If you want to be the next Metallica, or Madonna, or Brittany Spears, or one of the other stars who are known more for their publicity than for their music, then yeah the RIAA is you best bet. Of course if what you want is to make a living from making music and aren't really concerned with ever being a celebrity then you really should stay away from the RIAA.
That the problem is that people are so hard-wired to find social ineptitude a problem.
Social ineptitude is a problem. You are confusing being an introvert (preferring not to spend time with other people) with being socially inept. Not all introverts are socially inept. Sometimes people are labeled "nerds" because they choose to be socially uninvolved. However, the term originally (and in this context) referred to people who wish to be socially involved but are outcasts because they do things that are socially viewed opposite of the way they intend.
Actually, it doesn't happen all that often in the U.S. either. It's just that when there are 300 million people, something that only happens to 1% of the people still happens to 3 million people. I'm not saying that 1% of the population of the U.S. gets bullied because I have no idea what percentage of the population gets bullied, I'm just using that to give you an idea of the scale difference between Portugal and the U.S.. (If you are not familiar with the total population of Portugal it is about 10 million, or about 3.5% of the U.S. population).
What an interesting comment on the state of Facebook. I've always suspected Facebook represented some type of derangement, now you are suggesting that what it needs is new derangement.
NO, he could very well have known that he owned a big chunk of Facebook. His claim would be that he became aware of Zuckerberg's intention to not honor that ownership claim when he saw "recent press accounts of potential selling of Facebook or portions thereof". Whether or not any of this will hold up in court is another story. However, on the face of it, he has a claim.
Overall, the most important factor in determining whether a child learns is that child's parents. There are various techniques that parents can use to make sure that theirchild learns, but they all boil down to one thing: the parent must hold the child accountable for learning. Occasionally, someone other than a parent will enter a child's life and motivate that child to learn, but that is extremely rare and not something that can be systematically be applied to large groups. If you want to improve the education of children in this country, become a Big Brother/Big Sister and form a relationship with a child and work at motivating that child to learn. No, you won't change the overall numbers for the country, but the only way to do that is one child at a time.
Chavez is promoting a particular approach to government and several Latin American countries have leaders who have aligned themselves with his approach (the movement that the poster I replied to was referring to). I was pointing out that the countries where positive things are happening (economically as well as otherwise) are led by people who are taking a completely different approach to Chavez' "people-based" system (which I do not believe is actually people-based at all).
How many times has this already been brought up in the thread?
Before I posted, the total number of posts about NASA's mission to Muslim countries was zero. There are more now, but at that time there were zero.
If we are going to discuss NASA it is important to talk about what the Administration views as its primary mission (propaganda). Yes, the White House Press Secretary has said that Charles Bolden must have "misunderstood" Obama, of course this comes after the White House supported his statement over the weekend.
My point was that if the Administration can't at least make it look like they are keeping NASA focused on engineering rather than politics, how can you expect the Senate to keep politics out of the mix.
Pinochet has been out of power in Chile for longer than he was in power. The reason I used Chile is because it is a clear case of a country that is rejecting Hugo Chavez and is doing very well economically as a result. Columbia is another country that is rejecting the Hugo Chavez model and has had an improved economy as a result. Venezuela on the other hand has suffered economically as a result of Hugo Chavez. How does an oil exporting country have energy shortages?
It has nothing to do with a "pro-muslim conspiracy". It has to do with the head of NASA saying the primary focus of NASA is something completely unrelated to space.
I'm sorry, he was talking about the mission of NASA. I thought the mission of NASA should be something to do with space exploration. What does reaching out to muslim nations have to do whith NASA? That sounds more like a State Department job to me. The other things he listed in that particular quote as part of the mission of NASA didn't sound like they belonged on NASA's agenda either.
Well, not all the world... not even all the western world sees that as a bad thing. Many countries actually see it as a way to bring some stability to a zone that is completely unstable due to the presence of a militar super-power (for the region), Israel, and that by giving nuclear capability to other country in the region that would level out the status quo in the zone and prevent most of the violence that we have seen committed by Israel against their neighbours in the last decades.
You phrased that incorrectly. It would bring stability to the region because anybody in the region who does not bow to Iranian demands on following their version of Islam risks getting nuked. Since the Iranian leaders have also expressed a desire to witness the muslim version of Armegeddon it means there are significant chances that when they get nuclear weapons they will launch a nuclear strike against Israel, that should do wonders for the stability of the Middle East.
