The problem here is that labels own the copyright and make their money from album sales. Merchandising and concert revenue, on the other hand, typically go into the bands' pockets. So of course there are bands out there that would love to use albums as a loss leader for their concerts.
Okay, but I think the most important implication of this post is that perhaps there is absolutely no need for there to be record labels anymore.
Recording studios aren't even a hundredth as expensive as they used to be. Many bands - Radiohead included - have their own.
So if enough people are inclined to listen to music without having it on plastic disks in physical stores - why bother with the labels at all?
Sure, a band needs to be promoted, but the logical solution is for them to hire a PR guy - not for their PR guy to hire them.
In meatspace, "Orwellian" has bad connotations, because it's morally questionable to make dissenters disappear into the dead of night when it involves killing them.
Online, though, it's just the only way to go. In any place where you have authority - like your own website - then if anyone crosses you, don't say a word to them. Don't say a word to anyone else. Just erase their account and ban their IP. If they come back, do it again. If anyone notices and asks about it, don't comment.
Nothing takes a forum down faster than drama, and the best way to avoid drama is to simply ensure that no one is allowed to voice dissent. I am in no way kidding. On a site that discusses model airplanes, even the tiniest bit of unpleasantness should be dealt with with a swift and permanent ban and expunging of all evidence that the user and his unpleasantness ever existed.
Of course, in many ways this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say there are good reasons for a teenager to impersonate someone older. There are some of us who, even as teenagers, would prefer that our ideas be met with rational scrutiny rather than "involved guidance."
Agriculture doesn't belong in the cities -- not until it will be able to work in greenhouses using artificial soil and industrial-like environment, because otherwise it won't have enough area and water to be efficient. At no point in history cities had anything to do with agricultural production, and now is not the right time to start.
On the other hand, reduced (or, better, reversed) sprawl can provide stable environment for development of farming around cities, in the areas that now are waiting to be sold for new suburban development.
Care to explain how that's a "strawman"? Moving food production as close as possible to the end consumers is *exactly* what the slow food movement advocates. Instead of large, centralized farms, they want small, decentralized farms - which logically means a far higher percent of people in the agriculture sector.
As for your statement on "reduced/reversed sprawl," you don't seem to bother to explain what you mean. Build vertically? Limit the size of the lots that can be developed? Delineate one or two borders on a city so the growth can at least be directed?
The fact that alternatives exist does not mean that entertainment is not being withheld. Scrabulous is optimized and positioned to the point where people find it extremely convenient and enjoyable; attempting to destroy it does some harm to many people in exchange for a possible financial gain for people who probably neither need nor deserve it.
Oh, and by the way, you can rest assured that I've never paid for a copy of Microsoft Windows.
I like being able to post completely anonymously. I even like being able to misinform people about my identity. I think it's a good thing that a 14-year-old girl can pose as a 50-year-old man and see if her ideas will be taken seriously on their own merits.
But not as a specific 50-year-old man who actually exists. While I think we should all have the right to conceal our identity, we certainly shouldn't have the right to assume someone else's.
This is the least controversial thing I have ever written.
Well, in theory, any kind of power could be harnessed to power electric cars. You can't safely put a small nuclear reactor in every car on the road, but you can certainly charge many cars on the power provided by a single reactor. There isn't enough surface area on cars to have them run on solar power by any feasible stretch of modern technology - but you could power quite a few cars with a solar array. Wind. Geothermal. The possibilities are... well, not endless, but very broad.
Prevention is always better than cure. Better to go back to building cities so that they can meet their original purpose of putting daily needs within walking distance. Better to fix the leak rather than put a bigger or more sophisticated bucket under it.
While there are certainly advantages to living in geographically self-contained units, there are also massive benefits to centralizing industries.
Yes, the "slow foods" movement will tell us, accurately, that shipping our produce from hundreds of miles away causes an incredible amount of waste in fuel.
