Nope. I'm willing to skip reading the article (and refrain from passing judgment) because my time is limited and I've got better things to do.
Is there some bit of insight buried in the article? Or is my reasonably obvious conclusion that a liberal-baiting headline tops a bunch of liberal-baiting paragraphs, devoid of anything but partisan nonsense?
Right now I'm deferring any judgment except to not read it. But if you'd like to confirm that it's partisan BS, go ahead.
Actually, you're the one judging people (me) based on a small amount of information.
I wasn't judging any people. I was judging the article. If you'd care to demonstrate that my snap judgment was wrong, go ahead. Or did I waste my time reading your response as well?
That's my impression as well. They still do a good job of reporting the real news, but are completely insane on the opinion pages.
Not entirely unlike Fox News, in fact, which really does deliver only somewhat slanted news on the pure news shows but are frothingly deranged on the opinion shows. WSJ seems to do a better job of keeping it from spilling over, while Fox News viewers who believe that they're genuinely separate are deluded.
I look at the link and I think, "Gosh, is the Wall Street Journal capable of delivering an objective opinion on this? They do, after all, have a stake in the issue."
So I click through, and there's the sub-head: "The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations."
Technically, I have to actually read the article to come up with an opinion. But I had a chili dog for lunch, and I don't need to be nauseated any further. I might even agree with the article's conclusion, but I doubt I'll find the reasoning sound.
I can't get too enthused about a prototype of something that might one day lead to another prototype, "up to ten years away".
But the article in the sidebar titled "Breakthrough raises possibility of genetic children for same-sex couples" is at least amusingly illustrated with a picture of Bert and Ernie.
the whole rest of the world, over whom you have no influence, social or direct.
And that's just it: you have no influence, nor they over you. In a sense, your underwear is more private on Google Street View than it is on the street. The people who see the underwear on the street are your friends and neighbors. You'll interact with them after they've seen your underwear.
The imagined voyeurs are on Google Street View might in fact be real people, but you don't know them and will never meet them. In fact, the odds are that they don't even exist; the world is a very, very big place and it's got no particular interest in your middle-of-nowhere.
If she'd become the target of some sort of stalker, or if some juvenile web site put up a "look at the giant underwear, hur hur" page, she might have a case against them. And in doing so she might take a swipe at Google, which has deeper pockets, though her odds of success are pretty low. In taking a preemptive swipe against Google, though, and subjecting herself to the Streisand Effect, she looks either money-grubbing or obsessive. Neither of those is going to engender much sympathy.
I'd like to think so, and I'm sure it happens, but it doesn't produce day-job-quitting revenue.
A decent band produces only a few genuinely good singles a year, and the cost is surprisingly high. It costs at least $1,000 in studio time, and often ten times that much. But even at the low end, if you manage to get your listeners to contribute an average of a dime apiece, you've got to have a small stadium full of followers before you've even paid off the producer. That's a lot closer to the hump side of the long tail.
If you want to make minimum wage at it, you're talking about having 25,000 or more followers willing to contribute as much as a dime. (It's more likely 1 person contributing a buck per song and 9 more just listening.)
Getting 25,000 fans isn't something that happens by word of mouth, at least not very often. Segmentation to find your niche is great, but the long tail is VERY long, and VERY segmented.
The new media have been very good for bands who play for the love of it, and that's been great for those (few) listeners who seek out what they want rather than having their tastes handed to them. But even the pending, unlamented demise of the RIAA isn't going to create any sudden flood of openings for career musicians.
Those numbers sound about right. But I can show you literally hundreds of very, very good bands who would happily sell their musical souls for $40k. You get bands like Radiohead who get to give away their music after that, because the studio did the heavy lifting of making them famous, something they couldn't do on their own no matter how good.
The situation with the writers is different. You're right that there's no merch market for the writers, but they don't end up in the same kind of indentured servitude because the expenses aren't quite so high. They're a lot higher than you might expect, what with copy editors and reviewers and such, but those people are less expensive than producers and engineers, and they work on $1k computers rather than in million-dollar studios.
