you are not quite correct. see, this is America, and as such, it is filled with 50+ year old holders-of-power who make/pass laws. these people are very well versed is things like baseball games and outdoor concerts, as they grew up around them. they did not, however, grow up around anything digital, nor do they have the slightest bit of common sense on issues involving anything digital. they need counsel on such issues, so they turn to the deep-pocketed insider lobbyists who are quite well versed in the tech "wizardry." the advice given is almost certainly going to be in favor of the industry who wants to perpetuate the false idea that digital bits can belong to someone, and thus be controlled. i'm sure it helps that the lobbyist says "here, if you ever get confused, i've written you a cheat-sheet on the back of this hundred-dollar bill." of course its not always a c-note.. sometimes is a multi million dollar house in the california hills.. but thats old news, so who wants to remember that?
parent is modded funny, but its an informative sort of statement.. do some research and find out how much, exactly, artists are compensated for cd sales by the riaa.. i think you'll find several conflicting points of data, all well below a "reasonable" amount. (think fractions of a percent)
the only cinema i've been to in years is a locally-owned independent theater that was restored to a movie theater. the building itself is chock full of character, and has excellent acoustics, since it was designed before amplified sound. it's got a really great top-notch sound system now, and since the guy who sells you the concessions is the same guy who owns the whole place, you can request different films. my girlfriend and i mentioned to him off-hand that we'd love to see the original, un-raped analog star wars trilogy on the big screen since we were too young to see it in theaters growing up. he thought it was a great idea, so he did it. i think we have him sold on showing ghostbusters and evil dead this halloween. i guess the point of the story is that people are perfectly willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to see a good movie in a good setting..
you wanna talk about shortsighted? by giving money to Stanford you are indirectly encouraging them to continue bowing to these outside corporations. if you want to take a truly far-sighted stance you would do well to consider crossing Stanford off of your list of prospective schools. if enrollment drops by any measurable amount and prospective students make it clear that they wont even consider Stanford as a prospective university because they fine students based on hearsay, you'd better believe other universities will take note, even if Stanford doesn't.
i have a similar story.. although i'm not pursuing a professional career. im a cad/engineering major, and i needed something to soothe my brainmeats in-between stressing about school. i picked up a cheap electric guitar and a used bass. i used free tabs to learn a few songs, and ended up really enjoying playing music. now, a little over 2 years later, i'm still using free tabs from the net to learn songs i find interesting or fun. i'm even a decent enough of a musician to read "through" the tablature and come up with the *real* song.. everyone knows a great deal of tabs out there are pretty far off from the real deal. that brings me to my point.. can tablature be copyright infringement if it's actually incorrect?? it seems to me that copyright protects against note-for-note copies of a song. i mean, how many people get away with sampling 15 seconds or more of a song inside other music? isn't that far worse than learning to play just the guitar part, especially if it's not technically the real guitar part due to a few inconsistencies? i dont understand all this insane extortion thats going on these days.. it's as if the US is re-living the industrial revolution days of robber barons and monopolies. i guess the only difference is that nowadays theres no muckrakers, rather only bloggers. the US is a young country, but we really shouldnt have the memory of a 3 year old..
remember kids, when Kremin Joe lets fly with his evil pinko commie nukes, duck and cover! oh wait, this is 2007? well then, when Jihad Joe lets fly with his evil terrorist insurgent attacks, duck and cover! who says the americans dont learn anything from the past?
In other news, geeks all over the world have banded together to try to get Lucas classified as a war criminal, and officially declare all of his post-return-of-the-jedi works as crimes against humanity.
you'll need Jack and JackQT, the gui frontend to jack. also, as far as i know, unless you use a music-specific distro, you'll have to tweak the kernel to allow low-latency realtime operation. in short, linux is far from an "out of the box" solution for musicians, however it's becoming a viable option for those of us who enjoy such tweaks. IMHO, linux is not an acceptable environment for pro production. it is however, a hell of a great solution for the weekend warrior who wants to do basic tracking and recording, and doesnt want to break the bank. if you want to produce professional tracks, my preference is a mac running logic 7. aside from a decent interface, thats really all you need.. i even sold off some of my highly-prized analog gear because some of the built-in vst effects in logic are actually better, and offer more customizable sounds. now dont get me wrong--i love linux--but as far as creating music with it goes, it's more of a fun, geeky way to play around, rather than a serious production environment. but look at the bright side.. i know of exactly 0 pro shops that use Vista, and at least 2 studios in my area have a running linux box intended for tracking and recording. they are.. let's say.. "under-loved" but hey, at least they are there.
