What kind of penalties do they have for this sort of thing in Taiwan? I would really hate to think that some copyright megalopoly would seek to enforce its laws in a country where people who break stupid IP laws that shouldn't exist and are in dire need of reform get caned or have their hands chopped off or something. Actually if this did happen on a mass scale it might help to turn public sentiment completely against the robber barons, and maybe then something could finally be done to put these people in check.
Come on, hardly any DJ's can be considered artists. They do "work for hire".
That's because the industry has conspired to shape it that way. In the early days of radio, remember, there were all kinds of drama and performances with people who were considered entertainers/artists and who were celebrities.
In the modern day radio forces DJs to be faceless clones of each other and not exhibit genuine personality traits. Much of what they do is not really artistic, and amounts to being little more than an announcer. But there's a great deal more potential for what the medium could allow. Even the lowly radio DJs have the potential to cultivate and shape culture by promoting music scenes and guiding the public to discover as-yet undiscovered New Sounds.
But prioritizing great quality is not the most cost-effective way to manage a radio station. They want everything to be predictable so they can guarantee to advertisers that the number of listeners will be the same from week to week.
Even so, there are still well-produced shows, such as talk shows, which, while not what we'd typically call "art" are a sort of journalism and are definitely a work of authorship.
You may equate "radio" with "listening to a set list of prerecorded music" but that is a small, though popular, part of a broad spectrum. Music programming isn't going to be affected by this so much as live talk shows and news/issues oriented stuff that people may only be able to get from a single source. People can get music from lots of places, but how do you listen to Stern/Limbaugh/Slesinner (or someone who actually doesn't suck) if you're not in one of their markets?
Even if we're talking about what the article is talking about, the voice talents who do the commercials, voice acting *is* an art, even if the commercial aspect of it makes it a "work for hire", the contracts for actors in commercials tend to be such that if a commercial is broadcast the talent appearing in the commercial gets a royalty or usage fee.
You'd have to choose one that NO astronomer has been watching (because they AREN'T supposed to just change course radically...), but...
OK, so how do you FIND an asteroid without an astronomer looking at it? That's how asteroids are discovered! An astronomer looks in the sky and finds it. Then he goes and tells everyone he knows, then it gets verified... etc. So, what then, are new asteroid discoveries going to become military secrets?
They say in the article you can move it around while it's behind the sun, but if you do then how do you know that you're attempts at moving it worked properly?
And if you do this more than once in about 100 million years, anyone who knows anything about probability will say that something is awfully goddamn fishy... Then they'll start rounding up the usual suspects. Which, really, is going to be a pretty short list.
IANA Physicist, but if a person uses a lever to move a heaver object, he has done more work. The lever only enabled him to do more work. It didn't do some of the work for him. So, yes, the person moving the object should be paid more.
OK, good, you agree with me. So what happens if you give the lever-operator a longer, more powerful lever? He's able to expend the same amount of effort to get more done. But he's still just moving a lever, expending the same amount of effort as before. He's working more efficiently. Should he get paid based on his effort? Or how much that effort accomplishes? Businesses *never* give you more money if you find a way to work more efficiently. They always just give you more work, and keep more money. That sucks and is lame from a labor perspective. I think it's how much the effort accomplishes.
If a radio station starts an Internet broadcast, how much should they raise the pay of the DJ's? By your argument, the DJ's pay should be baised on the number of listeners. So, if this station, which had 10,000 listeners, reaches 20 people via the net, should the DJ's should get a.2% raise? What if the servers go down for a day? Should their pay be docked that.2% for just that day? After all, he's not reaching those 20 people that day.
I would say that yes, the amount of increase in wages ought to be proportional to the increase in ratings. There's a distinction between ratings and market size, here, which might be confusing. Broadcasting to "the internet" gives you a huge market size, potentially. But it may only give a very small ratings increase. Management would be wise to harp on this point.
The only justification for any company to not raise employee wages in response to an increase in revenue is sheer executive and stockholder greed.
Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? Does Internet broadcasting result in revenue increses? When I was in college, I took an afternoon job with a local radio station. During my stay there, we decided to create an Internet simulcast. We got it from some company (I forgot which) in trade for a certain number of commercials per day. After getting it running, we saw NO change in the amount of ad revenue generated. The fact is, Internet broadcasts simply do not attract enough listeners to justify an increase in ad prices. We couldn't replace ads in the Internet stream like you suggest, because no national company is going to pay to reach a grand total of five listeners. Thus, since it wasn't generating any extra revenue, none of the employees got raises because of it.
You seem to understand the main ideas well, but don't let your experiences in college color your understanding of the state of the industry as it stands now. If you were in college in, say 1996 or 1997, the internet was much different back then. Although the 'net might account for negligible ratings presently, that doesn't mean that in the future it could bring about more. Once everyone is sucking information from a fat pipe it may become a very important consideration. The voice talents and personalities are just being forward-thinking.