So in the end the writer gets a pretty slim cut (about 10-15%), but the publisher eats most of those (comparatively slim) up-front costs.
Is it? Or is it just managing to avoid an argument by saying essentially nothing at all?
Maybe it's just a matter of different scale calibration, but a victory of that kind isn't worth the time I'd be spending on it. I'd rather just be silent. It's boring, but I'd take boring over the results of pushing the "crazy" button. And you ALWAYS end up pushing the crazy button sooner or later, unless you avoid the topic altogether.
(Or maybe you're just better at this game than I am.)
Wthout it you are condemned to obscurity or nearly.
And WITH it, you're condemned to obscurity or nearly. The number of artists who can support themselves from the income they get that way is tiny. Practically all have Real Jobs.
I didn't say you don't get great music out of it. There's lots and lots and lots of great music. So much that people aren't willing to pay terribly much for it.
I'm also not defending the RIAA's practices. I think they're horrible, and I'm glad they're dying. I'm just saying that independent artists aren't about to move in to take their place, at least not the place of making a living off their art.
As a cafe owner can attest that BMI and ASCAP make it almost impossible to play indie acts.
Most venues in my area pay the fees. I've found that the problem there isn't the fees, but the fact that customers prefer to listen to the stuff you have to pay fees for. The bars prefer cover bands: the music is tried and true, if bland.
Cafes can do better, but even if an artist plays mostly their own work, they've got to have at least some standards in the set list. It makes the set list more varied.
Which is why BMI and ASCAP are so anal about it; they know their music is being played. The fact that the lawyers are a*******s about it... well, yeah, that's a different issue. You're right that it does add an extra cost to having live music.
Get into what game? The RIAA's game is dying (and good riddance).
Indie artists don't need an association. What would it do? What indie artists need is fewer indie artists, or rather, a mechanism for people to find them among all the vast numbers of other indie artists.
Such things exist, like last.fm, though they'll always lack to "I wanna listen because everybody else is listening" factor that made the RIAA's promotions hot (and so boring).
What exactly did Apple do to mp3.com? Indie artists are welcome to make their music available through any mechanism they like: youtube, myspace, facebook, etc.
Or rather, they're welcome to sit in obscurity in any way they like. The RIAA is NOT a music industry. It's a promotions industry. They exist to make music famous, a process which costs a vast sum of money. And until relatively recently, it was a profitable business model, which never went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
If they've managed to take hold of the most famous platform for music, that's just what they do. But opening it more for indies isn't going to make them famous, which is what they crave. They can be ignored in iTunes with equal vigor to the way they've been ignored on youtube (and, for that matter, in bars and cafes) for a long time.
The Long Tail is a dream sold to small artists. The technology means that they've been able to raise their income from "nothing" to "next to nothing". Because the thing to remember about the Long Tail is that it's very, very, very long, and you're sitting out there somewhere in the middle of it. You wanna sit on the bigger hump, you spend money to do it. A _lot_ of money.
The independent market never "thrived". The artists were, statistically speaking, all starving. Even some extraordinarily talented ones making great music.
Technological change may be able to kill off the RIAA's fame-producing industry, but it's not like indie artists are in some sort of close second place raring to take over first.
Any idea why the Russian criminals waited this long to attack Spamhaus? They've been enemies the whole time. I assume Spamhaus has always had mighty powerful anti-DDoS tools.
Perhaps they're redirecting some of their spam power to the DDoS instead, using the Wikileaks story as some kind of cover for that. (Though I don't really get it; they don't need it.) I wonder if that would show up as a drop in spam traffic, though unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to use Spamhaus to measure that.
Ah. I was wondering why Spamhaus would bother having an opinion. Answer: if you get your Wikileaks download from the dot-info site, it might be malware infested, because everything else from that domain is. Go download it from somewhere else.
It would be helpful if Wikileaks were to at least put up hashes of the downloads. That would make it abundantly clear if the dot-info site were including malware. But I suppose they've got other things to worry about.
