Great tip. The stuff that I look for on Ebay tends to be rather focused (music synthesizers without keyboards - tone modules) so I doubt the sellers would misspell their titles.
You'all might want to check out the movie called 'The Damned' by Luchino Visconti made back in the early 1970's.
It has the best rendition of the 'Night of the Long Knives' ever seen in a film.
The sight of the Gestapo coming in their boats through the fog on the lake in the pre-dawn... then going from house to house blasting the shit out of every young blonde swinging dick they find...
Shit, it makes The Sopranos look like TeleTubbies.
The rest of the movie is rather long and frightfully dull so you might want to make it double feature with Lina Wehrmueller's 'Seven Beauties' for an evening of good old-fashioned European gemutlichkeit.
I used a combination of Visual Basic and Commodore 64 Logo.
Deposit the $250,000 in my Swiss Bank Account and I'll be at your office first thing Monday morning with the source. You can check to see whether it has any of the Unix code that you 'own'.
I might have to spend a year in jail (maybe even a little more if they find out about the thing with the seeds in the parking lot of the Grateful Dead show back in 1978). But after that I'll be free with $250,000. I'll use the time to brush up on investment theory and derivatives and maybe even get in a little weight training.
Beats a year in a cubicle doing tech support on the phone for $8/hr.
I have noticed an audio phenomenon with a music synthesizer where a mono signal (both left and right channels of a headphone set receiving exactly the same signal) will produce a sound that travels from one ear to the other and back for about two seconds.
This happens only on one patch created at random with a Yamaha FM synthesizer TX-81Z model.
I have no idea as to how it happens except to guess that a certain combination of the phases of the different original operators is causing a 'trick of the ears'.
This observation leads me to believe that it is possible to use a stereo two-channel signal to create the illusion of sounds coming from various three dimensional points and being artifically positionally manipulated.
Whether or not the research has advanced to the point where audio positional manipulation can actually be done on inexpensive ($100) headphones is debatable. [in other words, does this product really work or is it just more bullshit from the stereo equipment industry?]
Does anyone remember early 1970's Pink Floyd concerts where screaming guitar solos would come swirling from the back of the auditorium, spin around the stage, and shoot up through the roof? No, it wasn't all the acid. It was the elaborate quadrophonic sound system and creative stage technicians and audio engineers they employed.
Am I the only one who noticed how tired the last 'Star Wars' movie was? How much of the movie was directly lifted from other films? Like how the first twenty minutes of the movie (the 3-D car chase) was taken scene-by-scene from 'The Fifth Element'?
Am I the only one who noticed that people were actually laughing AT the last Star Wars movie? Like when Princess ImADildo falls out of flying car going 150 miles an hour over packed sand, jumps up and runs away? Everyone in the theatre was howling!
Someone should take George Lucas aside and calmly and rationally explain that this particular comic book fantasy has been milked dry (had been twenty years ago) and he should focus on something else if he wants to maintain his legacy in film history and not become the Ed Wood of his generation.
If I'm not mistaken, linguists call this the difference between phonetics and phonemics.
Phonetics are what everybody believes that they are saying and phonemics are the sounds that are actually spoken as determined by lab audio analysis.
I've heard that the Arabic language considers the 'k' sounds at the beginning of the English words 'cat' and 'kitten' to be different letters, which makes it very difficult for English speakers to learn the language.
Assuming that the numbers on BoxOfficeMojo are not just fantasy, it doesn't look like Matrix:Revolutions lost money. It made @140 million in boxoffice USA and @$240 million outside the USA. Assuming that half of the box office went to the distributors and exhibitors, and the video/DVD rental receipts will be 40% of box office, Matrix:Revolutions made enough money to pay for itself and make a small profit.
Idiot movies like this will continue to be made indefinitely because the cost of maintaining the luxurious lifestyles of the filmmakers, stars, and studio executives are considered part of the basic cost of the film.
