It's NOT in our best interest for "Mr. Bandwidth Hog" to pay the same amount as "Grandma Smith" who only checks her email once a day.
Actually, it is.
You see, when "Grandma Smith" realizes that AOL is a crappy service, she will call her nephew, a.k.a. "Mr. Bandwidth Hog", and ask him who the best ISP to use is. He will reccomend the ISP which treats him best, and she will pass that reccomendation on to her entire bridge club.
A mom & pop that loses the geek mindshare goes out of business in under a year. Every time.
I would define "success" minimally as "being able to make enough money to support yourself".
I, however, would define "success" minimally as "making music that would be worth listening to." But for those who's asperations revolves around quitting their day jobs, allow me to present the only formula that has ever been found to work consistently, no matter how the business is being run...
I think the slashcode should allow a filter that allows you to not display any reponse to a post which was moderated up as "Funny", because 90% of replies are either:
1. People trying to riff on the joke for a funny mod of their own, usually by making a less-funny comment, such as a similar pop-culture reference with a loose tie to what was said.
2. People who completely missed the joke and replied as if the post was serious, like you just did.
The "precious bodily fluids" comment should have been a dead give-away. Even if you never saw "Dr. Strangelove" and therefore missed it... if somebody says something you don't understand, they are probably telling a joke you don't get, and you probably should not bother to reply.
Moving back onto the topic: The US is a nation of almost 300 Million people, and voting is constitutionally handled by 50 different states according to their own policies. It's a much bigger bureaucratic problem to cope with than Canada, England, or any other small third-world country.
(See? There was another joke there. If you missed it, don't bother with a response.)
Artists, for the most part, see very little of the $18.99 you pay for a CD. The money they make comes from touring, and merchandise sales on tour. That's why Dave Matthews Band plays 200 shows a year - it is a cash cow for them.
Without the backing of a major label pimping them on the radio and elsewhere, they would not fill big halls for 200 shows a year. They would be just another jam band, playing songs people have not heard on the radio in small bars and working day jobs to support themselves. Thanks to the eeeevil record label, they can play in sold-out hockey arenas where a whole crowd of people sings along with "So Much To Say" and then buys a t-shirt on their way out.
Whether the success of Dave Matthews Band is a Good Thing is something I leave up to the reader, but there's no question that their record deal got them where they are.
Speaking as an American, I think the Tragically Hip are a pretty darn good band. I like cranking "Blow At High Dough" in the car, even though I have no clue WTF it's supposed to be about.
I've always found the Canadian Content laws kind of puzzling. By mandating that a certain percentage of broadcast time be Canadian, you are basically acknowledging that most Canadians would not consume that much Canadian content, were they given the choice... but if the Canadian people don't want it, what's the point?
While Canada is not really that different, culturally, from my home state of Minnesota, the government up there seems to make some downright goofy choices about what they ought to regulate, especially in regard to restrictions of economic freedom. For a nation that prints everything a second time in French, it sure doesn't seem like many of your leaders have read enough Voltaire or Toqueville.
Way off-topic here, but the point of crucifiction is to kill them by exposure, or the simple exhaustion of holding their weight up on their legs.
It was considered an act of mercy to break the legs of the deceased in order to speed up the process (once you lose the support of your legs, you get the strain on your chest which your post was talking about, and the victim suffocates.)
In the case of Christ, he already "gave up his spirit" (direct quote), meaning he relaxed his legs and let himself die, so the when the Romans came aroudn to break legs, they saw that he was already dead, and stabbed him in the torso with a spear just to make sure.
Subscription models have a bigger problem than that.
An "all you can eat buffet" works as a business concept, because everybody eats dinner once per evening, and they almost everybody eats 1 - 3 plate loads of food.
Most music consumers are broken into two groups: Those who only buy about one album a month or less, for whom the subscription model is not worth the money, and those who would be downloading music several hours each week, off whom you would not be making a profit.