Those tables were based on a geocentric theory of the universe. The earth stood still, and the sun and stars moved around it. They did a fair bit of 3D trig, in a coordinate system with the center of the earth at 0,0,0.
Suicide terrorism is inherently linked to having forces on the ground where they aren't wanted.
You mean like in Sweden?
I'm all for cutting back the egregious growth of the US military, but terrorism isn't caused by US military bases. They're an excuse, and if we deny them that excuse, there will be other excuses. Removing some of the forces is probably for the best, as it's ruinously expensive, but it's not going to cut terrorism back by a whit.
Which means, incidentally, that the trailing off of "fuck" at the beginning of the 19th century IS very interesting, for a different reason. It's watching the tail end of the use of the medial "s".
That's the kind of data that would have been really hard to gather any other way, unless the OCR were to distinguish between medial "s" and regular "s" in its results. There IS a Unicode for medial S, but most OCR doesn't go there.
So, we have a proxy for it: "suck" scanned as "fuck", which wouldn't otherwise appear very often. I should write a paper on it. Wouldn't "Use of 'Fuck' as a proxy for medial S" look great on my CV?
There may have been some format change that makes 1963 special, or it may be that their records start there. But I doubt that's the only mention of Slashdot on the Economist, so I suspect it's just that one issue that's misdated.
(A search at The Economist turns up two hits, both from 1999, but from different issues. I'm surprised that there isn't something more recent than that, and I suspect their search is flaky. Neither one is the article that the Google search turned up, which must be after 1999 since it mentions Google pacing ads on other sites.)
Most of the actual hits there appear to be OCR-os for the word "suck" and "such", often due to the use of medial "s" that resembles an "f". The word "such" appeared on a page which was badly speckled.
Given that the word "suck" was often used in the expression "to give suck", many of those pages are quite hilarious ("she would not suffer the strange lamb to fuck"). I didn't see any actual "fucks" in the first few pages of hits.
I know that the word was known. Shakespeare made a sly reference to it in Merry Wives of Windsor. But I suspect it wasn't often set down on paper, at least not in the kinds of books that got preserved.
The story resonates with me in particular. I'm in need of a new TV, and I know it's the sort of thing that I really need to see.
My price range is lower, but I'm still uncomfortable with buying it based on reviews alone. I may pay a substantial markup in order to have a knowledgeable salesmen show me the options so I can separate things that matter from those that don't. (I'm finding the reviews bewildering, which may simply mean that I should just buy whatever's cheapest.)
It's probably a corner case, though a car is an even bigger example. You really MUST drive it to know what you like, and it's a major expense. To go to a dealer, do the test drive, and then buy online... that would be perfectly legal and decidedly underhanded. I could do the same with the TV, and if I don't, it's just my conscience.
The downside to Amazon is that you don't get to examine the merchandise. The scariest case for a merchant is that they spend a huge some of money on a retail space and knowledgeable employees to convince you to buy, but the actual profit goes to Amazon. Or to the big-box store with an unpleasant shopping environment and minimum-wage drones that make less impact on the actual sale itself.
The $1,500 markup is an extreme case, but it's hard to say what a "reasonable" profit is. If the markup had been $500, they may have been making only marginal profits. You're clearly talking about a very high-end product, of which they sell only a few per month. It's not difficult for rent in a highly-visible place to run $10,000 a month. Real salesmen cost more than minimum-wage drones. $500 markup could be just breaking even.
I haven't got an answer. I can just point out the implicit contract: they agree to keep profits reasonable, and customers agree to buy where they shop. Customers may not be accurately about to judge the former part, and so feel free to break the latter. The net result is no store at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. I'm willing to skip reading the article (and refrain from passing judgment) because my time is limited and I've got better things to do.
Is there some bit of insight buried in the article? Or is my reasonably obvious conclusion that a liberal-baiting headline tops a bunch of liberal-baiting paragraphs, devoid of anything but partisan nonsense?
Right now I'm deferring any judgment except to not read it. But if you'd like to confirm that it's partisan BS, go ahead.
