You mention "create, review, rate, and sell content at a fair price"...
Any ONE of those, to do properly, is as much as a decade's worth of diligent learning and hard work.
To make matters worse, they overlap but are not the same thing. To review requires understanding as if you were creating, but it's not creating. To rate requires an appraisal of value as if you were reviewing, but it's not reviewing because reviewing is more communication and rating is the boiling down and removing of communication and reducing things to much simpler terms. And selling content at a fair price might be the trickest one of all- generally there ISN'T much overlap into that category, and creators tend to be lousy PR flacks because they're too close to their creations to have any perspective.
The URL I link to includes my music. I think after 20 years or so I've got pretty good at it. I'm no good at selling it, though, so I have to be content with making good music. At this point I don't believe anybody will pay anything for it, and I certainly don't know how to sell it- what with the way the RIAA carries on, I have a big hangup about even ASKING for money for it.
I'm working with 'xaltlee' to attack another aspect of the picture you present- we're gonna create a site for reviewing music. OUR way. Which is to some extent my way because I defer on technical issues to her a lot but have strong opinions on editorial issues- what we're going to do is a site that is all review and NO ratings. You'll actually read what people think, and they will talk to you and communicate rather than check off checklists and select genres you may never have heard of. If someone wants to turn you on to retrominimalist Detroit glitch, they will EXPLAIN in eloquent and fascinating language exactly why you should think this is important. And they'll have to- or they won't make it on the site. Every review will be interesting to read- period.
All I'm saying is, don't underestimate the things you've listed, or you WILL fail. The sound engineer George Massenburg once said, "guys, it takes a lifetime to get a LITTLE closer". That's what it's like.
Create- that's up to individual artists in whatever field. If you dig deep you can find the goods on how to become great at this, but you'll have to sacrifice a lot of your life to it.
Review- this one, I think, is by far the weakest. You can't be populist about it- it's as bad as creating art is, that way. I've read that a critic's first act of criticism must be through passion, desperately trying to TELL THE WORLD about something they find terribly important- whether that is positive important, or blowing the whistle on 'art' that they consider appalling, and enumerating exactly why in grisly detail. From that point on, the critic simply continues, hopefully continuing to tell the world about what they feel is terribly important. The concept of 'supporting artists' or 'being unbiased' has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you want to support artists, be rich and buy their crap no matter what it is. And that's not reviewing.
Rate- this is all over the place, and it's often combined with a sort of popular-voteyness that is supposed to be as effective as review. It's not, but since it's so easy to put together 'rate' mechanisms, this is the single most supported aspect you listed. It's susceptible to cheating, but there are ways to watch for that.
Sell content at a fair price- now that would be a neat trick! Small volume merchandise production doesn't get to use economies of scale very well, though modern technology has made many neat things possible- for instance, printers like iUniverse can 'publish' your book, which merely means you get an outlet for print-to-order books, much like burn-to-order CDs. These things (unless the entry cost is REALLY low) are not really that competitive with small pressing runs- but they're out there anyway as another option. On a more retail level there's CDBaby, which is a music online sales place and warehousing operation that will take indie CDs- I think that is a good step forward in 'selling stuff for a fair price', because they're specializing in doing the selling. In this area, there are plenty of places dabbling in it, but I am not aware of any one that's working on, say, an Amazon-like scale with comparable publicity. That said, you can place your indie CDs (if they have UPC codes) on Amazon to be sold. Then it becomes a matter of how do you get people to even know to buy your stuff- which gets back to the 'reviewing' and 'creating' side, though not 'rating', I think. Rating is not enough information to interest someone who doesn't already know what it is.
Yes, yes, build it. I'm just saying, you should specialize and come up with a SPECIFIC thing to build. Trying to cover all bases will just result in a big lose.
Yeah, I used to use a PC. I got to download pr0n and watch it using a special service on Windows XP.
Then when college was over, Mom said I couldn't use her credit card, and the PC blew up, and I said to hell with it and got a Mac. It was like a monastic self-denying thing. Or so I thought.
Now, I get laid! Thanks, Apple!
Oh, and I still download pr0n, but it's off usenet now, and this time I get to keep it. Get stuffed, Movielink!
Police in various areas will stop you to check your papers if you're black. I take it you're white (so am I, actually)
It makes very little sense to argue 'come on, the police would never do that' when they are already doing it and people are more worried about them doing it MORE.
No, you're wrong- they ARE fighting the next war. But it is not against the terrorists, at all. The terrorists are indispensable and if they don't exist they will be invented, because they are a tool for instilling a climate of fear for the purposes of tightening state control over the populace.
Which may never have happened, if our foreign policy did not produce some real terrorists- but look at the responses to this, and who benefits! It doesn't even matter if there are any terrorists left anymore, or if all of Al Quaeda lies buried in Afghan rubble. Probably dozens of us slashdotter media geeks could fake new Osama videos just as good as if they were real. It's no longer about terrorists at all- ask the UK, or Palestine, about living with continued violence. At this point it is about a radical shift in the structure of United States government, and whether it meets resistance or not, THAT is the war we currently have. The terrorists are mere assistants in this process. They have been co-opted.
