As a result, a de facto monopoly results, which is bad for consumers.
Ah yes, bad for consumers. What's funny, I think, is that in places where there are no price fixing laws, the whole thing goes out the window.
Anyone ever wonder why Japan's no longer the leader in CPU manufacture? They all price fixed in the late 80's/early 90's and dumped their chips on the market in an effort to kill the American competition.
What ended up happening is they ran out of money, raised the prices expecting high returns, and were quickly destroyed by the new American chips that were way better because their companies were doing R&D and not price fixing.
Price fixing and monopolies naturally go away in most instances. Especially with a luxury item like music, I really don't think it's necessary to have price fixing laws. I'm not one for selective enforcement. As a libertarian, I think if a law has to be selectively enforced to be fair, it's a bad law and should be done away with.
In this instance I don't see how it "hurts" anyone that the record companies are colluding. It's no less fair than unions forming and certainly no more destructive. Arguably, unions, if too demanding, can kill a business. Price fixing, if too agressive, can destroy a whole group of companies.
A Free Market means free to collude. If the music business wants to continue to price their product too high and destroy themselves, why not let them?
Now who's captain regressive? You really think that FLAT TAX is progressive? You've got to be kidding me. The fact that tax percentages increase with income does not reflect the view that the rich should be taxed more. It reflects the view that the poor should be taxed less. Why? Because rich people are spending their money on yachts. Poor people are spending their money on bread.
Regressive, progressive, and proportional taxation refer to the percentage of income being less, more or the same (respectively) to the rich as to the poor.
The flat tax does not tax the first 36 grand of income, and roughly 17% after that, therefore if you make 37 grand per year, you pay $170 if you make 136,000 per year, you pay $17,000. If you'd read my article, I put in a graph of how it's progressive. If you make 36,000 or lower, you pay NO taxes whatsoever. This includes half of the American population.
It's not actually a "flat tax", it's just a "simple progressive tax." Not only that, but even if it were 17% across the board, that would still not be regressive but PROPORTIONAL.
Why don't they just implement the fairtax and be done with all these other convoluted ideas?
Thank you, captain regressive.
The "fair tax" (for those who don't want to click the link) is a national sales tax. All sales taxes are regressive, unless they're taxes on silly luxury goods (which is so scatterbrained and idiotic it hurts my head).
I also have no idea how this is supposed to solve the problems of state taxes being variable and whatnot. I'm a libertarian but I think if we're going to have taxes, they should be based on income. All things being equal with corporate taxes, this works alright.
Of course, I think we should switch to a better method of income tax like The Flat Tax (full disclosure: this was written half-hazardly by me over the course of a month).
It's progressive, simple, and will make you more attractive to the opposite sex.
It'd be beneficial to just tack on state income taxes to a federal flat [income] tax to both simplify things and not add many secondary effects. The problem is, it'd require most places to not implement their own silly and awkward taxes on things.
The problem with any tax is that it ALWAYS reduces the amount of that item sold (see conceptual supply + demand + taxes graph). Therefore, a tax on "income" for people who labor to receive that income will raise wages and decrease employment.
The beauty of a flat tax is that it wouldn't affect half of Americans (see above article)--the higher demand your services are, the more taxed you are. Sales taxes hurt everybody unequally (people with less money pay more out of their income). A flat tax is, to stretch the term, price discriminatory in that it squeezes what it can out of people in the fairest and most equitable way possible.
Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out. Nobody's going nuts buying music because they're spending all their money on presents and other holiday shit.
It makes you wonder if the figures included iTMS gift certificates.
As for piracy.. well people could also say that the VCR hurt television sponsors, the question is "what do you do about it?"
IIRC (was not very old when it happened), everyone fought VCRs back in the day, and lost. Even if it did hurt TV ad sales back then, no-one can doubt that TV has gone on to be a much more lucrative enterprise, in spite of VCRs.
