I think the irony of this situation is that we're already so far past the MAD model of weaponry (i.e. that there are already so many super weapons...) that whether or not a new technology provides a new superweapon is largely moot.
Not so. Tactical nukes would be extremely useful, and if done well they wouldn't be nearly as dangerous to the environment as you might think. However, nukes intended to be deployed atmospherically aren't really needed these days.
But when we get to space, and everything needs to scale up, nukes are going to be the little guy in the arsenal, and perfectly safe to use. I mean, they're not going to contribute that much more radiation and so forth, and they're not going to hurt any planetary atmospheres (or rather, we don't know that they will, and there's good reason to believe that they won't). Sure, nukes deployed in the atmosphere are a super-weapon, but when it comes time to knock down megaton deep space warships, nukes are gonna be kid's toys.
Oh shit, terrorists might blow up my house. Better not have one of those.
Oh shit, terrorists might take out one of those floating bridges. Well, I'll quit driving on them.
I'm getting so sick of people saying "We can't do xxx because terrorists will blow it up." Hey dude, if you're scared, stay home.
But this attitude:
The one in which modern technology can be helpless against a small group of fanatics capable of orchestrating suicide bomb attacks. Nuclear power used to be perfectly safe when done right - but it was in the last century. Now any US or European nuclear plant is actually nothing but a huge "KICK ME!" for the Al Quaedda boys.
Means the terrorists beat you. You lost, they won, now go drop your pants so they can enjoy the spoils of victory.
There's a helluva an idea. Either a media player that you can pour, or a media player so small it fits in a pore. Helluva an idea. Remember, you don't have to have a working model to patent it...
I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.
Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.
Probably not, for the same reason kids don't understand you when you baby-talk them. With kids, they hear the word the way the adults say it, presumably correctly. Then they speak it in their "I'm still learning to talk" accent. So I might say "later", but my daughter will say "waiter". I understand her because I've been hearing her trying to talk, and she understands me because it's my speech she's trying to emulate. But if I say "waiter" when I mean "later", she'll be confused.
Mind you, she knows that she's not perfectly emulating my speech, and she tries everyday to speak a little more clearly. This is the reason you don't baby-talk kids, and you don't imitate a foreign-speaker's accent when you talk to them. They won't learn the correct speech (assuming you're speaking it 'correctly', whatever that is), and most importantly for the foreign-speaker, they won't understand you. (It's less important that the kid understand you and more important that they hear the word correctly. Understanding will come with time, but breaking an accent you imposed on them will be very difficult, if not impossible) Also, mind you, it's perfectly ok to limit your vocabulary to theirs, if necessary, to get your message across. But in neither case will the person's vocabulary expand when you do that, so unless you're trying to say something of grave importance ("Your house is on fire! Call 9-1-1!"), you're better off going ahead and taking the time to teach the new vocabulary.:)
What are you referring to? Without GNU there wouldn't be GCC, the GPL, or GNU/Linux. I trust them to build complete, professional software more than I trust most other open source projects, and most commercial operations too.
*sigh* There's a reason I qualified my statement with "at least recently", because recently GNU has accepted a lot of projects that are either vapor, or will never reach the 1.0 stage. They also have a few (and I'm only giving one example) that have been beyond 1.0 for awhile but I still don't trust to run reliably, keep file formats compatible, and so forth. My example is GNUCash.
Open source development works, that is true. It works at least as often as the closed development model. In fact, it appears to me to work far more often. But it's not a silver bullet that makes software development a piece of cake, and there's plenty of bad/vapor open source software out there.:)
And don't forget this. Never forget this! GNU still hasn't put out a reliable kernel for their OS, which is why it's GNU/Linux, rather than just plain "GNU". How long has it been in development?
So, I'll trust GNU to give me a reliable case, shaving cream, aftershave lotion, and even the handle for my razor, but I'm getting the blade from Linus.
My question is, does the civil court have the authority to evaluate guilt in a criminal act on the way to proving liability? Is this common?
The assumption you're making is that a civil court would have to evaluate guilt in a criminal act on the way to proving liability. Take it from another direction:
OJ was declared liable for the act in the civil court. That doesn't mean he was guilty of actually murdering anybody. It's probably fair to say there's the possibility someone else was there, did it, and then later on he showed up and allowed himself to be circumstantially linked to the crime. I don't know that it's a huge possibility or not. Other factors influence whether or not he is liable of the crime.
I consider the fact that OJ got taken to civil court and successfully sued to be something that really really sucks. If he was guilty, I'd like to think that our justice system is good enough to have found him guilty, but I think it would have been better all the way around if he had gotten off scot-free without the civil case even happening.
Consider that it's now possible to sue someone for committing a crime and have them declared liable for the crime. Now what if someone is sued and found liable for the crime, but they didn't actually commit it? We have laws to make someone an accessory to a crime so they fall under criminal prosecution, and that's where it belongs.
I'm too sleepy to finish this, and I'm not a lawyer either.:)
Ex: "She stole my song!" "He stole my invention!". Both phrases are understood to mean that one person claimed another's idea as her own.
And in both examples, you basically took something that wasn't yours and claimed it as yours, so for people who took your version of it, they don't know about the original. Theft is a valid word in this case.
What about when you copy someone's song for millions of people, and every single time you tell them who made the song, the label it's recorded under, and so forth? Is that theft?
No. At worst, it's copyright infringement. The person receiving it knows who the original is. I've never downloaded a song that correctly said what song it was without saying who the band was. I have downloaded songs that were mis-named, probably with the intention of getting me to download it and hear someone else's music. In those cases, I had no way to find out who made the actual song I downloaded, just that I knew it wasn't the right song. Had I not known, I'd probably call it theft when I finally found out who's song it was and who's song I thought I had downloaded.
Let me guess, you didn't actually read about Mixonic's service.
See, it works like this. They host the online store, so you don't have to deal with taking credit cards. They take the money from the customer for you. Then, after collecting that money, they charge you $4. They also charge shipping + tax to the customer. At the end of the month, they send you a check, provided it's over a certain amount of money.
Mixonic is a free service to sign up for. You sign up for free. You upload your music, your artwork, and design your CD, all for free. Sure, you have to record it already. Sure, you have to get people over to your Mixonic store to buy the record. Marketing is your problem. Mixonic offers distribution of a hard CD.
Yeah, you know, the liner isn't the greatest, and neither is the case. But your no longer in a position where you need a record label. Web marketing is cheap, and easy. You build a website, you get some advertising on it (not much money there, probably), you do your shows. At your shows you give out something that directs people to your website. Whatever. And, you know, there's only one place people can buy your CD at that point. But there's plenty of people around the web who want to help.
So, show me a band who's not on an RIAA-affiliated, and I'll give them a link. They'll probably pick up somewhere between 10 and 50 new visitors from my site each day. I want a link in return, of course.:)
Of course, also, not so very long ago in what is now referred to as the '90s, it became fashionable to whine rather than look for a solution to your problem. Take it for what it's worth, I couldn't care less about whiny bands, and whiny people.
You know, I found this really neat website where you can find out all about who your senators and stuff voted for. I'm going to try submitting it as a story to slashdot, since many people ask how to find out this information.
Anyway, you can click on any senate session and see what votes were taken. Then you can click to find out how each senator voted.
What I agree with is an artist's right to protect the works he creates.
Aha. So, what does "RIAA" stand for, anyway? Do any of the As in RIAA stand for Artist?
Nope.
The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. They're not the Recording Artist Association of America. They exist to protect the record labels. *Not* the copyright holders. *Not* the 'artists'. *Not* the performers, entertainers, and so forth.
The Record Labels.
We don't need The Record Labels any longer, and they know it. Now we can distribute the music ourselves. For many many many many moons, the Record Labels have guaranteed that performers can only make money by playing their live shows, and now they're in a position where the performers are looking at the record labels and saying "Really? I don't need the money from those CDs because you've made absolutely mutherfucking certain I never see any of that money anyway. I don't care if people copy it."
