I think you're assuming that the majority of consumers care whether a given musician is considered art, or are even capable of telling the difference.
Artists make art that they think is good. Fame/Success/Money-seekers make a product that will satisfy the desires of a large number of people. Do you really think good art will ever replace commercial art? Good art by its very nature challenges people, and most people don't want to be challenged. They want to go out and dance and party and get laid. And that is, not surprisingly, what most of the Top 40 are about.
I would argue that people will be upset if pointless, fun, mind-numbing, easy to listen to music dies in favor serious, artistic music. But we won't ever find out, because the market will always favor what's popular over what's good. If the labels die, the populist musicians will rise to prominence through a different venue and the true artists will still only be listened to by that small segment of the population that cares about artistic music.
I don't give a shit. If the record labels die I'll join the chorus singing "Hooray, the labels are dead." I'm saying it's not going to happen.
Everyone seems to think that if we just get right combination of technology and business saavy then a company like TuneCore can kill the record labels and usher in a new era of creative freedom. But guess what: people WANT to be told what to like. The 98% of the population that listens to music in their car, at work and in the gym doesn't have time to listen to 99 crappy indie albums to find the one they actually like. And even if they did have the time many wouldn't want to. And even then most people just want to listen to what people like them are listening to so others will think they are cool.
Certainly if recommender technologies keep getting better it will help, but they're not perfect now, and it will be a while before we can go completely without a middleman.
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales
I don't think that's true. People want more than to break even on the cost of a CD, they want fame and success. If you want your song played on the radio or a music video on MTV, you still need to go through a major label.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. It's a pretty strong financial argument against the labels, but some people want to be famous, too.
Middle class and wealthy people bought homes they couldn't afford, too, which contributed just as much.
I've never understood blaming this whole thing on "the poor" when it seems pretty clear that everyone in every financial position was suffering from collective delusions about the health of the housing market.
It is also intellectually dishonest to assert that the fact that the analogy between copyright infringement and shoplifting is imperfect proves that copyright infringement - morally - is not theft.
There is room for debate on this matter, but it is not a stretch to define theft as "taking something without paying for it that the creator intended to sell", or something along those lines. The digital age is requiring us all to redefine certain things, particularly the idea of property. You're asking me to reexamine my definition of "ownership", but you can't be bothered to reexamine your definition of "theft"? That seems like a double-standard to me.
I don't disagree with you per se, but what would be your reaction if your consulting dream team came up with a workflow that isn't what you were envisioning? Will you try to learn it or simply post on Slashdot that it's a disaster?
In your scenario, steps 2-4 could be eliminated and the rest simplified if you typed in the H&P at the point of care. However, I once had a doctor who hated the new system because his organization had eliminated dictation, and he was a slow typist. Now we've made you happy (in this particular instance anyway) and made my doctor unhappy.
There will always be users who don't like some aspect of the workflow. Vendors (or at least the one I used to work for) try their best to come up with ones that make the most number of users happy, but it's just not possible to please everyone.
First of all, the article is not a criticism of Obama, but merely claims that this particular initiative will not be successful. The author of the article even claims in a comment that he is generally an Obama supporter. Disagreeing with the author does not make you an "Obama apologist".
Secondly, the author says digital health records have a bad data model and provides "evidence" of this:
Incoherent database design isolates patient information from one department to the next and from one organization to the next. This wastes time and increases errors because medical personnel must enter patient information into a unique view of the system that corresponded to user identity and department - this prevents one medical professional from seeing patient information input by another medical professional.
Patient information is easily lost inside the electronic records system
Hard copy patient information becomes dissociated with the electronic record
etc.
This is not evidence, these are simply more claims. This is what he assumed happened based on his particular experience. All the things that happened to him could be just as easily explained by bad training, stubborn doctors who refuse to learn the system, or even a problem not even tangentially caused by IT, like a doctor not wanting to believe what a colleague he does not like decided, and saying, "Oh, I'll take your history again anyways".
The story is certainly tragic and scary, but the author seems to assume it is a systems problem because he comes from a systems background. He may be absolutely right, but he says nothing in the article that convinced me.
I typically don't agree with Parker and Stone's political nihilism, and I think this article is particularly despicable, but I do like their movies, particularly South Park. Before you write it off as propaganda, consider it in the context of when it came out in 1999, not when the war started in 2003.
