When people kill shipping magnates and CEOs and live in their houses, that's class warfare. When dispossessed working people are so desperate they'll beat up farming executives and steal their land, that's class warfare.
When people dare to ask whether Republican policies favor the rich and blame America's problems on welfare mothers, that's not "class warfare." See, there's a little contrast there. One is not the other.
Aparrently there are people near the top who know what they're doing, after all. Good.
Let's edit:
"Apparently there were people near the top who know what they were doing,"
Take a good long look at the neocon "think tanks" from which our current foreign policy took its core. They regard the position George H.W. Bush took toward Iraq as a sign of weakness; they explicitly pushed for a unilateralist, aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East so as to re-shape that part of the world, well before 9/11.
The concerns the senior Bush shows in this article simply irritate(d) the high-ups in our current administration. The multilateral model, the concern about becoming de facto rulers of Iraq -- all that just bespeaks an America too wussy to step up to the plate, in the view of people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They sent at least one letter to Clinton laying out this basic policy during the 90's.
You're probably right -- after Apple'd gotten the notoriously wrongheaded industry to roll over on tons of the points that've made DRM and song-by-song purchasing such a big hurdle in the past, they decided to move on to the Windows market first before they tried to get more concessions from the labels. You weren't their top priority, or they didn't think it was a winnable fight until they'd shown the labels this model wasn't the devil, or something like that.
But American cultural arrogance and hegemony? As usual, when it looks like a conspiracy, it's more often short-sightedness. The record labels just don't get it, they're living in past models of distribution. Even when someone cajoles them around to seing a way that works, they're hanging onto their old mindset. There's your arrogance. It's more like idiocy.
Salon.com's "Ask the Pilot" columnist has pointed this out a few times, and I think Michael Moore has a chapter about it in his "Stupid White Men" book. Pilots just don't make good money, not until they're high up on the list. Don't forget the money they pay for their own training while they're pulling in a grand $14k a year during those first few years.
Somewhere there ought to be a comparable list: jobs you assume are worked by well-heeled professionals, but that are actually basically full of blue collar people who're doing it for other reasons. Pilots are there because they like the work. It sure as heck isn't the money. Paramedics -- you think they're in it for the money? They get hardly anything for the job they do, those people are in it for something else.
(I'd rather read my imaginary article, frankly. This one's just a bitchy, demeaning piece of pop tabloid crap.)
If you're happy with the mp3-Cd player for what it does, cool, stick with it for that.
If you want something for the gym that'll last your hour's worth of workout, and you don't mind tweaking the playlists regularly to get some variety, a flash player makes sense.
For me the iPod does both just fine, at a premium price I thankfully didn't have to pay. To be honest, the main problem I have with it is deciding what to listen to when one playlist runs out on the treadmill. It's over there on my shoulder, and I'm scrolling through 1,200 songs or so... gets to be a real crisis.;-)
You're applying OS X-era standards to an OS of the previous generation. Doesn't seem like much of a rejoinder to "Mac OS 9 was a fast, strong OS." It was. Ask anyone who used it.
as long as you only needed to run one application at a time
The idea that you could "only run one program at a time" wouldn't sound right to any Mac user after OS 7 came out -- in, what, 1990 or something like that? For the vast majority of users "preemptive" multitasking was perfectly fine. (The difference is largely one in stability, from a desktop user's POV.)
were comfortable hand-setting memory sizes for your important programs
Someone running PageMaker or a photo editor as a serious designer maybe needed to do that. I used to support a twenty-person office in my spare time, and I was the only person around who even knew about those settings. Didn't come up much. Occasionally you'd re-set games to use more memory, for speed, but that was about it.
had the skill to sort through system extensions and control panels to find problems
Again, maybe the troubleshooting sorts needed to know about Conflict Catcher, but typical users didn't. (Frankly from my experience in support I think the whole "extension conflict" angle was much overblown. I can't recall coming across any significant problem that resulted from tussling control panels or whatever. Help lines always guessed extensions when something was mysterious. They'd have you rebuild your desktop, too. Didn't usually accomplish much.)
had no use for a command line
Ask a typical corporate W2k user how often she uses the command line.
and didn't need multiple users or serious security on your machine
I'll give you that one. Really all the W2k boxes here in corporateland don't do that either, though... Gosh, all those mysterious user-specific settings in my Windows folder don't seem all that secure...
