Umm, no. I don't know where you live, but I can support myself very comfortably on perhaps $1000 a month. $2000/month rents and such are not common in most of the country.
In big cities, they are.
$1000 a month would mean living very frugally in Seattle, and living well outside the main part of the city. It would buy you a cardboard box in an alley in San Francisco.
Not coincidentally, big cities are also where it's easiest to find higher-paying jobs.
If the executives & stars didn't make so much, they wouldn't need to charge so much
Yes, it must kill people to have to pay 15 whole dollars for a DVD, especially since the MPAA is sitting next to them with a handgun demanding that they buy as many as possible.
Film fans should be *incredibly* happy with the prices of DVDs. Movies from a decade or two ago can generally be had for about $10. That's less than seeing a full-price show in a lot of theatres now, and yet some people expect to pay even less?
Expecting to get media for free or cheap is (IMO) the geek equivalent of panhandling. If you are someone who gets irritated when a homeless person asks for spare change, how can you not expect the film and music industries to feel the same way when you suggest that they sell DVDs and CDs for $5 (or whatever) or that they shouldn't pursue people who bootleg them?
At least the homeless person *might* be spending the spare change on something that's actually necessary to live, like food.
Artists bank major cash on shows. Even your well-known indie hip-hop/underground artist gets paid fairly decent (see, $1,000 for a club show + hotel + food + transportation). Multiply that by, say, sparingly, 100 shows per year. That's $100,000 with virtually no marketing campaign to pay back.
A show every three days? That's pretty hardcore. Most indie bands I know play more like a show a month (or every few months) at the most.
Even using the $100k estimate, split that up among the members of an average-size band (3-5 members), take out taxes, and it starts to look a lot less impressive.
I do agree that most major-label bands make a ton of money on their live shows though. Especially since the tickets cost $30-$40 instead of $5-$10.
I really can't stand the lack of personal responsibility people seem to take for granted nowadays. Why should retailers subsidize the poor decisions of their customers?
I've stopped buying games from EB, because they *do* have a fairly liberal return policy, and so half of the "new" games I bought there were actually reshrunk returns from people who were unwilling to take responsibility for making sure they really wanted a game before they bought it. One of them (Silent Hill 2) I actually had to exchange because whoever had bought it previously had gotten some kind of crap all over the media side of the disc.
If you're not sure whether you want to actually buy a game, then rent it first. Don't expect retailers and other customers to pay the price for your inability to research a product before you buy it.
Obviously this doesn't apply to technical issues, but those are vastly in the minority compared to the people who change their mind after buying the game, or bootleg them and then return them.
Of course, this is way, way before 99.9% of the Slashdot readership were born so I'm not suprised it was missed. Hell, even I was only 1 year old.
Christopher Walken (as the archangel Gabriel) plays it on his trumpet (yes, that trumpet) in one of the Prophecy films too, which might be a little closer to this age group.
Art of the Saber is one of legions of "lightsaber effect" videos made by fans.
TFN Fanfilms has a huge library of Star Wars home movies. Many of them have excellent stories, and do much more than display the rotoscoping skills of the creators.
Duality is one of the most visually impressive, but because of conflicts between the two guys who made it it's not available on TFN anymore.
Any potential mass-market technology is going to have to be at least as easy to use as the current standard.
In the case of music purchases, which is more likely to catch on - something like iTunes, or a Rube Goldberg contraption based around voting and serial numbers?
I'm a systems engineer, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in complicated systems for getting the music I like. I buy CDs at stores or through the mail, because it's easy, the audio quality is perfect, and I can play the discs anywhere.
Is the average consumer going to be willing to put up with a more complex system like the one this article describes? I doubt it.
Like many other schemes I've seen, this one also reduces professional musicians to the equivalent of street buskers: putting their music out and hoping they make a couple of bucks off of it from the generous. If the world suddenly turned into a radically left-wing place overnight, I predict that the quality of music would go way down, very quickly. Professional musicians right now can spend months polishing up their tracks before release, because they can make a living at it. If they're just getting tips, few or none of them could. A lot of them wouldn't even bother to release music at all. I know I wouldn't.
