The publishers don't directly benefit from ad sales by the radio station, so the extra exposure doesn't help them--notice that the stations don't charge you to play their signal publicly.
Yes, but ASCAP did extract payment from the radio station broadcasting their songs. The store owner is simply receiving the broadcast from the radio station that has already paid ASCAP. If the "performance" actually began with the stores, then the radio stations shouldn't have to pay.
Do stores have to pay ASCAP a percentage of total sales? Do they have to pay based on the average census of customers in the store? What if business is bad and nobody is buying anything (perhaps because of the offending music) - do they still have to pay ASCAP. Or, in this case, does ASCAP have to pay damages for lost sales?
Even if you had signed on with ASCAP years ago, you still can't quit your new day job. There are many washed up pop stars who watch their "where are they now" segment on VH-1 and listen to their "one hit wonder" tune on the oldies station, yet some struggle to scrape up rent. Why? Bad management of their finances? Sometimes. More likely though, it is because they get very, very little from record company sales or ASCAP royalties.
With a few exceptions, rich musicians got that way by performing live (touring), not from record companies (who not only take the rights to their song, but also make the artists pay back all of the production expenses,etc) or ASCAP. Anyone who is getting played enough to generate significant ASCAP royalties would be popular enough to make quite a bit more touring.
When consumer bandwidth is high enough for the proliferation of high quality net radio stations playing the music of independent musicians that are in no way affiliated with the traditional music industry, we will start to see the first truely independent net "mega stars". The record companies and publishing companies will weep greatly as they watch their potential revenues slip away.
No more Record Companies
Instead of trying to slip your tape to a friend at a local station, an independent band will get it on the net and everyone in the world will hear it, and download their MP3, then pay 5$ for the CD if they like it.
No More Ticketmaster!
Best of all, there will be turnout for touring bands because peole will have signed up for tickets on the net directly (NOT using Ticketmaster!). Once a city gets enough interested audience members that have put in a request on the net, a tour date will be announced, and the credit cards of interested people will be automaticall charged. All the $$ will go to the jukebox hero and his ex-wives, not to ticketmaster or any of the other music industry pimps. There won't be any $4 extra charge for using your credit card, or any of the other silly charges that make the actual price $6-10 more than the price they announce on the radio.
No More Incentives to Play Their Game
The downsides of the music industry are well known to many musicians. Unfortunately some find out about these issues too late - they are already owned by the company. Portable digital studios are getting quite cheap. Distribution can now be done yourself. As a critical mass of upcoming musicians figure this out, they will vote with their feet. There will be several places on the net that will take them through the steps without screwing them. Artists will keep the rights to their material. There will no longer be any incentives to submit the the industry's unfair terms.
MP3.com: is it an Amazon?
The record companies and their buddies really are ripe for an Amazon-like internet presence to rock their world. Will MP3.com be the focal point for artists, who are the key in this revolution, to converge? When this happens, all of the record companies' SDMI crap, and ASCAP nasty letters will become moot. We'll pipe free, excellent, and popular music into our homes, cars, phones, intercoms, restaurants, websites, and out our asses while the pimps who used to harass us mop our floors and flip our burgers as they listen to free music.
I read Slashdot every day. I love it. But I don't consider it journalism. Journalists research their stories, and investigate all sides of the story, and try and discover the truth.
The best way to reach the truth (or to solve other optimization problems) is to have a vast number of people exploring all of the local peaks and valleys. Simulated annealing. Turn up the temperature and the entropy increases, but more possibilities are explored. Then slowly lower the temperature and settle in on the best answers. Genetic algorithms also have a similar feature - lots of possibilities explored at the same time. Another analogy might be the "effient market hypothesis" of stock pricing - a vast number of factors that no one person (or stock analyst) can fully understand emerge as a stock price to correctly value a company. The same type of emergent phenomena will make the net unbeatable for finding out "the truth" about things.
This is why the net is able to research a topic more extensively than a journalist - there are a bunch of people out there reading the posts, and some of them are invariably intimately familiar with the topic or just a hop-skip-and-jump away. This is why the net is a perfect place for open source software to thrive - a vast source of ideas, and a vast source of peer review. The implementation of the peer review is the critical part - it is the "fitness function" that determines how quickly we converge on the best ideas.
