It's a LOT harder for employers to screw you over when you know your rights AND take steps to see that they are enforced.
Agreed. Keep your word, keep records, keep your nose clean, and remember this is an adult having a public temper tantrum. If the tantrum escalates into actually doing you harm, calmly announce that you would hate to be forced to call the labor board or an attorney.
On some level, he knows he's being a jerk and making a fool of himself. If you meet that with a calm, pleasant, firm demeanor, he'll know that he may be acting like a two-year-old, but he's messing with an adult, so he can't get away with much.
And no need for you to do his job. You're not going to be around to live with your replacement, he is. It's to his benefit to do the finding.
"for the series to take place between episodes 3 and 4 would require a few staple characters to make regular apperances in order for the audience to become grounded."
The audience in question hasn't been grounded for a very long time -- these are the same people who waited in line at the wrong theater believing that the new movie would open there. Unless perhaps the "staple" characters would fasten them down somehow...
My grandfather had a habit, whenever he got a $2 bill, to tear off one corner. I asked him about it once, and he said that unless you tear off the corner, those bills are bad luck.
I thought (even at age 6) it was one of the weirder pieces of superstition I'd ever heard, but I've always thought of him when I saw that someone had "fixed" a $2 bill I got in change.
See, if the poor guy had just torn off the corners of all those twenties, none of this would have happened.
When I worked as a bank teller, an individual coming in with a bunch of bills with sequential serial #'s would have been a red flag. It practically shouts "STOLEN CASH."
Granted, that teller job was 29 years ago, and things may have changed, but I can see it looking just weird enough to trigger caution on the part of the cops.
The "I'm mad at the company, so I'm going to pay the minimum-wage cashier in something REALLY inconvenient" strikes me as a nasty, pointless way to get "revenge," and a useless form of protest.
There's a nice little online book trading co-op at http://www.bookcrossing.com./ People share books, trade books, and "release books into the wild" to track them. Kinda fun.
Knowing where a cab is doesn't do me much good, if that cab is already in service. I'm not sure what this map accomplishes that a list of phone numbers of reliable cab services would not do just as well.
Leeches are useful because their saliva has a powerful anticoagulant, as well as a vasodialator, and they have an efficient (if unattractive) delivery system.
For more on the use of leeches in surgery, you can click here:
Please quit sinking into the past and remember that the United States was founded largely on religous freedoms and freedoms from pursacution. Take a look at our history and look at the injustices people like you have put on our religion.
You're right about that... polygamy jokes are a cheap shot, and Mormons were treated very badly in the 19th century.
Heaven forbid you might actually care about your children and what they get into at a young age
Oh, my. I wish you had quit while you were ahead. People who really care about their kids don't let them play in the street, go dangerous places alone, or surf the Internet without adult supervision. No "V-chip" or Nanny-software is a substitute for a loving, present, involved, communicative parent.
I was not interested in podcasting until it occurred to me that I could download programs I like and save 'em up for long drives. Once a month I work at a location 5 hours away, and I have to drive to get there. The idea of listening to stuff I like instead of to six different variations of religious programming sounded very good indeed. I just have to figure out the cheapest way to listen to it, now, since I don't own an iPod.
The practical tips are good. Other possibilities to consider:
1. Is there any way to work SMARTER? Can the job be done in some way that breaks it up a little? Are you ever sitting and watching the screen, when you could be up and stretching or moving?
2. Look around your work environment. Is there anyone else at a similar task who seems to be thriving? What is he/she doing?
3. Check out this website: http://www.egoscue.com/ Pete Egoscue is a physical therapist who has come up with a lot of terrific exercises for surviving desk work. I, for one, would not be walking today had I not lucked onto his book, "Pain Free." Some of the exercises you do at home, some you can do at a desk, some are time-consuming, but they have done wonders for my body and mind and may help you.