In that case, maybe you had better let go of the desire to run secret police as well as the KGB, and approach the terrorism problem from a different angle, like not blowing up their countries, instilling puppet governments, and meddling in their politics at the behest of American political and business interests.
I love the assumptions that terrorism will automatically be so motivated that it'll move heaven and earth to hurt us. They hate us because we're NICE. Riiiight. So we stop being nice and they're supposed to stop hating us? Uh-huh.
American citizens didn't start wanting to make the Middle East a sheet of glass (a desire I've literally seen post 9/11- 'kill them all, men women and children') until the United States was literally attacked- not threatened, but physically attacked with great loss of life.
How many of you can identify the situations in which WE have identifiably physically attacked other countries and caused loss of life? We have a history of taking action like that, in the absence of declared war, sometimes by proxy (Israel) and our name's on every ammo clip.
If we were not physically assaulting people's homelands it would be a MUCH harder sell for some character to go 'Hey, here's an idea- go to the United States and BLOW YOURSELF UP AND DIE!'. It takes a very large amount of rage and despair to buy into something like that. If the threat is less urgent, that idea won't fly anymore.
Instead, our US leaders seem to want to go, 'Hey, here's an idea- let's keep everybody afraid and punish them terribly if they ARE terrorists, and intimidate them if they look kinda like terrorists, and we'll call 'freedom' the ability to sit home and not be blown up!' I think they are collaborating with the real terrorists to instill fear, for their personal gain. I find that pretty contemptible. If you're walking down the street you can be hit by a car, but that doesn't mean people need to be locked in small car-proof boxes. Freedom is risk and opportunity. You can't split off the risk part and discard it.
discussion, contains text of SF chronicle article on airline no-fly lists used to harass and delay peace activists
article explaining how if you look nonwhite or have the wrong sort of beard you get fingerprinted at the Canadian border
Stay safe! Stay home! Be good and don't say anything!
Next they'll be fingerprinting us at toll booths and you'll have to have a visa to travel from state to state. Hey, it worked for the USSR- for a while.
As a matter of fact I was searched too, the last time I flew anywhere (rare, for me). I suppose next time I'll be strip-searched, or beat up a bit. However, I do have one big advantage- I'm white. And I don't wear a beard, or particularly long hair.
Interesting times we live in. So this is what it's like to live in cold war USSR. Remember, there won't be a problem if you stay home and don't ask any questions!
I don't know if what I do is any good. I stood for hours holding a sign for a Progressive candidate for lt. governor, without anyone asking me to do so. I record music, and I just spent hours re-recording an already-recorded tune, "This Town Ain't Small Enough For The Both Of You", which is political and argues for third parties, sometimes pretty scathingly (Democrats and Republicans are compared to 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with fat and dirty faces'). The first version was way too odd and didn't groove. I have had hopes that this could be used by demonstrators etc. or given to the Progressives or Greens to use- but I'm too close to it and when I listen, I can get it to rock but I can't tell whether it'd work as a campaign song. I tried, it's not for me to say if it worked.
But yeah- I'm doing something, as best I can. I'll keep it up as long as I can. If I'm not good enough I hope there are other people better than me also out there making an effort...
"The American people as a whole are behind this stuff -- they may not understand the details, but they want to feel safe."
How do you know?...read it in the news? Funny how that conveniently agrees with what the administration would like you to believe.
What if people who aren't behind the government but are intimidated by it, stay home and sulk instead of vote? But of course that would conflict with the notion that the whole USA and all the people in it agree with whatever the administration wants...
More than two hundred years ago our forefathers declared our independence from King George's royalty
And you know it was about concern for power and not merely whining about someone's tax on tea
"Decent respect to the opinions of mankind", that's what they felt they owed to the powers of the earth
Wasn't long before they wrote a Constitution in the hope that they'd create a thing of lasting worth
They'd seen kings and they'd seen nobles, read about the days of ancient Greece and its renowned democracy
People vote for bread and circus, noblemen laugh at the people, kings make everyone just peasantry
Racked their brains to know the problem, knew we'd have ambitious leaders, figured their design might solve the thing
Wonder what they'd think about it if they knew we ended up allowing some guy to act like a king (you know what they'd say?)
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
We're a thousand miles up and the ground went away
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
There might be nothing left at the end of the day
More than two hundred years ago they didn't have the televison- you might think them wiser, purer men
But you know they had corruption, and you know they had attack ads- they had politicians even then
If there's something we've forgotten, maybe it's to pay attention to their careful plans for liberty
Maybe it's to still remember they had lessons they could teach us and they were a lot like you or me
More than two hundred years ago our forefathers, they tried to make a nation that could never know decay
From their weakness and corruption, kings and serfs and politicians reaching out to forge a better way
They knew it was human nature, even so they had the courage hoping we would understand somehow
Wouldn't they be sick to see us now?