So, the customers who you do get, you get at a loss, and nobody else will sign up for your service. Not really a situation that lends itself to profit, is it?
The word "assumptions" assumes that I've made no observations. I'm not making assumptions; I've meet many people who fit into the category I'm talking about. They are starting to buy computers and they don't give a shit about games, at least not yet. They want a device which lets them do certain communication-based tasks. Give them such a device, with a minimum of learning curve and expense, and they will be happy.
The iPod is an example of a $300 hand-held computer which only does 1 task well: it plays music. It has a half-implemented date & address book (you can't write directly to it) and a Solitaire game that's a pain in the ass to controll, but that's about it. You will never be able to run Unreal Tournament or a geneaolgy progrma on them, yet Apple is selling them by the millions! People who have been strongly exposed to the concept that the computer is a device which should be cable of doing anything have it in their mind that a computer which only does a few things will not sell... but the rest of humanity is used to devices that are not multi-fuctional. They don't expect to use their car to cook dinner or their washing machine to entertain them. To them, an Internet Appliance is all they are really shopping for. The "string of failed ventures" you speak of contains far more multi-functional computers than WebTV-like systems. For example, addint general-purpose computing functions to set-top game machines has failed every time it has been tried. People want a game console that plays games, and maybe plays DVD's, but do not appear interested in using their Nintendo to do their taxes. The cheaper hardware gets, the more attractive specific-purpose hardware becomes to the end users.
We are no longer paying thousands of dollars for machines that need to do everything in order to justify their expense. A $200 gadget that lets you use the Internet is not really such a bad idea to some people, even if they could have a formidable gaming PC which also does the same tasks for $300 more.
1-5: So, you are saying their local communications might be strong enough that we could be evesdrop on them from tens of thousands of light-years away and distiguish it from noise? Well, I suppose it's possible, but that would seem like overkill to me. Could you even tune in an epidose of Friends from Proxima (a mere 4 light-years away?) I would venture a guess that you would be hard-pressed to even prove from there that the signal even exists. Yet we are somehow going to detect the Airport card in Grxthnor's iBook on a planet much farther away than that!?
6. No one here "just sit listening." It takes a lot of work and deep knowledge of radio astronomy. And how did you make the shift from transmitting to "just sit listening?" Why is that a necessary condition?
I think you misunderstood what I said. I'll try to elucidate: My point is that we are carefully monitoring for their signal, but not going out of our way to send one to them. Isn't it plausible that they are (were) doing the same? If everybody is listening and nobody is speaking, there's nothing to hear.
Hey, I was just trying to post a witty comment to be a smart-ass. Is it my fault somebody medded me as "Informative" for it?
It is possible to have a completely service-based economy?
Yes, but not for the United States. Even if that was our goal, our massive export of food alone would prevent such an experiment from ever taking place. However, Hong Kong started out as an economy based on sweatshop manufacturing, but became Filthy Stinking Rich (by Asian standards, anyway) by converting to a mostly service-based economy.
People always make the dire warnings about the US "moving to a service-based economy" as if it's a bad thing. All that really means is that fewer of us are working in factories and more of us are working in offices. That's only bad news if you are a union boss, because the labor pool (and therefore your power base) is shrinking relative to the rest of the economy. Most people are happier in an office than in a factory.
Consider this, someday we might automate all manufacturing to the point that the world is a "completely service-based economy," so you might as well get used to the idea.
If, as it is reported, the Sun Desktop is just the latest & prettiest version of Gnome with a JVM thrown in, the peripheral issue is not that bad, and if this PC sells, it will drive the peripheral market to offer Linux drivers a little more often.
As for the game issue, you are still thinking in terms of the typical 1990s computer buyer, which is an already-saturated market. The "25-year old waitress who didn't go to college" type that I'm talking about, if she plays computer games at all, plays the puzzle games on PopCap, not a $60 release of "Unreal Tournament IV." She doesn't even know about the games that Windows supports, let alone care about them.
