Some rockstars may make a lot of money, but they sure aren't getting paid it by the RIAA.
Remember Toni Braxton? She sold an assload of CDs when she first hit the business. And I don't say 'assload' lightly. Check out this article at Salon that touches on the subject: Courtney Love does the math
The argument isn't that piracy doesn't hurt music; it's the piracy hasn't hurt music in any significant way. Luxury spending is down across the board in the U.S. far more than 11% this year.
If anything, the fact that the music industry is weathering the storm better than other industries suggests that they're growing. Now, I'm not going to go as far as to say that they're growing because of piracy, but it certainly hasn't been cutting into their sales by 97.8 million dollars or whatnot.
if you dont vote then get the fuck out of the country. if you dont believe in the system get the fuck out of the country. maybe if people like you start leaving (canadas close) people will notice. you do have the right to protest.
Come on up, folks, you'll probably love it. We use a much more proportional system of representation up here, so even if you don't vote Liberal or Tory, your voice is still heard. Just look at how big an impact the NDP had, or how big an impact Reform/Alliance have been having for the past few years.
The issue isn't whether or not you have the right to protest in America. It's whether or not your protests will have any effect. In a country like America, violent uprising is hardly an option - so when your voice and your vote have no effect, what are you to do?
Neo, having been able to directly access his own code in the Matrix, may have been enlightened to the point where he could access his own hardware in the real world, rather than 'API calls'. He may have gained direct control over his own consciousness. Agent Smith, having been an AI who could alter his own programming within the Matrix as well, could also do this. This would explain how he could heal himself in the Zion-existence, despite not being in Matrix 1, without resorting to Zion-existence being another Matrix.
This could be the reason the AI reiterates Neos, over and over again - to gain understanding of how to inhabit human bodies with direct control, as Smith now does. The untapped 'battery' power that Neo posesses is the same raw processing power of every human brain, but more so, since he has ascended to a new level of consciousness. This would make him an important and unique resource for the AIs to attempt to control. Everyone does get the whole humans-as-parallel-processors thing, right? That they're processing power for the Matrix, not electrical power?
If you are targetting people who don't want to purchase your product, I fail to see how your business model is defensible.
People want to purchase from indie labels for a few reasons: * Sound quality of vinyl/CD is much higher than that of an mp3 * You get neat inserts and such * The artists probably get some of the money, as opposed to the artists owned by megacorps who get screwed
Yes, indie and punk fans distrust major labels, and want to support indie labels, so their sales are propped up somewhat. I also know quite a few people who listen to house and trance who are strict audiophiles, and won't settle for the low sound quality of compressed recordings. But saying that the RIAA members are justified in calling everyone pirates because people don't want to buy what they're selling is nonsense. If they put out higher-quality products, I'm sure their sales would go up.
ps. I 'pirate' mp3s. I've purchased seven new CDs in the past two months. I've been unemployed for quite some time, and this is a significant expense for me. I would not have purchased these albums if I had not been introduced to the artists via p2p. So it goes.
When I saw Vagrant on that list I nearly flipped. Vagrant may be the most mainstream of the 'emo labels', but they're still not mainstream enough that Clear Channel will play their stuff. When I saw them there, I immediately fired off an email pointing out how the RIAA's current agenda is counter to Vagrant's best interests (e.g., that their sales would suffer if exposure to their music was restricted). Hopefully somebody actually reads it instead of throwing it in the trash.
Remember, your favourite 'indie' labels probably only have one or two dozen people in the office at most. If you write to them, and someone reads it, you've just spoken with a huge portion of the staff. I would urge anyone else who sees their favourite label on the RIAA's list to contact them, as well.
What? No. If he'd hired the best lawyer he could have found, he would be in debt for the rest of his life. Microsoft could have just kept bringing him back to court, over, and over, and over again until his legal fees were something on par with what the RIAA is suing that MTU kid for.
Consider the following: signals can travel across neurons at at best around 150 meters per second. Signals travelling across true electronic circuits, on the other hand, can travel at millions of times greater speed. In theory, it would be preferable then to have a brain constructed not of biological neurons, but circuitry (with a Faraday-cage skull, so people couldn't kill you with magnets). So here's the thought experiment.
Consider that you replace one neuron at a time in your brain with its equivalent piece of circuitry, slowly 'upgrading' the biological parts until your brain is entirely made of circuits. Do you at some point die? Does your body become inhabited by an artifical intelligence, using a neural net modeled after your brain? Or does your consciousness stay as you upgrade the hardware?
Now consider that rather than slowly replacing your neurons one by one, you construct an entire artifical brain, modeled perfectly after yours, but with circuitry instead of neurons. You set the electric state of this neural net to perfectly match that of your brain, and instantaneously switch your original brain off, connecting your body to the new, artifical replacement. Do you at some point die? Does your body become inhabited by an artifical intelligence, using a neural net modeled after your brain? Or does your consciousness migrate to the upgraded hardware?
Is there a difference between the two scenarios? If so, what is it? The result is exactly the same; you have a neural net running exactly as your brain would be, albeit faster. Is your existence connected to the hardware, the copy of the 'software', or is it something more transcendant?
The Opposite Of Sex features Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow in a black comedy that centres on several non-standard relationships;
Swimming With Sharks has Kevin Spacey, Frank Whaley, Benicio del Toro and Michelle Forbes in a movie about a new Hollywood assistant that slowly and subtly moves from dark humour to outright nihilism;
The Last Supper features Cameron Diaz in the story of a group of liberals who decide to enlighten radical right-wingers, by inviting them to dinner, and either converting them, or poisoning them;
and Cannibal! the musical is the incredibly funny musical dealing with Alfred Packer's ill-fated expedition party.
Achaea and Avalon still make huge amounts of money. The problem with most MUDs isn't that they don't have a market to make money off of; it's that they don't have enough coders to produce a good product. Most MUDs these days run off of a stock codebase (SMAUG, diku, etc.) with a mostly-stock world. The MUDs with original content do well, but few of them have enough coders.
I, for one, still spend quite a bit of time (and some money, as I have a membership on) Cardea, and it's more entertaining than most other games I have at my disposal. The only reason the average MUD does poorly is that it is a low-quality product with little original content and no original gameplay.
I hope you won't take offense if I trust Reuters reporters, who base their careers off of impartial, ethical reporting integrity, over Rumsfeld, a politician.
disclaimer: this argument has already been presented many, many times on Slashdot, I'm sure.
When I moved out to go to university last year and got my (off-campus, non-university) broadband internet connection up, I signed up for a little service called Audiogalaxy. Anyone remember Audiogalaxy? It was a community-oriented p2p music-trading service. The community-oriented bit, I found fantastic. Yes, you could just use it to download songs. You could also, however, join groups of people with similar musical tastes, who would forward you songs from artists you may never have heard before. Had it not been for Audiogalaxy, I might never have been introduced to artists like Pedro the Lion, Onelinedrawing, and The Weakerthans.
In the last year, I bought two CDs by The Weakerthans, one by Onelinedrawing, I have an order form filled out for a pair of Pedro the Lion CDs, some Pedro the Lion and Onelinedrawing merchandise, and I have tickets to see The Weakerthans in Calgary this weekend.
Is this a bad thing for the artists and labels? Do they just not want my money? I wouldn't have spent that money on Eminem and Britney Spears, sorry. If I hadn't been introduced to these other bands I wouldn't have spent that money on music at all. Peer-to-peer could be an absolute goldmine for the recording industry. It's free advertising. Do you know how much the recording industry spend on advertising last year? I don't even want to look it up. I'm afraid the incredible size of the number would cause this library computer to crash. It's probably written with scientific notation.
The funny thing is, the people who have the most lobbying power within the RIAA aren't the small record labels like Jade Tree or G7 or Vagrant or Deep Elm, the little guys who are attempting to run an honest business, support good artists, and bring good art out so that the public can enjoy it. They're the giant conglomerates, the ones who are responsible for Toni Braxton going broke despite selling $188 million dollars worth of CDs. These people don't care if I want to listen to good music. These people hate that I spend my money on bands I like, rather than no-talent pop-sensations. These people do not represent legitimate artists and recording companies - these people represent parasites, who take advantage of artists in able to fill their own pockets.
