As a keyboard player you have probably spent some time learning and perfecting the correct posture for playing your instrument, which has probably seeped into your computer keyboard use. Good typists get less carpal tunnel, because they know that they shouldn't keep their hands flexed all the time and sit in a comfortable position (like piano players).
There is no solid data giving any particular number of children a clear advantage with all other things being equal. The spoiled only child has no real basis when factoring in money/child and other relevant metrics.
Also, your 'didn't become a stereotype without reason' argument is a bit frightening. Do you use it to justify other stereotypes like stingy Scots and stealing Jews? The truth is many things that are/where common wisdom are just plain wrong.
Your argument for efficiency is worth hearing, but if it was that important to people to have the efficiency you talk about, why aren't high level assemblers used more often? If speed is so important on tasks like image manipulation, why not use Fortran instead of C? Fortran compilers are usually amazingly efficient. Similarly, does every program have to be written in only one language? If not, why not use the languages with efficient compilers for the parts that have to be fast and the languages with powerful constructs for the parts that have to be written fast.
As a bit of an aside -- remember that languages aren't efficient, compilers are. It may be that some languages lend themselves more to the development of efficient compilers, but there is no theoretical reason why a java compiler can't generate code that is as efficient as c code (given that they are doing the same thing).
Except if you happen to live near the equator like me. The winters aren't harsh enough and the summer days aren't long enough -- you need lights and ice on the rhizome and even then the yields aren't that great, so not enough to brew every second week...
And since a human has to program the machine, the machine cannot be a better musician than the person or persons who programmed it.
So the programmers of Deep Blue could all beat Kasparov?
I am a musician myself, and I have often been struck by how much of 'creating' music is 'finding' music -- messing around with different chords or inversions or melodic manipulations until you find something that sounds good. The brain is a computer, we're just not so clued up on the program.
Of course, this is similar to the way that there are only a finite number of programs that can be written in any language. People use infinite possibilities to indicate 'very large number of' possibilities in vernacular. Most people get the implicit limitations of a finite universe, and most people think it's splitting hairs to make that point every time.
Fortran 2003 is more 'modern' than c++ (most of which is based on a 1998 standard):-). Seriously, though, Fortran really shines for scientific computing. I am routinely blown away by the thoughtful design of the matrix operations which are a part of the language and can be crudely approximated by c++ libraries that make your code almost impossible to debug due to extensive template use.
I get that sentiment a lot, but there's a big difference between getting syntax wrong and getting dress wrong. Basically, code is a formal, well defined system. This means that there are formal rules that you can write down and use to check your syntax. Unfortunately, the rules for dress are a lot less formal. Fashions come and go, things change and there is no ISO standard that I can download that will allow me to stand in front of the mirror and check that I am correctly dressed. In some situations, I wouldn't mind being able to do this, but failing that it boils down to your 'feeling' about what you are wearing. You may have noticed that even fashion conscious people get it 'wrong' sometimes -- no-one dresses in such a way that everyone agrees they look great. Faced with this, many people decide to follow their own sense and get on with their lives. I don't blame them.
Academic plagiarism is not stealing any more than me saying the sky is red is stealing. There is a difference between lying and stealing. Plagiarism (passing off someone else's ideas as your own) is dishonest, but it sure as hell is not stealing.
I think western society is just so focussed on property as the prime right that most wrongs are in some way tied up to theft, so people think of rape as 'stolen innocence', murder as 'stolen life'. Unfortunately not every misdeed is a property infringement, that's why we have different words for them.
If I make a tool for someone, and they paid my asking price, is it unfair for them to use my tool to make something even more valuable? Or, if an artist paints a painting and sells it, does he deserve to be pissed off when the guy he sold it to sells it for a profit? Of course employers end up making more than employees -- that's how capitalism works. And I don't see how recording artists are so special that they need a whole different way of earning money from any other trade.
You say it's not our job to make sure they create something, but it's not some law that takes whatever they made away from them -- the law is what gives them copyright in the first place. There was a time before copyright. Strangely, they still had new music, new inventions and new stories.
Copyright or lack thereof does not affect artists ability to attempt to sell their work. In fact, without copyright we would probably see a lot more live music, as the artist is then charging for something that is impossible to reproduce cheaply -- the experience of seeing them perform live in person. We don't need copyright to ensure artists make music. I can't really comment on the quality or quantity of music produced mainly to encourage people to see the show, but I think it's a lot more understandable and doesn't need any legal strangeness like the whole mess of different "IP" laws to enforce it.
