I suppose that was my point - it's not that they are nominating themselves, rather they are nominating their friends... or did all the other science fiction authors writing last year suck?
Why no nomination of Dan Simmons, Wen Spencer, Jane Lindskold? What about John Ringo or David Drake, both who released novels last year... but don't publish in those magazines?
I'll come right out with it... I think this list is a lovefest of likeminded writers, some (or all, I haven't read all of them) may be good (perhaps even great) but who consistently chose people they knew.
This recommended reading list, published in Locus Magazine's February 2004 issue, is a consensus by Locus editors and reviewers -- Charles N. Brown, Gary K. Wolfe, Jonathan Strahan, Faren Miller, Russell Letson, Nick Gevers, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Karen Haber, and Rich Horton -- and other professionals, including Gardner Dozois, David G. Hartwell, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, and others.
It seemed to me that a lot of those named above turn out to have works on the list... coincidence?
It warms my heart to know that artists will be getting all the money that's due to them. Musicians always look so poor when I see them on television. Finally, they can afford the lifestyle they deserve.
Maybe the musicians that I know, the ones who never get on TV, can finally afford the lifestyle they deserve. One good thing the **IA campaigns have done is that they skylined the royalties issue - my friends tell me that royalties are coming through much faster these days.
Yep, study after study agrees with you, most potential voters just don't care enough to vote. OTOH, since nobody is making them stay home, it IS their fault. If you've got a bad situation and choose to do nothing about it then your unhappiness is your fault. Who dares, wins, right?
But then you throw in the "stolen election" comment. Since you've ignored all the stories of the actual vote counts giving the election to GW anyway, let me address only the following:
We also saw a president get into office even though most in the country voted for the "other guy" (if you remember, Gore had the popular vote, but not the electoral vote).
Go back and look at the counts - most in the country didn't vote at all (apathy striking early, was it?). Among those who did vote, the numbers were split into the 100ths of a percentage, with NEITHER GW nor Algore getting a majority! Yes, Al got the "popular vote," meaning a few voters chose him over GW, but the law says the Electoral College makes the final choice.
There were plenty of shenanigans in that election - Florida's crappy job "cleaning the poll lists" which kept criminals on them while dropping legitimate voters, Indiana's keeping open the polls in the urban & Democratic city districts while closing the rural & Republican sites while voters were still in line, etc, etc, etc. Get out there and make a difference, and stop crying over yesterday, or you're as responsible for the apathy as anybody.
When did "I want" become "they need"?
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
Pardon the rephrase, but "... we want our music now and in digital format" and "That is exactly why record companies need top come up with a way" isn't much excuse for copyright infringement, much less the out-and-out stealing of music.
No other medium allows for exact digital copies, so true to the original that most users NEVER REPLACE THEM WITH ORIGINALS. Sure, everybody has stories about buying albums they would not have before hearing them as.mp3s, but the dirty little secret of the file-"sharers" is that damn near nobody buys most (much less all) of the albums they copy.
Music may be inexpensive to duplicate, and Napster & its ilk make it darn near free to do so, but it costs money to make. And sell. And ship. And store. And you buying two albums to get one album of songs you want is what pays for those things. There's an awful lot of crap music out there, and it costs just as much to make as the stuff you like, and until it's out there nobody knows if it's crap or gold. THAT is the basis for the music industry, the balancing of risk - charging enough for the bestsellers to pay the costs on the no-hit wonders. Of course the price for GREATEST_CD_EVER is too high, you are also supporting the work of GONNA_BE_A GOOD_BAND_SOMEDAY_MAYBE.
I don't think it's a very good system, I don't think it's a very efficient system, and I'd love to see another system replace it. But taking the money out of the system via Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa/whatever means there won't be any money to fix it, and telling the industry they're a bunch of fscking thieves isn't much incentive for them to help you out by creating a new system. You want things to change - what are you willing to do differently that DOESN'T take away their livelihood?
If your entire defense is gonna be "oh, I'm only breaking the law a little..." maybe you might just want to keep it to yourself.
What I would give for some mod points - I bow in humble appreciation, reallocate.
I can testify to that!
on
Ant Farm PC
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I lost a power supply 6 years ago when a migrating column of "sugar ants"* wandered up the power cable and into my non-l33t Compaq PC. I had just got a then-new Roadrunner cable modem, so the system was on 24/7, apparently generating a tasty vibe.
I returned home that evening and noticed the screen was doing an unusual flickering. When I snapped on the lights, I found the system crawling with bugs like... well, you know. I took it outside, pulling out all the components and dusting them off with my trusty Spray-Air, but it was too late.
The next day I opened the power supply and found
about 25 traces of crispy ants neatly bridging the traces on the board inside, as well as 100 or so crispy but unattached.
The most annoying part was finding another half-sized Compaq power supply to fit the half-sized space in the full-sized tower case. (RANT)What the heck is wrong with Compaq's designers, anyway? Every case & component in their PC line seems to be curved or an odd size...(/RANT)
I was worried they'd come back, since the house had only jalousie (yeah, and lousy they were, too) windows, which couldn't be shut tight enough to keep out flies much less smaller-than-average-ants, but they never came back.
*These "sugar ants" were brown in color, a bit smaller than the average black mound-building ant and a LOT smaller that the "Texas Red-Devil" fire ants I hope never to see again... They had no interest in anything in the house, including the kitchen trash and even sugar spilled on the counter, but the sweet sweet smell of the transformer sure pulled them in!
Yes, it is, that's why the poster you quoted lost respect for Opera: THEY modified the content of msn.com. Microsoft provided a specific CSS, to reformat pages displayed by Opera, because the Opera code had a bug that made pages display differently. Microsoft's mistake was to send that CSS to all versions of the Opera browser, including those where the code error had been fixed.
End result: Microsoft gets blamed and harrassed by Opera for fixing a bug created by Opera, and/bots everywhere rejoice. Harrumpf!
Add me to the list of those thinking the less of Opera tonight.
So auto-workers should be our example, eh? Perhaps you can tell the class how the UAW and AFL-CIO kept all those cushy auto-worker jobs in the US... oh yeah, those were the first to move overseas in search of cheap labor.
Union commoditize the worker, in theory offering the employer a certified product. Unfortunately, the market only wants workers who are good enough, not those who are great but cost more to hire & keep, so the union product (local labor, that's you and me, kids!) is steadily priced out of existence.
I'm sorry, but your theorical model of a union is just that, theory. IRL, every single union I've ever had to deal with OR BE PART OF has been the "business union" type.
In fact, unions have become businesses in themselves, creating positions of wealth and power for a select few and absorbing the wealth of their members to do so.
Where's the chance to "make decisons democratically" or determine fees "by the membership" when there are 10,000 union members, scattered across the state, or worse, country? Union bosses pretty quickly squash any attempt to set local standards, instead each local union ends up playing by the rules established by the "Higher-ups".
What a joke, indeed.
Re:He talks about the 'dogma of nostalga'
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 1
my post was aimed at... the/.ers who have actually *moved out* of their parent's basement.;)
Well, if you meant me, and CowboyNeal, why didn't ya just say so?
Your analogies founder on one simple point: Electronic copies (mp3's, ogg, etc) of music are just as valuable as the physical media versions (CDs) while electronic (or any other method) copies of books are demonstrably less valuable than their physical equivalents. That is, if you download an mp3 (or ripped it yourself) to play on your cute new RioPlayer, you probably kept the copy even after buying the CD. If you had copied a book, though, and then bought a copy, you would have dumped the copy that very day.
Re:This is where a tablet pc would be nice
on
War of Honor
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· Score: 1
They're all reader applications - Microsoft Reader is, well, you know, Mobipocket is a rweally nice reader for all PDAs running Palm or WinCE software, and REB1100 is Rocket's EBook format. The first two are platform independent, while the third is desogned for EBook devices.
I have a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and I've been using Mobipocket since I downloaded it off the Baen site. Sure comes in handy during mandatory meetings!
I'm pretty sure "Joe OfficeSuite" doesn't spend much time producing documents in more than one format, so where's the benefit?
Complaining about the process, not the outcome ...
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You don't trust the current politicians.
You don't trust any new ones.
You don't trust the Electoral College. (No, you don't understand OR trust the Electoral College.)
And you don't have any ideas about a better way of doing things.
But you ARE willing to critique the system? My, how sporting of you. Here's the skinny, Erik, politics is work. It's the business of getting things done that are too big for any one person to do, the job of making the least-objectionable or least-hazardous decision about things that will affect us all. That job will continue to be done, despite your boycott, because it has to be.
Go ahead and complain, if that's all you've got. Just don't expect any sympathy from those willing to make the effort.
No, he was making such statements BEFORE he heard the witnesses. And to members of the press, who he swore to secrecy. WTF?! He chose to violate the Judicial Canons and yet tried to hold others to those standards!
Yes, I believe I'll call that 'biased'. And 'hypocritical'. And 'immature". Which are the things he was accusing Billy G. of being, only nobody was allowed to know that he had already made up his mind.
I also agree with many of the points you two have been making at each other regarding Free/Open Software, but I've gotta call you on this one:
... numerous Hollywood personalities blacklisted during the MacCarthy
debacle...
As somebody interested in real-world espionage and "security services" I must direct your attention to this book, which provides some interesting proof that many of those charged by MacCarthy WERE actually working for the Soviets. I don't think for a minute that MacCarthy was a nice guy, or even right in the way he went after these folks, but he appears to have been correct quite a number of times...
I try to avoid "me too!" posts, but that's a really great point I hadn't heard before:
Perhaps piracy contributes to the lack of
competitors in a market - this might be its most
severe impact.
This may be exactly why there aren't any good mid-range Office suites. With MS Office on the expensive end of the spectrum, and Star/Open Office on the cheap end, and pirates providing MSO at S/OO prices, who can afford to build a competative product?
Just curious, since I don't do P2P - How much non-theft^H^H^H^H^Hmusic related file sharing do you do? How does this work better than other ways of distributing the data?
Sorry for the late posting, I was out of town. I'm replying on/. (rather than directly to you) in a similar vein of meta-moderation.
Yes, much of my post was redundant, for the very simple reason that/. is not and will never be the right place to get legal advice. Maybe it could be a starting point, as you say in another message, but that's one man's opinion. What about all the bad advice, such as the posters who earnestly suggested the Labour Relations Board? The answer really is Get A Lawyer, isn't it?
The real 'advice' in my posting was simple, though perhaps phrased poorly: If you want somebody's help on a complex issue, you have to give them the facts. You have a document you feel may be unfair and ask my opinion, then you better let me see it!
IAAA (I am an American) and I have had the dubious pleasure of dealing with the law, and in every case (no pun intended) things worked out better if I talked to or was represented by a lawyer. Most times it cost me exactly nothing, because many lawyers let you have the first office visit free. At my current job, legal service is an employee benefit! I know that's rather uncommon, but the potential cost of legal advice should never keep you from getting competant help, when you really need it.
I cannot "close my eyes and scroll by", not when the answer IS so simple. Perhaps the real question should be "Why does/. keep posting these stories?" Or better yet, "Has anyone benefitted from legal advice gleaned from/.?" That's an article I'd like to see!
Slashdot Mirror
Why no nomination of Dan Simmons, Wen Spencer, Jane Lindskold? What about John Ringo or David Drake, both who released novels last year ... but don't publish in those magazines?
I'll come right out with it ... I think this list is a lovefest of likeminded writers, some (or all, I haven't read all of them) may be good (perhaps even great) but who consistently chose people they knew.
Quick, somebody say somethinhg!
But then you throw in the "stolen election" comment. Since you've ignored all the stories of the actual vote counts giving the election to GW anyway, let me address only the following:
Go back and look at the counts - most in the country didn't vote at all (apathy striking early, was it?). Among those who did vote, the numbers were split into the 100ths of a percentage, with NEITHER GW nor Algore getting a majority! Yes, Al got the "popular vote," meaning a few voters chose him over GW, but the law says the Electoral College makes the final choice.There were plenty of shenanigans in that election - Florida's crappy job "cleaning the poll lists" which kept criminals on them while dropping legitimate voters, Indiana's keeping open the polls in the urban & Democratic city districts while closing the rural & Republican sites while voters were still in line, etc, etc, etc. Get out there and make a difference, and stop crying over yesterday, or you're as responsible for the apathy as anybody.
No other medium allows for exact digital copies, so true to the original that most users NEVER REPLACE THEM WITH ORIGINALS. Sure, everybody has stories about buying albums they would not have before hearing them as .mp3s, but the dirty little secret of the file-"sharers" is that damn near nobody buys most (much less all) of the albums they copy.
Music may be inexpensive to duplicate, and Napster & its ilk make it darn near free to do so, but it costs money to make. And sell. And ship. And store. And you buying two albums to get one album of songs you want is what pays for those things. There's an awful lot of crap music out there, and it costs just as much to make as the stuff you like, and until it's out there nobody knows if it's crap or gold. THAT is the basis for the music industry, the balancing of risk - charging enough for the bestsellers to pay the costs on the no-hit wonders. Of course the price for GREATEST_CD_EVER is too high, you are also supporting the work of GONNA_BE_A GOOD_BAND_SOMEDAY_MAYBE.
I don't think it's a very good system, I don't think it's a very efficient system, and I'd love to see another system replace it. But taking the money out of the system via Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa/whatever means there won't be any money to fix it, and telling the industry they're a bunch of fscking thieves isn't much incentive for them to help you out by creating a new system. You want things to change - what are you willing to do differently that DOESN'T take away their livelihood?
If your entire defense is gonna be "oh, I'm only breaking the law a little ..." maybe you might just want to keep it to yourself.
I returned home that evening and noticed the screen was doing an unusual flickering. When I snapped on the lights, I found the system crawling with bugs like ... well, you know. I took it outside, pulling out all the components and dusting them off with my trusty Spray-Air, but it was too late.
The next day I opened the power supply and found about 25 traces of crispy ants neatly bridging the traces on the board inside, as well as 100 or so crispy but unattached.
The most annoying part was finding another half-sized Compaq power supply to fit the half-sized space in the full-sized tower case. (RANT)What the heck is wrong with Compaq's designers, anyway? Every case & component in their PC line seems to be curved or an odd size ...(/RANT)
I was worried they'd come back, since the house had only jalousie (yeah, and lousy they were, too) windows, which couldn't be shut tight enough to keep out flies much less smaller-than-average-ants, but they never came back.
*These "sugar ants" were brown in color, a bit smaller than the average black mound-building ant and a LOT smaller that the "Texas Red-Devil" fire ants I hope never to see again ... They had no interest in anything in the house, including the kitchen trash and even sugar spilled on the counter, but the sweet sweet smell of the transformer sure pulled them in!
End result: Microsoft gets blamed and harrassed by Opera for fixing a bug created by Opera, and /bots everywhere rejoice. Harrumpf!
Add me to the list of those thinking the less of Opera tonight.
Union commoditize the worker, in theory offering the employer a certified product. Unfortunately, the market only wants workers who are good enough, not those who are great but cost more to hire & keep, so the union product (local labor, that's you and me, kids!) is steadily priced out of existence.
In fact, unions have become businesses in themselves, creating positions of wealth and power for a select few and absorbing the wealth of their members to do so.
Where's the chance to "make decisons democratically" or determine fees "by the membership" when there are 10,000 union members, scattered across the state, or worse, country? Union bosses pretty quickly squash any attempt to set local standards, instead each local union ends up playing by the rules established by the "Higher-ups".
What a joke, indeed.
I have a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and I've been using Mobipocket since I downloaded it off the Baen site. Sure comes in handy during mandatory meetings!
You don't trust any new ones.
You don't trust the Electoral College. (No, you don't understand OR trust the Electoral College.)
And you don't have any ideas about a better way of doing things.
But you ARE willing to critique the system? My, how sporting of you. Here's the skinny, Erik, politics is work. It's the business of getting things done that are too big for any one person to do, the job of making the least-objectionable or least-hazardous decision about things that will affect us all. That job will continue to be done, despite your boycott, because it has to be.
Go ahead and complain, if that's all you've got. Just don't expect any sympathy from those willing to make the effort.
Yes, I believe I'll call that 'biased'. And 'hypocritical'. And 'immature". Which are the things he was accusing Billy G. of being, only nobody was allowed to know that he had already made up his mind.
Yes, much of my post was redundant, for the very simple reason that /. is not and will never be the right place to get legal advice. Maybe it could be a starting point, as you say in another message, but that's one man's opinion. What about all the bad advice, such as the posters who earnestly suggested the Labour Relations Board? The answer really is Get A Lawyer, isn't it?
The real 'advice' in my posting was simple, though perhaps phrased poorly: If you want somebody's help on a complex issue, you have to give them the facts. You have a document you feel may be unfair and ask my opinion, then you better let me see it!
IAAA (I am an American) and I have had the dubious pleasure of dealing with the law, and in every case (no pun intended) things worked out better if I talked to or was represented by a lawyer. Most times it cost me exactly nothing, because many lawyers let you have the first office visit free. At my current job, legal service is an employee benefit! I know that's rather uncommon, but the potential cost of legal advice should never keep you from getting competant help, when you really need it.
I cannot "close my eyes and scroll by", not when the answer IS so simple. Perhaps the real question should be "Why does /. keep posting these stories?" Or better yet, "Has anyone benefitted from legal advice gleaned from /.?" That's an article I'd like to see!