Compared to Disney, they're poor and little. Your example doesn't disprove favoritism; Take Two is not a market mover like Disney is. Who outside the gaming community has even heard of Take Two?
Lemme explain something to ya. Society is kept in check by providing them food and circuses; it's an old Roman Empire saying. Disney is one of the biggest circuses in town. Mess with Take Two and some gamers will grouse about it; mess with Disney and you've got a big problem. Disney could open up their own stores and say screw Wal Mart, and Wal Mart would hang their execs publicly for it.
Have you ever been through US Customs? Been stopped at a police drunk test roadblock? Been searched before getting on an airplane? Been searched before entering a _Courthouse_ or other government building? I believe the key wording here is "unreasonable searches and seizures". Now, I may feel that at least some of the foregoing are unreasonable, but obviously, the courts do not.
None of that in any way is relevant to justifying the NSA monitoring all American citizens' phone calls. There was no probable cause to justify monitoring all citizens' phone calls. There was no probable cause, and thus not even an illusion of reasonbility behind this nationwide act of search & seizure. For that matter, there was no probable cause behind the monitoring of Americans calling overseas. You cannot even remotely equate people passing through a court house with people communicating with one another, and justify there being someone there monitoring them.
What is your source for this bombshell? Even the NSA takes privacy seriously--I know, I received a briefing on acceptable and unacceptable actions _from the NSA_ when I was involved in testing a signal intelligence system several years ago. It was something that they seemed to take quite seriously. And, again, it doesn't seem like you've actually read the constitution--that annoying "unreasonable" rears its ugly head again.
a) No, you did not work with the NSA. Let's clear that up now before you run wild with that story.
b) There is absolutely nothing reasonable (legally or otherwise) about monitoring the entire nation's phone calls without getting a warrant. Not one single solitary ghost of a case of reasonability. The devil has a better chance of being accepted into Heaven than you have of showing where this was reasonable. There is no probable cause - not even the shadow of one - for monitoring all citizens' phone calls. You don't stand a snowball's chance of showing the readers how we are all legally deserving of being tapped. If you could, you would also invariably invalidate any need for warrants whatsoever.
c) And in 2009 the Democrats will use this to monitor their political enemies and I'll see you here crying about how the KGB ate America. May your chains set lightly.
Disney won't get held to the same treatment; they're a big corporation with lots of money.
Just so you know... rules, such as they are, are meant to keep you little people in your place. The wealthy and the corporate elite are above the rules because if they weren't, they would lose money and then they would take their business to other, more cronyi^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriendly nations overseas.
It's time we put an end to this "fairness" crap and put the needs of the herd aside for the needs of the alpha dogs in the pack. Rules stifle profits, innovation and progress.
"Bush has violated no rights of anybody in Git'mo. They are *not* US Citizens therefore they have no rights under the Constitution. They are enemy combatants. They do not even have rights under the Geneva convention"
BZZT. Not only have the courts refuted you on that, but Bush himself has accepted that you're wrong.
"Bush has not broken any laws in the eaves-dropping the NSA has done. We are at war and we are eavesdropping on enemy communications. And make sure you get that phrasing correct. There have not been any wiretaps, only Eaves droppings. Its a huge difference that the Antique media conveniently misses."
Bush has violated 2 constitutional rights here. a) The right of freedom of association. b) No search & seizure without a warrant. One person on all of those "international calls" was an American whose call was searched and seized without a warrant. Make no mistake. The US Constitution says nothing involving an American can be searched and seized without a warrant.
But most importantly: c) The NSA was also monitoring all Americans' calls - every citizen in America was being wiretapped, all without probable cause, all without a warrant. Flat out, the US Constitution completely and expressly forbids this, and there is no room for an alternative interpretation of the Constitution on this issue.
Privacy is only for nutcases with kooky ideas, and miscreants trying to hide their activities. Do you really think that my fellow Alabamans care if you have phonesex and talk about a blowjob? Ok, there's a law against blowjobs here, but really, who's gonna arrest you? And so what if someone plays your blowjob talk in front of the whole world one day? That's the whole point of removing privacy for Americans; if you're too ashamed of what you do in secret being shouted on the mountaintops, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
As for our Government's privacy.... they need privacy. Unlike your fantasies of privacy, their privacy is in the interest of protecting us from terror. A Government shrouded in absolute secrecy and shielded from accountability, ruling over a completely transparent constituency, is the only way to assure our public safety.