As an example, just what is the truth in the Packetstorm story? At first it seemed Harvard and the Anti-Online guy were totally evil. Now it seems maybe there's more to the story. A journalist would have spent time gleaning information from all sides of the story. Slashdot provided a quick link to one side of the story.
Of course, a journalist may have made several different conclusions during the process of writing the story that you were not aware of. The net lets you examine these ideas and hypotheses unfold in real time. You must realize that you are watching a process, and that it will take a finite amount of time to converge on a set of good conclusions. An excellent excercise in critical thinking.
The net is definately taking over the news. I can't remember the last time I even watched the news on TV. I do remember that it was very superficial. I still listen to NPR because they tend to be reasonably intellegent and usually go to good sources. Traditional media news will be forever changed.
This will be an absolute boon to all of those brains sitting around in jars with absolutely no way to interact with their environment:^) Soon they will be able to control X-10 devices and send eathother email! Imaginative types in jars will take day jobs as part of a rendering farm or other computational clusters.
I've been involved in neuroscience related work study for some time now and can confidently tell you that nobody knows the storage capacity of the brain. We still don't fully understand how memories are formed or stored.
We do know that our memories are associative, highly compressed, and unreliable. Even though we think we remember things, we actually remember suprisingly little about our experiences. Also, people seemed to be wired to remember different kinds of information. I have friends that remember every phone number they've ever called, but can't remember where they put their car keys!
The newspaper article I read said that the they found that his inferior parietal area was 15% wider than normal. But they also stated that the same area was missing a sulcus. A missing sulcus would normally mean less overall surface area, and might possibly negate the extra 15% in width. Anyone with access to the Lancet article know if they measured total surface area of this region?
Anyway, I think it's probably safe to say that Einstein was more than 15% smarter than the average person, even though he admitted to great difficulties with mathematics (probably becauase he was working with diffucult math). I think Einstein's gift was not necessarily mathematics, but rather insight and intuition.
Yes - I use a Psion Series 5 heavily every day and so do several of my friends. It is extremely well designed. I like the keyboard - it is the only keyboard on such a small device (smaller than most CE palmtops) that I can type on in a normal fashion with near normal speeds. I like the elegant OS. I had tried several CE devices, but the ergonomics were simply too poor.
The downsides: I haven't found a kit to program it (other than the "OPL" language) that is available without forking over $$$. There is no option for an internal communications card.
If you need more memory and functionality than the Palm offers, but don't want to fight windows CE, Psion Series 5 fits the bill.
On the other hand, does there really need to be a term for hacker type behavior? The same psychological temperment that make one a "hacker" today was has been present in people for all of history. I don't see a lot of difference between tinkering with computers and tinkering with engines, power tools, or short wave radios. A lot of guys (and some girls too) just like to tinker with machines and to build things. I think it is one of the fundamental guy (and some girls too) behaviors that is manifested differently depending upon the era in which the guy is living. Perhaps is stems from early evolutionary selection of people who are able to hack tools used for hunting and gathering. In the future, when computers just program themselves, perhaps guys will hack quanum gravity or the space-time continuum. Of maybe they will hack their Mr. Fusions, flux capacitors, and oscillating overthrusters.
Micropay just makes sense, as it streamlines the web site and the business model. Expect to see sites remain free for basic services, but provide augmented service to people submitting micropay cookies. For the micropay customer, the search will be faster (higher priority) and indexed against your personal profile and surfing history.
Authors will no longer need publishers. Musicians will no longer need record companies. Micropay will better allow shareware programmers to quit their dull jobs and pay their bills doing what they love.
Sort of reminds me of a segment I heard on NPR a year ago about an economist's ideas of a modern barter economy, and how computers might be used to manage the complex graph of service providers and people requesting services such that people could potentially do away with money (and income taxes?). I don't think I'll live to see a barter economy, but at least the micropay concept seems to be a step in the right direction that will empower people.
