See I'm not even sure about that one (big budget movies). Originally I was trying to find a breakdown of where the money went in making Lord of the rings, the closest I came was here, where it says about a third of the budget went into marketing. The second thing I noticed though is that the lifetime gross is four times that of its production cost. Now I'm not sure if lifetime gross for movies includes dvd, merchandise sales or not, or if production budget really includes everything spent on the making of the movie, but I'd guess it adds up to a pretty nice profit at the end of the day despite downloading.
Yup a 400% return is pretty damn good, but the risk level of that kind of investment is worse then buying junk bonds! You are promised a fat return on your investment, but the risk of a flop is very very high. That was 94 Million to make it plus another 50 million to market it and that equals 144 million invested. 377 million Gross so about 233 million net, well maybe net, or it might be the Net Net..:). So really it is only about a 260% ROI.
And those poor bastards who invested millions to make 'Ishtar"... I think they know the meaning of "Junk Bonds" because the ROI on that little gem was -50%... Yup it cost 30 million to make and GROSSED 14 million and that is in 1987 money!. Can you say, OUCH!
Ohhhh and what you are looking for instead of <br> is <p>...
You still don't get it! If people can just download it, in full fidelity ( musically ) then why would they buy it? What is the added value in buying it? None. So this guy has spent his 20,000.00 and has all the tools. He puts SOME content on a torent, he seeds Facebook, YouTube or what have you to give people a taste. If you buy it from his site, unencumbered by ANY sort of rights management and then YOU post it on say, PirateBay or any of the other numerous sites and it just gets downloaded and no one buys it from HIS site anymore, then he will go broke, its a simple money in -v- money out equation. He STILL has to pay rent or a mortgage, Electricity, Water, Garbage, Taxes, clothes, shoes for kids ( if he has them ), Hosting Bill, bandwidth charges the whole deal.
I agree that middlemen are a pain, they suck money out of the income stream that the artist is generating. Finding a middleman that wont rip you off is really hard, but they serve a purpose, they keep ( or should ) the cogs and gears of the machine that sells your content greased and running smoothly.
That's the difference between copyright infringement and stealing. If I steal something from you, you have to replace it somehow if you want to sell it to a paying customer. That's additional cost, and if I steal enough I can drive you into the red. If instead I copy your product, you still have the original and can sell it if you can find a buyer. This should show you why you are wrong. You wrote the key phrase, "if you can find a buyer". If you can get something for free are you going to buy it? I think not. I mean what is your motivation to lay down your hard earned cash? Some notion of altruism or "I support the arts" or "Wow this music is so good and relevant to my world view, that I will just go and give money to the creator of the content?" Please, perhaps 1 person in 10000 is that way, but the vast majority of the people will simply point their browser, click save-as and on to their iPod, Mp3 Player, phone or what have you it goes, and not even a note of thanks, much less money.
This is really amusing, but least I laugh to hard allow me to enlighten some...
The mighty Peregrine Falcon, THE fastest animal in the skies, bar none, have been clocked in dives exceeding 200mph, with radar. Now that is pretty damn fast for anything made of bone, muscle and sinew and covered in something as delicate as feathers. But one has to examine the actions of the animal when it accomplishes these seemingly impossible feats of speed.
Fist of all, much like the famous ( or infamous depending on your POV, especially if you were a pilot in the early very underpowered versions ) F-14 Tomcat Naval Jet Fighter, it makes maximum use of variable wing geometry. When a Peregrine stoops ( the technical term for diving from altitude in the bird world ) its 39 to 43 inch wings fold in very tightly making the outline of the bird look pretty like a "W", leaving just enough airfoil hanging out to effect control. This reduces stress on the main wing spar ( their bones and joints ) by a huge margin thus allowing it to accomplish this feat without tearing its wings off.
Now I don't have an actual measurement of their wing span in a full speed stoop, but from photo's I estimate that it reduces wing span by a good 75% or more. The area of the wing that would comprise the distance between a human elbow and the tips of our fingers goes parallel to the body and the upper wing ( the area from a human shoulder to the elbow ) then are pulled in close to the head, further reducing wing span.
Transition from this "clean" configuration to a "Dirty" configuration after either missing or hitting its prey can be quite rapid and causes the bird to bleed off speed at a very high rate. A Falcon cannot make a "pylon" ( a turn in an airplane in which one rolls the airplane from straight and level flight by nearly 90 degrees and then applies maximum UP elevator ) turn, the force on the wings would quickly overcome the bone, tendon, muscle and joint strength. Now this is not to say the are not maneuverable in a stoop but as you would surmise their maneuverability is greatly reduced at speed. Another very interesting feature of the bird is its nostrils. Small bony tubercles in a falcon's nostrils guide the air and shock wave to prevent over pressuring the lungs and giving the bird the ability to breath while diving.
so while looking to nature can be inspiring for aeronautical design there are very real limitations in duplicating the ability of a bird with mechanical devices. Another instance would be the original Wright Flyer. It did not have ailerons, it used what is called "Wing warping" which is what birds do, but it was found to be quite impractical since the amount of wing warping required to provide the same effectiveness as a bird required that the wings be so flexible to the point of losing to much strength. Now birds do Wing warping one better as they can not only warp their wings but they can dip a wing, decrease span, warp, move their tail in all axes, and do this all at the same time, providing maneuverability that airplane designers can only dream of.
