Re:busting myths mistakenly
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've broken the nock off more than a few arrows in my time, which, in this time of aluminum arrows, is about as close to "splitting" an arrow as you can get. If you're a good shot, and you're shooting at a small target it's not unlikely that you could hit an arrow that's already there. Basic probability distribution says that.
You'd have to be more uber than me to be able to do it repeatedly, or to hit the arrow on purpose, but I've known people who could hit their own arrow, given a few shots.
If I'd seen them prove that one "busted", I would have been peeved as well. In the era that they're referring to, in England, archery was the only allowed sport...I bet there were some damn ferocious archers, who could do things that modern sport hunters would not be capable of. They bow hunted for birds for christs sake.
I played 3 and Vice city. All you got for killing people was whatever cash they had on 'em. I guess you can look at the money you make as your "score" but it's really not the same thing.
I myself was wondering how you get "points" in GTA. I mean, what the hell? Points? Are they acting out a sidescroller for christs sake?
Just one more example of a scriptwriter with no effing clue what he's talking about. Points? I guess they've got to come up with some motivation for the hypothetical psycho gamers to want to leave their basements.
Gamer1: Lets go on a citywide shooting spree! Gamer2: STFU and pass the cheetos. Gamer1: There will be points... Gamer2: POINTS?!?! Screw cheetos! Hand me my m16 baby!
They use Bittorrent, and if yer from Oz or anywhere on that side of the big pond, you'll find that the downloads are pretty dang slow, because it's all off peak for them. I imagine this is going to have the same problem...If everyone is downloading/hosting the same thing, cool, but otherwise you're going to be waiting a while.
All that theory seems to be based on buying things solely because they're expensive. I mean, he would have us believe that the cool kids would immediately go down the 2.50 new releases, buying each one and scorning the cheap songs. I don't see it working like that.
If I like a song and I see the album, and the album is cheap, I'll take a chance on buying it because I may like more stuff on the album. But if I like a song, and the album costs a fortune, no way will I buy it for just the one song.
And online, I never buy songs that I haven't heard before. Why would anyone do that? It's the proverbial pig in a poke...Don't buy something when you're ignorant of what you're buying, for the proverb impared. So if you already know, then the only reason they can be pushing the higher price is because they think they'll be able to sell enough units to make more profit than they would have made at a lower price.
Yea, the argument makes some sense when applied to movies, but no sense when applied to songs, because its a serious time investment to watch a whole movie. But you could listen to two or three whole albums in the same amount of time, while doing other things.
So if someone hears a song they like, and they go online to buy it, are they going to see the lower price and immediately think, "Oh no, I like a cheap song, I must be weird." or are they going to think, "Na na na na AND IT'S ON SALE!!! WOOT!"
I may be crazy, but if I like something and it turns out to be cheap, so much the better.
Psh. the "Blogosphere" is nothing compared to what you're going to be seeing in ten years, in terms of internet communities. The ability of bands to market themselves directly to focused communities for practically nothing will naturally lead away from the RIAA, whose primary advantage is having the ready cash to generate media buzz.
If you look, we're seeing it already. The indie music phenomenon is something that could never have happened without the internet, and the emergence of indie labels that actually turn a profit should seriously worry the RIAA.
The point is with the internet you can get global play for FREE. I agree with you, it's a bitch to get out of the local bar. But if you can market to a much larger audience without needing record company capital...Well, then it's different.
Right now, today, we're still at the dawn of that sort of internet community. Ten years from now, they're gonna be huge, and they're not going to be dominated by RIAA marketing blitzes. And when their media advantage goes away, what point will their existence serve?
Just my opinion, but that's one middleman whose days are seriously numbered.
Add Ani Difranco to the list. She owns her own label and personally makes almost 7 dollars a cd for each CD she sells. Considering she's sold more than 2 million CDs to date...Well, you can do the math.
In the old model it was hard as hell to market yourself to the point where you could go widescale without record company support. She pulled that off through word of mouth and a cult following comprised of like-minded individuals who told their friends to buy.
This is starting ten years ago...Imagine what could be done today.
Saw an interesting article talking about the music marketing abilities of social networking sites like MySpace, etc.
Basically, I think that that sort of thing will take the place of the mass market media blitz. Again, there is currently a scarcity of massmarket bandwidth, but that is rapidly going away. As more people start looking to online communities of like-minded individuals to find things that are to their taste, traditional media falls behind because it's much more difficult for a corporation to engage in that sort of marketing.
When bands can market themselves to a few million people by posting some of their songs for free on a social networking site, what more can the record companies offer? You know how hard they try to market to the youth demographic, and how often they fail?
