i don't deny your right to decide not to live in the city, but when you make that decision, you live with the fact that gas prices vary.
and as far as government meddling, aren't you sort of dependant on *some other government* for your petroleum products? hmm. sort of beholden to somebody there, non? at least my means of transport is controlled by americans.
they're both choices, and both related to a general decision about whether or not you want to be dependant on a car --
to begin, you choose to need a car when you move to a place that 'demands' one -- or did someone force you to take your current apartment? did you even consider whether it was near a bus or train when you took it? most people don't.
then, you tacitly accepted membership in a community which doesn't care about mass transit -- another choice.
finally, *could* you take a bus? are there no busses or trains? can you simply not be inconvenienced?
i don't know what to say -- i mean, i decided not to have a car, cause i don't like them, because this was important to me, and now i don't have a car. you could have done the same, you didn't, and now you pay more than you think you should for gas. we both acted freely, didn't we? so what's the problem?
"I ask you, have you ever *seen* Wyoming? Or better yet, have you ever seen an unbroken expanse of land larger than 1sq mile with no people in it?"
oh -- i see -- you imply that i'm not in touch with your world by asserting a stereotype about people in mine. hmm. that's nice.
and i never said that living outside of a city was terrible, but it's got a downside -- cars, for one thing. do you dispute that you need your car? cause i don't own one. it saves me on the order of $10k a year, it's good for the environemnt, and it builds community.
There are pros and cons to living in and outside of the city. Being hopelessly dependant upon fossil fules is one of the cons to living outside, 'gang warfare' is one of the cons to living in NYC, although, frankly, i'm not sure what you're talking about.
But you've made your choice, is all i'm saying, and it *is* a choice. So suck up the downside -- cars pollute and cost a ton of money, and you don't have a choice. Facts.
yes, i'm aware of this, but it's an individual, inefficient, lifestyle choice.
You can choose to live this way, and it's fine, but if all of a sudden the inefficiency costs you, what can i say? Maybe all that space you put between yourself and your fellow man isn't as great or as necessary as you thought it was.
While i agree that it's not the fault of any individual, the fact that rapid transit isn't what it might be is both a cause *and an effect* of people's commitments to their cars. No question, more people would take the bus if it were cheaper or more convenient. But one might also assert that without sufficient initial interest in taking the bus, no one's going to make transit more convenient or cheap.
People love their cars. It's got something to do with Grease, i think, but it's not rational. Built for the way you live. Like a rock. It's American. But it's not rational.
So people love their cars for 50 years, and they design their cities based on this, and they all move to where they're an hour away from work. And that's ok. But don't expect those of us who take the subway to work to care if gas goes up to 6 dollars a gallon. In fact, I hope it does, given that maybe then our kids will be a little less likely to get skin cancer.
Cars are an unneccessary trapping of the sickness that is urban sprawl. Live where you work. Sleep under your desk.
I live in NYC, i ride the train to and from work every day, it's fast, cheap, and efficient, a marvel of engineering.
When i visit my parents in CT, however, you can't do a thing without a car. Now, of course, people outside of cities *could* constrcut decent mass transit, but they don't, and that's fine -- it's a lifestyle choice based on perceived convenience and, to some degree, an archaic sense that one's car contributes to one's identity.
But it's a lifestyle *choice*, and when the price of gas goes up and this causes what were, essentially, forseeable economic impacts, what am i supposed to do, cry?
Stop whining. Take the bus. In addition to saving a couple of bucks, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
[This is without even addressing the point that cars contribute to the breakdown of neighborhoods, and that a quarter of a million americans are killed in car accidents a year. F cars. They suck. No sympathy from me. Gas should cost 6 bucks a gallon, given the harm it does.]
i'm sick of hearing how metallica "started off" by allowing stealing of their music, and that this clearly indicates the fact that their in it for the money. this is ridiculous! people don't change? a cynic might even suggest that they were simply taking an initial loss up front in order to secure larger returns on the back end, a common business practice.
further, re: how quirky it is that their stuff has 'come into fashion, give me an effing break! compare anything from ride the lightning to this post-grunge power ballad crap their releasing, ready-made mtv 4 minute singles, and tell me again how they've just happened to become rich? they got sick of being poor, they started writing singles. end of story.
to reiterate: i haven't seen metallica since 8th grade, but i was at the record store the day kill em all came out, so i know what they were, and are about.
they were, as you say, about effing rocking out. now they are about $$$. have you seen their new video for god's sake? they're the elton john of heavy metal!
you keep saying "attacks against napster", as though they wouldn't mind the piracy if napster was a not-for-profit. that's ridiculous. they are going after napster not because napster is profiting from privacy, but because napster is allowing people to cut into metallica's pocktbook.
which is fine, but it's not about dignity or integrity, it's about money. which is all that i'm saying.
re: napsterites would have artists starving, that's the same sort of hyperbole that you're accusing napster of throwing around. lots of bands without deals support themselves. lots of bands support themselves off of tours. they aren't starving. furthermore, there are lots of people who play music and have day jobs. finally, there are a lot of people who aren't in it for the money at all. if the asertion is that musicians and music will be worse off if you can't make money from records sales at the level you once could (although we have yet to see any real evidence of this), i'd say that that's dubious at best.