If I advertise on the radio, I'm trying to attract customers. If someone lives far enough away that they can't pick up the station on their car radio, they're certainly not going to be able to drive to my business. Therefore, I don't want to pay for advertising that's not going to attract more customers. Especially since only a very few people listen to Internet radio anyway.
This is a good point, but it is a simple matter to strip local ads and replace them with advertising from a national or international account.
If the DJ's do extra work, and the station gets more money as a result, then the DJ's should share in a large part of that. Internet simulcasting doesn't bring in any more money, and doesn't require extra work on the part of the DJ's. So why should they be paid more?
Depends on what you mean by "work". Perhaps a DJ doesn't expend any more *effort* if he is heard by 10,000 people instead of 10 people. But he *is* accomplishing more. It's like a person using a lever to move amplify his effort to move an object. So by that rationale it would make sense to increase their pay. The only justification for any company to not raise employee wages in response to an increase in revenue is sheer executive and stockholder greed.
As a rule, Sales, not DJ's, are the only ones payed by commercial sold. DJ's get a flat salary, sometimes an additional fee for production work sold outside the market or to other stations and, in rare cases involving major talents, an incentive bonus based on ratings in their day-part. Why would they get a commercial cut?
Here's why: One cannot survive without the other. You can't sell ad space if you don't have a show, and you can't have a show if you don't sell ad space. Sales guys get rich off of commisions, but they are dependent upon the quality of the show the host creates. And most show hosts *do* get paid based on the size of their audience/market. It only makes sense to count internet listenership in those numbers. 300% might be too much of an increase, maybe, but there ought to be some kind of increase.
In the total amount of labour that goes into programming a radio day, the DJ's have the smallest part.
But it is an extremely important part. Many radio stations try to minimize the importance of their on-air talent to prevent them from becoming too famous to be disposable. Therefore many DJs do little more than play songs and recite playlists and give a little canned chatter and read the news. But people who have actual *shows* and personalities are what makes radio come alive and draws listeners. You can get away with a machine broadcasting a playlist, but most people who listen to internet radio are probably tuning in for a specific personality or unique content, such as live talk shows, not just trying to listen to music that they can find easily through more convenient channels.
No one believes line workers should get a cut of every dollar made from the after-sale use of a GM truck, or that a Quicken coder should share in the profits of every business using the software.
True, but the sort of work and the way a radio personality makes money for their employer isn't analogous to these examples.
1. Radio stations derive revenue based on the number of listeners that they can bring to advertisors.
2. Internet simulcasting and rebroadcasting allows a radio station to reach many more people, many of whom might live outside of their normal broadcasting radius, and who would not be reachable over the airwaves.
3. Therefore it's not totally unreasonable to ask for more money if you're a DJ. The radio station management is certainly going to ask for more money from the advertisors; why shouldn't DJs see some of that money?
It's an inconvenience for now for those of you in the listening audience, but it's a real issue and one that I think the on-air personalities have a strong case for.
This isn't a situation analogous to the RIAA/MPAA vs. the people; the public *isn't* being gouged for the cost of listening to radio.
It's more like the usual RIAA rips off artists so that the publisher and distributor can get fat off of the artist's vision and hard work.
What advantage does an asteroid have over a ICBM-delivered nuke? I can't see any.
Deployment time of, what, years? It's not like no one will notice what you're trying to do long before the asteroid's course is changed. A nuke can fly from one side of the planet to the other in about 45 minutes.
Possibly greater destruction? But nukes are already overkill, so this isn't an advantage.
No fallout? So the cockroaches and single-celled organisms that survive the Mass Extinction Event won't get cancer. Hooray.
Considering that the asteroid is delivered by swatting it with nukes that would make almost any target just as dead as it would be if hit by the rock, I think I'd rather stick with the nukes.
Seriously, what's the advantage of webifying your air conditioner? What makes this better than simply setting a thermostat, or a thermostat with a timer? Is this going to be a more intelligent, and therefore hopefully more energy-efficient A/C? Or what?
AIM is tied to x86 Windows, as the download is a binary program that creates aim.exe and must be run on x86 Windows. WINE (the most popular Windows-on-Linux/BSD solution) runs only on x86, as it performs no CPU emulation. If your organization does not own any x86 computers, you can't get aim.exe.
I thought AIM ran on Mac OS, on those non-x86 architecture boxen? If so, then how is AIM tied to Windows/x86 architecture?
Direct democracy isn't scalable. And this has been know since ancient times. Even with the advent of high tech communications, there are still insurmountable problems.
If all we need to read all 6 billion posts from every single person on the planet before we can make a decision on how to vote on some issue, we are surely doomed. We just don't have the time to listen to everyone.
Representative forms of governing have failed to bring about a just society, in large part because of the tendency of the representatives that we pick to entrench themselves and separate, detached, even foreign to the people they are supposed to represent.
By contrast, moderation of the sort seen at Slashdot does, IMO, a better job. Moderators are not that much different than the average user, at least in terms of their abilities to affect the content of the website. Their power is extremely transitory and their influence as an individual is weak.