Wouldn't they just puke to see us now?
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
We're a thousand miles up and the ground went away
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
There might be nothing left at the end of the day
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we have a problem...
This is America- you can BE a Nazi with a colored skin here. That said, I thought that Powell at least wasn't all that out there. Can't speak for the others, and it's my understanding Bush is putting forth a Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court who is basically a awful, wildly unprincipled, shill. You can't just go by the color of someone's skin to see if they are totalitarian powermongers. It's a big country, big enough to find shills of any race or nationality. If they wanted, Bush's people could find a Muslim Arab-American who would assert that racial profiling and car searches in Detroit was a good thing.
Yeah, they are going to have to prove they can be trusted before I even consider them worth listening to. I have every intention of voting for SOME Democrats, because I'm a Vermonter and some of our pols have been doing good things in Washington lately, but I don't care if they call themselves Democrats, Republicans, or Suffragettes. They could go 'okay, I'll fight for progressive issues and oppose Bush's war powers act but I'm running as a republican' and I'd still back them based on what they DO rather than the flag they wave.
Actually I hope some of these guys run as Independents, like our Bernie Sanders and, now, Jeffords. Democrat is becoming a handicap label and they'd probably do better without it.
"The link states that the military might is far more powerful than the combined might of the citizenry, and as a result any uprising would by futile."
Vietnam.
Also,
"But back to the crux of the post. He dismisses the chance that the military would ever turn against the ruling regime. I doubt this. While there are many (most) military leaders who will tow the line of their commanding officer, I refuse to believe that there would not be a single man of conscience in a position of military power over an extended period of time. Eventually, a single division would break and start to fight back. I'm sure they would be quickly squashed, but the action would make them heroes in the eyes of many others in the military, the action would be repeated, and eventually a full-scale civil war (not just rebellion) would break out."
The United States Military is _already_ not rubberstamping the administration's agenda. They'll be asked to do the footwork, but they are not brainless robots: recently a military school saw some insightful debate on the justness and advisability on war with Iraq, and numerous retired generals and Joint Chiefs of Staff have registered their objections with that agenda. Under the current circumstances that is all they will do- object, respectfully.
The big fear is that the Bush regime will reduce America to a Cold War USSR-like state of subjugation, with our own translation (literally!) of the KGB, and jackboots in the night. That's all well and good to be alarmed at this intention, but the military are American citizens and they have been trained to value honor and duty. Normally, they can go off and fight without being too troubled in this. If they're asked to go around oppressing or killing people within US borders, that WILL cross a line and you WILL see military at all ranks deciding that their orders and their honor are incompatible- and turning against the administration, through inaction, covert resistance, or open resistance.
In order to have a police state you have to have police- lots of them. More than we currently have. They also have to be amenable to acting as thugs, and though some police, and some military, are capable of this, there are those who are not. You CANNOT make KGB thugs out of decent cops, or decent soldiers- you can only get rid of them and try to find more suitable targets.
Never, never, NEVER rule out the existence of decent, honorable Republicans/soldiers/cops/etc. Don't you alienate them, because they are your brothers and they will side with you when things get ugly enough for them to break ranks.
And we're getting to the point where good people like that will find they have to break ranks, in order to be able to live with themselves.
One person can't take the load forever. You're not the only person out there- if you need a vacation, take a vacation. Better than burning out completely. Go lay low for a while (don't watch TV! Do a Thoreau-like thing, take some time for yourself) and there may come a time when your efforts will be more appreciated. Nobody is asking you to be superman...
I read advice like that in a store window (of a progressive-y kind of shop), and it rang very true. You've got to respect your own limitations, and if you're up against something too big for you, sometimes you have to let other people take point for a while, and go recover.
I'm going into the studio today to try and cut a new version of an 'activist' song I wrote (which is strongly for third-party representation), in hopes that it will actually help. I'm willing to stress out badly in order to get it right this time, and make it hot enough so people will want to hear it as a song. This continues a pattern of using the abilities I have for the cause- but a few years ago, I was a complete political dropout with my head in the sand. And maybe a few years from now, I'll be a dropout again. It's not about any one person being so indispensable.
Thank you for the effort you made while _I_ was hiding away from the reality. I hope a lot of us can take over for you now that you need some time off.
We have about as much control over Bush and Co. as the Iraqis do over Saddam- no lie.
But a lot of us are trying anyway. Don't be harsh if it looks like we're not doing anything! The administration control media and they're the ones with armies and police etc. so why would they be telling you that Americans are resisting them? They're going to do just like Saddam does, and tell you that 100% of all REAL Americans support the administration all the way.
You need to smarten up and realize that media is state-controlled, has been since before the first Gulf War, and you are not going to know what the American People think by watching Fox or reading Bush press releases.
Um, buying one is giving them money, which they don't care that much about in this area, and giving them mindshare and a sale to count, which they want more desperately than anything else.
