Of course this means that you (and anybody else who is thinking) will join for 1 month, download the whole damned store, and then quit, having "purchased" a library of the entire history of pop music for $50. Sounds like a real winner of a business plan!
Subscription models only work if you are not allowed to own a copy. =
Of course, no model that prohibits you from owning a copy will work either, because most of us don't want to "rent" our music. This is the real reason why subscription-based services are doomed.
Really? Every CD at my local Best Buy in the Twin Cities is $13 - $18, apart from a handful of "bargain" titles. At record stores, it's even worse.
As far as I've seen, CD prices are exactly where they were a year ago, if not slightly higher. Anybody who thought this lawsuit would accomplish anything other than making a few scumwad lawyers rich was a naive fool.
This is why I never participate in class-action lawsuits unless I was actually wronged in some way. Accepting my money for an overpriced item I choose to buy of my own free will is not something I should be able to sue you for.
Context, kid. Context. If you follow the thread, we were clearly discussing alternate-tunings on pianos. The piano as we know it did not really catch on until long after Bach was gone.
If your players were not more confused that you, then something needs to change.
Not that you need to be more clear-headed, just that you should facilitate more confusion among the players.
Back in college, I would prepare notes ahead of time so players could get "secret briefings" from both their Alpha Complex department as well as their secret societies. Nobody could be sure if another player was getting a "top secret" briefing from a superior officer, or plans for treason from a secret society comrade pretending to be a superior officer.
This also ensured that each player would have several different competing motivations, none of which improved their odds of survival, and all of which made their actions very confusing and unpredictable to the other party members.
The only way he can respond to that question and live is to say, "No! I was asking if the computer is still your friend, citizen! You look kind of suspicious to me..."
Within the first 30 minuets 2 players were already down 3 clones apiece, several others had lost a clone, and a major reactor leak killing several thousand citizens resulted from an over entusiastic attempt to retrive a bag of crunchy-time algea chips from a fission powered snack machine.
Sounds about right to me. In a first-time Paranoia party, if they survive all the way to the mission briefing room, you are clearly doing something wrong.:)
Warning: The following text is classified ULRAVIOLET. Do not read if you are not a Game Master. Should you accidentally make out some of the words as you scroll by, terminate yourself immediately. Your clone will be commondated for your loyalty.
One campaign which I designed that I never get tired of running with new groups of players is a scenario where key high-level people in Alpha Complex who were members of the "trekkie" secret society conspired to have a fully-functional "Enterprise" built. The party is sent up to command the bridge. Lots of great conflicting interests from secret societies (The "Whovians" consider it blasphemous and want it destroyed, for example), lots of tech that can go wrong: There are the insanely dangerous transporters. All five clones are stored in stasis on board for faster activation from the captain's chair (now you know what all those buttons are for!) An android First Officer who suffers from MPD (fans of different eras of Star Trek wanted him to be like different "logical" characters from the series, so one moment he talks and acts like Spock, the next like Data.) Lasers are replaced with "Phasers," which penetrate reflective armor, but are prone to "overload" and violently explode.
I even wrote an element of the campaign where they actually encounter a "Klingon" opponent, but the one party that lived long enough to encounter them never even turned on the view screen. When they were detected by the ship's sensors, the conversation between me and the guy playing the Communication Officer went sort of like this:
"A red light starts blinking on your console." "Does anybody else seem to have noticed." "No, everybody else is too preoccupied" "I ignore it then." A few minutes later... "The light has begun blinking again, faster this time." "I unscrew it and pretend nothing is wrong." (Note: clearly an experienced Paranoia player, that one!)
We are talking about pianos here. Pianos. Not harpsichords, organs, or other period instruments. You are incorrect to assume that I have not "tried" listening to Scarlatti or other music which is intended to be performed with a different tuning. If you read my post again (Holy crap, there's a lot of people reading things into it that I didn't say), you will see that I'm saying that tuning a piano to a historical temperament for the performance of one piece is a pointless exercise. If you are going to go to all that trouble, you might as well play it on the correct instrument. Bach never wrote anything for the piano, as it had not even been invented at the time.
