Even for classical music this should work out as those who listen to this genre are mostly able and willing to pay more than for a rock concert.
That's really true only for very posh venues in the United States. In many European countries, ticket prices are much, much lower than rock concert tickets, and kept low through state subsidizes in order to allow all social classes access. In Finland, I pay between 6 and 15 euro for any night at the orchestra, and around 12 euro for a solo recital or string quartet.
And businesses that would like to have employees that show up and work.
I don't think you have an inkling of how common marijuana use is in Middle America. An enormous amount of people with steady, respectable employment and dedication to their careers are toking secretly. Legalizing marijuana would not suddenly make the nation's workforce drop out.
And people who don't like having druggees steal their stuff so they can sell it for drugs.
While that might continue to be a problem with hard drugs like heroin (but even here therapeutic approaches are better than an unproductive "war"), legalization of marijuana would result in prices dropping down to that of tobacco. How much of a problem is it now for people to steal from others just to buy a pack of ciggies?
If you want to stabilize relations with China and various Muslim areas of the world I think we'd be well served to invite far more of their students to study here so that when they go back home they can correct the thinking of their friends and family.
Some of the 9/11 hijackers had studied abroad, think of Atta in Hamburg. Didn't stop them. And significant part of the contemporary Islamist movement goes back to Sayyid Qutb, who did come to the United States to study, but thought nonetheless that its culture was abominable. Though inviting foreigners to come study might be some benefits in terms of increased trade, you cannot eradicate violent opposition to a country that way.
(Incidentally, one of the things I've heard remarked about World War I is that so many of the officers butchering each other in that long, pointless conflict had studied in each other's countries prior to taking a commission).
Even if we didn't reach the moon, we got... orange drink... out of the deal.
While NASA's use of it on spacecraft popularized it, Tang predates the American space program. Like Velcro, it is a product erroneously attributed to spaceflight research but in fact was invented before.
I mean I always read about westerners trying to sneak into the country.
I can recall only a couple of cranks in recent years who tried to sneak in for missionary purposes or whatever. However, tourism in North Korea is a pretty ordinary thing, as much as Americans (who would have some difficult obtaining a visa) think it's somehow impenetrable. You fly in from China, are assigned to a group with a minder, and you get a tour of various impressive Communist sites and the North Korea side of the DMZ. You don't get to freely move about, but visiting North Korea holds some attraction for those who want to see the bizarre cult of personality state that it is before it (hopefully) disappears forever. There are myriad blogs on the web detailing people's trips.
Some people start an emacs instance when they come at work, and do everything in it.
And these people need to acquire new skills to stay employed. Emacs has already grown so large that eventually it will achieve sentience and be capable of performing any work that can be done within its buffers.
One of the concepts that interested me in Larry Niven's classic science-fiction work Ringworld is a civilization having to move its planet out from its sun in order to avoid perishing in their waste heat. I haven't seen that possibility explored so much in the years since. With studies like this, along with Kurzweil-ish woo-woo of extrapolating growth, can we talk an amusing guess at how long until heat waste renders the Earth, or at least certain parts of it uninhabitable?
So what? Academics are paid for teaching.... But the research they do is for fun and fame.
Is that an American thing? At my department (Finland), there are more people employed doing research full-time than teaching. You might get a little bit more money and somewhat greater job security if you teach, but you can certainly draw a paycheck (not just "fun and fame") from doing only research.
Kyiv is a city in Ukraine. What does it have to do witth a project of a scientific body in the government of Russia? (You cannot even claim that Kyiv is much of an ethnic Russian city anymore. The demographic changes over the last decade or so, with the wider prevalence of Ukrainian speakers in public, are impressive.)
I have converted all my ebooks into drm-free open formats, backed up with all my other stuff on separate hard drives. How is any corporation controlling me?
They are controlling you by lobbying for legislation that makes what you've done illegally. Format-shifting is illegal under the DMCA if it involves breaking DRM.
But for pleasure reading (did you ever read Dante's Inferno on a eBook? it's appalling! The printed version is so richly illustrated...)
What "printed version" of the Comedy are you referring to? There are myriad editions of Dante in English, some illustrated, most not, and there have been multiple sets of illustrations created for the text. If you are referring to Dore's illustrations, those tend to accompany translations like Longfellow's that contemporary readers would best avoid -- they are antiquated, sometimes contain misunderstandings of Dante's 13th-century Italian, and they lack a facing-page Italian text. Ironically, because those translations tend to lack a commentary, were it not for the illustrations they would actually be more readable on the Kindle and similar devices than modern editions where one would refer to endnotes.
