Big Wheel

A lot of the problem unfortunately stems from something that can't be directly fixed by legislative health care reform: the US doesn't have enough primary care doctors. Some of the reason why is that the AMA has endeavored to keep the overall expansion of medical schools much slower than it should be to keep up with population growth; this makes for extremely busy primary care doctors who make lots of money. Unfortunately (for me, anyway - in 8 years' time I may be one of those primary care physicians), what's really needed is more doctors who are still very busy but make significantly less money. Not an easy nut to crack policy-wise.

Tell that to PirateBay. They didn't actually host any of the torrents, they just linked to them. Interesting example, though I think it actually proves my point. The authorities, I would guess, go after torrent trackers only because it's so difficult to go after the infringers themselves - the torrenters. And from the point of view of actually stopping infringement it makes much more sense to go after the hubs that enable infringement. Prosecuting or suing seeders here and there not only is like playing an endless and not-very-lucrative game of whack-a-mole, it doesn't even succeed at stopping the filesharing because there are a million other seeders out there who can access the tracker. You can only stop the filesharing by taking down the tracker. But if people are linking from here (and other sites) to boots on Amazon, then Amazon is the main hub enabling the infringement's distribution, not here. Taking you out isn't effective at stopping the boot and yelling at Amazon to take down the page is. Why would someone go after you and not Amazon? I still don't get it. Don't get me wrong; I think it's generally wise to be cautious about this stuff. I just have trouble understanding the fear of a kind of litigation I've never even heard of occurring (suing individuals for linking to reputable retailers).

No, that's not really the point. The logic here is that even the threat of legal action is exceedingly unlikely - it's never going to come to winning or losing. Amazon and other Internet retailers are pretty risk-averse: rather than dick around with fighting to keep up boots here and there, they're going to invariably respond to even a C&D by simply taking down access to the boot. Which means that if you see a boot up there, Amazon hasn't been served with a C&D. Why someone would serve Jim with a C&D for board members' linking and not Amazon for actual selling...again, it really doesn't make any sense. The moral argument against linking is stronger...but I think it's unrealistic to think you can proactively rid the board of more than a small fraction of such links ("proactively" as opposed to moderators taking them down after the fact). Contrary to Larry's point, I don't think most who are linking to boots are intentionally doing so or know better; only some of us are walking discographies, and many do not think too hard about things like record labels (this board is about discussing MUSIC, amirite?). Hectoring a la Larry is not going to meaningfully reduce the instance of this problem. I didn't say that the people who were posting those links were doing so to intentionally violate the form rules -- rather, I think that in almost every case they were unaware of this rule in the first place or had forgotten about it. Thus, I wasn't hectoring anyone, just reminding people not to post those links. And I have more faith in the good sense and good will all of us than you do -- I'd be surprised if the number of those links doesn't go way down in the future. Yes, this board is about discussing music, but it's also about doing so within the boundaries of good behavior that Jim, the most beneficent of hosts IMO, has set up. To me it's not a matter of sense or good will, but of having highly specialized knowledge of recording circumstances that even many board veterans may not possess. I still can't tell precisely what is considered kosher under the rule. Is this an unauthorized recording? This 4cd box is from a European outfit called Solar Records that I've never heard of. The cover art and so forth make me skeptical that this label pays the Coltrane estate anything for these recordings or obtained permission to reissue them. However, the records are old enough that the material is probably PD in Europe. Plus, and this seems like the key criterion, the recordings themselves were consented to. Therefore I'm guessing that it is considered "authorized" under the rule. How about this? Unauthorized or authorized? I know a fair amount about Andrew Hill but I don't know anything about Warwick Records. Plus the reissue was done by our friends the Catalonians at Fresh Sound. So while again we can reasonably conclude that the Hill estate isn't making anything off the record, I don't know for sure whether this is authorized or not because I don't know what the specific history of this obscure label was. Next. Are these authorized? These recordings were most definitely NOT authorized at the time they were made. I think it's safe to say that Bird would find the idea of selling fragments of his solos for >$100 deeply weird at the very least. However, the records were made "authorized" by some kind of contract negotiations well after the artists themselves died. So I guess this counts as authorized under the rule, though at this point things are starting to get very confusing in light of the spirit of the rule (artist compensation). Finally, how about this: This video footage has never been officially released in the US but will be next month. So, it's "authorized" in the sense that Miles recorded the video for Sony. But this is definitely not the Sony version! Given that the Sony version has not even come out yet, would linking to this be kosher or not? Does that status change at all once Sony puts out its version? Point being, I try to think about this stuff and know a fair amount about the artists and I still can't tell for sure what's OK. A newbie is going to think about this stuff much, much less than that.