in fact, and here's the flawless victory, metallica's attitude towards the importance of a great live show early on, as compared to their record sales at the time, demonstrates that once, back before they started getting their tours sponsored by multinationals, once, they knew that a band can exist quite happily with crappy record sales and a fanatical following! they're the perfect example of why ruining cd sales as a business won't kill music! sure, it would've killed whitesnake and winger, but metallica? they'd've been fine.
so you can mourn the loss of winger if you want. but that's all you lose if record sales drop off cause of piracy. which they haven't, btw.
it's not bull. sure, they';re fighting for 'artistic ownership'. see, and that's something that matters wildly to artists. i heard once that f-ing marc chagall used to make viewers sign non-disclosure agreements. in fact, even though he was passionate about his art, he quit doing it cause so many people kept ripping him off.
artistic ownership is about (get this) *ownership*. intellectuall property rights are about (say it with me) property. metallica is not in this fight because of some kind of potential insult to the dignity and integrity of 'art', they don't even know what the words mean. they are in this fight because of property and ownership -- in short, they are in this fight to make sure that the current manner in which an artist can be paid stays in place. why? because of 'art'? no -- for *exactly* the same selfish reasons which you so debase in your post!
metallica is in this fight because they care about being paid for their art. van gogh died hungry in a mental institution or some shit. i'll take van gogh over these posession-posessed versace-suit poseurs any day of the week. get rid of em, let's get us some artists who aren't in it for the money. the assertion that the quality of music will falter in the absence of copyright protection for recorded music is at best unproven, and in some ways at odds with common sense.
sounds a bit silly and idealistic, i know, but some of my favorite fellow brooklynites, woody guthrie and they might be giants, have provided wonderful examples of how a musician might function and prosper, without a care for what's in it for them.
so, let's call a spade a spade. metallica, as far as this fight goes, are not artists, they are factory workers. they have no integrity -- they sell something of theirs at as high a margin as possible. they are not artists, not insofar as this discussion is concerned.
The difference as i see it is that if the RIAA wins, Dr. Dre and some guys in suits get some money, and all those 'artists' who do this for the money and ho's get to keep making music. If the napster guys win, they make it slightly more difficult to make money off of recorded music, but make it possible for anyone to promote themselves, get people to their shows. The Metallicas of the world, in it for the bucks alone, because touring is such hard work, they get out. Tough.
So, yeah, the impetus for most people might be simply to steal. But the outcome, not uncoincidentally, i think, helps more people than it hurts. Conversely, sure, the RIAA is just protecting their bottom line, but in the end, this is pretty bad for everybody except the heavy-rotation TRL guys.
It's socially progressive, by accident, to steal music.
i know that n lane was in it -- my sentence was poorly phrased. it should have read something like, "i swear to god, if i have to listen to nathan lane doing his f-ing nathan lane voice in another f-ing animated film, i'm going to go down to the Cartoon Casting Factory and beat somebody senseless."
And I love it when things are made to explode at high resolution for my amusement.
And I don't mind when the plot gets a little thin in order to make room for the above-mentioned childishness.
But Titan A.E. was honestly tough to sit through.
I'd read reviews comparing it to the Last Starfighter in that it has a cheesiness that was ultimately redeemed by its innocence bla bla bla, but they were way off. Really, the innocence is contrived, the voice-acting is cliched (am i the only one sick of cartoons that sound like nathan lane?), it's unoriginal, the heart-wrenching Armageddon-y "go back to the ship, i'll sacrifice myself" moment was laughably unmoving.
I was in a multiplex in brooklyn, and the worst part, the absolute worst part of the whole stupid experience was the fact that i could hear the soundtrack to Shaft pulsating through the walls, taunting me with its badness, saying, "henry, henry, henry -- how are you going to turn down the black private dick, ten times out of ten, etc, for matt damon and janine garafolo in outer space?"
so, umm, don't bother. or at least go see it at a theater where they're showing big momma's house. that wasy, when it sucks and you leave, you can comfort yourself by saying to your date, "hmm. could've been worse."
Figuring out how they get paid isn't my problem -- it's something that everybody in an information-selling industry is trying to figure out -- magazines, books, music, movies.
So Metallica 'isn't quite there yet'? Not my fault they (and everybody else, save for chuck d) are dragging their feet. Given the number of people who have gotten rich selling what appeared at first to be next-to-nothing online in the last ten years, am i really supposed to sit here until Lars gets around to learning Perl?
F this. An industry which becomes obselete because it hasn't even *tried* to keep up does *not* have any economic rights. No one has a right to make money through a particular devliery platform -- if in fact metallica owns the music and not the platform, they should be trying to get the music out via every available channel. the fact that they haven't shows that Lars is being disingenuous -- they aren't just lazy, they're in bed with the people who *do* need cds to hang around.
Metallica, Britney Spears, Milli Vanilli. Enjoy it while it lasts.
The goal to which you aspire is the shutdown of napster.
The 335K list doesn't have any bearing on this. It's entirely divorced in both intent and possible results, from any legal proceeding.
So what's the point? More specifically, what if napster had said, "ok, well ban these guys."? Would you have dropped the lawsuit? and why go after the fans at all, if you're seeking a legal remedy?
See, the reason that I ask, and the point which I would like to see addressed is that you're talking out of both sides of your head regarding your intentions. If, indeed, this is about an idea, a principle, then the legal remedy you're seeking against the company is the sole a sufficient means of recourse. This list of fans -- all it really does, and correct me if i'm wrong -- is protect you from further *financial* incursions (sort of). In fact, if this had been about an idea and not money, limiting your list to anything less than every napster user can't really be justified.
