That's why YouTube was so highly valued. Anyone can/will be able to have their content distributed anywhere in the world. It's a simple business model, you give us the content but don't necessarily give away ownership, we distribute it for you free, we keep all the ad revenue.
It's brilliant, because your revenue is proportional to how much you distribute the content. Low interest content generates little money, but little cost, and vice versa for the popular stuff.
It still seems like a novelty because the video quality is absolutely hideous, but a few generations from now it will be very good, and decades from now, our eyes will be the limiting factor and quality won't even need to improve further. We're basically there with audio already (too bad so many people still think 128k mp3s sound good).
This is 1.0. In the future, everyone gets their own TV show. If you get really popular (for free), you better believe you'll be able to get a cut of that ad revenue too. Why? Because You Tube is going to have a lot of competition....
That's an excellent question. If the TV business isn't profitable, maybe they could try asking for big fees from large, media-heavy sites, and then, if they didn't pay up, they could limit their customers' bandwidth to them.
Of course, I'm probably just talking crazy here...
All I know is, I'm trying municipal wifi. It's way cheaper and very comparable if you buy a year or two at a time, though obviously it might go up later. Still I can lock in now and always go crawling back to cable.
It's easy to see why Comcast wants to limit customers. Peer-to-peer sharing is the scapegoat.
If people think they can download as much as they want all the time, they might start thinking of their computers like the TV. Oh wait, they're already starting to.
Seriously, the day when you can ditch cable altogether is very very near (okay already here for me). Even without pirating anything. Seriously, the networks know the way the wind is blowing. Everything will start going online- it already is. Sure, the cable companies want to bring you the "on-demand" world, but they want to own it. But they're losing control and they're scared and they are starting to do stupid stuff... "WHAT? you watched Netflix ALL NIGHT?? ARRGGHHhh..."
They are realizing they have two businesses- content delivery and connectivity. Now they have to compete with the likes of Apple, Google, and Netflix for the former (among others). Recording industry 2.0. Their business model is a genereation away from being obsolete (well half is). The other half is just fine, and they really should have split the company along those lines, but probably can't for regulatory reasons, at least without further damaging the TV business.
The best course of action is clearly to blame the pirates and bury their heads in the sand.
Yes, it turns out that some forms of economic activity are hard to justify as we charge toward the looming technological singularity.
Looming eh? I'm sorry, but the wishful thinking factor in Mr. Kurzweil's writings is painfully obvious, as he himself would obviously be smart enough to understand otherwise. He clearly has issues with his own mortality and this singularity clearly is a kind of hoped-for fountain of youth for him(you've heard him, 'we'll get to the point where we extend human life expectancy more than one year, every year').
Such a sort life as we lead has to be a big bummer for a futurist. I can imagine the temptation to imagine that you're living on the dawn of such a huge event but, you know, you can't just call a collection of events a trend and say it's going to go on forever. Every that's accelerating keeps accelerating- until it doesn't any more.
Moore's law looked at the past reductions in densities of chips, and speculated that it would keep going until fundamental limits were hit because there was both a good argument and past precedence for this.
See the flaw yet in these sorts of comparisions? Doubling of knowledge and doubling of transistors isn't remotely similar. We don't know what we don't know. Maybe we've just grabbed all the low-hanging fruit, maybe there's a million more layers to the onion we don't know about.
All I'm saying with the Moore's law thing, which did have a good run as far as trends go, is that we understand integrated circuits a lot better than we understand intelligence. And since one finds a lot more to be impressed about in the average honey bee than in our most sophisticated robots one would presume that our understanding of it will increase in a rather evolutionary way. We made so much progress against the things that are hardest for us, but are only starting to realize the most important things are the ones we took completely for granted or considered obstacles. Who knows, we may marvel someday at the beauty of all that clumsy humanity that the supposed super-intelligence was supposed to be unencumbered by.
All I know is it's a lot easier for a robot to beat the world champion in chess than it is for it to drive down to, say, the nearest convenience store that sells Krispy Kremes and bring me back half a dozen (assuming I don't give a team of experts months of preparation to figure out how to do it- I 'll do it myself in that case:) ).
"Momentary breaks in fidelity"? When I hear something I'm used to hearing on a CD, when you get the MP3 you'll get stuff that ISN'T THERE ANYMORE. You can hear the difference with a $30 pair of headphones on pretty much anything. Hell, you can hear the difference on an iPod.
If you are listening to something with a lot of stuff going on at one you get the dominant thing going on drowning out the background parts a lot of the time. You don't get something for nothing, compression takes things out of the music. If it's done right it's the stuff you miss the least, but if you really love something don't you want to hear all of it?
Oh and "Music isn't about sound"? No offense but do you know how dumb that is? Trust me, the musicians are pretty concerned with it. I mean, does a "real music lover" enjoy the sheet music just as much? How anyone who just wants to hear the music as it was intended and without anything missing is not a real music lover, AND the type of OCD-sufferer who buys a $10,000 stereo is a pretty big stretch.
Why is this even an argument though? With broadband and 160 gig iPods, why do people still use 128-bit or even 256-bit MP3s?
"Next, the economy is looking better than ever, in nearly every single sector. Unemployment, interest rates and inflation are all low while the stock market, GDP and payroll are all up. The economy has been booming since '02."
I guess there's only a a *couple* big wall street firms saying we're ALREADY in a recession. Then there's that little quirk with the housing market imploding since most of the recent price gains were a house of cards ready to collapse due to profoundly lax lending standards based on an assumption that housing prices only go up. But the payback will only be price declines for periods measured in years, though, and the country's largest mortgage lender will probably be able to make a last-ditch sale of itself to avoid going completely bankrupt. I guess there's also the dollar which is in a death spiral because every day a nice big chunk of America gets sold overseas to finance our over consumption and under-saving. Oh and the stock market just corrected oh, 10% or so.
But you know, besides that, things are going pretty good.
"I know it's hard for many to grasp, but it's a tested and true economic principle. Google or Wiki Laffer Curve for an explanation as to how it all works"
Yeah, it's tested, it didn't work. It's only hard to understand if you think it says that cutting taxes always raises revenue. The theory doesn't even say that.
The laffer curve was a theory that theorized that there was a point in which raising tax rates would not produce additional income. This makes some sense but it depends on exactly where the inflection point is. THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE'RE PAST IT. There was little practical evidence that it would work when they tried it in the early 80s, and sure enough revenues went down as pretty much every credible economist predicted (so in order to raise them, Reagan raised taxes- and BY GOLLY IT WORKED).
This usage of it is quack economics pushed by people with ulterior motives and it's not a big secret, heck the people pushing it know it. In fact, everyone knows it except people like you because you're the suckers in this game. There's not a shred of evidence there. Correlation doesn't imply causation, even if you _don't_ cherry pick your data point. You can find a million examples of the opposite happening for every case of the "laffer curve at work". When you talk about capital gains receipts, maybe don't take the year the tech bubble burst as your starting point????? But hey, if the former GOVERNOR of DELAWARE says it in an OPINION PIECE, it must be true. He knew some economists, right? All those investment bankers reading the WSJ just want to do what's best for America, right? If they have to take a big tax cut to do it, well, they just have to suck it up and take it. God bless 'em, true patriots.
