I see the combined company eventually employing only business analysts, project co-ordinators, salesmen and client liason people.
With the exception of salesmen making in-person calls, I don't see any reason why these functions can't be outsourced as well.
The last frontier is, , , management.
While a CEO of a company who has outsourced all its core functions isn't going to render himself redundant on purpose, he has in effect, built an overseas organization capable of doing all the business the original organization physically in the USA was doing.
Unlike that CEO and his staff, this overseas organization will be the people in constant touch with the customer base and doing the actual providing of whatever goods and services the company provides. The CEO will be increasingly out of touch with what "his company" is doing. His orders and directives will be less and less meaningful. Sooner or later, he's going to be out of the loop.
One day, he either wakes up to find that nobody's answering his e-mail because his staff has left, taking the company's database and staff, or he gets an offer for the company's assets at a ridiculously low price, but one that lets him keep his golden parachute.
Does anyone believe that any court in India is going to pay any attention to any legal action to enforce a non-compete agreement after the locals have paid him off? (or the judge might simply tell that CEO that his action has no merit based on patriotism)
Forbidding the new company to do business via the American court system will only accomplish the extinction of the old one, as the people capable of doing the work in the US will be long gone, and chances are, the company won't have the physical assets in-country required to do the work.
In most cases, the foriegners will have the sense to let the now ex-CEO keep his golden parachute and the company's stockholders will simply find they've been hung out to dry.
Don't feel sorry for the current generation of CEOs. I'm certain that they are aware of this, and will have cashed out and either retired by then or will look for a new nation (probably EU) to repeat this cycle in. Their successors will take their golden parachutes and run.
You consider a state-run health care program automatic proof of "socialism"?
By your definition, every other country in the industrialized world is "socialist".
He's also the closest thing to an anti-gun control candidate the Democratic Party has produced at the national level since JFK and Hubert Humphrey.
I suggest taking a closer look at his positions. His Website contains several of them.
As for hate-mongering, the left (of which I actually am not a member, speaking as a supporter of vouchers) isn't the group that automatically equates any criticism of Bush to treason. Note that my politics is based on pragmatism, NOT ideology... I pull from right, left, center, or Libertarian based on what makes sense. But I consider the right a fuck of a lot more dangerous, Ashcroft is NOT a Democrat.
I do have a suggestion to you, since you may be one of the few on either side of the political debate that is actually interested in finding out what the hell is really going on.
Credible sources, please. If you consider Rush Limbaugh or the White Aryan Resistance credible, you have no business in an adult public policy discussion.
Unless you're one of those people who think that anyone who doesn't have an altar with Mean Mr. Mustache sitting on it is automatically a socialist. By that definition, even George Bush is probably a socialist.
but for society there is only one correct solution.
Now, having said all this, I think you are quite right that the bottom could still fall out of the U.S economy, quite possibly due to consumer spending. I am inclined to think the levels of household debt are alarming here. Consumers do not have much more to spend.
So your "correct" solution leaves the bottom falling out of the US economy?
Just how do you define "correct"? You a Libertarian cultist or something? (I'm joking.)
The real problem should be sort of obvious. The "middle class" is the one that does the bulk of consumer spending. Quite a few of the people displaced by outsourcing will never work again at anything remotely resembling their former income levels. Our economy is consumer-driven. There is NO way the people who are talking about what wonderful things Bush has done for them can buy enough consumer products to keep the economy afloat.
Which puts the "top 5%" who derive their income from salaries at risk.
The only people who are really safe from this have enough money invested (and they'd better be prepared to move it out of the US) so they can live for the rest of their lives without worrying about a job. The rest of us with high-tech skills should be thinking about emigration.
As far as outsourcing goes, what are our Fortune 500 companies going to do when the companies they outsource to decide that they know more about what it takes to make it in the US market than their increasingly out of touch American bosses do? Not that the people who outsourced will suffer, they'll have cashed out years before.
The people who think "nanotech" will save the US economy are whistling in the dark. Those jobs are going overseas as soon as production technology is stabilized.
