David Crosby, aside from being a fat, weird, overpaid, coked-up buffoon, has made some very good music over the years.
Download a copy of KazaaLite and search for Crosby, Stills, & Nash "Guinneviere" or The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" or "Mr Tambourine Man". Then check out "Wooden Ships" by CNSY or Jefferson Airplane. It is one of their best songs and one of the two that are still worth listening too (the other good JeffAir song is "Martha" which can probably found on Kazaa also).
The really great thing about Kazaa that the RIAA doesn't understand is that the music that is there is only there because people make a serious effort to put it there and keep it there. Kazaa users and posters keep the songs alive at great legal risk to themselves because they seriously believe that certain songs should be kept available. Clueless media executives will never understand this.
Anyway, Mr Crosby has credibility only because he has such passion towards defending great music, both his and his contemporaries'
David Crosby, aside from being a fat, weird, overpaid, coked-up buffoon, has made some very good music over the years.
Download a copy of KazaaLite and search for Crosby, Stills, & Nash "Guinneviere" or The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" or "Mr Tambourine Man". Then check out "Wooden Ships" by CNSY or Jefferson Airplane. It is one of their best songs and one of the two that are still worth listening too (the other good JeffAir song is "Martha" which can probably found on Kazaa also).
The really great thing about Kazaa that the RIAA doesn't understand is that the music that is there is only there because people make a serious effort to put it there and keep it there. Kazaa users and posters keep the songs alive at great legal risk to themselves because they seriously believe that certain songs should be kept available. Clueless media executives will never understand this.
Anyway, Mr Crosby has credibility only because he has such passion towards defending great music, both his and his contemporaries'.
I'm finding that often to only way to get a real honest reply to a real world situation is to post an overblown comment on Slashdot and get corrected by the a few of the thousands of varied professionals who see it and are provoked into giving a reply.
Music innovation is a two way street. The cultural process of making music has reached the point where the centralization of talent and distribution of recordings can no longer sustain musical culture.
In other words, if you love music, the time has come to start learning how to make it yourself. In the 20th century, the paridigm arose that people would listen to the radio to hear what was new. The best musicians would play on the radio to get known. People would buy musical recordings that they heard on the radio and musicians would copy the musical styles and add their own improvements. People would go to hear musicians play what they heard on radio and then a little bit more. As the bands improved and surpassed the radio performers, they would record, have their recordings played on the radio, and the cycle would begin again.
The various economic and technological developments covered in the PBS series have caused this model to fall apart.
The 21st century solution requires more input for the music community. If you love music, you need to learn to play an instrument and get involved in the music creation process. Not to the extent of the 20th century musicians, but more than the 20th century audience.
Start with music that you already like. Get a notation program that displays MIDI files in sheet music form and plays the notes through the sound card. It's not 'music', but that's not the point. The point is to learn about the music itself: the chords, the harmonies, the arrangements. Almost all popular songs from the past thirty years have MIDI files available on the web. It's an incredable resource, if you can use it.
Learn a little about written music. It's always the first program cut in public schools so there is a good possiblity that you have had no exposure to it in high school if you graduated within the past ten years. If you can learn C++, you can learn anything. Learning to read music is one path to independence from the RIAA, so it is worth the time and effort. Again the music notation programs like MIDISOFT studio v4.0 that play MIDI files are a big help.
Get instruments that match the ones used on your favorite recordings. Ebay is a great source. For example, you can now buy the same synthesizers used for 70s,80s, and 90s music at a tiny fraction of the original retail music store prices. Often you can buy a synthesizer or tone module (a synth without a keyboard that plays through the computer's MIDI port on the joystick connector) for $80, use it for several months, and resell it on Ebay for a different type for the same price that youo paid for it. You get a long term rental of a complicated musical instrument for the cost of shipping it to you from the previous owner. Sometimes you can get the instruments directly from the musicians who make the original pop hits and have been driven into bankruptcy after they pissed away their advance on SUVs, partys, and entourages.
You can also get schematics of many of the stomp box guitar effects on the web, including all those used to make the classical rock songs of the 60s and 70s. You can get files that explain note by note how to play the great guitar solos from that period as well. Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Santana, ect... All the great classic rock songs have been documented and are on-line. It doesn't matter if you don't really like the original music, it matters that you are learning to be a musician and as such you are breaking the deep psycological bonds that tie you to RIAA product.
Then you can start creating your own music and start trading it on specialized sites (such as the Yahoo Groups dedicated to a particular instrument or band). You can collaborate with other people engaged in the same process and who are at the same point as you. If you're stuck you can get help from others.
All this is completely beneath the radar of the RIAA, but will go a long way to meet your basic human need for music without being a passive disgrunted endless consumer of RIAA product.
The Mafia was formed to protect ordinary people from laws like this coming from Rome. Just as soon as you get the gangsters under some form of control, the politicians do something totally stupid to revive it.
Did the Mafia help get this law passed in order to revive their ancient public image as the last bulwark against total Roman oppression?
Since this is Italy, I assume this law only really applies to downloading materials that come from companies that Berlusconi owns a controlling interest in.
Which, since this is Italy, is practically everything.
Speaking on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Italian P2P users, what are Italian jails like? Are they sex torture rape factories like American prisons? Are they government profit centers like Mexican prisons (where you have to buy your own food)? If you download really big files and get the death penality, do they charge your family 50 cents like the Chinese do? Are they just 'work the zeks until they drop' slave-labor camps like the Soviet Gulags?
