Watch the news. Any source you wish. The terrorist bombers who don't like another gov't are a neverending supply of suicide bombers killing innocents. It's not buying into something. It's paying attention. Something you really should do.
And why are those bombers attacking americans? Assuming for the moment that they are, although they usually target Israel. How did Israel get there? Through US involvement. What about the last 70 years or so of western exploitation of the middle east? For most of the 20th century American and European governments put a lot of energy, time, and money into exploiting the fanatics in the middle east and encouraging them to act crazy.
There was a rash of airplane hijackings in the 70s and 80s. 9/11 doesn't even compare to what was going on back then, because it was more or less an isolated incident that didn't reflect a pattern.
The question that needs to be answered is: Do we have the right to go into other countries, raise discontent, push out their governments replacing them with satellite dictatorships, and then go back in with war and death and destruction to oust those dictators? What is our moral ground for what we have done in the Middle East?
The answer: It is the same moral ground for what we did in America during what's now referred to as "the indian wars". Yep. None at all. It's American Imperialism at its worst. You can buy into it all you want, but you're taking the irresponsible way out by disregarding all that we have done in the middle east to breed this situation.
Actually, the parent was right that they should have thrown 31 beagles at mars. It failed, but no one knows why, do they? Maybe if they had thrown more than one, they could have learned why one failed, and probably gotten more than one working on the surface. In that event, they would have been able to collect much more information than a single $545m mission, and would show a much more cost-effective operation, even if it had 90% of the landers fail.
Thank you, I was wondering what that picture was! Until now, I had honestly thought the only musicians ever to come out of Australia were AC/DC, Midnight Oil, and INXS.
Ya, but what about the days you worked your ass off and made less than him?
I *never* worked my ass off and made less than him. At least, in the muffler business, laziness gets quickly beat out by the market itself. People want their cars fixed *now* and don't have time to wait. If you want to slog your way through the job, work less and get paid more, it's just not going to happen.
I've put out what I consider a half-assed effort and still made more than him.:) The only time I made less than him was on the slow days when it was just the luck of the draw. On any busy day, I beat him hands down, and usually topped the shop. In a different shop, in the same company, I didn't top the shop every time it was busy because there was real competition with the other mechanics. In that place, I found that I made more money being a team player than fighting over work. If I helped a guy out on a job, he wouldn't have a problem helping me out when I needed it. More, he would even be willing to give up a job or two on a slow day to give me beer money or whatever, because he knows he can depend on my help.
Cutthroat competition can be fun, but isn't usually the best way to get the job done.:)
The formula never changes: volume is where the money is. It's volume that makes manufacturing work in the first place! Without volume, there'd be no need!
Now, I certainly sympathize with your statement about the printing industry, and it is a different ballgame than mechanic work. But in the end, it's still volume that pays the bills, pays the workers, puts food on the table, and so forth. Sure, when it's busy you might be inclined to pass up the small print run. Then, when it's slow, you can be certain the small print run won't come back to you when you need it. They'll remember how they were snubbed when you were busy. Passing up work for short-term gain always screws you in the long run, and the simple fact is, you can't pass up any work. Every piece of work you accept will affect you when it gets slow. In fact, by definition, the more work you take, the less slow you are.:)
So, yeah, I can see the real business problem of passing up the small job for the big job. But it will bite you on the ass. Winter doesn't have to be biting. It's always slow in the winter. Hell, plenty of times I had work in the winter because I didn't pass up the work in the summer. That same guy didn't have any work when it got slow, and there were quite a few times when people showed up and asked for me to work on their car because I didn't pass them up for more money.
Could the downward price pressure of all the accumulated used CDs hitting the market (and people like me buying them) be responsible for the recent sales declines and price reductions as much as P2P?
Could it also be the result of everyone having finally upgraded themselves to CD? How much of their sales in the 90s was the result of people upgrading their existing music collection? I know I upgraded mine...
Now I"ve upgraded mine to a format the RIAA doesn't want to support! I store it on my hard drive. The conduit they provide for me to put it on my hard drive happens to be a conduit through which I prefer not to interact. Consider this: I can go get a used CD from a music store, bring it home, rip it, take it back, sell it back to them, and get 70% of the money I spent back. In the end, a CD that only cost me $4.99 to buy used could bring me $3 when I take it back in to sell the next day. Furthermore, if I spent some time surveying the local used CD stores, I'll bet I could come out even or even pull a profit!
That's all because CD is no longer my preferred storage medium the same way that cassette was never my preferred storage medium. I stored on cassette when I wanted the music to be portable. I bought new on vinyl, and CD when it came out. Now I store on my hard drive, and when I want the music to be portable I burn on CD.
If they want my money the way they got it back in the days when I was upgrading my collection, they need to provide a way for me to upgrade my collection again, and that's all there is to it. The 90s are the first decade that didn't see a new music format distributed. In fact, it's the decade that DAT got beat out of replacing CD. Otherwise, every other decade has seen new music formats, and therefore has seen sales from existing "classics".
How much money has EMI made from re-issuing Beatles albums on new formats? Pink Floyd? Dark Side of the Moon regularly goes platinum, and it has probably outsold many other albums on every medium on which it has been distributed.
CDs just aren't preferred storage mediums any more. This time we made the switch without them.:) So this time they get to learn about "value" rather than "profit", because consumers don't give a flying fuck about "profit", they do care about "value". More value will attract more buyers, and that translates to more profit.
Instead of asking "If I download music, will it take away from record industry profits that they use to pay the artists?", the question to ask is "What value do I receive by downloading, and what is the competitive value offering by buying the CDs?" The answer to the second question will tell you where the record industry needs to move their marketing and sales...
I'm not certain those type of sales declines can be successfully spun into downloading and burning not hurting sales of recorded music.
The mistake you make is by trying to spin the sales figures to find a scapegoat. The recording industries would be better off introverting for awhile to find the reason sales are down. They would emerge newer, better, and proving much more value for what they ask.
Archeology is the search for fact! The Record Industries everywhere need to search for fact, not truth!
Also ever thought of this one? It may not be damaging CD sales, but what incentive does kazaa give the ARIA etc to provide a download service? Itunes was successful, but who knows how much revenue it is loosing to kazaa et al?
