The problem is, these aren't being passed off as opinion. You can have your opinion but this:
the man at the helm seems to be paying (off) attorneys all over the bay area to cover up the scandal which resulted in the terminations of many at the top including the VP of HR. 1) Board of director 2) CFO 3) GM 4) VP of engineering 5) VP of HR and more.
Comes off as fact not opinion. If you are going to level bribery and corruption charges at a business you better be sure you're telling the truth. A libel suit is easy to defend if you're telling the truth. Otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable for the company to sue you. To flip it arround is CNN allowed to run stories that "Queen B molests children" just because you've annoyed someone at CNN?
Libel laws do apply to individuals as well, but in all libel cases, you have to prove damage. Me saying "Locke2005 supports child labor" on slashdot more likely than not causes no damage, therefore you have a tough time making a case out of it.
If you like to be with your wife so much, why not actualy do something other than watch TV? $55.98 a month is a lot of money to be wasting on something you don't care about just so that you can placate your wife.
You don't care about TV, you don't care about watching it, yet you pay $55.98/month for it? Please contact me for further instructions since you seem to love paying for things you don't care about, my bank account could use an extra $55.98 a month
Why not? Your statement said our judgement about a publication should be based on the quality of the output (the ends) and not it's process for obtaining that output (the means).
There's more to it than just the artist. Let me walk you through a production for a CD that I recently helped put together.
1) You need to pay the artist.
2) You need to pay any extra musicians or backups you hire for each song if used.
3) You need to pay the studio. The studio that we were recently using charged on the order of about $40 / hour for just voice recording, no mixing no mastering. Since this was an all vocal group, that was about 30 hours of work. At $40 an hour comes out to $1,200
4) Then there's mixing and mastering. We got ourselves a deal and got that for $500. Total so far $1,700 + artist and musician costs.
5) Some of the songs we did were covers or alternate arrangements of other people's songs, which means we now have to buy rights. Generally rights for the songs we do average about $100 per song. In this case, about 5 songs we needed rights for. Total cost $2,200 + artist and musicians
6) Then there's the production of the actual CD. For a printed CD with cases and inserts and a small run we're looking at about $2 / CD + shipping. We did a small run of about 250 CDs, so now our cost is up to $2,700 + artist and musicians. Keep in mind we designed the CD ourselves so we didn't have to pay to get any album art done.
So for a basic amature CD we have a cost of upwards of $3,000 for anything in which the artists and musicians get paid (I should mention the group I was working with was all volunteer, they don't see any of the money their music makes).
So, if we take a nice round $3,000 price tag we would have to sell our 250 cds at a price tag of $12 per CD just to break even. Now, just to go further: If the group members wanted to make any profit off the CD, then they would need to charge more. There were 12 group members in this group, let's look at the cost now.
At $20 / CD that's $5000 total. -$3000 for production leaves us with $2000 over 12 members which comes out to a grand spanking $166.67 per group member for about 6 months of work. Not exactly minimum wage.
Granted on the huge commercial scales, the production costs are a little bit different in some places, but there are also a lot more people and a lot more money that needs to be paid before an artist makes any money. And keep in mind, none of my figures included any advertising or overhead costs. While I hate paying $20 a CD myself, once you do the number breakdowns it's a lot easier to see where the number comes from.
Er, Linux is linus' and Slashdot is Taco's and yes, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it, just like you can decide to read or not read, use or not use. The world will not end tomorrow if slashdot becomes a porn site, linux becomes closed source and wiki becomes a new maddox site.
But the overriding question is "So what?" Is wikipedia the free encyclopedia anyone can edit or not? Should people who have problems with what is written about them in wiki edit it themselves (a la the response to the Kennedy guy) or not? Does free mean free or does it mean free with restrictions on certain people?
