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Read this and think about who's REALLY responsible for the mess in Iraq:

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/061801/rubin061801.h tml

Little evidence??? I've never seen such willful blindness. I don't know if it's worth my time to counter this. How have you missed all of Bush's speeches, Blair's dossier of declassified intelligence, the numerous denunciations of Saddam by the U.N., and lots of other information coming out from nations around the world? When evidence against Saddam is presented to you guys, it's like putting an eye chart in front of a pack of moles.

Look, Saddam murders his own family members to prove his ruthlessness to potential dissendents. A close advisor once joked to Saddam that he step down from the "presidency." No smiles from Saddam. That guy's gone. And his family.

Saddam's goal is to be worshipped by his subjects. (Yes, subjects, not citizens.) The latest election is proof of this. Some voters pricked their fingers to mark their selection with blood. (In Old Testament-based religion, the shedding of blood signifies the making of a covenant.) He commands an awful lot of power. Saddam even manipulates the U.S. media. Btw, can anybody provide a link to a transcript or summary of any of the Iraqi election debates? I somehow missed them.

There's been lots of news that Saddam is linked to bin Laden and Palestinian terrorists. These guys are a threat to everybody. It is their explicitly stated goal to destroy the United States. As far as they're concerned, a country either converts to their religion or is targeted for destruction. They call us the Great Satan. They want to kill us. There's absolutely no question about it. What part of "We will kill you!" don't you understand?

Maybe pictures will convince you.

Or a video:
Broadband
56K
28K

If the NIHCM report doesn't convince you, just turn on your television and note which drugs are being marketed most aggressively. Ads for Celebrex may imply that it will enable arthritics to jump rope, but the drug actually relieves pain no better than basic ibuprofen; its principal supposed benefit is causing fewer ulcers, but the FDA recently rejected even that claim. Clarinex is a differently packaged version of Claritin, which is of questionable efficacy in the first place and is sold over the counter abroad for vastly less. Promoted as though it must be some sort of elixir, the ubiquitous "purple pill," Nexium, is essentially AstraZeneca's old heartburn drug Prilosec with a minor chemical twist that allowed the company to extend its patent. (Perhaps not coincidentally researchers have found that purple is a particularly good pill color for inducing placebo effects.)
...

A better explanation for the pharmaceutical slump is a shift in priorities toward marketing, particularly since the FDA first allowed companies to directly target consumers five years ago. According to data collected by Alan Sager, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, the number of research and development (R&D) employees at companies making patented drugs declined slightly between 1995 and 2000, while the number of people working in marketing shot up 59 percent. "Drug companies trumpet the value of breakthrough research, but they seem to be devoting far fewer resources than their press releases suggest," says Sager.

Moreover, drug companies have learned that when they can't create a new drug to treat an existing illness, they can create a new illness to treat with existing drugs. GlaxoSmithKline's multimillion-dollar promotion of anxiety disorder as a pernicious national problem enabled the company to make billions more selling Paxil--a drug most experts believe is needed by only a small fraction of the people who take it. Unimed is busy pushing the idea that there's a national problem called male menopause--a problem that just happens to be treatable by a testosterone gel the company makes. The gel is currently FDA-approved for men with rare--and thus relatively unprofitable--problems such as underdeveloped testes.
...

The explosion has a couple of causes. One is simply growth in the field, but another is that companies have found they can significantly extend patents through various legal maneuvers--from agreeing to test on children (Congress passed this law to create incentives for companies to perform separate tests on kids) to filing new patent applications on old drugs about to lose their protection. By slightly tweaking Prilosec into Nexium, AstraZeneca got several years of additional protection for a hot-selling prescription drug. "Companies today have found that the return on investment for legal tactics is a lot higher than the return on investment for R&D," says Sharon Levine, the associate executive director of the HMO Kaiser Permanente. "Consumers today are paying an inordinate premium under the guise of the creating the stream of innovation in the future. But it's actually funding lawyers."

