Sure she blames the Doc (and as you say: he may or may not be to blame, allthough he *did* have 13 malpractice-suits against him, lost 9 of those)
But the overwhelming impression from reading the pages is "Be careful with plastic surgery.", it's not a risk-free as their marketing will have you believe, and it *doesn't* magically improve your life.
This is unquestionably good advice. Furthermore, even if it was infact bad advice (which it isn't!) free speech means you're free to give even bad advice. Now, if she said something libellous and untrue about the doc, he would've had a point. But I don't see anything.
She *does* say he performed the procedure. She does say he had several malpractice-suits. She *does* say she considers the results poor. But all of these things are true (and the doc hasn't claimed otherwise in court).
If anything, she is still overly positive to plastic surgery imho -- she seems to think risks come primarily from selecting the wrong doctors. But as you correctly point out: surgery is *ALWAYS* risky -- even if you've got the best team on the planet doing the job. It's *NOT* something you should do without a very good reason. (And: I'm feeling kinda depressed this week, I'm only prettier than 90% of other women, with surgery I could be in the top 5% isn't a good reason. Not even close.)
Nothing is authorative in the sense that it's definitely true. (nothing other than maths anyway)
There's no source you can cite that will authoritatively show that Einstein was rigth.
What you *CAN* do is say that : "Professor X in his study Y, published in Z at [date] writes that..."
Mind you, he could be wrong for any of a hundred reasons. But that doesn't change the fact that he *did* write it.
What would be the authoritative source for a claim that London is the capitol of the UK ? Their official webpage could be hacked, or it could just have a typo. Same for any other document you care to cite, including the official transcripts from whichever session of their parliament decided this. There's no single cite that can establish even a simple fact like this with 100% certanity.
Luckily that ain't needed. Most people are *sufficiently* convinced that London is, indeed, the capitol of the UK.
Agreed. It's broken. Plain and simple. They are a billion dollar industry providing no service anybody needs. (ok, so that's not *entirely* true, but it's pretty close to true, and getting closer by the minute)
CDs cost precisely what the RIAA *wants* them to cost. So I honestly don't understand how they, off all people, can complain about the pricing. I think that they cost somewhat to much. But more important to me is that I think downloadable drm-infected music costs *WAAAAY* to much.
Sure, I can choose simply not to buy that. And I do. It's just that it's a pity, because I *DO* want to listen to music and I *DO* want those who make music I like to be rewarded. And I *am* prepared to pay a reasonable price to them. But the option is simply not offered to me. A market failure.
Artists want to sell music to me for like $0.10/track. I'd like to *buy* some of that music, and I would for 2-3 times the price, if I'd get it in an unencumbered format. But that doesn't work out, because the RIAA sits between and says I gotta pay literally ten times the price and then get it drm-infected. (whereafter they'll spend a significant portion of the money I just gave them lobbying *against* my interests) I'm just not prepared to do that.
There are newer better ways of *distributing* music, the music itself hasn't improved (that'd be a subjective judgement anyway).
Of the $15 a new CD costs, I pay something like $4 to the shop selling it for wages, shelf-space, rent etc. Perhaps $1-$2 for physical distribution, storage, imports etc. Another $1 or so for production, including covers, inlet etc.
All of which is services I have no need for whatsoever, and indeed would hugely prefer if they'd just drop. That leaves about half the price.
I'd also like them to just stop paying for advertising, fire a few dozen lawyers and fat bosses at the RIAA, and basically you're left with money for the band, and those people involved in actually *making* the music. (composers, text-writers, musicians, sound-technicians, etc) and a tiny cost for the distribution.
Yet, online music is overwhelmingly DRM-infected and $0.99/track, largely to avoid cannibalising traditional CD-sales. Of these $0.99 perhaps a tenth goes to the band. It's hugely ineffective.
$0.29/track of which $0.25 goes to those actually making the music would be more along the lines. This would double the income of everyone making music -- but leave RIAA irrelevant.
What you're not factoring in is the increase in cost of studio time
Studio-time is trough the floor. It used to be just a few decades ago that a studio capable of producing comercial-quality records cost on the order of a house. These days you get superior signal-handling from gear that costs literally 2-3 orders of magnitude less. Hell, $10K will buy you equipment good enough to win awards with your records, I know because my co-worker across the hall did 2 weeks ago. (Spelemannsprisen, the most prestigious Norwegian music-award)
the price of labor for the guy(s) running the boards), artist payments (in theory, this should also go up with inflation),
Actually, it should go up proportionally to average *salary*-increases in a society, which is *MORE* than inflation if the society is getting richer. This is however in this particular case more than offset by two facts. One, modern equipment is *much* less labour-intensive and two, the lower leads to increased availability, which leads to more people capable of dealing with much of it. Many bands even do a lot themselves. Yes they'll need one or two (preferably good!) sound-technicians for the couple of days the actual recording takes. But let's face it, that works out to paying an engineer for a week. For well-selling records its down in the noise.
