To avoid making a complete idiot of themselves when voting on fuel economy legislation, all congress members need to know is "Cars burn gas which creates pollution. Burning less gas creates less pollution."
They might not be able to make a nuanced decision with that little information, but they wouldn't vote to require all cars to be painted blue in order to reduce pollution.
SOPA is a stunningly bad piece of legislation and the problems aren't subtle or nuanced. Congress has lobbyists from Google and a lot of other heavyweight companies telling them it's a bad idea. There is absolutely no way they are clueless about the problems with the legislation, but certain congress members are trying to push it through none the less.
You're trusting that UMG is telling the truth despite the fact that there have been tons of false takedown notices issued by the music companies prior to this.
It's entirely possibly that UMG is intentionally misinterpreting whatever contractual agreement is in place with Google. It's almost as likely that they're telling bare-faced lies.
While members of congress may not know the technical details of how a combustion engine works, they have a general idea of how it works.
This is the equivalent of adding in a provision to the fuel economy laws that allows any company that produces gasoline to arbitrarily shut down any gas station they say is selling their company's gas without permission without any proof and no consequences for being wrong. Give that power to any gas company and you'll quickly see every competing station in town shut down and the costs at the one brand that's left skyrocket.
It doesn't take an expert to understand that giving someone arbitrary judicial powers with no consequences for the abuse of those powers is a horrible idea. Even the dumbest congressman understands it, but they don't give a fuck because the consumers don't donate as much money as the corporations that stand to benefit from the bill.
Jury nullification doesn't refer to the jury being nullified for doing something wrong like tweeting during a trial. It refers to the jury's right to make a decision that goes against written law if they feel that the application of that law to the defendant would be an injustice.
Re:Only part of the population can think abstractl
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 1
> Only part of the population can think abstractly.
You do realize that language is an abstraction, right? The word "horse" doesn't actually resemble a horse in any way, shape or form yet virtually everyone who speaks English understands what it is. The sounds of the word "horse" don't resemble any sound a horse would make, either, yet even an illiterate who can't read the word will know what the word means. Abstract thinking and symbology are inherent to our nature as human beings.
The problem is not, and never has been, that people can't think abstractly. Anyone without severe mental retardation can think in abstract terms because abstraction is the basis of human intelligence.
The problem is that a lot of people don't like learning anything and refuse to once they get out of school where they were forced to learn. A computer interface that is similar to what they were already forced to learn doesn't require learning anything new, so they prefer it, but that doesn't make it better anymore than the fact that kids prefer candy to vegetables makes candy the better food.
There is a lot of room for advancement in user interfaces, but advances don't come from dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, advancement isn't what companies are interested in. They're interested in sales and the lowest common denominator is likely to be the most profitable approach.
But consider this... the lowest common denominator approach is also what's given us Ke$ha, Jersey Shore and the Twilight series. Do we really want computer operating systems to take follow the same downward spiral?
Of course we should believe that ALM would have serviced even the remoteest locations. Telephone companies weren't required to provide service to every rinky dink little town and lthey hooked everyone up.
You should also ignore anything you might read about Universal Service Obligations, the Communications Act of 1934 and its later revisions. That stuff will just interfere with your suspension of disbelief and it's not like it took seventy-one years to get every town in the USA connected to the hone system once the act was passed, right?
I don't doubt your experience, but it is dependent upon both the quality of the delivery drivers and the manager who decides whether to fire them for their behavior or not.
My experience with FedEx before my most recent move was mediocre. No huge problems, but nothing to brag about. I moved to a smaller town, however, and my experience with FedEx now is freakin' awesome.
If I'm not home and it's raining or looks like it might rain, the guy who delivers to my neighborhood will take the package around to the back of my house, put it in my shed and leave a note on my door telling me it's there.
This is well beyond the service FedEx officially offers and I can't begin to explain how much I appreciate it, but I know that it's not the result of a corporate-wide level of attention to customer's needs. The driver and the manager who hired him and encourages this behavior are the source of my good fortune.
