And this is why there should be a minimum age limit on Slashdot. ANY hacker worth his salt knows tar is an bundler, not a compressor. Sheesh.
And seriously, moving from Ruby is just the new language of the moment, and Fortran is so, 1970s... As for perl, I'll have to see it to believe it. My experience is that programmers less than a year old can't properly grok doing multidimensional array syntax where one dimension is a hash, not to mention some of the cruftier reference use.
There's a difference between trusting a client, and trusting a password supposedly typed on the client.
If you ask me for a secure unix server, it's not my business if you'll be SSHing in, or telnetting to the SSH port and working out the encryption with your pocket calculator.
Trusting the client would be if the client said "the user wants document X, I checked his password and he's okay", and you blindly trust it because you don't think it could be hacked.
If there's an expectation that you'd get paid, you can bill.
If the lady sees you wearing a "Will lift groceries for money" shirt, and asks for help, you can bill her. If she just sees you in the parking lot, taking groceries to your own car, no.
If a boss calls an old employee in to look at something, I think there's a expectation of being paid. Send in an invoice for a reasonable (2x old wage) price and they'll have to pay.
Don't bill too much, if something costs vastly more than anywhere else and you don't let customers know, they can sometimes get out of paying. A restaurant for instance. If I go into a diner and ask for a coffee, you could ding me for perhaps double what a comparable place would charge, but beyond that it's not reasonable unless you've posted prices... Ditto with consulting. If you charge something in the range of a reasonable consultant, you're fine for the initial work, because nobody expects consultants to work for free. But nobody expects a $15/hour employee to bill $200/hour as a consultant, and you'd have trouble making it stick.
A double standard is applying one standard to judging something, and another to judging something different. I'm not. My standard of judging something in the industry isn't if it's good for some company, it's if it's good for the people in the long run.
Microsoft handicaps the industry and prevents actual competition. BeOS was a strong contender in the OS market, MS didn't compete, they forced OEMs to put Windows on *all* computers and were pretty strict about when dual-booting computers could be sold. That didn't help the markets, it *only* helped Microsoft.
By the "good for the people" standard, something that removes Microsoft from a market, even by arbitrary legislative means, is something that allows non-Microsoft companies to move in, and yes, that's a good thing. I don't specifically hate MS, I hate all controlling, monopolistic, summy companies. MS is just the one in the computer field, though I think people should be wary of IBM, Sun, etc, to make sure they don't ever control a needed OS or architecture. MS does control the commodity OS though, and uses this control ruthlessly, where the others are just potential problems.
You seem to have shut everything off at the mention of hurting Microsoft, yet you say I'm ignorant. You immediately go off on a Linux tangent, as if it's got anything to do with the MS-is-evil topic. Linux is another OS that could be a contender, but so was BeOS and so was OS/2, and so is MacOS. I'm not advocating anything at all, I simply don't want a company that can dictate market conditions. IBM was bad, it got smacked down. AT&T was bad, it got smacked down. Standard Oil was bad... The market is stronger, there are more choices, consumers are better off.
How would removing MS from their illegally gotten control of the industry hurt a consumer? They could still pick a MS product, but they wouldn't be forced to. Just like people can deal with IBM, or AT&T, but there are options.
How exactly do the people get to decide anything when dealing with Microsoft? They abuse their monopoly power without getting properly put in their place and they break the law many times without even a slap on the wrist.
Forcing MS out of an industry might be heavy handed, and ultimately unfair, but there's no reason to treat them nicely, they'll never return the favor. If they were gone, companies would have to compete more, without Microsoft pulling all their strings, and we'd see actual competition, not a monopoly and a few totally controlled suppliers.
It's not a double standard. If something is good for Microsoft, it's bad for the people. If something is bad for Microsoft, it's good for the people. This could be very bad for Microsoft, so it could be *very* good for the people.
Anything that keeps Microsoft down for a while keeps them from having the clout to push Palladium on everyone.
