Then that band has good contracts. Or, more likely, it has no contract with any record company, as otherwise they would not be allowed to sell directly.
Besides, buying CDs at the gig doesn't necessarily mean the artist receives more for it, than if you were to buy it in a shop or by placing a mail order over the Internet.
Allofmp3 was selling music from all over the world, including many popular American artists whose copyrights were held by members of the RIAA.
Submitter is obviously looking for non-American music: Pakistani music from Pakistan, Chinese music from China. As long as those sites do not sell anything whose copyrights are held by the RIAA, the RIAA has nothing to say about where and to whom they sell.
The real question is: do they have the correct license under their local laws (including selling to foreign countries), and do artists benefit from those sales. Not what the RIAA thinks about those sites.
Web sites that are built up using a bunch of separate images that together form a complete image, do need pixel-perfect alignment. Otherwise there are gaps or so, and that just looks terrible.
I did the same, also around six years ago, but the result was that in IE the page didn't render. At all. It got an empty page, instead. I was using some CSS to layout the page, which was supposed to do the job, but it didn't. It rendered in all browsers, not IE. So not testing for IE is apparently risky.
The cross-browser solution for an amateur developer like me that just wants to get stuff to work: drop the CSS layout and go for good-old tables. That did the job.
Maybe nowadays it works with CSS, too. Too much work for no gain.
That part I get; I also checked the wikipedia link provided by a helpful AC.
The issue I don't understand: this galaxy must have been some 13.3 bln light years away from us, as the light took that long to reach us. Anything closer we'd see "nearer in time". This means the galaxy must have been at least that big already at that time. Sounds pretty big to me, considering it has been expanding since and expansion is accelerating.
That galaxy is a mere 420 mln years old - must have been one of the very first galaxies to have formed. Impressive find!
Finding a galaxy at 13.5-14 bln years old, now that would be really interesting and means we have something wrong with our estimations of the age of our universe.
I think the point of OP is different: the light from this galaxy took 13.3 bln years to reach us; so this implies the light has been travelling for that distance (13.3 bln light-years) before it reached us. Otherwise it should have reached us earlier.
However 420 mln light years after the Big Bang, was the universe already that big? If the universe was smaller (say 1 bln light-years across) the light of that star system should have reached us long time ago.
And, on the same note, there must be a lot of our universe that we can not see, simply because it is now so far away from use that the light from those places can not have reached us yet.
It doesn't have to do with balls. It's simply not wanting to change something that works. And believe it or not, using MS Word format actually works. You can send a Word document to almost anyone, and they can handle it just fine. As long as that is the case, you can demand your vendor to use standard yadda yadda and use that internally but when that vendor doesn't support MS Word as well, it's not going to work.
Good luck with that. Proprietary standards are accepted because they Just Work. And when you send a file to someone, or receive one from someone, you just want it to open correctly. Which format it is doesn't matter, as long as it opens correctly. And at the moment for text documents, the only options are MS Word and pdf for that. And if you want them to be able to edit the file, it's just MS Word.
As long as MS Word format doesn't break (it mostly isn't) it will stay.
No matter how well this powerpoint file imports into LibreOffice, there is no CD-ROM player in sight... I don't have one anymore... really, people still use CDs for that?
They will just go for the special Chinese edition of the iPhone. Often a bit smaller than the original, and comes with two extra buttons. For the rest it looks exactly the same, both the case and the screen output. It just behaves more like Android, and the apps don't come from Apple's App Store. For the rest it's the same. It's even branded iPnone.
Come on. Not to defend Apple as such, but how can you call being outsold 1:5 a failure when you have one single model competing with hundreds of other models? When you compare model to model I wouldn't be surprised iPhone is the nr 1 selling phone model at a distance. Samsung is the only one that may rival them, they have some really well selling models. And in the Android world there are new models available almost every single day, while Apple has a new model maybe once a year.
In China it's even more so. When it comes to mobile phones, the US market is highly controlled and restricted, the China market is open. Yes, you heard that correctly: communist China's market is much more open than capitalist US's market. In China, like most of the rest of the world outside the US, you buy a phone, and then you buy a subscription to a network. They don't come bundled. So it's much easier for newcomers to put a model on the market - they don't need to care about having a carrier's blessing. This results in immense competition, pushing down prices.
And because no-one other than Apple can use iOS on their phones, they all opt for the Android option. Many would likely want iOS if it were available. Many would possibly even use Microsoft's offering if it were as cheap and customisable as Android.
They may be a "failure" but having 5% of a market worth 1.3 billion people, is still a huge market. With so little market share they would still be able to sell more phones in China then they would on a 20% market share in the US.