Marketing costs whatever you want it to cost. You can spend $100 or $100million promoting a single album. That was always so.
Fact is, the RIAA is just whining. There's nothing whatsoever stopping them from selling an album for $35. I encourage them to try. People are then, offcourse, free to simply not *buy* that. But that's a free market for you. I guess they're too used to monopolies and dictating terms.
Not Time's Scar from Chrono Chross -- surely ? I still get shivers down my back at that spot you know. Had it in my wedding even. Does that qualify me as among the Luckiest Guys Alive, to have a wife like that I mean ?
Okay ! What do you think about someone who likes (among a zillion other things);
Bertine Zetlitz
Nigthwish
Weird Al (atleast when I'm in a quirky mood)
Fabel
Die Puhdies
I am always at a loss what to answer when people ask what *type* of music I like. Let's see, Bertine is modern pop with a fair add-in of jazz and some elements from rock. Strong vocals, complex sound-picture, not depressive, but certainly not jolly either.
Nigthwish, hmm, hard-rock combined with vocals out of classical opera. It's not that rare now which odd combos like that, but the first time I heard them it was very new to me anyway, besides, they're good at it. Their concert in Dresden autumn 2005 was one of the best I've ever been to. Totally rocked.
Weird al ? Political satire and/or parody, often with well-known pop-songs as sound-stage. Funny, the *musical* value is near zero.
Fabel ? Norwegian band. Extraordinary texts. The kind you could read as poetry, without getting laughed out. Yet, talking of situations, emotions and problems normal people can relate to. The kind of thing that should make you all wanna go learn norwegian *grin*. Very very varied in mood.
Die Puhdies ? East-german rock-band. Not very heavy, more melodic. Kinda stuff that you tend to sing along to when you've had a few glasses too much. Musically it's not revolutionary, it's just good-mood kinda music.
If I'd mention more, they'd stay all over the spectrum, so I honestly don't know what I like. I know what I *don't* like though.
First: Sorry. I confused you with some other guy. I am truly sorry. My mistake.
It's true, even pictures are of modest size compared to for example movies. A a4-page at 150dpi has on the order of 10MP (megapixels), so if it's a full-color photo in high quality it'll be on the order of 1-3MB, if it is something with lots of large single-color areas (like for example a drawn black-white cartoon where 90% of the page is pure white) it'll be significantly less, perhaps as little as 100KB, which would mean 10MB can hold 100 pages.
In practice, pure-full-color-picture-entire-page is somewhat rare. More typical is what you see in magazines, a mix of pictures and text, pictures covering perhaps a quarter of the page. New Scientist has 60-85 pages, is in a format around letter, has lots of pictures (but not all that many full-page ones) and occupy ~25MB in its pdf-edition. (that edition has only 75dpi though, it'd probably be double that in 150dpi)
I guess most books will be at most 100MB. Text-only books stored as compressed, pure text take a tiny fraction of that, certainly less than 1MB.
One of the main *advantages* I see of eBooks is the portability. It'd be *great* to be able to drag around your entire library in one small convenient, easily-backuped package, complete with statistics as to what you read when, what you thougth of it, when you bougth it for what price and so on. I'd *love* to be able to say: "Show me some science-fiction that I like and that I haven't read the last 5 years", such functionality should be a no-brainer in an ereader and normal books can't do that. (not without huge effort anyway)
I'd also love to be able to scribble and comment in my books -- without affecting the original, and with the possibility of extracting the notes later, mail them to others and so on. Real useful for textbooks, and again something that normal books can't do.
Get me rigth, I'd love to have a nice ereader. Thing is, I've actually searched for one. And I've been unable to find one that comes even close to what I'd want. I sincerely do hope that this will change in the near future. When it does, it won't stop me if the reader-device initially costs $500 or even $1000.
2. how much do you plan on reading? plain ASCII test consumes 1 byte per character, so 1 gig would give you 1,000,000,000 characters of space.
I plan on reading stuff like New Scientist, journals of Architecture, technical documentation, and yes, normal text-only books. Thing is, the first 3 are severly hampered if they don't inculde highres full-colour images. I'd even wish for the possibility of zooming in on images (something books can't do) which would require including even higher-res versions.
I also would like to bring several large works of reference along for the ride. Hell, given half a possibility I'd like to bring *all* my books along. I agree, if you bring only pure-ascii books, and only that which you plan to read, no large references or the like, then 1GB or so is adequate.
i don't particularly care what the actual resolution is. if it is good and readable (laser-print output), it's fine for me.
You won't get laser-print readability without something aproaching laser-print resolution.
That's not a valid rebuttal. You claimed current eReaders have no significant drawbacks compared to books. In this comparison, low battery-life *IS* a significant drawback compared to books.
I don't know about you, but I don't sit around reading the same book for 10 hours straight.
