Yeah, that's true -- with MS gross profit margin, if you *do* count in all development, all marketing, all "innovation", actually all costs associated with Office and Windows at all, then there's still around 80% profit-margin on the final product.
That is, Microsoft could divide all Windows and Office-prices by 5, and still break even in those divisions.
Offcourse *All* other branches of Microsoft are bleeding cash.
Dunno. I mean, I learned it in school, but I don't know if you want to call a 15 year old a child or an adult. Got below average grades too by the way.:-)
I suppose that years of Internet, along with the major parts of my CS studies having english books (doesn't much pay to translate Chaums writings to Norwegian when there *may* be all of 20 Norwegians that care about them), aswell as my thesis being in english gives a fair amount of practice.
In written english, I can occasionally pass for native. If I tried that orally I'd fall trough like a rock after something like 2 seconds though, I've got a lot less practice speaking it. Besides, it's easier to learn grammar and vocabulary than to get rid of accents.
Get a newbie-friendly distro like Mandrake then. When you insert a Compact-flash card in a Mandrake-system, or plug in a supported digital camera, or a scanner, or a firewire-storage-thingie, what happens is that a icon pops up on your kde desktop.
That's it. You don't need to do anything to make this work. Though, if you like you can rigth-click on the icon, select properties, and set things like "Auto-open Filemanager on insertion", which would give you a filemanager-window on the device automagically when the device is hooked up.
Yeah, Mandrake uses KDE by default (but includes Gnome and other WMs too.), my point is, what you want is *mostly* an issue of well thougth-out standard distro-configurations, and not really anything fundamentally new.
preview wouldn't have helped me. You see, not everything is quite as obvious when english is your third language rather than your first. I do *try* to take care with my grammar and spelling, my apologies when it comes out wrong sometimes anyway.
This is true; you're not the first person to have problem with their ordering-system. They have even on admitted as much, and are claimingto be working on the problem.
Still, my recommendation is simply to get Mandrake-cds from somewhere else, and insteaed support Mandrakesoft financially by becoming a club-member if you wish. There's plenty of places selling mandrake-cds for a couple of bucks. The Mandrakesoft-shop, sadly, sucks.
Quite. And I rather suspect that most compounds consisting of 90% silver (certainly if that's by volume, likely even if that's by weigth) would have a consistency rather like your average silver jewelry. 925 silver, or 92.5% is the normal jewelry-quality afterall.
I don't think putting a silver-spoon between the cpu and the heatsink is a very clever idea.
This is a good point: Once a countrz has gotten into a two-party system, it is very very hard for it to get back out.
The principal problem is that that would require at least one of the two parties now cosily sharing the power to vote in favour of a law-change that would take away their nice little hegemony and replace it with something more accurately reflecting the will of the people.
As you say, this won't happen. No political party will ever vote in favor of taking power away from itself. Atleast not unless it really had the feeling that it was that or revolution.
One-party states have a similar problem, except there a revolution, or otherwise violent change is more likely because one-party-states are not seen as legitimate by the majority, they can't slap the nice shiny "Democracy" button on it and make it look like people actually have a choise.
You see, there exist this doctrine known as "First sale", which basically says that even for copyrigthed works, the moment you bougth a copy, that single copy is yours (what a concept!).
Thus attempts at restricting what a legal buyer can do with his property, such as claiming it's illegal for him to resell that property at any price he choose, to anyone, anywhere in the world, are moot.
I have no idea what you mean by "being transferred in and out of licence areas", fact is, copyrigth-law doesn't contain provisions for anything like "licence-areas", nor does any other law offer backing for such an idea.
It is true that the recording-industry would like to be able to sell a CD for cheap in a poor country, and still be shielded from the possibility that someone will buy it there, import it to a rich country, and undersell the much higher prices the record company wishes to charge there.
However, the fact that certain people wish something to be, doesn't by itself make it so.
Instead, it should be argued that artifical divisions like this are attempts to destroy the free market and screw over the consumers in the process. The recent ps2-modchip case from Italy was illustrative in this regard.
That the legal system has degenerated to such a degree that the richer/bigger part can pretty much use it as a threat and essentially claim: "Either you do as we say, or we're going to cost you more in legal bills", even when they don't actually have any hope or intention of winning those cases is just sad.
Which law precisely do you propose I may be breaking if I start a business based on buying legal, copyrigthed music somewhere in the world and "transferring it in and out of licence areas" ?
The strange thing is they don't see it themselves.
