You're missing a very important part of what they do: they control access to retail channels. Brick & mortar stores (heh, that dates me) still account for the majority of album sales.
Want to get your CD in Wal-Mart, Target, or any other large meatspace retailer? You've got to play ball with the RIAA content cartel.
Honestly, I don't think it's really reasonably to label this strategy as unethical - we're looking at two groups of companies backing roughly equivalent (from the POV of most consumers) formats, struggling for a telling market share advantage, and PR campaigns are a perfectly legitimate way of doing this. The coin's got to fall one way or the other, and the indecision on the part of the market is costing more people than will lose out one one format wins. The longer this goes on, the more people will lose out by having bought into the losing format.
I think the vast majority of customers really don't care very much which format wins - we just want one of them to win before we'll commit. If one wins because of particularly clever PR campaign, then fine! At least less effort, time, and money will be wasted in this war that will benefit nobody but the winning group of companies.
There are two thing to remember here: one, we pay (in the US) $.35-$.50/g in taxes? It seems to me that tax money is going to still have to come from somewhere to maintain whatever it is that's maintained by the taxes (roads, politicians, land wars in asia, whatever) - $1.50/g (energy gasoline equivalence) production might mean $2ish/gallon (gas equiv) at the pumps for production and taxes.
Then, supply and demand is still an issue - until production of ethanol with this method is ramped way up ("you may think it's a long way to the chemist's," etc), it's still going to be liquid energy on the open market and competing with all of that corn ethanol that politicians have been subsidizing for expensive production to buy Iowa voters.
Still an incredibly good price, mind you, and great protection against oil-based instability in the long run, but it's not the "FREE MONEY AND BEER SOON!!" that some might think at first blush.
Why do people forget "cannon" when talking about 18th century arms in the context of the 2nd amendment?
Anybody with a decent sized iron working set up could make cannon and cannonballs. There were battles in the civil war that were started by farmers deciding to start lobbing cannonballs at the british - artillery was certainly held by private citizens in the early days of the republic.
The judge will just order you to provide the police with the pass phrase. Refuse and you'll be jailed for contempt of court until to hand it over.
That turns out not to be the case, at least not yet. It's not completely settled law yet, but it's certainly reasonable right now to take the stance that even when it's protecting material that the police may search, passwords are protected by your right against self incrimintation.
You're looking at it wrong. It's not Rutan who's the pioneer here, it's Branson.
The challenge in getting private passengers into space is not primarily a technical one - we know that if we throw enough money at mass, we can get that mass to orbit and back safely. What we don't know is that we can get a stream of big private money for joy-rides.
The challenge is a business and marketing one. Once Branson proves that he can get people off the street (very rich streets, but populated nonetheless) lining up to hand him bales of money to get into space for fun, it won't matter that orbital trips will use little-to-none of the technology that Scaled Composites is deploying for these suborbital trips. He will then be able to finance seriously big research - He'll have proven that people will drop a couple hundred kilobucks for a couple of hours in space - that is what we call a test marketing plan.
It's not exciting that SpaceShip Two is being tested and deployed, it's exciting that Virgin Galactic's business plan seems to be working.
The article claims to have proof it exists. In case you're not familiar with the US legal system - if nobody can prove a crime has been committed, nobody would go to jail. Well, assuming that nobody claims that they're "unlawful combatants" of course.
While that's true, the fraudulent response to the FOIA request is itself a notable issue.
Somebody needs to go to jail for that - the ability of citizens to keep tabs on their government is too critical to the functioning of our democracy for us to just shrug when that ability is circumvented.
MAJIKTHISE: We'll go on strike! VROOMFONDEL: That's right. You'll have a national philosopher's strike on your hands. DEEP THOUGHT:Who will that inconvenience? MAJIKTHISE: Never you mind who it'll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It'll hurt, buster! It'll hurt!
And again, we see Christians acting like anybody daring to challenge their beliefs is "intolerant" and then playing the victim. When they argue against other beliefs, that's not intolerance - that's just them excerising their right of speech.
In the USA they like to behave like the 76.5% majority of them, who dictate the entire context of our culture, are so persecuted. Nobody can get elected President unless they are willing to mouth the right platitudes that say, "I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ." Even the barely-different Romney (who believes in some silly stuff in addition to the standard Christian silly stuff) is having a hard time.
Here's a hint: you can't hold the reigns of power and complain about being a persecuted minority.
when you look at most religious people and the only way you can tell they have religion is their loud harping on evolution and abortion and hatred of homosexuals, atheists, and people who don't share their faith?
