In the USA, where the managerial class seems to be specifically bred to be missing significant portions of their brains, it happens all the time that employees are ordered to train their replacements. Then they are fired or terminated for chickenshit and denied unemployment benefits.
This happened to me when I the small company that I was working for got taken over by its German parent company. The new six-foot eight-inch 30-year-old 'manager' came in and reassigned everyone to really stupid and degrading restructured positions. Then as they complained, each employee was fired.
Then the fuckhead went out of his way to ensure that the fired employees couldn't get unemployment benefits, even when it wouldn't cost the company anything (I looked into this and it was true) and the employees had been working profitably for as many as seven years. He said that Germany was ruined by socialists and now that he was in the US, he could run the place like a 'pure capitalist'. I considered reminding him that just firing people on a whim and then making sure that that couldn't get benefits was not such a good idea in a country where everybody had a gun collection, but I decided that I really didn't need the weird shit that would come from such a comment so easily misunderstood by a foreigner.
Sure enough the viruses, lawsuits, crank calls, and all sorts of nastiness started happening within a few weeks. Then the sales dropped off. Then the stock price went from 66 Euros to 1.5 Euros in a 12 month period (it's bounced back to 4.5 Euros).
Then it was my turn to jump into the tree chipper.
I followed your link to JetAudio (I'm always looking for a WinAmp alternative simply because I've used the same program for almost seven years now).
This is the ugliest web site that I've ever seen! If I didn't know that this was some kind of audio file player software, I never would have known.
I love the part where they say to download the freeware program and then list all of the features of the U-Pay version. From the description, I couldn't determine one difference between the U-Pay and the 'freeware' version.
What a mess.
I don't expect these people to be around in three years.
How about boring a tunnel beneath the Straits of Gibralter so that millions of Spanish and other Europeans currently living in desparate fear of Basque terrorism can excape to the freedom, security, and general prosperity found in the glorious lands of Allah?
Although Homeland Security as initially presented as a way of combining various diverse agencies for the purpose of clearer lines of communication, in reality the main purpose of combining all these agencies was to negate the influence of government employee unions.
All the old agencies were unionized. The new agency was prohibited by the law founding it from having employee unions. This was done 'for security reasons', of course. And it was completely ignored by the media in the aftermath of the September 11th massacre in their effort to find the hidden connection between Osama Bin Laden and Britney's titties.
There's no real evidence that the new HS department is any more efficient that the previous assortment of seperate departments. In fact they may be less efficient now because they are more easily influenced by political manipulation, like Microsoft's obsession with destoying the open-source movement.
Notwithstanding the possiblility that this entire post is an elaborate hoax in keeping with the USA April First tradition, I must say that helping anyone develop a surface-to-air missile is an unethical use of open source method.
There are far too many people running around who would use the technology to shoot down commercial airliners during their critical take-off and landing approaches. Knowingly allowing a technical contribution from oneself to be used for mass murder is unethical. I am not a lawyer, but I would believe that it is traditionally illegal under the 'accessory to murder' classification and most certainly under the vague new anti-terrorism laws being enacted in the OCED countries.
Of course, this only applies to individuals. If you are part of military defense contractor corporation, you will be getting large sums of money to develop the same technology and distribute it to 'friendly' countries. Representives from these countries will then distribute this technology to their various relatives in various terrorist organizations.
These groups will undoubtably commit acts of mass murder which will lead to the call for more funds spent developing new mass-murder technology (excuse me, defense technology) R&D contracts. The new technology will be distributed to 'friendly' governments who will distibute it to their relatives in terrorist groups... And the circle begins anew.
Terrorism will stop when all the young men who are willing to commit mass-murder for a cause have been identified and killed, AND, when the giant western military contractors stop making huge amounts of money developing mass-murder technology (like surface-to-air missles) that make the whole cycle possible.
Great Post! Well thought out and written. Logical and passionate.
I might suggest getting a DVD writer (I suggest an 8X speed one) and making DVDs of all the great music that you have come to know and trading these with friends, associates, people who look kind-of cool, and even strangers on website postings. Each blank DVD costs about a dollar and holds about 50 albums in 192kbps MP3 format. Mailing costs are about 60 cents a disk with quality shipping envelope folders at about 50 cents.
This , along with hard disk swapping (a $100 160 Gigabyte hard disk holding about 2100 albums) will be the new Napster and primary method of music awareness and promotion among elite listeners when (or if and when) the P2P networks are shut down by the media corporations.
In order to determine the real effect of P2P on recording sales, we have to move away from the idea that each recording is equal to each other recording, even though that approach is mandated by the media corporations by identical pricing for each title.
Let's assume that each person who buys recordings has a personal scale for the albums that he is aware of, say one to five. The albums considered five will be bought as soon as release at full retail, they love this band and want the new release now. The albums rated one would never be purchased and most likely not be listened to. The twos and threes will be bought if there is no new ones to be purchased and if a new interest in this band or recording can be generated.
P2P users (that is assuming those with high-speed bandwidth) will most-likely download three rated titles. Those with slow bandwidth (dialup modems) will download 'two' rated titles. The exposure to two and three rated titles will move some bands into the one rated category. That, and also the savings of not purchasing three rated recordings, allows the same amount of money that would have been spent for two and three rated recordings to be spent on new ones and twos.
As long as the same amount of money is being spent on recordings as before P2P, then obviously P2P doesn't hurt record sales. It does however, change the balance of sales amoung second and third tier level bands. Meaning, unless you're a superstar, P2P filesharing means that there is going to be a greater correlation between your touring and your record sales.
Record companies should adopt an Ebay auction approach to selling records. By agreeing to release only a certain number of physical recordings within a certain time period, then really popular bands can command higher than normal prices for their latest. New bands can price their recordings at manufacturing cost to get people to buy and try a new sound.
Opps! The record industry should have done this about twenty years ago. They wouldn't have anywhere near the problems that they have now. Well, too late now.
Perhaps its time to seriously consider seperating a section of the United States into an independent country in order to shield its people from the madness of Washington DC.
In the late 1970s there was a novel about the seperation of Northern California, Western Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska along the Cascade mountains in order to create an independent republic of Ecotopia. Perhaps we should study this concept if the easterners continue to go insane.
There would be many issues to settle and possibly a lot of bloodshed. (If the Americans were happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to kill Vietnamese for no reason at all, imagine how they would react to a modern secession of their own people.)
Nevertheless there are examples of modern peaceful disunion of empires, such as the former Soviet Union and Czeckoslovakia. Even our northern neighbors managed to come to peaceful new arrangement of powers between Quebec and Ottawa.
It's a wild idea...but it gains credability with each new outrage from the corporate lunatics and bible thumpers in Washington, DC.
Two old men want to pass a law that will put millions of young people in prison for activities that the young don't consider to be crimes.
Happened before with marijuana and Vietnam war draft evasion.
Perhaps since this number of young people being placed in jail will overwhelm the prison system, perhaps we should look into how much money the private prison corporations gave to the 'lawmakers' to get them to propose this insanity. The only people who will gain from doing this is the private prison corporations, CCA and Wackenhut.
Besides, this being the USA, you KNOW the only people who will be going to jail for this are black kids. White college boys can download all the 'death monster junko speed metal' that they want to and have a $20 fine and their dorm internet access suspended for a few hours, while a serious black student downloading a clip of Lena Horn or Billie Holliday for a black history class multimedia project will get the full 10 years.
Go ahead... tell me I'm wrong.
In the long run, about a hundred years or more, this type of legal intimidation will only serve to transfer the entire music, movie, culture, multimedia business out of the USA; and the bullet proof DRM that will be applied to media product of the last third of the 20th century and first third of the 21st will make it impossible to view or see or experience anything that was made in this period.
An example of this is ALL of the novels published in the US between 1930 and 1955. As the paper wears out, the books get pulped. Under the infinite minus a day copyright laws it is illegal to transfer them to digital format without corporate permission, and the corporations won't give permission because there is no profit in novels from this period now. End result? A whole generation of literature disappears to protect an asshole mickey mouse cartoon logo.
This will happen to all of today's media product too. Sad, stupid, and completely avoidable by reasonable people following reasonable copyright guidelines. Instead we get this idiot from Utah and Michael Eisner; and the permanent loss of our and our parent's culture.
Constitutional freedoms should apply to such vermin...
Constitutional freedoms do apply to everyone in the United States. It's what makes them morally superior to the Stalinists and the Muslims.
There are many shades of political opinion among the left and progressive peoples at that time. The monstrous crimes of Stalin were not generally known until Khrushchev's denounciation of Stalin in 1956 and the publication of Solshenetizn's 'Gulag' books in the early 1970's.
I wouldn't flamebait you on this. I do understand how the world works.
But I often have to wonder about some of the other posters on Slashdot. There seem to a lot of people here who don't understand the emotional consequences of the destruction of human life as well as they understand the technology behind it.
This can leave them at a serious disadvantage in that they may be easily convinced to engage in this activity without understanding what they will be going through afterwards when the reality of what they have done begins to sink in.
In the mid to late 1960's, many tens of thousands of 19-year-old men (the same age as many Slashdotters) thought that they were going to have a John Wayne 'cool movie hero'-type of experience by signing-up to fight a war in the Vietnamese jungle. Thirty years later many of them still haven't recovered from what they found themselves subjected to in the real world of war and industrialized mass-murder.
I'm always amazed at the restrait that the Israelis show towards the people who commit such violent and horrible acts of savagery against them. If someone were to do to the Americans what the Palestinians do to the Israelis on a regular basis, the Americans would just either kill most of them or put them all in a giant concentration camp in the wilds of Alaska (with microchips in their heads and AWACKs flying overhead to make sure that they didn't go anywhere).
But it is not my place to either condemn or criticize how the Israelis do things. It is their country and they understand what is a subtle, complex, and dangerous situation far more than I do. However, I can't shake the feeling that the Palestinians are basically a doomed people and it's just a matter of time before they do something that is so outrageous that the rest of the world will decide to just accept their systemic depopulation as a cruel but necessary step to a better world. I wish it weren't so, but it's beginning to look like this is way that it's going to be.
Sorry, I have to disagree with this one. It's a new century and we can no longer pretend that murder is not murder by arbitrarily classifing the victims as acceptable military targets. There will never be world peace until solders accept that what they do is murder. I no longer accept that there is any difference between civilian murder and military murder. There are other ways of dealing with political situations; it's just that murder is the usually the fastest, cheapest, and easiest.
But let's not pretend any more that this is not was it actually is. Killing people is murder, and wrapping the act in military metaphors is just a way to do and feel good about it afterwards.
The Hollywood blacklist was started in the late 1940's and continued roughly until the late 1950's.
It basically started when the president of the Screen Actor's Guild at the time, an over-the-hill actor named Ronald Reagan, decided to get on the good side of the House Committee on Un-American Activies by volunteering to turn over to them the names of all the people that he suspected of having Communist tendencies in the film industry.
The willingness of this actor to be a total asshole and his enthusiasm in destroying the lives of the other actors that he was supposed to be defending as SAG president caught the attention of the dormant conservative Republicans, who financed his California governor's race in the mid 1960's.
Fly through window, Then EXPLODE... Now That would be cool.
This is probably what the little plane will eventually be used for. An ounce of Cemtex plastic explosive surrounded by very hard plastic that rips apart skin, burrows deeply, and can't be detected by X-rays (Rhetegen sp? rays) enclosed on a little plane. Or the little plane can be the device sending guidance information to a larger missle. Another nasty assassination tool.
So what's so 'cool' about this kind of murder? Are you some kind of death freak? Or just another silly American suburban child-man who has been shielded from all possible exposure to real blood and evil except for ultra-violent movies and video games.
Murder is not 'cool', dude.
Let's Not Feed the Third World
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
The big problem with using advanced first-world technology is that when the people get a little food in them they fuck like crazy and create large population growths. The new populations can't get jobs because the third-world economy can't grow to meet the needs of all of these new people.
Then they become cannon fodder-suicide plums to manipulative religious fanatics who send them off to kill and be killed for the benefit of the religious leaders. And the people whom they get sent to kill are often the same people who were most concerned about making the world a better place for their parents in the first place...Peace Core Syndrome.
I realize that I sound like a monster, but... Seriously, if you want to help these people, Norplant them, then feed them.
I would let the media corps have an exclusive right to sell M&Ms or anyone's latest album in disk form. I would not let them send anyone to jail for file sharing. If you have a recording then you can share it.
In the present situation the global media companys claim the legal right to send anyone to jail for sharing 1920s ragtime music, or any music recorded since the 1920s. This is wrong. After the traditional period of 17 years, music recordings and publishing should revert to public domain for the any use that the public would like. If you want to claim that you wrote it and recorded it; fine. Many young people claim that they have written blues progressions that go back to the turn of the 20th century.
The fact that no one is getting busted 'here' for sharing 1920's music is not the same as having a legal protection from legal harassment for sharing 1920's music. If an overzealous prosecutor is looking for an excuse to bust someone, then sharing 1920s ragtime is as good as reason as any, if it is legally allowable.
First let me state that I completely reject the idea that giant media corporations own music. They don't make it, they don't compensate the people who do make it, and culture is not something that owned by a corporation anyway.
I will conceed their 'right' to an exclusive sales agreement on pre-pressed media for the recordings of 'artists' that sign contracts with their corporation, but only for a period of ten years. Downloads remain no one's 'property'. After the traditional period of seventeen years, the recording becomes public domain for anyone's use and reuse, commercial or private.
But I don't the ability to legally enforce my position.
I suggest that people prepare themselves for the hard and painfull process of removing their cultural consciousness from the global media corporation product. It's painfull because they infect every part of our cultural consciousness from the time that we are born.
I suggest studying music and filmmaking. And then getting inexpensive equipment such as musical instruments and camcorders and making your own personal audio-visual product. The instruments could be MIDI music synthesizers which desperately need new and exciting ways to create sounds and music through creative programming. The whole MIDI scene is stuck in a deep rut. There hasn't been a new programming idea in this field in ten years. The synthesizers cost one tenth of what they did ten years ago and it is possible to get powerful equipment for less than $100US.
The more that you get away from global media corporate product, the more that you begin to find topics like literary crititism, plotting, and writing revelant and important. Study in these subjects is completely wasted on people saturated in global media corporate product and should be dropped from school requirements. No more need for Cliff Notes and Anthology of English Lit books (at $150 a pop). Stupid and worthless.
Please do not concern yourself about the ethical and moral issues of copywrite legalities. There are none. The global media corporations STOLE the public domain by bribing the American legislators to pass laws extending copywrite to infinity minus a day.
No civilized person has any need to respect these copywrite laws. And you should pay attention to them only to the extent that you keep yourself from being imprisoned by them.
Anything that you do to undermine or superceed the copywrite laws is morally and ethically valid. Remember, these people stole the public domain. They have no right to call ANYONE thieves, nor do they have a right to claim any cultural content as their property.
But this isn't SCO vs. the Feds. It's Microsoft taking on the Feds in an arena of Microsoft's choosing.
At this point it is fairly clear that SCO is a shell corporation, shilling for Microsoft who is their primary funder through background 'loans','stock swaps', and probable other deep business secrets. MS is using the remains of SCO to destroy the corporate credibility of Linux and then continue to force the Open Source movement into its organization through fees and licenses.
The US Federal government threw everything it legally had at Microsoft in the 1990's and lost. MS used bribes (campaign contributions) and massive legal expenditures (tax deductable) to defeat the Feds.
Now they are on the offensive against their enemy. Personally I wouldn't take on the Feds so blatently (given their 25000 Hydrogen bombs, state-of-the-art assassination teams, and the fact that they are incorporated in the same country controlled by millions of middle-aged female bureaucrats), but I guess the richest man in the world believes that he has a good chance of bending them to his indomitable will.
Thanks to them, the whole DVD writer market is substantially less than it could have been.
Perhaps the **AA perfers to have the DVD writer market as small as possible. I doubt that they have had any influence on the mirade of 'standards' for DVD writers, but anything that decreases the willingness of people to buy DVD writers works in their interest.
I was thinking more Science Fiction TV shows like the original Star Trek, which dealt indirectly with 1960's issues that few other shows would touch.
The M.A.S.H. TV show aired primarily in the 1970's after the Vietnam war was over. The original movie was released in 1970. It was much tougher than the TV show and did relate to the Vietnam war, even though it was set in the Korean War. It was cheaper and politically easier to set the movie in the Korean war. Cheaper because the California countryside looked much more like Korea than tropical VietNam, and easier because the studio could claim to be making a historical war movie instead of a contemporary anti-war movie.
Actually this will probably be the only show to deal with today's most important legal issues.
The 'future' setting in television shows is always just a plot device to handle controversial modern issues without getting shot down by the network censors (the 'standards and practices' department).
Television in the USA is always a fine line between pissing off the commercial sponsers and attracting viewers. The material must be 'hot' enough to attact viewers from cable and internet but not to 'hot' to invoke the possiblility that the commercial sponsor will flip out.
However today since the media corporations own so much of the rest of the economy (or, more precisely, the media corporations are owned by giant conglamerates who own large chucks of the economy), it is more important not to piss off anyone in the government.
Television is stupid because there are very few types of progamming that meet those exact requirements, and all the possible plots and scenarios were already developed and aired twenty years ago.
Television would probably have to go off the air anyway by December 2006 without government decree. They simply have run out of things to show.
Actually, my friends and I developed a sci-fi noir detective movie set in 2035 based entirely around IP infringements. We worked up the stories more than 10 years ago, only to see a handful of some of our more absurd ideas actually show up in the courtrooms of today...
That is very cool. It is the way to become an important person.
The way to become a leader of your people is to project out (as you have done) the various possiblilities and then, develop techniques to deal with the suffering and upheavels that this absurd ideas are actually causing. When your people need help, and you can help them because you have foreseen the situation and have made plans to deal with it, then they will see you as their natural leader.
Forget phoney elections and cardboard candidates, it's just window dressing.
Saying that women are stupid technologically misses the point. The point is that we are all 'stupid' when it comes to the latest and greatest technology. The only people who aren't stupid are the engineers that created it; and they are 'stupid' in other fields.
Creating a product that is intuitive to use along with being productive, inexpensive, and profitable is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking that often requires massive engineering and state-of-the-art technology to make it look and feel easy to use.
Women are great product testers because they are not as conditioned as men to feel that being unable to work with a poorly designed product is a personal failing.
There are true, substantial, and measurable differences in how men and women approach and use technology. But since in the civilized world men and women are doing the same jobs with the same high tech equipment, the equipment should be designed with women in mind. If only to offset the subliminal bias that results from having design engineering teams being comprised of mostly men.
Colorio...almost a great name... but a little too close to Cholera for English speakers.
It does remind me of the name 'Infolio'; which was a pen-tablet computer made by PI Systems of Portland Oregon in the early 1990s. This company disappeared when the entire first generation tablet computer sank in the early 1990s, taking this product name with it.
'Infolio' is a perfect name for a tech product. It is beautiful to hear and fun to say.
What does happen to excellent marketing ideas and strategies when the start-up that conceived them goes under? Can they be bought and reused? Do they become available for reuse after the start-up that developed them has been gone for ten years?
Slashdot Mirror
In the USA, where the managerial class seems to be specifically bred to be missing significant portions of their brains, it happens all the time that employees are ordered to train their replacements. Then they are fired or terminated for chickenshit and denied unemployment benefits.
This happened to me when I the small company that I was working for got taken over by its German parent company. The new six-foot eight-inch 30-year-old 'manager' came in and reassigned everyone to really stupid and degrading restructured positions. Then as they complained, each employee was fired.
Then the fuckhead went out of his way to ensure that the fired employees couldn't get unemployment benefits, even when it wouldn't cost the company anything (I looked into this and it was true) and the employees had been working profitably for as many as seven years. He said that Germany was ruined by socialists and now that he was in the US, he could run the place like a 'pure capitalist'. I considered reminding him that just firing people on a whim and then making sure that that couldn't get benefits was not such a good idea in a country where everybody had a gun collection, but I decided that I really didn't need the weird shit that would come from such a comment so easily misunderstood by a foreigner.
Sure enough the viruses, lawsuits, crank calls, and all sorts of nastiness started happening within a few weeks. Then the sales dropped off. Then the stock price went from 66 Euros to 1.5 Euros in a 12 month period (it's bounced back to 4.5 Euros).
Then it was my turn to jump into the tree chipper.
What a nightmare. No wonder people go postal!
I followed your link to JetAudio (I'm always looking for a WinAmp alternative simply because I've used the same program for almost seven years now).
This is the ugliest web site that I've ever seen! If I didn't know that this was some kind of audio file player software, I never would have known.
I love the part where they say to download the freeware program and then list all of the features of the U-Pay version. From the description, I couldn't determine one difference between the U-Pay and the 'freeware' version.
What a mess.
I don't expect these people to be around in three years.
You say they do something with audio files?
How about boring a tunnel beneath the Straits of Gibralter so that millions of Spanish and other Europeans currently living in desparate fear of Basque terrorism can excape to the freedom, security, and general prosperity found in the glorious lands of Allah?
Although Homeland Security as initially presented as a way of combining various diverse agencies for the purpose of clearer lines of communication, in reality the main purpose of combining all these agencies was to negate the influence of government employee unions.
All the old agencies were unionized. The new agency was prohibited by the law founding it from having employee unions. This was done 'for security reasons', of course. And it was completely ignored by the media in the aftermath of the September 11th massacre in their effort to find the hidden connection between Osama Bin Laden and Britney's titties.
There's no real evidence that the new HS department is any more efficient that the previous assortment of seperate departments. In fact they may be less efficient now because they are more easily influenced by political manipulation, like Microsoft's obsession with destoying the open-source movement.
Notwithstanding the possiblility that this entire post is an elaborate hoax in keeping with the USA April First tradition, I must say that helping anyone develop a surface-to-air missile is an unethical use of open source method.
There are far too many people running around who would use the technology to shoot down commercial airliners during their critical take-off and landing approaches. Knowingly allowing a technical contribution from oneself to be used for mass murder is unethical. I am not a lawyer, but I would believe that it is traditionally illegal under the 'accessory to murder' classification and most certainly under the vague new anti-terrorism laws being enacted in the OCED countries.
Of course, this only applies to individuals. If you are part of military defense contractor corporation, you will be getting large sums of money to develop the same technology and distribute it to 'friendly' countries. Representives from these countries will then distribute this technology to their various relatives in various terrorist organizations.
These groups will undoubtably commit acts of mass murder which will lead to the call for more funds spent developing new mass-murder technology (excuse me, defense technology) R&D contracts. The new technology will be distributed to 'friendly' governments who will distibute it to their relatives in terrorist groups... And the circle begins anew.
Terrorism will stop when all the young men who are willing to commit mass-murder for a cause have been identified and killed, AND, when the giant western military contractors stop making huge amounts of money developing mass-murder technology (like surface-to-air missles) that make the whole cycle possible.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Great Post! Well thought out and written. Logical and passionate.
I might suggest getting a DVD writer (I suggest an 8X speed one) and making DVDs of all the great music that you have come to know and trading these with friends, associates, people who look kind-of cool, and even strangers on website postings. Each blank DVD costs about a dollar and holds about 50 albums in 192kbps MP3 format. Mailing costs are about 60 cents a disk with quality shipping envelope folders at about 50 cents.
This , along with hard disk swapping (a $100 160 Gigabyte hard disk holding about 2100 albums) will be the new Napster and primary method of music awareness and promotion among elite listeners when (or if and when) the P2P networks are shut down by the media corporations.
Well, home taping obviously didn't kill music, Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman did.
I hope that you don't mind me asking, but who are Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman? (and how did they 'kill' music?).
In order to determine the real effect of P2P on recording sales, we have to move away from the idea that each recording is equal to each other recording, even though that approach is mandated by the media corporations by identical pricing for each title.
Let's assume that each person who buys recordings has a personal scale for the albums that he is aware of, say one to five. The albums considered five will be bought as soon as release at full retail, they love this band and want the new release now. The albums rated one would never be purchased and most likely not be listened to. The twos and threes will be bought if there is no new ones to be purchased and if a new interest in this band or recording can be generated.
P2P users (that is assuming those with high-speed bandwidth) will most-likely download three rated titles. Those with slow bandwidth (dialup modems) will download 'two' rated titles. The exposure to two and three rated titles will move some bands into the one rated category. That, and also the savings of not purchasing three rated recordings, allows the same amount of money that would have been spent for two and three rated recordings to be spent on new ones and twos.
As long as the same amount of money is being spent on recordings as before P2P, then obviously P2P doesn't hurt record sales. It does however, change the balance of sales amoung second and third tier level bands. Meaning, unless you're a superstar, P2P filesharing means that there is going to be a greater correlation between your touring and your record sales.
Record companies should adopt an Ebay auction approach to selling records. By agreeing to release only a certain number of physical recordings within a certain time period, then really popular bands can command higher than normal prices for their latest. New bands can price their recordings at manufacturing cost to get people to buy and try a new sound.
Opps! The record industry should have done this about twenty years ago. They wouldn't have anywhere near the problems that they have now. Well, too late now.
Perhaps its time to seriously consider seperating a section of the United States into an independent country in order to shield its people from the madness of Washington DC.
In the late 1970s there was a novel about the seperation of Northern California, Western Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska along the Cascade mountains in order to create an independent republic of Ecotopia. Perhaps we should study this concept if the easterners continue to go insane.
There would be many issues to settle and possibly a lot of bloodshed. (If the Americans were happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to kill Vietnamese for no reason at all, imagine how they would react to a modern secession of their own people.)
Nevertheless there are examples of modern peaceful disunion of empires, such as the former Soviet Union and Czeckoslovakia. Even our northern neighbors managed to come to peaceful new arrangement of powers between Quebec and Ottawa.
It's a wild idea...but it gains credability with each new outrage from the corporate lunatics and bible thumpers in Washington, DC.
Two old men want to pass a law that will put millions of young people in prison for activities that the young don't consider to be crimes.
Happened before with marijuana and Vietnam war draft evasion.
Perhaps since this number of young people being placed in jail will overwhelm the prison system, perhaps we should look into how much money the private prison corporations gave to the 'lawmakers' to get them to propose this insanity. The only people who will gain from doing this is the private prison corporations, CCA and Wackenhut.
Besides, this being the USA, you KNOW the only people who will be going to jail for this are black kids. White college boys can download all the 'death monster junko speed metal' that they want to and have a $20 fine and their dorm internet access suspended for a few hours, while a serious black student downloading a clip of Lena Horn or Billie Holliday for a black history class multimedia project will get the full 10 years.
Go ahead... tell me I'm wrong.
In the long run, about a hundred years or more, this type of legal intimidation will only serve to transfer the entire music, movie, culture, multimedia business out of the USA; and the bullet proof DRM that will be applied to media product of the last third of the 20th century and first third of the 21st will make it impossible to view or see or experience anything that was made in this period.
An example of this is ALL of the novels published in the US between 1930 and 1955. As the paper wears out, the books get pulped. Under the infinite minus a day copyright laws it is illegal to transfer them to digital format without corporate permission, and the corporations won't give permission because there is no profit in novels from this period now. End result? A whole generation of literature disappears to protect an asshole mickey mouse cartoon logo.
This will happen to all of today's media product too. Sad, stupid, and completely avoidable by reasonable people following reasonable copyright guidelines. Instead we get this idiot from Utah and Michael Eisner; and the permanent loss of our and our parent's culture.
Constitutional freedoms should apply to such vermin...
Constitutional freedoms do apply to everyone in the United States. It's what makes them morally superior to the Stalinists and the Muslims.
There are many shades of political opinion among the left and progressive peoples at that time. The monstrous crimes of Stalin were not generally known until Khrushchev's denounciation of Stalin in 1956 and the publication of Solshenetizn's 'Gulag' books in the early 1970's.
I wouldn't flamebait you on this. I do understand how the world works.
But I often have to wonder about some of the other posters on Slashdot. There seem to a lot of people here who don't understand the emotional consequences of the destruction of human life as well as they understand the technology behind it.
This can leave them at a serious disadvantage in that they may be easily convinced to engage in this activity without understanding what they will be going through afterwards when the reality of what they have done begins to sink in.
In the mid to late 1960's, many tens of thousands of 19-year-old men (the same age as many Slashdotters) thought that they were going to have a John Wayne 'cool movie hero'-type of experience by signing-up to fight a war in the Vietnamese jungle. Thirty years later many of them still haven't recovered from what they found themselves subjected to in the real world of war and industrialized mass-murder.
I'm always amazed at the restrait that the Israelis show towards the people who commit such violent and horrible acts of savagery against them. If someone were to do to the Americans what the Palestinians do to the Israelis on a regular basis, the Americans would just either kill most of them or put them all in a giant concentration camp in the wilds of Alaska (with microchips in their heads and AWACKs flying overhead to make sure that they didn't go anywhere).
But it is not my place to either condemn or criticize how the Israelis do things. It is their country and they understand what is a subtle, complex, and dangerous situation far more than I do. However, I can't shake the feeling that the Palestinians are basically a doomed people and it's just a matter of time before they do something that is so outrageous that the rest of the world will decide to just accept their systemic depopulation as a cruel but necessary step to a better world. I wish it weren't so, but it's beginning to look like this is way that it's going to be.
Killing of military targets is not murder,dude
Sorry, I have to disagree with this one. It's a new century and we can no longer pretend that murder is not murder by arbitrarily classifing the victims as acceptable military targets. There will never be world peace until solders accept that what they do is murder. I no longer accept that there is any difference between civilian murder and military murder. There are other ways of dealing with political situations; it's just that murder is the usually the fastest, cheapest, and easiest.
But let's not pretend any more that this is not was it actually is. Killing people is murder, and wrapping the act in military metaphors is just a way to do and feel good about it afterwards.
The Hollywood blacklist was started in the late 1940's and continued roughly until the late 1950's.
It basically started when the president of the Screen Actor's Guild at the time, an over-the-hill actor named Ronald Reagan, decided to get on the good side of the House Committee on Un-American Activies by volunteering to turn over to them the names of all the people that he suspected of having Communist tendencies in the film industry.
The willingness of this actor to be a total asshole and his enthusiasm in destroying the lives of the other actors that he was supposed to be defending as SAG president caught the attention of the dormant conservative Republicans, who financed his California governor's race in the mid 1960's.
Fly through window, Then EXPLODE... Now That would be cool.
This is probably what the little plane will eventually be used for. An ounce of Cemtex plastic explosive surrounded by very hard plastic that rips apart skin, burrows deeply, and can't be detected by X-rays (Rhetegen sp? rays) enclosed on a little plane. Or the little plane can be the device sending guidance information to a larger missle. Another nasty assassination tool.
So what's so 'cool' about this kind of murder? Are you some kind of death freak? Or just another silly American suburban child-man who has been shielded from all possible exposure to real blood and evil except for ultra-violent movies and video games.
Murder is not 'cool', dude.
The big problem with using advanced first-world technology is that when the people get a little food in them they fuck like crazy and create large population growths. The new populations can't get jobs because the third-world economy can't grow to meet the needs of all of these new people.
Then they become cannon fodder-suicide plums to manipulative religious fanatics who send them off to kill and be killed for the benefit of the religious leaders. And the people whom they get sent to kill are often the same people who were most concerned about making the world a better place for their parents in the first place...Peace Core Syndrome.
I realize that I sound like a monster, but... Seriously, if you want to help these people, Norplant them, then feed them.
I would let the media corps have an exclusive right to sell M&Ms or anyone's latest album in disk form. I would not let them send anyone to jail for file sharing. If you have a recording then you can share it.
In the present situation the global media companys claim the legal right to send anyone to jail for sharing 1920s ragtime music, or any music recorded since the 1920s. This is wrong. After the traditional period of 17 years, music recordings and publishing should revert to public domain for the any use that the public would like. If you want to claim that you wrote it and recorded it; fine. Many young people claim that they have written blues progressions that go back to the turn of the 20th century.
The fact that no one is getting busted 'here' for sharing 1920's music is not the same as having a legal protection from legal harassment for sharing 1920's music. If an overzealous prosecutor is looking for an excuse to bust someone, then sharing 1920s ragtime is as good as reason as any, if it is legally allowable.
It should not be.
First let me state that I completely reject the idea that giant media corporations own music. They don't make it, they don't compensate the people who do make it, and culture is not something that owned by a corporation anyway.
I will conceed their 'right' to an exclusive sales agreement on pre-pressed media for the recordings of 'artists' that sign contracts with their corporation, but only for a period of ten years. Downloads remain no one's 'property'. After the traditional period of seventeen years, the recording becomes public domain for anyone's use and reuse, commercial or private.
But I don't the ability to legally enforce my position.
I suggest that people prepare themselves for the hard and painfull process of removing their cultural consciousness from the global media corporation product. It's painfull because they infect every part of our cultural consciousness from the time that we are born.
I suggest studying music and filmmaking. And then getting inexpensive equipment such as musical instruments and camcorders and making your own personal audio-visual product. The instruments could be MIDI music synthesizers which desperately need new and exciting ways to create sounds and music through creative programming. The whole MIDI scene is stuck in a deep rut. There hasn't been a new programming idea in this field in ten years. The synthesizers cost one tenth of what they did ten years ago and it is possible to get powerful equipment for less than $100US.
The more that you get away from global media corporate product, the more that you begin to find topics like literary crititism, plotting, and writing revelant and important. Study in these subjects is completely wasted on people saturated in global media corporate product and should be dropped from school requirements. No more need for Cliff Notes and Anthology of English Lit books (at $150 a pop). Stupid and worthless.
Please do not concern yourself about the ethical and moral issues of copywrite legalities. There are none. The global media corporations STOLE the public domain by bribing the American legislators to pass laws extending copywrite to infinity minus a day.
No civilized person has any need to respect these copywrite laws. And you should pay attention to them only to the extent that you keep yourself from being imprisoned by them.
Anything that you do to undermine or superceed the copywrite laws is morally and ethically valid. Remember, these people stole the public domain. They have no right to call ANYONE thieves, nor do they have a right to claim any cultural content as their property.
Thank you,
Simonetta
But this isn't SCO vs. the Feds. It's Microsoft taking on the Feds in an arena of Microsoft's choosing.
,'stock swaps', and probable other deep business secrets. MS is using the remains of SCO to destroy the corporate credibility of Linux and then continue to force the Open Source movement into its organization through fees and licenses.
At this point it is fairly clear that SCO is a shell corporation, shilling for Microsoft who is their primary funder through background 'loans'
The US Federal government threw everything it legally had at Microsoft in the 1990's and lost. MS used bribes (campaign contributions) and massive legal expenditures (tax deductable) to defeat the Feds.
Now they are on the offensive against their enemy. Personally I wouldn't take on the Feds so blatently (given their 25000 Hydrogen bombs, state-of-the-art assassination teams, and the fact that they are incorporated in the same country controlled by millions of middle-aged female bureaucrats), but I guess the richest man in the world believes that he has a good chance of bending them to his indomitable will.
Thanks to them, the whole DVD writer market is substantially less than it could have been.
Perhaps the **AA perfers to have the DVD writer market as small as possible. I doubt that they have had any influence on the mirade of 'standards' for DVD writers, but anything that decreases the willingness of people to buy DVD writers works in their interest.
I was thinking more Science Fiction TV shows like the original Star Trek, which dealt indirectly with 1960's issues that few other shows would touch.
The M.A.S.H. TV show aired primarily in the 1970's after the Vietnam war was over. The original movie was released in 1970. It was much tougher than the TV show and did relate to the Vietnam war, even though it was set in the Korean War. It was cheaper and politically easier to set the movie in the Korean war. Cheaper because the California countryside looked much more like Korea than tropical VietNam, and easier because the studio could claim to be making a historical war movie instead of a contemporary anti-war movie.
Actually this will probably be the only show to deal with today's most important legal issues.
The 'future' setting in television shows is always just a plot device to handle controversial modern issues without getting shot down by the network censors (the 'standards and practices' department).
Television in the USA is always a fine line between pissing off the commercial sponsers and attracting viewers. The material must be 'hot' enough to attact viewers from cable and internet but not to 'hot' to invoke the possiblility that the commercial sponsor will flip out.
However today since the media corporations own so much of the rest of the economy (or, more precisely, the media corporations are owned by giant conglamerates who own large chucks of the economy), it is more important not to piss off anyone in the government.
Television is stupid because there are very few types of progamming that meet those exact requirements, and all the possible plots and scenarios were already developed and aired twenty years ago.
Television would probably have to go off the air anyway by December 2006 without government decree. They simply have run out of things to show.
Actually, my friends and I developed a sci-fi noir detective movie set in 2035 based entirely around IP infringements. We worked up the stories more than 10 years ago, only to see a handful of some of our more absurd ideas actually show up in the courtrooms of today...
That is very cool. It is the way to become an important person.
The way to become a leader of your people is to project out (as you have done) the various possiblilities and then, develop techniques to deal with the suffering and upheavels that this absurd ideas are actually causing. When your people need help, and you can help them because you have foreseen the situation and have made plans to deal with it, then they will see you as their natural leader.
Forget phoney elections and cardboard candidates, it's just window dressing.
Saying that women are stupid technologically misses the point. The point is that we are all 'stupid' when it comes to the latest and greatest technology. The only people who aren't stupid are the engineers that created it; and they are 'stupid' in other fields.
Creating a product that is intuitive to use along with being productive, inexpensive, and profitable is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking that often requires massive engineering and state-of-the-art technology to make it look and feel easy to use.
Women are great product testers because they are not as conditioned as men to feel that being unable to work with a poorly designed product is a personal failing.
There are true, substantial, and measurable differences in how men and women approach and use technology. But since in the civilized world men and women are doing the same jobs with the same high tech equipment, the equipment should be designed with women in mind. If only to offset the subliminal bias that results from having design engineering teams being comprised of mostly men.
Colorio ...almost a great name... but a little too close to Cholera for English speakers.
It does remind me of the name 'Infolio'; which was a pen-tablet computer made by PI Systems of Portland Oregon in the early 1990s. This company disappeared when the entire first generation tablet computer sank in the early 1990s, taking this product name with it.
'Infolio' is a perfect name for a tech product. It is beautiful to hear and fun to say.
What does happen to excellent marketing ideas and strategies when the start-up that conceived them goes under? Can they be bought and reused? Do they become available for reuse after the start-up that developed them has been gone for ten years?