My first mp3 player, which is still kicking around in drawer or a closeted box, was a Creative Nomad II MG. $250 for 64 mb and $100 for a 128 mb mmc card -- $350 total. For that, I got a player with controls that were so awkwardly placed on the sides that even after a year of steady use, I had to actually look at it to change songs -- it was ridiculously easy to delete songs instead of skip them. The screen was extra small too.
Several years later I picked up a refurbed ipod for half the price with 15 gb of storage and controls I could use without looking at them. I recently got an 80 gb model, refurb, for half the price of my Creative, and the controls are even better than my old 15 gb model -- as long as I'm not searching through my library, I can control it "eyes-free" effortlessly and without thinking about it. Now, I'm sure most players don't have controls as dreadful as my Creative, but the fact the ipod is easy to use is not some kind of reality distortion event. The ipod is objectively better designed because I can adjust the volume and skip songs without looking at it. With the Nomad, anytime you pressed a button without looking I risked random outcomes up to and including song deletion. Reality distortion would be thinking that the Nomad was better than an ipod.
If "The Power of Nightmares" is to be believed, and it does seem like an excellent BBC documentary, the neo-cons and conservative muslim movements have similar roots in a reaction against decadence within the homelands. Both have profited from each other. I don't think it's as simple as a "West==Evil" argument.
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
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Ubuntu Kung Fu
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Another option for bookish people is "Unix in Plain English". My copy is a bit dated being from 1994, but it looks like there is second edition. It has a nice table of "If you want to _______, Use the UNIX command:____". It also has a DOS/UNIX equivalency table which used to be quite handy for me, till I forgot all the DOS stuff. It also has a sort of abbreviated man page for many commands with the thing most lacking about most man pages: examples.
I think we tend to agree. 90 years post death is pretty darn long. The only modification I'd like to see with the 14+14 (or 20+20) suggestion of yours is that it be X+X years, or the life of the creator, whichever is longer, while copyright is held by an actual person. For non-human entities, it would simply be X+X. Like you, I think 40 years is adequate to recoup expenses on the work. It certainly would be for me, as I just turned 40.
If you, an artist and want to make money, keep producing art. That simple. Works for every other job, you are not superhuman deserving different treatment.
A typical artist will have to try many times before making a profit on something. The recompense for the successful idea pays for the ones that don't pay off. Making art isn't like standing on an assembly line making widgets. It's easy to value the labor per widget, i.e., (hourly wage + other labor costs) / (widgets per hour). But how do you value the years of failure and practice it takes to get a piece of art that succeeds? While 90 years may be a bit on the long side to be able reap some benefit from a work, why should artists essentially get nothing: a pittance for what sells, and nothing for the all the work that didn't, but was crucial in making the piece that works possible? Such a system totally discourages arts.
I have my own business and my rates can seem high to people who don't understand that I don't earn X dollars/hour. That rate must pay staff salaries, rent, taxes, equipment, supplies, more taxes, services and utilities, and a few extra fees and taxes. I make decent money but it's really depressing to look at how little I keep of every dollar that comes in the door. Artists face similar self-employment hurdles -- the works that pay need to cover the works that don't, plus the time necessary to fail enough to succeed again. In art, failure is a huge amount of the overhead.
I would have liked to have been an artist, but I wasn't brave enough. I chose a permanent day job, and to dabble in my spare time. To be an artist, you have to work your tail off to get started, then you have to work like mad to make even a basic living, and then you have to have worry about how everyone seems to feel entitled to your work for a pittance or nothing. It takes a lot of guts to go that route and I didn't have them. Although the art I would have chosen is a physical sort, I do have a lot of empathy for people who make things that can be trivially copied these days. It must seem so pointless to spend so many years eating ramen and working hard to come up with a good idea, just to fulfill the sense of entitlement of the P2P community.
Yes -- it was written in a victorian style. If you ever do get a chance to read it, or listen to the unabridged book on tape as I've done, I'd highly recommend it. The book on tape is exceptionally well done.
