No, death is the end of life, the end of possibility. By definition, it's not part of life at all.
A 14 year old kid, getting run over by a drunk driver is a tragedy. An old man, dying at peace with his family and the world is not.
Ah, the facile conviction of youth.
An old man "dying at peace with his family and the world" IS a tragedy. Ask this theoretical old man's spouse how she feels about it. Ask his children and grandchildren. Ask his friends. I assure you that they all see his death as a tragedy. And, contrary to what religious fairy stories, TV, and movies may have led you to believe, the old man in question may be at peace with his family and the world, but I assure you that he views his own death as a tragedy of immense and personal proportions.
I get the strong impression that you have very little personal experience with death - and, in particular, the death of loved ones. In cases where the deceased person suffered horribly (for instance, from cancer, or end-stage emphysema), his friends and family may view his death as a release from suffering - but that only mitigates the tragedy somewhat. The loss and the grief remain razor-keen. Believe me, I speak from much personal experience - and the loss and suffering of which I speak were not just my own.
To put is another way
If one believes that every death is a tragedy, then every life becomes a tragedy because it ends with death.
Either you come to terms with the inevitability of death, or you are pursued by an inescapable tragedy until it catches you.
You present a false dichotomy. One can accept the inevitability of death without in any way lessening his appreciation of each death as a catastrophic tragedy, both for himself and for those who care about him - but especially for himself. Accepting that tragedy as inescapable does nothing to reduce its horror or make it somehow desirable. As Dylan Thomas put it:
Do not go gently into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It's got nothing to do with anything except that the news media loves sensationalism. To that end, they'd like to turn every death into a tragedy.
Dude, every death IS a tragedy.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
Pope John Paul II said, "Cosmogony and cosmology have always aroused great interest among peoples and religions. The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. The Sacred Book likewise wishes to tell men that the world was not created as the seat of the gods, as was taught by other cosmogonies and cosmologies, but was rather created for the service of man and the glory of God. Any other teaching about the origin and make-up of the universe is alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven."
Pretty much just fundies are YECers these days.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The Catholic Church still teaches the doctrine of Original Sin, which, in turn, is based directly on the story of Adam and Eve's Fall from grace. JP2 was denying that his church stood by the 7 days part of Genesis, not the Garden of Eden myth. That myth, and the consequent doctrine of Original Sin, are still fundamental (there's that word again) tenets of Catholicism.
Original Sin is what necessitates baptism in Christian churches - it's a ritual designed specifically to wash away that sin. Those that keep the form of baptism, but abandon the connection to the Fall are simply ritual-bound.
As I said in my original post, my objection is to organized religion, not necessarily to belief in God. Personally, I find Christianity more than a little creepy, and I very strongly object to the notion that you can spend your entire life as an unmitigated asshole, then, on your deathbed accept Yeshua as your personal savior and, SHAZZAM!, suddenly you get a free pass to Paradise. At the same time, I find it impossible to see how people who profess to believe in a loving deity can possibly accept the notion of eternal damnation, regardless of how monstrous a life someone may have led. Forever is an infinite interval. A single lifetime is less than an eyeblink by comparison.
And so on, and so forth. The more tightly scripture-bound, the more doctrinally-circumscribed, the more ritual-festooned, the less I like the religion, mostly because, as Heinlein pointed out in that last quote, essentially all religions are, stripped of the accompanying mumbo-jumbo, businesses designed to benefit their clergy, not their congregations. It's no accident that Christian clergy liken themselves to shepherds - a shepherd tends his flock for his own benefit, not for that of his sheep. He protects them from predators so that he, himself, can shear them, slaughter them for food, sell their lambs to hungry customers, and otherwise exploit them. That ain't exactly what I'd call selfless behavior.
I mean, who in their right mind wants to be a sheep, anyway?
I call myself a gnostic pantheist. Gnostic, because I view wannabe intercessors (i.e. - clergy) between the individual and the experience of the Divine as not only superfluous, but downright obstructionist. Pantheist, because my own, personal experience of the immanence of the Divine has led me to the conclusion that all of Existence is a single entity, of which you, I, and the local sewage treatment plant are all inextricably part. As I see it, divinity is a participatory phenomenon - and either you experience that revelation directly, or you don't really experience it at all. I was lucky enough to have that experience, but I don't go around preaching about it, because I realize that there's no way I can adequately convey what it's like to someone who has not had the same experience themselves. So I have belief - in a divinity that, for all practical purposes, might as well not exist, since it doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, doesn't offer any reward for belief, interfere in the course of events, or provide any kind of meaningful afterlife - but not religion. And that suits me pretty well.
Hoyle not only came to accept the Big Bang as a fact, but became a theist because of it, saying it was the logical conclusion to do so.
>>Again, belief in a God - or Gods - is not incompatible with a scientific mindset.
See the above sentence for a perfectly rational counterexample for someone with a scientific mindset.
Are you not a native English speaker? Because you're certainly missing the meaning of the phrase "not incompatible with a scientific mindset." (emphasis mine)
Again, most mainline Christian denominations do not use a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.
Sorry, but you're mistaken. All the fundamentalist denominations do (duh!). As does the Catholic Church - the largest single Christian denomination on the planet (and the source of the Original Sin concept). I don't know about your neck of the woods, but here in the U.S. of A., together, they pretty much make up the majority of "mainline Christian denominations".
Browsing your/. page, I see the majority of your essays center around Christian apologism. That puts me in the position of talking to a brick wall. Therefore, I will close this response with yet another quote from Robert A. Heinlein - one I think sums up my own attitude towards religion in general quite handily:
A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason - but one cannot have both.
That's because "everyone else" lives a totally unexamined life (in the Socratian sense). Therefore, they have no problem in believing in two utterly mutally contradictory principles (i.e. - the Big Bang vs. "Yahweh created the heavens and the earth in seven days" or human evolution vs. Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden) because they simply don't think about the contradictions.
Gasp! Before you said this, I'd never heard *anyone* claim that the Big Bang and the account of Genesis might be in conflict!
Heh, sarcasm aside, a lot of astronomers rejected the Big Bang theory a priori because they thought it smacked of Creationism. Hoyle, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Big_Bang)
Hoyle lived and worked (and wrote science fiction!) at a time when the evidence for the Big Bang was not as overwhelming as it now is - and at a time when his Steady State/continuous creation hypothesis had not been as thoroughly discredited as it now is.
Were he alive today, I have no doubt that Sir Fred Hoyle would accept the Big Bang as fact, just as every professional cosmologist now does.
Continuing in your line of thought, the best Christians I know are the ones that examine every aspect of their faith, and are honest enough to reject things which seem factually wrong. Are mustard seeds the smallest seeds on Earth? No? Ok.
Again, belief in a God - or Gods - is not incompatible with a scientific mindset. Even believing that a dead carpenter on a stick was the divine son of God, incarnated to save Humanity by accepting for himself the punishment for humankind's sins, is not completely incompatible with rationality. But insisting (as most Christian denominations do) that Yeshua ben Yusef's crucifixtion was to atone for Adam and Eve's Original Sin is entirely incompatible with the enormous weight of scientific evidence that Adam and Eve never existed, except in the mythology of a nomadic Bronze Age tribal culture.
