Slashback: OpenDocument, Intelligent Design, More DRM 399
Sony still not "getting it". c writes "Mark Russinovich continues his investigation of Sony's DRM as he tries out the official uninstaller. His verdict? 'I've analyzed virulent forms of spyware/adware that provide more straightforward means of uninstall.'" Relatedly Cronos1388 writes "According to the Inquirer an Italian group is also suing Sony over the rootkit." Also, an unexpected side effect of this technology is that script kiddies have been able to leverage Sony's tool to hide unauthorized cheat programs from the watchful eye of MMO creators.
Intelligent design supporters ousted. PMuse writes "The Register and others are reporting that all eight of the members of the Dover, PA school board that had required Intelligent Design to be taught alongside Evolution have been canned by voters in yesterday's election."
What does avian flu look like? DevL writes "Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson has managed to capture images of a H5N1 (bird flu) virus entering and taking control of a cell. While the text is in Swedish, the images speak for themselves."
Torrent user goes up the river. stinerman writes to tell us that the Hong Kong man who was recently arrested for making several movies available via BitTorrent has had his sentence handed down. Chan aka "Big Crook" uploaded Daredevil, Red Planet, and Miss Congeniality which landed him 3 months in jail.
Golden weighs in on OpenDocument debate. OSS_ilation writes "With so much FUD and anti-FUD flying in the face of Massachusetts' decision to go with OpenDocument, it's no surprise that open source advocate Bernard Golden weighs in with his take on current events."
User says new downloadable television just plain "sucks." Thomas Hawk writes "In the past few weeks the three major studios have all announced deals to begin offering downloadable television for consumers -- Apple/ABC, DirecTV/NBC, and Comcast/CBS. The problem with each of these respective offerings is that they largely suck. Apple sells expensive low res limited television from ABC. NBC's new service will only work on DirecTV DVRs (uh hello McFly, why pay money for this service when I can just record it for free). And CBS' downloadable programming could contain commercials."
Can you say "backfire" (Score:4, Insightful)
Downloadable TV (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Downloadable TV (Score:5, Insightful)
Network President: Greetings gentlemen, you already know my Execubots. Executive Alpha, programmed to like things that are seen before.
Alphabot: Hey hey hey.
Network President: Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule.
[Betabot rolls two dice.]
Betabot: More reality shows.
Network President: And Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate middle America.
Gammabot: It's funny but is it going to get them off their tractors?
Commercials? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look guys: intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE (Score:5, Insightful)
I am also a True Believer and attend a worship service every Sunday.
That said, ID is NOT true science. It is simply a score of men who wish to get nonsense into our textbooks.
We MUST stop ID!
The big question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You Forgot to Mention the California Class Acti (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the lawyers are lining up to ease the pain of the affected consumers by securing a $2 off coupon for the next DRM'ed CD while collecting $12 million for themselves.
Re:Can you say "backfire" (Score:3, Insightful)
Since CD sales have been falling, and it's cheaper to blame piracy than develop original artists
I'm not sure why people say things like that. It's a hell of a lot easier to find new good music today than it was 5 years ago, and a thousand times easier than it was 5 years before that. Maybe I just live in some weird radio paradise area that doesn't only play Avril Lavigne.
If there's a problem, and I'm not sure there is, it's that they play the same song off a CD for 3 months on the radio. Me and everyone I know, all of whom are fine paying for CDs, wait until we know there are at least two or three good songs on a disc before we pay for it. But with the radio set up the way it is now, I'm usually sick of the first song by the time the second one comes out.
The second problem is 90% of the CDs I buy are ones that don't get much time on the radio. If I hear a song three times on my way to work every day, I'm not going to buy it.
So my recommendation, record guys, if you're reading this, is to stop pushing that one single so hard. Give a song 3 weeks if it's really, really, fantastically great, then move on to the next one. I assume before you paid the band you made sure they had at least three good songs, right?
