Clear Channel, in addition to owning about half of the commercial radio stations in the USA, owns almost all the music venues (including first refusal rights on public arenas in most US cities), almost all of the ticket distribution companies (such as Ticketron), and about half of the outdoor billboards in the USA.
Musicians are told in no uncertain terms that they will accept the performance contracts offered to them regarding the percentage of gate admissions and band items like T-shirts that they will receive by Clear Channel. Or, their music will not get airplay. This is in addition to the fees that are charged to the 'hit men', the independent promoters, to 'consider' playing the record on the air of a Clear Channel FM station.
The musicians are, of course, charged the cost of this payola from their record company royalities, after, of course, the record companies take the expenses for producing the record. If the musicians refuse to use the hyper-expensive producers that the record company insists upon, the record company has the right, in the standard artist's recording contract, to refuse to accept the record as a part of the contract.
All this means that musicians are the dumbest and most exploited people in the working world. In everything they do, except have sex with groupies, they are losers.
People used to look up to musicians as truly cool people and some younger people still do. But in reality, they are to be pitied because they are stupid and have agreed to be locked into a contract that makes them permanent losers, regardless of how many records they sell, how interesting their music is, or how good that they look.
Musicians are like the guy who shoots himself to show his girlfriend that he can't live without her. He severs his spine and has to live the rest of his life in a cheap wheelchair with a piss-bag hanging over the side.
Do you feel sorry for him? Of course; on an elemental human level. Is he responsible for his condition? Fuck yes, he shot himself.
Musicians are also responsible for their exploitation. Only in their case, we can help them and others who would dream of becoming musicians, by refusing to give them any more money!
So yes, you have my permission to copy and distribute any music or so-called intellectual property that you want to.
A thousand or so years ago the Holy Roman Emperor had a disagreement with the Pope.
"Fuck the pope," said Emperor Hildebrand. "I control the land, the armies, the food, the markets, the people, everything. All he controls is the church."
The pope told the priests to tell the people that they would be excommunicated and go to hell if they obeyed the Emperor instead of the church. Six months later, Emperor Hildebrand was begging the Pope to allow him to administer the churches' 'guidance' in politics. The Pope was so mad that he made Hildebrand walk barefoot in the snow until his feet were frozen and had to be amputated.
This matters today because although Brussels controls the government, Microsoft controls the operating system that EVERYBODY depends on to feed their families and bring order to their lives. Microsoft will win this one because there is no realistic alternative to Windows. Linux is simply not ready yet.
Microsoft depends of the government to enforce their monopoly. The government runs its day-to-day business on Microsoft's operating system. Especially the court system that is expected to enforce the Eurocrat's anti-monopoly media posturing.
Neither side is going to do anything that would seriously affect was is basically a symbiotic relationship. Both sides need each other to operate; and their mutual continuous operation is far more important to both of them than any legal or juridictual platitudes.
This will just go on forever and do nothing except enrichen European law firms. It's exactly like the US government vs. IBM lawsuit of the 1970s that went on for over ten years, cost both sides hundreds of millions, and just ended one day when, out of the blue, Ronald Reagon just dropped the case by executive order in a three-sentence memo in 1981.
A fine that large is a symbolic action. A fine of $650,000 would seriously expect to be received by the government. But a $650 million fine is just something that governments levy on a major corporation to get their attention. It's not something that they would actually expect to ever receive.
It's sort of like those $250,000 fines that the RIAA charges some 13-year-old girl when they catch her downloading a Lindsey Lohan song.
Both Microsoft and the European Community government are new entities. Neither has the limits of their powers defined or tested.
Many people besides the programming community and the politicians are watching this fight as it will define how the other major oligopalistic corporations will deal with the EU bureaucrats in the future.
Microsoft needs the EU enforcement apparatice to maintain its monopoly and the European Union bureaucracy runs on Microsoft's software.
This whole showdown is a 'tempest in a teacup' or 'tussles in Brussels' and will die down to an endless Eurocratic paper shuffle that will never be fully resolved. It's the kind of money-making machine for upper-class European lawyers that Brussels is becoming world-famous for. It will become just one more of the million and one things that makes Europe less attractive to do business in. It will be 'resolved' in the same matter that all European Community business issues get resolved; with local flavor. In Italy by bribe, in Germany by rigorous preparation of ten thousand pages of chickenshit regulations, and in France by a nod and wink that enables the enarcs to get their customary payoffs and the rest of the people to bask in the 'gloire de la republic'; that is, series of substance-less but emotionally-charged gestures.
No, I didn't forget about Chicago. I believe that Chicago center is far enough away from the Wisconson and Indiana borders to regard the metro areas in the state border crossings to not really be part of the 'Chicago' experience. The metro areas merge because Chicagoland is so large, but it's not really Chicago or the a city that has a state border right through the city.
It could be just me, but it seems that Chicago is one of the least attractive cities in North America. The city center has some amazing buildings, but the rest of the city can be really, well, ugly. It's those long cold winters. The people are nice, which makes up for it.
Why does everyone on Slashdot assume that I'm a guy? Maybe just being here makes me an 'honorary' guy, or a guy in spirit and soul. Christ, you shouldn't even assume that I'm still alive.
Portland Oregon is a 1 million person metro area mostly in a state with no sales tax. About one quarter of the metro area is in Washington State with a 5% (I believe) sales tax and much lower state income tax.
Most people try to take advantage of this situation by residing in Washington and working in Washington State (if possible). Then they shop for durables in Oregon. Oregon's state income tax is quite high, much more so than WA. If you live in WA and work in OR, OR state makes you pay their income tax.
In a dual tax situation like this, the various governments watch everyone's financial situation closely to maximize their revenue. Everyone pays different amounts of tax. People who live in the no-sales-tax state are not required to pay sales tax on purchases of big-ticket items like cars that are bought in the sales tax state. One state has $15/yr car registration and the other has registration fees about ten times higher. There are also arrangements for college students not having to pay out-of-state tution to attend schools in the metro area that are technically out-of-state.