Well, the fact of the matter is that even as things stand, artists do not 'deserve to be compensated for their work'. An artist may have worked really, really hard on a really, really bad song that never sells. Furthermore, I am an engineer and I do not collect royalties on my designs, I just get a once-off payment for my time, where does that leave me in the whole issue?. I firmly believe that it is wrong to allow copyright (I mean morally wrong), because it violates my feeling of natural law as an engineer (you don't get something for nothing). I believe that trade should only be for non-reproducible goods (like time or physical materials), not for 'non-tangible assets'. So which of us is 'right'? All our rights and wrongs are societal norms.
But that's the point that I was trying to make: Given the option of remembering 20 ASCII codes to make accents or to remember the Mac way of alt-u for umlaut followed by a character, most people would choose the more mnemonic way. However, once you have learned one, you will be really resistant to learning another way of doing the same thing. This is a big part of 'knowing' a system, and it's also why people bond so strongly to their system and feel helpless in others.
Actually, I think you meant to say "they don't tell you all the things you are used to doing one way that you'll have to learn to do another way". Trust me, every person moving from Windows to Mac that I have spoken to the day they get the mac has a few things that piss them off. Number one is probably "there is no delete key". Then there's the way that compose keys work (my native language has a lot of accents, and they've learned to use ALT-137 or whatever, and it actually annoys them that they have to do ALT-e e to get the same result). In my experience, very few people actually miss cutting files, as it's not more trouble to drag them to the new location -- you have to open the new folder anyway, and Finder has those spring-loaded folders. The thing is, it gets to one when the things that you are so used to doing don't work. This doesn't mean that you can't move files away from your desktop, it just means you can't cut and paste files.
Another thing that I am only getting used to now is the whole Mac philosophy of windows not being full screen most of the time. It really does work if you give it a chance, but it is very alien to how I was used to working. So the "zoom" button, which most Windows users expect to be "maximize" doesn't work like you're used to. The point I'm trying to make here is that Apple aren't too lazy to implement all these windows-like behaviours, they really believe that their way of doing things is better. I don't really care one way or another, but I think many of the Mac ideas are pretty solid. I can tell you that I don't miss cut and paste on files at all.
We can't ask questions? I suppose asking for the value of a variable in gdb doesn't count. If you are referring to 'why is this program not working?' in the debugger reference, I assume you know that getting answers for these questions effectively requires strong AI, or at least a better specification of what it is that we are trying to do with the program in the first place.
Back to search and the semantic web, I think that we are using formal languages to ask questions in search every day. I would love to see some examples of questions that you would like to ask (you don't need to use a formal language). Many (if not most) of the ones I can think of are answered as well as can be expected by Google, even though they don't have explicit semantic search. For the ones that require better connection mapping, I think people are making good progress with larger databases and more efficient indexing methods. I suspect, however, that the real questions you want answered require an enormous amount of context. Now, if this is the case, then your original rant about not being able to ask questions is a bit obtuse. If I am missing some meaning in your words, I suppose that's just a great proof of how hard it is to be clear in natural language.
I must say I don't think it's quite as "freakin' awesome" as you seem to. I believe that natural language is not only hard to handle correctly, but also hard to use correctly. There is a reason why we have formal specifications and legal language -- "natural" language is just too vague. Now in some niche areas where you don't have your hands available I can see the allure of voice recognition, but I honestly think that speaking to computers to have them do stuff in anything resembling natural language will be harder to use to get to a specific goal than what we have now. I suppose if you just want some kind of result, that's not so bad, but I kinda like getting exactly what I ask for. A much better argument here. I know it's about programming, but that's basically what we do with computers on any level of use.
I have read several sources that say that PSO (and other stochastic algorithms) are the last resort -- what you throw at problems when they don't seem to be working any other way. Specifically, if you have no derivative information available or the derivatives are misleading, when you have interestingly shaped feasable regions or if you have many local minima, I think that PSO wins out on the 'total time to initial acceptable solution' criterion. Of course, if you are solving very similar problems repeatedly, PSO is not a good choice, but there are good reasons for using PSO. It's not just a fad.
