And for lack of a better response to all those points, I applaud you.
Granted I'm not a fan of death metal in anyway, but I had a funk producer tell me that the vocals needed to be in tune so he autotuned them and I almost slapped him... Totally agree on the electric cars remark...
I could certainly afford a much better sound system than what I use, but I can't because:
I'll address each point inline with your's.
1 - in a car or public transportation it's not worth it with the amount of noise going on. Better isolation of earbuds and active noise cancellation make a difference though.
I use a Klipsch isolating headset I got from Tiger Direct on one of their sales for $30. Sounds great and I can listen to music at half the volume of the stock Palm Pre headset, and still hear a significant difference in quality.
2 - I live in an appartment so I cannot push the volume up. And at low volume there's not much difference.
Ironic because at low volumes is where I hear the most significant difference between a high quality system and a cheap crappy one. Even if this reasoning is good, a pair of Grados is not that expensive.
3 - how often do you actively listen to music? Me, almost never, I usually put it on while doing something. So I'm not concentrating on the fine details of the highs or whatever
And how often do you actively watch TV? Everyone I know has a TV going on in the background while doing something else, but they'll still dump thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars into a "Home Theater" system with top of the line Blu-Ray player and 60" 1080p, but neglect to get anything better than the cheapest surround sound system they can find and then neglect to configure it.
In other words, you are right but that's not how it works.
...and my point is that it the two should not be mutually exclusive. In the 70s you could find people who would literally just sit down and listen to tape loops for hours. Granted they were often in some altered state of mind, but still, they would focus on hearing every subtle nuance in the music before they stopped. Now, we don't even care that there's the nastiest autotune on vocals making it sound like it's robotic because people can't sing but they want to sound "perfect" (and I'm not talking about T Pain on that one).
<soapbox>My point in all of this is that, music should not be the bastard child of urbanization, used only to block out the sounds of the world around you. It should be something that you sit down with the intention to enjoy. The more people ignore that, the crappy it will get. I just hope that it will end up with a renaissance of sorts, with people realizing that this stuff really is getting bad and starting to consider that the money they're investing in a sound system isn't going to waste. </soapbox>
I'm a recording engineer. I'm not an audiophile. I listen to things on everything from crappy 1993 car stereo systems to multi-thousand dollar sound systems. And I might point out the difference is a lot more than 5%. Now, the difference between my personal $500 sound system and the multi-thousand dollar systems I work on does not justify the price difference for anyone I know, but that's the privilege of a university's purchasing power.
Did I say that everyone who doesn't spend a fortune on music is a buffoon? No. I said that the people who claim to care about their music and love their music, listening on crappy computer speakers are pathetically wrong on what they're hearing, as well as the people who have never heard a CD quality source or a good Vinyl Record source.
Are you confusing Audio Data Compression with Dynamic Range Compression? They're completely different things. Also, turning things up create a fake belief that they sound better, as an aside.
Sometime, if you ever have the time, you should try taking a FLAC file, compressing a copy to MP3, AAC, or any other codec you like, inverting the phase in something like Audacity and play it against the original. You'll hear all the things that you're missing in the MP3.
If you really want to hear the best sound of your life, look into the Legacy stuff (hear them at trade shows such as CES). I listened to things on those I've listened to on Sennheiser 650s and PMC studio monitors and never heard before. They're amazing speakers, built by a great guy (met him in person a couple of times).
Yeah, because, "If you can't hear it, your ears just aren't good enough!" can be a valid rationalization for a lot of things in the audio world, so audiophiles think it's a valid rationalization for everything, from the difference between $10 speakers and $10,000 speakers (definitely noticeable) to their $300 power cables that had a Tesla Coil shot through it (and yes there are companies that sell those) to the $3 cable you buy at ratshack (definitely not existent).
Unlike audiophiles, non-audiophiles don't have a giant price tag that they can associate with their justifications.
...and how is it routed? Digital or Analog? Running to a receiver? Because if it's digital, running to a receiver you have ignored the point of TFA (and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment). If you're running analog out of the card, well, then I can put up a decent argument against what you're claiming.
And that is why, at a recent AES conference there was a great little speech given about how Audio is the only industry that eats its young. If it doesn't matter to the average consumer how it sounds, than we will progressively get worse and worse quality audio considered passable. It's sad enough that people are preferring the sound of MP3s and most have never heard music on anything better than crappy cheap earbuds or, at best, a poorly configured home theater system, yet they claim to love their music.