There aren't many metro areas that have state borders in the center of them. Kansas City, New York City, St. Louis, DC, Philly, Omaha, Cincinati. There are only two major metro areas with international borders cutting through them: El Paso and Detroit. Miami is one of the most important cities of Latin America even though it isn't actually in Latin America. It's a special case; everybody's neutral ground.
This tax situation is just going to get worse as the ultra-rich continue to pay a smaller percentage of their income to taxes through off-shore tax shelters and bribing state legislators to put specific loopholes for near individual situations into general laws. This is where someone introduces a law that no one would vote against (like making it illegal to expose your penis within 50 feet of an elementary school), and then puts a clause in the bill that would apply specifically to an individual large campaign contributor. The result of all this is that the tax burden gets shifted more each year from the rich to the middle-class.
The smarter elements of the middle class will use the internet to increasingly take advantage of offshore tax shelters on a much smaller scale. A company needs a network analyst. In the past they would hire someone to do this as an employee. In the future someone agrees to set up and maintain a network for $1500. The person sells an old Dell PC to the company for $1500. A bank in Luxembourg transfers $1500 to the network administrator's PayPal account. The network administrator uses her PayPal debit card to buy groceries and get cash-back after a day's work at the network site. The old Dell stays in the closet. No one pays tax.
This kind of thing is pretty transparent to a good government tax investigator. But when it becomes so common of a way of employment compensation that there are 100,000 cases a year for each government tax investigator, then there won't be much that the tax man can do to control it. There will always be some poor schmuck that gets slammed hard to set an example, just like the 12-year-old who gets slammed with a $150,000 fine for downloading a teen-idol pop song, but it will just be bad luck and its publicity will only increase the resolve of middle-class people to come up with new ways to not pay taxes.
Eventually all these huge budget-busting but mostly symbolic government projects like the Space Station, the BigDig, and Endless_Permanent_Middle-East_War will just be abandoned in mid-process due to lack of funds from decreasing tax revenues and the unwillingness of wealthy outsiders to lend money for some politician's wet-dream fantasy.
Answering surveys with bogus data doesn't work. The data is simply stored in huge data banks. Programs either now or the near future will filter out the bogus entries.
It would be a more important and civil act not to answer surveys with bogus data. The pundits, pollsters, advertisers and fraudsters are going to do what want regardless of public opinion and will manipulate the collected data to justify whatever position that they take from challengers.
Re:Free identity theft protection
on
ID Theft Made Easy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
My credit card company offered this very protection.
They included a preprinted check with my name on it for $5 ready for cashing. Pre-perforated and everything.
Way deep in the very small print on the back was the line that if I actually did cash this check, then I would be agreeing to have $69.95 automatically billed to my credit card each year for 'identity theft protection'.
Before this scam they sent me checks already made out to 'CASH' with my name and card number already preprinted on it. All I had to do was sign my name on the back and fill in the amount. I'm sure glad my sleazy meth-shooting junkie neighbors didn't find that one in my mailbox.
I wish that I could get all this nitwit chickenshit from the credit card companies to stop. I'd cancel the card, but I need it maybe once a year for car and hotel rentals.
Citi Corp. must make a ton of money off the American yahoos with all these schemes. Maybe even enough to cover the interest on all their bad loans to third world dictators enabling them to keep the Bongo Congo Mercedes dealership fat and happy.
It's a little disconcerting to see that no one has posted that Belgian surrealistic artist Rene Magritte did these type of images (painted canvas displaying background) back in the 1920s.
Don't you guys ever look through those big books of surrealistic art in bookstores and libraries? Much of the imagery that we consider 'weird' and 'futuristic' now was first conceived and painted back in the 1920s and 30s. Guys like Salvadore Dali, Yves Tanguy, Joan ('Ho-ahn') Miro, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte created the modern fantasy landscape look.
Their work was a step beyond the inflamed, blood-soaked, passionate, and sex-obsessed imagery of the 19th century Decadent Romanticists like Gustave Moreau, Klimt, and DeVille. It was this over-stimulated buffoonery led to the disaster of the Great War. Surrealism was an attempt to invoke the primal mental forces that lay beneath duty, religion, and even consciousness.
Since you'all have broadband you can find this images and paintings easily on the web. They are definitely worth the trouble to find and view them.
I hate sales tax and I like living here where there isn't any. You buy something for $99.95; give the clerk a hundred dollar bill; and get back a nickle and a 'thank you'.
To me sales taxes will always be associated with the unlamented sleazy California politician Willie Brown. In 1992, California's government ran out of money and had to resort to issueing 'registered warrants' instead of paychecks to government workers. Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the CA Legislature, 'proposed' raising the sales tax from 4.5% to 6%, (which was a nearly 35% arbitrary increase) and it was instantly approved. Then this weird schmuck Willie Brown gets on television and says, "What kind of person don't wanna pay two pennie to help the poor?"
Since California was in one of its periodic slumps and there was no growth in the economy that year, all the revenue that got transferred to the new sales tax came from depressed retail sales. Six months later, I read a interview with the California state economist where he noted that "a 1.5% rise in the sales tax resulted in a 17% decrease in sales tax revenue".
I nearly fell out of my chair. Was this guy so dumb that he thought that raising the tax rate from 4.5 to 6 was only a 1.5% increase? And since there was no growth in the economy and a sales tax increase, how could there not be a decrease in general sales when the price of everything went up to pay for the tax increase?
Anyway, I just glad to leave California. If your not a millionaire and in love, the place just sucks.
Getting down with Willie Brown! Willie Brown got a closet full of $1000 suits that's bigger than your $1000 a month studio apartment. Between Willie Brown and Jerry Brown, it's no wonder that the people of Oakland need so much crack to escape the reality of their pathetic government.
God, I am so happy to not live in California.
Even if laws don't exist yet to kill Open Source, the laws are coming if they threaten the big corporations.
When this happens, the open source community in the developed world will continue what they're doing quietly. Their code development won't stop: it will just not be implemented into businesses in the developed world (i.e. any country where the lawyers have more money than the industrialists).
However in the developing world, corporate lawyers don't have enough money to retard the development of industries that have the potential of making bigger payoffs to the politicians than the corporate lawyers do. In other words, the open source programs will be adopted by businesses and industries in the developing world regardless of the quasi-legal roadblocks that Microsoft uses to prevent OS use by businesses in the wealthy countries.