I for one would rather sacrifice my freedoms than risk my safety.
This is Pat Riot, the voice of a safe, secure America!
"A typo corrected within minutes and yet you focus on that as some sort of proof? Who's the blowhard?"
Corrected? When? You can't correct a mistake once it's posted. Dude, what are you smoking?
"Sure some look it up and some even make poor judgements based on it. But that hardly makes the target unemployable. Only a net.kook would claim otherwise."
A) So what? I was talking about the US and how bad things can get here; and B) Those aren't plans; they're how online bullies fsck up people on a daily basis. And the only picture you're ever going to see is the sand that's blocking your eyesight because your head is buried in it.
You're boring me. Go scream at the wall with your port 24 31337 h4x0r nonsense.
If you filch my personal info from a data center in India and sell it to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, however, the FBI can't touch you! Identity theft is much more fun than wrecking a computer! And remember, it's easy to get my information... just bribe the data center manager a year's salary... which amounts to your lunch money for a week.
Nah. I'm so fed up with cheap labor Libertarians, police state neo cons and so forth, that I've started making fun of them. Ever notice how they don't have much to say in favor of their stupid right wing utopian policies anymore?
The truth is, American workers are the laziest and unproductive workers in the world. Part of their unproductivity lies in the feeble nature of their bodies.
You don't hear of Chinese or East Indian workers suffering from this kind of stress, do you? That's because they love their work and they're grateful, unlike you lazy union commies. They could be digging a ditch filled with Union Carbide chemical waste and they'd be singing in the acid rain.
It's articles like this that convince me that you IT workers need to be relieved of your stress by laying you off and sending these stressful jobs to East India.
After a few years in poverty I'm sure you'll come crawling back to Corporate America begging for a chance to work 24 hour shifts writing software.
Your health doesn't mean squat; corporate profits are far more important!
I'd pay for a HD-DVD system if it meant games were longer, had more depth, and gave me much larger worlds to explore. For that matter, give the machines 2gb of RAM (RAM is cheap now) to cache up surrounding areas while you move. That way when you load a new area you have all or much of it in memory already.
Disc size is irrelevant to me unless I get more content. I want a game to last longer, and have more fun things to do. That's why 90% of my 360 playing time has been TES4: Oblivion (with time off to play Ninety Nine Nights for excitement's sake).
Bush != America therefore Anti-Bush != Anti-America
is not a troll.
But let's clarify the points being made in response to this story, points which the grandparent poster was inaccurately deriding as "America bashing": online flashcrowd style bullying is a major threat to America because we are just as vulnerable as the South Koreans are, to this problem. We have demonstrated, highly publicized incidents here as well.
Of course, that just flew right over the heads of many angry and painfully alienated Republicans, some no doubt wielding mod points in one hand and hurt feelings in the other.
Actually I hope Americans wake up to this threat before some really innocent people get nailed en masse. Discussing gaping weaknesses in the social system which allows false reputations to spread, do great damage, and to resist efforts to undo the damage, is as important, if not more so, than discussing weaknesses in Windows XP/Vista.
"Oh, I know how easy it is to do. I cut my teeth on port 24 hacking about 20 years ago and have kept current ever since. My point is that claiming to have such a profound influence on the guy's life is just ego stroking on your part, borderline net.kook. Usenet postings and a couple of signs on telephone poles do not a life a ruin."
If you do port 24 hacking then I am the President of the US. That's port 25, kid. Don't talk big about stuff when you can't even get your story right, blowhard. Defamatory USENET / Myspace postings ruin people's jobs every day; employers look that stuff up, and so do future employers.
Your ignorance is so great it's now developing its own gravity field.
We need more people like you, fighting the war on terror from behind the safety of your keyboard. If only all our armed forces would follow your example!
"It is self-limiting, the more people who do it, the less impact it will have because the more well-known it will be. The only long-term effect will be in raising people's awareness that you can't believe everything you read."
Apparently 1 in 10 North Koreans are a victim of this behavior... evidence that its impact is not diminished despite many, many North Koreans using this tactic. There's no real world evidence to show America would be any different. If what you said was true, celebrity gossip would have died out as a business by now.
"Sure there is, completely unemployable and all due to your radical defamation skills. You only wish your slashdot dick were so big."