if you think artists make a living off of record sales then apparently the MAFIAA's PR department has been very effective. any artist thats signed with an riaa label that tells you he/she is starving because 2million people downloaded the album is straight up lying to you. i'm a musician. i download albums. i would kindly ask that you download mine too. if you like it, come to a show, pay the cover, and buy a t-shirt. that's how i afford to eat. the bottom line is that publicity keeps artists well fed. you want to know why the studios produce pure shit? because they think of you (the consumer) as a slave-pig who will eat garbage with a smile on his face. if i sell you a box full of dysentery and tell you it's fillet mignon, youd come to my house and scream at me for being a scumbag. when the studios do it, you make excuses for them. plain and simple, it's no ones fault but their own. in any other industry, the choice would be obvious: change business models or become extinct. the **AA's are simply delaying the inevitable with litigation.
"Further investigation reveals that the alleged Ape was actually Steve Balmer, who is now President of the United States. When asked to do something about it, congress said 'we will work on a plan for a timetable to remove Balmer from office within 24 months, but there is little we can do.. he's just going to veto it."
AOL is an isp? my elected official told me it was the point on the intarweb in which all the tubes met. he also assured me it was most certainly not a pickup truck.
i bet young jeezy bought a bootleg off the street because when he goes into best buy the big bad mean security guards scare him. seriously.. steve balmers tougher in real life than those corporate rap star idiots. and you should never advocate downloading his music.. if i offered you a free kick to the nuts, you'd be wise to decline. as i see it 99% of corporate radio rap is less beneficial than a kick in the nuts.
sweet, the MPAA has given me implied consent to rip dvds to my personal media center box... oh wait, i have Star Wars and Ghostbusters on VHS.. i'm screwed!
to be honest, i have no idea how a lithium fire differs from any other kind of fire.. so care to enlighten me? why is water a bad thing? what's the proper technique for putting the fire out? are you aware of other common blunders that exacerbate the situation?
i would put the scientific accuracy between 2% and 98%, depending on the myth.. i mean, why buy a boat and try to ram it into a channel marker if you can simply solve the problem on paper? again.. entertainment. remember freshman physics where the prof made you draw a crappy little diagram for every problem so you could "visualize" it? yea, think how fun it's got to be to just straight up crash the boat; no diagram needed.:D which brings me to my 2nd point. i do, in fact, watch mythbusters for scientific reasons. sure, you wouldnt be caught dead doing that dirty physics in a lab or at class, but the show has a scientific air to it. the show is not a research lab.. it's not supposed to push the forefront of modern science.. but what it does do, it does extremely well: it gets the average TV watching American interested in science, at least so some degree. i mean, what person could possibly see several episodes without pondering the outcome of one of the myths during a commercial break? that desire to predict and understand results is the spirit of science that we should hope young people embrace and get excited about. anyway, you know geeks dont watch for the science anyway.. Kari and Jess are enough to get most geeks watching week after week.. i mean, theres something about a girl who looks that good and is smarter than i am to boot. must.. watch.. show....
linux is a kernel. it is incapable of sucking nuts. distributions, on the other hand.. they often suck nuts. good thing theres like 1000 of them, many of which have nice gui installers and tons of newbie help guides available for the most common problems. then again, you can always install slackware 2.0 from a floppy and then bitch about the remaining 6 slack users telling you to rtfm.. whoever modded parent "insightful" must have been trying to use a creative spelling of "troll."
i agree that analog gear is a necessary part of the equation for live shows. i make it a point to hang onto almost anything with a tube power section. i don't really play live much, and when i jam, it's usually in my little studio, but i often play guitar through an old fender blues deluxe tube amp. it's one of the original versions that had inconsistencies in the hand-wiring that produces a wonderful colored tone reminiscent of chicago style blues. for recording i almost exclusively use my line6 guitar and bass amps. the amp/cab modeling is super good, and the direct outs are pristinely clear. anyway, im getting real off-topic.. your vision of command line tracking is nice and geekly romantic, however in reality, linux DAWs are pretty much exactly how you would think--powerful, but with a learning curve, and a not-so-gorgeous GUI. sad but true. the good news is that all your favorite VSTs should work with no issues. as far as i can tell, the interest in linux-based DAWs and other audio production tools has been rising pretty steadily for many months.. with any luck ubuntu studio will be popular enough that people will be interested and motivated enough to code some really killer linux audio apps.