Come on, Italian politicians, you passed a law to put tens of thousands of your own young people in prison for activities that few civilized people consider to be a crime. Now that you have your 'law', what are you going to do with it?
Wanna send the RIAA a message? Pick a day, buy a bunch of new albums, and on the next day return them unopened and in resalable condition.
My understanding of the music biz is that in this type of situation, the retail price of the albums that are returned will be subtracted from the artist's royalities. So the only person receiveing a message are the musicians, who are learning that they should have never entered this line of work in the first place.
You didn't seriously expect that the music industry would not have figured out a way to charge the musicians for EVERYTHING that would be a cost for the record companies, did you?
The music industry is obsessed with the idea that they have the most desired product in the world (with the exception of refined opiates) and that everybody will do everything they can to get everything that they release. Therefore they must go to insane lengths to keep their product away from people except in small, measured, and expensive doses.
To a large extent this is the truth, but it is becoming less so every year. Eventually, the music industry will reach the point where they realise that their extended efforts to prevent people's access to their product has resulted in a significant decline in the demand for their product. Threaten enough people with prison, asset confiscation, and criminal records for using your product and people will stop using your product, regardless of the price that you charge for it. Tastes can change. The music industry may find out that the obsession with possessing pre-recorded music on disks might be a characteristic only found in western baby-boomers. When they pass from the scene, so may their industry.
I read that the music industry sales have fallen from 36 billion US dollars to 24 billion US in three years. That figure puts the entire business at less than South Korean prostitution (according to Asia Times -www.atimes.com) and almost as big as the toilet paper business. What other business this size gets special laws passed to put their customers in prison over pricing disagreements?
The way to get rich off the law is pass a law (bribe and blackmail the lawmakers) that makes illegal something that a large minority of people do. The majority of people will support the law because they don't engage in the particular activity.
Then use the fact that a large minority of people do it and continue to do it despite its illegality to raise the penalities for breaking this law very high. Again the majority of people will go along with this because they don't engage in this particular activity.
Use the high penalities to encourage a system of bounty hunters who get to share in the enormous fines that are brought against the many people (a large minority works best) who are found disobeying this law when they snitch their neighbors to the authorities for disobeying this law. Make sure the activity that is made illegal is common and accepted by a large minority of people. The best size of this minority is about 15 percent of the population; a larger percentage and you run the risk of a successful revolt and a smaller percentage doesn't bring in enough money to make the whole business worthwhile.
Then just sit back and let the money pile in from legal fees and fines.
In the USA, the stategy worked great on Black people (African-Americans) until the 1960's. It worked great on gays and other sexual minorities until the late 1970's. It still brings in hundreds of millions of dollars from the marijuana community every year to the police and the lawyers.
Now it about to be applied to the recorded music-lover community, starting with random students and working up from there to the general middle-class.
Just one more permanent American extortion money-making scheme. As soon as one passes, another takes its place. Americans talk a lot of trash about freedom, but when it comes to using the law to extort money from minorities, be they racial, sexual, life-style, and now digital media minorities, the dollar always comes first.
I simply refuse to accept that music file sharing is illegal.
People are sharing recorded sounds with each other, it is not a big deal. Since the companies put the recordings out into the public in the first place, they shouldn't be upset or surprised that people are sharing them with each other.
Sharing music files is about as big a 'crime' as sharing a can opener at a company picnic. The RIAA is simply exposing the gangster underbelly of the music industry that has always been discretely hidden (except to musicians) from the public with this ugly extortion.
This idea that music is sold in individual packages by created rock stars is a weird 20th-century concept (like communism) that simply appears grotesque and distasteful in the modern age. Music is like air: it comes into you, it comes out of you. No one can own it.
By all means, stop giving these people money that they use to extort money from others. What goes around, comes around.
While I acknowledge the argument that there is a need for standards in newly-developing technological fields, they are not as important as they were fifty years ago.
An advantage of tiny inexpensive microcontrollers is the ability to convert from one standard to another in the background, out of the notice of the user.
Standards are only a real problem when their specifications are not shared with the consumers, or when the companies make it illegal to convert from one standard to another. Reverse-engineering to get one machine to work with another should never be illegal, nor should publishing technical documentation about a particular machine.
Another problem is when the standard is so complex that simple inexpensive microcontrollers can't convert from one to another. An example of ultra-complex standards would be spoken languages: 1.3 billion people speak Mandarin Chinese and 1 billion speak English, but if you know one and not the other you are isolated when immersed in the country that uses that standard.
I think that a lot of people here are missing the point.
Both video games and movies are basically 20th century mediums. And as such they are now halfway steps to a new 21st century medium: an interactive digitally-generated photography.
Combine synthetic animation such as the AnaNova newscaster with quasi-AI like the classic Eliza program, voice recognition, on-line anonymous interaction with thousands of strangers presenting their image to you as 'avatars'. Have it semi-scripted by Hollywood screenwriters and directors. Run it on multiprocessor systems that are 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more powerful than today's systems.
You get an entirely new medium that makes today's movies and games look as dull as Super-8 family movies and silent film tricks from a hundred years ago. There are some people in Hollywood that realize that movies are about to go the way of Vaudeville in the next twenty years .
The visual sequence matches the series motif perfectly (who are those guys in the 60's astronaut/cosmonaut clips? Are they real period video clips, or actors?).
The song is too trite and borders on moronic.
They should get Brian Eno to write a theme song for the visuals.
