Wow. All the musicians I know (not a lot) make their living at music-related jobs, but none can sustain a family on their music earnings alone.
Well, I only know two guys making a living at it, but both are single and one of them tends bar once in a while, but his primary income stream is from gigs.
Okay, I confess my ignorance here. How can the RIAA even attempt to crush them?
You're not going to buy a song you never heard by a band you never heard of. The RIAA's mantra "free music is stealing" is to get people to stop downloading, PERIOD. If I want free top 40 music I can sample it from the radio with a lot less trouble than downloading it from the Pirate Bay or somewhere; just plug the radio into the PC, tune to a top 40 station and in a couple of hours I have their whole rotation. If I want indie music, the only way to get it is through either a download, or a friend emailing me a copy, both of which the RIAA villifies.
Every indie CD you buy is an RIAA CD you won't buy. The indies depend on internet downloads, which is why the majors are so against downloads.
However, I doubt the RIAA will succeed in crushing them; they're just annoying them now.
Hmmm, I never did like Gnome. This makes me like it even less. IMO the best thing about Linux is unlike Windows, it works the way YOU want it to work. With MS (and from what you say, now GNOME) it's their way or the highway. Nope, it's MY computer, not some gnome's box.
Hmm, I use to use Mandriva (Mandrake before that) and am on kubuntu now. It's been well over ten years since I tried SUSE, iirc the only probelm I had with it was a flaky video driver, and from what I've seen since I'm pretty sure they've patched that one up. I'll have to give it another try.
Wouldn't you know it, I just upgraded my kubuntu box over the weekend. Oh, well.
I was happy to find that the latest kubuntu has Samba turned on by default, and was able to see shares from my win 7 notebook, and then at lunch today was chagrined that it stopped working. How is Samba support in Suse?
I'm an ameteur, but I have a few friends who make their living as musicians. Not only are none of them with RIAA labels (most have self-published CDs, it only takes a couple thousand bucks to professionally produce and stamp a couple thusand CDs, complete with cover art and jewel cases), they wouldn't touch an RIAA contract with a ten foot pen. They've heard the horror stories.
They are the RIAA's competetion, and the RIAA is trying to crush them.
For every successful RIAA album there are twenty five RIAA losers that don't make a penny. Even successful albums often don't make any money for the artist, though the label does well.
So, if you cheat on your spouse and they don't catch you and you don't give them a disease, it's moral?
The spouse suffers harm whether he or she finds out about it -- and as the victim of adultery (I'm now divorced) I can tell you that if you cheat on her, she's going to find out. I had no trouble at all seeing the signs of my ex-wife's adultery, and it happened more than once.
In tenth grade, I copy your essay and submit it as my own. I get an A, you get an F. You still have your essay, all I've done is removed the ability for you to exploit your work for your benefit. No harm done?
That is causing harm. You have deprived me of something, unlike the pirate. If piracy prevented an artist from being able to sell his work I'd agree it was wrong, but it in fact does NOT prevent him from selling his work, and more likely causes the pirate to BUY that work that he certainly would not have before experiencing the artist's work.
Pirates don't claim to have written Metallica's songs. Your "copying in class" is nothing like piracy. It harms the student being copied from (unlike piracy) as well as the school itself and education in general.
Lets see, Star trek and... um... How many TV shows do you see about MBAs? I can't think of any. Cops? Tons of shows about cops.
As to pay, if we paid our teachers better maybe we'd get better teachers. All but three public school teachers I had were abysmal (graduated high school in 1970), but I never had a single bad college instructor. OK, there was that one economics class I dropped on the first day because the professor was obviously retarded, but only the one. Maybe pay and prestige has something to do with the lack of good teachers?
My daughters' teachers in the 90s were every bit as bad as the ones I had when I was a kid.
But then we both know that's not what's being pirated, don't we?
You might know, but I don't. Most of what I've downloaded has in fact been dead artists, or works that should have been in the public domain decades ago (much of which I already paid for, sometimes more than once). I have no idea what anybody else is downloading.
I don't think the mod system is broken, I think the metamod system is broken. It used to be that you would moderate mods as "fair" or "unfair" and too many unfairs and you didn't get mod points. I'm not sure what the new system accomplishes.