THAT - the pitfull insistence on adherence to scripture (and not just Judeo/Christian/Islamic scripture) and dogma - is why religion (as opposed to a personal belief in the Divine) is A Bad Thing.
At least in my book, it is.
As Robert A. Heinlein put it, "The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."
Note that Discovery Channel is not owned by ESPN, ABC, Disney, or any other third party. It's owned by Discovery, Inc. - full stop. National Geographic Channel, likewise, is not owned by any third party. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Geographic Society.
Right about Discovery, wrong about Nat Geo.
Last I checked, it was owned by News Corp... (well, most of it anyway)
The only people that believe science and religion are fundamentally in conflict are religious fundamentalists and the militant positivists you find here on Slashdot. For *everyone else* (as the study shows) they coexist in harmony.
That's because "everyone else" lives a totally unexamined life (in the Socratian sense). Therefore, they have no problem in believing in two utterly mutally contradictory principles (i.e. - the Big Bang vs. "Yahweh created the heavens and the earth in seven days" or human evolution vs. Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden) because they simply don't think about the contradictions.
Please note: belief in God, whatever form it might take, is a distinctly separate thing from adherence to a religion. Theism, per se, is not incompatible with science, because science has not disproved the existence of a Prime Mover (infinitely recursive issues aside), nor the existence of some variation on a Universal/Multiversal Overmind, or any other non-religoius variation on the theme of God. Religion, on the other hand, is a set of beliefs (usually founded - at least in the Western world - on some sort of scriptural basis), with a doctrinal basis. Religions demand their practitioners profess adherence to their particular set of beliefs (although Unitarian Universalists are a somewhat singular exception to that rule), and accept their church's doctrinal dogma.
Personally, I call myself a gnostic pantheist, for lack of a better term. But, because I'm the only one who adheres to my beliefs, because there's no scriptural basis for my beliefs, and because my beliefs have yet to generate any formal doctrine (although, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit to admiring the Golden Rule), you can't really call my belief system a religion. And, I might add, my belief system, at least thus far, is totally compatible with science as a system of thought, and with every scientific discovery of which I'm aware. (And, if it were not, it'd likely be my belief system that changed, since facts are... well... facts.)
In sum: Religion == Bad; Science == Good; God != Religion.
The tiers then exist to keep customers happy, allowing those that would not buy any service without the premium content to get it, while others pay for the basic package. As it currently works, I don't think they offer tiers of completely similar programming because the companies that own the channels demand that all of their channels be on the same tier even if they don't really have the same market focus (ESPN, ABC and Disney Channel). Why do the companies do this? They only have to get you to want one of the channels, and they force you to pay for all of them. The cable company is just the middle guy who signs the contract that allows them to carry the service, then advertises you to buy the product.
Wrong.
When I inquired about satellite service, some years back, I was told that, in order to get the Discovery channels (Discovery Channel, History Channel, Discovery Science, etc.), I would have to subscribe to their Tier 1 package - which included a raft of sports channels in which I had zero interest. In order to add the National Geographic Channel, I would also have to subscribe to their Tier 2 package (for a total additional cost for both tiers of around $75/month), which included yet another group of sports channels, in which I had less than zero interest. And, of course, the sales rep added that I could also subscribe to additional premium sports packages, as well - plus HBO, Showtime, etc. - each of which would add their own, separate charges to my bill.
Note that Discovery Channel is not owned by ESPN, ABC, Disney, or any other third party. It's owned by Discovery, Inc. - full stop. National Geographic Channel, likewise, is not owned by any third party. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Geographic Society.
The reason the satellite (and cable) provders bundle these prestige channels with sports programming is that they cost money, while the sports channels make money. So bundling them with sports channels forces sports fans to subsidize programming for those of us who have no interest in sports.
At any rate, that's the rationale the satellite and cable operators use.
The reality, of course, is that bundling also forces those of us who have zero interest in sports to subsidize you sports fans, because the NatGeo Channel, for instance, costs the satellite/cable operator around $6/month/subscriber (and I haven't checked, but I suspect the entire network of Discovery channels costs them somewhat less, since it's bundled with the less-expensive Tier 1 programming). And an a la carte (i.e. - unbundled) model would bring my cost down to a level I could accept, whereas having to spend nearly $100/month to receive the programming in which I'm actually interested was a complete dealbreaker.
So now I use bittorrent to watch the programs that interest me - broadcast, as well as satellite/cable-only - and I'm perfectly satisfied with that arrangement. I pay my cable company only for Internet service, and I wind up watching far less TV than I would have done had I subscribed to their programming, as well. It costs me far less per month, and, as a very welcome bonus, I don't have to put up with those endless, annoying, repeitive commercials, as well. I win, and the satellite/cable industry loses - all strictly because those assholes refuse to give their customers what they actually want.
THAT, that right there, that to me marks the dufus problem in a nutshell. it is upward failure where doing dumbshit yields a quick gain followed by a HORRIBLE outcome, but the gain gets the dufus moved up or a "selling point" on his resume and he/she is out of their before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
What you have just described is the fundamental career philosophy behind the MBA. To state it another way, the default MBA business strategy is: "Ramp up short-term profitability by whatever means is necessary/convenient, regardless of long-term consequences for the company, because by the time those consequences arise, you will have been hired away to work at a different company, at a higher pay grade, and dealing with those consequences will have become somebody else's problem.
The problem for the Western economy is that, ever since the Reagan administration (or the Thatcher administration, or the Mitterand administration, or... but you get the picture), MBAs have progressively grown in influence to a position of utterly dominating corporate governance in every country outside of China. It is they who are responsible for exporting the bulk of Western industrial production to developing countries, it is they who were responsible for creating and marketing poisonous mortgage-backed derivative securities (and thereby crashing the global economy - a process that is only now reaching its middle, rather than ending), and it is they who dominate corporate boardrooms.
It's not so much that they are psychopaths. It's that they have been trained to be psychopaths by the most prestigious business schools in the Western world. And this all in the name of delivering maximum value to shareholders.
The problem with the MBA philosophy is that the only shareholders that matter - because they are by far the largest shareholders - are institutional shareholders: insurance companies, pension funds, banks, and so on. And these shareholders' investment portfolios are run by - you guessed it - MBAs, who have absolutely no loyalty to anyone or anything except themselves. They'll kick a fundamentally-sound stock to the curb in a heartbeat, so long as their spreadsheets tell them that a company down the block is offering higher short-term profits, regardless of how unsound that new company's long-term outlook might be, because they don't invest for the long term.
Which, incidentally, is why Wall Street and its fraternal counterparts have been experiencing day-to-day mood swings like a bipolar teenager with PMS. In fact, that phenomenon is a result of the MBA-mediated migration to algorithmically-based automated trading systems, which, by intent completely ignore long-term value in favor of short-term gains produced by, essentially, day-trading on a massive scale.
And, short of outlawing MBAs and hanging all existing holders of the degree, I see absolutely zero chance that this utterly broken system that rewards only MBAs will - or, for that matter, can - change for the better any time in the forseeable future.
It is UNsurprising how a company that used to be regarded as the highest quality whatever-it-was-trying-to-sell when Akio Morita ran it can now have the level of respect usually afforded used car salesmen ever since Howard Stringer took over.
