I'm one of those "freebie" musicians who plays and records for the love of the sounds. (I can afford this only because I have a day job.)
What strikes me funny as the "outrage for having to pay for music" story goes another round on/. is that we really have come to wrongly view music as a non-economic good, like air. Why?
I think there are two reasons:
commerce has pretended to give music to us for free: music is an expected part of the background in any store, at any event, for any time spent on hold. Radios broadcast the stuff for free, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Wait a second, no one does that. Strike that. Radios broadcast music for free because they receive ad revenue, and it is therefore in their economic interest to broadcast music without charge. Funny, stores do the same: a store with a soundtrack feels more polished to us because we aren't troubled by the chaos of other people's conversations. I suppose the ultimate example of soundtrack-polishing is Nordstrom's, with their live pianists.
So despite appearances music is not like air, but is used as a means of enhancing commerce. But we *think* it is, because of its ubiquitous presence in our lives.
Second, the commerce model followed by RIAA and friends stands in stark contrast to the professional model followed by classical music. In general, pop music pays by a royalty system. Concerts do provide some revenue, but the primary income stream even from concerts comes from royalties for sales of CDs and T-shirts. By contrast, classical musicians are salaried or payed per gig. (Can you imagine Perlman being payed a fee for every T-shirt sold at a Kennedy center concert?) So why does this matter? Because a salaried musician is far less likely to look for ever-more oppressive ways to squeeze revenue from his art. His salary is thus-and-so, and if he doesn't like it, well then, he negotiates with his employers.
But in a royalty system, the "employers" are the consumers. The revenue-squeezing tactics we see here are really ASCAP's way of trying to re-negotiate their salary. The RIAAs talk of "fairness" really is just rhetoric to get the foot in the door, and the squeezing will never stop.
So what is the solution? I think we all need to first acknowledge that our belief that music is free like air is simply wrong. Downloaders who expect to sample for free before paying have an unworkable expectation.
But, the royalty system for music needs to go. The industry's expectation of being paid for every "instance" of their intellectual property is unsustainable. Instead, musicians should be salaried, should make most of their income from actually performing concerts for people, and should release on CD only if they fully expect their music to be copied by others. Instead of concerts being a hook to get people to buy CDs, CDs should be a hook to get people to go to concerts. That would mean higher concert prices, but it would return some sanity to a currently insane system.
Full agreement there. I do a fair amount of translation work, and context is... well, everything. Which means that...
As a term of art, "irony" will probably always have a specific, well-defined meaning. But, if you are posting on slashdot, chances are that you aren't an editor, literary critic or professional author. Even more certainly, 999 times out of 1000 your audience is not such a person either. Thus expecting people to use a strict definition of a literary term of art here is to ignore the context in which it is being used.
...is ignoring the elephant in the room. What *is* the "context" for a threaded discussion in which anyone can join in? The "Slashdot Community" is able to maintain loose context for perhaps a few dozen phrases and words ("Troll", "Mod Parent Up", etc.). How can I possibly communicate -- without providing my own private dictionary in my journal -- using words that are continually hijacked? Yes, of course I can "do my best like everyone else", but the main point is that unless those who read have some sort of agreement with those who write with regards to syntax and semantics, then "meaning" has no meaning, and conversation becomes filled with phrases like "that's not what I meant", "can't you even read?", and my all-time favorite, "whatever."
At this point we all go out for a drink and engage in an Offtopic conversation about Gadamer and Derrida:-).
Not saying that at all; that would be an easy choice between braking and swerving. The true choice is between braking, swerving, ignoring, straddling, or speeding up. That choice is something that computers are not yet capable of. The current research backs me up, too.
Here's a final example, if you are open to convincing:
You're driving behind a truck at 55mph in the left lane. There is a car behind you, a car to your right and behind -- with just barely enough room to duck into the lane if absolutely necessary. Now, the truck releases a part of its load. What do you do?
