Well, naturally it'll be a great outcome when it's used to save lives. What kind of outcome will it be when it's used to keep tabs on citizens' movements?
But bring up the Nazi eugenics experiments--and bear in mind the eugenics is scientifically established--and they just mumble and walk away.
They do? That's news to me; I've never seen it happen. Is this common in your experience?
Besides, it only sounds to me like another reason to keep politics away from science. You're talking about not only an area of scientific inquiry but an approach to the actual practice of science that was mandated by the Nazis. If that's not a clearcut example of utterly unacceptable political (mis)direction of science, what is?
If the present administration were a Democratic one and interfered with science the way the Bush administration has, then it'd make sense to hold a similar contest criticizing that administration's approach to science.
Don't like it when Republicans are criticized on science? Fine. Then get your Republican leaders not to downplay all climate research that doesn't reflect corporate interests, and not talk about evolution and "intelligent design" as though they were competing ideas of roughly comparable credibility, or treat evolutionary theory as though it were some radical, unsubstantiated idea that wasn't accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists.
Yes, science has been politicized terribly by people and governments at both ends of the political scale, and I won't hesitate to acknowledge one of the worst examples I can think of came from Soviet-style "communism," in which Soviet geneticists were hobbled by a state mandate to adhere to a hopelessly outdated and long discredited model of inheritance because it was thought to provide a natural parallel and support for elements of Soviet doctrine.
However comma in the US, which is a major venue for scientific research and technological innovation (not to mention simply being an enormously powerful and influential nation), as well as the area in which the organization sponsoring this contest is based, political constraints upon or interference with science have typically come from the political right - sometimes because scientific findings are thought to pose a challenge to religious belief, sometimes because they have implications for social policy that don't reflect conservative ideals or that challenge corporate interests, and so on. The Bush administration has repeatedly shown it is one of the worst offenders in this regard.
Funny. I do remember the '70s, and don't remember getting three songs for a quarter, but there you go. Even so, three plays in a fixed location under less-than-ideal listening conditions is nowhere near a permanent copy of a track one can play as many times as one likes.
An MP3 probably isn't high-quality compared to a CD, but what about tape, say? The fact a lot of people can't even tell the difference between MP3 and CD when listening ought to indicate an MP3 is sufficient quality-wise for many (most?). Yes, it's great if the quality is better, but I just don't think your expectations of the quality of product you're asking for with the maximum price you're willing to pay are remotely realistic / feasible. I mean, I can say I'd like a Porsche for fifty bucks, but no one's going to give me one of those, either.
I don't know what you're saying about fair market value. If the licensing rights alone make it unfeasible to distribute music for a dime a song, how does that make the fair market value less rather than more?
With CDs, on the one hand, one generally gets the best-sounding presentation available, plus all the compression options one might choose (since one does one's own compression), plus the physical package with art, liner notes, etc. On the other hand, it tends to be more expensive, and it takes up space, and it consumes resources, and it's vulnerable to all the things that can happen to physical stuff (fire, theft, etc. - yes, that can also happen to one's hard drive or CD-Rs or whatever, but one can have a slew of copies of downloads in different places, and unlike a copy of a CD, a copy of a download is a full, complete duplicate of the original product one paid for, so if one loses the original one loses nothing).
Downloads are cheaper, (arguably) less vulnerable to physical peril, don't take up much room, don't consume much in the way of resources, and so on - but they also don't sound as good, and tend not to have much in the way of liner notes, artwork, etc.
Life's all about trade-offs. Different people will prioritize these concerns differently, of course, and some won't see the drawbacks of a format as drawbacks at all.
That might be what it'd be worth to you, but it's unrealistically cheap. It costs more than a dime to play a song just once on a jukebox - typically a quarter, in fact, and it's been that way since at least as far back as the '70s, when a quarter was worth a lot more. If that's the case, actually getting one's own permanent copy of the song ought to be worth a lot more, and yet here's eMusic, actually selling stuff for slightly under a quarter, or even less, depending upon one's subscription plan... and one's inclination to actually use all the downloads one pays for, of course.