If I had a nickel for every time I've sat someone down in front of a decent quality sound system (think $500 system, counting receiver and speakers or receiver and headphones) and played them an album that they, "know inside and out" and they find something new that they've heard before, I would be able to afford the amazing speakers that a friend works with. Let's be honest, as long as people consider iTunes 128 kbps AAC to be, "High Quality" and 256 kbps AAC to be, "Highest Quality" with 128 MP3 being acceptable, it doesn't matter how expensive your soundcard is, it won't sound good.
Wouldn't Tolkien write his book if his grandchildren wouldn't have right to get millions by selling right to make a movie based on it?
Why does this right last for a hundred years? Wouldn't 10-15 years (typical patent lasts that long) suffice?
Well, considering Tolkien was (allegedly) compelled one day while grading his students papers to flip one over and write, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." on the back, I'd say he would.
So, if I understand you correctly, the many, many, many hours that typically go into a book (meaning the intangible story/textbook/whatever else you care to call it) is not to be considered in basic economics? That makes no sense to me.
Let's say you get paid minimum wage. I live in a state with a rather high minimum wage of $8.25 (might be why we're the second most in debt state in the union). Let's say that I write a story and it takes me 5 years of not constant, but moderate work to gather all my information, research my material, and edit it. Let's even be generous here and say I'm self-publishing, self-editing, and very wise in the ways of all things involved in this process.
Now let's say that I'm working on it about 10 hours a week, 20 weeks each year. Simple math brings that to 200 hours a year on it, for 5 years equals 1,000 hours. Now at my state's minimum wage, that comes to $8,250. Now let's factor in the cost of my research materials, and we'll say that that's a measly $200 a year, plus the one time cost of a computer at $500. This brings us up to $9,750.
So now I have to sell these ebooks at a price that will make back what I've theoretically earned. Let's say I expect the book to do decently and I'm of the mindset that selling it cheap is better for me and my book, so I'll sell it for $3 a pop. Means that I need to sell 3250 digital copies of it to make what I earned.
Now wait just a second, my server time isn't free, those point of sales systems aren't free. Let's say I expect it to take another 2 years before I make back what I've earned, and call me cheap but I'm only going to be paying $10 a month for a server. That puts me at $240 in server costs alone, and let's guess that it's $0.03/$1 for the credit card system that will be implemented. That $9,750 is now almost $10,000 with server costs included so I'm going to be lazy and round it up to that for the following math. If it's going to cost me $0.03 for every dollar I make, than that means that I need to now make $10,300, which roughly translates to 3430 copies of this story at $3 a pop.
Of course, as an author, I would want to make more than minimum wage for my writings, so let's say that I want $11/hr, now I need to make $13122.2 or approximately 4374 copies in 2 years or less to have made my work remotely worthwhile, by my standards. Now if I'm trying to make a living off of this, I'd have to be selling these at a lot more than $3 a pop, or I'd have to sell a lot more than 4374 copies in 2 years, try nearly 12000 copies at $3 a pop.
So I'm sorry if your claim that, "Basic economics" does not support things considered to be an art having a price higher than zero doesn't make any sense to me. Running the figures really makes a lot more sense to me than that.
And for the record, IANAEconomist, IANAAuthor, but I am a musician (non-recording, not profitable) and a recording engineer, and if you want to talk about that department, I have actual figures I can use instead of made up figures (only figures made up throughout this example is the amount of time put into production, I have no idea what the typical turnaround for a part time author is, but I would suspect that it's approximately 1000 hours worth of work for a decent length book).
Because there's no easy way to use webOS without being in the cloud for pretty much everything.
I Love my Pre, but if you RTS the poster is looking for a non-cloud based solution.
I do think that that's a little unrealistic to avoid the cloud now and do not understand the ethics violations that would ensue, but to each their own.
Of course, administrations in the US will never enforce a convenient language policy, so you're going to have to make allowances for electronic devices like dictionaries if you ban electronics from testing sites.
The problem with that is that English is not the official language of the US. It is the de facto national language, but it is not the official language. I'm not about to get into arguments over whether it should be, I'm not even going to state my position. I'm merely going to say that this alone is why you probably won't find any federally funded educational institutions that have such a policy.
While the Gamecube was not exactly as ill fated as the systems mentioned in the article, the system lost out on a good deal of gamers because of it's childish preconceptions. Eternal Darkness was one of my personal favorites that never was received as well as it should have been.
I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.
So expressing opinions on a blog is only okay if it's your blog. Got it.
German publication Wirtschaftswoche (“Economy Week”) says that German manufacturer Microdrones has delivered a cam-equipped flying mini drone to Google. Microdrones boss Mr. Juerss is quoted as saying “We have good chances for a long term business relationship with Google” (is he just overly optimistic? Google wasn’t available for comment to the magazine). According to him the drones “are superbly suited to deliver more up-to-date recordings for mapping service Google Earth.” Another potential use mentioned by Juerss is inspecting wind farms.
