Way to go, stupid poster. Try reading the articles. Especially the second one, which starts out (luckily for you, so you don't have to read too far): "A discredited discovery of two new heavy elements in 1999 was based on fabricated research, lab officials acknowledged. "
Then why order a hot coffee? Oh wait, we need to have a safe society (well-legislated of course). We should force all coffee sold in the US to be of a safe temperature. Something like 80 degrees fahrenheit. That way you can't hurt yourself by dumping the thing in your lap. And to make sure that irresponsible people don't do this at home, it should be illegal to sell coffee pots that are capable of heating coffee above 80 degrees without a license demonstrating that you are a properly trained coffee technician. Heating coffee in a non-designated coffee heating device would be punishable by a $200,000 fine and/or 5 years in prison. This is to keep people from harming society by releasing coffee that has been heated to unsafe levels to the public. Because, you should remember, society is the one that pays for all of those burns caused by too-hot coffee.
This ruling does not mean the death of Internet radio, but rather the death of Internet radio in the United States. This is an important difference, as I predict that the big US radio sites will either move out of the US, or be replaced by new sites that exist outside of the United States.
Here is what will happen:
Internet Radio continues to grow/develop, outside of the United States.
The number of US-based listeners continues to grow.
Non-US based Internet Radio stations begin to generate revenue.
US-based groups and industries begin to realize that they are missing out on a large stream of revenue/listerners, and begin to look for changes.
Sometime in the (near) future, new laws are passed that open up the United States market for Internet Radio.
So while I'm disgusted by the Copyright Office's decision, I have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic. Optimistic that sometime in the future people will realize what a big mistake this was.
Assuming that you're speaking of the United States...
we're not as connected to our home as the Icelandic are, we're nothing more then a bunch of immigrants.
It isn't as if the people of Iceland sprouted from the glaciers. They're immigrants just as much as anyone else. So I don't think the immigrant origin of the population has anything to do with it. The fact that they're living with a much smaller land might...
Wow, I agree that doctors shouldn't be threatened...but this is just a small chip in the bone that is our first amendment.
I'm not sure why you consider this to be a "small chip". The First Amendment has never been absolute. There has always been some limit to what people can say, especially if they are advocating some illegal activity.
That isn't to say that advocating illegal activity is automatically non-protected speech, but just that there is a point where expression becomes too "dangerous" to be protected. This may offend those with an especially idealistic view of the First Amendment, but is really a necessity in the real world.
Obviously the question of "what is protected" is a very tricky (and not well-defined) question. But this is why these cases are generally taken to the higher courts, where fuzzy legalities are better handled (rather than in the legislative side, where things are generally seen as black or white.)
Really, the process of reviewing controversial material is not something new, or really anything to be alarmed about. Although the courts in the United States tend to be very protective of the First Amendment, there are, of course, cases where things are taken too far. But this process is, by no means, an indication of the death of the first amendment.
seriously, if you think about it, a website cannot "immediately threaten" someone.
Just as the small vibrations of air caused by voice cannot hurt anyone, but walking into a bank and yelling that "anyone who doesn't hand over their money will die" is still illegal.
I suppose it's news that cooking will generate acrylamide, but really, cooking of any carbohydrate will create carcinogens, in the form of aromatic carbon compounds. For example, a well-cooked burger and a slightly-burnt piece of toast both contain anthracene, which is a carcinogen.
But it isn't anything new that people are eating carcinogens. Peanuts are (relatively) high in carcinogens, beer even more so. Eating "organic" foods doesn't help, because plants have developed chemical ways to deal with pests, and generate these toxic chemicals in even greater amounts when grown without pesticides.
One problem with reports like these is that they treat something that is "carcinogenic" as being a "kiss of death". Carcinogens are merely capable of causing cancerous mutations, given the right conditions. But then the question is, what kind of cancer? What types of tumors? The danger with smoking isn't just that it is so carcinogenic, but that the cancers that it causes are really nasty ones. Compare this with skin cancer, which also has a high rate of occurance, but is at the same time very treatable.
Trying to make an emergency out of this is ridiculous, and goes against all reason. It would be a lot more logical to perhaps try to determine the particulars of how (and if) the small amounts of acrylamide in food are treated by the body. The current bans on acrylamide in drinking water are reasonable, if there is nothing known about it, then don't allow it to be added. But the fact is that acrylamide has apparently been present in the human diet for a very long time, so why suddenly make a big fuss about it?
