Sure, two grand a person is a lot for representation, but look at the ROI. And it would only take 4,000 people donating $10 each to a cause to get this kind of treatment. Or 400 people giving $100 each.
Consider the following five forms of art: literature, music, film, painting, and video games.
Everyone can paint. Almost everyone can make music (everyone can clap their hands, most can hum, a good majority can sing on-key.) About the same number of people can do film (witness the cameraphone / YouTube craze.) Slightly less than everyone can do literature (assuming literacy is the standard for literature.)
But who can make a video game?
It requires a combination of computer literacy, logic, programming knowhow, AND some knowledge of usability to make a game that could be considered playable, even in the crudest sense.
So to actually create even the most basic video game requires a level of competency far above creating the most basic literature, painting, music, or even film. And the learning curve for it is exponential. In short, there will always be a lot more artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers than computer programmers. And by the simple law of averages, there'll be more "highbrow" artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers.
And what's worse, is that everyone can have a highbrow idea, and convert it into pseudocode.
An experiment: ask someone to describe how they would program a game of tic-tac-toe. Almost everyone can do it, it's just like the rules: One player is X, one player is O, play alternates back and forth, and after each play, you check to see if there is a row, column, or diagonal of Xs or Os.
But then ask them to code it, and most would balk. They know the ideas, but not the syntax. They know the logic, but not the programmatic flow. They know what recursion, instantiation, and nested conditionals are, but not how to code for it.
So really, the issue is that most people problably have highbrow game ideas, but abandon them at the sheer thought of implementing them, whereas a person with a highbrow idea for a piece of music, a novella, or a sculpture might just jump into it.
Barriers to entry aren't always just money and time.
Actually, I think the idea behind the summary has it backwards: in the 1960s and 70s, music, movies, and other forms of media and entertainment required a physical commitment of some sort, either by attending the show, owning the vinyl, buying the book, etc.
Now let's forget the term "highbrow" and instead substitute "niche", which more closely defines the species we are looking for: a form of entertainment with a limited but strong audience.
In the old days form, a niche market could be created by a physical community - a specialist bookstore, arthouse theater, independent record store, etc. And once catalog mailings sprung up, guess what? All the brick and mortar stores dumped all their independent books, movies, and records into catalogs and only left the hits in the aisles.
Video games, since their earliest days, have had an alternate method of delivery: the Internet. And niche games have clearly served themselves better by using the Internet as a delivery mechanism: platform-independence, low development costs, and an easy way to generate a community.
Now music and video have their own low-entry methods of delivery: YouTube, MySpace, GarageBand, Google Video, etc all give self-budgeted filmmakers and musicians an opportunity to show off their talents.
The key difference is that video games require much more education and technical knowhow to create than a book, a video, or a piece of music. The difference between the greatest director or producer of all-time and a guy with a camera or a microphone in his garage is great, but not nearly as great as the difference between an expert programmer and a guy with a computer.
So while music, movies, books, and most other content benefit from the Long Tail, the other barrier to entry (technical knowhow) keeps out most people (who might have highbrow ideas) from joining the game developer industry.
Especially because it's funny that you pay so many X dollars for proprietary support, and open source support is just so much easier to deal with. That's just sad on Microsoft's (and other software vendors - Oracle, I'm looking at you) part.
The guy on the street corner shouldn't have a better watch repair system than the guy in the jewelry store.
Seriously, they're complaining about the Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?
Seriously!?
IE7 fixes the Holly Hack, the box model, PNGs, the pixel jog, the double margin float, child selectors, position:fixed, the XMLHttpRequest object, XML degradation, the phantom box, percentage vs. auto, the PEEKABOO bug (Oh My God - line-height bug, too!), EMACScript degradation...
IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6. And because they have a new product, they're going to work harder on CSS2.1 for the next year while they claw their way back into their 90+% market share.
I could honestly care less about ACID2 compliance, and the people who do are impractical pedants. ESPECIALLY when IE6 fails so many more basic standards tests than ACID2, all of which IE7 is fixing.
It is like complaining that you passed calculus without knowing how to use a slide rule. Ridiculous.
The Long Tail is not about "choices" and option paralysis. The Long Tail theory assumes you know what you're looking for! The demand has always been built in - the problem has been supply.
The Internet's low barrier to entry means that the sheer volume of total supply has increased dramatically. Before the Internet, there was a large section of demand for obscure and otherwise "non-hit" material that could not be met by traditional brick and mortar stores. Now these needs can be met, without sacrificing any of the supply of "hit" material.
It's very simple. Nothing to do with choice. All about supply. Econ 101.
