Maybe the reason the Germans have no separate word for pidgeons and doves is that they don't care which is which. In this case, social differences lead to language choice, not vica versa. I guarantee you German bird watchers know the difference.
In English, we only have one word for "duck," despite the fact that there are many kinds of ducks. They all have different sizes, temperments and flavors, but we call them all "duck." Which leads to some pretty depressed diners, who like one sort of duck meat and then come to find the duck served at a different restaurant has a different flavor. It's a minor inconvenience caused by the fact that language evolves, it's not planned. It is not an indicator of a widespread cultural ignorance of ducks.
I'll bet if you laid out the nuts not by number, but by pattern, they'd get it instantly.
Ex:
* * * *
* * _* * *
* * * * * *
There's a reason we use those patterns on dice. They are much, much easier to recognize at a glance than these:
* * * *
* * * * *
* * * * * *
It's just hard for the brain to recognize. It actually needs to count them up. And if you've never counted to 6 before, it's gonna get confused. Shit, MY brain gets confused if I don't look at it hard.
Incidentally, I'll bet these researchers would have some serious difficulties killing anacondas and fileting them. Not because they don't have a word for it -- but because they've never done it before.
Of course, my problem with 1984 was that, eventually, they would dumb the language down to the point where only subversives would be able to discuss high level concepts such as doublespeak.
In short: I always felt that the governmental control of the people in 1984 was a bit too totalitarian to encourage the next generation of government controllers. That there was too much high-thinking required for the country not to fall apart in complete chaos within a few generations.
I think the chemical and social control of the castes in A Brave New World is much more likley.
Of course it seems that way. Terrorists have realized that certain activities will get them black flagged, so they're careful not to do those things. Need a bunch of potassium nitrate? Well, don't order it on YOUR credit card...they'll be looking for that. Have somebody else do it. Having a clear record will become a requisite for suicide attacks, and in a way that's pretty scary.
That's the whole problem with this Homeland Security business. It's too bureaocratic. The problem with American airline security pre-9/11 was complacency, not lack of security. Hiring more workers for less money and giving them more regulations isn't going to make the average security guy any more effective. Christ, I flew home from my honeymoon on September 10th, 2001 (yes, mindblowing...a day later I'd have never gotten home) with an 8 inch knife still strapped to my leg from my hike the day before. Walked right through security, right through the metal detector, didn't discover it until I was on the plane.
This knife -- like the box cutters used by the hijackers -- should have been discovered by security. It wasn't. Because security had been asked to tone down the sensitivity of metal detectors to keep lines moving and to reduce staffing for random searches.
Before 9/11, the crux of security checks was finding drugs, not stopping terror, because terror had never happened on American soil. Once it had, there was no need to wake up airport security and completely revise the travel regulations. We just had to make the guys already employed in this capacity understand why they were there. By adding all this red tape all we've done is, at great cost, removed accountability from the only people who can really stop air terrorism: airport security staff.
I'd like to see airport security cut in half, trained twice as well and paid 50% more. A small elite staff will be more effective and less intrusive all around than a bunch of drooling rent-a-cops who care more about procedure and moving the line then they do about protecting flights.
Oh geez, like a guy who got arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct at a football game and former speed freak -- like our current president?
Shit, man. I think if a former hard partier like Bush can become president of the country, the law should awknowledge that people can change. Otherwise the whole system is just hypocritical.
Language follows culture, not vica-versa. When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it. We invented a word. For a while, people were pretty bad with email, even though there was a word for it, because it's a difficult thing to understand. Then, after a few years, everybody "got" it.
I assume this is the same thing. Nomadic tribes don't deal with a lot of things, because everything they have they have to carry. So there's no need to count above two. If suddenly you ask a guy to keep track of four things, he's gonna have trouble: not because he doesn't have a word for it, but because he's going to have difficulty differentiating between the four things. It's no different than if I moved from driving a car to driving a semi trailer with no training. I'd get some of it, but important, non-intuitive concepts would be lost on me, and I'd probably crash. It's not because I don't have a word for them.
This is like the Inuit people and their umpteen words for snow. We outsiders can recognize the different types of snow with only a little practice, but since we don't get snow 8 months of the year, there's no need for it. English speakers understand foreign concepts like "esprit d'escalier" (the french term for all the cool things you wish you would have said when you leave somebody's house) or "bokeh" (the japanese term for the photographic effect that occurs with large aperatures in which the foreground is in sharp focus and the background is out of focus and fuzzy, thus drawing the eye towards the focus), even if we don't know what to call them.
