I dare you to find a SECOND source to qualify, put in context, and legitimize the statements on this site. If you do, come back then...if not you're just propaganting unsubstantiated criticism.
Were the sources they listed on the site too much trouble for you to look up?
College PIRG groups, which Nader founded and leads despite his denials of control, use an astonishingly undemocratic, even coercive funding mechanism that Ralph designed. Once a college approves, all students are automatically billed a few dollars out of their student fees to support the local PIRG. To avoid paying, students must make a special trip to the Registrar and fill out a form so they can get their $2-6 back.
Most don't of course, out of inertia or because they aren't even aware they're funding Ralph. That's why record and book clubs use the same mechanism. Nader, like most consumer advocates, opposes these billing methods as a rip-off - unless they fund his own groups. One PIRG worker estimated that at Penn State alone, forced payments would have brought in $270,000 a year, while a voluntary checkoff would only have raised $30,000
There's much more. I wish people would apply the the same level of suspicion to third-party candidates that they apply to popular candidates.
The $1,000,000 prize for the proof of the Goldbach conjecture was posted here a few months ago, and there are many other prizes for proving or disproving conjectures on the primes:
A mathematician I know was told by Paul Erdos that one should expect to find every pattern, within reason, in the primes. This was in reference to the unsolved "sum of reciprocals conjecture," that if A is a subset of the positive integers such that the sum of the reciprocals of the elements of A diverges, then A contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.
(This would imply that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.) Erdos offered $3,000 for a proof or counterexample to his conjecture, which has been taken over by Ron Graham since Erdos' departure.
For more prizes offered in number theory, see Richard K. Guy's book, Unsolved Problems in Number Theory
The problem is that people who like serious music (unlike college/high-school kiddies who listen to top 40 techno pop punk music) are less interested in illegally ripping off the musicians who make the music they love, and the companies who produce the music they love.
I see. I guess all of the Hesperion XX songs available on Napster were posted by members of Jordi Savall's huge teenybopper following.
Every serious music lover I have ever met loathes the selection of music on Napster, because it is just teeny bop top 40 type music.
A recent search from one Napster server returned more than 20 unique songs from Atom and His Package, more songs than I cared to count for Aphex Twin, most of the Reverend Horton Heat's song catalog, about ten Fig Dish songs, and nearly every Over the Rhine song. None of these bands have had a significant amount of top 40 airplay (I'm fairly certain that Atom & His Package has never had commercial radio airplay).
While the bands listed represent a small variety of genres and sub-genres, none of these bands are teenybop top 40 style music. Also, these were the first bands I searched for, so they probably are not anomolous quirks. You could do your own searches for the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mazarin(truly obscure), etc.
When you try anything remotely obscure, something that doesn't have a huge following amoung junior high school students, you get no hits at all.
Atom and His Package is quite obscure, and does not have much of a junior high school following. Likewise for the others.
My theory: The reason for the availability of band X on Napster and the unavailability of others is the natural intersection of the group of people who use the Internet with the group of people who like band X. Hence the flood of They Might Be Giants on Napster, and the unavailability of newer jazz recordings.
Slashdot Mirror
Were the sources they listed on the site too much trouble for you to look up?
----------Forced PIRG Contribution
Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1983 p1
Christian Science Monitor, March 24, 1983 p2
New York Times, March 13, 1983 p20
Forced contributions to his college PIRG groups:
College PIRG groups, which Nader founded and leads despite his denials of control, use an astonishingly undemocratic, even coercive funding mechanism that Ralph designed. Once a college approves, all students are automatically billed a few dollars out of their student fees to support the local PIRG. To avoid paying, students must make a special trip to the Registrar and fill out a form so they can get their $2-6 back. Most don't of course, out of inertia or because they aren't even aware they're funding Ralph. That's why record and book clubs use the same mechanism. Nader, like most consumer advocates, opposes these billing methods as a rip-off - unless they fund his own groups. One PIRG worker estimated that at Penn State alone, forced payments would have brought in $270,000 a year, while a voluntary checkoff would only have raised $30,000
There's much more. I wish people would apply the the same level of suspicion to third-party candidates that they apply to popular candidates.
-$20? I wanted a peanut.
A mathematician I know was told by Paul Erdos that one should expect to find every pattern, within reason, in the primes. This was in reference to the unsolved "sum of reciprocals conjecture," that if A is a subset of the positive integers such that the sum of the reciprocals of the elements of A diverges, then A contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. (This would imply that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.) Erdos offered $3,000 for a proof or counterexample to his conjecture, which has been taken over by Ron Graham since Erdos' departure.
For more prizes offered in number theory, see Richard K. Guy's book, Unsolved Problems in Number Theory
I see. I guess all of the Hesperion XX songs available on Napster were posted by members of Jordi Savall's huge teenybopper following.
A recent search from one Napster server returned more than 20 unique songs from Atom and His Package, more songs than I cared to count for Aphex Twin, most of the Reverend Horton Heat's song catalog, about ten Fig Dish songs, and nearly every Over the Rhine song. None of these bands have had a significant amount of top 40 airplay (I'm fairly certain that Atom & His Package has never had commercial radio airplay). While the bands listed represent a small variety of genres and sub-genres, none of these bands are teenybop top 40 style music. Also, these were the first bands I searched for, so they probably are not anomolous quirks. You could do your own searches for the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mazarin(truly obscure), etc.
When you try anything remotely obscure, something that doesn't have a huge following amoung junior high school students, you get no hits at all.
Atom and His Package is quite obscure, and does not have much of a junior high school following. Likewise for the others.
My theory: The reason for the availability of band X on Napster and the unavailability of others is the natural intersection of the group of people who use the Internet with the group of people who like band X. Hence the flood of They Might Be Giants on Napster, and the unavailability of newer jazz recordings.