The rest of the bad news is. . . a large middle class appears to be necessary for a stable modern democracy. The middle class is shrinking with increasing speed. How stable is a country where the "good jobs" basically don't exist in the US anymore, other than the few decently paying jobs that must be done locally?
With respect to publically funded research, remember that the bulk of taxes that pay for this also come from the middle class.
Skilled trades, maybe. I'm not sure that medicine is on the list, telecommuting for doctors is increasingly an option, though this may not be all that important in a population where an increasing percentage of the population can't afford medical care.
The doofus that said that the USA is here to stay is right. The land on which most of us are sitting isn't going much of anywhere. But in terms of either being the world technology leader or a viable place to live or even a superpower. . . the US might have another decade with luck. It might be a lot less.
Well, Nixon got a postage stamp. How should we honor other Americans with just as legitimate a claim to fame and who have contributed just as much to making the USA the great nation it is?
Charles Manson
Kenneth Lay (ex Enron CEO)
Bernard J. Ebbers, (former WorldCom CEO)
Albert Fish
Ed Gein
Actually, I wish Reagan well. In fact, I wish him another 10 years and a miraculous cure for the Alzheimer's which from the available evidence, affected him long before he retired from the Presidency.
That should be long enough to finally demonstrate what the Reagan legacy really means to America. What will America look like without a middle class? What will America look like when it's superpower status is becoming a thing of the past?
Don't know, but I plan to be on the outside looking in long before that.
is written, the start of the decline will be traced to the Reagan Administration.
I don't care whether you believe this or not.,But when you find out that the current recovery is temporary, your job is going to Bangalore, when you find your middle-class neighborhood sliding into the shitter because all of a sudden, there aren't any jobs and you're now wondering why you didn't take the advice of your smartest friends and leave the US. . . I just want you to remember this post.
This was when one important thing changed and very few people noticed. I'll let you try to figure out what that something is. It had to do with the role of CEOs in corporations, and that's as much of a hint as I'm going to bother with, since my purpose of life isn't to illuminate the darkness within the heads of rabid partisans of any US political party.
To eliminate anonymous transactions they would first have to ask for ID before either giving change, or accepting cash. Identifying the bill doesn't identify the person who holds it
All a bank would have to do is to grab RFIDs from bills given to you either by teller or via ATM when it records a payment to you, and once those numbers are in a governmental database, they can wait until the RFID reappears at someone's cash register.
While this doesn't necesarily work in a private cash transaction, nothing's perfect. Depends on what you spend money on. If "they" (a government, or a stalker who figured out who to bribe) are looking for you or want to track your activities, you'll leave a very nice trail of bread crumbs as you spend your "anonymous" cash. If they really want you, if they find that the person they're looking for isn't you, they'll try to find out who's paid him lately. Perhaps you believe that EU governments will only look for people for what you consider "good" reasons.
Though even allowing for private cash transactions, algorithms can probably be developed to assign probabilities to the the ID of a person who originates a transaction, e.g. if ID1-10 are given to a customer, if ID3-7 show up at a cash register As for anti-counterfeiting... what makes you think that RFID information is unforgeable? Or impossible to steal from somewhere in the supply chain? Or possibly, even purchase over the counter, given the other legitimate uses for them.
In any rate, when evaluating a possible threat, one evaluates the threat potential, not whether you think the other party has good intentions or not. A government that's well intentioned this year might not be next.
The USA exports a great many ideas, both good and bad. Perhaps a "anti-terrorist" citizen survelliance database is one of those ideas.
Perhaps an intense study of security might increase your paranoia level to the point where you might someday become an informed citizen.
Note that I actually favor the use of RFID in inventory tracking, and at the retail level, its use in removable packaging material to be disposed of by the end user, or retained for warranty reasons, but either way, subject to the choice of the customer.
RFID is a powerful technology, for good or evil purposes. Reducing our prices at the cash register is good. Using it as a police state enforcement tool is bad. Perhaps you disagree, but enjoy your right to express an opinion, however uninformed.
Get a brain transplant before posting on any more public policy issues, and don't pick a new brain from a jar marked "Abbie-Normal", it sounds like that mistake was already made once in your case.