Ok, just a few points -- I am a pretty hardcore Linux user, I have been Windows free for about 8 years. At work (university) I use linux exclusively. When my beloved IBM laptop died I needed a replacement and bought a PowerBook G4 based on the build quality and feature set, expecting to dual boot with Linux but hoping that the BSD (and fink) would be enough to tide me over. I am a convert to the Mac way.
Now, let me just say that I don't play games. This is probably the one part of the mac experience that is lagging behind, but I don't really care. I do scientific work on my Mac and it is really simpler and more pleasurable to use. Even though my Gentoo setup doesn't really require a lot of work these days (just updates every now and again), I have never run a linux setup that is quite as straightforward as the Mac.
Here's the interesting thing. Apple has some of the best usability research out there. They really want people to be able to use their computers. Many people find their interfaces "simpler and more pleasurable to use". How is it that you can determine that all this is wrong? Yes, when I switched I was pissed that there was no delete key. Now I am pretty pissed when I try to work on Windows and backspace doesn't delete stuff. The menu thing is also pretty well thought out -- it comes down to having a larger target for hitting the menu items, because the cursor doesn't go off the screen. Quite logical, really. Similarly for dialog boxes. Research shows that people don't really read the text of a box, so the Apple guidelines require verbs on the buttons, so I have to click "Delete" instead of "OK". I have become a bit lazy, so when Windows programs pop up an OK/Cancel dialog box, I have to do a double take.
Lastly, on the idea that research into usability is useless ("there are no facts whatsoever which are relevant"), I must say that part of my research is Human/Machine interfacing and there are really some facts which are relevant, like the fact that most computer novices find multiple mouse buttons confusing, that acquisition of the menu bar in Windows takes longer on average than on Mac OS, that people don't read dialog box text. I would link to references, but frankly that wouldn't change your mind. But next time you feel the need to bash the Mac GUI, it would be nice if you did it after spending some time (a few weeks) with it, rather than just complaining that you still expect things to work the way they did on some other system.
Perhaps because anti-trust is for monopolies? The fact is that the rules are different for Apple, because they do not have a monopoly on the OS market. Many things that are fine for 'normal' companies become not fine for monopolies (like buying other companies, bundling products, trying to get into new markets, etc).
So, you have not counted the parentheses (and commas, by the way) in, for instance:
f1(f2(f3(a, b), c)) vs (f1 (f2 (f3 a b) c))
In practice, you end up with the same number of parentheses in lisp as any other language, and you save on commas and semicolons. Pretty much the only place that's a bit less efficient is with expressions with lots of binary infix operators.
Ah - but your analogy breaks down because it fails to address how digital information is different from your scenario. The thing stopping you from cleverly hiding a recorder in your jacket, recording the guy playing the tune and then going home and transcribing the music would be that transcribing music is a pretty rare skill and you would probably pay the extra bucks to save you the effort. In the digital world there are effectively free transcribers everywhere. In terms of the real world, you don't really need much more effort to unDRM the file than to play it. And you will always have the option of running the whole shebang in an emulated environment and capturing the screen or scraping the doc or recording the audio output. So if even one person figures out how to do what is always theoretically doable (crack the DRM), you've not just lost one copy, you've lost the whole battle. This is why so many people in this thread come back to the fundamental problem of allowing someone to have everything they need to open a file but stop them from doing so.
The real problem with PS and one of the reasons for the simplification that is PDF is that PS is a Turing complete language. This means that one can do some pretty cool things like a Koch snowflake in a couple of lines, but it also means that some simple things (like counting the pages in a document) can be impossible to do fast. So PDF trimmed down all the programming features and added some stuff like forms, support for different image formats and faster access to information that enable renderers to do a better more modern job. So, in fact, PostScript has too much flexibility.
Authors have no right to fair compensation. If they want to write, they write. If I want to paint I paint. But I have a real job to pay the bills. Markets change and a viable career today may not be a viable career in ten years. Now you may argue that we will end up with less great literature because writers can't make a living, but I think most great literary works didn't make the writers much money anyway.
The best sellers are the most popular works, not the best. I am not worried that writers will stop writing, even if copyright was abolished today. Similarly, I am not worried that people will stop making music or inventing things. Creative acts are in our nature, and there will always be a band playing at the local pub charging for something that cannot be reproduced -- the experience of being there and watching them in person.