As an example; to model a nice, real looking explosion in CG takes a phenomenal amount of effort with physics simulation of the debris, optical simulation of light filtering through the smoke, etc. With miniature effects, you put some dirt on a squib and use a higher frame rate. In-camera effects work a hell of a lot better than CG in almost all cases, because instead of having to simulate every physical process going on you can just use the actual physical processes going on.
That only works with people who have never seen a large scale explosion. Anyone who has seen a large scale explosion will notice the lack of variety in composition and size of the debris, the missing shock wave effects, the lack of wind effects and a hundred other things that differentiate a large scale explosion from a small scale explosion played back slowly (not to mention Hollywood and the movie going public's love of unrealistically large gasoline fireball explosions which heroes can outrun).
"Wii Sports (released in 2006) 47 million copies sold At the beginning of 2009, Wii Sports passed the original Super Mario Bros. as the best-selling game of all time"
In two years, the number will have gone up, but 47 million is still a very tiny fraction of 7 billion and that's for the game that's sold more than any other game in history. Comparing a game's sales to the world population is obviously not an accurate way to gauge is successfulness. Comparing a game's sales to the best selling game of all time would be a much better gauge of how well the game did in the gaming market.
2% isn't a huge chunk, but as game sales go, it's quite good and it's far more than the 0.1% that you suggest. Many games sell only a few hundred copies or less. 90% of them never make a profit. The Humble Bundles have done far better than that (although not all of that money went to the developers... some goes to charities and some goes to the people running Humble Bundle).
You're obviously a Slashdot reader and the Humble Bundles been discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and... well there are over 700 hits on this search so I'm not going to link them all. You must either have started reading Slashdot yesterday, have absolutely no long term memory or you automatically scroll past gaming news without reading it. The Humble bundles are far from unknown, even if you have somehow avoided or forgotten about hearing about them.
Also, there's no reason this couldn't exist in a walled garden. There's tons of indie developers selling stuff for iOS. That store doesn't support pay what you want, but there's no reason they couldn't sell it for 99 cents, (or free) and ask for donations on their web site for people who wanted to pay more.
Not really relevant to my comment, as I never said it couldn't exist in a walled garden, but I'll respond.
There are reasons why this [the Humble Bundle sales model] can't exist in today's walled gardens.
The current app markets get a percentage of the sale price (and in-game sales too, in fact). Apps are not allowed to bypass this and any that try will be pulled from the market when they're caught. Apps cannot be sold for.99 cents and direct customers to the developers web site for donations. That's a sure-fire way to get your app taken off the market and eliminate your sales.
In addition, there is no way to sell bundles, no way to split profits between multiple developers and charities, no way to allow people to pay what they want, no way to bundle soundtracks and source code as bonuses, no way to provide gifting options, no way to provide app availability across mutliple platforms.. I could go on. Everything that makes buying a Humble Bundle different from just buying a game in the app store would have to be eliminated to fit it into an app store.
>Here's me in the very first response to your first post. > >We used to have "networked hard disks" or "file servers". Then we started having cloud servers which did the same but you lost the personal control. Now the marketing people started selling a "personal cloud" which is in fact exactly what you were selling originally
We still have file servers and network servers. Cloud servers did not take away our personal control over network servers and file servers, they simply gave people an option to let someone else manage the server. An option which, I might add, has been around since before network servers and file servers were inexpensive enough for an individual to own. Nothing has been lost, nothing has been gained. We've simply got a catchy name for something that has existed for decades.
You you keep demonstrating that you don't understand this when even a low grade moron could get it. Maybe I should use smaller words or something?
> Well; that depends what you mean by local storage. It's actually Gigabit Ethernet attached; it may or may not be local. So it's quite probable that you didn't even read the product description of the system you are talking about at the moment that you are accusing someone else of not having read it.
This is stupider than anything else you've said. You're honestly suggesting that someone is going to buy this dinky little Western Digital drive and ship it off to someone else so that it's no longer their own storage, local to their own network? There is no datacenter on the planet that would even begin to consider doing that sort of thing.
