A friend of mine claimed to have helped test some of these in the field for the army. Basically it was a headset sort of thing mounted on the helmet and it was hooked up to a computer module on his back. It's main function was displaying tactical info that was downloaded from a satalite (kind of like the map overlay in Doom) but it could also be patched into a camera mounted on his gun (excellent for shooting around corners and such with minimal exposure). Pretty cool.
It's sitting on my desk. It's called a "computer". Soon I will be getting another one for my living room. The really great thing about these is that they can communicate with each other, so one can access the stuff that's stored on another through a technique called "networking". Check around your house, you may have one of these cool devices laying around as well...
I've been considering building up a second box to use as an entertainment system, but this sounds like it would do most of what I'd be looking for and a lot cheaper. If it's got ethernet (so I can access my ripped DVDs and MP3s) I'm there.
Linux has 4 big advantages over other embedded OS's:
1. Open source. I know it's fairly obvious and has been mentioned before, but it really is a pain in the ass to get the proprietary embedded OS folks to take your project seriously. Basically you have to take what they give you and like it. Often there are workarounds, but that's more engineering time, usually for hardware, to fix a fairly simple software problem.
2. Native developement. I haven't seen this mentioned by anyone else yet, but it is a definate advantage to be able to run the same OS on the system you write the code on as you are on the embedded system. It makes testing/debugging a lot easier.
3. Licensing fees. At my last job we used Phar Lap, a unix variant embedded OS. We had to purchase a license for every single processor that running Phar Lap. These licenses came in the form of sheets of little stickers that we had to put somewhere on each board that had a processor running Phar Lap. The stickers were made from a conductive material. What a pain in the ass. On the other hand you could buy one copy of an embedded linux, or built your own embedded linux and use it as many times as you want. If you want stickers you can print up as many "Powered by YOURCOMPANYHERE Linux" stickers as you want real cheap.
4. Support (or, do you know where your copy of windows 3.1 is?). How do support a legacy system that is running a proprietary closed source OS? Tis is a real problem for embedded systems as many of them need to be supported for 5, 10 years, or more. At the afore mentioned job we supported systems for 7 years and generally at that point one of the support techs would "retire", buy up any excess parts we had for that system, and we would refer any support inquiries to them and/or their consulting company. Finding replacement hardware was hard enough, even within the 7 year window, but try finding a copy of an OS that hasn't been sold for 5 or 10 years. Go ahead, try to buy a copy of windows 3.1, I dare you...
Anyway, I spent a couple months trying to sell our engineers on linux (versus a combo of NT controlling Phar Lap or VxWorks) and some of them seemed to be interested, but of course I got laid off because of the tech slump, so I don't know if it's actually going somewhere.
A reputation for honesty and high quality is the best PR you can get, but it takes a lot of patience and work. You need a sales person, and the more they know about what you do, the better.
As an example, the founder of my company (a small mechanical engineering house specializing in custom industrial automation) is our sales force. He has also worked on design, in the machine shop, as the general manager, and has spent 6 years building up a reputation for the company for quality, integrity, and personal attention. We have no advertising budget, no contact with journalists (that I know of), and we will have no trouble meeting our goal of $1.1M for this year (up from $630k last year) based almost entirely on word of mouth. Additionally, there is no shortage of financing available for expansion and retooling of our machine shop.
I guess my advice is, don't worry about it. If your product is good and the price is right, your customers will provide your PR freely, even enthusiastically. Probably the biggest mistake you can make is trying to grow too fast.
SuSE does use RPM, though I haven't used it yet so I can't really comment on it's ease of use. My point was that I quickly and painlessly had everything installed that I needed, namely internet access, office apps, and some games, and I didn't need to know any more about my computer than my mom does to do it. My mom doesn't do any application management. She hasn't changed a single thing on her computer since I set it up almost a year ago, and if/when she does the learning curve will be the same whether she's using windows or Linux.
