Point well taken, and I'm pretty sure my brother writes off his CD-R blanks (as well as his computer, appropriate entertainment expenses, etc.). If he didn't, he'd be, well...even less well off.
However, the blank media charge supposedly is collected on _all_ media. If you're paying $0.02 (or less-even a negative number!) for media before the levy, it's because the store (or maybe the wholesaler) is probably selling it at a loss, as a loss-leader to get you into the store.
Many years ago, "Cook County Saloon" in Edmonton Alberta collected the SOCAN fees. I don't know if they still do or not.
We've had a media "levy" (don't call it a tax!) for the last twelve years. The irony is that my brother (a full-time professional musician) has to pay this levy on blank media he uses for his own music, and the money goes back to the record companies or music publishers. If any artists get his money, it's the Celine Dions of the country. (Although I seem to recall that she came out firmly against the levy, pointing out that even she's made less from it than she's paid into it by buying CD blanks for her computer).
"...only heavy utilizers are going to opt-in (or rather, not opt-out)."
This is where they'll make their money: If they implement the fee, 90% of users won't notice it or bother to opt-out. It's going to be a voluntary overpayment, with the money going to the middlemen as usual. (Will the artists get a cent of this? No, of course not! Why would THEY be the ones to profit from their music?)
Yeah, it's stupid. Stupid, immoral, and corrupt--like the music industry everywhere.
The astute amongst you may have noticed that between the quotation marks was nothing at all. After reasonable editing, that's all Schwartz ever says--nothing.
For the last ten years I've been a full-time Solaris admin (before that was a mix of HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, OSF/1(!), and other misc.). In that time, Jonathan Schwartz has NEVER said anything of substance. Nor has he done anything positive for the company.
When he was McNealy's lap-dog, he'd say stupid things and the stock would go up. When he became CEO, he continued saying (and doing!) stupid things, and the stock would go down.
Sun's time as a public company has come and, thanks to the pony-tailed freak, gone. The only way that Sun can survive independently is to buy themselves out (i.e. delist from the stock exchange). They have the capital, but clearly don't want to do it, so being bought out by someone is the only chance. IBM, Cisco, or possibly someone else (EMC2? Lenovo?), it doesn't matter--it _will_ happen eventually.
As for Schwartz's comments on FOSS, he alternately (a) haws his own company's new wares, (b) keenly points out the blindingly obvious, and (c) blows smoke. Nothing to see here.
Pity, though. I sometimes wonder what Sun would have become if McNealy had kicked Jonathan to the curb, and picked a better successor.
"...it would appear that it is now impossible for him to understand that his 'way' isn't the only one."
For Richard Stallman, I don't think another way has EVER been possible (or at least acceptible). Thing is, when the (commercial) world was essentially all closed-source, any pressure from the 'open' side was a good thing--and press he did! Open source (or in fact "Open Source Software(tm)) probably wouldn't be where it is today without his constant efforts.
However, he is and always has been a zealot. I'm not sure he'll be happy until capitalism is dead and bleeding, and an enlightened neo-socialist landscape covers the world, along with with peace, harmony, and fluffy bunnies. I'm not sure if I disagree with his ultimate vision, but I'm afraid that I can't be bothered to live the life of an OSS hermit until the software rapture.
Every single time Sun gets mentioned online, the license evangelists start frothing at the mouth. "Solaris isn't free, ZFS isn't free, dtrace isn't free, if it's not GPL, we shun it." When you look at the terms of the CDDL (or BSD license, Apache, etc.), that alone should be proof that the Open Source movement is already moving beyond the people who are going to benefit from it, and is turning into a fractious fringe movement.
20-24Mpix for full frame is about ideal. More than that, and the photosites get too small. If you want 50Mpix, you want medium format. 6u is about ideal--Canon is about 6.3u, and Nikon is 5.5u.
Perks for good staff? Yes. Quirks? Sure. Kid gloves and tolerance of anti-social behaviour? No. Behave like a reasonable adult, or get the hell out of my company! I don't care if you're the best programmer on planet earth--if you can't work with others, you should be working for yourself, in a yurt in outer Mongolia, and not bothering the rest of the world with your crappy attitude.
In short, juvenile delinquents shouldn't be employed. Hire grown-ups.
This is a sign of inexperienced and/or paranoid developers.