It's experience that drives language, not vica versa -- althought the part of the brain that employees language is also responsible for the most critical human activity: symbolic logic.
Would you rather than young people and the under educated remain in the dark about current events?
There's not really any utility in confusing people with big words and complex sentences when the whole goal of your job is to inform. I'm glad the mainstream American media doesn't feel the need to act superior in their reporting...especially after reading some of the pretentious critics on both sides of the political spectrum who act as though using the word "spurious" gives them the mandate of heaven. Reading an Anne Coulter essay is something like reading a "build your SAT vocabulary" paper written by a kid who didn't know what the words meant yet.
Incidentally, if the Bush administration has done anything right, it's massively decreasing the effectiveness of the words "capability" and "potential"
I mean, thing about it: I have the potential to fuck a super model -- I have a penis and am not dead. All I'd have to do is meet a super model and convince her than overweight computer programmers with rhetoric degrees and modest debt portfolios are the sexiest segment of the population, and that I am an exemplary member of that group.
This does not mean that super models should start a "dasmegabyte" alert system based on chatter found on EfNet IRC channels.
Going to war over "potential" crimes is ridiculous, because you can invent potential whereever you like. The rest of the world has every right to be disgusted that America went to war in Iraq with no provocation. I would actually rather live in fear of potential threats then to become a real one. But I'm not a murderer and I don't like to associate with them.
You're saying that violent games can't use religious iconography without offending people? Fine. Don't play them. Personally, I think the juxtaposition of religious chanting and violence is plenty apt. We're talking about a religion that spawned the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. A religion based on death and resurrection, war and redemption. Like it or not, violence is integral to Christianity. If you get so easily offended...well, don't read the Bible, either, because it's not all flowers and bunny farts in there, either. In fact, I can't think of a single book that doesn't center around some violent event, nasty injustice or bizarre sexual scandal.
Besides, it's fucking HELL. If you're a Christian, you probably believe that hell is a place that's very violent and very profane. It's the place where blasphemers GO. It's SUPPOSED to offend you. And it would be disrespectful to paint hell as anything other than a terrible place -- and that chanting of the damned wouldn't even be juxtaposition, it'd be an expected element of such an environment.
Finally: art doesn't care what offends you. In fact, it's supposed to shock and offend, or else it's not doing its job. Most video games don't qualify as art, but only because they aren't trying hard enough -- the best games I've played have been akin to virtual environments that sucked you in and made you think about why you were doing what you were doing. You can't achieve this if you're afraid of offending non-Christians who don't like background chanting.
And what about those of us who have multiple machines on a single IP address? Like the 23 PCs behind a firewall router at my office, or the three macs behind a gateway at home?
Of course, there is no good way of telling who's running what on the internet anyway.
Of course, the problem with free software is that this driver won't full support the features of the device for several years and due to poor access to documentation or software-only features may never support some things that make the card worth buying. The software and the driver itself will probably have an inscrutable, ugly and complex interface that only works from the command line/KDE/Gnome and if you have a problem with it your only options are to fix it yourself (assuming you have programming ability and can figure out what the problem is) or pay a high hourly price for somebody else to do it.
Meanwhile, your stupid buddies who paid their Windows Tax have been running the thing for a year without a major problem, and have spent all the time they saved by not fucking around with beta drivers watching TV and generally enjoying their purchase. Problems they had during setup were fixed by the company's technical support staff because their platform is actually supported.
Of course, if the company EOL's the card or goes out of business entirely, the Linux driver will still work, whereas the Windows version will stagnate and die. Iomega, I'm looking in your direction as I type this.
In short: the beauty of free-as-in-beer is only skin deep, and its true value -- free-as-in-freedom -- lies underneath a mountain of major annoyances.
Um...not hard at all? The reason I liked Kerry in the primaries was that every one of his views, positions and plans was clearly laid out on his website. Since he's become the official candidate, it's kind of been blurred a bit, but the message is still there.
Or are you listening to the Republican line that "changing your mind" is a sign of weakness?
Problem is, the hacktivists don't see it that way. They probably don't even LIKE Kerry...many voters don't consider him progressive enough for their tastes and the anti-war folks can't like that he's a decorated veteran even considering his later protests.
