Where are you getting them from now - online vendors like Amazon? They can sell stuff for much less than the brick-&-mortar stores, and they weren't an option in the early days of CDs. If you compare the prices at brick-&-mortar stores then to those now (and the same kinds of stores - discount stores in the '80s to discount stores in the '00s, music retailers in the '80s to music retailers in the '00s, etc.), I think you'll find the prices haven't gone down at all, for the most part (though I think there are some exceptions).
Fair enough, but the drop in the cost of manufacturing CDs exceeded that, and it did so quite some time ago (before enough years had passed for inflation to have as much of an effect as it's had now). The manufacturing costs of CDs had gone way down by the mid-'90s, for example, but I'm sure they were still selling for more then than they had when they were introduced in the early '80s.
Oh, remember how they used to come in those long cardboard boxes, to make them fit the old bins in stores that had originally held LPs? The cardboard boxes were abandoned in 1993; each of those boxes added about a dollar to the cost of making a CD (and I think that's a separate cost from what it added to shipping them, etc.). I don't think the selling price of CDs immediately (or ever) reflected that one sudden decrease in the manufacturing (and storage, shipping, etc.) cost, but instead the markup added by the box was retained and became pure additional profit for the labels. I'd like to know for sure, though; does anyone have access to detailed information on those boxes' associated costs and whatnot?
It's not a billion songs yet. Also, some of those songs sold have been as part of albums, and a lot of the album prices work out to less than 99 cents (or whatever other currency is used) per song. The music labels have therefore gotten well under $700 million so far.
That said, however, your point still stands. It's clear the labels have made a heck of a lot of money by now on music they don't even have to physically replicate, distribute, etc., and they're making more all the time.
Remember also how CDs were considerably more expensive than LPs and cassettes when they came out, but it was promised the price would fall as soon as CD technology matured? It's funny how the average CD price never did drop after all, even though the production costs for CDs fell dramatically from above that of LPs to a fraction of it...
No, that's there because they have to protect their trademark, obviously. That page addresses others using their logo, their designs, etc., and covers ground like reproducing their copyrighted / trademarked material (their logo, their instruction books, etc.) on websites and the like. Stipulating how you can use their logo or whatever is a bit different from trying to tell you how to refer to their products in conversation, though obviously that does speak to the same central concerns.
There are also brick-&-mortar LEGO stores that offer "pick a brick" shopping, where the store has a bunch of bins each full of loose bricks of a different shape and color, and you can pick as many or as few of each brick type as you want, just like some candy stores. Not all the stores have pick-a-brick, and the ones that do don't offer every single brick type for sale in this way (they couldn't possibly, given the huge variety of shapes and colors - they'd need thousands and thousands of bins at each store), but they do have enough to offer a really decent opportunity to get certain desired bricks cost-efficiently. LEGO stores in the US offer pick-a-brick by selling you a cup (in one of two sizes), which you fill to the brim with as many bricks as you can of whatever type you want from the bins; LEGO stores in Europe offer pick-a-brick in a different (even better) way, by letting you fill a plastic bag with as many or as few bricks as you want, and selling it to you by weight, just like those candy stores.
It's not a matter of them "letting" or not "letting" you call them LEGOs; it's a matter of them asking you to call them by their actual name. It's not as though they're going to do something to you if you call them LEGOs; you're free to call them whatever you want. They just (naturally) prefer that you refer to them correctly, but they're not going to sue you or something for calling them LEGOs (or LEGGOs, or Wibbies or Freemajiggos or whatever).
Yow, that's disturbing. What did the the governor's first responder, the tech guy, say about why they're "not allowed to replace MS with Linux"? I assume that's some sort of contractual requirement, but are any specifics available?
The Bush admin isn't the only Presidental adminsitration to cut corners down in LA when it comes to levees
Nope, it sure isn't, and the Clinton administration deserves criticism for it as well. The Bush administration is, however, the only US presidential administration currently in operation, and hence the one for which criticism of it stands the largest chance of actually doing any good.
The "hipness" and "style" of the iPod aren't the only reason people buy it, though, and not even the most important (at least, not for all users). The iPod has been getting raves since it came out for its design, ease-of-use, intuitiveness, etc., well before it became the market's 800 lb. gorilla.
