Bush is evil because he chose the most expensive and damaging possible solution to the problem of Saddam Hussein. He justified taking this step rather than looking for a better solution because he claimed Iraq was a clear and immediate danger, about the only legal justification for an unprovoked attack. It turns out, as most critics claimed, that Iraq was not an immediate danger; and the latest news is that it is likely that Bush knew it at the time. Bush didn't qualify his statements then, didnâ(TM)t allow anyone independent to see his evidence and make an independent judgment (supposedly for national security reasons), and even now he is claiming the WMD are sure to be found. He asked us to believe his unsupported accusations, and months later, the evidence that was so clear then is not good enough to help find the WMD now.
Clinton supposedly got impeached for lying, not for what he did. Why shouldn't Bush pay the same price for lying, even if you approve of the outcome? I'd certainly say the stakes were higher in Bush's case.
Well I agree about the spin part, and I also agree that porting to an unfamiliar computer is an important skill. However, it is hard to spin this sort of thing on a resume, and you'll have to depend on an HR person to decide that plenty of experience with long-irrelevant platforms is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I believe this project would be valuable experience, but someone skimming resumes probably won't. That is the reason I don't bother to highlight my extensive DOS experience, or my excellent knowledge of 6502 assembly language and Commodore Pets:-)
You have pointed out a flaw in the inheritance tax, but that isn't necessarily evidence that it should be scrapped, but evidence that it should be made better.
The problem that inheritance taxes are designed to solve is the problem that capital gains are not taxed until capital is sold. If someone dies before they have sold capital, the gains will go untaxed when inherited.
Canada has no inheritance tax; instead all of a person's assets are considered to be sold at the time of death, and the last tax form filled out for that person might have a huge amount of capital gains taxes owing (unless it is sheltered in a trust fund or something). This is not a very fair system, since the capital gains are taxed at the highest marginal rate, all in one year. An inheritance tax might be fairer.
Yes, inheritance taxes cause some double taxation and are hard on some small businessmen. But without inheritance taxes, there is a huge problem of not taxing capital gains on inherited capital. You've got to weigh the two problems to determine which is less fair; but I'd wager that not taxing inherited capital gains is a lot more unfair.
It would be more efficient to have only a single source of taxes -- more efficient for the tax collector and more efficient for the tax evader.
It is a pain to have income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and the whole list; but there is the benefit that no one will be likely to evade them all. If the only taxes were income taxes, you'd just have to evade that and you'd have it made.
You have to weigh the risk and reward before deciding to do something.
We have numbers in this example. This person wants to make at least $10 an hour; we are assuming that the person who wins this contest will get $23 an hour. If the chances of winning are more than 10/23 = 43%, then this is a worthwhile risk.
You are right to point out that there would be non-monetary benefits to doing this work (which is of course one reason why people volunteer for Open Source work). In this case, however, we can safely assume that the non-monetary benefits are worse for this project than others that are available, or else there would be no need for an added financial incentive.
You are right that porting is an important skill, but porting to Amiga? Why not pick a porting project for a more popular computer? There are benefits to doing this port, but I'm afraid the financial benefits are probably the most significant.
Since this test is about personal preferences, the results are really only applicable to people who are just like those in the test. The results might be applicable to a wider audience, or a different group of users, or it might not. I would prefer to read the opinions of about 6 different audio reviewers, but these results are at least better than anecdotes.
I was lucky, made it to my mid-30's and the second sale of the company I worked for before I became a Dilbert. I found out, first hand, what many others have learned; that Dilbert is a documentary:-)
This world really does make you cynical though. In my career I have had to work around about 4 bugs in Windows. In each case it took many weeks (or months) to find the error, then many weeks to devise a work-around. The first time, I actually tried to report the bug to someone; I'll never do that again:-) Using an open source O/S, I probably would have found those bugs twice as fast, and would have been able to actually fix the bug faster than coming up with a work-around. I am amazed that management would not prefer a fix in half the time, or that they should begrudge giving away the bug fix, given the salary it saved them and the benefit they could derive from other programmer's bug fixes.