Ten cents a song? The basic mechanical licensing rights cost almost that all by themselves; a download service ultimately pays more than a dime for its downloads. It can't give you songs for a dime apiece, for the same reason a change machine can't give you a dollar bill for a nickel.
It may not be anywhere near the deal it was when it offered unlimiteds, but it's still a great deal; 25 a track is still pretty darn cheap, and low enough to waste a few downloads from time to time on stuff one doesn't know (particularly since one does also get previews like at any other download store). I know I've discovered plenty of great stuff for myself I probably never would have otherwise.
Nitpick: they didn't change the total number of CDs a user can burn (and indeed, individual songs can be burned any number of times); they changed the number of times one can burn a specific playlist. This was not only less objectionable (though still not desirable, of course), but was more than offset, I think, by the fact that at the same time they did this they increased the number of computers one can have authorized to play the song, from three to five (and come to think of it, if each of those computers can burn the same playlist seven times, that means one can burn the same playlist a total of 35 times, as opposed to just 30 times before, so the burn limit actually increased, too. Can anyone confirm?).
eMusic actually pays the labels around 50 cents a song, believe it or not. They stay in business because of that use-it-or-lose-it model you mention; everyone pays a subscription fee which entitles them to a certain amount of service / product, but not everyone fully uses everything they pay for; lots of people let lots of downloads that they pay for slip by every month, thus subsidizing the gotta-get-every-last-track-I-can people (like me;), who wring every bit of value out of it they can. It's essentially the same model as a number of other sorts of businesses - health clubs, say, or insurance. Everybody pays a fee for the service, but not everyone takes full advantage of the service (in the case of insurance, it's not the customer's choice, of course, but rather them just collecting on the policy if / when the need arises, but from the POV of the business, it's largely the same as a health club charging $40 or whatever for monthly memberships, when some users show up and work out for an hour or more every day while others wind up hardly ever coming in the door).
It pretty much has to be this way for the subscription services, too, since there are certain fees they have to pay for the music, unless it's public domain.
That said, I do think 99 cents isn't outrageous for a song. It's a very small amount of money for anything; even things like candy bars are getting "up" there, and even a nontangible thing like a downloaded file is longer-lasting (and offers far more enjoyment to its user) than something ephemeral like a candy bar.
Moreover, for decades it's been commonly accepted practice for jukeboxes to charge a quarter to play a song just once. If that's the case - and keep in mind that's in a fixed location, usually in a less-than-ideal listening environment as far as purely enjoying music goes, and all that - then what would make it suddenly be a drastically outrageous jump to charge a hair under four times as much for one's own permanent copy of a song that one can listen to as many times as one can stomach it, anywhere, anytime, etc.?
OTOH, now that music is so much freer of physical constraints than ever before, and there's no cost-per-unit for manufacturing, etc., they could price songs much lower than 99 cents if they wanted, though at some point they wind up running into a wall where they simply can't slice the proceeds thinly enough to give a cut to everyone who's supposed to get one (the performer, the writer, the producer, etc.). But still.
Not sure why you think using iTunes=limit on a number of songs you have.
Unfortunately, the ROKR has a 100-song limit, regardless of how much storage capacity the phone is expanded to, since a phone with iTunes might otherwise bite into iPod sales, and Apple didn't want that.
Yeah, well, currently Apple have been changing what you can do with the music you have ALREADY PURCHASED. They have been doing this via iTunes software updates. They changed the number of CDs you are "allowed" to burn for each song, and the number of computers you are "allowed" to have each song on.
Wrong. Any individual song can be burned to CD any number of times; the limit is on the number of times one can burn a playlist containing that song. The number of playlist burns did indeed go down from ten to seven.