Oh my Gawd... You keep a copy of Grout handy!? While being an authoritative source, that book is probably the most dry and boring text ever written on the subject of music history. Hats off you you, cybin... You are clearly an information junkie!
(That, or you received a music degree recently enough that the book has not had time to be burried behind a box of old shoes in your storage closet.)
Umm... I think if you will re-read my post a little more carefully, you will find that we agree on almost every point. In your rush to be defensive, you failed to stop and observe that you were not under attack to begin with.
I sometimes use the same cheat on the rare occation that I'm playing by big classical guitar.
If you have to use it all the time on regular guitars, I would not want to call attention to it though. You know what the ladies say about men with small hands... ("They wear small gloves!")
Not quite true. Other temperaments were very common before the 19th century.
Exactly... and in what Century did the "pianoforte" become a popular instrument, ubiquidous in homes that could afford them and used by families making their own music all over Western civilization? That's right, the 19th.
For almost anything baroque or later, you want to use a tempered scale, so 99.99999% of the pianos out there are tuned to a tempered scale and left there.
Some modern works might call for alternate tuning, I'll leave it to music critics to argue over whether that's being done as a cheap gimmick or not, but otherwise just about all non-tempered keyboard music comes from an era before pianos. If you are enough of a purist to play a re-tuned piano when playing a pre-Bach work, you are probably enough of a purist to play it on a period instrument.
Besides, modern listeners have grown acustomed to the tempered scale. Playing in a "pure" tuning will only impress a handful of snobs.
That guy on the "learn great guitar" infomercials will tell you to use 13xxxx.
Play along with your favorite songs on the radio right away! Then realize that you would actually need to practice to get any farther, stow your brand-new Gibson away in the back of a closet after two days, and forget you even own it until the next time you move... at which time you could just eBay it, but that would mean giving up and admitting to your wife that buying it was a waste of money in the first place, which means you will not be allowed to complain when she makes her next $30,000 car purchase based on which one has more cup holders.
If you are a lesbian folk singer, there's no need to be a technical master of the guitar.
Thirtysomething male computer programmers, on the other hand, will impress nobody by singing "Blood and Fire" while openly weeping. Unless you are willing to dress up in flanel to pass yourself off as a very ugly butch lesbian and go on the Lilith Fair circuit, you need to learn how to play the whole guitar neck.:)
If you are having trouble buying bass strings, follow Paul McCartney's lead. In the early days of the Beatles he would string his bass with piano strings. This is a very cheap solution if you know a piano player who you don't like very much. It will probably wreck your fret-board, but rock and roll is supposed to be destructive, right?
Alternate tunings is exactly why this is huge for guitarists.
I would never put a device like this on my piano, because manual tuning only needs to be done twice a year, and any professioinal piano tuner worth his wage is also going to check all the pads and maintain the action of the keys for me.
But when I play guitar with my garage band, I mostly play in standard tuning, but switch to open-G for a lot of slide-blues songs. Currently, I do this by having two guitars, so an autotuner that can quickly switch like this is easilly worth the price of a second guitar to somebody like me.
Then there's the fact that I don't really like Pepsi to begin with. When somebody offers me a Pepsi, I tend to decline in favor of tap water. Therefore the value of 20 oz. of Pepsi to me is $0.00.
A bottle usually costs between $0.99 and $1.49, depending on where you buy it, so even if I'm a "winner" every time, I'm pretty much breaking even compared to just giving iTMS my credit card number and downloading whatever I like.
Hey, Steve... Is this what it has come to? You sell sugar water to children for a living now?
He was never the frontrunner is what happened. His poll numbers were inflated by people who liked Dean, but didn't show up for the primary elections.
Kerry had less money and less populist support, but a better traditional organization. Dean's impressive on-line donor list did not translate into active party members who took the time to assemble big groups of supporters on the voting days of the various states.
I'm not a Kerry supporter, but I would not call him a non-entity. He's an experienced senator who was on Gore's "short list" of possible VP running-mates four years ago. I suspect he will put together a pretty good coalition of both the moderate and far left wings of the party, and give Bush a pretty good run. People who think he has no chance are forgetting that nobody thought much of Bill Clinton (a small-state governor who spoke too long at the 1988 convention) in early 1992.