Besides a few bands that actually have some power over their label, ALL PERFORMERS do not need the record label to perform and make money. That's why, I think, that the only bands complaining about P2P are the really big ones, like, oh, say, Metallica. If P2P had come along in 1981, would Metallica have bitched about it, or used it?
So the only thing we need now is recording tech, which we have. We also need some skill in mastering, which we don't necessarily have. There's a growing market, I think, for independent contract-based Audio Engineering. That's the only thing we still need that the record labels provide. But wait!
The record labels don't provide it? They can, but do they have to? Nope, many bands get it from their studio, which may or may not be owned by a label. There are plenty of indy studios not affiliated with any label....
And the DIY option is finally there. $500 for a computer and you can DIY. Beats the hell out of a $100,000 recording studio charging you $60/hour to record, but then the quality isn't there because you still need an Audio Engineer to put it there.
So, yeah, we don't need the record labels any more. They have spent the better part of the last century screwing performers and musicians because the performers and musicians needed them. Now they don't, and they're scared. They dug their own grave, made their own bed, etc.
you'll download the "molecular blueprint" for the GNU/shaver1.2, or whatever, and recycle local molecules into the forms you need.
Ummmm, look. I love GNU, don't get me wrong. I run GNU/Linux here at home. But I'd *never* use a GNU/shaver. Ever. Now, if there were a razor that I could download made by Mozilla.... I wouldn't use that either.
Hrm. Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to use most of the open source razors that might become available simply because most open source projects never get past 1.0 and become officially stable. I don't want to know what kind of bugs could possibly exist in a pre-1.0 piece of software.
And GNU, at least lately, doesn't have the greatest track record of reliable non-vapor software past the 1.0 stage...
The internet gives bands a way to finally break clear of record companies, and here you come along telling us that we need them. Do you work for the RIAA, by any chance?
Distributing CDs cost $4, you charge your customer however much you want and pocket the difference.
Recordingyourmusic doesn't cost a fortune, either, as long as you have the gear to make the music (which you obviously already have if you're playing gigs) and can make the basic connection from your gear to your computer's mic jack.
Well, now that you mention it, why don't we talk about why ESB was so great (and in my opinion is one of the best movies ever made)?;)
First, Star Wars wasn't that great of a movie. But the casting was a bit different. George Lucas lined everyone up and had them all work together, and he chose the group of actors that worked best as a team. That had the result of generating instant chemistry between the leads. This is the casting that essentially chose the actors for ESB. Second, the same set of actors had already been through one movie together, and they were playing familiar but growing characters. It was an opportunity for each actor/actress to personally grow with the movie, and they all took it (regardless of Mark Hamill's plunge into dorkdom). Star Wars also had cutting-edge special effects, and they carried into ESB with many of the techniques being perfected. It was a couple of movies that essentially defined where the special effects industry would go throughout the '80s. This is all ignoring the basic story, which was actually only pretty good. The direction, though, was great (Lucas didn't direct it). All in all, ESB was very well-put together from the ground up, and since it drew on previous experience, they were able to grow almost everything they did. There's very little way it could have been a bad movie, in fact.
Now let's look at Attack of the Clones, the sister movie to ESB.
First, the Phantom Menace was made using only already known special effects techniques. They didn't do their cutting edge stuff until Attack of the Clones. Casting was based more or less on actor/role, and *not* the team-oriented casting that was done for the original star wars. So there isn't enough chemistry on the scene. Direction and story both come from George Lucas himself. Lucas' biggest strength seems to be to tell people the work isn't "good enough", but if you leave him to do the work himself, it always sucks. So anyway, the story itself isn't as good because Lucas is writing all of it (he's offloading screenplay, I think). Most of the characters die in the first movie, or otherwise don't move on the second (or are already well-established characters, like Yoda and Obi-wan. Obi-Wan shouldn't be treated as a well-established character, though, but he is. There's also 3PO and R2D2 that are well-established already). And there's the huge gap in Anakin's age, meaning that while his character moves on and grows, the actor must be replaced completely.
