IE users will be at a loss. NS users can download Mozilla, find some function like Javascript::delay(uint ms) {
usleep(ms);
return(0);
} and just coment out the usleep() call:)
Hmmm... I'm a kid.. I don't watch anything but the weather channel, occasionaly maybe discovery or the history channel, but... I don't live in Canada anyway.
People should take back their CDDB submissions!:)
Just write them a letter saying the information was submitted under false assumptions, and you are now declaring your submission null and void, and to request they remove your piece of effort from your database or you'll file a complaint against them for misusing your time.
Yeah, but everybody's on mp3.com. We've had... *zero* people listen to our stuff there. How do you let people know? Word of mouth doesn't work... I've been giving everyone I see the address for nearly a year now.
There's so many artists that you're never going to get noticed, no matter how different you are...
My band sells CD's for $2-$10, depending on how many people are buying and how much money we need to pay off debts. We don't even charge $15. And you may still argue that $10 is a lot more than $0.50, but it's a matter of economics. The actual contents of the CD is cost us a lot more than fifty cents. We've invested several thousand dollars into recording equipment and thousands of hours of our spare time.
We don't get $20M besides. That's only for major-label-endorsed bands anyway, some of which (like bb and n*sync, but correct me if i'm wrong there) don't even write their own music.
Our entire income for as long as we've been a band, in whole dollars, can be counted on less than dozen people's fingers.
And I don't think it's worth $20M. If we had toured for years and years, maybe a fraction of that... but definitely not $20M. So I agree with you on your statistic, but not your point.
Monopoly on distribution channels? Well, it's not like anybody else can magically pull *our* music out of thin air... if they manage to do that, and do it cheaper, we're out of business.
How many other companies sell complete versions of Windows NT besides Microsoft?;)
"
You are a sucker. You can record audio quality quite damn good in your kitchen with $5K of recording equipment, but then you'd miss out on the coke, blowjobs,
and other whoring that goes with the biz, right? If you actually knew what you were doing, you'd get the remaining 5% of the sound by mastering correctly.
"
Except I don't have 5k to spend. I can't afford my own explanation, nor can I afford yours.
"
Let's add on top of that the fact that most of your figures are for *touring*, not recording. That kind of outright lying with statistics is the only part of your post
that shows any connection to the real music industry. "
Yes, but that's the point. The touring is where most of the work is done by the musicians. I was responding to a post in which somebody claimed that musicians don't deserve the money they make because they only work a few hours and make millions of dollars (this only applies to a few musicians, and it's a blatant exaggeration anyhow)
And this *is* how the real music industry does stuff. This is nothing like DIY... my band owns all of our own equipment, poor as we may be. We don't go to studios. We aren't signed with a label. Our only income is from people buying our music (directly from us) and having us do shows. No greedy dumbasses are making $$ off of us. (But they probably wouldn't really want to anyhow; since we're not endorsed, we don't make much $. On average, a few dollars a month. Pretty sad, eh?)
It's more than a few hours. It takes me about twenty minutes to write one minute of music, and I'm *fast* compared to every artist I know.
Supposing that a band is composed of four people, and they practice a song individually ten times before meeting together to practice it ten times, and then recording it, which consists of sound checks between *every* song (unless you want the sound quality to slowly go out the window as your recording session goes on), and recording each part individually (if you record several parts at once, you can run into a LOT of balance problems), say, five times just to make sure there's no noticeable mistakes...
So to produce 25 songs of 3 minutes each (since 1/5 to 2/5 of songs don't make the cut for the CD) takes 25 hours to write, 50 hours individual practice, 12 hours group practice, and 25 hours in the studio... Assuming that the songwriting and recording is split equally among all four people, 25/4+50+12+25/4 hours per person is 74.5 hours per person for what is probably less than 45 minutes of music. And as the band size goes up, it takes far more time to practice it as a group.
I'm not even including instrument sound checks, tuning, warm-up, etc. in the total time, either. That's almost two solid weeks of work at forty hours per week, and doesn't include the tours to back it up. Because there's no way in hell people are going to buy your cd unless the radio plays you or they hear you play on tour somewhere, and everybody knows the radio sucks.