BTW, India is probably the only place in the world where there is a democratically elected communist state govt.
This is incorrect. Canada and Sweden both also have democratic elections, and are redder than Paris Hilton's eyes the morning after a three-day bender.
In the States maybe, we have 1 dollar (loonie) and 2 dollar (twoonie) coins in Canada....
As an American, I gotta say that I love the twoonie.
When I was in a cafe in Red Lake, Ont. I had a $5 breakfast and then could pretend to be a cheap bastard by leaving one coin for the tip. I wish we had two-dollar coins, too. They're fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have an objective study to back that claim up?
Women's concentration and teamwork are a little better than men's
Or that? Frankly, both comments sound to me like broad generalizations (or perhaps you could say, "generalizations about broads.")
For a moment there, I thought you (for one) were going to welcome our new female gamer overlords. :)
Subscription models only work if you are not allowed to own a copy. =
Of course, no model that prohibits you from owning a copy will work either, because most of us don't want to "rent" our music. This is the real reason why subscription-based services are doomed.
As far as I've seen, CD prices are exactly where they were a year ago, if not slightly higher. Anybody who thought this lawsuit would accomplish anything other than making a few scumwad lawyers rich was a naive fool.
This is why I never participate in class-action lawsuits unless I was actually wronged in some way. Accepting my money for an overpriced item I choose to buy of my own free will is not something I should be able to sue you for.
Context, kid. Context. If you follow the thread, we were clearly discussing alternate-tunings on pianos. The piano as we know it did not really catch on until long after Bach was gone.
Not that you need to be more clear-headed, just that you should facilitate more confusion among the players.
Back in college, I would prepare notes ahead of time so players could get "secret briefings" from both their Alpha Complex department as well as their secret societies. Nobody could be sure if another player was getting a "top secret" briefing from a superior officer, or plans for treason from a secret society comrade pretending to be a superior officer.
This also ensured that each player would have several different competing motivations, none of which improved their odds of survival, and all of which made their actions very confusing and unpredictable to the other party members.
If you want a game to just read rather than play, the highest honors go to Macho Women With Guns.
The only way he can respond to that question and live is to say, "No! I was asking if the computer is still your friend, citizen! You look kind of suspicious to me..."
Sounds about right to me. In a first-time Paranoia party, if they survive all the way to the mission briefing room, you are clearly doing something wrong. :)
Warning: The following text is classified ULRAVIOLET. Do not read if you are not a Game Master. Should you accidentally make out some of the words as you scroll by, terminate yourself immediately. Your clone will be commondated for your loyalty.
One campaign which I designed that I never get tired of running with new groups of players is a scenario where key high-level people in Alpha Complex who were members of the "trekkie" secret society conspired to have a fully-functional "Enterprise" built. The party is sent up to command the bridge. Lots of great conflicting interests from secret societies (The "Whovians" consider it blasphemous and want it destroyed, for example), lots of tech that can go wrong: There are the insanely dangerous transporters. All five clones are stored in stasis on board for faster activation from the captain's chair (now you know what all those buttons are for!) An android First Officer who suffers from MPD (fans of different eras of Star Trek wanted him to be like different "logical" characters from the series, so one moment he talks and acts like Spock, the next like Data.) Lasers are replaced with "Phasers," which penetrate reflective armor, but are prone to "overload" and violently explode.
I even wrote an element of the campaign where they actually encounter a "Klingon" opponent, but the one party that lived long enough to encounter them never even turned on the view screen. When they were detected by the ship's sensors, the conversation between me and the guy playing the Communication Officer went sort of like this:
"A red light starts blinking on your console."
"Does anybody else seem to have noticed."
"No, everybody else is too preoccupied"
"I ignore it then."
A few minutes later...
"The light has begun blinking again, faster this time."
"I unscrew it and pretend nothing is wrong." (Note: clearly an experienced Paranoia player, that one!)
We are talking about pianos here. Pianos. Not harpsichords, organs, or other period instruments. You are incorrect to assume that I have not "tried" listening to Scarlatti or other music which is intended to be performed with a different tuning. If you read my post again (Holy crap, there's a lot of people reading things into it that I didn't say), you will see that I'm saying that tuning a piano to a historical temperament for the performance of one piece is a pointless exercise. If you are going to go to all that trouble, you might as well play it on the correct instrument. Bach never wrote anything for the piano, as it had not even been invented at the time.