I'm not one of those who thinks music piracy increases sales, I actually think that's a bunch of crap, but I don't think it hurts sales nearly as much as they say it does. I remember at least 3/5 of the big five were charged with price fixing the same year as napster was big, and then they complained of low sales. Nowadays I think sales have more to do with the natural waxing and waining of the market.
I also think the storing of music on hard drives has lead to fewer sales due to physical media theft/damage (your CDs getting stolen out of your car, or your CD getting scratched for instance) disappearing. Imagine how many tens of thousands of CD players are stolen out of cars every year, along with possibly hundreds of thousands of CDs.. at $15/piece, that could mean millions, and now, because of iPods, people have a backup of their collection on their computers and don't need to buy the CDs again. I know all the CDs in my car are mixed and burned; if someone steals them I wont be buying more music because of it.
The music industry is not now, nor has it ever been dying. It's just scaling back a bit due to various reasons, and piracy is undoubtedly a part, albeit overstated.
They are usually biased and the writers are normally amateurs spouting incompetent opinions.
I've met journalism majors. I prefer to read things not written by them, thanks. The only difference between bloggers and the average journalist is that journalists are biased and incompetent, but they're not amateurs--they do it daily!
Of course it will be sold as "building bridges" or "advancing technology", etc... Something for our childrens' future, no doubt.
Or catching terrorists as the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.Terrorism (forgot the rest) was supposed to be used for, and isn't.. Or child molestors.. nobody likes them.
Re:Never underestimate the power of Nandrolone...
on
Cow Tipping is a Myth
·
· Score: 1
Five normal people, perhaps...or perhaps just one college football jock, hopped up on steriods and Jagermeister...
Or a truck, as we used to do back in my high school days.
This is a industry with long established practice of lying (including to the US Congress), faking research data and keeping "unwelcome" research from ever getting public.
Oh, you mean like every other institution on the planet?
Then I do an additional 2 hours a week of strength training not to get big but because you're obviously going to lose what you don't use during heavy weight loss.
Go out and drop a few bucks on a quality diet/exercise tracking system. They are simple to use, just plug in what you eat and what type of activities you do during the day. They can spit out graphs of your expected weight changes and make recomendations for how to meet your weight goals over a period of time.
Or you could just... exercise a bunch, eat better, and then use common sense.
Some got it, others don't.
I've lost 76 pounds over the past 6 months (I'm now 6'3", weigh 170, 31" waist).. just exercise a crapload, if you do your body will just figure the rest out on its own. It's not hard once you really get into it, expect a lot of pain in the transition period though.
But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years?
And I'm sure they'll bitch about those problems and how medicine's too expensive when those problems emerge.
You want medicine as cheap as it used to be? Stop going to the doctor after age 70, that'll fix that problem right up. I swear I read just a couple days ago about some 90 year old woman getting treated for breast cancer.. WHY?!?! We all gotta die sometime, just let it go or quit bitching about the cost.
Am I the only one distrubed by JW's obsession with them?
Ever heard of marketting? A bajillion people watched buffy because she was a teenage kung fu fantasy warrior.
What I really liked about the firefly series is that it didn't have much drama at all--they always cut it short in favor of dry humor instead of mashing your face in it like so much broken glass, or poshing it up like star trek.
Firefly = Space western = rad
Like Pale Rider with hotter babes and space-canibals.
I think it was worth it to me. You have to realize that you won't always get higher pay and more flexibility; sometimes part of becoming your own one-man company is that you have less flexibility because you are the only one to do things. And while the pay may be more per hour often you get fewer hours, or spend huge amounts of time marketing yourself and doing research to setting up contracts.
Still, on the whole it is worth it. You do have more independence.
I didn't find it worth it, but I never got established. I always had trouble finding work for appropriate pay, and never really did think I was getting paid enough.
Although I also did work for small businesses, which meant that they didn't know what they wanted and were pissed when they didn't get it or got what they didn't know they needed.