I would say that the best all-around translation of the Comedy into contemporary English is Allen Mandelbaum's. That one does happen to contain illustrations, by Barry Moser, but they are not especially important and someone reading the text without them would miss nothing.
that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)
Why not literary fiction? I've been travelling the world for the last several years now and haven't read as much classic literature as I would have liked to, because there's only so many books one can put into a backpack. But my significant other got a Kindle as a birthday gift, and after discovering a prominent pirated book site with epub/mobi/lit downloads, we've now got more literary fiction than we've ever dreamed of. We can even read hardcore 20th century modernism like William Gaddis on the Kindle and for the most part, the experience is immersive.
Sure, the presentation is not 100% ideal. I'm a longtime TeX user and I miss the fine points of typography on a Kindle. But things like hyphenation will probably come along pretty soon.
E-paper readers are not suitable for many things. I'm a researcher in linguistics and I have to read my scientific references from paper or my netbook screen (PDF-Kindle conversion is a joke as I'm sure many people here know). I've also found reading poetry to be unsatisfactory on the Kindle, even when the publication is available in a mobi/epub/lit format. But for literary fiction it's quite nice.
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
It's great that McAfee Labs has published this report on Anonymous, but isn't this only a distraction from the search for better bath salts and pills to seduce young women?
It would usually only be a tit bit if you are referring to one of the gods with 8 or 10 breasts or something like that. In most other cases, it would be a tidbit;-).
While "tidbit" is standard American English, this word has had different spellings in previous years and in different regional standards. (The OP is from India, so some differences in his English can be expected). See e.g. Merriam-Webster for a mention of the alternative spelling "titbit".
I don't see how you made $10/hour. The assignments that I got were only a few cents. You say $20 would pay for your expenses for the day? I thought that room and board would be more than that.
I take it you've never been to India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, etc.? Once you leave Europe and North America, you can often find a comfortable and clean bed for the night for under US$10, and even back in 2007 free wi-fi could be found a nywhere there were tourists. For cheap meals, just eat at places that local people eat at -- you think poor people spend more than US$10 on food per day?
I don't see how you made $10/hour. The assignments that I got were only a few cents.
There was a scoring system in place. If you maintained a good score, higher-paying jobs were made available. Of course you still had to do a search for jobs paying over $X to make them show up on your screen, but there was a pretty steady flow of them.
Five or six years, I transcribed podcasts for Mechanical Turk. Their audio files were already split into shorter passages (3 or 5 minutes, for example). Split them even further, and the transcriber might miss out on the context, which is often vital to knowing what exactly is being jabbered about.
That said, I'm not sure who is the target demographic for this kind of work anymore. Many of the podcasts were on subjects of interest to me, and I was getting about $10/hour from Mechanical Turk, which wasn't bad considering that I was often doing the work from backpacker beach havens around the globe where a couple of hours of work would pay all my expenses for the day. But the last time I had a look at Mechanical Turk, the amount they pay had been heavily reduced. Who wants it now? Even if you are in a cheap third world country, if you have the English skills for such transcriptions, you can surely find better and more dependable work elsewhere.
Re:Last time I went to the Lego Store...
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
·
· Score: 0
For 30 years? Whenever people well into adulthood mention they play with Legos, I am reminded of historians' judgement that one of the Russian tsarevitches was in some way developmentally disabled because he still made paper soldiers at the age of 18.
Seriously though; universities have to prove overseas students are actually attending the university. How would other suggest we do this?
By requiring that the student present a transcript each year at visa-renewal time in order showing that he or she has taken exams and gained a certain amount of credits toward a degree. This is how it is done in Finland, at least. This has the advantage of not hassling students who feel that their time is better spent in the library instead of at lectures.
Now that the number of planets around stars in this galaxy alone is in the ballpark of several billions, one starts to think that the reason for no apparent alien civilizations similar to this one is because they boil themselves out.. they simply raise the temperature of their own place before they are able to either counter the effect, or before they are tech savvy enough to colonize someplace else.
This idea has been around for a few decades now. In Larry Niven's Ringworld, the alien race the Puppeteers had moved their homeworld further away from their sun some centuries before the start of the novel, in order to avoid the death by heat that Niven felt would accompany technological development.
If you haven't already read George Orwell's 1984, you really should do so. The frequent comparisons between contemporary society and the novel aren't just based on a vague feeling of constant surveillance, which you might imagine if you don't have a knowledge of the book itself, but with things like this even Orwell's specific technology is coming true and even being outdone.
