Former John Birch Society Republican turned AFL-CIO labor activist who evolved into a progressive netizen which I'm now beginning to regret due to all the fucking emails I keep finding on my lawn!
CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) is not a part of this, and every tech/repair person I've ever talked to joked with me about piracy. They simply don't care.
Sadly, they're regional so you can't switch to their DSL product, but Qwest/CenturyLink has always been a great ISP.
I accidentally bought Word 6 before it went on sale (clerical error) and because of that and my very busy resume writing service I got to be a primary troubleshooter for MS on that horrible release. Apparently not one single beta tester typed over 50 wpm, and they didn't realize how buggy the Typeahead buffer was. Word was literally dropping words and letters at random out of what I was inputting and suddenly my workload doubled due to the need for very close proofreading. Resulted in involuntary eye twitches and then my heart went out of rhythm, something that's never happened before or since.
in this country. When Microsoft's super-buggy Word 6.0 resulted in my hospitalization (cardiac arrhythia), the MN AG's office refused to even consider suing Microsoft. They flat out told me that Microsoft was bigger than Minnesota, and there was no point to litigation.
Clinton's DOJ gave MS a free pass on monopolistic abuses. I don't think that horse is ever getting put back into the barn.
I'm bad on this topic. I used to use other search engines just to go against the grain, but Google won me over. Of all the major players online, I cannot think of anyone else who's been more useful to me, especially not for free.
It would break my heart to learn that Google's as bad as the rest of them.
Fifteen years is an awesome achievement, especially in a demanding area like IT trends. I've been tracking blogs pretty closely since my first one in 1999, and you are easily one of the most prolific quality bloggers out there.
And no, I don't know why your anniversary isn't on all the news wires, or why you haven't received a MacArthur grant yet.
Yes, there may have been one or two songs I downloaded that I didn't upload, but that happens when you're the last to grab the second album from a one-hit wonder band.
"If I went to a site called "pirate movie download den", I can be pretty sure they don't have the rights. When in doubt, air on the side of caution."
OK, guide me through the world I live in. I go to one torrent site and they have very strict rules for uploading. Nothing on any label that objects to their music being shared, nothing by any artist who objects. I've uploaded there and I'm very confident that the music I get at their site is OK to share and distribute.
The other sites I go to don't have rules, but I see a lot of the same music, so I know they have music that I can legally download.
HOW DO I TELL WHICH IS WHICH? Are average music consumers really expected to keep up-to-date lists of all the no-downloading-allowed labels and artists? Seriously?
I think what you're saying is that "free" should not be a legal distribution model. And you also seem to be saying that content that is legally uploaded and downloaded from a site like Pirate Bay is somehow tainted because not all of their torrents are OK with the RIAA/MPAA/porn producers, etc.
You don't seem shy about reiterating your arguments. Please respond.
to BILLIONS of dollars in fines. And as a Minnesota blogger I kept posting that fact over and over again every time Jammie's case came up in the newspaper. I would leave comments in local newspapers explaining that I had downloaded literally over 100,000 songs.
No one ever sued me.
The difference? Jammie had a job and money in the bank. I didn't.
RIAA never sues anyone who doesn't have money to pay, or a paycheck to slap a lien on.
This is all about money, and only about money.
Fuck the Eighth Circuit and the whores who sit on it.
Microsoft notoriously embedded code in Windows (and, for Mac users, in Word) that made your computer crash if you tried to use WordPerfect.
I was running a resume service and, for conversion purposes, tried to install WordStar and WordPerfect on my computer numerous times. You could not launch those problems if MS Word was open. Period.
For this alone Microsoft's corporate charter should have been pulled, yet all these years later they're still beating up their victim in court.
I grew up in the '50s. I was born just months after the CIA deposed the first democratically elected leader of a Muslim nation. As I grew up I watched the US prop up the corrupt Shah as Iran did the scut work of American "diplomacy" in the Middle East, a job that was taken over by Israel after the Shah fell.
Iran is an immature theocracy now, just like Israel. Iran, however, has centuries of history in their corner that indicates they will not attack their neighbors (Iraq attacked Iran with Reagan's blessings, remember?)
Iran needs to be watched, but the Iranian people will slowly bring sanity back to that nation despite it having some crackpot leaders.