Assuming a small tour of twelve gigs in two weeks, that each pay probably a few hundred dollars, that's another two weeks down the drain. Not only that, but you've only earned a measly six grand to split between the four members, AND all the roadies you hired, AND the manager that planned your tour, AND to pay for the vans, AND to cover the cost of the rented equipment you had to take (since you can't ensure that any gig will have a decent P.A. system already there).
Never mind recording studios, they're often $20/hour or more, and that's for the cheap ones. Since you spent the good part of a week for CD production in the recording studio, you probably managed to throw away about $500 there.
CD production isn't cheap, either. Between the costs of pressing a CD ($500/2000), having the artwork printed onto the CD ($200/2000), having the inserts printed and the CD put in a case ($300/2000), you've used up another $1000 per 2000 cd's. Yes, fifty cents per CD, but the minimum purchase is often 2000.
So you've now spent (assuming the tour only cost about $15,000), roughly $20,000 from start to finish, and managed to scrap up $6,000 income. Congratulations. One month's work and you've *lost* $14,000. Not to mention that, but in order to get radio airplay, you often have to send the radio stations the CD. True, they pay royalties, but over a year's time you'll only make a few dollars form each station. If the song was popular. For, say, 1000 stations nationally, with $3 shipping each, you may make a few hundred dollars of radio sales. But you'll probably just lose money their.
Now to ship to the music stores. Another several hundred down the drain. You've made a total of -$16,000.
So you can't afford to tour again yet, or to record more songs. So, in the meantime, you practice the songs so you can pull them off really well live, in the event that the CD sells well enough to back another tour.
Just think, there's three other band members who have been living out of their bank accounts for longer than one month now. If you're lucky, they still have some money left, because chances are your CD won't really start to sell for another few months.
But anyway. Why the slant, slashdot? Is it so wrong for artists to make a profit? You'd think an organization like the RIAA that was constantly fighting censorship legislation and promoting freedom of speech wouldn't be quite so shitted-upon by us.
We, as members of the slashdot community, decide we hate the RIAA.
Then one day, on a whim, I actually visited their website!
Anybody who's ever done so would realize that their viewpoint is more honorable than a lot of the people posting messages on slashdot. In fact, their viewpoint is probably more honorable than mine. But that's a subject for private debate, not to be openly trolled.
To blow a huge gaping hole in every atheist's personal beliefs and theories:
What if God and the Universe were literally the same thing?
Think about it for a second.
Rebuttal in advance: "So if God created the universe.. you're saying the universe created itself?" Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. Anybody who's ever studied the `big bang' realizes that the universe never actually was created, never actually started; time simply goes as far back as a certain point, and that's all there is. It's not like before that there was empty space; there *isn't* any "before that." It didn't exist!
God could be lots of things. God could be number theory. God could be the laws of physics. Who is anybody to say that God has to be some majestic humanoid? "And God created man in His image." Image... who's to say image means physical image? Maybe it's why we're conscious and no other species appear to be.
If God was the universe... then anything that anyone does, anything that anyone discovers by the scientific method, anything that happens to promote evolution and the big bang... would still be God.
Try picturing all of time and space as a single instant in a higher dimension.
If you're inside a vacuum, how do you know it's a vacuum? Because every environment pushes in on the walls, implying higher outer pressure? What if you went somewhere where the walls were pulled outwards?
You can't know anything from inside the bubble, nor from outside the bubble, so don't pretend to.
And a question to throw out there: So many scientific theories rely on general acceptance by the majority of the scientific community to be considered truth. These are often based on other widely-accepted postulates.
Suppose that these theories and postulates are partially correct; correct for the majority of applications.
What's 2/3 of 2/3 of 2/3 of 2/3? A majority of a majority of a majority of a majority, right? But that isn't a majority anymore... 16/81 is actually a pretty small fraction.
Remind me not to ever cite in a report something that has the potential of being banned in the future -- because then someone reading my report could bring charges against me for distributing banned material.
Re:I agree with the ratings issue.
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 2
Ahh, and remember, high school sex ed often has required viewing of people screwing, and middle school sex ed shows you how babies are born. But, of course, they'd be rated NC-17 if they didn't have "EDUCATIONAL" stamped on the front. But they would never, ever be allowed to show a movie rated R for violence even to a class of 17/18+-year-old seniors.
