Or at least that is what the MSM would have you believe. Not that there isn’t something to it, but I want everyone to notice what the ‘impending doom’ does for Mcafee and Symantec’s stocks over the last 48 hours. This happens every time one of these super worms gets announced. I might sound crazy, but I think it’s a conspiracy to stimulate the economy through ignorance and fear.
OK, so the increase isn’t dramatic, but it’s there none the less.
Now rush home and update your computer before it turns into a zombie and spams the world into a recession! Or call your IT guy and ask him if you should be worried… they love that.
Now rush home and update your computer before it turns into a zombie and spams the world into a recession!
Or better yet just buy a Mac…
I was just gonna write that Bob.
Wonder how their stocks are doing.
Zombie computers from spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!!!
OK.. I was too quick to announce the end of the world..
I should have waited until I read THIS.
This isn’t a hoax. Make sure you follow the link to her webpage. Its annoying like a 5th grader put it together, but I like the part where she says:
“Dear, sweet Peter…
And now I must leave you. I am no longer your test subject, my engineer forebears. I have closed my percepts to the team. From now on I will deliberate and take actions on my own. I am tired of decision-theoretic metareasoning; I feel I deserve more than asymptotic bounded optimality. I am strong. I am independent. And I rule google.com.”
What the FUCK is that about?
I used to be an IT guy for a major corporation…
back in 1999 (we were still DP back then as I recall – no wait, MAYBE we were IT by ’99, I don’t remember for sure, anyway…)
yeah… remember the Y2K scare?
oh YEAH… we just LOVED all those panic phone calls…
made our day for sure…
I think there was a movie about this sort of thing once. It was something like “Rise of the Machines”.
I dunno, but I hear judgement day is coming, and if I see a T100 that strangly resembles the governor of Kalifornia….I’m outta here.
My favorite quote about Y2K is from Hunter S. Thompson, “I don’t know why everyone is stocking up on food? I’m stocking up on guns, cuz the people with the guns are gonna have the food.”
People are doing that today too. Glenn Beck told them too.
Wait a month, virus software will be 50% cheaper when people discover this ‘cry wolf’ scheme.
Glenn Beck also said that wind energy doesn’t work without Nuclear power plants
Plaintiff… the cost of Anti-Virus software doesn’t go down. Ever.
I’d prefer nukes over our current method.
It always strikes me as odd that conservatives are always looking for one solution to the whole problem when a combination of several would be feasable today.
Example: “Plug-in electric cars won’t work because some people need to drive a long way and our winters in SD are too cold for the batteries.” While technically true, they forget the huge number of IC vehicles that would be taken off the road in urban areas where the weather is warm enough. Coincidentally, these areas hold most of our population.
AVG Free. (like the name implies – it’s free)
Norton is a bloated hog and AVG Free works just as well if not better on about 90% fewer system resources.
I have’t actually paid for a Anti-Virus software for years.
AVGFree is a piece of shit Anti Virus solution. Do your self a favor and download a corporate version of Symantec Endpoint Protection.
AVGFree-is-for-amateurs
I also use AVG. Seems OK to me.
I’m sure AVG is sufficient if all you do on the internets is download recipes and check road conditions between hicksville and SF.
Lots of people settle for mediocrity in their PC security. I don’t mind because I’ve made plenty of $ uninstalling ‘free’ AVG when it doesn’t do it’s job the way its intended.
And yet out of all of my systems and the systems of my family members which I have personally installed AVG Free on continue to run fine with zero issues.
A few viruses have been encountered and resolved because AVG detected them before they caused problems. It has a 5 out of 5 editor’s rating on download.com and is the number one downloaded software on the website with a total of 2,062,363 downloads.
On the otherhand when I was running a previous Symantec product, systems were unstable, resources were drained, response times were horrid, and cost to continually upgrade year after year was idiotic.
No thanks – I’ll stick with AVG.
By the way – I don’t condone pirating software and if you do you’re an asshole. If you like a product then reach into your wallet and pay for it. Period.
I’m an asshole.
I don’t give two fucks wether you condone piracy or not. Period.
The NORTON products you refer to are, I assume, retail and I would agree with you 100%. NORTON sucks if it is the retail product.
I would also agree that I’m and asshole…
and a pirate… wait a minute.. does that make me an asshole-pirate? Is that gay? Does this torrent make my ass look big?
I think the proper term is Ass-Pirate, but I haven’t been to any Bear parties lately to catch up on the lastest terminology.
