but why on earth would a non-AOL user want to use an AOL-branded version of IE?
When my Opera 7.0 browser coupled with ZoneAlarm firewall wouldn't work with eBay regarding of hours spent diddling the parameters and rebooting, the eBay rep said to use IE 6.0 to access eBay without trouble.
Well I had IE5 and two choices. I could download for hours or go out and get that AOL disk that I noticed earlier in the dumpster.
The AOL disk had IE6 on it that was customized for AOL ease-of-use. The combination of AOL IE6 and ZoneAlarm did not work, but by turning off the firewall I have been able to get on to eBay and trade without too many problems.
I will switch to Linux as soon as someone explains clearly and simply how to get online and interface with eBay with it. I won't spend hours dicking around trying to get it to work by myself. With IE-Windows, it already works. It just doesn't work well. And I don't really believe any more that it would work better with Linux without my putting in hundreds of hours of study. Who's going to pay me for that? You?
I'm moving towards 'collections'
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 1
I don't know what the industry is doing, but I'm moving towards collections.
These are DVD-ROMs or even Hard Drives that have 70 or so albums on a DVD or several hundred albums on a old hard drive. These aren't just random musical albums, but related titles.
It goes without saying that the only money changing hands is for the medium. No copyright fees, no rentals, no payments to the 'artists' or the global media corporations, no payments except the cost of the media.
And the media is cheap. Blank DVD ROMs hit $0.30 (US) each last week at Fry's Electronics, cheap enough to trade. 30 gig hard disks sell in the $30 range.
Collections are a really good way to get exposure to lots of 'long tail' artists. The article was well-reseached and well-thought-out, but it ignored the central but often unspoken truth of the digital media age: the price to the consumer for digital content has fallen many orders of magnitude compared to content on older analog media. The fact that this is currently illegal doesn't really change anything. The laws were custom written by the global media companies for their continued enrichment during the transision to the digital age. When the global media companies disappear, the copyright laws will also. And orders-of-magnitude cost and profit reductions will make them disappear. It's just a matter of time.
If the media corporations go bankrupt, will the stream of new content and new artistic works disappear. To a great extent, yes. But it will mostly be the product of the stars. The real artists will continue to work and produce, however they will be compensated in quite different methods. Perhaps the new permanent class of super rich being created by current American policies will take to being patrons of individual artists in a manner similiar to the Medici's sponsorship of the artists of Florence in the 1400's. Maybe the church will fund the recordings of great rock musicians in order to revive the faith amoung the young. Who knows? The only thing that seems certain is that the five global media companies will go bankrupt within about 20 years at most. Don't invest your life savings in them.
In economics class, we were taught that with every list of options, there was always one and usually two that weren't listed. Those are:
one: Do nothing. Completely ignore the situation. Pretend that it doesn't exist. Let it resolve itself.
two: The option that would never occur for you to think of in a million years. The option that is beyond the collective imagination of those examining the problem.
In regards to North Korea, I personally would recommend the first option of doing nothing. I see this a basically an Asian problem that will eventually have a fundamentally Asian solution. Why should people in Oklahoma or Vermont be concerned about 'doing something' about Korea? What could they possibly do that wouldn't make the situation worse?
America's policy on Korea has been to just throw things at the place. Money, Bombs, Solders, Tough Talk, more money, more tough talk. Plus the Americans bring lots of Korean people into the US in order to resettle them into districts where they will tip the balance to Republicans after they become US citizens (in about seven years) and vote. In return, the Koreans send the Americans the occasional lunatic preacher whenever they suspect that the fundamentalists there are getting a little too 'touchy-feely' in their devotional fervor. Then we end up having to deprogram a new set of young people all over again.
South Korea is one of America's true successes. After the World War II they were as hopeless, as poor, and as threatened as Palestine is today. Now it's time for the Americans to shut up and learn from the Koreans about how to solve some of their own problems.
I'm holding out for a version of NewtonOS that runs under version 3.0 of AmigaOS running under emulation on my Atari ST.
I'm still waiting for my Timex-Sinclair 1000 emulator that runs on my Commodore 64.
There's so much that I've been planning to do and I'm been waiting for such a long time.
However, if you have Atari ST programs that you want to run on the Windows PC, the STeem emulator works quite well. There were a lot of MIDI synthesizer programs published only for the Atari ST. For example, voice editors for the various tone modules that were state-of-the-art twelve years ago and are still being bought and sold for moderate sums on eBay.
All that money on a Boston University degree and they never taught you the difference between "its" (a possessive adjective) and "it's" (a contraction of it is).
Worse, they never explained that simple grammer mistakes would negate the force of any written public argument. Nor, did they explain how to use widely-available computer tools to catch these little things before publishing.
I remember every day in October 1972 passing the BU main dorm near Kenmore Square where the students had placed huge individual letters in the windows of an upper floor of the building. The letters read "LICK DICK IN 72", a reference to the election of Richard Nixon at the time.
Actually all intoxicants should be legalized.
But it would not be the interest of public health to make freely available antibiotics. If they were freely, widely, and unprofessionally used, new resistant strains of dangerous bacteria would quickly evolve.
Fighting harmful bacteria is something like fighting the Borg, they always quickly adapt to whatever weapon that you're throwing at them.
Even the argument for legalizing strong addictive destructive intoxicants is debatable. If everyone were mentally balanced, intelligent, and middle class work-ethic oriented, it would be a 'yes'. But given the bell curve of the people out there, maybe, just maybe, cheap and easy heroin, crack, and meth isn't the most opportune method for handling these little treasures for society as a whole.
