I wonder how much time these artists actually spend on live performances. Intellectual property creation is the only business that I know of where you can do something once and get paid for it forever.
Can you suggest a different model? (Don't start with performance. How many times a week do you go watch a live performance? Who has the time, the money to do that?)
The benefit of a performance lasts till the house lights come back up. The benefit of you raising a pound of beans lasts a shorter period of time than the time to grow and harvest them. The benefit of you making a shirt lasts a couple years on average. The benefit of you building a Car lasts only 10 years or until the first crash.
The benefit of recorded music or written literature, or architectural plans lasts forever, or at least as long as they continue to be sought out and used. Why shouldn't the artist/author/architect get paid more than once, if society benefits forever?
Should we have a Panel of Judges decide which songs should be published, then pay the artists some estimate of the total value, and have them forever relinquish rights and the music is forever the property of society?
You might make the case that copyrights last too long, and I might agree, but to imply that IP should be paid for exactly once per consumer stopped working the day people figured out how to make books, record music, or draw building plans.
Personally, that's what I would like to see. That's why I support live music.
Really, how many nights can you take off to see live music in an average week? Single and a big budget, maybe 3 evenings max? Then your choices are usually restricted to some Indian casino or a smoky bar, and maybe a big ticket show once in a while. Fine if you live in NYC or LA, and have all night to get there, sit there, and get back home. Its really not practical for consumers or performers except when in big-destination areas. You live in Duluth or Plano or North Canton you are pretty much out of luck.
Compare that to ho many times you actually listen to music in real life.
Performance is unrealistic except for big time talent.
Take a look at the graphic at the bottom of This Page.
It shows how many plays an artist would need on Spotify to make a minimum monthly wage. Self pressed CDs or sold thru something cheap like cdBaby are way easier for the new artist than any other method. Streaming services are a ghetto. As big of a rip off as the major studios.
Performance only works for people who already have something of a reputation. And it works very poorly for small artists. Seriously, are you going to drive across town to listen to a cellist for even a $10 dollar cover plus drinks?
For many artists, you simply have to look at it as extra week-end money, because you can't afford to quit your day job.
Too few venues, unless you want to play to drunks in a smokey bar for nothing but tips.
It will have to come to that, eventually. A higher percentage of the gross seems reasonable. This situation is becoming common knowledge.
The cost to the streamer companies is substantial, in terms of storage, bandwidth, and billing/payment processing. They will not want to give that up willingly, but as numbers like this become common knowledge, they will have to start paying more back.
The problem I see is that if there is a Label involved the Label is going to get the bulk of the micropayments as well. (They already take the bulk of the money from CD sales, even the big name artists are hard pressed to garner 12% of the revenue from a CD sale).
It appears to me that from an economics point of view that the price of music has been pushed down to the lowest point until a technology change allows artists to get into the streaming business for the price of a web site. The revenue just isn't there to hold the artist's interest.
The idea that artists can make a living performing is just not going to happen. Too few venues and too many wanna-be artists and nobody wants to go sit in some smokey bar every time they want to listen to music. Live music is great and all, but when you end up paying $30 for a nobody artist and suffer thru the entire evening for 3 good songs you quickly sour on the whole idea.
Wait for the knock at the door when something approaching your face appears in a photo at a street brawl, and the police find that someone tagged it because they thought it looked like you. All of a sudden you have to prove your innocence instead of them proving your guilt.
While you can tag people who don't have accounts, they won't be auto-tagged (obviously) and there's no way to search for them unless it's your own album -- so the stuff you're talking about has been unchanged since photo tagging first came out years ago.
Such nonsense. That YOU can't search for some unknown face, doesn't mean some privileged few (perhaps with warrant in hand) can't search.
having your face recognized in a photo that you already appear in, to people who already know you
Such naivety! One has to marvel!
Within a couple years every face will be identifiable on line in every picture you take whether or not you know the person or not, even if that person does not have a facebook account.
Face recognition plus Graph Search means nobody is safe from they prying eyes of facebook. If the FBI/CIA/NSA/Scotland Yard tried to set this up, world plus dog would be howling in protest.
(Oh, and before you spout any privacy protections, let me offer a loud scoff of derision in your general direction: HA!)
