Man, I had mod points all weekend and they expired just this morning. What a frickin' shame; you've been modded down entirely unfairly.
Not that I agree with you completely. I wouldn't call the Iliad "not that good". Too long, arguably, but if it's chanted at you by an expert in the original Greek, it's rapturous. Not that I'm expecting that, but the point is that an English translation is a different thing from the original.
It's pretentious only if you're reading one of the cruddy Victorian translations, which most people do. The story can be very exciting if translated well. There are a few good new ones I like much better.
I think a movie based on the Iliad could potentially be very interesting. But you're right that this isn't that movie. Me, I liked Troy. It had great performances by Bana, Pitt, and especially O'Toole, and some nice historical nods to those who have read the Iliad.
Yep. If you have the issue you can look inside and see me. I'm on the far left of the picture looking pretty blurry, partly because I'm well behind the focus and partly because I'd just run 23 miles.
Well, lessee. Most of the rewards programs offer you something like 1% back. (Amazon offers 5% on their own stuff and 1% on everything else.)
So a $300 iPod comes free after $30,000 worth of merchandise.
Personally, that's about two years for me. I put everything through my credit card, partly for the 1% but mostly for the convenience of not carrying cash (as well as the convenience of having the authorities know where I am, what I purchase, what sort of porn I like, etc.)
The card I use now offers me options: I can either have cash or the exact same amount in restaurant gift cards. What kind of a dope do they think I am?
When I started the program they just stuck a yearly rebate on the bill, which was great. Now I have to request it. But I have to wonder what would happen if they offered me, say, $100 in cash or $110 in restaurant gift cards. Who knows, I might actually take them up on that.
A brief explanation: in 1994 Oprah Winfry ran a marathon. A subsequent issue of Runner's World had an article on her. It had a photo of her, and humiliatingly, me. Humiliatingly, because I was behind her, and I looked like I had died three miles back. That was at mile 23; three miles later she beat me by six minutes.
I had saved the picture but didn't remember what issue it was. But I knew she was on the cover. The answer came on a page of past Runner's World covers.
I suspect I'm making this more scary rather than less. But damn, I'm beginning to forget how we knew anything before there was Google.
Perhaps you and I are searching for different things. I'm looking through my history at the last dozen or so requests to Google and in each case I found what I was looking for on the first page, often right at the top.
What was I looking for? "Founder sabermetrics". "french english dictionary". "oprah runner's world cover". "jprofiler". "hiroshima kilotons".
Kind of a diverse set of things, but they were rather specific. Often I'm looking for trivia, or a particular product. A little bit of convenient specificity and I find what I want. Perhaps the search-engine spammers aren't trying to spam the highly random stuff I'm looking for.
It doesn't always work, and I've been rebuffed in the past. But I use google two dozen times a day and I almost always get what I need.
To repeat less snarkily what a sibling post said, just because you cannot conceive a mechanism doesn't mean that none exists.
As a scientist your job is to examine the available data and come up with hypotheses. If the Belfast study suggests that homeopathy works, it's not your place to declare "but there's no spider venom in there!" It's your place to discover a new mechanism, or (much more likely) to find the flaw in the study.
Medicine in particular is full of places where we don't understand the mechanism, from aspirin to "complementary medicines" such as acupuncture. I'm actually a bit surprised acupuncture didn't make the list. The data in its favor is very strong, at least for some conditions, despite having almost no useful theory. (I've never had it myself, but the evidence is a lot more than anecdotal.) It makes a better candidate for the list than homeopathy, which is consistently slapped down by better evidence.
I'm fairly certain that the Belfast study will eventually be disproven, as so many others have. Homeopathy is rife with wishful thinking from its very creation in a silly theory that "like cures like" with zero scientific merit; the ludicrous-dilution factor is merely the cap on the silliness. Wishful thinking is a prime cause of poor scientific method.
But if you "don't get how they can claim that stuff like" this works, you don't get to point to your existing theory as proof. You have to point to data, because data trumps theory. If people replicate the Belfast study and the data gets more solid, it's your theory that goes, not the claims. I sure hope not, because it would force us to scrap a theory that's done some awesome work without giving us much of a pointer where the new theory list. But if I have to, I have to, because that's what science is.