In countries that are rich enough to allow businesses to have the resources to both pay off the politicians and buy legal copies of Microsoft applications, businesses will allow Microsoft to control the laws applicable to open-source programs. In countries where businesses can't afford to pay off the politicians and buy legal Microsoft aps, the local governments will refuse to allow Microsoft to use the government's legal structures for that company's sole gain because the local politicians know that in the long run they will get more money in pay-offs from business that are using open-source software than they will from Microsoft.
When you can grasp the pay-off structures, then you can understand the how the law will be interpreted and applied in most situations.
There is nothing majestic and omnipresent about the Law. Underneath all the rhetoric about justice and order, the law is merely a means to facilate the flow of money to those who control the application of violence in a society. If they feel that you are not sending enough money their way, then they will direct their control of violence your way. This is the fundamental guiding principle of how the world works.
This applies in the developed world even more than the developing world, but in developed countries these primal forces are better hidden through patents, copyrights, and academic consultants.
Perhaps that should read "... chief designer from 1989 to 1996, a period where Apple saw its market share drop to near irrelevance".
Weren't these the same people Steve Jobs saved Apple from?
This is certainly a valid point, but it is essentially a 'red herring'. It's not the design of the machines that was responsible for Apple's fall in market share. On the contrary, the exempalry design kept the market share from falling further.
Apple's low market share is primarily due to its high price and relative lack of low-cost software. The lack of low-cost software is a direct result of Apple's refusal implement circuitry that runs 80x86 code in general and (to a lesser extent) Windows API calls. The fact that Apple's OS may or may not look, feel, and act better than Windows is irrelevant. The computer is too expensive and the peripherals are too expensive.
PC equipment is highly price sensitive. The only market for Apple equipment is in the fields where dollar value added to the work created by a personal computer greatly exceeds the higher cost of the computer equipment itself (including software). For everyone else, the Windows/Linux OS solution is good enough. The benefits of an Apple system are not worth the extra cost, either the lower cost of the CPU and peripheral and the cost of using the more expensive Apple application software.
For some reason known only to them, Apple chooses to have only a tiny market share of the PC industry. They are certainly smart enough to redefine the industry on their terms.
I go to the grocery store and the bill for my beer comes to $2.56. "Oh, two fifty six." I smile to the cashier, "That is the number two multiplied by itself eight times!"
She gives me that look like she's not sure if she calls security that they will have me on the floor at gunpoint before I explode.
You Americans, you know that look. Someone gives it to you every day.
Few would remember a name from a distant culture. But many would remember that there was a math genius from India in the early 1900's if they had heard his story once.
There was another genius like this, only he was a musical genius. There was an African-American slave in the mid-1800's who could play nearly anything on the piano after hearing it once or twice. He was a 'field slave', not a 'house slave'. He used to sneak up to the plantation manor house and listen to visiting musicians play Bach and Mozart on the piano. He was caught one night playing Bach on piano in the manor house and only escaped being whipped to death by his unbelievable talent. He also had the ability to sit down at the piano and play any chord that someone else had just played. He could do by ear.
His 'master', the plantation owner, took him on concert tours around the US, even to the North where this black genius was not a legally-owned slave and would have been able to receive politcal asylum and freedom. But he always returned to the plantation with the 'master', as he was illiterate and uncomfortable among the northern wealthy gentry.
I know that this guy existed; he was a genius whose type of talent appears only in one of ten million people, but I have no idea what his name was. Maybe some Slashdotters who are seriously into African-American musical history could let us know.
What does that mean? For example, whales or dolphins in the ocean that communicate with clicks and sub-audio rumbles that we don't understand as communication?
Communication with intelligence not from this planet? There is no evidence that this kind of intelligence exists, outside of science fiction, so is it a rhetorical question as to how to communicate with it.
Or, - the only real aliens that we seriously need to communicate with. Getting your truck stopped at gunpoint in the third world (like the on Baghdad - Mosul road or 200 kilometers south of Lima) and trying to convince the bunch of cold, wide-eyed 18-year-olds with AK-47s NOT to just kill you and leave your body off the side of the road.
Especially when they speak some language that you've never heard of and don't consider you to be a human being anyway.
This is the only situation where 'alien' communication skills becomes a matter of importance. It's the kind of thing that Americans should learn in school, instead of Algebra. After all, you are a lot more likely in the future to be held at gunpoint by the side of the road by 'aliens' than you are to ever use algebra.
I worked for five years for a company that made rapid prototyping milling machines for circuit boards.
The circuit board rapid prototyping machine was basically an X-Y plotter with a Dremell tool motor that moved up and down. It cut lines on the surface of a copper-coated fiberglass board.
The cheapest machine to do this still cost about $10,000. Plus you had to have the PCB all ready laid out and ready for manufacture. It was slow, loud, and difficult to calibrate. I did a rewrite of the manual in English in order to clarify lots of little details needed for efficient operation. My rewrite came to 40 pages. And this is just to make a simple circuit like an op-amp buffer.
The machine 'ate' milling tools like gumdrops, at about $17 each. One tiny mistake, and your board was toast. Our fearless leader couldn't grasp that our primary competition wasn't the other circuit board milling machine maker, it was SPICE and the offshore inexpensive board houses where you could e-mail your Gerber files and get back finished professional PCBs by FedEx letter within a few days at much less cost than the materials alone would cost for the milling machine.
A great idea and product turned into a dead-end job, a white-elephant product, and a brick wall of cement-head management.
The point is, any 'rapid prototyping' machine will have a long way to go before it does anything relevant and productive. It will be many decades before any machine attempting to claim to be a 'general-purpose' rapid-prototyping machine will be anything more than a very expensive laboratory curiosity; the subject of speculative psuedo-scientific articles just this side of the science-fiction line.
Compare the last Star Wars with Cast Away for CGI mastery. All the scenes on the deserted island were filmed in Southern California and all the visual artifacts of civilization were removed post-production.
I saw the last Star Wars in a bar-theater and the whole audience was stunned at the banality of the story. The CGI was impressive, especially after watching lots of rubber-mask SciFi on television (Star Trek Voyager).
