I'm willing to wager that Microsoft's recent attention to IE7 is based on Firefox's recent gains in the market, not any altruistic interest in suddenly conforming to standards. If they weren't losing ground on the web right now, IE7 would just be a bugfix release with a new version or two, mostly centered on tight integration to their new OS.
That means they've stagnated their web browser to the point where the reason they can't even consider passing the Acid2 test is because they are so behind on implementing the standards.
So, they say "We're not gonna try to pass Acid2 test with the next release", and I'm reading "We can't hope to pass Acid2, meet our deadline, and also fix all the security holes we're getting lombasted for".
This isn't about free software vs Microsoft, not this time. It's also not about standards vs Microsoft. The market has become such that if Microsoft doesn't take notice and then follow it up with action, they'll start seriously losing. They know that when it all comes out in the wash, if they implement more standards and still fail the Acid2 test, they'll still make a bigger difference in the market than if they just keep stagnating their web browser.
Put it another way. You have 6 months to paint your car. It would take you 2 years to paint your car with new primer and a clearcoat. As it stands now, your car regularly gets towed away for looking like a derelict. In 6 months, you can paint your car by just sanding it down, putting some new primer and a couple of coats of paint. By doing so you won't get towed away for looking like a derelict anymore. How are you going to arrange your priorities to make the best possible advance in the next 6 months? Add to that that you know that after you've made the best possible advance in the timeframe given, *then* you have plenty of time to start over from scratch.
Microsoft didn't suddenly become altruistic, they got slapped in the face with a few anti-trust actions (think what you want about the terms of the settlement, the PR damage was noticeable). They also got bitch-slapped by a new web browser. They're existence, if they continue to do business as usual, is threatened by a development philosophy they can't embrace and extend, own, or otherwise render obsolete. They're responding to market demands. Did you think that anything other than market demands would change their direction?
You know, one of my favorite lines ever in a movie is in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the vampire says "There's nothing you can do that we can't do better" or something like that, and Buffy says "Clap!".
Heh, 'cause, you know, earlier in the movie he got an arm cut off...
As someone who had his leg amputated 20 years ago I am qualified to discuss this from first hand experience. I can still curl my missing toes and feel the resistance from doing it.
The funny thing is now I work with the same type of people bitching about how stressful work is. I tell them until they've worked for chump-change in a restaurant, blown-away, short-handed and every customer and manager is treating you like a piece-of-crap, you don't know what stress it.
That makes sense, doesn't it follow that if most people getting a degree are those spoiled brats that get C's because they can graduate with it and still have time to party, then when you get your degree and put it to work you should encounter the same people doing enough work of a high enough quality to "just get by" so they can go and party some more.
Heh.:)
I wholeheartedly agree with you that everyone needs to spend some time working in the restaurant business, and Starbucks doesn't count! It really builds character. You especially learn to deal with stress when you work at a burger place near a high school with an open campus and you learn to deal with having 200 kids get in line at the same time every day for lunch. The store brings in $1000 for that hour alone ('93-'94 numbers) and you work your ass off trying to make 200 hamburgers in 30 minutes. I find people who worked in food, whether they still work in food or not, are more rounded, flexible, and generally more competent.
Heh, so now I'm in school and the kids I'm next to are generally 6-12 years younger than me, and they all look to me for the highest grade. You know, the teacher says "The class average is XX, the lowest grade was YY and the highest was ZZ" and they just know I'm ZZ. I guess when you know exactly what an education is worth in the real world you're just inclined to get higher grades...:)
For me, it's mostly the arrogance people with degrees usually throw out. If I got a nickel for everytime someone told me having a degree meant you were a "cut above the rest", I wouldn't have had to spend all those years slaving over a hot grill (I make SpongeBob look like an amateur fry cook), hot engines, and other stuff. Having a degree meant any idiot could come in and immediately become my boss without knowing either jack or shit about the work we were doing. I trained so many people with degrees it's just ridiculous. Worse yet was when those ASE-certified idiots showed up with their little technical certificates and all the arrogance and "oh I know more than you, I went to school" and then turned right around and asked "Which way do I turn the screw to loosen it?" (YOU IDIOT, you turn the BOLT righty tighty, lefty loosey)
But am I bitter? Hmmm, yes. By far, most of the BS/BA/insertyourfavoritedegreehere that I've dealt with went to school on mom and dad's dime, fucked around and got ejected from college with a degree worth about as much as the Wizard of Oz's gift of intelligence. And these higher educated idiots? You guessed it, I still had to teach them how to read, write, and do math to flip fucking hamburgers.