You can also put a song on as many computers as you like, and have always been able to; the limit is that you can have only so many of them play the song. Moreover, when the playlist burn limit went down, this one actually went up, from three to five. I think this is actually more significant than the burn limit change, because I think it's more likely someone would want to be able to play the song on more than three computers than to be able to burn upwards of seven copies of a CD of a specific playlist, and if so, Apple's change is actually an improvement for most people (and those who want multiple burns of a playlist can always just make copies of the CD instead of burning the playlist over and over again, and get the same thing).
That said, it does still suck that iTMS music is hampered by any DRM at all (and the decreased burn limit certainly isn't a good thing, even if it's not as bad a thing as you made it out to be). I definitely prefer to get music sans DRM whenever I can, but the iTMS's advantages do sway me sometimes.
From the article: 'They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work".
Everyone who gave one of those three answers was right.
Yes, actually. I've seen the episode as well (thanks, Internet!), and without saying too much (so as not to spoil it for those who haven't seen it), there are some moments with stairs that seem almost deliberately put in specifically to address all the comments and jokes made about Daleks and stairs over the years. Characters in the episode even make a comment about stairs, before seeing what the Dalek is capable of.
Okay, I liked Indiana jones, but Jesus Christ, check out his profile! He hasn't done anything else!
How interesting. It's customary for people here to post links to pages that support their arguments rather than undermine them, but you've gone and done the opposite. There's an awful lot of material in his IMDB profile, a considerable amount of which doesn't pertain to either Star Wars, Indiana Jones or American Graffiti.
I suspect that mix is deliberate, though, along the lines of how "Vergon 6 was once filled with a superdense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds." I'm sure plenty of writers on the staff were / are fully aware of what they'd previously stated some percentage of Bender's composition to be, and had / have no intention of refraining from adding more to it whenever opportunities to do so arise.
They forgot to mention the other reason for low sales, being that popular music, for the most part, sucks.
Actually, TFA did mention it:
But many retailers and label executives alike point to a more fundamental problem this year: A lack of hit acts. Don VanCleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, says blame lies with "an absolute, gigantic cesspool of really bad bands."
Consumers seem to agree. This year has seen more albums come and go from the No. 1 sales spot than any year since SoundScan began keeping score in 1991 -- a sign that few hits have staying power. This year's album charts have seen brief reigns, often followed by rapid tumbles, by more than two dozen artists, including Kenny Chesney, Hilary Duff and Rob Thomas.
The music industry hasn't connected broadly with fans since the late-1990s heyday of the teen pop performed by the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and Britney Spears. "It's almost like we need a new genre of music," says John Sullivan, chief financial officer of Trans World Entertainment Corp., which operates music stores under the FYE and Coconuts names, among others. "There hasn't been anything fresh to get consumers excited in a while."
They don't necessarily reach the same conclusion, but they do at least bring up the idea music isn't selling as well because current music simply isn't as good or appealling as consumers would like.
Well, yeah, if you heap the kind of abuse you describe on them they'll suffer for it, but if you treat CDs the way a normal person might, they last a lot longer.
I keep my CDs in their jewelcases, and those are in racks. It's not hard. I just don't make a point of throwing them around. I'm always amazed at people who have bare CDs just lying around on desktops and whatnot; it's like they're trying to damage them...
I wondered about that myself. The article's authors seem unable to choose between noting the decades certain toys debuted or the decades they became massively popular.
Also, IIRC, Star Wars action figures weren't actually available until 1978, not '77.
I'd have left off First Contact, and put Contact higher.
Well, you can do something about that, if you like. It's still accepting votes, and many of the rankings have already changed a fair bit since the Slashdot summary was written.
It's not clear how many movies are on it, actually; they actually have more than ten movies to vote on, and they just maintain a list of the top ten specifically. The list is pretty dynamic; the rankings have changed around a bit since the Slashdot write-up was done. It may be that the non-US movies are getting low votes, or that they aren't being voted on at all (perhaps because not as many people have seen them?).
I agree about Gattaca, but do note this list is about space movies rather than sci-fi ones, and includes a number of non sci-fi films, including both docudramas (like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff) and documentaries. Gattaca does have space-related elements, but the sci-fi focus is on earthbound genetics. Whether it's sufficiently space-related to be on the list I couldn't say; I didn't see it there, but the way the list is set up it's hard to know for sure if a movie is on it unless one sees it there.
