Flawed in the sense it can't be peer reviewed to be "proven." It could be true but because it can't be independently verified then its not a proof because you can't prove it. Now whether this is truly a situation where a proof is unprovable or just people reacting to the thought of their profession being eliminating by technology is another debate entirely.
Part of what the internet gives is number of different avenues for bands to get their music out. Getting onto Napster for its subscription service could be a really good idea as it allows people to relate your music to more established bands' music. For example, people won't necessarily check out a new band but if they see this new band is similar to say Korn they're gonna be more likely to give it a whirl and with the subscription service they're not out anything. If you don't like the idea of selling people DRM music, I believe you can just distribute it on these services as a subscription album not for individual sale.
I also think something like Magnatune is a good idea in that it gives you a more direct distribution channel. One of the advantages of smaller bands is that people tend to actually buy their music instead of getting it over P2P networks of a band that's on the radio.
I think something that's been mentioned too that is important is the idea of giving out certain tracks while selling others. Live versions could be given for free while the album version could be downloaded from a service.
What's most important though is creating a buzz and fans. Getting the music out there is relatively easy, its actually finding listeners and a group of loyal fans to preach the gospel so to speak is what's hard.
Maybe I misunderstood part of this person's argument (I skimmed through the article), but isn't he saying that part of the disadvantage of open sourcing Windows or OFfice would be a lack of stability. I don't buy that argument. Microsoft would still have the trademarks to Windows and Office and would be able to wield tremendous power in requiring certain aspects of the program to be work a certain way ala the idea for open sourcing Java. Any disadvantage in brand stability would be offset I believe by more than offset by increased product quality. Microsoft might have valid economic reasons not to open source Windows but I sure don't think that a lack of brand stability should be one of them.
I think Microsoft does do a fairly good job with their SDKs. I've been trying to learn C# and its C# and.NET reference is good. I've only found two problems with MSDN's library:
1. If you have no idea where something would be located in the library, you may be in for a long, long search. More than once I've searched for things and to me they weren't in very intuitive locations. That's an MSDN issue though, not necessarily indicative of SDKs in general.
2. SDKs for MS at times will give awful examples. As someone who really learns new techniques by seeing examples, this can be very frustrating. When I was learning events and event handlers in C#, they had this example that I just couldn't understand. It was like they skipped the baby steps and just threw me into the deep end. (Wow, mixed metaphors...) They were trying to explain how to declare an event, create an event handler and the whole shebang in one example. I searched online for other examples and I found someone who split it up into a number of examples and I found that much more helpful. I guess it just means that when you write an SDK don't try to cram every possible bit of functionality into one example; split the examples up a bit so its easier for people get a handle on.
I agree with your attitude on dynamic typing. I have just started learning c# and while learning to type everything took me a while, I've found it to just be easier than PHP/Perl and the like because the IDE can suggest the methods, properties and events possible to a given object.
I love PHP and Perl still and I think for smaller projects it can be easier but its hard to go back now that I've seen the advantages of C#.
There could be a free speech issue involved in that the government is the one who adds sites to the list. The worry I see is that the government will add sites that don't fit the description of what they say they're blocking (smut) and will begin to expand that list to include non-conservative sites that are completely legitimate, such as Planned Parenthood, gay rights sites and the like. I dislike the idea of parents, with the help of government, "protecting" their children from opposing viewpoints.
The real first amendment issue would be whether this blocking will be required in libraries. I believe blocking software can be required in libraries but my understanding is that in those cases the government doesn't decide the list. When the government starts deciding the list of unacceptable sites, things start to get a bit dicey.
To some extent. This will come out of profit from companies which means it might not necessarily increase prices. In a lot of cases too, the taxation would come from profit made from out of state revenues and wouldn't affect in-state prices. It's a complex issue. If we tax people they may spend less with companies and then the companies would make less profit. The goal is to make taxes that are progressive. Business taxation is one way but its not the only way.
I agree completely. We are in a huge bind right now when it comes to taxes. Businesses pay the second lowest percentage of state taxes in the entire country. He has no way to raise actual business taxes due to an incredibly powerful business lobby and the Republican controlled legislature. The property tax freeze of course is nuts cuz it'd save homeowners at most $11 over 2 years (Wow 5 gallons of gas!!!). We've got a mess and until the Governor and legislature get on the same page (not likely going into gubenatorial elections in '06) not much is going to help.