I can't use Audiogalaxy now. It got turned into a pay-service, and copyright restrictions wrecked the entire service. I buy far fewer records now, because I have less exposure to new artists. My friends still recommend bands to me; I'll read about a show someone went to in their livejournal, and I'll download an mp3, and if I like the band, I may end up buying a CD or some concert tickets. I'm a pirate, a felon, and a thief for that. This is insane.
Yes, there will be people out there who will never buy music, ever. They'll steal mp3s and burn hundreds of CDs. Whatever. There are people out there that pirate dvds, too. Yes, it does hurt the industry. What will hurt the industry more, though, is clinging to outdated business models and preying upon the artists that provide the foundation for the entire industry. These mega-corps could be capitalising upon free advertising, diversifying their portfolios. They could have a Spears for every genre going platinum, and without having to spend millions on full-page ads in Vanity Fair and putting giant billboards up in Times Square.
It won't happen. The big-wigs will continue to bleed their artists dry and fight all calls for change. And I'll continue to steal mp3s, listen to who I like, and buy CDs from talented artists who can't whore themselves out on Coca-Cola commercials, people whose success is based on actual artistic merit. So it goes.
After the gold standard was abandoned in 1973, most countries began to stockpile US dollars, instead of gold, to maintain some security in their treasuries in case of rampant inflation/deflation.
However, as countries lose respect for the United States, and as the United States' stance is seen to be less stable, more and more nations will switch to stockpiling other currencies, like the Euro.
The net result of this for Joe American will be rampant inflation. All those stacks of US dollars that were previously safely locked up in random foreign vaults will hit the currency exchange, and get forced back into the American economy. As the American dollar falls in value due to inflation, more and more nations will feel compelled to liquidate their stocks of it before they lose all value. It'll be the currency-market equivalent of Black Thursday, and could be incredibly disastrous to the stability of America as a whole - perhaps even wrecking its status as the world's sole superpower. Just look what happened to Russia when its economy collapsed.
And who can say what will happen then? Will America bounce back like it did from the Great Depression? Or will Ashcroft and co take advantage of the 21st-century equivalent of Weimar Germany?
When you're at the top, an incredible amount relies not just on being the biggest, but on being trusted, liked, and perceived as stable. The current American administration has thrown much of this out the window, and the results could be disastrous. At any rate, the war will not be good for the economy. That's something you can count on.
What they did could be called Entrapment, and it could be called Espionage.
Ding! That's why it's bad. Entrapment and espionage are by definition infringement upon the values of the American Constitution. By deciding that these values are not applicable to 'foreigners', America again snubs its fat, ugly collective nose at the rest of the world, and says 'Who's your daddy?'.
You're missing the point, too. If I travel from Alberta (where I'm of legal drinking age) down to Ohio (where I'm not) and buy some liquor, I'm breaking American law, and I'm going to get in shit for it if I get caught. If you're in another country, or if you're directly affecting another country, you can pretty much say they have jurisdiction. These guys were stealing credit card numbers, at least some of which were American - attacks on American property.
The issue is that the methods used by the FBI infringed upon the accused's rights. This is saying that the United States' Constitution only applies to Americans - which, while perhaps justified, is morally reprehensible. The entire purpose of the constitution was to grant equal protections to everyone, for after all, "all men were created equals".
Yeah, sure. According to the FBI, American men were born more equal than everyone else.
Push 'em forward to one page, then javascript:history.back() from it - kids, don't do this at home!
Bad one, this. At least most of the IE loopholes I can avoid through settings tweaking / not surfing sites who would pull this on me. Now that *any* site can get full read/write/execute access on me with nowt but a redirect and history.back(), it's time to use Mozilla for my pr0n!
Since there isn't any real competition in broadband down there, I'd say that this is great, because all the AOLTimeWarner subscribers will flee to Canada. Which is good, see, because I'm trying to sell my mattress.
I didn't hit on it correctly with the soul thing, sorry. It depends on what your definitions of 'self' and of 'life' are.
If you are the sum of your memories, for example, the copy would be you. You'd just have moved. If you're something less tangible than that, you probably kicked the bucket when you hit the teleport button.
That only depends if you believe in souls. You would in all respects be the same person - the distinction between you and the original is meaningless, unless the original was just copied instead of destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember Toni Braxton? She sold an assload of CDs when she first hit the business. And I don't say 'assload' lightly. Check out this article at Salon that touches on the subject: Courtney Love does the math
The argument isn't that piracy doesn't hurt music; it's the piracy hasn't hurt music in any significant way. Luxury spending is down across the board in the U.S. far more than 11% this year.
