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How to Turn A Music Lover to Piracy
dugn writes to tell us The Consumerist is running a story about how a run of the mill (read non-tech-savvy) music lover was pushed to become a pirate. "I've devoted a not-inconsequential chunk of my life to collecting music; to tracking down obscure records, cassettes, 8-Tracks and CD's of all genres and styles. And now apparently that is all but over. Music has somehow evolved from tangible things into amorphous collections of 1's and 0's guarded over by interested parties as if they were gold bullion. How so very sad."
If (as the "content industry" would like us to believe) we do not ever actually "own" our music, but "license" it, then there can't be any such thing as a Music Pirte. It's more like Unlicensed Music Listener. Like an unlicensed driver. Your thoughts?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It gave people for mere pennies the ability to buy a service that once took a king's fortune to procure;
really? from what I remember of musical history most people got to listen to music for free and were encouraged to donate to the travelling bard or musician.
Granted history could be wrong and all artists commanded millions of rupees/gold coins/diamonds per performance from the kings of the world.
I am betting that that is not the case, most musicians worked for very little and gave away their craft, incredibly few were the "rock stars" that sold their creations for incredulous amounts of money. (Yes Mozart, Beethoven, and their likes were the exception and not the rule.)
Also most music was blatantly stolen. Most Irish jigs are variations of other jigs, and so on. Most of music's evolution is based on the original freedom and freeness the music had.
Paying huge sums of money all the time to musicians is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self. No matter what the RIAA and stars-in-their-eyes musicians want, it will change back to the way it was.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
People joke about the pricipal export of Lichtenstein being false teeth and the main export of Greece being culture, but Cuba does 'lend out' a phenomenal number of doctors to other countries.
I've visited and been very impressed at the serious level of effort they put into education and medicine.
Yes, they can't compete on level terms with the West and the phenomenal amout of cash we can put into solving a problem (viz. shotgun gene sequencing) but it very much reminds me of theoretical physics in Russia in the late 70's - frequently we were surprised by solutions to normally intractable problems they produced. We would say it would require many months of CPU time to simulate and their reply was 'we have no computers to do the simulation - we just invented new mathematics'. Cuban medicine and education appears to rely on inventiveness and necessity being the mother thereof.
uh, no, it doesn't.
the bible doesn't state how old the earth is.
the problem with most people is that 1. they input into text what isn't there and 2. they tend to listen to what everyone else in their group believes, regardless of the data that contradicts their view.
gen 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
yes, in the beginning, god created the universe. then, at some undisclosed point in time after that event, god took a formless and void earth and did some more creating. you and others ASSUME verse 2 occurred instantaneously after the event described in verse 1, but that doesn't have to be the case.
"in the beginning, i was born. now it came to pass that i had a college final exam."
is my exam necessarily the instant after i was born? would you assume it IN CONTEXT? of course not. yet that is EXACTLY what you do with genesis verses 1 and 2.
the bible speaks of original creation being perfect and beautiful and not "without form and void." the "without form and void" state could have occurred billions of years after the event described in verse 1.
the bible is 100% consistent with an earth billions of years old.
btw, reading into scripture what isn't there and valuing the traditions of men are EXACTLY why the false belief in an eternal hell exists (leveraged by selfish people in order to ultimately control people to suit their own ends - knowingly or not). a parable about regretting a lack of kindness after a resurrection from the dead has been twisted and distorted to mean something that was never intended and blatantly contradicts on topic scriptures.
yeah, people engulfed in flames are going to ask for a drop of water to cure dry mouth. that flame sure must've been hot to make dry mouth the rich man's #1 physical concern! -lol-
the wages of sin is death (ro 6:23) and the dead know nothing (ec 9:5).
look it up yourself. not many people teach these basic truths, instead, they teach death is life and love is torture and the masses eat it up like cherry pie on the weekend.
apparently, they do not know god is love (1jo4:16) and love does NO HARM TO ITS NEIGHBOR (ro 13:10). an eternal torture chamber for billions of people IS NOT LOVE AND CONTRADICTS THE VERY ESSENCE OF THE BIBLE*, yet almost every "christian" organization teaches it and nobody speaks out against it. the irony is that a god of love is consistent with the bible and inconsistent with the traditions of men (like plato's inferno hellfire), yet, "christians" tend to latch onto the traditions.
the facts that death is the wages paid to sinners (actually earned by sinners - failing to care for others EQUAL to oneself) and the death means one knows nothing are both are concise and on point teaching in the bible. most modern day christians REJECT these simple teachings so they can hold on to their traditions.
and, no, death != eternal life. read ro 6:23 - death is CONTRASTED to eternal life. death is exactly what ec 9:5 says it is... a state of knowing nothing, like before you were born.
read ezekiel 37 to see a time pictured when the great masses (in his case the whole house of israel) are resurrected to life from their state of knowing nothing (death!) and learn of god ways - well after this first life has passed away.
you won't find many modern day "christian" churches teaching this truth, either. yet, there it is for someone to see if they put aside their biases and believe what is written.
* yes, god did some physically harsh things to people, but remember that his actions were taken against clay, as it were. he ended a pretty miserable existence and will resurrect those people (see ez 37 for an example) to a much brighte