And really, if eolas kept MS from making a web browser, it'd help stimulate competition. MS squashes the competition, with them out of the way everyone else would have a chance.
There aren't really any incompatibilities with older code, so you don't need to go to a new kernel version like you would if you broke anything.
In one of the discussions with Linus on this issue he said there was a planned change that broke something but it wouldn't be in for this version. Because that would warrant a major version change of its own, he didn't want to go from 2.5 to 3.0 then from 3.3 or something to 4.0, he'd rather go from 2.9(or so) to 3.0, and avoid the version inflation.
I agree. There's no stigma in having a product numbered 1.x or 2.x, it simply means you got it right early on, without needing to break old applications too often.
And QNX is the only reasonable realtime OS for a multimedia device on a PC, but it's hardly a "modern gaming OS".
An 18-wheeler is hardly a modern sports car, yet much of our economy is dependent on them.
Irix may not be up to the state of the art for a full-featured UNIX, except in the area of hardware support, etc. I dunno, but I can see how it could be behind in some ways and yet ahead in others.
Are those 50k cases all as significant as the MS trial?
You have a lot of evidence that it went all the way to the top; it was patently false, so false that anyone involved in the Windows project would understand it to be false. Removing a browser *can not* make the system go slower.
Could you convict from that? Hell no. But it's enough to warrant an investigation. Maybe all you could get would be one of the techs, but if MS left some guy hanging for something like this it'd hurt them in the end through morale, not to mention the fact that anyone who lies in court like that (or fakes evidence) deserves what they get. It's pretty clear that this isn't something a subordinate is going to do on his own. Once again, not enough to convict but enough to warrant serious investigation.
Your numbers are also skewed. You say there are 50k trials, and 100 perjury trials, so 499 of each 500 get away with perjury. Do they "slip" a bit in recalling something or go all the way to faking evidence? How many trials involve a company near MS's size, in a serious case like this, and in your estimation, involve a lie of this magnitude? I'd guess it's significantly less than the full 50k.
People often lie, but rarely do they get away with outright faking of evidence that a major case hinges on.
Think of the magnitude of this. They had to know they were lying. Someone (Allchin?) had to get on stand and lie, they had to order underlings to fake the video. Not just one or two people were in on this, it went all the way to the top and in one of the most important cases to be tried in the 90s.
The problem is that a market with a predatory monopoly isn't free. Microsoft has often stepped outside of the market to destroy competition. They stole Stacker, sued other companies into bankruptcy, and threatened to withhold product from others, in a fashion it couldn't in a real free market, one without EULAs that restrict the right of first sale and a government that refuses to prosecute for perjury. Microsoft relies on the courts to enforce its idea of the laws, yet has rarely played within the law.
Bull. Microsoft used lies and fraud any number of times. They lied to Quicken about their intentions, they stole Stacker, they stalled lawsuits until the other party, right or wrong, went out of business. They outrighted lied in court multiple times, including with the faked video evidence.
Anyone else in their position, without all the "political contributions", would have gotten hit for perjury at a minimum.
In many ways, yes, 3d is easier to code. In a 2d game you've limited it, to the point of needing to throw out your old artwork, to a single viewpoint. In a 3d game it costs a bit more to make models instead of 2d spites, but it means you've got a ton of flexibility.
In a casual game of Everquest you might very well find that the isometric view is nicer. But nothing beats 1st person for immersion. Imagine wandering through a beatifully rendered forest, watching beams of light play through a light mist as the trees sway gently in the wind. You'll *never* get that in 2d games, Myst had awesome art but you couldn't look at any arbitrary thing. Once you've made your 3d world you can put a camera anywhere.
Scenery is also easier in 3d, at least from a designer's point of view. Once you do a set of textures, and detail textures, for a tree for instance, and modelled a single one, you can permute it in a variety of ways and all of a sudden you've got a forest of unique trees. Not a seperate model file for each, or a collection of views from every angle, but one master and a few numbers describing the differences. Gamers don't need to see the exact same tree often enough to recognize it, or to have a bloated game from having twenty different models/spite collections for every simple thing.