It could've been just me and my inability to tell them how it is, but dealing with stingy and computer illiterate mom-and-pop's was just a nightmare.
Web work was the worst:
Me: What kind of website do you want? What do you want it to do? I can do this, this and this. Them: I want it bright green with a picture of me here, here, and here and some products here.. BIG pictures with bright colors and happy faces Me: OK well you know half the world won't sit around for the 10 minutes it's going to take to load all that on dialup, not to mention you haven't told me if you want them to be able to order online Them: Yes, I want them to order online and we'll calculate the shipping and process the credit cards on this computer over here Me: You can't do that, -- Them: --LISTEN! I'M THE BOSS AND I'LL TELL YOU HOW IT IS Me: Yes sir
(two weeks later)
Me: OK, all done. So just out of curiosity who are you going to hire to sit at the computer all day and process all the orders in real time? Them: We thought you were going to do that. Me: If you read the contract very carefully, I believe it states quite clearly that I'm not your bitch. Now where's my check?
It's a true enigma why I never got any referals from them. Last time I checked they had to take their site down and replace it with a simple list of products and a phone number.
Or imagine what would have happened if she had, say, firebombed some buses, lynched a city council member, and gotten herself some guns... it probably would have been a lot more effective than the boycott was/is-to-this-day, especially if the panthers had back her play...
What the name of holy hell are you talking about? All that would do is delegitimize the problem and probably just piss everyone off.
Remember the riots of 1991? The police officers were still let go. Jesus someone needs to teach you some history.
Actually, it was Federal intervention that convinced the companies and the governments to change policy - the walking just convinced them to bring out dogs and turn firehoses on the crowds. It has ever been the unwillingness of the "peaceniks" to break heads that has let the fascist oppressors get the upper hand.
Actually, you totally skipped the part where the city started taking ham-fisted action in response to the boycott and triggered the national attention. See wikipedia.
"Sacrifice" just means there's that much more you have to fight to win back.
No, sacrifice, in this case, means that the profits for the record companies will go down, they couldn't blame piracy, MORE DMCA-type laws couldn't be passed, and they would be forced to change their policies.
Music will still be there if you change your mind, what have you got to lose besides what you've already STOLEN (or got for free, if you want to be a stickler about that)?
While Rosa Parks is a wonderful example should one find ones self in her situation, I think a better example for the spot we currently find ourselves in would be the Boston Tea Party: buncha patriots meet at the pub, get likkered up, decide somethings gotta be done; dress up like gangstas and go trash the latest shipment of the product, wiping corporate profits *and* taxation (without representation) for at least a week in a single act of studied mayhem... it seemed to be somehow related to broader changes, but I bet the British didn't think so at the time... took 'em a minit to figure out, it did...
I agree, that's a great example. If you remember correctly, and you obviously don't, WE WENT TO WAR WITH THE BRITISH AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DIED. The brits didn't yeild! In fact, they made things WORSE.
WORSE!! They taxed citizens EXTRA to pay for the tea that was lost. Similar to anti-piracy measures getting more strict in the days of napster.
Are you saying P2P users should crawl out of their parents' basements and shoot the lawyers that come to their door? What is the matter with you? What do you think that would do??
Remember when Oprah said she was kept out of a store because she was black and boycotted them? A formal apology was issued and their policies were changed.
Boycotts with support work, period. The problem is that most people don't care enough about what the RIAA does to actually boycott. I know I don't. Personally, I think most people who get sued deserve it. It's a product, like software, and it should not be pirated, period.
Fair use, on the other hand... well that's why I vote Libertarian.
Which would be fine, if you'd actually be willing to back up your "principles" with some actual sacrifice. Otherwise, you're just an overpriveliged whiner who's trying to rationalize grabbing something valuable without paying.
If you want to fight it, fight it, but I'd put fair money down that your exasperated tone is more a product of consistently defending and rationalizing your illegal downloading (be it theft, theft of services, infringement, whatever) than the weariness that comes from championing your cause legitimately.