I think I'm fairly average. I used to tape the occasional tape of the radio for my own use, (perfectly legal atleast in Norway where I live.) but I also bougth CDs quite regularily, nothing major, a couple a month maybe.
Then the internet came along, and I didn't really change much. It's true that taping from the radio is obsolete, and replaced by downloading some music, but it didn't really change my habits much.
Then the RIAA started to push CDs-that-aren't-CDs, along with the idea that threating customers as criminals is a clever thing to do. The immediate result, atleast for me, was that I started to investigate the issue. I came to the conclusion that the record-companies and the music-cartel in general, entities I was hardly aware of existing earlier, are stupid, immoral, criminal, price-fixing, artist-conning idiots.
These days I Actively avoid buying any CD from the major labels. Atleast in a way they profit from. Yes, I consider it wrong to download and burn music rather than fairly compensate artists, but I consider it MORE wrong to contribute financially to the immoral antics of the music-industry. Still, the better choise is to for example buy the CDs used, or buy music from independent labels, or directly from smaller artists, or for that matter going back to taping from radio.
In any case the RIAA hasn't gotten a single cent from me for the last 2 years, nor will they get a single cent from me in the future if I can help it.
...and therefore beyond critisism. Seriously, I agree that the US constitution is not hopeless, indeed for the time it was written it was quite radical.
But today it *does* show it's age. And a few points are downrigth undemocratic.
Worst when it comes to the elections are not the Electoral College in itself, but rather the fact that even though multiple people are elected from each state for the college, it is winner takes all.
It's pretty obvious to most people that if the population of a state is split 50/50, and that state sends 8 representatives, the democratic option would be to send 4/4 representatives, not 8/0 in favor of whichever party happens to get 50.2%.
It's also pretty obvious that a system in which everyone living in a clearly-republican or clearly-democratic state has no reason at all to go voting is not exactly optimal. How much, exactly does my vote for the republican candidate count if I live in a state far away from the balance-point (in either direction!)
"reduced infringement", you say, as if this is the obvious legal goal, and there's no reason to question it.
But I ask you this, would it not be more logical for the label-companies to worry about *increased*sales* rather than "reduced infringement" ? Sure, if you act like a bully, some people will be bullied and stop downloading music. Question is, will many of those feel positively inclined to *choose* to spend their money buying your music ? Will it actually help your bottom line that a significant part of your core-market hates you like the pest ?
Offcourse a hypotetical etical music-industry would not even care about increased sales, they would care about finding a model where as many artists as possible could be supported at a reasonable living-standard.
From the point of view of society, we won't get anything back (as in increased creativity/productivity/variety - the purpose of Copyrigth, remember ?) from rewarding Michael Jackson with $500 million/year instead of $1 million/year. Both sums are more than adequate for a single artist to spend his full energy and time creating music.
Now, on the other hand, if we could get $499 million/year distributed to say 10000 artists of different kinds which are today unable to make a full-time living of their music, the additional 50K/year would likely enable most of them to be full-time musicians.
The music-industry is just about the poorest possible imaginable way of distributing the resources of the buyers onto the creators. And not only because "the industry" itself eats something like 95% of the gross before the actual musicians see a single cent.
I went to see Return of the King, thinking it'd be worth it to see it at the big screen. "only" 12 euro, since me and my girlfriend went on a cheap day.
First, you wait in an overfilled lobby until 5 minutes after the movie should actually have started. (why settle for 4 showings a day when you can *squeeze* 5 showings into the schedule?)
Then you go find your chair, and are subjected to a FULL HALF HOUR of advertising. Really. I looked at my watch about 25 minutes into it as I was saying to my girlfriend "This is getting ridicolous". (as if that movie ain't long enough for the seats in the cinema as it is...)
Doesn't make it better that the advertising chooses to preach to us, the people who have decided to be legal and watch the film in the theatre that we're criminals and jail would be a fitting sentence.
You can also buy refreshments. Only 2 euro for a half-litre of Coke.
In comparison, at home I can, legally:
Pay 1.50 euro to rent the movie, then watch it with 4 friends, for a total of 30 cents/person.
No forced half-hour of advertsing.
Pause possible if/when wanted.
If someone is thirsty, Coke is available in the fridge at the grand total of eur 0.15 or so for a half-liter. That's like 1/12th of the price in the cinema.
And then they ask why many don't go to the cinema very often anymore...
Mind you, I could've downloaded the movie and saved the 1.50, but that seems kinda trivial in comparison.