Spoken like a truly ignorant child. You're so utterly clueless as to how easy that is to do.
Stick your head in the sand and say it doesn't exist and the truth goes away, eh?
I can make that scenario I described happen in 5 days flat. I've actually done all those things to online bullies before. There's a guy in Illinois who can't get a job because he threatened to sodomize a USENET poster's kid and I posed as him reposting his remark at local web boards and even had someone post his remarks on paper on a few telephone poles.
Yeah, he got an attorney, and yeah, I offered to fly out and answer to libel and stalking charges. But then he would have to admit to threatening to sodomize an 8 year old girl living no more than 25 miles away from him in the discovery of evidence phase.
Dear God, America is doomed. We'll be speaking Arabic in 10 years tops. It was that bloody Constitution that did us in. Thanks to a bunch of freedom loving ninnies, America has been bound and gagged in the face of Ay-rab brutes and now we won't stand a chance of knowing what they're doing.
Oh, wait. Didn't President Bush stacked the US Supreme Court? Yippee! We may yet crush the deadly scourge of freedom and preserve the security of our Union! But that won't always save us; maybe what we need is to suspend the Constitution until the War on Terror is over.
For instance, you can get on places like MySpace or USENET, pose as your victim, and start saying crazy things that will eventually find its way to future employers.
Or you can pose as other people saying nasty things about that person and make it sound like a large number of people hate this person.
Using anonymous proxies (or remailers on USENET) will make you increasingly resistant to being discovered and punished; but even if you are, that person will still have to clear their name with employers and such that don't know the "rest" of the story (such as, it's all a lie and perhaps their attacker is now in jail). The thing is, employers would rather not hire people mired in that kind of drama; so even if God tells them the truth, that only bolsters their decision not to hire the victim of such online malevolence.
This has all the elements it needs to be the next wave of domestic terrorism in America: anyone can do it, and the damage can be overwhelming. Plus, law enforcement is typically too slow and unconcerned with dealing with people who do this, and when this wave of terrorism hits its stride, civil courts will be crushed by all the thousands - or millions - of court cases, as every Tom Dick and Harry in the world takes advantage of what will be seen as the most powerful weapon of mass defamation in history.
I say "in history" because it's super cheap (free), super easy, super effective and super devastating, if the harasser knows how to do it right in the correct forums where information will propagate far and wide.
I never use AR for anything online, I didn't even think that was possible. All my uses of AR or Gameshark are for single player games; I don't ever want to play via X Box Live and have to pay for it. Perhaps AR should regulate themselves better with regards to this?
I've never seen a Lacie hard drive product that has more than a 1 year warranty. This product you mentions, has a 1 year warranty. I had a 500GB Big Disk die after 1 year. Upon opening it I saw that it was two 250gb drives linked via Raid 0 (sp?). When one drive failed, almost all data was lost. I recovered data from one drive but I was way beyond the warranty so there I was. With a LaCie 1TB drive? You're REALLY screwed if they've got 2x500gb drives in there.
Having backups of stuff on a drive is essential, but even more essential is the ability to replace the drive when it dies: in addition to losing my data, I don't want to have to shell out hundreds of bucks for a new drive.
A 3 or 5 year warranty doesn't mean the drive won't wait until 3 or 5 years to die, but if it is defective it might die in a year and I'll get a new drive for free under MOST hard drive warranties (assuming I don't drop it). I've lost a 500gb Seagate drive and got a new one for free, so yes, these warranties work. A drive with a one year warranty is a recipe for disaster.
I know this for a fact. I watch Fox News and they don't talk about any examples of cronyism, fraud, etc. You must be watching those liberal commie rag shows or something. The ban on options backdating is just another confiscationalist attack on wealth building. This is a witch hunt, I say, a bigoted witch hunt! The innocent women of Salem Massachusetts must be rolling in their graves at all the persecution that's going on.
The RIAA's publicity is also causing people to stop buying from them.
Sales are down. There's proof that the negative publicity - as well as poor music quality - is taking a toll.
I, for one, only buy second hand, if I do at all. My music collection is now mostly Anime and independent stuff, which is 100% of what I've collected since around 2003. I'm also quite successful at getting Britney Spears fans to dump the RIAA. Britney Spears fans.. if they can be convinced of the DRM issue and to switch, how hard can it be for everyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to Disney, they're poor and little. Your example doesn't disprove favoritism; Take Two is not a market mover like Disney is. Who outside the gaming community has even heard of Take Two?
