Excellent reply on RockNerd to the recent ARIA figures suggesting that millions of Australians are pirating music from the net.
According to your figures 1.8 million Australians have illegitimately downloaded music files via file sharing services last month, and 3.5 million Australians have used these services over time, yet according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report into broadband there are only 300,000 broadband users in Australia, and not all of them download music. If say (conservatively) half the broadband users download music, your totals suggest the other 3.35 million downloaders use dial up services. According to your analysis, that means that some 96% of downloaders use dial up services to download music. How do you reconcile this figure with your stated figure of 72% of downloaders using dial up services? With respect, in practice, it is virtually impossible to download music without a broadband connection, so how do you reconcile these 2 figures with the actual incidence of downloading from a dial up service?
Rumour has it CD stores (CD-Wow) have been warned not to identify which CDs are copy-protected else they won't be supplied any more CDs.
And the guys that build seats, lighting, set up PAs can't get insurance. Therefore, no more big events in Australia.
I can't make the icon corn-flower blue. Sorry.
I'm glad I don't go to uni in these times. Sony/Universal/EMI are asking uni's to send CDs and harddisks to their experts to look for piracy activity. I wonder how many people / universities they intend to ruin? How many kids who would have grown up to produce some excellent IT minds are going to go to jail? Or become evil bitter hackers? Or maybe the Unis will have to expel everyone who had an MP3 in their share drive? Would they really give up their income that easily?
What if they find a giant collection of MP3s, come down on some students head for it, just to find out it was an honors student PC with his own collection of MP3s on it, that he ripped himself from his own CDs or purchases himself legally and was in a non-shared drive for his own enjoyment?
The RIAA sue-athon in the US is going strong with 75 law suits being sent out each day. Watch everyone move to newly anonymous Freenet. I think I'll stick to trading R.E.M. approved music on WinMX.
Andy Baio, creator of the last three posters on this Disney2Movie Posters page I linked to a few days ago, kindly emailed to tell me that they are making a Haunted Mansion movie, so my "two of these are real" comment is wrong. Thanks Andy. I guess Disney is running out of stories that have fallen out of copyright to steal to make into movies so they're left with their own rides to pillage ideas from.
I'm re-reading Asimov's Robots And Empire. I don't remember reading it the first time. It's stuffed full of references to other Robots books that I do remember, but this one is all new. Maybe I never read it? I'll probably remember when I read the end.
If you havn't read Asimov the following paragraph is a mild spoiler, although it will make no sense at all to you so it doesn't really matter.
I don't understand why the Spacer's think that the robots they send out to pre-populate worlds had to look human. It doesn't make sense. Their human looking robot line failed (because no one wanted them, robots are supposed to be SHINY!) so they never sent robots out to pre-populate and terraform worlds. It's just dumb. Send out robot monkeys to prepopulate. Giant robot cubes. Bender units. Who cares what they look like. Spacers deserve everything they get. Lazy bastards.
I really must get to a library and remember some books I need to read. Whenever I try to think of stuff to read I go blank. Dave has sent me a list before but that list is gone, must go through his blog and steal ideas. I'm still trying to track down Noon's Pollen, no one seems to have it. Maybe I know why. I think Noon's Needle In the Groove is one of my fav music related books, although Vurt is better.
Learning MCMS2002 at the moment. It (the learning materials) assumes a lot of .NET knowledge which I don't have but isn't too hard, but assumes you have no CMS knowledge, which I do. So it's frustrating. They've fixed a few things I hated about CMS version 1, and proper integration with .NET and Visual Studio should solve some of the others, but it still looks like a glorified FrontPage to me. It's a fairly basic set of tools (API really) that is fully customisable. I can see it turning into a $80,000 set of .NET controls. IP is so expensive.
But let's for a few seconds pretend I did...
[mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm]
My work seems to block the Tatts website. Interesting...
Every month since EMI put copy-protection on their discs The Age has posted an article on it with a full wrap up, repeating itself like a broken record (hee). I thank them for hammering the point home over and over again. I didn't realise the latest Blur album is EMI'd. Crud. It's really good too. When my rip-fest hits my albums it's going to get interesting. I'm almost finished my singles. EPs and bonus discs next.
DirectTV suing anyone who bought the technology that made it possible to hack their device. Does this mean I can sue everyone who ever bought a gun because they could use it to blow my head off? [slashdot.org]
Reviews of all the latest DVD writers at TechSpot.
I stopped reading PC Format when they started putting DVDs on their cover. I have a PC DVD reader now... It was a lame excuse to stop reading it really. I mean, a better one would be that the magazine is a pile of crap.
And more making the technology illegal instead of the use, new bill in the US to make it illegal to upload a file (any file) to a P2P network. Reading into it, looks like it would make FTP illegal too.
enables 3rd parties to store data on that computer, or use that computer to search other computers' contents over the Internet
But as a Slashdot reader said, it's obvious (to them) that the bill was never meant to pass, it's stupid, but the rewrite might pass. I mean, it makes uploading a file to FTP a federal crime, up there with murder and rape, with a $250,000 fine. Those who introduced the bill, according to EFF, get more than a quarter of their $ from hollywood.
Someone said that we shouldn't take any notice of bills like this, that they're stupid and they go away as fast as they're posted... but would they go away if we didn't know?
Going out to and insanely expensive resturant tonight... it's like when I went to the US, don't think about the conversion rate, just have fun.
