sigh - ad hominem attacks aside, my point was that you can't make every human behave. Diseases will spread, my friend, no matter how moral you and your "normal" friends are. Has nothing to do with whether I'm a pervert. Ignore me. I don't exist. But viruses do - and viruses do not concern themselves with the morality of their hosts. Or haven't you ever had a cold? And hundreds of millions of other perverst DO exist. What are you going to do - kill them all? Wait for nature to take care of it for you? Neither is going to work. Sorry to bust your bubble.
If you were the ONLY source of nude pictures of your wife, that would be the case.
But since I have nude pictures of your wife, and I freely distribute them over the internet, then there is no need to force you to satisfy the demand for perverted goat sex.
(sorry, you set yourself up for that one. I couldn't resist. I am a bad boy. Come spank me now, Orrin.)
I do agree with your point, and I do think that the free market OUGHT to be able to fix this one. Artists stuck with bad contracts with evil corporations SHOULD be free to stop playing with the bullies, and start distributing their music freely over the internet, getting their promotion and kicks elsewhere. We have to ask ourselves why this hasn't happened. Why haven't the artist flocked away from the nasty RIAA companies? They SEEM like the only game in town, but aren't really, are they?
My question is, why the fuck were we stuck with GW Bush as the republican candidate. Orrin Hatch at least sounds like he has a clue.
Here's another one; he was one of the primary architects of the Government action against Microsoft - considering two major employers of his state, (Word Perfect and Novell) are what anyone would agree, two of Microsoft's most notable murder victems.
When somebody invests in my company, my company gives lots of money to compensate sales people, and the senior management. Then they take some of the extra money, which goes into paying for stock options, more employees, and buying this kewl new machine I just got for my lab.
When somebody gambles at a casino, the money buys coke which goes up the manager's nose. Do you think the bathroom attendants get a raise, new computers, more perks? Come on.
Listen, it comes down to this, really. Do you believe that individual human beings have a "free will"? Do they mindlessly succumb to the lottery spending, and the illusion of quick-wealth it offers? Are they helpless? Then yes. Bad Gummit! Stop manipulating those poor slaves, they can't help themselves.
If you DO believe in "free will", then the people who CHOOSE freely to waste their hard-earned dough on lottery tickets, every week, instead of putting it into a mutual fund, or at least buying some good heroin, are doing so, not because they are exploited. There is a strong case to be made that a fool and his money are soon parted. I don't see that there's anything wrong with that.
Personally, I don't believe a word of it that lotteries shift any tax burden off of anyone. Buy any bridges lately?
In Illinois, the state education budget would be lowered when lottery revenues were up, because lottery revenues were "to help fund education".
the only possible benefit I can see to state-sponsored lotteries versus Las Vegas Style gambling, is that you lose the ugly element to society - that is, basically, the advertising. If you've ever lived near an Indian Casino, or Riverboat Casino, or if you've ever been to Las Vegas, you know what I'm talking about. The constant high-volume blasting of the casino ads. The never stop, billboards, radio, TV, print. They're fuggin everywhere. Enough to drive you insane. It's bad enough when some LV Casino pays for ads in remote areas. I'm not sure what it is, it just rubs me the wrong way, the way they misrepresent things.
Don't get me wrong, I was married in Las Vegas. LV is a FUN, FUN, town. Watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and you'll get the idea. But I'd seriously not want to live there, and especially not want to raise kids there.
Of course, this is all hypocrisy, with the advent of internet stock trading, and all that jazz. Greenspan can rag all he wants about how people treat stock trading like casino gambling, but the guys who sit there and crunch quarterly results all day, are, in principal, no better than the guys who mathematically analyze card-games to try to develop "a system". The only difference is, the money in the stock market helps people - helps companies. The money going into casinos helps nobody but the Mafia. And the money going into the lottery helps lying politicians. It's basically a tax on people who are bad at math - maybe that's a good thing, eh?
here's a little hint: You are not talking to a fan-boy. I have no idea who Mystique is, and I'm looking forward more to the Tick movie than this X-Men schlock.