Of course, maybe I don't know how radio works. Maybe the stations are the ones making that call. And I suppose there's always a chance I'm not the typical CD buyer.
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this flamebait? (Score:3, Insightful)
I, for one, would like to thank Kansas for taking the first step that leads us to a new dark age!
Re:Can you say "backfire" (Score:2, Insightful)
Commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
You want hi-res Hollywood quality (Lost) television on the cheap with no advertisements? Come on.
To say a service sucks, go ahead and cite things like low-resolution, klunky DRM, limited playback options, platform dependence, or anything like that. But don't complain that their either charging for it or showing ads.
Re:Look guys: intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I rarely comment on lame moderation, but really, you're currently moded "Flamebait" for that?!? Someone needs to turn in their geek card and have their moderation responsibilities take away from them. Until someone can come up with an experiment to prove the existence of a deity, that's not flamebait, it's fact. "Intelligent Design" is not a Scientific Theory, it's not even really qualifiable as a Scientific Hypothesis... in order to be either there would need to be a way to test it. There are experiments to test all sorts of wacky quantum physics things, but not I.D., and there is a reason for that. How the heck do you propose to prove that "some intelligent designer" "guides" evolutionary forces?
Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that it's done by magic.
Thank god those school board lamers got voted out. The petty power-hungry jerks that end up on school boards in America, I swear... they're the worst... you just *know* there are real, serious needs of the students that went unaddressed while these guys were pushing their religious agenda.
Whew. The system works. In the time it took me to write and preview my comment, you went from flamebait to insightful. Faith in humanity partially restored, given that and recent election results ;-)
Re:Downloadable TV (Score:5, Insightful)
This assumes (a) that the affiliates are not owned by the broadcaster and (b) that the affiliates are in a position of power.
Let's think for a minute. What's a better market for an advertiser : All of the viewers in one major market, or all of the users of iTunes?
The local, independant affiliate has lost market share in a big, big way over the years. They don't have the sway over the broadcasters that they once had. How many people get their TV off-air ( not via cable or satellite ) these days? Is that market the wealthier, even middle-class group that advertisers like to target? Affiliates might not be the most important part of the network equation, at least not for long...
Re:Apple video SUCKS (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup. Optimized for the video iPod. You are somehow thinking it should be optimized for your computer? Not until Apple can make more money on that model...
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a "wild-eyed devotion" so much as a recognition that one thing is science and one thing is not. Kansan students are not going to be graduating knowing what is and is not science. I won't have any positions in my company available for astrologers either.
Re:Look guys: intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats the key - they are doing *both*. Charging for it, AND showing ads. Or more precisely, making you pay to download content that includes an ad.
That also nicely ignores the fact that the content is available already at high-quality, without ads, for free, and a faster download, on P2P.
Re:Commercials? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. These are commercials in a file that you pay for, that you download with your own bandwidth. Why should you have to tediously edit-out commercials from a program you already paid for? By a similar rationale, why should you have to sit through commercials in a movie theatre, after paying $8 for admission and who knows how much for concessions?
People really need to realize that their attention, and their personal information, are very valuable to marketers. It's not really a bargain to get a free T-shirt in exchange for signing up for a credit card. Your name, address, income, etc. are worth a lot of money to advertising folks. The T-shirt, if you wear it, is free advertising for them. Every second you watch a commercial, it's equivalent to giving money to the "sponsor." But people don't generally calculate the value of intangibles such as their time and attention. Any marketing students or professionals out there know the exact figure, the amount each TV viewer's time is worth to the people buying ads? In pennies per second? For Homer Simpson, for example? (White male, 35 years old, nuclear technician, wife and three kids.) If you have to download and (theoretically) watch the ads, they should be free, like broadcast TV. Otherwise you're paying for them twice.
Re:Downloadable TV (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't underestimate middle America.
Re:Look guys: intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Downloadable TV (Score:3, Insightful)
There are few guarantees in life but one of them is that if they leave the download market to the P2P community then noone will see their commercials.