Slashdot Mirror
As a keyboard player you have probably spent some time learning and perfecting the correct posture for playing your instrument, which has probably seeped into your computer keyboard use. Good typists get less carpal tunnel, because they know that they shouldn't keep their hands flexed all the time and sit in a comfortable position (like piano players).
There is no solid data giving any particular number of children a clear advantage with all other things being equal. The spoiled only child has no real basis when factoring in money/child and other relevant metrics.
Also, your 'didn't become a stereotype without reason' argument is a bit frightening. Do you use it to justify other stereotypes like stingy Scots and stealing Jews? The truth is many things that are/where common wisdom are just plain wrong.
Your argument for efficiency is worth hearing, but if it was that important to people to have the efficiency you talk about, why aren't high level assemblers used more often? If speed is so important on tasks like image manipulation, why not use Fortran instead of C? Fortran compilers are usually amazingly efficient. Similarly, does every program have to be written in only one language? If not, why not use the languages with efficient compilers for the parts that have to be fast and the languages with powerful constructs for the parts that have to be written fast.
As a bit of an aside -- remember that languages aren't efficient, compilers are. It may be that some languages lend themselves more to the development of efficient compilers, but there is no theoretical reason why a java compiler can't generate code that is as efficient as c code (given that they are doing the same thing).
Except if you happen to live near the equator like me. The winters aren't harsh enough and the summer days aren't long enough -- you need lights and ice on the rhizome and even then the yields aren't that great, so not enough to brew every second week...
So the programmers of Deep Blue could all beat Kasparov?
I am a musician myself, and I have often been struck by how much of 'creating' music is 'finding' music -- messing around with different chords or inversions or melodic manipulations until you find something that sounds good. The brain is a computer, we're just not so clued up on the program.
Of course, this is similar to the way that there are only a finite number of programs that can be written in any language. People use infinite possibilities to indicate 'very large number of' possibilities in vernacular. Most people get the implicit limitations of a finite universe, and most people think it's splitting hairs to make that point every time.
Fortran 2003 is more 'modern' than c++ (most of which is based on a 1998 standard) :-). Seriously, though, Fortran really shines for scientific computing. I am routinely blown away by the thoughtful design of the matrix operations which are a part of the language and can be crudely approximated by c++ libraries that make your code almost impossible to debug due to extensive template use.
I get that sentiment a lot, but there's a big difference between getting syntax wrong and getting dress wrong. Basically, code is a formal, well defined system. This means that there are formal rules that you can write down and use to check your syntax. Unfortunately, the rules for dress are a lot less formal. Fashions come and go, things change and there is no ISO standard that I can download that will allow me to stand in front of the mirror and check that I am correctly dressed. In some situations, I wouldn't mind being able to do this, but failing that it boils down to your 'feeling' about what you are wearing. You may have noticed that even fashion conscious people get it 'wrong' sometimes -- no-one dresses in such a way that everyone agrees they look great. Faced with this, many people decide to follow their own sense and get on with their lives. I don't blame them.
Academic plagiarism is not stealing any more than me saying the sky is red is stealing. There is a difference between lying and stealing. Plagiarism (passing off someone else's ideas as your own) is dishonest, but it sure as hell is not stealing.
I think western society is just so focussed on property as the prime right that most wrongs are in some way tied up to theft, so people think of rape as 'stolen innocence', murder as 'stolen life'. Unfortunately not every misdeed is a property infringement, that's why we have different words for them.
you reap what you sew
A stitch in time saves nine.
If I make a tool for someone, and they paid my asking price, is it unfair for them to use my tool to make something even more valuable? Or, if an artist paints a painting and sells it, does he deserve to be pissed off when the guy he sold it to sells it for a profit? Of course employers end up making more than employees -- that's how capitalism works. And I don't see how recording artists are so special that they need a whole different way of earning money from any other trade.
You say it's not our job to make sure they create something, but it's not some law that takes whatever they made away from them -- the law is what gives them copyright in the first place. There was a time before copyright. Strangely, they still had new music, new inventions and new stories.
Copyright or lack thereof does not affect artists ability to attempt to sell their work. In fact, without copyright we would probably see a lot more live music, as the artist is then charging for something that is impossible to reproduce cheaply -- the experience of seeing them perform live in person. We don't need copyright to ensure artists make music. I can't really comment on the quality or quantity of music produced mainly to encourage people to see the show, but I think it's a lot more understandable and doesn't need any legal strangeness like the whole mess of different "IP" laws to enforce it.