Yes, saying a majority of people with MP3 players are excluded from the WMA services is indeed "technically" correct; it's just plain correct, period, since we're talking about the number of people. If we were talking about the number of the actual players, then we'd have to clarify whether we meant the actual number of individual units out there, in which case it'd still probably be the majority (since I'd guess a majority of the MP3 players out there in use are iPods - certainly a majority of the MP3 players out there that work with any sort of DRM'ed files must be, anyway), whereas if we were talking about the number not of individual units but of makes and models, then it wouldn't be true; there are obviously a lot more individual makes and models of player that support DRM'ed WMA files, even if the total number of all individual units of all those models combined is topped by the total number of iPods.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently created a plain English guide to several fair use restrictions that major online music services, such as Apple's iTunes, force on their customers via Digital Rights Management (DRM) laden music files and End User License Agreements (EULAs). An excerpt from the guide follows: 'Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth.
Yeah forget about trying to break the DRM in iTunes cos like... uhh. you don't need to, to burn CDs.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or really don't know you can burn CDs of iTunes purchases, but just FYI, you can do so. That's not just "allowed," it's made easy, and is one of the major selling points.
Sure, they ought to know what they're getting into, but aside from the question of how realistic it is to expect Joe Average to actually read the EULA (and then decide not to go along with it, and reject it at that point after going to the trouble to download the software or whatever to get there), it'll still affect those of us who do reject DRM in one form or another, since mass acceptance will make them commercially viable, and may make the alternatives you seek commercially unviable. It's therefore in your interests to not only read the agreements for yourself, but also to educate others on them, and to generally oppose ones you think are particularly intolerable.
That said, I do permit myself to buy from the iTMS, since I gave it some consideration and decided the DRM implementation isn't too intrusive (for my own needs, anyway). I do support alternative, DRM-free services, though, and encourage others to do the same.
DRM does indeed suck, and open standards are good, but in all fairness, the EFF article there is misleading or wrong on at least a couple points with regard to iTunes purchases:
For one thing, check out this paragraph from TFA:
But Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. For instance, in April 2004, Apple decided to modify the DRM so people could burn the same playlist only 7 times, down from 10. How much further will the service restrict your ability to make legal personal copies of your own music? Only Apple knows.
Yes, it's true you can only burn a single unmodified playlist seven times. However, to burn it more than seven times, all one has to do is change the playlist - you can simply change the order of a couple tracks, add a track, delete a track, change the name of the playlist, whatever - and then burn it again; you can even change the playlist and then immediately change it back to the way it was before burning, so that you can still easily make as many burns of the playlist as you like. The workaround is incredibly trivial. The burn limit, then, doesn't remotely stop anyone from making >7 CDs of a playlist for friends or whatever; all it does (and all it's intended to do) is require a little human intervention in the duplication process after every seventh burned disc, to keep you from simply hooking up your computer to a multi-hundred-disc burner and cranking out copies by the truckload to sell on the streets while you go out for a sandwich. Unlike songs from some of the other DRM'ed music outfits, there is no limit on the number of times you can burn any individual track, so if you really "need" to burn a thousand CD copies of whatever it is you're getting, you can do so (and you can even burn the same playlist a thousand times; you just can't do it automatically, without intervening after every seventh burn).
The box at the end of the iTunes section also adds:
Additional iTunes Music Store Restrictions
* Restricts back-up copies: Song can only be copied to 5 computers
... except that's actually not true. You can copy the songs to as many damn computers (or CDs or DVDs or whatever, as discussed above) as you like; you just can't simultaneously enable more than five computers to play them. This has nothing to do with back-up copies; the author has confused backing up the files with actual usage of them (listening). You can make an infinite number of backups (and if, for whatever reason, you would rather use whole entire computers for backup purposes rather than blank optical discs or whatever, you can indeed copy the files to hard drives in hundreds or thousands of computers if you've got them handy; you just can't play it on all of them at once).
