The irony is that in America, anyone who votes for the two major parties is voting for the rise of Fascism.
Yeah, but just try telling a democrat that Clinton was just as willing to put an end to our privacy as Bush
I dunno. I was around for Daddy Bush's reign, and Clinton's, and W's. The country really did change when Clinton came into power. You weren't looking over your shoulder as much. You weren't having to constantly fight to keep your rights. Sure, it wasn't perfect, sure they were slimy politicians, but they weren't horrible. Sometimes they did things I agreed with.
And then, of course, when W came into power, it all got bad again. Keep in mind, folks, it was the Bushes who fought the First and Second Oil Wars.
If all the people who cherish liberty don't vote because they believe the choices are Tweedle-Di and Tweedle-Dum, then the other people get to pick their (and your) leader. And you'll probly end up with the Tweedle's evil cousin.
That pretty much sounds like what they're doing. They only tested only on XP, so they only "officially" support XP. But it works on other versions of windows, "if you can trick the installer". So if you're installing straight up, you can't get old OSes. But if you're willing to hack it a little, you can still run it on the old OSes. The fact that you have to trick the installer makes sure that users know that it's not supported and might not work right.
I've been professionally coding for ten years, and parenting for seven years. What I've found is that I simply do not work the outrageous hours. If they expect me to come in late, I'll find a day where Mom is taking the kids out, or the kids are just hanging out at home. Lately it's on days when Mom has visitation. And I'll come in extra on these days when needed, but it's according to my schedule. I've gotten some push-back on that, but I've found that if I ignore them, and do a lot of bad-ass coding while I'm there, that they don't fire me (lay me off, yes; fire, no).
My current boss maintains "A regular workday at is not eight hours, it's more like nine or ten hours." Right. And it's 5:40 on a Friday and how many people are here? I've also complained about Wednesday releases where 2/3 of our team are non-custodial parents who have the kids on Wednesdays, so we really can't stay Wednesday evening. (I don't wanna miss my time with the kids, and Mom makes plans/dates for when I'm taking the kids, so I can't just not pick them up.) In that case my boss responded, "Well, you know when releases are way in advance, so you can plan accordingly." I responded about how often our release dates changed, and he didn't respond. But again, I didn't get fired. I just leave on-time on the days where I have the kids.
I've also tried the whole work at home thing. It only works if someone else (i.e., Mom) is willing to be aggressive about keeping the kids from bugging me. Cuz the kids want to be close to me when I'm home, but I can't work with them in the room. It was also effective when we rented a house with a detached apartment, and that became my office.
Note that this works best when your spouse doesn't work outside the home. (I've said "Mom" above, but that's because my ex-SO is female, not because I'm making a discriminatory statement about how there aren't enough women programmers). I need someone watching the kids during the day so I can get work done, then when I get home I spend serious playtime with them. Especially when the kids are preschool. (But actually now that I think of it, it worked OK when Mom was working and the kids were in daycare. Except that we didn't spend as much time as the kids, and with Mom having a low-paying job, we ended up netting a loss of a couple hundred dollars over four months) Nowadays, Mom and I are divorced, and she watches them most of the time, so my visitation times are weekends and a weekday evening. That makes me more able to work late at other times, but makes my time with the kids sacrosanct.
Sometimes people fear that having a family and a programming job will get them divorced. I did get reprimanded once for taking three-hour lunches (oops) and subsequently laid off. But actually, my wife left me when I was unemployed for five months and about to run out of unemployment. She didn't leave while I was spending 40-50 hours a week working. Of course at that time I was also bringing home a lot of money for her to play with </spite>
So, basically, you can do it. And you will do it cuz you have to. And it'll work out and you'll find your particular way of balancing the kids, the job, and the wife.
But I have not seen a left politician in awhile say anything other than "You cannot protect yourself, you need the government to protect you. So let me decide what you can and cannot do for yourself."
Which gives you the lovely state of California.