Oh man you pegged my views to the T. I usually only post to whore karma points but I thought I'd let you know how totally right on you were.
If you don't like the RIAA, fine.. just don't buy OR STEAL their products. It's called a "boycott" and stealing does nothing but make them think you'd still buy their product if you couldn't steal it.
Imagine what would've happened if in response to Rosa Parks, blacks just stole busses and started driving them to their destinations instead of boycotting. The fact that they walked and SACRIFICED showed the companies that they had to yeild and change their policies.
I don't care for what the RIAA does, but even more dispicable to me is people stealing to "get back" at them. Grow up. If you want to steal, I don't care, I steal stuff all the time... wait I didn't just say that...
Just don't say you're stealing out of some righteous bullshit idea of sticking it to the man. You're stealing out of self interest FIRST and trying to rationalize it later.
You want to impress me with your dicipline and principles? Stop listening to music from the RIAA PERIOD.
Re:am I the only one who does not get it?
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
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· Score: 1
Nope, not really. iPods play mp3 files with the built in hardware, but the filesystem on the iPod gives it a weird hash for a name and organizes it in a weird file structure. Perhaps you were recalling something about the Sony music players that spent several hours converting mp3's to their proprietary format when it loaded them onto the player.
Is that really the filesystem or just a way of pissing me off when I try to use my iPod to share music?
Not to mention that my normal files I put on there don't have strange or cryptic names.
It could also be used to save space in the database. My iTunes database on my hard drive is 8MB.. I bet if all the file names were half as long, it'd be smaller.
Slashdot Mirror
3,314 fps would be INSANE.
Yeah, especially considering my monitor only does 125Hz.
It will confuse the hell out of your pacemaker.
/.'ers, this could be a huge concern.
Judging by the girth of some
... already have a joystick in them.
HIYO!!
Decaffinating coffee? Improving fuel economy?
These are not men!
As a result, a de facto monopoly results, which is bad for consumers.
Ah yes, bad for consumers. What's funny, I think, is that in places where there are no price fixing laws, the whole thing goes out the window.
Anyone ever wonder why Japan's no longer the leader in CPU manufacture? They all price fixed in the late 80's/early 90's and dumped their chips on the market in an effort to kill the American competition.
What ended up happening is they ran out of money, raised the prices expecting high returns, and were quickly destroyed by the new American chips that were way better because their companies were doing R&D and not price fixing.
Price fixing and monopolies naturally go away in most instances. Especially with a luxury item like music, I really don't think it's necessary to have price fixing laws. I'm not one for selective enforcement. As a libertarian, I think if a law has to be selectively enforced to be fair, it's a bad law and should be done away with.
In this instance I don't see how it "hurts" anyone that the record companies are colluding. It's no less fair than unions forming and certainly no more destructive. Arguably, unions, if too demanding, can kill a business. Price fixing, if too agressive, can destroy a whole group of companies.
A Free Market means free to collude. If the music business wants to continue to price their product too high and destroy themselves, why not let them?
Now who's captain regressive? You really think that FLAT TAX is progressive? You've got to be kidding me. The fact that tax percentages increase with income does not reflect the view that the rich should be taxed more. It reflects the view that the poor should be taxed less. Why? Because rich people are spending their money on yachts. Poor people are spending their money on bread.
Regressive, progressive, and proportional taxation refer to the percentage of income being less, more or the same (respectively) to the rich as to the poor.
The flat tax does not tax the first 36 grand of income, and roughly 17% after that, therefore if you make 37 grand per year, you pay $170 if you make 136,000 per year, you pay $17,000. If you'd read my article, I put in a graph of how it's progressive. If you make 36,000 or lower, you pay NO taxes whatsoever. This includes half of the American population.
It's not actually a "flat tax", it's just a "simple progressive tax." Not only that, but even if it were 17% across the board, that would still not be regressive but PROPORTIONAL.