As a programmer, being unable to see or change the source code of the O/S is an obstacle to my doing my job. If only management could be convinced of this.
If you are using Open Source software to fulfill your contract, your client is getting the benefit of someone else's free work.
If you are fixing a bug to help the client, they are getting the value out of your time. If you give the bug fix to others, in return for use of the Open Source code, why should your employer care?
So Microsoft updates their file format documentation and every other company has to update their program to handle the new format.
Documenting the format is a good step, but if Microsoft changes it regularly, Microsoft will retain the advantage that only their programs are compatible with the "standard" set by Microsoft.
It will be impossible to deflect Microsoft's arguments about this. What happens when Microsoft or any one else wants to add a new feature? There is no way to do this with a fixed file format. If the standard allows extensions, it won't be a standard for long.
I know, you could propose a committee to allow enhancements to the standard; but Microsoft will rightly point out that a committee can be exploited by its competitors to thwart Microsoft's attempt to beat them with a better product.
This sort of thing will not work out until the government decides that Microsoft's (or any other company's) ability to increase profits is less important than users' control over their own data (or computers).
You left out the fact that seatbelts prevent you from being tossed OUT of your car. It is much harder to get injured by other cars in an accident if you are still inside yours. A lot of the serious auto injuries and deaths I hear about involve people going through the windshield and getting run over or hitting someone else.
I'd also love to see the statistics that back up your contention that deaths aren't significantly reduced by seatbelts. I know it is only an anecdote, but the only person who was wearing a seatbelt was the one who survived Princess Diana's fatal car accident; and I know of a lot of other accidents where the people with seatbelts were much better off.
For the hell of it, Iâ(TM)ll add another thought to the mix. Most serious injuries and deaths in car accidents are caused by head injuries (just like with bicycles), so it might make more sense to enforce helmet use in cars than seatbelt use. Of course, wearing a helmet makes you look like a dork and messes up your hair, so no one would ever seriously consider this; letâ(TM)s introduce more expensive and less effective side airbags instead.
Microsoft will never go along with point 4; that's what keeps Microsoft in control. Take websites for example, if all web sites simply provided the data and let browsers do the displaying, it would be easy to write a competing browser. But if sites provide code (like activeX components), a competitor has to reproduce an operating environment to run the control. The more capabilities your executable components have, the harder it will be for competitors to support them, so Microsoft has every incentive to encourage the addition of code to data (and to ignore or sabotage alternate execution environments like Java).
Well, to get even more pedantic, Windows NT was based on OS/2, which was made by Microsoft for IBM. I don't know how much input IBM had in the design or implementation of OS/2, but by your argument OS/2 is IBM's product and therefore Microsoft based their Windows NT on IBM's OS/2 (which they happened to write).
Microsoft doesn't set the rules, the government sets the rules and Microsoft simply exploits them. The problem is that the current government is quite happy to maintain laws and introduce new ones that favour the companies (and people) that are already successful.
As the apologists for Microsoft usually point out, any company would do what Microsoft does if they were in the same position. In fact, shareholders would be mighty unhappy if companies didn't take every (legal) opportunity to make more money and eliminate competitors. Don't expect that your pleas to Microsoft to play fair will accomplish anything; pressure the government to overhaul the laws for businesses so that they are required to play fair (and of course, actually punish companies that break the law).
This is just what Microsoft wants you to think. We can't trust users to patch their software, therefore we must make patching involuntary. Once you can no longer control when your machine is patched, whoever gets to control the patching can do anything they want to your computer.
Never buy hardware or software that can be patched without your permission! If it can be patched, its capabilities can be changed at any time. Imagine your set-top box is suddenly "patched" so you can't change the channel during a commercial -- the day could come.
Inheritance taxes aren't really double taxation because capital gains taxes usually weren't paid on the inherited property. Capital gain taxes aren't paid unless the property is sold; when the property is inherited (and not taxed), no taxes are paid on the existing capital gains when it is transferred to the heir. Inheritance taxes now make up for the unpaid capital gains taxes. Inheritance taxes are double taxation for the capital gains that were already paid; they are the only taxation for the portion of capital gains that were not taxed in the hands of the original owner.
