With the rise of industry slavery was doomed, It just became a negative return beyond the moral reasons.
On a recent trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I encountered some interesting views on slavery. I was taking a tour of an old plantation house ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleton_Place ) and they were talking about their rice production before and after the Civil War. Before the war, they were able to produce quite a bit of rice. After the war, with slavery outlawed, they tried doing it using a "communal work" type of setup, but it wasn't profitable. Basically, once they had to pay their laborers, they couldn't turn a profit. It was interesting (to say the least) to hear slavery talked about in purely economic terms, as if there was no human suffering or moral quandaries involved. It was certainly different than the discussion you would have with someone from New York (like me) about slavery.
Might I add: Get your music fix from Indie artists. Buy from eMusic.com or AmieStreet.com. You'll spend less money, get music from great artists, won't get DRM, and the artists will actually see much of the money you're spending. I'd love to see the day when an eMusic/Amie Street artist got so popular that they broke into the Top 10 list. (If that's even possible.)
Actually, there are multiple instances of courts telling the RIAA to stop certain practices of theirs and the RIAA simply ignoring the judge's orders in another court.
Two examples that come to mind are filing multiple unrelated John Doe lawsuits as one (cuts down on filing time for the RIAA, but is an abuse of the court process) and being told that "making available" isn't a valid argument then telling another judge that "making available" *is* a valid argument.
The uncertainty principle says that you can't know the exact location and velocity of a particle. It doesn't say that a space warlord nuked some aliens on Earth thousands of years ago, set up a force field to keep their souls trapped here, that those trapped souls are the source of all problems in the world, and that the only way to get rid of them is to pay the Church of Scientology thousands of dollars to take courses.
I honestly don't think they're stupid, just calculating. They can't do anything about a recession or competition from other forms of entertainment without lowering their prices (something which might cut into their profits). They refuse to blame themselves and their own poor music quality. (That's just crazy talk.) So what's left are "evil Internet pirates." They pin as much blame as possible onto pirates and then try to get rules passed to stop the evil pirates. The rules have the side effect of giving the RIAA labels more money/power. (e.g. a mandatory $5/monthly "pirating" fee on your ISP bill, shotgun lawsuits, claiming that ripping CDs is illegal, claiming that all file sharing is illegal etc.) The end result, if they get their way, is a record industry that stays in power even when the market is trying to push them to the sidelines and that keeps profits artificially high.
Honestly, not much. To some degrees, it's an honor system. It's not like Temples are going to run detailed background checks on your family history to make sure you are Jewish or were converted in the proper manner. However, if the truth gets out that your conversion merely consisted of you declaring "I'm a Jew now," you'll be ostracized from the community. Even the most lenient of Temples, require some form of ritual/study combination to ensure that your conversion is done properly. The rules aren't meant to stop someone from imitating a Jew nor are they meant to prevent someone from studying Judaism or from following the Jewish laws, there are meant to stop "on a whim conversions." (Conversions by people who are likely to convert back after a week or so.) By all means, follow the laws of kashrut and observe the Jewish holidays all you want (I do it and believe me, it's not easy!), but you can't just declare that you've joined a community without following that community's rules for acceptance.
The catch is, you can't convert into it - you're either into it from the start, or you will think that it's insanity.
This isn't true, however. You can convert into Judaism, we just purposefully make it difficult to do so. The custom is that you need to turn the person away 3 times. Only after they come back after the third turn-away can they begin the process to convert. This helps ensure that people don't take conversion to Judaism lightly. The conversion itself is mainly classes to get up to speed on the religious laws and then a dunk in a mikvah (a kind of ritual pool). Males have an extra obstacle - circumcision. And don't think that hospital-administered one will get you out of it. In the case of an already circumcised male convert, a drop of blood is still taken (as a sort of token religious circumcision). The end result is that converts are actually more likely to be religious than natural-born Jews and aren't likely to convert away from Judaism on a whim.
Actually, I don't think it is the RIAA that is proving this. It's the social networking scene and people posting intimate details of their lives along with their names and personal information. When "John User" doesn't think twice about setting up his Facebook account to list his real name, location, date of birth, and a listing (with photos) of all of his recent activities, his anonymity vanishes.
And yes, I know this is being posted from an account using my real name. I set it up years ago. I've recently started using a pseudonym for many online sites, but can't simply change my Slashdot username.