But then again, there are SO many surplus people now that the long-term consequences of cheap and easy H,C,M would be better than the current policy of severe illegality coupled with widespread distribution of these items. This policy is only good for the people who are making tons of money from investing in private prison corporations. Since we know that Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America contribute large amounts of money to Political Action Committees that push for ever-increasing sentencing for minor offences, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there was a backdoor channel to funnel profits from the sale of illegal intoxicants into the 'legitimate' investments in prison corporations.
Once you understand the American mind, you can't be shocked by their fundamental brutality-for-profit nature.
Not that your country would be really any different given the opportunity, it's just that America is the land of greater opportunity to be total assholes.
"Sky Captain and the World of Tommorow" is an excellent example of the basic Hollywood problem today.
It didn't make any money.
In fact it lost a ton of money.
Box Office Mojo website reports that this product costs $78 million US to produce and $28 million US to advertise and promote. Yet in the critical first two weeks of theatrical release, it has brought back only $25 million. Generally Hollywood movies now must bring in 1/2 of their production costs in the first weekend of release in order to be considered profitable in the long run.
This product was well-made and certainly has appeal to a segment of the audience, but it was essensially a vanity project between the star Jude Law and the art director.
The real problem here is that someone in the studio framework who should know better allowed a $100 million vanity project to get made. This seems to indicate that Hollywood is running out of ideas for product and are beginning to throw money at anything that has a star's enthusiasm.
Studios are supposed to the star's bullshit filters, not bullshit enablers.
This is just one sign that Hollywood is on the verge of a product crisis not unlike those that hit it both in the 1950's from television and the early 1970's from the counter-culture.
Iceland might consider becoming the world's library since the other aspects of their financials are changing. The fishing is not as good as it used to be and trans-Atlantic airplanes don't need refueling stops anymore.
So why not just become the center of world trading in 'copyrighted' materials and take a microcharge of each trade? They'll get kicked out of the EU? Hardly likely. Brussells can be really boring on a small Eurocrat's salary and full-price media product can be mighty expensive (and will definitely be going up in price).
Better Iceland become the world's library than Vanuatuu, because that little island could just disappear in a typhoon and take all the servers and storage with it.
Maybe, you say, no one should be the world's center of 'illegal' trade in 'copyrighted' materials. Nonsense, that is a spin fantasy of the media giants who need inexpensive unofficial downloads as much as they need full-service 'all-fees-paid' fully-legit product sales.
When five companies control most of the world's media, it doesn't really matter if people buy the product at full copyright-paid Western prices or discounted 'pirate' prices. Either way they get all the money eventually because they are the only game in town. It's more important that people consume ever-increasing amounts of corporate media product. The money will get back to them. That isn't the case when there are thousands of small and medium-sized media companies globally. However that situation no longer exists and the media executives should revise their overall concept of how this new global framework works.
In a sense the reference in the parent to secret underground terrorist religious organizations is apt because these groups are the primary competition to the global media companies, especially in the developing world where 2/3rds of the population is under the age of 25. Hollywood and religious fanaticism don't mix all that well in the long term. Both compete for the leisure time attention span (and the loyalities) of the billions of new young people. In America, corporate Hollywood won because in the current political alliance between the major corporations and the religious right the religious community has always been the weaker partner.
It occurs to me now that the city of Portland Oregon (metro population 1.1 million) was menaced by the last big eruption of Mt. St. Helen's in May 1980.
In that event, the entire north side of the mountain blew up in a explosion with force equal to many hydrogen bombs. Luckly the area devastated was wilderness forest. Only about 15 people lived in the several hundred square miles primarily affected.
However on the west side of the mountain, there was a nuclear power plant on the Columbia river about 50 miles (80 km) away. If the volcano had blown out through the west side of the mountain instead of the north side, there was the serious possiblility that the shock wave would have ruptured the reactor coolant tanks and damaged the control and safety systems. In a worst case, this could have led to the release of radioactive material into the last 50 miles of the Columbia river. The river would have been closed for shipping. Which means that the port of Portland would have been closed, stopping shipment of massive amounts of grain to Asia from the Pacific Northwest. It would have also caused the extinction of the fisheries, such as salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia.
Incredibly, during this entire pre-eruption period, the operaters of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant did not shut down the facility or take any precautions against earthquake damage. The plant is closed now after it was revealed that it lies directly over an earthquake fault, but the spent fuel rods are still stored there because there isn't any other place to put them.
At the time of the eruption, no one seemed to be aware of this possibility. Or, more likely, everyone just decided to keep really quiet.
The eruption was too bad because Mt. St. Helens was a perfect cone before the eruption. It looked like Mt. Fuji in Japan. Now it looks like a million-seat football stadium: a big hole with a circular ridge around half of it.
Perhaps putting micro-transmitters in the frame might help.
This would give the police the ability to track the picture right after it was stolen. But there is the risk that the thieves would know about this technique and cut the picture from the frame.
I'm a little concerned about the loss of large collections of priceless art due a bombing of a museum. This might be the destruction of the building with a bomb, missle, or aircraft. Or even the loss of the museum when the city around is destroyed by an atomic weapon.
It seems that there should be plans to get, say, a hundred paintings maybe several hundred feet underground within ten minutes should authorities determine that a nuclear event is imminent. Especially for the collections like the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence. Any of these invaluable collections could be lost forever just because some schumck found a quarter-pound of plutonium at a Russian garage-sale and decided that it was the 'will of Allah' to do such a horrible thing.