Agreed, although it would be more polite to notify them. After all, it takes virtually no effort on AOL's part.
Man, AOL sucks. First they took away no-cost bimonthly floppies with free delivery, and now free web space to boot. That's more than impolite -- they've ruined data storage options for untold millions.
That's way off. You cannot win at tennis by missing the ball. You cannot win at PoP by missing the jump. In tennis, your partner will immediately serve another ball to you and you immediately get to try again -- trying again is not winning, it's trying again. In Pop if you miss a jump, you get to try again immediately too, but you still have to make the jump.
In most video games, and this is precisely why I stopped buying them, if you miss that tennis ball, you are transported back home, have to drive 10 minutes to the tennis court where your partner will serve another shot. Miss, you get transported home... in other words, you get to try 6 times/hr to hit the ball and spend most of the game just killing time. In real life, you'd be trying 60 times/hr. because you don't get sent home for missing the ball.
Game designers have conflated "time consuming" with "challenging". Many challenging things in life are time consuming and doing the work to meet the challenge is satisfying. Not all time consuming activities are challenging and satisfying, e.g., standing in line to get a new license at the DMV. I'm sure not going to spend $40 to be bored. When the gaming industry figures this out, it'll do better.
It wasn't one time, and "not fair" is really flippant attitude. Jews have been repeatedly killed off or evicted from various nations around Europe multiple times over the last 1500 years and at various times, forbidden to own land, segregated, marriage restricted from non-Jews, or forbidden to engage in skilled trades. But things never change, everyone seems to love to hate Jews for no reason at all.
Are you kidding? It's 5 to 1 at least: pro-palestine trolls get modded up faster than bullets and anyone who has anything positive to say about Jews or Israel is modded down almost immediately. It's a convergence of the left and right prejudices (held for different reasons) against Jewish peoples.
Well, the French Revolution came about in part because of a social structure in which a very few were ridiculously wealthy, and the lion's share of the populace was practically destitute. Get a crowd of hungry malcontents milling around the apple store in your example, and prices may fall to affordable levels. Otherwise, the apples are likely to taken, the store burned, and the proprietor may lose important body parts.
How does it defeat the article's point. Human nature is to be cheap. It's also to be lazy. When you can be either cheap or lazy, I suspect many people will choose "lazy" -- for evidence, look at all the "if I won the lottery" dreaming people do. Sellers need to make sure their prices are just right so that lazy looks more attractive than cheap.
When I was in high school, I was broke, yet I still found it possible to buy records (and then in college, CDs). Back then, copyright infringemet was a much more expensive and time consuming process compared to today:
You had to personally know someone with a physical copy.
You had to buy cassette tapes, and the good ones were a few bucks each -- given inflation, let's say $5/tape in today's dollars (although tapes may not cost that much now, when minimum wage was $3.35/hr, a $3 tape seemed pricey).
Then you had to copy from record to tape in real time and making a 90 minute mix tape was quite time consuming.
Kids today may be similarly broke, but the effort required to get a copy of a song is negligible and virtually free. Anyway, kids are going to listen to music -- if they can't download illegitimate copies, they _will_ buy music. It's just that instead of 40,000 songs from 4000 albums, they'd have 50-100 bought albums by the time they headed off to college and a smattering of illegitimate "tapes". If I owned a record company or was part of a band with recording income, I'd be concerned because copying music has never been easier or cost so little.
Well, that's sort of the point isn't? The term "hacking" has multiple meanings some of which aren't related to each other and some of which are.
Why make language drab and limit copyright infringement to a single word? We don't do that for other activities, e.g., murder: off, end, terminate, hit, rub out, take out... taken alone each synonym has a completely unrelated meaning.
So if "piracy" can only refer to seaway robbery, does "hacking" only mean to chop a physical object in a random manner with a bladed instrument? Or is our language flexible and capable of multiple meanings and nuances?
Physical objects not connected to the internet are much simpler to secure if only for the fact that at most 100s of people would even be close to the data in the physical world, but millions are "close" to it in the digital world.