So if you don't like Microsoft, don't buy one:)
If you don't like Microsoft, publically describe the xbox as the lame attempt at manipulation it is. Honestly, it's really NOT so great. It's only a midlevel gamer PC. That's not the greatest architecture in the world.
....obviously, because arguing for a monopoly being good for the economy on the grounds that it spends money is a pretty basic mistake.
Ideally, you'd have an actual market functioning, in which lots of people could make game systems. They've got complicated enough that this isn't really possible, but so far there is at least SOME choice and SOME evidence of a functioning market.
Maybe this is even thanks to Microsoft itself, seeing as Sony has such a strong position- but since they all seem to want to get into a position for price-fixing and entry-barrier raising, it is disconcerting that we have to settle for a balance of power like that. It's not reasonable to gamble everything on 'gee, maybe if we're lucky none of them will quite win and we can continue to enjoy the result of their actually working and making an effort'. Who would want that to stop? But it will, if the competitive market fails. Microsoft are unquestionably the most likely to slack off and produce crap and devote their efforts to harming newcomers, but Sony would surely slack off a bit too.
It's not a superior product. I know this may come as a shock, but Microsoft lie:) they put a great deal of effort into conning you with specs, and it obviously worked. What they have is a mid-performance gaming PC. You can build a PC that's _way_ better, or if you got a PS2 you could use a very different architecture with obscenely greater video bus bandwidth which makes texture caching more or less completely pointless.
Besides, xbox is useless if the games aren't fun:) who the hell cares if the central processing unit runs at a higher clock speed?
Are you kidding? What are your credentials, please, for claiming that ogg is inferior to mp3?
I'm a sound engineer, I _code_ audio DSP and wordlength reduction, I _analyse_ various mp3 codecs in novel ways and I have studied Ogg Vorbis and concluded that it offers the best of all mp3 encoder approaches, all at once. It has all the transient liveliness of Fraunhofer and all the tonal purity of Blade, and I've no doubt it's been improved still further since I looked.
I don't know who you are, but you're certainly no sound engineer (or audio DSP coder), and I... strongly disagree with your claim.
There's no such scheme. The 'foo' Book standards were from back in the day when media formats were invented to be read, not invented not to be readable:D
This is great. Not so much the Sorenson (though it does make me wonder- does that mean I could use the (older) Sorenson I have available, as an output format? I had more or less given up on ever using it seriously because I figured it was only Mac and some Windows and not accessible under Linux.)
What I mean is, the 2Xsai stuff (under whatever name) is great. I looked at two different pages of screenshots and was blown away- it was literally like redrafting the images to make them more appealing. That's very exciting.
Not only that- I've been flirting with the idea of doing some animations- not computer, but line art animations. I have only a simple 640x480 webcam for shooting the results, which would then be roughly NTSC resolution... LINE ART. See where I'm going with this? ANYTHING I could do with line art or even shading/crosshatching would be perfectly suited to being scaled with 2Xsai/Scale2X.
Which is GPLed under either name, so the exact name and source isn't that important. This one is OURS. And I find that incredibly exciting. I do the same thing- I've written digital audio wordlength reduction routines that are the best in the world by some yardsticks and among the best in the world by any standard, and I made them GPLed as well. The tools are falling into place- one person doesn't have to do it all by themselves, we can help each other, and it's getting to the point where in one area after another, the hottest tricks are covered under the GPL and available.
This is the way to do it. It's exciting to see it happening. And you bet I'm going to be coding up some sort of hack to try 2Xsai on scanned/cammed line-art. The coolest thing is that it will work just as well on any color depth, so long as you want to bring out cel-shadey effects and line edges. This is great, great stuff:)
High fives to ALL the people who've originated, inspired, and worked on this family of scaling algorithms- and BIG THANKS from someone who will be using it to do neat stuff that maybe you hadn't even anticipated. Because you might not have known there was somebody interested in drawing line art, shooting it with a limited-res camera and scaling it up while preserving the line-artiness of it. But you've just made it possible for anyone filming hand-drawn cels at 640x480 to upscale their footage to 1280x960... which, after just a bit of letterboxing, becomes HDTV standard 1280x720. Hell, digital cinema is only 1280x1024...
See why this is very exciting? You have a webcam-to-Feature-Film scaling algorithm there. In the event that you had such great cels that you really needed to get professional color density rather than crappy webcam color density, you can STILL do this through a simple webcam by taking multiple shots (say, 10 if you're anal) and AVERAGING them together. That completely deals with the color density problem- introduce slight lighting shifts if you want to get fancy with it. At that point it's only resolution- except, surprise! If you're working with line-art or cels, it's not! Bam, instant film/HDTV resolution output for ANYBODY.
Sorry for getting so relentlessly technical, but this is VERY exciting and has huge, huge implications AND it's all happening under the GPL. Excuse me for suggesting that we are kicking ass. Rock on:)
They can't- won't- they're Vivendi now, controlled by a major label. Don't expect anything from them, they don't even pay their artists- there have been several scandals over artists amassing heavy royalties and then being axed for no reason. I cringe a little bit everytime I see the name, though you can't really rescue people from getting burned (otherwise Microsoft would be much smaller).