Still, in order for the system to work properly, the moderators must be intelligent and at least somewhat fair. They *could* only mod up comments that they agreed with, without regard to how articulate the speaker made his/her point. But even if this is how all moderators behave in practice, there should be a tendency for the differing opinions of moderators to cancel each other out, and we should expect to see the full range of opinion displayed.
Executed properly, moderation serves to keep a discussion on topic, reduce the amount of time you need to spend reading by cutting out redundant comments, and offering a better position to particularly insightful or informative comments by elevating and amplifying them above the rabble of the non-visionaries, the inarticulate, and the pranksters.
And most often, if the opinions are there in the crowd, I think they will be represented in the moderated discussion. Moderation isn't supposed to decide what opinions are correct, but rather what opinions are well-constructed and well-argued. It may not do so with 100% accuracy in practice, but show me a system of evaluating arguments that works perfectly.
The reason we don't see every possible opinion is likely to be because of the demographics of the participants of a particular forum. Thus, a site like Slashdot tends to appear to take on the personality of the majority of the people who read it. But even then there is room for differences of opinion, sometimes even radical differences. But for the most part it should not be surprising that opinions tend to converge over time. This is not a bad thing in itself; what would make it bad is if this convergence is forced by authority.
I don't really see how forcing someone to change their mind is feasible on the internet; most people have only a very limited means to reach other people, and almost all of these methods cannot incorporate force or violence.
And what's being contested over is generally not something most people are willing to go to war over or become corrupt for. It's not like the outcomes of these discussions has any force of law or anything like that in the real world; it's just a bunch of people blowing steam. We share ideas with each other and come to conclusions which we may then apply to the real world, but I think it's very likely that those who already have power in the real world already know what they want to do and are not likely to have their minds substantially changed by any discussion on the internet, whether it be moderated or completely open.
So even if a moderated discussion doesn't allow every participant to be a moderator, I still don't think that the system is as corrupt as traditional politics.
---JJJIII
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
Re:I don't think the letter is real.
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Someone also pointed out the grammar problems, which I took notice to. A PR/Marketing/etc employee isn't going to put anything out with mistakes like that.
The grammar is suspect in my book, not because it is too bad... but because it is too good.
This is more what I would have expected from Nintendo:
Gentlemen:
How are you!! All your shelf space are belong to us. You customers buy many Game Boy Advance best mutual economy healthiness of retailer and manufacturer. Congratulation! A winner is us! Ha, ha, ha.
Our Game Cube is on the way to you soon make your time.
Somebody set up us the bad marketing trick. We are unhappy deceived in merchandising by Company X who advertise product vapors. Nintendo Cube on way to your store very soon. Their truck have not even started to move! Sign in store advise customer to keep money in wallet for future. This very bad advice for store to not sell game on shelf. You want to make profit or what?!! It's a secret to everyone.
They've just about guaranteed that they won't get support from the Linux community -- offering to GPL software *if* they go belly up is sure to guarantee that they *will*.
They ought to offer to GPL their software if they do *well*.
> The M16 and the AR15 are automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles actually designed to injure.
Perhaps that's part of it, but I think the biggest motivator in the historical adoption of assault weapons is the lowered minimum standard for the quality and training of the soldier who uses them. During the latter part of WWII lots of countries were dredging the bottom of their manpower reserves and having to rush the draftees to the front without sufficient training, so there was lots of appeal to the idea of a weapon that just sprays lead everywhere rather than requiring an elevated degree of marksmanship in the bearer.
Alright, this is offtopic, but I have to correct some misconceptions...
While your point is essentially true, a lot's happened since WWII. The modern US Army is professional and well-trained in combat tactics. They certainly know about aiming, and are well-practiced at the art.
The bottom of the barrel lead-sprayers of WWII were the Sten and the M3 "Grease Gun", which bore little resemblance to the M16. These *were* crude and inaccurate submachine guns, designed to be as cheap to manufacture as possible while still basically reliable. While the US issued the M3, and some US forces probably used the British Sten, their main infantry weapons were the M1 and the Browning Automatic Rifle, both of which were well-crafted rifles capable of great accuracy in competant hands. Some soldiers were even issued the 1903 Springfield, which by today's standards would be considered a sniper rifle.
After the War ended, the Army adopted the M14 rifle, which was capable of full-auto fire, but was well within the tradition of a well-crafted, mechanically accurate weapon. In the hands of a skilled shooter, they were capable of outstanding results.
There was some speculation in the Viet Nam conflict era that unskilled shooters could compensate for their inadequate training by spraying lots and lots of lead. After some experimentation, this proved to be untrue. The amount of ammo the Army shot at the enemy rose almost exponentially while the rate of kills stayed more or less the same. The lesson to be learned here is that nothing replaces trained skill and nerves of steel. A single bullet placed right where it needs to be is much, much more valuable than 50 sprayed in the general area.
While the M16 had some bugs in its initial design, these problems were addressed in the M16A2, and it is quite accurate in skilled hands. It is capable of single fire and three-round bursts, and even when firing full-auto soldiers are trained to aim. There is virtually no tactical value in firing blindly, or without sufficient skill to place fire where it needs to be.
