I hope they don't sell it. MySpace is much buggier and less logical than Facebook.
For one thing, as a "social network," MySpace tells you nothing about how you're connected to people. Facebook says "you know Pete who knows Lindsay who knows Robert who knows Kat." Much more interesting and useful, especially if a cool person happens to be one degree away from you. "Hey Katie, I met your friend Zack online. We should invite him to our party."
Over-education can also make communication impossible. I'm stealing from the book On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
"The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn't think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple - there must be something wrong with it."
And from another part of the book...
"Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
'I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.'
Orwell's version goes:
'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that sucess or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capactiy, but that a considerable amount of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.'"
From what I can see, educators are terrible about this sort of thing.
The kids that get in trouble on the internet are the same ones that would get in trouble at the mall or wherever.
Really? Are Slashdotters, as a rule, as outspoken in real life as they are here? I doubt it. Do email flamewars erupt more easily than real life arguments? Yes.
From the safety of their computers, even shy people will do riskier things. What the parent poster was saying is that kids don't take to heart the fact that real-life predators may be watching them online. How we solve this problem is debatable, but I agree that it exists.
I don't know much about farming, but I gather that first-world farmers are already pretty efficient. If you're a cow farmer around here, you're probably already selling the poop for fertilizer or using it yourself.
If you don't do that, there probably is a cost/benefit reason for it: maybe an hour of collecting poop nets you $10 in electricity and that's not worth YOUR time, but for a third-world farmer it's good money.
I totally agree. There is nothing mature about the stuff, it's just shorthand for "for heaven's sake keep it away from kids." As though it becomes harmless when you turn 18.
Really pornography is more adolescent than adult. For a mature person, sex has its place in life but isn't all there is. To hear the local morning DJs talk about it, you'd think they were middle school boys, to whom the concept was still mind-blowing.
A term that makes me laugh a lot is "gentlemen's club." I drove by one that was a run-down shack with strobe lights coming from inside, marked as a gentlemen's club. If the word gentleman means anything anymore, it means the exact opposite of their customer base.
I can manage my phone's noise with vibrate, thanks. But it would be nice to have the phone equivilent of a "do not disturb" sign. I'd put it in this mode when I went to bed, for example. A caller would get a message saying "Nathan is sleeping; press 1 if this is really really important and you need to wake him." That way emergency calls could still get through.
If you've ever accidentally awakened someone, you'd appreciate this feature from the calling end, too.
One thing that makes photography less than idiot-proof is the fact that a photo can only have one exposure. I don't know how the human eye works, but I observe that I can, for example, look at a person standing in an open doorway with bright sunlight outside and see their face clearly, as well as the trees outside. With a photo, if I expose the picture correctly for their face, the sky outside will be bright white; if I expose for the sky, their face will be dark.
A given piece of film can only have one sensitivity, but digital cameras now let you choose the ISO you want for your photo. Is there a technology yet that will use multiple ISOs in the same shot in order to get everything properly lit, or at least closer to it?
I don't know whether that would look good or not, but it would probably produce more usable pictures for things like security cameras.
If it does look good, and you could combine it with the "multiple focus" technology liked to by supersat here, you could basically point and shoot at random, then sit down later to crop and refocus the picture until it's perfect.
Good information should stand in its own two feet, and it should be easily verifiable. If it's not easily verifiable, then we should take it as a matter of taste.
Bah. Lots of good information has to (or should be) taken on authority.
When I took a class on botony, I could have verified what my professor told me about cell structure, but not easily. It made a lot more sense to trust that a guy who gets a doctorate in his field has proven his understanding of it and that my university doesn't hire idiots to teach botony.
Other information I've learned can't be tested at all; historical dates, for example, or the scientific name of something, which exists only by the consensus of experts. How do I know what the real name is? Because experts, whom I can identify, agree on it.
Information also has context like "how controversial is this?" If you give me a statistic on abortion, I will look carefully at who you are and what you'd like to prove. If you tell me when the light bulb was invented, I'm pretty sure you have no agenda and just need to decide if you're smart enough not to make typos.
You make a good point - for most people, the popularity of music is a factor in how much they like it. Music is kind of a social thing, so it's nice when you don't always have to say, "well you've never heard of them, but they're great..."
All I was saying is, if you're the sort of person who A) doesn't want to steal music but B) dislikes the industry as a whole, then there is the option of buying music from outside the industry, which probably will be better for the musicians you're trying to support.
As far as searching for stuff, I can picture a Slashdot type system that would help you find new bands with less effort. (This may already exist.) There could be a hojillion songs on the site, and you'd randomly start rating a few. Your recommendations would be averaged with others for an overall rating, and as the system got an idea for your tastes, it would say, "People who like what you like also tend to like this other thing," sorta like Amazon does with purchases. So a newcomer would see things rated high and low, and as they hung around more, they could get recommendations that suited them better.