Like the famous quote, no two countries with a McDonald's in them have gone to war with each other. Democracies don't go war to with each other, because democracies are governed by moderation, and they usually have strong diplomatic ties between them. And McDonald's are ostensibly drawn to stabile governments. The only exception to this is the US and Panama in 1989, which came more because democracy was subverted in the Panamanian elections and Bush was decidedly less lenient with regards to drugs than Reagan had been.
So no, it is not an economic reality, but it is inherently tied to a lack of moderation in one side of the conflict. That is why democracy is so important to the world. It is the one supreme human ideal that must be pushed above all others - not just because it embodies the concepts of freedom, equality, justice, and fairness, but also because it embodies the ideas of moderation, restraint, and deliberation. Which negates the need for nuclear weapons.
It may be easy to sneak it past them, but do you really think your parents don't know about all your hiding places by the time you're 14? They can guilt trip you with just one look of disappointment. They can smell fear. And even better, they learned all your deception and trickery back when you were 4 years old and couldn't hide it as well.
Yeah, your parents? They're ON to you. And if you managed to sneak it in, they'd find it later, while you were at school or off with your friends. And they probably wouldn't say anything about it until 3 months later - use it as a bargaining chip against you instead.
Good parents are like those cops who give you warnings when you speed. They bust you, they shame you, they tell you don't do it again, and they let you go. And the best parents, they know the difference between reckless driving and not using your turn signal.
Actually, all Hollywood has done is added remakes to their repertoire. They haven't shown a real slowdown in original pictures (of blockbuster or indie niche variety) since the 80s, when sequelization and remakes began emerging as a real industry standard.
Back in the 40s and 50s, Hollywood relied on literary adaptations. Today we rely on TV and old movies as our sources. We've just evolved with the culture, that's all. Nothing new. This is just the 21st century version of the "the book was better" argument.
Having seen Head, it is a very surreal and ahead of its time experience. It's not great, but it's not that bad, either. Kind of like a poor man's Tommy crossed with a poor man's Monty Python. Crossed with the Monkees TV show, which is of course also fairly funny and cartoonish.
Seriously, have you ever heard anyone really run that successful a campaign by calling their opponent a "pervert lover"? Being "soft on crime"?
Can you seriously imagine the commercial they would have to run to convey that image in regards to this bill?
"Representative Hogan is out of touch with America. He voted against a law that would prohibit minors from visiting MySpace.com in public libraries. Does that sound like the kind of guy you'd want in office?"
Everybody loves to be like, "Oh, well voters just eat that up, they're dumb and gullible," but no. Not really. No they're not. Most of them won't care about this bill one way or the other. And BECAUSE of that, any smart Representative ought to have the courage and conviction to say this law is inappropriate government meddling, and we don't need it. And be able to easily defend that charge at home. In 8 simple words, too.
"That bill is a violation of our liberties."
People in this country, they don't care about liberties in the rhetorical sense, but trust me, the few voters who use this bill (and bills like it) as a lynchpin issue in who they're voting for are the ones out of touch. And they'll get called on it.
I guess my point is I'm tired of all this tsk-tsk Chicken Little hysteria that we're all being labelled "unpatriotic" and "terrorists" and "pedo lovers" because of our positions. Who out there is actually doing this? Who is stifling your dissent? Who is really out there calling you a terrorist? Ann Coulter? Give me a break. Have your convictions, stick by them, voice them loudly and proudly. Nothing will happen to you.
An alternative band economics tutorial for a mid-sized band with regional/semi-national touring (from an ex-band member):
You have 3 members. You have a booking agent (who collects 5% commission on all gigs booked) and otherwise it's all you.
You play 40 gigs. You make (a fairly liberal) $1,000 a gig. (Some places pay $100. Some places pay $2,500. Most places pay around $1,000. Plus free beer!) $40,000 - your agent's take ($2,000) = $38,000 in concert revenue.
Your latest CD's production session cost you $30,000, you printed 10,000 CDs for $1 a CD = $10,000. You sell 20 CDs at each gig, at $10 a pop, netting you $80,000 - ($40,000 costs) = $40,000 on CDs. Doubled your investment!
You also make shirts and stickers, but those are basically sold at-cost as promos for your bands (for future concerts + CD revenue.) Profit line: we'll be generous and say you make $5,000 on swag. (If you are a major-label band, you make much, much more on your shirts. Some mid-level indie bands try to do this kind of thing, too. Major turn off. (I'm looking at you, Yo La Tengo.))
And finally, one of your songs gets picked up for play on a regional sports commercial (happens more than you think), and you get a hefty $5,000 contract for a royalty-free limited use of your song in that commercial. (This is unlikely for your average band, but happens a lot at the level just below the superIndies.)
