I have heard and seen numerous bands that don't get contracts or played on the radio because they don't fit the image and message that record companies "want", or don't play the games to get the contracts. That radio play time is what causes popularity, people know what they hear and can't know anything they don't hear. Take their title example "pop". The top female pop stars would not have become popular without a massive budget to advertise them and get their names out (telling everyone how it's a big star in the intro message). Until the VMA/MTV/(other award show) put up Miley Cyris and told everyone what a great artist she was who heard of her in the Music industry? Ariana Grande? Most of these people are only performers (actresses/actors) and purchase songs written for them that the producers tell them to play.

Read up on what most bands have had to do to gain popularity and the advertising required to make it big. Most bands, regardless of genre, have to give up control of just about everything. Producers change lyrics, change music, change production and the artists have no say. Smart musicians may build some elements of control into their contracts, but if they do the wrong things they receive no air time or advertising.

The study is wrong, because it negates the biggest reason for popularity. Advertising. The game is rigged, and most musicians know and admit as much.

Awesome, thanks for the NFO!

I was rather surprised with the new layout, and last night was buggy as all get out. Now that the bugs are worked out I like the new design. It's not beta, or if it is they built in everything we said was missing and fixed the text layout we complained about.

If there was some sort of announcement system I'd have been understanding last night. That is something Slashdot has never been good about though...

Noob Rocksmith questions. As a drummer for a lot of decades I have always considered picking up the guitar or bass. Much more portable and crowd friendly. First question: Is there a bass version? For either, how hard is it for someone who never picked up a guitar to start on Rocksmith?

I actually did go to their web site, you may have missed my last paragraph. "Unlock the Revenue Potential of Digital TV" is their leading add.

Screw auto-play, I'm trying to figure out who "ooyala"and "taboola" are, and why their content is being linked (by default on every Slashdot page). Whois data seems to link them to tucows, who I have not seen since they were found to be spreading malware through their download wrappers.

Yeah, you have to follow the whois chain down the road to get to tucows but it's obvious 2 steps away.

FWIW, taboola and ooyala seem to be both tracking companies (for marketing purposes *wink* *wink*). No thanks, I won't let their video play.

Oh, so you go to the ad hominem method of reason as a response, followed by your own isolated opinion as a follow up. Thanks for proving my point, twice. I'll ignore further irrational methods of proof, so would encourage you to actually learn the material you are attempting to criticize prior to making irrational claims. As a hunch, you will do nothing and maintain an irrational opinion and argue with invalid logic.

I saw a message from Soulskill that they will work on the bugs tomorrow. Until then, an idea would be to pad your top and bottom lines with a line-break. It may help people to read your whole comment.. then again I don't know if they strip breaks on either end under certain conditions.

I submitted a story and it was yanked, so I'll post in stories instead. Slashdot is once again broken. The top sentence of text in the majority of comments is clipped off so only about half the text is visible. The bottom sentence is spliced with the bottom links so you can't read those either. Buttons are almost all broken. Some buttons are not buttons at all, just text. Other buttons have the same text coloring as the button with maybe white shading?

How this could have ever gotten past QA is astounding. Fix the f^&$ing text so we can read it. Fix the buttons so I know what and where they are located. Dark green data fields on dark green backgrounds is not readable, fix that too. I see people posting pictures from IE so it's not just my browser. Last I checked, Firefox was the number one browser for *nix crowds which is a good portion of Slashdot's contributors.

It's not as bad as Beta in some ways, but being dumped on the community makes it close.

I guess that Dice learned nothing from the last Beta roll out. Submissions are gone from the main menu, text is all over the place with clipped characters on the top line and links covering the bottom line, and the buttons are completely broken. Some don't look like buttons at all, just text, others are a solid color with same color text and white borders.

Just as bad, default content is now coming from two known shady operators taboola and oolaya. If you are not running AdBlock and NoScript don't visit Slashdot until that crap is gone.

Just like the last Beta no concern or care for users that have been making Slashdot Slashdot for well over a decade. No notice, no feedback, and obviously the only testing that occurred was some Dev located somewhere in the world "claimed" it worked for them.

Is the goal to chase away the consumers who contribute to make this site what it is?

_YOU_ may not have had a professor that could teach, but that is not a problem with Liberal Arts. It is a problem with education in general, which has been completely screwed since the US Government took over in the 1930s. Many people have professors that do teach, and many students can learn on their own just by exposure.

I gave the reason for it's value, and your answer equates to "nuh uh" with no backing rational. Your generalization that people can slack off and pass a class happens in all majors, there is no restriction to Liberal Arts. In other words, it's invalid logic. (I am really not surprised that a person who claims Liberal Arts has zero value fails at simple logic, and I'd suggest that you contemplate that for a while.)

There is more to learn from the study of a single short story called "The Allegory of the Cave" than a semester of Calculus, if you care to actually study.

My claim regarding weight of Calculus vs. a single short story is from that of a Math major with 17 semesters of Mathematics. My minor was Liberal arts, which I took everything possible and ran out at 8 semesters.

They said nothing will happen with the program. You can toss funds in a pot, but without knowing why it was shut down you are foolish to do so. People giving to the pot are going to want their money back at some point. We all know that stuff like this gets lost in the bureaucracy and may take decades to come up for air.

I'm not being a downer, but a realist. Your answer could be to start your own site doing something similar and have a visible hand off policy in case you stop for some reason like NEWTON. Hell, make that a selling point.

The place that I vehemently disagree is in the perception you give that tax payers have control over funding individual projects NEWTON. We don't, we only pay taxes. Critters holding office that don't a rats ass about the people they represent handle the individual funding (or the people _they_ appoint to lead agencies). If given a chance I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people would support funding NEWTON and get rid of programs like the latest greatest science for killing people. That is exactly why people have no choice, but that's a much longer discussion.

And Pay walled to boot!