Please don't tell me that I'm prejudiced. You may have noticed that almost all of the truly horrible things that happen unprovoked in the world today happen because some asshole decided that it was the 'will of Allah' that such a thing should happen. We don't yet have any warning about these kind of actions. But an atomic bomb coming by ICBM will give us at least ten minutes warning even if we couldn't do anything to stop it. We might as well have the ability to protect things that are really important, like priceless art. It sounds extreme now, but it won't to the people looking at the paintings 500 or 1000 years in the future. Imagine if 'The Birth of Venus' by Botticelli had been burned by Savornella instead of having been hid for a few years.
Boy, it's a good thing that Slashdot wasn't around when Martin Luther King was leading civil rights marches.
We'd all still have 'colored' drinking fountains.
Flash mobs can work for basic freedoms when the political system is too corrupt or stagnant to respond to changes in the modern world.
Say you and your friends are tired of being arrested for possession of marijuana. You feel that if you're not disturbing the peace, it isn't anyone's business. And you feel that the people who do the arresting and prosecuting are just in it for the bribes and kickbacks from lawyers to the police and the judges, or they are making tons of money by investing in corporate prison systems.
So whenever you see or you be in 420 arrests happening, you send a flash bulletin. Many people who agree that this situation must change show up. They surround the arrest perimeter. They don't leave when ordered. They just aren't reasonable. A single arrest turns into a hundred arrests (for 'terrorism').
This happens over and over. It's not a one-time thing. Eventually, the authorities begin to get the message through their cement heads that the time has come for the situation to change.
It changes. No more 420 arrests; regardless of the 'law'.
This is not exactly how democracy is supposed to work, but it is the only way that does in corporate dictatorship (like where the people who make big bucks selling prescriptions to Marinol reinvest the money in corporate prisons, which are filled with (black) people serving time for being unable to come up with the money to bribe the judge, ahh... excuse me, for 'using drugs').
Even under the present absurd USA copyright laws this is clearly protected as parody.
- The audio is off and the audience is providing commentary.
- The film is thirty years old and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. It is outside of the copyright period in effect at the time of the film's initial release.
- A film seen by so many people becomes public domain as a result of having entered the cultural consciousness. The fact that is not legally secure only proves the absurdity of the USA copyright laws.
I say, ignore the Lucas 'warning', and hold your event. If you get legally closed, picket every theatre showing a Lucas film in the future. Hand out leaflets explaining the situation to everyone waiting in line to see the 'new' Lucas film. (New is quotes here because there is nothing new to be found any George Lucas film.)
The people waiting to see 'Star Bores number whatever' are the ones that can really appreciate the parody and can add new and interesting content to the parody.
George Lucas is turning into a freak like Howard Hughes became. He should get himself checked for tertiary syphilis.
So, you could say that Hitler was the hero who solved the Great Depression, though with some side-effects.
Adoph Hitler was a twisted little freak who had an uncanny almost-supernatural ability to stir up latent hatred by means of making speeches on radio (a very hot medium in McLuhan terms).
Hitler allowed really smart people to put policies in place that revived the rock-bottom German economy. When the economy started to recover, the dictator went fult-tilt-boogie with his plans to remove from the populace all of the groups of people whom he personally hated. The German tendency to follow-the-leader-regardless-of -the-consequences allowed him to implement the policies that led to the murder of 6 million Jews and the deaths of 70 million people in WWII.
No, you could not say that Hitler was the hero who solved the Great Depression, with some side effects. If he had been born 100 years later, Adoph Hitler would have been a Death-Metal rock star who designed his own album covers.
And the world would be a much better place than it is now after the consequences of his having been in it.
in what the Russians considered a broken promise to open a second front as soon as possible....As soon as possible from the British-American prescective was as soon as the Germans and Soviet Russians had finished killing off as many of each other as possible.
The whole point of the second world war was to remove possible competition from Anglo-Saxon hegemony over the British Empire. To the extent that the Germans and Russians destroyed each other while Americans watched (until early 1942), that strategy worked. After the war, the British Empire fell apart as each part of it became more technologically advanced.
The cold war was a means of driving the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, which eventually worked. The fact that the Soviets were the most brutal and repressive government in the world, with 10,000,000 randomly-selected people in slave-labor gulag concentration camps, didn't help their cause either.
put them back on and have the same song playing that I interrupted when I left.
This is a great idea. There would be a switch in the center point of the headphones. When the headphones are taken off the head, the switch trips, the music stops, and its position is recorded. Place the phones back on your head, the music restarts.
Put this idea on your resume and send it to both Apple and the company that actually makes the stuff that Apple claims as their own.
While all these ideas about implementing new digital technology are important and interesting, I feel that the designers don't grasp the central point of the digital revolution.
That is, digitronics are supposed to make everything in which it is implemented vastly cheaper. Designing an MP3 player into the frames of a pair of glasses is cool, but then charging $300 to $400 for them is an insult. The super rich won't buy them, the rest of us can't afford them, and anyone who would take the idea and make it into a commercial reality finds that they can't because the concept is patented-trademarked-copyrighted-whatever.
Now I understand that the marketers want to get as much money as possible for their new designs and ideas, but they don't seem to understand exactly how much money is actually possible. The total amount of $400 times the_number_of_actual_ pairs_sold at that price is much, much less than the amount of $65 times the number of pairs that would be sold if the price were in line with the concept.
Besides, I believe that incredibly cheap is incredibly cool. I'm trying to get a contest with a prize for the best computer design each year for an application that costs less than $5 for its parts. And a special prize for computer circuit designs that cost less than $1.
The winner (so far by default as there have been no other entries) is the PC-keyboard-to-MIDI controller that uses a 42-cent AVR Tiny11 to play a stand-alone PC keyboard as a MIDI piano note controller. It's found here.
