...that having money is no guarantee of having brains capable of rational thought.
I love dogs, but especially the few I've really gotten to actually know. They have unique personalities. Dogs, of course, have easily-identifiable traits or instincts, in common. But their unique personalities will NEVER be transfered via cloning, ever. These creatures are not single-cell, divide-to-replicate, beings... they are sentient beings whose unique personalities are shaped by their treatment (experience).
And while this useless hairball is dropping 50k on a piss-poor imitation of her so-called 'friend', 8 million dogs and cats will be euthanized in the US, this year. This brainless 'lady' is one sick bitch.
Then again, maybe kids today are far too sensitive.
Or maybe it is not unusual that 13 year old girls aren't fully adjusted/mature enough to always handle having their emotions fucked with, sadistically? Or are you some asshole 'survival of the fittest' type?
Your heartless bullshit aside, I hope the cunt behind this rots in the fucking southern California joint. As for you, if you ever think of having kids, think twice, please.
However when they take that burger, and put it on a 3 layer bun, add special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions et al they have a Big Mac Burger. Linux is a kernel. Red Hat Linux or Ubuntu Linux is their OS built around the kernel. That is how a qualifier works
I think I get it now. So, if you take the same Unix-like burger, and graft it onto an outdated bun, and toss in some incompatible file system sauce, with a non-native file manager relish, you just get a regular Mac. It's starting to make sense now.
Odds are that nytimes uses something NITF to store the stories themselves.
They do use NITF, on the incoming and internally.
NITF, unless I'm mistaken, utilizes a markup language that is, far and away, the best for the storage, analysis of, and re-distribution (in multiple formats for multiple purposes) of content; and that would be: XML. Nothing beats it for industrial strength document/content handling. Just my 2 cents on the XML question.
Apparently your spell checker wasn't pedantic enough to point you to the fact that "misspelt" is improper English.:P The correct term is misspelled.
Apparently you are another in a huge, long line of illiterates. Try an online dictionary. This is a good example of why reading/proofreading, with a brain that has something besides what passes for an 'education' in America, comes in so handy, and is much more dependable than your erroneously revered 'spell-checker.'
A friend works at a top London law firm (think top 3). Her group was given a PDF document and needed to find all sentences refering to a certain person. Instead of using the in-built search function they printed out all 400 pages of the document and then went through it by hand with highlighter pens... They're bloody good at law though.
I'll bet they are, actually. I worked on a defense project, and later at a large firm (think #1) that specialized in legal discovery organizational work. You know, gathering all pertinent documents from two Fortune 500 companies involved in an M&A, or a big legal case... And the preferred method was a sort of triangulation using eyeballs and printed matter, rather than e-search and monitors.
In the situation you mentioned, what if there were numerous individuals, who may or not be referred to in ANY sentence, by name, pronoun, or simply continuing data that no longer needed to refer, by name, to the 'topic' of the document's current discussion? How do you search for those adjacent sentences that have relevant data?
Well, if I was using a search mechanism, I'd be reading paragraphs before AND after the ID'd instance. And that, my friend, is coming mighty close to just reading the bloody document. You say the firm used a 'team' or small group? Sounds just about exactly bang on the money, to me.
I write web sites and fix them and decipher crappily-written (non-formatted) CSS, etc, and I love global find, and search & replace. All for it, believe me. But where statements that 'might' refer are also subject of the search, good old reading works really well.
Let's say you get a guy who is secretly pro-PETA heading the thing. For all we know, he could be trolling through the backup tapes looking for evidence of animal rights violations in the U.S. government.
I like it! Guy finds evidence of some official beating on a kitty cat. It makes it to Oprah. She says,, "4,000 American soldiers and 80,000 Iraqis is one thing, but this is going too far!" Guy gets popped, hung out to dry by the administration. He turns states evidence and unloads a shitload of backups... next thing you know, everybody from Ed Lansdale's kids to Karl Rove's boyfriend is swingin' from scaffolding at Nuremberg.... Peace On Earth, Good Will Toward Men.... at last.