Come, now. It's not fair to judge 20-30 good apples on the basis of 70-80 bad apples.
It's really helpful to see these games not as music games, but rhythm games.
I'm a guitarist, but my rhythm sucks and metronomes are nearly useless to me. Playing Rock Band has already markedly improved my ability to stay on tempo - this thing is a metronome on steroids that will whack you when you get too far off beat. That's exactly what I need and short of a whole lot of expensive instructor time or being constantly mauled by disgusted band mates, I can't see any other way that I could have improved this quickly.
What I really want is very similar software that works with real instruments. And a version that allows you to simply suppress a track to allow someone on a real instrument to replace it. This software is really exciting to me, and that's before even starting to talk about how it makes "playing" together so accessible to such a wide range of people - my 65-year-old folk-loving mother who never was into the new-fangled "Rock and Roll" stuff has become an instant addict and while she was staying with my over Xmas was waking me up while practicing Nirvana, the Pixies, and Nine Inch Nails. She wants some Lynard Skynard CDs, too.
I take it none of your CDs are more than 5 years old? Several of my older CDs have deteriorated substantially,
This is highly variable, it seems. I have dozens of CDs that are older than 15 years old and only a couple Led Zeppelin ones (both Physical Graffiti CDs) deteriorated to where they couldn't play. The oldest, a 20-year-old pressing of Boston's Boston is just fine.
20 years ago, Carnegie Mellon's introduction to programming course was taught in Pascal, so upper level courses (all taught in languages like C and Lisp) had to start out by teaching real languages first.
What this really comes down to is people griping that they have to teach things that they wish somebody else had already taught students. Nothing to see here, move along.
Google is a business, Red Hat is a business, News Corp is a business too
This is a stupid rebuttal. Intel is a business that OLPC is undercutting. This is not true for any of the others.
This meltdown was caused specifically because an Intel salesperson (inevitably) found themself in conflict with OLPC's interests. In contrast, OLPC actually serves Google's, Red Hat's, and News Corp's corporate interests.
Lastly there is a third problem. There is a ton of air traffic already. I wonder how hard it would be to factor in large, slow vehicles into the aviation corridors without impacting takeoffs and landings of jets and prop based traffic.
As a general aviation pilot who has frequently flown in an area of Florida where blimps are not rare (north of Tampa: they are often in transit to events in Tampa, Miami, or Orlando), I have to say that this is not a big issue.
For air traffic, visibility is the number one issue: if the pilot can see something, it's trivial to avoid it. You have full use of three dimensions, after all, unlike roads that are barely more than one dimension. The other big issues for air traffic have to do with choke points around airstrips at commercial airports, but that's not an issue for airships.
Even small advertising blimps really stick out for many miles in decent weather (which is all that the blimps fly in anyway). In fact, it's a really cool experience to be flying in the same patch of sky as one, it's like swimming in the ocean near a docile whale.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing a very important part of what they do: they control access to retail channels. Brick & mortar stores (heh, that dates me) still account for the majority of album sales.
Want to get your CD in Wal-Mart, Target, or any other large meatspace retailer? You've got to play ball with the RIAA content cartel.
Honestly, I don't think it's really reasonably to label this strategy as unethical - we're looking at two groups of companies backing roughly equivalent (from the POV of most consumers) formats, struggling for a telling market share advantage, and PR campaigns are a perfectly legitimate way of doing this. The coin's got to fall one way or the other, and the indecision on the part of the market is costing more people than will lose out one one format wins. The longer this goes on, the more people will lose out by having bought into the losing format.
I think the vast majority of customers really don't care very much which format wins - we just want one of them to win before we'll commit. If one wins because of particularly clever PR campaign, then fine! At least less effort, time, and money will be wasted in this war that will benefit nobody but the winning group of companies.
There are two thing to remember here: one, we pay (in the US) $.35-$.50/g in taxes? It seems to me that tax money is going to still have to come from somewhere to maintain whatever it is that's maintained by the taxes (roads, politicians, land wars in asia, whatever) - $1.50/g (energy gasoline equivalence) production might mean $2ish/gallon (gas equiv) at the pumps for production and taxes.
Then, supply and demand is still an issue - until production of ethanol with this method is ramped way up ("you may think it's a long way to the chemist's," etc), it's still going to be liquid energy on the open market and competing with all of that corn ethanol that politicians have been subsidizing for expensive production to buy Iowa voters.
Still an incredibly good price, mind you, and great protection against oil-based instability in the long run, but it's not the "FREE MONEY AND BEER SOON!!" that some might think at first blush.
Nah, it was an early morning brain fart. I meant the Revolutionary War.