Anyway, cheap is good. $400 MP3 sunglasses is an insult when sunglasses are $10 and MP3 players are $60.
Bahrain is a small island about ten miles wide and twenty miles long. It is long known as an important trading center in the Gulf where fundamentalists don't impose arbitrary social restrictions on international business.
The idea that a space shuttle could fall from the sky and land here undamaged as opposed to any point in the millions of square miles of ocean on the Earth's surface is absurd. Suppose the navigational on-board computer was damaged and it missed landing in the Soviet Union. It still would have gone into the ocean or broken up.
Maybe someone bought it under the table and then was told that it was going to be used to create an international incident, so they towed it out to the desert where it would be found and assumed that it had fallen from the sky.
Maybe some enterprising Russians sold it to someone with a lot of money (hmmm, anyone like that in Bahrain?) and convinced them that they could use it to begin an Islamic space program. Then they towed it out to the desert before anyone found out how gullible and backward they were (or how much money they got taken for).
We should be glad (but not too glad) that the music industry always appoints their most aggressive attack dog lawyers to the most public positions of their trade groups. These people can always be counted on to make over-the-top mean and stupid statements that makes our point for us that these people are greedy pigs.
If the music industry were smart (no worries there, so relax) they would get Janis Ian or Don Henley to head their trade organizations. That would make it easy for them to portray us as greedy freaks, and themselves as considerate and reasonable.
This guy, John Kennedy, has been taking so much shit about his name for the past fifty years that it's no wonder that he's such a twisted little junkyard dog!
Well I'm a libertarian. How true I don't know since I'm also a 'yellow-dog' Democrat.
And yes I think that we should try doing away with medical licensing. The AMA will always license 'real' doctors, and most insurance companies will only cover them. Increasing the choices will help reduce the costs.
However there is a crisis in USA health care and crisis means trying new things. I believe that there should be no patents on prescription drugs beyond a brief period (maybe one or two years). I believe that all drugs should be legal to buy by any adult. The only exception should be antibiotics, since public health is endangered by the development of resistant stains of diseases that would result from widespread untrained use of antibiotics. But intoxicants? Sure, if you're over 18, buy legally anything. (16 for marijuana cause that's when I first tried it).
This is not exactly sardonic. The microcontroller performance/price ratio has risen greatly over the past few years. But it hasn't risen as fast as the cost of medical equipment.
It's not uncommon to have 100-to-1 ratios between the price of the electonic parts and sensors and the retail price of specialized medical equipment. It comes from an environment of predatory lawsuits and cost-is-no-object medical insurance coverage. Health care costs are rising insanely in the USA. The only way employers are dealing with it is by not offering medical insurance benefits to their employees, which is not dealing with the issue at all. The Republican/Democrat lawmakers are bought off by the HMOs and the drug companies, and will continue to only vote for legisation that directly benefit the HMOs and drug companies.
When people like you will need medical care in America in the future, the options will be to take a trip to another country and buy treatment at a much less cost than America, or use black-market treatments, medicines, and medical equipment that has not passed US FDA certification. DIY stuff.
Black market medical equipment will be one hot fast-growing market for electronic developers and technicians in the next twenty years, simply due to the tens of millions of people thrown off the health insurance rolls. It will be necessary to develop an illegal, but parallel, FDA to ensure that this black-market equipment is reasonablely safe and reliable.
Networks in medical electronic schematics, software, sensors, and parts will spring up in P2P formats. Like the P2P music file-sharers, they will be completely illegal. And, like the music sharers, they will be completely necessary and fill the vital social function of providing a market for industries that have painted themselves into a corner through their own greed and stupidity.
... - and maybe one day they will not need actors either.
Actors are the cheapest part of making a movie. It the stars that are super-expensive.
Now if the studio can 'persuade' unknown actors with great potential to sell their facial expressions and movements, human characters can be inserted into movies like hordes of digitized extras. At some savings to the studio.
Even then the cost of promotion and advertising of a new film is often approaching and sometimes even surpassing the cost of making the film itself.
Hollywood films, despite all the emotion and news coverage that they induce, are not very profitable. Individual films can be, but on the whole, film studios just barely break even on box office receipts over the entire year's worth of releases. Profit from a film comes over time through the ancilliary markets, such as TV, hotels, airlines, theme parks, and video/DVD rentals.
Variety magazine is a good place to get an overview of the film business. However, they're so specialized towards industry detail and consumate boosters that one has to read between the lines with them.
Basically, the film industry is peaking after years of annual double-digit box-office growth in the past 15 years. The audience numbers (# of butts in seats) are flat for two years now, they're no longer growing. Box office receipts rise directly according to admission price increases, but these gross receipts are eaten up by greatly rising costs in film production and advertising. Audiences over 28 years old have fallen greatly, and under-25s are being siphoned off by video games.
The film industry is on the verge of a crisis not unlike those of the early 1950s and early 1970s. But they are the most creative industry in the world, and they always bounce back.
This hypocritical attempt to maximize profits is a bunch of bullshit and will ultimately result in Microsoft's downfall once they piss off the wrong entity. They may have done so already.
I read in the latest issue of Variety that Microsoft had a $1.1 billion loss last year. It was in an article on the 50 largest companies in the entertainment industry. I don't know if that was a misprint or not. I thought Microsoft was a perpetual motion money machine.
Slashdot Mirror
but why on earth would a non-AOL user want to use an AOL-branded version of IE?
When my Opera 7.0 browser coupled with ZoneAlarm firewall wouldn't work with eBay regarding of hours spent diddling the parameters and rebooting, the eBay rep said to use IE 6.0 to access eBay without trouble.
