Yeah, I noticed, he posted it as I was writing my reply. I saw the link (the cached copy), and it was interesting. I also wasn't saying I don't believe him or those claims. I wouldn't put it past the US government to test on Puerto Ricans or anyone else for that matter. The thing that did irk me was how he made those claims, failing to either cite anything or admit that they are just yet to be proven claims. I'm not normally a stickler for this kind of thing, but those are harsh accusations. Also, I thought the post was generally naive since it was pretty much saying he doesn't look forward to any scientific advance which involves human health, but I didn't think that's really how he feels, but maybe it is.
No, he can't because there is none. A lot of people believe these events happened, but there's no real proof of it. There are clues, and maybe the US government is trying to hide it, and he probably knows this, but the story doesn't sound as good though.
Mankind has used up the necessary resources to divert an asteroid collision. Those used resources in question were traced back to pyrotecnic displays used in popular motion picture features about asteroids colliding with earth.
I don't think it's entrapment either. But I also don't think anyone should get introuble for downloading something named 'Metallica.mp3' or 'EnterTheSandman.mp3'. Say I'm interested in hearing what Lars has to say about the song 'Enter the Sandman', and I come across, 'EnterTheSandman.mp3'. It might be the song, it might also be a voice recording of the interview about the song. It might be a recording of a thousand voices saying 'Wooop'. Downloading the file shouldn't be considered criminal activity. Perhaps keeping it after you download it and find out it's illegal should be.
Maybe I should share a file called 'FreeMusic.mp3' and have it really be a copy of my own copyrighted music. And then sue the bastards that try to download it!
I work for a small development company. We do small ecommerce sites ocassionaly. They usually do well. In some cases, these people had a popular physical store, no more than 1 or 2 shops, and their online business blows their store revenue away. They don't make money with banner ads or anything like that. They have a niche, I suppose.
I'm often surprised when my friend in similar fields tell me about how these large estore sites, like Amazon or Buy.com aren't make a profit.
I for one am glad the investor cash is running out. All the sites I deal with really have something to offer instead of fluff and promos. Investor cash is the reason I have to sometimes work with complete imbecils making great salaries. There are a lot of dot comms out there crossing their fingers, hoping to get bought. A good friend of mine works at one, and their deal to get bought fell through. Where are they now? Everyone's quitting the company, the few people there who care are frustrated by all the work they've put into the working parts of the site, and to see it go nowhere.
As for info sites.. I'm not sure what the issue here is. There seems to be plenty of info still around. Take warpig.com, info about paintball, their site isn't too jazzy, but it gets the job done. I don't see why any change in the net would cause them to go away. I suppose some drastic legislation might. I haven't found any of the info sites I frequent closing up.
Why do you need to spend so much on recording? I'm a novice musician, but have been in the studio a few times, $500 a time usually, for 5 hours or so, for a 5 peice band. Ok, so it's not the top studio, but what we made sounded pretty damn good, 10X better than I was expecting. And I'm no great musician. We practice a lot before we go in, to make sure we can use the small time we have. All the money we put in to this is from our day jobs. I don't expect to be recouped any of my money. Also, think about how you're producing the music, you're paying a lot of money up front. Why should how much you pay to create your song have anything to do with how much you expect to get back from fans? Unless you're making up for skill by spending a lot on the recording, which from the small number of concerts I've seen is often the case.
I think most dedicated fans would settle for a little less quality recording. Why do many fans go to concerts? Often they aren't the same quality as the original, sometimes worse. People even try to collect those less perfect recordings to play at home. Not everyone has such a highly trained ear, but I suspect that once a fan hears the talent, the recording quality isn't as important.
