Isn't it then incumbent on people like you to put real energy into stifiling these whack jobs and doing your very best to distance yourself from their insane worldview?
COME THE FUCK ON DUDE! You and I both fucking know that the labels cost is 10x cheaper than it was before they started making CDs. If it isn't, then they only have themselves to blame. Do you have any idea how much the artist gets for each CD sold?
The other solution for this problem is for the artists to wake up to the fact that the labels are fucking them and providing much less value than they did when manufacturing, distribution and marketing were real problems.
I am under no illusions about the legality of russian web sites, but the more money people spend on illegal russian websites, the higher the chance that the stupid labels will get it. I am willing to pay money for music - provided it is on my reasonable terms. The RIAA can choose to make money off me or not. I figure that the popularity of russian websites provides them with a workable model to provide me what I want at the price I want it. By providing them with this clear marketing data, I am part of what I hope will eventually be the solution. I am probably deluded though, the RIAA seems like they will contunie to legislate around their broken business model. Pretty mind blowing that they don't realize they'd sell 10x the product at 1/2 the price.
I am 38. I also pay for my music. I buy it off russian websites where they hit the correct price point. I am willing to open my wallet, but I am unwilling to pay the RIAA's inflated monopoly position prices. When will the labels get that they will sell 10x as much product by reducing their prices 1/2? And when will pricks like you come tumbling down off their high horses?
When will these fuckers get it? a buck a song? Fuck THAT. I will pay up to 8$ for a physical CD and 1/2 that for high quality compressed files. PERIOD. Until these assholes get it, I will get my music elsewhere.
You know - fuck being fair to all parties. Fuck the labels. It is time we the people revoke their corporate charter - they are no longer needed. In my opinion, the only people that deserve fairness are the artists and their fans. Metalica wasn't fucking crying when I was sending their demo around the world during the tape trading days.
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet: Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which was blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no vinyl nostalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto apartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s recession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my late 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $100 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
A reasonable service at a reasonable price. Look to the Russian sites. I select the quality and pay a reasonable price for it. The bottom line here is that I'll pay up to 4 bucks for a CD encoded at 256k VBR with no obnoxious DRM crap - no less quality and no more money.
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -.40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs). The only real limit to my spending at this price is the availability of good music - better go find some talented new artists fast!
Ease my conscious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s off Russian websites. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
This would keep me from downloading music "illegally" - I prom
And while we are on the topic - why the FUCK do breeders get a tax break? Instead, we should be charging them the massive cost to society their decision to breed adds to.
Well, because I am a full-time telecommuter, I don't have to live in an urban or even suburban environment. I live in a rural area on 3 acres so I don't have to be bothered by my neighbors. I do hear lots of birds all day long, but I find that kinda nice while I am working.
I strongly agree with all the comments explaing why Second Life wouldn't be a good tool for online learning, but I was hoping to read some well informed detail about viable alternatives. I was thinking that something like Groove or Placeware would be a good platform for building a real online school, but I don't know enough to talk about it with authority. Anyone?
I work for a monolithic tech co. 80% of the people I deal with (including myself) are telecommuters. Almost every day, I am on a call where I hear someone's kid screaming or crying in the background. These are six figure professionals we are talking about. In my mind, it is totally inexcusable. It is crap like this that gives telecommuting a bad name. Personally, I wouldn't let an employee telecommute if they have kids in the house.
Commuting sucks - that's not FUD, that's a statement of fact.
I agree that the post was from my perspective, but I also feel that I have a pretty useful perspective on the problem considering my extensive telecommuting experience. What's yours?
I am totally blown away that so many people responded to this guy's question with anti-telecommuter FUD. Having been a telecommuter for five years, I think I have a pretty good perspective on the value proposition:
1. Employee retention. Employees that telecommute have cheap golden handcuffs. I could never go back to commuting to a fucking cube farm and, unfortunately, employers that offer telecommuting are few and far between (due to the luddite FUD like we saw on this topic).
2. Commuting is rediculous. I used to spend three hours a day commuting. Lots of people do worse. During those three hours, I am not working and generally unavailable (unless I am driving solo, which means I can take phone calls, but has a huge social impact). Now that I work at home, I am available at 6am for email and chat while I am eating breakfast - that's 8am on the east coast and 2pm for Western Europe. If you include commuting time as work (since it really is), yes I "work" less than a cube farmer, but I am available more.
3. Work shouldn't be social time. If I want to socialize, I will do so with my friends, not my co-workers. I used to hate going to the cube farm because I knew I would have to spend too much time with the idle chit chat at the "watercooler," or worse yet, in my fricking cube. Socializing with your co-workers does NOT make your work relationship better, in fact it makes it much harder to keep people focused on actually working.