If Google continues to exist I guess it’s only natural they continue to expand their tools (same could be said for the world at large), lest laws stop them. For the time being we may want our faces and living rooms blurred, but who knows where we’re headed. Will there be a day where everyone’s non-privacy is our best privacy protection (like a camouflage pattern), or will we be scared to do anything unusual, creative and progressive with so much supervision (like 1984)?
In the original German article, they mention how some of the drones they've sold have been equipped with IR and thermal imaging technologies, and give you a teaser that you can come back on Monday to read about the companies that already use the technologies.
Sounds to me like Google is merely trying to vastly improve Google Maps and Google Earth's satellite views with cheap yet efficient technologies, and Wirtschaftswoche is just trying to sell magazines. Of course, who am I to be a naysayer of the tinfoil hat wearing among us...
You're mixing the financial gain of the author with the pirates'.
So no, the argument isn't contradictory.
But it is one hell of a thin line right there. Also, I'm fairly certain that I've heard the GP's aforementioned argument here on/. from at least one or two people.
The big difference here is, that financial gain that the author is missing out goes nearly directly to him, whereas with music the financial gain that the artist is missing out is less than 10% of revenue, more than likely less than that even.
Either way, people are violating licenses, it's just that with CC licenses, what is allowed and isn't allowed is pretty clear as day. There's none of this arguing over what is and isn't "Fair Use".
Firing squad is deemed inhumane in 49 out of 50 states, the exception being Oklahoma, where it is used solely as a backup, should lethal injection or electrocution fail or become unconstitutional. Utah allows firing squads only in cases where the prisoner had chose it before it became unconstitutional. Therefore, Gardner, having been on death row for 20 some odd years, had chose death by firing squad before it was deemed inhumane.
I realize this is OT, but it really struck me as odd that Utah was still doing a death by firing squad. Interestingly enough, Washington State still allows prisoners the choice of their method of execution between death by hanging and death by lethal injection.
Last I checked,.au TLDs were from Australia, an English speaking country. I have read two paragraphs and it's getting painful. Hell, the headline almost turned me completely away when I got to it. "Apples attack on Adobe..." What are apples throwing themselves on some bricks somewhere?! I hate being the grammar nazi, but sometimes, it has to be done.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why should I have to change my name, he's the one that sucks!"
...welcome to America.
Time for a lawsuit and a name change.
And for lack of a better response to all those points, I applaud you.
Granted I'm not a fan of death metal in anyway, but I had a funk producer tell me that the vocals needed to be in tune so he autotuned them and I almost slapped him... Totally agree on the electric cars remark...
I could certainly afford a much better sound system than what I use, but I can't because:
I'll address each point inline with your's.
1 - in a car or public transportation it's not worth it with the amount of noise going on. Better isolation of earbuds and active noise cancellation make a difference though.
I use a Klipsch isolating headset I got from Tiger Direct on one of their sales for $30. Sounds great and I can listen to music at half the volume of the stock Palm Pre headset, and still hear a significant difference in quality.
2 - I live in an appartment so I cannot push the volume up. And at low volume there's not much difference.
Ironic because at low volumes is where I hear the most significant difference between a high quality system and a cheap crappy one. Even if this reasoning is good, a pair of Grados is not that expensive.
3 - how often do you actively listen to music? Me, almost never, I usually put it on while doing something. So I'm not concentrating on the fine details of the highs or whatever
And how often do you actively watch TV? Everyone I know has a TV going on in the background while doing something else, but they'll still dump thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars into a "Home Theater" system with top of the line Blu-Ray player and 60" 1080p, but neglect to get anything better than the cheapest surround sound system they can find and then neglect to configure it.
In other words, you are right but that's not how it works.
...and my point is that it the two should not be mutually exclusive. In the 70s you could find people who would literally just sit down and listen to tape loops for hours. Granted they were often in some altered state of mind, but still, they would focus on hearing every subtle nuance in the music before they stopped. Now, we don't even care that there's the nastiest autotune on vocals making it sound like it's robotic because people can't sing but they want to sound "perfect" (and I'm not talking about T Pain on that one).
<soapbox>My point in all of this is that, music should not be the bastard child of urbanization, used only to block out the sounds of the world around you. It should be something that you sit down with the intention to enjoy. The more people ignore that, the crappy it will get. I just hope that it will end up with a renaissance of sorts, with people realizing that this stuff really is getting bad and starting to consider that the money they're investing in a sound system isn't going to waste. </soapbox>
Gah, audiophiles...