I like that sig, too. Witty and nerdy at the same time.
Copyright infringement is no more "theft" than rape is murder. If I steal your CDs, you no longer have those CDs. If I copy those CDs illegally, nobody has lost anything. If I read a library book, the author and publisher no more loses anything than if I download it off the internet.
For me to believe something is immoral, I have to believe that someone has been harmed from the act. Murder, rape, adultery, theft of physical items, slander, these things all harm people and are immoral. For me to believe copying a file is immoral you're going to have to convince me that someone has been harmed. So far all I've seen is evidence that nobody is harmed and a lot of people benefit.
I've realized that sadly the world doesn't beat a path to the door of the better mousetrap builder.
The mousetrap fallacy is a very popular one. However --
the sad truth is that they're vital to the industry and always will be.
Sorry, that's a fallacy as well. Thirty (or even fewer) years ago it was in fact true -- the costs of recording and marketing an album was prohibitive for the average person, but these days the most expensive part of making an album is the musical instruments and amps; studio time is dirt cheap. Duplication is dirt cheap. And there's the internet for it to be heard. What use are the record labels to anyone these days? Their purpose for existance is obsolete.
And in my opinion, culture would be far better off without the likes of Britney Spears or NSync. I hear far better, more original music played by far better musicians in the local bars. Musicians are a dime a dozen, songs should be as well.
Illegal != immoral. Music pirates spend more on music than non-pirates. The RIAA's problem is they don't want you hearing indie artists; DL an indie song and you might buy the CD, depriving the RIAA label of the sale of the CD you could no longer afford because you pirated the indie CD and then bought it.
The RIAA has radio, TV, and movies to get their music out to you. Antipiracy is a fight againt the competetion.
When someone told me how funny Terry Pratchett's books were, did I schlep down to B&N and shell out twenty bucks for a copy? Hell no, I pirated it from the library. There are now a couple of Pratchett books on my bookshelf permanently. I have a couple dozen Asimov books, were it not for library piracy I'd never have bought a single one.
Piracy sells content. The RIAA's problem is it sells their competetion's content.
No, what's immoral is the life+70 years monopoly before it enters the public domain, DMCA, and many other faults of copyright law. The ludicrously long term hinders creativity. The DMCA makes backing up data you've paid good money for illegal.
Keeping what I've already paid for away from me is immoral. Taking what belongs to we, the people (art and literature) is immoral. Copyright law is in terrible need of reform. Power needs to be taken form the entertainment companies and given to the people who actually create the art and literature.
How is that life+75 years going to entice Jimi Hendrix of Janice Joplin to produce more works? It doesn't. It's a disincentive to the record companies to record someone new; they can still make money off the old. Make the term 20 years and an artist won't be able to retire on the revenues of a single work.
LOL - that office suite. After having bought out and/or squashed a lot of good competition, you'd think that Microsoft would have a superb office suite.
One of the things I hate about Microsoft is FoxPro. That was a damned good DBMS, then MS bought them out. Version 6 wasn't too bad, version 8 was completely unusable. I believe they did it deliberately to kill FoxPro and promote the abomination that is MS Access. Christ, but I hate that fucking program, and I have to use it every day.
It always amuses me when someone says something I completely agree with and gets modded "troll". I, for one, think Microsoft has done a lot of harm to technology and I hate their products (well, Excel is an exception, better than their competetitors). Modding an honest opinion "troll" is just wrong. Some people should never get mod points.
Or just getting off the interilliteratenet and reading a book now and then? The kind of thing you pointed out sometimes amuses me and sometimes annoys me. Substituting "loose" for "lose" is one that annoys me; if you loose your mind, wonderful things happen. If you lose your mind, terrible things happen. One letter changes the meaning of the sentence completely.
If someone doesn't know the difference between through and threw or there, their, and they're, that simply indicates to me that they're not well educated and I should dismiss everything they say. Listening to the ignorant is pretty foolish, and misusing apostrophes and homophones shows incredible ignorance.
