Lollypop

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Posts posted by Lollypop

  4. Posted

    Dear music industry, low quality = low demand

    Posted by leflaw in Industry News on July 3, 2003 at 10:49 AM

    Printable Version

     

     

    Thursday, July 3, 2003

     

    Dear music industry,

    low quality = low demand

    Commentary

     

    By Mandy Jenkins

    The Cincinnati Enquirer

     

    Memo

     

    TO: Music Industry Executives

     

    RE: The truth

     

    I've heard the music industry is upset. You say a bunch of downloading kids are stealing your money and you're gonna take their shoplifting butts to court. Record sales are down and have been for a few years. You blame this on music pirates; I think you're missing the point.

     

    This is all your fault.

     

    People aren't buying because the music industry itself is faulted. First of all, CDs are too expensive for Gen X-ers and teens to buy. They will buy only the music of artists they really have loyalty to - otherwise, it's easier to download a single hit than slap down $20 for a whole CD of crap.

     

    That's right, I said it. The music industry sucks right now and your audience knows it. You aren't putting out music that is worth the cost of a CD.

     

    Your problem is that as soon as one band or singer gets big, you go right out and find 10 more who sound exactly like them and slap together a CD with one or two good songs in the bunch. The result? Low-quality music that all sounds alike and tons of one-hit wonders on the airwaves.

     

    Who can tell the difference between Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch or Vanessa Carlton? They were created to imitate each other. Why would I buy each of their CDs, when I could download "Sk8r Boi" and "Game of Love" and be done with it?

     

    Same thing goes for Nickelback, Staind, Puddle of Mudd and all of those bands that were created to be the "new" Creed (a rip-off of Pearl Jam, anyway). And the emo/wannabe punk bands like All-American Rejects, Simple Plan and Good Charlotte? They all sound the same.

     

    The first bit of evidence: the album sales top 10. The long-lasting sales on the charts go to groundbreaking new artists (Norah Jones, 50 Cent) or perennial favorites with proven talent (Metallica, Steely Dan, Radiohead). Those one-hit wonder bands don't stick around for long and it isn't because of downloaders - it's because they aren't that good.

     

    The second bit of evidence: I'll bet almost all online file-traders are between 15 and 30; however, they are not the only people who listen to music. What about everyone else; why aren't they buying music?

     

    My mom couldn't download a music file if her life depended on it, but you aren't going to catch her at a record store, either. Music isn't good enough to get her to pay that much for anything less than a "greatest hits" CD - and most of today's artists will never see one of those.

     

    Get my point? As long as the music industry continues to charge more for putting out garbage, your sales will decline. It doesn't matter how many college kids with T1 lines you find to sue - you will still lose in the end.

     

    This isn't a question of ethics and it isn't a statement of legality; it is a measure of quality - and you aren't delivering anymore.

  6. Posted

    I joined a similar thing ages ago but it was for cancer research. It was wierd when the computer used to dial up on it's own, as they wanted the imformation that your computer had been working on. ;)

  9. Posted

    As a self proclaimed Comic book "nerd" I have been asking myself that question since I was 10. Telepathy takes my vote over the urge to want to fly because being able to hear other's thoughts would make my life so much easier.

     

    P.s Roswell was cool at first..then got weird.

    Just think about everyones thoughts coming in at once. You'd go crazy. ;)

  11. Posted

    I would like to be able to manipulate objects without having to touch them.  No more looking for the remote...and I"ve always wanted to gently lift slow poke drivers off the road and place them on the shoulder until I passed them.

    ;)

  12. Posted

    I would like to be able to grow more teeth when I loose one, just like a shark can, and be able to grow another limb when you loose one. That would be handy. Maybe one day they will be able to give us a gene from a shark, and other living things, who knows. ;)

  17. Posted

    Premonition dreams, and waking dreams. I've had more than my fair share of them.  :laugh:

    Why the sad face?

    Because they aren't very pleasant. I have tried blocking them only with a little success. I am referring to what I call my waking dreams ( Images ). The last one I had was about the space shuttle Columbia. I saw a hole in the wing which grew, and grew. And that was before the disaster. :dude: My hubby calls me Spooky.

     

    Seems like it could be a wonderful gift but I understand if you say they are unpleasant. I only hope my recurring about an airplane crashing into a building does not ever happen as I saw it happen in the dream but hey, what would I be able to do about if it did :SHRUGS:

    A gift, I call it a curse. :laugh:

  18. Posted

    When I was back in the UK, I got deja-vu quite a lot. I once went to Canterbury and seemed to know the place quite well. Having said that, I had never been there before in my life, so how could I have had such a familiarity of the place.  You know the saying " I've been here before ". Sometimes I think memories from ones ancestors are passed on.  :laugh: I have never had that feeling since being in New Zealand.