Trick question. Turns out the "part of its load" was a piece of paper. But what if it were a small rock? A big rock? A chicken? Nails? A 2x4?
People do moderately poorly with this test, as you will no doubt agree. But computers do terribly because they cannot recognize the nature of obstacles, and certainly cannot weigh the consequences that their avoidance will have on others around them. Actually, the current situation is much worse than I've indicated. Computer-controlled driving can barely stay between the lanes right now. I'm not advocating Ludditism; I'm simply being realistic about the current state of the art.
A computer-controlled car should be able to sense an obstacle on the road and brake every time. Do you trust humans to do the same? (If your answer is yes, please pick up a newspaper and take a look for pedestrian traffic fatalities.)
Except that the right response is NOT to brake every time. Example: sometime last year, a deer jumped out on I-70 and ran into my lane, the middle lane. I managed to jump into the lane he had vacated and avoided collision. Braking would have been disastrous or fatal.
As I indicated in my first post, an obstacle leaves the driver with many options: swerving, braking, driving over it, speeding up. It turns out that computers are really bad, so far, at making that decision.
Can this change? Possibly. Can it change affordably? Maaaybeee...or not.
Other posters have pointed out that our vision perception is not strictly digital sampling, which is fair.
However, to understand my figure of 60Hz, check out the Nyquist rate here.
If anything, computer control systems could easily be outfitted with sensors far superior to what humans have
Strike the word "easily", and we agree. Any car that could outperform me visually would also outperform my income by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Wah, wah, wah yourself :-)
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In my HS English classes, including the AP ones, taught by the state English teacher of the year, we all learned that language is constantly evolving -- to assume that it is becoming more ambiguous is simply a leap of irrationality.
True...and False.
It is true that English is constantly evolving. There's no question about it, and it isn't just in the area of vocabularly, either. "Billy" Shakespeare's grammar takes a lot of effort for someone raised in the 20th or 21st centuries. Point taken.
That does not imply that therefore anything goes in language. To extend the evolution metaphor, not all language mutations are viable offspring. AND, in my opinion, the current mutation of "irony" tends towards confusion. Here's why: "irony" is a technical term in the literary profession, just like "gigabyte" is a technical term in the computer profession. If "irony" gets redefined or even extended through common usage, it becomes inrementally more difficult for literary discussions to take place with clarity. Much the same problem has happened when the term GB was redefined by the hard-drive industry to mean "1 000 000 000 bytes", which allowed them to inflate their capacity claims. Few were fooled, but it made purchasing hard drives more annoying, because it required reading the fine print just to find out how much storage was actually on the drive.
So, while I agree with the general idea of an evolving language, I would hold that technical terms should be considered "reserved words."
I wouldn't be willing to relinquish my car to computer control, for several reasons:
1) If only one -- just ONE -- object on the road doesn't play within the bounds of the driving algorithm, mass accidents can happen, because the first car to interact badly with said object now becomes a second unpredictable hazard on the road. With people in control, you only get mass pileups under the harshest of conditions (like blinding rain, snow, or fog).
2) Computer control requires getting real-time updates about road and traffic conditions in the immediate driving region. My eyes give me a 60Hz data refresh rate, with continuous conscious and subconscious processing. Can a computer system beat that?
3) No, it can't. One of my good friends is working on computer driving problems for NIST. Current driving algorithms get horrendously confused about dealing with obstacles. They can't handle the "avoid? stop? try to beat? ignore?" choice. Human drivers make that choice with difficulty but general success; Computer driving can't deal with that choice well at all.
We went in to induce labor, because Abi was not gaining weight like she should have been. After 18 hours of "prep" work (Cervadil, if that means anything), the OB gave my wife a hit of pitosin and told me to go get dinner. I had just purchased my lovely hospital meal when a nurse came charging after me and said "let's go." On the way up, she told me that an emergency C-section was required. Total change of reference frame. I got up and got on scrubs; Abi was born 5 minutes later. It was surreal, and scary, but not particularly disgusting. Perhaps different techniques were used?