Everybody seems to be in a big rush to step over the corpses of BeOS and OS/2 Warp to declare that nobody can every possibly challenge Microsoft in the x86 commodity PC market... But I'm not so sure.
Unlike the 90s, when most computer users were white-collar workers who wanted to use "the same software" when they got home from work, the home market now includes waitresses, construction workers, tow truck drivers, and a wide array of people who didn't even pay much attention to computers in High School, let alone attend college. These people want to shop on Amazon & eBay, exchange e-mail, take digital pictures, and IM with their friends, yet feel no compusion to ensure that their computer is "IBM compatable" (as we used to say back in the day). They have no work PC to exchange proprietary MS-Word documents with, so they can get by with just about anything that supports the apps they want.
Linux never really caught on with this market because it's thought of as a "geek" operating system, and frankly, it was hyped long before it was ready to be used by Joe Sixpack the Wal-Mart shopper. Put together a cheap box that allows a novice to figure out how to chat and shop online, and you've got a product you can sell.
otherwise the "winner" in the global economy is the country most willing to exploit its citizens, fuck its environment and provide substandard or unsafre products.
No, that would be the loser, because they would end up with angry citizens, poisoned resources, and a reputation for producing shoddy goods.
The winner would be the country with well-off people who saved a few bucks on each pair of jeans.
Except that if their development followed pretty much the same timeline as ours, it will be a few million years before we hear from them.
What we need to have happened, in order for SETI to not be a collosal waste of time and resources is:
1. There were beings out there capable of sending a signal. 2. They decided to send a strong enough signal out into space, on the off chance that we would come along someday to listen, even though they would be long dead before we gave them any feedback. 3. They also concluded that high frequency radio was the best way to send a broadcast out. 4. This all happened long enough ago that the signal would just now be reaching us, but not so long ago that the broadcast ended before we started listning. 5. They think enough like us that they also want their presense known to "whoever may be out there." 6. They are not so much like us that they decided a better idea would be to set up a network of radio telescopes, and just sit listening in case somebody else out there is doing all the work of sending a signal.
Re:Eerily reminiscent of my Windows days...
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Refreshing to see somebody admit when they were incorrect once in a while.
By the way, even if the Genie effect doesn't hog CPU cycles, if you find to "too girly" or whatever, you can get rid of it via the Preferences.
My point isn't that there's anything wrong with reading (or computing hobbies, or TV, or whatever). My point is that life is far to short to sit around reading a book you hate in a place where there are no options that are any better.
When I go to a movie and it turns out to be lousy, I leave. When a TV show isn't any good, I either change the channel, pop in a DVD of something I like, fire up the game console, or find another way to relax.
It's not at all rational to do something you don't enjoy unless you are being rewarded in some other way for it (i.e., getting paid.)
You know, if I'm on vacation with nothing to read but lousy novels, I stop reading and go outside.
If being outside is not more interesting than crappy novels, you not only bought the wrong book series, you chose the wrong vacation spot.
Re:Online mentions in IBM filing
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IF SCO code is inside of Linux, it is NOT LEGAL for ANYONE to distribute Linux until the SCO code is removed.
As I understand it (IANALE) That is only true if it is SCO code which was not authorized to be used in Linux. If it can be shown that they gave up copyright control of said code (and it appears that IBM believes it can, since they hold a perpetual license of the SCO technology they used, plus the fact that SCO may put some code into Linux themselves during their Caldera phase), then SCO would be out of luck even if their code was there... which they have not yet established in spite of the entire Linux OS being publicly available as plain text source code.
The burden is entirely on SCO to show: 1. That code they own has been copied into Linux. 2. That SCO still holds ownership of the code. 3. That the person or person who added the code was not authorized by SCO to release it.
If SCO's claims had any validity at all, they should already have been able to show that they've completed steps 1 and 2 by now, and they really don't have a case for demanding the audit trails they need for step 3 from other companies until 1 and 2 are done.