On whales and submarines. If it were not for the requirement that we a) Keep the water out of the people tank and b) be able to stay submerged for months on end, and c) carry weapons that are stand-off capable, perhaps a Blue Whale would be a decent model to study in submarine development, but not as much as one would think. One must remember that a whale of any kind is a completely articulated bit of construction. It can bend and twist in any direction thus altering its hydrodynamic profile at will. Careful study of its means of propulsion reveals that it is a "whole body" movement, not simply a movement of the flukes in an up and down motion. It was also discovered some time ago that whales overcome friction in the water by way of their blubber. Careful examination revealed that hydrodynamic pressure is relieved by the blubber and skin actualy undulating in concert with the pressure waves to facilitate their movement dow
The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well.
Last time I checked there are not many rivers left to damn up for hydro so the juice has to come from someplace and since fusion power isn't quite ready for prime time you are going to have to build a hell of a lot more power plants to transfer the power generation from a facility on 4 wheels to some very big stationary ones.
That being said, you can gain a hell of a lot of efficiency because large power plants do much better then the internal combustion engine, but they still have to burn something, either that or be prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
This is only the opening Salvo... This thing is far from over.
Even Sweden will eventually fold to the political pressure, just like "secret" Swiss bank accounts eventually became not so secret. There is such a huge amount of money riding on this that eventually its going to happen, it just is, it is inevitable.
I mean enjoy the ride as long as you can, but like any other carnival ride, it eventually ends. Thats just the way it is. You or I might not like it, but thats long and short of it.
LOL, I think its up to buck two ninety eight ( with inflation )
But yes I quite agree with you that we are in desperate need of both patent and copyright reform because they have been hijacked to illogical extremes by some very well funded congressmen by the like of Disney and such.
But there has to be a mechanism in place and enforced with great rigor to protect the legitimate rights of content owners. There will always be large companies that own the rights to various works, and there will always be individuals who own the rights to works, but the system must protect them equally.
I have said this before and I will say it again, movies cost massive amounts of money to bring to the screen and have multiple investors to spread the risk of having a flop that does not even make back the money it cost to produce it, and there are lots of them. Music is the same way. Very few bands have the kind of money it takes to get 100,000 cd's pressed and distributed. Very few individuals are willing to risk the kind of money it takes to put and act on the road to support a CD release and so companies with the money pony up the cash to make it happen and expect a return on their investment, so they negotiate to own the distribution rights and copyright to a particular CD pressing with X going to the artist, band what have you and Y going to them. The way the proceeds are split up is based on the contract the artist signs, nothing more nothing less, and if the band finds it to be to one sided no one is forcing them to sign the deal, they are free to look elsewhere for backing.
I think a great way to do that would be to use the internet. You put some samples of your music up and say, "If you like this and you want to hear us in your town, then invest what you can afford, we will pay a dividend back to you and X rate. If you want to see our CD in Wall-Mart of whatever the retail distribution channel is the we need the capitol to get the CD's pressed, so here is where you sign up and this is what we estimate the return will be for your investment.
The whole issue comes down to "Will I sell one CD then wake up some morning to see it on a torrent and then I am not making a red cent for each copy downloaded." Now how do I pay my investors?".
You are an employee, therefor everything you write for them is considered "work for hire" and therefor owned by them en toto in just about every state and that is pretty much the end of it. The ONLY exception to this that I know if is by a contractual arrangement. I am a consultant and depending on the project I have written contracts where I own the code but grant the customer an unlimited license in perpetuity to distribute the code within their organization and have all the usual language that binds all "assigns and receivers" yadda yadda yadda
As another poster said, don't let that stop you from making the request. Make your case in writing, but up front and honest about the upside AND the downside. Start with your immediate manager and ONLY if that person says yes, proceed with h(er/is) backing. If the answer is no, then like the other poster said, thank them for their time, be gracious and don't push it.
Uhmmm Not so. Boeing 777 - 767 - 757 all have FADEC and without it the engines don't run. They have backups for the backups of the backups of the main system, but no power, no thrust. Come to think of it, the fuel valves are electrical as well and since the throttle quadrants are no longer connected to the fuel control vales mechanically, no power no control. Since the control surfaces are also fly by wire, no electrical power, no control of the airplane either. Fuel pumps and hydraulic pumps are driven by the turbines yes; but the control is all electrical. Before you become completely freaked out rest assured that total and complete power loss is not going to happen, well unless the engine falls off the plane. ALL turbine engines have permanent magnet alternators mechanically connected to the engine core and will generate enough power to keep the FADEC and ECC running at as little as 9% N2 and some even have them on N1 as well. Your entire panel may be dark but the throttles will still respond, provided you can relight at least one engine.
Even the good old Cessna 172, 182, 210 line will soon have FADEC and will have EFI. It is getting to the point where these systems are beyond proven, and they are finding their way into lots of various sectors of aviation. ECU's have advanced to the point where their reliability is equal to if not exceeding magnetos. I have a 1992 Toyota pickup that has EFI and an ECU that has never failed, ever.
Interesting story... When fly by wire was 1st put out there ( it became required since the planes were so big and the control surfaces were so large that you could not move them without hydraulics ) pilots went nuts because of the lack of feedback, especially when approaching stall speed! There was not buffeting of the controls that one normally feels, especially from the elevator. Boeing had to go back and design in a hydraulics system to actually shake the control yoke when the computer knew you were getting ready to stall!
I feel you on the whole issue, but I am sorry to report that your statement is not true.
Yeah right, trust me if he hadn't have put out versions 2,3,4,5,6 etc. he would be a wage slave at a lab right now. Copyright protects you from being ripped off, plain and simple. I'm sure people in other industries would be shocked to hear that they're being "ripped off" when they only get paid for the time they spend working. How nice it'd be to work for one day and get paid as if you'd been there all week!
