That's what is already being done. And it's pretty awful.
The problem isn't necessarily with primary research. Reporters -- at least gee-whiz reporters who don't normally cover a science beat -- most often hear about these things through press releases from special interest groups. Those groups do the interpreting for the reporter. Such a reporter will never actually read the report but rather skim the headline and maybe read the introduction, but more likely will simply take the special interest group entirely at their word. Sometimes the interest group's conclusions are exactly the opposite of what the report said, and they say it just to get the reporter to write the bad story and do the damage -- the public will get the correction later, but for most people the first thing they heard was the sensational -- the memorable -- part, and the damage is done.
What the reporters need to do is actually read the damn findings and talk to the scientist(s) who wrote it. And there's no way a scientist can make a reporter do his or her job.
TFA links to another article (from CNNMoney) that says
The company [SpiralFrog] aroused interest last fall after it announced its licensing deals with Universal Music and performing rights organization Broadcast Music Inc. But the company missed its early 2007 launch and instead underwent an executive shuffle that ended with the ouster of then-CEO Robin Kent. [Joe Mohen, SpiralFrog's founder,] has attributed delays to the time-consuming process of obtaining rights from music publishers and other technical issues."
So this company has been working at this for more than a year (which predates Universal's iTunes melt down). A quick search on that widely reported meltdown reveals this from The Times of London:
It is unclear why Mr Kent was asked to leave the company, though a source close to the company said that it was because of differences between him and Mr Mohen, whose management style Mr Kent found "unacceptable".
"It was a kangaroo court - there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it," the source said.
This is not the behavior of a good business that is likely to succeed.
Seriously, just put two fingers on the trackpad and click. To scroll a window (like a scroll wheel) just put one finger down and move another on the trackpad. It's a thousand times better than just two buttons.
With the New York Times putting fawning articles like this in front of millions of readers every day, why would Apple want to spend money to do the same?
As a lifelong Apple fanboy (all Apple since 1982, thanks), I can say without a doubt that there's not been a better time to be an Apple fanboy in 20 years. We actually have some street cred now. IT departments no longer laugh dismissively at the idea of perhaps a Mac in the office, maybe. (Though corporate America is a long way from embracing Macs. And Apple originally lost the PC war because most consumers bought what they had at work for home (and, hey, it was a little cheaper).) People are actually buying Macs. Sales are up; growth is up. The article makes a big deal of Apple not starting its relationship with Best Buy soon enough to gain a retail presence. Hello? NYT, two years ago Apple barely had the cred and was still working on retail presence for the iPod. I bought my iPod at Target; I've vowed never to buy so much as a blank CD at Best Buy after some of its shady business practices, and if Apple wanted to just make the Mac available to more people, it'd sell them everywhere the iPods are sold. How far away is that? Well, they'd have to be able to make enough Macs to put them there, but I bet we'll see it someday.
You are picking and choosing your definitions. One definition of "good" (the third, in my Webster's) is "possessing or displaying moral virtue." One definition of "evil" (the first) is "profoundly immoral and malevolent." Those two are, quite clearly, opposites. "Compassion" is "sympathetic pity and concern for the suffering and misfortune of others," which doesn't necessarily make a person "good." Feeling bad for someone else is not the same thing as doing something that fixes someone else's misfortune. That is, compassion is a part of being good, but it is not the only part of being good.
Yes, it is smart enough to underline bgcolr if you typo for bgcolor.
It also color codes different parts of the tags. The default is blue for the tag itself (so "") and the properties in purple (such as "bgcolor=") and then a rust color for property values and gray for comments... etc. And it handles much more than html, but it handles those things less rigidly. That is, if it is a php document and you use the function mysql_fetch_array() then it will color code to blue. PHP lets you make your own functions, but BBEdit may not know what those are but still must let those functions be created without fuss, so if you were to type mysqlfetcharray() instead, it would neither mark it as misspelled nor color code it as blue, which is a polite way of saying that it's neither wrong nor right. The problem comes in remaining flexible without sounding alarms all the time -- it's very easy to make typos in custom function names. Also, if one uses html in a php doc (for example) the above syntax spelling starts to break down and it treats html code more generically and fails to start pointing out typos in markup tags. It probably assumes that the tags are for anything-goes xml tags, but I don't know. And I also don't know how good it is for this sort of stuff outside of html/php/perl/mysql, but it's very nice for me.