Good developers will know that writing good code and documenting it correctly is job security of another sort--companies who WANT to keep you or hire you, not companies who are forced to do so. Ultimately, undocumented code will be rewritten from scratch by someone else, and the original programmer will be fired.
Do your job to the best of your abilities--always.
Hmm. My experience seems to be a bit different than yours. I find firefox to be fast and solid. Maybe Chrome has improved since it was first released, but a dozen people here installed it on release date, and dumped it within two days because it was unusable. Besides, it's apparently Windows only? That's what Google tells me at least.
A big reason to use firefox for me is that it runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, without issue.
"Its a web browser, not the holy grail of computing. Its no more important, in the big picture, than an IM client."
Yes and no. It's definitely not the holy grail of computing. However, the web has become SO central to the internet (and in fact, computing in general) that it is actually more important than an IM client (or an FTP client, or...).
To be fair, I've not looked at ff3.1(5) yet, nor IE8. Sometime after they've hit final release, I'll be interested. Advertising betas just seems silly, even for/..
However, I work for an ISP. We spend roughly $5M/year on hardware, software, and man-hours in dealing with spam. Guess who pays for it--the customers, ultimately. That's one of the reasons people hate spammers--because they're ALL victims.
Secondly, there's the virus aspect (spam and viruses often go hand in hand, and Sanford certainly hasn't declined to get his hands dirty in that realm). Now we're talking about vandalism on a massive scale--again, vandalism of YOUR computer and mine. The thing that not enough people know, however, is that behind the spammers and espeically behind the viruses, lies the Russian mafia. Wanna talk about murders and thieves?
Ultimately, I think that one of the things which REALLY offends people about spammers is their psychopathic behaviour. "If I'm not in jail, I'm not doing anything wrong. If I'm in jail, the only thing I did wrong was get caught." Even most murderers have a greater sense of right and wrong, regardless of whether they pay attention to it or not.
Imagine if you lived in a small town where there was only one window repair shop. Every night, the owner of that window repair shop would walk through the town and smash a third of the windows he saw, so he could get paid to repair them the next day. Nothing wrong with such behaviour--just building a market and trying to make a living.
That's essentially the reason people hate spammers so much.
OK, I'm not a cruel man. At heart, I can't really support the death penalty for anyone.
But if I read tomorrow that Sanford Wallace was found dead with a bullet in his brain, I would have a hard time suppressing a loud cheer. Fucking deadbeat doesn't deserve the life he's wasted on crime.
Interesting point--by being professional and open, I didn't do any of the things that traditionally count as 'burning bridges.'
On the other hand, I would have been nearly unemployable in the area after that. "Oh, YOU'RE the guy who outed Mark, over at (company X). Yeah, I'm afraid we don't have a position for a junior troublemaker." Whether it was malicious or not, professional or not, the fact remained that I would NOT be crossing back over that bridge.
It happened once for me, and everyone deserves one chance to burn bridges.
I was living in in the USA, there on a work visa. Unfortunately, my manager was letting power go to his head, making life a living hell for the entire lab. He had it in for me, and I just wanted to finish up some things before quitting (and leaving the country), so it was a race and we both knew it.
JUST before he was about to fire me, I handed in my notice--four weeks, to ensure time to complete or transition my work tasks properly. He promptly told me to clean my workspace and avoid touching the lab equipment or computers, so within a few days, I was forced to sit at my desk, feet up, reading Hugh Johnson's wine Encyclopedia.
When it came time for my exit interview, I was asked if something could have been done differently to make me stay. I pointed out that every person in my group had a secret file in the bottom of their desk drawer, detailing the times our manager had been abusive, unreasonable, or unfair to them.
Management eventually saw those files, and "promoted" the manager to a desk position with no staff or responsibilities--just paperwork.
Buying computers is a cost sink. You buy computers and amortize the cost of them over a few years. You ONLY buy computers because you need to do computing work.
If you don't need the computing power, sell off 90% of them at a great price (maybe 20% below market value), RIGHT NOW. Holding onto depreciating assets with no return on them is no better than tossing money into a furnace.
Keep a couple of 'em around for growth, spares, and new projects. Sell the rest, and when you need the computing power, buy something 'x' times faster for the same amount of money.
"The statements made by Paul Aiken as quoted are factual."
Well, no they're not. Not exactly.