It seems to me that this is just a way to turn some rather boring research "we found chemical X in cooked food" into a hot-button issue. Maybe they'll get some more funding out of it. And with Sweden's tax rates, they'll probably be able to get a lot, too.
Leaving a car on a street unlocked with the keys inside is entrapment. This isn't.
Just like how if someone crawls through an unlocked window into your house, it isn't breaking and entering, because obviously you were inviting them to do so.
However, I would still take issue if they police department was in fact leaving the car unlocked w/keys since I think it would pose a public safety risk to kids that might get in trouble if they had easy access to a car w/keys.
And heaven knows, we must always REMEMBER THE CHILDREN!!!!!!
Saying Africa is backwater is like seeing a trailer park in the US and saying America is just a bunch of rednecks. Africa is full of green hills, farmland, and industry, in addition to its famous deserts.
I'm sticking with chickens, pigs and cows, myself. I just don't understand the appeal of "rare delicacies." Maybe someone can explain this cultural difference too me.
Of course, to a lot of people around the world, your insistence on eating Pork would be considered disgusting, dirty, etc. etc.
Actually, I thought about using some *BSD, but after a while I decided that I preferred to support the GPL over the BSD license. Not that I'm saying that other people should use one over the other, and I bet that a lot of people don't even care about which license they use. But I'm just a little fanatical (read: "stupid") about this. I use gnome over kde for the same reason.
Then we can discuss on the payment of data. Your first born son would be sufficent payment for the first three months.
I pay about US$60/month for ADSL, I get 5 static IPs, and usually >1Mbit/sec throughput (download). Compared with about $20/month for your typical 56K account, it isn't that bad.
Re:What about manufacturing vs producing ideas?
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 1
One issue which they didn't mention is the recent trend towards companies which just produce intellectual property, and don't actually make anything (for example, who license chip designs to manufacturers). This is mostly a recent trend (say, last 10-20 years). Not that I'm saying this is a good trend - I'd be hard pressed to say that the world is bettter of with Rambus than without it.
You just pointed out WHY this is a good trend. Developing new chip designs (or any new Intellectual activity) is risky. Most big companies are wary of too much risk, and for good reason, as a major flop can cause a lot of damage to the company, even if it is a relatively minor part of the company as a whole.
A small, new, company, though, has less to lose. So they often are the ones that make the big advances in technology. The problem is, by being small, they do not have the resources that are necessary to bring a design into being. By licensing their designs, however, they can allow a bigger company to do what they do best (bring a design into production), which insulating the larger corporation from the risk of the basic design.
Let me put it this way: You may not like Rambus's technology, (or the way the company acts), but what if Intel had been developing it? As it is, Intel tried to force RAMBUS on the industry, and they only had a (relatively) small investment in the company. Imagine if they had been developing that baby since the beginning! The investment would have been MUCH greater, and so Intel would have been using every resource at their disposal to recoup their investment, rather than seeing the writing on the wall and giving people the option to not use it at all.
And a procaryotic cell is... what? What makes a virus "non-livin"[sic] anyways? It reproduces just like every other DNA/RNA based organism in the world. Just because it doesn't have 2 feet and a bleeding heart...
They have nothing to give back and their eradication will not upset other species.
Huh? Virii provide several important purposes, primarily the culling of populations that have gotten too large. Remove all the virii from the world and things would be very different. Saying that virii contribute nothing to the world is a ridiculous, myopic statement.
Are you serious? If you'll pay for shipping, I'll gladly send you boxes of old computer hardware. Monster 3D cards, DIMMs, AT cases... I was going through my stuff and discovered that I had 7 unused CDROM drives! Want a 256K VGA video card to put in an ISA slot? Old soundblaster cards? Serial mice? I think I still have a 8MB Matrox millenium card there. There's a Z80 chip, still in box...
I used to live in a place that was right next to a line of high-voltage power lines. And while that isn't a problem to my health, (a few fradulent scientific studies to the contrary), I was close enough that the magnetic induction would give every CRT in my house a 60 Hz signal on the display, so that the screen would move back and forth according to the beat-signal created with regard to the refresh rate.
While this isn't a problem with TVs (which refresh at 60Hz), it was a MAJOR problem with my 21" Viewsonic CRT display, which, in order to get the benefit of the 1800x1400 display, had to be refreshed at 75Hz (going at 60Hz caused too much flicker on that huge display). Needless to say, trying to read tiny text, when the whole screen is shimmying back and forth at 15Hz was headache-inducing at the very least.
