Yeah, food production and distribution is messed up. So what? So supply is limited by other factors than physical potential. It's still limited.
Buying more food still raises prices. That is the direct result of just handing money to someone for food, especially food bought on the high-price local markets of the USA.
That the price is artificially high for other reasons is another problem. One to be dealt with, not ignored.
Do you know how to remove what you perceive as an intolerable debt? Pay it, whether it's your debt or not. Don't go around whining about how the system should be changed so the debt is paid by extortion (i.e. taxes). Your dollars are more directly powerful than your vote. Direct action works.
But perhaps you want to change the world with no cost to yourself but telling people what you want and voting for it. The ultimate lie of democracy is that all good things are there for the asking. In reality, many good things are only there for the buying, and using the coercive force of government rather than the sweat of your own brow is robbing Peter to pay Paul: for every good you do to one person, you do an equal and opposite evil to another.
However, you can help by voting for less inteference. Help food prices go down by letting small, inefficient family farms go out of business, to be replaced by large factory farms that will compete with each other on price and lower prices. Stop price-protection tariffs. When you hear some politician talking about "grain dumping" remember that all that means is low prices. If someone's "dumping grain" into your markets, that's a good thing for the people who are buying!
A farm is a business like any other, and one where consumers' rights to a free market should outweigh any nostalgic love of the family business. Fewer people will starve if they can buy at Walmart prices instead of having to pay whatever it takes to keep the local Mom'n'Pop going.
Protecting small farms == killing 3rd world children
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Again, I ask you to try begging for a day and then come tell me how it's not work just as hard as the work you do.
Whether it is difficult is utterly irrelevant, as it produces nothing of value. Would you argue that robbers are productive members of society because they have to carry all those heavy packages?
Sigh. I'm not sure how helping Kent eat makes third-world children starve,
Simple supply-and-demand economics: any increase in paying demand on a limited supply raises the price. There are so many people on the edge of starvation that any increase in food prices causes more people to starve, usually children. Regardless of how screwed up the food production/distribution system is, it does respond to increased demand by raising prices.
I didn't mean to go off on this tangent, though, it was late and I was in a bad mood and not thinking clearly; opening this particular can of worms rarely has a good effect on a short discussion. I do, however, measure all moral/economic decisions by "How many starving children could you feed with that?" That question presses at the back of my mind constantly. When you realize that every time you spend your money on something else you are choosing to let someone starve, it changes the way you think about things. You start to realize that many of the things you thought you were doing for moral reasons are wasteful and harmful and you're actually doing them for social reasons.
The implication being that panhandlers don't have that potential?
If they do, they should be helped to find it. Your own description seems to be of helpless people who can't do a job. A random child is much more likely to develop into someone who pulls his share than a full-grown man with a history of begging.
If it's public, I can do just about whatever I want that's legal.
Loitering is illegal in most public areas meant for transportation. You might be surprised at just how little is legal in public areas. Beggars are usually breaking some law.
Regardless, is legality the measure of your morals? You would only give your friend (who is in poor health) money if he stands out exposed to the elements all day? What will he do when he becomes too old and sick to stand outside all day? You would do it openly and produce envy of easy money in the criminal element that creates rivals, who will attack him for what little he has?
There are ways to give money that don't cause the harm of paying beggars on the street. Harm to the beggars and harm to the street and everyone who must use it.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
For the record, I didn't say, "don't feed hungry people," I said, "if you want to feed hungry people, give money to a charity kitchen."
Cluestick: some of them, MOST of them, are _NONE_ of those things
Okay, so most beggars are honest, sober, mentally healthy individuals? Someone around here needs a dose of the cluestick, but it ain't me.
Bigotry is ugly.
Political correctness is uglier. Blacks are distinguished by the color of their skin; a neutral thing. Computer geeks are distinguished by the fact that they have highly valuable and specialized knowledge; a positive thing. Beggars are distinguished by the fact that instead of working for their money, they harass people who do in the hopes that they will be given money for nothing; an unmistakably negative thing. No matter how politically correct it is to treat all groups as equal, regardless of what distinguishes them, it is wrong, both logically and morally.
Next you'll tell me about how I'm unfairly judging muggers and pedophiles.
The best thing you can say about a beggar is that he's not actively physically harming people, and that only in some cases. Remember that we live in a world with limited resources where every bite one man eats is a bite out of the mouth of a starving child. A human being is evil by default, by the act of consuming, and therefore evil in the balance if he doesn't contribute at least as much as he takes.
I work 14-hour days and 7-day weeks for my comfortable place and my internet connection. What does Kent do to justify you giving him money to buy food and drive up the price so another child starves in a 3rd-world country?
It's your money, if it makes you feel good to help someone just because he's nearby and you have to look him in the face rather than someone far off and in greater need who has the potential to become self-supporting, it's not my business. You earned the money, it's your choice of how to spend it. But it is not your public area to pollute by rewarding annoying and, yes, sometimes dangerous parasites with easy money so more are drawn to it. Find another way to give that isn't an attack on the community.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...give money to a charity kitchen. If they really want food, and there's one around, they can go to it.
For heaven sakes, don't give them stuff on the street! Not even food. It's like feeding wild animals: it encourages them to bother other people, and if enough people do it some of them start to expect it and get aggressive with the people who don't help them.