From the article:
"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
"Audio rights are derivative under copyright law." That is a fact. "They don't have the right to read a book out loud." That's an interpretation. Whether a Kindle reading out loud is a public performance is the crux of the matter here--and Aiken's opinion notwithstanding, still undecided.
Incidentally, aggregate readings constituting "public performance" also mean that I couldn't read out loud to myself more than once, which wouldn't be passable as law. Regardless, your definition doesn't seem to be borne out by the actual text of the US copyright laws. Also...
Reading something OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC is the rough definition of a performance. A Kindle presumably has a headphone jack, and can also be used in private.
Furthermore, you say that the definition of copy would include a performance. Not true! Read the following:
""Copies" are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."
In other words, reading isn't creating a copy, unless you actually make a copy (by transcribing or recording.)
Ultimately, I could see a fair claim in this situation, but it wouldn't be against Amazon. Instead, it would be against a consumer using the Kindle to create a public performance.
"Do you know where your OS caches files that you've opened?"
That doesn't matter. At least not directly. What matters is to have policies and tools in place to deal with it.
There are tools that will wipe all caches on boot and shutdown. OS partitions can be mounted read-only. These are policies and technologies that, when implemented together, can solve problems.
WHOLE DISK ENCRYPTION IS NOT THE WAY TO GO!!! If you encrypt an entire environment, it will be an annoyance to staff--and like all annoyances, will be worked around. (email attachments? Personal USB keys? You can forbid them, but if it's the only rational way for someone to do their job, they'll ignore the policy.)
The less you do that has a 'customer' impact (and for an IT/Security department, the customer is actually the company's staff), the more effective it will be. Years of security has taught me that the minimum rational policy in any given situation, with exceptions as necessary, will invariably produce the best security.
I'm married, and a parent. My "idealism" is tempered by the part that you apparently didn't read. Let me repeat: "OK, delay and stall as much as possible while you get your resume shopped around and get a new job lined up."
The OP said "My institution", so it's hard to tell whether it's government or corporate. If the latter, my advice is actually likely to keep paying the bills better than working in a company that's going to go down the tubes in another year. If the former, sooner or later a new director will reorganise 'everything,' and after a fiasco like this, is likely to fire EVERYONE involved.
Honestly, "prepare, cut, and run" is not only sound advice, but downright conservative and safe--ESPECIALLY in a bad economy. The key is in the preparation.
OK, delay and stall as much as possible while you get your resume shopped around and get a new job lined up.
Then quit.
This kind of silliness is (a)stupid, (b)pointless, and (c)doomed. Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong. (And no, I'm not opinionated at all!:-)
Fundamentally, this will fail because it's a blanket policy on dissimilar environments: All hardware is not equal, and all software is not equal. Portable gear should NOT be treated the same as fixed equipment. Sensitive customer data should NOT be treated the same as OS files. Throwing everything together under one usage policy comes from not understanding ANY of computers, data, or security.
"So why the hell do I care about how bloated the music industry is or how much musicians get paid?"
Straight answer: Because the music industry is harming musicians more than it's helping them--especially the smaller and less commercial musicians. Because if it weren't for this industry, you would be able to find MORE artists that you like, and existing artists would be able to make a (better?) living from their art--which leads to more and better music.
Yes, there's far too much brilliant music out there than I'll ever listen to. On the other hand, I might want more of one particular artist (shameless plug). I unfortunately know too many musicians who can't afford to release any more albums, because they're essentially making minimum wage from gigs, and owe the record companies thousands or tens of thousands for "promotional costs" of their previous album.
Would the telecom industry run smoothly if the back-line staff all got minimum wage? I rather doubt it.
Incidentally, I'm a little bit passionate about this topic because I have professional musicians in my family, and see many sides of the coin. Fundamentally, it should be simple: Artists and fans (or potential fans) should be able to connect, and the artists should be paid a decent wage. If someone else helps that connection, they deserve to be paid for their help as well. Everything else is noise and distraction.
Slashdot Mirror
Point well taken, and I'm pretty sure my brother writes off his CD-R blanks (as well as his computer, appropriate entertainment expenses, etc.). If he didn't, he'd be, well...even less well off.
However, the blank media charge supposedly is collected on _all_ media. If you're paying $0.02 (or less-even a negative number!) for media before the levy, it's because the store (or maybe the wholesaler) is probably selling it at a loss, as a loss-leader to get you into the store.