The majority of home users want to be able to take a computer out of a box, plug it in, and start doing the stuff they bought a computer to do; writing papers, emailing Uncle Bob, surfing the internet, playing some games and maybe some mp3s. They rarely, if ever, add/remove/update applications and the more complete the origional install the less likely they are to try. This, I think, is the real advantage of a distribution like SuSE, it comes with almost everything you would ever want. In order to acheive similar functionality on a windows box you need to buy a whole lot of 3rd party software packages and install them all individually (let me point out again that this was unnecessary in my SuSE install) and/or get a preinstalled package(which all have problems of their own in my experience).
Anyway, this is the "typical user" I refer to when I say that Linux is ready for the desktop. Somebody who wants their computer to "just work", and avoids app management like the plague. In other words, 9 out of the last 10 people I built computers for...
Last night I installed SuSE 7.1 on my home computer, and it was one of the easiest things I've ever done on a computer. Everything was autodetected. M$ USB optical mouse? No problem, even detected the right version. GeForce2? No problem. DSL? I had to do a little manual setup, but I had to do a lot more in windows. In fact the only thing even slightly difficult that I had to do was custom partitioning to preserve my window install (for reasons explained below), and even that was really easy (although I have to admit that some of that was due to my own forsight during my most recent re-install of windows).
I am absolutely not an experienced Linux user. I've had a P-120 running SuSE 6.3 for about 6 months with no GUI. All I've done on it was write some "Hello, World" style C++ programs in vi and compiled them with gcc. However, even the miniscule Linux knowledge I have was totally unnecessary. I would feel totally comfortable handing the CD's to my mom and letting her install it on her own. I am a fairly experienced windows user (which I would NOT let my mom install herself) which leads me to my contrasting winME experience...
My company recently hired a new General Manager and purchased for him a new computer (I guess the P-75 we lovingly refered to as the "Tower of Power" just wasn't doing it for him), a Duron based Compaq with winME installed. As the closest thing to an IT department my small company has it fell on me to get it talking and sharing with the other machines on the network (6 win98 boxen, a network HP printer, and a linksys DSL router). No dice. I couldn't make it talk to anything, even after running the home networking diskette winME's network wizard told me I needed. Said Manager then took a crack at it (he's A+ certified, so he's not totally clueless) with no luck. We are currently in the process of installing win98SE, and it will probably eat up the rest of the day as we hunt down drivers and install the various software packages he needs.
In my opinion, if Linux isn't ready for the desktop, winME certainly isn't.
Let me also note that I have several fellow Linux-newbie friends who have recently installed 7.x versions of Red Hat and Mandrake, with similar success. All are experienced windows users (some I would even call experts) and all have been amazed at the ease of their Linux experience.
Now if I can get Counterstrike running on Linux I can ditch M$ for good...
The solution to this is economic, not military. The US government needs to revoke China's Most Favored Nation trade status (which should never have been granted in the first place because of China's gross disreguard for human rights, but that's a whole other rant). Don't even threaten them with it, just do it and tell them that we will not even consider renewing their MFN status for a number of months (or years if we really wanted to be hardassed about it) equal to the number of days they "detain" our people. This is the only real avenue of recourse we have against the Chinese. A military "solution" simply will not work, for the basic reason of population. China has 10 times the population of the US, a real propaganda machine, and an almost complete disregaurd for the lives of their people. Anyone who thinks we can beat that combination militarily is an idiot.
I certainly wouldn't use it for gaming myself, but he was asking about PC-104 and that's a board I have experience with. I have only used the TME5811 as a control module for a dedicated video system, with a couple of TME2111's doing the realtime stuff. I just figured it was a place to start if he was wanting to go with PC-104. As I said, you can get a sweet laptop for what a PC-104 solution would cost, and you'd get 2 to 3 times the performance.