Of course, in my state (not California) you can only have sex missionary style.
Nope, both the left and the right decide that they have to protect you and will tell you how. E.g., it's not the left that supported the you-can-only-have-sex-in-a-particular-way laws. Not to mention the you can only have sex with or marry certain people (not your own gender now, not of a different race not too long ago). And the whole abortion thing is about people on the right saying they have to protect yourself from terminating a pregnancy (and thus either regretting it later, or being damned to hell).
I don't think passing laws to protect you from yourself is a left-or-right thing. I think it's ubiquitous among politicians in general.
I helped a friend of mine set up an optometrist with a BBS system for his office. My friend got free contacts (colored ones, I think). Unfortunately my eyes were perfect at the time, so I didn't get anything.:-(
The point is that if we rely on a single system (Akami), then that becomes a single point of failure. Single points of failure are the bane of reliability. If we had two systems, then if Akami went down, everything would shift to the other system. Things would be considerably slower, but the entire system wouldn't crash.
Granted, if both go down, we're still screwed. But the point is that it is much, much more likely that a single thing will fail then that a thing and its redundant backup will fail at the same time. Especially if they're both pretty reliable.
I know that Akami is made to be very reliable. But unless they run their system as two completely independant redundant systems, then there are still failures which could hit them both at the same time.
I don't understand what the problem with global warming is. The whole Gaia hypothesis says that the system is self correcting.
So here comes this species that mucks with the environment, burns biomass to power a high energy civilization, and pollutes everything. Eventually global warming, or pollution, or something else, gets to the point where it threatens that species. Some catastrophic event occurs which kills off a quarter of that species. The entire civilization collapses and the species reverts to a more primitive society, which doesn't pollute as much. Problem solved.
Gaia can fix it all. Gaia doesn't care if a species is drastically reduced (or killed off). Life will go on.
For everyone who hasn't done so yet, I recommend visiting the ACLU website as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and donating
And sign up for their action lists. Send letters to congress about important freedom items. (Of course, you send them the default form letter and they send you back a form letter. But I'm certain that somewhere someone's counting the number of for and against letters. So they can decide which issues they're not gonna advertise that they're supporting.)
Usually when I see a live band that I like, I'll buy the CD right there from them. In fact, that's been the only way I've bought CDs for years now. I like the band, and I know that I'm helping out. (Of course, I'm usually watching small local bands, usually at Pagan festivals or events). I'd love the opportunity to have exactly the show I just saw on CD. I'd love that kind of souvenir. And at $10, it's cheaper than a (studio-produced) CD or a T-shirt.
And frankly, if I show that CD to my friends, or burn them a copy, it's advertising for the band. If they like the live CD, they'll wanna see the band. And, probly, buy a live CD after that show.
VNC. Nothing like remote control of my box and the boxes in QA. Great for work at home; it's a bit slow over a modem, but you can do EVERYTHING over VNC.
Copyright infringement is not a "right", let alone a right that we might have. You will never see this capitalist country condone copyright infringement on the scale the warez groups produce.
"Copyright" is about the "rights to copy". The right to copy other people's work is a "right", albeit one we don't have. I am not giving an opinion on whether or not we should have that right. I'm simply saying that it's talking about rights, so it belongs in YRO. Even if it's talking about rights we should not have, it's still talking about rights, and it still belongs in YRO.
3)Vote to remove the legal protections that you bash the government for enforcing as is thier duty.
Great. When is the next vote for changing copyright law? Oh wait, a law like that would have to be proposed by congress and voted on by them. But the RIAA, music industry, etc. control congress. Then we need to start a grass roots movement to change copyright law. First we have to figure out what we want, then we have to gather the grass roots support (i.e., normal citizens).
Well, to figure out what we want, we should discuss it in some online forum. And to get grass roots support we could start with discussing it in some online forum. Hmmm... I guess that means we should post/discuss/proselytize on Slashdot.
We don't have the right to distributed pirated works online. How does this story fit in this category?