And then when you want, you project grid/hex lines on the ground, lock the camera at an overhead position, and you've got your 2d game.
The reason 3d looks bad now is that models are fairly low polygon count. The models in Final Fantasy (the movie) were over half a million faces each, with a HUGE skin file. Models in Quake are 500-1000 faces with a small JPG for a skin. Maps are similarly low-detail. When the computational barriers are broken we'll see some tremendous looking games. Hopefully at some point it'll become ubiquitous enough that games will stop trying to sell the effects and concentrate on the gameplay again. (Hollywood is stuck in the same rut.)
Not really. Imagine how close to perpendicular the mirror would need to be, to the laser beam. A beam reflected back two meters to either side is likely to miss and a beam reflected back even 10cm to either side is going to hit armor instead of the laser aperture. Even the smallest misalignment is going to cause a miss.
Then we've got imperfect mirror. Making a perfectly flat, large, mirror is very hard. If it's not perfectly flat, you couldn't reflect the beam back even if you had a ton of time for aiming and alignment.
Then, you'll only get 1/100th of a second to reflect the beam back before your mirror is totally destroyed (less, perhaps). If you used solid polished aluminum, with huge heat sinks behind it, you might get a bit longer protection but it's going to lose its perfect optical qualities pretty quickly.
If you shot at a ship, for instance, and hit a mirrored gunmount, you might cause serious damage to the nearby sailors, but the imperfect mirror and the motion of the attacking plane (meaning the angle of the beam is always changing) is going to keep a reflected beam, even from a nearly perfect mirror, from causing any distant collateral damage.
Metephors are like beavers, sometimes they chew you off at the ankles and something you're too thick, so you survive!
People who use metaphors are like aliens, you know they've got an agenda because of all the cattle mutilation and anal probing going on, but they don't tell you what's going on!
Webservers without published links are like slinkies without card catalogs, both have nothing to do with shoes!
Win95 is better on a P4 than on a 486 but we don't attribute that gain to Microsoft.
If their Tablet PC is any better it's simply because technology has enabled better handwriting recognition.
This is precisely Microsoft innovation. They release the same product that other companies have (usually after buying those companies or suing them out of business and buying the parts) and claim to have invented it. Microsoft claimed that Doublespace was an *INNOVATION*, even when the court case with Stacker, for them outright stealing 100% of it, was in progress.
Now, imagine that Win95 was actually truly secure. But, just months into its release, someone wrote a registry-rot worm. It stealthily spread through the population of Win95 machines and eventually infected the dev team at Microsoft. Customers don't suspect anything because it confirms their suspicions. Programmers just assume it's another bug and they work on it as best they can, but the system is too complex so they're never sure it's gone (and thus that it has another cause.)
At some point the spread is so successful that close to 100% of Microsoft is infected, even the machine they use to do builds. Thus, future versions of windows come with this virus pre-installed.
Because of the extra debugging work to get rid of what is really virus behaviour, the windows registry and security model really is the best, but we'll never know because of the virus and the settings it uses.
And the source and dest IPs. Once you're decrypting a packet, it doesn't take appreciably longer depending on what's in it, so a few sequence numbers and the like aren't a problem.
Some copyright schemes rely on the idea of voluntary reporting of your copies of copyrighted material, with the idea that you've already paid, or that the fee only goes so high, but that by reporting which material you have, the fees go to the correct authors.
This type of watermarking is ideal for that. It doesn't distort the image at all. The lack of "security" isn't a problem because the system assumes that if you aren't paying more, you'll be happy to report the copyrighted works you possess because it'll go to supporting the authors whose work you like.
So you should advocate temporary sterilization (implants) for anyone on social assistance who already has a child they had trouble caring for.
And then pump a ton of resources into educating their children and giving them good job opportunities. It sucks that society has to pick up the ball but if we don't that kid will 90% likely be in the same position as their parents, pumping out unwanted children while on the dole.