Of course, now I'm in school myself.:) But it's not a worthless degree I'm pursuing....
I'll put my masters up against all of y'all's degrees. Got it from the School of Hard Knocks. Graduated head of the class, majored in kicking ass. Did my time, became the master and I wrote the book of personal disaster but I don't need no PhD to be a doctor of fuckin' misery!
The dialectic is pure unadulterated evil. If Socrates were a real person, I would suggest we'd be better off without him. As it is, I think we'd be better off without that delusion of Plato's. Socrates should have sunk with Atlantis.
My main problem with socrates? He dealt in absolutes. He dealt with absolute nobility, for example. The only thing he did, and the *only* thing he did, was to get people to redefine the absolute to be consistent with his. He was a good arguer, but a terrible thinker.
(Of course, nobody knows if he was even a real person, it's likely he's just a fictional character created by Plato to amuse his audience for money)
I'll take the term limits on the President as the example and let you extrapolate that. During the first year the President's elected, he has to satisfy his party and whatever lobbyists put him there. He also has to spend it getting to know his way around Congress without antagonizing Congress. So he doesn't get to to anything he wants to do because he has to make sure the people in power with him will cooperate. During the second year, he has to continue satisfying his political party and the lobbyists. He doesn't yet get to do anything he wants. During the third year he has to do things to put on a good face and make the public happy, even if they accomplish nothing because during the fourth year he's gonna try to get re-elected. During the fifth year, if he gets re-elected, he has to repair the damage he did in the first four years. THis will occupy his sixth year as well. During the seventh year he gets to do anything he wants. During the eighth year he can't do much because Congress won't let him, he's leaving soon, after all.
So term limits on the PResident mean we only get one real year in which he gets to try to do the good things he promised. It also means that he doesn't *ever* get to focus on long-term goals because there's too many people coming in and out of office in the meantime, or too many of the government folks have to keep going back out for re-election. SO we have a short-sighted government.
I don't think voting is good, generally speaking. I think that the fundamental concept is good, that voting gives people a voice in government, but we need to pursue a system of government that provides for long-term planning. That will allow the government to pursue long-term projects that currently are impractical (NASA?) because whenever there's a new guy in Washington, shit gets cut.
Keeping the voice of the people in government is important. Protecting the rights of all citizens is important. Our republic does a half-assed job of those things and doesn't deliver on anything else.
Hmm, I'm too sleepy, this probly isn't making as much sense as I think it is, so I'll stop.
In my experience, it's the crazy liberal-types who are intolerant of diversity, even though they claim to champion it. Fact is, they only champion diversity when it furthers their own agenda, just like the other side.
Anyway, I lived in the Seattle area for 4 years and had my fill of conformity. I didn't expect liberal Seattle to be a bed of conformity where you will be oppressed if you don't conform to the norm, not after living in conservative Texas where you can always expect a smile, greeting, and a handshake from anybody regardless of religion, politics, or any of that other worthless crap.
As a foreigner, I genuinely don't mean this as a troll. I am actually interested in the answer. How do creationist christians explain the existance of fossil fuels?
As a bearer of a clue bat, I suggest that christians more than likely explain the existence of fossil fuels the same way they explain the existence of anything else.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
I always thought defender had an excellent control system. I loved that game so much my parents didn't let me play it in arcades ('cause I"d just keep pumping quarters into it).
Your point about "entrapment" is interesting, though. The RIAA would be uploading the data with permission, in which case downloading it would not even be illegal. Worse, the upload would be tantamount to the RIAA releasing that music into the public domain. They own the copyright and they put it on Kazaa. The implication is clear.
With the minor problem here that the RIAA doesn't own any of the copyrights involved, they're just the legal representative named by the copyright holders themselves. The copyrights are owned by the record labels. The RIAA doesn't have the power to sublicense the music, they only have the power to pursue infringers.
In some countries, your point about legal liability holds up, but not in the US. There is a lawyer posting around in this thread, you should read his posts clearly explaining they downloaders are liable for copyright infringement, especially since they include cites to actual cases that determine it to be so.
From their point of view, the latter constitutes the removal of 2c of plastic from sale plus $5-10 (or so) in lost revenue (after retail margins etc.)
Actually, from the labels' point of view, once the CD leaves their warehouse it's not their problem. It's paid for.:) They don't lose any revenue when someone steals a CD from a record store. The store loses their investment in the CD and also the lost sale from someone else purchasing it.
I see what you're saying, though. They're less concerned about physical theft, and when it is physical theft they'll ignore it in small amounts. IN large amounts they'd certainly prosecute.
The catch is, and this is important, if someone buys a CD in a record store, then makes a million copies and sells them in a farmer's market (or whatever), the labels care about that because it prevented a million copies from being sold through regular channels, and regular channels means the record label was the ultimate source of the records.
So their argument is that P2P filesharing is *that* kind of copyright infringement, the kind that prevents the sales of records through regular channels. And people have bought it, and the courts have bought it. It's not true, not completely. I'll bet that for every sale lost through P2P, another sale is generated. But you have to look at the mix. If Britney Spears (or whoever is the latest hot dancing chick with no real talent) lost a million sales through P2P, meanwhile 1.5 million sales were generated spread amongst 20 different indie rock bands, it's hard to argue that P2P didn't affect that. In that case, the RIAA's big record label lost a million sales because 150% of those sales went somewhere else.
Heh, it's interesting that one of the tests is, as someone else said, "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
Since you're the lawyer, I'm sure you'll find the flaws in my argument.:)
So let's say you review a song, and to illustrate a particularly negative statement you make, you quote the lyrics in print (not an mp3 or anything, you just type them out and say "This song really sucks, the whole band sucks", etc). The effect this would have on the work would be to lower its market value, presuming you have credibility as a reviewer and so forth.
As I understand it, though, reviews are protected through a history of case law. But let's assume they're not for the sake of the next part.:)
So let's say the band is particularly untalented and you post an mp3 for download. People listen and say "Wow, these guys suck" and then don't buy the album. You just reduced the market value of the album and prevented sales that might have been made in an otherwise less-informed audience.
Reverse that. The band is really good and you post an mp3 for download. The effect this has on the market value of the album has already been demonstrated by radio, in-store playing, and so forth. It increases the value of the records.
What I'm guessing, and I'm guessing because I'm not party to the actual reports, is that the record companies saw a drop in sales, contrary to the fact that numerous studies show that music downloaders actually spend more money on music. The drop they saw was in areas they expected to be big because they put a lot of money down on it. (A corresponding drop also seen by teenagers no longer nagging mom and dad to buy it because they downloaded it instead). Anyway, I'm thinking that what happened is the music business got more valuable, but the records that started selling weren't the ones the RIAA's members wanted to have sell, for whatever reason (less-promoted on the same labels, or possibly indie labels, or whatever).
The area in which P2P filesharing occupies, in my mind, is the area that's occupied by radio. People don't download to own, they download to preview, then they buy. And just like radio, there are people who are perfectly content to never buy. So the RIAA exploits a general sense of ignorance in the public (and probably has a certain amount of ignorance themselves, but you and I can't rely on that, they've got the money to buy the knowledge they need) to push P2P filesharing as the same thing as copying a CD (which it technically is) rather than the position it occupies in people's lifestyles (the human side of the equation).
I think the RIAA's going to win this one because they got in early enough to define the terms and set a few precedents. And also because Napster failed to defend themselves when the ball was in their court.
In order for the RIAA to go after *downloaders*, they'd have to *upload* to the downloaders. That makes their case something more like entrapment, I'll let a lawyer chime in with the specific term. Basically, how could the RIAA sue someone for downloading from them? Didn't they give permission to download when they posted it for upload?
I think that would undermine their case and a good lawyer could get it thrown out on that.
So instead they go after uploaders, because all they need to do for that is take their hacked client, connect to the network, search for the artist they've chosen to protect, then run a script that browses all the users and identifies the largest repositories, then crawl those repositories, take the IP address to the court for the subpoena, and go from there.
It's pretty obvious why they go after uploaders.:)
Let's see, three known jedi, those would be Annakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda?