It should be noted that some Mac programs, such as BBEdit, are also program-language aware. It not only uses the built-in OS spellchecker, but automatically doesn't mark properly spelled markup that would otherwise be caught in the spellchecker. So, code such as this:
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" alink="#00FF00">
will wind up with "bgcolor" and "alink" underlined in the standard system spellchecker, but not in BBEdit. I don't know how broad BBEdit is with that (the documentation only mentions html specifically), but one can also change the default dictionary to use Excalibur for TeX/LaTeX work.
Note, however, that no spellchecker will catch homonyms or words that can be written in two words or one, such as "spell checker"/"spellchecker."
The record labels are the ones who insist on the DRM. Apple merely insists on using their own DRM and not paying anyone else to use someone else's DRM. Apple does offer non-DRM; its iPods (and iTune software) play non-DRM music; you can actually use other software to manage your iPod -- it'd be a very open system if the record labels weren't insisting on DRM. And it's not a ploy by Apple to "keep its monopoly;" that would imply that it added it like some sort of bait-and-switch after it was the last-on-the-market/that-will-never-work Mp3 player that Apple haters were calling it when it was introduced. They put the product out there and people bought it. They did it on their own and it became incredibly popular, dwarfing the other players in the market as-is. Were consumers hoodwinked by this? Nope. They choose it. People really like their iPods and the vast majority of them have no desire to change to something else. The only monopolies that Apple has is as the seller of DRM'd AAC music files and the players for those files. But it is, even for die-hard iPod users, hardly much of a lock-in. I have 30 GB of music and of all of that maybe one album that is iPod-only. It's not enough of an incentive to keep me using an iPod if iPods sucked.
But Apple has nothing to do with the fact that the record companies are making crap music. Nothing. If the majority of people buying music were really happy with whole albums that they purchased for one song, then there would be no grand push to buy single songs instead of albums. But the fact is that people generally get burned with that method. The music industry has traditionally priced singles so that they are not much cheaper than full CDs, and that's probably because production costs are the same for singles and albums, and they'd prefer the consumer to buy the full album so that they have a better profit margin. They want singles to cost $5 not because it costs them $4 to make it, but because it costs the same 5 cents to make an album or a single and they want to get the price somewhere close to the point where people go, "Hmmm... if I like so much as one other song on this album, it's going to be cheaper for me to buy the whole album, so I guess I should." And then they make $10 instead of $5. Or, in the case of Apple's iTunes store, $1.
No, the risk for record companies is in investing in new talent. They want to be able to plug into "the formula" to market and sell albums. The companies look at what is working in the marketplace then find something just like that to invest their marketing dollars in. When they find the sound they want, they then go looking for the people who look the look they want and can make that sound. It's not a new technique -- The Monkeys, for example, were completely manufactured this way. But also (more recently and more to the problem) Creed only got a record contract because they sounded like Perl Jam, but better washed and without all the righteous indignation that can be so difficult for a record company to get around when marketing. It didn't matter that Creed was essentially a bunch of no-talent hacks because they could do the Pearl Jam formula, only without all the fuss.
But now they've become so refined in what they think people want and so limited in competition (there are only, what, three major labels now?) that they are just regurgitating and eating their own crap. They're actually cloning their clones. After Creed worked so well, they dug up Nickelback. That worked too, so how about this Three Days Grace thing... and, well, Three Days Grace sucks ass, and they suck so bad that the record companies have to admit that the music sucks. But they can't see that it's because of their refusal to get out of their formula. They think it's the talent pool. They think there aren't any more good artists because they can't find somebody else to fill in on the played out "Pearl Jam" slot. And all their other slots.
In the past it has taken about 12 years to go from innovative revolution to played-out commercialized copying clones -- 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991... but now it has been 16 years without a revolution. There hasn't been an Elvis, or a Beatles, or a punk/new wave/disco explosion, or a Nirvana. These record labels are completely lost. The only thing that has really changed is that the labels have consolidated so that they have no reason to try anything new. They are idiots.