The only answer is really to fix the tax system so businesses pay their fair share. Many people think this is economic suicide but business taxes have been going down since the 1960s and Wisconsin has been hit just as hard by a poor national economy. It has had a minimal effect on economic growth and a huge effect on fiscal stability. Like I said though, this ain't gonna happen soon.
Hey I agree completely. I wasn't defending them at all. What I was saying was calling it a police state will not help us at all because it allows the conservatives in power to say "oh he's just one of the anti-government nuts."
I agree that the patriot act and all the regulations surrounding it such as the Secret ID law are grossly unconstitutional and will lead to severe violations of our civil liberties but I think its extreme to say we live in a police state. A police state would allow all of the secret things you've mentioned in every case. That just doesn't happen yet (although there is certainly potential for it to happen). We do have a fairly robust and open justice system, despite all its flaws, in cases not involving terrorism. I'm not minimizing your concerns but making a statement like you did will allow others to ridicule our concerns as hyperbole.
Okay I'm not even going to claim this place is legal cuz honestly, its clearly not. There is no way that the record industry would allow someone to sell non-DRM'd music.
But its a shame its not legal. This is the chaos I went through trying out Virgin Digital's subscription service. Since it was the cheapest with the best selection I figured I'd try the free trial. First I couldn't log in. After half a day of trying a bunch of different things I finally got it to work. Then I looked for a band I wanted (Pennywise). Musicnet said it was in their catalog which is what Virgin Digital uses but it never came up. Okay I'll get past that. Then I want to download a song from a new album.... Hmmmm track 2 is missing. I check on the non-subscription catalog and lo and behold there is the song. So I pay 7.99 a month for some music that is completely decided arbitrarily.
You'd think this would be the end of my problems but I could only be so lucky. Next I downloaded a song and when I played it, it cut out half way through. So I downloaed it again and it worked perfectly. Next I downloaded another song and I had all of these loud crackling sounds. I can only assume it was a bad download or its a compression artifact. Oh but wait there's more! I wanted to play the song outside of Virgin Digital's player and instead in Windows Media Player. Hmmmm WMP says the song is corrupt. Well lets try another. That one is too!!! For god sakes, they're linked to the player!
At this point I couldn't take anymore and canceled my 14 day trial membership after less than 8 hours. I never was so unhappy with a service. Its sad because its was a good idea but no one wants to pay money for half of a product. At least these illegal sites have what I want: music that can be free of compression artifacts that can be played in any player I want and isn't limited by the RIAA.
You're missing the point. I don't look at my power bill and say "hey I wasted $20 last month"... Its a service and you're paying for the right to use that service. I don't want to pay $1 for a song that I only sorta like. Why should I spend money for something like that when I can listen to hundreds of thousands of songs for $10 or $15 a month? I get more selection for a lot less. I think its more like P2P than buying one song at a time and its just cheaper if you want to listen to a variety of music. If you would rather own the music, have at it; no one is stopping you. Its just a different product for different people.
That's surprising. I haven't found a system that loads Firefox faster than IE. I personally think its one of the problems that Mozilla needs to address. There may be completely valid reasons why it doesn't load as fast but the computer user who hears all the great stories of Firefox and tries it out are going to be surprised that it loads so much slower than IE.
RAM and OS are minor compared to the real bottleneck in general performance: the hard drive. Hard drives have access times in the millisecond while ram has it in the nanoseconds. Until someone figures out how to make a hard drive that has access times a thousand times quicker, we're still going to have processors waiting for data longer than they really should be. Research in this area is catching up but after many, many years of processor and RAM research its got a ton of catching up to do.
Castration has nothing to do with a penis. It has to do with eliminating sexual urges. If they don't have sexual urges, they're much less likely to molest. Chemical castration is the most common form today so there's actually no physical changes as there would be in the past.
You are right. I was referring to child molesters who are consistently attracted to children. They have a high rate of reoffending. There are many pedophiles who are completely harmless to children and they should be commended for taking responsibility for their action and working to prevent hurt.
Because it'd be impossible to prosecute any other way. You don't need to kill another person to investigate a murder you can just look at the photos. I think police have an exemption as well in the law.
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Flawed in the sense it can't be peer reviewed to be "proven." It could be true but because it can't be independently verified then its not a proof because you can't prove it. Now whether this is truly a situation where a proof is unprovable or just people reacting to the thought of their profession being eliminating by technology is another debate entirely.