Ah, but now we're talking about size of disruption. A bank having all their servers shut down is a far more major disrutption to more than just the bank, than a personal torrent site being shut down. As unfair as it sounds, a bank going down hurst more people than torrents going down. However, in the case of a bank, more likely than not instead of confiscating the servers, they would instead be posting armed guard or otherwise causing a different disruption.
As far as the wieght of your complaint were you a smaller corporation, keep in mind that the RIAA is not a single entity per se but 5 corporations leveying charges, plus somehow I doubt your complaint would be as well written as theirs. Remember it's all how you make the crime out to be that determines how quick and with what force the law responds.
It doesn't matter whether 20% or 1/20% that goes to the workers, the point is, they're still not getting it. I haven't been watching any sappy ads, but I have been on the production end of alums before. A lot of hard work and effort and energy goes into something like this, and while I personaly do not get all up in arms over some piracy and fully acknowledge that production of something does not guarantee or entitle one to profits from it, I do get rather annoyed by people who think they are on some god damned noble crusade when they pirate the product. While the executives may be evil as hell for raping everyone else for 99% of the profits, you are worse than all of them because you are depriving me of the last 1%. Unless you are personaly sending a check to every single person involved in every thing you pirate, dont pretend you're any more noble or any less greedy than the executives.
Depends on whether having said equipment would be dangerous to the investigation. If the police have reason to believe you are comitting a crime, and that the evidence of that crime is on your computer, and they have obtained the warrants, then it is perfectly reasonable for them to sieze your systems for the investigation. Unless you think they should inform you a head of time to schedule a time to take your systems when it won't disrupt you, and no, they don't mind if you run a magnet over the drives.
You don't have to break any law to be investigated, there just needs to be reasonable suspicion. That's the whole point of an INVESTIGATION. To INVESTIGATE as to whether a crime has been comitted.
Would you deny the poor college student from watching a movie like Dr Strangelove, that could change their life? What if they didnt have the $9.95 to buy it? They shouldnt be alowd to watch it because some company owns the rights to have it locked in a vault for the rest of time?
Would you deny the poor Grip who worked long a tireless hours on the film, or the code monkey who put together the special features or the assembly line worker at the dvd plant the ability to eat? What if they didn't have any other income? Should they not be allowed to eat because some god damned college kid can't be bothered to go flip burgers for two hours and buy the movie?
Please. This is why all the "something think of teh movie studios!!" crap breaks down. The idea of music/movies/art is to tell a story. Not to make money. FREE Storytelling has been a part of human history since the dawn of man. Just because in the last 150 years people decided that they could make a quick buck off of it doesnt change this fact.
Ah, but paid entertainment has been around just as long. Just because you don't think it's worth paying for does not change that fact.
It would be my assumption that his declaration of his nationality has less to do with associating himself with a group to gain rights to criticize and more to do with establishing his experiences for purposes of indicating he's not some fat redneck slob who got drunk, lost a ton of money in a casino and now has an axe to grind.
Your hypersensitivity to racial issues seems to idicate you are not as blind to color as you appear to be.
For example, why do none of their computers (even the top of the line Dual Dualcore CPU $3299 PowerMac G5) come standard with more than 512MB of ram? And have you priced out Apple's memory upgrades? Sheesh.
Because if i'm buying a Dual core system for my production house and planning to max that puppy out in RAM (all 16 GBs) That means throwing away some of the included RAM. Personaly, I feel better about having to junk two 256 chips than two 512s or two gig chips. And I don't know about you, but if I'm buying RAM I'd rather pay current low prices than the fixed price that Apple payed and has to recoupe (plus profits) 6 months or more ago.
NewsMax.com, Dummocrats.com, sfindymedia, two from huffington post and southcost today. Not exactly a stellar list of reports, especialy when they're all the exact same article copied word for word.
Hypertalk and a resurection of hypercard. While I loved learning to code on my C64 I was quickly frustrated by what was required to get basic images on the screen. Hypertalk proved to me more useful to me for making basic games and such, and on top of it, it had enough basic OO like programing involved that the concept was easy enough to pick up when I hit actual OO languages.
