That artists made any money from recordings was never really true, except for a few really big acts. Witness Roger McGuinn of the Byrds (testimony before the house judiciary committee) to name just one:

In 1973 my work with the Byrds ended. I embarked on a solo recording career on Columbia Records, and recorded five albums. The only money I've received for these albums was the modest advance paid prior to each recording. In 1977 I recorded three albums for Capitol Records in the group "McGuinn Clark and Hillman." Even though the song "Don't You Write Her Off" was a top 40 hit, the only money I received from Capitol Records was in the form of a modest advance. In 1989 I recorded a solo CD, "Back from Rio", for Arista Records. This CD sold approximately 500,000 copies worldwide, and aside from a modest advance, I have received no royalties from that project.

So there's nothing new there. Live gigs were always the life blood of any musician in the "recording era".

That's the heart of the matter isn't it? And I don't agree. That's a bit like saying that "well, the Japanese seem to do well with their way of writing, so it*s obviously equal in ever way when it comes to performance compared to the alternatives. (Hint; It's worse in many ways). Or, "Well all sufficiently semantically advanced programming languages are Turing complete, and hence it doesn't matter whether we write this is Brainfuck or Haskell. They're equivalent". (No, the similarities when it comes to utility ends with Turing). Or "well it's just a matter of notation anyway, we might as well do arithmetic using roman numerals instead of the Arabic we're using now" (Nope, not by a long shot, even though you can say 4 = IV).

Do you want me to go on? If humans are supposed to use it, shit like this matters. Now, the SI was based on the experience we had had with the previous systems (going back centuries) and their shortcomings, so OF COURSE it's an improvement. It'd be a sorry state of affairs if it wasn't. Is it perfect? Nope, but it's good enough by far.

Now to say that the US is falling behind in STEM because of that, I find a bit rich myself. I see much bigger problems than litres vs. hogsheads. BUT, of course, using backwards notations doesn't help either. It's just one more straw for the camel's back.

Sorry, typo. Meant "weight/force and mass"...

Nope. Pound is not both a unit of weight and a unit of force. The two are as distinct as the Newton and the kg. That you use the same sounding name for both of them doesn't fundamentally alter that fact.

Now, there are two ways of specifying specific impulse, one is to base it on the mass of the fuel, then you end up with a Isp as a velocity. If you use weight, you get a time. In either case the conversion factor is 'g' regardless.

This is *exactly* the same regardless of which system of units you work in. That you happen to have a simpler conversion since you're prone to conflating force and weight (lbf/lbm) doesn't really change this. Incidentally, confounding the two leads to a lot of problems in understanding, since your calculations are prone to giving the same result, but conceptually the wrong unit. Slugs notwithstanding. I haven't met a single american trained engineer in industry that actually used those.

But OK, if you're argument is that this unit isn't officially blessed by the SI. Then sure. But we use lots of units that while they are *based* on SI units, aren't officially blessed (fuel consumption is one straightforward example, l/100km). But who cares? The beauty of the SI system is that if you use it as a base, building your own engineering units becomes easy, straight forward, and converting back and forth for various calculations becomes (in general) simple without lots of convoluted conversion factors. You can think in SI, since you can do calculations and conversion in your head.

P.S. And on the divisibility. Guess why a standard kitchen module is 60cm (really 600mm)... Talk about divisibility

I don't understand your argument. The second is a perfectly valid SI unit. It's a base unit in fact. And you even use the same definition; those rocket scientists use the SI second for specific impulse. (As opposed to one of the other possibilities).

This is a better example of a unit you didn't manage to screw up than one where we show inconsistency, than anything else...

I remember from my stint in the telecoms sector, where there was constant whining that we didn't fill in our time report cards. "Very important, that's how we get paid!". (Yeah right, it all got lumped into one account statement when sent up the ladder anyway).

So, they decided it was time for some automated shaming. Every month an automatic email got sent that listed how much unreported time you had. And our boss would follow up with the inevitable; "We need to do this, please, pretty please". However, since his name was always pegged at the number two spot on the list (by a wide margin) only bested by *his* boss, it had the opposite effect. Quite a few of us realised that we didn't really need to do it weekly as our bosses and co-workers apparently couldn't be bothered to do it monthly even... Shaming fail. :-)

I remember it differently. Page and Brin, acording to what I read, shopped the idea around SI-valley for a long time and tried to sell it but there were no takers, as a) it's just an idea and b) "search has been done".

Anyway, I basically agree. People won't do "shit" work for free. But not everyone agrees on what "shit" is. And that's the majority of my point. Now, you're pretty adamant that fixing bugs is and always will be "shit". I don't really have as strong an opinion on the matter as you obviously do, but it's not really my experience, at least not to that degree. (There's the issue of one-upmanship, for instance.)

Oh, it's worse than that. The looks are evaluated based on how it looks when the light is OFF. That is, it has too look good during the day, when it doesn't have a purpose. Doesn't matter if it produces any actual *light* at all...

That sounded almost like a challenge! :-) What I'm saying that if someone manages to find a way to make bugfixing sexy and fun, bug fixing will start to happen. I'm tempted to think about this...

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with free as in beer vs. speech. I think Google managed to attract funding in no small part because they managed to make search fun. You invest in people not ideas after all. And also I would think it depends on what you mean by "do". They were after all grad students. I've left industry to pursue an academic career (such as it is) myself, and it wasn't for the money. Let me tell you... :-)

I read somewhere that that's what put Page and Brin apart, and what made them succeed was that they put search into a new light by declaring that it was FUN, instead of this boring buy-as-many-harddisks as you can routine info-processing job.

That resonated with me, because I remember always feeling that Altavista, even though interesting, was boring as hell. You couldn't pay me to get interested in that crap. Now Google on the other hand... (I'm talking back in the day, now not so much).