The last thing I want is for some poor, info-starved addict to enter a search and come across my meandering, opinionated bullshit... oops, I mean... My Blog. Because, believe me, I am sick of seeing half-assed blogs and techtalk from 4 years ago on the first page or two of Google results. Enough, Already!
I read people's blogs. They are great, and I advocate for everyone having at least one. But, why not let us search blogs, specifically, and leave the general search for data that has been 'vetted' in the most minimal sense? Nobody wants censorship here, and that includes me, absolutely. And I realize that blogs are sometimes heavily topic-oriented, so, maybe there is some way, through filtering that they could be included, and yet have more meaningful results in searches. I don't know.
Maybe it's just me (it probably is, seeing as how I'm bitched out with chemo side effects) but it seems that Google search results are getting less and less relevant. Are the Firefox programmers involved in it somehow? [laughs] Or maybe it's the same crew responsible for slowly destroying NEXTSTEP, I mean, OS X. (slowly used in the loosest sense)
I challenge this idea that 6 million dollar fines are just considered a cost of doing business
Right, agreed; it's more along the lines of a 'license', which is also a cost of doing business. So, let me get this straight, you figure this was a goof-up, right, and 'heads will roll'? Let's think about that.
For one thing, it seems likely that the 6 million in fines is portioned out to the scofflaws in relation to their size and/or sales. With me so far? Now, what do you figure the odds are that the relevant 'planners', etc, at SIX big chains, ALL made the same 'mistake', or, worse yet, that all six chains were in any way surprised that they'd end up paying some token fine?
For extra credit, excluding non-US stores, how long do you figure it will take these guys at their six chains to recoup their 'fines' (ha ha, there's that word again) in SECONDS?
I haven't done the math, but, I'll be honest, it would be a hilariously trivial number of open-for-biz seconds, I guarantee you that. It's a bit like forcing, say, Bill Gates, to buy a used Chevy.:)
Its take it or move to BFE Midwest and live like a fricken hermit.
I'm curious about something: What does 'BFE Midwest' stand for, or mean?
I moved out to the Minneapolis-St Paul area a couple years ago, and although I've always met great folks wherever I've, these Minnesotans are the nicest bunch of them all. Helpful, you can talk to young and old alike out in public without getting paranoid or 'WTF' reactions that are so common elsewhere in the States. And the State, itself, has this sort of conservative, yet very progressive 'tilt' to it. And of course a bunch of the greatest 80s bands came from here. I'm impressed... If Comcast could just drop dead, en masse, in a hurry, this place would be perfect!
I think of Lightroom as a reinvention of a lot of what Photoshop that I need to do...
My ex-wife was struggling with a demo of Photoshop, and had run into some serious lag and 'early-version' blues with Aperture. I gave her a full version of Lightroom, and racked up a ton of points, let me tell you.
I do work with already-existing images, for the most part, and use Photoshop and PhotoRetouch Pro. But she is a photographer (amongst other things) and absolutely loves Lightroom. I'd recommend it, based on my limited usage, and more on her real usage, to anyone out there who takes pictures and wants to pop them into their file systems with some serious editing on the way in. Really outstanding work on the part of Adobe... almost makes up for GoLive... on second thought, no... no, it doesn't.:)
Maybe its just me but after Photoshop 6, all they did was add bloat with minimal overall improvement (with a few notable exceptions)
I like the version in CS3 a lot. I saw a few things in the "What's new" and some of the demos of what folks were doing with the newer aspects of the app, and had a couple of "Wow" moments.
BUT, I will not argue with you, and, as a matter of fact, I'd go back to Photoshop 5, or 5.5, rather than 6, to say that if someone knows what they're doing with those versions, they can can compete with a huge majority of P-shop users out there.
It's the whitespace between the comment and the buttons that does it. Put the following in your user stylesheet:.commentBody { padding-bottom: 0 !important; }
Also, to get rid of the ad and/or whitespace above the "Reply-to" head, you can add this:
If an artist uses Tunecore [tunecore.com] to deliver their music to iTunes they keep 100% of their profits, after iTunes takes their cut.
