Posts by Pascal Monett 16763 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Please explain how the conditions of use have anything to do with the rate at which the service is charged.
Real-life analogy : you rent an appartment. After one year and one month, your landlord tells you that, in order to continue living in that appartment, you have to give him your Facebook pwd and the names of all your friends. if you don't, he'll throw you out.
Apparently, you think that that is normal. Congratulations, you are part of the problem.
To which you may "choose" to accept and continue using the service, or refuse and be banned from using it any more.
That is not a choice.
I think it is high time for this EULA/T&C issue to be brought to court. The users who signed up for the service in the beginning did not sign up for this, and there is no right to foist it on them now under pain of banishment. Feels very much like a bait-and-switch argument to me. Come on in, we'll allow you to listen to music, in exchange for money. Oh, now that you're in, you have to agree to selling your soul and that of all your acquaintances, else you can't listen to anything anymore, but we keep your money until you cancel explicitely.
Not acceptable.
It is time to oblige companies to respect the contractual obligations of Commercial Law. If payment is required for a service, then it is a contract. If it is a contract, then one side cannot change the conditions without consent from the other side.
That means that Spotify should not be allowed to change its T&Cs without user consent. No banishment should be possible if users refuse, Spotify should continue to provide the service that users initially signed up for.
I don't think that married men on the site are going to step forward at all.
What I'm saying is that the article makes as if that is all there is, and that is not the case. There are single people seeking to hook up, and it is likely that there are enough to seriously damage ALM in court. Is that a straightforward enough statement of fact for you ?
"anyone suing for breach of privacy could expose themselves to greater risk of divorce proceedings"
Ok, ok, the clear editorial stance on this issue is that ALM customers are dirty, dirty cheaters.
And there are cheaters, obviously. I would not be surprised if the cheaters were the majority, or even the vast majority.
But there are single people in there as well, and you can't treat them the same, now can you ? Given the amount of customers, there is probably a significant amount of single people who should have no qualms whatsoever in going to court. That is a real risk for ALM, but one that this article doesn't even consider.
It's nice to have a clear target to mow down, obviously, and I myself have stated that I couldn't care less if ALM folds or not, but it might be time to set the "cheater, cheater" megaphone down and bring a bit more objectivity to this serious issue, don't you think ?
Let me see, an interface nobody wants and must be replaced with 3rd-party tools (on PC, that is), an OS that rapes your data like never before, a looming threat of subscription to be allowed to use your own data, the promise of unwanted changes automatically downloaded and installed, and now information on WU patches being withheld on a whim.
Really, Microsoft, if this were a Hollywood film, now would be the perfect time for SatNad to stand in front of a mirror and the camera to show no reflection.
Bingo.
That is exactly what this case needed, a clearly unimpeachable example of someone who did no wrong and who was wronged.
Obviously, there were (are ?) cheaters on ALM, but nobody can blame a widower for trying to hook up. He is the ideal poster-figure for a lawsuit.
In other matters, women now make up 14% of ALM members ? Curious, yesterday it was 5%.
Funny, that.
There certainly is a lack of thinking these days. Whenever I search for information on how to get rid of a problem, generally in Windows, 9 times out of 10 the results returned link to some stupid YouTube video. It will last 3 to 10 minutes, 90% of which will have zero bearing on the subject ("I was just, ya kno, thinking about <insert pointless thing> and, like, I realized that there are still people who don't know how . . .) or just be filler (um, uh, hmmm, ya kno ?). So I have to get through all that gunk to get to the 12 seconds that actually explain what I need to know (if they are there).
Instead of just making a web page, taking a minute to grab a few screenies and putting another minute of effort into TYPING A CLEAR EXPLANATION.
But hey, it's a lot faster to just grab the micro and start blabbering without a clue as to how you're going to explain or thinking it through first, right ? Well guess what ? It shows. And you're wasting my time.
So I avoid YouTube links like the plague, unless there really isn't anything else.
Yup, you're getting old.
And so am I.
Old enough to remember my French professor telling us how wonderful it was to have a "living language".
He just neglected to say that it was all the morons who don't know how to speak their own language that actually impose changes that end up becoming fact.
That's why we now see all those things that "effect" change (gah!), or comments like "he would of" (beurk!). Not to mention the eternal confusion between they're and their.
We can now add another one to the ever-growing list. The beauty of a living language appears to be the infected pimple on a teen's face.
Now get off my lawn !
Of course somebody could.
And as soon as that somebody publishes the findings, they will be rubbished by the interested parties. A deluge of counter-facts will drown the results. Ad hominem attacks will ensue, and you will learn that one of the participants in the study once ran a red light, thus casting doubt on his professionalism and, by association, the validity of the study's results.
If all that is not enough, kiddie porn will be found.
There may well already be a "proper" study. You don't know about it because of the above.
It's not called Big Oil for nothing.
How can we be sure of that ?
Do we have an accurate map of the underground ? Do we have 100% certainty that there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the aquifers and the oil we want to mine that could be opened by high-pressure gas ?
I've read here (and elsewhere) that the aquifers are "above" the oil shales. Yet fracking consists of pushing high-pressure gas until the shales break open. Given that pressure can simply not go down (because more pressure), it follows that it goes back up. Towards the aquifers, apparently.
I'm not a geologist, obviously.