I'm not surprised in the least. Arcades are dying out. It's not like in the old days.
Arcades used to be cool places to hang out. The games there were far better than what you could get at home. The games themselves were hard, but with perseverance you could master them and get a decent play out of a quarter.
The games were more imaginative then, too. There were some games that sucked, but there were always a good dozen or so games that were really fun, and really different from each other.
Now everything is just the latest installment in some codified genre that the marketing people know will sell. You've got your fighting games, your light gun games, and your driving games. That's basically it. In a corner somewhere there might be a Millipede or a Ms. Pac Man, and that's only if the arcade's proprietor is a really cool guy.
The arcades themselves were more atmospheric. Dark lighting, the walls painted black, the carpet stained with spilled drinks, wads of gum, and cigarette ash. The games lurked in cozy little areas by themselves, almost hidden away in a corner. It gave patrons an intimate feel.
Now, everything is brightly lit, and games are way out in the open, with wide walkways between them.
And the games today typically cost 50 cents or even a dollar. And unlike in the old days, when a really good player could play for maybe 10 minutes or more on a single, the games today are designed to suck quarters out of your pocket every few minutes, regardless of how skilled you might be.
Todays console games offer the same high quality graphics and a deeper, richer gaming experience, where the design emphasis was on a quality experience, not making you pump a few more slugs into the coin slot every 2 minutes.
The only possible advantage an arcade game has these days is in VR-type technology, where you sit in a booth and are surrounded by screens and high-quality audio, and the whole thing shakes and moves around. But those type of games are even more expensive than the typical cabinets, and no one wants to spend an afternoon there, shelling out $5 per play.
Capcom's smart to be getting out of the arcades. As long as they continue to produce for the home, I'm not worried. They know where they can find me...
- Someone writes a java app capable of searching Pi for a number series identical to the ASCII values of the text they wish to tranfer.
- Upon finding this series, the location of it in Pi is transferred in a format something like "12137-12193" meaning "the message begins at place 12137 and ends at place 12193"
- Bingo. Your recipient has the message and all you transferred was two completely unrelated numbers.
The only problem with this is that the randomness of Pi and other such numbers will result in a huge pile of "noise" that conceals whatever hidden information might be found therein.
Yes, concealed in the digits of Pi may just be a CSSed HDTV special edition of the entire run of "Diff'rent Strokes". But, in order to find that magic section of digits, you're going to have to generate Pi out to a level of precision so far beyond what can be described as astronomical, that if you tried to store the number using a single atom for each digit, your copy of Pi would be more massive than the entire universe.
In other words, it's a great idea, just not very practical. All those monkeys banging on all those keyboards may well generate the complete works of Shakespeare; but when they do finally dublicate the life's work of the Bard, you'll have to sort through trillions of tons of waste paper to find it. Good luck managing all that paper.
This may be the ultimate solution for artists and online stations to go about. Some artists should think about releasing an online version of their songs prior to committing to anyone like RIAA, ASCAP, etc., this way their songs become more popular, people enjoy their music before its been monopolized, and artists can then leverage more rights from RIAA, and the others, and if those agencies don't like it, the artist (now popular from releasing a net based song) can then press and distribute records on their own, which many successful artists have done.
One problem I foresee in this is that the industry can always blacklist artists who try to work outside of their system. "Are you now, or have you ever been... signed to an independent label? Given away product for free? Performed for free? Well, guess what, you can't work for us you commie radical bastard!" And if that indy artist is doing something that the industry simply can't do without, they'll just come up with their own in-house artists who'll shamelessly copy the cutting edge sound and appropriate it. How many Pearl Jam clones can you count from the early 1990's?
It's cheaper for them to manufacture talents who essentially owe everything to their producers. Take 5 good-looking nobodies with some small measure of natural talent, dress them up, teach them a few dance moves, teach them to lip synch, promote the hell out of them and sit back and watch the money roll in. From their perspective, talent is disposable, and you can always find a replacement.
Maybe sony has wised up to the value that emulation might bring to them. Look at Sega's decision to get out of the hardware market and focus on software. The money is not in the razors (the consoles) it is in the blades (the games).
This is true, but is undeniable that the company that owns the console is at a huge advantage, provided that development for that console is not open and there are no competing consoles to develop games for.
Look at the NES during the last half of the 80's. Nintendo *owned* the home videogame market, and locked out 3rd-party developers who would not submit to Nintendo's licensing policies. Basically Nintendo made a lot of money from these people for doing nothing (aside from providing a key to get past the lockout mechanism, and then slapping a "Seal of Quality" on the game, and endorsing the licensed developers instead of suing them like they sued Tengen. Something like 30% of the cost of a 3rd-party game actually went to Nintendo, not the actual developer.