This is a very common practice. Not just iPhones, but all kinds of electronics are being smuggled from Hong Kong to China. Regularly I hear about police intercepting a smuggling attempt, usually larger volumes of PCBs, computer chips, hard drives, and other components being smuggled to the mainland.
This has to do with taxes. Electronics, particularly expensive stuff, is smacked with a "luxury tax" of like 20% on sales value (I forgot the exact number), plus of course a VAT. So an electronic device produced in mainland and sold there, has these taxes added to it's price. But when the same device is exported to Hong Kong, the factory doesn't have to pay taxes. So indeed mainland factories produce electronics, export them tax-free to Hong Kong, from where it's smuggled back into the mainland.
iPhones are just a high-profile case (the same is happening for iPads and other wanted electronics), and in that case it's more than just taxes: the device is released in Hong Kong but not on the mainland (Apple controls when and where they're being sold), where it is a status symbol optima forma so people are willing to pay a big premium (think in the tunes of 50-100%) to have one *right now*, because having one well before it's officially being released is even better to impress friends and business relations (or, of course, to use as gift to business relations and government officials). So mainlanders come to Hong Kong, buy a lot of them, and have mules carry them across the border.
You just pinpoint the one hardest point of translating: what is correct?
Correct depends on the message context, the writer, and the audience. Different people use different words. Then there are of course these memes, there is jargon, slang, etc. A good translation is really difficult and while current computer translations are often pretty good, they're far from perfect.
Use a phrase like "all your base are belong to us" or "do not want" and the average/. reader knows exactly what you mean, and you may even make them laugh. Yet if you say the same thing to, say, their parents (my parents would be a prime example) they would go "huh?".
Or how about trying to translate 4chan, particularly/b/. And then I'm not even thinking of intentionally misspelled stuff. Though translating stuff like 'waifu' to Japanese shouldn't be too hard... translating it for other English speakers will be harder!
That they are taught it in school doesn't mean they WANT to learn it. And as you say, most of them will never use English out of school. And then it's really quickly forgotten - a foreign language you must continue to use or you lose it.
And it does get harder as you get older, and not everyone is lucky enough to live in a multilingual country or city-state like Singapore.
Interestingly I have the exact opposite experience.
In my early 30s I started learning Cantonese seriously, considered one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn.
Yet I found it easier, and learned much faster, than the English, German and French that I learned back in secondary school (I'm a Dutch native so English and particularly German are relatively easy).
Reason is of course not age, it's interest. Living in a place where the whole world around you speaks Cantonese is a great motivator. And having mastered another foreign language (primarily English) helps, too: it is known that bilingual people can pick up a third language much easier than a monolingual can pick up a second. Having experience with the mere concept of another language is key here.
There are not that many true inventions done in this world. Most of the patents out there for that sake are innovations building on top of existing technology more than completely new inventions.
What Apple did was to make it look good and make it easy to use, in part through their complete integration of hardware and software. I don't agree with all their design decisions, but most Apple stuff I've dealt with works remarkably intuitive. They exert a huge level of control, making sure they know the exact hardware their software has to run on, and so can integrate it perfectly.
Compare Android on mobile phones: the phones are great, the OS is great, but they are not always perfectly aligned and in sync. Many phone manufacturers will add their own oddities and changes to make it work.
Or Windows on PCs: same story. One company creates software, others create hardware, and there are always issues with drivers, things that don't go as expected, and so on.
Well MS is a huge company, and (used to, at least) hire all the top graduates from top universities. They definitely have the cash to rake in all the talent they can get. There must be plenty of brainpower in their ranks. It's actually surprising how little comes out of it. Can't think of anything other than bad management.
Over the past decade I've learned quite some Cantonese (said to be much harder to learn than Mandarin, except Cantonese is the local language here). The tones are of course the hardest part for us westerners: it's something we don't use that way. Different tone = different meaning, possibly opposite, totally different, or slightly different (e.g. the difference between "today" and "tomorrow" is just the tone). Yet grammar is dead easy, and getting a (simple) message across usually works.
It is more like that foreign language speakers are so totally used to English speakers not being able to speak their language, that they reply in English. And, usually, in the vast majority of the cases the English of the non-English speaker is better than the foreign language skills of the English speaker. It happens to me all the time. I ask a question to say a market vendor in Cantonese, get answer in (often really poor) English.
Not likely they're being put up for sale on e-bay: to easy to track back who it comes from. You can count on it being sold as "fallen off a truck".
And Apple is possibly not even hit by this theft directly: they may be the manufacturer of the devices, but that doesn't mean that they still owned the lot that has been stolen.