In the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith's television watched him just as he was watching it. He had the advantage of an alcove in his home that wasn't within the view of the "telescreen", where he could sit and keep a secret diary. With this news story and the way microphone technology is evolving, I fear that even retiring to a secluded part of the room to write one's forbidden thoughts will have a Clippyesque mascot pop up on the screen to sell you pens and paper.
They essentially bypassed taking a couple days to learn the Constitution and a basic English test and an oath of loyalty to the US.
Legally immigrating to the US does not require one to do any of those things. Only those who wish to take US citizenship, which legal immigrants are eligible for only after years of living in the US, must do those things. And many legal immigrants to the US are happy to stay at the level of permanent residency, never applying for citizenship.
You know that you don't have to actually be sick to take sick days?
In Finland (and possibly the other Nordic countries whose welfare states served as a model for Finland's) you don't get a sick day unless you visit your neighbourhood's clinic in the morning and get a doctor to sign off on the sick day. On the plus side, you get paid for the day.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really true only for very posh venues in the United States. In many European countries, ticket prices are much, much lower than rock concert tickets, and kept low through state subsidizes in order to allow all social classes access. In Finland, I pay between 6 and 15 euro for any night at the orchestra, and around 12 euro for a solo recital or string quartet.
I don't think you have an inkling of how common marijuana use is in Middle America. An enormous amount of people with steady, respectable employment and dedication to their careers are toking secretly. Legalizing marijuana would not suddenly make the nation's workforce drop out.
While that might continue to be a problem with hard drugs like heroin (but even here therapeutic approaches are better than an unproductive "war"), legalization of marijuana would result in prices dropping down to that of tobacco. How much of a problem is it now for people to steal from others just to buy a pack of ciggies?
Some of the 9/11 hijackers had studied abroad, think of Atta in Hamburg. Didn't stop them. And significant part of the contemporary Islamist movement goes back to Sayyid Qutb, who did come to the United States to study, but thought nonetheless that its culture was abominable. Though inviting foreigners to come study might be some benefits in terms of increased trade, you cannot eradicate violent opposition to a country that way.
(Incidentally, one of the things I've heard remarked about World War I is that so many of the officers butchering each other in that long, pointless conflict had studied in each other's countries prior to taking a commission).
While NASA's use of it on spacecraft popularized it, Tang predates the American space program. Like Velcro, it is a product erroneously attributed to spaceflight research but in fact was invented before.
I can recall only a couple of cranks in recent years who tried to sneak in for missionary purposes or whatever. However, tourism in North Korea is a pretty ordinary thing, as much as Americans (who would have some difficult obtaining a visa) think it's somehow impenetrable. You fly in from China, are assigned to a group with a minder, and you get a tour of various impressive Communist sites and the North Korea side of the DMZ. You don't get to freely move about, but visiting North Korea holds some attraction for those who want to see the bizarre cult of personality state that it is before it (hopefully) disappears forever. There are myriad blogs on the web detailing people's trips.
And these people need to acquire new skills to stay employed. Emacs has already grown so large that eventually it will achieve sentience and be capable of performing any work that can be done within its buffers.
One of the concepts that interested me in Larry Niven's classic science-fiction work Ringworld is a civilization having to move its planet out from its sun in order to avoid perishing in their waste heat. I haven't seen that possibility explored so much in the years since. With studies like this, along with Kurzweil-ish woo-woo of extrapolating growth, can we talk an amusing guess at how long until heat waste renders the Earth, or at least certain parts of it uninhabitable?
Is that an American thing? At my department (Finland), there are more people employed doing research full-time than teaching. You might get a little bit more money and somewhat greater job security if you teach, but you can certainly draw a paycheck (not just "fun and fame") from doing only research.
Jokes aren't funny if they are built on misunderstandings of basic geography.
Kyiv is a city in Ukraine. What does it have to do witth a project of a scientific body in the government of Russia? (You cannot even claim that Kyiv is much of an ethnic Russian city anymore. The demographic changes over the last decade or so, with the wider prevalence of Ukrainian speakers in public, are impressive.)
They are controlling you by lobbying for legislation that makes what you've done illegally. Format-shifting is illegal under the DMCA if it involves breaking DRM.
What "printed version" of the Comedy are you referring to? There are myriad editions of Dante in English, some illustrated, most not, and there have been multiple sets of illustrations created for the text. If you are referring to Dore's illustrations, those tend to accompany translations like Longfellow's that contemporary readers would best avoid -- they are antiquated, sometimes contain misunderstandings of Dante's 13th-century Italian, and they lack a facing-page Italian text. Ironically, because those translations tend to lack a commentary, were it not for the illustrations they would actually be more readable on the Kindle and similar devices than modern editions where one would refer to endnotes.
