OK- maybe this one needs to be equally moderated as insightful _and_ flamebait (I see one 'flamebait' but it's still at 2).
Anger and this sort of strong language _are_ _justified_ here. The sort of inflexible capitalist ethic we're seeing is flatly incompatible with scientific growth and progress. There have been times when any scientific discovery was tightly owned and controlled. They called one of them 'The Dark Ages'.
While the capitalistic ethic can sometimes be pretty harmless in relation to science, we're rapidly approaching a period in history when it IS NOT. A period where you are NOT ALLOWED to think (or your university will seize your ideas as IP) or invent (or someone will file a patent and block you from using your idea) or pursue scientific progress (how dare you suggest standing in the way of someone else's greater profit and valuation?)
This can only lead to another Dark Ages. No doubt in the Dark Ages, people thought they were at the peak of human invention, the pinnacle of society. And so they stayed there- and stayed there- rotting. What we will see is a brightly-lit, electronic Dark Ages- and there we will stay until the worship of the capitalist ethic IN ALL THINGS is discarded, and science is allowed to be science again.
What with universities ready to sue students for control of the intellectual property the students developed while at uni, I say we are already well into the new Dark Ages. This reality is on the one hand a totally logical extrapolation of Western capitalism- and on the other hand utterly unthinkable. But it's the reality- for now.
If you're not a professional scientist, your opinion does not necessarily bear the same weight, and it's not up to you whether the restrictions are 'reasonable'. I am seeing most scientists saying that the restrictions are not reasonable, that it is a damaging compromise and bad precedent. It's their scene- Slashdotters are not expected to understand the value of freedom of sharing scientific information. (yikes. When did _that_ happen?) Your opinion isn't relevant because it's not your problem.
I side with the scientists but my opinion is not relevant either as I am not a scientist in this field either. I will take their word for it that 'Science' is way out of line here, their actions actively harmful.
Thanks- because of your post, I fired up my studio mains and turned on the local pirate radio station, to be greeted by "This Is Radio Clash". Sounds terrific- "this is Radio Clash on pirate satellite!". It should- I've spent hours building this station custom cables and helping them out. This is not a 'legal pirate radio' station. It's micro-wattage and only covers the town I live in, and it's run by a sort of collective of DJs and techies and radio activists.
The question you should be asking yourself is: how much freedom can they take from you before you will stop obeying them?
You may already be paying a tax to the RIAA on the CDRs. You could also end up paying a tax on the burner, the label printers, the label media, or indeed the downloads that you make available, which is probably the next step though it might be fightable. The idea would be that all music downloads pay a tax to the RIAA, and any music downloading that doesn't pay this would be illegal. Naturally as you're not part of the RIAA or its labels, you'd get nothing, but it could be set up so that you'd have to pay the tax (or have your fans pay the tax) or go to jail. Hell, it could be built into the infrastructure of the net- in paying your ISP you'd be paying the tax.
The simplest explanation is that, by refusing to allow bug reports on servers not controlled by MS, they can make the reports 'unreports' any chance they get.
10,000 reports on someone else's server == 10,000 reports
10,000 reports on MS server after deprecating ones that aren't really a problem == 0
PR spin advantage == priceless
This is of course known as the REALLY FSCKING STUPID school of marketing, dominated by the idea, "Our customers will only listen to US! (and no bugs are really serious anyway)". Unfortunately software problems can cost customers buttloads of money, meaning that this 'ostrich mode' strategy will produce a small amount of unrealistically rosy PR and a world of hurting in practice.
Couldn't happen to a nicer company- hopefully not too many other companies will really follow MS all the way down, marching into hell like trusting little lambs- if for no other reason than it'll be very costly to trust MS, and the bottom line will show it.
Do MCSEs get training in how to spin consulting fees etc. so that it doesn't look like MS's fault when support costs are high? Probably the main strategy for dealing with an expected firestorm of hackings and security breaches is to paint intruders as brilliant evil hackers rather than boring script kiddies.
Would you accept the following alteration of your statement?
"I'm not saying people should starve, except for those people who don't do anything to benefit society themselves."