4. Several people have mentioned caffiene and carbs. I find that sugar, especially, is poison if I'm under stress.
I loved B5 when it came out, had great fun watching it for years, and then felt like the steam went out of it towards the end, when he had to mangle the novel a bit to deal with the realities of casting, etc. But everything since then has felt to me like overkill. A big part of what made it good was the story arc, and when the arc is ended, the story should be too.
As with Star Trek -- it's sad to see a good idea milked until the cow is dead, and then milked some more just to see if anyone will buy dead cow milk.
moviepig.com writes: If there are astute slashDot readers out there who understand my lament, and who know an elusive sci-fi title (or two) that does manage the rare crossover, please identify.
Take a look at some of the books Robert Silverberg wrote in the 1970's; some of them are "Dying Inside," "Son of Man," and "Thorns" -- they are little gems. You have to ignore the dates in SF of that age (the "future" is now, at least chronologically speaking) but there were some interesting people writing interesting stuff back then.
Why does the answer to this question have to be binary? Anything done to excess for your body will cause trouble. And everyone's body is individual, so "excess" is going to be an individual concept.
I'm moderately prone to this sort of trouble. At the suggestion of a chiropractor, I made myself the habit of stretching my arms, shoulders, and hands every time I save my work and every time I pause to think. It rapidly became a habit, and I don't much think about it anymore -- nor do I have that tingly/owie feeling, either.
However-- I'm in the middle of the spectrum. I bet there are people out there who wouldn't have trouble if they keyboarded for hours without a break, and others for whom no amount of stretching will fix things.
Burial rituals imply a seeking for meaning after death and lead to religion.
Well, maybe. And maybe not. In making that statement, you are projecting notions of afterlife on people who may have simply had reverence for a body that once was a living person, someone of significance to them. There's nothing in the simple fact of a burial "ritual" -- which in this case may or may not have been a ritual, but which involved treatment of the body before disposal [burial] -- that points to "meaning" much less "religion."
Imagine that you *don't* believe in afterlife, and death is the ultimate challenge to meaningful life. Now imagine that someone you love a lot or respect a lot dies. They're lost, forever, they ain't coming back (at least, no one else has) and you feel sad as heck. The body's all you've got left, and you know from previous experience that it isn't going to keep for long. Elaborate burial might be merely a mark of respect and of bitter acceptance that when it's over, it's over.
Without a lot more data, there's no way of knowing what death meant to these folks, or what the after-death treatment of the bodies signifies.
I'm curious -- at what age(s) do parents today allow their children access to the Net at all? At what age(s) are most kids allowed to have an email account? And what sorts of rules do families these days have about Net and email use?
My children were growing up just as the Net was becoming public, and I remember this stuff as being very complicated in real-world parenting even then. It's infinitely more complicated now, I would think, since more people have email and the internet is seen by teachers as a reasonable place to do research. (All these are good things, mind you, they just weren't true a while back.)
It's very easy to talk about how theoretical parents -- or other people -- should raise theoretical kids. Usually real life solutions are much, much more complicated. I dealt with the garbage on TV and what it was doing to the kids by getting rid of the TV for 5 years. I don't see that as a possibility for dealing with a tool as useful as the Internet, but at the same time, I wonder at the practicality of some of the "suggestions" (pronouncements?) I've seen here about parental supervision.
And "talking about it" is only part of the solution. Even if family communication is good, I wonder how many 12 year old girls are going to go to mom or dad to ask about the picture of the horse having sex with a woman -- and how many will be unable to talk about it? And what about kids whose *parents* can't talk about sex at all? Are we going to say, oh, well, too bad, they drew lousy parents in the parent lotto and there's nothing any of the rest of us are going to do for them?
I don't know what the answers are but the whole matter brings up some pretty interesting questions.
Are you familiar with the labor agreements between the signatory record producers and the musicians union?
Studio musicians don't get "royalties" the way the artists do, but they do get new use payments (if the recording is used in a new medium, which happens frequently), and there is a special fund to which the record producers contribute that distributes special payments to musicians annually based on a formula including the number of records sold and the number of jobs done by the musician. These payments are important to the studio musicians, who don't have the same kind of individual contracts that artists negotiate.