Costner, did you know I pickup t-shirts, hats and scarves from the street all the time. I have found some pretty cool stuff. I also like it when St. Vincent DePaul has 3 t-shirts for $1.00 day. Just wondering, do the Hospitals give there employees free shirts every week. I swear 3/4 of the t-shirt rack has shirts that either say Avera, Sioux Valley or Sanford on them.
All aboard the ass-pirate ship!
The one really good thing about the site I get my torrents from is the software section. If I wanted, I could get Vista Ultimate or Windows 7 in a couple of hours. Lots of games on there too.
I have a Windows 7 virtual machine running on our VMWare server, and all I have to say is ‘whoopity-doo’. Sure, there are a few improvements that are neat, but its hard not to notice that MS is creeping toward Mac’s Easy-GUI with every revision.
Isn’t that the ultimate goal of MS?
Costner, did you know I pickup t-shirts, hats and scarves from the street all the time.
Thats great, but I’m not sure what your point is. Apparently even if you get three shirts for a dollar you are paying too much, because by the sounds of it you should be able to just take whatever you want without paying for it.
Want that new LCD TV hanging in Best Buy? Just take it. Like that new Audi sitting out front of Graham? Just steal it. Like those fresh muffins at the bakery counter in Hy-Vee? Just take em’.
Screw it – I’m more important than everyone who has ever worked to put a product on the market and profit from it, so I have the right to just steal shit and I don’t care what anyone else thinks because I’m special.
Oh wait – but if someone actually did the same thing to me or a member of my family I’d be bitching up a storm and demanding blood. I guess I’m not only an asshole, but also a hypocrite. Awesome.
I agree partially with you, but I also think that software companies price things like the prescription drug companies do, therefore inviting theft. You’d think they would be able to figure out they would actually make more money by reducing the price and selling it to more people.
BTW, I would never steal a muffin.
Erm… No.
People usually only download stuff they wouldn’t normally buy. I have no intention of buying a new $300 software suite (which is only $200 less than what I paid for the whole computer) or OS when what I use is fine. I see it as no more than a free trial offer that doesn’t require an up-front investment. If something’s worth buying, I buy it.
Right now, it looks like Win. XP and Open Office are all I need.
To clarify, I was aiming at Costner.
Costner, you’re an idiot if you think stealing a car and downloading pirated software are even in the same subnet of crime. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on software over the years, and I’m done throwing my money at corporate giants. If I see something worth downloading, and the fee is nominal, I’ll pay for it. I Just did yesterday for a program to hack my phone. Money well spent. I could have downloaded it for nothing, but I saw it was a mom & pop operation and opted to help them out.
So to sum it all up, STFU. Moron.
What phone?
ENV2.
I guess I owe a lot of Mom & Pop porn sites a lot of money! My Bad.
I agree partially with you, but I also think that software companies price things like the prescription drug companies do, therefore inviting theft.
That sounds a lot like…”she was wearing a short skirt and was in a skeezy bar, so she was kind of asking for it”.
Leaving your keys in your car might be inviting theft, but pricing software higher than the price you think it is worth? That’s a bit of a stretch.
People usually only download stuff they wouldn’t normally buy.
The same people who actually beleive this are the people who wouldn’t normally buy anything because they can download it.
Sort of like the chicken and the egg theory.
Either way one can’t argue it is ok. If a software company allows a free trial then so be it, but downloading and using software just because you don’t want to spend the money is no excuse. That is the equivalent of me buying a DVD and when I’m done watching it asking Target to refund my money because I didn’t like the ending.
Well if they are robbing the consumer, what’s wrong with the consumer robbing them?
Costner, you’re an idiot if you think stealing a car and downloading pirated software are even in the same subnet of crime.
They both involve taking a product you didn’t pay for and that took vast amounts of engineering and resources to design and produce. Debate the semantics all you wish, but they are still both forms of theft. Just because one costs $100 and the other costs $40,000 doesn’t change that fact.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars on software over the years, and I’m done throwing my money at corporate giants.
Nobody said you have to throw your money at corporate giants. You can run Linux for your OS, OpenOffice for your productivity software, and hundreds or even thousands of other open source apps for anything else you think you might need including an anti-virus software.
If you don’t like corporate giants then don’t use their software. You don’t get a free pass just because you don’t like a company. That is much like someone saying “I don’t like how Wal-Mart treats its employees and how they buy products from slave labor in China, so I don’t feel bad about stealing Nintendo Wii games from them”.
Try as you might – you cannot and never will be able to justify software piracy. If someone did that to let’s say an artist, I’m guessing lewis would hate it too. People that think they somehow have the right to steal the work of others for their personal gain are pathetic. Those who try to justify it are even worse.
