Bluetooth sucks and earbuds most definitely suck. And proper Bluetooth headphones are outrageously expensive. I won't use earbuds because 1. they're damaging to hearing and 2. the quality of even a wired earbud is just dismal.
I can go out and buy a decent set of wired headphones for $50. Basically I'm looking at double to triple that for Bluetooth. Not to mention that it's yet another thing that has to be charged.
I'm glad there are plenty of usage scenarios where Bluetooth is the answer, but that isn't all scenarios, and it's yet another reason I won't be buying an iPhone. At least I can thank Apple for adding another item to the long list of reasons I dislike iDevices.
The message of your post is "I don't want to hear about a gay nightclub being targeted..."
What's your problem? You don't like gay people? You don't want to admit that this was a hate crime? Please explain why you have such an allergy to an obvious attack on gay people being referred to as an attack on gay people?
Because he attacked a gay nightclub, appears to have been homosexual himself, and conflicted about his sexuality. Why is there this need in some circles to eliminate the homophobic nature of the attack?
I stopped buying Apple years ago. Their operating system is closed and sucks. I'll take Android with its warts, and since I stick to the Nexus class of devices I'm getting as close as one can get to a stock Android install.
That's ultimately my view. There was a brief period of time when an initially natural and later artificial restriction of supply (due to cost of manufacturing and distribution) allowed record companies, and sometimes (but not always) artists to make shitloads of money off of recorded music. But that period was really less than a century, and with the advent of digital music AND a wide-scale network, that scarcity has disappeared.
Even publishing royalties have only been around a few hundred years, a mere blip on the timeline of human history. The rest of that time, a lot of art was created that was either paid for up front, or was paid for by performance. In other words, troubadours and minstrels and the like got paid for performing music, whether their's or someone else's. That was the "business model", as it were, for thousands of years, and it's quite possible that may be the business model again. And yes, it will suck for small acts, but in the future the only way a small act is going to become a big act is basically by giving away the music on services like Youtube in the hopes that listeners will go "That wild band I just watched on the Internet's going to be in town in a few weeks!"
There was a time when recording and publishing royalties did make up a significant part of recording artists' revenues. In particular publishing rights could be quite significant, particularly where other artists covered a song. Recording royalties usually depended greatly on the clout the artist and their negotiators could bring to the table. A lot of artists were heavily screwed over by contracts signed early in their careers. The Beatles were notoriously paid pennies a song in recording royalties, even as they brought in EMI huge profits, and part of the reason they broke up was debates within the band over which new management could negotiate a better recording contract, because the original 1962 contract was just plain awful.
It was a very small venue, so it may have been a more reasonable request. Robert Fripp is notoriously prickly. Still, even if it made no difference to the musicians (and I suspect it did, there were seven of them on stage playing some pretty intricate compositions), it made the experience as a member of the audience much better. It was two hours of bliss for a prog rock fan like myself. I went to Rush last summer, and while it was also a great experience, large venues just don't carry the same charms that a nice theater does.
When I went to AC/DC last September, I had to pick up the tickets at the venue, and show the credit card I'd used. When I went to Rush last September I had to bring along a print out of my receipt. The only concert last year that I could just bring my tickets to was King Crimson, but that was a small venue (3,000 seat) concert, with its own ticket sales so it wasn't through Ticketmaster.
But really, even the scalpers are a small part of the problem. It's Ticketmaster, with its "affiliates" (read wholly-owned subsidiaries) which buy up large amounts of tickets. Essentially, face value of the ticket is meaningless, as scalpers who can't get rid of their tickets before the big show find out. At AC/DC I saw scalpers trying to hawk tickets that I know were about $90 for $50 or $60. In other words, they were taking a big hit.
I don't know what kind of concerts you go to, but the big ticket concerts I go to either mean I have to park a half mile away from the venue, or just as often catch a cab to the venue. Often these concerts are also out of town, so even if I could respond to the call right away, I'm hours away from being at an ailing relative's side. In a lot of cases with arenas and stadiums, just getting out of the venue takes time, particularly with thousands of people to wade through.
I went to a King Crimson concert last year where the band requested cell phones remain firmly in pockets, and where they gave an opportunity for people to take pictures. Their justification is that flash cameras and lots of blinking lights in the audience are distracting, and since they and the venue have the right to determine audience behavior, it wasn't much of a debate. And you know what, it was a great show, one of the best I've been to, and in no small part because selfish jerks like yourself were either not present, or shamed into keeping their phones in their pockets.
It always strikes me as a great irony that much of China's technical progress has been based on other peoples' work. The Soviets gave the Chinese nuclear technology before the big falling out, and much of China's technological advancement over the last four decades has been via Western technology, either legally obtained or via out and out theft.