College kids writing code in their free time will never be close to what software engineers getting paid to write stuff like Oracle, etc will.
College kids like Linus and his little project?
Many great achievments in mathematics, physics, and other disciplines were done by young (college aged) people. Often by people without preconceptions of what should or should not be possible. And without corporate support. Just passion for what they are interested in. Why should programming be any different?
As another poster has pointed out, ISDN prices are abnormally low in TN. I checked Bell South's rates for numbers in other areas: $67/month in Atlanta, $75/month in New Orleans, $61/month in Miami. Not quite as reasonable. Definitely not the way to go now that cable modems are here.
ISDN? In order for me to get the same deal I have now but at ISDN speeds (single channel), I would have to pay $575 a month!
You must live in a rural or lagging area
I can tell you that Memphis is not at the leading edge in telecommunications, but I've been using ISDN for years and will be getting a cable modem soon.
I just looked up Bell South's prices for my area: Installation of the line is $45.50. Basic ISDN (two phone numbers and caller ID) is $33.44 a month - not much more than a POTS line, and not a bad deal since it is equivalent to two POTS lines.
Access? A single 64K channel is $19.95 a month with Bell South. I use a different ISP, but prices are comparable. Perhaps the prices you were quoted were for ISDN with a fixed IP address?
I've been using ISDN for three years in Memphis. It's essentially the same price as a regular phone line. I had it installed when I moved in, and use it for both data and voice instead of having a regular phone line. I usually browse on one 64K channel and leave the other open for my phone. 64K is quite confortable for most browsing, but big downloads are tedious. I'll be switching to a cable modem soon, but will probably keep my ISDN line since it provides two phone lines in one.
Exactly. People interested enough to contribute their skills. After all, that's what free software hackers do. Perhaps as free software increasingly becomes more a part of people's lives, we will see the emergence of a free software advocate with the power and visibility of, say, Ralph Nader.
But there's no reason why we can't pursure our interests along many different avenues. The power of focal points such as slashdot are already felt, but could be magnified even more. I think slashdot should use its large mindshare as an organizing force for this. Imagine if you could have a little box on the side (like the freshmeat box) with a list of pending conflicts. If a particular conflict gets you hot, hit the donate button and charge $10 (or more) for defense fund. If it were that easy, I wouldn't think twice about sending small sums flying to the aid of people like this. Since there are a lot of slashdot readers, the small sums could add up quite fast. We just have to make it convenient for people to donate.
I've never been particularly politically involved, but it is clear that the net could make grass roots efforts incredibly swift and powerful.
The analogy may not be a complete fit, but there are striking parallels here. In the prisoner's dilemma, each player must choose between cooperation (open source that will benefit everyone), or defection (proprietary solutions in an attempt to get the upper hand).
Perhaps the best way to get some of this stuff funded would be through small donations from a large number of users who, unlike corporations, aren't worry about competitors.
I honestly believe that most large companies such as IBM are just using open-source as a method to gain publicity and free development out of the open-source community.
Perhaps so. But isn't this a perfectly acceptable way to get good press? Even if the license is not perfect, lots of people could potentially benefit from this.
Options:
You can't drive my Ferrari
You can drive it all you want - use it as a chick magnet even, but you can't change the license plates or get a job using it as a taxi without my permission
You can do with it what you please.
Option 2 is still a good thing. Even if they retain some measure of control, it's still a good gesture - they didn't have to do this. If someone tweaks their code to make their project fly better, and then returns to patch to IBM, then others will still benefit from the patch.
I would like to hereby encourage other software companies to seek publicity by giving me cool software to use.
As part of the M$ plan to take over the internet, I seem to remember there being talk of making the file formats of Office 2000/Windows 2000 based on XML. If that were to happen, then it shouldn't be a problem to hack together a parser or to write the tags.
I seem to recall hearing that this is going to be AmigaDOS 5.0's de facto scripting language...
Then I guess it's not just a coincidence that the Founder and CEO of the rebol company has "design and implementation of the highly acclaimed Amiga multitasking operating system" in his bio.
why should people use a "new language" just to do simple little tasks like downloading a webpage or sending mail?
Not sure if I will use it, but it looks like it's fairly versatile and quite small (190K or 150K, depending on which page you read). Kind of a swiss army knife, but not a powertool. Probably not a replacement for Perl, but if it's really this small, think of how many mod_rebol enabled apache processes you could have going at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but ASCAP did extract payment from the radio station broadcasting their songs. The store owner is simply receiving the broadcast from the radio station that has already paid ASCAP. If the "performance" actually began with the stores, then the radio stations shouldn't have to pay.
Do stores have to pay ASCAP a percentage of total sales? Do they have to pay based on the average census of customers in the store? What if business is bad and nobody is buying anything (perhaps because of the offending music) - do they still have to pay ASCAP. Or, in this case, does ASCAP have to pay damages for lost sales?
With a few exceptions, rich musicians got that way by performing live (touring), not from record companies (who not only take the rights to their song, but also make the artists pay back all of the production expenses,etc) or ASCAP. Anyone who is getting played enough to generate significant ASCAP royalties would be popular enough to make quite a bit more touring.
The best way to reach the truth (or to solve other optimization problems) is to have a vast number of people exploring all of the local peaks and valleys. Simulated annealing. Turn up the temperature and the entropy increases, but more possibilities are explored. Then slowly lower the temperature and settle in on the best answers. Genetic algorithms also have a similar feature - lots of possibilities explored at the same time. Another analogy might be the "effient market hypothesis" of stock pricing - a vast number of factors that no one person (or stock analyst) can fully understand emerge as a stock price to correctly value a company. The same type of emergent phenomena will make the net unbeatable for finding out "the truth" about things.
This is why the net is able to research a topic more extensively than a journalist - there are a bunch of people out there reading the posts, and some of them are invariably intimately familiar with the topic or just a hop-skip-and-jump away. This is why the net is a perfect place for open source software to thrive - a vast source of ideas, and a vast source of peer review. The implementation of the peer review is the critical part - it is the "fitness function" that determines how quickly we converge on the best ideas.
As an example, just what is the truth in the Packetstorm story? At first it seemed Harvard and the Anti-Online guy were totally evil. Now it seems maybe there's more to the story. A journalist would have spent time gleaning information from all sides of the story. Slashdot provided a quick link to one side of the story.
Of course, a journalist may have made several different conclusions during the process of writing the story that you were not aware of. The net lets you examine these ideas and hypotheses unfold in real time. You must realize that you are watching a process, and that it will take a finite amount of time to converge on a set of good conclusions. An excellent excercise in critical thinking.
The net is definately taking over the news. I can't remember the last time I even watched the news on TV. I do remember that it was very superficial. I still listen to NPR because they tend to be reasonably intellegent and usually go to good sources. Traditional media news will be forever changed.
I had always thought it was Riemann that brought along nonlinear geometry, and that nonlinear was interchangeble with non-Euclidean.
Anyway, the nonlinear browser will probably be a boon for folks dropping acid (or mayble you won't need the acid).
Silly english types... Your father was a hampster and your mother smelled of elderberrys.
Now go away or we shall taunt you some more...
This will be an absolute boon to all of those brains sitting around in jars with absolutely no way to interact with their environment :^) Soon they will be able to control X-10 devices and send eathother email! Imaginative types in jars will take day jobs as part of a rendering farm or other computational clusters.
We do know that our memories are associative, highly compressed, and unreliable. Even though we think we remember things, we actually remember suprisingly little about our experiences. Also, people seemed to be wired to remember different kinds of information. I have friends that remember every phone number they've ever called, but can't remember where they put their car keys!
Anyway, I think it's probably safe to say that Einstein was more than 15% smarter than the average person, even though he admitted to great difficulties with mathematics (probably becauase he was working with diffucult math). I think Einstein's gift was not necessarily mathematics, but rather insight and intuition.
The downsides: I haven't found a kit to program it (other than the "OPL" language) that is available without forking over $$$. There is no option for an internal communications card.
If you need more memory and functionality than the Palm offers, but don't want to fight windows CE, Psion Series 5 fits the bill.