You're right: these men and women don't have any copyright per se to the material. Where you are off base is that copyright isn't the only factor in who gets paid for work. The music industry is more complicated than that.
I would agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding of the music business in the debate about P2P, but that it's not as simple as people on either extreme want to paint it.
Hang on, then why the hell would I want to attach one to a PC? Surely even the pleasure of DXing doesn't get augmented with use of the PC.
Lots of reasons, but one is that SW listening conditions are changing constantly in only somewhat-predictable ways. If you are a dedicated DXer it can be both helpful and fun to exchange notes (quickly!) with other DXers.
Used to be, that happened via print media that was always pretty out of date by the time one got hold of it, or via radio programs that one had to have reception to get (so you got into a Catch 22 of how do you hear the program if you can't figure out current reception conditions?)
One group of DX'ers who moved from print to online is SPEEDX. Their website is a vast improvement over the old magazine format.
Whether the PC causes RF problems with reception depends on the PC. I was using a Mac alongside a ICOM receiver between 1989 and 2001 with no problem whatsoever -- from the Mac. The neighbor's microwave oven was another matter entirely. I always knew when they were defrosting stuff. I don't know about other PC's -- maybe someone else can comment on that?
Internet radio taking over shortwave, maybe, in some ways. They really are two different media, though, with different strengths. And there are still places in the world where not that many people have access to a computer or an ISP, but they still may have an old SW set to listen to the BBC.
(And for the romanticist, there's nothing like listening to a cricket match between Fiji and the Solomon Islands teams over Solomon Islands radio, commented in Pidgin English, by the glow of shimmering tubes!)
They also conduct 10 minute interviews with every person who goes through customs. Haven't flown there myself, but a good friend of mine has described it in detail, having gone back and forth dozens of times over the last few years. The security is far more extensive than air marshalls and a few gadgets on the planes.
Israel has a massive, complex security network, and you can't just extract a single entity, El Al, from it and pretend that none of the rest of the government's activities bear on how El Al works.
I've flown El Al several times in the past year, and I have been living in Jerusalem, and I can vouch for both: there's a lot more than a 10 minute interview to El Al if anything about you raises their hackles, *and* security in Israel is (has to be) a whole different animal than it is in the States. (I'm a U.S. citizen, a student living in Israel for a year.)
How is a 1 in 100 chance of having a few questions asked and your bags searched because of a false positive "completely destroying" any of your rights?
Here I have to take issue with you. "A few questions asked and your bags searched" is not what they are talking about in this article. I happen to trigger a couple of profiles that make airlines sit up and take notice (I'm a middle-aged single female, for starters) and as a result, flying is a nightmare. While I totally understand the need for careful security, if you are one of the lucky people on the list, you can look forward to the things that have actually happened to me in the past year:
-- kept off of one international flight, questioned for 4 hours, finally allowed on the next flight going out.
-- required to spend 3 hours clearing security, therefore missing my flight (while my laptop was disassembled so completely that tools were required, and all the parts x-rayed.)
-- when travelling with a friend, said friend was also taken off into a separate room, where he was questioned to see if his version of my story matched my version
-- Searches that require undressing.
-- Humiliating "interviews" in front of a line of people (who are also angry that the line is held up.)... I could go on.
My point is, we're not talking minor inconvenience, as you suggest. I have no desire to be blown up or crashed into a building, and I am quite clear that anything I do to protest this treatment makes matters worse, so I just grit my teeth and fly as little as I can.
Some airlines are more courteous than others; I've become a real fan of Continental, because they take their time checking me out but do it with a minimum of humiliation.
that there's some resolution to all this down the pike that is fair to all concerned?
