A central place where people could comment on pre-recorded music would be the greatest benefit of the Napster/file-sharing phenomenon in the long run.
With the radio formats encased in epoxy, and the music industry focusing on 'one hit wonders', it is becoming more difficult to get exposure to new music that you'll believe that you will like before hearing it. If people with similar interests to yours recommend a certain new title, then you are more willing to pay for a download (or through the free sharing services).
With hard disks reaching sizes of hundreds of gigabytes (expensive now but not in a few years), it will become easier to acquire large music collections by plugging drives together and doing high-speed bit copies. Under this paradigm, you have more music in your collection than you will likely ever listen to. A centralized music description service becomes a seriously helpful guide.
In effect when you get a collection of 1000 albums on a hard drive dub, you are like the program director for a major radio station (before Clear Channel) that gets hundreds of pieces of product a month from the music industry. Only it's a radio station with one listener and no advertising.
May I remind my gentle readers in the Slashdot community how insanely expensive any outer space adventure costs?
In this age of limits (obvious to all but US government bureaucrats and science fiction fans) that there is no practical return for the money expended putting humans into space.
This obsession with men on spending billions of public funds on space travel is a direct insult to the one out of ten women in the USA who are diagnosed with breast cancer (and the millions of women who die as a result). I recommend that the propeller-heads curb their enthusiasm for using public funds to implement science fiction fantasies until significant progress is made in defeating this disease that kills millions of women. Otherwise, you run the risk of reenforcing the public image amoung women that you are immature morons.
Nor would it be a waste of words to point out that other diseases such as AIDS and SARS and malaria and TB still deserve a greater share of public funds than space travel. While we on the subject, it might be a good idea to redirect some of the space budget for dealing with the inevitable return of pandemic influenza (such as happened in 1918 and 1957) and the possible introduction of weaponized SmallPox, for which we have little defense at the present.
Please confine your obsession with space travel to films and comic books.
They do have a great return policy, they'll take almost anything back without (major) hassles.
I used to buy almost all of my computer stuff at Fry's and noticed the same situation. Plus the boxes being sold as 'new' would have manuals or cables missing. That would be marked on the sticker and the unit would still be the same price as the unopened units.
I once bought three bare-bone systems in a row from Fry's before one worked. I used to think that it was my fault for being 'technically challenged'.
But life's too short for this nonsense. Fry's should have the world's most detailed web site that covers everything that they sell and have recently sold. All the drivers, all the manuals in PDF, everything. They should insist that the manufacturer supply their super web site with all this documentation before they agree to stock the product.
I now get most of my computer stuff from listings on PriceWatch.com.
Many interesting and relevent points made. Thank you for taking the time to write them.
However, I think that the term "dingleberry" is just a touch inappropriate. Perhaps "Grasshopper" would have the exact impact for a Slashdot rebuttal to a stanger.
Basically, we could knock a good 74-100$ off the iPod without losing money.
Does this mean that the projections of increased sales that would result from the lower unit price would generate revenue levels that would be higher than the current revenues from iPod sales?
Or does this mean that each iPod is sold by the retailer at a price that is $74-100 per unit above the price that the retailer gets them from the distributor.
The expression 'without losing money' is somewhat unclear in the above message.
Sorry to sound like Lt. Tuvak above, but I think that the point is a little too ambiguious.
Thank you,
Who votes doesn't count;who counts the votes does
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
It is becoming obvious that the 2004 US election has already been decided.
Bush will have been elected (not re-elected because he was appointed by the Supreme Count for his first term) by 51% to 49%.
The touchscreen voting machines have no paper record of the votes entered. They are made by a company that gave the maximum amount permitted to the Republican party. The CEO of the company is a conservative Republican. The Republican congressional representive in the district where the machines were tried in the 2002 election was elected by an 80% margin.
The software used to count the votes is closed and proprietary. Anyone who challenges it could be sent to prison for DMCA violations.
If the Soviets did this thirty years ago, the Republicans would jumping all over it as evidence of the total institutional corruption of the communist system. They aren't saying shit now.
I do encourage you to vote. It's a great habit that you don't want to get out of.
Bioscrypt now claim an error rate of 0.1% on fingerprint IDs.
So if the nitwits in the government go ahead with this and use biometrics to 'identify' hundreds of millions of people, then one in a thousand people will never be able to prove who they are.
They could end up spending life in prison because a stupid computer error (instead of a 'crime' like third conviction for possession of rolling papers or downloading an MP3 file.)
The HUGE possiblity of misidentification due to computer error precludes any use of this technology except in very limited circumstances for civilized people.
The question that we need to ask is not how we can perfect technological indentification, but why do we need such systems anyway? It's clear that this technology will lead to Orwellian fascism. So why are (as technologists) so obsessed with perfecting it? Anyone remember the lesson of Robert Oppenheimer and the development of atomic bombs? Once this stuff is in place it will never go away. And the technologists aren't going to ones controlling it.
Don't focus on the technology; focus on underlining assumptions that the technology is supposed to address.
Japan's 'impending labor shortage' is nothing more than plain old-fashioned bushito bullshit. The world's population is exploding, which means that there is no labor shortage in real terms. When they say 'impending labor shortage' the Japanese mean not enough of 'our people' to do all the work that needs to be done.
This is an indicator of the overwhelming but subliminal racism that permeates Asian culture. It never occurs to the Japanese that there actually could real decent intelligent civilized human beings outside of Japan that could be encouraged to move to Japan, do the work, and eventually become Japanese citizens and even, over time, actually even become Japanese.
Contrast that frame of mind with the Americans. The Americans talk endlessly about the levels of racism, both overt and subliminal, between the various groups of people who move there and live there. But after a few generations of being part of American culture, everybody is accepted as part of the 'salad bowl' of American society.
This could never happen in Japan. There are families of Korean background who have lived in Japan since the Tokugawa era (1600's) and they are still marched down to the local police station every year to be registered as 'gaijin' (foreigners). The Japanese even practice racism against their own people. They created a social sub-class called 'buraku-min' which get treated a second-class citizens even though there is no disconcernable difference between these people and the mainstream.
It's all just accepted as the way that things are, have always been, and should always be. But do they actually have a real labor shortage in a world that doubles in population every twenty years?
I don't want a repeat of the experience that I had with buying CD-RWs. I'm on my fourth now:
CD-RW#1 : Mitsumi 2x4x10 Paid $160 in 1998
After eight months this unit stopped recording CDs accurately. After about nine months it wouldn't record or read CDs. Tried to contact Mitsumi for a RMA, no telephone number to call and no response to my e-mails. Fuck 'em. Mitsumi's are junk.
CD-RW#2 : BTG 4x8x16 Paid $99 in 2000
This unit stopped recording CDs after seven months. Got a replacement unit from BTG for $10 shipping charge. Still works but not often used.
CD-RW#3 : QTC 4x24x32 Paid $85 in 2001
This unit was a 'best-buy' in PC-WORLD. After five months it actually started destroying CDs while attempting to read them by scuffing them so badly that they were unreadable thereafter. Destroyed six library audio CD's and stopped reading. Could not contact company for warranty return. Would not answer e-mails. Fuck 'em!! I don't trust any review in PC-World from now on either.
CD-RW#4 : Artec 10x32x40 Paid $65 in 2002
This unit is still working well after 18 months! I burn about two or three CD's a week without any problems. These guys rule!
I think that I'll wait for another year or two before getting a DVD writer. I'm SURE the sub $100 US DVD writers being sold now are junk. It will take a year at least for all this garbage to get sent back to the manufacturer under warranty and be failure-analysized. It will take another six months after that to incorporate all of the design corrections into newer models. Just like Microsoft.
I'll wait, thank you, Of course, there is always the risk that there will be mandated DRM added to the DVD burners by that time. But it's not as great a risk as buying an early sub-$100 model and have it fail (and not have a warranty service because the company won't answer e-mails)
Removable media, especially types that can hold large amounts of music like hard disks, has many advantages over swapable disks or tapes.
I've been making mix tapes since 1967 when I found out on a trip to Hong Kong that all of the record shops there would record any album in their store onto a reel-to-reel tape for the cost of the tape and a nominal fee for the recording time. Until recently the 1-to-1 time factor for making a copy has been the biggest limiting factor to building a collection in this way. In other words, it would take 45 minutes to make a copy of a 45 minute album.
Now digital coping allows an album to transfered from hard disk to CD-R in about a minute and collections of whole genres, say most of the great jazz albums recorded between 1955 and 1960 maybe 50 gigabytes, can be transfered from one hard disk to a new one in about an hour or two.
In the old framework of music sales, people would research what they wanted and made a carefully focused selection for purchase of a disk (a 33 1/3 LP, or CD). People always knew what they had in their carefully crafted collection of expensive disks.
But now or soon, people trade or buy entire librarys of 500 albums at a time on a single hard disk. The whole approach is different. They might be reading an article on the web of a type of music or certain band, then go to this collection a listen to a recommended track from the article. In the new paradigm, only the most fanatic actually know all or most of the music that is in their collection. People get a hard disk of 500 new albums and browse it or just wade, sampling a randomly selected track or select a focus category like "Popular top 40, 1963-1967, 'British Invasion'" and the MP3 server program would play a semi-random selection of the Beatles, the Searchers, Dave Clark Five, ect...
A hard disk with 2000 albums and good MP3 server program would replace radio. Or rather perform the function that radio used to do, introduce people to new musical styles and bands. The music industry has failed greatly in this area although they used to be rather good at it in the 1950's through 1980's. They should consider selling whole genres of music (500 albums of a type) on a hard disk at a reasonable price ($50). Maybe each album could only be played twice before being erased, it would still be worth it just for the ability to get exposure to new music.
Besides, we are going to do it anyway. So they might as well join us if they still want to be thought of as the music business in ten years.
In your guide to ripping CDs to MP3, you emphasize that one should not install the ASPI from Nero if another is loaded.
Might I humbly suggest that you put a new sentence in the guide explaining how to check if the other ASPI is not loaded? This would be most helpful to people who have yet to reach a high level of competence in this matter. These are the people for whom the guide has been written.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message.
I rip complete albums and listen to each song briefly. If I don't dislike it, I burn it to CDR along with another 8-10 albums. The CD-Rs get cataloged and placed in order on a spindle.
I get almost all of the CDs from the shelves of the public library. I'm trying to build a collection that I can still enjoy years in the future should the RIAA force the libraries to take pre-recorded music out of circulation. Tastes change over time and some things that I might not like now I might five or ten years from now.
I've been doing 20 or so albums a week for the past couple of years and do have about 80gig of MP3 music on two 100 CD-R spindles (good stuff gets stored twice on different CD-Rs). It's more of a long-term library than a collection.
80 gig seems very large by the old standards of limited access to pre-recorded music, back in the days when people paid three hours of minimum wage salary for a recording of about 50 minutes of music. But now with a 100 CD-R spindle holding 70 gig of MP3 and selling for $20, it's not unreasonable. Plus I'm archiving a lot of classical, opera, and jazz that's on the library shelf that I don't listen to now, but may in ten years.
A computer program can analyse an EKG as well as any doctor and not charge $103 for a few minutes of use.
As high tech people we need to start using our skills to knock the floor out from these people who are bankrupting the health care system in the USA.
For example, a program that that 'blurs' a line of text in such a way that the viewer sees the text as sharp and clear. The amount and type of 'blurring' (done through grey scale and math algorythms) will determine how much and in what ways the eyes are off for the person getting the test. The person can use this information to formulate a perscription for eyeglasses that can be filled inexpensively in China or India. The perscription glasses can be shipped UPS or FedEx at only a tiny percentage of the cost of the procedure in the USA.
Another example: you put a floppy disk into the the blood pressure machine at the supermarket and record the data. Do this for several supermarket machines in case one machine is uncalibrated. Run a program to analyse the data and if needed, order drugs from the cheapest place found on the internet. You assume the risk and avoid the doctor.
How about: you have a toothache. You go to a generic X-Ray store and get one or two X-Rays done on the area and have the images written to a CD-R. You upload the image to a dentist clearinghouse where the dentist's offer bids like E-Bay to fix it. Maybe two processes: one to diagnose it and one to repair it. Maybe you even hop a plane for a day and fly a few hundred miles to the cheapest dentist. People would rate the dentists on the Ebay-like medical/dental clearinghouse service, to weed out the quacks. Maybe a dentist in L.A. charges $1000 for a crown and one in Mexicali charges $300 for the same service. Your insurance doesn't cover Mexico? Shit, your employer stopped offering medical/dental insurance three years ago. Or, yes, it's available at only $200/month with $2000 deductable and $50 co-pays. Any you get $11.25 an hour. Yeah, sure, you're covered.
All this above is, probably is, might be as illegal as hell. But in the USA, the laws are made by the people who give the most money to the politicians, who often don't even read the laws that they vote on. Or have vast personal fortunes invested in the companies that the most to gain from the laws that they pass. (like the Senate majority leader with a vast fortune in HMOs declaring that it's unpatriotic to vote against a Medicare 'reform' bill that will vastly increase the profits of the HMOs, or the Vice President channeling huge government contracts to Halilburton, or the president who can't find a certain member of the Bin Laden family when the Bin Laden family were major financiers of his father's first oil company, or the chicken company who absorbed the losses of the Senator from New York's commodity trades so that she would be a consistent winner against astronomical odds, while her husband was deciding how stongly the environmental regulations would apply to the chicken company, and on and on....)
They are totally corrupt and so are the laws that they pass.
I get this from the phone company, who have the one of worst institutions in the US. There was a weird charge of $6 added to my phone bill for USBI misc charges. I called the for-questions 800 number and I get this woman who tells me that because of the 'do not call' list, they are adding this charge to my phone bill to compensate for their loss of revenue from not being able to telemarket. I couldn't even get her to tell me who she represented. When I asked, she said " We got fined $78,000 for violating the 'do not call' list, "Don't you think it's fair that I should be able to raise our rates to cover this?".
I was stunned. After speaking to four other people in the telephone billing system, I talked to one person who said now almost anyone can add random charges to your phone bill and if you don't pay, you'll lose your service. He said that one company was sending pop-up ads that started automatic collection of long-distance charges if you didn't click it off within about 15 seconds, even if it was under your browser display. This was a phone company representative! He said that the only way to ensure that you wouldn't get socked with random charges was to quote 'never lift your phone off the hook' unquote.
Actually, I think the message is now "just share with people you can trust, not the whole world".
This is so true. I now have an extra 80 gig hard drive nearly filled with MP3 music that I freely share with my co-workers.
I'll often go to the library and just grab 30 CDs off the shelf, bring them home, and rip them into MP3 (while getting the song titles from CDDB). All lot of titles I haven't heard even once and about 2/3rds I just erase {the '1000 Accordians Play The Beatles' wasn't as good as I thought it would be). But, there's lots of incredible World Music that I would have never known existed without using this method.
In a few years the RIAA will get its wish and people will stop trading MP3 files over the net. They will instead trade 100 gigabyte hard drives each filled with 2000 albums in 192kbps MP3 format with full titles and scanned cover art. With blank 4.7gig DVD disks hovering around $1 each and DVD burners nearing $100 (and sure to be increasing in quality), people will just trade whole genre collections on hard disk and copy the albums they like onto cheap DVDs.
But that's not the real issue. Eventually people will get bored with non-interactive 20th century music frozen into song units and start exploring ways to customize pre-recorded music.
The music industry will be the last to realize that people will actually pay money (some money at least) for music that they can remix at home and change the instrumentation, vocals, levels, and so other parameters. Something like you can do now with General MIDI files and classical music instrument synthesizers.
I've read that Hitler's favorite movie was 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. He had a deep 19th century sentimental affection for Disney kitsch.
I just can't see the Nazis taking a liking for 'Metropolis', expecially since they hated the director Fritz Lang. They arrested him after the release of "M" because they thought its second title ("The Murderer Amoungst Us") was a reference to their politcal thuggery. Lang moved to the US after being released and made many great Hollywood pictures.
Nor can I see Hitler actually thinking 'King Kong' was a great film. At the time the big monkey was seen as allusion to non-white peoples. Hitler, with his demonic psychotic focus on racial issues, would have picked up on that right away and it undoubtably made him uncomfortable.
I'm afraid that you've caught me on this. I don't remember the source. I definitely remember reading it and being just stunned.
It very likely could have been Variety magazine within the past two months.
Of course, if this film actually does get made, the production may be reduced to realistic levels that can generate a profit. But in the present Hollywood climate, it doesn't seem likely.
I had dismissed the King Kong remake rumor as Hollywood vaporware until I saw the reference to it in the article that generated this Slashdot topic. Now it seems quite possibly true.
If so then I think that Hollywood in 2003 is in the same position that the Dot-Com industry was in 1998. Obsessed with bigger and bigger projects that in the light of day stand no real chance of ever being profitable. And having each success encourage a wilder grander more expensive project.
Sort of like a gambler doubling his bet on each successful roll of the dice.
Director Peter Jackson has been given $400 million US to remake the classic movie 'King Kong'. Excuse me, but this is insane...
The remake is being done on the strength of Mr. Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, which has sold (or will have sold in a few months time) over a billion dollars US in box office tickets after costing roughly $200 million to make and promote worldwide. Impressive, yes.
The Lord of the Rings is a dense multi-volume fully realized fantasy that has offered a rich complex story and hundreds of opportunities for using state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery to complement the plot into a strong, enveloping film fantasy.
But $400 million for King Kong?!? This is a flimsy plot about a giant ape who develops an obsession about a tiny blonde human woman pet. (Hollywood metaphor anyone?). Big monkey lives on a distant island; whites come; they capture him (somehow); they take him to New York, he flips out, smashes up some shti, climbs a building, and gets shot down. Duh, end of story.
How is this worth making into a $400 million movie? Or, rather, how is $400 million going to make a better movie than the original or the 1978 Jessica Lange remake? More computer graphic imagery? Of what? A big monkey smashing things in NYC? Didn't we see all that already in the remake of Godzilla? You remember that... The remake of Godzilla that cost $80 million and lost most of it because it was stupid and a completely unnecessary film? How are you going to cover a $400 million investment on a big monkey film?
I haven't seen the new Peter Jackson 'King Kong'. Hell, it hasn't even been made. In fact, the producers are wracking their pointed little heads trying to think of some new angle that will get 45 million people to pay $10 each just to cover the pre-production cost ($400 million film and $50 million in publicity).
But I just know it's a bomb. It's the 'Gigli' of Summer 2006. And it's going to take a studio or two down with it.
Why is it that only sex offenders are publicly displayed on a list? Why aren't murderers put on such a list?
In America a non-white person who spends his days dreaming up new ways to kill white people is a sick, weird, terrorist pervert who deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.
A white person who spends his days dreaming up new ways to kill non-white people is an important component of the Research & Development Team of a major defense contractor. He's a welcome asset to his community and a true All-American!
A lot of places play fast and loose with the term 'sex offender'. Most people assume that this term refers to people who have raped or committed a sexual act on a pre-pubescent child.
However many places consider any man who is gay and has been arrested on the anti-homosexual laws. These conviction records are never erased or pardoned. So some guy who happened to be in a gay bar at a time when it was raided by the police 40 years ago is considered in the same class of 'sex offender' as an active pedophile.
Some places go even so far as to classify descrete 'public' uniration as a sex offence. Some guy taking a whizz at 1am behind a tree gets put into the same 'sex offender' category as the aformentioned pedophile. This conviction never goes away either. And God help you if your child has to go the bathroom right now and there are no public restrooms within miles.
Let's not forget all the 18 year old guys who get caught kissing their 17 year old sweethearts. They're convicted 'sex offenders' also.
-- the problem isn't a lack of regulation among game stores, or violent games, it's a total lack of parental responsibility.
I agree, it is the responsibility of parents to prepare their children for the real world. This includes instilling a basic sense of right and wrong.
There is also the current state of the technology where the game software is complex enough to show ultra-violence in emotionally effective ways but not advanced enough to convey the consequences that this violence inflicts on an individual. In other words, games now are able to induce an primal emotional thrill at killing an 'enemy', but are not advanced enough to induce the sense of loss, despair, and tragedy (or fear) that happens in a real battle situation by having a close teammate instantly killed.
One of the unintended side-effects of passing laws against the depiction of ultra-violence in interactive media is that the technology for the games is not allowed to develop to the point where the full emotional impact of combat can be imparted to the players.
Without these misguided laws, video games will eventually evolve to the point where they will become substitutes for the combat experience instead of tactical training tools for combat as they are currently being used (either openly or covertly).
Global economic integration is gradually making individual combat and warfare between nations an anacronism from past ages. But the subliminal conditioning resulting from thousands of years of human warfare (and the enormous stocks of 20th century advanced weaponry) continue to drive young men to compulsively seek out the combat experience in ways that are increasingly counter-productive to the global corporate new world order.
Deep, brutal, and complex interactive media violent video games will develop into the technological solution to this current dilemma.
and we'll be listening to completely digitally generated music on the FM dial.
Although it seems absurd now, this combination of AI digitally-generated music and poetry may be the key to breaking the stanglehold of the culture corporations (i.e. the RIAA).
The global culture corporations can't claim to own the copyright on a cultural experience that was not created by a person and they can't restrict the usage of computer algorythm-generated works of art or music nor their file exchange.
I think that this article begs the question as to why it is necessary to keep sending living biomass (i.e. human beings) into space.
Previous 20th-century arguments hold that despite the enormous cost and level of complications for keeping the biomass alive, the humans have the greatest ability to do useful work and respond creatively to unusual and unexpected situations. But certainly now the advanced robots can do everything, kilogram for kilogram, that the humans can do at much less cost (not to mention pseudo-'heartfelt output of emotion at the tragedy') when the biomass ceases living due to any one of the thousands of things that can and will go wrong in such a hostile environment.
Why should we consider these people 'heroes' for doing such pointless things like transporting their bodies into space at such enormous cost and dubious achievement? Heroes are the people like the team that recently got the cost of a watt of solar electricity reduced by an order of magnitude. Heroes are people who things that are extraordinary, inspiring, and, above all, useful.
Spending billions of dollars to launch a crew-cut poster boy (American, Chinese, or Russian, doesn't matter, it's the same guy) into space when a monkey or robot would do just as well does not generate 'heroes'. It's just PR for bloated defense contractors (American, Chinese, or Russian).
Please don't give this nonsense about the 'science' that is being conducted in space. There is no science in space, there's nothing in space.
All you space geeks should just spend more time in Hollywood learning how to make movies that will satisfy your obsession with this topic and stop wasting so many billions of tax dollars that are needed now for so many more important things.
My worries are when XYZ Corp creates the super ultra neat-o game and puts it out and the overall reputation and respect for gaming softare is so low that nobody will buy it...Will XYZ Corp go out of business?
Perhaps the execs at XYZ should consider an alternative to spending tons of money on the development of "Neat-O" as a sealed product.
Instead, they could:
- Develop a detailed plan-pilot-concept of how "Neat-O" should look and play.
- Sell ten or so "Neat-O" original developer subscriptions to developers for different sections of the game. These developers coordinate the algorythm, plot, and code development of the game.
- The game is released on low-cost CD's ($3-5 each) in its primitive form along with its source code.
- People playing the game develop suggestions and alternatives to the basic game on the CD. These improvements are uploaded to the XYZ website. XYZ charges $1 a year to access uploads received within the last two weeks and allows older uploads to be downloaded freely.
- "Neat-O" develops hundreds of levels and secret rooms. Subscribers to the XYZ Neat-O website reach over 200,000 worldwide. Revenues from the $1 a year subscription are split half to XYZ corp and half to the original ten developers or people who have bought one of the ten original developer subscription registrations.
This is one of many alteratives to business models that encourage 'piracy' by treating intellectual and cultural experiences as a product that can be marketed like a bar of soap.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I want to share a description only?
A central place where people could comment on pre-recorded music would be the greatest benefit of the Napster/file-sharing phenomenon in the long run.
With the radio formats encased in epoxy, and the music industry focusing on 'one hit wonders', it is becoming more difficult to get exposure to new music that you'll believe that you will like before hearing it. If people with similar interests to yours recommend a certain new title, then you are more willing to pay for a download (or through the free sharing services).
With hard disks reaching sizes of hundreds of gigabytes (expensive now but not in a few years), it will become easier to acquire large music collections by plugging drives together and doing high-speed bit copies. Under this paradigm, you have more music in your collection than you will likely ever listen to. A centralized music description service becomes a seriously helpful guide.
In effect when you get a collection of 1000 albums on a hard drive dub, you are like the program director for a major radio station (before Clear Channel) that gets hundreds of pieces of product a month from the music industry. Only it's a radio station with one listener and no advertising.
May I remind my gentle readers in the Slashdot community how insanely expensive any outer space adventure costs?
In this age of limits (obvious to all but US government bureaucrats and science fiction fans) that there is no practical return for the money expended putting humans into space.
This obsession with men on spending billions of public funds on space travel is a direct insult to the one out of ten women in the USA who are diagnosed with breast cancer (and the millions of women who die as a result). I recommend that the propeller-heads curb their enthusiasm for using public funds to implement science fiction fantasies until significant progress is made in defeating this disease that kills millions of women. Otherwise, you run the risk of reenforcing the public image amoung women that you are immature morons.
Nor would it be a waste of words to point out that other diseases such as AIDS and SARS and malaria and TB still deserve a greater share of public funds than space travel. While we on the subject, it might be a good idea to redirect some of the space budget for dealing with the inevitable return of pandemic influenza (such as happened in 1918 and 1957) and the possible introduction of weaponized SmallPox, for which we have little defense at the present.
Please confine your obsession with space travel to films and comic books.
Thank you,
"A trip to Fry's is two trips to Fry's"
They do have a great return policy, they'll take almost anything back without (major) hassles.
I used to buy almost all of my computer stuff at Fry's and noticed the same situation. Plus the boxes being sold as 'new' would have manuals or cables missing. That would be marked on the sticker and the unit would still be the same price as the unopened units.
I once bought three bare-bone systems in a row from Fry's before one worked. I used to think that it was my fault for being 'technically challenged'.
But life's too short for this nonsense. Fry's should have the world's most detailed web site that covers everything that they sell and have recently sold. All the drivers, all the manuals in PDF, everything. They should insist that the manufacturer supply their super web site with all this documentation before they agree to stock the product.
I now get most of my computer stuff from listings on PriceWatch.com.
Many interesting and relevent points made. Thank you for taking the time to write them.
However, I think that the term "dingleberry" is just a touch inappropriate. Perhaps "Grasshopper" would have the exact impact for a Slashdot rebuttal to a stanger.
Thank you,
Basically, we could knock a good 74-100$ off the iPod without losing money.
Does this mean that the projections of increased sales that would result from the lower unit price would generate revenue levels that would be higher than the current revenues from iPod sales?
Or does this mean that each iPod is sold by the retailer at a price that is $74-100 per unit above the price that the retailer gets them from the distributor.
The expression 'without losing money' is somewhat unclear in the above message.
Sorry to sound like Lt. Tuvak above, but I think that the point is a little too ambiguious.
Thank you,
It is becoming obvious that the 2004 US election has already been decided.
Bush will have been elected (not re-elected because he was appointed by the Supreme Count for his first term) by 51% to 49%.
The touchscreen voting machines have no paper record of the votes entered. They are made by a company that gave the maximum amount permitted to the Republican party. The CEO of the company is a conservative Republican. The Republican congressional representive in the district where the machines were tried in the 2002 election was elected by an 80% margin.
The software used to count the votes is closed and proprietary. Anyone who challenges it could be sent to prison for DMCA violations.
If the Soviets did this thirty years ago, the Republicans would jumping all over it as evidence of the total institutional corruption of the communist system. They aren't saying shit now.
I do encourage you to vote. It's a great habit that you don't want to get out of.
Just don't seriously expect it have any meaning.
Thank you,
Bioscrypt now claim an error rate of 0.1% on fingerprint IDs.
So if the nitwits in the government go ahead with this and use biometrics to 'identify' hundreds of millions of people, then one in a thousand people will never be able to prove who they are.
They could end up spending life in prison because a stupid computer error (instead of a 'crime' like third conviction for possession of rolling papers or downloading an MP3 file.)
The HUGE possiblity of misidentification due to computer error precludes any use of this technology except in very limited circumstances for civilized people.
The question that we need to ask is not how we can perfect technological indentification, but why do we need such systems anyway? It's clear that this technology will lead to Orwellian fascism. So why are (as technologists) so obsessed with perfecting it? Anyone remember the lesson of Robert Oppenheimer and the development of atomic bombs? Once this stuff is in place it will never go away. And the technologists aren't going to ones controlling it.
Don't focus on the technology; focus on underlining assumptions that the technology is supposed to address.
Thank you,
Japan's 'impending labor shortage' is nothing more than plain old-fashioned bushito bullshit. The world's population is exploding, which means that there is no labor shortage in real terms. When they say 'impending labor shortage' the Japanese mean not enough of 'our people' to do all the work that needs to be done.
This is an indicator of the overwhelming but subliminal racism that permeates Asian culture. It never occurs to the Japanese that there actually could real decent intelligent civilized human beings outside of Japan that could be encouraged to move to Japan, do the work, and eventually become Japanese citizens and even, over time, actually even become Japanese.
Contrast that frame of mind with the Americans. The Americans talk endlessly about the levels of racism, both overt and subliminal, between the various groups of people who move there and live there. But after a few generations of being part of American culture, everybody is accepted as part of the 'salad bowl' of American society.
This could never happen in Japan. There are families of Korean background who have lived in Japan since the Tokugawa era (1600's) and they are still marched down to the local police station every year to be registered as 'gaijin' (foreigners). The Japanese even practice racism against their own people. They created a social sub-class called 'buraku-min' which get treated a second-class citizens even though there is no disconcernable difference between these people and the mainstream.
It's all just accepted as the way that things are, have always been, and should always be. But do they actually have a real labor shortage in a world that doubles in population every twenty years?
No way.
I would buy a DVD writer, except...
I don't want a repeat of the experience that I had with buying CD-RWs. I'm on my fourth now:
CD-RW#1 : Mitsumi 2x4x10 Paid $160 in 1998
After eight months this unit stopped recording CDs accurately. After about nine months it wouldn't record or read CDs. Tried to contact Mitsumi for a RMA, no telephone number to call and no response to my e-mails. Fuck 'em. Mitsumi's are junk.
CD-RW#2 : BTG 4x8x16 Paid $99 in 2000
This unit stopped recording CDs after seven months. Got a replacement unit from BTG for $10 shipping charge. Still works but not often used.
CD-RW#3 : QTC 4x24x32 Paid $85 in 2001
This unit was a 'best-buy' in PC-WORLD. After five months it actually started destroying CDs while attempting to read them by scuffing them so badly that they were unreadable thereafter. Destroyed six library audio CD's and stopped reading. Could not contact company for warranty return. Would not answer e-mails. Fuck 'em!! I don't trust any review in PC-World from now on either.
CD-RW#4 : Artec 10x32x40 Paid $65 in 2002
This unit is still working well after 18 months!
I burn about two or three CD's a week without any problems. These guys rule!
I think that I'll wait for another year or two before getting a DVD writer. I'm SURE the sub $100 US DVD writers being sold now are junk. It will take a year at least for all this garbage to get sent back to the manufacturer under warranty and be failure-analysized. It will take another six months after that to incorporate all of the design corrections into newer models. Just like Microsoft.
I'll wait, thank you, Of course, there is always the risk that there will be mandated DRM added to the DVD burners by that time. But it's not as great a risk as buying an early sub-$100 model and have it fail (and not have a warranty service because the company won't answer e-mails)
Removable media, especially types that can hold large amounts of music like hard disks, has many advantages over swapable disks or tapes.
I've been making mix tapes since 1967 when I found out on a trip to Hong Kong that all of the record shops there would record any album in their store onto a reel-to-reel tape for the cost of the tape and a nominal fee for the recording time. Until recently the 1-to-1 time factor for making a copy has been the biggest limiting factor to building a collection in this way. In other words, it would take 45 minutes to make a copy of a 45 minute album.
Now digital coping allows an album to transfered from hard disk to CD-R in about a minute and collections of whole genres, say most of the great jazz albums recorded between 1955 and 1960 maybe 50 gigabytes, can be transfered from one hard disk to a new one in about an hour or two.
In the old framework of music sales, people would research what they wanted and made a carefully focused selection for purchase of a disk (a 33 1/3 LP, or CD). People always knew what they had in their carefully crafted collection of expensive disks.
But now or soon, people trade or buy entire librarys of 500 albums at a time on a single hard disk. The whole approach is different. They might be reading an article on the web of a type of music or certain band, then go to this collection a listen to a recommended track from the article. In the new paradigm, only the most fanatic actually know all or most of the music that is in their collection. People get a hard disk of 500 new albums and browse it or just wade, sampling a randomly selected track or select a focus category like "Popular top 40, 1963-1967, 'British Invasion'" and the MP3 server program would play a semi-random selection of the Beatles, the Searchers, Dave Clark Five, ect...
A hard disk with 2000 albums and good MP3 server program would replace radio. Or rather perform the function that radio used to do, introduce people to new musical styles and bands. The music industry has failed greatly in this area although they used to be rather good at it in the 1950's through 1980's. They should consider selling whole genres of music (500 albums of a type) on a hard disk at a reasonable price ($50). Maybe each album could only be played twice before being erased, it would still be worth it just for the ability to get exposure to new music.
Besides, we are going to do it anyway. So they might as well join us if they still want to be thought of as the music business in ten years.
In your guide to ripping CDs to MP3, you emphasize that one should not install the ASPI from Nero if another is loaded.
Might I humbly suggest that you put a new sentence in the guide explaining how to check if the other ASPI is not loaded? This would be most helpful to people who have yet to reach a high level of competence in this matter. These are the people for whom the guide has been written.
Thank you,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message.
I rip complete albums and listen to each song briefly. If I don't dislike it, I burn it to CDR along with another 8-10 albums. The CD-Rs get cataloged and placed in order on a spindle.
I get almost all of the CDs from the shelves of the public library. I'm trying to build a collection that I can still enjoy years in the future should the RIAA force the libraries to take pre-recorded music out of circulation. Tastes change over time and some things that I might not like now I might five or ten years from now.
I've been doing 20 or so albums a week for the past couple of years and do have about 80gig of MP3 music on two 100 CD-R spindles (good stuff gets stored twice on different CD-Rs). It's more of a long-term library than a collection.
80 gig seems very large by the old standards of limited access to pre-recorded music, back in the days when people paid three hours of minimum wage salary for a recording of about 50 minutes of music. But now with a 100 CD-R spindle holding 70 gig of MP3 and selling for $20, it's not unreasonable. Plus I'm archiving a lot of classical, opera, and jazz that's on the library shelf that I don't listen to now, but may in ten years.
A computer program can analyse an EKG as well as any doctor and not charge $103 for a few minutes of use.
As high tech people we need to start using our skills to knock the floor out from these people who are bankrupting the health care system in the USA.
For example, a program that that 'blurs' a line of text in such a way that the viewer sees the text as sharp and clear. The amount and type of 'blurring' (done through grey scale and math algorythms) will determine how much and in what ways the eyes are off for the person getting the test. The person can use this information to formulate a perscription for eyeglasses that can be filled inexpensively in China or India. The perscription glasses can be shipped UPS or FedEx at only a tiny percentage of the cost of the procedure in the USA.
Another example: you put a floppy disk into the the blood pressure machine at the supermarket and record the data. Do this for several supermarket machines in case one machine is uncalibrated. Run a program to analyse the data and if needed, order drugs from the cheapest place found on the internet. You assume the risk and avoid the doctor.
How about: you have a toothache. You go to a generic X-Ray store and get one or two X-Rays done on the area and have the images written to a CD-R.
You upload the image to a dentist clearinghouse where the dentist's offer bids like E-Bay to fix it. Maybe two processes: one to diagnose it and one to repair it. Maybe you even hop a plane for a day and fly a few hundred miles to the cheapest dentist. People would rate the dentists on the Ebay-like medical/dental clearinghouse service, to weed out the quacks. Maybe a dentist in L.A. charges $1000 for a crown and one in Mexicali charges $300 for the same service. Your insurance doesn't cover Mexico? Shit, your employer stopped offering medical/dental insurance three years ago. Or, yes, it's available at only $200/month with $2000 deductable and $50 co-pays. Any you get $11.25 an hour. Yeah, sure, you're covered.
All this above is, probably is, might be as illegal as hell. But in the USA, the laws are made by the people who give the most money to the politicians, who often don't even read the laws that they vote on. Or have vast personal fortunes invested in the companies that the most to gain from the laws that they pass. (like the Senate majority leader with a vast fortune in HMOs declaring that it's unpatriotic to vote against a Medicare 'reform' bill that will vastly increase the profits of the HMOs, or the Vice President channeling huge government contracts to Halilburton, or the president who can't find a certain member of the Bin Laden family when the Bin Laden family were major financiers of his father's first oil company, or the chicken company who absorbed the losses of the Senator from New York's commodity trades so that she would be a consistent winner against astronomical odds, while her husband was deciding how stongly the environmental regulations would apply to the chicken company, and on and on....)
They are totally corrupt and so are the laws that they pass.
I get this from the phone company, who have the one of worst institutions in the US. There was a weird charge of $6 added to my phone bill for USBI misc charges. I called the for-questions 800 number and I get this woman who tells me that because of the 'do not call' list, they are adding this charge to my phone bill to compensate for their loss of revenue from not being able to telemarket. I couldn't even get her to tell me who she represented. When I asked, she said " We got fined $78,000 for violating the 'do not call' list, "Don't you think it's fair that I should be able to raise our rates to cover this?".
I was stunned. After speaking to four other people in the telephone billing system, I talked to one person who said now almost anyone can add random charges to your phone bill and if you don't pay, you'll lose your service. He said that one company was sending pop-up ads that started automatic collection of long-distance charges if you didn't click it off within about 15 seconds, even if it was under your browser display. This was a phone company representative! He said that the only way to ensure that you wouldn't get socked with random charges was to quote 'never lift your phone off the hook' unquote.
Insane. What can you do?
Actually, I think the message is now "just share with people you can trust, not the whole world".
This is so true. I now have an extra 80 gig hard drive nearly filled with MP3 music that I freely share with my co-workers.
I'll often go to the library and just grab 30 CDs off the shelf, bring them home, and rip them into MP3 (while getting the song titles from CDDB). All lot of titles I haven't heard even once and about 2/3rds I just erase {the '1000 Accordians Play The Beatles' wasn't as good as I thought it would be). But, there's lots of incredible World Music that I would have never known existed without using this method.
In a few years the RIAA will get its wish and people will stop trading MP3 files over the net. They will instead trade 100 gigabyte hard drives each filled with 2000 albums in 192kbps MP3 format with full titles and scanned cover art. With blank 4.7gig DVD disks hovering around $1 each and DVD burners nearing $100 (and sure to be increasing in quality), people will just trade whole genre collections on hard disk and copy the albums they like onto cheap DVDs.
But that's not the real issue. Eventually people will get bored with non-interactive 20th century music frozen into song units and start exploring ways to customize pre-recorded music.
The music industry will be the last to realize that people will actually pay money (some money at least) for music that they can remix at home and change the instrumentation, vocals, levels, and so other parameters. Something like you can do now with General MIDI files and classical music instrument synthesizers.
Let's EAT the children of the managers of companies that advertise using spam!
I've read that Hitler's favorite movie was 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. He had a deep 19th century sentimental affection for Disney kitsch.
I just can't see the Nazis taking a liking for 'Metropolis', expecially since they hated the director Fritz Lang. They arrested him after the release of "M" because they thought its second title ("The Murderer Amoungst Us") was a reference to their politcal thuggery. Lang moved to the US after being released and made many great Hollywood pictures.
Nor can I see Hitler actually thinking 'King Kong' was a great film. At the time the big monkey was seen as allusion to non-white peoples. Hitler, with his demonic psychotic focus on racial issues, would have picked up on that right away and it undoubtably made him uncomfortable.
No, I think it was 'Snow White'.
I'm afraid that you've caught me on this. I don't remember the source. I definitely remember reading it and being just stunned.
It very likely could have been Variety magazine within the past two months.
Of course, if this film actually does get made, the production may be reduced to realistic levels that can generate a profit. But in the present Hollywood climate, it doesn't seem likely.
I had dismissed the King Kong remake rumor as Hollywood vaporware until I saw the reference to it in the article that generated this Slashdot topic. Now it seems quite possibly true.
If so then I think that Hollywood in 2003 is in the same position that the Dot-Com industry was in 1998. Obsessed with bigger and bigger projects that in the light of day stand no real chance of ever being profitable. And having each success encourage a wilder grander more expensive project.
Sort of like a gambler doubling his bet on each successful roll of the dice.
Director Peter Jackson has been given $400 million US to remake the classic movie 'King Kong'. Excuse me, but this is insane...
The remake is being done on the strength of Mr. Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, which has sold (or will have sold in a few months time) over a billion dollars US in box office tickets after costing roughly $200 million to make and promote worldwide. Impressive, yes.
The Lord of the Rings is a dense multi-volume fully realized fantasy that has offered a rich complex story and hundreds of opportunities for using state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery to complement the plot into a strong, enveloping film fantasy.
But $400 million for King Kong?!? This is a flimsy plot about a giant ape who develops an obsession about a tiny blonde human woman pet. (Hollywood metaphor anyone?). Big monkey lives on a distant island; whites come; they capture him (somehow); they take him to New York, he flips out, smashes up some shti, climbs a building, and gets shot down. Duh, end of story.
How is this worth making into a $400 million movie? Or, rather, how is $400 million going to make a better movie than the original or the 1978 Jessica Lange remake? More computer graphic imagery? Of what? A big monkey smashing things in NYC? Didn't we see all that already in the remake of Godzilla? You remember that... The remake of Godzilla that cost $80 million and lost most of it because it was stupid and a completely unnecessary film? How are you going to cover a $400 million investment on a big monkey film?
I haven't seen the new Peter Jackson 'King Kong'. Hell, it hasn't even been made. In fact, the producers are wracking their pointed little heads trying to think of some new angle that will get 45 million people to pay $10 each just to cover the pre-production cost ($400 million film and $50 million in publicity).
But I just know it's a bomb. It's the 'Gigli' of Summer 2006. And it's going to take a studio or two down with it.
This isn't a troll, it's a tragedy...
Thank you kindly,
Why is it that only sex offenders are publicly displayed on a list? Why aren't murderers put on such a list?
In America a non-white person who spends his days dreaming up new ways to kill white people is a sick, weird, terrorist pervert who deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.
A white person who spends his days dreaming up new ways to kill non-white people is an important component of the Research & Development Team of a major defense contractor. He's a welcome asset to his community and a true All-American!
A lot of places play fast and loose with the term 'sex offender'. Most people assume that this term refers to people who have raped or committed a sexual act on a pre-pubescent child.
However many places consider any man who is gay and has been arrested on the anti-homosexual laws.
These conviction records are never erased or pardoned. So some guy who happened to be in a gay bar at a time when it was raided by the police 40 years ago is considered in the same class of 'sex offender' as an active pedophile.
Some places go even so far as to classify descrete 'public' uniration as a sex offence. Some guy taking a whizz at 1am behind a tree gets put into the same 'sex offender' category as the aformentioned pedophile. This conviction never goes away either. And God help you if your child has to go the bathroom right now and there are no public restrooms within miles.
Let's not forget all the 18 year old guys who get caught kissing their 17 year old sweethearts. They're convicted 'sex offenders' also.
-- the problem isn't a lack of regulation among game stores, or violent games, it's a total lack of parental responsibility.
I agree, it is the responsibility of parents to prepare their children for the real world. This includes instilling a basic sense of right and wrong.
There is also the current state of the technology where the game software is complex enough to show ultra-violence in emotionally effective ways but not advanced enough to convey the consequences that this violence inflicts on an individual. In other words, games now are able to induce an primal emotional thrill at killing an 'enemy', but are not advanced enough to induce the sense of loss, despair, and tragedy (or fear) that happens in a real battle situation by having a close teammate instantly killed.
One of the unintended side-effects of passing laws against the depiction of ultra-violence in interactive media is that the technology for the games is not allowed to develop to the point where the full emotional impact of combat can be imparted to the players.
Without these misguided laws, video games will eventually evolve to the point where they will become substitutes for the combat experience instead of tactical training tools for combat as they are currently being used (either openly or covertly).
Global economic integration is gradually making individual combat and warfare between nations an anacronism from past ages. But the subliminal conditioning resulting from thousands of years of human warfare (and the enormous stocks of 20th century advanced weaponry) continue to drive young men to compulsively seek out the combat experience in ways that are increasingly counter-productive to the global corporate new world order.
Deep, brutal, and complex interactive media violent video games will develop into the technological solution to this current dilemma.
and we'll be listening to completely digitally generated music on the FM dial.
Although it seems absurd now, this combination of AI digitally-generated music and poetry may be the key to breaking the stanglehold of the culture corporations (i.e. the RIAA).
The global culture corporations can't claim to own the copyright on a cultural experience that was not created by a person and they can't restrict the usage of computer algorythm-generated works of art or music nor their file exchange.
I think that this article begs the question as to why it is necessary to keep sending living biomass (i.e. human beings) into space.
Previous 20th-century arguments hold that despite the enormous cost and level of complications for keeping the biomass alive, the humans have the greatest ability to do useful work and respond creatively to unusual and unexpected situations. But certainly now the advanced robots can do everything, kilogram for kilogram, that the humans can do at much less cost (not to mention pseudo-'heartfelt output of emotion at the tragedy') when the biomass ceases living due to any one of the thousands of things that can and will go wrong in such a hostile environment.
Why should we consider these people 'heroes' for doing such pointless things like transporting their bodies into space at such enormous cost and dubious achievement? Heroes are the people like the team that recently got the cost of a watt of solar electricity reduced by an order of magnitude. Heroes are people who things that are extraordinary, inspiring, and, above all, useful.
Spending billions of dollars to launch a crew-cut poster boy (American, Chinese, or Russian, doesn't matter, it's the same guy) into space when a monkey or robot would do just as well does not generate 'heroes'. It's just PR for bloated defense contractors (American, Chinese, or Russian).
Please don't give this nonsense about the 'science' that is being conducted in space. There is no science in space, there's nothing in space.
All you space geeks should just spend more time in Hollywood learning how to make movies that will satisfy your obsession with this topic and stop wasting so many billions of tax dollars that are needed now for so many more important things.
Thank you,
My worries are when XYZ Corp creates the super ultra neat-o game and puts it out and the overall reputation and respect for gaming softare is so low that nobody will buy it...Will XYZ Corp go out of business?
Perhaps the execs at XYZ should consider an alternative to spending tons of money on the development of "Neat-O" as a sealed product.
Instead, they could:
- Develop a detailed plan-pilot-concept of how "Neat-O" should look and play.
- Sell ten or so "Neat-O" original developer subscriptions to developers for different sections of the game. These developers coordinate the algorythm, plot, and code development of the game.
- The game is released on low-cost CD's ($3-5 each) in its primitive form along with its source code.
- People playing the game develop suggestions and alternatives to the basic game on the CD. These improvements are uploaded to the XYZ website. XYZ charges $1 a year to access uploads received within the last two weeks and allows older uploads to be downloaded freely.
- "Neat-O" develops hundreds of levels and secret rooms. Subscribers to the XYZ Neat-O website reach over 200,000 worldwide. Revenues from the $1 a year subscription are split half to XYZ corp and half to the original ten developers or people who have bought one of the ten original developer subscription registrations.
This is one of many alteratives to business models that encourage 'piracy' by treating intellectual and cultural experiences as a product that can be marketed like a bar of soap.