Royalties are crap!

I was reading about this Kindle II thing being made and sold by Amazon. It seem that they have a cool feature... Text to Speech... in this hand-held device. Now it seems that Authors are getting all in an uproar about copy right infringement. I think that this is a load of crap.
I make things for a living. I make prototype models. I design and make parts for a wide variety of applications. Do I get a royalty every time some one uses the part? Do I get paid every time some one looks at the part... picks it up? NO, NO and NO! I get paid to make the part... the end. BUT some how "artists" musicians, actors, authors... and their attorneys... have created this system where in they get paid ever time one of their songs is heard, movies are seen, or books are sold. They got paid to make their product and now they get paid again and again and again? How is that right? It's not like musicians or actors or writers don't make enough money to produce their product... 20 Million Dollars to spend 3 months of your life making a movie? There is no way one person's time can be worth 20 million for three months work... no way. I understand that this is an economy of scale. LOTS of people will listen to the song, see this movie or read that book. It is ridiculous and I don't mean that the way they sling it around on "So You Think You Can Dance" to use hip speak.
Oh and in case you think I forgot about ball players; baseball, basketball, football... NO I haven't! If any one deserves a major league ball players salary its the Military or Firemen or the Police! Any persons job that has the possibility of dieing on the job written in to the job description. But then we couldn't afford that could we?

I read somewhere that thanks to the internet , sex is now boring.

Holy Smokes I read this article today that hit the nail on the head with near completely perfect accuracy!
Please read it! It is MOST illuminating. This is the caution to pornography argument that I have been making for years. There is no real data that suggest that unregulated porn access causes an increase in sex crimes which is the usual BS argument. In fact there is lots of data that points the opposite way. But the thing that I found after living in a sex soaked stupor for years was exactly what this article talks about Reality sex VS Porn Fantasy sex. It sort of boils down to a thing called expectation management. Unless you are involved with a partner who is as into porn as you are... then porn is likely to become a problem in your relationship. Maybe not now, maybe not soon but eventually. If however you find your self in a relationship with some one like minded in the porn area... consider it very carefully before you rock that boat. That equality may be very difficult to find again! I am a big fan of porn... but I am subject to its addictive qualities. *** I *** Ruined my marriage with it. After years of self analysis I take full responsibility for that debacle.

I would only add this to the article. Sex Addiction is a like Alcohol addiction this way; not everyone is predisposed to be an alcoholic. Some can drink one drink at dinner on occasion and have liquor in the house with no compulsion to consume all of it at once, once they start. Some people cannot. Some people drink till they pass out… regularly. They ruin their health. They spend more on booze than their budget honestly allows. They lose their jobs drinking on the job. Similarly with porn, online or otherwise, there are men, and women it seems, that will spend loads of money on online porn site memberships, more than they have to spend. They will lose their jobs because they trolled porn online at work.

There are some guys and gals that are likely to become addicted and some that are not. Also I think with “sex addiction” the triggers are more prevalent. There are more women walking around to look at, to rate their ‘doability’ index, to objectify, and fantasize about their breasts…butts… than there are liquor ads or stores so the incidence of dealing with sexual triggers is higher with sex addiction. And advertising uses sex like they use the letter E. This leads to a situation of habit building through repetition.

The metaphor of having to hunt for your food and cooking it over an open fire seeming to make it taste better comes to mind. The ability to get Fat and sugar into your diet used to be DARN tough. You had to run down the fat bearing animal and kill it. Using a stick and a rock made that a long labor intensive process. In general it cost almost as many calories to kill and eat an animal as was in the animal. Now you can just drop into any of thousands of fast food places and get Lots of fat and sugar... fast, easy and cheap. (Fast, easy, cheap... remind you of any one???) Fat and sugar taste good for a reason . You need them in your diet but only a little and because it used to be darn difficult to get into your diet it was sort of self regulating.

Now with Porn shops in every teeny tiny town you can get lots of fast, easy, cheap "sex" into your life... and just like eating too much fat and sugar... it may not be good for you. That's not to say that once in a while fast, easy cheap sex isn't great, a steady diet of it... not so much.

Bottom line porn can be hurtful in an unbalanced relationship. It’s a long and slippery slope. (Long and slippery... never mind me...) Nothing about it is easy.

Politics... and the press

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama plans to sign an executive order ending the ban on federal funds for international groups that promote or perform abortions, officials told The Associated Press on Friday.

Some stuff deleted here for readability sake

The Democratic official and senior U.S. official who disclosed the plans did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to pre-empt Obama's announcement.

...more stuff deleted here for the same reasons as above.

I put this up because of the second paragraph...