In an unprecedented move, Conectiv pled guilty for providing access to electric current used to power Napster servers.
"In a law of physics knowing no geopolitical bundaries, electricity providers are morally and socially obligated to patrol their power grid for inappropriate usage.
The songs were those recorded by Metallica, which clearly goes beyond any policy for acceptable use.
I wasn't blaming women, just making fun of special rights groups:)
That doesn't give you a reason to doubt what intelligence I may have. You'd be just as guilty of the employer that hires a man over a woman because they doubted the woman's intelligence, albeit provably equal to the man's.
I'm sorry. I didn't realise that it was my fault that you have to pay more for car insurance. I feel so guilty now...
"
Actually, I don't. I don't pay for my own car insurance; I'm lucky enough to have parents that do that for me.
"
Oh, hang on, maybe it actually has something to do with the fact that males statistically have much higher car accident rates. "
So, any suggestions on how to fix this? Or make the insurance company understand that my sister speeds regularly, and I consistently drive 5-10 mph under the speed limit? I'm actually afraid of going fast. Speed kills. (Or, more correctly, it's not the speed, it's the quick starts and stops.)
"I have an idea. How about you make a start by driving carefully and bitch at any of your male friends who drive in a reckless manner and eventually the proportion
of male car accidents might come down to match the proportion of female car accidents and then the insurance companies will have to lower their prices for men.
"
I've lost a lot of `friends' this way. They still drive fast.
"
The reason men pay more for insurance is because men tend to be unsafe drivers. If you're annoyed about the amount you have to pay why not blame all the men
out there who are driving unsafely, not the women who are driving safely."
I didn't blame the women. There's no sense in blaming all the other men just because I was born one of them; they can't help that. I'm simply blaming the insurance companies--they're the ones that control rates.
As for what I said about women's rights groups: ever hear the debate about equal rights vs. special rights? Women have been discriminated against for a helluva long time (and still are), so I definitely agree that in most scenarios they should be cut a break. But--they're being cut a break at the expense of people like me, who don't necessarily discriminate against them. Majority may rule in a democracy, but does that make the majority right?
`But the majority is only right for the majority of
people the majority of time in the majority of situations. So our so-called
"majority", perhaps being 2/3, is actually 2/3 of 2/3 of 2/3, or 8/27, which
is not a majority at all! Hence, most of the time, it doesn't apply.'
And yes, I think men's rights/superiority groups would be just as silly.
Yeah, they drive worse, crash into things more, get involved in stupid macho shit which female drivers (on the whole) don`t do. They are just responsible for many
more claims. "
See, this is why I hate being male. Nearly every day I regret something I cannot change.
"
Men get paid more than women too. "
Which also sucks. It's another form of discrimination.
What gets me is that there's an EQUAL number of males and females on the planet, but young males pay much higher rates for car insurance. Of course, they couldn't just make both genders pay the in-between amount, because feminist superiority groups, errr, women's rights groups, would get all pissy.
I know it sounds socialist, but it's not like you can help what gender you are. How would you feel if an insurance company said: ``Hmmm.. you're naturally intelligent, therefore more curious, and more likely to get into situations that others might not get into. Your fees are doubled, congratulations.''
You'd think with all the statistical tools they have at their mercy, they'd be able to figure out a fair set of average rates to make the general population pay as a whole without all the obnoxious distinctions.
Now, if all the males on the planet other than me were to suddenly all die of unknown causes, and I could prove to them my ability to drive safely, would they lower my rates? Or would they *still* not trust me?
Slashdot Mirror
IE users will be at a loss. NS users can download Mozilla, find some function like Javascript::delay(uint ms) { :)
usleep(ms);
return(0);
} and just coment out the usleep() call
Hmmm... I'm a kid.. I don't watch anything but the weather channel, occasionaly maybe discovery or the history channel, but... I don't live in Canada anyway.
Welding your window shut is like using a car with a hood.
Trademarks are so *incredibly* silly, you know?
;)
One of these days I'm going to trademark every letter in the English alphabet...