Many years ago, "Cook County Saloon" in Edmonton Alberta collected the SOCAN fees. I don't know if they still do or not.
We've had a media "levy" (don't call it a tax!) for the last twelve years. The irony is that my brother (a full-time professional musician) has to pay this levy on blank media he uses for his own music, and the money goes back to the record companies or music publishers. If any artists get his money, it's the Celine Dions of the country. (Although I seem to recall that she came out firmly against the levy, pointing out that even she's made less from it than she's paid into it by buying CD blanks for her computer).
You make one mistake, in my estimation:
"...only heavy utilizers are going to opt-in (or rather, not opt-out)."
This is where they'll make their money: If they implement the fee, 90% of users won't notice it or bother to opt-out. It's going to be a voluntary overpayment, with the money going to the middlemen as usual. (Will the artists get a cent of this? No, of course not! Why would THEY be the ones to profit from their music?)
Yeah, it's stupid. Stupid, immoral, and corrupt--like the music industry everywhere.
The astute amongst you may have noticed that between the quotation marks was nothing at all. After reasonable editing, that's all Schwartz ever says--nothing.
For the last ten years I've been a full-time Solaris admin (before that was a mix of HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, OSF/1(!), and other misc.). In that time, Jonathan Schwartz has NEVER said anything of substance. Nor has he done anything positive for the company.
When he was McNealy's lap-dog, he'd say stupid things and the stock would go up. When he became CEO, he continued saying (and doing!) stupid things, and the stock would go down.
Sun's time as a public company has come and, thanks to the pony-tailed freak, gone. The only way that Sun can survive independently is to buy themselves out (i.e. delist from the stock exchange). They have the capital, but clearly don't want to do it, so being bought out by someone is the only chance. IBM, Cisco, or possibly someone else (EMC2? Lenovo?), it doesn't matter--it _will_ happen eventually.
As for Schwartz's comments on FOSS, he alternately (a) haws his own company's new wares, (b) keenly points out the blindingly obvious, and (c) blows smoke. Nothing to see here.
Pity, though. I sometimes wonder what Sun would have become if McNealy had kicked Jonathan to the curb, and picked a better successor.
"...taken as a whole he's a very important and positive figure."
Important, yes.
Positive, no.
"...it would appear that it is now impossible for him to understand that his 'way' isn't the only one."
For Richard Stallman, I don't think another way has EVER been possible (or at least acceptible). Thing is, when the (commercial) world was essentially all closed-source, any pressure from the 'open' side was a good thing--and press he did! Open source (or in fact "Open Source Software(tm)) probably wouldn't be where it is today without his constant efforts.
However, he is and always has been a zealot. I'm not sure he'll be happy until capitalism is dead and bleeding, and an enlightened neo-socialist landscape covers the world, along with with peace, harmony, and fluffy bunnies. I'm not sure if I disagree with his ultimate vision, but I'm afraid that I can't be bothered to live the life of an OSS hermit until the software rapture.
Every single time Sun gets mentioned online, the license evangelists start frothing at the mouth. "Solaris isn't free, ZFS isn't free, dtrace isn't free, if it's not GPL, we shun it." When you look at the terms of the CDDL (or BSD license, Apache, etc.), that alone should be proof that the Open Source movement is already moving beyond the people who are going to benefit from it, and is turning into a fractious fringe movement.
Should be:
"Richard Stallman Whines About Non-Free Web Apps"
"...Ansel Adams shot sheet film whose original dimensions were 8 x 10 inch..."
Or larger. :-) (He had a 20x16 camera, and many others larger than 8x10)
Chop those numbers in half, and yeah--maybe.
20-24Mpix for full frame is about ideal. More than that, and the photosites get too small. If you want 50Mpix, you want medium format. 6u is about ideal--Canon is about 6.3u, and Nikon is 5.5u.
No. No no no no no!
Perks for good staff? Yes. Quirks? Sure. Kid gloves and tolerance of anti-social behaviour? No. Behave like a reasonable adult, or get the hell out of my company! I don't care if you're the best programmer on planet earth--if you can't work with others, you should be working for yourself, in a yurt in outer Mongolia, and not bothering the rest of the world with your crappy attitude.
