I never wanted a music "player". I wanted a recorder. For one thing, I make my own music. For another thing, I listen to.wav format, not MP3. For another thing, my average track is 45 to 90 minutes long and doesn't originate from a CD rip. When I want to hear relatively mainstreamish, low-fi things, I have internet radio for that. But most of my listening time is spent on things where I have some involvement in its production, and usually in a situation where I or my client or my partner controls the copyright. Sure there are better pocket-sized recorders than my Edirol, but I have what I need and it's pretty danged good; at least as good as my studio mixer or my DAW. And the built-in mics are okay (just okay).
>My idea of American 'culture' is fast food, celebrities, gas guzzling cars, and guns. Have I missed >anything?
In my town there are many more "regular" restaurants than there are fast food "restaurants", and the biggest celebrities are probably the retired jazz musicians. There are more hybrid-fuel vehicles in the USA than in all other countries put together, and they are extremely common in my area. Where I live guns are legal, and this does not seem to create a major issue for anyone that I know of, not unlike Switzerland in my opinion.
As for the whole "obesity" thing, it's correlated with age I believe. The median age in my part of town is around 30, and most people seem to fall within one or two standard deviations from my perceived ideal of body mass, although I tend to only survey females, and very unscientifically at that.
From my office window I can see more restaurants than I care to count, but to get to a regular fast food chain, I'd have to go a couple of km. I *think* there might be a Taco Bell closer than that but I'm not sure. I, like most people around here, prepare and cook their own food, and to that end, there are some excellent markets.
The USA is a fairly big, multicultural place, and different parts of the country fit your (fully justified) stereotype to varying degrees. I realize I'm an outlier -- the office I'm in is powered by 17% solar with the rest coming from a conventional (gas) plant. I commute to work on a bicycle when the weather is fine, and I drive my reasonably efficient but still gas-guzzling car otherwise.
My family is a mix of Irish immigrants and indigenous people. I found it rather interesting (dismaying in some ways) to learn that the Irish ancestors were not, as I had believed, 1848 famine refugees, but were actually quite comfortable, and it appears that they came over with plenty of money. Here I had always thought that my g-g-grandfather crawled out of a workhouse, eating blades of grass on the way to the docks, boarded a famine ship, survived the voyage, was hounded out of New York to Oklahoma where he raped the first Indian woman he saw.
It turns out the famine years took a toll on their farming business (not potatoes) by depriving them of cheap labor, that they had no difficulty booking passage to America, that they bought land that they chose, and it further happens that the marriage to the Kiowa woman took place in an Anglican church with full enthusiasm from both families. They even paid a dowry.
Needless to say, learning all of this was *devastating* to my sense of cultural identity. OMFG, not only did my Irish ancestors never miss a meal in the 1840s, but my Indian family fully embraced their lifestyle and abandoned the whole tribal thing.
"My current company only hires people who are able to demonstrate competence in the field, and they hire 1 out of 5 candidates at most. They have billboards up all over the state and they're only able to get one candidate per week."
I'm one of the "good ones". Questions:
1. What state? To say the least, all points in the USA are not equal.
2. What marketing methods have you used besides billboards?
3. Will you give my resume to a person who is in this "one in five" predicament?
This is true, but there are places where CS+Fine Arts or CS+Business is what impresses them.
Right now I do have a job where we do calculus on the whiteboards (environmental science), but I know that the moment I step out of academia, that stops being common.
Twice in my career I have had a good laugh at the expense of someone whose abuse I suffered.
The first was David Duncan. He was a senior finance/accounting manager when I was a peon at Mobil. I basically had to jump at his every request even though I never worked for him or his department. I left that job to start an internet business, but I really enjoyed the day that I saw David Duncan testifying before Congress, explaining Enron to them. Beautiful day.
The second is today. When my internet company was encoding and streaming his sports and talk radio broadcasts (innovative for 1994, mind you), Mark Cuban used to page me and call me at home at all hours with the most unreasonable demands and questions. Now I realize if I had been willing to kiss his ass the way he was accustomed to being kissed, I might be a billionaire today, but it would never have happened. Today I am all smiles.
>The difference being that the taxicab/bus company itself makes money on each ride.
So if some non-profit organization operates a taxi service, you believe they should be exempt from regulations, solely on the basis of their non-profit status? Fortunately, the law does not agree with you.