I'll believe the reason for getting rid of the inheritance tax is to avoid double taxation when inherited property is transferred at the purchase price; then capital gains taxes will be applied and the inheritance will at least be taxed once. The current system looks a lot more like a tax break for the rich, with a double-taxation fig leaf to convince taxpayers that is fair.
Your suggestion makes a lot of sense, and might just make people happy to buy copy-protected CDs. The record record companies won't try it, unfortunately, because then they would have to admit that piracy isn't the reason for poor sales; high cost is the reason for poor sales. All the media companies assume that the file swapping services are successful because people want music for free; people might simply want to pay less that $20, but the only other choice they have is free. Would they buy for $5? The media companies don't want to know.
The record companies are full of idiots. I have fairly obscure musical taste, and I literally spend decades searching for CDs from certain groups; and by searching I mean flipping through the racks in every music store I ever see. When I do find these albums, they are usually imports that cost twice as much as normal CDs. Why is it that music that no one wants costs more than popular music? If the record companies offered a service where they would let you burn a copy of any out-of-print CD, for say $5; I might start buying CDs again. They could implement a plan like this easily. Except for the cost of the servers to supply the music files, there is no production cost, so any price they charge would be pure profit. The only thing stopping them from doing this is a stupid fear of piracy. I can only point out that if a CD is not offered for sale, the only way to get a copy is through piracy.
I own more than 1000 CDs, and used to buy about 50-100 a year. But lately, I have stopped buying CDs and started buying DVDs instead. My average cost for DVDs, since I buy a lot of them used, is less than $20 (Canadian); there is no way I will pay more than $15 for CDs.
Media companies should concentrate more on the people that buy (or used to buy) their products and worry less about those that don't. If the companies lowered prices and increased selection, both actions that can be helped by using the Internet, they could start prying money out of my pocket again. I used to be a great customer, despite the high prices and lousy selection, but they are going to have to work hard to get me to buy again.
I have a Yamaha CD burner that is equipped with a special music master mode. In this mode, the pits are burned longer so that the disk has less capacity, but the pits are burned more accurately. My wife and I had no difficulty hearing the difference between disks burned in special mode vs. those in normal mode. A friend administered a blind test on his own modest stereo system. The bits were identical between these disks, yet the music-mode disks sounded audibly better. Don't tell me bits are bits when it comes to audio CD players.
I don't know if they use an oscilloscope to measure jitter, or whether they just make these graphs up, but here is a link to a CD player review from Stereophile magazine
The world is a subtler place than a handful of specification numbers can represent. The old LP is better than CD arguments were often true at the time. It is easy to hear that modern CD players and remastered CDs are better than the original examples of "perfect sound forever" that were sold 15 years ago. I haven't listened to any turntables lately, but they may still sound better. If people are currently saying that analog photography is better than digital, and you don't agree, it is probably because they recognize details that you don't; it is not because they are describing figments of their imagination with terms like quality, tonality and vividness.
I hate to believe this stuff, but I listened with my own ears and I heard differences when I compared CD transports and digital cables. Using the same D/A converter, there are easily audible differences between different digital sources. Even in digital sound, there are things we don't understand (yet), and will eventually be able to improve.
I also wouldn't count on Walmart to provide better quality than current professional equipment. People will not pay for quality differences they cannot readily see, so they would rather have a lower price 8 megapixel camera than a better quality 16 megapixel camera. The fact that super VHS VCRs never sold in significant numbers despite easily visible quality differences shows that people will choose cheaper adequate quality over more-expensive better quality. I can tell you that the quality of audio equipment in Walmart does not match the quality of even 50 year old professional equipment.
It was well done propaganda because it blamed the problems of prohibition on the drug itself, and most people fall for it. If drugs weren't prohibited, the profits would go to law-abiding companies, not terrorists. Besides, it is illegal to simply possess drugs, not just buy them. If this person could legally grow her own pot, there would be no profit for anyone, least of all terrorists.