So the lawsuit, fine, that's your right, your principles are at stake, whatever. But how on earth can you justify this list except in terms of protecting your own bottom lines?
the moronic rantings of the original article speak to the fact that, while everyone here understands both the theoretical advantages and the actual successes of various co-operative open software efforts, the vast, vast, vast (99+ percent?) of software buyers don't.
the paranoid part of my mind conjects that perhaps the author is deeply invested in MS or something, a subcionsciously-controlled FUD factory, but at the end of the day i suspect that it's nothing so interesting. Young's response, true as it was, is neccessary in larger quantity, and in more high-profile spaces, because most people just don't get it. they don't see the parallel between welding your hood shut and entrusting a software company to do the right thing, even if they won't let you or anyone else look inside.
for my part, i'm going down to the corner of broadway and vesey with a bullhorn. gonna stand in the sun and scream about open source to passers-by. aw, yeah.
It would have been nice if they'd at least addressed the social impact of their assertions. How do we fit this study in with the fact that Pokemon games have held four or five of the top ten weekly sales spots for the last 18 months or so? Add in a sports game, Donkey Kong 64 (best selling game in us last year, accdng to Nintendo), and the great bulk of games being sold (not to college students, but to everyone) wind up being rather non-violent. I mean, look at these charts (from ign64.com, 2dec99):
1. Pokemon Yellow, Nintendo, Game Boy 2. NBA Live 2000, Electronic Arts, Playstation 3. Pokemon Blue, Nintendo, Game Boy 4. Pokemon Red, Nintendo, Game Boy 5. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Capcom, Playstation 6. WWF Wrestlemania 2000, THQ Inc, Nintendo 64 7. Pokemon Pinball, Nintendo, Game Boy Color 8. Pokemon Snap, Nintendo, Nintendo 64 9. NBA 2K, Sega, Dreamcast 10. Knockout Kings 2000, Electronic Arts, Playstation
Where's doom? Where's Mortal Kombat? OK, resident evil is pretty f-ed up, but it's a flash in the pan compared to the *five* pokemons on there, most of which are still on the charts right now.
Let's not overstate the dangers of video games. even if they're dangerous (which they're not) most of them are pokemon, or jet force gemini or ape escape or zelda, so who cares?
This is exactly what I said. I mean, it probably hurts my stand (that VGames aren't that bad for you, considering), since blowing a guy's head off now looks a lot more like blowing a guy's head off.
Plus the mario brothers stuff was hysterical. sure, and chu chu rocket's a violent game, too, what with all them cats eatin the mice.
I haven't gotten very far into the article, but they'd be carrying a lot more weight with me if they'd spelled Mortal Kombat correctly in the headline.....
i'm no fan of ms, or the way that it doesn business, and part of me prefers charity that i'm certain is coming from 'pure' motive, and not a desire to look good.
but the fact of the matter is that a $15 billion endowment, even if the kids have to use windows, gets a lot of underprivileged kids online, kids who otherwise wouldn't have the tools to compete. do i like the propogation of windows? no. but if i have to choose between giving a poor kid a windows pc and giving them no pc at all, who the heck am i to say that we shouldn't let them learn something very useful, even if it's maybe not the best possible thing ?
that is, you're letting linux fever blind you to the fact that charity is about helping others first, and making os distinctions second, or third, or fiftieth or something.
this money, i'm not sure of why he gave it, but i know that it immunizes a lot of people, it does a lot of other good. does it make gates look good? of course, and it should. he's donated more than you, or me, or my parents, or yours, or, probably your company, or mine. don't talk to me about %, either -- billions of dollars are billions of dollars, and he's supposedly giving most of it away upon his death, anyway, rather than willing it to his kids.
he's not my favorite, and ms is not my favorite, but we can be thankful that at least his monopolization or the intel os market has a charitable bent to it at the end of the day. it's far far better than nothing, and far far better than he had to do, so stop bashing the guy.
So what are we actually worried about it? This is the most abusable thing ever, which is why it's not a worry.
In case the Re: is lost on you, all we need to do is get 1000/.ers who disapprove of this thing, we each phone WAVE 5 times a day, and all of a sudden the whole process collapses. Can't work. Signal to noise ratio approaches zero, and WAVE won't work. This worries me none.
Now, a less abuse-prone process with similar intent, that's a problem, but WAVE? Ha.
...have been greatly exaggerated. By this evening, we'll all be back to talking about f-ing Elian. This ruling doesn't carry much weight with non-geeks -- they don't want choice, they want peace of mind.
Now, i know this sucks, and I know that peace of mind, with respect to an os, should come from a knowledge and understanding that you're using something reliable, flexible, and as easy to use as the first two constraints allow for. But the average bear (oh, god, another post condescending re: "average folks") is easily fooled by brand image, complacency, FUD, and any number of other things. They don't *want* a choice. My office runs Office, and so, probably, does yours.
Choices will proliferate, now, but they can't market the way that MS can, and as the kind folks at RC cola will tell you, brand loyalty can be a bitch to overcome. There's been linux for years now, and Mac OS -- this entire mob of us, on any other day of the year, would be talking about how we don't need corporations to produce good software, and yet here we are talking about how finally, with corporations free from MS, good software can finally be produced? The freedoms and the products have been around for years, a bit restricted by MS, and linux is a good example of the decline of MS's control. And yet, there's little decline in market share.