In short, juvenile delinquents shouldn't be employed. Hire grown-ups.
This is a sign of inexperienced and/or paranoid developers.
Good developers will know that writing good code and documenting it correctly is job security of another sort--companies who WANT to keep you or hire you, not companies who are forced to do so. Ultimately, undocumented code will be rewritten from scratch by someone else, and the original programmer will be fired.
Do your job to the best of your abilities--always.
Hmm. My experience seems to be a bit different than yours. I find firefox to be fast and solid. Maybe Chrome has improved since it was first released, but a dozen people here installed it on release date, and dumped it within two days because it was unusable. Besides, it's apparently Windows only? That's what Google tells me at least.
A big reason to use firefox for me is that it runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, without issue.
"Its a web browser, not the holy grail of computing. Its no more important, in the big picture, than an IM client."
Yes and no. It's definitely not the holy grail of computing. However, the web has become SO central to the internet (and in fact, computing in general) that it is actually more important than an IM client (or an FTP client, or...).
To be fair, I've not looked at ff3.1(5) yet, nor IE8. Sometime after they've hit final release, I'll be interested. Advertising betas just seems silly, even for /..
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
However, I work for an ISP. We spend roughly $5M/year on hardware, software, and man-hours in dealing with spam. Guess who pays for it--the customers, ultimately. That's one of the reasons people hate spammers--because they're ALL victims.
Secondly, there's the virus aspect (spam and viruses often go hand in hand, and Sanford certainly hasn't declined to get his hands dirty in that realm). Now we're talking about vandalism on a massive scale--again, vandalism of YOUR computer and mine. The thing that not enough people know, however, is that behind the spammers and espeically behind the viruses, lies the Russian mafia. Wanna talk about murders and thieves?
Ultimately, I think that one of the things which REALLY offends people about spammers is their psychopathic behaviour. "If I'm not in jail, I'm not doing anything wrong. If I'm in jail, the only thing I did wrong was get caught." Even most murderers have a greater sense of right and wrong, regardless of whether they pay attention to it or not.
Imagine if you lived in a small town where there was only one window repair shop. Every night, the owner of that window repair shop would walk through the town and smash a third of the windows he saw, so he could get paid to repair them the next day. Nothing wrong with such behaviour--just building a market and trying to make a living.
That's essentially the reason people hate spammers so much.
OK, I'm not a cruel man. At heart, I can't really support the death penalty for anyone.
But if I read tomorrow that Sanford Wallace was found dead with a bullet in his brain, I would have a hard time suppressing a loud cheer. Fucking deadbeat doesn't deserve the life he's wasted on crime.
Interesting point--by being professional and open, I didn't do any of the things that traditionally count as 'burning bridges.'
On the other hand, I would have been nearly unemployable in the area after that. "Oh, YOU'RE the guy who outed Mark, over at (company X). Yeah, I'm afraid we don't have a position for a junior troublemaker." Whether it was malicious or not, professional or not, the fact remained that I would NOT be crossing back over that bridge.
When invoked as sh (i.e. in sh-compatibility mode), how does the following display?
$ echo "hello\n"
It happened once for me, and everyone deserves one chance to burn bridges.
I was living in in the USA, there on a work visa. Unfortunately, my manager was letting power go to his head, making life a living hell for the entire lab. He had it in for me, and I just wanted to finish up some things before quitting (and leaving the country), so it was a race and we both knew it.
JUST before he was about to fire me, I handed in my notice--four weeks, to ensure time to complete or transition my work tasks properly. He promptly told me to clean my workspace and avoid touching the lab equipment or computers, so within a few days, I was forced to sit at my desk, feet up, reading Hugh Johnson's wine Encyclopedia.
When it came time for my exit interview, I was asked if something could have been done differently to make me stay. I pointed out that every person in my group had a secret file in the bottom of their desk drawer, detailing the times our manager had been abusive, unreasonable, or unfair to them.
Management eventually saw those files, and "promoted" the manager to a desk position with no staff or responsibilities--just paperwork.
Buying computers is a cost sink. You buy computers and amortize the cost of them over a few years. You ONLY buy computers because you need to do computing work.
If you don't need the computing power, sell off 90% of them at a great price (maybe 20% below market value), RIGHT NOW. Holding onto depreciating assets with no return on them is no better than tossing money into a furnace.