Yeah, like there are a ton of Muslims in Denmark. (About 5%.) There actually are a number of Muslims in Wichita. (I think there are five mosques.) Many of the largest, most influential families here are from the Mideast, and it is 79th in Muslim population in the U.S. and a little over 1% of the Wichita population, according to the last census. From the same year's data, 0.6% of the U.S. population claimed to be Muslim. So, compared to the rest of the U.S., yes, Wichita has a lot of Muslims.
I used to be the editor in chief of an alt-weekly in Wichita, Kansas. I ran all the Danish cartoons with a long editorial about how I got into the business as an editorial cartoonist and could never stand the cowardice of the establishment. There was little public outcry... just a couple of people telling me I wasn't being sensitive to muslims, which I explained I was aware of doing in the column anyway.
A while later, I was reading a column in the major daily's newspaper about how they were not going to ever print "Opus" because when they ran "Bloom County" in the '80s and '90s it "didn't poll well with readers." Well, it just so happens that "Bloom County" is what inspired me to become an editorial cartoonist and therefore what got me into the newspaper business. It was incredibly popular with me and all my friends, so I guess it was just the newspaper wanting to hold on to the geriatric (dead and dying) readers. So I wrote the Washington Post Writers Group (the "Opus" syndicator) this story and asked them if I could get an affordable deal on running "Opus" in my alt weekly. They sold it to me for about $10 a week.
If I was still editor of that paper, I'd be running that cartoon this week. But they killed it as soon as I left. Of course, it's circulation and popularity has dropped like a rock because the new owner refuses to be controversial in any way. How can you run a weekly and not be an alt-weekly?
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
"If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?" -- Bill Gates, 1984
I rest my case.
Re:Any consensus?
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The preferred format for the geek community is "teen girl". It will never quite completely erase the "big breast" format, though.
Performance rights organizations been doing this for years. At least, ASCAP has been.
They've shut down mom-and-pop bars that rent juke boxes from vendors but didn't pay a the fee to have music in their public place. You'd think that buying the CD would be enough to cover the royalty, but no. You'd think that because almost all the money goes to vendor who owns the machine that it would be the vendor's problem, but no. Go over to ASCAP site and read through the press release archive... every year they sue the business out of a dozen or so places that they decide to make examples of. It's only a tiny, tiny fraction of the business not paying the license, but if you put one business out of business, every remaining business in that market will pony up if it can.
But every year the fees go up and up and up. And now it's way way way more expensive to pay the fee than to risk it.
I ran a newspaper that wrote a story (reported by Michael Carmody) about this last year. Here's a solid quote from the story that supports what I'm saying:
"It's extortion, is what it is," says a local tavern owner, who would only comment anonymously for fear of reprisals from the PROs. ("I don't want to give ASCAP any ammunition against me," he explains.)
"It goes in waves," he says. "They'll hassle you for a while, then disappear, then come back. There's always a letter coming from somewhere -- BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, I think there's a fourth one now, too. It's a scam, I know, because you can negotiate with them. They came once and asked for $900, and I said, 'Well, 900 dollars, that's ridiculous,' and sent them $500 and they accepted it. If it's truly a license as they claim, they wouldn't do that. They just try to scare you into registering."
Let's go crazy
Let's get nuts
Let's look for the purple banana
'Til they put us in the truck, let's go
We're all excited
But we don't know why
Maybe it's 'cause
We're all gonna die
And when we do
What's it all for
You better live now before the grim reaper
Come knocking on your door, tell me
Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down, oh, no, let's go
It was, but he meant it like, "Oh, sure, this will be great -- they'll only have to redesign city's for this." What jobs also said was this: "I think [the design] sucks. Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant and it doesn't feel anthropomorphic."
Just saw your reply... but to replace the RAM in my MacBook you take out the battery and remove three screws that have very difficult-to-reach heads that are just barely above and perpendicular to the surface of the case, which means you have to have a short, thin screwdriver body and you can't put your fingers on it. Then, once you get the RAM in there, it's very hard to seat and the padding on the back of the flashing that covers the RAM likes to get in the way and make it all very difficult to re-seal. I've upgraded the RAM in five MacBooks with this design. To replace the Airport card on this machine you have to disassemble the case, which I've never done because Apple told me not to. Other iBooks I've owned and worked with were much, much, much easier to deal with -- just lift up the keyboard (no screws) and you have complete access to the RAM and Airport card
If it kills (U.S.) Internet radio then we can all laugh, say "I told you so," then pressure our government officials to prosecute the RIAA. And that will probably be the end of the RIAA as we know it. Then, when it's gone, (U.S.) Internet radio can come back. And almost everything about the music industry will change.