I'm not sure any nation has put as much work into the development of semiconductor technology as the US. Yes, lots of work was done elsewhere, and yes, lots of people from elsewhere come to the US and work in academia or for private companies working on that technology, but I think the history of the development of computers puts the US in a rather special place; first country to develop a first completely electronic computer, the country that invented the transistor, and the first country to develop an integrated microprocessor was the US. So I'd say the US was at the forefront of a lot of innovations in computing.
Bush's victory wasn't simply up to votes, but also up to the rather unorthodox way in which the winner was decided. What 2000 demonstrated is that how ballots are designed and who counts them for the election of the POTUS should be up to the Feds, and not at the whim of the states, but that's a whole other conversation.
If you're going to keep using aging software without a support license (and hence no further bugfixes or patches forthcoming) for a mission critical application, then yes, "what ifs" become very important.
Climate change is happening, and fossil fuels should be taxed to reflect the actual damage they do. But then again, you know I'm going to say that, and then you'll come back and claim I'm all very angry and such. So this time I'm not going to swear, but will say you're either a liar or a fool.
And what happens when some unsigned index counter wraps around and the database gets corrupted? At some point even the best written software needs bug fixes.
Which is precisely what I mean. The only way to make a flat tax not basically an out and out financial shit kicking on the poor is to modify it, and once you've done that it ceases to be a flat tax.
Flat taxes just don't work, and by the time anyone institutes them, they have been "de-flattened" in any number of ways simply because you'd have people at the poverty line plunging far beneath it, and people not far above the poverty line plunged into poverty.
They're shitty taxes designed by rich people with the sole purpose of keeping more of their money and fucking over the poor.
Political systems are meant to be hard to change. That's why most constitutions have fairly stringent amending rules. Stability is very important, particularly in governments that have to oversee societies with tens or hundreds of millions of citizens. Democracy is a key objective, but it is not the only objective, and even the Founding Fathers were wise enough to distrust democracy as much as they distrusted any other aspect of governance.
I'm sure if he goes through enough countries, he'll find one that matches what he thinks should be the proper way to run an education system.
In Canada, the provinces are responsible for education, and the Federal government has no direct role, as per the British North America Act. Mind you, Provincial governments do run education systems in a fairly centralized fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Bluetooth sucks and earbuds most definitely suck. And proper Bluetooth headphones are outrageously expensive. I won't use earbuds because 1. they're damaging to hearing and 2. the quality of even a wired earbud is just dismal.
I can go out and buy a decent set of wired headphones for $50. Basically I'm looking at double to triple that for Bluetooth. Not to mention that it's yet another thing that has to be charged.
I'm glad there are plenty of usage scenarios where Bluetooth is the answer, but that isn't all scenarios, and it's yet another reason I won't be buying an iPhone. At least I can thank Apple for adding another item to the long list of reasons I dislike iDevices.
The message of your post is "I don't want to hear about a gay nightclub being targeted..."
What's your problem? You don't like gay people? You don't want to admit that this was a hate crime? Please explain why you have such an allergy to an obvious attack on gay people being referred to as an attack on gay people?
Because he attacked a gay nightclub, appears to have been homosexual himself, and conflicted about his sexuality. Why is there this need in some circles to eliminate the homophobic nature of the attack?
I stopped buying Apple years ago. Their operating system is closed and sucks. I'll take Android with its warts, and since I stick to the Nexus class of devices I'm getting as close as one can get to a stock Android install.
That's ultimately my view. There was a brief period of time when an initially natural and later artificial restriction of supply (due to cost of manufacturing and distribution) allowed record companies, and sometimes (but not always) artists to make shitloads of money off of recorded music. But that period was really less than a century, and with the advent of digital music AND a wide-scale network, that scarcity has disappeared.
Even publishing royalties have only been around a few hundred years, a mere blip on the timeline of human history. The rest of that time, a lot of art was created that was either paid for up front, or was paid for by performance. In other words, troubadours and minstrels and the like got paid for performing music, whether their's or someone else's. That was the "business model", as it were, for thousands of years, and it's quite possible that may be the business model again. And yes, it will suck for small acts, but in the future the only way a small act is going to become a big act is basically by giving away the music on services like Youtube in the hopes that listeners will go "That wild band I just watched on the Internet's going to be in town in a few weeks!"
There was a time when recording and publishing royalties did make up a significant part of recording artists' revenues. In particular publishing rights could be quite significant, particularly where other artists covered a song. Recording royalties usually depended greatly on the clout the artist and their negotiators could bring to the table. A lot of artists were heavily screwed over by contracts signed early in their careers. The Beatles were notoriously paid pennies a song in recording royalties, even as they brought in EMI huge profits, and part of the reason they broke up was debates within the band over which new management could negotiate a better recording contract, because the original 1962 contract was just plain awful.