You might want to check out Toronto Microelectronics at www.tme-inc.com. They make a lot of PC-104 and other alternative form factor stuff. The full version of their 5811 product has built in ethernet(10/100), scsi(80 pin), vga(and a couple others I'm not familiar with), ide(44 pin, so you'd have to use a notebook harddrive, unless you went scsi), 2 pc100 dimm slots(which I know will support 128MB each), and a socket-7 cpu up to 500MHz/100MHz FSB at a cost of around $1500. You would still need to get a sound module, which I would guess to be around $150. You could fit the whole thing inside a hollowed-out hardcover book, which would be pretty cool. Keyboard, mouse and display would be extra. i think i'd probably go for an lcd, i've seen some for about $1000. You might also look at their PC-in-a-box, which I think is about $3000 and is kinda like an industrial x86 version of the G4 cube. It would end up costing you about the same as a high end laptop. You'd get better performance spending that on a laptop, but there is always the coolness factor that has to be considered...
Actually, it's not about pornography, although many would have you beleive that is the case. It's about restricting access to information. It's about the fact that the law is unconstitutional, not because it is censorship (although that is certainly arguable) but because the censorship is being done by third partys (the companies producing the censorware that is required) who are unaccountable. If the government were to produce their own censorware package or if the companies who are doing it were to release their lists of censored sites for public scrutiny it would still be disagreeable, but would at least be legal. And I'm not just pulling this stuff out of my a$$, but rather paraphrasing the ruling of a federal court judge.
This is exactly what I was going to post. I live in an area where there are lots of activists who are quite fond of the boycott idea. The thing they fail to see is that not buying something is a hidden loss. A company has no reason to notice it unless they are doing random polling to see why people aren't buying their product. I've never heard of a company doing this, so I have to assume it doesn't happen. When you buy something and return it as defective, however, that is very visible to the company. It's coming directly out of their pocket.
I have to say that I do feel that if I were to make it big in music I would be entitled to the equivalent of winning the lottery. Certainly far more entitled than a lottery winner, given that I actually created something that is deemed to have value and my chances of making it were about the same as their chances of winning. However, it would be more appropriate to say that I feel entitled to whatever people are willing to pay me for my creation. That said, I think you have a distorted veiw of the music business.
First, even a big name artist is lucky to get 2% of what you pay for a CD. That works out to about $300k for an artist or group that sells 1M albums. Barely enough to pay off the loan the record company gave them to produce the album (contrary to popular beleif, the artist does have to pay for that).
So how do musicians make money? Touring and merchandise (assuming they were smart enough to retain their merchandising rights). Touring may not sound like hard work to someone who has never done it, but I assure you that it is. And considering that it means living in a bus (in most cases actually a van that's also full of equipment, but we're talking about big names here) for a year, I certainly think that is equivalent to working 200+ hours a month.
Merchandising is a different issue. You pay a graphic artist to design some t-shirts and stickers for you, you pay to have them made, and hopefully people buy them. In most cases this is the truest way to support an artist that you like.
Also, most bands have only one good album in them, and that album is the distillation of 5 to 10 years of songwriting. It's is the best they have ever writen, and probably the best they ever will. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders".
As far as Lars is concerned, I don't have a problem with him, and I think if you read the interveiw he gave/. a while back, you wouldn't either. All Lars wants is to have some control over how the music he creates is distributed. In fact, Metallica is one of the few bands smart enough to retain control of their music in their recording contract. The software equivalent would be if you decided to retain copyright to a program you wrote and allow a big company to distribute it rather than sell them the program outright or release it under some open source license. I doubt anyone but RMS would have a problem with a programmer doing that, and I certainly don't have a problem with a musician doing it.
There is no free lunch, and in none of the cases discussed here is there an expectation of one. Creating music is work, just like creating anything else, and the people who do it well should be paid. How much they get paid is a direct function of how many people like what they do. It's capitalism working the way it should, and the fact is that musicians get paid a lot less than you think they do. If you're going to take issue with celebrities making money, point your sights at big name actors.
don't bullshit me that it's not a few hours of work, because it is. Programming is the same thing. Sure it make take me years to improve my skills, but the chances of me ever getting paid $20,000,000 USD for one song/program are next to zero
Actually, it is more than a few hours of work. for every song that gets written, there are a hundred more that just never quite seem to work. It took you years to improve your programming skills, and it's taken me years to improve my musical skills (15 so far). Additionally, music is a much more expensive than programming, and musicians are far less likely to get paid than programmers. Also, a musician is totally exposing themselves to their audience. Hopefully not in the pornographic sense, but certainly in an emotional and spiritual sense. The audience can tell if you aren't and will quickly lose interest. That aspect is simply not present in programming and that's why this isn't a very good comparison.