Lemme explain something to ya. Society is kept in check by providing them food and circuses; it's an old Roman Empire saying. Disney is one of the biggest circuses in town. Mess with Take Two and some gamers will grouse about it; mess with Disney and you've got a big problem. Disney could open up their own stores and say screw Wal Mart, and Wal Mart would hang their execs publicly for it.
So yes, Take Two is a very bad example.
None of that in any way is relevant to justifying the NSA monitoring all American citizens' phone calls. There was no probable cause to justify monitoring all citizens' phone calls. There was no probable cause, and thus not even an illusion of reasonbility behind this nationwide act of search & seizure. For that matter, there was no probable cause behind the monitoring of Americans calling overseas. You cannot even remotely equate people passing through a court house with people communicating with one another, and justify there being someone there monitoring them.
a) No, you did not work with the NSA. Let's clear that up now before you run wild with that story.
b) There is absolutely nothing reasonable (legally or otherwise) about monitoring the entire nation's phone calls without getting a warrant. Not one single solitary ghost of a case of reasonability. The devil has a better chance of being accepted into Heaven than you have of showing where this was reasonable. There is no probable cause - not even the shadow of one - for monitoring all citizens' phone calls. You don't stand a snowball's chance of showing the readers how we are all legally deserving of being tapped. If you could, you would also invariably invalidate any need for warrants whatsoever.
c) And in 2009 the Democrats will use this to monitor their political enemies and I'll see you here crying about how the KGB ate America. May your chains set lightly.
Disney won't get held to the same treatment; they're a big corporation with lots of money.
Just so you know... rules, such as they are, are meant to keep you little people in your place. The wealthy and the corporate elite are above the rules because if they weren't, they would lose money and then they would take their business to other, more cronyi^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriendly nations overseas.
It's time we put an end to this "fairness" crap and put the needs of the herd aside for the needs of the alpha dogs in the pack. Rules stifle profits, innovation and progress.
Sincerely,
Your friendly neighborhood satirist
"Bush has violated no rights of anybody in Git'mo. They are *not* US Citizens therefore they have no rights under the Constitution. They are enemy combatants. They do not even have rights under the Geneva convention"
BZZT. Not only have the courts refuted you on that, but Bush himself has accepted that you're wrong.
"Bush has not broken any laws in the eaves-dropping the NSA has done. We are at war and we are eavesdropping on enemy communications. And make sure you get that phrasing correct. There have not been any wiretaps, only Eaves droppings. Its a huge difference that the Antique media conveniently misses."
Bush has violated 2 constitutional rights here.
a) The right of freedom of association.
b) No search & seizure without a warrant. One person on all of those "international calls" was an American whose call was searched and seized without a warrant. Make no mistake. The US Constitution says nothing involving an American can be searched and seized without a warrant.
But most importantly:
c) The NSA was also monitoring all Americans' calls - every citizen in America was being wiretapped, all without probable cause, all without a warrant. Flat out, the US Constitution completely and expressly forbids this, and there is no room for an alternative interpretation of the Constitution on this issue.
Privacy is only for nutcases with kooky ideas, and miscreants trying to hide their activities. Do you really think that my fellow Alabamans care if you have phonesex and talk about a blowjob? Ok, there's a law against blowjobs here, but really, who's gonna arrest you? And so what if someone plays your blowjob talk in front of the whole world one day? That's the whole point of removing privacy for Americans; if you're too ashamed of what you do in secret being shouted on the mountaintops, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
As for our Government's privacy.... they need privacy. Unlike your fantasies of privacy, their privacy is in the interest of protecting us from terror. A Government shrouded in absolute secrecy and shielded from accountability, ruling over a completely transparent constituency, is the only way to assure our public safety.
I for one would rather sacrifice my freedoms than risk my safety.
This is Pat Riot, the voice of a safe, secure America!
[okay, you just know this is a parody, right?]
"A typo corrected within minutes and yet you focus on that as some sort of proof? Who's the blowhard?"
Corrected? When? You can't correct a mistake once it's posted. Dude, what are you smoking?
"Sure some look it up and some even make poor judgements based on it. But that hardly makes the target unemployable. Only a net.kook would claim otherwise."