(If your song is picked up for a soundtrack to a big-budget movie, you can pull up to $40,000. Then you can subsidize your CD sales a bit to increase exposure. Which you offset by negotiating for a slightly higher appearance fee at concerts. The major coup for ANY band is to get exposure on a nationally-marketed product. Ideally one you can sleep on at night after you snuggled with it.)
Total revenues: $88,000.
Costs: Travel to the gigs: $5,000. Hotel: $5,000. (A money-saving tip: make friends in cities you visit who have beds you can use.) Equipment repair, and other music-related expenses: $1,000. (Unless it all gets stolen. Ask Pretty Girls Make Graves.)
We'll assume that food is out of pocket (it usually comes from the band slush fund, but that's out of pocket, technically), and all other expenses incurred are auxiliary (not guaranteed to happen), and while you should of course have a good contingency if bad things happen, they're less costs than crises for a band anyway (#1 cause of band fighting: whether something justifies spending band money on it, instead of personal money.)
Total costs: $11,000.
Revenue ($88,000) - costs ($11,000) = $77,000. Divided by 3 leaves you about $26,000 each. Which is actually a bit higher than the best I ever made in a band ($22,000) but then again, we never made any money on shirts, and we didn't gig quite this much. Plus the gig only lasts maybe 3 months, and then you need a real job for the rest of the year, so you make another $18,000 working in your label's mail room or stocking groceries or doing tech support or whatever. And you wait till next year, where you might make $30,000 on the road, and you won't have to work one month. The American Dream, realized.
Now if you're an established act on a good label (think Fugazi or Apples In Stereo) you probably can pull 4 or 5 times this much money just on increased appearance fees alone. If you're just starting out on regional touring, you'll be lucky to make 75% of this.
One of the hidden advantages of being in a band is having multiple members. The 3 of you can cover 3 times the ground one person can, posting flyers, doing interviews, getting your name out, manning phones, etc. You really have to work as a cohesive unit on the "business" side of being in a band if you want to succeed. If one person simply refuses to help out, they've got to go, and the sooner the better, because being in a band of the dedication level I described requires financial sacrifice. To make up for it, you need real dedication to the band's economics from all of its members. And the plus is, if
If you don't enjoy puzzles that much, why would you even go to the exhibit in the first place? Clearly it's a place for puzzle lovers, who no doubt would enjoy actually doing a puzzle in addition to simply viewing them.
Uhh, trickle-down economics was shot down in 1986. That's why Reagan had to repeal all his tax cuts and ride the deficit train. Fast forward 20 years, and we're doing the same thing (except we're not repealing the tax cuts, so our deficits are even higher.)
Look, the real frank truth is that profit margins in America are higher than they've ever been, and CEO pay is higher than it's ever been, and operating expenses above mid-level management are higher than they've ever been. There is more money at the top than ever, and it is not showing up in the local economy. Period. The real problem is that a lack of moral calculus and the lack of a perceived "greed ceiling" (the point at which an individual decides they have made enough money and can afford to make less money) has made it hard for average Americans to get involved in the wealth creation system our founding fathers set up so long ago.
Benefits, health care, retirement - all used to be corporate guarantees, but no more. Companies offer no loyalty to the employees at the bottom any more. It's a regressive system, and it is being increasingly subsidized by the mysterious money pit that is the American federal deficit. Eventually that bubble will burst, and when it does, it will get very, very brutal here. That "greed ceiling" will come crashing down harder than ever, and everybody will suffer. That's the price of only viewing things in the short run (as your comical "big wig bonuses = increased consumer spending" laissez-faire econ 101 theory espouts.)
Trifecta comes from combining the prefix "tri-" and the word "perfecta", meaning perfect. It simply means achieving three criteria perfectly. They don't have to be in order (that's not implied by the word.) So if I said in order to win a game, you had to a) collect $100, b) cross the finish line, and c) answer a trivia question, and you did so, then you've hit a trifecta.
In fact, trifecta is a great word to use if there are 3 conditions that really sum up a particular position or situation. If you win the 100m, 200m, and 400m races, you've hit the trifecta of track glory. Or if you win the Oscar, Golden Globe, and SGA award, you've won the trifecta of a solid acting performance.
Trifecta. Three perfections. That's it. Not just horse racing.
How come non-RIAA labels can't form an "anti-RIAA" coalition? Most labels not on the RIAA are pretty hip, they have tracks for download without DRM on their sites, they're real big on freebies and artist promotion, and they're generally more about the music itself than the big labels.
So why can't they generate some sort of composite publicity for their activities? Why can't they call themselves soemthing fun like "AWESOME" (Association of Wedding Evil SOBs Out of the Music Enterprise) and run press releases like the RIAA? Donate some money to the EFF? Have some benefit concerts to Kill the RIAA?