Well I had IE5 and two choices. I could download for hours or go out and get that AOL disk that I noticed earlier in the dumpster.
The AOL disk had IE6 on it that was customized for AOL ease-of-use. The combination of AOL IE6 and ZoneAlarm did not work, but by turning off the firewall I have been able to get on to eBay and trade without too many problems.
I will switch to Linux as soon as someone explains clearly and simply how to get online and interface with eBay with it. I won't spend hours dicking around trying to get it to work by myself. With IE-Windows, it already works. It just doesn't work well. And I don't really believe any more that it would work better with Linux without my putting in hundreds of hours of study. Who's going to pay me for that? You?
I don't know what the industry is doing, but I'm moving towards collections.
These are DVD-ROMs or even Hard Drives that have 70 or so albums on a DVD or several hundred albums on a old hard drive. These aren't just random musical albums, but related titles.
It goes without saying that the only money changing hands is for the medium. No copyright fees, no rentals, no payments to the 'artists' or the global media corporations, no payments except the cost of the media.
And the media is cheap. Blank DVD ROMs hit $0.30 (US) each last week at Fry's Electronics, cheap enough to trade. 30 gig hard disks sell in the $30 range.
Collections are a really good way to get exposure to lots of 'long tail' artists. The article was well-reseached and well-thought-out, but it ignored the central but often unspoken truth of the digital media age: the price to the consumer for digital content has fallen many orders of magnitude compared to content on older analog media. The fact that this is currently illegal doesn't really change anything. The laws were custom written by the global media companies for their continued enrichment during the transision to the digital age. When the global media companies disappear, the copyright laws will also. And orders-of-magnitude cost and profit reductions will make them disappear. It's just a matter of time.
If the media corporations go bankrupt, will the stream of new content and new artistic works disappear. To a great extent, yes. But it will mostly be the product of the stars. The real artists will continue to work and produce, however they will be compensated in quite different methods. Perhaps the new permanent class of super rich being created by current American policies will take to being patrons of individual artists in a manner similiar to the Medici's sponsorship of the artists of Florence in the 1400's. Maybe the church will fund the recordings of great rock musicians in order to revive the faith amoung the young. Who knows? The only thing that seems certain is that the five global media companies will go bankrupt within about 20 years at most. Don't invest your life savings in them.
So let's see what options exist:
In economics class, we were taught that with every list of options, there was always one and usually two that weren't listed. Those are:
one: Do nothing. Completely ignore the situation. Pretend that it doesn't exist. Let it resolve itself.
two: The option that would never occur for you to think of in a million years. The option that is beyond the collective imagination of those examining the problem.
In regards to North Korea, I personally would recommend the first option of doing nothing. I see this a basically an Asian problem that will eventually have a fundamentally Asian solution. Why should people in Oklahoma or Vermont be concerned about 'doing something' about Korea? What could they possibly do that wouldn't make the situation worse?
America's policy on Korea has been to just throw things at the place. Money, Bombs, Solders, Tough Talk, more money, more tough talk. Plus the Americans bring lots of Korean people into the US in order to resettle them into districts where they will tip the balance to Republicans after they become US citizens (in about seven years) and vote. In return, the Koreans send the Americans the occasional lunatic preacher whenever they suspect that the fundamentalists there are getting a little too 'touchy-feely' in their devotional fervor. Then we end up having to deprogram a new set of young people all over again.
South Korea is one of America's true successes. After the World War II they were as hopeless, as poor, and as threatened as Palestine is today. Now it's time for the Americans to shut up and learn from the Koreans about how to solve some of their own problems.
I'm holding out for a version of NewtonOS that runs under version 3.0 of AmigaOS running under emulation on my Atari ST.
I'm still waiting for my Timex-Sinclair 1000 emulator that runs on my Commodore 64.
There's so much that I've been planning to do and I'm been waiting for such a long time.
However, if you have Atari ST programs that you want to run on the Windows PC, the STeem emulator works quite well. There were a lot of MIDI synthesizer programs published only for the Atari ST. For example, voice editors for the various tone modules that were state-of-the-art twelve years ago and are still being bought and sold for moderate sums on eBay.
no, I was talking about my mother's mother.
All that money on a Boston University degree and they never taught you the difference between "its" (a possessive adjective) and "it's" (a contraction of it is).
Worse, they never explained that simple grammer mistakes would negate the force of any written public argument. Nor, did they explain how to use widely-available computer tools to catch these little things before publishing.
I remember every day in October 1972 passing the BU main dorm near Kenmore Square where the students had placed huge individual letters in the windows of an upper floor of the building. The letters read "LICK DICK IN 72", a reference to the election of Richard Nixon at the time.
Isn't Howard Stern BU's most famous graduate?
all drugs should be legalised...
Actually all intoxicants should be legalized.
But it would not be the interest of public health to make freely available antibiotics. If they were freely, widely, and unprofessionally used, new resistant strains of dangerous bacteria would quickly evolve.
Fighting harmful bacteria is something like fighting the Borg, they always quickly adapt to whatever weapon that you're throwing at them.
Even the argument for legalizing strong addictive destructive intoxicants is debatable. If everyone were mentally balanced, intelligent, and middle class work-ethic oriented, it would be a 'yes'. But given the bell curve of the people out there, maybe, just maybe, cheap and easy heroin, crack, and meth isn't the most opportune method for handling these little treasures for society as a whole.