Back to the getting paid thing, I would say that it is fairly likely that your programming skills will earn you over 1,000,000 USD over 15 to 20 years. My musical skills, on the other hand, have cost me roughly 15,000 USD over the last 15 years with absolutely no return at all. This is the case for the vast majority of musicians. If someone were to decide that one of my songs were worth 1,000,000 USD tommorrow, that would put me roughly on par with what you will most likely make in 15 years of programming. The problem, of course, is that while you get to keep your 1M USD, I have to pay 200k to the record company for producing the album, another 200k for equipment to tour in support of the album (not to mention the cost of having to spend a year away from my wife and daughter), and the rest is split up between the band members. My last band had 6 members, which means 100k each. 100k for 15 years of work. You call that a big payoff? You would be surprised how many big musicians have had to file bankrupcy at least once, some even at the peak of their success (TLC comes to mind, but I know there are many others). The honest truth is that the only people making money off of music are the big record companies.
I think what the RIAA is really afraid of is that musicians now have other channels through which to distrubute their music. It isn't really digital music that scares them, but their own impending irrelevence.
There are plenty of other reasons for not wanting to relocate to Salt Lake City (or Utah in general). There is, of course, the Mormans. I've had several Morman friends in my life, and most of them turned into complete assholes while they were on their mission. They seem to get worse in proportion to the number of other Mormans they come into regular contact with. Having visited SLC, I must say that the liquer laws are extremely annoying. Moreover they are indicative of a more general problem, which is a cavalier attitude towards denouncing and interfering with the lives and choices of non-mormans. Last, but certainly not least in my mind, is the extremely poor water quality. Nowhere else in the country (that I've been) is the water so nasty that after 12 hours of marathon driving you wish you hadn't taken that shower because now you feel even more gross than when you got out of the car.
My conclusion is that SLC is not a particularly nice place to visit, and I certainly wouldn't want to live there. In fact, about the only thing I can say in Utah's favor is that they post minimum speed limits on their highways.
Did the court reject the appeal, or did it hear the case and rule against the challengers? If it's the later, do the challengers intend to appeal again?
Have you never heard of "derivative works"? Nothing is created in a vaccuum. Every creation is inspired by something else. The return of ideas to the public domain is the payback to the society or culture that helped create those ideas.
I'm sure it's totally coincidence that this is also the age group most likely to be involved in "extracuricular activities" that cause memory loss. I seriously doubt it has anything to do with PDA's.
I don't want it to seem like I have something against nuclear scientists, I know a few and they are very smart people. I would feel a lot more comfortable with nuclear power if the engineers and physicists were actually in control of it. As it is, politicians lie for a living and any confidence I may have had in business folks was squelched in my days as a math tutor. I've seen the kind of people that major in business, and I wouldn't trust most of them to run my coffee machine.
I don't disagree with anything you said, however I strongly beleive that nuclear power is not the best solution available. Solar and wind generators have the ability to make every rooftop a small power plant. The main reason these technologies have not been viable is that they require more surface area than traditional power plants. This can be bypassed by using rooftops, which are normally unused space anyway. Solar power is not without it's limitations, but most of these could be overcome through widespread deployment. The main advantage is that it would produce the most power during the highest usage periods, generally between noon and 5pm.
I agree that there are several nuclear plants within 5 to 15 miles of populated areas, however, how many more proposed sites have been shot down because of their proximity to populated areas? What Three Mile Island showed the general populace is that even well designed plants fail, and that's a very frightening proposition.
I agree that nuclear power doesn't have to be dangerous, and when it is controlled by engineers and physicists, rather than politicians and business men, I'll stop opposing it. It isn't nuclear power itself that really concerns me, but the nuclear power industry.
Nuclear power is NOT clean, safe, or cheap. These illusions are carefully crafted and maintained by the nuclear power industry and the Department of Energy.
Nuclear power plants seem clean because there aren't any smokestacks billowing pollution into the air, but the polution they produce is invisible to the human eye. Why do you think nuclear power plants can't be built near populated areas? Additionally, the process of mining the fuel is exremely poluting, and there is no way to dispose of the spent fuel rods, which are still extremely radioactive. Currently they are generally stored in on-site storage tanks awaiting the day that the government sets up a central storage area and takes over the responsibility. This brings us to safety.
Nuclear power plants could be safe if they were properly maintained, but of course they aren't. Why? Because maintainance costs money, and power generation costs money. The corporations that own these power plants would rather buy DOE officials than properly maintain the deisel generators which provide backup power for the cooling system. In fact, the lack of mainainance at nuclear power plants was one of the few valid y2k fears. Nuclear power plants are required to power their cooling systems (which are the only thing preventing meltdown) from the grid. In the event of grid failure there are the afor mentioned backup generators. Unfortunately there is sufficient evidence for concern that even the redundant backup systems would fail. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island provide very convincing examples of what happens when systems fail at a nuclear power plant. So much for safety, what about how cheap it is?
Guess what? It isn't! Nuclear power plants are subsidized by the Departments of Energy and Defence. Since this cost is hidden from the consumer, nuclear power appears cheap. Our tax dollars at work!
Of course, I don't expect you to take my word for it. Feel free to verify anything I've said hear. This link should get you started.
I don't want it to seem like I have something against nuclear scientists, I know a few and they are very smart people. I would feel a lot more comfortable with nuclear power if the engineers and physicists were actually in control of it. As it is, politicians lie for a living and any confidence I may have had in business folks was squelched in my days as a math tutor. I've seen the kind of people that major in business, and I wouldn't trust most of them to run my coffee machine.
It would be awfully inflamatory of me to shoot down your solution without presenting one of my own, so here you go. I won't argue that deregulation has caused a lot of problems, but it also encompasses the solution. Thanks to deregulation anyone can produce power and feed it back into the grid. For a few thousand dollars you can buy a few solar panels and a phase matching inverter. Wind generators and micro-hydroelectric generators can also be had fairly cheap. Last time I went to San Jose I saw lots of sun and wind not being used. If all these companies that are suffering under the yolk of rolling blackouts put up roughly one of thier CEOs weekly salaries for equipment and installation, the problem would be solved. If Reagan hadn't done away with the tax credits for doing so, they probably would.
Again, I encourage you to check it out for yourself. Try this link for starters.
My wife didn't think of me "in that way". Obviously that changed. I got my opening when the guy she was taking swing dance lessons with bailed on her. Opportunities will always present themselves, the key is for you to step up and take advantage of them.
My advice in general is flirt with the women you are interested in in a joking manner. If they respond then all is well, and if they don't then all is still well because you were just kidding around anyway. This requires three things from you in order to be effective: that you be looking for something more than sex, that you not be sure yourself whether you are kidding or not until you have to be, and cajones the size of Buicks.
In my experience they will respond at least 9 times out of 10.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been considering building up a second box to use as an entertainment system, but this sounds like it would do most of what I'd be looking for and a lot cheaper. If it's got ethernet (so I can access my ripped DVDs and MP3s) I'm there.
1. Open source. I know it's fairly obvious and has been mentioned before, but it really is a pain in the ass to get the proprietary embedded OS folks to take your project seriously. Basically you have to take what they give you and like it. Often there are workarounds, but that's more engineering time, usually for hardware, to fix a fairly simple software problem.
2. Native developement. I haven't seen this mentioned by anyone else yet, but it is a definate advantage to be able to run the same OS on the system you write the code on as you are on the embedded system. It makes testing/debugging a lot easier.