Interesting difference of perspectives on the MP3 CD players. I'm thinking of the large installed base of CD-only CD players, and the cheap bottom-line portable CD players which I imagine are very common.
I know that most DVD players, and probably most rack-mount CD players, support MP3 CDs. As for car audio, which I suspect is what the great-grandparent poster had in mind, I can't say; I drive a 1992 car with a tape deck. I was under the impression most were CD-only, but I could be wrong.
They put the copy protection on there to keep from making copyright infringement too easy. It's their compromise; they didn't want to close the "CD hole" because too many people would want it, but the CD hole is too small to rip vast quantities of music and put them on the file sharing networks.
Which, unfortunately, means inconvenience for a minority of users like you. That's your problem: CD players are ubiquitous, and MP3 CD players are relatively rare. So they're hoping for a sweet spot where they keep illegal copyright infringement to a minimum (but not preventing it entirely, which would involve draconian measures) while allowing fairly wide (but not universal) use of the music you've bought.
Arguably this is a violation of your fair-use rights, but to give you your full fair use rights would allow other people to infringe the copyrights at will, which at the very least is unfair to you (since you pay for your music) and at worst is cause for them to shut down iTMS entirely. Then you'd have to go back to buying physical CDs, which is rather more of a hassle.
(Slashdotters, of course, know that any hole can be enlarged into an infinite hole. I'm surprised nobody has created a "CD RAMdisk" which iTunes will burn to then automatically re-rip it as MP3. Apple and the record companies are hoping that while enlargement of the hole is possible, relatively few people will do it.)
Whether it's the right compromise I cannot say. Certainly it takes only one copy of a song to make it onto P2P to make it universally accessible, so as long as they're selling CDs iTMS could be completely draconian and not change total file sharing one drop. I'm not trying to justify it; I'm merely trying to explain the tradeoffs in their minds that mean that you can't easily burn your MP3 CDs. Cold comfort, I guess.
The real answer for me is that it's just easier for me to eat breakfast over a $.25 newspaper than a $1,800 laptop computer. Coffee becomes less worrying.
Another answer I haven't seen mentioned in the other responses is resolution. A laptop screen runs at maybe 70 DPI; perhaps anti-aliasing runs that up to an equivalent of 90. A paper is printed at something more equivalent to 300 DPI, which makes the text a whole lot easier on the eyes.
I see this all the time in offices; people will take PDFs and print them out to read them once, because it's more comfortable. The waste of paper bugs me, but I agree that it's less pleasant to read something on the screen.
With Firefox I'll generally zoom the text up, but then fairly little of it fits on the screen at once and I'm constantly scrolling.
Pictures, on the other hand, are generally somewhat nicer on the screen. I'm not certain there are any more pixels, since the newspaper at least has the option of printing them very large, but the newspaper's 72 DPI screen and lack of color most of the time give an edge to the monitor over the paper.
Don't read too much into my phrasing of "renaming". I'm agreeing with you: copyright infringement is a different crime from theft.
But if you feel that copyright infringement isn't a crime at all, then there we part ways. The two aren't equivalent, but both are wrong.
The **AAs are playing ugly semantics as well, trying to play up the crime. I don't support them on that, but I understand it: they're trying to get people to recognize that this is an act that at least potentially costs them sales. (They're playing ugly games to exaggerate the numbers of those sales, but I believe it's greater than zero.)
The nature of the ownership of intellectual property is an interesting debate to have. But neither can I support the "if it's not nailed down it's mine" and "if I can break the copy protection it's not nailed down" theory, either.
I think we agree that in this case two wrongs don't make a right. The RIAA are bastards, filing blind lawsuits and literally risking lives (if not to the extent of death at least livelihoods).
Stand with you on what precisely? Changing the name of the crime? Fine, it's "copyright infringement" and not "theft".
If your next step is to say that "copyright infringement" is not a crime, then "integrity" is not the word I'd use to describe your position. They're taking credit for something they didn't do, and violating the license to boot.
What punishment is appropriate is entirely open to debate (I'm not certain what an appropriate punishment for ordinary theft would be). I find that a far more interesting question than imagining that I can excuse the crime by renaming it.
The great thing about the Honda ad was that everything was balanced to within a hair's breadth. It came so close to failing (and did, numerous times), but held up gracefully, and that's what's so hypnotic about it. Not to mention the beautiful lines and clear photography; in this I couldn't even tell what was happening half the time.
