I know it sounds strange, but I'm sort of sorry that I'm not in New York for this (I moved to Boston 25 years ago). Yes, I know that it's a monstrous pain in the ass for everyone and even has the potential for injury and loss of life (e.g., heart attack from climbing stairs), but both blackouts I've been in ('65 and '77) were interesting experiences.
I was five years old for the first one and scared out of my wits when the lights went out. It was an early evening in November, around 5:30 PM, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor, watching TV (the Winchell-Mahoney hour). Lights, television, even the streetlamps outside went out. My first thought: "Mommmmmmmmm!!!!!".
We ended up walking over to my aunt's house a couple of blocks away and eating the cake that my mother had baked that day. That was our dinner. Blackout cake. She never made it again after that, but I remember with all the flickering candles it seemed like someone's birthday.
My father got stuck on the subway for 36 hours, though. Bummer for him.
When the '77 blackout hit, I was living with my father on the 15th floor of a building on East 96th St. I'd just gotten home from my summer job and turned on the radio. The DJ was complaining about the turntables running too fast (overcompensating for low voltage?). Looking out my bedroom window, I saw the blackout roll uptown: the Empire State Building went out first, then the rest of Midtown, the Upper East Side, and then us. It was a hot, humid night and you could see the occasional flash of heat lightning.
I checked on my neighbors, an elderly couple, before heading down to the street, where I bartered a couple of cold beers for a handful of candles. People were bewildered, wondering if the Indian Point nuclear plant had blown, or if the Rooskies were attacking. It took about an hour for the looting to start north of us and for most of the night there was an endless parade of NYPD patrol cars headed uptown, four or five cops in each, all in full riot gear.
I don't want to downplay the millions of dollars of damage that happened that night, but my neighborhood was pretty peaceful. It was like an instant block party, people sharing food and beer and the occasional joint, oldtimers (I guess that's me now) talking about the '65 Blackout (which, like today, started at the Mohawk grid and covered roughly the same area).
Fifteen flights up was nothing for me back then; I ran track in high school.
A couple of years ago my neighborhood in Boston lost power for 36 hours. Nothing big, maybe 25,000 households, but I was bereft. No cable, no Internet, just a battery-operated radio and, of course, candles. Off the grid.
But it was educational. I never realized how dependent I was on technology and the network, how much of my time is spent in front of the silicon devils (TV and computer). Thirty hours with nothing but books and an acoustic guitar for entertainment. When the power came on, the first thing I did was fire up a web browser. It was like a refreshingly cool shower of meaningless information after having to sit and stew with my thoughts.
Shit. I think I'll go to the basement and throw the main breaker. Just for old time's sake.
In August 1996, Microsoft made their internal microsoft.* hierarchy available to the world at large. Around that same time, they switched from INN v1.4 to a proprietary MS NNTP server.
For the next few weeks, every post made to microsoft.* and select other groups was duplicated by msnews.microsoft.com and spewed back to the world because the proprietary MS server changed the Message-ID for every post. Message-IDs are supposed to be unique, so an altered ID was seen as a new post by servers peering with MS and thus were not treated as duplicates and dropped.
Thousands and thousands of posts were duped and spewed by Microsoft's "innovative" server, both inside microsoft.* and out. The reaction among news admins ranged from mild chuckles at Microsoft's expense to blind rage and the use of cancelbots.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I could use a good laugh.
First of all, the article is dated September 2002, though that doesn't make the writer's concerns any less valid.
Second, this has been going on for almost twenty years, starting around the time digital tape decks (like Mitsubishi, Sony, 3M) gained wider currency in recording studios. Digital audio sounds really harsh when you push recording levels, as opposed to analog tape, which has a "softer" limit.
Rowan makes a very valid point: radio stations are notorious for compressing their feed, mostly to get the hottest signal within their transmitter's power limit. Television stations are even worse. I recall taking a road trip with my band in a rented van that didn't have a cassette player; we were at the mercy of every Top-40 station and all of them were playing Phil Collins's "Sussudio" every ten minutes. Some of the stations flattened the signal so much that we thought it was some sort of remix just for robots (the drum machine was at least twice as loud as the lead vocals).