Well, the fact of the matter is that even as things stand, artists do not 'deserve to be compensated for their work'. An artist may have worked really, really hard on a really, really bad song that never sells. Furthermore, I am an engineer and I do not collect royalties on my designs, I just get a once-off payment for my time, where does that leave me in the whole issue?. I firmly believe that it is wrong to allow copyright (I mean morally wrong), because it violates my feeling of natural law as an engineer (you don't get something for nothing). I believe that trade should only be for non-reproducible goods (like time or physical materials), not for 'non-tangible assets'. So which of us is 'right'? All our rights and wrongs are societal norms.
But that's the point that I was trying to make: Given the option of remembering 20 ASCII codes to make accents or to remember the Mac way of alt-u for umlaut followed by a character, most people would choose the more mnemonic way. However, once you have learned one, you will be really resistant to learning another way of doing the same thing. This is a big part of 'knowing' a system, and it's also why people bond so strongly to their system and feel helpless in others.
Actually, I think you meant to say "they don't tell you all the things you are used to doing one way that you'll have to learn to do another way". Trust me, every person moving from Windows to Mac that I have spoken to the day they get the mac has a few things that piss them off. Number one is probably "there is no delete key". Then there's the way that compose keys work (my native language has a lot of accents, and they've learned to use ALT-137 or whatever, and it actually annoys them that they have to do ALT-e e to get the same result). In my experience, very few people actually miss cutting files, as it's not more trouble to drag them to the new location -- you have to open the new folder anyway, and Finder has those spring-loaded folders. The thing is, it gets to one when the things that you are so used to doing don't work. This doesn't mean that you can't move files away from your desktop, it just means you can't cut and paste files.
Another thing that I am only getting used to now is the whole Mac philosophy of windows not being full screen most of the time. It really does work if you give it a chance, but it is very alien to how I was used to working. So the "zoom" button, which most Windows users expect to be "maximize" doesn't work like you're used to. The point I'm trying to make here is that Apple aren't too lazy to implement all these windows-like behaviours, they really believe that their way of doing things is better. I don't really care one way or another, but I think many of the Mac ideas are pretty solid. I can tell you that I don't miss cut and paste on files at all.
We can't ask questions? I suppose asking for the value of a variable in gdb doesn't count. If you are referring to 'why is this program not working?' in the debugger reference, I assume you know that getting answers for these questions effectively requires strong AI, or at least a better specification of what it is that we are trying to do with the program in the first place.
Back to search and the semantic web, I think that we are using formal languages to ask questions in search every day. I would love to see some examples of questions that you would like to ask (you don't need to use a formal language). Many (if not most) of the ones I can think of are answered as well as can be expected by Google, even though they don't have explicit semantic search. For the ones that require better connection mapping, I think people are making good progress with larger databases and more efficient indexing methods. I suspect, however, that the real questions you want answered require an enormous amount of context. Now, if this is the case, then your original rant about not being able to ask questions is a bit obtuse. If I am missing some meaning in your words, I suppose that's just a great proof of how hard it is to be clear in natural language.
I must say I don't think it's quite as "freakin' awesome" as you seem to. I believe that natural language is not only hard to handle correctly, but also hard to use correctly. There is a reason why we have formal specifications and legal language -- "natural" language is just too vague. Now in some niche areas where you don't have your hands available I can see the allure of voice recognition, but I honestly think that speaking to computers to have them do stuff in anything resembling natural language will be harder to use to get to a specific goal than what we have now. I suppose if you just want some kind of result, that's not so bad, but I kinda like getting exactly what I ask for. A much better argument here. I know it's about programming, but that's basically what we do with computers on any level of use.
I have read several sources that say that PSO (and other stochastic algorithms) are the last resort -- what you throw at problems when they don't seem to be working any other way. Specifically, if you have no derivative information available or the derivatives are misleading, when you have interestingly shaped feasable regions or if you have many local minima, I think that PSO wins out on the 'total time to initial acceptable solution' criterion. Of course, if you are solving very similar problems repeatedly, PSO is not a good choice, but there are good reasons for using PSO. It's not just a fad.