I saw M:R in the second run theatre for $3 on the last 1960's era giant screen left in town, so I didn't feel all that cheated by the stupid dialog, redundant plotting, and boring cliches. But I only go to about 1/10th of the movies that I did five years ago. If all the people in audience follow my pattern, then the movie biz is in trouble because they are on the verge of losing their audience to boredom at the same time that they have locked themselves into making these horribly expensive movie projects.
>It is the reason that the music industry and record business exists as it does in its present form. Primarily as a filter for junk music.
>>This is irony, right?
Not really. The music industry has always claimed that they must take all the money from the artists that sell in order to cover the losses of all of the artists that don't sell.
Someone in the music industry has to listen to all the low resolution demo tapes from all the bar bands that want record contracts. Someone has to say 'yes' or 'not' to whether or not to put money into the band. To record their music in an advanced studio with an expensive producter, to press CDs, to bribe Clear Channel to play the song on the national radio network, to get the attention of 'rock journalists' to write about the group and print the articles.
All this costs a ton of money, and, eventually it all gets paid for by the artists themselves.
What the MP3 revolution changed the distribution of music. Low cost digital recorders and mixers change the large up-front costs for making demos.
But what the MP3 revolution and the low cost recorders don't change is the need for someone to listen to all the 'product' and focus it towards the audience that would find it appealing.
This will continue to be what the remains of the music industry does best.
You need to ask yourself WHY you are risking your life on an amusement park ride that has less than a 0.86mm margin of error on a critical life-supporting part?
Am I the only one who sees the strong similarity between Britney Spears and Brigitte Bardot, the early 1960's French movie star?
Every year Britney looks more and more like Bardot.
It brings to mind the observation by Camille Paglia that the entertainment and movie industry recycles the same 'personae' every generation. The same faces, bodies, character types keep reappearing in mass media with different names.
The fact that on an open you-upload-your-music website there's going to be a lot talentless bands and noise tracks is a serious problem.
It is the reason that the music industry and record business exists as it does in its present form. Primarily as a filter for junk music. As long as it costs real money to put commit music to an unalterable disk format and distribute these disks to the world, the music business will be needed as a junk filter.
For U-upload music websites, allow me to suggest a game of 'musical chairs'. This refers to a children's game in the USA (possibly other places also) where there are a row of chairs and a number of children who walk or run around the chairs while a piece of music is being played. There is one less chair than the number of children. When the music stops unexpectedly, the children try to sit on one of the empty chairs as quickly as possible. One child is left with chair and the contest begins again. The last child (the fastest child or biggest child) is the winner.
A website would accept only 100 recordings a day as a set. Each day ten would be removed from the set until only ten tracks remain. Those remaining tracks would be added to the permanent downloadable tracks of the website. People would vote as to which tracks would be allowed to remain listed. The junk and vanity noise tracks would quickly disappear.
People visiting the site could download an MP3 'sampler' of ten-second segments sampled from the middle of the hundred tracks.
It's an idea to deal with the problem of the vast amounts of junk music that would be uploaded to an open MP3 website.
The vast resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are being used to battle diseases that have cursed mankind since the beginning of history. Particularily malaria and polio.
We are close to completely removing polio from the face of the earth, as we have done to the other ancient horror, smallpox.
Granted: the Gates legal team created the foundation to shelter the family wealth from taxes, and the wealth was created in less than honorable ways.
But, it is currently being directed successfully towards a goal that will benefit all humans now and in the future.
This is why the nerd king is being recognized as Sir Bill.
Yes, I will see to this as soon as I bury those barrels of water and diesel out in the desert, stockpile 10,000 rounds of anti-aircraft ammo, and prep my 10 year supply of tinfoil berets.
C'mon, a new ID is much cheaper, and (to follow the original thread) much lighter to carry around.
Besides, wouldn't it be just a lot, well, easier, to change into a Canadian when you're in a place where the locals have been conditioned to believe that the Americans are responsible for everything that's wrong in the world?
2400 DPI? You wouldn't actually scan an 8.5x11" paper at that would you? Unless you want to save a 500MB file for each document.
I didn't do the actual arithmetic so the file size might be in that range for a 8"x11" scan at 2400 DPI. I live in the US with US citizenship so I don't have Migra problems and I'm not all that familiar with the techniques of forging ID documents.