Well, maybe you have a directory full of fruit instead of files! Then "Fruit Basket" would make sense next to "Program Files"
People should take back their CDDB submissions! :)
Just write them a letter saying the information was submitted under false assumptions, and you are now declaring your submission null and void, and to request they remove your piece of effort from your database or you'll file a complaint against them for misusing your time.
Yeah, but everybody's on mp3.com. We've had... *zero* people listen to our stuff there. How do you let people know? Word of mouth doesn't work... I've been giving everyone I see the address for nearly a year now.
There's so many artists that you're never going to get noticed, no matter how different you are...
We're trying to break it. We're purchasing our own recording equipment, used or on sale/discount when possible, so we won't have to rent a studio.
If/when we tour, we're going to try to book it ourselves, have our own vans if we can...
My band sells CD's for $2-$10, depending on how many people are buying and how much money we need to pay off debts. We don't even charge $15. And you may still argue that $10 is a lot more than $0.50, but it's a matter of economics. The actual contents of the CD is cost us a lot more than fifty cents. We've invested several thousand dollars into recording equipment and thousands of hours of our spare time.
;)
We don't get $20M besides. That's only for major-label-endorsed bands anyway, some of which (like bb and n*sync, but correct me if i'm wrong there) don't even write their own music.
Our entire income for as long as we've been a band, in whole dollars, can be counted on less than dozen people's fingers.
And I don't think it's worth $20M. If we had toured for years and years, maybe a fraction of that... but definitely not $20M. So I agree with you on your statistic, but not your point.
Monopoly on distribution channels? Well, it's not like anybody else can magically pull *our* music out of thin air... if they manage to do that, and do it cheaper, we're out of business.
How many other companies sell complete versions of Windows NT besides Microsoft?
"
You are a sucker. You can record audio quality quite damn good in your kitchen with $5K of recording equipment, but then you'd miss out on the coke, blowjobs,
and other whoring that goes with the biz, right? If you actually knew what you were doing, you'd get the remaining 5% of the sound by mastering correctly.
"
Except I don't have 5k to spend. I can't afford my own explanation, nor can I afford yours.
"
Let's add on top of that the fact that most of your figures are for *touring*, not recording. That kind of outright lying with statistics is the only part of your post
that shows any connection to the real music industry. "
Yes, but that's the point. The touring is where most of the work is done by the musicians. I was responding to a post in which somebody claimed that musicians don't deserve the money they make because they only work a few hours and make millions of dollars (this only applies to a few musicians, and it's a blatant exaggeration anyhow)
And this *is* how the real music industry does stuff. This is nothing like DIY... my band owns all of our own equipment, poor as we may be. We don't go to studios. We aren't signed with a label. Our only income is from people buying our music (directly from us) and having us do shows. No greedy dumbasses are making $$ off of us. (But they probably wouldn't really want to anyhow; since we're not endorsed, we don't make much $. On average, a few dollars a month. Pretty sad, eh?)
Yeah.. I can't even make mistakes the right way. I screw up everything.
And people wonder why my self-esteem is so low!
It's more than a few hours. It takes me about twenty minutes to write one minute of music, and I'm *fast* compared to every artist I know.
Supposing that a band is composed of four people, and they practice a song individually ten times before meeting together to practice it ten times, and then recording it, which consists of sound checks between *every* song (unless you want the sound quality to slowly go out the window as your recording session goes on), and recording each part individually (if you record several parts at once, you can run into a LOT of balance problems), say, five times just to make sure there's no noticeable mistakes...
So to produce 25 songs of 3 minutes each (since 1/5 to 2/5 of songs don't make the cut for the CD) takes 25 hours to write, 50 hours individual practice, 12 hours group practice, and 25 hours in the studio... Assuming that the songwriting and recording is split equally among all four people, 25/4+50+12+25/4 hours per person is 74.5 hours per person for what is probably less than 45 minutes of music. And as the band size goes up, it takes far more time to practice it as a group.
I'm not even including instrument sound checks, tuning, warm-up, etc. in the total time, either. That's almost two solid weeks of work at forty hours per week, and doesn't include the tours to back it up. Because there's no way in hell people are going to buy your cd unless the radio plays you or they hear you play on tour somewhere, and everybody knows the radio sucks.