I don't think the aversion to science and math classes has anything to do with fear, for most students. It's about 1) interest, 2) laziness, and 3) reward.
I think it's about incompetent teachers. A bad teacher can make the most interesting subject in the world deadly dull and horribly boring. And face it, presented by a good instructor, math and the sciences are fascinating. The way they're presented in the US public school system they're (as the kids would say) "dumb and boring". The kids are almost right, their teacher is the one who's dumb and boring, not the subject matter.
I escaped that trap by having a great first grade teacher. By the time the deadly dull science teacher tried to ruin a fascinating subject, I'd already read about it by an interesting teacher like Asimov among others, who wrote some excellent nonfiction.
Seeing how volatile the stock market has been in the last few years, that would be a GOOD thing. There's far too little forward thinking, nobody cares about anything past the next quarter. Taxing sale of shares discourages selling and discourages short term buying. IMO both the company and stockholders are far better off if they hang onto their stock for the long haul. Speculative trading is not investing and should be discouraged, not encouraged. It does nothing to produce wealth or help the economy, and quite a bit to harm it.
So, to you, it's a "keep the slaves working" tax?
I don't think encouraging sucessful business owners to sell their businesses, when the guy who buys it may not be as good a businessman, is a good idea.
You really are a shill.
Who am I shilling for? Do you know what shill even means?
The maximum achievable dynamic range of an ADC is determined by the bit depth of the converter.
I completely forgot about dynamic range. Yes, the greater the bit depth the greater the range, and the bit depth does indeed have to match all the way through the system; a chain is only as good as its weakest link. But the dynamic range of CDs, greater than that of vinyl, isn't ever used that I've seen. In fact, the CD I made from Boston's first LP has more dynamics than the CD I bought (the band itself complained about that CD's remastering). I have other CDs that are similarly better than the digitally remastered analogs.
I don't know why you say that three data points isn't nearly enough, as the whole point of Nyquist's theorem is that it is, if the signal is perfectly bandlimited
No, that's not the point of Nyquist. The closer you get to the Nyquist limit, the more aliasing there is. Bitrex explains it pretty well here. Of course, Nyquist also says that if you go over the limit you get horrible noises, which is why you need the bandpass filter. But that filter won't add missing data, and three data points aren't enough to discern a sine wave from a sawtooth or square wave; with only three data points it's impossible.
Pigs do have human-level emotions. Ever seen one react when you point a gun at it? People are keeping potbellied pigs as pets these days, treating them like dogs and cats. Again, dogs and cats are food in some parts of the world.
Limp Bizkit already has it covered. "They did it all for Tanuki...".
ACDC beat them to it.
Well I'm upper upper class high society God's gift to ballroom notoriety And I always fill my ballroom The event is never small The social pages say I've got The biggest balls of all
I've got big balls I've got big balls They're such big balls And they're dirty big balls And he's got big balls And she's got big balls (But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
And my balls are always bouncing My ballroom always full And everybody comes and comes again If your name is on the guest list No one can take you higher Everybody says I've got Great balls of fire
I've got big balls Oh I've got big balls And they're such big balls Dirty big balls And he's got big balls And she's got big balls (But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
Some balls are held for charity And some for fancy dress But when they're held for pleasure They're the balls that I like best My balls are always bouncing To the left and to the right It's my belief that my big balls Should be held every night
We've got big balls We've got big balls We've got big balls Dirty big balls He's got big balls She's got big balls (But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
(We've got big balls) (We've got big balls)
And I'm just itching to tell you about them Oh we had such wonderful fun Seafood cocktail, crabs, crayfish (But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
It's generally animals that come across as being closer to humans in their intelligence / emotions that people are averse to eating.
Pigs are very intelligent, smarter than dogs or cats, and I sure love a ham sandwich. They eat dogs in Korea and cats in other parts of Asia. What it actually is is the norms in the culture you were raised in, not any properties of the animals themselves.
I would if everyone I ever met who tried it didn't say it was nasty.
I can vouch for the fact that sharks are indeed tasty.
I'll back you up on that. I ate shark in Thailand while in the USAF and it was delicious.