Even more important, the patent morass may be blocking new lines of research altogether. Every time a company wants to pursue research on a certain biological process, or even the individual genes involved, it has to find out who owns the patents and the price of a license, if one is even available. Last year Peter Ringrose, then the chief scientific officer at Bristol Myers Squibb, told The New York Times that there were "more than 50 proteins possibly involved in cancer that the company was not working on because the patent holders either would not allow it or were demanding unreasonable royalties." Rebecca Eisenberg, a law professor at the University of Michigan, has called this the "tragedy of the anti-commons," with companies and universities grabbing property that should remain in the public domain.

For the RIAA labels, P2P is a way that independent musicians can get around the FM radio monopoly to reach the general public....Where's the room for compromise? They either stop P2P (remember Internet Radio?) or die

All of this rests, a priori, on your presumption that P2P is such an effective alternative to RIAA's marketing and financial backing that it fundamentally threatens RIAA.

No, P2P alone isn't, but P2P and Internet Radio and other Net enabled methods of communication with a low cost of entry *are*.

Merely putting your wares out on a file server is not equivalent to marketing.

I'm glad you've learned something from my posts.

How many albums have been sold by artists using P2P and non-RIAA means exclusively to market? It exists, but it is still very much of a fringe thing.

You state as fact things that can't be any more than opinions from a dubious source which you seem to be going to a good deal of trouble to render more so.

The central US record-keeping organization of the industry that certifies "gold" and "platinum" is the RIAA. Soundscan primarily tracks brick and mortar retail channel (every record sold via POS in the US is tracked on the Soundscan central databass) and is just beginning to track Internet sales including CD-on-demand. The sales charts for records in Billboard and in mass media and RIAA's numbers all are based on SoundScan. Look it up at Google. If this is news to you, you should become informed before expecting anyone to take your opinions seriously.

You cannot even show that these independent artists are any more numerous

Never said that they were. Perhaps in the America you'd like to see, no garage band could exist without registering with the Department of Homeland Security or getting permission from the RIAA to exist. We don't live there yet.

or more successful than they were pre-P2P or internet.

Define success!.

For a record label, an artist who only sold 200K records in a year is a mid-list artist, they'll probably keep her and hope she makes real money someday.

An individual who sold 200K records without the industry has made $1-2M on $3-4M gross saled. Tell that new millionaire that she isn't a success.

For a label, an artist who sold 10K records in a year is getting dropped, and she won't be seeing a dime in royalties, and the A&R man who signed her is getting yelled at by his boss.

That artist selling 10K records on her own has made $50-100K... which is a very decent living.

Here are examples of two bands that have done very well out of MP3 file swapping.

Wilco defies experts as `Foxtrot' gallops
By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic
Published May 2, 2002
article here

Fair usage quotes:
Though the album was rejected by one major label as uncommercial, Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" defied record-industry expectations by selling 55,573 copies in its first week and debuting at No. 13 on the Billboard album chart--by far exceeding the band's past sales achievements.

The numbers released Wednesday by Soundscan, which monitors retail sales, flew in the face of mainstream record-industry thinking, which held that Wilco could not significantly expand its audience without commercial radio airplay and that it would hurt its sales by making its music widely available on the Internet.

[snip]

A similar strategy worked for Radiohead in 2000 and 2001, when experimental records such as "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" circulated on MP3 files months before the albums' release, yet the albums debuted listeners time to live with the music for a while and appreciate at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, when released. "It gave our what we were up to," said Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien.

Tower Records on Clark Street reported first-week "Foxtrot" sales of 299, double the best first-week sales of any album this year. "People have the record because they downloaded it, but that didn't affect sales whatsoever," said product manager Von Medler. "It's been a couple of years since we've had a first week of sales like this."

*end quote*

This is the cutting edge of band marketing, and by definition, only a few are going to be on the cutting edge.

The musician I am personally working with will be releasing some of her songs as MP3s for the same reason. She knows what the product is. Just like Wilco does and Radiohead does.

Sad that YOU don't quite get it yet, isn't it? Don't worry. Hilary Rosen of RIAA also does. You may assume like everyone else that any public statements she makes at variance with this are fabrications.

Where is the evidence that RIAA's services are any less in demand? Why isn't there any real decline in the # of artists to signing with RIAA?

Strike one. RIAA is a record label industry association. Artists are neither invited nor welcome to join, though if they own their own record labels qualifying according to RIAA criteria, their labels might be welcome to join. They don't provide services to individual artists any more than the BSA provides end-user support. If you don't know this, why should anything else you say be taken seriously?

Why should anyone believe that RIAA's real agenda for attacking P2P is killing alternative distribution/marketing (given how irrelevant it is today)

Care to tell Radiohead and Wilco how irrelevant it is?

Perhaps the RIAA/MPAA, like your pets, look ahead a bit further than you do. Movie piracy in the US via download isn't especially significant. It can't be, the last mile bandwidth to the home isn't in place yet, even broadband DSL/cablemodem isn't really fast enough. MPAA is also helping leading the effort to lock down the Net and personal computers. Perhaps you should tell Jack Valenti that the Internet is irrelevant to movie piracy.

and not for the fact that 99% of the services' traffic is their goods being pirated,

I won't blame you for getting this one wrong, most name musicians believe the same disinformation, and they got it where you did. CDs are the product. 128K MP3s are promotional items used to sell CDs. They are not the same thing. The ones who figure this out, like Wilco and Radiohead have a much better chance of making money in the modern music environment. Any stupid enough to listen to you will be whining about PIRATES.

The reason for this is that as is known to everyone in and out of the industry except you, free MP3 distribution boosts record sales. Record sales dropped immediately after Napster was shut down.

Major labels pay to get their product onto FM radio. The quality is comparable. Why? While you might buy an album you've never heard based on the idea that if an RIAA label makes it, it must be good, nobody else will. The quality of a 128K MP3 is sufficiently different from that of an album that if someone grabs a 128K MP3 for something that the person really likes, he'll buy the actual uncompressed CD. Maybe not on the 1st or the 4th or the 100th listening, but sooner or later, he's going to want to hear every nuance through his multichannel sound system which is telling him there are things on it he wants to hear and can't.

especially when services that do NOT serve piracy so effectively are left alone by and large (e.g., mp3.com et. al)?

Strike two. Which world do you live in? Try googling mp3.com and lawsuit and see how many hits you get. I got 11,600 .

Do you know who owns MP3.com now?

MP3.com isn't an adequate promotional channel for new musicians, and with rare exceptions, anyone who thinks this will find out differently the hard way. In my plans to promote an actual artist I'm working with, MP3.com is fairly low on the list of priorities. I'm going P2P and non-US Internet Radio first.

Why? Too crowded for one, and most important, it doesn't fit the way most people look for new music. Unless one is a self-defined member of a musical subculture, in which case one knows who the bands are and goes directly to their sites and knows where to go to hear the latest buzz about cool new bands, one finds new music by finding music that one likes that's familiar and waiting for similar music from new bands. On a place like mp3.com , for the new user, all the new content is unfamiliar.

I like Internet Radio for this because it offers defined genres. But to some extent, so does the search feature on an MP3 file sharing site.

Internet Radio wasn't serving pirates at all and the RIAA got it closed down, too. They were paying radio-type royalties to ASCAP and BMI (do you know who ASCAP and BMI are? If you don't, just what are you doing in this discussion?) and were trying to make a deal with RIAA labels to allow them to pay reasonable (i.e. ones that would allow them to stay in business) royalties to them. RIAA wouldn't allow them to stay in business even if they paid royalties to labels.

In fact, one of the people who was involved in negotiating the Yahoo music contract that the CARP copyright deal that got Internet Radio closed down was based on explicitly stated that the yahoo intent was to make sure that only major label music got played on Yahoo, and that the industry wanted to make sure that Yahoo wouldn't let "just anybody" have a chance to get music played there.