I don't see how money has anything to do with it. Never mind artists or weird backyard inventors constantly playing Tom Swift, consider that Mother Teresa should've starved by your original statement. Wouldn't it be better to look beyond money and the indirect effect of money benefitting society- and consider how a person might be trying to benefit society directly?
By the same token, if someone figured out (through, for instance, stock market manipulation- see Cisco, MS) how to gain huge amounts of money at _no_ benefit to society at all (the stock pyramid strategies themselves are no benefit, the products might be), shouldn't those people starve because they are actively choosing to be no use whatsoever to society?
I'm picturing it now- 3000 cubic foot concrete enclosure and two long excursion 8" woofers *g*
Seriously, if my studio mains turn out to have more cone area than Larry Ellison's 3000 cubic foot subwoofer, I will _never_ stop laughing. Does anybody know what he's got in there? He'll have to beat 4 12"s and I'll bet anything I get a more even, accurate response even if he's 20db louder. Silly bugger. Not that I would object to having enclosures that big myself:) I just don't think he has the faintest idea what he's doing with them.
I suppose he probably has about 8 EV 18" PA drivers in there. That should be fun but he should rent it out for raves, not just watch Jurassic Park on it:) maybe some club designers can learn from his silliness. Screw PA stacks, the subwoofer enclosure is the basement:)
The audiophile had horrible early reflection problems from his mondowonderfulspiffy speakers. The picture plainly showed 'em right up near the walls, and I didn't see any Sonex in there- in fact I didn't see any room treatment at all.
On the other hand, I'd happily kill for his speaker stands:) 200ft columns of concrete? That should do nicely. Add another for the turntable:)
Look at the music industry. It's completely marketing-driven and for decades has operated on a basis of payola, bribery, drugs and corruption. Quality? What quality? We spell quality "$17.99 Hot Value" on a 30 cent hunk of plastic!
Result: Napster. Result: indie music turning away from what was once the only access to media at all. Result: serious risk of losing the status quo and being forced to compete with totally unforeseen competitors on a basis of quality. It may never become priority one- marketing will be that- but it will have to be in there somewhere if there's enough competition.
By the same token, look at the software industry. The PC. DOS. Windows 3.1. Windows 95, 98, ME, and arguably an even lower quality/marketing ratio than the music industry.
Result: Linux, the continued survival of the Mac despite network effects, and again, serious risk of losing the status quo to competitors who just grit their teeth and _lose_ the 'first to market!' race in order to put out products that have a somewhat better chance of being lasting, useful values, the sort you get word-of-mouth on. You can't sell new versions of Linux every 16 months if the old versions stay perfectly good and useful and supported- but how many of you first heard about Linux through word of mouth?
Quality control gets dealt with- one way or another.
Only some of them are like that, not all of them. I find that if I want my Mac to be there working day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out, then I have to be choosy about the software I am willing to use- for instance, I had a recent version of Quicktime break a _video_ _camera_ (original ADB color quickcam). I can't simply go 'I can run anything I want that says it will run on a Mac!'. I have to turn down some of the offered products, and do my homework. Only then can I expect the Mac to be there 12/7/365 (you shut Macs off for the night you know;) ), and even then it's only because I'm a tech and maintain the thing.
I have an Apple Monitor (years old and refurb when I got it) that is beginning to wear out, too- and found Apple 15" Multiscan monitors to be absolute lemons. I guess Apple is _somewhat_ better than your average PC (i.e. way better than packard hell), but it's not a silver bullet either, just a viable choice if you want a system that's more controllable but still luserfriendly.
Cheaper suppliers will undercut _good_ suppliers- and put them out of business!. It's that simple- straight capitalism uncut- and the person who compared it to Dickens was right on the money. It's such a curious notion when people start to whine, "no-one is holding a gun to your head" (who are they defending, exactly?). Clue time, brainiac- what people are saying in this thread is that they are ALL that way. And that's disconcerting, though hardly unexpected.
The logical solution is of course to outsource all the work to South America or India or Vietnam or just anywhere really- doesn't matter if they don't speak English once the allowed time drops under a few seconds. You can hang up a phone in any language. Because it will be impossible to compete with this if you have to spend money on _real_ techs the good companies will die off, and we can have a world in which nothing works- but by God is it free! Everything will go straight to the cheapest possible provider regardless of concepts like consumer protection (read: commie socialist union people), and the world can have an economy that is hugely impressive so long as you are OK with all the labor coming from uneducated children in sweatshops- or lower-income Americans subjected to workplace conditions just one stage removed from sweatshops. If they don't like it they can damned well move to Guatemala- the job is!