3. Licensing fees. At my last job we used Phar Lap, a unix variant embedded OS. We had to purchase a license for every single processor that running Phar Lap. These licenses came in the form of sheets of little stickers that we had to put somewhere on each board that had a processor running Phar Lap. The stickers were made from a conductive material. What a pain in the ass. On the other hand you could buy one copy of an embedded linux, or built your own embedded linux and use it as many times as you want. If you want stickers you can print up as many "Powered by YOURCOMPANYHERE Linux" stickers as you want real cheap.
4. Support (or, do you know where your copy of windows 3.1 is?). How do support a legacy system that is running a proprietary closed source OS? Tis is a real problem for embedded systems as many of them need to be supported for 5, 10 years, or more. At the afore mentioned job we supported systems for 7 years and generally at that point one of the support techs would "retire", buy up any excess parts we had for that system, and we would refer any support inquiries to them and/or their consulting company. Finding replacement hardware was hard enough, even within the 7 year window, but try finding a copy of an OS that hasn't been sold for 5 or 10 years. Go ahead, try to buy a copy of windows 3.1, I dare you...
Anyway, I spent a couple months trying to sell our engineers on linux (versus a combo of NT controlling Phar Lap or VxWorks) and some of them seemed to be interested, but of course I got laid off because of the tech slump, so I don't know if it's actually going somewhere.
As an example, the founder of my company (a small mechanical engineering house specializing in custom industrial automation) is our sales force. He has also worked on design, in the machine shop, as the general manager, and has spent 6 years building up a reputation for the company for quality, integrity, and personal attention. We have no advertising budget, no contact with journalists (that I know of), and we will have no trouble meeting our goal of $1.1M for this year (up from $630k last year) based almost entirely on word of mouth. Additionally, there is no shortage of financing available for expansion and retooling of our machine shop.
I guess my advice is, don't worry about it. If your product is good and the price is right, your customers will provide your PR freely, even enthusiastically. Probably the biggest mistake you can make is trying to grow too fast.
The majority of home users want to be able to take a computer out of a box, plug it in, and start doing the stuff they bought a computer to do; writing papers, emailing Uncle Bob, surfing the internet, playing some games and maybe some mp3s. They rarely, if ever, add/remove/update applications and the more complete the origional install the less likely they are to try. This, I think, is the real advantage of a distribution like SuSE, it comes with almost everything you would ever want. In order to acheive similar functionality on a windows box you need to buy a whole lot of 3rd party software packages and install them all individually (let me point out again that this was unnecessary in my SuSE install) and/or get a preinstalled package(which all have problems of their own in my experience).
Anyway, this is the "typical user" I refer to when I say that Linux is ready for the desktop. Somebody who wants their computer to "just work", and avoids app management like the plague. In other words, 9 out of the last 10 people I built computers for...
I am absolutely not an experienced Linux user. I've had a P-120 running SuSE 6.3 for about 6 months with no GUI. All I've done on it was write some "Hello, World" style C++ programs in vi and compiled them with gcc. However, even the miniscule Linux knowledge I have was totally unnecessary. I would feel totally comfortable handing the CD's to my mom and letting her install it on her own. I am a fairly experienced windows user (which I would NOT let my mom install herself) which leads me to my contrasting winME experience...
My company recently hired a new General Manager and purchased for him a new computer (I guess the P-75 we lovingly refered to as the "Tower of Power" just wasn't doing it for him), a Duron based Compaq with winME installed. As the closest thing to an IT department my small company has it fell on me to get it talking and sharing with the other machines on the network (6 win98 boxen, a network HP printer, and a linksys DSL router). No dice. I couldn't make it talk to anything, even after running the home networking diskette winME's network wizard told me I needed. Said Manager then took a crack at it (he's A+ certified, so he's not totally clueless) with no luck. We are currently in the process of installing win98SE, and it will probably eat up the rest of the day as we hunt down drivers and install the various software packages he needs.
In my opinion, if Linux isn't ready for the desktop, winME certainly isn't.
Let me also note that I have several fellow Linux-newbie friends who have recently installed 7.x versions of Red Hat and Mandrake, with similar success. All are experienced windows users (some I would even call experts) and all have been amazed at the ease of their Linux experience.
