I often ponder on the "ignorance is not a defence" topic. Do you think at some point we could fight back with a class action lawsuit claiming that there is no way for a typical human to be sure that s/he is in compliance with all the local laws? If someone actually tried to memorize every law that applied to them it would be quite a task. And, of course, some of them change when you go to work in a different city/county/state.
As asb alluded to, there is no link between access to clean needles and increased drug use. Most of the drugs that are injected with needles are so powerful that addicts will shoot up when they "need" to shoot up, regardless of whether they have a clean needle or a dirty needle. Giving out clean needles does not increase drug use, but it does reduce disease transmission.
You neglect the problem of people who are capable of passing a rigorous driving test, and people who are always using those skills on the road.
I'm guessing that some people who can pass a rigorous driving exam will still want to sing alond to the radio and talk on the phone and generally do things behind the wheel that take away from their driving concentration.
And incidentally I hate smokers. I hate them SOOO much, with their free extra breaktimes. --- Do you also hate non-smokers who take 10min walks periodically throughout the day to clear their head/get away from a problem?
That's pretty much how I use my smoke breaks. And since my boss and closest co-worker smoke, sometimes we'll take a smoke break but continue to talk through whatever it is we've been working on. Unfortunately, as a nicotiene addict, it is hard for me to know if my concentration is waning from some "natural" force or because my brain is craving it's drug and focusing more attention on it. I do know that a nicotiene fix for a nicotiene addict helps restore concentration (not to mention reduce crabbiness), so it's actually a productivity booster.
...So your accounting user may be a "tech moron," but that's ok, because their job is not technology, but accounting. By most accountant standards, *I* am a "financials moron," but they don't hold it against me... --- There's a big difference in the two: You don't need financials to do your tech job, but they need (presumably) tech to do financials. Imagine if you needed to understand some "simple financials" to get your job done? You don't think the accountants would eventually loathe constantly (re-)explaining "simple" concepts to the "financials morons"?
Maybe it is time for the users to rise up against constant upgrades. Argue to their bosses that the human mind can only hold so much information and all this tech training is either forcing useful job-related information out the back door or else the tech information isn't getting in and productivity will go down. Instead of taking time and money from non-tech workers for training and lost productivity, we should put that time and money into the IT staff, as in, "The new system will be interoperable with the old system and will be used optionally. The old system will be maintained also (there's the extra time and money) and any changes "under the hood" will not affect the old system's functionality (except maybe depricating things that aren't needed)." I believe that some users will prefer the old system and some users will try out the new system. If it really has some new features that help them get their work done, certain people will learn it for that. Some people are more open to change than others. Anyway, with this system, the techies get to focus more on what their trained for and less on dealing with users. Not totally, but they'll only have to do design and training with the users who are self-selected to be open to the new system. By supporting the old system, the most users that are most resistant to change, and therefore most difficult to deal with will be placated with their old way of doing things. This can even work through hardware upgrades...essentially porting the old system to the new hardware.
I know there's lots of holes in the above, I'm thinking of a shared terminal...but you could just add one thing to the first "screen": Would you like to use the "Old System" or the "New System". Pick one and then you're off and running. A little social engineering might suggest the choices be "Old, Stodgy, and Reticent to Change System" or "New System that is the Wave of the Future", but I was really not trying to bash users in this post.
This really is a heady time. When new technology took 100 years to take hold, it was possible to let the "old guard" use their old methods until they died. The kids entering the workforce could learn the new tech; REALLY learn it by growing up with it around them. Now tech is being introduced at a much faster rate than the "changing of the guard". It seems to me that this era begs a solution to a more general problem than "make techies understand users" and "make users understand tech(ies)".
Things might already be moving too fast to make the "maintain the old system for the 'slow changers'". If that's the case, toss out the above and repeat after me: Sink or Swim! and quit giving the "sinkers" bitch-space in the WashPost!
To add to the pricing meme...
I don't really think I mind a new release being $18. What burns me is seeing older, not-very-popular music sitting there for $16. Give us a better trade-off...instead of the store being filled with $16 cds and a small little bargain bin of true crap (usually) being $10, why not the whole store at less than $10 and a small "promotion" bin at the front with the latest and greatest at a premium price?
That should satisfy the "stupid teenage girls with large parental pocketbooks" who want to feel like they belong, as well as those of us with patience...or just a different agenda...personally, I like to own cds and would love to play "catch up" in the jazz world, but it isn't economically feasible for me, or for the stores to shelve every single record ever produced.