Oh, and with both of the latter options I get to hear the actors actually talk with their own voices, like I prefer. If I choose to go to the cinema, I'll be subjected to varying-quality-but-always-annoying "synchronised" german.
While the direct, short-term deaths where indeed limited, the "costs" of fairly compensating for the damage of Chernobyl would have been astronomical, it would definitely have bankrupted any insurance-company.
Consider that at the time I was living in western Norway, more than 2000 km (1200 miles or so) away from Chernobyl, and here is a short sample (by no means complete !) of claims from my tiny little part of the fallout, limited to food-safety:
For the following 3 years local farmers had to feed their sheep bougth food rather than letting them graze on their fields in order to bring the radioactivity of the meat down under the safe-for-food limit (of 400 bequerel/kg I seem to remember)
Several previously hunted animals where unfit for human consumption for years, spanning from fish in certain lakes with a small amount of water-change to hirsh, moose, rabbit etc.
Even for things that still could safely be eaten an expensive information and testing-program had to be created with stations in most villages where you could have your kitchen-garden food or whatever tested.
"Rein-lav", the primary food of reindeer in the winther in Northern Norway turned out to be amazingly good at concentrating and accumulating radioactive substances. So good infact, that anyone depending on reindeers for their living was basically out of bussiness for several years.
The list is by no means complete, and that's only for one of the many areas that where hit by the fallout, and only for problems related to food-safety. What is fair compensation for this ? Times how many million ? Notice that I didn't even *mention* problems like increased birth-defencies and cancer-occurences for the following *decades*, nor ask what fair compensation for a chromoson-fault in your kid is.
Fact is, while 44 direct deaths is not at all unheard of for a "normal" industrial accident, I've never heard of a "normal" industrial accident that had consequences like this thousands of miles away from the accident-place.
I agree, by the way, that Nuclear-done-rigth can be quite safe as power-plants go. But it is stupid and counterproductive to compare Tchernobyl to other industrial accidents with 44 dead.
That's what I said: vacuum does nothing at all to stop *radiative* heat-transfer. Which scales by the 4th power of the surface-temperature of the radiator by the way, which is why it's the dominating heat-transfer for high-temperature stuff like the surface of the sun, and rather insignificant for low-temperature stuff like window glass.
Vacuum is *not* actually the perfect insulator. It is true that no heat is conducted trough vacuum, but on the other hand vacuum is near perfect in letting heat *radiate*. Now, if you combine vacuum with one or more reflective films to reflect back most of the radiated heat then you have eh, uhm, invented the termos-bottle.
Get the Mozilla/Firebird extension "AdBlock". It allows you to rigth-click *any* element and block it.
You can sue regex, so if you really wanted to nuke all flash you could just add a rule like *.swf, but in practice you migth want to keep some. *doubleclick* is rather helpful.
First 2-3 days you use it you'll need to rigth-click and remove stuff that annoys you. Thereafter you're pretty much free from annoying intrusive advertising forever. Atmost you migth have to see some new annoyance once. Then you tell AdBlock to nuke it, and it's gone.
What you write here is all painfully obvious to anyone who has gone trough primary school. It's also got no relevance whatsoever to what I was writing.
Everyone is aware that whole grain contains more minerals, more vitamins, more basically anything that's good for you than white flour.
The problem still has nothing to do with the grinding though, as it is perfectly possible, and indeed common, to buy whole grain flour which is nevertheless *also* ground into a dust. (yes, if you like you can also buy it coarser-milled but that's still got no influence on nutritional value.)
I don't really disagree with you that "fortified" flour should be pointless. Varied eating will contain everything your body needs. It's not like the human body is evolved to needing a mixture of vitamine-pills and "fortified" foods to do well afterall.
But I take issue with your other claims. They are, to put it bluntly also bullshit. There are very few, if any, vitamins, minerals or substances needed by the body that would in any way be lost by being powderized. What do you imagine vitamins are ? Small glass-pearls that get crushed in a mill ? Heat harms many vitamins. As does prolonged storage. As does, in some cases, exposure over a long time to uv-ligth. There's no nutrient that I'm aware of that takes any damage from being ground to a dust.
You're rigth though that cutting calories help with loosing weigth. That's fairly obvious to anyone who doesn't live in la-la-land. And you're also rigth that many of the high-carb foods we eat today contain few useful nutrients beyond the raw carbs. (aka "empty calories")
5: Argue that tools that can, and are infact, be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes should not themselves be illegal.