On the other hand, does there really need to be a term for hacker type behavior? The same psychological temperment that make one a "hacker" today was has been present in people for all of history. I don't see a lot of difference between tinkering with computers and tinkering with engines, power tools, or short wave radios. A lot of guys (and some girls too) just like to tinker with machines and to build things. I think it is one of the fundamental guy (and some girls too) behaviors that is manifested differently depending upon the era in which the guy is living. Perhaps is stems from early evolutionary selection of people who are able to hack tools used for hunting and gathering. In the future, when computers just program themselves, perhaps guys will hack quanum gravity or the space-time continuum. Of maybe they will hack their Mr. Fusions, flux capacitors, and oscillating overthrusters.
Authors will no longer need publishers. Musicians will no longer need record companies. Micropay will better allow shareware programmers to quit their dull jobs and pay their bills doing what they love.
Sort of reminds me of a segment I heard on NPR a year ago about an economist's ideas of a modern barter economy, and how computers might be used to manage the complex graph of service providers and people requesting services such that people could potentially do away with money (and income taxes?). I don't think I'll live to see a barter economy, but at least the micropay concept seems to be a step in the right direction that will empower people.
College kids like Linus and his little project?
Many great achievments in mathematics, physics, and other disciplines were done by young (college aged) people. Often by people without preconceptions of what should or should not be possible. And without corporate support. Just passion for what they are interested in. Why should programming be any different?
You must live in a rural or lagging area
I can tell you that Memphis is not at the leading edge in telecommunications, but I've been using ISDN for years and will be getting a cable modem soon.
I just looked up Bell South's prices for my area: Installation of the line is $45.50. Basic ISDN (two phone numbers and caller ID) is $33.44 a month - not much more than a POTS line, and not a bad deal since it is equivalent to two POTS lines.
Access? A single 64K channel is $19.95 a month with Bell South. I use a different ISP, but prices are comparable. Perhaps the prices you were quoted were for ISDN with a fixed IP address?
But there's no reason why we can't pursure our interests along many different avenues. The power of focal points such as slashdot are already felt, but could be magnified even more. I think slashdot should use its large mindshare as an organizing force for this. Imagine if you could have a little box on the side (like the freshmeat box) with a list of pending conflicts. If a particular conflict gets you hot, hit the donate button and charge $10 (or more) for defense fund. If it were that easy, I wouldn't think twice about sending small sums flying to the aid of people like this. Since there are a lot of slashdot readers, the small sums could add up quite fast. We just have to make it convenient for people to donate.
I've never been particularly politically involved, but it is clear that the net could make grass roots efforts incredibly swift and powerful.
Perhaps the best way to get some of this stuff funded would be through small donations from a large number of users who, unlike corporations, aren't worry about competitors.
Ah, the Zen of Microsoft. One can never completely comprehend it.
The Macintosh platform: M$ developed for it and at the same time tried to kill it.
Me thinks it is part of a strategy to kill off interest in Mozilla.
Perhaps so. But isn't this a perfectly acceptable way to get good press? Even if the license is not perfect, lots of people could potentially benefit from this.
Options:
Option 2 is still a good thing. Even if they retain some measure of control, it's still a good gesture - they didn't have to do this. If someone tweaks their code to make their project fly better, and then returns to patch to IBM, then others will still benefit from the patch.
I would like to hereby encourage other software companies to seek publicity by giving me cool software to use.
As part of the M$ plan to take over the internet, I seem to remember there being talk of making the file formats of Office 2000/Windows 2000 based on XML. If that were to happen, then it shouldn't be a problem to hack together a parser or to write the tags.
Anyone know about this?
Then I guess it's not just a coincidence that the Founder and CEO of the rebol company has "design and implementation of the highly acclaimed Amiga multitasking operating system" in his bio.
Not sure if I will use it, but it looks like it's fairly versatile and quite small (190K or 150K, depending on which page you read). Kind of a swiss army knife, but not a powertool. Probably not a replacement for Perl, but if it's really this small, think of how many mod_rebol enabled apache processes you could have going at once.