More often than not, my taxes fund their treatment. My taxes always fund the police who have to chase and try to arrest these losers.
Those costs exist because of the illegal nature of drugs like meth.
Pretending there is no social cost from drug addiction, pretending that drug addicts don't ruin the lives of people around them is an exercise in deliberate naivete.
Alcohol and gambling ruin peoples' lives too. Should those be made illegal?
Try asking the children of a meth addict "Who are we to tell them what they can and can't do with their own lives?"
Children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome could say the same thing about an alcoholic parent.
Legislation should cover actual damaging acts, not potential ones. If someone is irresponsible enough to use any drug (illegal or not) while pregnant, that should be a crime. DUI convictions for drunk driving are a perfect example of this.
Formal music created through random, pseudo-random, or mathematical processes is almost a century old at this point. Check out some Schoenberg or John Cage. It may not be your kind of thing (I'm not really into it myself), but it is an interesting branch of art.
I thought the controls were excellent. Did you use the built-in calibration feature?
I'm hardly a bad-ass gamer (I had to use an Action Replay to make it through Devil May Cry), but I was able to finish all four F-Zero GX cups on Master difficulty and all but one of the story missions on Hard difficulty with a bit of practice.
GX is definitely my favourite game so far this year. The only one that I know is going to overtake it is Defiance.
Sometimes I can't understand why people buy consoles at all when there are emulators
Because there are no working emulators for the current generation of consoles? Emulation is fine for yesterday's hardware (I use ePSXe to take screenshots of Playstation games for my website), but not for games you're buying new at the store.
"We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding."
I am fairly skeptical of extraordinary claims, but if the US military has researchers writing things like this, I'm definitely willing to listen.
No, it's only for things on CD-R. Otherwise no one could sell any game software from the last decade or so.
They will remove auctions for material on CD-R, but only if you can prove that it is - e.g. the auction photo shows a Playstation with a stack of CD-Rs labelled with a Sharpie. If the seller uses CD labels and calls them "CDs" instead of "CD-Rs," you are right, they won't remove the auction.
There are a number of ethical systems that give absolute positions on moral questions. Many of them are religions, but others are based on logic (e.g. rule utilitarianism). I don't know of any of them that would consider depriving musicians of their income as ethically acceptable behaviour.
Don't you think it's a little arrogant for you to speak for all musicians like that? Why not play it safe and assume that you *shouldn't* download anything except tracks from bands which publicly announce that that's what they want you to do? Because then you couldn't justify piracy on a mass scale?
Musicians need to be able to earn a living just like anyone else. Under your assumption, you are effectively telling all of them that their skills are worthless, because you aren't willing to pay them.
What I don't understand, and maybe I'm drunk, is if you're sharing files don't you fall under the same folder as those who sell weapons? Doesn't the "I'm just making these availible to use, it's up to those who use them to use them legally" argument work? no?
No, many Windows updates require that you reboot before installing any other update.
Only if you don't use QChain. All of the XP and 2000 hotfixes from the last nine months incorporate its functionality, but it's handy for the older ones and for NT 4 machines.
That site is totally insulting to professional musicians. Major labels may give artists a poor cut of sales, but they don't *force* anyone into a contract. Whoever runs that site, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any problem with the idea of effectively forcing musicians to give away their work in exchange for the hope of nebulous donations.
Yes, but their argument is that if you bankrupt the big 5, the artists will still exist, and can get a better deal with an "indy" label.
If that were the case, then no artist who had an independent label contract would try for a major label contract.
I know musicians on independent labels. They have to work day jobs to support their art. Musicians on major labels generally don't. Indie labels just can't generate the same kind of sales volume.
So the virus author and MS are equally guilty. Take one out and there's no problem.
That is a really poorly thought-out position. If someone breaks into my house, and I responsible because I didn't install steel doors and automated machinegun turrets?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, no. I don't know where you live, but I can support myself very comfortably on perhaps $1000 a month. $2000/month rents and such are not common in most of the country.
In big cities, they are.
$1000 a month would mean living very frugally in Seattle, and living well outside the main part of the city. It would buy you a cardboard box in an alley in San Francisco.
