Actually the tumors that most female rats acquire with age (they're not nearly as common in the males) are benign tumors of their mammary glands. It's not cancer, where the tumor cells mutate to spread throughout the body. But, if not removed, these tumors will eventually outgrow the rat itself, making it nearly impossible for the animal to move around to get food and water, and it will starve or die of dehydration -- not cancer.
That's just one of countless examples of how nature could not care less what happens to organisms after the typical period of sexual maturity and reproduction. The genetic code is optimized for vitality in the reproductive stage, and I think those same optimizations lead to all manners of gruesome and painful death on the other side of the hill.
Currently, the problem cannot yet be felt. In the short-term, indeed, people will still buy CDs and legitimate copies of songs, partly out of fear, partly because they think it's their moral duty to compensate artists. As a result, record companies have an incentive to sign artists, who have an incentive to devote their time to music.
Your argument assumes the majority of the money is going to the musicians, when in fact it's mostly going to an old, decaying industry that we no longer need. Certainly the equipment (and software) has progressed to the point that an honestly good musician can do his or her own mixing, or pool together with other local artists to get it done, and the Internet (especially with P2P file sharing) serves as the perfect distribution channel. So what are the sound techs and producers responsible for? They're responsible for engineering an artificial product -- taking low-talent, pretty faces and making something that sounds half-way decent using sophisticated techniques that belong more to NASA than good music. Then they've managed to shift the taste of an entire culture toward this spectrum of manufactured sound -- a predictable commodity providing a guaranteed return for their stockholders. Meh.
Providing music online, without record label contracts, artists can increase their income at a fraction of the cost the RIAA companies charge consumers. Just provide a Paypal link where people can contribute a donation. If you're good, you'll get plenty of money. If you're popular enough around the nation, you'll even get enough donations to fund music videos and a national tour (if that's what you want, though a lot of artists aren't interested in becoming celebrities).
Instead of a top-down system where musicians are pushed on us through media hype, commercials, and guaranteed air time (on a Clear Channel station, no doubt), artists will bubble up to the national stage by word of mouth, Internet fansites, and honest journalism (rather than passing off corporate press releases as news).
The RIAA CEOs need to redirect the assets in their companies to emerging industries. They're dying in the long run and they have a fiduciary obligation to their investors to realign their strategy. At the very least, they can focus on the big-budget movie industry. Hollywood movies with obscene budgets are more akin to carnival rides than speech, and I'm willing to pay for the thrill of watching them on a huge screen with the kind of resolution and sound I could never personally afford (I'd have to watch a few thousand movies just to make up for the equipment cost.) In general that's where entertainment companies need to be -- leveraging their assets to provide larger-than-life experiences in semi-public forums, experiences that common citizens desire, and will pay real money for because there's no way they can practically afford the experience on their own.
The 'state' is represented as a state vector, for which which the classical truth values are orthonormal basis vectors. So, logical true could be basis [1, 0] == |1> (pronounced 'ket 1') and logical false could be [0, 1] == |0> ('ket 0'). A qubit may actually be in state [0.866 0.5], which can be expressed as 0.866|1> + 0.5|0>. When you measure this qubit, the probability it's in the true state is 0.866^2 = 3/4, and the probability it's false is 0.5^2 = 1/4. The probability that you determine it to be either true or false is 3/4 + 1/4 = 1 (i.e. every time you measure the qubit, it's either true or false and nothing else). In general it's |psi> = alpha|1> + beta|0>, where psi, alpha, and beta are complex numbers.
1. Western governments are run by Western corporations, which have legions of lawyers and lobbyists writing our laws and bribing are supposed law makers (e.g. agribusiness corps such as ADM, the 'supermarket to the world'). Would these corporations be any less corrupt and short-sighted if the government disappeared tomorrow? I doubt it, not so long as their first and most important mandate is immediate shareholder profit, aggregating over 90% of the world's wealth into the hands of 1% of its people. We have the power to rewrite the laws that govern corporate ethics. We have the power to revoke corporate charters. The world is what we make of it.
2. What 'makes sense' to you is irrelevant. You didn't grow up impoverished with no access to nourishing food, clean water, basic medicine, electricity, thought-provoking education, and a safe, loving environment. You're an arrogant ass for even beginning to judge these people. And since when have Western corporations not liked doing business with fascists? It's the quickest way to pillage resources and secure cheap labor. Sure, let some evil thug repress the people and take all the negative publicity, while you walk out the back door with the family jewels and the children in chains and claim the moral high ground.