Major record companies deserve this mess; they've done it to themselves by overpricing CD's. However, they and the "stars" aren't the only ones affected by P2P copying -- studio musicians depend on royalties to live, and they are Not multimillionaires. I hear (anecdotally, but from reliably, from a friend who works for the musician's union), that those men and women are really hurting -- royalties are drying up.
Most people who make a living making music make a pretty bare living as it is. I wish there were some middle ground where people get paid a reasonable amount for real work that they have done, without it turning into a greedfest on anyone's side.
I can see why animal rights groups would be supportive of this technology, but it's really only a change on the level of replacing the axe-man with the guillotine.
If they can lower the rate of injury and premature death, then the total number of chickens subjected to farming goes down -- from an animal-rights point of view, if they treat the chickens better, they'll also kill fewer chickens in the long run.
That line about the chickens being basically babies in adult bodies gave me pause, though -- I am a confirmed carnivore, but some of the stuff we do in the name of taste and profit is hard to digest.
Hear something you like on the car radio, find it on the web. No need for third-parties to peddle their odious wares.
Yes. I love radio, but local broadcast programming in the U.S. just isn't interesting enough. I became a shortwave enthusiast (until it seemed to be taken over by Fundies, Inc. and the cool weird fun stuff went away). Now I have moved almost completely to listening to radio via the Net. There's great stuff here, and frankly, I don't mind the commercials so much if what comes in between them is good enough.
For instance, Radio VALCoffers a nice variety of really interesting music, most of which I can't get locally. Nice easy to use site, too (except for the language difference - but even if you don't read anything but English, it's pretty intuitive.) And there's good talk out there too.
I found most of the talk on broadcast too predictable -- I know ahead of time most of what Rush or NPR is going to say and way too much of each is knee-jerk rubbish. The little bit I like or want I can get, on my own schedule, via the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a LOT harder for employers to screw you over when you know your rights AND take steps to see that they are enforced.
Agreed. Keep your word, keep records, keep your nose clean, and remember this is an adult having a public temper tantrum. If the tantrum escalates into actually doing you harm, calmly announce that you would hate to be forced to call the labor board or an attorney.
On some level, he knows he's being a jerk and making a fool of himself. If you meet that with a calm, pleasant, firm demeanor, he'll know that he may be acting like a two-year-old, but he's messing with an adult, so he can't get away with much.
And no need for you to do his job. You're not going to be around to live with your replacement, he is. It's to his benefit to do the finding.
"for the series to take place between episodes 3 and 4 would require a few staple characters to make regular apperances in order for the audience to become grounded."
The audience in question hasn't been grounded for a very long time -- these are the same people who waited in line at the wrong theater believing that the new movie would open there. Unless perhaps the "staple" characters would fasten them down somehow...
My grandfather had a habit, whenever he got a $2 bill, to tear off one corner. I asked him about it once, and he said that unless you tear off the corner, those bills are bad luck.
I thought (even at age 6) it was one of the weirder pieces of superstition I'd ever heard, but I've always thought of him when I saw that someone had "fixed" a $2 bill I got in change.
See, if the poor guy had just torn off the corners of all those twenties, none of this would have happened.
When I worked as a bank teller, an individual coming in with a bunch of bills with sequential serial #'s would have been a red flag. It practically shouts "STOLEN CASH."
Granted, that teller job was 29 years ago, and things may have changed, but I can see it looking just weird enough to trigger caution on the part of the cops.
The "I'm mad at the company, so I'm going to pay the minimum-wage cashier in something REALLY inconvenient" strikes me as a nasty, pointless way to get "revenge," and a useless form of protest.
There's a nice little online book trading co-op at http://www.bookcrossing.com./ People share books, trade books, and "release books into the wild" to track them. Kinda fun.
Knowing where a cab is doesn't do me much good, if that cab is already in service. I'm not sure what this map accomplishes that a list of phone numbers of reliable cab services would not do just as well.