Contrast this with the relationship Atari had with their 3rd party developers. When other companies first started developing games for the Atari 2600, Atari was pissed off and tried to sue, but they lost. They didn't have a means to lock out competing developers, so they just accepted that other people could make games for the 2600 and they wouldn't see any of the money from it. This resulted in the development of a huge library of games for the 2600, which enabled Atari to sell a lot of console units. But if they weren't making money directly off of the sale of the consoles, this would not have benefitted them at all.
In the 32-bit age and beyond, there has been a healthy amount of competition, with no one system dominating the market to the extent that the Atari 2600 or NES did in their respective primes. But if one company does come to dominate the console market, they will be able to dictate terms to developers such that they will make money from their efforts in the form of licensing fees, even though they're not doing any real work to deserve it. Nintendo tried to pull the same draconian licensing deals with the SNES and N64, but since the market had the Sega Genesis and the Sony Playstation, 3rd-party developers had other options, and they took their business elsewhere. The result was a significantly smaller library of games for the SNES and N64, and the overall quality of those games was less than it could have been if Nintendo hadn't alienated some of the first-tier developers (Square especially)
Clearly then, it is of great benefit to a company if they can completely control developer's access to their console, especially if they are the only game in town. Sony was close to this, given the less than spectacular market performance of the N64 and Sega Saturn. If another company had essentially opened up a viable alternative (such as Bleem! and other PSX emulators) which allowed compatibility for the console and took control away from Sony, this ruined their shot at becoming the monopoly that Nintendo was during the 80's.
Now that the PSX is reaching obsolescence there's little incentive for them to try to control the PSX platform, and in fact there's more incentive for them to open up the console to keep the game library alive for a bit longer until interest in it is relegated to a marginalized segment of retro-gamers. So (IMO) it's not that Sony has "wisened up" and decided to play nice and share the pie with everyone, they just recognize that the prize they were fighting for is now irrelevant, and it's no longer in their interest to persue the matter.
Mostly lost in the age of the CD, reducing the size even further puts the nail in the coffin of this artform, the album cover.
One door closes and another opens. All those postage stamp designers who went on permanent layoff when email replaced snail mail will all have new jobs designing cover art for DataPlay albums.
It is not "open source" software that "destroys intellectual property", but in fact it's the GNU General Public License that does.
This sounds an awful lot like that GWB (or was it Dan Quayle?) quote, "It's not pollution that's harming the environment; it's the impurities in our air and water that's doing it." Don't you think?
I'm kindof sick of hearing about all the people who worry about people "playing God" or whether clones will "have souls" so here's a list of real ethical issues having to do with human cloning that I can think of, just off the top of my head.
Can a clone be owned?
Can a particular design of clone be owned?
Will a clone have the same rights as any other human being?
If a clone can be owned, who will own it? The person who supplied the genetic material? Or the megacorp that put it together and grew it?
For clones who are made improperly, will a company be legally liable for the suffering caused by their defects?
Can a clone's DNA be modified to change "undesirable" qualities or to engineer new features? What limits (if any) should be imposed upon this?
Suppose one day cloning becomes so much better than sexual reproduction that it becomes the preferred method. (People will still have sex, I'm sure, but will modify themselves to be sexually infertile and instead choose to clone themselves if they wish to have a child.) What will happen to genetic diversity, particularly if people are allowed to modify their genetic structure to create "designer" babies? Without a diverse genetic pool, will the human race become more susceptible to specific diseases that normally would affect people with only a certain genetic marker?
Sad that you've probably never served in the military (I have). Sad that you've probably never worked in a place where you realize that there is a need for all these weapons (I have). Despite what you see on TV or your personal opinions, there is a need.
Why is it whenever someone articulates an anti-military/pro-peace sentiment, and someone else responds to it with a pro-military/war-as-necessary-evil sentiment, can the second person never "get it" that the first person isn't just wishing for the elimination of the military forces of one side, but of all sides?
Granted that that's never going to happen, but still... the pro-military people always think that an anti-military person wants the elimination of their own armies, leaving their country vulnerable to invasion from outside armies. They don't want that. No one wants that. They want all armies to go away, and no one to ever invade anywhere. I mean, yeah, that's unrealistic. But the pro-military camp always attacks the pacifist's patriotism and committment to their country, and only seldom their sense of realism.
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What kind of penalties do they have for this sort of thing in Taiwan? I would really hate to think that some copyright megalopoly would seek to enforce its laws in a country where people who break stupid IP laws that shouldn't exist and are in dire need of reform get caned or have their hands chopped off or something. Actually if this did happen on a mass scale it might help to turn public sentiment completely against the robber barons, and maybe then something could finally be done to put these people in check.
That's because the industry has conspired to shape it that way. In the early days of radio, remember, there were all kinds of drama and performances with people who were considered entertainers/artists and who were celebrities.
In the modern day radio forces DJs to be faceless clones of each other and not exhibit genuine personality traits. Much of what they do is not really artistic, and amounts to being little more than an announcer. But there's a great deal more potential for what the medium could allow. Even the lowly radio DJs have the potential to cultivate and shape culture by promoting music scenes and guiding the public to discover as-yet undiscovered New Sounds.