Enter the internet distribution model. But, come on, there are people out there (me!) who don't "do" mp3! Gimmie my FLAC or SHN and I'll even pay a little more. Like this! Add a couple bucks for cds, case(s), paper and ink, and it's $18 for 3 discs (each around 70min). I consider that reasonable. I wish they'd taken the next step and released their latest studio album that way!
The! Yahoo! account! must! be! affecting! my! use! of! exclamation! points!!
But realistically, imagine a big-screen TV with a DVD player in Best Buy. Sitting next to it is a big-screen HDTV with a Hi-Definition DVD player playing the same movie. The difference would be obvious and stunning. Plus, the new hi-def players would play legacy DVDs. I think that such a format would be the catalyst for HDTV adoption. It would sell a lot of video projectors as well.
Here's another scenario. Imagine that the movie industry had decided that DVD was "too high" quality to be sold to the general public, and decided instead to sell VCDs. Had they done so, they would be "Napsterized" right now. Instead, VCDs and VCD quality video is a tiny niche. Everyone is used to DVD quality
Ok, I'm with you. I was kind of thinking about an endpoint of the "this one's better" road. But I suppose bigger TVs will keep getting cheaper, and all the other goodies that are expensive now will too. And when TVs and whatnot are not good enough, maybe there's some VR or hologram wizbang thing that will pick up the slack. Then again, bigger/better/more has been making its way into home theaters for a while now and people still go to see movies on "The Big Screen". You get more than just the bitstream at the theater. A large room with 20 or so speakers and a truly gigantic screen is gonna beat out home theater systems for a long, long time, even if the source disc is the same as what the theater uses.
the movie industry must be ready with a new format that makes DVD quality video "second rate", or they'll be steamrollered by the "free alternative" just like the recording industry.
I don't think the recording industry has been steamrollered at all. Sales are still strong (even with some slippage, they're raking it in).
The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.
The only problem with this is that there is a point where the source is "good enough". I think that 80-90% of the public considers VHS good enough when it comes to quality, but having non-linear searching abilities and what-not on DVDs provides enough value add to justify the upgrade.
I don't think most people are going to have the downstream equipment to make a difference between DVD and something better. Not that promotion and hype doesn't go a long way in that arena, but...
The way I look at it is that we may have bad feelings about drug dealers, but we sure do like them drugs.
I have no problem with drug dealers. It's drug regulation that I have a problem with.
The religious concept of, "You are forgiven", is definitely detracting from the morality and ideology in the US. A human forgiving another human is fantastic...but a human forgiving him/herself in advance for EVERYTHING they will ever do wrong (in the name of jesus or some such), is a way of ignoring the consequences for ones actions. Taking responsibility for ones actions seems much more "moral" to me...
Why is it that the religious "leaders" can boast the highest membership percentages ever (in the US) and then they complain about how immoral our country is? Widespread christianity IS part of the problem with our country's morals, IMO...
It is "fast-food" to be sure. Not tipping a wait-person is an important cost saving measure (IMO).
"Pepper's" on Van Buren has cheeburger/fries for $4 and "China Inn" next door has a HUGE carton of fried rice for $3.50.
I buy Dew and pretzels in bulk at the pharmacy down the street once a week.
Once there are McDonalds on every corner, and the whole world shops at The Gap, this place will be so boring it will drive me mad.
Where I work (Chicago, IL) there is a CrapDonalds on every corner, but I do not eat at any of them. Obviously, there are a lot of people who do eat there, and that is their choice. If anyone mentions it, I merely tell them about the restaurant down the street that (IMHO) has tastier food and costs less. They can make their own decision. On the other hand, if you go too far protecting your national identity...
"National Identity" -- who gets to define the "National Identity" of a nation? The minority in power? The majority? Either way, it is likely not to reflect the Actual Identity of more than a few people (if any).
Ever been to an "ethnic" neighborhood? I think that the people living and working in some of the "ethinic" neighborhoods here in Chicago seem to have plenty of Identity and it has nothing to do with the nation they live in, or used to live in, since many of them have been here for generations and possibly have never been back to the "homeland".
The music CD of today is a coporate construct. It is an attempt to create a commodity out of artistic expression
Well, yes and no. If you mean specifically the music CDs that are sold in stores, yes. If you mean the 50 or so music CDs in my collection that are CDRs of live performances of artists that allow recording and free distribution of those performances, then no.
