Not ignorant to the current state of the Iroquois. Just pointing out that all those good social qualities didn't ensure a favorable outcome for them. (and won't for us either).
Marathon: Earth's first colony ship, the Marathon, made from a hollowed-out asteroid, at the end of it's sub-light journey to a nearby star-system, is attacked by aliens bent on taking over the ship, destroying the nascent human colony on the planet below, and finding out where it came from so they can enslave humanity. The aliens are slavers, and have many races of slaves working for them. You are a super-killer cyborg, a military weapon, and it's your job to save the ship. You are sometimes aided by three AI's aboard the ship, who provide you with information, teleport you hither and yon, supply you with weapons, or become unresponsive or turn against you as the aliens hack into them. Later you find out that Durandal, one of the AI's actually was mad, signalled the alien scout ship, used you to get himself transmitted to the alien ship, and take it over, thus giving him the ability to travel faster than light - then use you and the alien ship to travel to an alien outpost, ex-home planet of one of the slave races, to uncover the secret to a technology that will allow Durandal to escape the eventual collapse of the universe in 12 billion years. (when you're an AI, and think yourself otherwise immortal, I guess you start pondering such problems).
Next - funny you should ask - comes Halo:, I've seen some kick ass demos, the plotline is based around a ringworld (smaller than Larry Niven's orbiting a gas giant, not constructed around it). Supposedly there's a plot tie-in to Marathon, but the details haven't leaked yet.
I don't know. Compared to the story presented in Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, Half-Life was pretty lame.
I just wish Bungee had put some effort into the engine in the process of going from Marathon to Marathon Infinity. That's why these games were so relatively unknown.
Hell, these days, even if you BUY a car, you don't really own it.
How many years will go by before you are paying more to the dealer-certified service than you were paying in payments to the bank, because the fucking thing breaks down every 6 weeks? oops Time to go buy another car.
But my 28-year old VW just keeps running and running. No computer chips, no emissions controls, no power steering, no AC, no radio. . . no problem.
yes! It's also often better to buy used than new, as a new car loses half it's value once you drive it off the lot. SCREW the dealers. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to find a used car that's not a mechanical nightmare. We all know the reliable brands though.
Frequent readers of slashdot may notice I have a tendency to begin my posts with the phrase: "It's all about. .."
In this case, it's all about CASH FLOW.
It's psychologically easier to sell a couch for $35 a month than it is to sell it for $2000. Once you get folks to accept that, you can jack up the price in increments that are much more difficult to track, $40 doesn't seem too much more, until you multiply that over 5 years: $300. Even better when 5 years down the road, those $ are worth close to the same they are now (low inflation). Wonder why inflation has been so low in the past few years? Companies can pose a much better case for future success if they have regular cash flow. Income. Which is funny, because I have a much easier time financing a house if I have a big chunk of money up front, than I do if I present my salary. It's what they want, continuous payments, a steadily increasing stream of income. Monthly service this, monthly payment that. Companies' employees demand monthly payments as salaries. Why not break down the income into monthlies as well? Easier on the accounting. Easier to dupe with.
The sick thing about it is, the people who CAN afford to buy things like cars outright with cash, are the same ones that can qualify for reasonable financing. The others get bent over with high rates, because they are higher-risk borrowers. A big stinky crock of shit, no?
To say nothing that when the day personal property is eliminated from the capitalistic system (hows THAT for a switch), we basically become economic slaves - not only are we running on an income treadmill, but we're pursuing a carrot merchandise on a stick.
This is the ONE reason I will not buy a TiVo. I will NOT buy into their monthly service crap. $12 is way too much to pay for downloading a TV directory, when my Satellite system downloads a new one every 5 seconds.
The only thing that has mitigated this downward spiral over the last decade has been the trend towards giving employees stock options, especially in the tech industry. Only then can a person break from the economic strata they started in. It worked for me. I'm one of the lucky few. I don't know who's back I stepped on to get here either. But I'm here, and I have a 9.9% rate Visa card, and a Home Equity Line of Credit, and OWN both of my cars.
No need for that - it was just an offhanded smartass comment. You can take the Karma Whore off of Slashdot, but you can't take the Slashdot out of the Karma Whore (or something like that). ;-)
"Yet, at the same time, when nobody trusts their representatives, representative democracy can't work."