Not coincidentally, big cities are also where it's easiest to find higher-paying jobs.
If the executives & stars didn't make so much, they wouldn't need to charge so much
Yes, it must kill people to have to pay 15 whole dollars for a DVD, especially since the MPAA is sitting next to them with a handgun demanding that they buy as many as possible.
Film fans should be *incredibly* happy with the prices of DVDs. Movies from a decade or two ago can generally be had for about $10. That's less than seeing a full-price show in a lot of theatres now, and yet some people expect to pay even less?
Expecting to get media for free or cheap is (IMO) the geek equivalent of panhandling. If you are someone who gets irritated when a homeless person asks for spare change, how can you not expect the film and music industries to feel the same way when you suggest that they sell DVDs and CDs for $5 (or whatever) or that they shouldn't pursue people who bootleg them?
At least the homeless person *might* be spending the spare change on something that's actually necessary to live, like food.
4. Thomas Edison and his many inventions
Grudge: Life
I thought Edison's grudges were against elephants and Nikola Tesla?
Artists bank major cash on shows. Even your well-known indie hip-hop/underground artist gets paid fairly decent (see, $1,000 for a club show + hotel + food + transportation). Multiply that by, say, sparingly, 100 shows per year. That's $100,000 with virtually no marketing campaign to pay back.
A show every three days? That's pretty hardcore. Most indie bands I know play more like a show a month (or every few months) at the most.
Even using the $100k estimate, split that up among the members of an average-size band (3-5 members), take out taxes, and it starts to look a lot less impressive.
I do agree that most major-label bands make a ton of money on their live shows though. Especially since the tickets cost $30-$40 instead of $5-$10.
I really can't stand the lack of personal responsibility people seem to take for granted nowadays. Why should retailers subsidize the poor decisions of their customers?
I've stopped buying games from EB, because they *do* have a fairly liberal return policy, and so half of the "new" games I bought there were actually reshrunk returns from people who were unwilling to take responsibility for making sure they really wanted a game before they bought it. One of them (Silent Hill 2) I actually had to exchange because whoever had bought it previously had gotten some kind of crap all over the media side of the disc.
If you're not sure whether you want to actually buy a game, then rent it first. Don't expect retailers and other customers to pay the price for your inability to research a product before you buy it.
Obviously this doesn't apply to technical issues, but those are vastly in the minority compared to the people who change their mind after buying the game, or bootleg them and then return them.
Of course, this is way, way before 99.9% of the Slashdot readership were born so I'm not suprised it was missed. Hell, even I was only 1 year old.
Christopher Walken (as the archangel Gabriel) plays it on his trumpet (yes, that trumpet) in one of the Prophecy films too, which might be a little closer to this age group.
Art of the Saber is one of legions of "lightsaber effect" videos made by fans.
TFN Fanfilms has a huge library of Star Wars home movies. Many of them have excellent stories, and do much more than display the rotoscoping skills of the creators.
Duality is one of the most visually impressive, but because of conflicts between the two guys who made it it's not available on TFN anymore.
How can you explain the Navy's researchers generating heat and helium-4 other than fusion?
What about the Navy? They believe it's real.
Any potential mass-market technology is going to have to be at least as easy to use as the current standard.
In the case of music purchases, which is more likely to catch on - something like iTunes, or a Rube Goldberg contraption based around voting and serial numbers?
I'm a systems engineer, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in complicated systems for getting the music I like. I buy CDs at stores or through the mail, because it's easy, the audio quality is perfect, and I can play the discs anywhere.
Is the average consumer going to be willing to put up with a more complex system like the one this article describes? I doubt it.
Like many other schemes I've seen, this one also reduces professional musicians to the equivalent of street buskers: putting their music out and hoping they make a couple of bucks off of it from the generous. If the world suddenly turned into a radically left-wing place overnight, I predict that the quality of music would go way down, very quickly. Professional musicians right now can spend months polishing up their tracks before release, because they can make a living at it. If they're just getting tips, few or none of them could. A lot of them wouldn't even bother to release music at all. I know I wouldn't.
More often than not, my taxes fund their treatment. My taxes always fund the police who have to chase and try to arrest these losers.