So I'd say that we've been post-ms-tech-monopoly for a while, and it doesn't really matter, cause they've got the name, and it's a name that bothers me, but not my dad or my boss. Legal remedies won't change the fact that Microsoft is the Kleenex of softwares.
The X-Box is a farce, and it pisses me off, because it's designed to stifle development for consoles that actually exist.
This article contains the best discussion of why we can't trust MS's intentions with regards to consle gaming any more than in ay other arena. The strategy is textbook by now: perceive of a threat to your hegemony, release specs for a super-powerful, industry-breaking alternative that you may or may not have plans to produce, and the 3d party developers for the competitor will hesitate -- "should i wait and develop for this monster supermachine that MS is building?" Development for the competitor is slowed, and everybody loses except MS, who hides in the vapor until they can address the threat in some way that doesn't actually involve producing anything.
This sucks for gamers. I, for one, am pissed as hell at the idea that MS is worried about digital home delivery from Sony's PS2, and has chosen to f up *my* gaming opportunities because of it.
*sigh* Is anything safe from them? i would be willing to wager that if they announced a super automobile, 300 mph top speed, 900 mpg, with 200 cupholders, a heads-up in-winshield dvd player and a laser for shooting at pedestrians, to be introduced, maybe, in 2003, ford's stock would drop. this is vapor. it's marketing, and it sucks.
Why I'm a Hypocrite, and What We Can Learn From It
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Database Nation
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· Score: 2
so, i work at a major direct-marketing company, doing modeling and segmentation for the purposes of maximizing the impacts of direct mail campaigns. i don't love what i do, but the math is fun and i get to program (btw, im iso work, math, perl, sas, nyc?:).
anyway, having been in this position for a while, i've becme acutely aware of not only how much information is available on your average Joe Consumer, but also how many varied hands this info passes through before magically being transmogrified into a piece of junk mail. a couple of months ago i got tired of the constant reminder in my own mailbox of how shady this all is, and i drew up letters to the dma, equifax, experian, and others to terminate their rights to traffic in my data.
fine. ok, so i'm a hypocrite, but worse than that, i mentioned to a peer, in confidence, that i was 'opting out'. next thing i know, i'm called into a superior's office, and without putting my personally paranoid spin on things, i'll simply describe the proceedings as an inquisition into my loyalty.
now, don't get me wrong -- i guess i shouldn't have mentioned it, and i should probably go into a line of work less troublesome for me, ethically. but the thing that wierds me out is the reaction that i should have no problem sacrificing my privacy, and that if i'm offended, i'm going to wind up getting in bad with management.
not the worst, though: the more of my non-tech friends i tell about how dirty my involvement in this process occasionally makes me feel, the more i hear that they don't mind, or don't think it's as bad as i say. they call me paranoid, and refuse or fail to draw the link between, in this case, junk mail and an invasion of their privacy.
now, don't post calling me a self-loathing scumbag -- i've got to make a living, and doing math tricks in washington square park doesn't pay as well as you might think. the point of my story is to provide a look at exactly how negatively any attitude other than complete surrender of one's information privacy can make one look, *has* made me look.
on the liner of radiohead's most recent single, they've written that the innocent have nothing to fear from the rapidly-expanding data industry. what follows from this attitude is that an individual who chooses to avoid this process of information buying, selling, and processing, is already in a position of issuing a tacit, unspoken admission of some sort of guilt.
This report, i think, is mistaken. Here are some reasons I feel this way, right off the top of my head:
$149 -- as everyone has been pointing out, this is ridiculous, seeing as how you couldn't buy several of the individual components for that price, and, even given drops in prices, this time next year, there's no way that the entire unit costs that amount. The DVD licensing alone would drive the cost above $200 bucks, that's why nintendo's next gen machine won't play DVD videos.
2001 -- yeah, ok. A machine with no announced specs, no announced 3d party developers, from a company that hasn't produced a piece of hardware this interesting since, um, ever, and I'm supposed to believe that it's going to hit a few months after the PS2? Maybe they squeeze it in by Christmas, but not at $149. And they sure as hell can't make it in the market alone, as consoles live and die by 3d party involvement. do we really think that ms *or* game developers are going to like the sound of that?
Sony -- i'm honestly scared of the PS2. it's a monster, and it's going to shape the rest of the market. by the time this supposed console hits the market, sony expects to have sold in excess of 10 million ps2's. where's the market for a machine which, while it has a hd, doesn't give any indications that it's oing to much more powerful, from a graphics rendering standpoint, than sony's machine? the ps2 will have a hard drive, probably larger than 4 gig, by the end of next year, anyway.
now, i could be wrong. and i'd love to be, cause there's no room for a 4th console right now, and i'd love to see ms fail in an attempt to strong-arms its way into a market it knows nothing about and in which it has no experience.
you've got to add to this the fact that console games and pc games are totally different and cater to totally different audiences. microsoft's crappy sidewinder controller wouldn't fly for a second with console gamers, next to dreamcast and sony's new analog controllers. console gamers don't want to play the sims, and pc gamers don't want to play soul caliber. so where's the market for what's essentially a windows pc without a mouse or keyboard when it's being marketed as a game console? have you tried playing quake 3 without keyboard or mouse?