This was when I shelled out the big $$$ and got a nice new SGI LCD (SGI 1600SW. It has a good viewing angle, good contrast ratio, runs at 1600x1024 (enough to display two web pages side-by-side), is light-weight and compact (especially compared to my 75 pound Viewsonic P815), and best of all, had no electron beam!
So if, like me, you have a problem with ambient magnetic fields, then I think that the only solution (until OLEDs come out, of course), is to get an LCD. And they're nice. Really nice. In fact, after seeing my display, all my friends went out and got LCDs as well. The only problem is that they're not nearly as cheap as CRT displays.
Well... You're exactly right. That's what I get for writing off the top of my head! You induced me to search through all my boxed-up books (I moved recently), and sure enough... I have mistaken the susceptibility of DES to Linear Cryptanalysis with Differential Analysis.
Diff Analysis was part of the design criteria, but not explicitly stated at the time, but Linear Analysis wasn't, and the S-Boxes in DES are among the 9 to 16 percent weakest against that attack.
It has been widely acknowledged that such agencies as the NSA have been at least a decade or more ahead of the private sector.
Schneier's Applied Cryptography has a discussion of this with regard to DES. Here's my description of it (I'm doing this off the top of my head, and I'm not an expert, so please excuse any mistakes):
In the early 1970s, IBM was contracted by the US Government to create a standard encryption algorithm that companies could use to secure their communications.
IBM was given free reign to design what they wanted, with one exception: Any algorithm that they developed would have to be given to the government (NSA) to look at, and the government would have final approval. So, after some work, IBM came up with the algorithm that we now know as DES, although what they came up with is slightly different than what is in use today...
The important part of DES, the part that does the actual encrypting, is a part of the algorithm where the incoming bits are mixed. The actual mixing can be described as a matrix of numbers. The makeup of this matrix is important, as it determines whether the bits are properly encrypted. If this block of numbers has the wrong configuration, then the numbers may not be mixed in a truly secure manner.
The question then, of course, is how to determine whether a block of numbers is "secure" or not. IBM had developed a test that would check this particular property, came up with a set of numbers that they had decided would make the algorithm properly secure, and gave it all to the NSA to check.
The NSA approved the algorithm, but with one exception: They supplied a new set of numbers for the mixing block! IBM checked these new numbers, found that they satisfied their requirements for security, and, so, that is what we are using today.
So What? About 10 years later a new method of attacking ciphers was developed, called Differential Analysis. This method was brand new, nobody had ever heard about it before, and turned out to be very powerful. Of course, DES was checked to see how secure it was against this new attack, and it turns out that the security of DES depends entirely on what numbers are picked for the mixing block.
Here's the interesting part: It turns out that the numbers used in DES, the ones that the NSA itself had generated and given to IBM, were in the 2% worst of all possible blocks to be used!
Coincidence? Perhaps...although it does seem to indicate that the NSA was aware of Differential Analysis many years before the rest of the world was, and purposely sabotaged DES to make it easier to crack. Remember that the NSA is the world's largest employer of mathematicians!
1) We're going to roll over and do whatever Apple says.
2) Just to make sure that our readers don't think that we're selling-out, we'll state that "we were not doing anything illegal". Of course we won't be taking a stand or anything that might involve a little bit of courage.
There are examples to the contrary. For one thing, Google never spent anything on marketing. I would pay to use Google.
There's a big difference between Google and a band that doesn't have any marketing: There is only ONE Google, while there are many many bands that don't have marketing. So when someone tells you about a great seach engine, it isn't hard to find it, but when someone mentions a great indie band, they are just one of thousands, and you're probably being told of different ones all the time.
Which of the indie bands are good? Which of the indie bands are worth paying money for? You don't know, you probably don't have the patience to find out, and you probably don't have the connections to hear all of them. That's what marketing (by the big evil music corporations) is for. They are the ones who find the diamond in the rough, the one good indie band out of the hundreds of crappy ones, and then make it available to the part of the world that doesn't frequent small smokey clubs in out-of-the-way places.
Slashdot Mirror
"
Sure sounds like lying to me...