I semi-agree with you on this -- on the current MacBook line you can't even replace the Airport card without performing major surgery, and getting the RAM in there is a complete bitch. On the other hand, I currently use two Macs in my house: a last-fall's MacBook and the one I'm using right now -- a formerly top-of-the-line PowerMac that turns 6-years-old next month.
"Affordable" is what you make of it. I bought this thing for less than $4k six years ago. My modifications are probably still under $4k. I've bought five HDs (usually I keep filling them up; I had one fail) and used it as the main production computer for a weekly newspaper for three of those years. I've replaced the DVD drive and just last month the CPU fan started making some noise, so I freshened it up. Oh, and I've worn out three keyboards. Not spilled anything in them, just wore them out. I type a lot.
I wish I had some idea of the number of hours of actual use this machine has had. I've owned it for far more that 50,000 hours and had it on and running (not sleeping) most of that time. $4k for 50k hours would be 8 cents an hour. You figure most people use their computers for 8 hours a day for two years (roughly 3000 hours) and then get a new one, and even if they're $600 machines then it's still 20 cents an hour.
I don't know how one would adjust for inflation (well, I do, as it would be about $4,600 in today's dollars) or adjust for the fact that you can just add a lot more to a MacPro than you could those old PowerMacs. I mean, you can drop anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 now. I can build one that I'd be real, real happy with for $3,800.
And as far as software goes, I can't possibly disagree more. Excluding games (yes, they have them for Macs), I've purchased exactly three commercial software packages for business use -- Office, Adobe Creative Suite (back before it was called that and then upgrades), and Stuffit Deluxe. Everything else I've ever used has been freeware or shareware or was bundled with the OS. I generally don't use Office or Stuffit now and today's earlier post on CS alternatives have got me investigating those, though it'll take a small miracle to pry InDesign from my hands. But you clearly just had no idea what you had or how to use it -- and were comparing it to something you did know, which is not the same as being a total noob.
Actually, that was in regards to something the Sun made up last week, not something it made up this week. It also constantly says things like, "Christopher Eccleston stunned the BBC by quitting as the Timelord after the first series of the revamped drama in 2005," when it is now widely known that Eccleston was up front about not playing the Doctor for more than one season (series). No one was stunned. Disappointed, maybe, but not stunned.
Actually, James Doohan was fine with being called Scotty. From the Wikipedia: "Doohan was often quoted as saying, 'Scotty is ninety-nine percent James Doohan and one percent accent.'" Doohan was well-loved by Star Trek fans, and if he wasn't then no one would mention this whole thing at all -- he'd just be this supporting actor named James on a silly two-season TV show made 40 years ago. Instead, he's Scotty. And we're happy he's home and mildly amused by his journey, as he probably would've been.
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That's what is already being done. And it's pretty awful.
The problem isn't necessarily with primary research. Reporters -- at least gee-whiz reporters who don't normally cover a science beat -- most often hear about these things through press releases from special interest groups. Those groups do the interpreting for the reporter. Such a reporter will never actually read the report but rather skim the headline and maybe read the introduction, but more likely will simply take the special interest group entirely at their word. Sometimes the interest group's conclusions are exactly the opposite of what the report said, and they say it just to get the reporter to write the bad story and do the damage -- the public will get the correction later, but for most people the first thing they heard was the sensational -- the memorable -- part, and the damage is done.
What the reporters need to do is actually read the damn findings and talk to the scientist(s) who wrote it. And there's no way a scientist can make a reporter do his or her job.
So this company has been working at this for more than a year (which predates Universal's iTunes melt down). A quick search on that widely reported meltdown reveals this from The Times of London:
This is not the behavior of a good business that is likely to succeed.
Seriously, just put two fingers on the trackpad and click. To scroll a window (like a scroll wheel) just put one finger down and move another on the trackpad. It's a thousand times better than just two buttons.
With the New York Times putting fawning articles like this in front of millions of readers every day, why would Apple want to spend money to do the same?
