The miniseries stuck more closely to the story, but the acting was bloody wooden.
Excuse me? To call Kyle MacLachlan's "acting" wooden is to insult trees. I saw Lynch's Dune when it premiered, at the Oakland Paramount theater - a 1,200 seat house with a state-of-the-art sound system - and the audience was all fanboys (me included). When Paul first sees Chani, and "thinks" (in voiceover) "My god, she's beautiful!" the entire audience burst into derisive laughter.
And don't get me started about Stink, and his, "I will kill him!" ham salad.
Feh.
The miniseries (and the followup, Children of Dune) was orders of magnitude better than Lynch's abortion.
Hell, National Lampoon's Doon was better than Lynch's movie!
Seventy miles is not that great a distance for viewing space launches. I remember watching from Satellite Beach (about 40 miles from Cape Kennedy) as Apollo 11 lifted off for the Moon. We could easily see the Saturn booster, and the roar of the engines was LOUD, even that far away. My mother took Super 8 footage of the launch, and, even with the very modest zoom factor, the rocket and payload capsule are quite clearly visible for the first 40 seconds or so.
Bob Bigelow is a Las Vegas slumlord. His minions are notorious for abrogating rental agreements on whim, evicting tenants without notice, and generally behaving as if they're above the law.
His vision is to build slums in space. The guy is a swine.
Copyright law is broken. It needs to be fixed, not fiddled with to Google's advantage only.
And, given last week's Supreme Court decision removing all restrictions on corporations' spending to influence political decisions, how long do you propose we hold our collective breath?
Let's face it, folks. Absent a revolution, we've lost this war. At the behest of five assholes in black party dresses, America has now officially become a plutocracy. Money talks and public interest walks.
Not that that's any great change from business as usual, you understand. It's just official now.
I'd weep for my poor, broken-ass country, if I wasn't so busy trying not to become homeless...
NASA doesn't set those goals. The President sets them. That's why we threw away the momentum of the Apollo project - Nixon hated it, because he (rightly) considered it a legacy of JFK. So he authorized Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, rather than work towards a lunar colony, or flights to Mars. And he cut NASA's requested budget.
And that's the other thing about long-term NASA goals. They're entirely at the mercy of Congress, which has consistently refused to fund them for other than the current fiscal year. So NASA is constantly having to ramp them up and down, depending on how popular funding space flight is this year.
Do you have any opinions of your own, or are they all recycled from fat, drug-addicted, reactionary trolls?
Ironically, as a musician or band, you won't get a major label offer until you are successful enough to attract the attention of a label. That means you're making enough money that they could make money off of you. So at that point, why sign? If you're not that successful yet, no one will offer you a deal anyhow, so it's not even a problem for you.
Wrong.
Your choices in summary:
1. sign and get slightly better promotion for a huge reduction in your personal profit
2. don't sign, get the promotion your music warrants on its own and keep all your own profits
If you're all that good, you're gonna make way more money at #2. If you're terrible and somehow you get a big advance because of #1, believe me, the label will find a way to claw that money back from you.
Spoken from the perspective of someone who just "knows" that's the way things work - or rather, the way he thinks they should work.
The problem is that real world doesn't work that way. The way the real world works is this:
1. You perform, for almost no money (or, in the case of pay-to-play venues, for less money than it costs you to promote the gig and buy the tickets you couldn't find friends to purchase from the allotment the management of the place portioned out to you - and, if you don't sell all of them, you won't get a second opportunity to play that venue), as often as you can, while you work a dead-end, stop-loss job that, nonetheless, you have to schedule your rehearsals, performances, and promotional activities around.
2. You scrape together enough money to record your band at a low-budget studio, without enough time to complete your overdubs, because you can't afford to pay for the extra time. So the end-product is less than satisfactory - sometimes a whole lot less than satisfactory - but at least you have something to sell at your gigs, and send copies of to college radio stations and independent record labels.
3. You spend a lot of effort on your MyFace page, embedding your recordings (which eats into your market for CDs, which you try to sell at your performances, but more often can't, because the economy sucks, and, oh yeah, your audience can get the MP3s for free, anyway).
4. Eventually, you manage to attract an offer from an independent record company, which will give you the budget to make a decent album recording, and just enough promotion to go with it that you may just get a modest, college-radio hit out of it.