They see themselves as being anti-Bush...a separate option from pro-Kerry. But many conservatives don't break it down so granularly...anybody on the other side is on the Other Side, and so we moderates voting Democrat this year are in the same boat as the draft dodging hippies and punk subversives.
In fact, one of the major problems I have with the modern Republican party is that they treat nearly everything as a binary issue. You're either for it or against it, you can't be ambivalent or vote to control the amount of something. In a way, this inflexibility makes the Republican party even more idealistic than the Democrats, and institutes a lot of what the Democrats claim is hypocrisy. How can you have a party that believes that parents should have the right to choose what school their children go to but that they're not bright not moral enough to choose whether or not to keep their child? Easy...each of these issues is broken down differently on that polar scale, and abortion falls cleanly into the "no fucking way" bin. Pragmatic decisions like keeping abortion legal, but dumping money into support and pro-child advertising campaigns to reassure scared young mothers that they don't have to kill their child, are seen as wishy washy liberalism -- even if such programs are met with greater success -- because they do not accept the artifical polarity forced onto the issue by idealistic conservatives. Yes, in a perfect world nobody would choose abortion and everybody would have a father and one parent would be able to be a primary caregiver. But these are cultural problems...and they are impossible to legislate.
Of course, the thing to realize is that for the most part Kerry has been keeping out of this overt Bush bashing. I mean, compare his speeches with those of pretty much everybody else and you see that when it comes to the opposition, he's the least rabidly Pro-Kerry guy in the bunch.
It is a shame that we've got a pro-Bush, anti-Bush populous, but that is what you get in a system that only allows for a binary vote. There is no chance that a third party candidate will win, so your choices are: vote for whoever you think will do the better job among Bush or Kerry, throw your vote away on an empty statement that won't change the system in the slightest, or stay home and eat some Cheetos.
After all, should Kerry win, chances are we'll still have a Republican majority in Congress, creating one of those great balances of power that usually result in sane governance. They'll be too busy fighting with each other to achieve anything dangerous.
Plus every time some genius comes along and commits a crime in the name of a progressive cause, we have to deal with a dozen media pundits saying, "See? Look what Liberals will do. Will Kerry supporters stop at nothing? Oh, these immoral people."
Then we have to deal with average people joining the Republican party just because it offers a sane choice compared to the nutjob left wingers. Hell, even crazies like Anne Coulter seem sane compared to hacker groups actively working to break the law in the name of democracy.
For years I was afraid to even admit I was a liberal. Not because I was embarrassed to care about progressive goals, but because I had to deal with being associated with misguided wierdos like these. I wish there was a t-shirt..."I'm against Bush but I don't want to kill him or take down his server or rage about how he's a filthy liar. I just want people not to vote for him because he hasn't done a very good job."
And the main difference between the RIAA and ROMS is that artists have no say, no contract, and no sway over ROMS. It's essentially theft of copyright masquerading as artist's rights. Say what you will about the RIAA -- and you did -- you still have the choice of not going with an RIAA member when signing a deal. In exchange for this bit of quality control, you have a massively smaller audience and nobody at all looking out for your rights as a musician.
The RIAA may seem a dinosaur, but it's the only legal entity artists have that's worth a damn...and even as shitty as it is, it beats the hell out of ROMS.
Abandonware is not a real thing, man. Copyright doesn't expire just because we want it to. Luckily, the company that produced it considered it not worth selling anymore and they're giving it away.
Well, between Lance Armstrong's lactic acid threshhold and Ian Thorpe's webbed feet, I'd say we're only a stone's throw away from the first Mutant Olympics. The logical progression from there is Cyborg Olympics -> Android Olympics -> Robolympics.
Are you claiming that ANYTHING Courtney Love said is reality?
Dude, I know quite a few professional musicians, mostly studio musicians or jazz artists signed to small labels, and they're all well compensated for their work. Not all artists get fucked by the RIAA. But even if they did, that still wouldn't justify using a foreign service that fucks artists on the cheap.
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Maybe the reason the Germans have no separate word for pidgeons and doves is that they don't care which is which. In this case, social differences lead to language choice, not vica versa. I guarantee you German bird watchers know the difference.