Yes but that would require foresight beyond the next election cycle from our political leaders, something which is has been lacking even more lately.
Part of what the internet gives is number of different avenues for bands to get their music out. Getting onto Napster for its subscription service could be a really good idea as it allows people to relate your music to more established bands' music. For example, people won't necessarily check out a new band but if they see this new band is similar to say Korn they're gonna be more likely to give it a whirl and with the subscription service they're not out anything. If you don't like the idea of selling people DRM music, I believe you can just distribute it on these services as a subscription album not for individual sale.
I also think something like Magnatune is a good idea in that it gives you a more direct distribution channel. One of the advantages of smaller bands is that people tend to actually buy their music instead of getting it over P2P networks of a band that's on the radio.
I think something that's been mentioned too that is important is the idea of giving out certain tracks while selling others. Live versions could be given for free while the album version could be downloaded from a service.
What's most important though is creating a buzz and fans. Getting the music out there is relatively easy, its actually finding listeners and a group of loyal fans to preach the gospel so to speak is what's hard.
Maybe I misunderstood part of this person's argument (I skimmed through the article), but isn't he saying that part of the disadvantage of open sourcing Windows or OFfice would be a lack of stability. I don't buy that argument. Microsoft would still have the trademarks to Windows and Office and would be able to wield tremendous power in requiring certain aspects of the program to be work a certain way ala the idea for open sourcing Java. Any disadvantage in brand stability would be offset I believe by more than offset by increased product quality. Microsoft might have valid economic reasons not to open source Windows but I sure don't think that a lack of brand stability should be one of them.
I think Microsoft does do a fairly good job with their SDKs. I've been trying to learn C# and its C# and .NET reference is good. I've only found two problems with MSDN's library:
1. If you have no idea where something would be located in the library, you may be in for a long, long search. More than once I've searched for things and to me they weren't in very intuitive locations. That's an MSDN issue though, not necessarily indicative of SDKs in general.
2. SDKs for MS at times will give awful examples. As someone who really learns new techniques by seeing examples, this can be very frustrating. When I was learning events and event handlers in C#, they had this example that I just couldn't understand. It was like they skipped the baby steps and just threw me into the deep end. (Wow, mixed metaphors...) They were trying to explain how to declare an event, create an event handler and the whole shebang in one example. I searched online for other examples and I found someone who split it up into a number of examples and I found that much more helpful. I guess it just means that when you write an SDK don't try to cram every possible bit of functionality into one example; split the examples up a bit so its easier for people get a handle on.
I agree with your attitude on dynamic typing. I have just started learning c# and while learning to type everything took me a while, I've found it to just be easier than PHP/Perl and the like because the IDE can suggest the methods, properties and events possible to a given object.
I love PHP and Perl still and I think for smaller projects it can be easier but its hard to go back now that I've seen the advantages of C#.
I agree completely. Subscriptions are the only area that DRM seems fair to me. Otherwise its just an intrusion.
There could be a free speech issue involved in that the government is the one who adds sites to the list. The worry I see is that the government will add sites that don't fit the description of what they say they're blocking (smut) and will begin to expand that list to include non-conservative sites that are completely legitimate, such as Planned Parenthood, gay rights sites and the like. I dislike the idea of parents, with the help of government, "protecting" their children from opposing viewpoints.
The real first amendment issue would be whether this blocking will be required in libraries. I believe blocking software can be required in libraries but my understanding is that in those cases the government doesn't decide the list. When the government starts deciding the list of unacceptable sites, things start to get a bit dicey.
We already have a generalized chip in a computer; it's called a CPU.
To some extent. This will come out of profit from companies which means it might not necessarily increase prices. In a lot of cases too, the taxation would come from profit made from out of state revenues and wouldn't affect in-state prices. It's a complex issue. If we tax people they may spend less with companies and then the companies would make less profit. The goal is to make taxes that are progressive. Business taxation is one way but its not the only way.
I agree completely. We are in a huge bind right now when it comes to taxes. Businesses pay the second lowest percentage of state taxes in the entire country. He has no way to raise actual business taxes due to an incredibly powerful business lobby and the Republican controlled legislature. The property tax freeze of course is nuts cuz it'd save homeowners at most $11 over 2 years (Wow 5 gallons of gas!!!). We've got a mess and until the Governor and legislature get on the same page (not likely going into gubenatorial elections in '06) not much is going to help.
