I feel no sympathy for them either, the people voted for this mess and now we are all going to pay for it. The budget problems that are occuring now in California are the inescapable result of decades of flawed economic and social policies that serve as an example and warning of the types of policies that tax and spend big government liberals would like to persue on a much larger scale and will if they are given control of the White House in 2008.
Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with current events or maybe you don't live in California, but this state is going through a major budget crises right now within the context of much larger budgetary problems that have been building towards a day of reckoning for decades and are just now beginning to come to a head. The Democrats want to raise taxes and the Republicans want to cut spending, but they can never agree to do either and so the state sputters along on emergency spending bills while the state politicians argue about the budget. The budget hasn't actually been delivered on time in years now because both sides play brinksmanship games as the deadline approaches and passes and then point the fingers at each other when the people ask whose fault it is. Meanwhile the state bond debts are rated around CCC or something equivalent to one (1) grade above junk (state bond indebtedness has increased by 1000%+ since the late 1970s) and surrounding states are baiting California business to pack up and come to their states where taxes are lower and there are fewer "crazy" regulations.
Speak for yourself, I played four (4) years of high school football as an offensive lineman and I would have played in college too if I had been large enough, but it was not to be. I now have a CS degree and six (6) years experience as a software developer, but I still remember my football days with a certain degree of fondness and nostalgia. In fact, I am going to play in my alumni game (full-contatct) against our old cross-town rivals next year and I am training to reprise my role as an offensive lineman right now. We have so few outlets as we get older to really vent some frustrations (legally) against our fellow citizens, so for me this is the perfect opportunity to get back out there and kick some butt while proving to my wife that talk of my prowess during my glory days is not entirely misplaced.
TFA states that the program can update its binary (and does so regularly) to evade the sorts of checksum detections which are used by AV tools to detect malware. It is quite possible that each infection is unique in checksum AND changes regularly after the initial infection. It probably randomizes file names and locations as well and rootkit techniques may also be employed to further evade detection. It is impossible to say for sure, but the botnet designers certainly did NOT want to be found so you can bet that they have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their programs. In fact, the only reliable way to detect that you are infected might be to run a packet monitoring program on a different machine and capture traffic off the network card to confirm or disprove the infection.
It still seems like a system where an untrusted party could take advantage to drop packets in this manner from non-preferred sources or to non-preferred destinations however. Sounds like something that Comcast might do...
I don't know why there isn't real director's cut that would have met Lynch's approval. How many of his other films have "directors cuts"? I am not certain, but probably few or none. By all accounts Lynch is very single minded about his films and how they are presented. Take the following excerpt from his wikipedia article, which sums up how he feels about such things quite nicely IMHO...
"Lynch tends to keep his personal life private and rarely comments on his films. However, he does attend public events and film festivals when he or his films are nominated/awarded. He is known to be notoriously evasive and cagey in interviews, and refuses to discuss the plot details and "true meanings" of his films, preferring viewers to come away with their own interpretations. None of his films released on DVD have director commentary tracks, and some (as per his request) do not even have chapter selections. This is due, at least in part, to his belief that a film should be viewed from beginning to end without interruption or distraction."
He is one of those directors, in the Kubrick sort of mold, who wants viewers to see his film precisely as he intended it to be viewed OR not at all. This worked well for Kubrick, but frankly, Lynch is not Kubrick.
Ok, one gripe about your interpretation of the Fremen. Have you heard of "unreliable narrator"? The people who think the Fremen are stinking, disheveled, "untamed" people are the one's enslaving them. Yes, that is true. However, the book also describes first hand the sights, smells, and activities of the Freeman sietch Tabar from the first person view of Paul Atreides with worn and patched still suits, coarse beards, the acrid ammonia reek of water reclamation processes, the spice, and strong poisons mixed with incense and all or the other earthy, human, and unfiltered smells of the sietch. Precisely what you might imagine of a group of humans who live communally underground in the deep desert, don't bathe, and when they do go out in the sun and heat, walk around in suits that are reprocessing their urine and feces because the water discipline, as the book describes it, is the only way to survive independently, as the Freeman have done and must do, in the deep desert. So while the Harkonnen are prejudiced and exaggerate or play up the unkemptness of the Freeman while mentioning none of their more noble qualities, there is some measure of the truth (i.e. the wild freeman described by the narrator) even though the narrator is at times unreliable and the Harkonnen are certainly biased (they hunt them for sport with lasguns in the desert after all).
and you can get the full-length director's cut, I'm surprised you hadn't seen it Except that it wasn't really the "director's cut" since Lynch disowned it (and it actually is a really bad hack job for the most part...only a couple of the added scenes were any good), hence direction by Alan Smithee and screenplay by "Judas Booth" (in reference of course to the apostle Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ and John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Lincoln).