We need to do something to end the cycle of poverty and ignorance, not simply blame the victims. Unless we're cold-hearted enough to let anyone without money literally starve to death in the streets, we'll end up paying in the end, so we might as well make sure it's preventative.
Besides, nobody in a libertarian world happily starves to death when they can't afford food, they turn to violence and crime, becoming more of a burden to society than if they'd been provided a cheap apartment and basic food while being given an education to help them find a new job.
Musicians may need others, managers, producers, marketers, and groupies:) but these don't have to be part of a monolithic agency. If musicians were free to contract with anyone, no radio monopolies, or distribution monopolies, then it would be a fair and open market.
The great thing about the internet is that it removes the "natural" monopolies, like limited airspace and prime shelf space. Any CD on Amazon is as easy to buy as any other. They've all got middle-shelf spots. Some may get front-page mention, but everything else is a keyword away.
When there are more indie musicians there'll be fan-run genre sites listing the latest stuff and rating it, much like quake-level sites or fan-fiction, or anything. Enthusiasts will seek out the new stuff and tell everyone else about it.
Magic relationship? No. But should we be squeezing every last dime out of the hardware costs and accepting %500 margins on software (over R&D and all other costs)? Why is software so magical, that some people think any ammount being charged is reasonable?
The only reason software is so expensive is because MS has a monopoly. Sure, it's hard making an office suite, but designing a chipset is harder and companies do that.
Is an office suite worth a couple hundred dollars to you? The same worth as a 200GB hard drive? (At a minimum, Office XP (Pro, or whatever it is with the extras) is well over double this price, maybe a 200GB HD, 1GB RAM, and a nice GeForce.)
Slashdot Mirror
And this is why there should be a minimum age limit on Slashdot. ANY hacker worth his salt knows tar is an bundler, not a compressor. Sheesh.
And seriously, moving from Ruby is just the new language of the moment, and Fortran is so, 1970s... As for perl, I'll have to see it to believe it. My experience is that programmers less than a year old can't properly grok doing multidimensional array syntax where one dimension is a hash, not to mention some of the cruftier reference use.
Punk.
There's a difference between trusting a client, and trusting a password supposedly typed on the client.
If you ask me for a secure unix server, it's not my business if you'll be SSHing in, or telnetting to the SSH port and working out the encryption with your pocket calculator.
Trusting the client would be if the client said "the user wants document X, I checked his password and he's okay", and you blindly trust it because you don't think it could be hacked.
If there's an expectation that you'd get paid, you can bill.
If the lady sees you wearing a "Will lift groceries for money" shirt, and asks for help, you can bill her. If she just sees you in the parking lot, taking groceries to your own car, no.
If a boss calls an old employee in to look at something, I think there's a expectation of being paid. Send in an invoice for a reasonable (2x old wage) price and they'll have to pay.
Don't bill too much, if something costs vastly more than anywhere else and you don't let customers know, they can sometimes get out of paying. A restaurant for instance. If I go into a diner and ask for a coffee, you could ding me for perhaps double what a comparable place would charge, but beyond that it's not reasonable unless you've posted prices... Ditto with consulting. If you charge something in the range of a reasonable consultant, you're fine for the initial work, because nobody expects consultants to work for free. But nobody expects a $15/hour employee to bill $200/hour as a consultant, and you'd have trouble making it stick.
A double standard is applying one standard to judging something, and another to judging something different. I'm not. My standard of judging something in the industry isn't if it's good for some company, it's if it's good for the people in the long run.
Microsoft handicaps the industry and prevents actual competition. BeOS was a strong contender in the OS market, MS didn't compete, they forced OEMs to put Windows on *all* computers and were pretty strict about when dual-booting computers could be sold. That didn't help the markets, it *only* helped Microsoft.
