Don't you hate being right all the time? I get tired of it after a while. Usually it's not being right that gets you in trouble though- it's how you point it out:-/
Phew, thank goodness someone else said it first. Here's links to a couple of articles about the active chromophore in the fish, vs. the active prion that causes BSE/vCJD. Good images in the flourescent protein article.
Repeat after me, everyone: Eating GM food will not cause my genes to be modified.
Who include IT decision makers and IT buyers for the 7 largest health care providers in the US. They have all been making noises about Linux, but nobody wants to be the first to take the plunge- I've been keeping a short mailing list updated with news items, like Israel asking for Thai pricing on MS office. This is the email I sent:
----email below------- You've been wondering when Linux will become mainstream enough for you to use it extensively in your organizations: I think you'll be interested in this recent response by Microsoft. When you have to buy research that says you have a better product, and the research companies need to skew the comparisons so heavily that it's obvious an apples-to-apples comparison would reflect unfavorably on the product you're pushing, the market has already made its choice; and then it's only a matter of time.
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.as p
My restatements of the "facts:"
1. FROM IDC: it's cheaper to hire someone straight out of college who earned an MCSE in an online training course than it is to hire someone with 5 years of real-world Unix/Linux sysadmin experience. Especially if all you consider is the direct compensation those people recieve, and you don't include the costs associated with systems downtime, security breaches, and the ratio of sysadmins to machines, which is typically lower than 1:20 in windows environments and 1:50 or higher in unix/linux environments.
2. FROM META: it's cheaper to buy 5 or 6 $5000-per-box commodity 4U windows servers than it is to buy a $470,000 proprietary RISC 42U mainframe, even if the software that runs on the mainframe costs you nothing extra. Especially when you don't consider the costs associated with downtime, redundancy, security, or the cost of buying new software for your six commodity boxes every 3 years. And never mind comparing the performance of free software on those same six commodity boxes- that's beside the point.
3. FROM GIGA: you can save development money by forcing all of your customers to upgrade so that their systems are compatible with yours. And if your customers don't want to upgrade, they don't really need to buy your stuff anyway.
all of these so-called "market research analyst" jokers should be ashamed to have their names associated with such obvious distortions of reality. I hope we never have to resort to this kind of chicanery to prove our value to our customers.
I have never met a man from Princeton that I didn't immediately want to punch in the mouth. I'm not saying that they don't exist, I'm just saying that I don't think this guy would be an exception.
My favorite Princeton Guy story- he was hired to guide my dotcom to an e-procurement platform. He picked iPlanet, even though it didn't do what we needed it to do. So we hired 40 programmers and started paying Netscape for a $600/hr adviser to help us customize it...
and then, surprise surprise, we ran out of money. what a fucktard.
right. but it's not the voters who decide who win, it's the guy who COUNTS the votes. Electronic voting, in its current form, is designed to hand elections to the highest bidder while concealing that design goal from the general public. It accomplishes this by hiding the vote-counting from public scrutiny.
That's why Diebold is in business- to make money, to obfuscate process, and to give elections to the winner.
The article makes a good point: if my classmates and I can xerox together an entire textbook from Amazon printouts for $15 or $20 rather than each of us paying $160 for a copy of this doorstop, you can bet I'll be the first in line. Paper is cheap.
In 80% of the college classes I've ever had, the prof makes you buy some crappy book he wrote, not because there isn't something better out there, but because he gets royalties on every copy he sells. And $160 I don't spend on textbooks is $160 I can spend on chicks, beer, and pizza... I don't need any more justification than that.
Obviously there are a couple of layers of problem here. One is that JetBlue made a promise to protect privacy, and broke that promise by sending data to a 3rd party. Another is that the TSA appears to *encourage* this kind of abuse, rather than expressing outrage that a carrier would take advantage of their customer relationships in such a manner.