Kudos to these guys for all the work, and I suppose it was worth the 54 seconds it took to watch it, but let's keep some perspective. At the mall I can get a similar show for 25 cents and I get a gumball at the end.
Despite my support for it in the grandparent post, I'm still extremely torn about Big Science projects. For $100 million you could support a fifty thousand grad students for a year, and grad students are the bedrock of science. Or you could support ten thousand grad students to their PhDs.
And while I'm a huge fan of the Big Questions that the Hubble helps answer, those are questions we've been pursuing for five thousand years. They're not imperative, the way AIDS and cancer are. You'll learn more about human beings by funding digs in Ethiopia, or developing more advanced fMRIs to study human cognition. If we go another decade or two without a telescope in space, it seems a reasonable period to wait after all these centuries.
Your plan seems like a good one. Since it needs a deorbit module anyway, we could probably find a way to get a few extra years out of it with marginal costs.
It's too bad that they didn't think of the end-of-life in the first place, except of course that it's more weight and cost, and they expected regular cheap servicing from the Shuttle when they designed it. I think that they actually expected to bring it back in the Shuttle as a souvenir. Too bad that turned out to be more Big Science with a smaller-than-hoped payoff.
I really like having Ms. Mikulski as senator, and I've voted for her each time she's been elected, but I should point out that the reason that she's pushing this isn't that she cares about getting hi-res pictures of aliens. The Space Telescope Science Institute is in Baltimore, MD, her home state, as well as NASA's Goddard facility.
That's what representatives of any sort do: they fight for their local interests. If they didn't do that, the voters would elect somebody who did. Unfortunately, without a fixed budget cap, that generally means deals of the form "You vote for my thing, so I'll vote for your thing, and the only one who loses is the guy who eventually has to pay off the debt."
So while I like Ms. Mikulski, and I support the "measly" few dozens of millions of dollars it would take to keep getting great science from Hubble, I thought a bit of disclosure would be appropriate.
Google computes PageRank partly by counting the number of pages pointing in to yours. It may be that they could throw a web page you suggest into the mix, but unless somebody else acknowledges it first, it come up with a very low score. So it may simply not come up in their algorithm if they haven't spidered to it.
That theory may be dumb; if you've got a page with a highly distinctive keyword on it, it should come up when you type in that keyword no matter what.
Taxation is like pricing. It's not proportional to what it costs to make; it's proportional to what they can get.
Taxation is rarely "fair" in the sense that you pay for exactly what you get. Generally, the rich pay more absolutely and as a percentage more of their income. They get the same police protection, drive the same roads, and their kids go to the same schools. Those of us who have no children pay the same taxes as people with ten kids in school.
When you buy a $10,000 HDTV you pay more in taxes than you do to buy celery, even though you used the same roads, the store is just as protected by the police, etc.
Fair? No, of course not. But fair is a hard thing to argue; some would say I benefit from having other people's kids in school. I know I'm glad they're not running around the neighborhood getting into trouble, for example.
So it doesn't particularly trouble me that taxes aren't usually proportional to use. But that creates a serious conflict when people say, "I shouldn't be forced to pay tax X because I don't use that service", which at the very least means higher taxes for those who do.
And in the limit case, what goes around comes around: fine, we'll exempt you from road taxes because you didn't drive to make that purchase. But now we're going to stop subsidizing the phone lines that your DSL comes over.
Or something like that. For all I know you have cable. But the point is that you shouldn't look too closely at the fairness of taxation, because your police protection and roads and schools are already subsidized by the rich and childless.
I'm not going to convince you, and I'm afraid I'm running late for an appointment. But if you're unhappy about your taxes, you'd be better off looking at how much the government spends. They collect too much taxes because they spend too much money. Solve that problem and your taxes will go down, no matter what you're buying.
I'd say that they're "enforcing existing taxes", since they already claim the right to tax sales, rather than raising taxes, but they're certainly planning to collect taxes that they weren't collecting before, on a thing that didn't really exist before.
But that's playing semantics, because you're right about the real issue: they're collecting more money because they're wasting what they're collecting. And sales taxes are the most regressive kind, because they tax what the poorest people buy.