To defend pot prohibition you have to show that the benefits of reducing pot use outweigh the costs of prohibition. Funding terrorism is clearly a cost of prohibiting pot, not a cost of using pot itself. This commercial, if true in any way, is actually an argument in favour of legalizing pot!
One of the big successes of the anti-drug propaganda war is what you have pointed out, the way the authorities have been able to blame the problems of prohibition on the drug itself.
Now, just because prohibition causes problems is not necessarily an argument against prohibition; it is simply part of the cost-benefit analysis. Alcohol prohibition worked to some extent, it cut alcohol consumption in half. However, the general public decided that the costs of prohibition outweighed the benefits of reducing alcohol use.
When it comes to pot, all the scientific evidence shows that it is less harmful than alcohol; it isn't possible to overdose (unlike alcohol "poisoning"), there are no serious diseases proven to be caused by it (unlike cirrhosis of the liver), and it is not nearly as addictive (read up on delirium tremens, then find any description of pot addiction). Since pot is even less harmful than alcohol, there is even less reason to accept the cost of prohibiting it, as compared to alcohol.
Now with other drugs, like heroin, the benefits of reducing consumption may outweigh the costs of enforcement. Unfortunately, governments rarely bother to even admit the costs of prohibition, preferring to blame everything on the drug. The result is that people are forced to choose the more dangerous mind-altering substance, Alcohol. They must risk arrest in order to make the more responsible and intelligent choice of using pot, the least harmful mind-altering drug.
I think it is more correct that the government can ban anything for any reason; it doesn't need a moral reason or even a majority of people in favour. The constitution describes what can't be banned, and that is based on the effect of the law, not the reason the law was passed.
I will point out the marihuana laws as a case in point. There is no reason that pot should be treated more seriously than alcohol on moral, medical or harm-to-society grounds. Unfortunately, the constitution does not require that laws be consistent.
I imagine a system where users are required to listen to some number of new songs when they log on. They can categorize it and rate it. Track user's preferences, then you could do some sort of "users that liked * also like *" service.
I figure the site could give out MP3 copies. To make money, add a system to make it easy to pay the band if you like the clip. Either that, or more to my liking, pay to burn a CD.
Don't worry about copy protection. If it is cheap and easy to pay, I expect most people will do it. Alternately, you could have some sort of free/pay split (like the adult sites), but I think the goal here is exposure. If the bands make it big, then they can go to the big labels to get rich (or is that raped?)
I think this type of service would help music listeners that like obscure music. The record labels will come up with something to serve groups that sell 100,000 copies and more, but there really is a need for something to help the small bands. If a site like this became popular, the major labels might use it as well, for all those 30-year-old albums that take decades of searching dusty stores to buy.
It may be true that direct, participatory democracy does not scale, but that observation alone doesn't tell us what system is better.
Direct democracy doesn't work because people don't have the time or desire to decide everything. For the unimportant matters, we would like to delegate our decision to someone else who thinks like us.
The problem with most current systems of government is that we end up delegating too many of our choices. Our current system was designed when voting was expensive, so a few important plebiscites and an election every few years was all the participation that was practical.
I think we can do better now and let every citizen decide what level of participation they want, on each issue. Instead of votes, we should have proxies. We could delegate that proxy to a worthy politician for most routine matters. However, when an important issue comes up, we could either vote ourselves, or delegate the proxy for that issue to someone else. With a bit of work, we could even categorize decisions and delegate social decisions to one politician and economic decisions to another, for example. We may not be individually heard, but if we pick our proxies well, they can express our opinion for us, kind of like Clay could for you:-)
We could certainly do better than our current system, even if pure direct participation is not possible.