(That, or you received a music degree recently enough that the book has not had time to be burried behind a box of old shoes in your storage closet.)
Umm... I think if you will re-read my post a little more carefully, you will find that we agree on almost every point. In your rush to be defensive, you failed to stop and observe that you were not under attack to begin with.
If you have to use it all the time on regular guitars, I would not want to call attention to it though. You know what the ladies say about men with small hands... ("They wear small gloves!")
Exactly... and in what Century did the "pianoforte" become a popular instrument, ubiquidous in homes that could afford them and used by families making their own music all over Western civilization? That's right, the 19th.
Some modern works might call for alternate tuning, I'll leave it to music critics to argue over whether that's being done as a cheap gimmick or not, but otherwise just about all non-tempered keyboard music comes from an era before pianos. If you are enough of a purist to play a re-tuned piano when playing a pre-Bach work, you are probably enough of a purist to play it on a period instrument.
Besides, modern listeners have grown acustomed to the tempered scale. Playing in a "pure" tuning will only impress a handful of snobs.
Play along with your favorite songs on the radio right away! Then realize that you would actually need to practice to get any farther, stow your brand-new Gibson away in the back of a closet after two days, and forget you even own it until the next time you move... at which time you could just eBay it, but that would mean giving up and admitting to your wife that buying it was a waste of money in the first place, which means you will not be allowed to complain when she makes her next $30,000 car purchase based on which one has more cup holders.
Thirtysomething male computer programmers, on the other hand, will impress nobody by singing "Blood and Fire" while openly weeping. Unless you are willing to dress up in flanel to pass yourself off as a very ugly butch lesbian and go on the Lilith Fair circuit, you need to learn how to play the whole guitar neck. :)
If you are having trouble buying bass strings, follow Paul McCartney's lead. In the early days of the Beatles he would string his bass with piano strings. This is a very cheap solution if you know a piano player who you don't like very much. It will probably wreck your fret-board, but rock and roll is supposed to be destructive, right?
Remember kids, there is no money in the first five frets! :)
Alternate tunings is exactly why this is huge for guitarists.
I would never put a device like this on my piano, because manual tuning only needs to be done twice a year, and any professioinal piano tuner worth his wage is also going to check all the pads and maintain the action of the keys for me.
But when I play guitar with my garage band, I mostly play in standard tuning, but switch to open-G for a lot of slide-blues songs. Currently, I do this by having two guitars, so an autotuner that can quickly switch like this is easilly worth the price of a second guitar to somebody like me.
A bottle usually costs between $0.99 and $1.49, depending on where you buy it, so even if I'm a "winner" every time, I'm pretty much breaking even compared to just giving iTMS my credit card number and downloading whatever I like.
Hey, Steve... Is this what it has come to? You sell sugar water to children for a living now?
(I keed, I keed!)
Kerry had less money and less populist support, but a better traditional organization. Dean's impressive on-line donor list did not translate into active party members who took the time to assemble big groups of supporters on the voting days of the various states.
I'm not a Kerry supporter, but I would not call him a non-entity. He's an experienced senator who was on Gore's "short list" of possible VP running-mates four years ago. I suspect he will put together a pretty good coalition of both the moderate and far left wings of the party, and give Bush a pretty good run. People who think he has no chance are forgetting that nobody thought much of Bill Clinton (a small-state governor who spoke too long at the 1988 convention) in early 1992.
MSNBC discusses debris apparently seen by the crew floating away from the International Space Station.
The crew saw debris as they were floating away from the ISS!? It sounds like the more alarming story is the fact that the ISS is losing crewmen! :)
This is incorrect. Canada and Sweden both also have democratic elections, and are redder than Paris Hilton's eyes the morning after a three-day bender.
As an American, I gotta say that I love the twoonie.
When I was in a cafe in Red Lake, Ont. I had a $5 breakfast and then could pretend to be a cheap bastard by leaving one coin for the tip. I wish we had two-dollar coins, too. They're fun.