It would be a hell of a lot better than that "reality show" garbage polluting the tubes year after year. Albeit higher risk, higher cost, and lower margin from the bean-counter's point of view (and FOX is run by the bean counters).
Personally, nothing would make me happier than to see God Emperor of Dune translated to film, either a big-budget movie or another miniseries. Yes, but if they pick up right in the middle of the books there is NO WAY that they can give people even a minimal proper frame of reference for the deeper meanings of that story AND do justice to God Emperor. Even if there were no time limits and budget was no object it could not be done. The preceding films simply MUST be done and done right to the same scale FIRST or it just won't work. People who are not like the Slashdot crowd, who have generally read and groked all of the novels, at least at some level, would be totally lost. They would excoriate the movie, no matter how good it was, because they would be coming at it completely out of context.
Will the Bene Gesserit have magic school-girl outfit change sequences? Now THAT was funny. The Bene Gesserit in the Sci-Fi mini series really did remind me of magic schoolgirls, all they needed were sailor uniforms and two-fingered salutes to complete the look. The Bene Gesserit were supposed to be cunning, ruthless, cynical, and at least amoral if not downright evil in pursuit of their goals. Oh well, that was among the least of what the Sci-Fi miniseries, decent though it was, got wrong.
They said the same thing about the Lord of the Rings and it WAS eventually done well (perhaps not perfectly, but it was really really good). The technology of movie making is finally approaching the point where it CAN do proper Justice to Dune IF and it is a big IF...the studios are willing to spend the kind of money that it would take. I think that it would cost at LEAST $300 million to really do justice to Dune and possibly even more than that. Are the studios willing to take that big of a risk on a Science Fiction film? The past history with Sci-Fi and Hollywood bean counters does not exactly inspire confidence. In order for this to work there must be at least a troika (group of three) people at the top who really understand and grok Dune and have the clout to actually get the resources to do it right. I am hopeful, but not certain that it can FINALLY at long last be FULLY done and done right.
What I would like to see is the WHOLE story shot, no matter how long it is, and then they can cut several different versions from that: one for theater release to give the general audience a taste of what Dune is in a way that makes sense as a whole, a regular DVD release with some more scenes added back in for the regular DVD cut to expand upon certain themes that were probably only hinted at in the theater version, AND finally...The whole nine-yards Ultimate Edition 9-hour DVD extravaganza for the TRUE hard-core fans which covers in exquisite minutiae the entire breadth and depth of the story to the maximum extent possible with film. If they do shoot the film in this way with these things in mind then I do think that re-making Dune ONE more time is WORTHWHILE. It would also be nice to set up the filming of the Remaining 5 (five) novels at the same time (and you wouldn't even need long term contracts for many of the actors with the possible exceptions of Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho for the Ghola versions) for a truly EPIC series of films that would stand the test of decades or even centuries in their scale, vision, and sheer magnificence (I know, I know, I am probably setting up an impossibly high standard, but one can hope anyway).
A mini-series can work, but you can't quite portray the many "feint within a feint" aspects of Dune in such a short time. Which are a CENTRAL part of Dune and also the subsequent novels. The plans within plans which take generations or even millenia in the case of the secret Kwisatz Haderach super-human breeding program of the Bene Gesserit are an indispensable element. The scale and complexity of Dune is what makes the whole story work and so it is essential to capture, as much as possible within the 2 (and Dune really deserves 3 hours) hours alloted to the film, this aspect of the story. The novels of the Dune universe themselves take place over a period of some 16,000 THOUSAND years in total and the long term evolution of humanity itself, which major changes in political, social, and even religious structure on a GRAND scale, is a major concern of the later novels which were set up and foreshadowed by the plans within plans intrigues of Dune.