Interesting. YOu make a strong point that existing P2P fills a niche that prevents the ARIA and RIAA labels to move into, forcing them to be dinosaurs and unable to adapt. Not that I'm trying to read more into what you said, it's just that that's what hit me when I read it.:)
I've never used Kazaa, but I've used Napster, WinMX, Lopster, and Audiogalaxy, and they all have several things in common. First: they don't give the user much in the way of searching. Just keyword searching. (Audiogalaxy is the exception to this, and the best example of what the record labels could offer. Instead of suing them, the record labels should have bought them or partnered with them, and grew the business) You can search for "Metallica", but what if you just want to see what else is available that sounds like Metallica? You can't. What if you're a band and you want to use P2P to market yourself? You have to keyword stuff your filenames. Personally, I don't download crap that's stuffed like that.
P2P does a bad job of filling the niche, and there's plenty of room for the recording industry to come in and add value to their service. Hell, just think of what would happen if Google put their search technology to work in P2P music file sharing! If I were google, I'd be pursuing a service with the RIAA labels distributing music, and look for alternate ways to extract money for it (subscription fees, charge per download, advertising, etc.) and make it possible for bands to self-serve their listings, so the RIAA et al can just profit without doing any work!:)
I suppose I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt fast food places give away ketchup in the hopes you'll come back and buy food (or cardboard, in your McDonald's example), but rather that you'll use it on food you've just bought.
Well, I worked in fast food for four and a half years, and I can say with utmost confidence, that fast food places do give away shit like ketchup in the hopes that you'll come back for more food. It's generally referred to as "Customer Service". It's the reason you can go to a fast food place, order a burger, then go to the manager and bitch that they fucked it up, and they'll give you a free burger, or whatever. Coupons, frequently. It's because they know that most people will come back to exercise the coupon. The simple fact is, I've worked at places that had high levels of Customer Service (which translates to giving away a lot of free stuff), and I've worked at places that had low levels of Customer Service (the RIAA, in this analogy), and the places that had the most customers, most business, and most sales, were the ones that gave away free shit.
On Halloween, one year, when I worked at SOnic, they ran their free dish of ice cream special. My boss complained that that meant they weren't going to make a lot of money on ice cream. When the room filled up (I worked at an indoor sonic, so those of you who live in Austin might guess where), I suggested I go around and give free dishes of ice cream toe veryone in the store. The boss nearly freaked, but he figured it would better to just do it now rather than let them nickel and dime us to death with their requests.
Within 20 minutes of my run, we sold 30 Sundaes at menu price.
Copyright is copyright, there isn't any "different copyrights available to people to release shit under." Sorry, by copyright is copyright.
You have only the rights provided by copyright law with regard to any copyrighted work, unless the creator of that work provides you with a license to use the work in a fashion that would normally not be allowed by traditional copyright law. That license amounts to "You have more rights, provided you follow our agreement, and we won't sue you."
GPL uses copyright law in this fashion. It exists as a license granted by the holder of the copyright giving the user more rights to use the software than they would have had under copyright law. the "L" in GPL stands for "License". IT is not a copyright, it is a license. A copyright is something that declares ownership of a creative work, and copyright law is the law that governs the terms of that ownership.
Copyright law is a compromise between the public's need and the public good of having information freely available, and the need of the creative types to make a living off of their work. The purpose of the compromise is to create a monopoly governing the use of the work that makes it possible for the creator to make money off of it, while ultimately that work still goes into the public store of knowledge (the public domain).
You must ask yourself, do our existing copyright laws serve the compromise, provide for the common good, and still protect the creator of the work for a reasonable time?
With copyright terms now stretching to 140+ years, and recent judgements that make it possible for corporations to maintain copyright indefinitely, that makes the laws unjust.
Now, I will exercise my fair use rights by quoting from a passage recorded, and I'll not tell you who recorded this speech, nor what song it introduces:
Citizens of Boston. Throughout the course of our nation's history, the people of Boston have rallied bravely whenever the rights of man have been threatened. Today, a new crisis has arisen. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, better known as the MTA, has been levying burdensome attacks on the population in the form of subway fair increases. Citizens hear me out! This can happen to you:
I certainly do not believe that the artists are recieving the short end of the stick either. When was the last time you saw them "struggling."
And how many "artists" do you know? You are aware that 99.999999% of musicians make their money by having full-time day jobs, aren't you? You are also aware that 99.999999% of recorded musicians live below the poverty line, traveling from city to city, playing for small audiences, and hoping that someday someone will decide their worth a shit, aren't you?
Not to put too fine a point on it, say I'm the only bee in your bonnet, make a little birdhouse in your soul. (to mention just one band that built a cult following among geeks and ultimately sold a lot of records, but were classed as "starving" for years. I should point out that it's also a band that was well-pirated for years)
Your analogy fails because Ketchup is given out for free.:) You can just walk up to sonic (or mcdonald's, or whatever) and ask for ketchup packets and they'll give it to you.
They'll give it to you knowing that when you next think of buying a hamburger or whatever, you'll think of them, they guys that gave you ketchup whenever you needed it the most!
Now, test your analogy by going to a music store and asking them for ketchup packets--er, I mean, ask them for a single, and see if they give it to you.
The RIAA is not interested in supporting Artists but in only supporting their greed for profits.
The RIAA and the credibility of their arguments is solely defined by what they are. They are the "Recording Industry Association of America". By definition, they don't give a shit about musicians, they care about the "Recording Industry", and musicians are only a small part of that industry.
Viewing the RIAA as spokesmen for musicians is a disservice to the musicians themselves, and the fact that the RIAA tries to push themselves off as being spokesmen for the musicians is lying at it's worst. They don't speak for musicians, and in the end they don't really give a shit about musicians.
Whos to say they wouldn't have gone up more if CD-R's and Mp3's wernt avaliable?
I'll say it.:)
Sales wouldn't have gone up more if CD-Rs and mp3's were't available.
It's called "word of mouth" advertising, and has always been the way the bands with the most staying power became successful. Metallica, the Who, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, the list goes on and on full of bands that worked hard, became successful mostly through word of mouth, and then maintained top sales and top billing throughout the rest of their careers.