Yep, I would pay $20 for MS Office. Commercial/Open Source would work well, if for instance Microsoft took a specialized, underfeatured Open Source word processor, and then added all it's bells and whistles to make it easier to use and more general for non-tech end users. That would lessen the work for a company like M$, and make that $20 a little more valuable. I'm sure M$ would get blasted for taking an Open Source project and releasing their own closed source one. Then again, maybe not, IBM's Websphere is popular and I haven't seen them get criticized about it. Lastly, it's nice to see people acknowledge how hard farmers work. I have some distant relatives who are farmers, and have visited them a few times when I was younger. I thought the tractors were cool and stuff, but even then I knew it was something I wouldn't or couldn't do. A lot of developers say they work long hours and try to impress you with tales of no food or sleep, but in my experience, most programmers fool around quite a bit I do too,to some degree, but I don't tout about how long or hard I've worked. In most enviornments, you can take long breaks, programmer friends of mine play foosball for an hour a day or more. Many many of them take days to get back to me on simple requests with no sense of urgency, like when I go to a client site, and they haven't setup a computer for me to work on, so they end up getting billed while I wait around for them to get to it. This will all change when the economy isn't as on fire as it is now, and companies will have to weed out these people.
Oops, I'm usually not this bad.. usually. Actually, I didn't think it was that clearly worded, most of the time I'm struggling not to digress and to organize my thoughts. Thanks though, and thanks for the constructive criticism.
I might not have the same trained ear as Ms. Love, but 128kbps sounds pretty good to me. I do encode all my stuff in VBR, high quality, in case I ever get better music equipment, but I can enjoy the song just as much at 128.
I'm not a big fan of her music, actually I think most of it sucks, but I thought that article was really good, except for bashing MP3 quality. Actually the extent to which she thinks 'MP3s sound shitty' makes be doubt how much she experience she's had with them. A good number of the mp3s I have that 'guitar/vocal emotional/cost feeling' she mentioned, and they haven't lost anything I can tell. A few of my friends doubt she wrote her own speech, but I like to think that isn't true.
128kbps should be good enough if you're going to listen to a crappy Hole song anyway.:P Ok, that was mean, they're not that bad I guess.
Though I don't drink, a good number of my online friend do, and I've personally watched their typing skills degrade as the night grew darker and their empty bottles accumulated. How is this supposed to help them? Also, I know my own typing varies from keyboard to keyboard dramatically, as I expect is the case for many others. I bet my mood alters it slightly too. Not that this thread needed more people downing the idea, but hey, it really is stupid.
Thanks for the reply, it gave me a lot to think about. One thing I am still not convinced about is all-free software. Perhaps most software could be free, but I think if we only had word processors to choose from that were made by a company as an internal solution and then released free, we might have only very specialized software or software that is hard for 'Mom & Pop' to use, or even people slightly more skilled. Which could boil down to computers not being as widely used as they are now, and the internet not growing as fast as it has. Maybe that's a good thing, but that's another debate, and I'm definately not the best person to argue any side of it. I lot of the work I do is eventually used by non-tech people (online finantial reports and online commerce), so you might expect I think it's a good thing that you don't have to be that smart to use a computer.
A scarry thought. I'm interested on your opinion about one of the other replies in this discussion, about libraries. Offering software in libraries, etc.
I agree, except on the software part. Books, magazines, music, movie etc help people learn (besides entertain), and apply the ideas they learn as they like, without charges. I think of most software as a tool. I don't expect to be able to borrow it out of the library and keep a copy forever, the same way I don't expect to borrow a bulldozer and keep it forever. You could use similar logic to argue against letting people borrow books, magazines, etc, but I think there's a difference. Software, like MS Word doesn't help you learn. You don't really need MS Word. There's nothing you can do with MS Word that you can basically do without it. Books contain ideas that you can't expect to get on your own. I'm at a loss to explain it better. One way to look at is that books impart knowledge, and software and equipment are facilitators. With those books, you can obtain the knowledge to build the software and equipment you think you need. Also, I think software in libraries is a good idea if the idea is for trial use, use the software until you return it. Pay for it afterwards. Open Source is nice, but there's a lot of other nice software we wouldn't have because it takes too much time and skill to produce for free. Copy machines in libraries is a good point though, and has significance to the software industry. Even though you can copy an entire book in the library, people still buy books. Though, sometimes it is just as expensive to photocopy a book, not to mention it's time consuming. Lasty, I should mention I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I use some pirated software. Almost all the software I use often (once a month or more), I buy, if it's not free that is. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but, for instance, I don't want to pay $100+ bucks for MS Word, when I use it rarely to view and lightly edit a Word file someone sent me in an email. Also, I have no stolen software that I would buy to use if I wasn't able to steal it.