But then again, there are SO many surplus people now that the long-term consequences of cheap and easy H,C,M would be better than the current policy of severe illegality coupled with widespread distribution of these items. This policy is only good for the people who are making tons of money from investing in private prison corporations. Since we know that Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America contribute large amounts of money to Political Action Committees that push for ever-increasing sentencing for minor offences, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there was a backdoor channel to funnel profits from the sale of illegal intoxicants into the 'legitimate' investments in prison corporations.
Once you understand the American mind, you can't be shocked by their fundamental brutality-for-profit nature.
Not that your country would be really any different given the opportunity, it's just that America is the land of greater opportunity to be total assholes.
"Sky Captain and the World of Tommorow" is an excellent example of the basic Hollywood problem today.
It didn't make any money.
In fact it lost a ton of money.
Box Office Mojo website reports that this product costs $78 million US to produce and $28 million US to advertise and promote. Yet in the critical first two weeks of theatrical release, it has brought back only $25 million. Generally Hollywood movies now must bring in 1/2 of their production costs in the first weekend of release in order to be considered profitable in the long run.
This product was well-made and certainly has appeal to a segment of the audience, but it was essensially a vanity project between the star Jude Law and the art director.
The real problem here is that someone in the studio framework who should know better allowed a $100 million vanity project to get made. This seems to indicate that Hollywood is running out of ideas for product and are beginning to throw money at anything that has a star's enthusiasm.
Studios are supposed to the star's bullshit filters, not bullshit enablers.
This is just one sign that Hollywood is on the verge of a product crisis not unlike those that hit it both in the 1950's from television and the early 1970's from the counter-culture.
Iceland might consider becoming the world's library since the other aspects of their financials are changing. The fishing is not as good as it used to be and trans-Atlantic airplanes don't need refueling stops anymore.
So why not just become the center of world trading in 'copyrighted' materials and take a microcharge of each trade? They'll get kicked out of the EU? Hardly likely. Brussells can be really boring on a small Eurocrat's salary and full-price media product can be mighty expensive (and will definitely be going up in price).
Better Iceland become the world's library than Vanuatuu, because that little island could just disappear in a typhoon and take all the servers and storage with it.
Maybe, you say, no one should be the world's center of 'illegal' trade in 'copyrighted' materials. Nonsense, that is a spin fantasy of the media giants who need inexpensive unofficial downloads as much as they need full-service 'all-fees-paid' fully-legit product sales.
When five companies control most of the world's media, it doesn't really matter if people buy the product at full copyright-paid Western prices or discounted 'pirate' prices. Either way they get all the money eventually because they are the only game in town. It's more important that people consume ever-increasing amounts of corporate media product. The money will get back to them. That isn't the case when there are thousands of small and medium-sized media companies globally. However that situation no longer exists and the media executives should revise their overall concept of how this new global framework works.
In a sense the reference in the parent to secret underground terrorist religious organizations is apt because these groups are the primary competition to the global media companies, especially in the developing world where 2/3rds of the population is under the age of 25. Hollywood and religious fanaticism don't mix all that well in the long term. Both compete for the leisure time attention span (and the loyalities) of the billions of new young people. In America, corporate Hollywood won because in the current political alliance between the major corporations and the religious right the religious community has always been the weaker partner.
It occurs to me now that the city of Portland Oregon (metro population 1.1 million) was menaced by the last big eruption of Mt. St. Helen's in May 1980.
In that event, the entire north side of the mountain blew up in a explosion with force equal to many hydrogen bombs. Luckly the area devastated was wilderness forest. Only about 15 people lived in the several hundred square miles primarily affected.
However on the west side of the mountain, there was a nuclear power plant on the Columbia river about 50 miles (80 km) away. If the volcano had blown out through the west side of the mountain instead of the north side, there was the serious possiblility that the shock wave would have ruptured the reactor coolant tanks and damaged the control and safety systems. In a worst case, this could have led to the release of radioactive material into the last 50 miles of the Columbia river. The river would have been closed for shipping. Which means that the port of Portland would have been closed, stopping shipment of massive amounts of grain to Asia from the Pacific Northwest. It would have also caused the extinction of the fisheries, such as salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia.
Incredibly, during this entire pre-eruption period, the operaters of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant did not shut down the facility or take any precautions against earthquake damage. The plant is closed now after it was revealed that it lies directly over an earthquake fault, but the spent fuel rods are still stored there because there isn't any other place to put them.
At the time of the eruption, no one seemed to be aware of this possibility. Or, more likely, everyone just decided to keep really quiet.
The eruption was too bad because Mt. St. Helens was a perfect cone before the eruption. It looked like Mt. Fuji in Japan. Now it looks like a million-seat football stadium: a big hole with a circular ridge around half of it.
Perhaps putting micro-transmitters in the frame might help.
This would give the police the ability to track the picture right after it was stolen. But there is the risk that the thieves would know about this technique and cut the picture from the frame.
I'm a little concerned about the loss of large collections of priceless art due a bombing of a museum. This might be the destruction of the building with a bomb, missle, or aircraft. Or even the loss of the museum when the city around is destroyed by an atomic weapon.
It seems that there should be plans to get, say, a hundred paintings maybe several hundred feet underground within ten minutes should authorities determine that a nuclear event is imminent. Especially for the collections like the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence. Any of these invaluable collections could be lost forever just because some schumck found a quarter-pound of plutonium at a Russian garage-sale and decided that it was the 'will of Allah' to do such a horrible thing.
