Ya know, I never put 2 and 2 together, before. Finally I do it, and because of this I'm more confused then before.
Yesterday I replaced a darksucker in the dining room. It had gotten full of dark, couldn't suck any more, and the room was a little dimmer. So we unscrewed it, screwed in a new one, and brightened the room.
After years of using darksuckers, I never thought that perhaps the dark they're sucking is dark matter. What a revelation. But now they're telling us that dark matter doesn't exist, so what does my darksucker suck?
If dark matter is down the tubes, has dark energy (the other possiblity) followed it?
I used to save more than I earned, but that was in a previous phase of my life. I'm now known as the father of a college student, in a few more years to become the father of two.
Actually, I'm not arguing against investing. I'm merely annoyed that there is a class of people that simplistically spouts your forumula as if, "That's all it takes to become rich." Some of that class of people are Ken Lay and whatsisname Fastou. Some others of that class ran the Silverado Savings and Loan.
Right now I'm watching economic policies I disagree with produce a mediocre economy with cost of living increasing faster than my pay, my "investments" on about the same curve, and no change of course in sight. Perhaps one reason corporate America isn't doing as well as they like is that as they cut their costs on the backs of the American worker, they're destroying the ability of those workers to afford their products. Maybe the American worker is overpaid, but he has also been the strongest market in the world, at least until he's unemployed.
Watch your investments "fail", having run off with all your money.
The real key to financial independence appears to be choosing your parents wisely. IMHO this is unfortunate, it can give rise to phenomena like "Paris Hilton."
While the Internet is central to music sales through Amazon and other such stores, and music downloads, I'm sure the RIAA would shut it down in a heartbeat, if they could.
This statement popped up in some of my security readings. It's most "efficient" to have one path between two places, and it's most "efficient" to set up peering agreements to route packets. But these efficient measures can introduce single points of failure.
On a similar note, that's why there are 13 root DNS servers, and why most of us aren't supposed to use them. The DNS example though, is one where efficiency and robustness agree. It's more efficient, at least in terms of net bandwidth, to use a DNS server closer than the root servers.
I have some friends who did a major renovation on their house recently, and was visiting to see how things were looking. I happened to look up at an unfinished cathedral ceiling, and saw "gullible" written there. (I presume you've heard the kids' joke.)
If you really wanted an answer, I'd be tempted to give one. But then if you really wanted an answer, you could have just started at www.gentoo.org. So instead I'll assume this is an imitation-question, and give you an imitation-answer, as to who USEs it:
I've read 2 books that take place in "The Culture", but I think neither were early or defining. I need to remember the guy's name when I'm in the bookstore, some time.
>a utopian society in which people get what they need.
Not a bad idea at all. But all too frequently, what we need is different from what we want. There's the rub.
It sounds like a utopian dream, but a couple of things scare me about it.
* Terrorists "NEED" nuclear and biological weapons. This one is all-too-easy to imagine.
* For that matter, there are Christian Apocolyptics who "NEED" to end the entire world.
* The wealthy "NEED" to preserve their station in life, which essentially comes from their control of something scarce. Read "The Forever Peace" by Joe Haldeman for an example where Kurzweillian technology is carefully restricted in order to preserve the status quo. (side point of the book)
* Given the above points, I "NEED" a way to get off of this rock, and go someplace else with "similarly enlightened" people. (My definition, of course.)
Makes me glad I just got the new motherboard. I really wish I had a few mini-itx's for my server closet, but I'm not spending the money now.
I don't doubt that nobody in the world will go to Taiwan's aid. By the same token, I don't think we really understand what a jolt it will be to our economies if Taiwan goes the way of Chechnya. Even in a middle-case peaceful takeover I could see several months of major disruption, worse if there's an exodus (or "downgrading") of corporate brain-trust.