She's very generous in giving money to those who ask for it because she knows that by doing so her conscience is clear.
Maybe if she knew someone who was attacked by aggressive panhandlers for refusing to give them money, or someone who lost their business because aggressive panhandlers harassed everyone in the area until it became known as an area to avoid, her conscience wouldn't be so clear.
People only become regular panhandlers because they try it and it works. In a busy area with sympathetic people, a panhandler can often get over twice as much as he could earn at the kind of job he can get. After a while, he starts to feel entitled to it, maybe some time on a bad day he decides he's entitled to everything in someone's pockets; once that happens, you've made a mugger. You might be surprised at how different that pathetic panhandler standing off to the side of the busy sidewalk looks at night in a deserted alleyway.
Whether panhandlers are con artists, drug addicts, or deranged lunatics, you don't want to encourage them.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It is not the typical employee's responsibility to look out for the company's best interests, it is the managers'. That the managers did not forsee problems with this employee hosting the web site on his own personal account is not the employee's fault. It wasn't a technical issue, it was a business and legal issue.
You are not obligated to protect the company from bad management decisions.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works.
Nonsense! Linux could very easily be converted into very simple system.
A distro designed to come pre-installed and configured (or be installed and configured by a technician), go directly from the logon screen into a non-user-configurable GUI, install only new software packaged in a certain way from a central server, and never let the user see a shell, would be perhaps even simpler and easier to use than a Mac.
Why doesn't one exist already? Two reasons: you can't sell support for a system that just works (no commercial motive), and nobody who programs computers cares about a system like that (no "I'll write it to use it myself" motive). Currently, free software development optimizes for: minimal effort of development, stability, power, and "coolness". Ease of use for the new user is barely a consideration, except in distro installation programs.
Can you really see a bunch of Linux hackers sitting around trying to write a "toaster" distro in their spare time?
Mass market busking might provide the solution to this kind of problem, but it'll be tough to make people understand why giving their money away is in their best interests.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That's what people are paying for these days: a game you can live in.
Sure the old games were great when you wanted to have a little quick fun, but you couldn't just pick one and play it for hours every day for months without getting bored.
People want games with huge worlds to explore: Final Fantasy N (where N is a sufficiently large integer), Zelda 64, even (dare I say it) Pokemon.
Strategy games that take days to play through a single game, and endless games to master: Civilization: CTP, Alpha Centauri, MoO.
Games with network play and replacable components: Quake, umm... those other games that play like Quake.
Games that are whole worlds unto themselves, complete with real human population: Ultima Online, Everquest.
Nothing less justifies the $60 price tag, and more importantly, nothing less justifies the effort of searching out and choosing which one is worth spending the money on. Sure, you might want a fun, simple arcade game, but when was the last time you shelled out for one?
You don't just play games anymore, you move in and adapt to prosper in your new environment. You want a nice home, don't you? That's where the money is, so that's where the development is.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Now, I ask you, is God's case any worse? Have you read his book?
God's case? For his own existence? I'll be laughing at that one for weeks. If just came to me and told be to believe in him, I would. It would be an awfully easy thing for him to prove.
I've read the Bible, it's a fairly random collection of history, practical advice, and silly myths. There's plenty of good stuff (like any mythological collection, it provides powerful metaphors), but even more crap. Amazingly, for every point there seems to be a contradictory point. I guess this was done intentionally, so the literate priests who study the whole Bible could find a passage and point it out to a barely literate person to support or justify any action.
If there was a God who loved us and wanted us to worship him, he wouldn't hide from us so carefully.
There are many thousands of such questions, so you might be able to pick a handful and bluff your way around them,
This is classic sophistry: have a thousand claims ready, don't make any effort to prove them or support them in any way, just make sure you have enough that your opponent can't disprove them all beyond a reasonable doubt. If he makes a good argument about one, just move on to the next. The technical term for it is a "shit barrage".
Any idiot can keep spouting nonsensical claims until the wisest man in the world just leaves in frustration. Any reasonably bright huckster can make up a continual stream of fairly plausible claims on spot, so ignorant observers go away believing him when his opponents leave in disgust.
Look at you! You threw out some completely random, unexplained, unsupported claims as if you expect me to feel a need to disprove them. Then, without even waiting for an answer, you reveal your intent to avoid arguing the points you brought up, but to abandon them when they are challenged and bring up new unsupported claims from your bottomless pile of bullshit. Here's a hint, pal: in science and rational debate, disbelief is the default, and any claim is considered false without supporting evidence. Your "thousands of such questions" wouldn't look so good if you realized that you are the one responsible for bringing proof to the table, since you introduced them. Scientific claims are few and cautious for a reason: it's a lot of work to prove things (they're also vast and sweeping for efficiency's sake).
Example: Religious Nut: If you slam your head against the wall a million times, you'll become immortal. Rational Man: That's nonsense. Religious Nut: Do you have any evidence? Rational Man: Well, I know that smashing your head against the wall isn't good for you. Religious Nut: Ah hah! So you admit you've never actually tried smashing your head against the wall Rational Man: Actually, there's a well document case of a man in an insane asylum who smashed his head against the wall over a million times. He died around one million one hundred-thousand. Religious Nut: Well, that one's not important. I'm right, but you're obviously too blind to see. Anyway, stuffing both fists up your own ass lets you talk to God. Rational Man: That's the most stupid thing I've ever heard. Religious Nut: Let's be scientific, have you tried it? Rational Man: Of course I've never tried it. I've never heard of anyone doing something so incredibly stupid and painful. Religious Nut: See, you have no proof! It must be true. Rational Man: I guess you haven't tried it either, there's no room for either hand to fit with your head up there.
