Maybe they do this partly to get publicity. Look at all the talk which goes on surrounding these things. I bet they got a lot more people talking about the G4 cube by going after MOSR, than if they hadn't. It keeps people talking about them, and I guess that's good (for Apple). It also reinforces the idea that their products are somehow super-secret/advanced and therefore worth going after. It seems to work too. Look at the number of people in the previous/. discussion on "Cube Photos - Fact or Fiction" who wound up going "Cool, I'd like one, even though it's $2k>."
And now we're goddam talking about them again. Huh.
Then you might like Forest Whitaker in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog - Way of the Samurai. It's rated 'R' so you might not get in, but you can always check out the web site Flash presentation (looks quite good, too).
David Lean directed some of the films that Guinness was in, including the more epic ones, such as Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and A Passage to India.
Fritz Lang, on the other hand, directed Metropolis, the futuristic German SF film from 1926 which some see as proto-cyberpunk. There's stuff on Metropolis all over the web, for instance here. But try Google.
I watched it again a few months ago. It's hysterical, even after all these years. Guinness is superb. He could get more laffs out of moving his left eyebrow 1/4 inch, than Jim Carey can from turning his face inside out for five minutes. That's because Guinness was a superb actor with superb timing. (IMHO). The rest of the cast aren't bad, either.
At least I'm guessing so, apologies if I am wrong. His earlier works, for instance his Fagan in Oliver Twist (1948), and the "Ealing comedies" (named after the studios which made them), such as The Lavendar Hill Mob (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955), are classics and loved to death by a lot of Brits. Including me. Rent the vids, sometime.
It's obvious that given the choice, government will lower cable privacy standards, rather than beef up telephone standards. One of the problems with the cable privacy standards is that you have to give prior notice that you will be obtaining people's records. Suspects are therefore alerted, and stop transmitting incriminating information.
The govt. will argue that this will not do, especially when the country is being threatened by all sorts of mean and nasty people (mad hackers, Chinese nuclear physicists, etc.). I guess one of the fall-outs of the fall of the eastern bloc, was that western governments need new "threats" to justify spending billions on military/spying technology. They are therefore claiming that in order to protect us all, they have to develop this technology whereby they will be able to listen to everything we say (and in fact who knows that they aren't doing so already -- we are only discussing laws here, not what they really get up to).
The reason they have let more rigourous cable privacy laws through so far, is that up until now, cable modems weren't on the radar of the types who run these agencies. Now it appears that we will all be using cable modems to talk with each other, they sure as hell will try and listen to it, whether it's legal or not.
A discussion of some of the legal implications of this is in the NY Times "Cyber Law Journal" (free reg. blah blah blah), here. According to this article, the govt. will make a play to apply telephone privacy standards to e-mail (e-mail standards are even lower), make it look as if they are increasing privacy, and then apply the whole nine yards to cable, thereby bringing a whole lot more data into their net.
Given what might or not be construed as legal activity in the near future -- listening to mp3s, wearing copyleft t-shirts, etc. -- it does not look good.
Using a "hands free" set is no different than having a conversation with someone in the car.
Well, I'm at home now, so don't have all the research to hand, but as far as I can remember, what has been done on this (comparing in-car passenger conversations with in-car phone conversations) has found that passengers, being in the car, and seeing what the driver sees, can anticipate hazards along with the driver, and then do shut the fuck up. The person on the other end of the phone usually can't see what the driver sees, and thus is more distracting for the driver.
A lot of it boils down to reaction speeds. Even 30 m.p.h. = 44 fps, so a 1/10 second distraction can easily make a difference between being under the wheels or not. Most people drive safely and responsibly and will not be involved in life-threatening situations; but no matter how good you are you can't anticipate everything. An important issue for me is that car cell-phone users are putting others at risk too.
Theres a LARGE amount a data on this in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's report, "An Investigation of the Safety Implications of Wireless Communications in Vehicles." The report correlates a lot of the studies which have been done into the issue, and also (importantly) comments on and critiques their methodology. General conclusions? Driving while using a phone is not good. (Report available here).
There is also evidence that "hands free" mic/headphone combinations make things worse, because they make the users feel that they are driving more responsibly, when in fact they are not.
More empirically, I can say that from my experience as pedestrian and cyclist in Boulder, CO, people driving and using the phone do not see you, even when you have right of way. The problem is worse with people in SUVs driving and using phones, because the higher driver position removes you from their already limited road attention even further.
