There are multiple Americas. There share some common needs, and have some common traits, but the East Coast has different needs and wants than the West Coast. Different still are the needs and want of the South, the Southwest, the Industrial/Great Lakes Region, the Northwest, and the Midwest (Grainbelt). Farmers have different needs than auto manufacturers, and insurance companies, and stock brokers, and software houses need.
This is why states rights is such an attractive doctrine. A solution for Kansas, may not work for Alabama, and a solution for New York might make no sense for Nevada.
I think you are missing the point. I never said that the Elite Parasitic Sub-society (EPSS) is inevitable. I said that it is. Full Stop.
But there are also sub-elite parasitic sub-societies, faith-based parasitic sub-societies, scum-of-the-earth parasitic sub-societies, and internet parasitic sub-societies.
Society works this way. Nobody will invite you to join their band if they don't know that you play the bassoon. How will they find out? Either they'll see you playing on a street corner, see your flyer at the record store ("non-elite non-parasitic bassoon player seeks hammered dulcimer and timable players for new-age ska fusion band", or your mom might mention it in passing, to her hairdresser, who's daughter is the top hammered dulimaniac in town, and since your mom is a good tipper, the hairdresser gives your number to her daughter. All of these scenarios involve some person interacting with some other person. Scenario 1 is you interacting directly with somebody else, face-to-face. Scenario 2 is a time shifted version of scenario 1, and scenario three has somebody with whom you've directly interacted, interacting with somebody else, face to-face.
The human interaction is unavoidable (and inevitable) Its how society works, at all levels.
You really do need to come to grips with this, otherwise, you might end up writing a Manifesto about elite parasitic sub-societies. Then it's not a huge leap to membership in The Friends of the Hooded Sweatshirt Society.
Play golf, go bowling, join a church choir, locate a scrapbooking consultant, learn tai chi or kendo.
Your key to getting ahead is gaining the personal trust of people who can help you get ahead when they need the skills you've got. You could meet a girl. her dad might be rich an powerful, and be in need of a son-in-law to take over the firms operations so he and the missus can travel asia like they always wanted to.
Besides, it isn't the elite parasitic sub-socities you need to worry about, its the Elite parasitic sub-societies: The Bavarian Illuminati, the CIA, and Evil Geniuses for a Better fnord Tomorrow.
Furrfu!
That's called networking. "It's who you know" is an axiom at all levels of society.
Get out from in front of your computer and do things with people. One of them may be the key to your future.
Stop whining. Life isn't fair. Buy a helmet and a hanky.
Read "Fire your boss".
If you want something to fall into your lap, your lap has to be where things can fall into it.
And what the hell is confomuity? I like that word. Can I use it too?
Your answer is correct, but I'm afraid your solution is incomplete.
The user directory is only half-the battle.
It eliminates the adminstrative overhead of maintaing indiviual password stores for all of one's applications, but the whole of single-signon, in my experience has been to have the use sign-in once, and never have to authenticate to each indiviual application over the live of the login session.
So once you have your directory, you need to have a mechanism for all you applications to query it, which may not be possible with old off-the-shelf software.
So a breed of software has emerged which acts as a proxy between you and your login dialogs. This software, and I've evaluated one of them in a MS Windows environment, tends to call itself a portal. You typically let it record your clicks and keys as you log into an application, and then is stores that info [hopefully in a secure fashion] and when you run that application again, it runs the login script before handing control to you.
So what can you do on *nix? Well, having not worked on that myself, I'll leave that answer to other responders, some of whom have already suggested a couple of applications to check out.
If you cannot trademark a verb, and you must protect your trademark, then we should change the law to explicitly define the verbing of one's trademark as not being dilution.
The somebody who tells you to "google for it", or even "Google for it" will not be diluting your trademark, but some cretin who says "Google for it on [OTHER SEARCH ENGINE]" should get a nice beat down from the corporate lawyers.
I am quite happy that we (well, actually, France) also have nukes: GWB will not treat us like Iraqis. After all, we are becoming a "rebel market" in Bush' eyes...
If France is such a great market, then give up your farm subsidies.
The EU spends half of its budget on farm subsidies - mostly going to France and Germany.