Nah, Cartoon Planet was a show. Related to Space Ghost Coast to Coast, though I'm not sure if it was a spinoff or not. They never show it anymore and as far as I know there is no DVD. But it featured the kind of stuff that is on "Musical Barbeque" - stupid skits, Brak telling jokes and singing songs, Space Ghost reading from the mail bag, etc.
On Space Ghost Coast to Coast, I always got the feeling that they asked the interviewees one set of questions, then recorded SG asking totally different questions. Their guests often seemed uncomfortable or confused. I guess that's part of the joke.
I always preferred Cartoon Planet, because there was more of Brak. Brak makes me happy.
The music piracy debate comes up again and again on Slashdot, and there are always similar viewpoints expressed:
View #1: "Stealing music hurts artists."
View #2: "No, it hurts record companies, who are screwing artists anyway."
My suggestion: buy indie music and/or buy straight from artists. Sites like Magnatune, Indieheaven and CD Baby (which also distributes music on iTunes and elsewhere) pay a large percentage of sales to musicians.
[self-promotion]
Suddenly, there's a direct connection: You buy music from me, and most of the money keeps me eating and recording. You get more music, I have more fun, and nobody gets screwed. Isn't that how it's supposed to be?
If you don't like what the industry has to offer, don't steal it; buy indie music.
[/self-promotion]
Not to point out the obvious or anything, but "Mick and the boys" happen to be one of the most successful groups of all time. That's like me saying, "Computer programmers don't need salaries; they can make their own programs and get filthy rich. Look at Bill Gates!"
A more realistic example is a known but not super-famous group like They Might Be Giants. Sure, you can get all their stuff on P2P, but you also have the option of buying straight from them on their web site. I like them and want them to keep making music full-time, so I will choose the latter. And since I've only seen them in concert once, they'll end up making more money from me by selling music - which is their primary business.
Why would Bellsouth charge Google? Without Google (and other useful sites), nobody would subscribe to their internet service. We're paying to get access to the internet, and they're complaining because our access is costing them money. Sounds like a problem with your business plan to me.
What might make more sense would be a pay-per-use plan, where you pay a flat rate for X amount of bandwidth or whatever and more if you use more. But of course if customers don't like the complication, they will choose another ISP.
I tend to agree that giving away music is good publicity for small-time musicians. I'm doing that with demos now, and probably when I get some studio recordings, I'll let people name their own price for them.
But I do copyright my work. I can give it away, but nobody can take it without asking. The fee to file for copyright is like $30 for a CD full of songs, so it's really a small cost, even for the little guy.
Yes, you probably will make the most money from live shows rather than CD sales. But wouldn't it stink if a good indie songwriter's work was stolen, recorded by a pre-packaged industry act, and the indie writer never saw a dime?
Record companies are becoming less and less necessary for the distribution of music. I think copyright, since it's cheap to get, actually helps level the playing field for independant artists.
I don't get this. The thing that makes Google ads better than most is that only those who are already interested will see them. And you only pay for the ads that generate a response in the form of a click.
That makes ads cost-effective for the advertiser and useful for the consumer. What could Google do with radio that would work like that?
Seems like you'd be stuck going the same old "listener demographics" route. Anybody have a clue how this helps them?
1) Ok, whatever you just said was pointless.
2) Aha, but if it's so pointless, why am I taking the time to comment on it?
Now I'm writing about myself for writing about you commenting about someone else writing about someone else writing about someone else writing about Apple!
Now... what I have done is so clearly ridiculous that someone must write to point that out.
A better punishment would be to make them buy the offended customer some albums from a competitor's label. Doesn't matter whose, as long as the ownership isn't tied in any way.
I heartily agree with that. Selling a CD off the shelf means manufacturing lots of them, printing booklets, shrink-wrapping, distributing to stores, suffering inevitable waste and theft, not always having the supply in the right place for the demand, etc etc.
Digital sales are VERY efficient. Once something is recorded and set up, your only distribution cost is bandwidth. So why the heck does one CDs worth of material cost the same as one physical CD?
For that matter, since a lot of the record company's work has been cut out, they should get a smaller cut of the profits than before, giving more to artists. Companies like CD Baby are doing nicely with this. Magnatune is another neat site; you can listen to streaming music all you like and you set your own price for the download (within limits).
I don't agree with stealing music, but I do think that low prices are a good way for music sellers to win back some of the business that now goes to illegal downloads.
The idea, I assume, is that people will be motivated to come back because their kids want the rest of the movie or game.