This series is too militaristic. The writers are reacting to the Saudi Arabian massacre of Sept.11 (heard of it? check the web if not) by imposing a Gulf War II-type of ambiance onto a series that takes place hundreds of years in the future.
It leaves a metal taste in my mouth.
People simply aren't going to think and act this way in the future.
The writers should take the actors and plots and move them to a contemporary Gulf war setting if they want to celebrate techno-warrior jingoism. They would get all the ratings boost that they need to keep going forever.
The ST:Enterprise writers should read some real modern science-fiction and stop feeding us all this John Wayne-meets-Star Wars stuff. Because, to tell the truth, they don't really do it as well as John Wayne (check out some of his 1950's movies on DVD if your not familiar with his persona) and George Lucas.
It wouldn't hurt (except the ratings) to lighten up on the rubber mask characters and the contrived sexual tension between the crew members. In two hundred years, people will either just anomomously fuck, take anti-Viagra pills, use virtual-reality porn, or bring their families with them on long space voyages. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose
Please reply with tips for getting those funny accented characters from obscure European legacy languages into Slashdot messages. Thanks.
Actually after reading the posted message, it occured to me that positioning giant hydrogen-filled blimps over forest fires is probably not the best approach to the situation.
Perhaps it's best to consider other options besides fixed wing aircraft for fighting fires.
How about huge balloons like Zeppelins or blimps that carry water over the fire and drop it.
Perhaps even ultra large HYDROGEN filled blimps that use the hydrogen as fuel for the positioning propellers of the craft, then converting part of the hydrogen into water to drop on the fire. The H2-to-water conversion will create electricity for the fuel cells to power the aircraft back to base.
Whenever someone suggests using hydrogen as anti-ballast another person always says Hindenberg, referring to the air disaster in 1938. However, recent research has shown that the Hindenberg burned because the skin of the craft was covered highly flammable paint. This paint, which resembled modern rocket fuel, caused the craft to burn and crash so quickly. The disaster would have happened in a similar manner even if the Hindenberg had been filled with helium.
Another approach would be to cover the fire with a huge, very light, very thin, non-flammable blanket. This would remove the air from the burning embers rather than lowering the surface temperature below the ignition point, which is what the water drop does. A group of very large dirigibles (think about ten times as large as the Goodyear/Fuji blimp) would position the blanket over the blaze, lower it with winches, extinguish the flames, then lift it and reposition it over other flames. Sounds weird, doesn't it? So does using a 747, for Christ's sake, to drop water on a mountain forest fire.
Anyway, using a 747 for fire control sounds more like Evergreen is trying to both get rid of obsolete aircraft and get a huge tax write-off at the same time. This company has a LONG history of scamming the government with dubious projects at high profit for themselves.
Please use this as an opportunity to tell me how wrong I am and how ridiculous these ideas are. That is part of the process of coming up with new and innovative solutions to a serious problem (at least to us here in the Pacific Northwest) that we have not been able to solve and are running out of ideas and money.
The solution is exceptionally simple: When you hear a song you want, go to the store or whatever source, and buy it. You will have no problems.
Those days are gone. We will actually have lots of problems.
One: we can't hear a song that we want because the channels of exposure are closed to all recordings except for a small number that the record companies have paid enormous amounts of money to have played on the Clear Channel monopoly. P2P exists to allow the music community to share their discoveries with others in the community.
Two: the price of the song is set by monopoly control by the record companies. The bands themselves have no control over the price of their songs, nor do the listeners. And the price is way too high. In a real free marketplace, buyers and sellers would bid and offer until the price was acceptable to both parties and the transaction occurs. For example, goth-metal 'artist' Delicious Goodhead records a rap album of Rolling Stones songs. I like the Stones and will pay $20 for their new recordings, hate rap and will only pay $0.25 for a #1 rap record, and thought Mr. Goodhead's last record was mediocre so will only pay $3 for his next masterpiece. I offer $5 for the new recording. A week after it leaves the top ten the record company accepts my bid and authorizes me to buy a blank CD-R at my local record store for $0.25 and have the latest Delicious Goodhead recording burned on it.
This is how the free market works. If the record industry worked this way, people would buy a lot more music.
Three: A large percentage of very dollar that you give to the RIAA for music recordings goes to put you in jail. Under their laws, their purchased legislators, and their penalties. It is not in anyone's better interest to give money to any entity that uses the money to destroy your life and freedom. Christ, you pay taxes, isn't that enough?
Four: The RIAA companies have repeatedly and systematicly shown that they will cheat and defraud the artists that make the music. If you give money to the record companies, you are hurting the music community because the fair and proper compensation that you believe that you are giving to the musicians is not, has never, and will not in the future get to the artists under the present music industry system. And every purchase that you make perpetuates that system.
If we could 'just buy the music', we would 'just buy the music'.
Most Americans are humbled and intimidated by other people's ability to master languages. They hide it with a false projection of linguistic ethnocentricism.
I'm always amazed that Americans will assume that someone from the USA who learns a hundred words of, say, an Asian language is considered a genius (especially if they are African-American in background) while a person from Asia who isn't fluent in English is 'slow'. It seems to be an unconscious form of racism that gets missed until pointed out.
Possibly the reason that it is so much fun to bash the people in Quebec about their language is the obsession that they have about stopping English from creeping into general usage. Their language laws are unique for North America and are somewhat extreme. For example, no language but French allowed in any commercial signs. Here in the US we have entire shopping malls that are owned by friends, family, and organizations that are all of one ethnic background. And all the signs in all the stores will be in Korean, Chinese, Spanish, or Russian. I've never seen this in other countries. And it would be seriously illegal in Quebec.
Technology writer George Gilder once said that the only languages that one needs to know to be successful are English and C++.
Language translation will probably be the next 'killer ap' for 64 and 128 bit, 100 GigaHertz computers that we will have on desks in ten years. It may be too early to start companies to do this now, but in five years it will be a major money maker for the information technology industry.
I suspect that in about thirty years we will have glasses that will 'project' the subtitles in near-real time of our conversations with people that are speaking different languages.
A big part of the algorythm for doing these titles will be the compromise of getting the essential core of the dialog, as you have pointed out is done with the subtitle process in today's films.
I've always thought that because of the high ratio of cognates that French should be easy to learn. There probably is a point of exposure to the language where the one can hear the cognates through the pronounciation differences. At that point, comprehension and structure begin to take place. The spoken phonetics become understandable words.
A problem for learning languages in the US is that one never hears them, with the exception of Spanish. In twenty years of living on the west coast of the US, I've heard French spoken twice, both times on the bus. Hardly anyone here is aware that Canada is actually two nations in one country and that the entire linguistic environment changes at the Quebec border.
Exposure to French on the west coast is all but nonexistant. The only way to hear the language is to get videos of old 'New Wave' films by Truffaut and Godard from the library, switch the DVD audio track to French (if it exists), or use internet radio streaming to link into a Montreal radio station.
I've just about given up putting any effort into learning French because there is so little use for it. Except for once every five or ten years when I go to Quebec or France and find that I can almost understand what is being said but actually comprehend nothing.
Anyway, I believe that the reason that French and English have so many cognates is because the Normans from NW France ruled England from 1066 to the 1400s? and forced all government business to be done in their language and Latin. That statement assumes that the Normans spoke a version of French, which might not be true.
Slashdot is a place where one can throw out wild and unsubstanciated claims that one suspects are true and get blasted as a complete idiot by people who actually do know what they are talking about. It's better than saying the same thing at a party and being made a fool in real life.
I sometimes wonder about the validity of my 'academic' degree in Economics (as opposed to my trade degree in Electronics).
Most US universities actually offer two Econ degrees: one in the liberal arts college and one in the business college. Generally the arts degree requires upper level language and literature study for a B.A. while the business college requires upper level marketing and accounting classes for a B.S.
Depending on the university, it is possible to get an Econ degree without writing a single paper in four years. Econ classes (at least the ones that I took) never required undergrads to write papers. For my upper-level arts classes, I ran the university film committee for three semesters. Got college credit and got paid for doing the projection work.
Generally Econ classes are not difficult if you accept the fact that what you're studying has little grounding in reality. For example, we were taught that high unemployment and high inflation would not happen at the same time, but that was exactly what was happening in the late 1970's when the deficits incurred as a result of losing the Vietnam War and the OPEC oil shocks were working their way through the economy after a few years delay. (Don't look now, but something similar will likely happen again in about five years).
Anyway, the classes were full of contradictory material, there were no papers due, and no seriously difficult material to master. So is an Economics degree bogus even when it's legit?
I might add that there is absolutely nothing that you can do with an Econ degree. If you are not making more money from student aid, Pell Grants, scholarships, and subsidized student services than you are paying for tution and opportunity cost of hanging out in Econ classes, then chose another major.
I've been to Eastern and Western Canada (never middle Canada) several times.
It seemed to be very expensive to live there. I live on the low side of middle class in a moderately priced West Coast USA city, and BC seemed to be rather expensive. Especially the provincial coupled with the federal sales tax, the various GSTs PSTs VATs whatever. The last time that I went I was really happy to get back to Washington state where everything was cheaper.
La situation en Quebec est plus difficulte si vous ne parlez pas ce que on crois serait francais la.
If you couldn't read the sentence above as fast as the one before it, reconsider moving to Quebec. They tend to rather touchy about their quaint local legacy language. If you studied a little French in school because French was the cool language to study instead of studying Spanish (which is the only language that Americans should seriously consider studying as it's not even a 'foreign' language here anymore), well then, yes, check out Quebec. Do, however, spend a few months watching DVDs with the language track set to French beforehand.
French is deceptively difficult language for Americans: it's spoken about 20-30% faster than English and has many subtle differences in the vowel sounds that aren't recognized in English. By the way, if you set the DVD audio track to French and the subtitles to French, you'll find that they are rarely the same. It seems that the movies generally get translated twice at different times, once for audio and once for titles. Plus neither of the two translator teams go by the original screenplay. Bit of a pain for language learners, but that was not its intended purpose. All in all, it's worth the trouble, because Quebec is North America's lost undiscovered country. [It's strange that due to NAFTA even Mexican products sold primarily in Mexico often have French translations on their boxes]
One last tip, don't hide sensitive materials from BC in your car at the same height of a dog's nose. Hollow door handles, tail lights, door panels, ect... Bad idea. Best leave Canadian pleasures behind, after all, America is best handled in typical American style: drunk.
Slashdot Mirror
David Crosby, aside from being a fat, weird, overpaid, coked-up buffoon, has made some very good music over the years.
Download a copy of KazaaLite and search for Crosby, Stills, & Nash "Guinneviere" or The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" or "Mr Tambourine Man". Then check out "Wooden Ships" by CNSY or Jefferson Airplane. It is one of their best songs and one of the two that are still worth listening too (the other good JeffAir song is "Martha" which can probably found on Kazaa also).