The creationists have always been arguing like the Religious Nut. They are shown to be wrong over and over again, only to bring out wilder and more ridiculous claims, until everyone who argues with them recognizes the obvious: it's much, much easier to make wild and ridiculous claims than to disprove them.
Ever hear the saying "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."? Well, I've certainly wasted my time, are you annoyed?
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
1) Any thinking scientist, who is religious, must spend some effort to understand and synthesize their religious beliefs with their scientific beliefs.
Hmm... all people think (including scientists), some scientists certainly seem to refuse to examine their religious beliefs, therefor, this is nonsense. Either that or a tautology redefining the word "thinking" to no useful end.
2) Atheism is the dominant belief in the scientific (geek) community.
I'll go along for the point of argument, but I think there are more agnostics and people with wierd personal religions than true atheists, unless you consider all people to be atheists who don't follow an organized religion.
3) So by your logic there are more religious people on slashdot then are listed here.
I wasn't aware that religious people on slashdot were "listed", and I'm not following anyway.
If you're saying that Christians are oppressed on slashdot and in the scientific community in general, therefor there are many of them in hiding, you're full of it. Note that the top-level post "Pray" got modded up to 5. Anyone who has strong views on anything and posts them gets flamed, that doesn't deter any group from posting.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Given the way scientists were treated in those days when they tried to suggest that they knew things that officials of the church didn't, don't you think that terminating your essays with "Of course, I believe in God, and this is all God's work. Actually, this proves that God exists. Isn't God great?" could be motivated by self-preservation rather than severe belief?
When atheism is oppressed (as it has been through most of history, and still is in much of the world), practical atheists give lip-service to religion. When speaking other words, or even remaining silent, would likely be punished, one's words are no evidence of anything at all.
BTW, Newton was a remarkably ruthless and pragmatic person who is known, as a matter of historical record, to have told lies often, and about many things, for his own benefit.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I find it helps to stop and scream a steady stream of profanity (with a little obscenity and some blasphemy thrown in for good measure) for a solid five or ten minutes. I stand up from my chair, put my fist through a wall, and curse the computer, the bastards who made the dev tools and the environment I have to code for, and the people who want the program written. It's helped me out of blocks many times.
Of course, I'll also resort to prayer when nothing else helps. I keep a herd of goats in the back yard for just that purpose, and a sacrificial knife sitting between my keyboard and my monitor.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
No joke. I think a nuclear war will wipe out the population of Earth shortly after we establish a viable free-roaming population off Earth.
People won't nuke their own planet, it just doesn't take that many bombs to make a planet unlivable. However, Earth will indefinitely continue to be the ultimate desirable living space and will be the focus of religious obsession for spacefarers. Whether it's "those degenerates who stayed behind and are destroying what's left of the Cradle of Man" or "the infidels who are standing in the way of Our Glorious Return," a few nukes (or big rocks, for that matter) here and there will seem acceptable. Of course, then a few more will seem acceptable, until all Holy Terra goes up in a holy fire.
I personally think that many people in high places have come to the same conclusion, and this is why space travel is so expensive. Our own little Bureau of Sabotage or I-A (see Frank Herbert's "The Dosadi Experiment" or "The Godmakers") to toss a monkey-wrench into things that will lead to planetary destruction, like space travel. I'm generally not big on conspiracy theories, but I think the surface facts of how we've avoided nuclear war thus far are simply incredible without some other organized effort.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not going to hang back when people start moving out.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I agree with the sentiment, but you seem to imply that some tasks can't benefit from more speed.
There is no general task that can't be done better with more power. You don't need to go around dreaming up new things for computers to do, almost everybody who writes a program throws out features because the computers wouldn't be fast enough to run them.
Sure, you can have "adequate" tools that work with current hardware, but if you don't see how all of them could be better, it's a failure of imagination.
3D will carry processors far beyond the 50 GHz region. Virtual reality is an obvious bottomless computation pit, you can always do better with more.
A few other computational bottomless pits (there are many more): -compression -physical simulation -genetic algorithms -natural language processing
Even in a thing like word processing, consider how much more computational power is needed to give consistently good advice on things like grammar and spelling. Yeah, the current software is pretty bad, but I don't believe good software can be written for this enhancement without more speed.
Perhaps most important of all is freeing up programmer time. The less you have to worry about conserving resources, the more you can get done. It's a shame when programmers waste resources inappropriately, but having computers fast enough to be able to just hack up a quick Perl script, rather having to write optimized C and assembly, can make incredible increases in productivity. Another example is being able to emulate old programs, rather than having to rewrite them.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Central Group of Ontario is their 3rd-party escrow agent. They know exactly how much gold there is, and they can't touch it without their say-so.
Also how would we integrate the e-gold system into our site? We'd have to have a person manully verifiying everything. Or write some pretty crazy scripts to interface with their website as it currently stands. There is no nice server to integrate into like I can with visa cards.