Did Al Gore take the initiative IN CONGRESS in creating the internet?
No. The Internet was not created by Congressmen. Did the bills he promoted help? Yes. Was the Internet his initiative? Absolutely not.
So, you can still say that since he didn't explicitly SAY 'in Congress' in response to the question about what he did in congress, he was actually claiming to have invented the entire internet from scratch. But at that point, anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would have to admit that this was a 'lie' that was created entirely by the press and was perpetrated on an American public that is instantly ready to believe anything they hear, as long as it's bad.
With full "intellectual honesty" I can say that his words were carefully chosen to imply that the Whole Damned Internet was his idea and his creation.
It's not a big deal... everybody pads his resume a little, and a presidential campaign is essentially a two-year long job interview, but the actual statement itself was so amazingly asinine that he invited every ounce of criticism he got. Everybody with a clue who watched that debate (myself included) laughed their ass off at what he said. No "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" was required.
My bad, it wasn't "the lead," it was "the initiative." Not that this is much better. Saying that the creation of the Internet was his initiative is still an outright lie.
He didn't say "helped" or "pushed for" or even "advocated"... he said "I took the lead," which is unambiguously claiming that it was his creation, which some people assisted him with.
Next you're going to try to say that Bush "didn't even imply" that Iraq probably had nukes.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is.
You see, when "Grandma Smith" realizes that AOL is a crappy service, she will call her nephew, a.k.a. "Mr. Bandwidth Hog", and ask him who the best ISP to use is. He will reccomend the ISP which treats him best, and she will pass that reccomendation on to her entire bridge club.
A mom & pop that loses the geek mindshare goes out of business in under a year. Every time.
that's like 6 hours a day for 25 days
or about 20.5% of the "unlimited" access you are paying for.
I, however, would define "success" minimally as "making music that would be worth listening to." But for those who's asperations revolves around quitting their day jobs, allow me to present the only formula that has ever been found to work consistently, no matter how the business is being run...
How to make money as a musician:
1. Be pretty.
2. Be capable.
3. Sell out.
Any questions?
1. People trying to riff on the joke for a funny mod of their own, usually by making a less-funny comment, such as a similar pop-culture reference with a loose tie to what was said.
2. People who completely missed the joke and replied as if the post was serious, like you just did.
The "precious bodily fluids" comment should have been a dead give-away. Even if you never saw "Dr. Strangelove" and therefore missed it... if somebody says something you don't understand, they are probably telling a joke you don't get, and you probably should not bother to reply.
Moving back onto the topic: The US is a nation of almost 300 Million people, and voting is constitutionally handled by 50 different states according to their own policies. It's a much bigger bureaucratic problem to cope with than Canada, England, or any other small third-world country.
(See? There was another joke there. If you missed it, don't bother with a response.)
Without the backing of a major label pimping them on the radio and elsewhere, they would not fill big halls for 200 shows a year. They would be just another jam band, playing songs people have not heard on the radio in small bars and working day jobs to support themselves. Thanks to the eeeevil record label, they can play in sold-out hockey arenas where a whole crowd of people sings along with "So Much To Say" and then buys a t-shirt on their way out.
Whether the success of Dave Matthews Band is a Good Thing is something I leave up to the reader, but there's no question that their record deal got them where they are.
I've always found the Canadian Content laws kind of puzzling. By mandating that a certain percentage of broadcast time be Canadian, you are basically acknowledging that most Canadians would not consume that much Canadian content, were they given the choice... but if the Canadian people don't want it, what's the point?
While Canada is not really that different, culturally, from my home state of Minnesota, the government up there seems to make some downright goofy choices about what they ought to regulate, especially in regard to restrictions of economic freedom. For a nation that prints everything a second time in French, it sure doesn't seem like many of your leaders have read enough Voltaire or Toqueville.