Well, you don't see much of the Jewish portrayal anymore, I'll give you that (not since they cancelled Seinfeld, anyway).
But the way blacks and gays are depicted, you just haven't been watching TV. It's on all the sitcoms, shit man. Where have you been?
And, if you DO manage to become "homo superior", you'll probably end up rich, marry some blonde fake-tit nose-job, and have ugly defective kids anyway.
That's what I'm saying. Sony is out to lunch. Of course. They want to keep their blowjobs.
I once spent 14 hours on a flight to London, sitting next to a guy who was an independent accountant - he did audits on Music companies. My credibility on this, as gossip goes, is left as an excercise for the reader. Suffice it to say, that the stories he told me, about how badly these guys cheat - and we're just talking about taxes and money-laundering here, they opened my eyes. Nobody more than me wants to see $3-$5/song die like a witness to Bill Clinton's sexual misadventures. But the thing is, they think they can get away with it. And why not? $19.99/CD is working. Even in the face of this rampant piracy, they're making obscene amounts of money.
There is the very valid argument that music labels and all that other stuff, DO serve a valid purpose. To filter out garbage. We've suggested an alternative model. But it can't work if the prices are set artificially high. Because you'll get this artificial market of the only people who can afford music (the bulk of the market) being 13-14 year old girls with rich daddies who want to spoil them rotten, and thus will give them TONS of money to buy a CD. The girlies didn't work for it, they don't know the value of it, so it's an easy sale. That is what is going on today, my friends. The music industry is happy to stick it to this niche market, they're profitable, handsomely. And they're getting their blowjobs.
Lars said one intersting thing in his latest address. He said he had no problem seeing the music industry move on to a new technology, one that was cheaper for production, and passed on the savings to the consumer . Also, if it protected the artists rights. I'm totally down with that. But what Lars didn't say, and probably won't say because he's a chicken shit, or maybe too dumb and rich to know, that CD's were supposed to be cheaper than LP's, and the cost savings were supposed to be passed onto the consumer. Instead, they were sold at a premium, because of the supposedly higher-quality audio, and prices have pretty much not gone down with the cost of production. If you go to non-mainstream CD sources (ie. Christian music, independents, what have you), you'll see CD's retailing at $4-$8. Perhaps closer to reality.
Most people "feel better about it". (not all. ..) potentially higher-quality (a studio-produced "clean" MP3 - made on nice equipment, perhaps filtered to reduce artifacts, etc. - as opposed to a low-bitrate hack done on "warez-d00d's" P90 running a pirated beta of Windows 2001.) Other value-added features? The effort to obtain the music "officially" and cleanly, must be less than that of obtaining it on Napster - ie. they need faster servers, better UI, and more reliability than "warez-d00d's" P90 on a pair of shotgunned 56k modems.
Going to analog copying, the value of your "product" is decreased. This is what the record industry hemmed and hawwed about over CD's, the fact that the consumer now has a "perfect digital copy" of the music, and can, in theory, make unlimited other perfect digital copies. Lars made this point in his/. interview. In their mind, it makes all the difference in the world. Otherwise, people would just tape off the radio.
Yes, there is more to this that I covered in my first post - yes, any attempt at changing the technology on the supply-side, will undoubtedly meet stiff market resistance - like DIVX. But the RIAA is very powerful, they can move to limit consumer choice very easily, they have very deep pockets, look at what's at stake for them - no less than world-domination of this medium. They could do it - I don't think very easily, but they could scam and advertise and leverage any new technology into place that would make piracy a LOT less appealing.