Get your acts together, people! Let's synergize our paradigms, or something! Go go go!
Most home computer users want the Internet and a word processor. In fact, there is a HUGE market for the bottom-of-the-line laptop systems of today - 40GB HD, 1.3 GHz, a snazzy monitor, and a WiFi card. That's all you need for the basics of computing - it can even handle music and movies!
It is the simple truth: we are well past the point where the most basic computer can meet the average user's needs. People can make up new "needs" (Vista - or even better, HD video) but right now the only thing we should be spending money on is more bandwidth and better connectivity. Once we have full constant connectivity, easy quick access to all IPv6 addresses, and a super stable protocol, our computing needs as a society will have been met. Any thing beyond that is, of course, welcomed and great - but it is just that, something beyond our needs, and merely a desire.
And along with this wonderful hardware utopia, is the software utopia of OSS. Which is that in 10 years, if we have OSS that can run the protocols and the connectivity, run the Internet and do basic productivity suite software stuff well, then we're done with that, too. It's a long haul, people, and OSS is the inevitable victor.
PS Why does nobody ever really consider the long run? As in, ever? From President Bush to global warming scientists to Slashdot posters to the lowliest insect, nobody has any consideration for the long run. It would certainly do our society a lot of good to have someone paid to consider it.
Constitutional Law 101: There is a major part of jurisprudence known as the "suspect classification." It drives most discrimination lawsuits in this country (including Loving v. Virginia (1967), which ruled statutes outlawing miscegenation were Unconstitutional.)
You aren't allowed to discriminate against people via the 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the law UNLESS you have a reasonable reason for doing so. So it's okay for a NASCAR team to not hire any blind drivers, and it's okay for a college to not admit you unless you made a certain score on the SAT. But if your classifications of people are "suspect", then you can get dinged by the 14th.
And while any class in a specific suit may be "suspect", there are the generally agreed-upon ones we in the government all know and love: race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, national origin, and family status. But sexual orientation is EXPLICITLY missing from this list, and is not viewed as a suspect classification. And the simple reason why is that the minority is, in fact, *too* minor. If our country was a good deal gayer in demography, we might get it on the list. But the fact is that the GLBT community accounts for at most 5% of the population, and probably less than that.
On top of that, most Americans in general are indifferent to people who are foreign-born. They aren't actively incensed that someone is Jamaican or Swedish or Vietnamese. But many Americans are hostile to the members of the GLBT community; this only exacerbates the "most minor minority" problem. And to make matters even worse, because homosexuals can hide their status (unlike their gender or race), many people feel they are somehow being forced to acknowledge something that doesn't need to be acknowledged (this is certainly how my parents feel about it. (DISCLAIMER: I'm not gay.))
Frankly (and unfortunately) homosexuality will always be a fringe cause, because its member set is so low. People can argue on principle all they want, but attempting to create gay rights through the American government is a poor strategy. The best thing that the GLBT community could do would be to live their private lives as openly, as humanely, and as unabashedly as possible. It is simply going to take a generation or two to get American society acclimated to the idea that gays are normal people, just like it took 100 years to accept that blacks were not some inferior species. I wish them the best of luck in all their endeavors, but the GLBT community does not seem to have a very worldly-wise view of the history of fringe causes.
The obvious solution to this is that Firefox should make the browser homepage open up and offer you (concisely and quickly) the 10 Most Popular Extensions, and some links to some more.
They should make Extensions part of their introductory spiel, and they should make them more accessible and drawn in. They should have "Extensions Packages" wherein you can download 5 XPIs at once and have them all install. I'm a power user, and even I'm turned off by the prospect of hunting through dozens of extensions to find something worthwhile.
I am going to make this my pet project: The ACID2 test is the most worthless implementation test ever created, and it is not worth mentioning as any sort of benchmark for browsers.
CSS2 compliance? A noble goal. A coherent box model? Fabulous.
ACID2? Doesn't mean anything to anybody, as you can be ACID2 compliant and still have a crapload of rendering issues and standards violations.
So please, please, please, W3C, or SOMEBODY with half a brain towards the real standards, please come up with a new test that genuinely represents a successful web browser compliance test. Call it ACID3, or better yet, BASE ("the complete oppposite of ACID") and make it represent something meaningful to the average web designer.
Slashdot Mirror
Politicians are much, much cheaper than that.
You can get $600,000 in sweetheart deals just by donating $40,000 to a House campaign. Oh, and note that that's 25 people giving money, not 1 person.
Sure, two grand a person is a lot for representation, but look at the ROI. And it would only take 4,000 people donating $10 each to a cause to get this kind of treatment. Or 400 people giving $100 each.
Consider the following five forms of art: literature, music, film, painting, and video games.