My favorite place for carrying on what mp3.com USED to be doing, is ampcast.com (as seen in my URL). They're very in touch with what you need to do in order to run a business of that nature. They offer the hosting and CD burn-to-order of very high quality, from Red Book uncompressed masters if you want, even including UPC codes and spine stickers if you want them (Ampcast can give people UPC codes a lot cheaper than if you went and bought them as an individual). However, if you are an artist, they charge a hosting fee- it's that or charge the listener, and I think we understand that charging the listener is a total bitch:)
Ampcast is up and running, still using a really awesome artist agreement that doesn't burn artists, and prepared to continue indefinitely- they have never run it like a dotcom, these guys can run a business. I know that I'm currently working to come up with fantastic amazing music in hopes of getting some traffic to Ampcast, because you've got to have the music or there's no point. I'd love to see them start doing some real business, for instance in the CDs they make. I helped them set up the system and you can get damn good CDs from them, for about as cheaply as anyone could do it.
Can't sell you any yet, dude, but you can download some. I grew up on Pink Floyd- www.ampcast.com/chrisj has a bunch of music that bears some relation to Pink Floyd.
Recent stuff (and I mean RECENT, like yesterday and last week) includes 'Another Beautiful Friend', probably the best yet- a bunch of other songs of all different types like 'Take A Number' which is hard rock and 'Lockstep' which is brutal metal- and on an earlier instrumental album (which is buyable, actually) there's a track, 'Horse', which is totally a nod to Pink Floyd.
Cheers. The internet is a very big place, you can run into people doing what you like even through bumping elbows with them on Slashdot. What kind of Pink Floydiness do you like best? I am in the studio lately doing new songs. Maybe I should pander to you:)
Slashdot Mirror
Any ONE of those, to do properly, is as much as a decade's worth of diligent learning and hard work.
To make matters worse, they overlap but are not the same thing. To review requires understanding as if you were creating, but it's not creating. To rate requires an appraisal of value as if you were reviewing, but it's not reviewing because reviewing is more communication and rating is the boiling down and removing of communication and reducing things to much simpler terms. And selling content at a fair price might be the trickest one of all- generally there ISN'T much overlap into that category, and creators tend to be lousy PR flacks because they're too close to their creations to have any perspective.
The URL I link to includes my music. I think after 20 years or so I've got pretty good at it. I'm no good at selling it, though, so I have to be content with making good music. At this point I don't believe anybody will pay anything for it, and I certainly don't know how to sell it- what with the way the RIAA carries on, I have a big hangup about even ASKING for money for it.
I'm working with 'xaltlee' to attack another aspect of the picture you present- we're gonna create a site for reviewing music. OUR way. Which is to some extent my way because I defer on technical issues to her a lot but have strong opinions on editorial issues- what we're going to do is a site that is all review and NO ratings. You'll actually read what people think, and they will talk to you and communicate rather than check off checklists and select genres you may never have heard of. If someone wants to turn you on to retrominimalist Detroit glitch, they will EXPLAIN in eloquent and fascinating language exactly why you should think this is important. And they'll have to- or they won't make it on the site. Every review will be interesting to read- period.
All I'm saying is, don't underestimate the things you've listed, or you WILL fail. The sound engineer George Massenburg once said, "guys, it takes a lifetime to get a LITTLE closer". That's what it's like.
Create- that's up to individual artists in whatever field. If you dig deep you can find the goods on how to become great at this, but you'll have to sacrifice a lot of your life to it.
Review- this one, I think, is by far the weakest. You can't be populist about it- it's as bad as creating art is, that way. I've read that a critic's first act of criticism must be through passion, desperately trying to TELL THE WORLD about something they find terribly important- whether that is positive important, or blowing the whistle on 'art' that they consider appalling, and enumerating exactly why in grisly detail. From that point on, the critic simply continues, hopefully continuing to tell the world about what they feel is terribly important. The concept of 'supporting artists' or 'being unbiased' has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you want to support artists, be rich and buy their crap no matter what it is. And that's not reviewing.
Rate- this is all over the place, and it's often combined with a sort of popular-voteyness that is supposed to be as effective as review. It's not, but since it's so easy to put together 'rate' mechanisms, this is the single most supported aspect you listed. It's susceptible to cheating, but there are ways to watch for that.
Sell content at a fair price- now that would be a neat trick! Small volume merchandise production doesn't get to use economies of scale very well, though modern technology has made many neat things possible- for instance, printers like iUniverse can 'publish' your book, which merely means you get an outlet for print-to-order books, much like burn-to-order CDs. These things (unless the entry cost is REALLY low) are not really that competitive with small pressing runs- but they're out there anyway as another option. On a more retail level there's CDBaby, which is a music online sales place and warehousing operation that will take indie CDs- I think that is a good step forward in 'selling stuff for a fair price', because they're specializing in doing the selling. In this area, there are plenty of places dabbling in it, but I am not aware of any one that's working on, say, an Amazon-like scale with comparable publicity. That said, you can place your indie CDs (if they have UPC codes) on Amazon to be sold. Then it becomes a matter of how do you get people to even know to buy your stuff- which gets back to the 'reviewing' and 'creating' side, though not 'rating', I think. Rating is not enough information to interest someone who doesn't already know what it is.