So, for attack of the clones, they don't get to reuse much of Phantom Menace. They are re-using various plot devices from the original series, which kinda sucks. Further, it sucks that Quai-Gon isn't making the spectral appearances we were so fond of Obi-Wan for making. They basically built the whole movie from scratch, and rather than offload as much of the movie as possible to other people, Lucas micromanaged all aspects of production. There's no 'team' working on it, there is only Lucas. See, power passes from God to George.
Don't get me wrong, Attack of the Clones is very well put-together. It's an awesome movie, and I really like it. But its a movie that easily doesn't live up to it's position in the series, and it must be compared to ESB because it occupies the same position as ESB. If it were a freshman attempt in the series, it would really really rock. But as the sophomore attempt, it's a pretty sucky movie.
Wait until they have to use some poorly built online banking software or online billing system that blocks Mozilla users. Keeping people in the dark about what browser they're using will give them a reason to badmouth Mozilla for not working properly when they find out what you did.
Heh, I don't have those problems. I just run Konqueror reporting itself as IE to get around those problems.;)
(Yeah, I know: why don't you run Linux then? 'Cause I don't know how to get Peachtree Accounting, Timeslips, Matthew Bender Authority, Kleinrock's tax resources, and various other professional stuff working under it and am not motivated enough yet to figure it out.)
To be used solely as a steppingstone:
Set up Windows box with severely extreme firewall, opening *only* RDP ports. Setup Terminal Server on this box.
From Linux, use rdesktop to use the windows computer. It's an extra login, but you'll run all your apps natively in Windows and use them from a Linux desktop. Eventually, you'll start looking for replacements for this stuff in Linux, and you'll find them, no worries about that. But as long as you sit on that windows box, inertia will be the real reason you never make the switch. Unless you're not really being sincere about wanting to make the switch....
Either way, they choose to ask someone that posts on Slashdot to help them the first time, wouldn't they do it the second time? At least before calling tech support?
It is for this reason that I refuse to fix a windows computer for anyone. If you're not inclined to learn about your computer and fix it yourself, I'm not going to waste my time doing your dirty laundry. If you *really* want my help, you won't object when I wipe windows off your hard drive and throw on something I can configure once and be reasonably certain you can't break it.
There won't be any reason for me tell you "Don't run this" and "don't run that". See, I'll tell you once and only once "If you type in the root password to a dialog, and then your computer is mysteriously trashed, I'm not helping you."
So, yeah, anybody want me to fix their computer? You'll get it back with Linux on it.;)
You post on slashdot and you let a cable guy touch your computer? What _were_ you thinking?
No shit, man. Those cable guys aren't allowed to touch anything on my side of the cable router, including unplugging the ethernet cable from the cable router. If they need that done, I'll do it for 'em. Of course, they try very very hard not to give me tech support anyway because their script is for Windows-only single computer, not a small network of Linux boxes.;)
lastly, I bet this girl can pay for all her bandwith for the next hundred years if she put up some posters of herself on that bike in the hot zone for sale here on/. Or just run an auction for a one of a kind.
Ah hell yeah, I'd take that.:) I've never been a fan of posters of hot chicks on motorcycles, either, but that's one poster that would be far more than sexy. There's a girl that's appealing on all levels.;)
Giving the drink to people AFTER the radioactive cloud passed was pretty much pointless and was more of a gesture that the government does something than any real help. (Don't blame the polish government though. They didn't know until it was too late too.)
This is the same government that built glass-bottom boats, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, perhaps, in women?
Um, no, it's more like pot. It just enhances traits that are already there.
Put a pound of almost anything in my lungs, and I can bet my health wouldn't be the best.
You know, there's a blowjob joke in there somewhere...
I think the irony of this situation is that we're already so far past the MAD model of weaponry (i.e. that there are already so many super weapons...) that whether or not a new technology provides a new superweapon is largely moot.