In 1999, the first Gulf War has been over for almost 10 years, and was terrorism this kind of faraway thing no one thought much about. South Park has always had an underlying theme, especially in early episodes, about the absurdity of celebrity and how we worship the wrong people for the wrong reason. Take as an example Jesus vs. Santa, fighting over the true meaning of Christmas, and the kids at the end decide it's presents. Was it the second episode of the series when everyone gets excited over a visit from John Stamos's younger brother?
In the movie, Saddam Hussein was portrayed as more evil, more cunning, more maniacal and more feared than Satan himself. When someone says, "Satan and Saddam Hussein are coming!" everyone else says "SADDAM HUSSEIN!?!?!?" as if THAT'S what scares them, not the prospect of a literal hell on earth. I don't think this is meant to vilify Hussein in particular, but as a critique of the way we have irrational fears of distant people who we don't even know or understand.
I won't make this defense for some of their post-9/11 work (Bin Laden having a microscopic penis? Seriously?), but I don't think it's fair to call the South Park movie propaganda, although I certainly wouldn't endorse having shown the movie to Saddam Hussein over and over again.
OK, parents were once children themselves. You can't take a problem that's endemic to an entire culture, point 100 million fingers at 100 million parents and say, "All of society's problems are specifically YOUR FAULT".
Why are today's parents so bad? By/. logic, I suppose it's because their parents raised them badly. But how did the grandparents get so bad? Was it the great-grandparents? I could go on until be get back to the first animal that nurtured its young.
I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist. I don't claim to understand the causes and know the solutions to our problems. But, with this like with just about everything else, assuming that the cause is simple and easy to understand will not fix anything.
I'm nothing special, I've just been using computers and programming for a long time.
Yeah! Who are these losers, anyway, who hadn't figured out their whole life career paths by the time they were 7?
Assuming everything in your story is true, you don't sound like "nothing special" to me. I would argue that the average person is actually NOT smart enough write Visual Basic apps at 7 and start their own software company at the age of 22 (or whatever) and make it profitable in a month. I believe that modesty is a virtue, and I respect that you think of yourself as "average", you are clearly above average.
I agree that a lot of people our age have a feeling of entitlement and that our culture generally gives young people the idea that you can succeed without hard work. However, I would give some thought to the possibility that some people are not as successful as you because they are NOT AS SMART, not because they are lazy.
In that case, the plan is "Sports are way more lucrative than cartoons, so screw the nerds, we'll just pre-empt for Nascar." Futurama was the same logic, and I guarantee you no one at Fox feels bad about showing football at the expense of a sci-fi cartoon.
Like any good nerd, I prefer Futurama to football (and especially Nascar), but that doesn't put money in the bank for the network.
By my estimation, you did little wrong. Morally, I mean. I'm sure you broke the law. I would argue that Survivor's advertisers and hence its producers lost out by you not seeing their ads, but that's besides my point.
However, not everyone is as conscientious as you are. From 2000-2008 I downloaded and regularly listended to maybe $5000 worth of music (I know, much less than many) and spent maybe $200 on CDs/MP3s. Personally, I am not likely to pay for something that I already got for free, which is why I pretty much don't listen to music anymore.
I do not know any actual statistics on this, but there are people who out there who pirate things to get them free, not to just "preview" them.
Do you convict a hardware store owner of facilitating murder because he makes available axes and those axes can be used for committing murder? Exchange the worlds "hardware store" for "web site", "murder" for "copyright violation" and "axes" for "torrents" and you have the problem the Swedish prosecutor failed to deal with.
You're right that the prosecutor didn't adequately deal with this, but to be a more accurate analogy the "hardware store" would called Murder Weapon Central, they sell mostly axes, large knives, handguns and rat poison, and when people accuse them of facilitating murder they point to the one tiny section of the store that sells levels and tape measures and say, "Look, this proves we're really just a hardware store, look at all the non-murder related things we sell, plus, there are plenty of non-murder related uses for axes, large knives, handguns and rat poison!".
This doesn't make the prosecution any less off-base, but there's no doubt in my mind that TPB violates at least the spirit of copyright law, if not the letter.
I always thought that the republic we have now was a compromise between groups that wanted more power to go to individual states and ones that favored a stronger central government.
How many left wingnuts got mod points and confused "flamebait" with "uncomfortable truth" this morning?