Of course it's about "Your Rights Online". You claim that it's not a right. Discussion of rights we don't have, and about whether or not we should have them, belong in YRO.
...By 44 hours the situation was seeing rates of production drop dramatically...
...Their concept is that there is a shortage of labor. This is inspite of 80 years of American History showing that we have a profoundly dangerous over supply of labor both in the USA and world wide...
But if there's an oversupply of labor, we can reduce that oversupply by making workers less productive. Working over 40 hours reduces productivity. So the Bush administration is reducing the labor surplus by removing barriers to overtime.
IANAL, but I believe that anything Linus himself has written (unless it is work for hire) he can fork on a different license at whim - he just can't revoke the GPL on code already released under it.
In theory, yes. But if anyone has modified the code or added even a single line, then he can't release it under another license, because it isn't "his" code. So, how much of Linux is prestine Linus code?
Give users names like "Adobe photoshop" and they'll be much happier than "Adobe super-fire bird".
But "Adobe" itself is a "clever" name. Who would've thought that a company could be very successful when their name means "mud brick". It should really be called "Mud Brick Photshop" (or, taking your example, "Mud Brick Super-Fire Bird").
Myth: CAPPS II will run a criminal background check on every passenger.
Fact: No, CAPPS II will NOT run a criminal background check on every passenger.... Specifically,...
* CAPPS II also performs a risk assessment, including a check... to detect individuals who... have outstanding Federal or state warrants for crimes of violence.
Um, how is a check against who has outstanding warrants not a criminal background check?
Also, so many of the responses hinge on people doing the right thing. So-and-so "will be contractually obliged" to delete the data, or to not use the data for other purposes. People and corporations are notorious for doing things that they're not supposed to do. So if I'm an airline, I can use CAPPS II data for marketing purposes, pay the fine for breaking CAPPS protocol, and still make a net profit.
I used to work for a major airline. One of the things my coworkers would do is look into the passenger lists to find when celebrities were flying, and go to the airport to see them. These people didn't even think about the fact that they were using the information systems improperly and that they were violating the privacy of the celebrities.
Didn't they say 10 computers would be enough for the whole world?;)
Yeah, and we're there. There's this huge multi-processor, redundant, distributed computer. It has a bus that any processor unit can use to communicate with any other. Processor units can vary widely in the specific technology used, but they must communicate (with each other) on the message bus. Most input terminals are tied to a single processor.
The Internet is the world's main computer. And that's the only computer we really need.
I've often wondered just how fast their turn-around time was once you started using words like Great Satan, infidels, chemical, Bin LaCARRIER LOST
That's why emacs has the "M-x spook" command. It prints out a string of phrases likely for the NSA to be searching for. The idea is to put it into all the emails you send. Increases the noise ratio for email-sniffers. Of course, you wouldn't wanna use it if you really were a terrorist.
OTOH, if the NSA has a good spam filter they use before reading my mail, i'd be happy if they could share the technology with the rest of the world.
Maybe they could use PopFile's Baysian filter. Make one bucket called "spam", one called "terrorist", and one called "everything else". Then start training the filter.
Would he be equally culpable if he repeatedly tried, on a smaller scale, to book free tickets from work which he cancelled at the last minute and his new employer was monitoring his PC without his knowledge?
But that wouldn't hurt the airlines. The free tickets are the spaces that aren't otherwise used. In my experience, after they book the plane, they call the space-available passengers to give away the remaining seats. If he cancelled at the last minute, he simply wouldn't have been in that last minute list, and someone else would've gotten the unoccupied seat. Or it would've flown empty. Neither one hurts the airline.
The GPL license explicitly states that you do not need to accept the license to USE the product. However, it is a copyrighted work, so you do not have the inherent right to distibute the work. If you wish to DITRIBUTE a GNU product, the only way to legally do so is to accept the GNU license.
So GPL is fundamently different from EULA. The EULA claims that by using the software you accept the license. The GPL claims that by distributing the software you accept the license.
