Probably because there's a stigma for adults in the U.S. to be reading picture books, just as there's a bias for adults to consider animation kid-fare.
Doesn't mean that it's right or wrong, but it's there. Aside from shorts, and comic strips, the adult audience in the U.S. is very unlikely to go out and buy serialized graphic novels, or watch 2D animated films, irregardless of quality (unless it's a Disney film.)
Also, "comic books" in the US has a very specific designation, for a maybe 30 page pulp story, sold in racks. If you broaden the term to include stuff like Doonsbury, Peanuts, and Garfield, then I'd argue that we have a pretty good penetration, which reflects format. The article mentions that japanese will buy manga to pass the time while on the subway - I'd just buy a newspaper, and take a glance at the comics while I browse through the business section. Different media drive different formats, for different audiences.
If you look at it that way, then US syndicated short format strip comics are not a failure. It's the traditional larger format pulp stuff that isn't selling well, probably because it's so damnned expensive. Hell, $3.00 for a single issue of Usagi Yojimbo??? For the cost of two comics, I can buy a remaindered copy of a Tom Clancy novel. That'd take up at least a week's worth of commuting on a bus or subway.
This is the same stuff you can buy at the local drugstore in 3% dilute solution to disinfect wounds, bleach hair, etc. At very high concentration (I think for rockets they use 90+%), they can use a catalyst to initiate a very rapid exothermic decomposition of the H202 to H20 (as steam) and O2. This provides thrust, without need of a 2-part fuel/oxidizer combo.
I know of at least 2 outfits starting out with hydrogen peroxide rockets - Armadillo Aerospace (Carmack's outfit) and the infamous Rocket Guy (the toy inventor turned spaceman.)
Research into hydrogen peroxide rockets was done in during WWII, and actually made it into some experimental applications, I believe...
I'm hanging my hopes on Armadillo Aerospace. Looking forward to them trying out for the X-Prize, and their approach of documenting everything on their website via pictures, video, and blog-type updates is great. I hope they succed - we need a commercial manufacturer of rockets that doesn't need to charge a premium to support overhead of non-space units.
Think cheap dumb boosters - the kind of vehicle the shuttle should have been before it was hijacked into being a commuter service. Keep in mind, we don't need to throw away the STS infrastructure (crusty as it may be.) Just replace the orbiter with a larger unmanned payload module, keep the external fuel tank and boosters. Then, build dozens of payload modules, external fuel tanks (screw the insulation - which is needed to keep ice from forming on the fuel tank, make the payload module disposable), and boosters, in order to get economies of scale. Since there's nobody on board, we don't have to worry about having 99.999999% reliability, nor do we have to waste money on life support.
Just so you know, this payload version of the shuttle already exists on paper, as one of the alternate configurations of the shuttle combo - known as the Shuttle C.
Or, we can buy Russian rockets wholesale, if we don't want to invest in our domestic rocket industry. Just don't put pilots in cargo vehicles - there's no point! If you want to send up pilots, put them in spacecraft specifically designed to deliver people... survivable spacecraft.
I think one possible chain of logic is that by suing Verizon to comply with the terms of the DMCA, the RIAA is building case law that will allow them to destroy P2P filesharing, legal or not. How? All they have to do is "suspect" a user of illegal activity, and have sherrifs bust down his door after getting the info from a carrier like Verizon. The user can prove his/her innocence Steve Jackson Games style - with the cops holding the computer and all associated media (CDs, tape backups, etc.)
Do this a couple of times, and the number of people using P2P, legal, or not, will shrink. With fewer filesharers, P2P becomes less valuable, as the global bandwidth shrinks, and fewer hosts/files are available. With P2P degraded, artists like Janis Ian lose a distribution channel, and the RIAA wouldn't mind that a bit.
Distribution. Their greatest fear is that artists will start releasing music on their own, side stepping the recording industry and their slave like contracts. Once an artist can release music (without the record company) through the Internet. The record companies will cease to exist. End of story
Artists currently CAN release music via the Internet. The problem is, it doesn't work very well. How do you publicize a new album? How do you expose listeners to your music?
The record companies are powerful because they control venues for publicity AND distribution. Building a new setup for distribution won't work without "pull" on the other side. Building "pull" is what all that advertising is about. However, there's a big advantage record companies have aside from controlling publicity and distribution. They control whole LIBRARIES of certain genres that they can package and exploit.
For example, I know if I browse through the Capitol Records back catalog, I'll find stuff I like AND is of high quality. I don't know that about Joe Small's internet publishing back catalog.
I agree, the current big music houses are all about greed, but until you can bankroll an operation with equivalent mindshare, you can't hope to generate the same pull for an unknown act, unless you're featured in the news, or on a variety show. With that said however, I'd bet on average you could make more real take-home income by selling your own CDs, than by signing with one of the RIAA member companies...
And that means you might buy something from a non-RIAA distributor.
Which can be damn difficult sometimes. For example, I'm trying to buy some albums put out by an Australian jazz singer (Nina Ferro), but there aren't any US distributors for her music. In essence, she doesn't exist, despite the fact that she's one of the hottest Australian jazz acts.