If you know something about economics surely you know something about economic incentives. This is just a game people play to get their taxes lowered. Republicans love to play along. They get to be Santa Claus, first giving tax cuts but not paying for them and then daring the Democrats to raise taxes after they put the country in terrible shape financially. See! They'll raise your taxes!! It's a game of chicken to get votes, just like the terrorism thing. You ask to be able to completely violate people's constitutional rights and then when someone has the nerve to say no, you blame them for the next terrorist attack, which is as inevitable as raising taxes after running up big deficits. It's great- they can't lose, though of course we do.
That's the beauty of Lou Dobbs, he doesn't have to be anything other than the train wreck that he is to get ratings. You watch his show and you get the feeling he thinks he has it because he's some towering intellectual giant (or O'Reilly for that matter). Whatever, they both press people's buttons and that gets ratings. They're like guests on Jerry Springer with million-dollar paychecks and nice suits, but still totally unaware how much the media bigwigs are laughing at them while they rake it in.
Immigration is a complex issue and I don't pretend to have an easy solution. All I know is that if I was born dirt poor in some rural wasteland in Mexico with a family and no opportunity, I'd be cutting your lawn or washing your dishes right now. The way Lou talks you'd think the first thing he'd do if he woke up a dirt poor illegal in East L.A. tomorrow is turn himself in. Heh, just not buying it. If I thought for one second he would feel the same way if it was a bunch of white Irishmen sneaking across the border I'd take back every bad thing I'd ever said about him.
Sorry, but "better than O'Reilly" doesn't get you over the bar.
Say what you want about the Newshour, it's the only thing that qualifies as a nightly newscast anymore. Everything else could be replicated by a 5 year old reading just the really big words from section A of that morning's USA Today (but hey, better pictures).
I cannot imagine any plausible scenario in which a non-mentally-ill person could join Dateline NBC and think they were joining a serious news program. Part of what makes the Daily Show funny is making fun of people who can say that sort of thing with a straight face.
60 minutes has become dateline for a more upscale and better educated audience. It's sad to say. Not sure if it was always that way or I'm just older. It's more fluff all the time, well done _classy_ fluff, but you know. You're lucky if one of the three segments meets a critical person's definition of hard news. I think Murrow would be on PBS if he were around today, but if he was on a network you better believe he'd be doing one Tiger Woods interview for every real news story he got (and just one only because he's Edward R. Murrow).
The networks are supposed to be doing genuine public interest stuff in return for their collective share of OUR spectrum. Too bad no one in Washington gives a shit anymore. You might get a full hour a week from all the networks combined that qualifies as news, mostly on Sunday morning. Those shows go way too easy on the current administration though, because they're well known enough to play the shows off each other.
Good point, but the other big hole is what "faster" really means. 1-16 are faster at running linpack, but that's about all you can tell. The linpack benchmark isn't horrible, and it's a long-time standard which counts for something, but the truth is it's really out of date. You wouldn't care how many fps you got on Doom II if you bought a brand new computer, would you? You would be needing to move a lot more data with a modern game, and so memory bandwidth, specialized hardware etc would matter a lot more, but if you just cared about doom performance you could skimp on all that and just go for raw clock speed. Not an exact comparison. mind you, but you get the idea. There's a lot of benchmarks you could run that wouldn't show any improvement from a $600 graphics card over a $10 one but obviously there's still a market for them, it just depends on the job.
This isn't a commodity cluster, every opteron is connected with it's neighbors in 3 dimensions via a custom router that plugs right into the hypertransport bus. There's no southbridge/pci card or something like that in the way. There's just a ton more node-to-node bandwidth and a lot less latency. You won't see the difference on linpack or seti@home, but you will on real-world scientific simulations like climate modeling, especially when you talk about 100s or thousands of processors working on the same job. Seti@home doesn't slow to a crawl because Joe in Toledo discovers bittorrent, but these types of codes are like that.
Trust me, this is a world-class machine for science. For the money they spent, they could be a lot higher up, but you don't bring a dragster to the Indy 500.
"Would you care to support that statement? If you cannot or choose not to, what does that say about your rationality? (It is worth noting I believe you are likely a male rather than a female who writes to degrade and misunderstand members of her own gender.)"
If you think there's anything consciously rational about the way _human beings_ usually make everyday decisions, you really need to go back to school. Even smart people do suboptimal/irrational/dumb things all the flippin' time. But unless you're a supreme tool (or an economist) you understand this and just wanted to take the "nothing rational about women" comment completely literally since that made the flimsiest straw man.
So, maybe it's possible that you and your wife have the only rational relationship on earth and are so clearly better than us all, due to your ultra-enlightened/educated status, that you really don't get this. However, a 'rational' person would conclude it's far more likely that your intention was just to brag about your wife, and to try to act smart but dignified while insulting someone for making a joke
"In lieu of evidence backing up your claim, I offer my wife as an example contradicting your generalization (even if my assumption regarding your sex is incorrect). A lynchpin of the relationship I have with her is our mutual ability to consistently solve our problems rationally. To reinforce that point, her name is prefixed with the title of doctor, a respected and enlightened status one does not achieve without the ability to reason."
.
Here's a hint- all the hey-its-a-real-logical-argument verbosity just seems pathetic when you aren't making a particularly complicated one. If you just said "nuh-uh, mah wife is rational, cuz _she's_ a doctor", it would have sounded kind of childish, right? Well, thats still all you said so dressing it up doesn't make you look smart. It just makes you look like you need to put down the thesaurus find something useful to be outraged about.
"Care to respond or are we all going to just let these anachronistic and misogynistic myths perpetuate ad infinitum?
"
How about "you're a pretentious tosspot?" That work for you? And if your wife is a real doctor, not like the liberal-arts type but the useful kind, I'd recommend you tone it down a bit. Makes you look a little insecure. Women hate that.
"Will a gun buyer have that same level of privacy after 8 years of President Hillary?"
You're concerned about HILLARY? If they're tracking people buying pita bread how much worse can it get? Wake up. Ever buy ammo with a credit card? Shooting glasses? Gun oil? Never in your whole life? Hell, ever buy anything at Gander Mountain or a place like that? If you fit the profile, you might as well tell them. Madison Avenue is watching you far better than big brother could- all they have to do is put database A and B together and large portions of the Bill of Rights go up in smoke, 2nd included.
Scared yet? If the government doesn't respect the fourth amendment what does it matter? Why this administration though we all were screaming "please please take the forth amendment just don't let them send any more guys with boxcutters after us" is beyond me. Pretty cowardly really, in more ways than one. They want us to believe we needed to do all this crazy shit to stop terrorist attacks, when the reality was 9/11 was 100% preventable we just SCREWED UP. We learned a hard lesson, but we also _should_ have learned we didn't need to gut the constitution or give up our cherished values to prevent it too.
The terrorists can attack us even if we give up every constitutional protection we have, just like a criminal can still get a gun, but if we don't have the forth, the second doesn't mean shit.
So I won't be taking any chances with Rudolph "W" Guiliani, who feels he has to be George++ on national security just so people forget his social views. That man scares me far more than Hillary does.
Hahahahahahaha.... You know everything about me because I disagreed with you? You seem to know what a straw man is already so I don't need to go into it. But don't you dare put words into my mouth, son. You don't have any clue about me or what I believe. So can you please attack what I actually said, instead of what you wished I said? I'd appreciate it.
Look, let me put it in terms you can understand- I pay into social security, it's MY fucking money, so I'm getting it back. It's that simple. Anyone who thinks it's not happening so Paris Hilton can avoid her inheritance taxes and get a 35% top marginal tax rate for putting her name on a perfume bottle is living on another planet.