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Bush is evil because he chose the most expensive and damaging possible solution to the problem of Saddam Hussein. He justified taking this step rather than looking for a better solution because he claimed Iraq was a clear and immediate danger, about the only legal justification for an unprovoked attack. It turns out, as most critics claimed, that Iraq was not an immediate danger; and the latest news is that it is likely that Bush knew it at the time. Bush didn't qualify his statements then, didnâ(TM)t allow anyone independent to see his evidence and make an independent judgment (supposedly for national security reasons), and even now he is claiming the WMD are sure to be found. He asked us to believe his unsupported accusations, and months later, the evidence that was so clear then is not good enough to help find the WMD now.
Clinton supposedly got impeached for lying, not for what he did. Why shouldn't Bush pay the same price for lying, even if you approve of the outcome? I'd certainly say the stakes were higher in Bush's case.
Well I agree about the spin part, and I also agree that porting to an unfamiliar computer is an important skill. However, it is hard to spin this sort of thing on a resume, and you'll have to depend on an HR person to decide that plenty of experience with long-irrelevant platforms is a good thing, not a bad thing.
:-)
I believe this project would be valuable experience, but someone skimming resumes probably won't. That is the reason I don't bother to highlight my extensive DOS experience, or my excellent knowledge of 6502 assembly language and Commodore Pets
You have pointed out a flaw in the inheritance tax, but that isn't necessarily evidence that it should be scrapped, but evidence that it should be made better.
The problem that inheritance taxes are designed to solve is the problem that capital gains are not taxed until capital is sold. If someone dies before they have sold capital, the gains will go untaxed when inherited.
Canada has no inheritance tax; instead all of a person's assets are considered to be sold at the time of death, and the last tax form filled out for that person might have a huge amount of capital gains taxes owing (unless it is sheltered in a trust fund or something). This is not a very fair system, since the capital gains are taxed at the highest marginal rate, all in one year. An inheritance tax might be fairer.
Yes, inheritance taxes cause some double taxation and are hard on some small businessmen. But without inheritance taxes, there is a huge problem of not taxing capital gains on inherited capital. You've got to weigh the two problems to determine which is less fair; but I'd wager that not taxing inherited capital gains is a lot more unfair.
It would be more efficient to have only a single source of taxes -- more efficient for the tax collector and more efficient for the tax evader.
It is a pain to have income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and the whole list; but there is the benefit that no one will be likely to evade them all. If the only taxes were income taxes, you'd just have to evade that and you'd have it made.
You have to weigh the risk and reward before deciding to do something.
We have numbers in this example. This person wants to make at least $10 an hour; we are assuming that the person who wins this contest will get $23 an hour. If the chances of winning are more than 10/23 = 43%, then this is a worthwhile risk.
You are right to point out that there would be non-monetary benefits to doing this work (which is of course one reason why people volunteer for Open Source work). In this case, however, we can safely assume that the non-monetary benefits are worse for this project than others that are available, or else there would be no need for an added financial incentive.
You are right that porting is an important skill, but porting to Amiga? Why not pick a porting project for a more popular computer? There are benefits to doing this port, but I'm afraid the financial benefits are probably the most significant.
Since this test is about personal preferences, the results are really only applicable to people who are just like those in the test. The results might be applicable to a wider audience, or a different group of users, or it might not. I would prefer to read the opinions of about 6 different audio reviewers, but these results are at least better than anecdotes.
A CD is what, about 650 Meg? That means that a 250 gig drive will only store 400 (full) CDs. That only handles 1/3 of my collection.
The amount of data on a CD is not trivial yet.
I was lucky, made it to my mid-30's and the second sale of the company I worked for before I became a Dilbert. I found out, first hand, what many others have learned; that Dilbert is a documentary :-)
:-) Using an open source O/S, I probably would have found those bugs twice as fast, and would have been able to actually fix the bug faster than coming up with a work-around. I am amazed that management would not prefer a fix in half the time, or that they should begrudge giving away the bug fix, given the salary it saved them and the benefit they could derive from other programmer's bug fixes.
This world really does make you cynical though. In my career I have had to work around about 4 bugs in Windows. In each case it took many weeks (or months) to find the error, then many weeks to devise a work-around. The first time, I actually tried to report the bug to someone; I'll never do that again
As a programmer, being unable to see or change the source code of the O/S is an obstacle to my doing my job. If only management could be convinced of this.
If you are using Open Source software to fulfill your contract, your client is getting the benefit of someone else's free work.
If you are fixing a bug to help the client, they are getting the value out of your time. If you give the bug fix to others, in return for use of the Open Source code, why should your employer care?
So Microsoft updates their file format documentation and every other company has to update their program to handle the new format.
Documenting the format is a good step, but if Microsoft changes it regularly, Microsoft will retain the advantage that only their programs are compatible with the "standard" set by Microsoft.
It will be impossible to deflect Microsoft's arguments about this. What happens when Microsoft or any one else wants to add a new feature? There is no way to do this with a fixed file format. If the standard allows extensions, it won't be a standard for long.
I know, you could propose a committee to allow enhancements to the standard; but Microsoft will rightly point out that a committee can be exploited by its competitors to thwart Microsoft's attempt to beat them with a better product.
This sort of thing will not work out until the government decides that Microsoft's (or any other company's) ability to increase profits is less important than users' control over their own data (or computers).
You left out the fact that seatbelts prevent you from being tossed OUT of your car. It is much harder to get injured by other cars in an accident if you are still inside yours. A lot of the serious auto injuries and deaths I hear about involve people going through the windshield and getting run over or hitting someone else.
I'd also love to see the statistics that back up your contention that deaths aren't significantly reduced by seatbelts. I know it is only an anecdote, but the only person who was wearing a seatbelt was the one who survived Princess Diana's fatal car accident; and I know of a lot of other accidents where the people with seatbelts were much better off.
For the hell of it, Iâ(TM)ll add another thought to the mix. Most serious injuries and deaths in car accidents are caused by head injuries (just like with bicycles), so it might make more sense to enforce helmet use in cars than seatbelt use. Of course, wearing a helmet makes you look like a dork and messes up your hair, so no one would ever seriously consider this; letâ(TM)s introduce more expensive and less effective side airbags instead.
Microsoft will never go along with point 4; that's what keeps Microsoft in control. Take websites for example, if all web sites simply provided the data and let browsers do the displaying, it would be easy to write a competing browser. But if sites provide code (like activeX components), a competitor has to reproduce an operating environment to run the control. The more capabilities your executable components have, the harder it will be for competitors to support them, so Microsoft has every incentive to encourage the addition of code to data (and to ignore or sabotage alternate execution environments like Java).
Well, to get even more pedantic, Windows NT was based on OS/2, which was made by Microsoft for IBM. I don't know how much input IBM had in the design or implementation of OS/2, but by your argument OS/2 is IBM's product and therefore Microsoft based their Windows NT on IBM's OS/2 (which they happened to write).
Microsoft doesn't set the rules, the government sets the rules and Microsoft simply exploits them. The problem is that the current government is quite happy to maintain laws and introduce new ones that favour the companies (and people) that are already successful.
As the apologists for Microsoft usually point out, any company would do what Microsoft does if they were in the same position. In fact, shareholders would be mighty unhappy if companies didn't take every (legal) opportunity to make more money and eliminate competitors. Don't expect that your pleas to Microsoft to play fair will accomplish anything; pressure the government to overhaul the laws for businesses so that they are required to play fair (and of course, actually punish companies that break the law).
This is just what Microsoft wants you to think. We can't trust users to patch their software, therefore we must make patching involuntary. Once you can no longer control when your machine is patched, whoever gets to control the patching can do anything they want to your computer.
Never buy hardware or software that can be patched without your permission! If it can be patched, its capabilities can be changed at any time. Imagine your set-top box is suddenly "patched" so you can't change the channel during a commercial -- the day could come.