Not so. Tactical nukes would be extremely useful, and if done well they wouldn't be nearly as dangerous to the environment as you might think. However, nukes intended to be deployed atmospherically aren't really needed these days.
But when we get to space, and everything needs to scale up, nukes are going to be the little guy in the arsenal, and perfectly safe to use. I mean, they're not going to contribute that much more radiation and so forth, and they're not going to hurt any planetary atmospheres (or rather, we don't know that they will, and there's good reason to believe that they won't). Sure, nukes deployed in the atmosphere are a super-weapon, but when it comes time to knock down megaton deep space warships, nukes are gonna be kid's toys.
Oh shit, terrorists might blow up my house. Better not have one of those.
Oh shit, terrorists might take out one of those floating bridges. Well, I'll quit driving on them.
I'm getting so sick of people saying "We can't do xxx because terrorists will blow it up." Hey dude, if you're scared, stay home.
But this attitude:
The one in which modern technology can be helpless against a small group of fanatics capable of orchestrating suicide bomb attacks. Nuclear power used to be perfectly safe when done right - but it was in the last century. Now any US or European nuclear plant is actually nothing but a huge "KICK ME!" for the Al Quaedda boys.
Means the terrorists beat you. You lost, they won, now go drop your pants so they can enjoy the spoils of victory.
in a porable media player
There's a helluva an idea. Either a media player that you can pour, or a media player so small it fits in a pore. Helluva an idea. Remember, you don't have to have a working model to patent it...
I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.
"He had a minkey."
(obligatory Clouseau quote)
Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.
Probably not, for the same reason kids don't understand you when you baby-talk them. With kids, they hear the word the way the adults say it, presumably correctly. Then they speak it in their "I'm still learning to talk" accent. So I might say "later", but my daughter will say "waiter". I understand her because I've been hearing her trying to talk, and she understands me because it's my speech she's trying to emulate. But if I say "waiter" when I mean "later", she'll be confused.
Mind you, she knows that she's not perfectly emulating my speech, and she tries everyday to speak a little more clearly. This is the reason you don't baby-talk kids, and you don't imitate a foreign-speaker's accent when you talk to them. They won't learn the correct speech (assuming you're speaking it 'correctly', whatever that is), and most importantly for the foreign-speaker, they won't understand you. (It's less important that the kid understand you and more important that they hear the word correctly. Understanding will come with time, but breaking an accent you imposed on them will be very difficult, if not impossible) Also, mind you, it's perfectly ok to limit your vocabulary to theirs, if necessary, to get your message across. But in neither case will the person's vocabulary expand when you do that, so unless you're trying to say something of grave importance ("Your house is on fire! Call 9-1-1!"), you're better off going ahead and taking the time to teach the new vocabulary. :)
What are you referring to? Without GNU there wouldn't be GCC, the GPL, or GNU/Linux. I trust them to build complete, professional software more than I trust most other open source projects, and most commercial operations too.
*sigh* There's a reason I qualified my statement with "at least recently", because recently GNU has accepted a lot of projects that are either vapor, or will never reach the 1.0 stage. They also have a few (and I'm only giving one example) that have been beyond 1.0 for awhile but I still don't trust to run reliably, keep file formats compatible, and so forth. My example is GNUCash.
Open source development works, that is true. It works at least as often as the closed development model. In fact, it appears to me to work far more often. But it's not a silver bullet that makes software development a piece of cake, and there's plenty of bad/vapor open source software out there. :)
And don't forget this. Never forget this! GNU still hasn't put out a reliable kernel for their OS, which is why it's GNU/Linux, rather than just plain "GNU". How long has it been in development?
So, I'll trust GNU to give me a reliable case, shaving cream, aftershave lotion, and even the handle for my razor, but I'm getting the blade from Linus.
My question is, does the civil court have the authority to evaluate guilt in a criminal act on the way to proving liability? Is this common?