Governments raise money to spend on roads, schools, and police with taxes. The money comes from somewhere; if you want those things you've got to pay for them. You may well be spending too much for what you're getting, but that's a separate issue.
The question here is, what do you tax? It's easiest to raise money by taking a piece of the money every time it moves. Tax the money when it gets paid to you. Tax them money when you pay for something.
You can also tax the stuff that doesn't move, like the property taxes on your house. Or you can "tax" for use: toll roads, for exampe. But nobody wants to pay for police on an as-needed basis, and we like the idea that everybody is guaranteed an education, even if they can't afford to pay for it.
The article is suggesting that there are sales happening that aren't being taxes. Most states already try to collect taxes on physical objects, even if they're sold over the Internet, though the rules vary from state to state. They're trying to both increase revenue and be fair. The states really hate it when people buy stuff over the Internet, because that means that the money is being sent to another state; not only do they lose tax revenue but it means in-state businesses suffer.
If you believe that they can tax stuff when it's sold, why not tax nontangible items? They already tax services; in most states you pay tax when the guy fixes your refrigerator.
It doesn't sound like an "internet" tax to me. They're just trying to make sure that the Internet isn't any different a place to make sales than local stores are.
I also do all those things. It's nice having a piece of software double-check my math. Actually, what I'd really like is something that says, "What forms do you have? Fill out the boxes here."
With a few exceptions (basis for stock transactions; charitable donations) everything you need to know is on those forms (1099, W2) unless you're doing something kind fancy. It's not that hard to do it by hand, but I like the surety that comes from spending $30 on a piece of software. Not to mention that the state forms then become trivial, since you've already entered everything.
The rumor I've heard is that Vin Diesel asked what actor he wanted to work with, and he said Judi Dench. I can only imagine that she did it for laughs. I heard Diesel DM'd a D&D game for Dench and she had a good time. She's one of the most brilliant Shakespearean actors of the age; I'd give my left nut to work with her and she's working with The Pacifier.
The question is not whether we can change the way music is distributed, but whether people will change what they want to listen to. If ClearChannel is pushing pablum, it's because their listener surveys tell them that listeners want to hear pablum.
Can we get listeners interested in music which isn't shoved down their throats? I dunno. The numbers suggest that at least some people are bailing on radio and RIAA-marketed CDs, and I doubt all of them are leaving for Kazaa.
I don't expect people to start listening to challenging music any more than I expect them to skip Vin Diesel's latest movie and come see my production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. I'm not putting Diesel out of business, and he's not coming after me. There's a faint chance that my awesome talent will get Judi Dench interested in performing with me, but I wouldn't take out a second mortgage for that bet.
Still, I love doing it, and I'm reconciled that I never will change the taste of more than a few dozen people. Maybe you, me, the grandparent poster, and your buddy can all improve the world's collective taste. You take out the second mortgage.
The subject line is facetious; I listed to a couple of tracks and they sounded pretty good. If you were playing my local club I wouldn't suddenly feel compelled to go outside for a smoke.
But I wouldn't call the marketing machine a BFD. It's the difference between you doing this for kicks on evenings and weekends and becoming a multi-zillionaire, making videos, playing stadiums, getting a heroin habit, and eventually your own biography on E!.
Seriously, it's a matter of to-each-his-own. You wanna make music, go for it. You don't care about the RIAA, and they don't give a rat's ass about you. But it appears that an awful lot of people listen to the marketing, and buy the music. They get rich; you get to have a day job.
Yeah, most of 'em lose. I'm in the same boat: I'm a part-time actor and I don't want to participate in the Hollywood machine that could make me famous and give me all the parts I want (.0001%) or suck my soul and leave me waiting tables (99.9999%). But Vin Diesel gets to work with Judi Dench and I played a house with 4 people the other night.
So don't dis the marketing machine. It's not that they'll come down on you. They'll do worse: they'll ignore you. If you like it that way, more power to ya.
Me? I like club music in clubs. No matter how good a band is it doesn't have any energy on a stereo, no matter how much you spend on it. So if you make it to Nation in DC, I'll see ya. If not, keep on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I had mod points all weekend and they expired just this morning. What a frickin' shame; you've been modded down entirely unfairly.
Not that I agree with you completely. I wouldn't call the Iliad "not that good". Too long, arguably, but if it's chanted at you by an expert in the original Greek, it's rapturous. Not that I'm expecting that, but the point is that an English translation is a different thing from the original.