> To be frank, I'm all up for a flamefest, but you aren't even funny. Could you at least try a bit harder.
Can't defend your idiotic position? Attack the other person's writing style! Nobody will notice that it's a pathetic attempt to distract from the fact that you're a MORON
And moron is an old term for mentally retarded, which is the only explanation I can come up with for your lack of ability to understand what I've said. Happy now? You should be. Retards are always happy.
Wow. You didn't even look at the link you're talking about, did you. Western Digital's personal cloud storage is,a local hard drive.
Go on. Look. Tell me how that is not a hard drive when the photo is of a drive, the advertising copy speaks of the drive, the contents line says "network drive" and includes a comparison to other local hard drives.and even mistakenly includes the drive's previous name, "My Book Live home network drive" (this is, after all, a rebranded product meant to take advantage of the obsession with "cloud storage."
And that is the link you responded to with "Awesome. It's like tethering.", which it absolutely is not, so it bloody well is what is under discussion and you' are proving that I was right. You are an absolute moron.
That's even stupider than my interpretation of what you said.
The cloud didn't disable your ability to store things locally. What kind of idiot thinks it did? The cloud is nothing more than a new name for paying for storage on someone else's servers, a concept that's been around since the days of the mainfraims, long before the internet was invented.
The old phone tethering you speak of was disabled on newer phones and you had to pay an extra charge for it.
Remote access to a hard drive is not disabled in any way. Nothing prevents you from manually setting up remote access to a drive and they still sell the drives without the package for a reduced price. Western Digital's offering simply includes, for an extra price, a software package that supposedly makes it easier to set up the remote access.
Stop squashing my hopes and dreams, dammit. The government and the 1% do a good enough job of that without you helping them:p
Re:Without Napster we'd still be buying all CD's
on
Napster Being Shut Down
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> Suppose in the (not too distant) future, next to no one ops to buy entire CDs vs. a single track. Won't all artists then be one or two hit wonders?
It depends on how talented the artist is and how devoted the artist's fans are. There are people who will only buy singles that they hear and like, but many people prefer to buy albums (especially if they've heard several songs they like one one album). A few will fall in love with the music and buy absolutely everything the artist produces.
Look at Lady Gaga's sales for The Fame Monster. 5.8 million albums in 2010. The songs were available as an MP3 single for $0.99 the same time the album became available at the end of 2009. Half the songs were on The Fame which released in 2008. People still bought millions of copies of the album.
For a (much) smaller artist, look at The Dollyrots. It's probable that you've never heard of them, though they've gotten enough exposure that it's not impossible. They are definitely not a superstar band.
They did a kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a new album. Of the 540 people that pledged money up front, only 39 pledged the minimum required to get a download of the album or less and 110 more pledged the minimum to get a physical CD. 291 (over 50%) of the people pledged more than the minimum necessary to get the album in the form they wanted it in.
The rewards varied, but as you get up into the hundreds of dollars, you can be certain that you're looking at the hardcore fans who will buy anything this group produces. 15 people pledged $300 each to get the band to write songs for them (which, since there are so many, are going to be made into a 2nd album that everyone who pledged gets a copy of). Two people pledged $1000 each to spend a day in the studio with the band where they get to watch, sing gang vocals and join in on hand claps. One idiot pledged $500 to get the album and a bunny suit (disclaimer: yes, I'm the idiot). These are fans who will not only buy anything the band produces, but will act as patrons to help fund the band's production of new material.
So... yes, there may be fewer people who buy albums, but there will always be people who buy albums even if individual songs are available. There will also always be fans who will buy everything produced by their favorite artists and dedicated fans with money who will help their favorite bands far more than a CD sale ever could.