The only thing scarier than Iraq with nukes (because they'll use them) is France with nukes (because they'll surrender to the first reservist with a sheep dog and a cirbine who crosses the border).
I don't care how much info the grocery store tracks about me. If I save a buck a gallon on milk, amortized across three small children, that's a lot of money.
Now apply that to other groceries.
Sometimes it is a special value like the other night when out for maple syrup and paper napkins, I found milk discounted to 1.28/gal (limit 3). Thats's a 1.21 savings per gal. The $3.63 buys me two venti coffees and S*bucks on my way to work.
Sometimes it is the difference between food being overpriced and reasonable. At that point, I get annoyed at the card system. Chciken, or milk should be affordable to everybody, not just card holders.
So the store knows that I buy lots of milk, and often I buy Juicy-Juice, or Gogurt. Big deal. What does it cost me? Nothing. And I get those useless coupons at checkout-time, trying to entice me to buy Dole brand lettuce in a bag instead of FreshExpress brand lettuce in bag.
Sometimes they even give me coupons for stuff I buy.
What could be worse than being a pet in a nursing home. You're responsible for cheering up a bunch of depressed seniors, and who's there for your needs? Nobody that's who.
I suggest we use the robots to cheer up the pets when they get off duty.
Didn't know there was a tv adaptation of "Next". Do you happen to recall when you saw it & on what channel? I'd like to see it.
I'm going to say that I swaw it a couple of months ago, and it was either on public TV, or on the discovery channel.
I think it more likely that the bands can typically only come up with one or two good songs in the time frame they have to record an album. I'm not a musician though, so the whole creative process there tends to amaze me anyway
That may very well be. But I've heard guys like Dwight Yoakum talking about how his record contract says he can only put 12 songs on a disc, and that he had to pay his record company to put out a 14 song disc. It looks like the record companies are not much into supplying value for the money we spand.
The label's business is selling "units". music on a physical medium. They don't make money unless you buy the media from them, and they aren't smart enough to figure out how to make money using a software licensing model.
They were in a position to be the only ones with enough resources and access to get records made, and they exploited that fact for a long time. They are losing their grip on their market place, and those in power never give up without a fight, and they'll fight dirty as necessary.
Thanks also for correcting my factual inaccuracies (my wife is reading "Next" so I couldn't get to it to check the story, though I think I got the gist of it correct).
You did. I was lucky enough to be there. It was a great time to be a Freak (a non-pejoritive for a Marillion fan). They even financed their next disc by preselling over the internet. They said that they raised more money in presales than they ever got as an advance from any record company, and that by DIYing the whole thing they made all the profit from the disc instead of 10p per unit.
Everybody who preordered got their picture on the liner, and they called the cd marillion.com.
I saw the TV adaptation of "Next". It was way cool to see Marillion featured so prominently.
I was at a Bears concert not to long ago, and I heard a tune over the PA pre-show that I really liked. We asked the sound guy, got the artist's name (Mike Kineally) and the song title (Live in Japan). Next day we got the MP3 of the song from Amazon. Now I can listen for a while, and later, maybe I'll decide to buy one of his CDs.
I still don't know anything about him, and I haven't listened to any more of his tunes (I'm a busy guy), but he's one of the top slots on my "music to explore as time permits" list.
I'm not shelling out for a CD that I have not listened to yet, and I don't have time to listen to the CD at the record store. I need a try before I buy solution, and I will buy what I like.
The record companies are kneekapping themselves by not selling singles, under the misguided idea that it cuts into album sales. Of course, from their point of view. If N'sync's new single is available, then the teenyboppers won't buy the CD and they won't make as much profit. Since they loathe to put more than two good songs on any CD, it is their inablilty to price singles such that 2 singles equals more profit than one full length CD. Bad business is bad for business. I'm sure their astounded when a cd has more than two hits.
In conclusion, I don't think the problem is big label versus indy label. It is the business practices of the label(s). Rober Fripp writes on this topic in the liner notes of all of the CDs releases on his Discipline Global Mobile label.
I'm a marillion fan. I donated to that concert fund. What they've done as an indy is great. But lets add a few facts to the mix.