But prioritizing great quality is not the most cost-effective way to manage a radio station. They want everything to be predictable so they can guarantee to advertisers that the number of listeners will be the same from week to week.
Even so, there are still well-produced shows, such as talk shows, which, while not what we'd typically call "art" are a sort of journalism and are definitely a work of authorship.
You may equate "radio" with "listening to a set list of prerecorded music" but that is a small, though popular, part of a broad spectrum. Music programming isn't going to be affected by this so much as live talk shows and news/issues oriented stuff that people may only be able to get from a single source. People can get music from lots of places, but how do you listen to Stern/Limbaugh/Slesinner (or someone who actually doesn't suck) if you're not in one of their markets?
Even if we're talking about what the article is talking about, the voice talents who do the commercials, voice acting *is* an art, even if the commercial aspect of it makes it a "work for hire", the contracts for actors in commercials tend to be such that if a commercial is broadcast the talent appearing in the commercial gets a royalty or usage fee.
OK, good, you agree with me. So what happens if you give the lever-operator a longer, more powerful lever? He's able to expend the same amount of effort to get more done. But he's still just moving a lever, expending the same amount of effort as before. He's working more efficiently. Should he get paid based on his effort? Or how much that effort accomplishes? Businesses *never* give you more money if you find a way to work more efficiently. They always just give you more work, and keep more money. That sucks and is lame from a labor perspective. I think it's how much the effort accomplishes.
I would say that yes, the amount of increase in wages ought to be proportional to the increase in ratings. There's a distinction between ratings and market size, here, which might be confusing. Broadcasting to "the internet" gives you a huge market size, potentially. But it may only give a very small ratings increase. Management would be wise to harp on this point.
You seem to understand the main ideas well, but don't let your experiences in college color your understanding of the state of the industry as it stands now. If you were in college in, say 1996 or 1997, the internet was much different back then. Although the 'net might account for negligible ratings presently, that doesn't mean that in the future it could bring about more. Once everyone is sucking information from a fat pipe it may become a very important consideration. The voice talents and personalities are just being forward-thinking.
This is a good point, but it is a simple matter to strip local ads and replace them with advertising from a national or international account.
Depends on what you mean by "work". Perhaps a DJ doesn't expend any more *effort* if he is heard by 10,000 people instead of 10 people. But he *is* accomplishing more. It's like a person using a lever to move amplify his effort to move an object. So by that rationale it would make sense to increase their pay. The only justification for any company to not raise employee wages in response to an increase in revenue is sheer executive and stockholder greed.
1. Radio stations derive revenue based on the number of listeners that they can bring to advertisors.
2. Internet simulcasting and rebroadcasting allows a radio station to reach many more people, many of whom might live outside of their normal broadcasting radius, and who would not be reachable over the airwaves.
3. Therefore it's not totally unreasonable to ask for more money if you're a DJ. The radio station management is certainly going to ask for more money from the advertisors; why shouldn't DJs see some of that money?
It's an inconvenience for now for those of you in the listening audience, but it's a real issue and one that I think the on-air personalities have a strong case for.
This isn't a situation analogous to the RIAA/MPAA vs. the people; the public *isn't* being gouged for the cost of listening to radio.
It's more like the usual RIAA rips off artists so that the publisher and distributor can get fat off of the artist's vision and hard work.
What advantage does an asteroid have over a ICBM-delivered nuke? I can't see any.
Considering that the asteroid is delivered by swatting it with nukes that would make almost any target just as dead as it would be if hit by the rock, I think I'd rather stick with the nukes.
...is what is the projected survivability of this new aircraft in collisions with Chinese interceptor craft?
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
I thought AIM ran on Mac OS, on those non-x86 architecture boxen? If so, then how is AIM tied to Windows/x86 architecture?
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
If all we need to read all 6 billion posts from every single person on the planet before we can make a decision on how to vote on some issue, we are surely doomed. We just don't have the time to listen to everyone.
Representative forms of governing have failed to bring about a just society, in large part because of the tendency of the representatives that we pick to entrench themselves and separate, detached, even foreign to the people they are supposed to represent.
By contrast, moderation of the sort seen at Slashdot does, IMO, a better job. Moderators are not that much different than the average user, at least in terms of their abilities to affect the content of the website. Their power is extremely transitory and their influence as an individual is weak.
Still, in order for the system to work properly, the moderators must be intelligent and at least somewhat fair. They *could* only mod up comments that they agreed with, without regard to how articulate the speaker made his/her point. But even if this is how all moderators behave in practice, there should be a tendency for the differing opinions of moderators to cancel each other out, and we should expect to see the full range of opinion displayed.
Executed properly, moderation serves to keep a discussion on topic, reduce the amount of time you need to spend reading by cutting out redundant comments, and offering a better position to particularly insightful or informative comments by elevating and amplifying them above the rabble of the non-visionaries, the inarticulate, and the pranksters.