Pff. "Wage slave" indeed - do you really have such disdain for people who work for a living?
Ohh piffle, You are being a bit to touchy there pal, this is/. fer god sakes. Hell I am a wage slave! I am a very well paid one, but never the less I am. If I work one day I get paid for one day ( consultant ). When I had a JOB I was on salary and quite often I got paid for 5 days when I was only there 3 and that was on top of paid vacation, but I didn't get paid overtime and I remember far to many 16 hour days.
If you don't put the next version ( of software at least ) out there, then your not gonna suck on the copyright tit for very long pal.
Sure you are. Look at Microsoft, for example: they squeezed money out of XP for several years, and the copyright on XP will ensure that they keep selling copies of Vista (because who in their right mind would pay for Vista when they could use XP for free?).
Well let me tell ya something, the Bill & Steve show would like to be sucking on the copyright tit one hell of a lot harder with Vista & Office 2007 then they are right now! Both of these are considered flops. Nobody in business wants Vista and they are holding off on Office 2007 in a big way. Vista is pretty much over, they have already starting hinting at release candidates for the next version of Windows. And bye the way, they are not getting XP for free, they can downgrade to it if they buy a Vista license or they can still get OEM XP from places like Dell and HP.
It's even more apparent in other fields. Look at Beatles albums or old Disney movies. How does anyone, except the people making money off of them, benefit from those still being under copyright?
Let me put it another way, why should anyone but the person / company who created the work be entitled to benefit from it? I mean what are you saying here, are you saying that after X time, you or anyone else should be able to start pressing Beatles CD's or Disney movies and start selling them?
I know someone who put himself through school to get a phd in optical design and spent every waking moment writing a better piece of optical design software. His software did 95% of what the major players in the optical design market did for 10% of the price. He published version 1.0 and before he knew it there were pirate copies showing up all over the place. Version 1.01 came along with a DONGOL to protect his Intellectual Property. The software is well into version 10, years later and it still comes with a DONGOL. So, he set out to make money by undercutting the "major players", and then got upset when he got undercut by someone else in turn? Forgive me if I don't see the big deal.
(BTW, you misspelled "dongle".)
Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. Not if you have patents and copyrights, you don't! You can work hard for a little bit up front, then sit back and keep squeezing money out of the work you've already done.
Yeah right, trust me if he hadn't have put out versions 2,3,4,5,6 etc. he would be a wage slave at a lab right now. Copyright protects you from being ripped off, plain and simple. If you don't put the next version ( of software at least ) out there, then your not gonna suck on the copyright tit for very long pal. He has competitors snapping at his heels constantly, trying to do what he does only better. You may have a copyright, but if you don't keep up the people that use your software they will go to your competitor, thats just the way it is.
Want an example of that? Look at MS Office. Now I hate the BORG as much as anyone, but if you look at what they did with office, you see why they took the market. OLE is arguably the worst technology ever designed, but it did something that brought the users to MS. You could plop that spreadsheet right into the middle of your Word document and badda-bing, instant eye popping memo that the boys in the big suite just went ga-ga over. Was Word superior to Word Perfect, or AMI-Pro or hell even Word Star, hell no. But the advent of being able to put all the bits together was a hit. The rest could not come even close to doing those kinds of things for quite a while. So copyright didn't save all the other word processors from the obscurity.
Seriously, what you're saying is pretty much what I've said in every copyright thread, but somehow your conclusion is 180 degrees off. If you want people to keep working, then abolish patents and copyrights: make them work for their income instead of charging rent on work they did in years past.
The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Of course they do, but some of them seem to want more than that. They want the fruits of everyone else's labor too, just because those others used some of the same ideas.
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor. Don't tell that to us, tell it to the people who want to milk their copyrights and patents instead of working!
For the same reason we have a copyright system. To allow a very few to extract above-market profits for an unreasonable amount of time at the vast expense of the many. Thank your Congressman for that, it wasn't always this way.
Yes that is the same tired response from someone who has never done the hard work, invested every penny they had and borrowed money from their family to bring a product to market, just to see it jumped on by 18 knock off shops and never see a penny for all their hard work. Yes there are things broken in both Patent and Copyright law, I certainly agree with that. But to hear someone like you blather on about the evils of patent and copyright just sickens me.
I know someone who put himself through school to get a phd in optical design and spent every waking moment writing a better piece of optical design software. His software did 95% of what the major players in the optical design market did for 10% of the price. He published version 1.0 and before he knew it there were pirate copies showing up all over the place. Version 1.01 came along with a DONGOL to protect his Intellectual Property. The software is well into version 10, years later and it still comes with a DONGOL.
Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor.
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
If you really look into it you will discover that IS demand. The population density does not make the numbers work for the accountants. The problem is, and always will be, that basic infrastructure is a twisted split between the government and business. Look at any infrastructure project. The market is there, but it costs serious money to put in infrastructure. The government goes into "partnership" with industry in the form of tax incentives, right of way, exclusive access to get infrastructure built. The problem(s) usually occur after the ripest fruit has been harvested, or put another way, when the easiest ore has been mined. After that, the partnership falls apart because the return for mining the deepest ore begins to get unacceptably thin and suddenly industry is not all to keen to keep on pushing forward. There will be delays, problems, and lots of stalling and at some point the hard ore will simply be forgotten.