I agree with you Tommy, but I assumed (maybe arrogantly so) that most of the people were talking about hypothetical situations, because they are being very general. How about to recoup the time and effort required to produce or write the thing in the first place? Assumptions aren't always arrogant, sometimes they are meant to give credit to those who have not explicitly stated every detail. There's not much point to his statement (and his previous post as well) if we don't assume he's thinking of a thing that is valuable. I assumed he wasn't talking about trying to receive payment for something of no value. But in either case, I agree with your statement.
Right, but if all you're concerned with is keeping the idea to yourself so nobody else can gain from it while you are alive, why would you care what happens to it after you die?
But not sad enough to hold back from fragging you when we play Doom III online. I think I speak for most Doom and Quake players when I voice my apathy with the offline flesh world. These last years of playing Doom and Quake have finally stripped myself of any compassion or empathy, and I'm finally reaping the rewards of that! Yeah!! Die!!!
This is a stupid topic. What are people going to say except recount their tales of how much they make and how life is hard because of this or that. Go tell it on a mountain. I check slashdot roughly everyday (or 4 times a week), and haven't had any complains about the topics until now. This is not merely flamebait, I really think this topic is worthless. If anyone has a solution that doesn't involve a Machine Enchaned Utopia or major reconstruction of our government, then maybe I'll change my opinion of this topic. It's bad.
. Let's keep stretching the boundaries of thought and human existence; I mean, that's what we're here for. I'm sick of you optimists making life out to be some big joy ride. We keep building and building, it won't last forever. Why bother.
Re:At the end of Ender's Shadow.....
on
New Ender Sequel
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· Score: 1
I wasn't very impressed by Achilles. He didn't seem all that smart to me or even that special. He came across as a thug with no real future. He may have been intended to be really bad and a real threat to Bean, but other than his size, I didn't see what it was. I didn't like the character that much really, to be honest, as far as liking the 'bad guy' goes. I'd really like to learn more about Peter and Bean too though.
If the way ABIT translates their motherboard manuals into english is any indication of how they code, they are probably doing us a favor. Sometimes not sharing IS better.
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Yeah, I noticed, he posted it as I was writing my reply. I saw the link (the cached copy), and it was interesting. I also wasn't saying I don't believe him or those claims. I wouldn't put it past the US government to test on Puerto Ricans or anyone else for that matter. The thing that did irk me was how he made those claims, failing to either cite anything or admit that they are just yet to be proven claims. I'm not normally a stickler for this kind of thing, but those are harsh accusations. Also, I thought the post was generally naive since it was pretty much saying he doesn't look forward to any scientific advance which involves human health, but I didn't think that's really how he feels, but maybe it is.
No, he can't because there is none. A lot of people believe these events happened, but there's no real proof of it. There are clues, and maybe the US government is trying to hide it, and he probably knows this, but the story doesn't sound as good though.
Mankind has used up the necessary resources to divert an asteroid collision. Those used resources in question were traced back to pyrotecnic displays used in popular motion picture features about asteroids colliding with earth.
I don't think it's entrapment either. But I also don't think anyone should get introuble for downloading something named 'Metallica.mp3' or 'EnterTheSandman.mp3'. Say I'm interested in hearing what Lars has to say about the song 'Enter the Sandman', and I come across, 'EnterTheSandman.mp3'. It might be the song, it might also be a voice recording of the interview about the song. It might be a recording of a thousand voices saying 'Wooop'. Downloading the file shouldn't be considered criminal activity. Perhaps keeping it after you download it and find out it's illegal should be.
Maybe I should share a file called 'FreeMusic.mp3' and have it really be a copy of my own copyrighted music. And then sue the bastards that try to download it!
Old news man, I announced over a month ago that Space.com would announce that NASA will announce something about water on Mars.
I work for a small development company. We do small ecommerce sites ocassionaly. They usually do well. In some cases, these people had a popular physical store, no more than 1 or 2 shops, and their online business blows their store revenue away. They don't make money with banner ads or anything like that. They have a niche, I suppose.
I'm often surprised when my friend in similar fields tell me about how these large estore sites, like Amazon or Buy.com aren't make a profit.