You buy a new PC how often, again? How much does a graphics card cost for your PC, assuming you want to be able to run the latest system at any given point? C'mon, pony up the cash, we're consumers, that's what we do...
would it really hurt if a company stuck to an obsolete console for 5-7 years?
Wouldn't hurt the company directly to lose those console sales, anyway. The truth is, consoles themselves are mostly a break-even proposition, or even a loss leader.
The real money's in the games, so if you can keep people buying them you're good. The original PS was behind Sega for a significant pause there before the PS2 release, but those Dreamcasts never got to critical mass in terms of the cartridges they could sell. So, there -- there's an example in which the mediocre old system survived on its market share, for a bit. (Even when PS2s were all the rage, the brand new flashy Sony system was about par with Sega's older one...)
But let yourself get leapfrogged for two years by a company like Nintendo, and you're over. Or Microsoft, despite their inexperience...
It's widely known (and this was on Apple's own message boards) that the only iPods that are reliable and usable while jogging are the original 5GB models, the newer 10/15/20 GB models are not capable of playing without skips when you are jogging, not unless you take very careful measures in where and how you attach it to your body or hold it.
Having worried about those same messages before I got my 10 GB new iPod as a gift -- cutting short my dwelling-on-the-decision process -- I can say this hasn't proven true for me at all. Not in the gym, not jogging.
My iPod may have cut a song off on me once, in the time I've had it since this June. I haven't had it skip, to my knowledge, at all, and the one cutoff could easily have been a battery juice problem. (No, I can't say I was keeping track of the charge level, 'cause you don't need to that much, and I wasn't counting the minutes since I'd started running either. At the time I shrugged and ran quiet for a few minutes. Never had a repeat of it.)
I run 5k and 10k stretches on the street and on the treadmill. Lately I've used an armband holder, but for a while I either had the iPod in my hand or a pocket or a pack at my waist. No skips, no spin downs, no problems -- except the possible one. If I wanted to consciously try to make it skip, surely I could -- but you know, I'm not at all clear on how I'd cause it, or whether I'd be able to manage it with my first attempt -- so my confidence in the thing is pretty high, isn't it?
Seems like the perfect player for running and general workouts, to me. Probably it wouldn't want to be in your hand for a kickboxing aerobics class or something...
C'mon, you've read the other umpty-lumpty stories about iTMS; It's time to remember all those posts about how the licensing arrangements are what's keeping Apple from selling outside the US.
You think Apple doesn't want to sell you stuff because of some center-of-the-universe conceit or other? They would gladly sell you anything you wanted, anything they could convince you you wanted, if their deals with the labels allowed it. They don't -- and this isn't different from any traditional music licensing in that way.
The next company you run into that could make a bazillion dollars in a foreign market, but chooses not to because they're a bunch of arrogant Americans, that'll be a first. You post a story about that one then.
I have no desire at all to read comic books - yet if somebody decided that I could never read comic books I would still be angry.
Thankfully the iTMS's restrictions aren't anything like as aggressive as this analogy makes out. The DRM in iTUNES is more like "You can let as many friends as you want to read this comic book, but you can't use a color photocopier to make copies of the comic which you then sell (or give away for free) in a kiosk at the mall."
...this just sounds like the typical antics of closed software programs...
No flame intended, but "typical antics" would be a pretty good description of the position that we should accept NO restrictions whatsoever on our use and re-use of copyrighted materials -- because we own the computers, or the paper, on which they reside. I'm not allowed to perform an author's plays without paying a royalty. Nor am I allowed to distribute copies of the script to 15,000 of my friends. Nor can you distribute free copies of Duke Nuke 'Em Forever -- not even if you bought the first copy. The iTunes store has found a nice little common ground that's basically not odious to anyone -- barring you. You see *any* compromise as inherently vitiating and therefore negating your principles. I'm all for free speech, I give to the ACLU for Crissakes, but there are genuine limits to that right. Old, old discussion you might want to have with any law student.