I very often read while travelling. I may not read the same book for 10 hours straigth. But I may very well read for a *total* of 10 hours before returning home. Needing to find a power-outlet to recharge while underway is a significant drawback compared to books.
If you're storing books in BloatyDRM or PDF format, sure, that's a problem. If they're just text, though, shouldn't matter -- check out Gutenberg for some fairly small files, and keep in mind that English text generally compresses by about an order of magnitude without even trying.
Books, however, have the ability to include high-resolution full-colour pictures without increasing in size. Not all books need or benefit from this. But some do. If my ereader can't, then that's another significant drawback compared to books.
E-Ink should fix this.
"should fix this" doesn't help when my argument was that *CURRENT* reader-devices suck. It's perfectly possible that *FUTURE* ones will suck less, but that was neither your nor my argument.
I should've said: Exponential growth of bandwith will change things fundamentally. (and we appear to have it)
It's just, even though Moore, as you say, originally only talked about transistor-count, it's apparent that lots of other computer-technologies follow similar patterns. (hd-storage, optical-storage, network-capacity etc)
True. Books may to some degree be protected by the fact that they're cheap. Atleast that's true for mass-market-paperbacks sold to people in rich countries. If I need to work for 15 minutes to pay for a book that'll entertain me for hours, then it may simply not be worth the bother to search it out and download it.
If legal music-downloads where 10 cents/song and in unencumbered formats, I think many wouldn't *bother* with the illegal alternatives.
Fact is, Lyse offers 6, 25 and 50 Mbps -- all symetrical.
Fact is, 50Mbps costs about double compared to 6. So, you get 9 times the bandwith for double the price.
Fact is, 94% of Lyses customers choose 6Mpbs, about 1% choose 50mbps.
To me, that strongly indicates that there's not much of a market for even more bandwith. Most people seem happy with 6mpbs, atleast to the point where they're not willing to pay more to get more. (sure they'd take a TB if it didn't cost them anything aditionally.)
They *definitely* don't, currently, have infrastructure to handle all customers on GB. But they *would* if there was demand for it.
Thing is, traditionally it's the other way around: it's the last mile that is the problem. It is *MUCH* more expensive to upgrade 10.000 customers from copper-coax-cable and to single-mode-fibre than it is to upgrade the infrastructure internally at the isp.
Doubling the bandwith available between New-York and London is fairly simple. Doubling the available last-mile bandwith for all inhabitants in London and New-York is mindbogglingly complex and expensive.
You can call it what you like, but yes, the bandwith available to the typical internet-user has been steadily and rapidly growing over time. Back at the start 14.4kbps modem was the norm. Then 28.8, 33.6 and eventually 58kbps, followed in some regions by 64 and 128 isdn, or straigth to ADSL starting from 500kbps and topping out around 4000kbps.
Today, ADSL is getting replaced with ADSL2 and fiber-to-the-home which *start* around 4Mpbs and tops out at around 100mbps. The physical single-mode fibre is actually capable of multiple terabits, that ain't offered because there's simply no demand.
I already *said* that lack of readers as comfy as paper-books is a significant brake for ebook-adoption. I agree bandwith isn't what books need. (movies need it though)
Most people don't, infact, read much books on screen. It's *possible* that you're rigth, and that unfamiliarity and price are the two main blocking factors, but even if those two where the only two problems, those are still significant enough that books currently totally dominate.
I don't agree though. Most devices I've seen also suffer from one or more of the following:
Sucky (less than 10 hour) battery-life.
Small storage (less than a few GB)
Poor readability in brigth ligth (such as in a sunlit park)
Proprietary one-off file-formats rather than good support for standard ones (html, pdf)
Tiny screen. A4 or atleast A5 would be a good start, alas most I've seen are even smaller. For some types of books A5 is really to small.
Miniscule resolution. Even just 150dpi on a a4 book would require 2500x1800 pixel resolution, most readers I've seen has like literally a tenth of this (as in 800x600) The same pixel-count would be required for 300dpi at a5 size.
No, or poor, possibility of making notes, filling in forms or similar. (I realize many that only want to stricly *read* don't need this, it'd still be a tremendous boost for many applications though)
Ok, so maybe these don't matter to you, and are all trumped by bookmarks. But I'd be willing to pay quite a bit for a device without these problems, and I *have* been deliberately searching, with no luck whatsoever this far.
Nah. Auron wasn't much strong when you first met him. (if he had been he'd have made Tidus pointless) he was doing perhaps 1.5 times the damage of Tidus, but on the other hand he had lower agility. He also doesn't give much mentoring, unless you count "I hope you know how to use it".
A completely different issue is whether the prisoners at Gitmo actually is entitled to human rights protection.
The thing that completely flabberghasts most of the world is that USA actually debate such a thing. What century do we live in anyway ? Seriously, they're called "human rights" for a reason. What part of Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind,(...) is hard to grasp ?