best of luck, bill. here's hoping you know wat you're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
i don't deny your right to decide not to live in the city, but when you make that decision, you live with the fact that gas prices vary.
and as far as government meddling, aren't you sort of dependant on *some other government* for your petroleum products? hmm. sort of beholden to somebody there, non? at least my means of transport is controlled by americans.
they're both choices, and both related to a general decision about whether or not you want to be dependant on a car --
to begin, you choose to need a car when you move to a place that 'demands' one -- or did someone force you to take your current apartment? did you even consider whether it was near a bus or train when you took it? most people don't.
then, you tacitly accepted membership in a community which doesn't care about mass transit -- another choice.
finally, *could* you take a bus? are there no busses or trains? can you simply not be inconvenienced?
i don't know what to say -- i mean, i decided not to have a car, cause i don't like them, because this was important to me, and now i don't have a car. you could have done the same, you didn't, and now you pay more than you think you should for gas. we both acted freely, didn't we? so what's the problem?
"I ask you, have you ever *seen* Wyoming? Or better yet, have you ever seen an unbroken expanse of land larger than 1sq mile with no people in it?"
oh -- i see -- you imply that i'm not in touch with your world by asserting a stereotype about people in mine. hmm. that's nice.
and i never said that living outside of a city was terrible, but it's got a downside -- cars, for one thing. do you dispute that you need your car? cause i don't own one. it saves me on the order of $10k a year, it's good for the environemnt, and it builds community.
You make my point wonderfully --
There are pros and cons to living in and outside of the city. Being hopelessly dependant upon fossil fules is one of the cons to living outside, 'gang warfare' is one of the cons to living in NYC, although, frankly, i'm not sure what you're talking about.
But you've made your choice, is all i'm saying, and it *is* a choice. So suck up the downside -- cars pollute and cost a ton of money, and you don't have a choice. Facts.
yes, i'm aware of this, but it's an individual, inefficient, lifestyle choice.
You can choose to live this way, and it's fine, but if all of a sudden the inefficiency costs you, what can i say? Maybe all that space you put between yourself and your fellow man isn't as great or as necessary as you thought it was.
While i agree that it's not the fault of any individual, the fact that rapid transit isn't what it might be is both a cause *and an effect* of people's commitments to their cars. No question, more people would take the bus if it were cheaper or more convenient. But one might also assert that without sufficient initial interest in taking the bus, no one's going to make transit more convenient or cheap.
People love their cars. It's got something to do with Grease, i think, but it's not rational. Built for the way you live. Like a rock. It's American. But it's not rational.
So people love their cars for 50 years, and they design their cities based on this, and they all move to where they're an hour away from work. And that's ok. But don't expect those of us who take the subway to work to care if gas goes up to 6 dollars a gallon. In fact, I hope it does, given that maybe then our kids will be a little less likely to get skin cancer.
Cars are an unneccessary trapping of the sickness that is urban sprawl. Live where you work. Sleep under your desk.
I live in NYC, i ride the train to and from work every day, it's fast, cheap, and efficient, a marvel of engineering.
When i visit my parents in CT, however, you can't do a thing without a car. Now, of course, people outside of cities *could* constrcut decent mass transit, but they don't, and that's fine -- it's a lifestyle choice based on perceived convenience and, to some degree, an archaic sense that one's car contributes to one's identity.
But it's a lifestyle *choice*, and when the price of gas goes up and this causes what were, essentially, forseeable economic impacts, what am i supposed to do, cry?
Stop whining. Take the bus. In addition to saving a couple of bucks, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
[This is without even addressing the point that cars contribute to the breakdown of neighborhoods, and that a quarter of a million americans are killed in car accidents a year. F cars. They suck. No sympathy from me. Gas should cost 6 bucks a gallon, given the harm it does.]
i'm sick of hearing how metallica "started off" by allowing stealing of their music, and that this clearly indicates the fact that their in it for the money. this is ridiculous! people don't change? a cynic might even suggest that they were simply taking an initial loss up front in order to secure larger returns on the back end, a common business practice.
further, re: how quirky it is that their stuff has 'come into fashion, give me an effing break! compare anything from ride the lightning to this post-grunge power ballad crap their releasing, ready-made mtv 4 minute singles, and tell me again how they've just happened to become rich? they got sick of being poor, they started writing singles. end of story.
to reiterate: i haven't seen metallica since 8th grade, but i was at the record store the day kill em all came out, so i know what they were, and are about.
they were, as you say, about effing rocking out. now they are about $$$. have you seen their new video for god's sake? they're the elton john of heavy metal!
you keep saying "attacks against napster", as though they wouldn't mind the piracy if napster was a not-for-profit. that's ridiculous. they are going after napster not because napster is profiting from privacy, but because napster is allowing people to cut into metallica's pocktbook.
which is fine, but it's not about dignity or integrity, it's about money. which is all that i'm saying.
re: napsterites would have artists starving, that's the same sort of hyperbole that you're accusing napster of throwing around. lots of bands without deals support themselves. lots of bands support themselves off of tours. they aren't starving. furthermore, there are lots of people who play music and have day jobs. finally, there are a lot of people who aren't in it for the money at all. if the asertion is that musicians and music will be worse off if you can't make money from records sales at the level you once could (although we have yet to see any real evidence of this), i'd say that that's dubious at best.