This might work, but it could backfire. You want to keep them wanting more; if it takes 10 visits to see a whole cartoon (or whatever), chances are that the kid will lose interest - and it had better be a great cartoon to warrent even a couple of return trips.
What would have worked on me, I think, is if you get a new downloadable game - a whole game, even if it's a little Tetris-type thing - every day that you visit. So you're never frustrated by a half-reward, but you're still curious what the next one will be.
Another thought: what does the hardware cost, is it worth it for the company, and is there a EULA that says you can't hack it for your own purpose?
I have never understood the name Emac. iMac, ok; maybe the "i" stands for "interactive," or "internet."
But "e," as in "email" or "e-commerce," means "electronic." So what you've got here is an electronic Mac? Well geez, how do all the other kinds work? Are they a mass of cogs and springs on the inside?
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, as a "social network," MySpace tells you nothing about how you're connected to people. Facebook says "you know Pete who knows Lindsay who knows Robert who knows Kat." Much more interesting and useful, especially if a cool person happens to be one degree away from you. "Hey Katie, I met your friend Zack online. We should invite him to our party."
"The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn't think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple - there must be something wrong with it."
And from another part of the book...
"Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
'I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.'
Orwell's version goes:
'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that sucess or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capactiy, but that a considerable amount of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.'"
From what I can see, educators are terrible about this sort of thing.
Really? Are Slashdotters, as a rule, as outspoken in real life as they are here? I doubt it. Do email flamewars erupt more easily than real life arguments? Yes.
From the safety of their computers, even shy people will do riskier things. What the parent poster was saying is that kids don't take to heart the fact that real-life predators may be watching them online. How we solve this problem is debatable, but I agree that it exists.
If you don't do that, there probably is a cost/benefit reason for it: maybe an hour of collecting poop nets you $10 in electricity and that's not worth YOUR time, but for a third-world farmer it's good money.
You think that's the prevailing attitude in this country? Holy crap, man. They practically put sex on cereal boxes.
Really pornography is more adolescent than adult. For a mature person, sex has its place in life but isn't all there is. To hear the local morning DJs talk about it, you'd think they were middle school boys, to whom the concept was still mind-blowing.
A term that makes me laugh a lot is "gentlemen's club." I drove by one that was a run-down shack with strobe lights coming from inside, marked as a gentlemen's club. If the word gentleman means anything anymore, it means the exact opposite of their customer base.
If you've ever accidentally awakened someone, you'd appreciate this feature from the calling end, too.
A given piece of film can only have one sensitivity, but digital cameras now let you choose the ISO you want for your photo. Is there a technology yet that will use multiple ISOs in the same shot in order to get everything properly lit, or at least closer to it?
I don't know whether that would look good or not, but it would probably produce more usable pictures for things like security cameras.
If it does look good, and you could combine it with the "multiple focus" technology liked to by supersat here, you could basically point and shoot at random, then sit down later to crop and refocus the picture until it's perfect.
Bah. Lots of good information has to (or should be) taken on authority.
When I took a class on botony, I could have verified what my professor told me about cell structure, but not easily. It made a lot more sense to trust that a guy who gets a doctorate in his field has proven his understanding of it and that my university doesn't hire idiots to teach botony.
Other information I've learned can't be tested at all; historical dates, for example, or the scientific name of something, which exists only by the consensus of experts. How do I know what the real name is? Because experts, whom I can identify, agree on it.
Information also has context like "how controversial is this?" If you give me a statistic on abortion, I will look carefully at who you are and what you'd like to prove. If you tell me when the light bulb was invented, I'm pretty sure you have no agenda and just need to decide if you're smart enough not to make typos.
All I was saying is, if you're the sort of person who A) doesn't want to steal music but B) dislikes the industry as a whole, then there is the option of buying music from outside the industry, which probably will be better for the musicians you're trying to support.
As far as searching for stuff, I can picture a Slashdot type system that would help you find new bands with less effort. (This may already exist.) There could be a hojillion songs on the site, and you'd randomly start rating a few. Your recommendations would be averaged with others for an overall rating, and as the system got an idea for your tastes, it would say, "People who like what you like also tend to like this other thing," sorta like Amazon does with purchases. So a newcomer would see things rated high and low, and as they hung around more, they could get recommendations that suited them better.
Nah, Cartoon Planet was a show. Related to Space Ghost Coast to Coast, though I'm not sure if it was a spinoff or not. They never show it anymore and as far as I know there is no DVD. But it featured the kind of stuff that is on "Musical Barbeque" - stupid skits, Brak telling jokes and singing songs, Space Ghost reading from the mail bag, etc.