You can do that here, actually. The only real requirement is passing the bar exam for your state, and to do that you have to display a certain familiarity with the law.
Supply and Demand trumps your "Sticky Pricey" theory, and when music became all digital, supply effectively went to infinity, because there is no limit to the number of copies of a single song that can be sold.
That being said, I think prices will drop because artists will find that it is more lucrative to sell songs for.25 without giving the RIAA a cut. Then there is the model piloted by webcomics, where the content is free, and supported by targeted advertising and the sale of branded merchandise.
Yea, we graduate less. "Greater Asia" to me suggests India, China, Korea, and everything in between...Otherwise known as more than a third of the people in the world. Just counting China and India vs the US we get:
2,500,000,000 / 300,000,000 = 8.3333 repeating
So, if they have 8 times as many people, they must graduate 8 times as many engineers right?
24,900 / 4400 = 5.66
Hmmmmm...It would seem that they only generate 5.6 times as many engineers. Only 67% of the number that we graduate, adjusted for population. Not to say that we shouldn't be doing better...I've no doubt we generate more lawyers than that! But it's just a scare number, not a real metric.
The thing is, the only thing that makes an addiction an addiction is the inability to function. It has nothing to do with time or money spent, it is all about how much it impacts your life.
They're very free with the term, when the reality is much less clear cut.
Eh. I've spent probably close to a month playing World of Warcraft since it came out (I can nail for a fact 26 days)...So 1/12th of my time over the last year. That qualifies as addiction by any standard. It's certainly more time than I spent eating.
In that time, I also got a job, got a raise, bought a house, lost 20 pounds, and kept my sideline freelancing business going.
I'm not seeing the problem. I was all geared up to play 5 hours of WoW last night, and I got a call at the last minute for some emergency network engineering, and I zipped off, made $380, and still got an hour and a half of WoW.
There are always habits that people don't deal with well. But don't lump all people together. If it doesn't impact your life negatively, who cares? I like my addiction. It's a hell of a lot better than watching TV.
Yea, I've got a win2k3 box hooked up as a Raster Image Processor...Basically it processes a binary image, makes it suitable for highrez film printing, does color separation, stuff like that. It takes a moderate amount of traffic, and needs to be rebooted at least once a week. Sometimes it goes into crash cycles on Fridays when the traffic is highest, and needs to be rebooted hourly.
I've got three antiquated Solaris boxes running older versions of the same software, and taking MORE traffic, that need to be rebooted about once a month.
I've gotta say, the software must be brutal because I've never had a Solaris machine have that many problems. Even so, Windows shows it's true colors as usual. On new hardware, with new software and all the patches, it's much less reliable than much older machines running a better os.
Like I speak arabic? But I still know what it means. To me, it's just a sign that people have no fricking idea what they're talking about. Supposed experts who know absolutely nothing, but aren't afraid to pass their appalling ignorance off as fact.
I think the flood of microsoft biased studies in the last year go a long way toward bolstering linux's claims. If they weren't to some extent true, microsoft wouldn't be trying so hard to discredit them.
I don't know why they bother honestly. My bosses bosses boss recently informed me that we use Microsoft almost exclusively. I just nodded and smiled, because it was easier to do that than explain that even our DESKTOPS are mostly Mac, and our infrastructure is 90% unix (Solaris, linux, bsd). The only people who really read those studies don't know what the hell they're talking about anyway.
I don't give a damn what microsoft's studies say. I've been using unix, linux, and windows for years, and unix and linux have ALWAYS been more reliable. I've got a 250,000 dollar machine hooked up to a brand new Dell box running 2003 that goes down as often as a nickel whore, and I am SICK of hearing from Microsoft that this is just my imagination!
Drives me nuts when idiot newspeople say, "The Al-Qaeda organization..." or, even better, "The Al-Qaeda bases in...", which of course translates to "the the base bases in..."
The thing I noticed with EQ was that people would get hooked into something...an epic weapon quest or something, and it would take MONTHS to finish it, and the whole time they'd be saying, "I just want to get my epic, then I can stop."
They did the same kind of thing with Jedi status, initially...you could get it, but it'd take for freaking ever. Seems like they're making it easy now, in an effort to draw in more players. I tell ya, I had enough and more of that game in the five free days I played. I could see grinding spanning out in all directions.
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That's some funny stuff.
I've broken the nock off more than a few arrows in my time, which, in this time of aluminum arrows, is about as close to "splitting" an arrow as you can get. If you're a good shot, and you're shooting at a small target it's not unlikely that you could hit an arrow that's already there. Basic probability distribution says that.
You'd have to be more uber than me to be able to do it repeatedly, or to hit the arrow on purpose, but I've known people who could hit their own arrow, given a few shots.