So I have a "disincentive to work" because I want my money back? I'm some kind of fucking deadbeat because I pay my social security taxes and want my benefit? I'm a deadbeat because no one but medicare will cover my 70-year-old ass? Tell the millions of seniors who saw a doctor yesterday the great society is a failure, asshole (BTW, they're actually mostly white people who worked hard all their lives).
These random, nearly unrelated examples you come up with does not disprove any of the things I said, especially since I never implied I supported bribing businesses to come to town, or anything else. I said we should invest in the future of this country. The point of an investment is that it pays off in the end and NOT doing this is financially irresponsible. I never implied we should waste money on ineffectual programs, although if the current Republican leadership were in charge it's hard to see how any agency could be effective- not even the military has been spared by the conspiracy of fools. They use their incompetence to justify their inaction.
But what does the Republican leadership know about fiscal responsibility anyways? The Republican leadership hates 'tax and spend' but all they've offered in return is 'NOT tax and spend'. Even corporate America is so appalled they're giving most of their money to Democrats. And if the Republican's big plan for setting everything straight is to fuck over the hard working Americans who built this country, that will be the final nail in the coffin. You can cloak your criticism of social programs in thinly-veiled racism, but once middle class Americans figure out you're putting them in the same category they're going to get more than a little offended. My Grandpa worked for nearly 50 years, and the only time he 'sat around' was the year he spent in a hospital after he nearly got his leg blown off at Anzio. Is he a Cadillac-driving welfare queen for cashing his social security check?
I never endorsed anything 'socialist' other than Social security and Medicaid, which is paid for by the people who receive it. If that's socialism, or if investing in the future of this country is socialism, then it just shows how you people use that word to bludgeon people. The only thing I am is an ex-republican/ex-dittohead/ex-conservative. I will never again trust those people or that party as long as I live, even after the current leadership has died of old age. I'm a Democrat only by default. This is the only country in the western world where I'd belong anywhere on the left, by the way.
So let me say it again: many of these people who are obsessed with 'growing the economy', are really just angling for a bigger slice for themselves since many of their policies are actually counterproductive in this regard. So, it makes perfect sense for these people want Social Security DEAD. This is awful since the only thing needed to sustain it is for us to un-fuck our priorities. We've had a lot higher taxes on the top tax bracket in the past (though we don't even need to go back to them), yet we still created a pretty good country (remember after the Clinton years when Greenspan was afraid we'd actually pay off the debt?). I'm not asking for a handout, I'll work a year or two extra. Hell, I'll even pay extra as long as the people who get the most
This is all smoke and mirrors. People on the right want to make things as hopeless as possible because they aren't concerned about the social security issue, they just want to kill it. Too bad that can't happen.
Anyone who thinks this generation is going to pay in and not get their money back is going to get zapped. If the rich get soaked, the rich get soaked. Almost no one in this country is saving enough for retirement sans social security check (or even with).
The Republicans are so slimy, they know taxes are going to have to go up, they're just not going to do it. They're going to leave it to the Democrats after it gets so bad there's no choice. It's a cynical game of chicken and it's disgusting.
Nothing makes me madder than all this 'low taxes make the economy grow, so don't "steal" my money' crap. Yes, to a point, but the sad fact of the matter is that a lot of spending is needed to make the economy grow. This isn't 1800 dude, a modern economy needs modern infrastructure, and it ain't cheap. Rich people get the most advantage out of all this too. There are plenty of places where there are extremely low taxes, but of course you don't see anyone starting anything other than a shell company there.
So ya gotta love Republicans, so patriotic when sending other people off to go die, but when they have to pay up all of a sudden this country never did anything for them. Wake up, assholes, this country made you rich. Think you'd be rich if you grew up in Sudan instead?
The schools here are in a tailspin, the roads are falling apart, we're falling behind in net connectivity, broadband access, basic research, and higher education funding.
People are going to figure out that we're mortgaging our future to pay for today's excess, but now of course we blame the people who just don't want to eat dog food for dinner in the twilight of their lives.
The point was it's nice to have choices, what's best for people varies. I can quit tomorrow and work someplace else if I wanted. In fact, it's even easier than many contracting gigs because there's no contract to break. So 'owning your own' life is a bogus argument, it really is.
If you have some great skills that are in demand, sure you can do really well that way. If you're just doing it because you have to it can be very stressful and also bad deal financially- especially with more frequent periods of unemployment. 50 an hour sounds like nice pay, but when you really add up all the benefits you get, including paid vacation, sick time, 401k matching- it's a pay cut for most people. If you're young and healthy (or making $125/hr), it might sound good- but if you have a family or god forbid a chronic medical condition it gets a lot more complicated.
It's not about turning your soul over to a company, it's about being able to stick with something that works for you, being able to work with people you know and like, and being able to have a more stable financial situation.
Speaking of McDonalds, remember when tech workers actually got SALARIES, you know, or benefits ?
Or when they worked for companies who wanted them to stay on a semi-permanent basis, as opposed to move along every 6-12 months.
Of course I'm still young and relatively cheap, so I still get to work for a company instead of a staffing agency. Hey, I mean, everyone loves a junior guy on salary, after all they're "better" programmers since they have no families, less cynicism, and in the end get paid less per hour than anyone.
Of course programmers really do get better with experience, that's why they have no job security. Good companies do understand, too bad there aren't that many any more.
College books are not cheap, however. [/payed $450 this semester]
Whatever, a college textbook is probably the cheapest thing you can use. Buy the 3-year-old previous edition off half.com or something for like 8 bucks.
How much has math changed in three years? It's not like the problems matter since no one is grading them. I mean, 10th edition, 11th edition, they're practically the same damn thing but one costs $139 and one costs $9.
How is that insightful???? You make a great point about IRAN wanting us to invade Iraq, but they of course had nothing to do with 9/11. My statement was about AL QUEDA, who remembered humiliating the Soviets in Afghanistan and could quite conceivably think they could do the same to us, if only they could provoke us into invading. THEY cared a lot about Afghanistan, because that's where they were!
Iran privately cheered when we ousted the Taliban, and Al Queda WILL cheer when we bomb Iran. These people are mortal enemies, each very much on the fast track to hell with regards to each group's respective religious beliefs. This is not an exaggeration or a joke, Al Queda has actually said, 'you guys should bomb Iran' (they probably have their eyes on Pakistan's bomb anyways). Ret. General Odom mentioned this a while back.
You ARE right about stupid leadership. We attacked a swarn enemy of Al Queda when we went after Hussein (he didn't want the competition), and if we attack Iran, we will be attacking the moral enemy of BOTH. We will be conducting military operations in three countries who ALL hate each other, AT ONCE! No one was ever that stupid in the middle east.
Why are we in such deep shit? Because no one realized it was even POSSIBLE to be this stupid. The only parallel I can think of to the Bush administration is Enron. I really mean it. It screwed up so bad, because it thought it was not only incredibly smart, but also above the rules others had to live by.
If George W. Bush had been president in 1941, he would have bombed Russia. Notice how when we talks about the Iraqis going to the polls and making their voices heard he neglects to mention how they overwhelmingly voted for whoever their religious leaders wanted them to. Americans are dying to create another theocratic regime in the middle east. Just you wait, no matter how long we stay, just you wait.
True, but it was always more complicated than that. We helped them fight Iran, because we didn't like Iran. When they started to get the upper hand, though, we backed off. We never wanted him to win, because we didn't want ANYBODY to win. The truth of the matter is we didn't like ANY of these leaders too much, but we used the fact they didn't like each other either to play them against each other and keep them weak.