But even ignoring that, there's a second problem, atleast equally bad.
It's perfectly possible (likely even!) that most of the people in Gitmo are guilty of horrible crimes. The way one deals with such is by charging people for an actual court, and have the court hand out a sentence. (which in the USA can include the death-penalty)
Putting everyone in prison for like literally half a decade, yet never formally forwarding any charges, and just say "it's ok, they're *probably* guilty, most of them anyway, so we won't even bother trying to show that for a court" is definitely *NOT* how it's done. It's a complete disgrace.
And it completely undermines USAs position as the "good guys". It gives the other side an excuse to say: Sure we play dirty, but look at them Americans, they ignore stuff like the human rigths when it suits them too, they're no different. (notice: I don't nessecarily *agree* with this statement, I just think you stupidly invite it by not following your own rules)
Moores law will fuck things up seriously. At the moment books are sort of protected for the simple reason that no reader-device is available which is even close to as comfy as good-old paperbooks. But the moment they are, things are going to get very interesting.
At the moment, typical home-bandwith is perhaps 1Mbps. Typical home-storage is perhaps 300GB. Which means (order of magnitude-estimates)
Downloading a book takes 10 seconds. You can store 300.000
Downloading like for example the complete harry-potter series takes a minute or two. You can store 50.000
Downloading a song in FM-like quality takes half a minute, you can store perhaps 100.000
Downloading an album in FM-like quality takes 10 minutes, you can store 7000.
Downloading an album in CD-quality takes an hour, you can store 1000.
Downloading a movie in low quality takes 2 hours. You can store 500.
Downloading a movie in DVD-quality takes a day. You can store 50.
Which means for most people, bandwith and storage is a limiting factor for the last few of these options. (depending on patience)
High-def movies migth add another order of magnitude size, so we're up to a week of downloading and you can store like 5-10 of them, which is definitely way into impractical-land.
But that's all today. Bandwith and storage grows exponentially, and though 1Mbps may be *typical* even today a significant (and rapidly growing) part of the population has a lot more.
Lyse, my ISP have stopped *offering* speeds lower than 6Mbps. Their top offering currently is 50Mbps. Which brings the high-def movie in original (blueray/HD-DVD) quality back down from a week and to 4 hours.
I expect 100Mbps to be the norm in my neighbourhood before the decade is out. The infrastructure is certianly already there, the only reason it's not the norm today is that few care for it. For 99% of the users today, 6Mbps (symetrical, same upload!) is adequate enough that they have no interest even in the "premium" 50Mbps offered for a modestly higher price.
Already today, people are downloading albums rathe than songs. And to some degree complete discographies rather than albums. And books are tiny compared to music.
We're only a short way away from being able to in effect say: "Screw it, I don't know yet what I want to read on the plane, let's just download 'all_books_published_in_the_usa_this_decade.zip' and put it on the reader, that's only a few TB anyway."
Just how large would "all_movies_ever_shown_in_an_american_theatre-dvdr ip.zip" be anyway ? How many years away from being able to download that in say a day are we ? How are the *AAs going to deal with it ?
Final Fantasy X also did this excellently. (avoiding the "let's swat butterflies for an hour first" crap)
It was breathtaking. Sin attacks. There are sinspawn. Then a boss shows up. You're overwhelmed, scared, no fucking idea what goes on in this cruel world. Confused.
Later (much later) you understand that actually, it's hard to actually die to a boss whose sole attack has the effect of halving your hp. But those few first hours are amazing. The game only started calming down once you got to Luca. Up until then it's pretty much a headlong rush.
Ok, so the second time you play the game it's freaking annoying that there appear to be no way of skipping the long movie-sequences. They're well-done, at the time the game came out among the best made. but you've seen them...
Do they honestly claim that someone who ignores unsubscribe-requests, uses lists for "other" purposes than those the user agreed to, ignores users unchecking "subscribe" boxes (which are by default checked offcourse!), still sends email to adresses in an old-not-updated database and lets spammers do their marketing is MISTAKEN for a spammer ?
I'd say anyone that fits even a third of these points are definitely a spammer, there is no mistake whatsoever.
Still, if I'm willing to pay up to $20 for some item, I'm not feeling cheated if some other guy buys it for $22. I wasn't willing to pay that much, so it's only fair that he gets it.
If he *also* really didn't want to pay that much, then he was being stupid.
I suppose you're rigth though, some people "hate losing", so they actually pay more than they want to pay to avoid "losing".
Ebay could eliminate this quite simply: don't display anything other than the number of bids on an item in auction, when the auction ends, the one with the highest bid wins and pays the price of the second-highest-bid. In the case where two people have identical max bids, the first bid made wins.
Maybe it's just the things I buy on Ebay that makes me not have this problem. Most of the stuff I buy there is dirt-cheap anyway, often to the point where payment is completely secondary and the main point is getting more use out of an item.