The band cares less about whether I hear them and more about whether I buy them.
Most musicians really do want you to hear their work. Artists make music because it brings them pleasure. Artists distribute music because they want to share their music. Our Muses demand that we Create. The buying thing is a different force from the desire to create and share music.
Musicians don't care about whether people buy their songs; they care about making the rent payment, eating things other than Raman. And then there's also the lure of being a mega-hit and being filthy rich. Whether the money comes from selling CDs or MP3's, or whether it comes from cover charges or T-shirt sales or web site subscriptions, doesn't matter to the musicians.
And that's the fundamental issue we're facing right now. In the Old Style, musicians made money by making record deals, going platinum, and getting huge royalties from the Record Companies. Yes, the record companies got more money out of the deal. Yes, the record companies abused musicians, especially if they weren't good at contract negotiation. But that was the only game in town. That was how musicians made money.
Now the Internet, MP3's, Napster et. al., CD Burners, low-cost recording and production equipment, have changed all of that. And now the question is: what is the paradigm for musicians to make money? And we have to answer the question in two parts. First, how does the run-of-the-mill (but still talented) musician make enough money to quit their day job, produce music full time, and still pay rent and buy food. And Second, how do the lucky few musicians become filthy rich? Or is "filthy rich rock star" still relevant in the new paradigm?
So, maybe selling individual MPs will work. Or maybe CD sales will work when the CDs are self-produced and cheap enough that it's not worth it to pirate. Or maybe the music should be free and bands should make money off of websites or merchandise sales or movie soundtracks or live gigs. Maybe we should go communist and give each musician food, housing, and healthcare, plus a monthly stipend, and they can spend all their time playing free gigs and recording free music.
I don't know how musicians should make money in the new paradigm. But I do know that "how musicians pay rent in the New Paradigm" is the fundamental question we're dealing with. Eventually, we will come up with an answer. What will it be? What should it be? How will musicians pay rent in the New Paradigm?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but just try telling a democrat that Clinton was just as willing to put an end to our privacy as Bush
I dunno. I was around for Daddy Bush's reign, and Clinton's, and W's. The country really did change when Clinton came into power. You weren't looking over your shoulder as much. You weren't having to constantly fight to keep your rights. Sure, it wasn't perfect, sure they were slimy politicians, but they weren't horrible. Sometimes they did things I agreed with.
And then, of course, when W came into power, it all got bad again. Keep in mind, folks, it was the Bushes who fought the First and Second Oil Wars.
If all the people who cherish liberty don't vote because they believe the choices are Tweedle-Di and Tweedle-Dum, then the other people get to pick their (and your) leader. And you'll probly end up with the Tweedle's evil cousin.
Ziroby
That pretty much sounds like what they're doing. They only tested only on XP, so they only "officially" support XP. But it works on other versions of windows, "if you can trick the installer". So if you're installing straight up, you can't get old OSes. But if you're willing to hack it a little, you can still run it on the old OSes. The fact that you have to trick the installer makes sure that users know that it's not supported and might not work right.
I've been professionally coding for ten years, and parenting for seven years. What I've found is that I simply do not work the outrageous hours. If they expect me to come in late, I'll find a day where Mom is taking the kids out, or the kids are just hanging out at home. Lately it's on days when Mom has visitation. And I'll come in extra on these days when needed, but it's according to my schedule. I've gotten some push-back on that, but I've found that if I ignore them, and do a lot of bad-ass coding while I'm there, that they don't fire me (lay me off, yes; fire, no).
My current boss maintains "A regular workday at is not eight hours, it's more like nine or ten hours." Right. And it's 5:40 on a Friday and how many people are here? I've also complained about Wednesday releases where 2/3 of our team are non-custodial parents who have the kids on Wednesdays, so we really can't stay Wednesday evening. (I don't wanna miss my time with the kids, and Mom makes plans/dates for when I'm taking the kids, so I can't just not pick them up.) In that case my boss responded, "Well, you know when releases are way in advance, so you can plan accordingly." I responded about how often our release dates changed, and he didn't respond. But again, I didn't get fired. I just leave on-time on the days where I have the kids.