You might also have missed the fact that PickupPal was charging a commission, before their legal troubles began.
>Personally, I'm confused as to how they came to these regulations.
What you quoted is a commentary on the regulations, and an interpretation of them.
The argument touches on the question of whether public transportation should be regulated at all.
If the answer to that is yes, then this kind of specialized taxi service should be subject to those regulations.
If the answer is no, then taxi and private bus companies need to be exempt, at least for the parts of their business that are indistinguishable from the "carpool service."
The Canadian government is not saying YOU can't give rides. They are saying that taxi and private bus companies are regulated, and if you operate one, you will comply with the regulations.
The company in the article operates something that is not reasonably different enough from a taxi service, that taxi services could use their example to avoid paying taxes, commercial insurance, or requiring licensed drivers.
There's still no law that would prevent you from having a carpool. You can even negotiate with your riders for compensation. What you can't do is operate a service that is essentially a taxicab, without following the local laws that regulate the taxi business. If you try to do that, the taxi businesses are going to cry foul, which is what happened here.
>If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family >member?
It's not different until you operate a service that allows drivers to share rides with complete strangers for a fare. Then you become a taxicab company, even if it's a non-profit one. You suddenly have the problems of personal versus public transportation insurance, accommodation for handicapped users, and tax liabilities. If you can somehow make an argument that YOUR service is DIFFERENT, the taxi and private bus companies are going to use those SAME arguments, and then *every* taxi becomes "a carpool rideshare service", and they use your loophole to avoid things like insurance, tax, licensing, and safety regulations.
You can still privately arrange carpools however you want, and you can even negotiate compensation for gas and wear-and-tear on the vehicle and stuff. You just can't setup a taxicab company and call it a duck.
I didn't see in the article when the money changes hands. I'm guessing there's some element of this service that isn't free, which makes the carpool service a commercial transport provider, and so that makes them subject to whatever laws govern transportation up there. There's probably tax issues involved here too. At what point does your "carpooling with strangers" hobby make you an unlicensed taxi driver?
There are some categories of calculations, where you are aware of all kinds of intermediate values, derivatives, etc., by virtue of the fact of that you are computing on a slide rule. Often, a result would have other related results right there on the ruler. Translating the same computations to a calculator tends to lose some of this insight. I don't know how useful that is, but I am aware of it. I also believe it's a little more difficult to teach logarithms (and applications of logs) because, now that slide rules are out of the picture, there is one less real-world thing where logs are used. I say the same about ratios, exponential notation, and awareness of accuracy and precision.
That said, I haven't taken either of my slide rules out of the case in 12 years. And that time was to show someone how we once used LL rules to do exponentiation even after we had electronic calculators. It's not that I miss the "good old days", it's that some mathematical awareness whose constant reinforcement we once took for granted, must now be bestowed artificially.
>If you're a programmer and you want to retain control of how your code is licensed, then you don't hand over the >copyright to anyone.
I think you missed my point: If I know they are going to release my work under the GPL, (e.g., it's in my contract from the beginning) I can be persuaded to license my work that way. In the OP's case, this would be the difference between being able to get my contribution or not. In my case, it's less about money and more about conflicts of interest with the academic institution where I'm employed.
I wish the OP wasn't anonymous. I'm genuinely connected to an organization that might be able to help him.
No, they can't sleep. They are having bad dreams after eating their dish of crow with sour grape sauce, and they think "the Media" should have done more to prevent their nightmare.
Here, practice saying "President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama."
At the Democratic Convention this summer in Denver, I lost count of the number of people who claimed they were delegates or otherwise had special credentials, and should be allowed to cut in line in front of us. We knew better - a person in our group really was a delegate (and waited in a different line, and got into the stadium long before us.) It stopped being funny about four hours into the wait. Those people around us in line, had all gotten to know each other pretty well. The line experience was actually a pretty important part of the event, and while I won't say we "enjoyed" it, the time passed quite pleasantly, aside from the endless people who would try to cut in line, without realizing that everybody in line KNEW who was in line within 30 meters of themselves. And there was great solidarity.