In all seriousness- haven't we learned _anything_? Must society continually race for the gutter? The person who invented the corporation has a lot to answer for- but the social dynamic in question is far older. We are effectively looking at a slave class being formed- let's not be so sure that the other jobs are by definition OK. How long until Wal Mart shelf stockers etc. are forced to wear electronic tracker bracelets, _their_ every second counted as well?
I think that in some places, if you treated a dog the way these employees are treated, the dog would be taken away from you and you'd be fined for animal abuse. I don't see how the human 'glorious right to choose' is significantly different from that of a dog. It's a lot of mystical bullsh*t made up to serve the needs of the wielders of the whip (real, abstract, economic or psychological). There are strong parallels between the underlying psychological aspects of this story, and the psychological aspects of brainwashing or 'breaking' prisoners of war- except that this tech support stuff is ubitiquous.
Maybe they should outlaw tech support. Think about it:)
The artist community is _fleeing_ mp3.com over a wide spectrum of issues. Some people are fleeing because (as seen in a Salon article) 'Payback For Playback' has turned into a ridiculous mess, in which the quality of the music has no or negative effect on income (in other words, time spent practicing your instrument takes away from time you could be whoring for downloads!)
That's a major problem- mp3.com is not dealing with it, instead mp3.com is adding 'name' artists to the same pool, tightening the screws even farther and provoking even worse behavior. I recently saw the first email download scam chain letter pyramid scheme- originated by 'artists' on mp3.com desperate for a slice of the pie. I don't think anyone anticipated things would get quite this ugly and embarrassing when PFP started.
Others, like myself, bailed when mp3.com changed their contract- it now gives mp3.com rights _perpetually_ that survive termination, and it is changeable without confirmation by the artist on only 5 days notice, and it's on the artist to keep checking that nothing changed, and then get a competent opinion if terms are changed. Only recourse is to quit. Many people are.
Me? *g* I am finding that I'm happier _without_ the financial interest (naturally, being known is great). Some mp3.commers moved to ampcast.com but I ended up on BeSonic, so my page (with a couple songs still being sorted out) is at...
...and there is one big change- on BeSonic I do not get paid off downloads. I prefer it that way! Read the Salon article linked above to get some idea of why. I did OK at mp3.com, made some money, but it goddamn ate my soul- I could not communicate with other musicians about fun music-geeky compositional stuff because the money got in the way- there was always someone to get _angry_ because I was too hungry for attention and obviously only out to get PFP money by boasting. *spit*
Well, a little of that goes a long way. Since I left it's kept getting worse until now mp3.com is a cesspool. If you care AT ALL about being an artist and doing good work, be somewhere else. I learned from mp3.com how linking downloads (listens) with money corrupts the motivations- the fact that I was OK with not getting rich was NOT ENOUGH, I got treated as if I was just out for greed. Well, now I'm on BeSonic- anyone who wanted to listen to any of my stuff but felt it was mercenary should go filch away as I do not get paid off BeSonic downloads. Anyone who liked what I had on mp3.com should go redownload it from besonic as all the mp3.com stuff was BladeEnc and the besonic stuff is all new mixes and encoded with Frau and LAME, so it sounds way better now:)
Anyway- forget the mp3.com unsigned artist community. It's the walking dead, and you can't make it on the merits of your music on mp3.com at this point. It's a very useful lesson about capitalism mixing with art: there's always a better way to make money than by making the best product you can. mp3.com means spam, marketing, gaming and total vacuity now- ironically, every bit as bad as the _mainstream_ industry that's taking it over- but the indie community killed itself. Over money.
Absolutely. None of this, to me, is an argument that Gore is particularly better- Gore scares the hell out of me, as I am interested in electronic civil liberties- but absolutely. Welcome to the United Bananas Of America. Not just a republic, but a first world banana republic! Now all we need is a collapsing economy- doh!:P
We already have that state. That's why Seattle had the WTO riots.