6: Argue that general purpose computers is a tool much to useful to society to consider giving them up, or locking them away with the keys in the hands of a elite few, over an issue as trivial as some downloaded music-files.
7: Continue to press the point that copyrigth-law is supposed to serve a *purpose*, the creation of science and the useful arts. If it ain't serving this purpose, it's unconstitutional and harmful. Retroactively extending copyrigths for works where the author is 50 years dead does nothing to stimulate science or the useful acts.
8: Continue to point out that the music-cartel is in trouble because they're providing a service noone really needs or wants anymore. Sure, that's putting it a bit on the point, but fact is, neither I as a producer of music, nor I as a consumer have any interest in supporting those things 90% of the cash goes to when I purchase a CD.
9: Try to get politicians to understand that not everything which is *disliked* should be *illegal*. The rigth solution to the "problem" of kids looking for porn in p-2-p space and finding it is *gasp* parents who actually give a fuck. (How is p2p worse for youngsters than thehun.net by the way ? Should we shut down the www too ?)
10: Get an actually democratic system in the US. It used to be every man one vote, these days it's more like every dollar one vote. There's more p2p users in the USA than there are people who voted for Bush....
This I agree with. Unfortunately I don't agree with that much more:-)
Actually, I think you're making a smidge of a mistake with design == usability. But that's only looking at it from the point of designer anything, where look is king.
Yeah. I really do think that's a mistake on the net. A site which is usable but ugly can be useful, even popular. A site that is pretty, but not usable, will never suceed. Perhaps a reason is that on the net your customer has to *interact* with the stuff you're making, not only passively look at it, like in TV or magazines. Personally I think many designers are much to stuck in a paper-world.
seriously, if everything looked the same, what would the point be?
I never said everything should look the same. I *did* however say that we don't need a "new and unique" navigation-system for every site.
The question you gotta ask is if users will bother learning a "new and unique" navigation only for your site, or if there's more to gain from synergy and recognition-effect. You migth not like the floppy as a symbol for "save", but odds are if you choose it, even people who're using your program for the first time will recognize it as "save". For the same reason, blue, unterlined text that is *not* a link is a bad idea, even if you think it looks "different".
If your market is ultra-hip post-cyberpunk *insert god damn stupid adjective here* that appreciates some weird, fucked up hyper-techno *insert descriptive here* interface,
Thing is, even if the flash-intro and all-blinking all-dancing stuff is amusing to you on the first visit, it's going to get old *real* fast the moment you try to actually acomplish something with the site. Assuming it's possible to "acomplish" anything with a flash-site, which is the exception. Repeat customers are important.
then giving them something that looks like Yahoo is gonna make 'em go to sleep.
So give them something that looks like E14. That was never my point. I gave a long list of drawbacks of flash. All of those can be overcome in a web-site that's still nothing at all like Yahoo. A few of those can possibly even be overcome in flash, though I've never seen it done.
Conversely, if you're peddling information to people with remarkable lack of imagination (think stock market investors or the people so afraid of the Inter-Net that they type URLs into Yahoo's search box because it's all they know) you want your interface to be as simple and straightforward as possible.
So Google is a success because of people with remarkable lack of imagination and a great fear of anything new and/or technical ?
I don't think so. To the contrary it seem to have won popularity first among computer professionals, hackers, nerds, technophiles. People who doesn't fall anywhere close to your stereotypes above. They like it because it fucking works. And because it doesn't insist on distracting from it's function with lots of blinking-ligths.
Look. Noone said all websites should look the same. Noone said that Yahoo and Google, or Slashdot, is the be-all of web-design. What I *did* say was only that I have yet to see a usable site made in Flash, and I sorta doubt I'm likely to see many. I also said that I don't think it's a accident that most successfull websites put a high value on usability and have a minimum of bullshit. If you have counter-examples, feel free to say so.
Actually there's tons of stuff in the US that are "rationed" through artificially created scarcity. Look up "copyrigth" sometime. Not that I agree with you that this is a particularily central point in 1984.
Companies nearly universally *believe* that people want blinking-ligths and stupidity.
But I'm pretty sure they're wrong. Sure, some people want it, some of the time. But there are a lot of us who don't.
How do you explain the stratospheric success of Google over other search-engines which almost universally provide a lot more blinking-ligths ? Turns out when you actually want to get things done, that's only distracting.
Same for all professional products. My Keyboard doesn't have blinking ligths. Then again it's not marketed to early teens either.