The flip side of this is the artist's viewpoint and the realities of how music is produced. It's more cheaper and faster to have a dozen songs you want to record when you go in the studio than to do a dozen sessions for one song each. If you record it all in one go, for example, you only set up all the equipment once, as opposed to setting it up a dozen times. You're also in the groove as you move from one song to the next. You don't have to spend a lot of time warming up and getting ready to record. The same thing applies to what the sound engineers engineers do as well. They need setup time and time with the band to discuss what the band wants. Mastering a dozen songs in one session is far faster than a dozen sessions with one song mastered in each and sound engineers charge by the hour.
tl;dr - Albums will continue to exist because there are plenty of fans who will buy albums and it's cheaper to record music an album at a time. And you should totally buy Dollyrots albums or might find a guy in a bunny suit peeing on your lawn.
Would you kindly step up the enforcement, then? We all know that the US government isn't going to listen to it's citizens, but it's just as obvious that they listen to corporations. Maybe if Amazon, Google and a few other major cloud storage providers take a huge hit, they'll tell the government to fix the situation.
How is remotely accessing a hard drive on your home computer in any way, shape or form like tethering? Did you not look at the product that was linked or do you have no clue what tethering is?
And what do think think has been taken away? It's an external hard drive that has all the functionality of an external hard drive. It includes some software to make it easier to set it up for remote access from other PCs, your phone, etc., but that adds functionality, it doesn't decrease it. What do you think is missing?
I agree that it shouldn't be released to any and all, but you've got it a bit wrong. This was developed in the Netherlands, not the US. The US government is one of the ones that most of us don't trust with this sort of thing.
Clearly you have complete faith in your immune system. We should have you exposed to this genetically altered, fantastically deadly virus so that you can demonstrate to the world how insignificant it is.
Slashdot Mirror
To avoid making a complete idiot of themselves when voting on fuel economy legislation, all congress members need to know is "Cars burn gas which creates pollution. Burning less gas creates less pollution."
They might not be able to make a nuanced decision with that little information, but they wouldn't vote to require all cars to be painted blue in order to reduce pollution.
SOPA is a stunningly bad piece of legislation and the problems aren't subtle or nuanced. Congress has lobbyists from Google and a lot of other heavyweight companies telling them it's a bad idea. There is absolutely no way they are clueless about the problems with the legislation, but certain congress members are trying to push it through none the less.
> Someone will have to pry my Jarts out of my cold dead brain.
FTFY
You're trusting that UMG is telling the truth despite the fact that there have been tons of false takedown notices issued by the music companies prior to this.
It's entirely possibly that UMG is intentionally misinterpreting whatever contractual agreement is in place with Google. It's almost as likely that they're telling bare-faced lies.
While members of congress may not know the technical details of how a combustion engine works, they have a general idea of how it works.
This is the equivalent of adding in a provision to the fuel economy laws that allows any company that produces gasoline to arbitrarily shut down any gas station they say is selling their company's gas without permission without any proof and no consequences for being wrong. Give that power to any gas company and you'll quickly see every competing station in town shut down and the costs at the one brand that's left skyrocket.
It doesn't take an expert to understand that giving someone arbitrary judicial powers with no consequences for the abuse of those powers is a horrible idea. Even the dumbest congressman understands it, but they don't give a fuck because the consumers don't donate as much money as the corporations that stand to benefit from the bill.
I don't think you understand what the term jury nullification means.
Jury nullification doesn't refer to the jury being nullified for doing something wrong like tweeting during a trial. It refers to the jury's right to make a decision that goes against written law if they feel that the application of that law to the defendant would be an injustice.
> Only part of the population can think abstractly.
You do realize that language is an abstraction, right? The word "horse" doesn't actually resemble a horse in any way, shape or form yet virtually everyone who speaks English understands what it is. The sounds of the word "horse" don't resemble any sound a horse would make, either, yet even an illiterate who can't read the word will know what the word means. Abstract thinking and symbology are inherent to our nature as human beings.
The problem is not, and never has been, that people can't think abstractly. Anyone without severe mental retardation can think in abstract terms because abstraction is the basis of human intelligence.