I've also tried the whole work at home thing. It only works if someone else (i.e., Mom) is willing to be aggressive about keeping the kids from bugging me. Cuz the kids want to be close to me when I'm home, but I can't work with them in the room. It was also effective when we rented a house with a detached apartment, and that became my office.
Note that this works best when your spouse doesn't work outside the home. (I've said "Mom" above, but that's because my ex-SO is female, not because I'm making a discriminatory statement about how there aren't enough women programmers). I need someone watching the kids during the day so I can get work done, then when I get home I spend serious playtime with them. Especially when the kids are preschool. (But actually now that I think of it, it worked OK when Mom was working and the kids were in daycare. Except that we didn't spend as much time as the kids, and with Mom having a low-paying job, we ended up netting a loss of a couple hundred dollars over four months) Nowadays, Mom and I are divorced, and she watches them most of the time, so my visitation times are weekends and a weekday evening. That makes me more able to work late at other times, but makes my time with the kids sacrosanct.
Sometimes people fear that having a family and a programming job will get them divorced. I did get reprimanded once for taking three-hour lunches (oops) and subsequently laid off. But actually, my wife left me when I was unemployed for five months and about to run out of unemployment. She didn't leave while I was spending 40-50 hours a week working. Of course at that time I was also bringing home a lot of money for her to play with </spite>
So, basically, you can do it. And you will do it cuz you have to. And it'll work out and you'll find your particular way of balancing the kids, the job, and the wife.
But I have not seen a left politician in awhile say anything other than "You cannot protect yourself, you need the government to protect you. So let me decide what you can and cannot do for yourself."
Which gives you the lovely state of California.
Of course, in my state (not California) you can only have sex missionary style.
Nope, both the left and the right decide that they have to protect you and will tell you how. E.g., it's not the left that supported the you-can-only-have-sex-in-a-particular-way laws. Not to mention the you can only have sex with or marry certain people (not your own gender now, not of a different race not too long ago). And the whole abortion thing is about people on the right saying they have to protect yourself from terminating a pregnancy (and thus either regretting it later, or being damned to hell).
I don't think passing laws to protect you from yourself is a left-or-right thing. I think it's ubiquitous among politicians in general.
I helped a friend of mine set up an optometrist with a BBS system for his office. My friend got free contacts (colored ones, I think). Unfortunately my eyes were perfect at the time, so I didn't get anything. :-(
The point is that if we rely on a single system (Akami), then that becomes a single point of failure. Single points of failure are the bane of reliability. If we had two systems, then if Akami went down, everything would shift to the other system. Things would be considerably slower, but the entire system wouldn't crash.
Granted, if both go down, we're still screwed. But the point is that it is much, much more likely that a single thing will fail then that a thing and its redundant backup will fail at the same time. Especially if they're both pretty reliable.
I know that Akami is made to be very reliable. But unless they run their system as two completely independant redundant systems, then there are still failures which could hit them both at the same time.
I don't understand what the problem with global warming is. The whole Gaia hypothesis says that the system is self correcting.
So here comes this species that mucks with the environment, burns biomass to power a high energy civilization, and pollutes everything. Eventually global warming, or pollution, or something else, gets to the point where it threatens that species. Some catastrophic event occurs which kills off a quarter of that species. The entire civilization collapses and the species reverts to a more primitive society, which doesn't pollute as much. Problem solved.
Gaia can fix it all. Gaia doesn't care if a species is drastically reduced (or killed off). Life will go on.
that the US spies on its "friends" in the first place.
It may be naive, but if you want respect you have to give respect.
What makes you think the US wants respect? World Dominance, yes. Respect?
