In Seattle, I have trouble finding a new cd (that I want to hear) for under $12. I've seen sales lately for cd's at a sale price of $14.99. (the new Decemberists album) I finally found it at $12.99 so I bought it and deleted my pirated copy. Usually I can't afford to buy every album I want to hear, so I have to wait until they show up in used bins for $9, which is a pretty reasonable price.
What band of the last 5 years is going to draw the attendance of say, the Rolling Stones, U2, or even Bad Company or Cheap Trick in another 5 years?
This question has always interested me. U2 was one of the few bands created after the mid 70's that can consistently draw stadium crowds without necessarily being entertainment-page stars or continuing to release high-quality records (some would disagree). A big cause may be that up to the early to mid-70's, what was good was also what was popular, for the large part and the counter-culture, which traditionally produces the music that we consider great, was enormous back then and had an unparalleled amount of influence. Since then, both the counter culture has softened and the music industry has become infested with money and marketing. Additionally, in the 60's and early 70's, rock music, as an art form, was in its infancy and an artist had far more freedom to explore new ideas. We'll never be able to say we've 'heard it all before', but most people don't listen closely enough to care about the subtle differences between today's Minders and the old Zombies, or whatever example you choose. The Beatles, Dylan and the Stones could create masterpiece after masterpiece without sounding pretensious, because no one had actually done it before.
There's a partial answer in there somewhere, but mostly I think it's something nostalgic, or a chance marketing thing: U2 became huge because fans *wanted* another Beatles or Stones and they wanted it for themselves and could live up to it.
Voting Irregularities in Ohio which used ES&S and Diebold machines. see pp. 28 & 29[pdf]. The first link is irrelevant as proof, but interesting. The second link contains all of the exit poll discrepencies for each state. It was a report done by the exit polling company to investigate the discrepencies. I can't find any lists of where Diebold or ES&S machines are used, but you'll see in which states the largest discrepencies were found. It's a very interesting study, although they don't point fingers, only describe where the discrepencies may have come from.
You're right. I don't think microsoft is going to be able to compete with adobe in the graphic designer or printer market. They have a credibility level of about zero with designers.
This means the.pdf users will split into two camps: designers and office workers, one using.pdf and the other.xps. The latter will be the vast majority, and this is all that Microsoft cares about. This 'killer' will work, because Microsoft has the monopoly advantage on all the day-to-day office products that are currently used to create.pdfs.
Common Sense: 1) They usually need it for healthcare or to cover other costs while paying health insurance premiums, 2) They'll need it to stay afloat for the next round of layoffs, or even if they need to change jobs/move etc. Living paycheck to paycheck is a bitch if anything unexpected happens.
I've read Illuminatus, and I've only read about 10 sci-fi books in my life. Someone I know just mentioned the book not too long ago at a breakfast party, so he must have had a pretty good impact on culture. I'd really recommend taking a look through it next time you're at the bookstore. It's definitely not for everybody, but taking that into consideration, it's a very remarkable book. It came out in the mid-70's I think, and has a cyberpunk feel.
Also, the band 'Love' from the mid-60's was one of the most popular at the time and an all-time critical favorite. They released Forever Changes ni 1967, which anybody who likes 60's psychedelia should own. They were Jim Morrison's favorite band. Anyway, Arthur Lee, the man behind the music and lead singer just passed away because he was too poor to afford adequate surgery. There was a benefit concert for him, but it was too late.
I think he's talking about the dramatic portrayal of cooking & eating (which makes up 65% of the Sopranos), and I'm not sure why he said Lamaze(?). It would make a boring game if the characters were sitting and eating spaghetti with other gangsters most of the time, which means the game needs to focus on the action & violence, which is not, really, per se, what the Sopranos is all about. It's far more of a character drama than say, CSI or 24.
Here's a free documentary online about two people's experience investigating Diebold and voting irregularities following the 2004 election. It's a very entertaining movie that reveals many of the technical components of Diebold's tabulation process (spoiler: they use an unprotected Microsoft Access database for the central tabulators!). Highly recommended, feature length.