The assumption you're making is that a civil court would have to evaluate guilt in a criminal act on the way to proving liability. Take it from another direction:
OJ was declared liable for the act in the civil court. That doesn't mean he was guilty of actually murdering anybody. It's probably fair to say there's the possibility someone else was there, did it, and then later on he showed up and allowed himself to be circumstantially linked to the crime. I don't know that it's a huge possibility or not. Other factors influence whether or not he is liable of the crime.
I consider the fact that OJ got taken to civil court and successfully sued to be something that really really sucks. If he was guilty, I'd like to think that our justice system is good enough to have found him guilty, but I think it would have been better all the way around if he had gotten off scot-free without the civil case even happening.
Consider that it's now possible to sue someone for committing a crime and have them declared liable for the crime. Now what if someone is sued and found liable for the crime, but they didn't actually commit it? We have laws to make someone an accessory to a crime so they fall under criminal prosecution, and that's where it belongs.
I'm too sleepy to finish this, and I'm not a lawyer either. :)
Ex: "She stole my song!" "He stole my invention!". Both phrases are understood to mean that one person claimed another's idea as her own.
And in both examples, you basically took something that wasn't yours and claimed it as yours, so for people who took your version of it, they don't know about the original. Theft is a valid word in this case.
What about when you copy someone's song for millions of people, and every single time you tell them who made the song, the label it's recorded under, and so forth? Is that theft?
No. At worst, it's copyright infringement. The person receiving it knows who the original is. I've never downloaded a song that correctly said what song it was without saying who the band was. I have downloaded songs that were mis-named, probably with the intention of getting me to download it and hear someone else's music. In those cases, I had no way to find out who made the actual song I downloaded, just that I knew it wasn't the right song. Had I not known, I'd probably call it theft when I finally found out who's song it was and who's song I thought I had downloaded.
Let me guess, you didn't actually read about Mixonic's service.
See, it works like this. They host the online store, so you don't have to deal with taking credit cards. They take the money from the customer for you. Then, after collecting that money, they charge you $4. They also charge shipping + tax to the customer. At the end of the month, they send you a check, provided it's over a certain amount of money.
Mixonic is a free service to sign up for. You sign up for free. You upload your music, your artwork, and design your CD, all for free. Sure, you have to record it already. Sure, you have to get people over to your Mixonic store to buy the record. Marketing is your problem. Mixonic offers distribution of a hard CD.
Yeah, you know, the liner isn't the greatest, and neither is the case. But your no longer in a position where you need a record label. Web marketing is cheap, and easy. You build a website, you get some advertising on it (not much money there, probably), you do your shows. At your shows you give out something that directs people to your website. Whatever. And, you know, there's only one place people can buy your CD at that point. But there's plenty of people around the web who want to help.
So, show me a band who's not on an RIAA-affiliated, and I'll give them a link. They'll probably pick up somewhere between 10 and 50 new visitors from my site each day. I want a link in return, of course. :)
Of course, also, not so very long ago in what is now referred to as the '90s, it became fashionable to whine rather than look for a solution to your problem. Take it for what it's worth, I couldn't care less about whiny bands, and whiny people.
You know, I found this really neat website where you can find out all about who your senators and stuff voted for. I'm going to try submitting it as a story to slashdot, since many people ask how to find out this information.
Anyway, you can click on any senate session and see what votes were taken. Then you can click to find out how each senator voted.
Here ya go
What I agree with is an artist's right to protect the works he creates.
Aha. So, what does "RIAA" stand for, anyway? Do any of the As in RIAA stand for Artist?
Nope.
The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. They're not the Recording Artist Association of America. They exist to protect the record labels. *Not* the copyright holders. *Not* the 'artists'. *Not* the performers, entertainers, and so forth.
The Record Labels.
We don't need The Record Labels any longer, and they know it. Now we can distribute the music ourselves. For many many many many moons, the Record Labels have guaranteed that performers can only make money by playing their live shows, and now they're in a position where the performers are looking at the record labels and saying "Really? I don't need the money from those CDs because you've made absolutely mutherfucking certain I never see any of that money anyway. I don't care if people copy it."