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My first mp3 player, which is still kicking around in drawer or a closeted box, was a Creative Nomad II MG. $250 for 64 mb and $100 for a 128 mb mmc card -- $350 total. For that, I got a player with controls that were so awkwardly placed on the sides that even after a year of steady use, I had to actually look at it to change songs -- it was ridiculously easy to delete songs instead of skip them. The screen was extra small too.
Several years later I picked up a refurbed ipod for half the price with 15 gb of storage and controls I could use without looking at them. I recently got an 80 gb model, refurb, for half the price of my Creative, and the controls are even better than my old 15 gb model -- as long as I'm not searching through my library, I can control it "eyes-free" effortlessly and without thinking about it. Now, I'm sure most players don't have controls as dreadful as my Creative, but the fact the ipod is easy to use is not some kind of reality distortion event. The ipod is objectively better designed because I can adjust the volume and skip songs without looking at it. With the Nomad, anytime you pressed a button without looking I risked random outcomes up to and including song deletion. Reality distortion would be thinking that the Nomad was better than an ipod.
I picked up a used iTouch. After jailbreaking, ssh works great.
If "The Power of Nightmares" is to be believed, and it does seem like an excellent BBC documentary, the neo-cons and conservative muslim movements have similar roots in a reaction against decadence within the homelands. Both have profited from each other. I don't think it's as simple as a "West==Evil" argument.
You can watch/DL from the internet archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Egypt isn't helping Hamas because they don't like the Muslim Brotherhood either.
Fuck random missile shooters.
Another option for bookish people is "Unix in Plain English". My copy is a bit dated being from 1994, but it looks like there is second edition. It has a nice table of "If you want to _______, Use the UNIX command:____". It also has a DOS/UNIX equivalency table which used to be quite handy for me, till I forgot all the DOS stuff. It also has a sort of abbreviated man page for many commands with the thing most lacking about most man pages: examples.
The violet blue in Macheads is the writer, not the porn star. If you're thinking of Noname Jane, think again.
Plus, the episodes with Dom-Kira were just 30 seconds away from pornographic.
I think we tend to agree. 90 years post death is pretty darn long. The only modification I'd like to see with the 14+14 (or 20+20) suggestion of yours is that it be X+X years, or the life of the creator, whichever is longer, while copyright is held by an actual person. For non-human entities, it would simply be X+X. Like you, I think 40 years is adequate to recoup expenses on the work. It certainly would be for me, as I just turned 40.
A typical artist will have to try many times before making a profit on something. The recompense for the successful idea pays for the ones that don't pay off. Making art isn't like standing on an assembly line making widgets. It's easy to value the labor per widget, i.e., (hourly wage + other labor costs) / (widgets per hour). But how do you value the years of failure and practice it takes to get a piece of art that succeeds? While 90 years may be a bit on the long side to be able reap some benefit from a work, why should artists essentially get nothing: a pittance for what sells, and nothing for the all the work that didn't, but was crucial in making the piece that works possible? Such a system totally discourages arts.
I have my own business and my rates can seem high to people who don't understand that I don't earn X dollars/hour. That rate must pay staff salaries, rent, taxes, equipment, supplies, more taxes, services and utilities, and a few extra fees and taxes. I make decent money but it's really depressing to look at how little I keep of every dollar that comes in the door. Artists face similar self-employment hurdles -- the works that pay need to cover the works that don't, plus the time necessary to fail enough to succeed again. In art, failure is a huge amount of the overhead.
I would have liked to have been an artist, but I wasn't brave enough. I chose a permanent day job, and to dabble in my spare time. To be an artist, you have to work your tail off to get started, then you have to work like mad to make even a basic living, and then you have to have worry about how everyone seems to feel entitled to your work for a pittance or nothing. It takes a lot of guts to go that route and I didn't have them. Although the art I would have chosen is a physical sort, I do have a lot of empathy for people who make things that can be trivially copied these days. It must seem so pointless to spend so many years eating ramen and working hard to come up with a good idea, just to fulfill the sense of entitlement of the P2P community.
Yes -- it was written in a victorian style. If you ever do get a chance to read it, or listen to the unabridged book on tape as I've done, I'd highly recommend it. The book on tape is exceptionally well done.
Man, AOL sucks. First they took away no-cost bimonthly floppies with free delivery, and now free web space to boot. That's more than impolite -- they've ruined data storage options for untold millions.
Have you been reading "The Diamond Age" recently?
Point, the second. Excellent Sig.
Alt: "Taco Hell"
What pocket change?
That's way off. You cannot win at tennis by missing the ball. You cannot win at PoP by missing the jump. In tennis, your partner will immediately serve another ball to you and you immediately get to try again -- trying again is not winning, it's trying again. In Pop if you miss a jump, you get to try again immediately too, but you still have to make the jump.
... in other words, you get to try 6 times/hr to hit the ball and spend most of the game just killing time. In real life, you'd be trying 60 times/hr. because you don't get sent home for missing the ball.
In most video games, and this is precisely why I stopped buying them, if you miss that tennis ball, you are transported back home, have to drive 10 minutes to the tennis court where your partner will serve another shot. Miss, you get transported home
Game designers have conflated "time consuming" with "challenging". Many challenging things in life are time consuming and doing the work to meet the challenge is satisfying. Not all time consuming activities are challenging and satisfying, e.g., standing in line to get a new license at the DMV. I'm sure not going to spend $40 to be bored. When the gaming industry figures this out, it'll do better.
It wasn't one time, and "not fair" is really flippant attitude. Jews have been repeatedly killed off or evicted from various nations around Europe multiple times over the last 1500 years and at various times, forbidden to own land, segregated, marriage restricted from non-Jews, or forbidden to engage in skilled trades. But things never change, everyone seems to love to hate Jews for no reason at all.
Are you kidding? It's 5 to 1 at least: pro-palestine trolls get modded up faster than bullets and anyone who has anything positive to say about Jews or Israel is modded down almost immediately. It's a convergence of the left and right prejudices (held for different reasons) against Jewish peoples.
Wish I had mod points for you -- positive ones BTW. Every message board on the internet is filled with this Palestine=angels, Jews=devils BS.
Well, the French Revolution came about in part because of a social structure in which a very few were ridiculously wealthy, and the lion's share of the populace was practically destitute. Get a crowd of hungry malcontents milling around the apple store in your example, and prices may fall to affordable levels. Otherwise, the apples are likely to taken, the store burned, and the proprietor may lose important body parts.
How does it defeat the article's point. Human nature is to be cheap. It's also to be lazy. When you can be either cheap or lazy, I suspect many people will choose "lazy" -- for evidence, look at all the "if I won the lottery" dreaming people do. Sellers need to make sure their prices are just right so that lazy looks more attractive than cheap.
Kids today may be similarly broke, but the effort required to get a copy of a song is negligible and virtually free. Anyway, kids are going to listen to music -- if they can't download illegitimate copies, they _will_ buy music. It's just that instead of 40,000 songs from 4000 albums, they'd have 50-100 bought albums by the time they headed off to college and a smattering of illegitimate "tapes". If I owned a record company or was part of a band with recording income, I'd be concerned because copying music has never been easier or cost so little.
Well, that's sort of the point isn't? The term "hacking" has multiple meanings some of which aren't related to each other and some of which are.
... taken alone each synonym has a completely unrelated meaning.
Why make language drab and limit copyright infringement to a single word? We don't do that for other activities, e.g., murder: off, end, terminate, hit, rub out, take out
So if "piracy" can only refer to seaway robbery, does "hacking" only mean to chop a physical object in a random manner with a bladed instrument? Or is our language flexible and capable of multiple meanings and nuances?
Physical objects not connected to the internet are much simpler to secure if only for the fact that at most 100s of people would even be close to the data in the physical world, but millions are "close" to it in the digital world.