That looks like a very cool deal. Somebody mod the AC up. There's less and less excuse for bands that want to, to not take control of their retail situation.
Vinyl records are much more rugged and CDs even more so, but the percentage for breakage doesn't reflect that.
Spoken like someone who never ever worked in the record business, specifically retail & shipping. Ever heard of warpage, bro'? Like, due to 60 shrink-wrapped'records being jammed in every box (standard), high heat, back of the UPS truck? No? Well, back in LA and all over the South we had tons of records that never made it to the shelves. Did they 'break'? Well, no, not exactly. They warped, to an unplayable state. Period. In the early 70s some of the Indie labels and European exporters started using 'loose' wrap, to avoid a a lot of the warping. But that took up space in the standard boxes, so the Big Labels (in the US, UK & Germany) never did get on board with that.
CDs? I wouldn't know, I went back into stagework and studios about 3 seconds after CDs started moving in the shops.
Don't get me wrong, the labels are the most organized gang of corrupt cocksuckers you ever want to know, but the 'breakage' thing did have real relevance after the vinyl content dropped, and the use of tight shrinkwrap became dominant.
I know the allowances for 'returns' on cassettes was much lower than the percentage on LPs, also.
"Breakage" was a concept that retailers had to fight for. The Big Labels didn't just cough it up out of the goodness of their hearts, and it was only after the fact that the Labels realized they could cut corners on inventory & accounting, by just giving all the jobbers and retail chains the same deal. But the retailers were 'caught' between US, the music fans, and THEM, the artists... and as a result, people used to hate the retail chains (I know I did, I worked for a few big ones), but the reality is, we the fans, AND the artists, had the same, common enemy: The Labels... not Sears, or Tower Records... not The Whorehouse (Oops, I meant 'Warehouse'), and not even Apple or Amazon.
It's the concentration of power that's evil and leads to abuse.
They are selling barely 19% of the music. Get a grip, Jesus.
The RIAA hates Apple, that makes Apple my friend, for now. Amazon is okay, too; a great place to get album covers for my terabyte of high bitrate Usenet music stash.
Concentration of Evil? Shit, negro, have you looked around the big World lately, or, ever? You think some relatively small company that has been nearly marginalized, and finally has a couple of big successes is 'evil', what, by default? Shit, my daughter was right, the world's going to Hell because of stupid motherfuckers.
I'd argue you're worse off. Getting used to typing your password >20 times a day will lead to you typing it with much less concern for security, and being more apt to fall for a look-a-like program/page/whatever, not to mention over the shoulder attacks and other out of band security issue
I understand what you're saying. And yes, it can be a pain to have to repeat the typing, but, in many environments, such as my workspace, there is zero 'over the shoulder' opportunity. Still, my method works for me, but it is not a one-size-fits-all method. I employ other normal, or widely-used, precautions and 'safeguards', seeing the presence of layers of protection as being not so much a guarantee of anything as a positive step in the right direction. I made peace with the zero timestamp a while ago. You're correct though, it is not invincible (social engineering, over-the-shoulder, etc), nor is it for 'everybody.'
Actually, all the malware would have to do is wait until the user uses sudo, and then it can quietly and permanently acquire root privileges
No way, if you take a little proactive action. Not sure how it works in Linux (I suspect it is the same) but all you do is sudo set your timestamp to zero. All activity is serial, so there is no 'window of opportunity' to piggyback on a user-issued su or sudo, or admin pw, whatever. Been doing that in the Console on a Macintosh for years.
You know, in all the years I've been on Apples (78 up), as well as Ataris, SGIs, SPARCstations, a shitload of wintels, etc), I've been a member of countless self-help forums in the Apple, and later, Mac, worlds, and 'blind devotion' is exemplified by perhaps 1% at the very most. But you people, with your free-floating anxieties about companies and this seemingly amorphous 'cloud' of that company's (alleged) user base have given me pause, and now I'm wondering how many people's famous last words were something along the lines of:
"Gee, I wish I'd spent more time/energy hating <fill-in-name-of-company/entity-that-doesn't-know/care-that-I-exist here>!"
Isn't there something more important you could be doing, like, fucking up Firefox even more, or...something... anything? Must be gratifying to see Life and Time as so limitless.
Re:"not properly document" criticism is invalid
on
India Votes Against OOXML
·
· Score: 1, Informative
hopefully posting this will undo may damage and clear all my mods on this topic
You did exactly the right thing. The way it works with posting and modding, is we can't 'mod' the same articles we post to, and, conversely, we can't post to the same articles we have already modded, or the mods will disappear. So, posting something is an easy way to 'fix' a goof-up.
What does the "Microsoft" logo do to you (down there)?
It's interesting that you should ask, because, apparently, the control group that was exposed to the MS logo wasn't affected in 'that way'... however, a smaller group, after repeated exposure to the icon/mascot of the Republican Party, did actually develop an inability to reach erections for approximately 6-8 weeks after, and, in an 'odd' side effect, developed a habit of breaking into discussions of a certain type with fellows in the next urinal in a variety of public places.
The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company. They make outrageous profit selling CDs for $15 each, but that's not illegal, and as long as people keep buying them for that price, they'll keep doing it.
Agreed, so far. But, by the same token, the 'the market' is also free to set its end of the 'price point.' But in the current (possibly outdated) model of this market if seller-A wants 10 bucks, the market only has a buy or not buy choice. No actual freedom, no determination of price point as function of supply and demand.
Potential buyers, are prevented from participating, AT ALL, in this type of closed market unless they meet an arbitrarily set price. So, what to do? If there is no 'auction' available, no supply/demand rationality, then anyone who wants to participate is screwed unless they acquiesce.
If my choice is limited, by the business model being enforced in this artificial 'market', to either paying ransom, or paying nothing except access to a common carrier, I'd be stupid to give in to ransom. It only encourages the dead model. Much like 'negotiating' with terrorists, or kidnappers, no?
One doesn't have to fall back to 'information wants to be free' mode, in order to understand that the market, one way or the other, will set the 'price' based on supply and demand.
It's a simple case of the monopolists versus classical free market forces. This is not new, at all. It's a war. And it revolves around the poles of Greed and Desire. Many artists know that when their fans download bootlegs of shows, or 'snipe' a few tracks from a weak album, the same desire is going to express itself in financially rewarding terms, from the artists' point of view, when conditions/products/perceived values alter. That's how free markets function.
As for so-called 'legality'... laws are mutable. And economics shows that when artificial methods are employed in the defense of 'sick', or 'failing' businesses, industries, or models, they can postpone, but not prevent, the inevitable. And usually the backlash, that Newtonian economic action/reaction outcome, is far more unsettling for the proponents and temporary beneficiaries of the artificial 'preventive' mechanisms, than letting the market (and, specifically, price points) evolve naturally.
But these guys are so short-sighted (in terms of investment, risk/reward, etc), and stupid, in terms of the history of their own market, that they are doomed to having a rough ride (which will get uglier for all of us) and a rude awakening, when the new model finally becomes conventional. The 'auction' model is ancient, and sound, for a reason, and history is littered with once-big names and movements that thought they could legislate or 'enforce/coerce' their away around immutable laws.
So, hey, go ahead, make bread $40 a loaf, and kill the rioters, but eventually it'll be the King's head laying in the guillotine.
Slashdot Mirror
...that having money is no guarantee of having brains capable of rational thought.
I love dogs, but especially the few I've really gotten to actually know. They have unique personalities. Dogs, of course, have easily-identifiable traits or instincts, in common. But their unique personalities will NEVER be transfered via cloning, ever. These creatures are not single-cell, divide-to-replicate, beings... they are sentient beings whose unique personalities are shaped by their treatment (experience).
And while this useless hairball is dropping 50k on a piss-poor imitation of her so-called 'friend', 8 million dogs and cats will be euthanized in the US, this year. This brainless 'lady' is one sick bitch.