But I looked at the presentation last week when this story broke (sorry it's a PDF...). To me, the biggest problem is that on Page 20, you have a whole group of individuals identified by SSN and DOB. If I were one of those people, I would be pretty upset- not just at JetBlue, but also at the careless spreadsheet jockey who posted this to the web in the first place.
This guy sounds like he's interested in doing something about it.
If all the songs traded over Napster were burnt onto music blanks (which, coincidently are exactly the same as data blanks)
Well, that's not strictly true. There is a class of cdr, which used to be called CDR-DA but I guess they've rebranded them as "Music CDR" that are specially engineered to be compatible with stereo component home CD recorders, like this one from Phillips. I don't know the details of how, whether it's some kind of lead-in or TOC bit that's set, but the Phillips recorder won't record on standard CDR disks.
that's right, if you buy this recorder, and you try to use it to record on a standard blank CDR disk, it won't work.
Don't know why anyone would buy one of these home CDRs, but i used to live with somone who had one, and I bought her a bunch of these CDR-DA disks from Memorex. She made me a couple of copies of some albums she had. Later, after I got all set up with my 120GB RAID and wanted to rip ALL of my CD's so I never need to buy another copy ever again, i learned something else about these disks. Turns out that the DA disks will PLAY in all players, but GRIP/CDParanoia won't let me rip them to MP3 format. The disk is recognized, and it gives me the right track list, and freeCDDB gives me the right artist/track names, but GRIP just... locks up. No dice.
My point is, caveat emptor. Even if they are tagged at the same price, "Music" cd's or anything labeled CDR-DA are intentionally crippled for use with home audio component CD recorders, and while you can use a regular cd burner to record the CD, you might not be able to rip anything from the CD later on.
Your point is well taken- why waste a huge wad of cash on a few trasient moments when you could take that money and use it as a down payment on a house? Weddings can be very expensive now, but I mean a dowry IN ADDITION to the wedding. Think about it- what does a wedding involve? Lots of flowers, girls in dresses, guys in suits, and the family gets to catch up on all the gossip. Who is this party really for?
Just like the ring, it's really for the bride. And her mother. I could give a shit whether there are three or four bridesmaids, or whether we have fish AND chicken and steak, or just the fish and steak choices at the reception. I just don't care which table uncle Leon sits at. If you as a parent choose to blow a wad of cash on your daughter's wedding, don't pretend for one SECOND that the groom derives any value from the event.
This is a party you are throwing for your daughter, which is very nice of you. It is not an acceptible substitute for the dowry I deserve-- as compensation for the service I've done you by taking your daughter off your hands.
I thought it was more like, her parents paid the guy to take her off their hands. If she doesn't get married, she either has to support herself, or her parents have to keep spending their hard-earned cash to feed, clothe, and house her.
So by finding someone to marry her, her parents were really relieving themselves of a significant financial burden- think about feeding two adult people for 25 years, vs. feeding _THREE_ adult people for 25 years.
I know, I know, this is an outdated idea in this modern world where women work outside the home and men stay home and breastfeed their kids--- but I'm not trolling, honest! I just think that it's not fair that I end up paying for a bauble, and doing a HUGE favor for her family unit, and society has decided that they don't owe me anything in return.
What I'd like to see is a return to the days where women came with a dowry. Yes, I'll still buy her a ring that costs $X,000 and her parents will still spend $YZ,000 on a fancy wedding- but they will also give ME a check for $50,000 because they don't have to support her any longer.
Or if not a check, at least some cattle or some other form of livestock.
If the engagement ring is two months' salary, the dowry should be 20% of the value of the parents' net worth.
Funny - I pactch regularly and taught my family to do the same.
I had no problems over the past two weeks.
good for you. now you just need to teach the other 100 million people on earth who use windows to do the same. I would advise that you start with small groups- say a thousand per day.
apparently you haven't been to SF/PRB*/Oakland lately. There are a number of stencils that have been spraypainted on local sidewalks and buildings lately- not so much in the last month or two, but lots and lots of new ones kept popping up before our prezidictator launched his little profit-sharing venture in Iraq.
some of the more memorable ones read:
RESIST PATRIOTISM
and another is If America wants a war, let it be a revolution!