Why do people forget "cannon" when talking about 18th century arms in the context of the 2nd amendment?
Anybody with a decent sized iron working set up could make cannon and cannonballs. There were battles in the civil war that were started by farmers deciding to start lobbing cannonballs at the british - artillery was certainly held by private citizens in the early days of the republic.
You're looking at it wrong. It's not Rutan who's the pioneer here, it's Branson.
The challenge in getting private passengers into space is not primarily a technical one - we know that if we throw enough money at mass, we can get that mass to orbit and back safely. What we don't know is that we can get a stream of big private money for joy-rides.
The challenge is a business and marketing one. Once Branson proves that he can get people off the street (very rich streets, but populated nonetheless) lining up to hand him bales of money to get into space for fun, it won't matter that orbital trips will use little-to-none of the technology that Scaled Composites is deploying for these suborbital trips. He will then be able to finance seriously big research - He'll have proven that people will drop a couple hundred kilobucks for a couple of hours in space - that is what we call a test marketing plan.
It's not exciting that SpaceShip Two is being tested and deployed, it's exciting that Virgin Galactic's business plan seems to be working.
The article claims to have proof it exists. In case you're not familiar with the US legal system - if nobody can prove a crime has been committed, nobody would go to jail. Well, assuming that nobody claims that they're "unlawful combatants" of course.
While that's true, the fraudulent response to the FOIA request is itself a notable issue.
Somebody needs to go to jail for that - the ability of citizens to keep tabs on their government is too critical to the functioning of our democracy for us to just shrug when that ability is circumvented.
When trying to do science, it's good not be be burned at the stake by villagers with pitchforks.
As a result, a head count of one vote per pitchfork ahead of time is sometime wise.
MAJIKTHISE: We'll go on strike!
VROOMFONDEL: That's right. You'll have a national philosopher's strike on your hands.
DEEP THOUGHT:Who will that inconvenience?
MAJIKTHISE: Never you mind who it'll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It'll hurt, buster! It'll hurt!
And again, we see Christians acting like anybody daring to challenge their beliefs is "intolerant" and then playing the victim. When they argue against other beliefs, that's not intolerance - that's just them excerising their right of speech.
In the USA they like to behave like the 76.5% majority of them, who dictate the entire context of our culture, are so persecuted. Nobody can get elected President unless they are willing to mouth the right platitudes that say, "I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ." Even the barely-different Romney (who believes in some silly stuff in addition to the standard Christian silly stuff) is having a hard time.
Here's a hint: you can't hold the reigns of power and complain about being a persecuted minority.
I get the reference, but seriously: anybody who lives in the south of the US. Black cars become EasyBake ovens in the summer.
Just wanted to say - thank you for those quotes.
It's really helpful to see these games not as music games, but rhythm games.
I'm a guitarist, but my rhythm sucks and metronomes are nearly useless to me. Playing Rock Band has already markedly improved my ability to stay on tempo - this thing is a metronome on steroids that will whack you when you get too far off beat. That's exactly what I need and short of a whole lot of expensive instructor time or being constantly mauled by disgusted band mates, I can't see any other way that I could have improved this quickly.
What I really want is very similar software that works with real instruments. And a version that allows you to simply suppress a track to allow someone on a real instrument to replace it. This software is really exciting to me, and that's before even starting to talk about how it makes "playing" together so accessible to such a wide range of people - my 65-year-old folk-loving mother who never was into the new-fangled "Rock and Roll" stuff has become an instant addict and while she was staying with my over Xmas was waking me up while practicing Nirvana, the Pixies, and Nine Inch Nails. She wants some Lynard Skynard CDs, too.
Europe is 3.9 million sq mi.
The USA is 3.8 million sq mi.
20 years ago, Carnegie Mellon's introduction to programming course was taught in Pascal, so upper level courses (all taught in languages like C and Lisp) had to start out by teaching real languages first.
What this really comes down to is people griping that they have to teach things that they wish somebody else had already taught students. Nothing to see here, move along.
This meltdown was caused specifically because an Intel salesperson (inevitably) found themself in conflict with OLPC's interests. In contrast, OLPC actually serves Google's, Red Hat's, and News Corp's corporate interests.
Even small advertising blimps really stick out for many miles in decent weather (which is all that the blimps fly in anyway). In fact, it's a really cool experience to be flying in the same patch of sky as one, it's like swimming in the ocean near a docile whale.
Motorola licensed Apple's DRM in the ROKR in 2005.
Except in some people's conspiracy theories it was an unmitigated disaster so now Apple doesn't let other companies play.