This is appropriate timing, as the FCC has just postponed the auction of the frequencies for 3G cell phones (the streaming audio/video ones). The best frequencies for these phones -- UHF, around 700 MHZ -- the ones you can receive indoors -- are already taken up by tv. The tv interests are supposed to be kicked off these frequencies by 2006, when digital tv should be up and running, but there's no guarantee that they will leave by then, as the tv corporation lobbies in WashDC built various escape clauses into the regs. So while Japanese and European 3G frequencies are being auctioned off and the infrastructure/tech is being developed, US manufacturers have to wait five years just to see whether or not they will get the frequencies.
There's a report on this on MSNBC. A different and very interesting perspective was in a business editorial in The Economist last week, but as the current issue has just appeared, and at the moment I can't get on to the site to see if the article was archived, no link.
I suppose that this is an FYI, and not a correction.
Nevertheless, it did set me to pondering the use of the past tense at the beginning of the item. Assuming that A. Bertil has not done anything to remove or differentiate himself from the group which constitutes "the number of people who've written" (and it's hard to see how he could have), he is then presumably still a member of that group. In this case, therefore, perhaps the "was one" should be an "is one."
The problem is that this "is one" does not seem to jibe too well with the past tense of "who've." I think however that this usage might be acceptable if we consider that this post and the responses to it are a form of interactive communication which, despite its asynchronous characteristics, might be construed as a conversation taking place in some kind of "present" implicitly established between the participants.
Of course, like all other 'presents,' this one is a moving frame of temporal reference. Tempis fugit, etc. In a couple of hours A. Bertil will have vanished into/.'s past, the "was one" will become more appropriate, and this post will be even more OT than it already is.
This is a bad move by the RIAA. With all Napster users in one 'community,' the RIAA had a chance to do a deal with a bunch of people who might not necessarily have looked beyond Napster. Now everybody is off to try everything else. It's like trying to get rid of the dandelions in your yard by walking round with a stick and whacking their heads off.
IMHO, all a conspiracy is, is two or more people agreeing amongst themselves to do something or some things without necessarily telling other people about it. We're all in conspiracies all the time, in our social life, at work, and so on. What we need to do is distinguish between 'good,' 'bad,' and just plain indifferent conspiracies. I think that one feature of 'bad' conspiracies is the exercise of power; so we need to look at who has it, why they use it, and, importantly, who they chose to exercise it against and for what reasons.
I'd rather talk about that, because focusing on the specifics of a situation might yield some way forward. The tendency to talk of more general 'conspiracies' seems to me to be just one more way to perhaps distance your own actions and involvement from what is actually going on in the world. It doesn't matter if it is religion, UFOs, or who whacked JFK, while the talk is enjoyable, these issues will remain in the realm of the unresolvable. And note that when these things do get out of hand, the consequences can be terrible (as in for instance Nazi conspiracy theories regarding the Jews, or Pol Pot's thoughts on the role of intellectuals and education).
Caffeine Use = Reduced Suicide Risk?
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Caffeine Vault
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· Score: 2
There's disputed research by Kawachi et al. that caffeine users might commit suicide less. I mean, they can only commit suicide once, but they are less likely to try. Junkscience.com has a cite for, and a short summary and discussion of, the original paper.
Re:Health Effects of caffeine
on
Caffeine Vault
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· Score: 1
Oh, and the other thing: ever wonder why Excedrin and some of the other headache medicines have caffeine in them? In part, it's because caffeine withdrawal in addicted patients (half of America it seems) can give you headaches.
Caffeine also, as the other reply states, dilates the blood vessels on the surface of the brain and scalp. I think (but am not sure) that this is useful for two different types of headache (and I get both) -- caffeine withdrawal headaches, which take a while to come on and feel like a slowly tightening band around my head, and migraines, which feel like being stabbed in the eye with a very sharp knife (anybody seen the film "Jesus' Son" by the way?...). Migraines come on v. quickly w/ recognisable symptoms but slugging a strong coffee in the first 20 or 30 minutes can sometimes avoid the consequences (i.e. lying down in the dark and moaning for 4 hours).
There's also research tying caffeine use to lower suicide rates. Having just had a breakfast cup or two, I'm off to find that...