As a lifelong Apple fanboy (all Apple since 1982, thanks), I can say without a doubt that there's not been a better time to be an Apple fanboy in 20 years. We actually have some street cred now. IT departments no longer laugh dismissively at the idea of perhaps a Mac in the office, maybe. (Though corporate America is a long way from embracing Macs. And Apple originally lost the PC war because most consumers bought what they had at work for home (and, hey, it was a little cheaper).) People are actually buying Macs. Sales are up; growth is up. The article makes a big deal of Apple not starting its relationship with Best Buy soon enough to gain a retail presence. Hello? NYT, two years ago Apple barely had the cred and was still working on retail presence for the iPod. I bought my iPod at Target; I've vowed never to buy so much as a blank CD at Best Buy after some of its shady business practices, and if Apple wanted to just make the Mac available to more people, it'd sell them everywhere the iPods are sold. How far away is that? Well, they'd have to be able to make enough Macs to put them there, but I bet we'll see it someday.
You are picking and choosing your definitions. One definition of "good" (the third, in my Webster's) is "possessing or displaying moral virtue." One definition of "evil" (the first) is "profoundly immoral and malevolent." Those two are, quite clearly, opposites. "Compassion" is "sympathetic pity and concern for the suffering and misfortune of others," which doesn't necessarily make a person "good." Feeling bad for someone else is not the same thing as doing something that fixes someone else's misfortune. That is, compassion is a part of being good, but it is not the only part of being good.
So be careful about what will dumb you down.
Yes, it is smart enough to underline bgcolr if you typo for bgcolor.
... etc. And it handles much more than html, but it handles those things less rigidly. That is, if it is a php document and you use the function mysql_fetch_array() then it will color code to blue. PHP lets you make your own functions, but BBEdit may not know what those are but still must let those functions be created without fuss, so if you were to type mysqlfetcharray() instead, it would neither mark it as misspelled nor color code it as blue, which is a polite way of saying that it's neither wrong nor right. The problem comes in remaining flexible without sounding alarms all the time -- it's very easy to make typos in custom function names. Also, if one uses html in a php doc (for example) the above syntax spelling starts to break down and it treats html code more generically and fails to start pointing out typos in markup tags. It probably assumes that the tags are for anything-goes xml tags, but I don't know. And I also don't know how good it is for this sort of stuff outside of html/php/perl/mysql, but it's very nice for me.
It also color codes different parts of the tags. The default is blue for the tag itself (so "") and the properties in purple (such as "bgcolor=") and then a rust color for property values and gray for comments
Note, however, that no spellchecker will catch homonyms or words that can be written in two words or one, such as "spell checker"/"spellchecker."
Word, dude.
The record labels are the ones who insist on the DRM. Apple merely insists on using their own DRM and not paying anyone else to use someone else's DRM. Apple does offer non-DRM; its iPods (and iTune software) play non-DRM music; you can actually use other software to manage your iPod -- it'd be a very open system if the record labels weren't insisting on DRM. And it's not a ploy by Apple to "keep its monopoly;" that would imply that it added it like some sort of bait-and-switch after it was the last-on-the-market/that-will-never-work Mp3 player that Apple haters were calling it when it was introduced. They put the product out there and people bought it. They did it on their own and it became incredibly popular, dwarfing the other players in the market as-is. Were consumers hoodwinked by this? Nope. They choose it. People really like their iPods and the vast majority of them have no desire to change to something else. The only monopolies that Apple has is as the seller of DRM'd AAC music files and the players for those files. But it is, even for die-hard iPod users, hardly much of a lock-in. I have 30 GB of music and of all of that maybe one album that is iPod-only. It's not enough of an incentive to keep me using an iPod if iPods sucked.
But Apple has nothing to do with the fact that the record companies are making crap music. Nothing. If the majority of people buying music were really happy with whole albums that they purchased for one song, then there would be no grand push to buy single songs instead of albums. But the fact is that people generally get burned with that method. The music industry has traditionally priced singles so that they are not much cheaper than full CDs, and that's probably because production costs are the same for singles and albums, and they'd prefer the consumer to buy the full album so that they have a better profit margin. They want singles to cost $5 not because it costs them $4 to make it, but because it costs the same 5 cents to make an album or a single and they want to get the price somewhere close to the point where people go, "Hmmm... if I like so much as one other song on this album, it's going to be cheaper for me to buy the whole album, so I guess I should." And then they make $10 instead of $5. Or, in the case of Apple's iTunes store, $1.