In my perfect world CD's would be available for all live shows, pure, unmastered and most of all truthfull. An oppourtunity to experience a real event.
Are you against the soundboard feed being used for the recording? After all, let's say a guitar player has their rig cranked up at the show and if you were there that guitar might be the loudest thing, but on the board they would have very little of his guitar in the mix because the rig is so loud, so the SBD recording would be pretty inacurate in relating the mix that was heard by the ears. But you can really get some solid bass and remove some of the hiss of crowd noise (not to mention individual voices) if you mix the SBD in with the audience/mic recording. This is mastered, but preferable IMHO...
I think some "studio" albums are very good and there are some cool sounding things you can do in a studio that is hard(er) to do on stage. And I'm sure some artists don't like living on the road, but have lots of musical ideas nonetheless. Fine. They need distribution (I suppose). But as we all know, digital property is not like any other property. My neighbor would suffer if I took their chair, but not if I "took" their music by copying it.
All in all, I think I'm agreeing with you that the live performance is it! Music was around way before we could preserve it for posterity in anything but our memories and the new forms (recordings) are just capitalization on technology. I think it's run its course...
Since the system is run by money, Vote with Dollars!
I don't think we can eliminate every suicidal maniac with a stick of dynamite, but we can destroy the world wide organization. We can eliminate their funds. We can target their leaders.
I'm with you here. We'll never eradicate US haters or other kinds of terrorists completely, but we can make a big dent in their effectiveness/scope.
Without leadership and financing, not to mention without countries that sponsor terrorism, the problem will substantially go away.
Here's where I think you get a little too broad. Defining "a country that sponsors terrorism" is pretty tricky, especially in the middle east. I know very little about their political climate over there, but just the tidbits I hear make me so confused. Ok, so we've got a dictatorship. But the dictator is not in power. There's a "ruling party". Oh, and then there's a couple of militant groups that nobody says "no" to because they are feared (for good reason, probably). If we take out a "country that sponsors terrorism", then we have become terrorists ourselves, by killing inocents who neither support the terrorists or their own government...
Slashdot Mirror
Rickenbacker!!!!!!
I often ponder on the "ignorance is not a defence" topic. Do you think at some point we could fight back with a class action lawsuit claiming that there is no way for a typical human to be sure that s/he is in compliance with all the local laws? If someone actually tried to memorize every law that applied to them it would be quite a task. And, of course, some of them change when you go to work in a different city/county/state.
As asb alluded to, there is no link between access to clean needles and increased drug use. Most of the drugs that are injected with needles are so powerful that addicts will shoot up when they "need" to shoot up, regardless of whether they have a clean needle or a dirty needle. Giving out clean needles does not increase drug use, but it does reduce disease transmission.
You neglect the problem of people who are capable of passing a rigorous driving test, and people who are always using those skills on the road.
I'm guessing that some people who can pass a rigorous driving exam will still want to sing alond to the radio and talk on the phone and generally do things behind the wheel that take away from their driving concentration.
Gotcha. No official policy on breaks where I work, so it's a little more slippery to define the issue...
And incidentally I hate smokers. I hate them SOOO much, with their free extra breaktimes.
---
Do you also hate non-smokers who take 10min walks periodically throughout the day to clear their head/get away from a problem?
That's pretty much how I use my smoke breaks. And since my boss and closest co-worker smoke, sometimes we'll take a smoke break but continue to talk through whatever it is we've been working on. Unfortunately, as a nicotiene addict, it is hard for me to know if my concentration is waning from some "natural" force or because my brain is craving it's drug and focusing more attention on it. I do know that a nicotiene fix for a nicotiene addict helps restore concentration (not to mention reduce crabbiness), so it's actually a productivity booster.
...So your accounting user may be a "tech moron," but that's ok, because their job is not technology, but accounting. By most accountant standards, *I* am a "financials moron," but they don't hold it against me...
---
There's a big difference in the two: You don't need financials to do your tech job, but they need (presumably) tech to do financials. Imagine if you needed to understand some "simple financials" to get your job done? You don't think the accountants would eventually loathe constantly (re-)explaining "simple" concepts to the "financials morons"?