Seriously, medical journal research is often -- but not always -- very good. The only trick is finding a journal article that is on topic. I'm sure that lasik will do that.
BTW, my daughter was one of those failure-to-progress C-sections; actually, she was an emergency C-section, since her heart rate dropped dramatically during the labor. It was... a stunning experience. I'm glad your delivery was less eventful, however.
blue is a shorter wavelength (400 - 450 nm) than red (650-700nm). Blue would likely focus in front of the retina, although I'm not sure how significant that effect is.
Not to put too fine a point on it ...
on
IT's Musical Habits
·
· Score: 3, Funny
That would be "1001 Verb Tenses", but my time-traveling abilities do not encompass going back to the moment my 8-month-old daughter hit Delete exactly as I hit Submit!
twice in the list of ideas was a "Quantum Gravity Gradiometer". For you gravity experts out there, how far-out is this? How small is a gravitational quantum supposed to be? Heck, what units is it measured in? (m/s^2? J?)
There are a couple of mentions of nuclear-powered engines. Anyone know what "RTG Plutonium -- current 25%" might mean?
The sonic-boomless airplane idea seems within reach. Any thoughts?
I respectfully reaffirm my position. Quoting the larger context,
If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes. But the computers most business people use today are not suited for that. That's because, he says, today's PC is too dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and paper. "[The PC] has a slightly better erase function but it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for."
Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web--it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it. "You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part."
We see that what Alan wants is
simulation, and
authorship.
In other words, he wants computers used for computational purposes (where authorship == "computation of ideas") rather than simply presentational purposes.
But a man like this cannot be dismissed merely because he occasionally creeps toward arrogance. What's much more important is that he does not merely complain. He has a vision and a team working to bring his alternate vision to reality.
Alan's point is that the truly mathematical aspects of computing have become second-place to the eye-candy aspects. I think he's right, but I also think it was inevitable. Why would hordes of people that never loved math before all the sudden become mathematicians just because they have computers to use?
Of course, Alan's aim is to change the tide. Hence, his work on Squeak. The goal for him is to use computers as a tool to enhance our thinking. More power to him.
Why are you acting like you're saying something heretical?
More like unpopular. If heretical, I would be putting my affairs in order prior to the stake./humor
I've gotten into the IP discussion before on this site, and I fully appreciate the position of those whose job it is to simply think for a living. The problem I have -- speaking as a mathematician -- is that mathematical knowledge is more often discovered than created. By that, I mean that any mathematical theorem whatsoever is simply a logical outworking of the axioms and definitions already in the system. It was implicitly "known", even if undiscovered. The only way to truly create mathematical knowledge is to coin a new axiom or definition, which usually leads to a whole new branch of mathematics.
So why does it matter? Isn't discovery good enough? Well, the problem with mathematical discovery is that the discoverer is relying so heavily on others' previous work that it becomes disingenous to claim the knowledge for his own. It's the "standing on the shoulders of giants" problem, except that where Einstein freely acknowledged it, everyone else quietly files for a patent or copyright.
To sum up, the problem I have with IP is that we reward people not for being truly creative, but for being slightly creative in a way that fails to acknowledge the contributions of others, and then allow those same people to punish others for doing the same thing.
One of Lerner-and-Jaffe's planks is the idea of allowing "obvious" patents to be challenged (like Amazon's one-click patent). The problem with this is the obviousness of hindsight. What happens to an idea that is merely one grade of brilliance beyond the "obvious"? You have twenty guys coming out of the woodworks saying "I thought of that." It seems to me that the obvious criterion will lead to just as much legal wrangling as the fights over who took which code from whom.
