Emusic is great! I've been using it for nearly a year. I listen to jazz mostly and some the stuff they have is just incredible. For example, the 12 CD set of complete Riverside recordings of Wes Montgomery. That alone was worth the price of one year subscription.
Being an anarchist may make the Slashdot crowd feel better[1], but it does nothing toward solving the problem, and makes the situation worst for both those playing by the rules[3], as well as those who seek to break it. Is that what you want?
You are right. We should be doing more to change the situation, rather than just disregard the current law.
I've done a little - wrote few letters and talked to people explaining the problem. It's suprizing how many people are not aware of the copyright land grab. I lend out my copy of "The Future of Ideas" a lot...
Your denying them compensation for the time and effort that went into creating the item in question. The form in which the item in question takes doesn't change that fact.
What if the person who created the work in question is dead? I downloaded a recording by Charlie Parker yesterday. I already own tons of his records (on vinyl and CD), just that particular tune wasn't on any of them.
Now, what did I steal?
Do you listen to the radio? Do you change the stations when commercials come on? If so, according your definition, you are stealing - you are listening to music without paying anything.
Your use of Kazaa to steal from those who purchased the musicians is for any reasonable person equal to Microsoft including linux/sched.c in the next version of Windows or to that scruffy-looking man outside stealing my car. All three hypothetical offenders are taking from others without permission. A pity they don't hang cattle rustlers any longer.
While I agree with you on using company network for downloading music, I think this last paragraph is misguided.
The "crime" we are talking about is called "Copyright Violation". It's not stealing. When I make a copy of something I don't deprive anyone of anything. Would you stop the guy outside from taking a picture of your car?
Depriving someone from potential profit is not in the same ballpark as stealing a material object.
There is no plausible scenario for ending that war that does not result in thousands of Japanese civilians dying. If not by being trapped in an invasion by both the US and the Soviet Union, then by starvation; if not by starvation, then being firebombed; if not by firebombs, then by atomic bombs.
I had read some accounts that speculated that the Japanese were ready to surrender before the A-bomb, Except for a fanatical faction among the army's leadership. The whole thing being complicated by US's insistance on uncoditional surrender.
I don't see how that - a complete and apparently intentional distortion of historical fact - is any less reprehensible than writing off the atomic bombings as unimportant.
Fine. But I still stand by my point. Does having killed millions of innocent civilians, justify killing hundreds of thosands of other innocent civilians?
Rubbish. The number of Chinese and southeast Asian civilians slaughtered directly by Japan, or killed as a result of Japanese occupation between 1937 and 1945, numbers in the millions.
I'm well aware of the atrocities committed by the Japanese troops in China and elsewhere.
The atom bombs weren't dropped to "punish" Japan, and to state that the ~200K people -- military as well as civilian -- that they killed far exceeded the death toll wrought by Japan is flat out wrong.
I didn't mean to imply that the death toll from the bomb exceeded the number of people killed by the Japanese. I know it didn't. Even the fire bombings of Japanese cities killed more people in one night than the A-bombs.
I suggest you learn the Pacific/Asian war was more than Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.
I've read quite a bit about the war in the Pacific. Did you know that Curtiss LeMay said of the fire bombings: "If we had lost, I would most likely be tried for war crimes.".
But, I'm simply trying to make this point: if a bunch of people (like the Japanese army) go and do some terrible things to innocent people, and then in response, we (i.e. our army etc) go and kill thousands of people, who mostly had nothing to do with the stuff their army did and were for the most part innocent.
That's all. It bothers me that people think that this is OK. War is hell, and somehow these things occur, but we should not dismiss them so casually.
Oh and the Japanese weren't bombing cities? You go on believing that Japan was an innocent victim in all of this.
They did. However, this kind of logic always has bothered me. The Japanese Army slaugthered thousands of innocent civilians. So, to punish "them", we slaughthered an order of magnitude more innocent civilians.
There's that group that *assumes* that Musicians will make their living and pay off bills from whatever money comes in from fans downloading, and concerts.
I just started reading a biography of Miles Davis. He came from a pretty well to do family and his parents payed for his music lessons when he was little. By the time he was 16 he was able to get jobs playing with some local bands and he made something like $80/week. This was in 1940s.
When he came to New York he went to Juliard (his father paid the tuition), but after a while he got better education and was able to make a living playing trumpet in various jazz clubs around NY.
So, he was able to make a living before even making a single record. But then he was Miles Davis and was quite dedicated to playing jazz.
He never had to starve.
It makes me really sad to find people spending a significant amount of their life doing stuff they don't really enjoy. Advice like your fathers is all too common.