But consider the alternative - a small farm for every nine city blocks. Suddenly, instead of having a system where one farmer can produce food for a thousand, you have a system where one farmer produces food for, say, fifty. Which means you have to have 20 times more farmers. Which means there are fewer people to provide other services. The same goes for commerce: five corner stores might be more convenient than one larger, more centralized 7-11 - but now you have five times as many people working in low-end retail.
It's centralization of the more menial services that allow so many of us to have jobs in less immediately-necessary services - like programming or science. And almost-completely-unnecessary services, like video game design and filmmaking? Forget about it.
...that this will usher in a glorious new era of alcoholism.
After all, I think it's the driving problem that really prevents people from drinking to their full potential. I can't count the number of times I've thought "I know, I'll go to a bar and get hammered!" and then, a few seconds later, "ahhh, but I don't know how I'd get home."
Yes, I think 2053 will have a few things in common with 1953 - a glorious time when men were men and martinis were brunch.
When the RIAA sued Napster, I decided they'd never see another dime from me - and, true to my word, I haven't bought another RIAA-member album since. Haven't pirated many, either. Turns out independent music is actually pretty good.
Well, guess what. Now I'm done with Hasbro. I'm uninstalling M:TGO; I won't be replacing Cranium, Axis & Allies, Risk, or Monopoly when they inevitably wear out; I won't be buying any video game based on Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, etc.
Fuck companies that cling to the antiquated business model that withholding entertainment through legal action is still a valid way to do things.
So, I've been playing with FreeCiv and FreeCol, and I thought their commentary was interesting.
The question was posed: isn't this blatant copyright infringement?
And their answer was - maybe not. Although it's clear that you can copyright graphics and sounds, and you can copyright a story and a plot, and you can copyright code, and you can copyright maps - it isn't clear whether you can copyright a ruleset.
It isn't clear, for example, whether you can copyright the concept of turning a card sideways to increase a number used to play other cards. It isn't clear whether the concept of a 2-D character jumping from one platform to another, and losing a life if he doesn't make it, could have been copyrighted.
Maybe this will clear some things up. Scrabble, after all, has no real proprietary art beyond their logo maybe the font used on the tiles. It's just rules, and nothing more. Can you copyright a concept? (Actually, that sounds more like something you'd use a patent for).
It looks like, basically, what's been created is a realistic robot tuatara designed to attract females and essentially turn them on sexually through dominance displays. And at least in theory, it's real enough that they can't distinguish it from the real thing.
If we have this technology - why are we wasting it on lizard-snakes?? Where's my robot girlfriend?
You know, people are making a lot of jokes about adding physical components to cell phones - electric razors, can openers, etc. - but I think that what would be ideal is if I could have everything physical I needed in one pocket - like a souped-up version of a Swiss Army knife - and everything informational I needed in the other pocket.
Ideally, one day we'll carry a small "wallet PC" that acts as both a cell phone and a computer in general, and is a complete replacement for everything one might find in the wallet.
And, even more ideally, the Swiss will finally integrate a small light saber onto their knives.
A neat little trick you can do on other people's computers is to make a shortcut of "My Computer" and label it "Your Computer". Put the shortcut next to "My Computer".
Whoa, two computers for the price of one!! Wait until marketing hears about this!!
And to think, before now, they were content merely to refer to 76 gig hard drives as "80 gig hard drives" through creative metric-system abuse...
So we walk a linguistic tightrope between blandness and bigotry.
Not only blandness, but also imprecision.
"Gay" in its derogatory sense is simply not a synonym for "contemptible." Saying "Spider-Man 2 was totally gay" does not mean "Spider-Man 2 was totally contemptible."
The word "gay" in that sense means something akin to "Weak; passing itself off as something stronger than it is; unlikely to be well-received by anyone with traditionally masculine values and/or attitudes."
There's no other word that does that. There's just not a synonym. "Lame" is the closest thing, but it's not quite right, and as we've already established, it's kind of a slur anyway.
So there are problems. If we really want people to stop using "gay," there needs to be a word that conveys the same information. Because sometimes I just need "gay." What the hell else is Fruits Basket if not the gayest fucking anime ever made? There's just no other description for it - and certainly not one as succinct, direct, clear, to the point, and universally understood.