A) So what? I was talking about the US and how bad things can get here; and B) Those aren't plans; they're how online bullies fsck up people on a daily basis. And the only picture you're ever going to see is the sand that's blocking your eyesight because your head is buried in it.
You're boring me. Go scream at the wall with your port 24 31337 h4x0r nonsense.
The FBI will relentlessly hunt you down for that.
If you filch my personal info from a data center in India and sell it to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, however, the FBI can't touch you! Identity theft is much more fun than wrecking a computer! And remember, it's easy to get my information... just bribe the data center manager a year's salary... which amounts to your lunch money for a week.
Ah, the joys of offshoring!
[this is a parody, of course]
Nah. I'm so fed up with cheap labor Libertarians, police state neo cons and so forth, that I've started making fun of them. Ever notice how they don't have much to say in favor of their stupid right wing utopian policies anymore?
The truth is, American workers are the laziest and unproductive workers in the world. Part of their unproductivity lies in the feeble nature of their bodies.
You don't hear of Chinese or East Indian workers suffering from this kind of stress, do you? That's because they love their work and they're grateful, unlike you lazy union commies. They could be digging a ditch filled with Union Carbide chemical waste and they'd be singing in the acid rain.
It's articles like this that convince me that you IT workers need to be relieved of your stress by laying you off and sending these stressful jobs to East India.
After a few years in poverty I'm sure you'll come crawling back to Corporate America begging for a chance to work 24 hour shifts writing software.
Your health doesn't mean squat; corporate profits are far more important!
[libertarian parody off]
I'd pay for a HD-DVD system if it meant games were longer, had more depth, and gave me much larger worlds to explore. For that matter, give the machines 2gb of RAM (RAM is cheap now) to cache up surrounding areas while you move. That way when you load a new area you have all or much of it in memory already.
Disc size is irrelevant to me unless I get more content. I want a game to last longer, and have more fun things to do. That's why 90% of my 360 playing time has been TES4: Oblivion (with time off to play Ninety Nine Nights for excitement's sake).
Bush != America
therefore
Anti-Bush != Anti-America
is not a troll.
But let's clarify the points being made in response to this story, points which the grandparent poster was inaccurately deriding as "America bashing": online flashcrowd style bullying is a major threat to America because we are just as vulnerable as the South Koreans are, to this problem. We have demonstrated, highly publicized incidents here as well.
Of course, that just flew right over the heads of many angry and painfully alienated Republicans, some no doubt wielding mod points in one hand and hurt feelings in the other.
MK Ultra made him confess falsely to this deed.
First conspiracy post!!
Actually I hope Americans wake up to this threat before some really innocent people get nailed en masse. Discussing gaping weaknesses in the social system which allows false reputations to spread, do great damage, and to resist efforts to undo the damage, is as important, if not more so, than discussing weaknesses in Windows XP/Vista.
"Oh, I know how easy it is to do. I cut my teeth on port 24 hacking about 20 years ago and have kept current ever since. My point is that claiming to have such a profound influence on the guy's life is just ego stroking on your part, borderline net.kook. Usenet postings and a couple of signs on telephone poles do not a life a ruin."
If you do port 24 hacking then I am the President of the US. That's port 25, kid. Don't talk big about stuff when you can't even get your story right, blowhard. Defamatory USENET / Myspace postings ruin people's jobs every day; employers look that stuff up, and so do future employers.
Your ignorance is so great it's now developing its own gravity field.
We need more people like you, fighting the war on terror from behind the safety of your keyboard. If only all our armed forces would follow your example!
"It is self-limiting, the more people who do it, the less impact it will have because the more well-known it will be. The only long-term effect will be in raising people's awareness that you can't believe everything you read."
Apparently 1 in 10 North Koreans are a victim of this behavior... evidence that its impact is not diminished despite many, many North Koreans using this tactic. There's no real world evidence to show America would be any different. If what you said was true, celebrity gossip would have died out as a business by now.
"Sure there is, completely unemployable and all due to your radical defamation skills. You only wish your slashdot dick were so big."
Spoken like a truly ignorant child. You're so utterly clueless as to how easy that is to do.
Stick your head in the sand and say it doesn't exist and the truth goes away, eh?
I can make that scenario I described happen in 5 days flat. I've actually done all those things to online bullies before. There's a guy in Illinois who can't get a job because he threatened to sodomize a USENET poster's kid and I posed as him reposting his remark at local web boards and even had someone post his remarks on paper on a few telephone poles.