Oh, but it can, that's what the military, tear gas, intelligence organizations, high taxation, UTICA, CDMA, nukes, police, media monopolies, and closed source are for. To ensure the continued hegemony.
"There's nothing that makes you want to be a better writer then having your posting roundly ripped to shreds by someone with a better sense of argument then you. It's a learning experience, and the Internet is the only place I've found this learning experience to be available."
People don't vote, because to do it right, you have to spend a lot of effort on wrapping your brain around all of the issues. You spend hours and hours on it. Only to be out voted by two others who were duped by a TV commercial. What's the point?
The sad fact is, even if a politician were to go onto such a forum, and, on the level, discuss an issue - many issues are far, far too complex to discuss in an online forum. Some clear, fully elucidated thoughts take pages and pages, with tables, numbers, statistics (and damn lies). Call me an elitist, but I'd even say that MOST regular folks can't even begin to understand the mechanics behind most issues that affect their daily lives. And some issues come to very sticky philosophical topics, which, when you get down to it, NOBODY understands - the best and brightest minds in history have been debating some of these issues for thousands of years to no avail.
Why did so and so vote against the school funding bill? Is he against education? well no, you see there was this bond issue, and if you look on page six, at the amortization, it would mean that the value that holders would be taxed at would make it a losing proposition, and nobody would buy the bonds, and we'd get less funding than the current system, and people in this region would pay more property taxes, blah blah, and the people who drafted the bill are being lobbyed by real-estate developers (this statement must come with proof - in an ideal world), who want property values to come down so they can put in a shopping mall. . . etc. See what I mean?
FUD reigns because we're all inherently lazy - who has time to read an 800-page discourse on the economic impact of user-fees on highway construction, when some of the data is backed up by sketchy research, or impacts emotionally charged issues like employment, education, abortion, gun control (man, if you want to see skewed statistics and messed-up studies, check into gun-control legislation)? We can't all get up to our shoulders in these issues. Okay, enough elitist crap - let's be egalitarian about it. Say Joe Sixpack CAN understand it. Does he have TIME to go over all of that information? For EVERY issue? Does anybody EXCEPT a full-time politician, with a staff of economic advisers, bean-counters, and researchers? This is what we pay them for. Even the politicians who actuall VOTE on issues aren't fully informed about most of them. It's a big fuckin job. That's the whole point of a representative government, as opposed to a truly democratic government. Yes, these issues ought to be transparent, and the internet is a great tool to save people the effort of having to go to city-hall, and look up records and statistics, to back up what a politician is saying, etc. stuff like that, but it's not going to be a cure for the sheer volume of information that's involved in these decisions, nor will it be a cure for biased presentation.
Ultimately, when a community discusses issues, the majority opinion will hold sway, as it does here on Slashdot. There are an awful lot of Microsoft haters here. If this were AOL, would you see the same level of Microsoft bashing as we do here on slashdot, right or wrong? So are slashdotters inherently smarter than AOL-ers? perhaps;-), but face it, we are a subculture, and the majority opinion in this subculture rules. Even when the internet becomes "ubiquitous", there will still be a large faction of the population that will not be on line to discuss these issues (um - people who have lives?), so it will still represent a subculture. This subculture may discuss issues in an unbiased manner - unbiased relative to the overall bias of the subculture. Get a newbie online, listening in, and they're shocked, aren't they?
There is no such thing as unbiased discussion of political issues.
Repeat.
There is no such thing as unbiased discussion of political issues.
It just does not exist. In fact, it is more of a fallacy than the tooth fairy or santa clause. Anybody who tells you any different is trying to sell you something. This is due to the inherent nature of politics. Any issue is going to reflect the interest of some people, but not others. There are very few issues that we can all agree on - seriously. If it was put to a world-vote on whether all nuclear bombs should be detonated simultanously to wipe out all life on earth, just for the entertaining light show it would make, I guarantee that you will not get a unanimous "no" vote. Yes, less than probably one in 500 million would seriously vote yes on such an issue, but if everyone voted, it would not be unanimous. And if everyone got a chance to discuss the issue, you'd get over 6 billion emotionally charged, biased in self-interest reasons why it would be a bad idea. The whole point of discussion of an issue is to bend others to your side. "Education"? Education is propaganda. This is why money talks. This is why, while the internet has a potential to help things, I think, in the long run, when commercial interests have grabbed all the bandwidth and mindshare, they'll have all the influence. Similar to the way things are today. Grassroots shmassroots. It just ain't gonna happen. Signal/noise is a commodity.