Same here. I've gotten a couple of e-mails from the "FBI" claiming that they'll be stopping by in a week to investigate me for some illegal money transfers. Now, putting aside the fact that I'm not involved in anything of the sort and putting aside the fact that the FBI wouldn't warn me that they would be stopping by in a week, why would they contact me via e-mail? So I junked it as spam. If I got a "you've been served" e-mail, I'd junk that too. E-mail and Facebook shouldn't be valid methods of serving someone with legal papers.
Ah, but if they could turn back the clock to a time when they were the be all and end all of music, they would make tons of money again. At least, that's what they think. They see their control slipping away. They see a time coming when artists might not even need labels at all and it scares them.
Personally, I think labels will always be needed, but their future is more like an ad agency or a book publisher than a cartel. An artist will sign up with a label and pay them a fee for the label to publish/promote some songs. If the artist isn't satisfied with the label's performance, the artist can leave for another label. The artist remains in control of the copyrights at all times.
According to my math, they're losing money hand over fist.
Which supports the theory that many here have put forward that this isn't about money or even copyrights at all. It's about control. It used to be that the only way to become even a moderately successful musician was to get a contract from a Big Recording Label. Since the labels had their pick of artists, they could dictate the terms. On the consumer front, you had to buy the music that the big labels decided would be on the shelves. Indie bands were around, but were a tiny niche. And any time the label came up with a new format (vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD), you needed to buy your collection all over again.
Computers and the Internet have changed all that, though. Nowadays, an artist can upload their music to eMusic, Amie Street, or a whole bunch of other sites to sell it. They could even sell it on their own website. Indie labels (offering artists better terms) are becoming more popular. Portable music players and the MP3 format mean that your music will play on your music player for some time to come.
The big labels don't like this and are trying to stop it at all costs. They tried to get the courts to declare that MP3 players were illegal (the Diamond Lawsuit). When that failed, they tried to keep music offline (Napster). When that didn't work, they worked with Apple on iTunes with the requirement that DRM be built in. When iTunes got too powerful, they allowed DRM to be ditched to come up with iTunes competitors (e.g. Amazon MP3). In each case, reality forces them back a notch, but they're still fighting back. If they had their wildest dreams granted, all online music would be made illegal, ripping CDs would be illegal, used CDs would be illegal, and portable music players would be illegal. Unless the RIAA finds a magic genie, though, it's not going to happen.
In addition, the lawsuits are also a diversion of blame. Sales are down and the labels need someone to blame. Should they blame the poor economy or the increased competition for consumers' entertainment dollar from DVDs, video games, etc? Should they blame themselves for putting out garbage music and seeking out bands purely on the basis that they sound similar to a band that had a hit? Or should they blame Evil Internet Pirates? Obviously, they've chosen Door #3 and are attempting to pin all of their financial woes on Evil Internet Pirates. It's much easier than blaming yourself or recognizing that sales were up during a boom time and now it is a bust time.
Actually, the artists will see a dime, but then the labels will need to take out a handling fee, processing fee, breakage fee, etc. In the end, the artist will owe the label $10,000.
As kramer said you'd probably be tossed out if you attempted this. But even assuming you got away with it, the RIAA has shown that they are willing to ignore precedent when it suits them. There was the recent set of cases where one judge ruled against "Making Available" and the RIAA failed to inform a second judge of that ruling when it was their responsibility to do so. Luckily, the second judge called for the legal equivalent of a do-over to fix his mistaken jury instructions.
Wasn't there a news story about this a week or so ago? Some companies were being sued because employees weren't allowed to punch in for the day until their computer was fully booted up and they loaded some applications. The employees figured that they were losing a half hour to an hour of paid time every day and so sued for back pay. If companies figure your start time as when you load the "punch in" application on your computer, then all the time you spend twiddling your thumbs while the system boots up is free to them.
Last year my wife kept mentioning that she wanted a mother-child pendant. (Here's a photo of one, in case you don't know what it is: http://www.amazon.com/Sterling-Silver-Heart-Shaped-Pendant-Russell/dp/B000OZT53O ) Trying to be a good husband, I took the hint and bought her one. It cost around $250, but I figured that it was something that she wanted. Instead, when I presented her with it, she slapped me and told me that I shouldn't have spent so much on a piece of jewelry. I think she would welcome the opportunity to get nice looking diamonds at only $5 each.