The really great thing about Kazaa that the RIAA doesn't understand is that the music that is there is only there because people make a serious effort to put it there and keep it there. Kazaa users and posters keep the songs alive at great legal risk to themselves because they seriously believe that certain songs should be kept available. Clueless media executives will never understand this.
Anyway, Mr Crosby has credibility only because he has such passion towards defending great music, both his and his contemporaries'
David Crosby, aside from being a fat, weird, overpaid, coked-up buffoon, has made some very good music over the years.
Download a copy of KazaaLite and search for Crosby, Stills, & Nash "Guinneviere" or The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" or "Mr Tambourine Man". Then check out "Wooden Ships" by CNSY or Jefferson Airplane. It is one of their best songs and one of the two that are still worth listening too (the other good JeffAir song is "Martha" which can probably found on Kazaa also).
The really great thing about Kazaa that the RIAA doesn't understand is that the music that is there is only there because people make a serious effort to put it there and keep it there. Kazaa users and posters keep the songs alive at great legal risk to themselves because they seriously believe that certain songs should be kept available. Clueless media executives will never understand this.
Anyway, Mr Crosby has credibility only because he has such passion towards defending great music, both his and his contemporaries'.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I'm finding that often to only way to get a real honest reply to a real world situation is to post an overblown comment on Slashdot and get corrected by the a few of the thousands of varied professionals who see it and are provoked into giving a reply.
Again I thank you.
Music innovation is a two way street. The cultural process of making music has reached the point where the centralization of talent and distribution of recordings can no longer sustain musical culture.
In other words, if you love music, the time has come to start learning how to make it yourself. In the 20th century, the paridigm arose that people would listen to the radio to hear what was new. The best musicians would play on the radio to get known. People would buy musical recordings that they heard on the radio and musicians would copy the musical styles and add their own improvements. People would go to hear musicians play what they heard on radio and then a little bit more. As the bands improved and surpassed the radio performers, they would record, have their recordings played on the radio, and the cycle would begin again.
The various economic and technological developments covered in the PBS series have caused this model to fall apart.
The 21st century solution requires more input for the music community. If you love music, you need to learn to play an instrument and get involved in the music creation process. Not to the extent of the 20th century musicians, but more than the 20th century audience.
Start with music that you already like. Get a notation program that displays MIDI files in sheet music form and plays the notes through the sound card. It's not 'music', but that's not the point. The point is to learn about the music itself: the chords, the harmonies, the arrangements. Almost all popular songs from the past thirty years have MIDI files available on the web. It's an incredable resource, if you can use it.
Learn a little about written music. It's always the first program cut in public schools so there is a good possiblity that you have had no exposure to it in high school if you graduated within the past ten years. If you can learn C++, you can learn anything. Learning to read music is one path to independence from the RIAA, so it is worth the time and effort. Again the music notation programs like MIDISOFT studio v4.0 that play MIDI files are a big help.
Get instruments that match the ones used on your favorite recordings. Ebay is a great source. For example, you can now buy the same synthesizers used for 70s,80s, and 90s music at a tiny fraction of the original retail music store prices. Often you can buy a synthesizer or tone module (a synth without a keyboard that plays through the computer's MIDI port on the joystick connector) for $80, use it for several months, and resell it on Ebay for a different type for the same price that youo paid for it. You get a long term rental of a complicated musical instrument for the cost of shipping it to you from the previous owner. Sometimes you can get the instruments directly from the musicians who make the original pop hits and have been driven into bankruptcy after they pissed away their advance on SUVs, partys, and entourages.
You can also get schematics of many of the stomp box guitar effects on the web, including all those used to make the classical rock songs of the 60s and 70s. You can get files that explain note by note how to play the great guitar solos from that period as well. Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Santana, ect... All the great classic rock songs have been documented and are on-line. It doesn't matter if you don't really like the original music, it matters that you are learning to be a musician and as such you are breaking the deep psycological bonds that tie you to RIAA product.
Then you can start creating your own music and start trading it on specialized sites (such as the Yahoo Groups dedicated to a particular instrument or band). You can collaborate with other people engaged in the same process and who are at the same point as you. If you're stuck you can get help from others.
All this is completely beneath the radar of the RIAA, but will go a long way to meet your basic human need for music without being a passive disgrunted endless consumer of RIAA product.
Anyway it is a real alternative to the RIAA.
The Mafia was formed to protect ordinary people from laws like this coming from Rome. Just as soon as you get the gangsters under some form of control, the politicians do something totally stupid to revive it.
Did the Mafia help get this law passed in order to revive their ancient public image as the last bulwark against total Roman oppression?
Since this is Italy, I assume this law only really applies to downloading materials that come from companies that Berlusconi owns a controlling interest in.
Which, since this is Italy, is practically everything.
Speaking on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Italian P2P users, what are Italian jails like?
Are they sex torture rape factories like American prisons? Are they government profit centers like Mexican prisons (where you have to buy your own food)? If you download really big files and get the death penality, do they charge your family 50 cents like the Chinese do? Are they just 'work the zeks until they drop' slave-labor camps like the Soviet Gulags?
Come on, Italian politicians, you passed a law to put tens of thousands of your own young people in prison for activities that few civilized people consider to be a crime. Now that you have your 'law', what are you going to do with it?
Wanna send the RIAA a message? Pick a day, buy a bunch of new albums, and on the next day return them unopened and in resalable condition.
My understanding of the music biz is that in this type of situation, the retail price of the albums that are returned will be subtracted from the artist's royalities. So the only person receiveing a message are the musicians, who are learning that they should have never entered this line of work in the first place.
You didn't seriously expect that the music industry would not have figured out a way to charge the musicians for EVERYTHING that would be a cost for the record companies, did you?
The music industry is obsessed with the idea that they have the most desired product in the world (with the exception of refined opiates) and that everybody will do everything they can to get everything that they release. Therefore they must go to insane lengths to keep their product away from people except in small, measured, and expensive doses.
To a large extent this is the truth, but it is becoming less so every year. Eventually, the music industry will reach the point where they realise that their extended efforts to prevent people's access to their product has resulted in a significant decline in the demand for their product. Threaten enough people with prison, asset confiscation, and criminal records for using your product and people will stop using your product, regardless of the price that you charge for it. Tastes can change. The music industry may find out that the obsession with possessing pre-recorded music on disks might be a characteristic only found in western baby-boomers. When they pass from the scene, so may their industry.
I read that the music industry sales have fallen from 36 billion US dollars to 24 billion US in three years. That figure puts the entire business at less than South Korean prostitution (according to Asia Times -www.atimes.com) and almost as big as the toilet paper business. What other business this size gets special laws passed to put their customers in prison over pricing disagreements?
The way to get rich off the law is pass a law (bribe and blackmail the lawmakers) that makes illegal something that a large minority of people do. The majority of people will support the law because they don't engage in the particular activity.
Then use the fact that a large minority of people do it and continue to do it despite its illegality to raise the penalities for breaking this law very high. Again the majority of people will go along with this because they don't engage in this particular activity.
Use the high penalities to encourage a system of bounty hunters who get to share in the enormous fines that are brought against the many people (a large minority works best) who are found disobeying this law when they snitch their neighbors to the authorities for disobeying this law. Make sure the activity that is made illegal is common and accepted by a large minority of people. The best size of this minority is about 15 percent of the population; a larger percentage and you run the risk of a successful revolt and a smaller percentage doesn't bring in enough money to make the whole business worthwhile.
Then just sit back and let the money pile in from legal fees and fines.
In the USA, the stategy worked great on Black people (African-Americans) until the 1960's. It worked great on gays and other sexual minorities until the late 1970's. It still brings in hundreds of millions of dollars from the marijuana community every year to the police and the lawyers.
Now it about to be applied to the recorded music-lover community, starting with random students and working up from there to the general middle-class.
Just one more permanent American extortion money-making scheme. As soon as one passes, another takes its place. Americans talk a lot of trash about freedom, but when it comes to using the law to extort money from minorities, be they racial, sexual, life-style, and now digital media minorities, the dollar always comes first.
I simply refuse to accept that music file sharing is illegal.
People are sharing recorded sounds with each other, it is not a big deal. Since the companies put the recordings out into the public in the first place, they shouldn't be upset or surprised that people are sharing them with each other.
Sharing music files is about as big a 'crime' as sharing a can opener at a company picnic. The RIAA is simply exposing the gangster underbelly of the music industry that has always been discretely hidden (except to musicians) from the public with this ugly extortion.
This idea that music is sold in individual packages by created rock stars is a weird 20th-century concept (like communism) that simply appears grotesque and distasteful in the modern age. Music is like air: it comes into you, it comes out of you. No one can own it.
By all means, stop giving these people money that they use to extort money from others. What goes around, comes around.
While I acknowledge the argument that there is a need for standards in newly-developing technological fields, they are not as important as they were fifty years ago.
An advantage of tiny inexpensive microcontrollers is the ability to convert from one standard to another in the background, out of the notice of the user.
Standards are only a real problem when their specifications are not shared with the consumers, or when the companies make it illegal to convert from one standard to another. Reverse-engineering to get one machine to work with another should never be illegal, nor should publishing technical documentation about a particular machine.
Another problem is when the standard is so complex that simple inexpensive microcontrollers can't convert from one to another. An example of ultra-complex standards would be spoken languages: 1.3 billion people speak Mandarin Chinese and 1 billion speak English, but if you know one and not the other you are isolated when immersed in the country that uses that standard.
Here's an idea:
Record a phone call from the one person that you DON'T want to talk to. Use the stupidest, most lame part of the call as the ring tone on your phone.
Then as soon as it 'rings', immediately turn the stupid thing OFF.
On behalf of all the people around you (in the library, in class, in the theatre):
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
I think that a lot of people here are missing the point.
Both video games and movies are basically 20th century mediums. And as such they are now halfway steps to a new 21st century medium: an interactive digitally-generated photography.
Combine synthetic animation such as the AnaNova newscaster with quasi-AI like the classic Eliza program, voice recognition, on-line anonymous interaction with thousands of strangers presenting their image to you as 'avatars'. Have it semi-scripted by Hollywood screenwriters and directors. Run it on multiprocessor systems that are 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more powerful than today's systems.
You get an entirely new medium that makes today's movies and games look as dull as Super-8 family movies and silent film tricks from a hundred years ago. There are some people in Hollywood that realize that movies are about to go the way of Vaudeville in the next twenty years
.
The visual sequence matches the series motif perfectly (who are those guys in the 60's astronaut/cosmonaut clips? Are they real period video clips, or actors?).
The song is too trite and borders on moronic.
They should get Brian Eno to write a theme song for the visuals.
This series is too militaristic. The writers are reacting to the Saudi Arabian massacre of Sept.11 (heard of it? check the web if not) by imposing a Gulf War II-type of ambiance onto a series that takes place hundreds of years in the future.
It leaves a metal taste in my mouth.
People simply aren't going to think and act this way in the future.
The writers should take the actors and plots and move them to a contemporary Gulf war setting if they want to celebrate techno-warrior jingoism. They would get all the ratings boost that they need to keep going forever.
The ST:Enterprise writers should read some real modern science-fiction and stop feeding us all this John Wayne-meets-Star Wars stuff. Because, to tell the truth, they don't really do it as well as John Wayne (check out some of his 1950's movies on DVD if your not familiar with his persona) and George Lucas.
It wouldn't hurt (except the ratings) to lighten up on the rubber mask characters and the contrived sexual tension between the crew members. In two hundred years, people will either just anomomously fuck, take anti-Viagra pills, use virtual-reality porn, or bring their families with them on long space voyages. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose
Please reply with tips for getting those funny accented characters from obscure European legacy languages into Slashdot messages. Thanks.
Actually after reading the posted message, it occured to me that positioning giant hydrogen-filled blimps over forest fires is probably not the best approach to the situation.
Perhaps it's best to consider other options besides fixed wing aircraft for fighting fires.
How about huge balloons like Zeppelins or blimps that carry water over the fire and drop it.
Perhaps even ultra large HYDROGEN filled blimps that use the hydrogen as fuel for the positioning propellers of the craft, then converting part of the hydrogen into water to drop on the fire. The H2-to-water conversion will create electricity for the fuel cells to power the aircraft back to base.
Whenever someone suggests using hydrogen as anti-ballast another person always says Hindenberg, referring to the air disaster in 1938. However, recent research has shown that the Hindenberg burned because the skin of the craft was covered highly flammable paint. This paint, which resembled modern rocket fuel, caused the craft to burn and crash so quickly. The disaster would have happened in a similar manner even if the Hindenberg had been filled with helium.
Another approach would be to cover the fire with a huge, very light, very thin, non-flammable blanket. This would remove the air from the burning embers rather than lowering the surface temperature below the ignition point, which is what the water drop does. A group of very large dirigibles (think about ten times as large as the Goodyear/Fuji blimp) would position the blanket over the blaze, lower it with winches, extinguish the flames, then lift it and reposition it over other flames. Sounds weird, doesn't it? So does using a 747, for Christ's sake, to drop water on a mountain forest fire.
Anyway, using a 747 for fire control sounds more like Evergreen is trying to both get rid of obsolete aircraft and get a huge tax write-off at the same time. This company has a LONG history of scamming the government with dubious projects at high profit for themselves.
Please use this as an opportunity to tell me how wrong I am and how ridiculous these ideas are. That is part of the process of coming up with new and innovative solutions to a serious problem (at least to us here in the Pacific Northwest) that we have not been able to solve and are running out of ideas and money.
The solution is exceptionally simple: When you hear a song you want, go to the store or whatever source, and buy it. You will have no problems.
Those days are gone. We will actually have lots of problems.
One: we can't hear a song that we want because the channels of exposure are closed to all recordings except for a small number that the record companies have paid enormous amounts of money to have played on the Clear Channel monopoly. P2P exists to allow the music community to share their discoveries with others in the community.
Two: the price of the song is set by monopoly control by the record companies. The bands themselves have no control over the price of their songs, nor do the listeners. And the price is way too high. In a real free marketplace, buyers and sellers would bid and offer until the price was acceptable to both parties and the transaction occurs. For example, goth-metal 'artist' Delicious Goodhead records a rap album of Rolling Stones songs. I like the Stones and will pay $20 for their new recordings, hate rap and will only pay $0.25 for a #1 rap record, and thought Mr. Goodhead's last record was mediocre so will only pay $3 for his next masterpiece. I offer $5 for the new recording. A week after it leaves the top ten the record company accepts my bid and authorizes me to buy a blank CD-R at my local record store for $0.25 and have the latest Delicious Goodhead recording burned on it.
This is how the free market works. If the record industry worked this way, people would buy a lot more music.
Three: A large percentage of very dollar that you give to the RIAA for music recordings goes to put you in jail. Under their laws, their purchased legislators, and their penalties. It is not in anyone's better interest to give money to any entity that uses the money to destroy your life and freedom. Christ, you pay taxes, isn't that enough?
Four: The RIAA companies have repeatedly and systematicly shown that they will cheat and defraud the artists that make the music. If you give money to the record companies, you are hurting the music community because the fair and proper compensation that you believe that you are giving to the musicians is not, has never, and will not in the future get to the artists under the present music industry system. And every purchase that you make perpetuates that system.
If we could 'just buy the music', we would 'just buy the music'.
But those days are gone.
Thank you for your reply.
Most Americans are humbled and intimidated by other people's ability to master languages. They hide it with a false projection of linguistic ethnocentricism.
I'm always amazed that Americans will assume that someone from the USA who learns a hundred words of, say, an Asian language is considered a genius (especially if they are African-American in background) while a person from Asia who isn't fluent in English is 'slow'. It seems to be an unconscious form of racism that gets missed until pointed out.
Possibly the reason that it is so much fun to bash the people in Quebec about their language is the obsession that they have about stopping English from creeping into general usage. Their language laws are unique for North America and are somewhat extreme. For example, no language but French allowed in any commercial signs. Here in the US we have entire shopping malls that are owned by friends, family, and organizations that are all of one ethnic background. And all the signs in all the stores will be in Korean, Chinese, Spanish, or Russian. I've never seen this in other countries. And it would be seriously illegal in Quebec.
Anyway, thanks for your reply.
Technology writer George Gilder once said that the only languages that one needs to know to be successful are English and C++.
Language translation will probably be the next 'killer ap' for 64 and 128 bit, 100 GigaHertz computers that we will have on desks in ten years. It may be too early to start companies to do this now, but in five years it will be a major money maker for the information technology industry.
Thanks for your reply to my message.
Thanks for the reply.
I suspect that in about thirty years we will have glasses that will 'project' the subtitles in near-real time of our conversations with people that are speaking different languages.
A big part of the algorythm for doing these titles will be the compromise of getting the essential core of the dialog, as you have pointed out is done with the subtitle process in today's films.
Thanks again for your reply.
Thank you for your extended reply.
I've always thought that because of the high ratio of cognates that French should be easy to learn. There probably is a point of exposure to the language where the one can hear the cognates through the pronounciation differences. At that point, comprehension and structure begin to take place. The spoken phonetics become understandable words.
A problem for learning languages in the US is that one never hears them, with the exception of Spanish. In twenty years of living on the west coast of the US, I've heard French spoken twice, both times on the bus. Hardly anyone here is aware that Canada is actually two nations in one country and that the entire linguistic environment changes at the Quebec border.
Exposure to French on the west coast is all but nonexistant. The only way to hear the language is to get videos of old 'New Wave' films by Truffaut and Godard from the library, switch the DVD audio track to French (if it exists), or use internet radio streaming to link into a Montreal radio station.
I've just about given up putting any effort into learning French because there is so little use for it. Except for once every five or ten years when I go to Quebec or France and find that I can almost understand what is being said but actually comprehend nothing.
Anyway, I believe that the reason that French and English have so many cognates is because the Normans from NW France ruled England from 1066 to the 1400s? and forced all government business to be done in their language and Latin. That statement assumes that the Normans spoke a version of French, which might not be true.
Slashdot is a place where one can throw out wild and unsubstanciated claims that one suspects are true and get blasted as a complete idiot by people who actually do know what they are talking about. It's better than saying the same thing at a party and being made a fool in real life.
Thanks again for the reply.
Thanks for your reply and interesting information. Where else but Slashdot could anyone have learned this?
I sometimes wonder about the validity of my 'academic' degree in Economics (as opposed to my trade degree in Electronics).
Most US universities actually offer two Econ degrees: one in the liberal arts college and one in the business college. Generally the arts degree requires upper level language and literature study for a B.A. while the business college requires upper level marketing and accounting classes for a B.S.
Depending on the university, it is possible to get an Econ degree without writing a single paper in four years. Econ classes (at least the ones that I took) never required undergrads to write papers. For my upper-level arts classes, I ran the university film committee for three semesters. Got college credit and got paid for doing the projection work.
Generally Econ classes are not difficult if you accept the fact that what you're studying has little grounding in reality. For example, we were taught that high unemployment and high inflation would not happen at the same time, but that was exactly what was happening in the late 1970's when the deficits incurred as a result of losing the Vietnam War and the OPEC oil shocks were working their way through the economy after a few years delay. (Don't look now, but something similar will likely happen again in about five years).
Anyway, the classes were full of contradictory material, there were no papers due, and no seriously difficult material to master. So is an Economics degree bogus even when it's legit?
I might add that there is absolutely nothing that you can do with an Econ degree. If you are not making more money from student aid, Pell Grants, scholarships, and subsidized student services than you are paying for tution and opportunity cost of hanging out in Econ classes, then chose another major.
I've been to Eastern and Western Canada (never middle Canada) several times.
It seemed to be very expensive to live there. I live on the low side of middle class in a moderately priced West Coast USA city, and BC seemed to be rather expensive. Especially the provincial coupled with the federal sales tax, the various GSTs PSTs VATs whatever. The last time that I went I was really happy to get back to Washington state where everything was cheaper.
La situation en Quebec est plus difficulte si vous ne parlez pas ce que on crois serait francais la.
If you couldn't read the sentence above as fast as the one before it, reconsider moving to Quebec. They tend to rather touchy about their quaint local legacy language. If you studied a little French in school because French was the cool language to study instead of studying Spanish (which is the only language that Americans should seriously consider studying as it's not even a 'foreign' language here anymore), well then, yes, check out Quebec. Do, however, spend a few months watching DVDs with the language track set to French beforehand.
French is deceptively difficult language for Americans: it's spoken about 20-30% faster than English and has many subtle differences in the vowel sounds that aren't recognized in English. By the way, if you set the DVD audio track to French and the subtitles to French, you'll find that they are rarely the same. It seems that the movies generally get translated twice at different times, once for audio and once for titles. Plus neither of the two translator teams go by the original screenplay. Bit of a pain for language learners, but that was not its intended purpose. All in all, it's worth the trouble, because Quebec is North America's lost undiscovered country. [It's strange that due to NAFTA even Mexican products sold primarily in Mexico often have French translations on their boxes]
One last tip, don't hide sensitive materials from BC in your car at the same height of a dog's nose. Hollow door handles, tail lights, door panels, ect... Bad idea. Best leave Canadian pleasures behind, after all, America is best handled in typical American style: drunk.
Just because we CAN invade their territory, disrupt their ecology, and torment them, doesn't mean that we should.
That applies to Iraqis, too.