I'm much more concerned about Israel, a nation that keeps moving right, and whose political parties are becoming increasingly hostile to African workers, gays and pretty much everyone who isn't Jewish.
You can call it a tie, but Iran doesn't influence the USA. Israel does.
this being one of the least of their crimes, but it always disappoints me when the Israeli dog wags their U.S. tail.
I would hate to have to vote for Ron Paul to achieve saner U.S. foreign policy, but I cannot think of one major candidate in the last twenty years who hasn't crapped on the U.S. Constitution in their haste to embrace Israel's thuggish world view.
Yes, many Jews died in WWII death camps, but how many Muslims have to die from IDF attacks before Israel calls it even?
This wasn't a capricious action taken by the Royal Commission on Recording Industry Association Profits, or the Royal Motion Picture Association of Thailand. This woman was arrested for violating a well known Thai law. You think it's silly to have laws protecting the dignity of the royal family? I won't argue with you, and if I was in Thailand, I definitely wouldn't argue with you.
But that doesn't make you right when you call the Thai people stupid for sticking with a monarchy. Thailand is the only Asian nation to have gone several centuries without being occupied by a foreign power. Thailand serves some of the best food in the world, and is the breadbasket of Asia. Thailand is not a stinking cesspool of filth and genocide like Cambodia, and is considerably more free than Burma, Cambodia or Laos, its closest neighbors.
Yes, maybe it sounds silly to have laws protecting a monarch, but when's the last time you heard of a Thai college student being fined $675,000 for illegal downloading? Also, no one ever goes to prison for getting or providing an abortion in Thailand.
Thailand's not a perfect country, but at this point in time it would behoove most Americans to STFU about other countries and their practices, most of which pale into insignificance when compared to our Wall Street driven mores.
They took my Facebook permissions then told me they were full up.
I HATE SITES THAT TAKE YOUR DATA THEN TELL YOU TO GO AWAY.
Sorry, they may be the best thing since sliced toast but all I know is that they tricked me into giving them all my Facebook permissions and I got zippo back.
and from the mid-'90s to about 2003, I had thousands of online clients from all 50 states. As a one-person business, figuring 50 different quarterly sales tax returns would have been a half-time job all by itself.
Sales taxes are horribly regressive, and compound the enormous wealth inequity in this country. Bezos is right. (This time.)
I don't think Clinton's solution makes any sense, but you should know that both Politifact and FactCheck have been ripped by other factcheck orgs for being exceptionally establishment-oriented. Politifact seems to go well out of its way to give breaks to Republicans not named Michele Bachmann while very aggressively parsing statements made by liberals.
Just wanted to make it clear that I'm not a quality blogger either, but an aggregator (i.e., totally sponging my content off the sweat on others' brows).
Mike Masnick is one of the more prolific bloggers I read, but he still can't touch Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, or Digby at Hullabaloo, or, frankly, any of several dozen very prolific political bloggers I read, and I'm sure there are some mommy bloggers who put these people to shame.
But the real question here is do you value quality or quantity? Who's the better author, Isaac Asimov or Thomas Pynchon? Barbara Cartland or Isabel Allende? Zane Grey or Ernest Hemingway?
Mike does a nice job of putting out a lot of quality product. Would acknowledgement from Guinness make him a better blogger? I don't think so.
I've been blogging since 1999, and daily since 2004 but I can't touch Mike's 38,000 posts because my average posts are much longer and work out to about a million words a year. Others are still more longwinded.
Guinness also fails to recognize originality. Yes, you have to be creative to make news items speak to larger issues like Mike does, but what about those who create wholly original posts each day? Doesn't originality count for more than putting a spin on someone else's news story?
(untitled comment)
CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) is not a part of this, and every tech/repair person I've ever talked to joked with me about piracy. They simply don't care.
Sadly, they're regional so you can't switch to their DSL product, but Qwest/CenturyLink has always been a great ISP.