It's pretentious only if you're reading one of the cruddy Victorian translations, which most people do. The story can be very exciting if translated well. There are a few good new ones I like much better.
I think a movie based on the Iliad could potentially be very interesting. But you're right that this isn't that movie. Me, I liked Troy. It had great performances by Bana, Pitt, and especially O'Toole, and some nice historical nods to those who have read the Iliad.
Sorry about your karma.
Yep. If you have the issue you can look inside and see me. I'm on the far left of the picture looking pretty blurry, partly because I'm well behind the focus and partly because I'd just run 23 miles.
Well, lessee. Most of the rewards programs offer you something like 1% back. (Amazon offers 5% on their own stuff and 1% on everything else.)
So a $300 iPod comes free after $30,000 worth of merchandise.
Personally, that's about two years for me. I put everything through my credit card, partly for the 1% but mostly for the convenience of not carrying cash (as well as the convenience of having the authorities know where I am, what I purchase, what sort of porn I like, etc.)
The card I use now offers me options: I can either have cash or the exact same amount in restaurant gift cards. What kind of a dope do they think I am?
When I started the program they just stuck a yearly rebate on the bill, which was great. Now I have to request it. But I have to wonder what would happen if they offered me, say, $100 in cash or $110 in restaurant gift cards. Who knows, I might actually take them up on that.
A brief explanation: in 1994 Oprah Winfry ran a marathon. A subsequent issue of Runner's World had an article on her. It had a photo of her, and humiliatingly, me. Humiliatingly, because I was behind her, and I looked like I had died three miles back. That was at mile 23; three miles later she beat me by six minutes.
I had saved the picture but didn't remember what issue it was. But I knew she was on the cover. The answer came on a page of past Runner's World covers.
I suspect I'm making this more scary rather than less. But damn, I'm beginning to forget how we knew anything before there was Google.
Perhaps you and I are searching for different things. I'm looking through my history at the last dozen or so requests to Google and in each case I found what I was looking for on the first page, often right at the top.
What was I looking for? "Founder sabermetrics". "french english dictionary". "oprah runner's world cover". "jprofiler". "hiroshima kilotons".
Kind of a diverse set of things, but they were rather specific. Often I'm looking for trivia, or a particular product. A little bit of convenient specificity and I find what I want. Perhaps the search-engine spammers aren't trying to spam the highly random stuff I'm looking for.
It doesn't always work, and I've been rebuffed in the past. But I use google two dozen times a day and I almost always get what I need.
To repeat less snarkily what a sibling post said, just because you cannot conceive a mechanism doesn't mean that none exists.
As a scientist your job is to examine the available data and come up with hypotheses. If the Belfast study suggests that homeopathy works, it's not your place to declare "but there's no spider venom in there!" It's your place to discover a new mechanism, or (much more likely) to find the flaw in the study.
Medicine in particular is full of places where we don't understand the mechanism, from aspirin to "complementary medicines" such as acupuncture. I'm actually a bit surprised acupuncture didn't make the list. The data in its favor is very strong, at least for some conditions, despite having almost no useful theory. (I've never had it myself, but the evidence is a lot more than anecdotal.) It makes a better candidate for the list than homeopathy, which is consistently slapped down by better evidence.
I'm fairly certain that the Belfast study will eventually be disproven, as so many others have. Homeopathy is rife with wishful thinking from its very creation in a silly theory that "like cures like" with zero scientific merit; the ludicrous-dilution factor is merely the cap on the silliness. Wishful thinking is a prime cause of poor scientific method.
But if you "don't get how they can claim that stuff like" this works, you don't get to point to your existing theory as proof. You have to point to data, because data trumps theory. If people replicate the Belfast study and the data gets more solid, it's your theory that goes, not the claims. I sure hope not, because it would force us to scrap a theory that's done some awesome work without giving us much of a pointer where the new theory list. But if I have to, I have to, because that's what science is.
Interesting difference of perspectives on the MP3 CD players. I'm thinking of the large installed base of CD-only CD players, and the cheap bottom-line portable CD players which I imagine are very common.