If anything, the fact that the music industry is weathering the storm better than other industries suggests that they're growing. Now, I'm not going to go as far as to say that they're growing because of piracy, but it certainly hasn't been cutting into their sales by 97.8 million dollars or whatnot.
That no one stepped forward to offer pro bono representation for this kid. This is certainly a high-profile case that could have been won.
Come on up, folks, you'll probably love it. We use a much more proportional system of representation up here, so even if you don't vote Liberal or Tory, your voice is still heard. Just look at how big an impact the NDP had, or how big an impact Reform/Alliance have been having for the past few years.
The issue isn't whether or not you have the right to protest in America. It's whether or not your protests will have any effect. In a country like America, violent uprising is hardly an option - so when your voice and your vote have no effect, what are you to do?
Second matrix, or meta-consciousness?
Neo, having been able to directly access his own code in the Matrix, may have been enlightened to the point where he could access his own hardware in the real world, rather than 'API calls'. He may have gained direct control over his own consciousness. Agent Smith, having been an AI who could alter his own programming within the Matrix as well, could also do this. This would explain how he could heal himself in the Zion-existence, despite not being in Matrix 1, without resorting to Zion-existence being another Matrix.
This could be the reason the AI reiterates Neos, over and over again - to gain understanding of how to inhabit human bodies with direct control, as Smith now does. The untapped 'battery' power that Neo posesses is the same raw processing power of every human brain, but more so, since he has ascended to a new level of consciousness. This would make him an important and unique resource for the AIs to attempt to control. Everyone does get the whole humans-as-parallel-processors thing, right? That they're processing power for the Matrix, not electrical power?
When I fill my form out, and enter it, I get a 404. What's the juice?
If you are targetting people who don't want to purchase your product, I fail to see how your business model is defensible.
People want to purchase from indie labels for a few reasons:
* Sound quality of vinyl/CD is much higher than that of an mp3
* You get neat inserts and such
* The artists probably get some of the money, as opposed to the artists owned by megacorps who get screwed
Yes, indie and punk fans distrust major labels, and want to support indie labels, so their sales are propped up somewhat. I also know quite a few people who listen to house and trance who are strict audiophiles, and won't settle for the low sound quality of compressed recordings. But saying that the RIAA members are justified in calling everyone pirates because people don't want to buy what they're selling is nonsense. If they put out higher-quality products, I'm sure their sales would go up.
ps. I 'pirate' mp3s. I've purchased seven new CDs in the past two months. I've been unemployed for quite some time, and this is a significant expense for me. I would not have purchased these albums if I had not been introduced to the artists via p2p. So it goes.
THANK YOU.
When I saw Vagrant on that list I nearly flipped. Vagrant may be the most mainstream of the 'emo labels', but they're still not mainstream enough that Clear Channel will play their stuff. When I saw them there, I immediately fired off an email pointing out how the RIAA's current agenda is counter to Vagrant's best interests (e.g., that their sales would suffer if exposure to their music was restricted). Hopefully somebody actually reads it instead of throwing it in the trash.
Remember, your favourite 'indie' labels probably only have one or two dozen people in the office at most. If you write to them, and someone reads it, you've just spoken with a huge portion of the staff. I would urge anyone else who sees their favourite label on the RIAA's list to contact them, as well.
Step 1. 'foreign terrorist' destroys 'important national structure'
Step 2. 'popular nationalist leader and ruling party' pass legislation to restrict civil rights in favour of 'national security'
Step 3. something. maybe fascism?
Step 4. PROFIT!!!
What? No. If he'd hired the best lawyer he could have found, he would be in debt for the rest of his life. Microsoft could have just kept bringing him back to court, over, and over, and over again until his legal fees were something on par with what the RIAA is suing that MTU kid for.
Consider the following: signals can travel across neurons at at best around 150 meters per second. Signals travelling across true electronic circuits, on the other hand, can travel at millions of times greater speed. In theory, it would be preferable then to have a brain constructed not of biological neurons, but circuitry (with a Faraday-cage skull, so people couldn't kill you with magnets). So here's the thought experiment.