I would go with C. Being rather young myself (30) I wouldnt' mind paying to see most of those acts (ticket prices not withstanding), but I can count on 1 hand the number of current acts I would pay to see.
Concerts are dying out because frankly, kids can't afford $60+ per seat. Even if the actual ticket is $40 or less the fees and shit that ticketmaster et al charge make it ridiculous.
And it's really entirely wrong. You're supposed to rate the person based on their actions in the transaction. For example, I purchased something from a seller and followed their instructions to the letter. Everything they asked for I did. However, despite this, I had to give them my shipping adress 4 times because the item had not shipped when they said it would and when I inquired as to why, they asked for my shipping address again. Finaly the item arrived, about 3 weeks late, however the item was in perfect condition and exactly as described in the email. So in the end, I got my product, and the only hassle was a failure of communication on the shipping address (which was not on my end as they got all my emails, but just never seemed to read the address I sent). All in all it was not a bad experience, but it wasn't good either, so I left a neutral feedback and in the coments said that product was perfect but shipping and communication was slow and delayed. In return, the seller left me negative feedback with the comment "Thanks asshole, I didn't deserve that". Now, I personaly feel that that was undeserved, especialy since he had no specific complaint other than I left honest feedback about him and not "OMG AWSOME A+++++++++++!" It's entirely unfair and wrong that buyers must almost literaly bribe their feedback from the sellers. Personaly I think ebay should implement a system where by you know when another person has left feedback, but you don't know what the feedback says until you've left your own or until a time limit for leaving feedback has passed.
Slashdot Mirror
And what happens when he publishes that as a writer for CNN? You can still dismiss him as a liar and a troll, but somehow I doubt you would.
The problem is, these aren't being passed off as opinion. You can have your opinion but this:
the man at the helm seems to be paying (off) attorneys all over the bay area to cover up the scandal which resulted in the terminations of many at the top including the VP of HR. 1) Board of director 2) CFO 3) GM 4) VP of engineering 5) VP of HR and more.
Comes off as fact not opinion. If you are going to level bribery and corruption charges at a business you better be sure you're telling the truth. A libel suit is easy to defend if you're telling the truth. Otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable for the company to sue you. To flip it arround is CNN allowed to run stories that "Queen B molests children" just because you've annoyed someone at CNN?
Libel laws do apply to individuals as well, but in all libel cases, you have to prove damage. Me saying "Locke2005 supports child labor" on slashdot more likely than not causes no damage, therefore you have a tough time making a case out of it.
If you like to be with your wife so much, why not actualy do something other than watch TV? $55.98 a month is a lot of money to be wasting on something you don't care about just so that you can placate your wife.
Selection bias is what you're looking for.
You don't care about TV, you don't care about watching it, yet you pay $55.98/month for it? Please contact me for further instructions since you seem to love paying for things you don't care about, my bank account could use an extra $55.98 a month
I disagree - why isn't this bought up as copyright infringement instead? It's clearly that. Why bring the DMCA into this?
Did you just ask why they brought theDigital Millenium Copyright Act into a copyright infringement case?
Why not? Your statement said our judgement about a publication should be based on the quality of the output (the ends) and not it's process for obtaining that output (the means).
There's more to it than just the artist. Let me walk you through a production for a CD that I recently helped put together.
1) You need to pay the artist.
2) You need to pay any extra musicians or backups you hire for each song if used.
3) You need to pay the studio. The studio that we were recently using charged on the order of about $40 / hour for just voice recording, no mixing no mastering. Since this was an all vocal group, that was about 30 hours of work. At $40 an hour comes out to $1,200
4) Then there's mixing and mastering. We got ourselves a deal and got that for $500. Total so far $1,700 + artist and musician costs.