I agree completely. While I did enjoy the Sci-Fi channel version of Dune and even the subsequent Children of Dune (although even somewhat less in that case) I was rather disappointed with a number of issues. For those of you who wish to hear the remainder of my critique you may follow along below:
1. The Acting: While there were some performances which I liked in the film, P.H. Moriarty as Gurney Halleck (although Patrick Stewart was still the best in this role, wonder if they will get him back for this next outing?), Ian McNeice as Baron Vladamir Harkonnen, and especially Julie Cox as Princess Irulan Corrino, the remainder of the performances ranged from average, Alec Newman as Paul Atreides, to terrible, Robert Russel as Dr. Yeuh, Miroslav Táborský as Count Hasimir Fenring (he is supposed to be a fierce genetic-eunuch assassin, not an effete dandy as he is portrayed in the mini-series), and to be honest, William Hurt as Duke Leto Atreides was also average to poor. The minor supporting cast was mostly average and some of them, notably László I. Kish as Glossu Rabban, were notable for their clichéd and over acted performances. Uwe Ochsenknecht as Stilgar was also a huge disappointment to me. Stilgar should be the toughest and strongest among all of his tribe of freeman, not a middle aged balding man with a paunch.
2. The locations: While it makes sense to shoot certain scenes on the set, the imperial palace on Kaitain for example, the extensive use of rather cheaply done computer animations of outdoor desert scenes really dragged the film down, even though the sets were great in some scenes, as in the imperial palace scenes. The film is called DUNE darn it...at least make the desert and outdoor shots look GOOD.
3. The visual style: The overall visual style of the film was far to uniform. I know that visual set and costume designers like to produce a "unified" look or theme, but in the case of Dune, where the environments are so varied (from the water world of Caladan to the Imperial splendor of Kaitain, to the harsh and barren world of Arrakis itself) the style must really be unique FOR EACH ONE (this is one aspect that the David Lynch version really hit spot on, despite its other shortcomings). The bright and colorful stillsuits were EGREGIOUSLY inappropriate for the desert planet of Arrakis. The whole of Arrakis should much more closely resemble the rundown and used look (ala Tatooine in Star Wars but even harsher and more run down...remember that the books describe sandstorms so intense that nobody who is unsheltered behind massive rock survives them...they are sandblasted to to bone and then the bones themselves to dust) than the bright and colorful look of the Padishah emperor and his entourage. The freeman sietchs where also not rugged looking enough and the freeman themselves, who are described as dirty, disheveled, and stinking to high heaven in the books (the wild and untamed people of the deep desert) are presented as clean cut and well dressed in the mini-series.
4. The story: Finally we come to the one part of the Sci-Fi miniseries that really was done well and that is matching the action on the screen to the story told in the book. With the exception of a few minor departures, which are allowable to facilitate the demands of a screenplay, the miniseries was very true to the events of the original Dune novel. This is one area where the new film should pay CLOSE attention or even improve upon by working in more background material from the appendixes of the original book, particularly the sections on desert ecology and the politics of the Imperium, the Landsraad, the Bene Gesserit, and the Spacing Guild.
This is not related to the license cost. Exactly. The only way to determine a price that actually works in the marketplace is supply and demand. That is why communism was and is always doomed to fail because it has no functioning price system to direct efficient market activities. The labor theory of value, or the notion that the price of a good or service is proportional to the amount of labor or capital that went into producing it, is wrong and the parent is right. Verizon will charge the maximum price that the market is willing to bear no matter how little or how much they paid for the spectrum licensing.
If the Linux crowd really wants to make substantial headway against Microsoft then they have to begin competing more effectively with one of the strongest remaining bastions at Microsoft: Visual Studio. The.NET Framework and Visual Studio are among the best quality products produced by Microsoft today and they are definitely NOT money makers by themselves, quite the opposite. In fact, Microsoft almost certainly loses money on their developer tools and it is probably among the smallest, if not THE smallest, markets for which Microsoft produces product. However, the developer tools support and promote the platform by ensuring that a good percentage of the available software developers in the marketplace will choose.NET and by extension Microsoft. Microsoft has always talked about "developer mindshare" and dance monkey boy even said it himself, "developers, developers, developers..."