It's not just about you. Part of working is being a part of a group that solves problems, or builds something or whatever. Being together and doing things with other people is just as important to being human.
That's why people can spend a lifetime working at a factory making widgets, because the companionship of other people and working together
makes the work meaningful.
You should read "Wind, Sand and Stars" by St. Exupery, if you want an insight into what puts meaning into human life.
Do what you love. No one wants to breathe their last with a sigh of wasted days.
But first you need to find what you love. It's not that obvious at first. Stuff you like when you are 12 is not necessarily the stuff you'd want to do when you are 35.
From other reviews that I read of this book it sound like the author is saying the quest to discover your "calling" is far from straight forward. You wind up getting just a "glimmer" of something that might be for you - but unless you go after it you will not even find out what it is that you love.
As I recall the popular vote went to Gore by more than 200,000 votes. But the electoral college swayed the results to Bush helped by the mess in Florida.
"I estimate it might be possible if I really understand that problem that it is about 50% likely to be completed in 5 weeks if no one bothers us in that time."
I recently read an article which discussed this. It basically said "This is an ESTIMATE. By definition ESTIMATEs are not exact!"...
As a mathematician I hate when you EE types come along and try do design software! You've barely learned a bit of calculus and do not understand abstraction.
This is what I mean. Learn the new technology. Stay current and informed. Read Slashdot (mod me up now). Take classes. But most of all, stick your nose into it, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.
That's why I like being a programmer. There is always new stuff to learn. I've avoided taking "the management track" an always chose to stay technical.
I started with punch cards and OS/360 assembler, wrote device drivers on PDP-11s, and today I'm mostly doing Java on Unix, with occasional hacks in whatever language is required.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Like several others have said in response to you, the majority of recording is actually about the producer and engineer, as opposed to the artists and their performance.
You are probably right, although I had made some recordings in a studio and I record at home all the time. But my stuff is not "commercial" grade - it's just for fun.
However, the music I like best is jazz, which is pretty hard to capture in a studio and does not lend itself to "production".
IMHO one of the reasons for the pathetic state of pop music is the tendency to over-produce that makes one pop singer sound just like any other.
In general people respond to performances of other people (i.e. they need not be perfect) and "pitch correcting" the voice just removes the personality of the artist and makes the whole thing sound sterile.
If you want good production, you will have to pay for it. And producers, the ones who really know how to mold a good sounding album, aren't cheap, even for the non-famous ones.
Unless you have a good artists, who does not need "production".
This album is a classic jazz album, which has been selling well (for jazz) since it was made in 1959. The record was made in two three hour sessions. What you hear on the album is the first complete take of each tune. Only one of the six tunes was recorded twice and the first take was used.
Studio time, plus the musicians pay was pretty much a days work for the 10 or so people involved.
Then there is the cost of pressing the records (which is probably higher than making CDs).
The differance is Rip/Mix/Burn is legal, while Download/Mix/Burn isn't.
Wrong! There are plenty of places where I can download MP3 files, without violating copyright. For example, Amazon.com had many free MP3 for downloading. Or pay services like Emusic.
Slashdot Mirror
But how are you going to know which songs to buy, if you have to pay $1 per song to sample it?
As far as I can recall Michael Jackson owns the rights to the Beatles catalog.
You are right. We should be doing more to change the situation, rather than just disregard the current law.
I've done a little - wrote few letters and talked to people explaining the problem. It's suprizing how many people are not aware of the copyright land grab. I lend out my copy of "The Future of Ideas" a lot...
What if the person who created the work in question is dead? I downloaded a recording by Charlie Parker yesterday. I already own tons of his records (on vinyl and CD), just that particular tune wasn't on any of them.
Now, what did I steal?
Do you listen to the radio? Do you change the stations when commercials come on? If so, according your definition, you are stealing - you are listening to music without paying anything.
While I agree with you on using company network for downloading music, I think this last paragraph is misguided.
The "crime" we are talking about is called "Copyright Violation". It's not stealing. When I make a copy of something I don't deprive anyone of anything. Would you stop the guy outside from taking a picture of your car?
Depriving someone from potential profit is not in the same ballpark as stealing a material object.
Are you saying that Java is the COBOL of the future? ;-)
I had read some accounts that speculated that the Japanese were ready to surrender before the A-bomb, Except for a fanatical faction among the army's leadership. The whole thing being complicated by US's insistance on uncoditional surrender.
I don't see how that - a complete and apparently intentional distortion of historical fact - is any less reprehensible than writing off the atomic bombings as unimportant.
Fine. But I still stand by my point. Does having killed millions of innocent civilians, justify killing hundreds of thosands of other innocent civilians?
I'm well aware of the atrocities committed by the Japanese troops in China and elsewhere.