You've got to separate a band's music from a band's franchise.
Music, is heard for free on the radio playing in a passing car. If you stand outside a concert hall on the public sidewalk. Walk past the open doors of the nightclub. Sound waves travelling freely through the air, unregulated by corporate desires, unimpeded by government laws. I don't see why MP3's can't fall under the same category. It's of promotional value for bands to get their music heard. While you CAN pinch the bits for cash, because the band's FRANCHISE creates demand for the music, but ultimately, the music is free.
The FRANCHISE is what sells tshirts, concert tickets, and CDs. The franchise was expensive to create, and record companies deserve a return on that investment. Thats fine. But there's grey area there too - how restrictive do you want the IP to be? Obviously it could get worse. What if music CD's were like DIVX? Go to your record store, buy a CD, play it once for your fee, and the player will bill you every time you want to play it again. I'm quite certain this would be a record industry exec's wet dream. Quite plausible, technologically. Yes, you'd have to get everyone to buy new players, but what the hell, if you sold the music only in the new format, they'd buy the players, wouldn't they? But with thousands of artists, each with dozens of albums, how would the average consumer figure out what they wanted to buy? If the price was low enough, they'd take a chance and buy something they weren't sure of. If the price was higher, they might be afraid to make the investment. We stand in a situation like this today. CDs are too costly to take a chance on a crap band (the only reason this model works today is because most (ok, enough) kids buy CDs on their parents' dime - they don't have to work for it, so it's not that big a risk to them). Consumers get enough "free samples" from the radio, a single here, a single there, to tell if they want to buy an album. Now, look at Napster as a highly efficient optimization of the promotional method, decades old, offered by radio. It gives the consumer a much more powerful tool to browse and sample a WIDE variety of music, well beyond what the radio could possibly offer, including beyond the industry-blessed singles. It gives the consumer the convenience of listen-on-demand: Say I'm a Frenchman, thinking of buying the Pink Floyd CD "Meddle". I have several problems with this. First, I don't know what the songs sound like. I have to take a risk of $20 to see if I like it. You'll very rarely hear such a song on the radio. Maybe on a special show, at 2am on a Sunday, on a station that specializes in classic/progressive rock - such stations only available in large American Cities. Compounding that, since this album was produced in the early-70's, 99.999% of record stores do not have it in stock - I guarantee that. This situation sucks, because here, a sale could easily be made, but my selection is so limited, I'll simply opt out of buying it. Maybe find a friend who has it and rip a CD. If I could buy the CD, I would, even maybe for $30, if I could listen to all the tracks first. There is a value in having the physical actual legitimate CD sitting on my shelf, both from the audiophile perspective, and from the perspective of the CD as a collectible (this concept kind of went out with vinyl though). Why would an item be collectible? High demand, limited physical quatities. You can't ascribe those qualities to bits on a disk, nor can you to sound waves propagating through air.
Beyond figuring out where the boundry SHOULD be between copies of music and profits, the computer, the internet, really ought to be used as a tool, a far more powerful and potent tool of promotion than radio ever was.