5. Then the major labels become interested enough to offer to buy your contract from the independent label, put you into what amounts to debt slavery to finance your next album and accompanying video(s), and (most importantly) pay Clear Channel the bribe money - excuse me, I meant "research fees" - that somehow, magically, gets your first major-label single actually played on commercial radio.
6. If you're really lucky, your song is a hit. At that point, you finally have a chance to beat the record company system - but only if you have already have a second single to promote (and not at all, if you're foolish enough to spend that income, rather than re-invest it by accepting a smaller advance for your second major-label album).
7. Rinse and repeat, until your contract is up, at which point, you finally have a chance to renegotiate the terms to something more in your favor. Just don't fail to continue to release hit records along the way, because it only takes one stiff - especially if it comes near the end of your contract, when you're getting creatively exhausted from the pressure and the touring - to put the record company in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiations. (This is what happened to Prince - and it's why he started insisting on being referred to as "the artist", because that's the way your record contract will refer to YOU - in the period when he appeared on SNL with the word "slave" written on his cheek in magic marker. And note th
Nope. I personally don't know or care about Andrea Thompson at all. But her name was on the space.com story, so I mentioned it. That's called "creditng the source."
As for my story, it is, of course, about both things - the new theory about Sagittarius A*, and the reporting about the theory - because both are relevant to me.
You're welcome not to care about either, though. Just try not to impute motives to other people without justification, lest you, yourself be judged a cynical troll with way too much time on its grubby little hands.
"I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998."
Actually, it's not even as capable as Cool Edit was more than a decade ago. Specifically, Audacity does not support MIDI, whereas, AIR, Cool Edit Pro did. And that's the main reason why Audacity is utterly worthless for music production: because it can't sync to MIDI. So, no drum machine, or outboard sequencer loops.
That's why, when the Linux fanboys point their lofty sneers at lowly Windoze, I just shrug. My old Windows 98SE box allows me to sync my drum droid to Cakewalk 9 to lay down kick, hi-hat, and ride tracks. So I use that, instead of a Linux box, because it actually works. And, in turn, I use Windows 98, because the audio interface hardware I use (the original 16-bit Layla by Echo Audio) doesn't have drivers that work with XP SP3. (Nor, I should point out, does it have Linux drivers.) Since I can't afford new hardware, I use a Windows box that allows me to do stuff like this, which Audacity would not.
And it's sad that that's the case, because I would like to be able to use Audacity on Linux, rather than Cakewalk on Windows.
I think a list of seminal books, rather than specific authors, is the way to go. (Heck, you could teach an entire class on Heinlein alone!) Mine would definitely include:
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. Perhaps Bester's best-known story (Bester won the very first Hugo award for best science fiction novel with The Demolished Man - which is a great exploration of a telepathic society cast as a detective story - but Stars is a short novel, which would allow you to fit more works into the time allotted), it's a story of one man's thirst for revenge (always a popular theme with teenagers) in a society where interplanetary travel is commonplace and most normal people have learned to teleport. The fact that the action takes place across this society's class structure, and that it anticipates (among other phenomena) flash mobs, excellently illustrates the science-fictional task of worldbuilding at its highest level.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. Although less popular than the author's Stranger in a Strange Land, it won - and deserved - the Hugo for Best Novel. More importantly, Heinlein's infamous didacticism is dialed back a good ways from the wildly-self-indulgent Stranger, and the story - of a lunar penal colony (most of the residents of which are prisoners only of irreversible gravity-mediated physiological changes) which fights a war for political independence from Earth - was the first SF novel to deal with low-gravity disability, the first that I know of to introduce a self-aware computer character that felt in any way "real", the first to introduce railgun bombardment from space as a terror weapon, and one of the first to explore (in Heinlein's holographic fashion) the possible impact on marriage customs of a society where the male-to-female ratio is heavily lopsided.
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny. Although best known for his less-ambitious Amber series, this was Zelazny's magnum opus. Set on a planet colonized centuries before, it tells the story of the struggle between Buddhism and Hinduism - except that the Hindu gods are the officers of the original colony ship, the Buddha is a rebel from their ranks who is determined to destroy the caste system over which they rule, and physical reincarnation is a reward doled out by the "gods" via cloning and mind-transfer technology. Beautifully-written (as you might expect from an English major with a degree in comparative mythology), it's also a riveting adventure story, with a complex protagonist fighting to overthrow an authoritarian society ruled by his oldest friends and associates, Lord of Light is perhaps the best melding of science fiction and fantasy ever written. It deservedly won both the Hugo (given by the fan community) and the Nebula (bestowed by the science fiction writers association) awards for best novel.