Please don't tell me that I'm prejudiced. You may have noticed that almost all of the truly horrible things that happen unprovoked in the world today happen because some asshole decided that it was the 'will of Allah' that such a thing should happen. We don't yet have any warning about these kind of actions. But an atomic bomb coming by ICBM will give us at least ten minutes warning even if we couldn't do anything to stop it. We might as well have the ability to protect things that are really important, like priceless art. It sounds extreme now, but it won't to the people looking at the paintings 500 or 1000 years in the future. Imagine if 'The Birth of Venus' by Botticelli had been burned by Savornella instead of having been hid for a few years.
Boy, it's a good thing that Slashdot wasn't around when Martin Luther King was leading civil rights marches.
We'd all still have 'colored' drinking fountains.
Or are you just feeling disenfranchised because our president has over a 50% approval rating...
No, I'm feeling depressed because we spent all this taxpayer's money to provide public education and you still never learned what a paragraph is.
Flash mobs can work for basic freedoms when the political system is too corrupt or stagnant to respond to changes in the modern world.
Say you and your friends are tired of being arrested for possession of marijuana. You feel that if you're not disturbing the peace, it isn't anyone's business. And you feel that the people who do the arresting and prosecuting are just in it for the bribes and kickbacks from lawyers to the police and the judges, or they are making tons of money by investing in corporate prison systems.
So whenever you see or you be in 420 arrests happening, you send a flash bulletin. Many people who agree that this situation must change show up.
They surround the arrest perimeter. They don't leave when ordered. They just aren't reasonable.
A single arrest turns into a hundred arrests (for 'terrorism').
This happens over and over. It's not a one-time thing. Eventually, the authorities begin to get the message through their cement heads that the time has come for the situation to change.
It changes. No more 420 arrests; regardless of the 'law'.
This is not exactly how democracy is supposed to work, but it is the only way that does in corporate dictatorship (like where the people who make big bucks selling prescriptions to Marinol reinvest the money in corporate prisons, which are filled with (black) people serving time for being unable to come up with the money to bribe the judge, ahh... excuse me, for 'using drugs').
Even under the present absurd USA copyright laws this is clearly protected as parody.
- The audio is off and the audience is providing commentary.
- The film is thirty years old and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. It is outside of the copyright period in effect at the time of the film's initial release.
- A film seen by so many people becomes public domain as a result of having entered the cultural consciousness. The fact that is not legally secure only proves the absurdity of the USA copyright laws.
I say, ignore the Lucas 'warning', and hold your event. If you get legally closed, picket every theatre showing a Lucas film in the future. Hand out leaflets explaining the situation to everyone waiting in line to see the 'new' Lucas film. (New is quotes here because there is nothing new to be found any George Lucas film.)
The people waiting to see 'Star Bores number whatever' are the ones that can really appreciate the parody and can add new and interesting content to the parody.
George Lucas is turning into a freak like Howard Hughes became. He should get himself checked for tertiary syphilis.
So, you could say that Hitler was the hero who solved the Great Depression, though with some side-effects.
Adoph Hitler was a twisted little freak who had an uncanny almost-supernatural ability to stir up latent hatred by means of making speeches on radio (a very hot medium in McLuhan terms).
Hitler allowed really smart people to put policies in place that revived the rock-bottom German economy. When the economy started to recover, the dictator went fult-tilt-boogie with his plans to remove from the populace all of the groups of people whom he personally hated. The German tendency to follow-the-leader-regardless-of -the-consequences allowed him to implement the policies that led to the murder of 6 million Jews and the deaths of 70 million people in WWII.
No, you could not say that Hitler was the hero who solved the Great Depression, with some side effects. If he had been born 100 years later, Adoph Hitler would have been a Death-Metal rock star who designed his own album covers.
And the world would be a much better place than it is now after the consequences of his having been in it.
in what the Russians considered a broken promise to open a second front as soon as possible. ...As soon as possible from the British-American prescective was as soon as the Germans and Soviet Russians had finished killing off as many of each other as possible.
The whole point of the second world war was to remove possible competition from Anglo-Saxon hegemony over the British Empire. To the extent that the Germans and Russians destroyed each other while Americans watched (until early 1942), that strategy worked. After the war, the British Empire fell apart as each part of it became more technologically advanced.
The cold war was a means of driving the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, which eventually worked. The fact that the Soviets were the most brutal and repressive government in the world, with 10,000,000 randomly-selected people in slave-labor gulag concentration camps, didn't help their cause either.
put them back on and have the same song playing that I interrupted when I left.
This is a great idea. There would be a switch in the center point of the headphones. When the headphones are taken off the head, the switch trips, the music stops, and its position is recorded. Place the phones back on your head, the music restarts.
Put this idea on your resume and send it to both Apple and the company that actually makes the stuff that Apple claims as their own.
A better life awaits you.
what does a good pair cost?
.
While all these ideas about implementing new digital technology are important and interesting, I feel that the designers don't grasp the central point of the digital revolution.
That is, digitronics are supposed to make everything in which it is implemented vastly cheaper. Designing an MP3 player into the frames of a pair of glasses is cool, but then charging $300 to $400 for them is an insult. The super rich won't buy them, the rest of us can't afford them, and anyone who would take the idea and make it into a commercial reality finds that they can't because the concept is patented-trademarked-copyrighted-whatever.
Now I understand that the marketers want to get as much money as possible for their new designs and ideas, but they don't seem to understand exactly how much money is actually possible. The total amount of $400 times the_number_of_actual_ pairs_sold at that price is much, much less than the amount of $65 times the number of pairs that would be sold if the price were in line with the concept.
Besides, I believe that incredibly cheap is incredibly cool. I'm trying to get a contest with a prize for the best computer design each year for an application that costs less than $5 for its parts. And a special prize for computer circuit designs that cost less than $1.