I for one am glad the investor cash is running out. All the sites I deal with really have something to offer instead of fluff and promos. Investor cash is the reason I have to sometimes work with complete imbecils making great salaries. There are a lot of dot comms out there crossing their fingers, hoping to get bought. A good friend of mine works at one, and their deal to get bought fell through. Where are they now? Everyone's quitting the company, the few people there who care are frustrated by all the work they've put into the working parts of the site, and to see it go nowhere.
As for info sites.. I'm not sure what the issue here is. There seems to be plenty of info still around. Take warpig.com, info about paintball, their site isn't too jazzy, but it gets the job done. I don't see why any change in the net would cause them to go away. I suppose some drastic legislation might. I haven't found any of the info sites I frequent closing up.
Why do you need to spend so much on recording? I'm a novice musician, but have been in the studio a few times, $500 a time usually, for 5 hours or so, for a 5 peice band. Ok, so it's not the top studio, but what we made sounded pretty damn good, 10X better than I was expecting. And I'm no great musician. We practice a lot before we go in, to make sure we can use the small time we have. All the money we put in to this is from our day jobs. I don't expect to be recouped any of my money. Also, think about how you're producing the music, you're paying a lot of money up front. Why should how much you pay to create your song have anything to do with how much you expect to get back from fans? Unless you're making up for skill by spending a lot on the recording, which from the small number of concerts I've seen is often the case.
I think most dedicated fans would settle for a little less quality recording. Why do many fans go to concerts? Often they aren't the same quality as the original, sometimes worse. People even try to collect those less perfect recordings to play at home. Not everyone has such a highly trained ear, but I suspect that once a fan hears the talent, the recording quality isn't as important.
Yep, I would pay $20 for MS Office. Commercial/Open Source would work well, if for instance Microsoft took a specialized, underfeatured Open Source word processor, and then added all it's bells and whistles to make it easier to use and more general for non-tech end users. That would lessen the work for a company like M$, and make that $20 a little more valuable.
I'm sure M$ would get blasted for taking an Open Source project and releasing their own closed source one. Then again, maybe not, IBM's Websphere is popular and I haven't seen them get criticized about it.
Lastly, it's nice to see people acknowledge how hard farmers work. I have some distant relatives who are farmers, and have visited them a few times when I was younger. I thought the tractors were cool and stuff, but even then I knew it was something I wouldn't or couldn't do. A lot of developers say they work long hours and try to impress you with tales of no food or sleep, but in my experience, most programmers fool around quite a bit I do too,to some degree, but I don't tout about how long or hard I've worked. In most enviornments, you can take long breaks, programmer friends of mine play foosball for an hour a day or more. Many many of them take days to get back to me on simple requests with no sense of urgency, like when I go to a client site, and they haven't setup a computer for me to work on, so they end up getting billed while I wait around for them to get to it. This will all change when the economy isn't as on fire as it is now, and companies will have to weed out these people.
Think different? Look the same?
Thanks, it's nice to hear that then :). I definitely will pay more attention to my spelling.
Oops, I'm usually not this bad.. usually. Actually, I didn't think it was that clearly worded, most of the time I'm struggling not to digress and to organize my thoughts. Thanks though, and thanks for the constructive criticism.
I might not have the same trained ear as Ms. Love, but 128kbps sounds pretty good to me. I do encode all my stuff in VBR, high quality, in case I ever get better music equipment, but I can enjoy the song just as much at 128.
:P Ok, that was mean, they're not that bad I guess.
I'm not a big fan of her music, actually I think most of it sucks, but I thought that article was really good, except for bashing MP3 quality. Actually the extent to which she thinks 'MP3s sound shitty' makes be doubt how much she experience she's had with them. A good number of the mp3s I have that 'guitar/vocal emotional/cost feeling' she mentioned, and they haven't lost anything I can tell. A few of my friends doubt she wrote her own speech, but I like to think that isn't true.
128kbps should be good enough if you're going to listen to a crappy Hole song anyway.
Though I don't drink, a good number of my online friend do, and I've personally watched their typing skills degrade as the night grew darker and their empty bottles accumulated. How is this supposed to help them?
Also, I know my own typing varies from keyboard to keyboard dramatically, as I expect is the case for many others. I bet my mood alters it slightly too.
Not that this thread needed more people downing the idea, but hey, it really is stupid.
