There's still time!

I'm fighting them, I've donated money to the EFF and advertised on all of my sites promoting them.

But I'm assuming that sooner of later the asshats will win. Ergo, I'm stocking up hard on Russian-bought music and movies. If it all came to a halt tomorrow, I have two very nice collections. I'll never go see another film in a theater, though, or rent a DVD. And the last music nickel the RIAA made off of me was circa 2005.

A Microsoft engineer says that Google's Android is to blame for spam.

That carries as much weight for me as Steve BLAMMER stating that he's going to &^%&$!! bury Google.

Noise with no real content. Next.

I worked at a place that manufactured snack cakes with a cute little girl as their trademark. I worked there 13 years as an hourly employee, then got promoted into their IT department.

It was great for five years or so, then the third generation of this family-owned started flexing their muscles, invoking a new unsaid policy that unless you could prove otherwise, the assumption was that you were a lazy goof-off who should be demoted or fired.

Thus was born the semiannual evaluations from hell process.

I would typically spend 20-40 hours applying loads of manure to my evaluation in an effort to be spared the axe. So would every other salaried employee in the billion-dollar company. This was time that could have been used in improving our production numbers via technology (I was an intranet developer). Instead, we had to slather our way though an incomprehensible eval process that forced us to make predictions based on absolutely no data. Basically, we had to try to read the minds of a couple of dysfunctional family members who now found themselves in officer positions.

They probably couldn't get warehouse worker jobs for Wal-Mart, thank God (for them) that they were members of the family.

I've been gone about a year now, others are going over the wall as other jobs make themselves available. The company has managed to grow in a bad economy, but when things get better, I predict a Microsoft-like turn for the worse, as folks who can afford Hostess or Dolly Madison snack cakes leave in droves.

I'm not saying that the psychotic salaried evals are causing the downfall of the company, but they certainly are a barometer of how things in general are going. Just like Microsoft.

Maybe you should apply for a job as a motherfucking editor? You might want to tone it back a bit on your motherfucking interview, though. Fuck.

They probably also had "data" proving that the public wanted the Ribbon abortion in Office. God, if I *pay* for it, I should get what I WANT.

My people? Who the **** are YOU?

...the same press that roasted Bush over Katrina won't have a thing to say about Obama now?

Actually, SP2 was a pretty danged intuitive package. I'm a PHP developer, and am very unimpressed with most asp.net web things I see, but SP2 blew me away. Its main virtue was ease of use. Along comes SP3, and MS finally realized that they had created a usable interface and needed to fix it immediately. All versions of SP after 2 have gotten heavier, kludgier, slower, and more confusing to use. In short, they show the same innovative thinking that the Office ribbon does. If you like the ribbon, you're probably impressed with what SP has become and will scold me.

"Yammer"

"CNET's policy is that Download.com is not in any position to determine whether a piece of software is legal or not, or whether it can be used for illegal activity. As I understand it, plenty of the software at issue has significant non-infringing uses. As for removing illegal software, CNET has a record of doing that. When the RIAA made a request to pull LimeWire, the once popular file-sharing software, CNET managers declined until a federal district judge ruled in 2010 that the service indeed violated copyright law. "

Good for you, CNET. Please, also add that they may kiss your collective ass for asking.

Executing repeat child molesters????? Why, the liberals would EXECUTE you for coming up with such a notion!

The funny thing is that for years the RIAA was that cool organization that presented artists with those gold and platinum records. I bought quite a few records back in those days, but felt a twinge of guilt when I would record them onto cassettes to spare wear and tear on the record. The guilt increased a bit if I recorded friends' albums, although I tended to eventually spring for my own copy of the good ones, just so i could get a more pristine cassette recording.

That was before they destroyed Napster, and proceeded on to suing folks of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages for, basically, copying albums to cassettes.

Now, I buy my music from Russian websites. The RIAA gets zilch. I get mp3's which are of a high enough quality that I highly prize them, and keep them redundantly backed up.

I also share with friends, via sneakernet.

If an artist blows me away (e.g. Bonnie Bramlett, of Delaney and Bonnie), and are clearly not already fabulously wealthy (e.g. Mick Jagger), I actually will track down their agent and send them a modest check from my S corporation. It's a tax-deductable contribution to someone who has earned their pay.

Otherwise, i might visit an artist's website and score some bling.

You see, money passes from my hands to a music seller. It passes from my hands directly to the artist. Or it passes from my hands to an enterprise connected with the artist that pays nothing to the RIAA.

You can say downloaders are destroying the traditional business model for music, RIAA, but the reals criminal here is staring back at you in the mirror. You have managed to anger me (and how many millions of others) enough to work out a fair and square way to purchase guilt-free music.

Tell him to get his resume at every temp agency he can find. Most IT jobs, at least in my area, are work-to-hire via the temps. In fact, my current job (intranet sysadmin) was obtained by accepting a work-for-hire assignment as a network admin!

I was set up by a lokel yokel business with my first box back in 1993. His patient training got me past the point of playing games and into actually developing a new career in IT. I'll always be grateful to him for that.