>> ..selling albums is not the optimal way for artists to receive compensation...
Says who? In any case, how an artist wants to make money is a matter for that artist, and no one else.
>> Pre-recorded albums should be free promotional material and a service to the fans.
Self-serving bunk. People can try to sell whatever they want. Your use of "should" implies a moral judgment at work. Morality has nothing to do with this. As my mother used to say, people in hell want ice water. And you just want free CD's.
>>...artists often forget that once the unnecessary middlemen are cut out of the picture, there is plenty of money to be made in concerts alone.
First, it's a safe bet that every entertainer knows there's money in selling tickets to a performance. Second, what's with that "unnecessary middleman" stuff? You want someone to be a fullt-time entertainer and fly their own planes, do their own accounting, arrange their own bookings, run their own payroll, act as their own lawyers, write their own contracts, prepare their own taxes, etc.?? Without middlemen, those bands you keep referring to as "artists" would never break out of the college bar circuits.
In general, just one more immature post trying to dress simple greed in bogus moralistic rationalizations.
You've heard this before, but here goes: Losing weght and getting in shape are two sides of the same coin. If you expend fewer calories than you eat, the extra calories stay around as fat. That's how you got the belly you mentioned. Be aware that carrying around extra abdominal poundage is especially risky, heart-wise. It also is a risk factor for colon and other kinds of cancer.
Often, taking time to look for the "best" way to get in shape and lose weight is just another excuse to avoid doing either.
So, don't eat as much (cut out the beer) and move your body more. Carve an hour out and go for a walk. Don't stroll -- walk fast enough to work up a sweat; if you aren't breathing faster and deeper half-way through, you aren't walking fast enough. Get a good pair of shoes; they make a difference.
(Of course, if you've been a couch potato for years and/or have hypertension, heart murmur, or any other condition, talk this over with your doctor. He/she will be happy about the diet, but you want to make sure that the exercising doesn't put you at risk.)
Here's my experience, following surgery 7 months ago: I take a 60-75 minute walk about 8 days out of 10 (I don't go when the weather's bad or when I can tell my muscles need a day off.) My pace is a tad over a 15-minute mile. Breakfast is usually a half-cup of oatmeal, cooked, sometimes topped with half of a banana, plus tea and juice. (Gave up coffee last year.) Lunch is a homemade fruit smoothie: a banana, some frozen peaches, frozen berries, a couple tablespoons of wheat germ, soy protein powder, and about a cup of soy or nonfat diary milk. Whirl in blender until smooth. Dinner is often something like ratatouille, homemade soup -- heavy on green veggies --, etc., with some whole grain bread, and a glass or two of wine. For variety, I've learned to make things like pizza margherita ( that's simply mozzarella, tomato sauce and fresh basil, or pizza with tuna, veggies and lots of garlic. No fast food; no ice cream, no pastries,no candy, no carbonated drinks, no junk food; no salty/fatty snacks. No butter. No margarine. The only cooking oil I use is olive oil.
That diet is probably more than most can put up with, but it works. I've lost at least 30 pounds, plus the belly. I am not hungry between meals or before bedtime. I sleep better, and I don't feel like cold death in the morning.
Don't play games with yourself. It's really easy to spend an hour reading Slashdot instead of taking that walk. But, ask yourself, is an hour's worth of Slashdot worth dieing earlier than necessary?
The right time for an organization to think about switching operating systems is when their current applications need to be replaced. Decide what apps are needed, and then get the OS that supports those apps.
Changing an organizatin's desktop computing platform is invariably an expensive, lengthy and unpopular process. Switching to an OS simply for ideological reasons (like, "supporting" Linux) is bad business.
>> The entire point of putting a distro of Linux on the shelf is public awareness marketing... down the road those consumers come back when they need servers....
I disagree. The purpose of marketing shrinkwrapped Linux is to make money, not to act as a loss leader for server sales. How many people wandering around the aisles of CompUSA are going to pick up the phone and start ording Red Hat servers?
RedHat seems to be ready to pull out of the shrinkwrap business and to stop paying RedHat developers to work on Linux apps. This is exactly what they would do if marketing shrink-wrapped Linux is a money-losing proposition.