More like "too stupid;dr". But it's not as catchy.
Actually, you're the one judging people (me) based on a small amount of information.
I wasn't judging any people. I was judging the article. If you'd care to demonstrate that my snap judgment was wrong, go ahead. Or did I waste my time reading your response as well?
That's my impression as well. They still do a good job of reporting the real news, but are completely insane on the opinion pages.
Not entirely unlike Fox News, in fact, which really does deliver only somewhat slanted news on the pure news shows but are frothingly deranged on the opinion shows. WSJ seems to do a better job of keeping it from spilling over, while Fox News viewers who believe that they're genuinely separate are deluded.
I look at the link and I think, "Gosh, is the Wall Street Journal capable of delivering an objective opinion on this? They do, after all, have a stake in the issue."
So I click through, and there's the sub-head: "The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations."
Technically, I have to actually read the article to come up with an opinion. But I had a chili dog for lunch, and I don't need to be nauseated any further. I might even agree with the article's conclusion, but I doubt I'll find the reasoning sound.
I can't get too enthused about a prototype of something that might one day lead to another prototype, "up to ten years away".
But the article in the sidebar titled "Breakthrough raises possibility of genetic children for same-sex couples" is at least amusingly illustrated with a picture of Bert and Ernie.
the whole rest of the world, over whom you have no influence, social or direct.
And that's just it: you have no influence, nor they over you. In a sense, your underwear is more private on Google Street View than it is on the street. The people who see the underwear on the street are your friends and neighbors. You'll interact with them after they've seen your underwear.
The imagined voyeurs are on Google Street View might in fact be real people, but you don't know them and will never meet them. In fact, the odds are that they don't even exist; the world is a very, very big place and it's got no particular interest in your middle-of-nowhere.
If she'd become the target of some sort of stalker, or if some juvenile web site put up a "look at the giant underwear, hur hur" page, she might have a case against them. And in doing so she might take a swipe at Google, which has deeper pockets, though her odds of success are pretty low. In taking a preemptive swipe against Google, though, and subjecting herself to the Streisand Effect, she looks either money-grubbing or obsessive. Neither of those is going to engender much sympathy.
I'd like to think so, and I'm sure it happens, but it doesn't produce day-job-quitting revenue.
A decent band produces only a few genuinely good singles a year, and the cost is surprisingly high. It costs at least $1,000 in studio time, and often ten times that much. But even at the low end, if you manage to get your listeners to contribute an average of a dime apiece, you've got to have a small stadium full of followers before you've even paid off the producer. That's a lot closer to the hump side of the long tail.
If you want to make minimum wage at it, you're talking about having 25,000 or more followers willing to contribute as much as a dime. (It's more likely 1 person contributing a buck per song and 9 more just listening.)
Getting 25,000 fans isn't something that happens by word of mouth, at least not very often. Segmentation to find your niche is great, but the long tail is VERY long, and VERY segmented.
The new media have been very good for bands who play for the love of it, and that's been great for those (few) listeners who seek out what they want rather than having their tastes handed to them. But even the pending, unlamented demise of the RIAA isn't going to create any sudden flood of openings for career musicians.
Those numbers sound about right. But I can show you literally hundreds of very, very good bands who would happily sell their musical souls for $40k. You get bands like Radiohead who get to give away their music after that, because the studio did the heavy lifting of making them famous, something they couldn't do on their own no matter how good.
The situation with the writers is different. You're right that there's no merch market for the writers, but they don't end up in the same kind of indentured servitude because the expenses aren't quite so high. They're a lot higher than you might expect, what with copy editors and reviewers and such, but those people are less expensive than producers and engineers, and they work on $1k computers rather than in million-dollar studios.
So in the end the writer gets a pretty slim cut (about 10-15%), but the publisher eats most of those (comparatively slim) up-front costs.
It's a *conversation* instead of an argument.
Is it? Or is it just managing to avoid an argument by saying essentially nothing at all?