Or they didn't confuse "partisan editorial" with "uncomfortable truth".
For every dubious right-wing blog making claims of foul play, I can show you a left-wing blog that has a point-by-point refutation of everything it's saying. Like this one.
In particular, if there were really precincts that had more votes than voters, then why did the Coleman campaign not make that part of the current trial (the main issue of which is improperly rejected absentee ballots, IIRC)?
There are multiple definitions for theory, here are two of them (from the Wiktionary): 1) An unproven conjecture, and 2) A coherent statement or set of statements that attempts to explain observed phenomena.
Proponents of intelligent design like to claim that scientists mean definition 1. But really we mean definition 2.
Do evolutionary biologists understand everything there is to know about evolution? Absolutely not. Not even close. Our definitions of it will continue to change as we learn more. However, it is a much more coherent explanation of the observed phenomena than ID. In fact, some biologists are even religious, preferring to focus on the mechanisms of evolution rather than nitpicking of why evolution came to happen.
It's like saying "Well his Nissan Maxima has leather seats and Bose stereo, mine doesn't - that's an artificial decision"...response "So is the price tag".
I get your point, but my point is that they're taking out functionality that was already there and then charging less for it. So to rephrase your analogy as I see the situation, it would be if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then at the dealership they stripped off the leather and replaced it with canvas (or whatever), and put in a crappy stereo using the excuse that only audiophiles really need nice stereos.
I don't mind paying extra to add extra features, but it seems silly to put in a artificial road block to make it seem like I'm getting more with the Home Premium Edition.
Starter Edition: A lightweight version for netbook computers, that will only be capable of running three applications concurrently.
Maybe someone can educate me here: are EeePCs and subnotebooks so underpowered that they can only run three programs at a time? It seems like a purely artificial limit repackaged as a "performance" feature.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're assuming that the majority of consumers care whether a given musician is considered art, or are even capable of telling the difference.
Artists make art that they think is good. Fame/Success/Money-seekers make a product that will satisfy the desires of a large number of people. Do you really think good art will ever replace commercial art? Good art by its very nature challenges people, and most people don't want to be challenged. They want to go out and dance and party and get laid. And that is, not surprisingly, what most of the Top 40 are about.
I would argue that people will be upset if pointless, fun, mind-numbing, easy to listen to music dies in favor serious, artistic music. But we won't ever find out, because the market will always favor what's popular over what's good. If the labels die, the populist musicians will rise to prominence through a different venue and the true artists will still only be listened to by that small segment of the population that cares about artistic music.
I don't give a shit. If the record labels die I'll join the chorus singing "Hooray, the labels are dead." I'm saying it's not going to happen.
Everyone seems to think that if we just get right combination of technology and business saavy then a company like TuneCore can kill the record labels and usher in a new era of creative freedom. But guess what: people WANT to be told what to like. The 98% of the population that listens to music in their car, at work and in the gym doesn't have time to listen to 99 crappy indie albums to find the one they actually like. And even if they did have the time many wouldn't want to. And even then most people just want to listen to what people like them are listening to so others will think they are cool.
Certainly if recommender technologies keep getting better it will help, but they're not perfect now, and it will be a while before we can go completely without a middleman.
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales
I don't think that's true. People want more than to break even on the cost of a CD, they want fame and success. If you want your song played on the radio or a music video on MTV, you still need to go through a major label.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. It's a pretty strong financial argument against the labels, but some people want to be famous, too.
Middle class and wealthy people bought homes they couldn't afford, too, which contributed just as much.
I've never understood blaming this whole thing on "the poor" when it seems pretty clear that everyone in every financial position was suffering from collective delusions about the health of the housing market.
It is also intellectually dishonest to assert that the fact that the analogy between copyright infringement and shoplifting is imperfect proves that copyright infringement - morally - is not theft.
There is room for debate on this matter, but it is not a stretch to define theft as "taking something without paying for it that the creator intended to sell", or something along those lines. The digital age is requiring us all to redefine certain things, particularly the idea of property. You're asking me to reexamine my definition of "ownership", but you can't be bothered to reexamine your definition of "theft"? That seems like a double-standard to me.
I don't disagree with you per se, but what would be your reaction if your consulting dream team came up with a workflow that isn't what you were envisioning? Will you try to learn it or simply post on Slashdot that it's a disaster?
