I, myself, am creating art. Photos and a bit of music. Also some mediocre short stories. While my products are definitely not good enough yet to ask money for them, I can understand the desire to earn a living by doing what you like the most.
I think that all digital art will become free for those who do not want to earn money from it. If a magazine wants to use one of your photos or if a corporation wants to use your music for an add, you should get paid. The rest will come from donations from fans or derived products.
But yes, you wont be able to earn as much money that way and the RIAA will milk the old system dry before adapting. This is logical. Even the oil industry will pull something like that. I'm sure of it.
People and corporations want to create tools. They want to do this cheaply and quickly. Instead of putting more money to make the system perfect, they prefer to simply make sure it works.
If everyone accepts that systems can't be 100% secured and voluntarily refrain from abusing systems, no playful kid and no adult weirdo would go behind bars.
Instead of trying to punish everyone, we should try to educate and prevent crimes by focusing on humans and their lives isntead of focusing on the machines and their systems.
In the end everything is useless anyway but a mission to mars is fun for the whole species.
See, instead of everyone looking at their navel, people will start raising their head and will start looking at the stars. Instead of having most people working for their own goals, people will start to share a dream. Instead of fighting each other, people will start to work as a team.
I'm currently working in the field of psychology and even though I'm not high on the ladder, the calls I receive are about couples breaking up and people complaining of surviving instead of living. A lot of people are living without knowing what to do with their life and this is the kind of goal that might bring people together and give them something to do with their life even if in the grand scheme of things it is useless.
Also, about the benefits, you can't go wrong with studying how to negate the effects of loneliness which apparently affects tons of people that live in cities. Also you get to fight back bone problems that are not that different from the problems aging people have. Of course, you also get the technologies for space travel but you don't care for that that much.
What is the price of music ? Why should musicians be less important than people building houses or growing crops ?
You make the typical error of suggesting that existence has a purpose and yet it doesn't. So whatever you do it is as important, or if you prefer, as unimportant as any other things you could do at that same moment.
Music is there to improve moral. People play music in stadiums to make the crowd react, they play music in tv shows to impose a mood, people work with songs in their head, etc. When you feel bored you can always whistle a song. Music is much more important than you think for keeping people to work hard and for keeping them happy.
So yes, musicians deserve to have millions as much as the next guy in society if you base your analysis on usefulness. Sadly, the salary of one's job is not based on how important it is but on how in demand it is.
Doctors are paid more because not everyone can be accepted at medical school. If anybody could become a doctor and if anybody could finish their medical training at their own pace, we would have much more doctors and they would eventually earn as much as everyone else.
Of course it can make people angry to get their own information stolen by other governments but on the other hand this happens only when the playing field is not leveled.
When all governments have similar technologies and ressources it forces the market to compete more and get new ideas on the market as soon as possible. Also, when military technologies are similar amongst nations, it forces them to negociate and talk instead of bullying the weaker ones.
Having a small advantage is all right but when some nations get to be much more advanced than others it gets problematic. It's all about having to listen to each other instead of simply using force. It's all about the human race advancing together instead of exploiting each other.
There is no such thing as investing TOO MUCH in the military. People that are saying we should focus more money on social problems and the economy don't understand that military technology can be applied to fix social problems eventually.
Rejoice for now we can drop food and medical supplies at supersonic speed! I can't wait to see the look on those African kids!
I firmly believe that if you don't have the best airforce in a major war, you loose.
You seem to think that air superiority is still important. This is an old point of view which has been superseded with the renewn interest in improving the army.
The Army can hide under bunkers and buildings, hide amongst the population, camouflage its tanks and anti-air guns and artillery. The army can move and occupy land. Not the air force.
Bombing before landing is important but the navy can do that more easily than the air force so why the need for air superiority?
The only reason is to be able to use helicopters and cargo airplanes. They can make your grunts move faster and safer but that's pretty much it. And don't forget that you can get air superiority thanks to anti-air guns and missile systems. As a matter of fact, do you still believe there are dog fights in the sky? Air planes are now airborn missile platforms to bomb and intercept. Small and stealthy pilotless aircrafts are the future.
The air force is not obsolete but it is definitely not the most important part of the team. The ground troops are the most important. The others are just gravy.
The Top Gun era has ended. Time to move on.
Forbidding this is not part of a democracy
on
eBay The Vote
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In a democracy, you have the right to vote and the right to be heard. You also have the right to democratically select a dictatorship. If the citizens want to be bought voluntarily and sell their freedom, a democracy should let them do that. If not, it's not a true democracy.