The problem with this research is that it shows that the declines in music sales in college towns began before Napster started up. Sometimes, several years before Napster started. For instance, a ZDNet report on the Soundscan report showed declines beginning in the first quarter of 1998. A report on MSNBC on June 13 (now no longer on the web site?) was illustrated by a chart labeled "RIAA 1998 Profile," which showed CD sales from 1994-1998! Sure, both show declining sales -- but from before Napster.
On the other hand, the declines might coincide with colleges and schools putting ethernet in their dorms, and students increasingly coming to school with computers. $0.02.
This posting's a bit late, but the web site of the UK committee on cell phones and health, mentioned in the article, is at http://www.iegmp.org.uk. There's a PDF of the report there, which includes the interesting observation that the cords in headsets could actually act as aerials and increase the signals entering the brain.
Great. If you're on a network, it will presumably be so easy to send all your 'attention metrics' to some central location, where your performance can be 'tracked' by mindless automatons, to determine just how much you are 'concentrating' on your job. The equation will run, less switching between tasks = better productivity. But what's wrong with hopping between windows? That's how I work best anyway. Doing just one task for a while can drive me nuts.
Tell me about it. When I'm on a PC at work, using the programmes which are provided for me, I spend way too much time and energy using the help index, trying to figure out how to stop MSW messing with what I want to do. On Macs, I use MS Word 5.1a, from the early 1990s I believe. It does everything I need. Without the dictionaries (I use British rather than American English anyway), the programme is about 880k. Which means I can carry it around on a floppy and install it wherever I need to use it in a couple of minutes. Plus, on a G4, it starts up and runs so quickly.
We can have the thermal inversions from hell, particularly in front of the Front Range, when it's hot at 6000 ft but there's still plenty of cold air flowing down off the snow mass up on the continental divide. One of the best times to see the brown cloud is to be a few hundred feet up the front range on a bright winter's day. It shows up really well against the snow covered plains. But what we also have are a boom economy, plenty of outdoor recreation opportunities, and way too many SUVs. SUVs (as you may well know) are not required to have clean emissions cuz car manufacturers payed Washington politicians to have them legally classified as trucks. As in, SUVs have truck sub-frames, therefore are 'trucks,' therefore can put far more CO/CO2 etc. into the air then they should. Boulder, for instance, despite all its pretensions to being a liberal-greeny type of place, is fast becoming an upper middle class wealth ghetto where the downtown streets are now so clogged with late-model wagons and SUVs as to resemble Jeep and Toyota dealerships, and the air quality quite literally sucks.
You're right; god dammit. I plead two mitigating circumstances. First, I'm British, and we just avoid all that sort of confusion by simply having 1760 yards in a mile. Second, I'm an anthropologist, and was just slavishly quoting the Nature article. However, the confusion seems to be in other places too, for instance in the web site of Yotta Yotta NetStorage at www.yottayotta.com (company motto: "Put a Lotta Yottayotta in Your Life," and there's also a company theme song). Also, somebody who uses the base 10 rather than base 2 definitions of these terms has placed calculations of how many bytes there are in different things are here... I was just thinking, that although 2*10 is quite close to 10*3 (2.4% off, right), 2*80 is quite a way off from 10*24 (about 21% I think). At some point, the two series must get completely out of step.
According to this article in Nature, 1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte, and 1000 petabytes = 1 exabyte. The article notes that as ever larger and more complex scientific experiments produce ever larger quantities of data, there was briefly a possibility that we would run out of words to describe the amount of data produced. Consider that while the Library of Congress contains less than 12 terabytes, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is expected to produce 100 petabytes (i.e., 100,000 terabytes) of stored data in 15 years... Anyway, moving on up, after exabyte, they (whoever they are) started naming things from the back of the alphabet. Thus 1000 exabytes = 1 zettabyte, and 1000 zettabytes = 1 yottabyte. Although the article does not say, perhaps the term for 1000 yottabytes will skip over 'x,' as we already have exabyte, and go to 'wottabyte'? I like the sound of that:)...
Well, I usually do buy the CD, in the end, if I like it. I think, though, that a number of points still obscure the apparently clear equation of more mp3 downloads = less sales of product.
In my experience, most mp3s are dumped, anyway. I just don't know what to do with them. I would guess if you could somehow figure the total number of files ever swapped on Napster -- and other sites -- it would dwarf the amount of storage out there. However, point taken, there will be a certain number out there which might otherwise have been sales to you. Funnily enough, the best use I can see for mp3 technology for myself -- assuming the memory becomes cheap enough -- is to be able to rip 10 or 20 CDs I already own, and then carry an mp3 player instead of a diskman. and CDs.