I know that most DVD players, and probably most rack-mount CD players, support MP3 CDs. As for car audio, which I suspect is what the great-grandparent poster had in mind, I can't say; I drive a 1992 car with a tape deck. I was under the impression most were CD-only, but I could be wrong.
They put the copy protection on there to keep from making copyright infringement too easy. It's their compromise; they didn't want to close the "CD hole" because too many people would want it, but the CD hole is too small to rip vast quantities of music and put them on the file sharing networks.
Which, unfortunately, means inconvenience for a minority of users like you. That's your problem: CD players are ubiquitous, and MP3 CD players are relatively rare. So they're hoping for a sweet spot where they keep illegal copyright infringement to a minimum (but not preventing it entirely, which would involve draconian measures) while allowing fairly wide (but not universal) use of the music you've bought.
Arguably this is a violation of your fair-use rights, but to give you your full fair use rights would allow other people to infringe the copyrights at will, which at the very least is unfair to you (since you pay for your music) and at worst is cause for them to shut down iTMS entirely. Then you'd have to go back to buying physical CDs, which is rather more of a hassle.
(Slashdotters, of course, know that any hole can be enlarged into an infinite hole. I'm surprised nobody has created a "CD RAMdisk" which iTunes will burn to then automatically re-rip it as MP3. Apple and the record companies are hoping that while enlargement of the hole is possible, relatively few people will do it.)
Whether it's the right compromise I cannot say. Certainly it takes only one copy of a song to make it onto P2P to make it universally accessible, so as long as they're selling CDs iTMS could be completely draconian and not change total file sharing one drop. I'm not trying to justify it; I'm merely trying to explain the tradeoffs in their minds that mean that you can't easily burn your MP3 CDs. Cold comfort, I guess.
The real answer for me is that it's just easier for me to eat breakfast over a $.25 newspaper than a $1,800 laptop computer. Coffee becomes less worrying.
Another answer I haven't seen mentioned in the other responses is resolution. A laptop screen runs at maybe 70 DPI; perhaps anti-aliasing runs that up to an equivalent of 90. A paper is printed at something more equivalent to 300 DPI, which makes the text a whole lot easier on the eyes.
I see this all the time in offices; people will take PDFs and print them out to read them once, because it's more comfortable. The waste of paper bugs me, but I agree that it's less pleasant to read something on the screen.
With Firefox I'll generally zoom the text up, but then fairly little of it fits on the screen at once and I'm constantly scrolling.
Pictures, on the other hand, are generally somewhat nicer on the screen. I'm not certain there are any more pixels, since the newspaper at least has the option of printing them very large, but the newspaper's 72 DPI screen and lack of color most of the time give an edge to the monitor over the paper.
Don't read too much into my phrasing of "renaming". I'm agreeing with you: copyright infringement is a different crime from theft.
But if you feel that copyright infringement isn't a crime at all, then there we part ways. The two aren't equivalent, but both are wrong.
The **AAs are playing ugly semantics as well, trying to play up the crime. I don't support them on that, but I understand it: they're trying to get people to recognize that this is an act that at least potentially costs them sales. (They're playing ugly games to exaggerate the numbers of those sales, but I believe it's greater than zero.)
The nature of the ownership of intellectual property is an interesting debate to have. But neither can I support the "if it's not nailed down it's mine" and "if I can break the copy protection it's not nailed down" theory, either.
I think we agree that in this case two wrongs don't make a right. The RIAA are bastards, filing blind lawsuits and literally risking lives (if not to the extent of death at least livelihoods).
She's going to hurt you for that.
It may take her years to track you down, but I assure you she'll stay alive for that. So, uh, thanks.
Stand with you on what precisely? Changing the name of the crime? Fine, it's "copyright infringement" and not "theft".
If your next step is to say that "copyright infringement" is not a crime, then "integrity" is not the word I'd use to describe your position. They're taking credit for something they didn't do, and violating the license to boot.
What punishment is appropriate is entirely open to debate (I'm not certain what an appropriate punishment for ordinary theft would be). I find that a far more interesting question than imagining that I can excuse the crime by renaming it.
The great thing about the Honda ad was that everything was balanced to within a hair's breadth. It came so close to failing (and did, numerous times), but held up gracefully, and that's what's so hypnotic about it. Not to mention the beautiful lines and clear photography; in this I couldn't even tell what was happening half the time.