Well, it's not your point, but that doesn't mean that my views are irrelevant. Threats, no matter how unlikely, are still a possibility, and in this matter they are unnecessary and easily avoided. There is absolutely no need to publicly share information that might in any way reflect negatively on our host. What we say privately is our own business. I can't understand why this alternative would not satisfy the different positions expressed here. I didn't say your views were irrelevant. Let's back up for a second. What I was responding to was this: Those are my words between the quotation marks, but that's not what I was arguing at all - the bit about winning litigation is a misrepresentation of my actual post. That's all I was saying - that the point you're contesting is attributed to me but in fact is not really mine at all. I'll accept the imprecision as my fault though and will try to be clearer in the future. As for the substantive content of our posts, reasonable people can disagree on that stuff.

Do they pay different amounts for plays in the US vs Europe? If not it's tougher to explain why Gail would be OK with one but not the other.

We discussed that upthread. For whatever reason the powers that be decided to restrict access on Spotify to non-US accounts.

No, that's not really the point. The logic here is that even the threat of legal action is exceedingly unlikely - it's never going to come to winning or losing. Amazon and other Internet retailers are pretty risk-averse: rather than dick around with fighting to keep up boots here and there, they're going to invariably respond to even a C&D by simply taking down access to the boot. Which means that if you see a boot up there, Amazon hasn't been served with a C&D. Why someone would serve Jim with a C&D for board members' linking and not Amazon for actual selling...again, it really doesn't make any sense. The moral argument against linking is stronger...but I think it's unrealistic to think you can proactively rid the board of more than a small fraction of such links ("proactively" as opposed to moderators taking them down after the fact). Contrary to Larry's point, I don't think most who are linking to boots are intentionally doing so or know better; only some of us are walking discographies, and many do not think too hard about things like record labels (this board is about discussing MUSIC, amirite?). Hectoring a la Larry is not going to meaningfully reduce the instance of this problem.

I don't compensate the copyright owners of that work, either.

Hey, I abide by the rule - I'm not interested in paying for the vast majority of boots, so I'm pretty sure I've never linked to one. But abiding by the rule doesn't mean we can't point out when we think the rule is dumb and without grounding in reality or sound legal advice. Saying JIM SAYS SO, SO STFU OR LEAVE is not much of an argument in its favor.

I hope there are no credit union lawyers with a penchant for defamation cases lurking, in that case...

But it does demolish any legal logic used to justify this board policy. The point of the policy, I presume, is to immunize Jim from lawsuits lodged by copyright holders. But if the world's largest online retailer is selling the product, arguing that linking to such products will amount to likely lawsuits for Jim makes no sense. The point of a lawsuit is to obtain relief from harm; if nobody is bothering to sue Amazon, which is causing about 1,000,000x the harm Jim is in such a case...then why does Jim have anything to fear? It's asinine. Jim established the Organissimo board. He made the rules. If we want to remain here, we follow them. It's as simple as that. It seems ridiculous that people have to quibble over nonsense. Nice. Then if that's the rationale, let's just replace Forums Discussion with a pinned thread that says BECAUSE JIM IS THE DAD AND HE SAYS SO and leave it at that.

But it does demolish any legal logic used to justify this board policy. The point of the policy, I presume, is to immunize Jim from lawsuits lodged by copyright holders. But if the world's largest online retailer is selling the product, arguing that linking to such products will amount to likely lawsuits for Jim makes no sense. The point of a lawsuit is to obtain relief from harm; if nobody is bothering to sue Amazon, which is causing about 1,000,000x the harm Jim is in such a case...then why does Jim have anything to fear? It's asinine.

I think that whichever records are on Spotify must be location-restricted and only available for non-US Spotify users. I'm less surprised at there being restrictions than at Gail allowing any Spotify access at all to them. Too bad, I still ain't buying some of the later 70s and 80s work until I hear samples first. My opinion of the major Zappa drummers I've heard goes, in descending order of preference, something like this: Chester Thompson > Ralph Humphrey > Aynsley Dunbar > Jimmy Carl Black > Chad Wackerman = Terry Bozzio. (Haven't heard much of the Colaiuta period.) Not sure the drumming is really what contributed most to the different sound of the bands, though - I suspect that the revolving door of guys on bass has more to do with it as well as the tightness of all the keyboard/guitar/horn players.