People in general don't have as much time as before. Especially those who live in urban areas. Free time now comes in short bursts instead of long hours. I think that entertainment has evolved along those lines so that games, books, tv shows etc. can now entertain you quickly.
Dan Brown's books are good examples of what can make people that don't usually read pick up a book. The chapters are short, something is always happening and there is a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter. Each chapter is built to entertain someone who has 20 minutes of free time.
As you can see, I don't think TV is the cause. I think that the rythm of today's society is the cause of the change in entertainment. If you can only relax for 20 minutes at a time, reading the Lord of the Rings is more difficult than reading short stories on the net.
I think the real problem here is that nobody really knows what art is. If you look back in time, art wasn't what it is today. Nowadays art is trying to define itself.
Some of you think that no one denies that movies are art but you are wrong. Many believe that most movies are not art and that only some movies can be considered art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film
This is important because if you consider that all movies are art, well if you film your vacations you have a storyline (your vacations), you have characters, you have different backgrounds, you have emotions, etc. So why shouldn't your vacations be considered art? If I draw a square with a pen is this art or not? If not then why is this art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mondrian_CompRYB.jpg ? If you look at dadaism (here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg ) can this be considered art or not?
Before arguing about games being art or not, we should start by arguing over what is art.
Yes I've thought about that but you wouldn't be able to have a huge network like the internet. To access information on a computer 100 km away your ping would be much higher than what you currently get. Also some people would have aloqwe wifi antennas than others so the network would be as fast as the slowest guy in the network. So the ones with the faster links would be used more but then it would slow down their own connection and eventually the network would still be slow.
Basically you would have a network that is just too plain slow.
Also there are networks that exist that are similar to the wifi network you are describing. Look at the "dark" networks like tor and see how that goes. People don't rely on them for their speed.
Yes but it's not because you see something that it's there. It works both ways. Also by accepting your point of view you would have to give weight to the idea that pink ponies exist where everyone isn't looking. Extrapolating based on observed AND tested facts is more safe than extrapolating on observed facts alone.
Also, you seem to assume that governments are always the source of the best technologies first and not the private sector and yet, many corporations are privately creating and inventing in order to sell to governments. Lockheed Martin is a good example of that with the US government.
Since this is not militaristic in nature, I wouldn't think the Chinese government would mind working with a corporation from another country. This looks more like a big pilot project to me. They will probably improve the concept after that and make their own version for the whole country if they really want to go that way.
I think that having everybody buy their own hardware and building their own internet was great in the beginning. I'm of course talking about the BBS era where people bought servers and modems. That was simple.
Now we are in an era of "inter-BBS" where the ISPs charge you but also let you browse the others "BBS". Since ISPs offer to host websites I'm considering them as the modern BBS. Now the problem is that some users are becoming competitors to these ISPs by providing services and thus are a new breed of "BBS" and they are making money instead of the ISP having full control. But who are managing the wires outside? The ISPs. So do we give all the rights to the ISPs or do we now declare that the Internet's hardware be owned by governments so that all of the citizens pay for the services?
Like the others have said someone has to pay the bill. If the users start to make more money than the ISPs then they should make sure parts of their earnings go into the development of the Internet right? Which is partly why the ISPs are currently bitching about all this.
I strongly believe the governments should invest and build the physical foundations and rent it to the users. Henceforth the Internet would be a service made by the people for the people.
I agree that this would go against the anarchistic Internet many of us wants but for upload and download speeds and efficiency of resources this would be great. I'm of course assuming that bureaucracy will not kill the whole process.
Anyway, if you really want privacy there will always be Tor networks and the old school BBS right?
Ok. You say that my response is a perfectly naive response because I ask you to back your claims and you then state the obvious by stating that you can't thus showing your comment was useless in the first place. I don't want to pick a fight it's just that I'd like people to explain themselves more.
I'm sure you were thinking about programs like Echelon but the truth is we know Echelon exists and it's not a small program. You can't hide something that big. It's not because we haven't heard of a Chinese equivalent that they already have one. Don't you think that such a big program would be easily discovered after a short while by their citizens or other governments spying on China? You might say that you didn't want to imply that but it sure did sound like it.
You were modded insightful and it is true that your idea is intriguing. On the other hand you do not back your claims with facts which makes for a poor attempt at starting a discussion. Don't give China more credits than it deserves.
If you want to start a conspiracy, at least do like the other crackpots out there and use tidbits of informations to explain why you think China has "plenty of secret ones just as big".
From: http://www.physorg.com/news62952904.html
"We don't think this original heat is a major part of the Earth's heat, though," Marone says. It only contributes 5 to 10 percent of the total, "about the same amount as gravitational heat."