5) Some of the songs we did were covers or alternate arrangements of other people's songs, which means we now have to buy rights. Generally rights for the songs we do average about $100 per song. In this case, about 5 songs we needed rights for. Total cost $2,200 + artist and musicians
6) Then there's the production of the actual CD. For a printed CD with cases and inserts and a small run we're looking at about $2 / CD + shipping. We did a small run of about 250 CDs, so now our cost is up to $2,700 + artist and musicians. Keep in mind we designed the CD ourselves so we didn't have to pay to get any album art done.
So for a basic amature CD we have a cost of upwards of $3,000 for anything in which the artists and musicians get paid (I should mention the group I was working with was all volunteer, they don't see any of the money their music makes).
So, if we take a nice round $3,000 price tag we would have to sell our 250 cds at a price tag of $12 per CD just to break even. Now, just to go further: If the group members wanted to make any profit off the CD, then they would need to charge more. There were 12 group members in this group, let's look at the cost now.
At $20 / CD that's $5000 total. -$3000 for production leaves us with $2000 over 12 members which comes out to a grand spanking $166.67 per group member for about 6 months of work. Not exactly minimum wage.
Granted on the huge commercial scales, the production costs are a little bit different in some places, but there are also a lot more people and a lot more money that needs to be paid before an artist makes any money. And keep in mind, none of my figures included any advertising or overhead costs. While I hate paying $20 a CD myself, once you do the number breakdowns it's a lot easier to see where the number comes from.
Er, Linux is linus' and Slashdot is Taco's and yes, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it, just like you can decide to read or not read, use or not use. The world will not end tomorrow if slashdot becomes a porn site, linux becomes closed source and wiki becomes a new maddox site.
But the overriding question is "So what?" Is wikipedia the free encyclopedia anyone can edit or not? Should people who have problems with what is written about them in wiki edit it themselves (a la the response to the Kennedy guy) or not? Does free mean free or does it mean free with restrictions on certain people?
Science, though, requires us to judge it, like any other publication, on the quality of what is produced, not our personal feelings about the process.
In ortherwords the ends justify the means?
Ah, but now we're talking about size of disruption. A bank having all their servers shut down is a far more major disrutption to more than just the bank, than a personal torrent site being shut down. As unfair as it sounds, a bank going down hurst more people than torrents going down. However, in the case of a bank, more likely than not instead of confiscating the servers, they would instead be posting armed guard or otherwise causing a different disruption.
As far as the wieght of your complaint were you a smaller corporation, keep in mind that the RIAA is not a single entity per se but 5 corporations leveying charges, plus somehow I doubt your complaint would be as well written as theirs. Remember it's all how you make the crime out to be that determines how quick and with what force the law responds.
It doesn't matter whether 20% or 1/20% that goes to the workers, the point is, they're still not getting it. I haven't been watching any sappy ads, but I have been on the production end of alums before. A lot of hard work and effort and energy goes into something like this, and while I personaly do not get all up in arms over some piracy and fully acknowledge that production of something does not guarantee or entitle one to profits from it, I do get rather annoyed by people who think they are on some god damned noble crusade when they pirate the product. While the executives may be evil as hell for raping everyone else for 99% of the profits, you are worse than all of them because you are depriving me of the last 1%. Unless you are personaly sending a check to every single person involved in every thing you pirate, dont pretend you're any more noble or any less greedy than the executives.
Depends on whether having said equipment would be dangerous to the investigation. If the police have reason to believe you are comitting a crime, and that the evidence of that crime is on your computer, and they have obtained the warrants, then it is perfectly reasonable for them to sieze your systems for the investigation. Unless you think they should inform you a head of time to schedule a time to take your systems when it won't disrupt you, and no, they don't mind if you run a magnet over the drives.
You don't have to break any law to be investigated, there just needs to be reasonable suspicion. That's the whole point of an INVESTIGATION. To INVESTIGATE as to whether a crime has been comitted.