Gah, misunderstanding morons.
I'm a recording engineer. I'm not an audiophile. I listen to things on everything from crappy 1993 car stereo systems to multi-thousand dollar sound systems. And I might point out the difference is a lot more than 5%. Now, the difference between my personal $500 sound system and the multi-thousand dollar systems I work on does not justify the price difference for anyone I know, but that's the privilege of a university's purchasing power.
Did I say that everyone who doesn't spend a fortune on music is a buffoon? No. I said that the people who claim to care about their music and love their music, listening on crappy computer speakers are pathetically wrong on what they're hearing, as well as the people who have never heard a CD quality source or a good Vinyl Record source.
Are you confusing Audio Data Compression with Dynamic Range Compression? They're completely different things. Also, turning things up create a fake belief that they sound better, as an aside.
Sometime, if you ever have the time, you should try taking a FLAC file, compressing a copy to MP3, AAC, or any other codec you like, inverting the phase in something like Audacity and play it against the original. You'll hear all the things that you're missing in the MP3.
If you really want to hear the best sound of your life, look into the Legacy stuff (hear them at trade shows such as CES). I listened to things on those I've listened to on Sennheiser 650s and PMC studio monitors and never heard before. They're amazing speakers, built by a great guy (met him in person a couple of times).
Yeah, because, "If you can't hear it, your ears just aren't good enough!" can be a valid rationalization for a lot of things in the audio world, so audiophiles think it's a valid rationalization for everything, from the difference between $10 speakers and $10,000 speakers (definitely noticeable) to their $300 power cables that had a Tesla Coil shot through it (and yes there are companies that sell those) to the $3 cable you buy at ratshack (definitely not existent).
Unlike audiophiles, non-audiophiles don't have a giant price tag that they can associate with their justifications.
...and how is it routed? Digital or Analog? Running to a receiver? Because if it's digital, running to a receiver you have ignored the point of TFA (and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment). If you're running analog out of the card, well, then I can put up a decent argument against what you're claiming.
And that is why, at a recent AES conference there was a great little speech given about how Audio is the only industry that eats its young. If it doesn't matter to the average consumer how it sounds, than we will progressively get worse and worse quality audio considered passable. It's sad enough that people are preferring the sound of MP3s and most have never heard music on anything better than crappy cheap earbuds or, at best, a poorly configured home theater system, yet they claim to love their music.
If I had a nickel for every time I've sat someone down in front of a decent quality sound system (think $500 system, counting receiver and speakers or receiver and headphones) and played them an album that they, "know inside and out" and they find something new that they've heard before, I would be able to afford the amazing speakers that a friend works with. Let's be honest, as long as people consider iTunes 128 kbps AAC to be, "High Quality" and 256 kbps AAC to be, "Highest Quality" with 128 MP3 being acceptable, it doesn't matter how expensive your soundcard is, it won't sound good.
Wouldn't Tolkien write his book if his grandchildren wouldn't have right to get millions by selling right to make a movie based on it?
Why does this right last for a hundred years? Wouldn't 10-15 years (typical patent lasts that long) suffice?
Well, considering Tolkien was (allegedly) compelled one day while grading his students papers to flip one over and write, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." on the back, I'd say he would.
Also, patents last 20 years typically.
So, if I understand you correctly, the many, many, many hours that typically go into a book (meaning the intangible story/textbook/whatever else you care to call it) is not to be considered in basic economics? That makes no sense to me.
Let's say you get paid minimum wage. I live in a state with a rather high minimum wage of $8.25 (might be why we're the second most in debt state in the union). Let's say that I write a story and it takes me 5 years of not constant, but moderate work to gather all my information, research my material, and edit it. Let's even be generous here and say I'm self-publishing, self-editing, and very wise in the ways of all things involved in this process.
Now let's say that I'm working on it about 10 hours a week, 20 weeks each year. Simple math brings that to 200 hours a year on it, for 5 years equals 1,000 hours. Now at my state's minimum wage, that comes to $8,250. Now let's factor in the cost of my research materials, and we'll say that that's a measly $200 a year, plus the one time cost of a computer at $500. This brings us up to $9,750.
So now I have to sell these ebooks at a price that will make back what I've theoretically earned. Let's say I expect the book to do decently and I'm of the mindset that selling it cheap is better for me and my book, so I'll sell it for $3 a pop. Means that I need to sell 3250 digital copies of it to make what I earned.