The atom bombs weren't dropped to "punish" Japan, and to state that the ~200K people -- military as well as civilian -- that they killed far exceeded the death toll wrought by Japan is flat out wrong.
I didn't mean to imply that the death toll from the bomb exceeded the number of people killed by the Japanese. I know it didn't. Even the fire bombings of Japanese cities killed more people in one night than the A-bombs.
I suggest you learn the Pacific/Asian war was more than Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.
I've read quite a bit about the war in the Pacific. Did you know that Curtiss LeMay said of the fire bombings: "If we had lost, I would most likely be tried for war crimes.".
But, I'm simply trying to make this point: if a bunch of people (like the Japanese army) go and do some terrible things to innocent people, and then in response, we (i.e. our army etc) go and kill thousands of people, who mostly had nothing to do with the stuff their army did and were for the most part innocent.
That's all. It bothers me that people think that this is OK. War is hell, and somehow these things occur, but we should not dismiss them so casually.
They did. However, this kind of logic always has bothered me. The Japanese Army slaugthered thousands of innocent civilians. So, to punish "them", we slaughthered an order of magnitude more innocent civilians.
I suggest you read the book "Hiroshima".
I just started reading a biography of Miles Davis. He came from a pretty well to do family and his parents payed for his music lessons when he was little. By the time he was 16 he was able to get jobs playing with some local bands and he made something like $80/week. This was in 1940s.
When he came to New York he went to Juliard (his father paid the tuition), but after a while he got better education and was able to make a living playing trumpet in various jazz clubs around NY.
So, he was able to make a living before even making a single record. But then he was Miles Davis and was quite dedicated to playing jazz. He never had to starve.
It's not just about you. Part of working is being a part of a group that solves problems, or builds something or whatever. Being together and doing things with other people is just as important to being human.
That's why people can spend a lifetime working at a factory making widgets, because the companionship of other people and working together makes the work meaningful.
You should read "Wind, Sand and Stars" by St. Exupery, if you want an insight into what puts meaning into human life.
But first you need to find what you love. It's not that obvious at first. Stuff you like when you are 12 is not necessarily the stuff you'd want to do when you are 35.
From other reviews that I read of this book it sound like the author is saying the quest to discover your "calling" is far from straight forward. You wind up getting just a "glimmer" of something that might be for you - but unless you go after it you will not even find out what it is that you love.
As I recall the popular vote went to Gore by more than 200,000 votes. But the electoral college swayed the results to Bush helped by the mess in Florida.
I recently read an article which discussed this. It basically said "This is an ESTIMATE. By definition ESTIMATEs are not exact!"...
I sort of agree. However, I find that there are two styles of thinking that people come with and only one is compatible with programming.
One is where a person loves tons of details and is able to handle them, but is unable to abstract and see the higher level.
The other kind is one that starts with a solid understanding of high level patterns and then is able to derive the details as needed.
It's the second one that makes a good programmer not the first.
As a mathematician I hate when you EE types come along and try do design software! You've barely learned a bit of calculus and do not understand abstraction.
That's why I like being a programmer. There is always new stuff to learn. I've avoided taking "the management track" an always chose to stay technical.
I started with punch cards and OS/360 assembler, wrote device drivers on PDP-11s, and today I'm mostly doing Java on Unix, with occasional hacks in whatever language is required.
I like computers, not people .... ;-)
Well, if you mean real musicians, rather than the pretend one hit wonders from MTV, then I agree.
I'd like a career like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck or Count Basie.
Meanwhile. I'm still coding after over 20 years in the field. I'll even get a pension from the first company I worked for when I retire..
Very true. Beatle's "Sergent Peper" album was recorded on a four track recorder.
You are probably right, although I had made some recordings in a studio and I record at home all the time. But my stuff is not "commercial" grade - it's just for fun.
However, the music I like best is jazz, which is pretty hard to capture in a studio and does not lend itself to "production".
IMHO one of the reasons for the pathetic state of pop music is the tendency to over-produce that makes one pop singer sound just like any other.
In general people respond to performances of other people (i.e. they need not be perfect) and "pitch correcting" the voice just removes the personality of the artist and makes the whole thing sound sterile.
Unless you have a good artists, who does not need "production".
Studio time, plus the musicians pay was pretty much a days work for the 10 or so people involved.
Then there is the cost of pressing the records (which is probably higher than making CDs).
Anyway, check out the book Making of Kind of Blue.
Today you can probably record and print 1000 CDs for under $5000.
Wrong! There are plenty of places where I can download MP3 files, without violating copyright. For example, Amazon.com had many free MP3 for downloading. Or pay services like Emusic.