Maybe it is time for the users to rise up against constant upgrades. Argue to their bosses that the human mind can only hold so much information and all this tech training is either forcing useful job-related information out the back door or else the tech information isn't getting in and productivity will go down. Instead of taking time and money from non-tech workers for training and lost productivity, we should put that time and money into the IT staff, as in, "The new system will be interoperable with the old system and will be used optionally. The old system will be maintained also (there's the extra time and money) and any changes "under the hood" will not affect the old system's functionality (except maybe depricating things that aren't needed)." I believe that some users will prefer the old system and some users will try out the new system. If it really has some new features that help them get their work done, certain people will learn it for that. Some people are more open to change than others. Anyway, with this system, the techies get to focus more on what their trained for and less on dealing with users. Not totally, but they'll only have to do design and training with the users who are self-selected to be open to the new system. By supporting the old system, the most users that are most resistant to change, and therefore most difficult to deal with will be placated with their old way of doing things. This can even work through hardware upgrades...essentially porting the old system to the new hardware.
I know there's lots of holes in the above, I'm thinking of a shared terminal...but you could just add one thing to the first "screen": Would you like to use the "Old System" or the "New System". Pick one and then you're off and running. A little social engineering might suggest the choices be "Old, Stodgy, and Reticent to Change System" or "New System that is the Wave of the Future", but I was really not trying to bash users in this post.
This really is a heady time. When new technology took 100 years to take hold, it was possible to let the "old guard" use their old methods until they died. The kids entering the workforce could learn the new tech; REALLY learn it by growing up with it around them. Now tech is being introduced at a much faster rate than the "changing of the guard". It seems to me that this era begs a solution to a more general problem than "make techies understand users" and "make users understand tech(ies)".
Things might already be moving too fast to make the "maintain the old system for the 'slow changers'". If that's the case, toss out the above and repeat after me: Sink or Swim! and quit giving the "sinkers" bitch-space in the WashPost!
To add to the pricing meme...
I don't really think I mind a new release being $18. What burns me is seeing older, not-very-popular music sitting there for $16. Give us a better trade-off...instead of the store being filled with $16 cds and a small little bargain bin of true crap (usually) being $10, why not the whole store at less than $10 and a small "promotion" bin at the front with the latest and greatest at a premium price?
That should satisfy the "stupid teenage girls with large parental pocketbooks" who want to feel like they belong, as well as those of us with patience...or just a different agenda...personally, I like to own cds and would love to play "catch up" in the jazz world, but it isn't economically feasible for me, or for the stores to shelve every single record ever produced.
Enter the internet distribution model. But, come on, there are people out there (me!) who don't "do" mp3! Gimmie my FLAC or SHN and I'll even pay a little more.
Like this! Add a couple bucks for cds, case(s), paper and ink, and it's $18 for 3 discs (each around 70min). I consider that reasonable. I wish they'd taken the next step and released their latest studio album that way!
The! Yahoo! account! must! be! affecting! my! use! of! exclamation! points!!
But realistically, imagine a big-screen TV with a DVD player in Best Buy. Sitting next to it is a big-screen HDTV with a Hi-Definition DVD player playing the same movie. The difference would be obvious and stunning. Plus, the new hi-def players would play legacy DVDs. I think that such a format would be the catalyst for HDTV adoption. It would sell a lot of video projectors as well.
Here's another scenario. Imagine that the movie industry had decided that DVD was "too high" quality to be sold to the general public, and decided instead to sell VCDs. Had they done so, they would be "Napsterized" right now. Instead, VCDs and VCD quality video is a tiny niche. Everyone is used to DVD quality
Ok, I'm with you. I was kind of thinking about an endpoint of the "this one's better" road. But I suppose bigger TVs will keep getting cheaper, and all the other goodies that are expensive now will too. And when TVs and whatnot are not good enough, maybe there's some VR or hologram wizbang thing that will pick up the slack. Then again, bigger/better/more has been making its way into home theaters for a while now and people still go to see movies on "The Big Screen". You get more than just the bitstream at the theater. A large room with 20 or so speakers and a truly gigantic screen is gonna beat out home theater systems for a long, long time, even if the source disc is the same as what the theater uses.
the movie industry must be ready with a new format that makes DVD quality video "second rate", or they'll be steamrollered by the "free alternative" just like the recording industry.
I don't think the recording industry has been steamrollered at all. Sales are still strong (even with some slippage, they're raking it in).
The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.
The only problem with this is that there is a point where the source is "good enough". I think that 80-90% of the public considers VHS good enough when it comes to quality, but having non-linear searching abilities and what-not on DVDs provides enough value add to justify the upgrade. I don't think most people are going to have the downstream equipment to make a difference between DVD and something better. Not that promotion and hype doesn't go a long way in that arena, but...
The way I look at it is that we may have bad feelings about drug dealers, but we sure do like them drugs. I have no problem with drug dealers. It's drug regulation that I have a problem with.
The religious concept of, "You are forgiven", is definitely detracting from the morality and ideology in the US. A human forgiving another human is fantastic...but a human forgiving him/herself in advance for EVERYTHING they will ever do wrong (in the name of jesus or some such), is a way of ignoring the consequences for ones actions. Taking responsibility for ones actions seems much more "moral" to me...
Why is it that the religious "leaders" can boast the highest membership percentages ever (in the US) and then they complain about how immoral our country is? Widespread christianity IS part of the problem with our country's morals, IMO...
It is "fast-food" to be sure. Not tipping a wait-person is an important cost saving measure (IMO). "Pepper's" on Van Buren has cheeburger/fries for $4 and "China Inn" next door has a HUGE carton of fried rice for $3.50. I buy Dew and pretzels in bulk at the pharmacy down the street once a week.
Once there are McDonalds on every corner, and the whole world shops at The Gap, this place will be so boring it will drive me mad.
Where I work (Chicago, IL) there is a CrapDonalds on every corner, but I do not eat at any of them. Obviously, there are a lot of people who do eat there, and that is their choice. If anyone mentions it, I merely tell them about the restaurant down the street that (IMHO) has tastier food and costs less. They can make their own decision.
On the other hand, if you go too far protecting your national identity...
"National Identity" -- who gets to define the "National Identity" of a nation? The minority in power? The majority? Either way, it is likely not to reflect the Actual Identity of more than a few people (if any).
Ever been to an "ethnic" neighborhood? I think that the people living and working in some of the "ethinic" neighborhoods here in Chicago seem to have plenty of Identity and it has nothing to do with the nation they live in, or used to live in, since many of them have been here for generations and possibly have never been back to the "homeland".
REAL ARTISTS HAVE DAY JOBS
...or a rich benefactor...
"So you're an Austrian nobleman / commissioning a Symphony in C" -Cake
The music CD of today is a coporate construct. It is an attempt to create a commodity out of artistic expression
Well, yes and no. If you mean specifically the music CDs that are sold in stores, yes. If you mean the 50 or so music CDs in my collection that are CDRs of live performances of artists that allow recording and free distribution of those performances, then no.
In my perfect world CD's would be available for all live shows, pure, unmastered and most of all truthfull. An oppourtunity to experience a real event.
Are you against the soundboard feed being used for the recording? After all, let's say a guitar player has their rig cranked up at the show and if you were there that guitar might be the loudest thing, but on the board they would have very little of his guitar in the mix because the rig is so loud, so the SBD recording would be pretty inacurate in relating the mix that was heard by the ears. But you can really get some solid bass and remove some of the hiss of crowd noise (not to mention individual voices) if you mix the SBD in with the audience/mic recording. This is mastered, but preferable IMHO...
I think some "studio" albums are very good and there are some cool sounding things you can do in a studio that is hard(er) to do on stage. And I'm sure some artists don't like living on the road, but have lots of musical ideas nonetheless. Fine. They need distribution (I suppose). But as we all know, digital property is not like any other property. My neighbor would suffer if I took their chair, but not if I "took" their music by copying it.
All in all, I think I'm agreeing with you that the live performance is it! Music was around way before we could preserve it for posterity in anything but our memories and the new forms (recordings) are just capitalization on technology. I think it's run its course...
Since the system is run by money, Vote with Dollars!
I don't think we can eliminate every suicidal maniac with a stick of dynamite, but we can destroy the world wide organization. We can eliminate their funds. We can target their leaders.
I'm with you here. We'll never eradicate US haters or other kinds of terrorists completely, but we can make a big dent in their effectiveness/scope.
Without leadership and financing, not to mention without countries that sponsor terrorism, the problem will substantially go away.
Here's where I think you get a little too broad. Defining "a country that sponsors terrorism" is pretty tricky, especially in the middle east. I know very little about their political climate over there, but just the tidbits I hear make me so confused. Ok, so we've got a dictatorship. But the dictator is not in power. There's a "ruling party". Oh, and then there's a couple of militant groups that nobody says "no" to because they are feared (for good reason, probably). If we take out a "country that sponsors terrorism", then we have become terrorists ourselves, by killing inocents who neither support the terrorists or their own government...