Inheritance taxes aren't really double taxation because capital gains taxes usually weren't paid on the inherited property. Capital gain taxes aren't paid unless the property is sold; when the property is inherited (and not taxed), no taxes are paid on the existing capital gains when it is transferred to the heir. Inheritance taxes now make up for the unpaid capital gains taxes. Inheritance taxes are double taxation for the capital gains that were already paid; they are the only taxation for the portion of capital gains that were not taxed in the hands of the original owner.
I'll believe the reason for getting rid of the inheritance tax is to avoid double taxation when inherited property is transferred at the purchase price; then capital gains taxes will be applied and the inheritance will at least be taxed once. The current system looks a lot more like a tax break for the rich, with a double-taxation fig leaf to convince taxpayers that is fair.
Your suggestion makes a lot of sense, and might just make people happy to buy copy-protected CDs. The record record companies won't try it, unfortunately, because then they would have to admit that piracy isn't the reason for poor sales; high cost is the reason for poor sales. All the media companies assume that the file swapping services are successful because people want music for free; people might simply want to pay less that $20, but the only other choice they have is free. Would they buy for $5? The media companies don't want to know.
The record companies are full of idiots. I have fairly obscure musical taste, and I literally spend decades searching for CDs from certain groups; and by searching I mean flipping through the racks in every music store I ever see. When I do find these albums, they are usually imports that cost twice as much as normal CDs. Why is it that music that no one wants costs more than popular music? If the record companies offered a service where they would let you burn a copy of any out-of-print CD, for say $5; I might start buying CDs again. They could implement a plan like this easily. Except for the cost of the servers to supply the music files, there is no production cost, so any price they charge would be pure profit. The only thing stopping them from doing this is a stupid fear of piracy. I can only point out that if a CD is not offered for sale, the only way to get a copy is through piracy.
I own more than 1000 CDs, and used to buy about 50-100 a year. But lately, I have stopped buying CDs and started buying DVDs instead. My average cost for DVDs, since I buy a lot of them used, is less than $20 (Canadian); there is no way I will pay more than $15 for CDs.
Media companies should concentrate more on the people that buy (or used to buy) their products and worry less about those that don't. If the companies lowered prices and increased selection, both actions that can be helped by using the Internet, they could start prying money out of my pocket again. I used to be a great customer, despite the high prices and lousy selection, but they are going to have to work hard to get me to buy again.
I have a Yamaha CD burner that is equipped with a special music master mode. In this mode, the pits are burned longer so that the disk has less capacity, but the pits are burned more accurately. My wife and I had no difficulty hearing the difference between disks burned in special mode vs. those in normal mode. A friend administered a blind test on his own modest stereo system. The bits were identical between these disks, yet the music-mode disks sounded audibly better. Don't tell me bits are bits when it comes to audio CD players.
: 5
I don't know if they use an oscilloscope to measure jitter, or whether they just make these graphs up, but here is a link to a CD player review from Stereophile magazine
http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?779
The graph near the bottom is supposedly measuring jitter with picosecond accuracy. Stereophile has been showing these graphs for many years.
The world is a subtler place than a handful of specification numbers can represent. The old LP is better than CD arguments were often true at the time. It is easy to hear that modern CD players and remastered CDs are better than the original examples of "perfect sound forever" that were sold 15 years ago. I haven't listened to any turntables lately, but they may still sound better. If people are currently saying that analog photography is better than digital, and you don't agree, it is probably because they recognize details that you don't; it is not because they are describing figments of their imagination with terms like quality, tonality and vividness.
I hate to believe this stuff, but I listened with my own ears and I heard differences when I compared CD transports and digital cables. Using the same D/A converter, there are easily audible differences between different digital sources. Even in digital sound, there are things we don't understand (yet), and will eventually be able to improve.
I also wouldn't count on Walmart to provide better quality than current professional equipment. People will not pay for quality differences they cannot readily see, so they would rather have a lower price 8 megapixel camera than a better quality 16 megapixel camera. The fact that super VHS VCRs never sold in significant numbers despite easily visible quality differences shows that people will choose cheaper adequate quality over more-expensive better quality. I can tell you that the quality of audio equipment in Walmart does not match the quality of even 50 year old professional equipment.