The problem is that a lot of people don't like learning anything and refuse to once they get out of school where they were forced to learn. A computer interface that is similar to what they were already forced to learn doesn't require learning anything new, so they prefer it, but that doesn't make it better anymore than the fact that kids prefer candy to vegetables makes candy the better food.
There is a lot of room for advancement in user interfaces, but advances don't come from dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, advancement isn't what companies are interested in. They're interested in sales and the lowest common denominator is likely to be the most profitable approach.
But consider this... the lowest common denominator approach is also what's given us Ke$ha, Jersey Shore and the Twilight series. Do we really want computer operating systems to take follow the same downward spiral?
Of course we should believe that ALM would have serviced even the remoteest locations. Telephone companies weren't required to provide service to every rinky dink little town and lthey hooked everyone up.
You should also ignore anything you might read about Universal Service Obligations, the Communications Act of 1934 and its later revisions. That stuff will just interfere with your suspension of disbelief and it's not like it took seventy-one years to get every town in the USA connected to the hone system once the act was passed, right?
I don't doubt your experience, but it is dependent upon both the quality of the delivery drivers and the manager who decides whether to fire them for their behavior or not.
My experience with FedEx before my most recent move was mediocre. No huge problems, but nothing to brag about. I moved to a smaller town, however, and my experience with FedEx now is freakin' awesome.
If I'm not home and it's raining or looks like it might rain, the guy who delivers to my neighborhood will take the package around to the back of my house, put it in my shed and leave a note on my door telling me it's there.
This is well beyond the service FedEx officially offers and I can't begin to explain how much I appreciate it, but I know that it's not the result of a corporate-wide level of attention to customer's needs. The driver and the manager who hired him and encourages this behavior are the source of my good fortune.
As an example; to model a nice, real looking explosion in CG takes a phenomenal amount of effort with physics simulation of the debris, optical simulation of light filtering through the smoke, etc. With miniature effects, you put some dirt on a squib and use a higher frame rate. In-camera effects work a hell of a lot better than CG in almost all cases, because instead of having to simulate every physical process going on you can just use the actual physical processes going on.
That only works with people who have never seen a large scale explosion. Anyone who has seen a large scale explosion will notice the lack of variety in composition and size of the debris, the missing shock wave effects, the lack of wind effects and a hundred other things that differentiate a large scale explosion from a small scale explosion played back slowly (not to mention Hollywood and the movie going public's love of unrealistically large gasoline fireball explosions which heroes can outrun).
Well, maybe this.
The payroll servers need time to dream of electric sheep.
http://www.iadt.edu/Student-Life/IADT-Buzz/January-2011/Ten-Best-Selling-Video-Games-Of-All-Time
"Wii Sports (released in 2006) 47 million copies sold
At the beginning of 2009, Wii Sports passed the original Super Mario Bros. as the best-selling game of all time"
In two years, the number will have gone up, but 47 million is still a very tiny fraction of 7 billion and that's for the game that's sold more than any other game in history. Comparing a game's sales to the world population is obviously not an accurate way to gauge is successfulness. Comparing a game's sales to the best selling game of all time would be a much better gauge of how well the game did in the gaming market.
2% isn't a huge chunk, but as game sales go, it's quite good and it's far more than the 0.1% that you suggest. Many games sell only a few hundred copies or less. 90% of them never make a profit. The Humble Bundles have done far better than that (although not all of that money went to the developers... some goes to charities and some goes to the people running Humble Bundle).
You're obviously a Slashdot reader and the Humble Bundles been discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and ... well there are over 700 hits on this search so I'm not going to link them all. You must either have started reading Slashdot yesterday, have absolutely no long term memory or you automatically scroll past gaming news without reading it. The Humble bundles are far from unknown, even if you have somehow avoided or forgotten about hearing about them.
Also, there's no reason this couldn't exist in a walled garden. There's tons of indie developers selling stuff for iOS. That store doesn't support pay what you want, but there's no reason they couldn't sell it for 99 cents, (or free) and ask for donations on their web site for people who wanted to pay more.