Except that by the time you've made the transition to OSS tools on Windows, and like how productive they've made you, there are now two extra facts to consider:
1: Those very same applications that you're used to are most likely available on Linux. (or *bsd) 2: Do you really want to take your money and use it to make Bill G, Steve B, et al richer and you poorer, next time Microsoft decides it's time for an upgrade?
A whole "China" subthread, and while everyone may be rightfully concerned about civil liberties in China, this discussion is about the operation of root DNS. Root DNS has *nothing* to say about civil liberties. But it does talk to *existence* of top-level domains, and now we need to wonder about Taiwan and the existence of the ".tw" domain. Taiwan is the elephant in the room for everyone. They get treated like a nation, they have the ".tw" domain, the US sells them weapons, etc. But China considers them a renegade province, and periodically rattles the sabre over it.
Does anyone know if there is any official diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, any official embassies exchanged? How do we do business with them? Unofficial embassies? (Trade missions?) Would the Taiwanese rather peacefully join China, (and all that means giving up) or would they rather risk turning their island into another Chechnya? Is China ready to kill the goose, by turning it into a Chechnya, in order to claim it?
Is this perhaps a natural step in "commercial" evolution?
Vermont being home to a lot of small, home-grown industries, and not a lot of big ones, I've noticed something. Companies start small and (hopefully) grow. At some point, many hit a critical point where they're no longer small enough to work the same old way they used to. They have to take on some aspects of bigness, in order to continue growth. (At this point, some companies also say, "Big enough, I don't want to take on the changes necessary for further growth.") I've seen this be an awkward point, and frequently quite troubled. Some companies don't survive the transition, perhaps due to losing market focus while preoccupied with internal issues. Some companies are changed beyond recognition. (The jury has been out for *years* on Ben & Jerry's on this one.) Some get through, and move on just fine.
It's possible that Firefox is in a similar position. It just got big enough to start getting significant bad press. The test will be their response, and their ability to get their vision out to users and potential users. It's time to move on, and keep working toward a better and more secure browser.
The difficulty is that Microsoft never plays fair. I'm not saying a word about their software. I'm talking about their corporate behavior. They don't compete fairly, never have, and until someone gives them a meaningful slap, unlike the US DOJ, I doubt they ever will. By unfair competition I mean bundling, AARD, astroturf, EasyKeys for OS/2, media shills, etc.
The customer should be interested in getting his solution up and running. As someone else said, assuming that the customer didn't purchase on-site support, the fact that he's talking to an engineer and not some user-help-less phone guy says that they're getting service.
Something smells about this story. Not the least that they appear to have taken on a conversion without a pilot project.
I've tried symlinking things before, and found that some code just doesn't like it - like knews and.newsrc. But to be honest, I've never really tried a read-only root. It's about time I did.
How do you get around the stuff that likes root to be r-w, like/etc/mtab? I know it's frequently suggested to replace this with a symlink to/proc/mounts, but I also understand that some software doesn't like this. There is also some other stuff that likes to write into/etc, like/etc/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-eth0.info.
If/dev/kmem is writable, the dropping CAP_SYS_MODULE only makes it a little more difficult to load a rootkit. I know X needs/dev/mem to be writable, but I'm not sure about/dev/kmem.
Beyond writing to Rep. Sanders and Sen. Jeffords, since I suspect Sen. Leahy is one of those backing this MESS, I need to think about practical considerations.
I've been thinking of a pending hdtv card, planning to buy before the broadcast flag came into effect. Last spring when the courts threw out the FCC's ability to impose the broadcast flag, I shelved my plans. Keep in mind that I have no other hdtv hardware or services, and this is just a hedge against the future. Even without the other hardware, I want the non-broadcast-flag hdtv card while I can still get it, because someday I will have hdtv hardware/services.
So does anyone have a clue when Son of Broadcast Flag will rear it's ugly head? What's the new deadline to buy an hdtv card? Can anyone comment on preferences between pchdtv-3000 and air2pc (or any others) for use with MythTV?