Now if I can get Counterstrike running on Linux I can ditch M$ for good...
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
First, even a big name artist is lucky to get 2% of what you pay for a CD. That works out to about $300k for an artist or group that sells 1M albums. Barely enough to pay off the loan the record company gave them to produce the album (contrary to popular beleif, the artist does have to pay for that).
So how do musicians make money? Touring and merchandise (assuming they were smart enough to retain their merchandising rights). Touring may not sound like hard work to someone who has never done it, but I assure you that it is. And considering that it means living in a bus (in most cases actually a van that's also full of equipment, but we're talking about big names here) for a year, I certainly think that is equivalent to working 200+ hours a month.
Merchandising is a different issue. You pay a graphic artist to design some t-shirts and stickers for you, you pay to have them made, and hopefully people buy them. In most cases this is the truest way to support an artist that you like.
Also, most bands have only one good album in them, and that album is the distillation of 5 to 10 years of songwriting. It's is the best they have ever writen, and probably the best they ever will. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders".
As far as Lars is concerned, I don't have a problem with him, and I think if you read the interveiw he gave /. a while back, you wouldn't either. All Lars wants is to have some control over how the music he creates is distributed. In fact, Metallica is one of the few bands smart enough to retain control of their music in their recording contract. The software equivalent would be if you decided to retain copyright to a program you wrote and allow a big company to distribute it rather than sell them the program outright or release it under some open source license. I doubt anyone but RMS would have a problem with a programmer doing that, and I certainly don't have a problem with a musician doing it.
There is no free lunch, and in none of the cases discussed here is there an expectation of one. Creating music is work, just like creating anything else, and the people who do it well should be paid. How much they get paid is a direct function of how many people like what they do. It's capitalism working the way it should, and the fact is that musicians get paid a lot less than you think they do. If you're going to take issue with celebrities making money, point your sights at big name actors.
Actually, it is more than a few hours of work. for every song that gets written, there are a hundred more that just never quite seem to work. It took you years to improve your programming skills, and it's taken me years to improve my musical skills (15 so far). Additionally, music is a much more expensive than programming, and musicians are far less likely to get paid than programmers. Also, a musician is totally exposing themselves to their audience. Hopefully not in the pornographic sense, but certainly in an emotional and spiritual sense. The audience can tell if you aren't and will quickly lose interest. That aspect is simply not present in programming and that's why this isn't a very good comparison.
Back to the getting paid thing, I would say that it is fairly likely that your programming skills will earn you over 1,000,000 USD over 15 to 20 years. My musical skills, on the other hand, have cost me roughly 15,000 USD over the last 15 years with absolutely no return at all. This is the case for the vast majority of musicians. If someone were to decide that one of my songs were worth 1,000,000 USD tommorrow, that would put me roughly on par with what you will most likely make in 15 years of programming. The problem, of course, is that while you get to keep your 1M USD, I have to pay 200k to the record company for producing the album, another 200k for equipment to tour in support of the album (not to mention the cost of having to spend a year away from my wife and daughter), and the rest is split up between the band members. My last band had 6 members, which means 100k each. 100k for 15 years of work. You call that a big payoff? You would be surprised how many big musicians have had to file bankrupcy at least once, some even at the peak of their success (TLC comes to mind, but I know there are many others). The honest truth is that the only people making money off of music are the big record companies.
I think what the RIAA is really afraid of is that musicians now have other channels through which to distrubute their music. It isn't really digital music that scares them, but their own impending irrelevence.
My conclusion is that SLC is not a particularly nice place to visit, and I certainly wouldn't want to live there. In fact, about the only thing I can say in Utah's favor is that they post minimum speed limits on their highways.
Boy was I wrong!
As I said:
I don't want it to seem like I have something against nuclear scientists, I know a few and they are very smart people. I would feel a lot more comfortable with nuclear power if the engineers and physicists were actually in control of it. As it is, politicians lie for a living and any confidence I may have had in business folks was squelched in my days as a math tutor. I've seen the kind of people that major in business, and I wouldn't trust most of them to run my coffee machine.
