Don't care. If your shit shows me ads, it's not getting into my kitchen. Note to self: Don't buy appliances from Samsung anymore.

Yes, I am vocal in how much I hate ads. I believe the CEOs of advertising companies should get one hit with a stick for every time their ad bothered someone even in the slightest.

Exactly what I'm saying.

The fact that users and enterprise customers are not demanding better software from Microsoft with the same fervor their ancestors demanded that the witch be burnt speaks volumes.

And I'm specifically talking about operating systems here. Software can crash for all I care. I'm fine software quality being all over the place, the market can sort that out. But operating systems are natural monopolies and the foundation for everything else. We should not accept shoddy quality there.

Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?

My personal guess would have been at least 10x. Did Microsoft bribe the study authors?

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

Mozilla has realized that AI is going to kill search and when search dies Google won't keep giving Mozilla the money it needs to stay above water. So now Mozilla is scrambling to find an AI business model that users don't hate. Goodbye Mozilla, it's been a fun couple of decades.

Investment bankers in New York are absolutely aware of how much time they spend working. They know that they slept on a cot the last two nights, have eaten delivery for their last twenty meals, and cannot remember what their friends look like. Which is why most of them quit and leave New York in two years or less. I can only imagine that the software timer is there to push the weak ones to quit sooner and not get a bonus.

I agree it would only be a surprise first strike. But if any container ship was potentially hiding a few of these, think of the chaos it would cause in supply chains.

He's basically a newborn :-)

Yes, but there is an important difference: TV had to appeal to an average audience member. Meanwhile the social media algorithms are intentionally working against you, trying to specifically find and use your triggers.

That's quite a different intent there.

On the TV, parents could also check the program for what they thought was suitable for their kid or not. They could watch the same program, even if not in the same room. Social media is a lot more personal and a lot harder to track and filter.

Hard disagree.

Not everything is subject to hype cycles. A lot of especially the SMALLER musicians, for example, basically live off their back catalog. I routinely buy the entire collection of artists that I freshly discover and fall in love with. And I totally feel that it is right that I pay them for music they made, no matter when they made it.

What is an abomination is copyright terms of DEATH + 70 years. Or whatever Disney pushed it to by now. I'm ok with inheritance of creative work, but it should not put the children into "never have to work in their entire life" territory.

Then again, there are two aspects: Creative control and money. I think that the Tolkien estate did a generally good job of protecting the integrity of JRR's works. Well, if we ignore Rings of Power, I have no idea what lies Amazon told them to get the approval for that shitshow.

And let's not forget that coypright law is also what protects GPL software.

And how is that any different than a nuclear arsenal? It's an attack weapon that's most highly useful in first strike situations. But your enemy probably has a bunch too and they're hard to find and wipe out in a first strike. So the only way to win is not to play.

This is an interestingly less expensive deterrent for middle powers to buy (or develop themselves) who don't want to invest in a nuclear program to keep the larger countries at bay. I actually see this as a positive because it offers an alternative to nuclear proliferation. With current technology, a barrage of missiles like this can't be intercepted cost effectively, and you can hide them relatively easily. It has a chance to maintain a peaceful status quo, and perhaps avoid the looming WW3.

To give you a more practical example of the range, pretty much all of the continental US would be within 800 miles of the northern and southern US land borders. Not that Canada or Mexico would actually follow a program to develop these, as the US, Canada, and Mexico are still quite close allies, but my points is that the cost would easily be within the capabilities of those countries, and the range is pretty huge. Even container ships parked off the western and eastern coasts could reach well over 2/3 of the US landmass.

I have no idea what gateway was meant to be for.

I suppose you could argue that it was kind of like how the original Apollo worked. The capsule that brings you back to Earth for re-entry stays in lunar orbit and you just descend in the lander and go back up to lunar orbit. Plus you can maintain a much larger living environment at the gateway station. But it certainly made the whole thing seem like a Rube Goldberg affair. Assuming Starship gets the bugs worked out, then you should be able to do the whole mission with a single re-usable ship, assuming you launch it to low Earth orbit empty of fuel and then send up multiple other Starship flights to refuel it before it goes to the Moon.