Then why order a hot coffee? Oh wait, we need to have a safe society (well-legislated of course). We should force all coffee sold in the US to be of a safe temperature. Something like 80 degrees fahrenheit. That way you can't hurt yourself by dumping the thing in your lap. And to make sure that irresponsible people don't do this at home, it should be illegal to sell coffee pots that are capable of heating coffee above 80 degrees without a license demonstrating that you are a properly trained coffee technician. Heating coffee in a non-designated coffee heating device would be punishable by a $200,000 fine and/or 5 years in prison. This is to keep people from harming society by releasing coffee that has been heated to unsafe levels to the public. Because, you should remember, society is the one that pays for all of those burns caused by too-hot coffee.
Here is what will happen:
Internet Radio continues to grow/develop, outside of the United States.
The number of US-based listeners continues to grow.
Non-US based Internet Radio stations begin to generate revenue.
US-based groups and industries begin to realize that they are missing out on a large stream of revenue/listerners, and begin to look for changes.
Sometime in the (near) future, new laws are passed that open up the United States market for Internet Radio.
So while I'm disgusted by the Copyright Office's decision, I have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic. Optimistic that sometime in the future people will realize what a big mistake this was.
Assuming that you're speaking of the United States...
we're not as connected to our home as the Icelandic are, we're nothing more then a bunch of immigrants.
It isn't as if the people of Iceland sprouted from the glaciers. They're immigrants just as much as anyone else. So I don't think the immigrant origin of the population has anything to do with it. The fact that they're living with a much smaller land might...
We don't have "compulsory licenses" for novels, poetry, software, etc, do we?
Sure we do. They're called "libraries".
True. You explained it better than I.
I'm not sure why you consider this to be a "small chip". The First Amendment has never been absolute. There has always been some limit to what people can say, especially if they are advocating some illegal activity.
That isn't to say that advocating illegal activity is automatically non-protected speech, but just that there is a point where expression becomes too "dangerous" to be protected. This may offend those with an especially idealistic view of the First Amendment, but is really a necessity in the real world.
Obviously the question of "what is protected" is a very tricky (and not well-defined) question. But this is why these cases are generally taken to the higher courts, where fuzzy legalities are better handled (rather than in the legislative side, where things are generally seen as black or white.)
Really, the process of reviewing controversial material is not something new, or really anything to be alarmed about. Although the courts in the United States tend to be very protective of the First Amendment, there are, of course, cases where things are taken too far. But this process is, by no means, an indication of the death of the first amendment.
seriously, if you think about it, a website cannot "immediately threaten" someone.
Just as the small vibrations of air caused by voice cannot hurt anyone, but walking into a bank and yelling that "anyone who doesn't hand over their money will die" is still illegal.
I suppose it's news that cooking will generate acrylamide, but really, cooking of any carbohydrate will create carcinogens, in the form of aromatic carbon compounds. For example, a well-cooked burger and a slightly-burnt piece of toast both contain anthracene, which is a carcinogen.
But it isn't anything new that people are eating carcinogens. Peanuts are (relatively) high in carcinogens, beer even more so. Eating "organic" foods doesn't help, because plants have developed chemical ways to deal with pests, and generate these toxic chemicals in even greater amounts when grown without pesticides.
One problem with reports like these is that they treat something that is "carcinogenic" as being a "kiss of death". Carcinogens are merely capable of causing cancerous mutations, given the right conditions. But then the question is, what kind of cancer? What types of tumors? The danger with smoking isn't just that it is so carcinogenic, but that the cancers that it causes are really nasty ones. Compare this with skin cancer, which also has a high rate of occurance, but is at the same time very treatable.
Trying to make an emergency out of this is ridiculous, and goes against all reason. It would be a lot more logical to perhaps try to determine the particulars of how (and if) the small amounts of acrylamide in food are treated by the body. The current bans on acrylamide in drinking water are reasonable, if there is nothing known about it, then don't allow it to be added. But the fact is that acrylamide has apparently been present in the human diet for a very long time, so why suddenly make a big fuss about it?
It seems to me that this is just a way to turn some rather boring research "we found chemical X in cooked food" into a hot-button issue. Maybe they'll get some more funding out of it. And with Sweden's tax rates, they'll probably be able to get a lot, too.
Or when the thief doesn't like whiskey and gives it to his sister...
Hey, they still share the same genes. I'm all for natural selection in this case.
Leaving a car on a street unlocked with the keys inside is entrapment. This isn't.