Absolutely wrong. Didn't you even look into this? It's a payment service! Of course it's designed for automatic verification!
If I wanted to steal money I think there would be a lot better ways of defrauding the public than through our looney scheme of depending on YOUR goodwill.
Hmm, people send you money, without expecting you to do anything that they can check. Sounds like an awfully good scam to me!
Anyway, there's no reason that someone has to be using the best of all possible scams to be running a scam. There's a reason the phrase "criminal mastermind" exists - most criminals aren't.
If you really think we are scamming everyone, we now prominently display how much has been scammed (i mean sent), on our homepage.
...and, of course, you'd record it accurately if you were scamming everybody.
Your whole argument comes down to, "You should trust us because we're telling you to trust us." It doesn't fly.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
If you have an account, you know it takes about 5 minutes to create one. People don't have one because they don't have a reason to.
The potential number of people with e-gold accounts is larger than the number with credit cards, especially in the demographic who is likely to get the idea behind giving money away. It's hard for a young person to get a credit card, but easy to get and fund an e-gold account.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
1.The money is worth more to us in the hands of an artist than it is in our pockets. We'd much rather have famous artist X proclaim they got a $100, than for us to have an extra $100 with which to go buy some more pizza.
You'd rather that the Backstreet Boys quietly stuff another $10,000 into their pockets (chump change to them; certainly no reason to call a press conference) than pay off your student loans.
Yeah, right.
You might send it along because you had to, as a matter of ethical and legal obligation, but really given the free choice (someone gave you the money without requiring you to send it someone), I don't believe for a second that you'd donate that large amount of money to a band you don't like. Hence, it is not more valuable to you in their wallets than in yours.
I believe you're probably honest, but you haven't even faced the real temptation of handling that money yet. If you start handling the kind of money that makes pop music superstars take notice, you might find it a lot harder to not skim off a few bucks (or a few tens of thousands) for yourself when nobody's looking.
I see no reason for people to trust you unless you have some competent and trusted auditor looking over your shoulder.
2.If we were stealing your money then why would why charge you a service fee?? Wouldn't we get more money without a service fee?
To make it look as if you're breaking even on donations, rather than the totally unbelievable idea that a couple of university kids are paying 5% of what everybody else does.
If you were running a scam, you would certainly do things like that to make it look like you're honest.
Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.
Fine. Require the musicians in the directory to have a PayPal or e-gold account, and just be a directory to these accounts, never touch the money yourself, or send along real paper checks that you can't cash yourself. That would make you 100% trustworthy.
As for paying for your servers, you have two major choices: advertising, and mass-market busking. Either would work, though I think people would appreciate you choosing the second option (and you are in a uniquely appropriate situation of having a customer base that understands the benefits of paying without being forced).
Actually, I'm planning to do something similar to this (kind of a cross between this and freshmeat.net) at buskware.com (nothing there yet, nor at buskware.org, which will be an advocacy/discussion site for buskware and mass-market busking). However, it will be aimed primarily at computer programs, and more specialized sites for other things (like music) will serve the donors' needs better than one centralized solution.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
While there is a trust issue with Fairtunes (I'm not accusing, but there's no reason to trust strangers who say they'll pass along money honestly when nobody can check whether they did), the point was that there are cheaper ways to transfer money even though this is a non-profit service.
I'm in on the same side, philosophically, as you guys (don't believe me? read this!), I just see it as a poor execution of a good idea.
BTW, I'm also Canadian. That's why I offer to take donations on my site with e-gold but not PayPals.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).
These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.
A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.
If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
If you could split up one incoming payment into many outgoing payments, it would then be a good service. However, they still have to do something about the trust problem. With no 3rd party observers, there's no reason to trust them.
What I meant about the musicians being willing to be paid, is that they may take it as evidence that the person who paid was engaging in unauthorized copying. It might be legally dangerous to send them money this way.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Digital cash is data representing and redeeemable a certain amount of money, which is very hard to forge and, once created, can be passed from person to person without contacting the service which creates and manages it. Digital cash can be stolen if you send the data over insecure channels, or store it on an insecure machine as the provider will pay the real money to anyone who presents the digital cash.
Your apparent idea of "digital cash" which doesn't represent a fixed amount of a real-life commodity is absurd. It is to my description above as monopoly money is to bank notes: an amusing toy, possibly mistaken for money by small children, but of no real value.
Internet-available account transfer services (meaning, you contact the service every time you want to send money to someone, and you can contact them to confirm that you've received it) are sufficient, and they are available. E-gold is an example (it is also a peer-to-peer system which allows micropayments and works with any SSL-supporting web browser). There are still security risks, but you only need one secure line, instead of establishing a secure line with every person you want to send money to.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. So you easily put $20 in, dole it out to hundreds of musicians in pennies, and over $19 would come through. All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands. Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing (hmm, thousands of dollars going through your service every day to already-rich musicians, many of which you don't listen to and some of the most profitable you actively dislike, but even given the free choice, you'd rather send it to them than pocket it or redirect it to your own favorite musicians. Yeah, right).
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, food production and distribution is messed up. So what? So supply is limited by other factors than physical potential. It's still limited.
Buying more food still raises prices. That is the direct result of just handing money to someone for food, especially food bought on the high-price local markets of the USA.
That the price is artificially high for other reasons is another problem. One to be dealt with, not ignored.