So, there's at least one guy with a can of spraypaint that is ready for some new leadership. and there's another guy with a website. So if by "approximately zero" you mean "nowhere except in california, and they're all nut jobs anyway" you might be right. But I think everone in the Terminator state would welcome a little regieme change on the other coast right now.
No, I can't tell you that, but since I went to CalTech too I poked your homepage to see if you were somone I knew from school, and I looked at your journal at speakeasy.com/~tzs. And I've got an answer to something else: the reason some people back in when they're parking perpendicular is that they have a better turning radius that way. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. e.g. I drive a `90 acura legend, and I can back into perpendicular spaces in one fluid movement that it would take me a 2 or 3 point turn to go into headfirst.
acutally, now that I think about it, it's not so much turning radius, but the space your car has to rotate through while it's making the turn. If you pull in head first, from the lane of traffic next to the parking space, the arc made by the car body overlaps the neighboring space at the midpoint of the turn. If you're backing in, the arc the car turns through is out in the middle of the street, and thus doesn't involve you hitting a parked car and feeling like a dumbass:-)
It doesn't make a lot of difference when you can pull out wide, and then turn in, but if you're in the lane right next to the space, it's easier to back in- especially when there are already cars parked on either side. Try it sometime, you'll see what I mean.
Have you considered that concept that hasn't changed in 600 years and still has at present *one billion members*, may actually be doing something right?
"doing something right" and "detrimental to society" are not mutually exclusive concepts.
In his novel Snow CrashNeal Stephenson addressed the idea that a well-designed religion functions like a virus. The herpesvirus responsible for causing roseola in human infants infects at least 90% of the people on earth, so it's obviously doing something right, from a purely biological population-genetics perspective. That doesn't mean it's good for you to have, or that it's beneficial to society as a whole- or indeed that it's given human well-being any thought at all.
Large, powerful organizations of people reach a point in their lifecycle where the primary goal is to perpetuate their own existance and grow their power base. All previous goals are subsumed by the imperative of self-preservation. Once past this critical point, those organizations are magnets for individuals who want to harness the power of all of those people to drive their personal ambitions, whether or not they are in the best interests of the organization as a whole, or people in general. Christianity as a whole passed that point a long time ago, and there's no going back.
I'm not saying that there aren't good things about Christianity, because there are: charity is good. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is good. Blind obedience and unthinking support are not good.
I'm saying that (1) the potential for abuse is inherent in any organization with a large enough membership, (2) the potential for abuse is greater when the organization encourages its members to believe in dogma and oral tradition, and by extension, the leaders who propagate that oral tradition, over rational thought and the scientific method or the evidence in front of their own eyes, and (3) people who exhibit this willingness to disregard evidence that contradicts their system of beliefs --and can justify their decision because they're at the head of a political faction that believe what they've been told to believe because it's easier than it is to evaluate the evidence on its own merits-- are EXACTLY the sort of people that should be prohibited from holding any sort of elected office.
There is a ritual in most religions where people gather to repeat stories that illustrate the philosophies that the religion claims to teach its members. The theory is that if you repeat something enough times, people start to believe it, whether or not it's true.
To tie this in to the RIAA topic, the RIAA have clearly passed the point where all they care about is their own survival, rather than bringing new and better products to their customers, and they're not making rational decisions about how to move forward. This could be because Rosen was a charismatic leader with her own agenda, or because she was too committed to the oral tradition. Rosen's gospel is "HELP! THE PIRATES ARE STEALING SONGS! LARS IS STARVING! THE INTERNET IS FULL OF THEIVES! KAZAA IS EVIL!" and some people believe it... but they're probably the same people that believe that dinosaur fossils were put there by God to mess with our heads when we found them. The rest of us are tired of hearing it, and hope that people making decisions about this issue that will affect our lives will take the time to think about it for themselves instead of just reciting from the scripture the RIAA has been making up for the last 4 years.