For everyone who hasn't done so yet, I recommend visiting the ACLU website as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and donating
And sign up for their action lists. Send letters to congress about important freedom items. (Of course, you send them the default form letter and they send you back a form letter. But I'm certain that somewhere someone's counting the number of for and against letters. So they can decide which issues they're not gonna advertise that they're supporting.)
Usually when I see a live band that I like, I'll buy the CD right there from them. In fact, that's been the only way I've bought CDs for years now. I like the band, and I know that I'm helping out. (Of course, I'm usually watching small local bands, usually at Pagan festivals or events). I'd love the opportunity to have exactly the show I just saw on CD. I'd love that kind of souvenir. And at $10, it's cheaper than a (studio-produced) CD or a T-shirt.
And frankly, if I show that CD to my friends, or burn them a copy, it's advertising for the band. If they like the live CD, they'll wanna see the band. And, probly, buy a live CD after that show.
VNC. Nothing like remote control of my box and the boxes in QA. Great for work at home; it's a bit slow over a modem, but you can do EVERYTHING over VNC.
Copyright infringement is not a "right", let alone a right that we might have. You will never see this capitalist country condone copyright infringement on the scale the warez groups produce.
"Copyright" is about the "rights to copy". The right to copy other people's work is a "right", albeit one we don't have. I am not giving an opinion on whether or not we should have that right. I'm simply saying that it's talking about rights, so it belongs in YRO. Even if it's talking about rights we should not have, it's still talking about rights, and it still belongs in YRO.
3)Vote to remove the legal protections that you bash the government for enforcing as is thier duty.
Great. When is the next vote for changing copyright law? Oh wait, a law like that would have to be proposed by congress and voted on by them. But the RIAA, music industry, etc. control congress. Then we need to start a grass roots movement to change copyright law. First we have to figure out what we want, then we have to gather the grass roots support (i.e., normal citizens).
Well, to figure out what we want, we should discuss it in some online forum. And to get grass roots support we could start with discussing it in some online forum. Hmmm... I guess that means we should post/discuss/proselytize on Slashdot.
OK, so what are doing wrong here?
We don't have the right to distributed pirated works online. How does this story fit in this category?
Of course it's about "Your Rights Online". You claim that it's not a right. Discussion of rights we don't have, and about whether or not we should have them, belong in YRO.
www.techsunite.org
But if there's an oversupply of labor, we can reduce that oversupply by making workers less productive. Working over 40 hours reduces productivity. So the Bush administration is reducing the labor surplus by removing barriers to overtime.
Yes, I realize this is twisted logic.
IANAL, but I believe that anything Linus himself has written (unless it is work for hire) he can fork on a different license at whim - he just can't revoke the GPL on code already released under it.
In theory, yes. But if anyone has modified the code or added even a single line, then he can't release it under another license, because it isn't "his" code. So, how much of Linux is prestine Linus code?
Give users names like "Adobe photoshop" and they'll be much happier than "Adobe super-fire bird".
But "Adobe" itself is a "clever" name. Who would've thought that a company could be very successful when their name means "mud brick". It should really be called "Mud Brick Photshop" (or, taking your example, "Mud Brick Super-Fire Bird").
From the article:
... Specifically, ...
... to detect individuals who ... have outstanding Federal or state warrants for crimes of violence.
Myth: CAPPS II will run a criminal background check on every passenger.
Fact: No, CAPPS II will NOT run a criminal background check on every passenger.
* CAPPS II also performs a risk assessment, including a check
Um, how is a check against who has outstanding warrants not a criminal background check?
Also, so many of the responses hinge on people doing the right thing. So-and-so "will be contractually obliged" to delete the data, or to not use the data for other purposes. People and corporations are notorious for doing things that they're not supposed to do. So if I'm an airline, I can use CAPPS II data for marketing purposes, pay the fine for breaking CAPPS protocol, and still make a net profit.
I used to work for a major airline. One of the things my coworkers would do is look into the passenger lists to find when celebrities were flying, and go to the airport to see them. These people didn't even think about the fact that they were using the information systems improperly and that they were violating the privacy of the celebrities.