Re: Re: There is no consumer protection
Here's a very old archive of a newspaper column about what happened to me, and sorry for misspelling Arrhythmia.
http://mfinley.com/articles/cardiac.htm
I accidentally bought Word 6 before it went on sale (clerical error) and because of that and my very busy resume writing service I got to be a primary troubleshooter for MS on that horrible release. Apparently not one single beta tester typed over 50 wpm, and they didn't realize how buggy the Typeahead buffer was. Word was literally dropping words and letters at random out of what I was inputting and suddenly my workload doubled due to the need for very close proofreading. Resulted in involuntary eye twitches and then my heart went out of rhythm, something that's never happened before or since.
There is no consumer protection
in this country. When Microsoft's super-buggy Word 6.0 resulted in my hospitalization (cardiac arrhythia), the MN AG's office refused to even consider suing Microsoft. They flat out told me that Microsoft was bigger than Minnesota, and there was no point to litigation.
Clinton's DOJ gave MS a free pass on monopolistic abuses. I don't think that horse is ever getting put back into the barn.
How can I contribute to that reward?
She's called me literally hundreds of times over the last ten years ON MY RESIDENTIAL LINE.
It's gotten to where I'm beginning to involuntarily hate everyone named Rachel.
Outrageous
The right of corporations to litter our doorsteps shall not be abridged.
Corporate litterers now have more rights than human beings engaged in political protest.
Re: Re: Given the Microsoft precedent
I'm bad on this topic. I used to use other search engines just to go against the grain, but Google won me over. Of all the major players online, I cannot think of anyone else who's been more useful to me, especially not for free.
It would break my heart to learn that Google's as bad as the rest of them.
Given the Microsoft precedent
I don't think the FTC gets to call anyone a monopolist, ever.
If what Microsoft did was legal, it is not possible to break this law.
Congratulations
Fifteen years is an awesome achievement, especially in a demanding area like IT trends. I've been tracking blogs pretty closely since my first one in 1999, and you are easily one of the most prolific quality bloggers out there.
And no, I don't know why your anniversary isn't on all the news wires, or why you haven't received a MacArthur grant yet.
Re: Re: Re: Using her numbers, at one time I would have been subject
Shhh! Don't tell Anonymous Coward how it works!
Yes, there may have been one or two songs I downloaded that I didn't upload, but that happens when you're the last to grab the second album from a one-hit wonder band.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"If I went to a site called "pirate movie download den", I can be pretty sure they don't have the rights. When in doubt, air on the side of caution."
OK, guide me through the world I live in. I go to one torrent site and they have very strict rules for uploading. Nothing on any label that objects to their music being shared, nothing by any artist who objects. I've uploaded there and I'm very confident that the music I get at their site is OK to share and distribute.
The other sites I go to don't have rules, but I see a lot of the same music, so I know they have music that I can legally download.
HOW DO I TELL WHICH IS WHICH? Are average music consumers really expected to keep up-to-date lists of all the no-downloading-allowed labels and artists? Seriously?
I think what you're saying is that "free" should not be a legal distribution model. And you also seem to be saying that content that is legally uploaded and downloaded from a site like Pirate Bay is somehow tainted because not all of their torrents are OK with the RIAA/MPAA/porn producers, etc.
You don't seem shy about reiterating your arguments. Please respond.
Using her numbers, at one time I would have been subject
to BILLIONS of dollars in fines. And as a Minnesota blogger I kept posting that fact over and over again every time Jammie's case came up in the newspaper. I would leave comments in local newspapers explaining that I had downloaded literally over 100,000 songs.
No one ever sued me.
The difference? Jammie had a job and money in the bank. I didn't.
RIAA never sues anyone who doesn't have money to pay, or a paycheck to slap a lien on.
This is all about money, and only about money.
Fuck the Eighth Circuit and the whores who sit on it.
What a farce
Microsoft notoriously embedded code in Windows (and, for Mac users, in Word) that made your computer crash if you tried to use WordPerfect.
I was running a resume service and, for conversion purposes, tried to install WordStar and WordPerfect on my computer numerous times. You could not launch those problems if MS Word was open. Period.
For this alone Microsoft's corporate charter should have been pulled, yet all these years later they're still beating up their victim in court.
Re: Iran
I grew up in the '50s. I was born just months after the CIA deposed the first democratically elected leader of a Muslim nation. As I grew up I watched the US prop up the corrupt Shah as Iran did the scut work of American "diplomacy" in the Middle East, a job that was taken over by Israel after the Shah fell.