Would you suggest banning the catholic faith because some of their clergy abused children?
No, I would suggest banning the catholic faith because it encourages groupthink, and provides a system for brainwashing millions of people with a set of social values that haven't changed in any substantitive way for the last 600 years.
well, maybe not ban the faith itself, but ban its believers from holding elected office, because they fail the test of rational thought.
3. Local exchanges. Even more extreme than a private network, people might make direct device-to-device copies. Go over to a friend's house and download their entire music collection to your laptop.
News flash- people are already doing this. It beats all the hassle of searching for a file and then ensuring its quality, and then filing it in the right place with the rest of the songs by that artist/album/mp3_bitrate_trackname. If you have a fried with a computer (I bet you do!) and you have $200 to spend on an external drive, you're in business. Hell, even USB beats DSL speeds.
And there is really something to be said for consistent quality and naming conventions. You buy a couple of big drives, you set up a raid, you rip everything you have at 160 or 192, and you suggest that 2 of your close friends should do the same... you never ever ever have to buy any of those albums ever again. And neither do your friends. Why be anonymous? if you have a circle of 4 or 5 people to trade stuff with, that probably represents more music than you could listen to in 5 years.
If I'm passing hard disks around with my friends, it makes it easy for us to just assimilate each other's entire music collection in an afternoon, rather than the 8-10 hours of DL time you would need to get, eg, the new Gang Starr album. The hardest part is scheduling regular updates when someone gets something new. My music collection has grown by 80 gigs in the past 12 months, and I haven't bought a single CD during that time- AND I haven't downloaded a single music file over the open internet since Napster went under.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you hate being right all the time? I get tired of it after a while. Usually it's not being right that gets you in trouble though- it's how you point it out :-/
That's HI-larious. I like option 4. But then I'm in a blow-up-Utah kind of mood lately.
Who would this "New Linux Thought Leader" be? I nominate CowboyNeal.
Phew, thank goodness someone else said it first. Here's links to a couple of articles about the active chromophore in the fish, vs. the active prion that causes BSE/vCJD. Good images in the flourescent protein article.
Repeat after me, everyone: Eating GM food will not cause my genes to be modified.
And if you were in a business where contracts mattered, you would send dead trees...
Who include IT decision makers and IT buyers for the 7 largest health care providers in the US. They have all been making noises about Linux, but nobody wants to be the first to take the plunge- I've been keeping a short mailing list updated with news items, like Israel asking for Thai pricing on MS office. This is the email I sent:
s p
----email below-------
You've been wondering when Linux will become mainstream enough for you to use it extensively in your organizations: I think you'll be interested in this recent response by Microsoft. When you have to buy research that says you have a better product, and the research companies need to skew the comparisons so heavily that it's obvious an apples-to-apples comparison would reflect unfavorably on the product you're pushing, the market has already made its choice; and then it's only a matter of time.
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.a
My restatements of the "facts:"
1. FROM IDC: it's cheaper to hire someone straight out of college who earned an MCSE in an online training course than it is to hire someone with 5 years of real-world Unix/Linux sysadmin experience. Especially if all you consider is the direct compensation those people recieve, and you don't include the costs associated with systems downtime, security breaches, and the ratio of sysadmins to machines, which is typically lower than 1:20 in windows environments and 1:50 or higher in unix/linux environments.
2. FROM META: it's cheaper to buy 5 or 6 $5000-per-box commodity 4U windows servers than it is to buy a $470,000 proprietary RISC 42U mainframe, even if the software that runs on the mainframe costs you nothing extra. Especially when you don't consider the costs associated with downtime, redundancy, security, or the cost of buying new software for your six commodity boxes every 3 years. And never mind comparing the performance of free software on those same six commodity boxes- that's beside the point.