Thanks for the reply, it gave me a lot to think about. One thing I am still not convinced about is all-free software. Perhaps most software could be free, but I think if we only had word processors to choose from that were made by a company as an internal solution and then released free, we might have only very specialized software or software that is hard for 'Mom & Pop' to use, or even people slightly more skilled. Which could boil down to computers not being as widely used as they are now, and the internet not growing as fast as it has. Maybe that's a good thing, but that's another debate, and I'm definately not the best person to argue any side of it. I lot of the work I do is eventually used by non-tech people (online finantial reports and online commerce), so you might expect I think it's a good thing that you don't have to be that smart to use a computer.
That's true, just like some like to learn to hurt themselves. J/K, you have a good point.
A scarry thought. I'm interested on your opinion about one of the other replies in this discussion, about libraries. Offering software in libraries, etc.
I agree, except on the software part. Books, magazines, music, movie etc help people learn (besides entertain), and apply the ideas they learn as they like, without charges. I think of most software as a tool. I don't expect to be able to borrow it out of the library and keep a copy forever, the same way I don't expect to borrow a bulldozer and keep it forever.
You could use similar logic to argue against letting people borrow books, magazines, etc, but I think there's a difference. Software, like MS Word doesn't help you learn. You don't really need MS Word. There's nothing you can do with MS Word that you can basically do without it. Books contain ideas that you can't expect to get on your own. I'm at a loss to explain it better. One way to look at is that books impart knowledge, and software and equipment are facilitators. With those books, you can obtain the knowledge to build the software and equipment you think you need.
Also, I think software in libraries is a good idea if the idea is for trial use, use the software until you return it. Pay for it afterwards. Open Source is nice, but there's a lot of other nice software we wouldn't have because it takes too much time and skill to produce for free.
Copy machines in libraries is a good point though, and has significance to the software industry. Even though you can copy an entire book in the library, people still buy books. Though, sometimes it is just as expensive to photocopy a book, not to mention it's time consuming.
Lasty, I should mention I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I use some pirated software. Almost all the software I use often (once a month or more), I buy, if it's not free that is. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but, for instance, I don't want to pay $100+ bucks for MS Word, when I use it rarely to view and lightly edit a Word file someone sent me in an email. Also, I have no stolen software that I would buy to use if I wasn't able to steal it.
I agree with you Tommy, but I assumed (maybe arrogantly so) that most of the people were talking about hypothetical situations, because they are being very general. How about to recoup the time and effort required to produce or write the thing in the first place? Assumptions aren't always arrogant, sometimes they are meant to give credit to those who have not explicitly stated every detail. There's not much point to his statement (and his previous post as well) if we don't assume he's thinking of a thing that is valuable. I assumed he wasn't talking about trying to receive payment for something of no value. But in either case, I agree with your statement.
Right, but if all you're concerned with is keeping the idea to yourself so nobody else can gain from it while you are alive, why would you care what happens to it after you die?
But not sad enough to hold back from fragging you when we play Doom III online. I think I speak for most Doom and Quake players when I voice my apathy with the offline flesh world. These last years of playing Doom and Quake have finally stripped myself of any compassion or empathy, and I'm finally reaping the rewards of that! Yeah!! Die!!!
This is a stupid topic. What are people going to say except recount their tales of how much they make and how life is hard because of this or that. Go tell it on a mountain. I check slashdot roughly everyday (or 4 times a week), and haven't had any complains about the topics until now. This is not merely flamebait, I really think this topic is worthless. If anyone has a solution that doesn't involve a Machine Enchaned Utopia or major reconstruction of our government, then maybe I'll change my opinion of this topic. It's bad.
. Let's keep stretching the boundaries of thought and human existence; I mean, that's what we're here for. I'm sick of you optimists making life out to be some big joy ride. We keep building and building, it won't last forever. Why bother.
I wasn't very impressed by Achilles. He didn't seem all that smart to me or even that special. He came across as a thug with no real future. He may have been intended to be really bad and a real threat to Bean, but other than his size, I didn't see what it was. I didn't like the character that much really, to be honest, as far as liking the 'bad guy' goes. I'd really like to learn more about Peter and Bean too though.
If the way ABIT translates their motherboard manuals into english is any indication of how they code, they are probably doing us a favor. Sometimes not sharing IS better.
Good for you