That said, the serial numbers are most definitely known by the people who owned the lot. When one of those appears on the market they will be instantly able to tell it's one of that lot. So also no warranty or anything any more.
Knowing how Google messes up things, a dictionary is not going to do it.
Take for example the English word "park". That can be "to park" where you are parking a car. Or it can be "a park", as in a green area to have a nice stroll. Same word, very different meaning.
Or the Dutch word "kussen", which in English can translate to pillow, cushion, pad, or kiss. The first three are synonyms, using the wrong one sounds odd but is usually intelligible. The fourth one is of course a very different meaning. Which one to use, depends on the context.
A while back I tried to translate the two-word combination "car park" into Chinese using Google Translate; I needed the characters but don't know how to type them. Result: car was translated correctly, park was the place where you go for a walk. They translated word by word using the wrong meaning for the second one. The proper translation is something like "stop-car-area" - when you try it now, you get the correct result.
Learning another language is anyway a good idea. It gives you the idea what a non-English speaker goes through to learn English.
Living in Hong Kong I often talk to Chinese about them speaking English. Many are worried that they make mistakes when they talk in English to foreigners - especially native speakers (from e.g. UK, US, Australia, etc).
So then I usually tell them not to worry, for the simple reason that they themselves are already much better with their languages than the English speaker. They are Chinese, speaking often not only Cantonese but also Mandarin, and of course English. These native English foreigners usually speak only English. So even if their English is not perfect, it is surely way better than the Chinese of that foreigner. So that foreigner should be happy that they bothered to learn English - they didn't bother to learn another language.
The name brings back sweet memories to the first useful translation service on the web: babelfish.altavista.com, launched almost 15 years ago. The domain still works, but the fish has been gobbled up by Microsoft and it's redirecting to Microsoft's translation service.
Of course Digital also got their name from Douglas Adams' masterpiece.
When accusing someone of breaking a contract, in how far are you yourself still bound by the terms of that contract?
If you buy say a mobile phone plan, and they overcharge/miscalculate/whatever: that's not necessarily a breach of that contract. The exact pricing terms are usually separate, if only so they can be changed without having to change the service contract itself. Yet if they say cancel your service without sufficient notice or your agreement, that'd be a direct breach of contract.
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Then that band has good contracts. Or, more likely, it has no contract with any record company, as otherwise they would not be allowed to sell directly.
Besides, buying CDs at the gig doesn't necessarily mean the artist receives more for it, than if you were to buy it in a shop or by placing a mail order over the Internet.
Wrong example.
Allofmp3 was selling music from all over the world, including many popular American artists whose copyrights were held by members of the RIAA.
Submitter is obviously looking for non-American music: Pakistani music from Pakistan, Chinese music from China. As long as those sites do not sell anything whose copyrights are held by the RIAA, the RIAA has nothing to say about where and to whom they sell.
The real question is: do they have the correct license under their local laws (including selling to foreign countries), and do artists benefit from those sales. Not what the RIAA thinks about those sites.
Web sites that are built up using a bunch of separate images that together form a complete image, do need pixel-perfect alignment. Otherwise there are gaps or so, and that just looks terrible.
I did the same, also around six years ago, but the result was that in IE the page didn't render. At all. It got an empty page, instead. I was using some CSS to layout the page, which was supposed to do the job, but it didn't. It rendered in all browsers, not IE. So not testing for IE is apparently risky.
The cross-browser solution for an amateur developer like me that just wants to get stuff to work: drop the CSS layout and go for good-old tables. That did the job.
Maybe nowadays it works with CSS, too. Too much work for no gain.
That part I get; I also checked the wikipedia link provided by a helpful AC.
The issue I don't understand: this galaxy must have been some 13.3 bln light years away from us, as the light took that long to reach us. Anything closer we'd see "nearer in time". This means the galaxy must have been at least that big already at that time. Sounds pretty big to me, considering it has been expanding since and expansion is accelerating.
That galaxy is a mere 420 mln years old - must have been one of the very first galaxies to have formed. Impressive find!
Finding a galaxy at 13.5-14 bln years old, now that would be really interesting and means we have something wrong with our estimations of the age of our universe.
I think the point of OP is different: the light from this galaxy took 13.3 bln years to reach us; so this implies the light has been travelling for that distance (13.3 bln light-years) before it reached us. Otherwise it should have reached us earlier.
However 420 mln light years after the Big Bang, was the universe already that big? If the universe was smaller (say 1 bln light-years across) the light of that star system should have reached us long time ago.
And, on the same note, there must be a lot of our universe that we can not see, simply because it is now so far away from use that the light from those places can not have reached us yet.