I am with you, I was throwing in the cost of "tricking out the garage" as well. It is getting easier and a lot cheaper these days. I mean even with something like "Garage Band" from Apple ( comes standard on just about all Macs now ) you can pull in live stuff, do some decent EQ on it and mix it in with synthed tracks, drums and the like and with some massaging and some sonic knowledge and a non tin ear you can at least get something demo-worthy out.
I have this fantasy studio in my head, have had it for years. A place way out in the country, all the right gear and make a space for a band to come and make music and get it down. Then just toodle around the country, big towns small towns, listening to acts all over, everything from every part of the musical spectrum. Then pic a few acts every year and bring them there, they get a great place to live, room and board and like 3 months to put their best stuff down. They leave with the best that they can do on a mastered CD, ready to be duped, its all theirs, no strings, just a leg up.
Yes actually I sampled my way through A-Z, mostly focusing on the types of music that I prefer but I did listen to every categorized type and quite a few of the "undefinable" ( self proclaimed ). My sampling took me focused uninterrupted time. Obviously I did not listen to every song, from every album, but I did give it a fair listen.
I am sure I will return there to give the afore mentioned "bright Spots" more time, and search about a bit more, but my overall impression of the quality of the work set forth remains the same. Most of what I listed to was just not up to my standards of either:
Musicianship
Lyrical Content
Vocal Ability
Overall Sound
Engineering
I trust you will accept the notion that my impressions of the work are not completely and utterly subjective. Others may find the same sample that I took to be something completely different. I must confess that I grew up in the era(s) of some of the best singer/songwriters to date and so my expectations are high.
If you believe there are works that I should pay special attention to, please do not hesitate to point them out and I will make the time to give them focused attention and give you my considered opinion, in detail. I am always looking for music and musicians that are a cut above. I don't know what kind of music you like, but one of my more recent discoveries is Ingrid Jensen. She is out of Canada and is a jazz trumpet player who is beginning to mature into a quite excellent musician and I would say without qualification, in the best traditions of Miles Davis
Now I must confess there were some bright spots, but they were far and away the exception.
Mostly is was all badly mixed / mastered. The vocals were muddy and buried. When instruments took solos they tended to be either punched up WAY to much to the point that they were completely out of context, or not at all and the talent was lost in the background noise. Again this is bad recording engineering and thats why well recorded music that really represents what we hear live takes a damn good recording engineer and those cost money baby, especially when it comes time to master the tracks
Perhaps all of this can be sat at the feet of someone doing the encoding falling down on the job, but I kind of doubt it, since most encoding software, even at defaults, gives a pretty good representation of the original input. Something is going on there, your guess is as good as mine.
The best example I can give people to have a reference for truly GREAT recording engineering is Steely Dan. Say what you like about their talent ( which I think is HUGE ) or their VERY heavy reliance on the best studio musicians for both recorded and live performances, but the recording engineering on their work, always has been and always will be second to none. If you really want to know what great recording engineering is, listen to anything they have ever recorded, the work IS the art of studio recording.
The most fascinating part is that their recorded music usually survives the worst mauling by some idiot MP3 encoder to the point that it is still pleasant to listen to,
Your typical./'r just doesn't get it, nor do they care. They just want to be able to download or rip whatever they want, whenever they want and do whatever they want with anyones work, no matter how hard the person had to work to create it, no matter how much time it took them and lets face it, time = money, or chicken, bread, soup, laundry detergent, orthodontist appointments, light & heating bills or whatever.
I think your estimate is a bit low though, I would say to come up with a decent ( very small ) recording studio is going to cost more in the neighborhood of 10-15K and the sky is the limit.
I think music without the recording industry is great, musicians just have to find a way to be able to "quit their day job" without them, and then figure out how to be in every music outlet in ever city at the same time while listening to every commercial on television & radio and...
Wow! As I replied to the other person who replied back to my question, that looks suicidal. I cannot for the life of me see any reason to pull scripts from a remote machine. I have seen a lot of JS pulled from remote machines and even that makes me really scratch my head and wonder what those people are thinking. I would seem you are asking for one huge ass heap of trouble doing anything like that. I use the include statement quite often but its always to a directory outside the webroot, and very specific permissions limit that directory to RO. Yikes, it looks like a combination of lazy / clueless.
You on the other hand sound seem rather atypical, and so if the usage offended you I am sorry.
I have absolutely no problem with people thinking the provisions of copyright should be modified as it is our right to petition our representatives to do just that. If they do not respond in a manner that suits you you are then free to vote against them next time they come up for re-election. I live in the San Francisco bay area and I have pretty much had it with Senator Diane Feinstein and I will be voting against her in the next election and I will try and convince everyone I know to do the same.
To a certain extent the system is rigged to those with the money, but even that only goes so far, if enough people vote against an elected representative then you will get someone in there that just might do whats right.
In business there are things like trade secrets, documents, drawings and the like that you have to distribute to a jobber or some other outside entity to accomplish a task, but you really only want the outside entity to have them for the amount of time that they actually need them to get a task completed.
Typically this has been accomplished via NDA's or other legal agreements. It appears that in some instances they want more then a "promise" to destroy the information when it is no longer useful for the legitimate contracted purpose. Sort of like the old "This tape will self destruct in 10 seconds" gag from mission impossible.
The problem is that it really cannot be accomplished. You can use PGP or IronKey (tm) as others have suggested but that only prevents the material from being easily viewed by 3rd parties and does not address the "self destruct" desire.
I really cannot think of a way to make that happen. Every method that I can think of requires the destruct method to either be built into the data ( as a code block ) but even then something has to execute that code, and that is simply worked around.