The gp's point is that they were afraid to chastise her based on these sensitive factors as a matter of politics. I think he would have a valid point without being racist or sexist, although he's wrong in this conclusion, because:
it's not clear (at least to me) that the Bin Laden intelligence was enough at the time to be taken seriously and that she was actually incompetent for ignoring it
the Bush Administration does not let its people 'spend more time with their families' for general incompetence, because it reflects badly on the administration (this privilege is given only to those who disagree with the administration, e.g. Colin Powell, or those under indictment)
(and this one will make a lot of people angry, but its obviously true) the Administration has benefited tremendously from 9/11 and it gave them their excuse to invade Iraq.
Based on my limited knowledge, this list seems odd: it leaves off N. Korea. Obviously we had high hopes for North Vietnam as well. Afghanistan's Taliban party is also regaining popularity. All in all, it's clear that the neo-conservative foreign policy ignores history as well as a mountain of well-intended academic study. Citizens of impoverished nations lack the means of protecting themselves against totalitarian leadership, even when a democracy is artificially constructed. Oftentimes, as in the case of Palestine, they don't even want a peaceful democracy. We put a chip on their shoulder and expect them to be grateful for us. It sounds like wishy-washy liberal horseshit, but we need to help impoverished countries create a national infrastructure where the citizens can worry about matters beyond their own safety and livelihood. This is essentially what happened in Russia: the Russians led well enough and increased its country's prosperity just enough that revolution became possible. It's still decades behind the rest of Europe, but so long as internal war doesn't sacrifice its solidarity and security, it should grow into a thriving economy at some point.
I'm not saying we shouldn't throw our weight around in some situations, but we need to be smart about it.
There was an impressive investigation conducted by Porkbusters.org in affiliation with numerous other bloggers, to uncover the congressman who put the 'secret hold' on the bill. It was possibly one of the most direct examples of bloggers influencing political events since the blog began.
It turned out, by a process of elimation, that it was Ted Stevens who held the bill. And don't forget this is the guy who was building the infamous Bridge to Nowhere-- $315m to connect an island (pop. 8000) to the mainland, replacing a 7-min ferry ride.
Alaskan politics is f*cked if you start looking into it. The governor Frank Murkowski has a 19% approval rating:)
I always found the hacker 'zines endlessly fascinating. I didn't enter the scene until around '90 so I was a little late coming in. Computer Underground Digest was sort of a 'Your Rights Online' before slashdot. Many of them, such as Phrack or Cult of the Dead Cow, were outdated even while I was reading them (how to create the blackbox to hack pay phones, etc).. there was some crazy sh*t in those that would probably not go down well in modern times.. how to build all sorts of bombs, hack streetlight computers, phone companies, etc. And CDC was full of fun juvenile humor. I think a few of them are still around in one form or another.
Video support (xine or mplayer) is a little troublesome, but everything else works fine minutes after install. There is also trouble with companies not fully supporting Linux, like the latest versions of Flash, for instance, or Adobe products. I think most people would prefer (K)Ubuntu over Linux if not for the 1337-stigma that Linux has. That's why when people ask me what they should buy, I tell them Macintosh! Their marketing to the general public is a thousand times better right now anyway (than Windows or esp. Linux). People are very confident to buy Macs nowadays. I'd like to see more businesses try it on the desktop.
I'm not an expert on any of these matters, but how hard would it be for an organization with integrity to just create their own alternate domain naming system? It may not be widespread at first, but it could be used by those 'in-the-know,' at least. I'm sure if it got some press and it were dirt-cheap, most companies and websites would get a domain or two, just for the heck of it. It might be an extremely good business venture for somebody if things start going sour with current registrars.
Back to the OP, drugs that make people be content all the time are a great way of keeping those that take them where they are now (or as some might say, "in their right and proper places"), since they remove the motivation for trying to improve one's own life.
There's evidence, and I don't feel like looking it up right now (the unabomber's manifesto is a secondary source of this information:), that civilization as it stands, especially here in the U.S. causes more clinical depression and anxiety than the life with which our brains were intended to deal. Many of the drugs you speak of are counteracting very legitimate claims of depression and anxiety. Furthermore, the drugs, if they even work, only take them back to 'normal' healthy levels of anxiety and mood management.