Leeches are useful because their saliva has a powerful anticoagulant, as well as a vasodialator, and they have an efficient (if unattractive) delivery system.
e main.htm
For more on the use of leeches in surgery, you can click here:
http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mcbstaff/graf/AvHm/MedUs
but I do not recommend clicking it while eating: rather high on the gross-o-meter.
Gee, this only got a 2?
Early conditioning makes a huge difference in what we attempt as adults.
Please quit sinking into the past and remember that the United States was founded largely on religous freedoms and freedoms from pursacution. Take a look at our history and look at the injustices people like you have put on our religion.
You're right about that... polygamy jokes are a cheap shot, and Mormons were treated very badly in the 19th century.
Heaven forbid you might actually care about your children and what they get into at a young age
Oh, my. I wish you had quit while you were ahead. People who really care about their kids don't let them play in the street, go dangerous places alone, or surf the Internet without adult supervision. No "V-chip" or Nanny-software is a substitute for a loving, present, involved, communicative parent.
I was not interested in podcasting until it occurred to me that I could download programs I like and save 'em up for long drives. Once a month I work at a location 5 hours away, and I have to drive to get there. The idea of listening to stuff I like instead of to six different variations of religious programming sounded very good indeed. I just have to figure out the cheapest way to listen to it, now, since I don't own an iPod.
The practical tips are good. Other possibilities to consider:
1. Is there any way to work SMARTER? Can the job be done in some way that breaks it up a little? Are you ever sitting and watching the screen, when you could be up and stretching or moving?
2. Look around your work environment. Is there anyone else at a similar task who seems to be thriving? What is he/she doing?
3. Check out this website: http://www.egoscue.com/ Pete Egoscue is a physical therapist who has come up with a lot of terrific exercises for surviving desk work. I, for one, would not be walking today had I not lucked onto his book, "Pain Free." Some of the exercises you do at home, some you can do at a desk, some are time-consuming, but they have done wonders for my body and mind and may help you.
4. Several people have mentioned caffiene and carbs. I find that sugar, especially, is poison if I'm under stress.
But check out Egoscue. Great stuff.
At least they landed 'em on the right planet.
"jms made a five-year novel-for-television"
I loved B5 when it came out, had great fun watching it for years, and then felt like the steam went out of it towards the end, when he had to mangle the novel a bit to deal with the realities of casting, etc. But everything since then has felt to me like overkill. A big part of what made it good was the story arc, and when the arc is ended, the story should be too.
As with Star Trek -- it's sad to see a good idea milked until the cow is dead, and then milked some more just to see if anyone will buy dead cow milk.
Sometimes the story is just over.
was one truckload of fresh meat and another of kittylitter.
moviepig.com writes: If there are astute slashDot readers out there who understand my lament, and who know an elusive sci-fi title (or two) that does manage the rare crossover, please identify.
Take a look at some of the books Robert Silverberg wrote in the 1970's; some of them are "Dying Inside," "Son of Man," and "Thorns" -- they are little gems. You have to ignore the dates in SF of that age (the "future" is now, at least chronologically speaking) but there were some interesting people writing interesting stuff back then.
Why does the answer to this question have to be binary? Anything done to excess for your body will cause trouble. And everyone's body is individual, so "excess" is going to be an individual concept.
I'm moderately prone to this sort of trouble. At the suggestion of a chiropractor, I made myself the habit of stretching my arms, shoulders, and hands every time I save my work and every time I pause to think. It rapidly became a habit, and I don't much think about it anymore -- nor do I have that tingly/owie feeling, either.
However-- I'm in the middle of the spectrum. I bet there are people out there who wouldn't have trouble if they keyboarded for hours without a break, and others for whom no amount of stretching will fix things.
Burial rituals imply a seeking for meaning after death and lead to religion.
Well, maybe. And maybe not. In making that statement, you are projecting notions of afterlife on people who may have simply had reverence for a body that once was a living person, someone of significance to them. There's nothing in the simple fact of a burial "ritual" -- which in this case may or may not have been a ritual, but which involved treatment of the body before disposal [burial] -- that points to "meaning" much less "religion."