Hey, I'm nobody's prude on this; I've done my p2p thing, still will in a pinch, and had no especial moral qualms about it. But seeing your objections to this pretty well-thought-out service makes me shudder. It'd be spiffy if bands and music labels were to voluntarily adopt a new business model based on free software's -- but you know, it would need to be, um, voluntary. If you concentrated on showing them the benefits, you might stand a ghost of a chance of convincing someone who isn't a free software convert already.
Amazing how persistent culture, even just a corporate culture, can be. It's not always truly "proprietary"; what they're trying to do is get the rest of the market to follow them to their own compression methods (and tapes) for the latest, smallest camcorders, or their memory sticks... or Betamax...
But geez, you'd think someone at Sony would eventually get a clue. No, guys, you're not doing well in the market because you've got your own funky formats that don't play well with others. It's the whole design and form thing that gets people to buy it. Think Walkman: uses the same cassettes in a "form factor" that nobody else has done. That's what Sony's good at. Duuuuh.
Their design department must just shake its collective head when the next newest-best format comes down the pike. Man.
Man, the local newspapers in my town were nothing but down on the upcoming season. The amount of "Coupling"-bashing stories I've run across is awfully high, considering I don't give a rip and have no idea when or where it was on. Those stories had to be right up there with the "Gigli"-gloating movie reviews. Offhand I can't name any favorably reviewed, or even just hyped, new programs.
It's true, the latest drivel from our networks makes M*A*S*H look like a Nobel prize winner, but the reviewers did say so. (It's movies where crud like "Pearl Harbor" will get a huge boost in momentum from hype reviews, selling up a big opening weekend before the word of mouth gets out.)
It's nice that you're idealistically hanging onto a service without major label artists and with a subscription model that's basically been shown to be unattractive to most listeners.
The traits that made iTunes stand out, though, were largely the price-per-song model and the fact that Jobs got the various labels on board for fairly innocuous DRM in the files. It was exactly the contrast with services like eMusic that made iTunes' store work. Ask anyone. It wasn't the interface -- the store's basically a nicely-designed Web page, and the jukebox is handy but has its faults. It's the sales model you're saying is so "silly" that appeals to people.
Not that you can't opt for your model. You just may have to switch from eMusic to do it, as they've gone pay-per-song now too. Marketed as "discovering" independents that aren't with the RIAA buggers, this model may still have a niche. That wouldn't compete with the mainstream players who're going to be all over this market by June next year, though.
You'll get modded as a troll for that, maybe, but it's a shade of one step from the truth. Diebold's CEO being a big Republican donor who's sworn to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes for Bush next year, that isn't the message I'm reading in the Mpls. Star Tribune. Here it reads like "Techies are concerned about sloppiness in voting systems" instead. That's just the first step in this story.
Election Systems and Software, the other major electronic voting company, is also, coincidentally, run by a big Repub' contributor. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska has a stake in that company. Can you imagine that? A sitting senator with financial interests in a company responsible for counting votes? Unbelievable.
Sort of makes me think about how incredibly brazen Halliburton's role is in Iraq now. These people don't even attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality. So, see, you're right -- this Australian company's ideas about the proper way to ensure confidence, they just don't apply. As long as our Repubs can fly under the radar, they don't care whether it's right or not.
Where was the step where the artist's promotional Web site became "popular", or was featured on slashdot, and the artist had to shell out huge ISP fees? I missed where even that little bit of money was coming from.
How did the artist afford a studio?
How did step 5, Artist becomes popular, translate into money in step 6? Are you saying she sold advertising? Who listened to the ads in this model, and when did they listen to those ads? On TV, if that's your example, there are commercial breaks. In a P2P, song-by-song model, there are no such breaks. What, product placements? In the form of lyrics about Frosted Flakes?
Are you saying artists themselves are going to be able to make decent deals with advertisers? Where was the step where the artist boned up on contract law?
OSX can be part of my culture when it's free software, and not a second before. OSX can be a part of my culture when Apple stops trying to sue people for copying their look and feel.
Oops, wait a minute, that second sentence almost seemed like a compromise. You might want to recant and return to the fundamentalist fold, there. Total freeness is the only possible doctrine. I'm not sure what line of heresy you're on by attempting to suggest forgiveness for companies coping with copyright law...
No, they obviously haven't, however we don't live back then.