No, the risk for record companies is in investing in new talent. They want to be able to plug into "the formula" to market and sell albums. The companies look at what is working in the marketplace then find something just like that to invest their marketing dollars in. When they find the sound they want, they then go looking for the people who look the look they want and can make that sound. It's not a new technique -- The Monkeys, for example, were completely manufactured this way. But also (more recently and more to the problem) Creed only got a record contract because they sounded like Perl Jam, but better washed and without all the righteous indignation that can be so difficult for a record company to get around when marketing. It didn't matter that Creed was essentially a bunch of no-talent hacks because they could do the Pearl Jam formula, only without all the fuss.
... and, well, Three Days Grace sucks ass, and they suck so bad that the record companies have to admit that the music sucks. But they can't see that it's because of their refusal to get out of their formula. They think it's the talent pool. They think there aren't any more good artists because they can't find somebody else to fill in on the played out "Pearl Jam" slot. And all their other slots.
... but now it has been 16 years without a revolution. There hasn't been an Elvis, or a Beatles, or a punk/new wave/disco explosion, or a Nirvana. These record labels are completely lost. The only thing that has really changed is that the labels have consolidated so that they have no reason to try anything new. They are idiots.
But now they've become so refined in what they think people want and so limited in competition (there are only, what, three major labels now?) that they are just regurgitating and eating their own crap. They're actually cloning their clones. After Creed worked so well, they dug up Nickelback. That worked too, so how about this Three Days Grace thing
In the past it has taken about 12 years to go from innovative revolution to played-out commercialized copying clones -- 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991
A high school editor taught me not to use the passive voice. "The notion 'blah blah blah' is often attributed to Voltaire." Jackass.
Yeah, like there are a ton of Muslims in Denmark. (About 5%.) There actually are a number of Muslims in Wichita. (I think there are five mosques.) Many of the largest, most influential families here are from the Mideast, and it is 79th in Muslim population in the U.S. and a little over 1% of the Wichita population, according to the last census. From the same year's data, 0.6% of the U.S. population claimed to be Muslim. So, compared to the rest of the U.S., yes, Wichita has a lot of Muslims.
I used to be the editor in chief of an alt-weekly in Wichita, Kansas. I ran all the Danish cartoons with a long editorial about how I got into the business as an editorial cartoonist and could never stand the cowardice of the establishment. There was little public outcry ... just a couple of people telling me I wasn't being sensitive to muslims, which I explained I was aware of doing in the column anyway.
A while later, I was reading a column in the major daily's newspaper about how they were not going to ever print "Opus" because when they ran "Bloom County" in the '80s and '90s it "didn't poll well with readers." Well, it just so happens that "Bloom County" is what inspired me to become an editorial cartoonist and therefore what got me into the newspaper business. It was incredibly popular with me and all my friends, so I guess it was just the newspaper wanting to hold on to the geriatric (dead and dying) readers. So I wrote the Washington Post Writers Group (the "Opus" syndicator) this story and asked them if I could get an affordable deal on running "Opus" in my alt weekly. They sold it to me for about $10 a week.
If I was still editor of that paper, I'd be running that cartoon this week. But they killed it as soon as I left. Of course, it's circulation and popularity has dropped like a rock because the new owner refuses to be controversial in any way. How can you run a weekly and not be an alt-weekly?
Which is it: Top secret phone records or information that has already been released in court cases? It doesn't seem like the two are the same.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
"If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?" -- Bill Gates, 1984
I rest my case.
The preferred format for the geek community is "teen girl". It will never quite completely erase the "big breast" format, though.
Performance rights organizations been doing this for years. At least, ASCAP has been.
They've shut down mom-and-pop bars that rent juke boxes from vendors but didn't pay a the fee to have music in their public place. You'd think that buying the CD would be enough to cover the royalty, but no. You'd think that because almost all the money goes to vendor who owns the machine that it would be the vendor's problem, but no. Go over to ASCAP site and read through the press release archive ... every year they sue the business out of a dozen or so places that they decide to make examples of. It's only a tiny, tiny fraction of the business not paying the license, but if you put one business out of business, every remaining business in that market will pony up if it can.