It was considered an act of mercy to break the legs of the deceased in order to speed up the process (once you lose the support of your legs, you get the strain on your chest which your post was talking about, and the victim suffocates.)
In the case of Christ, he already "gave up his spirit" (direct quote), meaning he relaxed his legs and let himself die, so the when the Romans came aroudn to break legs, they saw that he was already dead, and stabbed him in the torso with a spear just to make sure.
Licrosoft Windows!
An "all you can eat buffet" works as a business concept, because everybody eats dinner once per evening, and they almost everybody eats 1 - 3 plate loads of food.
Most music consumers are broken into two groups: Those who only buy about one album a month or less, for whom the subscription model is not worth the money, and those who would be downloading music several hours each week, off whom you would not be making a profit.
So, the customers who you do get, you get at a loss, and nobody else will sign up for your service. Not really a situation that lends itself to profit, is it?
The iPod is an example of a $300 hand-held computer which only does 1 task well: it plays music. It has a half-implemented date & address book (you can't write directly to it) and a Solitaire game that's a pain in the ass to controll, but that's about it. You will never be able to run Unreal Tournament or a geneaolgy progrma on them, yet Apple is selling them by the millions! People who have been strongly exposed to the concept that the computer is a device which should be cable of doing anything have it in their mind that a computer which only does a few things will not sell... but the rest of humanity is used to devices that are not multi-fuctional. They don't expect to use their car to cook dinner or their washing machine to entertain them. To them, an Internet Appliance is all they are really shopping for. The "string of failed ventures" you speak of contains far more multi-functional computers than WebTV-like systems. For example, addint general-purpose computing functions to set-top game machines has failed every time it has been tried. People want a game console that plays games, and maybe plays DVD's, but do not appear interested in using their Nintendo to do their taxes. The cheaper hardware gets, the more attractive specific-purpose hardware becomes to the end users.
We are no longer paying thousands of dollars for machines that need to do everything in order to justify their expense. A $200 gadget that lets you use the Internet is not really such a bad idea to some people, even if they could have a formidable gaming PC which also does the same tasks for $300 more.
6. No one here "just sit listening." It takes a lot of work and deep knowledge of radio astronomy. And how did you make the shift from transmitting to "just sit listening?" Why is that a necessary condition?
I think you misunderstood what I said. I'll try to elucidate: My point is that we are carefully monitoring for their signal, but not going out of our way to send one to them. Isn't it plausible that they are (were) doing the same? If everybody is listening and nobody is speaking, there's nothing to hear.
It is possible to have a completely service-based economy?
Yes, but not for the United States. Even if that was our goal, our massive export of food alone would prevent such an experiment from ever taking place. However, Hong Kong started out as an economy based on sweatshop manufacturing, but became Filthy Stinking Rich (by Asian standards, anyway) by converting to a mostly service-based economy.
People always make the dire warnings about the US "moving to a service-based economy" as if it's a bad thing. All that really means is that fewer of us are working in factories and more of us are working in offices. That's only bad news if you are a union boss, because the labor pool (and therefore your power base) is shrinking relative to the rest of the economy. Most people are happier in an office than in a factory.
Consider this, someday we might automate all manufacturing to the point that the world is a "completely service-based economy," so you might as well get used to the idea.
As for the game issue, you are still thinking in terms of the typical 1990s computer buyer, which is an already-saturated market. The "25-year old waitress who didn't go to college" type that I'm talking about, if she plays computer games at all, plays the puzzle games on PopCap, not a $60 release of "Unreal Tournament IV." She doesn't even know about the games that Windows supports, let alone care about them.
Unlike the 90s, when most computer users were white-collar workers who wanted to use "the same software" when they got home from work, the home market now includes waitresses, construction workers, tow truck drivers, and a wide array of people who didn't even pay much attention to computers in High School, let alone attend college. These people want to shop on Amazon & eBay, exchange e-mail, take digital pictures, and IM with their friends, yet feel no compusion to ensure that their computer is "IBM compatable" (as we used to say back in the day). They have no work PC to exchange proprietary MS-Word documents with, so they can get by with just about anything that supports the apps they want.