Imagine that you *don't* believe in afterlife, and death is the ultimate challenge to meaningful life. Now imagine that someone you love a lot or respect a lot dies. They're lost, forever, they ain't coming back (at least, no one else has) and you feel sad as heck. The body's all you've got left, and you know from previous experience that it isn't going to keep for long. Elaborate burial might be merely a mark of respect and of bitter acceptance that when it's over, it's over.
Without a lot more data, there's no way of knowing what death meant to these folks, or what the after-death treatment of the bodies signifies.
I'm curious -- at what age(s) do parents today allow their children access to the Net at all? At what age(s) are most kids allowed to have an email account? And what sorts of rules do families these days have about Net and email use?
My children were growing up just as the Net was becoming public, and I remember this stuff as being very complicated in real-world parenting even then. It's infinitely more complicated now, I would think, since more people have email and the internet is seen by teachers as a reasonable place to do research. (All these are good things, mind you, they just weren't true a while back.)
It's very easy to talk about how theoretical parents -- or other people -- should raise theoretical kids. Usually real life solutions are much, much more complicated. I dealt with the garbage on TV and what it was doing to the kids by getting rid of the TV for 5 years. I don't see that as a possibility for dealing with a tool as useful as the Internet, but at the same time, I wonder at the practicality of some of the "suggestions" (pronouncements?) I've seen here about parental supervision.
And "talking about it" is only part of the solution. Even if family communication is good, I wonder how many 12 year old girls are going to go to mom or dad to ask about the picture of the horse having sex with a woman -- and how many will be unable to talk about it? And what about kids whose *parents* can't talk about sex at all? Are we going to say, oh, well, too bad, they drew lousy parents in the parent lotto and there's nothing any of the rest of us are going to do for them?
I don't know what the answers are but the whole matter brings up some pretty interesting questions.
Learn how the music industry works.
Are you familiar with the labor agreements between the signatory record producers and the musicians union?
Studio musicians don't get "royalties" the way the artists do, but they do get new use payments (if the recording is used in a new medium, which happens frequently), and there is a special fund to which the record producers contribute that distributes special payments to musicians annually based on a formula including the number of records sold and the number of jobs done by the musician. These payments are important to the studio musicians, who don't have the same kind of individual contracts that artists negotiate.
You're right: these men and women don't have any copyright per se to the material. Where you are off base is that copyright isn't the only factor in who gets paid for work. The music industry is more complicated than that.
I would agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding of the music business in the debate about P2P, but that it's not as simple as people on either extreme want to paint it.
Hang on, then why the hell would I want to attach one to a PC? Surely even the pleasure of DXing doesn't get augmented with use of the PC.
Lots of reasons, but one is that SW listening conditions are changing constantly in only somewhat-predictable ways. If you are a dedicated DXer it can be both helpful and fun to exchange notes (quickly!) with other DXers.
Used to be, that happened via print media that was always pretty out of date by the time one got hold of it, or via radio programs that one had to have reception to get (so you got into a Catch 22 of how do you hear the program if you can't figure out current reception conditions?)
One group of DX'ers who moved from print to online is SPEEDX. Their website is a vast improvement over the old magazine format.
Whether the PC causes RF problems with reception depends on the PC. I was using a Mac alongside a ICOM receiver between 1989 and 2001 with no problem whatsoever -- from the Mac. The neighbor's microwave oven was another matter entirely. I always knew when they were defrosting stuff. I don't know about other PC's -- maybe someone else can comment on that?
Internet radio taking over shortwave, maybe, in some ways. They really are two different media, though, with different strengths. And there are still places in the world where not that many people have access to a computer or an ISP, but they still may have an old SW set to listen to the BBC.
(And for the romanticist, there's nothing like listening to a cricket match between Fiji and the Solomon Islands teams over Solomon Islands radio, commented in Pidgin English, by the glow of shimmering tubes!)
