Yeah the stadium filling acts have tour buses and roadies and groupies and all that, but the vast majority of performing musicians make enough money to stay alive and on the road, if they're lucky. But if you think about it, that's how it should be (should in a positive, not normative, sense.) The only reason we associate musicians with glamor, fame and stardom in the first place is owing to the strangehold that a few companies had on the means of production and distribution throughout the 20th century. Music was rationed and as is always the case with rationing, the price was driven artificially high.
Now that anyone is free to distribute their work at low cost, we're finding that there are lots and lots and lots of talented musicians out there who, in any other age, would have been laboring in obscurity. (Surely as a touring musician you will agree that this is true.) The new freedom to distribute music will increase our appetite for music, but I think to a larger extent it will increase the number of people who identify themselves as musicians. In other words, the amount of money spent on music will increase, but it will be spread around a much larger pool of people than ever before.
I view this as a good thing; we're entering a real golden age of music, probably unmatched in terms of ubiquity and creative outpouring since before the Enlightenment. As music becomes increasingly de-commoditized, those "stadium" acts seem like the last of a dying breed. In the future, we won't all have to listen to the same thing.
They own the copyright and can presumably to whatever they want. Certainly they won't waste time on the futile effort of trying to put the cat back in the bag--past source releases are out there for anyone to play with. But going forward, they don't have to release anything, and that will probably be enough to signal the death-knell for the open source version of the enterprise server. Typically with an open source "enterprise" app, the only people who know anything about what's going on in the code are under the employ of the company that wants to unfree it. It's very challenging and unrewarding for an outsider to try to pick up all the pieces and start where they left off, particularly since by definition the only people who are realizing incremental benefit are large enterprises making money off your free efforts. In that sense, I sympathize with companies who don't feel the pull of opening their enterprise applications. Why let some other capitalist make a buck off your hard work?
What wicked addition do you have in mind? It's hard to think of a way to improve on the current implementation. The downloads come in as fast as my pipe will allow, the network is sufficiently decentralized to the point where *AA are having zero success shutting it down, the protocol is robust to leechers/honeypots/deliberate munging of data, and even bandwidth throttling by the ISPs is becoming trivial to defeat through encryption. I mean really--what's left to accomplish?
What I really love about this is it wasn't "Regal Cinemas" zero-tolerance policy that nabbed this person, but rather that of some moron "assistant theater manager" making $35k who drank the corporate kool-aid and acted like taping was some sort of grave personal affront. Dontcha just love people like that? The company man act is so 1950s. Is this idiot getting some sort of performance bonus? (No.) WTF was it to him? It's not like her taping was going to make him late for his nightly WoW/porn session. Dweeb.
I challenge you to show me TSA safety rules for cars:-) Different departments: NHTSA is a DOT agency that sets crash standards for automobiles. TSA is a DHS agency that ruins your life every time you fly. Pedantry aside, this car looks almost identical to the Smart Car, which has been certified by NHTSA for import.
This is definitely not a car oriented towards commuting suburbanites. But nobody is claiming that. For zipping around the city though, I could see this being ideal for myself and a lot of my friends/coworkers. First, $13000 is pocket change to spend on a car in any major metropolitan area. By the time I finish writing this post, probably $2 million worth of expensive luxury import cars will have driven past my window. I don't know anyone who drives a car worth less than twice that amount. And of course, at that price, the car pays for itself in about six years with what you stop spending on gas (~$2000/yr per family.) And then there is the issue of parking--it looks like this car is about as long as others are wide, meaning you could virtually back in. In an age where people are paying $250k for a parking space, this could also be a big selling point.
Don't forget exercise! Portions are jacked and the hfcs thing is scary, but you can get away with a lot nutritionally if you get simply off your ass and burn if off. Go to Paris if you don't believe me, and take a gander at what these rail-thin middle aged women are able to pack away. It's really impressive. The corn syrup problem has a quick fix (stop tinkering with sugar tariffs) but portions are going to continue catering to the basest impulses of the hoi polloi. I think pushing exercise will be the only solution. And it's a social activity, no less.
Producing our own renewable energy costs more than pumping millions of years of accumulated energy out of the ground? Who knew?! And BTW if you priced in all the externalities associated with burning fossil fuels, it would be a lot closer to parity.