But the story sucked. The first twenty minutes of the film was a flying car chase lifted directly from The Fifth Element that had been released five years earlier. There was another scene later where the young princess falls off a land cruiser going about 100 MPH. She just jumps up and starts chasing after it. The whole audience howled! The film was bad and only seemed reasonable when compared to its "competition" like that excreteable Planet of the Apes remake.
Methinks Mr. Lucas has simply run out of ideas and is getting deeply tired in his soul about having to be remembered in film history by this over-blown series of light pop space fantasy.
Star Wars was just supposed to be a step for Mr. Lucas. A project that provided finance and credibility for other projects that let him become the next Kurosawa. Instead it's become an albatross around his neck, an anchor that prevents him from doing mature work.
What was the successor to the CD format? MP3, a lower-quality format,...
I suspect that this not only applies to audio, but to everything that gets digitized.
The digital result is always poorer in quality than the original medium. But the advantages of digitization cause it be widely accepted, not as a replacement for the original medium, but as a powerful alternative.
For example, when the musical instruments are digitized by synthesizers and samplers. The result is always a poorer quality musical instrument than the original. But you can change the instrument by just pressing a button. And you can fit hundreds of instrument samples on a single small chip. The inexpensive plastic keyboard that plugs into a sampler will never be as good or expressive as a real piano, but you don't have to transport a piano to very many performances to see the advantage of having a sampler the size of a video cassette that sounds almost as good.
Purists can tell that CDs don't sound as good as vinyl records. But they're smaller, cheaper, and last longer. And sound much better in a $30 CD player than a vinyl record will sound on an old $30 turntable stereo. Again digitization reduced the quality of the medium, but it was accepted for its other advantages.
Writers used to feel an 'intimate connection' with their typewriters that they often didn't feel with PC word processor programs. No one today would spend ten minutes with a typewriter and claim that it's better than a word processor program.
The phenomenon is seen everywhere. Little handheld cell phone voice quality is nowhere near as good as 1960's Bell equipment. Watching a film on DVD is nowhere as good as seeing it in a movie theater. Inkjet prints of scanned photos are far inferior than the original photo. PDF files of chip datasheets pale when compared to a big thick Data Book on crisp, thin, bright white paper. Hacking through an airline website to plan a trip is a poor imitation of having a good and knowledgeable travel agent.
Digitization turns everything into crap. BUT, the advantages of connecting the results of digitization in ways that were inconceivable with the old media makes the results of digitization widely and gladly accepted.
The argument that Broadband downloading will greatly reduce the demand for DVDs is rather flawed. It assumes that Broadband will be widely adopted. It assumes that an extremely wide variety of movies will be available for download from somewhere. It assumes that entertainment consumers will prefer a pay-per-view format over a physical disk recording that costs the same or less.
None of these arguments are reasonable. {note to grammar eagles, I'm assuming the word 'none' is an adjective of the noun 'arguments' so the verb 'are' must be plural. Please don't tell me 'none is' should be the correct form.}.
-DVD players sell for $30-$50, which is less than a single month of broadband. DVDs sell for the same as a pizza.
-Studios are in the process of converting every film in their archives into DVDs for sale or rental. Speciality video stores in every city will have titles that will never be available on-line. Broadband pay-per-view will always have the Star Wars flick from two years ago, but suppose you want to see Brian De Palma's The Fury or the original version of Swept Away (which is so much better than Madonna's version)?
-A physical disk means something. It has value. You can play it over and over without damage. Stop it and play scenes again. Sell it, trade it, lend it. Broadband distribution of films will never have this characteristic.
DVD's are challenged not by Broadband pay-per-view, but by the physical limitations of getting the physical disks of ten of thousands of movie titles distributed. Partly this will need a change in mindset. Filmmakers have to be willing to distribute their work on DVD. They have to be willing to accept that the vast majority of people who will see their work will see it on a video screen, not in a theater.
For example, every year my fair city has a 'film festival'. Prints of a hundred or so films are brought from all over the world and shown once or twice in a local theater for $10 each admission. Then they disappear; most never to be seen again. Suppose for $10 you could buy a six-pack of DVDs of your selection from this list of 100 films. Rare and interesting films would get much wider distribution and acknowledgement.
This is where the natural advantages of the DVD format will become apparent. The people who say that Broadband pay-per-view will wipe out DVD in the near future are just making wild statements to get their names exposed in the media.
To my knowledge, it is extremely illegal to sell heroin in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam is the most important city. Perhaps you are confusing heroin with marijuana, which makes you an honorary Republican.
It is possible to get a license to sell marijuana in Amsterdam. It's a long and painstaking process. Marijuana gets sold in small outlets called 'coffeeshops' (English word) and coffee gets sold in a 'koffiehuis' (Dutch word). Sex shops are sometimes openly advertised as 'Fuck Houses' (public display of vulgar words in foreign languages is frowned on, but not illegal).
Some psycedelics like peyote and other sensitive drugs like organic Viagra (yohimbe) or intelligence-enhancers can be bought legally at 'Smart Shops'.
Nowhere in the Netherlands can a person just walk off the street and buy highly addictive drugs like crack cocaine, crystal meth, or heroin. There MAY be government programs to provide heroin to addicts under controlled conditions and monitoring, but no one legally sells it in licensed shops.
Let's see a small (8cm x 3cm x 1cm) device that has an FM tuner that can be set to record (in OGG and/or MP3) several hours of FM broadcasts at user-settable times. Then be able to play it back and skip back/forth 15-second intervals to fast-forward or replay sections.
The headphone connector would also act as an RS-232 to connect to the PC in order to download the MP3 recordings and adjust the recording times along with other parameters. It would switch between logic level and audio by testing the impedance level of the load (8 ohms for speakers vs. high impedance for RS232).
It should cost $39.95 US and be shock-resistant so it wouldn't break if dropped.
Sony? Whatever. Whoever makes it, we will buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Clear Channel, in addition to owning about half of the commercial radio stations in the USA, owns almost all the music venues (including first refusal rights on public arenas in most US cities), almost all of the ticket distribution companies (such as Ticketron), and about half of the outdoor billboards in the USA.