People romanticise criminals, for the most part, out of greed and selfishness. "Now if _I_ knocked over a bank, I'd get this and this and that..." It's rarer that you'll have a person going "Now, if _I_ was mugging old ladies I'd kick them here and here and here" but it's probably going to become more popular. Brutalising a person or thing helps make things seem less out of control and threatening. People get off on the power of it and how easy it can be (well, sort of) and the romanticising is largely a lot of people who don't have the nerve to do what they think they want to do- crime. Law of the jungle. Anarchy!:P
The funny thing is, this is a sick distortion of what anarchy is really about. I found myself re-forming my political opinions around election time:P and in my reading, one thing really hit home- when you talk anarchism, there's a big difference between the people who want to 'mug old ladies' and the ones who want to cut down all forms of authority, as much as possible.
The former obviously are going to glorify criminals, that's a given. That's when you'll be hearing talk like 'rising above the system' (yah, like ripping me off for my bank deposit is evidence of some great enlightenment). The latter? The thing you have to understand about traditional anarchists is that anarchism does not make sense except in the context of a community. It's an undercutting of all forms of authority, including the physical authority of the mugger (or the manipulative conman authority of the fake bank guard). Everything becomes a process of negotiation, you don't have Authority to cry to anymore and you have to actually deal with people on an equal basis, interact with them instead of dominating or submitting to them. It's hard damn work- hard enough that children and immature people may get very frustrated. "If it's an anarchy why can't I get what I WANT?"
I think that's a good enough reason why some people always will glorify criminals. There's always going to be some people too dumb, selfish or dysfunctional to cooperate with other people, and they will long to just take what they want, always, in a sort of two-year-old fantasy world. The best thing to do is learn to recognise people like that and if you can't help them grow up a bit, don't leave your money lying around near them:)
Compare the prices of original products (for instance a Gibson SG) with the prices of knockoff clone products (for instance Epiphone or Samick copies). You can't seriously be claiming that public reputation is worthless. It can mean thousands of dollars in value. Name recognition is a huge factor in marketing, and scrapping patents completely doesn't mean copyright and trademark would go away. You could copy a '61 SG down to the millimeter (as Samick did!) and in fact produce a product that in most respects totally equals the original product, and you still don't have permission to call it a '61 Gibson SG- and you still won't get a tenth of what a real '61 SG brings on the open market.
This is a deeply questionable assertion for the following reason:
Given person A who's come up with an innovative idea and person B who has not, you're claiming that patents are necessary because in giving A a monopoly on the idea, it will force B, who's shown no aptitude for coming up with innovative ideas, to start doing it.
It makes more sense, logically, to disallow any and all patents. B then copies A's idea, and A, not B, is the one forced to come up with another innovative idea- A, not B, is the one who's shown an aptitude for doing just that- and A, not B, is the one publically credited with originating the idea that becomes widespread and popular.
What on earth gives you the idea that granting A monopolies on ideas will produce more innovation? Nothing will make B innovate- not everybody _can_ innovate, see Microsoft as exhibit B- and giving A patents only gives A an excuse to _stop_ innovating and hire more lawyers. The whole concept is quite stupid and based on a nice friendly notion of 'everybody can do this if they only try' which is nonsense.
Hell, I could preserve it through running the output through my studio's mains and _miking_ it. The level of detail inherent in 16 bit 44.1 is _not_ very great. That's why real studios run 20 or 24 bit these days, and mix to a format that's higher-resolution than CD. I flat guarantee that with a bit of experimentation I could run CD-D/A-amp-speakers-air-mic-preamplification/compr ession-A/D-file and preserve the watermark. That's because I have a lot of very custom hotrodded gear that I build myself. However, _anybody_ could just run outs into ins and have the watermark preserved- if you're not showing off by running the whole recording chain, any old gear will do.
And the SDMI watermark _does_ screw up the music- what makes you think it doesn't? If it's going to be detectable after mp3 128K encoding, it's going to degrade the music _more_ than 128K encoding, and the degradation is cumulative.