The concert fund was a fan's idea and completely fan administered. By the time this all came about, marillion was on their 9th or 10th studio album and had already released a double live set. All presumably with Record Label Marketing money getting them advertised and trying to get them some airplay. They had a rabidly loyal, internet savvy fanbase, built up from years of recording and touring.
Now they have a worldwide audience, and can cut out the old middlemen.
I love them, but they had over a decade invested with labels before they went indy.
Without major maketing dollars, you don't have the clout to get on the major outlets (video channels, radio stations, etc). You just have to hope word of mouth gets you a fanbase. Then you're back to how it was before MTV. Start out local, build to regional, hope somebody notices. All the while having to finance your own recordings, promototion, etc.
Evey band can't be Metallica or Marillion. Find a way to make independent promotion via the net work, and you've got something. There's an entire industry devoted to making your web page be first in a search engine's ranking. What's the analogy to indy music promotion? How do you get your music heard?
You aren't supposed to do anything on your cable modem connection except surf the web, read email, and be really impressed at how much faster than 56k it is.
They've all but said that outright. They don't sell bandwidth. They sell a high speed web surfing experience.
This should no longer surprise anybody here. Let's get over it.
> That's not exactly true when it comes to intellectual property. Companies can effectively lose trademarks by not enforcing them; "Aspirin" jumps to mind.
Aspirin was a Bayer tradmark. Bayer was/is a German company. After WWII we took aspirin from them. Spoils of war.
ObHistory: Bayer also trademarked the brand name Heroin after they invented diacetylmorphine. The "in" drug name ending at the time was "in".
Slashdot Mirror
Irony: (n) Using Dune references to make fun of star wars geeks.
Now there's writing. Always amusing.
Sometimes thought-provoking.
Stan Kelly-Bootle is the man.
I don't personally care to Verity Stob.
p.p.p.s., Please note, reading the above post qualifies you to place out of a graduate level Consumer Behavior marketing class.
Before placing out of, or indeed, into a Consumer Behavior marketing class, please kill yourself.
There are multiple Americas. There share some common needs, and have some common traits, but the East Coast has different needs and wants than the West Coast. Different still are the needs and want of the South, the Southwest, the Industrial/Great Lakes Region, the Northwest, and the Midwest (Grainbelt).
Farmers have different needs than auto manufacturers, and insurance companies, and stock brokers, and software houses need.
This is why states rights is such an attractive doctrine. A solution for Kansas, may not work for Alabama, and a solution for New York might make no sense for Nevada.
I think you are missing the point. I never said that the Elite Parasitic Sub-society (EPSS) is inevitable. I said that it is. Full Stop.
But there are also sub-elite parasitic sub-societies, faith-based parasitic sub-societies, scum-of-the-earth parasitic sub-societies, and internet parasitic sub-societies.
Society works this way. Nobody will invite you to join their band if they don't know that you play the bassoon. How will they find out? Either they'll see you playing on a street corner, see your flyer at the record store ("non-elite non-parasitic bassoon player seeks hammered dulcimer and timable players for new-age ska fusion band", or your mom might mention it in passing, to her hairdresser, who's daughter is the top hammered dulimaniac in town, and since your mom is a good tipper, the hairdresser gives your number to her daughter. All of these scenarios involve some person interacting with some other person. Scenario 1 is you interacting directly with somebody else, face-to-face. Scenario 2 is a time shifted version of scenario 1, and scenario three has somebody with whom you've directly interacted, interacting with somebody else, face to-face.
The human interaction is unavoidable (and inevitable) Its how society works, at all levels.
You really do need to come to grips with this, otherwise, you might end up writing a Manifesto about elite parasitic sub-societies. Then it's not a huge leap to membership in The Friends of the Hooded Sweatshirt Society.
Play golf, go bowling, join a church choir, locate a scrapbooking consultant, learn tai chi or kendo.
Your key to getting ahead is gaining the personal trust of people who can help you get ahead when they need the skills you've got. You could meet a girl. her dad might be rich an powerful, and be in need of a son-in-law to take over the firms operations so he and the missus can travel asia like they always wanted to.
Besides, it isn't the elite parasitic sub-socities you need to worry about, its the Elite parasitic sub-societies: The Bavarian Illuminati, the CIA, and Evil Geniuses for a Better fnord Tomorrow.