Now, you're probably asking, if she's persona non-grata here in the states, how did I get to hear her music? Easy, I listen to the Jim Cullum jazz band every weekend via PRI (Public Radio, International), on Riverwalk, Live from the Landing, where Nina has sung before. Variety shows like Prairie Home Companion are also another great source for music. Unfortunately, I got into these shows about 10 years ago, when public radio was a lot more diverse. These days, many of the older shows have been dropped, as all radio homogenizes, both public and commercial.
Internet radio really needs to be built on as a viable, wide-audience alternative to current radio, in order for these types of shows to survive, and in order to expose the buying public to music that they might want to try.
No exposure = no sales. And no, exposing someone to Shakira on screen, stage, and radio isn't going to make that person buy 10 of the same album. Exposing someone to 10 different artists might get them to buy 10 different albums. Face it, the music industry is approaching diminishing returns for the amount of payola and promotion that they're spending. Time to cut back on the amount of money for new acts, and broaden the palate. And a cheap way of promoting more acts is to stream mp3 samples!!!
Seriously, why isn't there a Capitol records streaming MP3 station? Why isn't there a Sony records streaming MP3 station? You think people are going to discover their back catalogs themselves? Nonsense!
Why aren't the executives jumping at the chance to kill off 3/4ths of the middlemen in the business and rake in the pure profit themselves? Any rational businessperson from outside the recording industry would do it. The only explaination is that there's a lot of vested interest in preserving the current system (aka, kickbacks/payola.) Thus, instead of serving the shareholders, the music execs are ONLY SERVING THEMSELVES.
If I'm not mistaken, the 3 main engines are used on launch only. They're useless in space, since they run off of the main fuel tank, which is jettisoned after the boost phase. The only engines of relevance in orbit/reentry are the OMS and RCS engines.
True enough, but even if I had a drawing or picture to contribute, there doesn't appear to be a mechanism by which to do so.
Remember, digital cameras are cheap, and people have all sorts of things in their garages (well, maybe not an AK-47, at least not in California anyways.) But if a museum curator decided to contribute a quick snapshot of say, the moon rocks, or if someone wanted to submit a vacation photo of the Arizona memorial under a Pearl Harbor entry, there ought to be a way of submitting it.
Maybe someone should develop a visual wikipedia, layered on top of the wikipedia proper?
I was looking at a couple of entries (Kevlar, AK-47) that I had contributed to in the past (hint, I added Twaron as one of the alternate trade names). One thing that struck me was that I expected them to have added pictures by now. For example, showing the AK-47, with maybe an exploded view and some close-ups, would have been helpful, as would maybe a picture of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor.
So they impose a levy on CDRs. Who gets that money? If I start my own band, and we produce our own album, can we get a license that will let us burn our own CDRs without paying this levy, or will be be forced to pay the incumbents a fee for competing with them?
Honestly, this makes as much sense as Ford, GM, and Chrysler paying residuals to buggy whip manufacturers. For chrissakes, medical imaging scanners (MR and CT) now burn their data to recordable CDs. Do you think it makes any sense to pay a consortium of music companies a fee when you get your medical scans done? What about paying that fee when the next release of RedHat comes out?
We need to find these people and beat them repeatedly with cluesticks until they wise up.
So what's to stop a show whose fan base is large enough to outright buy the show, or purchase the syndication rights, and put up a streaming station? Say, a Star Trek channel, funded by fan contribution, and incidentally selling Star Trek merchandise, etc., broadcasting every Sunday night between 9 and 12, with reflectors and p2p load distribution in order to minimize bandwidth costs. Instead of interrupting the show with commercials, you could just bookend each episode, like they do with PBS.
Seriously, enough geeks banded together to open up the source to Blender3D, and that was no trivial chunk of change (100k euros.)
You don't need to screw over small-time operators just to make a point. Set up a 2 tier pricing structure, with an upper bound on the number of allowed renewals. Impose a exponential fee for sole distribution rights (where you get to control who gets it and at what cost), and have a lower flat fee for ownership rights that allow mandatory licensing at a set rate.
If you want to milk your property, be prepared to pay what it's worth to you. If you want to maintain ownership of your copyright, but you don't mind licensing it at a reasonable rate, pay the flat fee. You can move from flat fee to exponential by paying the difference between the two renewal fees. You can go from exponential to flat, but you don't get the difference back.
At a certain point, the big corporations will say, screw it, flat fee. And after a certain number of renewals, it's out of their hands. That way, there's no incentive to screw with the copyright laws toward the end of a property's lifetime, as it's already been stepped down to a mass-market licensing model.
I have no cable TV yet I enjoy a 22 mbps (max) broadband connection for only $20 CDN a month.
You know, you could probably make a lot of money if you were close enough to the border between Canada and US, by putting up access points for Americans to dip into some of that absurdly cheap bandwidth you've got there...
I pay US $80 per month for a 384/768kbps DSL line...:(
Aren't hardcovers usually printed on acid-free paper.snip.
Many more are now, than they used to be, but not all. On the other hand, paperback paper quality has gone up as well (think trade paperbacks, not mass market.)