in fact, and here's the flawless victory, metallica's attitude towards the importance of a great live show early on, as compared to their record sales at the time, demonstrates that once, back before they started getting their tours sponsored by multinationals, once, they knew that a band can exist quite happily with crappy record sales and a fanatical following! they're the perfect example of why ruining cd sales as a business won't kill music! sure, it would've killed whitesnake and winger, but metallica? they'd've been fine.
so you can mourn the loss of winger if you want. but that's all you lose if record sales drop off cause of piracy. which they haven't, btw.
it's not bull. sure, they';re fighting for 'artistic ownership'. see, and that's something that matters wildly to artists. i heard once that f-ing marc chagall used to make viewers sign non-disclosure agreements. in fact, even though he was passionate about his art, he quit doing it cause so many people kept ripping him off.
artistic ownership is about (get this) *ownership*. intellectuall property rights are about (say it with me) property. metallica is not in this fight because of some kind of potential insult to the dignity and integrity of 'art', they don't even know what the words mean. they are in this fight because of property and ownership -- in short, they are in this fight to make sure that the current manner in which an artist can be paid stays in place. why? because of 'art'? no -- for *exactly* the same selfish reasons which you so debase in your post!
metallica is in this fight because they care about being paid for their art. van gogh died hungry in a mental institution or some shit. i'll take van gogh over these posession-posessed versace-suit poseurs any day of the week. get rid of em, let's get us some artists who aren't in it for the money. the assertion that the quality of music will falter in the absence of copyright protection for recorded music is at best unproven, and in some ways at odds with common sense.
sounds a bit silly and idealistic, i know, but some of my favorite fellow brooklynites, woody guthrie and they might be giants, have provided wonderful examples of how a musician might function and prosper, without a care for what's in it for them.
so, let's call a spade a spade. metallica, as far as this fight goes, are not artists, they are factory workers. they have no integrity -- they sell something of theirs at as high a margin as possible. they are not artists, not insofar as this discussion is concerned.
I agree -- both sides have a selfish concern.
The difference as i see it is that if the RIAA wins, Dr. Dre and some guys in suits get some money, and all those 'artists' who do this for the money and ho's get to keep making music. If the napster guys win, they make it slightly more difficult to make money off of recorded music, but make it possible for anyone to promote themselves, get people to their shows. The Metallicas of the world, in it for the bucks alone, because touring is such hard work, they get out. Tough.
So, yeah, the impetus for most people might be simply to steal. But the outcome, not uncoincidentally, i think, helps more people than it hurts. Conversely, sure, the RIAA is just protecting their bottom line, but in the end, this is pretty bad for everybody except the heavy-rotation TRL guys.
It's socially progressive, by accident, to steal music.
i know that n lane was in it -- my sentence was poorly phrased. it should have read something like, "i swear to god, if i have to listen to nathan lane doing his f-ing nathan lane voice in another f-ing animated film, i'm going to go down to the Cartoon Casting Factory and beat somebody senseless."
Now, I love the cartoons. I do.
And I love it when things are made to explode at high resolution for my amusement.
And I don't mind when the plot gets a little thin in order to make room for the above-mentioned childishness.
But Titan A.E. was honestly tough to sit through.
I'd read reviews comparing it to the Last Starfighter in that it has a cheesiness that was ultimately redeemed by its innocence bla bla bla, but they were way off. Really, the innocence is contrived, the voice-acting is cliched (am i the only one sick of cartoons that sound like nathan lane?), it's unoriginal, the heart-wrenching Armageddon-y "go back to the ship, i'll sacrifice myself" moment was laughably unmoving.
I was in a multiplex in brooklyn, and the worst part, the absolute worst part of the whole stupid experience was the fact that i could hear the soundtrack to Shaft pulsating through the walls, taunting me with its badness, saying, "henry, henry, henry -- how are you going to turn down the black private dick, ten times out of ten, etc, for matt damon and janine garafolo in outer space?"
so, umm, don't bother. or at least go see it at a theater where they're showing big momma's house. that wasy, when it sucks and you leave, you can comfort yourself by saying to your date, "hmm. could've been worse."
Figuring out how they get paid isn't my problem -- it's something that everybody in an information-selling industry is trying to figure out -- magazines, books, music, movies.
So Metallica 'isn't quite there yet'? Not my fault they (and everybody else, save for chuck d) are dragging their feet. Given the number of people who have gotten rich selling what appeared at first to be next-to-nothing online in the last ten years, am i really supposed to sit here until Lars gets around to learning Perl?
F this. An industry which becomes obselete because it hasn't even *tried* to keep up does *not* have any economic rights. No one has a right to make money through a particular devliery platform -- if in fact metallica owns the music and not the platform, they should be trying to get the music out via every available channel. the fact that they haven't shows that Lars is being disingenuous -- they aren't just lazy, they're in bed with the people who *do* need cds to hang around.
Metallica, Britney Spears, Milli Vanilli. Enjoy it while it lasts.
While we're on the subject, who paid for NetPD? You or your label, and don't tell me it's the same thing -- did one of you 4 cut a check, or not?
Now, let me get this straight:
The goal to which you aspire is the shutdown of napster.
The 335K list doesn't have any bearing on this. It's entirely divorced in both intent and possible results, from any legal proceeding.
So what's the point? More specifically, what if napster had said, "ok, well ban these guys."? Would you have dropped the lawsuit? and why go after the fans at all, if you're seeking a legal remedy?