well, linux uses the JACK toolkit (http://jackaudio.org/), which is also available for macs, and its really awesome.. it's a bit tough to really learn how to be a JACK guru, but qtjack provides a good gui based frontend to get you going. As far as DAW's go, linux is really missing out.. it's a shame too, because you could custom-roll a linux kernel to be a real-time powerhouse, and i've managed to accomplish latencies as low as 3-5ms. The list of DAWs for linux is pretty small, but Ardour (http://ardour.org/) is pretty good, as is Rosegarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/). Neither of those DAWs really come close to the standards, like Cubase, DP, Sonar, etc. but for the weekend warrior, they are more then enough. the only thing they really lack are good quality sample packs, but that's part of the price with major windows-based DAWs. If you really want to toy around, i suggest Ubuntu Studio (http://ubuntustudio.org/). the.iso's aren't available yet, but on the wiki they give a link to a quick noobie guide to installing the necessary apps, configuring them, and even setting up a real-time kernel. IMHO, a mac running Logic is about the best setup you could possibly get for audio. with DAWs and VST's becoming more and more mature, you can trade racks and racks of expensive purpose-built gear for a single macbook pro, Logic, a firewire interface, and some software instruments (logic comes with quite a few high-calibre ones).
i have a small home-based audio recording studio, and i'm becoming more involved in the whole computer music scene. from what i gather, quite a large number of studios have decided to switch entirely to Mac for production environments. i guess vista stepped on so many toes that a lot of shops that run XP have been migrating to Macs and plan to be exclusively apple shops, even before XP's end of life. for some reason, professionals seem to be pissed off that MS wants to control what they do with their own data.. can't imagine why.
you are very true to your nick, Overly Critical Guy.. i can't fault you for that. but the emphasis you placed on "FUCKING OVER" made me think that perhaps there was a direct correlation between downloading and slumping record sales. Of course, on further inspection, i have found no scientifically credible data that would lead me to believe CD sales currently are, or ever will be affected by piracy. I decided to phone one of my friends who happens to make a living from playing music. I asked him what his thoughts were, and the answers he gave me were pretty enlightening.. it seems that most musicians, from unsigned artists, all the way up to the most popular mega bands make the majority of their income from touring and merchandising. those $20 t-shirts you buy at a concert have a several-hundred-percent profit margin. Another interesting tidbit that came straight from the horses mouth has to do with advertising.. apparently most "starving artist" type musicians love the idea of free advertising. at least that's the case with my guinea pig artist and everyone he plays with. according to him, the best thing that could happen to an unsigned musician who is playing professionally would be to have an album or two skyrocket up the "most downloaded" chart. a group's popularity is apparently what pushes more bodies into the venue, and in turn, what ramps up an artist's income. who woulda thunk it? so, yes, you are completely correct; downloading the entire Metallica catalog is, in fact FUCKING OVER metallica for as much as a thousandth of a percent of their yearly income. especially when you see them play live and buy 5 $10 beers and 2 $20 t-shirts at the venue. but hey, i have to agree with you that its appalling that many people on/. were saying to go after individual infringers, where as now they are completely opposed to the idea. i mean, christ, it's almost as if the socio-economic climate has completely changed in 7 years.. despicable rats always changing their stance on issues every 2/3 of a decade or so.. next thing you know, we'll have republicans challenging a republican president's decisions, or even a government rife with opposition to war.....i think you get the idea.
i didnt mean to imply that AMD was literally selling chips to the content providers.. what i meant was that AMD creates the chips, and once they exist, the content providers put heavy force on the OEMs like dell and HP to put those chips in PCs.
pretend you produced a device that could detect and disarm any car bombs within a 1 mile radius. then pretend that the US uses it's political power to force several countries in a region to purchase the device.
ok, thats not really an outstanding, or particularly realistic analogy, but you get the idea, right?
sorry, i'm on pain meds after dental surgery and it's making me quite useless.
yea, and huge hovering robots will roam the earth in extermination teams to get rid of the last few human strongholds.. sorry.. not gonna happen. tinfoil hats aside, the current market climate and legal climates will prevent this from ever growing up into a big scary monster. hell, microsoft is having a hard time getting vista to grow up into a big snarling dog, let alone a monster.