It basically has to come down to trust. Either you trust the outside entities that you deal with or you don't. When I was in the military I had access to classified materials, and I was looked over from front to back top to bottom, my friends and neighbors were interviewed as well as my Principal from High School.
Sadly, I think the last 8 years of the current administration have re-enforced the notion of mistrust and it has found its way deep into the culture of corporate America.
Look if all your argument is going to based on straw men then please don't respond. I will be happy to debate points relent to the argument, but trying to compare copyright to the things that the Rosa Parks protested for is really actually absurd.
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Yup a 400% return is pretty damn good, but the risk level of that kind of investment is worse then buying junk bonds! You are promised a fat return on your investment, but the risk of a flop is very very high. That was 94 Million to make it plus another 50 million to market it and that equals 144 million invested. 377 million Gross so about 233 million net, well maybe net, or it might be the Net Net.. :). So really it is only about a 260% ROI.
And those poor bastards who invested millions to make 'Ishtar"... I think they know the meaning of "Junk Bonds" because the ROI on that little gem was -50%... Yup it cost 30 million to make and GROSSED 14 million and that is in 1987 money!. Can you say, OUCH!
Ohhhh and what you are looking for instead of <br> is <p>...This is the crux of it. Someone who actually gets it.
You still don't get it! If people can just download it, in full fidelity ( musically ) then why would they buy it? What is the added value in buying it? None. So this guy has spent his 20,000.00 and has all the tools. He puts SOME content on a torent, he seeds Facebook, YouTube or what have you to give people a taste. If you buy it from his site, unencumbered by ANY sort of rights management and then YOU post it on say, PirateBay or any of the other numerous sites and it just gets downloaded and no one buys it from HIS site anymore, then he will go broke, its a simple money in -v- money out equation. He STILL has to pay rent or a mortgage, Electricity, Water, Garbage, Taxes, clothes, shoes for kids ( if he has them ), Hosting Bill, bandwidth charges the whole deal.
I agree that middlemen are a pain, they suck money out of the income stream that the artist is generating. Finding a middleman that wont rip you off is really hard, but they serve a purpose, they keep ( or should ) the cogs and gears of the machine that sells your content greased and running smoothly.
That's the difference between copyright infringement and stealing. If I steal something from you, you have to replace it somehow if you want to sell it to a paying customer. That's additional cost, and if I steal enough I can drive you into the red. If instead I copy your product, you still have the original and can sell it if you can find a buyer. This should show you why you are wrong. You wrote the key phrase, "if you can find a buyer". If you can get something for free are you going to buy it? I think not. I mean what is your motivation to lay down your hard earned cash? Some notion of altruism or "I support the arts" or "Wow this music is so good and relevant to my world view, that I will just go and give money to the creator of the content?" Please, perhaps 1 person in 10000 is that way, but the vast majority of the people will simply point their browser, click save-as and on to their iPod, Mp3 Player, phone or what have you it goes, and not even a note of thanks, much less money.This is really amusing, but least I laugh to hard allow me to enlighten some...
The mighty Peregrine Falcon, THE fastest animal in the skies, bar none, have been clocked in dives exceeding 200mph, with radar. Now that is pretty damn fast for anything made of bone, muscle and sinew and covered in something as delicate as feathers. But one has to examine the actions of the animal when it accomplishes these seemingly impossible feats of speed.
Fist of all, much like the famous ( or infamous depending on your POV, especially if you were a pilot in the early very underpowered versions ) F-14 Tomcat Naval Jet Fighter, it makes maximum use of variable wing geometry. When a Peregrine stoops ( the technical term for diving from altitude in the bird world ) its 39 to 43 inch wings fold in very tightly making the outline of the bird look pretty like a "W", leaving just enough airfoil hanging out to effect control. This reduces stress on the main wing spar ( their bones and joints ) by a huge margin thus allowing it to accomplish this feat without tearing its wings off.
Now I don't have an actual measurement of their wing span in a full speed stoop, but from photo's I estimate that it reduces wing span by a good 75% or more. The area of the wing that would comprise the distance between a human elbow and the tips of our fingers goes parallel to the body and the upper wing ( the area from a human shoulder to the elbow ) then are pulled in close to the head, further reducing wing span.
Transition from this "clean" configuration to a "Dirty" configuration after either missing or hitting its prey can be quite rapid and causes the bird to bleed off speed at a very high rate. A Falcon cannot make a "pylon" ( a turn in an airplane in which one rolls the airplane from straight and level flight by nearly 90 degrees and then applies maximum UP elevator ) turn, the force on the wings would quickly overcome the bone, tendon, muscle and joint strength. Now this is not to say the are not maneuverable in a stoop but as you would surmise their maneuverability is greatly reduced at speed. Another very interesting feature of the bird is its nostrils. Small bony tubercles in a falcon's nostrils guide the air and shock wave to prevent over pressuring the lungs and giving the bird the ability to breath while diving.
so while looking to nature can be inspiring for aeronautical design there are very real limitations in duplicating the ability of a bird with mechanical devices. Another instance would be the original Wright Flyer. It did not have ailerons, it used what is called "Wing warping" which is what birds do, but it was found to be quite impractical since the amount of wing warping required to provide the same effectiveness as a bird required that the wings be so flexible to the point of losing to much strength. Now birds do Wing warping one better as they can not only warp their wings but they can dip a wing, decrease span, warp, move their tail in all axes, and do this all at the same time, providing maneuverability that airplane designers can only dream of.