Where I don't concur is Rowan's placing the blame for this on the labels. True, the A&R people are the ones who have right-of-refusal on the final mix, but you can't let engineers, producers, and the mastering lab off the hook. I've been on the other side of the glass and I know that I've been guilty of patching compressors into a channel to keep the kick drum at a managable level, make up for a singer's lax microphone discipline, or "punch up" the final mix. Note that I'm not blaming the musicians; they do whatever they have to in order to get the track on tape. If that means Joe Frontman is going to sway back and forth like Bill Gates at a deposition, so be it. It was my job to deal.
Finally, not to sound too much like a Luddite, but back in the analog days, there was a limit on the number of effects you could employ, the limit being the number of physical units present in your studio rack. Now, with ProTools or Cakewalk, your limits are RAM and CPU cycles, both of which are cheaper to expand than buying more compressors, limiters, gates, reverbs, etc.
The author seems to make a correlation between the number of copyright registrations and the number of musical compositions. I don't believe that a true 1:1 comparison can be made between them.
As many a Slashdotter has pointed out, musicians make their money not from selling records but from going on tour.
Just because "many a Slashdotter" has pointed something out doesn't make that statement true.
Most musicians make more from CDs that sell enough to get past the break-even point (i.e., after the label has recouped its expenses) than they do from touring. (Note: I said "most" so put your Phish back in your trousers please.)
Touring expenses are enormous. Living in hotels 200 days out of the year? Not cheap, and you still have morgage/rent payments to make on your primary residence. The venue owners take a massive cut of the gate, and a large part of that goes to their expenses (insurance, union labor, security, etc.).
Touring for the large majority of acts is a break-even proposition at best. The exceptions are the Grateful Dead-like acts that can count on people who are willing to see a dozen of their shows every year and those "top-tier" arena acts (U2, Springsteen, Stones, et. al.) who can charge between $75 and $300 for a single seat. And those dinosaurs still make more from a CD (since they have name recognition and the label's not afraid of spending $1M to promote a low-risk release).
For the rest of the acts on tour, live shows are a means of promoting an album, thus a modest loss is an acceptable cost of doing business. No CD, no tour, unless they can take advantage of the economy of scale afforded by a multi-act tour (like Lollapalooza).
Touring is an extremely inefficient way of reaching listeners. Four to six weeks in the studio can produce a recording that millions will buy (and millions more will hear on the radio). To reach a million concert-goers, a band would have to play 50 nights of sold-out hockey rinks (20,000 seats), which with travel time and days off approaches three months on the road.
As for revenue streams, retail sales aren't the only source of income from a recording. There are royalties from airplay (heard any live cuts on the radio lately?), and from soundtrack and commercial uses. I wonder if you asked "any Slashdotter" what a transcription royalty was or the origin of mechanical royalties whether you'd get a correct (or even coherent) answer.
Finally, here's a quite from Robbie Robertson, late of the band The Band about touring:
The road has taken a lot of the great ones...it's a goddamned impossible way of life.
Of course, I don't see what goes on here making a damn bit of difference with respect to the Byzantine construct known as the music industry. Any Slashdotter could tell you that much.
DirectBandâ will initially cover over 100 top metropolitan areas across all 50 U.S. states, plus the top 13 Canadian cities.
Outside of these areas? Sorry. Stuck in the subway or the Lincoln Tunnel where FM signals can't reach? Too bad. Should have brought a back-up watch just in case SPOT can't latch on to a signal, maybe one of those $1.99 LCD Toy Story II watches you get with purchase of a Happy Meal and a medium beverage.
On the other hand, there's the possibility of some real fun for someone who has the know-how to cobble together a low power FM transmitter that can broadcast on the SPOT sideband.
"Hang on, I've got to check my mess...Holy Mother of Goatse.cx!"
My mother was getting fed up with BSODs and unexplained freezes and the like, so I suggested that she try Linux and brought over a Knoppix CD. She was pretty impressed with it, but she had a few questions.
"Can I play Counter Strike on Linux?" she said.
"Counter Strike? You play that?" I'd been laboring under the impression that she was a Freecell addict.
"All the time. I love fraggin' n00bs."
"Mom!"
"And what about my pr0n? Can I use Linux to view it?"