"We", our government, cant keep a damn secret.. not even a small one. "Officials" what ever that really means, are shooting their mouths off even though they are expressly NOT authorized to shoot their mouths off. It galls me to read this. Either this un-named official is a right fuckwitt for speaking against a Presidential order or... well I cant think of anything else that you would be... "pre-empting" a Presidential announcement. If an employee did something like this in most any company you could name they would be fired pretty quickly (instantly) and no good recommendation would be forthcoming. How is it that the "press" gets away with this sort of thing. How is it that they can print these stories on the 'word' of a person who clearly has a lack of ethics so profound that they will say things that the President is supposed to be saying. That to me is a LESS than credible source. But the source must at all costs be protected. Its one thing if there is wrong doing going on and there needs to be a whistle blower... but pre-emting a statement as banal as this. What "scoop" is that? I think the 'source' and the writer should be forced to take some "waste of time ethics class" something like an anger management class but for assholes who cant keep their mouths shut, for 1000 hours and have their dirty little family secrets "leaked" to the press. Of course no one would give a crap and you couldn't sell papers that way.
This is not news that needs to be 'scooped' in advance of its time. Most news is not in my opinion. The only time sensitive news that I can think of is the weather and market issues, but I leave room on that list for other potential news worthy issues. Beating the President to the punch on this is just ridiculous. I say ridiculous in the truest sense of the word... not the hip new definition they sling around on 'So You Think You Can Dance'. Those that engage in this sort of soft squishy ethics, for no good reason other than to say that they knew first, are contemptible.
The truly frightening thing to me is this: if they "leaked" this story... what other stories are they "leaking" and to whom are they "leaking" that information to?
I read no less than three stories this week with that disclaimer tag line at the end.

On a lighter note...

I watch a lot of TV. Historically... well ever since the DVR things came available... I don't watch many commercials except very very fast, third gear. Recently There are a couple new commercials that are worth seeing and seeing again and again. The KGB what ever that is... not relative to the Used to be Soviet Union. A couple weeks ago came this commercial then more recently came this new one. I think these guys are marketing Geniuses!
In case you want to know about the Hodge Conjecture this is the Wiki on that.
By the look of it I have a better shot at understanding this Hodge thing and winning the prize money than understanding a woman ever... ever.

A night at the movies...

I watched a movie last night. It is in my opinion one of the best of the worst movies I have ever seen. It has a great idea for a plot line and it is executed pretty well… mostly. It is a 1997 movie called “Event Horizon”. It is a horribly gruesome movie. I don’t know why I stayed up to watch it. I felt very ugly and dirty and small afterwards. The short of the story is that a Dr. Weir developed a spaceship that is capable of folding/bending space. The Idea is to bring two distant points in space, say many many lights years apart, together, then to transition from the start point to the distant point. This allows the ship to sort of cheat at traveling faster than the speed of light. But there seems to be a catch, as you might guess with any cheat of this magnitude. There is a gap between the two points. That gap is apparently hell. The ship, on its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri, disappears. Seven years later it reappears near the planet Neptune. A rescue ship, the 'Lewis and Clark' sent to investigate. The 'Event Horizon' comes back “possessed” by something… presumably the devil but certainly evil and very malevolent. The possessing 'spirit' fills the rescue crew with false and hateful images of fear and, you guessed it, gore, slowly pushing some towards insanity. The "bad" part is this; these are images flashed at the audience at high speed and frightening clarity in short bursts… ala subliminal advertising… that are absolutely horrific . I won’t even describe them. I said all that to say this there are a whole raft of movies out like this. The "Saw" movies, the "Hostel" movies where gore and unspeakable violence are the central attraction. They are like porn movies only... no sex, just evil, pain, and gore. At a certain level I would rather watch the porn movies… but they are not too very good for the soul either… more on that another time. How is it possible that there are enough people who will watch a movie like this, let alone enough who pay to see them to make them profitable? There must be lots of people out there willing to pay to see them… they make them all the time. Not too much for plot holds them together just excuses to torture and eviscerate people slowly and cruelly. Like I said Porn with gore not sex. Instead of the hapless pizza guy with a huge schlong who delivers to a sorority party or cougar party you have individuals with various emotional or mental deficiencies who like to bathe in blood or worse. Another movie I saw that perhaps I should not have... "The Cell" from 2000. The Cell has an Interesting sort of SCI/Fi-ish plot which is what interested me initially, layered with a time critical serial killer search. The Cell features amazingly beautiful cinematography hung on horribly ugly plot points. Sort of like having beautiful royal purple velvet drapes and furnishings in a battle field foxhole where infantry men had been blown up. I stayed to watch it but my fiancé... she did not. She was horrified by it and left.

In hind sight I should have been also. I wish, now, that I had also.