When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.
Congratulations, you just discovered electromagnetic induction. If your body happened to be a pretty good conductor and formed complete circuits (like your radio), that energy might affect you in a similarly significant way.
It wasn't a radio. It was an 8-track cassette player. The RF energy from WHIO's towers was powerful enough to move the magnets in my brother's speakers sufficiently to produce a clearly audible signal.
Again: non-trivial.
I will, however, agree with you that under the situation you speak of we're starting to talk about non-trivial amounts of energy. This is not comparable to your wifi router or your cell phone, as you yourself have stated. At this point detailed blind studies are warranted. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if it turned out that it increased your risk to certain conditions. That risk is going to be smaller than the increased risk of cancer from being exposed to sunlight.
Glad to see that you've already determined the outcome of these "detailed blind studies".
All of this is ignoring the fact that studies have been performed with the nutjobs who believe wifi routers are giving them headaches. And they confirmed that these people are not susceptible to what they think they are. I'm not saying they're liars and pretenders, but they're either misinterpreting the cause of their pain or suffering from hypochondria.
In all seriousness, we agree on this point. My argument was not with the baselessness of the tinfoil hatters' fears. It was with the parent poster's blanket assertion that "Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds."
That's a statement that is generally true. True enough to apply to the vast, vast majority of/. readers - but not to all of us.
And, in that, it's like most sweeping assertions, n'est-ce pas?
I'm not really defending these people - I make no claims to be affected, and I'm sure most of them are hypochondriacs, but isn't it possible that, out of over 300 million people in the U.S., some of them might actually be more sensitive to the effects of electromagnetic fields than you?
Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds.
Not necessarily.
When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.
"Insignificant?" I don't theeng so, Queekstraw. 50,000 watts at a distance of, say, 150 feet (and I'm being generous here) is a non-trivial amount of EM in anybody's world.
Four or five orders of magnitude greater than your neighbor's WiFi router, but still...
Sorry, but you are wrong and you can claim us as enemies as much as you want - you *don't* have any God/Nature/whatever given rights to profit. You have to earn it.
Sorry, but you mistake my position, and you misattribute to me somebody else's position.
It's clear that English is not your natal language, so perhaps that helps in part to account for your error.
Here's the thing you misunderstand: My statement, "if you're arguing that I have no claim of ownership over my own art, then you're my enemy," is about control of my material, not profit from it. You chose to make your own recordings freely available under CC licensing. That is a perfect example of an artist - YOU - exercising control over his own work. Not demanding profit from it. Exercising control over it.
If you have no valid claim of ownership of your own work, then you have no right to release it under CC licensing. Instead, you permit others to take that choice away from you and appropriate your work for themselves whether you agree to it or not.
The distinction is not subtle. It's fundamental. My work is my property. Your work is your property. We are each free to give it away, sell it, or keep it strictly to ourselves, as we individually choose, only because our own work is our own property.
And, if you're arguing that I have no claim of ownership over my own art, then you're my enemy.
Without a label, how does a recording artist promote his or her music to people who don't listen to Internet radio? A lot of people aren't willing to pay a luxury price for a cellular data plan that would let them replace in-vehicle FM radio with Internet radio. And without a recognized music publisher, how can a songwriter be sure that his song isn't similar enough to someone else's song to attract lawsuits alleging plagiarism?*
* Plagiarism here means infringement of copyright without attribution.
As a recording artist who has no label contract or publishing deal, I can tell you that my personal experience has been that Internet radio is no panacea for getting my own music heard and played. The main problem for recording artists is the same as it was back in the 20th Century: it's very, very difficult to get potential listeners' attention. Historically, the role of record labels primarily was promotion of their artists, along with distribution of their work (and, for new artists, the process of "artist development", as well - a term which mostly meant matching raw talent with the right producer to capture the sound that made the A&R guy sign the artist to begin with, and to mold his/her/their sound into a form that would sell records). For physical CDs and vinyl, the labels' distribution arms are still important (and will continue to be, as long as there exist fans who desire a physical CD or vinyl album to add to their collection), digital distribution notwithstanding. But their real importance lies in promotion.
Realistically speaking, the vast majority of unsigned artists have essentially zero ability to mount and sustain a nationwide or global promotion campaign for their own recordings. Getting people to notice we exist is not increasingly easy in the digital age - it's increasingly difficult, because the amount of competition for the listeners' attention has increased so much, as well. There are a kajillion bands out there, all clamoring for an audience, and getting that audience's attention is still the hardest part of getting anything other than esthetic satisfaction from all the effort that goes into recording.
It's easy for/jerks to prattle about how a recording artist should plan make money from playing out and give away his/her/their recordings as promotional devices. The problem is that you simply don't make very much money playing live unless you're already famous. You certainly don't make enough to afford health insurance, for instance, or that 401K that some sneering codemonkey mentioned as a retirement vehicle in a prior post. Working musicians mostly don't have 401Ks. And, if they do, they're way underfunded, because the money just doesn't stretch that far.
For all their parasitic ways, what record labels still bring to the table is the money and machinery to promote the artists they sign, and the music that they make. Payola is still very much alive in the radio industry here in America, for instance. Nowadays, ClearChannel calls it "research fees", but it's still payola, and your music doesn't get played without it. Not to mention billboards, posters, stand-ups, commercials - all those things cost real money, and it's the record labels that pay for them.
As for copyright, I spent three months recording Whatever Happened To The Revolution. That's an average of four hours a day, working six days a week. And I have yet to make a dime off of it. So, when some know-it-all blathers about how I only deserve to get paid once for that effort (and keep in mind that I put a similar amount of time and effort into every song I record) I want to smack that fool upside the head, because he has no idea what being a recording artist - with or without a label contract - is all about.
Yes, I agree that the copyright system is badly broken. From my perspective, t
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character...
For me, that was always the climax of King's speech... the line that made me tear up; the line that brought a lump to my throat.
<sigh>
Just another sad instance of, "Be careful what you wish for."
These people are Evangelical Christian "Scientists", who are part of the evangelical christian movement.
Your quotation marks are misplaced. These are actual scientists, who also happen to be evangelical Christians.
As a person who despises organized religions of all types, it would be easy for me to give in to the temptation to belittle these folks. Intellectual honesty, however, prohibits me from attempting to impugn their professional scientific credentials, simply because I disagree with their religious beliefs.
Yes, Wikipedia is non-authoritative. Nonetheless, the article is an excellent summary of current modeling of the Permian/Triassic extinction event - which resulted from the 100,000-year-long Siberian Traps basalt flow eruption (a very different kind of volcanic eruption than the cinder-cone-building type with which we're all familiar). And the citations in the footnotes are, in many cases, of actual scientific papers, rather than Wikipedia-style user summaries.
When the dinosaurs ruled the planet, temperatures were quite significantly higher than they are now, and the ecosphere supported an abundance of highly successful flora and fauna.
Yes, and those higher temperatures were a result of the runaway greenhouse gas emissions that caused the P/T extinction event - a cataclysm that ended with the extinction of 95% of all species on the planet (98% of ocean species!). Had the P/T event not occurred, the dinosaurs (not to mention their Triassic predecessors) would never have had the chance to evolve.