3. FROM GIGA: you can save development money by forcing all of your customers to upgrade so that their systems are compatible with yours. And if your customers don't want to upgrade, they don't really need to buy your stuff anyway.
all of these so-called "market research analyst" jokers should be ashamed to have their names associated with such obvious distortions of reality. I hope we never have to resort to this kind of chicanery to prove our value to our customers.
Kids? Games are for ME! The kids can play f*cking scrabble or something.
I have never met a man from Princeton that I didn't immediately want to punch in the mouth. I'm not saying that they don't exist, I'm just saying that I don't think this guy would be an exception.
My favorite Princeton Guy story- he was hired to guide my dotcom to an e-procurement platform. He picked iPlanet, even though it didn't do what we needed it to do. So we hired 40 programmers and started paying Netscape for a $600/hr adviser to help us customize it...
and then, surprise surprise, we ran out of money. what a fucktard.
It's just, y'know, counting
right. but it's not the voters who decide who win, it's the guy who COUNTS the votes. Electronic voting, in its current form, is designed to hand elections to the highest bidder while concealing that design goal from the general public. It accomplishes this by hiding the vote-counting from public scrutiny.
That's why Diebold is in business- to make money, to obfuscate process, and to give elections to the winner.
Where have you been for the last 3 years? The US _is_ a dictatorship, and we're definitely on the right side of center. For another year at least...
The article makes a good point: if my classmates and I can xerox together an entire textbook from Amazon printouts for $15 or $20 rather than each of us paying $160 for a copy of this doorstop, you can bet I'll be the first in line. Paper is cheap.
In 80% of the college classes I've ever had, the prof makes you buy some crappy book he wrote, not because there isn't something better out there, but because he gets royalties on every copy he sells. And $160 I don't spend on textbooks is $160 I can spend on chicks, beer, and pizza... I don't need any more justification than that.
Obviously there are a couple of layers of problem here. One is that JetBlue made a promise to protect privacy, and broke that promise by sending data to a 3rd party. Another is that the TSA appears to *encourage* this kind of abuse, rather than expressing outrage that a carrier would take advantage of their customer relationships in such a manner.
But I looked at the presentation last week when this story broke (sorry it's a PDF...). To me, the biggest problem is that on Page 20, you have a whole group of individuals identified by SSN and DOB. If I were one of those people, I would be pretty upset- not just at JetBlue, but also at the careless spreadsheet jockey who posted this to the web in the first place.
This guy sounds like he's interested in doing something about it.
what refund check? I haven't seen shit. Oh, please send that bill for $87 billion straight to Dick Cheney's house.
Well, that's not strictly true. There is a class of cdr, which used to be called CDR-DA but I guess they've rebranded them as "Music CDR" that are specially engineered to be compatible with stereo component home CD recorders, like this one from Phillips. I don't know the details of how, whether it's some kind of lead-in or TOC bit that's set, but the Phillips recorder won't record on standard CDR disks.
that's right, if you buy this recorder, and you try to use it to record on a standard blank CDR disk, it won't work.
Don't know why anyone would buy one of these home CDRs, but i used to live with somone who had one, and I bought her a bunch of these CDR-DA disks from Memorex. She made me a couple of copies of some albums she had. Later, after I got all set up with my 120GB RAID and wanted to rip ALL of my CD's so I never need to buy another copy ever again, i learned something else about these disks. Turns out that the DA disks will PLAY in all players, but GRIP/CDParanoia won't let me rip them to MP3 format. The disk is recognized, and it gives me the right track list, and freeCDDB gives me the right artist/track names, but GRIP just... locks up. No dice.
My point is, caveat emptor. Even if they are tagged at the same price, "Music" cd's or anything labeled CDR-DA are intentionally crippled for use with home audio component CD recorders, and while you can use a regular cd burner to record the CD, you might not be able to rip anything from the CD later on.
I use procmail and SA to filter my mail. One of my procmail.rc recipes opens a pipe to the SA on my hosting company's server, and SA does its thing.
Do I need to change my spamassassin.rc file? Do I need to ask my mailserver admin to make changes?