Example: we'll get twins in april. This means we need babyclothes. Tons of them. Most of them never ever get even *close* to wearing out, because small babies pretty much just sleep, eat and cry and grow quickly, so in 2 months the clothes are too small anyway. So, I ordered a crate of 200 pieces of clothing in size 0-12months, all in very good condition. (some of it like-new, some of it looks like it may have been washed 5-10 times, none of it has any holes, stains or obvious signs of wear) $50.
Frankly, it's more of a convenience-thing in this case. Buying that all new would a) cost something like $500 and b) take half of forever of baby-shop-trawling, which I, being a male, don't particularily feel like. If the end-price is $30 or $100 is completely unimportant.
The stuff that looks good after our twins have grown out of it gets sold. Again -- I'm happy that the stuff gets used, I don't care at all if I get $20 or $100. The point is, throwing it away is a waste.
That'd be nice. "I bid $X for this -- if I get outbid then I bid $Y for that -- if that also fails then I bid $Z for that."
It'd allow me to buy something without being forced to either babysit the auctions, risk getting multiple copies or use sniping-software. (which are your current 3 choices)
True. But not all electricity generates *extra* heat.
For example, when I use electricity to power my dishwasher, eventually all of the electricity ends up as waste heat.
But the thing is, the electricity comes from a hydropower-turbine. If I was to *not* use the electricity, then the same energy would've ended up as waste-heat from friction in the river.
It makes no difference to total heat if the sequence is: rainfall-river-friction-heat or rainfall-turbine-electricity-dishwasher-heat.
If we, on the other hand create electricity from fossil or nuclear fuels, then we release heat from energy that would otherwise stay stored as chemical or nuclear energy.
You're rigth, this effect is miniscule compared to the greenhouse-effect. Probably completely ignorable. Which is why I much prefer modern nuclear plants over oil or coal-powered powerplants.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure she blames the Doc (and as you say: he may or may not be to blame, allthough he *did* have 13 malpractice-suits against him, lost 9 of those)
But the overwhelming impression from reading the pages is "Be careful with plastic surgery.", it's not a risk-free as their marketing will have you believe, and it *doesn't* magically improve your life.
This is unquestionably good advice. Furthermore, even if it was infact bad advice (which it isn't!) free speech means you're free to give even bad advice. Now, if she said something libellous and untrue about the doc, he would've had a point. But I don't see anything.
She *does* say he performed the procedure. She does say he had several malpractice-suits. She *does* say she considers the results poor. But all of these things are true (and the doc hasn't claimed otherwise in court).
If anything, she is still overly positive to plastic surgery imho -- she seems to think risks come primarily from selecting the wrong doctors. But as you correctly point out: surgery is *ALWAYS* risky -- even if you've got the best team on the planet doing the job. It's *NOT* something you should do without a very good reason. (And: I'm feeling kinda depressed this week, I'm only prettier than 90% of other women, with surgery I could be in the top 5% isn't a good reason. Not even close.)
There's no source you can cite that will authoritatively show that Einstein was rigth.
What you *CAN* do is say that : "Professor X in his study Y, published in Z at [date] writes that ..."
Mind you, he could be wrong for any of a hundred reasons. But that doesn't change the fact that he *did* write it.
What would be the authoritative source for a claim that London is the capitol of the UK ? Their official webpage could be hacked, or it could just have a typo. Same for any other document you care to cite, including the official transcripts from whichever session of their parliament decided this. There's no single cite that can establish even a simple fact like this with 100% certanity.
Luckily that ain't needed. Most people are *sufficiently* convinced that London is, indeed, the capitol of the UK.
CDs cost precisely what the RIAA *wants* them to cost. So I honestly don't understand how they, off all people, can complain about the pricing. I think that they cost somewhat to much. But more important to me is that I think downloadable drm-infected music costs *WAAAAY* to much.
Sure, I can choose simply not to buy that. And I do. It's just that it's a pity, because I *DO* want to listen to music and I *DO* want those who make music I like to be rewarded. And I *am* prepared to pay a reasonable price to them. But the option is simply not offered to me. A market failure.
Artists want to sell music to me for like $0.10/track. I'd like to *buy* some of that music, and I would for 2-3 times the price, if I'd get it in an unencumbered format. But that doesn't work out, because the RIAA sits between and says I gotta pay literally ten times the price and then get it drm-infected. (whereafter they'll spend a significant portion of the money I just gave them lobbying *against* my interests) I'm just not prepared to do that.
Of the $15 a new CD costs, I pay something like $4 to the shop selling it for wages, shelf-space, rent etc. Perhaps $1-$2 for physical distribution, storage, imports etc. Another $1 or so for production, including covers, inlet etc.
All of which is services I have no need for whatsoever, and indeed would hugely prefer if they'd just drop. That leaves about half the price.