Do you know how to remove what you perceive as an intolerable debt? Pay it, whether it's your debt or not. Don't go around whining about how the system should be changed so the debt is paid by extortion (i.e. taxes). Your dollars are more directly powerful than your vote. Direct action works.
But perhaps you want to change the world with no cost to yourself but telling people what you want and voting for it. The ultimate lie of democracy is that all good things are there for the asking. In reality, many good things are only there for the buying, and using the coercive force of government rather than the sweat of your own brow is robbing Peter to pay Paul: for every good you do to one person, you do an equal and opposite evil to another.
However, you can help by voting for less inteference. Help food prices go down by letting small, inefficient family farms go out of business, to be replaced by large factory farms that will compete with each other on price and lower prices. Stop price-protection tariffs. When you hear some politician talking about "grain dumping" remember that all that means is low prices. If someone's "dumping grain" into your markets, that's a good thing for the people who are buying!
A farm is a business like any other, and one where consumers' rights to a free market should outweigh any nostalgic love of the family business. Fewer people will starve if they can buy at Walmart prices instead of having to pay whatever it takes to keep the local Mom'n'Pop going.
Protecting small farms == killing 3rd world children
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Again, I ask you to try begging for a day and then come tell me how it's not work just as hard as the work you do.
Whether it is difficult is utterly irrelevant, as it produces nothing of value. Would you argue that robbers are productive members of society because they have to carry all those heavy packages?
Sigh. I'm not sure how helping Kent eat makes third-world children starve,
Simple supply-and-demand economics: any increase in paying demand on a limited supply raises the price. There are so many people on the edge of starvation that any increase in food prices causes more people to starve, usually children. Regardless of how screwed up the food production/distribution system is, it does respond to increased demand by raising prices.
I didn't mean to go off on this tangent, though, it was late and I was in a bad mood and not thinking clearly; opening this particular can of worms rarely has a good effect on a short discussion. I do, however, measure all moral/economic decisions by "How many starving children could you feed with that?" That question presses at the back of my mind constantly. When you realize that every time you spend your money on something else you are choosing to let someone starve, it changes the way you think about things. You start to realize that many of the things you thought you were doing for moral reasons are wasteful and harmful and you're actually doing them for social reasons.
The implication being that panhandlers don't have that potential?
If they do, they should be helped to find it. Your own description seems to be of helpless people who can't do a job. A random child is much more likely to develop into someone who pulls his share than a full-grown man with a history of begging.
If it's public, I can do just about whatever I want that's legal.
Loitering is illegal in most public areas meant for transportation. You might be surprised at just how little is legal in public areas. Beggars are usually breaking some law.
Regardless, is legality the measure of your morals? You would only give your friend (who is in poor health) money if he stands out exposed to the elements all day? What will he do when he becomes too old and sick to stand outside all day? You would do it openly and produce envy of easy money in the criminal element that creates rivals, who will attack him for what little he has?
There are ways to give money that don't cause the harm of paying beggars on the street. Harm to the beggars and harm to the street and everyone who must use it.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
For the record, I didn't say, "don't feed hungry people," I said, "if you want to feed hungry people, give money to a charity kitchen."
Cluestick: some of them, MOST of them, are _NONE_ of those things
Okay, so most beggars are honest, sober, mentally healthy individuals? Someone around here needs a dose of the cluestick, but it ain't me.
Bigotry is ugly.
Political correctness is uglier. Blacks are distinguished by the color of their skin; a neutral thing. Computer geeks are distinguished by the fact that they have highly valuable and specialized knowledge; a positive thing. Beggars are distinguished by the fact that instead of working for their money, they harass people who do in the hopes that they will be given money for nothing; an unmistakably negative thing. No matter how politically correct it is to treat all groups as equal, regardless of what distinguishes them, it is wrong, both logically and morally.
Next you'll tell me about how I'm unfairly judging muggers and pedophiles.
The best thing you can say about a beggar is that he's not actively physically harming people, and that only in some cases. Remember that we live in a world with limited resources where every bite one man eats is a bite out of the mouth of a starving child. A human being is evil by default, by the act of consuming, and therefore evil in the balance if he doesn't contribute at least as much as he takes.
I work 14-hour days and 7-day weeks for my comfortable place and my internet connection. What does Kent do to justify you giving him money to buy food and drive up the price so another child starves in a 3rd-world country?
It's your money, if it makes you feel good to help someone just because he's nearby and you have to look him in the face rather than someone far off and in greater need who has the potential to become self-supporting, it's not my business. You earned the money, it's your choice of how to spend it. But it is not your public area to pollute by rewarding annoying and, yes, sometimes dangerous parasites with easy money so more are drawn to it. Find another way to give that isn't an attack on the community.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...give money to a charity kitchen. If they really want food, and there's one around, they can go to it.
For heaven sakes, don't give them stuff on the street! Not even food. It's like feeding wild animals: it encourages them to bother other people, and if enough people do it some of them start to expect it and get aggressive with the people who don't help them.
She's very generous in giving money to those who ask for it because she knows that by doing so her conscience is clear.
Maybe if she knew someone who was attacked by aggressive panhandlers for refusing to give them money, or someone who lost their business because aggressive panhandlers harassed everyone in the area until it became known as an area to avoid, her conscience wouldn't be so clear.