Well, OK, we are going to tax it specially, and it will, like liquor, only be available in special stores.
And just like liquor taxes, the fiction of using the tax on drugs for any drug rehab/educational purposes will be proposed, ballyhooed, and ignored in real life. The money will be siphoned off to pay more government employees.
3. This is the first time evidently someone has gotten arrested for it. It probably won't be the last. I'm not familiar with how silk road works. I'm guessing there are barriers to try to prevent law enforcement or other criminals from using it to find out when and where drug transactions are going to be happening. I'm also guessing those barriers are not foolproof.
Chances are Silk Road is crawling with cops. But they are not focused on catching buyers or occasional sellers, but are more focused on catching the bigger distributors. Probably they don't even cite Silk as their principal source when prosecuting. Hard to prove much of anything on the internet to a jury, easier to trot in some Joe Undercover cop and have him explain a (probably at least half truthful) account of how he came to know about those deals, without mentioning that first info came via silk.
Couple that with what looks like a smudgy part of the opened window / door through which the camera is sticking out (right in front of the handle) and you've got your pole mounted camera sticking out with the tripod itself simply masked out.
Yup, and there is a reflection in the window just aft of that smudge. Then, at about 1:30 the sunlight comes from the left rear of the chopper and the poll casts a shadow on the pilots window.
The little box below the pilots side window looks like a transceiver for camera management.
I'm wondering if the helicopter is just CG'd in. I certainly wouldn't have done it that way - I'd stick the camera on the bottom of the chopper - who wants to stare are the pilots?
It would be easier to CG out the mounting arm. (Google does this with Streetview, but they aren't trying too hard, and it doesn't look anywhere near as clean.).
If you look at the chopper,, such that you are looking backward along the left side, and zoom out (mouse wheel) you will see an artifact of a gray line, Upper Right corner, which changes angle occasionally, but is always there. Swing the video to look forward, and that artifact changes sides. (appears in Upper Left).
At around 2:33 the segment shows sunlight on the left side of the chopper, and a horizontal shadow of a pole is cast across the pilots windshield and door.
Between the first segment (up to 1:39) they appear to be taking images or telemetry in thru the third round window from the front. After that point in time, the perspective changes and they appear to be taking in images thru the door way. It appears that the camera position changes here as well.
An access port below the letter M also is left open for sequences after 1:40. Either sloppy pre-flight inspection or it was needed for power when the camera position changed.
There are some young adults that have their gaming console smacked right in the living room, but by and large this isn't a very useful arrangement unless there are only two people in the household, both of whom are couch potatoes. Monopolizing the big screen probably isn't the best way for games.
Most of these consoles end up in the spare bedroom, so that kids can watch DVDs and TV, and the adults can watch the football game, or actually have friends over to see something besides empty pizza boxes and smashed beer cans.
Handhelds have a power problem. Almost any game is a battery sucking nightmare. And the device itself is easy to drop, sit on, or throw against the wall after a crushing defeat.
I still think there will be a console, if nothing else, just to serve up the game and do the heavy lifting, but perhaps your HUD will move onto the handheld, so that multiple players aren't seeing exactly what you have in the ammo box.
None of the current handhelds are suitable if you ask me. Touch screens just don't cut it. What is needed is a tablet sized device with 4 buttons on the back on both sides located where you fingers naturally fall, maybe one on the front on each side, and a touch screen that really isn't involved in gameplay.
But seriously, I don't see very many people handing over their gaming to Apple's nanny mentality.
If you are down, you have no metrics. Because, you are DOWN! So stop with this "oh I have numbers" nonsense. The customer that buys 10 minutes after you resumed operations, or 10 hours after is just as likely to be someone who tried earlier when you were down. You have no way of knowing, because your site was DOWN.
Its a big enough impediment to set up another account, hand over your credit card to yet another web site, that I would wait an hour, maybe five, because I know Amazon will be back in short order, and I get free shipping, and they've never ripped me off.
I'm NOT wandering off to some random site, just because of a short term outage. If I needed it quickly, I wouldn't be ordering on line in the first place. Its not at all like a brick and mortar store being closed after I drove have way across town, and another store is right next door. If I went somewhere to shop, I probably need it right away, and the cost of coming back is too high. The cost of checking Amazon an hour later is exactly ZERO.
