zcrar70

For more examples, see: http://www.economist.com/node/21541423 - on attempts to reform tort law

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571141-cheaper-legal... - on how US legal education can be reformed to reduce the cost of legal counsel

http://www.economist.com/node/18389167 - on problems with the US' patent laws

Jeff Atwood also has one - his review is here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/the-last-pc-laptop....

It wasn't always that way, and it doesn't need stay that way either. If no-one values the music, then maybe it will; if people do value music, then maybe it won't.

> I also don't understand the undertone of righteous indignation at Spotify's existence. I can listen to the radio, where songs are played gratis

The difference is that radio play was used to promote albums, which people then bought. Recording a song on the radio came with many disadvantages: DJ interruptions, missing the start/end of the song, lower sound quality, no album art etc.

With Spotify, there's no need to purchase the album, as there are no such disadvantages, the whole album is usually online, and you can play songs whenever you want to listen to them, not when the DJ feels like playing them. This makes in less economically interesting to be an artist. The righteous indignation against spotify is probably due to the fact that artists actually make very little money out of their content, whereas the spotify owners are probably going to make a lot of money out of the artists' content.

An interesting graph illustrating how much an artist has to sell through various platforms (CD, spotify, itunes etc.): http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

Exactly - the estimate above just counts the time to make the album towards the cost, but there are many additional costs to add to that: from a financial perspective, the cost of pressing CDs, making sleeves, any marketing costs (making posters, paying for designers, buying ad space, perhaps hiring a marketing person), hiring a plugger (someone who plugs your record to radio stations, magazines, etc. for plays or reviews). For someone self-releasing, the time to do all that themselves (plus some minimal fixed costs, e.g. printing, pressing CDs for sales at gigs, etc.) would need to be accounted for.

Finally, there would still need to be some minimal admin around the publishing to make sure the author rights are protected. I'm not sure there's a DIY route for this other than setting up your own publishing company and getting someone to administer it (but there may be.) This would also take time and/or reduce earnings.

This is great for consumers, but it makes it a lot less interesting for producers. I'm not sure yet what the impact of that is going to be, but I suspect that it could mean a decrease in the quality of content overall, which would be detrimental to everyone.

> Music publishers can take anywhere from 10% (for an admin deal) to 50% (for a co-publishing deal). Bigger percentages involve advances (recoupable payments against future royalties), but also much longer terms (5-10+ years).

Note this is for the publishing royalties only (not performance rights)

And on @alex1'- post:

> The label will own the song recordings, not the artist.

This would depend on the contract, though it's true that in most cases today the label would own the recording.

In some cases the artists choose to sub-license the recording to the record company, in which case he/she/they retain rights to the recording.

Finally, as is well known now artists often get an advance from the record company on signing a contract. This advance however is deductible from any earnings the artist would receive. Sometimes the advance is used to pay for the recording or equipment or even to finance a tour (the tours are usually not financed by the labels, aside from the 360 arrangements someone else mentioned.)

No-one has mentioned the artist manager fees - I'm not sure of what the figures for that are, but I think they range from 10% up to 50% (of the advance) in some very rare cases.

In short, in most cases making a living as a musician/recording artist is hard to impossible. Many semi-successful indie bands don't earn much more than a minimum wage job, with perhaps similar long-term prospects. If you make it big, you're rich but anything else is not a great existence. Oh, and the record companies often struggle too (both majors and indie these days.)

Also, the success ratio sounds similar to the early days of the music business - a lot of people plugging away, only a few will make it.

It'll be interesting to see how it turns out!

Having the power of .Net in a scripting language is great, but it would have been even nicer if that language was consistent with the others on the platform (C#, JS, Ruby, Python for instance.) In fact I regularly think of converting our existing PS deployment scripts to Python, and better tooling support would definitely help.

Twitter itself isn't giving up on old browsers; which makes me wonder how interesting this would be to anyone else who wants to create a real-world site for the general public (the general public still uses those browsers quite widely)...

* the Airbus A310 is popular with third-world country airlines

* third-world country airports are less well equipped

* the crash was likely due to pilot tiredness and poor airport layout, and had little to do with the A310 design

I guess he doesn't feel he needs to prove anything anymore (which doesn't seem to be the case of Steve Jobs...)

It's a pretty good all-round fitness 'program' of sorts, or perhaps more of a collection of exercises, and much less prescriptive than the above. Emphasis is on bodyweight exercises, but not at the expenses of weights training.

I don't think they necessarily do - they're just saying what they think, but then other people read it and get annoyed (justifiably.)

That's the thing with blogs, the entire world can hear your opinion, and sometimes it would have been better if they didn't.

I didn't miss you saying that, but I also noticed that you replied to my original post with an unequivocal answer - so you don't support doing it, but you also think it's OK? Did I understand that correctly?

In any case, I should perhaps have been clearer:

What makes it OK for someone to hijack Iranian government websites based on hearsay they read on the internet, but makes it bad for the Chinese to hijack the Dalai Lama's computers?

I wasn't talking about you in particular - you did seem to defend those that carried out the attacks. You still haven't answered that question.

Moral relativism as a popular meme is very recent in the historical record

Who talked about moral relativism? Not me. The point of my question was twofold:

* One person's right is another's wrong, and that arriving at some sort of greater truth is something we (as a civilisation) haven't been able to figure out yet. This has nothing to do with moral relativism as far as I'm concerned, and I still don't think it's an easy question to answer.

* We only have partial, incomplete and possibly biased information about what's going on in Iran, the same way that Chinese DDoSers' understanding of Tibet is probably heavily skewed by the information they have access to.

That's why I don't think it's OK for us to DDoS Iranian government sites, and then complain about Chinese hackers doing it to anyone else.

Life is something you participate in. You have an obligation to make the choice.

I think it's perfectly fine not to have a strong opinion about something that you don't know enough about.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658355

I agree with the author that it isn't acceptable to launch DDoS attacks on Iranian state sites, and then complain about the Chinese doing the same on US government sites.