Didn't they say 10 computers would be enough for the whole world? ;)
Yeah, and we're there. There's this huge multi-processor, redundant, distributed computer. It has a bus that any processor unit can use to communicate with any other. Processor units can vary widely in the specific technology used, but they must communicate (with each other) on the message bus. Most input terminals are tied to a single processor.
The Internet is the world's main computer. And that's the only computer we really need.
I've often wondered just how fast their turn-around time was once you started using words like Great Satan, infidels, chemical, Bin LaCARRIER LOST
That's why emacs has the "M-x spook" command. It prints out a string of phrases likely for the NSA to be searching for. The idea is to put it into all the emails you send. Increases the noise ratio for email-sniffers. Of course, you wouldn't wanna use it if you really were a terrorist.
OTOH, if the NSA has a good spam filter they use before reading my mail, i'd be happy if they could share the technology with the rest of the world.
Maybe they could use PopFile's Baysian filter. Make one bucket called "spam", one called "terrorist", and one called "everything else". Then start training the filter.
Would he be equally culpable if he repeatedly tried, on a smaller scale, to book free tickets from work which he cancelled at the last minute and his new employer was monitoring his PC without his knowledge?
But that wouldn't hurt the airlines. The free tickets are the spaces that aren't otherwise used. In my experience, after they book the plane, they call the space-available passengers to give away the remaining seats. If he cancelled at the last minute, he simply wouldn't have been in that last minute list, and someone else would've gotten the unoccupied seat. Or it would've flown empty. Neither one hurts the airline.
The GPL license explicitly states that you do not need to accept the license to USE the product. However, it is a copyrighted work, so you do not have the inherent right to distibute the work. If you wish to DITRIBUTE a GNU product, the only way to legally do so is to accept the GNU license.
So GPL is fundamently different from EULA. The EULA claims that by using the software you accept the license. The GPL claims that by distributing the software you accept the license.
The band cares less about whether I hear them and more about whether I buy them.
Most musicians really do want you to hear their work. Artists make music because it brings them pleasure. Artists distribute music because they want to share their music. Our Muses demand that we Create. The buying thing is a different force from the desire to create and share music.
Musicians don't care about whether people buy their songs; they care about making the rent payment, eating things other than Raman. And then there's also the lure of being a mega-hit and being filthy rich. Whether the money comes from selling CDs or MP3's, or whether it comes from cover charges or T-shirt sales or web site subscriptions, doesn't matter to the musicians.
And that's the fundamental issue we're facing right now. In the Old Style, musicians made money by making record deals, going platinum, and getting huge royalties from the Record Companies. Yes, the record companies got more money out of the deal. Yes, the record companies abused musicians, especially if they weren't good at contract negotiation. But that was the only game in town. That was how musicians made money.
Now the Internet, MP3's, Napster et. al., CD Burners, low-cost recording and production equipment, have changed all of that. And now the question is: what is the paradigm for musicians to make money? And we have to answer the question in two parts. First, how does the run-of-the-mill (but still talented) musician make enough money to quit their day job, produce music full time, and still pay rent and buy food. And Second, how do the lucky few musicians become filthy rich? Or is "filthy rich rock star" still relevant in the new paradigm?
So, maybe selling individual MPs will work. Or maybe CD sales will work when the CDs are self-produced and cheap enough that it's not worth it to pirate. Or maybe the music should be free and bands should make money off of websites or merchandise sales or movie soundtracks or live gigs. Maybe we should go communist and give each musician food, housing, and healthcare, plus a monthly stipend, and they can spend all their time playing free gigs and recording free music.
I don't know how musicians should make money in the new paradigm. But I do know that "how musicians pay rent in the New Paradigm" is the fundamental question we're dealing with. Eventually, we will come up with an answer. What will it be? What should it be? How will musicians pay rent in the New Paradigm?