There is no good answer for Visual Studio + MSDN in the Linux community yet (mono is on the right path, but they are only just out of beta now) and that is one of the primary reasons that I and many other.NET developers (and there are a lot of us) have avoided Linux as our primary workstation OS and target platform. I know about Eclipse and Mono and there are a few features in Eclipse particularly that do trump similar functionality in Visual Studio. However, in the overall analysis Visual Studio is a better C# and.NET IDE and that is what is keeping many of us developers in the Microsoft fold. I actually want Mono and Eclipse to continue improving and competing more effectively with Visual Studio, but a few hundred dollars difference in OS price + cost of Visual Studio (which most of us get via MSDN subscription at work anyway) is just not worth the hassle of using a sub-optimal development environment, at least not for the professionals among us.
So you would volunteer yourself to be subjected to the same treatment simply because you have nothing to hide and are innocent so everything will work out in the end? I don't think so.
Yes, but the evaporation process is extremely slow. The following is an excerpt from the wiki article on Hawking Radiation:
For a black hole of one solar mass (about 2 × 10^30 kg), we get an evaporation time of 10^67 years--much longer than the current age of the universe. So even though this hole is evaporating like any other it could not have been much larger at the time of its formation (although it might have been somewhat smaller depending upon how much mass it has sucked in during its existence so far), even if it had existed since the beginning of the Universe which is impossible because stars, and especially lower mass stars like the one that most probably formed this black hole, did not emerge until billions of years after the initial Big Bang. The effect of the hawking radiation does not explain the apparent small size of this black hole or, more precisely, it is not a significant factor.
maybe, but at least you will not be targeted for the construction of an individual profile to more closely link your name (hopefully not your real name), geographic location, purchase histories, etc...into a much more detailed and invasive dossier for use by unscrupulous advertisers. There are more than a few people who fit your broad description so there is essentially no concern that they might serve a slightly better ad (which I wont see anyway with the AdBlock, Flashblock, and NoScript add-ons that I have installed) based upon the fact that I am an anonymous geek.
Are you suggesting then, that marketers share no part of the blame whatsoever when the corrupt advertisers use their data and research to confuse, confound, and harass the public? Are the marketers not specifically enabling the offending activity to take place?
What about the members of the RIAA? The music labels deserve their share of the blame for supporting the RIAA with their membership dues. The RIAA exists in part so that their members can act behind the scenes as part of an organization that shields them from the direct wrath of activists, bad PR, and the possible sanctions associated with questionable legal tactics. The RIAA is a contemptible and possibly corrupt organization ala RICO, but let us not forget the labels who stand behind the RIAA and approve of it's actions by continuing to pay their membership dues.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel no sympathy for them either, the people voted for this mess and now we are all going to pay for it. The budget problems that are occuring now in California are the inescapable result of decades of flawed economic and social policies that serve as an example and warning of the types of policies that tax and spend big government liberals would like to persue on a much larger scale and will if they are given control of the White House in 2008.
Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with current events or maybe you don't live in California, but this state is going through a major budget crises right now within the context of much larger budgetary problems that have been building towards a day of reckoning for decades and are just now beginning to come to a head. The Democrats want to raise taxes and the Republicans want to cut spending, but they can never agree to do either and so the state sputters along on emergency spending bills while the state politicians argue about the budget. The budget hasn't actually been delivered on time in years now because both sides play brinksmanship games as the deadline approaches and passes and then point the fingers at each other when the people ask whose fault it is. Meanwhile the state bond debts are rated around CCC or something equivalent to one (1) grade above junk (state bond indebtedness has increased by 1000%+ since the late 1970s) and surrounding states are baiting California business to pack up and come to their states where taxes are lower and there are fewer "crazy" regulations.
And whose fault is that?
Speak for yourself, I played four (4) years of high school football as an offensive lineman and I would have played in college too if I had been large enough, but it was not to be. I now have a CS degree and six (6) years experience as a software developer, but I still remember my football days with a certain degree of fondness and nostalgia. In fact, I am going to play in my alumni game (full-contatct) against our old cross-town rivals next year and I am training to reprise my role as an offensive lineman right now. We have so few outlets as we get older to really vent some frustrations (legally) against our fellow citizens, so for me this is the perfect opportunity to get back out there and kick some butt while proving to my wife that talk of my prowess during my glory days is not entirely misplaced.