Then, right at the end of the line there was a way to cut in from across the road -- and if you tried it, you had about a 30% chance of getting in the gate, or getting escorted off the Ivesco Field premises and not allowed back. People seem to not understand that the police at an event like that either are, or report directly to, Federal Secret Service. It was frustrating to say the least, but to watch them getting arrested was pretty satisfying.
Honesty is the best policy. Don't pretend that they are developing a proprietary product and then decide to release it when it's done. START as an open source project and take advantage of community efforts if they present themselves.
In fact, before you spend any money, I think you should do the hard parts first: Requirements gathering, specifications, and stakeholder expectations. You really can't hire programmers and expect these things to happen magically. Setup the project so that it has a chance for success, and your labor might come to you more inexpensively than it would otherwise.
I personally would prefer that you specified in the contract that you wanted to own the copyright so that you could release it under the GPL or whatever, instead of hiding this information. If you were upfront with it, (which people seem to be advising you not to do!), I could be persuaded to license my work under the GPL (or your license), while retaining the copyright, and this would make me much more likely to do business with you.
Unfortunately, "Anonymous" does not provide any way for us to contact him.
I happen to have Cocoa and OpenStep experience, and have done plenty of biotech research. I'm also too busy to pay much attention to Anonymous.
Most of my material is.wav (or.flac) data either straight from my DAW or straight from my field recorder.
>makes a whole variety of software and players like your mp3s better.
What mp3s?
I'm a musician/composer. I have a file of every take, every track, every time I pickup an instrument or sit down at the piano, every time my band rehearses or performs. Editing metadata is not something someone is going to spend the hours doing, especially at the pay rate ($0).
On the other hand, my file naming convention works perfectly well, no matter whether iTunes likes it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry, i am antidestewardessist.
I never wanted a music "player". I wanted a recorder. For one thing, I make my own music. For another thing, I listen to .wav format, not MP3. For another thing, my average track is 45 to 90 minutes long and doesn't originate from a CD rip. When I want to hear relatively mainstreamish, low-fi things, I have internet radio for that. But most of my listening time is spent on things where I have some involvement in its production, and usually in a situation where I or my client or my partner controls the copyright. Sure there are better pocket-sized recorders than my Edirol, but I have what I need and it's pretty danged good; at least as good as my studio mixer or my DAW. And the built-in mics are okay (just okay).
>Why does everybody as for a pony, but not a stable to keep it in, or food to keep it alive?
I live all alone in a farmhouse, you insensitive clod.
Is there something significant about the number of digits in your ID?
Where the hell did all these people come from anyway?
This slashdot thingy is still online? Cool!
>No. You're just not the customer.
You are the *product*.
Only about two percent of the population is more than two standard deviations below normal intelligence, but that doesn't work as a punch line.
>1. Utah
I had a feeling you were going to say that. I have a pretty strong social bias against wanting to live there. We'll just leave it at that.
>My idea of American 'culture' is fast food, celebrities, gas guzzling cars, and guns. Have I missed >anything?
In my town there are many more "regular" restaurants than there are fast food "restaurants", and the biggest celebrities are probably the retired jazz musicians. There are more hybrid-fuel vehicles in the USA than in all other countries put together, and they are extremely common in my area. Where I live guns are legal, and this does not seem to create a major issue for anyone that I know of, not unlike Switzerland in my opinion.
As for the whole "obesity" thing, it's correlated with age I believe. The median age in my part of town is around 30, and most people seem to fall within one or two standard deviations from my perceived ideal of body mass, although I tend to only survey females, and very unscientifically at that.
From my office window I can see more restaurants than I care to count, but to get to a regular fast food chain, I'd have to go a couple of km. I *think* there might be a Taco Bell closer than that but I'm not sure. I, like most people around here, prepare and cook their own food, and to that end, there are some excellent markets.
The USA is a fairly big, multicultural place, and different parts of the country fit your (fully justified) stereotype to varying degrees. I realize I'm an outlier -- the office I'm in is powered by 17% solar with the rest coming from a conventional (gas) plant. I commute to work on a bicycle when the weather is fine, and I drive my reasonably efficient but still gas-guzzling car otherwise.
My family is a mix of Irish immigrants and indigenous people. I found it rather interesting (dismaying in some ways) to learn that the Irish ancestors were not, as I had believed, 1848 famine refugees, but were actually quite comfortable, and it appears that they came over with plenty of money. Here I had always thought that my g-g-grandfather crawled out of a workhouse, eating blades of grass on the way to the docks, boarded a famine ship, survived the voyage, was hounded out of New York to Oklahoma where he raped the first Indian woman he saw.