I'd also like them to just stop paying for advertising, fire a few dozen lawyers and fat bosses at the RIAA, and basically you're left with money for the band, and those people involved in actually *making* the music. (composers, text-writers, musicians, sound-technicians, etc) and a tiny cost for the distribution.
Yet, online music is overwhelmingly DRM-infected and $0.99/track, largely to avoid cannibalising traditional CD-sales. Of these $0.99 perhaps a tenth goes to the band. It's hugely ineffective.
$0.29/track of which $0.25 goes to those actually making the music would be more along the lines. This would double the income of everyone making music -- but leave RIAA irrelevant.
Studio-time is trough the floor. It used to be just a few decades ago that a studio capable of producing comercial-quality records cost on the order of a house. These days you get superior signal-handling from gear that costs literally 2-3 orders of magnitude less. Hell, $10K will buy you equipment good enough to win awards with your records, I know because my co-worker across the hall did 2 weeks ago. (Spelemannsprisen, the most prestigious Norwegian music-award)
the price of labor for the guy(s) running the boards), artist payments (in theory, this should also go up with inflation),
Actually, it should go up proportionally to average *salary*-increases in a society, which is *MORE* than inflation if the society is getting richer. This is however in this particular case more than offset by two facts. One, modern equipment is *much* less labour-intensive and two, the lower leads to increased availability, which leads to more people capable of dealing with much of it. Many bands even do a lot themselves. Yes they'll need one or two (preferably good!) sound-technicians for the couple of days the actual recording takes. But let's face it, that works out to paying an engineer for a week. For well-selling records its down in the noise.
Marketing costs whatever you want it to cost. You can spend $100 or $100million promoting a single album. That was always so.
Fact is, the RIAA is just whining. There's nothing whatsoever stopping them from selling an album for $35. I encourage them to try. People are then, offcourse, free to simply not *buy* that. But that's a free market for you. I guess they're too used to monopolies and dictating terms.
Not Time's Scar from Chrono Chross -- surely ? I still get shivers down my back at that spot you know. Had it in my wedding even. Does that qualify me as among the Luckiest Guys Alive, to have a wife like that I mean ?
W00t ? Somebody with a clue on Slashdot ? Whodda thunk it. Thank you. You made my day brigther !
I am always at a loss what to answer when people ask what *type* of music I like. Let's see, Bertine is modern pop with a fair add-in of jazz and some elements from rock. Strong vocals, complex sound-picture, not depressive, but certainly not jolly either.
Nigthwish, hmm, hard-rock combined with vocals out of classical opera. It's not that rare now which odd combos like that, but the first time I heard them it was very new to me anyway, besides, they're good at it. Their concert in Dresden autumn 2005 was one of the best I've ever been to. Totally rocked.
Weird al ? Political satire and/or parody, often with well-known pop-songs as sound-stage. Funny, the *musical* value is near zero.
Fabel ? Norwegian band. Extraordinary texts. The kind you could read as poetry, without getting laughed out. Yet, talking of situations, emotions and problems normal people can relate to. The kind of thing that should make you all wanna go learn norwegian *grin*. Very very varied in mood.
Die Puhdies ? East-german rock-band. Not very heavy, more melodic. Kinda stuff that you tend to sing along to when you've had a few glasses too much. Musically it's not revolutionary, it's just good-mood kinda music.
If I'd mention more, they'd stay all over the spectrum, so I honestly don't know what I like. I know what I *don't* like though.
It's true, even pictures are of modest size compared to for example movies. A a4-page at 150dpi has on the order of 10MP (megapixels), so if it's a full-color photo in high quality it'll be on the order of 1-3MB, if it is something with lots of large single-color areas (like for example a drawn black-white cartoon where 90% of the page is pure white) it'll be significantly less, perhaps as little as 100KB, which would mean 10MB can hold 100 pages.
In practice, pure-full-color-picture-entire-page is somewhat rare. More typical is what you see in magazines, a mix of pictures and text, pictures covering perhaps a quarter of the page. New Scientist has 60-85 pages, is in a format around letter, has lots of pictures (but not all that many full-page ones) and occupy ~25MB in its pdf-edition. (that edition has only 75dpi though, it'd probably be double that in 150dpi)
I guess most books will be at most 100MB. Text-only books stored as compressed, pure text take a tiny fraction of that, certainly less than 1MB.
One of the main *advantages* I see of eBooks is the portability. It'd be *great* to be able to drag around your entire library in one small convenient, easily-backuped package, complete with statistics as to what you read when, what you thougth of it, when you bougth it for what price and so on. I'd *love* to be able to say: "Show me some science-fiction that I like and that I haven't read the last 5 years", such functionality should be a no-brainer in an ereader and normal books can't do that. (not without huge effort anyway)
I'd also love to be able to scribble and comment in my books -- without affecting the original, and with the possibility of extracting the notes later, mail them to others and so on. Real useful for textbooks, and again something that normal books can't do.