Do note, too, that when Apple changed the number of times you could burn a playlist without changing it from ten down to seven (which was done at the request of the record companies, who despite their frequent filesharing lawsuits and whatnot are evidently still more concerned about unauthorized actual physical copies), they also increased the number of computers you could simultaneously authorize to play the music, up to five; it used to be just three. I personally think this is a considerable improvement over the DRM situation when the iTMS first launched (since the playlist burning limit is so trivial to workaround, whereas if you wanted to listen to music on more than three computers you'd have to deauthorize one and authorize another each time, aside from the greater need to be able to play a track on multiple comps than to be able to burn more than seven "backups" in the first place).
All that said... yeah, I do think it still sucks that DRM "has" to be there, and I do use other services that provide unfettered, DRM-free MP3s (eMusic, for one).
I think the parent poster's point was not that these games don't (or do) run on Linux, but that they don't run on a console. All those games are "computer" games generally (regardless of whatever OS they're available for), i.e., they're not available on consoles.
Right, so let's charge them with felonies! Yeah, that's sensible.
Ok, so punish them, sure, but felonies? Do you also favor beheading as punishment for jaywalkers? Their punishment is so ridiculously disproportionate to the "crime" it's galling.
Not so. In 1998, they purchased $150 million worth of non-voting stock in Apple as part of a larger agreement between the two companies. They've since sold it, and don't currently own any substantial stock in Apple, I believe.
Mark Okrand developed it for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and all the subsequent Star Trek material that required the language, but the Klingon language was first spoken in the opening moments of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and for those scenes (when Klingons encounter V'Ger), Jimmy Doohan came up with the language. Okrand's subsequent work began with Doohan's original material from the first movie, and used that as a base.
That's what they did the last time, actually, when they held a similar contest for the count-up to the 100,000,000th song purchase. The winner got 10,000 songs, a custom-engraved 40 GB iPod (the top of the line model at the time), and a 17" PowerBook. As it turned out, the winner was already a Mac guy, so it didn't "convert" him, but I'm sure winning one single Mac convert wouldn't have been as big a deal as the mindshare obtained by the whole promo anyway.
But the theatrical-release-to-DVD-release window is so short already - just a few months, now - that shortening it any more will mean nearly simultaneous releases. That would essentially kill theatrical releases, as even many people who enjoy theatrical releases would get the DVDs simply because they're more convenient, and convenience trumps most other things in the American marketplace.
From a business perspective, it could be a good thing, but from the point of view of someone who loves watching movies in theaters, it's a bad thing. Movies are in theaters such a short time now that one all but "has" to see them on opening weekend to get the full experience. Home video has certainly made it possible for anyone to see far, far more movies than they ever could if they were totally reliant upon theatrical exhibitions, which is a great thing, but there's something special about seeing movies in theaters with fellow audience members, and that experience is going away.
Don't get me wrong; as indicated above, I think video in general has been great, and DVDs in particular are a wonderful development, but there's always pluses and minuses to everything, and here the theatrical experience is what's being detracted from.
Additionally, as the previous poster mentioned, there's a whole free album sampler; as a matter of fact, there have been at least two: this one, and a similar, previous "Universal Motown Edition" one that no longer seems to be available.
I think they're mainly intended for new iPod owners; the first time one goes to the iTMS after connecting a new iPod, there's a button on the main page with a blurb about free music for your new iPod, or some such thing. I actually ignored it when I got my iPod, thinking it was just a blurb about the regular free weekly stuff, but apparently it's a link to one of these samplers. The samplers don't seem to be accessible from directly within the iTMS any other way (they don't show up in search results, for example), but they can be linked to from outside the iTMS, as I've done here; that's how I found out about them after initially failing to check out that button when I got my iPod.
A number of the songs in the samplers are some of the same ones they've offered as the free Singles of the Week, Discovery Downloads, etc., but most of them aren't.
Isn't that what I stipulated to? I asserted that six movies were credited with the same writer and director when one had a different director. Eleven out of twelve is still close enough for my original point to be valid.