They also conduct 10 minute interviews with every person who goes through customs. Haven't flown there myself, but a good friend of mine has described it in detail, having gone back and forth dozens of times over the last few years. The security is far more extensive than air marshalls and a few gadgets on the planes.
... I could go on.
Israel has a massive, complex security network, and you can't just extract a single entity, El Al, from it and pretend that none of the rest of the government's activities bear on how El Al works.
I've flown El Al several times in the past year, and I have been living in Jerusalem, and I can vouch for both: there's a lot more than a 10 minute interview to El Al if anything about you raises their hackles, *and* security in Israel is (has to be) a whole different animal than it is in the States. (I'm a U.S. citizen, a student living in Israel for a year.)
How is a 1 in 100 chance of having a few questions asked and your bags searched because of a false positive "completely destroying" any of your rights?
Here I have to take issue with you. "A few questions asked and your bags searched" is not what they are talking about in this article. I happen to trigger a couple of profiles that make airlines sit up and take notice (I'm a middle-aged single female, for starters) and as a result, flying is a nightmare. While I totally understand the need for careful security, if you are one of the lucky people on the list, you can look forward to the things that have actually happened to me in the past year:
-- kept off of one international flight, questioned for 4 hours, finally allowed on the next flight going out.
-- required to spend 3 hours clearing security, therefore missing my flight (while my laptop was disassembled so completely that tools were required, and all the parts x-rayed.)
-- when travelling with a friend, said friend was also taken off into a separate room, where he was questioned to see if his version of my story matched my version
-- Searches that require undressing.
-- Humiliating "interviews" in front of a line of people (who are also angry that the line is held up.)
My point is, we're not talking minor inconvenience, as you suggest. I have no desire to be blown up or crashed into a building, and I am quite clear that anything I do to protest this treatment makes matters worse, so I just grit my teeth and fly as little as I can.
Some airlines are more courteous than others; I've become a real fan of Continental, because they take their time checking me out but do it with a minimum of humiliation.
that there's some resolution to all this down the pike that is fair to all concerned?
Major record companies deserve this mess; they've done it to themselves by overpricing CD's. However, they and the "stars" aren't the only ones affected by P2P copying -- studio musicians depend on royalties to live, and they are Not multimillionaires. I hear (anecdotally, but from reliably, from a friend who works for the musician's union), that those men and women are really hurting -- royalties are drying up.
Most people who make a living making music make a pretty bare living as it is. I wish there were some middle ground where people get paid a reasonable amount for real work that they have done, without it turning into a greedfest on anyone's side.
I can see why animal rights groups would be supportive of this technology, but it's really only a change on the level of replacing the axe-man with the guillotine.
If they can lower the rate of injury and premature death, then the total number of chickens subjected to farming goes down -- from an animal-rights point of view, if they treat the chickens better, they'll also kill fewer chickens in the long run.
That line about the chickens being basically babies in adult bodies gave me pause, though -- I am a confirmed carnivore, but some of the stuff we do in the name of taste and profit is hard to digest.
Hear something you like on the car radio, find it on the web. No need for third-parties to peddle their odious wares.
Yes. I love radio, but local broadcast programming in the U.S. just isn't interesting enough. I became a shortwave enthusiast (until it seemed to be taken over by Fundies, Inc. and the cool weird fun stuff went away). Now I have moved almost completely to listening to radio via the Net. There's great stuff here, and frankly, I don't mind the commercials so much if what comes in between them is good enough.
For instance, Radio VALCoffers a nice variety of really interesting music, most of which I can't get locally. Nice easy to use site, too (except for the language difference - but even if you don't read anything but English, it's pretty intuitive.) And there's good talk out there too.
I found most of the talk on broadcast too predictable -- I know ahead of time most of what Rush or NPR is going to say and way too much of each is knee-jerk rubbish. The little bit I like or want I can get, on my own schedule, via the computer.