The winner (so far by default as there have been no other entries) is the PC-keyboard-to-MIDI controller that uses a 42-cent AVR Tiny11 to play a stand-alone PC keyboard as a MIDI piano note controller. It's found here
Anyway, cheap is good. $400 MP3 sunglasses is an insult when sunglasses are $10 and MP3 players are $60.
I agree with the poster.
Bahrain is a small island about ten miles wide and twenty miles long. It is long known as an important trading center in the Gulf where fundamentalists don't impose arbitrary social restrictions on international business.
The idea that a space shuttle could fall from the sky and land here undamaged as opposed to any point in the millions of square miles of ocean on the Earth's surface is absurd. Suppose the navigational on-board computer was damaged and it missed landing in the Soviet Union. It still would have gone into the ocean or broken up.
Maybe someone bought it under the table and then was told that it was going to be used to create an international incident, so they towed it out to the desert where it would be found and assumed that it had fallen from the sky.
Maybe some enterprising Russians sold it to someone with a lot of money (hmmm, anyone like that in Bahrain?) and convinced them that they could use it to begin an Islamic space program. Then they towed it out to the desert before anyone found out how gullible and backward they were (or how much money they got taken for).
We should be glad (but not too glad) that the music industry always appoints their most aggressive attack dog lawyers to the most public positions of their trade groups. These people can always be counted on to make over-the-top mean and stupid statements that makes our point for us that these people are greedy pigs.
If the music industry were smart (no worries there, so relax) they would get Janis Ian or Don Henley to head their trade organizations. That would make it easy for them to portray us as greedy freaks, and themselves as considerate and reasonable.
This guy, John Kennedy, has been taking so much shit about his name for the past fifty years that it's no wonder that he's such a twisted little junkyard dog!
Well I'm a libertarian. How true I don't know since I'm also a 'yellow-dog' Democrat.
And yes I think that we should try doing away with medical licensing. The AMA will always license 'real' doctors, and most insurance companies will only cover them. Increasing the choices will help reduce the costs.
However there is a crisis in USA health care and crisis means trying new things. I believe that there should be no patents on prescription drugs beyond a brief period (maybe one or two years). I believe that all drugs should be legal to buy by any adult. The only exception should be antibiotics, since public health is endangered by the development of resistant stains of diseases that would result from widespread untrained use of antibiotics. But intoxicants? Sure, if you're over 18, buy legally anything. (16 for marijuana cause that's when I first tried it).
This is not exactly sardonic. The microcontroller performance/price ratio has risen greatly over the past few years. But it hasn't risen as fast as the cost of medical equipment.
It's not uncommon to have 100-to-1 ratios between the price of the electonic parts and sensors and the retail price of specialized medical equipment. It comes from an environment of predatory lawsuits and cost-is-no-object medical insurance coverage. Health care costs are rising insanely in the USA. The only way employers are dealing with it is by not offering medical insurance benefits to their employees, which is not dealing with the issue at all. The Republican/Democrat lawmakers are bought off by the HMOs and the drug companies, and will continue to only vote for legisation that directly benefit the HMOs and drug companies.
When people like you will need medical care in America in the future, the options will be to take a trip to another country and buy treatment at a much less cost than America, or use black-market treatments, medicines, and medical equipment that has not passed US FDA certification. DIY stuff.
Black market medical equipment will be one hot fast-growing market for electronic developers and technicians in the next twenty years, simply due to the tens of millions of people thrown off the health insurance rolls. It will be necessary to develop an illegal, but parallel, FDA to ensure that this black-market equipment is reasonablely safe and reliable.
Networks in medical electronic schematics, software, sensors, and parts will spring up in P2P formats. Like the P2P music file-sharers, they will be completely illegal. And, like the music sharers, they will be completely necessary and fill the vital social function of providing a market for industries that have painted themselves into a corner through their own greed and stupidity.
... - and maybe one day they will not need actors either.
Actors are the cheapest part of making a movie. It the stars that are super-expensive.
Now if the studio can 'persuade' unknown actors with great potential to sell their facial expressions and movements, human characters can be inserted into movies like hordes of digitized extras. At some savings to the studio.
Even then the cost of promotion and advertising of a new film is often approaching and sometimes even surpassing the cost of making the film itself.
Hollywood films, despite all the emotion and news coverage that they induce, are not very profitable. Individual films can be, but on the whole, film studios just barely break even on box office receipts over the entire year's worth of releases. Profit from a film comes over time through the ancilliary markets, such as TV, hotels, airlines, theme parks, and video/DVD rentals.
Variety magazine is a good place to get an overview of the film business. However, they're so specialized towards industry detail and consumate boosters that one has to read between the lines with them.
Basically, the film industry is peaking after years of annual double-digit box-office growth in the past 15 years. The audience numbers (# of butts in seats) are flat for two years now, they're no longer growing. Box office receipts rise directly according to admission price increases, but these gross receipts are eaten up by greatly rising costs in film production and advertising. Audiences over 28 years old have fallen greatly, and under-25s are being siphoned off by video games.
The film industry is on the verge of a crisis not unlike those of the early 1950s and early 1970s. But they are the most creative industry in the world, and they always bounce back.
Horray for Hollywood!
This hypocritical attempt to maximize profits is a bunch of bullshit and will ultimately result in Microsoft's downfall once they piss off the wrong entity. They may have done so already.
I read in the latest issue of Variety that Microsoft had a $1.1 billion loss last year. It was in an article on the 50 largest companies in the entertainment industry. I don't know if that was a misprint or not. I thought Microsoft was a perpetual motion money machine.