Or are OP and me missing something? If so, what?
It doesn't have to do with balls. It's simply not wanting to change something that works. And believe it or not, using MS Word format actually works. You can send a Word document to almost anyone, and they can handle it just fine. As long as that is the case, you can demand your vendor to use standard yadda yadda and use that internally but when that vendor doesn't support MS Word as well, it's not going to work.
Good luck with that. Proprietary standards are accepted because they Just Work. And when you send a file to someone, or receive one from someone, you just want it to open correctly. Which format it is doesn't matter, as long as it opens correctly. And at the moment for text documents, the only options are MS Word and pdf for that. And if you want them to be able to edit the file, it's just MS Word.
As long as MS Word format doesn't break (it mostly isn't) it will stay.
Good luck with that in my office.
No matter how well this powerpoint file imports into LibreOffice, there is no CD-ROM player in sight... I don't have one anymore... really, people still use CDs for that?
They will just go for the special Chinese edition of the iPhone. Often a bit smaller than the original, and comes with two extra buttons. For the rest it looks exactly the same, both the case and the screen output. It just behaves more like Android, and the apps don't come from Apple's App Store. For the rest it's the same. It's even branded iPnone.
Come on. Not to defend Apple as such, but how can you call being outsold 1:5 a failure when you have one single model competing with hundreds of other models? When you compare model to model I wouldn't be surprised iPhone is the nr 1 selling phone model at a distance. Samsung is the only one that may rival them, they have some really well selling models. And in the Android world there are new models available almost every single day, while Apple has a new model maybe once a year.
In China it's even more so. When it comes to mobile phones, the US market is highly controlled and restricted, the China market is open. Yes, you heard that correctly: communist China's market is much more open than capitalist US's market. In China, like most of the rest of the world outside the US, you buy a phone, and then you buy a subscription to a network. They don't come bundled. So it's much easier for newcomers to put a model on the market - they don't need to care about having a carrier's blessing. This results in immense competition, pushing down prices.
And because no-one other than Apple can use iOS on their phones, they all opt for the Android option. Many would likely want iOS if it were available. Many would possibly even use Microsoft's offering if it were as cheap and customisable as Android.
They may be a "failure" but having 5% of a market worth 1.3 billion people, is still a huge market. With so little market share they would still be able to sell more phones in China then they would on a 20% market share in the US.
This is a very common practice. Not just iPhones, but all kinds of electronics are being smuggled from Hong Kong to China. Regularly I hear about police intercepting a smuggling attempt, usually larger volumes of PCBs, computer chips, hard drives, and other components being smuggled to the mainland.
This has to do with taxes. Electronics, particularly expensive stuff, is smacked with a "luxury tax" of like 20% on sales value (I forgot the exact number), plus of course a VAT. So an electronic device produced in mainland and sold there, has these taxes added to it's price. But when the same device is exported to Hong Kong, the factory doesn't have to pay taxes. So indeed mainland factories produce electronics, export them tax-free to Hong Kong, from where it's smuggled back into the mainland.
iPhones are just a high-profile case (the same is happening for iPads and other wanted electronics), and in that case it's more than just taxes: the device is released in Hong Kong but not on the mainland (Apple controls when and where they're being sold), where it is a status symbol optima forma so people are willing to pay a big premium (think in the tunes of 50-100%) to have one *right now*, because having one well before it's officially being released is even better to impress friends and business relations (or, of course, to use as gift to business relations and government officials). So mainlanders come to Hong Kong, buy a lot of them, and have mules carry them across the border.
You just pinpoint the one hardest point of translating: what is correct?
Correct depends on the message context, the writer, and the audience. Different people use different words. Then there are of course these memes, there is jargon, slang, etc. A good translation is really difficult and while current computer translations are often pretty good, they're far from perfect.
Use a phrase like "all your base are belong to us" or "do not want" and the average /. reader knows exactly what you mean, and you may even make them laugh. Yet if you say the same thing to, say, their parents (my parents would be a prime example) they would go "huh?".
Or how about trying to translate 4chan, particularly /b/. And then I'm not even thinking of intentionally misspelled stuff. Though translating stuff like 'waifu' to Japanese shouldn't be too hard... translating it for other English speakers will be harder!
That they are taught it in school doesn't mean they WANT to learn it. And as you say, most of them will never use English out of school. And then it's really quickly forgotten - a foreign language you must continue to use or you lose it.
And it does get harder as you get older, and not everyone is lucky enough to live in a multilingual country or city-state like Singapore.
Interestingly I have the exact opposite experience.