Assuming a small tour of twelve gigs in two weeks, that each pay probably a few hundred dollars, that's another two weeks down the drain. Not only that, but you've only earned a measly six grand to split between the four members, AND all the roadies you hired, AND the manager that planned your tour, AND to pay for the vans, AND to cover the cost of the rented equipment you had to take (since you can't ensure that any gig will have a decent P.A. system already there).
Never mind recording studios, they're often $20/hour or more, and that's for the cheap ones. Since you spent the good part of a week for CD production in the recording studio, you probably managed to throw away about $500 there.
CD production isn't cheap, either. Between the costs of pressing a CD ($500/2000), having the artwork printed onto the CD ($200/2000), having the inserts printed and the CD put in a case ($300/2000), you've used up another $1000 per 2000 cd's. Yes, fifty cents per CD, but the minimum purchase is often 2000.
So you've now spent (assuming the tour only cost about $15,000), roughly $20,000 from start to finish, and managed to scrap up $6,000 income. Congratulations. One month's work and you've *lost* $14,000. Not to mention that, but in order to get radio airplay, you often have to send the radio stations the CD. True, they pay royalties, but over a year's time you'll only make a few dollars form each station. If the song was popular. For, say, 1000 stations nationally, with $3 shipping each, you may make a few hundred dollars of radio sales. But you'll probably just lose money their.
Now to ship to the music stores. Another several hundred down the drain. You've made a total of -$16,000.
So you can't afford to tour again yet, or to record more songs. So, in the meantime, you practice the songs so you can pull them off really well live, in the event that the CD sells well enough to back another tour.
Just think, there's three other band members who have been living out of their bank accounts for longer than one month now. If you're lucky, they still have some money left, because chances are your CD won't really start to sell for another few months.
A few hours? Well, maybe.
The RIAA isn't exactly the U.S. Gov't.
But anyway. Why the slant, slashdot? Is it so wrong for artists to make a profit? You'd think an organization like the RIAA that was constantly fighting censorship legislation and promoting freedom of speech wouldn't be quite so shitted-upon by us.
We, as members of the slashdot community, decide we hate the RIAA.
Then one day, on a whim, I actually visited their website!
Anybody who's ever done so would realize that their viewpoint is more honorable than a lot of the people posting messages on slashdot. In fact, their viewpoint is probably more honorable than mine. But that's a subject for private debate, not to be openly trolled.
IF anybody wants to see prior, just type: whois themes.org
To blow a huge gaping hole in every atheist's personal beliefs and theories:
What if God and the Universe were literally the same thing?
Think about it for a second.
Rebuttal in advance: "So if God created the universe.. you're saying the universe created itself?" Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. Anybody who's ever studied the `big bang' realizes that the universe never actually was created, never actually started; time simply goes as far back as a certain point, and that's all there is. It's not like before that there was empty space; there *isn't* any "before that." It didn't exist!
God could be lots of things. God could be number theory. God could be the laws of physics. Who is anybody to say that God has to be some majestic humanoid? "And God created man in His image." Image... who's to say image means physical image? Maybe it's why we're conscious and no other species appear to be.
If God was the universe... then anything that anyone does, anything that anyone discovers by the scientific method, anything that happens to promote evolution and the big bang... would still be God.
Try picturing all of time and space as a single instant in a higher dimension.
If you're inside a vacuum, how do you know it's a vacuum? Because every environment pushes in on the walls, implying higher outer pressure? What if you went somewhere where the walls were pulled outwards?
You can't know anything from inside the bubble, nor from outside the bubble, so don't pretend to.
And a question to throw out there: So many scientific theories rely on general acceptance by the majority of the scientific community to be considered truth. These are often based on other widely-accepted postulates.
Suppose that these theories and postulates are partially correct; correct for the majority of applications.
What's 2/3 of 2/3 of 2/3 of 2/3? A majority of a majority of a majority of a majority, right? But that isn't a majority anymore... 16/81 is actually a pretty small fraction.
Remind me not to ever cite in a report something that has the potential of being banned in the future -- because then someone reading my report could bring charges against me for distributing banned material.