I'm seriously curious: at what point do you think Christianity magically made this transition you're saying it underwent -- from the old, whacked-out ideas about good and evil to our supposed modern enlightened ones?
I have relatives in Oklahoma whose southern Baptist faith qualifies in all the areas you're laying into Islam about.
Before 9/11, the worst act of terror on US soil was by a couple of right-wing radical white guys. My Oklahoma relations were all for what Tim McVeigh stood for -- though they had some misgivings about his methods. Afterward they seemed rather torn about what had happened. They liked that it was a blow against the government, and had vague ideas about scoring points against Clinton somehow. But seeing the child in that firefighter's arms, that caused just a note of cognitive dissonance for them. Just a note.
Walk back a step. U.S. post-civil-war reconstruction was torn apart by the KKK's acts of political violence. The KKK was and is almost exclusively made up of white Christians. They think of their religion as one of the buttresses of their movement, and cite the Bible in defense of their ideas. Your shift can't have happened before 1870, then.
but the famine isn't going to visit destruction upon foreign countries.
No, our right-wing, avowedly Christian President will take care of that.
A. He's just a temp... Being a temp, no reason to negotiate, just fire and forget.
"Just a temp" might not mean quite what you think it does in the context of Microsoft. Like some of our local companies in Minneapolis -- 3M being an example I know about from some inside contacts -- Microsoft keeps a very substantial percentage of its workforce as long-term temps, doesn't it? You have your Full Employees/Citizens, and then you have a large block of temps who're working on rotating contracts. Still true?
Maybe we also could see this as a sign of morale among those temps. (One imagines them living the life of Wesley under the Dread Pirate Roberts. ("Good night, nice work on that speel check feature. I'll most likely fire you in the morning.")
No intention of starting a flame war, and there's some difference between hardware companies (Apple) and software shops (MS) anyway -- but aren't all tech companies disposed to terminate anything like a "leak" or nascent industrial espionage with prejudice?
Apple's sent its share of threatening letters to rumor sites, hasn't it? I have a relative working in one of their retail stores, and Apple takes its non-disclosure rules seriously. The employees know to respect the policy; it couldn't be clearer that I'm not meant to ask about future products. Steve Jobs wants to do the introductions -- he's good at them -- and the employees know not to let anything slip. Period. (When the Canadian Time story about the new iMacs broke, we all imagined heads rolling, didn't we?)
Granted, when it comes from MS we tend to hear Darth Vader's breath rasping along in the background, but this isn't that horribly radical a move. Whether the punishment was proportionate to the crime, that's another set of questions. But other companies have done similar stuff.
Re:Translated for the America-Impaired
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
People who don't understand the line between advocacy and journalism will say stuff like that. Hey, take your own advice. Listen to your local NPR station for a day.
Our local station actually does have the numbers on its listeners, and they're split quite evenly between the major parties. We have a local political call-in show, "Midday," the host of which is astonishingly capable and fair. People have tried to get the guy to run for Governor of Minnesota -- people from both major parties as well as the Independence party (until the social conservatives reached ascendance in the MN Republican Party, but that's another story). On the national level Talk of the Nation, under Ray Suarez in particular, was a model of intelligence and impartiality; it's the only talk show I've ever heard that could take on a topic like gun control and actually ask useful questions.
Seriously, try it. You'll hear the questions you think aren't being asked.
Interesting little synopsis of the usual environmental debate, your post.
Environmentalist: We're running out, and our current wasteful practices mean we're running out fast!
Apathetic response: Who cares about a bunch of dead plants anyway?
The answer being, as we (literally) burn through these resources, they not only produce waste that endangers the place we live, they also become more scarce -- leading to the places that have the dead plants, in the form of oil, receiving quite a lot of value for what's left. Scarcity and value, see? Take a look at the extreme wealth of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, examine the Wahaabist faith they've backed using that wealth, all the result of a scarcity of these old dead plants in the world, and then tell me -- is it a potential problem for oil to be the scarce resource we're relying on? Do we want to continue to use inefficient methods of blowing through the oil we've got left, making it more scarce, increasing the upheaval caused by things like Opec's production targets? Or not?
So, see, when environmentalists are worried about this, it's not some tree-hugging lovey-eyed thing on their part, it's self-interest. Similarly, when scientists fret over an oncoming mass extinction, they're worried because no previous mass extinction has allowed the currently dominant group of species to continue in that role. It's not that they're only worried about black-footed ferrets or whatever; they also see that human survival is at stake.
That being the point. Not that "really big numbers" is necessarily the best argument, but human survival is the point.
The anti-drug D.A.R.E. program basically turns out to inform kids about how drugs are used. For the ones who might be at risk for drug use, it's basically a how-to primer.
Here's thinking the MPAA's articles in "Time for Kids" -- I assume that article my kids got was spawned by this cash? -- will have the same effect. I have two ten-year-olds, they have no idea what P2P systems are, but after reading the article they asked. Gave me a chance to walk through a few sides of the moral situation.
(The Time for Kids article did have a counterpoint sidebar, incidentally. Teachers, some teachers, won't put up with total proganda in the classroom.)
Yet another Apple product that failed to save the world. Lately they do nothing but disappoint us. Boo.
First you have the iTunes store which doesn't do anything but give the average user basically anything he or she might have wanted to have in on online music store. Despite its being free, we're all cheesed off that it doesn't support OGG, or it's meant partly to push iPods (duh), or whatever.
Now this -- a supercomputer that has, to quote that again, the "best price/performance ratio ever achieved on a supercomputer." But dang it all, it doesn't completely blow away every established precedent -- it's just in the top five on the usual list of comparisons. One more crushing disappointment.
From Microsoft, we just want products that don't completely ream us. From Apple, we want the entire world to seem a little friendlier and cooler with every product release, every dot-incremenent OS update. They both disappoint us, but the expectations seem a little different...
Slashdot Mirror
When people kill shipping magnates and CEOs and live in their houses, that's class warfare. When dispossessed working people are so desperate they'll beat up farming executives and steal their land, that's class warfare.
When people dare to ask whether Republican policies favor the rich and blame America's problems on welfare mothers, that's not "class warfare." See, there's a little contrast there. One is not the other.
Make a little note, anonymous coward.
Let's edit:
"Apparently there were people near the top who know what they were doing,"
Take a good long look at the neocon "think tanks" from which our current foreign policy took its core. They regard the position George H.W. Bush took toward Iraq as a sign of weakness; they explicitly pushed for a unilateralist, aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East so as to re-shape that part of the world, well before 9/11.
The concerns the senior Bush shows in this article simply irritate(d) the high-ups in our current administration. The multilateral model, the concern about becoming de facto rulers of Iraq -- all that just bespeaks an America too wussy to step up to the plate, in the view of people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They sent at least one letter to Clinton laying out this basic policy during the 90's.
But American cultural arrogance and hegemony? As usual, when it looks like a conspiracy, it's more often short-sightedness. The record labels just don't get it, they're living in past models of distribution. Even when someone cajoles them around to seing a way that works, they're hanging onto their old mindset. There's your arrogance. It's more like idiocy.
Funny how clearly this is obvious B.S. Gee, let's see, if this was true how do you suppose /. would have reacted?
Utterly, completely implausible, leaving alone that it's false. Anonymous coward indeed.
Somewhere there ought to be a comparable list: jobs you assume are worked by well-heeled professionals, but that are actually basically full of blue collar people who're doing it for other reasons. Pilots are there because they like the work. It sure as heck isn't the money. Paramedics -- you think they're in it for the money? They get hardly anything for the job they do, those people are in it for something else.
(I'd rather read my imaginary article, frankly. This one's just a bitchy, demeaning piece of pop tabloid crap.)
If you want something for the gym that'll last your hour's worth of workout, and you don't mind tweaking the playlists regularly to get some variety, a flash player makes sense.