I dunno, I buy hardcovers cause the type is easier on my eyes, and I like collecting books with dust jackets. However, I rarely buy HCs new - I'll buy remaindered and used books instead, often times cheaper than a new paperback edition. I used to buy book club editions, but with the cost of shipping as it is, it's cheaper buying the discounted original publisher hardcover off of Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
I listen to classical american music - jazz, big band, and musicals, from 1910 - 1959, with some musical selections after that. I also buy soundtracks, a little contemporary R&B and jazz on the side, and a smattering of celtic and folk music.
I don't listen to "pop" music at all. You can't get Frank Sinatra on FM where I am, unless it's on a Public Radio station, and only rarely these days (they've all become NPR talk-radio clones.)
It seems as though all forms of "free" media have been subsumed by corporations with something to sell, and instead of offering interesting content in exchange for our eyeballs or ears, they've decided it's cheaper to dictate our tastes instead. Is it any wonder we're no longer interested in watching the crap on TV, or listening to the droning, repetitve, fad-driven monoculture of the radio?
Every one of those broadcasters (the ones that are nothing more than corporate advertising mouthpieces) should have their licenses revoked for failing to serve public interest - remember, they're using a public resource, under license from the government (or rather, the people.) Any citizen can contest their fitness, and have that license for spectrum revoked, and given the RIAA payola, and their efforts at sabotaging competition (streaming radio), we should do just that.
In responce to your arguement that there needs to be criminal penalties, there already are.
Really? Where? I've yet to hear of any spammers go to prison - if you can tell me of any, it'd really brighten my day.:) There are civil penalties in certain areas of the US, and if you have enough clout and they're selling illegal items, you can slap them with a fraud suit. But again, I've yet to hear of any spammers serving jail time.
99% of the people who I email personally I have meet personally or talked over the phone or in some mannor exchanged information.
That's great. I personally don't use the phone very much, and the people I communicate with are usually contacting me for the very first time, via e-mail. ECN wouldn't help me, nor would it be very much different than setting up a whitelist.
A large part of the financial insentive is trading "good" email lists.
While trading (or renting) lists is an accepted practice for catalogs, and postal mailed solicitations (although there is a growing backlash, related to the intolerance of e-mailed junk mail), trading e-mail lists is NOT a legitimate tactic in the online world. The only people I know of who sell e-mails are spammers, and these are the kind of people who would sell you 999,999 bad e-mails on a 1 million e-mails cd. Like I said, the spammer business model isn't bothered by invalid addresses, bounces, etc. - all they have to do is harvest, autoguess, or steal enough addresses, and there will be some idiot who responds.
Again, for your plan to work, you'd have to force everyone in the world to essentially run a whitelist. "If I don't know you, I won't take e-mail from you." Obviously if nobody accepts spam, spammers will go away, or at least become pathetically irrelevant. But it also means that e-mail will no longer be an open communications medium, but something more like AIM, where only people on your buddy list can chat with you.
Before I'm willing to take that step, I'd like to put the screws on the spammer-criminals and see if that takes care of the problem. My rationale behind using the law to penalize spammer behavior is this: big spammers like having money, and being able to spend it/show it off. That's just the kind of people they are (ie, get-rich-quick scum.) If they move their spamming operations overseas, then fine, we can still bust the guy behind it if he's in the states. If he flees, even better, he becomes a paraiah, and has to do all his business outside of the United States. If he's willing to live with that penalty, then fine. I'm betting, however, many of them might decide not chancing jail time, especially if they've been there before. And if I'm wrong? Well, you can always whitelist/ECN if things get bad enough.
Forcing you to use their mailservers isn't abridgement of speech, and is thus not a violation of their "common carrier" status. It's more like saying you can't use non-Bell equipment on a Bell telephone network. You can still make whatever calls you want - you just have to use their equipment to do so.
Also, you have to consider - are they restricting speech in general, or are they restricting the content of speech? Forcing you to make less than 15 calls a month could be considered a restriction of speech, but again is not an abridgement of that right. Preventing you from complaining about the RIAA and the MPAA would be a restriction of content and thus a violation of their common carrier status.
Your proposal is laudable, but you overthought it. Instead of issuing ECNs, and layering a whole nother level of protocols, you could just have everyone run their own domain (or subdomain), and every time you give your address out, make it unique. For example:
I buy a book from Amazon.com. I give them the following address: amazoncom20021109@joe.mydomain.com (ie, domain+date@mydomain)
If amazon abuses that address, I remove it from the active list of allowed addresses, and it just bounces.
However, there's a problem. Neither your proposal or method I use will allow the guy off the street to mail me without having been given a valid address, nor will they make spam no longer cost effective. These are the two main problems to controlling spam - allowing mail you want (without knowing the person sending it), and providing a feedback mechanism to actively discourage future spam (a penalty.)
Spammers don't care about bounces, because they don't have to deal with them. And unless you force everyone to refuse mails from unknown senders, the spammer business model of spam everyone, get some idiot schmuck to bite, still holds. So all we've done is increase the level of complexity without fixing the root problem - the economics of spam. Sure we've cut down on the amount of spam we personally get, but we can do that already (Spamassassin, throwaway e-mails, authentication, etc.)