Consider that you replace one neuron at a time in your brain with its equivalent piece of circuitry, slowly 'upgrading' the biological parts until your brain is entirely made of circuits. Do you at some point die? Does your body become inhabited by an artifical intelligence, using a neural net modeled after your brain? Or does your consciousness stay as you upgrade the hardware?
Now consider that rather than slowly replacing your neurons one by one, you construct an entire artifical brain, modeled perfectly after yours, but with circuitry instead of neurons. You set the electric state of this neural net to perfectly match that of your brain, and instantaneously switch your original brain off, connecting your body to the new, artifical replacement. Do you at some point die? Does your body become inhabited by an artifical intelligence, using a neural net modeled after your brain? Or does your consciousness migrate to the upgraded hardware?
Is there a difference between the two scenarios? If so, what is it? The result is exactly the same; you have a neural net running exactly as your brain would be, albeit faster. Is your existence connected to the hardware, the copy of the 'software', or is it something more transcendant?
The Opposite Of Sex features Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow in a black comedy that centres on several non-standard relationships;
Swimming With Sharks has Kevin Spacey, Frank Whaley, Benicio del Toro and Michelle Forbes in a movie about a new Hollywood assistant that slowly and subtly moves from dark humour to outright nihilism;
The Last Supper features Cameron Diaz in the story of a group of liberals who decide to enlighten radical right-wingers, by inviting them to dinner, and either converting them, or poisoning them;
and Cannibal! the musical is the incredibly funny musical dealing with Alfred Packer's ill-fated expedition party.
Achaea and Avalon still make huge amounts of money. The problem with most MUDs isn't that they don't have a market to make money off of; it's that they don't have enough coders to produce a good product. Most MUDs these days run off of a stock codebase (SMAUG, diku, etc.) with a mostly-stock world. The MUDs with original content do well, but few of them have enough coders.
I, for one, still spend quite a bit of time (and some money, as I have a membership on) Cardea, and it's more entertaining than most other games I have at my disposal. The only reason the average MUD does poorly is that it is a low-quality product with little original content and no original gameplay.
I hope you won't take offense if I trust Reuters reporters, who base their careers off of impartial, ethical reporting integrity, over Rumsfeld, a politician.
When I moved out to go to university last year and got my (off-campus, non-university) broadband internet connection up, I signed up for a little service called Audiogalaxy. Anyone remember Audiogalaxy? It was a community-oriented p2p music-trading service. The community-oriented bit, I found fantastic. Yes, you could just use it to download songs. You could also, however, join groups of people with similar musical tastes, who would forward you songs from artists you may never have heard before. Had it not been for Audiogalaxy, I might never have been introduced to artists like Pedro the Lion, Onelinedrawing, and The Weakerthans.
In the last year, I bought two CDs by The Weakerthans, one by Onelinedrawing, I have an order form filled out for a pair of Pedro the Lion CDs, some Pedro the Lion and Onelinedrawing merchandise, and I have tickets to see The Weakerthans in Calgary this weekend.
Is this a bad thing for the artists and labels? Do they just not want my money? I wouldn't have spent that money on Eminem and Britney Spears, sorry. If I hadn't been introduced to these other bands I wouldn't have spent that money on music at all. Peer-to-peer could be an absolute goldmine for the recording industry. It's free advertising. Do you know how much the recording industry spend on advertising last year? I don't even want to look it up. I'm afraid the incredible size of the number would cause this library computer to crash. It's probably written with scientific notation.
The funny thing is, the people who have the most lobbying power within the RIAA aren't the small record labels like Jade Tree or G7 or Vagrant or Deep Elm, the little guys who are attempting to run an honest business, support good artists, and bring good art out so that the public can enjoy it. They're the giant conglomerates, the ones who are responsible for Toni Braxton going broke despite selling $188 million dollars worth of CDs. These people don't care if I want to listen to good music. These people hate that I spend my money on bands I like, rather than no-talent pop-sensations. These people do not represent legitimate artists and recording companies - these people represent parasites, who take advantage of artists in able to fill their own pockets.
I can't use Audiogalaxy now. It got turned into a pay-service, and copyright restrictions wrecked the entire service. I buy far fewer records now, because I have less exposure to new artists. My friends still recommend bands to me; I'll read about a show someone went to in their livejournal, and I'll download an mp3, and if I like the band, I may end up buying a CD or some concert tickets. I'm a pirate, a felon, and a thief for that. This is insane.