If I'd seen them prove that one "busted", I would have been peeved as well. In the era that they're referring to, in England, archery was the only allowed sport...I bet there were some damn ferocious archers, who could do things that modern sport hunters would not be capable of. They bow hunted for birds for christs sake.
You remember that old school Doom mod that put Barney in place of the Cacodemon? I think they only did that so people would use the chainsaw more.
I played 3 and Vice city. All you got for killing people was whatever cash they had on 'em. I guess you can look at the money you make as your "score" but it's really not the same thing.
I myself was wondering how you get "points" in GTA. I mean, what the hell? Points? Are they acting out a sidescroller for christs sake?
Just one more example of a scriptwriter with no effing clue what he's talking about. Points? I guess they've got to come up with some motivation for the hypothetical psycho gamers to want to leave their basements.
Gamer1: Lets go on a citywide shooting spree!
Gamer2: STFU and pass the cheetos.
Gamer1: There will be points...
Gamer2: POINTS?!?! Screw cheetos! Hand me my m16 baby!
I don't know about you, but "Barney and Friends" is MUCH more likely to send me on a killing spreee than your average violent video game.
They use Bittorrent, and if yer from Oz or anywhere on that side of the big pond, you'll find that the downloads are pretty dang slow, because it's all off peak for them. I imagine this is going to have the same problem...If everyone is downloading/hosting the same thing, cool, but otherwise you're going to be waiting a while.
All that theory seems to be based on buying things solely because they're expensive. I mean, he would have us believe that the cool kids would immediately go down the 2.50 new releases, buying each one and scorning the cheap songs. I don't see it working like that.
If I like a song and I see the album, and the album is cheap, I'll take a chance on buying it because I may like more stuff on the album. But if I like a song, and the album costs a fortune, no way will I buy it for just the one song.
And online, I never buy songs that I haven't heard before. Why would anyone do that? It's the proverbial pig in a poke...Don't buy something when you're ignorant of what you're buying, for the proverb impared. So if you already know, then the only reason they can be pushing the higher price is because they think they'll be able to sell enough units to make more profit than they would have made at a lower price.
That's just common sense.
Yea, the argument makes some sense when applied to movies, but no sense when applied to songs, because its a serious time investment to watch a whole movie. But you could listen to two or three whole albums in the same amount of time, while doing other things.
So if someone hears a song they like, and they go online to buy it, are they going to see the lower price and immediately think, "Oh no, I like a cheap song, I must be weird." or are they going to think, "Na na na na AND IT'S ON SALE!!! WOOT!"
I may be crazy, but if I like something and it turns out to be cheap, so much the better.
Psh. the "Blogosphere" is nothing compared to what you're going to be seeing in ten years, in terms of internet communities. The ability of bands to market themselves directly to focused communities for practically nothing will naturally lead away from the RIAA, whose primary advantage is having the ready cash to generate media buzz.
If you look, we're seeing it already. The indie music phenomenon is something that could never have happened without the internet, and the emergence of indie labels that actually turn a profit should seriously worry the RIAA.
The point is with the internet you can get global play for FREE. I agree with you, it's a bitch to get out of the local bar. But if you can market to a much larger audience without needing record company capital...Well, then it's different.
Right now, today, we're still at the dawn of that sort of internet community. Ten years from now, they're gonna be huge, and they're not going to be dominated by RIAA marketing blitzes. And when their media advantage goes away, what point will their existence serve?
Just my opinion, but that's one middleman whose days are seriously numbered.
Add Ani Difranco to the list. She owns her own label and personally makes almost 7 dollars a cd for each CD she sells. Considering she's sold more than 2 million CDs to date...Well, you can do the math.
In the old model it was hard as hell to market yourself to the point where you could go widescale without record company support. She pulled that off through word of mouth and a cult following comprised of like-minded individuals who told their friends to buy.
This is starting ten years ago...Imagine what could be done today.
Saw an interesting article talking about the music marketing abilities of social networking sites like MySpace, etc.
Basically, I think that that sort of thing will take the place of the mass market media blitz. Again, there is currently a scarcity of massmarket bandwidth, but that is rapidly going away. As more people start looking to online communities of like-minded individuals to find things that are to their taste, traditional media falls behind because it's much more difficult for a corporation to engage in that sort of marketing.
When bands can market themselves to a few million people by posting some of their songs for free on a social networking site, what more can the record companies offer? You know how hard they try to market to the youth demographic, and how often they fail?
You can do that here, actually. The only real requirement is passing the bar exam for your state, and to do that you have to display a certain familiarity with the law.