Honestly, this is about rights of corporations vs rights of people. With this congress and this administration, I expect to lose. I'll fight in the meantime, but I also plan to make preparations to lose.
I generally agree with you, but the difference is that I didn't know how autocratic the other nations were. My knowledge of autocracy is only significant in that it's that of the common man. In other words, China is really "in your face" about their central control of political opinion. For the other nations, I suspect autocracy was a matter of tradition and convenience. (to the ruling class) China appears to have turned it into a matter of principle.
They will have interesting times. In another post, I had initially put my timeframe to the same 10-20 years you did. But at least part of the issue is "Internet time," so I revised it to 5-20 years.
Clearly China wants it both ways: They want the economic success of a capitalist free market They want to retain their authoritarian power
They have a society awakening to their economic power. I wonder how well they will be able to keep that society "capped" as it rises. I know an "old" society can get lazy, and accept caps, but I think a new one will be exploring its limits, and find discomfort in those boundaries. In 5-20 years, I suspect China will be in for "Interesting Times."
Those that I've spoken with who have gone into consultancy say that once ALL of the benefits are gone, you need 2X your former pay just to break even. That's vacation, health care, dental, sick days, etc. Not to mention that consultants need to provide some sort of office space, communications, etc. Those costs were formerly paid by the employer. That's why the burden rate for you usually ends up looking like somewhere in the realm of 2X your salary.
So the 3X price might seem high, and it is, a bit. But to the company, it's only 50% higher than having the employee would have been. To the consultant, it's 2X the "discretionary" (after fixed overhead) pay rate. From the company's point of view, they only need the consultant for a fixed task or set of tasks. From the consultant's point of view, he needs some padding to weather the lean times.
So it's not as extravagant as it looks, for either party. By the same token, I don't really think it's a win-win situation, either. It just is.
(I used to know JCL, and be pretty decent at it. I'll bet I could relearn fairly readily. Actually, JCL was kind of neat, because everything stayed put until you did the SUBMIT. Then it was too late, and you'd better have done it right.)
Because at some point, it's easy to vanish into absurdity.
I don't feel like paying for the road to your home, any more than you feel like paying for the road to mine. Let's privatize ALL roads.
In the end, the only people who would win would be the beancounters. The people who figure out how much I'm paying for my little slice of road, and how much you're paying for yours. Then how much we each have to pay to drive over each other person's stretch of road as we drive to work. Don't forget about the guys who don't want to participate in beancounter madness - they've just put up tollbooths at each side of their property. Isn't it a pain to stop at 3 or 4 of those on the way into work, tossing the coins into the basket so the arm goes up?
As for bike paths, people in the US are exercise-avoidant enough, on their own. If pay to run/ride becomes an impediment to running and riding, let their health go downhill. So let's decide that there will be NO socialized medicine whatsoever, and we're going to let people drop dead in their homes and on sidewalks when they don't take care of themselves. Next someone has to agree to pay before the ambulance leaves the hospital. (or the firetruck leaves the firehouse, for that matter.) Oh, who pays to remove the dead bodies?
Now public health - my health DOES become an issue. The deadbeat's house next door just caught fire. He didn't pay to have the firemen come, so his house burns to the ground. Only problem - the sparks caught my house on fire, too. Oh, and his sanitary problems (dead bodies, for instance) got into the groundwater, and my well's contaminated. I could sue, but there's no point, because he hasn't got any money.
Somewhere you've got to draw a line, and declare "community" or "society." Apparently you draw that line at a lower level of built-in services than I do, and that's fine. But IMHO, drawing that line isn't so much a matter of "peoples' rights" as it is of simple efficiency. At some point it costs more to enumerate, account, and bill than it does to simply tax and provide.
Out of curiousity, what is your ideal minimum provided by taxes?
>Hello RIAA: Getting my money is a privilege, not a right. You are not entitled to get my money simply >because you think that I should buy your product. I don't buy Microsoft software either for the same >reason-- that they treat their customers as criminals for the simple reason that they use their product.
To begin, look at something lots of people are doing and say, "What if I had a piece of all of that?" That's OK for a starting point, but it's where you go from there when things get can get nasty. The "good" way would be to come up with some way to help those people do what they're doing, more conveniently, better, or whatever. Then they'd be glad to give you some money as fair exchange for helping them. Unfortunately the current US business model seems to be focused on the "tax" model. ie, find a way to skim the revenue without doing commensurate work. In this model, they also tend to look at an activity and say, "I *deserve* a piece of every bit of that!" What they fail to realize is that people will follow a law of pricing. Music downloaders have lots of music because it's "free." The moment they have to pay for it, then the quantity of music becomes a cost factor balanced with food, clothing, and other such stuff. But somehow the RIAA looks at it as if they were "denied" that much revenue, and had they been charging, they would have gotten that amount of money.
We were out walking the causway through the Bay yesterday, and I had a terrible thought. Someone's probably looking at all those people walking, and saying "What if I had a piece of all of that?" The next step would be to "privatize" bike and walking trails, the then Private Enterprise can run them for a modest fee, and instead of Government paying maintenance, (no doubt doing it incompetently, and government supposedly does with EVERYTHING) they'd be collecting revenue from the initial sale, and tax revenue from the walkers/riders.
Me, I'd be walking somewhere else, and wishing I still had the views.
As for music, I buy as little as I can, because I feel dirty buying label music. I do some shoppig at the indies on cdbaby, also.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya know, I never put 2 and 2 together, before. Finally I do it, and because of this I'm more confused then before.
Yesterday I replaced a darksucker in the dining room. It had gotten full of dark, couldn't suck any more, and the room was a little dimmer. So we unscrewed it, screwed in a new one, and brightened the room.
After years of using darksuckers, I never thought that perhaps the dark they're sucking is dark matter. What a revelation. But now they're telling us that dark matter doesn't exist, so what does my darksucker suck?
If dark matter is down the tubes, has dark energy (the other possiblity) followed it?
I used to save more than I earned, but that was in a previous phase of my life. I'm now known as the father of a college student, in a few more years to become the father of two.
Actually, I'm not arguing against investing. I'm merely annoyed that there is a class of people that simplistically spouts your forumula as if, "That's all it takes to become rich." Some of that class of people are Ken Lay and whatsisname Fastou. Some others of that class ran the Silverado Savings and Loan.
Right now I'm watching economic policies I disagree with produce a mediocre economy with cost of living increasing faster than my pay, my "investments" on about the same curve, and no change of course in sight. Perhaps one reason corporate America isn't doing as well as they like is that as they cut their costs on the backs of the American worker, they're destroying the ability of those workers to afford their products. Maybe the American worker is overpaid, but he has also been the strongest market in the world, at least until he's unemployed.
I'm just grumpy. Ignore me.
Watch your investments "fail", having run off with all your money.
The real key to financial independence appears to be choosing your parents wisely.
IMHO this is unfortunate, it can give rise to phenomena like "Paris Hilton."
Please, don't give them any ideas!
While the Internet is central to music sales through Amazon and other such stores, and music downloads, I'm sure the RIAA would shut it down in a heartbeat, if they could.
This statement popped up in some of my security readings. It's most "efficient" to have one path between two places, and it's most "efficient" to set up peering agreements to route packets. But these efficient measures can introduce single points of failure.
On a similar note, that's why there are 13 root DNS servers, and why most of us aren't supposed to use them. The DNS example though, is one where efficiency and robustness agree. It's more efficient, at least in terms of net bandwidth, to use a DNS server closer than the root servers.
I have some friends who did a major renovation on their house recently, and was visiting to see how things were looking. I happened to look up at an unfinished cathedral ceiling, and saw "gullible" written there. (I presume you've heard the kids' joke.)