A lot of people loose a lot of bussiness because people just get plain annoyed with all the crap they have to go through to be "allowed" to actually be a customer and purchase stuff. I feel pretty sure I'm not the only one who's closed down web-shop windows in disgust upon discovering that they insist on yet-another stupid plugin to allow me to buy their products.
How exactly could a flash-site be more accessible than html ?
How well do flash-sites work for blind people with screen-readers ?
How does it work to bookmark a spesific part of a flash-site ? (say a product from a product-catalog)
How accessible is a flash-site if you are using a text-only browser ?
How do I choose the font and fontsize I like on a flash-site ?
How do I change part of a flash-animation without forcing the repeating user to download the entire flash-animation over ?
How well do flash-sites work for printout and offline reading ?
That's just for a start. Sorry, but "can do moving vector-graphics and sounds" just aren't by a ligthyear enough to make up for those fairly serious problems.
In Practice, offcourse, as you hint when you say "in theory", flash-sites are much *worse* that is - they have a lot of *additional* problems that they could, in principle, assuming the people who choose to make their web-site in flash where sane, avoid. Problems such as the entire site being stuck in a fixed 400x300 box, and containing no useful info whatsoever after you get over the flashing-jumping-singind-dancing vector-graphics.
I never said Slashdot has good design. I said it doesn't force you to put up with a lot of crap to get at the actual content.
You're rigth offcourse, a usable site alone won't bring you much, unless there is also some actual content of interest on the site.
Luckily, it's rarely so that you have to choose -- the more usable sites tend to be the ones with most contant too. When a site resorts to flash-crap and "cutesy" animated menues, in almost all cases that also indicates they don't actually have anything to say, so they decided to make it "pretty but non-useful" instead of only "non-useful".
Slashdot Mirror
That is, Microsoft could divide all Windows and Office-prices by 5, and still break even in those divisions.
Offcourse *All* other branches of Microsoft are bleeding cash.
I suppose that years of Internet, along with the major parts of my CS studies having english books (doesn't much pay to translate Chaums writings to Norwegian when there *may* be all of 20 Norwegians that care about them), aswell as my thesis being in english gives a fair amount of practice.
In written english, I can occasionally pass for native. If I tried that orally I'd fall trough like a rock after something like 2 seconds though, I've got a lot less practice speaking it. Besides, it's easier to learn grammar and vocabulary than to get rid of accents.
That's it. You don't need to do anything to make this work. Though, if you like you can rigth-click on the icon, select properties, and set things like "Auto-open Filemanager on insertion", which would give you a filemanager-window on the device automagically when the device is hooked up.
Yeah, Mandrake uses KDE by default (but includes Gnome and other WMs too.), my point is, what you want is *mostly* an issue of well thougth-out standard distro-configurations, and not really anything fundamentally new.
preview wouldn't have helped me. You see, not everything is quite as obvious when english is your third language rather than your first. I do *try* to take care with my grammar and spelling, my apologies when it comes out wrong sometimes anyway.
Still, my recommendation is simply to get Mandrake-cds from somewhere else, and insteaed support Mandrakesoft financially by becoming a club-member if you wish. There's plenty of places selling mandrake-cds for a couple of bucks. The Mandrakesoft-shop, sadly, sucks.
I don't think putting a silver-spoon between the cpu and the heatsink is a very clever idea.
The principal problem is that that would require at least one of the two parties now cosily sharing the power to vote in favour of a law-change that would take away their nice little hegemony and replace it with something more accurately reflecting the will of the people.
As you say, this won't happen. No political party will ever vote in favor of taking power away from itself. Atleast not unless it really had the feeling that it was that or revolution.
One-party states have a similar problem, except there a revolution, or otherwise violent change is more likely because one-party-states are not seen as legitimate by the majority, they can't slap the nice shiny "Democracy" button on it and make it look like people actually have a choise.
You see, there exist this doctrine known as "First sale", which basically says that even for copyrigthed works, the moment you bougth a copy, that single copy is yours (what a concept!).
Thus attempts at restricting what a legal buyer can do with his property, such as claiming it's illegal for him to resell that property at any price he choose, to anyone, anywhere in the world, are moot.
I have no idea what you mean by "being transferred in and out of licence areas", fact is, copyrigth-law doesn't contain provisions for anything like "licence-areas", nor does any other law offer backing for such an idea.
It is true that the recording-industry would like to be able to sell a CD for cheap in a poor country, and still be shielded from the possibility that someone will buy it there, import it to a rich country, and undersell the much higher prices the record company wishes to charge there.