Might want to amend your rules to say that
You are what you eat, especially to who is eating you. I have a friend who used to raise hogs, ever eat pork fed on ice cream? What an animal eats does affect how it tastes.
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Wow. All the musicians I know (not a lot) make their living at music-related jobs, but none can sustain a family on their music earnings alone.
Well, I only know two guys making a living at it, but both are single and one of them tends bar once in a while, but his primary income stream is from gigs.
Okay, I confess my ignorance here. How can the RIAA even attempt to crush them?
You're not going to buy a song you never heard by a band you never heard of. The RIAA's mantra "free music is stealing" is to get people to stop downloading, PERIOD. If I want free top 40 music I can sample it from the radio with a lot less trouble than downloading it from the Pirate Bay or somewhere; just plug the radio into the PC, tune to a top 40 station and in a couple of hours I have their whole rotation. If I want indie music, the only way to get it is through either a download, or a friend emailing me a copy, both of which the RIAA villifies.
Every indie CD you buy is an RIAA CD you won't buy. The indies depend on internet downloads, which is why the majors are so against downloads.
However, I doubt the RIAA will succeed in crushing them; they're just annoying them now.
Hmmm, I never did like Gnome. This makes me like it even less. IMO the best thing about Linux is unlike Windows, it works the way YOU want it to work. With MS (and from what you say, now GNOME) it's their way or the highway. Nope, it's MY computer, not some gnome's box.
Hmm, I use to use Mandriva (Mandrake before that) and am on kubuntu now. It's been well over ten years since I tried SUSE, iirc the only probelm I had with it was a flaky video driver, and from what I've seen since I'm pretty sure they've patched that one up. I'll have to give it another try.
Wouldn't you know it, I just upgraded my kubuntu box over the weekend. Oh, well.
I was happy to find that the latest kubuntu has Samba turned on by default, and was able to see shares from my win 7 notebook, and then at lunch today was chagrined that it stopped working. How is Samba support in Suse?
I'm an ameteur, but I have a few friends who make their living as musicians. Not only are none of them with RIAA labels (most have self-published CDs, it only takes a couple thousand bucks to professionally produce and stamp a couple thusand CDs, complete with cover art and jewel cases), they wouldn't touch an RIAA contract with a ten foot pen. They've heard the horror stories.
They are the RIAA's competetion, and the RIAA is trying to crush them.
For every successful RIAA album there are twenty five RIAA losers that don't make a penny. Even successful albums often don't make any money for the artist, though the label does well.
So, if you cheat on your spouse and they don't catch you and you don't give them a disease, it's moral?
The spouse suffers harm whether he or she finds out about it -- and as the victim of adultery (I'm now divorced) I can tell you that if you cheat on her, she's going to find out. I had no trouble at all seeing the signs of my ex-wife's adultery, and it happened more than once.
In tenth grade, I copy your essay and submit it as my own. I get an A, you get an F. You still have your essay, all I've done is removed the ability for you to exploit your work for your benefit. No harm done?
That is causing harm. You have deprived me of something, unlike the pirate. If piracy prevented an artist from being able to sell his work I'd agree it was wrong, but it in fact does NOT prevent him from selling his work, and more likely causes the pirate to BUY that work that he certainly would not have before experiencing the artist's work.
Pirates don't claim to have written Metallica's songs. Your "copying in class" is nothing like piracy. It harms the student being copied from (unlike piracy) as well as the school itself and education in general.
How many TV shows do you see about engineers?
Lets see, Star trek and... um... How many TV shows do you see about MBAs? I can't think of any. Cops? Tons of shows about cops.
As to pay, if we paid our teachers better maybe we'd get better teachers. All but three public school teachers I had were abysmal (graduated high school in 1970), but I never had a single bad college instructor. OK, there was that one economics class I dropped on the first day because the professor was obviously retarded, but only the one. Maybe pay and prestige has something to do with the lack of good teachers?
My daughters' teachers in the 90s were every bit as bad as the ones I had when I was a kid.
But then we both know that's not what's being pirated, don't we?
You might know, but I don't. Most of what I've downloaded has in fact been dead artists, or works that should have been in the public domain decades ago (much of which I already paid for, sometimes more than once). I have no idea what anybody else is downloading.