Yes, yes, build it. I'm just saying, you should specialize and come up with a SPECIFIC thing to build. Trying to cover all bases will just result in a big lose.
*g*
How about 'Digital Rights Minimization'? :D
It makes very little sense to argue 'come on, the police would never do that' when they are already doing it and people are more worried about them doing it MORE.
Which may never have happened, if our foreign policy did not produce some real terrorists- but look at the responses to this, and who benefits! It doesn't even matter if there are any terrorists left anymore, or if all of Al Quaeda lies buried in Afghan rubble. Probably dozens of us slashdotter media geeks could fake new Osama videos just as good as if they were real. It's no longer about terrorists at all- ask the UK, or Palestine, about living with continued violence. At this point it is about a radical shift in the structure of United States government, and whether it meets resistance or not, THAT is the war we currently have. The terrorists are mere assistants in this process. They have been co-opted.
I love the assumptions that terrorism will automatically be so motivated that it'll move heaven and earth to hurt us. They hate us because we're NICE. Riiiight. So we stop being nice and they're supposed to stop hating us? Uh-huh.
American citizens didn't start wanting to make the Middle East a sheet of glass (a desire I've literally seen post 9/11- 'kill them all, men women and children') until the United States was literally attacked- not threatened, but physically attacked with great loss of life.
How many of you can identify the situations in which WE have identifiably physically attacked other countries and caused loss of life? We have a history of taking action like that, in the absence of declared war, sometimes by proxy (Israel) and our name's on every ammo clip.
If we were not physically assaulting people's homelands it would be a MUCH harder sell for some character to go 'Hey, here's an idea- go to the United States and BLOW YOURSELF UP AND DIE!'. It takes a very large amount of rage and despair to buy into something like that. If the threat is less urgent, that idea won't fly anymore.
Instead, our US leaders seem to want to go, 'Hey, here's an idea- let's keep everybody afraid and punish them terribly if they ARE terrorists, and intimidate them if they look kinda like terrorists, and we'll call 'freedom' the ability to sit home and not be blown up!' I think they are collaborating with the real terrorists to instill fear, for their personal gain. I find that pretty contemptible. If you're walking down the street you can be hit by a car, but that doesn't mean people need to be locked in small car-proof boxes. Freedom is risk and opportunity. You can't split off the risk part and discard it.
discussion, contains text of SF chronicle article on airline no-fly lists used to harass and delay peace activists
article explaining how if you look nonwhite or have the wrong sort of beard you get fingerprinted at the Canadian border
Stay safe! Stay home! Be good and don't say anything!
Next they'll be fingerprinting us at toll booths and you'll have to have a visa to travel from state to state. Hey, it worked for the USSR- for a while.
As a matter of fact I was searched too, the last time I flew anywhere (rare, for me). I suppose next time I'll be strip-searched, or beat up a bit. However, I do have one big advantage- I'm white. And I don't wear a beard, or particularly long hair.
Interesting times we live in. So this is what it's like to live in cold war USSR. Remember, there won't be a problem if you stay home and don't ask any questions!
But yeah- I'm doing something, as best I can. I'll keep it up as long as I can. If I'm not good enough I hope there are other people better than me also out there making an effort...
Are you sure the RIAA does not/will not demand money for any streaming broadcast whether or not you play RIAA's property?
How do you know? ...read it in the news? Funny how that conveniently agrees with what the administration would like you to believe.
What if people who aren't behind the government but are intimidated by it, stay home and sulk instead of vote? But of course that would conflict with the notion that the whole USA and all the people in it agree with whatever the administration wants...
And you know it was about concern for power and not merely whining about someone's tax on tea
"Decent respect to the opinions of mankind", that's what they felt they owed to the powers of the earth
Wasn't long before they wrote a Constitution in the hope that they'd create a thing of lasting worth
They'd seen kings and they'd seen nobles, read about the days of ancient Greece and its renowned democracy
People vote for bread and circus, noblemen laugh at the people, kings make everyone just peasantry
Racked their brains to know the problem, knew we'd have ambitious leaders, figured their design might solve the thing
Wonder what they'd think about it if they knew we ended up allowing some guy to act like a king (you know what they'd say?)
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
We're a thousand miles up and the ground went away
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
There might be nothing left at the end of the day
More than two hundred years ago they didn't have the televison- you might think them wiser, purer men
But you know they had corruption, and you know they had attack ads- they had politicians even then
If there's something we've forgotten, maybe it's to pay attention to their careful plans for liberty
Maybe it's to still remember they had lessons they could teach us and they were a lot like you or me
More than two hundred years ago our forefathers, they tried to make a nation that could never know decay
From their weakness and corruption, kings and serfs and politicians reaching out to forge a better way
They knew it was human nature, even so they had the courage hoping we would understand somehow
Wouldn't they be sick to see us now?