It was well done propaganda because it blamed the problems of prohibition on the drug itself, and most people fall for it. If drugs weren't prohibited, the profits would go to law-abiding companies, not terrorists. Besides, it is illegal to simply possess drugs, not just buy them. If this person could legally grow her own pot, there would be no profit for anyone, least of all terrorists.
To defend pot prohibition you have to show that the benefits of reducing pot use outweigh the costs of prohibition. Funding terrorism is clearly a cost of prohibiting pot, not a cost of using pot itself. This commercial, if true in any way, is actually an argument in favour of legalizing pot!
One of the big successes of the anti-drug propaganda war is what you have pointed out, the way the authorities have been able to blame the problems of prohibition on the drug itself.
Now, just because prohibition causes problems is not necessarily an argument against prohibition; it is simply part of the cost-benefit analysis. Alcohol prohibition worked to some extent, it cut alcohol consumption in half. However, the general public decided that the costs of prohibition outweighed the benefits of reducing alcohol use.
When it comes to pot, all the scientific evidence shows that it is less harmful than alcohol; it isn't possible to overdose (unlike alcohol "poisoning"), there are no serious diseases proven to be caused by it (unlike cirrhosis of the liver), and it is not nearly as addictive (read up on delirium tremens, then find any description of pot addiction). Since pot is even less harmful than alcohol, there is even less reason to accept the cost of prohibiting it, as compared to alcohol.
Now with other drugs, like heroin, the benefits of reducing consumption may outweigh the costs of enforcement. Unfortunately, governments rarely bother to even admit the costs of prohibition, preferring to blame everything on the drug. The result is that people are forced to choose the more dangerous mind-altering substance, Alcohol. They must risk arrest in order to make the more responsible and intelligent choice of using pot, the least harmful mind-altering drug.
I think it is more correct that the government can ban anything for any reason; it doesn't need a moral reason or even a majority of people in favour. The constitution describes what can't be banned, and that is based on the effect of the law, not the reason the law was passed.
I will point out the marihuana laws as a case in point. There is no reason that pot should be treated more seriously than alcohol on moral, medical or harm-to-society grounds. Unfortunately, the constitution does not require that laws be consistent.
I wonder if a system like slashdot could work.
I imagine a system where users are required to listen to some number of new songs when they log on. They can categorize it and rate it. Track user's preferences, then you could do some sort of "users that liked * also like *" service.
I figure the site could give out MP3 copies. To make money, add a system to make it easy to pay the band if you like the clip. Either that, or more to my liking, pay to burn a CD.
Don't worry about copy protection. If it is cheap and easy to pay, I expect most people will do it. Alternately, you could have some sort of free/pay split (like the adult sites), but I think the goal here is exposure. If the bands make it big, then they can go to the big labels to get rich (or is that raped?)
I think this type of service would help music listeners that like obscure music. The record labels will come up with something to serve groups that sell 100,000 copies and more, but there really is a need for something to help the small bands. If a site like this became popular, the major labels might use it as well, for all those 30-year-old albums that take decades of searching dusty stores to buy.
It may be true that direct, participatory democracy does not scale, but that observation alone doesn't tell us what system is better.
:-)
Direct democracy doesn't work because people don't have the time or desire to decide everything. For the unimportant matters, we would like to delegate our decision to someone else who thinks like us.
The problem with most current systems of government is that we end up delegating too many of our choices. Our current system was designed when voting was expensive, so a few important plebiscites and an election every few years was all the participation that was practical.
I think we can do better now and let every citizen decide what level of participation they want, on each issue. Instead of votes, we should have proxies. We could delegate that proxy to a worthy politician for most routine matters. However, when an important issue comes up, we could either vote ourselves, or delegate the proxy for that issue to someone else. With a bit of work, we could even categorize decisions and delegate social decisions to one politician and economic decisions to another, for example. We may not be individually heard, but if we pick our proxies well, they can express our opinion for us, kind of like Clay could for you
We could certainly do better than our current system, even if pure direct participation is not possible.