If you really wanted an answer, I'd be tempted to give one. But then if you really wanted an answer, you could have just started at www.gentoo.org. So instead I'll assume this is an imitation-question, and give you an imitation-answer, as to who USEs it:
USE=" acpi -bonobo bootsplash -eds emul-linux-x86 -esd exif -gnome -gtkhtml -guile -ipv6 java -kde lm_sensors nptl ppds threads
I've read 2 books that take place in "The Culture", but I think neither were early or defining. I need to remember the guy's name when I'm in the bookstore, some time.
>a utopian society in which people get what they need.
Not a bad idea at all. But all too frequently, what we need is different from what we want. There's the rub.
It sounds like a utopian dream, but a couple of things scare me about it.
* Terrorists "NEED" nuclear and biological weapons. This one is all-too-easy to imagine.
* For that matter, there are Christian Apocolyptics who "NEED" to end the entire world.
* The wealthy "NEED" to preserve their station in life, which essentially comes from their control of something scarce. Read "The Forever Peace" by Joe Haldeman for an example where Kurzweillian technology is carefully restricted in order to preserve the status quo. (side point of the book)
* Given the above points, I "NEED" a way to get off of this rock, and go someplace else with "similarly enlightened" people. (My definition, of course.)
Makes me glad I just got the new motherboard. I really wish I had a few mini-itx's for my server closet, but I'm not spending the money now.
I don't doubt that nobody in the world will go to Taiwan's aid. By the same token, I don't think we really understand what a jolt it will be to our economies if Taiwan goes the way of Chechnya. Even in a middle-case peaceful takeover I could see several months of major disruption, worse if there's an exodus (or "downgrading") of corporate brain-trust.
Except that by the time you've made the transition to OSS tools on Windows, and like how productive they've made you, there are now two extra facts to consider:
1: Those very same applications that you're used to are most likely available on Linux. (or *bsd)
2: Do you really want to take your money and use it to make Bill G, Steve B, et al richer and you poorer, next time Microsoft decides it's time for an upgrade?
A whole "China" subthread, and while everyone may be rightfully concerned about civil liberties in China, this discussion is about the operation of root DNS. Root DNS has *nothing* to say about civil liberties. But it does talk to *existence* of top-level domains, and now we need to wonder about Taiwan and the existence of the ".tw" domain. Taiwan is the elephant in the room for everyone. They get treated like a nation, they have the ".tw" domain, the US sells them weapons, etc. But China considers them a renegade province, and periodically rattles the sabre over it.
Does anyone know if there is any official diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, any official embassies exchanged?
How do we do business with them? Unofficial embassies? (Trade missions?)
Would the Taiwanese rather peacefully join China, (and all that means giving up) or would they rather risk turning their island into another Chechnya?
Is China ready to kill the goose, by turning it into a Chechnya, in order to claim it?
Is this perhaps a natural step in "commercial" evolution?
Vermont being home to a lot of small, home-grown industries, and not a lot of big ones, I've noticed something. Companies start small and (hopefully) grow. At some point, many hit a critical point where they're no longer small enough to work the same old way they used to. They have to take on some aspects of bigness, in order to continue growth. (At this point, some companies also say, "Big enough, I don't want to take on the changes necessary for further growth.") I've seen this be an awkward point, and frequently quite troubled. Some companies don't survive the transition, perhaps due to losing market focus while preoccupied with internal issues. Some companies are changed beyond recognition. (The jury has been out for *years* on Ben & Jerry's on this one.) Some get through, and move on just fine.
It's possible that Firefox is in a similar position. It just got big enough to start getting significant bad press. The test will be their response, and their ability to get their vision out to users and potential users. It's time to move on, and keep working toward a better and more secure browser.