Musicians are told in no uncertain terms that they will accept the performance contracts offered to them regarding the percentage of gate admissions and band items like T-shirts that they will receive by Clear Channel. Or, their music will not get airplay. This is in addition to the fees that are charged to the 'hit men', the independent promoters, to 'consider' playing the record on the air of a Clear Channel FM station.
The musicians are, of course, charged the cost of this payola from their record company royalities, after, of course, the record companies take the expenses for producing the record. If the musicians refuse to use the hyper-expensive producers that the record company insists upon, the record company has the right, in the standard artist's recording contract, to refuse to accept the record as a part of the contract.
All this means that musicians are the dumbest and most exploited people in the working world. In everything they do, except have sex with groupies, they are losers.
People used to look up to musicians as truly cool people and some younger people still do. But in reality, they are to be pitied because they are stupid and have agreed to be locked into a contract that makes them permanent losers, regardless of how many records they sell, how interesting their music is, or how good that they look.
Musicians are like the guy who shoots himself to show his girlfriend that he can't live without her. He severs his spine and has to live the rest of his life in a cheap wheelchair with a piss-bag hanging over the side.
Do you feel sorry for him? Of course; on an elemental human level. Is he responsible for his condition? Fuck yes, he shot himself.
Musicians are also responsible for their exploitation. Only in their case, we can help them and others who would dream of becoming musicians, by refusing to give them any more money!
So yes, you have my permission to copy and distribute any music or so-called intellectual property that you want to.
The comment that Canadians speak much the same as Americans is quite true, for most of Canada.
In other parts of Canada, on parle tres different de les Americains. eh?
Canada is one country and two nations.
A thousand or so years ago the Holy Roman Emperor had a disagreement with the Pope.
"Fuck the pope," said Emperor Hildebrand. "I control the land, the armies, the food, the markets, the people, everything. All he controls is the church."
The pope told the priests to tell the people that they would be excommunicated and go to hell if they obeyed the Emperor instead of the church. Six months later, Emperor Hildebrand was begging the Pope to allow him to administer the churches' 'guidance' in politics. The Pope was so mad that he made Hildebrand walk barefoot in the snow until his feet were frozen and had to be amputated.
This matters today because although Brussels controls the government, Microsoft controls the operating system that EVERYBODY depends on to feed their families and bring order to their lives. Microsoft will win this one because there is no realistic alternative to Windows. Linux is simply not ready yet.
Microsoft depends of the government to enforce their monopoly. The government runs its day-to-day business on Microsoft's operating system. Especially the court system that is expected to enforce the Eurocrat's anti-monopoly media posturing.
Neither side is going to do anything that would seriously affect was is basically a symbiotic relationship. Both sides need each other to operate; and their mutual continuous operation is far more important to both of them than any legal or juridictual platitudes.
This will just go on forever and do nothing except enrichen European law firms. It's exactly like the US government vs. IBM lawsuit of the 1970s that went on for over ten years, cost both sides hundreds of millions, and just ended one day when, out of the blue, Ronald Reagon just dropped the case by executive order in a three-sentence memo in 1981.
A fine that large is a symbolic action. A fine of $650,000 would seriously expect to be received by the government. But a $650 million fine is just something that governments levy on a major corporation to get their attention. It's not something that they would actually expect to ever receive.
It's sort of like those $250,000 fines that the RIAA charges some 13-year-old girl when they catch her downloading a Lindsey Lohan song.
It's not a serious fine, it's a media stunt.
Both Microsoft and the European Community government are new entities. Neither has the limits of their powers defined or tested.
Many people besides the programming community and the politicians are watching this fight as it will define how the other major oligopalistic corporations will deal with the EU bureaucrats in the future.
Microsoft needs the EU enforcement apparatice to maintain its monopoly and the European Union bureaucracy runs on Microsoft's software.
This whole showdown is a 'tempest in a teacup' or 'tussles in Brussels' and will die down to an endless Eurocratic paper shuffle that will never be fully resolved. It's the kind of money-making machine for upper-class European lawyers that Brussels is becoming world-famous for. It will become just one more of the million and one things that makes Europe less attractive to do business in. It will be 'resolved' in the same matter that all European Community business issues get resolved; with local flavor. In Italy by bribe, in Germany by rigorous preparation of ten thousand pages of chickenshit regulations, and in France by a nod and wink that enables the enarcs to get their customary payoffs and the rest of the people to bask in the 'gloire de la republic'; that is, series of substance-less but emotionally-charged gestures.
No, I didn't forget about Chicago. I believe that Chicago center is far enough away from the Wisconson and Indiana borders to regard the metro areas in the state border crossings to not really be part of the 'Chicago' experience. The metro areas merge because Chicagoland is so large, but it's not really Chicago or the a city that has a state border right through the city.
It could be just me, but it seems that Chicago is one of the least attractive cities in North America. The city center has some amazing buildings, but the rest of the city can be really, well, ugly. It's those long cold winters. The people are nice, which makes up for it.
Why does everyone on Slashdot assume that I'm a guy? Maybe just being here makes me an 'honorary' guy, or a guy in spirit and soul. Christ, you shouldn't even assume that I'm still alive.
Portland Oregon is a 1 million person metro area mostly in a state with no sales tax. About one quarter of the metro area is in Washington State with a 5% (I believe) sales tax and much lower state income tax.
Most people try to take advantage of this situation by residing in Washington and working in Washington State (if possible). Then they shop for durables in Oregon. Oregon's state income tax is quite high, much more so than WA. If you live in WA and work in OR, OR state makes you pay their income tax.
In a dual tax situation like this, the various governments watch everyone's financial situation closely to maximize their revenue. Everyone pays different amounts of tax. People who live in the no-sales-tax state are not required to pay sales tax on purchases of big-ticket items like cars that are bought in the sales tax state. One state has $15/yr car registration and the other has registration fees about ten times higher. There are also arrangements for college students not having to pay out-of-state tution to attend schools in the metro area that are technically out-of-state.