I don't think the mod system is broken, I think the metamod system is broken. It used to be that you would moderate mods as "fair" or "unfair" and too many unfairs and you didn't get mod points. I'm not sure what the new system accomplishes.
I like that sig, too. Witty and nerdy at the same time.
Copyright infringement is no more "theft" than rape is murder. If I steal your CDs, you no longer have those CDs. If I copy those CDs illegally, nobody has lost anything. If I read a library book, the author and publisher no more loses anything than if I download it off the internet.
For me to believe something is immoral, I have to believe that someone has been harmed from the act. Murder, rape, adultery, theft of physical items, slander, these things all harm people and are immoral. For me to believe copying a file is immoral you're going to have to convince me that someone has been harmed. So far all I've seen is evidence that nobody is harmed and a lot of people benefit.
I've realized that sadly the world doesn't beat a path to the door of the better mousetrap builder.
The mousetrap fallacy is a very popular one. However --
the sad truth is that they're vital to the industry and always will be.
Sorry, that's a fallacy as well. Thirty (or even fewer) years ago it was in fact true -- the costs of recording and marketing an album was prohibitive for the average person, but these days the most expensive part of making an album is the musical instruments and amps; studio time is dirt cheap. Duplication is dirt cheap. And there's the internet for it to be heard. What use are the record labels to anyone these days? Their purpose for existance is obsolete.
And in my opinion, culture would be far better off without the likes of Britney Spears or NSync. I hear far better, more original music played by far better musicians in the local bars. Musicians are a dime a dozen, songs should be as well.
Illegal != immoral. Music pirates spend more on music than non-pirates. The RIAA's problem is they don't want you hearing indie artists; DL an indie song and you might buy the CD, depriving the RIAA label of the sale of the CD you could no longer afford because you pirated the indie CD and then bought it.
The RIAA has radio, TV, and movies to get their music out to you. Antipiracy is a fight againt the competetion.
When someone told me how funny Terry Pratchett's books were, did I schlep down to B&N and shell out twenty bucks for a copy? Hell no, I pirated it from the library. There are now a couple of Pratchett books on my bookshelf permanently. I have a couple dozen Asimov books, were it not for library piracy I'd never have bought a single one.
Piracy sells content. The RIAA's problem is it sells their competetion's content.
No, what's immoral is the life+70 years monopoly before it enters the public domain, DMCA, and many other faults of copyright law. The ludicrously long term hinders creativity. The DMCA makes backing up data you've paid good money for illegal.
Keeping what I've already paid for away from me is immoral. Taking what belongs to we, the people (art and literature) is immoral. Copyright law is in terrible need of reform. Power needs to be taken form the entertainment companies and given to the people who actually create the art and literature.
How is that life+75 years going to entice Jimi Hendrix of Janice Joplin to produce more works? It doesn't. It's a disincentive to the record companies to record someone new; they can still make money off the old. Make the term 20 years and an artist won't be able to retire on the revenues of a single work.
Ditto, I'm in the throws of producing a PP slide brief and it too is excruciating.
Watch those homophones in your presentation, a mistake like that could cost you a grant. I believe the word you were looking for is "throes".
LOL - that office suite. After having bought out and/or squashed a lot of good competition, you'd think that Microsoft would have a superb office suite.
One of the things I hate about Microsoft is FoxPro. That was a damned good DBMS, then MS bought them out. Version 6 wasn't too bad, version 8 was completely unusable. I believe they did it deliberately to kill FoxPro and promote the abomination that is MS Access. Christ, but I hate that fucking program, and I have to use it every day.
It always amuses me when someone says something I completely agree with and gets modded "troll". I, for one, think Microsoft has done a lot of harm to technology and I hate their products (well, Excel is an exception, better than their competetitors). Modding an honest opinion "troll" is just wrong. Some people should never get mod points.
How about English classes? ;-)
Or just getting off the interilliteratenet and reading a book now and then? The kind of thing you pointed out sometimes amuses me and sometimes annoys me. Substituting "loose" for "lose" is one that annoys me; if you loose your mind, wonderful things happen. If you lose your mind, terrible things happen. One letter changes the meaning of the sentence completely.