We need something to make them think twice before spamming people... like criminal penalties. The prospect of having to spend a year with Bubba (or Bertha) up in the big house should be a sufficient deterrent.:)
Spamhausen are a mixed blessing. They're fucking annoying because until you realize that they're spamhausen, you treat them like normal ISPs and send them abuse reports. They then pass the abuse report to the spammer so they can fine tune their spam message to avoid filters, move their IP to the next one on their block, and start spamming again.
On the other hand, once you realize an ISP is totally black hat *cough* *coretel* *cough*, you can blackhole their entire IP block and cut off all future spam from them.
Again, we need a public debate on the issue. Too many laws are being passed by lobbyists and their paid congressional monkeys. Problem is, the average American has been trained to ignore government and politics, except when incited by left or right-wing demagogues over emotional issues (which result in bad policy, but good political publicity.)
Unfortunately, until people are educated (will this ever happen?) and are willing to vote, serve on juries, and voluntarily contribute to military/civil service, we're going to see an ever fewer, and ever more influential bunch of people controling more and more of our lives. And the most ironic part: we as the American people are letting them get away with it.
What can we on Slashdot do? We need to field a geek candidate who "gets it" and put him (or her) in Congress, with a shitload of money and a big whopping stick (geek lobby) to back them. Next step, control the media with press releases, protests, and of course, preemptive lawsuits. Last step, kill the RIAA/MPAA business models by replacing them with honest contracts that work and benefit the artist and the promoter.
It can be done, but it will have to be a hard fought war against entrenched interests, both corporate and political.
Maybe the hospitals should start taxing the NRA and the police?
Hangun Control Inc. wants to tax both guns and ammunition under the same idea, so Rosen and the RIAA aren't the only ones bending common sense to fit their needs.
Remember, the power to tax is the power to destroy. The RIAA wants to tax broadband, which really means that they'd like for broadband to go away...
Well, if you were smart, and Antarctica was a tax free haven, you'd build a refinery anchored right off the shore, ready to take tanker shipments of oil, and exporting tax-free fuel to ships at sea, and the scientists on the continent. If someone actually did build a resort there, you could make money by supplying them with fuel oil, and they'd make money by giving your refinery workers someplace to go Friday nights.
With enough people there, you can start looking into closing the loop by building hydroponics farms under the ice, the local ports closest to Anarctica would do thriving business shipping supplies in bulk, etc. Remember, in the gold rush it wasn't the prospectors who made money, it was the inkeepers, saloon owners, whores, suppliers, outfitters, etc. who supplied the poor schmucks, and then took their money when they came to town. The city of San Francisco wasn't built by miners, but by merchants. Same idea in Anarctica - the people who want to have a tax free haven go there, someone has to feed, clothe, and entertain them. That's where the real (and hopefully at some point self-sustaining) economy begins.
The energy costs for heating and plane propulsion wouldn't be worth it. Where do you suggest they fly from? Surely people aren't/that/ desperate to evade taxes.
You'd be surprised. It's a routine practice for large corporations to "sell" intellectual property (trademarks, patents, etc.) to subsidiaries in "tax-free" havens, and then lease back those assets at a big cost to the parent corporation. Parent corporation shows a loss in taxed jurisdictions, and can write the lease cost off, subsidiary corporation shows a profit from the leases, which can offset real losses in other subsidiaries after taxes (like in Europe), and thus make international performance look better than it is, while avoiding taxes on their IP assets.
How would this play out in space (or in Antarctica, as was in the example)? They'd have to actually man the outpost with a bean-counter in order to "prove" to the IRS that they actually have operations there. Take a look at Enron, and the amounts of money they spent on the lawyers and accountants to set that scheme up. You give 'em a bona fide tax free haven in space, and a way to get up there, and they'll go. Besides, they can write transport and life-support off as overhead...
Soon, they set up a subsidary to produce oxygen, which they can then sell at a profit to other companies that are setting up shop, all tax-free. Next thing you know, someone starts manufacturing habitation modules and control circuitry in space, tax-free. You'll need maneuvering jets and propellant, and on and on. Next thing you know you'll have a thriving manufacturing base, producing tons of crap because you don't need 80% efficiency to make money, you only need maybe 60% efficiency since you don't need to pay taxes on the money you make. That's a lot of money saved when you don't need to achieve that extra 20%.
Think about it - would internet commerce have taken off if they had begun taxing it in it's infancy? The dot-bombs would all have said yes, but all those mom-and-pop shops that are doing good business today probably wouldn't have come into existence.
Finally, once you cross the threshold of maybe two or three dozen people, you have to shift from the disposable "camping in space" approach we currently have, to a "living in space" approach. Right now, missions on the ISS have us compacting waste, and shipping it back to earth. There is no closed loop - it's all disposable, as if we were on a camping trip. Once we get beyond a certain number of people that are there permanently, you should see implementation of closed-loop technologies to recover water, oxygen, metals, organics, etc. simply because that's cheaper for a long-term operation. This will spur other technologies necessary for exploring and exploiting the rest of the solar system.
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Probably because there's a stigma for adults in the U.S. to be reading picture books, just as there's a bias for adults to consider animation kid-fare.