In English, we only have one word for "duck," despite the fact that there are many kinds of ducks. They all have different sizes, temperments and flavors, but we call them all "duck." Which leads to some pretty depressed diners, who like one sort of duck meat and then come to find the duck served at a different restaurant has a different flavor. It's a minor inconvenience caused by the fact that language evolves, it's not planned. It is not an indicator of a widespread cultural ignorance of ducks.
Ex:There's a reason we use those patterns on dice. They are much, much easier to recognize at a glance than these:It's just hard for the brain to recognize. It actually needs to count them up. And if you've never counted to 6 before, it's gonna get confused. Shit, MY brain gets confused if I don't look at it hard.
Incidentally, I'll bet these researchers would have some serious difficulties killing anacondas and fileting them. Not because they don't have a word for it -- but because they've never done it before.
Of course, my problem with 1984 was that, eventually, they would dumb the language down to the point where only subversives would be able to discuss high level concepts such as doublespeak.
In short: I always felt that the governmental control of the people in 1984 was a bit too totalitarian to encourage the next generation of government controllers. That there was too much high-thinking required for the country not to fall apart in complete chaos within a few generations.
I think the chemical and social control of the castes in A Brave New World is much more likley.
Yeah, but it's hard to hold down a guy who's good at math if you can only form a posse of two people.
Remember: two's company, three's a crowd. Four is a mob.
Of course it seems that way. Terrorists have realized that certain activities will get them black flagged, so they're careful not to do those things. Need a bunch of potassium nitrate? Well, don't order it on YOUR credit card...they'll be looking for that. Have somebody else do it. Having a clear record will become a requisite for suicide attacks, and in a way that's pretty scary.
That's the whole problem with this Homeland Security business. It's too bureaocratic. The problem with American airline security pre-9/11 was complacency, not lack of security. Hiring more workers for less money and giving them more regulations isn't going to make the average security guy any more effective. Christ, I flew home from my honeymoon on September 10th, 2001 (yes, mindblowing...a day later I'd have never gotten home) with an 8 inch knife still strapped to my leg from my hike the day before. Walked right through security, right through the metal detector, didn't discover it until I was on the plane.
This knife -- like the box cutters used by the hijackers -- should have been discovered by security. It wasn't. Because security had been asked to tone down the sensitivity of metal detectors to keep lines moving and to reduce staffing for random searches.
Before 9/11, the crux of security checks was finding drugs, not stopping terror, because terror had never happened on American soil. Once it had, there was no need to wake up airport security and completely revise the travel regulations. We just had to make the guys already employed in this capacity understand why they were there. By adding all this red tape all we've done is, at great cost, removed accountability from the only people who can really stop air terrorism: airport security staff.
I'd like to see airport security cut in half, trained twice as well and paid 50% more. A small elite staff will be more effective and less intrusive all around than a bunch of drooling rent-a-cops who care more about procedure and moving the line then they do about protecting flights.
Ah, don't worry too much about the crows, man. They're all busy accompanying the souls of the avenging dead.
That's a big job for a medium sized carrion bird. I'll bet crows are pretty pissed at how easy ravens got off, lousy curved beak bastards.
Oh geez, like a guy who got arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct at a football game and former speed freak -- like our current president?
Shit, man. I think if a former hard partier like Bush can become president of the country, the law should awknowledge that people can change. Otherwise the whole system is just hypocritical.
Language follows culture, not vica-versa. When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it. We invented a word. For a while, people were pretty bad with email, even though there was a word for it, because it's a difficult thing to understand. Then, after a few years, everybody "got" it.
I assume this is the same thing. Nomadic tribes don't deal with a lot of things, because everything they have they have to carry. So there's no need to count above two. If suddenly you ask a guy to keep track of four things, he's gonna have trouble: not because he doesn't have a word for it, but because he's going to have difficulty differentiating between the four things. It's no different than if I moved from driving a car to driving a semi trailer with no training. I'd get some of it, but important, non-intuitive concepts would be lost on me, and I'd probably crash. It's not because I don't have a word for them.
This is like the Inuit people and their umpteen words for snow. We outsiders can recognize the different types of snow with only a little practice, but since we don't get snow 8 months of the year, there's no need for it. English speakers understand foreign concepts like "esprit d'escalier" (the french term for all the cool things you wish you would have said when you leave somebody's house) or "bokeh" (the japanese term for the photographic effect that occurs with large aperatures in which the foreground is in sharp focus and the background is out of focus and fuzzy, thus drawing the eye towards the focus), even if we don't know what to call them.