CDRs and mp3 file sharing represent word of mouth advertising. Sure, maybe you won't buy that album you just got burned from a friend, at least, not right away, but if you really like it, you'll go after the musicians' other albums. I got my first copy of...And Justice For All as a tape recording from a CD. In the end, I bought hundreds of dollars worth of Metallica junk, including tickets to several concerts, and now I'm one of Metallica's anti-fans.:) The chances that I ever would have bought anything from them in the first place were slim and none without that initial "piracy". Yeah, this is anecdotal evidence, but I'm not offering it as evidence. I'm offering it as explanation for what "word of mouth" advertising is in the record business and how it affects the bottom line.
So, yes, without CDRs and mp3 file sharing, word of mouth wouldn't have spread nearly as much music around as it did, and therefore wouldn't have even had opportunity to generate sales.
So, the only real danger to the record industry is in the long list of one-hit wonders and people who will only ever record one album, because then there is no back catalog to sell, and future sales won't be there because they're one-hit wonders, and by definition they fade into obscurity after their single of fame.
Britney is more deserving of space on the iPod, and more deserving of one's listening time, than Jimmy Hendricks and Janis Joplin.
No problems here, all three of them are "artists" i'd rather not subject myself to.:) I'm not interested in where Joe is going with that gun of his, and if I hear about Bobby McGee one more time I'm gonna do something psycho, I swear I will! I'll hurt somebody....
(Misspelling of 'reaping' as 'raping' intentional.)
And stupid, as well. You can't rape an inanimate object. So the phrase "raping money" doesn't make any sense, since "money" is the object that is being raped.
I know what your intentions were, but you need to get your direct objects in line.:)
More than 50 % of file sharers tend not to buy music they have downloaded (ie. 'rarely' or 'never' buy)."
Coincidentally, that matches the RIAA's claim that most of their music doesn't sell. Yes, ARIA and RIAA are two different organizations in two different countries, but let's look deeper at this.:)
If the RIAA claims that 90%+ of their catalog will never sell in enough quantities to make an impact on their bottom line, than it also stands to reason that some huge percentage of music available for download *sucks*, and that people won't buy it no matter how they came across it. This holds up because *someone* buys a copy of every CD ever made, and for some reason or other, what is available for download on P2P seems to very much match what is available for sale, with the addition of many out of print songs.
So, statistically, we can expect that 90%+ of what's available on P2P isn't worth buying, by the RIAA's own argument that 90%+ of their own artists aren't worth buying! With that reasoning, it's hard to believe that only 50% of downloaders don't buy most of what they download, because that implies that 50% of downloaders DO buy most of what they download. That translates ultimately to having downloaders by more music than ever before!
The bottom line was that everyone made more money, consumers got more choice, and sampling (and buying) of CDs got distributed over a wider cast of artists. The only exposure was with the top few artists at each of the top 5 record labels, which she thought would be very influential on the way the industry would behave. Unfortunately, a significant share of most record labels profits come from very few artists.
Record company thinking is a dinosaur. I have labeled the very last sentence in your post as the "rock-star mentality", and it is identical to the "home-run mentality".:)
Basically, the record-company is stuck in the rut of trying to make rock-stars out of musicians, and pushing every musician they can to stardom. Statistically, this model fails because only a very select few, determined by market forces, will become a "hit". The industry can impact that, to some extent, and they do try, but in the end it's market forces that dominate the next big thing. It always is. I suggest that dropping CD sales is mostly due to the record industry trying to make the next big hit, rather than trying to find out what it is.
I think the record industry needs to drop the rock-star mentality and go for the muffler man mentality. This requires more description:
Back when I did exhaust work, I worked with a guy who didn't want any of the "small" jobs. The setup was this: When a job sold, the ticket would get hung on the wall in shop. We (the mechanics) would take them each in line. When you finished a job, you grab the next ticket in line and start working on it, no matter what it is. We made commission, no hourly or salary pay, so we got paid (theoretically) for what we were worth.
So, this guy decides that small jobs are a waste of time and he only wants to work the big jobs. He did a few brake jobs that day, and one of the higher-priced exhaust jobs. He cherry-picked.;) He hovered close to the tickets and would slow down his work until the next ticket was a high-dollar ticket. Then he would crank it up, finish his job, and grab it before someone else got to it.
That left all the small jobs for me and the other guy. So I busted my ass and did as many of them as I could.
At the end of the day, I had done $1,400 worth of work (earning 14% of that), while the cherry-picker had only done about $900.
His was the "rock-star mentality", and mine was the "muffler man mentality". It compares nicely with grocery stores who only get 3% profit on gross sales, and take a loss on many of the individual products in the store! Yet they rake in millions each year!
The recording industry needs to take a lesson from all of this and focus more on getting all of their music to sell rather than pushing the Next Big Thing. People have diverse interests, and any investor will tell you to diversify your holdings. Why does the record industry insist on focusing on less than 10% of their total catalog? Because it makes money? I'll bet that they'd make a LOT more money if they focused on getting their whole catalog to sell and worried more about gross sales than they worry about individual musicians. And that's where P2P file sharing becomes an asset in their marketing strategy, rather than the liability it poses now.
Make no mistake: P2P does represent a liability to the record industry. Ultimately it might well result in their downfall. Not through immoral piracy, but simply because customers don't give a shit about the industry, they care about the musicians that make the music, and they will support those musicians. Historically, all of the big rock bands to come out that have shown staying power started by building their own following. Aerosmith wasn't an overnight sensation, neither was Metallica. Both of them worked their asses off for years, making shit for pay, until they finally had enough of a following to be viable bands to the record industry. For all those years, they were classed in the 90%+ of
Heh heh. Hey dude, if your name is "DunbarTheInept", how is it you're so competent at pointing out my fuckups?;)
Yes, yes, all of your response was right. I was just trying to say "I seem to recall reading old literature that read the numbers right-to-left", and that our reading of them the way we do now (however it is) is recent. Am I on crack with that one? (I'm not offering an example anymore, 'cause all my examples have been bad;) )
While we're on the subject, I have a serious problem with the way Kwrite deals with drag'n'drop text. The order is essentially this: First you highlight the text. Then you left-click and start dragging. All good, so far. You place the cursor where you want the text. Still good.