Or maybe it is not unusual that 13 year old girls aren't fully adjusted/mature enough to always handle having their emotions fucked with, sadistically? Or are you some asshole 'survival of the fittest' type?
Your heartless bullshit aside, I hope the cunt behind this rots in the fucking southern California joint. As for you, if you ever think of having kids, think twice, please.
I think I get it now. So, if you take the same Unix-like burger, and graft it onto an outdated bun, and toss in some incompatible file system sauce, with a non-native file manager relish, you just get a regular Mac. It's starting to make sense now.
They do use NITF, on the incoming and internally.
NITF, unless I'm mistaken, utilizes a markup language that is, far and away, the best for the storage, analysis of, and re-distribution (in multiple formats for multiple purposes) of content; and that would be: XML. Nothing beats it for industrial strength document/content handling. Just my 2 cents on the XML question.
Apparently you are another in a huge, long line of illiterates. Try an online dictionary. This is a good example of why reading/proofreading, with a brain that has something besides what passes for an 'education' in America, comes in so handy, and is much more dependable than your erroneously revered 'spell-checker.'
I'll bet they are, actually. I worked on a defense project, and later at a large firm (think #1) that specialized in legal discovery organizational work. You know, gathering all pertinent documents from two Fortune 500 companies involved in an M&A, or a big legal case... And the preferred method was a sort of triangulation using eyeballs and printed matter, rather than e-search and monitors.
In the situation you mentioned, what if there were numerous individuals, who may or not be referred to in ANY sentence, by name, pronoun, or simply continuing data that no longer needed to refer, by name, to the 'topic' of the document's current discussion? How do you search for those adjacent sentences that have relevant data?
Well, if I was using a search mechanism, I'd be reading paragraphs before AND after the ID'd instance. And that, my friend, is coming mighty close to just reading the bloody document. You say the firm used a 'team' or small group? Sounds just about exactly bang on the money, to me.
I write web sites and fix them and decipher crappily-written (non-formatted) CSS, etc, and I love global find, and search & replace. All for it, believe me. But where statements that 'might' refer are also subject of the search, good old reading works really well.
I like it! Guy finds evidence of some official beating on a kitty cat. It makes it to Oprah. She says,, "4,000 American soldiers and 80,000 Iraqis is one thing, but this is going too far!" Guy gets popped, hung out to dry by the administration. He turns states evidence and unloads a shitload of backups... next thing you know, everybody from Ed Lansdale's kids to Karl Rove's boyfriend is swingin' from scaffolding at Nuremberg.... Peace On Earth, Good Will Toward Men.... at last.
The last thing I want is for some poor, info-starved addict to enter a search and come across my meandering, opinionated bullshit... oops, I mean... My Blog. Because, believe me, I am sick of seeing half-assed blogs and techtalk from 4 years ago on the first page or two of Google results. Enough, Already!
I read people's blogs. They are great, and I advocate for everyone having at least one. But, why not let us search blogs, specifically, and leave the general search for data that has been 'vetted' in the most minimal sense? Nobody wants censorship here, and that includes me, absolutely. And I realize that blogs are sometimes heavily topic-oriented, so, maybe there is some way, through filtering that they could be included, and yet have more meaningful results in searches. I don't know.
Maybe it's just me (it probably is, seeing as how I'm bitched out with chemo side effects) but it seems that Google search results are getting less and less relevant. Are the Firefox programmers involved in it somehow? [laughs] Or maybe it's the same crew responsible for slowly destroying NEXTSTEP, I mean, OS X. (slowly used in the loosest sense)
Right, agreed; it's more along the lines of a 'license', which is also a cost of doing business. So, let me get this straight, you figure this was a goof-up, right, and 'heads will roll'? Let's think about that.
For one thing, it seems likely that the 6 million in fines is portioned out to the scofflaws in relation to their size and/or sales. With me so far? Now, what do you figure the odds are that the relevant 'planners', etc, at SIX big chains, ALL made the same 'mistake', or, worse yet, that all six chains were in any way surprised that they'd end up paying some token fine?