And considering the skill levels of each of these jedi, Luke as a padawan should have been able to kick some ass? I don't get it. The quantity of the competition isn't as important as the quality of the competition when we're talking about Luke facing Vader. I didn't object at all to Luke kicking ass against regular people, it was going up against Vader that I objected to.
Vader, in his history, helped the Emperor to hunt down and kill all of the Jedi. In ANH, the quote is "You, my friend, are all that remains of that religion." Or something like that. Governor Tarkin said it. In order to kill that many Jedi, you have to be really good. Did Vader take out the Jedi council? Mind you, in the original trilogy we didn't know there was a jedi council, but we *did* know the Jedi were a large, organized religion, and there were masters in it (Yoda and Obi-Wan being the sole survivors, surviving because they were in hiding). And Vader was good enough to defeat them.
Granted, Vader is a decade younger than Obi-Wan (a fact we didn't know originally). Of course, we also thought Darth was his first name, not a title. Anyway, there is the possibility that Vader wasn't as good as he was in his younger years.
That still doesn't mean Luke should have been able to defeat him! Recall that in EST, Vader was trying *not* to kill Luke, so he was pulling his punches. In that movie, Luke was trying to kill Vader. In the third movie, neither one of them were trying to kill each other! Does the master of Kung Fu win or lose against the learner when they pull punches?
I don't think the Emperor was manipulating them specifically, I think he wanted Luke to kill Vader, convert to the dark side, and then become his new apprentice. I think Vader figured that out in the end, or close to it, and was held in check only by the Emperor's power. When the Emperor went all medieval on Luke, he lost his hold on Vader, and Vader made his first value judgment in decades. I think the Emperor would have been happy to have either of them as his sith lord, but he knew he couldn't have both, and that if both were his sith lords, they would turn on him and destroy him anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm willing to wager that Microsoft's recent attention to IE7 is based on Firefox's recent gains in the market, not any altruistic interest in suddenly conforming to standards. If they weren't losing ground on the web right now, IE7 would just be a bugfix release with a new version or two, mostly centered on tight integration to their new OS.
That means they've stagnated their web browser to the point where the reason they can't even consider passing the Acid2 test is because they are so behind on implementing the standards.
So, they say "We're not gonna try to pass Acid2 test with the next release", and I'm reading "We can't hope to pass Acid2, meet our deadline, and also fix all the security holes we're getting lombasted for".
This isn't about free software vs Microsoft, not this time. It's also not about standards vs Microsoft. The market has become such that if Microsoft doesn't take notice and then follow it up with action, they'll start seriously losing. They know that when it all comes out in the wash, if they implement more standards and still fail the Acid2 test, they'll still make a bigger difference in the market than if they just keep stagnating their web browser.
Put it another way. You have 6 months to paint your car. It would take you 2 years to paint your car with new primer and a clearcoat. As it stands now, your car regularly gets towed away for looking like a derelict. In 6 months, you can paint your car by just sanding it down, putting some new primer and a couple of coats of paint. By doing so you won't get towed away for looking like a derelict anymore. How are you going to arrange your priorities to make the best possible advance in the next 6 months? Add to that that you know that after you've made the best possible advance in the timeframe given, *then* you have plenty of time to start over from scratch.
Microsoft didn't suddenly become altruistic, they got slapped in the face with a few anti-trust actions (think what you want about the terms of the settlement, the PR damage was noticeable). They also got bitch-slapped by a new web browser. They're existence, if they continue to do business as usual, is threatened by a development philosophy they can't embrace and extend, own, or otherwise render obsolete. They're responding to market demands. Did you think that anything other than market demands would change their direction?
Spamming should just be outlawed and we wont have to worry about this violence.
Right, because making something illegal immediately stops it from happening. What kind of crack are you smoking?
I'm going to consider it a good excuse to replace all my clocks. I have some of the first atomic clocks to hit the market and they're ugly as sin.
You know, one of my favorite lines ever in a movie is in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the vampire says "There's nothing you can do that we can't do better" or something like that, and Buffy says "Clap!".
Heh, 'cause, you know, earlier in the movie he got an arm cut off...
As someone who had his leg amputated 20 years ago I am qualified to discuss this from first hand experience. I can still curl my missing toes and feel the resistance from doing it.