Then, the fucking thing cuts the text, updates the location of all the text, and THEN places the text at the location you specified.
The reason this is a problem is like this. Consider this text:
Hello, world!
I want to drag the text "lo," and place it between the 'r' and the 'l' in 'world'. So I highlight "lo," and drag it between the 'r' and the 'l'.
THe steps go like this. First, Kwrite cuts the text.
Hel world!
THEN it pastes the text into column #10, as I instructed.
Hel world!lo,
That *really* irks me, since I obviously intended the text to go between the 'r' and the 'l', so the line would read:
Hel worllo,d!
Ooooo, that really pisses me off. I find I have to do a simple drag and drop in two steps, one to put the text at the end of the line, then another to put it where I wanted it in the first place. Now, the only time it really matters is when you're moving text from the early part of a line to a later part of the same line. Mind you, the line is terminated by a LF, sometimes a CR, and sometimes a CR/LF, but if you try to paste the text after the EOL marker (whatever it is), no problem. If you try to paste it before the location where you've highlighted, no problem there either. Only when you try to paste to later on in the line.
Hmmm, I wonder how easy it would be to hack Kwrite to do it right. Anybody got any pointers on where I'd go to fix this bug?
And using "ten" is not a good example since the numbers from 10 to 20 are exceptions to the general case. (For every other two-digit number, you speak it as "{tens-word} {ones digit}" for example: 21 = "twenty-one", not "one-twenty". All the numbers from 21 to 99 follow this pattern.
Hm, I picked "ten" because it was convenient. I should point out that for English, saying the number from left-to-right is fairly recent. I seem to recall Shakespearian language saying "5 and 30" and "5 and 30 and twoscore". I could have it wrong slightly, but I do think that English used to read numbers right-to-left. It is slightly more intuitive to phrase the number that way, but I find it harder to hear the number and transliterate it myself, but then I was raised to read that last number as "55".
The only problem with X's cNp is like between applications when, say, you want to replace a section of hilighted text with the text in the buffer. Highlighting the text you want to replace kills the buffer! So, you have hacks like the x-button in Firebird which clears the URL bar.
This is a problem that could easily be solved.:( One of the frustrating things about XFree86 is how they back away from this problem. KDE and Gnome want to interoperate to an extent, but I'm not entirely convinced they want to interoperate to the extent that is needed to make this stuff really useful. It's frustrating that when I'm using gFTP I can't just drag a file from my desktop (Kde) to the remote server and have it ftp up there. It's also frustrating that I can't drag a picture from Mozilla to my desktop or a file manager and have it download to the indicated place in the directory tree. What's really annoying is that these are problems that can easily be solved by XFree86 while still degrading nicely for legacy apps that still expect a certain behavior.
To deal with your exact situation, two buffers are clearly called for. An explicit and an implicit buffer. The explicit buffer would be filled when you actually hit ^c or ^x (actual keystrokes are managed by the app, of course), and the implicit buffer would be filled when you just highlight something. Since X keeps track of different sessions, it should be possible to have an implicit buffer for each application. Then, if you highlight in two apps and middle-click in one, the implicit buffer in the target app gets replaced by the implicit buffer in the other app. Problem solved. Meanwhile, any data you've put in your clipboard explicitly is still preserved. The question then is "Does middle-click ever become active on the explicit buffer?" I'd say yes, when the implicit buffers are empty the behavior should cascade.
As far as dealing with files on the clipboard, storing them as a URL and providing a series of flags would probably solve that problem. Creating a series of "X objects" to act in place of the DCOP server or the bonobo server would be nice, but there's a problem there. KDE and Gnome chose different ways of sharing objects between apps because of different design decisions, and there are goods and bads for each of them. In any case, I think X can implement a basic flag set that indicates whether or not the object stored is any of a series of standards objects (Corba, COM, XPCOM, etc, not that COM has an implementation in this arena) and the textual representation of the object provided by the application that gave it to the clipboard. If an app doesn't understand the flags, X would default to giving it the text representation, preserving backwards compatibility. KDE and Gnome would each have to implement compliance with X's new standard for object sharing, but as soon as they did so, all KDE and Gnome apps would "just work", and it might even be possible to work out a protocol that allows sharing of KDE and Gnome objects transparently.
Yeah, yeah, my armchair X programming is really going to save the world. I know.;)
You might just want, BTW, wanna check something other than fiction for evidence and stuff. Baen in particular has a liking of historical fiction that can at times be rather shoddy to say the least. I did a few minutes' looking around, and this looks like a decent collection of sources on Islamic history if you're bored enough to take a looksee.
Hmm, I think I mentioned that having fiction as a source of information is probably bad, since it's by definition "made up".:)
In any case, this puts a whole different light on the Crusades, and the crusades are a part of history I haven't been all that interested in. Conquest of the Holy Land for the Greater Glory of God doesn't make for interesting reading, whereas Belisarius does.:) So that's one of the few areas where I've still got my American Public Education and not much else, although I've managed to bolster my education in most other areas of history (Far East history isn't taught much either where I came from, so while I'm not strong in that area, I've still got more than I was given in school).
It's kind of saddening to see that the Islam nations were once a world power, and the world power, apparently (by your other post), while the rest of the world was in a state of decline leading towards rebirth. But as a result of Western rebirth, it doesn't look like there's even an opportunity for the Middle East to have their own rebirth and emerge as a world power again. Their location just isn't nearly as economically and strategically important as it used to be, since we can sail right around them (or, more likely, we can nuke our way right around them, since we don't sail any more). I wonder if they're in a good position to take advantage of space travel to rise again, since they've failed to take advantage of oil to rise again (not entirely their fault, 20th Century western history isn't kind to the Middle East). It's entirely possible from the armchair in which I'm observing for Western civilization to decline enough for the Middle East to rise again, but even if Western civilization declines, where is the room for the Middle East to rise?
Thank you! That was the most interesting post I've read in a long time.:) I love learning about history, but I've never had the patience to study it, like in school and stuff.;) So I suppose I consider myself a shade tree historian. But your post was very informative, and I do vaguely remember hearing about the Caliphates. I'll bet it's part of American conditioning these days that the Caliphates are just breezed over and relegated to a footnote in public history classes... Or I could take off my tinfoil hat.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Watch the news. Any source you wish. The terrorist bombers who don't like another gov't are a neverending supply of suicide bombers killing innocents. It's not buying into something. It's paying attention. Something you really should do.
And why are those bombers attacking americans? Assuming for the moment that they are, although they usually target Israel. How did Israel get there? Through US involvement. What about the last 70 years or so of western exploitation of the middle east? For most of the 20th century American and European governments put a lot of energy, time, and money into exploiting the fanatics in the middle east and encouraging them to act crazy.
There was a rash of airplane hijackings in the 70s and 80s. 9/11 doesn't even compare to what was going on back then, because it was more or less an isolated incident that didn't reflect a pattern.
The question that needs to be answered is: Do we have the right to go into other countries, raise discontent, push out their governments replacing them with satellite dictatorships, and then go back in with war and death and destruction to oust those dictators? What is our moral ground for what we have done in the Middle East?
The answer: It is the same moral ground for what we did in America during what's now referred to as "the indian wars". Yep. None at all. It's American Imperialism at its worst. You can buy into it all you want, but you're taking the irresponsible way out by disregarding all that we have done in the middle east to breed this situation.
Actually, the parent was right that they should have thrown 31 beagles at mars. It failed, but no one knows why, do they? Maybe if they had thrown more than one, they could have learned why one failed, and probably gotten more than one working on the surface. In that event, they would have been able to collect much more information than a single $545m mission, and would show a much more cost-effective operation, even if it had 90% of the landers fail.
Thank you, I was wondering what that picture was! Until now, I had honestly thought the only musicians ever to come out of Australia were AC/DC, Midnight Oil, and INXS.
Ya, but what about the days you worked your ass off and made less than him?
I *never* worked my ass off and made less than him. At least, in the muffler business, laziness gets quickly beat out by the market itself. People want their cars fixed *now* and don't have time to wait. If you want to slog your way through the job, work less and get paid more, it's just not going to happen.
I've put out what I consider a half-assed effort and still made more than him. :) The only time I made less than him was on the slow days when it was just the luck of the draw. On any busy day, I beat him hands down, and usually topped the shop. In a different shop, in the same company, I didn't top the shop every time it was busy because there was real competition with the other mechanics. In that place, I found that I made more money being a team player than fighting over work. If I helped a guy out on a job, he wouldn't have a problem helping me out when I needed it. More, he would even be willing to give up a job or two on a slow day to give me beer money or whatever, because he knows he can depend on my help.
Cutthroat competition can be fun, but isn't usually the best way to get the job done. :)
The formula never changes: volume is where the money is. It's volume that makes manufacturing work in the first place! Without volume, there'd be no need!
Now, I certainly sympathize with your statement about the printing industry, and it is a different ballgame than mechanic work. But in the end, it's still volume that pays the bills, pays the workers, puts food on the table, and so forth. Sure, when it's busy you might be inclined to pass up the small print run. Then, when it's slow, you can be certain the small print run won't come back to you when you need it. They'll remember how they were snubbed when you were busy. Passing up work for short-term gain always screws you in the long run, and the simple fact is, you can't pass up any work. Every piece of work you accept will affect you when it gets slow. In fact, by definition, the more work you take, the less slow you are. :)
So, yeah, I can see the real business problem of passing up the small job for the big job. But it will bite you on the ass. Winter doesn't have to be biting. It's always slow in the winter. Hell, plenty of times I had work in the winter because I didn't pass up the work in the summer. That same guy didn't have any work when it got slow, and there were quite a few times when people showed up and asked for me to work on their car because I didn't pass them up for more money.
Could the downward price pressure of all the accumulated used CDs hitting the market (and people like me buying them) be responsible for the recent sales declines and price reductions as much as P2P?
Could it also be the result of everyone having finally upgraded themselves to CD? How much of their sales in the 90s was the result of people upgrading their existing music collection? I know I upgraded mine...
Now I"ve upgraded mine to a format the RIAA doesn't want to support! I store it on my hard drive. The conduit they provide for me to put it on my hard drive happens to be a conduit through which I prefer not to interact. Consider this: I can go get a used CD from a music store, bring it home, rip it, take it back, sell it back to them, and get 70% of the money I spent back. In the end, a CD that only cost me $4.99 to buy used could bring me $3 when I take it back in to sell the next day. Furthermore, if I spent some time surveying the local used CD stores, I'll bet I could come out even or even pull a profit!
That's all because CD is no longer my preferred storage medium the same way that cassette was never my preferred storage medium. I stored on cassette when I wanted the music to be portable. I bought new on vinyl, and CD when it came out. Now I store on my hard drive, and when I want the music to be portable I burn on CD.
If they want my money the way they got it back in the days when I was upgrading my collection, they need to provide a way for me to upgrade my collection again, and that's all there is to it. The 90s are the first decade that didn't see a new music format distributed. In fact, it's the decade that DAT got beat out of replacing CD. Otherwise, every other decade has seen new music formats, and therefore has seen sales from existing "classics".
How much money has EMI made from re-issuing Beatles albums on new formats? Pink Floyd? Dark Side of the Moon regularly goes platinum, and it has probably outsold many other albums on every medium on which it has been distributed.
CDs just aren't preferred storage mediums any more. This time we made the switch without them. :) So this time they get to learn about "value" rather than "profit", because consumers don't give a flying fuck about "profit", they do care about "value". More value will attract more buyers, and that translates to more profit.
Instead of asking "If I download music, will it take away from record industry profits that they use to pay the artists?", the question to ask is "What value do I receive by downloading, and what is the competitive value offering by buying the CDs?" The answer to the second question will tell you where the record industry needs to move their marketing and sales...
I'm not certain those type of sales declines can be successfully spun into downloading and burning not hurting sales of recorded music.
The mistake you make is by trying to spin the sales figures to find a scapegoat. The recording industries would be better off introverting for awhile to find the reason sales are down. They would emerge newer, better, and proving much more value for what they ask.
Archeology is the search for fact! The Record Industries everywhere need to search for fact, not truth!
Also ever thought of this one? It may not be damaging CD sales, but what incentive does kazaa give the ARIA etc to provide a download service? Itunes was successful, but who knows how much revenue it is loosing to kazaa et al?