"This isn't happening." I felt an icy ball forming in my stomach, a feeling of nausea rising in my throat.
"Don't be ghey. I have needs too, you know." She opened up her browser; the home page was set to goatse.cx! I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
"LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA!" I felt as if my whole world was crashing down around me.
So yeah, Linux might not be the best choice for my Mom. Also, if you play CS on a low-latency East Coast server, watch out for Mom. She likes to AWP wh0r3.
Interesting question. I was wondering that myself.
Not many people outside the music industry are aware that retail sales are the only revenue stream. For one thing, there's something called mechanical royalties, a fee of 7.5 cents per song per unit that's paid to the songwriter (not the performer, unless they are the same person or persons). BTW, the term mechanical originally referred to player piano rolls, and goes back over a century.
If a band releases an album of all "cover" songs, all the mechanical royalties go to the songwriters.
There's also performance royalties, money paid to the songwriter from radio and television airplay (as well as jukebox placements and clubs that employ cover bands). The recent controversy surrounding streaming webcasts involved these. Performance royalties are administered by ASCAP, BMI, and SECAM, organizations that collect fees from radio and television stations (and clubs and jukebox vendors) and disburse these monies to songwriters according to a formula based on the number of plays multiplied by the potential number of listeners.
Other revenue streams include synchronization rights (the use of musical works in a movie soundtrack) and transcription royalties (use of musical works in advertisements).
For all but the most popular bands and songwriters, these royalty payments don't amount to much, but even a "one hit wonder" might see a jackpot if their song hits the Top 40 or ends up in a movie or a television commercial.
The canonical/apocryphal royalty success story is that of Paul Anka, who wrote the theme for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and earned over $700 each week from performance royalties simply by having that tune played on every NBC affiliate in the country five nights each week.
Go to Sen. Hatch's web site and click on the "MyUtahSearch.com" graphic on the right hand side of the page. It redirects you to a [not safe for work] pr0n site.
I was wondering about that, too. But the site states that they're allowed to boost the power legally if it's operated by a licensed Ham radio operator (under FCC Part 97 rules).
Cringely got something like 10Km with a Pringles can, so I expect someone with more of a clue can push that to 55,000'.
Granted, Bands may get little money for their effort, but they usually put out Albums to support TOURS. The tours make them the most money-- if they're good.
You've got it backwards: bands tour in support of albums, and except for two classes of bands (jam bands like Phish and $300/seat acts like U2) tours are a break-even proposition at best.
In terms of mindshare, releasing an album is the most efficient, cost-effective means of attracting listeners. Consider the example of an album that goes platinum in two weeks (1 million sales); to reach the same number of listeners at live venues would mean 50 gigs at 20,000 seat arenas. Add travel time and off days and that's close to three months of touring to reach the same number of people.
Show me a country that does have a problem with that.
Russia, especially after the fall of Communism but also immediately before. When the remnants of the Red Army were still based in the Ukraine in the early '90s, they couldn't afford to pay the local utilities and had their power shut off, only to have it restored when the Soviets reminded Ukraine Light and Power that Kalashnikovs didn't need electricity to operate.
Hell, even the US Armed Forces, supposedly the best equipped soldiers in the world, have had their enlisted men's families living on food stamps. Sure, it's not starvation, but for the cost of one B-2, two boomers, or one sixth of a carrier group, they could be chowing down on Surf 'n' Turf every night for a decade.
Crossing that one border isn't trivial. And when they do, what are the chances that hax0r599 will do what he's supposed to? Odds are he'll decide that running water, heat in the winter and more than 900 calories a day beats the hell out freezing, starvation and having you, your parents, and your grandparents sent off to the death camps.
First of all, no, crossing the border isn't trivial. That's why North Korea uses submarines to infiltrate the South. Take a look at the west coast of the Korean Peninsula on a map: it's almost a Mandelbrot fractal. Plenty of places for your 1337 K0r34N H4X0rZ to come ashore.
Then there are the underground tunnels North Korea digs under the DMZ, a legacy of Great Leader Kim Il Sung's fondness for the '60s sitcom Hogan's Heroes.