People only become regular panhandlers because they try it and it works. In a busy area with sympathetic people, a panhandler can often get over twice as much as he could earn at the kind of job he can get. After a while, he starts to feel entitled to it, maybe some time on a bad day he decides he's entitled to everything in someone's pockets; once that happens, you've made a mugger. You might be surprised at how different that pathetic panhandler standing off to the side of the busy sidewalk looks at night in a deserted alleyway.
Whether panhandlers are con artists, drug addicts, or deranged lunatics, you don't want to encourage them.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It is not the typical employee's responsibility to look out for the company's best interests, it is the managers'. That the managers did not forsee problems with this employee hosting the web site on his own personal account is not the employee's fault. It wasn't a technical issue, it was a business and legal issue.
You are not obligated to protect the company from bad management decisions.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The title is "Oh, hah hah", and that couldn't be meant as a sarcastic, humorless laugh preceding a sarcastic, humorless, informative comment.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I wrote out a long letter explaining what he got wrong, and got a "message returned, undeliverable" reply.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
There are about 6 billion people on the planet, and for most of them, NullOS(tm) is their only OS.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works.
Nonsense! Linux could very easily be converted into very simple system.
A distro designed to come pre-installed and configured (or be installed and configured by a technician), go directly from the logon screen into a non-user-configurable GUI, install only new software packaged in a certain way from a central server, and never let the user see a shell, would be perhaps even simpler and easier to use than a Mac.
Why doesn't one exist already? Two reasons: you can't sell support for a system that just works (no commercial motive), and nobody who programs computers cares about a system like that (no "I'll write it to use it myself" motive). Currently, free software development optimizes for: minimal effort of development, stability, power, and "coolness". Ease of use for the new user is barely a consideration, except in distro installation programs.
Can you really see a bunch of Linux hackers sitting around trying to write a "toaster" distro in their spare time?
Mass market busking might provide the solution to this kind of problem, but it'll be tough to make people understand why giving their money away is in their best interests.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That's what people are paying for these days: a game you can live in.
Sure the old games were great when you wanted to have a little quick fun, but you couldn't just pick one and play it for hours every day for months without getting bored.
People want games with huge worlds to explore: Final Fantasy N (where N is a sufficiently large integer), Zelda 64, even (dare I say it) Pokemon.
Strategy games that take days to play through a single game, and endless games to master: Civilization: CTP, Alpha Centauri, MoO.
Games with network play and replacable components: Quake, umm... those other games that play like Quake.
Games that are whole worlds unto themselves, complete with real human population: Ultima Online, Everquest.
Nothing less justifies the $60 price tag, and more importantly, nothing less justifies the effort of searching out and choosing which one is worth spending the money on. Sure, you might want a fun, simple arcade game, but when was the last time you shelled out for one?
You don't just play games anymore, you move in and adapt to prosper in your new environment. You want a nice home, don't you? That's where the money is, so that's where the development is.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Now, I ask you, is God's case any worse? Have you read his book?
God's case? For his own existence? I'll be laughing at that one for weeks. If just came to me and told be to believe in him, I would. It would be an awfully easy thing for him to prove.
I've read the Bible, it's a fairly random collection of history, practical advice, and silly myths. There's plenty of good stuff (like any mythological collection, it provides powerful metaphors), but even more crap. Amazingly, for every point there seems to be a contradictory point. I guess this was done intentionally, so the literate priests who study the whole Bible could find a passage and point it out to a barely literate person to support or justify any action.
If there was a God who loved us and wanted us to worship him, he wouldn't hide from us so carefully.
There are many thousands of such questions, so you might be able to pick a handful and bluff your way around them,
This is classic sophistry: have a thousand claims ready, don't make any effort to prove them or support them in any way, just make sure you have enough that your opponent can't disprove them all beyond a reasonable doubt. If he makes a good argument about one, just move on to the next. The technical term for it is a "shit barrage".
Any idiot can keep spouting nonsensical claims until the wisest man in the world just leaves in frustration. Any reasonably bright huckster can make up a continual stream of fairly plausible claims on spot, so ignorant observers go away believing him when his opponents leave in disgust.
Look at you! You threw out some completely random, unexplained, unsupported claims as if you expect me to feel a need to disprove them. Then, without even waiting for an answer, you reveal your intent to avoid arguing the points you brought up, but to abandon them when they are challenged and bring up new unsupported claims from your bottomless pile of bullshit. Here's a hint, pal: in science and rational debate, disbelief is the default, and any claim is considered false without supporting evidence. Your "thousands of such questions" wouldn't look so good if you realized that you are the one responsible for bringing proof to the table, since you introduced them. Scientific claims are few and cautious for a reason: it's a lot of work to prove things (they're also vast and sweeping for efficiency's sake).
Example:
Religious Nut: If you slam your head against the wall a million times, you'll become immortal.
Rational Man: That's nonsense.
Religious Nut: Do you have any evidence?
Rational Man: Well, I know that smashing your head against the wall isn't good for you.
Religious Nut: Ah hah! So you admit you've never actually tried smashing your head against the wall
Rational Man: Actually, there's a well document case of a man in an insane asylum who smashed his head against the wall over a million times. He died around one million one hundred-thousand.
Religious Nut: Well, that one's not important. I'm right, but you're obviously too blind to see. Anyway, stuffing both fists up your own ass lets you talk to God.