Maybe it's just a matter of different scale calibration, but a victory of that kind isn't worth the time I'd be spending on it. I'd rather just be silent. It's boring, but I'd take boring over the results of pushing the "crazy" button. And you ALWAYS end up pushing the crazy button sooner or later, unless you avoid the topic altogether.
(Or maybe you're just better at this game than I am.)
Wthout it you are condemned to obscurity or nearly.
And WITH it, you're condemned to obscurity or nearly. The number of artists who can support themselves from the income they get that way is tiny. Practically all have Real Jobs.
I didn't say you don't get great music out of it. There's lots and lots and lots of great music. So much that people aren't willing to pay terribly much for it.
I'm also not defending the RIAA's practices. I think they're horrible, and I'm glad they're dying. I'm just saying that independent artists aren't about to move in to take their place, at least not the place of making a living off their art.
As a cafe owner can attest that BMI and ASCAP make it almost impossible to play indie acts.
Most venues in my area pay the fees. I've found that the problem there isn't the fees, but the fact that customers prefer to listen to the stuff you have to pay fees for. The bars prefer cover bands: the music is tried and true, if bland.
Cafes can do better, but even if an artist plays mostly their own work, they've got to have at least some standards in the set list. It makes the set list more varied.
Which is why BMI and ASCAP are so anal about it; they know their music is being played. The fact that the lawyers are a*******s about it... well, yeah, that's a different issue. You're right that it does add an extra cost to having live music.
Get into what game? The RIAA's game is dying (and good riddance).
Indie artists don't need an association. What would it do? What indie artists need is fewer indie artists, or rather, a mechanism for people to find them among all the vast numbers of other indie artists.
Such things exist, like last.fm, though they'll always lack to "I wanna listen because everybody else is listening" factor that made the RIAA's promotions hot (and so boring).
What exactly did Apple do to mp3.com? Indie artists are welcome to make their music available through any mechanism they like: youtube, myspace, facebook, etc.
Or rather, they're welcome to sit in obscurity in any way they like. The RIAA is NOT a music industry. It's a promotions industry. They exist to make music famous, a process which costs a vast sum of money. And until relatively recently, it was a profitable business model, which never went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
If they've managed to take hold of the most famous platform for music, that's just what they do. But opening it more for indies isn't going to make them famous, which is what they crave. They can be ignored in iTunes with equal vigor to the way they've been ignored on youtube (and, for that matter, in bars and cafes) for a long time.
The Long Tail is a dream sold to small artists. The technology means that they've been able to raise their income from "nothing" to "next to nothing". Because the thing to remember about the Long Tail is that it's very, very, very long, and you're sitting out there somewhere in the middle of it. You wanna sit on the bigger hump, you spend money to do it. A _lot_ of money.
The independent market never "thrived". The artists were, statistically speaking, all starving. Even some extraordinarily talented ones making great music.
Technological change may be able to kill off the RIAA's fame-producing industry, but it's not like indie artists are in some sort of close second place raring to take over first.
Any idea why the Russian criminals waited this long to attack Spamhaus? They've been enemies the whole time. I assume Spamhaus has always had mighty powerful anti-DDoS tools.
Perhaps they're redirecting some of their spam power to the DDoS instead, using the Wikileaks story as some kind of cover for that. (Though I don't really get it; they don't need it.) I wonder if that would show up as a drop in spam traffic, though unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to use Spamhaus to measure that.
Ah. I was wondering why Spamhaus would bother having an opinion. Answer: if you get your Wikileaks download from the dot-info site, it might be malware infested, because everything else from that domain is. Go download it from somewhere else.
It would be helpful if Wikileaks were to at least put up hashes of the downloads. That would make it abundantly clear if the dot-info site were including malware. But I suppose they've got other things to worry about.
Those tables were based on a geocentric theory of the universe. The earth stood still, and the sun and stars moved around it. They did a fair bit of 3D trig, in a coordinate system with the center of the earth at 0,0,0.
Suicide terrorism is inherently linked to having forces on the ground where they aren't wanted.