There aren't many metro areas that have state borders in the center of them. Kansas City, New York City, St. Louis, DC, Philly, Omaha, Cincinati. There are only two major metro areas with international borders cutting through them: El Paso and Detroit. Miami is one of the most important cities of Latin America even though it isn't actually in Latin America. It's a special case; everybody's neutral ground.
This tax situation is just going to get worse as the ultra-rich continue to pay a smaller percentage of their income to taxes through off-shore tax shelters and bribing state legislators to put specific loopholes for near individual situations into general laws. This is where someone introduces a law that no one would vote against (like making it illegal to expose your penis within 50 feet of an elementary school), and then puts a clause in the bill that would apply specifically to an individual large campaign contributor. The result of all this is that the tax burden gets shifted more each year from the rich to the middle-class.
The smarter elements of the middle class will use the internet to increasingly take advantage of offshore tax shelters on a much smaller scale. A company needs a network analyst. In the past they would hire someone to do this as an employee. In the future someone agrees to set up and maintain a network for $1500. The person sells an old Dell PC to the company for $1500. A bank in Luxembourg transfers $1500 to the network administrator's PayPal account. The network administrator uses her PayPal debit card to buy groceries and get cash-back after a day's work at the network site. The old Dell stays in the closet. No one pays tax.
This kind of thing is pretty transparent to a good government tax investigator. But when it becomes so common of a way of employment compensation that there are 100,000 cases a year for each government tax investigator, then there won't be much that the tax man can do to control it. There will always be some poor schmuck that gets slammed hard to set an example, just like the 12-year-old who gets slammed with a $150,000 fine for downloading a teen-idol pop song, but it will just be bad luck and its publicity will only increase the resolve of middle-class people to come up with new ways to not pay taxes.
Eventually all these huge budget-busting but mostly symbolic government projects like the Space Station, the BigDig, and Endless_Permanent_Middle-East_War will just be abandoned in mid-process due to lack of funds from decreasing tax revenues and the unwillingness of wealthy outsiders to lend money for some politician's wet-dream fantasy.
Answering surveys with bogus data doesn't work. The data is simply stored in huge data banks. Programs either now or the near future will filter out the bogus entries.
It would be a more important and civil act not to answer surveys with bogus data. The pundits, pollsters, advertisers and fraudsters are going to do what want regardless of public opinion and will manipulate the collected data to justify whatever position that they take from challengers.
My credit card company offered this very protection.
They included a preprinted check with my name on it for $5 ready for cashing. Pre-perforated and everything.
Way deep in the very small print on the back was the line that if I actually did cash this check, then I would be agreeing to have $69.95 automatically billed to my credit card each year for 'identity theft protection'.
Before this scam they sent me checks already made out to 'CASH' with my name and card number already preprinted on it. All I had to do was sign my name on the back and fill in the amount.
I'm sure glad my sleazy meth-shooting junkie neighbors didn't find that one in my mailbox.
I wish that I could get all this nitwit chickenshit from the credit card companies to stop. I'd cancel the card, but I need it maybe once a year for car and hotel rentals.
Citi Corp. must make a ton of money off the American yahoos with all these schemes. Maybe even enough to cover the interest on all their bad loans to third world dictators enabling them to keep the Bongo Congo Mercedes dealership fat and happy.
It's a little disconcerting to see that no one has posted that Belgian surrealistic artist Rene Magritte did these type of images (painted canvas displaying background) back in the 1920s.
Don't you guys ever look through those big books of surrealistic art in bookstores and libraries? Much of the imagery that we consider 'weird' and 'futuristic' now was first conceived and painted back in the 1920s and 30s. Guys like Salvadore Dali, Yves Tanguy, Joan ('Ho-ahn') Miro, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte created the modern fantasy landscape look.
Their work was a step beyond the inflamed, blood-soaked, passionate, and sex-obsessed imagery of the 19th century Decadent Romanticists like Gustave Moreau, Klimt, and DeVille. It was this over-stimulated buffoonery led to the disaster of the Great War. Surrealism was an attempt to invoke the primal mental forces that lay beneath duty, religion, and even consciousness.
Since you'all have broadband you can find this images and paintings easily on the web. They are definitely worth the trouble to find and view them.
I hate sales tax and I like living here where there isn't any. You buy something for $99.95; give the clerk a hundred dollar bill; and get back a nickle and a 'thank you'.
To me sales taxes will always be associated with the unlamented sleazy California politician Willie Brown. In 1992, California's government ran out of money and had to resort to issueing 'registered warrants' instead of paychecks to government workers. Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the CA Legislature, 'proposed' raising the sales tax from 4.5% to 6%, (which was a nearly 35% arbitrary increase) and it was instantly approved. Then this weird schmuck Willie Brown gets on television and says, "What kind of person don't wanna pay two pennie to help the poor?"
Since California was in one of its periodic slumps and there was no growth in the economy that year, all the revenue that got transferred to the new sales tax came from depressed retail sales. Six months later, I read a interview with the California state economist where he noted that "a 1.5% rise in the sales tax resulted in a 17% decrease in sales tax revenue".
I nearly fell out of my chair. Was this guy so dumb that he thought that raising the tax rate from 4.5 to 6 was only a 1.5% increase? And since there was no growth in the economy and a sales tax increase, how could there not be a decrease in general sales when the price of everything went up to pay for the tax increase?
Anyway, I just glad to leave California. If your not a millionaire and in love, the place just sucks.
Getting down with Willie Brown! Willie Brown got a closet full of $1000 suits that's bigger than your $1000 a month studio apartment. Between Willie Brown and Jerry Brown, it's no wonder that the people of Oakland need so much crack to escape the reality of their pathetic government.
God, I am so happy to not live in California.
Don't forget Krychek, from The X Files. He was rogue FBI, so I guess that counts as a cop show.
Even if laws don't exist yet to kill Open Source, the laws are coming if they threaten the big corporations.
When this happens, the open source community in the developed world will continue what they're doing quietly. Their code development won't stop: it will just not be implemented into businesses in the developed world (i.e. any country where the lawyers have more money than the industrialists).
However in the developing world, corporate lawyers don't have enough money to retard the development of industries that have the potential of making bigger payoffs to the politicians than the corporate lawyers do. In other words, the open source programs will be adopted by businesses and industries in the developing world regardless of the quasi-legal roadblocks that Microsoft uses to prevent OS use by businesses in the wealthy countries.