Your point is well taken- why waste a huge wad of cash on a few trasient moments when you could take that money and use it as a down payment on a house? Weddings can be very expensive now, but I mean a dowry IN ADDITION to the wedding. Think about it- what does a wedding involve? Lots of flowers, girls in dresses, guys in suits, and the family gets to catch up on all the gossip. Who is this party really for?
Just like the ring, it's really for the bride. And her mother. I could give a shit whether there are three or four bridesmaids, or whether we have fish AND chicken and steak, or just the fish and steak choices at the reception. I just don't care which table uncle Leon sits at. If you as a parent choose to blow a wad of cash on your daughter's wedding, don't pretend for one SECOND that the groom derives any value from the event.
This is a party you are throwing for your daughter, which is very nice of you. It is not an acceptible substitute for the dowry I deserve-- as compensation for the service I've done you by taking your daughter off your hands.
I thought it was more like, her parents paid the guy to take her off their hands. If she doesn't get married, she either has to support herself, or her parents have to keep spending their hard-earned cash to feed, clothe, and house her.
So by finding someone to marry her, her parents were really relieving themselves of a significant financial burden- think about feeding two adult people for 25 years, vs. feeding _THREE_ adult people for 25 years.
I know, I know, this is an outdated idea in this modern world where women work outside the home and men stay home and breastfeed their kids--- but I'm not trolling, honest! I just think that it's not fair that I end up paying for a bauble, and doing a HUGE favor for her family unit, and society has decided that they don't owe me anything in return.
What I'd like to see is a return to the days where women came with a dowry. Yes, I'll still buy her a ring that costs $X,000 and her parents will still spend $YZ,000 on a fancy wedding- but they will also give ME a check for $50,000 because they don't have to support her any longer.
Or if not a check, at least some cattle or some other form of livestock.
If the engagement ring is two months' salary, the dowry should be 20% of the value of the parents' net worth.
Funny - I pactch regularly and taught my family to do the same.
I had no problems over the past two weeks.
good for you. now you just need to teach the other 100 million people on earth who use windows to do the same. I would advise that you start with small groups- say a thousand per day.
why not offer them a choice?
I'll help you move to linux for free, or I'll charge you $50 to fix your system this time.
tell them the charge will double each time they need help, for either system.
I wish you had posted logged in, so I could list you as a friend. a crazy, crazy, crazy friend.
apparently you haven't been to SF/PRB*/Oakland lately. There are a number of stencils that have been spraypainted on local sidewalks and buildings lately- not so much in the last month or two, but lots and lots of new ones kept popping up before our prezidictator launched his little profit-sharing venture in Iraq.
some of the more memorable ones read:
RESIST PATRIOTISM
and another is
If America wants a war, let it be a revolution!
So, there's at least one guy with a can of spraypaint that is ready for some new leadership. and there's another guy with a website. So if by "approximately zero" you mean "nowhere except in california, and they're all nut jobs anyway" you might be right. But I think everone in the Terminator state would welcome a little regieme change on the other coast right now.
*oh, PRB == People's Republic of Berkeley
No, I can't tell you that, but since I went to CalTech too I poked your homepage to see if you were somone I knew from school, and I looked at your journal at speakeasy.com/~tzs. And I've got an answer to something else: the reason some people back in when they're parking perpendicular is that they have a better turning radius that way. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. e.g. I drive a `90 acura legend, and I can back into perpendicular spaces in one fluid movement that it would take me a 2 or 3 point turn to go into headfirst.
:-)
acutally, now that I think about it, it's not so much turning radius, but the space your car has to rotate through while it's making the turn. If you pull in head first, from the lane of traffic next to the parking space, the arc made by the car body overlaps the neighboring space at the midpoint of the turn. If you're backing in, the arc the car turns through is out in the middle of the street, and thus doesn't involve you hitting a parked car and feeling like a dumbass
It doesn't make a lot of difference when you can pull out wide, and then turn in, but if you're in the lane right next to the space, it's easier to back in- especially when there are already cars parked on either side. Try it sometime, you'll see what I mean.