Maybe, but not only is iTunes still (by far) the biggest player in this market, but the number 2 player (eMusic) sells stuff for less than iTunes does, and without DRM, to boot, and that's an even less attractive proposition for the major labels. "Yeah, let's show iTunes where to stick it! They're not paying us enough or giving us enough control; let's take our game to where we'll get paid even less, and have less control!!" Yeah, that might happen...
This chart shows how much each of over 30 different paid music download outfits pay CD Baby, a digital music distributor for a number of indie labels. It's my understanding those services each pay all the labels and distributors who supply their tracks the same (so, for example, Apple pays 70 cents per individually downloaded track whether it's from some industry behemoth like Warner or BMI, or some tiny indie outfit). Note the prices paid by the download services to the wholesalers run from around 50 cents to 75 cents a track; note also that Apple already is near the high end of that range, at 70 cents a download. There's only one service that pays more than Apple, and only two others that pay as much as it does, and that's out of more than thirty different services. Apple's already paying more than almost any other player in music downloads, and they're the one selling more than all those others combined.
I know how many drives, floor space, power, and maintenance you need to run a datacenter with 30 TB of data (required to run a site with 1 million + songs). I know how much bandwidth and servers you need to deliver these songs to the desktop. This is not cheap.
I know what the average wholesale price is per digital song and I know what Apple is charging. It is simply impossible to break even on the current price structure. EVERY distributor is losing money. Which is why everyone other than iTunes is pushing the subscription model (which has a much higher margin). iTunes can afford to lose the money because they make it back and more on their device sales.
If you say so, but FWIW it's been reported more than once that the iTMS does indeed generate a (relatively small) profit for Apple independently of iPod sales. It may have began as a loss leader, but it's not any more; this has been reported in multiple accounts, and confirmed by Apple.
Apple currently pays a label / distributor 70 cents for an individual track downloaded from it; I believe similar pricing applies to albums (so, $7 for a typical $9.90 or $9.99 album). 29 cents for a download of a few megabytes or about three bucks for one of fifty or a hundred megs shouldn't be impossible to make a profit on.
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Some of the hot women might not care to be checked out by people they can't check out in return. Would you?
Well, naturally it'll be a great outcome when it's used to save lives. What kind of outcome will it be when it's used to keep tabs on citizens' movements?
They do? That's news to me; I've never seen it happen. Is this common in your experience?
Besides, it only sounds to me like another reason to keep politics away from science. You're talking about not only an area of scientific inquiry but an approach to the actual practice of science that was mandated by the Nazis. If that's not a clearcut example of utterly unacceptable political (mis)direction of science, what is?
Don't like it when Republicans are criticized on science? Fine. Then get your Republican leaders not to downplay all climate research that doesn't reflect corporate interests, and not talk about evolution and "intelligent design" as though they were competing ideas of roughly comparable credibility, or treat evolutionary theory as though it were some radical, unsubstantiated idea that wasn't accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists.
Yes, science has been politicized terribly by people and governments at both ends of the political scale, and I won't hesitate to acknowledge one of the worst examples I can think of came from Soviet-style "communism," in which Soviet geneticists were hobbled by a state mandate to adhere to a hopelessly outdated and long discredited model of inheritance because it was thought to provide a natural parallel and support for elements of Soviet doctrine.
However comma in the US, which is a major venue for scientific research and technological innovation (not to mention simply being an enormously powerful and influential nation), as well as the area in which the organization sponsoring this contest is based, political constraints upon or interference with science have typically come from the political right - sometimes because scientific findings are thought to pose a challenge to religious belief, sometimes because they have implications for social policy that don't reflect conservative ideals or that challenge corporate interests, and so on. The Bush administration has repeatedly shown it is one of the worst offenders in this regard.