If anyone is a real puppet, it's Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family is hardly an democracy to be, but it's them or the wahabbis, and we certainly want the royals instead (plus gas). Of course we know now this pissed off at least 19 of them...
The day we can afford to tell all those people where to stick their oil is the day everyone will be better off.
The police, the military, and my parents are terrorist organizations too. Not saying that in a provocative way either (except in the case of my parents;) )- terrorism is a tactic, not a moral position. You scare the shit out of your adversary, in order to get your way while minimizing or avoiding direct confrontation. Remember shock and awe? That the heck do you think that was? Operation 'Terrorize the Iraqi Army' wouldn't have been so politically correct, but we wanted to scare them so they gave up.
Police live by this tactic, they don't call it that but they know they can't catch everyone so they grab someone and throw the book at them once and a while to send a message.
And take nuclear terrorism, we (the US) INVENTED it. We didn't have enough bombs to level Japan, but we acted like we did and pretty much everyone turning blue in the face over 'the terrorists' these days would say it was a good thing (it probably did save millions of Japanese lives, you have to admit that- they weren't exactly ready to give up). Of course, that wasn't the only city we leveled. Some we leveled more or less to send a message. Some cities weren't great military or industrial centers and were relatively untouched in targeted bombing, so they just made that much more of a statement when the whole thing burned to the ground one night in a massive firestorm.
At any rate, someone in the government needs to look up 'moral superiority' in a dictionary fast. All this emphasis on 'Terrorism (tm)' just makes us look like hypocrites, when we, in strict numerical terms have killed far more old men, women and children than Al Queda ever has (not that they're not working on it...). That's just a fact. Americans have killed lots of innocent people and when you look at the justifications, you cannot deny that many of these people were killed simply to scare, demoralize and disorient our enemies. Sure we were fighting Nazis, but we forget sometimes 'the good war' was pretty much the most unholy fucking disaster to ever befall mankind. Taking the lesser evil, even the far lesser one, requires one to do evil, and we only came out 'clean' by comparison.
Al Queda are horrible people and they need to die, but just saying they're terrorists and we're not isn't going to convince anyone other than ourselves.
Al Queda chops people's fucking heads off if they shave or sneak a sip of whiskey. It should NOT have been hard to convince the Arab world these people are a dead end. You see, it's a simple (but not easy) war to win- the moderates who make up the majorities of these countries turn against the extremists. We just had to help them- and yet we couldn't even do that. It was a PR war all along and we lost it so fast no one noticed. We've been so determined to hunt grasshoppers with our howitzers, we missed a pretty obvious point: the average modern war, even one conducted with restraint, is a absolute PR nightmare. So much so, I often wonder if Al Queda WANTED us to invade Afghanistan.
Soft power used to be our greatest asset, you know, the Statue of Liberty, Elvis records, cheeseburgers. That's what really brought down the Iron Curtain, enough people finally saw us and said, 'screw this, we're doing it their way'. Our enemies were dying to hang themselves and when they had enough rope the alternative for their oppressed people was obvious.
Nowadays in the Muslim word, seeing your broken Government and thinking it would be great to do things the American way is a good way to get your head chopped off. So if they fall, it sure won't be the democratic types taking over.... We've conducted the worst advertising campaign for democracy in the history of democracy and are clearly our own worst enemy.
No one said they were stupid, they're just unwilling to accept a very unpleasant reality. That's just human nature. I believe they have chosen to pursue the strategy that gives them the best shot at maintaining their present position. That isn't realistic and will in the long run hurt them more.
The advantages they hold are not going to increase over time- time is not on their side. The internet is completely unlike a cd shop, you don't need to fight anyone for shelf space, so being a major label doesn't get you in the door anymore. Conventional radio matters less and less so controlling access to who gets on matters far less. The means by which people learn about and obtain their music these days give far fewer advantages to the old guard.
They have gotten as rich as they have by controlling the bandwidth through which people get their music. There's too much bandwidth for them to control these days. I can go on and on- word of mouth spreads so much faster on the internet that artificial hype matters far less.
The only asset they have that matters now is their intellectual property, so they are obsessed with maintaining as tight a control on it as they can, so they can use it to get their way and create artificial barriers for their own benefit (killing internet radio for example).
But at the end of the day, artists sure don't need someone to own their property for them, they need someone to get it to potential fans. That argument is going to be a lot tougher for the record labels in the future.
They aren't buying time, they're just holding on as long as they can. There is a fundamental shift going on that means record companies are going to need artists FAR more than the artists need them. Musicians are getting a lot more business savvy too, look at hip hop. They know now not only what a ridiculous rip-off most record contracts are, but they are also learning every day how much easier doing it yourself is, or doing it with an independent label that might actually view them as something more than a product.
The artists are going to hold all the cards in the future, and it's about time.
That or it runs through the way the big cartels try to form the world instead (through bribery): Everything new gets crippled until it's worse than what came before.
They can't stop the technology that is making this happen though, even if they wanted to! Information is information and the core technology has far too many uses for even an industry like big media to kill. Once people have the raw power to move the bits around it's so hard to stop. Either the media companies come up with DRM and people sidestep it, or people say 'screw you big media' and do things their own way- using the _same_ basic infrastructure!
For example, once people could move bits around the world for a flat rate, long distance service as we knew it was going to die. People just had to figure out how to move their voices instead of their data. MCI didn't get a veto. Once people get pissed off enough they can bypass traditional phone service all together. Either phone companies figure this out and set their expectations (and their prices) accordingly or they die.
I mean who else could possibly get hurt buy killing off the media industries?
You seem to be missing the joke. Buying used CDs will not actually kill the record industry, any more than piracy will. But the record industry should and will eventually have to change, and it will ultimately benefit both consumers and musicians much more- but at the big boys' expense. This is because their primary role, putting physical discs on shelves, is no longer necessary. That's just how technology works, it changes things- but they want to blame something they think they have (some) control over.
When everyone has a huge hi-def screen connected to a ultra-high bandwidth connection, television companies and movie chains will no longer control distribution of content either. Everyone from Joe Schmoe to NBC will have their own spot on the dial. Movie theaters will have to get into the 21st century in a big hurry or they will be a thing of the past too.
The main thing that's happening is not piracy, that's a consequence of the technology but not the fundamental shift that these people most fear. They need to maintain their control of the distribution system far more than they need to contain piracy. Piracy can't get much worse in music and people are still making money. Piracy will always be a psuedo tax on any information industry but the real shift will be who makes the money.
You bash indie movies, music etc, but it's just a consequenece of lowering of the barriers to entry. The big boys can still play, and will still make whatever you're willing to pay for- they will just have much more competition. (That being said, big budget popcorn movies are definitely going to be an endangered species- mostly because video games will almost completely kill them. People will have to go back to telling stories.)
You complain, but you will love it. You're disrespecting indie music and movies because you have a preconceived view of them- you won't once more people like you start doing that stuff, and once technology makes creativity king once again. While high end equipment gets cheaper, better and more user friendly, people's ears and eyes will notice the high end less and less. When industries begin to mature, that's what happens.
So, now remind me... what part of musicians keeping more of their money and their rights is going to discourage them from producing good music again?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why YouTube was so highly valued. Anyone can/will be able to have their content distributed anywhere in the world. It's a simple business model, you give us the content but don't necessarily give away ownership, we distribute it for you free, we keep all the ad revenue.