And most often, if the opinions are there in the crowd, I think they will be represented in the moderated discussion. Moderation isn't supposed to decide what opinions are correct, but rather what opinions are well-constructed and well-argued. It may not do so with 100% accuracy in practice, but show me a system of evaluating arguments that works perfectly.
The reason we don't see every possible opinion is likely to be because of the demographics of the participants of a particular forum. Thus, a site like Slashdot tends to appear to take on the personality of the majority of the people who read it. But even then there is room for differences of opinion, sometimes even radical differences. But for the most part it should not be surprising that opinions tend to converge over time. This is not a bad thing in itself; what would make it bad is if this convergence is forced by authority.
I don't really see how forcing someone to change their mind is feasible on the internet; most people have only a very limited means to reach other people, and almost all of these methods cannot incorporate force or violence.
And what's being contested over is generally not something most people are willing to go to war over or become corrupt for. It's not like the outcomes of these discussions has any force of law or anything like that in the real world; it's just a bunch of people blowing steam. We share ideas with each other and come to conclusions which we may then apply to the real world, but I think it's very likely that those who already have power in the real world already know what they want to do and are not likely to have their minds substantially changed by any discussion on the internet, whether it be moderated or completely open.
So even if a moderated discussion doesn't allow every participant to be a moderator, I still don't think that the system is as corrupt as traditional politics.
---JJJIII
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
The grammar is suspect in my book, not because it is too bad... but because it is too good.
This is more what I would have expected from Nintendo:
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
They ought to offer to GPL their software if they do *well*.
---JJJIII
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
Alright, this is offtopic, but I have to correct some misconceptions...
While your point is essentially true, a lot's happened since WWII. The modern US Army is professional and well-trained in combat tactics. They certainly know about aiming, and are well-practiced at the art.
The bottom of the barrel lead-sprayers of WWII were the Sten and the M3 "Grease Gun", which bore little resemblance to the M16. These *were* crude and inaccurate submachine guns, designed to be as cheap to manufacture as possible while still basically reliable. While the US issued the M3, and some US forces probably used the British Sten, their main infantry weapons were the M1 and the Browning Automatic Rifle, both of which were well-crafted rifles capable of great accuracy in competant hands. Some soldiers were even issued the 1903 Springfield, which by today's standards would be considered a sniper rifle.
After the War ended, the Army adopted the M14 rifle, which was capable of full-auto fire, but was well within the tradition of a well-crafted, mechanically accurate weapon. In the hands of a skilled shooter, they were capable of outstanding results.
There was some speculation in the Viet Nam conflict era that unskilled shooters could compensate for their inadequate training by spraying lots and lots of lead. After some experimentation, this proved to be untrue. The amount of ammo the Army shot at the enemy rose almost exponentially while the rate of kills stayed more or less the same. The lesson to be learned here is that nothing replaces trained skill and nerves of steel. A single bullet placed right where it needs to be is much, much more valuable than 50 sprayed in the general area.
While the M16 had some bugs in its initial design, these problems were addressed in the M16A2, and it is quite accurate in skilled hands. It is capable of single fire and three-round bursts, and even when firing full-auto soldiers are trained to aim. There is virtually no tactical value in firing blindly, or without sufficient skill to place fire where it needs to be.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
I'm not surprised in the least. Arcades are dying out. It's not like in the old days.
Arcades used to be cool places to hang out. The games there were far better than what you could get at home. The games themselves were hard, but with perseverance you could master them and get a decent play out of a quarter.
The games were more imaginative then, too. There were some games that sucked, but there were always a good dozen or so games that were really fun, and really different from each other.
Now everything is just the latest installment in some codified genre that the marketing people know will sell. You've got your fighting games, your light gun games, and your driving games. That's basically it. In a corner somewhere there might be a Millipede or a Ms. Pac Man, and that's only if the arcade's proprietor is a really cool guy.
The arcades themselves were more atmospheric. Dark lighting, the walls painted black, the carpet stained with spilled drinks, wads of gum, and cigarette ash. The games lurked in cozy little areas by themselves, almost hidden away in a corner. It gave patrons an intimate feel.
Now, everything is brightly lit, and games are way out in the open, with wide walkways between them.
And the games today typically cost 50 cents or even a dollar. And unlike in the old days, when a really good player could play for maybe 10 minutes or more on a single, the games today are designed to suck quarters out of your pocket every few minutes, regardless of how skilled you might be.
Todays console games offer the same high quality graphics and a deeper, richer gaming experience, where the design emphasis was on a quality experience, not making you pump a few more slugs into the coin slot every 2 minutes.
The only possible advantage an arcade game has these days is in VR-type technology, where you sit in a booth and are surrounded by screens and high-quality audio, and the whole thing shakes and moves around. But those type of games are even more expensive than the typical cabinets, and no one wants to spend an afternoon there, shelling out $5 per play.
Capcom's smart to be getting out of the arcades. As long as they continue to produce for the home, I'm not worried. They know where they can find me...
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
The only problem with this is that the randomness of Pi and other such numbers will result in a huge pile of "noise" that conceals whatever hidden information might be found therein.