To explain gravitational heat, Marone again evokes the image of the hot, freshly formed Earth, which was not of a consistent density. In a gravitational sorting process called differentiation, the denser, heavier parts were drawn to the center, and the less dense areas were displaced outwards. The friction created by this process generated considerable heat, which, like the original heat, still has not fully dissipated.
Then there's latent heat, Marone says. This type arises from the core's expanding as the Earth cools from the inside out. Just as freezing water turns to ice, that liquid metal is turning solid--and adding volume in the process. "The inner core is becoming larger by about a centimeter every thousand years," Marone says. The heat released by this expansion is seeping into the mantle.
For all this, however, Marone says, the vast majority of the heat in Earth's interior--up to 90 percent--is fueled by the decaying of radioactive isotopes like Potassium 40, Uranium 238, 235, and Thorium 232 contained within the mantle. These isotopes radiate heat as they shed excess energy and move toward stability. "The amount of heat caused by this radiation is almost the same as the total heat measured emanating from the Earth."
Sometime billions of years in the future, he predicts, the core and mantle could cool and solidify enough to meet the crust. If that happens, Earth will become a cold, dead planet like the moon.
Long before such an occurrence, however, the Sun will likely have evolved into a red-giant star, and grown large enough to engulf our fair planet. At that point, whatever heat is left in the mantle will hardly matter.
So there you go. It is cooling down very slowly so there is plenty of energy for us to use. Also if you know about the end of the universe, you will understand that eventually we will not have enough energy to survive anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death
See, I know this is Slashdot and everybody wants to flame everything but you have to relax and think for a minute here. He HAS a point. More and more mainstream artists are solo artists that are using a prerecorded song made on a computer and THIS is what he means buy "digital music". He's not simply talking about music files. If you care only about the money, it is not profitable to be in a band. Going solo as a singer and using digital music is the way to go but on the other hand it kills a whole part of music: fun.
It's an incredible experience to you play with others and to actually build on each other's sound. There is an immediate sense of fulfillment. Also the audience loves to see people struggle to make their sound. It gives a good show. A digital solo at 220 BPM is nothing like a live solo. Nobody cares about the digital solo because nobody sees any skills in that while a guitar player, and even some bass players, can actually show what they are doing while dancing and moving around.
With the current level of technology, you don't need the guitar, bass, drum, orchestras etc. You could have an orchestra of synthesizers and the keyboardists could do the same thing and even more for less money. Yet, I think everybody would be bored and would wonder why they didn't simply listen to it on their computer. Eventually though, all of the instruments might become simple toys to play around a fire. A bit like how the harmonica was quite popular and practical once and now nobody cares about it.
I think it is alright that a school recommends a product. The kids' marks depend on it in a way. If you go to a painting class and the teacher recommends you to buy a certain paint and a certain brush then don't be surprised if it takes more effort to achieve the same thing as the other students with different tools. You will need a different approach and method.
What would be wrong though is if the school recommends a specific product without having it freely available in their computer labs. If the children can't have access to Microsoft's products at school after the teaching hours then there is a problem. Before recommending parents to buy a product I would make sure the kids can have access to a good computer lab.
I'm glad someone shared their opinion. I wasn't sure if I would be seen as a troll but I always saw the whole universe as a sandbox in which we can play and do crazy stuff since everything is doomed anyway.
So I, too, believe it's all about the game:)
I guess I posted this yesterday because I felt like bitching about the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I was merely saying that the oil corporations will do whatever they can to make sure other alternatives are not used. They will protect their market.
I, myself, am creating art. Photos and a bit of music. Also some mediocre short stories. While my products are definitely not good enough yet to ask money for them, I can understand the desire to earn a living by doing what you like the most.
I think that all digital art will become free for those who do not want to earn money from it. If a magazine wants to use one of your photos or if a corporation wants to use your music for an add, you should get paid. The rest will come from donations from fans or derived products.
But yes, you wont be able to earn as much money that way and the RIAA will milk the old system dry before adapting. This is logical. Even the oil industry will pull something like that. I'm sure of it.
People and corporations want to create tools. They want to do this cheaply and quickly. Instead of putting more money to make the system perfect, they prefer to simply make sure it works.
If everyone accepts that systems can't be 100% secured and voluntarily refrain from abusing systems, no playful kid and no adult weirdo would go behind bars.
Instead of trying to punish everyone, we should try to educate and prevent crimes by focusing on humans and their lives isntead of focusing on the machines and their systems.
Very good point!
I wouldn't panic if I were you...