You mean like in Sweden?
I'm all for cutting back the egregious growth of the US military, but terrorism isn't caused by US military bases. They're an excuse, and if we deny them that excuse, there will be other excuses. Removing some of the forces is probably for the best, as it's ruinously expensive, but it's not going to cut terrorism back by a whit.
Cutting one of those would fully fund the NSF budget, full stop.
Which means, incidentally, that the trailing off of "fuck" at the beginning of the 19th century IS very interesting, for a different reason. It's watching the tail end of the use of the medial "s".
That's the kind of data that would have been really hard to gather any other way, unless the OCR were to distinguish between medial "s" and regular "s" in its results. There IS a Unicode for medial S, but most OCR doesn't go there.
So, we have a proxy for it: "suck" scanned as "fuck", which wouldn't otherwise appear very often. I should write a paper on it. Wouldn't "Use of 'Fuck' as a proxy for medial S" look great on my CV?
The Economist dates to 1843.
There may have been some format change that makes 1963 special, or it may be that their records start there. But I doubt that's the only mention of Slashdot on the Economist, so I suspect it's just that one issue that's misdated.
(A search at The Economist turns up two hits, both from 1999, but from different issues. I'm surprised that there isn't something more recent than that, and I suspect their search is flaky. Neither one is the article that the Google search turned up, which must be after 1999 since it mentions Google pacing ads on other sites.)
Most of the actual hits there appear to be OCR-os for the word "suck" and "such", often due to the use of medial "s" that resembles an "f". The word "such" appeared on a page which was badly speckled.
Given that the word "suck" was often used in the expression "to give suck", many of those pages are quite hilarious ("she would not suffer the strange lamb to fuck"). I didn't see any actual "fucks" in the first few pages of hits.
I know that the word was known. Shakespeare made a sly reference to it in Merry Wives of Windsor. But I suspect it wasn't often set down on paper, at least not in the kinds of books that got preserved.
That is very, very odd. It appears to be in 1899:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=slashdot&year_start=1800&year_end=1960&corpus=0&smoothing=0
but a further search turns up zero results. If it were a OCR-o, it should at least show up.
There is another hit, labeled 1963:
http://books.google.com/books?id=x-O2AAAAIAAJ&q=%22slashdot%22&dq=%22slashdot%22&hl=en&ei=9bwLTaTADoet8Abf1qT7DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAA
but it's a badly mis-dated issue of The Economist. Not sure why it's the only one.
The story resonates with me in particular. I'm in need of a new TV, and I know it's the sort of thing that I really need to see.
My price range is lower, but I'm still uncomfortable with buying it based on reviews alone. I may pay a substantial markup in order to have a knowledgeable salesmen show me the options so I can separate things that matter from those that don't. (I'm finding the reviews bewildering, which may simply mean that I should just buy whatever's cheapest.)
It's probably a corner case, though a car is an even bigger example. You really MUST drive it to know what you like, and it's a major expense. To go to a dealer, do the test drive, and then buy online... that would be perfectly legal and decidedly underhanded. I could do the same with the TV, and if I don't, it's just my conscience.
Did you go to that store to look at the TV?
The downside to Amazon is that you don't get to examine the merchandise. The scariest case for a merchant is that they spend a huge some of money on a retail space and knowledgeable employees to convince you to buy, but the actual profit goes to Amazon. Or to the big-box store with an unpleasant shopping environment and minimum-wage drones that make less impact on the actual sale itself.
The $1,500 markup is an extreme case, but it's hard to say what a "reasonable" profit is. If the markup had been $500, they may have been making only marginal profits. You're clearly talking about a very high-end product, of which they sell only a few per month. It's not difficult for rent in a highly-visible place to run $10,000 a month. Real salesmen cost more than minimum-wage drones. $500 markup could be just breaking even.
I haven't got an answer. I can just point out the implicit contract: they agree to keep profits reasonable, and customers agree to buy where they shop. Customers may not be accurately about to judge the former part, and so feel free to break the latter. The net result is no store at all.