It's brilliant, because your revenue is proportional to how much you distribute the content. Low interest content generates little money, but little cost, and vice versa for the popular stuff.
It still seems like a novelty because the video quality is absolutely hideous, but a few generations from now it will be very good, and decades from now, our eyes will be the limiting factor and quality won't even need to improve further. We're basically there with audio already (too bad so many people still think 128k mp3s sound good).
This is 1.0. In the future, everyone gets their own TV show. If you get really popular (for free), you better believe you'll be able to get a cut of that ad revenue too. Why? Because You Tube is going to have a lot of competition....
That's an excellent question. If the TV business isn't profitable, maybe they could try asking for big fees from large, media-heavy sites, and then, if they didn't pay up, they could limit their customers' bandwidth to them.
Of course, I'm probably just talking crazy here...
All I know is, I'm trying municipal wifi. It's way cheaper and very comparable if you buy a year or two at a time, though obviously it might go up later. Still I can lock in now and always go crawling back to cable.
It's easy to see why Comcast wants to limit customers. Peer-to-peer sharing is the scapegoat. If people think they can download as much as they want all the time, they might start thinking of their computers like the TV. Oh wait, they're already starting to.
Seriously, the day when you can ditch cable altogether is very very near (okay already here for me). Even without pirating anything. Seriously, the networks know the way the wind is blowing. Everything will start going online- it already is. Sure, the cable companies want to bring you the "on-demand" world, but they want to own it. But they're losing control and they're scared and they are starting to do stupid stuff... "WHAT? you watched Netflix ALL NIGHT?? ARRGGHHhh..."
They are realizing they have two businesses- content delivery and connectivity. Now they have to compete with the likes of Apple, Google, and Netflix for the former (among others). Recording industry 2.0. Their business model is a genereation away from being obsolete (well half is). The other half is just fine, and they really should have split the company along those lines, but probably can't for regulatory reasons, at least without further damaging the TV business.
The best course of action is clearly to blame the pirates and bury their heads in the sand.
Yes, it turns out that some forms of economic activity are hard to justify as we charge toward the looming technological singularity.
:) ).
Looming eh? I'm sorry, but the wishful thinking factor in Mr. Kurzweil's writings is painfully obvious, as he himself would obviously be smart enough to understand otherwise. He clearly has issues with his own mortality and this singularity clearly is a kind of hoped-for fountain of youth for him(you've heard him, 'we'll get to the point where we extend human life expectancy more than one year, every year').
Such a sort life as we lead has to be a big bummer for a futurist. I can imagine the temptation to imagine that you're living on the dawn of such a huge event but, you know, you can't just call a collection of events a trend and say it's going to go on forever. Every that's accelerating keeps accelerating- until it doesn't any more.
Moore's law looked at the past reductions in densities of chips, and speculated that it would keep going until fundamental limits were hit because there was both a good argument and past precedence for this.
See the flaw yet in these sorts of comparisions? Doubling of knowledge and doubling of transistors isn't remotely similar. We don't know what we don't know. Maybe we've just grabbed all the low-hanging fruit, maybe there's a million more layers to the onion we don't know about.
All I'm saying with the Moore's law thing, which did have a good run as far as trends go, is that we understand integrated circuits a lot better than we understand intelligence. And since one finds a lot more to be impressed about in the average honey bee than in our most sophisticated robots one would presume that our understanding of it will increase in a rather evolutionary way. We made so much progress against the things that are hardest for us, but are only starting to realize the most important things are the ones we took completely for granted or considered obstacles. Who knows, we may marvel someday at the beauty of all that clumsy humanity that the supposed super-intelligence was supposed to be unencumbered by.
All I know is it's a lot easier for a robot to beat the world champion in chess than it is for it to drive down to, say, the nearest convenience store that sells Krispy Kremes and bring me back half a dozen (assuming I don't give a team of experts months of preparation to figure out how to do it- I 'll do it myself in that case
"Momentary breaks in fidelity"? When I hear something I'm used to hearing on a CD, when you get the MP3 you'll get stuff that ISN'T THERE ANYMORE. You can hear the difference with a $30 pair of headphones on pretty much anything. Hell, you can hear the difference on an iPod.
If you are listening to something with a lot of stuff going on at one you get the dominant thing going on drowning out the background parts a lot of the time. You don't get something for nothing, compression takes things out of the music. If it's done right it's the stuff you miss the least, but if you really love something don't you want to hear all of it?
Oh and "Music isn't about sound"? No offense but do you know how dumb that is? Trust me, the musicians are pretty concerned with it. I mean, does a "real music lover" enjoy the sheet music just as much? How anyone who just wants to hear the music as it was intended and without anything missing is not a real music lover, AND the type of OCD-sufferer who buys a $10,000 stereo is a pretty big stretch.
Why is this even an argument though? With broadband and 160 gig iPods, why do people still use 128-bit or even 256-bit MP3s?
"Which is better? Voting with our dollars by emigrating to countries with more political and economic freedoms while it's still possible."
I'll help you pack.
"Next, the economy is looking better than ever, in nearly every single sector. Unemployment, interest rates and inflation are all low while the stock market, GDP and payroll are all up. The economy has been booming since '02."
I guess there's only a a *couple* big wall street firms saying we're ALREADY in a recession. Then there's that little quirk with the housing market imploding since most of the recent price gains were a house of cards ready to collapse due to profoundly lax lending standards based on an assumption that housing prices only go up. But the payback will only be price declines for periods measured in years, though, and the country's largest mortgage lender will probably be able to make a last-ditch sale of itself to avoid going completely bankrupt. I guess there's also the dollar which is in a death spiral because every day a nice big chunk of America gets sold overseas to finance our over consumption and under-saving. Oh and the stock market just corrected oh, 10% or so.
But you know, besides that, things are going pretty good.
"I know it's hard for many to grasp, but it's a tested and true economic principle. Google or Wiki Laffer Curve for an explanation as to how it all works"
Yeah, it's tested, it didn't work. It's only hard to understand if you think it says that cutting taxes always raises revenue. The theory doesn't even say that.
The laffer curve was a theory that theorized that there was a point in which raising tax rates would not produce additional income. This makes some sense but it depends on exactly where the inflection point is. THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE'RE PAST IT. There was little practical evidence that it would work when they tried it in the early 80s, and sure enough revenues went down as pretty much every credible economist predicted (so in order to raise them, Reagan raised taxes- and BY GOLLY IT WORKED).
This usage of it is quack economics pushed by people with ulterior motives and it's not a big secret, heck the people pushing it know it. In fact, everyone knows it except people like you because you're the suckers in this game. There's not a shred of evidence there. Correlation doesn't imply causation, even if you _don't_ cherry pick your data point. You can find a million examples of the opposite happening for every case of the "laffer curve at work". When you talk about capital gains receipts, maybe don't take the year the tech bubble burst as your starting point????? But hey, if the former GOVERNOR of DELAWARE says it in an OPINION PIECE, it must be true. He knew some economists, right? All those investment bankers reading the WSJ just want to do what's best for America, right? If they have to take a big tax cut to do it, well, they just have to suck it up and take it. God bless 'em, true patriots.
If you know something about economics surely you know something about economic incentives. This is just a game people play to get their taxes lowered. Republicans love to play along. They get to be Santa Claus, first giving tax cuts but not paying for them and then daring the Democrats to raise taxes after they put the country in terrible shape financially. See! They'll raise your taxes!! It's a game of chicken to get votes, just like the terrorism thing. You ask to be able to completely violate people's constitutional rights and then when someone has the nerve to say no, you blame them for the next terrorist attack, which is as inevitable as raising taxes after running up big deficits. It's great- they can't lose, though of course we do.
