily be done by private individuals, but at the same time, it is not a one-organization-fits-all solution.
'nuff said. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSGEbJLCRuQ
Soundwave seems to have not lost anything over the years...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCYLEO9sIVQ
I'm still disappointed that Frank Welker is not the voice of Megatron. I'll still see the film, but Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are equally important to an old school audience. Granted, Megatron will not be a gun either, but still, I would have preferred Frank Welker over Hugo Weaving.
Don't you have better things to do than make assumptions about other people's posts? Maybe you don't. In any event, you add NOTHING to why I got modded down, but I sound more like an EV-DO commercial probably.
You said:"Internet access is rarely provided or flakey at best"
Could you please elaborate a bit further? You see the problem I have with your statement is I am now using EV-DO via my smart phone for high speed wireless broadband in major metropolitan areas, tethered to my machine here (PDA net). My plan is currently via US Sprint, although you can also go with Verizon and Cingular/AT&T has their own system called 3G. I can tell you from personal experience that EV-DO from my place here is 450 kilobit/sec download-anything but flakey and in select cities, like San Francisco EV-DO is even faster, supporting up to 1 megabit/sec download.
Oh and the upload speeds are lighting quick too, exceeding 150 kilobits/sec most of the time.
The fee? $15 a month-unlimited data, on top of a voice plan which is $40 per month (450 minutes), and if you run out of minutes, just use Skype...so using Google's stuff isn't so bad, really, depending on where you are in the country.
Mitchell, was a licensee of Capcom, released the game in 1998.
The clone, Zuma came out around 2004...
I was curious, as it was introduced in a Wired article and then I signed up for the beta http://www.joost.com/. For those who are unfamiliar, here is a Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost/ entry...
Since Viacom basically owns Blizzard Entertainment, who was able to shut down BNETD, I default to Google...
I do Adobe Flash development for some of my work, and I do also use other Adobe/Macromedia tools, like Fireworks and Illustrator. I don't know how I would have done some of the previous work if the alpha channel in PNG wasn't available. Obviously, Adobe Flash is one way to get past the lack of transparency support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
.NET 2.0 Framework) defaults to PNG. PAINT.NET is a superior free replacement to MSPAINT, IMHO.
A great way to see how JPG is still smaller than PNG in file size, is to use the "Save For Web" feature on a lot of Adobe products, like Photoshop/ImageReady and you can then see the file size estimates adjacent to each other.
PNG is well supported today though. This application, called PAINT.NET http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html (needs
Many branches of the US Federal Government have former Microsoft employees in strategic places and vice versa, so it's one way that Microsoft keeps close watch on their bigger US Federal Government accounts (like the Navy).
That being said, there are some US Federal Government accounts that are tightly integrated with Microsoft products, and there are others who may not even use Microsoft products obviously. Workstations and servers are often upgraded in groups, but not all at once. For some US Federal Government accounts, they'll still upgrade to Windows Vista in a year or two (or maybe three) from now when all of their workstations meet the minimum requirements for Windows Vista, but many of them have group policy enabled to turn off the "Aeroglass" interface.
Well, I don't know all the details on the active duty side of the house so well. I know for a fact that though that civilians can be fired over one DUI incident, because a contractor I know, just recently took a "drug and awareness" class, and he was telling me that how it's tough to get fired, it's not impossible. Contractors of course, can be let go at the end of the contract, if it is not renewed/refunded. They are getting tougher though for active duty folk concerning things like domestic violence, but not enough to fire you over it. I'll have to ask about officers versus enlisted staff though 'cause I hadn't thought about that difference...
Getting fired from the Federal Government is generally tough-especially if you are prior military. Unlike private industry, it requires TONS of paperwork, and/or an extraordinary event. You have to really fuck up to get canned. Typically, the way to deal with a problem employee is to promote them into another department or position-that is usually how it is done. This is one reason why the Federal Government has some seriously mismatched people in certain positions. Also, the closer you are to retirement, the less likely they will actually fire you. You can be marginalized, but you won't get fired very easily. Some branches of the military are cracking down on some bad behavior. For example, the US Coast Guard will fire you if you get yourself a DUI as a civilian, and if you are active duty you COULD get two DUI's (pending a board review) before being fired, but that's it. On the flip side, you could be a lazy bum and be a low productivity worker for decades, and probably make it to retirement while being paid moderately well.
The line of separation for GS positions typically stops at the GS-12 level-there are still some incompetent workers at the 13, 14 and 15 levels, but the numbers are far fewer, because at those levels incompetency and general specialist/management efficiency becomes blurred.
Note, there is a little hope on the horizon-the Federal Government IS though moving some jobs away from the GS classification into a new pay banding system that rewards you based on performance, but unions are suing to slow down the change over with mixed results. That's why some job postings say GS and others have the new classification. Under the new pay banding, the probability of getting fired doesn't change much, but it is harder to move up if you are a bad worker.
It seems obvious to me he's a friend of the RIAA. He runs an anti-P2P company according to this link http://p2pnet.net/story/10845/ and had some kind of DRM scheme or something...
Intervideo/Corel has the dominant OEM market share of the largest PC vendors, and many of the middle-tier vendors, so don't assume Hollywood will suddenly default to Cyberlink's PowerDVD in the future, just because WinDVD 8 got hacked. This dominance of OEM's is what allowed them to have a mildly successful IPO, so compared to Cyberlink, Intervideo/Corel has a lot more money, and generates a much larger volume of DVD sales than Cyberlink and others could anytime soon.
Just because Mel Karmazin and others want to merge with XM, doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Recall what happened when Dish Network tried to buy DirectTV? It went on for a year, before regulators shut it down-so if I were you, I wouldn't be concerned at this time.
If I thought that these groups had any traction at all-I'd likely be more open to this, but the industry has a 9-and-0 record against the censors. That is a very strong precedent. Now I wasn't alive when the movie and comic book industries went through this process, but to use a canned phrase, "this too shall pass" and 10 years from now, politicians will be looking at some other scapegoat.
Citing their constitutional rights is what Federal judges are most concerned about-the decisions they provide are well reasoned and are pretty much free of the emotion that was used to draft the faulty "laws" in the first place.
I don't like to cite this name as he's an attention whore by default, but the anti-video game activist, John Bruce Thompson reflects EXACTLY what I think is going on now and what will happen in the near future-just at a faster, more personalized pace. A complete replay of "Seduction Of The Innocent" all over again. He was initially very loud and had an unproven record trying to link video game violence to murder among other things back when the Columbine incident hit. John Carmack ignored the accusations without commenting on them, which was the appropriate response-now, only a very few even remember that detail. Fast forward to the present, he's still on the war path, but he isn't getting much press and after his most recent failure, he did manage to finally get a bar complaint against him. He's not yet been successful as an ambulance chaser, but like Caldera International, as the failures mount, less and less people pay attention, ultimately forgetting the situation entirely.