Everyone can paint.
Almost everyone can make music (everyone can clap their hands, most can hum, a good majority can sing on-key.)
About the same number of people can do film (witness the cameraphone / YouTube craze.)
Slightly less than everyone can do literature (assuming literacy is the standard for literature.)
But who can make a video game?
It requires a combination of computer literacy, logic, programming knowhow, AND some knowledge of usability to make a game that could be considered playable, even in the crudest sense.
So to actually create even the most basic video game requires a level of competency far above creating the most basic literature, painting, music, or even film. And the learning curve for it is exponential. In short, there will always be a lot more artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers than computer programmers. And by the simple law of averages, there'll be more "highbrow" artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers.
And what's worse, is that everyone can have a highbrow idea, and convert it into pseudocode.
An experiment: ask someone to describe how they would program a game of tic-tac-toe. Almost everyone can do it, it's just like the rules: One player is X, one player is O, play alternates back and forth, and after each play, you check to see if there is a row, column, or diagonal of Xs or Os.
But then ask them to code it, and most would balk. They know the ideas, but not the syntax. They know the logic, but not the programmatic flow. They know what recursion, instantiation, and nested conditionals are, but not how to code for it.
So really, the issue is that most people problably have highbrow game ideas, but abandon them at the sheer thought of implementing them, whereas a person with a highbrow idea for a piece of music, a novella, or a sculpture might just jump into it.
Barriers to entry aren't always just money and time.
Actually, I think the idea behind the summary has it backwards: in the 1960s and 70s, music, movies, and other forms of media and entertainment required a physical commitment of some sort, either by attending the show, owning the vinyl, buying the book, etc.
Now let's forget the term "highbrow" and instead substitute "niche", which more closely defines the species we are looking for: a form of entertainment with a limited but strong audience.
In the old days form, a niche market could be created by a physical community - a specialist bookstore, arthouse theater, independent record store, etc. And once catalog mailings sprung up, guess what? All the brick and mortar stores dumped all their independent books, movies, and records into catalogs and only left the hits in the aisles.
Video games, since their earliest days, have had an alternate method of delivery: the Internet. And niche games have clearly served themselves better by using the Internet as a delivery mechanism: platform-independence, low development costs, and an easy way to generate a community.
Now music and video have their own low-entry methods of delivery: YouTube, MySpace, GarageBand, Google Video, etc all give self-budgeted filmmakers and musicians an opportunity to show off their talents.
The key difference is that video games require much more education and technical knowhow to create than a book, a video, or a piece of music. The difference between the greatest director or producer of all-time and a guy with a camera or a microphone in his garage is great, but not nearly as great as the difference between an expert programmer and a guy with a computer.
So while music, movies, books, and most other content benefit from the Long Tail, the other barrier to entry (technical knowhow) keeps out most people (who might have highbrow ideas) from joining the game developer industry.
Now, forgetting t
Here's a media PC that actually looks like AV gear, though yes, it does cost $700.
http://www.magicitx.com/store/mb-dvs-01.html
Especially because it's funny that you pay so many X dollars for proprietary support, and open source support is just so much easier to deal with. That's just sad on Microsoft's (and other software vendors - Oracle, I'm looking at you) part.
The guy on the street corner shouldn't have a better watch repair system than the guy in the jewelry store.
Make something idiotproof and we'll make a better idiot.
Seriously, they're complaining about the Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?
...
Seriously!?
IE7 fixes the Holly Hack, the box model, PNGs, the pixel jog, the double margin float, child selectors, position:fixed, the XMLHttpRequest object, XML degradation, the phantom box, percentage vs. auto, the PEEKABOO bug (Oh My God - line-height bug, too!), EMACScript degradation
IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6. And because they have a new product, they're going to work harder on CSS2.1 for the next year while they claw their way back into their 90+% market share.
I could honestly care less about ACID2 compliance, and the people who do are impractical pedants. ESPECIALLY when IE6 fails so many more basic standards tests than ACID2, all of which IE7 is fixing.
It is like complaining that you passed calculus without knowing how to use a slide rule. Ridiculous.
The Long Tail is not about "choices" and option paralysis. The Long Tail theory assumes you know what you're looking for! The demand has always been built in - the problem has been supply.
The Internet's low barrier to entry means that the sheer volume of total supply has increased dramatically. Before the Internet, there was a large section of demand for obscure and otherwise "non-hit" material that could not be met by traditional brick and mortar stores. Now these needs can be met, without sacrificing any of the supply of "hit" material.
It's very simple. Nothing to do with choice. All about supply. Econ 101.