That said, I support what they're doing. I don't think that ideas can actually be owned. (*** ducks ***)
TMBG and the fine folks at homestarrunner.com are teaming up for a number of projects. The folks who brought you Strong Bad are working on an animated internet video of "Experimental Film" TMBG's upcoming single off "The Spine." John and John also recently sat down to an impromptu jam session with the Homestar puppet and performed "A Little Help from My Friends" and some Billy Idol songs nobody knew the words for.
Hear TMBG music at www.homestarrunner.com (email #99)
My take on chlorophyll-photovoltaic cells is that they will be feasible some day but it is hard to say when. Their potential advantage over more conventional biomass approaches to energy is that thay would not need to be tended to the way plants in fields or in vats must be. Their potential advantage over more conventional silicon photovoltaic cells is that they may some day be much cheaper to make. But one question that arises is whether the proteins in the chloroplasts can be treated to be made stable for long periods of time.
This is a non-trivial concern. The electron generation can probably occur by multiple pathways, only some of which are reversible. As a result, the proteins become oxidized over time, and lose potency. Some of the links in the article hinted at this problem.
"The fact that you prevented it from happening doesnt change the fact that it was *going* to happen."
So says John Anderton, defending the use of pre-crime techniques.
Of course, the entire point of the movie (culminating in Anderton's boss's death, contrary to the pre-vision of the three precogs) is that there isn't "absolute metaphysics" as Anderton claims. At the end of the movie, pre-crime is dismantled because it turns out to be fallible and not absolute after all.
Of course, you probably knew all that and were just reveling in the irony and paradoxes of "pre-traffic".:-)
...because the exact same thing happened to my Mom recently. She got a Toshiba Notebook, installed the Earthlink Internet software, went out on the web, and picked up Sasser in record time. I fussed at her and told her to reinstall from scratch, then install Norton before going out on the web. She did; same thing happened. Obviously, she aquired the worm either
a) WHILE she was activating Norton over the Internet, or
b) BECAUSE Norton didn't automatically shut down ports once it was activated.
My question is, why is Norton not designed so that it closes all ports during the initial "registration" process, except of course for the port used to serve their registration process?
Slashdot Mirror
What strikes me funny as the "outrage for having to pay for music" story goes another round on
I think there are two reasons:
commerce has pretended to give music to us for free: music is an expected part of the background in any store, at any event, for any time spent on hold. Radios broadcast the stuff for free, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Wait a second, no one does that. Strike that. Radios broadcast music for free because they receive ad revenue, and it is therefore in their economic interest to broadcast music without charge. Funny, stores do the same: a store with a soundtrack feels more polished to us because we aren't troubled by the chaos of other people's conversations. I suppose the ultimate example of soundtrack-polishing is Nordstrom's, with their live pianists.
So despite appearances music is not like air, but is used as a means of enhancing commerce. But we *think* it is, because of its ubiquitous presence in our lives.
Second, the commerce model followed by RIAA and friends stands in stark contrast to the professional model followed by classical music. In general, pop music pays by a royalty system. Concerts do provide some revenue, but the primary income stream even from concerts comes from royalties for sales of CDs and T-shirts. By contrast, classical musicians are salaried or payed per gig. (Can you imagine Perlman being payed a fee for every T-shirt sold at a Kennedy center concert?) So why does this matter? Because a salaried musician is far less likely to look for ever-more oppressive ways to squeeze revenue from his art. His salary is thus-and-so, and if he doesn't like it, well then, he negotiates with his employers.
But in a royalty system, the "employers" are the consumers. The revenue-squeezing tactics we see here are really ASCAP's way of trying to re-negotiate their salary. The RIAAs talk of "fairness" really is just rhetoric to get the foot in the door, and the squeezing will never stop.
So what is the solution? I think we all need to first acknowledge that our belief that music is free like air is simply wrong. Downloaders who expect to sample for free before paying have an unworkable expectation.