Personally, I'd rather see a nickel-a-pop model, download an unprotected MP3 for a nickel, there's no incentive to copy it other than what falls into "fair use". Probably makes more economic sense for the record company, if you support the download infrastructure with what we talked about in the last discussion - some sort consumer-driven moderation system to filter out the crap, supplemented by some system of professional review like what's going on on www.rottentomatoes.com for film, and you replace a very expensive product that sells a lot of units, to a very cheap product that sells more than enough units to make up for the decline in price, coupled with NO increased cost of production, coupled with very happy consumers because they're getting more for their money, and they're getting a higher quality product, because the filtering is done based on review by folks like music professors, and knowledgable masses of fans, rather than a record-company exec who got a blowjob.
This is primarily why their fighting it. To keep their blowjobs.
Toshiba has repeatedly been butt-fucked by the US justice system ever since they were caught selling silent-submarine-propeller technology to the Soviets.
I'm not saying that they deserve it, or not. I'm just saying, I don't blame them for not wanting to have their healing hemmorhoids ripped open again.
Apparently, some company there just patented the bottle. Yeah, glass bottle for storing all kinds of liquids and stuff. They invented it. Really. Pay up man.
Hey man, Orrin Hatch ROCKS! I think he should be a good candidate for President of the US. Of course, the IT standard for the US Gov will be changed from NT to NetWare, even desktops. Hey, NetWare has a GUI now. ..
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Feinstien, of course being a California senator, stands up in FAVOR of the RIAA, doesn't she?
It ain't about republican or democrat no more.
(or maybe Hatch is just a bit pissed that EMI won't give him a juicy contract and make him into a leather-pants-wearing rock star)
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
dead corporation = thousands of unemployed voters.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
sigh - ad hominem attacks aside, my point was that you can't make every human behave. Diseases will spread, my friend, no matter how moral you and your "normal" friends are. Has nothing to do with whether I'm a pervert. Ignore me. I don't exist. But viruses do - and viruses do not concern themselves with the morality of their hosts. Or haven't you ever had a cold? And hundreds of millions of other perverst DO exist. What are you going to do - kill them all? Wait for nature to take care of it for you? Neither is going to work. Sorry to bust your bubble.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Do any of these play CD-RW's?
Is Joliet format supported?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
In the article, they mentioned that EMI will be releasing most of it's catalog on line soon.
Anyone have any idea what format? (protected or not?)
Anyone have any idea how much they're charging?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
If you were the ONLY source of nude pictures of your wife, that would be the case.
But since I have nude pictures of your wife, and I freely distribute them over the internet, then there is no need to force you to satisfy the demand for perverted goat sex.
(sorry, you set yourself up for that one. I couldn't resist. I am a bad boy. Come spank me now, Orrin.)
I do agree with your point, and I do think that the free market OUGHT to be able to fix this one. Artists stuck with bad contracts with evil corporations SHOULD be free to stop playing with the bullies, and start distributing their music freely over the internet, getting their promotion and kicks elsewhere.
We have to ask ourselves why this hasn't happened. Why haven't the artist flocked away from the nasty RIAA companies? They SEEM like the only game in town, but aren't really, are they?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Novell, Word Perfect, many, many others. Provo/Salt Lake was on the verge of becoming a real center of technological development.
But you can't argue against that he seems to actually really have a clue.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
My question is, why the fuck were we stuck with GW Bush as the republican candidate. Orrin Hatch at least sounds like he has a clue.
Here's another one; he was one of the primary architects of the Government action against Microsoft - considering two major employers of his state, (Word Perfect and Novell) are what anyone would agree, two of Microsoft's most notable murder victems.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
When somebody invests in my company, my company gives lots of money to compensate sales people, and the senior management. Then they take some of the extra money, which goes into paying for stock options, more employees, and buying this kewl new machine I just got for my lab.
When somebody gambles at a casino, the money buys coke which goes up the manager's nose. Do you think the bathroom attendants get a raise, new computers, more perks? Come on.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
uh, maybe he wants to define "fair use" to mean; you can think about the music when you're not listening to a liscenced pay-per-play copy.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Listen, it comes down to this, really. Do you believe that individual human beings have a "free will"? Do they mindlessly succumb to the lottery spending, and the illusion of quick-wealth it offers? Are they helpless? Then yes. Bad Gummit! Stop manipulating those poor slaves, they can't help themselves.