How about on your world, we reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 to less than 100ppm?
I'd like to hear how you propose we accomplish that. The fact is that removing any significant amount of CO2 from the atmosphere is simply not possible with current technology. Simply reducing (or eliminating) additional increases in human-originated CO2 emissions will be a Herculean enough task.
We have no real idea what the consequences of geoengineering on a planetary scale are, and they could equally well be detrimental to the survival of life on Earth.
You're correct about that. However, what's being proposed by most people who are actively engaged in attempting to find solutions to AGW is not geoengineering, but controlling the increase in CO2 emissions.
It's too late to prevent the coming climate changes altogether. About the best we can do now is to try to limit the peak CO2 levels future generations will experience, and to prepare for the very real and devastating changes in climate and geology that the eventual loss of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps will cause.
"You do realize that Murdoch supported Hillary Clinton, right?"
I am sure he has his reasons. That changes nothing I said.
Of course he had his reasons. He was convinced that Hillary Clinton would be far easier to demonize, and would be a far more effective rallying point for the Republican base in the general election than any of the other Democratic candidates.
Say what you will about Murdoch's ethics (and I'd suggest you start with, "Ewww!"), that he is a master strategist and long-term thinker is beyond question.
The deficit is caused primarily by two things: The lower tax receipts from the huge destruction of wealth during the 2008 crash. The increased spending in the social safety net that automatically kicks in during such downturns.
So wrong.
Although lower tax receipts stemming from the loss of wealth definitely play a role in the current deficit, lower tax receipts from the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and profligate tax expenditures for corporate tax loopholes (GE, anyone?) contribute far more. Likewise, 10 years of off-budget (and thus deficit-financed) wars have added massively to the deficit. Additionally, interest-only payments on the existing national debt also play a non-trivial role, since money spent on paying debt service is money that's not available to pay for other stuff (such as the afore-mentioned social safety net and multiple wars).
Long term out deficit is a product of bad demographics and health costs.
Demographics and spiraling health costs are only part of that grim picture. Far, far more threatening is the prospect of exponential increases in the national debt as a result of interest-rate-driven increases in debt-service costs.
The current, artificially-maintained, low interest rates cannot last forever. Eventually, even the Federal Reserve's ability to keep them so low - by printing money - that banks actually make money on overnight inter-bank loans (due to the delta between inter-bank interest rates and inflation) won't be sufficient to keep them from creeping up. When that happens, the cost of paying even the interest on the national debt swiftly will grow until it exceeds the current budget. As an example, should the prime rate exceed 10%, annual service on even a mere $14 trillion in national debt will be nearly one-and-a-half trillion dollars.
Just let that figure soak in for a moment. And that money will pay for NOTHING except interest on the national debt. The cost of every other item in the budget - from national defense to entitlement programs, including national parks, NASA, air traffic control, interstate highway maintenance, and so on - will HAVE to be deficit-financed, because tax revenues simply won't be anywhere close to enough to pay for them out of current receipts.
As Commander Kruge put it, "Exhilarating, isn't it?"
Actually, a lie is exactly what it is. Or, more accurately, it's hysterical propaganda (originally published in that prestigious scientific journal Forbes Magazine) by a pretend scientist (who uses the term "alarmist" no fewer than 14 times in this 567-word, 9-paragraph pile of fresh, steaming nonsense) who quacks on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute (an organization whose "work" has been funded by an array of right-wing billionaire's foundations, tobacco companies, and Exxon Mobil), based on junk science by a well-known climate skeptic and "intelligent design" advocate who has made a fundamental scientific error by confusing correlation with causation.
The Space Station is in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and will fall to the Earth without its regular altitude boosts
Getting the Space Station in a Geo synchronous orbit, let alone deep space (that means outside of the solar system), is a totally different league in terms of needed energy to overcome the gravity well called Earth and mainly the Sun.
Boosting the ISS to geosync orbit is obviously out of the question. However, boosting it into an orbit another couple of hundred miles higher is not. And doing so would greatly extend its useful life, without requiring nearly as much altitude maintenance. And, now that the STS is out of business, the Shuttle's altitude ceiling no longer limits resupply/recrewing launches to altitudes that our now-defunct "space truck" could reach.
Also question is for what?
Well, for one thing, continuing the microgravity experiments that it was designed to perform. For another, as a training facility for zero-G workers. For a third, as a potential tourist destination, with the tourism income going to the partnership that built the thing to begin with (given attractive enough financing terms, I'd bet Robert Bigelow would be interested in buying it). And those three are just off the top of my head.
Limiting exists to prevent overmodulation, an FCC no-no.
Good point.
However, I think it's important to understand that limiting is a special-purpose application of audio dynamic range compression, not a separate technology (which I'd bet you know, but most non-audio-geek Slashdotters probably don't). Limiting prevents the audio signal being processed from exceeding a certain volume threshold, while compression, per se, sets both a ceiling and a floor to the total volume, and expanding affects only how low the volume of the processed signal can be (i.e. - it boosts the level of very quiet passages, but does not set an upper limit on the signal's volume). So, really, all three techniques are aspect of the same fundamental technology.
But, yeah: broadcast signal volume overmodulation. Not a good thing, FCC or no.
Compression in radio broadcasts was originally done to make sure the quiet passages didn't get lost in the noise of the transmission. Radio has a limited dynamic range, so the choice was between missing parts, or compressing to get the sound into the range of the transmission.
That's mostly true of AM radio. FM has a much greater dynamic range than AM (about the same range as a cassette tape, in fact). The Wikipedia article on Dynamic Range Compression agrees (by implication) with my contention that FM stations began using compression to compensate for road noise in the late 60s and early 70s ("the so-called "album rock" stations of the 70s and classical music and "easy listening" stations of that era in particular, avoided heavy compression. Classical stations hardly use any, which explains why a classical listener, particularly in the car, must keep turning the volume up and down, constantly fighting the ambient noise prevalent in car listening.")
Of course, that's Wikipedia, where the issue of authority comes down to who last edited the article, but still...
It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.
Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.
Maybe it's because I'm a dinosaur myself, but I can't stand over-compressed recordings. Few people are aware that terrestrial radio stations often limit and compress their signal before transmitting it - a technique that I think probably began as a way to let the sound stand out against road noise for those who listen to the radio in their cars. The problem is that not only does that limit the dynamic range (how much so depends on the level of compression), destroying the artist's intended contrast between quiet passages and loud ones, it also increases the noise level in the quiet passages (because any existing noise on the track is also amplified by compression) and distorts any subtleties in the loud ones (i.e. - a note can't die away organically, because high compression/limiting forces it to maintain a constant level until it's nearly silent). Compression/limiting also creates a "pumping" effect in songs that have been mixed using what's called an "exciter", the effect of which is difficult to explain, but quite easy to hear, if you have both a processed and unprocessed version of the same track to listen to.
I use compression/limiting in mastering my songs, but I do so in multiple passes, and I always use "soft knee" limiting, rather than a hard, clippy-sounding limiter. And I leave enough dynamic range for the quiet passages to actually contrast with the louder ones.
You can hear some of my latest stuff here, if you give a damn (Javascript and cookies required).