Kudos to these guys for all the work, and I suppose it was worth the 54 seconds it took to watch it, but let's keep some perspective. At the mall I can get a similar show for 25 cents and I get a gumball at the end.
A friend of mine really did put off suicide until she knew how Star Wars turned out (we're talking about the original three movies.)
Boy, did Jedi piss her off.
Despite my support for it in the grandparent post, I'm still extremely torn about Big Science projects. For $100 million you could support a fifty thousand grad students for a year, and grad students are the bedrock of science. Or you could support ten thousand grad students to their PhDs.
And while I'm a huge fan of the Big Questions that the Hubble helps answer, those are questions we've been pursuing for five thousand years. They're not imperative, the way AIDS and cancer are. You'll learn more about human beings by funding digs in Ethiopia, or developing more advanced fMRIs to study human cognition. If we go another decade or two without a telescope in space, it seems a reasonable period to wait after all these centuries.
Your plan seems like a good one. Since it needs a deorbit module anyway, we could probably find a way to get a few extra years out of it with marginal costs.
It's too bad that they didn't think of the end-of-life in the first place, except of course that it's more weight and cost, and they expected regular cheap servicing from the Shuttle when they designed it. I think that they actually expected to bring it back in the Shuttle as a souvenir. Too bad that turned out to be more Big Science with a smaller-than-hoped payoff.
I really like having Ms. Mikulski as senator, and I've voted for her each time she's been elected, but I should point out that the reason that she's pushing this isn't that she cares about getting hi-res pictures of aliens. The Space Telescope Science Institute is in Baltimore, MD, her home state, as well as NASA's Goddard facility.
That's what representatives of any sort do: they fight for their local interests. If they didn't do that, the voters would elect somebody who did. Unfortunately, without a fixed budget cap, that generally means deals of the form "You vote for my thing, so I'll vote for your thing, and the only one who loses is the guy who eventually has to pay off the debt."
So while I like Ms. Mikulski, and I support the "measly" few dozens of millions of dollars it would take to keep getting great science from Hubble, I thought a bit of disclosure would be appropriate.
Google computes PageRank partly by counting the number of pages pointing in to yours. It may be that they could throw a web page you suggest into the mix, but unless somebody else acknowledges it first, it come up with a very low score. So it may simply not come up in their algorithm if they haven't spidered to it.
That theory may be dumb; if you've got a page with a highly distinctive keyword on it, it should come up when you type in that keyword no matter what.
Taxation is like pricing. It's not proportional to what it costs to make; it's proportional to what they can get.
Taxation is rarely "fair" in the sense that you pay for exactly what you get. Generally, the rich pay more absolutely and as a percentage more of their income. They get the same police protection, drive the same roads, and their kids go to the same schools. Those of us who have no children pay the same taxes as people with ten kids in school.
When you buy a $10,000 HDTV you pay more in taxes than you do to buy celery, even though you used the same roads, the store is just as protected by the police, etc.
Fair? No, of course not. But fair is a hard thing to argue; some would say I benefit from having other people's kids in school. I know I'm glad they're not running around the neighborhood getting into trouble, for example.
So it doesn't particularly trouble me that taxes aren't usually proportional to use. But that creates a serious conflict when people say, "I shouldn't be forced to pay tax X because I don't use that service", which at the very least means higher taxes for those who do.
And in the limit case, what goes around comes around: fine, we'll exempt you from road taxes because you didn't drive to make that purchase. But now we're going to stop subsidizing the phone lines that your DSL comes over.
Or something like that. For all I know you have cable. But the point is that you shouldn't look too closely at the fairness of taxation, because your police protection and roads and schools are already subsidized by the rich and childless.
I'm not going to convince you, and I'm afraid I'm running late for an appointment. But if you're unhappy about your taxes, you'd be better off looking at how much the government spends. They collect too much taxes because they spend too much money. Solve that problem and your taxes will go down, no matter what you're buying.
I'd say that they're "enforcing existing taxes", since they already claim the right to tax sales, rather than raising taxes, but they're certainly planning to collect taxes that they weren't collecting before, on a thing that didn't really exist before.
But that's playing semantics, because you're right about the real issue: they're collecting more money because they're wasting what they're collecting. And sales taxes are the most regressive kind, because they tax what the poorest people buy.