Like the famous quote, no two countries with a McDonald's in them have gone to war with each other. Democracies don't go war to with each other, because democracies are governed by moderation, and they usually have strong diplomatic ties between them. And McDonald's are ostensibly drawn to stabile governments. The only exception to this is the US and Panama in 1989, which came more because democracy was subverted in the Panamanian elections and Bush was decidedly less lenient with regards to drugs than Reagan had been.
So no, it is not an economic reality, but it is inherently tied to a lack of moderation in one side of the conflict. That is why democracy is so important to the world. It is the one supreme human ideal that must be pushed above all others - not just because it embodies the concepts of freedom, equality, justice, and fairness, but also because it embodies the ideas of moderation, restraint, and deliberation. Which negates the need for nuclear weapons.
Yeah! WebTV, your time has come!
It may be easy to sneak it past them, but do you really think your parents don't know about all your hiding places by the time you're 14? They can guilt trip you with just one look of disappointment. They can smell fear. And even better, they learned all your deception and trickery back when you were 4 years old and couldn't hide it as well.
... 2...)
Yeah, your parents? They're ON to you. And if you managed to sneak it in, they'd find it later, while you were at school or off with your friends. And they probably wouldn't say anything about it until 3 months later - use it as a bargaining chip against you instead.
Good parents are like those cops who give you warnings when you speed. They bust you, they shame you, they tell you don't do it again, and they let you go. And the best parents, they know the difference between reckless driving and not using your turn signal.
(Car analogy karma bonus in 3
What if a thief towed the truck off? Certainly the car can still be stolen without actually driving it away.
Actually, all Hollywood has done is added remakes to their repertoire. They haven't shown a real slowdown in original pictures (of blockbuster or indie niche variety) since the 80s, when sequelization and remakes began emerging as a real industry standard.
I wrote a piece about unoriginality in Hollywood for E2, it pretty much has all the numbers.
Back in the 40s and 50s, Hollywood relied on literary adaptations. Today we rely on TV and old movies as our sources. We've just evolved with the culture, that's all. Nothing new. This is just the 21st century version of the "the book was better" argument.
Having seen Head, it is a very surreal and ahead of its time experience. It's not great, but it's not that bad, either. Kind of like a poor man's Tommy crossed with a poor man's Monty Python. Crossed with the Monkees TV show, which is of course also fairly funny and cartoonish.
Seriously, have you ever heard anyone really run that successful a campaign by calling their opponent a "pervert lover"? Being "soft on crime"?
Can you seriously imagine the commercial they would have to run to convey that image in regards to this bill?
"Representative Hogan is out of touch with America. He voted against a law that would prohibit minors from visiting MySpace.com in public libraries. Does that sound like the kind of guy you'd want in office?"
Everybody loves to be like, "Oh, well voters just eat that up, they're dumb and gullible," but no. Not really. No they're not. Most of them won't care about this bill one way or the other. And BECAUSE of that, any smart Representative ought to have the courage and conviction to say this law is inappropriate government meddling, and we don't need it. And be able to easily defend that charge at home. In 8 simple words, too.
"That bill is a violation of our liberties."
People in this country, they don't care about liberties in the rhetorical sense, but trust me, the few voters who use this bill (and bills like it) as a lynchpin issue in who they're voting for are the ones out of touch. And they'll get called on it.
I guess my point is I'm tired of all this tsk-tsk Chicken Little hysteria that we're all being labelled "unpatriotic" and "terrorists" and "pedo lovers" because of our positions. Who out there is actually doing this? Who is stifling your dissent? Who is really out there calling you a terrorist? Ann Coulter? Give me a break. Have your convictions, stick by them, voice them loudly and proudly. Nothing will happen to you.
So stop being afraid.
An alternative band economics tutorial for a mid-sized band with regional/semi-national touring (from an ex-band member):
You have 3 members. You have a booking agent (who collects 5% commission on all gigs booked) and otherwise it's all you.
You play 40 gigs. You make (a fairly liberal) $1,000 a gig. (Some places pay $100. Some places pay $2,500. Most places pay around $1,000. Plus free beer!) $40,000 - your agent's take ($2,000) = $38,000 in concert revenue.
Your latest CD's production session cost you $30,000, you printed 10,000 CDs for $1 a CD = $10,000. You sell 20 CDs at each gig, at $10 a pop, netting you $80,000 - ($40,000 costs) = $40,000 on CDs. Doubled your investment!
You also make shirts and stickers, but those are basically sold at-cost as promos for your bands (for future concerts + CD revenue.) Profit line: we'll be generous and say you make $5,000 on swag. (If you are a major-label band, you make much, much more on your shirts. Some mid-level indie bands try to do this kind of thing, too. Major turn off. (I'm looking at you, Yo La Tengo.))