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Dude, every death IS a tragedy.
Nonsense. Death is a natural part of life.
No, death is the end of life, the end of possibility. By definition, it's not part of life at all.
A 14 year old kid, getting run over by a drunk driver is a tragedy. An old man, dying at peace with his family and the world is not.
Ah, the facile conviction of youth.
An old man "dying at peace with his family and the world" IS a tragedy. Ask this theoretical old man's spouse how she feels about it. Ask his children and grandchildren. Ask his friends. I assure you that they all see his death as a tragedy. And, contrary to what religious fairy stories, TV, and movies may have led you to believe, the old man in question may be at peace with his family and the world, but I assure you that he views his own death as a tragedy of immense and personal proportions.
I get the strong impression that you have very little personal experience with death - and, in particular, the death of loved ones. In cases where the deceased person suffered horribly (for instance, from cancer, or end-stage emphysema), his friends and family may view his death as a release from suffering - but that only mitigates the tragedy somewhat. The loss and the grief remain razor-keen. Believe me, I speak from much personal experience - and the loss and suffering of which I speak were not just my own.
To put is another way
If one believes that every death is a tragedy, then every life becomes a tragedy because it ends with death.
Either you come to terms with the inevitability of death, or you are pursued by an inescapable tragedy until it catches you.
You present a false dichotomy. One can accept the inevitability of death without in any way lessening his appreciation of each death as a catastrophic tragedy, both for himself and for those who care about him - but especially for himself. Accepting that tragedy as inescapable does nothing to reduce its horror or make it somehow desirable. As Dylan Thomas put it:
Do not go gently into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
nine-times confided:
It's got nothing to do with anything except that the news media loves sensationalism. To that end, they'd like to turn every death into a tragedy.
Dude, every death IS a tragedy.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne - Meditation XVII
>>As does the Catholic Church
Pope John Paul II said, "Cosmogony and cosmology have always aroused great interest among peoples and religions. The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. The Sacred Book likewise wishes to tell men that the world was not created as the seat of the gods, as was taught by other cosmogonies and cosmologies, but was rather created for the service of man and the glory of God. Any other teaching about the origin and make-up of the universe is alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven."
Pretty much just fundies are YECers these days.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The Catholic Church still teaches the doctrine of Original Sin, which, in turn, is based directly on the story of Adam and Eve's Fall from grace. JP2 was denying that his church stood by the 7 days part of Genesis, not the Garden of Eden myth. That myth, and the consequent doctrine of Original Sin, are still fundamental (there's that word again) tenets of Catholicism.
Original Sin is what necessitates baptism in Christian churches - it's a ritual designed specifically to wash away that sin. Those that keep the form of baptism, but abandon the connection to the Fall are simply ritual-bound.
As I said in my original post, my objection is to organized religion, not necessarily to belief in God. Personally, I find Christianity more than a little creepy, and I very strongly object to the notion that you can spend your entire life as an unmitigated asshole, then, on your deathbed accept Yeshua as your personal savior and, SHAZZAM!, suddenly you get a free pass to Paradise. At the same time, I find it impossible to see how people who profess to believe in a loving deity can possibly accept the notion of eternal damnation, regardless of how monstrous a life someone may have led. Forever is an infinite interval. A single lifetime is less than an eyeblink by comparison.
And so on, and so forth. The more tightly scripture-bound, the more doctrinally-circumscribed, the more ritual-festooned, the less I like the religion, mostly because, as Heinlein pointed out in that last quote, essentially all religions are, stripped of the accompanying mumbo-jumbo, businesses designed to benefit their clergy, not their congregations. It's no accident that Christian clergy liken themselves to shepherds - a shepherd tends his flock for his own benefit, not for that of his sheep. He protects them from predators so that he, himself, can shear them, slaughter them for food, sell their lambs to hungry customers, and otherwise exploit them. That ain't exactly what I'd call selfless behavior.
I mean, who in their right mind wants to be a sheep, anyway?
I call myself a gnostic pantheist. Gnostic, because I view wannabe intercessors (i.e. - clergy) between the individual and the experience of the Divine as not only superfluous, but downright obstructionist. Pantheist, because my own, personal experience of the immanence of the Divine has led me to the conclusion that all of Existence is a single entity, of which you, I, and the local sewage treatment plant are all inextricably part. As I see it, divinity is a participatory phenomenon - and either you experience that revelation directly, or you don't really experience it at all. I was lucky enough to have that experience, but I don't go around preaching about it, because I realize that there's no way I can adequately convey what it's like to someone who has not had the same experience themselves. So I have belief - in a divinity that, for all practical purposes, might as well not exist, since it doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, doesn't offer any reward for belief, interfere in the course of events, or provide any kind of meaningful afterlife - but not religion. And that suits me pretty well.
Hoyle not only came to accept the Big Bang as a fact, but became a theist because of it, saying it was the logical conclusion to do so.
>>Again, belief in a God - or Gods - is not incompatible with a scientific mindset.
See the above sentence for a perfectly rational counterexample for someone with a scientific mindset.
Are you not a native English speaker? Because you're certainly missing the meaning of the phrase "not incompatible with a scientific mindset." (emphasis mine)
Again, most mainline Christian denominations do not use a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.
Sorry, but you're mistaken. All the fundamentalist denominations do (duh!). As does the Catholic Church - the largest single Christian denomination on the planet (and the source of the Original Sin concept). I don't know about your neck of the woods, but here in the U.S. of A., together, they pretty much make up the majority of "mainline Christian denominations".
Browsing your /. page, I see the majority of your essays center around Christian apologism. That puts me in the position of talking to a brick wall. Therefore, I will close this response with yet another quote from Robert A. Heinlein - one I think sums up my own attitude towards religion in general quite handily:
A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason - but one cannot have both.
Gasp! Before you said this, I'd never heard *anyone* claim that the Big Bang and the account of Genesis might be in conflict!
Heh, sarcasm aside, a lot of astronomers rejected the Big Bang theory a priori because they thought it smacked of Creationism. Hoyle, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Big_Bang)
Hoyle lived and worked (and wrote science fiction!) at a time when the evidence for the Big Bang was not as overwhelming as it now is - and at a time when his Steady State/continuous creation hypothesis had not been as thoroughly discredited as it now is.
Were he alive today, I have no doubt that Sir Fred Hoyle would accept the Big Bang as fact, just as every professional cosmologist now does.
Continuing in your line of thought, the best Christians I know are the ones that examine every aspect of their faith, and are honest enough to reject things which seem factually wrong. Are mustard seeds the smallest seeds on Earth? No? Ok.
Again, belief in a God - or Gods - is not incompatible with a scientific mindset. Even believing that a dead carpenter on a stick was the divine son of God, incarnated to save Humanity by accepting for himself the punishment for humankind's sins, is not completely incompatible with rationality. But insisting (as most Christian denominations do) that Yeshua ben Yusef's crucifixtion was to atone for Adam and Eve's Original Sin is entirely incompatible with the enormous weight of scientific evidence that Adam and Eve never existed, except in the mythology of a nomadic Bronze Age tribal culture.
THAT - the pitfull insistence on adherence to scripture (and not just Judeo/Christian/Islamic scripture) and dogma - is why religion (as opposed to a personal belief in the Divine) is A Bad Thing.