In my early 30s I started learning Cantonese seriously, considered one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn.
Yet I found it easier, and learned much faster, than the English, German and French that I learned back in secondary school (I'm a Dutch native so English and particularly German are relatively easy).
Reason is of course not age, it's interest. Living in a place where the whole world around you speaks Cantonese is a great motivator. And having mastered another foreign language (primarily English) helps, too: it is known that bilingual people can pick up a third language much easier than a monolingual can pick up a second. Having experience with the mere concept of another language is key here.
There are not that many true inventions done in this world. Most of the patents out there for that sake are innovations building on top of existing technology more than completely new inventions.
What Apple did was to make it look good and make it easy to use, in part through their complete integration of hardware and software. I don't agree with all their design decisions, but most Apple stuff I've dealt with works remarkably intuitive. They exert a huge level of control, making sure they know the exact hardware their software has to run on, and so can integrate it perfectly.
Compare Android on mobile phones: the phones are great, the OS is great, but they are not always perfectly aligned and in sync. Many phone manufacturers will add their own oddities and changes to make it work.
Or Windows on PCs: same story. One company creates software, others create hardware, and there are always issues with drivers, things that don't go as expected, and so on.
Well MS is a huge company, and (used to, at least) hire all the top graduates from top universities. They definitely have the cash to rake in all the talent they can get. There must be plenty of brainpower in their ranks. It's actually surprising how little comes out of it. Can't think of anything other than bad management.
Over the past decade I've learned quite some Cantonese (said to be much harder to learn than Mandarin, except Cantonese is the local language here). The tones are of course the hardest part for us westerners: it's something we don't use that way. Different tone = different meaning, possibly opposite, totally different, or slightly different (e.g. the difference between "today" and "tomorrow" is just the tone). Yet grammar is dead easy, and getting a (simple) message across usually works.
It is more like that foreign language speakers are so totally used to English speakers not being able to speak their language, that they reply in English. And, usually, in the vast majority of the cases the English of the non-English speaker is better than the foreign language skills of the English speaker. It happens to me all the time. I ask a question to say a market vendor in Cantonese, get answer in (often really poor) English.
Not likely they're being put up for sale on e-bay: to easy to track back who it comes from. You can count on it being sold as "fallen off a truck".
And Apple is possibly not even hit by this theft directly: they may be the manufacturer of the devices, but that doesn't mean that they still owned the lot that has been stolen.
That said, the serial numbers are most definitely known by the people who owned the lot. When one of those appears on the market they will be instantly able to tell it's one of that lot. So also no warranty or anything any more.
Knowing how Google messes up things, a dictionary is not going to do it.
Take for example the English word "park". That can be "to park" where you are parking a car. Or it can be "a park", as in a green area to have a nice stroll. Same word, very different meaning.
Or the Dutch word "kussen", which in English can translate to pillow, cushion, pad, or kiss. The first three are synonyms, using the wrong one sounds odd but is usually intelligible. The fourth one is of course a very different meaning. Which one to use, depends on the context.
A while back I tried to translate the two-word combination "car park" into Chinese using Google Translate; I needed the characters but don't know how to type them. Result: car was translated correctly, park was the place where you go for a walk. They translated word by word using the wrong meaning for the second one. The proper translation is something like "stop-car-area" - when you try it now, you get the correct result.
Learning another language is anyway a good idea. It gives you the idea what a non-English speaker goes through to learn English.
Living in Hong Kong I often talk to Chinese about them speaking English. Many are worried that they make mistakes when they talk in English to foreigners - especially native speakers (from e.g. UK, US, Australia, etc).
So then I usually tell them not to worry, for the simple reason that they themselves are already much better with their languages than the English speaker. They are Chinese, speaking often not only Cantonese but also Mandarin, and of course English. These native English foreigners usually speak only English. So even if their English is not perfect, it is surely way better than the Chinese of that foreigner. So that foreigner should be happy that they bothered to learn English - they didn't bother to learn another language.
The name brings back sweet memories to the first useful translation service on the web: babelfish.altavista.com, launched almost 15 years ago. The domain still works, but the fish has been gobbled up by Microsoft and it's redirecting to Microsoft's translation service.
Of course Digital also got their name from Douglas Adams' masterpiece.
When accusing someone of breaking a contract, in how far are you yourself still bound by the terms of that contract?
If you buy say a mobile phone plan, and they overcharge/miscalculate/whatever: that's not necessarily a breach of that contract. The exact pricing terms are usually separate, if only so they can be changed without having to change the service contract itself. Yet if they say cancel your service without sufficient notice or your agreement, that'd be a direct breach of contract.