Now wait just a second, my server time isn't free, those point of sales systems aren't free. Let's say I expect it to take another 2 years before I make back what I've earned, and call me cheap but I'm only going to be paying $10 a month for a server. That puts me at $240 in server costs alone, and let's guess that it's $0.03/$1 for the credit card system that will be implemented. That $9,750 is now almost $10,000 with server costs included so I'm going to be lazy and round it up to that for the following math. If it's going to cost me $0.03 for every dollar I make, than that means that I need to now make $10,300, which roughly translates to 3430 copies of this story at $3 a pop.
Of course, as an author, I would want to make more than minimum wage for my writings, so let's say that I want $11/hr, now I need to make $13122.2 or approximately 4374 copies in 2 years or less to have made my work remotely worthwhile, by my standards. Now if I'm trying to make a living off of this, I'd have to be selling these at a lot more than $3 a pop, or I'd have to sell a lot more than 4374 copies in 2 years, try nearly 12000 copies at $3 a pop.
So I'm sorry if your claim that, "Basic economics" does not support things considered to be an art having a price higher than zero doesn't make any sense to me. Running the figures really makes a lot more sense to me than that.
And for the record, IANAEconomist, IANAAuthor, but I am a musician (non-recording, not profitable) and a recording engineer, and if you want to talk about that department, I have actual figures I can use instead of made up figures (only figures made up throughout this example is the amount of time put into production, I have no idea what the typical turnaround for a part time author is, but I would suspect that it's approximately 1000 hours worth of work for a decent length book).
So maybe this is why Apple decided to stop updating their java and leave it to Oracle...
Because there's no easy way to use webOS without being in the cloud for pretty much everything.
I Love my Pre, but if you RTS the poster is looking for a non-cloud based solution.
I do think that that's a little unrealistic to avoid the cloud now and do not understand the ethics violations that would ensue, but to each their own.
Of course, administrations in the US will never enforce a convenient language policy, so you're going to have to make allowances for electronic devices like dictionaries if you ban electronics from testing sites.
The problem with that is that English is not the official language of the US. It is the de facto national language, but it is not the official language. I'm not about to get into arguments over whether it should be, I'm not even going to state my position. I'm merely going to say that this alone is why you probably won't find any federally funded educational institutions that have such a policy.
While the Gamecube was not exactly as ill fated as the systems mentioned in the article, the system lost out on a good deal of gamers because of it's childish preconceptions. Eternal Darkness was one of my personal favorites that never was received as well as it should have been.
wow...never heard of that before...had a nice read before class.
So expressing opinions on a blog is only okay if it's your blog. Got it.
In the original German article, they mention how some of the drones they've sold have been equipped with IR and thermal imaging technologies, and give you a teaser that you can come back on Monday to read about the companies that already use the technologies.
Sounds to me like Google is merely trying to vastly improve Google Maps and Google Earth's satellite views with cheap yet efficient technologies, and Wirtschaftswoche is just trying to sell magazines. Of course, who am I to be a naysayer of the tinfoil hat wearing among us...
Since when do we have to cite valid sources on Slashdot?! Come on AC, you've been here longer than me!
In this case, the pirates (the companies) are.
You're mixing the financial gain of the author with the pirates'.
So no, the argument isn't contradictory.
But it is one hell of a thin line right there. Also, I'm fairly certain that I've heard the GP's aforementioned argument here on /. from at least one or two people.
The big difference here is, that financial gain that the author is missing out goes nearly directly to him, whereas with music the financial gain that the artist is missing out is less than 10% of revenue, more than likely less than that even.
Either way, people are violating licenses, it's just that with CC licenses, what is allowed and isn't allowed is pretty clear as day. There's none of this arguing over what is and isn't "Fair Use".
Firing squad is deemed inhumane in 49 out of 50 states, the exception being Oklahoma, where it is used solely as a backup, should lethal injection or electrocution fail or become unconstitutional. Utah allows firing squads only in cases where the prisoner had chose it before it became unconstitutional. Therefore, Gardner, having been on death row for 20 some odd years, had chose death by firing squad before it was deemed inhumane.
I realize this is OT, but it really struck me as odd that Utah was still doing a death by firing squad. Interestingly enough, Washington State still allows prisoners the choice of their method of execution between death by hanging and death by lethal injection.
While initially considered to be a bad sinus infection, the disease quickly spread after Patient Zero ate the brains of an attending neurosurgeon.
Fixed it for ya.
+1
Last I checked, .au TLDs were from Australia, an English speaking country. I have read two paragraphs and it's getting painful. Hell, the headline almost turned me completely away when I got to it. "Apples attack on Adobe..." What are apples throwing themselves on some bricks somewhere?! I hate being the grammar nazi, but sometimes, it has to be done.