Through the late 80's and 90's, industry was wondering why so much money was spent on computers, but productivty wasn't going up. Then the internet arrived, and productivity started to rise. Napster offers the same kind of synergy for the music industry. They're too blind to see it. They seem to want to keep things as they are, and I'm betting they'd like to go to a DIVX model if they could. This is where it is the place of the consumer to put a foot down, and drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Yes, I classify MP3 downloading as a form of civil disobedience. I believe that people should be able to freely download any MP3 they want and listen to it, and give it to their friends, and sure, those that can't afford to buy the CD, shouldn't have to - they don't enjoy the benefit of having the physical CD, they have to live with the same stigma they guy who steals newspapers out of the vending machine does. It's called the honor system. People with honor, deserve to be treated with honor, the ones with no honor, just ignore them, they're not hurting anybody, really. The ones with honor will buy the CDs they like, and delete the music they don't like. The record company will still make lots of money - they could even provide music through their official sources, and charge like a nickel a song, which most people will pay for, as a sample-basis. This is high enough for them to make a profit (considering a copy costs them nothing to produce), and low enough to keep the "barrier to entry" where people of less capital means can download honestly. Sharing the files freely with others should be encouraged (and collecting money for sharing the files will be forbidden by law, and enforced). And in this way, the awesome tool that is the internet can be used FOR the record company's benefit, FOR the band's benefit, CDs will still be sold, money will still be made, and I'll be able to listen to that King Crimson album before I plop down $20.
The only way this can work AGAINST the recording industry, is if they are making a huge amount of money through "mistake" purchases. Well, judging by the last 3 CDs I bought, that may not be far from the truth. ..
Larry Niven's Ringworld series had swords, with extensible single-atom-wide blades, encased in some kind of energy field to protect their fragility, but they'd cut instantly through anything. Monowire blades, or something like that.
actually, if I was a guzillionaire like the Offspring , I would take a loss and give away the t-shirts. I used to do screen printing and t-shirt airbrushing, it costs like $3 a shirt in bulk. If I was a guzillionaire, I'd blow a hundred thou on something like that. What good would another Lambourghini do me anyway? My Maserati does 185, I lost my license, now I don't drive.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have enough money, you CAN buy software "on the spot".
Look at Corel's acquisition of MetaCreations. Adobe's purchase of GoLive. It can be done.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Not ignorant to the current state of the Iroquois. Just pointing out that all those good social qualities didn't ensure a favorable outcome for them. (and won't for us either).
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
and for those who didn't play Marathon:
Marathon: Earth's first colony ship, the Marathon, made from a hollowed-out asteroid, at the end of it's sub-light journey to a nearby star-system, is attacked by aliens bent on taking over the ship, destroying the nascent human colony on the planet below, and finding out where it came from so they can enslave humanity. The aliens are slavers, and have many races of slaves working for them. You are a super-killer cyborg, a military weapon, and it's your job to save the ship. You are sometimes aided by three AI's aboard the ship, who provide you with information, teleport you hither and yon, supply you with weapons, or become unresponsive or turn against you as the aliens hack into them. Later you find out that Durandal, one of the AI's actually was mad, signalled the alien scout ship, used you to get himself transmitted to the alien ship, and take it over, thus giving him the ability to travel faster than light - then use you and the alien ship to travel to an alien outpost, ex-home planet of one of the slave races, to uncover the secret to a technology that will allow Durandal to escape the eventual collapse of the universe in 12 billion years. (when you're an AI, and think yourself otherwise immortal, I guess you start pondering such problems).
Next - funny you should ask - comes Halo:, I've seen some kick ass demos, the plotline is based around a ringworld (smaller than Larry Niven's orbiting a gas giant, not constructed around it). Supposedly there's a plot tie-in to Marathon, but the details haven't leaked yet.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
I don't know. Compared to the story presented in Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, Half-Life was pretty lame.
I just wish Bungee had put some effort into the engine in the process of going from Marathon to Marathon Infinity. That's why these games were so relatively unknown.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Hell, these days, even if you BUY a car, you don't really own it.
How many years will go by before you are paying more to the dealer-certified service than you were paying in payments to the bank, because the fucking thing breaks down every 6 weeks? oops Time to go buy another car.
But my 28-year old VW just keeps running and running. No computer chips, no emissions controls, no power steering, no AC, no radio. . . no problem.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
where are the Iroquois now?
The name is used for posh country-clubs in Suburban Chicago.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
yes! It's also often better to buy used than new, as a new car loses half it's value once you drive it off the lot. SCREW the dealers. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to find a used car that's not a mechanical nightmare. We all know the reliable brands though.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
What a deal! Does that cover MY lifetime, the lifetime of the box, or the lifetime of the TiVo corporation?
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Hey, you GOT it! Good for you! Here's a cracker!
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
It's not all as bad as that.