However, the fact that certain people wish something to be, doesn't by itself make it so.
Instead, it should be argued that artifical divisions like this are attempts to destroy the free market and screw over the consumers in the process. The recent ps2-modchip case from Italy was illustrative in this regard.
That the legal system has degenerated to such a degree that the richer/bigger part can pretty much use it as a threat and essentially claim: "Either you do as we say, or we're going to cost you more in legal bills", even when they don't actually have any hope or intention of winning those cases is just sad.
Which law precisely do you propose I may be breaking if I start a business based on buying legal, copyrigthed music somewhere in the world and "transferring it in and out of licence areas" ?
I think I'm fairly average. I used to tape the occasional tape of the radio for my own use, (perfectly legal atleast in Norway where I live.) but I also bougth CDs quite regularily, nothing major, a couple a month maybe.
Then the internet came along, and I didn't really change much. It's true that taping from the radio is obsolete, and replaced by downloading some music, but it didn't really change my habits much.
Then the RIAA started to push CDs-that-aren't-CDs, along with the idea that threating customers as criminals is a clever thing to do. The immediate result, atleast for me, was that I started to investigate the issue. I came to the conclusion that the record-companies and the music-cartel in general, entities I was hardly aware of existing earlier, are stupid, immoral, criminal, price-fixing, artist-conning idiots.
These days I Actively avoid buying any CD from the major labels. Atleast in a way they profit from. Yes, I consider it wrong to download and burn music rather than fairly compensate artists, but I consider it MORE wrong to contribute financially to the immoral antics of the music-industry. Still, the better choise is to for example buy the CDs used, or buy music from independent labels, or directly from smaller artists, or for that matter going back to taping from radio.
In any case the RIAA hasn't gotten a single cent from me for the last 2 years, nor will they get a single cent from me in the future if I can help it.
How this helps their bussiness is unclear to me.
But today it *does* show it's age. And a few points are downrigth undemocratic.
Worst when it comes to the elections are not the Electoral College in itself, but rather the fact that even though multiple people are elected from each state for the college, it is winner takes all.
It's pretty obvious to most people that if the population of a state is split 50/50, and that state sends 8 representatives, the democratic option would be to send 4/4 representatives, not 8/0 in favor of whichever party happens to get 50.2%.
It's also pretty obvious that a system in which everyone living in a clearly-republican or clearly-democratic state has no reason at all to go voting is not exactly optimal. How much, exactly does my vote for the republican candidate count if I live in a state far away from the balance-point (in either direction!)
But I ask you this, would it not be more logical for the label-companies to worry about *increased*sales* rather than "reduced infringement" ? Sure, if you act like a bully, some people will be bullied and stop downloading music. Question is, will many of those feel positively inclined to *choose* to spend their money buying your music ? Will it actually help your bottom line that a significant part of your core-market hates you like the pest ?
Offcourse a hypotetical etical music-industry would not even care about increased sales, they would care about finding a model where as many artists as possible could be supported at a reasonable living-standard.
From the point of view of society, we won't get anything back (as in increased creativity/productivity/variety - the purpose of Copyrigth, remember ?) from rewarding Michael Jackson with $500 million/year instead of $1 million/year. Both sums are more than adequate for a single artist to spend his full energy and time creating music.
Now, on the other hand, if we could get $499 million/year distributed to say 10000 artists of different kinds which are today unable to make a full-time living of their music, the additional 50K/year would likely enable most of them to be full-time musicians.
The music-industry is just about the poorest possible imaginable way of distributing the resources of the buyers onto the creators. And not only because "the industry" itself eats something like 95% of the gross before the actual musicians see a single cent.
I went to see Return of the King, thinking it'd be worth it to see it at the big screen. "only" 12 euro, since me and my girlfriend went on a cheap day.
First, you wait in an overfilled lobby until 5 minutes after the movie should actually have started. (why settle for 4 showings a day when you can *squeeze* 5 showings into the schedule?)
Then you go find your chair, and are subjected to a FULL HALF HOUR of advertising. Really. I looked at my watch about 25 minutes into it as I was saying to my girlfriend "This is getting ridicolous". (as if that movie ain't long enough for the seats in the cinema as it is ...)
Doesn't make it better that the advertising chooses to preach to us, the people who have decided to be legal and watch the film in the theatre that we're criminals and jail would be a fitting sentence.
You can also buy refreshments. Only 2 euro for a half-litre of Coke.