So in a way, this plane ends wars. The quicker you end a war, the fewer casualties are the result. This war machine is a life saver (especially our own!!) I would argue the exact opposite. Things like this start wars. The easier and more painless you make war, the greater is our tolerance for it. The only way the Iraq war was allowed to progress to the dismal state it's in today--indeed, to begin at all--was by virtue of a passive, contented electorate palliated by low taxes, cheap gas, and no wartime sacrifices demanded. Simply put, most of us have no stake at all in this war. We couldn't care less what is going on half a world away. This is what politicians really mean when they refer to the draft being "infeasible": if you were to suddenly interest a large portion of the country in our foreign policy adventures by putting their loved ones in harm's way, guess what! No more frivolous wars. In fact we probably wouldn't have fought any major conflicts since WWII. So the morals of this story are, 1) support a mandatory service requirement; and 2) be very weary of anything that turns war into a video game.
Yeap. I couldn't agree more. I just wish more people like you had been around before all those credulous schmucks lost their retirements during the GOOG crash.
Haha. You mean like it's the job of the head of the EPA to advocate for the environment? Or the job of the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect endangered species? Or the job of the US Attorneys to prosecute cases in a fair and nonpartisan manner? Or the job of the director of FEMA to respond to emergencies? (I'm not even going to bother linking to that one.)
I agree with you 100%--in fact, 120--but c'mon! Where was the outrage six years ago? This wolf-in-sheep's-clothes act has been going on since literally day one. It's partly gratifying to see people finally waking, but mostly just depressing and scary. Should things really have to sink this low before we start asking more from our leaders?
Lots of people complain about the fawning praise lavished on the iPhone by a credible press. Tom Dickson is the only person I have seen yet who was shrewd enough to co-opt this for his own gain. It's like he established a hype resonance field--taking all the iPhone puffery, squaring it, and making it his own. I'm guessing he didn't wait all night to score those two iPhones. He probably picked a couple up off eBay for two grand; that he's willing to blow half that on a 10-second video clip testifies to how much more he's getting in return.
Here here! It's rare I find someone else who shares this outlook, esp. in an online forum. I have way fewer friends than most people I know, and they're scattered literally across the globe. But we go back to high school in most cases. They're like family. I'd take a bullet for any of them. In a way it's bad, because I find myself hardly even making an effort to make new friends, being completely content with the ones I have now.
People who spend large amounts of time socializing through the computer just strike me as creepy. Even though that's most people so, hey, what does that say about me? I don't know:-)
Very true. IIRC the first "crack" to AACS was obtained by simply dumping the memory image of a working player and trying every key-length binary word inside it until they got a match. A lot less elegant than you might have thought but hey, whatever works.
G'luck with that, is all I have to say. Having once waded into the Samba codebase trying to ferret out a bug, I can't see them getting very far unless they manage to snipe one of the core developers. Samba is giant and the amount of resources needed to backport every bugfix (to say nothing of feature additions) and be at all subtle about it has got to exceed just accommodating the new license. And don't forget Samba 4 is on the way, so you lose ADS too if you want to fork 3. No, I think they'll either put up or shut up.
Have you been to the Pacific Islands? I lived there for a little while. There are thousands of them and the effects of a rise in sea level will vary greatly depending on where you are. But as little as a.2m rise could easily have a deleterious effect on a lot of people. There are many avenues by which this could occur, the "ocean swallowing the whole island" being perhaps the least likely. Waves are essentially just repeated draws from a probability distribution; if you alter the sea level, you will affect the mean. Flooding and erosion become slightly but measurably more likely. Even if an area is still "livable", regular flooding one more more times a year will often cause entire villages to pack up and move inland. Sometimes even one event is sometimes enough. The entire northeastern coast of Savaii became depopulated following Typhoon Ofa in 1990; fishers turned into farmers, and all the villages went uphill. Another problem is increased silting due to erosion, which will kill the fringing reefs and with them, a major source of food for many islanders.
But why speak hypothetically? This already happened two years ago in Vanuatu--Google "tegua"--and if you listen to the villagers who lived there, they paint a very consistent and lucid picture: flooding never occurred before the late 1980s. Within twenty years, the sea encroached 15m. Now, their homeland is unlivable. These people are leading indicators, and we would do well to heed their cries.
I'm an economist, so I know what you're talking about, and that argument seems real slippery to me. I want to believe what you are saying is true, because I myself have downloaded far more music than I ever would have bought for $16.99 an album. But OTOH I would pay $1, or even $5, for a lot of that stuff if forced. Who's to say what would happen in the counterfactual world where no IP infringement exists? Particularly with all these incredible gadgets nowadays that make music more enjoyable and portable than ever before. Would we really settle for listening to the same CDs over and over again on our iPods? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure we'd reorient our expenditures slightly and buy more music. So, yes, the idea that the demand for music is inelastic is pretty risible (did they really say that? I've never heard that claim.) It's not oil. But I think the people who go around assuaging their guilty consciences by telling themselves they wouldn't have bought it anyways are equally delusional.
The obvious thing would be so simply eliminate the optical drive. I use mine to install software and that's about it. Make it external and still satisfy the daily needs of 85-90% of your userbase.
A second idea, hinted at in a recent patent filing, is to make the access door on the bottom. If you eliminate the need for a side-mounted, slot loading drive, you free up a lot of precious real estate both in terms of thickness and what else you can now put on the side. Flipping over your laptop to change a CD sucks, sure, but again, how often are you doing this? For me it's like a couple times a week max.
Note that all these rumors point to an entirely new product, the "MacBook Thin", which would not be a revamp of the current low-end MacBook line. Sorry, you don't get all this cool new stuff for $999:-) More like twice that, based on the rumors.
Is there anyone out there besides me who couldn't care less about this thing? I guess I'm really barking up the wrong tree by asking this on Slashdot--maybe the library would be a better place--but I mean, jesus h christ people, it's just a phone. You call people with it. It sends e-mails, so you don't have to wait until you're at home or the office. Woop-de-doo. Oh, and you can read the NY Times on a slow, cramped web browser. I just totally don't see the point of it all, other than to close off the last few remaining channels of your life where you might have had some uninterrupted personal time to be alone with your thoughts.
I think the situation will closely mirror all other historical examples in advertising. Consumers start out intensely naive and susceptible to the most ridiculous, blatant pitches imaginable. Gradually their awareness increases, to the point where they become jaded and impervious to the traditional forms. This causes advertisers to refine their methods to become more subtle (think product placement or "QualComm Park".) We start hating those. Rinse, wash, and repeat.
The thought that search results could become tainted by commerce might seem surprising now, but in ten years everyone will just come to expect it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that anyone is free to distribute their work at low cost, we're finding that there are lots and lots and lots of talented musicians out there who, in any other age, would have been laboring in obscurity. (Surely as a touring musician you will agree that this is true.) The new freedom to distribute music will increase our appetite for music, but I think to a larger extent it will increase the number of people who identify themselves as musicians. In other words, the amount of money spent on music will increase, but it will be spread around a much larger pool of people than ever before.
I view this as a good thing; we're entering a real golden age of music, probably unmatched in terms of ubiquity and creative outpouring since before the Enlightenment. As music becomes increasingly de-commoditized, those "stadium" acts seem like the last of a dying breed. In the future, we won't all have to listen to the same thing.
They own the copyright and can presumably to whatever they want. Certainly they won't waste time on the futile effort of trying to put the cat back in the bag--past source releases are out there for anyone to play with. But going forward, they don't have to release anything, and that will probably be enough to signal the death-knell for the open source version of the enterprise server. Typically with an open source "enterprise" app, the only people who know anything about what's going on in the code are under the employ of the company that wants to unfree it. It's very challenging and unrewarding for an outsider to try to pick up all the pieces and start where they left off, particularly since by definition the only people who are realizing incremental benefit are large enterprises making money off your free efforts. In that sense, I sympathize with companies who don't feel the pull of opening their enterprise applications. Why let some other capitalist make a buck off your hard work?
What wicked addition do you have in mind? It's hard to think of a way to improve on the current implementation. The downloads come in as fast as my pipe will allow, the network is sufficiently decentralized to the point where *AA are having zero success shutting it down, the protocol is robust to leechers/honeypots/deliberate munging of data, and even bandwidth throttling by the ISPs is becoming trivial to defeat through encryption. I mean really--what's left to accomplish?