Actually, I love it. Go to it guys. Degrade your music all you want. It only makes it easier for indie guys like me to compete with you and kick your arses:)
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Anger and this sort of strong language _are_ _justified_ here. The sort of inflexible capitalist ethic we're seeing is flatly incompatible with scientific growth and progress. There have been times when any scientific discovery was tightly owned and controlled. They called one of them 'The Dark Ages'.
While the capitalistic ethic can sometimes be pretty harmless in relation to science, we're rapidly approaching a period in history when it IS NOT. A period where you are NOT ALLOWED to think (or your university will seize your ideas as IP) or invent (or someone will file a patent and block you from using your idea) or pursue scientific progress (how dare you suggest standing in the way of someone else's greater profit and valuation?)
This can only lead to another Dark Ages. No doubt in the Dark Ages, people thought they were at the peak of human invention, the pinnacle of society. And so they stayed there- and stayed there- rotting. What we will see is a brightly-lit, electronic Dark Ages- and there we will stay until the worship of the capitalist ethic IN ALL THINGS is discarded, and science is allowed to be science again.
What with universities ready to sue students for control of the intellectual property the students developed while at uni, I say we are already well into the new Dark Ages. This reality is on the one hand a totally logical extrapolation of Western capitalism- and on the other hand utterly unthinkable. But it's the reality- for now.
I hope to God I live to see the end of this.
I side with the scientists but my opinion is not relevant either as I am not a scientist in this field either. I will take their word for it that 'Science' is way out of line here, their actions actively harmful.
The question you should be asking yourself is: how much freedom can they take from you before you will stop obeying them?
Yeah, I can see why you're angry and frightened.
*ROFL* over "we all know the free-market is not doing well in this case because it isn't free-market enough..." you'd think people would get a clue...
What is your favorite sound from a TMBG released song?
This is of course known as the REALLY FSCKING STUPID school of marketing, dominated by the idea, "Our customers will only listen to US! (and no bugs are really serious anyway)". Unfortunately software problems can cost customers buttloads of money, meaning that this 'ostrich mode' strategy will produce a small amount of unrealistically rosy PR and a world of hurting in practice.
Couldn't happen to a nicer company- hopefully not too many other companies will really follow MS all the way down, marching into hell like trusting little lambs- if for no other reason than it'll be very costly to trust MS, and the bottom line will show it.
Do MCSEs get training in how to spin consulting fees etc. so that it doesn't look like MS's fault when support costs are high? Probably the main strategy for dealing with an expected firestorm of hackings and security breaches is to paint intruders as brilliant evil hackers rather than boring script kiddies.
Yes.
Oh, you mean a Randite. Never mind ;)
"I'm not saying people should starve, except for those people who don't do anything to benefit society themselves."
I don't see how money has anything to do with it. Never mind artists or weird backyard inventors constantly playing Tom Swift, consider that Mother Teresa should've starved by your original statement. Wouldn't it be better to look beyond money and the indirect effect of money benefitting society- and consider how a person might be trying to benefit society directly?
By the same token, if someone figured out (through, for instance, stock market manipulation- see Cisco, MS) how to gain huge amounts of money at _no_ benefit to society at all (the stock pyramid strategies themselves are no benefit, the products might be), shouldn't those people starve because they are actively choosing to be no use whatsoever to society?
Seriously, if my studio mains turn out to have more cone area than Larry Ellison's 3000 cubic foot subwoofer, I will _never_ stop laughing. Does anybody know what he's got in there? He'll have to beat 4 12"s and I'll bet anything I get a more even, accurate response even if he's 20db louder. Silly bugger. Not that I would object to having enclosures that big myself :) I just don't think he has the faintest idea what he's doing with them.
I suppose he probably has about 8 EV 18" PA drivers in there. That should be fun but he should rent it out for raves, not just watch Jurassic Park on it :) maybe some club designers can learn from his silliness. Screw PA stacks, the subwoofer enclosure is the basement :)
On the other hand, I'd happily kill for his speaker stands :) 200ft columns of concrete? That should do nicely. Add another for the turntable :)
Result: Napster. Result: indie music turning away from what was once the only access to media at all. Result: serious risk of losing the status quo and being forced to compete with totally unforeseen competitors on a basis of quality. It may never become priority one- marketing will be that- but it will have to be in there somewhere if there's enough competition.