3. Face time is not that important. I am a product manager and one could say, of all the telecommutable jobs, being a PM should require more face time. Bullshit. The real problem is that many people in the corporate world do not know how to have an effective conference call. I get stuck on these calls all the time and the worst offenders are the people who work at the cube farm mothership in San Jose. When the call is something I care about, I will lead the meeting. When I am at the cube farm mothership for meetings, they are usually far less productive.
4. Living in a major metro sucks ass. I lived in the Bay Area for much of my life and, while it is an OK place to go for a vacation, I'd never want to live in that shit hole again. I live in the mountains of New Mexico now. It takes me 15 minutes to get to civilization (Whole Foods, restaurants, symphony, airport, etc...). For the price of my awesome spread on 3 acres, I could buy a crackerbox house in the far flung suburbs if I had to work in the Bay Area. I would have to drive hours to get to work.
An open Letter to the RIAA
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which is blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no nastalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto appartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s resession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my mid 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $250 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
1. Save me time - downloading stuff on Kazaa is work: sifting through the crappy files, figuring out which songs I am missing from a given CD, and organizing the 40+gigs of it all - this stuff takes time and my time is worth money to me. Figure out ways to save me time and I will pay a price for it.
2. Selection - I am limited to what the masses are trading. I like obscure shit and am willing to experiment, but not at $15-17 (notice how this trended higher?) a pop - no fricking way!
3. Ease my concious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
So, how can the labels meet these needs? Again, simple:
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -.40 a song. Bill me based on band
I have this same problem with SATA cables and have a fairly modern case. The case has drive bays, but no built in connectors. Could you provide links to some examples?
Lie on your resume. The easiest way for you to do this is to make up a small consulting firm that you worked for and gee - what do you know, they are outta business now.
When I used to smoke pot, I only did it while I was exercising. On the rare occasion that I did get high before watching a movie or something, I would go batty because I wanted to be outside hiking or something. For me, getting high reinforced exercise. If you get stoned and watch TV all the time, pot reinforces being a mental zombie.
Within nothing lies the possibility for everything.
I came up with that on an acid trip 20 years ago. Surely someone has applied a real scientific approach to this? Brownie points to anyone who can point me to it...
For me, the "message" in pi was the whole fricking point of Contact - that they left it out of the movie smacks of someone afraid of pissing off religious people.
Slashdot Mirror
http://one.revver.com/watch/89096
Frankly, I think that we the people should revoke the members of the RIAA's charter.
Isn't it then incumbent on people like you to put real energy into stifiling these whack jobs and doing your very best to distance yourself from their insane worldview?
COME THE FUCK ON DUDE! You and I both fucking know that the labels cost is 10x cheaper than it was before they started making CDs. If it isn't, then they only have themselves to blame. Do you have any idea how much the artist gets for each CD sold? The other solution for this problem is for the artists to wake up to the fact that the labels are fucking them and providing much less value than they did when manufacturing, distribution and marketing were real problems.
I am under no illusions about the legality of russian web sites, but the more money people spend on illegal russian websites, the higher the chance that the stupid labels will get it. I am willing to pay money for music - provided it is on my reasonable terms. The RIAA can choose to make money off me or not. I figure that the popularity of russian websites provides them with a workable model to provide me what I want at the price I want it. By providing them with this clear marketing data, I am part of what I hope will eventually be the solution. I am probably deluded though, the RIAA seems like they will contunie to legislate around their broken business model. Pretty mind blowing that they don't realize they'd sell 10x the product at 1/2 the price.
We are not talking about widgets here - the labels have a monopoly on the artists they own and they have been raping consumers since CDs came along.
I am 38. I also pay for my music. I buy it off russian websites where they hit the correct price point. I am willing to open my wallet, but I am unwilling to pay the RIAA's inflated monopoly position prices. When will the labels get that they will sell 10x as much product by reducing their prices 1/2? And when will pricks like you come tumbling down off their high horses?
When will these fuckers get it? a buck a song? Fuck THAT. I will pay up to 8$ for a physical CD and 1/2 that for high quality compressed files. PERIOD. Until these assholes get it, I will get my music elsewhere.
You know - fuck being fair to all parties. Fuck the labels. It is time we the people revoke their corporate charter - they are no longer needed. In my opinion, the only people that deserve fairness are the artists and their fans. Metalica wasn't fucking crying when I was sending their demo around the world during the tape trading days.
The bottom line is that the labels have a monopoly on the acts they own.
An open Letter to the RIAA
.40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs). The only real limit to my spending at this price is the availability of good music - better go find some talented new artists fast!
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which was blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no vinyl nostalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto apartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s recession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my late 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $100 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
A reasonable service at a reasonable price. Look to the Russian sites. I select the quality and pay a reasonable price for it. The bottom line here is that I'll pay up to 4 bucks for a CD encoded at 256k VBR with no obnoxious DRM crap - no less quality and no more money.
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
Ease my conscious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s off Russian websites. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
This would keep me from downloading music "illegally" - I prom
And while we are on the topic - why the FUCK do breeders get a tax break? Instead, we should be charging them the massive cost to society their decision to breed adds to.