They didn't, until about a month ago, when the iPhone came out. Cancer and parking downtown were also solved. Hope you had a nice vacation.
LOL! You mean.. you mean to tell me that that was going to pass as a DefCon hacker? That is just a great end to my Friday.
The only thing surprising here was that they had to be tipped off.
What I really love about this is it wasn't "Regal Cinemas" zero-tolerance policy that nabbed this person, but rather that of some moron "assistant theater manager" making $35k who drank the corporate kool-aid and acted like taping was some sort of grave personal affront. Dontcha just love people like that? The company man act is so 1950s. Is this idiot getting some sort of performance bonus? (No.) WTF was it to him? It's not like her taping was going to make him late for his nightly WoW/porn session. Dweeb.
I challenge you to show me TSA safety rules for cars :-) Different departments: NHTSA is a DOT agency that sets crash standards for automobiles. TSA is a DHS agency that ruins your life every time you fly. Pedantry aside, this car looks almost identical to the Smart Car, which has been certified by NHTSA for import.
This is definitely not a car oriented towards commuting suburbanites. But nobody is claiming that. For zipping around the city though, I could see this being ideal for myself and a lot of my friends/coworkers. First, $13000 is pocket change to spend on a car in any major metropolitan area. By the time I finish writing this post, probably $2 million worth of expensive luxury import cars will have driven past my window. I don't know anyone who drives a car worth less than twice that amount. And of course, at that price, the car pays for itself in about six years with what you stop spending on gas (~$2000/yr per family.) And then there is the issue of parking--it looks like this car is about as long as others are wide, meaning you could virtually back in. In an age where people are paying $250k for a parking space, this could also be a big selling point.
Don't forget exercise! Portions are jacked and the hfcs thing is scary, but you can get away with a lot nutritionally if you get simply off your ass and burn if off. Go to Paris if you don't believe me, and take a gander at what these rail-thin middle aged women are able to pack away. It's really impressive. The corn syrup problem has a quick fix (stop tinkering with sugar tariffs) but portions are going to continue catering to the basest impulses of the hoi polloi. I think pushing exercise will be the only solution. And it's a social activity, no less.
Books can be had for as little as $1. Or free, at your local library.
Producing our own renewable energy costs more than pumping millions of years of accumulated energy out of the ground? Who knew?! And BTW if you priced in all the externalities associated with burning fossil fuels, it would be a lot closer to parity.
Yeap. I couldn't agree more. I just wish more people like you had been around before all those credulous schmucks lost their retirements during the GOOG crash.
Haha. You mean like it's the job of the head of the EPA to advocate for the environment? Or the job of the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect endangered species? Or the job of the US Attorneys to prosecute cases in a fair and nonpartisan manner? Or the job of the director of FEMA to respond to emergencies? (I'm not even going to bother linking to that one.)
I agree with you 100%--in fact, 120--but c'mon! Where was the outrage six years ago? This wolf-in-sheep's-clothes act has been going on since literally day one. It's partly gratifying to see people finally waking, but mostly just depressing and scary. Should things really have to sink this low before we start asking more from our leaders?
Lots of people complain about the fawning praise lavished on the iPhone by a credible press. Tom Dickson is the only person I have seen yet who was shrewd enough to co-opt this for his own gain. It's like he established a hype resonance field--taking all the iPhone puffery, squaring it, and making it his own. I'm guessing he didn't wait all night to score those two iPhones. He probably picked a couple up off eBay for two grand; that he's willing to blow half that on a 10-second video clip testifies to how much more he's getting in return.
Tom Dickson Jr., I salute you.
Here here! It's rare I find someone else who shares this outlook, esp. in an online forum. I have way fewer friends than most people I know, and they're scattered literally across the globe. But we go back to high school in most cases. They're like family. I'd take a bullet for any of them. In a way it's bad, because I find myself hardly even making an effort to make new friends, being completely content with the ones I have now.