I agree. I've had a Wiimote fly out of a hand while playing... out of my 5 year old's hand. (The strap was on and kept it from going too far.) That only happened once. We had a nice talk about letting go and it hasn't happened since. Unless these people have a mental age of 5, I don't see why someone's Wiimote should fly out of their hands. And if your mental age is 5, maybe you shouldn't be playing Nintendo Wii unsupervised.
Any sperm-egg pairing is a potential human. Stopping that pairing is (in the view of some religions) a sin. (Witness religious rules against condoms.) I therefore conclude that to keep from sinning, all men and women must repeatedly have sex with each other to get as many sperm-egg pairings made as possible. (I'd volunteer, but my wife would kill me. And I don't want her to sin.;-) )
When my wife was pregnant with our second child, there was a time when we thought he might have Down's Syndrome. As we waited for the test results, we discussed our options. We came to the conclusion that -- if the test came back positive -- we would abort the pregnancy. We just didn't have the money to take care of a Down's Syndrome child and felt it would hurt our existing son. It was an awful decision to have to make and we felt horrible, but we knew it was the right thing to do.
Luckily, the test came back negative and we went on to have a healthy baby boy. While we're thankful that we didn't have to follow through on our decision, we don't regret it. It was an awful decision to have to make, but it should be between the parents-to-be, their doctor, and their god (if they believe in one). The government and/or someone else's god/religion shouldn't intrude into the decision.
As an aside, the initial test, it turns out, shows positive for nearly everyone. Why do they give a test like that?!! To torture parents-to-be?
There are three simple reasons why a music tax is a bad idea.
1 - There are people who won't use it but will be forced to pay. Not only people like me who currently get their music from legal sources, but people who don't listen to music at all. This includes people who *CAN'T* listen to music. Yes, deaf people would be forced to pay for music that they couldn't listen to if they wanted to.
2 - The fees will go to the power players. The major labels will make sure the rules are tilted so that indie labels get little to nothing. In fact, they'll probably ensure that artists get little to nothing as well.
3 - There will be a pile-on by other industries. The movie industry will ask why the music industry is so special and will demand their own "piracy tax." Then the TV industry will join in. Then the software industry. The book industry. And so on. Pretty soon, your "piracy tax" will double or triple the price of your Internet connection.
If you make it voluntary, you remove problem #1, but problem numbers 2 and 3 will still remain. And I can guarantee that the industry won't want it to be voluntary.
Calvin: You find it strange that scientists can imagine something as farfetched as all the matter in the universe exploding out of something the size of of the head of a pin, but can't imagine a more creative name than the big bang?! Hobbes: Well, what would you call it? Calvin: THE HORRENDOUS SPACE KABLOOEY!
PDFCreator wasn't for StarOffice. It was to allow people to convert their WordPro, Microsoft Word, etc documents into PDFs for posting online.
In the end, we didn't change our office suites at all. The big problem with OpenOffice.org (and StarOffice) was that they didn't support opening Lotus WordPro files. We have a ton of those and would need to be able to open them up in whatever new program we used. I'd be interested if anyone knows of a Lotus WordPro import filter for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
I have a coworker who is like this. Every time he hears that I'm using a free piece of software, he makes a snide remark. If the server goes down, he tries to pin it on some freeware that I used. (Nevermind that the crash could in no way be realistically tied to the freeware.) In his mind, Free = Junk. He seems to think that you have to pay money to get quality software. That's why, when I tried to recommend OpenOffice.org to replace our Lotus WordPro installations, I decided to recommend StarOffice instead. I figured that he wouldn't object as much if we needed to pay something for the software. (He must be silently fuming that I've got tons of people here using PDFCreator to convert their documents into PDF for posting to our Intranet.)
I will agree that good teachers tend to get burned out quickly. My wife is/was a teacher and she saw plenty of good first year teachers dropping out of the teaching profession in their second year. She's a stay at home mom now because we figured that her salary minus daycare for our two boys would mean she'd be taking home less than $4K per year. And for that $4K, she would need to work 10 hours per day, take work home with her (grading, lesson planning, etc) and would need to deal with administrators and parents making her life a living hell. Which is a shame because she was one of the good teachers. It just wasn't worth it financially for her to continue. She's have earned more per hour worked flipping burgers at McDonald's.
For the record, she was in a private school. An all-girl's Catholic middle school. A year after she left (after our second son was born), she heard that a long-time teacher left the school. Then, during a visit, she heard some parents patting themselves on the back for forcing that teacher out and planning the next one to target. She concluded that she had left at just the right time.