Governments raise money to spend on roads, schools, and police with taxes. The money comes from somewhere; if you want those things you've got to pay for them. You may well be spending too much for what you're getting, but that's a separate issue.
The question here is, what do you tax? It's easiest to raise money by taking a piece of the money every time it moves. Tax the money when it gets paid to you. Tax them money when you pay for something.
You can also tax the stuff that doesn't move, like the property taxes on your house. Or you can "tax" for use: toll roads, for exampe. But nobody wants to pay for police on an as-needed basis, and we like the idea that everybody is guaranteed an education, even if they can't afford to pay for it.
The article is suggesting that there are sales happening that aren't being taxes. Most states already try to collect taxes on physical objects, even if they're sold over the Internet, though the rules vary from state to state. They're trying to both increase revenue and be fair. The states really hate it when people buy stuff over the Internet, because that means that the money is being sent to another state; not only do they lose tax revenue but it means in-state businesses suffer.
If you believe that they can tax stuff when it's sold, why not tax nontangible items? They already tax services; in most states you pay tax when the guy fixes your refrigerator.
It doesn't sound like an "internet" tax to me. They're just trying to make sure that the Internet isn't any different a place to make sales than local stores are.
I also do all those things. It's nice having a piece of software double-check my math. Actually, what I'd really like is something that says, "What forms do you have? Fill out the boxes here."
With a few exceptions (basis for stock transactions; charitable donations) everything you need to know is on those forms (1099, W2) unless you're doing something kind fancy. It's not that hard to do it by hand, but I like the surety that comes from spending $30 on a piece of software. Not to mention that the state forms then become trivial, since you've already entered everything.
No, wait, that's for frisbees. They're not going anywhere.
(Yeah, I know Discraft makes "flying disks" and "frisbee" is a name brand. It's funnier the way I wrote it.)
The rumor I've heard is that Vin Diesel asked what actor he wanted to work with, and he said Judi Dench. I can only imagine that she did it for laughs. I heard Diesel DM'd a D&D game for Dench and she had a good time. She's one of the most brilliant Shakespearean actors of the age; I'd give my left nut to work with her and she's working with The Pacifier.
The question is not whether we can change the way music is distributed, but whether people will change what they want to listen to. If ClearChannel is pushing pablum, it's because their listener surveys tell them that listeners want to hear pablum.
Can we get listeners interested in music which isn't shoved down their throats? I dunno. The numbers suggest that at least some people are bailing on radio and RIAA-marketed CDs, and I doubt all of them are leaving for Kazaa.
I don't expect people to start listening to challenging music any more than I expect them to skip Vin Diesel's latest movie and come see my production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. I'm not putting Diesel out of business, and he's not coming after me. There's a faint chance that my awesome talent will get Judi Dench interested in performing with me, but I wouldn't take out a second mortgage for that bet.
Still, I love doing it, and I'm reconciled that I never will change the taste of more than a few dozen people. Maybe you, me, the grandparent poster, and your buddy can all improve the world's collective taste. You take out the second mortgage.
The subject line is facetious; I listed to a couple of tracks and they sounded pretty good. If you were playing my local club I wouldn't suddenly feel compelled to go outside for a smoke.
But I wouldn't call the marketing machine a BFD. It's the difference between you doing this for kicks on evenings and weekends and becoming a multi-zillionaire, making videos, playing stadiums, getting a heroin habit, and eventually your own biography on E!.
Seriously, it's a matter of to-each-his-own. You wanna make music, go for it. You don't care about the RIAA, and they don't give a rat's ass about you. But it appears that an awful lot of people listen to the marketing, and buy the music. They get rich; you get to have a day job.
Yeah, most of 'em lose. I'm in the same boat: I'm a part-time actor and I don't want to participate in the Hollywood machine that could make me famous and give me all the parts I want (.0001%) or suck my soul and leave me waiting tables (99.9999%). But Vin Diesel gets to work with Judi Dench and I played a house with 4 people the other night.
So don't dis the marketing machine. It's not that they'll come down on you. They'll do worse: they'll ignore you. If you like it that way, more power to ya.
Me? I like club music in clubs. No matter how good a band is it doesn't have any energy on a stereo, no matter how much you spend on it. So if you make it to Nation in DC, I'll see ya. If not, keep on it.