By the "good for the people" standard, something that removes Microsoft from a market, even by arbitrary legislative means, is something that allows non-Microsoft companies to move in, and yes, that's a good thing. I don't specifically hate MS, I hate all controlling, monopolistic, summy companies. MS is just the one in the computer field, though I think people should be wary of IBM, Sun, etc, to make sure they don't ever control a needed OS or architecture. MS does control the commodity OS though, and uses this control ruthlessly, where the others are just potential problems.
You seem to have shut everything off at the mention of hurting Microsoft, yet you say I'm ignorant. You immediately go off on a Linux tangent, as if it's got anything to do with the MS-is-evil topic. Linux is another OS that could be a contender, but so was BeOS and so was OS/2, and so is MacOS. I'm not advocating anything at all, I simply don't want a company that can dictate market conditions. IBM was bad, it got smacked down. AT&T was bad, it got smacked down. Standard Oil was bad... The market is stronger, there are more choices, consumers are better off.
How would removing MS from their illegally gotten control of the industry hurt a consumer? They could still pick a MS product, but they wouldn't be forced to. Just like people can deal with IBM, or AT&T, but there are options.
How exactly do the people get to decide anything when dealing with Microsoft? They abuse their monopoly power without getting properly put in their place and they break the law many times without even a slap on the wrist.
Forcing MS out of an industry might be heavy handed, and ultimately unfair, but there's no reason to treat them nicely, they'll never return the favor. If they were gone, companies would have to compete more, without Microsoft pulling all their strings, and we'd see actual competition, not a monopoly and a few totally controlled suppliers.
It's not a double standard. If something is good for Microsoft, it's bad for the people. If something is bad for Microsoft, it's good for the people. This could be very bad for Microsoft, so it could be *very* good for the people.
Anything that keeps Microsoft down for a while keeps them from having the clout to push Palladium on everyone.
And really, if eolas kept MS from making a web browser, it'd help stimulate competition. MS squashes the competition, with them out of the way everyone else would have a chance.
There aren't really any incompatibilities with older code, so you don't need to go to a new kernel version like you would if you broke anything.
In one of the discussions with Linus on this issue he said there was a planned change that broke something but it wouldn't be in for this version. Because that would warrant a major version change of its own, he didn't want to go from 2.5 to 3.0 then from 3.3 or something to 4.0, he'd rather go from 2.9(or so) to 3.0, and avoid the version inflation.
I agree. There's no stigma in having a product numbered 1.x or 2.x, it simply means you got it right early on, without needing to break old applications too often.
And QNX is the only reasonable realtime OS for a multimedia device on a PC, but it's hardly a "modern gaming OS".
An 18-wheeler is hardly a modern sports car, yet much of our economy is dependent on them.
Irix may not be up to the state of the art for a full-featured UNIX, except in the area of hardware support, etc. I dunno, but I can see how it could be behind in some ways and yet ahead in others.
Are those 50k cases all as significant as the MS trial?
You have a lot of evidence that it went all the way to the top; it was patently false, so false that anyone involved in the Windows project would understand it to be false. Removing a browser *can not* make the system go slower.
Could you convict from that? Hell no. But it's enough to warrant an investigation. Maybe all you could get would be one of the techs, but if MS left some guy hanging for something like this it'd hurt them in the end through morale, not to mention the fact that anyone who lies in court like that (or fakes evidence) deserves what they get. It's pretty clear that this isn't something a subordinate is going to do on his own. Once again, not enough to convict but enough to warrant serious investigation.
Your numbers are also skewed. You say there are 50k trials, and 100 perjury trials, so 499 of each 500 get away with perjury. Do they "slip" a bit in recalling something or go all the way to faking evidence? How many trials involve a company near MS's size, in a serious case like this, and in your estimation, involve a lie of this magnitude? I'd guess it's significantly less than the full 50k.
People often lie, but rarely do they get away with outright faking of evidence that a major case hinges on.
Think of the magnitude of this. They had to know they were lying. Someone (Allchin?) had to get on stand and lie, they had to order underlings to fake the video. Not just one or two people were in on this, it went all the way to the top and in one of the most important cases to be tried in the 90s.