Doesn't mean that it's right or wrong, but it's there. Aside from shorts, and comic strips, the adult audience in the U.S. is very unlikely to go out and buy serialized graphic novels, or watch 2D animated films, irregardless of quality (unless it's a Disney film.)
Also, "comic books" in the US has a very specific designation, for a maybe 30 page pulp story, sold in racks. If you broaden the term to include stuff like Doonsbury, Peanuts, and Garfield, then I'd argue that we have a pretty good penetration, which reflects format. The article mentions that japanese will buy manga to pass the time while on the subway - I'd just buy a newspaper, and take a glance at the comics while I browse through the business section. Different media drive different formats, for different audiences.
If you look at it that way, then US syndicated short format strip comics are not a failure. It's the traditional larger format pulp stuff that isn't selling well, probably because it's so damnned expensive. Hell, $3.00 for a single issue of Usagi Yojimbo??? For the cost of two comics, I can buy a remaindered copy of a Tom Clancy novel. That'd take up at least a week's worth of commuting on a bus or subway.
Not unless he's had a sex change operation. Men are blond. Women are blonde.
This is the same stuff you can buy at the local drugstore in 3% dilute solution to disinfect wounds, bleach hair, etc. At very high concentration (I think for rockets they use 90+%), they can use a catalyst to initiate a very rapid exothermic decomposition of the H202 to H20 (as steam) and O2. This provides thrust, without need of a 2-part fuel/oxidizer combo.
I know of at least 2 outfits starting out with hydrogen peroxide rockets - Armadillo Aerospace (Carmack's outfit) and the infamous Rocket Guy (the toy inventor turned spaceman.)
Research into hydrogen peroxide rockets was done in during WWII, and actually made it into some experimental applications, I believe...
I'm hanging my hopes on Armadillo Aerospace. Looking forward to them trying out for the X-Prize, and their approach of documenting everything on their website via pictures, video, and blog-type updates is great. I hope they succed - we need a commercial manufacturer of rockets that doesn't need to charge a premium to support overhead of non-space units.
2 .htm.
Think cheap dumb boosters - the kind of vehicle the shuttle should have been before it was hijacked into being a commuter service. Keep in mind, we don't need to throw away the STS infrastructure (crusty as it may be.) Just replace the orbiter with a larger unmanned payload module, keep the external fuel tank and boosters. Then, build dozens of payload modules, external fuel tanks (screw the insulation - which is needed to keep ice from forming on the fuel tank, make the payload module disposable), and boosters, in order to get economies of scale. Since there's nobody on board, we don't have to worry about having 99.999999% reliability, nor do we have to waste money on life support.
Just so you know, this payload version of the shuttle already exists on paper, as one of the alternate configurations of the shuttle combo - known as the Shuttle C.
If you're curious about other never-built shuttle designs, visit http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld02
Or, we can buy Russian rockets wholesale, if we don't want to invest in our domestic rocket industry. Just don't put pilots in cargo vehicles - there's no point! If you want to send up pilots, put them in spacecraft specifically designed to deliver people... survivable spacecraft.
I think one possible chain of logic is that by suing Verizon to comply with the terms of the DMCA, the RIAA is building case law that will allow them to destroy P2P filesharing, legal or not. How? All they have to do is "suspect" a user of illegal activity, and have sherrifs bust down his door after getting the info from a carrier like Verizon. The user can prove his/her innocence Steve Jackson Games style - with the cops holding the computer and all associated media (CDs, tape backups, etc.)
Do this a couple of times, and the number of people using P2P, legal, or not, will shrink. With fewer filesharers, P2P becomes less valuable, as the global bandwidth shrinks, and fewer hosts/files are available. With P2P degraded, artists like Janis Ian lose a distribution channel, and the RIAA wouldn't mind that a bit.
Distribution. Their greatest fear is that artists will start releasing music on their own, side stepping the recording industry and their slave like contracts. Once an artist can release music (without the record company) through the Internet. The record companies will cease to exist. End of story
Artists currently CAN release music via the Internet. The problem is, it doesn't work very well. How do you publicize a new album? How do you expose listeners to your music?
The record companies are powerful because they control venues for publicity AND distribution. Building a new setup for distribution won't work without "pull" on the other side. Building "pull" is what all that advertising is about. However, there's a big advantage record companies have aside from controlling publicity and distribution. They control whole LIBRARIES of certain genres that they can package and exploit.
For example, I know if I browse through the Capitol Records back catalog, I'll find stuff I like AND is of high quality. I don't know that about Joe Small's internet publishing back catalog.
I agree, the current big music houses are all about greed, but until you can bankroll an operation with equivalent mindshare, you can't hope to generate the same pull for an unknown act, unless you're featured in the news, or on a variety show. With that said however, I'd bet on average you could make more real take-home income by selling your own CDs, than by signing with one of the RIAA member companies...
And that means you might buy something from a non-RIAA distributor.
Which can be damn difficult sometimes. For example, I'm trying to buy some albums put out by an Australian jazz singer (Nina Ferro), but there aren't any US distributors for her music. In essence, she doesn't exist, despite the fact that she's one of the hottest Australian jazz acts.