Just like how if someone crawls through an unlocked window into your house, it isn't breaking and entering, because obviously you were inviting them to do so.
However, I would still take issue if they police department was in fact leaving the car unlocked w/keys since I think it would pose a public safety risk to kids that might get in trouble if they had easy access to a car w/keys.
And heaven knows, we must always REMEMBER THE CHILDREN!!!!!!
Saying Africa is backwater is like seeing a trailer park in the US and saying America is just a bunch of rednecks. Africa is full of green hills, farmland, and industry, in addition to its famous deserts.
Do you even know what "backwater" means?
I'm sticking with chickens, pigs and cows, myself. I just don't understand the appeal of "rare delicacies." Maybe someone can explain this cultural difference too me.
Of course, to a lot of people around the world, your insistence on eating Pork would be considered disgusting, dirty, etc. etc.
This resulted in the sale of 7,487 units [of Civilization: Call to Power]; Loki sold about 1,500 others itself.
:)
I bought one of the 9000 copies of Civ:CTP that were sold. I feel like I'm part of an elite group!
I've been using Gentoo Linux, and I love it.
:)
Actually, I thought about using some *BSD, but after a while I decided that I preferred to support the GPL over the BSD license. Not that I'm saying that other people should use one over the other, and I bet that a lot of people don't even care about which license they use. But I'm just a little fanatical (read: "stupid") about this. I use gnome over kde for the same reason.
Anyways, it's your fault for asking why!
Then we can discuss on the payment of data. Your first born son would be sufficent payment for the first three months.
I pay about US$60/month for ADSL, I get 5 static IPs, and usually >1Mbit/sec throughput (download). Compared with about $20/month for your typical 56K account, it isn't that bad.
One issue which they didn't mention is the recent trend towards companies which just produce intellectual property, and don't actually make anything (for example, who license chip designs to manufacturers). This is mostly a recent trend (say, last 10-20 years). Not that I'm saying this is a good trend - I'd be hard pressed to say that the world is bettter of with Rambus than without it.
You just pointed out WHY this is a good trend. Developing new chip designs (or any new Intellectual activity) is risky. Most big companies are wary of too much risk, and for good reason, as a major flop can cause a lot of damage to the company, even if it is a relatively minor part of the company as a whole.
A small, new, company, though, has less to lose. So they often are the ones that make the big advances in technology. The problem is, by being small, they do not have the resources that are necessary to bring a design into being. By licensing their designs, however, they can allow a bigger company to do what they do best (bring a design into production), which insulating the larger corporation from the risk of the basic design.
Let me put it this way: You may not like Rambus's technology, (or the way the company acts), but what if Intel had been developing it? As it is, Intel tried to force RAMBUS on the industry, and they only had a (relatively) small investment in the company. Imagine if they had been developing that baby since the beginning! The investment would have been MUCH greater, and so Intel would have been using every resource at their disposal to recoup their investment, rather than seeing the writing on the wall and giving people the option to not use it at all.
Since we're dealing with such reputable sources, here's another book that might be of interest.
A virus is a Non-Livin protein sack
And a procaryotic cell is... what? What makes a virus "non-livin"[sic] anyways? It reproduces just like every other DNA/RNA based organism in the world. Just because it doesn't have 2 feet and a bleeding heart...
They have nothing to give back and their eradication will not upset other species.
Huh? Virii provide several important purposes, primarily the culling of populations that have gotten too large. Remove all the virii from the world and things would be very different. Saying that virii contribute nothing to the world is a ridiculous, myopic statement.
Are you serious? If you'll pay for shipping, I'll gladly send you boxes of old computer hardware. Monster 3D cards, DIMMs, AT cases... I was going through my stuff and discovered that I had 7 unused CDROM drives! Want a 256K VGA video card to put in an ISA slot? Old soundblaster cards? Serial mice? I think I still have a 8MB Matrox millenium card there. There's a Z80 chip, still in box...
Just email me... maybe we can work something out.
I used to live in a place that was right next to a line of high-voltage power lines. And while that isn't a problem to my health, (a few fradulent scientific studies to the contrary), I was close enough that the magnetic induction would give every CRT in my house a 60 Hz signal on the display, so that the screen would move back and forth according to the beat-signal created with regard to the refresh rate.