Not really relevant to my comment, as I never said it couldn't exist in a walled garden, but I'll respond.
There are reasons why this [the Humble Bundle sales model] can't exist in today's walled gardens.
The current app markets get a percentage of the sale price (and in-game sales too, in fact). Apps are not allowed to bypass this and any that try will be pulled from the market when they're caught. Apps cannot be sold for .99 cents and direct customers to the developers web site for donations. That's a sure-fire way to get your app taken off the market and eliminate your sales.
In addition, there is no way to sell bundles, no way to split profits between multiple developers and charities, no way to allow people to pay what they want, no way to bundle soundtracks and source code as bonuses, no way to provide gifting options, no way to provide app availability across mutliple platforms.. I could go on. Everything that makes buying a Humble Bundle different from just buying a game in the app store would have to be eliminated to fit it into an app store.
Your definition of a tiny niche audience is interesting. The first four humble bundles had combined sales of over $5 million to over a million people.
That's not "a few slashdot nerds".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Indie_Bundle
>Here's me in the very first response to your first post.
>
>We used to have "networked hard disks" or "file servers". Then we started having cloud servers which did the same but you lost the personal control. Now the marketing people started selling a "personal cloud" which is in fact exactly what you were selling originally
We still have file servers and network servers. Cloud servers did not take away our personal control over network servers and file servers, they simply gave people an option to let someone else manage the server. An option which, I might add, has been around since before network servers and file servers were inexpensive enough for an individual to own. Nothing has been lost, nothing has been gained. We've simply got a catchy name for something that has existed for decades.
You you keep demonstrating that you don't understand this when even a low grade moron could get it. Maybe I should use smaller words or something?
> Well; that depends what you mean by local storage. It's actually Gigabit Ethernet attached; it may or may not be local. So it's quite probable that you didn't even read the product description of the system you are talking about at the moment that you are accusing someone else of not having read it.
This is stupider than anything else you've said. You're honestly suggesting that someone is going to buy this dinky little Western Digital drive and ship it off to someone else so that it's no longer their own storage, local to their own network? There is no datacenter on the planet that would even begin to consider doing that sort of thing.
> To be frank, I'm all up for a flamefest, but you aren't even funny. Could you at least try a bit harder.
Can't defend your idiotic position? Attack the other person's writing style! Nobody will notice that it's a pathetic attempt to distract from the fact that you're a MORON
And moron is an old term for mentally retarded, which is the only explanation I can come up with for your lack of ability to understand what I've said. Happy now? You should be. Retards are always happy.
Oh, and in case you're too lazy or stupid to scroll up and find the link you responded to, here it is:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Personal-Cloud-Storage/dp/B0047FL85U
Go on. Take a good long look at it and hang your idiot head in shame.
Wow. You didn't even look at the link you're talking about, did you. Western Digital's personal cloud storage is,a local hard drive.
Go on. Look. Tell me how that is not a hard drive when the photo is of a drive, the advertising copy speaks of the drive, the contents line says "network drive" and includes a comparison to other local hard drives.and even mistakenly includes the drive's previous name, "My Book Live home network drive" (this is, after all, a rebranded product meant to take advantage of the obsession with "cloud storage."
And that is the link you responded to with "Awesome. It's like tethering.", which it absolutely is not, so it bloody well is what is under discussion and you' are proving that I was right. You are an absolute moron.
That's even stupider than my interpretation of what you said.
The cloud didn't disable your ability to store things locally. What kind of idiot thinks it did? The cloud is nothing more than a new name for paying for storage on someone else's servers, a concept that's been around since the days of the mainfraims, long before the internet was invented.
I didn't realize I was talking to a moron.
Not the same at all.
The old phone tethering you speak of was disabled on newer phones and you had to pay an extra charge for it.
Remote access to a hard drive is not disabled in any way. Nothing prevents you from manually setting up remote access to a drive and they still sell the drives without the package for a reduced price. Western Digital's offering simply includes, for an extra price, a software package that supposedly makes it easier to set up the remote access.