There is no one place where any specific service is hosted. For more then one of their offerings to be down from inside, and not from the outside, it might have been something like internal routers or switch gear, or perhaps an internal route advertising accident.
But Brandon Butler wrote the summary, and lifted the calculations directly from Network World, so a lot of people just assume that people try exactly once, then give up and never return.
Its totally silly of course, because Amazon often has the best prices, and people will simply wait. Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.
The cost to Amazon is probably not really that great. There might be some hourly people sitting around doing nothing. Some network staff might have been called in to work overtime.
But averaged over a month, I doubt there will be an actual drop in sales.
It isn't going to drive down their cost more since they are already using it.
Yes it is going to drive down costs more.
There is no way for IP based call to my POTS home landline to avoid paying something somewhere to somebody.
POTS lines are not callable by VOIP or SIP phones without a gateway to POTS somewhere. That gateway needs a traceable origin. Nobody provides these for free, and even if they did, they are traceable, and the telephone company through which they first connect knows explicitly who they bill for these trunks.
Most people do not have IP based phones, and those that do receive a lot of junk calls. We have them at work, and the amount of crap we get on them is astounding.
Getting rid of the telephone network will not solve this problem. Nothing you've suggested will actually help. When all calls originate and terminate on IP based networks you actually drive DOWN the robocaller's cost. As long as they need a gateway to POTS somewhere there is a cost for them and a traceable demarcation point. Once ALL segments are IP, you are screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much time these artists actually spend on live performances. Intellectual property creation is the only business that I know of where you can do something once and get paid for it forever.
Can you suggest a different model?
(Don't start with performance. How many times a week do you go watch a live performance? Who has the time, the money to do that?)
The benefit of a performance lasts till the house lights come back up.
The benefit of you raising a pound of beans lasts a shorter period of time than the time to grow and harvest them.
The benefit of you making a shirt lasts a couple years on average.
The benefit of you building a Car lasts only 10 years or until the first crash.
The benefit of recorded music or written literature, or architectural plans lasts forever, or at least as long as they continue to be sought out and used. Why shouldn't the artist/author/architect get paid more than once, if society benefits forever?
Should we have a Panel of Judges decide which songs should be published, then pay the artists some estimate of the total value, and have them forever relinquish rights and the music is forever the property of society?
You might make the case that copyrights last too long, and I might agree, but to imply that IP should be paid for exactly once per consumer stopped working the day people figured out how to make books, record music, or draw building plans.
Personally, that's what I would like to see. That's why I support live music.
Really, how many nights can you take off to see live music in an average week? Single and a big budget, maybe 3 evenings max?
Then your choices are usually restricted to some Indian casino or a smoky bar, and maybe a big ticket show once in a while.
Fine if you live in NYC or LA, and have all night to get there, sit there, and get back home.
Its really not practical for consumers or performers except when in big-destination areas. You live in Duluth or Plano or North Canton you are pretty much out of luck.
Compare that to ho many times you actually listen to music in real life.
Performance is unrealistic except for big time talent.
Take a look at the graphic at the bottom of This Page.
It shows how many plays an artist would need on Spotify to make a minimum monthly wage.
Self pressed CDs or sold thru something cheap like cdBaby are way easier for the new artist than any other method. Streaming services are a ghetto. As big of a rip off as the major studios.
Exactly, again, why is the money going to the industry and not the artists?
Because they signed with the industry when they were young and foolish.
Those that take the early money generally lose.
Performance only works for people who already have something of a reputation. And it works very poorly for small artists.
Seriously, are you going to drive across town to listen to a cellist for even a $10 dollar cover plus drinks?
For many artists, you simply have to look at it as extra week-end money, because you can't afford to quit your day job.
Too few venues, unless you want to play to drunks in a smokey bar for nothing but tips.
Is negotiating a higher price not possible?
It will have to come to that, eventually. A higher percentage of the gross seems reasonable.
This situation is becoming common knowledge.
The cost to the streamer companies is substantial, in terms of storage, bandwidth, and billing/payment processing. They will not want to give that up willingly, but as numbers like this become common knowledge, they will have to start paying more back.