Wouldn't they just puke to see us now?
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
We're a thousand miles up and the ground went away
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we've lost our way
Houston, Houston we have a problem
There might be nothing left at the end of the day
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we have a problem
Houston, Houston we have a problem...
(I wrote this song, "Houston, We Have A Problem", to express exactly the opinion you just expressed...)
This is America- you can BE a Nazi with a colored skin here. That said, I thought that Powell at least wasn't all that out there. Can't speak for the others, and it's my understanding Bush is putting forth a Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court who is basically a awful, wildly unprincipled, shill. You can't just go by the color of someone's skin to see if they are totalitarian powermongers. It's a big country, big enough to find shills of any race or nationality. If they wanted, Bush's people could find a Muslim Arab-American who would assert that racial profiling and car searches in Detroit was a good thing.
Actually I hope some of these guys run as Independents, like our Bernie Sanders and, now, Jeffords. Democrat is becoming a handicap label and they'd probably do better without it.
Vietnam.
Also,
"But back to the crux of the post. He dismisses the chance that the military would ever turn against the ruling regime. I doubt this. While there are many (most) military leaders who will tow the line of their commanding officer, I refuse to believe that there would not be a single man of conscience in a position of military power over an extended period of time. Eventually, a single division would break and start to fight back. I'm sure they would be quickly squashed, but the action would make them heroes in the eyes of many others in the military, the action would be repeated, and eventually a full-scale civil war (not just rebellion) would break out."
The United States Military is _already_ not rubberstamping the administration's agenda. They'll be asked to do the footwork, but they are not brainless robots: recently a military school saw some insightful debate on the justness and advisability on war with Iraq, and numerous retired generals and Joint Chiefs of Staff have registered their objections with that agenda. Under the current circumstances that is all they will do- object, respectfully.
The big fear is that the Bush regime will reduce America to a Cold War USSR-like state of subjugation, with our own translation (literally!) of the KGB, and jackboots in the night. That's all well and good to be alarmed at this intention, but the military are American citizens and they have been trained to value honor and duty. Normally, they can go off and fight without being too troubled in this. If they're asked to go around oppressing or killing people within US borders, that WILL cross a line and you WILL see military at all ranks deciding that their orders and their honor are incompatible- and turning against the administration, through inaction, covert resistance, or open resistance.
In order to have a police state you have to have police- lots of them. More than we currently have. They also have to be amenable to acting as thugs, and though some police, and some military, are capable of this, there are those who are not. You CANNOT make KGB thugs out of decent cops, or decent soldiers- you can only get rid of them and try to find more suitable targets.
Never, never, NEVER rule out the existence of decent, honorable Republicans/soldiers/cops/etc. Don't you alienate them, because they are your brothers and they will side with you when things get ugly enough for them to break ranks.
And we're getting to the point where good people like that will find they have to break ranks, in order to be able to live with themselves.
I read advice like that in a store window (of a progressive-y kind of shop), and it rang very true. You've got to respect your own limitations, and if you're up against something too big for you, sometimes you have to let other people take point for a while, and go recover.
I'm going into the studio today to try and cut a new version of an 'activist' song I wrote (which is strongly for third-party representation), in hopes that it will actually help. I'm willing to stress out badly in order to get it right this time, and make it hot enough so people will want to hear it as a song. This continues a pattern of using the abilities I have for the cause- but a few years ago, I was a complete political dropout with my head in the sand. And maybe a few years from now, I'll be a dropout again. It's not about any one person being so indispensable.
Thank you for the effort you made while _I_ was hiding away from the reality. I hope a lot of us can take over for you now that you need some time off.
But a lot of us are trying anyway. Don't be harsh if it looks like we're not doing anything! The administration control media and they're the ones with armies and police etc. so why would they be telling you that Americans are resisting them? They're going to do just like Saddam does, and tell you that 100% of all REAL Americans support the administration all the way.
You need to smarten up and realize that media is state-controlled, has been since before the first Gulf War, and you are not going to know what the American People think by watching Fox or reading Bush press releases.
OK?
So if you don't like Microsoft, don't buy one :)
If you don't like Microsoft, publically describe the xbox as the lame attempt at manipulation it is. Honestly, it's really NOT so great. It's only a midlevel gamer PC. That's not the greatest architecture in the world.
Ideally, you'd have an actual market functioning, in which lots of people could make game systems. They've got complicated enough that this isn't really possible, but so far there is at least SOME choice and SOME evidence of a functioning market.
Maybe this is even thanks to Microsoft itself, seeing as Sony has such a strong position- but since they all seem to want to get into a position for price-fixing and entry-barrier raising, it is disconcerting that we have to settle for a balance of power like that. It's not reasonable to gamble everything on 'gee, maybe if we're lucky none of them will quite win and we can continue to enjoy the result of their actually working and making an effort'. Who would want that to stop? But it will, if the competitive market fails. Microsoft are unquestionably the most likely to slack off and produce crap and devote their efforts to harming newcomers, but Sony would surely slack off a bit too.