It turns out the famine years took a toll on their farming business (not potatoes) by depriving them of cheap labor, that they had no difficulty booking passage to America, that they bought land that they chose, and it further happens that the marriage to the Kiowa woman took place in an Anglican church with full enthusiasm from both families. They even paid a dowry.
Needless to say, learning all of this was *devastating* to my sense of cultural identity. OMFG, not only did my Irish ancestors never miss a meal in the 1840s, but my Indian family fully embraced their lifestyle and abandoned the whole tribal thing.
I need a drink now.
"My current company only hires people who are able to demonstrate competence in the field, and they hire 1 out of 5 candidates at most. They have billboards up all over the state and they're only able to get one candidate per week."
I'm one of the "good ones".
Questions:
1. What state? To say the least, all points in the USA are not equal.
2. What marketing methods have you used besides billboards?
3. Will you give my resume to a person who is in this "one in five" predicament?
>CS by itself isn't as attractive to employers.
This is true, but there are places where CS+Fine Arts or CS+Business is what impresses them.
Right now I do have a job where we do calculus on the whiteboards (environmental science), but I know that the moment I step out of academia, that stops being common.
Twice in my career I have had a good laugh at the expense of someone whose abuse I suffered.
The first was David Duncan. He was a senior finance/accounting manager when I was a peon at Mobil. I basically had to jump at his every request even though I never worked for him or his department. I left that job to start an internet business, but I really enjoyed the day that I saw David Duncan testifying before Congress, explaining Enron to them. Beautiful day.
The second is today. When my internet company was encoding and streaming his sports and talk radio broadcasts (innovative for 1994, mind you), Mark Cuban used to page me and call me at home at all hours with the most unreasonable demands and questions. Now I realize if I had been willing to kiss his ass the way he was accustomed to being kissed, I might be a billionaire today, but it would never have happened. Today I am all smiles.
Are you implying that if they hadn't done this, there would be less poverty in India?
>The difference being that the taxicab/bus company itself makes money on each ride.
So if some non-profit organization operates a taxi service, you believe they should be exempt from regulations, solely on the basis of their non-profit status? Fortunately, the law does not agree with you.
You might also have missed the fact that PickupPal was charging a commission, before their legal troubles began.
>Personally, I'm confused as to how they came to these regulations.
What you quoted is a commentary on the regulations, and an interpretation of them.
The argument touches on the question of whether public transportation should be regulated at all.
If the answer to that is yes, then this kind of specialized taxi service should be subject to those regulations.
If the answer is no, then taxi and private bus companies need to be exempt, at least for the parts of their business that are indistinguishable from the "carpool service."
The Canadian government is not saying YOU can't give rides. They are saying that taxi and private bus companies are regulated, and if you operate one, you will comply with the regulations.
>A carpool is quite a bit different from a bus
The company in the article operates something that is not reasonably different enough from a taxi service, that taxi services could use their example to avoid paying taxes, commercial insurance, or requiring licensed drivers.
There's still no law that would prevent you from having a carpool. You can even negotiate with your riders for compensation. What you can't do is operate a service that is essentially a taxicab, without following the local laws that regulate the taxi business. If you try to do that, the taxi businesses are going to cry foul, which is what happened here.
>If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family
>member?
It's not different until you operate a service that allows drivers to share rides with complete strangers for a fare.
Then you become a taxicab company, even if it's a non-profit one. You suddenly have the problems of personal versus public transportation insurance, accommodation for handicapped users, and tax liabilities. If you can somehow make an argument that YOUR service is DIFFERENT, the taxi and private bus companies are going to use those SAME arguments, and then *every* taxi becomes "a carpool rideshare service", and they use your loophole to avoid things like insurance, tax, licensing, and safety regulations.
You can still privately arrange carpools however you want, and you can even negotiate compensation for gas and wear-and-tear on the vehicle and stuff. You just can't setup a taxicab company and call it a duck.
I didn't see in the article when the money changes hands. I'm guessing there's some element of this service that isn't free, which makes the carpool service a commercial transport provider, and so that makes them subject to whatever laws govern transportation up there. There's probably tax issues involved here too. At what point does your "carpooling with strangers" hobby make you an unlicensed taxi driver?
