JackC

Yes. It's a pain in the arse too. But it should be remembered that being a referee for a journal article is only the start of the process. Once the paper is published, that is when the real peer review process begins. In general, I think the peer review process is not that well understood by people who haven't dealt with it.

I'd say it would be a fair bet. With any business you can only blow the bubble so big. Eventually people decide that the crowds are too big, it's too expensive, you can't see anything and there's better coverage on TV so they stay away. Some other cash cow then pops up somewhere else to take its place. Tis the way of things.

Well again that's not so suprising. Gigs have got bigger and bigger over the years and so have the ticket prices. If you don't want to fund a $50M tour, don't book 80,000 seater stadiums. There's still room at the bottom it's just that major record labels won't get out of bed for less than a couple of gold albums and a multi million dollar merchandising deal.

You obviously know the industry better than me, I'm only an amateur and certainly don't have a Grammy on my mantlepeice (an impressive achievement by the way). But because you are in the industry you would be wise to exploit it as best you can. If my opinions help you see a way to do that then great. If not then I'll refund the money you paid me for them. Every market finds it's own level and the music market is currently undergoing an "adjustment". What is happening, why and what to do about it is a matter for debate (or not). But every business faces it's problems, I'm sorry that this one just happens to be yours.

Yep. There aren't many businesses where you can do something once and sell it a million times over. I certainly can't record me fixing someones car and flog that till it goes platinum.

Redbook-compliant CD are different from CDRs but a CD is still a CD. I could burn an mp3 download to a CDR but that wouldn't get me the original artwork, liners and lyric sheets would it? You might be right about CDs being replaced though, but I would be very suprised if hard copies disapeared all together. I expect there will still be some form of music storage object I can go to a store and buy. ***So that you can listen to it on demand. And people are very demanding today. Americans want it when they want it, how they want it. You're right. You don't *need* to buy it. You don't *need* to buy a rig, that can of RedBull, or those stylin' new shoes either. You buy em' cuz you want them, not because you *need* to. The music industry is a victim of its own success. At one time music was rare. You listened to it on crackly AM radio sets where it was being broadcast from a ship somewhere off shore. You'd make a special effort to go to a friends house just because he had a new record and you could spend hours listening and analysing every inch of the cover. But music bcame more popular and more places wanted to play it. Now days you can't go anywhere without a musical acompaniment. Shops, pubs, cars, TV stations, websites, birthday cards, door bells, cell phones, they all pump out music 24/7. It's what busnessmen call a mature industry. There's no more room for growth because the market is saturated. As a result, music is devalued because it's absolutely everywhere. I can listen to most mainstream stuff more or less on demand by flicking on the radio, MTV, loading up the vid on Youtube or some random guy's cell phone ring tone. Indie stuff is much harder to find and it still has some value because of that. Truly original stuff is the rarest and most valuable of all.

I think you're right to an extent. There is a diversity of music available these days and that may well water down the absolute number of sales that any individual artist can generate. When there is more music to choose from, the sales are spread thinner. The same can be seen in viewing figures for TV shows. The overall number of people watching has gone up but they are spread over many more channels so the viewing figures for each show drops. Another problem is that mainstream music gets an inordinate amount of air play. I'm unlikely to buy Crazy by Gnarls Barkley because it's been done to death on the radio. I don't need to buy it, I've heard is hundreds of times so you're right, airplay does not lead to sales. It's the same with older music. Why buy the Led Zeppelin back catologue when I've heard it hundreds of times and actually grown weary of it because of that. I disagree about CDs though. They are cheap to produce, anyone with a CD burner and a laptop can record and produce their own CDs. It's true that mp3s are cheaper but there is something to be said for actually having the box and packaging along with the music. People who want to have the music for a collection to keep (these people do exist, I'm one of them) are less likely to grab mp3s because they are disposable. If this weeks top 20 is disposable music, it makes sense to put it on a disposable format. CDs may get eclipsed by downloads but hard copies will always exist in some form or another. I've not seen a paperless office yet despite decades of email and pdf files and numerous experts telling me that paperclips will be redundant. Music is not a bit different from this. Edit: Vinyl was supposed to have been eclipsed by CDs and for the main part it has, but you can still buy it. Limited outlets maybe but it didn't disapear completely.

I think mainsteam music is suffering not only because of mp3 downloads but because an awful lot of mainstream music sucks big time. Since the invention of the mp3 format, I buy many, many more CDs than I ever did because a lot of indie labels have demos available online, I can download them and find all sorts of gold. If I like it, I always buy the CD because I want the hard copy in its case on my shelf with my other CDs. What I don't do is buy mainstream music, not beacuse I can find it for free but because it sucks.

Absolutely right. If I was a sig line sort of guy, I'd use that.

I hope the robot got the crap half of your crap.

Why would you? And what happens when you divorce? Does the robot end up with half your crap?

Tell him to eat loads of beans, shove the harp up his ass and fart the national anthem. He'll rock. Smelly rock, but rock none the less. I hate people like that cos it takes me years to suck at anything

I added another one. http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=785382&songID=6120198

Yep. I played guitar in a couple of bands. Eventually got so sick of it that I played my last gig and put my guitars back in their cases where they stayed for about 7 years. I'm playing again now but never again in a band.

"Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf's skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer's lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains." (from Gargantua, 1534)

+1

Under those circumstances, I think so.

It is my understanding that Russell's paradox is an artifact of naive set theory and that it vanishes under ZFC set theory.

Dunno but probably no bigger than about 1.3x10^26m if c is 3x10^8 m/s and the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years and big bang cosmology is about right. Although I haven't completely discounted periodic boundaries (but I've heard some people have). The universe is the complete set of everything, everywhere. There are no things that exist outside of the complete set of everyhing everywhere. The many worlds interpretation of QM notwithstanding. If there is something is probably extends somewhere. If there is nothing, it probably extends nowhere. I thought we solved that one. 42?

I haven't needed a gun in my entire life. I'd rather be prepared to go to the pub and being strapped would almost certainly limit my drinking opportunities. There's a fair chance that the average gun owner doesn't actually need one either, they just enjoy it.

I'm sure you're right but at what point that would happen depends in the implementation you are using. If in doubt, test it. The point is: if you're going to get a computer to do your maths, make sure you know how and when it will fall over and give you gibberish. That's fine provided software know what the problem is and how to fix it. There's not too much evidence to suggest they do

Ermm.. no. But I think the real moral of this story is don't fuck with infinities. There be dragons...

I remember a similar problem. A Koch Snowflake has an infinite perimeter but a finite area. So if you extruded the shape into a Koch Vase you could fill it with paint but you wouldn't have enough to paint it. But if you made the walls infinitely thin the inside surface area would be the same as the outside surface area and because it's full of paint, you've already painted the inside and that's impossible.

That depends on what program you wrote. A simple loop that adds 9x10^-n for each n-th trip round the loop would never reach 1. Computers don't get infinities either. You have to catch them or the program either crashes, gets stuck in a loop or outputs gibberish.

I know the proof is correct, I just think they way you explained it was misleading. For any finite number of decimal places the proof fails and most people haven't got the hang of working with infinities.