Finally, the disparity in living conditions between NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact didn't seem to have much of an impact on the efficacy of Soviet espionage operations. Granted, it wasn't as wide a gap as that between North and South Korea, but it shows that one shouldn't underestimate an agent's loyalty to his country (or concern for the safety of his family during his absence).
Bailiff: All rise, the Honorable Cmdr Taco, presiding.
[...]
DA McCoy: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we will show beyond a reasonable doubt that on the evening of November 22nd, the defendant, Mr. H4x0rD00d, did knowingly and willfully employ an aimbot and an OpenGL wallhack during the commission of...
Defense Attorney: OMG, LOL! Objection!
Judge Taco: Overruled. STFU.
[...]
Judge Taco: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how do you find the defendant?
Foreman: On the count of wallhacking in the first degree, we find the defendant guilty. On the count of using an aimbot with intent to 0wn, we find the defendant guilty. On the count of misdemeanor page-widening, we find the defendant not guilty. On the count of trolling with intent to flame, we find the defendant not guilty. On the count of felony sock-puppetry, we find the defenNO CARRIER
6. Vested interests. You can call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I think various interests want the price of healthcare to skyrocket so that they can use that as an excuse to socialize it. The corporations actually secretly like the idea of socialized medecine, because then they get to become government agencies. If you are a corporate sleazeball, the next step up is to become a government sleazeball; the perks are just that much better. You can just hear them salivating.
You know, I agree with just about all of your points, and I can't deny that the vested interests of corporations (insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc.) are a major driver of skyrocketing health care costs, but I have to dump a reality check on this one.
These corporations do not want to become government agencies, and in the current climate of privatization and deregulation, they never will be. For one thing, private sector executive compensation and perqs are light years away from what government service offers. There's not a single CEO or chairman alive who would give up a multi-million dollar salary and equity for a bureaucrat's chump change. And as an appointee they'd have to undergo a background check at the very least, and most likely an appearance before a Senate comittee and a confirmation vote. Every dodgy stock deal and shareholder lawsuit would be dragged out for all to see.
Besides, the whole idea of socialized medicine in the US died ten years ago.
Anybody with military experience please correct/confirm this, but don't many soldiers in the field carry some kind of handgun in addition to whatever rifle/machinegun/etc is their primary weapon
Sidearms are issued only to officers and some NCOs (modulo Specfor, MPs, and other specialized units). Your average grunt has only his M4 (the updated M-16), and usually only two per Army squad carry the M203 grenade launcher (that device that's clamped under the M4's barrel).
There's always your bayonet, but the last US Army bayonet charge was 1951, during the Korean War. "Fix bayonets!" is the last thing you want to hear.
Ammo load is typically between 120 and 200 rounds. The prime consideration is water. All that ammo and weaponry is useless on a dehydrated soldier.
There was this one guy who worked for Sun Micro and was disappointed at how slowly Java ran on his Sparcstation, so he attached one of those JATO rocket engines...
Linked off of the letter from McDarl is a page entitled "Quotes from Linux Leaders":
Richard Stallman
"Linux is a copy of UNIX. There is very little new stuff in Linux."Linux kernel forum
"I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect." Richard Stallman, Free as in Freedom, Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software: O'Reilly (2002) at p. 72
"The whole GNU project is really one big hack. It's one big act of subversive playful cleverness..." Richard Stallman, Revolution OS (DVD)
Bruce Perens
"This is becoming a tradition. I go there and break the law every year in the name of free speech." Bruce Perens, explaining his plan to demonstrate how to modify DVD technology to attendees of an Open Source convention.
"We have to remember that Linux is a follow-on to UNIX. It's not just a UNIX clone. It's actually a UNIX successor." Bruce Perens, mpulse magazine, December 2001.
Okay, since when is RMS a Linux leader? GNU, yes. FSF, of course. But a "Linux Leader"? Making the GNU toolset available for inclusion into Linux doesn't exactly smell like leadership to me.
So SCO puts up two quotes from RMS, and two from Bruce Perens. And that's it. Hmmm...isn't there someone else, someone for whom the "Leader" label might be more appropriate, someone who might be considered the creator of Linux? Um...his name escapes me right now. Oh, wait: it's Alan Cox!
No, that's not it.