Yes, there will be people out there who will never buy music, ever. They'll steal mp3s and burn hundreds of CDs. Whatever. There are people out there that pirate dvds, too. Yes, it does hurt the industry. What will hurt the industry more, though, is clinging to outdated business models and preying upon the artists that provide the foundation for the entire industry. These mega-corps could be capitalising upon free advertising, diversifying their portfolios. They could have a Spears for every genre going platinum, and without having to spend millions on full-page ads in Vanity Fair and putting giant billboards up in Times Square.
It won't happen. The big-wigs will continue to bleed their artists dry and fight all calls for change. And I'll continue to steal mp3s, listen to who I like, and buy CDs from talented artists who can't whore themselves out on Coca-Cola commercials, people whose success is based on actual artistic merit. So it goes.
No, it will not.
After the gold standard was abandoned in 1973, most countries began to stockpile US dollars, instead of gold, to maintain some security in their treasuries in case of rampant inflation/deflation.
However, as countries lose respect for the United States, and as the United States' stance is seen to be less stable, more and more nations will switch to stockpiling other currencies, like the Euro.
The net result of this for Joe American will be rampant inflation. All those stacks of US dollars that were previously safely locked up in random foreign vaults will hit the currency exchange, and get forced back into the American economy. As the American dollar falls in value due to inflation, more and more nations will feel compelled to liquidate their stocks of it before they lose all value. It'll be the currency-market equivalent of Black Thursday, and could be incredibly disastrous to the stability of America as a whole - perhaps even wrecking its status as the world's sole superpower. Just look what happened to Russia when its economy collapsed.
And who can say what will happen then? Will America bounce back like it did from the Great Depression? Or will Ashcroft and co take advantage of the 21st-century equivalent of Weimar Germany?
When you're at the top, an incredible amount relies not just on being the biggest, but on being trusted, liked, and perceived as stable. The current American administration has thrown much of this out the window, and the results could be disastrous. At any rate, the war will not be good for the economy. That's something you can count on.
Ding! That's why it's bad. Entrapment and espionage are by definition infringement upon the values of the American Constitution. By deciding that these values are not applicable to 'foreigners', America again snubs its fat, ugly collective nose at the rest of the world, and says 'Who's your daddy?'.
You're missing the point, too. If I travel from Alberta (where I'm of legal drinking age) down to Ohio (where I'm not) and buy some liquor, I'm breaking American law, and I'm going to get in shit for it if I get caught. If you're in another country, or if you're directly affecting another country, you can pretty much say they have jurisdiction. These guys were stealing credit card numbers, at least some of which were American - attacks on American property.
The issue is that the methods used by the FBI infringed upon the accused's rights. This is saying that the United States' Constitution only applies to Americans - which, while perhaps justified, is morally reprehensible. The entire purpose of the constitution was to grant equal protections to everyone, for after all, "all men were created equals".
Yeah, sure. According to the FBI, American men were born more equal than everyone else.
Push 'em forward to one page, then javascript:history.back() from it - kids, don't do this at home!
Bad one, this. At least most of the IE loopholes I can avoid through settings tweaking / not surfing sites who would pull this on me. Now that *any* site can get full read/write/execute access on me with nowt but a redirect and history.back(), it's time to use Mozilla for my pr0n!
Since there isn't any real competition in broadband down there, I'd say that this is great, because all the AOLTimeWarner subscribers will flee to Canada. Which is good, see, because I'm trying to sell my mattress.
Ding! Mod that sucker up.
I didn't hit on it correctly with the soul thing, sorry. It depends on what your definitions of 'self' and of 'life' are.
If you are the sum of your memories, for example, the copy would be you. You'd just have moved. If you're something less tangible than that, you probably kicked the bucket when you hit the teleport button.
That only depends if you believe in souls. You would in all respects be the same person - the distinction between you and the original is meaningless, unless the original was just copied instead of destroyed.
Did you type that with your nose there, Mr. chrisd?
It's, um, infinitely fast. Thank you for your request; now please move to Interrogation Chamber C-76 for Knowledge Overrabundance Self-Termination.
The computer is your friend.