In comparison, at home I can, legally:
And then they ask why many don't go to the cinema very often anymore...
Mind you, I could've downloaded the movie and saved the 1.50, but that seems kinda trivial in comparison.
Oh, and with both of the latter options I get to hear the actors actually talk with their own voices, like I prefer. If I choose to go to the cinema, I'll be subjected to varying-quality-but-always-annoying "synchronised" german.
Consider that at the time I was living in western Norway, more than 2000 km (1200 miles or so) away from Chernobyl, and here is a short sample (by no means complete !) of claims from my tiny little part of the fallout, limited to food-safety:
The list is by no means complete, and that's only for one of the many areas that where hit by the fallout, and only for problems related to food-safety. What is fair compensation for this ? Times how many million ? Notice that I didn't even *mention* problems like increased birth-defencies and cancer-occurences for the following *decades*, nor ask what fair compensation for a chromoson-fault in your kid is.
Fact is, while 44 direct deaths is not at all unheard of for a "normal" industrial accident, I've never heard of a "normal" industrial accident that had consequences like this thousands of miles away from the accident-place.
I agree, by the way, that Nuclear-done-rigth can be quite safe as power-plants go. But it is stupid and counterproductive to compare Tchernobyl to other industrial accidents with 44 dead.
That's what I said: vacuum does nothing at all to stop *radiative* heat-transfer. Which scales by the 4th power of the surface-temperature of the radiator by the way, which is why it's the dominating heat-transfer for high-temperature stuff like the surface of the sun, and rather insignificant for low-temperature stuff like window glass.
Vacuum is *not* actually the perfect insulator. It is true that no heat is conducted trough vacuum, but on the other hand vacuum is near perfect in letting heat *radiate*. Now, if you combine vacuum with one or more reflective films to reflect back most of the radiated heat then you have eh, uhm, invented the termos-bottle.
You can sue regex, so if you really wanted to nuke all flash you could just add a rule like *.swf, but in practice you migth want to keep some. *doubleclick* is rather helpful.
First 2-3 days you use it you'll need to rigth-click and remove stuff that annoys you. Thereafter you're pretty much free from annoying intrusive advertising forever. Atmost you migth have to see some new annoyance once. Then you tell AdBlock to nuke it, and it's gone.
Everyone is aware that whole grain contains more minerals, more vitamins, more basically anything that's good for you than white flour.
The problem still has nothing to do with the grinding though, as it is perfectly possible, and indeed common, to buy whole grain flour which is nevertheless *also* ground into a dust. (yes, if you like you can also buy it coarser-milled but that's still got no influence on nutritional value.)
But I take issue with your other claims. They are, to put it bluntly also bullshit. There are very few, if any, vitamins, minerals or substances needed by the body that would in any way be lost by being powderized. What do you imagine vitamins are ? Small glass-pearls that get crushed in a mill ? Heat harms many vitamins. As does prolonged storage. As does, in some cases, exposure over a long time to uv-ligth. There's no nutrient that I'm aware of that takes any damage from being ground to a dust.
You're rigth though that cutting calories help with loosing weigth. That's fairly obvious to anyone who doesn't live in la-la-land. And you're also rigth that many of the high-carb foods we eat today contain few useful nutrients beyond the raw carbs. (aka "empty calories")
6: Argue that general purpose computers is a tool much to useful to society to consider giving them up, or locking them away with the keys in the hands of a elite few, over an issue as trivial as some downloaded music-files.
7: Continue to press the point that copyrigth-law is supposed to serve a *purpose*, the creation of science and the useful arts. If it ain't serving this purpose, it's unconstitutional and harmful. Retroactively extending copyrigths for works where the author is 50 years dead does nothing to stimulate science or the useful acts.
8: Continue to point out that the music-cartel is in trouble because they're providing a service noone really needs or wants anymore. Sure, that's putting it a bit on the point, but fact is, neither I as a producer of music, nor I as a consumer have any interest in supporting those things 90% of the cash goes to when I purchase a CD.
9: Try to get politicians to understand that not everything which is *disliked* should be *illegal*. The rigth solution to the "problem" of kids looking for porn in p-2-p space and finding it is *gasp* parents who actually give a fuck. (How is p2p worse for youngsters than thehun.net by the way ? Should we shut down the www too ?)
10: Get an actually democratic system in the US. It used to be every man one vote, these days it's more like every dollar one vote. There's more p2p users in the USA than there are people who voted for Bush....
For a start...