I don't disagree with anything you said, however I strongly beleive that nuclear power is not the best solution available. Solar and wind generators have the ability to make every rooftop a small power plant. The main reason these technologies have not been viable is that they require more surface area than traditional power plants. This can be bypassed by using rooftops, which are normally unused space anyway. Solar power is not without it's limitations, but most of these could be overcome through widespread deployment. The main advantage is that it would produce the most power during the highest usage periods, generally between noon and 5pm.
I agree that there are several nuclear plants within 5 to 15 miles of populated areas, however, how many more proposed sites have been shot down because of their proximity to populated areas? What Three Mile Island showed the general populace is that even well designed plants fail, and that's a very frightening proposition.
I agree that nuclear power doesn't have to be dangerous, and when it is controlled by engineers and physicists, rather than politicians and business men, I'll stop opposing it. It isn't nuclear power itself that really concerns me, but the nuclear power industry.
Nuclear power is NOT clean, safe, or cheap. These illusions are carefully crafted and maintained by the nuclear power industry and the Department of Energy.
Nuclear power plants seem clean because there aren't any smokestacks billowing pollution into the air, but the polution they produce is invisible to the human eye. Why do you think nuclear power plants can't be built near populated areas? Additionally, the process of mining the fuel is exremely poluting, and there is no way to dispose of the spent fuel rods, which are still extremely radioactive. Currently they are generally stored in on-site storage tanks awaiting the day that the government sets up a central storage area and takes over the responsibility. This brings us to safety.
Nuclear power plants could be safe if they were properly maintained, but of course they aren't. Why? Because maintainance costs money, and power generation costs money. The corporations that own these power plants would rather buy DOE officials than properly maintain the deisel generators which provide backup power for the cooling system. In fact, the lack of mainainance at nuclear power plants was one of the few valid y2k fears. Nuclear power plants are required to power their cooling systems (which are the only thing preventing meltdown) from the grid. In the event of grid failure there are the afor mentioned backup generators. Unfortunately there is sufficient evidence for concern that even the redundant backup systems would fail. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island provide very convincing examples of what happens when systems fail at a nuclear power plant. So much for safety, what about how cheap it is?
Guess what? It isn't! Nuclear power plants are subsidized by the Departments of Energy and Defence. Since this cost is hidden from the consumer, nuclear power appears cheap. Our tax dollars at work!
Of course, I don't expect you to take my word for it. Feel free to verify anything I've said hear. This link should get you started.
I don't want it to seem like I have something against nuclear scientists, I know a few and they are very smart people. I would feel a lot more comfortable with nuclear power if the engineers and physicists were actually in control of it. As it is, politicians lie for a living and any confidence I may have had in business folks was squelched in my days as a math tutor. I've seen the kind of people that major in business, and I wouldn't trust most of them to run my coffee machine.
It would be awfully inflamatory of me to shoot down your solution without presenting one of my own, so here you go. I won't argue that deregulation has caused a lot of problems, but it also encompasses the solution. Thanks to deregulation anyone can produce power and feed it back into the grid. For a few thousand dollars you can buy a few solar panels and a phase matching inverter. Wind generators and micro-hydroelectric generators can also be had fairly cheap. Last time I went to San Jose I saw lots of sun and wind not being used. If all these companies that are suffering under the yolk of rolling blackouts put up roughly one of thier CEOs weekly salaries for equipment and installation, the problem would be solved. If Reagan hadn't done away with the tax credits for doing so, they probably would.
Again, I encourage you to check it out for yourself. Try this link for starters.
My advice in general is flirt with the women you are interested in in a joking manner. If they respond then all is well, and if they don't then all is still well because you were just kidding around anyway. This requires three things from you in order to be effective: that you be looking for something more than sex, that you not be sure yourself whether you are kidding or not until you have to be, and cajones the size of Buicks.
In my experience they will respond at least 9 times out of 10.