While this isn't a problem with TVs (which refresh at 60Hz), it was a MAJOR problem with my 21" Viewsonic CRT display, which, in order to get the benefit of the 1800x1400 display, had to be refreshed at 75Hz (going at 60Hz caused too much flicker on that huge display). Needless to say, trying to read tiny text, when the whole screen is shimmying back and forth at 15Hz was headache-inducing at the very least.
This was when I shelled out the big $$$ and got a nice new SGI LCD (SGI 1600SW. It has a good viewing angle, good contrast ratio, runs at 1600x1024 (enough to display two web pages side-by-side), is light-weight and compact (especially compared to my 75 pound Viewsonic P815), and best of all, had no electron beam!
So if, like me, you have a problem with ambient magnetic fields, then I think that the only solution (until OLEDs come out, of course), is to get an LCD. And they're nice. Really nice. In fact, after seeing my display, all my friends went out and got LCDs as well. The only problem is that they're not nearly as cheap as CRT displays.
Well... You're exactly right. That's what I get for writing off the top of my head! You induced me to search through all my boxed-up books (I moved recently), and sure enough... I have mistaken the susceptibility of DES to Linear Cryptanalysis with Differential Analysis.
Diff Analysis was part of the design criteria, but not explicitly stated at the time, but Linear Analysis wasn't, and the S-Boxes in DES are among the 9 to 16 percent weakest against that attack.
Thanks for the correction.
It has been widely acknowledged that such agencies as the NSA have been at least a decade or more ahead of the private sector.
Schneier's Applied Cryptography has a discussion of this with regard to DES. Here's my description of it (I'm doing this off the top of my head, and I'm not an expert, so please excuse any mistakes):
In the early 1970s, IBM was contracted by the US Government to create a standard encryption algorithm that companies could use to secure their communications.
IBM was given free reign to design what they wanted, with one exception: Any algorithm that they developed would have to be given to the government (NSA) to look at, and the government would have final approval. So, after some work, IBM came up with the algorithm that we now know as DES, although what they came up with is slightly different than what is in use today...
The important part of DES, the part that does the actual encrypting, is a part of the algorithm where the incoming bits are mixed. The actual mixing can be described as a matrix of numbers. The makeup of this matrix is important, as it determines whether the bits are properly encrypted. If this block of numbers has the wrong configuration, then the numbers may not be mixed in a truly secure manner.
The question then, of course, is how to determine whether a block of numbers is "secure" or not. IBM had developed a test that would check this particular property, came up with a set of numbers that they had decided would make the algorithm properly secure, and gave it all to the NSA to check.
The NSA approved the algorithm, but with one exception: They supplied a new set of numbers for the mixing block! IBM checked these new numbers, found that they satisfied their requirements for security, and, so, that is what we are using today.
So What? About 10 years later a new method of attacking ciphers was developed, called Differential Analysis. This method was brand new, nobody had ever heard about it before, and turned out to be very powerful. Of course, DES was checked to see how secure it was against this new attack, and it turns out that the security of DES depends entirely on what numbers are picked for the mixing block.
Here's the interesting part: It turns out that the numbers used in DES, the ones that the NSA itself had generated and given to IBM, were in the 2% worst of all possible blocks to be used!
Coincidence? Perhaps...although it does seem to indicate that the NSA was aware of Differential Analysis many years before the rest of the world was, and purposely sabotaged DES to make it easier to crack. Remember that the NSA is the world's largest employer of mathematicians!
Summary of MacFixIt's reply:
1) We're going to roll over and do whatever Apple says.
2) Just to make sure that our readers don't think that we're selling-out, we'll state that "we were not doing anything illegal". Of course we won't be taking a stand or anything that might involve a little bit of courage.
[lots of useless justification snipped]
There are examples to the contrary. For one thing, Google never spent anything on marketing. I would pay to use Google.
There's a big difference between Google and a band that doesn't have any marketing: There is only ONE Google, while there are many many bands that don't have marketing. So when someone tells you about a great seach engine, it isn't hard to find it, but when someone mentions a great indie band, they are just one of thousands, and you're probably being told of different ones all the time.
Which of the indie bands are good? Which of the indie bands are worth paying money for? You don't know, you probably don't have the patience to find out, and you probably don't have the connections to hear all of them. That's what marketing (by the big evil music corporations) is for. They are the ones who find the diamond in the rough, the one good indie band out of the hundreds of crappy ones, and then make it available to the part of the world that doesn't frequent small smokey clubs in out-of-the-way places.