Besides a few bands that actually have some power over their label, ALL PERFORMERS do not need the record label to perform and make money. That's why, I think, that the only bands complaining about P2P are the really big ones, like, oh, say, Metallica. If P2P had come along in 1981, would Metallica have bitched about it, or used it?
So the only thing we need now is recording tech, which we have. We also need some skill in mastering, which we don't necessarily have. There's a growing market, I think, for independent contract-based Audio Engineering. That's the only thing we still need that the record labels provide. But wait!
The record labels don't provide it? They can, but do they have to? Nope, many bands get it from their studio, which may or may not be owned by a label. There are plenty of indy studios not affiliated with any label....
And the DIY option is finally there. $500 for a computer and you can DIY. Beats the hell out of a $100,000 recording studio charging you $60/hour to record, but then the quality isn't there because you still need an Audio Engineer to put it there.
So, yeah, we don't need the record labels any more. They have spent the better part of the last century screwing performers and musicians because the performers and musicians needed them. Now they don't, and they're scared. They dug their own grave, made their own bed, etc.
Now fuck 'em.
you'll download the "molecular blueprint" for the GNU/shaver1.2, or whatever, and recycle local molecules into the forms you need.
Ummmm, look. I love GNU, don't get me wrong. I run GNU/Linux here at home. But I'd *never* use a GNU/shaver. Ever. Now, if there were a razor that I could download made by Mozilla.... I wouldn't use that either.
Hrm. Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to use most of the open source razors that might become available simply because most open source projects never get past 1.0 and become officially stable. I don't want to know what kind of bugs could possibly exist in a pre-1.0 piece of software.
And GNU, at least lately, doesn't have the greatest track record of reliable non-vapor software past the 1.0 stage...
All right, let Courtney say it again.
The internet gives bands a way to finally break clear of record companies, and here you come along telling us that we need them. Do you work for the RIAA, by any chance?
Distributing CDs cost $4, you charge your customer however much you want and pocket the difference.
Recording your music doesn't cost a fortune, either, as long as you have the gear to make the music (which you obviously already have if you're playing gigs) and can make the basic connection from your gear to your computer's mic jack.
Any questions?
Question: What's more vacuous than putting Family Guy into the same category as Friends?
Answer: Wondering "what's more vacuous than putting Family Guy into the same category as Friends".
Well, now that you mention it, why don't we talk about why ESB was so great (and in my opinion is one of the best movies ever made)? ;)
First, Star Wars wasn't that great of a movie. But the casting was a bit different. George Lucas lined everyone up and had them all work together, and he chose the group of actors that worked best as a team. That had the result of generating instant chemistry between the leads. This is the casting that essentially chose the actors for ESB. Second, the same set of actors had already been through one movie together, and they were playing familiar but growing characters. It was an opportunity for each actor/actress to personally grow with the movie, and they all took it (regardless of Mark Hamill's plunge into dorkdom). Star Wars also had cutting-edge special effects, and they carried into ESB with many of the techniques being perfected. It was a couple of movies that essentially defined where the special effects industry would go throughout the '80s. This is all ignoring the basic story, which was actually only pretty good. The direction, though, was great (Lucas didn't direct it). All in all, ESB was very well-put together from the ground up, and since it drew on previous experience, they were able to grow almost everything they did. There's very little way it could have been a bad movie, in fact.
Now let's look at Attack of the Clones, the sister movie to ESB.
First, the Phantom Menace was made using only already known special effects techniques. They didn't do their cutting edge stuff until Attack of the Clones. Casting was based more or less on actor/role, and *not* the team-oriented casting that was done for the original star wars. So there isn't enough chemistry on the scene. Direction and story both come from George Lucas himself. Lucas' biggest strength seems to be to tell people the work isn't "good enough", but if you leave him to do the work himself, it always sucks. So anyway, the story itself isn't as good because Lucas is writing all of it (he's offloading screenplay, I think). Most of the characters die in the first movie, or otherwise don't move on the second (or are already well-established characters, like Yoda and Obi-wan. Obi-Wan shouldn't be treated as a well-established character, though, but he is. There's also 3PO and R2D2 that are well-established already). And there's the huge gap in Anakin's age, meaning that while his character moves on and grows, the actor must be replaced completely.