It's also a common and legitimate argument against depression/anxiety drugs that people are taking them where simple cognitive/behaviorial therapy (i.e. learning to think positively) will do the trick. Very common and very true. But some people just have chemical imbalances and are simply unable to manage their emotions. For this, drugs can only get you back to 'normal.' It won't make you 'content all the time.' That's what the hardest drugs (legal or illegal) do best-- for awhile, but things always get out of hand. There is nothing that makes you content all the time.
You sure have a lot of angst. "Representing the interests of the music industry" includes marketing. They have competition just as any business has competition-- anyone who doesn't pay up, e.g. most independent labels like Merge, Saddle Creek, K Records, Kill Rock Stars, etc. Over the last several years, there's been a boom in independent music which is probably hurting their sales more than p2p is. In fact, I didn't really listen to much new music until the napster days. I was able to hear so many great new bands and then use sites like amazon and allmusic to find out even more, that my cd purchasing habits went from normal to problematic to insane. And still, the RIAA only sees kickbacks from about a tenth of the new cds I buy, because they're from independent labels. So, yes, I would guess they have a big interest in stifling p2p due to its competitive effects.
That may be a horrible idea, depending on how you look at it.. do you want to take the field of software development, which has traditionally been open to a wide range of education-levels and people from other fields (grassroots geeks) and introduce a 'class' system? (*all* of the most brilliant programmers/software engineers I know are not CS/CE grads) IMO, the software industry has thrived on the talents and creativity of those programers who really love doing what they do and would be bored silly in the structured classroom environment.
OTOH, software mistakes can sometimes cause millions or billions of dollars worth of damage.. so some kind of accountability in the form of a certification might help?
(PS, I do have a BS degree in CS, but do not work in the software industry.)
Yeah, but if you overhear someone talking about, say, Mickey Spillane and you want to know who he is, wikipedia is fine. That's what wikipedia is for, in my opinion. Most people, I would venture to say, learn in order to satisfy their own curiosity, not because they're writing a report. And biases are found in any information found in any context (usually, in what the writers have chosen NOT to say). Its just a fact of life that you have to learn to recognize them and read around them. And with more diversity than any other encyclopedia company, I'd bet there's less bias than any other encyclopedia.
(Disclaimer: I'm a long-time libertarian candidate. You've never heard of me, but then neither has anybody else.)
First of all, regarding your statement, The Democrats in particular are quick to scream about voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement whenever an ID-less black person blah blah blah, the Democrats have long been the party to defend minority rights. If they weren't quick to scream about voter disenfranchisement they wouldn't be sticking to their platform. It's true that they have a personal interest for doing so, but you can't separate the fact into two separate agendas and treat the Democrats as though they're just scrounging for votes.
Second of all, Rep John Conyers (D-MI) wrote What Went Wrong In Ohio, describing mountains of evidence for vote tampering and voter disenfranchisement within the Ohio election system by ES&S, Diebold, and Secretary of the State of Ohio Kenneth Blackwell (election supervisor, who will be supervising his own election for governor this year; he was also the chair of Ohio's re-election campaign for GWB). Thousands of complaints were filed by Ohioans (Ohioese?) for the difficulty they'd found in trying to vote.
To say that both parties are guilty is a serious mistake. I really don't think there is a 'conspiracy' leading up to the Bush administration, but the Republicans, lets face it, have had a culture of corruption leading at least as far back as Eisenhower, McCarthy & J Edgar Hoover. Read the history books, or the nightly news.
Of course, that's not your entire point. How do you expect to get the government to produce and enforce a law regulating itself? As someone else had said, with an incumbancy rate so high (80-95%?), congress likes things just the way they are. And given the amount of well-documented evidence of vote tampering in Ohio in '04, the federal election officials obviously aren't going to lift a finger to investigate anything. Unless more people start asking questions instead of mockingly crying 'sure, a conspiracy! right!' everytime somebody criticises the gov't, there's not going to be a change. Corruption starts from money, the Republicans have the vast majority of corporate support, the corporations don't care about *you* only your money, yet these cowards, willfully standing up for the power to get robbed by corporate america, still stand up for the republicans when there's evidence of tampering with the election system.
I believe you're correct, that its been blown slightly out of proportion, but it's still "The Right Thing To Do," no matter how small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I don't agree that it's become a huge issue, but if nobody complains, legislators are going to keep doing what they want.