Not knocking the technique, just genuinely curious.
I think you may have hit the nail on the head.
Samsung absolutely needs this case to last until the USPTO renders a final decision on that patent. With an invalidate patent, Apple will have had the rug pulled out from under its feet and the next trial will likely be very much more favorable to Samsung.
Apple is likely going to do everything it can to make the patent stick (if it can).
Well duh, that was part of the business play since Day 1.
I don't like this kind of web site at all. That it got hacked and exposed doesn't bother me one bit, and if it folds as a result, it is no loss.
I will not, however, say that ALM is getting what it deserves. There will be personal tragedies following this and that is sad.
But ALM can bite the bullet any time.
Bandwidth.
Living in France, I have tried to use the Internet TV option of my ISP for two years. Last year, I gave up and reinstalled satellite.
The reason is that I live in a rural area, not a city, and my bandwidth is 10Mbps. Not shabby for surfing or online gaming, but ghastly when it comes to watching a 25fps TV show. The instances where I could watch an entire evening of TV without pixellation, tearing or the picture freezing while the sound continued for a few seconds can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
That is why I have steadfastly refused to subscribe to Canal+, despite their yearly efforts to incite me to. I'm not going to pay even more to watch the same pixellation, tearing and frame-freezing issues.
I suppose that, with at least double the bandwidth, the issues would mostly go away, and with a proper fiber link they should likely disappear entirely. However, the nearest fiber link is in the city 30km away, and there is no timetable on when it might happen to reach my door.
So, until that glorious day, I am staying on satellite.
My point ? I have a 10Mbps connection in a rural area. That is actually rather fast around here. I personally know quite a few people who are happy to have a 2Mbps connection. Of course, I know some who are on fiber (the bastards). In majority, though, rural areas simply don't have the bandwidth to enable Netflix.
So yeah, I'm not surprised. I shrug along with my compatriots.
Now, about those frog legs . . .
I beg to differ.
Record companies make profits because they nail the artist to the wall and strip him of all rights to his creations for the duration of the contract. Then they proceed to milk him for all he's worth while it lasts, leaving him with pennies. Artists accept that because they are young, ambitious and ignorant of the consequences - and it seems to be their only chance at getting known.
Only when an artist is sufficiently well-known to go solo does he start making money, because by that point he is capable of setting up his own recording company and giving the others the finger.
That's why Madonna, Prince and every other music superstar have their own recording companies. If they still worked under their original contracts, they wouldn't be the multi-millionaires they are now.
Parents have already made their "informed choice" by either educating their children or not.
If they count on ratings to decide, then they have not educated their children.
Educate your child properly and he will be able to decide for himself if what he is watching is worth it. But that requires a lot more effort than letting a bunch of people you don't know and have no control over decide what is good "for the children".
In the end, this "effort" is moot anyway. Until you have a foolproof method for ensuring the age of the person using the browser, that is.
If they're also smoking the stuff, they could well be dumb enough to think they can get it back.
After all, stupider things have happened.
Ferarri, Maserati, etc...
In other words, people with money, meaning people with influence and, perhaps more importantly, people who know just how influential they are.
I wonder how quickly said manufacturers will pony up that additional $1 to solve this problem. For a business based on image, this is one heck of a smear.
Well I hope it'll still be up by the time I get to a PC where I can download it.
I'm interested in finally getting a look see at a part of what I've been fighting against for the past twenty years (on and off, every time someone I know brought me a PC to clean).
If I can learn what they do, maybe I can better make people around me understand that THEY SHOULD STOP CLICKING ON BLOODY EVERYTHING.
Patience.
Ours is a waiting game now.
Vista failed miserably, and look how fast MS followed with Windows 7, which is what Vista should have been.
Let's see how this 1 0 malarky floats. I'm betting that The Cloud is not going to do it any good. If 1 0 fails as miserably as it should, then maybe we'll get a proper version 11 in two years time that will actually be worth it.
But really, the only proper attitude from a security standpoint is to not use social networks when you have a job in National Security.
And that is not something that today's young generation can accept, because contact with home is a vital element for morale.
That means that it is likely quite easy to track a given person's activities if that person is married, because there is no way that he won't be telling his wife when he's coming back home.
I approve of the warning, but realistically it is next to useless. People are people, not security drones. They need to have a barbeque every now and then, and social media is now a part of our lives.
Personally, I love the line where they state that the candidate must have "Integrity".
That is the one criteria ICANN has never, ever demonstrated.
This requirement list is like all other ICANN PR stuff : a puff piece, all style over substance.
I do agree that ICANN desperately needs someone with integrity, I just very much doubt that such a person will survive in that position for more than a week.
Yeah, somehow.
Maybe it had something to do with the endless stream of lawsuits coupled with Intel's withdrawal of support demonstrating that RAMBUS was just a load of hot air ?
Or maybe it was just bad luck. Yeah, that's what he must be thinking.
Well, looks like we're going to see what their IP is really worth.
I'm getting the popcorn.
You never get an OS update on your phone because, although Google makes Android updates on a regular basis (and I suppose Apple does as well), your provider is not interested in pushing it out because that would put in peril all the other crap that they put in.
As for MS, we're complaining because it's not just patches to the system. It's going to be entire new functions, UI modifications, the works. And they've already fucked it up barely a week after launch.
Not a good sign for the future.
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