I won't be buying it because Metallica hasn't been a good band since like 1989-1990. Their motives here are suspect, to be sure, but MY reason is that I'm sure whatever they put up their will be a stale, watered-down echo of their former greatness. Any other problems aren't really relevant... It is music, after all. I don't care for a lot musician's politics, but I separate their political speech from their music because music is art and entertainment: Artists and entertainers are like anybody else, they can be wrong too, but it certainly doesn't automatically invalidate their life's work.
...right around the time these stories really started getting mass-publicity...
And was shocked to find that, for example, my 3745 had, among other things, 4 VWIC-2MFT-T1 interfaces... Three of the four were counterfeit--but all were bought through Cisco Gold partners.
Until I saw this with my own eyes, I had no idea how wide this issue reached.
Insuring if you have Hot Water or not, or if a toilet (Out of many) is clogged will not effect the companies profits. T
So you'd pay to eat in a restaurant that didn't have either of those things working? I sure wouldn't--and not eating in a restaurant sounds like it would affect the bottom line to me.
Will this set a precedent for other companies that want to stop the aftermarket resale of their products?
Do you think? Wouldn't Cisco, or Adobe love to crack down on the grey-market resale of old versions of their products? Talk about taking asinine to a whole new level...
The WAN optimization you describe does work for certain kinds of file transfers like pushing docs, spread, preso's, files, etc around a network. If you have peered appliances, you can see a significant reduction in WAN bandwith utilization within a few weeks.
It's just compression with a big, honking dictionary built from the bits that have been sent before. Random data, network traffic that is encrypted before hitting the WAN optimizer, and real-time media can't be optimized in the same way (as much as you want your boss to talk faster, you can't make it happen. lol).
The result is that more WAN bandwidth is made available to other traffic. That means real-time media isn't competing for space.
Yeah, its definitely effective for some traffic, most notably HTTP and File Sharing--convenient... Jury is still out on whether it will be enough to save us the cost of buying more bandwidth... By my estimate most of our sites are well over the number of users/machines that I would consider their "max," so we may still end up buying more bandwidth, but possibly less than we would have without the Steelheads. As far as HTTP is concerned, we saw some pretty drastic improvements in the first few days, so I'm eager to see how the next couple weeks play out with other protocols...
I mean, they're band-aids, yes, to be sure. However, I would point out that in the IT World we are too quick to condemn band-aids... For small wounds, they're just what the doctor ordered.
Comcast is making the mistake that many companies managers make: Not scaling up infrastructure. My company is recovering from this sort of shortsightedness right now... We added 35% more employees but didn't grown bandwidth on the WAN even one iota... Now everything is slow and voice-calls are starting to drop (despite fairly aggressive compression and QoS) and they're looking at band-aids like the Riverbed Steelhead, which does TCP optimization and "accelerates" your WAN... Because its cheaper to buy a dozen of those appliances today and appear to be "solving the problem" than to ask their superiors, up front, for tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands more dollars per year in recurring bandwidth charges. This way they can appear to be exploring the more "economical" solution and if they end up having to do the build-out anyway, so what? They'll just make sure the build-outs go on their employee goals/perf review and rake in lucrative, monstrous bonuses for completing them.
but if copyright law made any sense at all they wouldn't have had to pay a dime to Tolkien's estate to make the movie.
...and if my Aunt had balls she'd be my Uncle...
The law IS the way it is, because organizations like New Line lobbied it that way... I doubt very much the MPAA considered the possibility of the copyright system being used AGAINST its members rather than to help them shield their profits.
...Major entertainment companies have long been of the opinion that the artists who create the products they sell are expendable and interchangable... THis is how a studio executive could sleep at night after giving the Tolkien estate less than $63,000 compensation for a property that has made New Line north of $1 billion in revenue...
Glad to hear it--they're getting what they deserver.
The fact that there are two classes of legally recognized entities, with competing rights allocated to each, is sort of the definition of a class struggle.
Wow. Please project this in flaming, 3/4 mile high letters in the sky over Washington D.C....
Re:Im a sun employee
on
Sun Buys MySQL
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I've been using some compact flourescents for about a year now, and they're nice in some applications but it seems sort of stupid to cast off the old-fashioned light-bulb just yet...
Specifically, I'm talking about lights that dim... CF bulbs do not dim. They are either all the way on or all the way off. Overcoming this would be a huge stride in getting them into every light-fixture everywhere...
I work in a call center for a bank, and I don't know how many times I tell people that they signed a particular agreement binding us and them to something. And that they should have read it prior to signing but people really don't take the time, usually five minutes, to read anything.