Get me rigth, I'd love to have a nice ereader. Thing is, I've actually searched for one. And I've been unable to find one that comes even close to what I'd want. I sincerely do hope that this will change in the near future. When it does, it won't stop me if the reader-device initially costs $500 or even $1000.
I plan on reading stuff like New Scientist, journals of Architecture, technical documentation, and yes, normal text-only books. Thing is, the first 3 are severly hampered if they don't inculde highres full-colour images. I'd even wish for the possibility of zooming in on images (something books can't do) which would require including even higher-res versions.
I also would like to bring several large works of reference along for the ride. Hell, given half a possibility I'd like to bring *all* my books along. I agree, if you bring only pure-ascii books, and only that which you plan to read, no large references or the like, then 1GB or so is adequate.
i don't particularly care what the actual resolution is. if it is good and readable (laser-print output), it's fine for me.
You won't get laser-print readability without something aproaching laser-print resolution.
That's not a valid rebuttal. You claimed current eReaders have no significant drawbacks compared to books. In this comparison, low battery-life *IS* a significant drawback compared to books.
I don't know about you, but I don't sit around reading the same book for 10 hours straight.
I very often read while travelling. I may not read the same book for 10 hours straigth. But I may very well read for a *total* of 10 hours before returning home. Needing to find a power-outlet to recharge while underway is a significant drawback compared to books.
If you're storing books in BloatyDRM or PDF format, sure, that's a problem. If they're just text, though, shouldn't matter -- check out Gutenberg for some fairly small files, and keep in mind that English text generally compresses by about an order of magnitude without even trying.
Books, however, have the ability to include high-resolution full-colour pictures without increasing in size. Not all books need or benefit from this. But some do. If my ereader can't, then that's another significant drawback compared to books.
E-Ink should fix this.
"should fix this" doesn't help when my argument was that *CURRENT* reader-devices suck. It's perfectly possible that *FUTURE* ones will suck less, but that was neither your nor my argument.
I should've said: Exponential growth of bandwith will change things fundamentally. (and we appear to have it)
It's just, even though Moore, as you say, originally only talked about transistor-count, it's apparent that lots of other computer-technologies follow similar patterns. (hd-storage, optical-storage, network-capacity etc)
If legal music-downloads where 10 cents/song and in unencumbered formats, I think many wouldn't *bother* with the illegal alternatives.
Fact is, 50Mbps costs about double compared to 6. So, you get 9 times the bandwith for double the price.
Fact is, 94% of Lyses customers choose 6Mpbs, about 1% choose 50mbps.
To me, that strongly indicates that there's not much of a market for even more bandwith. Most people seem happy with 6mpbs, atleast to the point where they're not willing to pay more to get more. (sure they'd take a TB if it didn't cost them anything aditionally.)
They *definitely* don't, currently, have infrastructure to handle all customers on GB. But they *would* if there was demand for it.
Thing is, traditionally it's the other way around: it's the last mile that is the problem. It is *MUCH* more expensive to upgrade 10.000 customers from copper-coax-cable and to single-mode-fibre than it is to upgrade the infrastructure internally at the isp.
Doubling the bandwith available between New-York and London is fairly simple. Doubling the available last-mile bandwith for all inhabitants in London and New-York is mindbogglingly complex and expensive.
Today, ADSL is getting replaced with ADSL2 and fiber-to-the-home which *start* around 4Mpbs and tops out at around 100mbps. The physical single-mode fibre is actually capable of multiple terabits, that ain't offered because there's simply no demand.
I already *said* that lack of readers as comfy as paper-books is a significant brake for ebook-adoption. I agree bandwith isn't what books need. (movies need it though)
I don't agree though. Most devices I've seen also suffer from one or more of the following:
Ok, so maybe these don't matter to you, and are all trumped by bookmarks. But I'd be willing to pay quite a bit for a device without these problems, and I *have* been deliberately searching, with no luck whatsoever this far.
The thing that completely flabberghasts most of the world is that USA actually debate such a thing. What century do we live in anyway ? Seriously, they're called "human rights" for a reason. What part of Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind,(...) is hard to grasp ?
But even ignoring that, there's a second problem, atleast equally bad.
It's perfectly possible (likely even!) that most of the people in Gitmo are guilty of horrible crimes. The way one deals with such is by charging people for an actual court, and have the court hand out a sentence. (which in the USA can include the death-penalty)
Putting everyone in prison for like literally half a decade, yet never formally forwarding any charges, and just say "it's ok, they're *probably* guilty, most of them anyway, so we won't even bother trying to show that for a court" is definitely *NOT* how it's done. It's a complete disgrace.