And finally, one of your songs gets picked up for play on a regional sports commercial (happens more than you think), and you get a hefty $5,000 contract for a royalty-free limited use of your song in that commercial. (This is unlikely for your average band, but happens a lot at the level just below the superIndies.)
(If your song is picked up for a soundtrack to a big-budget movie, you can pull up to $40,000. Then you can subsidize your CD sales a bit to increase exposure. Which you offset by negotiating for a slightly higher appearance fee at concerts. The major coup for ANY band is to get exposure on a nationally-marketed product. Ideally one you can sleep on at night after you snuggled with it.)
Total revenues: $88,000.
Costs:
Travel to the gigs: $5,000.
Hotel: $5,000. (A money-saving tip: make friends in cities you visit who have beds you can use.)
Equipment repair, and other music-related expenses: $1,000. (Unless it all gets stolen. Ask Pretty Girls Make Graves.)
We'll assume that food is out of pocket (it usually comes from the band slush fund, but that's out of pocket, technically), and all other expenses incurred are auxiliary (not guaranteed to happen), and while you should of course have a good contingency if bad things happen, they're less costs than crises for a band anyway (#1 cause of band fighting: whether something justifies spending band money on it, instead of personal money.)
Total costs: $11,000.
Revenue ($88,000) - costs ($11,000) = $77,000. Divided by 3 leaves you about $26,000 each. Which is actually a bit higher than the best I ever made in a band ($22,000) but then again, we never made any money on shirts, and we didn't gig quite this much. Plus the gig only lasts maybe 3 months, and then you need a real job for the rest of the year, so you make another $18,000 working in your label's mail room or stocking groceries or doing tech support or whatever. And you wait till next year, where you might make $30,000 on the road, and you won't have to work one month. The American Dream, realized.
Now if you're an established act on a good label (think Fugazi or Apples In Stereo) you probably can pull 4 or 5 times this much money just on increased appearance fees alone. If you're just starting out on regional touring, you'll be lucky to make 75% of this.
One of the hidden advantages of being in a band is having multiple members. The 3 of you can cover 3 times the ground one person can, posting flyers, doing interviews, getting your name out, manning phones, etc. You really have to work as a cohesive unit on the "business" side of being in a band if you want to succeed. If one person simply refuses to help out, they've got to go, and the sooner the better, because being in a band of the dedication level I described requires financial sacrifice. To make up for it, you need real dedication to the band's economics from all of its members. And the plus is, if
If you don't enjoy puzzles that much, why would you even go to the exhibit in the first place? Clearly it's a place for puzzle lovers, who no doubt would enjoy actually doing a puzzle in addition to simply viewing them.
Uhh, trickle-down economics was shot down in 1986. That's why Reagan had to repeal all his tax cuts and ride the deficit train. Fast forward 20 years, and we're doing the same thing (except we're not repealing the tax cuts, so our deficits are even higher.)
Look, the real frank truth is that profit margins in America are higher than they've ever been, and CEO pay is higher than it's ever been, and operating expenses above mid-level management are higher than they've ever been. There is more money at the top than ever, and it is not showing up in the local economy. Period. The real problem is that a lack of moral calculus and the lack of a perceived "greed ceiling" (the point at which an individual decides they have made enough money and can afford to make less money) has made it hard for average Americans to get involved in the wealth creation system our founding fathers set up so long ago.
Benefits, health care, retirement - all used to be corporate guarantees, but no more. Companies offer no loyalty to the employees at the bottom any more. It's a regressive system, and it is being increasingly subsidized by the mysterious money pit that is the American federal deficit. Eventually that bubble will burst, and when it does, it will get very, very brutal here. That "greed ceiling" will come crashing down harder than ever, and everybody will suffer. That's the price of only viewing things in the short run (as your comical "big wig bonuses = increased consumer spending" laissez-faire econ 101 theory espouts.)
What's wrong with Luddite? Phobia implies a kind of paralyzing fear, Luddism is more like "aggressive opposition."
Seriously, no.
Trifecta comes from combining the prefix "tri-" and the word "perfecta", meaning perfect. It simply means achieving three criteria perfectly. They don't have to be in order (that's not implied by the word.) So if I said in order to win a game, you had to a) collect $100, b) cross the finish line, and c) answer a trivia question, and you did so, then you've hit a trifecta.
In fact, trifecta is a great word to use if there are 3 conditions that really sum up a particular position or situation. If you win the 100m, 200m, and 400m races, you've hit the trifecta of track glory. Or if you win the Oscar, Golden Globe, and SGA award, you've won the trifecta of a solid acting performance.
Trifecta. Three perfections. That's it. Not just horse racing.