The problem I see is that if there is a Label involved the Label is going to get the bulk of the micropayments as well. (They already take the bulk of the money from CD sales, even the big name artists are hard pressed to garner 12% of the revenue from a CD sale).
It appears to me that from an economics point of view that the price of music has been pushed down to the lowest point until a technology change allows artists to get into the streaming business for the price of a web site. The revenue just isn't there to hold the artist's interest.
The idea that artists can make a living performing is just not going to happen. Too few venues and too many wanna-be artists and nobody wants to go sit in some smokey bar every time they want to listen to music. Live music is great and all, but when you end up paying $30 for a nobody artist and suffer thru the entire evening for 3 good songs you quickly sour on the whole idea.
Wait for the knock at the door when something approaching your face appears in a photo at a street brawl, and the police find that someone tagged it because they thought it looked like you. All of a sudden you have to prove your innocence instead of them proving your guilt.
While you can tag people who don't have accounts, they won't be auto-tagged (obviously) and there's no way to search for them unless it's your own album -- so the stuff you're talking about has been unchanged since photo tagging first came out years ago.
Such nonsense. That YOU can't search for some unknown face, doesn't mean some privileged few (perhaps with warrant in hand) can't search.
having your face recognized in a photo that you already appear in, to people who already know you
Such naivety! One has to marvel!
Within a couple years every face will be identifiable on line in every picture you take whether or not you know the person or not, even if that person does not have a facebook account.
Face recognition plus Graph Search means nobody is safe from they prying eyes of facebook.
If the FBI/CIA/NSA/Scotland Yard tried to set this up, world plus dog would be howling in protest.
(Oh, and before you spout any privacy protections, let me offer a loud scoff of derision in your general direction: HA!)
Well, OK, we are going to tax it specially, and it will, like liquor, only be available in special stores.
And just like liquor taxes, the fiction of using the tax on drugs for any drug rehab/educational purposes will be proposed, ballyhooed, and ignored in real life. The money will be siphoned off to pay more government employees.
3. This is the first time evidently someone has gotten arrested for it. It probably won't be the last. I'm not familiar with how silk road works. I'm guessing there are barriers to try to prevent law enforcement or other criminals from using it to find out when and where drug transactions are going to be happening. I'm also guessing those barriers are not foolproof.
Chances are Silk Road is crawling with cops. But they are not focused on catching buyers or occasional sellers, but are more focused on catching the bigger distributors. Probably they don't even cite Silk as their principal source when prosecuting. Hard to prove much of anything on the internet to a jury, easier to trot in some Joe Undercover cop and have him explain a (probably at least half truthful) account of how he came to know about those deals, without mentioning that first info came via silk.
One off buys are not worth chasing.
Couple that with what looks like a smudgy part of the opened window / door through which the camera is sticking out (right in front of the handle) and you've got your pole mounted camera sticking out with the tripod itself simply masked out.
Yup, and there is a reflection in the window just aft of that smudge. Then, at about 1:30 the sunlight comes from the left rear of the chopper and the poll casts a shadow on the pilots window.
The little box below the pilots side window looks like a transceiver for camera management.
I'm wondering if the helicopter is just CG'd in. I certainly wouldn't have done it that way - I'd stick the camera on the bottom of the chopper - who wants to stare are the pilots?
It would be easier to CG out the mounting arm. (Google does this with Streetview, but they aren't trying too hard, and it doesn't look anywhere near as clean.).
If you look at the chopper,, such that you are looking backward along the left side, and zoom out (mouse wheel) you will see an artifact of a gray line, Upper Right corner, which changes angle occasionally, but is always there. Swing the video to look forward, and that artifact changes sides. (appears in Upper Left).
At around 2:33 the segment shows sunlight on the left side of the chopper, and a horizontal shadow of a pole is cast across the pilots windshield and door.
Between the first segment (up to 1:39) they appear to be taking images or telemetry in thru the third round window from the front. After that point in time, the perspective changes and they appear to be taking in images thru the door way. It appears that the camera position changes here as well.
An access port below the letter M also is left open for sequences after 1:40. Either sloppy pre-flight inspection or it was needed for power when the camera position changed.