Interesting. YOu make a strong point that existing P2P fills a niche that prevents the ARIA and RIAA labels to move into, forcing them to be dinosaurs and unable to adapt. Not that I'm trying to read more into what you said, it's just that that's what hit me when I read it. :)
I've never used Kazaa, but I've used Napster, WinMX, Lopster, and Audiogalaxy, and they all have several things in common. First: they don't give the user much in the way of searching. Just keyword searching. (Audiogalaxy is the exception to this, and the best example of what the record labels could offer. Instead of suing them, the record labels should have bought them or partnered with them, and grew the business) You can search for "Metallica", but what if you just want to see what else is available that sounds like Metallica? You can't. What if you're a band and you want to use P2P to market yourself? You have to keyword stuff your filenames. Personally, I don't download crap that's stuffed like that.
P2P does a bad job of filling the niche, and there's plenty of room for the recording industry to come in and add value to their service. Hell, just think of what would happen if Google put their search technology to work in P2P music file sharing! If I were google, I'd be pursuing a service with the RIAA labels distributing music, and look for alternate ways to extract money for it (subscription fees, charge per download, advertising, etc.) and make it possible for bands to self-serve their listings, so the RIAA et al can just profit without doing any work! :)
I suppose I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt fast food places give away ketchup in the hopes you'll come back and buy food (or cardboard, in your McDonald's example), but rather that you'll use it on food you've just bought.
Well, I worked in fast food for four and a half years, and I can say with utmost confidence, that fast food places do give away shit like ketchup in the hopes that you'll come back for more food. It's generally referred to as "Customer Service". It's the reason you can go to a fast food place, order a burger, then go to the manager and bitch that they fucked it up, and they'll give you a free burger, or whatever. Coupons, frequently. It's because they know that most people will come back to exercise the coupon. The simple fact is, I've worked at places that had high levels of Customer Service (which translates to giving away a lot of free stuff), and I've worked at places that had low levels of Customer Service (the RIAA, in this analogy), and the places that had the most customers, most business, and most sales, were the ones that gave away free shit.
On Halloween, one year, when I worked at SOnic, they ran their free dish of ice cream special. My boss complained that that meant they weren't going to make a lot of money on ice cream. When the room filled up (I worked at an indoor sonic, so those of you who live in Austin might guess where), I suggested I go around and give free dishes of ice cream toe veryone in the store. The boss nearly freaked, but he figured it would better to just do it now rather than let them nickel and dime us to death with their requests.
Within 20 minutes of my run, we sold 30 Sundaes at menu price.
'nuff said. Giving away free shit makes money.
Idiot, the quote from my post that you used shows where those particular artists get their money: their full-time jobs. :)
Copyright is copyright, there isn't any "different copyrights available to people to release shit under." Sorry, by copyright is copyright.
You have only the rights provided by copyright law with regard to any copyrighted work, unless the creator of that work provides you with a license to use the work in a fashion that would normally not be allowed by traditional copyright law. That license amounts to "You have more rights, provided you follow our agreement, and we won't sue you."
GPL uses copyright law in this fashion. It exists as a license granted by the holder of the copyright giving the user more rights to use the software than they would have had under copyright law. the "L" in GPL stands for "License". IT is not a copyright, it is a license. A copyright is something that declares ownership of a creative work, and copyright law is the law that governs the terms of that ownership.
Copyright law is a compromise between the public's need and the public good of having information freely available, and the need of the creative types to make a living off of their work. The purpose of the compromise is to create a monopoly governing the use of the work that makes it possible for the creator to make money off of it, while ultimately that work still goes into the public store of knowledge (the public domain).
You must ask yourself, do our existing copyright laws serve the compromise, provide for the common good, and still protect the creator of the work for a reasonable time?
Read this
With copyright terms now stretching to 140+ years, and recent judgements that make it possible for corporations to maintain copyright indefinitely, that makes the laws unjust.
Now, I will exercise my fair use rights by quoting from a passage recorded, and I'll not tell you who recorded this speech, nor what song it introduces:
I certainly do not believe that the artists are recieving the short end of the stick either. When was the last time you saw them "struggling."
And how many "artists" do you know? You are aware that 99.999999% of musicians make their money by having full-time day jobs, aren't you? You are also aware that 99.999999% of recorded musicians live below the poverty line, traveling from city to city, playing for small audiences, and hoping that someday someone will decide their worth a shit, aren't you?
Not to put too fine a point on it, say I'm the only bee in your bonnet, make a little birdhouse in your soul. (to mention just one band that built a cult following among geeks and ultimately sold a lot of records, but were classed as "starving" for years. I should point out that it's also a band that was well-pirated for years)
Your analogy fails because Ketchup is given out for free. :) You can just walk up to sonic (or mcdonald's, or whatever) and ask for ketchup packets and they'll give it to you.
They'll give it to you knowing that when you next think of buying a hamburger or whatever, you'll think of them, they guys that gave you ketchup whenever you needed it the most!
Now, test your analogy by going to a music store and asking them for ketchup packets--er, I mean, ask them for a single, and see if they give it to you.
Obviously, they won't.
The RIAA is not interested in supporting Artists but in only supporting their greed for profits.
The RIAA and the credibility of their arguments is solely defined by what they are. They are the "Recording Industry Association of America". By definition, they don't give a shit about musicians, they care about the "Recording Industry", and musicians are only a small part of that industry.
Viewing the RIAA as spokesmen for musicians is a disservice to the musicians themselves, and the fact that the RIAA tries to push themselves off as being spokesmen for the musicians is lying at it's worst. They don't speak for musicians, and in the end they don't really give a shit about musicians.
Whos to say they wouldn't have gone up more if CD-R's and Mp3's wernt avaliable?
I'll say it. :)
Sales wouldn't have gone up more if CD-Rs and mp3's were't available.
It's called "word of mouth" advertising, and has always been the way the bands with the most staying power became successful. Metallica, the Who, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, the list goes on and on full of bands that worked hard, became successful mostly through word of mouth, and then maintained top sales and top billing throughout the rest of their careers.