I always preferred Cartoon Planet, because there was more of Brak. Brak makes me happy.
The music piracy debate comes up again and again on Slashdot, and there are always similar viewpoints expressed:
View #1: "Stealing music hurts artists."
View #2: "No, it hurts record companies, who are screwing artists anyway."
My suggestion: buy indie music and/or buy straight from artists. Sites like Magnatune, Indieheaven and CD Baby (which also distributes music on iTunes and elsewhere) pay a large percentage of sales to musicians.
[self-promotion]
Suddenly, there's a direct connection: You buy music from me, and most of the money keeps me eating and recording. You get more music, I have more fun, and nobody gets screwed. Isn't that how it's supposed to be?
If you don't like what the industry has to offer, don't steal it; buy indie music. [/self-promotion]
A more realistic example is a known but not super-famous group like They Might Be Giants. Sure, you can get all their stuff on P2P, but you also have the option of buying straight from them on their web site. I like them and want them to keep making music full-time, so I will choose the latter. And since I've only seen them in concert once, they'll end up making more money from me by selling music - which is their primary business.
What might make more sense would be a pay-per-use plan, where you pay a flat rate for X amount of bandwidth or whatever and more if you use more. But of course if customers don't like the complication, they will choose another ISP.
But I do copyright my work. I can give it away, but nobody can take it without asking. The fee to file for copyright is like $30 for a CD full of songs, so it's really a small cost, even for the little guy.
Yes, you probably will make the most money from live shows rather than CD sales. But wouldn't it stink if a good indie songwriter's work was stolen, recorded by a pre-packaged industry act, and the indie writer never saw a dime?
Record companies are becoming less and less necessary for the distribution of music. I think copyright, since it's cheap to get, actually helps level the playing field for independant artists.
I don't get this. The thing that makes Google ads better than most is that only those who are already interested will see them. And you only pay for the ads that generate a response in the form of a click.
That makes ads cost-effective for the advertiser and useful for the consumer. What could Google do with radio that would work like that?
Seems like you'd be stuck going the same old "listener demographics" route. Anybody have a clue how this helps them?
I want to play!
1) Ok, whatever you just said was pointless.
2) Aha, but if it's so pointless, why am I taking the time to comment on it?
Now I'm writing about myself for writing about you commenting about someone else writing about someone else writing about someone else writing about Apple!
Now... what I have done is so clearly ridiculous that someone must write to point that out.
A better punishment would be to make them buy the offended customer some albums from a competitor's label. Doesn't matter whose, as long as the ownership isn't tied in any way.
I heartily agree with that. Selling a CD off the shelf means manufacturing lots of them, printing booklets, shrink-wrapping, distributing to stores, suffering inevitable waste and theft, not always having the supply in the right place for the demand, etc etc.
Digital sales are VERY efficient. Once something is recorded and set up, your only distribution cost is bandwidth. So why the heck does one CDs worth of material cost the same as one physical CD?
For that matter, since a lot of the record company's work has been cut out, they should get a smaller cut of the profits than before, giving more to artists. Companies like CD Baby are doing nicely with this. Magnatune is another neat site; you can listen to streaming music all you like and you set your own price for the download (within limits).
I don't agree with stealing music, but I do think that low prices are a good way for music sellers to win back some of the business that now goes to illegal downloads.
Seems I was funny in an unintentional way. Thanks for your gracious corrections.
:)
Obviously, there is a reason I call myself NerdPOSEUR.
The idea, I assume, is that people will be motivated to come back because their kids want the rest of the movie or game.
This might work, but it could backfire. You want to keep them wanting more; if it takes 10 visits to see a whole cartoon (or whatever), chances are that the kid will lose interest - and it had better be a great cartoon to warrent even a couple of return trips.
What would have worked on me, I think, is if you get a new downloadable game - a whole game, even if it's a little Tetris-type thing - every day that you visit. So you're never frustrated by a half-reward, but you're still curious what the next one will be.
Another thought: what does the hardware cost, is it worth it for the company, and is there a EULA that says you can't hack it for your own purpose?
I have never understood the name Emac. iMac, ok; maybe the "i" stands for "interactive," or "internet."
But "e," as in "email" or "e-commerce," means "electronic." So what you've got here is an electronic Mac? Well geez, how do all the other kinds work? Are they a mass of cogs and springs on the inside?
So, for the obligatory recap, we're looking forward to: Mice that are really strong, don't age (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/ 18/2133229&tid=214&tid=14), can regrow damaged limbs (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/ 01/0035245&tid=99&tid=14), and have no fear (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/ 18/0644240&tid=191&tid=14).
I, for one, am investing in explosive mousetraps.
For each song I sell on ITunes, I get 65 cents.