Perhaps a brain transplant might bring your IQ up to that of an idiot.
how you can continue your education if you can't reenter the USA. . . and think carefully about whether you want to or not.
I'm sending a copy of that Government Executive article to anyone I run across thinking about getting a college education in the USA... to support my advising them NOT to.
There are worse things than not getting an education in the USA. Jail is one of them.
Did your teacher explain to you how she/he knew that WD-40 in the private parts is a real bad idea?
As for how I found out the same thing about oil of wintergreen. . . must have read about it on slashdot. Obviously. Do I seem like the kind of pervert who. . .
You missed my point. The idea isn't to get across that what one is doing is legal or untraceable, it's just to get across the idea that it isn't morally wrong by the standards the current generation who are parents to kids in high school/college grew up with.
No, you're not, except in a tiny handful of cases. If it were the case, the record companies would be bankrupt by now.
Find a better place than RIAA propaganda to get your info.
You are of course, simply wrong to the point where nothing you say about the business of music can be taken seriously. The case for every song on commercial radio being a result of payola can be considered established fact.
BTW, the major labels are all in major financial trouble, and paying for this part of promotion is part of the reason. Better cash your paycheck quickly.
No guarantee on data availability. I simply keyword-searched on my personal database on payola. If any URLs don't work, Google is even your friend. Keyword search on "payola".
THAT'S WHAT THE PREVIEW BUTTON IS FOR. READ YOUR POSTS BEFORE POSTING.
There's a serious issue here concerning the rights of artists.
Only in your mind, and only in the imagination of RIAA publicists. Eminem's latest album was completely uploaded to the Net as MP3? His album went straight to #1. Please explain to him in public how his rights were violated by EVIL PIRATES.
There is NO convincing evidence anywhere that P2P displaces record sales.
As for your example, Isaac Asimov, too bad he never saw the Baen Free Library. Out of print science fiction books have been uploaded by several name authors to the library, betting that it would expand the sales of current titles. NO DRM, just zipfiles you can turn into.RTFs or html pages.
The experiment has been a success, and given Asimov's intelligence, we can be sure that if he were living today, he'd have his back-issue stuff either there or somewhere similar under his control.
Your copyright strawman doesn't cut any ice with me, I'm a published writer and have applied for more than one patent, and know far more about the law in this area than you will ever need to know. I certainly don't support getting rid of copyright.
While there are some people here who want to do away with it, most here would be content with reform, i.e. changing current law to add mandatory Internet licensing to mandatory broadcast licensing, so anyone who broadcasts via the Net for commercial purposes has to pay a royalty to songwriters, collected via Performers Rights Societies like ASCAP and BMI. (and tracked via the same people who do SoundScan)
Selling music is about promotion, and the RIAA version of the story is simply an attempt to restrict mass distribution of music promtional materials to channels like radio they can buy control of.
Thanks to your RIAA buddies, I had a hell of a time getting the music tracks of an independent artist I'm personally working with onto Kazaa for fear of attack by the thugs you either work for or even stupider, are working for free of charge.
As for your imaginary "moral obligation", our moral obligation to artists is buy from them if we like their work. We have NO moral obligation to RIAA labels and no amount of your whining can make one. Perhaps you will buy a major label record because a label ad says to. Nobody else will.
Distributing broadcast-quality tracks of an artists' work simply provides them with free promotional exposure. If you think there's something immoral about someone hearing a track off an album that a record company didn't pay for radio time or the bandwidth before, you're a dumb shit.
Whenever you listen to a song on the radio, YOU ARE LISTENING TO AN ANALOG BROADCAST OF THE MP3 FORMAT ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE ALBUM WHICH HAS BEEN PAID FOR BY THE RECORD COMPANY. MP3 is the dominant automation format used in radio today.
The difference in this sense? The listener and provider of the file are redistributing this ad for the record company free of charge. Nobody's listening to the radio station's ads, but if the radio station isn't providing the content, why should we?
I wonder how many pro-RIAA postings are from people employed by RIAA PR agencies as opposed to "useful fools" who spread the RIAA message because they've been pumped full of bullshit and have the urge to spew it at somebody?