For me the iPod does both just fine, at a premium price I thankfully didn't have to pay. To be honest, the main problem I have with it is deciding what to listen to when one playlist runs out on the treadmill. It's over there on my shoulder, and I'm scrolling through 1,200 songs or so... gets to be a real crisis. ;-)
as long as you only needed to run one application at a time
The idea that you could "only run one program at a time" wouldn't sound right to any Mac user after OS 7 came out -- in, what, 1990 or something like that? For the vast majority of users "preemptive" multitasking was perfectly fine. (The difference is largely one in stability, from a desktop user's POV.)
were comfortable hand-setting memory sizes for your important programs
Someone running PageMaker or a photo editor as a serious designer maybe needed to do that. I used to support a twenty-person office in my spare time, and I was the only person around who even knew about those settings. Didn't come up much. Occasionally you'd re-set games to use more memory, for speed, but that was about it.
had the skill to sort through system extensions and control panels to find problems
Again, maybe the troubleshooting sorts needed to know about Conflict Catcher, but typical users didn't. (Frankly from my experience in support I think the whole "extension conflict" angle was much overblown. I can't recall coming across any significant problem that resulted from tussling control panels or whatever. Help lines always guessed extensions when something was mysterious. They'd have you rebuild your desktop, too. Didn't usually accomplish much.)
had no use for a command line
Ask a typical corporate W2k user how often she uses the command line.
and didn't need multiple users or serious security on your machine
I'll give you that one. Really all the W2k boxes here in corporateland don't do that either, though... Gosh, all those mysterious user-specific settings in my Windows folder don't seem all that secure...
would it really hurt if a company stuck to an obsolete console for 5-7 years?
Wouldn't hurt the company directly to lose those console sales, anyway. The truth is, consoles themselves are mostly a break-even proposition, or even a loss leader.
The real money's in the games, so if you can keep people buying them you're good. The original PS was behind Sega for a significant pause there before the PS2 release, but those Dreamcasts never got to critical mass in terms of the cartridges they could sell. So, there -- there's an example in which the mediocre old system survived on its market share, for a bit. (Even when PS2s were all the rage, the brand new flashy Sony system was about par with Sega's older one...)
But let yourself get leapfrogged for two years by a company like Nintendo, and you're over. Or Microsoft, despite their inexperience...
Having worried about those same messages before I got my 10 GB new iPod as a gift -- cutting short my dwelling-on-the-decision process -- I can say this hasn't proven true for me at all. Not in the gym, not jogging.
My iPod may have cut a song off on me once, in the time I've had it since this June. I haven't had it skip, to my knowledge, at all, and the one cutoff could easily have been a battery juice problem. (No, I can't say I was keeping track of the charge level, 'cause you don't need to that much, and I wasn't counting the minutes since I'd started running either. At the time I shrugged and ran quiet for a few minutes. Never had a repeat of it.)
I run 5k and 10k stretches on the street and on the treadmill. Lately I've used an armband holder, but for a while I either had the iPod in my hand or a pocket or a pack at my waist. No skips, no spin downs, no problems -- except the possible one. If I wanted to consciously try to make it skip, surely I could -- but you know, I'm not at all clear on how I'd cause it, or whether I'd be able to manage it with my first attempt -- so my confidence in the thing is pretty high, isn't it?
Seems like the perfect player for running and general workouts, to me. Probably it wouldn't want to be in your hand for a kickboxing aerobics class or something...
You think Apple doesn't want to sell you stuff because of some center-of-the-universe conceit or other? They would gladly sell you anything you wanted, anything they could convince you you wanted, if their deals with the labels allowed it. They don't -- and this isn't different from any traditional music licensing in that way.
The next company you run into that could make a bazillion dollars in a foreign market, but chooses not to because they're a bunch of arrogant Americans, that'll be a first. You post a story about that one then.
Thankfully the iTMS's restrictions aren't anything like as aggressive as this analogy makes out. The DRM in iTUNES is more like "You can let as many friends as you want to read this comic book, but you can't use a color photocopier to make copies of the comic which you then sell (or give away for free) in a kiosk at the mall."
No flame intended, but "typical antics" would be a pretty good description of the position that we should accept NO restrictions whatsoever on our use and re-use of copyrighted materials -- because we own the computers, or the paper, on which they reside. I'm not allowed to perform an author's plays without paying a royalty. Nor am I allowed to distribute copies of the script to 15,000 of my friends. Nor can you distribute free copies of Duke Nuke 'Em Forever -- not even if you bought the first copy. The iTunes store has found a nice little common ground that's basically not odious to anyone -- barring you. You see *any* compromise as inherently vitiating and therefore negating your principles. I'm all for free speech, I give to the ACLU for Crissakes, but there are genuine limits to that right. Old, old discussion you might want to have with any law student.