In your scenario, steps 2-4 could be eliminated and the rest simplified if you typed in the H&P at the point of care. However, I once had a doctor who hated the new system because his organization had eliminated dictation, and he was a slow typist. Now we've made you happy (in this particular instance anyway) and made my doctor unhappy.
There will always be users who don't like some aspect of the workflow. Vendors (or at least the one I used to work for) try their best to come up with ones that make the most number of users happy, but it's just not possible to please everyone.
First of all, the article is not a criticism of Obama, but merely claims that this particular initiative will not be successful. The author of the article even claims in a comment that he is generally an Obama supporter. Disagreeing with the author does not make you an "Obama apologist".
Secondly, the author says digital health records have a bad data model and provides "evidence" of this:
Incoherent database design isolates patient information from one department to the next and from one organization to the next. This wastes time and increases errors because medical personnel must enter patient information into a unique view of the system that corresponded to user identity and department - this prevents one medical professional from seeing patient information input by another medical professional.
Patient information is easily lost inside the electronic records system
Hard copy patient information becomes dissociated with the electronic record
etc.
This is not evidence, these are simply more claims. This is what he assumed happened based on his particular experience. All the things that happened to him could be just as easily explained by bad training, stubborn doctors who refuse to learn the system, or even a problem not even tangentially caused by IT, like a doctor not wanting to believe what a colleague he does not like decided, and saying, "Oh, I'll take your history again anyways".
The story is certainly tragic and scary, but the author seems to assume it is a systems problem because he comes from a systems background. He may be absolutely right, but he says nothing in the article that convinced me.
I typically don't agree with Parker and Stone's political nihilism, and I think this article is particularly despicable, but I do like their movies, particularly South Park. Before you write it off as propaganda, consider it in the context of when it came out in 1999, not when the war started in 2003.
In 1999, the first Gulf War has been over for almost 10 years, and was terrorism this kind of faraway thing no one thought much about. South Park has always had an underlying theme, especially in early episodes, about the absurdity of celebrity and how we worship the wrong people for the wrong reason. Take as an example Jesus vs. Santa, fighting over the true meaning of Christmas, and the kids at the end decide it's presents. Was it the second episode of the series when everyone gets excited over a visit from John Stamos's younger brother?
In the movie, Saddam Hussein was portrayed as more evil, more cunning, more maniacal and more feared than Satan himself. When someone says, "Satan and Saddam Hussein are coming!" everyone else says "SADDAM HUSSEIN!?!?!?" as if THAT'S what scares them, not the prospect of a literal hell on earth. I don't think this is meant to vilify Hussein in particular, but as a critique of the way we have irrational fears of distant people who we don't even know or understand.
I won't make this defense for some of their post-9/11 work (Bin Laden having a microscopic penis? Seriously?), but I don't think it's fair to call the South Park movie propaganda, although I certainly wouldn't endorse having shown the movie to Saddam Hussein over and over again.
Lars Ulrich also has a degree in alchemy. He turns rock into gold records.
OK, parents were once children themselves. You can't take a problem that's endemic to an entire culture, point 100 million fingers at 100 million parents and say, "All of society's problems are specifically YOUR FAULT".
Why are today's parents so bad? By /. logic, I suppose it's because their parents raised them badly. But how did the grandparents get so bad? Was it the great-grandparents? I could go on until be get back to the first animal that nurtured its young.
I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist. I don't claim to understand the causes and know the solutions to our problems. But, with this like with just about everything else, assuming that the cause is simple and easy to understand will not fix anything.
And I ask--why the fuck can't they?
I'm nothing special, I've just been using computers and programming for a long time.
Yeah! Who are these losers, anyway, who hadn't figured out their whole life career paths by the time they were 7?
Assuming everything in your story is true, you don't sound like "nothing special" to me. I would argue that the average person is actually NOT smart enough write Visual Basic apps at 7 and start their own software company at the age of 22 (or whatever) and make it profitable in a month. I believe that modesty is a virtue, and I respect that you think of yourself as "average", you are clearly above average.
I agree that a lot of people our age have a feeling of entitlement and that our culture generally gives young people the idea that you can succeed without hard work. However, I would give some thought to the possibility that some people are not as successful as you because they are NOT AS SMART, not because they are lazy.
Yes! I'm glad I'm not the only one who has seen this. It hasn't happened to me in a long time, though. Are you sure it hasn't been fixed?