An MP3 probably isn't high-quality compared to a CD, but what about tape, say? The fact a lot of people can't even tell the difference between MP3 and CD when listening ought to indicate an MP3 is sufficient quality-wise for many (most?). Yes, it's great if the quality is better, but I just don't think your expectations of the quality of product you're asking for with the maximum price you're willing to pay are remotely realistic / feasible. I mean, I can say I'd like a Porsche for fifty bucks, but no one's going to give me one of those, either.
I don't know what you're saying about fair market value. If the licensing rights alone make it unfeasible to distribute music for a dime a song, how does that make the fair market value less rather than more?
With CDs, on the one hand, one generally gets the best-sounding presentation available, plus all the compression options one might choose (since one does one's own compression), plus the physical package with art, liner notes, etc. On the other hand, it tends to be more expensive, and it takes up space, and it consumes resources, and it's vulnerable to all the things that can happen to physical stuff (fire, theft, etc. - yes, that can also happen to one's hard drive or CD-Rs or whatever, but one can have a slew of copies of downloads in different places, and unlike a copy of a CD, a copy of a download is a full, complete duplicate of the original product one paid for, so if one loses the original one loses nothing).
Downloads are cheaper, (arguably) less vulnerable to physical peril, don't take up much room, don't consume much in the way of resources, and so on - but they also don't sound as good, and tend not to have much in the way of liner notes, artwork, etc.
Life's all about trade-offs. Different people will prioritize these concerns differently, of course, and some won't see the drawbacks of a format as drawbacks at all.
Ten cents a song? The basic mechanical licensing rights cost almost that all by themselves; a download service ultimately pays more than a dime for its downloads. It can't give you songs for a dime apiece, for the same reason a change machine can't give you a dollar bill for a nickel.
I'm guessing you're not a big movie watcher...
It may not be anywhere near the deal it was when it offered unlimiteds, but it's still a great deal; 25 a track is still pretty darn cheap, and low enough to waste a few downloads from time to time on stuff one doesn't know (particularly since one does also get previews like at any other download store). I know I've discovered plenty of great stuff for myself I probably never would have otherwise.
Nitpick: they didn't change the total number of CDs a user can burn (and indeed, individual songs can be burned any number of times); they changed the number of times one can burn a specific playlist. This was not only less objectionable (though still not desirable, of course), but was more than offset, I think, by the fact that at the same time they did this they increased the number of computers one can have authorized to play the song, from three to five (and come to think of it, if each of those computers can burn the same playlist seven times, that means one can burn the same playlist a total of 35 times, as opposed to just 30 times before, so the burn limit actually increased, too. Can anyone confirm?).
It pretty much has to be this way for the subscription services, too, since there are certain fees they have to pay for the music, unless it's public domain.
That said, I do think 99 cents isn't outrageous for a song. It's a very small amount of money for anything; even things like candy bars are getting "up" there, and even a nontangible thing like a downloaded file is longer-lasting (and offers far more enjoyment to its user) than something ephemeral like a candy bar.
Moreover, for decades it's been commonly accepted practice for jukeboxes to charge a quarter to play a song just once. If that's the case - and keep in mind that's in a fixed location, usually in a less-than-ideal listening environment as far as purely enjoying music goes, and all that - then what would make it suddenly be a drastically outrageous jump to charge a hair under four times as much for one's own permanent copy of a song that one can listen to as many times as one can stomach it, anywhere, anytime, etc.?
OTOH, now that music is so much freer of physical constraints than ever before, and there's no cost-per-unit for manufacturing, etc., they could price songs much lower than 99 cents if they wanted, though at some point they wind up running into a wall where they simply can't slice the proceeds thinly enough to give a cut to everyone who's supposed to get one (the performer, the writer, the producer, etc.). But still.
Unfortunately, the ROKR has a 100-song limit, regardless of how much storage capacity the phone is expanded to, since a phone with iTunes might otherwise bite into iPod sales, and Apple didn't want that.
Wrong. Any individual song can be burned to CD any number of times; the limit is on the number of times one can burn a playlist containing that song. The number of playlist burns did indeed go down from ten to seven.