Now, you're probably asking, if she's persona non-grata here in the states, how did I get to hear her music? Easy, I listen to the Jim Cullum jazz band every weekend via PRI (Public Radio, International), on Riverwalk, Live from the Landing, where Nina has sung before. Variety shows like Prairie Home Companion are also another great source for music. Unfortunately, I got into these shows about 10 years ago, when public radio was a lot more diverse. These days, many of the older shows have been dropped, as all radio homogenizes, both public and commercial.
Internet radio really needs to be built on as a viable, wide-audience alternative to current radio, in order for these types of shows to survive, and in order to expose the buying public to music that they might want to try.
No exposure = no sales. And no, exposing someone to Shakira on screen, stage, and radio isn't going to make that person buy 10 of the same album. Exposing someone to 10 different artists might get them to buy 10 different albums. Face it, the music industry is approaching diminishing returns for the amount of payola and promotion that they're spending. Time to cut back on the amount of money for new acts, and broaden the palate. And a cheap way of promoting more acts is to stream mp3 samples!!!
Seriously, why isn't there a Capitol records streaming MP3 station? Why isn't there a Sony records streaming MP3 station? You think people are going to discover their back catalogs themselves? Nonsense!
Why aren't the executives jumping at the chance to kill off 3/4ths of the middlemen in the business and rake in the pure profit themselves? Any rational businessperson from outside the recording industry would do it. The only explaination is that there's a lot of vested interest in preserving the current system (aka, kickbacks/payola.) Thus, instead of serving the shareholders, the music execs are ONLY SERVING THEMSELVES.
If I'm not mistaken, the 3 main engines are used on launch only. They're useless in space, since they run off of the main fuel tank, which is jettisoned after the boost phase. The only engines of relevance in orbit/reentry are the OMS and RCS engines.
True enough, but even if I had a drawing or picture to contribute, there doesn't appear to be a mechanism by which to do so.
Remember, digital cameras are cheap, and people have all sorts of things in their garages (well, maybe not an AK-47, at least not in California anyways.) But if a museum curator decided to contribute a quick snapshot of say, the moon rocks, or if someone wanted to submit a vacation photo of the Arizona memorial under a Pearl Harbor entry, there ought to be a way of submitting it.
Maybe someone should develop a visual wikipedia, layered on top of the wikipedia proper?
I was looking at a couple of entries (Kevlar, AK-47) that I had contributed to in the past (hint, I added Twaron as one of the alternate trade names). One thing that struck me was that I expected them to have added pictures by now. For example, showing the AK-47, with maybe an exploded view and some close-ups, would have been helpful, as would maybe a picture of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor.
So they impose a levy on CDRs. Who gets that money? If I start my own band, and we produce our own album, can we get a license that will let us burn our own CDRs without paying this levy, or will be be forced to pay the incumbents a fee for competing with them?
Honestly, this makes as much sense as Ford, GM, and Chrysler paying residuals to buggy whip manufacturers. For chrissakes, medical imaging scanners (MR and CT) now burn their data to recordable CDs. Do you think it makes any sense to pay a consortium of music companies a fee when you get your medical scans done? What about paying that fee when the next release of RedHat comes out?
We need to find these people and beat them repeatedly with cluesticks until they wise up.
So what's to stop a show whose fan base is large enough to outright buy the show, or purchase the syndication rights, and put up a streaming station? Say, a Star Trek channel, funded by fan contribution, and incidentally selling Star Trek merchandise, etc., broadcasting every Sunday night between 9 and 12, with reflectors and p2p load distribution in order to minimize bandwidth costs. Instead of interrupting the show with commercials, you could just bookend each episode, like they do with PBS.
Seriously, enough geeks banded together to open up the source to Blender3D, and that was no trivial chunk of change (100k euros.)
You don't need to screw over small-time operators just to make a point. Set up a 2 tier pricing structure, with an upper bound on the number of allowed renewals. Impose a exponential fee for sole distribution rights (where you get to control who gets it and at what cost), and have a lower flat fee for ownership rights that allow mandatory licensing at a set rate.
If you want to milk your property, be prepared to pay what it's worth to you. If you want to maintain ownership of your copyright, but you don't mind licensing it at a reasonable rate, pay the flat fee. You can move from flat fee to exponential by paying the difference between the two renewal fees. You can go from exponential to flat, but you don't get the difference back.
At a certain point, the big corporations will say, screw it, flat fee. And after a certain number of renewals, it's out of their hands. That way, there's no incentive to screw with the copyright laws toward the end of a property's lifetime, as it's already been stepped down to a mass-market licensing model.
I have no cable TV yet I enjoy a 22 mbps (max) broadband connection for only $20 CDN a month.
:(
You know, you could probably make a lot of money if you were close enough to the border between Canada and US, by putting up access points for Americans to dip into some of that absurdly cheap bandwidth you've got there...
I pay US $80 per month for a 384/768kbps DSL line...
Aren't hardcovers usually printed on acid-free paper .snip.
Many more are now, than they used to be, but not all. On the other hand, paperback paper quality has gone up as well (think trade paperbacks, not mass market.)