Thank you, go back to your econ class.
Why don't they just implement the fairtax and be done with all these other convoluted ideas?
Thank you, captain regressive.
The "fair tax" (for those who don't want to click the link) is a national sales tax. All sales taxes are regressive, unless they're taxes on silly luxury goods (which is so scatterbrained and idiotic it hurts my head).
I also have no idea how this is supposed to solve the problems of state taxes being variable and whatnot. I'm a libertarian but I think if we're going to have taxes, they should be based on income. All things being equal with corporate taxes, this works alright.
Of course, I think we should switch to a better method of income tax like The Flat Tax (full disclosure: this was written half-hazardly by me over the course of a month).
It's progressive, simple, and will make you more attractive to the opposite sex.
It'd be beneficial to just tack on state income taxes to a federal flat [income] tax to both simplify things and not add many secondary effects. The problem is, it'd require most places to not implement their own silly and awkward taxes on things.
The problem with any tax is that it ALWAYS reduces the amount of that item sold (see conceptual supply + demand + taxes graph). Therefore, a tax on "income" for people who labor to receive that income will raise wages and decrease employment.
The beauty of a flat tax is that it wouldn't affect half of Americans (see above article)--the higher demand your services are, the more taxed you are. Sales taxes hurt everybody unequally (people with less money pay more out of their income). A flat tax is, to stretch the term, price discriminatory in that it squeezes what it can out of people in the fairest and most equitable way possible.
Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out. Nobody's going nuts buying music because they're spending all their money on presents and other holiday shit.
It makes you wonder if the figures included iTMS gift certificates.
As for piracy.. well people could also say that the VCR hurt television sponsors, the question is "what do you do about it?"
IIRC (was not very old when it happened), everyone fought VCRs back in the day, and lost. Even if it did hurt TV ad sales back then, no-one can doubt that TV has gone on to be a much more lucrative enterprise, in spite of VCRs.
I'm not one of those who thinks music piracy increases sales, I actually think that's a bunch of crap, but I don't think it hurts sales nearly as much as they say it does. I remember at least 3/5 of the big five were charged with price fixing the same year as napster was big, and then they complained of low sales. Nowadays I think sales have more to do with the natural waxing and waining of the market.
I also think the storing of music on hard drives has lead to fewer sales due to physical media theft/damage (your CDs getting stolen out of your car, or your CD getting scratched for instance) disappearing. Imagine how many tens of thousands of CD players are stolen out of cars every year, along with possibly hundreds of thousands of CDs.. at $15/piece, that could mean millions, and now, because of iPods, people have a backup of their collection on their computers and don't need to buy the CDs again. I know all the CDs in my car are mixed and burned; if someone steals them I wont be buying more music because of it.
The music industry is not now, nor has it ever been dying. It's just scaling back a bit due to various reasons, and piracy is undoubtedly a part, albeit overstated.
BTW, I got together an EXECELLENT cooling system for my 360
Sounds fanantastic!
... are the words "no, seriously."
They are usually biased and the writers are normally amateurs spouting incompetent opinions.
I've met journalism majors. I prefer to read things not written by them, thanks. The only difference between bloggers and the average journalist is that journalists are biased and incompetent, but they're not amateurs--they do it daily!
Of course it will be sold as "building bridges" or "advancing technology", etc... Something for our childrens' future, no doubt.
Or catching terrorists as the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.Terrorism (forgot the rest) was supposed to be used for, and isn't.. Or child molestors.. nobody likes them.
Five normal people, perhaps...or perhaps just one college football jock, hopped up on steriods and Jagermeister...
Or a truck, as we used to do back in my high school days.
This is a industry with long established practice of lying (including to the US Congress), faking research data and keeping "unwelcome" research from ever getting public.
Oh, you mean like every other institution on the planet?
I do about 2 hours a day 6 days a week of cardio.
Then I do an additional 2 hours a week of strength training not to get big but because you're obviously going to lose what you don't use during heavy weight loss.