That's the beauty of Lou Dobbs, he doesn't have to be anything other than the train wreck that he is to get ratings. You watch his show and you get the feeling he thinks he has it because he's some towering intellectual giant (or O'Reilly for that matter). Whatever, they both press people's buttons and that gets ratings. They're like guests on Jerry Springer with million-dollar paychecks and nice suits, but still totally unaware how much the media bigwigs are laughing at them while they rake it in.
Immigration is a complex issue and I don't pretend to have an easy solution. All I know is that if I was born dirt poor in some rural wasteland in Mexico with a family and no opportunity, I'd be cutting your lawn or washing your dishes right now. The way Lou talks you'd think the first thing he'd do if he woke up a dirt poor illegal in East L.A. tomorrow is turn himself in. Heh, just not buying it. If I thought for one second he would feel the same way if it was a bunch of white Irishmen sneaking across the border I'd take back every bad thing I'd ever said about him.
Sorry, but "better than O'Reilly" doesn't get you over the bar.
Say what you want about the Newshour, it's the only thing that qualifies as a nightly newscast anymore. Everything else could be replicated by a 5 year old reading just the really big words from section A of that morning's USA Today (but hey, better pictures).
I cannot imagine any plausible scenario in which a non-mentally-ill person could join Dateline NBC and think they were joining a serious news program. Part of what makes the Daily Show funny is making fun of people who can say that sort of thing with a straight face.
60 minutes has become dateline for a more upscale and better educated audience. It's sad to say. Not sure if it was always that way or I'm just older. It's more fluff all the time, well done _classy_ fluff, but you know. You're lucky if one of the three segments meets a critical person's definition of hard news. I think Murrow would be on PBS if he were around today, but if he was on a network you better believe he'd be doing one Tiger Woods interview for every real news story he got (and just one only because he's Edward R. Murrow).
The networks are supposed to be doing genuine public interest stuff in return for their collective share of OUR spectrum. Too bad no one in Washington gives a shit anymore. You might get a full hour a week from all the networks combined that qualifies as news, mostly on Sunday morning. Those shows go way too easy on the current administration though, because they're well known enough to play the shows off each other.
Good point, but the other big hole is what "faster" really means. 1-16 are faster at running linpack, but that's about all you can tell. The linpack benchmark isn't horrible, and it's a long-time standard which counts for something, but the truth is it's really out of date. You wouldn't care how many fps you got on Doom II if you bought a brand new computer, would you? You would be needing to move a lot more data with a modern game, and so memory bandwidth, specialized hardware etc would matter a lot more, but if you just cared about doom performance you could skimp on all that and just go for raw clock speed. Not an exact comparison. mind you, but you get the idea. There's a lot of benchmarks you could run that wouldn't show any improvement from a $600 graphics card over a $10 one but obviously there's still a market for them, it just depends on the job.
This isn't a commodity cluster, every opteron is connected with it's neighbors in 3 dimensions via a custom router that plugs right into the hypertransport bus. There's no southbridge/pci card or something like that in the way. There's just a ton more node-to-node bandwidth and a lot less latency. You won't see the difference on linpack or seti@home, but you will on real-world scientific simulations like climate modeling, especially when you talk about 100s or thousands of processors working on the same job. Seti@home doesn't slow to a crawl because Joe in Toledo discovers bittorrent, but these types of codes are like that.
Trust me, this is a world-class machine for science. For the money they spent, they could be a lot higher up, but you don't bring a dragster to the Indy 500.
"Would you care to support that statement? If you cannot or choose not to, what does that say about your rationality? (It is worth noting I believe you are likely a male rather than a female who writes to degrade and misunderstand members of her own gender.)"
.
If you think there's anything consciously rational about the way _human beings_ usually make everyday decisions, you really need to go back to school. Even smart people do suboptimal/irrational/dumb things all the flippin' time. But unless you're a supreme tool (or an economist) you understand this and just wanted to take the "nothing rational about women" comment completely literally since that made the flimsiest straw man.
So, maybe it's possible that you and your wife have the only rational relationship on earth and are so clearly better than us all, due to your ultra-enlightened/educated status, that you really don't get this. However, a 'rational' person would conclude it's far more likely that your intention was just to brag about your wife, and to try to act smart but dignified while insulting someone for making a joke
"In lieu of evidence backing up your claim, I offer my wife as an example contradicting your generalization (even if my assumption regarding your sex is incorrect). A lynchpin of the relationship I have with her is our mutual ability to consistently solve our problems rationally. To reinforce that point, her name is prefixed with the title of doctor, a respected and enlightened status one does not achieve without the ability to reason."
Here's a hint- all the hey-its-a-real-logical-argument verbosity just seems pathetic when you aren't making a particularly complicated one. If you just said "nuh-uh, mah wife is rational, cuz _she's_ a doctor", it would have sounded kind of childish, right? Well, thats still all you said so dressing it up doesn't make you look smart. It just makes you look like you need to put down the thesaurus find something useful to be outraged about.
"Care to respond or are we all going to just let these anachronistic and misogynistic myths perpetuate ad infinitum? "
How about "you're a pretentious tosspot?" That work for you? And if your wife is a real doctor, not like the liberal-arts type but the useful kind, I'd recommend you tone it down a bit. Makes you look a little insecure. Women hate that.
"Will a gun buyer have that same level of privacy after 8 years of President Hillary?"
.
You're concerned about HILLARY? If they're tracking people buying pita bread how much worse can it get? Wake up. Ever buy ammo with a credit card? Shooting glasses? Gun oil? Never in your whole life? Hell, ever buy anything at Gander Mountain or a place like that? If you fit the profile, you might as well tell them. Madison Avenue is watching you far better than big brother could- all they have to do is put database A and B together and large portions of the Bill of Rights go up in smoke, 2nd included
Scared yet? If the government doesn't respect the fourth amendment what does it matter? Why this administration though we all were screaming "please please take the forth amendment just don't let them send any more guys with boxcutters after us" is beyond me. Pretty cowardly really, in more ways than one. They want us to believe we needed to do all this crazy shit to stop terrorist attacks, when the reality was 9/11 was 100% preventable we just SCREWED UP. We learned a hard lesson, but we also _should_ have learned we didn't need to gut the constitution or give up our cherished values to prevent it too.
The terrorists can attack us even if we give up every constitutional protection we have, just like a criminal can still get a gun, but if we don't have the forth, the second doesn't mean shit. So I won't be taking any chances with Rudolph "W" Guiliani, who feels he has to be George++ on national security just so people forget his social views. That man scares me far more than Hillary does.
Hahahahahahaha.... You know everything about me because I disagreed with you? You seem to know what a straw man is already so I don't need to go into it. But don't you dare put words into my mouth, son. You don't have any clue about me or what I believe. So can you please attack what I actually said, instead of what you wished I said? I'd appreciate it.
Look, let me put it in terms you can understand- I pay into social security, it's MY fucking money, so I'm getting it back. It's that simple. Anyone who thinks it's not happening so Paris Hilton can avoid her inheritance taxes and get a 35% top marginal tax rate for putting her name on a perfume bottle is living on another planet.
So I have a "disincentive to work" because I want my money back? I'm some kind of fucking deadbeat because I pay my social security taxes and want my benefit? I'm a deadbeat because no one but medicare will cover my 70-year-old ass? Tell the millions of seniors who saw a doctor yesterday the great society is a failure, asshole (BTW, they're actually mostly white people who worked hard all their lives).
These random, nearly unrelated examples you come up with does not disprove any of the things I said, especially since I never implied I supported bribing businesses to come to town, or anything else. I said we should invest in the future of this country. The point of an investment is that it pays off in the end and NOT doing this is financially irresponsible. I never implied we should waste money on ineffectual programs, although if the current Republican leadership were in charge it's hard to see how any agency could be effective- not even the military has been spared by the conspiracy of fools. They use their incompetence to justify their inaction.
But what does the Republican leadership know about fiscal responsibility anyways? The Republican leadership hates 'tax and spend' but all they've offered in return is 'NOT tax and spend'. Even corporate America is so appalled they're giving most of their money to Democrats. And if the Republican's big plan for setting everything straight is to fuck over the hard working Americans who built this country, that will be the final nail in the coffin. You can cloak your criticism of social programs in thinly-veiled racism, but once middle class Americans figure out you're putting them in the same category they're going to get more than a little offended. My Grandpa worked for nearly 50 years, and the only time he 'sat around' was the year he spent in a hospital after he nearly got his leg blown off at Anzio. Is he a Cadillac-driving welfare queen for cashing his social security check?
I never endorsed anything 'socialist' other than Social security and Medicaid, which is paid for by the people who receive it. If that's socialism, or if investing in the future of this country is socialism, then it just shows how you people use that word to bludgeon people. The only thing I am is an ex-republican/ex-dittohead/ex-conservative. I will never again trust those people or that party as long as I live, even after the current leadership has died of old age. I'm a Democrat only by default. This is the only country in the western world where I'd belong anywhere on the left, by the way.
So let me say it again: many of these people who are obsessed with 'growing the economy', are really just angling for a bigger slice for themselves since many of their policies are actually counterproductive in this regard. So, it makes perfect sense for these people want Social Security DEAD. This is awful since the only thing needed to sustain it is for us to un-fuck our priorities. We've had a lot higher taxes on the top tax bracket in the past (though we don't even need to go back to them), yet we still created a pretty good country (remember after the Clinton years when Greenspan was afraid we'd actually pay off the debt?). I'm not asking for a handout, I'll work a year or two extra. Hell, I'll even pay extra as long as the people who get the most
This is all smoke and mirrors. People on the right want to make things as hopeless as possible because they aren't concerned about the social security issue, they just want to kill it. Too bad that can't happen.
Anyone who thinks this generation is going to pay in and not get their money back is going to get zapped. If the rich get soaked, the rich get soaked. Almost no one in this country is saving enough for retirement sans social security check (or even with).
The Republicans are so slimy, they know taxes are going to have to go up, they're just not going to do it. They're going to leave it to the Democrats after it gets so bad there's no choice. It's a cynical game of chicken and it's disgusting.
Nothing makes me madder than all this 'low taxes make the economy grow, so don't "steal" my money' crap. Yes, to a point, but the sad fact of the matter is that a lot of spending is needed to make the economy grow. This isn't 1800 dude, a modern economy needs modern infrastructure, and it ain't cheap. Rich people get the most advantage out of all this too. There are plenty of places where there are extremely low taxes, but of course you don't see anyone starting anything other than a shell company there.
So ya gotta love Republicans, so patriotic when sending other people off to go die, but when they have to pay up all of a sudden this country never did anything for them. Wake up, assholes, this country made you rich. Think you'd be rich if you grew up in Sudan instead?
The schools here are in a tailspin, the roads are falling apart, we're falling behind in net connectivity, broadband access, basic research, and higher education funding.
People are going to figure out that we're mortgaging our future to pay for today's excess, but now of course we blame the people who just don't want to eat dog food for dinner in the twilight of their lives.
The point was it's nice to have choices, what's best for people varies. I can quit tomorrow and work someplace else if I wanted. In fact, it's even easier than many contracting gigs because there's no contract to break. So 'owning your own' life is a bogus argument, it really is.
If you have some great skills that are in demand, sure you can do really well that way. If you're just doing it because you have to it can be very stressful and also bad deal financially- especially with more frequent periods of unemployment. 50 an hour sounds like nice pay, but when you really add up all the benefits you get, including paid vacation, sick time, 401k matching- it's a pay cut for most people. If you're young and healthy (or making $125/hr), it might sound good- but if you have a family or god forbid a chronic medical condition it gets a lot more complicated.
It's not about turning your soul over to a company, it's about being able to stick with something that works for you, being able to work with people you know and like, and being able to have a more stable financial situation.
Speaking of McDonalds, remember when tech workers actually got SALARIES, you know, or benefits ?
Or when they worked for companies who wanted them to stay on a semi-permanent basis, as opposed to move along every 6-12 months.
Of course I'm still young and relatively cheap, so I still get to work for a company instead of a staffing agency. Hey, I mean, everyone loves a junior guy on salary, after all they're "better" programmers since they have no families, less cynicism, and in the end get paid less per hour than anyone.
Of course programmers really do get better with experience, that's why they have no job security. Good companies do understand, too bad there aren't that many any more.
Is it funny that both of you used the same source but made completely opposite statements about the same phenomena?
I mean it IS wikipedia, but still...
At any rate, I can settle this: PBS's Nova said they have a cooling effect and the temp went up after 9/11. THAT makes it true.
College books are not cheap, however. [/payed $450 this semester]
Whatever, a college textbook is probably the cheapest thing you can use. Buy the 3-year-old previous edition off half.com or something for like 8 bucks.
How much has math changed in three years? It's not like the problems matter since no one is grading them. I mean, 10th edition, 11th edition, they're practically the same damn thing but one costs $139 and one costs $9.
I used to laugh at Al Gore jokes... until Dec 2000 or so...
Just haven't been as funny these last 7 years... dunno what it is...
How is that insightful???? You make a great point about IRAN wanting us to invade Iraq, but they of course had nothing to do with 9/11. My statement was about AL QUEDA, who remembered humiliating the Soviets in Afghanistan and could quite conceivably think they could do the same to us, if only they could provoke us into invading. THEY cared a lot about Afghanistan, because that's where they were!
Iran privately cheered when we ousted the Taliban, and Al Queda WILL cheer when we bomb Iran. These people are mortal enemies, each very much on the fast track to hell with regards to each group's respective religious beliefs. This is not an exaggeration or a joke, Al Queda has actually said, 'you guys should bomb Iran' (they probably have their eyes on Pakistan's bomb anyways). Ret. General Odom mentioned this a while back.
You ARE right about stupid leadership. We attacked a swarn enemy of Al Queda when we went after Hussein (he didn't want the competition), and if we attack Iran, we will be attacking the moral enemy of BOTH. We will be conducting military operations in three countries who ALL hate each other, AT ONCE! No one was ever that stupid in the middle east.
Why are we in such deep shit? Because no one realized it was even POSSIBLE to be this stupid. The only parallel I can think of to the Bush administration is Enron. I really mean it. It screwed up so bad, because it thought it was not only incredibly smart, but also above the rules others had to live by.
If George W. Bush had been president in 1941, he would have bombed Russia. Notice how when we talks about the Iraqis going to the polls and making their voices heard he neglects to mention how they overwhelmingly voted for whoever their religious leaders wanted them to. Americans are dying to create another theocratic regime in the middle east. Just you wait, no matter how long we stay, just you wait.