From Darl McBride's letter:
Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation of our intellectual property or other rights.
Yeah, that's gonna work real well. Whatcha gonna do, Darl, flood Kazaa with bogus distros that consist entirely of/* What the fuck do you think you're doing? */ comments? Hey, it worked for Madonna, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I know it sounds strange, but I'm sort of sorry that I'm not in New York for this (I moved to Boston 25 years ago). Yes, I know that it's a monstrous pain in the ass for everyone and even has the potential for injury and loss of life (e.g., heart attack from climbing stairs), but both blackouts I've been in ('65 and '77) were interesting experiences.
I was five years old for the first one and scared out of my wits when the lights went out. It was an early evening in November, around 5:30 PM, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor, watching TV (the Winchell-Mahoney hour). Lights, television, even the streetlamps outside went out. My first thought: "Mommmmmmmmm!!!!!".
We ended up walking over to my aunt's house a couple of blocks away and eating the cake that my mother had baked that day. That was our dinner. Blackout cake. She never made it again after that, but I remember with all the flickering candles it seemed like someone's birthday.
My father got stuck on the subway for 36 hours, though. Bummer for him.
When the '77 blackout hit, I was living with my father on the 15th floor of a building on East 96th St. I'd just gotten home from my summer job and turned on the radio. The DJ was complaining about the turntables running too fast (overcompensating for low voltage?). Looking out my bedroom window, I saw the blackout roll uptown: the Empire State Building went out first, then the rest of Midtown, the Upper East Side, and then us. It was a hot, humid night and you could see the occasional flash of heat lightning.
I checked on my neighbors, an elderly couple, before heading down to the street, where I bartered a couple of cold beers for a handful of candles. People were bewildered, wondering if the Indian Point nuclear plant had blown, or if the Rooskies were attacking. It took about an hour for the looting to start north of us and for most of the night there was an endless parade of NYPD patrol cars headed uptown, four or five cops in each, all in full riot gear.
I don't want to downplay the millions of dollars of damage that happened that night, but my neighborhood was pretty peaceful. It was like an instant block party, people sharing food and beer and the occasional joint, oldtimers (I guess that's me now) talking about the '65 Blackout (which, like today, started at the Mohawk grid and covered roughly the same area).
Fifteen flights up was nothing for me back then; I ran track in high school.
A couple of years ago my neighborhood in Boston lost power for 36 hours. Nothing big, maybe 25,000 households, but I was bereft. No cable, no Internet, just a battery-operated radio and, of course, candles. Off the grid.
But it was educational. I never realized how dependent I was on technology and the network, how much of my time is spent in front of the silicon devils (TV and computer). Thirty hours with nothing but books and an acoustic guitar for entertainment. When the power came on, the first thing I did was fire up a web browser. It was like a refreshingly cool shower of meaningless information after having to sit and stew with my thoughts.
Shit. I think I'll go to the basement and throw the main breaker. Just for old time's sake.
k.
In August 1996, Microsoft made their internal microsoft.* hierarchy available to the world at large. Around that same time, they switched from INN v1.4 to a proprietary MS NNTP server.
For the next few weeks, every post made to microsoft.* and select other groups was duplicated by msnews.microsoft.com and spewed back to the world because the proprietary MS server changed the Message-ID for every post. Message-IDs are supposed to be unique, so an altered ID was seen as a new post by servers peering with MS and thus were not treated as duplicates and dropped.
Thousands and thousands of posts were duped and spewed by Microsoft's "innovative" server, both inside microsoft.* and out. The reaction among news admins ranged from mild chuckles at Microsoft's expense to blind rage and the use of cancelbots.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I could use a good laugh.
k.
First of all, the article is dated September 2002, though that doesn't make the writer's concerns any less valid.
Second, this has been going on for almost twenty years, starting around the time digital tape decks (like Mitsubishi, Sony, 3M) gained wider currency in recording studios. Digital audio sounds really harsh when you push recording levels, as opposed to analog tape, which has a "softer" limit.
Rowan makes a very valid point: radio stations are notorious for compressing their feed, mostly to get the hottest signal within their transmitter's power limit. Television stations are even worse. I recall taking a road trip with my band in a rented van that didn't have a cassette player; we were at the mercy of every Top-40 station and all of them were playing Phil Collins's "Sussudio" every ten minutes. Some of the stations flattened the signal so much that we thought it was some sort of remix just for robots (the drum machine was at least twice as loud as the lead vocals).