Parents of Napster users were sharing music long before the PC was invented by taping songs and swapping them with friends. That is why they don't teach kids that sharing music is stealing.
As it turned out, this increased album sales, just like file-swapping now.
The only difference is that politicians were paid off to make the logical extension of this into digital illegal.
We have to be very careful before claiming a law is unjust simply because of popular opinion. And the argument that people should be able to use an artist's work outside of that artist's terms of creation because "everyone's doing it" (well, a lot of DSL users are doing it) strikes me as a very dubious argument at best.
Everybody always has done it, up to now, legally.
Any musician and anyone else serious about music who's older than Britney Spears' generation grew up taping off the radio and swapping tapes. This was how people swapped music files before the Internet and personal computers.
Do any of us feel guilty about STEALING MUSIC and being PIRATES!!!
Of course not, tapes effectively extended the range of radio broadcast promotion of albums, i.e. taping songs off the radio helped sell albums, just as P2P and Internet radio helps sell CDs now.
The only difference between fileswapping and taping is that the RIAA paid Congress to make swapping songs via Internet illegal.
If you believe differently, you have been suckered by RIAA propaganda.
if they ever taped songs off the radio and shared the tapes with friends when they were kids?
If they did (almost certainly), ask them if they felt guilty and ashamed about stealing FROM ARTISTS?
Tell them that filesharing is simply doing the same thing using your computer to grab them from P2P instead of the radio and your hard drive instead of a tape recorder.
Tell them the only difference between what they did and "filesharing" is that the RIAA bribed a bunch of politicians to declare the digital version is illegal and that the tape version is explicitly legal.
What's important here isn't that this changes the law, but to let them know what you're doing is merely illegal, not wrong.
If your parents can't tell the difference. . . you've got some unpleasant time to do before you leave home, good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the sites I expect to get hacked are any that Armed Forces personnel actually use for voting.
If they are very, very, lucky, the only black hat work will be done by outside site defacers, not the insiders I expect to have pre-hacked the boxes.
I can't tell from the google results so far if the Federal Voting Assistance Program uses ESS/Diebold/Global or not.
With the exception of salesmen making in-person calls, I don't see any reason why these functions can't be outsourced as well.
The last frontier is, , , management.
While a CEO of a company who has outsourced all its core functions isn't going to render himself redundant on purpose, he has in effect, built an overseas organization capable of doing all the business the original organization physically in the USA was doing.
Unlike that CEO and his staff, this overseas organization will be the people in constant touch with the customer base and doing the actual providing of whatever goods and services the company provides. The CEO will be increasingly out of touch with what "his company" is doing. His orders and directives will be less and less meaningful. Sooner or later, he's going to be out of the loop.
One day, he either wakes up to find that nobody's answering his e-mail because his staff has left, taking the company's database and staff, or he gets an offer for the company's assets at a ridiculously low price, but one that lets him keep his golden parachute.
Does anyone believe that any court in India is going to pay any attention to any legal action to enforce a non-compete agreement after the locals have paid him off? (or the judge might simply tell that CEO that his action has no merit based on patriotism)
Forbidding the new company to do business via the American court system will only accomplish the extinction of the old one, as the people capable of doing the work in the US will be long gone, and chances are, the company won't have the physical assets in-country required to do the work.
In most cases, the foriegners will have the sense to let the now ex-CEO keep his golden parachute and the company's stockholders will simply find they've been hung out to dry.
Don't feel sorry for the current generation of CEOs. I'm certain that they are aware of this, and will have cashed out and either retired by then or will look for a new nation (probably EU) to repeat this cycle in. Their successors will take their golden parachutes and run.
By your definition, every other country in the industrialized world is "socialist".
He's also the closest thing to an anti-gun control candidate the Democratic Party has produced at the national level since JFK and Hubert Humphrey.
I suggest taking a closer look at his positions. His Website contains several of them.
As for hate-mongering, the left (of which I actually am not a member, speaking as a supporter of vouchers) isn't the group that automatically equates any criticism of Bush to treason. Note that my politics is based on pragmatism, NOT ideology... I pull from right, left, center, or Libertarian based on what makes sense. But I consider the right a fuck of a lot more dangerous, Ashcroft is NOT a Democrat.