I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's created a model for a people-based system. He's a divisive character, especially outside of Venezuela. But there's no denying that he's made life a lot better for a lot of the people of his country, while improving the economic conditions overall.
Venezuela is producing a lot less oil than it did when Hugo Chavez took over. One could claim that this because the oil fields are being exhausted. However, the evidence suggests that this is because exploration of new oil fields has essentially come to a stand still and existing equipment is not being properly maintained. All of the news I have seen suggest that there are increasing shortages of various basic goods (Chavez has set price ceilings below the cost of obtaining the goods).
Therefore, based on what I have seen, I will deny that he has made life significantly better for anyone other than his cronies and I believe that rather than improving economic conditions overall, he has instead made conditions worse. As to South American countries that are succeeding most of them have been moving away from the Left. Chile, for example, which earlier this year was moved from being considered a "developing country" to being considered a "developed country" (I'm not sure I am getting the terminology correct there)
If i buy something for $1000 new and sell on ebay for $900 used, i am not making money, and thus should not pay tax. I already paid tax when i received the original $1000 to buy the item with. You pay tax on PROFIT, not loss.
What did you do with it in the meantime? Actually, the IRS says that you should declare the $900 as income and the $1000 as expense. Of course if you spent the $1000 in an earlier fiscal year than when you made the sale, it may not have been deductible in that year.
I agree with your basic point. However, Galileo is not really a supporting anecdote. Galileo got in trouble with the Catholic Church because he was an asshole. Galileo got into a scientific and philosophic argument with a rival. His rival had the support of powerful members of the Jesuits. Galileo called him an idiot for disagreeing with Galileo. His rival essentially said, "You can't talk to me like that, I'll sick the Inquisition on you." Galileo's response was, "I'll call your Jesuits and raise you the Pope" (who was a long time personal friend of Galileo's). The Pope heard the dispute and told Galileo to publish a treatise that made the best case possible for both sides of the dispute (the Pope clearly having a lot of respect for Galileo's abilities). Galileo published the required treatise, but he put the arguments he disagreed with in the mouth of a character that was portrayed as a simpleton and clearly represented the Pope.
Right, because we can't have people receiving thousands of dollars to debunk our theories interfere with the millions we are getting to support those theories.
I have never argued that piracy is legitimate. From a consumer's perspective, piracy is wrong (I will except from this those who pirate as a means to sample before buying. The morality of this can be argued, but is not part of the case I am making one way or the other). From a producer's perspective, I believe that piracy is generally a net positive. There have been several studies that have demonstrated that on average those who pirate buy more legitimate copies of the product class being studied than the general populace.
People pay because they have two options: (1) Pay and get the product, (2) don't pay and don't get the product. When people decide that the product is worth more to them than the money they're paying, then they buy. Piracy is the third option: don't pay and get the product. You can't reasonably argue that people are going to choose option #1 over option #3 because they "value the product".
Yes, I can argue that people will choose option #1 over option #3 because the value the product. Most people recognize that if they do not provide those who produce the goods they wish to consume with reimbursement, those producers will stop producing.
The problem with the idea that if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it there would be a large increase in sales is that all of the ways to stop them from pirating cost you more sales than you recover from the pirates that now pay for it.
I will illustrate another problem with your idea. I know someone who pirated the World of Goo (actually somebody else had pirated it and gave it to them, they did not realize that they should have paid for it). They showed it to me and a bunch of other people. I downloaded the demo and fiddled with it. I showed the free demo to a friend who went out and bought it. At worst, the producers of World of Goo broke even on that pirated game. If someone had not given an illegal copy to the person who showed it to me, they quite likely would have bought a copy. However, in that circumstance they would not have shown it to the 5 or 6 people they showed it to (of which I was one). I would then have never shown it to my friend who ended up buying it. Said friend would never have bought it.
Most pirates obtain the product with less effort than it would take for them to obtain a legitimate copy. That is why I put the parenthetical comment about those for whom price was not the deciding factor.
I think if you were a magical genie that offered the RIAA the option of having copyright for only 7 years and an absolute stop to piracy of the works for those 7 years, they might take it. The big hits they were producing just before digital copying became practical on a wide scale were boy bands and brittany spears. I immagine they probably don't have the staying power of the rolling stones.