True, but it was always more complicated than that. We helped them fight Iran, because we didn't like Iran. When they started to get the upper hand, though, we backed off. We never wanted him to win, because we didn't want ANYBODY to win. The truth of the matter is we didn't like ANY of these leaders too much, but we used the fact they didn't like each other either to play them against each other and keep them weak.
If anyone is a real puppet, it's Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family is hardly an democracy to be, but it's them or the wahabbis, and we certainly want the royals instead (plus gas). Of course we know now this pissed off at least 19 of them...
The day we can afford to tell all those people where to stick their oil is the day everyone will be better off.
The police, the military, and my parents are terrorist organizations too. Not saying that in a provocative way either (except in the case of my parents ;) )- terrorism is a tactic, not a moral position. You scare the shit out of your adversary, in order to get your way while minimizing or avoiding direct confrontation. Remember shock and awe? That the heck do you think that was? Operation 'Terrorize the Iraqi Army' wouldn't have been so politically correct, but we wanted to scare them so they gave up.
Police live by this tactic, they don't call it that but they know they can't catch everyone so they grab someone and throw the book at them once and a while to send a message.
And take nuclear terrorism, we (the US) INVENTED it. We didn't have enough bombs to level Japan, but we acted like we did and pretty much everyone turning blue in the face over 'the terrorists' these days would say it was a good thing (it probably did save millions of Japanese lives, you have to admit that- they weren't exactly ready to give up). Of course, that wasn't the only city we leveled. Some we leveled more or less to send a message. Some cities weren't great military or industrial centers and were relatively untouched in targeted bombing, so they just made that much more of a statement when the whole thing burned to the ground one night in a massive firestorm.
At any rate, someone in the government needs to look up 'moral superiority' in a dictionary fast. All this emphasis on 'Terrorism (tm)' just makes us look like hypocrites, when we, in strict numerical terms have killed far more old men, women and children than Al Queda ever has (not that they're not working on it...). That's just a fact. Americans have killed lots of innocent people and when you look at the justifications, you cannot deny that many of these people were killed simply to scare, demoralize and disorient our enemies. Sure we were fighting Nazis, but we forget sometimes 'the good war' was pretty much the most unholy fucking disaster to ever befall mankind. Taking the lesser evil, even the far lesser one, requires one to do evil, and we only came out 'clean' by comparison. Al Queda are horrible people and they need to die, but just saying they're terrorists and we're not isn't going to convince anyone other than ourselves.
Al Queda chops people's fucking heads off if they shave or sneak a sip of whiskey. It should NOT have been hard to convince the Arab world these people are a dead end. You see, it's a simple (but not easy) war to win- the moderates who make up the majorities of these countries turn against the extremists. We just had to help them- and yet we couldn't even do that. It was a PR war all along and we lost it so fast no one noticed. We've been so determined to hunt grasshoppers with our howitzers, we missed a pretty obvious point: the average modern war, even one conducted with restraint, is a absolute PR nightmare. So much so, I often wonder if Al Queda WANTED us to invade Afghanistan.
Soft power used to be our greatest asset, you know, the Statue of Liberty, Elvis records, cheeseburgers. That's what really brought down the Iron Curtain, enough people finally saw us and said, 'screw this, we're doing it their way'. Our enemies were dying to hang themselves and when they had enough rope the alternative for their oppressed people was obvious.
Nowadays in the Muslim word, seeing your broken Government and thinking it would be great to do things the American way is a good way to get your head chopped off. So if they fall, it sure won't be the democratic types taking over.... We've conducted the worst advertising campaign for democracy in the history of democracy and are clearly our own worst enemy.
No one said they were stupid, they're just unwilling to accept a very unpleasant reality. That's just human nature. I believe they have chosen to pursue the strategy that gives them the best shot at maintaining their present position. That isn't realistic and will in the long run hurt them more.
The advantages they hold are not going to increase over time- time is not on their side. The internet is completely unlike a cd shop, you don't need to fight anyone for shelf space, so being a major label doesn't get you in the door anymore. Conventional radio matters less and less so controlling access to who gets on matters far less. The means by which people learn about and obtain their music these days give far fewer advantages to the old guard.
They have gotten as rich as they have by controlling the bandwidth through which people get their music. There's too much bandwidth for them to control these days. I can go on and on- word of mouth spreads so much faster on the internet that artificial hype matters far less.
The only asset they have that matters now is their intellectual property, so they are obsessed with maintaining as tight a control on it as they can, so they can use it to get their way and create artificial barriers for their own benefit (killing internet radio for example).
But at the end of the day, artists sure don't need someone to own their property for them, they need someone to get it to potential fans. That argument is going to be a lot tougher for the record labels in the future.
They aren't buying time, they're just holding on as long as they can. There is a fundamental shift going on that means record companies are going to need artists FAR more than the artists need them. Musicians are getting a lot more business savvy too, look at hip hop. They know now not only what a ridiculous rip-off most record contracts are, but they are also learning every day how much easier doing it yourself is, or doing it with an independent label that might actually view them as something more than a product.
The artists are going to hold all the cards in the future, and it's about time.
That or it runs through the way the big cartels try to form the world instead (through bribery): Everything new gets crippled until it's worse than what came before.
They can't stop the technology that is making this happen though, even if they wanted to! Information is information and the core technology has far too many uses for even an industry like big media to kill. Once people have the raw power to move the bits around it's so hard to stop. Either the media companies come up with DRM and people sidestep it, or people say 'screw you big media' and do things their own way- using the _same_ basic infrastructure!
For example, once people could move bits around the world for a flat rate, long distance service as we knew it was going to die. People just had to figure out how to move their voices instead of their data. MCI didn't get a veto. Once people get pissed off enough they can bypass traditional phone service all together. Either phone companies figure this out and set their expectations (and their prices) accordingly or they die.
I mean who else could possibly get hurt buy killing off the media industries?
You seem to be missing the joke. Buying used CDs will not actually kill the record industry, any more than piracy will. But the record industry should and will eventually have to change, and it will ultimately benefit both consumers and musicians much more- but at the big boys' expense. This is because their primary role, putting physical discs on shelves, is no longer necessary. That's just how technology works, it changes things- but they want to blame something they think they have (some) control over.
When everyone has a huge hi-def screen connected to a ultra-high bandwidth connection, television companies and movie chains will no longer control distribution of content either. Everyone from Joe Schmoe to NBC will have their own spot on the dial. Movie theaters will have to get into the 21st century in a big hurry or they will be a thing of the past too.
The main thing that's happening is not piracy, that's a consequence of the technology but not the fundamental shift that these people most fear. They need to maintain their control of the distribution system far more than they need to contain piracy. Piracy can't get much worse in music and people are still making money. Piracy will always be a psuedo tax on any information industry but the real shift will be who makes the money.
You bash indie movies, music etc, but it's just a consequenece of lowering of the barriers to entry. The big boys can still play, and will still make whatever you're willing to pay for- they will just have much more competition. (That being said, big budget popcorn movies are definitely going to be an endangered species- mostly because video games will almost completely kill them. People will have to go back to telling stories.)
You complain, but you will love it. You're disrespecting indie music and movies because you have a preconceived view of them- you won't once more people like you start doing that stuff, and once technology makes creativity king once again. While high end equipment gets cheaper, better and more user friendly, people's ears and eyes will notice the high end less and less. When industries begin to mature, that's what happens.
So, now remind me... what part of musicians keeping more of their money and their rights is going to discourage them from producing good music again?