If you DO believe in "free will", then the people who CHOOSE freely to waste their hard-earned dough on lottery tickets, every week, instead of putting it into a mutual fund, or at least buying some good heroin, are doing so, not because they are exploited. There is a strong case to be made that a fool and his money are soon parted. I don't see that there's anything wrong with that.
Personally, I don't believe a word of it that lotteries shift any tax burden off of anyone. Buy any bridges lately?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Oh this is so much total bullshit.
In Illinois, the state education budget would be lowered when lottery revenues were up, because lottery revenues were "to help fund education".
the only possible benefit I can see to state-sponsored lotteries versus Las Vegas Style gambling, is that you lose the ugly element to society - that is, basically, the advertising. If you've ever lived near an Indian Casino, or Riverboat Casino, or if you've ever been to Las Vegas, you know what I'm talking about. The constant high-volume blasting of the casino ads. The never stop, billboards, radio, TV, print. They're fuggin everywhere. Enough to drive you insane. It's bad enough when some LV Casino pays for ads in remote areas. I'm not sure what it is, it just rubs me the wrong way, the way they misrepresent things.
Don't get me wrong, I was married in Las Vegas. LV is a FUN, FUN, town. Watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and you'll get the idea. But I'd seriously not want to live there, and especially not want to raise kids there.
Of course, this is all hypocrisy, with the advent of internet stock trading, and all that jazz. Greenspan can rag all he wants about how people treat stock trading like casino gambling, but the guys who sit there and crunch quarterly results all day, are, in principal, no better than the guys who mathematically analyze card-games to try to develop "a system". The only difference is, the money in the stock market helps people - helps companies. The money going into casinos helps nobody but the Mafia. And the money going into the lottery helps lying politicians. It's basically a tax on people who are bad at math - maybe that's a good thing, eh?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
here's a little hint: You are not talking to a fan-boy. I have no idea who Mystique is, and I'm looking forward more to the Tick movie than this X-Men schlock.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Well, you don't see much of the Jewish portrayal anymore, I'll give you that (not since they cancelled Seinfeld, anyway).
But the way blacks and gays are depicted, you just haven't been watching TV. It's on all the sitcoms, shit man. Where have you been?
And, if you DO manage to become "homo superior", you'll probably end up rich, marry some blonde fake-tit nose-job, and have ugly defective kids anyway.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
okay, we're talking Marvel Comics here. Get a grip.
Anyway, I just watched Blade Runner again last night. I don't think I'll be enjoying ANY other movies for about another 20 months or so.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
They used to be men.
But they had operations.
now they're ex-men.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Then Metallica should be suing the illegal downloaders. They should not even involve Napster, except maybe to subpoena user information as evidence.
napster doesn't do anyting illegal. Not a thing. The suit is total bullshit.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
That's what I'm saying. Sony is out to lunch. Of course. They want to keep their blowjobs.
I once spent 14 hours on a flight to London, sitting next to a guy who was an independent accountant - he did audits on Music companies. My credibility on this, as gossip goes, is left as an excercise for the reader.
Suffice it to say, that the stories he told me, about how badly these guys cheat - and we're just talking about taxes and money-laundering here, they opened my eyes. Nobody more than me wants to see $3-$5/song die like a witness to Bill Clinton's sexual misadventures. But the thing is, they think they can get away with it. And why not? $19.99/CD is working. Even in the face of this rampant piracy, they're making obscene amounts of money.