If legitimate promotion and distribution of independent artists is really the goal of P2P,

The goal of P2P is file distribution. The content of the files is the business of the users. Why should a file sharing network have any other goals?

then Napster and all of its followers could have served that end, and simultaneously avoid RIAA's harrasment, by only allowing enumerated artists on its network after they sign an agreement stating that they are willing to have their goods traded in such a fashion. That could have been done very easily,

Explain how. Not that it matters, but I want to see you make a fool of yourself in public.

yet it was not and has not yet been done.

If the primary 128K MP3 value is to provide an advance sample of the CD listening experience, just why is this important? People are NOT trading almost CD-quality 256K MP3s to any significant extent. Just let the "Jolly Roger" flag recede into your hallucinations now.

Oh yeah, and why do you assume that RIAA can only do FM radio and multi-platinum artists?

You conflate two entirely different questions. You don't know why RIAA labels can only effectively service artists capable of selling 1M records and above? AND YOU ARE EXPLAINING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY TO US?

Strike 3. You're out!

But for my amusement, I'm going to kick the props out from under the rest of this part of your world view anyway. More to the point, refuting your mistakes are giving me a very few useful and potentially profitable ideas, the most important of which I won't discuss here.

You obviously haven't read Janis Ian's articles, have you? She demonstrated based on her experience that they don't serve their mid-list. As to why they can't, you yourself are providing part of the explanation right here. Don't you read your own posts before hitting "Send"? Why should anybody else read them?

MTV? Product placement in movies? Sports? Major websites? Streaming servers?

Yes, and all of these channels have a limited number of useful slots and the majority are targeted towards certain kinds of music. Pushing Metallica on urban black FM radio stations is a waste of money.

The only artists who can be marketed cost-effectively through those channels are either the ones who are multi-platinum or in the judgement of the label, can become multi-platinum. There really isn't any good economic reason to do otherwise. The other major expense with respect to a marketing model based on brick-and-mortar sales is manufacturing and shipping the physical product to tens of thousands of record stores. If you've shipped a dozen CDs to each of 10K record stores and only 10K CDs sell total, the record label is deep in the hole.

They have a lot of cash, experience, and they specialize in this stuff. They can and will adapt...

All it is going to take is one artist breaking 1M unit CD sales without the aid of a major record label (who cares if the RIAA blesses it via "platinum"? All who know anything about the industry know the numbers come from SoundScan) through the use of Internet promotion and in-person + Internet sales and the word getting around that he made $5-10M off those 1M sales instead of $50K and artists start bailing from their record labels. You obviously haven't read Courtney Love's explanation of a major label record contract and you certainly have never seen one yourself... meaning you've got no business discussing the music business in a public forum. But you may already have figured this out.

ALL the big 5 RIAA labels are in trouble. Due to "piracy"? Only in the imaginations of RIAA publicists and those naive enough to believe them. Care to look in a mirror before you continue to read this?Music sales as a whole dropped right after Napster closed. The difference appears to be lack of promotion via a mass-market P2P channel... say, the equivalent of several Clear Channel FM radio stations in major markets getting blown up.

There are two reasons for the decline in record sales after the impact of Napster's shutdown finally rippled out. "It's the economy, stupid!" is one.

By and large, the labels are owned by very large multinationals. If the label artists start bailing, the stock value of the parent companies suddenly takes a hit grossly disproportionate to the actual impact on asset value. Watch most of the big 5 go on the block at fire sale prices, i.e. for far less than the values of their catalogues and physical assets. Remember the dot.bomb? Many good companies went down with the bad. This will happen sooner than even most of RIAA's worst enemies will believe possible. Most labels won't have time to adapt before they go on the block.

Not to say that all labels will go down, and I'm certain that in the post-RIAA landscape, the competent music specialists currently employed by the labels will make more money than ever before. I think most will work directly for musicians as contractors, but some will work for surviving labels and new ones. The new labels that start out with and the old ones who adapt to to a "everybody has access to Net promotion - WE know what we're doing" based business by drastically cutting expenses, concentrating on artist support, creating fair contracts, publishing them on the Web, and boasting about how good they are in every venue they can buy ads in, spending far less money per new artist by using Internet channels only for promo and distribution unless an artist proves real mass market potential will make more money than anyone believes possible.

The surviving and new labels will be able to make money with an artist that sells 5-10K records... as will the artist. The new successful label model will be hundreds or thousands of 10K-50K selling artists, and a few breakout artists who it'll be worth the trouble to go to traditional brick and mortar distribution for.

From an artist viewpoint, the point behind having a label is to make more money with less non-music hassle than one can without one. If one's worldwide sales potential is 10K records a year with what an individual can do about promo, one has the chance to make a decent living without a label. To make a label contract worthwhile, an artist needs to be convinced that the record label can make life easier for him and increase his income. In the new world, the record labels will have to make that case to a musician inclined to believe otherwise.

even if it's not RIAA as we know them,

Again. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY PLAYERS ARE AND YOU ARE LECTURING US ABOUT THE INDUSTRY?

there will always be a need for some major backing of this kind. The

reason is simple: it is impossible for everyone to have everyones ear.

Anybody who's selling music and bought access to "everyone's ear" paid way the hell too much.

Your "simple" reason is simply wrong. You really don't know what a record label does for musicians, do you?

Most simply put, it's an interface; a broker between the musician and the part of the public most likely to buy that musician's music. It's gatekeeper function is imposed by economics, if an organization is going to use the mass media as the primary tool to promote a record and brick and mortar distribution as the primary sales channel, very substantial resources must be devoted per musician. Add this to the legendary drastically inflated overhead, and this means extremely substantial resources. With the full knowledge that on the average, most of these investments will be lost. Other label resources are used to help the musician make the record, i.e. studio time, experienced in-house or external music and video producers and directors, etc. Labels constrained this way must make what appear to be the "safest" choices, not the best or most artistically appealing ones.

People are getting bored by the safe choices. That's the other big reason why the major labels and Clear Channel is in big trouble. While you presumably are content with Clear Channel, and I'd guess you to be a 60s-80s "album-oriented-rock" type, listenership is dropping. Are you going to tell us that P2P "piracy" is hitting FM radio as well? Same price and one doesn't have to tie up one's BW downloading, similar quality, and if your assumptions are true (they aren't), same music.

Unless our media fractures into such small niche groups (which it has not and we have no reason to believe it will) there will be a market for the finite mindshare of consumers. That market is necessarily expensive because the demand is so great and the supply is so little.

With respect to the media shattering into small niche groups, the media hasn't. the AUDIENCE has. This ain't "The Summer of Love" anymore. Times have changed since "The San Francisco Sound" or "The English Beat" was what everybody was listening to. There isn't one big sound everyone is listening to anymore, even within music categories like metal or hiphop or "alternative music".

Let's take metal as an example. It has shattered into at least a dozen different niches, some as different as chalk and cheeze. You know the difference between "heavy" metal and "doom" metal? The audience for the less important niches isn't big enough to support a million-selling audience even if EVERYBODY who listened to it bought a particular album. This is happening across the big music categories. I don't know if this will ever get to the point where 1M album sales are simply impossible, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen.

I'm probably going to let you have the last word on this, there's a limit on the amount of pro bono time I can spend educating one blockhead, though I hope and believe others have benefited. Not that I expect the last word to do you any good, unless you count further exposure of your ignorance as a good.

I find it hard to believe that you are really as ignorant as your public post indicates. Are you grassroots or astroturf?

After reading this article and the current post, I think we should just disown Delaware.

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• Just like Senator McCain who is refered to as Senator John McCain (R-Media).

Or, as some have pointed out, maybe it should be Senator John McCain (D-Democrat).

I guess even with his position of power Harry Reid finally lost and/or the rest of congress finally got (a little) common sense.

Don't worry, there are not links to Goatse

Here are many more interesting Microsoft bashing articles for your enjoyment:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

And here is an article that asks if Microsoft-bashing good for you.

In China, and most of the rest of the world, you are not valued for the quality of your product or for how hard you work. You're valued for "who you are" -- the son of a famous general, the brother of a diplomat, the cousin of the President.

Sure, nepotism never happens in the U.S....

The debate, though, is happening, albiet not in the mainstream press. (OTOH, the NYTimes has had several stinging editorials and op-eds, all against the measures - that's as mainstream as it gets, I guess.)

On the right: see this article - and on the left, this one is the only one I can find now. Excellent reading both, and you know something is up when the Nation and the New Republic agree! Or try this one, where Sandra Day O'Connor is quoted as saying "We're likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in our country."

Whoa! This is the swing vote on the Supreme Court... say bye bye freedoms. Some days, I wonder where we're going, and why we're sitting in this handbasket...

TNR is my favorite new/politics mag, but please keep in mind the problems with Glass' articles that brander mentions - ;here is the link to TNR's apology to its readers

I lack the time or the inclination to rebut all of these assertations, but let me mention the one that Mr. Brin gives as his main reason to reject the Republicans: taxes.

It is obvious to all who seriously analyze the facts, that supply side economic theories work. Study after study shows Laffer's Curve to be an accurate description of the behavior of the economy with respect to tax cuts. It's not a matter of favoring the rich, but of expanding the pie for everyone. And the best answer is (surprise, surprise) treat everyone equally! Yes, all men are created equal should apply to taxes too! It's only fait that everyone pay a similar percent of their income in taxes to the government. (It's appropriate that we allow the less fortunate to escape this burden with deductions and such, but we should move away from the other extreme.) Making the tax code fairer (ie flatter) helps everyone by improving the economy and removing obstacles to income growth.

I'm a middle class type, married with one kid. I don't have 90 milliion dolllars; I don't even have one million. (At the rate I'm going, I never will.) But I want my daughter to have that chance. I think she has a better chance if Al Gore and his "targeted" policies are never implemented.

One more thing: a moderate can only be portrayed as extreme if the person doing the portraying is truly on one end of the spectrum. Bush is pretty close to the center on most issues, and appreicates his diferences with others where his position is not usiversally accecpted (like abortion). He is not a "right-winger" to be sure. Look at his record in Texas and you see a moderate, even in his court nominations (See this article from The New Republic, a somewhat left-wing magazine, for more info.) I can't say I agree with Bush on everything; he clearly doesn't understand the Internet. But, all things considered, Gov. Bush is better for the country. Mr. Brin's opinions are clearly more extreme than the typical Republican or Democrat.

Indeed. A few things worthy of note here:

1. The numbers are most likely coming from Forrester Research, a company that was founded to make projections about how technology impacts business. And they're traded on nasdaq. Go figure! It's like asking a Ford dealer what the best make of car is.

2. The Economist isn't always right. I've been keeping their projections for the future issues onhand for about five years now, and they simply don't do all that well. Apparently I'm not the only one -- the cover story from the June 14th issue of the New Republic ran a pretty sizable expose on it. Check it out.

3. The numbers are still pretty damn small. First, e-commerce: currently 8 billion out of 242,239 billion in consumer expenditures. A tiny fraction, seems about right. Forrester's saying in five years half of what's bought will be over the internet. ("Todd, we're out of milk... Can you hop online and order some?) Seems a little high to me! On the business to business side, I couldn't get the numbers -- if you wanted them you had to order a cdrom from the census bureau (but you couldn't order it online --the irony did not escape me). But total business reciepts were (breath!): $16,654,636,336,000. So do the math and make a rough calculation.

Lastly, let's remember that not that many people can afford computers. Also keep in mind that the vast, majority of businesses have less than four employees (no numbers handy, eek). Census dept gives us roughly 10 out of 11 as having under 20 employees, though. The cost of a comprehensive net presence isn't going to be worth it for most companies.

"the INTERNET ... revolutionizing the way you obtain porn."