I do have a suggestion to you, since you may be one of the few on either side of the political debate that is actually interested in finding out what the hell is really going on.
Check out the Open Sources Intelligence mailing list (OSINT-L). Subscribe in digest format.
I might actually vote for Dean.
Note: Dean's real position on gun control is roughly, "let the states decide individually what kind of gun control they think they need".
Credible sources, please. If you consider Rush Limbaugh or the White Aryan Resistance credible, you have no business in an adult public policy discussion.
Unless you're one of those people who think that anyone who doesn't have an altar with Mean Mr. Mustache sitting on it is automatically a socialist. By that definition, even George Bush is probably a socialist.
You mean all the jokes told in the last few years about the intelligence of Republicans are really true?
You use XP, don't you.
Now, having said all this, I think you are quite right that the bottom could still fall out of the U.S economy, quite possibly due to consumer spending. I am inclined to think the levels of household debt are alarming here. Consumers do not have much more to spend.
So your "correct" solution leaves the bottom falling out of the US economy?
Just how do you define "correct"? You a Libertarian cultist or something? (I'm joking.)
The real problem should be sort of obvious. The "middle class" is the one that does the bulk of consumer spending. Quite a few of the people displaced by outsourcing will never work again at anything remotely resembling their former income levels. Our economy is consumer-driven. There is NO way the people who are talking about what wonderful things Bush has done for them can buy enough consumer products to keep the economy afloat.
Which puts the "top 5%" who derive their income from salaries at risk.
The only people who are really safe from this have enough money invested (and they'd better be prepared to move it out of the US) so they can live for the rest of their lives without worrying about a job. The rest of us with high-tech skills should be thinking about emigration.
As far as outsourcing goes, what are our Fortune 500 companies going to do when the companies they outsource to decide that they know more about what it takes to make it in the US market than their increasingly out of touch American bosses do? Not that the people who outsourced will suffer, they'll have cashed out years before.
The people who think "nanotech" will save the US economy are whistling in the dark. Those jobs are going overseas as soon as production technology is stabilized.
The rest of the bad news is. . . a large middle class appears to be necessary for a stable modern democracy. The middle class is shrinking with increasing speed. How stable is a country where the "good jobs" basically don't exist in the US anymore, other than the few decently paying jobs that must be done locally?
With respect to publically funded research, remember that the bulk of taxes that pay for this also come from the middle class.
Skilled trades, maybe. I'm not sure that medicine is on the list, telecommuting for doctors is increasingly an option, though this may not be all that important in a population where an increasing percentage of the population can't afford medical care.
The doofus that said that the USA is here to stay is right. The land on which most of us are sitting isn't going much of anywhere. But in terms of either being the world technology leader or a viable place to live or even a superpower. . . the US might have another decade with luck. It might be a lot less.
Apparently MS wasn't content with getting a missile cruiser towed to port after a computer crash.
Well, Nixon got a postage stamp. How should we honor other Americans with just as legitimate a claim to fame and who have contributed just as much to making the USA the great nation it is?
Actually, I wish Reagan well. In fact, I wish him another 10 years and a miraculous cure for the Alzheimer's which from the available evidence, affected him long before he retired from the Presidency.
That should be long enough to finally demonstrate what the Reagan legacy really means to America. What will America look like without a middle class? What will America look like when it's superpower status is becoming a thing of the past?
Don't know, but I plan to be on the outside looking in long before that.
I don't care whether you believe this or not.,But when you find out that the current recovery is temporary, your job is going to Bangalore, when you find your middle-class neighborhood sliding into the shitter because all of a sudden, there aren't any jobs and you're now wondering why you didn't take the advice of your smartest friends and leave the US. . . I just want you to remember this post.
This was when one important thing changed and very few people noticed. I'll let you try to figure out what that something is. It had to do with the role of CEOs in corporations, and that's as much of a hint as I'm going to bother with, since my purpose of life isn't to illuminate the darkness within the heads of rabid partisans of any US political party.
No wonder NASA is interested.