The Adolescence of P1, by Thomas Ryan. Other than Mistress, this was the first SF novel to explore the idea of a self-aware computer consciousness arising from what today we would call a self-modifying Internet worm. It confines itself to that theme, rather than engaging in a major world-building exercise. Because it is set in the "present day" 1980's, it would allow you to introduce the idea that science fiction themes can be set in familiar, rather than exotic surroundings without in any way lessening their entertainment value or the relevance and weight of their themes.
The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. Set in a highly-mobile future society that's dependent on networked computers for day-to-day existence - a society that bears a striking resemblance to our own - Rider is one of the best examples of dead-on prognosticating in SF. It's also a breathless adventure, which pits the whiz-kid hacker protagonist against the evil CIA that's been determined to exploit him and orphans like him since his childhood. Again, as in Ryan's Adolescence, Brunner includes an emergent computer intelligence given birth by the protagonist's experiments with self-modifying code, but the focus here i
Unlike what seems like everyone who has posted a comment on this story thus far, I am a member of ASCAP. In fact, I'm a member both as an individual artist, and as a publisher (my publishing company represents exactly one artist - me). ASCAP stands for "American Society of Composers, Artists, and Producers". It charges no membership fees, but you must have at least one published song to be eligible for membership. The directors are elected from within the membership's ranks.
The problem with ASCAP is that its executives all have intimate ties to the legacy recording industry, and that they're pretty much totally unresponsive to input from those of us who don't have such ties. In fact, as far as I can tell, there is no useful mechanism for ordinary members, like me, to affect ASCAP policymaking in any way, shape, or form. Our only power is to vote the bastards out of office - and the problem there is that, as with many other nominally non-profit organizations (I know that seems counterintuitive, but, in fact, ASCAP is chartered as a non-profit organization, which supports itself by charging its members a modest fee for collecting performance royalties on their behalf - a royalty on a royalty, if you will - and, if you are owed no royalties, you pay no fees), elections are essentially popularity contests. "Oh, I recognize that name!" is about as deeply as most ASCAP members think about who they vote for. So the board of directors is mostly dominated by producers, rather than songwriters, and the majority of them are themselves relics of a bygone era, who are, for the most part, digital dimwits, who think of the Internet as the vacuum cleaner that's sucking up all the income from the CDs that aren't selling any more.
The thing is that, from a songwriter's perspective, what ASCAP is chartered to do is essential to making a living. Not all successful songwriters are members of touring bands. Many of us aren't even (or are barely even) recording artists. Instead, there is a substantial population of members who write songs for other people to record, or write soundtrack music (i.e. - not the hits the TV studios license as theme songs, or background music, but the incidental music that sets the mood, or heightens the tension - music that most viewers don't consciously notice, because that's not its function, but that they would definitely miss, if it wasn't there), or commercial jingles, or even music for videogames. Those members of ASCAP need licensing income in order to pay the mortgage and buy groceries. Few of them are millionaires.
So, again, what ASCAP does (or, at least, what it's supposed to do) is not inherently evil. The problem is that its executive ranks are filled with unimaginitive dinosaurs. They're not focused on PR, or on pumping up members' sales numbers, because that's not their charter. Their charter is simple and straightforward: to see that their members get paid every time their recordings are performed in public. That those executives are shortsighted enough to try to squeeze Apple (or any other company) for royalties on 30-second samples does not invalidate the legitimacy of writers needing to get paid for their work, just as coders get paid for theirs. The difference is that coders tend to do "works for hire", so their employers own the code they write, whereas almost all ASCAP members are self-employed. If we don't get royalties, we starve.
Finally, note that Apple is making a pile of money on iTunes. Steve Jobs is not a selfless hero. He's a businessman who has developed a distribution system for music that insures that songwriters receive mechanical royalties (which is where that 9.1 cents comes in) on the sale of individual songs. Mechanical royalties are different from performance royalties. They are paid to songwriters when songs they have written are first sold to individual buyers - essentially, a one-time payment to the writer(s) on each song you, as consumers, purchase, whether in CD format, or as a digital download. ASCAP has nothing to do with colle
Slashdot Mirror
We must take control and save the world.
Save the cheerleader, save the world.
I'm surprised I have to explain this.
The miniseries stuck more closely to the story, but the acting was bloody wooden.