Ok, just a few points -- I am a pretty hardcore Linux user, I have been Windows free for about 8 years. At work (university) I use linux exclusively. When my beloved IBM laptop died I needed a replacement and bought a PowerBook G4 based on the build quality and feature set, expecting to dual boot with Linux but hoping that the BSD (and fink) would be enough to tide me over. I am a convert to the Mac way.
Now, let me just say that I don't play games. This is probably the one part of the mac experience that is lagging behind, but I don't really care. I do scientific work on my Mac and it is really simpler and more pleasurable to use. Even though my Gentoo setup doesn't really require a lot of work these days (just updates every now and again), I have never run a linux setup that is quite as straightforward as the Mac.
Here's the interesting thing. Apple has some of the best usability research out there. They really want people to be able to use their computers. Many people find their interfaces "simpler and more pleasurable to use". How is it that you can determine that all this is wrong? Yes, when I switched I was pissed that there was no delete key. Now I am pretty pissed when I try to work on Windows and backspace doesn't delete stuff. The menu thing is also pretty well thought out -- it comes down to having a larger target for hitting the menu items, because the cursor doesn't go off the screen. Quite logical, really. Similarly for dialog boxes. Research shows that people don't really read the text of a box, so the Apple guidelines require verbs on the buttons, so I have to click "Delete" instead of "OK". I have become a bit lazy, so when Windows programs pop up an OK/Cancel dialog box, I have to do a double take.
Lastly, on the idea that research into usability is useless ("there are no facts whatsoever which are relevant"), I must say that part of my research is Human/Machine interfacing and there are really some facts which are relevant, like the fact that most computer novices find multiple mouse buttons confusing, that acquisition of the menu bar in Windows takes longer on average than on Mac OS, that people don't read dialog box text. I would link to references, but frankly that wouldn't change your mind. But next time you feel the need to bash the Mac GUI, it would be nice if you did it after spending some time (a few weeks) with it, rather than just complaining that you still expect things to work the way they did on some other system.
Why no anti-trust suit by the US DOJ?
Perhaps because anti-trust is for monopolies? The fact is that the rules are different for Apple, because they do not have a monopoly on the OS market. Many things that are fine for 'normal' companies become not fine for monopolies (like buying other companies, bundling products, trying to get into new markets, etc).
So, you have not counted the parentheses (and commas, by the way) in, for instance:
f1(f2(f3(a, b), c)) vs (f1 (f2 (f3 a b) c))
In practice, you end up with the same number of parentheses in lisp as any other language, and you save on commas and semicolons. Pretty much the only place that's a bit less efficient is with expressions with lots of binary infix operators.
Ah - but your analogy breaks down because it fails to address how digital information is different from your scenario. The thing stopping you from cleverly hiding a recorder in your jacket, recording the guy playing the tune and then going home and transcribing the music would be that transcribing music is a pretty rare skill and you would probably pay the extra bucks to save you the effort. In the digital world there are effectively free transcribers everywhere. In terms of the real world, you don't really need much more effort to unDRM the file than to play it. And you will always have the option of running the whole shebang in an emulated environment and capturing the screen or scraping the doc or recording the audio output. So if even one person figures out how to do what is always theoretically doable (crack the DRM), you've not just lost one copy, you've lost the whole battle. This is why so many people in this thread come back to the fundamental problem of allowing someone to have everything they need to open a file but stop them from doing so.
The real problem with PS and one of the reasons for the simplification that is PDF is that PS is a Turing complete language. This means that one can do some pretty cool things like a Koch snowflake in a couple of lines, but it also means that some simple things (like counting the pages in a document) can be impossible to do fast. So PDF trimmed down all the programming features and added some stuff like forms, support for different image formats and faster access to information that enable renderers to do a better more modern job. So, in fact, PostScript has too much flexibility.
Authors have no right to fair compensation. If they want to write, they write. If I want to paint I paint. But I have a real job to pay the bills. Markets change and a viable career today may not be a viable career in ten years. Now you may argue that we will end up with less great literature because writers can't make a living, but I think most great literary works didn't make the writers much money anyway.
The best sellers are the most popular works, not the best. I am not worried that writers will stop writing, even if copyright was abolished today. Similarly, I am not worried that people will stop making music or inventing things. Creative acts are in our nature, and there will always be a band playing at the local pub charging for something that cannot be reproduced -- the experience of being there and watching them in person.