By the same token, look at the software industry. The PC. DOS. Windows 3.1. Windows 95, 98, ME, and arguably an even lower quality/marketing ratio than the music industry.
Result: Linux, the continued survival of the Mac despite network effects, and again, serious risk of losing the status quo to competitors who just grit their teeth and _lose_ the 'first to market!' race in order to put out products that have a somewhat better chance of being lasting, useful values, the sort you get word-of-mouth on. You can't sell new versions of Linux every 16 months if the old versions stay perfectly good and useful and supported- but how many of you first heard about Linux through word of mouth?
Quality control gets dealt with- one way or another.
I have an Apple Monitor (years old and refurb when I got it) that is beginning to wear out, too- and found Apple 15" Multiscan monitors to be absolute lemons. I guess Apple is _somewhat_ better than your average PC (i.e. way better than packard hell), but it's not a silver bullet either, just a viable choice if you want a system that's more controllable but still luserfriendly.
Cheaper suppliers will undercut _good_ suppliers- and put them out of business!. It's that simple- straight capitalism uncut- and the person who compared it to Dickens was right on the money. It's such a curious notion when people start to whine, "no-one is holding a gun to your head" (who are they defending, exactly?). Clue time, brainiac- what people are saying in this thread is that they are ALL that way. And that's disconcerting, though hardly unexpected.
The logical solution is of course to outsource all the work to South America or India or Vietnam or just anywhere really- doesn't matter if they don't speak English once the allowed time drops under a few seconds. You can hang up a phone in any language. Because it will be impossible to compete with this if you have to spend money on _real_ techs the good companies will die off, and we can have a world in which nothing works- but by God is it free! Everything will go straight to the cheapest possible provider regardless of concepts like consumer protection (read: commie socialist union people), and the world can have an economy that is hugely impressive so long as you are OK with all the labor coming from uneducated children in sweatshops- or lower-income Americans subjected to workplace conditions just one stage removed from sweatshops. If they don't like it they can damned well move to Guatemala- the job is!
In all seriousness- haven't we learned _anything_? Must society continually race for the gutter? The person who invented the corporation has a lot to answer for- but the social dynamic in question is far older. We are effectively looking at a slave class being formed- let's not be so sure that the other jobs are by definition OK. How long until Wal Mart shelf stockers etc. are forced to wear electronic tracker bracelets, _their_ every second counted as well?
I think that in some places, if you treated a dog the way these employees are treated, the dog would be taken away from you and you'd be fined for animal abuse. I don't see how the human 'glorious right to choose' is significantly different from that of a dog. It's a lot of mystical bullsh*t made up to serve the needs of the wielders of the whip (real, abstract, economic or psychological). There are strong parallels between the underlying psychological aspects of this story, and the psychological aspects of brainwashing or 'breaking' prisoners of war- except that this tech support stuff is ubitiquous.
Maybe they should outlaw tech support. Think about it :)
That's a major problem- mp3.com is not dealing with it, instead mp3.com is adding 'name' artists to the same pool, tightening the screws even farther and provoking even worse behavior. I recently saw the first email download scam chain letter pyramid scheme- originated by 'artists' on mp3.com desperate for a slice of the pie. I don't think anyone anticipated things would get quite this ugly and embarrassing when PFP started.
Others, like myself, bailed when mp3.com changed their contract- it now gives mp3.com rights _perpetually_ that survive termination, and it is changeable without confirmation by the artist on only 5 days notice, and it's on the artist to keep checking that nothing changed, and then get a competent opinion if terms are changed. Only recourse is to quit. Many people are.
Me? *g* I am finding that I'm happier _without_ the financial interest (naturally, being known is great). Some mp3.commers moved to ampcast.com but I ended up on BeSonic, so my page (with a couple songs still being sorted out) is at...
http://www.besonic.com/chrisj (hooray!)
