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Below are some great quotes from the first file sharing suit brought by the riaa to get a court hearing. Keep in mind that these are remarks from plaintiffs! I love it. All are excerpted from Ars Technica’s excellent reporting on the trial.
From Sony’s Jennifer Pariser, who, when she is dismissed by her employer, will surely have a successful career in comedy writing to look forward to:
IP addresses and screenshots, “don’t identify human beings.”
“We haven’t stopped to calculate the amount of damages we’ve suffered due to downloading,*”
on the number of people who actually downloaded music from the Kazaa account of the defendant, Jammie Thomas,
“We don’t know.” I can’t identify any other entities aside from what SafeNet reported, but I know that many others did… that’s the way the system works.”
On the spending of millions of dallars pursuing those nefarious file sharing hordes, some of whom have turned out to be dead…
“we’ve lost money on this program.”
*Yesterday on the opening day of the trial Ms. Pariser channeled Carl Sagan, asserting that file sharing, “causes several billions of dollars of harm. It’s important to combat. If we don’t, we have no business.”
BEFORE YOU GO ANY FURTHER…
Wow! This post is getting a lot of hits (a lot for me, double digits on a daily basis). But did you know that there are two more posts in this series, part 2, and also the exciting conclusion! With screenshots!
Hey feeding buddies,
I’ve started running a side by side comparison of Google Reader, which I have been quite underwhelmed by in the past, and Bloglines which has been my old standby reader pretty much since I became a semi-regular web user and blogger.
Bloglines is my sentimental favorite but lately there’s been less love. It keeps freezing up and needing a manual refresh. And there’s the old problem that some posts from certain feeds don’t show up until they’re a few hours old. Most of the time, who cares about this? But occasionally I would appreciate a more timely turnaround, and bloglines hanging problem is getting more frequent and driving me up the wall.
Google reader has recently been thrown out of the Google Labs nest and is now making its way in the wild. My previous go-rounds with Greader have left me waving my hand dismissively as I clicked back over to Bloglines. It was unweidly, poorly organized, and most importantly gave me a hard time about importing my opml file (exported from bloglines, nach). Can you say ‘non starter?’ I think you can.
But now Greader looks like a contender. Which brings me to the point of my post. Here is what my pal Stephen might refer to as comment bait:
Have you tried either or both Bloglines and/or and what do you think? Do you know of other free, web based* readers that work great and you think I should check out?
Little help?
*Free and web based are essential ingredients. Do not expect your comment about the ‘inexpensive’ hard drive based feed reader you just love to survive (yes Will, this means you). If you want to extol its virtues you may do so on your own blog. Just sayin’.
Late last night at a Microsoft server farm somewhere, a tech looked at the power cord laying on the floor and said, “Hey, who unplugged this?” His buddy on the lateshift replied, “Oh, that was me. I needed a place to plug in the coffee maker.”
Apparently the Windows Genuine Advantage crisis has now been rectified. You may update at will.
If you are a windows user like me, this is something you should know:
Microsoft is having some sort of major melt down of its Windows Genuine Advantage verification service. The biggest headache for those of us who are stuck with use windows is that if you try to install any software that demands verification by WGA, your computer could get tagged as having an invalid copy of windows. That could be bad.
Here’s what ARS has to say…
If you use Windows, do your best to avoid anything that requires a ping to WGA. That means you should stay away from patches and add-ons until the coast is clear. WGA will not reach out across the Internet and deactivate your copy of Windows, but you should avoid talking to a WGA server for any reason.
For those of you doing installations and upgrades this weekend, we recommend that you avoid activation at this time. Remember that you can run Windows legally for 30 days without activating.
If you attempt a validation and it fails, your install may be marked as non-genuine, which could lead to several annoyances. First things first, do not reboot a Windows machine that has been marked as non-genuine. Once you do so, you will lose functionality and the Aero interface. It would be best to wait until this problem has been resolved.
Ick.
The Aero interface for those of you who (like me) are clueless, is the graphical interface for Windows Vista.
I’m not altogether certain that this outage affects XP users, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ve turned off my Automatic Updates service until the coast is clear.
If any of you readers with a higher Geek IQ than myself want to chime in/correct me/vent at me regarding this situation, please use the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly.
And as for all you Mac users: don’t even start.
You can embed google maps now. Like, woah!
Unless of course, you’re on wordpress.com. In which case, you can’t.
Works on blogger though, apparently.*
*When blogger works. Which is not now. Heh. (8/22/07, 10:30EDT)
I just emptied out my gmail inbox.
I feel so… accomplished.