All a bank would have to do is to grab RFIDs from bills given to you either by teller or via ATM when it records a payment to you, and once those numbers are in a governmental database, they can wait until the RFID reappears at someone's cash register.
While this doesn't necesarily work in a private cash transaction, nothing's perfect. Depends on what you spend money on. If "they" (a government, or a stalker who figured out who to bribe) are looking for you or want to track your activities, you'll leave a very nice trail of bread crumbs as you spend your "anonymous" cash. If they really want you, if they find that the person they're looking for isn't you, they'll try to find out who's paid him lately. Perhaps you believe that EU governments will only look for people for what you consider "good" reasons.
Though even allowing for private cash transactions, algorithms can probably be developed to assign probabilities to the the ID of a person who originates a transaction, e.g. if ID1-10 are given to a customer, if ID3-7 show up at a cash register As for anti-counterfeiting... what makes you think that RFID information is unforgeable? Or impossible to steal from somewhere in the supply chain? Or possibly, even purchase over the counter, given the other legitimate uses for them.
In any rate, when evaluating a possible threat, one evaluates the threat potential, not whether you think the other party has good intentions or not. A government that's well intentioned this year might not be next.
The USA exports a great many ideas, both good and bad. Perhaps a "anti-terrorist" citizen survelliance database is one of those ideas.
Perhaps an intense study of security might increase your paranoia level to the point where you might someday become an informed citizen.
Note that I actually favor the use of RFID in inventory tracking, and at the retail level, its use in removable packaging material to be disposed of by the end user, or retained for warranty reasons, but either way, subject to the choice of the customer.
RFID is a powerful technology, for good or evil purposes. Reducing our prices at the cash register is good. Using it as a police state enforcement tool is bad. Perhaps you disagree, but enjoy your right to express an opinion, however uninformed.
While you can.
Perhaps a brain transplant might bring your IQ up to that of an idiot.
I'm sending a copy of that Government Executive article to anyone I run across thinking about getting a college education in the USA... to support my advising them NOT to.
There are worse things than not getting an education in the USA. Jail is one of them.
That's already going on.
Ask David Nelson. Any David Nelson who's had the misfortune to have to fly out of a US airport.
As for how I found out the same thing about oil of wintergreen. . . must have read about it on slashdot. Obviously. Do I seem like the kind of pervert who. . .
You missed my point. The idea isn't to get across that what one is doing is legal or untraceable, it's just to get across the idea that it isn't morally wrong by the standards the current generation who are parents to kids in high school/college grew up with.
Find a better place than RIAA propaganda to get your info.
You are of course, simply wrong to the point where nothing you say about the business of music can be taken seriously. The case for every song on commercial radio being a result of payola can be considered established fact.
BTW, the major labels are all in major financial trouble, and paying for this part of promotion is part of the reason. Better cash your paycheck quickly.
No guarantee on data availability. I simply keyword-searched on my personal database on payola. If any URLs don't work, Google is even your friend. Keyword search on "payola".
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/06/25/pfp_co ngress/
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/06/25/eagle_ eye/
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/24/1515236.shtm l?tid=141
http://features.slashdot.org/features/01/06/05/103 4234.shtml?tid=141
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/06/25/1316255.shtm l?tid=141
http://www.latimes.com/cgi-bin/slwebcli?DBLIST=lt0 1&DOCNUM=41999&TEMPLATE=9002&DBPUB=20010529KFHQeKB S&QDesc=Logs%20Link%20Payments%20With%20Radio%20Ai rplay
I've never seen a pro-RIAA posting on Slashdot.
THAT'S WHAT THE PREVIEW BUTTON IS FOR. READ YOUR POSTS BEFORE POSTING.
There's a serious issue here concerning the rights of artists.
Only in your mind, and only in the imagination of RIAA publicists. Eminem's latest album was completely uploaded to the Net as MP3? His album went straight to #1. Please explain to him in public how his rights were violated by EVIL PIRATES.
There is NO convincing evidence anywhere that P2P displaces record sales.