The problem is that a market with a predatory monopoly isn't free. Microsoft has often stepped outside of the market to destroy competition. They stole Stacker, sued other companies into bankruptcy, and threatened to withhold product from others, in a fashion it couldn't in a real free market, one without EULAs that restrict the right of first sale and a government that refuses to prosecute for perjury. Microsoft relies on the courts to enforce its idea of the laws, yet has rarely played within the law.
Bull. Microsoft used lies and fraud any number of times. They lied to Quicken about their intentions, they stole Stacker, they stalled lawsuits until the other party, right or wrong, went out of business. They outrighted lied in court multiple times, including with the faked video evidence.
Anyone else in their position, without all the "political contributions", would have gotten hit for perjury at a minimum.
If I see Jar-Jar in this one, I swear I'm going to boycott the rest of the series of rulings!
In many ways, yes, 3d is easier to code. In a 2d game you've limited it, to the point of needing to throw out your old artwork, to a single viewpoint. In a 3d game it costs a bit more to make models instead of 2d spites, but it means you've got a ton of flexibility.
In a casual game of Everquest you might very well find that the isometric view is nicer. But nothing beats 1st person for immersion. Imagine wandering through a beatifully rendered forest, watching beams of light play through a light mist as the trees sway gently in the wind. You'll *never* get that in 2d games, Myst had awesome art but you couldn't look at any arbitrary thing. Once you've made your 3d world you can put a camera anywhere.
Scenery is also easier in 3d, at least from a designer's point of view. Once you do a set of textures, and detail textures, for a tree for instance, and modelled a single one, you can permute it in a variety of ways and all of a sudden you've got a forest of unique trees. Not a seperate model file for each, or a collection of views from every angle, but one master and a few numbers describing the differences. Gamers don't need to see the exact same tree often enough to recognize it, or to have a bloated game from having twenty different models/spite collections for every simple thing.
And then when you want, you project grid/hex lines on the ground, lock the camera at an overhead position, and you've got your 2d game.
The reason 3d looks bad now is that models are fairly low polygon count. The models in Final Fantasy (the movie) were over half a million faces each, with a HUGE skin file. Models in Quake are 500-1000 faces with a small JPG for a skin. Maps are similarly low-detail. When the computational barriers are broken we'll see some tremendous looking games. Hopefully at some point it'll become ubiquitous enough that games will stop trying to sell the effects and concentrate on the gameplay again. (Hollywood is stuck in the same rut.)
Not really. Imagine how close to perpendicular the mirror would need to be, to the laser beam. A beam reflected back two meters to either side is likely to miss and a beam reflected back even 10cm to either side is going to hit armor instead of the laser aperture. Even the smallest misalignment is going to cause a miss.
Then we've got imperfect mirror. Making a perfectly flat, large, mirror is very hard. If it's not perfectly flat, you couldn't reflect the beam back even if you had a ton of time for aiming and alignment.
Then, you'll only get 1/100th of a second to reflect the beam back before your mirror is totally destroyed (less, perhaps). If you used solid polished aluminum, with huge heat sinks behind it, you might get a bit longer protection but it's going to lose its perfect optical qualities pretty quickly.
If you shot at a ship, for instance, and hit a mirrored gunmount, you might cause serious damage to the nearby sailors, but the imperfect mirror and the motion of the attacking plane (meaning the angle of the beam is always changing) is going to keep a reflected beam, even from a nearly perfect mirror, from causing any distant collateral damage.
Metephors are like beavers, sometimes they chew you off at the ankles and something you're too thick, so you survive!
People who use metaphors are like aliens, you know they've got an agenda because of all the cattle mutilation and anal probing going on, but they don't tell you what's going on!
Webservers without published links are like slinkies without card catalogs, both have nothing to do with shoes!
I rest my case!
When Win2k gave me that error I couldn't make it install. Always died during the text phase of the install.