Not a chance. Think about your second sentence. Do you really think they would give up the copyright on the stuff by people like the Rolling Stones for 7 years on the artists they are pushing now? Think about this, no music which has been produced under standard copyright in my lifetime will enter public domain in my lifetime, which in my opinion makes a mockery of the reason the Constitution specifies for allowing copyright.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
This demonstrates a terrible understanding of economics. The reason those people pay what they do is because they value the product that highly. The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
Here's my broadband plan (note broadband means any service greater than telephone narrowband signals) (i.e. >>4000 hertz)
- Take a page out of the FDR years which mandated telephone companies must wire all homes with telephone lines
- Update the law so it says the telephone company must provide DSL (or FiOS or equivalent service) to all homes by 1/1/2012
- Use the already-existing Universal Service Fund (USF) to cover the costs
Done. Since 99.9% of homes have telephone wires running into them, there's no digging required. No manual labor. More disruption. Simply install a ~$100 DSLAM in each neighborhood. Within a year's time, virtually everyone would have access to 1000 kbit/s or more service. That's 20+ times faster than what they had before (28k or 56k).
Over time those DSL would be phased-out and upgraded to fiber, but as of 2012 the US Congress could claim, "Not one single american citizen is still stuck on dialup."
I corrected that for you. When FDR did that he was basically consolidating the monopoly that Woodrow Wilson had started for AT&T (both were "progressives" after all).
Norway and Sweden have similar population clusters and sparse country areas, and they have near universal broadband coverage, both wired and wireless. The difference is that they spend more money on investing in infrastructure and less on maintaining an overseas empire and a police state.
No the difference is that Norway has a population of less than 5 million and Sweden has a population of less than 10 million while the US has a population of over 300 million. It would be more useful to compare individual states to individual European countries. It would, also, be more useful if Americans would stop worrying about the Internet connection speeds for the whole country and would instead focus on getting the speed up in their own state.
It's a failure of vision, investment, and will. It has nothing to do with population density.
No, it has to do with total population, 300 million people is just too big a chunk of people to get them all (or enough of them) on the same page as to how to accomplish something like improving Internet connectivity vs other priorities. The Founding Fathers never imagined something like the Internet, but if they had, they would have expected solutions to be developed and rolled out on a state by state basis, with those systems that worked best gradually being adopted by other states.
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If you want to be the next Metallica, or Madonna, or Brittany Spears, or one of the other stars who are known more for their publicity than for their music, then yeah the RIAA is you best bet. Of course if what you want is to make a living from making music and aren't really concerned with ever being a celebrity then you really should stay away from the RIAA.
That the problem is that people are so hard-wired to find social ineptitude a problem.
Social ineptitude is a problem. You are confusing being an introvert (preferring not to spend time with other people) with being socially inept. Not all introverts are socially inept. Sometimes people are labeled "nerds" because they choose to be socially uninvolved. However, the term originally (and in this context) referred to people who wish to be socially involved but are outcasts because they do things that are socially viewed opposite of the way they intend.
Actually, it doesn't happen all that often in the U.S. either. It's just that when there are 300 million people, something that only happens to 1% of the people still happens to 3 million people. I'm not saying that 1% of the population of the U.S. gets bullied because I have no idea what percentage of the population gets bullied, I'm just using that to give you an idea of the scale difference between Portugal and the U.S.. (If you are not familiar with the total population of Portugal it is about 10 million, or about 3.5% of the U.S. population).
put out spin how FB is under new derangement
What an interesting comment on the state of Facebook. I've always suspected Facebook represented some type of derangement, now you are suggesting that what it needs is new derangement.
NO, he could very well have known that he owned a big chunk of Facebook. His claim would be that he became aware of Zuckerberg's intention to not honor that ownership claim when he saw "recent press accounts of potential selling of Facebook or portions thereof". Whether or not any of this will hold up in court is another story. However, on the face of it, he has a claim.
Overall, the most important factor in determining whether a child learns is that child's parents. There are various techniques that parents can use to make sure that theirchild learns, but they all boil down to one thing: the parent must hold the child accountable for learning. Occasionally, someone other than a parent will enter a child's life and motivate that child to learn, but that is extremely rare and not something that can be systematically be applied to large groups. If you want to improve the education of children in this country, become a Big Brother/Big Sister and form a relationship with a child and work at motivating that child to learn. No, you won't change the overall numbers for the country, but the only way to do that is one child at a time.
Chavez is promoting a particular approach to government and several Latin American countries have leaders who have aligned themselves with his approach (the movement that the poster I replied to was referring to). I was pointing out that the countries where positive things are happening (economically as well as otherwise) are led by people who are taking a completely different approach to Chavez' "people-based" system (which I do not believe is actually people-based at all).