Go out and drop a few bucks on a quality diet/exercise tracking system. They are simple to use, just plug in what you eat and what type of activities you do during the day. They can spit out graphs of your expected weight changes and make recomendations for how to meet your weight goals over a period of time.
... exercise a bunch, eat better, and then use common sense.
Or you could just
Some got it, others don't.
I've lost 76 pounds over the past 6 months (I'm now 6'3", weigh 170, 31" waist).. just exercise a crapload, if you do your body will just figure the rest out on its own. It's not hard once you really get into it, expect a lot of pain in the transition period though.
But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years?
And I'm sure they'll bitch about those problems and how medicine's too expensive when those problems emerge.
You want medicine as cheap as it used to be? Stop going to the doctor after age 70, that'll fix that problem right up. I swear I read just a couple days ago about some 90 year old woman getting treated for breast cancer.. WHY?!?! We all gotta die sometime, just let it go or quit bitching about the cost.
Am I the only one distrubed by JW's obsession with them?
Ever heard of marketting? A bajillion people watched buffy because she was a teenage kung fu fantasy warrior.
What I really liked about the firefly series is that it didn't have much drama at all--they always cut it short in favor of dry humor instead of mashing your face in it like so much broken glass, or poshing it up like star trek.
Firefly = Space western = rad
Like Pale Rider with hotter babes and space-canibals.
I think it was worth it to me. You have to realize that you won't always get higher pay and more flexibility; sometimes part of becoming your own one-man company is that you have less flexibility because you are the only one to do things. And while the pay may be more per hour often you get fewer hours, or spend huge amounts of time marketing yourself and doing research to setting up contracts.
Still, on the whole it is worth it. You do have more independence.
I didn't find it worth it, but I never got established. I always had trouble finding work for appropriate pay, and never really did think I was getting paid enough.
Although I also did work for small businesses, which meant that they didn't know what they wanted and were pissed when they didn't get it or got what they didn't know they needed.
It could've been just me and my inability to tell them how it is, but dealing with stingy and computer illiterate mom-and-pop's was just a nightmare.
Web work was the worst:
Me: What kind of website do you want? What do you want it to do? I can do this, this and this.
Them: I want it bright green with a picture of me here, here, and here and some products here.. BIG pictures with bright colors and happy faces
Me: OK well you know half the world won't sit around for the 10 minutes it's going to take to load all that on dialup, not to mention you haven't told me if you want them to be able to order online
Them: Yes, I want them to order online and we'll calculate the shipping and process the credit cards on this computer over here
Me: You can't do that, --
Them: --LISTEN! I'M THE BOSS AND I'LL TELL YOU HOW IT IS
Me: Yes sir
(two weeks later)
Me: OK, all done. So just out of curiosity who are you going to hire to sit at the computer all day and process all the orders in real time?
Them: We thought you were going to do that.
Me: If you read the contract very carefully, I believe it states quite clearly that I'm not your bitch. Now where's my check?
It's a true enigma why I never got any referals from them. Last time I checked they had to take their site down and replace it with a simple list of products and a phone number.
Or imagine what would have happened if she had, say, firebombed some buses, lynched a city council member, and gotten herself some guns ... it probably would have been a lot more effective than the boycott was/is-to-this-day, especially if the panthers had back her play ...
... it seemed to be somehow related to broader changes, but I bet the British didn't think so at the time ... took 'em a minit to figure out, it did...
What the name of holy hell are you talking about? All that would do is delegitimize the problem and probably just piss everyone off.
Remember the riots of 1991? The police officers were still let go. Jesus someone needs to teach you some history.
Actually, it was Federal intervention that convinced the companies and the governments to change policy - the walking just convinced them to bring out dogs and turn firehoses on the crowds. It has ever been the unwillingness of the "peaceniks" to break heads that has let the fascist oppressors get the upper hand.