Yeah, he got an attorney, and yeah, I offered to fly out and answer to libel and stalking charges. But then he would have to admit to threatening to sodomize an 8 year old girl living no more than 25 miles away from him in the discovery of evidence phase.
That case flew like a lead brick.
He's sneezing.
It's over. *sob* It's all over. *sniffle*
Dear God, America is doomed. We'll be speaking Arabic in 10 years tops. It was that bloody Constitution that did us in. Thanks to a bunch of freedom loving ninnies, America has been bound and gagged in the face of Ay-rab brutes and now we won't stand a chance of knowing what they're doing.
Oh, wait. Didn't President Bush stacked the US Supreme Court? Yippee! We may yet crush the deadly scourge of freedom and preserve the security of our Union! But that won't always save us; maybe what we need is to suspend the Constitution until the War on Terror is over.
[end neo con parody]
For instance, you can get on places like MySpace or USENET, pose as your victim, and start saying crazy things that will eventually find its way to future employers.
Or you can pose as other people saying nasty things about that person and make it sound like a large number of people hate this person.
Using anonymous proxies (or remailers on USENET) will make you increasingly resistant to being discovered and punished; but even if you are, that person will still have to clear their name with employers and such that don't know the "rest" of the story (such as, it's all a lie and perhaps their attacker is now in jail). The thing is, employers would rather not hire people mired in that kind of drama; so even if God tells them the truth, that only bolsters their decision not to hire the victim of such online malevolence.
This has all the elements it needs to be the next wave of domestic terrorism in America: anyone can do it, and the damage can be overwhelming. Plus, law enforcement is typically too slow and unconcerned with dealing with people who do this, and when this wave of terrorism hits its stride, civil courts will be crushed by all the thousands - or millions - of court cases, as every Tom Dick and Harry in the world takes advantage of what will be seen as the most powerful weapon of mass defamation in history.
I say "in history" because it's super cheap (free), super easy, super effective and super devastating, if the harasser knows how to do it right in the correct forums where information will propagate far and wide.
I never use AR for anything online, I didn't even think that was possible. All my uses of AR or Gameshark are for single player games; I don't ever want to play via X Box Live and have to pay for it. Perhaps AR should regulate themselves better with regards to this?
and Action Replay Max for the 360.
What ever happened to "I own this console now"? Nowdays it's "you buy this console but WE decide how you use it".
I'm sure glad they don't do that with cars! Imagine no Toyotas Celicas being allowed to have spoilers..
Oh wait, bad example.......
I've never seen a Lacie hard drive product that has more than a 1 year warranty. This product you mentions, has a 1 year warranty. I had a 500GB Big Disk die after 1 year. Upon opening it I saw that it was two 250gb drives linked via Raid 0 (sp?). When one drive failed, almost all data was lost. I recovered data from one drive but I was way beyond the warranty so there I was. With a LaCie 1TB drive? You're REALLY screwed if they've got 2x500gb drives in there.
Having backups of stuff on a drive is essential, but even more essential is the ability to replace the drive when it dies: in addition to losing my data, I don't want to have to shell out hundreds of bucks for a new drive.
A 3 or 5 year warranty doesn't mean the drive won't wait until 3 or 5 years to die, but if it is defective it might die in a year and I'll get a new drive for free under MOST hard drive warranties (assuming I don't drop it). I've lost a 500gb Seagate drive and got a new one for free, so yes, these warranties work. A drive with a one year warranty is a recipe for disaster.
Me? I'll wait for Seagate's version.
I know this for a fact. I watch Fox News and they don't talk about any examples of cronyism, fraud, etc. You must be watching those liberal commie rag shows or something. The ban on options backdating is just another confiscationalist attack on wealth building. This is a witch hunt, I say, a bigoted witch hunt! The innocent women of Salem Massachusetts must be rolling in their graves at all the persecution that's going on.
[end right wing parody]
The RIAA's publicity is also causing people to stop buying from them.
Sales are down. There's proof that the negative publicity - as well as poor music quality - is taking a toll.
I, for one, only buy second hand, if I do at all. My music collection is now mostly Anime and independent stuff, which is 100% of what I've collected since around 2003. I'm also quite successful at getting Britney Spears fans to dump the RIAA. Britney Spears fans.. if they can be convinced of the DRM issue and to switch, how hard can it be for everyone else?