In countries that are rich enough to allow businesses to have the resources to both pay off the politicians and buy legal copies of Microsoft applications, businesses will allow Microsoft to control the laws applicable to open-source programs. In countries where businesses can't afford to pay off the politicians and buy legal Microsoft aps, the local governments will refuse to allow Microsoft to use the government's legal structures for that company's sole gain because the local politicians know that in the long run they will get more money in pay-offs from business that are using open-source software than they will from Microsoft.
When you can grasp the pay-off structures, then you can understand the how the law will be interpreted and applied in most situations.
There is nothing majestic and omnipresent about the Law. Underneath all the rhetoric about justice and order, the law is merely a means to facilate the flow of money to those who control the application of violence in a society. If they feel that you are not sending enough money their way, then they will direct their control of violence your way. This is the fundamental guiding principle of how the world works.
This applies in the developed world even more than the developing world, but in developed countries these primal forces are better hidden through patents, copyrights, and academic consultants.
If you want to see how different Swedish is from English, go to Stockholm.
If you want to see how similar Swedish is to English, go to Helsinki.
Perhaps that should read "... chief designer from 1989 to 1996, a period where Apple saw its market share drop to near irrelevance".
Weren't these the same people Steve Jobs saved Apple from?
This is certainly a valid point, but it is essentially a 'red herring'. It's not the design of the machines that was responsible for Apple's fall in market share. On the contrary, the exempalry design kept the market share from falling further.
Apple's low market share is primarily due to its high price and relative lack of low-cost software. The lack of low-cost software is a direct result of Apple's refusal implement circuitry that runs 80x86 code in general and (to a lesser extent) Windows API calls. The fact that Apple's OS may or may not look, feel, and act better than Windows is irrelevant. The computer is too expensive and the peripherals are too expensive.
PC equipment is highly price sensitive. The only market for Apple equipment is in the fields where dollar value added to the work created by a personal computer greatly exceeds the higher cost of the computer equipment itself (including software). For everyone else, the Windows/Linux OS solution is good enough. The benefits of an Apple system are not worth the extra cost, either the lower cost of the CPU and peripheral and the cost of using the more expensive Apple application software.
For some reason known only to them, Apple chooses to have only a tiny market share of the PC industry. They are certainly smart enough to redefine the industry on their terms.
I go to the grocery store and the bill for my beer comes to $2.56.
"Oh, two fifty six." I smile to the cashier, "That is the number two multiplied by itself eight times!"
She gives me that look like she's not sure if she calls security that they will have me on the floor at gunpoint before I explode.
You Americans, you know that look. Someone gives it to you every day.
Few would remember a name from a distant culture. But many would remember that there was a math genius from India in the early 1900's if they had heard his story once.
There was another genius like this, only he was a musical genius. There was an African-American slave in the mid-1800's who could play nearly anything on the piano after hearing it once or twice. He was a 'field slave', not a 'house slave'. He used to sneak up to the plantation manor house and listen to visiting musicians play Bach and Mozart on the piano. He was caught one night playing Bach on piano in the manor house and only escaped being whipped to death by his unbelievable talent. He also had the ability to sit down at the piano and play any chord that someone else had just played. He could do by ear.
His 'master', the plantation owner, took him on concert tours around the US, even to the North where this black genius was not a legally-owned slave and would have been able to receive politcal asylum and freedom. But he always returned to the plantation with the 'master', as he was illiterate and uncomfortable among the northern wealthy gentry.
I know that this guy existed; he was a genius whose type of talent appears only in one of ten million people, but I have no idea what his name was. Maybe some Slashdotters who are seriously into African-American musical history could let us know.
'Alien intelligence'
What does that mean? For example, whales or dolphins in the ocean that communicate with clicks and sub-audio rumbles that we don't understand as communication?
Communication with intelligence not from this planet? There is no evidence that this kind of intelligence exists, outside of science fiction, so is it a rhetorical question as to how to communicate with it.
Or, - the only real aliens that we seriously need to communicate with. Getting your truck stopped at gunpoint in the third world (like the on Baghdad - Mosul road or 200 kilometers south of Lima) and trying to convince the bunch of cold, wide-eyed 18-year-olds with AK-47s NOT to just kill you and leave your body off the side of the road.
Especially when they speak some language that you've never heard of and don't consider you to be a human being anyway.
This is the only situation where 'alien' communication skills becomes a matter of importance. It's the kind of thing that Americans should learn in school, instead of Algebra. After all, you are a lot more likely in the future to be held at gunpoint by the side of the road by 'aliens' than you are to ever use algebra.
I worked for five years for a company that made rapid prototyping milling machines for circuit boards.
The circuit board rapid prototyping machine was basically an X-Y plotter with a Dremell tool motor that moved up and down. It cut lines on the surface of a copper-coated fiberglass board.
The cheapest machine to do this still cost about $10,000. Plus you had to have the PCB all ready laid out and ready for manufacture. It was slow, loud, and difficult to calibrate. I did a rewrite of the manual in English in order to clarify lots of little details needed for efficient operation. My rewrite came to 40 pages. And this is just to make a simple circuit like an op-amp buffer.
The machine 'ate' milling tools like gumdrops, at about $17 each. One tiny mistake, and your board was toast. Our fearless leader couldn't grasp that our primary competition wasn't the other circuit board milling machine maker, it was SPICE and the offshore inexpensive board houses where you could e-mail your Gerber files and get back finished professional PCBs by FedEx letter within a few days at much less cost than the materials alone would cost for the milling machine.
A great idea and product turned into a dead-end job, a white-elephant product, and a brick wall of cement-head management.
The point is, any 'rapid prototyping' machine will have a long way to go before it does anything relevant and productive. It will be many decades before any machine attempting to claim to be a 'general-purpose' rapid-prototyping machine will be anything more than a very expensive laboratory curiosity; the subject of speculative psuedo-scientific articles just this side of the science-fiction line.
Compare the last Star Wars with Cast Away for CGI mastery. All the scenes on the deserted island were filmed in Southern California and all the visual artifacts of civilization were removed post-production.
I saw the last Star Wars in a bar-theater and the whole audience was stunned at the banality of the story. The CGI was impressive, especially after watching lots of rubber-mask SciFi on television (Star Trek Voyager).
But the story sucked. The first twenty minutes of the film was a flying car chase lifted directly from The Fifth Element that had been released five years earlier. There was another scene later where the young princess falls off a land cruiser going about 100 MPH. She just jumps up and starts chasing after it. The whole audience howled! The film was bad and only seemed reasonable when compared to its "competition" like that excreteable Planet of the Apes remake.
Methinks Mr. Lucas has simply run out of ideas and is getting deeply tired in his soul about having to be remembered in film history by this over-blown series of light pop space fantasy.
Star Wars was just supposed to be a step for Mr. Lucas. A project that provided finance and credibility for other projects that let him become the next Kurosawa. Instead it's become an albatross around his neck, an anchor that prevents him from doing mature work.
What was the successor to the CD format? MP3, a lower-quality format,...
I suspect that this not only applies to audio, but to everything that gets digitized.
The digital result is always poorer in quality than the original medium. But the advantages of digitization cause it be widely accepted, not as a replacement for the original medium, but as a powerful alternative.
For example, when the musical instruments are digitized by synthesizers and samplers. The result is always a poorer quality musical instrument than the original. But you can change the instrument by just pressing a button. And you can fit hundreds of instrument samples on a single small chip. The inexpensive plastic keyboard that plugs into a sampler will never be as good or expressive as a real piano, but you don't have to transport a piano to very many performances to see the advantage of having a sampler the size of a video cassette that sounds almost as good.
Purists can tell that CDs don't sound as good as vinyl records. But they're smaller, cheaper, and last longer. And sound much better in a $30 CD player than a vinyl record will sound on an old $30 turntable stereo. Again digitization reduced the quality of the medium, but it was accepted for its other advantages.
Writers used to feel an 'intimate connection' with their typewriters that they often didn't feel with PC word processor programs. No one today would spend ten minutes with a typewriter and claim that it's better than a word processor program.
The phenomenon is seen everywhere. Little handheld cell phone voice quality is nowhere near as good as 1960's Bell equipment. Watching a film on DVD is nowhere as good as seeing it in a movie theater. Inkjet prints of scanned photos are far inferior than the original photo. PDF files of chip datasheets pale when compared to a big thick Data Book on crisp, thin, bright white paper. Hacking through an airline website to plan a trip is a poor imitation of having a good and knowledgeable travel agent.
Digitization turns everything into crap. BUT, the advantages of connecting the results of digitization in ways that were inconceivable with the old media makes the results of digitization widely and gladly accepted.
The argument that Broadband downloading will greatly reduce the demand for DVDs is rather flawed. It assumes that Broadband will be widely adopted. It assumes that an extremely wide variety of movies will be available for download from somewhere. It assumes that entertainment consumers will prefer a pay-per-view format over a physical disk recording that costs the same or less.
None of these arguments are reasonable. {note to grammar eagles, I'm assuming the word 'none' is an adjective of the noun 'arguments' so the verb 'are' must be plural. Please don't tell me 'none is' should be the correct form.}.
-DVD players sell for $30-$50, which is less than a single month of broadband. DVDs sell for the same as a pizza.
-Studios are in the process of converting every film in their archives into DVDs for sale or rental. Speciality video stores in every city will have titles that will never be available on-line. Broadband pay-per-view will always have the Star Wars flick from two years ago, but suppose you want to see Brian De Palma's The Fury or the original version of Swept Away (which is so much better than Madonna's version)?
-A physical disk means something. It has value. You can play it over and over without damage. Stop it and play scenes again. Sell it, trade it, lend it. Broadband distribution of films will never have this characteristic.
DVD's are challenged not by Broadband pay-per-view, but by the physical limitations of getting the physical disks of ten of thousands of movie titles distributed. Partly this will need a change in mindset. Filmmakers have to be willing to distribute their work on DVD. They have to be willing to accept that the vast majority of people who will see their work will see it on a video screen, not in a theater.
For example, every year my fair city has a 'film festival'. Prints of a hundred or so films are brought from all over the world and shown once or twice in a local theater for $10 each admission. Then they disappear; most never to be seen again. Suppose for $10 you could buy a six-pack of DVDs of your selection from this list of 100 films. Rare and interesting films would get much wider distribution and acknowledgement.
This is where the natural advantages of the DVD format will become apparent. The people who say that Broadband pay-per-view will wipe out DVD in the near future are just making wild statements to get their names exposed in the media.
To my knowledge, it is extremely illegal to sell heroin in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam is the most important city. Perhaps you are confusing heroin with marijuana, which makes you an honorary Republican.
It is possible to get a license to sell marijuana in Amsterdam. It's a long and painstaking process. Marijuana gets sold in small outlets called 'coffeeshops' (English word) and coffee gets sold in a 'koffiehuis' (Dutch word). Sex shops are sometimes openly advertised as 'Fuck Houses' (public display of vulgar words in foreign languages is frowned on, but not illegal).
Some psycedelics like peyote and other sensitive drugs like organic Viagra (yohimbe) or intelligence-enhancers can be bought legally at 'Smart Shops'.
Nowhere in the Netherlands can a person just walk off the street and buy highly addictive drugs like crack cocaine, crystal meth, or heroin. There MAY be government programs to provide heroin to addicts under controlled conditions and monitoring, but no one legally sells it in licensed shops.
Thank you,
Let's see a small (8cm x 3cm x 1cm) device that has an FM tuner that can be set to record (in OGG and/or MP3) several hours of FM broadcasts at user-settable times. Then be able to play it back and skip back/forth 15-second intervals to fast-forward or replay sections.
The headphone connector would also act as an RS-232 to connect to the PC in order to download the MP3 recordings and adjust the recording times along with other parameters. It would switch between logic level and audio by testing the impedance level of the load (8 ohms for speakers vs. high impedance for RS232).
It should cost $39.95 US and be shock-resistant so it wouldn't break if dropped.
Sony? Whatever. Whoever makes it, we will buy it.