Actually, you totally skipped the part where the city started taking ham-fisted action in response to the boycott and triggered the national attention. See wikipedia.
"Sacrifice" just means there's that much more you have to fight to win back.
No, sacrifice, in this case, means that the profits for the record companies will go down, they couldn't blame piracy, MORE DMCA-type laws couldn't be passed, and they would be forced to change their policies.
Music will still be there if you change your mind, what have you got to lose besides what you've already STOLEN (or got for free, if you want to be a stickler about that)?
While Rosa Parks is a wonderful example should one find ones self in her situation, I think a better example for the spot we currently find ourselves in would be the Boston Tea Party: buncha patriots meet at the pub, get likkered up, decide somethings gotta be done; dress up like gangstas and go trash the latest shipment of the product, wiping corporate profits *and* taxation (without representation) for at least a week in a single act of studied mayhem
I agree, that's a great example. If you remember correctly, and you obviously don't, WE WENT TO WAR WITH THE BRITISH AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DIED. The brits didn't yeild! In fact, they made things WORSE.
WORSE!! They taxed citizens EXTRA to pay for the tea that was lost. Similar to anti-piracy measures getting more strict in the days of napster.
Are you saying P2P users should crawl out of their parents' basements and shoot the lawyers that come to their door? What is the matter with you? What do you think that would do??
Remember when Oprah said she was kept out of a store because she was black and boycotted them? A formal apology was issued and their policies were changed.
Boycotts with support work, period. The problem is that most people don't care enough about what the RIAA does to actually boycott. I know I don't. Personally, I think most people who get sued deserve it. It's a product, like software, and it should not be pirated, period.
Fair use, on the other hand... well that's why I vote Libertarian.
Which would be fine, if you'd actually be willing to back up your "principles" with some actual sacrifice. Otherwise, you're just an overpriveliged whiner who's trying to rationalize grabbing something valuable without paying.
If you want to fight it, fight it, but I'd put fair money down that your exasperated tone is more a product of consistently defending and rationalizing your illegal downloading (be it theft, theft of services, infringement, whatever) than the weariness that comes from championing your cause legitimately.
Oh man you pegged my views to the T. I usually only post to whore karma points but I thought I'd let you know how totally right on you were.
If you don't like the RIAA, fine.. just don't buy OR STEAL their products. It's called a "boycott" and stealing does nothing but make them think you'd still buy their product if you couldn't steal it.
Imagine what would've happened if in response to Rosa Parks, blacks just stole busses and started driving them to their destinations instead of boycotting. The fact that they walked and SACRIFICED showed the companies that they had to yeild and change their policies.
I don't care for what the RIAA does, but even more dispicable to me is people stealing to "get back" at them. Grow up. If you want to steal, I don't care, I steal stuff all the time... wait I didn't just say that...
Just don't say you're stealing out of some righteous bullshit idea of sticking it to the man. You're stealing out of self interest FIRST and trying to rationalize it later.
You want to impress me with your dicipline and principles? Stop listening to music from the RIAA PERIOD.
Nope, not really. iPods play mp3 files with the built in hardware, but the filesystem on the iPod gives it a weird hash for a name and organizes it in a weird file structure. Perhaps you were recalling something about the Sony music players that spent several hours converting mp3's to their proprietary format when it loaded them onto the player.
Is that really the filesystem or just a way of pissing me off when I try to use my iPod to share music?
Not to mention that my normal files I put on there don't have strange or cryptic names.
It could also be used to save space in the database. My iTunes database on my hard drive is 8MB.. I bet if all the file names were half as long, it'd be smaller.
Can someone please explain to me exactly WHEN the FCC became a law-creation body?
When the supreme court and congress started abusing the interstate commerce clause.
5) No girls in class, and at work after you graduate.
That's usually why universities MAKE you take liberal arts classes.
The REAL Bad News is ... they're still powered by refined petroleum products.
As opposed to unrefined coal products, as most electricity in the US is produced from?