See, the reason that I ask, and the point which I would like to see addressed is that you're talking out of both sides of your head regarding your intentions. If, indeed, this is about an idea, a principle, then the legal remedy you're seeking against the company is the sole a sufficient means of recourse. This list of fans -- all it really does, and correct me if i'm wrong -- is protect you from further *financial* incursions (sort of). In fact, if this had been about an idea and not money, limiting your list to anything less than every napster user can't really be justified.
So the lawsuit, fine, that's your right, your principles are at stake, whatever. But how on earth can you justify this list except in terms of protecting your own bottom lines?
the moronic rantings of the original article speak to the fact that, while everyone here understands both the theoretical advantages and the actual successes of various co-operative open software efforts, the vast, vast, vast (99+ percent?) of software buyers don't.
the paranoid part of my mind conjects that perhaps the author is deeply invested in MS or something, a subcionsciously-controlled FUD factory, but at the end of the day i suspect that it's nothing so interesting. Young's response, true as it was, is neccessary in larger quantity, and in more high-profile spaces, because most people just don't get it. they don't see the parallel between welding your hood shut and entrusting a software company to do the right thing, even if they won't let you or anyone else look inside.
for my part, i'm going down to the corner of broadway and vesey with a bullhorn. gonna stand in the sun and scream about open source to passers-by. aw, yeah.
It would have been nice if they'd at least addressed the social impact of their assertions. How do we fit this study in with the fact that Pokemon games have held four or five of the top ten weekly sales spots for the last 18 months or so? Add in a sports game, Donkey Kong 64 (best selling game in us last year, accdng to Nintendo), and the great bulk of games being sold (not to college students, but to everyone) wind up being rather non-violent. I mean, look at these charts (from ign64.com, 2dec99):
1. Pokemon Yellow, Nintendo, Game Boy
2. NBA Live 2000, Electronic Arts, Playstation
3. Pokemon Blue, Nintendo, Game Boy
4. Pokemon Red, Nintendo, Game Boy
5. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Capcom, Playstation
6. WWF Wrestlemania 2000, THQ Inc, Nintendo 64
7. Pokemon Pinball, Nintendo, Game Boy Color
8. Pokemon Snap, Nintendo, Nintendo 64
9. NBA 2K, Sega, Dreamcast
10. Knockout Kings 2000, Electronic Arts, Playstation
Where's doom? Where's Mortal Kombat? OK, resident evil is pretty f-ed up, but it's a flash in the pan compared to the *five* pokemons on there, most of which are still on the charts right now.
Let's not overstate the dangers of video games. even if they're dangerous (which they're not) most of them are pokemon, or jet force gemini or ape escape or zelda, so who cares?
This is exactly what I said. I mean, it probably hurts my stand (that VGames aren't that bad for you, considering), since blowing a guy's head off now looks a lot more like blowing a guy's head off.
Plus the mario brothers stuff was hysterical. sure, and chu chu rocket's a violent game, too, what with all them cats eatin the mice.
I haven't gotten very far into the article, but they'd be carrying a lot more weight with me if they'd spelled Mortal Kombat correctly in the headline.....
but the fact of the matter is that a $15 billion endowment, even if the kids have to use windows, gets a lot of underprivileged kids online, kids who otherwise wouldn't have the tools to compete. do i like the propogation of windows? no. but if i have to choose between giving a poor kid a windows pc and giving them no pc at all, who the heck am i to say that we shouldn't let them learn something very useful, even if it's maybe not the best possible thing ?
that is, you're letting linux fever blind you to the fact that charity is about helping others first, and making os distinctions second, or third, or fiftieth or something.
this money, i'm not sure of why he gave it, but i know that it immunizes a lot of people, it does a lot of other good. does it make gates look good? of course, and it should. he's donated more than you, or me, or my parents, or yours, or, probably your company, or mine. don't talk to me about %, either -- billions of dollars are billions of dollars, and he's supposedly giving most of it away upon his death, anyway, rather than willing it to his kids.
he's not my favorite, and ms is not my favorite, but we can be thankful that at least his monopolization or the intel os market has a charitable bent to it at the end of the day. it's far far better than nothing, and far far better than he had to do, so stop bashing the guy.
So what are we actually worried about it? This is the most abusable thing ever, which is why it's not a worry.
/.ers who disapprove of this thing, we each phone WAVE 5 times a day, and all of a sudden the whole process collapses. Can't work. Signal to noise ratio approaches zero, and WAVE won't work. This worries me none.
In case the Re: is lost on you, all we need to do is get 1000
Now, a less abuse-prone process with similar intent, that's a problem, but WAVE? Ha.
...have been greatly exaggerated. By this evening, we'll all be back to talking about f-ing Elian. This ruling doesn't carry much weight with non-geeks -- they don't want choice, they want peace of mind.
Now, i know this sucks, and I know that peace of mind, with respect to an os, should come from a knowledge and understanding that you're using something reliable, flexible, and as easy to use as the first two constraints allow for. But the average bear (oh, god, another post condescending re: "average folks") is easily fooled by brand image, complacency, FUD, and any number of other things. They don't *want* a choice. My office runs Office, and so, probably, does yours.