Fascinating, I never would have pegged Jim as the "math" type (seems like the musicians I know are split 50/50). Like the idea of this thread a lot. The first guy is not very well known at all but is really an excellent teacher and musician, showing tons of patience with students often thought too young to learn improvisational music. His name is Brent LaCasce and he runs the music department at tiny Fryeburg Academy in rural Maine (also teaches at other places). Were it not for this guy I might have given up music around age 11. The second, Mike Gerber, you might have heard of. Gerber played in New York for bit and also with Jaco (who I think he met in Florida) for a while. A reasonably good summary is here: http://www.alldeaf.com/deaf-news/31797-blind-partly-deaf-piano-man-plays-heart.html Gerber has been blind from birth and his hearing was not great either when I studied with him in 1998-99. But yeah, a genius for sure. As you might expect, an outstanding ear, able to pick out complex piano voicings from the record on the first try. And where so many teachers didn't give a shit about anyone besides the 5 or 6 giants who influenced them most (usually: 1) Bill Evans; 2) Wynton Kelly; 3) McCoy Tyner; 4) Herbie Hancock; 5) Keith Jarrett; 6) A wild card but probably Art Tatum or someone) Gerber actually appreciated and absorbed random bebop players - Walter Bishop, etc. I respected him for that and it made me pay attention in a way it didn't with other teachers. And he was the first to really dig into the transcriptions we worked on and help through the parts that didn't "make sense" from a theory perspective but nonetheless were definitely on the record. One part I'm thinking of is that voicing that Herbie plays on bar 7 of "Eye of the Hurricane," which I think we worked out has a natural 13th and a sharp 5th on top - usually considered a no-no. (I forget what the bass is playing but the voicing is basically a rootless Bb7 chord, so it has a Gb, G, and Ab in the voicing which doesn't correspond to any traditional chord-scale theory and is usually considered to be an unacceptable dissonance.) It's funny, we never talked about Tristano or Andrew Hill and probably not Jaki Byard either.(late edit: I think we may have discussed Byard briefly, because Byard was killed around the time I was taking lessons, but I probably didn't own any Byard recordings yet then that would have sparked studying his playing together.) It would have been interesting if I had discovered them back then.

Thanks a lot, Chad. Making me look like an idiot, that I can handle. But making Goodspeak appear a paragon of good judgment for the first time in his entire life? Unforgivable.

Praying that Mike Brown finds a way to royally screw this up with terrible coaching...

this is pretty amazing too:

Ah, thank you! Last night I let out a stream of obscenities last night that amounted to "still with the gymnastics?" mostly because it meant more amped up routines that they can't even practice much lest a neck get broken. And they need to give these girls anti-helium before they talk. That would be sulfur hexafluoride or xenon:

Are avatars uploaded directly to the board's server or are they hyperlinked (which is what it sounds like from Shawn's description)? If the latter and your avatar is actually hosted on tattoo-hunter.com, then if that site got hacked this week it's possible your avatar's URL now points to a file containing malware instead of the usual picture. Oh - more likely in fact is that Google may have blacklisted tattoo-hunter.com for some reason (like a Google server recently crawled them and found malware SOMEWHERE on that domain), which is why Shawn's getting the warning in Chrome even though other antivirus software isn't detecting any actual virus.

It's the new hipster thing to do. Has anyone tried to ferment their own pickles before? I've done kimchi (still figuring it out) and sauerkraut (came out AWESOME) but just tried my first shot at dill pickles. No vinegar, just salt, spices, dill, garlic and veggies. I have one jar of cut cucumber spears, which came out...weird and slightly bitter. I think the Kirby cucumbers I used had grown too big and thick. Also have a jar of the same whole cucumbers, a jar of smaller Kirbys, and a jar of green tomatoes going. Haven't cracked them open yet though.

And the 156 points broke the old Olympic record by almost 20 points. Carmelo basically had carte blanche to just keep heaving 3s and the Nigerians kind of gave up on playing defense after the first half too(and started chucking up 3s themselves). Any night you score 29/46 from beyond the arc is gonna be pretty good.

Bumping this old thread. Since it was last updated, the AKG K14Ps were discontinued and I believe the Sennheiser MX400/500 were too. I tried all of them - the AKGs had better sound but I found them much more uncomfortable in the ears compared to the Sennheisers. I burn through earbuds quickly (18-24 months before I snag them in a door or break an internal wire somewhere). Anyone know what the go-to models are for inexpensive headphones these days? Thinking of going with the HD-202s but they're a little more than I really need at the moment.

Thought NYC-area members would want to know about this show this Friday. The record is a Tzadik release with Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz on gimbri. An old buddy is on drums - he's a beast!

The NYT story on the badminton fiasco makes the badminton federation look pretty bad. They set up a dumb system this year and are now penalizing the players for playing strategically. Is this really so different from a swimmer who saves his energy for the big heats and takes it easy in the quals, just making sure he finishes 8th or whatever?

Certainly more of a sport than biathlon (which requires a machine), or rhythmic gymnastics or ice dancing (technically demanding interpretive dance). Ping pong at that level requires as much skill as regular tennis and probably better hand-eye coordination and reaction time. As for USA basketball, they could have won by 60 if they'd opted not to showboat in the 1st and 4th quarters and keyed in on one Tunisian player who was draining open jumpers.