Well I know that's supposed to be rhetorical. But, really, it's not an unsolveable problem.
First of all, you can suggest it through correllational research - which is what these guys did. They grabbed and analyzed data from 41 nations, plotted test performance against homework given, and found corellations.
Of course, that's not proof. To prove it, you'd have to run two essentially identical classes side-by-side: one that gets a normal amount of homework (the control group) and one that gets significantly more (the experimental group).
But since we don't generally approve of experimenting with kids' educations like that - the corellational research is enough, at least for me.
I'm guessing you wouldn't put up a tagline that says, "Politics is really black".
And yet most people wouldn't hesitate to put up a tagline that says, "Politics is really lame," despite the fact that technically that's a slur against the handicapped.
And, similarly, while one would get scolded for saying "That guy jewed me out of $50," no one would bat an eye if you said "That guy gypped me out of $50," despite the fact that the latter is every bit as offensive a slur against gypsies as the former is against Jews.
Regarding #2 there, I have a question: why isn't firearm usage and safety taught in schools? You'd think it would help cut down on the accidental shootings that kids keep getting themselves into.
Probably because it makes more sense to do that in boot camp - which is, when you think about it, just another form of public education.
After all, it's clearly in the State's interest that its military carries more and better guns, and has more and better training, than its civilians. The ability to rise up against a corrupt government may have been a reason for the Second Amendment - but, not surprisingly, the State doesn't see it that way anymore.
You can only thrust so much work at kids, but the REAL learning starts happening when the kids start LEARNING FOR THEMSELVES and feel comfortable coming to the teacher with all sorts of difficult questions.
That's basically a question of intrinsic (personal) versus extrinsic (reward/punishment based) motivation - and yes, given a choice between the two, intrinsic motivation works better every time. And I'm sure everyone's seen that in real life - a programmer who he loves writing code will code in circles around some guy who just figured a CS degree would be the best way to make six figures.
But with respect to extrinsic motivation - not all extrinsic motivation is created equal. Where rewards outweigh punishments, a person will be moderately motivated to perform the task wel. Where punishments outweigh rewards, a person will generally be motivated only to avoid the task entirely.
A grade is both a punishment and a reward depending on how it is received. But generally, a family that strongly rewards good grades and only weakly punishes bad grades will create a student extrinsically motivated to score high marks. A family that simply expects good grades and strongly punishes bad grades will create a student who figures out how to "get by" in school and then, once out from under his parents thumb, has an aversion to anything widely considered "success" and may actually avoid, for example, finishing college or applying for high-paying jobs. The kind of person who, despite being very bright, would work at a record store for minimum wage because he "loves music."
So anyway, my point - and I know it took a while to get there - is that excessive homework is the negative form of extrinsic motivation. Unless success is *heavily* reinforced, it provides way too much negative feedback in comparison to positive. So what it really teaches students is that doing work.. sucks. And that's something that will bleed into their work ethic for the rest of their lives.
And once they have the opportunity for the first time in their lives not to work - guess what?
No, it's not. It's about giving them the basic knowledge they need in the modern society.
What, so you think the government provides public educations for completely altruistic reasons?
The man considered the father of public education - I can't recall his name off the top of my head - declared that there were two reasons for public education:
1. To increase economic growth by providing citizens with job skills and foundations for job skills; and
2. To increase the nation's military readiness by teaching patriotic/nationalistic ideals.
Later, the "military readiness" was expanded upon - it was officially recommended that schools establish a concept of "school spirit" and compete against each other. The idea was that a student fanatically and irrationally dedicated to a school would be more likely to become a citizen fanatically and irrationally dedicated to a nation.
Since then, the purposes of public education have expanded even more - including addressing health problems (e.g. through health classes, P.E., and sexual education) and social problems (e.g. through the D.A.R.E. program, if it worked, and through programs like busing to create interracial schools).
Consider for a moment just how much of what they taught you in high school was "basic knowledge you need in the modern society." By seventh grade, most of us could do arithmetic and basic algebra, read directions and the daily news, and write well enough to express basic ideas. We were fully qualified for the majority of agricultural and industrial jobs, and plenty of service jobs, too.
So we went into high school with the basic knowledge we need in modern society. That's not what we were there for.
All films, music etc derive 99% of their income from sales to individuals
Films, music, etc., have no income. They are pieces of information.
It may be true that 99% of the income involved in the creation, manufacture, distribution, marketing, promotion, etc. of such information is derived from sales to individuals. I don't know.
But I do know this: with respect specifically to the creators of artistic works - especially music - far more money is generated by the "performance royalty" (a royalty paid when the work is used in another profit-generating enterprise, from a commercial to a concert to an open mic) than by the "mechanical royalty" (the royalty paid when the work is sold in a store, which overwhelmingly just covers the cost of promoting the work, sticking it on a truck, and letting it sit in the physical real estate until someone buys it).
[i]Actually, if they just made the image a question that you'd have to answer (an easy one), I think that would go a long way to make it harder for bots to get it right.[/i]
Now that is [i]interesting[/i].
But consider that there's big money at stake here. If a company like Yahoo complied ten thousand images with simple questions on them ("What animal says 'quack'?"), I can pretty much guarantee that spam companies would simply respond by hiring ten teenagers to catalog a thousand questions each over the course of a week and recreate Yahoo's database.
I'm not sure how one would get around this problem. And, of course, there's a language-barrier problem, too: a Japanese person might have good enough English to want to use the website for a legitimate purpose, but might not know that we think ducks say 'quack' (because, let's face it, they don't).
Slashdot Mirror
That you spend time downloading songs for your pleasure shows that they have much more value than you want to pay for it.
That doesn't follow at all. That he spends time downloading the song shows that the songs have enough value to be worth downloading.
Which isn't much.
The problem here is that labels own the copyright and make their money from album sales. Merchandising and concert revenue, on the other hand, typically go into the bands' pockets. So of course there are bands out there that would love to use albums as a loss leader for their concerts.
Okay, but I think the most important implication of this post is that perhaps there is absolutely no need for there to be record labels anymore.
Recording studios aren't even a hundredth as expensive as they used to be. Many bands - Radiohead included - have their own.
So if enough people are inclined to listen to music without having it on plastic disks in physical stores - why bother with the labels at all?
Sure, a band needs to be promoted, but the logical solution is for them to hire a PR guy - not for their PR guy to hire them.
In meatspace, "Orwellian" has bad connotations, because it's morally questionable to make dissenters disappear into the dead of night when it involves killing them.
Online, though, it's just the only way to go. In any place where you have authority - like your own website - then if anyone crosses you, don't say a word to them. Don't say a word to anyone else. Just erase their account and ban their IP. If they come back, do it again. If anyone notices and asks about it, don't comment.
Nothing takes a forum down faster than drama, and the best way to avoid drama is to simply ensure that no one is allowed to voice dissent. I am in no way kidding. On a site that discusses model airplanes, even the tiniest bit of unpleasantness should be dealt with with a swift and permanent ban and expunging of all evidence that the user and his unpleasantness ever existed.
Of course, in many ways this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say there are good reasons for a teenager to impersonate someone older. There are some of us who, even as teenagers, would prefer that our ideas be met with rational scrutiny rather than "involved guidance."
That's a strawman.
Agriculture doesn't belong in the cities -- not until it will be able to work in greenhouses using artificial soil and industrial-like environment, because otherwise it won't have enough area and water to be efficient. At no point in history cities had anything to do with agricultural production, and now is not the right time to start.
On the other hand, reduced (or, better, reversed) sprawl can provide stable environment for development of farming around cities, in the areas that now are waiting to be sold for new suburban development.
Care to explain how that's a "strawman"? Moving food production as close as possible to the end consumers is *exactly* what the slow food movement advocates. Instead of large, centralized farms, they want small, decentralized farms - which logically means a far higher percent of people in the agriculture sector.
As for your statement on "reduced/reversed sprawl," you don't seem to bother to explain what you mean. Build vertically? Limit the size of the lots that can be developed? Delineate one or two borders on a city so the growth can at least be directed?
The fact that alternatives exist does not mean that entertainment is not being withheld. Scrabulous is optimized and positioned to the point where people find it extremely convenient and enjoyable; attempting to destroy it does some harm to many people in exchange for a possible financial gain for people who probably neither need nor deserve it. Oh, and by the way, you can rest assured that I've never paid for a copy of Microsoft Windows.
I like being able to post completely anonymously. I even like being able to misinform people about my identity. I think it's a good thing that a 14-year-old girl can pose as a 50-year-old man and see if her ideas will be taken seriously on their own merits.
But not as a specific 50-year-old man who actually exists. While I think we should all have the right to conceal our identity, we certainly shouldn't have the right to assume someone else's.
This is the least controversial thing I have ever written.
Well, in theory, any kind of power could be harnessed to power electric cars. You can't safely put a small nuclear reactor in every car on the road, but you can certainly charge many cars on the power provided by a single reactor. There isn't enough surface area on cars to have them run on solar power by any feasible stretch of modern technology - but you could power quite a few cars with a solar array. Wind. Geothermal. The possibilities are... well, not endless, but very broad.
Prevention is always better than cure. Better to go back to building cities so that they can meet their original purpose of putting daily needs within walking distance. Better to fix the leak rather than put a bigger or more sophisticated bucket under it.
While there are certainly advantages to living in geographically self-contained units, there are also massive benefits to centralizing industries.
Yes, the "slow foods" movement will tell us, accurately, that shipping our produce from hundreds of miles away causes an incredible amount of waste in fuel.
But consider the alternative - a small farm for every nine city blocks. Suddenly, instead of having a system where one farmer can produce food for a thousand, you have a system where one farmer produces food for, say, fifty. Which means you have to have 20 times more farmers. Which means there are fewer people to provide other services. The same goes for commerce: five corner stores might be more convenient than one larger, more centralized 7-11 - but now you have five times as many people working in low-end retail.
It's centralization of the more menial services that allow so many of us to have jobs in less immediately-necessary services - like programming or science. And almost-completely-unnecessary services, like video game design and filmmaking? Forget about it.
...that this will usher in a glorious new era of alcoholism.
After all, I think it's the driving problem that really prevents people from drinking to their full potential. I can't count the number of times I've thought "I know, I'll go to a bar and get hammered!" and then, a few seconds later, "ahhh, but I don't know how I'd get home."
Yes, I think 2053 will have a few things in common with 1953 - a glorious time when men were men and martinis were brunch.
When the RIAA sued Napster, I decided they'd never see another dime from me - and, true to my word, I haven't bought another RIAA-member album since. Haven't pirated many, either. Turns out independent music is actually pretty good.
Well, guess what. Now I'm done with Hasbro. I'm uninstalling M:TGO; I won't be replacing Cranium, Axis & Allies, Risk, or Monopoly when they inevitably wear out; I won't be buying any video game based on Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, etc.
Fuck companies that cling to the antiquated business model that withholding entertainment through legal action is still a valid way to do things.
So, I've been playing with FreeCiv and FreeCol, and I thought their commentary was interesting.
The question was posed: isn't this blatant copyright infringement?
And their answer was - maybe not. Although it's clear that you can copyright graphics and sounds, and you can copyright a story and a plot, and you can copyright code, and you can copyright maps - it isn't clear whether you can copyright a ruleset.
It isn't clear, for example, whether you can copyright the concept of turning a card sideways to increase a number used to play other cards. It isn't clear whether the concept of a 2-D character jumping from one platform to another, and losing a life if he doesn't make it, could have been copyrighted.
Maybe this will clear some things up. Scrabble, after all, has no real proprietary art beyond their logo maybe the font used on the tiles. It's just rules, and nothing more. Can you copyright a concept? (Actually, that sounds more like something you'd use a patent for).