Well, a little of that goes a long way. Since I left it's kept getting worse until now mp3.com is a cesspool. If you care AT ALL about being an artist and doing good work, be somewhere else. I learned from mp3.com how linking downloads (listens) with money corrupts the motivations- the fact that I was OK with not getting rich was NOT ENOUGH, I got treated as if I was just out for greed. Well, now I'm on BeSonic- anyone who wanted to listen to any of my stuff but felt it was mercenary should go filch away as I do not get paid off BeSonic downloads. Anyone who liked what I had on mp3.com should go redownload it from besonic as all the mp3.com stuff was BladeEnc and the besonic stuff is all new mixes and encoded with Frau and LAME, so it sounds way better now :)
Anyway- forget the mp3.com unsigned artist community. It's the walking dead, and you can't make it on the merits of your music on mp3.com at this point. It's a very useful lesson about capitalism mixing with art: there's always a better way to make money than by making the best product you can. mp3.com means spam, marketing, gaming and total vacuity now- ironically, every bit as bad as the _mainstream_ industry that's taking it over- but the indie community killed itself. Over money.
Absolutely. None of this, to me, is an argument that Gore is particularly better- Gore scares the hell out of me, as I am interested in electronic civil liberties- but absolutely. Welcome to the United Bananas Of America. Not just a republic, but a first world banana republic! Now all we need is a collapsing economy- doh! :P
People romanticise criminals, for the most part, out of greed and selfishness. "Now if _I_ knocked over a bank, I'd get this and this and that..." It's rarer that you'll have a person going "Now, if _I_ was mugging old ladies I'd kick them here and here and here" but it's probably going to become more popular. Brutalising a person or thing helps make things seem less out of control and threatening. People get off on the power of it and how easy it can be (well, sort of) and the romanticising is largely a lot of people who don't have the nerve to do what they think they want to do- crime. Law of the jungle. Anarchy! :P
The funny thing is, this is a sick distortion of what anarchy is really about. I found myself re-forming my political opinions around election time :P and in my reading, one thing really hit home- when you talk anarchism, there's a big difference between the people who want to 'mug old ladies' and the ones who want to cut down all forms of authority, as much as possible.
The former obviously are going to glorify criminals, that's a given. That's when you'll be hearing talk like 'rising above the system' (yah, like ripping me off for my bank deposit is evidence of some great enlightenment). The latter? The thing you have to understand about traditional anarchists is that anarchism does not make sense except in the context of a community. It's an undercutting of all forms of authority, including the physical authority of the mugger (or the manipulative conman authority of the fake bank guard). Everything becomes a process of negotiation, you don't have Authority to cry to anymore and you have to actually deal with people on an equal basis, interact with them instead of dominating or submitting to them. It's hard damn work- hard enough that children and immature people may get very frustrated. "If it's an anarchy why can't I get what I WANT?"
I think that's a good enough reason why some people always will glorify criminals. There's always going to be some people too dumb, selfish or dysfunctional to cooperate with other people, and they will long to just take what they want, always, in a sort of two-year-old fantasy world. The best thing to do is learn to recognise people like that and if you can't help them grow up a bit, don't leave your money lying around near them :)
You do that.
'Comrade'. ;)
Stick with it- the Matrix parody alone is worth the wait :)
oops, excuse me, I mean JEFF K IS A LTO FUNNYAR!!! ;)
Your argument seems to be totally baseless :)
Given person A who's come up with an innovative idea and person B who has not, you're claiming that patents are necessary because in giving A a monopoly on the idea, it will force B, who's shown no aptitude for coming up with innovative ideas, to start doing it.
It makes more sense, logically, to disallow any and all patents. B then copies A's idea, and A, not B, is the one forced to come up with another innovative idea- A, not B, is the one who's shown an aptitude for doing just that- and A, not B, is the one publically credited with originating the idea that becomes widespread and popular.
What on earth gives you the idea that granting A monopolies on ideas will produce more innovation? Nothing will make B innovate- not everybody _can_ innovate, see Microsoft as exhibit B- and giving A patents only gives A an excuse to _stop_ innovating and hire more lawyers. The whole concept is quite stupid and based on a nice friendly notion of 'everybody can do this if they only try' which is nonsense.
And the SDMI watermark _does_ screw up the music- what makes you think it doesn't? If it's going to be detectable after mp3 128K encoding, it's going to degrade the music _more_ than 128K encoding, and the degradation is cumulative.
Actually, I love it. Go to it guys. Degrade your music all you want. It only makes it easier for indie guys like me to compete with you and kick your arses :)
*duck*