There is the very valid argument that music labels and all that other stuff, DO serve a valid purpose. To filter out garbage. We've suggested an alternative model. But it can't work if the prices are set artificially high. Because you'll get this artificial market of the only people who can afford music (the bulk of the market) being 13-14 year old girls with rich daddies who want to spoil them rotten, and thus will give them TONS of money to buy a CD. The girlies didn't work for it, they don't know the value of it, so it's an easy sale. That is what is going on today, my friends. The music industry is happy to stick it to this niche market, they're profitable, handsomely. And they're getting their blowjobs.
Lars said one intersting thing in his latest address. He said he had no problem seeing the music industry move on to a new technology, one that was cheaper for production, and passed on the savings to the consumer . Also, if it protected the artists rights. I'm totally down with that. But what Lars didn't say, and probably won't say because he's a chicken shit, or maybe too dumb and rich to know, that CD's were supposed to be cheaper than LP's, and the cost savings were supposed to be passed onto the consumer. Instead, they were sold at a premium, because of the supposedly higher-quality audio, and prices have pretty much not gone down with the cost of production. If you go to non-mainstream CD sources (ie. Christian music, independents, what have you), you'll see CD's retailing at $4-$8. Perhaps closer to reality.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
several reasons.
.)
Most people "feel better about it".
(not all. .
potentially higher-quality (a studio-produced "clean" MP3 - made on nice equipment, perhaps filtered to reduce artifacts, etc. - as opposed to a low-bitrate hack done on "warez-d00d's" P90 running a pirated beta of Windows 2001.)
Other value-added features?
The effort to obtain the music "officially" and cleanly, must be less than that of obtaining it on Napster - ie. they need faster servers, better UI, and more reliability than "warez-d00d's" P90 on a pair of shotgunned 56k modems.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Shut the pipes, and tomorrow, they'll be trading MP3's on CD-R's and DVD-RAM by sneakernet.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
No, the RIAA has already copyrighted Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence"
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Going to analog copying, the value of your "product" is decreased. This is what the record industry hemmed and hawwed about over CD's, the fact that the consumer now has a "perfect digital copy" of the music, and can, in theory, make unlimited other perfect digital copies. Lars made this point in his /. interview. In their mind, it makes all the difference in the world. Otherwise, people would just tape off the radio.
Yes, there is more to this that I covered in my first post - yes, any attempt at changing the technology on the supply-side, will undoubtedly meet stiff market resistance - like DIVX. But the RIAA is very powerful, they can move to limit consumer choice very easily, they have very deep pockets, look at what's at stake for them - no less than world-domination of this medium. They could do it - I don't think very easily, but they could scam and advertise and leverage any new technology into place that would make piracy a LOT less appealing.
Personally, I'd rather see a nickel-a-pop model, download an unprotected MP3 for a nickel, there's no incentive to copy it other than what falls into "fair use". Probably makes more economic sense for the record company, if you support the download infrastructure with what we talked about in the last discussion - some sort consumer-driven moderation system to filter out the crap, supplemented by some system of professional review like what's going on on www.rottentomatoes.com for film, and you replace a very expensive product that sells a lot of units, to a very cheap product that sells more than enough units to make up for the decline in price, coupled with NO increased cost of production, coupled with very happy consumers because they're getting more for their money, and they're getting a higher quality product, because the filtering is done based on review by folks like music professors, and knowledgable masses of fans, rather than a record-company exec who got a blowjob.
This is primarily why their fighting it. To keep their blowjobs.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Toshiba has repeatedly been butt-fucked by the US justice system ever since they were caught selling silent-submarine-propeller technology to the Soviets.
I'm not saying that they deserve it, or not. I'm just saying, I don't blame them for not wanting to have their healing hemmorhoids ripped open again.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Be lucky we're not in Russia.
Apparently, some company there just patented the bottle. Yeah, glass bottle for storing all kinds of liquids and stuff. They invented it. Really. Pay up man.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Hey man, Orrin Hatch ROCKS! I think he should be a good candidate for President of the US. Of course, the IT standard for the US Gov will be changed from NT to NetWare, even desktops. Hey, NetWare has a GUI now. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!