But every year the fees go up and up and up. And now it's way way way more expensive to pay the fee than to risk it.
I ran a newspaper that wrote a story (reported by Michael Carmody) about this last year. Here's a solid quote from the story that supports what I'm saying:
It was, but he meant it like, "Oh, sure, this will be great -- they'll only have to redesign city's for this." What jobs also said was this: "I think [the design] sucks. Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant and it doesn't feel anthropomorphic."
Just saw your reply ... but to replace the RAM in my MacBook you take out the battery and remove three screws that have very difficult-to-reach heads that are just barely above and perpendicular to the surface of the case, which means you have to have a short, thin screwdriver body and you can't put your fingers on it. Then, once you get the RAM in there, it's very hard to seat and the padding on the back of the flashing that covers the RAM likes to get in the way and make it all very difficult to re-seal. I've upgraded the RAM in five MacBooks with this design. To replace the Airport card on this machine you have to disassemble the case, which I've never done because Apple told me not to. Other iBooks I've owned and worked with were much, much, much easier to deal with -- just lift up the keyboard (no screws) and you have complete access to the RAM and Airport card
So does anyone have a torrent of this hologram? The Vista I have really needs it.
If it kills (U.S.) Internet radio then we can all laugh, say "I told you so," then pressure our government officials to prosecute the RIAA. And that will probably be the end of the RIAA as we know it. Then, when it's gone, (U.S.) Internet radio can come back. And almost everything about the music industry will change.
I semi-agree with you on this -- on the current MacBook line you can't even replace the Airport card without performing major surgery, and getting the RAM in there is a complete bitch. On the other hand, I currently use two Macs in my house: a last-fall's MacBook and the one I'm using right now -- a formerly top-of-the-line PowerMac that turns 6-years-old next month.
"Affordable" is what you make of it. I bought this thing for less than $4k six years ago. My modifications are probably still under $4k. I've bought five HDs (usually I keep filling them up; I had one fail) and used it as the main production computer for a weekly newspaper for three of those years. I've replaced the DVD drive and just last month the CPU fan started making some noise, so I freshened it up. Oh, and I've worn out three keyboards. Not spilled anything in them, just wore them out. I type a lot.
I wish I had some idea of the number of hours of actual use this machine has had. I've owned it for far more that 50,000 hours and had it on and running (not sleeping) most of that time. $4k for 50k hours would be 8 cents an hour. You figure most people use their computers for 8 hours a day for two years (roughly 3000 hours) and then get a new one, and even if they're $600 machines then it's still 20 cents an hour.
I don't know how one would adjust for inflation (well, I do, as it would be about $4,600 in today's dollars) or adjust for the fact that you can just add a lot more to a MacPro than you could those old PowerMacs. I mean, you can drop anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 now. I can build one that I'd be real, real happy with for $3,800.
And as far as software goes, I can't possibly disagree more. Excluding games (yes, they have them for Macs), I've purchased exactly three commercial software packages for business use -- Office, Adobe Creative Suite (back before it was called that and then upgrades), and Stuffit Deluxe. Everything else I've ever used has been freeware or shareware or was bundled with the OS. I generally don't use Office or Stuffit now and today's earlier post on CS alternatives have got me investigating those, though it'll take a small miracle to pry InDesign from my hands. But you clearly just had no idea what you had or how to use it -- and were comparing it to something you did know, which is not the same as being a total noob.
In the end, though, you get what you pay for.
Actually, that was in regards to something the Sun made up last week, not something it made up this week. It also constantly says things like, "Christopher Eccleston stunned the BBC by quitting as the Timelord after the first series of the revamped drama in 2005," when it is now widely known that Eccleston was up front about not playing the Doctor for more than one season (series). No one was stunned. Disappointed, maybe, but not stunned.
Actually, James Doohan was fine with being called Scotty. From the Wikipedia: "Doohan was often quoted as saying, 'Scotty is ninety-nine percent James Doohan and one percent accent.'" Doohan was well-loved by Star Trek fans, and if he wasn't then no one would mention this whole thing at all -- he'd just be this supporting actor named James on a silly two-season TV show made 40 years ago. Instead, he's Scotty. And we're happy he's home and mildly amused by his journey, as he probably would've been.