Stop squashing my hopes and dreams, dammit. The government and the 1% do a good enough job of that without you helping them :p
> Suppose in the (not too distant) future, next to no one ops to buy entire CDs vs. a single track. Won't all artists then be one or two hit wonders?
It depends on how talented the artist is and how devoted the artist's fans are. There are people who will only buy singles that they hear and like, but many people prefer to buy albums (especially if they've heard several songs they like one one album). A few will fall in love with the music and buy absolutely everything the artist produces.
Look at Lady Gaga's sales for The Fame Monster. 5.8 million albums in 2010. The songs were available as an MP3 single for $0.99 the same time the album became available at the end of 2009. Half the songs were on The Fame which released in 2008. People still bought millions of copies of the album.
For a (much) smaller artist, look at The Dollyrots. It's probable that you've never heard of them, though they've gotten enough exposure that it's not impossible. They are definitely not a superstar band.
They did a kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a new album. Of the 540 people that pledged money up front, only 39 pledged the minimum required to get a download of the album or less and 110 more pledged the minimum to get a physical CD. 291 (over 50%) of the people pledged more than the minimum necessary to get the album in the form they wanted it in.
The rewards varied, but as you get up into the hundreds of dollars, you can be certain that you're looking at the hardcore fans who will buy anything this group produces. 15 people pledged $300 each to get the band to write songs for them (which, since there are so many, are going to be made into a 2nd album that everyone who pledged gets a copy of). Two people pledged $1000 each to spend a day in the studio with the band where they get to watch, sing gang vocals and join in on hand claps. One idiot pledged $500 to get the album and a bunny suit (disclaimer: yes, I'm the idiot). These are fans who will not only buy anything the band produces, but will act as patrons to help fund the band's production of new material.
So... yes, there may be fewer people who buy albums, but there will always be people who buy albums even if individual songs are available. There will also always be fans who will buy everything produced by their favorite artists and dedicated fans with money who will help their favorite bands far more than a CD sale ever could.
The flip side of this is the artist's viewpoint and the realities of how music is produced. It's more cheaper and faster to have a dozen songs you want to record when you go in the studio than to do a dozen sessions for one song each. If you record it all in one go, for example, you only set up all the equipment once, as opposed to setting it up a dozen times. You're also in the groove as you move from one song to the next. You don't have to spend a lot of time warming up and getting ready to record. The same thing applies to what the sound engineers engineers do as well. They need setup time and time with the band to discuss what the band wants. Mastering a dozen songs in one session is far faster than a dozen sessions with one song mastered in each and sound engineers charge by the hour.
tl;dr - Albums will continue to exist because there are plenty of fans who will buy albums and it's cheaper to record music an album at a time. And you should totally buy Dollyrots albums or might find a guy in a bunny suit peeing on your lawn.
Would you kindly step up the enforcement, then? We all know that the US government isn't going to listen to it's citizens, but it's just as obvious that they listen to corporations. Maybe if Amazon, Google and a few other major cloud storage providers take a huge hit, they'll tell the government to fix the situation.
How is remotely accessing a hard drive on your home computer in any way, shape or form like tethering? Did you not look at the product that was linked or do you have no clue what tethering is?
And what do think think has been taken away? It's an external hard drive that has all the functionality of an external hard drive. It includes some software to make it easier to set it up for remote access from other PCs, your phone, etc., but that adds functionality, it doesn't decrease it. What do you think is missing?
I agree that it shouldn't be released to any and all, but you've got it a bit wrong. This was developed in the Netherlands, not the US. The US government is one of the ones that most of us don't trust with this sort of thing.
Clearly you have complete faith in your immune system. We should have you exposed to this genetically altered, fantastically deadly virus so that you can demonstrate to the world how insignificant it is.
Of course not. You could have an expensive 3D TV and buy cheaper glasses meant for a cheaper 3D TV set or even from another manufacturer if there was.