See, instead of everyone looking at their navel, people will start raising their head and will start looking at the stars. Instead of having most people working for their own goals, people will start to share a dream. Instead of fighting each other, people will start to work as a team.
I'm currently working in the field of psychology and even though I'm not high on the ladder, the calls I receive are about couples breaking up and people complaining of surviving instead of living. A lot of people are living without knowing what to do with their life and this is the kind of goal that might bring people together and give them something to do with their life even if in the grand scheme of things it is useless.
Also, about the benefits, you can't go wrong with studying how to negate the effects of loneliness which apparently affects tons of people that live in cities. Also you get to fight back bone problems that are not that different from the problems aging people have. Of course, you also get the technologies for space travel but you don't care for that that much.
So is it worth it ? I say sure, why not?
You've never had sex, right?
You make the typical error of suggesting that existence has a purpose and yet it doesn't. So whatever you do it is as important, or if you prefer, as unimportant as any other things you could do at that same moment.
Music is there to improve moral. People play music in stadiums to make the crowd react, they play music in tv shows to impose a mood, people work with songs in their head, etc. When you feel bored you can always whistle a song. Music is much more important than you think for keeping people to work hard and for keeping them happy.
So yes, musicians deserve to have millions as much as the next guy in society if you base your analysis on usefulness. Sadly, the salary of one's job is not based on how important it is but on how in demand it is.
Doctors are paid more because not everyone can be accepted at medical school. If anybody could become a doctor and if anybody could finish their medical training at their own pace, we would have much more doctors and they would eventually earn as much as everyone else.
When all governments have similar technologies and ressources it forces the market to compete more and get new ideas on the market as soon as possible. Also, when military technologies are similar amongst nations, it forces them to negociate and talk instead of bullying the weaker ones.
Having a small advantage is all right but when some nations get to be much more advanced than others it gets problematic. It's all about having to listen to each other instead of simply using force. It's all about the human race advancing together instead of exploiting each other.
Rejoice for now we can drop food and medical supplies at supersonic speed! I can't wait to see the look on those African kids!
You seem to think that air superiority is still important. This is an old point of view which has been superseded with the renewn interest in improving the army.
The Army can hide under bunkers and buildings, hide amongst the population, camouflage its tanks and anti-air guns and artillery. The army can move and occupy land. Not the air force.
Bombing before landing is important but the navy can do that more easily than the air force so why the need for air superiority?
The only reason is to be able to use helicopters and cargo airplanes. They can make your grunts move faster and safer but that's pretty much it. And don't forget that you can get air superiority thanks to anti-air guns and missile systems. As a matter of fact, do you still believe there are dog fights in the sky? Air planes are now airborn missile platforms to bomb and intercept. Small and stealthy pilotless aircrafts are the future.
The air force is not obsolete but it is definitely not the most important part of the team. The ground troops are the most important. The others are just gravy.
The Top Gun era has ended. Time to move on.
In a democracy, you have the right to vote and the right to be heard. You also have the right to democratically select a dictatorship. If the citizens want to be bought voluntarily and sell their freedom, a democracy should let them do that. If not, it's not a true democracy.
Dan Brown's books are good examples of what can make people that don't usually read pick up a book. The chapters are short, something is always happening and there is a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter. Each chapter is built to entertain someone who has 20 minutes of free time.
As you can see, I don't think TV is the cause. I think that the rythm of today's society is the cause of the change in entertainment. If you can only relax for 20 minutes at a time, reading the Lord of the Rings is more difficult than reading short stories on the net.
Some of you think that no one denies that movies are art but you are wrong. Many believe that most movies are not art and that only some movies can be considered art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film
This is important because if you consider that all movies are art, well if you film your vacations you have a storyline (your vacations), you have characters, you have different backgrounds, you have emotions, etc. So why shouldn't your vacations be considered art? If I draw a square with a pen is this art or not? If not then why is this art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mondrian_CompRYB.jpg ? If you look at dadaism (here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg ) can this be considered art or not?
Before arguing about games being art or not, we should start by arguing over what is art.
Basically you would have a network that is just too plain slow.
Also there are networks that exist that are similar to the wifi network you are describing. Look at the "dark" networks like tor and see how that goes. People don't rely on them for their speed.
Also, you seem to assume that governments are always the source of the best technologies first and not the private sector and yet, many corporations are privately creating and inventing in order to sell to governments. Lockheed Martin is a good example of that with the US government.
Since this is not militaristic in nature, I wouldn't think the Chinese government would mind working with a corporation from another country. This looks more like a big pilot project to me. They will probably improve the concept after that and make their own version for the whole country if they really want to go that way.