>> Once all the "voices" in society are all filtered through the government and big business...
I don't understand this obsession with equating the "media" with "the voice of the people".
First, there is no "people". We're just 300 million indviduals. Most of the time when someone starts emoting about "the people", he means "the people who agree with me".
Second, a media outlet reflects the views of its owners and the people who create the content. That's the way it has always been and that's the way it will remain. The "media" has never impartially reflected the views of every citizen, because that's impossible.
Third, I don't have much use for ClearChannel, but I wouldn't say business has "hijacked" airwaves owned by the public. Airwaves are uselss without a studio and a transmitter. Someone will always own those, What's the difference between a station owned by a business and a stationed owned by soething or someone else? Nothing, as far as I can see. The salient point is that they're owned.
I know this is about satellite TV, but....None of this would be happening if people would just stick to ASCII and stop trying to treat the Internet as if it was some kind of big, distributed boombox.
Don't play into the hands of people who think the web is a broadcasting medium.
Nope. Over the top, perhaps, but bringing suit, or lots of 'em, is not illegal.
Re:OK, Filesharing Is Counterfeiting
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
Shoplifting, counterfeiting, copyight infringement are all specific kinds of criminal behavior that can be subsumed under the broader label of theft.
Pro-filetheft advocates like to pretend that the only thing that can be stolen is a physical entity. But, that is just deliberate wordsmithing by people who need to rationalize their illegal behavior.
Dunno about surveys, but it is commonly accepted that IE has more than 90 percent of the browser market.
If Netscape/Mozilla really do have enough "advanced" features to give people the incentive to use them, why haven;t we seen a storm of people siwtching? Because, as you say, 9 of 10 people don't know aout Netscape/Mozilla. Why? Well, when is the last time you saw an advertisement for Netscape or Mozilla? When was the last time you saw a store giving away Mozilla CD's?
I use Mozilla, not IE. But Netscape and Mozilla don't offer enough advantages over IE to compell the majority of users to switch. Even if it did, Netscape and Mozilla do little, if anything, to advertise their products.
Possible, but very unlikely. Any goodies that an alternative browser might offer can be adopted by Microsoft. If it is a goodie that won't work on Windows, why would they care?
Microsoft is moving on from peddling IE as a separate application because people take browsing capability for granted. Unless they're ideologically driven, they will need a strong incentive to take the risk of installing a separate program just to do something they can already do.
That won't happen unless Microsoft drops IE and starts shipping Mozilla.
OK, Filesharing Is Counterfeiting
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
Shoplifting, copyright infringement, counterfeiting...they're all forms of theft to me.
But, what's the difference between making illegal copies of a dollar bill and making illegal copies of a CD? None that I can see. So, let's call filesharing counterfeiting. Happy now?
Re:So, If I Don't Like It, I Can Steal It?
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
First, you have a moral obligation to obey the law, even if you disagree with it.
We see a lot of juvenile attempts to justify theft by pointing at the RIAA's less-than-subtle behavior. But,the RIAA's behavior is not relevant to this discussion. They could be killing babies, but it still wouldn't change the true nature of filesharing: it is theft.
You can't dress up greed for free music in some kind of civil disobediance garb. Civil disobediance entails people deliberately violating a law so they can provoke arrest in order to challenge the constitutionality of that law in court. So, unless so-called filesharers are willing to find lawyers, get arrested, go to trial, and, if necessary, appeal all the way the Supreme Court, I am inclined to think they're still unprincipled thieves.
>>...CD-R's labeled for Music actually have a few cents of the price going to the recording industry...
I don't see that has much to do with copyright and fair use. It has everything to do with the record industry's ability and willingness to play hardball politics, something that can't be said for the other side in this argument.
Re:So, If I Don't Like It, I Can Steal It?
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
In my book, "Lost IP sales" due to illegal copying counts as theft, even if it is potential earnings.
However, this is largely a semantic gambit. Copyright infringement is a crime, whatever we might call it otherwise. I've yet to see an argument justifying it as legitimate that doesn't sound like something dreamed up in a debate club of 12-year olds.
Re:So, If I Don't Like It, I Can Steal It?