No-one actually knows what sells music in the music industry. The first person who actually figures that one out, will have the market. Success involves not just technical competence, but a mix of other intangibles, including fashions and trends. Unlike other more material commodities, there is no direct equation between the use value of musical commodity, and its exchange value. Just because you have a product you think is fantastic, doesn't mean it will sell, and that could have nothing to do with how good you are as an artist or musician.
From my personal experience, the effort I went through to copy something I wanted but didn't want to buy was directly related to my income. On $12 an hour, I burned CDs. On $25 an hour, I like walking into the record store. Point being, there is probably a correlation between income and copying; in other words, Napster users might not have that much money anyway (although university undergrads? -- hmmm, I don't know).
Anyway. The few people I know who have gained some sort of temporary exposure for being musicians (record deals, tours, selling out venues, etc.) all worked far harder than just about anybody else I know. You have to work pretty hard just to be on the radar, but I guess you know that. (My brother is in a band in Wales, they work hard, tour a lot, have great reviews, play to sell out crowds, have a bunch of CDs, but I doubt they could afford a 'previously owned' BMW between them, although they do seem to be having a great time). What I'm saying is, it's quite a crap shoot. You have to have a fair amount of luck. Napster's implications have now been superseded by Gnutella, Freenet, etc., anyway. So I wouldn't worry about it, it'll take too much of the time you could be using for your own projects, with which I wish you every success.
There are many fallacies in the arguments put around by the various parties in this dispute. Record companies push reports which show that CD sales in college town record stores have been declining. Problem is, the decline happened before Napster (a more credible explanation is college kids having access to ethernet, credit cards, and online stores). Napster claims that is enabling file sharing rather then bootlegging. Problem is, these concepts are tied to ideas of property and its sharing which predate the Internet, and the scale at which it now enables music to be shared. Then musicians claim that they are losing income because of Napster.
Baptist Death Ray state, 'Meanwhile, the consumer looks at a Web site where he or she can spend $8 for a CD, and then looks at Napster and sees the entire contents of the album online, free. Pay, or free.' What is wrong with this statement is that it is NOT a case of pay or free. It's a case of free, or I don't listen to the song. There is no guarantee that if BDR's songs were not available for free, then I would pay for them. Reason? Why should I PAY for BDR's music, if there are better alternatives? I'm not saying that BDR's music is bad, but that there might be people doing better things.
I don't have enough money to buy every CD that is averagely competent. In other words, if I download a BDR mp3, BDR have not necessarily lost $8 on a CD I might not have wanted to buy in the first place.
I've had this discussion with a number of musicians who think that, just because they are somehow 'artists,' then anything they produce should automatically have some kind of value on the market. Wrong. I have a limited income, and I try to spend that on CDs I really like. I like to reverse the musician argument of "I'm producing something, you should pay me" to read instead "I'm spending my money on your product and I expect you to deliver a certain level of quality." Which is advice a lot of them could heed.
Slashdot Mirror
And now we're goddam talking about them again. Huh.
-fff-
(I like Macs, BTW)
See ya
-fff-
Fritz Lang, on the other hand, directed Metropolis, the futuristic German SF film from 1926 which some see as proto-cyberpunk. There's stuff on Metropolis all over the web, for instance here. But try Google.
-fff-
fff
The govt. will argue that this will not do, especially when the country is being threatened by all sorts of mean and nasty people (mad hackers, Chinese nuclear physicists, etc.). I guess one of the fall-outs of the fall of the eastern bloc, was that western governments need new "threats" to justify spending billions on military/spying technology. They are therefore claiming that in order to protect us all, they have to develop this technology whereby they will be able to listen to everything we say (and in fact who knows that they aren't doing so already -- we are only discussing laws here, not what they really get up to).
The reason they have let more rigourous cable privacy laws through so far, is that up until now, cable modems weren't on the radar of the types who run these agencies. Now it appears that we will all be using cable modems to talk with each other, they sure as hell will try and listen to it, whether it's legal or not.
A discussion of some of the legal implications of this is in the NY Times "Cyber Law Journal" (free reg. blah blah blah), here. According to this article, the govt. will make a play to apply telephone privacy standards to e-mail (e-mail standards are even lower), make it look as if they are increasing privacy, and then apply the whole nine yards to cable, thereby bringing a whole lot more data into their net.