My main point with the message is that few people make the connection between having a high-resolution scanner and the possiblility of using it to scan all their life documents (birth certificate, family records, ect) and cherished photographs. Combine that with inexpensive CD-R and DVD writers to back up and store these scans inexpensively in multiple locations.
It's a suggestion to use all this new computer equipment in unexplored and unconceived applications. And yes for the millions of people in the USA without legal papers, it might not be a bad idea to use this new technology to keep a back up ID or two in a cheap and high density media format. If DVD recordable disks appear in 8cm format like the mini CD-Rs have, this might be an optimal data storage medium. Small, dense, light, and very inexpensive while not durable or scratch resistant.
Shouldn't this study have been funded by the RIAA since their entire business model depends on the long term storage of CDs, either in warehouses, record stores, or homes?
Why should the taxpayers pay for this?
Plus the RIAA could say that the money that they have **extorted** ahem - collected - from 'pirates' has been going to research the greater public good of legitimate music CD buyers.
Maybe the RIAA really is run by morons if they can't see that a positive public relations opportunity such as a CD preservation study would help them after all the bad publicity that they generate for themselves.
We so expect them to be as slick as political consultants so that when they show themselves to be in reality just as mean, slow, and stupid as we claim that they are; we're all just a little let down.
I keep everything on the hard disk. Luckily the size doubles every few years,...
I agree with using the hard disk as best backup. The size is small for the amount of data held and the access time to huge numbers of files is only thousandths of a second.
Hard disks have also inherent disadvantages. They are extrememly fragile, they must be screwed into the PC and be connected by confusing cables before use, the cost-per-megabyte is still eight times greater than removable optical disks like CD-R and DVD-R, and they can lose all of their data at once if the index gets corrupted.
I recommend that everyone take all their life documents, financial data, family photos, and career documentation and put all this data in encrypted form on inexpensive CD-Rs and DVDs. Place one in the glove box of your car. Send one to trusted family members or parents. Put one in a safe-deposit box either at your local bank or in a different country. Put the de-encryption passwords in your legal will, so your estate executors can get access to your information on the encrypted disks.
If for some reason you are forced to be living under an assumed identity, have another complete identity ready on a CD-R in your car or suitcase/backpack. You don't want to be in a situation where you find the police or the Migra waiting for you to come home and you're having all of your alternate identity papers inside the house. Make sure that the resolution of the scans of your alternate ID papers is good enough to recreate credible documents. With current 2400 DPI scanners selling for $100-$150 US, that shouldn't be a problem.
If something happens to the original papers or photos, then your records won't be lost. I've had friends lose their jobs and had all their personal papers and photos destroyed by callous landlords or vandals. I've seen (after living in California) people lose all their family records, life documents, and photos after fires, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, you-name-it.
We finally have low-cost tools to back up and recreate our lives. It would be a pity not to use them.
"I sorry ma'am but your request for perscription drug benefits has been denied because our records show that for ten years between 2000 and 2010 you consumed an average of 0.5 kilos of beef a week. Your present medical condition is a result of your own negligence."
It also might be a good idea, as our liberatarian friends like to remind us, to actually start taking better care of our health and to recognize our own resposibility for our future medical conditions. Maybe that second hambuger and third beer isn't such a good idea if there is going to be no Medicare for us in the future.
We should also start accepting the idea that the giant social, medical, and pension programs that we paid into all our lives will be gone by the time that we are old enough to need them. All them money that we put into these programs is being pissed away now to give the 'greatest generation' $80,000 hip replacements when they are 85 years old, or is being secretly looted to support the giant US government federal deficits incurred by cutting taxes while at the same time creating huge expensive endless wars.
Also the social climate among the young is changing. Anyone who tattoos their face and puts metal bolts into their body for cosmetic reasons when they are twenty can not seriously be expected to voluntarily support programs to assist the aged and disabled when they are fifty. Call me a bigot, but this just seems to be a realistic observation.
I'm always considered the possibility that in twenty or thirty years from now when the USA Medicaid program is bankrupt, that the data gathered from these supermarket cards will be used as a justification to deny medical benefits to people. Whent the system is broke, the administrators have to do something to ration what few medical benefits that will remain and food purchase data seems the best reason because they can blame it all on the users.
"I sorry ma'am but your request for perscription drug benefits has been denied because our records show that for ten years between 2000 and 2010 you consumed an average of 0.5 kilos of beef a week. Your present medical condition is a result of your own negligence."
This would seem absurd except for the fact that the government is using twenty year old marijuana misdemonor convictions to deny current benefits like housing assistance and graduate student loans presently.
Before you tell me how absurd and paranoid I am, remember that people would have labeled paranoid anyone who said twenty years ago that everybody would have to pee in a bottle to test for heroin in order to get a simple job like selling shoes.
It's probably a good idea to keep out of corporate data bases as much as possible because unknown people can simply and arbitrarily destroy your life on a whim by using this data. This can be done either by delibrate malicious intent by identity thieves and zealous prosecutors or just corporate mandate.
Millions of jobs are disappearing in the US due to bad political and corporate decisions. Any justification to pin the blame on the worker themselves will be eagerly sought out and used against them. Expect this type of data mining for blame-the-victim tactics to increase in the future in the USA.
I remember when calculators came out; you could get expelled from school if you were caught with one.
Hello,
Was this a high school that you are referring to when you say that you could get expelled for having a calculator or even a middle school?
What was their reason for expelling a student with a portable machine that did arithmetic?
I'm curious because I wonder about the effect that new advanced technology has on deeply conservative societies and nobody is more conservative than an American public school administrator.
I wonder what will happen in places like Singapore, (which is deeply politically conservative, moderately conserative in education, and progressive in adoption of new electronic technologies) when the first spoken-Chinese to traditional character writers appear at low cost? Will students there attempt to refuse to spend ten years memorizing Chinese characters? Will the government ban them except for foreigners as being 'disruptive to society'? Or will they accept them a novelity and as just another electonic product to make and sell?
An even worse dilemma for Singapore will be the camera to speech convertors. This will be (in about 10 years as a guess) a hand-held device that 'speaks' the Chinese characters that the user has in the camera viewfinder. With these machines will students refuse to spend ten years memorizing characters now that there would be a cheap machine that 'reads' the characters and speaks them?
The thing that got me, when importing some CDs from Tower Records in the US, before I realised I would get slapped with an import tax bill, is that they add the duty to the price of the items, and then add the VAT to the items + duty price. A tax on the duty tax! Incredible.
I have to agree that this tax-on-tax business is commonplace among governments and completely unjustifiable.
I suspect that in the long run that people in the UK will use e-mail to make person-to-person contacts with people (strangers in the sense that they have no contacts except an e-mail on an individual subject) in the 'colonies'.
People will upload lists of music that they are interested in. Someone who is planning a trip to the UK and the area where the person may live might either buy the actual CDs in their local country or copy the music i onto CD-Rs. Then the two parties can arrange to meet in person at a pub, coffeehouse, or whatever and exchange product for a pre-agreed price.
Before the internet this type of exchange could be done and had been done now-and-then but it was difficult to arrange the details.
It's not much, but it's an idea of how to approach the problem of music distribution across borders when the global music corporations aren't interested in developing the market that is there. They ignore the market by charging absurdly high prices when the potential customers can see how the markets and prices are in other places.
Slashdot Mirror
Computerized language translators depend on correct spelling and grammar to correctly manage a phrase.
It takes a lot more time and processor cycles to translate misspelled words.
Language translation, that is quality language translation, will be one of the 'killer aps' of the 64-bit generation of processors.
Great tip. The stuff that I look for on Ebay tends to be rather focused (music synthesizers without keyboards - tone modules) so I doubt the sellers would misspell their titles.
Still it is interesting.
The best way to clear mine fields is the Iranian way.
You go to the schools and round up a whole bunch of kids.
Then you give them all little plastic keys to heaven to wear around their necks.
Then you get them all to wrap their arms around each other's shoulders and march them across the mine fields, all yelling 'Allah Akbar!!'.
Then you go to their parent's houses later that evening and over a cup of tea tell them how proud they should be now their kid is in heaven.
You don't need no jive-ass flowers...
You'all might want to check out the movie called 'The Damned' by Luchino Visconti made back in the early 1970's.
It has the best rendition of the 'Night of the Long Knives' ever seen in a film.
The sight of the Gestapo coming in their boats through the fog on the lake in the pre-dawn... then going from house to house blasting the shit out of every young blonde swinging dick they find...
Shit, it makes The Sopranos look like TeleTubbies.
The rest of the movie is rather long and frightfully dull so you might want to make it double feature with Lina Wehrmueller's 'Seven Beauties' for an evening of good old-fashioned European gemutlichkeit.
No No No..
I did it.
I used a combination of Visual Basic and Commodore 64 Logo.
Deposit the $250,000 in my Swiss Bank Account and I'll be at your office first thing Monday morning with the source. You can check to see whether it has any of the Unix code that you 'own'.
I might have to spend a year in jail (maybe even a little more if they find out about the thing with the seeds in the parking lot of the Grateful Dead show back in 1978). But after that I'll be free with $250,000. I'll use the time to brush up on investment theory and derivatives and maybe even get in a little weight training.
Beats a year in a cubicle doing tech support on the phone for $8/hr.
Keep me posted!!!
I have noticed an audio phenomenon with a music synthesizer where a mono signal (both left and right channels of a headphone set receiving exactly the same signal) will produce a sound that travels from one ear to the other and back for about two seconds.
This happens only on one patch created at random with a Yamaha FM synthesizer TX-81Z model.
I have no idea as to how it happens except to guess that a certain combination of the phases of the different original operators is causing a 'trick of the ears'.
This observation leads me to believe that it is possible to use a stereo two-channel signal to create the illusion of sounds coming from various three dimensional points and being artifically positionally manipulated.
Whether or not the research has advanced to the point where audio positional manipulation can actually be done on inexpensive ($100) headphones is debatable. [in other words, does this product really work or is it just more bullshit from the stereo equipment industry?]
Does anyone remember early 1970's Pink Floyd concerts where screaming guitar solos would come swirling from the back of the auditorium, spin around the stage, and shoot up through the roof? No, it wasn't all the acid. It was the elaborate quadrophonic sound system and creative stage technicians and audio engineers they employed.
Am I the only one who noticed how tired the last 'Star Wars' movie was? How much of the movie was directly lifted from other films? Like how the first twenty minutes of the movie (the 3-D car chase) was taken scene-by-scene from 'The Fifth Element'?
Am I the only one who noticed that people were actually laughing AT the last Star Wars movie? Like when Princess ImADildo falls out of flying car going 150 miles an hour over packed sand, jumps up and runs away? Everyone in the theatre was howling!
Someone should take George Lucas aside and calmly and rationally explain that this particular comic book fantasy has been milked dry (had been twenty years ago) and he should focus on something else if he wants to maintain his legacy in film history and not become the Ed Wood of his generation.
If I'm not mistaken, linguists call this the difference between phonetics and phonemics.
Phonetics are what everybody believes that they are saying and phonemics are the sounds that are actually spoken as determined by lab audio analysis.
I've heard that the Arabic language considers the 'k' sounds at the beginning of the English words 'cat' and 'kitten' to be different letters, which makes it very difficult for English speakers to learn the language.
Assuming that the numbers on BoxOfficeMojo are not just fantasy, it doesn't look like Matrix:Revolutions lost money. It made @140 million in boxoffice USA and @$240 million outside the USA. Assuming that half of the box office went to the distributors and exhibitors, and the video/DVD rental receipts will be 40% of box office, Matrix:Revolutions made enough money to pay for itself and make a small profit.
Idiot movies like this will continue to be made indefinitely because the cost of maintaining the luxurious lifestyles of the filmmakers, stars, and studio executives are considered part of the basic cost of the film.
I saw M:R in the second run theatre for $3 on the last 1960's era giant screen left in town, so I didn't feel all that cheated by the stupid dialog, redundant plotting, and boring cliches. But I only go to about 1/10th of the movies that I did five years ago. If all the people in audience follow my pattern, then the movie biz is in trouble because they are on the verge of losing their audience to boredom at the same time that they have locked themselves into making these horribly expensive movie projects.
>It is the reason that the music industry and record business exists as it does in its present form. Primarily as a filter for junk music.
>>This is irony, right?
Not really. The music industry has always claimed that they must take all the money from the artists that sell in order to cover the losses of all of the artists that don't sell.
Someone in the music industry has to listen to all the low resolution demo tapes from all the bar bands that want record contracts. Someone has to say 'yes' or 'not' to whether or not to put money into the band. To record their music in an advanced studio with an expensive producter, to press CDs, to bribe Clear Channel to play the song on the national radio network, to get the attention of 'rock journalists' to write about the group and print the articles.
All this costs a ton of money, and, eventually it all gets paid for by the artists themselves.
What the MP3 revolution changed the distribution of music. Low cost digital recorders and mixers change the large up-front costs for making demos.
But what the MP3 revolution and the low cost recorders don't change is the need for someone to listen to all the 'product' and focus it towards the audience that would find it appealing.
This will continue to be what the remains of the music industry does best.
I must admit to a personal failure.
I would be less than truthful if I didn't admit that I care less about Hollywood celebrities individually than they do about me as a person.
I know that this must be so because of the magazines that placed prominently in every single supermarket check-out line in the country tell me so!
You need to ask yourself WHY you are risking your life on an amusement park ride that has less than a 0.86mm margin of error on a critical life-supporting part?
Am I the only one who sees the strong similarity between Britney Spears and Brigitte Bardot, the early 1960's French movie star?
Every year Britney looks more and more like Bardot.
It brings to mind the observation by Camille Paglia that the entertainment and movie industry recycles the same 'personae' every generation. The same faces, bodies, character types keep reappearing in mass media with different names.
The fact that on an open you-upload-your-music website there's going to be a lot talentless bands and noise tracks is a serious problem.
It is the reason that the music industry and record business exists as it does in its present form. Primarily as a filter for junk music. As long as it costs real money to put commit music to an unalterable disk format and distribute these disks to the world, the music business will be needed as a junk filter.
For U-upload music websites, allow me to suggest a game of 'musical chairs'. This refers to a children's game in the USA (possibly other places also) where there are a row of chairs and a number of children who walk or run around the chairs while a piece of music is being played. There is one less chair than the number of children. When the music stops unexpectedly, the children try to sit on one of the empty chairs as quickly as possible. One child is left with chair and the contest begins again. The last child (the fastest child or biggest child) is the winner.
A website would accept only 100 recordings a day as a set. Each day ten would be removed from the set until only ten tracks remain. Those remaining tracks would be added to the permanent downloadable tracks of the website. People would vote as to which tracks would be allowed to remain listed. The junk and vanity noise tracks would quickly disappear.
People visiting the site could download an MP3 'sampler' of ten-second segments sampled from the middle of the hundred tracks.
It's an idea to deal with the problem of the vast amounts of junk music that would be uploaded to an open MP3 website.
The vast resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are being used to battle diseases that have cursed mankind since the beginning of history. Particularily malaria and polio.
We are close to completely removing polio from the face of the earth, as we have done to the other ancient horror, smallpox.
Granted: the Gates legal team created the foundation to shelter the family wealth from taxes, and the wealth was created in less than honorable ways.
But, it is currently being directed successfully towards a goal that will benefit all humans now and in the future.
This is why the nerd king is being recognized as Sir Bill.
Yes, I will see to this as soon as I bury those barrels of water and diesel out in the desert, stockpile 10,000 rounds of anti-aircraft ammo, and prep my 10 year supply of tinfoil berets.
C'mon, a new ID is much cheaper, and (to follow the original thread) much lighter to carry around.
Besides, wouldn't it be just a lot, well, easier, to change into a Canadian when you're in a place where the locals have been conditioned to believe that the Americans are responsible for everything that's wrong in the world?
2400 DPI? You wouldn't actually scan an 8.5x11" paper at that would you? Unless you want to save a 500MB file for each document.
I didn't do the actual arithmetic so the file size might be in that range for a 8"x11" scan at 2400 DPI. I live in the US with US citizenship so I don't have Migra problems and I'm not all that familiar with the techniques of forging ID documents.
My main point with the message is that few people make the connection between having a high-resolution scanner and the possiblility of using it to scan all their life documents (birth certificate, family records, ect) and cherished photographs. Combine that with inexpensive CD-R and DVD writers to back up and store these scans inexpensively in multiple locations.
It's a suggestion to use all this new computer equipment in unexplored and unconceived applications. And yes for the millions of people in the USA without legal papers, it might not be a bad idea to use this new technology to keep a back up ID or two in a cheap and high density media format. If DVD recordable disks appear in 8cm format like the mini CD-Rs have, this might be an optimal data storage medium. Small, dense, light, and very inexpensive while not durable or scratch resistant.
Shouldn't this study have been funded by the RIAA since their entire business model depends on the long term storage of CDs, either in warehouses, record stores, or homes?
Why should the taxpayers pay for this?
Plus the RIAA could say that the money that they have **extorted** ahem - collected - from 'pirates' has been going to research the greater public good of legitimate music CD buyers.
Maybe the RIAA really is run by morons if they can't see that a positive public relations opportunity such as a CD preservation study would help them after all the bad publicity that they generate for themselves.
We so expect them to be as slick as political consultants so that when they show themselves to be in reality just as mean, slow, and stupid as we claim that they are; we're all just a little let down.
I keep everything on the hard disk. Luckily the size doubles every few years,...
I agree with using the hard disk as best backup. The size is small for the amount of data held and the access time to huge numbers of files is only thousandths of a second.
Hard disks have also inherent disadvantages. They are extrememly fragile, they must be screwed into the PC and be connected by confusing cables before use, the cost-per-megabyte is still eight times greater than removable optical disks like CD-R and DVD-R, and they can lose all of their data at once if the index gets corrupted.
I recommend that everyone take all their life documents, financial data, family photos, and career documentation and put all this data in encrypted form on inexpensive CD-Rs and DVDs. Place one in the glove box of your car. Send one to trusted family members or parents. Put one in a safe-deposit box either at your local bank or in a different country. Put the de-encryption passwords in your legal will, so your estate executors can get access to your information on the encrypted disks.
If for some reason you are forced to be living under an assumed identity, have another complete identity ready on a CD-R in your car or suitcase/backpack. You don't want to be in a situation where you find the police or the Migra waiting for you to come home and you're having all of your alternate identity papers inside the house. Make sure that the resolution of the scans of your alternate ID papers is good enough to recreate credible documents. With current 2400 DPI scanners selling for $100-$150 US, that shouldn't be a problem.
If something happens to the original papers or photos, then your records won't be lost. I've had friends lose their jobs and had all their personal papers and photos destroyed by callous landlords or vandals. I've seen (after living in California) people lose all their family records, life documents, and photos after fires, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, you-name-it.
We finally have low-cost tools to back up and recreate our lives. It would be a pity not to use them.
"I sorry ma'am but your request for perscription drug benefits has been denied because our records show that for ten years between 2000 and 2010 you consumed an average of 0.5 kilos of beef a week. Your present medical condition is a result of your own negligence."
It also might be a good idea, as our liberatarian friends like to remind us, to actually start taking better care of our health and to recognize our own resposibility for our future medical conditions. Maybe that second hambuger and third beer isn't such a good idea if there is going to be no Medicare for us in the future.
We should also start accepting the idea that the giant social, medical, and pension programs that we paid into all our lives will be gone by the time that we are old enough to need them. All them money that we put into these programs is being pissed away now to give the 'greatest generation' $80,000 hip replacements when they are 85 years old, or is being secretly looted to support the giant US government federal deficits incurred by cutting taxes while at the same time creating huge expensive endless wars.
Also the social climate among the young is changing. Anyone who tattoos their face and puts metal bolts into their body for cosmetic reasons when they are twenty can not seriously be expected to voluntarily support programs to assist the aged and disabled when they are fifty. Call me a bigot, but this just seems to be a realistic observation.
I'm always considered the possibility that in twenty or thirty years from now when the USA Medicaid program is bankrupt, that the data gathered from these supermarket cards will be used as a justification to deny medical benefits to people. Whent the system is broke, the administrators have to do something to ration what few medical benefits that will remain and food purchase data seems the best reason because they can blame it all on the users.
"I sorry ma'am but your request for perscription drug benefits has been denied because our records show that for ten years between 2000 and 2010 you consumed an average of 0.5 kilos of beef a week. Your present medical condition is a result of your own negligence."
This would seem absurd except for the fact that the government is using twenty year old marijuana misdemonor convictions to deny current benefits like housing assistance and graduate student loans presently.
Before you tell me how absurd and paranoid I am, remember that people would have labeled paranoid anyone who said twenty years ago that everybody would have to pee in a bottle to test for heroin in order to get a simple job like selling shoes.
It's probably a good idea to keep out of corporate data bases as much as possible because unknown people can simply and arbitrarily destroy your life on a whim by using this data. This can be done either by delibrate malicious intent by identity thieves and zealous prosecutors or just corporate mandate.
Millions of jobs are disappearing in the US due to bad political and corporate decisions. Any justification to pin the blame on the worker themselves will be eagerly sought out and used against them. Expect this type of data mining for blame-the-victim tactics to increase in the future in the USA.
I remember when calculators came out; you could get expelled from school if you were caught with one.
Hello,
Was this a high school that you are referring to when you say that you could get expelled for having a calculator or even a middle school?
What was their reason for expelling a student with a portable machine that did arithmetic?
I'm curious because I wonder about the effect that new advanced technology has on deeply conservative societies and nobody is more conservative than an American public school administrator.
I wonder what will happen in places like Singapore, (which is deeply politically conservative, moderately conserative in education, and progressive in adoption of new electronic technologies) when the first spoken-Chinese to traditional character writers appear at low cost? Will students there attempt to refuse to spend ten years memorizing Chinese characters? Will the government ban them except for foreigners as being 'disruptive to society'? Or will they accept them a novelity and as just another electonic product to make and sell?
An even worse dilemma for Singapore will be the camera to speech convertors. This will be (in about 10 years as a guess) a hand-held device that 'speaks' the Chinese characters that the user has in the camera viewfinder.
With these machines will students refuse to spend ten years memorizing characters now that there would be a cheap machine that 'reads' the characters and speaks them?
Time will tell...
thank you,
It is at least logical. VAT is a tax on the value of goods.
I'm afraid that I must disagree. VAT refers to a Value-Added tax.
There is no value added to a good by taxing it. Therefore the VAT can not logically be applied to taxes.
The thing that got me, when importing some CDs from Tower Records in the US, before I realised I would get slapped with an import tax bill, is that they add the duty to the price of the items, and then add the VAT to the items + duty price. A tax on the duty tax! Incredible.
I have to agree that this tax-on-tax business is commonplace among governments and completely unjustifiable.
I suspect that in the long run that people in the UK will use e-mail to make person-to-person contacts with people (strangers in the sense that they have no contacts except an e-mail on an individual subject) in the 'colonies'.
People will upload lists of music that they are interested in. Someone who is planning a trip to the UK and the area where the person may live might either buy the actual CDs in their local country or copy the music i onto CD-Rs. Then the two parties can arrange to meet in person at a pub, coffeehouse, or whatever and exchange product for a pre-agreed price.
Before the internet this type of exchange could be done and had been done now-and-then but it was difficult to arrange the details.
It's not much, but it's an idea of how to approach the problem of music distribution across borders when the global music corporations aren't interested in developing the market that is there. They ignore the market by charging absurdly high prices when the potential customers can see how the markets and prices are in other places.
Thank you,
Most guys come with pretty straight-forward love detectors: they're called 'erections'.
Ladies, if you see one, there's a 96% chance that the guy's in love with you.
You don't need any special glasses.