I would say that the best all-around translation of the Comedy into contemporary English is Allen Mandelbaum's. That one does happen to contain illustrations, by Barry Moser, but they are not especially important and someone reading the text without them would miss nothing.
Why not literary fiction? I've been travelling the world for the last several years now and haven't read as much classic literature as I would have liked to, because there's only so many books one can put into a backpack. But my significant other got a Kindle as a birthday gift, and after discovering a prominent pirated book site with epub/mobi/lit downloads, we've now got more literary fiction than we've ever dreamed of. We can even read hardcore 20th century modernism like William Gaddis on the Kindle and for the most part, the experience is immersive.
Sure, the presentation is not 100% ideal. I'm a longtime TeX user and I miss the fine points of typography on a Kindle. But things like hyphenation will probably come along pretty soon.
E-paper readers are not suitable for many things. I'm a researcher in linguistics and I have to read my scientific references from paper or my netbook screen (PDF-Kindle conversion is a joke as I'm sure many people here know). I've also found reading poetry to be unsatisfactory on the Kindle, even when the publication is available in a mobi/epub/lit format. But for literary fiction it's quite nice.
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
It's great that McAfee Labs has published this report on Anonymous, but isn't this only a distraction from the search for better bath salts and pills to seduce young women?
While "tidbit" is standard American English, this word has had different spellings in previous years and in different regional standards. (The OP is from India, so some differences in his English can be expected). See e.g. Merriam-Webster for a mention of the alternative spelling "titbit".
I take it you've never been to India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, etc.? Once you leave Europe and North America, you can often find a comfortable and clean bed for the night for under US$10, and even back in 2007 free wi-fi could be found a nywhere there were tourists. For cheap meals, just eat at places that local people eat at -- you think poor people spend more than US$10 on food per day?
There was a scoring system in place. If you maintained a good score, higher-paying jobs were made available. Of course you still had to do a search for jobs paying over $X to make them show up on your screen, but there was a pretty steady flow of them.
Five or six years, I transcribed podcasts for Mechanical Turk. Their audio files were already split into shorter passages (3 or 5 minutes, for example). Split them even further, and the transcriber might miss out on the context, which is often vital to knowing what exactly is being jabbered about.
That said, I'm not sure who is the target demographic for this kind of work anymore. Many of the podcasts were on subjects of interest to me, and I was getting about $10/hour from Mechanical Turk, which wasn't bad considering that I was often doing the work from backpacker beach havens around the globe where a couple of hours of work would pay all my expenses for the day. But the last time I had a look at Mechanical Turk, the amount they pay had been heavily reduced. Who wants it now? Even if you are in a cheap third world country, if you have the English skills for such transcriptions, you can surely find better and more dependable work elsewhere.
For 30 years? Whenever people well into adulthood mention they play with Legos, I am reminded of historians' judgement that one of the Russian tsarevitches was in some way developmentally disabled because he still made paper soldiers at the age of 18.
Cite?
By requiring that the student present a transcript each year at visa-renewal time in order showing that he or she has taken exams and gained a certain amount of credits toward a degree. This is how it is done in Finland, at least. This has the advantage of not hassling students who feel that their time is better spent in the library instead of at lectures.
This idea has been around for a few decades now. In Larry Niven's Ringworld , the alien race the Puppeteers had moved their homeworld further away from their sun some centuries before the start of the novel, in order to avoid the death by heat that Niven felt would accompany technological development.
If you haven't already read George Orwell's 1984 , you really should do so. The frequent comparisons between contemporary society and the novel aren't just based on a vague feeling of constant surveillance, which you might imagine if you don't have a knowledge of the book itself, but with things like this even Orwell's specific technology is coming true and even being outdone.
In the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith's television watched him just as he was watching it. He had the advantage of an alcove in his home that wasn't within the view of the "telescreen", where he could sit and keep a secret diary. With this news story and the way microphone technology is evolving, I fear that even retiring to a secluded part of the room to write one's forbidden thoughts will have a Clippyesque mascot pop up on the screen to sell you pens and paper.
Legally immigrating to the US does not require one to do any of those things. Only those who wish to take US citizenship, which legal immigrants are eligible for only after years of living in the US, must do those things. And many legal immigrants to the US are happy to stay at the level of permanent residency, never applying for citizenship.
In Finland (and possibly the other Nordic countries whose welfare states served as a model for Finland's) you don't get a sick day unless you visit your neighbourhood's clinic in the morning and get a doctor to sign off on the sick day. On the plus side, you get paid for the day.