Slashdot Mirror
On a recent trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I encountered some interesting views on slavery. I was taking a tour of an old plantation house ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleton_Place ) and they were talking about their rice production before and after the Civil War. Before the war, they were able to produce quite a bit of rice. After the war, with slavery outlawed, they tried doing it using a "communal work" type of setup, but it wasn't profitable. Basically, once they had to pay their laborers, they couldn't turn a profit. It was interesting (to say the least) to hear slavery talked about in purely economic terms, as if there was no human suffering or moral quandaries involved. It was certainly different than the discussion you would have with someone from New York (like me) about slavery.
Might I add: Get your music fix from Indie artists. Buy from eMusic.com or AmieStreet.com. You'll spend less money, get music from great artists, won't get DRM, and the artists will actually see much of the money you're spending. I'd love to see the day when an eMusic/Amie Street artist got so popular that they broke into the Top 10 list. (If that's even possible.)
Actually, there are multiple instances of courts telling the RIAA to stop certain practices of theirs and the RIAA simply ignoring the judge's orders in another court.
Two examples that come to mind are filing multiple unrelated John Doe lawsuits as one (cuts down on filing time for the RIAA, but is an abuse of the court process) and being told that "making available" isn't a valid argument then telling another judge that "making available" *is* a valid argument.
The uncertainty principle says that you can't know the exact location and velocity of a particle. It doesn't say that a space warlord nuked some aliens on Earth thousands of years ago, set up a force field to keep their souls trapped here, that those trapped souls are the source of all problems in the world, and that the only way to get rid of them is to pay the Church of Scientology thousands of dollars to take courses.
I honestly don't think they're stupid, just calculating. They can't do anything about a recession or competition from other forms of entertainment without lowering their prices (something which might cut into their profits). They refuse to blame themselves and their own poor music quality. (That's just crazy talk.) So what's left are "evil Internet pirates." They pin as much blame as possible onto pirates and then try to get rules passed to stop the evil pirates. The rules have the side effect of giving the RIAA labels more money/power. (e.g. a mandatory $5/monthly "pirating" fee on your ISP bill, shotgun lawsuits, claiming that ripping CDs is illegal, claiming that all file sharing is illegal etc.) The end result, if they get their way, is a record industry that stays in power even when the market is trying to push them to the sidelines and that keeps profits artificially high.
Honestly, not much. To some degrees, it's an honor system. It's not like Temples are going to run detailed background checks on your family history to make sure you are Jewish or were converted in the proper manner. However, if the truth gets out that your conversion merely consisted of you declaring "I'm a Jew now," you'll be ostracized from the community. Even the most lenient of Temples, require some form of ritual/study combination to ensure that your conversion is done properly. The rules aren't meant to stop someone from imitating a Jew nor are they meant to prevent someone from studying Judaism or from following the Jewish laws, there are meant to stop "on a whim conversions." (Conversions by people who are likely to convert back after a week or so.) By all means, follow the laws of kashrut and observe the Jewish holidays all you want (I do it and believe me, it's not easy!), but you can't just declare that you've joined a community without following that community's rules for acceptance.
The article's author says about Judaism:
This isn't true, however. You can convert into Judaism, we just purposefully make it difficult to do so. The custom is that you need to turn the person away 3 times. Only after they come back after the third turn-away can they begin the process to convert. This helps ensure that people don't take conversion to Judaism lightly. The conversion itself is mainly classes to get up to speed on the religious laws and then a dunk in a mikvah (a kind of ritual pool). Males have an extra obstacle - circumcision. And don't think that hospital-administered one will get you out of it. In the case of an already circumcised male convert, a drop of blood is still taken (as a sort of token religious circumcision). The end result is that converts are actually more likely to be religious than natural-born Jews and aren't likely to convert away from Judaism on a whim.
Actually, I don't think it is the RIAA that is proving this. It's the social networking scene and people posting intimate details of their lives along with their names and personal information. When "John User" doesn't think twice about setting up his Facebook account to list his real name, location, date of birth, and a listing (with photos) of all of his recent activities, his anonymity vanishes.
And yes, I know this is being posted from an account using my real name. I set it up years ago. I've recently started using a pseudonym for many online sites, but can't simply change my Slashdot username.
Same here. I've gotten a couple of e-mails from the "FBI" claiming that they'll be stopping by in a week to investigate me for some illegal money transfers. Now, putting aside the fact that I'm not involved in anything of the sort and putting aside the fact that the FBI wouldn't warn me that they would be stopping by in a week, why would they contact me via e-mail? So I junked it as spam. If I got a "you've been served" e-mail, I'd junk that too. E-mail and Facebook shouldn't be valid methods of serving someone with legal papers.