But, the royalty system for music needs to go. The industry's expectation of being paid for every "instance" of their intellectual property is unsustainable. Instead, musicians should be salaried, should make most of their income from actually performing concerts for people, and should release on CD only if they fully expect their music to be copied by others. Instead of concerts being a hook to get people to buy CDs, CDs should be a hook to get people to go to concerts. That would mean higher concert prices, but it would return some sanity to a currently insane system.
/ramble
At this point we all go out for a drink and engage in an Offtopic conversation about Gadamer and Derrida
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
Here's a final example, if you are open to convincing:
You're driving behind a truck at 55mph in the left lane. There is a car behind you, a car to your right and behind -- with just barely enough room to duck into the lane if absolutely necessary. Now, the truck releases a part of its load. What do you do?
Trick question. Turns out the "part of its load" was a piece of paper. But what if it were a small rock? A big rock? A chicken? Nails? A 2x4?
People do moderately poorly with this test, as you will no doubt agree. But computers do terribly because they cannot recognize the nature of obstacles, and certainly cannot weigh the consequences that their avoidance will have on others around them.
Actually, the current situation is much worse than I've indicated. Computer-controlled driving can barely stay between the lanes right now.
I'm not advocating Ludditism; I'm simply being realistic about the current state of the art.
Sorry, bum link on that post. Check out the Nyquist rate here.
As I indicated in my first post, an obstacle leaves the driver with many options: swerving, braking, driving over it, speeding up. It turns out that computers are really bad, so far, at making that decision.
Can this change? Possibly. Can it change affordably? Maaaybeee...or not.
However, to understand my figure of 60Hz, check out the Nyquist rate here.
Strike the word "easily", and we agree. Any car that could outperform me visually would also outperform my income by a couple of orders of magnitude.
It is true that English is constantly evolving. There's no question about it, and it isn't just in the area of vocabularly, either. "Billy" Shakespeare's grammar takes a lot of effort for someone raised in the 20th or 21st centuries. Point taken.
That does not imply that therefore anything goes in language. To extend the evolution metaphor, not all language mutations are viable offspring. AND, in my opinion, the current mutation of "irony" tends towards confusion. Here's why: "irony" is a technical term in the literary profession, just like "gigabyte" is a technical term in the computer profession. If "irony" gets redefined or even extended through common usage, it becomes inrementally more difficult for literary discussions to take place with clarity.
Much the same problem has happened when the term GB was redefined by the hard-drive industry to mean "1 000 000 000 bytes", which allowed them to inflate their capacity claims. Few were fooled, but it made purchasing hard drives more annoying, because it required reading the fine print just to find out how much storage was actually on the drive.
So, while I agree with the general idea of an evolving language, I would hold that technical terms should be considered "reserved words."
I wouldn't be willing to relinquish my car to computer control, for several reasons:
1) If only one -- just ONE -- object on the road doesn't play within the bounds of the driving algorithm, mass accidents can happen, because the first car to interact badly with said object now becomes a second unpredictable hazard on the road. With people in control, you only get mass pileups under the harshest of conditions (like blinding rain, snow, or fog).
2) Computer control requires getting real-time updates about road and traffic conditions in the immediate driving region. My eyes give me a 60Hz data refresh rate, with continuous conscious and subconscious processing. Can a computer system beat that?
3) No, it can't. One of my good friends is working on computer driving problems for NIST. Current driving algorithms get horrendously confused about dealing with obstacles. They can't handle the "avoid? stop? try to beat? ignore?" choice. Human drivers make that choice with difficulty but general success; Computer driving can't deal with that choice well at all.
We went in to induce labor, because Abi was not gaining weight like she should have been. After 18 hours of "prep" work (Cervadil, if that means anything), the OB gave my wife a hit of pitosin and told me to go get dinner. I had just purchased my lovely hospital meal when a nurse came charging after me and said "let's go." On the way up, she told me that an emergency C-section was required. Total change of reference frame. I got up and got on scrubs; Abi was born 5 minutes later. It was surreal, and scary, but not particularly disgusting. Perhaps different techniques were used?
