I used to work at a TV station and we never did anything to alter the sound of any of the programming or commercials.

This is our complaint exactly. We would very much like you to alter the sound of the programming or commercials to reduce the volume. If you did this, we might actually let the commercials play without muting the system.

in my opinion the broadcasters are responsible here, precisely because they are blindly (err, deafly) just running the tapes at the standard levels. sure, solving this problem flawlessly would require a lot of volume-monitoring technology and setting a standard average volume level and such. but they've failed to even attempt solve this glaring, decades-old problem with something as crude as "reduce all advertisements in volume by 6 dB for six weeks and see how it goes" or "return advertisements for remastering when they exceed a certain RMS volume". i've given up on the broadcasters because the ads are now so much louder than the programming that i fear they will damage my equipment -- i can't risk even seeing one ad because i can't afford to replace my speakers just because a bunch of antisocial assholes want to sell some more garbage to idiots.

i think i can entertain you both by sending you here: http://youtube.com/melodysheep

well, that's certainly more recent than i thought. but it's preeeettty pathetic that the 20 years since then have seen not a single work enter the public domain.

That reminds me -- when's the last time a copyrighted work passed into the public domain? I'm 28 years old; has that ever happened in my lifetime? A brief discussion with some of my lawyer friends a couple of weeks ago concluded that it probably hadn't.

well, my advice to them would be to stop selling it, of course, but it seems that the marketing scum have been running too much at microsoft, and the people who build their actual products running too little ... and it finally caught up with them. it's difficult to claim with a straight face that windows XP is a supportable configuration except on legacy boxes. microsoft should run, not walk, away from that train wreck.

apple keeps ramping up the pointless restrictions and i keep looking for another smartphone with minimal moving parts -- no slidey shit, no foldy shit, and definitely no no no physical keypad. i won't buy a pre. it's got all the planned-failure mechanical parts that i bought an iphone to avoid, even if the OS is the most promising thing i've seen in a year.

the best candidate right now looks like the HTC magic/G2/mytouch/whatchamacallit, although it's still got that nasty trackball, and that disastrous headphone adapter thing, both of which will hopefully be gone by the android phone that's shipping next time i'm shopping for a phone.

i basically want something with a good browser, nice fonts (so, never a blackberry), passable email, a passable library of apps, and as few moving parts as possible. right now the iphone is the thing that comes closest to meeting those criteria, even though apple's restrictive behavior has been juvenile and borderline illegal.

honestly, you don't have a clue anywhere in the same county as what you're talking about. you're embarrassing yourself. you don't even seem to be aware of the penalties for concerted action. this is open and shut, and you're hung up on being a fan of a brand. get over it.

this is clearly a play to prevent any competitor from offering the service-unifying technology Google is offering. the suspicious "duplication of functionality" clause on the EULA is practically an admission of this. taken together with the huge number of "approved" apps that do duplicate functionality shipped with the base OS, it's clear that Apple wants to pick and choose who is allowed to duplicate what functionality -- specifically, they will permit apps that violate this EULA clause only as long as they don't interfere with Apple/AT&T's ability to restrain trade. sure, AT&T Unified Messaging is not exactly the same thing as Google Voice, but you'd have to try pretty hard to convince yourself that this isn't a brazen attempt to protect that service against competition. these actions are federal felonies under the sherman act.

apple are very obviously engaging in illegal anticompetitive behavior here. i need them to relent on this and permit google to distribute this application, or i am going to flee immediately into the waiting arms of t-mobile the moment my contract is up. apple's management of the app store can only be described, honestly, as mentally ill.

the basic interface of the GUI web browser has not changed appreciably since NCSA Mosaic, for crying out loud. you have a URL bar with some buttons on the left and maybe some buttons on the right, and a display pane for the page itself below that. i can't even begin to guess what you think is so different between MSIE 6 and MSIE 7/8 and Firefox and Chrome and Safari. they're all the same basic interface. and in the details where MSIE differs, it's easily the worst of the bunch.