I dunno, I buy hardcovers cause the type is easier on my eyes, and I like collecting books with dust jackets. However, I rarely buy HCs new - I'll buy remaindered and used books instead, often times cheaper than a new paperback edition. I used to buy book club editions, but with the cost of shipping as it is, it's cheaper buying the discounted original publisher hardcover off of Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
I listen to classical american music - jazz, big band, and musicals, from 1910 - 1959, with some musical selections after that. I also buy soundtracks, a little contemporary R&B and jazz on the side, and a smattering of celtic and folk music.
I don't listen to "pop" music at all. You can't get Frank Sinatra on FM where I am, unless it's on a Public Radio station, and only rarely these days (they've all become NPR talk-radio clones.)
It seems as though all forms of "free" media have been subsumed by corporations with something to sell, and instead of offering interesting content in exchange for our eyeballs or ears, they've decided it's cheaper to dictate our tastes instead. Is it any wonder we're no longer interested in watching the crap on TV, or listening to the droning, repetitve, fad-driven monoculture of the radio?
Every one of those broadcasters (the ones that are nothing more than corporate advertising mouthpieces) should have their licenses revoked for failing to serve public interest - remember, they're using a public resource, under license from the government (or rather, the people.) Any citizen can contest their fitness, and have that license for spectrum revoked, and given the RIAA payola, and their efforts at sabotaging competition (streaming radio), we should do just that.
In responce to your arguement that there needs to be criminal penalties, there already are.
:) There are civil penalties in certain areas of the US, and if you have enough clout and they're selling illegal items, you can slap them with a fraud suit. But again, I've yet to hear of any spammers serving jail time.
Really? Where? I've yet to hear of any spammers go to prison - if you can tell me of any, it'd really brighten my day.
99% of the people who I email personally I have meet personally or talked over the phone or in some mannor exchanged information.
That's great. I personally don't use the phone very much, and the people I communicate with are usually contacting me for the very first time, via e-mail. ECN wouldn't help me, nor would it be very much different than setting up a whitelist.
A large part of the financial insentive is trading "good" email lists.
While trading (or renting) lists is an accepted practice for catalogs, and postal mailed solicitations (although there is a growing backlash, related to the intolerance of e-mailed junk mail), trading e-mail lists is NOT a legitimate tactic in the online world. The only people I know of who sell e-mails are spammers, and these are the kind of people who would sell you 999,999 bad e-mails on a 1 million e-mails cd. Like I said, the spammer business model isn't bothered by invalid addresses, bounces, etc. - all they have to do is harvest, autoguess, or steal enough addresses, and there will be some idiot who responds.
Again, for your plan to work, you'd have to force everyone in the world to essentially run a whitelist. "If I don't know you, I won't take e-mail from you." Obviously if nobody accepts spam, spammers will go away, or at least become pathetically irrelevant. But it also means that e-mail will no longer be an open communications medium, but something more like AIM, where only people on your buddy list can chat with you.
Before I'm willing to take that step, I'd like to put the screws on the spammer-criminals and see if that takes care of the problem. My rationale behind using the law to penalize spammer behavior is this: big spammers like having money, and being able to spend it/show it off. That's just the kind of people they are (ie, get-rich-quick scum.) If they move their spamming operations overseas, then fine, we can still bust the guy behind it if he's in the states. If he flees, even better, he becomes a paraiah, and has to do all his business outside of the United States. If he's willing to live with that penalty, then fine. I'm betting, however, many of them might decide not chancing jail time, especially if they've been there before. And if I'm wrong? Well, you can always whitelist/ECN if things get bad enough.
I'm curious. Do the firefighters in Canberra set backfires? Or does the abundance of fuel prevent them from using that tactic?
Forcing you to use their mailservers isn't abridgement of speech, and is thus not a violation of their "common carrier" status. It's more like saying you can't use non-Bell equipment on a Bell telephone network. You can still make whatever calls you want - you just have to use their equipment to do so.
Also, you have to consider - are they restricting speech in general, or are they restricting the content of speech? Forcing you to make less than 15 calls a month could be considered a restriction of speech, but again is not an abridgement of that right. Preventing you from complaining about the RIAA and the MPAA would be a restriction of content and thus a violation of their common carrier status.
Your proposal is laudable, but you overthought it. Instead of issuing ECNs, and layering a whole nother level of protocols, you could just have everyone run their own domain (or subdomain), and every time you give your address out, make it unique. For example:
:)
I buy a book from Amazon.com. I give them the following address: amazoncom20021109@joe.mydomain.com (ie, domain+date@mydomain)
If amazon abuses that address, I remove it from the active list of allowed addresses, and it just bounces.
However, there's a problem. Neither your proposal or method I use will allow the guy off the street to mail me without having been given a valid address, nor will they make spam no longer cost effective. These are the two main problems to controlling spam - allowing mail you want (without knowing the person sending it), and providing a feedback mechanism to actively discourage future spam (a penalty.)
Spammers don't care about bounces, because they don't have to deal with them. And unless you force everyone to refuse mails from unknown senders, the spammer business model of spam everyone, get some idiot schmuck to bite, still holds. So all we've done is increase the level of complexity without fixing the root problem - the economics of spam. Sure we've cut down on the amount of spam we personally get, but we can do that already (Spamassassin, throwaway e-mails, authentication, etc.)