Those costs exist because of the illegal nature of drugs like meth.
Pretending there is no social cost from drug addiction, pretending that drug addicts don't ruin the lives of people around them is an exercise in deliberate naivete.
Alcohol and gambling ruin peoples' lives too. Should those be made illegal?
Try asking the children of a meth addict "Who are we to tell them what they can and can't do with their own lives?"
Children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome could say the same thing about an alcoholic parent.
Legislation should cover actual damaging acts, not potential ones. If someone is irresponsible enough to use any drug (illegal or not) while pregnant, that should be a crime. DUI convictions for drunk driving are a perfect example of this.
Just why, I wonder, do environmentalists worry more about damage to trees than to people?
Because people *choose* to use drugs. Who are we to tell them what they can and can't do with their own lives?
Formal music created through random, pseudo-random, or mathematical processes is almost a century old at this point. Check out some Schoenberg or John Cage. It may not be your kind of thing (I'm not really into it myself), but it is an interesting branch of art.
I thought the controls were excellent. Did you use the built-in calibration feature?
I'm hardly a bad-ass gamer (I had to use an Action Replay to make it through Devil May Cry), but I was able to finish all four F-Zero GX cups on Master difficulty and all but one of the story missions on Hard difficulty with a bit of practice.
GX is definitely my favourite game so far this year. The only one that I know is going to overtake it is Defiance.
Sometimes I can't understand why people buy consoles at all when there are emulators
Because there are no working emulators for the current generation of consoles? Emulation is fine for yesterday's hardware (I use ePSXe to take screenshots of Playstation games for my website), but not for games you're buying new at the store.
Mod the parent post up. From the foreword:
"We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding."
I am fairly skeptical of extraordinary claims, but if the US military has researchers writing things like this, I'm definitely willing to listen.
No, it's only for things on CD-R. Otherwise no one could sell any game software from the last decade or so.
They will remove auctions for material on CD-R, but only if you can prove that it is - e.g. the auction photo shows a Playstation with a stack of CD-Rs labelled with a Sharpie. If the seller uses CD labels and calls them "CDs" instead of "CD-Rs," you are right, they won't remove the auction.
Morality is subjective.
There are a number of ethical systems that give absolute positions on moral questions. Many of them are religions, but others are based on logic (e.g. rule utilitarianism). I don't know of any of them that would consider depriving musicians of their income as ethically acceptable behaviour.
Don't you think it's a little arrogant for you to speak for all musicians like that? Why not play it safe and assume that you *shouldn't* download anything except tracks from bands which publicly announce that that's what they want you to do? Because then you couldn't justify piracy on a mass scale?
Musicians need to be able to earn a living just like anyone else. Under your assumption, you are effectively telling all of them that their skills are worthless, because you aren't willing to pay them.
What I don't understand, and maybe I'm drunk, is if you're sharing files don't you fall under the same folder as those who sell weapons? Doesn't the "I'm just making these availible to use, it's up to those who use them to use them legally" argument work? no?
No.
On the other hand, every time I see a day where Slashdot is filled with links to pro-piracy propaganda sites, I got out and buy some major label CDs.
No, many Windows updates require that you reboot before installing any other update.
Only if you don't use QChain. All of the XP and 2000 hotfixes from the last nine months incorporate its functionality, but it's handy for the older ones and for NT 4 machines.
How did this get modded as informative?
That site is totally insulting to professional musicians. Major labels may give artists a poor cut of sales, but they don't *force* anyone into a contract. Whoever runs that site, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any problem with the idea of effectively forcing musicians to give away their work in exchange for the hope of nebulous donations.
Yes, but their argument is that if you bankrupt the big 5, the artists will still exist, and can get a better deal with an "indy" label.
If that were the case, then no artist who had an independent label contract would try for a major label contract.
I know musicians on independent labels. They have to work day jobs to support their art. Musicians on major labels generally don't. Indie labels just can't generate the same kind of sales volume.
So the virus author and MS are equally guilty. Take one out and there's no problem.
That is a really poorly thought-out position. If someone breaks into my house, and I responsible because I didn't install steel doors and automated machinegun turrets?