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you are not quite correct. see, this is America, and as such, it is filled with 50+ year old holders-of-power who make/pass laws. these people are very well versed is things like baseball games and outdoor concerts, as they grew up around them. they did not, however, grow up around anything digital, nor do they have the slightest bit of common sense on issues involving anything digital. they need counsel on such issues, so they turn to the deep-pocketed insider lobbyists who are quite well versed in the tech "wizardry." the advice given is almost certainly going to be in favor of the industry who wants to perpetuate the false idea that digital bits can belong to someone, and thus be controlled. i'm sure it helps that the lobbyist says "here, if you ever get confused, i've written you a cheat-sheet on the back of this hundred-dollar bill." of course its not always a c-note.. sometimes is a multi million dollar house in the california hills.. but thats old news, so who wants to remember that?
parent is modded funny, but its an informative sort of statement.. do some research and find out how much, exactly, artists are compensated for cd sales by the riaa.. i think you'll find several conflicting points of data, all well below a "reasonable" amount. (think fractions of a percent)
the only cinema i've been to in years is a locally-owned independent theater that was restored to a movie theater. the building itself is chock full of character, and has excellent acoustics, since it was designed before amplified sound. it's got a really great top-notch sound system now, and since the guy who sells you the concessions is the same guy who owns the whole place, you can request different films. my girlfriend and i mentioned to him off-hand that we'd love to see the original, un-raped analog star wars trilogy on the big screen since we were too young to see it in theaters growing up. he thought it was a great idea, so he did it. i think we have him sold on showing ghostbusters and evil dead this halloween. i guess the point of the story is that people are perfectly willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to see a good movie in a good setting..
you wanna talk about shortsighted? by giving money to Stanford you are indirectly encouraging them to continue bowing to these outside corporations. if you want to take a truly far-sighted stance you would do well to consider crossing Stanford off of your list of prospective schools. if enrollment drops by any measurable amount and prospective students make it clear that they wont even consider Stanford as a prospective university because they fine students based on hearsay, you'd better believe other universities will take note, even if Stanford doesn't.
i have a similar story.. although i'm not pursuing a professional career. im a cad/engineering major, and i needed something to soothe my brainmeats in-between stressing about school. i picked up a cheap electric guitar and a used bass. i used free tabs to learn a few songs, and ended up really enjoying playing music. now, a little over 2 years later, i'm still using free tabs from the net to learn songs i find interesting or fun. i'm even a decent enough of a musician to read "through" the tablature and come up with the *real* song.. everyone knows a great deal of tabs out there are pretty far off from the real deal. that brings me to my point.. can tablature be copyright infringement if it's actually incorrect?? it seems to me that copyright protects against note-for-note copies of a song. i mean, how many people get away with sampling 15 seconds or more of a song inside other music? isn't that far worse than learning to play just the guitar part, especially if it's not technically the real guitar part due to a few inconsistencies? i dont understand all this insane extortion thats going on these days.. it's as if the US is re-living the industrial revolution days of robber barons and monopolies. i guess the only difference is that nowadays theres no muckrakers, rather only bloggers. the US is a young country, but we really shouldnt have the memory of a 3 year old..
remember kids, when Kremin Joe lets fly with his evil pinko commie nukes, duck and cover! oh wait, this is 2007? well then, when Jihad Joe lets fly with his evil terrorist insurgent attacks, duck and cover! who says the americans dont learn anything from the past?
funny story.. we actually used to do that. now we have Diebold. progress.. mmmm, how bittersweet it is.
In other news, geeks all over the world have banded together to try to get Lucas classified as a war criminal, and officially declare all of his post-return-of-the-jedi works as crimes against humanity.
...or land of litigation and bullshit? you decide.
you'll need Jack and JackQT, the gui frontend to jack. also, as far as i know, unless you use a music-specific distro, you'll have to tweak the kernel to allow low-latency realtime operation. in short, linux is far from an "out of the box" solution for musicians, however it's becoming a viable option for those of us who enjoy such tweaks. IMHO, linux is not an acceptable environment for pro production. it is however, a hell of a great solution for the weekend warrior who wants to do basic tracking and recording, and doesnt want to break the bank. if you want to produce professional tracks, my preference is a mac running logic 7. aside from a decent interface, thats really all you need.. i even sold off some of my highly-prized analog gear because some of the built-in vst effects in logic are actually better, and offer more customizable sounds. now dont get me wrong--i love linux--but as far as creating music with it goes, it's more of a fun, geeky way to play around, rather than a serious production environment. but look at the bright side.. i know of exactly 0 pro shops that use Vista, and at least 2 studios in my area have a running linux box intended for tracking and recording. they are.. let's say.. "under-loved" but hey, at least they are there.