For extra credit, excluding non-US stores, how long do you figure it will take these guys at their six chains to recoup their 'fines' (ha ha, there's that word again) in SECONDS?
I haven't done the math, but, I'll be honest, it would be a hilariously trivial number of open-for-biz seconds, I guarantee you that. It's a bit like forcing, say, Bill Gates, to buy a used Chevy. :)
Ha ha ha, that's funny, and whee ae the mods at?
I'm curious about something: What does 'BFE Midwest' stand for, or mean?
I moved out to the Minneapolis-St Paul area a couple years ago, and although I've always met great folks wherever I've, these Minnesotans are the nicest bunch of them all. Helpful, you can talk to young and old alike out in public without getting paranoid or 'WTF' reactions that are so common elsewhere in the States. And the State, itself, has this sort of conservative, yet very progressive 'tilt' to it. And of course a bunch of the greatest 80s bands came from here. I'm impressed... If Comcast could just drop dead, en masse, in a hurry, this place would be perfect!
My ex-wife was struggling with a demo of Photoshop, and had run into some serious lag and 'early-version' blues with Aperture. I gave her a full version of Lightroom, and racked up a ton of points, let me tell you.
I do work with already-existing images, for the most part, and use Photoshop and PhotoRetouch Pro. But she is a photographer (amongst other things) and absolutely loves Lightroom. I'd recommend it, based on my limited usage, and more on her real usage, to anyone out there who takes pictures and wants to pop them into their file systems with some serious editing on the way in. Really outstanding work on the part of Adobe... almost makes up for GoLive... on second thought, no... no, it doesn't. :)
BUT, I will not argue with you, and, as a matter of fact, I'd go back to Photoshop 5, or 5.5, rather than 6, to say that if someone knows what they're doing with those versions, they can can compete with a huge majority of P-shop users out there.
Also, to get rid of the ad and/or whitespace above the "Reply-to" head, you can add this:
Cache has to be flushed, also, I believe, but the stle change persists afterward.
That seems to help. Thanks
That looks like a very cool deal. Somebody mod the AC up. There's less and less excuse for bands that want to, to not take control of their retail situation.
Spoken like someone who never ever worked in the record business, specifically retail & shipping. Ever heard of warpage, bro'? Like, due to 60 shrink-wrapped'records being jammed in every box (standard), high heat, back of the UPS truck? No? Well, back in LA and all over the South we had tons of records that never made it to the shelves. Did they 'break'? Well, no, not exactly. They warped, to an unplayable state. Period. In the early 70s some of the Indie labels and European exporters started using 'loose' wrap, to avoid a a lot of the warping. But that took up space in the standard boxes, so the Big Labels (in the US, UK & Germany) never did get on board with that.
CDs? I wouldn't know, I went back into stagework and studios about 3 seconds after CDs started moving in the shops.
Don't get me wrong, the labels are the most organized gang of corrupt cocksuckers you ever want to know, but the 'breakage' thing did have real relevance after the vinyl content dropped, and the use of tight shrinkwrap became dominant.
I know the allowances for 'returns' on cassettes was much lower than the percentage on LPs, also.
"Breakage" was a concept that retailers had to fight for. The Big Labels didn't just cough it up out of the goodness of their hearts, and it was only after the fact that the Labels realized they could cut corners on inventory & accounting, by just giving all the jobbers and retail chains the same deal. But the retailers were 'caught' between US, the music fans, and THEM, the artists... and as a result, people used to hate the retail chains (I know I did, I worked for a few big ones), but the reality is, we the fans, AND the artists, had the same, common enemy: The Labels... not Sears, or Tower Records... not The Whorehouse (Oops, I meant 'Warehouse'), and not even Apple or Amazon.
They are selling barely 19% of the music. Get a grip, Jesus.
The RIAA hates Apple, that makes Apple my friend, for now. Amazon is okay, too; a great place to get album covers for my terabyte of high bitrate Usenet music stash.