On whales and submarines. If it were not for the requirement that we a) Keep the water out of the people tank and b) be able to stay submerged for months on end, and c) carry weapons that are stand-off capable, perhaps a Blue Whale would be a decent model to study in submarine development, but not as much as one would think. One must remember that a whale of any kind is a completely articulated bit of construction. It can bend and twist in any direction thus altering its hydrodynamic profile at will. Careful study of its means of propulsion reveals that it is a "whole body" movement, not simply a movement of the flukes in an up and down motion. It was also discovered some time ago that whales overcome friction in the water by way of their blubber. Careful examination revealed that hydrodynamic pressure is relieved by the blubber and skin actualy undulating in concert with the pressure waves to facilitate their movement dow
No worries, we all let our fingers get ahead of our brains now and again.
The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well.
Last time I checked there are not many rivers left to damn up for hydro so the juice has to come from someplace and since fusion power isn't quite ready for prime time you are going to have to build a hell of a lot more power plants to transfer the power generation from a facility on 4 wheels to some very big stationary ones.
That being said, you can gain a hell of a lot of efficiency because large power plants do much better then the internal combustion engine, but they still have to burn something, either that or be prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
This is only the opening Salvo... This thing is far from over.
Even Sweden will eventually fold to the political pressure, just like "secret" Swiss bank accounts eventually became not so secret. There is such a huge amount of money riding on this that eventually its going to happen, it just is, it is inevitable.
I mean enjoy the ride as long as you can, but like any other carnival ride, it eventually ends. Thats just the way it is. You or I might not like it, but thats long and short of it.
LOL, I think its up to buck two ninety eight ( with inflation )
But yes I quite agree with you that we are in desperate need of both patent and copyright reform because they have been hijacked to illogical extremes by some very well funded congressmen by the like of Disney and such.
But there has to be a mechanism in place and enforced with great rigor to protect the legitimate rights of content owners. There will always be large companies that own the rights to various works, and there will always be individuals who own the rights to works, but the system must protect them equally.
I have said this before and I will say it again, movies cost massive amounts of money to bring to the screen and have multiple investors to spread the risk of having a flop that does not even make back the money it cost to produce it, and there are lots of them. Music is the same way. Very few bands have the kind of money it takes to get 100,000 cd's pressed and distributed. Very few individuals are willing to risk the kind of money it takes to put and act on the road to support a CD release and so companies with the money pony up the cash to make it happen and expect a return on their investment, so they negotiate to own the distribution rights and copyright to a particular CD pressing with X going to the artist, band what have you and Y going to them. The way the proceeds are split up is based on the contract the artist signs, nothing more nothing less, and if the band finds it to be to one sided no one is forcing them to sign the deal, they are free to look elsewhere for backing.
I think a great way to do that would be to use the internet. You put some samples of your music up and say, "If you like this and you want to hear us in your town, then invest what you can afford, we will pay a dividend back to you and X rate. If you want to see our CD in Wall-Mart of whatever the retail distribution channel is the we need the capitol to get the CD's pressed, so here is where you sign up and this is what we estimate the return will be for your investment.
The whole issue comes down to "Will I sell one CD then wake up some morning to see it on a torrent and then I am not making a red cent for each copy downloaded." Now how do I pay my investors?".
You are an employee, therefor everything you write for them is considered "work for hire" and therefor owned by them en toto in just about every state and that is pretty much the end of it. The ONLY exception to this that I know if is by a contractual arrangement. I am a consultant and depending on the project I have written contracts where I own the code but grant the customer an unlimited license in perpetuity to distribute the code within their organization and have all the usual language that binds all "assigns and receivers" yadda yadda yadda
As another poster said, don't let that stop you from making the request. Make your case in writing, but up front and honest about the upside AND the downside. Start with your immediate manager and ONLY if that person says yes, proceed with h(er/is) backing. If the answer is no, then like the other poster said, thank them for their time, be gracious and don't push it.
Uhmmm Not so. Boeing 777 - 767 - 757 all have FADEC and without it the engines don't run. They have backups for the backups of the backups of the main system, but no power, no thrust. Come to think of it, the fuel valves are electrical as well and since the throttle quadrants are no longer connected to the fuel control vales mechanically, no power no control. Since the control surfaces are also fly by wire, no electrical power, no control of the airplane either. Fuel pumps and hydraulic pumps are driven by the turbines yes; but the control is all electrical. Before you become completely freaked out rest assured that total and complete power loss is not going to happen, well unless the engine falls off the plane. ALL turbine engines have permanent magnet alternators mechanically connected to the engine core and will generate enough power to keep the FADEC and ECC running at as little as 9% N2 and some even have them on N1 as well. Your entire panel may be dark but the throttles will still respond, provided you can relight at least one engine.
Even the good old Cessna 172, 182, 210 line will soon have FADEC and will have EFI. It is getting to the point where these systems are beyond proven, and they are finding their way into lots of various sectors of aviation. ECU's have advanced to the point where their reliability is equal to if not exceeding magnetos. I have a 1992 Toyota pickup that has EFI and an ECU that has never failed, ever.
Interesting story... When fly by wire was 1st put out there ( it became required since the planes were so big and the control surfaces were so large that you could not move them without hydraulics ) pilots went nuts because of the lack of feedback, especially when approaching stall speed! There was not buffeting of the controls that one normally feels, especially from the elevator. Boeing had to go back and design in a hydraulics system to actually shake the control yoke when the computer knew you were getting ready to stall!
I feel you on the whole issue, but I am sorry to report that your statement is not true.