Hey, I'm nobody's prude on this; I've done my p2p thing, still will in a pinch, and had no especial moral qualms about it. But seeing your objections to this pretty well-thought-out service makes me shudder. It'd be spiffy if bands and music labels were to voluntarily adopt a new business model based on free software's -- but you know, it would need to be, um, voluntary. If you concentrated on showing them the benefits, you might stand a ghost of a chance of convincing someone who isn't a free software convert already.
But geez, you'd think someone at Sony would eventually get a clue. No, guys, you're not doing well in the market because you've got your own funky formats that don't play well with others. It's the whole design and form thing that gets people to buy it. Think Walkman: uses the same cassettes in a "form factor" that nobody else has done. That's what Sony's good at. Duuuuh.
Their design department must just shake its collective head when the next newest-best format comes down the pike. Man.
It's true, the latest drivel from our networks makes M*A*S*H look like a Nobel prize winner, but the reviewers did say so. (It's movies where crud like "Pearl Harbor" will get a huge boost in momentum from hype reviews, selling up a big opening weekend before the word of mouth gets out.)
The traits that made iTunes stand out, though, were largely the price-per-song model and the fact that Jobs got the various labels on board for fairly innocuous DRM in the files. It was exactly the contrast with services like eMusic that made iTunes' store work. Ask anyone. It wasn't the interface -- the store's basically a nicely-designed Web page, and the jukebox is handy but has its faults. It's the sales model you're saying is so "silly" that appeals to people.
Not that you can't opt for your model. You just may have to switch from eMusic to do it, as they've gone pay-per-song now too. Marketed as "discovering" independents that aren't with the RIAA buggers, this model may still have a niche. That wouldn't compete with the mainstream players who're going to be all over this market by June next year, though.
Election Systems and Software, the other major electronic voting company, is also, coincidentally, run by a big Repub' contributor. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska has a stake in that company. Can you imagine that? A sitting senator with financial interests in a company responsible for counting votes? Unbelievable.
Sort of makes me think about how incredibly brazen Halliburton's role is in Iraq now. These people don't even attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality. So, see, you're right -- this Australian company's ideas about the proper way to ensure confidence, they just don't apply. As long as our Repubs can fly under the radar, they don't care whether it's right or not.
How did the artist afford a studio?
How did step 5, Artist becomes popular, translate into money in step 6? Are you saying she sold advertising? Who listened to the ads in this model, and when did they listen to those ads? On TV, if that's your example, there are commercial breaks. In a P2P, song-by-song model, there are no such breaks. What, product placements? In the form of lyrics about Frosted Flakes?
Are you saying artists themselves are going to be able to make decent deals with advertisers? Where was the step where the artist boned up on contract law?
Oops, wait a minute, that second sentence almost seemed like a compromise. You might want to recant and return to the fundamentalist fold, there. Total freeness is the only possible doctrine. I'm not sure what line of heresy you're on by attempting to suggest forgiveness for companies coping with copyright law...
You just made the poster's point ever so well.
I'm seriously curious: at what point do you think Christianity magically made this transition you're saying it underwent -- from the old, whacked-out ideas about good and evil to our supposed modern enlightened ones?
I have relatives in Oklahoma whose southern Baptist faith qualifies in all the areas you're laying into Islam about.
Before 9/11, the worst act of terror on US soil was by a couple of right-wing radical white guys. My Oklahoma relations were all for what Tim McVeigh stood for -- though they had some misgivings about his methods. Afterward they seemed rather torn about what had happened. They liked that it was a blow against the government, and had vague ideas about scoring points against Clinton somehow. But seeing the child in that firefighter's arms, that caused just a note of cognitive dissonance for them. Just a note.
Walk back a step. U.S. post-civil-war reconstruction was torn apart by the KKK's acts of political violence. The KKK was and is almost exclusively made up of white Christians. They think of their religion as one of the buttresses of their movement, and cite the Bible in defense of their ideas. Your shift can't have happened before 1870, then.
but the famine isn't going to visit destruction upon foreign countries.
No, our right-wing, avowedly Christian President will take care of that.