CDRs and mp3 file sharing represent word of mouth advertising. Sure, maybe you won't buy that album you just got burned from a friend, at least, not right away, but if you really like it, you'll go after the musicians' other albums. I got my first copy of ...And Justice For All as a tape recording from a CD. In the end, I bought hundreds of dollars worth of Metallica junk, including tickets to several concerts, and now I'm one of Metallica's anti-fans. :) The chances that I ever would have bought anything from them in the first place were slim and none without that initial "piracy". Yeah, this is anecdotal evidence, but I'm not offering it as evidence. I'm offering it as explanation for what "word of mouth" advertising is in the record business and how it affects the bottom line.
So, yes, without CDRs and mp3 file sharing, word of mouth wouldn't have spread nearly as much music around as it did, and therefore wouldn't have even had opportunity to generate sales.
So, the only real danger to the record industry is in the long list of one-hit wonders and people who will only ever record one album, because then there is no back catalog to sell, and future sales won't be there because they're one-hit wonders, and by definition they fade into obscurity after their single of fame.
Britney is more deserving of space on the iPod, and more deserving of one's listening time, than Jimmy Hendricks and Janis Joplin.
No problems here, all three of them are "artists" i'd rather not subject myself to. :) I'm not interested in where Joe is going with that gun of his, and if I hear about Bobby McGee one more time I'm gonna do something psycho, I swear I will! I'll hurt somebody....
(Misspelling of 'reaping' as 'raping' intentional.)
And stupid, as well. You can't rape an inanimate object. So the phrase "raping money" doesn't make any sense, since "money" is the object that is being raped.
I know what your intentions were, but you need to get your direct objects in line. :)
More than 50 % of file sharers tend not to buy music they have downloaded (ie. 'rarely' or 'never' buy)."
Coincidentally, that matches the RIAA's claim that most of their music doesn't sell. Yes, ARIA and RIAA are two different organizations in two different countries, but let's look deeper at this. :)
If the RIAA claims that 90%+ of their catalog will never sell in enough quantities to make an impact on their bottom line, than it also stands to reason that some huge percentage of music available for download *sucks*, and that people won't buy it no matter how they came across it. This holds up because *someone* buys a copy of every CD ever made, and for some reason or other, what is available for download on P2P seems to very much match what is available for sale, with the addition of many out of print songs.
So, statistically, we can expect that 90%+ of what's available on P2P isn't worth buying, by the RIAA's own argument that 90%+ of their own artists aren't worth buying! With that reasoning, it's hard to believe that only 50% of downloaders don't buy most of what they download, because that implies that 50% of downloaders DO buy most of what they download. That translates ultimately to having downloaders by more music than ever before!
Yeah, I know. Rhetoric only goes so far...
The bottom line was that everyone made more money, consumers got more choice, and sampling (and buying) of CDs got distributed over a wider cast of artists. The only exposure was with the top few artists at each of the top 5 record labels, which she thought would be very influential on the way the industry would behave. Unfortunately, a significant share of most record labels profits come from very few artists.
Record company thinking is a dinosaur. I have labeled the very last sentence in your post as the "rock-star mentality", and it is identical to the "home-run mentality". :)
Basically, the record-company is stuck in the rut of trying to make rock-stars out of musicians, and pushing every musician they can to stardom. Statistically, this model fails because only a very select few, determined by market forces, will become a "hit". The industry can impact that, to some extent, and they do try, but in the end it's market forces that dominate the next big thing. It always is. I suggest that dropping CD sales is mostly due to the record industry trying to make the next big hit, rather than trying to find out what it is.
I think the record industry needs to drop the rock-star mentality and go for the muffler man mentality. This requires more description:
Back when I did exhaust work, I worked with a guy who didn't want any of the "small" jobs. The setup was this: When a job sold, the ticket would get hung on the wall in shop. We (the mechanics) would take them each in line. When you finished a job, you grab the next ticket in line and start working on it, no matter what it is. We made commission, no hourly or salary pay, so we got paid (theoretically) for what we were worth.
So, this guy decides that small jobs are a waste of time and he only wants to work the big jobs. He did a few brake jobs that day, and one of the higher-priced exhaust jobs. He cherry-picked. ;) He hovered close to the tickets and would slow down his work until the next ticket was a high-dollar ticket. Then he would crank it up, finish his job, and grab it before someone else got to it.
That left all the small jobs for me and the other guy. So I busted my ass and did as many of them as I could.
At the end of the day, I had done $1,400 worth of work (earning 14% of that), while the cherry-picker had only done about $900.
His was the "rock-star mentality", and mine was the "muffler man mentality". It compares nicely with grocery stores who only get 3% profit on gross sales, and take a loss on many of the individual products in the store! Yet they rake in millions each year!
The recording industry needs to take a lesson from all of this and focus more on getting all of their music to sell rather than pushing the Next Big Thing. People have diverse interests, and any investor will tell you to diversify your holdings. Why does the record industry insist on focusing on less than 10% of their total catalog? Because it makes money? I'll bet that they'd make a LOT more money if they focused on getting their whole catalog to sell and worried more about gross sales than they worry about individual musicians. And that's where P2P file sharing becomes an asset in their marketing strategy, rather than the liability it poses now.
Make no mistake: P2P does represent a liability to the record industry. Ultimately it might well result in their downfall. Not through immoral piracy, but simply because customers don't give a shit about the industry, they care about the musicians that make the music, and they will support those musicians. Historically, all of the big rock bands to come out that have shown staying power started by building their own following. Aerosmith wasn't an overnight sensation, neither was Metallica. Both of them worked their asses off for years, making shit for pay, until they finally had enough of a following to be viable bands to the record industry. For all those years, they were classed in the 90%+ of
Heh heh. Hey dude, if your name is "DunbarTheInept", how is it you're so competent at pointing out my fuckups? ;)
Yes, yes, all of your response was right. I was just trying to say "I seem to recall reading old literature that read the numbers right-to-left", and that our reading of them the way we do now (however it is) is recent. Am I on crack with that one? (I'm not offering an example anymore, 'cause all my examples have been bad ;) )
While we're on the subject, I have a serious problem with the way Kwrite deals with drag'n'drop text. The order is essentially this: First you highlight the text. Then you left-click and start dragging. All good, so far. You place the cursor where you want the text. Still good.