How come non-RIAA labels can't form an "anti-RIAA" coalition? Most labels not on the RIAA are pretty hip, they have tracks for download without DRM on their sites, they're real big on freebies and artist promotion, and they're generally more about the music itself than the big labels.
So why can't they generate some sort of composite publicity for their activities? Why can't they call themselves soemthing fun like "AWESOME" (Association of Wedding Evil SOBs Out of the Music Enterprise) and run press releases like the RIAA? Donate some money to the EFF? Have some benefit concerts to Kill the RIAA?
Get your acts together, people! Let's synergize our paradigms, or something! Go go go!
For many many people this is simply not true.
Most home computer users want the Internet and a word processor. In fact, there is a HUGE market for the bottom-of-the-line laptop systems of today - 40GB HD, 1.3 GHz, a snazzy monitor, and a WiFi card. That's all you need for the basics of computing - it can even handle music and movies!
It is the simple truth: we are well past the point where the most basic computer can meet the average user's needs. People can make up new "needs" (Vista - or even better, HD video) but right now the only thing we should be spending money on is more bandwidth and better connectivity. Once we have full constant connectivity, easy quick access to all IPv6 addresses, and a super stable protocol, our computing needs as a society will have been met. Any thing beyond that is, of course, welcomed and great - but it is just that, something beyond our needs, and merely a desire.
And along with this wonderful hardware utopia, is the software utopia of OSS. Which is that in 10 years, if we have OSS that can run the protocols and the connectivity, run the Internet and do basic productivity suite software stuff well, then we're done with that, too. It's a long haul, people, and OSS is the inevitable victor.
PS Why does nobody ever really consider the long run? As in, ever? From President Bush to global warming scientists to Slashdot posters to the lowliest insect, nobody has any consideration for the long run. It would certainly do our society a lot of good to have someone paid to consider it.
Constitutional Law 101: There is a major part of jurisprudence known as the "suspect classification." It drives most discrimination lawsuits in this country (including Loving v. Virginia (1967), which ruled statutes outlawing miscegenation were Unconstitutional.)
You aren't allowed to discriminate against people via the 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the law UNLESS you have a reasonable reason for doing so. So it's okay for a NASCAR team to not hire any blind drivers, and it's okay for a college to not admit you unless you made a certain score on the SAT. But if your classifications of people are "suspect", then you can get dinged by the 14th.
And while any class in a specific suit may be "suspect", there are the generally agreed-upon ones we in the government all know and love: race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, national origin, and family status. But sexual orientation is EXPLICITLY missing from this list, and is not viewed as a suspect classification. And the simple reason why is that the minority is, in fact, *too* minor. If our country was a good deal gayer in demography, we might get it on the list. But the fact is that the GLBT community accounts for at most 5% of the population, and probably less than that.
On top of that, most Americans in general are indifferent to people who are foreign-born. They aren't actively incensed that someone is Jamaican or Swedish or Vietnamese. But many Americans are hostile to the members of the GLBT community; this only exacerbates the "most minor minority" problem. And to make matters even worse, because homosexuals can hide their status (unlike their gender or race), many people feel they are somehow being forced to acknowledge something that doesn't need to be acknowledged (this is certainly how my parents feel about it. (DISCLAIMER: I'm not gay.))
Frankly (and unfortunately) homosexuality will always be a fringe cause, because its member set is so low. People can argue on principle all they want, but attempting to create gay rights through the American government is a poor strategy. The best thing that the GLBT community could do would be to live their private lives as openly, as humanely, and as unabashedly as possible. It is simply going to take a generation or two to get American society acclimated to the idea that gays are normal people, just like it took 100 years to accept that blacks were not some inferior species. I wish them the best of luck in all their endeavors, but the GLBT community does not seem to have a very worldly-wise view of the history of fringe causes.
The obvious solution to this is that Firefox should make the browser homepage open up and offer you (concisely and quickly) the 10 Most Popular Extensions, and some links to some more.
They should make Extensions part of their introductory spiel, and they should make them more accessible and drawn in. They should have "Extensions Packages" wherein you can download 5 XPIs at once and have them all install. I'm a power user, and even I'm turned off by the prospect of hunting through dozens of extensions to find something worthwhile.
I am going to make this my pet project: The ACID2 test is the most worthless implementation test ever created, and it is not worth mentioning as any sort of benchmark for browsers.
CSS2 compliance? A noble goal. A coherent box model? Fabulous.
ACID2? Doesn't mean anything to anybody, as you can be ACID2 compliant and still have a crapload of rendering issues and standards violations.
So please, please, please, W3C, or SOMEBODY with half a brain towards the real standards, please come up with a new test that genuinely represents a successful web browser compliance test. Call it ACID3, or better yet, BASE ("the complete oppposite of ACID") and make it represent something meaningful to the average web designer.