Witness the failure of DIVX.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
heh, check out the lifestyle of the poor slobs in "The Fifth Element".
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
the way cars and houses are priced, the economically challenged (read: poor), quite often do not have a choice.
These laws are just nicking the middle-upper class the way the lower classes have always been nicked.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
or as The Tick used to say: .an unsettling trend. . ."
". .
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Frequent readers of slashdot may notice I have a tendency to begin my posts with the phrase: "It's all about. . ."
In this case, it's all about CASH FLOW.
It's psychologically easier to sell a couch for $35 a month than it is to sell it for $2000. Once you get folks to accept that, you can jack up the price in increments that are much more difficult to track, $40 doesn't seem too much more, until you multiply that over 5 years: $300. Even better when 5 years down the road, those $ are worth close to the same they are now (low inflation). Wonder why inflation has been so low in the past few years?
Companies can pose a much better case for future success if they have regular cash flow. Income. Which is funny, because I have a much easier time financing a house if I have a big chunk of money up front, than I do if I present my salary. It's what they want, continuous payments, a steadily increasing stream of income. Monthly service this, monthly payment that. Companies' employees demand monthly payments as salaries. Why not break down the income into monthlies as well? Easier on the accounting. Easier to dupe with.
The sick thing about it is, the people who CAN afford to buy things like cars outright with cash, are the same ones that can qualify for reasonable financing. The others get bent over with high rates, because they are higher-risk borrowers. A big stinky crock of shit, no?
To say nothing that when the day personal property is eliminated from the capitalistic system (hows THAT for a switch), we basically become economic slaves - not only are we running on an income treadmill, but we're pursuing a carrot merchandise on a stick.
This is the ONE reason I will not buy a TiVo. I will NOT buy into their monthly service crap. $12 is way too much to pay for downloading a TV directory, when my Satellite system downloads a new one every 5 seconds.
The only thing that has mitigated this downward spiral over the last decade has been the trend towards giving employees stock options, especially in the tech industry. Only then can a person break from the economic strata they started in. It worked for me. I'm one of the lucky few. I don't know who's back I stepped on to get here either. But I'm here, and I have a 9.9% rate Visa card, and a Home Equity Line of Credit, and OWN both of my cars.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"I'd take this offline if I could. . ."
No need for that - it was just an offhanded smartass comment. You can take the Karma Whore off of Slashdot, but you can't take the Slashdot out of the Karma Whore (or something like that).
;-)
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"Yet, at the same time,
when nobody trusts their representatives, representative democracy can't work."
Oh, but it can, that's what the military, tear gas, intelligence organizations, high taxation, UTICA, CDMA, nukes, police, media monopolies, and closed source are for. To ensure the continued hegemony.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"There's nothing that makes you want to be a better writer then having your posting
/.-er for over 2 years.
roundly ripped to shreds by someone with a better sense of argument then you. It's a learning
experience, and the Internet is the only place I've found this learning experience to be available."
This is why I've been a
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
People don't vote, because to do it right, you have to spend a lot of effort on wrapping your brain around all of the issues. You spend hours and hours on it. Only to be out voted by two others who were duped by a TV commercial. What's the point?
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
The sad fact is, even if a politician were to go onto such a forum, and, on the level, discuss an issue - many issues are far, far too complex to discuss in an online forum. Some clear, fully elucidated thoughts take pages and pages, with tables, numbers, statistics (and damn lies). Call me an elitist, but I'd even say that MOST regular folks can't even begin to understand the mechanics behind most issues that affect their daily lives. And some issues come to very sticky philosophical topics, which, when you get down to it, NOBODY understands - the best and brightest minds in history have been debating some of these issues for thousands of years to no avail.
;-), but face it, we are a subculture, and the majority opinion in this subculture rules. Even when the internet becomes "ubiquitous", there will still be a large faction of the population that will not be on line to discuss these issues (um - people who have lives?), so it will still represent a subculture. This subculture may discuss issues in an unbiased manner - unbiased relative to the overall bias of the subculture. Get a newbie online, listening in, and they're shocked, aren't they?