This I agree with. Unfortunately I don't agree with that much more :-)
Actually, I think you're making a smidge of a mistake with design == usability. But that's only looking at it from the point of designer anything, where look is king.
Yeah. I really do think that's a mistake on the net. A site which is usable but ugly can be useful, even popular. A site that is pretty, but not usable, will never suceed. Perhaps a reason is that on the net your customer has to *interact* with the stuff you're making, not only passively look at it, like in TV or magazines. Personally I think many designers are much to stuck in a paper-world.
seriously, if everything looked the same, what would the point be?
I never said everything should look the same. I *did* however say that we don't need a "new and unique" navigation-system for every site.
The question you gotta ask is if users will bother learning a "new and unique" navigation only for your site, or if there's more to gain from synergy and recognition-effect. You migth not like the floppy as a symbol for "save", but odds are if you choose it, even people who're using your program for the first time will recognize it as "save". For the same reason, blue, unterlined text that is *not* a link is a bad idea, even if you think it looks "different".
If your market is ultra-hip post-cyberpunk *insert god damn stupid adjective here* that appreciates some weird, fucked up hyper-techno *insert descriptive here* interface,
Thing is, even if the flash-intro and all-blinking all-dancing stuff is amusing to you on the first visit, it's going to get old *real* fast the moment you try to actually acomplish something with the site. Assuming it's possible to "acomplish" anything with a flash-site, which is the exception. Repeat customers are important.
then giving them something that looks like Yahoo is gonna make 'em go to sleep.
So give them something that looks like E14. That was never my point. I gave a long list of drawbacks of flash. All of those can be overcome in a web-site that's still nothing at all like Yahoo. A few of those can possibly even be overcome in flash, though I've never seen it done.
Conversely, if you're peddling information to people with remarkable lack of imagination (think stock market investors or the people so afraid of the Inter-Net that they type URLs into Yahoo's search box because it's all they know) you want your interface to be as simple and straightforward as possible.
So Google is a success because of people with remarkable lack of imagination and a great fear of anything new and/or technical ?
I don't think so. To the contrary it seem to have won popularity first among computer professionals, hackers, nerds, technophiles. People who doesn't fall anywhere close to your stereotypes above. They like it because it fucking works. And because it doesn't insist on distracting from it's function with lots of blinking-ligths.
Look. Noone said all websites should look the same. Noone said that Yahoo and Google, or Slashdot, is the be-all of web-design. What I *did* say was only that I have yet to see a usable site made in Flash, and I sorta doubt I'm likely to see many. I also said that I don't think it's a accident that most successfull websites put a high value on usability and have a minimum of bullshit. If you have counter-examples, feel free to say so.
You forgot about surviving being dropped from a dozen meters, wrapped in air-bags and bouncing an estimated 10-15 times before coming to a rest. :-)
Actually there's tons of stuff in the US that are "rationed" through artificially created scarcity. Look up "copyrigth" sometime. Not that I agree with you that this is a particularily central point in 1984.
But I'm pretty sure they're wrong. Sure, some people want it, some of the time. But there are a lot of us who don't.
How do you explain the stratospheric success of Google over other search-engines which almost universally provide a lot more blinking-ligths ? Turns out when you actually want to get things done, that's only distracting.
Same for all professional products. My Keyboard doesn't have blinking ligths. Then again it's not marketed to early teens either.
A lot of people loose a lot of bussiness because people just get plain annoyed with all the crap they have to go through to be "allowed" to actually be a customer and purchase stuff. I feel pretty sure I'm not the only one who's closed down web-shop windows in disgust upon discovering that they insist on yet-another stupid plugin to allow me to buy their products.
That's just for a start. Sorry, but "can do moving vector-graphics and sounds" just aren't by a ligthyear enough to make up for those fairly serious problems.
In Practice, offcourse, as you hint when you say "in theory", flash-sites are much *worse* that is - they have a lot of *additional* problems that they could, in principle, assuming the people who choose to make their web-site in flash where sane, avoid. Problems such as the entire site being stuck in a fixed 400x300 box, and containing no useful info whatsoever after you get over the flashing-jumping-singind-dancing vector-graphics.
You're rigth offcourse, a usable site alone won't bring you much, unless there is also some actual content of interest on the site.
Luckily, it's rarely so that you have to choose -- the more usable sites tend to be the ones with most contant too. When a site resorts to flash-crap and "cutesy" animated menues, in almost all cases that also indicates they don't actually have anything to say, so they decided to make it "pretty but non-useful" instead of only "non-useful".