There are some categories of calculations, where you are aware of all kinds of intermediate values, derivatives, etc., by virtue of the fact of that you are computing on a slide rule. Often, a result would have other related results right there on the ruler. Translating the same computations to a calculator tends to lose some of this insight. I don't know how useful that is, but I am aware of it. I also believe it's a little more difficult to teach logarithms (and applications of logs) because, now that slide rules are out of the picture, there is one less real-world thing where logs are used. I say the same about ratios, exponential notation, and awareness of accuracy and precision.
That said, I haven't taken either of my slide rules out of the case in 12 years. And that time was to show someone how we once used LL rules to do exponentiation even after we had electronic calculators. It's not that I miss the "good old days", it's that some mathematical awareness whose constant reinforcement we once took for granted, must now be bestowed artificially.
Wow! I've been boycotting CC for quite a while. I expected to seem them decline as a result, but I never dreamed of THIS!
Unfortunately for any celebration, today is also the day the Phoenix Lander was pronounced dead :-(
>If you're a programmer and you want to retain control of how your code is licensed, then you don't hand over the >copyright to anyone.
I think you missed my point: If I know they are going to release my work under the GPL, (e.g., it's in my contract from the beginning) I can be persuaded to license my work that way. In the OP's case, this would be the difference between being able to get my contribution or not. In my case, it's less about money and more about conflicts of interest with the academic institution where I'm employed.
I wish the OP wasn't anonymous. I'm genuinely connected to an organization that might be able to help him.
No, they can't sleep. They are having bad dreams after eating their dish of crow with sour grape sauce, and they think "the Media" should have done more to prevent their nightmare.
Here, practice saying "President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama."
At the Democratic Convention this summer in Denver, I lost count of the number of people who claimed they were delegates or otherwise had special credentials, and should be allowed to cut in line in front of us. We knew better - a person in our group really was a delegate (and waited in a different line, and got into the stadium long before us.)
It stopped being funny about four hours into the wait. Those people around us in line, had all gotten to know each other pretty well. The line experience was actually a pretty important part of the event, and while I won't say we "enjoyed" it, the time passed quite pleasantly, aside from the endless people who would try to cut in line, without realizing that everybody in line KNEW who was in line within 30 meters of themselves. And there was great solidarity.
Then, right at the end of the line there was a way to cut in from across the road -- and if you tried it, you had about a 30% chance of getting in the gate, or getting escorted off the Ivesco Field premises and not allowed back. People seem to not understand that the police at an event like that either are, or report directly to, Federal Secret Service. It was frustrating to say the least, but to watch them getting arrested was pretty satisfying.
Honesty is the best policy. Don't pretend that they are developing a proprietary product and then decide to release it when it's done. START as an open source project and take advantage of community efforts if they present themselves.
In fact, before you spend any money, I think you should do the hard parts first: Requirements gathering, specifications, and stakeholder expectations. You really can't hire programmers and expect these things to happen magically. Setup the project so that it has a chance for success, and your labor might come to you more inexpensively than it would otherwise.
I personally would prefer that you specified in the contract that you wanted to own the copyright so that you could release it under the GPL or whatever, instead of hiding this information. If you were upfront with it, (which people seem to be advising you not to do!), I could be persuaded to license my work under the GPL (or your license), while retaining the copyright, and this would make me much more likely to do business with you.
Unfortunately, "Anonymous" does not provide any way for us to contact him.
I happen to have Cocoa and OpenStep experience, and have done plenty of biotech research. I'm also too busy to pay much attention to Anonymous.
If you can write a shell script that puts metadata into .wav format, go for it. I still won't use iTunes though.
>So you're NOT using file metadata?
Most of my material is .wav (or .flac) data either straight from my DAW or straight from my field recorder.
>makes a whole variety of software and players like your mp3s better.
What mp3s?
I'm a musician/composer. I have a file of every take, every track, every time I pickup an instrument or sit down at the piano, every time my band rehearses or performs. Editing metadata is not something someone is going to spend the hours doing, especially at the pay rate ($0).
On the other hand, my file naming convention works perfectly well, no matter whether iTunes likes it or not.