Iran is an immature theocracy now, just like Israel. Iran, however, has centuries of history in their corner that indicates they will not attack their neighbors (Iraq attacked Iran with Reagan's blessings, remember?)
Iran needs to be watched, but the Iranian people will slowly bring sanity back to that nation despite it having some crackpot leaders.
I'm much more concerned about Israel, a nation that keeps moving right, and whose political parties are becoming increasingly hostile to African workers, gays and pretty much everyone who isn't Jewish.
You can call it a tie, but Iran doesn't influence the USA. Israel does.
I'm keeping my eye on Israel if you don't mind.
I'm not disappointed in Israel
this being one of the least of their crimes, but it always disappoints me when the Israeli dog wags their U.S. tail.
I would hate to have to vote for Ron Paul to achieve saner U.S. foreign policy, but I cannot think of one major candidate in the last twenty years who hasn't crapped on the U.S. Constitution in their haste to embrace Israel's thuggish world view.
Yes, many Jews died in WWII death camps, but how many Muslims have to die from IDF attacks before Israel calls it even?
The rules in Thailand are very well understood
This wasn't a capricious action taken by the Royal Commission on Recording Industry Association Profits, or the Royal Motion Picture Association of Thailand. This woman was arrested for violating a well known Thai law. You think it's silly to have laws protecting the dignity of the royal family? I won't argue with you, and if I was in Thailand, I definitely wouldn't argue with you.
But that doesn't make you right when you call the Thai people stupid for sticking with a monarchy. Thailand is the only Asian nation to have gone several centuries without being occupied by a foreign power. Thailand serves some of the best food in the world, and is the breadbasket of Asia. Thailand is not a stinking cesspool of filth and genocide like Cambodia, and is considerably more free than Burma, Cambodia or Laos, its closest neighbors.
Yes, maybe it sounds silly to have laws protecting a monarch, but when's the last time you heard of a Thai college student being fined $675,000 for illegal downloading? Also, no one ever goes to prison for getting or providing an abortion in Thailand.
Thailand's not a perfect country, but at this point in time it would behoove most Americans to STFU about other countries and their practices, most of which pale into insignificance when compared to our Wall Street driven mores.
Tried to sign up
They took my Facebook permissions then told me they were full up.
I HATE SITES THAT TAKE YOUR DATA THEN TELL YOU TO GO AWAY.
Sorry, they may be the best thing since sliced toast but all I know is that they tricked me into giving them all my Facebook permissions and I got zippo back.
I used to write resumes
and from the mid-'90s to about 2003, I had thousands of online clients from all 50 states. As a one-person business, figuring 50 different quarterly sales tax returns would have been a half-time job all by itself.
Sales taxes are horribly regressive, and compound the enormous wealth inequity in this country. Bezos is right. (This time.)
(untitled comment)
I don't think Clinton's solution makes any sense, but you should know that both Politifact and FactCheck have been ripped by other factcheck orgs for being exceptionally establishment-oriented. Politifact seems to go well out of its way to give breaks to Republicans not named Michele Bachmann while very aggressively parsing statements made by liberals.
Re: Guinness is full of it on several counts
Just wanted to make it clear that I'm not a quality blogger either, but an aggregator (i.e., totally sponging my content off the sweat on others' brows).
Mike Masnick is one of the more prolific bloggers I read, but he still can't touch Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, or Digby at Hullabaloo, or, frankly, any of several dozen very prolific political bloggers I read, and I'm sure there are some mommy bloggers who put these people to shame.
But the real question here is do you value quality or quantity? Who's the better author, Isaac Asimov or Thomas Pynchon? Barbara Cartland or Isabel Allende? Zane Grey or Ernest Hemingway?
Mike does a nice job of putting out a lot of quality product. Would acknowledgement from Guinness make him a better blogger? I don't think so.
Guinness is full of it on several counts
I've been blogging since 1999, and daily since 2004 but I can't touch Mike's 38,000 posts because my average posts are much longer and work out to about a million words a year. Others are still more longwinded.
Guinness also fails to recognize originality. Yes, you have to be creative to make news items speak to larger issues like Mike does, but what about those who create wholly original posts each day? Doesn't originality count for more than putting a spin on someone else's news story?
How do you rate photobloggers or videobloggers?