Don't you mean "first leg experience?"
The funny thing is now I work with the same type of people bitching about how stressful work is. I tell them until they've worked for chump-change in a restaurant, blown-away, short-handed and every customer and manager is treating you like a piece-of-crap, you don't know what stress it.
That makes sense, doesn't it follow that if most people getting a degree are those spoiled brats that get C's because they can graduate with it and still have time to party, then when you get your degree and put it to work you should encounter the same people doing enough work of a high enough quality to "just get by" so they can go and party some more.
Heh. :)
I wholeheartedly agree with you that everyone needs to spend some time working in the restaurant business, and Starbucks doesn't count! It really builds character. You especially learn to deal with stress when you work at a burger place near a high school with an open campus and you learn to deal with having 200 kids get in line at the same time every day for lunch. The store brings in $1000 for that hour alone ('93-'94 numbers) and you work your ass off trying to make 200 hamburgers in 30 minutes. I find people who worked in food, whether they still work in food or not, are more rounded, flexible, and generally more competent.
Heh, so now I'm in school and the kids I'm next to are generally 6-12 years younger than me, and they all look to me for the highest grade. You know, the teacher says "The class average is XX, the lowest grade was YY and the highest was ZZ" and they just know I'm ZZ. I guess when you know exactly what an education is worth in the real world you're just inclined to get higher grades... :)
For me, it's mostly the arrogance people with degrees usually throw out. If I got a nickel for everytime someone told me having a degree meant you were a "cut above the rest", I wouldn't have had to spend all those years slaving over a hot grill (I make SpongeBob look like an amateur fry cook), hot engines, and other stuff. Having a degree meant any idiot could come in and immediately become my boss without knowing either jack or shit about the work we were doing. I trained so many people with degrees it's just ridiculous. Worse yet was when those ASE-certified idiots showed up with their little technical certificates and all the arrogance and "oh I know more than you, I went to school" and then turned right around and asked "Which way do I turn the screw to loosen it?" (YOU IDIOT, you turn the BOLT righty tighty, lefty loosey)
But am I bitter? Hmmm, yes. By far, most of the BS/BA/insertyourfavoritedegreehere that I've dealt with went to school on mom and dad's dime, fucked around and got ejected from college with a degree worth about as much as the Wizard of Oz's gift of intelligence. And these higher educated idiots? You guessed it, I still had to teach them how to read, write, and do math to flip fucking hamburgers.
Of course, now I'm in school myself. :) But it's not a worthless degree I'm pursuing....
I do my PHP with two dry sticks.
Partially paraphrased, mostly quoted, Suicidal Tendencies :)
Are you always that sensitive? I was talking trash to the GP.
No, he was right, you're not funny.
The dialectic is pure unadulterated evil. If Socrates were a real person, I would suggest we'd be better off without him. As it is, I think we'd be better off without that delusion of Plato's. Socrates should have sunk with Atlantis.
My main problem with socrates? He dealt in absolutes. He dealt with absolute nobility, for example. The only thing he did, and the *only* thing he did, was to get people to redefine the absolute to be consistent with his. He was a good arguer, but a terrible thinker.
(Of course, nobody knows if he was even a real person, it's likely he's just a fictional character created by Plato to amuse his audience for money)
THere are a few things people tend to ignore. :)
I'll take the term limits on the President as the example and let you extrapolate that. During the first year the President's elected, he has to satisfy his party and whatever lobbyists put him there. He also has to spend it getting to know his way around Congress without antagonizing Congress. So he doesn't get to to anything he wants to do because he has to make sure the people in power with him will cooperate. During the second year, he has to continue satisfying his political party and the lobbyists. He doesn't yet get to do anything he wants. During the third year he has to do things to put on a good face and make the public happy, even if they accomplish nothing because during the fourth year he's gonna try to get re-elected. During the fifth year, if he gets re-elected, he has to repair the damage he did in the first four years. THis will occupy his sixth year as well. During the seventh year he gets to do anything he wants. During the eighth year he can't do much because Congress won't let him, he's leaving soon, after all.
So term limits on the PResident mean we only get one real year in which he gets to try to do the good things he promised. It also means that he doesn't *ever* get to focus on long-term goals because there's too many people coming in and out of office in the meantime, or too many of the government folks have to keep going back out for re-election. SO we have a short-sighted government.