i say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. it's the only way to be sure.
if you think artists make a living off of record sales then apparently the MAFIAA's PR department has been very effective. any artist thats signed with an riaa label that tells you he/she is starving because 2million people downloaded the album is straight up lying to you. i'm a musician. i download albums. i would kindly ask that you download mine too. if you like it, come to a show, pay the cover, and buy a t-shirt. that's how i afford to eat. the bottom line is that publicity keeps artists well fed. you want to know why the studios produce pure shit? because they think of you (the consumer) as a slave-pig who will eat garbage with a smile on his face. if i sell you a box full of dysentery and tell you it's fillet mignon, youd come to my house and scream at me for being a scumbag. when the studios do it, you make excuses for them. plain and simple, it's no ones fault but their own. in any other industry, the choice would be obvious: change business models or become extinct. the **AA's are simply delaying the inevitable with litigation.
"Further investigation reveals that the alleged Ape was actually Steve Balmer, who is now President of the United States. When asked to do something about it, congress said 'we will work on a plan for a timetable to remove Balmer from office within 24 months, but there is little we can do.. he's just going to veto it."
AOL is an isp? my elected official told me it was the point on the intarweb in which all the tubes met. he also assured me it was most certainly not a pickup truck.
i bet young jeezy bought a bootleg off the street because when he goes into best buy the big bad mean security guards scare him. seriously.. steve balmers tougher in real life than those corporate rap star idiots. and you should never advocate downloading his music.. if i offered you a free kick to the nuts, you'd be wise to decline. as i see it 99% of corporate radio rap is less beneficial than a kick in the nuts.
sweet, the MPAA has given me implied consent to rip dvds to my personal media center box... oh wait, i have Star Wars and Ghostbusters on VHS.. i'm screwed!
to be honest, i have no idea how a lithium fire differs from any other kind of fire.. so care to enlighten me? why is water a bad thing? what's the proper technique for putting the fire out? are you aware of other common blunders that exacerbate the situation?
i would put the scientific accuracy between 2% and 98%, depending on the myth.. i mean, why buy a boat and try to ram it into a channel marker if you can simply solve the problem on paper? again.. entertainment. remember freshman physics where the prof made you draw a crappy little diagram for every problem so you could "visualize" it? yea, think how fun it's got to be to just straight up crash the boat; no diagram needed. :D which brings me to my 2nd point. i do, in fact, watch mythbusters for scientific reasons. sure, you wouldnt be caught dead doing that dirty physics in a lab or at class, but the show has a scientific air to it. the show is not a research lab.. it's not supposed to push the forefront of modern science.. but what it does do, it does extremely well: it gets the average TV watching American interested in science, at least so some degree. i mean, what person could possibly see several episodes without pondering the outcome of one of the myths during a commercial break? that desire to predict and understand results is the spirit of science that we should hope young people embrace and get excited about. anyway, you know geeks dont watch for the science anyway.. Kari and Jess are enough to get most geeks watching week after week.. i mean, theres something about a girl who looks that good and is smarter than i am to boot. must.. watch.. show....
linux is a kernel. it is incapable of sucking nuts. distributions, on the other hand.. they often suck nuts. good thing theres like 1000 of them, many of which have nice gui installers and tons of newbie help guides available for the most common problems. then again, you can always install slackware 2.0 from a floppy and then bitch about the remaining 6 slack users telling you to rtfm.. whoever modded parent "insightful" must have been trying to use a creative spelling of "troll."
i agree that analog gear is a necessary part of the equation for live shows. i make it a point to hang onto almost anything with a tube power section. i don't really play live much, and when i jam, it's usually in my little studio, but i often play guitar through an old fender blues deluxe tube amp. it's one of the original versions that had inconsistencies in the hand-wiring that produces a wonderful colored tone reminiscent of chicago style blues. for recording i almost exclusively use my line6 guitar and bass amps. the amp/cab modeling is super good, and the direct outs are pristinely clear. anyway, im getting real off-topic.. your vision of command line tracking is nice and geekly romantic, however in reality, linux DAWs are pretty much exactly how you would think--powerful, but with a learning curve, and a not-so-gorgeous GUI. sad but true. the good news is that all your favorite VSTs should work with no issues. as far as i can tell, the interest in linux-based DAWs and other audio production tools has been rising pretty steadily for many months.. with any luck ubuntu studio will be popular enough that people will be interested and motivated enough to code some really killer linux audio apps.