Then, the fucking thing cuts the text, updates the location of all the text, and THEN places the text at the location you specified.
The reason this is a problem is like this. Consider this text:
I want to drag the text "lo," and place it between the 'r' and the 'l' in 'world'. So I highlight "lo," and drag it between the 'r' and the 'l'.
THe steps go like this. First, Kwrite cuts the text.
THEN it pastes the text into column #10, as I instructed.
That *really* irks me, since I obviously intended the text to go between the 'r' and the 'l', so the line would read:
Ooooo, that really pisses me off. I find I have to do a simple drag and drop in two steps, one to put the text at the end of the line, then another to put it where I wanted it in the first place. Now, the only time it really matters is when you're moving text from the early part of a line to a later part of the same line. Mind you, the line is terminated by a LF, sometimes a CR, and sometimes a CR/LF, but if you try to paste the text after the EOL marker (whatever it is), no problem. If you try to paste it before the location where you've highlighted, no problem there either. Only when you try to paste to later on in the line.
Hmmm, I wonder how easy it would be to hack Kwrite to do it right. Anybody got any pointers on where I'd go to fix this bug?
And using "ten" is not a good example since the numbers from 10 to 20 are exceptions to the general case. (For every other two-digit number, you speak it as "{tens-word} {ones digit}" for example: 21 = "twenty-one", not "one-twenty". All the numbers from 21 to 99 follow this pattern.
Hm, I picked "ten" because it was convenient. I should point out that for English, saying the number from left-to-right is fairly recent. I seem to recall Shakespearian language saying "5 and 30" and "5 and 30 and twoscore". I could have it wrong slightly, but I do think that English used to read numbers right-to-left. It is slightly more intuitive to phrase the number that way, but I find it harder to hear the number and transliterate it myself, but then I was raised to read that last number as "55".
The only problem with X's cNp is like between applications when, say, you want to replace a section of hilighted text with the text in the buffer. Highlighting the text you want to replace kills the buffer! So, you have hacks like the x-button in Firebird which clears the URL bar.
This is a problem that could easily be solved. :( One of the frustrating things about XFree86 is how they back away from this problem. KDE and Gnome want to interoperate to an extent, but I'm not entirely convinced they want to interoperate to the extent that is needed to make this stuff really useful. It's frustrating that when I'm using gFTP I can't just drag a file from my desktop (Kde) to the remote server and have it ftp up there. It's also frustrating that I can't drag a picture from Mozilla to my desktop or a file manager and have it download to the indicated place in the directory tree. What's really annoying is that these are problems that can easily be solved by XFree86 while still degrading nicely for legacy apps that still expect a certain behavior.
To deal with your exact situation, two buffers are clearly called for. An explicit and an implicit buffer. The explicit buffer would be filled when you actually hit ^c or ^x (actual keystrokes are managed by the app, of course), and the implicit buffer would be filled when you just highlight something. Since X keeps track of different sessions, it should be possible to have an implicit buffer for each application. Then, if you highlight in two apps and middle-click in one, the implicit buffer in the target app gets replaced by the implicit buffer in the other app. Problem solved. Meanwhile, any data you've put in your clipboard explicitly is still preserved. The question then is "Does middle-click ever become active on the explicit buffer?" I'd say yes, when the implicit buffers are empty the behavior should cascade.
As far as dealing with files on the clipboard, storing them as a URL and providing a series of flags would probably solve that problem. Creating a series of "X objects" to act in place of the DCOP server or the bonobo server would be nice, but there's a problem there. KDE and Gnome chose different ways of sharing objects between apps because of different design decisions, and there are goods and bads for each of them. In any case, I think X can implement a basic flag set that indicates whether or not the object stored is any of a series of standards objects (Corba, COM, XPCOM, etc, not that COM has an implementation in this arena) and the textual representation of the object provided by the application that gave it to the clipboard. If an app doesn't understand the flags, X would default to giving it the text representation, preserving backwards compatibility. KDE and Gnome would each have to implement compliance with X's new standard for object sharing, but as soon as they did so, all KDE and Gnome apps would "just work", and it might even be possible to work out a protocol that allows sharing of KDE and Gnome objects transparently.
Yeah, yeah, my armchair X programming is really going to save the world. I know. ;)
You might just want, BTW, wanna check something other than fiction for evidence and stuff. Baen in particular has a liking of historical fiction that can at times be rather shoddy to say the least. I did a few minutes' looking around, and this looks like a decent collection of sources on Islamic history if you're bored enough to take a looksee.
Hmm, I think I mentioned that having fiction as a source of information is probably bad, since it's by definition "made up". :)
In any case, this puts a whole different light on the Crusades, and the crusades are a part of history I haven't been all that interested in. Conquest of the Holy Land for the Greater Glory of God doesn't make for interesting reading, whereas Belisarius does. :) So that's one of the few areas where I've still got my American Public Education and not much else, although I've managed to bolster my education in most other areas of history (Far East history isn't taught much either where I came from, so while I'm not strong in that area, I've still got more than I was given in school).
It's kind of saddening to see that the Islam nations were once a world power, and the world power, apparently (by your other post), while the rest of the world was in a state of decline leading towards rebirth. But as a result of Western rebirth, it doesn't look like there's even an opportunity for the Middle East to have their own rebirth and emerge as a world power again. Their location just isn't nearly as economically and strategically important as it used to be, since we can sail right around them (or, more likely, we can nuke our way right around them, since we don't sail any more). I wonder if they're in a good position to take advantage of space travel to rise again, since they've failed to take advantage of oil to rise again (not entirely their fault, 20th Century western history isn't kind to the Middle East). It's entirely possible from the armchair in which I'm observing for Western civilization to decline enough for the Middle East to rise again, but even if Western civilization declines, where is the room for the Middle East to rise?
Thank you! That was the most interesting post I've read in a long time. :) I love learning about history, but I've never had the patience to study it, like in school and stuff. ;) So I suppose I consider myself a shade tree historian. But your post was very informative, and I do vaguely remember hearing about the Caliphates. I'll bet it's part of American conditioning these days that the Caliphates are just breezed over and relegated to a footnote in public history classes... Or I could take off my tinfoil hat. ;)