No - jeez, you've already forgotten the earlier exchange, where I mentioned Richard Marquand? Yow. Ok, let's get it straight here - George Lucas conceived the whole shebang, and directed Episodes I, II, III, and IV (though not in that order, of course). Episode V was directed by Irvin Kershner. Episode VI was directed by Richard Marquand, who is not American. In other words, 1) fully a third of the overall saga is directed by people other than George Lucas (which in and of itself isn't really relevant to the films' Americanness, but does establish you didn't quite know what you were talking about), and 2) one of the films is indeed directed by a non-American, so your claim that all six were directed by an American is simply incorrect, which removes one of the two "facts" you gave to support your argument. Let's move on to the other...
Darth Vader, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2 hardly count as starring roles, let alone roles in the traditional sense. I would definitely give you both Obi-Wans and Palpatine as starring non-Americans though.
Wrong again. That they all involve masked or inhuman characters and that two of them don't speak intelligible human languages does not change the fact that actors portrayed them just as actors portrayed Luke, Leia, Qui-Gon, Shmi, Padmé, Han, etc. Moreover, at least three of those four are very significant characters indeed - the whole six-episode story arc is about Anakin's rise, fall, transformation to Vader and redemption, and Vader is one of the key characters in the whole saga, while Artoo and Threepio are two of the only characters to appear in all the films, and are also the ones from whose point of view the story is largely told. They're essential to the storylines. And yes, they required actors on the set, wearing the costumes and interacting with the other actor / characters. They're totally starring roles.
To reiterate my last post: "The only thing erroneous about what I said was that they were all written and directed by an American, when one out of the six was only written by Lucas, but not directed by it."
As I said: two of the six, not one, and one of those two was directed by a non-American.
The post I originally replied to implied we should be taking these films in some galactic context, and not as if we were humans from earth, let alone the US. That is simply absurd.
No, it is not absurd that there might be cultural and political differences between the invented worlds of the Star Wars saga and the reality that exists on Earth in general and in the USA in particular, which is what the parent post was about.
Nobody was saying that US audiences shouldn't look at the films through the framework of the realities of their own experience. What was said is that the story may (does) depict things that differ from strict reality simply by virtue of being set in a completely artificial setting (even if it's inspired by actualities), and as such, it's free to feature differences in behavior from the way humans act on Earth.
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Where are you getting them from now - online vendors like Amazon? They can sell stuff for much less than the brick-&-mortar stores, and they weren't an option in the early days of CDs. If you compare the prices at brick-&-mortar stores then to those now (and the same kinds of stores - discount stores in the '80s to discount stores in the '00s, music retailers in the '80s to music retailers in the '00s, etc.), I think you'll find the prices haven't gone down at all, for the most part (though I think there are some exceptions).
Oh, remember how they used to come in those long cardboard boxes, to make them fit the old bins in stores that had originally held LPs? The cardboard boxes were abandoned in 1993; each of those boxes added about a dollar to the cost of making a CD (and I think that's a separate cost from what it added to shipping them, etc.). I don't think the selling price of CDs immediately (or ever) reflected that one sudden decrease in the manufacturing (and storage, shipping, etc.) cost, but instead the markup added by the box was retained and became pure additional profit for the labels. I'd like to know for sure, though; does anyone have access to detailed information on those boxes' associated costs and whatnot?
That said, however, your point still stands. It's clear the labels have made a heck of a lot of money by now on music they don't even have to physically replicate, distribute, etc., and they're making more all the time.
Remember also how CDs were considerably more expensive than LPs and cassettes when they came out, but it was promised the price would fall as soon as CD technology matured? It's funny how the average CD price never did drop after all, even though the production costs for CDs fell dramatically from above that of LPs to a fraction of it...
No, that's there because they have to protect their trademark, obviously. That page addresses others using their logo, their designs, etc., and covers ground like reproducing their copyrighted / trademarked material (their logo, their instruction books, etc.) on websites and the like. Stipulating how you can use their logo or whatever is a bit different from trying to tell you how to refer to their products in conversation, though obviously that does speak to the same central concerns.
Yours would be better without the comma.
LEGO's online / mail-order catalog store offers lots of bulk assortments of various kinds of parts, so if you need a bunch of red 2 x 4 bricks (for example), you can get them there. They also have a variety of bulk tubs and buckets that have substantial quantities of basic parts in basic colors; these are widely available.