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
We're not talking about reading, and you know it. We're talking about stealing by making and distributing illegal copies. Some folks go to absurd lengths to rationalize their own theft via filesharing, like arguing that the CD's they want have only 2 tracks worth listening to. How you can get from "I don't like 80 percent of this CD" to "That gives me the right to steal the other 20 percent" is beyond me. If that is true, then I have a right to walk out of those Amsterdam museums with Rembrandts under my arm simply because I don't like 80 percent of his work.
So, If I Don;t Like It, I Can Steal It?
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
Oh, good. That means it is OK to steal anything I don't like, I don't much like Rembrandt. Guess I'll fly to Amsterdam and starting letting those nice Dutch museums "share" with me.
Stop whining about CD's with "filler". ("Yes, judge. I stole all that stuff, but because I think its filler, I'm innocent.") . Try better musicians; no one is forcing you to buy anything. Better yet, just wait to grow up and you'll have better things to do with your money than blowing it on music with a 5-minute lifespan,
Re:Decent book review
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
No, the equivalent is copying the book and standing on a street corner giving it away to anyone who asks.
Shoplifting is theft. Napster was based on theft. If you took all the CD's you own, bought a CD duplicator, and gave away exact copies of CD's to a global audience of complete strangers, that would be theft,too, of the CD publisher's, maker's and retailers's money.
Or, it's rather like buying legitimate tickets to the Movie-of-the Week, printing perfect counterfeit tickets, and giving them away free outside the theater.
Doing the same thing using the Internet as the delivery vehicle doesn't change a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Why do people assume that you need a RAD tool for application development...
Because it's faster than coding everything from scratch and because someone might actually have an affinity for the language.
>> ..selling albums is not the optimal way for artists to receive compensation...
...artists often forget that once the unnecessary middlemen are cut out of the picture, there is plenty of money to be made in concerts alone.
Says who? In any case, how an artist wants to make money is a matter for that artist, and no one else.
>> Pre-recorded albums should be free promotional material and a service to the fans.
Self-serving bunk. People can try to sell whatever they want. Your use of "should" implies a moral judgment at work. Morality has nothing to do with this. As my mother used to say, people in hell want ice water. And you just want free CD's.
>>
First, it's a safe bet that every entertainer knows there's money in selling tickets to a performance. Second, what's with that "unnecessary middleman" stuff? You want someone to be a fullt-time entertainer and fly their own planes, do their own accounting, arrange their own bookings, run their own payroll, act as their own lawyers, write their own contracts, prepare their own taxes, etc.?? Without middlemen, those bands you keep referring to as "artists" would never break out of the college bar circuits.
In general, just one more immature post trying to dress simple greed in bogus moralistic rationalizations.
Want a secret? Here it is: There is no secret.
You've heard this before, but here goes: Losing weght and getting in shape are two sides of the same coin. If you expend fewer calories than you eat, the extra calories stay around as fat. That's how you got the belly you mentioned. Be aware that carrying around extra abdominal poundage is especially risky, heart-wise. It also is a risk factor for colon and other kinds of cancer.
Often, taking time to look for the "best" way to get in shape and lose weight is just another excuse to avoid doing either.
So, don't eat as much (cut out the beer) and move your body more. Carve an hour out and go for a walk. Don't stroll -- walk fast enough to work up a sweat; if you aren't breathing faster and deeper half-way through, you aren't walking fast enough. Get a good pair of shoes; they make a difference.
(Of course, if you've been a couch potato for years and/or have hypertension, heart murmur, or any other condition, talk this over with your doctor. He/she will be happy about the diet, but you want to make sure that the exercising doesn't put you at risk.)