Mandrake 8.2 installed perfectly, detected all of my hardware, and let me get online to find out what was wrong with Win2k.
But yeah, it was a hardware problem. Sure.
So I never bothered going back to 2k.
Win95 is better on a P4 than on a 486 but we don't attribute that gain to Microsoft.
If their Tablet PC is any better it's simply because technology has enabled better handwriting recognition.
This is precisely Microsoft innovation. They release the same product that other companies have (usually after buying those companies or suing them out of business and buying the parts) and claim to have invented it. Microsoft claimed that Doublespace was an *INNOVATION*, even when the court case with Stacker, for them outright stealing 100% of it, was in progress.
That's the only real MS innovation.
Now, imagine that Win95 was actually truly secure. But, just months into its release, someone wrote a registry-rot worm. It stealthily spread through the population of Win95 machines and eventually infected the dev team at Microsoft. Customers don't suspect anything because it confirms their suspicions. Programmers just assume it's another bug and they work on it as best they can, but the system is too complex so they're never sure it's gone (and thus that it has another cause.)
:)
At some point the spread is so successful that close to 100% of Microsoft is infected, even the machine they use to do builds. Thus, future versions of windows come with this virus pre-installed.
Because of the extra debugging work to get rid of what is really virus behaviour, the windows registry and security model really is the best, but we'll never know because of the virus and the settings it uses.
Or not.
And the source and dest IPs. Once you're decrypting a packet, it doesn't take appreciably longer depending on what's in it, so a few sequence numbers and the like aren't a problem.
Some copyright schemes rely on the idea of voluntary reporting of your copies of copyrighted material, with the idea that you've already paid, or that the fee only goes so high, but that by reporting which material you have, the fees go to the correct authors.
This type of watermarking is ideal for that. It doesn't distort the image at all. The lack of "security" isn't a problem because the system assumes that if you aren't paying more, you'll be happy to report the copyrighted works you possess because it'll go to supporting the authors whose work you like.
So you should advocate temporary sterilization (implants) for anyone on social assistance who already has a child they had trouble caring for.
And then pump a ton of resources into educating their children and giving them good job opportunities. It sucks that society has to pick up the ball but if we don't that kid will 90% likely be in the same position as their parents, pumping out unwanted children while on the dole.
We need to do something to end the cycle of poverty and ignorance, not simply blame the victims. Unless we're cold-hearted enough to let anyone without money literally starve to death in the streets, we'll end up paying in the end, so we might as well make sure it's preventative.
Besides, nobody in a libertarian world happily starves to death when they can't afford food, they turn to violence and crime, becoming more of a burden to society than if they'd been provided a cheap apartment and basic food while being given an education to help them find a new job.
Musicians may need others, managers, producers, marketers, and groupies :) but these don't have to be part of a monolithic agency. If musicians were free to contract with anyone, no radio monopolies, or distribution monopolies, then it would be a fair and open market.
The great thing about the internet is that it removes the "natural" monopolies, like limited airspace and prime shelf space. Any CD on Amazon is as easy to buy as any other. They've all got middle-shelf spots. Some may get front-page mention, but everything else is a keyword away.
When there are more indie musicians there'll be fan-run genre sites listing the latest stuff and rating it, much like quake-level sites or fan-fiction, or anything. Enthusiasts will seek out the new stuff and tell everyone else about it.
Sixth Sense.
Magic relationship? No. But should we be squeezing every last dime out of the hardware costs and accepting %500 margins on software (over R&D and all other costs)? Why is software so magical, that some people think any ammount being charged is reasonable?
The only reason software is so expensive is because MS has a monopoly. Sure, it's hard making an office suite, but designing a chipset is harder and companies do that.
Is an office suite worth a couple hundred dollars to you? The same worth as a 200GB hard drive? (At a minimum, Office XP (Pro, or whatever it is with the extras) is well over double this price, maybe a 200GB HD, 1GB RAM, and a nice GeForce.)