TFA states that the program can update its binary (and does so regularly) to evade the sorts of checksum detections which are used by AV tools to detect malware. It is quite possible that each infection is unique in checksum AND changes regularly after the initial infection. It probably randomizes file names and locations as well and rootkit techniques may also be employed to further evade detection. It is impossible to say for sure, but the botnet designers certainly did NOT want to be found so you can bet that they have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their programs. In fact, the only reliable way to detect that you are infected might be to run a packet monitoring program on a different machine and capture traffic off the network card to confirm or disprove the infection.
"Lynch tends to keep his personal life private and rarely comments on his films. However, he does attend public events and film festivals when he or his films are nominated/awarded. He is known to be notoriously evasive and cagey in interviews, and refuses to discuss the plot details and "true meanings" of his films, preferring viewers to come away with their own interpretations. None of his films released on DVD have director commentary tracks, and some (as per his request) do not even have chapter selections. This is due, at least in part, to his belief that a film should be viewed from beginning to end without interruption or distraction."
He is one of those directors, in the Kubrick sort of mold, who wants viewers to see his film precisely as he intended it to be viewed OR not at all. This worked well for Kubrick, but frankly, Lynch is not Kubrick.
They said the same thing about the Lord of the Rings and it WAS eventually done well (perhaps not perfectly, but it was really really good). The technology of movie making is finally approaching the point where it CAN do proper Justice to Dune IF and it is a big IF...the studios are willing to spend the kind of money that it would take. I think that it would cost at LEAST $300 million to really do justice to Dune and possibly even more than that. Are the studios willing to take that big of a risk on a Science Fiction film? The past history with Sci-Fi and Hollywood bean counters does not exactly inspire confidence. In order for this to work there must be at least a troika (group of three) people at the top who really understand and grok Dune and have the clout to actually get the resources to do it right. I am hopeful, but not certain that it can FINALLY at long last be FULLY done and done right.
What I would like to see is the WHOLE story shot, no matter how long it is, and then they can cut several different versions from that: one for theater release to give the general audience a taste of what Dune is in a way that makes sense as a whole, a regular DVD release with some more scenes added back in for the regular DVD cut to expand upon certain themes that were probably only hinted at in the theater version, AND finally...The whole nine-yards Ultimate Edition 9-hour DVD extravaganza for the TRUE hard-core fans which covers in exquisite minutiae the entire breadth and depth of the story to the maximum extent possible with film. If they do shoot the film in this way with these things in mind then I do think that re-making Dune ONE more time is WORTHWHILE. It would also be nice to set up the filming of the Remaining 5 (five) novels at the same time (and you wouldn't even need long term contracts for many of the actors with the possible exceptions of Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho for the Ghola versions) for a truly EPIC series of films that would stand the test of decades or even centuries in their scale, vision, and sheer magnificence (I know, I know, I am probably setting up an impossibly high standard, but one can hope anyway).
I agree completely. While I did enjoy the Sci-Fi channel version of Dune and even the subsequent Children of Dune (although even somewhat less in that case) I was rather disappointed with a number of issues. For those of you who wish to hear the remainder of my critique you may follow along below:
1. The Acting: While there were some performances which I liked in the film, P.H. Moriarty as Gurney Halleck (although Patrick Stewart was still the best in this role, wonder if they will get him back for this next outing?), Ian McNeice as Baron Vladamir Harkonnen, and especially Julie Cox as Princess Irulan Corrino, the remainder of the performances ranged from average, Alec Newman as Paul Atreides, to terrible, Robert Russel as Dr. Yeuh, Miroslav Táborský as Count Hasimir Fenring (he is supposed to be a fierce genetic-eunuch assassin, not an effete dandy as he is portrayed in the mini-series), and to be honest, William Hurt as Duke Leto Atreides was also average to poor. The minor supporting cast was mostly average and some of them, notably László I. Kish as Glossu Rabban, were notable for their clichéd and over acted performances. Uwe Ochsenknecht as Stilgar was also a huge disappointment to me. Stilgar should be the toughest and strongest among all of his tribe of freeman, not a middle aged balding man with a paunch.
2. The locations: While it makes sense to shoot certain scenes on the set, the imperial palace on Kaitain for example, the extensive use of rather cheaply done computer animations of outdoor desert scenes really dragged the film down, even though the sets were great in some scenes, as in the imperial palace scenes. The film is called DUNE darn it...at least make the desert and outdoor shots look GOOD.