"Just a temp" might not mean quite what you think it does in the context of Microsoft. Like some of our local companies in Minneapolis -- 3M being an example I know about from some inside contacts -- Microsoft keeps a very substantial percentage of its workforce as long-term temps, doesn't it? You have your Full Employees/Citizens, and then you have a large block of temps who're working on rotating contracts. Still true?
Maybe we also could see this as a sign of morale among those temps. (One imagines them living the life of Wesley under the Dread Pirate Roberts. ("Good night, nice work on that speel check feature. I'll most likely fire you in the morning.")
Apple's sent its share of threatening letters to rumor sites, hasn't it? I have a relative working in one of their retail stores, and Apple takes its non-disclosure rules seriously. The employees know to respect the policy; it couldn't be clearer that I'm not meant to ask about future products. Steve Jobs wants to do the introductions -- he's good at them -- and the employees know not to let anything slip. Period. (When the Canadian Time story about the new iMacs broke, we all imagined heads rolling, didn't we?)
Granted, when it comes from MS we tend to hear Darth Vader's breath rasping along in the background, but this isn't that horribly radical a move. Whether the punishment was proportionate to the crime, that's another set of questions. But other companies have done similar stuff.
People who don't understand the line between advocacy and journalism will say stuff like that. Hey, take your own advice. Listen to your local NPR station for a day.
Our local station actually does have the numbers on its listeners, and they're split quite evenly between the major parties. We have a local political call-in show, "Midday," the host of which is astonishingly capable and fair. People have tried to get the guy to run for Governor of Minnesota -- people from both major parties as well as the Independence party (until the social conservatives reached ascendance in the MN Republican Party, but that's another story). On the national level Talk of the Nation, under Ray Suarez in particular, was a model of intelligence and impartiality; it's the only talk show I've ever heard that could take on a topic like gun control and actually ask useful questions.
Seriously, try it. You'll hear the questions you think aren't being asked.
And hey, let me ask you, does it bother you at all that your sense of humor is based on specious "talking points" from a political party?
Environmentalist: We're running out, and our current wasteful practices mean we're running out fast!
Apathetic response: Who cares about a bunch of dead plants anyway?
The answer being, as we (literally) burn through these resources, they not only produce waste that endangers the place we live, they also become more scarce -- leading to the places that have the dead plants, in the form of oil, receiving quite a lot of value for what's left. Scarcity and value, see? Take a look at the extreme wealth of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, examine the Wahaabist faith they've backed using that wealth, all the result of a scarcity of these old dead plants in the world, and then tell me -- is it a potential problem for oil to be the scarce resource we're relying on? Do we want to continue to use inefficient methods of blowing through the oil we've got left, making it more scarce, increasing the upheaval caused by things like Opec's production targets? Or not?
So, see, when environmentalists are worried about this, it's not some tree-hugging lovey-eyed thing on their part, it's self-interest. Similarly, when scientists fret over an oncoming mass extinction, they're worried because no previous mass extinction has allowed the currently dominant group of species to continue in that role. It's not that they're only worried about black-footed ferrets or whatever; they also see that human survival is at stake.
That being the point. Not that "really big numbers" is necessarily the best argument, but human survival is the point.
Here's thinking the MPAA's articles in "Time for Kids" -- I assume that article my kids got was spawned by this cash? -- will have the same effect. I have two ten-year-olds, they have no idea what P2P systems are, but after reading the article they asked. Gave me a chance to walk through a few sides of the moral situation.
(The Time for Kids article did have a counterpoint sidebar, incidentally. Teachers, some teachers, won't put up with total proganda in the classroom.)
First you have the iTunes store which doesn't do anything but give the average user basically anything he or she might have wanted to have in on online music store. Despite its being free, we're all cheesed off that it doesn't support OGG, or it's meant partly to push iPods (duh), or whatever.
Now this -- a supercomputer that has, to quote that again, the "best price/performance ratio ever achieved on a supercomputer." But dang it all, it doesn't completely blow away every established precedent -- it's just in the top five on the usual list of comparisons. One more crushing disappointment.
From Microsoft, we just want products that don't completely ream us. From Apple, we want the entire world to seem a little friendlier and cooler with every product release, every dot-incremenent OS update. They both disappoint us, but the expectations seem a little different...