It looks like, basically, what's been created is a realistic robot tuatara designed to attract females and essentially turn them on sexually through dominance displays. And at least in theory, it's real enough that they can't distinguish it from the real thing. If we have this technology - why are we wasting it on lizard-snakes?? Where's my robot girlfriend?
What else can you add to a cell phone?
You know, people are making a lot of jokes about adding physical components to cell phones - electric razors, can openers, etc. - but I think that what would be ideal is if I could have everything physical I needed in one pocket - like a souped-up version of a Swiss Army knife - and everything informational I needed in the other pocket.
Ideally, one day we'll carry a small "wallet PC" that acts as both a cell phone and a computer in general, and is a complete replacement for everything one might find in the wallet.
And, even more ideally, the Swiss will finally integrate a small light saber onto their knives.
A neat little trick you can do on other people's computers is to make a shortcut of "My Computer" and label it "Your Computer". Put the shortcut next to "My Computer".
Whoa, two computers for the price of one!! Wait until marketing hears about this!!
And to think, before now, they were content merely to refer to 76 gig hard drives as "80 gig hard drives" through creative metric-system abuse...
So we walk a linguistic tightrope between blandness and bigotry.
Not only blandness, but also imprecision.
"Gay" in its derogatory sense is simply not a synonym for "contemptible." Saying "Spider-Man 2 was totally gay" does not mean "Spider-Man 2 was totally contemptible."
The word "gay" in that sense means something akin to "Weak; passing itself off as something stronger than it is; unlikely to be well-received by anyone with traditionally masculine values and/or attitudes."
There's no other word that does that. There's just not a synonym. "Lame" is the closest thing, but it's not quite right, and as we've already established, it's kind of a slur anyway.
So there are problems. If we really want people to stop using "gay," there needs to be a word that conveys the same information. Because sometimes I just need "gay." What the hell else is Fruits Basket if not the gayest fucking anime ever made? There's just no other description for it - and certainly not one as succinct, direct, clear, to the point, and universally understood.
How could you prove it any which way?
Well I know that's supposed to be rhetorical. But, really, it's not an unsolveable problem.
First of all, you can suggest it through correllational research - which is what these guys did. They grabbed and analyzed data from 41 nations, plotted test performance against homework given, and found corellations.
Of course, that's not proof. To prove it, you'd have to run two essentially identical classes side-by-side: one that gets a normal amount of homework (the control group) and one that gets significantly more (the experimental group).
But since we don't generally approve of experimenting with kids' educations like that - the corellational research is enough, at least for me.
I'm guessing you wouldn't put up a tagline that says, "Politics is really black".
And yet most people wouldn't hesitate to put up a tagline that says, "Politics is really lame," despite the fact that technically that's a slur against the handicapped.
And, similarly, while one would get scolded for saying "That guy jewed me out of $50," no one would bat an eye if you said "That guy gypped me out of $50," despite the fact that the latter is every bit as offensive a slur against gypsies as the former is against Jews.
Regarding #2 there, I have a question: why isn't firearm usage and safety taught in schools? You'd think it would help cut down on the accidental shootings that kids keep getting themselves into.
Probably because it makes more sense to do that in boot camp - which is, when you think about it, just another form of public education.
After all, it's clearly in the State's interest that its military carries more and better guns, and has more and better training, than its civilians. The ability to rise up against a corrupt government may have been a reason for the Second Amendment - but, not surprisingly, the State doesn't see it that way anymore.
You can only thrust so much work at kids, but the REAL learning starts happening when the kids start LEARNING FOR THEMSELVES and feel comfortable coming to the teacher with all sorts of difficult questions.
That's basically a question of intrinsic (personal) versus extrinsic (reward/punishment based) motivation - and yes, given a choice between the two, intrinsic motivation works better every time. And I'm sure everyone's seen that in real life - a programmer who he loves writing code will code in circles around some guy who just figured a CS degree would be the best way to make six figures.
But with respect to extrinsic motivation - not all extrinsic motivation is created equal. Where rewards outweigh punishments, a person will be moderately motivated to perform the task wel. Where punishments outweigh rewards, a person will generally be motivated only to avoid the task entirely.