There are some young adults that have their gaming console smacked right in the living room, but by and large this isn't a very useful arrangement unless there are only two people in the household, both of whom are couch potatoes. Monopolizing the big screen probably isn't the best way for games.
Most of these consoles end up in the spare bedroom, so that kids can watch DVDs and TV, and the adults can watch the football game, or actually have friends over to see something besides empty pizza boxes and smashed beer cans.
Handhelds have a power problem. Almost any game is a battery sucking nightmare. And the device itself is easy to drop, sit on, or throw against the wall after a crushing defeat.
I still think there will be a console, if nothing else, just to serve up the game and do the heavy lifting, but perhaps your HUD will move onto the handheld, so that multiple players aren't seeing exactly what you have in the ammo box.
None of the current handhelds are suitable if you ask me. Touch screens just don't cut it. What is needed is a tablet sized device with 4 buttons on the back on both sides located where you fingers naturally fall, maybe one on the front on each side, and a touch screen that really isn't involved in gameplay.
But seriously, I don't see very many people handing over their gaming to Apple's nanny mentality.
If you are down, you have no metrics. Because, you are DOWN! So stop with this "oh I have numbers" nonsense. The customer that buys 10 minutes after you resumed operations, or 10 hours after is just as likely to be someone who tried earlier when you were down. You have no way of knowing, because your site was DOWN.
Its a big enough impediment to set up another account, hand over your credit card to yet another web site, that I would wait an hour, maybe five, because I know Amazon will be back in short order, and I get free shipping, and they've never ripped me off.
I'm NOT wandering off to some random site, just because of a short term outage. If I needed it quickly, I wouldn't be ordering on line in the first place. Its not at all like a brick and mortar store being closed after I drove have way across town, and another store is right next door. If I went somewhere to shop, I probably need it right away, and the cost of coming back is too high. The cost of checking Amazon an hour later is exactly ZERO.
That's what I thought too.
The story was updated while I was typing the post you replied to with a suggestion they were being flooded.
But when you look at their total network capabilities, it just doesn't make sense.
How the fuck could you POSSIBLY know this?
Your site is down, you have no idea how many tried and went elsewhere.
As soon as you stop parsing english as if it were math you'll be fine.
The structure I used has been around for hundreds of years.
Google the quoted phrase "nothing constitutes" to see hundreds of examples.
Technically, what I said is exactly what I said.
(Nothing purchased on line) (constitutes an emergency).
The verb was constitutes, not purchasing.
Which is exactly why I said:
Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.
Amazon has multiple data-centers.
There is no one place where any specific service is hosted.
For more then one of their offerings to be down from inside, and not from the outside, it might have been something like internal routers or switch gear, or perhaps an internal route advertising accident.
But Brandon Butler wrote the summary, and lifted the calculations directly from Network World, so a lot of people just assume that people try exactly once, then give up and never return.
Its totally silly of course, because Amazon often has the best prices, and people will simply wait. Nothing purchased on line constitutes an emergency to most people.
The cost to Amazon is probably not really that great. There might be some hourly people sitting around doing nothing. Some network staff might have been called in to work overtime.
But averaged over a month, I doubt there will be an actual drop in sales.
Most of your argument works for email just as well for calling.
Exactly my point. Exactly! Finally you start to understand.
Spam email accounts for 72% of all email traffic. Its down from 90% in 2009.
Why? Because it is essentially free. Its IP based and easily can avoid detection, and reroute around blocklists.
It isn't going to drive down their cost more since they are already using it.
Yes it is going to drive down costs more.
There is no way for IP based call to my POTS home landline to avoid paying something somewhere to somebody.
POTS lines are not callable by VOIP or SIP phones without a gateway to POTS somewhere. That gateway needs a traceable origin. Nobody provides these for free, and even if they did, they are traceable, and the telephone company through which they first connect knows explicitly who they bill for these trunks.
Most people do not have IP based phones, and those that do receive a lot of junk calls. We have them at work, and the amount of crap we get on them is astounding.
Getting rid of the telephone network will not solve this problem. Nothing you've suggested will actually help.
When all calls originate and terminate on IP based networks you actually drive DOWN the robocaller's cost. As long as they need a gateway to POTS somewhere there is a cost for them and a traceable demarcation point.
Once ALL segments are IP, you are screwed.