"doing something right" and "detrimental to society" are not mutually exclusive concepts.
In his novel Snow CrashNeal Stephenson addressed the idea that a well-designed religion functions like a virus. The herpesvirus responsible for causing roseola in human infants infects at least 90% of the people on earth, so it's obviously doing something right, from a purely biological population-genetics perspective. That doesn't mean it's good for you to have, or that it's beneficial to society as a whole- or indeed that it's given human well-being any thought at all.
Large, powerful organizations of people reach a point in their lifecycle where the primary goal is to perpetuate their own existance and grow their power base. All previous goals are subsumed by the imperative of self-preservation. Once past this critical point, those organizations are magnets for individuals who want to harness the power of all of those people to drive their personal ambitions, whether or not they are in the best interests of the organization as a whole, or people in general. Christianity as a whole passed that point a long time ago, and there's no going back.
I'm not saying that there aren't good things about Christianity, because there are: charity is good. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is good. Blind obedience and unthinking support are not good.
I'm saying that (1) the potential for abuse is inherent in any organization with a large enough membership, (2) the potential for abuse is greater when the organization encourages its members to believe in dogma and oral tradition, and by extension, the leaders who propagate that oral tradition, over rational thought and the scientific method or the evidence in front of their own eyes, and (3) people who exhibit this willingness to disregard evidence that contradicts their system of beliefs --and can justify their decision because they're at the head of a political faction that believe what they've been told to believe because it's easier than it is to evaluate the evidence on its own merits-- are EXACTLY the sort of people that should be prohibited from holding any sort of elected office.
There is a ritual in most religions where people gather to repeat stories that illustrate the philosophies that the religion claims to teach its members. The theory is that if you repeat something enough times, people start to believe it, whether or not it's true.
To tie this in to the RIAA topic, the RIAA have clearly passed the point where all they care about is their own survival, rather than bringing new and better products to their customers, and they're not making rational decisions about how to move forward. This could be because Rosen was a charismatic leader with her own agenda, or because she was too committed to the oral tradition. Rosen's gospel is "HELP! THE PIRATES ARE STEALING SONGS! LARS IS STARVING! THE INTERNET IS FULL OF THEIVES! KAZAA IS EVIL!" and some people believe it... but they're probably the same people that believe that dinosaur fossils were put there by God to mess with our heads when we found them. The rest of us are tired of hearing it, and hope that people making decisions about this issue that will affect our lives will take the time to think about it for themselves instead of just reciting from the scripture the RIAA has been making up for the last 4 years.
No, I would suggest banning the catholic faith because it encourages groupthink, and provides a system for brainwashing millions of people with a set of social values that haven't changed in any substantitive way for the last 600 years.
well, maybe not ban the faith itself, but ban its believers from holding elected office, because they fail the test of rational thought.
News flash- people are already doing this. It beats all the hassle of searching for a file and then ensuring its quality, and then filing it in the right place with the rest of the songs by that artist/album/mp3_bitrate_trackname. If you have a fried with a computer (I bet you do!) and you have $200 to spend on an external drive, you're in business. Hell, even USB beats DSL speeds.
And there is really something to be said for consistent quality and naming conventions. You buy a couple of big drives, you set up a raid, you rip everything you have at 160 or 192, and you suggest that 2 of your close friends should do the same... you never ever ever have to buy any of those albums ever again. And neither do your friends. Why be anonymous? if you have a circle of 4 or 5 people to trade stuff with, that probably represents more music than you could listen to in 5 years.
If I'm passing hard disks around with my friends, it makes it easy for us to just assimilate each other's entire music collection in an afternoon, rather than the 8-10 hours of DL time you would need to get, eg, the new Gang Starr album. The hardest part is scheduling regular updates when someone gets something new. My music collection has grown by 80 gigs in the past 12 months, and I haven't bought a single CD during that time- AND I haven't downloaded a single music file over the open internet since Napster went under.