How many times has this already been brought up in the thread?
Before I posted, the total number of posts about NASA's mission to Muslim countries was zero. There are more now, but at that time there were zero.
If we are going to discuss NASA it is important to talk about what the Administration views as its primary mission (propaganda). Yes, the White House Press Secretary has said that Charles Bolden must have "misunderstood" Obama, of course this comes after the White House supported his statement over the weekend.
My point was that if the Administration can't at least make it look like they are keeping NASA focused on engineering rather than politics, how can you expect the Senate to keep politics out of the mix.
Since most space efforts are international that's when.
OK, how many muslim countries have a space program?
Pinochet has been out of power in Chile for longer than he was in power. The reason I used Chile is because it is a clear case of a country that is rejecting Hugo Chavez and is doing very well economically as a result. Columbia is another country that is rejecting the Hugo Chavez model and has had an improved economy as a result. Venezuela on the other hand has suffered economically as a result of Hugo Chavez. How does an oil exporting country have energy shortages?
It has nothing to do with a "pro-muslim conspiracy". It has to do with the head of NASA saying the primary focus of NASA is something completely unrelated to space.
I'm sorry, he was talking about the mission of NASA. I thought the mission of NASA should be something to do with space exploration. What does reaching out to muslim nations have to do whith NASA? That sounds more like a State Department job to me. The other things he listed in that particular quote as part of the mission of NASA didn't sound like they belonged on NASA's agenda either.
What else do you expect when the head of NASA says that his primary mission is to remind Muslims of all the contributions they made to science?
Well, not all the world ... not even all the western world sees that as a bad thing. Many countries actually see it as a way to bring some stability to a zone that is completely unstable due to the presence of a militar super-power (for the region), Israel, and that by giving nuclear capability to other country in the region that would level out the status quo in the zone and prevent most of the violence that we have seen committed by Israel against their neighbours in the last decades.
You phrased that incorrectly. It would bring stability to the region because anybody in the region who does not bow to Iranian demands on following their version of Islam risks getting nuked. Since the Iranian leaders have also expressed a desire to witness the muslim version of Armegeddon it means there are significant chances that when they get nuclear weapons they will launch a nuclear strike against Israel, that should do wonders for the stability of the Middle East.
I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's created a model for a people-based system. He's a divisive character, especially outside of Venezuela. But there's no denying that he's made life a lot better for a lot of the people of his country, while improving the economic conditions overall.
Venezuela is producing a lot less oil than it did when Hugo Chavez took over. One could claim that this because the oil fields are being exhausted. However, the evidence suggests that this is because exploration of new oil fields has essentially come to a stand still and existing equipment is not being properly maintained. All of the news I have seen suggest that there are increasing shortages of various basic goods (Chavez has set price ceilings below the cost of obtaining the goods).
Therefore, based on what I have seen, I will deny that he has made life significantly better for anyone other than his cronies and I believe that rather than improving economic conditions overall, he has instead made conditions worse. As to South American countries that are succeeding most of them have been moving away from the Left. Chile, for example, which earlier this year was moved from being considered a "developing country" to being considered a "developed country" (I'm not sure I am getting the terminology correct there)
If i buy something for $1000 new and sell on ebay for $900 used, i am not making money, and thus should not pay tax. I already paid tax when i received the original $1000 to buy the item with. You pay tax on PROFIT, not loss.
What did you do with it in the meantime? Actually, the IRS says that you should declare the $900 as income and the $1000 as expense. Of course if you spent the $1000 in an earlier fiscal year than when you made the sale, it may not have been deductible in that year.
I agree with your basic point. However, Galileo is not really a supporting anecdote. Galileo got in trouble with the Catholic Church because he was an asshole. Galileo got into a scientific and philosophic argument with a rival. His rival had the support of powerful members of the Jesuits. Galileo called him an idiot for disagreeing with Galileo. His rival essentially said, "You can't talk to me like that, I'll sick the Inquisition on you." Galileo's response was, "I'll call your Jesuits and raise you the Pope" (who was a long time personal friend of Galileo's). The Pope heard the dispute and told Galileo to publish a treatise that made the best case possible for both sides of the dispute (the Pope clearly having a lot of respect for Galileo's abilities). Galileo published the required treatise, but he put the arguments he disagreed with in the mouth of a character that was portrayed as a simpleton and clearly represented the Pope.