A grade is both a punishment and a reward depending on how it is received. But generally, a family that strongly rewards good grades and only weakly punishes bad grades will create a student extrinsically motivated to score high marks. A family that simply expects good grades and strongly punishes bad grades will create a student who figures out how to "get by" in school and then, once out from under his parents thumb, has an aversion to anything widely considered "success" and may actually avoid, for example, finishing college or applying for high-paying jobs. The kind of person who, despite being very bright, would work at a record store for minimum wage because he "loves music."
So anyway, my point - and I know it took a while to get there - is that excessive homework is the negative form of extrinsic motivation. Unless success is *heavily* reinforced, it provides way too much negative feedback in comparison to positive. So what it really teaches students is that doing work.. sucks. And that's something that will bleed into their work ethic for the rest of their lives.
And once they have the opportunity for the first time in their lives not to work - guess what?
No, it's not. It's about giving them the basic knowledge they need in the modern society.
What, so you think the government provides public educations for completely altruistic reasons?
The man considered the father of public education - I can't recall his name off the top of my head - declared that there were two reasons for public education:
1. To increase economic growth by providing citizens with job skills and foundations for job skills; and
2. To increase the nation's military readiness by teaching patriotic/nationalistic ideals.
Later, the "military readiness" was expanded upon - it was officially recommended that schools establish a concept of "school spirit" and compete against each other. The idea was that a student fanatically and irrationally dedicated to a school would be more likely to become a citizen fanatically and irrationally dedicated to a nation.
Since then, the purposes of public education have expanded even more - including addressing health problems (e.g. through health classes, P.E., and sexual education) and social problems (e.g. through the D.A.R.E. program, if it worked, and through programs like busing to create interracial schools).
Consider for a moment just how much of what they taught you in high school was "basic knowledge you need in the modern society." By seventh grade, most of us could do arithmetic and basic algebra, read directions and the daily news, and write well enough to express basic ideas. We were fully qualified for the majority of agricultural and industrial jobs, and plenty of service jobs, too.
So we went into high school with the basic knowledge we need in modern society. That's not what we were there for.
All films, music etc derive 99% of their income from sales to individuals
Films, music, etc., have no income. They are pieces of information.
It may be true that 99% of the income involved in the creation, manufacture, distribution, marketing, promotion, etc. of such information is derived from sales to individuals. I don't know.
But I do know this: with respect specifically to the creators of artistic works - especially music - far more money is generated by the "performance royalty" (a royalty paid when the work is used in another profit-generating enterprise, from a commercial to a concert to an open mic) than by the "mechanical royalty" (the royalty paid when the work is sold in a store, which overwhelmingly just covers the cost of promoting the work, sticking it on a truck, and letting it sit in the physical real estate until someone buys it).
[i]Actually, if they just made the image a question that you'd have to answer (an easy one), I think that would go a long way to make it harder for bots to get it right.[/i]
Now that is [i]interesting[/i].
But consider that there's big money at stake here. If a company like Yahoo complied ten thousand images with simple questions on them ("What animal says 'quack'?"), I can pretty much guarantee that spam companies would simply respond by hiring ten teenagers to catalog a thousand questions each over the course of a week and recreate Yahoo's database.
I'm not sure how one would get around this problem. And, of course, there's a language-barrier problem, too: a Japanese person might have good enough English to want to use the website for a legitimate purpose, but might not know that we think ducks say 'quack' (because, let's face it, they don't).
Of course, as far as I know, traditional media ads don't affect me either, but I understand research shows that they "work".
You know, I wouldn't say I respond directly to commercials; that is to say, I don't see an ad for Pizza Hut and reach for the phone.
But I will say this: if I'm on vacation, and I see a Pizza Hut sitting next to something called Big Antonio's Pizza... I'll probably pick door #1.
And that's probably the advertising at work.
I wonder why this is so but, oh well, Google is all-wise!
It appears that Google is only reporting movies that are currently playing in theaters.
If you're really that set on making sure they're giving proper respect to Natalie Portman, you might want to try this link.