And yes, I am a pilot.
You are SUCH an ASSHOLE.
Pff. "Wage slave" indeed - do you really have such disdain for people who work for a living?
Ohh piffle, You are being a bit to touchy there pal, this is /. fer god sakes. Hell I am a wage slave! I am a very well paid one, but never the less I am. If I work one day I get paid for one day ( consultant ). When I had a JOB I was on salary and quite often I got paid for 5 days when I was only there 3 and that was on top of paid vacation, but I didn't get paid overtime and I remember far to many 16 hour days.
If you don't put the next version ( of software at least ) out there, then your not gonna suck on the copyright tit for very long pal. Sure you are. Look at Microsoft, for example: they squeezed money out of XP for several years, and the copyright on XP will ensure that they keep selling copies of Vista (because who in their right mind would pay for Vista when they could use XP for free?).Well let me tell ya something, the Bill & Steve show would like to be sucking on the copyright tit one hell of a lot harder with Vista & Office 2007 then they are right now! Both of these are considered flops. Nobody in business wants Vista and they are holding off on Office 2007 in a big way. Vista is pretty much over, they have already starting hinting at release candidates for the next version of Windows. And bye the way, they are not getting XP for free, they can downgrade to it if they buy a Vista license or they can still get OEM XP from places like Dell and HP.
It's even more apparent in other fields. Look at Beatles albums or old Disney movies. How does anyone, except the people making money off of them, benefit from those still being under copyright?Let me put it another way, why should anyone but the person / company who created the work be entitled to benefit from it? I mean what are you saying here, are you saying that after X time, you or anyone else should be able to start pressing Beatles CD's or Disney movies and start selling them?
(BTW, you misspelled "dongle".) Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. Not if you have patents and copyrights, you don't! You can work hard for a little bit up front, then sit back and keep squeezing money out of the work you've already done.
Yeah right, trust me if he hadn't have put out versions 2,3,4,5,6 etc. he would be a wage slave at a lab right now. Copyright protects you from being ripped off, plain and simple. If you don't put the next version ( of software at least ) out there, then your not gonna suck on the copyright tit for very long pal. He has competitors snapping at his heels constantly, trying to do what he does only better. You may have a copyright, but if you don't keep up the people that use your software they will go to your competitor, thats just the way it is.
Want an example of that? Look at MS Office. Now I hate the BORG as much as anyone, but if you look at what they did with office, you see why they took the market. OLE is arguably the worst technology ever designed, but it did something that brought the users to MS. You could plop that spreadsheet right into the middle of your Word document and badda-bing, instant eye popping memo that the boys in the big suite just went ga-ga over. Was Word superior to Word Perfect, or AMI-Pro or hell even Word Star, hell no. But the advent of being able to put all the bits together was a hit. The rest could not come even close to doing those kinds of things for quite a while. So copyright didn't save all the other word processors from the obscurity.
Seriously, what you're saying is pretty much what I've said in every copyright thread, but somehow your conclusion is 180 degrees off. If you want people to keep working, then abolish patents and copyrights: make them work for their income instead of charging rent on work they did in years past. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Of course they do, but some of them seem to want more than that. They want the fruits of everyone else's labor too, just because those others used some of the same ideas. So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor. Don't tell that to us, tell it to the people who want to milk their copyrights and patents instead of working!Yes that is the same tired response from someone who has never done the hard work, invested every penny they had and borrowed money from their family to bring a product to market, just to see it jumped on by 18 knock off shops and never see a penny for all their hard work. Yes there are things broken in both Patent and Copyright law, I certainly agree with that. But to hear someone like you blather on about the evils of patent and copyright just sickens me.
I know someone who put himself through school to get a phd in optical design and spent every waking moment writing a better piece of optical design software. His software did 95% of what the major players in the optical design market did for 10% of the price. He published version 1.0 and before he knew it there were pirate copies showing up all over the place. Version 1.01 came along with a DONGOL to protect his Intellectual Property. The software is well into version 10, years later and it still comes with a DONGOL.
Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor.
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
Actually, no it isn't.
If you really look into it you will discover that IS demand. The population density does not make the numbers work for the accountants. The problem is, and always will be, that basic infrastructure is a twisted split between the government and business. Look at any infrastructure project. The market is there, but it costs serious money to put in infrastructure. The government goes into "partnership" with industry in the form of tax incentives, right of way, exclusive access to get infrastructure built. The problem(s) usually occur after the ripest fruit has been harvested, or put another way, when the easiest ore has been mined. After that, the partnership falls apart because the return for mining the deepest ore begins to get unacceptably thin and suddenly industry is not all to keen to keep on pushing forward. There will be delays, problems, and lots of stalling and at some point the hard ore will simply be forgotten.
Hey bro,
I am with you, I was throwing in the cost of "tricking out the garage" as well. It is getting easier and a lot cheaper these days. I mean even with something like "Garage Band" from Apple ( comes standard on just about all Macs now ) you can pull in live stuff, do some decent EQ on it and mix it in with synthed tracks, drums and the like and with some massaging and some sonic knowledge and a non tin ear you can at least get something demo-worthy out.
I have this fantasy studio in my head, have had it for years. A place way out in the country, all the right gear and make a space for a band to come and make music and get it down. Then just toodle around the country, big towns small towns, listening to acts all over, everything from every part of the musical spectrum. Then pic a few acts every year and bring them there, they get a great place to live, room and board and like 3 months to put their best stuff down. They leave with the best that they can do on a mastered CD, ready to be duped, its all theirs, no strings, just a leg up.