It's experience that drives language, not vica versa -- althought the part of the brain that employees language is also responsible for the most critical human activity: symbolic logic.
Would you rather than young people and the under educated remain in the dark about current events?
There's not really any utility in confusing people with big words and complex sentences when the whole goal of your job is to inform. I'm glad the mainstream American media doesn't feel the need to act superior in their reporting...especially after reading some of the pretentious critics on both sides of the political spectrum who act as though using the word "spurious" gives them the mandate of heaven. Reading an Anne Coulter essay is something like reading a "build your SAT vocabulary" paper written by a kid who didn't know what the words meant yet.
Incidentally, if the Bush administration has done anything right, it's massively decreasing the effectiveness of the words "capability" and "potential"
I mean, thing about it: I have the potential to fuck a super model -- I have a penis and am not dead. All I'd have to do is meet a super model and convince her than overweight computer programmers with rhetoric degrees and modest debt portfolios are the sexiest segment of the population, and that I am an exemplary member of that group.
This does not mean that super models should start a "dasmegabyte" alert system based on chatter found on EfNet IRC channels.
Going to war over "potential" crimes is ridiculous, because you can invent potential whereever you like. The rest of the world has every right to be disgusted that America went to war in Iraq with no provocation. I would actually rather live in fear of potential threats then to become a real one. But I'm not a murderer and I don't like to associate with them.
You're saying that violent games can't use religious iconography without offending people? Fine. Don't play them. Personally, I think the juxtaposition of religious chanting and violence is plenty apt. We're talking about a religion that spawned the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. A religion based on death and resurrection, war and redemption. Like it or not, violence is integral to Christianity. If you get so easily offended...well, don't read the Bible, either, because it's not all flowers and bunny farts in there, either. In fact, I can't think of a single book that doesn't center around some violent event, nasty injustice or bizarre sexual scandal.
Besides, it's fucking HELL. If you're a Christian, you probably believe that hell is a place that's very violent and very profane. It's the place where blasphemers GO. It's SUPPOSED to offend you. And it would be disrespectful to paint hell as anything other than a terrible place -- and that chanting of the damned wouldn't even be juxtaposition, it'd be an expected element of such an environment.
Finally: art doesn't care what offends you. In fact, it's supposed to shock and offend, or else it's not doing its job. Most video games don't qualify as art, but only because they aren't trying hard enough -- the best games I've played have been akin to virtual environments that sucked you in and made you think about why you were doing what you were doing. You can't achieve this if you're afraid of offending non-Christians who don't like background chanting.
And what about those of us who have multiple machines on a single IP address? Like the 23 PCs behind a firewall router at my office, or the three macs behind a gateway at home?
Of course, there is no good way of telling who's running what on the internet anyway.
Sorry about that. Here's a WORKING link.
Of course, the problem with free software is that this driver won't full support the features of the device for several years and due to poor access to documentation or software-only features may never support some things that make the card worth buying. The software and the driver itself will probably have an inscrutable, ugly and complex interface that only works from the command line/KDE/Gnome and if you have a problem with it your only options are to fix it yourself (assuming you have programming ability and can figure out what the problem is) or pay a high hourly price for somebody else to do it.
Meanwhile, your stupid buddies who paid their Windows Tax have been running the thing for a year without a major problem, and have spent all the time they saved by not fucking around with beta drivers watching TV and generally enjoying their purchase. Problems they had during setup were fixed by the company's technical support staff because their platform is actually supported.
Of course, if the company EOL's the card or goes out of business entirely, the Linux driver will still work, whereas the Windows version will stagnate and die. Iomega, I'm looking in your direction as I type this.
In short: the beauty of free-as-in-beer is only skin deep, and its true value -- free-as-in-freedom -- lies underneath a mountain of major annoyances.
Um...not hard at all? The reason I liked Kerry in the primaries was that every one of his views, positions and plans was clearly laid out on his website. Since he's become the official candidate, it's kind of been blurred a bit, but the message is still there.
Or are you listening to the Republican line that "changing your mind" is a sign of weakness?
Then maybe you'd like to buy one...
$9, and all of the proceeds go to Cafe Press.