Why did so and so vote against the school funding bill? Is he against education? well no, you see there was this bond issue, and if you look on page six, at the amortization, it would mean that the value that holders would be taxed at would make it a losing proposition, and nobody would buy the bonds, and we'd get less funding than the current system, and people in this region would pay more property taxes, blah blah, and the people who drafted the bill are being lobbyed by real-estate developers (this statement must come with proof - in an ideal world), who want property values to come down so they can put in a shopping mall. . . etc. See what I mean?
FUD reigns because we're all inherently lazy - who has time to read an 800-page discourse on the economic impact of user-fees on highway construction, when some of the data is backed up by sketchy research, or impacts emotionally charged issues like employment, education, abortion, gun control (man, if you want to see skewed statistics and messed-up studies, check into gun-control legislation)? We can't all get up to our shoulders in these issues. Okay, enough elitist crap - let's be egalitarian about it. Say Joe Sixpack CAN understand it. Does he have TIME to go over all of that information? For EVERY issue? Does anybody EXCEPT a full-time politician, with a staff of economic advisers, bean-counters, and researchers? This is what we pay them for. Even the politicians who actuall VOTE on issues aren't fully informed about most of them. It's a big fuckin job. That's the whole point of a representative government, as opposed to a truly democratic government.
Yes, these issues ought to be transparent, and the internet is a great tool to save people the effort of having to go to city-hall, and look up records and statistics, to back up what a politician is saying, etc. stuff like that, but it's not going to be a cure for the sheer volume of information that's involved in these decisions, nor will it be a cure for biased presentation.
Ultimately, when a community discusses issues, the majority opinion will hold sway, as it does here on Slashdot. There are an awful lot of Microsoft haters here. If this were AOL, would you see the same level of Microsoft bashing as we do here on slashdot, right or wrong? So are slashdotters inherently smarter than AOL-ers? perhaps
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
There is no such thing as unbiased discussion of political issues.
Repeat.
There is no such thing as unbiased discussion of political issues.
It just does not exist. In fact, it is more of a fallacy than the tooth fairy or santa clause. Anybody who tells you any different is trying to sell you something.
This is due to the inherent nature of politics. Any issue is going to reflect the interest of some people, but not others. There are very few issues that we can all agree on - seriously. If it was put to a world-vote on whether all nuclear bombs should be detonated simultanously to wipe out all life on earth, just for the entertaining light show it would make, I guarantee that you will not get a unanimous "no" vote. Yes, less than probably one in 500 million would seriously vote yes on such an issue, but if everyone voted, it would not be unanimous.
And if everyone got a chance to discuss the issue, you'd get over 6 billion emotionally charged, biased in self-interest reasons why it would be a bad idea.
The whole point of discussion of an issue is to bend others to your side. "Education"? Education is propaganda. This is why money talks. This is why, while the internet has a potential to help things, I think, in the long run, when commercial interests have grabbed all the bandwidth and mindshare, they'll have all the influence. Similar to the way things are today. Grassroots shmassroots. It just ain't gonna happen. Signal/noise is a commodity.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
You've got to separate a band's music from a band's franchise.
.
Music, is heard for free on the radio playing in a passing car. If you stand outside a concert hall on the public sidewalk. Walk past the open doors of the nightclub. Sound waves travelling freely through the air, unregulated by corporate desires, unimpeded by government laws. I don't see why MP3's can't fall under the same category. It's of promotional value for bands to get their music heard. While you CAN pinch the bits for cash, because the band's FRANCHISE creates demand for the music, but ultimately, the music is free.