Keep a couple of 'em around for growth, spares, and new projects. Sell the rest, and when you need the computing power, buy something 'x' times faster for the same amount of money.
Thank you! /. is now usable for the first time in months!
We don't have rats. Simple solution.
"The statements made by Paul Aiken as quoted are factual."
Well, no they're not. Not exactly.
From the article:
"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
"Audio rights are derivative under copyright law." That is a fact.
"They don't have the right to read a book out loud." That's an interpretation. Whether a Kindle reading out loud is a public performance is the crux of the matter here--and Aiken's opinion notwithstanding, still undecided.
Incidentally, aggregate readings constituting "public performance" also mean that I couldn't read out loud to myself more than once, which wouldn't be passable as law. Regardless, your definition doesn't seem to be borne out by the actual text of the US copyright laws. Also...
Reading something OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC is the rough definition of a performance. A Kindle presumably has a headphone jack, and can also be used in private.
Furthermore, you say that the definition of copy would include a performance. Not true! Read the following:
""Copies" are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."
In other words, reading isn't creating a copy, unless you actually make a copy (by transcribing or recording.)
Ultimately, I could see a fair claim in this situation, but it wouldn't be against Amazon. Instead, it would be against a consumer using the Kindle to create a public performance.
"Do you know where your OS caches files that you've opened?"
That doesn't matter. At least not directly. What matters is to have policies and tools in place to deal with it.
There are tools that will wipe all caches on boot and shutdown. OS partitions can be mounted read-only. These are policies and technologies that, when implemented together, can solve problems.
WHOLE DISK ENCRYPTION IS NOT THE WAY TO GO!!! If you encrypt an entire environment, it will be an annoyance to staff--and like all annoyances, will be worked around. (email attachments? Personal USB keys? You can forbid them, but if it's the only rational way for someone to do their job, they'll ignore the policy.)
The less you do that has a 'customer' impact (and for an IT/Security department, the customer is actually the company's staff), the more effective it will be. Years of security has taught me that the minimum rational policy in any given situation, with exceptions as necessary, will invariably produce the best security.
I'm married, and a parent. My "idealism" is tempered by the part that you apparently didn't read. Let me repeat:
"OK, delay and stall as much as possible while you get your resume shopped around and get a new job lined up."
The OP said "My institution", so it's hard to tell whether it's government or corporate. If the latter, my advice is actually likely to keep paying the bills better than working in a company that's going to go down the tubes in another year. If the former, sooner or later a new director will reorganise 'everything,' and after a fiasco like this, is likely to fire EVERYONE involved.
Honestly, "prepare, cut, and run" is not only sound advice, but downright conservative and safe--ESPECIALLY in a bad economy. The key is in the preparation.
OK, delay and stall as much as possible while you get your resume shopped around and get a new job lined up.
Then quit.
This kind of silliness is (a)stupid, (b)pointless, and (c)doomed. Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong. (And no, I'm not opinionated at all! :-)
Fundamentally, this will fail because it's a blanket policy on dissimilar environments: All hardware is not equal, and all software is not equal. Portable gear should NOT be treated the same as fixed equipment. Sensitive customer data should NOT be treated the same as OS files. Throwing everything together under one usage policy comes from not understanding ANY of computers, data, or security.
Get out. Run while you can!
"So why the hell do I care about how bloated the music industry is or how much musicians get paid?"
Straight answer: Because the music industry is harming musicians more than it's helping them--especially the smaller and less commercial musicians. Because if it weren't for this industry, you would be able to find MORE artists that you like, and existing artists would be able to make a (better?) living from their art--which leads to more and better music.
Yes, there's far too much brilliant music out there than I'll ever listen to. On the other hand, I might want more of one particular artist (shameless plug). I unfortunately know too many musicians who can't afford to release any more albums, because they're essentially making minimum wage from gigs, and owe the record companies thousands or tens of thousands for "promotional costs" of their previous album.
Would the telecom industry run smoothly if the back-line staff all got minimum wage? I rather doubt it.
Incidentally, I'm a little bit passionate about this topic because I have professional musicians in my family, and see many sides of the coin. Fundamentally, it should be simple: Artists and fans (or potential fans) should be able to connect, and the artists should be paid a decent wage. If someone else helps that connection, they deserve to be paid for their help as well. Everything else is noise and distraction.