Furrfu! That's called networking. "It's who you know" is an axiom at all levels of society. Get out from in front of your computer and do things with people. One of them may be the key to your future. Stop whining. Life isn't fair. Buy a helmet and a hanky. Read "Fire your boss". If you want something to fall into your lap, your lap has to be where things can fall into it. And what the hell is confomuity? I like that word. Can I use it too?
... and get your classified ad ready, becuase you're going to need somebody new to make up the the old guys rent.
Your answer is correct, but I'm afraid your solution is incomplete.
The user directory is only half-the battle.
It eliminates the adminstrative overhead of maintaing indiviual password stores for all of one's applications, but the whole of single-signon, in my experience has been to have the use sign-in once, and never have to authenticate to each indiviual application over the live of the login session.
So once you have your directory, you need to have a mechanism for all you applications to query it, which may not be possible with old off-the-shelf software.
So a breed of software has emerged which acts as a proxy between you and your login dialogs. This software, and I've evaluated one of them in a MS Windows environment, tends to call itself a portal. You typically let it record your clicks and keys as you log into an application, and then is stores that info [hopefully in a secure fashion] and when you run that application again, it runs the login script before handing control to you.
So what can you do on *nix? Well, having not worked on that myself, I'll leave that answer to other responders, some of whom have already suggested a couple of applications to check out.
cheers.
Also, if anyone hasn't heard of a decent NC-17 movie since Showgirls
You're not actually suggesting that Showgirls was a decent NC-17 film, are you?
The horror! The horror!
f.
He baked is cake,
now he has to lie in it.
If you cannot trademark a verb, and you must protect your trademark, then we should change the law to explicitly define the verbing of one's trademark as not being dilution.
The somebody who tells you to "google for it", or even "Google for it" will not be diluting your trademark, but some cretin who says "Google for it on [OTHER SEARCH ENGINE]" should get a nice beat down from the corporate lawyers.
When we took it as spoils of war.
ObMrSmartyPants: Heroin used to be Bayer's trademark name for Diacetyl Morphine. Same war outcome.
I am quite happy that we (well, actually, France) also have nukes: GWB will not treat us like Iraqis. After all, we are becoming a "rebel market" in Bush' eyes...
If France is such a great market, then give up your farm subsidies.
The EU spends half of its budget on farm subsidies - mostly going to France and Germany.
The only thing scarier than Iraq with nukes (because they'll use them) is France with nukes (because they'll surrender to the first reservist with a sheep dog and a cirbine who crosses the border).
I propose a new poll:
I am old enough to vote:
* Yes
* No
* Don't blame me. I voted for Bill and Opus.
* I never voted for Cowboy Neal
Even better, the email, while HTML, contains no ads.
The title of that page is apparantly "Included Page Header"
Doh!
I don't care how much info the grocery store tracks about me. If I save a buck a gallon on milk, amortized across three small children, that's a lot of money.
Now apply that to other groceries.
Sometimes it is a special value like the other night when out for maple syrup and paper napkins, I found milk discounted to 1.28/gal (limit 3). Thats's a 1.21 savings per gal. The $3.63 buys me two venti coffees and S*bucks on my way to work.
Sometimes it is the difference between food being overpriced and reasonable. At that point, I get annoyed at the card system. Chciken, or milk should be affordable to everybody, not just card holders.
So the store knows that I buy lots of milk, and often I buy Juicy-Juice, or Gogurt. Big deal. What does it cost me? Nothing. And I get those useless coupons at checkout-time, trying to entice me to buy Dole brand lettuce in a bag instead of FreshExpress brand lettuce in bag.
Sometimes they even give me coupons for stuff I buy.
Conclusions: Supermarket cards good. Fire bad.
What could be worse than being a pet in a nursing home. You're responsible for cheering up a bunch of depressed seniors, and who's there for your needs? Nobody that's who.
I suggest we use the robots to cheer up the pets when they get off duty.
Or get them a monkey. He likes pumpernickel [monkeybagel.com]
Didn't know there was a tv adaptation of "Next". Do you happen to recall when you saw it & on what channel? I'd like to see it.