The difficulty is that Microsoft never plays fair. I'm not saying a word about their software. I'm talking about their corporate behavior. They don't compete fairly, never have, and until someone gives them a meaningful slap, unlike the US DOJ, I doubt they ever will. By unfair competition I mean bundling, AARD, astroturf, EasyKeys for OS/2, media shills, etc.
The customer should be interested in getting his solution up and running. As someone else said, assuming that the customer didn't purchase on-site support, the fact that he's talking to an engineer and not some user-help-less phone guy says that they're getting service.
Something smells about this story. Not the least that they appear to have taken on a conversion without a pilot project.
You're right about that one.
.newsrc. But to be honest, I've never really tried a read-only root. It's about time I did.
I've tried symlinking things before, and found that some code just doesn't like it - like knews and
If you sold your computer, you could buy CDs. ...and a comb for your wife's hair.
/.ers get it.)
Just hope that she hasn't sold her hair to buy you some CDs.
(Not a techie reference. let's see how many
How do you get around the stuff that likes root to be r-w, like /etc/mtab? I know it's frequently suggested to replace this with a symlink to /proc/mounts, but I also understand that some software doesn't like this. There is also some other stuff that likes to write into /etc, like /etc/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-eth0.info.
If /dev/kmem is writable, the dropping CAP_SYS_MODULE only makes it a little more difficult to load a rootkit. I know X needs /dev/mem to be writable, but I'm not sure about /dev/kmem.
Beyond writing to Rep. Sanders and Sen. Jeffords, since I suspect Sen. Leahy is one of those backing this MESS, I need to think about practical considerations.
I've been thinking of a pending hdtv card, planning to buy before the broadcast flag came into effect. Last spring when the courts threw out the FCC's ability to impose the broadcast flag, I shelved my plans. Keep in mind that I have no other hdtv hardware or services, and this is just a hedge against the future. Even without the other hardware, I want the non-broadcast-flag hdtv card while I can still get it, because someday I will have hdtv hardware/services.
So does anyone have a clue when Son of Broadcast Flag will rear it's ugly head?
What's the new deadline to buy an hdtv card?
Can anyone comment on preferences between pchdtv-3000 and air2pc (or any others) for use with MythTV?
Honestly, this is about rights of corporations vs rights of people. With this congress and this administration, I expect to lose. I'll fight in the meantime, but I also plan to make preparations to lose.
I generally agree with you, but the difference is that I didn't know how autocratic the other nations were. My knowledge of autocracy is only significant in that it's that of the common man. In other words, China is really "in your face" about their central control of political opinion. For the other nations, I suspect autocracy was a matter of tradition and convenience. (to the ruling class) China appears to have turned it into a matter of principle.
They will have interesting times. In another post, I had initially put my timeframe to the same 10-20 years you did. But at least part of the issue is "Internet time," so I revised it to 5-20 years.
Oh, I dunno about your "freedom to blog" statement. That too may pass. Look back a few days... http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/ 23/1226250&tid=153&tid=95&tid=219
As for "they'll have to allow more personal freedom in the end." I agree, but I think it will be a painful and bloody process.
Clearly China wants it both ways:
They want the economic success of a capitalist free market
They want to retain their authoritarian power
They have a society awakening to their economic power. I wonder how well they will be able to keep that society "capped" as it rises. I know an "old" society can get lazy, and accept caps, but I think a new one will be exploring its limits, and find discomfort in those boundaries. In 5-20 years, I suspect China will be in for "Interesting Times."
Those that I've spoken with who have gone into consultancy say that once ALL of the benefits are gone, you need 2X your former pay just to break even. That's vacation, health care, dental, sick days, etc. Not to mention that consultants need to provide some sort of office space, communications, etc. Those costs were formerly paid by the employer. That's why the burden rate for you usually ends up looking like somewhere in the realm of 2X your salary.
So the 3X price might seem high, and it is, a bit. But to the company, it's only 50% higher than having the employee would have been. To the consultant, it's 2X the "discretionary" (after fixed overhead) pay rate. From the company's point of view, they only need the consultant for a fixed task or set of tasks. From the consultant's point of view, he needs some padding to weather the lean times.