There are also brick-&-mortar LEGO stores that offer "pick a brick" shopping, where the store has a bunch of bins each full of loose bricks of a different shape and color, and you can pick as many or as few of each brick type as you want, just like some candy stores. Not all the stores have pick-a-brick, and the ones that do don't offer every single brick type for sale in this way (they couldn't possibly, given the huge variety of shapes and colors - they'd need thousands and thousands of bins at each store), but they do have enough to offer a really decent opportunity to get certain desired bricks cost-efficiently. LEGO stores in the US offer pick-a-brick by selling you a cup (in one of two sizes), which you fill to the brim with as many bricks as you can of whatever type you want from the bins; LEGO stores in Europe offer pick-a-brick in a different (even better) way, by letting you fill a plastic bag with as many or as few bricks as you want, and selling it to you by weight, just like those candy stores.
It's not a matter of them "letting" or not "letting" you call them LEGOs; it's a matter of them asking you to call them by their actual name. It's not as though they're going to do something to you if you call them LEGOs; you're free to call them whatever you want. They just (naturally) prefer that you refer to them correctly, but they're not going to sue you or something for calling them LEGOs (or LEGGOs, or Wibbies or Freemajiggos or whatever).
Yow, that's disturbing. What did the the governor's first responder, the tech guy, say about why they're "not allowed to replace MS with Linux"? I assume that's some sort of contractual requirement, but are any specifics available?
Nope, it sure isn't, and the Clinton administration deserves criticism for it as well. The Bush administration is, however, the only US presidential administration currently in operation, and hence the one for which criticism of it stands the largest chance of actually doing any good.
Yes, saying a majority of people with MP3 players are excluded from the WMA services is indeed "technically" correct; it's just plain correct, period, since we're talking about the number of people. If we were talking about the number of the actual players, then we'd have to clarify whether we meant the actual number of individual units out there, in which case it'd still probably be the majority (since I'd guess a majority of the MP3 players out there in use are iPods - certainly a majority of the MP3 players out there that work with any sort of DRM'ed files must be, anyway), whereas if we were talking about the number not of individual units but of makes and models, then it wouldn't be true; there are obviously a lot more individual makes and models of player that support DRM'ed WMA files, even if the total number of all individual units of all those models combined is topped by the total number of iPods.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or really don't know you can burn CDs of iTunes purchases, but just FYI, you can do so. That's not just "allowed," it's made easy, and is one of the major selling points.
That said, I do permit myself to buy from the iTMS, since I gave it some consideration and decided the DRM implementation isn't too intrusive (for my own needs, anyway). I do support alternative, DRM-free services, though, and encourage others to do the same.
DRM does indeed suck, and open standards are good, but in all fairness, the EFF article there is misleading or wrong on at least a couple points with regard to iTunes purchases:
For one thing, check out this paragraph from TFA:
Yes, it's true you can only burn a single unmodified playlist seven times. However, to burn it more than seven times, all one has to do is change the playlist - you can simply change the order of a couple tracks, add a track, delete a track, change the name of the playlist, whatever - and then burn it again; you can even change the playlist and then immediately change it back to the way it was before burning, so that you can still easily make as many burns of the playlist as you like. The workaround is incredibly trivial. The burn limit, then, doesn't remotely stop anyone from making >7 CDs of a playlist for friends or whatever; all it does (and all it's intended to do) is require a little human intervention in the duplication process after every seventh burned disc, to keep you from simply hooking up your computer to a multi-hundred-disc burner and cranking out copies by the truckload to sell on the streets while you go out for a sandwich. Unlike songs from some of the other DRM'ed music outfits, there is no limit on the number of times you can burn any individual track, so if you really "need" to burn a thousand CD copies of whatever it is you're getting, you can do so (and you can even burn the same playlist a thousand times; you just can't do it automatically, without intervening after every seventh burn).The box at the end of the iTunes section also adds:
Do note, too, that when Apple changed the number of times you could burn a playlist without changing it from ten down to seven (which was done at the request of the record companies, who despite their frequent filesharing lawsuits and whatnot are evidently still more concerned about unauthorized actual physical copies), they also increased the number of computers you could simultaneously authorize to play the music, up to five; it used to be just three. I personally think this is a considerable improvement over the DRM situation when the iTMS first launched (since the playlist burning limit is so trivial to workaround, whereas if you wanted to listen to music on more than three computers you'd have to deauthorize one and authorize another each time, aside from the greater need to be able to play a track on multiple comps than to be able to burn more than seven "backups" in the first place).