I don't think voting is good, generally speaking. I think that the fundamental concept is good, that voting gives people a voice in government, but we need to pursue a system of government that provides for long-term planning. That will allow the government to pursue long-term projects that currently are impractical (NASA?) because whenever there's a new guy in Washington, shit gets cut.
Keeping the voice of the people in government is important. Protecting the rights of all citizens is important. Our republic does a half-assed job of those things and doesn't deliver on anything else.
Hmm, I'm too sleepy, this probly isn't making as much sense as I think it is, so I'll stop.
Anyway, I lived in the Seattle area for 4 years and had my fill of conformity. I didn't expect liberal Seattle to be a bed of conformity where you will be oppressed if you don't conform to the norm, not after living in conservative Texas where you can always expect a smile, greeting, and a handshake from anybody regardless of religion, politics, or any of that other worthless crap.
Yeah, and the guys that figured out how to send messages between cities by beating on drums probably thought they were the peak of civilization.
It's all relative, it really is. :)
As a foreigner, I genuinely don't mean this as a troll. I am actually interested in the answer. How do creationist christians explain the existance of fossil fuels?
As a bearer of a clue bat, I suggest that christians more than likely explain the existence of fossil fuels the same way they explain the existence of anything else.
I always thought defender had an excellent control system. I loved that game so much my parents didn't let me play it in arcades ('cause I"d just keep pumping quarters into it).
Heh, I was starting to think I was the problem, since I was having trouble following the posts here too. Thankfully, I'm not. :)
I'll move on, since I don't speak corporatespeak after all. I thought I did, it looks like English, but I guess I don't.
(Circuit coourt I believe)
I see your computer has the problem mine doooooes.
Now they have a right to profit from the idea.
Since when did patents grant someone the right to profit?
It's just like a parking permit. You have the right to hunt, but not the right to a space.
Your point about "entrapment" is interesting, though. The RIAA would be uploading the data with permission, in which case downloading it would not even be illegal. Worse, the upload would be tantamount to the RIAA releasing that music into the public domain. They own the copyright and they put it on Kazaa. The implication is clear.
With the minor problem here that the RIAA doesn't own any of the copyrights involved, they're just the legal representative named by the copyright holders themselves. The copyrights are owned by the record labels. The RIAA doesn't have the power to sublicense the music, they only have the power to pursue infringers.
In some countries, your point about legal liability holds up, but not in the US. There is a lawyer posting around in this thread, you should read his posts clearly explaining they downloaders are liable for copyright infringement, especially since they include cites to actual cases that determine it to be so.
From their point of view, the latter constitutes the removal of 2c of plastic from sale plus $5-10 (or so) in lost revenue (after retail margins etc.)
Actually, from the labels' point of view, once the CD leaves their warehouse it's not their problem. It's paid for. :) They don't lose any revenue when someone steals a CD from a record store. The store loses their investment in the CD and also the lost sale from someone else purchasing it.
I see what you're saying, though. They're less concerned about physical theft, and when it is physical theft they'll ignore it in small amounts. IN large amounts they'd certainly prosecute.
The catch is, and this is important, if someone buys a CD in a record store, then makes a million copies and sells them in a farmer's market (or whatever), the labels care about that because it prevented a million copies from being sold through regular channels, and regular channels means the record label was the ultimate source of the records.
So their argument is that P2P filesharing is *that* kind of copyright infringement, the kind that prevents the sales of records through regular channels. And people have bought it, and the courts have bought it. It's not true, not completely. I'll bet that for every sale lost through P2P, another sale is generated. But you have to look at the mix. If Britney Spears (or whoever is the latest hot dancing chick with no real talent) lost a million sales through P2P, meanwhile 1.5 million sales were generated spread amongst 20 different indie rock bands, it's hard to argue that P2P didn't affect that. In that case, the RIAA's big record label lost a million sales because 150% of those sales went somewhere else.
Heh, it's interesting that one of the tests is, as someone else said, "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
Since you're the lawyer, I'm sure you'll find the flaws in my argument. :)
So let's say you review a song, and to illustrate a particularly negative statement you make, you quote the lyrics in print (not an mp3 or anything, you just type them out and say "This song really sucks, the whole band sucks", etc). The effect this would have on the work would be to lower its market value, presuming you have credibility as a reviewer and so forth.