At least in my book, it is.
As Robert A. Heinlein put it, "The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."
Note that Discovery Channel is not owned by ESPN, ABC, Disney, or any other third party. It's owned by Discovery, Inc. - full stop. National Geographic Channel, likewise, is not owned by any third party. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Geographic Society.
Right about Discovery, wrong about Nat Geo.
Last I checked, it was owned by News Corp... (well, most of it anyway)
I sit partially corrected.
That's because "everyone else" lives a totally unexamined life (in the Socratian sense). Therefore, they have no problem in believing in two utterly mutally contradictory principles (i.e. - the Big Bang vs. "Yahweh created the heavens and the earth in seven days" or human evolution vs. Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden) because they simply don't think about the contradictions.
Please note: belief in God, whatever form it might take, is a distinctly separate thing from adherence to a religion. Theism, per se, is not incompatible with science, because science has not disproved the existence of a Prime Mover (infinitely recursive issues aside), nor the existence of some variation on a Universal/Multiversal Overmind, or any other non-religoius variation on the theme of God. Religion, on the other hand, is a set of beliefs (usually founded - at least in the Western world - on some sort of scriptural basis), with a doctrinal basis. Religions demand their practitioners profess adherence to their particular set of beliefs (although Unitarian Universalists are a somewhat singular exception to that rule), and accept their church's doctrinal dogma.
Personally, I call myself a gnostic pantheist, for lack of a better term. But, because I'm the only one who adheres to my beliefs, because there's no scriptural basis for my beliefs, and because my beliefs have yet to generate any formal doctrine (although, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit to admiring the Golden Rule), you can't really call my belief system a religion. And, I might add, my belief system, at least thus far, is totally compatible with science as a system of thought, and with every scientific discovery of which I'm aware. (And, if it were not, it'd likely be my belief system that changed, since facts are ... well ... facts.)
In sum: Religion == Bad; Science == Good; God != Religion.
Rolgar stated:
The tiers then exist to keep customers happy, allowing those that would not buy any service without the premium content to get it, while others pay for the basic package. As it currently works, I don't think they offer tiers of completely similar programming because the companies that own the channels demand that all of their channels be on the same tier even if they don't really have the same market focus (ESPN, ABC and Disney Channel). Why do the companies do this? They only have to get you to want one of the channels, and they force you to pay for all of them. The cable company is just the middle guy who signs the contract that allows them to carry the service, then advertises you to buy the product.
Wrong.
When I inquired about satellite service, some years back, I was told that, in order to get the Discovery channels (Discovery Channel, History Channel, Discovery Science, etc.), I would have to subscribe to their Tier 1 package - which included a raft of sports channels in which I had zero interest. In order to add the National Geographic Channel, I would also have to subscribe to their Tier 2 package (for a total additional cost for both tiers of around $75/month), which included yet another group of sports channels, in which I had less than zero interest. And, of course, the sales rep added that I could also subscribe to additional premium sports packages, as well - plus HBO, Showtime, etc. - each of which would add their own, separate charges to my bill.
Note that Discovery Channel is not owned by ESPN, ABC, Disney, or any other third party. It's owned by Discovery, Inc. - full stop. National Geographic Channel, likewise, is not owned by any third party. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Geographic Society.
The reason the satellite (and cable) provders bundle these prestige channels with sports programming is that they cost money, while the sports channels make money. So bundling them with sports channels forces sports fans to subsidize programming for those of us who have no interest in sports.
At any rate, that's the rationale the satellite and cable operators use.
The reality, of course, is that bundling also forces those of us who have zero interest in sports to subsidize you sports fans, because the NatGeo Channel, for instance, costs the satellite/cable operator around $6/month/subscriber (and I haven't checked, but I suspect the entire network of Discovery channels costs them somewhat less, since it's bundled with the less-expensive Tier 1 programming). And an a la carte (i.e. - unbundled) model would bring my cost down to a level I could accept, whereas having to spend nearly $100/month to receive the programming in which I'm actually interested was a complete dealbreaker.
So now I use bittorrent to watch the programs that interest me - broadcast, as well as satellite/cable-only - and I'm perfectly satisfied with that arrangement. I pay my cable company only for Internet service, and I wind up watching far less TV than I would have done had I subscribed to their programming, as well. It costs me far less per month, and, as a very welcome bonus, I don't have to put up with those endless, annoying, repeitive commercials, as well. I win, and the satellite/cable industry loses - all strictly because those assholes refuse to give their customers what they actually want .
hairyfeet opined:
THAT, that right there, that to me marks the dufus problem in a nutshell. it is upward failure where doing dumbshit yields a quick gain followed by a HORRIBLE outcome, but the gain gets the dufus moved up or a "selling point" on his resume and he/she is out of their before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
What you have just described is the fundamental career philosophy behind the MBA. To state it another way, the default MBA business strategy is: "Ramp up short-term profitability by whatever means is necessary/convenient, regardless of long-term consequences for the company, because by the time those consequences arise, you will have been hired away to work at a different company, at a higher pay grade, and dealing with those consequences will have become somebody else's problem.
The problem for the Western economy is that, ever since the Reagan administration (or the Thatcher administration, or the Mitterand administration, or ... but you get the picture), MBAs have progressively grown in influence to a position of utterly dominating corporate governance in every country outside of China. It is they who are responsible for exporting the bulk of Western industrial production to developing countries, it is they who were responsible for creating and marketing poisonous mortgage-backed derivative securities (and thereby crashing the global economy - a process that is only now reaching its middle, rather than ending), and it is they who dominate corporate boardrooms.
It's not so much that they are psychopaths. It's that they have been trained to be psychopaths by the most prestigious business schools in the Western world. And this all in the name of delivering maximum value to shareholders.
The problem with the MBA philosophy is that the only shareholders that matter - because they are by far the largest shareholders - are institutional shareholders: insurance companies, pension funds, banks, and so on. And these shareholders' investment portfolios are run by - you guessed it - MBAs, who have absolutely no loyalty to anyone or anything except themselves. They'll kick a fundamentally-sound stock to the curb in a heartbeat, so long as their spreadsheets tell them that a company down the block is offering higher short-term profits, regardless of how unsound that new company's long-term outlook might be, because they don't invest for the long term.
Which, incidentally, is why Wall Street and its fraternal counterparts have been experiencing day-to-day mood swings like a bipolar teenager with PMS. In fact, that phenomenon is a result of the MBA-mediated migration to algorithmically-based automated trading systems, which, by intent completely ignore long-term value in favor of short-term gains produced by, essentially, day-trading on a massive scale.
And, short of outlawing MBAs and hanging all existing holders of the degree, I see absolutely zero chance that this utterly broken system that rewards only MBAs will - or, for that matter, can - change for the better any time in the forseeable future.
tysonedwards should have said:
It is UNsurprising how a company that used to be regarded as the highest quality whatever-it-was-trying-to-sell when Akio Morita ran it can now have the level of respect usually afforded used car salesmen ever since Howard Stringer took over.
FTFY
When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.
Congratulations, you just discovered electromagnetic induction. If your body happened to be a pretty good conductor and formed complete circuits (like your radio), that energy might affect you in a similarly significant way.