Now we are in an era of "inter-BBS" where the ISPs charge you but also let you browse the others "BBS". Since ISPs offer to host websites I'm considering them as the modern BBS. Now the problem is that some users are becoming competitors to these ISPs by providing services and thus are a new breed of "BBS" and they are making money instead of the ISP having full control. But who are managing the wires outside? The ISPs. So do we give all the rights to the ISPs or do we now declare that the Internet's hardware be owned by governments so that all of the citizens pay for the services?
Like the others have said someone has to pay the bill. If the users start to make more money than the ISPs then they should make sure parts of their earnings go into the development of the Internet right? Which is partly why the ISPs are currently bitching about all this.
I strongly believe the governments should invest and build the physical foundations and rent it to the users. Henceforth the Internet would be a service made by the people for the people.
I agree that this would go against the anarchistic Internet many of us wants but for upload and download speeds and efficiency of resources this would be great. I'm of course assuming that bureaucracy will not kill the whole process.
Anyway, if you really want privacy there will always be Tor networks and the old school BBS right?
I'm sure you were thinking about programs like Echelon but the truth is we know Echelon exists and it's not a small program. You can't hide something that big. It's not because we haven't heard of a Chinese equivalent that they already have one. Don't you think that such a big program would be easily discovered after a short while by their citizens or other governments spying on China? You might say that you didn't want to imply that but it sure did sound like it.
If you want to start a conspiracy, at least do like the other crackpots out there and use tidbits of informations to explain why you think China has "plenty of secret ones just as big".
Einstein was the one who added bubbles to beer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Einstein
To explain gravitational heat, Marone again evokes the image of the hot, freshly formed Earth, which was not of a consistent density. In a gravitational sorting process called differentiation, the denser, heavier parts were drawn to the center, and the less dense areas were displaced outwards. The friction created by this process generated considerable heat, which, like the original heat, still has not fully dissipated.
Then there's latent heat, Marone says. This type arises from the core's expanding as the Earth cools from the inside out. Just as freezing water turns to ice, that liquid metal is turning solid--and adding volume in the process. "The inner core is becoming larger by about a centimeter every thousand years," Marone says. The heat released by this expansion is seeping into the mantle.
For all this, however, Marone says, the vast majority of the heat in Earth's interior--up to 90 percent--is fueled by the decaying of radioactive isotopes like Potassium 40, Uranium 238, 235, and Thorium 232 contained within the mantle. These isotopes radiate heat as they shed excess energy and move toward stability. "The amount of heat caused by this radiation is almost the same as the total heat measured emanating from the Earth."
Sometime billions of years in the future, he predicts, the core and mantle could cool and solidify enough to meet the crust. If that happens, Earth will become a cold, dead planet like the moon.
Long before such an occurrence, however, the Sun will likely have evolved into a red-giant star, and grown large enough to engulf our fair planet. At that point, whatever heat is left in the mantle will hardly matter.
So there you go. It is cooling down very slowly so there is plenty of energy for us to use. Also if you know about the end of the universe, you will understand that eventually we will not have enough energy to survive anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_deathIt's an incredible experience to you play with others and to actually build on each other's sound. There is an immediate sense of fulfillment. Also the audience loves to see people struggle to make their sound. It gives a good show. A digital solo at 220 BPM is nothing like a live solo. Nobody cares about the digital solo because nobody sees any skills in that while a guitar player, and even some bass players, can actually show what they are doing while dancing and moving around.
With the current level of technology, you don't need the guitar, bass, drum, orchestras etc. You could have an orchestra of synthesizers and the keyboardists could do the same thing and even more for less money. Yet, I think everybody would be bored and would wonder why they didn't simply listen to it on their computer. Eventually though, all of the instruments might become simple toys to play around a fire. A bit like how the harmonica was quite popular and practical once and now nobody cares about it.
What would be wrong though is if the school recommends a specific product without having it freely available in their computer labs. If the children can't have access to Microsoft's products at school after the teaching hours then there is a problem. Before recommending parents to buy a product I would make sure the kids can have access to a good computer lab.
I'm glad someone shared their opinion. I wasn't sure if I would be seen as a troll but I always saw the whole universe as a sandbox in which we can play and do crazy stuff since everything is doomed anyway.
:)
So I, too, believe it's all about the game
I guess I posted this yesterday because I felt like bitching about the universe.
Take THAT, universe!
Even if we decided to colonize space, we're all going to die anyway because of the thermal death of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death
So why bother?
I just wish we could find a planet where it is written "We apologize for the inconvenience"...