Where I don't concur is Rowan's placing the blame for this on the labels. True, the A&R people are the ones who have right-of-refusal on the final mix, but you can't let engineers, producers, and the mastering lab off the hook. I've been on the other side of the glass and I know that I've been guilty of patching compressors into a channel to keep the kick drum at a managable level, make up for a singer's lax microphone discipline, or "punch up" the final mix. Note that I'm not blaming the musicians; they do whatever they have to in order to get the track on tape. If that means Joe Frontman is going to sway back and forth like Bill Gates at a deposition, so be it. It was my job to deal.
Finally, not to sound too much like a Luddite, but back in the analog days, there was a limit on the number of effects you could employ, the limit being the number of physical units present in your studio rack. Now, with ProTools or Cakewalk, your limits are RAM and CPU cycles, both of which are cheaper to expand than buying more compressors, limiters, gates, reverbs, etc.
k.
The author seems to make a correlation between the number of copyright registrations and the number of musical compositions. I don't believe that a true 1:1 comparison can be made between them.
It's been my experience (as a songwriter and producer) that a single work can be covered by a number of copyrights. For example, I would regularly compile a tape of unpublished recordings, entitle it "Compositions, 19xx to 19xx", and send it in with a Form PA and $20. Once I'd published a recording of a song, I'd copyright just that work. Also, the recording (tape, single, LP, or CD) would have its own copyright (under Form SR, which covers sound recordings specifically, that (P) sign that often accompanies ©). Additionally, lyrics could be copyrighted separately (under Form TX, for written works).
Sounds anal, but I had a lawyer who specialized in entertainment law suss it all out for me.
k.
Just because "many a Slashdotter" has pointed something out doesn't make that statement true.
Most musicians make more from CDs that sell enough to get past the break-even point (i.e., after the label has recouped its expenses) than they do from touring. (Note: I said "most" so put your Phish back in your trousers please.)
Touring expenses are enormous. Living in hotels 200 days out of the year? Not cheap, and you still have morgage/rent payments to make on your primary residence. The venue owners take a massive cut of the gate, and a large part of that goes to their expenses (insurance, union labor, security, etc.).
Touring for the large majority of acts is a break-even proposition at best. The exceptions are the Grateful Dead-like acts that can count on people who are willing to see a dozen of their shows every year and those "top-tier" arena acts (U2, Springsteen, Stones, et. al.) who can charge between $75 and $300 for a single seat. And those dinosaurs still make more from a CD (since they have name recognition and the label's not afraid of spending $1M to promote a low-risk release).
For the rest of the acts on tour, live shows are a means of promoting an album, thus a modest loss is an acceptable cost of doing business. No CD, no tour, unless they can take advantage of the economy of scale afforded by a multi-act tour (like Lollapalooza).
Touring is an extremely inefficient way of reaching listeners. Four to six weeks in the studio can produce a recording that millions will buy (and millions more will hear on the radio). To reach a million concert-goers, a band would have to play 50 nights of sold-out hockey rinks (20,000 seats), which with travel time and days off approaches three months on the road.
As for revenue streams, retail sales aren't the only source of income from a recording. There are royalties from airplay (heard any live cuts on the radio lately?), and from soundtrack and commercial uses. I wonder if you asked "any Slashdotter" what a transcription royalty was or the origin of mechanical royalties whether you'd get a correct (or even coherent) answer.
Finally, here's a quite from Robbie Robertson, late of the band The Band about touring:
Of course, I don't see what goes on here making a damn bit of difference with respect to the Byzantine construct known as the music industry. Any Slashdotter could tell you that much.
k.
Outside of these areas? Sorry. Stuck in the subway or the Lincoln Tunnel where FM signals can't reach? Too bad. Should have brought a back-up watch just in case SPOT can't latch on to a signal, maybe one of those $1.99 LCD Toy Story II watches you get with purchase of a Happy Meal and a medium beverage.