Nice dream anyway...
Rolls Eyes
Yes actually I sampled my way through A-Z, mostly focusing on the types of music that I prefer but I did listen to every categorized type and quite a few of the "undefinable" ( self proclaimed ). My sampling took me focused uninterrupted time. Obviously I did not listen to every song, from every album, but I did give it a fair listen.
I am sure I will return there to give the afore mentioned "bright Spots" more time, and search about a bit more, but my overall impression of the quality of the work set forth remains the same. Most of what I listed to was just not up to my standards of either:
I trust you will accept the notion that my impressions of the work are not completely and utterly subjective. Others may find the same sample that I took to be something completely different. I must confess that I grew up in the era(s) of some of the best singer/songwriters to date and so my expectations are high.
If you believe there are works that I should pay special attention to, please do not hesitate to point them out and I will make the time to give them focused attention and give you my considered opinion, in detail. I am always looking for music and musicians that are a cut above. I don't know what kind of music you like, but one of my more recent discoveries is Ingrid Jensen. She is out of Canada and is a jazz trumpet player who is beginning to mature into a quite excellent musician and I would say without qualification, in the best traditions of Miles Davis
Best Regards
For the most part it was just bad to mediocre.
Now I must confess there were some bright spots, but they were far and away the exception.
Mostly is was all badly mixed / mastered. The vocals were muddy and buried. When instruments took solos they tended to be either punched up WAY to much to the point that they were completely out of context, or not at all and the talent was lost in the background noise. Again this is bad recording engineering and thats why well recorded music that really represents what we hear live takes a damn good recording engineer and those cost money baby, especially when it comes time to master the tracks
Perhaps all of this can be sat at the feet of someone doing the encoding falling down on the job, but I kind of doubt it, since most encoding software, even at defaults, gives a pretty good representation of the original input. Something is going on there, your guess is as good as mine.
The best example I can give people to have a reference for truly GREAT recording engineering is Steely Dan. Say what you like about their talent ( which I think is HUGE ) or their VERY heavy reliance on the best studio musicians for both recorded and live performances, but the recording engineering on their work, always has been and always will be second to none. If you really want to know what great recording engineering is, listen to anything they have ever recorded, the work IS the art of studio recording.
The most fascinating part is that their recorded music usually survives the worst mauling by some idiot MP3 encoder to the point that it is still pleasant to listen to,Your typical ./'r just doesn't get it, nor do they care. They just want to be able to download or rip whatever they want, whenever they want and do whatever they want with anyones work, no matter how hard the person had to work to create it, no matter how much time it took them and lets face it, time = money, or chicken, bread, soup, laundry detergent, orthodontist appointments, light & heating bills or whatever.
I think your estimate is a bit low though, I would say to come up with a decent ( very small ) recording studio is going to cost more in the neighborhood of 10-15K and the sky is the limit.
I think music without the recording industry is great, musicians just have to find a way to be able to "quit their day job" without them, and then figure out how to be in every music outlet in ever city at the same time while listening to every commercial on television & radio and...
Well you get the point.
Wow! As I replied to the other person who replied back to my question, that looks suicidal. I cannot for the life of me see any reason to pull scripts from a remote machine. I have seen a lot of JS pulled from remote machines and even that makes me really scratch my head and wonder what those people are thinking. I would seem you are asking for one huge ass heap of trouble doing anything like that. I use the include statement quite often but its always to a directory outside the webroot, and very specific permissions limit that directory to RO. Yikes, it looks like a combination of lazy / clueless.
OMG!!!!!!
I would never even remotely entertain the notion of something like that. I mean it just LOOKS suicidal!
Thanks for the reply.
Huh??
I am not clear on the concept you are suggesting. Do you mean something like:I have absolutely no problem with people thinking the provisions of copyright should be modified as it is our right to petition our representatives to do just that. If they do not respond in a manner that suits you you are then free to vote against them next time they come up for re-election. I live in the San Francisco bay area and I have pretty much had it with Senator Diane Feinstein and I will be voting against her in the next election and I will try and convince everyone I know to do the same.
To a certain extent the system is rigged to those with the money, but even that only goes so far, if enough people vote against an elected representative then you will get someone in there that just might do whats right.
In business there are things like trade secrets, documents, drawings and the like that you have to distribute to a jobber or some other outside entity to accomplish a task, but you really only want the outside entity to have them for the amount of time that they actually need them to get a task completed.
Typically this has been accomplished via NDA's or other legal agreements. It appears that in some instances they want more then a "promise" to destroy the information when it is no longer useful for the legitimate contracted purpose. Sort of like the old "This tape will self destruct in 10 seconds" gag from mission impossible.
The problem is that it really cannot be accomplished. You can use PGP or IronKey (tm) as others have suggested but that only prevents the material from being easily viewed by 3rd parties and does not address the "self destruct" desire.
I really cannot think of a way to make that happen. Every method that I can think of requires the destruct method to either be built into the data ( as a code block ) but even then something has to execute that code, and that is simply worked around.
It basically has to come down to trust. Either you trust the outside entities that you deal with or you don't. When I was in the military I had access to classified materials, and I was looked over from front to back top to bottom, my friends and neighbors were interviewed as well as my Principal from High School.
Sadly, I think the last 8 years of the current administration have re-enforced the notion of mistrust and it has found its way deep into the culture of corporate America.
Look if all your argument is going to based on straw men then please don't respond. I will be happy to debate points relent to the argument, but trying to compare copyright to the things that the Rosa Parks protested for is really actually absurd.