It is possible (even likely) that the customer DIDN'T sign anything binding them to whatever objectionable terms you're referring to... The reason for this is that banks, credit-card issuers, and other financial institutions usually bury a clause in anything signed by any customer that says something to the effect of:
"And we can change these terms any time we see fit, and are only required to inform you after the change has already happened. IF you do not accept the new terms, your only recourse is to cancel your account and stop doing business with us--which also incidentally makes 100% of any amount owed INSTANTLY due for payment. Also, you're agreeing to be bound by those new terms from the date they are implemented until you cancel your account, because by opening the account you're "pre-agreeing" to these terms taht we haven't made up yet."
And that, my friend, makes the agreement meaningless and worthless. If one party can change it AT WILL, you really don't have a contract... You have extortion. It also, literally, means that nobody can read everything... Because even when you GET informed about the changes, they don't send you the modified agreement in its entirety--they send you the changed portion. so unless you made a photocopy of the original, you are being informed of the changes to an original YOU DON'T HAVE. Once, I received an "Amended customer agreement" from a credit-card company that was one page, inded only one SENTENCE long, and it said the following:
On Page 2, Section 1 of the original, paragraph 1 sentence 2, clause 3 is hereby amended to include the phrase "And all others as we see fit."
And before you say "Well, you should have saved a copy" I challenge you to immediately produce for me every copy of every agreement you've ever signed with your creditors. If you can't, you're a rank hypocrite defending an indefensible corporate swindle.
Now, that's not to say that I don't read everything. I do, and I even make an effort to strike through patently objectionable clauses (like the one above) and initial them, but 1) Some companies will not accept modified/amended agreements and 2) I don't always see/grok all the objectionable clauses right away because I AM NOT A LAWYER. Should I really be required to keep an attorney on retainer so I can accomplish something as simple as opening a checking-account? Or getting an oil-change?
When it came time I looked, and read, every single piece of paperwork, and found that my monthly payment had an extra $300 tacked to it. I looked at the paralegal, who just wanted to be done and go home, and told her to call the bank because I didn't agree to that in my original paperwork that I was given.
Unless you are an attorney, you violated the cardinal rule of real-estate... DON'T DO A CLOSING WITHOUT AN ATTORNEY WHO REPRESENTS YOU LOOKING OVER THE PAPERS. That $300 "miscalculation" likely wasn't a "mistake." Mortgage brokers are some of the sleaziest operators around--you will not find a more wretched den of scum and villainy than their annual convention. If a layman like you spotted this "error" there were probably tons of other "junk fees" in there too that you weren't really obligated to pay... I have done about a dozen property closings over the years and I have always gotten more "junk-fees" taken off the tab than I paid the lawyer to do the closing. I have come out like $5k ahead over the last decade doing this.
Further, I'd guess since you work in a call-center, you're not very old/life-experienced just yet... Chances are they saw your DOB on the papers and decided to see how much extra they could screw you out of... Chances are the payment
I think in some cases they're so convinced that they can't learn it that they prevent themselves from doing so even if they otherwise could, and in some cases they don't have the sort of brain processes that allow a person to systematize knowledge about how one part of one thing works to understand how other parts or other things work, so memorizing instructions is all they can do.
The term you're looking for is "learned helplessness." They have either been told so many times, or have told themselves so many times, that they CAN'T do something that these "false facts" become their reality. Since trying to go beyond your limits requires an emotional risk (i.e. "What if I fail? I'll look foolish....") people who learn to be helpless tend to stay that way unless they get help breaking out of it or they accidentally do the thing the "know" they can't and get the idea that they actually can. (Wow, that was one tortured sentence...)
My users have a gigabyte of exchange storage, access to OWA, Treos, and RPC over HTTPS from anywhere on earth, and they exchange attachments using Sharepoint... I hear what you're saying: Google and Yahoo's offerings aren't static and are constantly improving--but so are mine! As we add more storage, I grow my offerrings to my users... We have Sharepoint and blogs and internal IM and a proxy to get them safely onto AIM/Yahoo/MSN/JAbber and the like... Our environment offers them a lot of stuff precisely so they don't feel like they have to "get it outside"... Network ADministration is like... being married to 5500 people at the same time... You have to think about their needs too! And I do...
A) What's good enough for college is often good enough for business. All it takes is a product/service that matches the executives' pinstripes.
B) Do you have an MCSE Messaging cert? How much will it be worth when nobody does their email in-house?