Ah, but if they could turn back the clock to a time when they were the be all and end all of music, they would make tons of money again. At least, that's what they think. They see their control slipping away. They see a time coming when artists might not even need labels at all and it scares them.
Personally, I think labels will always be needed, but their future is more like an ad agency or a book publisher than a cartel. An artist will sign up with a label and pay them a fee for the label to publish/promote some songs. If the artist isn't satisfied with the label's performance, the artist can leave for another label. The artist remains in control of the copyrights at all times.
Which supports the theory that many here have put forward that this isn't about money or even copyrights at all. It's about control. It used to be that the only way to become even a moderately successful musician was to get a contract from a Big Recording Label. Since the labels had their pick of artists, they could dictate the terms. On the consumer front, you had to buy the music that the big labels decided would be on the shelves. Indie bands were around, but were a tiny niche. And any time the label came up with a new format (vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD), you needed to buy your collection all over again.
Computers and the Internet have changed all that, though. Nowadays, an artist can upload their music to eMusic, Amie Street, or a whole bunch of other sites to sell it. They could even sell it on their own website. Indie labels (offering artists better terms) are becoming more popular. Portable music players and the MP3 format mean that your music will play on your music player for some time to come.
The big labels don't like this and are trying to stop it at all costs. They tried to get the courts to declare that MP3 players were illegal (the Diamond Lawsuit). When that failed, they tried to keep music offline (Napster). When that didn't work, they worked with Apple on iTunes with the requirement that DRM be built in. When iTunes got too powerful, they allowed DRM to be ditched to come up with iTunes competitors (e.g. Amazon MP3). In each case, reality forces them back a notch, but they're still fighting back. If they had their wildest dreams granted, all online music would be made illegal, ripping CDs would be illegal, used CDs would be illegal, and portable music players would be illegal. Unless the RIAA finds a magic genie, though, it's not going to happen.
In addition, the lawsuits are also a diversion of blame. Sales are down and the labels need someone to blame. Should they blame the poor economy or the increased competition for consumers' entertainment dollar from DVDs, video games, etc? Should they blame themselves for putting out garbage music and seeking out bands purely on the basis that they sound similar to a band that had a hit? Or should they blame Evil Internet Pirates? Obviously, they've chosen Door #3 and are attempting to pin all of their financial woes on Evil Internet Pirates. It's much easier than blaming yourself or recognizing that sales were up during a boom time and now it is a bust time.
Actually, the artists will see a dime, but then the labels will need to take out a handling fee, processing fee, breakage fee, etc. In the end, the artist will owe the label $10,000.
As kramer said you'd probably be tossed out if you attempted this. But even assuming you got away with it, the RIAA has shown that they are willing to ignore precedent when it suits them. There was the recent set of cases where one judge ruled against "Making Available" and the RIAA failed to inform a second judge of that ruling when it was their responsibility to do so. Luckily, the second judge called for the legal equivalent of a do-over to fix his mistaken jury instructions.
Wasn't there a news story about this a week or so ago? Some companies were being sued because employees weren't allowed to punch in for the day until their computer was fully booted up and they loaded some applications. The employees figured that they were losing a half hour to an hour of paid time every day and so sued for back pay. If companies figure your start time as when you load the "punch in" application on your computer, then all the time you spend twiddling your thumbs while the system boots up is free to them.
Last year my wife kept mentioning that she wanted a mother-child pendant. (Here's a photo of one, in case you don't know what it is: http://www.amazon.com/Sterling-Silver-Heart-Shaped-Pendant-Russell/dp/B000OZT53O ) Trying to be a good husband, I took the hint and bought her one. It cost around $250, but I figured that it was something that she wanted. Instead, when I presented her with it, she slapped me and told me that I shouldn't have spent so much on a piece of jewelry. I think she would welcome the opportunity to get nice looking diamonds at only $5 each.
I agree. I've had a Wiimote fly out of a hand while playing... out of my 5 year old's hand. (The strap was on and kept it from going too far.) That only happened once. We had a nice talk about letting go and it hasn't happened since. Unless these people have a mental age of 5, I don't see why someone's Wiimote should fly out of their hands. And if your mental age is 5, maybe you shouldn't be playing Nintendo Wii unsupervised.