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument that science is wrong to discriminate against metaphysical theories is wrong. Sectarian disputes are arguments over metaphysical theories, science does not take a position on such theories and therefore cannot be drawn into such debates while retaining it's integrity. This entire attack on science as if it is antagonistic of religious beliefs is provably wrong. Those who make it should be shunned as idiots, regardless of their metaphysical positions.
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm very glad that when I was a kid, some of my teachers took the time to go over logic and reason instead of just facts. Being able to figure something out is more useful than knowing specific tidbits of knowledge, because you can generally use that skill to find the knowledge when you need to.
Teaching creationism as something that's in the same category as evolution is a huge blow to that potentially developing framework of logic in someone's mind. There's nothing wrong with it as a religious belief, it just doesn't belong in a science class any more than cake recipes belong in a geometry class.
It's Microsoft's license that is anti-business (Score:5, Insightful)
It may also be possible that they could force your customers to register for the right to use your software (so they know who to 'go after', in cutting off your air supply).
And, of course, if your company gets bought out, your license disappears.
I can see lenders and shareholders running screaming from any business that embarks on a major undertaking, having accepted these terms. You would have to be either foolish or desparate to do so unless you could recoup the full cost of your endeavor with your first contract (which could raise the cost of your contract, making you non-competetive).
Unlike the ODF, which (contrary to MS's FUD) does not place any restrictions on a company using it(*), Microsoft's XML license would leave any company accepting it at the abject mercy of a convicted monopolist.
Good luck. You'll need it.
(*)Unlike KOffice (which also implements ODF), Open Office is LGPL, which means that a company could legaly compile in proprietary extensions to OO without having to release their own code. That is, in fact, precisely what SUN does with StarOffice. This opens up opportunities for local vendors that would never be available under MS-Office.
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically if ID is presented as a scientific theory in Kansas and the students believe this, they are at a disadvantage to students that learn ID is NOT a scientific theory.
Quit trying to make people into anti religious zealots when they may not be. I really don't care if you believe a pink unicorn created the world in 2 minutes. But I do care if you cannot determine what is scientific/verifiable/repeatable/falsifiable or not.
Cheers!
Re:Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology (Score:3, Insightful)
So you won't hire people who believe in a deity, then? They do believe in an invisible Sky Daddy, you know.
Religion and science are two different things. Don't take my word for it, ask the Vatican [slashdot.org].
Re:Here is what I am telling Microssoft (Score:5, Insightful)
If Windows did that much, then it would be so much easier to prevent this kind of crap. Heck, Mac puts up a warning just because an installer wants to run an external program.
Re:Can you say "backfire" (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple...
1.) It depends on your definition of "good". This is a subjective argument that the labels can't win on.
2.) The downward forcing of prices for CDs from the likes of WalMart is causing their decline in profits. The labels then blame it on piracy. You have seen the FUD..."Piracy has cost us XXX bazillion in sales!!!" when in reality it is the outlets refusing to sell CDs for what the labels expect they should get.
3.) Clear channel owns a HUGE percentage of the radio market. Whatever they don't own some other large corporation does. This means a homgonious selection of songs across the country. Local bands never make it onto local stations since there are no local stations any more. When was the last time you heard a local band even (maybe especially) if you live in a big city where the likelyhood is that local bands exist. Guarenteed they won't get air time even if they payed themselves if they aren't piped from clear channel. Look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they opposed Bush's war. They were pulled from all clear channel lineups and disappeared from the face of the planet.
B.
Re:Here is what I am telling Microssoft (Score:2, Insightful)
I am planning to tell MSFT something slightly different than grandparent post. I am tired of cleaning spyware and other garp off of my wife's computer. Tomorrow, she gets a Mac. I will snail-mail MSFT a copy of the sales receipt, along with a letter stating exactly why MSFT lost a sale, and exactly why MSFT software is from this time forward quarantined to strictly off-net computers in this house.