We're doing google apps for students, but staff are still in-house... And I know "the sky is falling, it won't be long" but actually, it will--in fact for us, it will be never. Staff members email critical, business confidential (and student confidential) information around internally at present. If we outsourced email, now 100% Of that traffic is floating across the public internet in plain text, a clear violation of several requirements of our educational accreditation--hardly a wise business decision for us. And I doubt very much that any smart CIO would really want to let his control of the messaging system into the hands of a third party. Finally, I Don't know if you've priced Google Apps for the Enterprise, but the cost is--insane... You WILL NOT save one thin dime using it--its around $50/user/year. Educational users are free, but that's a small portion of email users on earth. Unless you have an absolutely miniscule environment, outside of EDU, Google isn't a savings... Yes, Exchange requires a CAL, PC, Windows license, and OFfice license, but except for the CAL, statistically, you probably already ahve that other stuff anyway. AND.EDU users get a campus agreement price on licensing from MS that is just short of unfair competition (and might be, but we're forbidden to disclose the exact amount we pay.) I am no huge fan of Exchange... It's got great user functions, and the admin functionality has improved drastically over the last five years, but it still is a MASSIVE PITA. The world eagerly awaits the day that an enterprise competitor to Exchange comes along that has the same level of functionality (or better) and also installs and administers as easily (or better.)
MCSEs w/Messaging: May find their ability to consult on Small Business Server implementations reduced, but these are the only companies that the $50/user/year price of Google Enterprise will attract... If you have more than 50 or so employees, it just doesn't make sense... You'll already have an infrastructure setup to support your PCs if you have more people than that, and if you're already running AD, the incremental difficulty/expense of Exchange Server just isn't that bad. I mean, its taking years off my life, but it does work... pretty well.
It would've been hunky dory, if it were possible to not have to deal with the advertisements and other crap, that supports these "free" services... I'm not sure about Microsoft's solution, but Google Apps for Education allows you to turn off the advertisements for your students...
Out of curiosity, how did you "promptly" re-image 700+ workstations? Is there some software that will net-boot them all and make it happen? If so, does it update the windows license key and everything when it does? The only thing i can think of that would do this would be netbooting them into a linux distro that grabs an img, pulls it down to each client, then writes and reboots.
Sorry, i know this is TOTALLY off-topic, but really large scale I.T. stuff like that interests me.
We use a product called Altiris deployment solution. The workstations do a PXE boot (i.e. boot to the network interface) and map a drive to deployment share on PXE server. Then the PXE environment you choose (can be MS-DOS, PC-DOS, barebones windows, Linux etc) acts as an OS for that system, but its running off of a network share, so that it can partition the workstation's hard disk, formats it, and downloads/installs the image with all the software already a part of it. Then one of our admins queues up an appropriate "rename and join the domain" jobs and in about 40 minutes or so we go from a pile of cardboard boxes to a functional Windows XP with all neccessary software installed and ready to roll.
But there are tons of other options... LANDesk is one, and Symantec Ghost is another.
Will downgrade new machines from Vista to XP or some alternative due to the overhead and application support? I know in my office, Vista has been vanishing, replaced by Linux running Wine for the few Windows apps we actually require.
I know we are! We rolled out 700+ new workstations this week with Vista pre-installed... and promptly wiped them for our corporate image of XP SP2. What a joke... MS is counting all of these "OEM" sales, but I bet a pretty large proportion of corporate and enterprise "sales" of Vista aren't actually being used.
Capitalism, and the free market are the method by which we allocate people to the tasks they are best at. J K Rowling is a better writer than she would be a supermarket worker, and capitalism has put her in her correct role. If nobody is ever rewarded for creating art, then art will always remain an amateurish sideline. I don't want all the entertainment in the world to be part time efforts created at weekends.
You are arguing a point NOBODY else is arguing against... Yeah, it would be ideal and perfect if all artists could focus on their art 24x7... BUt they don't, and this has actually been QUITE beneficial to the art world.
There has been a LOT of great work produced by people not in those circumstances. For example, Charles Bukowski. Tell me how he writes ANY of those books if he isn't holding down a shitty job he hates--how he creates the relatable, sad, Everyman character of himself in those stories without living those gruelling shifts on a postal-route as the object of his supervisor's loathing and scorn?