So it's not as extravagant as it looks, for either party. By the same token, I don't really think it's a win-win situation, either. It just is.
(I used to know JCL, and be pretty decent at it. I'll bet I could relearn fairly readily. Actually, JCL was kind of neat, because everything stayed put until you did the SUBMIT. Then it was too late, and you'd better have done it right.)
Because at some point, it's easy to vanish into absurdity.
I don't feel like paying for the road to your home, any more than you feel like paying for the road to mine. Let's privatize ALL roads.
In the end, the only people who would win would be the beancounters. The people who figure out how much I'm paying for my little slice of road, and how much you're paying for yours. Then how much we each have to pay to drive over each other person's stretch of road as we drive to work. Don't forget about the guys who don't want to participate in beancounter madness - they've just put up tollbooths at each side of their property. Isn't it a pain to stop at 3 or 4 of those on the way into work, tossing the coins into the basket so the arm goes up?
As for bike paths, people in the US are exercise-avoidant enough, on their own. If pay to run/ride becomes an impediment to running and riding, let their health go downhill. So let's decide that there will be NO socialized medicine whatsoever, and we're going to let people drop dead in their homes and on sidewalks when they don't take care of themselves. Next someone has to agree to pay before the ambulance leaves the hospital. (or the firetruck leaves the firehouse, for that matter.) Oh, who pays to remove the dead bodies?
Now public health - my health DOES become an issue. The deadbeat's house next door just caught fire. He didn't pay to have the firemen come, so his house burns to the ground. Only problem - the sparks caught my house on fire, too. Oh, and his sanitary problems (dead bodies, for instance) got into the groundwater, and my well's contaminated. I could sue, but there's no point, because he hasn't got any money.
Somewhere you've got to draw a line, and declare "community" or "society." Apparently you draw that line at a lower level of built-in services than I do, and that's fine. But IMHO, drawing that line isn't so much a matter of "peoples' rights" as it is of simple efficiency. At some point it costs more to enumerate, account, and bill than it does to simply tax and provide.
Out of curiousity, what is your ideal minimum provided by taxes?
>Hello RIAA: Getting my money is a privilege, not a right. You are not entitled to get my money simply
>because you think that I should buy your product. I don't buy Microsoft software either for the same
>reason-- that they treat their customers as criminals for the simple reason that they use their product.
To begin, look at something lots of people are doing and say, "What if I had a piece of all of that?" That's OK for a starting point, but it's where you go from there when things get can get nasty. The "good" way would be to come up with some way to help those people do what they're doing, more conveniently, better, or whatever. Then they'd be glad to give you some money as fair exchange for helping them. Unfortunately the current US business model seems to be focused on the "tax" model. ie, find a way to skim the revenue without doing commensurate work. In this model, they also tend to look at an activity and say, "I *deserve* a piece of every bit of that!" What they fail to realize is that people will follow a law of pricing. Music downloaders have lots of music because it's "free." The moment they have to pay for it, then the quantity of music becomes a cost factor balanced with food, clothing, and other such stuff. But somehow the RIAA looks at it as if they were "denied" that much revenue, and had they been charging, they would have gotten that amount of money.
We were out walking the causway through the Bay yesterday, and I had a terrible thought. Someone's probably looking at all those people walking, and saying "What if I had a piece of all of that?" The next step would be to "privatize" bike and walking trails, the then Private Enterprise can run them for a modest fee, and instead of Government paying maintenance, (no doubt doing it incompetently, and government supposedly does with EVERYTHING) they'd be collecting revenue from the initial sale, and tax revenue from the walkers/riders.
Me, I'd be walking somewhere else, and wishing I still had the views.
As for music, I buy as little as I can, because I feel dirty buying label music. I do some shoppig at the indies on cdbaby, also.