On the other hand, there's the possibility of some real fun for someone who has the know-how to cobble together a low power FM transmitter that can broadcast on the SPOT sideband.
"Hang on, I've got to check my mess...Holy Mother of Goatse.cx!"
Damn. Now I hope these things really take off.
k.
My mother was getting fed up with BSODs and unexplained freezes and the like, so I suggested that she try Linux and brought over a Knoppix CD. She was pretty impressed with it, but she had a few questions.
"Can I play Counter Strike on Linux?" she said.
"Counter Strike? You play that?" I'd been laboring under the impression that she was a Freecell addict.
"All the time. I love fraggin' n00bs."
"Mom!"
"And what about my pr0n? Can I use Linux to view it?"
"This isn't happening." I felt an icy ball forming in my stomach, a feeling of nausea rising in my throat.
"Don't be ghey. I have needs too, you know." She opened up her browser; the home page was set to goatse.cx! I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
"LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA!" I felt as if my whole world was crashing down around me.
So yeah, Linux might not be the best choice for my Mom. Also, if you play CS on a low-latency East Coast server, watch out for Mom. She likes to AWP wh0r3.
k.
Interesting question. I was wondering that myself.
Not many people outside the music industry are aware that retail sales are the only revenue stream. For one thing, there's something called mechanical royalties, a fee of 7.5 cents per song per unit that's paid to the songwriter (not the performer, unless they are the same person or persons). BTW, the term mechanical originally referred to player piano rolls, and goes back over a century.
If a band releases an album of all "cover" songs, all the mechanical royalties go to the songwriters.
There's also performance royalties, money paid to the songwriter from radio and television airplay (as well as jukebox placements and clubs that employ cover bands). The recent controversy surrounding streaming webcasts involved these. Performance royalties are administered by ASCAP, BMI, and SECAM, organizations that collect fees from radio and television stations (and clubs and jukebox vendors) and disburse these monies to songwriters according to a formula based on the number of plays multiplied by the potential number of listeners.
Other revenue streams include synchronization rights (the use of musical works in a movie soundtrack) and transcription royalties (use of musical works in advertisements).
For all but the most popular bands and songwriters, these royalty payments don't amount to much, but even a "one hit wonder" might see a jackpot if their song hits the Top 40 or ends up in a movie or a television commercial.
The canonical/apocryphal royalty success story is that of Paul Anka, who wrote the theme for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and earned over $700 each week from performance royalties simply by having that tune played on every NBC affiliate in the country five nights each week.
k.
It's the Extended Dance Remix version.
k.
Go to Sen. Hatch's web site and click on the "MyUtahSearch.com" graphic on the right hand side of the page. It redirects you to a [not safe for work] pr0n site.
[Thanks to The Turd Report for pointing this out on K5.]
k.
"If the code don't fit you must acquit." -- Johnny Cochrane
k.
I was wondering about that, too. But the site states that they're allowed to boost the power legally if it's operated by a licensed Ham radio operator (under FCC Part 97 rules).
Cringely got something like 10Km with a Pringles can, so I expect someone with more of a clue can push that to 55,000'.
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That's adorable; I've never seen a web page with pictures of someone's cats before. More people should do this sort of thing.
I've got to wonder if he pronounces the name Giz with a hard "G" or a soft "g".
Oh, yeah: the case mod. Fugly. I'd rather look at pictures of kitties.
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You've got it backwards: bands tour in support of albums, and except for two classes of bands (jam bands like Phish and $300/seat acts like U2) tours are a break-even proposition at best.
In terms of mindshare, releasing an album is the most efficient, cost-effective means of attracting listeners. Consider the example of an album that goes platinum in two weeks (1 million sales); to reach the same number of listeners at live venues would mean 50 gigs at 20,000 seat arenas. Add travel time and off days and that's close to three months of touring to reach the same number of people.
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Set the Wayback Machine.
(For an overview go here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.korea-dpr
Comedy GOLD!
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Russia, especially after the fall of Communism but also immediately before. When the remnants of the Red Army were still based in the Ukraine in the early '90s, they couldn't afford to pay the local utilities and had their power shut off, only to have it restored when the Soviets reminded Ukraine Light and Power that Kalashnikovs didn't need electricity to operate.