You can also put a song on as many computers as you like, and have always been able to; the limit is that you can have only so many of them play the song. Moreover, when the playlist burn limit went down, this one actually went up, from three to five. I think this is actually more significant than the burn limit change, because I think it's more likely someone would want to be able to play the song on more than three computers than to be able to burn upwards of seven copies of a CD of a specific playlist, and if so, Apple's change is actually an improvement for most people (and those who want multiple burns of a playlist can always just make copies of the CD instead of burning the playlist over and over again, and get the same thing).
That said, it does still suck that iTMS music is hampered by any DRM at all (and the decreased burn limit certainly isn't a good thing, even if it's not as bad a thing as you made it out to be). I definitely prefer to get music sans DRM whenever I can, but the iTMS's advantages do sway me sometimes.
Everyone who gave one of those three answers was right.
I think the LEGO company might have a few things to say about someone else naming a product X-Pod.
Yes, actually. I've seen the episode as well (thanks, Internet!), and without saying too much (so as not to spoil it for those who haven't seen it), there are some moments with stairs that seem almost deliberately put in specifically to address all the comments and jokes made about Daleks and stairs over the years. Characters in the episode even make a comment about stairs, before seeing what the Dalek is capable of.
How interesting. It's customary for people here to post links to pages that support their arguments rather than undermine them, but you've gone and done the opposite. There's an awful lot of material in his IMDB profile, a considerable amount of which doesn't pertain to either Star Wars, Indiana Jones or American Graffiti.
I suspect that mix is deliberate, though, along the lines of how "Vergon 6 was once filled with a superdense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds." I'm sure plenty of writers on the staff were / are fully aware of what they'd previously stated some percentage of Bender's composition to be, and had / have no intention of refraining from adding more to it whenever opportunities to do so arise.
Actually, TFA did mention it:
They don't necessarily reach the same conclusion, but they do at least bring up the idea music isn't selling as well because current music simply isn't as good or appealling as consumers would like.
I keep my CDs in their jewelcases, and those are in racks. It's not hard. I just don't make a point of throwing them around. I'm always amazed at people who have bare CDs just lying around on desktops and whatnot; it's like they're trying to damage them...
Also, IIRC, Star Wars action figures weren't actually available until 1978, not '77.
Well, you can do something about that, if you like. It's still accepting votes, and many of the rankings have already changed a fair bit since the Slashdot summary was written.
I agree about Gattaca, but do note this list is about space movies rather than sci-fi ones, and includes a number of non sci-fi films, including both docudramas (like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff) and documentaries. Gattaca does have space-related elements, but the sci-fi focus is on earthbound genetics. Whether it's sufficiently space-related to be on the list I couldn't say; I didn't see it there, but the way the list is set up it's hard to know for sure if a movie is on it unless one sees it there.
This chart shows how much each of over 30 different paid music download outfits pay CD Baby, a digital music distributor for a number of indie labels. It's my understanding those services each pay all the labels and distributors who supply their tracks the same (so, for example, Apple pays 70 cents per individually downloaded track whether it's from some industry behemoth like Warner or BMI, or some tiny indie outfit). Note the prices paid by the download services to the wholesalers run from around 50 cents to 75 cents a track; note also that Apple already is near the high end of that range, at 70 cents a download. There's only one service that pays more than Apple, and only two others that pay as much as it does, and that's out of more than thirty different services. Apple's already paying more than almost any other player in music downloads, and they're the one selling more than all those others combined.
If you say so, but FWIW it's been reported more than once that the iTMS does indeed generate a (relatively small) profit for Apple independently of iPod sales. It may have began as a loss leader, but it's not any more; this has been reported in multiple accounts, and confirmed by Apple.
Apple currently pays a label / distributor 70 cents for an individual track downloaded from it; I believe similar pricing applies to albums (so, $7 for a typical $9.90 or $9.99 album). 29 cents for a download of a few megabytes or about three bucks for one of fifty or a hundred megs shouldn't be impossible to make a profit on.