Excuse me? To call Kyle MacLachlan's "acting" wooden is to insult trees. I saw Lynch's Dune when it premiered, at the Oakland Paramount theater - a 1,200 seat house with a state-of-the-art sound system - and the audience was all fanboys (me included). When Paul first sees Chani, and "thinks" (in voiceover) "My god, she's beautiful!" the entire audience burst into derisive laughter.
And don't get me started about Stink, and his, "I will kill him!" ham salad.
Feh.
The miniseries (and the followup, Children of Dune) was orders of magnitude better than Lynch's abortion.
Hell, National Lampoon's Doon was better than Lynch's movie!
Honey, you feed the dogs - and I'll feed the fish.
Seventy miles is not that great a distance for viewing space launches. I remember watching from Satellite Beach (about 40 miles from Cape Kennedy) as Apollo 11 lifted off for the Moon. We could easily see the Saturn booster, and the roar of the engines was LOUD, even that far away. My mother took Super 8 footage of the launch, and, even with the very modest zoom factor, the rocket and payload capsule are quite clearly visible for the first 40 seconds or so.
His vision is to build slums in space. The guy is a swine.
Rules? In a knife fight ... ?
Does this remind anyone else of Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children duology? 'Cause it sure reminds me of them!
Copyright law is broken. It needs to be fixed, not fiddled with to Google's advantage only.
And, given last week's Supreme Court decision removing all restrictions on corporations' spending to influence political decisions, how long do you propose we hold our collective breath?
Let's face it, folks. Absent a revolution, we've lost this war. At the behest of five assholes in black party dresses, America has now officially become a plutocracy. Money talks and public interest walks.
Not that that's any great change from business as usual, you understand. It's just official now.
I'd weep for my poor, broken-ass country, if I wasn't so busy trying not to become homeless ...
NASA doesn't set those goals. The President sets them. That's why we threw away the momentum of the Apollo project - Nixon hated it, because he (rightly) considered it a legacy of JFK. So he authorized Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, rather than work towards a lunar colony, or flights to Mars. And he cut NASA's requested budget.
And that's the other thing about long-term NASA goals. They're entirely at the mercy of Congress, which has consistently refused to fund them for other than the current fiscal year. So NASA is constantly having to ramp them up and down, depending on how popular funding space flight is this year.
Do you have any opinions of your own, or are they all recycled from fat, drug-addicted, reactionary trolls?
Ironically, as a musician or band, you won't get a major label offer until you are successful enough to attract the attention of a label. That means you're making enough money that they could make money off of you. So at that point, why sign? If you're not that successful yet, no one will offer you a deal anyhow, so it's not even a problem for you.
Wrong.
Your choices in summary: 1. sign and get slightly better promotion for a huge reduction in your personal profit 2. don't sign, get the promotion your music warrants on its own and keep all your own profits
If you're all that good, you're gonna make way more money at #2. If you're terrible and somehow you get a big advance because of #1, believe me, the label will find a way to claw that money back from you.
Spoken from the perspective of someone who just "knows" that's the way things work - or rather, the way he thinks they should work.
The problem is that real world doesn't work that way. The way the real world works is this:
1. You perform, for almost no money (or, in the case of pay-to-play venues, for less money than it costs you to promote the gig and buy the tickets you couldn't find friends to purchase from the allotment the management of the place portioned out to you - and, if you don't sell all of them, you won't get a second opportunity to play that venue), as often as you can, while you work a dead-end, stop-loss job that, nonetheless, you have to schedule your rehearsals, performances, and promotional activities around.
2. You scrape together enough money to record your band at a low-budget studio, without enough time to complete your overdubs, because you can't afford to pay for the extra time. So the end-product is less than satisfactory - sometimes a whole lot less than satisfactory - but at least you have something to sell at your gigs, and send copies of to college radio stations and independent record labels.
3. You spend a lot of effort on your MyFace page, embedding your recordings (which eats into your market for CDs, which you try to sell at your performances, but more often can't, because the economy sucks, and, oh yeah, your audience can get the MP3s for free, anyway).
4. Eventually, you manage to attract an offer from an independent record company, which will give you the budget to make a decent album recording, and just enough promotion to go with it that you may just get a modest, college-radio hit out of it.
5. Then the major labels become interested enough to offer to buy your contract from the independent label, put you into what amounts to debt slavery to finance your next album and accompanying video(s), and (most importantly) pay Clear Channel the bribe money - excuse me, I meant "research fees" - that somehow, magically, gets your first major-label single actually played on commercial radio.