Problem is, the hacktivists don't see it that way. They probably don't even LIKE Kerry...many voters don't consider him progressive enough for their tastes and the anti-war folks can't like that he's a decorated veteran even considering his later protests.
They see themselves as being anti-Bush...a separate option from pro-Kerry. But many conservatives don't break it down so granularly...anybody on the other side is on the Other Side, and so we moderates voting Democrat this year are in the same boat as the draft dodging hippies and punk subversives.
In fact, one of the major problems I have with the modern Republican party is that they treat nearly everything as a binary issue. You're either for it or against it, you can't be ambivalent or vote to control the amount of something. In a way, this inflexibility makes the Republican party even more idealistic than the Democrats, and institutes a lot of what the Democrats claim is hypocrisy. How can you have a party that believes that parents should have the right to choose what school their children go to but that they're not bright not moral enough to choose whether or not to keep their child? Easy...each of these issues is broken down differently on that polar scale, and abortion falls cleanly into the "no fucking way" bin. Pragmatic decisions like keeping abortion legal, but dumping money into support and pro-child advertising campaigns to reassure scared young mothers that they don't have to kill their child, are seen as wishy washy liberalism -- even if such programs are met with greater success -- because they do not accept the artifical polarity forced onto the issue by idealistic conservatives. Yes, in a perfect world nobody would choose abortion and everybody would have a father and one parent would be able to be a primary caregiver. But these are cultural problems...and they are impossible to legislate.
Of course, the thing to realize is that for the most part Kerry has been keeping out of this overt Bush bashing. I mean, compare his speeches with those of pretty much everybody else and you see that when it comes to the opposition, he's the least rabidly Pro-Kerry guy in the bunch.
It is a shame that we've got a pro-Bush, anti-Bush populous, but that is what you get in a system that only allows for a binary vote. There is no chance that a third party candidate will win, so your choices are: vote for whoever you think will do the better job among Bush or Kerry, throw your vote away on an empty statement that won't change the system in the slightest, or stay home and eat some Cheetos.
After all, should Kerry win, chances are we'll still have a Republican majority in Congress, creating one of those great balances of power that usually result in sane governance. They'll be too busy fighting with each other to achieve anything dangerous.
Plus every time some genius comes along and commits a crime in the name of a progressive cause, we have to deal with a dozen media pundits saying, "See? Look what Liberals will do. Will Kerry supporters stop at nothing? Oh, these immoral people."
Then we have to deal with average people joining the Republican party just because it offers a sane choice compared to the nutjob left wingers. Hell, even crazies like Anne Coulter seem sane compared to hacker groups actively working to break the law in the name of democracy.
For years I was afraid to even admit I was a liberal. Not because I was embarrassed to care about progressive goals, but because I had to deal with being associated with misguided wierdos like these. I wish there was a t-shirt..."I'm against Bush but I don't want to kill him or take down his server or rage about how he's a filthy liar. I just want people not to vote for him because he hasn't done a very good job."
Dude, NOFX sucks.
And the main difference between the RIAA and ROMS is that artists have no say, no contract, and no sway over ROMS. It's essentially theft of copyright masquerading as artist's rights. Say what you will about the RIAA -- and you did -- you still have the choice of not going with an RIAA member when signing a deal. In exchange for this bit of quality control, you have a massively smaller audience and nobody at all looking out for your rights as a musician.
The RIAA may seem a dinosaur, but it's the only legal entity artists have that's worth a damn...and even as shitty as it is, it beats the hell out of ROMS.
Abandonware is not a real thing, man. Copyright doesn't expire just because we want it to. Luckily, the company that produced it considered it not worth selling anymore and they're giving it away.
Heh. Every time I pull a male connector from a female connector, I ask "was it good for you?"
I love electronics.
Well, between Lance Armstrong's lactic acid threshhold and Ian Thorpe's webbed feet, I'd say we're only a stone's throw away from the first Mutant Olympics. The logical progression from there is Cyborg Olympics -> Android Olympics -> Robolympics.
Are you claiming that ANYTHING Courtney Love said is reality?
Dude, I know quite a few professional musicians, mostly studio musicians or jazz artists signed to small labels, and they're all well compensated for their work. Not all artists get fucked by the RIAA. But even if they did, that still wouldn't justify using a foreign service that fucks artists on the cheap.
I'm more worried about the three laws of fighting robotics. Especially since the first two are "you don't talk about robotic fight club."