In fact, throughout the entire history of the human creative endeavor, "Copyright" has existed for such a blink-of-an-eye that the works produced under its canopy seem insignificant in comparison to the voluminous bodies of work that exist which are NOT copyrighted. Of course, artists should be paid, but for every example you can name where copyright has been fair to an artist, I can name 10 where the fat-cat middlemen have leeched away the profits for themselves, taken the rights, and left the "major label artist" holding the bag on tons of production costs and marketing expenses that he now OWES to his record label.
Further, the Copyright system has not led to the utopian scenario you would have us blindly accept... For the handful of artists that are getting rich, or at least making a healthy profit (i.e. able to support themselves with ONLY art) in the current economic model for art (copyrighted works distributed by fat-cat middlemen holding all the cards) there are thousands or millions working one (or more) jobs to support their art. In fact, if I had to wager, I'd guess that the vast majority of the world's artists still exist this way: Doing something to support themselves and their art outside of that art. This paradigm has led to some of the greatest, most wonderful works of art in the history of human civilization. All the copyright system has brought us is Britney Spears, Harry Potter, and Product-Placement on TV and in the movies. Its brought us yet-another-poorly-written-poorly-acted-Die-Hard-m ove starring a 60-year-old Bruce WIllis sporting his "product-placement" "Depends Undergarments."
then does it not also mean that when they sing the lyrics that emanate naturally from sympathetic resonance in our brains to the rhythm of the nebula, that we then also hear their lyrics in our earthly language through the same suspended disbelief that we do for the rest of the spoken words (and text!) in the show?
Dude, come on... It's a bad cover of a Dylan song... GIVE ME A BREAK. Use a symphony or something artsy... But likely "All Along the Watchtower" fit the budget... A command performance by the London Philharmonic probably would not.
All of that new NSA equipment would have to be re-worked. I doubt that the taxpayers would approve.
I am posting in this thread because I'm fresh out of mod points... But even if I weren't, there isn't any "+1, Deftly Ironic" moderation or I'd set you up with one of those...
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I won't be buying it because Metallica hasn't been a good band since like 1989-1990. Their motives here are suspect, to be sure, but MY reason is that I'm sure whatever they put up their will be a stale, watered-down echo of their former greatness. Any other problems aren't really relevant... It is music, after all. I don't care for a lot musician's politics, but I separate their political speech from their music because music is art and entertainment: Artists and entertainers are like anybody else, they can be wrong too, but it certainly doesn't automatically invalidate their life's work.
...right around the time these stories really started getting mass-publicity...
And was shocked to find that, for example, my 3745 had, among other things, 4 VWIC-2MFT-T1 interfaces... Three of the four were counterfeit--but all were bought through Cisco Gold partners.
Until I saw this with my own eyes, I had no idea how wide this issue reached.
Three words:
ROBOTIC LUCY LIU!
"I love you BILLY EVERYTEEN."
So you'd pay to eat in a restaurant that didn't have either of those things working? I sure wouldn't--and not eating in a restaurant sounds like it would affect the bottom line to me.
Do you think? Wouldn't Cisco, or Adobe love to crack down on the grey-market resale of old versions of their products? Talk about taking asinine to a whole new level...
As an addendum, I spoke to the vendor today about a different subject and they mentioned the next version will accelerate HTTPS too! I pee with joy.
Yeah, its definitely effective for some traffic, most notably HTTP and File Sharing--convenient
I mean, they're band-aids, yes, to be sure. However, I would point out that in the IT World we are too quick to condemn band-aids... For small wounds, they're just what the doctor ordered.
Comcast is making the mistake that many companies managers make: Not scaling up infrastructure. My company is recovering from this sort of shortsightedness right now... We added 35% more employees but didn't grown bandwidth on the WAN even one iota... Now everything is slow and voice-calls are starting to drop (despite fairly aggressive compression and QoS) and they're looking at band-aids like the Riverbed Steelhead, which does TCP optimization and "accelerates" your WAN... Because its cheaper to buy a dozen of those appliances today and appear to be "solving the problem" than to ask their superiors, up front, for tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands more dollars per year in recurring bandwidth charges. This way they can appear to be exploring the more "economical" solution and if they end up having to do the build-out anyway, so what? They'll just make sure the build-outs go on their employee goals/perf review and rake in lucrative, monstrous bonuses for completing them.
The law IS the way it is, because organizations like New Line lobbied it that way... I doubt very much the MPAA considered the possibility of the copyright system being used AGAINST its members rather than to help them shield their profits.
...Major entertainment companies have long been of the opinion that the artists who create the products they sell are expendable and interchangable... THis is how a studio executive could sleep at night after giving the Tolkien estate less than $63,000 compensation for a property that has made New Line north of $1 billion in revenue...
