One thing Clive should have done after creating that hard-drive-formatting virus on Mario's computer was to double-click it to see what would happen. Other great learning experiences: drop Mario's computer out the window to see what would happen. Slam Mario's monitor down on top of his head and see if he can still type. I would love to try those things, because I'm smart and bored.
In the short term, this radar thing could reduce accidents. In the long term, making human-driven cars more expensive will decrease the cost difference of the fully robotic cars of the future.
Great progress has been made in car safety over the past 50 years, maintaining a pretty constant death rate of 50,000/year in the US despite a huge increase in number of miles driven. But this death tool is still way too high. My hope is for fully robotic cars. No tempers, no egos, just punch in your destination and talk on your cell phone until you get there.
The other artist says, "You're famous? Cool! Then you must be playing bigger gigs for lots more money these days. So why can't you pay your rent?"
Musicians make a living by performing, not by selling records. Recording contracts take all the expenses of production, advertising, manufacturing, shipping, etc, etc, etc, out of the musician's share, usually leaving zero. What musicians get out of record sales is Exposure, which gets them better gigs so they can make more money performing. That's the way it's been for the past century.
Record companies and a few toady artists have been highly successful in convincing the public that copyright infringement hurts musicians. It doesn't. They get the same exposure whether you listen to them on the radio, or a CD you bought, or your friend's CD which you didn't pay for, or a downloaded copy you didn't pay for. It's all the same to the musician. The difference between paying and not paying only affects record companies.
Getting exposure by distributing free online instead of by selling recordings not only cuts out the middleman, it makes copy-policing and all its headaches and side-effects unnecessary.
The way to fight the RIAA is to destroy the whole notion of buying copies of music. Simply putting music online and letting it generate the fame that selling CDs does is the way to fight the RIAA. More importantly, throwing off the pay-per-copy notion is the only way to stop our downward spiral toward a world where the electronics we buy and the things we do with them are closely watched and tightly policed.
These guys must be going for their Advanced Circumlocution degree. After the usual introductory review of existing solutions that don't work, they dive directly into graphs proving how their system will increase everyone's well-being. I gave up halfway through. Could somebody briefly sum up the mechanics of their solution -- what exactly are they proposing that the sender and receiver (and the third party) do? Maybe it was so obvious that I just missed it.
Selfishness and going way the fuck overboard with generosity are not the only two options here.
Throwing a party for your building: $500 Equipping it for game-playing, with hardware that will be okay for maybe a year and a half and then seem so slow it sucks: $7000 Telling other people how to spend money when you don't have any: PRICELESS
You should buy $7000 worth of a stock index mutual fund and add $2000 every year. Assuming you are about 20 now, by the time you are 45 you will have over a million dollars.
An index fund invests in all or most of the stocks in the entire stock market, which has averaged a 17% annual gain since 1920.
Instead of playing philanthropist to your gaming buddies, take care of yourself. Most of them are going to forget you exist in a few years. I'm going to turn 50 this summer, and if somebody had given me this advice when I was in college I'd be home in my backyard right now, instead of sitting at this desk looking over my shoulder to be sure my boss doesn't catch me posting on Slashdot.
I can just hear my dad saying, when I vented my teenage gripes about our government, "If you don't like it here why don't you go live in Russia?"
I never wanted to live in Russia. I just wanted America to be the place it's supposed to be. I want American freedom to mean more than the freedom to continue shopping while our trusted leaders take care of everything.
Okay, that's it for me. After years of using MSIE, I am downloading the Mozilla installer as I type this, and hopefully will be disabling IE this evening. Enough is enough.
Just a petty gripe, go ahead and mod off-topic, but is there really a hotspot "industry?" A few days ago in an article featured here a guy selling virtual MUD objects was claiming to be the world leader in the "game enhancement industry." Give me a freakin break. A niche business isn't an industry.
There. I feel better now./takes deep breath, drinks more caffeine.
To: Agent Smartberry From: John Smallberries Subj: Project Strangeberry
Received status report from Agent Hackberry regarding distribution of brain control devices for Earth computers. Components will be disguised as high-speed data storage units and installed by unsuspecting users. Agent Smithberry assures shipment of Interociter tubes from Squalis Prime by stardate 4337.82. Please forward to John Bigbootay and destroy in the usual manner.
Interesting points. Record companies promote musicians in order to sell more records, not to ensure that the musician has a steady concert income. It would be nice to have a music industry with artist promotion as its actual goal rather than a useful side effect.
I don't see why this couldn't happen. For many centuries, art galleries have promoted painters, sculptors and other artists without signing them into long term contracts or demanding the rights to the artists' future works. If you show a painting at a gallery in New York, you are free to show it again in Denver. Same goes for concert promoters. If you play a gig in Detroit, the promoter doesn't demand a piece of your income for the rest of your life.
As for the need for better artist management, yeah, I think people in many walks of life would benefit from better management. Credit companies shouldn't hand out credit on a silver platter and shame people into buying more than they can afford so they don't feel inferior to their neighbors. But in the world we live in, people are supposed to learn how to intelligently look after their own affairs. This holds true whether you play in a band, work at McDonalds or write software. Or all three. I don't think musicians have are more needy than anybody else in that regard.
On the surface, giving musicians a bigger piece of the huge pie that record companies have been gobbling up for so long sounds like a noble idea. But musicians have had a whole century to get together and do something about their relationships with record companies. How do they deserve somebody riding in on a white horse and handing them an income stream that technology has rendered obsolete? If trading copies of songs costs almost nothing and takes almost no effort, why should anybody continue to make money from it? After all, people in almost every other occupation make money only by performing "live" at their workplace, not from royalties on anything they produce. As a programmer, it's always been that way for me.
If the move to free distribution succeeds, it will mean more than just free downloads for people who have Internet access. It will mean legitimizing bootleg recordings as well. The concept is to eliminate selling music one copy at a time, and instead charge for live performances and let recordings circulate freely. The benefit to society, aside from the free music, would be freedom from the growing web of rules and technology dedicated to policing who has copies of what, and the unintended side effects of all that enforcement structure.
Gabriel said he could not understand big music stars that advocated free music downloads while accepting big cheques from record companies at the same time. After all, most artists depended on record sales for up to 60% of their income, he said.
On the other hand...
Apart from being a successful musician, running his own record studio and the Real World record label, he is also active in the field of digital downloading.
So Gabriel can't understand other musicians doing the same thing he does? Mmmm-okay. I also don't know where he gets the idea that most artists get 60% of their income from record sales. Maybe a business-savvy few like himself and Madonna have recording contracts that don't eat up their royalties with expenses.
My issue is with this statement:
In the age of digital downloads musicians and the music industry have had to find a way of giving consumers what they want while securing revenue streams.
NO THEY DON'T have to secure their revenue streams. It would be perfectly fine if our culture changed so that musicians treated downloads as free advertising, rather than try to perpetuate the record company business model of getting money for each copy. We don't need the copy police and all the technical and legal restrictions being imposed on us for the benefit of a business model, no matter who is making the money.
There's a difference between truly eradicating SPAM and merely providing a means for some people to buy their way out of it. It's like the difference between making airlines secure and giving some passengers fast-track security passes.
Simply sending a message to the owner of the card doesn't qualify as an invasion of privacy in my book. It would be a violation of privacy had these stores sent people's address information to a third party, but they didn't do that. Privacy means, "Keep my information confidential." It doesn't mean, "Never contact me."
Speaking of crime, what about a home RFID scanner to prevent thefts? You and your family members get tagged. Anything you want to protect, you tag and scan into the system. Alarms go off when a tagged item leaves the house, unless a family member's tag leaves at the same time. Could this work?
Amazon.com isn't a public utility. If they want to help candidates raise money, they can include or exclude whichever ones they want. For that matter, so can you or I on our own sites.
On the other hand, disguising money as freedom of speech is pretty much what has turned American democracy into a bribery-fueled special-interest feeding trough.
I haven't been following the RFID debate but I know there's been one. The article briefly mentions that opponents fear RFID tags threaten privacy. I don't get how the way the store tags its merchandise threatens anybody's privacy. If you pay cash then there's nothing to tie an item to you, whether it's RFID-tagged or not. And if you use credit, how is anybody going to learn anything more from RFID-tagged items than they could learn right now from a store's credit transaction records?
Thumbs down to MSNBC for spooning up a dripping dose of Verisign PR. Thumbs up to consultant Christopher Ambler for getting them to print "rat's ass."
"From our perspective, I think that clearly we are the leader in that particular area..." says Ken Silva... He believes that none of the other root server operators can match VeriSign's investment. etc, etc, etc. Abruptly he pulls his hand away, like a small child sensing the heat radiating from a stove burner. "Can you pull that door closed? I didn't hear it click," How many times did he rehearse that bit of security-is-our-middle-name theatrics?
"Mr. Sontag, this is all really just a load of crap, right?"
"What's the lowest price you can give me on this car?"
"Are you employed by any law enforcement organization?"
"Are those real?"
"Do you solemnly swear to defend and protect the constitution of the United States of America, and to execute the duties of the office of the Presidency to the best of your ability, so help you God?"
Slashdot Mirror
One thing Clive should have done after creating that hard-drive-formatting virus on Mario's computer was to double-click it to see what would happen. Other great learning experiences: drop Mario's computer out the window to see what would happen. Slam Mario's monitor down on top of his head and see if he can still type. I would love to try those things, because I'm smart and bored.
Hey Mario, can I come over?
Sure, astronaut, deep sea submersibles, yeah, yeah. But they left out bikini team oiler.
In the short term, this radar thing could reduce accidents. In the long term, making human-driven cars more expensive will decrease the cost difference of the fully robotic cars of the future.
Great progress has been made in car safety over the past 50 years, maintaining a pretty constant death rate of 50,000/year in the US despite a huge increase in number of miles driven. But this death tool is still way too high. My hope is for fully robotic cars. No tempers, no egos, just punch in your destination and talk on your cell phone until you get there.
The other artist says, "You're famous? Cool! Then you must be playing bigger gigs for lots more money these days. So why can't you pay your rent?"
Musicians make a living by performing, not by selling records. Recording contracts take all the expenses of production, advertising, manufacturing, shipping, etc, etc, etc, out of the musician's share, usually leaving zero. What musicians get out of record sales is Exposure, which gets them better gigs so they can make more money performing. That's the way it's been for the past century.
Record companies and a few toady artists have been highly successful in convincing the public that copyright infringement hurts musicians. It doesn't. They get the same exposure whether you listen to them on the radio, or a CD you bought, or your friend's CD which you didn't pay for, or a downloaded copy you didn't pay for. It's all the same to the musician. The difference between paying and not paying only affects record companies.
Getting exposure by distributing free online instead of by selling recordings not only cuts out the middleman, it makes copy-policing and all its headaches and side-effects unnecessary.
The way to fight the RIAA is to destroy the whole notion of buying copies of music. Simply putting music online and letting it generate the fame that selling CDs does is the way to fight the RIAA. More importantly, throwing off the pay-per-copy notion is the only way to stop our downward spiral toward a world where the electronics we buy and the things we do with them are closely watched and tightly policed.
These guys must be going for their Advanced Circumlocution degree. After the usual introductory review of existing solutions that don't work, they dive directly into graphs proving how their system will increase everyone's well-being. I gave up halfway through. Could somebody briefly sum up the mechanics of their solution -- what exactly are they proposing that the sender and receiver (and the third party) do? Maybe it was so obvious that I just missed it.
Selfishness and going way the fuck overboard with generosity are not the only two options here.
Throwing a party for your building: $500
Equipping it for game-playing, with hardware that will be okay for maybe a year and a half and then seem so slow it sucks: $7000
Telling other people how to spend money when you don't have any: PRICELESS
You should buy $7000 worth of a stock index mutual fund and add $2000 every year. Assuming you are about 20 now, by the time you are 45 you will have over a million dollars.
An index fund invests in all or most of the stocks in the entire stock market, which has averaged a 17% annual gain since 1920.
Instead of playing philanthropist to your gaming buddies, take care of yourself. Most of them are going to forget you exist in a few years. I'm going to turn 50 this summer, and if somebody had given me this advice when I was in college I'd be home in my backyard right now, instead of sitting at this desk looking over my shoulder to be sure my boss doesn't catch me posting on Slashdot.
I can just hear my dad saying, when I vented my teenage gripes about our government, "If you don't like it here why don't you go live in Russia?"
I never wanted to live in Russia. I just wanted America to be the place it's supposed to be. I want American freedom to mean more than the freedom to continue shopping while our trusted leaders take care of everything.
in the days when they didn't carry guns.
Stop, or I'll yell, "Stop" again!
Okay, that's it for me. After years of using MSIE, I am downloading the Mozilla installer as I type this, and hopefully will be disabling IE this evening. Enough is enough.
Given how disappointing episodes I and II (and I'm guessing III) were, Episode IV's title turned out to be prophetic.
Just a petty gripe, go ahead and mod off-topic, but is there really a hotspot "industry?" A few days ago in an article featured here a guy selling virtual MUD objects was claiming to be the world leader in the "game enhancement industry." Give me a freakin break. A niche business isn't an industry.
/takes deep breath, drinks more caffeine.
There. I feel better now.
Alternate translation:
To: Agent Smartberry
From: John Smallberries
Subj: Project Strangeberry
Received status report from Agent Hackberry regarding distribution of brain control devices for Earth computers. Components will be disguised as high-speed data storage units and installed by unsuspecting users. Agent Smithberry assures shipment of Interociter tubes from Squalis Prime by stardate 4337.82. Please forward to John Bigbootay and destroy in the usual manner.
Probably already been posted, but I wonder how these guys are managing to survive.
Interesting points. Record companies promote musicians in order to sell more records, not to ensure that the musician has a steady concert income. It would be nice to have a music industry with artist promotion as its actual goal rather than a useful side effect.
I don't see why this couldn't happen. For many centuries, art galleries have promoted painters, sculptors and other artists without signing them into long term contracts or demanding the rights to the artists' future works. If you show a painting at a gallery in New York, you are free to show it again in Denver. Same goes for concert promoters. If you play a gig in Detroit, the promoter doesn't demand a piece of your income for the rest of your life.
As for the need for better artist management, yeah, I think people in many walks of life would benefit from better management. Credit companies shouldn't hand out credit on a silver platter and shame people into buying more than they can afford so they don't feel inferior to their neighbors. But in the world we live in, people are supposed to learn how to intelligently look after their own affairs. This holds true whether you play in a band, work at McDonalds or write software. Or all three. I don't think musicians have are more needy than anybody else in that regard.
On the surface, giving musicians a bigger piece of the huge pie that record companies have been gobbling up for so long sounds like a noble idea. But musicians have had a whole century to get together and do something about their relationships with record companies. How do they deserve somebody riding in on a white horse and handing them an income stream that technology has rendered obsolete? If trading copies of songs costs almost nothing and takes almost no effort, why should anybody continue to make money from it? After all, people in almost every other occupation make money only by performing "live" at their workplace, not from royalties on anything they produce. As a programmer, it's always been that way for me.
If the move to free distribution succeeds, it will mean more than just free downloads for people who have Internet access. It will mean legitimizing bootleg recordings as well. The concept is to eliminate selling music one copy at a time, and instead charge for live performances and let recordings circulate freely. The benefit to society, aside from the free music, would be freedom from the growing web of rules and technology dedicated to policing who has copies of what, and the unintended side effects of all that enforcement structure.
Gabriel said he could not understand big music stars that advocated free music downloads while accepting big cheques from record companies at the same time.
After all, most artists depended on record sales for up to 60% of their income, he said.
On the other hand...
Apart from being a successful musician, running his own record studio and the Real World record label, he is also active in the field of digital downloading.
So Gabriel can't understand other musicians doing the same thing he does? Mmmm-okay. I also don't know where he gets the idea that most artists get 60% of their income from record sales. Maybe a business-savvy few like himself and Madonna have recording contracts that don't eat up their royalties with expenses.
My issue is with this statement:
In the age of digital downloads musicians and the music industry have had to find a way of giving consumers what they want while securing revenue streams.
NO THEY DON'T have to secure their revenue streams. It would be perfectly fine if our culture changed so that musicians treated downloads as free advertising, rather than try to perpetuate the record company business model of getting money for each copy. We don't need the copy police and all the technical and legal restrictions being imposed on us for the benefit of a business model, no matter who is making the money.
There's a difference between truly eradicating SPAM and merely providing a means for some people to buy their way out of it. It's like the difference between making airlines secure and giving some passengers fast-track security passes.
Simply sending a message to the owner of the card doesn't qualify as an invasion of privacy in my book. It would be a violation of privacy had these stores sent people's address information to a third party, but they didn't do that. Privacy means, "Keep my information confidential." It doesn't mean, "Never contact me."
Speaking of crime, what about a home RFID scanner to prevent thefts? You and your family members get tagged. Anything you want to protect, you tag and scan into the system. Alarms go off when a tagged item leaves the house, unless a family member's tag leaves at the same time. Could this work?
Amazon.com isn't a public utility. If they want to help candidates raise money, they can include or exclude whichever ones they want. For that matter, so can you or I on our own sites.
On the other hand, disguising money as freedom of speech is pretty much what has turned American democracy into a bribery-fueled special-interest feeding trough.
I haven't been following the RFID debate but I know there's been one. The article briefly mentions that opponents fear RFID tags threaten privacy. I don't get how the way the store tags its merchandise threatens anybody's privacy. If you pay cash then there's nothing to tie an item to you, whether it's RFID-tagged or not. And if you use credit, how is anybody going to learn anything more from RFID-tagged items than they could learn right now from a store's credit transaction records?
Thumbs down to MSNBC for spooning up a dripping dose of Verisign PR.
Thumbs up to consultant Christopher Ambler for getting them to print "rat's ass."
"From our perspective, I think that clearly we are the leader in that particular area..." says Ken Silva... He believes that none of the other root server operators can match VeriSign's investment. etc, etc, etc. Abruptly he pulls his hand away, like a small child sensing the heat radiating from a stove burner. "Can you pull that door closed? I didn't hear it click," How many times did he rehearse that bit of security-is-our-middle-name theatrics?
"Honey, do you still love me?"
"Mr. Sontag, this is all really just a load of crap, right?"
"What's the lowest price you can give me on this car?"
"Are you employed by any law enforcement organization?"
"Are those real?"
"Do you solemnly swear to defend and protect the constitution of the United States of America, and to execute the duties of the office of the Presidency to the best of your ability, so help you God?"
I find it hard to take sides on this. A coat of slime with a coat of slime on it is still just... slime.