Given what might or not be construed as legal activity in the near future -- listening to mp3s, wearing copyleft t-shirts, etc. -- it does not look good.
fff
Well, I'm at home now, so don't have all the research to hand, but as far as I can remember, what has been done on this (comparing in-car passenger conversations with in-car phone conversations) has found that passengers, being in the car, and seeing what the driver sees, can anticipate hazards along with the driver, and then do shut the fuck up. The person on the other end of the phone usually can't see what the driver sees, and thus is more distracting for the driver.
A lot of it boils down to reaction speeds. Even 30 m.p.h. = 44 fps, so a 1/10 second distraction can easily make a difference between being under the wheels or not. Most people drive safely and responsibly and will not be involved in life-threatening situations; but no matter how good you are you can't anticipate everything. An important issue for me is that car cell-phone users are putting others at risk too.
fff
There is also evidence that "hands free" mic/headphone combinations make things worse, because they make the users feel that they are driving more responsibly, when in fact they are not.
More empirically, I can say that from my experience as pedestrian and cyclist in Boulder, CO, people driving and using the phone do not see you, even when you have right of way. The problem is worse with people in SUVs driving and using phones, because the higher driver position removes you from their already limited road attention even further.
fff
fff
Nevertheless, it did set me to pondering the use of the past tense at the beginning of the item. Assuming that A. Bertil has not done anything to remove or differentiate himself from the group which constitutes "the number of people who've written" (and it's hard to see how he could have), he is then presumably still a member of that group. In this case, therefore, perhaps the "was one" should be an "is one."
The problem is that this "is one" does not seem to jibe too well with the past tense of "who've." I think however that this usage might be acceptable if we consider that this post and the responses to it are a form of interactive communication which, despite its asynchronous characteristics, might be construed as a conversation taking place in some kind of "present" implicitly established between the participants.
Of course, like all other 'presents,' this one is a moving frame of temporal reference. Tempis fugit, etc. In a couple of hours A. Bertil will have vanished into /.'s past, the "was one" will become more appropriate, and this post will be even more OT than it already is.
fff
I'd rather talk about that, because focusing on the specifics of a situation might yield some way forward. The tendency to talk of more general 'conspiracies' seems to me to be just one more way to perhaps distance your own actions and involvement from what is actually going on in the world. It doesn't matter if it is religion, UFOs, or who whacked JFK, while the talk is enjoyable, these issues will remain in the realm of the unresolvable. And note that when these things do get out of hand, the consequences can be terrible (as in for instance Nazi conspiracy theories regarding the Jews, or Pol Pot's thoughts on the role of intellectuals and education).
There's disputed research by Kawachi et al. that caffeine users might commit suicide less. I mean, they can only commit suicide once, but they are less likely to try. Junkscience.com has a cite for, and a short summary and discussion of, the original paper.
Caffeine also, as the other reply states, dilates the blood vessels on the surface of the brain and scalp. I think (but am not sure) that this is useful for two different types of headache (and I get both) -- caffeine withdrawal headaches, which take a while to come on and feel like a slowly tightening band around my head, and migraines, which feel like being stabbed in the eye with a very sharp knife (anybody seen the film "Jesus' Son" by the way?...). Migraines come on v. quickly w/ recognisable symptoms but slugging a strong coffee in the first 20 or 30 minutes can sometimes avoid the consequences (i.e. lying down in the dark and moaning for 4 hours).
There's also research tying caffeine use to lower suicide rates. Having just had a breakfast cup or two, I'm off to find that ...
On the other hand, the declines might coincide with colleges and schools putting ethernet in their dorms, and students increasingly coming to school with computers. $0.02.
This posting's a bit late, but the web site of the UK committee on cell phones and health, mentioned in the article, is at http://www.iegmp.org.uk. There's a PDF of the report there, which includes the interesting observation that the cords in headsets could actually act as aerials and increase the signals entering the brain.
Great. If you're on a network, it will presumably be so easy to send all your 'attention metrics' to some central location, where your performance can be 'tracked' by mindless automatons, to determine just how much you are 'concentrating' on your job. The equation will run, less switching between tasks = better productivity. But what's wrong with hopping between windows? That's how I work best anyway. Doing just one task for a while can drive me nuts.