Besides, xbox is useless if the games aren't fun :) who the hell cares if the central processing unit runs at a higher clock speed?
I'm a sound engineer, I _code_ audio DSP and wordlength reduction, I _analyse_ various mp3 codecs in novel ways and I have studied Ogg Vorbis and concluded that it offers the best of all mp3 encoder approaches, all at once. It has all the transient liveliness of Fraunhofer and all the tonal purity of Blade, and I've no doubt it's been improved still further since I looked.
I don't know who you are, but you're certainly no sound engineer (or audio DSP coder), and I... strongly disagree with your claim.
There's no such scheme. The 'foo' Book standards were from back in the day when media formats were invented to be read, not invented not to be readable :D
Sorry about the unclosed bold tag :)
What I mean is, the 2Xsai stuff (under whatever name) is great. I looked at two different pages of screenshots and was blown away- it was literally like redrafting the images to make them more appealing. That's very exciting.
Not only that- I've been flirting with the idea of doing some animations- not computer, but line art animations. I have only a simple 640x480 webcam for shooting the results, which would then be roughly NTSC resolution... LINE ART. See where I'm going with this? ANYTHING I could do with line art or even shading/crosshatching would be perfectly suited to being scaled with 2Xsai/Scale2X.
Which is GPLed under either name, so the exact name and source isn't that important. This one is OURS. And I find that incredibly exciting. I do the same thing- I've written digital audio wordlength reduction routines that are the best in the world by some yardsticks and among the best in the world by any standard, and I made them GPLed as well. The tools are falling into place- one person doesn't have to do it all by themselves, we can help each other, and it's getting to the point where in one area after another, the hottest tricks are covered under the GPL and available.
This is the way to do it. It's exciting to see it happening. And you bet I'm going to be coding up some sort of hack to try 2Xsai on scanned/cammed line-art. The coolest thing is that it will work just as well on any color depth, so long as you want to bring out cel-shadey effects and line edges. This is great, great stuff :)
High fives to ALL the people who've originated, inspired, and worked on this family of scaling algorithms- and BIG THANKS from someone who will be using it to do neat stuff that maybe you hadn't even anticipated. Because you might not have known there was somebody interested in drawing line art, shooting it with a limited-res camera and scaling it up while preserving the line-artiness of it. But you've just made it possible for anyone filming hand-drawn cels at 640x480 to upscale their footage to 1280x960... which, after just a bit of letterboxing, becomes HDTV standard 1280x720. Hell, digital cinema is only 1280x1024...
See why this is very exciting? You have a webcam-to-Feature-Film scaling algorithm there. In the event that you had such great cels that you really needed to get professional color density rather than crappy webcam color density, you can STILL do this through a simple webcam by taking multiple shots (say, 10 if you're anal) and AVERAGING them together. That completely deals with the color density problem- introduce slight lighting shifts if you want to get fancy with it. At that point it's only resolution- except, surprise! If you're working with line-art or cels, it's not! Bam, instant film/HDTV resolution output for ANYBODY.
Sorry for getting so relentlessly technical, but this is VERY exciting and has huge, huge implications AND it's all happening under the GPL. Excuse me for suggesting that we are kicking ass. Rock on :)
My favorite place for carrying on what mp3.com USED to be doing, is ampcast.com (as seen in my URL). They're very in touch with what you need to do in order to run a business of that nature. They offer the hosting and CD burn-to-order of very high quality, from Red Book uncompressed masters if you want, even including UPC codes and spine stickers if you want them (Ampcast can give people UPC codes a lot cheaper than if you went and bought them as an individual). However, if you are an artist, they charge a hosting fee- it's that or charge the listener, and I think we understand that charging the listener is a total bitch :)
Ampcast is up and running, still using a really awesome artist agreement that doesn't burn artists, and prepared to continue indefinitely- they have never run it like a dotcom, these guys can run a business. I know that I'm currently working to come up with fantastic amazing music in hopes of getting some traffic to Ampcast, because you've got to have the music or there's no point. I'd love to see them start doing some real business, for instance in the CDs they make. I helped them set up the system and you can get damn good CDs from them, for about as cheaply as anyone could do it.
Recent stuff (and I mean RECENT, like yesterday and last week) includes 'Another Beautiful Friend', probably the best yet- a bunch of other songs of all different types like 'Take A Number' which is hard rock and 'Lockstep' which is brutal metal- and on an earlier instrumental album (which is buyable, actually) there's a track, 'Horse', which is totally a nod to Pink Floyd.
Cheers. The internet is a very big place, you can run into people doing what you like even through bumping elbows with them on Slashdot. What kind of Pink Floydiness do you like best? I am in the studio lately doing new songs. Maybe I should pander to you :)