Word: downloaders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...future, when the panacea for venereal disease is finally discovered, a new form of highly contagious and often unexpungeable affliction will excite the public’s fear: the download. Symptoms: icon blemishes, commonly found in the bottom right corner of the screen; a geologically protracted start-up delay; and the PC deathknell, “Fatal error has occurred. You will lose any unsaved information because you just had to download that pirated Backgammon software. Nice going, chump...
...untrammeled roominess; when windows and menus sprang from her toolbars like a great splash in a clear lake; when your desktop sat empty and content, like a mid-day showing of Serendipity. What is it, then, that drives us to engage in unprotected interface with these ill-intentioned download sites? Certainly this irresponsible behavior is not a means to some kind of useful end; after you initially polluted your computer with Free Cell or College Jeopardy, how many times did you actually play it? Methinks not enough to justify the lightning bolt that blazes in your icon tray every time...
What’s most pernicious about these “free” downloads is their tacit promises of protection. Take the RealPlayer shareware, a media streaming program so offensively retrograde that a million monkeys with a million keyboards with a million 1’s and 0’s could never devise it. During one illicit encounter with the RealPlayer.exe file brought on by a misbegotten attempt to watch “Bootylicious: In concert,” I responsibly unchecked all the boxes that would have signed me up for daily newsletters, news updates, update letters...
...industries brought about by the Internet and digitization. I’ve always held that the worst-case scenario would be one in which competing record labels, unable to come to agreement on a Napster-like service for digital subscriptions to music, would fracture into a handful of incompatible download sites. Yet I could never have imagined just how bad the situation would...
...their users from sharing content. Now, everything is changing. As former Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig has written in Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, on the Internet, owners of intellectual property can enforce their one-user, one-payment dreams. They can architect the format and means of downloading such that you simply cannot e-mail or Instant Message an MP3 file to a friend. Even worse, they can extend the per-use model of the public performance companies to end users, forcing individuals to pay miniscule amounts—say 10 cents—every time they want...