We need something to make them think twice before spamming people... like criminal penalties. The prospect of having to spend a year with Bubba (or Bertha) up in the big house should be a sufficient deterrent.
Spamhausen are a mixed blessing. They're fucking annoying because until you realize that they're spamhausen, you treat them like normal ISPs and send them abuse reports. They then pass the abuse report to the spammer so they can fine tune their spam message to avoid filters, move their IP to the next one on their block, and start spamming again.
On the other hand, once you realize an ISP is totally black hat *cough* *coretel* *cough*, you can blackhole their entire IP block and cut off all future spam from them.
Again, we need a public debate on the issue. Too many laws are being passed by lobbyists and their paid congressional monkeys. Problem is, the average American has been trained to ignore government and politics, except when incited by left or right-wing demagogues over emotional issues (which result in bad policy, but good political publicity.)
Unfortunately, until people are educated (will this ever happen?) and are willing to vote, serve on juries, and voluntarily contribute to military/civil service, we're going to see an ever fewer, and ever more influential bunch of people controling more and more of our lives. And the most ironic part: we as the American people are letting them get away with it.
What can we on Slashdot do? We need to field a geek candidate who "gets it" and put him (or her) in Congress, with a shitload of money and a big whopping stick (geek lobby) to back them. Next step, control the media with press releases, protests, and of course, preemptive lawsuits. Last step, kill the RIAA/MPAA business models by replacing them with honest contracts that work and benefit the artist and the promoter.
It can be done, but it will have to be a hard fought war against entrenched interests, both corporate and political.
Maybe the hospitals should start taxing the NRA and the police?
Hangun Control Inc. wants to tax both guns and ammunition under the same idea, so Rosen and the RIAA aren't the only ones bending common sense to fit their needs.
Remember, the power to tax is the power to destroy. The RIAA wants to tax broadband, which really means that they'd like for broadband to go away...
Well, if you were smart, and Antarctica was a tax free haven, you'd build a refinery anchored right off the shore, ready to take tanker shipments of oil, and exporting tax-free fuel to ships at sea, and the scientists on the continent. If someone actually did build a resort there, you could make money by supplying them with fuel oil, and they'd make money by giving your refinery workers someplace to go Friday nights.
With enough people there, you can start looking into closing the loop by building hydroponics farms under the ice, the local ports closest to Anarctica would do thriving business shipping supplies in bulk, etc. Remember, in the gold rush it wasn't the prospectors who made money, it was the inkeepers, saloon owners, whores, suppliers, outfitters, etc. who supplied the poor schmucks, and then took their money when they came to town. The city of San Francisco wasn't built by miners, but by merchants. Same idea in Anarctica - the people who want to have a tax free haven go there, someone has to feed, clothe, and entertain them. That's where the real (and hopefully at some point self-sustaining) economy begins.
The energy costs for heating and plane propulsion wouldn't be worth it. Where do you suggest they fly from? Surely people aren't /that/ desperate to evade taxes.
You'd be surprised. It's a routine practice for large corporations to "sell" intellectual property (trademarks, patents, etc.) to subsidiaries in "tax-free" havens, and then lease back those assets at a big cost to the parent corporation. Parent corporation shows a loss in taxed jurisdictions, and can write the lease cost off, subsidiary corporation shows a profit from the leases, which can offset real losses in other subsidiaries after taxes (like in Europe), and thus make international performance look better than it is, while avoiding taxes on their IP assets.
How would this play out in space (or in Antarctica, as was in the example)? They'd have to actually man the outpost with a bean-counter in order to "prove" to the IRS that they actually have operations there. Take a look at Enron, and the amounts of money they spent on the lawyers and accountants to set that scheme up. You give 'em a bona fide tax free haven in space, and a way to get up there, and they'll go. Besides, they can write transport and life-support off as overhead...
Soon, they set up a subsidary to produce oxygen, which they can then sell at a profit to other companies that are setting up shop, all tax-free. Next thing you know, someone starts manufacturing habitation modules and control circuitry in space, tax-free. You'll need maneuvering jets and propellant, and on and on. Next thing you know you'll have a thriving manufacturing base, producing tons of crap because you don't need 80% efficiency to make money, you only need maybe 60% efficiency since you don't need to pay taxes on the money you make. That's a lot of money saved when you don't need to achieve that extra 20%.
Think about it - would internet commerce have taken off if they had begun taxing it in it's infancy? The dot-bombs would all have said yes, but all those mom-and-pop shops that are doing good business today probably wouldn't have come into existence.
Finally, once you cross the threshold of maybe two or three dozen people, you have to shift from the disposable "camping in space" approach we currently have, to a "living in space" approach. Right now, missions on the ISS have us compacting waste, and shipping it back to earth. There is no closed loop - it's all disposable, as if we were on a camping trip. Once we get beyond a certain number of people that are there permanently, you should see implementation of closed-loop technologies to recover water, oxygen, metals, organics, etc. simply because that's cheaper for a long-term operation. This will spur other technologies necessary for exploring and exploiting the rest of the solar system.