It wasn't a radio. It was an 8-track cassette player. The RF energy from WHIO's towers was powerful enough to move the magnets in my brother's speakers sufficiently to produce a clearly audible signal.
Again: non-trivial.
I will, however, agree with you that under the situation you speak of we're starting to talk about non-trivial amounts of energy. This is not comparable to your wifi router or your cell phone, as you yourself have stated. At this point detailed blind studies are warranted. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if it turned out that it increased your risk to certain conditions. That risk is going to be smaller than the increased risk of cancer from being exposed to sunlight.
Glad to see that you've already determined the outcome of these "detailed blind studies".
All of this is ignoring the fact that studies have been performed with the nutjobs who believe wifi routers are giving them headaches. And they confirmed that these people are not susceptible to what they think they are. I'm not saying they're liars and pretenders, but they're either misinterpreting the cause of their pain or suffering from hypochondria.
In all seriousness, we agree on this point. My argument was not with the baselessness of the tinfoil hatters' fears. It was with the parent poster's blanket assertion that "Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds."
That's a statement that is generally true. True enough to apply to the vast, vast majority of /. readers - but not to all of us.
And, in that, it's like most sweeping assertions, n'est-ce pas?
I'm not really defending these people - I make no claims to be affected, and I'm sure most of them are hypochondriacs, but isn't it possible that, out of over 300 million people in the U.S., some of them might actually be more sensitive to the effects of electromagnetic fields than you?
Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds.
Not necessarily.
When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.
"Insignificant?" I don't theeng so, Queekstraw. 50,000 watts at a distance of, say, 150 feet (and I'm being generous here) is a non-trivial amount of EM in anybody's world.
Four or five orders of magnitude greater than your neighbor's WiFi router, but still ...
Sorry, but you are wrong and you can claim us as enemies as much as you want - you *don't* have any God/Nature/whatever given rights to profit. You have to earn it.
Sorry, but you mistake my position, and you misattribute to me somebody else's position.
It's clear that English is not your natal language, so perhaps that helps in part to account for your error.
Here's the thing you misunderstand: My statement, "if you're arguing that I have no claim of ownership over my own art, then you're my enemy," is about control of my material, not profit from it. You chose to make your own recordings freely available under CC licensing. That is a perfect example of an artist - YOU - exercising control over his own work. Not demanding profit from it. Exercising control over it.
If you have no valid claim of ownership of your own work, then you have no right to release it under CC licensing. Instead, you permit others to take that choice away from you and appropriate your work for themselves whether you agree to it or not.
The distinction is not subtle. It's fundamental. My work is my property. Your work is your property. We are each free to give it away, sell it, or keep it strictly to ourselves, as we individually choose, only because our own work is our own property.
And, if you're arguing that I have no claim of ownership over my own art, then you're my enemy.
Don't sign with a label.
Without a label, how does a recording artist promote his or her music to people who don't listen to Internet radio? A lot of people aren't willing to pay a luxury price for a cellular data plan that would let them replace in-vehicle FM radio with Internet radio. And without a recognized music publisher, how can a songwriter be sure that his song isn't similar enough to someone else's song to attract lawsuits alleging plagiarism?*
* Plagiarism here means infringement of copyright without attribution.
As a recording artist who has no label contract or publishing deal, I can tell you that my personal experience has been that Internet radio is no panacea for getting my own music heard and played. The main problem for recording artists is the same as it was back in the 20th Century: it's very, very difficult to get potential listeners' attention. Historically, the role of record labels primarily was promotion of their artists, along with distribution of their work (and, for new artists, the process of "artist development", as well - a term which mostly meant matching raw talent with the right producer to capture the sound that made the A&R guy sign the artist to begin with, and to mold his/her/their sound into a form that would sell records). For physical CDs and vinyl, the labels' distribution arms are still important (and will continue to be, as long as there exist fans who desire a physical CD or vinyl album to add to their collection), digital distribution notwithstanding. But their real importance lies in promotion.
Realistically speaking, the vast majority of unsigned artists have essentially zero ability to mount and sustain a nationwide or global promotion campaign for their own recordings. Getting people to notice we exist is not increasingly easy in the digital age - it's increasingly difficult, because the amount of competition for the listeners' attention has increased so much, as well. There are a kajillion bands out there, all clamoring for an audience, and getting that audience's attention is still the hardest part of getting anything other than esthetic satisfaction from all the effort that goes into recording.
It's easy for /jerks to prattle about how a recording artist should plan make money from playing out and give away his/her/their recordings as promotional devices. The problem is that you simply don't make very much money playing live unless you're already famous. You certainly don't make enough to afford health insurance, for instance, or that 401K that some sneering codemonkey mentioned as a retirement vehicle in a prior post. Working musicians mostly don't have 401Ks. And, if they do, they're way underfunded, because the money just doesn't stretch that far.
For all their parasitic ways, what record labels still bring to the table is the money and machinery to promote the artists they sign, and the music that they make. Payola is still very much alive in the radio industry here in America, for instance. Nowadays, ClearChannel calls it "research fees", but it's still payola, and your music doesn't get played without it. Not to mention billboards, posters, stand-ups, commercials - all those things cost real money, and it's the record labels that pay for them.
As for copyright, I spent three months recording Whatever Happened To The Revolution. That's an average of four hours a day, working six days a week. And I have yet to make a dime off of it. So, when some know-it-all blathers about how I only deserve to get paid once for that effort (and keep in mind that I put a similar amount of time and effort into every song I record) I want to smack that fool upside the head, because he has no idea what being a recording artist - with or without a label contract - is all about.
Yes, I agree that the copyright system is badly broken. From my perspective, t
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character ...
For me, that was always the climax of King's speech ... the line that made me tear up; the line that brought a lump to my throat.
<sigh>
Just another sad instance of, "Be careful what you wish for."
These people are Evangelical Christian "Scientists", who are part of the evangelical christian movement.
Your quotation marks are misplaced. These are actual scientists, who also happen to be evangelical Christians.
As a person who despises organized religions of all types, it would be easy for me to give in to the temptation to belittle these folks. Intellectual honesty, however, prohibits me from attempting to impugn their professional scientific credentials, simply because I disagree with their religious beliefs.
Citation required....
Okay, how about this one?
Yes, Wikipedia is non-authoritative. Nonetheless, the article is an excellent summary of current modeling of the Permian/Triassic extinction event - which resulted from the 100,000-year-long Siberian Traps basalt flow eruption (a very different kind of volcanic eruption than the cinder-cone-building type with which we're all familiar). And the citations in the footnotes are, in many cases, of actual scientific papers, rather than Wikipedia-style user summaries.
When the dinosaurs ruled the planet, temperatures were quite significantly higher than they are now, and the ecosphere supported an abundance of highly successful flora and fauna.
Yes, and those higher temperatures were a result of the runaway greenhouse gas emissions that caused the P/T extinction event - a cataclysm that ended with the extinction of 95% of all species on the planet (98% of ocean species!). Had the P/T event not occurred, the dinosaurs (not to mention their Triassic predecessors) would never have had the chance to evolve.
How about on your world, we reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 to less than 100ppm?