Concentration of Evil? Shit, negro, have you looked around the big World lately, or, ever? You think some relatively small company that has been nearly marginalized, and finally has a couple of big successes is 'evil', what, by default? Shit, my daughter was right, the world's going to Hell because of stupid motherfuckers.
Insightful? More like delusional
Absolutely correct. Somebody give this AC the max in mod points. The whole post was informative and interesting.
No way, if you take a little proactive action. Not sure how it works in Linux (I suspect it is the same) but all you do is sudo set your timestamp to zero. All activity is serial, so there is no 'window of opportunity' to piggyback on a user-issued su or sudo, or admin pw, whatever. Been doing that in the Console on a Macintosh for years.
You know, in all the years I've been on Apples (78 up), as well as Ataris, SGIs, SPARCstations, a shitload of wintels, etc), I've been a member of countless self-help forums in the Apple, and later, Mac, worlds, and 'blind devotion' is exemplified by perhaps 1% at the very most. But you people, with your free-floating anxieties about companies and this seemingly amorphous 'cloud' of that company's (alleged) user base have given me pause, and now I'm wondering how many people's famous last words were something along the lines of:
Isn't there something more important you could be doing, like, fucking up Firefox even more, or...something... anything? Must be gratifying to see Life and Time as so limitless.You did exactly the right thing. The way it works with posting and modding, is we can't 'mod' the same articles we post to, and, conversely, we can't post to the same articles we have already modded, or the mods will disappear. So, posting something is an easy way to 'fix' a goof-up.
It's interesting that you should ask, because, apparently, the control group that was exposed to the MS logo wasn't affected in 'that way'... however, a smaller group, after repeated exposure to the icon/mascot of the Republican Party, did actually develop an inability to reach erections for approximately 6-8 weeks after, and, in an 'odd' side effect, developed a habit of breaking into discussions of a certain type with fellows in the next urinal in a variety of public places.
Agreed, so far. But, by the same token, the 'the market' is also free to set its end of the 'price point.' But in the current (possibly outdated) model of this market if seller-A wants 10 bucks, the market only has a buy or not buy choice. No actual freedom, no determination of price point as function of supply and demand.
Potential buyers, are prevented from participating, AT ALL, in this type of closed market unless they meet an arbitrarily set price. So, what to do? If there is no 'auction' available, no supply/demand rationality, then anyone who wants to participate is screwed unless they acquiesce.
If my choice is limited, by the business model being enforced in this artificial 'market', to either paying ransom, or paying nothing except access to a common carrier, I'd be stupid to give in to ransom. It only encourages the dead model. Much like 'negotiating' with terrorists, or kidnappers, no?
One doesn't have to fall back to 'information wants to be free' mode, in order to understand that the market, one way or the other, will set the 'price' based on supply and demand.
It's a simple case of the monopolists versus classical free market forces. This is not new, at all. It's a war. And it revolves around the poles of Greed and Desire. Many artists know that when their fans download bootlegs of shows, or 'snipe' a few tracks from a weak album, the same desire is going to express itself in financially rewarding terms, from the artists' point of view, when conditions/products/perceived values alter. That's how free markets function.
As for so-called 'legality'... laws are mutable. And economics shows that when artificial methods are employed in the defense of 'sick', or 'failing' businesses, industries, or models, they can postpone, but not prevent, the inevitable. And usually the backlash, that Newtonian economic action/reaction outcome, is far more unsettling for the proponents and temporary beneficiaries of the artificial 'preventive' mechanisms, than letting the market (and, specifically, price points) evolve naturally.
But these guys are so short-sighted (in terms of investment, risk/reward, etc), and stupid, in terms of the history of their own market, that they are doomed to having a rough ride (which will get uglier for all of us) and a rude awakening, when the new model finally becomes conventional. The 'auction' model is ancient, and sound, for a reason, and history is littered with once-big names and movements that thought they could legislate or 'enforce/coerce' their away around immutable laws.
So, hey, go ahead, make bread $40 a loaf, and kill the rioters, but eventually it'll be the King's head laying in the guillotine.