All that said... yeah, I do think it still sucks that DRM "has" to be there, and I do use other services that provide unfettered, DRM-free MP3s (eMusic, for one).
It can be complicated. First of all, what kinds of soundtracks are you talking about - original score albums or song compilations?
I think the parent poster's point was not that these games don't (or do) run on Linux, but that they don't run on a console. All those games are "computer" games generally (regardless of whatever OS they're available for), i.e., they're not available on consoles.
Ok, so punish them, sure, but felonies? Do you also favor beheading as punishment for jaywalkers? Their punishment is so ridiculously disproportionate to the "crime" it's galling.
Not so. In 1998, they purchased $150 million worth of non-voting stock in Apple as part of a larger agreement between the two companies. They've since sold it, and don't currently own any substantial stock in Apple, I believe.
Mark Okrand developed it for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and all the subsequent Star Trek material that required the language, but the Klingon language was first spoken in the opening moments of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and for those scenes (when Klingons encounter V'Ger), Jimmy Doohan came up with the language. Okrand's subsequent work began with Doohan's original material from the first movie, and used that as a base.
That's what they did the last time, actually, when they held a similar contest for the count-up to the 100,000,000th song purchase. The winner got 10,000 songs, a custom-engraved 40 GB iPod (the top of the line model at the time), and a 17" PowerBook. As it turned out, the winner was already a Mac guy, so it didn't "convert" him, but I'm sure winning one single Mac convert wouldn't have been as big a deal as the mindshare obtained by the whole promo anyway.
Right. This is the LEGO Death Star. It's rounder and less pointy.
But the theatrical-release-to-DVD-release window is so short already - just a few months, now - that shortening it any more will mean nearly simultaneous releases. That would essentially kill theatrical releases, as even many people who enjoy theatrical releases would get the DVDs simply because they're more convenient, and convenience trumps most other things in the American marketplace.
Don't get me wrong; as indicated above, I think video in general has been great, and DVDs in particular are a wonderful development, but there's always pluses and minuses to everything, and here the theatrical experience is what's being detracted from.
I think they're mainly intended for new iPod owners; the first time one goes to the iTMS after connecting a new iPod, there's a button on the main page with a blurb about free music for your new iPod, or some such thing. I actually ignored it when I got my iPod, thinking it was just a blurb about the regular free weekly stuff, but apparently it's a link to one of these samplers. The samplers don't seem to be accessible from directly within the iTMS any other way (they don't show up in search results, for example), but they can be linked to from outside the iTMS, as I've done here; that's how I found out about them after initially failing to check out that button when I got my iPod.
A number of the songs in the samplers are some of the same ones they've offered as the free Singles of the Week, Discovery Downloads, etc., but most of them aren't.
Wrong again. That they all involve masked or inhuman characters and that two of them don't speak intelligible human languages does not change the fact that actors portrayed them just as actors portrayed Luke, Leia, Qui-Gon, Shmi, Padmé, Han, etc. Moreover, at least three of those four are very significant characters indeed - the whole six-episode story arc is about Anakin's rise, fall, transformation to Vader and redemption, and Vader is one of the key characters in the whole saga, while Artoo and Threepio are two of the only characters to appear in all the films, and are also the ones from whose point of view the story is largely told. They're essential to the storylines. And yes, they required actors on the set, wearing the costumes and interacting with the other actor / characters. They're totally starring roles.
As I said: two of the six, not one, and one of those two was directed by a non-American.
No, it is not absurd that there might be cultural and political differences between the invented worlds of the Star Wars saga and the reality that exists on Earth in general and in the USA in particular, which is what the parent post was about.
Nobody was saying that US audiences shouldn't look at the films through the framework of the realities of their own experience. What was said is that the story may (does) depict things that differ from strict reality simply by virtue of being set in a completely artificial setting (even if it's inspired by actualities), and as such, it's free to feature differences in behavior from the way humans act on Earth.