6. If you're really lucky, your song is a hit. At that point, you finally have a chance to beat the record company system - but only if you have already have a second single to promote (and not at all, if you're foolish enough to spend that income, rather than re-invest it by accepting a smaller advance for your second major-label album).
7. Rinse and repeat, until your contract is up, at which point, you finally have a chance to renegotiate the terms to something more in your favor. Just don't fail to continue to release hit records along the way, because it only takes one stiff - especially if it comes near the end of your contract, when you're getting creatively exhausted from the pressure and the touring - to put the record company in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiations. (This is what happened to Prince - and it's why he started insisting on being referred to as "the artist", because that's the way your record contract will refer to YOU - in the period when he appeared on SNL with the word "slave" written on his cheek in magic marker. And note th
Hey, bastardrs have feelings, too, y'know ...
..king tape and popsicle sticks. As any giant sloth can attest, they're mas...
"She still doesn't look any more realistic than a blowup doll:
http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/01/09/ces2010-roxxxy-truecompanion-worlds-first-sex-robot-preview-nsfw"
Ewww ... that underbite, is English-bulldog-sexy.
Bow, freakin' yuck!
As for my story, it is, of course, about both things - the new theory about Sagittarius A*, and the reporting about the theory - because both are relevant to me.
You're welcome not to care about either, though. Just try not to impute motives to other people without justification, lest you, yourself be judged a cynical troll with way too much time on its grubby little hands.
Just sayin' ...
"I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998."
Actually, it's not even as capable as Cool Edit was more than a decade ago. Specifically, Audacity does not support MIDI, whereas, AIR, Cool Edit Pro did. And that's the main reason why Audacity is utterly worthless for music production: because it can't sync to MIDI. So, no drum machine, or outboard sequencer loops.
That's why, when the Linux fanboys point their lofty sneers at lowly Windoze, I just shrug. My old Windows 98SE box allows me to sync my drum droid to Cakewalk 9 to lay down kick, hi-hat, and ride tracks. So I use that, instead of a Linux box, because it actually works. And, in turn, I use Windows 98, because the audio interface hardware I use (the original 16-bit Layla by Echo Audio) doesn't have drivers that work with XP SP3. (Nor, I should point out, does it have Linux drivers.) Since I can't afford new hardware, I use a Windows box that allows me to do stuff like this, which Audacity would not.
And it's sad that that's the case, because I would like to be able to use Audacity on Linux, rather than Cakewalk on Windows.
But I can't.
So I don't.
Well, isn't that special, Ed?
I do.
Next question?
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. Perhaps Bester's best-known story (Bester won the very first Hugo award for best science fiction novel with The Demolished Man - which is a great exploration of a telepathic society cast as a detective story - but Stars is a short novel, which would allow you to fit more works into the time allotted), it's a story of one man's thirst for revenge (always a popular theme with teenagers) in a society where interplanetary travel is commonplace and most normal people have learned to teleport. The fact that the action takes place across this society's class structure, and that it anticipates (among other phenomena) flash mobs, excellently illustrates the science-fictional task of worldbuilding at its highest level.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. Although less popular than the author's Stranger in a Strange Land, it won - and deserved - the Hugo for Best Novel. More importantly, Heinlein's infamous didacticism is dialed back a good ways from the wildly-self-indulgent Stranger, and the story - of a lunar penal colony (most of the residents of which are prisoners only of irreversible gravity-mediated physiological changes) which fights a war for political independence from Earth - was the first SF novel to deal with low-gravity disability, the first that I know of to introduce a self-aware computer character that felt in any way "real", the first to introduce railgun bombardment from space as a terror weapon, and one of the first to explore (in Heinlein's holographic fashion) the possible impact on marriage customs of a society where the male-to-female ratio is heavily lopsided.
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny. Although best known for his less-ambitious Amber series, this was Zelazny's magnum opus. Set on a planet colonized centuries before, it tells the story of the struggle between Buddhism and Hinduism - except that the Hindu gods are the officers of the original colony ship, the Buddha is a rebel from their ranks who is determined to destroy the caste system over which they rule, and physical reincarnation is a reward doled out by the "gods" via cloning and mind-transfer technology. Beautifully-written (as you might expect from an English major with a degree in comparative mythology), it's also a riveting adventure story, with a complex protagonist fighting to overthrow an authoritarian society ruled by his oldest friends and associates, Lord of Light is perhaps the best melding of science fiction and fantasy ever written. It deservedly won both the Hugo (given by the fan community) and the Nebula (bestowed by the science fiction writers association) awards for best novel.
The Adolescence of P1, by Thomas Ryan. Other than Mistress, this was the first SF novel to explore the idea of a self-aware computer consciousness arising from what today we would call a self-modifying Internet worm. It confines itself to that theme, rather than engaging in a major world-building exercise. Because it is set in the "present day" 1980's, it would allow you to introduce the idea that science fiction themes can be set in familiar, rather than exotic surroundings without in any way lessening their entertainment value or the relevance and weight of their themes.
The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. Set in a highly-mobile future society that's dependent on networked computers for day-to-day existence - a society that bears a striking resemblance to our own - Rider is one of the best examples of dead-on prognosticating in SF. It's also a breathless adventure, which pits the whiz-kid hacker protagonist against the evil CIA that's been determined to exploit him and orphans like him since his childhood. Again, as in Ryan's Adolescence, Brunner includes an emergent computer intelligence given birth by the protagonist's experiments with self-modifying code, but the focus here i
Unlike what seems like everyone who has posted a comment on this story thus far, I am a member of ASCAP. In fact, I'm a member both as an individual artist, and as a publisher (my publishing company represents exactly one artist - me). ASCAP stands for "American Society of Composers, Artists, and Producers". It charges no membership fees, but you must have at least one published song to be eligible for membership. The directors are elected from within the membership's ranks.
The problem with ASCAP is that its executives all have intimate ties to the legacy recording industry, and that they're pretty much totally unresponsive to input from those of us who don't have such ties. In fact, as far as I can tell, there is no useful mechanism for ordinary members, like me, to affect ASCAP policymaking in any way, shape, or form. Our only power is to vote the bastards out of office - and the problem there is that, as with many other nominally non-profit organizations (I know that seems counterintuitive, but, in fact, ASCAP is chartered as a non-profit organization, which supports itself by charging its members a modest fee for collecting performance royalties on their behalf - a royalty on a royalty, if you will - and, if you are owed no royalties, you pay no fees), elections are essentially popularity contests. "Oh, I recognize that name!" is about as deeply as most ASCAP members think about who they vote for. So the board of directors is mostly dominated by producers, rather than songwriters, and the majority of them are themselves relics of a bygone era, who are, for the most part, digital dimwits, who think of the Internet as the vacuum cleaner that's sucking up all the income from the CDs that aren't selling any more.
The thing is that, from a songwriter's perspective, what ASCAP is chartered to do is essential to making a living. Not all successful songwriters are members of touring bands. Many of us aren't even (or are barely even) recording artists. Instead, there is a substantial population of members who write songs for other people to record, or write soundtrack music (i.e. - not the hits the TV studios license as theme songs, or background music, but the incidental music that sets the mood, or heightens the tension - music that most viewers don't consciously notice, because that's not its function, but that they would definitely miss, if it wasn't there), or commercial jingles, or even music for videogames. Those members of ASCAP need licensing income in order to pay the mortgage and buy groceries. Few of them are millionaires.
So, again, what ASCAP does (or, at least, what it's supposed to do) is not inherently evil. The problem is that its executive ranks are filled with unimaginitive dinosaurs. They're not focused on PR, or on pumping up members' sales numbers, because that's not their charter. Their charter is simple and straightforward: to see that their members get paid every time their recordings are performed in public. That those executives are shortsighted enough to try to squeeze Apple (or any other company) for royalties on 30-second samples does not invalidate the legitimacy of writers needing to get paid for their work, just as coders get paid for theirs. The difference is that coders tend to do "works for hire", so their employers own the code they write, whereas almost all ASCAP members are self-employed. If we don't get royalties, we starve.
Finally, note that Apple is making a pile of money on iTunes. Steve Jobs is not a selfless hero. He's a businessman who has developed a distribution system for music that insures that songwriters receive mechanical royalties (which is where that 9.1 cents comes in) on the sale of individual songs. Mechanical royalties are different from performance royalties. They are paid to songwriters when songs they have written are first sold to individual buyers - essentially, a one-time payment to the writer(s) on each song you, as consumers, purchase, whether in CD format, or as a digital download. ASCAP has nothing to do with colle