Hell, even the US Armed Forces, supposedly the best equipped soldiers in the world, have had their enlisted men's families living on food stamps. Sure, it's not starvation, but for the cost of one B-2, two boomers, or one sixth of a carrier group, they could be chowing down on Surf 'n' Turf every night for a decade.
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First of all, no, crossing the border isn't trivial. That's why North Korea uses submarines to infiltrate the South. Take a look at the west coast of the Korean Peninsula on a map: it's almost a Mandelbrot fractal. Plenty of places for your 1337 K0r34N H4X0rZ to come ashore.
Then there are the underground tunnels North Korea digs under the DMZ, a legacy of Great Leader Kim Il Sung's fondness for the '60s sitcom Hogan's Heroes.
Finally, the disparity in living conditions between NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact didn't seem to have much of an impact on the efficacy of Soviet espionage operations. Granted, it wasn't as wide a gap as that between North and South Korea, but it shows that one shouldn't underestimate an agent's loyalty to his country (or concern for the safety of his family during his absence).
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...to NBC, Law And Order: Special Moderators Unit
Bailiff: All rise, the Honorable Cmdr Taco, presiding.
[...]
DA McCoy: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we will show beyond a reasonable doubt that on the evening of November 22nd, the defendant, Mr. H4x0rD00d, did knowingly and willfully employ an aimbot and an OpenGL wallhack during the commission of...
Defense Attorney: OMG, LOL! Objection!
Judge Taco: Overruled. STFU.
[...]
Judge Taco: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how do you find the defendant?
Foreman: On the count of wallhacking in the first degree, we find the defendant guilty. On the count of using an aimbot with intent to 0wn, we find the defendant guilty. On the count of misdemeanor page-widening, we find the defendant not guilty. On the count of trolling with intent to flame, we find the defendant not guilty. On the count of felony sock-puppetry, we find the defenNO CARRIER
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But at $6/share that's still three times what it was trading for in mid-March of this year and ten times its July '02 price.
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Even so, I'm still holding out for Yoda for Workgroups 3.11
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You know, I agree with just about all of your points, and I can't deny that the vested interests of corporations (insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc.) are a major driver of skyrocketing health care costs, but I have to dump a reality check on this one.
These corporations do not want to become government agencies, and in the current climate of privatization and deregulation, they never will be. For one thing, private sector executive compensation and perqs are light years away from what government service offers. There's not a single CEO or chairman alive who would give up a multi-million dollar salary and equity for a bureaucrat's chump change. And as an appointee they'd have to undergo a background check at the very least, and most likely an appearance before a Senate comittee and a confirmation vote. Every dodgy stock deal and shareholder lawsuit would be dragged out for all to see.
Besides, the whole idea of socialized medicine in the US died ten years ago.
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Sidearms are issued only to officers and some NCOs (modulo Specfor, MPs, and other specialized units). Your average grunt has only his M4 (the updated M-16), and usually only two per Army squad carry the M203 grenade launcher (that device that's clamped under the M4's barrel).
There's always your bayonet, but the last US Army bayonet charge was 1951, during the Korean War. "Fix bayonets!" is the last thing you want to hear.
Ammo load is typically between 120 and 200 rounds. The prime consideration is water. All that ammo and weaponry is useless on a dehydrated soldier.
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There was this one guy who worked for Sun Micro and was disappointed at how slowly Java ran on his Sparcstation, so he attached one of those JATO rocket engines...
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Okay, since when is RMS a Linux leader? GNU, yes. FSF, of course. But a "Linux Leader"? Making the GNU toolset available for inclusion into Linux doesn't exactly smell like leadership to me.
So SCO puts up two quotes from RMS, and two from Bruce Perens. And that's it. Hmmm...isn't there someone else, someone for whom the "Leader" label might be more appropriate, someone who might be considered the creator of Linux? Um...his name escapes me right now. Oh, wait: it's Alan Cox!
No, that's not it.
From Darl McBride's letter:
Yeah, that's gonna work real well. Whatcha gonna do, Darl, flood Kazaa with bogus distros that consist entirely of
It's official: SCO is dying.
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I suppose it's only a matter of time before the same thing happens to Professore Arturo Metallica of the University of Milan.
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