I'm going to say that I swaw it a couple of months ago, and it was either on public TV, or on the discovery channel.
I think it more likely that the bands can typically only come up with one or two good songs in the time frame they have to record an album. I'm not a musician though, so the whole creative process there tends to amaze me anyway
That may very well be. But I've heard guys like Dwight Yoakum talking about how his record contract says he can only put 12 songs on a disc, and that he had to pay his record company to put out a 14 song disc. It looks like the record companies are not much into supplying value for the money we spand.
The label's business is selling "units". music on a physical medium. They don't make money unless you buy the media from them, and they aren't smart enough to figure out how to make money using a software licensing model.
They were in a position to be the only ones with enough resources and access to get records made, and they exploited that fact for a long time. They are losing their grip on their market place, and those in power never give up without a fight, and they'll fight dirty as necessary.
Thanks also for correcting my factual inaccuracies (my wife is reading "Next" so I couldn't get to it to check the story, though I think I got the gist of it correct).
You did. I was lucky enough to be there. It was a great time to be a Freak (a non-pejoritive for a Marillion fan). They even financed their next disc by preselling over the internet. They said that they raised more money in presales than they ever got as an advance from any record company, and that by DIYing the whole thing they made all the profit from the disc instead of 10p per unit.
Everybody who preordered got their picture on the liner, and they called the cd marillion.com.
I saw the TV adaptation of "Next". It was way cool to see Marillion featured so prominently.
I was at a Bears concert not to long ago, and I heard a tune over the PA pre-show that I really liked. We asked the sound guy, got the artist's name (Mike Kineally) and the song title (Live in Japan). Next day we got the MP3 of the song from Amazon. Now I can listen for a while, and later, maybe I'll decide to buy one of his CDs.
I still don't know anything about him, and I haven't listened to any more of his tunes (I'm a busy guy), but he's one of the top slots on my "music to explore as time permits" list.
I'm not shelling out for a CD that I have not listened to yet, and I don't have time to listen to the CD at the record store. I need a try before I buy solution, and I will buy what I like.
The record companies are kneekapping themselves by not selling singles, under the misguided idea that it cuts into album sales. Of course, from their point of view. If N'sync's new single is available, then the teenyboppers won't buy the CD and they won't make as much profit. Since they loathe to put more than two good songs on any CD, it is their inablilty to price singles such that 2 singles equals more profit than one full length CD. Bad business is bad for business. I'm sure their astounded when a cd has more than two hits.
In conclusion, I don't think the problem is big label versus indy label. It is the business practices of the label(s). Rober Fripp writes on this topic in the liner notes of all of the CDs releases on his Discipline Global Mobile label.
The concert fund was a fan's idea and completely fan administered. By the time this all came about, marillion was on their 9th or 10th studio album and had already released a double live set. All presumably with Record Label Marketing money getting them advertised and trying to get them some airplay. They had a rabidly loyal, internet savvy fanbase, built up from years of recording and touring.
Now they have a worldwide audience, and can cut out the old middlemen.
I love them, but they had over a decade invested with labels before they went indy.
Without major maketing dollars, you don't have the clout to get on the major outlets (video channels, radio stations, etc). You just have to hope word of mouth gets you a fanbase. Then you're back to how it was before MTV. Start out local, build to regional, hope somebody notices. All the while having to finance your own recordings, promototion, etc.
Evey band can't be Metallica or Marillion. Find a way to make independent promotion via the net work, and you've got something. There's an entire industry devoted to making your web page be first in a search engine's ranking. What's the analogy to indy music promotion? How do you get your music heard?
Can they be far behind?
Where are the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow when you need them?
Fnord.
They've all but said that outright. They don't sell bandwidth. They sell a high speed web surfing experience.
This should no longer surprise anybody here. Let's get over it.
> That's not exactly true when it comes to intellectual property. Companies can effectively lose trademarks by not enforcing them; "Aspirin" jumps to mind.
Aspirin was a Bayer tradmark. Bayer was/is a German company. After WWII we took aspirin from them. Spoils of war.
ObHistory: Bayer also trademarked the brand name Heroin after they invented diacetylmorphine. The "in" drug name ending at the time was "in".
Now that's funny!!