Choices will proliferate, now, but they can't market the way that MS can, and as the kind folks at RC cola will tell you, brand loyalty can be a bitch to overcome. There's been linux for years now, and Mac OS -- this entire mob of us, on any other day of the year, would be talking about how we don't need corporations to produce good software, and yet here we are talking about how finally, with corporations free from MS, good software can finally be produced? The freedoms and the products have been around for years, a bit restricted by MS, and linux is a good example of the decline of MS's control. And yet, there's little decline in market share.
So I'd say that we've been post-ms-tech-monopoly for a while, and it doesn't really matter, cause they've got the name, and it's a name that bothers me, but not my dad or my boss. Legal remedies won't change the fact that Microsoft is the Kleenex of softwares.
This article contains the best discussion of why we can't trust MS's intentions with regards to consle gaming any more than in ay other arena. The strategy is textbook by now: perceive of a threat to your hegemony, release specs for a super-powerful, industry-breaking alternative that you may or may not have plans to produce, and the 3d party developers for the competitor will hesitate -- "should i wait and develop for this monster supermachine that MS is building?" Development for the competitor is slowed, and everybody loses except MS, who hides in the vapor until they can address the threat in some way that doesn't actually involve producing anything.
This sucks for gamers. I, for one, am pissed as hell at the idea that MS is worried about digital home delivery from Sony's PS2, and has chosen to f up *my* gaming opportunities because of it.
*sigh* Is anything safe from them? i would be willing to wager that if they announced a super automobile, 300 mph top speed, 900 mpg, with 200 cupholders, a heads-up in-winshield dvd player and a laser for shooting at pedestrians, to be introduced, maybe, in 2003, ford's stock would drop. this is vapor. it's marketing, and it sucks.
so, i work at a major direct-marketing company, doing modeling and segmentation for the purposes of maximizing the impacts of direct mail campaigns. i don't love what i do, but the math is fun and i get to program (btw, im iso work, math, perl, sas, nyc? :).
anyway, having been in this position for a while, i've becme acutely aware of not only how much information is available on your average Joe Consumer, but also how many varied hands this info passes through before magically being transmogrified into a piece of junk mail. a couple of months ago i got tired of the constant reminder in my own mailbox of how shady this all is, and i drew up letters to the dma, equifax, experian, and others to terminate their rights to traffic in my data.
fine. ok, so i'm a hypocrite, but worse than that, i mentioned to a peer, in confidence, that i was 'opting out'. next thing i know, i'm called into a superior's office, and without putting my personally paranoid spin on things, i'll simply describe the proceedings as an inquisition into my loyalty.
now, don't get me wrong -- i guess i shouldn't have mentioned it, and i should probably go into a line of work less troublesome for me, ethically. but the thing that wierds me out is the reaction that i should have no problem sacrificing my privacy, and that if i'm offended, i'm going to wind up getting in bad with management.
not the worst, though: the more of my non-tech friends i tell about how dirty my involvement in this process occasionally makes me feel, the more i hear that they don't mind, or don't think it's as bad as i say. they call me paranoid, and refuse or fail to draw the link between, in this case, junk mail and an invasion of their privacy.
now, don't post calling me a self-loathing scumbag -- i've got to make a living, and doing math tricks in washington square park doesn't pay as well as you might think. the point of my story is to provide a look at exactly how negatively any attitude other than complete surrender of one's information privacy can make one look, *has* made me look.
on the liner of radiohead's most recent single, they've written that the innocent have nothing to fear from the rapidly-expanding data industry. what follows from this attitude is that an individual who chooses to avoid this process of information buying, selling, and processing, is already in a position of issuing a tacit, unspoken admission of some sort of guilt.
$149 -- as everyone has been pointing out, this is ridiculous, seeing as how you couldn't buy several of the individual components for that price, and, even given drops in prices, this time next year, there's no way that the entire unit costs that amount. The DVD licensing alone would drive the cost above $200 bucks, that's why nintendo's next gen machine won't play DVD videos.
2001 -- yeah, ok. A machine with no announced specs, no announced 3d party developers, from a company that hasn't produced a piece of hardware this interesting since, um, ever, and I'm supposed to believe that it's going to hit a few months after the PS2? Maybe they squeeze it in by Christmas, but not at $149. And they sure as hell can't make it in the market alone, as consoles live and die by 3d party involvement. do we really think that ms *or* game developers are going to like the sound of that?
Sony -- i'm honestly scared of the PS2. it's a monster, and it's going to shape the rest of the market. by the time this supposed console hits the market, sony expects to have sold in excess of 10 million ps2's. where's the market for a machine which, while it has a hd, doesn't give any indications that it's oing to much more powerful, from a graphics rendering standpoint, than sony's machine? the ps2 will have a hard drive, probably larger than 4 gig, by the end of next year, anyway.
now, i could be wrong. and i'd love to be, cause there's no room for a 4th console right now, and i'd love to see ms fail in an attempt to strong-arms its way into a market it knows nothing about and in which it has no experience.
you've got to add to this the fact that console games and pc games are totally different and cater to totally different audiences. microsoft's crappy sidewinder controller wouldn't fly for a second with console gamers, next to dreamcast and sony's new analog controllers. console gamers don't want to play the sims, and pc gamers don't want to play soul caliber. so where's the market for what's essentially a windows pc without a mouse or keyboard when it's being marketed as a game console? have you tried playing quake 3 without keyboard or mouse?
best of luck, bill. here's hoping you know wat you're doing.