FYI,
I’ve temporarily removed the recent comments list from the top of the right hand sidebar. Sometime today the wordpress gnomes added avatars to the recent comments, which was a nice touch as it provided a more readable separation between individual comment indicators. The problem with whatever they did is that it turned the section into a still life. Comments posted following the “upgrade” did not appear, not even after a few hours.
So they’re gone. I’m confident the wordpress machinery will spring quickly to life in order to recitfy this blip. Once that happens, you’ll (I’ll) once again be able to access the lastest in commenty excellence from amongst the numberless horde of serotoninreaders.
Oh, and btw, I still do not have an iPhone.
Via Lifehacker a new way to play with google maps.
Now you can change the driving directions by grabbing the blue route line and dragging it to create a new destination point, which will in turn create a new route.
Here‘s how google maps tells me to travel from one point on R7 to another.
But the revised route is how I do it when I’m delivering the mail. The revisions were successfully entered on the map and directions list by simply clicking and dragging the small square that appears when hovering over the route.
About flippin’ time!
Check out Etymologic: the toughest word game on the web… or so it claims. I got 6 out of 10 right on my first try; Etymologic told me I gotta go study. I tallied a slightly better 7 on the next round.
Let’s see how you do.
Duncan Riley of TechCrunch writes about WeFi, a free wifi finder service that is still in private beta until Wednesday. Here’s a bit of what he has to say about it…
The WeFi client replaces the Windows connection manager and finds and connects to free WiFi hotspots. The location of free hotspots is displayed on a map that also shows the location of other WeFi users. The maps are regularly updated as users discover and connect to WiFi.
This could be a handy dandy little service. Especially if, say, you’re on a road trip and you’re deciding day by day where you’re going to go, and you’re blogging the entire thing. I know, I know. No one in their right mind would ever do such a thing. Anyway, there are many potential uses for this service and I’ll definitely be checking it out once it launches on Wednesday.
I can’t tell from Riley’s description how it differs from AnchorFree (formerly metrofreefi.com), except perhaps in that it’s constantly updated based on user data. When I use Wefi as a guest, I do not see single hotspot in my area, and anchorfree doesn’t list any either. I know of four off the top of my head.
We’ll see how the Wefi’s hotspots line up with reality once it’s online. I know I’ll be adding some.
Viacom is suing Google. Big news!
Some guy named Mark Cuban has posted a defense of Viacom’s position in this whole copyright battle between the media giant and Google/YouTube. I’m not providing a link to his rant because it’s very long and it rambles a bit and this Cuban fella needs links like God needs cattle or hillsides or both. If you want to read it… oh, the irony… simply Google ‘ “Mark Cuban” viacom google ‘. You’ll find it.
Now, I don’t think Mr. Cuban is wrong per se. He seems to be smart enough and all that. And Viacom might win the suit, after all. They’ve got lots of money and lawyers and stuff, maybe more than Google even.
But I think this is one of those things where they (Viacom) lose even if they win, contrary to what one of Cuban’s commenters said:
As far as I’m concerned, Youtube grew large by blatantly ignoring copyright. As well know, pirates are the enemy of civilization. Civilization is the reason why we don’t still sit around in a f**g cave.
…I personally think that regardless of my personal interests, STEALING is bad. For the greater good. Everything else is a obviously a rationalization (going with technology, exposure, etc.).
So yeah Mark: Right on. Keep it up. As far as I’m concerned, you are defending the very values of civilization itself.
Um, yeah. Okay. I don’t think civilization is going to collapse if Google keeps “pirating.” And there will always be pirates even if Google disappears overnight. Just like there will always be people who find ways of creatively using existing TV programming to make something that’s actually good. [sorry for that, I couldn’t resist]
In any event, it takes Cuban a whopping 1,368 words to say why he thinks Viacom is doing what they’re doing and why they’re right. Wow! I think he should pay me for having to read that much. It was hard work.
But I wish to invoke the scientific principle of Ockham’s Razor. You know, like in that Robert Zemeckis movie. “All things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”
I can explain Viacom’s move in a single, relatively brief sentence: “They so badly missed the boat on what the web could do for media sharing and distribution that they’re now trying to recoup their losses (albeit, virtual losses), even if that means they wind up looking like morons.”
Wait! I can do even better than that. I can summarize the whole thing in much fewer words: “Gootube has money that Youtube did not that Viacom now wants.”
Or, even more briefly: “Money.”
This isn’t about preserving civilization or copyrights or rights of any kind. This is purely business, which means it’s about money. C’mon Mark. You’re a smart guy. You couldn’t figure that out?
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