well, linux uses the JACK toolkit (http://jackaudio.org/), which is also available for macs, and its really awesome.. it's a bit tough to really learn how to be a JACK guru, but qtjack provides a good gui based frontend to get you going. As far as DAW's go, linux is really missing out.. it's a shame too, because you could custom-roll a linux kernel to be a real-time powerhouse, and i've managed to accomplish latencies as low as 3-5ms. The list of DAWs for linux is pretty small, but Ardour (http://ardour.org/) is pretty good, as is Rosegarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/). Neither of those DAWs really come close to the standards, like Cubase, DP, Sonar, etc. but for the weekend warrior, they are more then enough. the only thing they really lack are good quality sample packs, but that's part of the price with major windows-based DAWs. If you really want to toy around, i suggest Ubuntu Studio (http://ubuntustudio.org/). the .iso's aren't available yet, but on the wiki they give a link to a quick noobie guide to installing the necessary apps, configuring them, and even setting up a real-time kernel. IMHO, a mac running Logic is about the best setup you could possibly get for audio. with DAWs and VST's becoming more and more mature, you can trade racks and racks of expensive purpose-built gear for a single macbook pro, Logic, a firewire interface, and some software instruments (logic comes with quite a few high-calibre ones).
i have a small home-based audio recording studio, and i'm becoming more involved in the whole computer music scene. from what i gather, quite a large number of studios have decided to switch entirely to Mac for production environments. i guess vista stepped on so many toes that a lot of shops that run XP have been migrating to Macs and plan to be exclusively apple shops, even before XP's end of life. for some reason, professionals seem to be pissed off that MS wants to control what they do with their own data.. can't imagine why.
you are very true to your nick, Overly Critical Guy.. i can't fault you for that. but the emphasis you placed on "FUCKING OVER" made me think that perhaps there was a direct correlation between downloading and slumping record sales. Of course, on further inspection, i have found no scientifically credible data that would lead me to believe CD sales currently are, or ever will be affected by piracy. I decided to phone one of my friends who happens to make a living from playing music. I asked him what his thoughts were, and the answers he gave me were pretty enlightening.. it seems that most musicians, from unsigned artists, all the way up to the most popular mega bands make the majority of their income from touring and merchandising. those $20 t-shirts you buy at a concert have a several-hundred-percent profit margin. Another interesting tidbit that came straight from the horses mouth has to do with advertising.. apparently most "starving artist" type musicians love the idea of free advertising. at least that's the case with my guinea pig artist and everyone he plays with. according to him, the best thing that could happen to an unsigned musician who is playing professionally would be to have an album or two skyrocket up the "most downloaded" chart. a group's popularity is apparently what pushes more bodies into the venue, and in turn, what ramps up an artist's income. who woulda thunk it? so, yes, you are completely correct; downloading the entire Metallica catalog is, in fact FUCKING OVER metallica for as much as a thousandth of a percent of their yearly income. especially when you see them play live and buy 5 $10 beers and 2 $20 t-shirts at the venue. but hey, i have to agree with you that its appalling that many people on /. were saying to go after individual infringers, where as now they are completely opposed to the idea. i mean, christ, it's almost as if the socio-economic climate has completely changed in 7 years.. despicable rats always changing their stance on issues every 2/3 of a decade or so.. next thing you know, we'll have republicans challenging a republican president's decisions, or even a government rife with opposition to war.. ...i think you get the idea.
i didnt mean to imply that AMD was literally selling chips to the content providers.. what i meant was that AMD creates the chips, and once they exist, the content providers put heavy force on the OEMs like dell and HP to put those chips in PCs. pretend you produced a device that could detect and disarm any car bombs within a 1 mile radius. then pretend that the US uses it's political power to force several countries in a region to purchase the device. ok, thats not really an outstanding, or particularly realistic analogy, but you get the idea, right? sorry, i'm on pain meds after dental surgery and it's making me quite useless.
yea, and huge hovering robots will roam the earth in extermination teams to get rid of the last few human strongholds.. sorry.. not gonna happen. tinfoil hats aside, the current market climate and legal climates will prevent this from ever growing up into a big scary monster. hell, microsoft is having a hard time getting vista to grow up into a big snarling dog, let alone a monster.