Here's my experience, following surgery 7 months ago: I take a 60-75 minute walk about 8 days out of 10 (I don't go when the weather's bad or when I can tell my muscles need a day off.) My pace is a tad over a 15-minute mile. Breakfast is usually a half-cup of oatmeal, cooked, sometimes topped with half of a banana, plus tea and juice. (Gave up coffee last year.) Lunch is a homemade fruit smoothie: a banana, some frozen peaches, frozen berries, a couple tablespoons of wheat germ, soy protein powder, and about a cup of soy or nonfat diary milk. Whirl in blender until smooth. Dinner is often something like ratatouille, homemade soup -- heavy on green veggies --, etc., with some whole grain bread, and a glass or two of wine. For variety, I've learned to make things like pizza margherita ( that's simply mozzarella, tomato sauce and fresh basil, or pizza with tuna, veggies and lots of garlic. No fast food; no ice cream, no pastries,no candy, no carbonated drinks, no junk food; no salty/fatty snacks. No butter. No margarine. The only cooking oil I use is olive oil.
That diet is probably more than most can put up with, but it works. I've lost at least 30 pounds, plus the belly. I am not hungry between meals or before bedtime. I sleep better, and I don't feel like cold death in the morning.
Don't play games with yourself. It's really easy to spend an hour reading Slashdot instead of taking that walk. But, ask yourself, is an hour's worth of Slashdot worth dieing earlier than necessary?
The right time for an organization to think about switching operating systems is when their current applications need to be replaced. Decide what apps are needed, and then get the OS that supports those apps.
Changing an organizatin's desktop computing platform is invariably an expensive, lengthy and unpopular process. Switching to an OS simply for ideological reasons (like, "supporting" Linux) is bad business.
>> 'Hey Pierre, curriel me those sales figures.' Just sounds wrong!" Especially if you don't actually speak french ;)....
Umm, that's English...if you spoke French, you wouldn't be saying "Hey Pierre..." in the first place.
I've always thought French language policing is a bit silly, but "e-mail" is an English concoction. Let the French speak French.
>> The entire point of putting a distro of Linux on the shelf is public awareness marketing... down the road those consumers come back when they need servers... .
I disagree. The purpose of marketing shrinkwrapped Linux is to make money, not to act as a loss leader for server sales. How many people wandering around the aisles of CompUSA are going to pick up the phone and start ording Red Hat servers?
RedHat seems to be ready to pull out of the shrinkwrap business and to stop paying RedHat developers to work on Linux apps. This is exactly what they would do if marketing shrink-wrapped Linux is a money-losing proposition.
I think the point is to drive in the same rut, over and over, rather than driving these multi-tonned rigs over new ground.
Why? Cars, trucks, trains, planes, boats don't.
Remember, these things operate on farm, somone's property, behind fences. Someplace where stray humans are not supposed to be.
Besides, serious farm equipment is big and noisy. If a person or an animal can't tell one is coming and get out of the way, they're already dead.
Haven't been near any farm equipment lately, eh?
>> Once all the "voices" in society are all filtered through the government and big business...
I don't understand this obsession with equating the "media" with "the voice of the people".
First, there is no "people". We're just 300 million indviduals. Most of the time when someone starts emoting about "the people", he means "the people who agree with me".
Second, a media outlet reflects the views of its owners and the people who create the content. That's the way it has always been and that's the way it will remain. The "media" has never impartially reflected the views of every citizen, because that's impossible.
Third, I don't have much use for ClearChannel, but I wouldn't say business has "hijacked" airwaves owned by the public. Airwaves are uselss without a studio and a transmitter. Someone will always own those, What's the difference between a station owned by a business and a stationed owned by soething or someone else? Nothing, as far as I can see. The salient point is that they're owned.
I know this is about satellite TV, but....None of this would be happening if people would just stick to ASCII and stop trying to treat the Internet as if it was some kind of big, distributed boombox.
Don't play into the hands of people who think the web is a broadcasting medium.
Nope. Over the top, perhaps, but bringing suit, or lots of 'em, is not illegal.
Shoplifting, counterfeiting, copyight infringement are all specific kinds of criminal behavior that can be subsumed under the broader label of theft.
Pro-filetheft advocates like to pretend that the only thing that can be stolen is a physical entity. But, that is just deliberate wordsmithing by people who need to rationalize their illegal behavior.
Ummm, remember the Netscape days when people downloaded Netscape because there wasn't a pre-installed IE?
As soon as MS began giving away IE, Netscape needed to do two things: 1) Become radically better; 2) Advertise. They did neither.
Dunno about surveys, but it is commonly accepted that IE has more than 90 percent of the browser market.