Tell me about it. When I'm on a PC at work, using the programmes which are provided for me, I spend way too much time and energy using the help index, trying to figure out how to stop MSW messing with what I want to do. On Macs, I use MS Word 5.1a, from the early 1990s I believe. It does everything I need. Without the dictionaries (I use British rather than American English anyway), the programme is about 880k. Which means I can carry it around on a floppy and install it wherever I need to use it in a couple of minutes. Plus, on a G4, it starts up and runs so quickly.
Google has an interesting collection of links on "urban climate." http://directory.google.com/alpha/Top/Science/Eart h_Sciences/Meteorology/Urban_Climat e/.
*Cough, cough.* That feels better. $0.02.
You're right; god dammit. I plead two mitigating circumstances. First, I'm British, and we just avoid all that sort of confusion by simply having 1760 yards in a mile. Second, I'm an anthropologist, and was just slavishly quoting the Nature article. However, the confusion seems to be in other places too, for instance in the web site of Yotta Yotta NetStorage at www.yottayotta.com (company motto: "Put a Lotta Yottayotta in Your Life," and there's also a company theme song). Also, somebody who uses the base 10 rather than base 2 definitions of these terms has placed calculations of how many bytes there are in different things are here... I was just thinking, that although 2*10 is quite close to 10*3 (2.4% off, right), 2*80 is quite a way off from 10*24 (about 21% I think). At some point, the two series must get completely out of step.
According to this article in Nature, 1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte, and 1000 petabytes = 1 exabyte. The article notes that as ever larger and more complex scientific experiments produce ever larger quantities of data, there was briefly a possibility that we would run out of words to describe the amount of data produced. Consider that while the Library of Congress contains less than 12 terabytes, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is expected to produce 100 petabytes (i.e., 100,000 terabytes) of stored data in 15 years... Anyway, moving on up, after exabyte, they (whoever they are) started naming things from the back of the alphabet. Thus 1000 exabytes = 1 zettabyte, and 1000 zettabytes = 1 yottabyte. Although the article does not say, perhaps the term for 1000 yottabytes will skip over 'x,' as we already have exabyte, and go to 'wottabyte'? I like the sound of that :) ...
Well, I usually do buy the CD, in the end, if I like it. I think, though, that a number of points still obscure the apparently clear equation of more mp3 downloads = less sales of product.
Anyway. The few people I know who have gained some sort of temporary exposure for being musicians (record deals, tours, selling out venues, etc.) all worked far harder than just about anybody else I know. You have to work pretty hard just to be on the radar, but I guess you know that. (My brother is in a band in Wales, they work hard, tour a lot, have great reviews, play to sell out crowds, have a bunch of CDs, but I doubt they could afford a 'previously owned' BMW between them, although they do seem to be having a great time). What I'm saying is, it's quite a crap shoot. You have to have a fair amount of luck. Napster's implications have now been superseded by Gnutella, Freenet, etc., anyway. So I wouldn't worry about it, it'll take too much of the time you could be using for your own projects, with which I wish you every success.
There are many fallacies in the arguments put around by the various parties in this dispute. Record companies push reports which show that CD sales in college town record stores have been declining. Problem is, the decline happened before Napster (a more credible explanation is college kids having access to ethernet, credit cards, and online stores). Napster claims that is enabling file sharing rather then bootlegging. Problem is, these concepts are tied to ideas of property and its sharing which predate the Internet, and the scale at which it now enables music to be shared. Then musicians claim that they are losing income because of Napster.
Baptist Death Ray state, 'Meanwhile, the consumer looks at a Web site where he or she can spend $8 for a CD, and then looks at Napster and sees the entire contents of the album online, free. Pay, or free.' What is wrong with this statement is that it is NOT a case of pay or free. It's a case of free, or I don't listen to the song. There is no guarantee that if BDR's songs were not available for free, then I would pay for them. Reason? Why should I PAY for BDR's music, if there are better alternatives? I'm not saying that BDR's music is bad, but that there might be people doing better things.
I don't have enough money to buy every CD that is averagely competent. In other words, if I download a BDR mp3, BDR have not necessarily lost $8 on a CD I might not have wanted to buy in the first place.
I've had this discussion with a number of musicians who think that, just because they are somehow 'artists,' then anything they produce should automatically have some kind of value on the market. Wrong. I have a limited income, and I try to spend that on CDs I really like. I like to reverse the musician argument of "I'm producing something, you should pay me" to read instead "I'm spending my money on your product and I expect you to deliver a certain level of quality." Which is advice a lot of them could heed.
$0.02. Ker-chingg!