Glad to hear it--they're getting what they deserver.
I'm not surprised two people would waste mod-points lowering a facetious reply to a facetious reply... Whoever you both are--YOU NEED GIRLFRIENDS!
Wow. Please project this in flaming, 3/4 mile high letters in the sky over Washington D.C....
Are you having a Whopper Freakout yet?
I've been using some compact flourescents for about a year now, and they're nice in some applications but it seems sort of stupid to cast off the old-fashioned light-bulb just yet...
Specifically, I'm talking about lights that dim... CF bulbs do not dim. They are either all the way on or all the way off. Overcoming this would be a huge stride in getting them into every light-fixture everywhere...
It is possible (even likely) that the customer DIDN'T sign anything binding them to whatever objectionable terms you're referring to... The reason for this is that banks, credit-card issuers, and other financial institutions usually bury a clause in anything signed by any customer that says something to the effect of:
"And we can change these terms any time we see fit, and are only required to inform you after the change has already happened. IF you do not accept the new terms, your only recourse is to cancel your account and stop doing business with us--which also incidentally makes 100% of any amount owed INSTANTLY due for payment. Also, you're agreeing to be bound by those new terms from the date they are implemented until you cancel your account, because by opening the account you're "pre-agreeing" to these terms taht we haven't made up yet."
And that, my friend, makes the agreement meaningless and worthless. If one party can change it AT WILL, you really don't have a contract... You have extortion. It also, literally, means that nobody can read everything... Because even when you GET informed about the changes, they don't send you the modified agreement in its entirety--they send you the changed portion. so unless you made a photocopy of the original, you are being informed of the changes to an original YOU DON'T HAVE. Once, I received an "Amended customer agreement" from a credit-card company that was one page, inded only one SENTENCE long, and it said the following:
On Page 2, Section 1 of the original, paragraph 1 sentence 2, clause 3 is hereby amended to include the phrase "And all others as we see fit."
And before you say "Well, you should have saved a copy" I challenge you to immediately produce for me every copy of every agreement you've ever signed with your creditors. If you can't, you're a rank hypocrite defending an indefensible corporate swindle.
Now, that's not to say that I don't read everything. I do, and I even make an effort to strike through patently objectionable clauses (like the one above) and initial them, but 1) Some companies will not accept modified/amended agreements and 2) I don't always see/grok all the objectionable clauses right away because I AM NOT A LAWYER. Should I really be required to keep an attorney on retainer so I can accomplish something as simple as opening a checking-account? Or getting an oil-change?
Unless you are an attorney, you violated the cardinal rule of real-estate... DON'T DO A CLOSING WITHOUT AN ATTORNEY WHO REPRESENTS YOU LOOKING OVER THE PAPERS. That $300 "miscalculation" likely wasn't a "mistake." Mortgage brokers are some of the sleaziest operators around--you will not find a more wretched den of scum and villainy than their annual convention. If a layman like you spotted this "error" there were probably tons of other "junk fees" in there too that you weren't really obligated to pay... I have done about a dozen property closings over the years and I have always gotten more "junk-fees" taken off the tab than I paid the lawyer to do the closing. I have come out like $5k ahead over the last decade doing this.
Further, I'd guess since you work in a call-center, you're not very old/life-experienced just yet... Chances are they saw your DOB on the papers and decided to see how much extra they could screw you out of... Chances are the payment
The term you're looking for is "learned helplessness." They have either been told so many times, or have told themselves so many times, that they CAN'T do something that these "false facts" become their reality. Since trying to go beyond your limits requires an emotional risk (i.e. "What if I fail? I'll look foolish....") people who learn to be helpless tend to stay that way unless they get help breaking out of it or they accidentally do the thing the "know" they can't and get the idea that they actually can. (Wow, that was one tortured sentence...)
My users have a gigabyte of exchange storage, access to OWA, Treos, and RPC over HTTPS from anywhere on earth, and they exchange attachments using Sharepoint... I hear what you're saying: Google and Yahoo's offerings aren't static and are constantly improving--but so are mine! As we add more storage, I grow my offerrings to my users... We have Sharepoint and blogs and internal IM and a proxy to get them safely onto AIM/Yahoo/MSN/JAbber and the like... Our environment offers them a lot of stuff precisely so they don't feel like they have to "get it outside"... Network ADministration is like... being married to 5500 people at the same time... You have to think about their needs too! And I do...