Linux never really caught on with this market because it's thought of as a "geek" operating system, and frankly, it was hyped long before it was ready to be used by Joe Sixpack the Wal-Mart shopper. Put together a cheap box that allows a novice to figure out how to chat and shop online, and you've got a product you can sell.
No, that would be the loser, because they would end up with angry citizens, poisoned resources, and a reputation for producing shoddy goods.
The winner would be the country with well-off people who saved a few bucks on each pair of jeans.
What we need to have happened, in order for SETI to not be a collosal waste of time and resources is:
1. There were beings out there capable of sending a signal.
2. They decided to send a strong enough signal out into space, on the off chance that we would come along someday to listen, even though they would be long dead before we gave them any feedback.
3. They also concluded that high frequency radio was the best way to send a broadcast out.
4. This all happened long enough ago that the signal would just now be reaching us, but not so long ago that the broadcast ended before we started listning.
5. They think enough like us that they also want their presense known to "whoever may be out there."
6. They are not so much like us that they decided a better idea would be to set up a network of radio telescopes, and just sit listening in case somebody else out there is doing all the work of sending a signal.
By the way, even if the Genie effect doesn't hog CPU cycles, if you find to "too girly" or whatever, you can get rid of it via the Preferences.
When I go to a movie and it turns out to be lousy, I leave. When a TV show isn't any good, I either change the channel, pop in a DVD of something I like, fire up the game console, or find another way to relax.
It's not at all rational to do something you don't enjoy unless you are being rewarded in some other way for it (i.e., getting paid.)
1. Enter building
2. Go downstairs to boiler room
3. Find custodian
4. Tell him, "I will give you this fine pen if you tell me how tall the building is."
If being outside is not more interesting than crappy novels, you not only bought the wrong book series, you chose the wrong vacation spot.
As I understand it (IANALE) That is only true if it is SCO code which was not authorized to be used in Linux. If it can be shown that they gave up copyright control of said code (and it appears that IBM believes it can, since they hold a perpetual license of the SCO technology they used, plus the fact that SCO may put some code into Linux themselves during their Caldera phase), then SCO would be out of luck even if their code was there... which they have not yet established in spite of the entire Linux OS being publicly available as plain text source code.
The burden is entirely on SCO to show: 1. That code they own has been copied into Linux. 2. That SCO still holds ownership of the code. 3. That the person or person who added the code was not authorized by SCO to release it.
If SCO's claims had any validity at all, they should already have been able to show that they've completed steps 1 and 2 by now, and they really don't have a case for demanding the audit trails they need for step 3 from other companies until 1 and 2 are done.
No. The Internet was not created by Congressmen. Did the bills he promoted help? Yes. Was the Internet his initiative? Absolutely not.
So, you can still say that since he didn't explicitly SAY 'in Congress' in response to the question about what he did in congress, he was actually claiming to have invented the entire internet from scratch. But at that point, anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would have to admit that this was a 'lie' that was created entirely by the press and was perpetrated on an American public that is instantly ready to believe anything they hear, as long as it's bad.
With full "intellectual honesty" I can say that his words were carefully chosen to imply that the Whole Damned Internet was his idea and his creation.
It's not a big deal... everybody pads his resume a little, and a presidential campaign is essentially a two-year long job interview, but the actual statement itself was so amazingly asinine that he invited every ounce of criticism he got. Everybody with a clue who watched that debate (myself included) laughed their ass off at what he said. No "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" was required.
My bad, it wasn't "the lead," it was "the initiative." Not that this is much better. Saying that the creation of the Internet was his initiative is still an outright lie.
Next you're going to try to say that Bush "didn't even imply" that Iraq probably had nukes.
Battlestar, not BattleStar. The show pre-dates the stupid 90s trend of capatalizing conjoined words.