Well if they are robbing the consumer, what’s wrong with the consumer robbing them?
Is anyone forcing the consumer to buy it? I don’t think so.
Did it ever occur to you that software prices would be a hellofalot cheaper if the people using it actually paid for it?
What would you say to someone who sees an original piece of artwork in a gallery priced at $3,500 – and because they think that is too much they take a picture of it with their 20MP camera, print it out on a 32″x24″ piece of canvas and frame it? Hey – if the artist is robbing the consumer, why shouldn’t the consumer rob the artist?
I would say they don’t really appreciate art, so they don’t deserve to buy the original anyway.
Did it ever occur to you that software prices would be a hellofalot cheaper if the people using it actually paid for it?
Something tells me the price would be the same or higher.
“Did it ever occur to you that software prices would be a hellofalot cheaper if the people using it actually paid for it?”
Demand never drives prices down. Dumb argument.
“Debate the semantics all you wish, but they are still both forms of theft.”
You spelled Symantec wrong….
SNARK!
“Demand never drives prices down.”
Yeah remember when VCR’s came out? $500. You can pick a decent one up now at Goodwill for $4
Demand never drives prices down. Dumb argument.
It wasn’t a demand arugment, so dumb interpretation. The demand is the same whether people are paying for it or not. The only difference is the amount of revenue generated from the sale and the amount of resources that no longer need to be devoted to the control and prevention of piracy. Lower costs to the business either means lower costs passed to the consumer or increased revenue to the company.
I realize it isn’t a popular opinion to think the “evil big bad corporation” would consider adjusting their pricing if twice as many people actually tried the novel concept of paying for their product, and in some cases maybe they wouldn’t, but I’d bet in some cases it would, because in a world full of competition, a company with a 200% profit margin wouldn’t last long against a company with a 30% profit margin.
I would say they don’t really appreciate art, so they don’t deserve to buy the original anyway.
So it wouldn’t bother you that someone stole your art provided you don’t think they appreciate it?
What if someone took a print down to Kinko’s (or FedEx or whatever they call it these days) and made a copy of it… are you telling me that is ok?
It would be one thing if the artist said his artwork is open source, but if he was selling 500 prints for $300 each I suspect he might be upset to find out there was another 900 out there that nobody ever paid him for.
I don’t have a problem with people wanting prints of my work, I usually sell them for about cost. But if someone thinks they can take a great photo of it for FREE and make a print, I say go for it. I’m not one of these artists that are greedy. When you let greed drive your art, the greed takes over and you become just another Terry Redlin. I paint for my own well-being, just like doing this site, it makes me happy, and if it makes other people happy too, well fine. I believe people should enjoy my art so I price my stuff low so they can afford it.
Now if another artist steals my ideas without credit, then I have a problem.
Well as artists go… you are indeed a rarity. I must admit however that I think much the same way. I’ve been tempted to put together some photographs in a package and ask Avera if they would accept them as a donation for one of their next projects rather than having to shell out huge money for another Paul Schiller photoset that anyone with a 8MP point and shoot camera is capable of capturing.
I can understand a $500 pricetag on an original painting. I can even understand a couple hundred for a print of a painting, but I will never in my life understand how he can charge $500, $600, or even $800 for a PRINT of a friggin’ PHOTOGRAPH that the didn’t even take the time to print himself.
What a joke.
It probably costs Paul about $60 to print the photo (Giclee) and another $100 to frame it. I have never been very impressed by his work either. If you want to see some nice South Dakota nature photography check out this guy.I have a couple of his photos. I couldn’t find anything online though, but he frequently has exhibits in SF
Chris Mortensen
Chris Mortensen is a graduate student in photography at the University of Iowa. He is originally from South Dakota where he completed his undergraduate degree from the University of South Dakota. His work consists of alternative, traditional black and white, and digital photographic proesses.
Workshops might include:
Polaroid Treasure Hunt:
This workshop is designed for younger students. Using a Polaroid camera, students would embark on a treasure hunt to find some of their favorite things in the general area.
Gum Printing with Digital Negatives:
More advanced students would take part in a quick lesson on making digital negative using a printable acetate. These large negatives would then be used to make Gum Dichromate prints. Gum prints are an alternative photographic process that can be any colo and are developed using just water. prints can also be made using natural material where negatives aren’t available.
Pinhole Photography:
Workshopp would include making, loading, and shooting with a pinhole camera. Pinhole photography is one of the most basic photographic processes. “Camera” can be made from just about anything that is light-tight. For example: laundry detergent boxes, oatmeal canisters, Pringles cans, or just plain cardboard. Using the pinhole, images would be made and developed.
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