Posts by Russell Brown
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I was going to say, why would you say something as uninformed short sighted and stupid as that but then I realised you were probably bored and baiting me, nice try mr brown, I'm not falling for it.
No, not baiting you. Although I'm slightly surprised it's taken this long for you to turn up.
Look, music DRM is effectively over. It'll revise that view if something huge happens (I'm not sure what would actually change the market to that extent), but it got that way when Sony BMG put its catalogue on Amazon MP3 in January, meaning that all the major labels were now selling their music as 256k MP3 files, without DRM.
Amazon is teeing up its European launch now, via the UK. It will roll out into other territories after that. Maybe we'll see it next year.
It's a shame it's not here now, because I love the way Amazon is meshing with communities like Hype Machine, and I've love to be able to use it. I want to buy music after sampling it. It'd be cool to get the innovative pricing Amazon is introducing.
Also, even as an Apple fanboy, I really don't like the iTunes Store. The interface sucks, you're not getting real community value (especially compared to eMusic), and the fixed pricing system doesn't make sense. And I hate being stuck with 128k files. On the upside, actually buying music is really easy, and I'd use it more often from Hype Machine if it offered a better product.
So for me, DRM isn't actually the major issue, just a symptom of a political battle I wish was just over already. Apple and the majors (EMI excepted) need to sort this shit out and stop making me, a lifelong customer who wants this to work, the meat in the sandwich. It is not there to prevent piracy: it's there because the majors are at loggerheads with Apple and no one's blinked yet.
If the majors thought they were gonna die without DRM, would they really have given Amazon five millions tunes to sell without it?
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What I can say is that when you come to play rugby in New Zealand you are not just playing the All Blacks, you are taking on the whole nation. Everyone is against you. (italics added)
There is a siege mentality out here and that's what makes it so difficult to come to New Zealand and concentrate purely on playing rugby.
What a load of bullshit. I really, really resent it when the English crack on like this. I'll wager that they were shown great hospitality the entire time they were here (and that certainly seemed to be the case on the night in question). They can't blame their crap performances on some mythical public aggro. It's pathetic. But I suspect that's what was in Henry's mind.
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But it's also not necessarily enough to press charges. Particularly in a case like this where she might have said something along the lines of "I went back to the hotel with one guy but then I was raped by these others guys here". That's her word against theirs, obviously consenting for something but not consenting to something else. If she's the only witness for the prosecution and the accused all deny it, I'd imagine the police wouldn't be able to build a case.
I suspect you're right. We have had another high-profile charge of rape against a sportsman that didn't stick, despite very troubling medical evidence and a complaint who did complain.
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I took Graham Henries reported comments not as support for the English behaviour, or even solidarity for accused "brothers"... but merely not being wanted to be seen as taking shots at them.....
Quite. There will have been a bunch of English journalists walking around with chips on their shoulders. If he'd said anything that could have been interpreted as taking advantage of the situation (and that might even have included "no comment") there would have been dark mutterings in the UK press.
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All of them, be they Halliburton, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Body Shop or Neighbourhood Hippy Organics, Inc. are out to make money for shareholders any way they can. Some of them manage to do this in an ostensibly fluffier fashion, that's all.
I disagree. I think Halliburton/KBR is objectively much more evil than Google; its repeated instances of war profiteering and bogus invoicing being representative of that. Monsanto (and I'm not anti-GE) behaves evilly a lot.
There's an obvious border crossed when a company goes public and thus assumes a duty to its shareholders -- and that was certainly an issue for Google. But Google has an interest in, so far as possible, not being evil. (1) It is good for recruiting -- many of the smartest people Google employs are there because of the cultural fit. They feel it is in line with their beliefs. (2) And more importantly, Google needs us to continue to place trust in it, or its business is damaged, perhaps fatally.
So, obviously, it's an enlightened-self-interest version of non-evil, but I think it's more than fluff too.
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Russell, this might work for playing WMA files on a Mac: Flip4Mac.
Yep, I've got the paid version, and it lets me play and export lots of stuff via QuickTime
But not if there's Windows Media DRM present. And the files are only 128k anyway. Screw that. Gimme proper.
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If you read the Sunday gossip pages (and there is a grim fascination in doing so) you'll learn fairly swiftly that being a "WAG" is an accepted form of vicarious celebrity. I'm sure that that, as well as any financial reward, was in Sophie Lewis's mind when she chose to contact the press.
The women involved appear to have been summoned by the club owner, Brooke Howard-Smith. What their expectations were, we don't know.
But even if there was a not a rape here, I'd be angry if the All Blacks were to act like this on tour. They'd be representing their country, and I wouldn't expect them to celebrate a defeat with binge drinking and dubious sexual behaviour.
What is it with men who want to watch each other having sex with a young woman? Do they ask her if that's okay? What exactly is that about?
The England management now says it will write into contracts that touring players will not be able to bring women back to their rooms. That seems a shame: why shouldn't a man and a woman get it on in a foreign port? It's just the whiff of exploitation when it turns creepy like this that I don't like.
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the media seemed to happy to mix the two up, and thereby make all these girls look bad, i.e. "they might have had it coming".
I thought the Herald on Sunday was particularly bad on that score. Along with their kiddy-porn pics in the feature section, it added up to a fairly revolting edition.
My impression, from conversations during the weekend, is that most people, understandably, feel they don't know exactly what happened, but that whatever took place was not good.
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__Meanwhile the 'Medical Matters' thread here at PA has swollen to twenty-something pages, for little purpose other than providing a playpen for a single obsessive trollfoetus.__
Shhh! leave him there.Don't invite him to move on over.
What do you reckon? He has trollish spells of commenting on his own comments, but then someone responds and I'm unwilling to cut off the exchange. I could just ban him, but it doesn't seem quite right.
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With respect to PAS vs talkback, I've always tried to keep in mind Gordon Dryden's entreaty to his listeners back at the dawn of talkback radio in New Zealand: "Don't give me your opinion -- give me your experience."
In other words, talk about something you know, rather than just shooting off at the mouth. That's what bugs me whenever I hear talkback radio: most of the time, no one knows fucking anything. Compare and contrast to Matthew Poole's contributions to the police/crime thread here this week.
Every now and then someone like Slarty (who IRL has a really interesting job) will swing by and disgorge some experience. James Green can always be relied on to say something useful about medical statistics. Peter Ashby's stuff on conception and development in the Medical Matters thread was really useful to me. Others, like Emma, bring minds honed by life experience.
The downside is that this erudition can rather dauntingly raise the bar for new entrants.
OTOH, the guy I mentioned on the talkback, who wanted the police state: did he really want police resources tied up with arresting and processing anyone who looked at them sideways? Did he really want to live in a country where that happened? Of course not. He just hadn't bothered to think about it, and there was no one to tell him to have another go at his stupid idea.
But let's remember, that's Leighton Smith's slot. His listeners are the most biddable morons of all. They really are the first people who'd line up for a fascist state. I know Kerre tends to be fairly shocked by them when she has to step in to that slot.
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