3. The visual style: The overall visual style of the film was far to uniform. I know that visual set and costume designers like to produce a "unified" look or theme, but in the case of Dune, where the environments are so varied (from the water world of Caladan to the Imperial splendor of Kaitain, to the harsh and barren world of Arrakis itself) the style must really be unique FOR EACH ONE (this is one aspect that the David Lynch version really hit spot on, despite its other shortcomings). The bright and colorful stillsuits were EGREGIOUSLY inappropriate for the desert planet of Arrakis. The whole of Arrakis should much more closely resemble the rundown and used look (ala Tatooine in Star Wars but even harsher and more run down...remember that the books describe sandstorms so intense that nobody who is unsheltered behind massive rock survives them...they are sandblasted to to bone and then the bones themselves to dust) than the bright and colorful look of the Padishah emperor and his entourage. The freeman sietchs where also not rugged looking enough and the freeman themselves, who are described as dirty, disheveled, and stinking to high heaven in the books (the wild and untamed people of the deep desert) are presented as clean cut and well dressed in the mini-series.
4. The story: Finally we come to the one part of the Sci-Fi miniseries that really was done well and that is matching the action on the screen to the story told in the book. With the exception of a few minor departures, which are allowable to facilitate the demands of a screenplay, the miniseries was very true to the events of the original Dune novel. This is one area where the new film should pay CLOSE attention or even improve upon by working in more background material from the appendixes of the original book, particularly the sections on desert ecology and the politics of the Imperium, the Landsraad, the Bene Gesserit, and the Spacing Guild.
If the Linux crowd really wants to make substantial headway against Microsoft then they have to begin competing more effectively with one of the strongest remaining bastions at Microsoft: Visual Studio. The .NET Framework and Visual Studio are among the best quality products produced by Microsoft today and they are definitely NOT money makers by themselves, quite the opposite. In fact, Microsoft almost certainly loses money on their developer tools and it is probably among the smallest, if not THE smallest, markets for which Microsoft produces product. However, the developer tools support and promote the platform by ensuring that a good percentage of the available software developers in the marketplace will choose .NET and by extension Microsoft. Microsoft has always talked about "developer mindshare" and dance monkey boy even said it himself, "developers, developers, developers..."
.NET developers (and there are a lot of us) have avoided Linux as our primary workstation OS and target platform. I know about Eclipse and Mono and there are a few features in Eclipse particularly that do trump similar functionality in Visual Studio. However, in the overall analysis Visual Studio is a better C# and .NET IDE and that is what is keeping many of us developers in the Microsoft fold. I actually want Mono and Eclipse to continue improving and competing more effectively with Visual Studio, but a few hundred dollars difference in OS price + cost of Visual Studio (which most of us get via MSDN subscription at work anyway) is just not worth the hassle of using a sub-optimal development environment, at least not for the professionals among us.
There is no good answer for Visual Studio + MSDN in the Linux community yet (mono is on the right path, but they are only just out of beta now) and that is one of the primary reasons that I and many other
So you would volunteer yourself to be subjected to the same treatment simply because you have nothing to hide and are innocent so everything will work out in the end? I don't think so.
maybe, but at least you will not be targeted for the construction of an individual profile to more closely link your name (hopefully not your real name), geographic location, purchase histories, etc...into a much more detailed and invasive dossier for use by unscrupulous advertisers. There are more than a few people who fit your broad description so there is essentially no concern that they might serve a slightly better ad (which I wont see anyway with the AdBlock, Flashblock, and NoScript add-ons that I have installed) based upon the fact that I am an anonymous geek.
Are you suggesting then, that marketers share no part of the blame whatsoever when the corrupt advertisers use their data and research to confuse, confound, and harass the public? Are the marketers not specifically enabling the offending activity to take place?
yes, they are synonyms.
What about the members of the RIAA? The music labels deserve their share of the blame for supporting the RIAA with their membership dues. The RIAA exists in part so that their members can act behind the scenes as part of an organization that shields them from the direct wrath of activists, bad PR, and the possible sanctions associated with questionable legal tactics. The RIAA is a contemptible and possibly corrupt organization ala RICO, but let us not forget the labels who stand behind the RIAA and approve of it's actions by continuing to pay their membership dues.