Ahh, and remember, high school sex ed often has required viewing of people screwing, and middle school sex ed shows you how babies are born. But, of course, they'd be rated NC-17 if they didn't have "EDUCATIONAL" stamped on the front. But they would never, ever be allowed to show a movie rated R for violence even to a class of 17/18+-year-old seniors.
What if I take it apart, and swap tags out with another item? Or even *remove them entirely* ohmygosh! :)
In an unprecedented move, Conectiv pled guilty for providing access to electric current used to power Napster servers.
"In a law of physics knowing no geopolitical bundaries, electricity providers are morally and socially obligated to patrol their power grid for inappropriate usage.
The songs were those recorded by Metallica, which clearly goes beyond any policy for acceptable use.
Just imagine the possibilities if one of the materials it could use was an edible, fast-drying sugary paste!
:)
Doughnuts for all!
Or, better yet, little edible figurines of Metallica!
"Forbidden doughnut..." --Homer Simpson
So are there plans to integrate OSSS/Free into the 2.6 kernel?
;)
I wasn't blaming women, just making fun of special rights groups :)
That doesn't give you a reason to doubt what intelligence I may have. You'd be just as guilty of the employer that hires a man over a woman because they doubted the woman's intelligence, albeit provably equal to the man's.
"
I'm sorry. I didn't realise that it was my fault that you have to pay more for car insurance. I feel so guilty now...
"
Actually, I don't. I don't pay for my own car insurance; I'm lucky enough to have parents that do that for me.
"
Oh, hang on, maybe it actually has something to do with the fact that males statistically have much higher car accident rates. "
So, any suggestions on how to fix this? Or make the insurance company understand that my sister speeds regularly, and I consistently drive 5-10 mph under the speed limit? I'm actually afraid of going fast. Speed kills. (Or, more correctly, it's not the speed, it's the quick starts and stops.)
"I have an idea. How about you make a start by driving carefully and bitch at any of your male friends who drive in a reckless manner and eventually the proportion
of male car accidents might come down to match the proportion of female car accidents and then the insurance companies will have to lower their prices for men.
"
I've lost a lot of `friends' this way. They still drive fast.
"
The reason men pay more for insurance is because men tend to be unsafe drivers. If you're annoyed about the amount you have to pay why not blame all the men
out there who are driving unsafely, not the women who are driving safely."
I didn't blame the women. There's no sense in blaming all the other men just because I was born one of them; they can't help that. I'm simply blaming the insurance companies--they're the ones that control rates.
As for what I said about women's rights groups: ever hear the debate about equal rights vs. special rights? Women have been discriminated against for a helluva long time (and still are), so I definitely agree that in most scenarios they should be cut a break. But--they're being cut a break at the expense of people like me, who don't necessarily discriminate against them. Majority may rule in a democracy, but does that make the majority right?
`But the majority is only right for the majority of
people the majority of time in the majority of situations. So our so-called
"majority", perhaps being 2/3, is actually 2/3 of 2/3 of 2/3, or 8/27, which
is not a majority at all! Hence, most of the time, it doesn't apply.'
And yes, I think men's rights/superiority groups would be just as silly.
--theorangesquid, who bikes nearly everywhere...
"
Yeah, they drive worse, crash into things more, get involved in stupid macho shit which female drivers (on the whole) don`t do. They are just responsible for many
more claims. "
See, this is why I hate being male. Nearly every day I regret something I cannot change.
"
Men get paid more than women too. "
Which also sucks. It's another form of discrimination.
What gets me is that there's an EQUAL number of males and females on the planet, but young males pay much higher rates for car insurance. Of course, they couldn't just make both genders pay the in-between amount, because feminist superiority groups, errr, women's rights groups, would get all pissy.
I know it sounds socialist, but it's not like you can help what gender you are. How would you feel if an insurance company said: ``Hmmm.. you're naturally intelligent, therefore more curious, and more likely to get into situations that others might not get into. Your fees are doubled, congratulations.''
You'd think with all the statistical tools they have at their mercy, they'd be able to figure out a fair set of average rates to make the general population pay as a whole without all the obnoxious distinctions.
Now, if all the males on the planet other than me were to suddenly all die of unknown causes, and I could prove to them my ability to drive safely, would they lower my rates? Or would they *still* not trust me?