If it does become a big issue in the media, which side do you think Americans are going to take? Its going to become another pawn issue in the Ultra-Manly U.S. Pride game and the gov't will never give it up. Personally, I agree that its wrong, but its futile and possibly a political dead-end to pursue it until it actually becomes a problem for foreign countries.
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In Seattle, I have trouble finding a new cd (that I want to hear) for under $12. I've seen sales lately for cd's at a sale price of $14.99. (the new Decemberists album) I finally found it at $12.99 so I bought it and deleted my pirated copy. Usually I can't afford to buy every album I want to hear, so I have to wait until they show up in used bins for $9, which is a pretty reasonable price.
This question has always interested me. U2 was one of the few bands created after the mid 70's that can consistently draw stadium crowds without necessarily being entertainment-page stars or continuing to release high-quality records (some would disagree). A big cause may be that up to the early to mid-70's, what was good was also what was popular, for the large part and the counter-culture, which traditionally produces the music that we consider great, was enormous back then and had an unparalleled amount of influence. Since then, both the counter culture has softened and the music industry has become infested with money and marketing. Additionally, in the 60's and early 70's, rock music, as an art form, was in its infancy and an artist had far more freedom to explore new ideas. We'll never be able to say we've 'heard it all before', but most people don't listen closely enough to care about the subtle differences between today's Minders and the old Zombies, or whatever example you choose. The Beatles, Dylan and the Stones could create masterpiece after masterpiece without sounding pretensious, because no one had actually done it before.
There's a partial answer in there somewhere, but mostly I think it's something nostalgic, or a chance marketing thing: U2 became huge because fans *wanted* another Beatles or Stones and they wanted it for themselves and could live up to it.
Voting Irregularities in Ohio which used ES&S and Diebold machines. see pp. 28 & 29[pdf]. The first link is irrelevant as proof, but interesting. The second link contains all of the exit poll discrepencies for each state. It was a report done by the exit polling company to investigate the discrepencies. I can't find any lists of where Diebold or ES&S machines are used, but you'll see in which states the largest discrepencies were found. It's a very interesting study, although they don't point fingers, only describe where the discrepencies may have come from.
huh? no. I don't see where you misunderstood me, but that's precisely the point I was making.
You're right. I don't think microsoft is going to be able to compete with adobe in the graphic designer or printer market. They have a credibility level of about zero with designers.
This means the .pdf users will split into two camps: designers and office workers, one using .pdf and the other .xps. The latter will be the vast majority, and this is all that Microsoft cares about. This 'killer' will work, because Microsoft has the monopoly advantage on all the day-to-day office products that are currently used to create .pdfs.
Common Sense: 1) They usually need it for healthcare or to cover other costs while paying health insurance premiums, 2) They'll need it to stay afloat for the next round of layoffs, or even if they need to change jobs/move etc. Living paycheck to paycheck is a bitch if anything unexpected happens.
I've read Illuminatus, and I've only read about 10 sci-fi books in my life. Someone I know just mentioned the book not too long ago at a breakfast party, so he must have had a pretty good impact on culture. I'd really recommend taking a look through it next time you're at the bookstore. It's definitely not for everybody, but taking that into consideration, it's a very remarkable book. It came out in the mid-70's I think, and has a cyberpunk feel.
Also, the band 'Love' from the mid-60's was one of the most popular at the time and an all-time critical favorite. They released Forever Changes ni 1967, which anybody who likes 60's psychedelia should own. They were Jim Morrison's favorite band. Anyway, Arthur Lee, the man behind the music and lead singer just passed away because he was too poor to afford adequate surgery. There was a benefit concert for him, but it was too late.
I think he's talking about the dramatic portrayal of cooking & eating (which makes up 65% of the Sopranos), and I'm not sure why he said Lamaze(?). It would make a boring game if the characters were sitting and eating spaghetti with other gangsters most of the time, which means the game needs to focus on the action & violence, which is not, really, per se, what the Sopranos is all about. It's far more of a character drama than say, CSI or 24.
Here's a free documentary online about two people's experience investigating Diebold and voting irregularities following the 2004 election. It's a very entertaining movie that reveals many of the technical components of Diebold's tabulation process (spoiler: they use an unprotected Microsoft Access database for the central tabulators!). Highly recommended, feature length.
Based on my limited knowledge, this list seems odd: it leaves off N. Korea. Obviously we had high hopes for North Vietnam as well. Afghanistan's Taliban party is also regaining popularity. All in all, it's clear that the neo-conservative foreign policy ignores history as well as a mountain of well-intended academic study. Citizens of impoverished nations lack the means of protecting themselves against totalitarian leadership, even when a democracy is artificially constructed. Oftentimes, as in the case of Palestine, they don't even want a peaceful democracy. We put a chip on their shoulder and expect them to be grateful for us. It sounds like wishy-washy liberal horseshit, but we need to help impoverished countries create a national infrastructure where the citizens can worry about matters beyond their own safety and livelihood. This is essentially what happened in Russia: the Russians led well enough and increased its country's prosperity just enough that revolution became possible. It's still decades behind the rest of Europe, but so long as internal war doesn't sacrifice its solidarity and security, it should grow into a thriving economy at some point.
I'm not saying we shouldn't throw our weight around in some situations, but we need to be smart about it.
I'm curious, but I don't see it.
There was an impressive investigation conducted by Porkbusters.org in affiliation with numerous other bloggers, to uncover the congressman who put the 'secret hold' on the bill. It was possibly one of the most direct examples of bloggers influencing political events since the blog began.
It turned out, by a process of elimation, that it was Ted Stevens who held the bill. And don't forget this is the guy who was building the infamous Bridge to Nowhere-- $315m to connect an island (pop. 8000) to the mainland, replacing a 7-min ferry ride.
Alaskan politics is f*cked if you start looking into it. The governor Frank Murkowski has a 19% approval rating :)
I always found the hacker 'zines endlessly fascinating. I didn't enter the scene until around '90 so I was a little late coming in. Computer Underground Digest was sort of a 'Your Rights Online' before slashdot. Many of them, such as Phrack or Cult of the Dead Cow, were outdated even while I was reading them (how to create the blackbox to hack pay phones, etc).. there was some crazy sh*t in those that would probably not go down well in modern times.. how to build all sorts of bombs, hack streetlight computers, phone companies, etc. And CDC was full of fun juvenile humor. I think a few of them are still around in one form or another.
I am posting a comment to slashdot. Either my IP is banned and this will not post, or it is unbanned, and it will post.
Video support (xine or mplayer) is a little troublesome, but everything else works fine minutes after install. There is also trouble with companies not fully supporting Linux, like the latest versions of Flash, for instance, or Adobe products. I think most people would prefer (K)Ubuntu over Linux if not for the 1337-stigma that Linux has. That's why when people ask me what they should buy, I tell them Macintosh! Their marketing to the general public is a thousand times better right now anyway (than Windows or esp. Linux). People are very confident to buy Macs nowadays. I'd like to see more businesses try it on the desktop.
Ha! Solutionize. I'm going to try slipping that one into a meeting sometime :)
I'm not an expert on any of these matters, but how hard would it be for an organization with integrity to just create their own alternate domain naming system? It may not be widespread at first, but it could be used by those 'in-the-know,' at least. I'm sure if it got some press and it were dirt-cheap, most companies and websites would get a domain or two, just for the heck of it. It might be an extremely good business venture for somebody if things start going sour with current registrars.
There's evidence, and I don't feel like looking it up right now (the unabomber's manifesto is a secondary source of this information :), that civilization as it stands, especially here in the U.S. causes more clinical depression and anxiety than the life with which our brains were intended to deal. Many of the drugs you speak of are counteracting very legitimate claims of depression and anxiety. Furthermore, the drugs, if they even work, only take them back to 'normal' healthy levels of anxiety and mood management.
It's also a common and legitimate argument against depression/anxiety drugs that people are taking them where simple cognitive/behaviorial therapy (i.e. learning to think positively) will do the trick. Very common and very true. But some people just have chemical imbalances and are simply unable to manage their emotions. For this, drugs can only get you back to 'normal.' It won't make you 'content all the time.' That's what the hardest drugs (legal or illegal) do best-- for awhile, but things always get out of hand. There is nothing that makes you content all the time.