     

    Do you believe in past lives?

    I'm not sure :dude: But the times I went to places that I had never been to before, and I knew everything about the place. I even recognized the streets but that was only in the old parts of town.

     

    I have a terrible fear of fire :laugh:

     

    http://www.geocities.com/localhistories/ca...canterbury.html

  19. Posted

    When I was back in the UK, I got deja-vu quite a lot. I once went to Canterbury and seemed to know the place quite well. Having said that, I had never been there before in my life, so how could I have had such a familiarity of the place.  You know the saying " I've been here before ". Sometimes I think memories from ones ancestors are passed on.  :laugh: I have never had that feeling since being in New Zealand.

     

    Do you believe in past lives?

    I'm not sure :laugh: But the times I went to places that I had never been to before, and I knew everything about the place. I even recognized the streets but that was only in the old parts of town.

  20. Posted

    From someone who was working in a photo store, which specializes in restoring old photographs, when a lady brought in a old picture of a man sitting behind a cow, milking it.

     

     

    Her: "Can you fix this picture for me?"

    Me: "Sure. What would you like us to do?"

    Her: "Can you move the cow?"

    Me: "Move the cow?"

    Her: "I want to know what my great-grandfather looked like. That's him."

    She pointed to the feet sticking out under the cow.

     

     

    Me: "I don't think we can do that."

    Her: "Just move the cow over, and we'll be able to see his face."

    Me: "I'm sorry. We don't have the technology to do that."

    Her: (getting huffy) "Well, I guess I'll just take this somewhere else."

  22. Posted

    Time Travel

     

    Real Time Experiments

     

    In a laboratory in the United States, the first real attempts to travel through time are being planned. A professor at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Dr. Ronald Mallett, has been obsessed with the notion of time travel since he was just a child.

     

    His life's goal is founded in his past, when as a boy, he first read H.G. Wells' science fiction novel The Time Machine, which suggested the prospect of returning to the past to save his father who died at just 33, when Mallet was 10.

     

    Now he believes he has found a way to make time travel possible - on a circulating beam of light. He is working on a project to move sub-atomic particles forward through time using lasers; if he succeeds, it will be a milestone in science and will open the door to the possibility of a machine that will transport people into the future.

     

    Mallett has acquired scholarly fame recently with his published theories on time travel. Time is relative to space and velocity. This concept is difficult to grasp, but it has been supported by experiment. Travelling close to the speed of light will slow a clock, even an atomic clock. Likewise, a clock outside our atmosphere, far from any gravitational pull, will run faster than a clock on earth. Therefore, if an artificial gravitational force were created, time travel would, in theory, be possible.

     

    Dr Mallet completed his doctorate in general physics with the title "Quantum Theory in a (3+!) de Sitter Universe" at Pennsylvania State University, and has published in the areas of the classic and quantum theory of black holes, relativistic astrophysics, and quantum cosmology. Currently, he teaches as a full professor at the University of Connecticut. He explains to us that his work on gravitational theory in based on "the exact solution to the Einstein field equations," and that the "solution has been used to study the Hawking radiation of evaporating black holes."

     

    His research interests are gravitational theory, based on an exact solution of the Einstein field equations, which combines the effect of mass loss due to radiation with the de Sitter inflationary geometry. That solution has been used to study the Hawking radiation of evaporating black holes, as well as the effect of radiation from the shells surrounding false vacuum bubbles on the evolution of these bubbles.

     

    The evolution of false vacuum bubbles is an important topic in the study of the very early history of the universe. Ongoing investigations address topics in quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole. The quantum evolution of the universe is usually described by the Wheeler-deWitt equation. The probability density associated with the wave function of this equation is, however, not positive definite. A new wave equation for the wave function of the universe, in which this problem is removed, has been found. This result suggests that the universe may have been created with two possible states.

     

    If this is true, then it looks like Dr Mallet may well be the person to explore both states.

  24. Posted

    Premonition dreams, and waking dreams. I've had more than my fair share of them.  :laugh:

    Why the sad face?

    Because they aren't very pleasant. I have tried blocking them only with a little success. I am referring to what I call my waking dreams ( Images ). The last one I had was about the space shuttle Columbia. I saw a hole in the wing which grew, and grew. And that was before the disaster. :laugh: My hubby calls me Spooky.

  25. Posted

    Has any one heard of REMOTE VIEWING? I was looking at a short bit about this last night on the sci-fi channel, a prior participant was saying he bailed out of the project when they started talking about this ability being used as a weapon against people. I wonder (if it is real) if they used/use it against saddam and bin laden...

    I heard that the CIA were using physics durring the cold war to get images of Russian nuclear, and missile sites. :laugh: