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College Funding Bill Passes House, P2P Provision Intact
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the College Opportunity and Affordability Act passed through the House today with a vote of 354-58 and the anti-P2P provision is intact. That provision would require universities to filter P2P and to offer legal alternatives. They are claiming now, though, that universities would not lose federal funding if they fail to do this. Of course, an amendment that would have clarified that was withdrawn immediately after it was offered."
Our young adults are learning an important lesson - money talks.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
We need to find a way to make P2P distribution models legitimately profitable for the corporations that lobby in Washington for these asinine laws. I was under the impression that the Warcraft folks already had some kind of a P2P model going for distributing their patches and suchlike--perhaps other companies could be induced to do the same?
Elsewise, it might become very popular and profitable to set up some kind of P2P-friendly VPN service, with endpoints just outside the DMZ of various college networks...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
It also comes down to value for the dollar. A student can get much more entertainment value out of a $60 game than out of 4 music CDs.
The fact of the matter is, music has COMPETITION. The days of the $12 CD making sense are long, long gone. People aren't sitting around hoarding their money. No, they spend it on *other entertainment products* such as DVDs and video games. Look at how CD sales have dropped and how DVD/VG sales have risen over the past few years. To call it hypocrisy is BEYOND STUPID. You would have to stone cold batcrap bonkers to not realize it's a matter of the music industry being unable to compete for the entertainment dollars of its demographic.
And yes, buying music like that would indeed make someone poor, or at least *feel* poor, because it is a POOR FINANCIAL CHOICE in the face of what the competition is offering. A movie costs as much as, or less, than its soundtrack much of the time. A game can offer a dorm's entire floor hours of entertainment and the game industry THRIVES on that, whereas the music industry does what it can to make sure that if a dorm's entire floor is to enjoy hours of music, it will cost not $60 but far more, trying their best to tie it not only to an individual, but to a particular device that individual owns.
I don't even know why I'm taking the time to post this reply; if you had the intellectual capacity of a dixie cup you would have the sense to not post what you did.
I like basketball!!1!
Welfare for the rich, once again.
With our government increasingly owned and operated by big business, it's no wonder that the one CEO that was running for president has been run out the race by a disgusted electorate. It seems like although many citizens could never elaborate fully on their instinctive negative reaction to Mr. Governor CEO, they know in their bones that there's a very very good reason NOT to have someone with experience in the corporate executive suite in the White House. Remember, these are the kind of people who get captive Boards of Directors to vote them 9-figure bonuses when the Company does poorly, while expecting "givebacks" from their workers and closing plants. That's the last kind of person we need running government at the moment.
Forget separation of Church and State. It's time for separation of Industry and State. Increasingly, "Big Government" seems preferable to me to the "lean, mean, cut jobs, cut costs" approach that's brought on the "get mine and get out" attitudes of the leaders of commerce. It wasn't always this way. Yes, there were plenty of fat-cat Industrialists in the first part of the 20th century, but there was also a few truly patriotic business leaders who believed that you couldn't sell your product if your customers weren't working and making money to spend. This was replaced by the "if we can't sell cigarettes here, we'll sell them to the stupid third-worlders" mentality (notice the drastically increasing levels of tar and nicotine in the cigarettes sold in Africa and Asia).
If we ever slide into full-scale class warfare in this country, there's not going to be a lot of pity for CEOs or their hired lobbyists or their fully-pwned elected officials.
A bill in Congress for funding higher education that gives subsidies to the Entertainment Industry. Fucking Hell.
You are welcome on my lawn.