You sure have a lot of angst. "Representing the interests of the music industry" includes marketing. They have competition just as any business has competition-- anyone who doesn't pay up, e.g. most independent labels like Merge, Saddle Creek, K Records, Kill Rock Stars, etc. Over the last several years, there's been a boom in independent music which is probably hurting their sales more than p2p is. In fact, I didn't really listen to much new music until the napster days. I was able to hear so many great new bands and then use sites like amazon and allmusic to find out even more, that my cd purchasing habits went from normal to problematic to insane. And still, the RIAA only sees kickbacks from about a tenth of the new cds I buy, because they're from independent labels. So, yes, I would guess they have a big interest in stifling p2p due to its competitive effects.
That may be a horrible idea, depending on how you look at it.. do you want to take the field of software development, which has traditionally been open to a wide range of education-levels and people from other fields (grassroots geeks) and introduce a 'class' system? (*all* of the most brilliant programmers/software engineers I know are not CS/CE grads) IMO, the software industry has thrived on the talents and creativity of those programers who really love doing what they do and would be bored silly in the structured classroom environment.
OTOH, software mistakes can sometimes cause millions or billions of dollars worth of damage.. so some kind of accountability in the form of a certification might help?
(PS, I do have a BS degree in CS, but do not work in the software industry.)
Featured article today on Uncyclopedia: RIAA CEO discusses the analog hole. I'm not sure why this hasn't made the front page of slashdot...?
Yeah, but if you overhear someone talking about, say, Mickey Spillane and you want to know who he is, wikipedia is fine. That's what wikipedia is for, in my opinion. Most people, I would venture to say, learn in order to satisfy their own curiosity, not because they're writing a report. And biases are found in any information found in any context (usually, in what the writers have chosen NOT to say). Its just a fact of life that you have to learn to recognize them and read around them. And with more diversity than any other encyclopedia company, I'd bet there's less bias than any other encyclopedia.
(Disclaimer: I'm a long-time libertarian candidate. You've never heard of me, but then neither has anybody else.)
First of all, regarding your statement, The Democrats in particular are quick to scream about voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement whenever an ID-less black person blah blah blah, the Democrats have long been the party to defend minority rights. If they weren't quick to scream about voter disenfranchisement they wouldn't be sticking to their platform. It's true that they have a personal interest for doing so, but you can't separate the fact into two separate agendas and treat the Democrats as though they're just scrounging for votes.
Second of all, Rep John Conyers (D-MI) wrote What Went Wrong In Ohio, describing mountains of evidence for vote tampering and voter disenfranchisement within the Ohio election system by ES&S, Diebold, and Secretary of the State of Ohio Kenneth Blackwell (election supervisor, who will be supervising his own election for governor this year; he was also the chair of Ohio's re-election campaign for GWB). Thousands of complaints were filed by Ohioans (Ohioese?) for the difficulty they'd found in trying to vote.
To say that both parties are guilty is a serious mistake. I really don't think there is a 'conspiracy' leading up to the Bush administration, but the Republicans, lets face it, have had a culture of corruption leading at least as far back as Eisenhower, McCarthy & J Edgar Hoover. Read the history books, or the nightly news.
Of course, that's not your entire point. How do you expect to get the government to produce and enforce a law regulating itself? As someone else had said, with an incumbancy rate so high (80-95%?), congress likes things just the way they are. And given the amount of well-documented evidence of vote tampering in Ohio in '04, the federal election officials obviously aren't going to lift a finger to investigate anything. Unless more people start asking questions instead of mockingly crying 'sure, a conspiracy! right!' everytime somebody criticises the gov't, there's not going to be a change. Corruption starts from money, the Republicans have the vast majority of corporate support, the corporations don't care about *you* only your money, yet these cowards, willfully standing up for the power to get robbed by corporate america, still stand up for the republicans when there's evidence of tampering with the election system.
Wow, great link. Thanks...
I believe you're correct, that its been blown slightly out of proportion, but it's still "The Right Thing To Do," no matter how small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I don't agree that it's become a huge issue, but if nobody complains, legislators are going to keep doing what they want.
If it does become a big issue in the media, which side do you think Americans are going to take? Its going to become another pawn issue in the Ultra-Manly U.S. Pride game and the gov't will never give it up. Personally, I agree that its wrong, but its futile and possibly a political dead-end to pursue it until it actually becomes a problem for foreign countries.