Supply and Demand trumps your "Sticky Pricey" theory, and when music became all digital, supply effectively went to infinity, because there is no limit to the number of copies of a single song that can be sold.
.25 without giving the RIAA a cut. Then there is the model piloted by webcomics, where the content is free, and supported by targeted advertising and the sale of branded merchandise.
That being said, I think prices will drop because artists will find that it is more lucrative to sell songs for
I actually decided to look up the number of JDs (juris doctor = Law Degree) compared to Engineering PhDs...
All I could find was 1997:
Engineering Phds: 5980
JDs: 39,331
Source
I don't think we need to worry about anyone overcoming our lawyer production anytime soon. =P
Yea, we graduate less. "Greater Asia" to me suggests India, China, Korea, and everything in between...Otherwise known as more than a third of the people in the world. Just counting China and India vs the US we get:
2,500,000,000 / 300,000,000 = 8.3333 repeating
So, if they have 8 times as many people, they must graduate 8 times as many engineers right?
24,900 / 4400 = 5.66
Hmmmmm...It would seem that they only generate 5.6 times as many engineers. Only 67% of the number that we graduate, adjusted for population. Not to say that we shouldn't be doing better...I've no doubt we generate more lawyers than that! But it's just a scare number, not a real metric.
The thing is, the only thing that makes an addiction an addiction is the inability to function. It has nothing to do with time or money spent, it is all about how much it impacts your life.
They're very free with the term, when the reality is much less clear cut.
Eh. I've spent probably close to a month playing World of Warcraft since it came out (I can nail for a fact 26 days)...So 1/12th of my time over the last year. That qualifies as addiction by any standard. It's certainly more time than I spent eating.
In that time, I also got a job, got a raise, bought a house, lost 20 pounds, and kept my sideline freelancing business going.
I'm not seeing the problem. I was all geared up to play 5 hours of WoW last night, and I got a call at the last minute for some emergency network engineering, and I zipped off, made $380, and still got an hour and a half of WoW.
There are always habits that people don't deal with well. But don't lump all people together. If it doesn't impact your life negatively, who cares? I like my addiction. It's a hell of a lot better than watching TV.
More like, "Creationists feeling the need to come up with Intelligent Design shows how much merit there is to The Theory of Evolution."
A good product doesn't feel like it has to shout about how good it is all the time. It's goodness speaks for itself.
Yea, I've got a win2k3 box hooked up as a Raster Image Processor...Basically it processes a binary image, makes it suitable for highrez film printing, does color separation, stuff like that. It takes a moderate amount of traffic, and needs to be rebooted at least once a week. Sometimes it goes into crash cycles on Fridays when the traffic is highest, and needs to be rebooted hourly.
I've got three antiquated Solaris boxes running older versions of the same software, and taking MORE traffic, that need to be rebooted about once a month.
I've gotta say, the software must be brutal because I've never had a Solaris machine have that many problems. Even so, Windows shows it's true colors as usual. On new hardware, with new software and all the patches, it's much less reliable than much older machines running a better os.
Like I speak arabic? But I still know what it means. To me, it's just a sign that people have no fricking idea what they're talking about. Supposed experts who know absolutely nothing, but aren't afraid to pass their appalling ignorance off as fact.
I think the flood of microsoft biased studies in the last year go a long way toward bolstering linux's claims. If they weren't to some extent true, microsoft wouldn't be trying so hard to discredit them.
I don't know why they bother honestly. My bosses bosses boss recently informed me that we use Microsoft almost exclusively. I just nodded and smiled, because it was easier to do that than explain that even our DESKTOPS are mostly Mac, and our infrastructure is 90% unix (Solaris, linux, bsd). The only people who really read those studies don't know what the hell they're talking about anyway.
I don't give a damn what microsoft's studies say. I've been using unix, linux, and windows for years, and unix and linux have ALWAYS been more reliable. I've got a 250,000 dollar machine hooked up to a brand new Dell box running 2003 that goes down as often as a nickel whore, and I am SICK of hearing from Microsoft that this is just my imagination!
Nope. It's just Qaeda.
Drives me nuts when idiot newspeople say, "The Al-Qaeda organization..." or, even better, "The Al-Qaeda bases in...", which of course translates to "the the base bases in..."
The thing I noticed with EQ was that people would get hooked into something...an epic weapon quest or something, and it would take MONTHS to finish it, and the whole time they'd be saying, "I just want to get my epic, then I can stop."
They did the same kind of thing with Jedi status, initially...you could get it, but it'd take for freaking ever. Seems like they're making it easy now, in an effort to draw in more players. I tell ya, I had enough and more of that game in the five free days I played. I could see grinding spanning out in all directions.