If someone doesn't know the difference between through and threw or there, their, and they're, that simply indicates to me that they're not well educated and I should dismiss everything they say. Listening to the ignorant is pretty foolish, and misusing apostrophes and homophones shows incredible ignorance.
I don't think the aversion to science and math classes has anything to do with fear, for most students. It's about 1) interest, 2) laziness, and 3) reward.
I think it's about incompetent teachers. A bad teacher can make the most interesting subject in the world deadly dull and horribly boring. And face it, presented by a good instructor, math and the sciences are fascinating. The way they're presented in the US public school system they're (as the kids would say) "dumb and boring". The kids are almost right, their teacher is the one who's dumb and boring, not the subject matter.
I escaped that trap by having a great first grade teacher. By the time the deadly dull science teacher tried to ruin a fascinating subject, I'd already read about it by an interesting teacher like Asimov among others, who wrote some excellent nonfiction.
So, yes, many WILL stop trading stock
Seeing how volatile the stock market has been in the last few years, that would be a GOOD thing. There's far too little forward thinking, nobody cares about anything past the next quarter. Taxing sale of shares discourages selling and discourages short term buying. IMO both the company and stockholders are far better off if they hang onto their stock for the long haul. Speculative trading is not investing and should be discouraged, not encouraged. It does nothing to produce wealth or help the economy, and quite a bit to harm it.
So, to you, it's a "keep the slaves working" tax?
I don't think encouraging sucessful business owners to sell their businesses, when the guy who buys it may not be as good a businessman, is a good idea.
You really are a shill.
Who am I shilling for? Do you know what shill even means?
The maximum achievable dynamic range of an ADC is determined by the bit depth of the converter.
I completely forgot about dynamic range. Yes, the greater the bit depth the greater the range, and the bit depth does indeed have to match all the way through the system; a chain is only as good as its weakest link. But the dynamic range of CDs, greater than that of vinyl, isn't ever used that I've seen. In fact, the CD I made from Boston's first LP has more dynamics than the CD I bought (the band itself complained about that CD's remastering). I have other CDs that are similarly better than the digitally remastered analogs.
I don't know why you say that three data points isn't nearly enough, as the whole point of Nyquist's theorem is that it is, if the signal is perfectly bandlimited
No, that's not the point of Nyquist. The closer you get to the Nyquist limit, the more aliasing there is. Bitrex explains it pretty well here. Of course, Nyquist also says that if you go over the limit you get horrible noises, which is why you need the bandpass filter. But that filter won't add missing data, and three data points aren't enough to discern a sine wave from a sawtooth or square wave; with only three data points it's impossible.
It's like having a girlfriend was when I was in highschool: an exercise in masochism. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go clean the litter box again
Sounds like you have trouble with pussy...
Pigs do have human-level emotions. Ever seen one react when you point a gun at it? People are keeping potbellied pigs as pets these days, treating them like dogs and cats. Again, dogs and cats are food in some parts of the world.
Screw PETA, support the ASPCA. They've been around a long time and unlike PETA they're not batshit insane.
Limp Bizkit already has it covered. "They did it all for Tanuki...".
ACDC beat them to it.
It's generally animals that come across as being closer to humans in their intelligence / emotions that people are averse to eating.
Pigs are very intelligent, smarter than dogs or cats, and I sure love a ham sandwich. They eat dogs in Korea and cats in other parts of Asia. What it actually is is the norms in the culture you were raised in, not any properties of the animals themselves.
That said, I wouldn't eat bonobo,
I didn't see any depiction of Mario, I saw somebody spamming his band's site. Do you have a link to the actual video?
nobody's lining up to try crow-pie.
I would if everyone I ever met who tried it didn't say it was nasty.
I can vouch for the fact that sharks are indeed tasty.
I'll back you up on that. I ate shark in Thailand while in the USAF and it was delicious.
Might want to amend your rules to say that
You are what you eat, especially to who is eating you. I have a friend who used to raise hogs, ever eat pork fed on ice cream? What an animal eats does affect how it tastes.