We're doing google apps for students, but staff are still in-house... And I know "the sky is falling, it won't be long" but actually, it will--in fact for us, it will be never. Staff members email critical, business confidential (and student confidential) information around internally at present. If we outsourced email, now 100% Of that traffic is floating across the public internet in plain text, a clear violation of several requirements of our educational accreditation--hardly a wise business decision for us. And I doubt very much that any smart CIO would really want to let his control of the messaging system into the hands of a third party. Finally, I Don't know if you've priced Google Apps for the Enterprise, but the cost is--insane... You WILL NOT save one thin dime using it--its around $50/user/year. Educational users are free, but that's a small portion of email users on earth. Unless you have an absolutely miniscule environment, outside of EDU, Google isn't a savings... Yes, Exchange requires a CAL, PC, Windows license, and OFfice license, but except for the CAL, statistically, you probably already ahve that other stuff anyway. AND
MCSEs w/Messaging: May find their ability to consult on Small Business Server implementations reduced, but these are the only companies that the $50/user/year price of Google Enterprise will attract... If you have more than 50 or so employees, it just doesn't make sense... You'll already have an infrastructure setup to support your PCs if you have more people than that, and if you're already running AD, the incremental difficulty/expense of Exchange Server just isn't that bad. I mean, its taking years off my life, but it does work... pretty well.
It would've been hunky dory, if it were possible to not have to deal with the advertisements and other crap, that supports these "free" services...
I'm not sure about Microsoft's solution, but Google Apps for Education allows you to turn off the advertisements for your students...
We use a product called Altiris deployment solution. The workstations do a PXE boot (i.e. boot to the network interface) and map a drive to deployment share on PXE server. Then the PXE environment you choose (can be MS-DOS, PC-DOS, barebones windows, Linux etc) acts as an OS for that system, but its running off of a network share, so that it can partition the workstation's hard disk, formats it, and downloads/installs the image with all the software already a part of it. Then one of our admins queues up an appropriate "rename and join the domain" jobs and in about 40 minutes or so we go from a pile of cardboard boxes to a functional Windows XP with all neccessary software installed and ready to roll.
But there are tons of other options... LANDesk is one, and Symantec Ghost is another.
I know we are! We rolled out 700+ new workstations this week with Vista pre-installed... and promptly wiped them for our corporate image of XP SP2. What a joke... MS is counting all of these "OEM" sales, but I bet a pretty large proportion of corporate and enterprise "sales" of Vista aren't actually being used.
You are arguing a point NOBODY else is arguing against... Yeah, it would be ideal and perfect if all artists could focus on their art 24x7... BUt they don't, and this has actually been QUITE beneficial to the art world.
There has been a LOT of great work produced by people not in those circumstances. For example, Charles Bukowski. Tell me how he writes ANY of those books if he isn't holding down a shitty job he hates--how he creates the relatable, sad, Everyman character of himself in those stories without living those gruelling shifts on a postal-route as the object of his supervisor's loathing and scorn?
In fact, throughout the entire history of the human creative endeavor, "Copyright" has existed for such a blink-of-an-eye that the works produced under its canopy seem insignificant in comparison to the voluminous bodies of work that exist which are NOT copyrighted. Of course, artists should be paid, but for every example you can name where copyright has been fair to an artist, I can name 10 where the fat-cat middlemen have leeched away the profits for themselves, taken the rights, and left the "major label artist" holding the bag on tons of production costs and marketing expenses that he now OWES to his record label.
Further, the Copyright system has not led to the utopian scenario you would have us blindly accept... For the handful of artists that are getting rich, or at least making a healthy profit (i.e. able to support themselves with ONLY art) in the current economic model for art (copyrighted works distributed by fat-cat middlemen holding all the cards) there are thousands or millions working one (or more) jobs to support their art. In fact, if I had to wager, I'd guess that the vast majority of the world's artists still exist this way: Doing something to support themselves and their art outside of that art. This paradigm has led to some of the greatest, most wonderful works of art in the history of human civilization. All the copyright system has brought us is Britney Spears, Harry Potter, and Product-Placement on TV and in the movies. Its brought us yet-another-poorly-written-poorly-acted-Die-Hard-
Dude, come on... It's a bad cover of a Dylan song... GIVE ME A BREAK. Use a symphony or something artsy... But likely "All Along the Watchtower" fit the budget... A command performance by the London Philharmonic probably would not.
I am posting in this thread because I'm fresh out of mod points... But even if I weren't, there isn't any "+1, Deftly Ironic" moderation or I'd set you up with one of those...
So does the whole family gather 'round the PC in your den? Or do you put your laptop on the coffee table?