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Actually the tumors that most female rats acquire with age (they're not nearly as common in the males) are benign tumors of their mammary glands. It's not cancer, where the tumor cells mutate to spread throughout the body. But, if not removed, these tumors will eventually outgrow the rat itself, making it nearly impossible for the animal to move around to get food and water, and it will starve or die of dehydration -- not cancer.
That's just one of countless examples of how nature could not care less what happens to organisms after the typical period of sexual maturity and reproduction. The genetic code is optimized for vitality in the reproductive stage, and I think those same optimizations lead to all manners of gruesome and painful death on the other side of the hill.
Currently, the problem cannot yet be felt. In the short-term, indeed, people will still buy CDs and legitimate copies of songs, partly out of fear, partly because they think it's their moral duty to compensate artists. As a result, record companies have an incentive to sign artists, who have an incentive to devote their time to music.
Your argument assumes the majority of the money is going to the musicians, when in fact it's mostly going to an old, decaying industry that we no longer need. Certainly the equipment (and software) has progressed to the point that an honestly good musician can do his or her own mixing, or pool together with other local artists to get it done, and the Internet (especially with P2P file sharing) serves as the perfect distribution channel. So what are the sound techs and producers responsible for? They're responsible for engineering an artificial product -- taking low-talent, pretty faces and making something that sounds half-way decent using sophisticated techniques that belong more to NASA than good music. Then they've managed to shift the taste of an entire culture toward this spectrum of manufactured sound -- a predictable commodity providing a guaranteed return for their stockholders. Meh.
Providing music online, without record label contracts, artists can increase their income at a fraction of the cost the RIAA companies charge consumers. Just provide a Paypal link where people can contribute a donation. If you're good, you'll get plenty of money. If you're popular enough around the nation, you'll even get enough donations to fund music videos and a national tour (if that's what you want, though a lot of artists aren't interested in becoming celebrities).
Instead of a top-down system where musicians are pushed on us through media hype, commercials, and guaranteed air time (on a Clear Channel station, no doubt), artists will bubble up to the national stage by word of mouth, Internet fansites, and honest journalism (rather than passing off corporate press releases as news).
The RIAA CEOs need to redirect the assets in their companies to emerging industries. They're dying in the long run and they have a fiduciary obligation to their investors to realign their strategy. At the very least, they can focus on the big-budget movie industry. Hollywood movies with obscene budgets are more akin to carnival rides than speech, and I'm willing to pay for the thrill of watching them on a huge screen with the kind of resolution and sound I could never personally afford (I'd have to watch a few thousand movies just to make up for the equipment cost.) In general that's where entertainment companies need to be -- leveraging their assets to provide larger-than-life experiences in semi-public forums, experiences that common citizens desire, and will pay real money for because there's no way they can practically afford the experience on their own.
The 'state' is represented as a state vector, for which which the classical truth values are orthonormal basis vectors. So, logical true could be basis [1, 0] == |1> (pronounced 'ket 1') and logical false could be [0, 1] == |0> ('ket 0'). A qubit may actually be in state [0.866 0.5], which can be expressed as 0.866|1> + 0.5|0>. When you measure this qubit, the probability it's in the true state is 0.866^2 = 3/4, and the probability it's false is 0.5^2 = 1/4. The probability that you determine it to be either true or false is 3/4 + 1/4 = 1 (i.e. every time you measure the qubit, it's either true or false and nothing else). In general it's |psi> = alpha|1> + beta|0>, where psi, alpha, and beta are complex numbers.
1. Western governments are run by Western corporations, which have legions of lawyers and lobbyists writing our laws and bribing are supposed law makers (e.g. agribusiness corps such as ADM, the 'supermarket to the world'). Would these corporations be any less corrupt and short-sighted if the government disappeared tomorrow? I doubt it, not so long as their first and most important mandate is immediate shareholder profit, aggregating over 90% of the world's wealth into the hands of 1% of its people. We have the power to rewrite the laws that govern corporate ethics. We have the power to revoke corporate charters. The world is what we make of it.
2. What 'makes sense' to you is irrelevant. You didn't grow up impoverished with no access to nourishing food, clean water, basic medicine, electricity, thought-provoking education, and a safe, loving environment. You're an arrogant ass for even beginning to judge these people. And since when have Western corporations not liked doing business with fascists? It's the quickest way to pillage resources and secure cheap labor. Sure, let some evil thug repress the people and take all the negative publicity, while you walk out the back door with the family jewels and the children in chains and claim the moral high ground.