It was a very small venue, so it may have been a more reasonable request. Robert Fripp is notoriously prickly. Still, even if it made no difference to the musicians (and I suspect it did, there were seven of them on stage playing some pretty intricate compositions), it made the experience as a member of the audience much better. It was two hours of bliss for a prog rock fan like myself. I went to Rush last summer, and while it was also a great experience, large venues just don't carry the same charms that a nice theater does.
When I went to AC/DC last September, I had to pick up the tickets at the venue, and show the credit card I'd used. When I went to Rush last September I had to bring along a print out of my receipt. The only concert last year that I could just bring my tickets to was King Crimson, but that was a small venue (3,000 seat) concert, with its own ticket sales so it wasn't through Ticketmaster.
But really, even the scalpers are a small part of the problem. It's Ticketmaster, with its "affiliates" (read wholly-owned subsidiaries) which buy up large amounts of tickets. Essentially, face value of the ticket is meaningless, as scalpers who can't get rid of their tickets before the big show find out. At AC/DC I saw scalpers trying to hawk tickets that I know were about $90 for $50 or $60. In other words, they were taking a big hit.
I don't know what kind of concerts you go to, but the big ticket concerts I go to either mean I have to park a half mile away from the venue, or just as often catch a cab to the venue. Often these concerts are also out of town, so even if I could respond to the call right away, I'm hours away from being at an ailing relative's side. In a lot of cases with arenas and stadiums, just getting out of the venue takes time, particularly with thousands of people to wade through.
I went to a King Crimson concert last year where the band requested cell phones remain firmly in pockets, and where they gave an opportunity for people to take pictures. Their justification is that flash cameras and lots of blinking lights in the audience are distracting, and since they and the venue have the right to determine audience behavior, it wasn't much of a debate. And you know what, it was a great show, one of the best I've been to, and in no small part because selfish jerks like yourself were either not present, or shamed into keeping their phones in their pockets.
For me as well. I actually buy music. I'm not interested in streaming services at all.
It always strikes me as a great irony that much of China's technical progress has been based on other peoples' work. The Soviets gave the Chinese nuclear technology before the big falling out, and much of China's technological advancement over the last four decades has been via Western technology, either legally obtained or via out and out theft.
I'm not sure any nation has put as much work into the development of semiconductor technology as the US. Yes, lots of work was done elsewhere, and yes, lots of people from elsewhere come to the US and work in academia or for private companies working on that technology, but I think the history of the development of computers puts the US in a rather special place; first country to develop a first completely electronic computer, the country that invented the transistor, and the first country to develop an integrated microprocessor was the US. So I'd say the US was at the forefront of a lot of innovations in computing.
Even IE works better than Edge.
And then, when there's a major update, all of a sudden your defaulted back to Edge.
Indeed. I'm willing to put up with a bit more power drain to have a browser that actually works. Edge is just terrible.
They have medications for your condition.
Bush's victory wasn't simply up to votes, but also up to the rather unorthodox way in which the winner was decided. What 2000 demonstrated is that how ballots are designed and who counts them for the election of the POTUS should be up to the Feds, and not at the whim of the states, but that's a whole other conversation.
If you're going to keep using aging software without a support license (and hence no further bugfixes or patches forthcoming) for a mission critical application, then yes, "what ifs" become very important.
Are you stalking me or something?
Climate change is happening, and fossil fuels should be taxed to reflect the actual damage they do. But then again, you know I'm going to say that, and then you'll come back and claim I'm all very angry and such. So this time I'm not going to swear, but will say you're either a liar or a fool.
And what happens when some unsigned index counter wraps around and the database gets corrupted? At some point even the best written software needs bug fixes.
Which is precisely what I mean. The only way to make a flat tax not basically an out and out financial shit kicking on the poor is to modify it, and once you've done that it ceases to be a flat tax.
Flat taxes just don't work, and by the time anyone institutes them, they have been "de-flattened" in any number of ways simply because you'd have people at the poverty line plunging far beneath it, and people not far above the poverty line plunged into poverty.
They're shitty taxes designed by rich people with the sole purpose of keeping more of their money and fucking over the poor.
Political systems are meant to be hard to change. That's why most constitutions have fairly stringent amending rules. Stability is very important, particularly in governments that have to oversee societies with tens or hundreds of millions of citizens. Democracy is a key objective, but it is not the only objective, and even the Founding Fathers were wise enough to distrust democracy as much as they distrusted any other aspect of governance.
I'm sure if he goes through enough countries, he'll find one that matches what he thinks should be the proper way to run an education system.
In Canada, the provinces are responsible for education, and the Federal government has no direct role, as per the British North America Act. Mind you, Provincial governments do run education systems in a fairly centralized fashion.
Because protecting Texas's right to teach Creationism is such an important cultural feature that needs preserving.