Would you deny the poor college student from watching a movie like Dr Strangelove, that could change their life? What if they didnt have the $9.95 to buy it? They shouldnt be alowd to watch it because some company owns the rights to have it locked in a vault for the rest of time?
Would you deny the poor Grip who worked long a tireless hours on the film, or the code monkey who put together the special features or the assembly line worker at the dvd plant the ability to eat? What if they didn't have any other income? Should they not be allowed to eat because some god damned college kid can't be bothered to go flip burgers for two hours and buy the movie?
Please. This is why all the "something think of teh movie studios!!" crap breaks down. The idea of music/movies/art is to tell a story. Not to make money. FREE Storytelling has been a part of human history since the dawn of man. Just because in the last 150 years people decided that they could make a quick buck off of it doesnt change this fact.
Ah, but paid entertainment has been around just as long. Just because you don't think it's worth paying for does not change that fact.
It would be my assumption that his declaration of his nationality has less to do with associating himself with a group to gain rights to criticize and more to do with establishing his experiences for purposes of indicating he's not some fat redneck slob who got drunk, lost a ton of money in a casino and now has an axe to grind.
Your hypersensitivity to racial issues seems to idicate you are not as blind to color as you appear to be.
For example, why do none of their computers (even the top of the line Dual Dualcore CPU $3299 PowerMac G5) come standard with more than 512MB of ram? And have you priced out Apple's memory upgrades? Sheesh.
Because if i'm buying a Dual core system for my production house and planning to max that puppy out in RAM (all 16 GBs) That means throwing away some of the included RAM. Personaly, I feel better about having to junk two 256 chips than two 512s or two gig chips. And I don't know about you, but if I'm buying RAM I'd rather pay current low prices than the fixed price that Apple payed and has to recoupe (plus profits) 6 months or more ago.
NewsMax.com, Dummocrats.com, sfindymedia, two from huffington post and southcost today. Not exactly a stellar list of reports, especialy when they're all the exact same article copied word for word.
Hypertalk and a resurection of hypercard. While I loved learning to code on my C64 I was quickly frustrated by what was required to get basic images on the screen. Hypertalk proved to me more useful to me for making basic games and such, and on top of it, it had enough basic OO like programing involved that the concept was easy enough to pick up when I hit actual OO languages.
I would go with C. Being rather young myself (30) I wouldnt' mind paying to see most of those acts (ticket prices not withstanding), but I can count on 1 hand the number of current acts I would pay to see.
Concerts are dying out because frankly, kids can't afford $60+ per seat. Even if the actual ticket is $40 or less the fees and shit that ticketmaster et al charge make it ridiculous.
If people only bought from people with a feedback of 100 or more, how would any new sellers get started?
And it's really entirely wrong. You're supposed to rate the person based on their actions in the transaction. For example, I purchased something from a seller and followed their instructions to the letter. Everything they asked for I did. However, despite this, I had to give them my shipping adress 4 times because the item had not shipped when they said it would and when I inquired as to why, they asked for my shipping address again. Finaly the item arrived, about 3 weeks late, however the item was in perfect condition and exactly as described in the email. So in the end, I got my product, and the only hassle was a failure of communication on the shipping address (which was not on my end as they got all my emails, but just never seemed to read the address I sent). All in all it was not a bad experience, but it wasn't good either, so I left a neutral feedback and in the coments said that product was perfect but shipping and communication was slow and delayed. In return, the seller left me negative feedback with the comment "Thanks asshole, I didn't deserve that". Now, I personaly feel that that was undeserved, especialy since he had no specific complaint other than I left honest feedback about him and not "OMG AWSOME A+++++++++++!" It's entirely unfair and wrong that buyers must almost literaly bribe their feedback from the sellers. Personaly I think ebay should implement a system where by you know when another person has left feedback, but you don't know what the feedback says until you've left your own or until a time limit for leaving feedback has passed.