I dunno, I thought economists were worse ...
... a stunning experience. I'm glad your delivery was less eventful, however.
Seriously, medical journal research is often -- but not always -- very good. The only trick is finding a journal article that is on topic. I'm sure that lasik will do that.
BTW, my daughter was one of those failure-to-progress C-sections; actually, she was an emergency C-section, since her heart rate dropped dramatically during the labor. It was
blue is a shorter wavelength (400 - 450 nm) than red (650-700nm). Blue would likely focus in front of the retina, although I'm not sure how significant that effect is.
Sorry, couldn't resist the irony :-)
That would be "1001 Verb Tenses", but my time-traveling abilities do not encompass going back to the moment my 8-month-old daughter hit Delete exactly as I hit Submit!
(With apologies to Doug Adams)
twice in the list of ideas was a "Quantum Gravity Gradiometer". For you gravity experts out there, how far-out is this? How small is a gravitational quantum supposed to be? Heck, what units is it measured in? (m/s^2? J?)
There are a couple of mentions of nuclear-powered engines. Anyone know what "RTG Plutonium -- current 25%" might mean?
The sonic-boomless airplane idea seems within reach. Any thoughts?
simulation, and
authorship.
In other words, he wants computers used for computational purposes (where authorship == "computation of ideas") rather than simply presentational purposes.
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
Of course, Alan's aim is to change the tide. Hence, his work on Squeak. The goal for him is to use computers as a tool to enhance our thinking. More power to him.
I've gotten into the IP discussion before on this site, and I fully appreciate the position of those whose job it is to simply think for a living. The problem I have -- speaking as a mathematician -- is that mathematical knowledge is more often discovered than created. By that, I mean that any mathematical theorem whatsoever is simply a logical outworking of the axioms and definitions already in the system. It was implicitly "known", even if undiscovered. The only way to truly create mathematical knowledge is to coin a new axiom or definition, which usually leads to a whole new branch of mathematics.
So why does it matter? Isn't discovery good enough? Well, the problem with mathematical discovery is that the discoverer is relying so heavily on others' previous work that it becomes disingenous to claim the knowledge for his own. It's the "standing on the shoulders of giants" problem, except that where Einstein freely acknowledged it, everyone else quietly files for a patent or copyright.
To sum up, the problem I have with IP is that we reward people not for being truly creative, but for being slightly creative in a way that fails to acknowledge the contributions of others, and then allow those same people to punish others for doing the same thing.
One of Lerner-and-Jaffe's planks is the idea of allowing "obvious" patents to be challenged (like Amazon's one-click patent). The problem with this is the obviousness of hindsight. What happens to an idea that is merely one grade of brilliance beyond the "obvious"? You have twenty guys coming out of the woodworks saying "I thought of that." It seems to me that the obvious criterion will lead to just as much legal wrangling as the fights over who took which code from whom.
That said, I support what they're doing. I don't think that ideas can actually be owned. (*** ducks ***)
+3 informative. Thanks. :-)
Of course, the entire point of the movie (culminating in Anderton's boss's death, contrary to the pre-vision of the three precogs) is that there isn't "absolute metaphysics" as Anderton claims. At the end of the movie, pre-crime is dismantled because it turns out to be fallible and not absolute after all.
Of course, you probably knew all that and were just reveling in the irony and paradoxes of "pre-traffic".
Let me see your badge.
We still have that right.
...because the exact same thing happened to my Mom recently. She got a Toshiba Notebook, installed the Earthlink Internet software, went out on the web, and picked up Sasser in record time. I fussed at her and told her to reinstall from scratch, then install Norton before going out on the web. She did; same thing happened. Obviously, she aquired the worm either
a) WHILE she was activating Norton over the Internet, or
b) BECAUSE Norton didn't automatically shut down ports once it was activated.
My question is, why is Norton not designed so that it closes all ports during the initial "registration" process, except of course for the port used to serve their registration process?