Well, because I am a full-time telecommuter, I don't have to live in an urban or even suburban environment. I live in a rural area on 3 acres so I don't have to be bothered by my neighbors. I do hear lots of birds all day long, but I find that kinda nice while I am working.
I strongly agree with all the comments explaing why Second Life wouldn't be a good tool for online learning, but I was hoping to read some well informed detail about viable alternatives. I was thinking that something like Groove or Placeware would be a good platform for building a real online school, but I don't know enough to talk about it with authority. Anyone?
I work for a monolithic tech co. 80% of the people I deal with (including myself) are telecommuters. Almost every day, I am on a call where I hear someone's kid screaming or crying in the background. These are six figure professionals we are talking about. In my mind, it is totally inexcusable. It is crap like this that gives telecommuting a bad name. Personally, I wouldn't let an employee telecommute if they have kids in the house.
And my post was FUD how exactly?
Commuting sucks - that's not FUD, that's a statement of fact.
I agree that the post was from my perspective, but I also feel that I have a pretty useful perspective on the problem considering my extensive telecommuting experience. What's yours?
Here are a couple suggestions for you based on your list. Both have tons of free downloads on thier site.
:)
http://www.laundryroom.net/
http://www.bornnaked.net/
You're welcome
I am totally blown away that so many people responded to this guy's question with anti-telecommuter FUD.
Having been a telecommuter for five years, I think I have a pretty good perspective on the value proposition:
1. Employee retention. Employees that telecommute have cheap golden handcuffs. I could never go back to commuting to a fucking cube farm and, unfortunately, employers that offer telecommuting are few and far between (due to the luddite FUD like we saw on this topic).
2. Commuting is rediculous. I used to spend three hours a day commuting. Lots of people do worse. During those three hours, I am not working and generally unavailable (unless I am driving solo, which means I can take phone calls, but has a huge social impact). Now that I work at home, I am available at 6am for email and chat while I am eating breakfast - that's 8am on the east coast and 2pm for Western Europe. If you include commuting time as work (since it really is), yes I "work" less than a cube farmer, but I am available more.
3. Work shouldn't be social time. If I want to socialize, I will do so with my friends, not my co-workers. I used to hate going to the cube farm because I knew I would have to spend too much time with the idle chit chat at the "watercooler," or worse yet, in my fricking cube. Socializing with your co-workers does NOT make your work relationship better, in fact it makes it much harder to keep people focused on actually working.
3. Face time is not that important. I am a product manager and one could say, of all the telecommutable jobs, being a PM should require more face time. Bullshit. The real problem is that many people in the corporate world do not know how to have an effective conference call. I get stuck on these calls all the time and the worst offenders are the people who work at the cube farm mothership in San Jose. When the call is something I care about, I will lead the meeting. When I am at the cube farm mothership for meetings, they are usually far less productive.
4. Living in a major metro sucks ass. I lived in the Bay Area for much of my life and, while it is an OK place to go for a vacation, I'd never want to live in that shit hole again. I live in the mountains of New Mexico now. It takes me 15 minutes to get to civilization (Whole Foods, restaurants, symphony, airport, etc...). For the price of my awesome spread on 3 acres, I could buy a crackerbox house in the far flung suburbs if I had to work in the Bay Area. I would have to drive hours to get to work.
An open Letter to the RIAA What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
.40 a song. Bill me based on band
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which is blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no nastalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto appartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s resession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my mid 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $250 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
1. Save me time - downloading stuff on Kazaa is work: sifting through the crappy files, figuring out which songs I am missing from a given CD, and organizing the 40+gigs of it all - this stuff takes time and my time is worth money to me. Figure out ways to save me time and I will pay a price for it.
2. Selection - I am limited to what the masses are trading. I like obscure shit and am willing to experiment, but not at $15-17 (notice how this trended higher?) a pop - no fricking way!
3. Ease my concious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
So, how can the labels meet these needs? Again, simple:
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
I have this same problem with SATA cables and have a fairly modern case. The case has drive bays, but no built in connectors. Could you provide links to some examples?
Lie on your resume. The easiest way for you to do this is to make up a small consulting firm that you worked for and gee - what do you know, they are outta business now.
When I used to smoke pot, I only did it while I was exercising. On the rare occasion that I did get high before watching a movie or something, I would go batty because I wanted to be outside hiking or something. For me, getting high reinforced exercise. If you get stoned and watch TV all the time, pot reinforces being a mental zombie.
0 = 1 + -1
0 = 2 + -2
0 = x + -x
etc...
Within nothing lies the possibility for everything.
I came up with that on an acid trip 20 years ago. Surely someone has applied a real scientific approach to this? Brownie points to anyone who can point me to it...
How much did it cost for you to do that?
For me, the "message" in pi was the whole fricking point of Contact - that they left it out of the movie smacks of someone afraid of pissing off religious people.