As for your example, Isaac Asimov, too bad he never saw the Baen Free Library. Out of print science fiction books have been uploaded by several name authors to the library, betting that it would expand the sales of current titles. NO DRM, just zipfiles you can turn into .RTFs or html pages.
The experiment has been a success, and given Asimov's intelligence, we can be sure that if he were living today, he'd have his back-issue stuff either there or somewhere similar under his control.
Your copyright strawman doesn't cut any ice with me, I'm a published writer and have applied for more than one patent, and know far more about the law in this area than you will ever need to know. I certainly don't support getting rid of copyright.
While there are some people here who want to do away with it, most here would be content with reform, i.e. changing current law to add mandatory Internet licensing to mandatory broadcast licensing, so anyone who broadcasts via the Net for commercial purposes has to pay a royalty to songwriters, collected via Performers Rights Societies like ASCAP and BMI. (and tracked via the same people who do SoundScan)
Selling music is about promotion, and the RIAA version of the story is simply an attempt to restrict mass distribution of music promtional materials to channels like radio they can buy control of.
Thanks to your RIAA buddies, I had a hell of a time getting the music tracks of an independent artist I'm personally working with onto Kazaa for fear of attack by the thugs you either work for or even stupider, are working for free of charge.
As for your imaginary "moral obligation", our moral obligation to artists is buy from them if we like their work. We have NO moral obligation to RIAA labels and no amount of your whining can make one. Perhaps you will buy a major label record because a label ad says to. Nobody else will.
Distributing broadcast-quality tracks of an artists' work simply provides them with free promotional exposure. If you think there's something immoral about someone hearing a track off an album that a record company didn't pay for radio time or the bandwidth before, you're a dumb shit.
The difference in this sense? The listener and provider of the file are redistributing this ad for the record company free of charge. Nobody's listening to the radio station's ads, but if the radio station isn't providing the content, why should we?
I wonder how many pro-RIAA postings are from people employed by RIAA PR agencies as opposed to "useful fools" who spread the RIAA message because they've been pumped full of bullshit and have the urge to spew it at somebody?
As it turned out, this increased album sales, just like file-swapping now.
The only difference is that politicians were paid off to make the logical extension of this into digital illegal.
Additional content like provided on DVDs. . . interviews, games, band information, pictures. . .
"Members only" areas on band websites, you get an ID number off a CD or play it when you access the site get access.
Drawings for free tickets.
If one really likes the music, one buys the CD because it sounds better, AAC is NOT a lossless format.
I wonder how many people are buying iTunes tracks and buying the CDs later? Anybody see numbers yet?
Everybody always has done it, up to now, legally.
Any musician and anyone else serious about music who's older than Britney Spears' generation grew up taping off the radio and swapping tapes. This was how people swapped music files before the Internet and personal computers.
Do any of us feel guilty about STEALING MUSIC and being PIRATES!!!
Of course not, tapes effectively extended the range of radio broadcast promotion of albums, i.e. taping songs off the radio helped sell albums, just as P2P and Internet radio helps sell CDs now.
The only difference between fileswapping and taping is that the RIAA paid Congress to make swapping songs via Internet illegal.
If you believe differently, you have been suckered by RIAA propaganda.
If they did (almost certainly), ask them if they felt guilty and ashamed about stealing FROM ARTISTS?
Tell them that filesharing is simply doing the same thing using your computer to grab them from P2P instead of the radio and your hard drive instead of a tape recorder.
Tell them the only difference between what they did and "filesharing" is that the RIAA bribed a bunch of politicians to declare the digital version is illegal and that the tape version is explicitly legal.
What's important here isn't that this changes the law, but to let them know what you're doing is merely illegal, not wrong.
If your parents can't tell the difference. . . you've got some unpleasant time to do before you leave home, good luck.
That may be just as unhealthy as the number of American politicians who got voted out of office with lead slugs.
Offhand, I'd guess Linux combined with a general lack of good ideas adding up to the idea that MS isn't worth reinvesting in.
"if Sun ever pays out a sizeable dividend, it means we've run out of R&D ideas and the company's in trouble".
In 'leading edge' high-tech, that's the conventional wisdom, and it's what I started wondering about right after I saw the announcement.