As I understand it, though, reviews are protected through a history of case law. But let's assume they're not for the sake of the next part. :)
So let's say the band is particularly untalented and you post an mp3 for download. People listen and say "Wow, these guys suck" and then don't buy the album. You just reduced the market value of the album and prevented sales that might have been made in an otherwise less-informed audience.
Reverse that. The band is really good and you post an mp3 for download. The effect this has on the market value of the album has already been demonstrated by radio, in-store playing, and so forth. It increases the value of the records.
What I'm guessing, and I'm guessing because I'm not party to the actual reports, is that the record companies saw a drop in sales, contrary to the fact that numerous studies show that music downloaders actually spend more money on music. The drop they saw was in areas they expected to be big because they put a lot of money down on it. (A corresponding drop also seen by teenagers no longer nagging mom and dad to buy it because they downloaded it instead). Anyway, I'm thinking that what happened is the music business got more valuable, but the records that started selling weren't the ones the RIAA's members wanted to have sell, for whatever reason (less-promoted on the same labels, or possibly indie labels, or whatever).
The area in which P2P filesharing occupies, in my mind, is the area that's occupied by radio. People don't download to own, they download to preview, then they buy. And just like radio, there are people who are perfectly content to never buy. So the RIAA exploits a general sense of ignorance in the public (and probably has a certain amount of ignorance themselves, but you and I can't rely on that, they've got the money to buy the knowledge they need) to push P2P filesharing as the same thing as copying a CD (which it technically is) rather than the position it occupies in people's lifestyles (the human side of the equation).
I think the RIAA's going to win this one because they got in early enough to define the terms and set a few precedents. And also because Napster failed to defend themselves when the ball was in their court.
In order for the RIAA to go after *downloaders*, they'd have to *upload* to the downloaders. That makes their case something more like entrapment, I'll let a lawyer chime in with the specific term. Basically, how could the RIAA sue someone for downloading from them? Didn't they give permission to download when they posted it for upload?
I think that would undermine their case and a good lawyer could get it thrown out on that.
So instead they go after uploaders, because all they need to do for that is take their hacked client, connect to the network, search for the artist they've chosen to protect, then run a script that browses all the users and identifies the largest repositories, then crawl those repositories, take the IP address to the court for the subpoena, and go from there.
It's pretty obvious why they go after uploaders. :)
And considering the skill levels of each of these jedi, Luke as a padawan should have been able to kick some ass? I don't get it. The quantity of the competition isn't as important as the quality of the competition when we're talking about Luke facing Vader. I didn't object at all to Luke kicking ass against regular people, it was going up against Vader that I objected to.
Vader, in his history, helped the Emperor to hunt down and kill all of the Jedi. In ANH, the quote is "You, my friend, are all that remains of that religion." Or something like that. Governor Tarkin said it. In order to kill that many Jedi, you have to be really good. Did Vader take out the Jedi council? Mind you, in the original trilogy we didn't know there was a jedi council, but we *did* know the Jedi were a large, organized religion, and there were masters in it (Yoda and Obi-Wan being the sole survivors, surviving because they were in hiding). And Vader was good enough to defeat them.
Granted, Vader is a decade younger than Obi-Wan (a fact we didn't know originally). Of course, we also thought Darth was his first name, not a title. Anyway, there is the possibility that Vader wasn't as good as he was in his younger years.
That still doesn't mean Luke should have been able to defeat him! Recall that in EST, Vader was trying *not* to kill Luke, so he was pulling his punches. In that movie, Luke was trying to kill Vader. In the third movie, neither one of them were trying to kill each other! Does the master of Kung Fu win or lose against the learner when they pull punches?
I don't think the Emperor was manipulating them specifically, I think he wanted Luke to kill Vader, convert to the dark side, and then become his new apprentice. I think Vader figured that out in the end, or close to it, and was held in check only by the Emperor's power. When the Emperor went all medieval on Luke, he lost his hold on Vader, and Vader made his first value judgment in decades. I think the Emperor would have been happy to have either of them as his sith lord, but he knew he couldn't have both, and that if both were his sith lords, they would turn on him and destroy him anyway.
Of course, they did that anyway....