I'd like to hear how you propose we accomplish that. The fact is that removing any significant amount of CO2 from the atmosphere is simply not possible with current technology. Simply reducing (or eliminating) additional increases in human-originated CO2 emissions will be a Herculean enough task.
We have no real idea what the consequences of geoengineering on a planetary scale are, and they could equally well be detrimental to the survival of life on Earth.
You're correct about that. However, what's being proposed by most people who are actively engaged in attempting to find solutions to AGW is not geoengineering, but controlling the increase in CO2 emissions.
It's too late to prevent the coming climate changes altogether. About the best we can do now is to try to limit the peak CO2 levels future generations will experience, and to prepare for the very real and devastating changes in climate and geology that the eventual loss of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps will cause.
"You do realize that Murdoch supported Hillary Clinton, right?"
I am sure he has his reasons. That changes nothing I said.
Of course he had his reasons. He was convinced that Hillary Clinton would be far easier to demonize, and would be a far more effective rallying point for the Republican base in the general election than any of the other Democratic candidates.
Say what you will about Murdoch's ethics (and I'd suggest you start with, "Ewww!"), that he is a master strategist and long-term thinker is beyond question.
Ideology is the mind killer. Ideology is the little-stupid that brings idiocy.
Mod parent +1 Funny, please!
The deficit is caused primarily by two things: The lower tax receipts from the huge destruction of wealth during the 2008 crash. The increased spending in the social safety net that automatically kicks in during such downturns.
So wrong.
Although lower tax receipts stemming from the loss of wealth definitely play a role in the current deficit, lower tax receipts from the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and profligate tax expenditures for corporate tax loopholes (GE, anyone?) contribute far more. Likewise, 10 years of off-budget (and thus deficit-financed) wars have added massively to the deficit. Additionally, interest-only payments on the existing national debt also play a non-trivial role, since money spent on paying debt service is money that's not available to pay for other stuff (such as the afore-mentioned social safety net and multiple wars).
Long term out deficit is a product of bad demographics and health costs.
Demographics and spiraling health costs are only part of that grim picture. Far, far more threatening is the prospect of exponential increases in the national debt as a result of interest-rate-driven increases in debt-service costs.
The current, artificially-maintained, low interest rates cannot last forever. Eventually, even the Federal Reserve's ability to keep them so low - by printing money - that banks actually make money on overnight inter-bank loans (due to the delta between inter-bank interest rates and inflation) won't be sufficient to keep them from creeping up. When that happens, the cost of paying even the interest on the national debt swiftly will grow until it exceeds the current budget. As an example, should the prime rate exceed 10%, annual service on even a mere $14 trillion in national debt will be nearly one-and-a-half trillion dollars.
Just let that figure soak in for a moment. And that money will pay for NOTHING except interest on the national debt. The cost of every other item in the budget - from national defense to entitlement programs, including national parks, NASA, air traffic control, interstate highway maintenance, and so on - will HAVE to be deficit-financed, because tax revenues simply won't be anywhere close to enough to pay for them out of current receipts.
As Commander Kruge put it, "Exhilarating, isn't it?"
Actually, a lie is exactly what it is. Or, more accurately, it's hysterical propaganda (originally published in that prestigious scientific journal Forbes Magazine) by a pretend scientist (who uses the term "alarmist" no fewer than 14 times in this 567-word, 9-paragraph pile of fresh, steaming nonsense) who quacks on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute (an organization whose "work" has been funded by an array of right-wing billionaire's foundations, tobacco companies, and Exxon Mobil), based on junk science by a well-known climate skeptic and "intelligent design" advocate who has made a fundamental scientific error by confusing correlation with causation.
Nothing to see here. Move along,
The Space Station is in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and will fall to the Earth without its regular altitude boosts
Getting the Space Station in a Geo synchronous orbit, let alone deep space (that means outside of the solar system), is a totally different league in terms of needed energy to overcome the gravity well called Earth and mainly the Sun.
Boosting the ISS to geosync orbit is obviously out of the question. However, boosting it into an orbit another couple of hundred miles higher is not. And doing so would greatly extend its useful life, without requiring nearly as much altitude maintenance. And, now that the STS is out of business, the Shuttle's altitude ceiling no longer limits resupply/recrewing launches to altitudes that our now-defunct "space truck" could reach.
Also question is for what?
Well, for one thing, continuing the microgravity experiments that it was designed to perform. For another, as a training facility for zero-G workers. For a third, as a potential tourist destination, with the tourism income going to the partnership that built the thing to begin with (given attractive enough financing terms, I'd bet Robert Bigelow would be interested in buying it). And those three are just off the top of my head.
Limiting exists to prevent overmodulation, an FCC no-no.
Good point.
However, I think it's important to understand that limiting is a special-purpose application of audio dynamic range compression, not a separate technology (which I'd bet you know, but most non-audio-geek Slashdotters probably don't). Limiting prevents the audio signal being processed from exceeding a certain volume threshold, while compression, per se, sets both a ceiling and a floor to the total volume, and expanding affects only how low the volume of the processed signal can be (i.e. - it boosts the level of very quiet passages, but does not set an upper limit on the signal's volume). So, really, all three techniques are aspect of the same fundamental technology.
But, yeah: broadcast signal volume overmodulation. Not a good thing, FCC or no.
Compression in radio broadcasts was originally done to make sure the quiet passages didn't get lost in the noise of the transmission. Radio has a limited dynamic range, so the choice was between missing parts, or compressing to get the sound into the range of the transmission.
That's mostly true of AM radio. FM has a much greater dynamic range than AM (about the same range as a cassette tape, in fact). The Wikipedia article on Dynamic Range Compression agrees (by implication) with my contention that FM stations began using compression to compensate for road noise in the late 60s and early 70s ("the so-called "album rock" stations of the 70s and classical music and "easy listening" stations of that era in particular, avoided heavy compression. Classical stations hardly use any, which explains why a classical listener, particularly in the car, must keep turning the volume up and down, constantly fighting the ambient noise prevalent in car listening.")
Of course, that's Wikipedia, where the issue of authority comes down to who last edited the article, but still ...
It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.
Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.
Maybe it's because I'm a dinosaur myself, but I can't stand over-compressed recordings. Few people are aware that terrestrial radio stations often limit and compress their signal before transmitting it - a technique that I think probably began as a way to let the sound stand out against road noise for those who listen to the radio in their cars. The problem is that not only does that limit the dynamic range (how much so depends on the level of compression), destroying the artist's intended contrast between quiet passages and loud ones, it also increases the noise level in the quiet passages (because any existing noise on the track is also amplified by compression) and distorts any subtleties in the loud ones (i.e. - a note can't die away organically, because high compression/limiting forces it to maintain a constant level until it's nearly silent). Compression/limiting also creates a "pumping" effect in songs that have been mixed using what's called an "exciter", the effect of which is difficult to explain, but quite easy to hear, if you have both a processed and unprocessed version of the same track to listen to.
I use compression/limiting in mastering my songs, but I do so in multiple passes, and I always use "soft knee" limiting, rather than a hard, clippy-sounding limiter. And I leave enough dynamic range for the quiet passages to actually contrast with the louder ones.
You can hear some of my latest stuff here, if you give a damn (Javascript and cookies required).