The only answer is really to fix the tax system so businesses pay their fair share. Many people think this is economic suicide but business taxes have been going down since the 1960s and Wisconsin has been hit just as hard by a poor national economy. It has had a minimal effect on economic growth and a huge effect on fiscal stability. Like I said though, this ain't gonna happen soon.
Some do willingly because they have a heart. I would think most would rather they be able to buy that second house unfortunately.
Hey I agree completely. I wasn't defending them at all. What I was saying was calling it a police state will not help us at all because it allows the conservatives in power to say "oh he's just one of the anti-government nuts."
I agree that the patriot act and all the regulations surrounding it such as the Secret ID law are grossly unconstitutional and will lead to severe violations of our civil liberties but I think its extreme to say we live in a police state. A police state would allow all of the secret things you've mentioned in every case. That just doesn't happen yet (although there is certainly potential for it to happen). We do have a fairly robust and open justice system, despite all its flaws, in cases not involving terrorism. I'm not minimizing your concerns but making a statement like you did will allow others to ridicule our concerns as hyperbole.
Okay I'm not even going to claim this place is legal cuz honestly, its clearly not. There is no way that the record industry would allow someone to sell non-DRM'd music.
But its a shame its not legal. This is the chaos I went through trying out Virgin Digital's subscription service. Since it was the cheapest with the best selection I figured I'd try the free trial. First I couldn't log in. After half a day of trying a bunch of different things I finally got it to work. Then I looked for a band I wanted (Pennywise). Musicnet said it was in their catalog which is what Virgin Digital uses but it never came up. Okay I'll get past that. Then I want to download a song from a new album.... Hmmmm track 2 is missing. I check on the non-subscription catalog and lo and behold there is the song. So I pay 7.99 a month for some music that is completely decided arbitrarily.
You'd think this would be the end of my problems but I could only be so lucky. Next I downloaded a song and when I played it, it cut out half way through. So I downloaed it again and it worked perfectly. Next I downloaded another song and I had all of these loud crackling sounds. I can only assume it was a bad download or its a compression artifact. Oh but wait there's more! I wanted to play the song outside of Virgin Digital's player and instead in Windows Media Player. Hmmmm WMP says the song is corrupt. Well lets try another. That one is too!!! For god sakes, they're linked to the player!
At this point I couldn't take anymore and canceled my 14 day trial membership after less than 8 hours. I never was so unhappy with a service. Its sad because its was a good idea but no one wants to pay money for half of a product. At least these illegal sites have what I want: music that can be free of compression artifacts that can be played in any player I want and isn't limited by the RIAA.
You're missing the point. I don't look at my power bill and say "hey I wasted $20 last month"... Its a service and you're paying for the right to use that service. I don't want to pay $1 for a song that I only sorta like. Why should I spend money for something like that when I can listen to hundreds of thousands of songs for $10 or $15 a month? I get more selection for a lot less. I think its more like P2P than buying one song at a time and its just cheaper if you want to listen to a variety of music. If you would rather own the music, have at it; no one is stopping you. Its just a different product for different people.
That's surprising. I haven't found a system that loads Firefox faster than IE. I personally think its one of the problems that Mozilla needs to address. There may be completely valid reasons why it doesn't load as fast but the computer user who hears all the great stories of Firefox and tries it out are going to be surprised that it loads so much slower than IE.
RAM and OS are minor compared to the real bottleneck in general performance: the hard drive. Hard drives have access times in the millisecond while ram has it in the nanoseconds. Until someone figures out how to make a hard drive that has access times a thousand times quicker, we're still going to have processors waiting for data longer than they really should be. Research in this area is catching up but after many, many years of processor and RAM research its got a ton of catching up to do.
Castration has nothing to do with a penis. It has to do with eliminating sexual urges. If they don't have sexual urges, they're much less likely to molest. Chemical castration is the most common form today so there's actually no physical changes as there would be in the past.
huh?
You are right. I was referring to child molesters who are consistently attracted to children. They have a high rate of reoffending. There are many pedophiles who are completely harmless to children and they should be commended for taking responsibility for their action and working to prevent hurt.
I think its pretty awful to consider anyone less than human. That doesn't minimize what they did or how bad it was but they are humans nonetheless.
Glad you said it. Shame not more people see it that way.
Because it'd be impossible to prosecute any other way. You don't need to kill another person to investigate a murder you can just look at the photos. I think police have an exemption as well in the law.
Hmm wouldn't to me but I guess I don't pleasure out of a human beings suffering.