Right, because we can't have people receiving thousands of dollars to debunk our theories interfere with the millions we are getting to support those theories.
I have never argued that piracy is legitimate. From a consumer's perspective, piracy is wrong (I will except from this those who pirate as a means to sample before buying. The morality of this can be argued, but is not part of the case I am making one way or the other). From a producer's perspective, I believe that piracy is generally a net positive. There have been several studies that have demonstrated that on average those who pirate buy more legitimate copies of the product class being studied than the general populace.
People pay because they have two options: (1) Pay and get the product, (2) don't pay and don't get the product. When people decide that the product is worth more to them than the money they're paying, then they buy. Piracy is the third option: don't pay and get the product. You can't reasonably argue that people are going to choose option #1 over option #3 because they "value the product".
Yes, I can argue that people will choose option #1 over option #3 because the value the product. Most people recognize that if they do not provide those who produce the goods they wish to consume with reimbursement, those producers will stop producing.
The problem with the idea that if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it there would be a large increase in sales is that all of the ways to stop them from pirating cost you more sales than you recover from the pirates that now pay for it.
I will illustrate another problem with your idea. I know someone who pirated the World of Goo (actually somebody else had pirated it and gave it to them, they did not realize that they should have paid for it). They showed it to me and a bunch of other people. I downloaded the demo and fiddled with it. I showed the free demo to a friend who went out and bought it. At worst, the producers of World of Goo broke even on that pirated game. If someone had not given an illegal copy to the person who showed it to me, they quite likely would have bought a copy. However, in that circumstance they would not have shown it to the 5 or 6 people they showed it to (of which I was one). I would then have never shown it to my friend who ended up buying it. Said friend would never have bought it.
Most pirates obtain the product with less effort than it would take for them to obtain a legitimate copy. That is why I put the parenthetical comment about those for whom price was not the deciding factor.
I think if you were a magical genie that offered the RIAA the option of having copyright for only 7 years and an absolute stop to piracy of the works for those 7 years, they might take it. The big hits they were producing just before digital copying became practical on a wide scale were boy bands and brittany spears. I immagine they probably don't have the staying power of the rolling stones.
Not a chance. Think about your second sentence. Do you really think they would give up the copyright on the stuff by people like the Rolling Stones for 7 years on the artists they are pushing now? Think about this, no music which has been produced under standard copyright in my lifetime will enter public domain in my lifetime, which in my opinion makes a mockery of the reason the Constitution specifies for allowing copyright.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
This demonstrates a terrible understanding of economics. The reason those people pay what they do is because they value the product that highly. The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
Here's my broadband plan (note broadband means any service greater than telephone narrowband signals) (i.e. >>4000 hertz)
- Take a page out of the FDR years which mandated telephone companies must wire all homes with telephone lines - Update the law so it says the telephone company must provide DSL (or FiOS or equivalent service) to all homes by 1/1/2012 - Use the already-existing Universal Service Fund (USF) to cover the costs
Done. Since 99.9% of homes have telephone wires running into them, there's no digging required. No manual labor. More disruption. Simply install a ~$100 DSLAM in each neighborhood. Within a year's time, virtually everyone would have access to 1000 kbit/s or more service. That's 20+ times faster than what they had before (28k or 56k).
Over time those DSL would be phased-out and upgraded to fiber, but as of 2012 the US Congress could claim, "Not one single american citizen is still stuck on dialup."
I corrected that for you. When FDR did that he was basically consolidating the monopoly that Woodrow Wilson had started for AT&T (both were "progressives" after all).
Norway and Sweden have similar population clusters and sparse country areas, and they have near universal broadband coverage, both wired and wireless. The difference is that they spend more money on investing in infrastructure and less on maintaining an overseas empire and a police state.
No the difference is that Norway has a population of less than 5 million and Sweden has a population of less than 10 million while the US has a population of over 300 million. It would be more useful to compare individual states to individual European countries. It would, also, be more useful if Americans would stop worrying about the Internet connection speeds for the whole country and would instead focus on getting the speed up in their own state.
It's a failure of vision, investment, and will. It has nothing to do with population density.
No, it has to do with total population, 300 million people is just too big a chunk of people to get them all (or enough of them) on the same page as to how to accomplish something like improving Internet connectivity vs other priorities. The Founding Fathers never imagined something like the Internet, but if they had, they would have expected solutions to be developed and rolled out on a state by state basis, with those systems that worked best gradually being adopted by other states.