If Netscape/Mozilla really do have enough "advanced" features to give people the incentive to use them, why haven;t we seen a storm of people siwtching? Because, as you say, 9 of 10 people don't know aout Netscape/Mozilla. Why? Well, when is the last time you saw an advertisement for Netscape or Mozilla? When was the last time you saw a store giving away Mozilla CD's?
I use Mozilla, not IE. But Netscape and Mozilla don't offer enough advantages over IE to compell the majority of users to switch. Even if it did, Netscape and Mozilla do little, if anything, to advertise their products.
Possible, but very unlikely. Any goodies that an alternative browser might offer can be adopted by Microsoft. If it is a goodie that won't work on Windows, why would they care?
Microsoft is moving on from peddling IE as a separate application because people take browsing capability for granted. Unless they're ideologically driven, they will need a strong incentive to take the risk of installing a separate program just to do something they can already do.
too bad, but not unexpected. Remember, AOL's purpose in life is to make money, not promote alternatives to Microsoft.
Tieing yourself to a browser more than 9 of 10 people don't want to use seems like a good way to cut sales, not increase them.
>> If Mozilla surpasses IE ...
That won't happen unless Microsoft drops IE and starts shipping Mozilla.
Shoplifting, copyright infringement, counterfeiting...they're all forms of theft to me.
But, what's the difference between making illegal copies of a dollar bill and making illegal copies of a CD? None that I can see. So, let's call filesharing counterfeiting. Happy now?
First, you have a moral obligation to obey the law, even if you disagree with it.
We see a lot of juvenile attempts to justify theft by pointing at the RIAA's less-than-subtle behavior. But,the RIAA's behavior is not relevant to this discussion. They could be killing babies, but it still wouldn't change the true nature of filesharing: it is theft.
You can't dress up greed for free music in some kind of civil disobediance garb. Civil disobediance entails people deliberately violating a law so they can provoke arrest in order to challenge the constitutionality of that law in court. So, unless so-called filesharers are willing to find lawyers, get arrested, go to trial, and, if necessary, appeal all the way the Supreme Court, I am inclined to think they're still unprincipled thieves.
>> ...CD-R's labeled for Music actually have a few cents of the price going to the recording industry...
I don't see that has much to do with copyright and fair use. It has everything to do with the record industry's ability and willingness to play hardball politics, something that can't be said for the other side in this argument.
In my book, "Lost IP sales" due to illegal copying counts as theft, even if it is potential earnings.
However, this is largely a semantic gambit. Copyright infringement is a crime, whatever we might call it otherwise. I've yet to see an argument justifying it as legitimate that doesn't sound like something dreamed up in a debate club of 12-year olds.
We're not talking about reading, and you know it. We're talking about stealing by making and distributing illegal copies. Some folks go to absurd lengths to rationalize their own theft via filesharing, like arguing that the CD's they want have only 2 tracks worth listening to. How you can get from "I don't like 80 percent of this CD" to "That gives me the right to steal the other 20 percent" is beyond me. If that is true, then I have a right to walk out of those Amsterdam museums with Rembrandts under my arm simply because I don't like 80 percent of his work.
Oh, good. That means it is OK to steal anything I don't like, I don't much like Rembrandt. Guess I'll fly to Amsterdam and starting letting those nice Dutch museums "share" with me.
Stop whining about CD's with "filler". ("Yes, judge. I stole all that stuff, but because I think its filler, I'm innocent.") . Try better musicians; no one is forcing you to buy anything. Better yet, just wait to grow up and you'll have better things to do with your money than blowing it on music with a 5-minute lifespan,
No, the equivalent is copying the book and standing on a street corner giving it away to anyone who asks.
Shoplifting is theft. Napster was based on theft. If you took all the CD's you own, bought a CD duplicator, and gave away exact copies of CD's to a global audience of complete strangers, that would be theft,too, of the CD publisher's, maker's and retailers's money.
Or, it's rather like buying legitimate tickets to the Movie-of-the Week, printing perfect counterfeit tickets, and giving them away free outside the theater.
Doing the same thing using the Internet as the delivery vehicle doesn't change a thing.