Rational Man: That's the most stupid thing I've ever heard.
Religious Nut: Let's be scientific, have you tried it?
Rational Man: Of course I've never tried it. I've never heard of anyone doing something so incredibly stupid and painful.
Religious Nut: See, you have no proof! It must be true.
Rational Man: I guess you haven't tried it either, there's no room for either hand to fit with your head up there.
The creationists have always been arguing like the Religious Nut. They are shown to be wrong over and over again, only to bring out wilder and more ridiculous claims, until everyone who argues with them recognizes the obvious: it's much, much easier to make wild and ridiculous claims than to disprove them.
Ever hear the saying "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."? Well, I've certainly wasted my time, are you annoyed?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
1) Any thinking scientist, who is religious, must spend some effort to understand and synthesize their religious beliefs with their scientific beliefs.
Hmm... all people think (including scientists), some scientists certainly seem to refuse to examine their religious beliefs, therefor, this is nonsense. Either that or a tautology redefining the word "thinking" to no useful end.
2) Atheism is the dominant belief in the scientific (geek) community.
I'll go along for the point of argument, but I think there are more agnostics and people with wierd personal religions than true atheists, unless you consider all people to be atheists who don't follow an organized religion.
3) So by your logic there are more religious people on slashdot then are listed here.
I wasn't aware that religious people on slashdot were "listed", and I'm not following anyway.
If you're saying that Christians are oppressed on slashdot and in the scientific community in general, therefor there are many of them in hiding, you're full of it. Note that the top-level post "Pray" got modded up to 5. Anyone who has strong views on anything and posts them gets flamed, that doesn't deter any group from posting.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Given the way scientists were treated in those days when they tried to suggest that they knew things that officials of the church didn't, don't you think that terminating your essays with "Of course, I believe in God, and this is all God's work. Actually, this proves that God exists. Isn't God great?" could be motivated by self-preservation rather than severe belief?
When atheism is oppressed (as it has been through most of history, and still is in much of the world), practical atheists give lip-service to religion. When speaking other words, or even remaining silent, would likely be punished, one's words are no evidence of anything at all.
BTW, Newton was a remarkably ruthless and pragmatic person who is known, as a matter of historical record, to have told lies often, and about many things, for his own benefit.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I find it helps to stop and scream a steady stream of profanity (with a little obscenity and some blasphemy thrown in for good measure) for a solid five or ten minutes. I stand up from my chair, put my fist through a wall, and curse the computer, the bastards who made the dev tools and the environment I have to code for, and the people who want the program written. It's helped me out of blocks many times.
Of course, I'll also resort to prayer when nothing else helps. I keep a herd of goats in the back yard for just that purpose, and a sacrificial knife sitting between my keyboard and my monitor.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...that Mars is inhabited by a single sapient subariessian slime-mold colony that controls the weather and is currently in its semi-dormant period.
What do you think is interfering with all the Mars probes? What do you think makes the canals appear and disappear?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
No joke. I think a nuclear war will wipe out the population of Earth shortly after we establish a viable free-roaming population off Earth.
People won't nuke their own planet, it just doesn't take that many bombs to make a planet unlivable. However, Earth will indefinitely continue to be the ultimate desirable living space and will be the focus of religious obsession for spacefarers. Whether it's "those degenerates who stayed behind and are destroying what's left of the Cradle of Man" or "the infidels who are standing in the way of Our Glorious Return," a few nukes (or big rocks, for that matter) here and there will seem acceptable. Of course, then a few more will seem acceptable, until all Holy Terra goes up in a holy fire.
I personally think that many people in high places have come to the same conclusion, and this is why space travel is so expensive. Our own little Bureau of Sabotage or I-A (see Frank Herbert's "The Dosadi Experiment" or "The Godmakers") to toss a monkey-wrench into things that will lead to planetary destruction, like space travel. I'm generally not big on conspiracy theories, but I think the surface facts of how we've avoided nuclear war thus far are simply incredible without some other organized effort.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not going to hang back when people start moving out.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I agree with the sentiment, but you seem to imply that some tasks can't benefit from more speed.
There is no general task that can't be done better with more power. You don't need to go around dreaming up new things for computers to do, almost everybody who writes a program throws out features because the computers wouldn't be fast enough to run them.
Sure, you can have "adequate" tools that work with current hardware, but if you don't see how all of them could be better, it's a failure of imagination.
3D will carry processors far beyond the 50 GHz region. Virtual reality is an obvious bottomless computation pit, you can always do better with more.
A few other computational bottomless pits (there are many more):
-compression
-physical simulation
-genetic algorithms
-natural language processing
Even in a thing like word processing, consider how much more computational power is needed to give consistently good advice on things like grammar and spelling. Yeah, the current software is pretty bad, but I don't believe good software can be written for this enhancement without more speed.
Perhaps most important of all is freeing up programmer time. The less you have to worry about conserving resources, the more you can get done. It's a shame when programmers waste resources inappropriately, but having computers fast enough to be able to just hack up a quick Perl script, rather having to write optimized C and assembly, can make incredible increases in productivity. Another example is being able to emulate old programs, rather than having to rewrite them.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Who?
Central Group of Ontario is their 3rd-party escrow agent. They know exactly how much gold there is, and they can't touch it without their say-so.