And it completely undermines USAs position as the "good guys". It gives the other side an excuse to say: Sure we play dirty, but look at them Americans, they ignore stuff like the human rigths when it suits them too, they're no different. (notice: I don't nessecarily *agree* with this statement, I just think you stupidly invite it by not following your own rules)
At the moment, typical home-bandwith is perhaps 1Mbps. Typical home-storage is perhaps 300GB. Which means (order of magnitude-estimates)
Which means for most people, bandwith and storage is a limiting factor for the last few of these options. (depending on patience) High-def movies migth add another order of magnitude size, so we're up to a week of downloading and you can store like 5-10 of them, which is definitely way into impractical-land.
But that's all today. Bandwith and storage grows exponentially, and though 1Mbps may be *typical* even today a significant (and rapidly growing) part of the population has a lot more.
Lyse, my ISP have stopped *offering* speeds lower than 6Mbps. Their top offering currently is 50Mbps. Which brings the high-def movie in original (blueray/HD-DVD) quality back down from a week and to 4 hours.
I expect 100Mbps to be the norm in my neighbourhood before the decade is out. The infrastructure is certianly already there, the only reason it's not the norm today is that few care for it. For 99% of the users today, 6Mbps (symetrical, same upload!) is adequate enough that they have no interest even in the "premium" 50Mbps offered for a modestly higher price.
Already today, people are downloading albums rathe than songs. And to some degree complete discographies rather than albums. And books are tiny compared to music.
We're only a short way away from being able to in effect say: "Screw it, I don't know yet what I want to read on the plane, let's just download 'all_books_published_in_the_usa_this_decade.zip' and put it on the reader, that's only a few TB anyway."
Just how large would "all_movies_ever_shown_in_an_american_theatre-dvdr ip.zip" be anyway ? How many years away from being able to download that in say a day are we ? How are the *AAs going to deal with it ?
We live in interesting times.
It was breathtaking. Sin attacks. There are sinspawn. Then a boss shows up. You're overwhelmed, scared, no fucking idea what goes on in this cruel world. Confused.
Later (much later) you understand that actually, it's hard to actually die to a boss whose sole attack has the effect of halving your hp. But those few first hours are amazing. The game only started calming down once you got to Luca. Up until then it's pretty much a headlong rush.
Ok, so the second time you play the game it's freaking annoying that there appear to be no way of skipping the long movie-sequences. They're well-done, at the time the game came out among the best made. but you've seen them...
The law does definitely have a sense of humour.
Do they honestly claim that someone who ignores unsubscribe-requests, uses lists for "other" purposes than those the user agreed to, ignores users unchecking "subscribe" boxes (which are by default checked offcourse!), still sends email to adresses in an old-not-updated database and lets spammers do their marketing is MISTAKEN for a spammer ?
I'd say anyone that fits even a third of these points are definitely a spammer, there is no mistake whatsoever.
If he *also* really didn't want to pay that much, then he was being stupid.
I suppose you're rigth though, some people "hate losing", so they actually pay more than they want to pay to avoid "losing".
Ebay could eliminate this quite simply: don't display anything other than the number of bids on an item in auction, when the auction ends, the one with the highest bid wins and pays the price of the second-highest-bid. In the case where two people have identical max bids, the first bid made wins.
Maybe it's just the things I buy on Ebay that makes me not have this problem. Most of the stuff I buy there is dirt-cheap anyway, often to the point where payment is completely secondary and the main point is getting more use out of an item.
Example: we'll get twins in april. This means we need babyclothes. Tons of them. Most of them never ever get even *close* to wearing out, because small babies pretty much just sleep, eat and cry and grow quickly, so in 2 months the clothes are too small anyway. So, I ordered a crate of 200 pieces of clothing in size 0-12months, all in very good condition. (some of it like-new, some of it looks like it may have been washed 5-10 times, none of it has any holes, stains or obvious signs of wear) $50.
Frankly, it's more of a convenience-thing in this case. Buying that all new would a) cost something like $500 and b) take half of forever of baby-shop-trawling, which I, being a male, don't particularily feel like. If the end-price is $30 or $100 is completely unimportant.
The stuff that looks good after our twins have grown out of it gets sold. Again -- I'm happy that the stuff gets used, I don't care at all if I get $20 or $100. The point is, throwing it away is a waste.
I guess I'm not the typical eBayer.
It'd allow me to buy something without being forced to either babysit the auctions, risk getting multiple copies or use sniping-software. (which are your current 3 choices)
For example, when I use electricity to power my dishwasher, eventually all of the electricity ends up as waste heat.
But the thing is, the electricity comes from a hydropower-turbine. If I was to *not* use the electricity, then the same energy would've ended up as waste-heat from friction in the river.
It makes no difference to total heat if the sequence is: rainfall-river-friction-heat or rainfall-turbine-electricity-dishwasher-heat.
If we, on the other hand create electricity from fossil or nuclear fuels, then we release heat from energy that would otherwise stay stored as chemical or nuclear energy.
You're rigth, this effect is miniscule compared to the greenhouse-effect. Probably completely ignorable. Which is why I much prefer modern nuclear plants over oil or coal-powered powerplants.