:-)
People who spend large amounts of time socializing through the computer just strike me as creepy. Even though that's most people so, hey, what does that say about me? I don't know
Very true. IIRC the first "crack" to AACS was obtained by simply dumping the memory image of a working player and trying every key-length binary word inside it until they got a match. A lot less elegant than you might have thought but hey, whatever works.
G'luck with that, is all I have to say. Having once waded into the Samba codebase trying to ferret out a bug, I can't see them getting very far unless they manage to snipe one of the core developers. Samba is giant and the amount of resources needed to backport every bugfix (to say nothing of feature additions) and be at all subtle about it has got to exceed just accommodating the new license. And don't forget Samba 4 is on the way, so you lose ADS too if you want to fork 3. No, I think they'll either put up or shut up.
Have you been to the Pacific Islands? I lived there for a little while. There are thousands of them and the effects of a rise in sea level will vary greatly depending on where you are. But as little as a .2m rise could easily have a deleterious effect on a lot of people. There are many avenues by which this could occur, the "ocean swallowing the whole island" being perhaps the least likely. Waves are essentially just repeated draws from a probability distribution; if you alter the sea level, you will affect the mean. Flooding and erosion become slightly but measurably more likely. Even if an area is still "livable", regular flooding one more more times a year will often cause entire villages to pack up and move inland. Sometimes even one event is sometimes enough. The entire northeastern coast of Savaii became depopulated following Typhoon Ofa in 1990; fishers turned into farmers, and all the villages went uphill. Another problem is increased silting due to erosion, which will kill the fringing reefs and with them, a major source of food for many islanders.
But why speak hypothetically? This already happened two years ago in Vanuatu--Google "tegua"--and if you listen to the villagers who lived there, they paint a very consistent and lucid picture: flooding never occurred before the late 1980s. Within twenty years, the sea encroached 15m. Now, their homeland is unlivable. These people are leading indicators, and we would do well to heed their cries.
I'm an economist, so I know what you're talking about, and that argument seems real slippery to me. I want to believe what you are saying is true, because I myself have downloaded far more music than I ever would have bought for $16.99 an album. But OTOH I would pay $1, or even $5, for a lot of that stuff if forced. Who's to say what would happen in the counterfactual world where no IP infringement exists? Particularly with all these incredible gadgets nowadays that make music more enjoyable and portable than ever before. Would we really settle for listening to the same CDs over and over again on our iPods? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure we'd reorient our expenditures slightly and buy more music. So, yes, the idea that the demand for music is inelastic is pretty risible (did they really say that? I've never heard that claim.) It's not oil. But I think the people who go around assuaging their guilty consciences by telling themselves they wouldn't have bought it anyways are equally delusional.
The obvious thing would be so simply eliminate the optical drive. I use mine to install software and that's about it. Make it external and still satisfy the daily needs of 85-90% of your userbase.
:-) More like twice that, based on the rumors.
A second idea, hinted at in a recent patent filing, is to make the access door on the bottom. If you eliminate the need for a side-mounted, slot loading drive, you free up a lot of precious real estate both in terms of thickness and what else you can now put on the side. Flipping over your laptop to change a CD sucks, sure, but again, how often are you doing this? For me it's like a couple times a week max.
Note that all these rumors point to an entirely new product, the "MacBook Thin", which would not be a revamp of the current low-end MacBook line. Sorry, you don't get all this cool new stuff for $999
Is there anyone out there besides me who couldn't care less about this thing? I guess I'm really barking up the wrong tree by asking this on Slashdot--maybe the library would be a better place--but I mean, jesus h christ people, it's just a phone. You call people with it. It sends e-mails, so you don't have to wait until you're at home or the office. Woop-de-doo. Oh, and you can read the NY Times on a slow, cramped web browser. I just totally don't see the point of it all, other than to close off the last few remaining channels of your life where you might have had some uninterrupted personal time to be alone with your thoughts.
I think the situation will closely mirror all other historical examples in advertising. Consumers start out intensely naive and susceptible to the most ridiculous, blatant pitches imaginable. Gradually their awareness increases, to the point where they become jaded and impervious to the traditional forms. This causes advertisers to refine their methods to become more subtle (think product placement or "QualComm Park".) We start hating those. Rinse, wash, and repeat.
The thought that search results could become tainted by commerce might seem surprising now, but in ten years everyone will just come to expect it.