So, for attack of the clones, they don't get to reuse much of Phantom Menace. They are re-using various plot devices from the original series, which kinda sucks. Further, it sucks that Quai-Gon isn't making the spectral appearances we were so fond of Obi-Wan for making. They basically built the whole movie from scratch, and rather than offload as much of the movie as possible to other people, Lucas micromanaged all aspects of production. There's no 'team' working on it, there is only Lucas. See, power passes from God to George.
Don't get me wrong, Attack of the Clones is very well put-together. It's an awesome movie, and I really like it. But its a movie that easily doesn't live up to it's position in the series, and it must be compared to ESB because it occupies the same position as ESB. If it were a freshman attempt in the series, it would really really rock. But as the sophomore attempt, it's a pretty sucky movie.
Wait until they have to use some poorly built online banking software or online billing system that blocks Mozilla users. Keeping people in the dark about what browser they're using will give them a reason to badmouth Mozilla for not working properly when they find out what you did.
Heh, I don't have those problems. I just run Konqueror reporting itself as IE to get around those problems. ;)
Rue the day? Who says that anymore?
(Yeah, I know: why don't you run Linux then? 'Cause I don't know how to get Peachtree Accounting, Timeslips, Matthew Bender Authority, Kleinrock's tax resources, and various other professional stuff working under it and am not motivated enough yet to figure it out.)
To be used solely as a steppingstone:
Set up Windows box with severely extreme firewall, opening *only* RDP ports. Setup Terminal Server on this box.
From Linux, use rdesktop to use the windows computer. It's an extra login, but you'll run all your apps natively in Windows and use them from a Linux desktop. Eventually, you'll start looking for replacements for this stuff in Linux, and you'll find them, no worries about that. But as long as you sit on that windows box, inertia will be the real reason you never make the switch. Unless you're not really being sincere about wanting to make the switch....
Either way, they choose to ask someone that posts on Slashdot to help them the first time, wouldn't they do it the second time? At least before calling tech support?
It is for this reason that I refuse to fix a windows computer for anyone. If you're not inclined to learn about your computer and fix it yourself, I'm not going to waste my time doing your dirty laundry. If you *really* want my help, you won't object when I wipe windows off your hard drive and throw on something I can configure once and be reasonably certain you can't break it.
There won't be any reason for me tell you "Don't run this" and "don't run that". See, I'll tell you once and only once "If you type in the root password to a dialog, and then your computer is mysteriously trashed, I'm not helping you."
So, yeah, anybody want me to fix their computer? You'll get it back with Linux on it. ;)
You post on slashdot and you let a cable guy touch your computer? What _were_ you thinking?
No shit, man. Those cable guys aren't allowed to touch anything on my side of the cable router, including unplugging the ethernet cable from the cable router. If they need that done, I'll do it for 'em. Of course, they try very very hard not to give me tech support anyway because their script is for Windows-only single computer, not a small network of Linux boxes. ;)
lastly, I bet this girl can pay for all her bandwith for the next hundred years if she put up some posters of herself on that bike in the hot zone for sale here on /. Or just run an auction for a one of a kind.
Ah hell yeah, I'd take that. :) I've never been a fan of posters of hot chicks on motorcycles, either, but that's one poster that would be far more than sexy. There's a girl that's appealing on all levels. ;)
Giving the drink to people AFTER the radioactive cloud passed was pretty much pointless and was more of a gesture that the government does something than any real help. (Don't blame the polish government though. They didn't know until it was too late too.)
This is the same government that built glass-bottom boats, after all.
Luck? TMI not being a catastrophe wasn't due to luck. It was Due to adequate containment vessel design. Whay do you call adequate engineering "luck"?
ONe word: Ford