Any sperm-egg pairing is a potential human. Stopping that pairing is (in the view of some religions) a sin. (Witness religious rules against condoms.) I therefore conclude that to keep from sinning, all men and women must repeatedly have sex with each other to get as many sperm-egg pairings made as possible. (I'd volunteer, but my wife would kill me. And I don't want her to sin. ;-) )
When my wife was pregnant with our second child, there was a time when we thought he might have Down's Syndrome. As we waited for the test results, we discussed our options. We came to the conclusion that -- if the test came back positive -- we would abort the pregnancy. We just didn't have the money to take care of a Down's Syndrome child and felt it would hurt our existing son. It was an awful decision to have to make and we felt horrible, but we knew it was the right thing to do.
Luckily, the test came back negative and we went on to have a healthy baby boy. While we're thankful that we didn't have to follow through on our decision, we don't regret it. It was an awful decision to have to make, but it should be between the parents-to-be, their doctor, and their god (if they believe in one). The government and/or someone else's god/religion shouldn't intrude into the decision.
As an aside, the initial test, it turns out, shows positive for nearly everyone. Why do they give a test like that?!! To torture parents-to-be?
"Stay away from our women. You've got metal fever, boy. Metal fever."
"I knew I should have shown him Electro Gonorrhea: The Noisy Killer."
There are three simple reasons why a music tax is a bad idea.
1 - There are people who won't use it but will be forced to pay. Not only people like me who currently get their music from legal sources, but people who don't listen to music at all. This includes people who *CAN'T* listen to music. Yes, deaf people would be forced to pay for music that they couldn't listen to if they wanted to.
2 - The fees will go to the power players. The major labels will make sure the rules are tilted so that indie labels get little to nothing. In fact, they'll probably ensure that artists get little to nothing as well.
3 - There will be a pile-on by other industries. The movie industry will ask why the music industry is so special and will demand their own "piracy tax." Then the TV industry will join in. Then the software industry. The book industry. And so on. Pretty soon, your "piracy tax" will double or triple the price of your Internet connection.
If you make it voluntary, you remove problem #1, but problem numbers 2 and 3 will still remain. And I can guarantee that the industry won't want it to be voluntary.
Obligatory Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin: You find it strange that scientists can imagine something as farfetched as all the matter in the universe exploding out of something the size of of the head of a pin, but can't imagine a more creative name than the big bang?!
Hobbes: Well, what would you call it?
Calvin: THE HORRENDOUS SPACE KABLOOEY!
PDFCreator wasn't for StarOffice. It was to allow people to convert their WordPro, Microsoft Word, etc documents into PDFs for posting online.
In the end, we didn't change our office suites at all. The big problem with OpenOffice.org (and StarOffice) was that they didn't support opening Lotus WordPro files. We have a ton of those and would need to be able to open them up in whatever new program we used. I'd be interested if anyone knows of a Lotus WordPro import filter for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
I agree. Especially this line: "I along with many others tried Linux during college"
I half expected her to follow up with "but I didn't inhale." ;-)
I have a coworker who is like this. Every time he hears that I'm using a free piece of software, he makes a snide remark. If the server goes down, he tries to pin it on some freeware that I used. (Nevermind that the crash could in no way be realistically tied to the freeware.) In his mind, Free = Junk. He seems to think that you have to pay money to get quality software. That's why, when I tried to recommend OpenOffice.org to replace our Lotus WordPro installations, I decided to recommend StarOffice instead. I figured that he wouldn't object as much if we needed to pay something for the software. (He must be silently fuming that I've got tons of people here using PDFCreator to convert their documents into PDF for posting to our Intranet.)
I will agree that good teachers tend to get burned out quickly. My wife is/was a teacher and she saw plenty of good first year teachers dropping out of the teaching profession in their second year. She's a stay at home mom now because we figured that her salary minus daycare for our two boys would mean she'd be taking home less than $4K per year. And for that $4K, she would need to work 10 hours per day, take work home with her (grading, lesson planning, etc) and would need to deal with administrators and parents making her life a living hell. Which is a shame because she was one of the good teachers. It just wasn't worth it financially for her to continue. She's have earned more per hour worked flipping burgers at McDonald's.
For the record, she was in a private school. An all-girl's Catholic middle school. A year after she left (after our second son was born), she heard that a long-time teacher left the school. Then, during a visit, she heard some parents patting themselves on the back for forcing that teacher out and planning the next one to target. She concluded that she had left at just the right time.