The FRANCHISE is what sells tshirts, concert tickets, and CDs. The franchise was expensive to create, and record companies deserve a return on that investment. Thats fine. But there's grey area there too - how restrictive do you want the IP to be? Obviously it could get worse. What if music CD's were like DIVX? Go to your record store, buy a CD, play it once for your fee, and the player will bill you every time you want to play it again. I'm quite certain this would be a record industry exec's wet dream. Quite plausible, technologically. Yes, you'd have to get everyone to buy new players, but what the hell, if you sold the music only in the new format, they'd buy the players, wouldn't they? But with thousands of artists, each with dozens of albums, how would the average consumer figure out what they wanted to buy? If the price was low enough, they'd take a chance and buy something they weren't sure of. If the price was higher, they might be afraid to make the investment. We stand in a situation like this today. CDs are too costly to take a chance on a crap band (the only reason this model works today is because most (ok, enough) kids buy CDs on their parents' dime - they don't have to work for it, so it's not that big a risk to them). Consumers get enough "free samples" from the radio, a single here, a single there, to tell if they want to buy an album. Now, look at Napster as a highly efficient optimization of the promotional method, decades old, offered by radio. It gives the consumer a much more powerful tool to browse and sample a WIDE variety of music, well beyond what the radio could possibly offer, including beyond the industry-blessed singles. It gives the consumer the convenience of listen-on-demand:
Say I'm a Frenchman, thinking of buying the Pink Floyd CD "Meddle". I have several problems with this. First, I don't know what the songs sound like. I have to take a risk of $20 to see if I like it. You'll very rarely hear such a song on the radio. Maybe on a special show, at 2am on a Sunday, on a station that specializes in classic/progressive rock - such stations only available in large American Cities. Compounding that, since this album was produced in the early-70's, 99.999% of record stores do not have it in stock - I guarantee that. This situation sucks, because here, a sale could easily be made, but my selection is so limited, I'll simply opt out of buying it. Maybe find a friend who has it and rip a CD. If I could buy the CD, I would, even maybe for $30, if I could listen to all the tracks first. There is a value in having the physical actual legitimate CD sitting on my shelf, both from the audiophile perspective, and from the perspective of the CD as a collectible (this concept kind of went out with vinyl though). Why would an item be collectible? High demand, limited physical quatities. You can't ascribe those qualities to bits on a disk, nor can you to sound waves propagating through air.
Beyond figuring out where the boundry SHOULD be between copies of music and profits, the computer, the internet, really ought to be used as a tool, a far more powerful and potent tool of promotion than radio ever was.
Through the late 80's and 90's, industry was wondering why so much money was spent on computers, but productivty wasn't going up. Then the internet arrived, and productivity started to rise. Napster offers the same kind of synergy for the music industry. They're too blind to see it. They seem to want to keep things as they are, and I'm betting they'd like to go to a DIVX model if they could. This is where it is the place of the consumer to put a foot down, and drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Yes, I classify MP3 downloading as a form of civil disobedience. I believe that people should be able to freely download any MP3 they want and listen to it, and give it to their friends, and sure, those that can't afford to buy the CD, shouldn't have to - they don't enjoy the benefit of having the physical CD, they have to live with the same stigma they guy who steals newspapers out of the vending machine does. It's called the honor system. People with honor, deserve to be treated with honor, the ones with no honor, just ignore them, they're not hurting anybody, really. The ones with honor will buy the CDs they like, and delete the music they don't like. The record company will still make lots of money - they could even provide music through their official sources, and charge like a nickel a song, which most people will pay for, as a sample-basis. This is high enough for them to make a profit (considering a copy costs them nothing to produce), and low enough to keep the "barrier to entry" where people of less capital means can download honestly. Sharing the files freely with others should be encouraged (and collecting money for sharing the files will be forbidden by law, and enforced). And in this way, the awesome tool that is the internet can be used FOR the record company's benefit, FOR the band's benefit, CDs will still be sold, money will still be made, and I'll be able to listen to that King Crimson album before I plop down $20.
The only way this can work AGAINST the recording industry, is if they are making a huge amount of money through "mistake" purchases.
Well, judging by the last 3 CDs I bought, that may not be far from the truth. .
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"The Offspring have succeeded in making Napster look like pricks where all of Metallica's rhetoric
couldn't."
By their works, they shall be known.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Larry Niven's Ringworld series had swords, with extensible single-atom-wide blades, encased in some kind of energy field to protect their fragility, but they'd cut instantly through anything. Monowire blades, or something like that.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
actually, if I was a guzillionaire like the Offspring , I would take a loss and give away the t-shirts. I used to do screen printing and t-shirt airbrushing, it costs like $3 a shirt in bulk. If I was a guzillionaire, I'd blow a hundred thou on something like that. What good would another Lambourghini do me anyway? My Maserati does 185, I lost my license, now I don't drive.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
"Am I missing anything here?"
.
yes, perhaps the first amendment. .
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .