Then once you've bought a whole crate of albums for $1 apiece, you could set up a kiosk next to the music store and undercut their prices. But then somebody else who already owns a Metallica CD could buy *my* albums for the cost of the media plus *my* cost of materials and distribution... which would be much much less than a dollar. Extend this ad nauseam and the cost of an album asymptotes to the cost of the media itself.
Ars gratia artis, bitches. If your band is any good, we'll still buy tickets to your show and buy t-shirts. Considering a T-shirt costs as much as an album, and even nosebleed seats go for as much as a boxed set, I doubt Metallica will be going bankrupt any time soon.
So anyway... brick'n'mortar music stores don't make any sense.
"Oh dear," said the music store, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
So if I own a copy of Death Magnetic already, can I buy a second copy at the local record store for just the cost of the media? Blank CD's go for a penny or two. Once you factor in the cost of the packaging and distribution... I figure $0.99 is a fair price.
You think music stores would go for that? 'Cause that's the logical extension of what you're saying.
Being the middleman can be risky. You aren't in charge of the supply of the products you sell because somebody else makes it and sells it to you (and other middlemen) You can't control the demand for said products, except by advertising. Note that the most successful retail outfits are those that either (a) own a small but very reliable market of consumers (specialist mom-n-pop stores) or (b) also dominate the wholesale and distribution portion (e.g. monster chain stores).
Seriously, the very concept of wholesale-retail-consumer is obsolete for digital media. Music is not the same kind of product as groceries.
Furthermore, when Lars downloaded the album by P2P, he implicated himself in any future RIAA witch hunts. Now when the recording industry thugs go after their latest batch of victims, they'll have to include Lars Ulrich in the target list.
If they don't target him just like any other poor slob on the internet, the RIAA stands to lose money. The industry works by strongarming regular folks who get caught downloading music, but when untouchable band members start clogging up the docket there's that much less money to be made by suing regular people.
People still believe that flying cars are only 5 years away, too.
I'd like to point out that NASA is merely loaning the classroom space. This does not imply agreement or support from all corners of said administration.
Mar's Law: Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
The difference with religion is that they don't even pretend to uphold scientific rigor. To true believers it's the beauty and mystery of faith. To outsiders, it's batshit irrationality.
This will be interesting to see how it affects NASA's SBU (sensitive but unclassified) policy. Currently, SBU material is not exempt from FOIA requests but each request has to be evaluated individually. The only things we can't release through a FOIA are ITAR restricted information, private personnel/health type stuff, and things that actually *are* classified.
Coming from the DoD world, the very concept of "classifying" something as sensitive but unclassified just seems bizarre.
That depends. Would the travel expenses be tax-deductable?
Anyhow, I agree with your sentiment about hiring domestic workers. If you want to be a part of the team, join the damn team. Come to the USA, become a US citizen! I'm 100% cool with huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The problem only arises when people leech off the system without contributing.
A decade ago, I worked with outsourced Indian manufacturing. Time zones made it pain in the ass, but the cultural divide was not bad at all.
Try dealing with Europeans during the month of August, and THEN you will truly understand being unable to get any work done.
On the desktop I moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu *because* of things like the nvidia driver working right out of the box. Guess that makes me a noob.
Anybody who uses a regular cell phone-- noob. You're not a real man unless you have to break out the soldering iron and multimeter just to make a phone call.
I just found out yesterday that there's a Gordon Ramsay video game. It's rated T for teen in the US, yet apparently it still has Ramsay's trademark cussing. WTF?
Oh well. The game also includes SCARY CRIME KNIVES so it's probably banned in the UK by default.
I don't mind that Ubuntu hides some of its inner workings from the end user. The problem is that those inner workings are haphazardly logged (or not) and unintentionally obfuscated even to the serious tinkerer.
I still keep Ubuntu on the desktop at home because it supports cool stuff out of the box. When something goes wrong it's easy to wipe and reinstall. My servers run FreeBSD. Yours run Debian. To-may-to, To-mah-to.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one more important thing you earned, besides that measely 14.4k per year: respect.
Some civvie contractors may never earn it, regardless of their salaries.
You can't spell slaughter without laughter!
If the military needs nerds, they can always hire civilian contractors.
Alternatively, there are certain nerds who enjoy military culture and do fine there.
Then once you've bought a whole crate of albums for $1 apiece, you could set up a kiosk next to the music store and undercut their prices. But then somebody else who already owns a Metallica CD could buy *my* albums for the cost of the media plus *my* cost of materials and distribution... which would be much much less than a dollar. Extend this ad nauseam and the cost of an album asymptotes to the cost of the media itself.
Ars gratia artis, bitches. If your band is any good, we'll still buy tickets to your show and buy t-shirts. Considering a T-shirt costs as much as an album, and even nosebleed seats go for as much as a boxed set, I doubt Metallica will be going bankrupt any time soon.
So anyway... brick'n'mortar music stores don't make any sense.
"Oh dear," said the music store, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
So if I own a copy of Death Magnetic already, can I buy a second copy at the local record store for just the cost of the media? Blank CD's go for a penny or two. Once you factor in the cost of the packaging and distribution... I figure $0.99 is a fair price.
You think music stores would go for that? 'Cause that's the logical extension of what you're saying.
Being the middleman can be risky. You aren't in charge of the supply of the products you sell because somebody else makes it and sells it to you (and other middlemen) You can't control the demand for said products, except by advertising. Note that the most successful retail outfits are those that either (a) own a small but very reliable market of consumers (specialist mom-n-pop stores) or (b) also dominate the wholesale and distribution portion (e.g. monster chain stores).
Seriously, the very concept of wholesale-retail-consumer is obsolete for digital media. Music is not the same kind of product as groceries.
Restricting the use of language doesn't work.
When you download without seeding, you're downloading with Hitler!
Furthermore, when Lars downloaded the album by P2P, he implicated himself in any future RIAA witch hunts. Now when the recording industry thugs go after their latest batch of victims, they'll have to include Lars Ulrich in the target list.
If they don't target him just like any other poor slob on the internet, the RIAA stands to lose money. The industry works by strongarming regular folks who get caught downloading music, but when untouchable band members start clogging up the docket there's that much less money to be made by suing regular people.
Mod parent up. It's true. JLG and the other Be Inc execs failed pretty at strategic choices for their company.
1. Letting Apple pick NeXT (and Jobs) instead of BeOS.
2. The idiotic focus shift to "internet appliances" (whatever the fuck those were supposed to be) just as the dot com bubble was bursting.
3. Allowing key portions of the IP to be locked up in legal agreements with other much MUCH more powerful companies.
The old Net Server
sucked raw eggs through a thin straw.
BONE: fast, yet not stable.
Be already came
with GCC, since R3
for x86.
Even EGCS ran well
but PowerPC was stuck
with lame Metrowerks.
People still believe that flying cars are only 5 years away, too.
I'd like to point out that NASA is merely loaning the classroom space. This does not imply agreement or support from all corners of said administration.
Mar's Law: Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
The difference with religion is that they don't even pretend to uphold scientific rigor. To true believers it's the beauty and mystery of faith. To outsiders, it's batshit irrationality.
Won't somebody please think of the lolcats?!?
I heard (maybe wrongly) that this was already a law in Japan.
Makes me wonder... if they grandfather older phones, would they grandfather the firmware version, or just the physical hardware?
This will be interesting to see how it affects NASA's SBU (sensitive but unclassified) policy. Currently, SBU material is not exempt from FOIA requests but each request has to be evaluated individually. The only things we can't release through a FOIA are ITAR restricted information, private personnel/health type stuff, and things that actually *are* classified.
Coming from the DoD world, the very concept of "classifying" something as sensitive but unclassified just seems bizarre.
That depends. Would the travel expenses be tax-deductable? Anyhow, I agree with your sentiment about hiring domestic workers. If you want to be a part of the team, join the damn team. Come to the USA, become a US citizen! I'm 100% cool with huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The problem only arises when people leech off the system without contributing.
A decade ago, I worked with outsourced Indian manufacturing. Time zones made it pain in the ass, but the cultural divide was not bad at all. Try dealing with Europeans during the month of August, and THEN you will truly understand being unable to get any work done.
If they have to redo the soundtrack, I hope they hire Bill Cosby.
With all this talk of Microsoft losing money, maybe they should get into the botnet business for themselves. Vertical integration!
Right on. If I can help it my servers don't even have X on them.
On the desktop I moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu *because* of things like the nvidia driver working right out of the box. Guess that makes me a noob.
Anybody who uses a regular cell phone-- noob. You're not a real man unless you have to break out the soldering iron and multimeter just to make a phone call.
I just found out yesterday that there's a Gordon Ramsay video game. It's rated T for teen in the US, yet apparently it still has Ramsay's trademark cussing. WTF?
Oh well. The game also includes SCARY CRIME KNIVES so it's probably banned in the UK by default.
I don't mind that Ubuntu hides some of its inner workings from the end user. The problem is that those inner workings are haphazardly logged (or not) and unintentionally obfuscated even to the serious tinkerer.
I still keep Ubuntu on the desktop at home because it supports cool stuff out of the box. When something goes wrong it's easy to wipe and reinstall. My servers run FreeBSD. Yours run Debian. To-may-to, To-mah-to.