Also how would we integrate the e-gold system into our site? We'd have to have a person manully verifiying everything. Or write some pretty crazy scripts to interface with their website as it currently stands. There is no nice server to integrate into like I can with visa cards.
Absolutely wrong. Didn't you even look into this? It's a payment service! Of course it's designed for automatic verification!
If I wanted to steal money I think there would be a lot better ways of defrauding the public than through our looney scheme of depending on YOUR goodwill.
Hmm, people send you money, without expecting you to do anything that they can check. Sounds like an awfully good scam to me!
Anyway, there's no reason that someone has to be using the best of all possible scams to be running a scam. There's a reason the phrase "criminal mastermind" exists - most criminals aren't.
If you really think we are scamming everyone, we now prominently display how much has been scammed (i mean sent), on our homepage.
...and, of course, you'd record it accurately if you were scamming everybody.
Your whole argument comes down to, "You should trust us because we're telling you to trust us." It doesn't fly.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
If you have an account, you know it takes about 5 minutes to create one. People don't have one because they don't have a reason to.
The potential number of people with e-gold accounts is larger than the number with credit cards, especially in the demographic who is likely to get the idea behind giving money away. It's hard for a young person to get a credit card, but easy to get and fund an e-gold account.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
1.The money is worth more to us in the hands of an artist than it is in our pockets. We'd much rather have famous artist X proclaim they got a $100, than for us to have an extra $100 with which to go buy some more pizza.
You'd rather that the Backstreet Boys quietly stuff another $10,000 into their pockets (chump change to them; certainly no reason to call a press conference) than pay off your student loans.
Yeah, right.
You might send it along because you had to, as a matter of ethical and legal obligation, but really given the free choice (someone gave you the money without requiring you to send it someone), I don't believe for a second that you'd donate that large amount of money to a band you don't like. Hence, it is not more valuable to you in their wallets than in yours.
I believe you're probably honest, but you haven't even faced the real temptation of handling that money yet. If you start handling the kind of money that makes pop music superstars take notice, you might find it a lot harder to not skim off a few bucks (or a few tens of thousands) for yourself when nobody's looking.
I see no reason for people to trust you unless you have some competent and trusted auditor looking over your shoulder.
2.If we were stealing your money then why would why charge you a service fee?? Wouldn't we get more money without a service fee?
To make it look as if you're breaking even on donations, rather than the totally unbelievable idea that a couple of university kids are paying 5% of what everybody else does.
If you were running a scam, you would certainly do things like that to make it look like you're honest.
Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.
Fine. Require the musicians in the directory to have a PayPal or e-gold account, and just be a directory to these accounts, never touch the money yourself, or send along real paper checks that you can't cash yourself. That would make you 100% trustworthy.
As for paying for your servers, you have two major choices: advertising, and mass-market busking. Either would work, though I think people would appreciate you choosing the second option (and you are in a uniquely appropriate situation of having a customer base that understands the benefits of paying without being forced).
Actually, I'm planning to do something similar to this (kind of a cross between this and freshmeat.net) at buskware.com (nothing there yet, nor at buskware.org, which will be an advocacy/discussion site for buskware and mass-market busking). However, it will be aimed primarily at computer programs, and more specialized sites for other things (like music) will serve the donors' needs better than one centralized solution.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
While there is a trust issue with Fairtunes (I'm not accusing, but there's no reason to trust strangers who say they'll pass along money honestly when nobody can check whether they did), the point was that there are cheaper ways to transfer money even though this is a non-profit service.
I'm in on the same side, philosophically, as you guys (don't believe me? read this!), I just see it as a poor execution of a good idea.
BTW, I'm also Canadian. That's why I offer to take donations on my site with e-gold but not PayPals.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
In the future...we hope
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).
These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.
A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.
If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
If you could split up one incoming payment into many outgoing payments, it would then be a good service. However, they still have to do something about the trust problem. With no 3rd party observers, there's no reason to trust them.
What I meant about the musicians being willing to be paid, is that they may take it as evidence that the person who paid was engaging in unauthorized copying. It might be legally dangerous to send them money this way.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Digital cash is data representing and redeeemable a certain amount of money, which is very hard to forge and, once created, can be passed from person to person without contacting the service which creates and manages it. Digital cash can be stolen if you send the data over insecure channels, or store it on an insecure machine as the provider will pay the real money to anyone who presents the digital cash.
Your apparent idea of "digital cash" which doesn't represent a fixed amount of a real-life commodity is absurd. It is to my description above as monopoly money is to bank notes: an amusing toy, possibly mistaken for money by small children, but of no real value.
Internet-available account transfer services (meaning, you contact the service every time you want to send money to someone, and you can contact them to confirm that you've received it) are sufficient, and they are available. E-gold is an example (it is also a peer-to-peer system which allows micropayments and works with any SSL-supporting web browser). There are still security risks, but you only need one secure line, instead of establishing a secure line with every person you want to send money to.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. So you easily put $20 in, dole it out to hundreds of musicians in pennies, and over $19 would come through. All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands. Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing (hmm, thousands of dollars going through your service every day to already-rich musicians, many of which you don't listen to and some of the most profitable you actively dislike, but even given the free choice, you'd rather send it to them than pocket it or redirect it to your own favorite musicians. Yeah, right).
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.