Yes, concealed in the digits of Pi may just be a CSSed HDTV special edition of the entire run of "Diff'rent Strokes". But, in order to find that magic section of digits, you're going to have to generate Pi out to a level of precision so far beyond what can be described as astronomical, that if you tried to store the number using a single atom for each digit, your copy of Pi would be more massive than the entire universe.
In other words, it's a great idea, just not very practical. All those monkeys banging on all those keyboards may well generate the complete works of Shakespeare; but when they do finally dublicate the life's work of the Bard, you'll have to sort through trillions of tons of waste paper to find it. Good luck managing all that paper.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
One problem I foresee in this is that the industry can always blacklist artists who try to work outside of their system. "Are you now, or have you ever been... signed to an independent label? Given away product for free? Performed for free? Well, guess what, you can't work for us you commie radical bastard!" And if that indy artist is doing something that the industry simply can't do without, they'll just come up with their own in-house artists who'll shamelessly copy the cutting edge sound and appropriate it. How many Pearl Jam clones can you count from the early 1990's?
It's cheaper for them to manufacture talents who essentially owe everything to their producers. Take 5 good-looking nobodies with some small measure of natural talent, dress them up, teach them a few dance moves, teach them to lip synch, promote the hell out of them and sit back and watch the money roll in. From their perspective, talent is disposable, and you can always find a replacement.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
This is true, but is undeniable that the company that owns the console is at a huge advantage, provided that development for that console is not open and there are no competing consoles to develop games for.
Look at the NES during the last half of the 80's. Nintendo *owned* the home videogame market, and locked out 3rd-party developers who would not submit to Nintendo's licensing policies. Basically Nintendo made a lot of money from these people for doing nothing (aside from providing a key to get past the lockout mechanism, and then slapping a "Seal of Quality" on the game, and endorsing the licensed developers instead of suing them like they sued Tengen. Something like 30% of the cost of a 3rd-party game actually went to Nintendo, not the actual developer.
Contrast this with the relationship Atari had with their 3rd party developers. When other companies first started developing games for the Atari 2600, Atari was pissed off and tried to sue, but they lost. They didn't have a means to lock out competing developers, so they just accepted that other people could make games for the 2600 and they wouldn't see any of the money from it. This resulted in the development of a huge library of games for the 2600, which enabled Atari to sell a lot of console units. But if they weren't making money directly off of the sale of the consoles, this would not have benefitted them at all.
In the 32-bit age and beyond, there has been a healthy amount of competition, with no one system dominating the market to the extent that the Atari 2600 or NES did in their respective primes. But if one company does come to dominate the console market, they will be able to dictate terms to developers such that they will make money from their efforts in the form of licensing fees, even though they're not doing any real work to deserve it. Nintendo tried to pull the same draconian licensing deals with the SNES and N64, but since the market had the Sega Genesis and the Sony Playstation, 3rd-party developers had other options, and they took their business elsewhere. The result was a significantly smaller library of games for the SNES and N64, and the overall quality of those games was less than it could have been if Nintendo hadn't alienated some of the first-tier developers (Square especially)
Clearly then, it is of great benefit to a company if they can completely control developer's access to their console, especially if they are the only game in town. Sony was close to this, given the less than spectacular market performance of the N64 and Sega Saturn. If another company had essentially opened up a viable alternative (such as Bleem! and other PSX emulators) which allowed compatibility for the console and took control away from Sony, this ruined their shot at becoming the monopoly that Nintendo was during the 80's.
Now that the PSX is reaching obsolescence there's little incentive for them to try to control the PSX platform, and in fact there's more incentive for them to open up the console to keep the game library alive for a bit longer until interest in it is relegated to a marginalized segment of retro-gamers. So (IMO) it's not that Sony has "wisened up" and decided to play nice and share the pie with everyone, they just recognize that the prize they were fighting for is now irrelevant, and it's no longer in their interest to persue the matter.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
One door closes and another opens. All those postage stamp designers who went on permanent layoff when email replaced snail mail will all have new jobs designing cover art for DataPlay albums.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
This sounds an awful lot like that GWB (or was it Dan Quayle?) quote, "It's not pollution that's harming the environment; it's the impurities in our air and water that's doing it." Don't you think?
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
I'm kindof sick of hearing about all the people who worry about people "playing God" or whether clones will "have souls" so here's a list of real ethical issues having to do with human cloning that I can think of, just off the top of my head.
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Why is it whenever someone articulates an anti-military/pro-peace sentiment, and someone else responds to it with a pro-military/war-as-necessary-evil sentiment, can the second person never "get it" that the first person isn't just wishing for the elimination of the military forces of one side, but of all sides?
Granted that that's never going to happen, but still... the pro-military people always think that an anti-military person wants the elimination of their own armies, leaving their country vulnerable to invasion from outside armies. They don't want that. No one wants that. They want all armies to go away, and no one to ever invade anywhere. I mean, yeah, that's unrealistic. But the pro-military camp always attacks the pacifist's patriotism and committment to their country, and only seldom their sense of realism.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!