In that case, the plan is "Sports are way more lucrative than cartoons, so screw the nerds, we'll just pre-empt for Nascar." Futurama was the same logic, and I guarantee you no one at Fox feels bad about showing football at the expense of a sci-fi cartoon.
Like any good nerd, I prefer Futurama to football (and especially Nascar), but that doesn't put money in the bank for the network.
By my estimation, you did little wrong. Morally, I mean. I'm sure you broke the law. I would argue that Survivor's advertisers and hence its producers lost out by you not seeing their ads, but that's besides my point.
However, not everyone is as conscientious as you are. From 2000-2008 I downloaded and regularly listended to maybe $5000 worth of music (I know, much less than many) and spent maybe $200 on CDs/MP3s. Personally, I am not likely to pay for something that I already got for free, which is why I pretty much don't listen to music anymore.
I do not know any actual statistics on this, but there are people who out there who pirate things to get them free, not to just "preview" them.
Your whole post is nothing but Lexicotarian talking points anyway.
What?!?! I thought he was a robot! Dammit!
Do you convict a hardware store owner of facilitating murder because he makes available axes and those axes can be used for committing murder? Exchange the worlds "hardware store" for "web site", "murder" for "copyright violation" and "axes" for "torrents" and you have the problem the Swedish prosecutor failed to deal with.
You're right that the prosecutor didn't adequately deal with this, but to be a more accurate analogy the "hardware store" would called Murder Weapon Central, they sell mostly axes, large knives, handguns and rat poison, and when people accuse them of facilitating murder they point to the one tiny section of the store that sells levels and tape measures and say, "Look, this proves we're really just a hardware store, look at all the non-murder related things we sell, plus, there are plenty of non-murder related uses for axes, large knives, handguns and rat poison!".
This doesn't make the prosecution any less off-base, but there's no doubt in my mind that TPB violates at least the spirit of copyright law, if not the letter.
I always thought that the republic we have now was a compromise between groups that wanted more power to go to individual states and ones that favored a stronger central government.
How many left wingnuts got mod points and confused "flamebait" with "uncomfortable truth" this morning?
Or they didn't confuse "partisan editorial" with "uncomfortable truth".
For every dubious right-wing blog making claims of foul play, I can show you a left-wing blog that has a point-by-point refutation of everything it's saying. Like this one.
In particular, if there were really precincts that had more votes than voters, then why did the Coleman campaign not make that part of the current trial (the main issue of which is improperly rejected absentee ballots, IIRC)?
it is described as a theory.
There are multiple definitions for theory, here are two of them (from the Wiktionary): 1) An unproven conjecture, and 2) A coherent statement or set of statements that attempts to explain observed phenomena.
Proponents of intelligent design like to claim that scientists mean definition 1. But really we mean definition 2.
Do evolutionary biologists understand everything there is to know about evolution? Absolutely not. Not even close. Our definitions of it will continue to change as we learn more. However, it is a much more coherent explanation of the observed phenomena than ID. In fact, some biologists are even religious, preferring to focus on the mechanisms of evolution rather than nitpicking of why evolution came to happen.
You may be wrong and you may be right, but you can't deny that deliberately releasing mosquitoes into a crowd of people is pretty much a dick move.
As much as I hate to be a flaming troll, I have three words for this:
What
A
Douche
What's that, boss? My salary is being paid out of a Gates Foundation malaria research grant? Oops.
It's like saying "Well his Nissan Maxima has leather seats and Bose stereo, mine doesn't - that's an artificial decision"...response "So is the price tag".
I get your point, but my point is that they're taking out functionality that was already there and then charging less for it. So to rephrase your analogy as I see the situation, it would be if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then at the dealership they stripped off the leather and replaced it with canvas (or whatever), and put in a crappy stereo using the excuse that only audiophiles really need nice stereos.
I don't mind paying extra to add extra features, but it seems silly to put in a artificial road block to make it seem like I'm getting more with the Home Premium Edition.
Starter Edition: A lightweight version for netbook computers, that will only be capable of running three applications concurrently.
Maybe someone can educate me here: are EeePCs and subnotebooks so underpowered that they can only run three programs at a time? It seems like a purely artificial limit repackaged as a "performance" feature.
Except it is Russia, so it will be dueling balalaikas.